CLASSIC HOAXES: The Bonsai Kittens Prank!
There are so many prank stories which are painstakingly put together just to make them seem believable. Out of the oh-so-many hoaxes there are about, there's one which seems to have been created in a couple of hours by its creator. Yet its reach was massive. The man behind the Bonsai kitten website hoax assumed his site would almost immediately deemed a joke. However, animal rights activists did not find it amusing and that's why the Bonsai kitten got its reputation, once it was rumbled as a more 'controversial' hoax.
It was launched as an online site where you could apparently place orders for tiny 'Bonsai' kittens to be grown and reared inside jars. The site's operating principle was based on Japanese Bonsai plants which are renowned for their miniature size.
Some might smile at the site's explanation as to how the kitten will be fed inside the jar (through a feeding tube), some might grimace. There were even pictures of kittens being led into the jars. Animal rights activists, and those easily affected by the thought of tiny kitties being kept in jars, were horrified at the prospect.
The only information available points towards a Dr. Michael Wong Chang as responsible. There was a site trace made which indicated the author of the website was an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) student. Due to complaints, MIT complied with authorities to have it shut down immediately.
Due to the uproar that it created, the FBI also investigated the matter. The result: they were not able to pin Chang down for creating the site. However, they also found no real malicious intent. This means that, unsurprisingly, the creator did not really plan to grow the kittens inside a jar, and there was no trace or records of any actual Bonsai Kitten sold in jars or out.
Dr. Chang created the site as a satirical response to 'the human belief that nature is a commodity'. The creator was even surprised at the global reaction that his website caused. Well, animal rights advocates certainly saw it in a different light.
Even 14 years after it was created, the site continues to receive hate emails. The original site was shut down from the MIT's university server but there were other servers willing to host it. It became a cycle. There would always be a new server wanting to host bonsaikittens.com.
It is doubtful that the creator of the site intended to encourage animal cruelty, and most intelligent viewers will be able to take the site for what it is – a bit of fun. However, if they do start selling cute kittens in jars, we'll be front of the queue!


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Education Minister Dr Dipu Moni said on Wednesday the government is working relentlessly to improve the standard of higher education aiming to create skilled manpower in the country, reports BSS.
"Everyone must work together to create skilled manpower here.
That's why there is no alternative to higher education," she said while addressing the 8th convocation of Daffodil International University on its permanent campus located at Ashulia, Savar.
Dipu Moni said the country is now on the right track of development under the leadership of Prime Minister (PM) Sheikh Hasina and it is advancing fast.
"Bangladesh has already turned into a digitalised one," she added.
She said PM Sheikh Hasina has taken several steps to reorganise all the tiers of the country's higher education.


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Jayanto Chattopadhyay (born 28 July 1946) is a Bangladeshi actor and reciter. He studied in English literature from Calcutta University. He portrayed the famous character Misir Ali in a television drama named Trishna.

Works

Films
 Adam Surat (1989)
 Kittonkhola (2000)
 Matir Moina (2002) (The Clay Bird)
 Joyjatra (2004)
 Ontarjatra (2006)
 Nirontor (2006)
 Banshi (2007)
 Noy Number Bipod Sanket (2007)
 The Last Thakur (2008)
 Runway (2010)
 Opekkha (2010)
 Ghetuputra Komola (2012)
 Pita - The Father (2012)
 Shikhandi Kotha (2013)
 Sutopar Thikana (2015)
 Matir Projar Deshe (2018)
 Padmar Prem (2019)
 Kagojer Phul (TBA)
 Amar Ache Jol (2008)
 Krishnopokkho (2016)
 Birotto (2022)

Drama serials
 Bishaash (2010)
 Kala Koitor (2012)

Dramas
 Trishna
 Lilaboti
 Khela

Web series

See also
 Cinema of Bangladesh
 Bangladeshi film actor

References

External links

1946 births
Bengali Hindus
Bangladeshi Hindus
Male actors in Bengali cinema
Bangladeshi television personalities
Living people
21st-century Bangladeshi male actors
Bengali male television actors
University of Calcutta alumni
People from Satkhira District
Recipients of the Ekushey Padak

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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2018 Week 1: Bengals vs. Colts 2nd Half Open Thread — Colts lead 16-10
By Brett Mock@bamock Sep 9, 2018, 2:40pm EDT
Share All sharing options for: 2018 Week 1: Bengals vs. Colts 2nd Half Open Thread — Colts lead 16-10
After one half of play, the Colts lead the Bengals 16-10. The defense has been playing very fast and has an entirely different personality from the one a year ago. The offense is hitting on all cylinders early and has been efficiently directed by Frank Reich and Andrew Luck. The pace on offense in the first half had the Bengals defensive line visibly exhausted, which should pay dividends in the second half.
Let's revisit the keys to the game and see how things have been going after two quarters.
Colts Tight Ends vs. Bengals Linebackers and Secondary
We have already seen the impact of utilizing tight ends Eric Ebron, Jack Doyle and Erik Swoope in the first half. All have been able to take advantage of mismatches against linebackers in coverage. Eric Ebron's touchdown occurred while in man coverage with a linebacker.
The tight ends are the only players getting in on the act in the short-middle zones. Running backs have also been targeted on dump-off passes in short-zones and have been taking advantage of Cincinnati's weakness in this area of the field.
Colts Offensive Line vs. Bengals Pass Rush
Outside of a couple of holding penalties, the offensive line has been doing a nice job. They have been aided by a heavy dose of quick release passes and shorter routes. They have also been aided by keeping the Bengals defense guessing by using a lot of different offensive weapons and keeping players fresh in the backfield. Joe Haeg has been doing a nice job at left tackle.
Backfield Answers?
How about all of them? Jordan Wilkins got the start and continues to display excellent vision and one step burst to get through the hole when it is there. Nyheim Hines has been a huge surprise after a lackluster preseason and has certainly been used in a lot of different ways. There has been a great deal of motion pre-snap in the backfield to create space and mismatches as well.
At this point, it is exciting to imagine how dynamic the backfield could be when Mack and Turbin return.
Can Matt Eberflus Manufacture Pressure on Andy Dalton?
Pressure has been inconsistent in the first half but it has also helped keep the Bengals out of the end zone and helped force a turnover. Al Woods batted pass early in the game that was picked off by Kenny Moore. Denico Autry batted down a pass that ended a drive in the red zone and forced Cincinnati to take a field goal.
We still need to see the edge rush get to work.
Opportunism on Defense
Kenny Moore picked up an interception off of the Al Woods batted pass. Matthias Farley forced A.J. Green to fumble and Darius Leonard recovered it. This is a big deal as we head into the second half.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Tag Archives: head spins gently
November 2016 – upcoming London gigs – electro-poetryscapes with Jeremy Reed & The Ginger Light at the Horse Hospital (5th)
They might be performing in Bloomsbury , but their heart's in Soho. You can't get away from it.
I once started writing a set of time-travelling stories about Soho, and one day I may go back to them. If so, it might be difficult not to write Jeremy Reed into them. Poet locum and unruly novelist, with fifty-odd books behind him, both his work and his person is soused in the atmosphere, possibilities and ramifications of this particularly disobedient district of London. For my lifetime and his, it's been the haunt of artists, drunks, liars, king-queens, agreeable rascality and disagreeable visionaries. Even in its current state of snarling retreat, slowly losing a civil war against the clammy, sterilizing encroachment of central London gentrification, chain shops and absentee renting, it's still the part of town where you're most likely to see an inexplicable marching band or dishevelled unicorn.
A Firewords Display presents:
Jeremy Reed & The Ginger Light
The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Saturday 5th November 2016, 7.30pm – information
Dating back to 2012, The Ginger Light is a collaboration between Jeremy and Itchy Ear, a.k.a. Covent Garden loftbird Gerald McGee: an electronic music producer, film buff and keen, self-starting soundtracker who adds spectrally-energised EDM and electronica backings to footage from the likes of brutal nightmare-noir 'Kiss Me Deadly', Jean Genet's steamy men's-prison reverie 'Un Chant d'Amour' and the differently-dreamy 1903 film of 'Alice In Wonderland'. Working live from a laptop, Gerald complements Jeremy's word salvos with sound layers too detailed and active to be described as simple backdrops.
Like the poems they lift and wreathe, Gerald's soundscapes are multilayered time-travel textures: archaeological digs pulling up mongrel music memories from London's strata of music and broadcast history. Ladbroke grove dub-echoes, Carnaby pop and basement jazz; psychedelic acid-rock distortions from the UFO or Portobello Road. Ominous Throbbing Gristle reverberation and corrosive washes from the old Hackney squats. Floating ghostly sound effects, like snippets of radio drama caught on a forty-year rebound.
As for Jeremy, he plays his own role to the hilt. Blurring confessor and transgressor, impressionist chronicler and flagrant charlatan, he's a figure of arch and wasted glamour, as if Quentin Crisp had woken up one morning transformed into Jim Morrison. A Soho fixture since the mid-'80s, he's a onetime protege of Francis Bacon; hailed as the real poetic deal by past literary titans (Seamus Heaney, J.G. Ballard and Edmund White – two of whom compared him to Rimbaud and one to Bowie's Thomas Newton, the Man Who Fell to Earth) and by living pop-poetry shapers (Bjork, Richard Hell, Pete Docherty).
He delivers his own poems in a voice like London sleet – a heavy-lidded, lead-cadenced drone; lisping and compellingly monotonous, burnished by rich and antiquated RADA tones and by a seething incantatory Peter Hammill flair. In the psychic autopsy of talent's fragility in 'Soho Johnny'; you can detect echoes of the Beats and of the exploding perspective of the '60s; in his calling-up and collaging of spirits including Derek Jarman and Jack the Ripper, those of cut-up broadsheets and psychogeography; in his accounts of shoplifters and dissidents adrift in the changing junk-raddled backwash of city trade, commerce and exploitation, there are looming narcotic Blakean myths.
A career-long celebrator of the transgressive, ignored and cast-aside, Jeremy's becoming not only a poet locum for Soho, but something of a genius loci: declaiming the neighbourhood's crumpled, contemplative, spontaneous amorality like the last pub-bard standing. In consequence, he himself seems to be succumbing to being fixed in time, representing qualities being swept away as Crossrail opportunities and predatory investment force them out. Like the Wood Green soiree happening the previous night, he's edging towards becoming one of those fragile something to enjoy while you still can. Here he is, rouged and alert, alongside Gerald and delivering a Ginger Light performance earlier this year: keeping the vision breathing.
Tags: battered hats, drift and float, duo music, head spins gently, Jean Genet, Jeremy Reed & The Ginger Light, London (England), The Horse Hospital (promoter/venue), wasted glamour, word salad
Categories 2016 music, ambient music, dance, deep listening, DIY music, downtempo, electro-acoustic music, electronic, electronica, experimental music, experimental pop, field recordings, film & cinema, films, folktronica, freaktronica, improvisation, interactive performances, jazz, LGBTQIA+ music, loop music, music drama, New Music, outsider music, performance art, plunderphonics, poetry, political music, previews, psychedelic ambient music, sampledelia, sound collage, soundscapes, spoken word, storytelling, trip hop
Through the feed – Sufjan Stevens reissues 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' with various goodie options
Sufjan Stevens: 'Enjoy Your Rabbit'
Assuming that you've not heard about this yet (I still have the sneaking suspicion that the majority of my readers are ahead of me as regards news)…
…that prolific, poly-instrumental singer-songwriter/critical darling Sufjan Stevens is reissuing one of his earliest and oddest albums. Originally released by Asthmatic Kitty back in 2001, 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' was reissued a couple of days ago (June 24th) on limited-edition deluxe vinyl and as a download.
On initial hearing, 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' doesn't sound much like the work with which Sufjan later made his name. Despite the man's reputation for assured eclectism, it seems out-of-place and unexpected – very different from the concept albums in which he codified his life and thoughts into the hopes, dreams and terrains of American states; or from his baroque-ified folk-Americana (in which you were as likely to hear a cor anglais as a banjo or harmonium); or from his combining of original film and symphony music for 'The BQE'; or even his battery of Christmas albums.
Recorded during Sufjan's first stint in New York, it's almost entirely electronic – a fizzing post-modern cut-up built from digital work station noises, samples and tweaks of live sounds (including stray guitars, organs, the brassy lather of Tom Eaton's trumpet and prelingual vocals from Liz Janes and Sufjan himself). There's a running theme via the Chinese zodiac and its twelve-year cycle, each year of which lends its name to a track (Year Of The Dragon, Year Of The Rat and so on), although Sufjan muddies the waters with two extra pieces – the title track and The Year Of Our Lord. (Given his professed Christianity, the latter is as likely to be sincere as it is to be a tongue-in-cheek gag: given the nature of the album, it's probably both.)
Over to his label, Asthmatic Kitty, for a fuller explanation (as Asthmatic Kitty appears to have a staff of two, one of whom is Sufjan, you can be pretty sure that this is a definitive statement):
"Departing from the singer-songwriter format of his first Asthmatic Kitty album, 'A Sun Came', this collection of fourteen colourful instrumental compositions combines Sufjan's noted gift for melody with electronic sounds to create an unusually playful and human – not to mention humane – electronic experience. First released in 2001 on CD, 2014 — the Year of the Horse — brings the original recording back as a double-LP set, the first disc clear and the other left to fortune. And no one can foresee who will receive one of two very special boxes of fortune cookies, containing fortunes penned especially for this occasion by Sufjan himself.
'Enjoy Your Rabbit' is the most underrated and overlooked album in Sufjan's discography. It contains in capsule form what he would later unpack into more palatable music. There are flashes of 'Michigan' and 'Illinois' in Year Of Our Lord, Year Of The Ox and Year Of The Dog, and shadows of 'Age Of Adz' in the darkest moments of Year Of The Boar, Year Of The Snake or Year Of The Dragon. 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' is a harbinger. A precursor. A wink in the eye before the slight. You should have listened in the first place. We'll forgive you though, because when an album is only available in wasteful jewel-case CD, how cool can it be? Jewel-cases are so 1998. But now that it's in multi-colored limited-edition gimmick-ridden vinyl, you have no excuse. 'Enjoy Your Rabbit', which Sufjan wrote and recorded in the innocence of a pre-9/11 2001, is Sufjan's best work because it is Sufjan at his least self-aware.
In an alternate reality, Sufjan never made 'Michigan' or 'Seven Swans' or 'Illinois'; he kept making electronic freakout albums like 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' in obscurity, until perhaps he just gave up and stayed in graphic design and some pitying barely-afloat label re-released 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' and sold a few dozen copies to a few scattered part-time record store employees. But here we are in this reality, where 'Michigan' is slated for an energy drink commercial, 'Illinois' is a backdrop to a pensive montage in a kickstarted blockbuster movie, and 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' is relegated to a drunken purchase at Amazon.com.
Here at Asthmatic Kitty, where we often ignore reality as it's presented, 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' is one of our most played records. We find ourselves in the small company of ballet choreographers, quartets, and occasional internet reviewers, but there should be more of us. So, as if we were in that alternate universe where "Sufjan" is more likely the name of a 'Game of Thrones' character than an indie star, we hope you'll give this record a chance now that it's available as vinyl. It is just as genius as anything Sufjan has released since. Everything's been downhill since."
To my own cranky ears, 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' is a fascinating, skillful blip in Sufjan's career – a rare chance to see his singular talent from a specific angle. It's a little similar to your first encounter with Frank Zappa's cascading Synclavier cut-ups if all you'd previously heard was his catalogue of hairy, horse-laugh rock cabaret numbers about groupie misdemeanours and middle-America caught napping and dribbling. Another comparison is Adrian Belew's 1986 one-off 'Desire Caught By The Tail' – a snarling, abstract career swerve from a musician who'd previously satisfied his avant-garde leaning by blowing spacey textures and barnyard/traffic sound effects through art-rock songs, but was now sitting down with a crude guitar synth (plus a jumble of pedals and assorted things to hit with a stick) in order to create uncompromising Picasso-Hendrix shapes at heavy-metal volume. Did someone say 'Metal Machine Music'? Not quite, although there are moments of crushing noise on 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' which recall Lou Reed's own Marmite effort.
One thing which can be said for certain is that 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' is a breathtakingly playful record which nonetheless exhibits Sufjan's extraordinary breadth of influences and compositional skills. If you listen closely, his subsequent ways of building a song are all already present and correct. Though they're sheathed and blurred within the blip-glitching video-Pong noises, Tibetan bells and drunken brass band textures of Year Of The Monkey, they're definitely there: it's a song, voiced with all the oddness of a Charles Ives let loose on a sampler.
Speaking of Zappa, some prime bogus pomp shows up on Year Of The Snake and Year Of The Boar. Amongst the larking bass-harmonium reed drone and the razzing fizz of Sufjan's electronics, some weighty blimpery waddles and patters. I could have sworn that Year Of The Boar even quotes 'The Phantom Of The Opera' at one point. Sufjan's certainly not slow to drop in a 'Mission Impossible' quote on the album's title track, which is otherwise the odd song out – an angular, dissonant line of Rock-In-Opposition guitar fuzz joined by a cavalcade of pushy racket and chiptune burble.
As for the Chinese component, it's not clear whether this is a gimmick (like Sufjan's subsequent tall tales of a "50 States" concept project) or another little metajoke which he's balled up and sent sailing over our heads. Scattered sparingly across the record, Mannar Wong adds some genuine spoken Chinese. In and around certain pieces, trilled Chinese melodies bump up against European string quartet tunes or (as on Year of the Tiger) flute around cabaret vocalese and bells over thudding shadow-tones. But at least as much is drawn through and worked in from other sources: Sufjan's first years in the thick of New York's cosmopolitanism must have been a greedy feast for his ears. Steam-organ and No Wave whomp, carefully orchestrated, collide with early-Genesis prog flourishes. Sewer-pulsations meet Bontempi organs and sample-heavy vocal murmurs, folded into Latin pop melodies. Silvery Krautrock turns into dinky, glitch-mauled castle music on Year Of The Rat. For Year of the Sheep, Sufjan turns the music into a battle between pulp and celestial. Against the birth-of-the-world vocalise which he and Liz Janes knit together, animal sounds yawp and rampage – angry pregnant elephants, excited pterodactyls.
The thirteen-minute Year Of The Horse – the piece on which Sufjan could really have come unstuck – instead shows him in full control: sustaining and mutating schools of ideas at greater length, like a post-techno Mike Oldfield. Despite its mongrel elements and its sense of hazard sources, over the course of its journey (minimalist piano figure in trio with vibrating mechanical sounds and out-of-focus kettledrums; panpipe-riffles marshalling around industrial squashing-tones; a finale of glitched/phased/near-atonal signal twitches), it's not so dissimilar to those carefully-structured stretches of 'Tubular Bells' or 'Ommadawn' back in the 1970s. Not that Sufjan would necessarily agree: his time at New York's New School (which he was attending while he wrote this album) would have exposed him to any number of inspirations from chance heroes to masters of structure. What's clear is that under the capering and restless sonics, great swathes of 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' display Sufjan's bedrock talent and the solidity of his musical placings. It's a cliché that a single work by one artist can hold as many ideas as another artist's entire career, but this is one of those cases where the old saw is true. I've heard plenty of electrophonic records eking out a single concept or a sparse few, albeit successfully. 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' makes most of them sound like lazy sketches.
You should judge for yourselves, though – this wasn't supposed to be a review. You can get your copy of the album from Asthmatic Kitty or Bandcamp (both fixed-price vinyl or download) or from Noisetrade (pay-what-you-like download-only). For the possibility of fortune cookies, I'm guessing that you should pester Asthmatic Kitty directly. If you want the additional option of ordering a vinyl twosome of 'Enjoy Your Rabbit' and Osso String Quartet's 'Run Rabbit Run' as a thirty-dollar special offer… well, that's another thing to talk to Asthmatic Kitty about.
Sufjan Stevens online:
Tags: glorious twitch, head spins gently, intriguingly mixed bags, New York City programmatic music, reissues, Sufjan Stevens
Categories 2001 music, 2014 music, album reviews, baroque pop, classical fusion, electronic, electronica, experimental music, previews, progressive rock, reviews, sampledelia, singer-songwriter
Album reviews – Felipe Otondo: 'Tutuguri' ("sound moulded by careful hands")
Felipe Otondo: 'Tutuguri'
Having pursued his studies from his native Chile to Denmark and then to the UK (he currently teaches at the University of Lancaster), electro-acoustic musician Felipe Otondo has already made himself a world traveler. The cosmopolitan sourcing of his music ensures that he travels even further afield, even while sitting at his computer. The four pieces on his debut album 'Tutuguri' draw on concepts, patterns, sounds and language from India, Java and Mexico as well as from European and American sound-labs.
This reminds me that, like bats, human beings use sound to find where we are. We often remain unaware of this, or even dismiss it. In cities, for example, we tend to think in terms of filtering out the extraneous noise – the rumbling press of traffic, the too-close babble of our neighbours on public transport or through the thin walls of apartment blocks; the persistent layering of unwanted music as ambient features for shopping or working. In spite of this, we'll still use sounds to judge our way and to establish our place in a shifting world. Recurring sounds in the subway tell us that the service is regular, or when we need to change direction. Changing accents in voices and even birdsong rachet our subliminal paranoia up or down. Subtle switches in the quality of sound moving through the air tell us about weather, and about the places we move through. Some newly-blind people even report developing an echo-location sense, measuring the presence of oncoming pedestrians, lamp-posts and corners by the minute changes in echo and sound positioning.
Most importantly, we associate the places we know with an arrangement of sound. Wind will be shaped around a building in a particular way, the patterns of dialogue and intonation spoken in and around particular shops and café. Traffic lights and contraflows generate their own rhythms and exchanges. Blindfolded, I'd still be able to recognise the back-street where I currently live from its specific sound patterns: cars nudging the speed-bumps with a particular speed and duration, the toss and bend of the trees in the wind paths, the pitches of children's voices in the school half-way along, the frequency of slow buses creeping to the nearby bus garage. These recognitions surprise us, often in ways which we don't even consider until the connections occur to us.
To me (being less of a traveler than many) Felipe's sound sources are more exotic, initially implying spatial journeys or international visits. The complex and beautifully-packaged CD sleeve for 'Tutuguri' enhances this, opening up like an origami flower (or like the jaws of a concealed alligator). The four intent and deceptively challenging pieces within the album are designed to shuffle the consciousness rather than soothe it. They divert the listener along other paths: associative, temporal, historical; hallucinatory or sacramental. When Felipe cites them as being "meditative", he doesn't mean relaxing, or lazy. Listening care is required. At a distance – at a point of detachment or reduction to background – Felipe's pieces will sound like a fluttery wallpaper of treated sound effects. Up close, turned up, or simply heard on headphones, the craft is evident: Felipe's years studying spatial sound and timbral perception have been well spent. He'll set you down in the middle of a set of beautifully recorded instruments or noises – or as an offset, slightly distanced observer – and then gradually alter that sound-world in increments, or in sudden dartings.
The oldest piece on offer here, Ciguri, takes Native Mexican bell and gong sounds and cuts them loose from root time. This isn't as straightforwardly surgical, or as uninvolved, as it might read. Felipe is open about the inspiration he's drawn from the Mexican peyote ceremony (and from Antonin Artaud's writings on it). In particular, he's interested in the time-distortion effect experienced when ingesting mescaline (which he recreates here via digital editing). On the way, he also explores inharmonicity – the additional non-harmonic tones created within a sound, via variations in the source material's state of rigidity and elasticity. Strictly speaking, this is a physical exploration, but if you're talking ritual – if you're talking metaphysics – the same idea might be extended to the participants in the ceremony. As in any sacrament, each of their experiences will be shaped by their willingness, and by how their own histories and attitudes impact on how their brain works and how their world is conceived.
On Ciguri, Felipe doesn't make matters quite that explicit, but he does his very best to remind us of how subjective an experience this can be. Sound-wise, he places us in the heart of a slow heat of hanging metals, and we listen (over nine minutes) as they alter. During this time, different parts of the surrounding structure take turns to transmute while others remain still. Gently struck tones blur from a simple ping to a fluttering hummingbird drill: the substance of the metals themselves seem to move restlessly between solid resonant bronze, a whispering foil, or a mere shining hiss of elements. The reasons behind this may be all in the math, but it doesn't feel that way. As the numbers race through their patterns, the world around us changes and we're hypnotized by what feels like the universe breathing.
Another piece, Irama, draws directly on Javanese gamelan orchestra music (using manipulated recordings of the Sekar Petak ensemble at the University of York). Irama's title comes from a flexible gamelan term – one that can be used to define the time between two notes, or the time between two actions; or the rhythmic relationships between parts of the composition; or tempo in general. Drawing all of these meanings together under one conceptual net suggests a substantial and integral connection between all of them, much as each of the Indonesian gongs, flutes, pots and zithers in a specific gamelan orchestra is honed and tuned to fit only with instruments from the same orchestra. Of course, digital electro-acoustic processing means that any relationship between notes, pitches or rhythms which didn't already exist can be first conceived and then molded into shape: and Felipe flexes and reshapes the gamelan sounds according to his own design.
Irama's gong sounds range from the familiar bronze boom to the kind of light dry patterings and tight-hide raps which you'd expect to hear bounding from frame drums. Over a particularly deep gong sound, a metallophone texture is stretched into a soft drone: when the broader percussion section returns, it's joined by soft struck pings and an oceanic flutter. At crucial points, particular gong chimes cut through to suggest changes of intent and mood. Apart from these, all of the sounds which lope through Irama reinforce themselves, subtly adding to an arrangement which becomes denser and denser, shifting to a jazzier pulses before (nearly four minutes in) rising to flood-rate and then dispelling into nothing. A second section begins – sterilized pings and rings, more German laboratory than Javanese ritual. Drilling echoes are buried inside it, ringing edge-tones place themselves above it. At six minutes, the frame-drums return; at seven, the pulse has multiplied again to the point of flooding; at eight, softened rings are the dominant sound as the piece diminishes into calmness. As with Ciguri, there seems to be more than the mathematics at work here; but beyond the calculations, all of Irama could itself be an illustration of time as human experience – its repetitions, its bewildering multiplicity of voices; its moments of collective intensity and its sudden rapid lulls.
As a listener, attempting to put narratives (however clumsy) onto more elusive or abstract pieces of music is a common strategy. Thankfully, the mixed instrumental/vocal piece Teocalli already comes with a narrative. It's based on 'The Night Face Up', a short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, whose surreal-modernist approach (creatively disrupting his plots and chances of resolution via a shifting, subjective consciousness and by the restless straw-shuffling of jazz) is well suited to the cut/paste/reshuffle of Felipe's compositional tools.
The original tale is about an injured, hospitalized motorcyclist: delirious, and dreaming that he's a man hunted by the ancient Aztecs and targeted for sacrifice. Location and context come adrift in the dreamer's mind, but are carefully deployed by the writer – here, Felipe steps carefully into the latter role, guiding his strips and layers of sound into place. Hunters' drums roll in the background, sometimes scooping up in an enormous glottal curl of extreme echo, swooped by fierce panning and sound-fielding. At times, they run backwards, creating great ominous bowls of sound-space. In a recurring cut-up, a little choir of men sing what sounds like a Mexican popular tune. This moves in and out of Teocalli like a radio which can't stay fixed on the station, just as the injured man in the story can't stay fixed within his own time or his own experience. Watchful silences bead within the piece, within the drum-slides; filled with tiny arrested hangs of reverberation.
Through these silences (but also often in the midst of great surging wrenches of drums, as they wrestle for our attention) women's voices speak. Zapotec women, from a pre-Spanish civilization that lives alongside and intertwined with modern Mexico. They converse and chat, presumably about ordinary human matters – these are interview snippets, not field recordings. But as these women are separated from listeners like us by their language (and by our own crude knowledge, and cruder guesses, about their culture), they innocently become part of the sinister hallucinatory sound environment which Felipe creates. As drums sweep and skirl around our heads, so too does a whole jungle of suggestions – brief clusters of crickets, digitally squeezed and timeslid; bird calls, as of hunters hidden in the undergrowth. When one of the women speaks again, her unconcerned and easy voice is shaded into callousness. When, at one point, she suddenly laughs, easy and confident, the dense paranoia and wilderness swirling around her conspires to render her cruel.
There's no final outcome to Teocalli – no cathartic slaughter, no rescue. Eventually Felipe's piece just blows away into the shadows, like the memory of ugly wings pressed around you. The fever dream is over. With the passing sweat those eerie vicious terrors go with them. The deep-rooted fear (part-humble, part-racist) of an ancient, incipient otherness. The fear of comfort and security crumpling and allowing the past to pluck you away; a raw, helpless morsel.
In its way, the final 'Tutuguri' piece – Sarnath – is as ritualistic as the others, yet it doesn't rely so much on recreating states of mind. Instead, it attempts to sculpt suggestions of place, history and connections. It's based on Francis Booth's Indian location recordings of places associated with the story of the Buddah (and is named after the deer park in which Buddhist Dharma was first taught). In a sense, Sarnath is both site-specific and displaced, bringing the noises of Buddah-touched locations to wherever its soundfiles are played. Concert venue. Boom box. Perhaps even a trekker's smartphone, being carried on a pilgrimage of its own.
As Felipe switches between recordings (clicking up one-by-one the sonic capturess of different geographical stops on the Buddah journey), Sarnath itself seems to be moving from place to place in search of something. Literally, a footprint? Literally, an echo? Felipe toys with the field recordings: folding them on themselves, stretching them over time. A bell might sound, swell hugely, then drop away. Chants may be heard. On a half-distant road, a procession of ecstatically banging drums may wind its way to a shrine. Behind these, birds and animals twitter. Away from the devotions, there are the soft chips and scrapes of human work being carried on regardless. Here, Felipe's notes most obviously cite the intense, subtle states of mind connected with meditation: here, with whispers of Buddha making their presence felt, it's a traditional part of the tale. Here, too, are the tiny sounds to focus meditation; the small sonic flakes of the natural world around which attention can be wound.
'Tutuguri' is four pieces; four stories. None of them conclusive; and despite the sleevenotes and the substantial clues, at least part of the stories I've recounted here have been dreamed up by me. The solo listener – the sound moulded by careful hands around my ears, yes; some of the intimations perhaps patted into place. But in other cases this music is just process doing what process does: forming channels for their own sake, numbers making shapes and illusions as part of the pattern comes into view, and only part of that's actually recognized. Much of the purely technical side of Felipe Otondo's music escapes me: instead, I experience much of it as the psychological backwash, like the vapour trails after the plane has passed. Still, if I'm creating my own ideas for what Felipe's music might entail or might intimate, there's clearly enough extra substance there for me to build on. That's what humans do: we use sound to find out where we are. Finding places we know: judging our way through what's being presented to us; sometimes, the recognitions surprise us.
Working blind, but guided by sound, I travel too.
Sargasso Records, SCD28070 (5065001338700)
CD/download album
Released: 25th March 2013
Sargasso Records (CD) or Amazon (download).
Felipe Otondo online:
Tags: Antonin Artaud, Chile, creeping horror, drift and float, eeriness, Felipe Otondo, head spins gently, inklings of disaster, intimations of ancientness, Julio Cortázar, Lancaster (England), Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, pilgrimages, rattlebag, stealth music, the fine art of sampling
Categories 2013 music, album reviews, ambient music, ceremonial music, electro-acoustic music, electronic, experimental music, field recordings, gamelan, process music, reviews, sampledelia, sound collage, South American music, world & indigenous music
Album reviews – Darkroom: 'Fallout 2' & 'Fallout 3' albums, 2002 ("a game of reverse-chicken… impressive and utter liquefaction")
Darkroom: 'Fallout 2'
The second part in Darkroom's 'Fallout' trilogy ( a set of interwoven concert travelogues) sees the unorthodox dark-ambient trio shrink to fit circumstances: recorded over the course of four gigs in Cambridge between spring 2000 and spring 2001, 'Fallout 2' records their first period of work as a duo. With singer Tim Bowness temporarily absent from the group, the five lengthy live tracks see Darkroom's sound now built up entirely from Andrew Ostler's infinitely malleable, polluted volume of electronic sounds and Michael Bearpark's massed, heaven-and-hell loop guitars.
Subtracting the singer should have meant removing the human face from Darkroom's activities. It should have forced their music – which was already suffused with hanging menace, dense atmospherics and chaotic leanings – further down the road to alienation. In fact, the opposite is true. Minus those fragmentary Bowness sighs, whispers and melodic wails, Darkroom do relinquish part of their edge of romance and distress. But they also dispense with the intimations of human disintegration, morbidity and panic which Tim's beautifully tortured vocal tones brought to the project.
In his absence, Darkroom is able to relax and experiment with a two-way balance instead of the three-way teeter they'd thrived on previously. Os and Michael sit back and play off each other – not in unison, but in a dialogue of occasional crossings and of deceptive, mock-disengaged responses. As with 'Fallout One', the two-man Darkroom continue to embrace instinctive wandering noise-stews rather than art-rock discipline.
For this album, at least, these are gentler brews: one even begins with a serene duet of heaven-scented loop guitar and a windblown squiggle of pink noise, rather than the warning tones of before. Released from some of his duties as textural foil to Tim, it's Michael who now gives the music its anchors: cyclic calling phrases, humming confections of layered Frippertronic-like loops, space-echoed licks, sometimes a sound like someone wrenching their way out of a giant metal tank. Os – as usual – takes responsible for most of the layers of sonic detail and for the most drastic directional shifts within Darkroom's ever-restless improvisations.
Os' increasing plunderphonic tendencies (linking and threading pieces with snippets of international radio conversation, Cambridge choristers or muezzin calls) prove that behind his responsibilities for the main body of Darkroom's sound, he's also the joker in the pack, dialling up effects and textures from a vast trick-bag of electronic sounds which he then sloshes across the speakers and leaves to evolve. His rhythms, too, betray a sense of cool, amused mischief. He'll stitch in trails of techno beats, or hijack a piece five-and-a-half minutes in with jazzy cymbals and toms drenched in flapping dub treatments. He'll even drop in the occasional comedy drum-wallop to accompany some blooping synth sounds he appears to have stolen off a kiddy-ride in a shopping center. Inscrutable humour aside, Os also assembles a remarkable variety of more solid elements to flesh out Darkroom's randomness: imposing psychedelic cadences, static veils and suggestive electrophonic shapes.
Though Michael Bearpark's playing still owes a debt to Robert Fripp (via his "Bearatronics" loops and his occasional digressions into trumpet-guitar), he's far less formally-minded. While you could also draw parallels to the mangled roots sounds used by David Torn, Michael is a far more reticent, distant and watchful guitarist: less flamboyant, but similarly eclectic. Across the album, he comes up with the kind of junkyard guitar that Marc Ribot would be proud of; or treats us to yanks and scrabbles of twanging guitar in the vein of Henry Kaiser or Fred Frith. He unwinds collapsing, Spanish-guitar-style electric rolls; or feeds in the Bill Frisell-influenced ghost-country minimalism that he's increasingly stamped onto Darkroom music. Os responds with gusty, gauzy swirls of noise, or busies himself chopping up the sound even as Michael enriches it.
It's co-operation of a kind, I suppose. Sometimes the Bearpark/Os interplay is gloriously subtle. More often, they're engaged in a game of reverse-chicken in which they seem to be seeing just how far they can wander from each other's playing before Darkroom collapses, adding a kind of free-jazz risk to the elements of illbience, Krautrock and musique concrete that already flourish in the group's sound. Darkroom's apparent abstract shapelessness (more accurately their indifference to, and boredom with, the monotonous formality of much electronic music) seems to put a lot of people off. However, their loosely-knit and liberated music still has few rivals or peers in electronica.
Tim Bowness returns for 'Fallout 3' which at first listen sounds as if it could be pegged as the kinder, gentler Darkroom. This seems an unlikely label. Nonetheless, the album initially seems something of a let-up from Darkroom's unsettling dark-ambient explorations.
As the group's main studio-flexer, Os exerts most of the active control over the emerging music. On this occasion, he does this by taking more of those Darkroom live recordings and drastically remixing them. Drawn from two of the mid-2000 Cambridge gigs which initiated 'Fallout 2' (plus four other gigs between 1999 and 2000 in Cambridge and London), 'Fallout 3' is tagged as "a celebration of the art of post-production" and compresses their rich, chaotic improvised sprawl into a thickening wall of noise. This is Darkroom as jelly, rather than their usual coils of prismatic vapour. In the process, it displays a side of the group which might appeal better to ambient-music aficionados and art/noise acolytes (those who've so far proved immune to, or unconscious of, Darkroom's brooding wide-open power).
The art-rock richness of Tim's keening, beautiful-agony vocal was previously something of a scene-stealer – especially when it reached heights of drama which recalled Peter Hammill at full tilt. This time it drifts faintly through the mix like a displaced ghost. Half-obscured, half-dreamy, its physical presence fades to a livid imprint. As for the industrial-melodic textures of Michael's guitars (and his layered MiniDisc manipulations), these have sunk even deeper than before into the fabric of Darkroom sounds, as have most of the drum loops. The most audible Darkroom instrumentation to be heard on 'Fallout 3' is the humble studio fader and the reverb unit, teasing their way through the music and rebuilding detail.
Turned right down, 'Fallout 3' sounds like the smooth-peanut-butter option compared to the crunchier varieties of 'Fallout One' and 'Fallout 2′. Turned up, though, the music piles upwards inexorably; like a thick fluid shot through with veins of displaced voices. Sometimes these voices belong to Tim, processed almost beyond recognition to become muttering crowds or alien choirboys. Sometimes they're radio voices stroked out of the ether by Os' continuing casual interest in plunderphonics. Those little instrumental dialogues and monologues that used to weave through Darkroom pieces have been melted down too. Everything played becomes food to feed this new amorphous monster.
The result is that, more than ever, Darkroom's music has the amnesiac, dissolving qualities of oceans. Powerful and ever-massing, and strangely indifferent to the repercussions of its nature. The sound itself, for what it's worth, is closer to dry land if perhaps not stable ground. That continuously-rumbling, near-geological depth of soundfield and the thick "angry-earth" quality to the sound brings this reinvented Darkroom closer to the relentless, tectonic grind of Robert Hampson's dark-ambient process music in Main. Like Main's, the pieces on 'Fallout 3' are much of a muchness. All are slightly differing curves on a line mostly heading in one direction, arcing beyond post-rock to the land of out-rock. There's far less of the more identifiable tendencies of the past – nowhere near as much of that Fripp-&-Eno-swimming-in-Lee-Perry's-galactic-fishtank feel. The always diffuse identities of the Darkroom players are now barely there at all. The music has turned them inside out.
Consequently this is seventy-five minutes of impressive and utter liquefaction that's still– identifiably – Darkroom, and which also enables them to thumb an invisible nose at past accusations of formlessness. Even when their musical substance is reduced to something as intangible as this, Darkroom's baleful and beautiful intent remains intact: a long way beyond the easy trance to which most electronic acts are finally reduced. Darkroom's vision is still inexplicable and alien. It's also still undeniable.
Neither kinder nor gentler, then. Just even more seductively suffocating and inscrutable.
Darkroom: 'Fallout 2' & 'Fallout 3'
Burning Shed (no catalogue numbers or barcodes)
CD-R/download albums
Released: 01 January 2002 ('Fallout 2') & 1st February 2002 ('Fallout 3')
Get them from:
Burning Shed ('Fallout 2', 'Fallout 3') or Bandcamp ('Fallout 2', 'Fallout 3')
Darkroom online:
Tags: Andrew Ostler, apocalyptic roars, Cambridge (England), creeping horror, Darkroom, drift and float, ghostliness, head spins gently, live concert recordings, Michael Bearpark, murmur to wail, no-man, pitch-bending, rattlebag, textural guitar music, Tim Bowness, wall of sound
Categories 2002 music, album reviews, ambient music, drum and bass, electronic, electronica, experimental music, improvisation, industrial music, instrumental music, kosmische & Krautrock, loop music, remixes, reviews, sampledelia, techno
REVIEW – Apricot Rail: 'Basket Press' single, 2013 ("a five-minute garland")
Apricot Rail: 'Basket Press'
Damn, but latter-day post-rock bands can be dour. Something renders so many of them dry, or scrunched up into a kind of passive-aggressive melodrama. Too many of them belong to the post-Mogwai/Explosions In The Sky faction – increasingly hackneyed building blocks of minimal, stilted guitar arpeggios, building to a fuzzed-up tumble of noise via a gradual crescendo. I've heard it too often now. It's like watching the same slow-motion fireworks every night – every time, the same chilly histrionics.
Perth sextet Apricot Rail, trailing this new single for their second album 'Quarrels', manage to avoid that disappointment. As ever, they bring some of the original post-rock enchantment back as well as plenty of enchantment of their own. Admittedly, on a first hearing Basket Press is more conventionally post-rocky than their previous outing (2011's 'Surry Hills' EP, in which whirring warmth and a sun-dappled shuffling of approaches gave their music the vivid craft of a beautiful set of handmade holiday postcards). The band have even returned to those pluck/build/fuzz/hallucinate ingredients I've just been savaging, and there's less of the generous instrument-swapping that's freshened their approach in the past.
In spite of this, Apricot Rail manage to avoid drabness and predictability. Basket Press is a five-minute garland of distinct and graceful stages. Part summery harvest-time music, part rippling classical suite, part affectionate conversation, it's bound together with a palpable friendliness. First there's a lone guitar sketching out slow American-folk arpeggios with a touch of echo (the chords, save for one crucial falling note, reworking the floating Pink Floyd melancholia of Us And Them). Then, as woodwind player Mayuka airs a fuzzy flute trail of sustained notes, there are three. Guitarists Ambrose, Jack and Justin strum, curl and gently chisel out firmer chords over a cosy fuss of drums, as if they were rounding off a carved scroll. From this, a move to that on-the-one post-rock downstrum – then, as two guitars mix a light picking of melody with pinging counter harmonics, Mayuka's flute wakes into a twining, rising counterpoint. Bass and drums move in via a low dotting – a patter, and a dialogue.
All along, the feeling is of a mutual binding, of teamwork, all six musicians facing inwards to share the exchange. The music slips through phases like breathing, like the momentum of thoughts; like assured working hands shifting their grip on a gardening hoe. A rare and understated joy wells through it, passing hints. In many respects, all of this is moving to a similar pulse as that mid-'70s sweep of world-folk and chamber-jazz melanged into being by Paul McCandless, Ralph Towner and their colleagues in Oregon. As the lowest-pitched guitar stirs a new folkier rhythm into the band circle, Mayuka responds with sweet McCandless-esque clarinet curves. Upping the ante, a detailed guitar study – a Mediterranean sparkle – works its way in over rising supportive drums. Another guitar, sitting in the mid-register, embroiders sweet minimal rosettes of lazy cycling notes.
Eventually the band builds through a mass of roaring pedalwork and noise into the kind of land-sliding, sleeting mass of guitar-descend which we're used to as that conclusive Mogwai-tradition flourish. This time, though: it's been prepared for. Rather than the expected ragged glory of a ruined Sysiphus-bound downwards into gravity's clutches, it's a payoff – a burst of energy from what the musicians have put into the song and stored there.
For the curious – a basket press is a wine-making device, one used for over a thousand years. I can see the connection. Harvest arrives.
Hidden Shoals Recordings (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download-only single
Released: 10th January 2013
Apricot Rail online:
Tags: Apricot Rail, drift and float, gemlike sparkle, head spins gently, multi-instrumentalists, Perth (Australia), songs that sound like summer
Categories 2013 music, dream pop, folk music, instrumental music, music downloads for free/cheap/pay-what-you-like, post-rock, reviews, rock, single reviews
REVIEW – Darkroom: 'Fallout One' album, 2001 ("like a small corpse flattened onto a moving tyre")
Darkroom: 'Fallout One'
Maybe it's due to simply not being on the right label (they're homed neither at Warp Records nor at Rephlex, nor at any of the other established electronica houses who provide a credible passport to attention). Maybe it's the frustration of continually bouncing, disregarded and unloved, off the defense radar at 'The Wire'. Maybe it's simply the usual difficulties regarding working on and playing an abstract, thickly electronic music with even fewer anchors than most of the buzzing, bleeping efforts in that particular field.
Whatever it is, while the mightily amorphous Darkroom should have been a serious avant-garde cult act by now. Instead, they've been in retreat since their initial late '90s rising and since those times when they brought their galactic rumble-and-wail to some of the artier club-nights around London. It's dispiriting – but at least this has been a strategic retreat rather than slinking off, defeated, to lick their wounded diodes.
Darkroom remain active, particularly in their native Cambridge. They still haunt basements, galleries and art-house cinemas whenever they can, recording hours and hours of live material. They're still more or less unknown: but they've been making the most of this anonymity. At least it allows them to continue to explore their own unsettling take on ambient music, unencumbered by the demands of the more familiar electronica clubs or by any micro-cultures other than their own. The 'Fallout' trilogy (of which this is the first installment) is the result.
These recordings present an unadulterated Darkroom, live and in the raw – a sound of boiling sea-stuff, of natural chaos, of expansively stewing noise. They've abandoned the song experiments and the more disciplined, streamlined aspects of their previous album 'Seethrough' in order to embrace more of the chaotic, massy, polytextural wanderings that they touched on in their 'Daylight' debut. Each of the tracks on 'Fallout One' is functionally numbered: One to Seven. None are graced with any more of a name, nor indeed any more clues of any kind. There are no sine-wave surfing references, no snippets of French or intimations of disturbance, no jokes (unless you count the press release name-checking both Photek and Satan). There aren't even any nods to the collective's old Samuel Beckett fetish.
Darkroom don't guide anymore. They drift remotely through their music with a mixture of utter authority and confusing haphazardness, stirring ideas in and spinning them out. You can't place yourself with this music: you can only live with it. Any associations which you care to make are now entirely your own.
'Fallout One' also emphasizes an increasing musical dominance by Andrew Ostler, the keyboard-and-programming corner of the Darkroom triangle. Freshly returned from his solo project Carbon Boy, Os brings back plenty – he adds a glut of shortwave radio voices; he disrupts Darkroom's light-footed beats and breaks them up into free-jazz stumbles. His relentless mutations of dense electronics regularly distort and destroy any settled landscapes that the group might have settled on. Lurking in the background, Michael Bearpark concentrates on turning his guitar into a slow-hand blur of inscrutable forbidding noise. When he's not doing that he's building up a succession of aquamarine loops, sounding like a coldly psychotic take on Michael Brook.
By comparison, singer Tim Bowness seems more displaced than ever. Already abstract, whenever his vocals appear now they take the form of shocked, drowning, incoherent whoops and keens, half-submerged in the swirl of choking ambience and psychedelic space echo which his collaborators are cooking up. As ever, the effect is similar to the contorted vocal tapestries of Tim Buckley's 'Starsailor'. This time, though, Bowness sounds as if he's gradually being sucked down a black hole, protesting all the way. It's a far cry from the measured, beautifully-finished art-pop tones and diction of his day-job in no-man. Still, he seems to thrive on the chance to unleash this kind of utterly unguarded noise.
Caught as live as this, Darkroom's music is more disorientating and disturbing than it's ever been before on album. Though always too lushly endowed with timbre and detail to be unrelentingly hostile, it offers little in the way of chill-out calm or methodical reassurance. Even the gentler tracks such as Three or Four regularly see Darkroom's more pastoral landscapes bent out of shape. A desperate, looping Bowness mantra of "say" will be overcome by data squirts and snippets of Gregorian chant; a hum of guitar will be scratched over by a violently juddering, reedy electronic screech; clicking needles will have a strange banana-boat yodel stretched across them.
Throughout, Os' sculpting of the sounds induces sonic meltdown. Hiccups of sounds, whale song, a mutilated loop of geothermal Mellotron or a dignified broadcaster's voice will all be sucked up, shredded and blown out, or brought round and round like a small corpse flattened onto a moving tyre. In their collision of the beautiful, the horror-inducing and the plain distorted, Darkroom offer nothing easy. 'Fallout One' is music for dissolving cities – a cool-headed, unconditional embracing of confusion.
Burning Shed (no catalogue number or barcode)
CD-R/download album
Burning Shed or Bandcamp.
REVIEW – Elephant: 'Golden' single, 2012 ("playing in the sunshine")
Elephant: 'Golden'
Hmm. It's only taken Elephant a year and a half to journey from being walkers in the gloaming (singing out their queasy, dissolved surrealism) to playing in the sunshine. There were some clues on their previous EP, 'Assembly', which embraced mainstream pop while twirling mournfully like a mascara-ed panda; yet this is a firm step outwards from the obsessive feel of their early singles. Or is it?
Whether it's Amelia Rivas' French ancestry coming through, or just a shared and surfacing taste for classy Europop, Golden sees Elephant strip away their cavernous post-punk layers of dream-pop guitars and blood-throb synths in favour of gently bobbing acoustic strums, shimmering organ string pads, a touch of swing and bell-like keyboard smears. Actually, come to think of it, they've been here before on Actors, the surprising B-side to their second single Allured. This is altogether more sedate, though – a leisurely boat trip as compared to Actors' chic bike ride, or perhaps a gentle merry-go-round bump'n'whirl. Compared to the hallucinatory greyness of their earlier work, it's full-colour. French-tinged pop, for certain: an antique kind, filtered through Goffin and King and through Elephant's subtle and invisible technical skills.
The link to what's come before remains Amelia's voice (still mournful and carrying a dry-eyed narcotic timbre, whatever she's singing about) and her baffling way with a lyric, in which she dabs loosely associated words and phrases into a line like painted highlights and hopes that you'll focus on her own scattered picture. With this kind of tune – this lightness, this air of sated contentment – I'm assuming that Golden is a love song. It certainly starts as intimate ("speaking in codes to you / in a drowned-out room. / Chandelier shelters us – / only space for two,") but a chorus that gives equal weight to the words "escapade" and "hate" suggests something a little more complex.
Certainly by the second verse – "gazing from this altitude, / trapeze transforms to new. / The old was there all along. / Telescope straight to you," – we're in lyrical warpspace. Though Elephant have never sounded so cosy, so lovewrapped on the outside, the usual hallucinations are bleeding up from the inside. By the third verse, the summertime and the sunlight are taking on a shadow-etched 'Twin Peaks' hue – "The trees they whisper too, / as I glare from a bird's eye view. / The grass entwines my feet and hands – / they hold me like you do."
If you look at something too closely, cracks appear, and that's true both when looking at songs and looking at love. Love and rage: the cuddle that ebbs away into a stifle… I'm backing off. Today I was promised sunshine, and a dank draught from the basement wasn't part of the plan.
Perhaps if I don't look too hard, I'll be able to glide along on the surface, hold hands and enjoy the golden light. Perhaps it will all be OK. Will it?
Elephant (self-released)
Released: 6th June 2012
Elephant online:
Tags: Elephant (pop group), head spins gently, listening to women, London (England), multi-instrumentalists, not what it seems, songs that sound like summer, word salad
Categories 2012 music, alternative pop, alternative rock, dream pop, pop, reviews, single reviews, synth pop


Join us in the lap pool for a kick workout! Kickboards and fins will be provided by Fitness Plus. Learn how to do each part of the workout and how to use the equipment. You don't have to be a strong swimmer to get the benefits of a great aerobic water workout.


text:
Q: iOS 8.1 image display Having a weird problem and can't find anything after over an hour of searching.
I am using Xcode 8 but also experience the issue when using Xcode 7 (I copied the project directory and tested in Xcode7 - I am working in Xcode 8 and created the project in Xcode 8, I only did this for testing purposes) to run the project in the simulator. I have no code in the view controller at this point so I know the problem is not related to code.
I have a simple view created in a storyboard but when I run it on any 8.1 simulator or device the logo appears stretched/skewed.

The original image is below:

I have created this simple placeholder image to make the point, originally I was using our company logo - so I know it's not an issue with the image since this one was just created.
I have tried removing all constraints from the image and just using width, height, and position constraints but the issue still persists.
Has anybody seen this happen before? What do I need to do to fix this?

A: you may change the uiimageview's view mode to "Aspect Fill" or "Aspect Fit" in the utilities area .
Check this

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


After a not easy start in the FIA F3 European Championship, the 2015 racing season of Eurointernational turned in a positive way thank to the programme wanted by Giorgio Mondini and Antonio Ferrari with a new adventure, the sport prototype. For the italian team manager, this kind of car was already a special love born more than 20 years ago, when Eurointernational was protagonist in USA with Ferrari 333 SP race car.
Started in late June, the programme in the Campionato Italiano Sport Prototipi has been successfully just from the first race, where Giorgio Mondini took both pole position and win in Magione, after few days after the delivery of the car into the italian team factory. From that day, the Ligier JS53 Evo 2 has been modified and upgraded by Eurointernational, becoming at least 1″ faster than the original one.
The italian-swiss driver has won both overall and CN2 standings with the only points conquered with Eurointernational, making his debut just in the third race of the season. Mondini got 8 wins, 7 pole-positions, one 2nd place andone 3rd place in 10 races, signing the new lap time record in all circuits.
Eurointernational and Antonio Ferrari's plans are now already focused on 2016 racing season: in the next days, the team will start a huge testing programme around the Europe with the Ligier LMP3 cars and two other Ligier JS53 Evo 2 are expected to be delivered at the italian team within the end of the year. Next season will see Eurointernational involved in different series: at now, the provisional plan is set to have 2 LMP3 in European Le Mans Series, 3 CN2 in Vdev (and some races in the Italian Sport Prototype Championship (aka Campionato Italiano Sport Prototipi) and the return in the FIA F3 European Championship with 2 Dallara F312 powered by Mercedes-Benz.
All programmes will be supported by Hexathron Racing Systems both by its engineers and with the work on professional racing simulator.


text:
Donald Trump Swears This Election Will Be Rigged And He's Right
This upcoming election will be rigged in Hillary Clinton's favor according to Donald Trump. Everyone thinks he's in his feelings, but I think he's dropping jewels. I also think he's in on it.
The presidential race has a reputation for being entertaining ever since the Kennedy and Nixon debates. We must have taken that concept and ran with it. America just has to prove that anything is possible, but are we going too far?
Hillary Clinton is clearly the best candidate out of the two, but why do we have to make it so obvious? We get it! He's not qualified. That's a fact. You can't say anything about this guy without him going off on Twitter. He even attacked a gold star family. Who wants a president like that? At first it was entertaining, but it's not funny anymore.
To make matters worse his team is constantly giving out incorrect information on national TV. Katrina Pierson, his spokeswoman has made a number of false statements on CNN like "Afghanistan was Obama's War". Really? Clearly President Bush was in office at the time. I was in high school and I remember that. As a candidate on the road to election, your team should be sharper than that. So are we really supposed to believe this is real?
His latest stunt is recently stating that President Obama started Isis. He also Claims that Hillary Clinton is the co-founder. Donald even stood by that statement in an interview. Now he's saying he was being sarcastic, but not really, and didn't mean it literally. Although he literally used the word literally. Can Hillary Clinton win now? Because I'm literally over it.
If this is real, that means Donald Trump is the worst candidate to ever run for president in the republican party. Like the absolute worse, and if you're that bad I can't help but believe that you're doing it on purpose.
Whitney Marquise Acoff
Whitney Marquise Acoff (WIT-nee MAR-kee AK-oaf) is a professional journalist and political blogger. Getting her start in fashion writing she's been a friend of Mercedes Benz Fashion Week for many years. Whitney has also interviewed celebrities such as Wendy Williams and managed celebrity social media accounts for Mike Epps, DL Hughley, Ricky Smiley, and more. Today Whitney is the Editor in Chief of her own publication The Inside Report. She also still contributes to many publications while growing her brand.
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How Rheumatoid Arthritis Is Diagnosed
More in Arthritis
Causes & Risk Factors
Support & Coping
More Arthritis Types & Related Conditions
Rheumatoid Arthritis Guide
How the Disease and Disease Remission Are Confirmed
Carol Eustice
Carol Eustice is a writer covering arthritis and chronic illness, who herself has been diagnosed with both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.
David Ozeri, MD
Medically reviewed by David Ozeri, MD
David Ozeri, MD, is a board-certified rheumatologist from Tel Aviv, Israel specializing in arthritis, autoimmune diseases, and biologic therapies.
Labs and Tests
Other Diagnoses
Next in Rheumatoid Arthritis Guide
Treating Rheumatoid Arthritis—Effectively
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a difficult disease for healthcare providers to diagnose, especially in its early stages, because the signs and symptoms are similar to those of many other conditions. So far, healthcare providers don't have a single test that definitively diagnoses RA, so they rely a physical exam, family medical history, several blood tests, and imaging such as X-rays.
Rheumatoid arthritis differs from osteoarthritis ("wear-and-tear" arthritis) in that it is an autoimmune disorder. That means the immune system mistakenly attacks its own cells and tissues, primarily, in RA, the cells and tissues of the joints.
Most autoimmune diseases are hard to diagnose, but getting it right is important because it helps determine the appropriate course of treatment.
Verywell
One of the first tools of diagnosis is a physical exam. The aim of the evaluation is, in part, to determine the characteristics of the joint pain and swelling to better distinguish it from other causes of joint pain, like osteoarthritis.
Many of the questions your healthcare provider will ask are aimed at determining whether RA or osteoarthritis is more likely to be causing your symptoms.
Areas Affected Tends to affect multiple joints (polyarthritis) Usually affects the hands, feet, knees, and spine; sometimes involves just a single joint (monoarthritis)
Symmetry Symmetrical, meaning that joint symptoms on one side of the body will often be mirrored on the other side of the body Can be either asymmetrical (unilateral) or symmetrical, particularly if many joints are involved
Fatigue, Malaise, Fever Common due to systemic (whole-body) inflammation
Not typically associated with this disease, as it is not inflammatory
Morning Stiffness Lasts more than 30 minutes, sometimes more than an hour, but improves with activity
Brief; less than 15 minutes
In addition to evaluating your physical symptoms, the healthcare provider will review your family history. Rheumatoid arthritis can often run in families, doubling your risk of the disease if a second-degree relative (like a grandmother or uncle) has it and tripling your risk if an immediate family member (i.e., parent, sibling) is affected.
Lab tests are used for two primary purposes in diagnosing rheumatoid arthritis:
To classify your serostatus
To measure or monitor the level of inflammation in your body
Serostatus
Serostatus (loosely translated as "blood status") refers to the key identifiers of the disease in your blood. If these compounds are detected in a blood test, you're classified as seropositive. If they are not found, you're deemed seronegative.
Seropositive results can be further classified as:
Low positive
Moderate positive
High/strong positive
Two tests are used to establish your serostatus:
Rheumatoid Factor (RF): RF is a type of autoantibody found in approximately 70% of people living with the disease. Autoantibodies are proteins produced by the immune system that attack healthy cells or cell products as if they were germs. While high levels of RF are strongly suggestive of RA, they also can occur with other autoimmune diseases (such as lupus) or non-autoimmune disorders such as cancer and chronic infections.
Anti-Cyclic Citrullinated Peptide (anti-CCP): Anti-CCP is another autoantibody found in the majority of people with rheumatoid arthritis. Unlike RF, a positive anti-CCP test result occurs almost exclusively in people with RA. A positive result might even identify people who are at risk for getting the disease, such as those with a family history of it.
Where both serostatus tests fall short is in their sensitivity, which is generally below 80%. What this means is that, while valuable in the diagnostic process, the tests are prone to ambiguity or falsely negative results.
Because neither test is 100% indicative of RA, they're used as part of the diagnostic process rather than as sole indicators.
Inflammatory Markers
Inflammation is a defining characteristic of rheumatoid arthritis, and certain markers in your blood reveal information about inflammation to your healthcare provider. Tests that look at key markers not only help confirm the initial diagnosis of RA but are used periodically to see how well you're responding to treatment.
Two common tests of inflammatory markers are:
Erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR or sed rate) is a test that measures how long it takes red blood cells to settle to the bottom of a long, upright tube, known as a Westergren tube. When there's inflammation, the red blood cells stick together and sink faster. It is a non-specific measurement of inflammation but can provide key insights that are valuable to a diagnosis.
C-reactive protein (CRP) is a type of protein the liver produces in response to inflammation. While also non-specific, it is a more direct measure of your inflammatory response.
ESR and CRP can also be used to diagnose arthritis remission, a state of low disease activity in which inflammation is more or less in check.
Your healthcare provider may order other tests to gauge your disease progression, as well.
Rheumatoid Arthritis Doctor Discussion Guide
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Imaging Tests
The role of imaging tests in rheumatoid arthritis is to identify the signs of joint damage, including bone and cartilage erosion and the narrowing of the joint spaces. They can also help track the progression of the disease and establish when surgery is needed.
Each test can provide different and specific insights:
X-rays: Especially useful in identifying bone erosion and joint damage, X-rays are considered the primary imaging tool for arthritis. However, they're not as helpful in the very early stages of the disease, before changes in cartilage and synovial tissues are significant.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): MRI scans are able to look beyond the bone, spot changes in soft tissues, and even positively identify joint inflammation in the early stages of the disease.
Ultrasounds: These scans are also better than X-rays at spotting early joint erosion, and they can reveal specific areas of joint inflammation. This is a valuable feature, given that inflammation can sometimes linger even when the ESR and CRP point to remission. In such cases, treatment is continued until you're truly in remission.
Classification Criteria
In 2010, the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) updated its longstanding classification criteria for rheumatoid arthritis. The revisions were motivated, in part, by advances in diagnostic technologies. While the classifications are intended to be used for clinical research purposes, they help healthcare providers be more certain about your diagnosis.
The 2010 ACR/EULAR Classification Criteria looks at four different clinical measures and rates each one on a scale of 0 to 5. A cumulative score of 6 to 10 can provide a high degree of confidence that you do, in fact, have rheumatoid arthritis.
While healthcare providers are the only ones who use these criteria, looking at them can help you understand why an RA diagnosis often can't be made quickly or easily.
Criteria Value Points
Duration of Symptoms Less than six weeks 0
More than six weeks 1
Joint Involvement One large joint 0
Two to 10 large joints 1
One to three small joints (without the involvement of larger joints) 2
Four to 10 small joints (without the involvement of larger joints) 3
Over 10 joints (with at least one small joint) 5
Serostatus RF and anti-CCP are negative 0
Low RF and low anti-CCP 2
High RF and high anti-CCP 3
Inflammatory Markers Normal ESR and CRP 0
Abnormal ESR and CRP 1
The strongest indicator of progressive joint damage in rheumatoid arthritis is considered to be seropositivity. That said, seronegativity doesn't preclude progressive joint damage.
People who test positive for both rheumatoid factor and anti-CCP are more likely to have a rapid progression of joint damage than people who are positive for one or the other.
Factors that point to a poor prognosis with progressive joint damage include:
X-ray evidence or clinical evidence of joint damage
Increased number of joints involved with active synovitis, tenderness, swelling, or joint effusions
Elevated ESR or CRP
Positive for anti-CCP
High level of medication use, including corticosteroids, used to treat inflammation in the affected joints
An inadequate response to medications
Decreased joint function as determined by the Health Assessment Questionnaire
Declining quality of life
Diagnosing disease remission is not as straightforward as diagnosing the disease in the first place. It requires not only diagnostic tests but a subjective assessment of what you feel about your condition. Accurately diagnosing remission is important because it determines whether certain treatments can be stopped or if going off of them is likely to cause a relapse.
To this end, the ACR has established what is called the DAS28. DAS is an acronym for disease activity score, while 28 refers to the number of joints that are examined in the assessment.
The DAS involves four scores:
The number of tender joints your healthcare provider finds (out of 28)
The number of swollen joints your healthcare provider finds (out of 28)
Your ESR and CRP results (normal versus abnormal)
Your rating of how you feel and your overall health, ranging from "very good" to "very bad"
These results are put through a complex mathematical formula to calculate your overall score.
DAS 28 SCORES
0–2.5 Remission
2.6–3.1 Low disease activity
3.2–5.1 Moderate disease activity
Above 5.1 High disease activity
Just as certain tests can help differentiate between rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, other tests may be ordered to find out whether your symptoms could be caused by another condition. This is especially likely if your RA test results are either inconclusive or negative.
Conditions with similar symptoms include other autoimmune disorders as well as connective tissue, neurological, and chronic inflammatory diseases such as:
Myelodysplastic syndromes
Paraneoplastic syndromes
Sjögren's syndrome
Systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus)
What blood tests are used to diagnose rheumatoid arthritis?
Blood tests used to diagnose RA measure either serostatus or inflammation. Rheumatoid factor and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) are used to establish serostatus. Erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR or sed rate) and C-reactive protein (CRP) are used to measure inflammation.
What is considered positive for rheumatoid factor?
The normal range for the RF test is 20 IU/ml or less. Test results above 20 IU/ml are considered positive for rheumatoid factor. However, about 20% of people with RA test negative for RF and about 5% of people who test positive for RF do not have RA.
What does a positive anti-CCP test mean?
A positive anti-CCP test typically indicates rheumatoid arthritis. An anti-CCP test is considered positive if it is above 20 units. A negative anti-CCP test does not rule out RA, however, as about 20% of RA patients are seronegative for anti-CCP.
Dealing with chronic inflammation? An anti-inflammatory diet can help. Our free recipe guide shows you the best foods to fight inflammation. Get yours today!
Birtane M, Yavuz S, Taştekin N. Laboratory evaluation in rheumatic diseases. World J Methodol. 2017;7(1):1-8. doi:10.5662/wjm.v7.i1.1
MedlinePlus. Erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR).
Arthritis Foundation. Rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis.
Aletaha D, Neogi T, Silman AJ, et al. 2010 Rheumatoid arthritis classification criteria: an American College of Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism collaborative initiative. Arthritis Rheum. 2010;62(9):2569-81. doi:10.1002/art.27584
American College of Rheumatology. Disease activity score (DAS)/Disease activity score in 28 joints (DAS28).
Wasserman AM. Diagnosis and management of rheumatoid arthritis. Am Fam Physician. 2011;84(11):1245-52.
Hospital for Special Surgery. Understanding rheumatoid arthritis lab tests results.
Aletaha D, Neogi T, Silman A, et al. 2010 Rheumatoid arthritis classification criteria: an American College of Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism collaborative initiative. Arthritis Rheum. 2010:62(9):2565-81 doi:10.1002/art.27584
Anderson J, Caplan L, Yazdany J, et al. Rheumatoid Arthritis Disease Activity Measures: American College of Rheumatology Recommendations for Use in Clinical Practice. Arthritis Care Res. 2012; 64(5):6. doi:10.1002/acr.21649
Bykerk V, Masarotti E. The new ACR/EULAR remission criteria: rationale for developing new criteria for remission. Rheumatology. 2012;51:vi16vi20. doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kes281
Smolen J, Aletaha D, McInnes I. Rheumatoid arthritis. Lancet. 2017;388(10055):2023-38. doi:10.1016/So140-6736(16)30173-8
Everything to Know About Seropositive Rheumatoid Arthritis
How to Tell If Your Rheumatoid Arthritis Is Severe
Rheumatoid Arthritis vs. Fibromyalgia: Symptoms and Causes
Gout vs. Rheumatoid Arthritis: What Are the Differences?
Types of Rheumatoid Arthritis
What Does Rheumatoid Arthritis Progression Look Like?
Joint Pain Causes and Treatment Options
What To Know About Psoriatic Arthritis vs. Lupus
What To Know About Psoriatic Arthritis vs. Rheumatoid Arthritis
Healthcare Providers Consider Other Diseases Before Diagnosing Rheumatoid Arthritis
Everything to Know About Psoriatic Arthritis of the Knee
Rheumatoid Arthritis: Blood Tests for Diagnosis
Psoriatic Arthritis vs. Multiple Sclerosis
What Causes Rheumatoid Nodules?
What's Available for Treating Rheumatoid Arthritis?
What to Know About Rheumatoid Arthritis in Men


Stu Barnes played for the Dallas Stars from 2002-2003 season through the 2007-2008 season, given the 2004-2005 strike season he totaled 5 years as a player. After retirement Barnes moved into the Coaching ranks and became an assistant under then Dallas Head Coach Marc Crawford until the end of the 2011-2012 season. In June of 2017 he again joined the organization for a second stint as Assistant Coach. His total of regular season games played of 329 puts him just outside the top 25 in Dallas Stars history, but given his totals are at 531 and counting for total games playing and coaching his ultimate landing spot will be solidly in the top 10, possible the top 5.
In 329 games in Dallas Barnes compiled 53 goals 67 assists for 120 points and 136 penalty minutes, as well as appeared in 39 playoff games tallying 6 goals and 8 assists for 14 points and 6 penalty minutes in those games.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
< Case studies
Grand Designs – The Corn Mill
In February 2018 we carried out a huge installation for twin brothers Nik and Jon Daughtry, which later in October 2018 was featured on the popular television programme Grand Designs.
The episode began with brothers Nik and Jon outlining their ambitious plans to build two huge family homes on the site of an ancient water mill for just £345,000 with a sceptical presenter Kevin McCloud thinking the budget was too conservative.
The identical 48-year-old twins, "adventurous" Nik and "pragmatic" Jon from Sheffield, live identical lives in many ways. Running a design company and gallery space together, driving identical cars, they own identical dogs and decided to build two identical modern-industrial homes on stilts next to each other. Nik and his wife Emma needed more space for their four children, while the project represented a whole new start for Jon after separating from his wife, but he still required space for this two children.
The site for this exciting grand design was concealed behind the two houses Nik and Jon were renting prior to the build. 200 years ago, the site originally housed a corn mill and until recently two old buildings dating back to the 1950s. The site boasted a beautifully flat concrete yard and by the time the TV cameras started rolling, the twins had bought it together, fully cleared, for £173,000.
A huge one-acre pond brings character to this project and hints at the site's history. Sheffield based Coda Bespoke were commissioned to bring the twins plans to life. Their plans included steel frames to sketch the outlines of two sizeable buildings, while the voids would be dressed out with pre-sized concrete slabs and blockwork walls, which would be clad in sleek black corrugated steel.
It wouldn't be an episode of Grand Designs without trials and tribulations along the way, but our involvement eased stress the twins experienced during their extensive build. We first met the brothers at the Grand Designs Live exhibition in London, as they set about sourcing the bespoke glazing for their complex project. We advised that our showroom in Leeds was the perfect place to visit, as there is no-where else in the UK that displays a vast selection of products on such a grand scale. Within weeks we welcomed the Daughtry's into our Leeds showroom and warmly received their congratulations on our 'incredible, glazing theme park'
What we delivered
The design of both properties was based around a strong, industrial aesthetic so the twins opted for our heavy-duty lift and slide XP Glide S doors. They wanted substantial sightlines that indicated strength to sit alongside other design features including exposed bare plywood, steel and blockwork.
The strength of our products was a constant theme throughout the project with doors required at three metres high, and heavy-duty sashes and gearing required for our S70 casement windows and tilt and turn windows due to large window widths or heights or a combination of both the two. Huge fixed picture windows and an entrance atrium spanning more than five metres in height all added extra dimensions to this dramatic project. Our aluminium products were all installed in RAL 9005 jet black to match the external corrugated steel cladding. Internally the jet-black windows and doors continue the industrial theme and appearance throughout both homes.
The arrival of the 'Beast from the East' on the day of our installation didn't bode well for anyone but we made it to site, crane and all, despite the adverse weather conditions. We spent the week completing our installation in sub-zero temperatures, howling winds and a snow-filled winter sky, something that didn't go unnoticed by the television cameras as our installation in abysmal conditions made the programmes final edit.
What did Kevin Mcloud think of the project?
When Kevin visited the two completed homes is was clear that he was impressed with both the siblings' nod to Sheffield's heritage but also 'the spirit that enabled them to produce two proud industrial statements, that look like one building as you approach'.
"It's like walking into a very luxurious power station…fabulous", says Kevin upon entering Jon's home, which boasts the scale of an old Victorian pump house.
The entrance to Nik's property is through our huge glazed atrium, and heading upstairs a large picture window frames the view of a large tree, which Kevin describes as 'drawing you up the staircase'. Later he described the kitchen as 'a very beautiful viewing box looking out towards the water'.
Kevin expertly summarised the quality of the project by congratulating the twins, saying 'This is architecture that connects, by rejuvenating an old industrial yard Nik and John have jointly fabricated an urban oasis for themselves and their families. It looks fantastic, it's beautiful, you've created two cracking buildings here'.
We've received constant compliments from the twins throughout this project, particularly during the installation itself. We've also worked alongside the designers, Coda Bespoke, on another distinctive project that you can explore by clicking here.
The project has since gone on to win 'Best Residential Development' at the 2018 Northern Design Awards, but it's the direct feedback from the twins that makes us most happy and proud to be involved with this project:
'woke up this morning feeling very lucky as I have every day since we've finished, thank you, we couldn't have done it without you. From start to finish your level of service was amazing'
A vast number of different products were used throughout both builds so we've picked out the main items below:
Plot 1
4355mm x 3000 – XP Glide S
3982mm x 2200mm – Shaped gable frame
2270mm x 2250m – Liseo front door with sidelight
2540mm x 2460mm – Fixed Picture windows
S70 Casement windows at various sizes
Tilt and turn windows at various sizes
2619mm x 53800mm – entrance atrium consisting of curtain walling and a Liseo front door.
2 x 3655mm x 3000mm – XP Glide S
Discover these products
XP Glide SS70 Casement WindowsHorizon Tilt & Turn Windows
Ulla Green
Oakdale Manor


Graduate and alumni Alex Lock is in the news.
Alex graduated with a double degree in Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
Alex is also a member of The School of Architecture & Built Environment (SABE) Professional Advisory Board.
As a senior landscape architect at Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL) and Brand SA ambassador, she has seen a shift in Adelaide's "changing built landscape and approach to its public spaces and public life within the city" over her eight years as a professional landscape architect.
Originally from Bundaberg, Qld, Lock completed a double master's degree in architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Adelaide, finding work with TCL not long out of university. Now a senior landscape architect at TCL, her firm has played a large part in this changing landscape and approach to public spaces. Notable TCL projects include the North Terrace redevelopment, the Riverbank masterplan, the Footbridge, the Victoria Square/ Tarntanyangga redevelopment and the Festival Plaza. With these, Lock says the bigger picture is always in mind. (Christopher Sanders, September 2018).
For further information visit: The Adelaide REVIEW website.
This entry was posted in Events, News, Research. Bookmark the permalink.


Genuine Stingray!! As stunning to the touch as it is grabbing of attention. So unbelievably soft and more durable than leather this opera clutch is one of a kind treasure! Not only fashion forward the stingray opera clutches hold all the essentials, neatly. They're the perfect size to use as a clutch or a wallet with a larger bag. The hard shell casing will protect your items. I've added a little padding so they feel good. Inside features two pockets on each side, for cash. One zipper pocket for loose items, four slots for credit cards and one clear slot for photo ID. And for a little extra luxury there's a dash of dupioni silk, this one has a marine blue color. ~Genuine stingray Stingray is a food resource in Thailand and other countries and the skins would otherwise be discarded.


text:
Mamintal Abdul Jabbar Tamano (December 25, 1928 – May 18, 1994) was a Filipino statesman and a former Senator of the Philippines.

Early life and education
Tamano was born in Tamparan, Lanao. He graduated valedictorian at the Lanao High School in 1947. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952 and a Bachelor of Laws degree the following year, both from the University of the Philippines. He was a member of the Upsilon Sigma Phi fraternity. He also obtained a Master of Laws at the Cornell University in 1958.

Career and political life
In 1954, he was appointed as justice of the peace of Marantao, Lanao. In 1959, he became a provincial secretary. That same year, he was elected as vice-governor of the newly formed province of Lanao del Sur, serving until 1969.

He was elected as Senator in 1969 but he was unable to finish his term because President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. During the martial law years, he went on self-exile to Saudi Arabia staying there until 1986, when Marcos was ousted by the People Power Revolution. Shortly afterwards, he became a member of President Corazon Aquino's cabinet as Deputy Minister of Foreign Relations.

In 1987, he was elected again to the Senate. As a Senator, he worked for the autonomy for the Muslims and the rest of Mindanao and on Mindanao's natural resources to upgrade the conditions of that islands. He was the principal author of Republic Act 6848, which provided for the
charter of the Al-Amanah Islamic Investment Bank of the Philippines.

In the 1992 elections, he sought reelection as senator under the Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino ticket, but lost.

Personal life
Senator Tamano was married to Haji Putri Zorayda Abbas with whom he had nine children, including Atty. Adel Tamano former president of Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila and current chief administrative officer of Dito Telecommunity, who unsuccessfully sought election to the Philippine Senate in 2010.

Death
He died of cerebral hemorrhage on May 18, 1994.

References

External links
 Former Senators – Mamintal Tamano
 National Historical Commission of the Philippines

Nacionalista Party politicians
Senators of the 8th Congress of the Philippines
Senators of the 7th Congress of the Philippines
1928 births
1994 deaths
University of the Philippines alumni
Cornell University alumni
Recipients of Gawad Mabini
20th-century Filipino judges
Filipino Muslims
Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino politicians
People from Lanao del Sur
Corazon Aquino administration personnel


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CATERING SERVICES, an integral part of the Culinary Arts Ministry, exists to design and create the total dining experience for special meal functions at Grace Baptist Church. Catering Services works in partnership with Culinary Services.
The CULINARY SERVICES works in partnership with Catering Services to cook and serve nutritious and cost-effective food for Grace meal functions that fit into the health and wholeness vision of Grace Baptist Church.