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Ricky the one and only
Published July 4, 2012	Published in San Diego CityBeat Leave a Comment
Ricky Persky's head doesn't reach very much higher than the seat of his pennyfarthing. A smile turns up the corners of his bushy, horseshoe moustache as he steadily mounts his vintage-style bike with a 28-inch wheel in front and a frame that swoops way down and connects a much smaller wheel in back. Persky carefully pedals along the sidewalk through Spanish Landing Park dressed in authentic knickers with knee-high, skull-and-crossbones socks pulled taut, a straw boating hat, suspenders, a vintage Winnie the Pooh tie and a vest with the gold chain of a pocket watch dangling out. As he rides through the crowd, everyone turns to look. Small children giggle and point. Couples snap photos. "Look, honey, I've never seen one of those in person before" is heard. Some folks even applaud.
"People enjoy a warm feeling, a glow, a smile," says Persky, who's quick to offer a ride or hand out his business card, which identifies him as "Ricky the I & Only," co-founder of the San Diego Penny Farthing Club. "Penny-farthings are the transport vehicle of the galaxy that makes people smile."
Persky calls the penny-farthing the original fixed-gear bike. It has only one gear, and the bikes used to be raced on velodrome-like tracks in the late 1800s through the early 1900s (originally, it was thought that the bigger the wheel, the faster the bike). Persky likes the simplicity of the bike's design. He digs sitting upright and slowing down to two, maybe three miles an hour so he can sit back and relax.
"Life opens up when you just slow down a tiny bit," Persky says. And he means it.
It was about 15 years ago, not long after his father's death, that Persky had an epiphany. He was at his first woodcarving class, really enjoying it, and he thought to himself, Why not try new things more often? Why not do things that make him happy and others smile, no matter how odd?
"I vowed right then and there that when I get the inspiration to want to do something, I simply do it," Persky says. "because there's no tomorrow."
Since then, the longtime San Diegan has built himself a busy and creative lifestyle guided by his every inclination and desire. In 2006, Persky retired from his professional life—first as an ad man for a San Diego handyman company, then as a field biologist for the Department of Agriculture. Along with starting the Penny Farthing Club, he's allocated most of his free time to his hobbies, volunteer work and offbeat interests. A peek into the cab of his truck, which is covered in white vinyl lettering of quirky quotes he came up with himself or took from someone else, reveals a banjo.
"I'm terrible at it," he says. "But I'm having a lot of fun learning."
Persky's also apprenticing with a topnotch saddle maker at Downtown Saddlery in Santee, learning the art of leatherworking. Sometimes you can find him hanging out with the swashbuckling crew of Klingons, pirates (or Klingon-pirates) performing sword fighting demonstrations as part of Stranglehold, a local nonprofit that tours California participating in costumed events. Other times, Persky's pounding away with the Verona Drum and Dance Circle, an activity that helped him earn the Native American "Screaming Eagle" pendant that he feels honored to be wearing around his neck.
"I'm being accepted by a number of walks, and it's really kind of cool," he says.
Last July, the Maritime Museum of San Diego embarked on building a full-sized, functional historical replica of the San Salvador, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's flagship that's touted as the first European vessel to reach the West Coast. Persky knew he'd fit right in. He signed on as one of the project's volunteers, and is absolutely pumped that he has the chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the top wooden-boat builders from around the world.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he says as he gives a tour of the construction site at Spanish Landing Park and introduces the workers one-by-one, each meeting Persky's enthusiasm with a handshake and a chuckle.
"This is that big; that's why every time I step on site, I'm in a state of awe."
Persky says he does a bit of everything at the San Salvador build, but his biggest contribution has been coming up with a way to use small wooden scraps left over from the dowels and frame. He's made friends with the on-site blacksmith, so he puts together the scraps in interesting ways and then has the blacksmith brand the wood sculpture with a line drawing of the ship.
He shows off his latest handmade San Salvador keepsakes, which are being sold in the site's small gift shop, hands me one and says, "Oh, you're going to love this," a preface he often uses when discussing the ship, his penny-farthings (he has eight in all) or anything else he's into at the time. It's hard not to fall a little in love with whatever Persky's talking about—his passion is contagious.
"Ricky's just done a lot," says Cathy Hannon who, with her husband Ray, runs the Downtown Saddlery and has gotten to know Persky through his apprenticeship. "Really and truly, he's probably already lived about 10 lifetimes, you know what I mean? He's definitely passed a lot of us up. He's just willing to experience whatever there is to experience."
Persky knows he leads a unique life, but he certainly doesn't consider himself special. He says anyone, whether they're in their supposedly quiet twilight years or not, can take advantage of life the way he has.
"I embrace the fact that it's not retirement; it's simply a change of your job description," he says. "We're all totally free and capable of doing it. My only advice is have a smile on your face and have a lot of fun doing it."
Originally published in San Diego CityBeat on March 14, 2012. Follow Kinsee on Facebook, Twitter or shoot her an email.
San Diego Michael Jackson impersonator bares it all
It takes almost two hours for Devra Gregory to become Michael Jackson. The makeup's first. She starts with a brown cover-up base and then blends in lots of white. She's the '90s Jackson—pale with a long Jheri curl. After she gets the perfect skin tone, she spends a good chunk of time on her nose, using makeup tricks and techniques to give it the unnaturally pointy, slender look of Jackson's surgically altered olfactory orifice. Her eyes have to be enlarged with the help of heavy eyeliner. To complete the look, she carefully draws in new eyebrows and adds a cleft to her chin. She slips on her wig and next comes the challenge of making her female body male.
"I learned some tricks with foam rubber," Gregory says.
"Sometimes, you have to add to take away."
Her hips are easily hidden by thickening up her middle with the rubber padding. She has a whole body contraption, in fact, which she's devised over the last 12 years she's been playing the part of Jackson. It fits nicely under the costumes she often makes herself. But even with the man suit and makeup mask on, she still has to work hard to take on male mannerisms—men walk differently and stand a certain way, she says. Even more difficult is capturing the epic aura, quiet ego and massive charisma of a man whose fans hail him as a king.
In terms of looks, Gregory is in the upper echelon of the hordes of Michael Jackson impersonators who, especially after his death in 2009, have been able to make surprisingly decent livings performing for private and corporate parties. She's a little on the short side, but when she's on stage executing Jackson's signature dance moves close to flawlessly, that's when she sets herself apart. Gregory's a lifelong, trained professional dancer and admitted perfectionist. She rehearses while facing a mirror with the reflection of a television showing Jackson concerts behind her (she wants to be sure to inverse the flipped image on the screen so she can mimic the moves exactly right).
When people show up to Gregory's upcoming, self-produced show, WoMan in the Mirror, A Dancer's Journey, they'll get the Jackson they want. She'll kick things off by doing the high-energy performance that's earned her national attention. But stick around for the second act and you might be surprised. Gregory, a native San Diegan who's left the city on wild adventures many times only to find herself back again, leads an odd and interesting life. She wants to tell an audience all about it in a 90-minute show that combines dance performances with acting, audience participation and jarringly honest storytelling that'll illustrate her life as a dancer, a woman, a practicing Wiccan and, of course, MJ.
She'll appear as a ballerina, a burlesque dancer, a stripper, a kids performer in a corny SeaWorld show, a backup dancer in a drag show, a solo drag-queen star at Lips San Diego restaurant. And, yes, everything in WoMan in the Mirror is something Gregory culled from her spontaneous real life.
"Sometimes, as a professional dancer, you take whatever job you can get," she explains from her rehearsal space in National City. "Sometimes, life gives you the unexpected so you can't really plan for anything."
When Gregory first decided to produce her own one woman show, she began the script-writing process by inviting a group of friends over for wine and telling them her life story. She recorded that night's conversation, had it transcribed, weeded out all the ums and uhs, tweaked it and eventually came out with a working script. She hired Jessica Bird, casting director at San Diego Repertory Theatre, as her director and, together, the two have created a polished piece of work.
At a recent rehearsal, Gregory managed to immediately suck me into the show. She was going over the part of her life when she went from being a performer in a vaudeville act to swinging around a pole as "Lacy," the sweet-but-sexy girl next door, at a strip joint. She talked about her Jewish mother and father, demonstrated a Wiccan ceremony she learned after being invited into her first Wiccan covenant and remembered how liberating it was to attend an acting class.
Her acting, by the way, is good, Bird says. Bird's been impressed with the ease with which Gregory's been able to quickly memorize the lines and unflinchingly tell the narrative of her alternative life.
"Her story is very intriguing," Bird says. "I think the story of her life and the religious aspect was actually more intriguing to me than the Michael Jackson thing. I know that's what's going to bring other people to the show, but hopefully they stay engaged through everything else."
Woman in the Mirror, A Dancer's Journey, May 18 through 20 , 10th Avenue Theatre 930 10th Ave., Downtown
Originally published in San Diego CityBeat May 16, 2012. Write to editor@sdcitybeat.com. Follow Kinsee on Facebook and Twitter.
Work of My Hands goes all-in for ArtWalk
Published May 4, 2012	Published in San Diego CityBeat Leave a Comment
Inside a timeworn Hillcrest home, Rachel Eva and Shawn Michael have been busy collecting discarded, dilapidated scraps of various sorts and storing the finds in their narrow side yard. They're starting to look like hoarders. Recently, the fresh-faced young couple scored a rusted steel pole from their neighbor's old clothesline. They like how the paint has naturally chipped away over time. Eva and Michael revive the bits of tattered metal and wood in their small home workshop by piecing things together in unusual and unexpected ways—she's often responsible for adding the organic-looking elements; he's usually the one pushing for the industrial look. They then affix antique-style light bulbs, transforming the odds and ends into freestanding, functional sculptural lamps.
The sculptural lighting is just Eva and Michael's latest project in a constant stream. They're always working on something big out back in the workshop or painting studio. It's been like that since they met in 2006. They played it cool for awhile—the whole "just friends" thing—but eventually decided to give in, get married and become partners in their art ventures. First, it was mostly painting. They called their first art show Work of My Hands, a biblical reference that communicates the idea that both good and evil can be done with one's hands, and it's up to the individual to decide which to pursue.
They liked the title so much that they kept it as the name for all the projects they do (workofmyhands.com). Together, they've produced two of the Port of San Diego's "Urban Trees," the large-scale, treelike sculptures that lined the embarcadero until the program was ended last year. Their most recent urban tree, a large, rusted steel trunk and branches with flowing orange, yellow and red leaves streaming down, was a clear precursor to their subsequent work.
"I definitely think the urban trees activated that three-dimensional desire," said Eva, who, with her tall, thin frame and full lips looks a little like Don Draper's newest wife, Megan, on Mad Men.
Plus, Michael, who was sick of showing up to art shows that didn't have the right lighting or wall space, had already begun incorporating built-in light and wall stands for his paintings.
Eva and Michael needed to set a goal in order to jumpstart their transition to sculpting. When you're a young, hip artist who'd rather hang up your brushes for good than paint watercolors of seagulls, there's a lot to make fun of at the big, annual Mission Federal ArtWalk in Little Italy. But they decided not to scorn it until they tried it, and they settled on applying for a booth. It gave them a deadline and a space that would need to be filled with new work.
The pair got rejected the first time around but was accepted on appeal. The number crunching began. Given the high cost of materials and new tools and the renovation of their workshop, they needed more money. Like many artists looking for cash these days, they turned to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.
They'd met their goal of $5,484 by March 31 and surpassed it by the time the campaign closed the next day.
"We got really good feedback from people we didn't even know," Eva said. "That was encouraging."
The space that the couple renovated as their workshop is small but just right for the job. A mix of old and new tools hangs on the pegboard wall alongside machines and other equipment. A small window looks out over their backyard—a lush, somewhat overgrown plot of land that looks like a scene from The Secret Garden. As birds swooped in to feed on the birdseed hanging from a large tree in the middle of the yard and a fat chipmunk took advantage of anything that spilled below, it was easy to see how Eva and Michael hit upon the industry-meets-nature theme of their work. Even their house, a weathered-but-strong, cottage-style home built in 1911, is the perfect backdrop for their creations.
"We wanted something that has this American handmade quality that will last through time," Michael said.
The work that the pair has completed so far simultaneously recalls the past and reaches toward the future. They have a knack for spotting interesting, beautiful textures in the objects they find and combining them in balanced and striking compositions.
At ArtWalk—which is happening in the heart of Little Italy from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, April 28 and 29—Eva and Michael will be in Booths 151 and 153 (on Beech Street just west of India), showing their new work to the public for the first time. If things go well, they'll continue in the direction they're going, or perhaps they'll branch off to something new. One thing is certain: They'll do whatever they end up doing side-by-side.
"I know it's rare, but we just want to do things together," Michael said. "I think there's more of an impossibility of us not to work together. We both just operate this way."
Originally published in San Diego CityBeat on April 25, 2012. Follow Kinsee on Facebook, Twitter or shoot her an email.
Reintroducing the 'Infamous Babes'
Armando Muñoz Garcia needed money. "La Mona," his famed 58-foot, habitable concrete sculpture of a nude woman towering over run-down homes and streams of garbage in a Tijuana gully, requires steady maintenance and upkeep. Plus, the self-taught artist needed to fund his newest creation, "Eve of the Sea," a sculpture of a mermaid sprouting up from a hillside in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico.
Perhaps it was the border region's ubiquitous Bart Simpson coin banks or the plaster surfing monkeys that gave Muñoz the idea. He made a 23-inch mold of "La Mona" (officially titled "Tijuana III Millennium" because she was built in 1990 to mark the third millennium and Tijuana's 1989 centennial) and began the laborious process of churning the miniatures out en masse, then selling them to tourists for $20 to help fund his larger-scale ventures. He'd leave his workshop with 10 freshly molded sculptures in tow, but by the time he'd driven several miles on pothole-ridden roads to get to the kiln, he'd have only three or four left intact to fire.
"But I just kept doing it," Muñoz said. "One thing I recognize about myself… when things turn really difficult, I'm comfortable there. When things are really easy, I'm bored."
That unyielding drive and willingness to take on seemingly absurd challenges is part of what San Diego artist and arts educator Bob Matheny likes about Muñoz.
Early one April morning, Matheny led me to a packed storage room he calls his art vault. He dug through shelves filled with his diverse works of art and soon found a miniature "La Mona."
"This is one of the first ever made," said the retired Southwestern College arts professor, holding up a beautifully detailed statuette.
Dozens of modified "La Mona" statues stand on the shelves. There's a gluttonous version of actress and singer Lillian Russell with a corn cob in her hand and several more stuck to her belly; samba singer Carmen Miranda stands out with a tall headdress made of fruit; and Betty Boop looks dazzling in her red-sequin gown.
Matheny first met Muñoz in 1996, when he tagged along on a trip to Mexico with then-San Diego Union-Tribune staffer Welton Jones. By that time, Muñoz was already receiving worldwide attention for his sculptures. They visited both the mermaid and "La Mona," and an impressed Matheny went home with a miniature as a souvenir. On a subsequent trip to see Muñoz, Matheny impulsively bought another 25.
"I liked Armando," Matheny said. "I just wanted to help him economically so he could continue with the mermaid."
Matheny helped Muñoz buy his own kiln (a loan that Muñoz paid back), and he helped organize a fundraiser in La Jolla, selling the statues for $100. Matheny bought even more and ultimately got an idea for an art project. Together, Matheny and Muñoz decided to transform the statues into famous women, both real and mythical. They titled it "Infamous Babes, Chicks, Dames, Dolls, and/or Statues of Liberty and Freedom," a humorous, somewhat controversial title that Matheny thinks might have banished the modified statuettes into relative obscurity.
Matheny transformed about 100 of the "Babes," and Muñoz, busy with the big mermaid, managed to finish just six, including a surrealistic version of French educator Maria Montessori. After about 200 sculptures, the mold finally broke; not one blank has been made since.
The "Infamous Babes" were shown at the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) from Dec. 7, 2001, through Jan. 14, 2002. After that show, Matheny shopped the exhibition around to several venues in the U.S. but was never able to generate much interest. He declined one offer for a show in Northern California that would've been rushed and offered no compensation for shipping. A curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego stopped by to see the Babes, but Matheny said she left after commenting on the size of their breasts. In the end, he showed a few of them at the Southwestern College Art Gallery, which he helped found. After that, most of the Babes were stored away indefinitely. The best catalogue and exhibition of the work continues to be Matheny's own online gallery.
After Matheny dug out more of the "Infamous Babes"—Olive Oyl, Dorothy Dandridge and lucha libre wrestler La Ultima Dragona—we headed down to Puerto Nuevo so he could give his longtime friend the mermaid Babe that had been stored in the art vault for years. Matheny was also curious to see the big mermaid, which has been in-progress since 1995.
"He's almost done," Matheny laughed. "Well, we joke about the date. He's been talking about an unveiling every year for five or six years now."
As we pulled up to the mermaid, Muñoz greeted us with a smile and zipped us around on a tour of the five-story, hollow sculpture he currently calls home.
"I used to have my bed over there in one breast before the rest was finished," he laughed.
Muñoz told us the sculpture was almost done. On April 27, he said, he'll open it as a restaurant, celebrating with a public photography show and party. He'll run the restaurant for awhile, but he eventually wants to sell the mermaid to fund his next project—a 150-foot piece that would be the largest habitable sculpture ever made. He calls the U.S. "Upstairs America" and said his next project could help overcome the recent drop in tourism, brought on by the drug wars and the negative perception of Mexico among tourists.
"I don't want to say I'm the savior of Baja or that I'm the only one who has the salvation," he said. "I'm just going to propose my work as something that could be iconic for Baja… I'm convinced that this kind of creation is very attractive to foreigners, because people keep coming to see [it]. Besides, what else can I do? There's nothing else to do in this world. Why not?"
At lunch, a multi-course meal overseen by Muñoz, also a skilled, self-taught chef, Matheny made fun of his friend for being a sissy wine sipper, and Muñoz teased Matheny for being a macho-man tequila drinker. From friendly quips to art philosophy, they shared the kind of banter only old friends can.
"This project has lasted 17 years already," Muñoz said, looking up at the bare breasts baking in the afternoon sun. "Seventeen years. Can you believe that? It's a lot of time, but I enjoy it because…. now I have all these stories and interesting friends.
"Like Bob," he added, patting Matheny on the back.
This story was originally published in San Diego CityBeat on April 18, 2012. Click here to view a slideshow.
Foreclosure photography in San Diego
Published April 12, 2011	Published in San Diego CityBeat Leave a Comment
A cozy three-bedroom home. A clean, white SUV. A husband, kid and a dog. It's easy to look at photographer Amanda Dahlgren—with her wavy blond hair, shiny wedding ring and hip glasses with little half-moon ivory details on the rims—and think she's living the American Dream. But Dahlgren can't keep herself from focusing on the dreams of others—and doing a little dreaming herself.
"I have this, sort of"—Dahlgren pauses as she checks her GPS coordinates on her phone and turns her steering wheel in the right direction—"twisted love affair with real estate. Driving around a neighborhood at night, and it's cool outside and the lights are on and it's all warm in the houses, and you just think, I wish I lived there. I don't know, there's just something—."
Dahlgren pauses again, glances at the GPS and speeds up. She spent a week researching her next shot location, and now she's racing to get to the spot when the light is right—just after sunset is perfect. We head northeast from Dahlgren's neighborhood in Bay Park to Scripps Ranch as the sun quickly sinks lower in the sky.
A few weeks ago, Dahlgren stopped by a home show in Carmel Valley. The development company markets houses one at a time, then invites the prospective buyers to a "viewing party" in hopes of creating competition.
"They say they don't have anything available," Dahlgren explains. "And, instead, they hold these parties and they lock the doors behind you and create this fake urgency. They're sick, they really are."
A small part of Dahlgren is still interested in buying a new home, but, mostly, she's just feeding her inner real-estate geek. Dahlgren admits to spending her free time touring model homes for fun. She's been known to surf the Internet for long stretches of time, too, looking through hundreds of listings and fantasizing about moving into a bigger home in the perfect neighborhood. And while the rest of her family is content where they are, a few years ago, her desire for a better life got so strong that she started pushing her husband to get serious about buying a house.
That was right before the real-estate bubble burst, and now she thanks her husband for being so stubborn. Click here to read the full story.
Beautiful Precision
When Michael Carini's out in public, he looks tense. At a café a few months ago, he sat down on a couch and pulled plastic-covered pages from his portfolio and a printed artist statement, then looked at me intensely, trying hard to gauge my level of approval.
"I kind of live a life of seclusion," the 26-year-old says. "I don't go out much. I have a neurological condition so I really don't feel comfortable going out in public."
Carini has Tourette syndrome, and, along with some of the negative symptoms—anxiety, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, mood swings and physiological tics—it's part of why he's so prepared for the interview. It's also a big part of why his paintings are so technical and precise.
"Part of Tourette's is that you want to control everything," explains Carini, who's surprisingly honest and open, partly because he seems oblivious of social norms.
The artist has produced three bodies of work. The first, The Lost Shepherd, a series of paintings depicting German shepherds set against backdrops of colorful grids, he completed while in college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The paintings are big and painstaking in their precision (he used a single-hair brush to paint individual hairs on the dogs). But people didn't seem to understand the work. He became known as "The Dog Guy" even though the dog was merely a symbol for his idea that even someone like a shepherd can get lost. Carini quit—partly out of frustration and partly because the detailed, figurative work was bringing out his obsession with control and perfection.
"I still do technical work," he says. "I just don't do representational work anymore. With my condition, the abstract allows me to be done when I want to be. The [shepherd paintings] were too much. I would not leave my house. I would even skip work and class because I had to paint until it's done, and then when it was done, I had to immediately start something else."
Read the rest of the story.
The Politics of Planting
Published May 11, 2010	Published in San Diego CityBeat Leave a Comment
Life on an organic farm isn't as peaceful as you think
By Kinsee Morlan, originally published in San Diego CityBeat on 11/15/2006
Barry Logan starts most of his days at 6 a.m. with a cup of organic, fair-trade coffee mixed with a splash of fresh goat's milk. With KPFA-FM, a liberal free-speech radio station based in Berkeley, streaming loudly from his laptop sitting nearby, he sips his coffee and plans his day. The sole owner of La Milpa Organica, a 20-acre organic farm in Escondido, Logan has a lot to do between sunup and sundown-and he's got even more on his mind.
On a recent fall morning, Logan's first after-coffee task was payroll. As he clipped together stacks of cash to pay his two apprentices and six field hands who help run things, he broke down the basic economics of La Milpa.
"Little farms are really expensive to run," explained Logan, 51, a compact man who wears his hair in two long braids that frame his face. "Water's expensive, maintaining the equipment is expensive, seeds are expensive, labor's about half my cost, insurance on all the vehicles is expensive, and gasoline is outrageous with me driving six days a week to farmers' markets and restaurant deliveries."
A former computer programmer who got so fed up with mainstream America that he once shot-literally shot with a gun-his television set, Logan is fully committed to a life of grassroots activism and counterculture living (not to mention a life without TV). He's a vocal critic of the so-called Green Revolution, the increase in agricultural production by use of new technologies like pesticides, fertilizer and mechanization that began in the 1940s, and has decided to absorb the extra costs and work that comes with operating a 100-percent-or as close to 100 percent as he can get-organic farm.
If you ask Logan about the meaning of the term "organic," he'll refuse to give you a straightforward answer. He agrees, somewhat, with the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Organic Program standards, a dizzying list of requirements and regulations put in place in 2002 that includes ecologically based practices, an emphasis on sustainability and the ban of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers-but he says the standards fall short.
"They don't talk about process," Logan said. "It doesn't talk about your relationship with the land.
"One of the things about organic growing," Logan continued, "we don't feed the plants; we feed the soil."
That means chemicals like Miracle-Gro are a no-no. Instead, Logan and his crew rely on traditional farming practices. They rotate the crops, use chickens and beneficial bugs (like ladybugs) to help combat aphid and other insect infestations, collect compost and rock dust to use as fertilizer and-as Logan's dirty jeans and cracked hands demonstrate-they get down on their hands and knees and pull weeds one by one. "Organic is the hard way to do things," said Logan.
But he wouldn't have it any other way. Logan says communities need small farms like La Milpa so people can know exactly where their food is coming from.
"The stuff you get at Vons," Logan said, "we call that old food from far away." He crouched down and grasped a bright purple eggplant growing on a vine in front of him. "Look at the color of this guy-now, see, these are really alive. What you find is that the quality imbedded in this living food, when you eat it you get the benefit of that, and the further it travels away from the plant, it diminishes, it diminishes, it diminishes…."
Logan has company. According to the USDA, certified organic cropland for grains, fruits, vegetables and other crops more than doubled from 1992 to 1997, then doubled again for many crops between 1997 and 2003. A report released this year by California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), one of the largest and oldest USDA-accredited organic certifying agents in the state, says the number of organic farms in California is growing by approximately 100 new producers and processors a year. Louis Christie, the local CCOF regional service representative, estimates the current number of certified organic farms in San Diego County at 150. "But that number's growing because a lot of people are transitioning," said Christie. "It's a hard number to keep track of."
But while the organic market keeps growing-especially for vegetables and fruits-and places like Wal-Mart continue adding organic-labeled foods to their grocery aisles, the overall adoption level remains low. According to the USDA, less than half of 1 percent of all U.S. cropland was certified organic in 2003.
There's another trend in U.S. agriculture that may be helping keep that number low. While some farmers are going organic, others are turning to biotechnology. More and more U.S. farms are growing crops with altered genetic material, Genetically Modified Organisms, known as GMOs or transgenic crops.
The U.S. is the largest producer of transgenic crops in the world. A high percentage of all U.S. crops of cotton, soybeans and corn are transgenic-according to the USDA, 85 percent of U.S. soybean acreage in 2004 was transgenic.
Logan cringes at the mention of transgenic crops. Earlier this month, he hosted the Zapatista Corn Harvest Festival, a fundraising event sponsored by local nonprofit Schools for Chiapas, to raise money for a program that supplies GMO test kits to the indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico. Logan is among those who say the traditional maize (corn) seeds in Chiapas and other parts of Mexico are getting mixed in with the United States' transgenic corn, which is not only illegal-the planting of transgenic crops has been banned in Mexico since 1998-but has vast cultural implications. About a third of the indigenous people of Chiapas are of Maya descent, and because of Maya mythology, they consider themselves "The People of the Corn."
Logan stood in front of a small patch of Chiapas corn planted on La Milpa as a symbol of his support. While a row of small black ants marched across the brim of his faded mint green baseball cap, he decried the spread of transgenic crops. "It's not only scary," said Logan, "it's sacrilege."
Whether or not transgenic crops are mixing with traditional Mexican maize is still up for debate. A controversial study published in the science journal Nature in 2001 found traces of transgenic corn in Mexican maize but was later retracted by the journal, which stated that "the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper." Another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year found that "transgenic maize seeds were absent or extremely rare in the sampled fields."
But Logan and Schools for Chiapas founder Peter Brown, who lives part-time in Chiapas, have no doubts that Mexican maize is being "contaminated."
"The way people [in Chiapas] are finding it now," Brown said, "they go look for the shittiest looking corn in the fields and that's the corn with the contamination."
Both Brown and Logan are committed to helping the people of Chiapas eradicate all transgenic corn. "I'm a professional Don Quixote," Logan said. "I'm this eccentric guy working on a farm sustaining 11 people, but someone's got to do it. You just got to get up and keep doing it every day.
You can find La Milpa produce at the Oceanside, La Mesa, Poway and Hillcrest farmers' markets. http://www.milpaorganica.com.
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About US Sample Page
» We Strongly Dismiss the Slanderous Article Against Our Association; It Is an Example of Irresponsibility
» Prominent Uyghur Muslim Cleric Believed Dead After Nearly 30 Years in Xinjiang Prison
» Why Did Kyrgyz Stage a Protest Outside the Chinese Embassy?
» Thousands Rally in Indonesia to Protest China's Crackdown on Uyghur Muslims
» China faces pressure as Congress condemns the persecution of Muslim minorities
» Federal MPs urge tough response to China's Muslim crackdown
» East Turkestan: Authorities Urge Uyghurs to Turn Themselves in
» Keanu Reeves spotted in Chinese anti-Muslim propaganda poster in Xinjiang
» Pakistan asks China to soften restrictions on Uyghur Muslims
» States should act in concert to denounce China's campaign of oppression in East Turkistan
» Uyghur Children Separated From Parents, Held in 'Little Angels Schools' in Uyghur
About Uyghurs
HomeNewsAbout USAbout UyghursCommentaryContactEventsGalleryVideos
Home » About Uyghurs » About Uyghurs
East Turkistan, also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, lies in the heart of Asia. The current territorial size of East Turkistan is 1,626,000 square kilometers (635,000 square miles), which is 4 times the size of California.
According to official records in 1949, East Turkistan's original territories contained 1,820,000 square kilometers of land. The Qinghai and Gansu provinces of China annexed part of the territory as a result of the Chinese communist invasion of 1949.
East Turkistan has a diverse geography. It has grand deserts, magnificent mountains, and beautiful rivers, lakes, grasslands and forests.
A brief history of East Turkistan and its people
East Turkistan is the homeland of the Turkic speaking Uyghurs and other central Asian peoples such as Kazaks, Kyrgyz, Tatars, Uzbeks, and Tajiks. According to the latest Chinese census, the present population of these Muslims is slightly over 11 million; among these, the 8.68 million Uyghurs constitute the majority. However, Uyghur sources indicate that Uyghur population in East Turkistan exceeds 15 million.
East Turkistan is located beyond a logical boundary of China, the Great Wall. Historically, East Turkistan is a part of Central Asia, not of China. East Turkistan's people are not Chinese; they are Turks of Central Asia.
Records show that the Uyghurs have a history of more than 4000 years in East Turkistan. Situated along a section of the legendary Silk Road, Uyghurs played an important role in cultural exchanges between the East and West and developed a unique culture and civilization of their own.
Uyghurs embraced Islam in A.D. 934 during the Karahanid Kingdom. Kashgar, the capital of the Kingdom, quickly became one of the major learning centers of Islam. Art, the sciences, music and literature flourished as Islamic religious institutions nurtured the pursuit of an advanced culture. In this period, hundreds of world-renowned Uyghur scholars emerged. Thousands of valuable books were written. Among these works, the Uyghur scholar Yusuf Has Hajip's book, Kutatku Bilig (The Knowledge for Happiness, 1069-1070) and Mahmud Kashgari's Divan-i Lugat-it Turk (a dictionary of Turk languages) are most influential.
East Turkistan was invaded by the Manchu Empire of China
The Islamic Uyghur Kingdom of East Turkestan maintained its independence and prosperity until the Manchu Empire invaded the nation in 1876. After eight years of bloody war, the Manchu Empire formally annexed East Turkistan into its territories and renamed it "Xinjiang" (meaning "New Territory" or "New Frontier") on November 18, 1884. Uyghur power, stature and culture went into a steep decline after the Manchu invasion.
After Chinese Nationalists overthrew the Manchu Empire in 1911, East Turkistan fell under the rule of the nationalist Chinese government. The Uyghurs, who wanted to free themselves from foreign domination, staged numerous uprisings against Nationalist Chinese rule and twice (once in 1933 and again in 1944) succeeded in setting up an independent East Turkistan Republic.
Political Background
Heavy-handed state repression of all activities associated by the Chinese government with "Separatism" has created a dire human rights enviornment for the Uyghur Muslim minority population of northwest China. Beijing has for more than a decade claimed to be confronted with "religious extremist forces" and "violent terrorists" in Xinjiang Province, a vast region one-sixth of China's land area.
Xinjiang is in fact a large, sparsely populated area that has been a site of heavy army and police concentrations since 1949, and is used as a base for nuclear testing, miliatry training, and prison labor facilities. The population of 18 million includes several Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups, of which the Uyghurs, numbering eight million, are the largest. The percentage of ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang has grown as a result of government policies from six percent in 1949 to 40 percent at present, and now numbers some 7.5 million people. Much like Tibetans, Uyghurs in Xinjiang have struggled for cultural survival in the face of a government-supported influx by Chinese migrants, as well as harsh repression of political dissent and any expression, however lawful or peaceful, of their distinct identity.
Reports from Xinjiang document a pattern of abuse, including political imprisonment, torture, and disappearance. Mosques are summarily closed and the Uyghur language is banned from use in universities. Uyghurs are subjected to compulsory unpaid labor in the construction of a pipeline planned to export local petroleum resources to other parts of China. Uyghurs also continue to be the only population in China consistently subjected to executions for political crimes, and these executions are often both summary and public.
A handful of small-scale explosions aimed at government targets over the past decade have been repeatedly invoked by the Chinese government, particularly since September 11, in support of its strike-hard campaign to crack down on separatism and terrorism. In policy pronouncements for both domestic and international audiences, the government has sought to establish that all separatism is tantamount to Islamic terrorism, and in fact uses the terms interchangeably. The state's efforts to extinguish the common desire among Uyghurs for autonomy or outright independence appear to have increased the alienation of the population and, some analysts speculation, the potential for future violent conflict.
Although human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International express concern over the deteriorating situation in Xinjiang, expertise on the region is so scarce that activists agree that without critical support from Uyghur-run human rights organizations, very little information from within Xinjiang will see the light of day. Some information collection and documentation has begun in a sporadic way in Uyghur communities across the diaspora, but the effect will be limited without the establishment the establishment of a human rights organization specifically focused on the Uyghur situation.
Chinese Controls on Uyghur Students...	About US
We Strongly Dismiss the Slanderous Article Against Our Association; It Is an Example of Irresponsibility
Prominent Uyghur Muslim Cleric Beli...
December 31, 2018(0) Comments
Why Did Kyrgyz Stage a Protest Outs...
Thousands Rally in Indonesia to Pro...
China faces pressure as Congress co...
November 24, 2018(0) Comments
Federal MPs urge tough response to ...
East Turkestan: Authorities Urge Uy...
Keanu Reeves spotted in Chinese ant...
Pakistan asks China to soften restr...
September 21, 2018(0) Comments
States should act in concert to den...
Uyghur Children Separated From Pare...
Chinese Controls on Uyghur Students...
July 07, 2013(0) Comments
'The Wounds of the Uyghur Peo...
Chinese Authorities Confirm Police ...
Two Uyghurs Believed Killed in Hota...
Beijing Cracks Down On Uyghur Unres...
Turkey denies FM called Uyghur Turk...
China Jails 19 Uyghurs Ahead of Uru...
Sacred Right Defiled: China's Iro...
June 12, 2013(0) Comments
Prominent Uyghur Muslim Cleric Believed Dead After Nearly 30 Years in Xinjiang Prison
Chinese Controls on Uyghur Students Ahead of Ramadan
'The Wounds of the Uyghur People Have Not Healed'
Chinese Authorities Confirm Police Fired at Uyghur Protesters
Two Uyghurs Believed Killed in Hotan Violence
Beijing Cracks Down On Uyghur Unrest In Xinjiang Province, Blames US for Encouraging 'Terrorists'
Turkey denies FM called Uyghur Turks 'terrorists'
China Jails 19 Uyghurs Ahead of Urumqi Anniversary
Sacred Right Defiled: China's Iron-Fisted Repression of Uyghur Religious Freedom
Prominent Uyghur Muslim Cleric Believed Dead After...
Sacred Right Defiled: China's Iron-Fisted Repres...
China Jails 19 Uyghurs Ahead of Urumqi Anniversary...
Why Did Kyrgyz Stage a Protest Outside the Chinese...
Thousands Rally in Indonesia to Protest China's ...
China faces pressure as Congress condemns the pers...
East Turkistan Education and Solidarity Association - Copyright 2016

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Home/Trending/Woman seen running bullet on the road in desi style, people were surprised to see swag and confidence
Woman seen running bullet on the road in desi style, people were surprised to see swag and confidence
For the new generation, it has become most important to impress anyone with your style. In such a situation, those who create content on social media take full care that their style becomes a trade, which their fans follow.
sister in law bike
Image Credit source: Instagram/sona_omi
Nowadays social media is very popular. Any news which is very funny, funny, sensitive, giving any message or any dance Video Yes, it goes viral immediately. Every day something or the other goes viral on Facebook, WhatsApp or any other digital platform. Some videos are so funny and many videos are such that astonished Let's do it. one such video these days Discussion is in After seeing whom you will surely be surprised.
For the new generation, it has become most important to impress anyone with your style. In such a situation, those who create content on social media take full care that their style becomes a trade, which their fans follow. Now watch this clip itself, where a woman in a desi avatar is seen firing a bullet with pleasure. . The surprising thing is that in spite of wearing traditional dress, tika on the forehead, veil on the head, women are seen galloping bullets on the road.
In the video, you can see that a sister-in-law wearing a traditional dress is seen riding a bullet bike on the road in a cool way. The craze of the woman does not end at this only, but she has kept one of her friends sitting behind her. Meanwhile, someone was also making his video on the road. Then as soon as it came on social media, the style of sister-in-law with bullet became viral. Seeing the video, it seems that she is a professional rider.
This video has been shared on Instagram by an account named sona_omi. Which has been liked by more than 59 thousand people till the time of writing the news and their respective responses are being given in the comment section. Commenting on the video, a user wrote, 'Sister-in-law's bullet-riding style did not seem weaker than any man from anywhere.' While another user wrote, 'It's all a matter of confidence Guru..! Another user wrote,' The desi style of a woman is really unique.'
Fans were furious after seeing KL Rahul's flop, people trolled badly by sharing memes
Car Accident: A horrific accident happened on the racing track, cars climbed one on top of the other, people were stunned after watching the video
Team India's bat-bat in Nagpur, equalized in the series, the fans said – 'Dil Jeet Liye Tum Toh…'
Viral Video: The person showed such a game of balancing, watching the video would say- 'Wow what a talent?'


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text:
Q: Add css style value via jquery I want to make a header with random images on page load with use of little jquery.
I found this code

My header looks like:

After compile the smarty template site source code looks like here:

And its not good because i need to fill the "header_containter" with random image that should be something like that

So i want to add css style property via jquery or other way? Any ideas?

A: Yes, you can use the .css method this way:
$(selector).css('property', 'value');

In your case, this would be:
$("#header_container").css('background', "url('http://xxx/img/header/h3.jpg') no-repeat center top;");

Edit at will, this should point you in the right direction.
Best.

A: You may use:
$('myOjbect').css('background-image', 'url(' + imageUrl + ')');

Also read more http://api.jquery.com/css/

A: your image names should be 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg .....
Then using jquery you can do something like this. Every time it set one of image as background image from 6 of image list.
Change the image path as you need.
$( document ).ready(function() {
    var numOfImages = 6;
    var imageName = 1 + Math.floor(Math.random() * numOfImages )+ ".jpg";
    $('#divID').css("background-image", "url(/"+imageName+")");
});

working fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/cF8fQ/1/

A: You can set inline css values easily with jQuery.
$("#header_container").css({
    "background": "url('your-image.jpg') 50% 50% no-repeat",
    "background-size": "cover"
});

This also uses a css3 property background-size:cover to make sure the image fully covers the header area. This probably won't work on older browsers.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


You can only import schematics and paint data. Same region required.
That's not true, I imported my schematics and paint data from my Armored Core 4. Maybe the region of your AC4 and AC:FA saves are different, or the saves are on another account?


text:
Marxism & Communism
The Third Revolution : Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State EPUB
by Elizabeth C. Economy
In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi, himself, the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life, and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power, seeking to reclaim its past glory and to create a system of international norms that better serves its more ambitious geostrategic objectives. In so doing, the Chinese leadership is reversing the trends toward greater political and economic opening, as well as the low-profile foreign policy, that had been put in motion by Deng Xiaoping's "Second Revolution" thirty years earlier. Through a wide-ranging exploration of Xi Jinping's top political, economic and foreign policy priorities-fighting corruption, managing the Internet, reforming the state-owned enterprise sector, improving the country's innovation capacity, enhancing air quality, and elevating China's presence on the global stage-Economy identifies the tensions, shortcomings, and successes of Xi's reform efforts over the course of his first five years in office. She also assesses their implications for the rest of the world, and provides recommendations for how the United States and others should navigate their relationship with this vast nation in the coming years.
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Available to Download
Download NowRead on PC, tablet,
phone or eReader
Also by Elizabeth C. Economy
The Third Revolution


text:
Q: CodeIgniter insert_batch: Field 'exp_user' doesn't have a default value I am trying to insert an array as a row to an "expenses" table on my DB:
public function insert_expense($expenses){
    $this->db->insert_batch('expenses', $expenses);
}

and I keep getting this error:

A Database Error Occurred
  Error Number: 1364
  Field 'exp_user' doesn't have a default value
  INSERT INTO expenses () VALUES (), (), (), (), (), (), (), (), (), (), (), ()
  Filename: models/Expenses_model.php
  Line Number: 26

This is the structure of my table:

And this is an example of what I'm trying to insert:
array(12) {
    ["exp_user"] "1"
    ["exp_date"] "2016-10-18"
    ["exp_date_request"] "2016-10-18"
    ["exp_client"] "Potato"
    ["exp_provider"] "Miew"
    ["exp_amount"] "1"
    ["exp_currency"] "₪"
    ["exp_budget"] "budget2"
    ["exp_method"] "cc"
    ["exp_frequency"] "Monthly"
    ["exp_expenditure"] "asdasdas asdas dsa as"
    ["exp_charge_client"] NULL
}

A: In case the variable $expenses is the array you have in your example:
$expenses = array(
    "exp_user" => "1",
    "exp_date" => "2016-10-18",
    "exp_date_request" => "2016-10-18",
    "exp_client" => "Potato",
    "exp_provider" => "Miew",
    "exp_amount" => "1",
    "exp_currency" => "₪",
    "exp_budget" => "budget2",
    "exp_method" => "cc",
    "exp_frequency" => "Monthly",
    "exp_expenditure" => "asdasdas asdas dsa as",
    "exp_charge_client" => NULL
);

You can't use it in the insert_batch function (since the insert_batch function expects to get an array of arrays (of data) as the second parameter).
Basically the insert_batch function gives you the ability to insert multiple rows (without looping over the insert function). You can just use multidimensional array for that:
$expenses = array(
    array(
        "exp_user" => "1",
        "exp_date" => "2016-10-18",
        "exp_date_request" => "2016-10-18",
        "exp_client" => "Potato",
        "exp_provider" => "Miew",
        "exp_amount" => "1",
        "exp_currency" => "₪",
        "exp_budget" => "budget2",
        "exp_method" => "cc",
        "exp_frequency" => "Monthly",
        "exp_expenditure" => "asdasdas asdas dsa as",
        "exp_charge_client" => NULL
    ),
    array(
        "exp_user" => "1",
        "exp_date" => "2016-10-18",
        "exp_date_request" => "2016-10-18",
        "exp_client" => "Potato",
        "exp_provider" => "Miew",
        "exp_amount" => "1",
        "exp_currency" => "₪",
        "exp_budget" => "budget2",
        "exp_method" => "cc",
        "exp_frequency" => "Monthly",
        "exp_expenditure" => "asdasdas asdas dsa as",
        "exp_charge_client" => NULL
    ),
    array(
        "exp_user" => "1",
        "exp_date" => "2016-10-18",
        "exp_date_request" => "2016-10-18",
        "exp_client" => "Potato",
        "exp_provider" => "Miew",
        "exp_amount" => "1",
        "exp_currency" => "₪",
        "exp_budget" => "budget2",
        "exp_method" => "cc",
        "exp_frequency" => "Monthly",
        "exp_expenditure" => "asdasdas asdas dsa as",
        "exp_charge_client" => NULL
    )
);

And now it makes sense to use the insert_batch.
If you have only 1 record you want to insert you can use the insert function:
$this->db->insert('expenses', $expenses);

Or change the call to:
$this->db->insert_batch('expenses', array( $expenses ) );


text:
Filmmaker Sues Hawaii: My Film Is 'Not The History They Want Told'
Nonprofit News Powered By Elizabeth Ahana Herbert Kai Renee Louis Michael Makino Susan Wynne Piters Readers Like You
No Arrests And No Construction Convoy After A Day Of Protests
Filmmaker Sues Hawaii: My Film Is 'Not The History They Want Told'
Tim Chey alleges the state film office withheld tax grants for his movie "Islands" because it's about the Christian conversion of a Hawaiian chiefess.
By Stewart Yerton / November 5, 2018
Hawaii taxpayers have doled out tens of millions of dollars in recent years to help pay for productions like Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic World," Walt Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" and the game show "Wheel of Fortune."
The content of these productions had nothing to do with Hawaii, and none of the principal cast was Native Hawaiian, but the projects were made at least partly in Hawaii and thus qualified for state tax credits administered by the Hawaii Film Office.
Now an independent filmmaker who has made a movie telling a Hawaiian story, featuring what he says is a mostly Native Hawaiian and Polynesian cast, is crying foul. Tim Chey, producer and director of a historical drama about Hawaii's Chiefess Kapiolani, an early Hawaiian convert to Christianity, says the state has refused to grant tax credits his film has earned.
Chiefess Kapiolani, played by the actress Teuira Shanti Napa, defies the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele to show her Christian faith in the feature film "The Islands," which is due in theaters in March.
Tim Chey/RiverRain Productions
Chey, who is also a Los Angeles attorney, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii. The complaint names Donne Dawson, the state's film commissioner, Benita Brazier, a high-level economic development specialist, and the film office.
Dawson did not return calls from Civil Beat. Christine Hirasa, a spokeswoman for the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, declined to comment.
The complaint calls the film office's actions "the most dishonorable" Chey has encountered in 22 years of making movies. In an interview, Chey said he's dealt with film offices in Louisiana, Georgia, Florida and New Mexico.
"Here the filmmaker shot a movie that would honor a Hawaiian Chiefess, provides good-paying jobs to Hawaiian/Polynesians, and the Hawaii Film Office back-stabbed him by deceiving him and playing little juvenile high-school games no other film office of any state would dare to do," the lawsuit says.
Chey's film credits include a slew of inspirational, faith-based movies featuring accomplished actors like Stephen Baldwin, Malcolm McDowell and Cuba Gooding Jr. The movie in dispute, "The Islands," stars the Oscar winner Mira Sorvino as a missionary who helps convert Chiefess Kapiolani to Christianity. It's due in theaters in March, Chey said.
Chey's suit includes claims related to a purported breach of contract involving the tax credits. It also alleges the film office discriminated against his film because it shows how a prominent Native Hawaiian helped establish Christianity in the islands in the 1800s. According to the suit, Chey received death threats from people who objected to the film's content, which includes a scene in which Kapiolani defies the Hawaiian goddess Pele and descends into a volcano to test her newfound Christian faith.
At one point before production, the suit says, Chey received "a strange message" from an employee of the film office expressing concerns about the movie.
"This is a complete violation of Filmmaker's 1st Amendment rights for a government agency to inquire about the content of a movie — it's almost unheard of," the suit says. "Imagine a California agency calling a Hollywood studio and 'inquiring' about the content of the horror movie 'The Nun.' The outrage would be worldwide. This is no different."
"It's not the history they want told," Chey said in an interview. "But I'm sorry. It happened."
Chey says he's submitted all the required paperwork, including records of cancelled checks provided by Bank of Hawaii, but that the film office has nonetheless refused to honor his application.
For every dollar spent by productions like "Hawaii Five-0," shown here, the state pays the producer 20 to 25 cents in refundable tax credits.
The suit comes just over a year after Gov. David Ige signed a bill extending the tax credit program, which is one of Hawaii's most generous business tax incentives.
Although technically a tax credit, the incentive is effectively a rebate. Qualifying productions on Oahu get 20 percent of their production expenditures back from the state; films based on neighbor islands get 25 percent back.
The rebate applies to money paid to vendors located out of state as well as those in Hawaii. It also applies to all cast and crew, including nonresident, marquee stars and directors, who typically get housed in posh accommodations while filming and earn mammoth paychecks, all subsidized by Hawaii taxpayers.
According to the tax credit law, a spectrum of productions qualify for the incentive, including not just feature-length motion pictures and television series, but also commercials, music videos, interactive games and television series pilots. The law doesn't say much about the content of qualifying productions, although they don't include pornographic productions, local news shows and televised sporting events.
The program cost Hawaii's general fund about $40 million in 2015, according to the Hawaii Department of Taxation's 2017 report on tax credits. That was more than twice the $19.5 million in tax credits the state paid to landlords who provided affordable housing to low-income residents that year, the department said.
Starting in 2019, total movie rebates will be capped at $35 million annually.
Compared to the big rebates the state pays blockbuster movies and television series like "Hawaii Five-0," Chey said his credit request is minuscule. He said he hasn't drawn a salary for producing and directing the movie, so he's not asking Hawaii taxpayers to subsidize his pay as they do other directors. Chey declined to say how much the movie cost to make, but said it was small compared to the big studio movies.
"They're giving millions back to 'Jurassic World,'" he said. "And they won't even give us a bowl of porridge."
Native Hawaiian And Polynesian Cast
Chey also said he's tried to do the right thing in terms of casting at a time when producers making movies in Hawaii and elsewhere have been criticized for hiring Caucasian actors to portray Polynesian or Asian characters.
The director Cameron Crowe, for example, incited a storm of controversy when he cast Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a Chinese-Hawaiian character, in the 2015 movie "Aloha," which was filmed in Hawaii.
More recently, a biopic about Kamehameha starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who is part-Samoan and went to high school in Hawaii, has drawn criticism.
"Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Robert Zemeckis (director) and Randall Wallace (writer) are not Hawaiian," Hawaiian activist M. Healani Sonoda-Pale wrote recently in Civil Beat. "They cannot adequately tell our story without tainting it with their own foreign lens and perspective. They can only disparage a great Hawaiian man."
The movie is scheduled to open in theaters in March.
RiverRain Productions
Chey said more than 98 percent of his cast members are Native Hawaiian and Polynesian. Teuira Shanti Napa, who plays the lead role of Chiefess Kapiolani, is from Rarotonga and goes to college at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. Umi Perkins, a Harvard-educated Native Hawaiian scholar, co-wrote the script.
Chey shot much of the film at Kualoa Ranch on Oahu, he said. He used union actors, and although the crew was nonunion, Chey said he paid crew members as much as $500 to $700 per day.
Chey said he followed procedures outlined by the film office to qualify for the tax credits. He submitted a project registration form before production started, in October 2017, he said.
And he said he submitted a completed production report documenting expenditures after the movie finished filming, along with vendor lists and other documentation of expenditures.
Emails submitted as exhibits in the lawsuit show Brazier asking Chey to revise some documents, which Chey appears to do, according to the emails. But the emails indicate that a communication breakdown occurred in early 2018 and into the summer, as Chey wrote emails to Brazier and Margaret Ahn, a deputy attorney general, asking about the status of the rebate. The emails indicate that Chey was not getting a response from the film office.
"I cannot be treated any differently than 'Jurassic World,' 'Kong: Skull Island,' or any Hollywood movie," Chey wrote at one point, showing increasing agitation at the apparent lack of response from the office. "I will subpeona and depose the producers of all the movies shot in Hawaii should we enter into litigation."
Although Chey said he hasn't started sending subpoenas to other producers to see how the film office treated their applications for tax credits, a 2016 audit of the tax credit program showed that the office has hardly been a stickler for detail when awarding credits to producers.
For instance, the audit looked at 25 productions the office certified for tax credits in 2014 and 2015 and found that the office approved seven project registration forms even though the forms were submitted after a deadline for submission. In one instance, the registration form was received more than a year late, the audit said. The audit also found the office accepted two production reports submitted after a 90-day deadline.
Chey said the audit report shows the office has been far more accommodating to other productions than they have been with him.
"I've done everything by the book," he said.
Stewart Yerton
Stewart Yerton is the senior business writer for Honolulu Civil Beat. You can reach him at syerton@civilbeat.org.
Use the RSS feed to subscribe to Stewart Yerton's posts today


Oculus Connect was jam-packed today with updates and new demos for attendees to jump in and try. However, there was one demo that really stuck out from the rest. It seemed like any conference attendee you asked about their favorite demo experience, they all seemed to respond with a resounding Bullet Train.
Epic Game Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney revealed their sci-fi shooter Bullet Train for the Oculus Rift on stage today, which takes advantage of the Oculus Touch controller for locomotion. The latest VR experience from Epic Games puts you in the middle of the action where you can master the art of teleportation, time manipulation, and close quarter combat that shines a light on the potential of creating amazing VR experiences.
Although I had registered for an Oculus Touch demo time for later in the day, it was not immediately clear until Bullet Train was announced on stage exactly what VR experiences Oculus would be introducing to attendees.
When the time came, I knew exactly which demo I was going to try. The Oculus Touch event space was littered with semi-private partitioned rooms designed to look like an average size living room. I was greeted by a friendly staff member, strapped on the Oculus Rift headset, tightened the Oculus Touch controllers, and fired up the Bullet Train experience.
I found myself virtually standing in the middle of a train running through a subway tunnel. I immediately stared down at my glowing virtual hands in front of my body and wiggled my fingers. This is cool. For much of the short introductory train ride, a narrator trained me on how to take full advantage of all the game controls on the Oculus Touch, preparing me for my stop and what was sure to be an intense gun battle with resistance forces.
When the train finally stopped at the station and the doors slid open, the firefight began. The immersive battle was unlike anything I have experienced before in a game and I made sure to take full advantage of my character's abilities.
One unique VR movement element to Bullet Train was the ability of teleportation, adding an entirely new level of mobility and interaction to the game world.
As I was dual wielding two shotguns (which can be reloaded with a simple one-handed pump action) I plowed through enemies on the platform left and right. Spotting resistance coming down an escalator, I pointed my left hand in their direction, knowing I needed to get closer with a shorter-range shotgun blast. I held down a button on the Touch controller and teleported to the escalator waypoint in the blink of an eye.
The idea of teleportation in virtual reality was quick and intuitive, allowing me to traverse the train station environment with limited IRL physical movement and any risk of motion sickness. I like this superhero power.
Another ability within Bullet Train was the ability to slow down time. Any reference to the Matrix from demo attendees describing this action all day definitely came from this ability to slow game action down to a crawl, allowing me to watch bullets slowly float towards me.
Time manipulation was exciting, but even better was the ability to also catch the bullets in midair and throw them back at the enemy forces. This is where I really had fun. Picking off rounds and flicking them in any direction I wanted, even stylizing my combat by throwing rounds behind my back or under my leg. I love this superhero power.
Discovered by accident, I teleported towards a group of enemies and found myself face to face with an adversary after having already accidentally dropped my handgun. My first initial reaction as an unarmed user was to jab my fist into his face. With no surprise to me in the heat of battle, the enemy dropped to the ground, and I stole his weapon. I was armed again and ready to fight. It all seemed so natural.
Bullet Train was a whirlwind of ducking, swiveling, throwing, and smiling the entire time. For being just a demo that might not actually be developed into a full title game, I couldn't be more excited for the possibilities of virtual reality.
Next year couldn't come soon enough.


text:
NsisCreator is a simple library written in C# that lets you generate NSIS scripts from definitions stored in XML files. You can use NsisCreator in your build process to generate NSIS scripts on-the-fly at build time, to minimize the effort of manually maintaining your scripts. Furthermore NsisCreator enables you to modularize your NSIS scripts, if you have to create several scripts that are similar, but differ in some aspects.

## Example

The following code creates a XML file that captures the *static* definition of your NSIS project. **This step has to be done only once.** Besides general informations like product name, product version and company name, the XML file contains the location and file extensions of all relevant files, but not their exact names. In this way you do not have to make any changes if new files have to be added to the setup project.

Here's the code to generate the XML file:

```csharp
var builder = new ScriptBuilder();
builder.SetProductName("Backup3000")
       .SetProductPublisher("Up2-11")
       .SetProductVersion("1.0")
       .SetOutFileName(Variable.Create("OUT_FILE"))
       .MainSection.SetName("MainSection")
                   .SetExecutableName("Startup.exe")
                   .SetOutDir(OutDir.ProgramFiles("Up2-11", "Backup3000"))
                   .Files.AddFromDirectory(@"C:\Development\Backup3000\Binaries")
                           .AddIncludeFilter(FilterType.EndsWith, ".dll")
                           .AddIncludeFilter(FilterType.EndsWith, ".exe").Parent
					     .AddFromDirectory(@"C:\Development\Backup3000\Libraries")
                           .AddIncludeFilter(FilterType.EndsWith, ".dll").Parent
                         .Parent
                   .Parent
       .Save(@"C:\Build\Backup3000.xml");
```

We use the variable *OUT_FILE* so we can provide the name of the final EXE file at runtime.

With the XML file at hand you can integrate NsisCreator into your build process. You simply have to call NsisCreator, provide the XML file and define the name of the output file:

	NsisCreator -i C:\Build\Backup3000.xml -o C:\Build\Backup3000.nsi

This creates the file *C:\Build\Backup3000.nsi* which now can be compiled:

	makensis /DOUT_FILE=C:\Deployment\Backup3000_Setup.exe C:\Build\Backup3000.nsi

This step finally creates our setup package *C:\Deployment\Backup3000_Setup.exe*

## Modules

Based on the previous example, we now can build two different variants of our application, one for a test environment and one for a production environment. We assume that the two variants have different configuration files and that the production variant needs some additional PDF files which should be placed in AppData.

#### Test Environment

Let's start with the variant for the test environment. We create a configuration that adds a configuration file to the project (remember, this has to be done only once):

```csharp
var builder = new ScriptBuilder();
builder.AddAdditionalSection("Test Configuration")
         .SetOutDir(OutDir.ProgramFiles("Up2-11", "Backup3000"))
         .Files.AddFile(@"C:\Development\Configuration\Test.config")
                 .SetTargetName("Startup.config").Parent.Parent
         .Save(@"C:\Build\TestConfiguration.xml");
```

In the build process we now can create the test version based on the previously created main definition:

	NsisCreator -i C:\Build\Backup3000.xml -a C:\Build\TestConfiguration.xml -o C:\Build\Backup3000.nsi

	makensis /DOUT_FILE=C:\Deployment\Test\Backup3000_Setup.exe C:\Build\Backup3000.nsi

#### Prod Environment

We again create a XML file for the configuration file (or we could simply copy and adjust the file TestConfiguration.xml):

```csharp
var builder = new ScriptBuilder();
builder.AddAdditionalSection("Prod Configuration")
         .SetOutDir(OutDir.ProgramFiles("Up2-11", "Backup3000"))
         .Files.AddFile(@"C:\Development\Configuration\Prod.config")
                 .SetTargetName("Startup.config").Parent.Parent
         .Save(@"C:\Build\ProdConfiguration.xml");
```

And now the definition for the PDF files we need for production:

```csharp
var builder = new ScriptBuilder();
builder.AddAdditionalSection("PDF files")
         .SetOutDir(OutDir.AppData("Up2-11", "Backup3000"))
         .Files.AddFromDirectory(@"C:\Development\Data").Parent.Parent
         .Save(@"C:\Build\Data.xml");
```

Looking at the build process again, we now can create the final production version based on the previously created main definition:

	NsisCreator -i C:\Build\Backup3000.xml -a C:\Build\ProdConfiguration.xml -a C:\Build\Data.xml -o C:\Build\Backup3000.nsi

	makensis /DOUT_FILE=C:\Deployment\Test\Backup3000_Setup.exe C:\Build\Backup3000.nsi

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


One-leg balances make good stretches for post-workout as well. For example, try holding the classic runner's quadriceps stretch (bend one leg behind you, aiming your foot at your buttocks, and hold your ankle with your hand. Be careful to keep your knees aligned) for 30 seconds on each leg, without relying on a chair or wall for support.
This dynamic balance exercise is great with a tennis racket or golf club in hand: Stand on one leg, holding the club or racket in the opposite hand; quickly shift your weight onto the other foot as you switch hands; stabilize and hold. Make it more difficult by hopping, adding pivots, swinging the racket or shifting focus.
At home, stand on one leg while doing dishes, brushing your teeth, fixing your hair or cooking. Once you get confident, you can also make it more difficult by trying to balance on an unstable surface, like a soft pillow.
Posted on December 31, 2014 by Ted Sobol and filed under fitness.