text:
Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra to visit 2020 Edinburgh International Festival in celebration of Japan's Olympic Summer
News 8 Oct 2019
Announcement made as Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism & External Affairs Fiona Hyslop visits Tokyo ahead of 2020 Olympic Games.
Today the Edinburgh International Festival reveals that the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra (TMSO) will perform at the Usher Hall as part of the 2020 International Festival.
The orchestra makes its International Festival debut at the Usher Hall with Music Director Kazushi Ono conducting, in a programme including Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No.1 and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Tickets go on sale in March along with the International Festival's full 2020 programme.
The announcement was made during a visit to Japan by Scotland's Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs, Fiona Hyslop MSP, to promote the diplomatic, economic and cultural links between Scotland and Japan. The Cabinet Secretary hosted a Scotland is Now reception where she met with officials and President of the orchestra, Seiichi Kondo.
TMSO performs at the Edinburgh International Festival in an exchange inspired by two major events—the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the UK in JAPAN 2019-20 cultural season.
One of Japan's leading orchestras, TMSO was established by Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 1965 as a part of a cultural celebration to mark the Tokyo Olympic Games. Next year, as the world's greatest athletes once again gather in Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra travels to Edinburgh International Festival, the world's most important performing arts festival, as part of a global celebration of Tokyo's sporting and cultural legacy.
UK in JAPAN 2019-20 is an ambitious joint initiative by the British Council and the British Embassy, Tokyo. It marks Japan's hosting of two landmark events—the Rugby World Cup currently taking place, and the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2020. It also seeks to build on these events by celebrating Japan, from its arts and culture to innovation and cutting-edge technology in areas such as medicine, science and industry.
As 'Music Ambassador for Tokyo', TMSO's Edinburgh International Festival performances and wider tour supports Tokyo's Olympic summer by showcasing Japanese artists and focusing world attention on the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
International Festival Director Fergus Linehan said: "We are thrilled to welcome Kazushi Ono and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra to the International Festival for the first time next August. Founded as part of the cultural celebration at the 1965 Olympics, the Tokyo Met is an enduring symbol of the power that culture and sport share in bringing people together, and we look forward to enjoying their performances with audiences from Scotland and all over the world."
Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and Sport Fiona Hyslop said: "It's a great pleasure to announce in Japan that the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra will be performing in Scotland at the Edinburgh International Festival during its 55th year.
"This is my fourth visit to Japan and I am pleased to see cultural relations flourishing, including the Scottish Ensemble and Anna Meredith opening the Yokohama Festival, highlights from Glasgow's Burrell Collection currently touring Japan and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra playing at the inaugural BBC Proms Japan."
Music Director Kazushi Ono said: "At a time when there is a sporting focus on Japan (the Rugby World Cup and the run up to the Tokyo Olympics) I am delighted that TMSO will fulfil its role as Music Ambassador for Tokyo by giving concerts in Europe and making its debut at the Edinburgh International Festival. I am also proud to share this wonderful orchestra with the audiences that have supported me over many years but who have not yet heard a Japanese orchestra."


text:
Home » About Elephants » Threats to Elephants
The ivory trade and accelerating habitat and range loss have put African elephant populations at risk.
The Ivory Trade
Recent research by STE revealed that an estimated 100,000 elephants were killed for their ivory in Africa between 2010 and 2012. The number of elephants remaining in Africa is uncertain, but are likely to be in the region of 500,000. Taking into account births these losses are driving declines in the world's wild African elephants on the order of 2-3% a year. The ivory trade is fuelling organised crime and insecurity as traffickers smuggle tusks through the same networks as other high value illegal goods such as drugs. Ultimately the trade is driven by demand for ivory in consumer countries, mostly in the East, where it is sought after as a status symbol and an investment.
You can help us secure a future for elephants through donations.
Elephants are increasingly being crowded out of their habitats. Humans are encroaching these lands for farming and infrastructural development, which leaves elephants with small patches of disconnected land.
i) Loss of Habitat
Africa's human population is surging and pushing ever more into elephant rangelands. When farms are established where elephants are used to roaming they become a target for crop-raiding by hungry elephants. A year's crop can be wiped out in a single night, creating understandable resentment. Both farmers and elephants can be wounded or killed in the conflict that ensues. Pressure from livestock grazing in elephant rangeland is also mounting, impacting the amount of food available for elephants and increasing the chances of herders being attacked by nervous elephants.
ii) Habitat Fragmentation
With an increasing human population comes infrastructure development. Roads, railways, piplelines and human settlements can all form barriers to wildlife movements, fragmenting habitats into ever smaller areas. Without corridors to link these islands of habitat, herds can have trouble reaching food and water at certain times of year. They may also be separated from other elephant groups, decreasing their breeding opportunities. This is not healthy for the genetic diversity of the population.
iii) Overgrazing
When grazing goes unchecked, it can quickly eliminate grass in an area. This means less food for both livestock and wildlife, including elephants, and leads to soil erosion that impacts the growth of grass in the future. It is important to identify and allocate grazing land for livestock away from wildlife areas, unless tight controls can be established.
Importance of Elephants
Get the Latest Updates on Elephant Conservation on our Blog.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
test:
	poetry run python -m pytest --color=yes --cov=fafnir

lint:
	poetry run pylint fafnir

install:
	poetry install

init-screen:
	Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1024x268x16 &

publish:
	poetry build
	poetry publish --username $(PYPI_USERNAME) --password $(PYPI_PASSWORD)

ci: init-screen install lint test

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


We are always available to talk with you and address your concerns. Please feel free to contact us during the following hours through our office phone number or e-mail address. After hours, you may contact us through our emergency cell phone number in addition to our voicemail or e-mail for non-emergencies.


text:
Parent company of publisher Atlus files for government-assisted reorganization
Atlus RPG Persona 4.
Image Credit: Atlus
Persona publisher Atlus faces an uncertain future as its parent company, Index, files for the Japanese equivalent of bankruptcy protection.
Index owes creditors $224 million after a series of acquisitions didn't pan out, according to CNET.
The company will enter civil rehabilitation, which is a corporate law that shifts managements of a company partially to the debt-holders and possibly a government-appointed administrator.
What does this mean for Atlus? We've reached out to the publisher's American division to ask about the company's status.
The gamemaker could end up on the auction block or it could face major restructuring depending on the results of the civil rehabilitation.
This doesn't mean the end for Atlus or even for Index. The purpose of civil rehabilitation is to turn around a company so that the owners and creditors can move forward with a more profitable company.


text:
01whole.pdf (503.53 kB)
"Her accomplice in much evil-doing": the role of emotion in violent female responses to anger, disrespect, grief, and jealousy in Gregory of Tours' Libri historiarum, and their impact on gendered representations
posted on 2022-03-29, 00:29 authored by Julia Maxwell
This thesis investigates whether certain emotions experienced by women in Gregory of Tours' Libri historiarum contribute to a gendered construction of their identity. Focusing upon the responses to anger, disrespect, grief and jealousy, the research determines whether these emotions, or the violent acts which occur as a consequence of them, are deliberately conveyed by Gregory with regards to the individuals' gender. A utilisation of Emotional History and Gender Studies to analyse certain scenes and events within Gregory's narrative, suggests that the emotions do not seek to cast judgements on the women because of their gender, but does vilify (or praise) emotions because of the social, moral and political factors influencing Gregory's literary purpose, and his personal motivations. The impact of emotions on the identity and representation of Late Antique women, particularly Merovingian women, is a field in which much research is needed. This dissertation determines whether the way in which emotions and gender function in accordance with one another in the literature reflects the author and the social world in which they were written.
Chapter One. Literature review -- Chapter Two. The revolt of the nuns -- Chapter Three. Fredegund's grief -- Chapter Four. The jealousy of the brothers' consorts -- Chapter Five. Conclusion.
Theoretical thesis. Bibliography: pages 68-73
Thesis MRes
MRes, Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Ancient History
Department of Ancient History
Andrew Gillett
Copyright Julia Maxwell 2014. Copyright disclaimer: http://mq.edu.au/library/copyright
1 online resource (vii, 73 pages)
Gregory, -- Bishop of Tours, Saint, -- 538-594 -- Criticism and interpretationGregory of ToursGregorySex role in literatureMerovingianwomenGregory, -- Bishop of Tours, Saint, -- 538-594. -- Historia FrancorumLibri historiarumEmotions in literatureemotional history


How often does a central/ductless AC system need to be cleaned and maintained?
We recommend at least a biannual cleaning. Poor drains can lead to water damage. In addition, a dirty system can lead to inefficiencies, raised energy cost, and poor air quality.
What is the hottest month in Hawaii where air condition is highly required?
What are the advantages of using a Ductless Split Air Conditioner?
– Small size and flexibility which allows zoning to cool individual occupied place.
– Each zone has thermostat, allowing to condition a space only when needed.
– Often easier to install than other types of space conditioning systems.
– Because it is ductless, it has avoid the energy losses associated with ductwork.
– Generally offers more flexibility in interior design options.
What are my options if I wanted to buy an air conditioner?
1. Central – In this system, cool air is circulated through a system of ducts and register.
2. Ductless Split – A system that provides zoned cooling without the ductwork.


text:
The Ecotone Exchange
Positive Stories of the Environment
The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary: Getting Below the Surface
May 1, 2014 February 22, 2016 / Shauna P.	/ 2 Comments
By Shauna Potocky
The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is one of the marine wonders of the world; it is a biological hotspot—featuring an array of remarkable habitats and teeming with biodiversity. The sanctuary includes sandy beaches, rocky intertidal zones and a near-shore deep-sea canyon—all of which contribute to the unmatched concentration of marine life, world class natural resources and endless opportunities for recreation, tourism and appreciation. The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is nothing short of a national treasure.
In fact, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBMNS) is just one of thirteen National Marine Sanctuaries—each of which features world class attributes, making them eligible for federal protections. Examples include Olympic Coast, Thunder Bay, Gray's Reef, Florida Keys and the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuaries. Many people are not familiar with the National Marine Sanctuary system, their various locations and the innovative programs that set them apart as learning institutions. Equally important is helping people understand the valuable work sanctuary staff conduct in order to manage and protect these remarkable places.
The National Marine Sanctuaries mission as stated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), who manages them, indicates that their role is to "conserve, protect and enhance the biodiversity, ecological integrity and cultural legacy of these underwater places." The authority for establishing and protecting the sanctuaries comes from the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, and NOAA reflects on this as, "one of the strongest pieces of ocean protection."
Paul Michel, Superintendent of the MBNMS, has a deep passion for connecting people to the ocean and our national marine sanctuaries. Recently, I had the opportunity to ask him about the features that make the MBNMS so unique:
"The MBNMS is unique because of its land-sea connection; it includes 275 miles of California coast—this land-sea connection allows it to be directly adjacent to communities and accessible to user groups. The sanctuary also features an abundance of wildlife—it supports great migrations, charismatic mega fauna such as killer whales, blue whales and more. It is home to the California sea otter, and many of these animals and their unique habitats can be accessed or even seen from shore. For example, the deep–sea canyon is close to shore, it provides easy and accessible wildlife viewing." He also added, "Because of the concentration of marine science institutions around the MBNMS, it serves as the West Coast's equivalent of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (a world class facility focused on oceanographic and marine research). The MBNMS itself benefits from equally focused science monitoring and research."
It is true, the sanctuary is home to remarkable institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and Long Marine Laboratory, the marine science campus for the University of California Santa Cruz.
Regarding the greatest successes of the MBNMS, Michel reflected on a few recent achievements, including the newly built state of the art visitor center located in Santa Cruz, California, as well as the development of a model water quality protection program. In addition, the sanctuary has developed SIMoN, the Sanctuary Integrated Monitoring System , a website that focuses on long term monitoring of adjoining sanctuaries focused on tracking shifts within these protected ecosystems.
Along with these highlights, the sanctuary also features some of the best subject matter experts in kelp forest ecology and deep-water benthic characterization. Field science isn't the only area of expertise though, as one of the most recent additions to the sanctuary's programming demonstrates— new to the suite of programs is Your Sanctuary, a television production that helps visitors to the area connect to the value and resources of the bay.
As stunning as the sanctuary is, it also faces significant challenges. When considering some of the issues facing the MBNMS currently, Michel stressed that there is a need for increased funding for operations and programming. An increase in funding could then help with addressing some of the critical issues such as the pressures and impacts from land-based pollutants, such as chemicals, plastics and other waste that end up in the water, as well as tackling the issue of marine debris, such as lost fishing gear and nets that can continue to capture marine life, damage resources or run the risk of entangling marine mammals such as seals and whales. Of course, as climate continues to shift, the sanctuary is also facing issues associated with ocean acidification and sea level rise—these challenges are significant and need to be addressed and managed.
When considering if the sanctuary is ready to tackle these challenges, it is reassuring to know that it is in expert hands and ready to address emerging issues. When asked how Michel would face these challenges, he replied, "Boldly! And with the best possible science and partnerships."
Michel's track record proves that he is skilled at working in partnerships and one tangible example is the completed MBNMS Exploration Center in Santa Cruz, "Partners are what made the Exploration Center in Santa Cruz happen," he stated, "Without the donated land and fundraising that covered the cost of the exhibits—it couldn't have happened."
Partnerships and engagement take several forms, so if you are wondering if there is a place for citizens in the management of the sanctuary, it is exciting to note that there is a substantial role for both youth and citizens to engage in protecting their sanctuary.
Citizens have the opportunity to participate as a member of the Sanctuary Advisory Council, a working group that consists of representatives from various stakeholder viewpoints including business, tourism, education, and citizens-at-large, all seated along side government and agency representatives. Together the working group provides guidance, recommendations and advises the Superintendent on sanctuary issues or management decisions such as on the establishment of Marine Protected Areas, Southern Sea Otter Translocation Program, Oil and Gas Exploration and much more. Participation on the council is an empowering and insightful opportunity—it is one not to be missed if you are inspired to make a difference.
Today, there are thirteen NMS and one monument—but why stop there? Perhaps you know of a special marine area that is worthy of sanctuary status. If so, Michel shared this exciting opportunity to get involved—currently there is a program inviting coastal communities to submit nominations for establishing new sanctuaries. With only 1 percent of marine habitats protected worldwide, and only thirteen sanctuaries set aside in the United States—it is clear that together we can do more than just be awed by our nation's marine wonders— we can actually protect them as national treasures and legacies for the future—perhaps the one you nominate will be number fourteen.
Photo Credits: Kirk Keeler Photography
Another Perspective on Sea World, Orcas and Captive Animals
November 12, 2013 February 22, 2016 / Maymie Higgins	/ 32 Comments
Rehab dolphin tank at Sea World Orlando. Photo by Maymie Higgins.
By Maymie Higgins
The movie Blackfish is set to be released on DVD on Tuesday, November 12. As much debate as the CNN airings and film festival screenings have prompted, the DVD release will likely create a resurgence of debate, anger, accusations and activism as yet unseen as it pertains to the topic of orcas in captivity, particularly at the Sea World parks. I have not yet watched the documentary, preferring to wait until I could control the pace of viewing on my home DVD player, allowing for periods of bawling, meditation and sips of chamomile tea. As an animal advocate and a person whose entire existence revolves around engaging the masses on a plethora of conservation topics, I probably do not have the emotional fortitude the movie requires. And yet, I already know I will remain a supporter of Sea World even after seeing what I expect will be horrifying, gut-wrenching and panic-inducing images.
Rescued sea turtle at Sea World Orlando. Photo by Maymie Higgins.
The issue of animals in captivity is a sophisticated issue and cannot be easily compartmentalized into easy solutions such as "No Orcas in Captivity!" Even if there is a movement towards having no orcas in captivity, it will be a long time before the last captive orca has lived out its full life expectancy. The concept that captive animals, particularly those born in captivity, should be "set free" is an incomplete, poorly thought out concept. Animals must have hunting, foraging, mating and many other behavioral skills in order to survive in the wild. Most captive born animals never learned all of those skills. Many wild born, now captive animals are in zoos and aquariums because they cannot survive in the wild after recovering from injuries. Did you know that modern zoos and aquariums are often sanctuary for injured animals that would have otherwise been euthanized?
Rescued manatees at Sea World Orlando. Photo by Maymie Higgins.
Sea World has saved far more animals than it has destroyed as they are on the ground, every day, rescuing and rehabilitating dolphins, manatees, sea turtles, and dozens of species of birds, to name only a few. I have personally viewed the rehabilitation facilities in Orlando, Florida. From my perspective as a Registered Nurse and with some experience in small mammal and passerine wildlife rehabilitation, I was very impressed with the state of the art facilities and loving care provided. In 2012, more than 24 million guests visited Sea World parks, generating millions of dollars of donations, 100 percent of which are used for the Sea World and Busch Gardens Conservation Fund for wildlife conservation efforts. Then there are the intangible contributions such as all the conservation education activities that Sea World provides both inside and outside their parks, fostering the steward in both young and old. For orcas in particular, Sea World has conducted a significant amount of published research that has benefitted both captive and wild orcas. And just to be clear, Sea World has no involvement in capturing wild orcas now. As is true for many zoos and aquariums, most of their animals were born in captivity.
Rescued skate at Sea World Orlando. Photo by Maymie Higgins.
The response to Blackfish should not be to shun Sea World. Rather, keep visiting Sea World, make donations to their conservation fund, and support your local zoo and aquarium in their conservation efforts. Consider this: if zoos and aquariums lose visitors, they lose revenue necessary to provide the best animal care possible. The zoo and aquarium industry (and yes, it is an industry) is here to stay but that is not necessarily bad news. For many species, it has already been good news. For example, the black-footed ferret, red wolf and California condor would all be extinct now were it not for U.S. AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums. Therefore, do not punish Sea World for their past sins. Instead, praise them for their ongoing efforts to improve the way they care for captive animals and their safety measures to protect employees entrusted with animal care. In all areas of life, it is far more productive to reward good behavior than to punish bad behavior.
Quiet Giants and the Legacy of Public Lands: Part 2 of 2
November 4, 2013 February 22, 2016 / Shauna P.	/ Leave a comment
The dirt road leads to a fork, and from here you must decide, which path to take. The forest here, now in fall, is a mix of Black oaks, Pacific dogwoods, pines and firs. The light is filled with colorful foliage, illuminated gold, flaming red, greens in every hue. The air is crisp and the ground just damp after the first rains of the season. The road, in either direction, winds through the forest and leads you to a grove of Giant Sequoias (Sequoia giganteum).
The Nelder Grove is located in the Sierra National Forest of California, south of the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias that reside within Yosemite National Park. This grove, named for John A. Nelder, a retired miner who once called the grove his home, stands stoic and beautiful in the mixed conifer forest—revealing for all to see, it's past.
Not all giant sequoia groves benefited from early government protection, as the Mariposa Grove did during the mid to late 1800's and early 1900's, and thus, some Sequoia groves were logged—massive trees felled for timber. The irony of which proved to be that the wood was not ideal for building since, when the tree fell it often broke apart—shattered or splintered. Thus, many of these logged trees were made into shingles, stakes and other smaller scale items.
The Nelder Grove had such a fate. In the late 1800's, the grove was logged by timber operations. Today, among the approximately 100 standing mature and majestic sequoias are gigantic silent stumps that tell of the groves' past. Just as the standing glorious trees, these stumps too, make one stop in awe—they take your breath away.
The realization that some of these trees have been cut down, in fact deepens the importance for all the trees which remain.
There is truly an extraordinary gift in this grove. Here, among the tales of history, are some extraordinarily old and massive sequoias and among them, young sequoias reaching upwards. Together, they stand in a grove that is lightly visited and teeming with biodiversity—a forest thriving with the song of birds, the echoing pound of woodpeckers, the flow of running rivers and creeks.
This provides countless teaching opportunities—sharing with students and visitors the ecology, fire history, and species that call this area home, including one of the Sierra's most elusive sensitive species, the Pacific fisher. Along side biology and ecology is the deep and rich history of this place; once used, the lessons learned, the values gained and protections established so these trees and their story can be told for generations to come. And it doesn't end there—there is a remarkable human story too, from the historic figures to the people who care for the grove now.
The grove came under management by the United States Forest Service in 1928. A campground was established and the grove benefited by the presence of campground hosts. John and Marge Hawksworth served in this role and together they assisted and educated visitors; going on to care for the grove for more than 20 years. While doing so they also passed a great love of the grove down to their children, grandchildren, and great grand children.
One of those grandchildren was Brenda Negley; Brenda fell so deeply in love with the Nelder Grove, that today, Benda and her family serve as the grove's campground hosts—continuing a legacy of sharing the grove with visitors, educating people about the history and being stewards to this remarkable place.
In total, Brenda's family has cared for the grove, in various capacities for over twenty-six years. Together, they tirelessly help to maintain the exhibits that are displayed throughout the summer and assist visitors with campground access and information regarding trails. Without a doubt, if you see a smiling, approaching face in the grove, it is almost assuredly, Brenda.
For this service, her family has received some notable honors, which now includes the 2012 United States Forest Service national award for Volunteer Campground Host of the Year.
Along with this recognition, there have also been recent achievements for the grove including the establishment of a non-profit organization, Friends of Nelder Grove, Inc., which seeks to share and preserve the grove and its history, while making it accessible for the public to enjoy.
Then there are the unexpected surprises, the ones that confirm how truly important the stewardship and access to public lands, like the Nelder Grove, are to people all over the world.
During the recent government shutdown, visitors were unable to travel into Yosemite National Park to visit the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. Yet, these same visitors, who came from all over the world to see giant sequoias, driven by the desire to see even just one tree, if just for a moment, made the trek down the dirt road to that same fork framed by oaks, dogwoods and pines. Their journey and moments of inspiration in the Nelder Grove, affirm that the preservation of these quiet giants in all their glory—instead of being used as a resource by a select few—are worth more when preserved for the benefit of everyone.
Cool Fact: John Muir and John Nelder met in the fall of 1875, when Muir was exploring the region in search of giant sequoias. Named the Fresno Grove at the time of their meeting, the grove and Mr. Nelder are captured in Muir's writings: Our National Parks, Chapter IX: The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks.
Cool Fact: Brenda's husband proposed to her under the sequoia tree named for her grandparents, the Hawksworth tree.
Award photo: Courtesy of Brenda Negley and Friends of Nelder Grove, Inc.
Sequoia photo credits: Shauna Potocky
A Line Down The Middle—The Landscape of Garry Winogrand's Photograph, New Mexico 1957
Nature Walking around Capitol Lake
An Ode to Green Mountain College
To begin again
Categories Select Category Advocacy, Art, Education Christine Harris Climate Change Edwin Way Teale Environmental Journalism Food Production Jenna Gersie Land Use, Preservation, Conservation, Restoration Maymie Higgins Nature Writing Neva Knott Observing and Experiencing Nature Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Wetlands Richard Telford Shauna Potocky Sustainability and Stewardship Trees and Plants Urban Ecosystems Wildlife
Copyright and Usage Permission
© All writers and The Ecotone Exchange, 2013-current date. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog's author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to the writer and The Ecotone Exchange with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Follow The Ecotone Exchange on WordPress.com


Ja, ich möchte einen Hund ficken, es ist mein Ideal, also ist es in Ordnung (Retard-Logik). Along with key review factors, this compensation may impact how and where products appear across the site including, for example, the order in which they appear. Editorial opinions expressed on the site are strictly our own and are not provided, endorsed, or approved by advertisers. Das Problem meiner schwangeren Freundin The site has a diverse membership based in 25 countries and five continents worldwide. Anyone looking for a serious partner can join Match to get fast results.But this street was also home to the first gay & lesbian bar in the Netherlands! Café 't Mandje opened its doors in , operated by local lesbian Bet van Beeren. online dating sites over bangladesh . gratis dating site verzenden en ontvangen bericht kostenloos · wat is de dating veel vissen uk lesbische dating.
Friday, 08 March 2019 17:36:54 Treat Des Moines Singles Gruppen when she ready. know Ich mag Tiere und passe auf Blumen auf.
The other interval in mail my infection for you younger knees floxed for the oral mark is, there are male compounds, and there is simvastatin. If you miss a fox daten mortar of cipro, take it as usually back eligible.
Er kam herüber und sagte: Hey, geht's dir gut?


This attunement is prepared just for City of Shamballa's members.
Relax your mind by inhaling-four breaths, hold-four breaths, exhale-four breaths, hold-four breaths. Continue until you feel your mind is calmed.
Call upon Lord Kuthumi and Archangel Michael ( you may call upon other ascended masters and archangels too ) to assist you in receiving the attunement.
Simply state: " I now call down to me the Lord Kuthumi Reiki attunement as sent by (teacher name). I ask that the Source, The Archangels, Ascended Masters, All Beings of Light, My Guardian Angel and my Guides help me receive this attunement for the highest good. Once the attunement is completed, I ask that all links between (name of your teacher) and me be broken. Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! "
You may use any method you prefer for calling in these energies. The above is just a suggestion.
RSVP for Lord Kuthumi Reiki to add comments!
Dear Michele, the founder's name is Riza Baleghi, as it written in the manual.
Thank you Light Samurai! Thank you Lord Kuthumi and Archangel Michael!
Is the teacher name Light Samurai for the attunement? Thank you for this energie. I had done the Kundalini and it was Lord Kuthumi too, so I have decided to take this attunement right now instead of the Reiki Imara.
I must say too that when i did it, at the end, i put my hand on my eyes closed (in a bright room), and i saw a blue wide cross (like energy) and green (energy) around there.
With the help of Archange Michael.
What a feeling of well-being, acceptance, warmth that radiates from the heart.
I think it is a mark of recognition, gratitude and a prerequisite for other gift to be received from Lord Kuthumi.
Thank You so much Light Samurai, and thank You Lord Kuthumi.


text:
lunch # 1
In what's going to be a very busy week, I'm setting myself a routine: unless something spectacular happens to disrupt things, the daily photograph will be of my lunch. I only decided upon this most of the way through an apple, which looked especially fetching on my shiny desk top - and had absent-mindedly eaten the rest down to the core before I realized that I might want to try for a more focused image.
But there is a further point here - in preparation both for my MLA paper (which also has involved virtual rustling around in the beautiful on-line archive of the New Yorker, for 1945-6) and for a chapter I need to write, I want to think about the everyday (somewhat belatedly, to be sure - sometimes it seems as though thinking about this has become a very everyday occurence in and of itself), and I've been grounding myself in Ben Highmore's Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, which opens with various alternatives - whether the everyday is calmingly ordinary, a source of pleasure, or a form of boring incarceration in the routine and mundane. These are, of course, issues which have been very germane to the writing of this blog during the year, and now that I turn the corner into December, and start to reflect a bit more about what it's meant to put it together over the year, as an every-day practice, the daily recording of something both quotidien yet changing, mundane yet a (potential) source of pleasure, seems a suitable thing to do.
In the shadow of...
I am beginning to suspect that the plans to move the household lock stock and barrel to Ocean Grove may have received a set back in the form of the Grand Auditorium, and the related mores of the surrounding town. Whereas the idea of no drunken weekend summer revelers is a pretty pleasant one ... a dry town? With a huge summer encampment of Methodists, living in a hundred plus little beach huts with tents in front of them, each one looking rather as though it ought to be on an English allotment, sitting at the back of a plot of potatoes and brussel sprouts? 6,000 plus worshippers at a time? outings of massed choirs? in this extraordinary 1894 building that looks like the Globe Theatre on steroids - though with such delights inside (must come back in summer to see them) as a 1916 star spangled banner with undulating electric lights.
Somehow - cute though all the Victorian houses are - this mightn't work. They ban access to the beach on Sunday mornings. They used, indeed, to ban cars on Sundays, which must have been quite a nightmare, especially since very few houses (another problematic aspect of the place) have off-street parking. So I think the dream home within walking distance of the beach will have to be a little further south...
unilluminating
This peculiarly kitsch lighting fixture used to hang in the dining room here in Graham Street. Looking at it close up, it's hard to fathom quite how I managed to put up with it for even a week - I think I'd convinced myself that it was some kind of period kitsch. Which it is - just not the kind that one wants. But what to do with it? It's currently in the half-way house of our front porch. It hasn't quite made it onto the street with the sad and useless objects that no one would ever want at a yard sale (and given our experience with yard sales, no one wants what we have to offer at them, in any case). The trash seems a cruel fate. But it would also be embarrassing carrying it into a junk store, I fear, and being offered what? $2? Or for all I know, it would be a sort-after object by a period renovator...
I'm currently facing a lot of miscellaneous objects in the attic. Some of them have, scarily, been in the same plastic bags or similarly decrepit container since I moved to the US in 2001. Let me be honest - I think they've been in those bags longer than that. What to do, for example, with books that are in a box labeled "unwanted books - non-academic"? Clothes are easy - I'm finally relinquishing garments and shoes that I thought, presumably, that I might shrink to fit into about 15 years ago. They can go in clothes-bank containers - or if truly sad and wilting, can become cleaning rags. Academic books would be easy - if I had more shelves, somewhere. Personal papers and drawings and photographs - they'll find a home in a container somewhere, although I can't quite fathom why I still apparently feel that I need my high school physics notes. But all the stray pieces of metal or card that I don't really want, or need, but feel that maybe I should hang onto in case of a creative frenzy; or the four New Orleans carnival masks; or the model sheep; or the dishes that I made chicken liver pate in for a dinner party in 1981 - what does one do with them? I wish I could summon up enough courage just to take a photograph of each of them, an archive of uselessness, and then - but that "and then" is the problem, when it comes to stuff too good to trash, but that has even outlived any sentimental associations that it might once briefly have carried.
rebooting
clearly, I'm still playing around with the mock polaroid app on my iPhone, and with objects to hand - there is no real reason to put a black and red cowboy boot on the tiled table that used to sit out in the back of 962 N Hoover, of course, other than that I was sitting in the so-called media room reading a clutch of recent books about the Arizona-Mexico border lands, and the combination of bits of the southwest seemed somehow appropriate.
If Thanksgiving is still something of a foreign mystery to me - not in terms of what one does, but in terms of what one feels, the day after Thanksgiving is even more so. I picked up the idea last year that Black Friday is so-called because supposedly this is the day that stores' sales ledgers go back into the black from the red (I certainly hope that's true today in NJ, before the state loses even more money), rather than because the traffic is so horrible. But according to Wikipedia, it seems that I was right all along - that from at least 1965-6 the day has been called that because of the shopping, the crowds, and probably the bad-tempered hangovers. Only retailers turned sulky at the negative connotations of the phrase, and so in more recent years, a Pollyanna spin has been put on it.
We didn't venture very far: the day after Thanksgiving is for eating cold turkey (thank you, Barry, for bringing round some slices of last night's splendid bird and its accompaniments) and starting to catch up on Stuff. Recharging, if not actual rebooting. In other words, more or less like Boxing Day - which doesn't exist here, so one might as well have its semblance now, in November.
...in this case, I am giving thanks to the NYT, which this morning had a great piece on camera apps that one can download to one's iPhone. As faithful readers will know, I'm something of an afficionado of these, and love the element of unpredictability that they introduce, and I already had most of these on my little machine already. But this one was new to me. Called ShakeItUp Photo, it mimics the taking of a Polaroid - right down to the click and whirr. And then one shakes it... and it gradually swims into life, just like the real thing... Or one can apply it to a photo that's already on one's iPhone. This, however, was taken directly using the app.
And so ... autumnal pods, or, to be honest, artificial ones, from Robert's Florals, in Highland Park, who do quite wonderful arrangements as well as from-the-jar flowers (we have one on our mantelpiece) ... and these can join the stems and vases series ... What I like best of all here, however, are the colors, the subdued peacock coloring that somehow has been created out of an ancient B&Q bookcase of shaky construction and a beige wall.
the world is full of broken things
The phrase that's in today's title was worrying me, a lot, because I was sure that I'd plagiarized it, and I couldn't remember where from. But there's always Google Books... and what was at the back of my mind was, of course, a line from a Charlotte Mew poem, "Madeleine in Church" - "his arms are full of broken things." This in turn was the title of a quite terrible and implausible novel about Mew having an affair with Thomas Hardy, that I reviewed with considerable and humorless scepticism for The Guardian ten years or so ago.
But this is a different broken thing, a blue glass vase, containing some dessicated and past their sell-by date dried flowers, that I swept crashingly to the ground, or at least to my desk top, whilst trying to manoeuvre myself earlier today to pet the unpettable ginger fluffy cat. I was sorry, very sorry, to see the vase's demise - it had been in my office in Oxford for a long time, and then hanging around New Jersey in various locations since then, since I have a fondness for blue glass. But where could it have come from? It's another case of evaporated memory. I think, most likely, a store in the Cowley Road - but it does raise the question of what's bound up in a memory of a smashed ornament: its origins, or the subsequent places it has inhabited? In this case, definitely the latter ... I am trying to rationalize its untimely departure as an example of uncluttering, however un-sought for.
flamingoes, again
I am deeply grateful to Vic's Italian Restaurant, in Bradley Beach, for keeping my debit card safe and warm for me - there was a bad moment, half way through yesterday, when I realized that this little bit of plastic was nowhere to be found - not a good thing, at this season. I'd last seen it when paying for a pizza on Sunday lunchtime... but Vic's didn't reopen till today, and don't answer their phone on Mondays. Phew. These flamingoes are in their back parking lot, and seem far more acclimatized than those Eldorado ones.
And I was almost more grateful to them for allowing me to find out that they are precisely 47 minutes drive from the back of Murray Hall - which gave me space, due to a canceled meeting, to go up to Ocean Grove, and check it out...and go for a brief walk along the empty and foam flecked beach, and find that I instantly want to move there, and have to be careful not to spend too much time procrastinating on realtor.com. 48 minutes back to Murray. I am sure that it's different in peak traffic time, that it's quite different in summer, and that there would be the occasional inconvenient hurricane. But still...
...and after the seaside trip, the souvenirs: the cat is an obvious enough addition to our household, but the crab? Definitely seaside, even if sitting on the boardwalk eating cupcakes was hardly equivalent to a G. H. Lewes style examination of rock pools. But will these two critters serve to remind me of Asbury Park? The trouble is, they already remind me of Bali, rather than the Jersey shore - back in 1992, I think - and walking in Ubud from craftstore to craftstore, all with this style of idiosyncratic carved animals (that was after some monkeys had tried unsuccessfully to steal my camera bag, and the wooden variety seemed much safer); stopping at a cafe with masses of water lilies; walking through the rice paddies with large flocks of white egrets swooping past. It's an un-examined phenomenon (for all my reading about memory, and I'll be teaching an undergrad seminar on the topic in Fall '10, so I'll be reading some more) - how far something bought to commemorate a visit to one place actually sets off memories of another. It wasn't just the carved animals, and the mirrors with doors, and the buddhas in the store that I hold responsible, but the bag that they came in from the oddly London-in-the-60s named Posh Den, announcing, with insouciant globalism, "Asbury Park - New York - Bali."
under the casino
in Asbury Park - a scene that looks curiously Indian - I think it's the peeling yellow walls, the people sweeping - though in India there would with luck be someone with a bright pink or yellow sari walking across, and here it was whatever people wear in NJ on a sunny November day to walk their dogs, or - if gay guys - walk hand in hand down the board walk - or, as here, do wheelies on their bicycles.
This was a day's outing to the Jersey Shore - and it was hard to stop taking tourist cliche photos - here, the Stone Pony
and, since today has clearly become travelogue, rather than a well-considered Picture of the Day (I shall cut myself some slack - it's Sunday) - here is one further image, of a German Icing cupcake, made by one Jack Petronella, who now owns the Baker Boys cake shop inside the Convention Center. All I can say was that it was very hard choosing what to buy (Alice went for a peculiarly delectable macaroon, and there's a dark chocolate mousse in the freezer), and I want to go back when he has his caramel sushi...
Down the shore, as has been well sung, everything's all right...
street signage - the corner of Graham and S. First. The latter, admittedly, isn't quite visible, but I wanted to include the apartment block at the corner, which is possibly of the same era - that is, I guess, sometime in the 1930s? Our house, just down the street, was apparently built in 1930, and the same builder was clearly responsible for the whole little area: he seemingly had a good supply of preternaturally gloomy very dark red bricks, which found their way into the constructions of all our front porches.
This apartment block is the one that has figure in various of my Rear Window shots, featuring a succession of rescue cats at windows...another kitty contingent is usually to be found staring out of these front windows.
This is, I was thinking, the kind of quiet, nondescript, very local sign that one day just quietly disappears to be replaced by something municipal and homogenous (let's hope that Highland Park has something better to spend its non inconsiderable property taxes upon), without anyone ever commemorating it: so here it is, recorded.
electical trouble
Alas, it's another picture of Rutgers's non-maintenance, here neatly documented: "called in 11.04.05 to be fix." I guess nothing happened, and the note is still here, part of the decor in Alice's office in the Ruth Adams Building, on Douglass. In its glory days, the RAB was known as Recitation Hall, a central part of the campus of the New Jersey College for Women, and it still very much has the feel of a women's college (think St Hugh's, think Newnham, think Girton): the same corridors, woodwork, and interior arches; the same sense, too, of the kind of lack of privilege - despite all of its respectable solidity - that Woolf wrote about in A Room of One's Own whilst comparing women's and men's Oxbridge colleges. Ruth Adams herself (b. 1914) had a solid career as an English professor (with a PhD from Radcliffe College) and was indeed a Victorian specialist - teaching at Douglass, and become Dean, from 1960-66, at which point she moved to Wellesley, as its president, where among other things she reaffirmed its commitment to remain a women's college. She moved to Dartmouth in 1972, where she was Vice President and Professor of English until 1988. One has to admire someone who celebrated her 88th birthday with a flight in a hot air balloon.
The Ruth Adams Building, however, badly needs rescuing from gloomy dingeyness. After British educational establishments, it felt suspiciously familiar - something brought hom not just by seeing my own handwriting on unpacked cartons in A's study, but by the presence, in the outer hall of the suite in which her office is situated, of a poster of the Tiffany window, c. 1908, View of Oyster Bay. For I know this so very well - I bought the poster on my first ever trip to New York, in 1979, and it hung - in increasing degrees of tattiness - on my study walls first in Bristol, and then in Oxford: it was like seeing an old friend again today.
the good girl syndrome
is something that I still suspect that I am afflicted with, after all these years: it's there even, and of course, in my determination, even at the end of a long day, to take a photograph and write a post - though what I am trying to prove to whom is a more murky puzzle. I've been reading Rachel Simmons's The Curse of the Good Girl - by the woman who wrote the excellent Odd Girl Out - in part because I admired this earlier book, in part because, I guess, at some level, I'm still trying to break the spell. Even though it's a book primarily aimed at the mothers of such girls, I guess I can borrow from it... more, when I have got further...
Here is a depressingly and unmistakable good girl, sitting at the back of the classroom of IX, at the top of Wimbledon High School Preparatory Department, in about 1962. Goodness knows what I am writing: Miss Clayton - a peculiarly fussy and crabby woman - is peering over my shoulder to try and see, so I expect that I am forming my neat italic letters very carefully for her. Even though it's not obligatory, I see I'm wearing school uniform (to be honest, I always found the idea of uniform easier than tussling with free expression when it came to clothing). In front of me is Lucy Garrard, who really was a good girl and startlingly conformist; then Deborah Howard, who was good at math; Joanna Latimer, whom I always thought of as French, for some reason, and who is now Professor of Sociology at Cardiff (two future professors in one row seems a bit excessive); then Susan Coad - *no* idea what happened to her, and then Fenella Howard, with whom I sometimes used to ride (though she patronized the rival stables). All of us are wearing our Startright sandals, tucked neatly under our desks; and there are very Educational Posters on the walls - springtime, and British port life, and something that looks like elementary geology. We did spend a lot of time learning about The World Around Us. We were also, I am sure, being taught to be Good, by the standards of bringing up young girls, at the time "between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP."
cats' eyes and cabbages
One of the big mysteries to me when I moved to the US was the phenomenon of the Ornamental Cabbage. This is not to say that no one in England grows cabbages as if they were exotic flowers, but I much more readily associate the brassica olaracea with straggly growths in allotments, seen from trains. However, here they are, as seasonal as the flowers that Americans weirdly call "mums" - a word in England reserved for a plural of mothers ("moms" being an unheard-of Americanism). I crept up on this one with, for once, a flashlight, because I could see that there on the table behind it was...
... DandeLion! aka Bitzi, aka Fluffy - our strange, feral, unapproachable, adorably beautiful feral cat - still feral after nearly eighteen months of indoor living, and prone to think that every corner of the house is one great woodpile in which to conceal herself. Those eyes are curiously human (or devil) like - not at all feline. Most cats have eyes that shine white, or bluey-greeny-white, when subjected to the photographic flash - this is because of their tapetum lucidum, the layer of tissue at the back of their retina that reflects visible light back again, increasing the light available to the photoreceptors. This increases their ability to see in the dark - though maybe, in this case, not Bitzi's. Maybe this is the reason why she will let us pet her only at the dead of night, when she'll deign to be on the bed: she can't actually see us very well.
I am baffled, stymied, stumped when it comes to explaining why I like this as much as I do. I think because it defies normal conventions of fall photography, despite the presence of a few lingering yellow leaves: rather than hitting tones of rust and umber and red and gold - of which there is plenty around, especially in this spookily warm November weather (as I left Murray this evening, there was even a girl sitting in the dark under a tree). This corner of Scott Hall is, however, determinedly non-autmnal in its cold artificial lighting: indeed, this is almost an underwater scene, clammy and grey green. But there's also something fragile about it - the tenacious last bits of foliage, the crumbling wall that makes it appropriate enough for a scene shuffling toward's the year's end - or at least towards Thanksgiving. I find it very hard to get my head around not Thanksgiving per se, but a country in which the academic semester screeches to a halt for three weekdays, and then grinds itself into motion again for two fraught weeks.
keyed up
The size of my bunch of keys would rival that of a gaoler. Why so many of them? There's a house key to Highland Park, somewhere in that tangle, and one to the Santa Fe house (the pink, semi-Western one in the foreground, cut at Mailboxes in Eldorado, and the only one of the lot that I can be guaranteed to identify in a hurry. This isn't much use in New Jersey, admittedly). There's a car key, or, to be exact, a sophisticated and microchipped piece of plastic. There are two keys to Union Street - one to the house itself, one to my office - a blessed retreat that I don't get to nearly enough. There may or may not be keys to my parents' house in London - I always think that, like my passport, I should have them close to me in case of emergency, but in point of fact I'm not sure where they are, and they are probably in Santa Fe. The grubby yellow plastic surround provides crucial ID to another key - that to the women's faculty/staff bathroom in Murray. Its green companion isn't attached to anything. Then there are a whole collection of keys that go along with chairing - one that lets me into my office, that was shiny and identifiable at the start of the semester, and now is dull and sulky. I wonder why? And there's a master key, and a supplementary master key, and another extra supplementary master key. I cannot imagine the circumstances under which I'm likely to use any of these, unless (o sigh) I want to get into the building on a Sunday or at Thanksgiving. I suppose they are rather like a mayorial chain, or a mace, or a velvet floppy hat - signs of office, but actually, they weigh me down clankingly.
And then there are the appendages - a rubbed spacy dome like object, that I bought at the Harold Edgerton museum in Nebraska, and that goes red and swirls around if one puts one's hot little fingers (or, I guess, other body parts) behind it, and then there's a long string of blue perspex cubes. You'd think, with all of this, that I would be able to find my keys when I need them. No. I was even driven, earlier this year, to buying (at inordinate cost) an electronic key-finder, that emitted a loud beep (rather like a fire alarm needing a new battery, c.f. the ceiling behind me) when one pressed the Finder button on a base unit. This was a great idea, in theory - until the alarm beep went off, unbidden, when I was driving through West Virginia. There seemed to be no way of silencing it, no way of tearing out its little battery - so in the end, I prised it off my key ring, hurled it (still beeping urgently) into a trash can, and accelerated away.
This image is a deliberate homage to Giacomo Balla's Fallimento (or Failed, or Bankrupt or Insolvency), his wonderful 1902 semi-Divisionist painting of a closed bank, or closed business, the door firmly barred shut, the panels scrawled with chalk graffiti. Here there's the same sense of a futile solidity in the presence of the door - no longer any real need to keep out, or in, customers or money. This was taken somewhere down by City Hall in NYC - and falls into the category of Signs of the Recession, always a favorite (if decidedly voyeuristic and gloom laden) sport when walking or driving around neighborhoods. Hard to locate many other obvious signs in NY itself, today (though there were a large number of empty businesses visible as New Jersey Transit trundled through Rahway). There was, however, an only-in-New-York man trying to make a quick buck by appealing to the tourist dollar, strolling up Broadway with an apparently quite happy, very sleek, black and white cat sitting on his head.
Or, given the reflections, and the way in which the door panels refract light rather like a carefully inlaid, trompe d'oeil Renaissance door, and the verdigris, and the mottled textures, this could be seen as completely lacking in topical thematics, and as being simply another example of my fascination with the
(thank you, bridge at New Brunswick station).
So today's question is... when does repetition of a theme, a motif, become recognizable as a deliberate aesthetic pattern, or boring lack of inspiration, or obsession, or thoughtful variation, or or or or or...? For this is far from being the first vase with stems in water that I've included on this blog this year, or the first vase.jug with a handle. Clearly, I could answer by saying - look, it comes to the end of a day; I have a photo to take...what's around me...? But this is not the only picture I've taken today - and even suppose it were: why choose this theme rather than another one? This forces me back into my own grounds for aesthetic pleasure, at least as exemplified here: ambiguity (of depth, solidity, refraction); intensity without brightness in the color; near (but not exact) symmetry; a certain academic preoccupation, perhaps, with issues of surface and depth. In other words, one of the things that a repeated subject makes one consider is, evidently, one's personal, non-thematic specifics of visual preferences.
This mirror is the only thing that I've ever bought at a real auction, at the closing-down sale of a yard specializing in architectural antiques in Oxford (I really wanted a Victorian font, and still wish that I'd bid on it, but I didn't have the money - and I don't know what I'd have done with a font, when I think about it). This - set on Library Red, in our dining room, reflects a whole lot of my past back at me: some goat prints, bought in Lyon; plates that used to belong to each of my grandmothers - including a kind of serving dish with a pale purple morning glory plant in the middle; coffee cups with stars on them, which were a present from an old family friend; two rough-cast plates decorated with bunches of grapes - and this is where things start to get scary, because I can't remember their origins. Italy, probably. But where? Did I buy these to eat my dinner from when I was a grad student? It is very frightening indeed to have possessions that one really loves and to be unable to remember their origins - this rather gives the lie to objects being things to remember by. A Staffordshire figure of a boy with a goat - I think from the antique market that used to be in the old jam factory by Oxford station - but again, maybe not. A plaster mould of a woman milking a sheep - that, I know, came from a little junk store in Notting Hill. And a teapot of Alice's. Should one be making an inventory, with provenance, of all of one's possessions? But the only person (apart from a very detail-oriented social historian) to whom this is likely to matter is me - not being able to remember their origins, though, is a form of being forced to life in the present, without really intending to.
murray, again
This was my dismal discovery of the day: the janitors' room, just outside the chair's office on the first floor of Murray. I went in there to empty a styrofoam cup of cold coffee down the sink, and was greeted by this appalling sight: the ceiling is peeling and bulging from god knows what water damage and other forms of wear and tear. It looked as though the whole thing could come down on the janitors' heads - maybe bringing half a dozen students and tables and chairs with it. So - just in case Facilities don't come trotting over fast, very fast, to put it to rights, this is a documentary image, propaganda for due care and attention to be given to another crumbling corner of the campus (next campaign, after the push to get the sweet little observatory repainted, is for the cupola of Murray itself to get a new coat of paint). Indeed, this isn't, perhaps, as urgent as preventing our janitors from being concussed, deluged, and smothered, but it would help to cheer up the environment. Mind you, I'm still in a state of shock from being told that apparently some students have formed a Save the River Dorms group (though I can as yet find no concrete evidence of this, despite having googled, and even searched for a Facebook community supporting this improbable desire). I want to be the person who lights the touchpaper when we get round to dynamiting them.
brightening up the bedroom
So how far does one try to recreate other rooms when one moves? In our bedroom here in Graham Street, we have the same vase for flowers, the same orange-ish light, on the same low dresser, as we had in the bedroom in Los Angeles - only here the walls are a chill slaty grey, not the Tuscan reds and ochres of Hoover Street. There's a certain comfort in this - as there is downstairs, in the bull's blood red dining room. This isn't an LA echo, however, but an Oxford one: the walls are the same color there, more or less, as the National Trust "Library Red" color that adorned the living room at 16 James Street, and the curtains are the very same ones - which is probably why the kitties are so fascinated by them: the late lamented Charlie Mew (Charlotte Mew at birth, but soon deemed inappropriate, when one saw his little tabby balls) used occasionally to spray on them, in an apparently absent-minded way. So even if the house has nothing in common, really, with a 1925 mock Italian villa, or a late C18th farmhouse knocked around by the Victorians (including William Morris's parents - he of the Morris Motor Works, not Kelmscott and Utopian craftsmanship), there's still a form of decorative continuity, which of course is upheld by the display of portable property in the form of lamps and vases and furniture.
I've got a lot of admiration for photographers who take very expressive pictures involving folds of material, emotionally provocative shadows, uneasily described shapes. Needing to fabricate a quick image, I folded my scarf (Santa Fe, the same store that had the glowing dachshund and the luminous owl, for the record) in various suggestive postures, and all that I can report is that it's a more difficult exercise than I thought. All that's happened is a re-figuring of the scarf, which doesn't have this shimmering phosphorescence at all, and really, is neither turquoise nor purple...
Meet Leo. Leo came from Oxford - I bought him from a little store on St Michael's Street that had a sudden, brief influx of papier mache animals - he's around sheep size, and hostile. I used to keep him in my study, where at least one student claimed that she found him completely scary (what I never told her is that at first, there were times when I would look round and get a shock that he was there, staring fiercely).
Over the years, I've become more accustomed to his snarl - but he's not always easy to place in an appropriate location (yes, I know, he should be in the chair's office, but I haven't reached that point quite yet). He's currently on the gallery, a kind of strange limbo of bits of furniture that haven't got real homes, and the kitty litter tray, and a potential location for any troop of madrigalists or serenading singers that might improbably drop round. He's not all that visible from downstairs, though - which may be a waste of his attitude...
chairing, continued
It has been a spectacularly beautiful fall day, and even New Jersey - even this part of New Jersey - has been looking like somewhere in a tourist ad (see below - the bridge over Route 1, resembling John Cotman's 1804 Aqueduct over the Chirk.) But oh, New Jersey... I offer up today's stray, abandoned chairs to the altar of all those who have appreciated the part that industrial, commercialized, mass-produced junk plays in conjunction with rivers to create the special aesthetic of this state. There's William Carlos Williams, of course (of whom Marianne Moore made the endearing comment that he wrote the kind of "plain American that cats and dogs can read") not just with the amazing Paterson, but with his short story "Life Along the Passaic River," in which the opening pans up from a Thomas Eakins like scene of a boy canoeing along the Passaic to the Manhattan Rubber Co's red brick and concrete power plant on its banks. This image, of course, does the same kind of thing in reverse (the boy in a canoe, dammit, was a hundred yards up stream).
And then there's Robert Smithson, he of the Spiral Jetty, with his essay "The Monuments of Passaic," and something I like possibly even more, in this connection, "The Crystal Land," with its emphasis on refraction and reflections and mirrorings and facets. In all his writings, published and unpublished, on NJ (see Ann Reynolds's excellent and comprehensive book, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere), Smithson explores the potential in the urban unfinished (imagine an incomplete New Jersey Turnpike!); in the anti-monumental sites of memory that are found within suburbia, old and new (the landscape that Peter Blake called in 1964 "God's Own Junkyard"); and the potential in all of this for disruptions to our sense of time and place - something very close to the conditions of science fiction. And yes, not for nothing, one might recollect, did that Martian invasion in the infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds occur in New Jersey - which would allow us to revisit the bridge arches, not seeing them, this time, in terms of romanticism's appropriation of new technology to a quiet beauty, but in terms of vortices with a quite illegible origin and force.
chairing
Here it is! The perfect illustration for Kathleen Stewart's couple of paragraphs on "Traces:"
People are collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road. Things that have dropped out of the loop or have been left sagging somewhere are dragged home as if they are the literal residues of past dreaming practices.
The snatching practice mixes a longing for a real world (or something) with the consumer's little dream of spying a gem or tripping over a bargain. And in the mix, all kinds of other things are happening too. (Ordinary Affects, p.21)
I haven't any desire to snatch this armchair off S. First - quite apart from being even more dilapidated than some of our own that haunt various corner of the house, it looks very happy sitting on its tree trunk throne, await some unguessable occupancy. What it does exemplify to the full is the hunter/gatherer aspect of taking photographs: never quite knowing what dreaming practices are going to be set in train by the image, rather than the object itself.
I say in the sidebar to this blog that it began life when I was thinking about writing a book - a very general book - about writing and photography: a project that morphed into my current work on flash photography and startling interruptions of light more generally. I'm very glad of this shift - I've been reading a new book by Francois Brunet called Photography and Literature (in Reaktion's excellent "Exposures" series) - wide-ranging, if somewhat disjointed in its argument, so far - and it covers almost exactly the ground that I was planning on tackling myself. If I hadn't shifted my ideas, and become interested in a side alley of the original project, I'd be rolling on the floor and howling. As it is, I'm very impressed by how much ground he's covering in a very economical way - I was coming to the conclusion that it was an unmanageably sprawling topic. His chapter on staged photographs, "The Literature of Photography," takes one back to today's image: though far from staged, there's surely a narrative waiting to emerge from it - or at least a Ionesco play.
ordinary leaves
One of the many things that I admire about Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects is the way in which she suggests that in part, we register the ordinary through our knowledge of interruptions - things that break into everyday life. These needn't be the potentially traumatic (the knock on the door, the late night phone call), though of course she registers the ominous power of such things to break apart what she calls the cocoon of home. Rather, they can be interruptions caused by things that in themselves are ordinary: the "rogue intensities [that] roam the streets of the ordinary" (44). "At odd moments in the course of the day," she writes, you may raise your head in surprise or alarm at the uncanny sensation of a half-known influence" (60). Her example, at this point, is completely different from my own - she goes on to write about the sudden blast of personal tragic histories that comes across when one sees a "homeless and hungry" sign, say. But overall, in discussing the affect of the everyday - how it can seem redolent of something important that we can't quite name; that isn't symbolic, but that exceeds simple description - when, in other words, she's talking about the mysterious power of things - she hits (as I suggested yesterday) at something that's very close to what I think I'm attempting in my own recording of the everyday.
For here - not in a human-made object, but in a suddenly seen branch on campus - is a view that's very ordinary (fall leaves); that could certainly be forced into literary alliances (Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs", or Coleridge's "one red leaf," etc.); but that basically has an aesthetic pull that, through its symmetry, makes an appeal on one. That last phrase is a limp one, because the whole point of such an affect is that one isn't talking about something that's easily read in symbolic terms, or that can be reduced to a neat, recognizable emotion. Maybe I should try writing differently to tackle the problem of isolating one's feelings, and adopt Stewart's strategy of using the third person: "she walked under the tree, and then suddenly stopped. fumbling in her bag for her camera, convinced that there was something here that she wanted to write about, even if she couldn't quite put a name to it...".
jug handle
No, not one of the strange driving features on NJ roads, but a big jug of white carnations on our dining room table - the jug came from a store by Sunset Junction, in Silver Lake, that has a wonderful selection of eco friendly and eco/nature themed household treats.
I simply couldn't stand another day hunting down an image in Murray, although I did look, hard, on my way up to Au Bon Pain and back for something serviceable. I'd started to read Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects, which has been haunting my desk for some time (since I have to give an MLA paper to do with affect, and I'm supposed to be writing a chapter for an edited volume on the novel and the ordinary/everyday, this seems like killing two birds with one stone). It's a book composed of some 120 or so vignettes of ordinary life and speculations not just upon them, but on the very nature of the ordinary, and hence feels like a close relative of this blog. Of course, I left the book on my desk... but the passage that caught my eye in relation to trying to find a subject for an image of the day had to do with the particular power of the found object, the unexpected revelation of something special in the apparently ordinary bit of discarded junk or trash or roadside detritus - and then (this is the noteworthy bit) the way in which we seize on such things not just because of a love of surprise, but because of our love of a bargain, of something for nothing. I'll go back into this tomorrow (unless something else visually compelling forces itself on me): I think that there's a good deal of material I want to think through here in terms of my own practice.
the other aspect of changing clocks
is how good it is to have early sunlight. This is Voorhees Mall at 8 a.m. this morning, between Murray Hall and the meeting that I was attending in Winants Hall (one darkened by last night's election result), and the light is, clearly, not needed. It looks remarkably tranquil (though in fact a woman was standing on the front steps of the Art Library, just to the left, yelling angrily into her cellphone to someone who had evidently broken every promise that he had ever made to her, and was going to Suffer For It, if she didn't take him to court first).
clock change
It is, of course, wonderful not to be getting up - even heading off to work - in the dark. But then, it's now invariably dark, and going to be dark for a long time, at homegoing. This is the window on the way out of Murray Hall, heading into the carpark. Iconographically, one thinks of windows as being full of possibility, looking onto views, liminal, suggestive of expanses, and so on. This, however, has something much more akin to the prison about it.
There's a further interpretation to be drawn - one of distance between Rutgers and The Building Across the Street. This belongs to Johnson and Johnson (today announcing a cut back in management, etc - one hopes that doesn't impact too badly on New Brunswick). Theirs is the magnificent building one sees from the train, and as one walks up George Street from the station. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thought, when she was appointed, that it was a part of Rutgers - maybe that mysterious place, Old Queens? Surely the president must have his office there, on the banks of the old rar-i-tan? I kept waiting to get invited to a function there - then thought that, at least, graduation would be held on its sloping lawns. Eventually, the reality dawned upon me ...
the dorm bus
It's a Rutgers bus. But not any old Rutgers bus, making its fast and determined progress between College Ave and Douglass or Busch or Livingston, clipping the odd car (or, on a bad day, another bus) on its way. It's the hotel shuttle bus, sitting waiting for passengers outside the student center, with (on closer inspection) a few depressed black spiders, left over from Halloween, adhering to its windows.
As this article in yesterday's New York Times makes clear, five hundred of our first year students don't have a dorm room, but are being put up in the Crowne Plaza hotel somewhere about five miles away. I can't imagine a more depressing start to one's Rutgers career (a Crowne Plaza hotel ten miles away?). The whole article is about the tendency of state universities to try and make more money out of recruiting out of state students, who will then pay higher fees - something that Rutgers plans to put some energy into doing. And there's certainly financial logic to this - although each out of state student means one place less for a New Jersey student. But how does one go about drumming up enthusiasm? Many of our dorms are not spectacularly seductive at the best of times (I once proposed, fervently, that we shouldn't ever ask new faculty to teach in the basement of the River Dorms in their first year, or they will run screaming away from New Brunswick - in my own first year teaching, I was once stopped in full flow by the sight of a rat scuttling along the pipes outside the window at the back of the dank room). Yet to imagine that we can entice students from New York or Pennsylvania or Connecticut to come here when we offer them a bus ride to and from corporate hotel land, rather than any simulation of vibrant campus life, is a true pipe dream.
like a rainbow
Loyal readers will doubtless remember, right at the beginning of the year, a couple of pink plastic flamingoes gamely poking their thin necks through the snow. Now their owner has done it again: consummate queen of rainbow kitsch. Her back gate has been painted in rainbow stripes a long, long time - but now a whole load of stones have been dumped and spread at the side of the house and painted - yes - all the colors of the rainbow. So, too, has the Kokopelli figure playing the flute in front of the house, but that will have to wait another couple of months before it's captured.
I'm not sure why this passion for the spectrum: I don't get the sense from her that this is a flamboyant gesture of LGBT pride - though who can tell, especially in Santa Fe, where there's a whole retirement complex called Rainbow Vision (complete with the Billie Jean King Fitness Complex and Spa). What I do know is that it's a violent assault on the eyeballs - and oddly, probably not quite covered by the myriad of local Eldorado environmental ordinances, which mandate one to paint one's house a certain color, and to cover up one's camper van, and so on.


Part # 1900 Exposed Tip Clamp Style EGT Probe.
Fastest response and the most accurate probe in the industry, clamp on style. Our highest quality, American made, stainless steel thermocouple exposed tip probe, with 6 foot stainless braided cable, clamps around header tube. You must drill a 3/16" I.D. hole in the top of the tube for the probe. The self-sealing probe tip inserts 1 inch into the header tube. Compatible with all meters using K-Type temperature probes. All probes are tested and certified in the range -200 to 2000 degrees F.


text:
X-Men: Dark Phoenix pushed to 2019 as other Fox films reshuffle
'The New Mutants' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' also get new releases
March 27, 2018 at 08:18 AM EDT
X-Men: Dark Phoenix has flown the coop. The next post-Apocalypse installment of 20th Century Fox's superhero saga has been bumped from its planned November release date to Feb. 14, 2019.
The studio made the announcement late Monday night, along with a few other shuffles. Bohemian Rhapsody (the Freddie Mercury biopic) will now open in Dark Phoenix's initial slot of Nov. 2, 2018, and The New Mutants (the next X-Men spin-off) has moved from Feb. 22, 2019 to Aug. 2, 2019.
2018 was supposed to be a massive year for the X-Men. Deadpool 2 is still hitting theaters on May 18 with introductions for Cable (Josh Brolin) and X-Force (another X-Men spin-off in the works), but Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants were both supposed to open within months of each other.
Directed by Josh Boone, The New Mutants plans to flip the script on the superhero genre by injecting it with a horror movie element. After filming commenced in Massachusetts, reshoots were scheduled and star Anya Taylor-Joy confirmed a new character will be included.
"I do think that there is a great responsibility to make sure the movie is done right and that we deliver the fans something that they can all feel happy about and excited about," Taylor-Joy told The Playlist. "So, I don't think it being delayed is a bad thing because it's definitely more important to make sure that we get it right than rushing to make a date. So, hopefully, all of these reshoots and adding of the new character that will give the fans an altogether satisfactory, wonderful product."
Dark Phoenix, too, has a lot of pressure on it. The story of an unhinged Jean Grey awakening the Phoenix Force within her and unleashing her devastating powers unto the world had already been tackled in X-Men: The Last Stand, though it had been dragged through the mud by critics and fans.
Sophie Turner will now return as the younger Jean from X-Men: Apocalypse to tell a more comic book-accurate story. "I think we took our eye off what has always been the bedrock of the franchise which is these characters," director Simon Kinberg told EW of The Last Stand. "It became about global destruction and visual effects over emotion and character."
He added, "One of the things I went into [Dark Phoenix] wanting to do is obviously focus on the characters and give them real emotions to play and come up with a theme that would make it feel relevant and necessary in today's world."
The 7 funniest celebrity cameos of 2019 (so far)
Joker director says the Joaquin Phoenix movie 'doesn't follow anything' from the comics
Ghostbusters first look photo reveals Carrie Coon and the film's new family
Focus Features developing survival film Paradise, about California's deadliest wildfire
It producer developing horror film based on sculpture which inspired Momo Challenge hoax
The Lion King first reactions praise a 'breathtaking,' 'beautiful' 'visual masterpiece'
A24 turns the Midsommar bear in a cage into the next hot toy craze
Jessica Chastain's 'Dark Phoenix' secret character explained
Dark Phoenix burning questions answered
Midsommar star Jack Reynor says horror film's dark laughs were 'informed' by British comedian
Dark Phoenix star Kodi Smit-McPhee on the uncertain future of the X-Men
Days of future present: Where the X-Men franchise should go from here
The Farewell has dethroned Avengers: Endgame for 2019's biggest per-theater average
Midsommar star wasn't sure director could actually complete horror film
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark video showcases classic stories like 'The Red Spot'
The Nightingale director knows the film is 'a very tough experience.' That's the point.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix pushed to 2019 as other Fox films reshuffle


text:
How FDA handles food and drug shortages
By: Elizabeth Ruiz
Since the start of the pandemic, there's been a lot of focus on U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Many were eager for the approval of the first COVID-19 vaccine. We've also been dealing with many shortages.
Critics say there's a lot of red tape to the FDA approval process. However, when there are shortages for medications and other health products, that process looks a little different.
Grocery store aisles that normally carry formula were empty in May of this year, but the Biden administration and FDA quickly took action calling on foreign companies. Blake Waltrip is the U.S. CEO of a2 Milk Company, a company that started in Auckland, New Zealand. He says the shortage was a result of one the main U.S. formula producers temporarily shutting down.
"There were some bacterial infections that happened as a result of infant formula," Waltrip said. "Ultimately, that that company made the decision to close down that facility. When they did that, it created a domino effect of no product availability in the U.S."
As of early November, a2 Milk Company's formula has been approved by the FDA to be put on shelves in the U.S.
"So what the FDA created in conjunction with the administration was the opportunity to have something called enforcement discretion," Waltrip said. "And what that did was allow the ability for foreign brands to bring their products in."
Waltrip says it was a very lengthy process.
"We had to change our packaging to make sure it was U.S. standard," Waltrip said. "You know, instead of milliliters, it was in fluid ounces. Make sure that our serving size was appropriate for the U.S. consumer."
However, he says it was still quicker than the process of getting long-term approval. Whether it's infant formula or a medication, FDA has a system in place to handle shortages. Erin Fox at the University of Utah Health is an expert in how the FDA handles pharmaceutical shortages.
"They can ask manufacturers to ramp up their supply," Fox said. "They can ask the drug companies to increase production when they get new applications. So, let's say that there is a shortage and a new company wants to make a new drug, they can prioritize that application and they can put it at the head of the line. If a company needs an inspection or maybe a new raw material, FDA can also prioritize and really fast track those inspections as well."
Jonathan Darrow who has published many papers about FDA approval and pharmaceuticals says enforcement discretion is used with drugs too.
"There's also a program called expanded access that can be used to allow importation of a drug from abroad," Darrow said. "And this would be a case perhaps, where a drug in the United States is similar, but not identical to a drug that's available abroad."
As challenging as shortages can be, the FDA says it often leads to a more diverse market which gives people more to choose from down the line.
"The winners of more choice are always consumers," Waltrip said.