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Eugene Fashion Week
Designers and models work together to promote healthy body image
Fashion by Alex V. CipollePosted on 04/25/2013
Courtney Wade of Seams Legit with model Sephirah Krinsky. 'Everything she wears turns to gold. She's not afraid,' Wade saysPhoto courtesy Melissa Mankins / Paper Moon Photo Studio
On a typical spring evening in Eugene, inside Paper Moon Photo Studio is a warm celebration of flesh: leather straps wrapped around narrow waists and ruffles cupping curvy bottoms; sequins shimmering on large breasts and fringe dancing on flat bosoms; full hips hugged by velvet and slender torsos bound in spandex; tattoos and nipple rings peeking out beneath bra straps and ribbons. The studio is hosting modeling fittings for the upcoming Eugene Fashion Week, running April 29 to May 4.
When Eugene Fashion Week (EFW) put out a call for models of all shapes and sizes, intentional or not, it was doing something radical for the fashion industry. In 2013 this may not seem bold or brave, but don't be fooled, when it comes to runway fashion, it is. Even outside the fashion epicenters of New York, Milan and Paris, rigid modeling standards are rampant — typically female models must be between 5-feet-9 and 5-feet-11-inches and fall between a size 00 (yes, that's a size smaller than 0) and size 4. The requirements pop up in fashion weeks across the country from Seattle to Chicago. In fact, for Portland Fashion Week, models must be between 5-feet-8-inches and 6-feet tall and between size 0 and size 6.
Many critics of the industry place the blame on fashion designers for fueling unhealthy body images by choosing models that more closely resemble coat hangers, but the truth is more complex: To promote healthier body image in the fashion world, designers and models must collaborate. Designers have to make sample sizes larger than a size 2 and women and men who are a larger than size 2 have to step forward and proudly flaunt their bodies, which is exactly what is happening in Eugene. As EFW Producers Mitra Chester and Laura Lee Laroux put it at the model call March 11 at the Oak Street Speakeasy, "Walking the runway is very much about: You're the hottest person in the room," regardless of whether that's "curvy, round or skinny."
Jennifer Brown of the lingerie label Under The Root, showing at the swimsuit-lingerie show on May 1, is all-too-familiar with elite standards of the industry, having moved to Eugene from Chicago three years ago. Brown's line, which she deems "loungerie" for women and men, is filled with soft, comfortable and flirty bras, boy shorts, camisoles, boxer briefs and rompers made from lush, vintage upcycled fabrics. Flip through her lookbooks and you'll find models ranging from slender to fuller-figured with minimal make-up and bare feet. Brown explains that this is more of an innate rather than intentional choice. Her background is in modern dance, and her fellow dancers were the original customers she was designing for. She says that modern dancers have athletic bodies that are more "average," rather than the long, lean lines of ballet dancers.
"You can be small and athletic, you can be large and athletic," Brown says. "Small, large — is so relative." Under The Root pieces come in sizes small, medium and large, and thus she needs models in a range of sizes to represent her clothes. Brown typically chooses friends to model her designs — dancers, yoga teachers, performers — because it's "more about who they are and what they do" than their measurements. For EFW, Brown cannot use her own models because a pool of models is provided for all the designers to choose from and share, so it really comes down to first impressions of attitude. "You have to be pretty confident to get in front of a camera with a pair of underwear on," she says.
For the designers of Seams Legit, Courtney Wade and Lillie Ledwell, the choice to represent more average body types is very intentional. "We're both curvy women," Wade says. "I like to work with curvy shapes." The pinup-inspired Seams Legit features everything from lingerie and swimwear to evening gowns for the avant-garde runway show at The Shedd. Wade and Ledwell point out that there are some practical reasons for designers to make smaller sizes — they use less fabric and designing for smaller bodies without curves is simpler.
"It is very easy to make something for a size 2," Wade says. "It's much more complicated to make something that's going to fit somebody with all different shapes. Every size 8 does not look the same."
"It's not just straight up and down," Ledwell adds.
"That's what is great about Eugene — the models here are all shapes and sizes," Wade says. She adds that a few models were insecure, saying, "My boobs aren't perfect — I breastfed." Wade, who recently had a baby, laughs. "I've been breastfeeding. I get this!" She says, "I don't need someone who's small so my stuff looks good no matter what. I don't care if you've had a baby — I can make something look great on you."
The Models
Desiree Kuenkele looks like a woman straight out of a Mad Men-era Coca Cola advertisement: Her pin-curled hair is a Lucille Ball-red, her wide smile is framed by cherry rouge lips and her figure is reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe. Until she came to Eugene, however, she never thought modeling was an option. At 26, Kuenkele says, "I feel like I'm too old, too short and too fat. You know, technically." Kuenkele is originally from Indiana, where she studied fashion merchandising at Ball State University. When it came to the local fashion shows there, she did hair and makeup but never modeled. "I just didn't even think it was a possibility. For the runway shows … everyone was super tiny. No one was even making clothes for any other size than 2," she says. "Here, they want curvy girls instead of being like 'Oh, nothing will fit you.'"
Kuenkele will be modeling the designs of Seams Legit, So Fresh, Freudian Slip and VaVaVie. She is perhaps most excited to walk the runway in a design by VaVaVie, which is inspired by a peacock with emerald green velvet shorts complete with tail and a corset bedazzled with jewels. When asked if she's nervous as a first-time model to walk down the runway in underwear, Kuenkele shakes her head. "I feel more comfortable naked than I do in clothes," she says. She explains that it's all about confidence and letting go of your fears, and she points to her parents for her self-esteem. "They would compliment not only how pretty I am but my character."
Whereas Kuenkele is 1950s glam, Dory Lou is earthy punk: She wears angular tortoise shell glasses, her septum is pierced with a simple silver hoop and her chestnut brown hair has been shaved close to her head except for a modest Mohawk. This is Lou's second year with EFW and she originally got involved in modeling over a year ago when she saw a Craigslist ad posted by Jennifer Brown, whom she will be modeling for this year in addition to Seams Legit, Spandex Body and Sparkle Glitter Glow. But Lou, who is the mother of a 10-year-old, never aspired to be a model while growing up in California. "I grew up as a beautiful young lady with a horrible body image," she says. "When I was 24, I moved to Eugene, and the body image in Eugene is so much more accepting and the men are different about it. The men don't objectify women like they do in California and I feel like that's really helped."
Lou says that local designers have helped her feel comfortable and valued in her own body as well. "Designers were really excited about my body. I had a lot of them approach me, 'Would you please model this?'" she says. "I was really surprised because I'm not tall and skinny. I'm short and stocky and full of curves." Lou would like to see more womanly bodies on the runway and she thinks part of that responsibility falls on fuller-figured women. "If the only people who are going to put their bodies out there are stick figures — these skinny, skinny girls — then that's what we're going to think is a beautiful body. So more of us wonderfully voluptuous, round, soft women need to put our bodies out there and be like, 'No. This is woman.'"
Eugene Fashion Week kicks off with the swimsuit and lingerie show 10 pm Wednesday, May 1, at Oak Street Speakeasy; $10. The Shedd will host the ready-to-wear show 8 pm Friday, May 3, and the avant-garde show 8 pm Saturday, May 4; $12 adv., $15 door. Visit eugenefashionweek.com for more information.
'The beauty spectrum is changing,' says model Desiree Kuenkele, with Seams Legit's Lillie Ledwell. Photo courtesy Melissa Mankins / Paper Moon Photo Studio
EFW production team Laura Lee Laroux, Mac Goodwin and Mitra Chester.
Model fitting at Paper Moon Photo Studio April 15 Photos courtesy Claire Flint Last / Paper Moon Photo Studio
Sew you want to be a designer?
DIY is so chic right now. Whether it's taking community sewing classes or getting a degree in apparel design, the Willamette Valley has options for you.
The Redoux Parlour in the Whit offers classes for several different skill levels, from basic stitches to pattern design to construction. Sessions run for four weeks on Wednesday evenings ($70). The next sessions start May 8. They also offer internships. For more info, visit redouxparlour.com.
Deluxe on Willamette hosts custom internships and apprenticeships, which can focus on construction, design, merchandising or marketing. For more info, call 541-686-0205 or email info@deluxefashionshop.com
The UO Craft Center at the EMU has classes for sewing, knitting, felting, silk painting, silkscreen printmaking and jewelry-making year round. Visit craftcenter.uoregon.edu for details and registration.
OSU's School of Design and Human Environment — featuring a program in apparel design — was named one of the Top 20 Fashion Schools in the nation by Fashionista.com alongside Parsons The New School for Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology. The college also offers programs in textiles and merchandising management. Visit wkly.ws/1gi for more information.
LCC offers career training in fashion design with six different levels of coursework including body measurement, patternmaking and creative design implementation. Visit wkly.ws/1gh for details.
The Country Fair Runway
Fair fashion and glitter
Fashion 2 years ago
photo by Erin Dougherty Williams
photo by Erin Dougherty WilliamsOregon Country Fair is known for trying to be an all-inclusive spot for people of all kinds. It encompasses the most … Continue reading →
Tags: OCF2018
Denim and the City
Vanessa Froehling takes her street-wear line to Portland's FashioNXT runway week
CultureFashion 3 years ago
Vanessa Froehling, left, auditioning for FashioNXT in July. Photo courtesy Jeff Wong.
Local designer Vanessa Froehling has denim on the brain. Stonewashed, herringbone print, chambray, stretch and black denim, to be sure. In her home studio, Froehling flips through hangers of designs, including sailor-style high-waisted women's shorts, a men's blazer and a women's jumpsuit. Continue reading →
A smattering of the thrify, fantastic designs from St. Vincent de Paul's upcycled fashion show Metamorphose April 23 at Hi-Fi Music Hall
A smattering of the thrify, fantastic designs from St. Vincent de Paul's upcycled fashion show Metamorphose April 23 at Hi-Fi Music Hall (1) Designer: Renne Phillips/VaVaVie • Model: Desiree Noir (2) Designer: Renne Phillips/VaVaVie • Model: Amelina Dawning Continue reading →


Rapid advances in technology and increasing competitiveness in the digital sphere have led enterprises to focus a lot more time and budget on the user experience and interface of their digital estate. There are now entire internal teams and external agencies that spend all of their time thinking about these things.
Some reports indicate that enterprises with great UX have increased revenue by 37%. User-centric design decisions have also been shown to increase revenue. For example ESPN.com found out what users wanted during their homepage redesign and incorporated this knowledge, leading to a 35% increase in revenue.
The importance of UX is perhaps seen even more starkly on the negative side. Way back in 2012, 88% of online consumers were telling surveys they would not return to a website that gave them a bad experience. In 2014, 86% of mobile app users were telling surveys they would stop using an app that didn't meet expectations. And why not? Competitors are very happy to offer them a better experience and increase their conversions and engagement at the expense of rivals. If you still need convincing, last year's inaugural Design in Tech Report from KPCB's Design Partner, John Maeda, is full of information about the increasing importance of UX and design for digital.
One key challenge presented by this increased significance is ensuring that users get a great experience, wherever they are in the world. Global enterprises tend to want both brand consistency and websites/apps that communicate well to users, whatever culture or country they are coming from. This comes with several questions and challenges.
Think about your favourite e-commerce website or a website that reliably gives you a great user experience, every time. Now think about how users from another country or culture might see the exact same website. Assuming that language translation is perfect (not always the case), how might they see it?
Would navigation be harder for some users than others?
Are you using any metaphors or jargon that would not make sense to some users?
Is the information you are presenting relevant to the way users from different countries make decisions?
Some of the considerations here are about the fundamental design principles that underpin your website, such as simplicity vs. complexity. Enterprises also need to carefully consider the culture and psychology of the users they are seeking to engage. If you are only translating a standardised website then you have centralised brand consistency but you may be confusing or boring a large proportion of users.
A good way of preventing this is to get your local business users involved in content and localisation early on, but what frameworks can inform you and your teams about cultural preferences?
One such framework that can help to build culturally relevant user experience is Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Hofstede has been researching cross cultural communication for many years and has developed his model over time, adding the sixth dimension in 2010. Originally based on a detailed survey of IBM's global offices in the late 1960s, the research now incorporates data from the extensive World Values Survey.
The extent to which less powerful members of institutions/organisations accept that power is distributed unequally.
Values – High PD countries have a stronger focus on hierarchy, authority and expertise. Low PD countries tend to be more democratic and informal.
Implications – High power distance cultures would tend to prefer strictly organised sites with limited navigation and fewer choices, whereas low PD cultures prefer a less formal structure and a broader range of options.
The degree to which individuals are integrated into groups.
Values – More individualistic cultures emphasise personal achievements and loose social ties, while collectivist societies are more interested in consensus and cohesive in-groups.
Implications – Content that more closely reflects the level of group integration in the society will be preferred. For example, imagery representing individual achievement will be favoured in high IDV societies.
The distribution of emotional roles across genders.
Values – Masculine cultures tend to be more competitive, assertive, and materialistic and value traditional roles. Feminine cultures are more likely to be cooperative, with more concern for relationships, quality of life and less traditional roles.
Implications – Results oriented symbols and information will be preferred in MAS cultures with community and interaction more highly rated in feminine ones.
The degree of tolerance for ambiguity.
Values – Countries with high uncertainty avoidance exercise more strict laws, rules and regulations to control change while those with low uncertainty avoidance are more pragmatic and value less restriction.
Implications – Clarity and detail in visuals and information will be preferred by high uncertainty avoidance cultures. Low uncertainty avoidance cultures will engage with more general and symbolic content.
The time horizon of the society.
Values – Long-term oriented societies are focused on the future, giving reward to persistence and saving. Short-term oriented societies focus more on the present and past, rewarding strong social relationships.
Implications– In high LTO countries content that emphasises long-term development and goals of the business and products will be admired. Content/visuals indicating more immediate gratification will be more engaging in low LTO cultures.
The sixth dimension, added later, refers to what extent the society suppresses gratification.
Values – High indulgence societies tend more towards gratification of human desires whereas high restraint societies are regulated by stricter social norms.
Implications – Indulgent societies have a strong belief in personal control over life and emotions whereas restraint societies are more likely to recognise the influence of outside factors.
If we take the UK as an example we can see that the data indicates a highly individualist, highly indulgent society with a focus on results and success. According to this model, the UK also has a higher tolerance for ambiguity and would prefer less formal structures.
Of course as with any model, Hofstede's has its challenges. The data supporting these broad ideas has been presented as averages of a national level, based on questionnaires. There is a danger that models like this one could lead you into the trap of stereotyping when applied in an uncritical way.
However, applied critically, these dimensions can be a framework for gaining insight into what kinds of experiences users in different cultures and places expect. Treat it as a starting point and combine with what you already know about your users to ask what you can learn about customers' expectations and needs. Some of the wider challenges can be mitigated by the trend towards greater personalisation and relevancy. Meanwhile, handled with reason and awareness, the six dimensions can inform your thinking about the cross-cultural user experience.
User experience can sometimes seem like a costly undertaking, but getting it right can make the difference between staying relevant for your users regardless of their country, culture or background and seeing them seek a better experience elsewhere. Of course not everyone has the budget available to build an internal UX team or acquire a design agency, but third-party consultants can offer expertise and advice about how to improve your UX. If you are undertaking a redesign or rebuild, make sure that the user experience is central to this and considered from the beginning. Tools such as these calculators from Human Factors can help you get an idea of what ROI and/or savings you could achieve.
Ensuring a great user experience for all of your customers across local markets is a great investment in the future of your digital enterprise and could be the thing that enables you to remain useful to users for a long time to come.


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Match Day 22 : Ards vs Loughgall.
Ards vs Loughgall.
Bluefin Sport Championship.
Saturday 21st December at 3.00 p.m.
It's the last game before Christmas and John Bailie's first home game managing the team he played for for so many years, if that isn't enough to drag you away from Christmas shopping there is a well-known visitor who will be handing out selection boxes and mince pies to lucky fans, so get down early!
As far as the game goes Ards fans will hope the team can continue the improved performance shown last week in the 3-0 win at Dundela. Michael McLellan, who scored twice against the Duns will be missing from the panel as he also picked up his fifth yellow card of the season, so is suspended for one game. On the plus side Kym Nelson and T.J.Murray are available, having completed their suspensions. Dylan Wilson and Ben Cushnie, who have been missing through injury recently are still on the doubtful list.
Loughgall are eleven points clear of Ards in the table, but Ards do have a game in hand so a win on Saturday would help narrow the gap. The Villagers were surprisingly beaten 1-0 at home by Queens last weekend but did get back on the winning trail by winning 3-1 at Annagh United on Tuesday to clinch a place in the Mid-Ulster Cup Final.
When the two sides met at Loughgall in late September they fought out a 0-0 draw, a rare result for both teams this season. Loughgall have a potent attack, with their 43 league goals being the second highest but when on form the Ards defence can be difficult to breach, with eight clean sheets to their credit so far this season.
Let's hope that a good crowd will be there to see an early Christmas present in the form of a win and three more points.
There will be a collection at the match in aid of our charity partner Cancer Focus Northern Ireland, so please give generously!
Match Sponsor : Romas Newtownards.
Ball Sponsor : Prime Shine Car Wash.
Match Officials :
Referee : Glenn Buchanan.
1st Assistant : Jamie Cairnduff.
2nd Assistant : Jamie Patterson.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Known for penning dozens of doorstopper horror- and supernatural-themed novels, the prolific Stephen King has also managed to knock out several books of short stories and novellas over his career. As he notes in the introduction to this new but uneven collection, "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams," short fiction offers him a breather from the demands of novels. "When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married," King observes. By comparison, the short story is "a waltz with a stranger you will never see again, or a kiss in the dark, or a beautiful curio for sale laid out on a cheap blanket at a street bazaar." Hence the title of this compendium, one in which readers will quickly recognize many of King's habitual themes and devices.
The 68-year-old master craftsman begins in his familiar territory of haunted cars, perhaps as a nod to longtime readers who might otherwise feel lost in the book's literary melange. The lead-off tale, "Mile 81," about a people-eating vehicle that terrorizes a decrepit rest area along I-95 in Maine, eats its own tail. Heck, King sources his own work: "Jimmy Golding hadn't believed in monster cars since he saw that movie 'Christine' as a kid." Perhaps the "Constant Reader," King's name for his devotees, will forgive that self-referential Easter egg, but the story feels like a retread, and is one of the collection's weakest.
More affecting is the work rooted in the real, rather than the paranormal. Take "Batman and Robin Have an Altercation," about a son's relationship to his father who suffers from Alzheimer's. As the two drive back to the nursing home after a dinner at Applebee's, the dad lets slip an old affair with a neighbor. "[T]here's no governor on them," King observes about parents with memory loss. "Yes, they hurt you." And the son, too, is seen unsure of his own memory: "How old was he then? Three? Only two? Yes, maybe only two, but he doesn't doubt the recollection; it's like a fleck of bright glass seen at the side of the road, one so perfectly positioned it leaves an afterimage." Similarly understated is "Under the Weather," a dour psychological profile of a husband who can't face his wife's death. No green bile or overcoming great evil here.
One unusual aspect of this book is the commentary King offers on each of its 20 tales. "When I was a young man, I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft when I was reading Lovecraft," he admits in the intro to "Premium Harmony," a present-tense story about a haggard marriage. In it, he pays homage to Raymond Carver, whom he admires for the "clarity" of his style and the "beautiful tension of his prose line." Example: "Marriage is like a football game and he's quarterbacking the underdog team. He has to pick his spots. Make short passes." The story, one of the least reliant on King tropes, ends up being one of the collection's most moving.
But other yarns, emerging from half-baked thought experiments, leave behind a gimmicky taste. There's the judge addicted to knowing the future ("The Dune"); a Western period piece full of stereotypic tumbleweeds and clipped cowboy speech ("A Death"); and a haunted-house exorcism complete with a raging thunderstorm ("The Little Green God of Agony"). Several take authorial power and storytelling itself as their subject: a reporter whose obituaries actually kill people ("Obits"); a Kindle that can call up alternate fictional worlds ("Ur"). A couple of the stories are actually narrative poems ("The Bone Church," "Tommy"), but lacking much attention to rhythm or the sound of language, these read more like chopped-up prose, not verse. "Drunken Fireworks," an overlong, voice-driven tall tale about an absurd fireworks competition, makes unimpressive use of a borderline caricature of the backwoods Maine accent.
When King dials back the horror shtick in the more harrowing tales of "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams," it's the quotidian particulars of 21st century life — Walmart, DUI convictions, road rage, the stony realism of Maine's rural poor — that haunt us more effectively than any undead vehicle. "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams," of course, wouldn't feel like real Stephen King to some without a closing story from the apocalypse. In the grimly gorgeous "Summer Thunder," another high point in the collection, a man, his stray dog, Gandalf, and a neighbor wait out radiation poisoning at the end of the world. The final line is killer.


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Full Movie: Meri Aan l Ayub Khan, Deepak Shirke, Mukesh Khanna, Shah Baaz Khan l 1993
By admin On Feb 20, 2018
Meri Aan l Ayub Khan, Deepak Shirke, Mukesh Khanna, Shah Baaz Khan l 1993
Kaaliya Patil is a laborer in a mill in a small town in India. The region experiences riots and as a result there is considerable violence. The police are summoned and are compelled to open fire in the crowds, resulting in deaths of several people. Amongst the dead are Patil's wife and daughter. Patil's pleas for help are ignored, and he also does not get any justice through the system. Angered, he quits his job and takes to crime, and soon becomes the top lieutenant of a don named Sher Khan. Patil still nurses considerable anger at the police, and he seizes his chance to abduct the Police Commissioner's (Ashraf Khan) only daughter and thus avenge the death of his child and wife. For Sher Khan this is like killing two birds with one stone, as he will not only get his vengeance against Ashraf, but also force him to get his only daughter, Farheen, to marry his brother, Salim. The question is will Ashraf let Patil and Sher Khan to get the upper hand, or does he have a surprise tucked …
Movie :- MERI AAN 1993
PRODUCER :- Roopesh Kumar
DIRECTOR :- Roopesh Kumar
CAST :- Ayub Khan, Deepak Shirke, Mukesh Khanna, Shah Baaz Khan, Farheen, Prithavi, Roopesh Kumar & Sabeeha
Khakee : The Real Police (Thoongavanam) 2018 Hindi Dubbed Motion Poster | Kamal Hassan, Trisha
Review: Lost & Found (2018)


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Q: Can I get markdown file's contents in Objective-C? I can get the contents of a .txt file in this way:
NSString *articlePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"test" ofType:@".txt"];
return [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:articlePath encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];

However,it is no use when the file is a markdown file:
NSString *articlePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"test2" ofType:@".md"];
return [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:articlePath encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];

The articlePath is "nil",but the file is exist actually.
I wonder if there any method I can use to get the contents of a .md file.
Thanks in advance.

A: Go to : Target -> "Build Phases" -> "copy bundle Resources" Then add that particular file here.
Make sure that test2 file is there

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


United Kingdom Rescue Challenge 2013 Gets Underway In Liverpool.
Hundreds of firefighters competed in a large event as the first day of a two day rescue challenge event took place. The free event continues on July 6 in Liverpool.


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Manchester United boss Erik ten Hag has added to his backroom team with the appointment of Benni McCarthy as a first-team coach. Photo: Twitter @ManUtd
POLL: Who are you most excited to see Benni work with at Man U?
Benni McCarthy will be working with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial. Which prospect excites you most?
by Craig Lewis
in Soccer
Late on Saturday night, Manchester United officially confirmed that new manager Erik ten Hag has added to his backroom team with the appointment of South African soccer legend Benni McCarthy as a first-team coach.
WATCH: BENNI SPEAKS ABOUT HIS WELCOME AT MAN UNITED!
The South African was at Old Trafford on Sunday as the Reds drew 1-1 with Rayo Vallecano in United's final pre-season friendly.
McCarthy will be coaching the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial among other attackers in the current Manchester United squad. You can check out the full squad list here.
Vote below to let us know which player you are most excited to see working with the Bafana Bafana legend:
click here to create a Poll
Benni has been warmly welcomed at United
In a statement released on Monday, United said "the former striker has both the pedigree and knowledge to assist in sharpening up the team's attack".
Ten Hag was on the look-out for one more recruit to his backroom staff, in preparation for next weekend's Premier League opener against Brighton & Hove Albion at Old Trafford, and felt his fellow former Ajax man fitted the bill.
"There was still one place in our coaching staff that I wanted to fill," he told MUTV. "Someone with a different voice and Benni is that one.
"He has experience as a manager. He was a coach in the professional level and he was a former striker, a really successful striker as well."
The manager also elaborated on McCarthy's specific role at Carrington, with the Reds preparing for life at home and abroad in 2021/22.
"He will focus on the positioning and attacking," said Ten Hag.
"I'm not saying only the strikers, but also the integration from the full-backs and midfielders. Our way of play has to be dynamic."
You can watch a clip of Benni chatting in Man United colours below:
READ | SUPERSPORT UNITED ANNOUNCE GAVIN HUNT AS NEW COACH
Benni McCarthy
latest soccer news
Former Bok captain: SA can win both games against NZ!


stickpoll.me 9 out of 10 based on 817 ratings. 4,314 user reviews.
1968 Dodge Charger R T VIN: XS29L8B348150 Check out this beautiful 1968 Dodge Charger R T for sale! This is an original R T and started life as a high HP 440ci V8 Charger.
This is the way my car looked when I bought it back in 2007. The engine was done as well as the front end before I bought it but after years sitting in the sun the bushings starts to get noicy!
Accel Auto Group is proud to offer for sale a 1969 Dodge Charger R T. This Charger comes with it's numbers matching 440 big block hooked to its numbers matching 727 automatic transmission, both have been rebuilt with less than 20 miles on them.
Top Notch Quality Wheels at an Affordable Price. Using a state of the art manufacturing process that includes counter pressure injection molds, each rim is sent through heat treatment for increased fortification.
Lights Lenses: Fender Turn Signals: Fender turn signal pair. Replacement for 2930781. Fits 70 72 Dart, 70 72 Valiant, 70 340 Challenger, 70 Coronet, 71 Dodge B Body, 72 Fury, 70 72 C Body w o peak moldings.


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Cannes 2018: 'Cold War', a tale of star-crossed lovers in 1950s Poland
FRANCE 24 English
How do artists and writers see the world? We take you to the crossroads where culture meets the news and engages with what's happening in our lives today. From Monday to Friday at 12:15pm Paris time.
Publié le vendredi 11 mai 2018 à 16:37 par Lisa NESSELSON
Durée : 6:50
Film critic Lisa Nesselson tells us about two movies competing for the top prize at Cannes: "Cold War", by UK-based Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, and "Sorry Angel", the latest film from French writer-director Christophe Honoré. She also tells us about another section of the festival, International Critics' Week, where she saw a French film, "Sauvage", by director Camille Vidal-Naquet.
Podcasts – Anatomie de l'art
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StarShipSofa
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The Audio Science Fiction Magazine See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/starshipsofa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Host Frances Anderton looks at design and architecture from a Los Angeles perspective.
Mosaic of China
The guests' only common factor is that they are all interesting people with engaging stories to tell, or thought-provoking ideas to share. When all their stories and ideas are pieced together, they form a Mosaic of China.
An English-language podcast showcasing people who are making their mark in China. 一个轻松愉快的英语播客,展示了一群目前正在中国留下印记的人。
TTM Show
Podcast on our last aventures...
Our Podcast to talk about everything.
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Yesterday world financial markets closed predominantly with a slump. Investors are waiting for further developments around Crimea and sanctions against Russia.
Trading in Europe posted the following results – Britain's FTSE 100 fell 0.49 percent down to 6,573.13 points, Germany's DAX 30 grew 0.37 percent up to 9,277.05 points whereas France's CAC 40 shed 0.12 percent down to 4,308.06 points.
In Russia, the MICEX index dropped 1.21 percent from the closing level the day before and made 1,319.72 points while the RTS index fell 0.46 percent down to 1,155.94 points.
In the USA, the Dow Jones shed 0.7 percent down to 16,222.17 points, the NASDAQ fell 0.59 percent down to 4,307.60 points, and the S&P 500 BMI dropped 0.61 percent down to 1,860.77 points.
The price of May futures for the North Sea petroleum mix of mark Brent Crude Oil rose by $0.55, up to $106.79 a barrel. The price of April futures for light WTI oil went up by $1.62, reaching $99.70 a barrel.
Yesterday the results of the Federal Reserve meeting were published – the quantitative easing program was cut by $10 billion. It's already the third reduction in a row. The base interest rate was kept at 0-0.25% per annum. The Federal Reserve also downgraded its outlook for US economy growth to 2.8-3% instead of 2.8-3.2%.
On the Forex market, EUR/USD sharply went down to 1.3820. Most probably, the pair will have a slight upward correction as it crosses the support levels at this rate. However, macroeconomic news may influence the pair's dynamic.


Caught Looking examines articles from the academic literature relevant to baseball and statistical analysis. This review covers three articles on the topic of racial discrimination by umpires. The goal, as always, is to expose the academic frontier to a wide audience and seek ways to move the discussion forward.
Sports can sometimes provide an interesting laboratory to examine pressing social questions that are hard to analyze in other places. It's hard to measure whether two accountants have different salaries because they have different productivity levels or because one might face discrimination in the labor market. With sports, and especially baseball, a wealth of data allows us to measure productivity with a precision not available in most industries.
This past year, two papers in the Journal of Sports Economics investigated the possibility of racial discrimination by umpires in Major League Baseball using datasets that covered millions of pitches. The first paper, Further Examination of Potential Discrimination Among MLB Umpires, by Scott Tainsky, Brian Mills and Jason Winfree, focused on data from 1997-2008, and the second, The Connection Between Race and Called Strikes and Balls, by Jeff Hamrick and John Rasp, drew on data from 1989-2010. Both of these papers examined carefully a 2011 paper that appeared in the American Economic Review, the top journal in the economics literature. Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives, and Evaluation, by Christopher Parsons, Johan Sulaeman, Michael Yates and Daniel Hamermesh, focused on the period 2004-2008.
Parsons and his co-authors found some evidence of discrimination by umpires against pitchers of a different race, but that this effect disappears the more carefully scrutinized the umpire's decision is. While this effect is statistically significant, it is also small, affecting on average something less than one pitch per team per game. In both of the more recent papers, the authors found that any evidence of racial discrimination by umpires is very dependent on the particular modeling assumptions.
Before digging into what causes the differences in results, it's useful to look first at the goals of the first study. Parsons and his co-authors had a somewhat more ambitious goal than to simply identify whether there was discrimination among umpires. They also wanted to see whether pitchers and batters changed their behavior in response to this. In other words, if a pitcher found himself on the wrong end of a discriminating umpire, he may be more likely to try to miss bats with fastballs than try to sneak a back-door breaking ball on the black. In addition, they also asked whether umps tried to get away with discrimination more often when they weren't being as closely watched, either by fans or by the newly invented QuesTec machines, and whether pitchers and batters were adjusting accordingly.
To recap, the authors hypothesized that umpires engaged in racial discrimination, that players were able to recognize that this discrimination existed, that players were able to recognize that the extent of discrimination was different under different conditions of monitoring, and that players adjusted their behavior in the face of discrimination. This is a lot to ask of data, even with millions of observations, and it is remarkable that they found some support all the way through this logical chain.
Their paper focused on umpire-pitcher discrimination, rather than umpire-batter discrimination, and began by classifying umpires and pitchers as White, Black, Hispanic or Asian, then breaking down the called-strike percentage of taken pitches by different racial combinations. After examining over 3.5 million pitches, a little over half of which were called balls or strikes by the umpire, they found a slightly higher called-strike percentage (32.0 percent to 31.5 percent) when the umpire and pitcher are racially matched than when they are not. Next, they employed a linear probability model to account for differences in game situations (inning, count, home field) and umpire-, pitcher- and batter-fixed effects (more on this later), to isolate the effect of umpire discrimination on called strike probabilities. There is some evidence that Hispanic umpires may favor Hispanic pitchers relative to White pitchers, and some evidence that White umpires favor White pitchers over Hispanic and Black pitchers, but the magnitude is small. In the full model, the authors do not find that their estimates for discrimination are statistically significant.
However, they press on. Perhaps close monitoring changes the behavior of umpires—if you know you're being watched more carefully, you discriminate at a different time. Alternatively, perhaps racial bias changes the behavior of pitchers—if you know you're getting squeezed on the corners, you don't throw to the corners. And here they find evidence that, in fact, people are changing their behaviors. In the period of study, QuesTec cameras were installed in some, but not all, ballparks to track pitches. Without QuesTec in the park, umpires are 0.59 percentage points more likely to call a strike for a racially matched pitcher, but the presence of QuesTec reduces the probability by 1.07 percentage points, more than offsetting the racial bias found without QuesTec. Both effects are statistically significant. They find similar results for highly attended games and on terminal (two-strike or three-ball) counts where implicit scrutiny is likely to be high. In addition, PITCHf/x data on pitch location from the 2007-2008 seasons shows that racially matched pitchers do in fact throw more often to the edges of the strike zone in non-QuesTec parks, and that racially matched pitchers give up fewer hits in non-QuesTec parks. Together, all of these results suggest that racial differences between pitchers and umpires impact behavior, and that monitoring reduces or eliminates its effects.
This is fascinating, and even in datasets with millions of observations like we have with pitches, this is a hard thing to find. However, these results come at the end of a long logical chain and depend on the first result—racial discrimination among umpires—being present. The two more recent papers call this into question.
Hamrick and Rasp use data for 32 seasons, from 1989-2010, covering more than 13 million pitches. They also focus on umpire-batter matching, not just umpire-pitcher matching, and find a mix of contradictory information even in their descriptive statistics. For example, White umpires call more strikes both for White pitchers relative to Blacks and Hispanics, but also call relatively more strikes against White hitters. The empirical strategy is to use two-way and three-way interaction terms to identify racial discrimination. Three-way interaction terms combine dummy variables for umpire race, pitcher or hitter race, and situation (terminal count, QuesTec, attendance, game score). In the full version of their model, none of the three-way interaction effects are statistically significant, though they suppress the actual coefficient estimates which would show whether the signs and magnitudes are consistent with what would be expected. From here, they drop the three-way interaction terms and revisit the model with two-way interaction terms.
In this version of the model, the authors find a number of statistically significant differences in behavior across races that appear in various circumstances—for instance, Latin umpires call fewer strikes when QuesTec is present. But note that the three-way indicator was not significant, implying that this behavior is roughly consistent across races of pitchers and batters. There are a number of other situations where umpire race and called strike probability are statistically significantly related, but again, independent of the race of the pitcher or batter.
Hamrick and Rasp suggest that these racial differences in behavior may lead to spurious findings of racial discrimination in other studies. They don't refer to the Parsons study directly here, but it would seem to apply.
Tainsky, Mills and Winfree use data from 1997-2008 on umpire and pitcher races, testing both the whole period and the 2004-2008 period used in the Parsons study. This paper uses a much smaller set of control variables—simply, an indicator for home park and an indicator for QuesTec to go along with the variables of interest indicator for racial match between pitcher and umpire, and an interaction between the QuesTec and racial match indicators. In models without fixed-effects, the authors find a statistically significant effect of discrimination of a magnitude consistent with the other studies, about a half of a percentage point. They also find that the presence of QuesTec partially offsets this effect. However, they do not find evidence of statistically significant discrimination in models including fixed effects for year, pitcher and umpire. This stands in contrast to the earlier study, which found discrimination in models with fixed effects.
In an appendix to their paper, Tainsky, Mills and Winfree dig into the differences between the two papers, and there are several. First, racially classifying umpires and players is hard, especially in the case of Black Hispanic individuals. Laz Diaz, for instance, is responsible for about a tenth of pitches called by minority umpires, and the two datasets arrive at different classifications. A number of other corrections and distinctions are identified as well.
Second, and more importantly in terms of the difference in results, the two models treat fixed effects differently. Fixed effects, in a nutshell, are like player-specific or umpire-specific constants. It's deeper than that, but basically, different umpires have at least slightly different strike zones and called-strike probabilities, but with fixed-effects, the umpire's unique fingerprint is held constant from game to game. The same is true for pitchers—some pitchers simply have an approach that leads to more called strikes than others. It seems highly appropriate to include fixed effects for pitchers and umpires when modeling for discrimination. However, as the appendix points out, the two papers treat fixed effects differently. Tainsky and his collaborators use a single pitcher-fixed effect and find no evidence of discrimination, while Parsons and co-authors use two fixed effects for each pitcher and each umpire, one in QuesTec parks and one in non-QuesTec parks, and with this specification, they turn up evidence of racial discrimination.
Tainsky, Mills and Winfree clearly prefer one fixed effect per pitcher, but it's easy to see why Parsons, Sulaeman, Yates and Hamermesh may prefer two. QuesTec was controversial at its adoption, and there appears to have been at least some conscious impact of the system on player and umpire behavior. All of the studies showed an increase in called-strike probability in QuesTec stadiums, so something changed in QuesTec games versus non-QuesTec games, either in the approach of pitchers, umpires, or both. It's also quite possible that not all players or umpires changed in uniform fashion, rather that some adjusted differently to QuesTec than others. In other words, the fixed effect for an individual might be different from QuesTec parks to non-QuesTec parks.
The Tainsky study also looks at PITCHf/x data to map the actual called strike zone and test whether pitchers are more likely to throw to the edges of the zone in the presence of a racially matched umpire. Plots of strike zones developed from a smoothed Generalized Additive Model (see the paper for details and cool diagrams) in stadiums with and without QuesTec look nearly identical for both matched and non-matched pitcher-umpire pairs. With these maps, they do find evidence that pitchers tease the edges of the zone in two-strike counts, but they find no evidence in support of discrimination-induced changes in pitcher behavior in regression models.
The Parsons study turns up some interesting and seemingly robust results that depend on a complex series of interactions. Umpires first must discriminate, but only in some instances. Players must recognize this and must find it beneficial to change their behavior accordingly, but again, only in some instances. Discrimination, though, is hard to recognize in the data, even when looking at millions of pitches over decades. Perhaps pitchers can recognize early in games when they're getting squeezed and adjust within the game, though this seems hard to imagine when discrimination seems to affect about one pitch per game per team. Perhaps minority pitchers whose tendency is to challenge hitters in high-leverage situations perform better in the minor leagues and thus are self-selected into the majors, but this wouldn't seem to affect their behavior in QuesTec versus non-QuesTec parks.
Looking forward, PITCHf/x provides a new set of tools to investigate the issue of discrimination at the umpire level. None of the studies takes up this issue directly, but game-day scouting of a particular umpire's tendencies remains a plausible path toward the behaviors and outcomes identified in the Parsons study. Unfortunately for researchers, but perhaps fortunately for fairness, the PITCHf/x strike zone maps we can create these days represent the information needed to identify discrimination if it exists, but also the kind of monitoring that would drive it away.
Michael Wenz is Associate Professor of Economics at Northeastern Illinois University. Caught Looking reviews mainly recent articles from peer–reviewed academic journals. Please send along suggestions, especially for interesting dissertation or thesis chapters that aren't always easy to find.
"Their paper focused on umpire-pitcher discrimination, rather than umpire-batter discrimination, and began by classifying umpires and *batters* as White, Black, Hispanic or Asian, then breaking down the called-strike percentage of taken pitches by different racial combinations."
Shouldn't the *batters* be pitchers instead?
Guess how many Latin umpires were used in these studies?
It's a small number. Small number of Black umpires too. I wanted to talk a bit more about that part of it, but I don't know what I have to add. Go check out the originals!
"Also of note is that even though the sample has nearly 8.3 million pitches, the number is reduced greatly when examining some combinations of umpires and pitchers only for pitches subject to judgment by umpires. Indeed, from 2004-2008, there were only around 2,550 pitches thrown by Black pitchers requiring the judgment of Black umpires."
Based on my own study of modeling a strike zone, 2,500 pitches tends to not be nearly enough called pitches to have a good idea of what that strike zone looks like even for a single umpire with less variability than an aggregate of multiple umpire zones.
My point is that there is not nearly enough data to test any of the hypotheses -- the original paper should never have been written. The behavior of handful of individuals -- no matter what that behavior is -- simply cannot be used to infer the behavior and intent of a large group of people.
I understood your point, and I was providing further information. Much of what you say here was the entire point of our retort in JSE.
I'll also add a bit to what our original paper reported. I fit a number of models with substantial control variables (including location of pitches) to evaluate discrimination that were not included in the published paper or its appendix. I found no statistically significant effects of race matching in the FX data, either (data through either 2010 or 2011, I forget specifically). I even fit these with separate race match variables for each race classification combination.
And Michael explains why it might be troublesome to look there (including my own estimates): all pitches are closely monitored after the implementation of F/X. We also make this note in our paper (IIRC, maybe it was removed) that if the interest is the differential effect of monitoring, then it seems strange to use a sample where all pitches are monitored very closely (the data are publicly available) to make this evaluation.
There is much more to do here with such great data. I continue to try and work with it and wish I could do it all!
Where are the tests that show that Joe West, Angel Hernandez, and CB Buckner are just garbage umps? That they may not have any racial bias between them and instead are just really bad at their job.
Does it make a difference that they are all of different races and each of them deserves to be replaced?
At the risk of getting too far afield, I could not agree more, Derek. Those three umps are awful, Hernandez especially. On top of being what I believe is the worst ump in the league (subjectively, I admit), he at least once intentionally made the wrong call (the A's non-homer in Cleveland). I don't understand why a player gets kicked out of baseball for life for throwing a game while an umpire gets away with what happened there.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until it happens. Let the computer call balls and strikes. I don't go to the ballpark to watch the umpires.
I enjoyed this. I appreciate the initial effort to try and find some evidence of discrimination. I like that someone thought to go looking for that. And I agree with the challenges raised to the initial findings. Good stuff.
While it may be tough to pinpoint any real evidence of discrimination, it looks like the data does show that QuesTec (or some other form of monitoring that the umps are aware of) does seem to impact the calls. If the umps know that they're being watched, they try harder to get it right. Feels like it would be obvious but it's still nice to see that demonstrated in the data.
I agree with the closing bit about how we now have the kind of technology available to us to not only more accurately measure the variables but also prevent this kind of inconsistency from ever becoming a real problem again. Regardless of whether or not it ever existed in the first place. One pitch per game per team isn't huge but it is statistically significant enough to raise an eyebrow.
The bottom line seems to be that we should monitor the umps and let them know it's happening. Then hold them to any glaring issues.
Just don't do robot umps. It's too weird.
I do think a lot of the recent chatter about the transitory nature of large gains to pitch framing is on the money for exactly this reason. Monitoring it will improve the umpiring.
I would think that if there is preferential behavior, it is most likely strong in some individuals and weak or nonexistent in most. It doesn't seem like the kind of phenomenon that would be present across the board.
Also, race matching is not the only form of racial preference. In some other professions, some black individuals have been found to prefer non-blacks, and more than likely there are other groups like this in certain circumstances; I'm just not that widely read in this.


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This Trans Student's Bathroom Lawsuit Could Be a Watershed Moment for the South
Drew Adams' case will either secure transgender protections in three southern states or push the issue to the Supreme Court.
by Kate Sosin 3/6/2019
By the time Drew Adams' case is decided, he will likely be headed to college. But that's hardly the point. The transgender 18-year-old has been using the boys' restroom at Allen Nease High School all year.
It's what his case could mean for students nationally that has advocates zeroed in on the Ponte Vedra, Florida, lawsuit.
Adams won a federal decision that granted him access to the boys' restroom at his school last July. This February, Lambda Legal, which has been fighting his case, urged the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to deny the St. John's County School Board request to overturn that win.
But in opposing Adams, the district may have given transgender advocates a watershed opportunity: Adams' case will now either secure transgender protections in three southern states or push the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.
Drew Adams in his room.
"This has the possibility to create a precedent that would protect the rights of transgender students and transgender people more generally under the federal civil rights law," Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior attorney at Lambda Legal who is fighting Adams' case, tells NewNowNext. "In the deep South, we're talking about Georgia, Alabama, and Florida."
The Supreme Court previously punted on the issue of transgender student protections. In 2017, the court declined to hear the case of Virginia trans student Gavin Grimm. Grimm won his case back in federal court, but his school district has continued to debate its policy on transgender students and bathrooms.
Gavin Grimm: Graduating With Dignity But Without Justice
Just 20 states and Washington D.C. have protections on the books that cover transgender people. Last year, Ash Whitaker a trans student in Wisconsin, won his case in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Indiana and Illinois. Neither Indiana nor Wisconsin had trans protections previously.
Now, Adams' case is poised to do the same in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. If he loses, Lambda Legal could appeal the case to the Supreme Court, setting the stage for a historic battle over trans rights nationally.
Adams story begins in 2014 when he started to identify as a boy. His mom, Erica Kasper, knew he was trans before he did, he explains to NewNowNext.
"There are a lot of instances in my childhood that I look back on now and think, Huh, maybe I should have realized sooner than I did," says Adams. "But I told my mom after a week of scouring the internet… it was nerve-wracking as any coming-out experience would be, but I had probably the best experience I had ever heard of."
Adams' family supported him, and it was not until 2015 when someone anonymously reported Adams at school for using the boys' bathroom that he faced discrimination.
School counselors told Adams he had to use gender-neutral bathrooms. According to court documents, the school had just three gender-neutral restrooms, each a 15 to 20-minute walk from Adams' classes. Adams was forced to choose between missing class and forgoing using the bathroom, he claims. He worried that using a separate bathroom would out him as transgender to staff and students.
"It's been an added level of stress on top of the normal high school stuff," Kasper tells NewNowNext.
Unable to make headway with school administrators, Kasper filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights under the Obama Administration. But the investigation dragged on for months and fell to the Trump administration, which has been notoriously hostile to transgender people. In February 2017, just as Adams' case was on the brink of a resolution, the Trump administration rolled back Obama-era guidance protecting transgender students.
Kasper and Adams turned to Lambda Legal. Adams' federal suit was the first-ever transgender bathroom case to go trial.
In a detailed decision, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Corrigan ruled that the issue boiled to down to one thing: Adams was a boy who legally had a right to use the boys' restroom. He ordered the district to pay $1,000 to Adams in damages and to allow him access to the boys' restroom.
After the ruling, the year was uneventful for Adams. "It's not that different from ordinary high school," he says. "Most days the case does not actually affect me except for being able to use the correct bathroom now. I'm mostly just a normal kid trying to survive high school."
But the St. John County School Board appealed his win.
District Superintendent Tim Forson did not respond to a request to comment. But according to the Florida Times Union, Adams' principal had testified that she did not consider him to be a boy.
The very public fight over Adams' restroom access has taken place against a backdrop of unprecedented anti-transgender violence in neighboring Jacksonville. Three transgender women were murdered in the city in 2018, as well as a gender non-conforming gay man. A fifth transgender woman survived a shooting. Two other transgender people were murdered in Florida last year. All of the victims have been people of color.
Kasper says the murders, coupled with the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in Orlando in 2016, has added to her anxieties for Adams as he navigates Florida as an out trans person. Still, she says, the family never considered moving. "We're not going to change hearts and minds if we don't stay to do it."
LGBTQ advocates have long argued that Title IX, the federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on sex, applies to transgender students. The Obama-era guidance on transgender students hinged on that interpretation.
But as a handful of schools across the country deny transgender students access to affirming bathrooms, LGBTQ legal organizations have hastened to cement clear-cut interpretations in the courts.
Eliza Byard, executive director of LGBTQ education advocacy organization GLSEN, says schools are increasingly doing right by their transgender students without fanfare.
"I think it is deeply upsetting that we face a situation where the court, and indeed the Supreme Court of the United States might tell 2% of the U.S. student population that they have no rights and dignity," Byard says to NewNowNext.
In 2017, Adams testified before the Jacksonville city council in favor of city's Human Rights Ordinance that secured LGBTQ non-discrimination protections.
Those protections, however, only cover Jacksonville and not its suburbs where Adams lives and attends school. While Adams' fight started with a personal need, the issue is bigger than just him, he says.
"I definitely want to help as many people as I can," says Adams, who will graduate in May. "I want to change as many hearts as minds as I can. I think that storytelling and putting a human face and a human story to a politicized issue like transgender rights is the only way to do that."
Kate Sosin
Kate Sosin is an award-winning, trans-identified news and investigative reporter.
@shoeleatherkate
Tags: Transgender


Showing results by author "Duncan Greive"
Daniel William Carter is acknowledged as the greatest fly-half to have played international rugby. A veteran of more than 100 test matches, he is the world record holder for most test points, has twice been named the IRB's Player of the Year and twice named New Zealand Player of the Year. Carter, though, is renowned for his modesty and unassuming nature and argues that he has he always "just tried to do the best job I can for the All Blacks".


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Defining What Netflix Will Be, or Eight Reasons to Give Sense8 a full 3rd Season
July 11, 2017 July 11, 2017 jstueart
As most people know, on June 1st, Netflix decided not to renew Sense8. Fans of the Wachowski Sisters + J Michael Straczynski show, a show that weaves a global narrative to tell a very human story of eight people sharing their minds, knowledge, and empathy, were devastated that the story would not have a third season. Many knew that it only had one more season of story, but Netflix decided not to renew. Then the fanbase rallied and wrote and tweeted and called out! and helped show-writers garner a 2 hour special for Sense8! Amazing!
I am so happy that we get 2 hours to wrap up Sense8, and don't take this blogpost here as less than gratitude for that 2 hours. But I'd like to make a bigger case for you–a case you haven't heard–about giving Sense8 a whole season based on what might be good for Netflix, not just for fans.
While there has been speculation as to why the show was not renewed, that's speculation. Netflix spends a lot of money trying to find hit series, and sometimes a good series doesn't find the right market. When the cancellation happened, there was plenty of anger towards Netflix, and, in the moment, I even threatened to dump Netflix. But I love Stranger Things, and I watch Star Trek, Daredevil, Luke Cage, etc. It would be hard for me to dump Netflix for good. I know, they're counting on that–they've made us LOVE this service. Okay.
Instead of eight negative reasons to renew Sense8, I want to give 8 positive reasons to renew Sense8 for a whole last season. I want to give them something they can go to the marketing table with and say—"Let's do one more season." (Please especially consider #7)
Ultimately, right decisions aren't made because of negative consequences but because the positive consequences are stronger. We aren't charitable because of Fear of Hell or Fear of Bad Publicity. We are charitable because we want to help.
Why Netflix Would Want to Complete a Third Season of Sense8
1. NETFLIX IS COMMITTED TO COMPLETION: Sense8 has exactly ONE more season. It's a three season arc. You renew that last season, you are a hero, and the story is complete, and people bingewatch the three seasons for years afterwards on Netflix. They will come to Netflix for those three seasons. You're not having to commit to an unknown number of seasons, or risking anything AFTER this season. You already committed two seasons and they were amazing, and fans loved them, and they are almost home-free. You create NEW fans by following through on your series. But MORE people will become afraid to watch or commit to a new series if the series could be cancelled before it's finished. The more unfinished series, the more Netflix becomes untrustworthy for a new viewer. The positive spin: you complete series, and they can be assured that when they watch a series on Netflix, especially with the millions of fans this series has created, that it will have closure–that series runners will know ahead of time that their series must establish closure. This one is close to being finished.
2. NETFLIX EDUCATES ITS VIEWERSHIP ABOUT VIEWERSHIP. You teach Netflix viewers about Viewership using Sense8. Part of the shock of this announcement was that viewers thought that their fan base was enough. We don't get to watch the Viewership numbers like you do, so we can't tell when to rally, or how we're doing, or if we're about to fall. It's a bit unfair to a very large group of fans to say that their numbers are not enough. What kinds of viewership help make your decisions? Do you need a certain number every week? And how do you calculate when you drop 10 episodes over a weekend? How many times should we view it? How many tweets do you need? How many blogposts analyzing the show? If you give us those numbers, WE CAN HELP SAVE THE SHOWS WE LOVE. I guarantee that the fanbase for Sense8 is the most dedicated fan base you've ever had (more on that below). But telling us to love a show and then, when it's not good enough, taking it from us without telling us how to celebrate and support it correctly can be very bad in the long run–it leaves a bad taste in fans' mouths. Netflix needs to teach its viewers what matters to save a show–how can we love a show enough to keep it if we don't know what you need? If not, fans won't try a show till a second season is guaranteed…or may just not try it unless you do what you did with The Crown, and guarantee 6 seasons to tell that arc.
3. NETFLIX DEFINES ITSELF BROADLY, NOT JUST ANOTHER COMEDY CENTRAL: Okay, we understand that money is a bottom line and that Amy Schumer stand-up specials, Adam Sandler movies, and comedy series make money. They make TONS of money. So go be another Comedy Central, and you'll be happy, right? You saved Trailer Park Boys from cancellation on another network and gave it more seasons–8, 9, 10, and specials… You gave Bojack Horseman 4 seasons and Fuller House 3 seasons. The Ranch, star-studded as it is, looks fairly humdrum, but it's a comedy, and it will do okay enough for three seasons. But you also put 6 seasons of $120 million a season on The Crown, and $60 Million a season on House of Cards, and $40 million on Orange is the New Black. You took risks on The Get Down and Hemlock Grove, and you are committed to Marvel, even when Iron Fist reviews are dismal. Sense8 is an audience underserved in the whole of the TV market. Doing one more season of Sense8 covers that audience, but also shows that series that take risks in talking about gender and sexuality are welcome. Do another The Ranch, or another Amy Schumer special to cover costs of a Sense8, but cancelling series that don't get viewership may make Netflix more and more a comedy station…. it will not be the place to take risks, or the place for viewers to take risks.
4. NETFLIX HONORS SMALL FAN BASES: Some shows, some audiences are inherently smaller. However, Sense8 audiences are in very few senses of the word, small. The series was doing fantastic in Brazil, in Europe, in the US, in Australia! It has a global reach because it has a global storyline. Are these viewers more numerous than those for Trailer Park Boys? Maybe not. Maybe they are smaller. But if you rank only your large viewerships as reasons to produce series, you'll end up homogenous, and most likely comedic. You want to be a Streaming Service for Everyone— so you're going to need to represent well, even when the numbers don't get as high as you want. Otherwise, you'll fail to be what you want to be. House of Cards and Orange is the New Black are two sides of the same coin: criminals out free to hurt the public, and decent people in jail who are trying to survive. Underwood will end up in jail; some of the women in OitnB will hopefully end up free. With Sense8, you have a global hit on your hands–it's even pirated half a million times in multiple countries because they are desperate for this series! Fix the pirating, yes, but see the devoted expansive fan base. We may be small, but you need small fan bases of 2 million too.
5. NETFLIX IS GLOBAL. Netflix wants a Fan base that is worldwide. Sense8 has a fan base that is world wide. This show is not just an American based show like most of your other shows. It spans the globe. And while "globe-trotting" has been used against it because of the budget, it should be used FOR it since Netflix is a global presence and it seeks to have a global audience but not one of its shows travels and shows the globe as much as Sense8. It is your flagship of the globalization of story. It does more for you than you know, as it gives everyone the idea that not all American based production companies have a limited, or slanted, interpretation of other countries, and that everything doesn't revolve around the US. Viewers see that, your Japanese and Brazilian and European viewers see themselves reflected in the storylines and the casting choices of Sense8. That's important to keep–because the message that sends is that Netflix itself is global. Netflix has the perspective of the whole globe, not just an American perspective. If you want that viewership in other countries, a show like Sense8 is your bridge.
6. NETFLIX HONORS LGBT FAN BASES: Just helping to create this show, you have already secured a loyal love of LGBT fans who know that you can also create other shows or allow other LGBT shows to be made. As long as you don't create and then abandon, that is. We are inherently a small group, maybe as much as 15% or 20%. But you don't want to go with numbers because other minorities would be struggling to be heard too and then you would end up being the white, straight network, because that's where the numbers are. You are committed to the broad tastes of consumers, and giving each of them content they love. You say as much on your site.
Content People Love
In 2017, we expect to spend over $6B on a P&L basis on content for our members. In addition we'll spend over $1B on marketing in 2017, getting people so excited about our content that they join Netflix.
People's tastes are very broad, even in a single market. The internet allows us to offer a wide variety, and to have our user interface quickly learn and make recommendations based upon individual users' tastes. Those members who love action blockbusters, Korean soaps, anime, sci-fi, Sundance films, zombie shows, or kids cartoons will find that Netflix fills their homepage with relevant and interesting titles.
So it's wide variety of viewers with a wide variety of tastes that you want, and
By personalizing promotion of the right content to the right member, we have a large opportunity to promote our original content, one that's effectively unlimited in duration.
So if you want to keep appealing to that wide base, finish LGBT projects too (or give green lit shows a year to prove, and then grant them the number of seasons it might take to tell their story). You did that with the Crown. Funding Sense8, you gave us a show that finally treats us with respect and dignity and goes beyond what so many other series have done. We are not confined to the "gay best friend" on a straight person's show. We are not relegated to "boyfriend shopping" or a Sex-in-the-City type show about dating. We are treated as full-fledged human beings, capable of starring in thrillers, science fiction, dramas that don't just rely on our unique sexualities, but don't shy away from them either.
The show is as diverse as the world. While Lito's coming out is a main plot for him, it is not the main plot for the show. The show actually covers political leadership in Nigeria, family drama and corporate corruption in South Korea, drug families controlling Germany, and the Mexican film industry. This show is MORE than LGBT, but because it is more than LGBT, it achieves what most LGBT dream of: a seamless integration into the fabric of human life, a recognition that we are a part of the whole. We don't want to be the whole, and we don't want to be absent, but that fine line is very difficult and the Wachowskis and JMS walk that line so beautifully! This show appeals to more than just an LGBT base, but it does that because it respects its LGBT base.
7. NETFLIX KNOWS IT CAN RELY ON ITS FAN BASE TO HELP. We've just shown you what we can do to ask for a show back—and you've been so kind to give us a 2 hour ending. However, if you can rally millions to bring back a show—you could also give us the opportunity to help FUND the last season. I know, it's unusual, but take a page from Patreon and Kickstarter. Why not have a final season paid for in part from viewers? Charge us $10 bucks for 10 episodes. Let us be the Cluster we want to be. Ten dollars from millions of people would at least help with the cost. We would be able to download the episodes for $1 a piece or just pay $10 up front. Which would defray the cost of the series. We love this series so much–we would do this. Or you could ask us to donate via Patreon–or make it so that some of us, those with $10 can help out those who may not have it and still want to see the show.
This could be a new model for you with series. When greenlit, a series gets a first season, maybe a second, and then if you think you want to cut it because viewership is down—you ask the fans if they'd be willing to go all Patreon for a last season. If they say yes, then you grant a last season and let people pay for that third season. It's an alternative to just axing a series. This way you know which series people would be willing to pay extra for. Heck, other cable channels have a pay-per-view for special things. I know, you may get kick-back from those who say, "Oh, you know you can make the fans pay and you're targeting minorities." But if the series is good, but expensive, we could enter into a contract with you, together. This way, by having us answer your question over whether we would pay, we would have a choice over whether to have just two seasons, or that third blessed season. Without the possibility of helping to fund our favorite show, we end up with nothing. What a cooperative model you would have if third seasons relied on fans assistance.
8. NETFLIX TELLS GOOD STORIES WITH A MESSAGE. Finally, as you've heard everywhere on the net for the last two months, this show has a great message, unlike most shows. You want to be associated with shows that have not only dramatic appeal, well-written characters, but also a good message. Global cooperation vs. Global Competition is a message for 2017. Working with each other is a strong message. Accepting yourself and others, a strong message. Not going for revenge, a good message. This show is not only positive for LGBT, but it is positive for what it means to be human. In a time when humanity is not showing its best side—with people wanting to break away from others rather than share together–in an age when climate change and globalization asks us to think of ourselves on a shared world, we need a Sense8.
This show is a global education for its viewers, showing other cultures, and how we are entwined. For Americans especially, we can be so narrow-minded and insular. For English-speaking countries, we can be panicked at losing control of the GDP, of leading the world in business, and we can be frightened of strong countries around the world. We should not be fearing Latin America or India or Korea or the Arab Emirates. We should be learning about them, and partnering with them. The world is no longer just England, three countries in Europe, China, Japan, Russia and the US. We need to be expanding our idea of humanity, of togetherness, of shared global responsibility if we are to take on the crises coming up.
It teaches us about kindness, and every opportunity that a viewer suspects we'll get rejection or rage or lose something, the writers surprise us with kindness and forgiveness. We need more empathy and kindness in this world. I know Story will give us that.
I believe in this show, and I believe in the Heart of Netflix, and that funding this show, or helping to create this show–even with MY funding– is in the best interest of Netflix, and is in the best interest of the world we'd like to have.
Sense8's opening is perhaps the greatest montage of understanding how similar humans are around the planet–even in our infinite diversity. Seeing each other as human is the first step in treating others humanely. This show does so much good for the viewer–educates, creates empathy, gives knowledge, shows real issues in each country. It asks the viewer to come together into a cluster, because really that's the nature of humanity. Thousands of clusters in a giant cluster.
civil rights, gay, politics, science fiction and fantasy writing, TV series, writing3rd Season, LGBT, Netflix, Sense8, Straczynski, tv series, Wachowski, writing
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One thought on "Defining What Netflix Will Be, or Eight Reasons to Give Sense8 a full 3rd Season"
Last minute stuff July 15, 2017 / 9:59
Sense8 is so amazing and I just watched seas1 this year plus I was controllin myself from watchin S2 quickly , coz then I'll get crazy waiting for S3. And now its cancelled. Morons.


It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always ROUSE Them to be strong and stronger.
Trigger Warning: This article involves graphic descriptions of harmful homophobic practices used in "conversion therapy".
Injury. The dark horse of inspiration. Powerful, unexpected, and potentially dangerous. The idea is simple: people are roused to action if they feel they, or someone they care about, is being injured by the situation you seek to change (or, more generally, if they feel there is a big downside to inaction). If you can make the injury vivid and present, bring it into the room with you, put a face and a name to it, then you can inspire people to act.
Beware: when you harness the element of injury, the potential for demagoguery is high. While all the elements of inspiration have their dark sides, injury is the most easily abused of all. You must tread a fine line between rousing righteous anger – a positive and healthy catalyst for change – and inciting violent rage. History is littered with movements which have tipped from one to the other with disastrous consequences.
This caveat in mind, though, there is no reason to avoid recognition of injury completely. Indeed, often an effective conveyance of how people have been and are being injured by a particular policy, practice, or approach is merely a side-effect of telling the truth. When genuine injury is being caused, it is our responsibility to bring it to light in the most gripping way possible, to give voice to the injury so that we can do something about it. So, when it comes to the element of injury, caution is warranted but avoidance is not.
How do you do this? How do you bring real injury to light in a way which sticks in the mind of an audience, helps them empathize with those suffering, and rouses them to act but does not goad them to rage and hatred? Use three techniques which, together (and in homage to Marshall Ganz, who gave me the idea), I refer to as "painting hell". First, be specific: you have to do the difficult job of telling people exactly what is happening in as much detail as you can stand (short of voyeurism). Second, be personal: put a face, a name, and a story on the injury so people see this isn't abstract but concrete. Third, be emotional, allowing your emotional response to the injury to activate the empathy of your audience.
The specific details Sam provides about his ordeal give it a concreteness and reality which they would lack otherwise, making them massively more emotionally compelling.
It may seem morbid or gruesome to provide such details when trying to encourage people to act. It may even seem manipulative. But I want to argue that it is in fact a way of being honest. This really happened to Sam. It happens to other kids too. To refuse to present that fact with great specificity in order to avoid causing discomfort is to withhold the whole truth, and to silence those who have experienced violence, oppression, and degradation.
When I talk about the dangers of "conversion therapy", I don't talk about it in general. I talk about Sam. About the wonderful guy I know and about what was done to him. I make it personal, because it is personal. Real lives, real people, are at stake. This is why I call this element "injury" and not "harm": harm seems more diffuse and abstract, while injuries happen to people. When you make an issue personal by putting a name, a face, and a story on the injury being caused, you become more effective.
I cannot tell Sam's story without tears coming to my eyes. When I talk about what was done to him, I am filled with anger and incredible sorrow. There's no reason to hide this: we are not Spock. We are emotional beings, and our emotions tend to spread to others. Displaying – instead of trying to hide – genuine moral emotions is a perfectly legitimate (and powerful) way to engage people to care about an issue. Caring is an emotion. So let your emotions show.
Very often when we want to encourage people to act to make a change it is because current conditions are intolerable: they are causing injury. If you can make that injury apparent – by offering specific details of the harm caused, by putting a name, a face, and a story to the injury, and by showing your own emotional responses – you can ROUSE Them.
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text:
BRIAN MOUNTFORD
CHURCH GOING GONE
CHRISTIAN ATHEIST
FRIDAY'S CHILD
Diary: being a vicar in secular society
It may be school half term, but the Oxford University term is only three weeks in. My first encounter with this year's freshers at Corpus Christi College was at the Welfare introductory meeting where I faced an Auditorium full of eighteen-year-olds looking down challengingly at me from seats tiered as steeply as the Coliseum. Times have changed. 40 years ago, at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, I met every fresher for an obligatory ten-minute interview in my room. At Corpus when I stood up to speak I sensed intuitively that I must begin by saying I recognise this is a multi-faith society, an international society, and with 70% of their age group in the UK claiming to have no religion, also a post-religious society. The sight of nodding heads made me more relaxed. Thus, I acknowledged the unwritten terms and conditions on which I act as Chaplain.
I also do chaplaincy work in St Hilda's College where each term I hold 'The Chaplain's Chat' – a public conversation between me and a distinguished guest. We've talked about religion in the media, Christianity and the meaning of life, what theology is and why it's worth pursuing in an age of unbelief, and discussed Philip Pullman's approach to religion and writing – with the author himself as my interlocutor. This term my guest will talk about what it's like to be a Muslim woman in British society. Students turn out in good numbers for these occasions because they're genuinely interested and know they'll enjoy a no-holds-barred discussion afterwards. Students know as well as anyone the teasing angst of the ultimate questions: who am I? What's life about? Does it mean anything? And it's easy to confuse indifference towards religious institutions with antipathy towards the spiritual. Even indifference might be an unfair accusation: cultural ignorance nearer the mark.
But there's antagonism towards religion in other quarters. In St Hilda's College the room that was the chapel is about to be demolished as part of a major re-development. Some Fellows think it shouldn't be replaced, and if we must it should be a Faith Room rather than a Christian chapel. Why should Christianity, and Anglicanism in particular, be privileged in this contemporary, secular society? If you were building a college from scratch, would you include a chapel at all?
The Church has to engage intellectually with such attitudes. It's no good being proudly counter-cultural only to be pushed further and further towards the margins. Many of the objections are prejudicial anyway: objectors usually haven't ever attended a chapel event and some blandly assume, in a Dawkins-like way, that what goes on there is a sinister attempt at brainwashing and the promotion of irrational belief in impossible things. Had we a historic chapel building and world class choir the argument wouldn't so easily progress and, in any case, the aesthetic virtues of uplifting music would be seen as self-authenticating and as transcending the perceived small-mindedness of theology.
Since retiring from the University Church, I often preach in rural churches near where I live in Islip and find that congregations respond enthusiastically to sermons exploring basic theological ideas or explaining principles of Biblical criticism in relation to a text. This response is not merely from the intelligentsia – no one wants to be talked down to or treated like a primary school child. Actually, primary school children don't like being talked down to either. One sermon even led to comment in the parish magazine. I'm not saying a more intellectual approach would fill these churches, but it would be a start.
Each week I write an e-pistle to everyone at Corpus. The Emeritus Professor of English recoils from the neologism – too like 'e-commerce' – but admits, were he alive today, St Paul would have emailed the Ephesians. Last week's letter drew a reply from an Honorary Fellow lamenting the Church of England's seeming lack of interest in critical theology. To my mind he's right: critical theology is essentially creative rather than a tropical storm threatening to sink the fragile ark of Christianity.
For the past year I've also been Publisher at Large for the 'Christian Alternative' imprint of John Hunt Publishing. Many of the books I'm offered are by authors over sixty years old, but I really want to hear younger voices. In this week's e-pistle I floated the idea of persuading ten people in the 18 – 24 age-bracket to write 4000 words each on what they think about religion. I said I'd be equally interested in arguments for and against, perspectives on being, for example, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, atheist and of 'no religion', or of being 'spiritual but not religious'. I'd like to get to the edge of what I earlier described as antagonism and indifference and cultural dissonance. Generally, we find multi-authored books hard to sell and therefore resist them, but I think this would work. I'm pleased to report, seven students have already committed to contribute. It could be a twenty-first century 'Essays and Reviews', which set out the historic manifesto of modern Liberal Anglicanism and, despite its prosaic title, caused a stir in the 1860's. But I'm not limiting this to Oxford and would be delighted to hear from anyone reading this.
I need to write my own chapter about the future of religion, how I see religion in Britain today, and how our indifference contrasts with rising fundamentalisms.
The Lord's prayer gets to the essence of Christianity in a way that seems to me thoroughly modern. It says: there are universal and transcendent values that we must respect; we must try to realise these values in our society; let us be content with basic provision; help us to act lovingly.
Indispensable pillars of Christianity: The New Testament
Are Census results bad new for Christians?
Reflection on Fauré's Requiem for All Souls
brian.mountford@oriel.ox.ac.uk


When I imagined what Mysterion might look like, the first image that popped into my head was that of Homer's conception of the world (depicted left). In the Iliad, there is a beautiful section that describes the shield of Achilles as being round as the world. Running around the edge of the shield is Ocean (pronounced "OH-kay-ahn"), which is the Greek equivalent of the Jewish "waters above the heavens." In other words, the world is surrounded by water, with boundaries of land and sky to keep it at bay.
The centre of this Homeric world is earth (including our own oceans, seas and rivers). The sky is a great dome implanted with the sun, the moon and the stars. Beneath the earth are pillars extending into the deep waters the base of the universe, again much like the Jewish conception articulated in the Old Testament.
In re-conceiving this ancient view of the universe, I imagined our world (the "normal" world) of Lethes to lie at the bottom of the sphere depicted above, and Mysterion is the real world located at the centre of the sphere. Ocean runs around the edge of the sphere, flowing down into Lethes in the East and upward in the West. Lethes is a kind of sedimentary world, where the remnants of Mysterion gather. This reinforces the idea of our "normal" world being the residue of Reality.


hey everyone, hope you had a great healthy memorial day weekend! we have just finished up week 4 which means we are a third of the way done.... yikes does time fly!! i'd say that this week is a good week for reflection... where are you at with meeting your goals?? if you multiply your total results thus far by 3 did you make it to your goal. if the answer is yes, pat yourself on the back, you are doing great!! if not, it's time to dig deep and figure out a way to get motivated to make some healthy changes. you can do this, you paid $20 to do this!! there are still 8 weeks left, which is plenty of time to win this!!
congrats to this weeks top three in both categories! impressive to say the least!! and check out below to see where you stand in the overall race to win the $$$. hope your week is going well!!
overall standings.... the race to the $$$!!
houston we have lift-off.... week 3 winners!
hi everyone! sorry for the delay! was out of town for the weekend at a vendor event and thought i had posted the results from my hotel room on sunday.... but had only created a draft!! yikes!! thanks for the heads up tonight from a competitor who called in to alert us!!
congrats to everyone for surviving week 3... it proved to be a hard one for lots of you!!! as a group we lost 43 pounds this week, which is awesome, but a huge drop from the first two. hang in there, you are not alone, and you can do this!! every pound lost counts, don't beat yourself up for small losses for when added together they become large!
we did have a few competitors who rocked it this week! congrats to the top 3 losers!!
#1 you have a prize waiting for you!
week 2... a smashing success!!
Give yourselves a pat on the back!! The overall results from week 2 were AWESOME!! To date... as a group... we've lost 333.7 lbs!!! Go GT Losers!!! Of course a couple of people did AMAZING this week... so without further ado... here are the week 2 biggest losers! First place will have prizes waiting at the store starting tomorrow morning!
Congrats!! Check out everyone else's results shown under the 2nd week results page on the right side of the blog! Hope everyone is having a great week!
Greetings Biggest Loser Challengers! I am so glad that each one of you are on board for GTBLC(round 2). The first challenge was such a good experience for me that I didn't hesitate when it was time to sign up for this round. I thought I would share my before and after pictures with you and some of the things that worked for me during those 12 weeks.
I lost 29 lbs. during the 12 week challenge and that made me so happy. While I still have a ways to go to get to where I want to be, I am proud of the changes I have made in my life thus far. I physically feel different. I feel strong. I feel healthy. I feel happy and I feel a tiny bit lighter. I think of my starting weight and those very first mornings at the gym...I seriously thought I was going to pass out. Sit ups were impossible. I couldn't breath when I ran, and I felt very weak when I attepted to do push ups. Fast forward 12 weeks later, I know and can feel that I am stronger and lighter. I am not going to lie, the gym is still hard and I still can't breath when I run...but I enjoy my time there and am loving my results.
The three things that really helped with my weight loss along the way were exercise, tracking what I ate and positive thoughts.
The gym was not a part of my daily life before this challenge started. With a nudge from Kelly and the fabulous trainers at Fitness MD, I completed my first week at the gym. Before I knew it, a month had passed and here I am now...5 months later and going strong. I can't imagine starting my day without my 1 hour Fit Club workout. I love how I feel and love the daily challenge.
Tracking what I eat is huge for me. I figure if I am going to take the time to write down the things I am putting in my mouth, they better be worth it. By writing it down, I am accountable for ever BLT(bite, lick and taste). I keep a little journal with what I have eaten. This also helps if I have had a bad week (results), I can simply look back at my week and reevaluate and make the needed changes.
A positive attitude is a must in my world. Instead of getting down on myself and telling myself that I can't do things, I simply say "I can do this". I might not do it perfectly, but I am doing it. I am trying. I am trying with a smile and that has made all the difference in my little world.
As you make our way through this challenge, do it one day at a time. Set mini goals for yourself and pat yourself on the back when your achieve them. I can't wait to see what we lose as a group this time around!