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Journal of Materials Chemistry A
Flexible hydroxyapatite ultralong nanowire-based paper for highly efficient and multifunctional air filtration
Fei-Fei Chen, Ying-Jie Zhu, Li-Ying Dong, Ri-Long Yang, Zhi-Chao Xiong
Ultralong hydroxyapatite nanowire-based air filter paper with a low pressure drop and high removal efficiencies for PM2.5 and PM10 has been developed.
Publisher URL: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2017/TA/C7TA03870D
DOI: 2017/TA/C7TA03870D
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Opinion: Worst New Zealand places the rowdy tourists should have visited
Scott Palmer
The family of tourists have outraged Kiwis across New Zealand. Credits: Image: Krista Curnow + File; Video: Newshub
OPINION: The rowdy UK tourists' campaign of abuse and harassment across New Zealand has been cut short after the group was served a deportation notice.
It came as a shock to the group of undesirables, who claimed they came to New Zealand to see "the Hobbits".
Rowdy tourists: 'We're here to see the Hobbits'
Rowdy tourists: Group served deportation notice
Opinion: They are not Irish and they are not welcome
But while they failed to make it to Hobbiton, here are five places the rowdy tourists would've perhaps felt more comfortable:
The Huntly Power Station in all its glory. Photo credit: Newshub
Like the tourists, Huntly most makes the news for its criminal behaviour.
"The Waikato River passes through Huntly as fast as it can, and so should you," Facebook page Shit Towns of New Zealand (SToNZ) writes.
"Popular Huntly pastimes include lobbing rocks at passing cars, trading illicit substances in public toilets, and robbing each other's houses even though they have nothing worth stealing. Huntly: Lock your doors and don't slow down."
Relationships between residents and police occasionally erupt in violence. One notorious party ended with the crowd of more than 60 people assaulting police, throwing rocks and bricks through police car windows.
In another incident, police responded to reports that a group of about 30 people were fighting in a street. When officers attended, they had bottles thrown at them and were fired at with paintball guns.
Apart from the crime, Huntly is famous for its coal-fired power station, which regularly enrages environmentalists.
Flooding at the Waiheke Island ferry terminal Photo credit: Supplied
Or they could have visited Waiheke Island, once described by former Newshub reporter David Farrier as a water-ringed prison colony for Auckland's most annoying people.
Why do people hate Waiheke Island?
David Farrier confronts the man who dared say Waiheke Island was great
He despises Waihekeans for three primary reasons: "the snobbery, the arrogance, the property disputes".
His disgust for the island intensified as people began documenting their drunken endeavours via Instagram.
"I began to notice the sorts of people who went there on the weekend: Piling onto the ferry, getting shitfaced, taking lots of wine-drinking selfies, then later spewing up and hitting the ferry back to the mainland.
Waiheke's only redeeming quality is its birdlife, Farrier says, and even that comes with a caveat.
"The way I see it, the birds of Waiheke have wings, so they are not really a part of the place - they are merely stopping by," he theorises.
"Probably to take a shit."
A filthy Auckland beach
A sanitary pad washes up on an Auckland beach. Photo credit: Karen Withers
Instead of defiling Auckland's Takapuna Beach, they could have swum in one of Auckland's festering beaches.
Popular Auckland beaches too polluted to swim in
Safeswim's new, improved Auckland dirty beaches tool
Multiple beaches are continually failing water quality standards. The main risk is from "faecal contamination", often caused by problems with the wastewater system.
When contaminated by human or animal faeces, the water can contain disease-causing bacteria, viruses and protozoa (such as salmonella, campylobacter or giardia).
These can cause illnesses including gastroenteritis, respiratory illness, ear and eye infections and skin infections.
Current beaches to avoid include Huia Beach, St Mary's Bay, and Herne Bay.
One of New Zealand's 'worst towns' to live
The Hawera Mt View Lions Club's float. Photo credit: Debbie Ngarewa-Packer / Facebook
Or they could have visited one of New Zealand's 'worst towns' - like Tokoroa or Hawera.
Researchers from the Motu Economic and Public Policy Research say the South Taranaki towns of Hawera and Eltham, along with the Southland town of Winton and the Waikato town of Tokoroa, are the worst places in New Zealand to live and work.
Tokoroa is described by SToNZ as "loathed by nature, economic forces and mankind alike".
"Its median annual income is $17,000, nearly one in four Tokoroans is unemployed, and barely half of the population over 15 possess formal qualifications.
"Until the 1930s its soil made livestock sick, while its lake has long been unsafe for swimming, pending intensive de-weeding efforts (which, incidentally, are also regularly carried out by police in many of the town's houses)," SToNZ says.
Meanwhile, Hawera recently made the news after a blackface float was awarded second place at an A&P parade.
The Beehive has been engulfed by recent scandals. Photo credit: Getty
But they might fit in at the Beehive. New Zealand's epicentre of taxpayer waste and corruption, the Beehive is home to backstabbing, betrayal and bullying.
A recent report found the government had used private spies to snoop on Christchurch earthquake claimants, while MBIE has been training its staff to create multiple fake identities online to "harvest information".
And Speaker of the House Trevor Mallard has announced an independent external review into bullying and harassment of staff.
The AM Show host Duncan Garner expects it will reveal bullying, harassment, intimidation and unwanted sex.
"I expect this review to highlight the total power imbalance between the worker and the MP, the drinking, the relationships, the Wellington wife, the sex, wanted and unwanted, the daily humiliation of the weak and of the wrong," Garner said.
"It's a place where good people go to die and the survivors must become feral to win."
Scott Palmer is a Digital News Producer at Newshub.


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Slitsread
← One To Protect (One to Hold) By Tia Louise Cover Reveal
The King (Black Dagger Brotherhood #12) by J.R. Ward →
by casperfitz | April 4, 2014 · 8:50 pm
Fall From Grace (Mad World #1) by Christine Zolendz
I'm finally home after struggling through my brother's illness and death. But, home is definitely a bit different. My best friend (the only person alive now that knows my secret) has a new boyfriend; and he has a friend. Shane Maxton: bad boy, tattooed rock god, eye candy extraordinaire. He is also New York City's most arrogant, self-serving, son of a, well, a definite one-night stand kind of a guy.
But, it doesn't matter to me because I've spent my existence looking for the love of my life, my angel. And, there is nothing that Shane Maxton can do to change that.
A paranormal romance.
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3.5 Stars!
I love the storyline with it's own history… I find it quite interesting. It goes back thousands of years ago when a human (a female) fell in love with Watcher (an angel), who were placed on earth to watch and protect humans… to cut a long story short, as punishment for such crime, the human's soul is constantly searching for her angel on earth forever and banned from heaven and the angel is exiled from earth, thrown in the Abyss until Judgement Day. And this human would be the now existing Grace.
Grace, I liked and hated her character. I like that she is strong-willed, confident and relentless on her search for her angel, Shamsiel. And she does sound like she hates living, constantly losing family and friends over and over… while she lives on from one life to another. But what I don't get is why she is constantly angry at Shane (from start to end basically), and Shane was funny and nice to her and saved her life like twice! She never did trust him but is constantly judging. And that went on and on in the book, which was exhausting. I would get it if she wasn't open to dating anyone else, but she did!
And what's up with Tucker! He sounds mental throwing tantrums, lol… and gross, like seriously… If you'd wonder who Tucker is, he is Grace's best friend's boyfriend friend who Grace was pushed to go out on a date.
Anyway, Shane is or was a manwhore (am I allowed to say that?) till he met Grace (or so he says cause Grace don't believe that). He is the lead singer of the band Mad World. And Grace must have this pull on him cause he never gives up chasing her despite Grace's sarcasm and bitching for someone who doesn't care. Though, according to Shane, Grace just constantly surprise him. I like Shane, he seems sad on the inside, funny on the outside. I wish I could read his thoughts… but this entire story is based on Grace's POV only.
For me, this is one of those I'd say emotionally exhausting and frustrating, character wise. But I really am intrigue with the story, cause it has this twist in the end as to what Grace really is and why the angels wants her. And I will leave it at that. To say more would be giving away the story.
And, of course, it ended on a cliffy. And I seriously don't know where the story will go from there, so that is something to look forward to on the next book.
By Casperfitz
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Originally from Spain, Alvaro Argente (aka Magic Malka) showed a natural talent for showmanship being a teenager, when he joined a street circus performing group as a fire juggler.
During university (he studied Psychology at the UAM) his interest in the use of psychology in performing arts led him to study Ascanio's material about the topic, starting to practice magic as a hobby, but it was only after meeting Juan Tamariz during a performance that he decided to make the jump to professional magic.
Deeply influenced by Juan Tamariz, Ascanio, Pepe Carroll and René Lavand, combining his comedy circus background with his studies in Social Psychology, Malka had his early performances busking all over Spain, and soon he was performing in the main restaurants, bars and clubs in Madrid (Lunch Box, Viva las Vegas Club, Dominion etc.), as well as festivals (SOS 4.8) and conferences.
Since moving to the UK in 2012, Malka has joined both Illusions Magic Bar and Smoke and Mirrors (two popular magic venues located in Bristol) as resident magician, as well as headlining his own shows, festivals (all over the world, from Glastonbuty to Faqra Club, in some cases working with the famous circus collective The Invisible Circus) and performing in all kinds of private hires (from weddings to funerals, literally).
After performing as a resident magician at illusions and smoke & mirrors for 2 years, Malka decided to start his own project: #Properbeer & #Propermagic, in collaboration with Brewdog, The Old Bookshop, Bristol Eats and The Three Tuns. At the moment, the project has involved more than 30 independent pubs and breweries all over the UK.
You can find out more about his upcoming shows and projects through Facebook and Twitter, and of course this website!


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Home › Gothic Literature › Postmodern Gothic
Postmodern Gothic
By Nasrullah Mambrol on September 2, 2018 • ( 1 )
The play of fear and laughter has been inscribed in Gothic texts since their inception, an ambivalence that disturbs critical categories that evaluate their seriousness or triviality. The uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form, and affects all categories and boundaries from the generic to the social. Producing powerful emotions rather than aesthetic judgments, effects on audiences and readers rather than instructions for them, narrative forms and devices spill over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres. Exacerbated rather than resolved by the artificial assemblages of Gothic forms, the excess contaminates all distinctions in the way it highlights the function of forms and conventions in the everyday as well as fictional world. The hybrid mixing of forms and narratives has uncanny effects, effects which make narrative play and ambivalence another figure of horror, another duplicitous object to be expelled from proper orders of consciousness and representation.
The twentieth century's escalating anxiety regarding modernity as a combination of civilisation, progress and rationality has become focused on the way that social, historical and individual formations are bound up with the organising effects of narratives. Perceived as a condensation of grand narratives, the legitimacy, universality and unity of modernity is put in question. Part of the challenge to modernity's assumptions, meanings, exclusions and suppressions has emerged in fictions that juxtapose, and thereby reorganise, narrative styles and relations. The stories of Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969), mixing fragments of myth, fairytale and everyday realism, expose the violence and the violent structures of fantasy that are inscribed in and between the different narratives composing a culture, an uncanny narrative shadow that subverts distinctions between fictional forms and the narratives shaping reality, family and identity. Angela Carter's fiction, self-consciously mixing different forms, including fairytale, legend, science fiction and Gothic, shows the interplay of narratives shaping reality and identity, particularly in relation to the production of meanings for sexuality. Her Heroes and Villains (1969) uses the future to reflect on distinctions between civilisation and barbarity. 'The Bloody Chamber' (1979), like the other stories in the collection of the same name, plays with the ways fairytales, legends and Gothic fictions construct identities, fantasies, fears and desires, particularly in terms of female sexuality and desire: a young female speaker casts herself as a Gothic heroine on her marriage to an aristocratic libertine and voluptuary in the Sadeian mould. In echoes of Rebecca, the heroine discovers letters of the Marquis's first wife. She turns out to have been a relation of Dracula. Further explorations through the Marquis's precipitously situated castle lead to Radcliffean terrors in dark vaults, amid macabre instruments. Threatened by imminent death at the hands of her husband, a spectral and knightly figure rides to her rescue: the romantic hero is her mother. The play of absurdity and horror interrogates the narrative forms that structure fantasies and have real effects. In her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972), Carter looks at the play of reality and fantasy by using Freud's notion of the uncanny, but written over the entire social formation. The mysterious villain of the title has stretched the unconscious over the surface of the world so that all perceptions are transformed and mutated along the paths of desire and, more important, the physical laws supposed to govern concrete reality no longer apply. The narrator's picaresque travels through worlds in which conventional distinctions of space and time, matter and spirit, reality and fantasy are irrelevant present different stories, myths and social and scientific principles to suggest that the world is fictional in its broadest sense, an effect of narratives, identifications, fantasies and desires that no longer bow to the grand narrative dominated by the reality principle. Encounters with strange peoples, with different customs, assumptions and attributes, open up singular notions of narrative, reality and identity to heterogeneous possibilities.
Throughout Gothic fiction terror and horror have depended on things not being what they seem. In encouraging superstitious interpretation in, and of, novels by means of narrative devices and generic expectations, Gothic texts have always played along the boundaries between fictional forms and social rules. In the complex assemblage of different stories within early Gothic novels, the labyrinthine complexity ultimately delivers its secret and produces the horror that expels the object of fear, restoring properly conventional boundaries. An uncanny and disturbing uncertainty none the less shadows this process with an ambivalence and duplicity that cannot be contained. In Gothic fictions and films it is this ambivalence and duplicity that has emerged as a distinctly reflexive form of narrative anxiety. It involves a pervasive cultural concern—characterised as postmodernist—that things are not only not what they seem: what they seem is what they are, not a unity of word or image and thing, but words and images without things or as things themselves, effects of narrative form and nothing else. Unstable, unfixed and ungrounded in any reality, truth or identity other than those that narratives provide, there emerges a threat of sublime excess, of a new darkness of multiple and labyrinthine narratives, in which human myths again dissolve, confronted by an uncanny force beyond its control.
The horror of textuality is linked to pervasive terrors of anarchic disintegration or psychotic dissolution. In an impressive example of Gothic fiction, The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco displays its sublimely textual form. With selfconsciously Gothic features like the narrative detailing the discovery of a medieval manuscript, the gloomy settings, dark vaults, mysterious deaths and the medieval architecture and history that run through it, the novel rearticulates distinctions between enlightenment rationality and religious superstition. The arrival of a monk, William of Baskerville, and his novice, the narrator, Adso, at a fourteenth-century Abbey dominated by a great octagonal library coincides with a series of mysterious and macabre deaths. Interpreted as signs of divine apocalypse or diabolical machination, the deaths foretell greater terrors for the superstitious monastic community. Baskerville, as his name suggests, has powers of deduction like those of Sherlock Holmes and sets out to provide a rational explanation of supposedly supernatural terrors.
The conventional disingenuity of the 'editor's' preface to the story, stating its absolute distance from concerns of the present, ironically focuses attention on the relation of history and contemporaneity. The novel is full of modern as well as historical allusions: important contemporary antecedents signal a concern with literary and theoretical issues, the writings of Jorge Luis Borges being particularly significant in that the mystery centres on the library constructed in the form of a labyrinth. The novel's mystery is a mystery in and about texts, its object and cause being a text itself, a missing philosophical work whose knowledge and power is feared and desired. Baskerville, monk and detective, is also slightly different from his conventional fictional forebears; his rational and detective skills are presented as critical and analytic abilities: he is an excellent reader of signs and narrative conventions (pp. 24–5). Superstition appears as an effect of misreading, of the mislocation of signs and narratives. Following the clues through the dark corridors and vaults of the Abbey, Baskerville uncovers the textual and fragmented trail of signs and secret codes that both conceal and cause the crimes, arriving at the horror and the explanation in the hidden chamber of the labyrinthine library. The horror is not a bloody spectre or corpse but takes the form of Baskerville's double, an old librarian named Jorge, possessed of religious dogmatism and callous and diabolical cunning, perfect foils for the former's intellectual pride. The murders are explained as the attempt to prevent monks reading a book that was believed lost: Aristotle's second book of the Poetics, on comedy. Jorge, to Baskerville's horror, explains the motive for murderous censorship. Such a book by the philosopher would undermine the power of ecclesiastical order by celebrating laughter, legitimating its refusal to respect any law and authority, its rebellious energy threatening the 'dismantling and upsetting of every holy and venerable image' (p. 476). Laughter, activating a diabolical play that exceeds the attempts of sacred horror to expel or control it, is associated with the play of signs, narratives and interpretations, a play that is itself ambivalent in the way it is constructed as either rationally open and liberating or devilishly, anarchically irreverent.
For the order Jorge represents laughter is reviled as the enemy of truth and power. His fear of laughter, however, produces his own acts of irrational and intolerant suppression. The violence that Jorge's dogmatic and restricted order sanctions is, from the narrator's identification with Baskerville's position, shown to be the true object of horror, associated with the superstitious and tyrannical oppression that, throughout Gothic fiction, is linked to the injustice and cruelty of the Catholic Inquisition. Arbitrary, irrational and restrictive power is opposed by Baskerville's enlightened and rational humanism. The invocation of enlightenment values that are produced and contested throughout Gothic fiction is made with a significant difference: truth and reason are no longer seen as absolutes or agents of systems of power. They are, instead, ways of reading in which texts are left open and plural, their play not subjected to a singular, restricted and partial—politically interested—meaning. Adso's concluding reflections remain uncertain about his mentor's motivations and ideas as well as the message that his own manuscript holds. The uncertainty, presented throughout the novel in textual terms, is repeated in a last anecdote of Adso's later return to the Abbey whose library was destroyed in a great conflagration occurring as a result of Jorge's and Baskerville's confrontation. Amid the library's ruins, Adso collects and catalogues some of the tiny fragments of books that remain: 'at the end of my reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books' (p. 500).
While The Name of the Rose advances this vision of the fragmentary forms of textual, individual and social bodies, whose meanings and identities are effects of patient and partial reconstruction, the image of disintegration that it implies is a shocking one for positions that have been fostered by narratives of individual, social and natural unity, homogeneity and totality. The shadows of narrative duplicity, ambivalence and play that open on to a fragmented glimpse of textuality are, in Alan Parker's film, Angel Heart (1986), rendered spectral and threatening objects of terror. Beginning in the manner of a 1950s detective thriller, with a corpse, the film's opening image cedes to an apparently different narrative in which a down-at-heel private eye, Harry Angel, is hired to find a missing person by a mysterious client called Louis Cyphre. The investigation leads Angel away from a grubby New York: it takes him south to a world dominated by religious ritual and voodoo. In the course of the investigation Angel becomes the chief suspect for the murders that shadow it.
Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart (1987)
Punctuated by flashbacks of mysterious shrouded figures, blood-filled bowls and blood-stained walls, the film suggests another story: one narrative, the detective story, is gradually supplanted by a Faustian tale of diabolical repossession. This is marked by a complete reversal of narrative expectations, a narrative twist that, though characteristic of the detective genre, in this case undermines it. Angel discovers that he is the criminal he has been pursuing. For, in the arcane ritual alluded to in the flashbacks, the heart of an innocent victim, Angel, was torn out and eaten by the criminal who then assumed Angel's appearance. This was done so that the villain could renege on a contract with the devil, substituting another's soul for his own. Satan—'Lucifer' in the shape and name of 'Louis Cyphre'—returns to claim his due, hiring 'Angel' for the purpose. The word-play reveals the secret of the film, a fact that, in horror, is recognised by Angel'. New flashbacks, replicating scenes from earlier in the film, show Angel' committing the murders that have shadowed his investigation. The first narrative, it appears, has constructed a false identity: like the shots of mirrors, identity cards and dog tags throughout the film, it is also duplicitous. Angel is detective and criminal, hero and villain, pursuer and pursued, deceiver and dupe. In the play of narrative deceptions bodies, souls, identities and roles are substituted for each other. In the movement between genres there is a diabolical process of deception displayed and performed, a process that multiplies meanings and identities to the point where nothing is what it seems but an effect of narrative appearances. The audience is drawn into this process, duped by the narrative play and robbed of a proper ending and solution to the mystery. The play of narratives is also a game of signs: Louis Cyphre is not only Lucifer, but Lu-cipher, the name that cracks the Faustian narrative's code. The deciphering of the name draws the audience further into the narrative's play of codes, signs and images. The play of words, of codes and ciphers, also encodes the film as a narrative game of ciphers and signs: it is just a matter of word-play. Signs and images are thus presented as diabolical and excluded, cast out in horrified recognition of the empty and superficial word-play that ends the film. Angel, the figure of duplicity, described as the closest thing to 'pure evil', is a transgressor who is simultaneously punished by diabolical law, for breaking the contract, and by secular law, for murder, condemned to burn in hell's flames and the electric chair. Evil, presented in and as a duplicitous play of words, is thus displayed and cast out.
Enmeshed, however, in processes of doubling that its attempt to join its parallel narratives never closes, Angel Heart, as a film, as a set of narrative images itself, also signifies the opposite: that identity, meaning and unity are spectral illusions of signs. It cannot expunge this horror, cannot take an external and fixed position. The invocation of evil, however, signals a return to romantic patterns of organising the significance on a global and binary scale. In the films of David Lynch a similar interplay of good and evil, light and dark, is manifested as an uncanny and unavoidable duplicity. In Blue Velvet (1986), the play of visual allusions also absorbs the American Gothic tradition in which the uncanny proximity of good and evil is seen to be very close to home, within the boundaries of community life. Lynch's television series, Twin Peaks (1990–2), uses similar Gothic contrasts in a visual text whose network of allusions, quotations, stylistic parodies and pastiches was as broad as it was reflexive. Playing with various narrative conventions the series followed the investigation of a terrible murder of a girl in the small-town community to uncover evils multiple sources in primordial, individual, cultural and narrative locations: deep in the woods, in human fears, selfish desires and sexual repressions, in the community and within the family. The evil in the woods alludes to Hawthorne; the evil father resonates throughout Gothic, as does the identification with psychopathology. The figure of evil, the vagrant face of Bob, appears as the mirror image of the paternal perpetrator, a reflection that haunts the series. Evil, also, is located in outer space, an echo of the Cold War threat of communism that had just disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Evils place is multiplied in the dense network of cultural and narrative allusion. Evil is also identified, in the self-conscious use of romance forms, with myths and fictions.
Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet (1986)
The final battle of good and evil is staged when the detective enters the deceptive Black Lodge—a place of reversals and evil doubles—to save the woman he loves. They both return. But the romantic happy ending is undermined by the final scene. Washing in his hotel bathroom, the detective looks in a mirror. Staring from it is the dishevelled face of Bob, the evil image and sign of diabolical possession. The turning of one into the other, good into evil, forms a doubly self-conscious and banal inversion of the conventional romantic ending. The camera returns from the mirror to focus on the detective's features, now distorted in a malevolent grin that is itself a reflection of the mirror image's evil face. Not so much a conventional display of the truth of interiority, of the evil within, the double reflection presents evil as an effect of images and narrative surfaces, another device of diabolical duplicity. Having turned the figure of good, unity, coherence, identity and cleanliness into evil's double, another alluring figure in a diabolical repertoire of signs, the series' playfulness evokes both laughter and horror: it just plays games, and yet, there seems to be nothing but narrative games, no position outside or determining them, no frame that is not, itself, caught up in a web of duplicity and ambivalent effects that contaminates all cultural boundaries and distinctions.
Source: Botting, Fred, and Dale Townshend. Gothic. London: Routledge, 2004.
Prawer, S.S., Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1980.
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Categories: Gothic Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Postmodernism, Vampire Narratives
Tags: Angela Carter, Baskerville, Blue Velvet, David Lynch, Fragmentation in Postmodern Novels, Gothic, Gothic Fiction, Gothic Literature, Heroes and Villains, Jorge Luis Borges, parody, pastiche, Postmodern Gothic, Postmodernism, Postmodernism and Gothic, Pricksongs and Descants, Robert Coover, The Bloody Chamber, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, The Name of the Rose, Twin Peak, Vampire Narrative, William of Baskerville
Gothic Novels and Novelists | Literary Theory and Criticism


Only full control can give absolute quality! The entire production process is continuously verified, from the selection of the wheat to the finished product, to the final cooking and taste test. Our pasta is the best fruit of our territory. This is why we gave it the name of our land. In fact, our Mill and our Pasta Factory are located in the Baronìa, an inland territory of the Region Campania, at the foothills of the Appennini Mountains. A natural crossroads of our culture, made of wheat and pasta, the Baronìa has always represented a bridge across the master pasta makers in Campania and the Tavoliere delle Puglie, the largest and most precious wheat belt in Italy. Here, in Baronìa, wheat has been a vital resource for centuries, on which is based the rural food tradition, handed down from generation to generation.
We are really proud of our plant in Flumeri. Its extension and the absolutely advanced technology and business strategies applied, oriented towards a complete control of all phases of production, place it on top of the list in the field of pasta making. As just a few other Italian pasta manufacturers, the plant integrates the Mill and the Pasta Factory, thus assuring a full control of the entire production cycle. And this is the only true condition that grants quality and purity to our semolina, which makes the Pasta Baronìa so unique and so different.


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FF: All Over the Place
My reading is more chaotic than usual this week…
Some of My Folklore and Mythology
Just a reminder… The Friday Fragments lists what I've read over the past week. Most of the time I don't include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.
Once again, this is not a book review column. It's just a list with, maybe, a bit of descriptions or a few opinions tossed in.
The Diviners by Libba Bray. Audiobook. A good Halloween-tide book with serial killers, comets, and conspiracies, all mixed in a cocktail shaker right out of the Roaring Twenties. Only complaint was that several plotlines seemed to be introduced solely because the characters will be needed in book two. I think she could have waited – even though, oddly, some of those characters were my favorites.
Sabine's Notebook: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Continues and The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes by Nick Bantock. The first book made a sequel seem impossible, so this fascinates. I realized I'd picked up them out of order, so went back and things right.
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. This came up in Alan and my discussions, so I decided to read. The Fuzzies are adorable, but the plot drags because the "good guys" don't figure out what the "bad guys" are up to, even though there's ample evidence. But I did love the Fuzzies.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie. Audiobook. It's been a stressful week, so I decided to spend time with my old friend Hercule Poroit.
Fighting the Flying Circus by Captain Eddie. V. Rickenbacker. A non-fiction autobiographical account of what is was like to be a fighter pilot in WWI.
I've been reading about praying mantises and alchemy. Seriously. I told you my reading was all over the place this week!
TT: The Next To Last Continent
JANE: The other day, when I was adding The Shepherd's Crown to my shelf of Terry Pratchett novels, I saw The Last Continent. As I know you know, in addition to being a fun novel, it's also a brilliant look at all the things that are characteristically – even stereotypically – "known" about Australia.
Uniquely New Zealand?
And suddenly I found myself wondering… Could Pratchett have done a sequel, called, say, The Next to Last Continent, about a Discworld New Zealand? Is there a National Type for New Zealanders or are they just like Australians?
ALAN: What a good question! Before I came to live here, like everybody else I lumped Australians and New Zealanders together. To me they seemed indistinguishable, in both their accent and their culture. I just thought of them as "antipodean," and left it at that. But once I settled in and got used to how things worked, I began to realise that although the two countries do have a lot of similarities, there are some significant differences as well.
JANE: That's fascinating! I definitely want to know more. Let's start with the accent. How do people speak on "The Next to Last Continent"?
ALAN: The New Zealand accent has some peculiarities that really make it stand out from its Australian cousin. For example, New Zealanders have a very odd way of pronouncing some single syllable words – they tend to add syllables where none exist. So "known" and "grown" become "knowen" and "growen," for example. And the word "no" has at least three syllables when spoken by a typical New Zealander, and I'll swear that on occasion I've heard five…
JANE: Can you try to spell "no" as said by New Zealanders?
ALAN: Something like Naooohu. It's a very odd sound indeed. I wonder what your spelling checker will make of that combination of letters…
JANE: It is puzzled. I am telling it to just put up with it!
ALAN: Conversely, there is a tendency to drop syllables out of multi-syllabic words. A certain very prominent New Zealand politician cannot actually pronounce the name of the country he helps to govern. It comes out sounding rather like "New Zlnd".
JANE: Ah… An interesting contrast, however, not completely alien. At least when I was a kid – I don't know if the accent has survived to now – Marylanders often said "Balmer, Merlin" for "Baltimore, Maryland." Sounds like a magic spell…
ALAN: New Zealanders also have a habit of turning declarative statements into something that sounds like a question, but isn't. They do this by putting the word "eh?" at the end. So someone might say, "This is an interesting tangent, eh?" But despite the rising inflection and the question mark, it isn't a question at all, it's just a simple statement of fact. I'm told that Canadians do something similar, but I don't know any Canadians, so I can't be sure. Have you come across it? You are a lot closer to Canada than I am.
JANE: I have, although, here at least, the sound is usually given a long "a" sound, rather than the short "e" usually associated with "eh." Which sound do New Zealanders use? Long "a" or short "e"?
ALAN: Definitely a short "e".
JANE: You asked if I knew any Canadians. I do, in fact. My first editor, John Douglas, was Canadian. He'd lived in the U.S. for many years, but he said that whenever he went home to visit family, his accent would get "recharged."
By contrast, author Charles de Lint and his wife, MaryAnn Harris, are both Canadian, and I don't recall either of them using that characteristic verbal trick.
Maybe some of our Canadian readers – I know we have several – could weigh in and explain this for me.
ALAN: Good idea. When in doubt, consult the experts.
JANE: Your comment also makes me think about a tendency my husband, Jim, has, in his speech patterns. He doesn't say "eh," but he often ends statements with a rising inflection that turns them into a question. "Today we're going to the grocery store," can become a question.
This can drive me nuts, since we've usually discussed that we are indeed going grocery shopping, and I don't know why he's suddenly asking. Now I wonder if he was influenced by Canadian speech patterns. He grew up in a part of Michigan that is close enough to Canada that he could see it across the Detroit River, so this isn't unlikely. A couple of the guys in his dorm were from the Iron Mountain area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He said that, based on their speech patterns, anyone would have thought they were Canadians.
I remember you mentioning that New Zealanders also shift vowel sounds. I bet that really complicates the situation!
ALAN: Yes, that's an odd one. New Zealanders have completely lost the sounds of "a" and "e" – those sounds have slid over towards "i" and "o." And of course "i" and "o" themselves have moved a bit in the direction of "u." So "yes" becomes "yis" and "peg" becomes "pig". If you go into a shop to buy a pin, you will leave with a writing implement.
Australians love to tease us by claiming, with some degree of truth, that New Zealanders dine on "fush and chups." Mind you, Australians do funny things with vowels as well; they elongate them. Therefore I could easily get my own back by pointing out that Australians dine on "feesh and cheeps." So there!
JANE: Yuck! Both versions create nasty mental images for me.
ALAN: But by far the most interesting effect of the vowel shift is that "woman" and "women" have become homonyms. Both are pronounced "woman" and you simply have to depend on context in order to figure out whether the singular or the plural is being used. Even after all the years that I've lived here, I still find this one very confusing.
JANE: Wait! You say they are both pronounced "woman," but if you don't use "a," than the sound is more like "wo-min"? Am I right?
ALAN: Sort of. The sound is actually closer to "wo-mun."
JANE: I'm beginning to be surprised that Roger and I could understand you people at all when we were there. Maybe you made a special effort. I do recall that Vonda McIntyre had become something closer to "Vondurr."
ALAN: What makes you think that you understood us?
JANE: (choking with laughter). Maybe we didn't! Still, we all managed.
I also wondered whether New Zealanders had odd words, like the Australian "bonzer." (I think that's right; I didn't look it up.) There's Pakeha, of course, which is a loan word from Maori that's become part of general use, but are there others?
ALAN: We have a lot of Maori loan words of course (Pakeha is a perfect example), but we also have some constructions that are uniquely our own. If you wander around aimlessly, you are taking a "tiki tour." Something that is broken is "munted." When you are very angry, you are "ropeable" and when you are very happy, you are "stoked." When you go swimming you wear your "togs." If you want to take a quick look at something you will "have a wee squiz" at it. When you want someone to hurry up, you might tell them to "rattle your dags." Are those odd enough for you? They certainly sounded more than a little peculiar to me when I first heard them.
JANE: Hmm… I've heard of "swimming togs." We use that here, sometimes, but the others are completely alien and seem vaguely Scottish, somehow.
ALAN: Well spotted! Much of the South Island was settled from Scotland, and some of their colourful phrasing has made its way into the mainstream of day to day Kiwi conversation. "Wee" in the sense of small is a particularly good example and is very common.
JANE: I feel almost like a linguist!
We've certainly had fun with the language. I bet those language changes – especially some of the expressions you mentioned – reflect a cultural identity that's distinct not only from the Australian, but from other nations as well. Maybe next time, you can tell me more about what makes New Zealand uniquely itself, rather than a shadow Australia.
Chatting With Dave Gross
JANE: This week I'm interviewing Dave Gross, the author of the recently released Lord of Runes, the most recent of his "Radovan and the Count" novels set in the Pathfinder gaming universe.
I always start these interviews by asking the same question, so here it is…
Dave's Pathfinder Novels
In my experience, writers fall into two general categories: those who have been writing stories since before they could actually write and those who came to writing somewhat later.
Which sort are you?
DAVE: The first sort, with an asterisk.
One of my first big treasures was an old Olivetti typewriter with which I struggled for years before taking a proper typing class.
I can't remember when I first started writing stories, but I'll never forget my earliest positive feedback on a writing assignment. Mrs. Hughes was the fourth-grade English teacher for the problem students, of which I was clearly one because of my habit of reading comics instead of listening. Mrs. Hughes was young, sweet-natured, and a knockout. I'm pretty sure I already had a crush on her before she cemented my affections by reading us The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was possibly my earliest introduction to full-on fantasy. Before that, I was more interested in horror and science-fiction.
Anyway, for my assignment I wrote a short story about a young guy who goes to Hollywood, gets work with a film crew, and gets bitten by a werewolf, as one does. I don't remember much detail except that the actress's name was Rae and a silver pocketknife was Chekhov's gun. Mrs. Hughes was so delighted to receive a coherent and typed narrative that she read it aloud to class, simultaneously humiliating and inspiring me.
Alas, the school soon gave us standardized tests. When the results came in, I got kicked out of the slow class and the new, stricter teacher confiscated my comics. It was too late for that brand of discipline, though. I was already reading novels instead of listening in class.
The asterisk: My fiction writing became far less frequent as an adult, when I poured most of that energy into college essays, then technical manuals at my first proper job. Later, when I was teaching, and later still, when I was editing, I found most of my creative energy spent on the day job. Only in the mid-90s did I start publishing stories, and my first full-length novel didn't come out until 2001.
JANE: So often I meet young people – like your fourth grade self – who are enthusiastic about writing or art (or both) and find that enthusiasm dampened by the demands of their school. I'm glad you found your way back again.
You mention having been an editor first. Can you talk a bit about that? How does one move from teaching to editing? And how did you find your way into the gaming magazines?
DAVE: One of the good things about my college experience is that I never accumulated student debt, but I did end up with three part-time jobs, two of them teaching gigs at the university and at a local business college. Even combined, they barely paid a subsistence living, so I soon realized I couldn't afford to send myself through a Ph.D. program. I was going to have to take a proper job.
A buddy pointed me to a job opening at TSR, makers of Dungeons & Dragons, which I'd played since I was 12 or 13. The application process is a story in itself, but after a long period of waiting for a traveling VP's approval, I joined the company as Associate Editor of Polyhedron. Soon I moved up to editor, then over to Dungeon, and then to Dragon and editor-in-chief. A few years after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and moved us out west, I transferred to the Star Wars magazines. Later still, after we'd all left Wizards to form Paizo, I briefly edited Amazing Stories before being enticed up to the Great White North.
The teaching experience made the transition to magazine editor easy, because marking papers isn't far removed from blue-lining stories.
JANE: As you know, I'm a gamer. That's a hobby that, back in the late eighties, when I was getting started writing and selling fiction, was something one sometimes had to be careful about mentioning. Certainly, there was a lot of bad gaming fiction out there wherein, to borrow a phrase from the time, "you could hear the dice rattling."
However, now game-related fiction is a major sub-section of SF/F publishing. Can you talk a little about what goes into writing for a specific game franchise? How familiar does one need to be with the game, for example? How directive are the editors as to plot, pacing, and such?
DAVE: Some tie-in fiction writers barely know the games (a combination of rules and setting), and a few of them can pull it off anyway—but most can't. The challenge is to write a story that appeals to non-gamers while assuring gamers that the novel's characters are in the game world. That means getting the laws of magic right, and there are rules for that. That means paying attention to the names of queens and heroes, gods and nations, and basically doing all the same research you'd do if preparing an historical fantasy. So yeah, don't let them hear the dice rattling, but make sure you're as absorbed in the setting as, say, a Star Wars novelist is in the films, comics, and everything else about the galaxy far, far away.
I've been fortunate in that, when I wrote for the Forgotten Realms, I knew the setting better than the book editors did. When I wrote for Pathfinder, I didn't know the setting as well as the editors, but I learned it, played it, studied it, immersed myself. When I wrote for Privateer Press, it was even more challenging because, while I read a lot of the setting material, I hadn't played the games much, so I relied a lot on guidance from the continuity team.
I like it better when I have the time to do the research, including the "lab work" of playing the games. If I've done that as a gamer before writing a book, so much the better.
As for how much of the plot is directed, it depends on the publisher. I enjoyed writing for TSR, Wizards of the Coast, and Paizo the most because they generally left everything in the author's hands, editing primarily for setting continuity. Other publishers want you to write their existing characters. That's fun in its way, but I much prefer creating the plot and characters while using the publisher's setting.
JANE: I've very much enjoyed the three Radovan and the Count novels I've read to this point (Lord of Runes, Queen of Thorns, and Prince of Wolves). One of the elements that I enjoy the most is how very different the sections narrated by Radovan are from those narrated by Count Varian. You change not only point of view, but vocabulary, narrative style, and – most importantly – interpretation of events.
Since I've been reading the novels out of order, I've become aware of how your style shifted over time, especially in the parts narrated by Count Varian. Can you talk about some of the choices you made?
DAVE: The first Pathfinder story I wrote was a novella. While I considered alternating points of view from the very start, since it was a shorter work I decided it would be better to focus on the henchman, Radovan. That put him in the position of recording the stories of the great detective. However, I had just come off a month-long binge of film noir. The voice I developed for Radovan was more Sam Spade than James Watson. I took it a step farther into hardboiled territory by using present tense.
That worked fine for the novella, but when my editor wanted a novel pitch with the same characters, I realized that alternating first-person POV, especially in present tense, could challenge some readers. I ended up rewriting the first four or five chapters several times: first-person, third-person, present tense, and past. Once I started to "hear" Varian's voice, I went with first-person, past tense, which felt like a good balance between the hard-boiled Radovan and the aristocratic Count.
In the beginning, I wrote Varian's POV in more compound-complex sentences with occasional $5 words. Then I doubled down and composed his early chapters in an epistolary style to stick a red arrow over the plot point—a missing Pathfinder agent. Looking back at it, I realize the style, along with a first chapter heavy in setting names, was all a bit thick.
That's why in Master of Devils, and again in Queen of Thorns I relaxed Varian's diction, depending more on vocabulary and class prejudice to express the character. Queen of Thorns seemed to hit the sweet spot, so while I've experimented with slang and diction and different types of low humor for Radovan since then, the style has remained consistent from Queen to King of Chaos and Lord of Runes.
Even while writing Prince of Wolves I was aware that Varian's voice could use another buff before the final draft, but those first few novels for Pathfinder Tales were on unusually short deadlines, and then my October release got moved up to August, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. Rather than a month, I had only a couple days to revise. If I could go back and edit any of my published works, I'd expand and revise "Hell's Pawns," "The Lost Pathfinder," and Prince of Wolves for a deluxe edition.
As for the boys' different interpretation of events, I think it's important that every character sees the world through a distorting lens of prejudice, ideals, limitations, and desires. How else do you explain why perfectly reasonable people don't agree with you on every little thing? There are times in my life when I completely disagree with myself at other times in my life. Perspective is slippery, and we're all unreliable narrators.
JANE: That reminds me of a question a friend of mine who does a series of interviews for YALSA always asks her subjects. I think I'll adapt it here.
Is there any advice you'd give your young writer self – either that fourth grade kid or the man who turned to writing novels after that long hiatus? As a former editor, you're in a rather unique position to provide such advice.
DAVE: Recently I read an anecdote about a pottery teacher who offered students a choice: he'd judge their work on either quality or quantity. By the end of the term, the students who cranked out many pots to earn their As were also making the finest pieces, better than those by students who agonized over making a single perfect vase each time.
So my advice to Young Dave would be, "Crank 'em out!"
In a way, I've had that opportunity by working as what the great Garrison Keillor calls a "deadline writer," sometimes turning out a short novel in a month when I wanted three. Now there are some fine writers who pride themselves on spending ten years on a single novel to "get it right the first time," and there's something to be said for that ethic, but I think quantity and repetition is also a good teacher, maybe a better one for beginning writers.
So, Young Dave, write a story every week, even if it sucks. Then write another one and another and another.
JANE: I'd agree… Although I'd also tell Young Dave, "But don't expect them all to sell…"
Finally, do you have any future projects you'd like to tell us about?
DAVE: I've started a novel in a new setting that combines several of my favorite genres: epic fantasy, wuxia, and Mythos horror.
The other new thing is I've broken from my habit of starting with a novella-length outline. While I have a good sketch of the first half of the story, I'm holding off on outlining the second half until I establish the rules of the world and the principal conflicts. It feels like starting a coast-to-coast trip with a map of only the first state. It's terrifying. It's exciting. I've got the top down and the wind in my hair.
JANE: That last is particularly fascinating, since my Wandering a couple of weeks ago touched on the subject of intuitive plotter or outliner… It's neat that you're permitting yourself to be both!
I'll let you get to your novel, and stop taking up your valuable writing time. Thank you very much. It has been a distinct pleasure chatting with you!
FF: Art and Writing Intertwined
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This week, again, purely by accident, art and writing as elements entered into a fair amount of my reading material.
For one, the German edition of Fire Season arrived! I really like how Stephanie was interpreted for this one, although Climbs Quickly looks like a taxidermied lynx. Probably just smoke inhalation.
Persephone Claims Flammenzeit!
Roadsouls by Betsy James. Manuscript of a forthcoming novel. I liked and will try to remember to mention when it is released. Journey is more internal than external, but no less real – and author uses her background as an artist to very good effect.
Tortall and Other Lands by Tamora Pierce. Audiobook. A short story collection, containing material from between 2005-2012. Enjoyed, especially the last story, which is neither SF nor F…
Gryphon & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. Maybe because Betsy James is also a professional artist, I was reminded of this book (and its sequels) which are as much art as book. There's a weird appeal to reading someone else's mail.
The Diviners by Libba Bray. Audiobook. Cultural contradictions of "Roaring Twenties" well-evoked. Horror elements creeping in…
The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Conclude by Nick Bantock. The first book made a sequel seem impossible, so this fascinates.
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. This came up in Alan and my discussions, so I decided to read. No. I hadn't read it before… despite the theme,which is one I have also addressed in my fiction!
After a long time away, I decided to get back into bead work. I have a weakness for projects that involve very small beads. I've been delving into myriad books, because no one seems to include all I want to know about a stitch. Assumptions are SO dangerous for a writer!
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The Shelfie Game
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TT: Judging On Their Own Terms
ALAN: Jane, you were about to tell me the story of Talli and Great Cthulhu as an example of how cats have excellent memories. My own experiences with cats suggest that they do indeed remember things very well, so I'm curious to see how your experience stacks up with mine.
JANE: Right! Here goes…
Elephant Gives a Wave
Jim and I went to visit my dad in Colorado, bringing with us our cat Talli. Talli was initially quite pleased with the new location, wandering around and exploring freely in company with another of our cats, Arawn. That is, until he walked into the living room, which had a very high ceiling with a fan spinning lazily at the top.
Talli panicked, ran back into the kitchen, then dove under the table. Eventually, we coaxed him out, but he would not go back into the living room. What puzzled us was that he picked as his "safe place" the mud room (that's what we call an entry room meant for taking off dirty shoes and things) off the kitchen, even though he could have gone into several other rooms without passing near Great Cthulhu.
The mud room was not at all a comfortable place, but Talli stayed crouched on the threshold for hours, even though his companion cat, Arawn, had gone elsewhere and we were right there in the kitchen.
Sometime later, my brother, Graydon, arrived, bringing with him his dog, Otis. Otis was not a small dog. He was a mutt with some Chow and Labrador retriever in him. Talli had only met Otis once before, when Gray had brought him along on a visit to New Mexico well over a year before. However, Talli and Otis had made friends, in part because Otis let Talli eat his kibbles.
When Talli saw Otis, he left the threshold of the mud room where he'd been crouched all this time and, tail held high, made a beeline for Otis.
It was evident that not only had Talli remembered Otis, he'd remembered his scent. Dad only let Otis into the mudroom of the house, so the room must have smelled strongly of him. When frightened, Talli had gone to the room that smelled like his friend.
ALAN: Did Talli get over his fear of Cthulhu?
JANE: Yes, in fact, he did, but only after spending some time with Otis. Who knows? Maybe Otis told him the house was safe.
ALAN: I don't want to apply human concepts to animal behaviour. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless I do think that animals and humans share an understanding of some quite subtle ideas.
For example, I'm quite convinced that animals can understand how numbers work. I remember as a child going to see Cuddles the Killer Whale at Flamingo Park Zoo in North Yorkshire. He had an outdoor pool and spectators sat on carefully arranged chairs around the pool to watch him do his stuff. I watched him swimming round and round and round, and every so often he would stop and peek over the edge of the pool at the audience. And then he'd go swimming round and round and round again. Eventually, when he decided that there were now enough people to make his next trick worthwhile, he made an almighty leap out of the pool, high into the air, and then he crashed back down into the water sending a huge spray out over the audience, all of whom shrieked and screamed and ran and shook themselves. And there was Cuddles, peering at them over the edge of the pool, laughing his head off…
He used to do that every day. He never tired of the joke. But he wouldn't do it if there weren't enough people to splash…
JANE: Oh! That's great! Many people persist in viewing animals as organic computers, with "instinct" as the guiding software. In this descriptive template, play behavior is simply training for adult roles as hunters or to run faster and jump farther.
However, Cuddles is far from alone in liking to play practical jokes. Oddly enough, my story about such also involves water.
Back when I was in graduate school, I'd often walk over to the Bronx Zoo during my break. One of my favorite places to go was the snow leopard to watch the kittens. This was in the day when many of the enclosures were the old-fashioned concrete floor/iron bar sort. The snow leopard's water dish was a large steel basin bolted to the bars.
On this particular day, Kitten One was busily sloshing the water in the basin back and forth with one paw – actually, he had his foreleg in, almost to the shoulder. Back and forth, back and forth, he went, spilling some water as he played, apparently unaware that his brother was carefully stalking him, using for cover the large deadfall tree that was the centerpiece of the enclosure.
Slosh, slosh goes Kitten One. Creep, creep goes Kitten Two. Then Kitten Two freezes, makes that ridiculous butt-wiggle that cats do before they leap and springs into the air. At which point Kitten One, slides gracefully to the side so that Kitten Two lands squarely in the middle of the puddle Kitten One had been creating – now quite clearly with the intent of catching his brother in the trap. Kitten Two slid across the floor, before romping back in soggy fury to pounce his gleeful brother. I was very sorry to leave…
ALAN: Oh that's lovely! When my cat Bess was a kitten she used to put one paw into her water bowl while she drank from it. Presumably she was holding the water in place to make sure that it didn't run away. She still has a fascination with water and she will chase the spray from the hosepipe when Robin waters the garden.
Something else I saw at a zoo has always puzzled me. The elephants at this zoo lived on an island with a deep (dry) moat all around it so that they couldn't get off. Notices saying "Do Not Feed The Elephants" were bolted to the wall of the moat. On the day that I was there, the elephants were standing at the edge of the enclosure with their trunks dangling down into the moat. And every single elephant was standing above one of the notices, and every trunk was dangling in front of the notice, obscuring it so that it couldn't be read.
I refuse to believe that was a coincidence. But I have no idea how (or if) the animals connected the notices with the lack of treats in their life. I'd love to know exactly what it was that I was seeing there.
JANE: Funny… I'm not sure if elephants can read, but animals do understand language, including – or perhaps I should say, "especially" – body language. I've noticed this many time in my encounters with the wolves of Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary. One example particularly stands out.
Back when I was still writing the Firekeeper books, I'd often invite Wild Spirit to attend book events with one of their "ambassador" wolves. At one event, my friend Pati Nagle and I were doing an event together. Her husband, Chris, was there in full Civil War military costume. (Her book was one of her excellent "Civil War in the West" novels.)
Anyhow, as we were winding down, Chris commented to Leyton, the WSWF representative, that Raven the wolf was apparently afraid of him and wondered if this might be because of his odd clothing.
Leyton said, "No. He thinks you're afraid of him, and at these events, if he thinks someone is afraid of him, he stays back." Chris replied, "But I'm not afraid of him at all!" Leyton nodded. "Maybe not, but your body language is telling Raven differently." Chris asked what he should do to change the message he was sending. Leyton gave him step by step instructions and Chris, who is a fine performer, immediately followed them. As soon as Chris finished adjusting his stance, Raven rose from where he'd been sitting and went over to give Chris a friendly sniff.
ALAN: What did he have to alter to make Raven accept him?
JANE: It's been a lot of years, so I don't remember precisely, but I know one element was how he was holding his arms.
ALAN: My dog Jake is very sensitive to body language – and the position of my arms seems to be particularly important in getting messages across to him. If I point fiercely (yes, it can be done) he knows that he has to stop what he's doing and go where I'm pointing. I don't have to say a word, the body language does it all.
JANE: That's neat. My cats also understand a fairly wide variety of gestures. We're fairly certain that they also know each other's names, since they respond to their own, but not to someone else's. Well, with the exception of Kwahe'e… He'll come to someone else's name if he thinks he can poach their food.
We probably could go on telling each other animal stories forever, but let's stop here and see what our readers can tell us about their experiences with Earth's other people – the animals.
Curiosities Now Available!
Back in September of 2013, I asked whether folks would be more interested in seeing another of my out-of-print novels made available or a short story collection. To my surprise, there turned out to be a lot of interest in a short story collection.
At Last!
Aside: The comments on the post were only part of the feedback I used to make my decision. Additionally, many people asked me if I would consider putting together a book on writing. I decided I'd really enjoy doing that, and so Wanderings on Writing became the project I tackled whenever I had free time.
Now, at last, Curiosities is (or should be in the very near future) available as an e-book for Kindle, Nook, i-Tunes, Google Play, and Kobo.
For those of you who, like me, prefer a "real" book, Curiosities is also available from Amazon Create Space.
Curiosities includes nineteen short stories, ranging from my first published piece "Cheesecake" (1990) to 2014's "Born from Memory." Although all the stories included were published elsewhere, some have been nearly impossible to find for many years. Each story is accompanied by a short afterpiece talking about some aspect of the story. I might tell what inspired the story or talk about influences or just offer some odd bit of trivia. There's also an original introduction discussing how I came to select these particular stories out of the sixty-some I'd had published to that point.
The cover art by Rowan Derrick is a photo montage meant to represent the cluttered interior of my brain. Many of the pieces included were taken from my office. Others were Rowan's. You can have fun trying to guess which are which.
Why did it take nearly two years for Curiosities to be completed? Well, mostly because I wrote a lot of other things as well. Artemis Awakening and Artemis Invaded came out. In fact, a good deal of Artemis Invaded was written at this time. Fire Season (written with David Weber) was released. The previously mentioned Wanderings on Writing also took a good deal of time and effort.
I also wrote a variety of shorter projects, some of which – like "The Hermit and the Jackalopes" in S.M. Stirling's anthology The Change: Stories of Downfall and Rebirth, and "The Button Witch" on Urban Fantasy.com – are now available. Others, like "The Headless Fluteplayer" (a prequel to my and Roger Zelazny's Lord Demon) and "Deception on Gryphon" (featuring Stephanie Harrington and associates) are yet to be released.
We did hope to have Curiosities completed for release at Bubonicon in August of 2015, but various small glitches kept cropping up. The latest was just this week… Emily Mah Tippets, who did the book conversion and design, called me on Monday to let me know that… Oh! Never mind. Suffice to say that long before the end, we both decided the project had gremlins.
But it's out! I hope you enjoy it. It was a good trip down memory lane for me. Now it's time to look to the future.
Posted in My Stories | 8 Comments »
FF: A Change of Plans
Although I love audiobooks, sometimes I can't stand a reader's interpretation of the material. That happened to me this week.
Plans Take Flight!
For those of you new to this post… The Friday Fragments lists what I've read over the past week. Most of the time I don't include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.
Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross. I enjoyed. Look for a WW interview with Dave Gross before the end of October!
Roadsouls by Betsy James. Manuscript of a forthcoming novel.
Tortall and Other Lands by Tamora Pierce. Audiobook. A short story collection, containing material from between 2005-2012. I'm about half-way through and enjoying.
An Important Side Note:
Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Audiobook. This is the one I had to give up on as an audiobook, because the reader was driving me completely nuts. I'll be finishing as a "regular" book as soon as I can slot it in!
TT: Our Planet is Full of Aliens!
JANE: For the last couple of weeks, we've been chatting about aliens. So, have we covered all the bases on types of aliens?
ALAN: No, not quite. We actually live on a planet that is full of aliens. Animals are completely alien to us in the same sense that SF aliens are. They think differently; they react differently; they have different priorities.
Flossy, Mephitis, and Harlequin
JANE: I'm the last person who would disagree with you about that. As I mentioned a while back, my novel Marks of Our Brothers is rooted in my awareness that how humans view animal intelligence is rarely based on judging them on their own terms. All too often, how "intelligent" an animal is thought to be is based on how human they seem or at least how well they can mimic human behavior.
I'd rather view animal behavior on their own terms and leave the question of "smarter" or "dumber" out of it entirely.
ALAN: Yes, indeed. And if SF teaches us anything about aliens, it teaches us to judge them on their own criteria rather than to try shoehorning them into ours. Though having said that, I think there's a definite spectrum of intelligence – even animals of the same species can be "smart" or "dumb" in comparison with each other.
JANE: I agree… We both like animals and share our homes with them. I'm sure if we were visiting over coffee, we'd have fun telling each other about the interesting things our co-residents have done. Typing out stories isn't quite the same, but we can give it a try.
Let me start with the story of how Jim misinterpreted Flossie the guinea pig. That way we'll start off with a creature that most humans would consider at the "bottom" of the spectrum.
ALAN: Tell me more! How do you misinterpret a guinea pig? Enquiring minds want to know…
JANE: We have several guinea pigs. When the weather permits, we put them outside in a hutch. We always bring them in at night, though. One day, Jim commented to me that Flossie really didn't like coming in. "She'll run to the side of the hutch, then try to climb the side to get away from me."
Now, I'd noticed the same behavior but, knowing guinea pigs (Jim had only been living with them for about five years at that point), and knowing they don't really climb, I had interpreted it differently.
"She's not running away. She's helping you to pick her up. She's noticed that you always scoop her around the middle, then lift. She's making it easier for you."
And, after observing, Jim agreed I was right. Over time, Flossie taught her "trick" to her hutchmates, Mephitis and Shandy. The habit did not pass on to the next generation. (Flossie, Shandy, and Mephitis have all gone on.) However, Usagi, one of our current residents, does not like being held around her middle. She's perfectly fine with being picked up – only on her own terms. If you hold a hand level in front of her, she will let you slide it under her and even walk on. Again, her roommate, Silver, has picked up the trick, so we have two guinea pigs who behave rather like large, furry parakeets.
ALAN: Do they perch on your shoulder and say "Pieces of eight!" as well?
JANE: No! They say "pieces of carrot," though…
ALAN: It's clear to me that animals can, and do, think about the situations they find themselves in, then work out a plan to achieve their goals. We took our dog Jake to the park where he can run freely off the lead. There's a small river running through the park which many of the dogs like to swim in. Jake hadn't learned how to swim yet. He was happy to paddle in the shallows, but he wouldn't go out of his depth.
However, one day he was playing chase with another dog and he got so involved in the game that he chased the dog through the water, all the way across the river to the other side. Once the excitement died down, Jake realised that he had a problem. He was on one side of the river and we were on the other side! How on earth was he going to get back to us?
He stood there for a moment, and then he looked both right and left, decided which bridge was the closest, and then he raced to that bridge, came across the river and rejoined us. I was very impressed. Naturally, he got a treat for being such a clever boy. I don't think many dogs could have solved that problem so quickly and so elegantly.
These days he can swim like a fish, so the problem has now completely gone away and he criss-crosses the river willy-nilly.
JANE: And doubtless shakes water all over you when he arrives. Oh, well, everything can't be perfect.
One thing that really bothers me about tests meant to judge animal "intelligence" are those that involve running mazes. Often these tests are used on creatures that wouldn't perform a task like this in normal life. Moreover, how well an animal "remembers" a maze is then used to judge length of memory. By this standard, I've read studies that say that most animals have very short memories.
I don't know about you, but if my memory (which is excellent) was judged on the basis of running mazes, I'd fail abysmally. Jim, whose memory is rooted in visual associations, would probably score as a moron, since most of those mazes are without features.
ALAN: I'd be the same – I'm hopeless at mazes. Robin, on the other hand, loves them and is quite brilliant at navigating them. We've visited several mazes here in NZ and I'm always astonished at how expertly she finds her way through them. I just tag along, hopelessly lost…
Clearly I'm even more moronic than Jim.
JANE: My point is that none of us non-"maze runners' are dumb, and neither are those animals who fail to live up to this challenge.
ALAN: Yes, that's quite true. But, nevertheless, I'm sure that maze-running is measuring something significant about the way that the animals fit into their world. My cats Ginger and Milo never saw a maze in their lives, but I'm certain they'd have been really good at solving them. When we moved to a new house, they both used maze-running techniques to explore it. Ginger used a strict left-hand rule. She circled the house (in and out of every cupboard) hugging the wall as closely as she could and taking every left turn that she found until she ran out of them.
Milo had a different, but equally successful, technique. He started from his food bowl from which he took a revivifying snack. Then he set off in a straight line. Once he'd explored as far as he could in that direction (no turns allowed), he came back to the food bowl for another mouthful and then set off again in a new direction.
JANE: That's really neat! Ginger was motivated by preserving some sense of personal safety, while Milo was motivated by assuring himself he would not lose his source of food!
I've seen many incidents that prove that housecats (who are usually judged by these tests as having short memories) have excellent memories. One of these is what I call the story of Talli and Great Cthulhu.
I actually related the story a few months ago. But it's so appropriate to what we're discussing that I'd really like to tell it again. I'll give the short version, promise…
ALAN: That's a good idea – I'd love to hear that story again.
JANE: Okay. I'll start with it next time.
Off to the Balloon Fiesta!
I guess there's some truth to the old saying that people who live in an area are the ones least likely to attend the events that bring tourists to town.
When Pigs — and Other Things — Fly!
I thought about that this past Thursday as Jim and I sat in slowly creeping traffic on the way to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Although this event has been going on (under various names) for a long time, we'd never been to it together. It had been about twenty years for me and even longer for Jim.
One reason we hadn't gone before was that our house is right on the flight path taken by lots of balloons, so we see balloons up close almost every day. We've come to recognize the various patterns used by the companies that give rides, and even notice when they add a new balloon to their fleet. It hardly seemed worth getting up the early hour required and joining crowds to attend the Fiesta.
So what made us change our minds? Well, as those of you know who have been reading these Wanderings (or Tangents or Fragments), Jim is a pretty good photographer. When I came across a listing for a contest with the theme of autumn in New Mexico, I encouraged him to enter. He did and, while he didn't win any of the main prizes, his photo was among the "honorable mentions" which came with four tickets to the Balloon Fiesta.
It seemed like an omen.
We decided to drive over, rather than taking the Park and Ride, since the price of the Park and Ride included the tickets we already owned. Besides, we were going on a Thursday, not a weekend. The traffic shouldn't be too bad, especially if we left early.
We left our house before 5:30 a.m., which seemed plenty of time given that the event didn't start until 7:00 a.m., and we'd normally need only twenty minutes to get to the Balloon Park. We were wrong. Traffic slowed to a crawl the closer we came to the park. As we came within a mile, people walking along the paths that paralleled the road were going faster than the vehicle traffic. I realize this is usual in some parts of the country, but it isn't in Albuquerque.
We finally arrived and were parked by 7:30. Happily, the balloons had only just started launching, so we had plenty to watch. We'd chosen our day because it fit Jim's work schedule, but an added bonus was that this was one of the days when "special shapes" were featured.
Special shapes are balloons that aren't crafted in the usual "balloon shape." You know what I mean – the one where there's a wide upper dome that tapers at the bottom, providing a place for the gondola to hang. There's a variation on this "usual" shape that's more like an American football – tapered at top and bottom. These are more commonly used in racing and agility events.
Special shapes vary considerably. Some are the usual shape with additions. A good example of this sort was an elephant we saw: the main balloon was pink, but extensions in the shape of ears and a trunk had been added on. The effect was very convincing. Another along this theme had side panels featuring three different clown faces. On this one, the extensions were used to give dimensions to the clown's headgear. Oh! And I can't forget the one that looks like Carmen Miranda's head, complete with her signature crown of various sorts of fruit.
Many special shapes don't bear any resemblance to a classic balloon shape. They're more like the huge inflated figures that you sometimes see suspended over parade floats – the difference being that these are free flying sculptures. We were treated to an amazing variety. There were three flying pigs – one with wings, one without, and a third costumed as Spiderman. There was "High Kitty," a tribute to the famous "Hello Kitty." There was the shoe belonging to the Old Woman who lived therein, complete with a child out on the roof. There was a wizard, with a black and white cat in his backpack. Oh! And the heads of Darth Vader and Yoda rose majestically side by side.
There was a full-body beagle, complete with floppy ears and wagging tail. An orca, leaping through the sky with an enormous grin on its face. An enormous alarm clock. Three bumblebees, two of which – as they rose into the air – "held hands" so convincingly that Jim and I were sure the two envelopes were stitched together. They weren't – it was the skill of the pilots that enabled this to be carried out.
And these were only a few… And for every special shape, there were many, many classic balloons in every color you can imagine and a few patterns – like the two that appeared to have been made from batik fabric – that I would never have anticipated.
Because special shapes aren't as easy either to inflate or to pilot, it's a lot less certain whether they'll be able to go up. Wind that a "normal" balloon can handle with a little care can ground a special shape.
We were very lucky. Not only was the wind so light as to be unfelt on the ground, the air currents kept bringing the already launched balloons back over the field, so we were able to see them from various angles and at a wide variety of elevations. By the time the last balloon launched and some of the earlier risers were coming down, Jim finally stopped taking pictures and I realized that I was both cold and hungry.
From one of the numerous concession stands, we bought pretty good breakfast burritos and ate them, watching the balloons all the while. Eventually, we joined the crowds, stopping to watch some Indian dancers, to look at the offerings of various vendors, and to amble through the art exhibit. Then we made our way back to our car and joined the crawling traffic. This time it didn't seem nearly as bad because we had balloons to watch as we made our way home.
Posted in Going Places | 6 Comments »
FF: Mostly YA, Purely By Chance
News Flash! Curiosities, my forthcoming short story collection, is now available for pre-order on i-Tunes. Pre-order on other e-book sites will begin next week. The print-on-demand version will be available soon, for those of you who prefer "real books." Look for an official Launch Day announcement before the end of October.
Kel Claims the Shepherd's Crown
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Audiobook. Interesting mixture of elements. I don't think this one would be for everyone, because of the heavy reliance on 1980's pop culture elements, but it suited me just fine.
The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett. I really enjoyed. The end note is of writerly interest.
Naruto, issue 71. Lots of fight scenes and super attacks can't hide that interpersonal relationships are really the center of this story.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Audiobook. Starts like a typical "Beauty and the Beast" story, but that's just the lauch pad.
Prince of Wolves by David Gross. Time for another sword and sorcery romp.
And Also:
Back issues of magazines that piled up while we were on the road!


text:
There are schools offering public administration degrees in Massachusetts!
Click to browse online public administration degrees >
Schools Offering Public Administration Programs in Massachusetts
Public Administration Degrees in Connecticut
Public Administration Degrees in Vermont
Public Administration Degrees in New Hampshire
Public Administration Degrees in Maine
Public Administration Degrees in Rhode Island
Public Administration Degrees in New York
See All Schools in Massachusetts
Schools in MA
Each year, roughly 0.5% of Massachusetts students graduate with degrees in public administration. Thus, Massachusetts' 23 public administration schools put out approximately 1,015 public administration professionals each year.
The top-ranked school in Massachusetts with a public administration program is Harvard University, which is located in Cambridge. In 2010, it was ranked 0th nationwide. 578 students graduated with a degree in public administration from Harvard University in 2010. Harvard University charged in-state students $38,415 in tuition fees per year.
The second-ranked school in Massachusetts that has a public administration program is Tufts University. Tufts University, which was ranked 12th in the country in 2010, is located in Medford. In 2010, 14 students graduated from Tufts University public administration program. The tuition rate at Tufts University was $41,598 per year.
The third-ranked school in Massachusetts that has a public administration program is Boston University. Boston University, which was ranked 14th in the country in 2010, is located in Boston. 33 students graduated with degree in public administration from Boston University in 2010. The tuition rate at Boston University was $39,864 per year.
Tuition at Massachusetts' public administration schools ranges from $41,598 per year to $3,578 per year. But, the average tuition is $23,306 per year. In 2010, the public administration schools that charged the highest tuition rates in Massachusetts were:
Tufts University - located in Medford, students are charged $41,598 per year
Hampshire College - located in Amherst, students are charged $41,299 per year
Brandeis University - located in Waltham, students are charged $40,289 per year
The public administration schools that charged the lowest tuition rates in Massachusetts were:
Bristol Community College - located in Fall River, students are charged $3,578 per year
Cape Cod Community College - located in West Barnstable, students are charged $3,624 per year
Massasoit Community College - located in Brockton, students are charged $3,720 per year
A public administration degree from a Massachusetts school... what next?
Some of the most popular jobs public administration graduates in Massachusetts pursue include chief executive officer, economic development specialist, and community development planner. In 2010, there were 17,190 public administration professional working in Massachusetts, including 470 legislators, 15,060 chief executive officers, and 440 economic development specialists. The following counties have the largest number of Massachusetts public administration professionals:
Bristol County - 10,240 public administration professionals
Middlesex County - 1,500 public administration professionals
Hartford County - 1,430 public administration professionals
The government projects that, by 2018, the number of public administration professionals in the state of Massachusetts will grow to 1,990. This would require a 0% decline in the field.
public administration professionals in Massachusetts make an average of $85,585 per year. In 2010, however, some Massachusetts public administration professional earned as little as less than $15,980 per year or as much as more than $145,050 per year. The following counties in Massachusetts have the highest average salaries for public administration professionals:
Barnstable County - $173,810 per year
Berkshire County - $148,825 per year
Bristol County - $148,462 per year
The following counties in Massachusetts have the lowest average salaries for public administration professional:
Hartford County - $110,390 per year
Worcester County - $117,390 per year
Windham County - $125,170 per year
On average, the highest paid public administration professionals in Massachusetts were:
Chief Executive Officer - $186,190 per year
Economic Development Specialist - $85,580 per year
Community Development Planner - $70,570 per year
The public administration professionals with lowest average salaries in Massachusetts were:
Legislator - per year
For more data regarding a career in public administration in Massachusetts and to compare salaries with various related fields such as sociology or political science, take a look at the graphs and charts below.
Associate's Degree in Public Administration in Massachusetts
Bachelor's Degree in Public Administration in Massachusetts
Master's Degree in Public Administration in Massachusetts
Doctoral Degree in Public Administration in Massachusetts
Certificate in Public Administration in Massachusetts
Curious what studying Public Administration gets you?
Check out the different options and how they're looking in Massachusetts
Chief Executives 15,060 $186,190 -31.4%
Urban and Regional Planners 1,220 $70,570 19.6%
Legislators 470 n/a
Economists 440 $85,580 -30.2%
Below are public administration related jobs in Massachusetts


Clive Watkin is a leading sales and lettings agency with offices throughout the Wirral Peninsula and Liverpool. Clive Watkin was founded in 1992 and since then, has grown from a single sales office in Heswall to a brand leading agency on the Wirral peninsula and north Liverpool, with 10 residential sales offices and 7 residential lettings branches.
Clive Watkin's reputation is based on consistently high levels of service, and we understand that the only way to deliver this is by investing in the right people.
With extensive local knowledge and the backing of a UK wide network, our sales division focuses on finding the right buyer for your property as quickly as possible. As well as a successful sales operation, here at Clive Watkin, we also offer a successful lettings division covering the entire Wirral Peninsula, North Liverpool and Sefton.


text:
Site Name: Custer-Loomis (So-Aqs)
Location: Custer (Loomis Trl Rd), WA
Current AQI: 2.0
Custer (Loomis Trl Rd) WA, US: 48.950699, -122.554398
Jan. 16, 2022, 8 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 2.0 ppb (2) N/A N/A 0.0 μg/m3 (0) 2.0
Jan. 16, 2022, 7 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 1.0 ppb (1) N/A N/A 5.2 μg/m3 (22) 22.0
Jan. 16, 2022, midnight N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 9.0 ppb (9) N/A N/A 4.1 μg/m3 (18) 18.0
Jan. 15, 2022, 11 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 9.0 ppb (9) N/A N/A 4.2 μg/m3 (18) 18.0
Jan. 15, 2022, 10 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 10.0 ppb (10) N/A N/A 2.0 μg/m3 (9) 10.0
Jan. 15, 2022, 9 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 8.0 ppb (8) N/A N/A 0.0 μg/m3 (0) 8.0
Jan. 15, 2022, 4 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 0.0 ppb (0) N/A N/A 3.1 μg/m3 (13) 13.0
Jan. 15, 2022, noon N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 0.0 ppb (0) N/A N/A 0.7 μg/m3 (3) 3.0
Jan. 15, 2022, 11 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 0.0 ppb (0) N/A N/A 2.0 μg/m3 (9) 9.0
Jan. 15, 2022, midnight N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 2.0 ppb (2) N/A N/A 1.9 μg/m3 (8) 8.0
Jan. 14, 2022, 10 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 9.0 ppb (9) N/A N/A -1.4 μg/m3 (0) 9.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 11 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 10.0 ppb (10) N/A N/A 2.2 μg/m3 (10) 10.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 10 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 15.0 ppb (14) N/A N/A -1.6 μg/m3 (0) 14.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 9 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 17.0 ppb (16) N/A N/A 2.3 μg/m3 (10) 16.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 5 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 13.0 ppb (13) N/A N/A 0.0 μg/m3 (0) 13.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 1 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 17.0 ppb (16) N/A N/A -2.1 μg/m3 (0) 16.0
Jan. 13, 2022, noon N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 15.0 ppb (14) N/A N/A 0.0 μg/m3 (0) 14.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 11 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 15.0 ppb (14) N/A N/A 2.4 μg/m3 (10) 14.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 9 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 12.0 ppb (12) N/A N/A 0.5 μg/m3 (3) 12.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 7 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 11.0 ppb (11) N/A N/A 2.7 μg/m3 (12) 12.0
Jan. 13, 2022, 4 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 8.0 ppb (8) N/A N/A -0.4 μg/m3 (0) 8.0
Jan. 12, 2022, 10 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 9.0 ppb (9) N/A N/A 1.6 μg/m3 (7) 9.0
Jan. 12, 2022, 8 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 9.0 ppb (9) N/A N/A -0.8 μg/m3 (0) 9.0
Jan. 12, 2022, 11 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 13.0 ppb (13) N/A N/A 1.1 μg/m3 (5) 13.0
Jan. 11, 2022, 8 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 35.0 ppb (33) N/A N/A -1.1 μg/m3 (0) 33.0
Jan. 11, 2022, midnight N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 16.0 ppb (15) N/A N/A 0.0 μg/m3 (0) 15.0
Jan. 10, 2022, noon N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 21.0 ppb (20) N/A N/A 3.5 μg/m3 (15) 20.0
Jan. 10, 2022, midnight N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 27.0 ppb (25) N/A N/A -1.5 μg/m3 (0) 25.0
Jan. 9, 2022, 11 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 28.0 ppb (26) N/A N/A 1.5 μg/m3 (7) 26.0
Jan. 9, 2022, 9 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 29.0 ppb (27) N/A N/A 1.0 μg/m3 (5) 27.0
Jan. 9, 2022, 7 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 29.0 ppb (27) N/A N/A -0.7 μg/m3 (0) 27.0
Jan. 9, 2022, 4 p.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 25.0 ppb (24) N/A N/A 2.7 μg/m3 (12) 24.0
Jan. 9, 2022, noon N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 23.0 ppb (22) N/A N/A 2.2 μg/m3 (10) 22.0
Jan. 9, 2022, 11 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 23.0 ppb (22) N/A N/A 1.5 μg/m3 (7) 22.0
Jan. 9, 2022, 10 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 0.5 μg/m3 (3) 3.0
Jan. 9, 2022, 9 a.m. N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 25.0 ppb (24) N/A N/A 2.2 μg/m3 (10) 24.0


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Long-Term Support
Posted By Paul Kafasis on September 8th, 2015
Rogue Amoeba has been around for almost 13 years, and in that time we've been fortunate to work with phenomenal employees, some of whom have stuck with us for many years. Most recently, our technical support lead Chris Barajas celebrated his five year anniversary with the company. After half a decade of helping customers with our products, we now take a moment to express our gratitude to Chris.
Technical support is a demanding role here at Rogue Amoeba. It requires answering emails rapidly and continuously, so that customers and potential customers alike get the answers they need. In addition to providing helpful and polite responses, there's a great deal of problem solving required. Tracking down bugs and issues based on reports from users is also a key part of the job. We've had a half-dozen people handle the role over the years, and none have lasted as long as Chris. We're tremendously grateful for the work he's done and the stability he's provided. We know that the many, many, many users he's helped are grateful as well.
It'll Last and Last
When an employee reaches the five year mark with us, we present them with a distinctive gift we hope will be meaningful to them specifically. Given that Chris can work from just about anywhere where he has an Internet connection, he's done quite a bit of traveling over the years. He's also spent a good amount of time refining what he carries with him. With this in mind, we set out to find Chris a great bag to travel with, ultimately deciding on a gorgeous briefcase from Saddleback Leather:
(Out of focus dog not included)
When a company offers a 100 year warranty and uses the slogan "They'll fight over it when you're dead", you know they're worth checking out. It's clear that the folks at Saddleback care as much about their products as we do about ours, and Chris has been delighted with the bag. We hope he has decades more use of it.
Of course, there was also a custom made card, as well as one of the 5 year challenge coins we've had minted. All of this is just a small way to show our appreciation for the work Chris has done.
Chris is often fortunate to be able to receive appreciative feedback from those users he's helped, but it's important to publicly acknowledge the milestone as well. We want to thank Chris for his hard work since 2010. He's helped thousands upon thousands of customers with our products, and then guided us to improve those products based on that feedback. So thank you Chris, and here's to more great work in the future!
We've previously celebrated the five year anniversaries of four other employees here at Rogue Amoeba: Christa, Lee, Jeff, and Mike.
One Response to "Long-Term Support"
Steve Nicholson says:
I've spent some years in music software customer support so I can appreciate the dedication Chris has for his job. It can be challenging at times. When I was working for Emagic I had to explain to a user that I couldn't help him figure out how to program his synthesizer that wasn't an Emagic product. He promised to find our office and come in and kill me.
I've received great support from Chris a few times dating back to December 2010. Congratulations, Chris, on the great job.