text:
The Gilmore Girls – 10 years on
Thursday, June 18, 2015 Permalink
Spoiler Alert: This post contains some references to 'how the show finished up'.
The Gilmore Girls seems to be on everyone's lips of late. A few people I know were already revisiting the show (which first screened between in 2000 and 2007) when it reappeared on Australian TV screens a couple of months ago—encouraging me to take a casual look now and again. (Which soon became every day!)
Thankfully our local TV station isn't breaking the show between series, so in just a few months we're already up to season four. And even though I watched it a decade ago and know what happens, I'm loving the time I spend each day with Lorelai and Rory.
For those who've lived under a rock, The Gilmore Girls is a show about a 32 year old woman, Lorelai Gilmore, who (as a 16yr old from a wealthy family) found herself pregnant. She left home, had her child—who she named after herself ( and known as Rory) and has worked her way from maid to manager of an inn while getting her college degree at night school. Her ultimate aim is to open her own inn, which she eventually does.
Fortunately for Lorelai, she's independent and chock-full of attitude… not to mention friggin' gorgeous; and Rory, who we first meet at 15-16yrs, is smart and sassy like her mum. The Gilmore Girls are kinda renowned for their fast-talking, witty (and sometimes nonsensical) banter. Indeed, when they first appeared on our TV screens theirs was the relationship mothers and daughters envied.
Because anything and everything is being re-made or made into a movie there's been talk about a Gilmore Girls movie. So far it's just talk but recently most of the cast came together for the 2015 ATX Television Festival in Austin, Texas.
I'm kinda happy talk of a reunion show or movie was pushed aside cos those things never fail to disappoint. Instead I've been pondering what I would have done with our GG gang in my own reunion show — The Gilmore Girls: 10 years on.
ATX Festival – June 2015
Photo by Jack Plunkett
Lorelai and Luke are still married (or not, whatevs) and have a 9 year old boy (Luke Jnr) who's v.much like his father and into sports, fishing and rough stuff and constantly pulls Lorelai WAY outside of her comfort zone.
The Dragonfly Inn is doing well and being managed by Michel while Lorelai's in a hands-off role. But now that Luke Jnr's in school she's feeling old and redundant and has taken hanging around the diner, annoying Luke and trying to change stuff. In an attempt to sidetrack her Luke suggest she runs against Taylor for the position of Town Mayor.
Her relationship with her mother hasn't changed. #onagain #offagain
He's still running the diner and as grumbly as ever. The annoying daughter who appeared in season six has again disappeared and Luke takes great delight in offering Luke Jnr incredibly inappropriate life-advice.
Rory had back-to-back boyfriends for much of the series, so I'd like to think that 10 years later she's had a few romances but is still single.
She's a TV journalist and is on the cusp of great success when something terrible and embarrassing happens. (Nude photos, story stuff-up. I haven't decided.) But it means she comes running back to Stars Hollow to hide; despite having not visited for some time. Obviously the story arc will involve Rory rediscovering her confidence and being reminded about what's important in life. Yadda yadda yadda.
Rory's boyfriends
Dean's got a chain of hardware stores or plumbing businesses or similar. He's wealthy and divorced with two kids.
Jess is an impoverished but respected indie author who's finally keen to settle down.
Logan married some well-bred type while on the rebound from Rory but has since separated.
All three are trying to win Rory back. #natch
Sookie St James
Sookie, hubby Jackson and kids still live in town but Sukie now has her own cable cooking show. It's a bit like Tim Taylor's Tool Time. The show is a comedy of errors but works cos Sookie's got talent and her clumsiness is kinda cute.
Of there were a myriad of other peeps but… well, meh, I cared little for them. (Though as an aside—and I know this is often hotly debated on forums—I would have been happy for Lorelai to end up with Max or Christopher or Alex or Luke. They were all pretty great characters and all fit well with the two Lorelais.)
I apologise if you're not a fan of the show or if you've never seen it as this will all mean nothing to you. 🙂
Were you a Gilmore Girls fan?
What do you think they'd be doing now?*
I'm flogging my blog With Some Grace today.
* And yes, I know… once we've discussed this important issue we'll get back to resolving the crisis in the Middle East.
amymedicalauthor
But where is Emily in this scenario, Deb? We have to have a plot thread for her as well?
Love love love Gilmore Girls and really want to sit down with all the DVD's and my now 17 yo daughter and just glom them! Oh the banter!
And you say you're not a romance reader?? After this I just do not believe it 🙂
Ack! Sorry, that was me…
Ah yes… gathered that!
Nah, Emily only gets a mention in Lorelai's bit (that they're still fighting off and on). I thought about making her change completely following the death of her husband… but figured that'd be a bit cliched… if she was suddenly some alternative-lifestyle hippie living in a commune and cavorting with nature. 🙂
Ah see, I loved the character of Emily more and more and more as the series went on. She's got a hard crust but her heart is in the wrong place and I can totally see where Lorelai gets her strength from.
I've got far more sympathy for her now that I'm watching it a second time. Plus I hadn't realised they didn't throw Lorelai out but she ran away after Rory was born.
MyBlissPoint
I just started watching this show last weekend because everyone acts like I'm a freak for not having seen it. So far, I really like it and will watch it through to the end. I will now be recalling your predictions when I do reach the end. 🙂
There's something addictive about it. The characters are great. (Even the ones I didn't bother focussing on!)
I used to love that show and banned people from talking while it was on so I didn't miss any of the banter. I always thought it was weird, though, that Lorelai named her daughter after herself. Who does that?!
I guess she was 16, so…
It's on GEM at 8am and 5.30pm each weekday (the 8am is a repeat of the previous day's 5.30pm). I record it and watch it while I'm cooking dinner each night. And because I know what happens I'm really glad '9' isn't drawing it out. It's a bit like semi-binge-watching. I don't think I'd hang in there if it was just on weekly.
Di (@ShinyGlitterBug)
I've never watched The Gilmore Girls, but I do love Alexis Bledel, who plays Rory. Is that Melissa McCarthy I spy in the cast photo? Never knew she was in it!
Yes Di, Melissa McCarthy played Sookie – a chef and Lorelai's best friend (and eventual business partner). She was great in the show. She wasn't at the reunion I noted but I recall seeing her promoting her latest film elsewhere at the time.
Lisa@RandomActsOfZen
OK, if you could do this, I would be a fanatical viewer, Deb!
Both John and I watched this without fail, because the characters are some of the best ever put together in one TV show.
I tried to get Bell into watching, when it started again, but I think at 12 it's just a bit too much quick banter just yet. I fully intend watching it with her when she's a bit older. x
They're great characters aren't they?! I didn't necessarily like every series of the show and I think a lot of forums think that season 6 went off the rails a bit but it got back on track by the end. (A bit like so many shows I loved – Buffy, West Wing – there was a dodgy season before things finally improved!)
That was totally weird – here now….
Who knows… My FB feed is doing strange things. I've been monitoring a friend who's in hospital about to give birth and only just saw a msg from 19hrs ago that 'tomorrow' was the day. I'm now counting backwards to work out if she wrote that last night or this morning!
I didn't watch it but it's funny how attached you get to long running shows and then 'poof' they're gone….
At least this one was able to tie up loose ends. I hate when shows are unexpectedly cancelled after an end of season cliffhanger! That's a killer!!!
I wasn't allowed to watch TV as a child and when I moved out I gorged myself on Melrose Place for starters. It didn't last long though and for years now, I've hardly watched any TV. It's the only reason, I fit so much in. So I completely missed this series and well most others. It's posts like these though that make me wonder what I've missed out on.
I've always loved TV. As a child in the 1970s I loved Bionic Woman, Six Million Dollar Man, Charlie's Angels, Starsky & Hutch etc… Nowadays I mostly love TV on DVD but I don't currently belong to a video library (in my hometown) to borrow many. I can't afford to buy them at the moment but also refuse to buy anything I won't watch again and again. Mostly I tape stuff now and rarely watching anything live as I hate ads and like to also fast-forward shows when I get impatient.
I love shows which are well written – Buffy, West Wing, Deadwood, Pushing Daisies (to name a few) as well as those which are just entertaining (Person of Interest, Miss Fisher, Criminal Minds, Orphan Black – come to mind).
I think if I had my life over I'd want to be a screen writer when I grow (grew) up.
Elaine B
Love The Gilmore Girls – have seen it several times & it gets better each time. Would love to live in Stars Hollow!
I know what a quant and quirky town!
Okay, I am a freak for not having watch the Gilmore Girls. It sounds absolutely fabulous so I might as well start from scratch, the very beginning…Is it on Netflix?
Oh I don't know Grace. I'd be surprised if it's not…
Michelle Weaver (@pinkypoinker)
I did NOT know Melissa McCarthy was in the Gilmore Girls. I love her. I did watch it a bit but clearly I'm not as big a fan as you. I did think they were a gorgeous Mum and daughter though.
Must confess I wasn't a huge fan back in the day – particularly when I realised I wasn't going to emulate Lorelai and Rory's relationship given that I was already in my mid 30s so being a young and stunning mother was not an option. I enjoyed it now and loving it now as I'm watching with a different level of understanding. I have (for example) way more sympathy to Lorelai's parents than I had back then…
Deb did you watch Parenthood? The fact that Lauren Graham (and the dude from Six Feet Under who is in a real life relationship with Lauren Graham) was in it was what drew me to it and then I just loved it. Directed by Ron Howard and similar to Brothers and Sisters which I also adored.
I saw the first few seasons of Parenthood but then drifted away. THere were some great pics of her daughter from that show and Alexis Bledel at the ATX festival.
I must have been living under a rock because I've never watched The Gilmore Girls, but after your up sell, I'm starting to think I should!
Ah yes… but you need to start at the beginning! 🙂
I was crazy for the GG. I even drove 2 hours to see Lauren Graham on stage in a summer production. She was on a talk show the other day talking about a movie she has coming out. Don't remember what it's called, something independent. I have to say that I didn't love the book she wrote though.
Love your fan fiction!
I didn't know she'd written a book. I'm happy to just watch her on screen and tell myself I must hate her because she's so gorgeous and doesn't seem to be ageing.
I've only watched maybe 2-3 episodes of it. When it first came out, I was a young mother going to college myself, so I didn't have much time for TV. I've been wanting to watch it though, even before the reunion rumor popped up. After I'm caught up on Supernatural, I'll probably go into this. Can never have too much Jared time! 😀
Ah of course cos Jared P is in the few 3 seasons of GG! I think he pops up from time to time later but is front and centre in seasons 1 & 2! He looks SO young though (and I guess it started 15 years ago and he was playing a high school student, so that was to be expected!)
I adored this show, can quote it and my oldest and I will watch re-runs whenever we can. I am loving that it is on Netflix.
A few people I knew had started watching it Kimberley (probably in the US) and suddenly it reappeared here so it was great timing.
Ok, I'm about to say something embarrassing…are you ready? Promise you won't tell anyone? Here goes….I've never seen an episode. Yep, true story.
Oh my God. And you've got a teenage daughter and everything!!!! You'll have to check it out so you can at least say you have…. 🙂
Malinda (@MBPaperPackages)
I loved this show and watched it back in its original days while I was at uni.
I only just realised yesterday (when responding to a comment) that it started 15 years ago. Oh my god!
Beck @craftypjmum
I use to love watching this show, and I still get a kick out of watching the re-runs when I can. There is something about the shows of the 90's and early 000's isn't there. xx
I have actually never seen the show, but my sister adores it. She is so obsessed she was desperate to have a baby girl and call her Lorelai. She so far has 2 boys. I have joked with each pregnancy I am naming the girl Lorlelai, which she hates haha. Love your story line!
Thanks Jess. You'll have to watch it… suspect it would be very dated by the time your girls are old enough to watch it with you.
I loved Gilmore Girls! I just finished rewatching all of the episodes on Netflix and it was awesome. Lol. I want to move to Stars Hollow. Or Bluebell on Hart of Dixie which I am convinced is the Stars Hollow set.
Isn't the town just gorgeous. Had it been made 10 years later, we'd probably have interactive maps on the show website!
Becky from BeckyandJames
I LOVED Gilmore Girls but for some reason didn't get to watch the end seasons (it's possible my parents gave away our television). I think I will find myself some DVDs and watch them as they're never on at a practical time for me to watch. Thanks for sharing.
A friend of mine has them all so the DVDs are definitely out there. I actually just have my TiVo set each day so I can watch it as I'm cooking dinner etc. I hope you enjoy the last few seasons. From memory, the second last season's a bit #meh but it eventually sorts itself out!
I watched all the first couple of seasons episodes and then it stopped and I never got back into it (probably because my husband wasn't a fan and he hogs the remote). But I loved the show. I'll have to see if I can start watching it again.
If you have Netflix you can watch it all, but GEM has been playing it for a year or two – season after season and then restarting!


In general I'm opposed to single purpose batterie de cuisine. I'm not a food snob and I think a lot of single purpose kitchen wear/gadgets are on the market solely to make money.
But, I will admit that I have wanted one of the Leyse Asparagus Steamers, since I first learned of them, about 40 years ago. They were pricey then and now, that the company was purchased by Vollrath, they are no longer made.


text:
Q: Nginx together with haproxy does not point the root index.php file I have 1 local haproxy server (10.10.1.18) that is used for loadbalance 2 nginx local webservers (web1=10.10.1.21,web2=10.10.1.22).
I can reach local ips of web servers to the index.php file successfully like that http://10.10.1.21/ and http://10.10.1.22/
However, when I point local ip of haproxy http://10.10.1.18/, it only brings the index.html file instead of index.php file.  We also have a domainname that points the public ip to the haproxy but http://example.uni.edu brings again the index.html file and not index.php file
So I don't think it's about public vs local ip  but rather haproxy or nginx configuration
/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # Example configuration for a possible web application.  See the
    # full configuration options online.
    #
    #   http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.4/doc/configuration.txt
    #
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # Global settings
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    global
        # to have these messages end up in /var/log/haproxy.log you will
        # need to:
        #
        # 1) configure syslog to accept network log events.  This is done
        #    by adding the '-r' option to the SYSLOGD_OPTIONS in
        #    /etc/sysconfig/syslog
        #
        # 2) configure local2 events to go to the /var/log/haproxy.log
        #   file. A line like the following can be added to
        #   /etc/sysconfig/syslog
        #
        #    local2.*                       /var/log/haproxy.log
        #
        log         127.0.0.1 local2

        chroot      /var/lib/haproxy
        pidfile     /var/run/haproxy.pid
        maxconn     10000
        user        haproxy
        group       haproxy
        daemon

        # turn on stats unix socket
        stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # common defaults that all the 'listen' and 'backend' sections will
    #use if not designated in their block
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    defaults
        mode                    http
        log                     global
        option                  httplog
        option                  dontlognull
        option http-server-close
        option forwardfor       except 127.0.0.0/8
        option                  redispatch
        retries                 3
        timeout http-request    10s
        timeout queue           1m
        timeout connect         10s
        timeout client          1m
        timeout server          1m
        timeout http-keep-alive 10s
        timeout check           10s
        maxconn                 10000

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    #HAProxy statistics backend
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    listen haproxy3-monitoring *:80
      mode    http
      option forwardfor except 127.0.0.1
      option httpclose
      stats   enable
      stats   show-legends
      stats   refresh           5s
      stats   uri               /stats
      stats   realm             Haproxy\ Statistics
      stats   auth              username:password
      stats   admin             if TRUE

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # main frontend which proxys to the backends
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    frontend main
            bind *:80
            default_backend webapp-main

    # round robin balancing between the various backends
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    backend webapp-main
            balance roundrobin
            option httpchk HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:\ example.uni.edu
            server  web1 10.10.1.21:80 check
            server  web2 10.10.1.22:80 check

web1 nginx - /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  10.10.1.21;

        # note that these lines are originally from the "location /" block
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/  =404;

        }
        error_page 404 /404.html;
        error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root /usr/share/nginx/html;
        }

        location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {
            fastcgi_split_path_info  ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
            fastcgi_index   index.php;
            fastcgi_pass    unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
            include         fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_path_info;
            fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        }

        location /dataroot/ {
            internal;
            alias /var/moodledata/; # ensure the path ends with /
        }

        location /cachedir/ {
            internal;
            alias /var/moodledata/cache/; # ensure the path ends with /
        }

        location /localcachedir/ {
            internal;
            alias /var/moodledata/localcache/; # ensure the path ends with /
        }

        location /tempdir/ {
            internal;
            alias /var/moodledata/temp/; # ensure the path ends with /
        }

        location /filedir/ {
            internal;
            alias /var/moodledata/filedir/; # ensure the path ends with /
        }

    }

web2 has the same configs as web1 along with its own local ip.
When I point directly the index.php  http://10.10.1.18/index.php it downloads the index.php file and gives

503 Service Unavailable

Anybody has similar experience issues like this?

A: Finally it worked out, please follow these steps:

*

*do not use config files under /etc/nginx/conf.d/  only use 1 config file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf like this

     # For more information on configuration, see:
        #   * Official English Documentation: http://nginx.org/en/docs/
        #   * Official Russian Documentation: http://nginx.org/ru/docs/

        user nginx;
        worker_processes auto;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
        pid /run/nginx.pid;

        events {
            worker_connections 8192;
        }

        http {
            log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                              '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                              '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

            access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
            tcp_nopush     on;
            sendfile            on;
            keepalive_timeout   65;
            types_hash_max_size 2048;

            client_body_buffer_size 10K;
            client_header_buffer_size 1k;
            client_max_body_size 512m;
            large_client_header_buffers 2 1k;

            client_body_timeout 1200;
            client_header_timeout 1200;
            send_timeout 100;

            include             /etc/nginx/mime.types;
            default_type        application/octet-stream;

        server {
            listen       80;
            server_name  example.uni.edu;

            # note that these lines are originally from the "location /" block
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
            index index.php index.html index.htm;

            location / {
                root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
                index index.php;
            }
            error_page 404 /404.html;
            error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
            location = /50x.html {
                root /usr/share/nginx/html;
            }

            location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {
                root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
                fastcgi_split_path_info  ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
                fastcgi_index   index.php;
                fastcgi_pass    unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
                #fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                include         fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_path_info;
                fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            }

            ###################### For Moodle Application ##################
            location /dataroot/ {
                internal;
                alias /var/moodledata/; # ensure the path ends with /
            }

            location /cachedir/ {
                internal;
                alias /var/moodledata/cache/; # ensure the path ends with /
            }

            location /localcachedir/ {
                internal;
                alias /var/moodledata/localcache/; # ensure the path ends with /
            }

            location /tempdir/ {
                internal;
                alias /var/moodledata/temp/; # ensure the path ends with /
            }

            location /filedir/ {
                internal;
                alias /var/moodledata/filedir/; # ensure the path ends with /
            }
            ###################### For Moodle Application ##################
        }
       }

*

*Make sure you use a valid haproxy config along with 2 different ports 80 is for backend and 8080 is to monitor the stats

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # Example configuration for a possible web application.  See the
    # full configuration options online.
    #
    #   http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.4/doc/configuration.txt
    #
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # Global settings
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    global
        # to have these messages end up in /var/log/haproxy.log you will
        # need to:
        #
        # 1) configure syslog to accept network log events.  This is done
        #    by adding the '-r' option to the SYSLOGD_OPTIONS in
        #    /etc/sysconfig/syslog
        #
        # 2) configure local2 events to go to the /var/log/haproxy.log
        #   file. A line like the following can be added to
        #   /etc/sysconfig/syslog
        #
        #    local2.*                       /var/log/haproxy.log
        #
        log         127.0.0.1 local2

        chroot      /var/lib/haproxy
        pidfile     /var/run/haproxy.pid
        maxconn     10000
        user        haproxy
        group       haproxy
        daemon

        # turn on stats unix socket
        stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # common defaults that all the 'listen' and 'backend' sections will
    #use if not designated in their block
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    defaults
        mode                    http
        log                     global
        option                  httplog
        option                  dontlognull
        option http-server-close
        option forwardfor       except 127.0.0.0/8
        option                  redispatch
        retries                 3
        timeout http-request    10s
        timeout queue           1m
        timeout connect         10s
        timeout client          1m
        timeout server          1m
        timeout http-keep-alive 10s
        timeout check           10s
        maxconn                 10000

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    #HAProxy statistics backend
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    listen haproxy3-monitoring *:8080
      mode    http
      option forwardfor
      option httpclose
      stats   enable
      stats   show-legends
      stats   refresh           5s
      stats   uri               /stats
      stats   realm             Haproxy\ Statistics
      stats   auth              username:password
      stats   admin             if TRUE

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    # main frontend which proxys to the backends
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    frontend main
            bind *:80
            option http-server-close
            option forwardfor
            default_backend webapp-main

    # round robin balancing between the various backends
    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
    backend webapp-main
            balance source
            option httpchk HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:\ example.uni.edu
            server  web1 10.10.1.21:80 check
            server  web2 10.10.1.22:80 check

*

*Now you are fine to lookup your stats http://10.10.1.18:8080/  or http://example.uni.edu:8080/
You can also browse your application   http://example.uni.edu
Note: Make sure you public ip points to your haproxy server successfully!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


When I had to meet up with someone for a coffee in West Perth the other day, I immediately chose Pony Express, and was glad to have done so.
This time, the Slayer was operational, and I ordered a single origin espresso. Their coffee roaster, Crema Gourmet Coffee Roasters, had left postcards on the tables expounding the virtues of this particular single origin from the family-owned Finca El Limonar estate in Guatemala's mountainous Huehuetenango region, which has been in operation since the middle of last century.
Check out the crema on this bad boy - occupying as much volume as the coffee itself, and every bit as delicious (or perhaps more so)! Beautiful, rich, creamy, soft, fruity textures and flavours abound, with my favoured lemon-crisp citrusy finish at the end.
When I chatted to Emmanuele of Ristretto some time later about the monstrous head of crema I enjoyed, his view was that the volume of crema is a function of the freshness of the coffee beans, not the machine. And he then proceeded to make me a cup of Guatemalan La Esperanza (this one was the 2012 Cup of Excellence #7), which he had freshly roasted himself the previous week at his Northbridge roastery (is that what it's called? I dunno - I just made it up). And yes - massive head of crema all the way to the rim of the porcelain espresso cup, and tasting every bit as silky, fruity and citrusy as one would expect from a great coffee. I even got hints of ginger with the first few sips!
That's what I love about coffee - you learn a new thing everytime you ask, and everyone has a different approach and philosophy, but all roads still lead to great coffee.


I had heard from a few people that Seoul was a great place to shop with the all-night malls of Dongdaemun, the busy streets of Myeongdong, the souvenirs of Insadong, and the markets of Namdaemun. As this was my first trip to Seoul, I actually didn't do much shopping as I spent most of my time being a tourist and going to all the palaces.
A very random purchase considering I can get socks pretty much anywhere and everywhere on planet Earth. However, I felt that Seoul's selection of socks was particularly impressive. Have I ever mentioned that when I moved to Hong Kong I only bought 3 pairs of socks with me? Crazy. I just bought these 3 pairs of stripy socks from a market stall. Not particularly exciting stuff but I like them. There were some watermelon, burger, and other fun printed socks, but I managed to restrain myself.
Korea is land of skincare. I don't have any pictures to show you what I bought as I used it whilst I was in Seoul. If you're looking to stock up on your favourite Korean brands, then Myeongdong seemed like the place to be. Streets and streets of women standing outside the stores waving packets of facemasks at you to try and entice you into the shop. I bought some hydrogel facemasks from Innis Free that you'll be pleased to know worked great at clearing up my dry skin. Nice.
I can't resist stationery in general, but am a total sucker for pens in pretty colours. I'd heard there was a 'stationery street' in Dongdaemun but I didn't make it there. I did however make it to an Art Box which I had read about on the blog - Cute in Korea. I went to the branch near EWHA University and picked up some brush tip and calligraphy pens by Kuretake. Oh, and some regular Stabilo pens that were bought purely for the fact that I liked the colours.
For the first few days in Seoul it rained. It rained a lot. I had brought some boots with me to wear and they got soaked through on the first day. I wasn't able to wear for the rest of my time there as they didn't dry until the day before we left.
The other two pairs of shoes I had brought with me were also inappropriate for the wet weather and so I bought a pair of JuJu 'Babe' jellies from Aland, and I also ended up buying a pair of flip-flops to walk about in.
Aland had so much nice stuff that I wanted to buy, in fact there were a lot of nice things to buy in Seoul but I only travelled with hand luggage and didn't feel like buying a suitcase. Oh well, I suppose it just means I'll have to take a trip back to Seoul.
So, that's what I bought. Not a huge or thrilling haul but definitely a small taster to what's available and incentive to go back.


Last week, I believe it was a Tuesday, a fad lit up Facebook like the Fourth of July. I think it was called "What Would You Do?" No, wait, "What Would Jesus Say?" No, wait, "What Would I Say?" There were suddenly more WWIS posts than all of the baby photos and song lyric statuses... combined!! For those not familiar, the concept is simple. You've been writing meaningless Facebook statuses and comments for years. But what if, suddenly, the words from each one were mixed together into short phrases that make little to no sense? Phrases like "can now it" and "I'm on 11/13" and "God is real." I immediately jumped on the bandwagon, and have no doubt that these are things that I would say. But, when would I say them? We don't have to wonder, I figured it out.
"Sometimes, I sit and think we know."
Do you sometimes feel like life is one giant game?
"It is plenty of a game."
Do you have fun at concerts?
"Where do I don't have fun?"
What would you say if I told you that we didn't catch all of the Pokemon?
"That's fine, we'll get em next time."
If you could act, who would you like to play?
"Me as the Ghost of Space in my life."
Are you writing anything else besides this right now?
"I'm working on an updated version of Dante's Inferno, where internet is down."
What are you going to do for your test on natural disasters tomorrow?
"Improv + Cold Weather until I study for Hurricane Sandy."
What's a typical Halloween like for you?
"It's just me from afar. Boo! Halloween is real quiet..."
What are you going to do to the Thanksgiving turkey this year?
"I think I'm gonna gobble it."
What would you call a Jewish holiday in which you only get chocolate coins?
What does the addition of Cage the Elephant and Apples Against Humanity equal?
Which do you prefer: Frank Ocean or the Baltimore Ravens?
"By the transitive property, Frank Ocean beat the Ravens."
"People Say It's Labor Day?"
What happened to your meth lab, Charlie?
"The feds got to it."
How did you get the cats in the alley to talk like teenagers?
"I'm pretty sure I'm a wizard and somehow willed them to use abbreviations ASAP."
What's on you DVR right now?
"23 Minute to Win Its."
What's the most racist thing you've almost done?
"I nearly derailed the Mexicans to bring on the UNION."


Preactor 500 APS takes materials control a step further. It has an Advanced Material Control (AMC) feature. In this, materials can be produced or consumed at any operation step within an order.
This means that both by-products and co-products can be modelled in Preactor and used as constraints..
Preactor 500 Advanced planning and Scheduling (APS) Software also has a BoM exploder (PBX) that can be used to carry out Bill of Material explosions during a Capable to Promise Enquiry.
The PBX is not aimed at replacing an MRP module in an ERP system. It is used on an ad-hoc basis where the user wants to find an achievable due date for an order that has one or more products (multi-line orders are supported) that has a multiple level BoM.
When the enquiry is run the user enters the product, quantity, customer etc. Preactor then runs its BoM exploder. It has the details of the BoM and routing within its own data tables. Based on this it creates an order for each level of the BoM and adds the process route to each.
Next each order attempts to satisfy its material requirements by linking to available components such as that in stock or already scheduled to be purchased or manufactured.
If no materials are available then it will link to materials in the orders created during the enquiry process. Any of these orders that are not required (there is enough materials available already in the schedule file or in stock) then these are deleted.
Finally the operations of the orders remaining are added to the schedule taking into account the current load and all constraints and the finish date of the final product displayed.


text:
Should I pop my pimple or leave it?
Do pimples go away if not popped?
What to do with a pimple instead of popping it?
Should I pop a pimple with pus?
What happens if you leave a pimple alone?
When is it OK to pop a pimple?
When I pop a pimple hard stuff comes out?
What happens when you pop a pimple and blood comes out?
Do pimples make noise when they pop?
Should I pop my pimple if its white?
How long does a pimple last?
Why do some pimples not pop?
While waiting is never fun, it's worth it when it comes to pimple-popping. Basically, what happens if you don't pop a whitehead is that it goes away on its own, usually in 3 to 7 days. It may happen that you wake up one morning and notice the pimple is gone.
Better than popping
Go to your dermatologist for an extraction. A dermatologist can remove a pimple using special tools in a sterile environment. …
Apply a hot compress. A hot compress can soothe the pain of a pimple that's inflamed. …
Use an over-the-counter spot treatment. …
Try an at-home spot treatment.
Don't pop or squeeze pus-filled pimples
You can cause the bacteria to spread and the inflammation to worsen.
That can cause the pimple to become more red, inflamed, swollen and infected, and may even lead to permanent scarring. "It's best to let a pimple run through its life span," Rice says. Left alone, a blemish will heal itself in 3 to 7 days. Popped improperly, it can linger for weeks or lead to scarring.
THIS IS AMAZING: Quick Answer: What is the mass of 4 moles of oxygen?
A pimple is ready to squeeze when it has developed a white or yellow "head" on top, Dr. Pimple Popper Sandra Lee told Marie Claire. "If the pimple has a head, at that point it is the easiest to extract, with the least risk of scarring because the bump is very superficial to the surface of the skin," she said.
The stuff you squeeze out of them is pus, which contains dead white blood cells.
No pimples are naturally filled with blood. If blood comes out of a pimple, this means that you have popped it and now it is healing and scabbing over. The forced trauma of popping the pimple brings the blood out of the irritated skin.
"Sometimes when you remove contents from the skin and the skin is a little bit floppy, it can make noises," Lee explains in the episode.
Can I pop a pimple if I can see the white part? It's tempting, but popping or squeezing a pimple won't necessarily get rid of the problem. Squeezing can push bacteria and pus deeper into the skin, which might cause more swelling and redness.
Pimples are a common, usually harmless, type of skin lesion. They happen when your skin's oil glands make too much oil called sebum. This can lead to clogged pores and cause pimples. Pimples can take as long as six weeks to go away, but smaller, single pimples may take only a few days to disappear.
THIS IS AMAZING: Frequent question: What happens to the number of moles of solute when a solution is diluted?
Blind pimples are usually not positioned near the skin's surface, which means that they cannot be "popped" like whiteheads. Trying to pop a blind pimple can result in permanent scars, a more-noticeable pimple, the pimple becoming more painful, or an infection.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Frances – The classic short winter coat with an Oh! twist.
The Frances Coat is our take on a short classic winter coat.
The coat comes with beautiful mink cuffs and fluffy fox collar.
The Frances Coat features soft mink cuffs and a fluffy fox collar from Kopenhagen Fur.


text:
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{% block admin %}
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Admin

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Registration Form
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Already Registered?
Login Here.

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                                                Username: <input class="form-control" id="id_username" maxlength="254" name="username" type="text" placeholder="Username" required autofocus/>
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


After much soul-searching (and perhaps a bit of insta-FOMO), I have finally not only accepted but now embraced the change in season! So long refreshing summer berry ice creams! Adios frozen smoothie bowls! And a huge welcome to this perfect autumn warming and nourishing breakfast. Each serving provides 404 calories, 17g of protein and 10g of fibre thanks to the Omega-3 rich Chia & Flaxseeds, as well as wholegrain oats.
This seemingly indulgent crumble-like breakfast is wonderful fresh out of the oven with a nice dollop of creamy yogurt, but is also equally delicious served cold to be enjoyed over the next few days. I normally make a batch on the weekends and then it serves me well as a super speedy breakfast during the week. It keeps me full all morning long thanks to the complex carbohydrates and high protein content, along with nutritionally dense and wholesome ingredients.
· Grease a 22cm square baking dish. (I didn't have mine to hand so used 6 individual enamel dishes but still worked great).
· In a mixing bowl, combine the oats, protein powder, chia seeds, flaxseeds, seeds, cinnamon, baking powder and salt.
· Bake for approximately 40–45 minutes if using a large dish, until the top is nice and golden. The individual enamel dishes only take 25–30 mins to cook.


From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.
I never did. Apart from a single poem—a macabre thing written in Scots about, of all things, a public hanging—I never wrote anything that wasn't part of my schoolwork. If given a topic I would hand in an essay or a story or a poem, I suppose. I don't actually recall ever being asked to write a poem but I also can't imagine going through Primary School without ever doing so, so let's just assume that I did. The first thing I wanted to be—this would be about the age of seven—was a mathematician; I remember being asked—the class I was in was in one of the huts that had been constructed in the playground—and I also recall Brian S. at the back of the class saying he wanted to be a giant when he grew up. I've no idea what anyone else said they wanted to be or whether any of them got to be what they wanted to be although I'm fairly certain Brian never got to be a giant. I've always been good at maths, always in the top maths class and always in the top percentile of that class but I never became a mathematician. That said all that algebra certainly came in handy when I started programming which I also loved and was good at.
Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
By the time I was seventeen—and by this time I'd left school and already quit my first job (I'd wanted to be a draughtsman and although I was top of my year I didn't cope well in the workplace; I realised very quickly that that wasn't the job for me)—and I was wondering what exactly I was going to do with my life. The idea of trying anything that involved anything more than Basic English—for example, journalism—never occurred to me. A family friend pointed me towards a vacancy in the Civil Service and that's where I went. It was a good fit. The job required business English, modest arithmetical skills and a modicum of common sense so, having two out of the three under my belt, I muddled through until I could fake the third. I'm still faking it.
I began to write poetry so I would have something to submit to the school magazine and for each of the four years I was at Secondary School I had more poems published than anyone else; this was between the ages of twelve and sixteen. After leaving school at sixteen I found I still wanted to write poetry, that it filled a need other than the need for attention, and so I continued and began submitting to small press magazines with, I hasten to add, modest success. I even got paid for one and not just a contributor's copy. But I still viewed writing as a hobby although I hated the word and have never referred to my writing as a hobby other than on a CV and even there after a few years I changed 'Hobbies' to 'Interests'. I was never going to make any money out of it—that was blindingly obvious—and yet when I looked in the mirror I saw a poet looking back at me and I gained some comfort from that. I never, not for a second, considered writing prose and then one day I came home from work and, without giving it a second thought, wrote a play. It was a bad play—it clearly needed that second thought—but it had a good title—The Normalpath. Why I thought I could write a play I have no idea. An idea came a-knocking, it evidently wouldn't work as a poem, so I let the content dictate the form. Little did I know that this was to become my first Rule of Writing. I was twenty-one when I wrote what technically can be described as my first book; motivated by the birth of my first and only child I dashed off a children's book, H M Mole, with the great opening line: "Henry Martin Mole was a mole which is a useful thing to be with a name like Henry Martin Mole". She was eighteen before I got round to reading it to her but that's another story.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure.
Yes, at sixteen (and even younger), I knew that words were a source of pleasure. I loved prefixes and suffixes. I thought the word 'hemidemisemiquaver' was just wonderful, so much more magical than the boring old American 'sixty-fourth note'.
Orwell completed his first novel, Burmese Days, when he was thirty. This, I have to say, surprised me. From the way he describes his childhood I assumed that he would've begun much earlier. I was only four years older when I wrote my first novel; you can't really call H M Mole a novel.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in—at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own—but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
I've read those three sentences over and over again. They read like a statement of fact, the kind of thing a university lecturer would trot off and his students would scribble down frantically and try to decipher (in more ways than one) later on. Whether one agrees with him or not Orwell certainly gives one reason to pause. What was my motive for writing and has that motive changed? No one does anything without a reason even if that reason isn't reasonable. (I can feel the kid in me here delighting in that play on words.) Is 'motive' the same as 'inspiration'? What inspires me to write? Inspiration is not unlike attraction. I get ideas all the time, hundreds of the buggers running through my head every day, but I'm only drawn to a few and even fewer get developed into a piece of writing. It's like women. I like women. I've always liked women. But I don't have a type. I've considered the women I've had relationships throughout my life and the ones I would've liked to have had relationships and they have very little in common when it comes to looks, build, personality or intelligence. But each of them has that certain je ne sais quoi. Attraction is not unlike taste, in fact we talk about a man's taste in women, but when I consider my palette there are all kinds of flavours and textures that appeal to me. I love chips and I probably could live off them forever but I would get bored with them eventually. And so it's true with what drives me to write. Yet I can see certain recurring themes in my work. The earliest is a preoccupation with the notion of truth.
I was brought up in a religious household and the need to be honest and truthful in all things was a big thing—Satan was the father of the lie but we would know the truth and the truth would set us free—and yet quickly enough I found myself telling little fibs, quite naturally. I say no one taught me to lie but the reality was that I was surrounded by liars. All of us are. We aspire to be truth tellers and that's not a bad thing to aspire to but it's very hard to fight human nature. If there's a single theme underlying my entire oeuvre it's the search for truth. Even in the kid's book we have a reclusive mole whose eyes are opened when a young and worldly-wise mouse (Fingal O'Mouse, would you believe) takes him on a trip to London. Twenty-odd years later who's the protagonist in my first novel but a reclusive bookseller whose life is turned upside down by the appearance of a young man who purports to be the personification of the truth? In all my books you'll find the same dynamic: ignorance forced to face the truth.
Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.
Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.
This is a dangerous one because I am clever. I don't need to try to seem to be clever. I can't help but be clever. I've no great need to appear cleverer than I am, however. Despite the fact being clever has often distanced me from people, I wish I was cleverer; the damage has been done. At school I never studied. I never felt as if I was studying. I never really got what the other kids were moaning about. To my mind there was only learning and learning was fun; it continues to be fun. Work is satisfying especially if you can be creative in that work. It's what passes with me for play; play I find hard. Anyway I have a modicum of cleverness comprised of a fair amount of knowledge derived from fifty-four years' worth of experience which distils down into a fair bit of understanding and a soupçon of actual honest-to-goodness wisdom and insight. I think it's wrong not to share that. I don't make more of it than it is—there's so much stuff I know nothing about—but the stuff I do know is good stuff and I'd hate for it all to be lost when I shuffle off this mortal coil. It pleases me that when I die my daughter will have a small library on her bookshelf all written by me.
It's not enough to say something that's true or important. There are ways to say things, effective ways, and a lot of the time they're neither fancy nor clever. Advertisers are masters in this regard and all you have to do is look at a book of quotations to realise that often all we remember from a work an author might have slaved years over is a line like, "Hell is other people." I don't know how long Sartre laboured over No Exit but I wonder how he would feel to know that that's all most people know of his play and a lot of the people who know that don't even know it was him that wrote it? But it's a good line. It deserves to be remembered. It is the essence of the whole play. It's what you take away with you.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (I wonder who first said that.) Not all writing—or art or music, come to think of it—is or ought to be beautiful because it's asking us to experience or remember something unpleasant. The words ought to be well chosen and appropriate. They might not be beautiful but they should satisfy a particular need; they should be fit for purpose. I'm with Taylor Coleridge who said, "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order." Beauty is not mentioned.
but not to this sense of loss.
I can't say I was entirely unmoved by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but—and this is unusual for me because I'm not much of a nature lover either—I was taken aback by the incredible number of flowers that we went through on the days leading up to her funeral. And every one of them died too. And to what purpose? To add a bit of colour to a bleak day?
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature—taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained when you are first adult—I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties.
He also says nothing about writing to entertain or for financial gain. These are by-products of the writing process. Even for a writer like Stephen King. He's lucky in that's he's able to write what he wants and others find the work entertaining and are willing to pay him for the pleasure of reading it. But that's not why he writes; read his On Writing if you doubt me. He doesn't need the money and yet he writes daily. I expect most writers these days don't need the money. They have jobs that pay the bills and if their writing brings in a few quid extra then that's a nice bonus. I think if I had to write in order to put bread on the table I'd feel very differently about my writing. I remember reading Hunger many years ago and disliking the fact that the writer had to bend his art to meet the needs of others.
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.
I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
This is one of the reasons I've shied away from sequels. Been there; done that. I was actually a little disappointed with myself when I was working on my novella Exit Interview because I set it in the same universe as Living with the Truth and the situation is not entirely dissimilar to the setup in Stranger than Fiction; I felt it was unavoidable. When I sit down to edit it—which I leave for a long, long time usually—I may well try to distance the book a little; it stands on its own well enough; it doesn't need the references even if they don't hurt. Maybe I'm just doing what I always do when I've finished something new: I'm tearing it to pieces. The novelty of a new novel never lasts for long.
In my play about C.S.Lewis, Shadowlands, I gave Lewis the line, 'We read to know we're not alone.' That has been my own experience. It's through books that people I've never met have reached out to me, saying, 'This is what matters most to me. Does it matter to you too?' This feeds something very different to the appetite for entertainment. It feeds, I suppose, the hunger for meaning.
Ah, finally, meaning. In my novella, Joe Kaye is asked what he thinks the meaning of life is. His response?
[I]n my humble opinion meaning is the meaning of life. You need to be doing meaningful things for life to be worth living. It's not enough to get up, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed and repeat ad infinitum ad nauseum. Life is like a pot. It can contain meaning or it can be left empty. It can be functional or decorative. You need to make a difference.
I confess: that's me talking here, not Joe.
Of Orwell's four primary drives I'd have to say that the third one is dominant within me, the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity, to give those 'facts' meaning. What I write—what I'm writing right now—has to mean something. Otherwise, what's the point? My books matter. My stories matter. My poems matter, even the not very good ones like 'Death of an English Rose'. Every time I read it I'm reminded of that day and how I felt. The same happens when I pick up my novel The More Things Change. It means something to me that it'll never mean to anyone else. I remember sitting at home working on it when my wife phoned me and told me to turn on the news; there was something happening in the skies over New York. There's nothing in the book that reflects that but a book only contains spaces for meaning. The actual meaning is jammed into these nooks and crannies by the readers. Some are a bad fit. Occasionally though one reader comes along who has all the missing pieces. At least in theory one has. Personally I'm still waiting. But while I'm waiting I keep writing.
#184 – Because who I am on paper is better than who I am in reality.
#181 – Because I can.
#156 – Because I don't know what else to do.
#144 – To get revenge without going to prison.
#88 – Because I like writing better than talking to people.
#45 – Because it's a part of who I am.
#14 – Because I want to recreate the world.
We've known since 2012 that Canongate were planning to republish William McIlvanney's fiction back catalogue. They made a start last year with Laidlaw, which sold in the tens of thousands, followed quickly by the next two books in the trilogy; there's even talk (finally!) of a TV adaptation and "McIlvanney has also spoken of plans to write a fourth instalment" but I'm not holding my breath. As the "the godfather of tartan noir" (not a term he himself coined or even appreciates that much) a lot of people will be pleased to see that. 2014 sees the rest of his novels come back into print including (arguably) his greatest work, Docherty. As part of Book Week Scotland, the Scottish Book Trust asked the public to vote for their favourite Scottish novel of the last fifty years and Docherty came in at number 10. Top of the list was Trainspotting. It's interesting that Irvine Welsh in his foreword to Ron Butlin's The Sound of My Voice ranked Docherty as one of the top five most critically well-regarded Scottish novels since the 1970s. It's not a competition though; who said Scotland's only entitled to one literary landmark? We're Scottish, for God's sake—we don't do things by halves.
Ostensibly about one man, Tam Docherty, a miner at the beginning of the twentieth century, Docherty's focus expands to encompass his whole family, then the High Street, the town of Graithnock, Ayrshire and ultimately it reaches out towards the maze of trenches in France with ridiculous British names like Strathcona Walk and Finchley Road that long ago were filled in and have vanished under grass fields and poppies. Docherty is William McIlvanney's ode to the human spirit. I originally wrote 'elegy' but the human spirit's not dead; not yet—it's just not what it once was. Where there's life there's hope, though.
Tam and his youngest son Conn, born in the book's prologue in 1903, vie for the reader's attention right from the opening chapter; the rest of the family have their moments in the spotlight but this is feels at times like a two-hander between father and son, one whose star is in the ascendant, the other whose future he sees mapped out in the life of his own aging father, Old Conn, and which is inevitable. The book is about a name, it's about what it means to be a Docherty. And in Graithnock at the turn of the century being a Docherty meant something, a bit like being a Corleone in Palermo about the same time only Tam is no Godfather.
When some of [the men] got seats for his mother and Kathleen [the family's only daughter] and his grandfather, and recognised his father, Conn felt suddenly taller to think that he had connections with them. Their conversation fell on him like a magic formula releasing itself into him.
The name rippled among a few of them, causing looks Conn couldn't understand at the time, that lens-adjustment by which the blurred hearsay of the past is crystallised into present fact.
Scottish vocabulary is like a fifth column operating within the sonorous pomposity of English, full of renegade plosives and gutturals that love to dismantle pretentions.
and he gets in trouble with his teacher over his refusal at one point to use the King's English.
I think if you disenfranchise people from their own speech you take a bit of their head away as well, you disenfranchise them from their own experience to some extent.
"I've always believed in images," [McIlvanney] says with firm conviction. "I write in an imagistic way because I think that an image is a very succinct way of putting across a meaning; and it's also a very democratic way of doing it. We all understand images." I put it to him that this is the essence of good writing, but he rebuffs my point with self-deprecating humour. "You would have to tell me what the essence of writing is—I just write the stuff, I don't know." He smiles again.
"To me it feels like the essence is that it's concrete. I love concretion, I love not getting airy fairy, and I think images keep you nailed to the earth.
Looking up, Conn felt his father's hand fit tightly, like a helmet, over his head.
And his father's voice cleft the calmness of hi's play like a lightning-flash.
Some of the dust of that brief, explosive moment settled on Conn for good.
Docherty is also, despite its subject matter, a surprisingly funny book. The humour is often deadpan or dry and frequently self-deprecatory. As Beckett wrote, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." And as many nameless others have noted, "You've got to laugh." If you don't you'll cry.
I write from an attempt to perceive the truth, and politics are part of that truth. Writing a novel, I'm not constantly thinking of politics. The politics comes out of writing the novel, it isn't that the novel comes out of the politics. When I write a novel, I try to write as honestly as I can about the life I see around me. The compulsion to write came before I was politically aware. As a spin off from a desire to understand the nature of experience come political convictions.
Graith comes from Old Norse. We find it occasionally used in English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but it is predominantly found in Scots, where it is still in use today, often in the sense of tools, hence this piece of practical advice from Neil Munro in The Looker-On: "A man should ha'e all his workin' graith aboot him before he starts on a roof for a job o' ony kind".
In English then, Tooltown, I suppose (Tool Hill would be more accurate), but I'd expect a place with a name like that to be home to Bob the Builder and Postman Pat to be honest. Graithnock is a hard-sounding word where life is hard work and only those with the wherewithal to live "a pot of soup away from hunger" survive. There really is no English equivalent although the northerners—whom most Scots regard as cousins—will know where we're coming from.
The name seemed to drown him, like regal robes on a midget. The doctor sipped [his whisky].
Over the next three hundred and fifty pages or so we do indeed see Conn as he becomes known grow from an infant into a strong sixteen-year-old who, despite the fact his father would've wished anything else for him but can't afford to do a damn thing about it, ends up down the mine with his father and his brother, Angus. Mick, the other brother, goes off to war. So it's also a coming of age novel, in more ways than one.
He saw families as little fortresses of loyalty and sanity and mutual concern, set defiantly in a landscape of legalised looting and social injustice.
Tam Docherty may not be an educated man but he is a thinking man. He's like the Jew who's been looking for the Messiah all his life but when Jesus turns up on his doorstep fails to recognise him and goes on waiting. Change too often comes from unexpected quarters and shuffles forward so slowly that it's hard to notice any movement at all. Tam himself is actually an agent of such change. He was brought up as a Catholic but married a Protestant girl. His eldest two get sent to the Catholic School and the other two to the High Street state school. His reason? "It's nearer," was all he said when pressed.
In that harsh climate people developed certain characteristics common to them all. Where so little was owned, sharing became a precautionary reflex. The only security they could have was one another. Most things were borrowable, from a copper for the gas to a black suit for funerals.
So: identity, family, community. In that order.
If I was to label it I'd say the novel was a work of sentimental realism which sounds disparaging but it's not intended to be. I look back on the seventies—when McIlvanney was writing Docherty—with genuine affection. It was a bleak time in British history but it was where I grew up—it was my time—and it's impossible not to dwell on the good stuff even though it's difficult to completely shrug off the bad stuff. Twenty-three years older than me McIlvanney feels the same about the fifties: "I think the fifties get an unjustifiably bad press," he writes "The surface greyness of the fifties was like a patina on good metal: if you polish it, you'll see there's something there." (This is what he does in The Kiln which I'll get to in a minute.) Clearly the same can be said about the early 1900's. It is possible to be nostalgic without becoming mawkish.
So, yes, Tam is presented as something of a working class hero—McIlvanney admitted as much when he said his novel was "an attempt to democratise traditional culture, to give working-class life the vote in the history of heroism"—but he's also a flawed character and as time goes on his flaws become harder to ignore especially at home when his guard is down. Only Conn, the youngest, still clings to the pedestal on which his father stands desperate for him not to topple. He's certainly no rebel, not politically anyway; if anything Tam could be accused of being a conformist unlike his sons Mick and Angus who both in turn square up to him and are disappointed to see their father back down. He makes a lot of noise but that's about it. To be fair Tam's not a fighting man—by that I mean he never goes looking for a fight (unlike his son, Angus)—but he also never walked away from one no matter what the size of his opponent.
In Strange Loyalties, Jack Laidlaw describes Tam Docherty as "a legend in Graithnock before we were born, a street-fighter for justice" As can be seen from the scene on the train even within his own lifetime Tam was lionised by his peers and yet McIlvanney doesn't present much evidence to justify his heroic status other than the fact that people need heroes and they'll kluge them together from whatever's available. The miners go on strike at one point but there's no indication that Tam was at the front bolstering the troops. He did his bit, showed solidarity but when the bosses refused to back down he, like the rest, tucked his tail between his legs and trudged back to work. What confrontations we do get to witness are nothing to write home about like the time he beats up a man for peeking into a neighbour's window.
What he is is a man. When you have nothing to speak of how do you measure your worth? If you're a woman it's probably all to do with fertility; good childbearing hips may not have been a sign of beauty in the traditional sense but they are nevertheless a means of measurement available to all. If you're male it's by how much of a man you are and what it means to be a man hasn't really changed for hundreds of years. Only in recent times has the notion of honour started to lose meaning. I wonder if there's still honour amongst thieves. Tam Docherty is a decent bloke. William McIlvanney's a decent bloke. They have values. (Just think about the word for a minute.) That used to be the measure of a man. Strength has always been a consideration but no one idolises a bully no matter how much they may kowtow to him.
The problem McIlvanney faced was how to end a book like this. Or to be more precise where to end it. What we're witnessing is the end of a generation but most generations fade in and out; there's rarely a sharp cut-off point (the Sixties, for example, probably ended somewhere around 1972). He could, of course, have presented us with Tam Docherty standing like some old Communist statue staring into the future convinced that better days are coming or he could've left him like Vladimir or Estragon or Greyfriars Bobby blindly waiting because anything else would mean giving up. What he chooses was an act of … I'm going to call it redemption. It's a popular trope: good guy turns bad and then at the last minute does the right thing (think Darth Vader in Star Wars as a classic example). Tam, of course, doesn't give in to the dark side but he does lose something along the way; as I noted above, his fight becomes bluster. But something happens and life offers him one last chance to be the hero and he jumps at it—literally. What was he thinking? We'll never know. And when people don't know stuff they make it up. Just look at Robin Hood.
There was a real High Street. This isn't it but this is meant in part to be an acknowledgement of the real one. For that reason I was to make it clear that at no point are any of the people in this book identifiable with actual people who lived there. But I hope there survives in the book some of the spirit with which those people imbued the place.
This is a very different book and I couldn't help but being a little disappointed with it which is a shame because it's probably the better novel. (Allan Massie certainly thinks so.) My fault for reading it straight after Docherty and for imagining that it was going to be a sequel in the traditional sense which it's not; one interviewer called it a semi-sequel. The only person who appears in both books is Conn Docherty but he's not the huge presence his father was. Surprisingly neither of his brothers is even mentioned which I thought was just a little odd; I would've liked to have known what became of them.
I remember coming home from the dancin' around the age of 17, and there was my mother sitting with the pinny on, reading The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I don't think where we came from that was a common phenomenon. I also remember having impromptu poetry readings, though I think we pulled the curtains in case anyone stoned us.
The first thing I wrote was a poem when I was fourteen. It was like a piece of extra-terrestrial material that landed in the living room, and I thought I think that's a poem! I chose my judge carefully. My brother Neilly was out back sawing a bit of wood; I went to him because he was tolerant of all my half-baked ambitions. Neilly said, You didn't write that, did you? It's great. If Neilly hadn't said that, I might have packed it in there and then.
The kiln was not only in Avondale Brickwork. It was between Maddie Fitzpatrick's legs. It was in his head. It was where you found who you were.
[H]e realised that old griefs were still with him. You didn't live beyond them, you just found out how to live round them. They were like bad lodgers you learned to accommodate. In that repeated scouring of himself, he had yet again being trying to rebuild the world around him. Wasn't that what everybody had to do in the light of changing experience? To live in the world was to remake it daily.
He remembers having to translate The Anabasis in the Greek class. And that's another thing: Latin and Greek at school—what does that have to do with living in Graithnock?
Interestingly it's a fight that's central to The Kiln, a "square-go" as McIlvanney might've referred to it. Tom Docherty is a writer. It's not that he's never done a day's hard work in his life because we know that he has but that's not what he's all about; he doesn't aspire to be a man who works with his hands. (The Scot in me wants to make some flippant remark about writers still needing their hands but that aside…) The fight takes place in the brickworks and it's between Tom and a bully called Cran Craig; the symbolism smacks you in the face but only once you realise that a 'cran' is a crane and 'craig' is derived from the Gaelic creag meaning 'a rocky cliff'. Cran is the anti-Docherty. He hates all Dochertys. We never learn why exactly but that's not important. What is important is that Tom has to face up to his legacy. What does it mean to be a Docherty? This is his rite of passage. He wins as it happens—a lucky blow coupled with the fact Cran has an Achilles' heel (well, Achilles' arse)—and he gets to walk away holding his head up. In much the same way as his grandfather's brawls became legend, so also will this one.
He walks away from Cran, the brickworks, Graithnock. He has become a Docherty. Now he decides the time has come to redefine what it means to be a Docherty. Can one be a Docherty and, for example, a writer?
To challenge conditioning without trying to eradicate it, to modify it honestly in the light of individual thought, was to become yourself. The rest was an act of psychic self-deceit. He wouldn't be pretending to be who he wasn't.
There's a lovely scene in Docherty where Tam sits with Conn and gets him to read from a book of poetry that he's come by. It pleases Tam that he lives in a world where poets exist but how would he feel about a grandson who became a poet? I'd like to think he'd be big enough to be proud of him. Whether he'd be necessarily proud of everything Tom gets up to on his way to becoming a poet I can't say but I can guess.
I spoke Scots until I was five, and I went to primary school, and I was taught English—what I resent is that I was taught English to the suppression of Scots. I think it was necessary that I be taught Standard English in conjunction, as a harmonious marriage, with my own daily speech—it would have been good! […] all I can do, it seems to me, is inhabit the paradoxes as healthily as possible and try to embrace the dichotomies. And I think there can be a fruitful union between the two; it seems to me false to seek a reversion. I think you have to inhabit the contemporary situation as healthily as you can.
In Docherty I used Scots dialogue because that's how they spoke there at that time. I used English outwith the dialogue because the residual Scots wasn't flexible or rich enough to convey the complexity of the ideas I wanted to express. Even if, after I had studied a Scottish dictionary, I had found the Scots words. Ninety-odd percent of Scots people wouldn't have known what the hell I was saying. It's time to own up. Languages die. Who knows what the Etruscans were trying to say? Scots isn't dead. But it's no very weel. I at least tried to recognise it in the dialogue.
Critics often jump all over the violence in his books as if violence was a way of life. It's not, not for any of the characters, but it is an aspect of life. Even I got into fights at school. I grew up in Scotland, what was I to expect? One area I've not mentioned up until now is his attitude towards women. Really the issue is not the author's attitude towards women but his country's. His books are set in times and places where men ruled the roost; I just love it when academics use words like 'homosocial'—seriously, who talks like that? Men were the primary breadwinners, yes, but the women weren't sitting around with their feet up sipping piña coladas while their maids got on with the housework. All his books focus on men—that would be 'homocentric' then?—but the importance of women to these men can't be (and isn't) ignored; there are long sections in Docherty devoted to Tam's wife, his daughter and his neighbour, Miss Gilfillan. Tam gets into a fight with a peeping tom to protect Miss Gilfillan, Angus tackles his brother-in-law for mistreating his wife—women are to be defended—and Conn fights Angus over his attitude towards their father; in every case there's a principle involved and they don't simply lash out in frustration. There's no comparison between the fighting in Docherty and the arbitrary violence of Begbie in Trainspotting (I'm thinking especially of the balcony scene). By the fifties in The Kiln, however, the women have become more powerful and the young Tom is very much in thrall to them especially Maddie Fitzpatrick who basically uses Tom and tosses him out the door when she's had her fun which is a complete reversal of what happens with Tom's Uncle Angus. Tom's mother decides that her son will go to university and her husband, Conn (a shadow of the man he aspired to be), simply accepts her ruling. If McIlvanney does write a third book (which he was talking about back in 2010 although in 2013 he let slip that he still had a long way to go) it will be interesting to see how the battle of the sexes is fairing. It would be nice if Tom's daughter could be the book's focus.
By the time the coal was gone, Graithnock hardly noticed because it had other things to do: there was whisky-distilling and heavy engineering and the shoe factory and later the making of farm machinery. But the shoe factory closed and the world-famous engineering plant was bought by Americans and mysteriously run down and the making of farm machinery was transferred to France and the distillery didn't seem to be doing so well.
Something like honour, something as difficult to define and as difficult to live decently without, had gone from the people's sense of themselves. ... An old woman could be mugged in a park, an old man tied and tortured in his home for the sake of a few pounds, five boys can beat up a sixth, a girl raped because she was alone, the houses of the poor broken into as if they had been mansions.
I can see why he might relocate the Dochertys to Glasgow. Graithnock's story appears done. For now at least.
I think you should read a book as straight as possible if you can. Starting a book should be like arriving in a new country. Hand in your passport and take it as it comes.
Bring your intelligence, as much as you can muster. But surrender your prejudices at the border. They're contraband.
If you find you don't like what you meet there then go and read someone else. Enough people stop McIlvanney in the street and tell him how much his writing has meant to them that he won't be too upset if you don't appreciate what he has to offer. But at least give him a go. Allan Massie has described him as the Scottish Camus—and, of course, Camus's not to everyone's tastes either—and McIlvanney is a fan—"I love the idea that Camus combined a terrific intelligence with terrific humanity," he says—well, I can say the same about him: McIlvanney's work combines terrific intelligence with terrific humanity.
In a chat with Stuart Kelly in a pub he mentions that "he is proudest that a review called his work tender. 'It's always been about love,' he says" and he's is right: he loves his family, his community, his language and his heritage. And we love his books. Well I certainly do.


This is the second book I've read by this author, and they have one thing very much in common - they seem to be all about the mood. This is the story of a quiet friendship, started by two women whose memories are painful but precious, and the slow blossom of their friendship, and revelation of the secrets, is the bulk of the novel. Olsson's writing is lovely, and she perfectly captures the intensity of the relationship between these two women. I particularly enjoyed the snippets of poetry at the beginning of each chapter - they seemed well matched for each scene, and made me want to read more work by the poets. This will not be the book for everyone - it is almost completely internal, with virtually no "action" at all beyond the changing of seasons and the revealing of memories. I found it to be a slow but satisfying read - I do enjoy this author, and will read more of her work.


We're not going to give too much away, but Larch Class are busy creating their photo masterpieces.
Woohoo! That was super fun!
Glad that you enjoyed it Amber!
The answer to the challenge is lightning goes before thunder because light is quicker than sound.
That was quite fun Amber, even I think so!
The answer to the challenge is lightning because light travels faster than sound.
Well done, super scientist Sindhu!
Yeah it's true ! Light travels so fast you can't see it!
I also think it is lightning comes first because it is more quicker and because it is like that it will come first.


Whewwwww, what a week! We broke all of our donation records and goals. This was our most ambitious marathon and with everyone's help we put on our best show yet. We raised over $59,000 for ACT Today and beat our gaming goal of catching all 646 available Pokemon.
The support we received from everyone was incredible. I can't thank enough all of our sponsors/supporters along with all of the help we get within from our marketing team, ops and mods.
The marathon was extremely draining in terms of man power at the barn. We had to exhaust all of our resources. Over 20 people volunteered throughout the week to either play, commentate or help out with the back end of the marathon. Thank you guys for sticking through those long nights and tough shifts. You are all the best people and my best friends.
Up next, the Mario Marathon! We will be posting info about the Mario marathon over the following weeks and months to get you pumped and informed for our next event. Our tentative start date is December 14th 2012.
Hey there! So you know that Icarus and Skulldog donated some wonderful prizes for the marathon! But did you know they're helping motivate people to donate? It's true!
Icarus is taking commission slots RIGHT NOW for people who donate! Sign up for a slot, donate, e-mail him the proof, get a commission! If you give a little more, he'll even mail you the original art! Wow!
Skulldog has made a post on DeviantArt saying she'll take a Pokémon art request when he hit a milestone! If you're on DA, leave a comment of what Pokémon you'd like to see drawn, and maybe yours will be chosen! Yay!
I'm in no way in charge of this. These people are doing this purely out of the goodness of their hearts. So donate! Show them some love! Comment on their stuff! And if you know of anyone who's putting up similar motivations, let me know! I'll add them to the list!
You can now donate to ACT Today to reserve a name for a trainer and/or starter for our upcoming Pokemon marathon. Trainers will cost $25 and starters $50 with a character limit of 10. The donate button is on the right hand side of the webpage. After you donate you will have the option to leave a comment which is where you can write the name of the trainer or Pokemon you want and its nickname. Underneath the donation button you can see which trainers and starter Pokemon are still available to name. If for some reason two people donate around the same time and the Pokemon or starter is taken, we will have to move your nickname to another Pokemon or starter. We will email you to work out what you would like to switch to.
If you are not able to leave a comment after you donate, send an email to comments@thespeedgamers.com.
Pokemon Marathon Prize Announcement – Bug Pokemon Art Cards!
Hey again! I've been missing for a bit, on account of me making something… special… for the marathon. But until then, let's check out another great art prize for the marathon! I told you I got several awesome artists, didn't I?
Pokemon Marathon Prize Announcement – Poison Pokemon Painting!
Nintendo's 3DS digital download service, the eShop, will be going live June 6th. But even if you don't have any money to spare, there'll be content for you starting day one. 3DS owners who access the eShop will receive a free download of the 3D classics port of Excite Bike. Like the original, the title will feature a track editor, but this time the port will include the ability to save up to thirty two tracks. The download is a limited offers, so 3DS owners would do well to download it as soon as possible.
Nintendo also announced that the service will be launching with some Pokémon software as well, Pokédex 3D. This Pokédex 3D will allow players to access information on the 150 new Pokémon in Pokémon Black and White. Players start with sixteen Pokémon unlocked. They will continue to unlock Pokémon through QR codes, Spot Pass and Street Pass. The title also gives you a full 3D view of these Pokémon as well as the ability to place Pokémon into pictures via AR cards. There's no mention of a time limit on the free availability of this title.
Excitebike, like other enhanced 3D classics, will look like the original NES games with added depth, but NintendoWorldReport has screenshots for Pokédex 3D.


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If it comes to luck, there is a great misconception about fortune cookies in the Asian culture. Fortune cookies are often served as a dessert in Chinese restaurants in the United States and other Western countries but are not a tradition in Asia. A served cookie contains a fortune with some wisdom or vague prophecy. Since Unix, the fortune application does the same on the terminal. Fortune displays a random message from a database of quotations. I have created a database set for geeks, which holds some favourite tweets from Programming Wisdom. See below a quote.
Each entry starts with %.
Each entry must end with a newline.
Logstash is like a swiss knife. You can pre-process nearly any kind of data for Elasticsearch. In Elasticsearch, we want to store the content and the person. Having the data in Elasticsearch, we can search for wisdom if needed for example in a presentation. We could tweak the text analysing, but we are going to deal with that in a separate future blog post.
To store the data, you can provide logstash with an index template.
We choose to store analysed text only for the quotes and for the person we want the default multi-field approach. We may search for names but might also want to do aggregation on persons.
As input, we take the file. We apply the multiline codec and configure to treat each line, that belongs to the beginning entry with % as one event.
The filter section contains the commands to clean up the data and separate them into the fields quote and person.
We use Elasticsearch for storage, so the output uses the elasticsearch output plugin.
The noteworthy part is that we provide the template options, to tell Elasticsearch how to store the data.
In the end, you will receive this output as displayed in Kibana.
As demonstrated, Logstash is a powerful tool to deal with data in a challenging format. The fortune database for geeks was an example. The configuration is challenging itself. With proper help, guidance and patience you can accomplish to get almost any data into Elasticsearch. We wish you a happy and fortunate year of the pig!


Year 2019 is here when Nigerians will choose new set of political leaders from the federal to state level. Three of the states in Southwest Region – Oyo, Ogun and Lagos – will have new governors on May 29 of the year that marks 20 years of the return of democracy to the country. By that date, the Southwest region would have welcomed five new governors, including Ekiti and Osun, who are being sworn-in this year.
There is no doubt that self-government has engendered a level of development and citizen involvement in the administration of our country notwithstanding its attendant shortcomings. For instance, Nigeria has transferred power from one government to another and from one political party to another. The capacity of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to organise free, fair and credible election has also improved over time. The country has experienced a fair measure of economic successes and failures. Regrettably, Nigeria still relies largely on proceeds from sale of crude oil while struggling to diversify revenue sources.
The establishment of the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) Commission by the six Southwest governors is one of the vital gains of democracy in the region in this 4th Republic. Established in July, 2013, the commission manages the regional development integration programmes of the homogenous states, serves as a catalyst for development, and facilitates sustainable working relationships among different governance stakeholders thereby making the region a preferred place to visit, live, work and invest.
DAWN Commission's successes in the last five years reinforce the imperative of the bottom-up approach to development given the failure of the top-down approach that has been the lot of our pseudo-federal system where all states look to the central government for survival. It takes little reflection to see that a bottom-up growth trajectory will automatically engender socio-economic integration among the states in the different geopolitical zones of Nigeria. In fact, the examples of regional integration as a potent factor in economic successes abound across the globe: European Union (EU), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and even regions within American federation such as the Mid-Western states regional cooperation suffice.
Regional cooperation delivers great benefits in several ways. It promotes economies of scale that reduces transactions cost and by implication, high cost of governance; promotes knowledge and experience-sharing among member states thereby shortening the learning curve for innovations; creates opportunities for pursuing joint infrastructure that will aid seamless transportation within the region; improves ease-of-doing business and deepens market for goods and services.
Regional cooperation also puts the states in good stead to collectively negotiate for opportunities as a bloc as against individuals going it alone. And as a region seeking self-sustenance, the issue of resource mobilisation through Internally Generated Revenue can be enhanced by harmonisation of taxes and levies within the region which will help prevent tax evasion and avoidance.
Based the above, this article is meant to nudge the electorate in the Southwest on the need to be mindful of candidates they will give mandates to preside over the affairs of their states and those that will represent their interests at the National and State Assemblies, bearing in mind the enormity of the intellectual capacity required to sustain and build on the foundation for regional integration already laid.
Governance is serious business because it determines the rise and fall of a nation and the human condition of the citizens. Thus, the quality of minds to be handed the reins of leadership is of essence. It also calls attention to the need to put the incoming governors on notice on the need to continue from where the outgoing chief executives will stop on the regional development integration programme.
The region's electorate have the responsibility of ensuring that the right leaders are elected into office. Citizens need to be sufficiently educated on the need to not allow undue sentiment to sway them into electing misfits in our communities to preside over our affairs. Citizens need to consciously elect credible persons who are intellectually sound and sufficiently imbued with the omoluabi ethos for which the people of the region are renowned. We owe our people and the generations unborn the duty to think about the development of the region over and above self-interest or pecuniary gains.
The constitution only requires anyone seeking to occupy a political office to show evidence of being educated up to at least a school certificate level or its equivalent. While the writers of the constitution can be excused for that provision for such leadership positions, it goes without saying that we need to up our game and raise the stake for anyone seeking public office in the region, especially as it concerns demonstrated leadership qualities. Aside our early exposure to Western education, our forebears that occupied those exalted positions were known to be widely read and great thinkers who commanded the respect of their contemporaries.
Public governance in the globalised world of today requires sound intellectual foundation. A contemporary public administrator must have sufficient grasp of issues and an exceptional ability to diagnose problems and reach out to the depth of his/her knowledge base to prescribe solutions to enormous challenges militating against the well-being of citizens. Hence, anyone aspiring to public leadership in Nigeria of today must possess a well-developed intellectual capacity enhanced by good education, exposure and native intelligence. Otherwise, the individual will struggle to discharge the responsibilities expected of the office.
This would not have been an issue in the Southwest based on our glorious history but the reality of present-day politics makes this an imperative – a situation where the democratic space has been so deregulated to the extent that anyone with money but without the requisite leadership skills begins to aspire to occupy the governance stools, continues to threaten and invariably affect the trajectory of our development as a region. While anyone is constitutionally eligible to stand for election, the people of the region must be very circumspect in exercising their right. Candidates seeking public offices in the region should be conscientiously considered before being voted for. Our future and that of our children depend on the quality of minds elected to coordinate the affairs of the states in our region.
Meanwhile, the search for quality minds to occupy front-line governance positions would not be peculiar to the region going by what is now becoming the trend in other parts of the country. A cursory scan of states in other regions across the country will confirm this assertion. The relevance of Plato's postulation as to the need for philosopher-kings to administer society is more apt now than ever. We can observe that lucid minds are now being put forward for leadership positions. For instance, Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State and his deputy, Ivara Esu, are professors of note while Willie Obiano, a respectable banker, holds sway in Anambra State.
The administrative capacity of Mallam El-Rufai has never been in doubt. In Kano, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje has a Ph.D in Public Administration, his erstwhile Deputy Hafiz Abubakar is a professor of Biochemistry, while his new deputy, Hon. Nasir Gawuna is a PhD holder too. Sokoto and Gombe states are being governed by a successful lawyer and a chartered accountant respectively. We, therefore, as a region cannot afford to drop from the present level of governance in the region but rather aspire to take some notches up.
We must also know that the region does not reserve the right to remain number one in any sector. If we are to remain at the top, we must prove ourselves worthy by employing the services of quality minds in all sectors of governance.Another issue of note as we approach another transition is the need for the incoming chief executives to sustain the existing cooperation and collaboration among the six states. As mentioned earlier, the inherent benefits in regional cooperation and development integration cannot be gainsaid.
In the project, Oyo, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti states will make land available for rice farming while Lagos will provide funds. Lagos will also serve as the off-takers of the produce for processing at her rice mill. Beside the objective of making the region rice sufficient, it will also generate direct and indirect job opportunity for the people. I therefore enjoin us to give consideration to all the above as we approach another transition in 2019.
Oyeleye is DG, DAWN Commission.