If you are interested in any properties, please use the links below.
East Neuk Estates is a coming together of six families who are the cornerstone of the area's farming community – some of us are even able to trace our families' time in this cherished landscape back over those 600 years. We are Balcarres, Balcaskie, Elie, Gilston, Kilconquhar and Strathtyrum estates.
Today's collaboration took on its present form in 2008. Generational change in several of the estates brought us together – with fresh ideas and a willingness to learn from each other. We work together on many aspects of our respective estates.


text:
Q: AGP Upgrade Assistant window not opening in Android Studio When I press Tools > AGP Upgrade Assistant button, nothing happens.

I am using Arctic Fox 2020.3.1 Patch 4. I also tried this on Bumblebee 2021.1.1 and the same problem occurs.
Other maybe relevant info
Fluter Android Studio plugin 63.2.1
Dart Android Studio plugin 203.8452
Dart 2.15.1
Flutter 2.8.1
Android gradle plugin 3.6.0
Gradle 6.1.1-all

A: The APG Upgrade Assistant opens only when you open the Android folder as an Android project

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Change The Race Ratio' Campaign Reaches 100 Signatories
Momentum continues to build around Change the Race Ratio – a campaign aimed at increasing racial and ethnic participation in business – with a total of 100 firms now signed up since the campaign launched on 1st October 2020.
Latest campaign signatories include BAE Systems, Bolton Associates, Britvic, First Group, JLL, Mace Group, Miles Advisory, Paysafe and Sage.
Lord Karan Bilimoria CBE DL
Lord Karan Bilimoria CBE DL, CBI President, said: "We can and must vastly improve racial and ethnic diversity in business. Not only is it a vital step towards giving more people the chance to succeed and making society more inclusive; the business case is also crystal clear. Diverse companies perform better on every metric.
"I'm incredibly proud to reach the milestone of 100 companies signed-up to our campaign commitments. We have been overwhelmed with interest since Change the Race Ratio launched.
"All firms have a role to play in shifting the dial on diversity in business and that's ensuring talent from all walks of life can thrive in the workplace."
Charles Woodburn, BAE Systems Chief Executive Officer, said:"We are very proud to support the Change the Race Ratio campaign in helping to bring greater ethnic diversity to British businesses. We believe that developing an inclusive, diverse workplace where everyone contributes their unique experiences and insights will help drive innovation and future success for business.''
Stephanie Hyde, JLL UK Chief Executive, said:
"Like many businesses we are working towards a more diverse and inclusive culture and making this latest commitment to Change the Race Ratio is central to this. Ultimately, we want JLL to be a place where people feel like they belong and thrive, and that all individual differences are valued."
As signatories of Change the Race Ratio, companies make the following four Commitments to Change:
Increase racial and ethnic diversity among Board members. Take action to set targets, aligned to Parker Review, achieving:
FTSE 100 – At least one racially or ethnically diverse Board member by end 2021.
FTSE 250 – At least one racially or ethnically diverse Board member by 2024.
Increase racial and ethnic diversity in senior leadership
Take action at ExCo and ExCo minus one to set clear and stretching targets and publish them within 12 months of making this commitment.
In addition, aim to establish a separate target for black participation at both levels.
Be transparent on actions
Publish a clear action plan to achieve the targets and share progress in the Annual Report or on the company website.
In addition, disclose ethnicity pay gaps within 2 years of joining.
Create an inclusive culture in which talent from all diversities can thrive
Focusing on recruitment and talent development processes to drive a more diverse pipeline; data collection and analysis; fostering safe, open and transparent dialogue with mentoring, support and sponsorship; and working with a more diverse set of suppliers and partners, including minority owned businesses.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


PTguide Port Townsend, WA - Elks Lodge: SWING DANCE - last dance of the season!
Discovery Dance presents Paul Rogers and The Humanikins Swing Dance with a free lesson in Jitterbug/Single Time Swing at 7pm taught by Janice Eklund. LIVE Music starts at 8pm. No partner necessary. Last Dance of the season! Please join us!!
FREE Jitterbug/Single Time Swing workshop taught by professional dance instructor Janice Eklund.
Dance workshop starts at 7pm, live music at 8. Open to the public, you do not have to be an Elk's member.


Cupar Ladies Golf Club. Instituted 1885. sometimes known as Bonvil Ladies GC. This club has a course opened in the spring of 1896. It is only a "putting" course of nine holes, and is situated in Bonvil Park, about half a mile from the railway station. There is no club-house.
Hon sec. B Darling, Westbank, Cupar; com. Miss E M Campbell, Mrs Ramsay, Miss Murray Johnstone, Rev A P Hogarth; greenkeeper, Charles Henderson. Membership 92. Sub 5s. Strangers introduced by members one week free, 1s. a week thereafter. (GGA 1898).
The holes vary from 30 to 70 yards and only putting clubs are allowed. A clubhouse is available (WWG).
Still open in Dec 1938, membership 120 (C).


When copying text from a web page, there are carriage return symbols at the end of each line of text, as opposed to paragraph marks or natural breaks. I want to use the find and replace command to remove the carriage return symbols at the end of each line so the text will flow unbroken in my word document. When using find and replace, what do I put in the find box to represent the carriage return symbol. I will want to replace it with a space, but not sure what symbol to use for the carriage return. I have tried copying the carriage return symbol in the word doc and pasting it into the find box, but that doesn't work.
Please let me know if there's an easier way than find and replace to remove the carriage returns, or if not, what ascii symbol do I use to represent the carriage return in the find dialog box?
Down the bottom are the special characters for Line Breaks, Paragraph Marks, etc.
You may need to experiment a bit to get what your looking for.


text:
Q: android studio can't connect to online database 1.So I followed the Tonikami tutorial and tried to add rows in my database on 000webhost and awardspace with no success. I just press the register button and nothing happens. On the monitor I get a message No Network Security Config specified, using platform default, which a lot of people on the internet said that I shouldn't have a problem beacause of this. I will upload my register-request activity which I named register-page among with my register-activity and register.php. Keep in mind that I already have a login-page and a login.php but while the register isn't working I don't wish to ask about them yet.I also checked to see if the php code worked on www.mywebsite.com/Register.php and it worked fine adding a row to my database. Android version 7.1.1.
RegisterPage(request)
package com.example.geqwe1.atry;

import android.content.Intent;
import android.support.v7.app.AlertDialog;
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.AdapterView;
import android.widget.ArrayAdapter;
import android.widget.Button;
import android.widget.EditText;
import android.widget.Spinner;

import com.android.volley.RequestQueue;
import com.android.volley.Response;
import com.android.volley.toolbox.Volley;

import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

public class RegisterPage extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_register_page);

        ArrayAdapter<CharSequence> adapter;
        Button register_b;
        Button previous;

        final Spinner spinner = (Spinner) findViewById(R.id.gender);
        register_b = (Button) findViewById(R.id.register_button);
        previous = (Button) findViewById(R.id.previous_button);
        final EditText email_1 = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.email_register);

        adapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(this, R.array.Gender, android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item);
        adapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
        spinner.setAdapter(adapter);
        spinner.setOnItemSelectedListener(newAdapterView.OnItemSelectedListener() {
            @Override
            public void onItemSelected(AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) {
            }

            @Override
            public void onNothingSelected(AdapterView<?> parent) {

            }
        });

        register_b.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View v) {
                final String email = email_1.getText().toString();
                final String spinner1 = spinner.getSelectedItem().toString();

                Response.Listener<String> responseListener = new Response.Listener<String>() {
                    @Override
                    public void onResponse(String response) {
                        try {
                            JSONObject jsonResponse = new JSONObject(response);
                            boolean success = jsonResponse.getBoolean("success");
                            //Toast.makeText(RegisterPage.this,"success",Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

                            if(success) {
                                Intent successIntent = new Intent(RegisterPage.this,LoginActivity.class);
                                startActivity(successIntent);
                            }
                            else {
                                AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(RegisterPage.this);
                                builder.setMessage("Register failed")
                                            .setNegativeButton("Retry",null)
                                            .create()
                                            .show();
                            }

                        } catch (JSONException e) {
                            e.printStackTrace();
                        }

                    }
                };

                RegisterActivity registerRequest = new RegisterActivity(email,spinner1,responseListener);
                RequestQueue queue = Volley.newRequestQueue(RegisterPage.this);
                queue.add(registerRequest);
            }
        });

        previous.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View v) {
                Intent previousIntent = new Intent(RegisterPage.this,LoginActivity.class);
                startActivity(previousIntent);
            }
        });

    }
};

RegisterActivity
package com.example.geqwe1.atry;

import com.android.volley.Response;
import com.android.volley.toolbox.StringRequest;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

public class RegisterActivity extends StringRequest{
    private static final String REGISTER_REQUEST_URL = "http://www.ankle.atwebpages.com/Register.php";
    private Map<String, String> params;

    public RegisterActivity(String email, String gender, Response.Listener<String> listener){
        super(Method.POST,REGISTER_REQUEST_URL,listener,null);
        params = new HashMap<>();
        params.put("email",email);
        params.put("gender",gender + "");
    }

    @Override
    public Map<String, String> getParams() {
        return params;
    }
}

2.I have already put this line in Android Manifest
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />

Register.php
<?php
$con = mysqli_connect("fdb15.awardspace.net", "2432552_db", "mypassword", "2432552_db");

$email = $_POST["email"];
$gender = $_POST["gender"];
$statement = mysqli_prepare($con, "INSERT INTO users_table (email, gender) VALUES (?, ?)");
mysqli_stmt_bind_param($statement, "ss", $email, $gender);
mysqli_stmt_execute($statement);

$response = array();
$response["success"] = true;

echo json_encode($response);
?>

Thanks in advance for your advice.


text:
Wonderful Art of Frank R. Paul
Posted by lord_k on December 28, 2010 at 6:30am
Today, let's take another look at the artwork of the Diesel Era greatest sci-fi illustrator.
Gernsback's Amazing Stories magazine was successful, but Gernsback lost control of the publisher when it went bankrupt in February 1929. By early June he had launched three new magazines, two of which published science fiction. The June 1929 issue of Science Wonder Stories appeared on newsstands on 5 May 1929, and was followed on 5 June by the July 1929 issue of Air Wonder Stories. Both magazines were monthly, with Gernsback as editor-in-chief and David Lasser as editor.
Frank R. Paul was responsible for the cover art. His concepts appeared on the subscription leaflets of both Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories:
Frank R. Paul can be credited with the first color painting of a space station published in the U.S.:
His cover for the November 1929 Science Wonder Stories was an early, if not the earliest, depiction of a flying saucer.
This painting appeared almost two decades before the sightings of mysterious flying objects by Kenneth Arnold. He has been described as the first person to make a living drawing spaceships; this is a slight exaggeration, as much of his income was also derived from technical drawing.
These visions of robots, spaceships, and aliens were presented to an America wherein most people did not even own a telephone. Indeed, they were the first science fiction images seen by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Forrest J Ackerman and others who would go on to great prominence in the field.
In 1930, Gernsback decided to merge Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories into Wonder Stories. In an editorial just before Science Wonder Stories changed its name, Gernsback commented that the word "Science" in the title "has tended to retard the progress of the magazine, because many people had the impression that it is a sort of scientific periodical rather than a fiction magazine".
Ironically, the inclusion of "science" in the title was the reason that science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began reading the magazine; when he saw the August 1929 issue he obtained permission to read it from his father on the grounds that it was clearly educational.
14 years later Frank R. Paul illustrated a sci-fi story written by Asimov. But it's another ... er, story, that I'd better save for the next week. Right now, ladies and gentlemen, you can browse our Wonder Stories album (89 hi-res images, most of them in color, courtesy of Golden Age Comic Books Stories) and/or enjoy the slideshow:
Find more photos like this on Dieselpunks
Text source: Wiki
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Comment by lord_k on December 29, 2010 at 2:17am
I've got a number of Science and Invention covers (scans, of course) done by Paul. Electrical Experimenter is absolutely amazing, but hi-res scans are scarce. Last week I uploaded two EE covers (see Amazing Stories album)
Comment by Caerulctor on December 28, 2010 at 8:07pm
Paul was doing interior art for Gernsback's magazines -- notably his half factual, half fictional Science and Invention prior to becoming the primary cover artist for Amazing Stories when it debuted in 1926. But the covers for Science and Invention were mostly done by another artist, Howard V. Brown, who had a quite different (but no less remarkable) style -- few other artists in the early 1920s were producing such vivid visions of the future. I heartily recommend viewing the covers of Science and Invention and its predecessor, The Electrical Experimenter, from about 1915 on. They're truly amazing -- and full of unexplored ideas for retro-futuristic gadgets.
Comment by lord_k on December 28, 2010 at 1:59pm
To Larry:
there's more to come.
To Tome:
you mean Paul, I presume.
Comment by Tome Wilson on December 28, 2010 at 1:50pm
It was educational because it had the word "science" in the title. That's priceless.
Thank you so much for these, Lord K. Gernsback's work has a technical quality to it that, despite the bizarre color palette, really gives a sense of realism to his machines. I wonder how much time he spent thinking of the mechanics of a piece before he actually set pencil to paper.
Comment by Larry on December 28, 2010 at 1:34pm
More of the wonderful retro-future. Gotta love it!


1925 House Bill 1200. An Act Making Appropriations For The Maintenance Of Departments, Boards, Commissions, Institutions And Certain Activities Of The Commonwealth, For Interest, Sinking Fund And Serial Bond Requirements, And For Certain Permanent Improvements.
Title 1925 House Bill 1200. An Act Making Appropriations For The Maintenance Of Departments, Boards, Commissions, Institutions And Certain Activities Of The Commonwealth, For Interest, Sinking Fund And Serial Bond Requirements, And For Certain Permanent Improvements.


Yes. This post sounds a little strange, but Friday was a paid holiday and I had purchased a Groupon to go indoor sky diving at iFly SF in Union City about 8 months ago. It was a date we had planned on going on for awhile, but since Mando and I both work now, our days off never overlap. This Groupon was also going to expire soon so having this day off allowed us to go ahead and finally try out this experience.
As you can see, we had a good time. It was recommended to wear loose, fitting comfortable clothes and sneakers, which I did.The experience was very surreal. I've had dreams before where I could fly, but to actually experience it was awesome! It was not easy in the beginning, especially because you are trying to place your body in a certain position while a huge force of wind is keeping you up. I don't know if I would ever go sky diving off a plane since I have a small fear of heights, but I would come back here to do some more indoor skydiving! I'd like to learn the tricks and be able to fly higher next time.
After this adventure, Armando and I headed to In-and Out to have some burgers and animal style fries. We then decided to catch a movie since the theater was right next door in the Union Landing Shopping Center. We watched The Hunger Games due to all its recent hype and we were both curious about the movie. ( We had not read the books either). It was a great movie, great cast, and although it was a little disturbing seeing children dying, it was nice seeing in the end that love conquers all.
That looks SO FUN! I once went sky diving and actually enjoyed it, despite my fear of heights. But this looks like a way to get the best out of it, without having to, you know, jump out of a plane!


Glandular fever (also known as infectious mononucleosis, or mono) is an infectious disease caused by a virus called Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).
Glandular fever is a common illness and is sometimes called the 'kissing disease' because the virus is spread through saliva and commonly affects teenagers and young adults.
These symptoms are common among teenagers and young adults with glandular fever. Younger children infected with EBV often experience few or no symptoms.
Sometimes a fine skin rash may appear if certain antibiotics (amoxycillin or ampicillin) have been prescribed in the mistaken belief that the symptoms have been caused by a bacterial throat infection.
In about 50 per cent of people with glandular fever the spleen (a large organ in the upper left side of your abdomen) becomes enlarged. An enlarged spleen (splenomegaly) generally causes no symptoms, but in rare cases the spleen can rupture, causing sudden and intense abdominal pain.
Severe cases of glandular fever can also be associated with liver inflammation (hepatitis) and jaundice (yellowing of the whites of the eyes and skin).
How do you get glandular fever?
Glandular fever is caused by an infection with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The virus is transmitted through saliva, and can be passed from person to person through kissing. It can also be spread via sneezing, coughing or sharing eating utensils, drinking containers or by sucking on toys.
Most adults have been exposed to EBV at some time in their lives and are immune to glandular fever. Because many people are infected with EBV during childhood and experience few or no symptoms, they are not aware that they have been exposed.
Glandular fever can be diagnosed with a simple blood test called a mono spot test, which tests for antibodies to the Epstein-Barr virus. However, the mono spot test may not detect the infection during the first week of the illness. There are other antibody tests that can be used to test for glandular fever early in the illness.
Your doctor may also order another blood test called a full blood count (FBC) to check your white cell count. An increase in white blood cells (lymphocytes), particularly atypical lymphocytes, can be associated with glandular fever.
There is no specific treatment for glandular fever, but getting plenty of rest and keeping up your fluid intake are important for recovery.
Glandular fever is a viral illness, so antibiotics are not helpful (antibiotics are useful only in treating bacterial infections).
Gargling with salt water several times a day may help relieve a sore throat.
Pain relievers such as paracetamol and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) can be used to treat pain and fever. Aspirin should not be given to children under the age of 16 years, because it can trigger a rare but serious condition called Reye's syndrome.
People with glandular fever are sometimes treated with corticosteroids to help reduce severe swelling of the throat and tonsils.
Most people with glandular fever are unwell for 2 to 3 weeks, but tiredness and swollen lymph nodes can persist for several more weeks. In fact, it may take a few months before you feel completely well. It is important to take your time in getting back to normal.
Ongoing fatigue that lasts for 2-3 months is quite common. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection, like a number of other viruses, may be a trigger for the development of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). However, chronic fatigue syndrome is NOT regarded as a chronic (ongoing) EBV infection and EBV is not considered a specific cause of CFS.
You should rest as much as needed during the initial phase of the illness. Once your sore throat and fever are better and you start to feel less tired, increase your activities gradually, being careful not to push yourself too hard.
Contact sports, vigorous activities and heavy lifting should be avoided for at least a month because of the risk of rupturing the spleen, even in people who do not have a noticeably enlarged spleen.
Does my child have to stay away from school or child care?
Children should stay home from school or child care while they are feeling unwell, but there is no specific recommended time frame for staying away from school or day care.
If your symptoms are not improving after a couple of weeks, or your symptoms return after a period of improvement, you should see your doctor.
Glandular fever is a very common illness, and most people recover without any problems.
In rare cases, complications develop. Some of the possible complications include the following.
Blood cell problems – anaemia (reduced red blood cells) or thrombocytopenia (reduced platelets, which are involved in blood clotting).
Problems with the nervous system, including meningitis (inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain), encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and Guillain-Barre syndrome (an autoimmune disorder in which the body's immune system attacks the peripheral nerves – the nerves connecting the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body).
Heart problems, including inflammation of the heart (myocarditis) or the membrane around the heart (pericarditis).
Ruptured spleen is a serious but very rare possible complication.
If you have glandular fever you can help prevent the spread of infection by limiting close contact with others. Avoid sharing food, drinks and utensils with others. Frequent hand washing also helps prevent the spread of disease.
The Epstein-Barr virus can be found in your saliva for months after an infection. In fact, once you've been infected with EBV, the virus remains in the body for life. Many people who have had glandular fever continue to intermittently shed the virus in their saliva. For this reason, there is no specific recommendation for children or teenagers with glandular fever to stay away from school or day care. Although, of course, you should stay at home until you are feeling better.
1. Pharyngitis and/or tonsillitis (revised October 2014). In: eTG complete. Melbourne: Therapeutic Guidelines Limited; 2015 Nov. http://online.tg.org.au/complete/ (accessed Mar 2016).
2. Mayo Clinic. Mononucleosis (last updated 11 Dec 2015). http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/mononucleosis/home/ovc-20165827 (accessed Mar 2016).
3. Merck Manual Professional Version. Infectious mononucleosis (reviewed Apr 2013). http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/infectious-diseases/herpesviruses/infectious-mononucleosis (accessed Mar 2016).
4. National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). Staying healthy: preventing infectious diseases in early childhood education and care services – 5th Edition (2013). https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/guidelines-publications/ch55 (accessed Mar 2016).
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Epstein-Barr virus and infectious mononucleosis (updated 7 Jan 2014). http://www.cdc.gov/epstein-barr/about-mono.html (accessed Mar 2016).
6. NHS Choices. Glandular fever (updated 29 Oct 2014).http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Glandular-fever/Pages/Introduction.aspx (accessed Mar 2016).


text:
Bloemencorso Leersum is een jaarlijks evenement in de Nederlandse plaats Leersum (provincie Utrecht), dat gewoonlijk gehouden wordt in het derde weekend in augustus. Naast de optocht zijn er dat weekend ook andere activiteiten in Leersum.

Op zaterdag rijden de corsowagens twee rondes door Leersum. De meer dan veertig praalwagens zijn voorzien van miljoenen dahlia's. Op een van de wagens rijdt de koningin van het bloemencorso. Op het parcours rijdt de Corso Express, dweilorkesten zorgen voor de muzikale omlijsting. De wagens worden op zondag in het dorp tentoongesteld.

Geschiedenis
Het Bloemencorso Leersum bestaat sinds 1952. Het kwam voort uit de festiviteiten op Koninginnedag. Die dag werd tijdens de regeringsperiode van koningin Wilhelmina op 31 augustus gevierd. In Leersum reden in de optocht fietsjes en karretjes mee die versierd waren met heide, mos en oranje bloemen: goudsbloemen en afrikaantjes.

Toen Koninginnedag op 30 april werd gevierd werd bleven de Leersummers hun bloemenoptocht in augustus houden. Vanaf 1953 werd het eerste echte bloemencorso georganiseerd met praalwagens en versierde auto's. Dit gebeurde onder de naam 'Bloemencorso Midden-Nederland'. In de beginjaren was het hele dorp verlicht en werden de gevels van de huizen versierd met bloemen. De wagens waren versierd met sparrengroen en bosjes gladiolen en anjers.

Prijzen
Tijdens de doorkomst bij de tribune worden de prijzen bekendgemaakt. De winnaar krijgt de ereprijs van de gemeente Utrechtse Heuvelrug. Andere prijzen zijn er voor:
 Grote Praalwagens (+60.000 dahlia's)
 Kleine praalwagens (20.000-60.000 dahlia's)
 Grote jeugdwagens (10.000-30.000 dahlia's)
 Kleine Jeugdwagens (2.500-10.000 dahlia's)
 Mini jeugdwagens (-2.500 dahlia's)
Hiernaast worden prijzen gegeven voor onder andere originaliteit, kunstzinnigheid, figuratie en presentatie. Er is tevens een persprijs, een pechprijs en een publieksprijs.

Utrechtse Heuvelrug
Leersum
Evenement in Utrecht (provincie)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Our natural lamb and sheep sausage casings are perfect for fine emulsion or coarse grid products, including cooked, smoked or fresh sausage. Each sheep casing is translucent and white to provide a glossy, professional look. We offer long and extra-long strand specifications for maximum efficiency during processing.
Sheep casings are the highest quality small diameter casings used for the finest sausages such as: Wieners, Knackwurst, Chipolata, Merguez, Nürnberger Bratwurst, Bockwurst and Frankfurters.
Our natural hog casings are ideal for fresh, smoked and dry sausages. Uniform size and shape allow for consistency and minimal waste. Because our hog casings are all natural, they have a tender and firm bite, providing just the right resistance. They're also transparent so they easily highlight your sausages' quality ingredients.
Hog casings are used for numerous types of sausages such as grill sausage, Bockwurst, Boudin Blanc / Noir, Chorizo, cooked sausage, Pepperoni, Italian sausage and Bratwurst.
Calibers ranging from 26 mm to 51/+ mm from whiskered and whiskerfree raw materials.
XL and XXL specifications for superior efficiency.
Our fatends will give your cooked or dry sausage that typical natural look. In our factories every fatend has been processed manually; this way we can guarantee the best quality. Our fatends undergo a process 28 different steps before the finished products is up to our high standards.
We supply all calibers and lengths at our customers' request, with or without crown.
Fatends are used for Liver sausage, Braunschweiger, Genoa, Thuringer and dry and semi dry sausages such as Spanish Lomo, Salchizon and Chorizo.
We supply our afterends in nets of 100 pieces. The caliber of our afterends varies from 40/43 until 65/70. The length of the afterends can vary from 20cm until 60cm upon request. We can also supply bundles of 9 meters, pre-selected, separated or unseparated in 50/+ and 50/-.
Afterends are primarily used for Saucisse Morteau, Saucisse de Montbéliard, Liver sausage, Braunschweiger, Genoa, Thuringer, Summer sausage and Cervelats.
Our natural beef casings bring out the best in traditional ring-shaped or large diameter sausages. With a firm bite and uniform shape and size, your customers can expect a bold, flavorful, consistent experience every time. You can choose from a thick-walled traditional look or a fat-free, seamless casing to best suit your product.
Van Hessen teams up with renowned beef casings specialists from South America. Only the best is good enough for our customers. For rounds, middles and caps we focus on consistency, strength and fat free products, suitable for both dry and cooked applications.
The three most commonly used types of beef casings are: beef bung caps, beef rounds and beef middles. Beef bung caps are used for Capocolla, veal sausage, large Bologna, Lebanon and cooked Salami. Beef rounds are used for ring Bologna, ring liver sausage, Mettwurst, Polish sausage, blood sausage, Kishka and Holsteiner. Approximate stuffing capacities are indicated in 'green weights'.
Beef middles can be used for Leona style sausage, all other types of Bologna, dry and semi-dry Cervelats, dry and cooked Salami and veal sausage. The wall thickness is largely determined by the amount of fat left on the finished casing. Beef casings with a heavy textured wall will have some fat on the casing wall while casings with thin texture will have virtually no fat.
Our natural hog, sheep and beef casings bring out the best in any sausage. They're completely natural and traditional. Nothing artificial. Nothing manufactured. Because of this your sausage stays tender, juicy and fresh, with that distinctive "snap" that makes every bite mouth-watering.


text:
Q: How to learn a hidden model variable (task variance) in tensorflow that has no ground truth data I am working with a faster-rcnn type of system where automated focal loss was recently implemented from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09048.pdf
In the above-linked paper in section 3.4. Regression it states

We assume that the labels are distributed around the actual correct ground truth by a Gaussian distribution with a variance of σ^2.

and

However, to correctly compute the cumulative distribution function the variance σ^2 of the task needs to be estimated. [...] training the variable σ^2 like a weight of the network.

I do not have data for the task variance σ^2.
I do not fully understand how it can be learned without having data for it.
Should I simply make the variable trainable and assume that the optimize knows what to do?


text:
Home/Veteran/Canadians can send Valentines to Vets
EventsVeteran
Paige LeClair 2 weeks ago
0 0 1 minute read
For the last 30 years, Valentines for Vets has been showing gratitude to Veterans for their sacrifices and achievements in serving our country.
Every year, Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) invites Canadian schools, individuals, and organizations to make Valentines for Vets. Once received, VAC then distributes the valentines to Veterans in long-term care facilities across the country in time for February 14.
"Valentines for Vets provides an opportunity for Canadians to thank our Canadian Veterans for their service," says Martin Magnan, team lead media, Veterans Affairs Canada. "The personal touch of handmade valentines brings smiles to their faces—some Veterans even display their cards for weeks after Valentine's Day."
The initiative was created by late newspaper columnist Ann Landers, who encouraged her readers to create special valentines for Veterans in care facilities throughout Canada and the United States. VAC became involved with the program in 1996 and has been receiving and distributing valentines to Veterans in care facilities across the country ever since.
Landers passed away in 2002. However, VAC says they are committed to continuing her legacy of honouring Veterans while reminding Canadians to be grateful and help teach students about Veterans' sacrifices and successes along the way.
Canadians interested in sending a valentine to a Veteran can send them by February 1st to:
Valentines for Vets Veterans Affairs Canada Commemoration
Distribution Unit 125 Maple Hills Ave.
C1C 0B6.
Valentines that are not received by the deadline will be kept to distribute next year.
Although creativity is encouraged, the Veterans Affairs Canada website offers tips and suggestions to ensure valentines will be distributed.
"Please do not include candy or chocolate with the valentines," the website suggests, as well as "Ensuring students are aware of who Veterans are—they are living and were men and women who served in the military. Avoid using 'RIP' and images related to violence or death, such as graveyards or guns."
For more information about this program and how you can get involved, visit here. Or, email here.
Paige LeClair
As a recent graduate from the St. Thomas University Journalism program, Paige has a passion for storytelling and investigative journalism. In 2016, she, along with her journalism team were awarded first place at the Emerge Media Awards in the multimedia category. The team was also a finalist at the Canadian Association of Journalist Awards. She is excited to work with other military spouses providing stories and information to the military community. Paige is newly married to Andrew, a Lineman, and moved to their first posting in Petawawa in May of this year. She is excited to begin this journey with Andrew, their dog Diablo, and cat, Linux
The Veterans Channel gives a voice to servicemen and women, past and present
Building A Life After Service
Government Supports Study of Horse Therapy Programs
Favorite Photo June 2nd 2017


The list of highly cited researchers is compiled annually by Thomson Reuters and singles out scientists whose work has been cited most often by their peers. Researchers given this honor have been in the top 1 percent of citations for their field of study spanning the last decade.
With that goal in mind, Dr. Crotty has dedicated himself over to understanding the fundamentals of what makes a good immune response to help tailor vaccine candidates so they elicit a protective immune response.
In 2009, he discovered a pivotal master switch that ignites the production of a certain group of helper T helper cells known as follicular helper T (Tfh) cells, which in turn help B cells make more antibodies. Subsequently, Crotty's team systematically unraveled the molecular mechanisms that drive the differentiation and maturation of Tfh and antibody-producing B cells. Most importantly, he demonstrated that Tfh cells are crucially important for triggering broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in a large group of HIV-infected individuals.
His findings led to Crotty's recognition as an expert in vaccine design, and to his inclusion as a T cell expert in one of the nation's top AIDS vaccine consortiums.
Shane Crotty received his B.S. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996. He also received a B.S. in Writing from MIT the same year. Crotty undertook graduate work in virology at the University of California, San Francisco in the Program in Biological Sciences. There he discovered the mechanism of action of the antiviral drug ribavirin, widely used to treat chronic hepatitis C infections. Crotty earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2001. He then pursued postdoctoral work at the Emory University Vaccine Center with Dr. Rafi Ahmed from 2001 to 2003, studying aspects of the generation and maintenance of immune memory after viral infections. In 2003, he accepted a faculty position at LJI.
Crotty was named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences in 2005, and was the recipient of the annual American Association of Immunologists (AAI) Investigator Award for outstanding early-career research contributions to the field of Immunology in 2012. He is also the author of Ahead of the Curve, a biography of Nobel laureate scientist David Baltimore, which was published in 2001.


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Meet The Brazilian Entrepreneur Making Money With Other People's Free Time
Anderson Antunes Contributor
Business & Wealth News From Brazil
Most businessmen would agree that time is money, but 24-year-old Brazilian social entrepreneur Lorrana Scarpioni has literally built her entire business model upon that motto. The only difference is that the time from which she is profiting is not hers. Scarpioni is the founder and CEO of Bliive, a collaborative network that allows users to exchange time and skills, rather than money. "The world has 1 trillion idle hours per year and they could be used to do amazing things," is the company's motto.
It works like this: a member can offer an hour-long guitar or piano lesson to another user, earning Bliive points in return. Those can be used to purchase an array of tasks and skills offered by others users, which numbers over 60,000 in 100 countries. Bliive's revenues come from partnerships with companies, schools and universities that pay for access into an exclusive and customized service known as "Bliive Groups."
Brazilian entrepreneur Lorrana Scarpioni (PHOTO: Folhapress)
As a part of the network, they collaborate and promote themselves while integrating different sectors and discovering the needs and skills of their members. "Today, just in pre-lunch operation, we have already closed three sponsored contracts and two trials in London and San Francisco," Scarpioni told FORBES. "We are also testing new products: Bliive Hotposts, in which we will recommend places like cafes and pubs to our users as safe places to get to know each other and exchange time; and Sponsored Experiences, which is an opportunity for brands to get engaged with their clients in our platform."
Scarpioni's dedication to Bliive has already paid off. Aside from being chosen by the Brazilian edition of Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's magazine of innovation, as one of Brazil's Top 10 innovators under the age of 35, she was also selected among 160 aspiring entrepreneurs from over 30 countries who entered the first round of UK Trade & Investment's pioneering Sirius Programme, considered one of the best businesses accelerator programs in the world. As a result, Scarpioni is getting mentoring, a seed investment of £48,000 (around $75,000) and visa endorsement to live and work in the UK, where she is based. Bliive remains 100% owned by Scarpioni and her partners, Murilo Mafra, 25, Jose Fernandes, 23, and Roberto Pompeo, 46.
Earlier in December, Bliive secured a deal with Brazilian private investors Mariana and Karina Boner from The Top Coaching & Consulting, an independent private equity investment firm focused on social enterprises. Although she didn't comment on specifics of the deal, Scarpioni said it valued Bliive at around $3.5 million.
"In five years, I see Bliive as a reference in social innovation and online collaboration, fully immersed in several sectors of the economy, like education, business and the third sector," says Scarpioni. "Bliive will become a more human and sustainable way for millions of people to live experiences. In what concerns our financials, I believe Bliive will be worth about $100 million by 2020."
I'm a journalist covering everything from media issues to the world of that very particular group of people who are just as rich as they are media shy. I also write abou...


In 3 days Kim Cofino and I will be leading the Flat Classroom Workshop as part of the 21st Century Learning Conference. I am also looking forward to Anne Mirtschin being there as well helping to organise and run the workshop in between presenting. We have about 30 students and 10 teachers registered for full time participation in the workshop with over 20 'virtual' participants registered as well.
One of the challenges of flattening the learning environment is getting used to working with people who are not face-to-face in the same room. As business, political and economic situations around the world (to mention a few) evolve, as Thomas Friedman describes in his book, The World is Flat, there are certain flatteners that promote and allow for connection, collaboration and creation via distance. Outsourcing, networked connections, wireless and virtual worlds make it possible for us to connect with and work with almost anyone in the world. Learning how to do this reliably and responsibly is part of what we do in the Flat Classroom projects each year. But how does this relate to a learning situation? How do we accommodate different cultures, different time zones and different expectations of what working in a team means?
What does it mean to attend a workshop virtually?
The Flat Classroom Workshop is an opportunity for participants who cannot physically come to Hong Kong, to attend 'virtually'. This means they will be team members or expert advisers to the teams from a distance. They will join the same online networking and collaboration spaces and contribute to the work in progress and final outcomes.
What is expected of the virtual participants?
There are virtual participants signed up for this event from all over the world, in many time zones. Therefore there is not an expectation that interaction with the 'at home' team members will be in real time. If there is an opportunity for real time this will enhance the connection and understanding. Real time opportunities include being part of the backchannel and watching the uStream video of each session as well as contributing to ideas, research and discussion with their team members.
However more realistically most virtual participants will be staying in touch and contributing asynchronously throughout the event.
Will virtual participants really be part of the workshop?
Yes! But this will take a commitment from the participants to stay connected and to be actively commenting, adding to the wiki, adding a blog post and generally contributing where they can to the development of the action project. It will also take commitment from the 'at home' participants as well to include their virtual team members by commenting back, asking questions, including them in the development of their ideas and actions.
As organisers of the Flat Classroom Workshop we believe this is pedagogically sound and relevant to learning in today's world and welcome the virtual participants to this event.
Cultural Scavenger Hunt: We invite virtual participants and readers of this blog to complete the online form so we have data to refer to at the workshop.
Come and join us in Hong Kong!
Hi Julie, I have packed my bags now and am really looking forward to working with you in a face to face situation, rather than virtually,as our flat classroom projects usually are. 5 of my students are excited about working virtually with us and I still may have a sixth student. A seventh would have loved to have joined in but the Saturday involvement is a problem as she works all day. See you soon and cant wait to meet the new flatclassroom members. Thanks for offering this opportunity to us all.
To be honest, elearning is fun. You will have to discover a lot of things through elearning. You will be engaged in serious questioning here and really learn and study by yourself.


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Home / Education / News
Traditional medicine gains ground in African universities
By: Emeka Johnkingsley
The number of African countries with national policies on traditional medicine increased almost fivefold between 2001 and 2010, according to a report on a decade of traditional medicine on the continent.
The report, launched at a meeting of the WHO Regional Committee for Africa two weeks ago (29 August–2 September), also found that the number of countries with strategic plans for traditional medicine increased from zero to 18 in the same period, and those with national regulatory frameworks rose from one to 28.
In 2010, 22 countries conducted research on traditional medicines for malaria, HIV/AIDS, sickle-cell anaemia, diabetes and hypertension using WHO guidelines.
According to the WHO, roughly 80 per cent of people in developing countries depend on traditional medicine for their primary healthcare.
Some African universities had incorporated traditional medicine into the curricula for medical and pharmacy students, the report found. Health ministers and the WHO African regional office agreed at the meeting to promote this integration as a way of increasing research in the field.
Karniyus Gamaniel, director-general of Nigeria's National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD), said: "This is a very good development … The issue of curricula in medical and pharmacy schools is fundamental as this would provide the right orientation and sensitisation of younger people to begin to develop career lines in this direction."
The WHO regional director for Africa, Luis Gomes Sambo, who presented the report, stressed that having national policies on traditional medicine placed the conservation and sustainable use of medicinal plants in the arena of public health.
He called on African institutes to compile inventories of medicinal plants and to conduct research on the safety, efficacy and quality of medicinal plants.
Tamunoibuomi Okujagu, director-general of the Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency, told SciDev.Net that the decision to introduce traditional medicine into medical schools would reduce the cynicism expressed towards the practice in Africa, counteract 'quackery' and ensure professionalism.
"A number of our health challenges require traditional medicines," he said. "Traditional medicine policies are good for Africa."
Joseph Okogun, a consultant phytochemist at the NIPRD, said the integration of traditional medicines into medical schools was overdue.
"Many people in technologically advanced countries use alternative medicine, which includes traditional medicines. The reason for the increased attention is that traditional medicines have weaker side effects compared with synthetic drugs," he said, adding that they are also cheaper and often work as combination therapies.
National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development
Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency
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Q&A: Gender failings put half of science talent at risk


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26/10/15 Supergirl vs. the Marvel Cinematic Universe
I grew up thinking of DC and Marvel as rival teams in a vast, superpowered Olympics. Who's stronger, Superman or Thor? Who's faster, Quicksilver or Flash? Every spin of the comics rack was a new exhibition in their never-ending face-off.
That's why new Supergirl show is such a game-changer. Sure, the character has been around since 1949 (though that "Supergirl" was Queen Lucy from the Latin American kingdom of Borgonia, not Kara Zor-El, Superman's cousin). Melissa Benoist's Supergirl looks perfectly fun too. I'm even happy to see CBS back in the superheroine business. They rescued Wonder Woman from cancellation in 1976, before introducing the first live-action incarnations of the very male Marvel pantheon: Spider-Man, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, and, one of the most successful superhero shows ever, The Incredible Hulk. We'll see if Supergirl survives five seasons too.
But aside from its team-switching network, it's the show's timeslot that throws the biggest red flag on the DC-Marvel playing field. Mondays at 8:00? That's when the pre-Batman series Gotham airs. I would shout FOUL! But can you foul your own teammate? Supergirl and Batman, they're both DC regulars. So it must be an off-sides penalty? One of them should be lining up Tuesdays at 9:00 to go head-to-head with Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., right?
Actually, no. Supergirl is CBS, Gotham is Fox. Neither networks cares about comic book rivalries. Their playing field is primetime. The CW airs a pair of Justice League characters too, Flash and Arrow, plus soon Atom, Hawkgirl and a few other second-stringers in their third DC-licensed show, Legends of Tomorrow. If CBS preferred any of those time slots, they'd land Supergirl there instead. Worse, Warner Brothers has a Flash film scheduled for a 2018 release—but it will be staring Ezra Miller, not CW actor Grant Gustin. If Green Arrow makes into 2019's Justice League Part Two, Stephen Amell can expect to be benched too.
These aren't just facelifts. The TV and film versions of DC superheroes are different people living in different worlds. Christopher Nolan had barely completed his Batman trilogy in 2012 when Warner Brothers started their Ben Affleck reboot. Supergirl earned her pilot because of her cousin's box office success in 2013's Man of Steel. But that's not the same Superman. Look at Jimmy Olsen. The difference is literally black and white. He's played by Mehcad Brooks on TV, and Rebecca Buller in the film (okay, they changed the female Jimmy to Lana Lang, but still).
Compare that no-rules rulebook to Marvel's team-player strategy. In addition to the Avengers, the Marvel Cinematic Universe includes five solo franchises (Ant-Man, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk), four Netflix shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Luke Cage), and two ABC shows (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter). And they're all jigsaws pieces in a single, unified puzzle.
When the Netflix Matt Murdock talks about uptown superheroes, he doesn't just mean Thor, Iron Man and Captain America; he means the Chris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Evans incarnations of Thor, Iron Man and Captain America. Peggy Carter began in the first Captain American film in 2011, before spun-off in her own TV show last year, and she appeared in the first scene of this summer's Ant-Man, and she'll appear again for her own funeral in Captain America 3 next spring.
Imagine the galaxy-sized migraines involved in keeping all those planets spinning in the same solar system. No wonder DC and Warner Brothers happily hand-over creative control for each of their independent universes. When asked about Supergirl, Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment, said "we've been given license and latitude to make some changes." In other words, forget continuity, our Supergirl flies solo. That might sound less impressive—hell, it is less impressive—but orbiting inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe carries its own penalties.
Witness director Edgar Wright. The hilariously idiosyncratic British film-maker approached Marvel about Ant-Man back in 2004. The then-fledgling studio was delighted. But when production finally rolled around a decade later, the Marvel blockbuster mill wasn't so keen on Wright's personal take on a potential franchise. Avengers director Joss Whedon adored the script, but Marvel scrapped it, handed the rewrite pen to Paul Rudd, and subbed out Wright for the lesser known but far more malleable Peyton Reed. Granted, Reed's miniature battle scene shot on a Thomas the Tank Engine train track was genius, but the rest of the film was by-the-Marvel-numbers.
There's at least one potential reason for that all-controlling gravity. At the center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe spins a supermassive black hole named Disney. It also owns ABC, home of Carter and S.H.I.E.L.D. It was also the TV home for Superman in the 50s, Batman in the 60s, and—for a season at least—Wonder Woman in the 70s. But the Mickey Mouse subsidiary isn't interested in promoting Warner Brothers property anymore.
The megalomaniacal one-puzzle policy has even taken root in Marvel Entertainment's root company, Marvel Comics. Its continuity used to include thousands of free-wheeling universes. On Earth-1610, Spider-Man is black and Hispanic; on Earth-2149, superheroes are zombies; on Earth-8311, Peter Parker is a pig named Peter Porker. There was even an Earth-616, where we all read Marvel Comics, and Earth-199999, home of the Evans, Downey Jr., and Hemsworth Avengers, who apparently are completely unaware that Marvel Studios is watching and recording them.
That all changed last summer. With its mini-series Secret Wars, Marvel Comics destroyed its fifty-year-old universe, and rebooted its most beloved characters into a single, one-size-fits-all reality (All-New All-Different Marvel!), in which its writers and artists must toil in perfect, lock-step synchronization.
Meanwhile, DC is following Supergirl in the opposite direction. After their own recent, reality-transforming maxi-series Convergence, every character, storyline, and alternate world that's ever appeared in any DC comic book is officially back on the playing field. Apparently the writers were envious of their TV and screenplay counterparts and wanted the same unfettered free-for-all. And now they got it.
So when you tune in to Supergirl Monday nights, enjoy the metaphysical implications of your viewing choice. That's a whole new world blinking on your screen.
19/10/15 Super Cowboy in the White House
Here's the debate question we should ask Clinton, Trump, Sanders, and the herd of Republicans running for President:
"What art would you hang in the Oval Office?"
It sounds frivolous, but the answers reveal a lot about our last two presidents.
When George W. Bush moved from the Texas governor's office to the Oval Office in 2001, he brought his favorite painting, a 28 x 40 oil by Westerns illustrator W.H.D. Koerner which appeared on the back of his campaign biography, A Charge to Keep. The title is from a hymn, and a friend gave him the painting because it illustrated a 1918 short story of the same name. Bush believed the figure in the painting, a cowboy charging up a hill on horseback, was a 19th century Methodist evangelist spreading his faith across the West.
"He's a determined horseman," the President told visitors, "a very difficult trail. And you know at least two people are following him, and maybe a thousand."
"Bush's personal identification with the painting," writes David Gergen, "reveals a good deal about his sense of himself . . . . a brave, daring leader riding fearlessly into the unknown, striking out against unseen enemies, pulling his team behind him, seeking, in the words of Wesley's hymn, 'to do my Master's will.'"
Although the painting did appear beside Ben Ames Williams' "A Charge to Keep" in Country Gentleman Magazine, Koerner painted it three years earlier for The Saturday Evening Post to illustrate a story by William J. Neidig called "The Slipper Tongue."
The horseman is a horse-thief fleeing a lynch mob.
But whatever its title, the work has become the best known of Koerner's over 800 commissioned paintings and drawings, including "Hugo Hercules," the original comic strip superhero.
Koerner immigrated from Germany at the age of three, and seventeen years later got a job as a staff artist for the Chicago Tribune for $5 a day. His duties included producing a Sunday strip for the Comics Supplement. He came up with an urban cowboy with super-strength. If that's not enough to call him a superhero, Hugo calls himself "the boy wonder" while aiding a series of Chicago damsels-in-mild-distress.
He has his own catch phrase too, "Just as easy," tossed off whenever he performs some inhuman feat, like ice skating with a boat on his shoulders or flinging a defensive line of football players across a goal post. Sometimes he adds, "I could do this forever," as if Koerner has hasn't drawn him in a sufficiently effortless pose. Clark Kent wouldn't declare, "This is a job for . . . Superman!"for almost four decades, but Hugo knows when "It's up to me!"
Oval Office visitors commented how Koerner's Methodist horse-thief looked a bit like George W., but Hugo was the one with the cowboy hat—offset by a sports jacket, stripped pants and bowtie. The hat vacillated between white and black though, and Hugo vacillated too. Overall he was a force for good, but his altruism was random and occasionally the good he did was correcting the harm he'd done—like when he missed a football and accidentally punted a house across a field. But at least he lugged it back, right? And so what if he uses his strength to collect the bowling competition prize money after destroying a wall and passing trolley in the process? After catching a falling safe from crushing an old man as his daughter helplessly watched, he asks: "Am I glad I did it? Wid de doll's arms around me neck and de old gent coffing a three spot? Am I glad?"
Note that folksy way of talking too. No wonder George W. liked Koerner. And if Hugo can be a bit destructive—did he really have to rip up a porch to carry it umbrella-like over a woman worried about the rain?—he helps far more than he harms, like when he catches that family jumping from a burning house, or when he carries a fire engine to another would-be disaster. He stops that runaway horse before it crashes its owner's carriage, but more often he only saves damsels from mild inconvenience, halting trolleys and cable cars that refuse to stop, or lifting an elephant standing on a handkerchief. And how did the striking cab-driver's union feel when carried that woman and her pile of crates? Dragging a derailed train twenty miles is nice, but is lifting a young Romeo and his car to his Juliet's balcony for a parting kiss really the best use of one's superpowers? As far as actual menaces, hugo does wrestle a bear into submission—though he was only saving himself. Same with those three muggers who corner him at gunpoint. They look ready to abandon the criminal life after he points a canon in their faces.
Would their bullets have bounced off him? Could he have leapt tall buildings if they'd tried to escape? No idea. We'll never know how Hugo might have matured into his yet-to-be-named genre. The strip only ran from September 1902 to January before Koerner abandoned it for better work. Soon he was studying with famed illustrator Howard Pyle, creator of the 1883 classic The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as varied adventures of Arthurian knights, noble pirates, and a modern Aladdin. It was a thorough education in proto-superheroes, but Koerner's interests turned west when The Saturday Evening Post commissioned his first two frontier scenes instead. He never returned. When he died at the age of 58, he was one of the best known artists of the Old West. That was 1938, the year Action Comics No. 1 rode onto newsstands.
When the Bushes returned to Texas, they took their so-called "A Charge to Keep" with them. The Obamas, fresh from Koerner's hometown of Chicago, replaced his galloping horse-thief with a more traditional Saturday Evening Post illustration, Norman Rockwell's "Working on the Statue of Liberty." At 24 x14, it's less than half the size of Koerner's work. It depicts four tiny workmen scaling the torch to clean its amber glass. It's slow, dangerous work—something Hugo Hercules could have finished in three panels.
The Obama Oval Office, however, is not cowboy-free. Frederic Remington's sculpture "The Bronco Buster" still sits on its side table, and the President not only kept but expanded his predecessor's spy programs, herding up emails across the frontier of the World Wide Web. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel found out the NSA was following their Master's will and bugging her phone, her government threatened the diplomatic equivalent of a lynch mob–counterespionage. "They're like cowboys," explained a party member, "who only understand the language of the Wild West."
What language will our next President understand?
Tags: A Charge to Keep, George W. Bush, Howard Pyle, Hugo Hercules, Norman Rockwell, Saturday Evening Post, The Slipper Tongue, W.H.D. Koerner
12/10/15 The First Superhero?
I've been assembling an ur-team of Avengers for my book On the Origin of Superheroes, and my first-ever superhero award goes to the Golem. He's super-strong, impervious to pain, and, when made from clay, can even shapeshift a bit. On the downside, he's dumb in both senses and so requires close supervision. Sorcerers and programmers beware.
"There is nothing more uncanny than something that is almost human," says Margaret Atwood. "All our stories about robotics are stories like that. It's what we have always worried about. It's the sorcerer's apprentice story: He learns how to do the charm; he doesn't know how to turn it off. It's the Golem story: You make the Golem, you activate it, it's supposed to do your work for you, and then it runs amok."
Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy features a genetically engineered species of designer humans, but they're too mellow to cause the survivors of her apocalypse much trouble. When it comes to magic brooms and water buckets running amok, I picture Mickey Mouse, but Goethe published his poem "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" while Napoleon was still waging France's Revolutionary Wars.
Apparently Goethe cribbed the tale from Lucian's Philopseudes, c. 150 CE, though the word "golem" is even older. It means "shapeless mass" in Hebrew, which is the description of Ben Grimm that Stan Lee typed up for Jack Kirby in 1960: "He's sort of shapeless—he's become a THING." Kirby drew a giant bumpy rock monster that turned orange at the printer's. I don't know if either had the Golem in mind, but Fantastic Four writer Karl Kesel did when he decided forty years later that Ben's full name was Benjamin Jacob Grimm.
Benjamin grew up going to synagogue as a kid and could still recite Torah passages from memory, so he probably knows that "golem" first appears in Psalms 139:16 ("my substance, yet being unperfect") when David praises God for creating him. The Talmud (c. 200 CE) uses the term to describe Adam's creation too: "In the first hour, his dust was gathered; in the second, it was kneaded into a shapeless mass." But jump forward another couple hundred years, and a passage mentions the first living golem: "Rabbah created a man, and sent him to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him, but received no answer. Thereupon he said unto him: 'Thou art a creature of the magicians. Return to thy dust.'"
Apparently they weren't all that hard to manufacture. All Pygmalion had to do was pray to Venus to bring his ivory statue Galatea to life. Daedalus soldered his golem Talos from bronze. If you're up on your Kabbalistic techniques, Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Formation) gives a how-to, but Aryeh Kaplan warns apprentices not to attempt it alone. Virgin dirt is also key. Marvel was still printing on pulp paper in 1974, which is why their Strange Tales Golem only ran three issues. Writer Len Wein gave the legend his best superheroic spin:
"In centuries agon, they had called him a myth, a creature formed of stone and clay and the blood of a people's oppression—a moving monolith who rose before the yoke of tyranny—shattered it in his monumental fists—then vanished into the sands of time—there to be almost forgotten—until today! Now once more he rises—summoned from his eons-long sleep to protect those he loves."
Marvel tries not to take sides in the Palestine-Israeli conflict, declaring it
"a war of territory, of ideologies—fought with great fervor but with little gain—fought with loaned weaponry wielded by men—men charged with love of country and the courage of their convictions, but men nonetheless—aye, as in all wars before this, fought by men—imperfect, all-too-human men."
But those the Golem loves are the family of Jewish archeologists who dig him up, while General Omar leads an army of marauding rapists who pillage the archeological camp and machinegun the grandfather. Uncle Abraham's dying tear reanimates the creature. "Eyes of a camel!" shouts one of the keffiyeh-wearing soldiers. "The statue—it lives!"
Michael Chabon's golem surfaces for far less dramatic adventures. His amazing Kavalier and Clay find its coffin filled
"to a depth of about seven inches, with a fine powder, pigeon-gray and opalescent, that Joe recognized at once from boyhood excursions as the silty bed of the Moldau . . . . The speculations of those who feared that the Golem, removed from the shores of the river that mothered it, might degrade had been proved correct."
My wife and I sat along the banks of the Moldau (AKA Vltava) sipping Budvar in a Prague café in 1996. The ground was too paved to be termed virginal, but the city has a legion of statues and tourist shop figurines already prepped for animation. Prague is to Golem as Metropolis is to Superman. The tales proliferated there like magic brooms in the 1800s. One named Josef protected Jews from a supervillainous Emperor with the additional superpower of invisibility—so basically half of the Fantastic Four. Benjamin Kuras, author of As Golems Go, explains why Golem still adventures in the Czech Republic:
"After living through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazism and decades of communism, the Czechs are drawn to a character with supernatural powers that will help liberate them from oppression."
The Golem is also the original "robot," a Czech word for "laborer" or "slave." Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (AKA "Rossum's Universal Robots") unleashed them on the world, resulting in the extinction of the human race in 1920. Despite the nuts-and-bolts contraptions in promo shots, Čapek's robots are the flesh-and-blood variety, more like clones or Philip Dick's sheep-dreaming replicants. Carl Burgos had the same idea when he drew the Human Torch for Marvel Comics No. 1 in 1939. The flames were one of those unintended "run amok" side effects, but rather than burning Brooklyn to the ground, the almost human Torch gets his superpower under control (bringing our Fantastic Four tally to 75%) and vows to help humanity even though humanity tried to seal him in a steel and concrete cage.
The Human Torch fizzled in the forties and wandered out to the desert to die—the same fate Wein copied for his Golem. The evil robot Ultron rebuilt the Torch's burnt-out corpse in 1968, and he was reborn as my favorite childhood superhero, the Vision. But then the original Torch erupted from a secret grave in the 80s, so the Vision was never really the Torch but a copy soldered from spare parts. Only, no wait, that's not it either, because next it turns out the Vision and the Torch are in fact the same synthoid split in two when a time-traveling supervillain manipulated the timeline. Except then the Vision half was ripped apart by She-Hulk, and his identity may or may not inhabit the sentient armor of the time-traveler's teen-age self, while his soul returned in a team of Dead Avengers before Tony Stark reassembled his body. And don't even get me started whether that body is the kind with buzzing wires and clanking pistons or the kind with synthetic organs that gurgle and fart.
Human animation is simpler. My wife returned from Prague pregnant with our daughter. King David praises God for "cover[ing] me in my mother's womb," but we followed a very different nuts and bolts process. Though nothing like the Thing, my daughter has been running amok for eighteen years now. She looks a lot more like the clay statue Hippolyte sculpted and, with the help of her gods William Marston and Harry G. Peter, brought to life in 1941—making Wonder Woman the original comic book Golem. Sadly, she's not available for my team of First Avengers.
Tags: Golem, Human Torch, Karel Čapek, Karl Kesel, Len Wein, Margaret Atwood, Prague, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Thing, Vision
05/10/15 Henry James Inked Me
After reading The Time Machine in 1900, Henry James wrote to H. G. Wells: "You are very magnificent. . . . I rewrite you much, as I read—which is the highest praise my damned impertinence can pay to an author." It's a strange compliment, and he expanded it two years later: "my sole and single way of perusing the fiction of Another is to write it over—even when most immortal—as I go. Write it over, I mean, re-compose it, in the light of my own high sense of propriety and with immense refinements and embellishments. . . to take it over and make the best of it."
James's damned impertinence turned his highest praise into an actual invitation to collaborate with Wells on a science fiction novel: "Our mixture would, I think, be effective. I hope you are thinking of doing Mars—in some detail. Let me in there, at the right moment—or in other words at an early stage . . . ." The two authors shared a literary agent, James B. Pinker, and James wanted to take over and make the best of a Wells manuscript before Pinker saw it: "to secure an ideal collaboration . . . I should be put in possession of your work in its . . . pre-Pinkerite state. Then I should take it up and give it the benefit of my vision. After which, as post-Pinkerite—it would have nothing in common with the suggestive sheets received by me, and yet we should have labored in sweet unison." He ends his letter "your faithful finisher."
This is a bizarre request. Give me your rough draft to rework however I wish. Wells declined. Of course Wells declined. But first he tested whether the offer was one-sided, asking to peruse the notes to James' next novel, The Ambassadors. Although James had a "carefully typed" 20,000-word prospectus, he did not share it with Wells. "A plan for myself, as copious and developed as possible, I always draw up," he explained, but "such a preliminary private outpouring . . . isn't a thing I would willingly expose to an eye but my own." And he wouldn't expose it to another's over-writing hand either. He was his own finisher.
James's notion of an "ideal collaboration" is laughably outside the norms of literary authorship, but it also reveals the damned impertinence of comic book production norms. Pencillers hand over "suggestive sheets" to inkers, or "finishers," who literally draw over them, refining and embellishing according to their own sense of propriety. That includes erasing. It may be some lowly office helper—Stan Lee in his earliest days—holding the eraser, but it's the inker who decides what stays and what goes. James's final pages "would have nothing in common" with Wells' erased and overwritten rough draft. And yet the plot, the chapter structure, the scene-by-scene movement—what comic book creator would call the layouts and breakdowns—they would still be Wells'. Reworking a sentence—adding flourishes, curving the grammar for new stylistic effects, while preserving and augmenting some paraphrasable meaning—that's an inker's job.
Four years later, after reading Wells' The Future of America, James wrote again, revealing his inking style: "you tend always to simplify overmuch . . . But what am I talking about, when just this ability and impulse to simply—so vividly—is just what I all yearningly envy you?—I who was accursedly born to touch nothing save to complicate it."
James would have added complexity to Wells' overly simplified language—how Eric Shanower inked Curt Swan's pencils for The Legend of Aquaman.
Swan was nearing the end of his career in 1989, but according to Mark Waid (via Eddy Zeno's Curt Swan: A Life in Comics) Swan considered the special issues a personal high point. The face, the anatomy, the foreshortened movement, those are recognizably Swan, but look at the background, the clouds, the meticulously scalloped waves, that's Shanower, an artist renown for his details. His Age of Bronze is almost calligraphic in its precision, each scallop of chain mail a painstaking wonder.
Would Wells have benefited from such a finish by James? Probably. But Swan wasn't always grateful for Shanower's efforts. During a visit to my campus, Shanower told a table of professors how he would erase Swan's background buildings in order to correct all the perspectives errors. Swan didn't thank him. He thought Shanower was wasting his time, but, like Wells in James' "ideal collaboration," his opinions were irrelevant once the sheets were in Shanower's hands.
Compare Shanower's chain mail and seas scallops to the inked versions of Swan by other artists, and you'll see what Swan considered an appropriate attention to detail. Bob Hughes at Who Drew Superman? credits Swan for dominating Superman during that other Bronze Age while collaborating with a dozen different artists. Bob Oksner inked Superman No. 287 in 1975:
Vince Colletta inked Superman Spectacular in 1977:
And Al Williamson inked Superman No. 410 in 1985:
Look at the full-page layouts, and you'll also see Swan's signature breakdown: the top 2/3rds divided into 4-5 panels, anchored by a bottom rectangle featuring Superman flying toward the right margin:
The Swan-Oksner background buildings look pretty detailed to my eye–though some of those perspective lines might be a tad wonky beyond Superman's right shoulder. The Swan-Colletta and Swan-Williamson backgrounds are comparatively sparse. In fact, sparseness was Vince Colletta's signature "style." Though his best work is revered for its own Shanower-esque precision, other artists dislike his high sense of propriety.
Editor kept Colletta employed because he got his work in on time, but pencillers, like Wells, avoided the sweet unison of collaboration. Joe Sinnott (who also inked plenty of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four pages) said Colletta "wrecked" his romance stories because Colletta "would eliminate people from the strip and use silhouettes, everything to cut corners and make the work easier for himself." Marvel writer Len Wein agreed that Colletta "ruined" art, and Steve Ditko and later Kirby refused to work with him.
Ditko, like Wells, preferred to ink himself. PencilInk documents a range of examples (Amazing Spider-man No. 3, 1963; Monster Hunters No. 8, 1976; Iron Man Annual No. 11, 1990):
But sometimes even Ditko would have to willingly expose his preliminary outpourings for the benefit of another artist's vision. Wayne Howard, for example, inked House of Mystery No. 247 in 1976:
And Dan Adkins inked Superboy No. 257 in 1979:
But the most discordant of Ditko's finishers was John Byrne. As an artist used to getting top-billing as both writer and penciller, he, like James, took possession of Ditko's pages, applying his own immense refinements and embellishments. Look at Avengers Annual No. 13 from 1984:
The thug's left foot–only Ditko would draw the impossibly upturned sole. But that's a Byrne mouth on Captain America, the musculature too. When Mr. Fantastic appears, he seems to have beamed in from Byrne's Fantastic Four run, but that's a glaringly Ditko-esque face grinning open-mouthed beside him:
The mixture of the two is even stranger:
Is this what a Wells-James collaboration looks like? James would have placed his name first–though only because cutting Wells from the credit box entirely wouldn't be an option too. That's what Alexander Dumas did with his collaborators. Auguste Maquet co-authored both The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, but it's only Dumas on the covers because Maquet was his employee, what Marvel calls "work for hire." Maquet produced rough drafts for his boss to write-over. He later sued for co-credit, but the French courts ruled in favor of Dumas.
In comics, the prestige position is reversed. Swan and Kirby had so many inkers because their editors wanted them pencilling as many titles as possible. At Marvel, the penciller was the primary creator, laying out stories with empty captions and balloons for the so-called writers to fill-in. In Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, Jason Lee plays Ben Afflleck's inker and takes insult when called a "tracer." Lee's name also appears below Affleck's in the actual credits. By the end of the film, Lee has ended their collaboration. H. G. Wells was wise never to begin one with Henry James.
[And if you'd like to read more about their correspondence, check out Nicholas Delbanco's Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James and H. G. Wells. ]
Tags: curt swan, eric shandower, H. G. Wells, Henry James, John Byrne, Steve Ditko, Vince Colletta


text:
Lizzywanders.
illustration & game design ~ available for freelance
I'm Liselore "Lizzy" Goedhart and this is my blog. I'm an independent illustrator and game developer based in Utrecht, NL. My style is organic, stylistic, colorful and cute. I'm interested in designs that are open to interpretation. When I laugh or smile during the process of making a character, I know I'm on the right track :)
My artist name is Lizzywanders because wander is a term that interests me in a lot of ways.
First, to wander means: to roam, drift and float, but it also means to continue walking and moving. I believe my mind wanders constantly, looking for magic and means to express myself.
Secondly, wanders can be pronounced as 'wonders'; for instance, right now I'm wondering about this sentence.
And lastly, the main character of the game Shadow of the Colossus is called Wander. This game is always a big inspiration to me when it comes to art, story and gameplay.
Early August 2008 I started my own company in Utrecht, together with four other creatives, called Monobanda. We developed playful experiences and artistic games. After 6 years I decided to become an independent designer with my company Lizzywanders.
All artwork © Liselore Goedhart 2015


text:
Drawing the Line: a new military fiction novel by Peter Nealen
by Jack Murphy Aug 1, 2017
Former Force Recon Marine Peter Nealen has his latest military fiction novel out, one that I know our readers have been looking forward to for a while now. This book is actually a prequel to the Praetorian series about a mission taking place in Mexico that the author has been foreshadowing in his books for years. Drawing the Line is sure to make some great summer reading that I'll be catching up on as well. -Jack
If it hadn't been for the earpiece, I never would have heard the radio over the snarl of the four-wheeler's engine.
"Hillbilly, this is Plug," Hank called.
I eased off the throttle and took one hand off the handlebars to key the radio. "Send it, Plug."
"Can you push up to the top of that ridgeline just to the east of you and take a look to the south?" he asked. "Tell me what you see."
"Sure thing," I answered. It wasn't like we had a set patrol route, or even any particular need to be anywhere. So far, this job had consisted of little more than long hours just hot-wheeling around the hills of southern Arizona on four-wheelers and the occasional pickup truck.
I gunned the engine and sent the sturdy little ATV surging up between the mesquites and the creosote bushes toward the ridge that Hank had indicated. It wasn't a long climb, but it was steep and rocky, with plenty more sagebrush and creosote bushes that I had to weave around. But it still only took a couple of minutes to reach the top.
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Halting my ATV, I stood on the running boards and pulled my binos out of the saddlebags. As I lifted them to my eyes and scanned the open ground to the south, I quickly saw what Hank had been talking about.
There were four figures trotting through the grass and brush in the next draw over. They were moving pretty quickly, and heading generally north. Given that Hank and I were the only ones out on patrol at the time, and all of Manuel Lopez's ranch hands were either working around the house and barns, or watching the herds to the east of us, that kind of narrowed things down.
"Plug, Hillbilly," I sent, keeping the binos trained on the four. "I do believe we have some uninvited visitors."
"That's what I saw, too," he replied. "Just wanted to corroborate it. Meet you down below, and we'll go say howdy?"
"Sure," I answered. I wasn't going to complain about actually having some work to do.
The truth be told, even though we were all experienced warfighters, with years of work in the military and some in the contracting world, we had perhaps been a touch naïve when we'd started up our little company. After all, we owned Praetorian Security, and we knew the score better than any of the soft-clothed financiers who owned most of the rest of the PMSCs out there. We could determine our own equipment, pick our own jobs, and find the jobs that would keep us in the thick of it, in the shit.
We were finding out the hard way that those kinds of jobs were few and far between, and often involved a lot more shady business to get than we'd necessarily expected. Most of the time, they were either outright illegal, or in some kind of gray area that tended to get all kinds of scrutiny, so the clients who had those sorts of jobs didn't tend to be very forthcoming about them. We'd set up our little private Special Operations company, only to find that we didn't immediately have clients running to our doorstep.
So, we'd taken the first decent job that had finally come our way. It paid only a little over three hundred dollars a day per man, which didn't go even half as far those days as it had even five years earlier, but it was better than nothing. Even if it was for only two weeks. For our three hundred a day, we rode around Manuel Lopez' ranch in the hills west of Nogales and watched for trespassers, be they narcos, illegals, or coyotes.
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So far, we'd shot a lot more coyotes of the four-legged kind, along with a few coy-wolves, than we'd seen human interlopers. And the coyotes and coy-wolves were elusive little critters.
Leaning into the ATV, I started it down the ridgeline, which meandered down and to the south. It was rocky, but the four-wheeler had a good suspension, and I didn't have too much trouble negotiating the terrain. The mesquite and sycamore trees were far enough apart that I didn't have to do much dodging, either.
In a matter of minutes, I saw Hank's dust cloud as he crossed the draw behind me, cutting ahead to meet me on the ridgeline, above and about seven hundred meters north of the oncoming group of newcomers. We'd be able to get a better look at them from there, and plan our next move. If they were just illegals, we could probably turn them around quickly enough, though if there was a coyote with them, and not the four-legged kind, he might be armed. But this didn't look like a group that would have a human trafficker guiding them across the border. The coyotes usually preferred larger groups, especially with the Border Patrol having essentially fallen back to the Phoenix line. Bigger groups were more lucrative, and they didn't have to worry about much interference.
I got to our rendezvous point about thirty seconds ahead of Hank, and sat my four-wheeler easily, taking a long drink from my canteen while I pulled my cap off to wipe some of the sweat and dust off my face. It was hot down there, and there wasn't a lot of shelter from the Arizona sun away from the mesquites.
I was in full view of the newcomers, and from what I could make out of their activity with my naked eyes, they saw me. Well, there hadn't been any way of disguising the noise of the ATV's engine in the desert quiet, and besides, we were there as deterrents more than we were as gunfighters, as vaguely disappointing as that might have been for men hankering for another taste of that combat adrenaline rush.
Hank roared up and stopped in a small cloud of dust. He was short and barrel-chested, built like a fireplug, which had gotten him his callsign. That, and the fact that he was fire-engine red most of the time, if he was outside. It wasn't so much a matter that he sunburned; Hank was just a red-faced guy. Since he shaved his head, it meant he looked a lot like a boiled lobster much of the time; a boiled lobster with a three-inch blond goatee.
"It's about fucking time," he grumbled, standing up on the floorboards of his four-wheeler. "This shit's boring as fuck."
"Ah, it still gets us out in the open, and we're still getting paid to carry guns," I pointed out without looking at him. I was still watching the four below. "It's better than nothing."
"Maybe so, but it's still not the 'Next Executive Outcomes,' is it?" he grumbled. He laughed suddenly. "Boy, were we optimistic, weren't we?"
"Let's focus on the here and now," I said. "Do they look like they're running for cover to you?"
He squinted, then frowned. "No, it does not," he agreed. "Bad guys, you think?"
"You never know, down here," I said. "We're not that far from Nogales, but I'm pretty sure that the local cops who aren't on the take aren't going to be in a hurry to do much law enforcement this far from backup." Which was a large part of why we were down there; Mr. Lopez couldn't be sure that there was anyone else to secure his ranch, and he'd lost some stock already. So, unable to rely on the law, he'd hired us, at least for as long as he could afford.
"How do you want to play it?" Hank asked. He was one of the few of us who had been "just a grunt," though I knew a lot of grunts who could outperform and out-shoot SOF guys, but had just never gotten the chance. Hank was one of those guys. He wasn't bitter about it; he was just glad that Jim had known him and had brought him aboard and given him the opportunity.
It wasn't like there were a lot of other jobs open for former trigger pullers those days.
I peered around at the sage- and mesquite-covered hills. There were any number of spots that would make decent overwatch positions, and I didn't want to be running down there to get in the middle of those guys without somebody watching my back. We both had our rifles in scabbards on our ATVs for a reason. Finally, I pointed to a rocky promontory sticking out of the grass and brush about another two hundred meters south of us. The four down below were going to have to go past it soon. "Why don't you go set up there, and I'll move down to intercept them once you're in position," I said. "Don't bother about concealment; they need to see you to get the message."
With a jaunty half-wave, half-salute, Hank revved his four-wheeler again and headed for the indicated position. I turned my attention back to the oncoming intruders. Hank knew his business.
The four of them were still moving, threading through the sage and creosote bushes, apparently completely unconcerned about the fact that we were watching them. That got my hackles up, and I scanned the hills for backup. Either they thought that we were local law enforcement, bought and paid for, or Border Patrol, which had had its teeth pulled this far south for years now, or they just figured we didn't have the guts to do anything. Or, this was an ambush, and they were the bait.
But I wasn't getting paid just to watch. There wasn't anyone to report the crossing to, either. So, after giving Hank a couple of minutes to move into his pos, I started to thread my way down into the draw, taking a route that would bring me up to them from uphill. I'd take any terrain advantage that I could get.
I was halfway down the side of the ridge when Hank's voice crackled in my earpiece. "Hillbilly, Plug. In position. No weapons in sight."
I waved over my head to let him know I'd heard. Hank would have set up in such a way that he could watch them and me at the same time.
The four of them had slowed as I got closer, though they hadn't stopped. I considered pulling my SOCOM 16 out of its scabbard, but decided that I'd be able to get the .45 on my hip into action a lot faster, especially with Hank providing covering fire from above. I left the rifle where it was for the moment.
They finally stopped as I roared within fifty yards of them. I moved to get in front of them before braking hard, the ATV rocking on its shocks as I stopped in a cloud of dust.
"Buenos tardes!" I called out. "You know you're on private property, right?"
None of the four of them looked like the type who really gave a fuck whether they were on private property or not. They were all Mexican, lean and mean-looking, dressed in an assortment of jeans, cargo pants, and t-shirts. Only one guy, who looked like the youngest, had a collared shirt on, open to his breastbone, and revealing parts of several extensive and somewhat gruesome tattoos.
Yeah, even if the bottom dropping out of the dollar hadn't slowed down the traffic in migrant workers to a bare trickle, these guys weren't going to be mistaken for migrant workers looking for a better life anytime soon.
The young guy in the black collared shirt spat in the dust, but none of them said anything. They just stood there and glared at me.
"Yeah, I get the message," I said. "And I couldn't give less of a fuck. Turn your asses around and start walking back the way you came. Otherwise, my partner up above might start getting a mighty itchy trigger finger."
The beefy-looking, sweaty one spat at my tire. "Chinga tu madre, maricon," he said. Fuck your mother, faggot.
I just grinned like a death's head and waved my off hand. A sharp crack echoed across the draw, and dust was smacked up less than a foot from old boy's feet. He flinched and jumped backward a bit, almost hitting one of his homies.
"We don't usually like to use warning shots, but I'm feeling generous today," I said, not entirely truthfully. While Mr. Lopez had said he didn't really give a damn how we went about securing his ranch, he'd still been noticeably uncomfortable at the notion of setting up sniper hides and just schwacking anyone who crossed the line when that course of action had been brought up, though not entirely seriously. So, Alek and I had decided to go ahead and make warning shots SOP. "Now turn around and leg it back down the draw, or the next one goes through your fucking skull."
Get Drawing the Line on Amazon.
About Jack Murphy View All Posts
Jack served as a Sniper and Team Leader in 3rd Ranger Battalion and as a Senior Weapons Sergeant on a Military Free Fall team in 5th Special Forces Group. Having left the military in 2010, he graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. Murphy is the author of Reflexive Fire, Target Deck, Direct Action, and Gray Matter Splatter. His memoir, "Murphy's Law" is due for a 2019 release and can be pre-ordered now.
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