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HomeSwann's Down by Charles Salzberg
Swann's Down by Charles Salzberg
June 24, 2019 the bookworm book reviewsbook review, book tour, crime thriller, indie author, mystery, Partners In Crime
source: free review copy via Partners in Crime Tours
title: Swann's Down
author: Charles Salzberg
genre: crime mystery
first line: "We're partners, right?"
When Henry Swann is asked by his quirky partner, Goldblatt, to find a missing psychic who's swindled his ex-wife out of a small fortune, he just can't say no. Although he doesn't actually expect to get paid, he figures it might give him a chance to finally learn more about his partner's mysterious past. His search takes him into the controversial, arcane world of psychics, fortunetellers, and charlatans, while raising questions in his own mind about whether or not there is an after-life.
While working his partner's case, he's approached by a former employer, attorney Paul Rudder, to track down a missing witness who might be able to provide an alibi for his client, Nicky Diamond, a notorious mob hitman who's scheduled to go on trial for murder he claims he didn't commit in a week. Swann's search for the missing witness, who happens to be the defendant's girlfriend, takes him from Brooklyn to a small beach town across the Bay from Mobile, Ala. But what does she really know and will she even come back with him to testify for her boyfriend?
Praise for Swann's Down:
"Psychics, double-crosses, missing persons—Charles Salzberg's latest Henry Swann book has it all. Swann's Down is a gritty, no-frills PI novel that brings to mind greats like Reed Farrel Coleman's Moe Prager and Michael Harvey's Michael Kelly. Whether this is your first Swann adventure or the latest, you won't want to miss the brass-knuckle punch that is Swann's Down. Trust me."
— —Alex Segura, author of Blackout and Dangerous Ends
"From Manhattan to Coney Island to the steamy shores of Alabama, Charles Salzberg delivers a top-flight mystery with his latest Henry Swann outing. Highly recommended."
— Tom Straw, New York Times bestselling author as Richard Castle
Swann's Down gives readers two intriguing mysteries for the price of one, as skip tracer Henry Swann pursues a woman who might alibi a murderer and a psychic who swindled the ex-wife of Swann's partner. Shamus Award-nominated Salzberg does a superb job cutting between the two investigations. I kept turning pages to stay with both chases as the suspense increased to the very end. Whatever is going on, Swann is at the center of this story. His wry wit, quotes from authors and philosophers, genius for questioning suspects, and dark past make him a character readers will follow anywhere as he seeks his quarry. This is another thrilling addition to this excellent series.
— Rich Zahradnik, Lights Out Summer, winner of the 2018 Shamus Award for Best Paperback Private Eye Novel
Henry Swann dives in where others fear to tread in Swann's Down: Fast. Funny. And Smart. This time out, Swann crosses paths with a psycho hitman, a phony psychic and Swann's mysterious partner, a disbarred lawyer. Who could ask for more? I hope we'll see a lot more of Swann in the future and that this isn't Swann's swan song.
— Paul D. Marks, Shamus Award-winning Author of White Heat and Broken Windows.
Today I am posting my thoughts on Swann's Down by Charles Salzberg . This crime thriller caught me by surprise as I finished it in one sitting.
This is the fifth installment in the Henry Swann series but reads perfectly well as a stand alone. The book starts off with detective Henry Swann being sent by his partner Goldblatt to track down the psychic who scammed his ex-wife Rachel out of almost seventy five thousand dollars. As he searches for psychic Madame Sofia, the storyline takes a different twist when Swann's former boss hires him to find a woman named Jana. Jana is needed to testify as an alibi for her boyfriend, a hitman named Nicky Diamond who is being charged with murder but she is missing.
This was a fast, easy read and I enjoyed the narrative and the interesting cast of characters as the mysteries were solved. I liked Swann and his straightforwardness. I enjoyed the flow of the story and as he searches for clues in hunting down the bad guys I was easily swept along. Swann even ends up in Paterson where I was born and raised to ask a few questions. Swann's Down was a fun mystery with a noir vibe.
"Like it or not, everyone has a past. Some remember it. Some don't. Some learn from it. Some refuse to."-p. 91, Swann's Down
Genre: Detective/Noir/Mystery
Published by: Down & Out Books
ISBN: 978-1-64396011-1
Series: Henry Swann
Purchase Links: Amazon | BN.com | Goodreads
Charles Salzberg is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in New York magazine, Esquire, GQ, Redbook, The New York Times Book Review and other periodicals. He has written over 20 non-fiction books, including From Set Shot to Slam Dunk, an oral history of the NBA, and Soupy Sez: My Zany Life and Times. He is author of the Shamus Award nominated Swann's Last Song, Swann Dives In, Swann's Lake of Despair, nominated for two Silver Falchions, Swanns Way Out, Devil in the Hole, named one of the best crime novels of the year by Suspense magazine. He was a Visiting Professor of Magazine at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and he teaches writing the New York Writers Workshop where he is a Founding Member. He is a member of the MWA-NY Board.
Catch Up With Charles Salzberg On:
Charlessalzberg.com, Goodreads, Twitter, & Facebook!
Swann's Down is on virtual blog tour, click here to view the rest of the participants.
Disclaimer: This review is my honest opinion. I did not receive any kind of compensation for reading and reviewing this book. I received a free review copy of Swann's Down via Partners in Crime Tours in exchange for my honest thoughts.
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13 thoughts on "Swann's Down by Charles Salzberg"
I too enjoyed this book. Loved the characters and the author's writing style.
The book sounds like a lot of fun. It has been a while since I finished a book in one sitting. I can see getting drawn in and doing so however.
Thanks Brian, this one as fun and I was easily drawn in.
fun with noir vibe sounds good 🙂 I read one like that…omg that was years ago now when I think
I enjoyed this one 🙂
charlessalzberg says:
Thanks so much for the kind review. One sitting, is quite an honor, though it reminds me of people who work days preparing a Thanksgiving feast and then it's gone in 20 minutes. But it sure was satisfying!
Thank you, I enjoyed your book! And I like the Thanksgiving dinner comparison lol
I'm glad you enjoyed this mystery, Naida. Terrific review! 🙂
Thank you Susan!
I can't remember the last time I finished a book in one sitting. I'll have to look for this one.
I enjoyed this one!
Yvonne (@Fiction_Books) says:
I have a couple of these easy-read, fill-in books scheduled, which suits me just fine.
I had expected to discover that this book was part of a well-established, lengthy series, however as we are only up to book #5 and the stories work okay as stand alones, I might add them to my list!
Hi Yvonne, this was a good one and I breezed right through it.


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Political Syntax I: Mythical and Legal Declaratives
Filed under: GA — adam @ 11:19 am
The most exemplary declarative probably issues from the ideal court when it simply declares what the law is: "statute x violates the First Amendment"; "y has no standing to speak here"; "fact z is legally irrelevant"; etc. Such sentences sustain a world comprised solely of utterances governed by rules of internal coherence; they are situated at the crossroads of demands that can only made commensurable within the legal system; and they correspond to the generative character of social reality (drawing upon precedents and leading to appeals, translating external conflicts into ones internal to the system). The judge as umpire or arbiter ensures the "proper" alignment of deferred imperatives and imperative-ostensive articulations that goes into making a declarative order: facts are only allowed into evidence if a "chain" of custody can be established ostensively at each point along the way, the reliability of testimony is rigorously allowed for, in part through the exclusion of testimony which is intrinsically below a certain threshold of reliability ("hearsay"), those facts must touch directly upon some violation which has been alleged, etc., etc.
The law itself is somewhat less exemplary as a declarative, insofar as any law verges on the imperative; nor, however, is the law a body of commands. Whether we are speaking of general, constitutional laws, such as "The power of the executive will be vested in the President" or "homocide will be punished by…" or "a Department of Health Services is hereby established pursuant to" some previous statute requiring such a department for its activation, what laws do is authorize someone to issue imperatives within a restricted sphere of activity. But wherein, exactly, does this "authorizing" lie? The law doesn't create the world of imperatives, even if it adds to it, prodigiously–it takes a prior world of imperative-ostensive articulations as given. The law, as an independent reality, must emerge as a transcendence of some crisis in that world of articulations, a crisis in which the demand that others recognize the same ostensives as oneself becomes impossible. The separation of the imperative and the judgment of its provenance and legitimacy is the result–this separation is "law."
In my previous posts on "originary grammar," I have posited a crisis of the imperative which I have called "originary nihilism": due to incompatability between imperatives and/or between imperatives which cannot be rescinded and a reality which cannot be adjusted to satisfy them, the interlocutors lose the common object which makes the completion of the imperative possible in the first place–the crisis gets to the point, in other words, where the crisis is intensifying while knowledge of what would count as its resolution recedes. Now, I would like to add to this analysis the assumption that what the impossible imperative ultimately demands is the "total" presence of the one to whom the imperative is issued: the more the imperative goes unfulfilled, the more the "will" and "good faith" of the one expected to carry it out becomes the issue, and the more the crisis-ridden demand swerves into one that the subject of the demand "saturate" the linguistic space with "proof" of his bona fides; but it is precisely such "proof" that is always impossible to provide in a satisfactory manner.
This analysis would link, loosely (as part of a long term process of consolidation), the emergence of the declarative with the emergence of the big man in the post-egalitarian community. The declarative event, that is, preserves the memory of the imperative crisis which itself provided the first indication that a crisis of the community tended to single out some member as origin of that crisis. Further, it seems reasonable to assume that the emission of the first declarative would not have been by the focus of the crisis, who would be too busy trying desperately to fulfill the impossible demand and would himself be "saturated" with the expectations flowing his way; rather, it would be some relatively unassociated member of the community who would place the term for the demanded object (or some object singled out among the swirling demands) next to a term for some other familiar element of the community's common reality and redirect the group's attention to the possible reality evoked by that articulation. If, as Eric Gans contends in his "Originary Narrative," "narrative is the declarative reading of the originary sign," the declarative is simultaneously the translation of the originary scene into a narrative, the movement from one center qua site of crisis to another center qua site of transcendence. And this translation is necessarily a "misreading," or at least a "mythical" reading, insofar as the declarative must locate the source of transcendence in the seamless continuity between the "struggles" of the subject of the impossible imperative and the ostensive verification by the group that the center has been restored as a result of those "struggles," even if the "verification" can only be in the formation of the declarative "distraction" itself. To put it otherwise, the fully originary declarative must align within a single vector all the criss-crossing imperatives: one imperative must be represented as a response to another leading to some concluding fulfillment of an inner or outer demand. At any rate, the division between storyteller and actor, king and shaman/priest, etc., is already implicit in the originary declarative, which is why I associate the emergence of the declarative with the emergence of the minimal conditions for the big man, which, again, need be nothing more than a recognition that crises tend to establish a "force field" in which attention gravitates toward a specific "responsible" member.
Such "mythical" declaratives constitute narratively an existing but incoherent (from m the new position required by the emission of the declarative) field of imperative-ostensive articulations, primarily by assimilating new articulations into that field. What the law does is destroy the a priori ordering of imperatives that the declarative would initially help to establish and consolidate, so that "judgment" takes over at least some portion of the function of myth. In transcending originary nihilism, the declarative is also modelling the intelligence of the center by enabling a mode of centering within what I would like to call the "field of semblances" opened up by the sign: by "semblance," I mean any thing that is simultaneously sign and object, something that can be localized, possessed and controlled, while at the same time it (in our very desire to localize, possess and control it) directs out attention elsewhere. All objects and signs are semblances, but in varying, even widely varying proportions–all objects, that is, except the originary one which, as the source of all signs, always itself resides at least a little beyond signification. At the same time, there is a certain "signness" that resides slightly beyond objecthood," in our very freedom to issue new signs. Any thing we might actually confront or point to in the world, though, is a semblance within the field of semblances, with absolute object and absolute sign serving as guarantees of some minimal coherence of the field.
The field of semblances requires, as I suggested, various centerings, nodal points (what Lacan called "points du caption") that provide patterns and regularities within the field. The declarative enables us to produce such centerings by registering the impossible demand, which could emerge at any point and, at least as important, could always be anticipated as a result of some shift in the field of imperative-ostensive articulations, and ordering such demands within a new, projected, reality. Any sentence, any string of sentences, is modelling a new way of assembling semblances. The declarative both imitates the chaos of demands it simulates an extrication from and models an appropriate scene upon which such demands would be neutralized because upon that scene the demands would be irrelevant, replaced by new, more manageable and interesting ones. In such imitation and modeling lies, respectively, the "style" and "content" of the sentence.
So, laws don't "tell" individuals not to do x or y–the law against murder does not command me, personally, not to commit murder; the laws of taxation do not command me to pay my taxes. The law authorizes the chain of imperatives that would ultimately lead to my incarceration for murder or tax evasion. But, again, "authorize" can't simply mean to conjure up out of thin air–there have always been, since there have been imperatives, individuals whose suppression of certain activities at certain times and places would not be interfered with, and would in fact receive the necessary assistance. What the law does is separate those authorized functions from specific "imperators," i.e., those at the highest end of a chain of imperatives. If the originary declarative establishes the conditions for the big man by interrupting and ordering the colliding imperatives directed at some proto-big man (or, rather some image, even a "negative" one, of a possible big man); which is to say, if the declarative emerges by speaking of the big man, or speaking the possibility of the big man into being (the declarative formally announces the possibility of a concentration of imperatives–and the line between being the target of the concentrated force of ordered imperatives and being the author of that force is an extremely thin one–precisely by deferring the consequences of the chaos of impossible imperatives)–the declarative order, by contrast, effects a transformation from the symbiosis of "imperator" and "declaimer" in the "mythical" declarative to the convertibility of the two positions into each other.
What this convertibility really entails is something as simple, but in a sense as astonishing, as some imperators being willing to act against others without thereby arrogating the entire imperative field for themselves. (By "act against" [or, really, just to "act"] I mean produce a new ostensive sign available to emitter and audience that will "seal" or provide the "content" of a new declarative affirming that that new ostensive can be accommodated within the possible field of semblances opened up by a prior declarative–a prior declarative which in its turn requires these succeeding ones to provide its own, ostensive, content.) How important this is is indicated by how difficult it must have been, what a tremendous event it must have required–even now, think of how difficult it is in the most liberal, law governed countries, to get the police or military to police their own. And I don't mean to refer merely to some "primitive" solidarity on the part of those (in David Grossman's terms, the "sheepdogs") entrusted to protect us (the "sheep") from the "wolves." Rather, the "sheepdogs" are simply aware as the rest of us, ever tempted to confuse the protective growling of the sheepdog for the genuinely dangerous snarl of the wolf, are not, that a far higher threshold for initiating suspicion is absolutely necessary for the sheepdogs since a far higher degree of trust is required for such institutions to function.
The law, then, is precisely this point of convertibility between imperatives and declaratives. A lawful imperative is one that can be "translated" into a declarative: "bring that here" is, in other words, only lawful insofar as the linguistic and institutional conditions exist for translating it into something like "for commonly agreed upon purposes it its necessary that that object be moved from its present location to the one I am indicating; and, according to commonly accepted procedures, you are the one with the responsibility to effect that movement." While we couldn't really speak of "lawful declaratives," we could speak of responsible declaratives within a law governed field of semblances, and such declaratives would be those providing for the possibility of a subsequent declarative assimilating the imperative-ostensive content of the sentence in question: "ultimate" responsibility would be determined by those (declaratively established) centers within the field of semblances where the imperative-ostensive articulations circulate.
Such "conversions" would always be problematic, and here is where politics would enter. Leaving aside for now the political founding event that would have been required to bring a regime of laws into existence in the first place, we could say that within such a regime politics would be situated in between the ongoing processes of imperatives-converting-into-declaratives and declaratives-converting into imperative/ostensives. At any point along the way one could sever some link required for full convertibility. A young man spray painting graffitti on the side of a school is seen by a policeman on patrol–does the policeman pursue relentlessly, using deadly force if necessary against the fleeing perpetrator; does he shrug, or perhaps smile, and let the boy run off; does he apprehend the boy, perhaps a little roughly, and get called up on abuse charges, while the graffitti is celebrated for its authenticity and cutting edge social commentary and its creator given a scholarship to art school from donations by citizens appalled at his treatment? Any of these scenes, and many more in between, is compatible with the formal prohibition on defacing public property, and whichever is played out will provide us with far more information regarding the quality of the regime than the mere fact of that prohibition. The lines of force go both ways here: the declarative stating that vandalism is a wrong against the public gets rerouted along the way to the implementation of the imperative it authorizes; while the imperator must, in a split second, consider whether the imperative he is charged with enforcing can, under these conditions, undergo conversion to a declarative acceptable to himself and his future judges: can he "justify" the risks of injury to himself, the perpetrator, and bystanders in a pusuit carried out to some degree of relentlessness; will any imaginable enforcement of his charge likely be translated into a widely shared declarative on the order of "this policeman is hereby deemed to have abused his position through the exercise of excessive force"? And this even leaves aside the far from negligible fact that the policeman also has to "live with himself," which is to say, carry out the translation from imperative to declarative and back again on his own private, perhaps idiosyncratic, moral terms.
So, we are engaging politically when we produce declaratives that generate regions in the field of lawful semblances that might interfere with declarative-imperative-declarative convertibilities. Legal declaratives (general prohibitions and licenses, whether formalized by law or not) create a space in which the carrying out of imperatives is supplemented by third party ostensive verification; political declaratives propose imperative fields that serve primarily to generate new ostensives, which is to say, show us something new regarding the imperatives people are ready and able to fulfill, refuse and resist (with refusal and resistance being nothing more than the issuance to oneself of an unauthorized imperative, but one more fully convertible–within the field of semblances centered in oneself, at any rate–with legal declaratives).
Adam Katz
The Global Civil War of Position
Assume, as per the Girardian account of human origin, that there can be no originary scene without a scapegoat; further assume, contra Girard, that the crucifixion of Jesus was just one more in a long series of scapegoatings, resolving nothing but rather making the process even more insidious because the victim in this case openly asks for it; and, finally, assume that all of the modern social forms that claim to transcend scapegoating, like the nation state, individual rights and liberties, the modern market, etc., are themselves simply extensions and concealments of the now global, unified process of scapegoating (the nation produces the despised minority, the market the exploited poor, individual rights the culturally othered, etc.). Add to this the immeasurable means of destruction available within this system, and the recent demise of the only possible (because sceneless) alternative to scenic liberty, and you have the ideology of the contemporary Left. If you believe all these things, where do you look for political salvation, or at least relief–how, if nothing else, do you throw up some roadblocks to the stampede? Your mission must be to prevent any scene from arriving at closure. Scapegoating requires some "mark" be attributed to the scapegoat–the more that mark singles out the scapegoat as an object of attention, and as dangerous or subversive in some way to the community, the more it would set in motion the stampede. What you must do is prevent any mark from taking shape. You can recognize, in theory, that individuals and even members of groups (at the very least, voluntarily formed groups) might accumulate and call for marks for perfectly legitimate reasons; but overshadowing that abstract recognition is the deeper knowledge that the distinction between legitimate markings and scapegoating will ultimately be made by the same communal mechanism as would orchestrate any scapegoating, so, for all practical purposes, the distinction is irrelevant; even worse, it must be attacked as a distraction, one that the leaders of mobs (the ones with the torches) will predictably deploy. You must simply reject any marking–wherever some marking is starting to take shape, you must foreground whatever in the potentially marked group resists such marking. At the same time, there is one exception to your absolute opposition to marking: it is essential that you mark the unmarked markers. Marking the "white" markers, as you have learned from bitter experience, is a question of both sheer survival and justice (they will destroy you if given half a chance; and they deserve it–now all will be marked and a version of original sin put in place); even more, you must do so pre-emptively, because they are experts and it comes naturally to them, while you have to keep reminding yourself to be tough enough. Doing whatever is required to prevent the consolidation of any "mark," along with the seemingly contradictory task of marking up the putative markers; inventing entire disciplines and political movements dedicated to nothing more than the invention of ways to disrupt "marking" and bring those responsible into ill repute–this is all of the activity of the contemporary Left–they do nothing else.
That is certainly enough to keep them very busy, though–it may be necessary to represent the "marked-up" as "resistant" to being marked, as challenging the stereotpye through the formation of their own "agency"; but, then, that "resistant" agency can itself become part of the "mark-up" (the group in question is violent, unruly, or untrustworthy), in which case it becomes necessary to deny that the "group" in question exists in any determinate form (it is just a product of the "marking" itself); it may be necessary to discover all kinds of facts that have been ignored in the process of marking that group and simply repeating them whenever you get the chance–but it might also be necessary to produce wholly fictional versions of the group, which can always be justifable on anti-marking grounds. And there can be all kinds of interesting debates about whether marking proceeds along lines of some kind of material interest or is "constitutive"; over which groups are genuinely in danger of being marked (how about veterans?), the various gradations and combinations of markings, and so on.
It is important to analyze the Left on two levels. First, as a mode of sacrality, a religion: in this case, the Left could be seen to be worshipping the actual or prospective victim of the normal and we could trace a line from the original victims of the Left (free thinking intellectuals and democrats persecuted by the Church and Absolutist regimes) through the emergence of the "masses" in the Western countries, victims of the gigantic "sparagmos" of the Industrial Revolution, through to women and, especially, the Third World, in the wake of the post-Leninist turn in revolutionary socialism toward oppressed nations as stand-ins for the disappointing Western proletariat. At an earlier, more "heroic" stage, the Left claimed a project of social transformation in socialisms which, in originary terms, we could simply define as the fantasy of abolishing scenes altogether in our collective subsumption under natural-technological processes; with the collapse of this project, though, the Left is really a death-cult: the victims of the normal must continually be slaughtered, actually and symbolically, in order for the normal order to be forever marred, forever guilty, incomplete, in need of absolution.
This does not mean that the Left has no political form, of course: politically, the various currents of the Left have merged into a "transnational progressivism," in which a post-national international law, with its legitimating roots in the post-War Nuremberg Trials and associated legal innovations, buttressed by the equally transnational, adversarial media and academic establishments, progessively neturalizes all the elements of national and cultural life that might conceivably restart the clash of private and public interests which (on this account) led to the catastrophe of the two world wars (the founding, traumatic scene of modern scapegoating). But such a world would be intrinsically static, which is to say the telos of transnational progressivism is as much a fantasy as socialism; insofar as the Left is a movement, which is to say, moves–responds to and generates events–it is currently the Global Intifada, an unsteady but sufficiently coherent conjoining of violence and threats of violence which for the most part stays just below the threshold needed to trigger massive retaliation (mostly Muslim, but drawing in the remnants of the socialist Left, e.g., Venezuala); and the ongoing, mobile international war crimes tribunal/class action lawsuit conducted by the elite media human rights groups, NGOs and educational institutions throughout the West.
What this means is that we in the West are in a state of civil war: that is, a struggle between opposing forces or factions within the same society who recognize incommensurable sovereigns. There are those of us who recognize the sovereignty of the U.S. Constitution, and those of us who recognize the sovereignty of international post-Nuremberg law. (I apologize for the American-centric character of my argument; am I so wrong in my assumption, though, that if the United States doesn't remain on the constitutional side in this civil war, it won't matter very much what anyone else does?) This condition is disguised by the exaggerated, even cult-like, obeisances the Left pays to the Constitution; but the Consitution they adore is not one that would be recognizable to anyone reading the actual text, along with the debates over its ratification, and with the post-Civil War amendments particularly in mind–rather, it is a Constitution which, over the past half century or so has been reshaped along transnational progressive lines, aimed at liquidating intermediate levels of authority between the sovereign state and the sovereign individual (who is therefore defined more and more against local communities, traditional norms and public opinion) and (more recently) subordinating American policy to international actors and agendas.
One naturally hestitates to use the term "civil war" not merely because it implies a degree of hostility and division few would wish to concede, but for the more empriical reason that it doesn't look like a civil war: no one can really picture "reds" and "blues" facing off in military or physical confrontation. But, here, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (an important forerunner of the contemporary Left)'s distinction between a "War of Maneuver" and a "War of Position" is helpful: a war of maneuver is when one actually destroys or dislodges the enemy from some position they hold; the war of position is the struggle to occupy those positions which would give one an insuperable advantage once we get to the war of maneuver. And, of course, if one gains such an advantage, there will be no "actual" war. In that case, winning the war of position is enough, especially if it is won (as wars of position tend to be) gradually, even imperceptibly, and by subtly "re-inscribing" the positions everyone already occupies so that the war appears to be (even to some of those waging it) merely needed reform of an antiquated set of relationships–in that case, only when one looks back after it is over, or finds out that some customary act is suddenly forbidden, some commonsensical sentiment suddenly unintelligible, does one see the real relation between victor, victim, and spoils. It is impossible to go for too long without realizing one is in a war of maneuver; but in an intelligently executed war of position, one can indeed be unaware, giving an enormous advantage to those waging it coherently and determinedly.
Just as it is fairly easy to identify the enemy in this global civil war of position, it is easy to identify the means and goal of struggle: the latter, the restoration where necessary and protection where still possible of commensurability between acts and consequences; which commensurability is the sole guarantee of freedom; the former, the defeat of our "victims" through the defense of their victims, a strategy that works equally well against our jihadist enemies as against our Leftist ones (really, anyone can play: for example, in harping on the racial disparity in those imprisoned for violent crimes, isn't one obscuring the racial–and gender!–disparity in the victims of those crimes?). "All" that needs to be worked out is the proper mode of doing so in each case, on the battlefield, in knowledge, in the media, the law, diplomacy, and so on.
One thing we are certainly learning these days is how high are the demands of a free order, and how powerful the desire to submit, already, if we can just have stability, if we can just be allowed to ignore prattle about health care proposals rather than having to hear about threats and destruction. (I, at least, start to look back and wonder: would we have won World War II if the USSR had not been attacked by Nazi Germany, bringing both Stalin and our own domestic Left onto our side?; would our steadfastness in the Cold War have survived one more "hot" episode on the order of Korea or Vietnam?)
Where are we now? The one bright spot is Iraq, which contains all the pertinent components of the war, in both its "civil" and "foreign" dimensions: we are defeating a powerful form of Islam (after having defeated one of the leading practitoners of a newly resurgent–as in Russia–form of "big man" tyrannical rule) by turning its victims against it and are in the process of creating a new, hopefully responsible member of the community of nation states; a member which we have good grounds to think will be jealoius of its sovereignty, suspicious of the intentions of their "Arab brothers" and international caretaker institutions like the UN, and positively hostile to the calls to join the jihad. Everywhere else there is backtracking and an abandonment of positions, sometimes hard won ones, as in Bush's complete reversal on the Israeli-Palestinian front. The general dysfunctionality of our governing institutions, brought to the surface in the demands placed upon them by this new war, have not been addressed at all–the CIA and State Department continue to set their own foreign policy untrammelled, even unmolested; and in 2009, the Democrats, a diminishingly respectable front for the global death cult, might very well control Congress and the Presidency. And, understandably, no one wants to think too closely about what all this means. Even Republicans, even the Bush Administration, are staying miles away from compelling new evidence that there were, in fact, chemical and biological weapon stockpiles in Iraq in 2003, which were transported over to Syria and buried (and later, in the chaos of the invasion, removed) in Iraq–just challenging the prevailing narrative ("there were no WMDS!") seems to require too much energy, to involve too much risk. In my view the already small number of people who could take the slightest interest in what I am saying here is certainly shrinking daily.
It is probably uncomfortable for most to speak of a "global civil war," even one of "position"–everyone becomes a combatant, and such a characterization introduces the frightening possibility of the politicization of all areas of life. It is precisely the "positional" dimension that makes this war different, though, since victory would involve a complex array of "re" and "de" politicizations–in certain areas, a properly political site would have to be liberated from law and morality; in others, perhaps exchange relations and "culture" (in the broadest sense of the proliferation and dissemination of models for living), what is called for is a liberation from politics; meanwhile, what is often at stake is the relation between political actors and spectators, or between politics in the sense of coercive state action and citizen activity. The position I seem to have been coming to occupy is that of the analyst of discourse, in its most essential form, that of the sentence, both literally and as focusing our attention on the "syntax" of all practices–a position that, it seems to me, would at times be overtly and even hyperbolically political and at other times detached and ivory towerish; engaging the daily elements of cultural dialogue, but also high culture, "extreme" esthetic experiments and the realm of sheer possibility. My hope, I suppose, is that simply going about our business as originary thinkers inquiring into the semiotics of reality will be the only global positioning system we require.
Of course, a war of position is simultaneously a deferral of war, but a deferral that creates an interim during which preparations proceed; and, from another angle, war is almost completely preparation–as the saying goes, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. And amateurs talk "ideas" and "images," while professional talk "models" and "narratives." The most suitable models and narratives in the middle of our preparatory period will be somewhat counter-intuitive and yet familiar enough; indeed, they will make us wonder what makes them, at least ever so slightly, counter-intuitive. They will be retrieved and modified models: the black conservative scapegotated by the "leaders" of his or her community while, in fact, recovering traditions of self-reliance developed under Jim Crow; the "infidel" who embodies a recognizable pattern of feminist awakening, who nevertheless makes "establishment" feminists extremely uneasy; the Muslim stepping forward in defense of a Christian neighbor in a nascent Arab democracy; veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars stepping forward as a new generation of leaders, remaking both political parties and the media; etc. All these narratives, to some extent, resist the force of accumulated demands made by partisans on all sides, at the very least the "demand" that one's own narrative, especially the doomsday ones, prove true. Such models and narratives are already circulating to some extent; the question for a "cultural politics" as well as a "cultural studies," then, is what would need to change for any one of these narratives to undergo a quantum leap beyond the circle of those who presently cultivate it, to increase in circulation by an order of magnitude (from 1,000 to 10,000, 100,000 to 1,000,000, etc.)? A precondition, at any rate, is a certain faith in "reality": when thinking about who is on the "side" in our "civil war" I am calling "constitutionalist," aside from small cadres of intellectuals, pundits and activists, the answer is all of us, insofar as we buy and sell on the market, sustain basic norms of civility, insist on keeping violence and obscenity out of spaces whose sanctity we are charged to protect, try and get a little bit closer to the truth when it seems important to do so, measure ourselves against others and others against ourselves, seek out options short of scapegoating in dealing with those we oppose or hate, and so on. And when we notice and begin to resent, in the name of those for whom we bear responsibiity, those who undermine these props of reality. When we share such resentments with others, the defense of small things (minor commensurabilities, reciprocities and accountabilities) can snowball, just as the existence of a "democratic enough" Iraq will stick in the sides of the region's tyrants and terrorists, and become, more and more, an inevitable point of reference and inspiration for its liberators.
In other words, both sides can play the game of a fully deliberate global war which, paradoxically, we will win by reducing its strictly military component: victory for us would tend towards the narrowing of the confrontation to one between our armed people and theirs, with civilians refusing to act (and effectively assisted in this refusal) as shields; in this case, the war would be over very rapidly. Getting to that point depends upon whether those intermediate figures who, while unarmed, call for our murder and destruction, will be deemed martyrs or criminals against humanity; and determining that denomination will be whoever gains the "high ground" in the post-Auschwitz political, legal and moral order indelibly stamped by the awareness that our fundamental categories of social life could readily render us complicit in the unthinkable, whether through commission or omission. That high ground is the unconditional defense of individual freedom as irreducible point of origin and the insistence upon individual accountability as established through freely entered into covenants (the only thing that can genuinely bind up and conclude what a free individual sets in motion): each point of that structure (freedom, accountability, covenant) is a fulcrum enabling us to overturn victimary revaluations as we hold each other accountable for holding our putative victims accountable for the freedom they deny others (through omission and comission) and the covenanting they consider impossible even as they remain parasitical upon every jot and tittle of the terms devised and agreed upon by those more courageous and generous than themselves.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
N Scale. N Scale is 1:160 scale. Introduced to back in 1962, N scale has become very popular. You will find a large variety of road name and prototypes from the very early steam era up to the modern day. With the continued perfection of injection molding and fine pad printing, the quality and realism of N scale has reached new levels. You will also find some incredible models crafted in brass.
My father was an avid model railroader and he chose N scale because he liked the amount of running and switching you could fit in a small area. At it's peak, his railroad had 2 main yards and 5 towns. You would build your consist in the main yard and head out on switching duties. Complicated runs could take you a couple of hours (if you didn't use the five finger crane!)
Click image to search ebay for n scale trains.
Trainlots.Com features references to products from one or more of our advertisers that we may receive compensation at no expense to you as a user. You can see more on our privacy policy page. Below you will find a few examples of current listings or click here to search N Scale on ebay.


The SoundTracer project is a collaborative effort between the Norwegian National Library and the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. The goal of the project is to use the audio recordings collected by the folk music department of the National Library to create a query-by-gesture application that is able to search and retrieve specific pieces of music using motion detected by a mobile device. This brief summary will outline the objectives, the methods that are used, as well as the results of the SoundTracer project.


Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto AgencySenator Kay Baily Hutchinson joined other Republicans in passing a bill in March to make it easier for small companies to raise money.
Whether the Jump-start Our Business Start-ups Act will create jobs or only encourage fraud is open to debate, but one thing is clear: this piece of legislation is a reminder that Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, is completely inept at regulating our financial system.
The JOBS Act is an annoyingly named piece of legislation that purports to create jobs partly by seeking to increase the number of initial public offerings. Companies with up to $1 billion in revenue are labeled emerging growth companies and relieved of disclosure and other securities law requirements for their first five years after going public.
The act also does a number of other things that are wholly unrelated to encouraging I.P.O.'s but intended to make fund-raising easier for companies. Most prominently it allows for so-called crowdfunding. Companies will be permitted to raise up to $1 million through mass, online solicitations via the Internet.
Proponents argue that these changes will unleash the markets from overregulation brought about by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Critics are calling this the bucket shop act of 2012. They claim that the JOBS Act undoes important reforms to discourage fraud, prompted by the Enron and WorldCom scandals.
Well, we really just don't know, and this uncertainty is a sad reminder of what a sausage factory Congress is. Congress simply doesn't understand financial markets and instead legislates to the political winds. It is very likely that Congress may have adopted the JOBS Act based on the wrong premise and may end up hurting, rather than helping, markets.
The market for initial public offerings is already fairly robust. The United States has the largest number of offerings so far this year, according to Dealogic.
It is smaller offerings that have been in decline over the years. But the decline of small offerings most likely has very little to do with the changes wrought by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Grant Thornton, an accounting and consulting firm that has studied the I.P.O. market found that in 1996, the number of offerings raising less than $25 million was 309, which declined to nine by 2001, a year before Sarbanes-Oxley.
Grant Thornton asserts that the decline is a result of changes in market structure. One reason is decimalization — pricing stocks in cents rather than fractions — that took profits out of trading that had previously given brokers an incentive to list small companies.
But special interests, including the Business Roundtable, were able to tie the decline in small I.P.O.'s to Sarbanes-Oxley and disclosure requirements that were too demanding. Congress bought this argument despite the lack of hard evidence. By doing so, Congress actually ignored evidence that a similar deregulation of foreign issuers in the last decade led to the scandal involving Chinese reverse I.P.O.'s. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now looking to re-regulate that market.
There is a real risk that Congress's actions could harm the market. People pay more for American stocks than they would for those in other countries because we have enhanced antifraud rules. If investors lose faith in the United States market, stocks may decline in value.
As for market structure, the likely reason for the decline in small I.P.O.'s, Congress directed the S.E.C. to study and report whether the stock price of emerging growth companies should be quoted in increments from 1 cent to 10 cents. The commission can then make rules to force shares to be quoted in higher spreads than 1 cent per share.
But making people pay more for these shares would be about as popular as raising the gasoline tax. Congress gave the S.E.C. discretion to make this decision, latitude the agency is likely to use to avoid taking such a step, particularly because it opposes large parts of the JOBS Act. In other words, lawmakers sidestepped the really difficult decimalization issue, leaving it to the regulators in a way almost intended for nothing to happen.
In other areas, Congress also enacted unworkable reforms. The best example is the crowdfunding provision. At the last minute, the Senate amended this provision, ostensibly to enhance fraud protection.
In doing so, Congress made the provisions hard to use. Crowdfunding companies will have to raise money through Internet platforms in small individual amounts, less than $2,000 for most Americans. If a company raises more than $500,000 it will have to prepare audited financials. This is a huge expense that will discourage most companies from resorting to crowdfunding for significant amounts of capital.
Crowdfunding is an interesting experiment and has the potential to democratize fund-raising. But it really is just an experiment.
Congress would have been better off leaving it to the S.E.C. to design and run such an experiment, allowing the commission to tweak the crowdfunding mechanism in light of market developments.
Given the iffy supporting evidence, the whole JOBS Act is an experiment. For this reason, Prof. John C. Coates IV of Harvard Law School has recommended that the terms of the act have a two- or three-year sunset provision allowing for renewal if the provisions are found to work.
Instead this legislation took on the aura of a must-pass to give the illusion Congress was creating jobs. That is why we are getting a major deregulatory bill so soon after the financial crisis. The JOBS Act succeeded because it took the public interest forces by surprise, being pushed out of the House before the problems with the bill could be highlighted.
This is infuriating. If Congress makes a decision based on uncertain facts, then it is using its judgment and doing what we elect them to do. But here the facts, evidence and what was best for the markets simply did not matter.
Tinkering with a multitrillion-dollar market based on sentiment is unlikely to create jobs and help our markets. It is merely foolish.
This is not just a Republican or Democratic issue. The JOBS Act was passed with bipartisan support. Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley were similarly flawed. In those acts, Congress made decisions about our financial markets without even reading or considering the actual facts at hand and often legislated in a manner intended to fail. For another illustration, you only need to look at the travails of the agencies trying to issue the Volcker Rule.
This is both a pro-business and pro-consumer issue. Congress seems to get both the reform part and the raising standards part wrong as special interests control the agenda.
Perhaps the best thing Congress could do for securities regulation in the future is to take a break for a few years and focus on naming post offices.


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2017 Best 40 Under 40 Professors: Elena Reutskaja, IESE Business School
International Business School News
by: Andrea Carter on March 25, 2017 | 2 Comments 2,954 Views
Elena Reutskaja
Associate Professor of Marketing
How's this for a rave review? One of Elena Reutskaja's students likens her performance as a business school professor to an orchestra conductor who guides musicians to a breathtaking level of mastery that evokes deep emotions.
How does she do it? Showing a vested interest in her students. Remembering details about each student in her classroom and recalling in detail what each participant has said in previous classes. Plus, Reutskaja manages to do this with unbridled energy and a terrific sense of humor. It's these types of characteristics that create a dynamic class atmosphere that thoroughly engages her students.
When she's not teaching a class like an awe-inspiring orchestra conductor, Professor Reutskaja is actively involved in a number of international research projects run by leading institutions across the world. Her research is found between consumer behavior, decision making, and international marketing while her primary research focus is on the problem of choice overload that consumers face day-to-day.
Education: PhD in Economics, Finance and Management, specializing in Behavioral Decision Making, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), December 2008
List of courses you currently teach: Marketing Management; Behavioral Insights; Behavioral Decision Making
What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you've made from it? My main areas of expertise are choice architecture and choice overload. I employ many different methods from traditional experiments to brain-imaging, eye-tracking and emotion recognition because I believe it makes research more interesting, novel, solid and fun.
I have made many discoveries about how we make choices, that I myself have learned from: that our brain simply "switches off" and shows less activity in several areas when we are choosing from very big, rather than from intermediate, choice sets; that our eyes are too "lazy" to examine every choice option available to us, even if we have time to do so; that when choosing a hospital for surgery, patients often place greater weight on attributes such as distance to home or cleanliness of the room, over attributes that can actually can kill them (like "mortality ratio" or "infection rates"); that innumerate people are more vulnerable to "evil" nudges than numerate ones; that choosing in a dyad makes you give up your best alternative but does not make you feel worse because of it. Fortunately, I have also discovered that there are many tools available to people which can help them make better decisions. Studying these tools fascinates me.
Professor you most admire: Impossible to choose one! There are so many! But in the first place, I definitely would mention my "academic parents" (advisers) Robin Hogarth (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Rosemarie Nagel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) who are not just great professionals but also incredible people. And, of course, Carlos Garcia Pont from IESE, who taught me how to teach.
"I knew I wanted to be a B-school professor when…I was in kindergarten… As long as I remember myself I remember being sure that I would be a professor when I grow up."
"If I weren't a B-school professor…I would be an entrepreneur or fashion designer."
One word that describes my first time teaching an MBA class: "Oh, my God!" (in all the senses simultaneously)
Most memorable moment in the classroom, or in general, as a professor: When students gave me a standing ovation after my very first course had finished. I did not deserve it, but that was the best appreciation I could dream of!
What professional achievement are you most proud of? When I was asked by a policy-maker and one of the central banks for professional advice…
What do you enjoy most about being a business school professor? Always being in an energetic environment full of students who are smarter than you (our MBA and Executive students are outstanding.)
What do you enjoy least about being a business school professor? Grading on a bell-curve. I suffer when putting "Cs"…
What is your favorite business-themed movie and what is the biggest lesson that MBA students could gain from it? Moneyball. It shows that decision making is not as useless and boring as many people thought it to be …
What are your favorite companies and why? Expilab Research and Emotion Research Lab because they make the experiments we conduct much more realistic and fun. And their founders are incredible and cool.
Fun fact about yourself: I was a member of the National Fencing Team and Champion of Belarus in Fencing (when I was young…)
Bucket list item #1: Change someone´s life for the better.
Favorite book: I passionately hate reading novels… (Borrowed it from my friend Matthias Seifert ☺ )
Favorite movie: Many. From The Godfather to Love Actually.
Favorite type of music: From classic Russian composers to Bossa nova to Rock.
Favorite television show: I do not watch many. If I have time, I prefer to watch the sitcom The Big Bang Theory.
Favorite vacation spot: New York
What are your hobbies? Sports, hiking, travelling, dancing
Twitter handle: Don´t have one.
"If I had my way, the business school of the future would have…no borders: accessible only based on merit (tuition/costs/ visas/gender/languages would not be an obstacle for anyone). And business education, in turn, would focus more on teaching how to build ethically responsible and sustainable businesses."
Students say:
"Just like an orchestra conductor guides a beautiful musical rendition to evoke emotions, Elena guides conversations during a case discussion to bring out a spectrum of opinions that highlight interesting aspects of the case. As an engineer, I appreciate the way in which Elena introduced the world of marketing and its unique frameworks that made the process of creative thinking easy. Her energy coupled with a great sense of humor ensures that the class remains engaged and focused on every twist and turn throughout the discussion. Her classes are definitely a highlight of my MBA learning experience!"
"Marketing is a hard subject to teach, and in my opinion, professor Elena did this extremely well. Not only did she have a strong grasp on marketing principles and related theory to real life extremely well, but also added an interesting sense of fun to all her cases. I looked forward to all her classes, and prepared for them thoroughly, since participating in her class was almost a given."
"Elena is a remarkable professor and passionate human being. Her animated teaching style captivates students' attention in a way that is relevant and interesting to both students that have years of marketing experience and those that have absolutely none. Elena shows her vested interest in her students by remembering individual characteristics and recalling what each student has said in previous classes. In this way, she creates a dynamic class atmosphere where students are constantly engaged. All her actions have equipped her students with applicable skills no matter what their future careers will be."
Tagged: Best 40 Under 40 Professors, Elena Reutskaja, IESE best profs, IESE Business School
Previous: 2017 Best 40 Under 40 Professors: Marcus Opp, U.C.-Berkeley (Haas)
Next: 2017 Best 40 Under 40 Professors: David Matsa, Northwestern (Kellogg)


There's never a bad time to enjoy a Long Island Wine Country vacation and historic Greenport Village makes for the perfect North Fork home base.
Long Island's North Fork is wine country, with some 3,000 acres of vines, vineyards, and tasting rooms. This happy fact alone makes Long Island's North Fork the perfect place to get away from it all. Greenport is located in the heart of Long Island's wine country. This makes the historic, Long Island village a naturally convenient home base for visiting our many wineries.


text:
Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions
Anita A. Koshy, Ashley E. Fouts, Melissa B. Lodoen, Ozan Alkan, Helen M. Blau, John C. Boothroyd
We describe a Toxoplasma gondii strain that will permit the use of site-specific recombination to study the host-parasite interactions of this organism. This Toxoplasma strain efficiently injects a Cre fusion protein into host cells. In a Cre-reporter cell line, a single parasite invasion induced Cre-mediated recombination in 95% of infected host cells. By infecting Cre-reporter mice with these parasites, we also monitored host-cell infection in vivo.
Nature Methods
https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1438
Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
Host-Parasite Interactions Medicine & Life Sciences
Cre recombinase Medicine & Life Sciences
Toxoplasma Medicine & Life Sciences
Fusion reactions Chemical Compounds
Cell Line Medicine & Life Sciences
Koshy, A. A., Fouts, A. E., Lodoen, M. B., Alkan, O., Blau, H. M., & Boothroyd, J. C. (2010). Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions. Nature Methods, 7(4), 307-309. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1438
Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions. / Koshy, Anita A.; Fouts, Ashley E.; Lodoen, Melissa B.; Alkan, Ozan; Blau, Helen M.; Boothroyd, John C.
In: Nature Methods, Vol. 7, No. 4, 04.2010, p. 307-309.
Koshy, AA, Fouts, AE, Lodoen, MB, Alkan, O, Blau, HM & Boothroyd, JC 2010, 'Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions', Nature Methods, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 307-309. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1438
Koshy AA, Fouts AE, Lodoen MB, Alkan O, Blau HM, Boothroyd JC. Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions. Nature Methods. 2010 Apr;7(4):307-309. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1438
Koshy, Anita A. ; Fouts, Ashley E. ; Lodoen, Melissa B. ; Alkan, Ozan ; Blau, Helen M. ; Boothroyd, John C. / Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions. In: Nature Methods. 2010 ; Vol. 7, No. 4. pp. 307-309.
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title = "Toxoplasma secreting Cre recombinase for analysis of host-parasite interactions",
abstract = "We describe a Toxoplasma gondii strain that will permit the use of site-specific recombination to study the host-parasite interactions of this organism. This Toxoplasma strain efficiently injects a Cre fusion protein into host cells. In a Cre-reporter cell line, a single parasite invasion induced Cre-mediated recombination in 95% of infected host cells. By infecting Cre-reporter mice with these parasites, we also monitored host-cell infection in vivo.",
author = "Koshy, {Anita A.} and Fouts, {Ashley E.} and Lodoen, {Melissa B.} and Ozan Alkan and Blau, {Helen M.} and Boothroyd, {John C.}",
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AU - Fouts, Ashley E.
AU - Lodoen, Melissa B.
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AU - Blau, Helen M.
AU - Boothroyd, John C.
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AB - We describe a Toxoplasma gondii strain that will permit the use of site-specific recombination to study the host-parasite interactions of this organism. This Toxoplasma strain efficiently injects a Cre fusion protein into host cells. In a Cre-reporter cell line, a single parasite invasion induced Cre-mediated recombination in 95% of infected host cells. By infecting Cre-reporter mice with these parasites, we also monitored host-cell infection in vivo.
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text:
Q: How to integrate, by CloudFormation, Api Gateway with Step Functions I'm creating a CloudFormation template for the platform I'm working on. I need to integrate Api Gateway and Step Functions, to make one of my step functions be executed by a call to a Api Gateway Method.
I'm not finding any documentation on this. I struggled to find the Integration/Uri, that should be
arn:aws:apigateway:${region}:states:action/StartExecution

but now I'm not sure on what to write in my RequestTemplates. I suppose that I could actually leave it empty, to make it act like a proxy, but I would really appreciate if you could give me any further information.
Thank you

A: Obviously I could not leave RequestTemplates empty because it contains the information on what StateMachine is to be called. The URI itself doesn't contain that information, but it just points to the State Machine API's entrypoint.
The correct way comes from this documentation's page.
State Machine APIs expose various methods. The one to execute the Step Function is "StartExecution". To that entrypoint a body formed like this has to be passed
{
"input": "string",
"name": "string",
"stateMachineArn": "string"
}

So, in Cloud Formation:
"Integration": {
    "Type": "AWS",
    "IntegrationHttpMethod": "POST",
    "Uri": {
        "Fn::Join": ["",
            ["arn:aws:apigateway:",
            {
            "Ref": "AWS::Region"
            },
            ":states:action/StartExecution"]]
        },
    "RequestTemplates": {
        "application/json": {
            "Fn::Sub": ["{\"input\": \"$util.escapeJavaScript($input.json('$'))\",\"stateMachineArn\": \"${arn}\"}",
            {
            "arn": {
                "Ref": "[StepMachineResourceName]"
                }
            }]
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Ever since the new enemy for Halo 4, the Prometheans, were revealed earlier this year, the race has kept fans guess due to 343's tight lips. Well, that mystery is starting to get cracked, as a new video documentary has hit the web today by the name of Making of 'Halo 4' – Return of the Forerunners.
The 10-minute ViDoc offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process behind the Prometheans, the menacing new class of Forerunner enemies that will dramatically change the gameplay sandbox and pose the most formidable threat the series' iconic hero, the Master Chief, has ever faced.
Featuring never-before-seen concept art and development footage, as well as in-depth commentary from "Halo 4" creative director Josh Holmes, franchise development director Frank O'Connor, executive producer Kiki Wolfkill, narrative director Armando Troisi, art director Kenneth Scott, as well as lead concept artists, animators, VFX artists and designers, the ViDoc offers a captivating look at the design process behind the first brand-new class of enemies in the "Halo" series since its inception more than a decade ago.
It's pretty exciting to see a new race in a franchise like Halo, and this should be just enough to give the 4th incarnation that unique feeling older fans can grip on to.
There is still more to chew on however, as a new "Joyride" video has hit the Waypoint, and acts as a vignette for the upcoming series, "Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn".
Check out the vidoc below and the vignette at Waypoint, and stay tuned, as there is sure to be plenty more Halo 4 coverage to come.


This page lists more detailed information about the hex color code #ed872d(also known as cadmium orange color). In a RGB color space, hex #ed872d is composed of 237(92.94%) red, 135(52.94%) green and 45(17.65%) blue. Its decimal value is 15566637. In a CMYK color space, it is consist of 0% cyan, 43.04% magenta, 81.01% yellow and 7.06% black. It has a hue angle of 28.13 degrees, a saturation of 84.21% and a lightness of 55.29%.
Color #ed872d contains mostly Red color, is a warm color and closest websafe color is #ff9933. #ed872d color hex could be obtained by blending #ffff5a with #db0f00. Other more detailed information such as description, conversion, analysis, schemes, shades & tines, tones, alternatives, preview in css/html and background images of this color, please browses the following content.
#ed872d color description : light brilliant orange(brown)/light brilliant orange.
A shade is achieved by adding black to any pure hue, while a tint is created by mixing white to any pure color. In this example, #070301 is the darkest color, while #fef9f4 is the lightest one.
A tone is produced by adding gray to any pure hue. In this case, #958c85 is the less saturated color, while #ff861b is the most saturated one.
Below, site show some colors close to #ed872d. Having a set of related colors can be useful if you need an inspirational alternative to your original color choice.
This text has a font color of #ed872d.
This paragraph has a background color of #ed872d.
This element has a border color of #ed872d.


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The Brooklyn Growler
"Life is all skittles and beer." — Tom Lehrer
beer history
links of note
literary drinking
December 10, 2010 • 9:39 pm 0
Bourbons for the Apocalypse
Yes, OK, I take umbrage with Philip Gourevitch's Ten American Whiskeys That Made the World News in 2010 a Bit Less Unbearable over in that New Yorker rag.
It's not because I disagree with pairing whiskey with politics. No. As 2010 closes, the U.S. Senate has done its level-best to make drinking compulsory in understanding its decisions. If not for it. At least for me. The GOP has long been a party of monsters. It is now unafraid to stand revealed.
I digress.
At first I was heartened by Mr. Gourevitch's blog post. I saw Four Roses and was excited. An unopened bottle of Four Roses was in my home, awaiting its deployment in some Friday-night Manhattans.
Four Roses is one of those cheap-ish bourbons that are always welcome. Prior to its Kentucky distillery being bought out by Japan's Kirin Brewery, Four Roses was known as being little more than amber-colored paint thinner.
Today, it's a fine mix of sippin' bourbon. Straight, it runs a little hot. But with an ice cube or two, Four Roses releases its flavors of oak and spices and gold kryptonite and rich mahogany… It's nice.
Gourevitch's list stops at nine, and I'm OK with that. I also can't argue with his taste in American whiskeys. I wouldn't turn down a glass of any of them. Still, I stumble.
The list, which includes Noah's Mill and Pappy Van Winkle, 15 year, has the caveat – "None of them costs much more than a night of beers at most American bars." If you're drinking those two, you're having a pretty good night at the bar – even in New York. I think Gourevitch is drinking with Paul Rudd at nine-dollar beer night, every night.
You can do well for under forty bucks (thirty bucks even). There's another list that can be made. I assembled my own. These are some bourbons (and its buddies) that aren't very expensive and hold their own both straight and on ice, as well as in cocktails.
W.L. Weller, seven year
Rittenhouse (rye)
Famous Grouse (scotch whisky)
Old Overholt (rye)
Make haste to your liquor store. We have 2011 and its political horrors and world upheavals to look forward to yet.
Filed under: bourbon, bourbon, buffalo trace, bulleit, evan williams, famous grouse, four roses, japan, kentucky, kirin brewery, maker's mark, manhattans, noah's mill, old overholt, pappy van winkle, rebel yell, rittenhouse, rye, scotch whisky, the new yorker, wild turkey
August 7, 2010 • 8:57 am 2
Is a 55% ABV Beer Still a Beer?
The Scottish rascals at BrewDog Beer have fused craft beer with roadkill. BrewDog's End of History beer weighs in at a whopping 55 percent alcohol by volume (ABV). Why, that's enough to kill a passel of varmints. BrewDog claims it's the world's strongest beer.
Each bottle of End of the Century, which costs $650 to $900 per, comes in a roadkill koozie. On the BrewDog blog, owner and brewer James Watt explains the beer –
The End of History was designed to challenge people's perceptions about what beer is and how it can be enjoyed, served and packaged. We wanted to fuse art, craft beer and taxidermy to make a statement. It is part of our mission to show people there is an alternative to monolithic corporate beers and to beer and elevate the status of beer in our culture.
A Google News search of BrewDog about a fortnight after the story broke produces some 200 articles in many major publications (Forbes, BBC News, MSNBC, Wired, Eater, and The Independent). And they all pretty much say the same thing – golly! this dern beer is inside of a squirrel carcass and it's got a high-alcohol content! The end.
When asked about the inspiration for the beer, Watt talks about corporate beers versus craft beers.
"The real catalysts for a binge-drinking culture are not well-crafted beers but the monolithic corporate machines that have cultivated a culture of quantity rather than quality amongst UK beer drinkers," says Watt, speaking to the Telegraph.
Only twelve bottles of End of History have been brewed. It's an expensive process to create such a high ABV beer, which I'll explain in more detail below. But I can't help but think that a craft beer that costs nearly a grand a bottle is also a beer that is going to be enjoyed by a beer enthusiast who is less interested in corporate monoliths cranking out lawnmower beers than enjoying the exclusivity of the beer.
What's All the Fuss About?
"There is a huge distinction to be drawn between custom taxidermy and the cosmetic industry where hundreds of thousands of animals are bred, experimented on then slaughtered," says Watt to the Telegraph.
Say what you will, but for however much the beer is going to cost, it's going to have to be in a vessel that is special enough for some dude to want to put it on the shelf in his man cave and say, "Look at this crazy thing! There's beer in it!"
Taxidermy is gross. Humans do it to prove their dominion over the beasts of the field and the fish in the sky and the fowl in the sea. Maybe it's a nobler death for roadkill to be a beer koozie than to decay by the side of the road, but if it were me, I'd rather be dead on the side of the road. And also, I've seen roadkill. The difference between a varmint that was hit by a car and a varmint that was captured and killed and then wrapped around a beer bottle is a pretty steep difference.
A Sam Adams Utopia – which is a small-batch, high-octane (25 percent ABV) beer – comes in a nifty bottle that resembles a copper brew kettle. A buddy and I used to sit at the bar of a brewpub and lust for a bottle of Utopia that sat on the top shelf. One weird night with a little too much money burning a hole in either of our pockets and we woulda chipped in to crack that thing open. But so the point is, after buying the coupla-hundred-dollar beer, you still have a souvenir to show off to your dumb buddies.
What About the Process Makes This Thing Special?
The beer is a blonde ale with an infusion of juniper. Because of its alcohol content, End of History is stronger than most spirits – bourbon, gin, vodka – and should be drunk in smaller quantities than your average beer. Pour it in a shot glass, rather than a pint, for instance.
But the larger question remains – is a 55 percent ABV beer still a beer?
Beers are created through a process of fermentation. You boil a bunch of grain in a pot, add some hops and yeast and sugar, and then leave it alone for a while for the yeast to eat the sugar and you've got a beer.
Most spirits are distilled via a vapor process, where all of the components are heated and turned into a vapor, which removes the water (and most of the ingredients that offer flavor, color, sugar, etc.), while the alcohol-soluble compounds travel through the tube that collects the distillate. There's not much flavor left behind in the alcohol-rich liquid. The smoky, wood-barrel flavors you taste in bourbon comes from the barrels that the bourbon is aged in. Some studies are proving that vodka has no taste at all but what you do taste is whatever was in the water that was used to dilute it down to bottle proof (for more info, see this post by Cooking Issues, the French Culinary Institute's blog).
End of the Century was freeze distilled (aka fractional freezing or fractionation) to reach this volume of alcohol. BrewDog had to start with a beer – a lot of beer; a whole lot of beer – in order to properly freeze distill it down to a smaller quantity of liquid that retained a beer-like taste, while also retaining a high-alcohol content. The process of freeze distilling involves freezing the beer and then diluting the remaining liquid. It's really hard to do this because you need to have a very mature yeast strain that can survive the cycle of freezing and thawing. With Freeze distillation much of the water is lost but not so much the flavor or body or alcohol or sugar or (and this is really important, especially with beer) the yeast.
So Is End of the Century a Beer?
Well, it certainly started off life as a beer but ended as something that isn't quite that. A beer doesn't need to be distilled to be a beer. A beer's a beer. It also doesn't need to have a high ABV just to be enjoyed. I'm reluctant to call End of the Century a spirit also. I will say that its twelve buyers really bought into the hype. After all of the press and what was a successful marketing of a high-end alcohol drink, the leaving of BrewDog's marketing manager is also something of a question. The picture indicates that it's less of a beer and more of a liquore.
Honestly, what End of the Century reminds me of is an olde timey medicine that will cure you of what ails you, especially if it's sobriety.
And also, if you're buying something called End of the Century in 2010, which is pretty close to the beginning of the century, you're willing to overlook the misuse of small details.
If you want to try a freeze-distilled beer, there's always an Eisbock. It's nowhere near 55 percent (somewhere between 9 percent and 40 percent, usually) but at about $10 a bottle, it's something of an indication of what End of the Century might be like, and it can be enjoyed by just about anybody, which is as non-corporate a thing as anyone could want really.
Filed under: breweries, bourbon, brewdog, distillation, fractionation, freeze distillation, gin, koozie, malt, roadkill, samuel adams, sugar, utopia, vodka, yeast
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Tag Archives: Whatever Works
Sony Classics re-teams with Woody and a "Stranger"
Wed, Mar 3 2010
Also tagged: Anne Thompson, anthony hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Cinema of France, Entertainment, Entertainment/Culture, Europe, film, Freida Pinto, josh brolin, London, Marion Cotillard, Match Point, Naomi Watts, new york, new york city, Owen Wilson, Paris, Sony Corporation, USD, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen, writer /director, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
BY KEVIN CRUST Undeterred by the performance of "Whatever Works," Sony Pictures Classics is taking another chance on Woody Allen by picking up his latest drama, "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger," for a fall release. Shot and set in London, the film stars Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony[...]
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Owen Wilson signs onto Woody Allen film
Fri, Feb 19 2010
Also tagged: Carla Bruni, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Entertainment/Culture, Fantastic Mr. Fox, fox, france, French people, Government, Human Interest, Nicolas Sarkozy, Owen Wilson, Woody Allen
According to THR's Risky Business Blog, Owen Wilson's next film will be with the legendary Woody Allen. The untitled project has rumors of France's First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy participation in the film as well. Production is scheduled to start this summer. Wilson was last heard in the film "Fantastic Mr.[...]