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Dallas Shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson, Lost Christian Faith After Serving in Afghanistan, Parents Say
CP Current Page: U.S. | Monday, July 11, 2016
By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, July 11, 2016
Dallas shooter Micah Xavier Johnson, 25. | (Photo: Facebook)
Micah Xavier Johnson, the 25-year-old gunman who murdered five police officers and injured seven others during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas last Thursday, reportedly lost his Christian faith after serving in Afghanistan.
"He loved his country. … He wanted to protect his country," Delphine Johnson, 49, the gunman's mother who is reportedly an employee at a local church, told TheBlaze.
"The military was not what Micah thought it would be," Delphine added. "He was very disappointed, very disappointed. But it may be that the ideal that he thought of our government, what he thought the military represented, it just didn't live up to his expectations."
According to The Dallas Morning News, Micah joined the Army Reserve in 2009, the same year he completed high school and served with the 420th engineering brigade.
His mother, who instilled his Christian faith in him, told TheBlaze that she watched her son transform from a fun-loving extrovert into a "hermit" after his military service of approximately six years, including a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan in July 2014.
"He was withdrawn, didn't want to talk to people anymore, didn't believe in God anymore," Myrtle Booker, 62, who knew his mother through church, told The Dallas Morning News.
The Telegraph reported that while serving in Afghanistan Micah was accused of sexual harassment.
His female accuser sought a protective order against him "for myself, my family, home, restaurant and any other place of residence I may reside." She also told superiors Johnson needed "mental help."
She said in a complaint that Johnson bought her Victoria's Secret underwear unsolicited.
Bradford Glendening, a Texas-based lawyer who represented Johnson in the case, told The Dallas Morning News: "I'm sure he created a hostile work environment by being sexually forward with her. She said she wanted him to seek mental help for behavioral health."
Wells Newsome, a soldier who served with Johnson at the time, also told the publication: "We all knew he was a pervert because he got caught stealing girls' panties. But murdering cops is a different story. You really never know what someone is capable of until it's too late."
Micah's mother and his father, James Johnson, 55, told TheBlaze that as a kid, Johnson wanted to be a police officer and later became "gung-ho" about enlisting the military.
Micah's father, who is now married to a white woman, explained that it wasn't until his son's return from his deployment with the military in 2014 that the gunman began studying black history and shared that interest on social media.
"I don't know what to say to anybody to make anything better," James Johnson told TheBlaze in tears. "I didn't see it coming. … I love my son with all my heart. I hate what he did."
Both his mother and his stepmother, Donna, agreed that "he was a good son."
In the days leading up to the shooting last Thursday, Micah had reportedly been troubled by the recent killings of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, and Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old father who was shot dead last Tuesday by Baton Rouge police officers in Louisiana.
LISTEN TO MICAH JOHNSON'S PARENTS BELOW:
Contact: leonardo.blair@christianpost.comFollow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblairFollow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost
Dallas Sniper Shootings: 5 Officers Dead, 6 Wounded in Targeted Killings at Black Lives Matter Protest
Pastor Steven Furtick Says He Was Crushed After Seeing Videos of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling Being Killed
TD Jakes Prays 'Vengeance Is Mine Sayeth the Lord' Amid Dallas Shootings
Eric Metaxas: Christians Should Respond to Dallas Cop Shootings With Silence
Dallas Sniper Attack Needs to Be Addressed in Church This Sunday, Christian Leader Urges
Benjamin Watson Reveals What Black Lives Matter Means to Him
Philando Castile's Fiancee Speaks at Potter's House Megachurch


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Q: Azure Pipelines: Wait for the triggered pipeline to finish (Chain Builds Awaiter) I have a pipeline that triggers parallel build using Parallel Builds tasks and is supposed to wait till all the parallel builds have completed. These parallel builds run for a very long time (like 3 to 3.5 days). So far the Parallel Builds Task starts the build as expected and waits for 1d 23h 22m, but fails after that. I am unable to see the logs, it shows as failed but does not allow to click on the task to check the logs or to download.

The TimeOut Variable for the task is 0 which indicates infinite timeout, but since every time it is failing after same amount of time I think it is running out of time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


What is colour temperature and how does it affect the way lithophanes look? Below is some information on what the differences are between colour temperatures and how they might change the final print result of your lithophane. You must also take into consideration the material the lithophanes are printed with when deciding how you want the final result to look.
Colour temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin (K). The colour temperature of a lamp (bulb/LED) describes how the light appears when the human eye looks directly at the illuminated bulb.
HOW IS COLOUR TEMPERATURE MEASURED?
Colour temperature is measured by a unit called the Kelvin (K). The Kelvin thermodynamic temperature scale is defined so that absolute zero is 0 kelvins (K). (Note: The Celsius and Fahrenheit scales are defined so that absolute zero is −273.15 °C or −459.67 °F). Imagine heating a bar of steel and observing the colour of the bar at increasing temperatures. At some point the bar will appear to glow a dull red. As heat is added, the dull red turns to yellow, then to white, then to bluish white, finally to blue.
A light bulb that produces light perceived as yellowish white will have a colour temperature of around 2700K. As the colour temperature increases to 3000K – 3500K, the colour of the light appears less yellow and more white. When the colour temperature is 5000K or higher the light produced appears bluish white. The colour temperature of daylight varies, but is often in the 5000K to 7000K range.
When the desired lighting effect is "very warm", use light sources in the 2000K – 2500K range. These can be hard to find at the required strength to backlight a lithophane, so you're probably better going for a less warm light or combining very warm and warm together to achieve the required "look" you want.
When the desired lighting effect is "warm", use light sources in the 2700K – 2800K range. Most common incandescent light bulbs will produce light in this colour temperature range. An exception is the incandescent light bulb with a neodymium coating. The neodymium filters out the yellow and red wavelengths of the visible spectrum leaving predominantly blue wavelengths. So even though neodymium light bulbs have a 2800K colour temperature, the light they produce appears to be bluer – similar to daylight and to other light bulbs that product light with colour temperatures in the 5000K or higher range.
When the desired effect is neutral or bright white, use light sources in the 3000K – 3500K range. For a slightly bluer, "cooler" effect use 4000K.
Daylight colour temperature at noon is 5600K, but sunlight colour temperature can vary widely based on time of day and weather conditions. To give the perception of daylight (bluish white light), use light sources with a colour temperature of 5000K or higher.
Colour temperature designations of light bulbs and LED lights can be confusing. Sometimes you'll see subjective terms such as "warm white" or "cool white." Other times, the quantitative Kelvin temperature number will be used: 2700K (warm white), 4100K (cool white).
Daylight (with a very slight overcast sky): 6500K (bluish, white light).
Most incandescent and halogen bulbs are in the Kelvin range 2700K-3000K. Fluorescent, metal halide and LED bulbs can be purchased with colour temperature options from 2700K to 6500K. You can find LED lights in the 2000-2600K range, but in general they are expensive and the illumination is quite weak from them.


Items where Author is "Ajulo, O. O."
Osamor, V. C. and Azeta, A. A. and Ajulo, O. O. (2013) Tuberculosis–Diagnostic Expert System: An architecture for translating patients information from the web for use in tuberculosis diagnosis. Sage. health Informatics Journal.
This list was generated on Wed Apr 24 18:42:04 2019 PDT.


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On October 11, 2018 By Eric In Mixed Martial Arts Like
We Are Who You Thought We Were
So a fight broke out at a fight, huh? Who could have seen that coming?
Even though a number of people could give the rest of us the I-told-you-so treatment, it was still a genuine shock when Khabib Nurmagomedov leaped out of the cage and jump-attacked Conor McGregor's cornermen at UFC 229 on Saturday in Las Vegas. Why would he do such a thing after winning the biggest fight of his life, in dominant, legacy-defining fashion, no less? Didn't he get ample revenge in the cage? Apparently, he didn't…
On December 5, 2017 By Eric In Mixed Martial Arts Like
A GOAT For All Seasons
"A few years ago, I wrote a series called "Under the Microscope," where I analyzed the Greatest of All-Time arguments for fighters across several weight classes. I only did this for the five legacy divisions — lightweight through heavyweight — since the sub-lightweight weight classes were too young; there simply weren't enough fighters who could be legitimately defended as the G.O.A.T. Every weight class had its own distinct gray areas and there were definitely fighters that were harder to make a case for than others, but there were at least enough contenders for the crown.
I debated doing a shortened version for featherweight but ultimately didn't because there was really only one option: Jose Aldo. He was the only Ultimate Fighting Championship featherweight titleholder at the time, and he had dominated two of the three previous World Extreme Cagefighting champions along the way. I could have made half-hearted cases for Urijah Faber and Mike Thomas Brown — and an even less-convincing one for Norifumi Yamamoto — but those would have been tremendous stretches. There was Aldo, an unfathomably wide gulf, then everybody else.
That was 2015, though. In the post-UFC 218 world, the discussion surrounding the greatest featherweight of all-time is now a lot more interesting. Following Max Holloway's 12th straight win and second consecutive TKO victory over Aldo on Saturday in Detroit, the G-Word was floated around the 26 year-old. "Blessed" himself declined the G.O.A.T. mantle, chiefly citing a lack of title defenses compared to the all-time great he had just thoroughly smashed for the second time in six months. If anything, Holloway has made his case for the humblest featherweight G.O.A.T. contender.
There is, however, a case to be made for Holloway, as there continues to be one for Aldo. Of course, there is also a case to be made for Conor McGregor. It's worth inspecting these cases, as they provide different looks at the criteria we use for assessing greatness and the various ways in which a fighter can be great…"
On August 28, 2017 By Eric In Mixed Martial Arts 1
Let's Not Overthink This
"Very little in life is truly surprising. We are creatures of habit, fenced off by routines that are more or less predictable for months on end, if not longer. This only magnifies with age, as the openness and possibility of the future continues to funnel into a single, specific direction. It isn't always a bad thing — it makes our lives much more stable and easier to manage — but the realization of it is often crushing and existentially deflating.
It's no small wonder then that sports are such a common escape. They frequently provide a real outlet for genuine surprise to occur. Aside from maybe March Madness, fighting by nature lends itself more regularly to upsets than anything else in sports. It is perhaps the most redeeming and alluring quality of violence; anyone can get knocked out at any moment. Unlike a series of offensive drives in football or an elongated scoring spree in basketball, a comeback in boxing, kickboxing or MMA is instantaneous.
This was the underpinning logic behind much of the otherwise irrational belief that Conor McGregor had a legitimate chance to beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. on Saturday in Las Vegas. In a world where Leicester City won the English Premier League, the Cleveland Cavaliers came back from a 3-1 deficit in the NBA Finals to beat the winningest team of all-time and Donald Trump won Pennsylvania and Michigan, who's to say someone with no professional boxing experience can't beat one of the most gifted boxers ever? Surely stranger things have happened.
Yes, sometimes shocking and improbable things happen. What "The Money Fight" reminded us, however, is that likely and probable things happen much more often…"
On August 22, 2017 By Eric In Mixed Martial Arts Like
The Simple Complexities of The Money Fight
"As "The Money Fight" inexorably becomes reality and the odds inexplicably become closer, the cynicism of it all has grown tiresome. You, dear readers, may recall that I haven't been particularly enthused by the match, but that isn't because I don't understand its appeal. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about it. The optics alone of seeing Conor McGregor in the ring against Floyd Mayweather Jr. will be interesting. Plus, for all the criticism McGregor gets for his goofy-looking training methods, there is an undeniable itch of curiosity to see if maybe he's on to something. That's to say nothing of the ultimate appeal of Mayweather's career in the last decade: the desire to see him lose. To lose to a boxing debutante would be the most hilariously embarrassing schadenfreude imaginable, unlikely as it may be.
Both actors are fascinating in their own ways. Mayweather is unquestionably The Best Ever, though not in the way he sells himself. No, Mayweather is not anywhere near the top of the all-time pound for pound list, and he is hardly in contention as the greatest welterweight or lightweight, either. Imagine Mayweather against a prime Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns or Roberto Duran, and it is hard to picture him winning any of those fights. He is a gifted, beautiful fighter, no doubt, but the zero in his loss column has masked his flaws and granted him undue credit…"
The Dueling Insecurities of Boxing and MMA
"Few conflicts are as inevitable or as stupid as generational ones.
Without exception, every generation has bemoaned the one that follows. Kids these days are addicted to their phones; the kids before them had their egos overstuffed by participation trophies; the kids before them were rotting their brains with TV and video games; with the kids before them, it was all that darned rock and roll music; the kids before them … you get it. Yet somehow, despite all these oh-so-serious problems with the youth and the even more serious fist shaking, the cranky folks yelling at generational passersby to get off their lawn have only ever been addressing the next group to take their spot on the porch.
There's a flipside to that, of course. Older generations are not the only guilty parties when it comes to broad dumb accusations. Young people are frequently guilty of dismissing the wisdom of life experience, eagerly substituting it for Google voyages and Netflix documentaries. The abundance of information available to people and the 24/7 access to it make it easy for anyone to feign expertise about anything and everything, and unlike true expertise, the fake kind is often immune to listening.
These aren't terribly difficult challenges to overcome — all you really need to do is attempt to understand where the other is coming from — but these differences and generalizations are so deeply entrenched that it's hard to uproot them and give genuine empathy a chance to occur. The upcoming Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Conor McGregor boxing match has unearthed a similar mindset, much of it stemming from similar generational disparities…"

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Our 20-seat plane skipped and bounced down the dirt runway and I had to blink a few times to realize that I was looking out the window at the African bush. Just 20 hours ago, I was waving goodbye to glittering Manhattan and now I was on a charter flight over the rolling plains of the Sabi Sands. Our pilot joked that he usually saw lions on this airstrip as he touched down. This was Africa and here it doesn't matter who you are or where you are coming from, you all just dive right in.
I was embarking on my second Living Local, Traveling Global video series and though the first was also in Africa, up North in Egypt, already South Africa seemed like a world away. The first half of our Swain Destinations custom tour was spent on the Sabi Sands Game Reserve, a private section of the famous Kruger National Park. And for a guide, we had none other than President & Owner Ian Swain himself. His vast travel knowledge, expertise in South Africa and his humor, made us feel privileged to see this country with such an experienced guide.
Our luxury digs, Singita Castleton camp, felt fit for a member of the royal family. We had hand-prepared meals with seemingly endless dishes, rooms straight out of Out of Africa, drawing rooms where Teddy Roosevelt would have reflected, and a full staff that anticipated all our needs before we did. The same staff even donned their traditional dress to surprise us with a bush barbecue, or bomo, and they taught me how to sing & dance around a bonfire.
And of course, I can't forget to mention the rotating backdrop of animals, everywhere. The nearly invisible fence that separated us from all the gazelles, giraffes, elephants, lions, hippos and more was just yards away from my cottage door.
Yet out on our early morning game drives, there were no fences. Cheetahs curiously walked up to our truck. I watched lionesses and cubs munch on a tasty kudu. We sat right into the middle of a pack of 300 lounging Cape Buffalo. We even saw the elusive jaguar noshing on its fresh kill up in a tree as a hyena circled menacingly below. Our two expert guides grew up on these lands; our tracker was from a nearby tribe, and I swear he had a sixth sense because he could just feel where the animals were even though we couldn't see them. This was everyday life in the wild South Africa and we were right in the heart of it.
Cape Town was just as upfront and in-your-face as the game reserve. Next, we jetted down to the vibrant coastal city of Cape Town for the second half of our trip. All the magnificence of this city and the region surrounding it just smacks the breath out of you. One minute we are chatting with the restaurant owner of one of the most coveted tables in town, and the next, we are sipping reserve wines from the Cape Winelands before a behind-the-scenes winery tour. I even got friendly with a cheetah cub that tried to "play" with me as I petted him at a conservation center.
The most intensely real experience was spending a few hours in the Langa Township, Cape Town's oldest. Children ran up to us on the street, young moms brightened as I took Polaroid picture of their babies and a grandmother hawked her t-shirts to us from her front step. We were invited into their homes. We cooked sheep's head soup, we sang with a woman making homemade "beer" in the shantytown…we tasted real life in a township.
This was not a sugarcoated tour. South Africa just embraced us with open arms and Swain Destinations made it possible for us to step right in. Whether it was the surprise visit by the pack of elephants to the giggles shared with two little girls staring at their Polaroid photo, briefly I was a part of this country. These tours don't keep you at arm's length. They set up these experiences and then stepped back to let the real magic of travel unfold all around us.
Kelley Ferro is a travel expert & video journalist living in NYC. She films her show, Get Lost, around the world–hopping on a plane at least twice a month She is also the executive producer for Tripfilms.com. For more on her travels, follow Kelley's Facebook page.
To me, South Africa is one of the most fascinating countries to visit. It is furiously multi-cultural; a young democracy struggling to grow up fast to meet the country's many challenges.
When I was invited to join Collette's tour back in April, I was overjoyed, and at the same time I was a little hesitant to accept my assignment. The charge was to 'travel like a local' and I wasn't quite sure how to accomplish that in a group, dashing from highlight to highlight across South Africa.
The minute we met our South African ground connection and guide Tesse Easingwood– it was clear, we'd experience our travel through a local's perspective. Tesse has boundless energy, compassion, knowledge, and humor. With her in charge we had no choice, but to see the real South Africa–the good, and sometimes also the difficult.
To start, Tesse was refreshingly upfront about her background: "Before you ask, of course I grew up during Apartheid. My entire family, including me, were pro apartheid." Her family, like many others, left as soon as Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994. Tesse wasn't prepared at all to follow in the footsteps of her family. Determined to share the new, emerging country with travelers, she stayed: "How could I not? I love South Africa!".


Feel free to select the route that will suit your wedding best, there are many to choose from. It is only up to you to decide on the proper place for the exchange of your vows. The ceremony will be witnessed by the most beautiful Prague monuments such as Charles Bridge, Dancing House, Jirásek Bridge, Vyšehrad, National Theatre, Legion Bridge, Čechův Bridge, Rudolfinum, Sovovy Mlýny, Old Town Bridge Tower and St. Anežka Monastery.


Home Delivery for Noida & Ghaziabad.
Be it birthdays, anniversaries, mother's day or father's day, none of the celebrations is complete without a cake. It was mother's day, in order to surprise my mother I ordered a cake from Fruit Culture Bakery. I am very particular about the delivery and the taste of cakes. It had happened in the past, that due to delivery being delayed, my whole party went for a toss. Thus for me, taste and delivery services are of paramount importance.
I placed an order for black forest cake, with an endearing message for my mother. The delivery was sharp on time and the cake looked freshly baked.
Before I go into the cake review, would educate my readers' little bit about Black Forest Cake.
Black Forest cake has multiple (usually 4) layers of chocolate sponge cake, cherries, and whipped cream. It is frosted with whipped cream and covered with chocolate shavings and a few cherries for decoration. It is also called Schwarzwderkirschtorte in German, which means Black Forest Cherry Torte or Gateau.
The general way of making Black Forest Cake, is in a large bowl, combine flour, 2 cups sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add eggs, milk, oil, and 1 tablespoon vanilla; beat until well blended. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and bake it for 35 minutes.
Does this sound simple? Trust me baking it is not if cocoa powder is not put in the right combination, it will make the cake bitter or tasteless. So a baker needs to pay attention to even minutest of things, before baking the finest cake.
Thankfully Fruit Culture Bakery- delivered the yummiest of Black Forest Cake. The cream was nicely whipped, with proper proportions of cocoa powder in it. Thus making the cake fluffy and tasty. Even after finishing the cake, the craving remained.
This is not the first time I have ordered the cake from the bakery and like old times, it met my expectations well.
Would definitely recommend this bakery for cakes, they also bake birthday cakes with different themes like minion, Shin Chen, Doremon, Frozen etc. They are not highly priced like other leading brands.
So what are you waiting for, pick up the phone and book your cake?


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TV Guise [AS GOOD AS IT GETS] →
The Decade's Finest [The Ten Best Movies of the 90s]
From the December 24, 1999 issue of the Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Ten Best Movies of the 90s
(not including but with notes on Cradle Will Rock)
Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen. – From the preface to Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood
A lot of havoc is wreaked by the usual annual ten-best lists. For starters, there's the hard-sell behavior of publicists trying to get critics to see every major year-end release before December 31, even though most of these features won't open in Chicago until at least January. This results in two time frames — one for national releases and another for local releases — which confuses everyone. If you play by the rules of the Chicago Film Critics Association (which should really be called the Chicago Film Publicists Association), you're encouraged to act like a publicist and promote features on your ten-best list that haven't opened in Chicago — but you're strictly forbidden to act like a critic and review any of them. Then there's the hard-sell approach of certain national magazine editors who feel they have to know what the "best movies of 1999″ are by mid-November, long before most of the late entries have been screened.Behind both pressures — which squash the very possibility of what Andrew Sarris has called a "weighted critical valuation" while creating numerous deceptions — is the Oscars system. At the end of each year film companies send out dozens of videos of contending features not only to Academy members but to reviewers. This means that critics who play the ten-best game or collectively give annual awards are generally obliged to become part of the Oscars campaigns — months in advance of Oscars night — whether or not they want to be part of that nonsense. Unusual formats and deadlines that papers such as the Reader have for the holidays only make things worse. So it'll be impossible for me to review any new features at length before mid-January.
So why am I proposing a ten-best list of 90s movies to precede a ten-best list for 1999? One reason is that this allows me to stretch the rules of the ten-best game and change some of its meaning and import, at least in this paper. Another reason is that even though I can't quite consider every 1999 film for either list, a 90s list lets me go beyond Chicago and even U.S. openings to include new movies I saw anywhere between January 1, 1990, and mid-December 1999.
But first I want to stretch the rules another way, by forcing a few paragraphs about Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock, which opens here on Christmas day, into my argument — because I want to write something more than a capsule review about the film before mid-January, by which time it may be gone. It's not one of the ten best movies of the 90s, but it still has merit. Moreover, it breaks certain historical rules, making a few other historical achievements possible. Like all ten films on my 90s list, its strengths are ultimately grounded in its limitations, and, as Flannery O'Connor noted of Hazel Motes, the profoundly cantankerous hero of her first novel, its unusual capacities grow out of its no less singular incapacities. For the past seven months, ever since Robbins's movie premiered in Cannes, friends and associates who saw it there have been warning me that I, as an Orson Welles specialist, would despise it. Writer-director Robbins does make the character of Welles (Angus MacFadyen) a silly boozer and pretentious loudmouth without a serious bone in his body — something closer to Jack Buchanan's loose parody of Welles in the 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon than a historically responsible depiction of Welles in 1937. Yet Welles is a marginal character in Cradle Will Rock, and he had little to do with its subject, the short-lived glory of American socialist art. Furthermore, the film's depiction of that subject is both historically defensible and rather gutsy.The heroes of Robbins's movie are Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), head of the WPA's Federal Theater, who defended state-funded art against the stupid (and very 90s-like) attacks of Martin Dies and his House committee; and Aldo Silvano (John Turturro), a populist everyman and somewhat fictionalized Italian-American cast member of Marc Blitzstein's Marxist opera, The Cradle Will Rock, perhaps suggested by Howard da Silva, who opposed the sliding of his home country toward fascism. Welles, rightly, isn't much more than an irritating speck in relation to these two noble presences. (More questionable is Robbins's letting Dies be a more coherent and dignified character than Welles, though this suits his ultimate strategy.)
In 1937 Welles was a 22-year-old radio actor who was extremely well paid but usually unbilled; he was just starting to make a name for himself as an innovative theater director who sometimes acted in his own productions, but he hadn't yet become a radio or film director. No matter how highly one ranks Welles as an artist — or as a "premature antifascist," who spoke at a communist bookshop, wrote for the Daily Worker, and emceed a benefit concert for New Masses in 1938 — his importance in the history of socialist art is marginal at best. The same could be said of Welles's producer John Houseman (played by Cary Elwes as an improbable blend of Tom Wolfe and William Buckley). Robbins is generally more respectful of Diego Rivera as a leftist artist of this period, but even Rivera, as played by Ruben Blades, comes across like a cartoon radical; Hank Azaria's Blitzstein registers somewhat like an effete version of John Waters or Billy De Wolfe, a light comic actor in 50s musicals. Only Rivera's and Blitzstein's art are accorded any real integrity; the artists themselves are not, perhaps because Robbins hates elitism and star politics — one reason he may distrust Welles. If Robbins had more imagination and more capacity for nuance he might have appreciated the irony of Welles's hefty salary as an anonymous radio actor being fed directly — albeit secretly and illegally — into his Federal Theater productions, making those productions, like all of his movies, unclassifiable hybrids of public art and private enterprise. But then Robbins already had a pretty complex story about art, politics, and patronage — one that doesn't betray the significance of the spontaneous populist premiere of Blitzstein's opera after the government shut it down. This premiere was essentially without a director or sets, and it brought more fame to Welles (who'd directed the production that was shut down) than Welles brought to it.
Welles fully recognized this paradox in his autobiographical and highly self-critical screenplay on roughly the same subject, The Cradle Will Rock, written in 1984 but published a decade later, after his death–a script Robbins says he deliberately didn't read before writing his own. If Michael Denning, author of The Cultural Front, is right that Welles's theater company "went from an experiment in people's theater to a trademark for a star," the contradictions and ambiguities of that evolution certainly weren't lost on Welles. Perhaps because his script, unlike Robbins's, is built on personal recollections, its nostalgia for the period registers quite differently: it's the reverse of Robbins's script in its warm treatment of individuals and its relative indifference to collective expression. Robbins gives the dated Blitzstein opera much more attention, plainly seeing it as the last hurrah of American collectivist art, and to build his case he takes a few pretty dubious historical shortcuts — such as making Nelson Rockefeller the godfather of American abstract painting. Yet regardless of his movie's faults, Robbins's real point is to show us what we lost when we abandoned socialist art rather than what we gained, and that's an affecting and meaningful story. If Welles gets lost in the shuffle, you can't have everything.
Comparable trade-offs can be found in all ten of my favorite films of the 90s. In alphabetical order they are:
1. Actress/Center Stage/Ruan Ling Yu (Stanley Kwan, 1991)
2. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991, the 230-minute version)
3. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
4. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
5. From the East/D'est (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
6. Inquietude/Anxiety (Manoel de Oliveira, 1998)
7. The Puppet Master (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)
8. Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1993)
9. When It Rains (Charles Burnett, 1995)
10. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
Three of these — Dead Man, When It Rains, Eyes Wide Shut – are American, though the last might more properly be called English-American or stateless, given that it was made by an American expatriate in England with a mainly English crew. Two — A Brighter Summer Day and The Puppet Master –a re Taiwanese. The remaining five are from Belgium (From the East), Hong Kong (Actress), Hungary (Satantango), Iran (The Wind Will Carry Us), and Portugal (Inquietude). If I'd had room for a French work it probably would have been Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep, André Téchiné's Thieves, Claude Chabrol's The Ceremony, or the final version of Jean-Luc Godard's eight-part Histoire(s) du cinéma (though this is a video, not a film — a distinction that's still worth making).
The kind of trade-offs I see in these films are generally just as historical in their import as those in Cradle Will Rock. All three of the Chinese-language works on my list are period films, set in the 20th century and made in places that until very recently have all but refused to recognize their own history. This makes Kwan's film about the great silent Shanghai film actress Ruan Ling-yu (exquisitely played by Maggie Cheung) a pioneering, passionate act of resistance to this tradition — and an expression of wonderment about the early part of this century and its unsounded depths that can no longer be found in Western cinema (one rare and mainly unheralded exception: Richard Linklater's The Newton Boys).The importance of such an act of resistance appears to have eluded Charles Tesson, whose review in the current issue of Cahiers du Cinéma comes close to dismissing the film — which has very belatedly opened in Paris this month and has yet to open in the U.S. — for its lack of historical rigor and the failure of Cheung to "live up to" Ruan Ling-yu's example, as seen in the many clips of her performances in the film. But the lack of a precise fit between these two actresses and eras is part of Kwan's point, and the acute and moving historical pathos of Actress would be diminished by a better fit. (And anyway, what's the point of wanting a precise duplication when we have the original Ruan Ling-yu?) Far more illuminating is Cheung's own recent testimony in the rock weekly Les inrockuptibles: "In Asia nothing is preserved, turning toward the past is regarded as stupid, abberant."
In the case of Taiwan, one can date the discovery of history – and hence an inquiry into national identity –to the recent birth of democracy in that country after half a century as a Japanese colony and then under the control of mainland China (1945-'49) and the Kuomintang (1949-'87). Prior to 1987, history was effectively a forbidden subject. For Edward Yang, the inquiry is autobiographical, harking back to his high school days in the early 60s; for Hou Hsiao-hsien, it's a more comprehensive moral and existential inquiry into the social and political turmoil in Taiwan during this century, with The Puppet Master forming the middle part of a trilogy that begins with City of Sadness and ends with Good Men, Good Women. Covering the life of puppeteer Li Tien-lu from his birth in 1909 to the end of World War II, with the present-day Li appearing periodically to recount portions of his story, The Puppet Master is only one of four masterpieces made by Hou in the 90s. Before long, thanks to the heroic initiative of programmer Wendy Lidell at distributor Fox Lorber, Chicagoans will finally get a chance to see a proper Hou retrospective — a program that played to packed houses in New York a few months ago. The resounding success of this event proved that the idea that Hou — one of the two greatest working filmmakers in the world right now, along with Kiarostami — is esoteric and unexportable is basically an alibi concocted by lazy critics and distributors unable to get beyond old markets and convinced that moviegoers across the globe are numskulls. (Until the comparable success of a recent traveling Robert Bresson retrospective, he too was thought to be inaccessible, often by the same "experts.") The event also offered striking evidence that the apparent xenophobia and isolationism of American audiences may be partly the self-serving invention of American publicists with million-dollar ad campaigns who don't want to intimate that other cultures and aesthetic tastes exist.
It probably isn't coincidental that all three American films on my list hark back to earlier eras — explicitly in the case of Jim Jarmusch's radical western, implicitly in Charles Burnett's jazz parable about locating common roots in contemporary Watts via the 60s (specifically, a "countercultural" jazz album of John Handy's group at Monterey), and implicitly in Kubrick's adaptation of a masterful 1927 novella by Arthur Schnitzler. (Kubrick transplanted the action to 90s New York, but his movie has a great deal to say about every decade in this century except the 90s. And just as we already "have" Ruan Ling-yu on film — or at least Kwan does — we already have certain notions about New York in the 90s, so why should we need to have them duplicated on film?)I suppose it could be argued that Jarmusch, Burnett, and Kubrick were in some fashion turning their back on the 90s, but the first two do have things to say about the present and its peculiar habits and customs. Jarmusch's crucial gesture — a simple yet highly significant step in the history of multicultural cinema — was to assume the existence of Native American moviegoers (a move signaled in part by his insertion of jokes addressed specifically to Native Americans), something no maker of westerns to my knowledge had ever done before; the implications of such a move are so far-reaching that many white spectators haven't begun to sort them out. (Native Americans were apparently hip to what Dead Man was doing from the beginning.) Burnett's astonishingly beautiful film compresses an extraordinary amount of what he knows about his hometown and the homeless into its 12 minutes, making it as succinct as a 12-bar blues chorus — and an implicit critique of the flab of most features. Even Kubrick's remoteness from what's fashionable in the 90s might be construed as a critique of that.
The remaining four features on my list all come from countries — Belgium, Hungary, Portugal, and Iran –that are generally seen in the U.S. as marginal (a bit like the way film distributors regard Chicago relative to New York and Los Angeles). Yet it's the Dardenne brothers' marginal status as Belgians that makes their films — La promesse and the soon-to-open Rosetta – central to what's happening in much of the world at the moment. Most of us are still catching up to the reality that the world no longer revolves around New York or Paris or Moscow or Beijing, no longer sees those cities as the key to the meaning of contemporary existence. Half of my 90s favorites are set in the sticks — because that's where the action is now. The big cities now are responsible mainly for paper flow, national TV broadcasts, and movie premieres.
The marginality of Chantal Akerman — the daughter of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and settled in Belgium – -is especially striking because her painterly, nonnarrative focus tends to rest on things most filmmakers wouldn't consider worth their attention. Her most famous film, Jeanne Dielman (1975), focuses on a woman's housework. In From the East, probably her greatest feature since then, her own words best describe her agenda: "While there's still time, I would like to make a grand journey across Eastern Europe. To Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the former East Germany, and back to Belgium. I'd like to film there, in my own style of documentary bordering on fiction. I'd like to shoot everything. Everything that moves me." (Later in the same text she asks herself whether by "while there's still time" she means "time before the Western 'invasion' becomes too blatant," even as she recognizes that "there is no pure 'before' that would now be perverted or contaminated.") A virtually wordless film in which stasis and movement feel almost interchangeable — exemplified by a handheld camera endlessly scanning sprawled, sleeping bodies in a crowded depot — allows emotion to collect and build into a throbbing Jewish sorrow that mysteriously surrounds everyday images, such as cars driving through the snow or people waiting at night at a bus stop.
Bela Tarr's view of postcommunist Hungary is considerably more sarcastic, partially because that Hungary is made to seem identical to communist Hungary: both are rainy and muddy, both are informed by drunken squalor, small-mindedness, gullibility, and greed. A seven-hour black-and-white feature designed to be shown with two short intermissions — actually the easiest and most immediately pleasurable film on my list to watch, apart from the Burnett short — Satantango is as mean, as precise, and as hilarious in its corrosive humor as the best comic works of Faulkner. If it weren't for the Kiarostami film, I'd be tempted to call it the funniest movie of the 90s as well. Part of its power undoubtedly derives from the long novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (only a fraction of which has been published in English) that the author and Tarr adapted, but Tarr's virtuoso, choreographed long takes are much more than translated prose.
The three-part – the penultimate feature in the current canon of the 91-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, the world's oldest active director and certainly one of its wisest and most cultivated — combines the works of three authors, a one-act play and two stories, into an existential parable with every part welded into a single perfect shape. It begins as a lunatic stage farce in which an elderly father argues that his elderly son should commit suicide by leaping out of a window as a way to ensure his immortality. This becomes an ironic, philosophical tale about an aristocratic dandy attending the farce who falls in love with a dying prostitute. Then a friend of the dandy consoles him by telling him a sort of fairy tale about a girl who plans to leave her village to go see the Mother of the River; she discovers afterward that her fingers are made of gold and is transformed into the Mother of the River for the next thousand years, making it impossible for her to leave the village. These three kinds of doom are seen meditatively through the telescopic lense of an angry yet reconciled wit, and the interlocking stories are inflected with a kind of magic that recalls The Arabian Nights.
In The Wind Will Carry Us – which was recently picked up for distribution by New Yorker Films, having already opened to much acclaim in Tokyo and Paris — our other greatest living master is near the height of his powers (his 1990 Close-up, which belongs in its company, is also about to open in New York). It's a comedy about city slickers, all but one of whom remain offscreen as they invade an ancient village in Kurdistan to await the death of a 100-year-old woman, who also remains offscreen; their reasons aren't stated, though they have something to do with the media, probably a plan to tape or film the funeral ceremony. Apart from being gorgeous — Kiarostami is clearly the best landscape artist making movies right now — this picture is probably as accurate and as funny a report on the current state of the planet as we're likely to get, expressed in a form as concise as Kiarostami can make it. Simultaneously a history of antiquity, the 20th century, and that endless stretch of time known as the present, it shows the interrelatedness of all three periods at practically every moment. To speak to people outside the village on his mobile phone, the city-slicker protagonist–not exactly a nice guy or a hero–has to drive up a hill to a cemetery overlooking the village, where he also converses with an unseen worker who's digging a hole in the ground. The film's only interior is a dark cave worthy of Plato, where the city slicker flirts with the digger's fiancee, who's milking a cow, by quoting from the Forugh Farrokhzad poem that gives this movie its title. As is always the case with Kiarostami, the innovative use of sounds and images makes them merely tools for articulating new kinds of content: we don't see the offscreen characters because we don't need to — Kiarostami's movies are nothing if not focused. And the documentary techniques used to produce fictional details are as purposeful and suggestive as ever. Here's one telling example: A schoolboy becomes the local guide for the protagonist, who asks the kid at one point if he considers him a good man; blushing, the boy says he does. We squirm at this trusting response, yet given everything we know about Kiarostami's methods, it's clearly Kiarostami who's asking that question and getting that unscripted response. This single ambiguous exchange contains an encounter between adult and child, filmmaker and subject, well-to-do and poor, city and country, modernity and antiquity, media and nature, documentary and fiction, and truth and falsity. By keeping its expression elemental, Kiarostami allows this exchange to tell us more than most features.
When he premiered this movie last September in Venice, where it won two prestigious prizes (if not the top ones), Kiarostami announced that he would no longer enter any of his films in festival competitions. Many critics and interviewers assumed that some bitterness or disappointment must have been behind this decision, but it's clear from recent interviews that this is not the case. Having by now won a total of 60 international prizes over the course of 30 years of filmmaking, he feels he's got enough — certainly all he needs to go on making the films he wants to. (He says he also suspects that many filmmakers win prizes because of their names rather than their work; this limits recognition of new talent, and he'd like to widen the playing field.)
The best news I can think of to greet the new millennium is that Kiarostami has become a recognized master on a global scale — in spite of the efforts of Miramax to bury his work, the efforts of other studios to ignore it, and the efforts of some American critics to dismiss it for the sake of more studio garbage. Ironically, most of the remaining holdouts I'm aware of reside in Iran and the U.S. — two culturally conservative countries that are resistant to innovation. But in both change is already under way.


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Q: Can't upload any documents to Azure CosmosDB I've been playing with Azure CosmosDB for the past couple of weeks. I've been uploading documents and trying things out perfectly fine. Today, I can't upload any documents - it simply hangs forever, with a notification saying "Uploading and creating documents", but no documents ever appear.
To be clear, I'm talking about the "Upload Item" button on the "Items" page of a Container. I click it, select a JSON document as I always do, and click upload. It hangs there after that.
Things I've tried:
- Deleting the database + container and starting again
- Upping the RU/s from the free minimum of 400 RU/s to 1,000 RU/s (I'm on a PAYG account)
- Using the local CosmosDB emulator - this works absolutely fine, it's able to accept those JSON documents and create them in the DB no problem
- Using a different browser, and older versions of those documents that worked previously
- Creating documents manually with the "New Item" button - this works, but it is very cumbersome compared to uploading the documents as I am frequently making changes
I'm not sure what else to try - any suggestions? Is this working for anyone else?
I'm on "East US 2" even though I'm in Europe, because I kept getting problems and had to keep jumping servers until the stuff I needed was available.

A: This is a known issue in the portal. We have deployed a fix to this that is now available.
Thank you for reporting.


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Budget & Tax Center: A Costly Cover for More Business Tax Cuts in NC
Analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that 27 percent of the total net tax cut from the increase in the standard deduction will actually go to…
New Analysis: A Third of NC Taxpayers Won't Benefit from Proposed Tax Refund Plan
North Carolina Senate and House leaders are moving forward with a flawed proposal to spend the majority of the state's revenue over collections, more than $600 million, to issue tax…
North Carolina Justice Center: Higher Rates on Higher Income: Why a Graduated Income Tax is Good Policy for North Carolina
At the same time, a graduated rate structure — in contrast with the state's current flat tax rate on income — can make more revenue available for key public investments,…
NC Policy Watch: Report: Corporations Are Stiffing North Carolina on $373 Million in State Taxes
It turns out that state leaders can ensure that companies pay the proper amount of taxes on income generated from business conducted in their jurisdictions, but existing tax codes at…
NC Policy Watch: North Carolina's Tax Code Isn't Helping the State's Growing Inequality
Despite claims by the architects of North Carolina's failed tax-cut experiment, policy choices since 2013 have not ensured that middle and low-income taxpayers are paying lower shares of their income…
NC Policy Watch: Low-income Tax Payers in NC Pay More of Their Income in State and Local Taxes Each Year Than the Richest Taxpayers
Sales taxes play a critical role in the regressive and consequently inequitable nature of the North Carolina tax system. Like most other states, North Carolina relies on sales and excise…
BTC Report: Income tax rate cap amendment is costly for taxpayers, communities
Imposing an arbitrary income tax cap in the North Carolina Constitution could fundamentally compromise our state's ability to fund our schools, roads, and public health, as well as raise the cost…
WRAL: Meg Wiehe: Capping North Carolina's top income tax rate isn't good for our communities
ITEP Deputy Director Meg Wiehe writes for WRAL.com that it would be unwise to constitutionally cap the North Carolina state income tax rate, pointing out that school funding in the state is…
NC Budget and Tax Center: Corporations over Carolinians?
Big corporations and wealthy executive have been on quite a run. Corporate profits are at historic levels,[1] stock prices are through the roof, and plush executive pay has become the…
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Lead Poisoning and Anemia Associated with Use of Ayurvedic Medications Purchased on the Internet — Wisconsin, 2015
MMWR Weekly
PDF of this issue
August 21, 2015 / 64(32);883-883
Jon Meiman, MD1,2; Robert Thiboldeaux, PhD2; Henry Anderson, MD2
On April 30, 2015, the Wisconsin Division of Public Health (WDPH) was notified by a local health department of an elevated blood lead level (BLL) in a female patient aged 64 years. All Wisconsin laboratories are required to provide BLL testing results performed on any state resident to WDPH, and WDPH and local health departments are statutorily mandated to investigate any single BLL ≥20 µg/dL or BLLs that are persistently ≥15 µg/dL. Review of medical records revealed that the patient had developed progressive fatigue and shortness of breath during a period of multiple weeks that prompted inpatient medical evaluation. Hemoglobin level was 8.3 g/dL (normal range for age and sex of patient = 12.5–15.0 g/dL), and peripheral blood smear showed normochromic, normocytic red blood cells with basophilic stippling. A BLL was obtained and found to be 85.8 µg/dL. Urine toxic metals tests revealed mercury and aluminum levels in the normal range. Combined methylated and inorganic urine arsenic levels were slightly elevated at 53.3 µg/L (normal = <18.9 µg/L). The patient was discharged for outpatient lead chelation therapy with oral meso-2,3-dimercaptosuccinic acid.
WDPH interviewed the patient to determine possible environmental sources of lead. She did not report any home remodeling that involved paint disturbance or plumbing maintenance, symptoms consistent with pica, use of pottery manufactured outside the United States, or ingestion of wild game, which can contain lead shot fragments (1). She reported taking several supplements, including two Ayurvedic (traditional Indian) medications produced in India that she purchased on the Internet: Mahayogaraj Guggulu (MG) (Sri Sri Ayurveda Trust) and Bruhat Vata Chintamani Rasa (BVCR) (Shree Dhootapapeshwar Limited). The patient ingested approximately four tablets of MG and two tablets of BVCR daily during February–April 2015.
The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene performed metals testing of the patient's well water using graphite furnace atomic absorption, and of both Ayurvedic medications using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy. Well water lead level was 4.3 µg/L (Wisconsin public health standards set acceptable levels at ≤15 µg/L), and arsenic was undetectable. BVCR contained 16.4 mg/kg (0.2%) lead, and MG contained 48,700 mg/kg (4.9%) lead. Both supplements also contained trace amounts of cadmium, chromium, and aluminum, as well as substantial amounts of arsenic (3,830 mg/kg in MG) and thallium (14.7 mg/kg in MG and 17.2 mg/kg in BVCR). On the basis of estimated daily MG and BVCR consumption and the patient's body weight, the patient's exposure to arsenic and thallium exceeded thresholds deemed safe for human health, as defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2). The patient discontinued Ayurvedic medication use and reported improvement in symptoms after 1 month of chelation therapy.
Lead is a highly toxic substance that has no endogenous physiologic role, and no safe level of exposure has been identified. High levels of exposure can cause anemia, cognitive dysfunction, coma, and death (3). Although strict regulations have substantially reduced environmental contamination in the United States, lead poisoning continues to occur. This case report confirms earlier reported risk for lead poisoning from Ayurvedic medications produced in India (4), and highlights the acute toxicity that can develop from short-term use. Although toxic metals can occur naturally in some Ayurvedic medicines, or result from contamination, metals such as lead are often intentionally added to some preparations because of putative health benefits (e.g., naga bhasma, a lead-based herbal medicine used to treat various conditions). Physicians should be aware of possible toxicity caused by these medications and should consider lead poisoning as a cause of unexplained anemia in patients taking Ayurvedic medication. Although this investigation did not reveal health problems caused by other toxic metals, the elevated levels of arsenic and thallium could have presented health risks if these medications had been consumed for prolonged periods. State and local public health departments should consider outreach to educate the public about potential risks of Ayurvedic medications and consider sales restrictions as permitted by statutory and regulatory authority.
1Epidemic Intelligence Service, CDC; 2Wisconsin Division of Public Health, Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Health.
Corresponding author: Jon Meiman, xdf5@cdc.gov, 608-261-6375.
Pain DJ, Cromie RL, Newth J, et al. Potential hazard to human health from exposure to fragments of lead bullets and shot in the tissues of game animals. PLoS One 2010;5:e10315.
US Environmental Protection Agency. Regional screening level summary table. Philadelphia, PA: US Environmental Protection Agency; 2015. Available athttp://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/risk/human/rb-concentration_table/Generic_Tables/docs/master_sl_table_run_JUNE2015_rev.pdf .
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Toxicological profile for lead. Atlanta, GA: US Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry; 2007. Available at http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp13.pdf .
Saper RB, Phillips RS, Sehgal A, et al. Lead, mercury, and arsenic in US- and Indian-manufactured Ayurvedic medicines sold via the Internet. JAMA 2008;300:915–23.


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Project Cars 2 Is Striving To Be The Racing Simulation Fans Want, Again
Second gear.
By Edmond Tran on February 8, 2017 at 6:33AM PST
In the genre dominated by Forza and Gran Turismo, Project Cars distinguishes itself by being progressive. It's multi-platform, all the game's content is unlocked from the start, and it's both crowdfunded and developed in conjunction with the community. Interested players can buy into the project and attend meetings, play weekly builds, and give feedback directly to developers in Slightly Mad Studios' no-nonsense forum. The team are as obsessed with involving the community in the development process as they are with capturing every minute detail in the vehicles. Now, Slightly Mad Studios are hoping that with its growing fan base, and by continuing the groundwork laid in the first game, Project Cars 2 will be an even stronger competitor to the long-standing rival simulators they admire. To help improve on the original, the game's co-directors Andy Tudor and Stephen Viljoen told GameSpot they took on board every ounce of criticism.
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"We've got a great big database of all the reviews and stuff that came in [for Project Cars] along with who did the review, the links, and the number out of ten," Tudor explained. "But the most important column is the 'notes' column which says things like, 'They thought the gamepad handling was too hard' or 'They wished they were more cars' and that is a great to-do list right there."
Viljoen continues: "More often than not, what they say is what we knew. We know we didn't have all the cars everybody wanted. We knew the gamepad control wasn't all it needed to be, but we needed to release the game at some point. So yeah, it's certainly a confirmation of what we felt, but there's always something that somebody picks up on that we missed out on and we go, 'Good point. We need to fix that.'"
The most ambitious new addition in Project Cars 2 is a geographically-accurate and dynamic solar and weather system. In the demo we played, this meant that a few laps around the Fuji Speedway in Japan were different each time. Clouds gathered, rain poured down on the track, and pools of water would form in different locations, before gradually evaporating as the sun came out again. This was visually impressive to witness, but the introduction of this technology isn't purely aesthetic. "All of the racers and manufacturers we talk to tell us that the key thing in racing is what the environment does," Viljoen explained. "It is the unpredictability of the environment that feeds into what makes you win a race or lose it, what happens when you get your strategy wrong or when you get it right, how you approach a race weekend that spans a long period of time. There's so much affected by what the weather is going to do, what time of the year it is, and all these things."
For the hardcore audience, the unpredictability of these effects have much deeper implications than simply needing to adjust your braking distance on a wet track, and that's why the team wanted to leave static conditions behind. Vilijoen spoke about the effects the the weather would have on the temperature of the track, and the tire adjustments necessary for those who obsessed over those intricacies. "If you go to a spot in the middle of summer in Project Cars 2, the sun moves at the correct archway for that time of year," he explains. "Most of the track will be covered in sunlight, and [because] it's a warmer time of year you have higher ambient temperature, [and] the track surface itself is being affected by the sunlight calculations, so you have a temperature for that track and it changes during the course of a race."
"Now if you go there again in winter, the sun is at a lower angle, more parts of the track are going to be in shade and others are going to be in sunlight, so now you have this part of the track warmer than that part of the track because it's accurately calculated with the sun there. This is how it is in real life, obviously, and that makes a big difference in how real-world race drivers approach a race weekend. And because this is at the heart of Project Cars--we simulate the experience of being a race driver--it's a critical aspect of it. You don't just get on there and it's always the same, where you can get the lap times every time. That's not authentic." Vilijoen affirms.
The developers and I joked that with all the painstaking work going into replicating true-to-life dynamic environments, most people wouldn't even be able to appreciate the subtleties unless they implemented a low performance racing mode with cars that couldn't break the speed limit so easily. "Funny you should say something like that," Tudor remarks. "We can't talk about it just yet."
The other big, albeit less visibly dramatic change in Project Cars 2 is in how the game simulates tires. Not only how they're affected by the aforementioned weather conditions, but also the physics of how they come into contact with track surfaces. It's something the developer is determined to improve because of both feedback from the original Project Cars, and the sequel's inclusion of loose-surface racing with ice and dirt tracks.
Regarding the original simulations, Viljoen admitted: "There were areas that we knew needed improvement, and one of them was when you push the car beyond the limit. When you go over the edge, the way the slip curve of the tyre works made it a bit difficult for people to catch the car when it goes sideways. In Project Cars 2 we've added additional types of grip simulations, where we accurately simulate how it affects the handling of the car when the tire is moving across the track surface when it's not rolling. [Also] how the tarmac is ripping the tire itself, which effects, in a big way, that aspect of driving. So we got a full simulation of that implemented, and part of the fallout of that is that our cars are now far more controllable when they go over the limit: we have a far more progressive slip curve which determines how handleable you still are on the car when it is sideways."
One thing that isn't changing, despite some criticisms, is the team's approach in having every car and track available to players from the beginning. It's staunchly different to other titles in the racing genre, where earning currency for vehicle and track unlocks are typical to create a sense of progression. "We're not going to gate cars and tracks because that's the fun thing you actually play with," Tudor said. Vilijoen added: "If you want to step straight into Tier One, you can go for it. There are still things you can unlock, but that's bonus stuff, they're not core to the game. We're not saying, 'You're not allowed to play this.' We understand that there are some game designs where that fits, but largely that's a bit of a bygone era."
But there's an ulterior motive, too: Slightly Mad Studios wants Project Cars 2 to be an entry point into the world of motorsport, for any kind of player, but especially those who aren't as fanatical about it as their core audience. The model is a way to mimic the flexible careers of racecar drivers, and they hope it will organically teach people the language of the sport. "We want to encourage a way of thinking that's like a driver, as opposed to 'Oh, I can't wait to level up and unlock the next car.'" Tudor said. "It's about that way of thinking, the terminology, and what you go to the watercooler with the next day and talk about with your friend. You get a contract with a team, and then you've got a season of races, and you kinda work through there and you're thinking in your head, 'Oh I wish I could race for this team' or 'I'm going to sidestep my career and go from GT racing to Touring instead.' We want you to come out with that kind of vocabulary as opposed to, 'Oh, I unlocked something' or 'I did a huge drift the other day and got 500 points.'"
The other thing that Slightly Mad Studios isn't changing is its openness with the community and encouraging feedback on its forums, which is as important as feedback from real-world racecar drivers, it seems. The studio receives more requests than is practical, of course, and though Tudor and Vilijoen did lament a vocal minority of naysayers who get frustrated when they don't get their way, by-and-large the developer is hoping people appreciate its transparency and optimism, but understand the need for intervention.
"We honestly go into every single title full-bore," Viljoen said. "We constantly get to the end of a project and go, 'Okay guys, we overshot a little bit here. Let's pull this back.' But as the old saying goes, we'd rather aim for the moon and eat an eagle than aim for an eagle and eat a rock". Tudor laughed, "I've never heard that ever before."
"We aim high, and we accomplish most of it. It's important for us right from the outset that whatever we agree is going to be included in the game adds depth and not noise. Because it is so easy to just lose yourself in the details."
With all their technological improvements, I asked the directors what they hoped most to achieve in developing the sequel. Tudor reaffirmed: "More than anything I hope people can trust that the game that you eventually pick up has been made by people who listen to you, who are all as passionate as you are. I don't think we would make the game any other way."
Project Cars 2 is slated for a late 2017 release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Edmond Tran
Editor / Senior Video Producer for GameSpot in Australia. Token Asian.
@EdmondTran
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Packable Pails were invented by the stores owners Tom and Melissa Reed. Packable Pails collapse easily to store at less than 2 inches in your bag or suitcase. Ideal for the beach, sandbox, take to the park, Trick or Treating, Easter baskets, to wash the car, give the family dog a drink on a long trip and more!


Scabies is an itchy skin condition caused by scabies mites. It may also occur during pregnancy. This article discusses the treatment options for pregnant women.
Some pregnant women may get rashes over time. It may be due to the weather, dry skin, or some allergy. However, if the rash itches a lot and comes with red marks in those areas, it could be due a skin disease called scabies. This is a common skin problem with symptoms similar to rashes. Scabies is caused by mite infestation which live underneath the surface of the skin. The most common areas where they affect includes thighs, elbows, and hands.
Any person, especially pregnant women may get easily infected by scabies. It is usually caused due to skin-to-skin contact with an infected person. Usually, in pregnant women, it's when the partner has scabies infestation that the mite gets transmitted. Moreover, you may also get the infection if you share contaminated items like clothes, towel, and bedding with the infected person. However, a quick handshake or hug with a person who is infected usually does not spread the mites. Moreover, pets can't pass these mites to you since the mites which infect the humans are different than those that infect the pets.
It's one of the most effective medicines which help kill the mites. You need to apply this medicine from the neck to the toe and leave it overnight. After about 12 hours, wash it off with warm water. This process needs to be repeated after about a week so that all the mites are removed from the body.
This is an oral, antiparasitic medication which has shown to be effective in treating this infection. The FDA has still not approved this medicine, and therefore you need to ensure that you take this drug only after consulting a dermatologist.
If applied in the form of ointment or cream along with petrolatum, it may be quite effective to treat this skin condition. However, the FDA has still not approved the use of sulfur as an option to treat scabies. Therefore, it should be applied only if other methods of treating the condition have failed. There are no known side effects of using sulfur by pregnant women.
This lotion is another treatment option which is available. This medicine has been approved to be used in adults, but not in children.
There are several natural remedies that may help treat this skin condition during pregnancy. Products made from nature are free of harmful chemicals, and therefore there are no side effects.
Tea tree oil is an effective remedy against this condition. While applying this oil, make sure that you apply it along with a carrier oil since concentrated tea tree oil may harm the skin. The oil not only soothes the skin, but also kills the parasites.
Neem oil, is another option which may be used. You need to apply this oil on the whole body from the neck to toes for better results.
Scabies does not affected the unborn baby or the mother-to-be. However, you need to get medical attention immediately, or else the condition might deteriorate. It may be treated successfully if you follow the instructions of your dermatologist.


I first encountered Tim Wells in 2006 when he sent some of his poetry to the literary quarterly I edit, Pen Pusher Magazine. I ended up choosing Number Two Breakfast for publication in the second issue. It's about the artists Gilbert and George eating breakfast in their favourite East End caff, and ends with the haunting lines: "When George asks Gilbert to pass the brown sauce/A hush falls". How could I not put it in?
Tim showed up to the launch party, a skinhead in a Ben Sherman shirt. Not one of our usual crowd, then, but as luck would have it, he turned out to be a poet of wit and brilliance, and has become a great friend.
Number Two Breakfast exemplifies everything that is great about Mr Wells's work: it's funny, a great piece of storytelling, it's about London, packs a verbal punch and it gets better with each reading.
In fact, the only thing it doesn't have is any reference to reggae or soul. However, a lot of his poems are full of such references, and in his newcollection Rougher Yet (due to be published by Donut Press in May 2009) the sound of reggae and soul plays a more significant part than ever.
When he isn't gigging or doing his business, Wells runs the cult poetry magazine Rising that he started in 1993. He has also published three other collections: Boys' Night Out in the Afternoon (2005); A Man Can Be a Drunk Sometimes But a Drunk Can't Be a Man (2001); and If You Can Read This, You're Too Close (2003).
Anna: How did you get into reggae in the first place?
Tim: My dad's always been a record collector and is a big soul man. When I got into music I was more into reggae 'cos kids want something of their own.
A: And when did the poetry come into things?
T: I got into reggae and then in the late 1970s/early 1980s we had ranting poetry – it was a big thing.
T: Lots of shouting and rhyming basically, people like Attila the Stockbroker, Ginger John and Porky the Poet – that's Phill Jupitus – would be reading. I gigged with John Cooper Clarke plenty – he's top drawer. I used to go on as "Teething Wells", 'cos the poet and journalist Steven Wells was quite big at the time doing the same sort of shows, and his moniker was "Seething Wells" and then I was this 16-year-old skinhead doing the same thing. We used to get quite a lot of gigs.
A: You always dress well for readings. Is that part of the skinhead thing?
T: When we'd go to soul and reggae nights we'd always dress well. I like to dress well for a show. You never saw Jackie Wilson looking like a scruff. The poet David Jay jokes with me that there's a "best-dressed poet" award we pass it between us every month. There are a lot of badly dressed poets that could do with some Gerry DeVeaux help.
A: Was there a big link between music and poetry back when you started?
T: Yeah. There used to be a lot of bands, mostly punk bands really, and they'd have a poet on between sets. You got into the gig for free, so that was good. We'd go to soundclashes, too. Reggae sounds like Saxon and Fatman would go up against each other and they had some quality DJs.
A: What was the poetry about? Anything in particular?
A: Right, so you were doing these shows with Jupitus and others ... then what? How did you progress from there?
T: Well, we did these gigs. A good laugh actually. And that got me taking it seriously. I started concentrating on the writing.
A: You started doing more bog-standard poetry readings?
T: Yeah. There were a handful of poetry venues by then. Not like now where there are plenty of great nights and people like Scroobius Pip are well known.
At this point, Tim's phone starts to ring. Suitably enough, his ringtone is Liquidator by the Harry J Allstars and the caller is his editor, Andy Ching, asking whether he means to use the word "body" or "corpse" in one of his poems in Rougher Yet. For the readers' interest, he opted for "body". We return to the 1980s.
A: We're in Stoke Newington now. What was going on round these parts back then?
T: There were quite a lot of reggae clubs; there was Phoebe's in Stoke Newington back in the day, there was Shenolas in Hackney, but that was a bit later on. And the Four Aces, just down the road.
A: Is it still there?
T: No. It got demolished for the new Tube station that they've been promising to build since 1975. Then a lot of bands would be on at the Town & Country in Kentish Town [now the Forum]. There was a DJ there, Wendy May. She was good – played lots of soul and R&B at a night called The Locomotion. We went to The 100 Club All Nighters, The Dublin Castle, The George Robey and Gaz's quite a lot as well. I remember seeing Horace Andy at Gaz's, the band ran out of songs to play and he went on and sang a cappella for about 20 minutes. Superb! Oh, and we used to go to the Scala cinema – that was pretty good.
T: Yeah. It was open all night and you could get beer and pies. So we used to go out and see bands and then we'd get there about 11 or 12-ish. You could watch four or five films and have some beers.
T: And the pies! And then go home the next day. It was a good place. I've done everything there is to do in the Scala at one point or another.
T: It was a funny place cos they'd show all the Planet of the Apes films in a row. It was great. So you'd get film buffs, drug addicts in there, tramps sleeping, couples who'd just copped off, and then you'd get kids running riot – well, basically us lot running riot and having a laugh. They used to have these huge leaflets with all that month's films on and if the film was pony we'd make paper planes out of them and throw them at the screen.
A: Was the screen where the stage is now?
T: Yeah. It's an old bearpit place so the seats are really, really high. It was pretty good.
A: So you were into the music and the scene. Who were (and are) your musical heroes?
T: People I've looked up to? Hmm. People like Curtis Mayfield who was a good enough singer in his own right with the Impressions, but he wrote and produced a lot of stuff for singers like Major Lance and Gene Chandler; Willie Dixon; Prince Buster's always pretty good. Joe Gibbs – he's one of my favourite reggae producers. Junjo Lawes I always rated.
A: I've heard quite a lot of the new poems from Rougher Yet at your readings and it seems like there are more music references than ever, especially to soul music. Any reason?
T: I've just been buying a lot of soul records recently. I've got a lot of the ska and rocksteady that I want and a lot of it is kind of looking back. The nature of poetry is quite nostalgic and a lot of my happier days have been wrapped up with music.
A: There's one poem, Lady You Shot Me, that takes its title from Sam Cooke's last words. What's the story behind that?
T: It's pretty tragic, actually. He was chasing a brass around a hotel and a woman ended up shooting him. She claimed it was in self-defence, but Cooke's family said that she had been trying to rob him. Whatever the reason, he was found dead wearing an overcoat, one shoe and nothing else. He was an inspirational bloke. I wrote the poem for the 70th birthday of US poet Todd Moore. In the poem Sam Cooke sees his death in a smear of strawberry jam from a birthday cake between a girl's breasts.
T: Yeah. His song A Change Is Gonna Come was an early protest song. In fact, the best moment I've had in 2008 was in January. I was doing this show at the George in Stepney, I did that same poem and then this huge black geezer stands up and started singing A Change Is Gonna Come – it was a lovely moment.
A: What about your poem, Wa Do Dem? It's an Eek a Mouse song, isn't it?
T: Eek a Mouse is one of my favourites. I'm proud to say I've seen him perform in three different decades: 80s, 90s and the zero-zeros.
A: And which was the best?
T: Probably the 80s 'cos I nearly got squashed to death by a tidal wave of black schoolgirls.
I mention how that happened to me at an Oasis gig at Earls Court in the 90s, except I was getting squashed by huge, aggressive drunk men.
A: Right, back to Eek a Mouse. What's the story behind this one?
T: Wa Do Dem, the song, is about Eek a Mouse being 6'7" and having a short girlfriend. Wa Do Dem, the poem, is about me meeting Eek a Mouse when I was a teenager. It was at Highbury Corner funnily enough.
A: Which of your other heroes have you met?
T: I was lucky enough to meet Sam Phillips – the guy who discovered Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and ran Sun Records. He was a lovely fellow and inspirational. Meeting Prince Buster was pretty special too. I especially love it at soul shows when acts that are pretty much forgotten in the US come over to England and are playing to packed venues. I don't think they actually believe it 'til they're on stage with the lights in their eyes and the cheers ringing round the room. I saw Maxine Brown and Mary Love a while ago with my dad, that was an incredible show.
A: OK, then. I know you've got a massive record collection.
A: What was your first record?
T: Can't actually remember. One of my first was Rupie Edwards's Irie Feelings. He's still got a record store on Ridley Road Market to this very day.
A: What about fanzines and magazines? Was there anything out there at the time?
T: Yeah, we used get Black Echoes – that was a newspaper. Then there was a fanzine called Hard As Nails from Canvey Island, and there was Zoot from Scotland that I used to write for. There were some good mod ones, In the Crowd, Right Track, and Down in the Basement was an essential northern soul mag. Small Axe was a decent reggae one, and there were quite a few ranting poetry ones. One really good one that combined northern soul with ranting poetry was Kool Notes run by a fellow called Richard Edwards.
A: And have you modelled Rising on those music fanzines?
T: Yeah, I suppose so. I deliberately go for a fanzine look with Rising. I like the idea of it being a bit like a demo tape – something like that. And while everyone else is trying to make poetry serious and grown-up, I've deliberately gone the other way.
A: Which is why it's good.
T: It's always good the other way, Anna.


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Malva nuts, also known as Pangdahai is consider an ideal herb to make tea for sore throat. It's past down from many generations that are accustomed to boiling and drinking the Pangdahai tea when there's something wrong with their throats.
Directions: Recommend 3 nuts or less per time for 16 oz boiling water. When brewed with hot water, the nut skin opens up and swells to 8 times its size.


text:
Draft Talk (Moderator: LMG) »
Experts call on the draft
Author Topic: Experts call on the draft (Read 2023 times)
1. Cleveland Browns — Sam Darnold, QB Experts: 5 out of 8
2. New York Giants — Josh Rosen, QB Experts: 6 out of 8
3. Indianapolis Colts — Saquon Barkley, RB or Bradley Chubb, DE Experts: 3 each out of 8
4. Cleveland Browns (from Houston Texans) — Minkah Fitzpatrick, CB Experts: 4 out of 8
5. Denver Broncos — Baker Mayfield, QB Experts: 3 out of 8
6. New York Jets — Baker Mayfield, QB, Bradley Chubb, DE, or Minkah Fitzpatrick CB Experts: 2 each out of 8
7. Tampa Bay Buccaneers — Bradley Chubb, DE Experts: 3 out of 8
8. Chicago Bears — Calvin Ridley, WR Experts: 2 out of 8
9. San Francisco 49ers — Quenton Nelson, G Experts: 5 out of 8
10. Oakland Raiders — Roquan Smith, LB Experts: 3 out of 8
11. Miami Dolphins — Derwin James, S Experts: 3 out of 8
12. Cincinnati Bengals — Brian O'Neill, OT Experts: 2 out of 8
13. Washington Redskins — Josh Allen, QB Experts: 2 out of 8
14. Green Bay Packers — Denzel Ward, CB or Marcus Davenport, DE Experts: 2 each out of 8
15. Arizona Cardinals — Baker Mayfield, QB, Josh Allen, QB, or Josh Jackson, CB Experts: 2 each out of 8
16. Baltimore Ravens — Calvin Ridley, WR Experts: 4 out of 8
17. Los Angeles Chargers — Da'Ron Payne, DT or Orlando Brown, OT Experts: 2 each out of 8
18. Seattle Seahawks — Mike McGlinchey, OT Experts: 2 out of 8
19. Dallas Cowboys — Da'Ron Payne, DT or Maurice Hurst, DT Experts: 2 each out of 8
20. Detroit Lions — Derrius Guice, RB Experts: 3 out of 8
21. Buffalo Bills — Lamar Jackson, QB, Mason Rudolph, QB, or Rashaan Evans, LB Experts: 2 each out of 8
22. Buffalo Bills (from Kansas City Chiefs) — Vita Vea, DT or Tremaine Edmunds, LB Experts: 2 each out of 8
23. Los Angeles Rams — Carlton Davis, CB Experts: 4 out of 8
24. Carolina Panthers — Courtland Sutton, WR Experts: 3 out of 8
25. Tennessee Titans — no consensus Experts: N/A
26. Atlanta Falcons — Isaiah Oliver, CB Experts: 2 out of 8
27. New Orleans Saints — no consensus Experts: N/A
28. Pittsburgh Steelers — Rashaan Evans, LB Experts: 3 out of 8
29. Jacksonville Jaguars* — no consensus Experts: N/A
30. Philadelphia Eagles* — Kolton Miller, OT Experts: 2 out of 8
31. Minnesota Vikings* — Billy Price, OL Experts: 2 out of 8
32. New England Patriots* — Taven Bryan, DT Experts: 2 out of 8
The experts: ESPN's Mel Kiper, Walter Football, RJ White of CBSSports.com, USA Today's Luke Easterling, Rob Rang of NFLDraftScout.com, Eric Galko of Sporting News, Rotoworld's Josh Norris, and DraftTek.
OneTwoSixFive
Re: Experts call on the draft
Even where there is pretty good consensus beyond the first two picks, like the 49ers (5 out of 8 experts) taking a guard at pick 9/10 (coin flip), it could so easily be an OT or a WR or a CB.
I always think that in many mock drafts, the architect of the mock looks for somewhere to shoehorn in a good player, even if it is not a good fit. While the 49ers really need a guard (and Nelson is a very good one), they have many other needs that could command a high pick, and they can still get a good guard later. It just isn't a premium position like OT, WR, CB.
Remember, several years ago they got Iupati as a guard in round one. He was great at the 49ers, but they had to get rid of him when the second contract became due, as they didn't want to commit big money to the guard position. Using your highest pick at a non-premier position and a short career (with the team that drafted him), is not a recipe for good drafting, especially when you have many positions that need an upgrade.
As long as a draft mocker always tries to make a sensible decision at each spot, he will have a better chance of getting closer to how the draft really pans out. For example, I believe guard Nelson will fall in the draft. He is probably top 5 overall in talent, but I expect him to fall to a point where the difference between him and the other available prospects is big enough, that he cannot be passed over any longer. That may be as early as the late teens, or maybe in the 20's.
Also, most mocks never really address the elephant in the room, the one where teams really like a particular player that is not their most acute need, and take him. Even worse, trades will certainly mess up the order, making all mocks pretty useless, though they can be fun, fans like to see them, and writers have to write, well, something, in the sleepy dog-days, before the draft.
I also found it interesting that CB Ward was mocked to the Packers even though they don't tend to take CBs under 5'11". I would have guessed Iowa CB, Joshua Jackson, as a more logical choice, though I acknowledge that as TT is no longer GM, that might change.
There still seems to be uncertainty as to how the more talented edge rushers stack up to each other. Davenport, Landry, Key, Okoronkwo, any of these could well be available when the Packers pick.............so who is the best choice ?
« Last Edit: January 21, 2018, 06:12:26 AM by OneTwoSixFive »
(ricky) "Personally, I'm putting this in a box, driving a stake through its heart, firing a silver bullet into its (empty) head, nailing it shut, loading it into a rocket and firing it into the sun. "
(Pink Floyd) "Set the controls for the heart of the sun"
dannobanano
Quote from: OneTwoSixFive on January 21, 2018, 05:55:01 AM
Well said OneTwoSixFive.
The other thing mockers (especially this early in the process) don't factor in is how Free Agency will affect a teams "current" top priority. It's like trying to throw a football from LA through a window in NY.
ricky38
Marcus Davenport is suppose to be a freak of nature but he also listed as a project. The Packers don't need another project from the 14th pick in the draft. They need someone who can come in and be a playmaker on defense right away.


text:
Rangers forward Chris Kreider undergoes successful rib surgery, will be reevaluated in six weeks
By Zachary Ripple
After being diagnosed with a blood clot, Rangers forward Chris Kreider underwent successful rib resection surgery Sunday, the team announced Tuesday.
Kreider, who has remained out of action since being removed Dec. 27 in a game against the Capitals, will be reevaluated in six weeks. He remains out indefinitely.
Chris Kreider will remain sidelined for at least six weeks following rib surgery. (Abbie Parr/Getty Images)
While the timetable for Kreider isn't clear, there is precedent for such a procedure. Steven Stamkos and Andrei Vasilevskiy of the Lightening have both undergone surgery after being diagnosed with blood clots in the last three years, with each player returning after approximately two months.
Kreider racked up 11 goals and 11 assists in 37 games prior to the injury.
chris kreider


I saw your post and I've been thinking about it ever since. It's one of those thoughts that's making me anxious, because I have so much to say about it and since I don't know you personally, I can't get it all off my chest. Your dilemma isn't huge and you've acknowledged that there are much bigger problems in the world but at the same time, you've said you now feel 'like a terrible mother' and, in my opinion, that's pretty serious.
So your son is approaching his first birthday and in all the chaos of moving house and everything that goes with it, you've realised that you won't have enough time to order him a custom birthday cake. You're now left with the horrifying prospect of presenting him with a shop-bought cake. On top of that, you're worried that the presents you've bought him, albeit expensive, 'don't look like much'. You said you've seen so many pictures of beautiful custom cakes and huge stacks of presents from other mums on Facebook and you feel guilty that you're not giving your son the same. You feel like a terrible mother, and that's the part I can't stop thinking about.
I'm going to state the obvious and I'm sure this is something that you've probably been trying to drill into your own head too. Your son is almost one. He doesn't know or care if his cake is custom-made, shop bought or if it's a cadbury's mini roll with a candle on top. He doesn't care if he has a huge pile of presents - let's face it, he'll probably play with one of them for a few seconds and then spend the rest of the afternoon going in and out of the cardboard box it came in.
The thing is, you don't want the custom cake for your son. You want the custom cake and the huge pile of presents to impress the other mums on Facebook. You want to meet their standard of a 'good mum' - the mum that goes all-out for every birthday and Christmas, who has angelic, over-achieving children and the perfect (photogenic) family life.
What you probably don't realise is that each and every mum on facebook has probably had their own variation of your problem. They're all trying to meet that standard. A standard unconsciously created by themselves. A competition that none of them ever wanted to enter but one where they now find themselves both the participant and the judge. Everyone is trying to compete and it's not because they want to brag or make you feel inferior, it's because they don't want to feel inferior themselves.
It's worth mentioning that you went into a secret group on facebook to vent about this. A group where no one knows each other, and everyone has their guard down. It's almost like you stepped back from the fake world of Facebook and whispered your question to the real world, before adjusting your 'mum of the year' badge and heading back in with a huge fake smile.
I suggest you keep stepping back from that fake world and keep going until you are no longer in it. You don't need anyone to judge your parenting. It's not up to them to decide whether you're a good mum or not. When deciding what to get your son for his birthday, think about what would make him happy, not everyone else. You'll probably find that that's your love, your attention, your time. Spend the day playing with a new toy, singing happy birthday and he'll be over the moon.
Instead of posting a photo of a huge pile of presents and an overpriced cake, post a picture of your happy, smiling boy on his birthday. Don't enter the competition, set a new standard of your own. Let's face it, anyone who thinks any less of you for it isn't worth your time anyway. If you stick two fingers up to the mum competition, the chances are other mums will feel encouraged to do it too. If you want to post something about your boy's birthday, think about your reasons for posting it and if you find you're doing it for validation from others, stop. Take a step back and remember you don't need it.
Being a mum is hard enough as it is without that added pressure. Letting go of that competitiveness will be like a weight off your shoulders and will give you the freedom to follow your gut instinct and just do what makes you and your son happy. That's all that matters.
Have any of you felt the need to compete against other mums on facebook?
10 comments on "Mum Politics: To The Mum On The Forum"
I love this post - I saw the same post on the same forum and I can agree with pretty much everything you've said. It's a sad world when we're so consumed about meeting this ever elusive perfect parent standard, that we don't realize we're already better than it. The very fact that she's put so much thought into her childs birthday shows she's a brilliant mum - the Asda cake doesn't make her any less so. A little reminder for the rest of us also when birthdays roll around - posting pictures of the pile of presents on the more doesn't make you a better parent, it simply makes you one who is eager to appear to be one.
I do love social media but it does create fake standards wether its being 'Mother of the Year' or in the 'Perfect relationship' and people fall into this trap that what they read and see on Facebook are the standards which have to be met in order to be happy or successful. I loved this read and it absolutely spot on - "Set our own standards" and "anyone who thinks any less of you for it isn't worth your time anyway" Hear, Hear :) Chris.
I love this post so much. There are sooo many mums I know whose entire existence seems to revolve around lengthy Facebook statuses about how perfect their families are, how high their children's achievements are and how big the pipes of presents are on their birthdays. It's as if none of their family achievements are personal, it's all for show. People asked us what to get Lucas for Christmas last year- he was two weeks old! He was happy to get a bottle and sleep the rest of the day!
It breaks my heart, although it doesn't surprise me, to know that some mothers think like this. As if society doesn't hold women to enough impossible standards already.
I see a lot of these pictures of present hauls, particularly at Easter/Christmas, on the STFU Parents blog/Facebook page, and it makes me so uncomfortable. Parenthood isn't a performance. It's loving your kids, and raising them to be awesome little people. Something that I can tell from what you DO choose to share you're not going to have a problem with.
Also: it was SO lovely to see you yesterday and I'm sorry for not saying goodbye before I had to rush back to work. Glad you're still able to make some time for yourself and you look absolutely wonderful.
I know it really is awful. Wow I haven't seen Easter/Christmas hauls before - that sounds odd!
Loved this Eilidh, and you're totally right! I can't wait to have kids one day but I hope I don't get consumed with all the extra drama that seems to come with it these days!! Being a mum must be hard enough without trying to live up to unattainable standards! Plus it's all so false!! The amount of times I've been on Facebook and seen all the pics you're talking about...it really just seems a lot of the time that it's all out on for show!!