text:
The REAL-LIFE fairy-tale landscape: Images capture Switzerland's beautiful Lauterbrunnen valley
by travelnews January 14, 2020 Travel Articles
The REAL-LIFE fairy-tale mountain landscape: Incredible images capture Switzerland's impossibly beautiful Lauterbrunnen valley (though you might be forgiven for thinking it's Hollywood CGI at work)
Lauterbrunnen Valley is a 'trough valley' that contains no less than 72 waterfalls – one is 1,000ft high
The valley town of Lauterbrunnen sits at an elevation of 795 metres (2,608ft) and is pretty from every angle
A nearby cableway takes visitors to the Schilthorn peak, where On Her Majesty's Secret Service was filmed
By Ted Thornhill, Mailonline Travel Editor
Take a moment to rub your eyes in disbelief.
Then allow us to reassure you that no, you're not looking at Hollywood CGI – these are real photos of a mountain valley that really does exist.
The images capture Switzerland's impossibly picturesque Lauterbrunnen Valley, a 'trough valley' that contains no less than 72 waterfalls.
Plus alpine meadows and lonely mountain inns.
The most photographed of the waterfalls is undoubtedly the free-falling Staubbach Falls. Here water cascades dramatically almost 1,000ft from an overhanging rock face.
Scroll down and behold the Alps at its most breathtaking.
The Lauterbrunnen Valley, says www.myswitzerland.com, is one of the biggest nature conservation areas in Switzerland
At the free-falling Staubbach Falls, water plunges dramatically almost 1,000ft from an overhanging rock face
Lauterbrunnen Valley is a 'trough valley' that contains no less than 72 waterfalls
The valley town of Lauterbrunnen, pictured, sits at an elevation of 795 metres (2,608ft)
Heavenly: The town of Lauterbrunnen draped in sunlight one winter morning
Lauterbrunnen town is linked by railway to the holiday resort of Mürren, which overlooks the valley, and Interlaken Ost, the gateway to the Jungfrau Region
Just up the valley from Lauterbrunnen town is the mindblowing Trümmelbach Falls – which thunder down the inside of the 'Black Monk' mountain. Up to 20,000 litres of water per second cascade over 10 glacier falls from a total height of about 650ft, according to www.myswitzerland.com
Vast ski areas can be reached from Lauterbrunnen, which looks like a fairy-tale village from every angle
Pockets of low-lying cloud hang lazily in the valley, which looks eye-catching through every season
An amazing aerial view of the village of Mürren, which sits right above the valley in dramatic fashion. It's easily accessible from Lauterbrunnen
The cableway from Stechelberg, which is a 3.5-mile walk along the valley floor from Lauterbrunnen. It takes visitors to the 2,971m (9,747ft) peak of the Schilthorn, famous for being the setting for 007 classic On Her Majesty's Secret Service
In 1779, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited the valley and was inspired by the Staubbach Falls to write his well-known poem Spirit song over the Waters, says www.myswitzerland.com
Can Olympian Helen Glover really get YOU fit on this glorious Algarve spa holiday?
CDC warns against travel to Germany, Denmark as COVID cases surge
Open All Hours and Gavin and Stacey: The filming locations for Britain's favourite TV shows MAPPED
Holidays in Switzerland: Why you should hop to the hip Carouge area in Geneva
Avoid the crowds and high prices of Bali and Dubrovnik and try Bintan and Sibenik instead
The best expedition cruises on the horizon that offer adventures on the high seas
Luxury holidays: The world's top 100 hotel suites in 2022 revealed
Breathtaking moment a juvenile giraffe run after a truck full of safari enthusiasts in South Africa


Articles by our readers about news. Do you want to contribute to this category too? Please subscribe to be an author.
As more pressure is exerted upon organisations to demonstrate good governance across their entire operation, increasingly boards of directors are expected to possess far greater knowledge and understanding of the organisation's business and its supply chain. For directors to naively believe that their collegial friendships at board level, or their business connections will 'make the grade' is simply not good enough, neither acceptable.
Sustainable Development Goals: Can South Africa do it?
The impacts of the widely broadcasted activities that South African citizens witnessed regarding the 'Nenegate blunder' will be felt hardest amongst the poor, and for many years to come. And this is with no thanks to President Jacob Zuma. President Zuma singularly decided to remove Minister Nene as South Africa's Finance Minister in December 2015 — seemingly with no proper reason — and following this move, half a trillion Rand was wiped off the value of South African stocks and bonds in just two days.
Compensation issues are again dominating annual meeting season. Have shareholders begun to assert their rights more aggressively, or have companies learned nothing from years of dialogue?
An explosive start to this year's proxy season has many observers calling 2016 the second Shareholder Spring. Significant opposition to compensation at companies such as BP, Citigroup, Anglo American and Smith & Nephew has caused embarrassment and surprise, while more investors seem willing not only to oppose management in key votes, but to engage in very public debates on the subject.
There is an ongoing and very heated debate between the unconditional supporters of private equity and their opponents. It's not hard to see why. On the surface, these investors can often buy fragile companies, load on debt to fund strategic change and sack workers in a bid for efficiency. It can look ruthless, but the industry claims it simply works.
STARBUCKS CEO: WHAT'S THE ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY OF A FOR-PROFIT COMPANY?


text:
A bulwark at the Tempus Fugit.
I am not what I was.
Before pneumonia.
Before my head on car crash on the Grand Central.
I have not yet regained my strength.
Though my "numbers" seem to be going in the right direction--the threat of Hepatitis has diminished--I am still suffering from atrial fibrillation, which leaves me dizzy and short of breath. Of all the things you don't want to be short of, breath is about number one on the list.
I am too weak still to even walk Whiskey around the block, much less head uptown to the Tempus Fugit, a dark former speakeasy that's hidden in an old warehouse building on east 91st Street. I miss the place, however. Miss the companionship of the bartender--a guy who seems to have some answers, and I miss the sweet nectar of the brew they serve, Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE.)
So, I was pleased last night at 2:17 in the morning when my iPhone began vibrating. It could be just one person at that hour, the bartender of the Tempus Fugit.
"I trust you will soon be darkening our door," he began with no introduction.
"How did you know I am sick?" I stammered.
"A good bartender is like a good wife or a good friend. We know things without being told. I am glad your counts are heading back down and others are heading back up."
"I am fighting my natural inclination to rush things. To rush back to work. To once again be the bulwark."
I could see him in my mind's eye, cradling the phone between his cauliflower ear and his well-muscled sloped shoulder, wiping the bar all the while with his damp white terry.
"A bulwark. Like Fort Eben-Emael in Belgium. Here's the thing about being a bulwark...the Belgians learned this in 1940 when the Nazis blitzed in.
"It was the largest fort in the world, Eben-Emael, and believed by most to be impregnable. Yet in less than a couple of hours, a couple of German DFS 230 attack gliders with fewer than 60 soldiers knocked over the place."
I instinctively bent my elbow and drained an imaginary eight-ounce juice glass of Pike's Ale.
"The thing about being a bulwark is that you take a lot of hits. Everyone comes at you. Take it easy on yourself, my friend. You'll be back soon."
With that he hung up the Ameche.
And I went back to sleep.
Posted by george tannenbaum at 9:43 AM 5 comments
TWTW.
There was a slight article in "The New York Times" sports page today about a former American League slugger and current announcer for the Chicago White Sox, "Hawk" Harrelson. Unlike so many of today's baseball "cognoscenti," Harrelson does not believe in "Sabermetrics," the excruciating mathematical analysis of the game that is supposed to make mountains out of molehills and frozen-rope doubles out of weak grounders.
Not believing in Sabermetrics, I think is akin to saying in our business "I don't believe in Big Data."
Well, I'll say it here.
"I don't believe in Big Data."
What I believe is the ingredient to marketing success is what Harrelson believes is the greatest ingredient to baseball success.
The Will To Win.
What makes great work, work that works, is people who make that work work.
It's blowing apart dumbness.
It's exploding hoary rules.
It's throwing out best practices.
And doing something different.
That gets noticed.
That makes an impact.
Technology, big data and all its friends is a parity product.
No one has yet chosen an agency based on the efficiency of their HVAC system. Because they are all the same.
As is data.
What differentiates is TWTW.
Posted by george tannenbaum at 5:08 PM 0 comments
Dr. Cohen.
Over the next few weeks I will be spending an inordinate amount of time with my internist of 32 years, Richard P. Cohen.
The way Dr. Cohen practices medicine has more in common with how it was practiced in the 1960s than in our heavily industrialized age.
He believes in "laying on hands." In listening. In the "meta" power of humanity as a force stronger than mere technology.
We are all of us--and all our clients, too--about to be victims of a mega-merger. I don't see it making advertising stronger or better or more effective.
What I see are the things that make accounts work--the things that lead to powerful and effective work--they will attempt to wring from the system. Listening to clients, knowing their heart patterns, being intimate with their bloodstream and their desires....there's no room for any of that on a timesheet. It's all so inefficient. Antiquated. Dinosaurish.
What people don't want to wake up and realize is painfully obvious to me. Systems, technologies, software and processes are good for 80% of all cases.
When you get pneumonia, complications, atrial fibrillation and a hosts of other mishegas accompanied by a head-on collision into a concrete wall, I don't want "scale, size and 'efficiency.'"
I want a human.
Hopefully one with insight and compassion.
Who's handled a case like mine before.
Posted by george tannenbaum at 11:26 AM 0 comments
My meeting with Maurice Levy.
Years ago when I was an SVP, Group Creative Director on the HP business at Publicis & Hal Riney, I had occasion to meet Maurice Levy.
Hal Riney had been the agency of the 80s and 90s and their iconic building along the Embarcadero in San Francisco stood as a "city on a hill." They did great work that built great brands--that differentiated them and built a soul and personality for them. Saturn. Alamo. Gallo. Bartles & Jaymes.
At the top of the building in a beautiful serif face was a sign that read "Hal Riney." By the time I got there in 2004 they had appended to it "Publicis &".
That appendage seemed to me like adding something to the name of Mickey Mantle. As if when CBS owned the Yankees they mandated that the slugger be called CBS and Mantle. Or Stoneham Mays. Or Yawkey Williams.
One guy knows the game. Is a maestro, the g e n i u s of the diamond. The one people pay to see. The other is a genius of the ledger. A man who can add rows of numbers and make them lie.
CBS Mantle.
Stoneham Mays.
Yawkey Williams.
Publicis Riney.
In short, a sacrilege. An affront. An abomination.
Like paying $200 for opera tickets--to something by Verdi or Rossini or Wagner--something godlike, and getting an ad on that ticket that says "brought to you by Bank of America."
Brought to you by me and my labor and decision to attend. All you did, Bank of Fucking America was bring down the world's economy one $17,000 'executive commode' at a time.
In any event I was running the HP business at Publicis & Hal Riney and doing it fairly alone. There were few account people, and none at a senior level to help me fight the fight.
I am a yeoman and took the business on my broad shoulders and made an impact and progress. But it wasn't enough. Maurice and a henchman came in and we were introduced.
He is a wall-eyed little man in a nice suit with a meringue of salt-and-pepper hair. He came up to my shoulders. We chatted and he said, "You are poonching above your weight. We have gotten you help so you no longer will have to poonch above your weight."
I thought about the French army, Europe's largest in 1940 surrendering to the Nazi's in 41 days. I wish he knew more about poonching above his weight. A lot of Levy's would have been saved along the way.
A few days later a new account guy arrived. A guy I knew from Ogilvy and IBM to help my punches tell. But frankly, it was too little too late and I blew out of Publicis & Hal Riney in just seven months.
I think the world has become an immensely bureaucratized place.
When our armed forces prepares for a mission they do something called "moving the metal mountain."
It is slow. Ungainly. Complex. Wasteful. Enormously expensive and it consumes everything in its wake.
This is our world. Omnipublicom or whatever advertising's newest behemoth--I propose Fucktardipubliom--will not be about a Hal Riney or Maurice or Charles, or Mantle or Mays. It will be about optimization, globalization, standardization and massification.
Individualism, that which brought us to the business in the first place, will be a casualty once again and we will continue regurgitating processed cheese food.
I made it home a couple hours ago, thanks to the good, tolerant graces of my wife and a young doctor, who took me under her wing at the hospital.
For all the advances of medical technology, a hospital is a painful place to be sick. And, like the old "Tootsy Frootsy Ice Cream scene" with Chico and Groucho in "A Day at the Races," if you don't like the diseases you have, we'll make up some new ones for you.
Pursuant to that young doctor, she made me think a little about advertising.
We have become in the world corporations.
We protect and serve the corporation.
And the corporation proscribes our behaviors.
Mostly that means work is done slowly, mundanely, and by committee. With more check ins than are humanly bearable.
That way, out the other end, comes just what you'd expect.
A corporate turd.
Every so often, however, someone breaks or ignores that corporate, almost Soviet morass. And smiles and perseveres and prevails.
Our systems in so many ways are so broken.
Everything from phone service to airlines to hospitals to agencies has been motor-vehicleized.
We need to find a way through this.
I any event, I am home now.
Thanks for all the kind wishes.
I'm fine.
One of the biggest issues in my life--and it has been for 55 years, is that "I am fine."
I take a lot of shit on.
I do a lot.
You can throw crap my way and I handle it.
I am fine.
On the weekend, I was not fine. And by the time Monday rolled around I was the apotheosis of unfine.
But I traipsed out to Minnesota to sell a campaign.
My agency needed me to.
My client needed me to and "I would be fine."
Even after the car accident Monday night I said to the ambulance driver, "I'm fine."
I just wanted to get home and see my visiting daughter,
Well, now I have been in the hospital since Wednesday.
And am only now approaching fine.
I won't pyschoanalyze here my need to provide, come through, be fine.
I can only promise to try a little less hard.
And I'll probably be fine.
So I am in the hospital suffering from a bacterial pneumonia that all but destroyed me. The accident in the gypsy cab only added injury to insult.
Things seem to be progressing...slowly. And sometime I suppose they will release me from the emergency room and into a real room.
This has been just about the worst week of my life.
But I no longer think I'm going to die.
A bad night in Queens.
I have been sick as a dog.
First I thought I had food poisoning.
Then, it turns out I'm having serious adverse effects from a medication my doctor gave me.
Literally my hair hurts, my skin hurts.
I am headachey and dizzy and chills and fever.
Yet yesterday I had to go to Minnesota to present some boards to the CEO.
Which went well.
The flight back to New York was cancelled.
Then on again.
Then cancelled.
Then three hours late.
We landed at LaGuardia after midnight in pouring rain and no cabs.
I can hardly stand up at this point.
So I grab a Gypsy cab.
Big mistake.
His car was from the early 90s and the tires were as bald as Don Rickles.
He was driving too fast, spun out of control, crashed into one concrete wall and rebounded into another.
Thank god I had my seat belt on. I wouldn't be typing this if I hadn't.
I am bruised up pretty bad.
My knee was wrenched.
And like I said, my hair still hurts.
But somehow I got another car, and made it finally home.
The great unraveling.
Sorry there's been no Monday post today.
I'm traveling on business, sick as a dog and the agency saw fit to wedge all 6'2" of me into a middle seat.
I'm important to the agency.
I'm the one they send when there's a meeting with the CEO, as there is today. But I'm not so important that they treat me well.
I subscribe, and have for more than two decades, to the famously liberal magazine "The New Republic." I don't know who's taken over editorial control, but they have revitalized the magazine. It no longer looks like it's printed on foolscap in the basement of a substandard high school in Mississippi.
The cover of this issue really got me. Because everything that's happened to journalism, medicine, and advertising is now happening to law.
What's happened, to keep it simple, of course is that money men have moved in and destroyed our reason for being. They get their $16 million payouts--or more--and we hear that salaries are frozen. They have lowered prices, lowered wages and made yet another industry a furious race to the bottom.
And when the profits--which they have robbed from the system--disappear, people, working stiffs like me, will get the shaft.
A morning with Uncle Slappy.
Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie arrived early this morning. They had had enough of the Florida heat, hadn't been up for some time, and decided at the last moment to visit me and my wife.
"You escaped the Florida heat for the New York heat," I said to the old man as he arrived at my door.
All he said in response is a single word: "Coffee."
Uncle Slappy believes, as I do, that my wife for all her mishegas makes the single best of cuppa coffee in the world. I don't know how she does it, but day in and day out she does.
After Slappy had caffeinated we decided we would walk to Sable's together. Sable's is one of the best "fish" places in the city. That is, a place to procure your lox, your baked salmon, your whitefish and your sturgeon.
Danny Sze and his brother Kenny, two immigrant Chinese, opened Sable's almost 30 years ago after they had risen to head fish slicers at the more famous Zabar's. Over the last three decades, the Sze brothers have turned "Chewish." That is, Chinese-Jewish.
They speak a smattering of Yiddish, have a mezuzah out front, and know more about the Jewish holidays than most Rabbis.
Uncle Slappy and I braved the 90-degree heat and the 90 percent humidity and made it to the cool of Sable's in just under 15 minutes. When we got there, Uncle Slappy immediately recognized the celebrity status of another customer.
"It's Fonzi!" he shouted, shaking Henry Winkler's hand.
The two kibbitzed for a while like they were old friends. Then Winkler left with his lox and left me and the Sze brothers alone with Uncle Slappy.
Danny gave Uncle Slappy a big schtickle of lox and whitefish salad on a small slice of sesame bagel.
"The Chinese make the best Jews," Uncle Slappy proclaimed and "the Jews make the best Italians. Think about it, Paul Muni...Jew. Henry Winkler...Jew. Sheldon Leonard...Jew. John Garfield...Jew. George Raft...Jew."
The Sze brothers didn't know what to make of Uncle Slappy's philippic but they enjoyed that he called the Chinese the best Jews.
They gave him another schtickle of lox.
And we walked together home.
Friday reflection.
It's Friday.
The end of another seamy, seemingly interminably long week.
A week of back and forth with the client over a campaign.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
And back and forth some more.
We are improving the work to death.
Smoothing out the rough edges.
Taking out that which might offend.
Or might give pause.
Or might make one laugh.
I had a talk yesterday with a young journalist about advertising.
Like most young journalists he was unduly influenced and interested in the purported mad man era.
What's the difference between then and now?
Well, to keep this simple, today we have a bureaucratic infrastructure that legislates humanity and soul out of most things.
We have skeins of rounds and hordes of approvers and some times literally hundreds of people who weigh in, and hundreds more not to offend.
The end, thankfully, of a long week.
Today's journalism.
I admit I do not understand what the issue is with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev being on the cover of "Rolling Stone" magazine.
Boston's mayor Thomas Menino wrote to the publisher of "Rolling Stone," saying its cover "rewards a terrorist with celebrity treatment." Various retailers have said they will not display or sell the magazine.
Again, I do not understand.
It seems to me that people should be smart enough--and should be given the chance--to pass their own judgments of Tsarnaev. Yet we live in a time where we prefer censorship and ostracism to openness and freedom.
I believe Tsarnaev did a terrible thing, would have done more terrible things, and is a terrible person. He should suffer the worst we can mete out--if and when he is tried and convicted.
But where is the evil, the lack of taste and sensitivity in showing his picture?
The "Esquire" cover of Lt. William Calley was controversial when it appeared. I'm sure people were outraged by it.
He was charged in 1969 with the premeditated murder of 104 Vietnamese civilians during a Calley-led rampage that killed as many as 500 Vietnamese villagers.
Yet George Lois and "Esquire" put him on Esquire's cover--looking happy if not beatific, surrounded by affectionate Vietnamese children.
What has happened in our world that we need to see things in such a Manichean manner--black vs. white, good vs. evil, light vs. darkness.
What has happened in our world that we eschew diversity of thought. That we cannot tolerate point of view and controversy?
I've also posted a cover of "Time" magazine who had Hitler on their covers more than once. He was even their "Man of the Year" in 1938. (In '39, Time lightened up a bit, naming Stalin their "MoTY.")
Another hot night in the Tempus Fugit.
The heat was like a fat man in the seat next to you on an airplane. It crowded you. It violated you. It pressed against you. There was no escaping it.
And it smelled.
It smelled the smell of a million unshowered.
It smelled the smell of pigeon.
Of steaming sewer.
Of dog shit left to bake.
The city, which always closed you in, loomed now. The sky, way above the towers built by rapacious bankers, was more distant. Its color the color of wet sheet rock. The streets seemed narrower. The toxins in the air more redolent.
Even within my apartment, with five air-conditioning units running at full-bore, the heat was there. Movement slowed. And conversation hung in the moist atmosphere.
I got home late. I had seen an old friend for a couple of drinks and dinner and did not arrive home until after midnight. Even at that hour, long past the time I usually go to bed, I knew that sleep this night would not come. The gates to Morpheus were barred. Nailed shut. Closed for the duration.
I decided to not even try. I slipped a collar over Whiskey and once again we headed north to the Tempus Fugit.
We arrived, long-tongued and languid 20 minutes later. Getting there was like swimming through a thermocline. The Tempus Fugit was a strata of cool alongside layers and layers of oppression.
Whiskey curled at my feet and I assumed my usual juncture, a stool one in from the end.
The bartender once again played Nijinsky, or Pee Wee Reese, and was around the bar with a small wooden bowl of cold for Whiskey and then in a blur was pulling back a Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE) for me.
"Heat," I mumbled with my usual insight. "Heat," I said again as if the word had meaning anymore.
I drained my Pike's and hadn't even the time to place my eight-ounce glass on the bar before the bartender placed another amber in from of me.
"On a night like to night," he said "there is no need for language. Leave us go prognathous and grunt and point only."
I nodded as he brought over a small wooden bowl of Spanish peanuts. I pushed it away and he filled in the blanks for me.
"I know," he laughed. "A pound in every nut."
By the time I had rendered my second glass half-empty I had returned to the world of the living. My vital bodily fluids were coursing again through my over-loaded system and I was beginning to feel almost human.
"Think of this," he said. He was wiping the clean varnished surface of the teak with a damp white terry. "Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called in the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the house of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard..." He paused and I finished.
"No one had explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."
"What are you seeking, my friend, at this altitude? Some yards, either above or below street level on east 91st Street."
I laughed a bit as he refilled my glass. He scooted around the bar with a tumbler of ice and refreshed Whiskey's bowl. She remained asleep and oblivious.
The Tempus Fugit, as usual, was empty and nearly dark. The four or five table along the back wall, each with a geometry all its own were unoccupied. The one stool to my right and the twelve or so to my left were similarly unemployed.
Behind the bar, amid a forest of various bottles, there was in addition to the 15-watt that lit the cash register, a single neon advertising in crackling blue type Pike's. It cast a glow over the place that reminded me of the color treatment of Victor Sjostrom's 1921 horror "The Phantom Carriage."
"What do any of us seek?" I replied.
"Some seek company. Some solace. Some peace. Some battle. Some love. Some the absence of love. Some death. Some life. And some, like you seek all of those things."
Whiskey stirred, got up and sniffed a bit around the bar.
"That's a little heavy for a saloon keeper," he said continuing to polish the polish.
"Maybe it's the heat," I answered as I pushed two $20s his way.
"On me," he enjoined.
I leashed Whiskey and we began walking out of the place.
"Stay cool," he said. "Stay cool."
The Black Dog barks one early Wednesday.
I'm in early once again and once again the office is as empty as a promise.
There's not a single ass in a single seat and the only sound other than that which comes from my ancient MacBook keyboard (only the cool kids get new computers) is the boom and whoosh of an over-achieving HVAC system.
I don't have a reason, right now, for coming in early. We are in the throes of trying to sell some commercials and our next "deck" is ready to go though our next meeting isn't scheduled until Monday.
This round of spots--my fourth with this client--I fear I've lost the battle. We have negotiated, not communicated. And, I fear, when we produce them, the client will wash their hands of them--like they were our idea--even though we were bludgeoned into them.
There are times when advertising is like the French in Dien Bien Phu in 1954. You keep building your arsenal, you keep fortifying yourself, but the enemy is more plentiful, more determined and has history on his side.
This is a dark age, I fear. An age of darkness, not an age of discovery. An age where the great advances are not drugs to eradicate polio, but are ways to make things cheaper.
Globalization--and it has taken over our industry--where centers of capital are distant from where the work is centered, is the law of the land. Wages are driven ever downward and no one seems to realize what Henry Ford realized a century ago, that without a middle class, there is no consumer class.
I'm no fan of Henry Ford. He was a virulent hate-mongering anti-semite who spewed his hate through a popular newspaper--the "Dearborn Independent." He distributed "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," in multiple languages throughout the world. He sold the Nazis war machinery.
All that. But he paid a living wage.
Today our best companies employ de facto overseas slaves and avoid paying taxes like my mother avoided giving compliments.
We, the people, are anesthetized. Doped out on televised stupidity, and hyped-up cupidity and on global warming humidity.
Our industry is dumb. We can't separate "news" from "new," and build apps and toys rather than businesses.
And it's all ok, so long as your timesheet is done on time and a bunch of bespoke blue-suited financocrats get their $16 million per annum despite having never written an ad.
A choice we make.
There are a few nice commercials on the air now promoting WNET, one of New York's three public television stations. You can view them and read about them here.
Each of the spots purports to be a network promo for a dumbed down television show. One, for example, is called "Long Island Landscapers," ("The boys are going over the hedge and their bad attitude is in full bloom.") Once the spoof is set up, we cut to a super that says: "The fact that you thought this was a real show says a lot about the state of TV."
Idiocy is what I'm talking about.
Immaturity is what I'm talking about.
Nastiness, small-mindedness, name-calling, hyperbole, ugliness, violence, stupidity are what I'm talking about. They exist, all of the above, in our world in spades.
And they will continue to exist as long as we indulge them.
As long as we accept the "dominant complacency," it will prevail.
But we don't have to accept it.
I know we in advertising exist in the world and must be cognizant of it.
But we must also, I think, lead.
As shapers of brands, we are powerful shapers of public mores and opinions.
We don't have to be dumb.
We don't have to succumb.
Half a century ago, when according to TV advertising women cared about nothing but "waxy yellow build-up," David Ogilvy said "the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife."
We can update that for today.
Catering to the lowest is not a mandatory.
It's a choice.
It's one I refuse to kowtow to.
A well-lighted night in the Tempus Fugit.
A hot slurry of pigeons, rats, dogshit, rubbish and what passes for air has descended once again on New York. The temperature, even in the evenings, is circa 90, and there hasn't been even the wisp of a breeze besides that which comes from slamming shut taxi doors and the curses of Punjabi drivers.
The building I live in has central air, and each of the cooling units in each of the apartments 190 units has been gasping on high—hoping against hope to put a dent in the heat. But by last night, the temperature had creeped up too far, the humidity was too high and Whiskey and I decided to try our luck cooling down at the Tempus Fugit.
I threw on an old grey t-shirt and girded Whiskey with her collar. We set out on a walk—about a mile in length—that we had done so many times before.
We arrived on East 91st Street and navigated downstairs and upstairs, through a warren of small hallways, sliding open steel expansion gates, fiddling with door handles, until we finally hit the Tempus Fugit. The Tempus Fugit was there as it is always there, impervious to time and the elements.
I sat down, my grey t-shirt fairly soaked through with perspiration, on my favorite stool, one in from the end and Whiskey curled by my feet. The bartender was quick from behind the bar on little cat's feet, like Phil Rizzuto. He nimbly placed a small wooden bowl of ice water in front of her. He was back behind the bar in another instant, pulling in one motion a Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE) for me and sliding it deftly in front of me.
Before he had settled back to his stance, I drained the full eight-ounces and slid my empty juice glass back his way. He pulled me Pike's number two and then he began.
"The heat has become like a character in a play by Tennessee Williams," he began. "It has a presence and a large speaking part."
"Certainly, the heat is on everyone's lips," I added dimly.
He placed in front of me a small bowl of Mr. Salty pretzels. I grabbed a handful if only to replenish the salt I lost walking up to the Tempus Fugit.
"During the heat wave of 1972, the heat played rougher than Raymond Chandler with a set of brass knuckles."
He paraphrased, "Meek little wives are feeling the edge of carving knives and studying their husbands' necks."
"Chandler could really sling it, couldn't he?"
"From July 13 to July 20th, 1972, there were 57 homicides in the City. That's more than seven a day. That would add up to more than 2,500 for the year—more than three times the number of US soldiers than were killed that year in Vietnam."
I emptied my second Pike's and he filled me up again. He did so with not a single wasted motion.
"Of course murders happen in darkness. And there was no shortage of darkness that July. In just over a week, New York saw outages that hit 400,000 people, then 200,000, then three-quarters of a million."
"That sounds about par for the course these days," I said. "Though I have to give Con-Ed credit, since hurricane Sandy, the lights have been on."
"The lights have never gone out in the Tempus Fugit." He wiped the varnished bar in a tight circular motion with a white terry towel.
"What about in '65?" I asked. "What about in '77?" Those were the years of two major blackouts in New York. The first was in November and half of New York feared it was prelude to a Soviet nuclear onslaught or a Cuban one. The second one spurred the worst riots and looting since the 1863 Civil War draft riots.
He removed the glass in front of me, wiped it a few times, then drew me another Pike's. He circled around the bar with an aluminum tumbler full of ice-water, he re-filled Whiskey's bowl. She was still panting from the heat of the walk up and eagerly welcomed the cool.
"We never lost power," the bartender said calmly. "It was like the miracle at Lourdes."
"Verizon must have its own generator," I offered. Verizon--the telecom company--occupies most of the old warehouse building.
He smiled and continued polishing the varnished teak to the bar-top. We sat in silence for a good five minutes.
"No," he said. "We never lost our lights."
"Never?"
"We have an obligation," he said as he polished.
I got up to leave. The sun would be up in an hour. I passed two twenties over to him. He pushed them back like a champion volley-baller.
"On me," he said.
And Whiskey and I walked home in the dark.
The best revenge.
Years ago I was taught something very simple by Steve Hayden who was then Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather.
Steve never acted like I expected a Vice Chairman would. He was never high and mighty. He never toed the company line. He never gave you bullshit about how great things were.
In short, he pretty much told it like it was. And that's why scores of people in the industry, from coast to coast, admire and miss Steve, and would give their left arms to work for him again.
He was honest.
He cared about the work.
And he cared about the people who cared about the work.
No matter where you work, the best place or I suppose the worst, we all go through an excruciating number of rounds, revises, re-dos and rethinks before work ever gets produced.
Crappy agencies and clients allow work to get a little worse through each of these renditions.
Good agencies and clients allow the work to be improved.
Good agencies, and this is what Steve taught me, know that the best revenge is a better ad.
I'm on round 87 of a bunch of commercials now.
I'm trying hard to keep them from sucking.
Denouement.
We had a great meeting!
It was really great!
We presented seamlessly!
Everything went off without a glitch!
Everyone was happy!
The clients' attention didn't waver!
The clients were nodding in agreement!
Everyone felt good about the work!
We're getting there!
Everyone was pleased!
We got a great email about the meeting!
(We didn't sell a thing.)
Social media in the Tempus Fugit.
I got off my flight last night at around one AM. I unfolded myself from the seat they had wedged me into and walked the dead-man's walk through the dead-world's airport (LaGuardia) past the skeins of shuttered fastfood restaurants, ardently hoping my Town Car would be there and I wouldn't have to hold-music and phone-tree while waiting for it.
It was hot last night and humid. There wasn't a breath of air anywhere in the five boroughs and even the Town Car, whose air-conditioning was blasting like an Apollo space-craft, was as sticky as a caramel apple.
The driver read out my address.
"No," I said, and instead I gave him the address of the Tempus Fugit. We sped there through the nearly empty streets. I arrived before one-thirty.
"Where's the pup?" the bartender said as he greeted me. "Oh, I see you've been traveling."
I dropped my overnight bag and my computer case at the seat of my stool one in from the end. He pulled me a Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE) and leaned over the bar to begin tonight's interchange.
"I want to pick you brain about some marketing ideas I have for the Tempus Fugit. See if we could bring more folks in from the neighborhood."
"You could start with a sign out front," I said.
"Let's not get radical. A sign is a bit mercantile from where I sit. I was thinking more in terms of consumer interaction and engagement."
"It sounds like you read a book on marketing in the digital age."
He schluffed me off like a bear swatting a honey bee. "Here's what I want you to do. I want you to tweet about the Tempus Fugit."
"I'm not sure what that will do." I answered somberly. "I have just 79 followers."
"I want you to Vine about the Tempus Fugit as well. A six-second looped film of a Pike's being served."
"I'm not really sure how the whole Vine thing works," I answered.
"Before long these Vines will spread. I'll ask people who come in to Vine their Pikes, then we'll post all the Vines we get on the Tempus Fugit website."
"I didn't know you had a site," I was beginning to cry into my beer.
"I don't. But can you imagine a virtual Tempus Fugit, serving virtual Pike's Ale. My heart flutters when I think of all the conversations we could generate."
He filled my eight-ounce juice glass with cool amber.
"We'll have Mayors of the Tempus Fugit on Foursquare. And Dukes on Yelp. People will be positively swilling in our Ale!"
"My friend," I began.
He was wiping the mahogany clean and dry with the damp of a white terry. He seemed to be doing it with an usual intensity.
"Imagine how my Klout score will rise," he continued.
"Your Klout score," I laughed to keep from crying.
He then broke from the role he was playing and drew me another Pike's. Then he did something he never did before, reaching across the bar to put his hand on my shoulder. He gave it an affectionate squeeze.
"No," he said standing straight up. "No, the Tempus Fugit shall remain a place that time has forgotten. A place that the years cannot improve."
"You had me worried there for a moment," I said.
"The Pike's are on me," he answered. "Just don't tweet about that. I don't want it getting around."
Posted by george tannenbaum at 12:33 PM 2 comments
Curmudgeonly.
A lot of people of late have taken to calling me a curmudgeon.
I don't like this.
I feel it is today's au courant language.
A politically-correct way of calling someone old and grumpy.
I am not old.
I am not grumpy.
I have run a dozen marathons and can out think and out write and out present nearly anyone out there.
I get frustrated which leads me to vent my spleen at stupidity.
At asking consumers to engage with brands in ways that are more complicated than building in balsa wood a scale model of the "Little Indian Girl" genuine replica cedar canoe complete with reinforcing ribs.
Or in making things that no one will ever see that might win an award but does nothing outside of Madison Avenue's bubble.
I get frustrated when people treat this business as if we make toys not drive sales.
I get frustrated at grand proclamations that are 100% puffery and 0% accountability.
I get frustrated by people who phone it in when something doesn't interest them.
I get frustrated by a lot of things.
Healthy outrage is healthy.
It doesn't mean I hate my life, or my boss, or my agency, or my client, or the industry.
It just means I want to make it and them better.
Posted by george tannenbaum at 9:34 AM 10 comments
Fuck perfection.
I'm in the filthiest place on earth, or one of them, LaGuardia airport, on my way west to present some work to some C-level people.
The work has stayed essentially the same for the last six weeks.
But for the last six weeks we have probably permutated two versions of the deck a day, everyday.
We are trying to make it perfect.
With not an extra space between words.
Not a punctuation mark hanging.
Not a participle dangling.
I hate perfection.
I hate the mania, the obsession to scrub something so clean that it's antiseptic.
They say kids today don't have the resistance to illness enjoyed by previous generations because over-protective parents have shielded them from every germ.
I fear that we are doing the same in our business.
In the quest for perfection we are destroying humanity, life, wit and worst, serendipity and surprise.
We have plowed over reality and laid down astroturf.
It might look good but it has no life.
I just looked up "goofs" on IMDB's listing of "Citizen Kane," arguably the greatest movie ever.
I counted 34.
The pizzo.
There's an article in today's "New York Times" about a restauranteur, Vincenzo Conticello, in Italy who's refusing to pay what's known as a "pizzo" to the Mafia.
The pizzo is a protection fee. In Conticello's case, the pizzo runs to tens of thousands of euros. When he refused to pay, some of his customers' cars were damaged. One of his house cats was killed. Arson is another popular tactic. As is murder.
According to the "Daily Telegraph," around 80% of businesses in Italy pay a pizzo. This translates into untold millions of euros in graft.
Contincello is joining a small but growing movement to resist the pizzo. He says, "I know that many prefer to pay the pizzo. But in the long term we become slaves of criminality..."
Naturally, I think some form of pizzo is in effect in our business. Four major holding companies hold 70% of the ad business in New York. Which likely "limits trade, movement, salaries and benefits."
The advertising pizzo also places restraints on your freedom. There are no longer scores of shops to choose from. Instead there are essentially four.
It ain't criminal what the unofficial gang of four are doing. There's no anti-trust legislation in the ad business. And of course, you're "at will." You can quit any time.
But it still feels, at least some days, that we have become slaves to a system.
Reflections on writing and life.
I've been writing Ad Aged for six years now. Except for a few days while on vacation, a few more while chased by the darkest of Black Dogs and most Saturdays and Sundays, I've written every day. In fact, over the past 2,000 or so days, I've managed to write something like 3,500 posts--more than one and a half a day.
That said, it's unusual that I wake up knowing what I want to write. And that's why I love having a blog. I feel the need to write, but don't know what to write about. So, I am forced every morning to think.
That is to think. Really think. To think about what's going on in my world and our industry. To balance that thinking with the consideration of what readers may or may not find interesting. And then to throw all that together and come up with a post.
I suppose if I had a more orderly mind, I could plot out days or even weeks in advance what I want to write about. But I prefer the spontaneity of fear. Of having to face every morning this white rectangle. Of having to type and hoping for the best.
Along the way, I've created a few characters who speak to me when I am up a tree. There's my Uncle Slappy--wise in the way of the world and always ready with a crack or a witticism. And there's the bartender at the Tempus Fugit, another man wise to the world with a view, I think that's jaded but unique. These guys help me. They're almost always there when they're needed.
There's a third guy I think about when I am stuck and though I've never written about him, he spurs me on when I can find no reason to keep on going.
This is a guy called Andre who I played baseball with when I was a precocious teenager.
In those days, say in 1973 when I was 15, I played on a summer league team with mostly college kids. The most gifted of these was a pitcher named Andre. He didn't stick around long enough for us to learn much about him. But what we did learn was pretty frightening.
He had come home from Vietnam without all his faculties intact. He could hardly have a simple conversation--he seemed like a fuse that had already been lit, a temper waiting to explode. However, he had a fastball like Tom Seaver, and that was good enough for us. I would put a small sponge in my mitt when I caught him.
About halfway through our summer season, Andre got arrested and taken away. He had been using heroin and was caught. Another casualty in a world full of horrible casualties.
Five years later, I saw Andre again. I was riding the number one train up to my dorm room and I saw him begging on the subway platform at 50th Street. He looked like a Central Casting homeless man. Still long and thin, but somehow longer and thinner. His hair cascaded around his unshaven face like a waterfall. He had on his fatigues which were filthy and he was begging loudly and aggressively.
It scared me seeing him. I didn't know what to do. I probably should have run out to help him, but he scared me. And what could I do that the Veteran's Administration and Social Services hadn't already tried? Besides I was late for class.
I never saw him again.
But I've thought about him often.
I've thought about the sadness that arrives when someone can no longer fight. When someone has succumbed to the defeats that are all around us. When someone is ruined and without hope.
I think about Andre as I struggle, at times, through my own depression, through the travails of my life and my career. I think about him the way I think about Viktor Frankl.
We are all handed a portion of hell.
How we deal with it makes all the difference.
A heat wave in the Tempus Fugit.
Last night it was as hot in the city as the handles on the gates of Hell. The temperature during the day had risen to the mid-90s. Though the mercury had dropped some when the sun went down, nearly every surface of the city was radiating stored heat. What's more, the exhaust of a million cars and a million more air-conditioners only added to the swelter.
The heat must have awakened Dame Insomnia, because she jostled me from my slumber at around 2:15. I tried ignoring her as I almost always do.
I picked up my book and headed to the living room. Whiskey followed me and curled at my feet as I read a dozen or so pages on America's entry into Vietnam. Those pages didn't tire me. I looked at the clock, it was now 3. Whiskey and I made eye-contact. It was time to face facts. This night would only pass from the welcoming environs of the Tempus Fugit.
I be-leashed Whiskey, grabbed a handful of low-calorie biscuits and we headed north. With ever-watchful eyes and bearing scars, we headed up-town, full of the hazy notion that sleep would someday come unsullied, undiluted, unending.
In just a few minutes, we arrived in the cool of the Tempus Fugit. There was an old oscillating fan on the bar-top. It sat in the place of the large jar of pickled hard-boiled eggs that a few of the regulars, not me, enjoy. I'm not much of a pickled hard-boiled egg guy; I suppose they're delicious. I'm just not ready to take the plunge. Somewhere, perhaps, a hen is thanking me.
As I do, I sat on my usual stool, one in from the end, and Whiskey once again curled at my size 14s. The bartender was out from behind the mahogany like Nijinsky, and was quick with her small wooden bowl filled with icy water.
Back behind the bar he slid over to me a cool Pike's Pale Ale (the ALE that won for YALE) in an eight-ounce juice glass. I've found through more than 40 years of drinking that beer is best served in an eight-ounce glass. You can nurse it along and it doesn't go warm or flat on you. They understand nuance like this at the Tempus Fugit.
"It's nothing, this heat, compared to 1972. In that year, 891 died in New York alone. That's more than died in the Chicago fire and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake combined."
"I was living here then, and I don't even remember that."
"No one remembers anything anymore. We have sensationalized everything. Nothing has any meaning."
"You're running a little gloomy today."
He slid a bowl of salted Spanish peanuts my way. I slid them back his way, saying as I always do "a pound in every nut."
Then he took my glass and refilled it again with cool amber.
"I remember there was a movie theatre up on Broadway and 88th Street in those days. There's a Duane Reade, a Starbucks, a condo and nail salon there now." (Here's what the street looked like in 1971.)
"Ya, the New Yorker," I said. "I used to go there when I was in college at Columbia. They tore it down probably 30 years ago."
"New York isn't worth shit anymore thanks to nail salons, Starbucks, Duane Reades and condos." He wiped the already spotless bar-top ever cleaner with a damp white terry towel.
"You're damned right, I'm gloomy. I'm tired of hearing about the weather. We knew how to handle it before New York got pasteurized. Before they took the impurities out of it. We went to the New Yorker--the air-conditioned New Yorker--they would play Charlie Chaplin movies all day long. $5 would get you in for as long as you wanted to stay. That's how you beat the heat."
"I guess watching Chaplin in "The Gold Rush" would lower your temperature a bit," I said.
"You're darn tootin' it would. Today, the city opens up 'cooling stations' for people without A/C. Today if we had a heatwave like we had back then--today with the cooling stations, ten-thousand would wilt and die. They ought to open up the old movie theatres and play Chaplin."
"The old movie theatres are no more," I said sadly. "Like you said, they've been Duane Readed, and Starbucked, and nail saloned and condo'd."
He filled Whiskey again and me too, with my third Pike's. He stood behind the bar from us, wiping in an efficient circular motion. He had gone laconic on me. Something that had never happened before during all my hours in the Tempus Fugit.
I didn't like seeing him like this--didn't want to leave him like this. But it was time to leave. I pulled two 20s from my wallet--it was clammy with sweat--and placed them on the bar top.
"On me," he said.
And then he smiled. And then he laughed. And then he said, "stay cool."
Whiskey and I walked home along the East River.
Hoping to do just that.
Hoping to stay cool.
The 4th on the water.
My kids have been in for the last couple days, Hannah from all points of the globe (most recently New Zealand) and Sarah with her boyfriend in tow, in from Boston.
My wife got tickets that gained us entrance to Pier 66A, which juts out into the muddy, turbid Hudson from just about 26th Street. The pier itself is on two levels, and because we paid at a higher rate, we were allowed to go topside.
We finally found a small round table near the western-most part of the pier. We were about 20 or 30 yards out into the Hudson and about 150 yards from the southernmost of the four Macy's barges from which fireworks were being launched.
There was an open bar and some runny hummus and we each got a drink and sat down to watch the night darken and the fireworks light up the sky.
Around eight o'clock a fleet of seven NYPD helicopters flew low overhead in a classic V. It looked like something out of "Apocalypse Now" and you could hear people humming Wagner from various other tables. The sun was going out and the lights of the city were coming on, most spectacularly the new Freedom Tower, about three miles south of us was illuminated in three tiers of red, white and blue.
Seven miles north or so, the towers of the George Washington Bridge went on. Then the string of pearls, the illumination of its suspension superstructure. Further down the river, about five miles you could see the green of the Statue of Liberty.
At 8:30 it wasn't yet completely dark, but some towns in New Jersey couldn't wait and their fireworks flaccidly lit their small portion of sky. All the while the massive Macy's barges sat stolidly in the river, each with a Macy*s logo burning bright.
The city seemed to quiet as it neared 9:20 and time for the fireworks. A police boat sped by, its emergency lights flashing a bright blue. And then a Coast Guard zodiac boat. The area around the barges was cordoned off. Boats, there were literally thousands of them were kept about 100 yards away.
New York's police, fire and emergency services departments are probably the best in the world outside of Israel or London. They are supremely efficient and frighteningly paramilitary and they had cordoned off a fair portion of the west side, for safety's sake. There were numerous check points, no bags allowed, and radiation detectors to boot.
At 9:20 the explosions began. Boom! Boom! Boom! Loud, palpable percussions that you could feel in your bones. The sky lit up a variety of colors and the pyrotechnics went on and on. It's astonishing, really, when you see something like we saw how your vocabulary and your cameras fail you. Neither words nor pixels can capture the effect of such an event.
Around 10:00, the whole affair was over and everyone in New York streamed away from the river, toward mid-town and in search of a toilet.
Magically, I found, almost immediately, a gypsy cab and we got the hell out of there without getting our hair too mussed.
New York on July 4th.
Uncle Slappy on the Egyptian revolution.
Uncle Slappy called tonight just as the news on PBS was over. I picked up the phone on the second ring. I knew it was Uncle Slappy and I knew he had a good one for me.
"The fancy Puerto Rican anchorman with the mustache said the Egyptian army got him," he began, as usual without even saying hello. "They ousted their President Morty."
I'm used to playing his straight man. The fact is, I actually enjoy it.
"That's President Morsi, Uncle Slappy, not President Morty."
"The last I saw of Morty he was kicked out of the co-op association for stealing paper towels from the clubhouse. The first time, they looked the other way. But when they caught him again, he was gone."
"Time and tide wait for no man, I suppose."
"I'm not quite sure how Morty became president of Egypt, but there you have it. Let me read you the Times' headline: "Army Ousts Egypt's President Morty.
"I wonder" he continued "if they caught him with a roll of bounty."
With that, the old man hung up the phone. And I was left staring at mine.
Golden Retriever paws.
A little over a year ago my wife came home from one of her many trips to California with a bouncing 10-week-old Golden Retriever whom we named Whiskey.
We had no idea how big Whiskey would get. While her parents were large, she was the "runt" of the litter--the smallest of the dozen or so of her brothers and sisters.
Maybe it's a unique feature of Manhattan living, maybe it's the magnetism of a puppy, but as we walked Whiskey in those early months, we would often be stopped by dog-lovers, experts and a variety of commentators.
It wasn't unusual for us to be stopped on the corner of, say, 83rd Street and hear someone say "look at those paws, she's going to be big." And then be stopped on the corner of 82nd Street and hear someone say, "look at those paws, she's going to be petite."
My point, of course, has nothing to do with Golden Retrievers.
It's twofold.
1. Everyone always acts the expert.
2. People are usually wrong about 50% of the time.
I think that holds for Golden Retriever paws.
I know it holds for advertising.
Death at an early age.
I've been working in the industry since 1984, at major agencies, for major creative directors, on major clients.
During those 29 years I've earned applause--actually hand-clapping--maybe three times. Each time, it was pre-cursor to a painful death.
The last time before this time was back in the 90s. We were pitching an account that, if won, would have brought Ally & Gargano back to respectability. It had been one of the great agencies of all time and winning this account would have given it the opportunity to be great again on a national stage.
My partner and I worked all weekend long and came up with something we knew was good. We presented it to about 15 people at an internal meeting Monday morning. To a man, they stood and applauded.
Over the next six weeks of the pitch, that work was picked at and emasculated. Finally, just a week before the client presentation, I ripped the tissue off the wall, crumbled it up and threw it at the Chief Creative Officer.
I remember what I said to him like it was yesterday. "You want it dead, it's dead."
The same has happened recently. A client screamed after I presented a campaign, "I love it. We have to do this."
Since that point, six weeks ago, advertising cadaver-ists have stormed in. They are the most thorough type of surgeons. Armed with razor sharp implements of torture, they've had their way with the work.
Removing real. Removing grit. Removing truth. Removing humor.
The campaign is now cardboard thin.
An embarrassment.
We are showing it to the big boss in a week, only because he saw it before and liked it. We have an obligation.
But the destroyer-gnomes who never liked it (they exist at both clients and agencies) have gnawed it into nothingness.
So much for applause.
Black Dog Monday.
I don't feel like writing today.
In fact, prolific as I am, there are many days I don't feel like it. I either can't think of anything to write. Or, more often, I am in such an abyss of a mood that I feel like crawling under my metaphorical rock and shielding myself until such time that I can emerge.
Most days, I write through my lethargy and/or anger. I'm a stupidly committed type of person, and I'm afraid that the few readers I do have would disappear if I stopped writing so assiduously. Rich Siegel over at Round Seventeen is taking a full week off. I have never been able to do that.
Today I'm in a shitty mood.
Shitty because for the past ten weeks everyone has been telling me "it's my pool." And then they go ahead and piss in it. There ain't enough chlorine in the world to make it mine again. I'll be looking elsewhere to swim.
Along the way we've subjected ourselves to literally two client "check-ins" a week. Two opportunities for them to express disdain, to show their pusillanimity, to make things worse. Today this buggery is called "working together," or "partnering" with clients. It's supposed to be good.
We have also constructed an elaborate schedule of about two agency check-ins a week. No good ever comes from people who say "we're just trying to make this better."
I can think of no creative pursuit worth its salt (I am not talking Hollywood movies which are an industrial product) that allows itself this sort of gestation.
Last night I saw Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors," via New York's Public Theatre, outdoors in the Delacorte Theatre in New York's Central Park. It's as about as dumb a play as you will find anywhere. A pure conceit with two sets of twins not realizing the other set are alive and in the same small city. There's canoodling, merry mix-ups, dull-witted jailers and pompous Dukes.
In all, it's about the level of the old Patty Duke TV show where Patty Duke plays both herself and her identical cousin Cathy. Hijinx abound.
No point here today, except that some days it's harder than others.
Somedays you wish all the people who were telling you that they care about what you think didn't really mean "we don't give a rat's ass for your talent and experience. We want to get our grips on this work and make it ours."
Somedays I handle the bullshit better than others.
Today isn't one of those days.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Loading 10k+ rows of JSON into jqGrid 1k rows at a time Introduction
I load a JSON object via ajax into the browser outside of jqGrid. I then load the JSON into a grid, which the initial setting datatype: "local", using the following:
  $("#myGrid").jqGrid("setGridParam", {datatype: "json", loadonce: true});
  $("#myGrid")[0].addJSONData(jsonObject);
  $("#myGrid").jqGrid("setGridParam", {datatype: "local", loadonce: true});

The above tricks the grid into allowing me to load a JSON object without the jqGrid making an automatic call for it (which is its default behavior).
Implementing server-side pagination would be ideal, but not currently feasible in my case.
The Question
I need to load about 10-20k rows into the grid from JSON. But that takes several seconds. To boost performance, I'm trying to add 1k rows from a JSON object at a time (which is fast and doesn't stall the browser), but I can't figure out how to do that with a JSON object on my hands. Here is my attempt, which loads the first 1k rows into the grid, but doesn't properly update the pager, and doesn't allow me to add additional rows via addJSONData.
$("#myGrid").jqGrid({
  jsonReader: {
    page: function(json) { return 1; },
    records: function(json) { return json.records; },
    repeatitems: false,
    root: "objects",
    total: function(json) { return json.totalPages; }
  },
  // . . .
}

$.jgrid.extend({
  loadJsonFirstPageOnly: function(json) {
    return this.each(function() {
      // copy the first page of data into a truncated JSON object to load into the grid
      var resultsPerPage = $("#" + this.id + "_ResultsPerPage").val();
      var numberOfPages = parseInt(json.objects.length / resultsPerPage);
      var firstPageData = {"objects": [], "pages": numberOfPages, "records": json.objects.length};
      for (var i = 0; i < 1000 && i < json.objects.length; i++) {
        firstPageData.objects[i] = json.objects[i];
      }
      // load the truncated JSON object into the grid
      var $this = $(this).jqGrid("setGridParam", {datatype: "json", loadonce: true});
      this.addJSONData(firstPageData);
      $this.jqGrid("setGridParam", {datatype: "local", loadonce: true});
      // adjust the grid's internal state
      this.p.allData = json;
    });
  }
});

Any thoughts? Thanks!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


I am more deeply convinced than ever, by renewed study of Romans and other scriptures, that the view I have insisted on, as to a new nature and place in resurrection, as contrasted with flesh under law, is not only true, but is the great fundamental point on which the Apostle Paul insists as distinguishing Christianity. That, while surely sins are expiated and put away, "all are under sin" is what he is dwelling upon, and that wholly as in flesh, and hence death and a new state come in, through grace, in Christ. Besides the blessed fact of putting away sins, this is the truth of the Romans - righteousness being established by the obedience of Christ as such. But this, too, in contrast with law. Even as to convincing power, he does not say by the law is the knowledge "of sins," for conscience told that, but the knowledge "of sin." "All have sinned," is in the end of Romans 3; so in verses 12-16 is offences under law specially. Both "sins" and "sin" in chapter 4:7, 8; so verse 25. In chapter 2:12, is actual sinning, as in chapter 3:23. From chapter 6, where death is applied, "sin" is the subject.
The details, I have given here, serve as reference, but only show the force of the Apostle's argument. It is well to note them specially. I add, when I have said above, Romans 6, it must be remembered that that is founded on the great truth that we must not look to law, which is individual, but beyond it to the two great heads, Adam and Christ - one of sin, the other of righteousness and life. Only "for that all have sinned" comes in. In Galatians we have only chapter 3:22, where all are "concluded under sin," where we have help to see what the force of "righteousness" (chap. 5:21) is, in contrast with "sin."
It is clearer and clearer to me every day that the whole gist of the Apostle's teaching, especially in Romans, is that as the law was correlative with flesh, and so, we being sinful, a ministration not of deliverance but of death, we are brought in Christ into a new condition by the Spirit of life in Him, and that, this being by death, we are free in the new man according to the law of the Spirit of life. That deliverance is not by the law, but by having life in the power of the Spirit in contrast with flesh. The law came in by the bye, to bring clearly out what flesh was, but that Spirit instead of flesh is true deliverance, Christ's death set aside the title of flesh. The whole of Romans 8 is the teaching of this. The new power of life - the Spirit in the power of life - has set me free from flesh and its law of evil, has put me into another existence and life. But that my conscience might be true, and God's righteousness maintained in it, God has condemned sin in the flesh, in a Sacrifice for sin, even the Cross. Thus, Spirit and flesh are fully contrasted, and the law has no place even with either, for judgment has come on flesh, not law which could make no hand of it, and then Spirit replaces flesh. This makes the "fors" of verses 2 and 3 quite plain, which are otherwise difficult, and the whole bearing of the teaching clear.


Bill Text - AB-281 Transmission and distribution lines: undergrounding and fire hardening: CEQA: administrative and judicial streamlining.
An act to add Section 21168.6.13 to the Public Resources Code, and to add Section 8390 761.2 to the Public Utilities Code, relating to electricity.
AB 281, as amended, Frazier. Transmission and distribution lines: undergrounding. undergrounding and fire hardening: CEQA: administrative and judicial streamlining.
Existing law requires electrical corporations and local publicly owned electric utilities to construct, maintain, and operate their electrical lines and equipment in a manner that will minimize the risk of catastrophic wildfire posed by those electrical lines and equipment. Existing law requires electrical corporation and local publicly owned electric utilities to prepare annually a wildfire mitigation plan.
This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation to require electrical corporations and local publicly owned electric utilities to take certain actions related to electric transmission and distribution lines and equipment in high fire risk areas.
(d) The increase increasing peril facing California is further exemplified by the terrible damage wrought during the 2018 fire season, when more than 8,500 wildfires burned 1.9 million acres of land, destroying more than 20,000 structures and killing at least 104 people.
(a)Require electrical corporations and local publicly owned electric utilities to relocate electric transmission and distribution lines and equipment outside of high fire risk areas, if feasible.
(b)Require electrical corporations and local publicly owned electric utilities, for overhead electric transmission and distribution lines and equipment as to which the requirement of subdivision (a) is not feasible, to relocate those lines and that equipment underground.
(c)Require electrical corporations and local publicly owned electric utilities, for electric transmission and distribution lines and equipment as to which the requirements of subdivisions (a) and (b) are not feasible, to make improvements to those lines and that equipment to prevent, and minimize the risk of, fire ignition events.
(A) A determination that a project is exempt from this division.
(B) A negative declaration or mitigated negative declaration.
(C) An environmental impact report.
(2) "Fire hardening project" means a project for the replacement or relocation of electric distribution or transmission lines in high fire threat districts, as determined by the Public Utilities Commission, to reduce the risk of wildfire posed by the electric distribution or transmission lines.
(b) On or before September 1, 2020, the Judicial Council shall adopt rules of court that apply to an action or proceeding to attack, review, set aside, void, or annul the certification or adoption of an environmental review document for a fire hardening project that meets the requirements of subdivision (c), or the granting of any approval for the fire hardening project, to require the action or proceeding, including any potential appeals therefrom, to be resolved, to the extent feasible, within 270 days of the filing of the certified record of proceedings with the court.
(2) The draft environmental review document and final environmental review document shall contain, as an appendix, the full text of this section.
(3) Within 10 days after the release of the draft environmental review document, if any, the lead agency shall conduct an informational workshop to inform the public of the key analyses and conclusions of that document.
(4) Within 10 days before the close of the public comment period, the lead agency shall hold a public hearing to receive testimony on the draft environmental review document. A transcript of the hearing shall be included as an appendix to the final environmental review document.
(5) (A) Within five days following the close of the public comment period, a commenter on the draft environmental review document may submit to the lead agency a written request for nonbinding mediation. The lead agency and applicant shall participate in nonbinding mediation with all commenters who submitted timely comments on the draft environmental review document and who requested the mediation. Mediation conducted pursuant to this paragraph shall end no later than 35 days after the close of the public comment period.
(B) A request for mediation shall identify all areas of dispute raised in the comment submitted by the commenter that are to be mediated.
(C) The lead agency shall select one or more mediators who shall be retired judges or recognized experts with at least five years' experience in land use and environmental law or science, or mediation. The applicant shall bear the costs of mediation.
(D) A mediation session shall be conducted on each area of dispute with the parties requesting mediation on that area of dispute.
(E) The lead agency shall adopt, as a condition of approval, any measures agreed upon by the lead agency, the applicant, and any commenter who requested mediation. A commenter who agrees to a measure pursuant to this subparagraph shall not raise the issue addressed by that measure as a basis for an action or proceeding challenging the lead agency's decision to certify or to adopt the environmental review document or to grant project approval.
(A) New issues raised in the response to comments by the lead agency.
(B) New information released by the public agency subsequent to the release of the draft environmental review document, such as new information set forth or embodied in a staff report, proposed permit, proposed resolution, ordinance, or similar document.
(C) Changes made to the project after the close of the public comment period.
(D) Proposed conditions for approval, mitigation measures, or proposed findings required by Section 21081 or a proposed reporting and monitoring program required by paragraph (1) of subdivision (a) of Section 21081.6, if the lead agency releases those documents subsequent to the release of the draft environmental review document.
(E) New information that was not reasonably known and could not have been reasonably known during the public comment period.
(7) The lead agency shall file the notice required by subdivision (a) of Section 21152 within five days after the last initial project approval.
(d) (1) The lead agency shall prepare and certify the record of the proceedings in accordance with this subdivision and in accordance with Rule 3.2205 of the California Rules of Court. The applicant shall pay the lead agency for all costs of preparing and certifying the record of proceedings.
(2) No later than three business days following the date of the release of the draft environmental review document, the lead agency shall make available to the public in a readily accessible electronic format the draft environmental review document and all other documents submitted to or relied on by the lead agency in the preparation of the draft environmental review document. A document prepared by the lead agency or submitted by the applicant after the date of the release of the draft environmental review document that is a part of the record of the proceedings shall be made available to the public in a readily accessible electronic format within five business days after the document is prepared or received by the lead agency.
(3) Notwithstanding paragraph (2), documents submitted to or relied on by the lead agency that were not prepared specifically for the project and are copyright protected are not required to be made readily accessible in an electronic format. For those copyright protected documents, the lead agency shall make an index of the documents available in an electronic format no later than the date of the release of the draft environmental review document, or within five business days if the document is received or relied on by the lead agency after the release of the draft environmental review document. The index shall specify the libraries or lead agency offices in which hardcopies of the copyrighted materials are available for public review.
(4) The lead agency shall encourage written comments on the project to be submitted in a readily accessible electronic format, and shall make those comments available to the public in a readily accessible electronic format within five days of their receipt.
(5) Within seven business days after the receipt of any comment that is not in an electronic format, the lead agency shall convert that comment into a readily accessible electronic format and make it available to the public in that format.
(6) The lead agency shall indicate in the record of the proceedings comments received that were not considered by the lead agency pursuant to paragraph (6) of subdivision (c) and need not include the content of the comments as a part of the record.
(7) Within five days after the filing of the notice required by subdivision (a) or (b) of Section 21108 or subdivision (a) or (b) of Section 21152, the lead agency shall certify the record of the proceedings for the approval or determination and shall provide an electronic copy of the record to a party that has submitted a written request for a copy. The lead agency may charge and collect a reasonable fee from a party requesting a copy of the record for the electronic copy, which shall not exceed the reasonable cost of reproducing that copy.
(8) Within 10 days after being served with a complaint or a petition for a writ of mandate, the lead agency shall lodge a copy of the certified record of proceedings with the superior court.
(9) Any dispute over the content of the record of the proceedings shall be resolved by the superior court. Unless the superior court directs otherwise, a party disputing the content of the record shall file a motion to augment the record at the time it files its initial brief.
(10) The contents of the record of proceedings shall be as set forth in subdivision (e) of Section 21167.6.
(e) Subdivision (c) and paragraphs (2) and (3) of subdivision (d) do not apply to a determination that the project is exempt from this division.


As young men, both Mitt and his father spent more than two years abroad as Mormon missionaries.
Whatever fate befalls Mitt Romney's presidential hopes, there can be no doubt that his father, George, inspired his beleaguered candidacy. And the younger Romney hopes favorable memories of his dad will inspire voters in Tuesday's Michigan primary.
The elder Romney, who died in 1995 at age 88, was a successful auto mogul at a time when the thriving Detroit-based industry dominated U.S. car sales. He was a popular three-term Republican governor of a prosperous Michigan at a time when Democrats had long prevailed there behind powerful union leaders. And, for a time, he was widely presumed to be on track to become the 1968 GOP presidential nominee.
While trolling for votes in Tuesday's primary, Mitt Romney has played the nostalgia card. He's held up a picture of his father that underscored their physical resemblance: the same long jaw, the same deep brows above crackling eyes, the same helmet-like sweep of hair. Nevertheless, the economically depressed state where Romney was born and where he seeks to revive his prospects bears scant similarity to the booming Michigan that launched his father's White House bid some four decades ago.
Father and son both married their high school sweethearts before following parallel career paths. As young men, they both spent more than two years abroad as Mormon missionaries. Before seeking political office, both amassed fortunes in their business careers. Both then became governors.
Both entered their respective presidential cycles as formidable contenders. As the 1968 contest took shape, George Romney appeared to be well-positioned to win it all.
He was a moderate in tune with the political climate of his era. His strong civil rights record appealed to liberals. Although he was to the right of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, another leading contender, he had little in common with such conservatives as former Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, or California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who hoped a "stop Nixon" surge would make him the compromise choice.
As the race began, Romney looked good compared to a shopworn Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, Nixon emerged as the easy winner. He named Romney to his Cabinet as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Mitt was 21.


Mossack Fonseca, the embattled Panama-based law firm at the centre of the global offshore leak known as Panama Papers, has recused itself as the registered agent of Sutton Energy Limited (SEL), a shell company co-owned by Laolu Saraki, younger brother of Nigerian Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and Kojo Annan, son of a former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan.
The law firm said it was withdrawing its services due to what it described as "adverse findings" on Sutton, PREMIUM TIMES can report today.
Following a PREMIUM TIMES report, which was part of the Panama Papers investigation exposing the hidden assets of the Saraki family, Carmen Batista, an employee at the corporate head office of the offshore provider, wrote to Afrex Sal, the Geneva-based administrator of Sutton Energy Limited (SEL), announcing the decision of the company to resign as its registered agent.
The original email, however, did not provide further details other than the claim of adverse findings against the younger Saraki and Mr Annan.
But in another correspondence to the company's Geneva branch, referencing a letter of protest written by Mr Annan's lawyer, James Palmer of Omnia Strategy LLP, another employee of Mossack Fonseca, Saran Persaud, said the company was cutting links with SEL because its owners were involved in alleged corruption and false declaration of assets.
"We are resigning due to negative findings associated with Messrs. Kojo Annan and Laolu Saraki, affiliated with the company as directors and/or shareholders. The PEP's are alleged to have failed to disclose assets as required by the legislation in their country, along with allegations of corruption," Mrs Persaud wrote.
"As per our company policy approved by the Board of Directors, we will not continue to act as Registered Agent for companies with PEP's where adverse results are found/linked, due to the elevated risk associated with such persons. This is notwithstanding that an official verdict may not have been reached by the courts," Mrs Persaud explained further in the email dated January 30, 2017.
He added that SEL would not accept the resignation without further details of particular "adverse findings" it claimed.
"Your Geneva office holds the day-to-day relationship with SEL and if they can't find no issue then our client is left at a loss to understand what it could be," Mr Palmer argued.
Mr Palmer added that Mr Saraki was no longer involved with the company as far back as August 2008.
"The extent that the notice is connected with anything that Mr Saraki may have done since August 2008 then this would be a decision made on a mistaken assumption and should be reversed.
"Finally, SEL and its shareholders have been left confused and concerned by this turn of events. We all want to see a swift solution and look forward to hearing from you by close of business," he wrote.
Through the exchange of emails between Mossack Fonseca's Panama office, its branch in Geneva and Mr Palmer, it was also revealed that Afrex Sal, a client company, which had been the administrator for SEL was no longer interested in acting in that role.
Panama-based Afrex Sal is a shell company which was a client company for Monaco-based Ovlas Trading co-owned by Sayyu Dantata, the brother of Africa's wealthiest man, Aliko Dangote and Patrice Alberti.
During the 2016 Panama Papers investigations, PREMIUM TIMES had reported that the Saraki family owned a string of assets in tax havens which the Senate President failed to declare as required by Nigerian law.
The younger Saraki, documents show, is linked to a number of shell companies in offshore destinations among them SEL.
Another is Polly Capital Holdings Ltd registered in Niue, a small island nation in the South Pacific Ocean. After being the sole owner of the company for a number of years, Mr Saraki sold half of the company to a one Richard Pembroke.
Similarly, Mr Saraki co-owned other offshore companies with Mr Annan and other associates: Obi Asika, Olufela Ibidapo who are all known figures in Nigeria.
Messrs. Saraki and Annan hold equal shares of 25,000 in Blue Diamond Holding Management Corp. The duo, along with Mr. Asika, also own SEL, registered in the British Virgin Island.
Mr. Asika owns 15,000 units of shares, the same amount owned by Messrs. Saraki and Annan. Mr. Asika was a senior special assistant to former President Goodluck Jonathan.
Mr. Annan sits on the board of another of Mr. Asika's company, Dragon Africa. Additional documents show that the trio – Messrs Saraki, Annan and Asika – also co-own Sapphire Holding Ltd., a company located in Samoa, a tiny Island of an estimated 194,320 people in the South Pacific.
Company documents also indicate that Ensol Limited (Environmental Solutions), registered in the Republic of Seychelles, with registration number 028376, partly belongs to Mr Saraki.
The company is co-owned with Ama Annan, a relative of Mr Annan, who was appointed director on May 19, 2006 but ceased to be director on July 2, 2008. Mr. Ibidapo, was then appointed to replace her on January 4, 2010.
Mr. Ibidapo is a top employee at Heritage Bank, a successor bank to the defunct Societe Generale Bank of Nigeria, largely owned by the Saraki family but whose operational license was revoked by the Central Bank of Nigeria in January 2006 following the re-capitalisation policy in the banking sector.
The bank however returned with a new name (Heritage Bank) in 2012 following the order of the Federal High Court compelling the central bank to restore its operational permit after it declared that it had amassed the required capital base to return to business.


You might need to know the monitor resolutions for the particular RealPresence Group Series system that you are using. The following tables provide resolution rates for the video standards NTSC and PAL for Monitor 1, Monitor 2, and Monitor 3 (RealPresence Group 700 system only). The following table shows the Monitor 1 Resolution Rates.
The following table shows the Monitor 2 Resolution Rates.
The following table shows the Monitor 3 Resolution Rates.


text:
Is The US About To See An Invasion Of Stoner Rabbits?
Watership Down would have been a very different film with these pot loving carrot munchers in it
by Sam Haddad
shhhaddad
In a storyline that wouldn't look out of place in an episode of South Park, a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) official in Utah has warned of the dangers of stoned rabbits if medical marijuana was to become legal in the state.
Special agent Matt Fairbanks told the Utah state senate: "Deforestation has left marijuana grows with even rabbits that had cultivated a taste for the marijuana."
"One of them refused to leave us, and we took all the marijuana around him, but his natural instincts to run were somehow gone." A comment sometime pot smokers may identify with.
The bill under discussion would not legalise cannabis to the extent it's been made legal in Colorado, Alaska and Washington State, it would just be for medical use.
Jeremy Roberts, president of the company Medical Cannabis Payment Solutions, gave a brilliant response to Fairbanks, one that all Monty Python fans will smirk at. "I was kind of shocked to find out the killer rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is actually in the Utah mountains."
He also pointed out this bill would only let marijuana be grown indoors so it wouldn't affect the outdoor rabbit population.
Special Agent Fairbanks's assertion that "I deal in facts. I deal in science" was left looking not especially watertight.
As for what symptoms these drug-crazed rabbits could be expected to exhibit, they'd be much the same as the ones that affect humans. So not remotely murderous but definitely showing a propensity for:
Getting the munchies…
Being a little twitchy…
Needing the odd tap on the nose…
But mostly just wanting to kip as much as possible…
Finally, no piece with the keywords "stoned" "rabbits" can be published without a hat tip to this guy.
Could getting stoned actually make you BETTER at sports. This Olympic gold medallist thinks so…
24 things only people who have ever tried to snowboard stoned will understand
'I Went on Holiday to a Country That Doesn't Exist'
Getting off the beaten track is one thing, disappearing off the map altogether is something else...
Missing, Presumed Dead: 5 Incredible Stories Of Ocean Survival
"After a widespread search of the ocean proved fruitless, their friends and family back home held a memorial service for them."
Ever Seen Someone Cycle Down A Mountain Road Backwards At 80km/h? Neither Had We...
Any regular road cyclist will instantly recognise how ridiculous this is...
article laughter Nature surprise


Photography: When I look through my camera lens I see things that invoke a feeling that I can't describe. I look for the unusual in the everyday object. Animals, flowers and things that bring peace to my soul are my focus.
Kleanz: I have been making my own soaps and cleaning products for many years. Giving them as gift and for personal use mainly. I love the process of making a pure natural product and finding that perfect balance of what make me smile when I use that product. Products are made with 90% organic, but as we all know being certified organic is costly so the other 10% is from people and places that practice organically but are not certified or is a natural product make. I use raw butters and oils. Organic and/or therapeutic grade essential oils or flavor oils. Natural Micas and natural minerals & herbs to color with. Everything is made right in our gallery Stonewall In Mineral Point.


Jay Burnett has been providing excellent customer service to local residents and businesses here in Central Oregon for over 25 years.
Jay began his pool and spa career in 1992, right in Prineville. These past 25 years have given him a broad knowledge and experience in every aspect of pool and spa care in our ever changing Central Oregon climate. Jay has made his mark with providing safe, consistent and excellent water clarity in all pools and spas under his care. His experience with maintaining multiple swimming pools and public spas at local resorts, in addition to servicing hundreds of individual hot tub units, make Jay an expert in water quality and safety.
Jay looks forward to working with and for the community through their business of Cline Falls Pool and Spa. "He wants to make a difference in your satisfaction of your pool and spa for years to come".


Hide your IP address with our Fast VPN with High VPN speed. Nobody will know where you are browsing from. Secure Internet and Personal data with our strong encryption. Unblock geographically restricted websites and get unlimited streaming to surf any channel you want. Open the web and browse safely with our fast - one tap to connect to VPN proxy server!
Our Premium VPN app for Android is a secure way to access all major international websites (Netflix, Pandora, Hulu, Torrent sites, Amazon Prime and more). It's the Easiest VPN to use, connect and protect your Internet traffic easily with one click! It provides reliable ip hider and encrypted network VPN connectivity for Android phones and tablets. Our Turbo VPN ensures continuous strong VPN access for when you are on the go, without needing to refresh your device. You can also make sure you IP address is hidden from government censorship when web browsing.
Our Fast VPN service is your premium vpn privacy guard and more secure than your typical proxy.
Whether you need to provide VPN access to your email, desktop, Android plug in or applications Fast VPN has got you covered. We have developed a new network proxy configuration to effectively avoid firewall interference. It also provides business critical app connectivity, so you can get your work done without a hassle. If you want to secure IP and receive the ultimate VPN protection.
Choose one of our top VPN addresses from over 100 countries to surf websites restricted in your region, such as: a UK VPN, USA VPN, VPN Australia, VPN China, France VPN, Canada VPN, and many more.
People will always try to reconnect their VPN browser after a WiFI or Cellular connection, however with FAST VPN you won't have to manually restart the VPN connection. Our Auto VPN reconnect mode does all the work for you. This is the best option for a safe vpn.
2. Connect with easy with our simple VPN 1 click setup.
3. Fast speed, vpn unlimited bandwidth.
4. No root access required to attain privileged control.
5. Strong encryption and hotspot shield to protect your online privacy.
6. Unblock unlimited proxy & servers in numerous regions.
7. Access all geographically restricted apps & websites.
8. No Ads or Pop-Ups. Ever.
9. Auto vpn proxy reconnect mode.
Why use a vpn? So that you can unblock websites wherever you are at all times, browse the web privately and feel secure. There are unique advantages to get from the best vpn provider. When you connect to vpn you will improve security, protect privacy, access restricted resources and get better connectivity.


We offer a life-time trade in policy. Please inquire. To see the extent of the gallery inventory, please visit our updated website at www.artnet.com/mlagallery.html - for more info please call us at (323) 319-2225, (626) 664-2060, or (323) 222-3400. Our skype handle is spidermark1. We have been in business for over 10 years, and enjoy a very good feedback rating. We believe in, and offer outstanding customer service. MLA Gallery has a few other paintings by Dominguez, as well as a large selection of paintings, graphics, sculptures, and drawings by established Latin artists, and Latin Masters. Please inquire for many others.
- Jurado en el Salón Provincial de artes Plásticas de Pinar del Río, Cuba.
- Campamento Internacional de Pioneros de Tarará.
- Jurado en el Salón de Pintura de Centro Habana.


text:
Luss 1,and 2.
Luss Golf Course.
Helensburgh and Gairloch Times August 14th 1907.
Opening of New Golf Course.
The new nine hole golf course at Luss was opened on Tuesday last by Lady Colquhoun in presence of a large gathering of the residents and visitors.
Lady Colquhoun was the recipient of a Silver- Mounted driver as a souvenir of the occasion, the presentation being made by the Rev. Duncan Robertson, Parish Minister. The new course is a fine sporting one, and one which certain to be highly appreciated.
Helensburgh and Gairloch Times December 16th 1908.
The first annual meeting of the young Loch Lomondside club was held in the Luss Public Hall. Mr W. Jackson, Captain, presided. The secretary's report showed the club to be in a flourishing condition. The Treasurer's statement showed a balance in favour of the club. It was stated that the new course would be completed by February 1st . The following office bearers were elected : Patron and Patroness, Sir Alan and Lady Colquhoun of Rossdhu House, Captain, Mr William Jackson, Camstradden ; Vice Captain, Mr Alex. M. Thom ; Secretary, Mr Andrew Forsyth ; Treasurer, Mr Charles Murdoch ; Committee – Rev. Alexander S. Dunlop and Messrs James McNab, Robert Milne, Peter McFarlane, and James Dempster.
Helensburgh and Gareloch Times August 24th 1910
Golf Club.
Concert – A highly successful concert in aid of the golf club took place in the hall on Friday evening – Sir Iain Colquhoun of Luss, Bart., presiding over a crowded attendance. A varied programme of songs and pianoforte solos was admirably sustained by Mrs Davie, Mrs Lang, Miss Douglas Dick, Miss Dunsmore, Messrs Forsyth, Meighan, and Crawford ; and a charming sketch, entitled " The Collaborators" was cleverly performed by the Hon. Miss Winifred Hamilton and Mr Beith ( Ian Hay ). At the close hearty votes of thanks were accorded to the artistes and also to Sir Iain for his courtesy in presiding. The concert was followed by a dance.
Helensburgh and Gareloch Times September 4th 1912.
The End for Luss.
Concert – A concert in aid of the Luss Golf Club was given in Luss Hall on Wednesday of last week. The Rev. A.S. Dunlop presided over an audience that was large considering the inclement nature of the weather. The chairman explained that the course had had to be abandoned and the club brought to an end owing to the continued difficulty in securing the necessary funds – a difficulty which was felt all the more on account of the smallness of the local population from which members might be drawn. The proceeds of the concert were to help to discharge liabilities which still rested on the club. An interesting and varied programme was sustained by the Fairfield Male Quartette – Messrs T. Adam, George Granger, Charles Middleton, and W. Irvine – assisted by Misses Maie Abercromby and Cameron Craig. Mr Dunlop also contributed two songs. The accompaniments were played by Mr Turnbull and Mr Campbell McGregor. The concert was followed by a dance in which a large number of visitors and local people took part. The music was supplied by the Richmond Brothers.