text:
var $ = require('jquery');
var _ = require('underscore');
var L = require('leaflet');

var OTP = require('otpjs');
OTP.config = OTP_config;

onLoad(function() {

    // set up the leafet map object
	var map = L.map('map').setView(OTP.config.initLatLng, (OTP.config.initZoom || 13));
    map.attributionControl.setPrefix('');

	// create OpenStreetMap tile layers for streets and aerial imagery
	var osmLayer = L.tileLayer('http://{s}.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/' + OTP.config.osmMapKey + '/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
        subdomains : ['a','b','c','d'],
	    attribution: 'Street Map: Terms & Feedback'
	});
    var aerialLayer = L.tileLayer('http://{s}.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/' + OTP.config.aerialMapKey + '/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
        subdomains : ['a','b','c','d'],
        attribution : 'Satellite Map: Terms & Feedback'
    });

    // create a leaflet layer control and add it to the map
    var baseLayers = {
        "Street Map" : osmLayer,
        "Satellite Map" : aerialLayer
    };
    L.control.layers(baseLayers).addTo(map);

    // display the OSM street layer by default
    osmLayer.addTo(map);

    // create the trip topography widget and add it to the map
    var topoControl = new OTP.topo_views.LeafletTopoGraphControl();
    topoControl.addTo(map);

    // create a data model for the currently visible stops, and point it
    // to the corresponding API method
    var stopsRequestModel = new OTP.models.OtpStopsInRectangleRequest();
    stopsRequestModel.urlRoot = OTP.config.otpApi + '/transit/stopsInRectangle';

    // create the stops request view, which monitors the map and updates the
    // bounds of the visible stops request as the viewable area changes
    var stopsRequestMapView = new OTP.map_views.OtpStopsRequestMapView({
        model: stopsRequestModel,
        map: map
    });

    // create the stops response view, which refreshes the stop markers on the
    // map whenever the underlying visible stops model changes
    var stopsResponseMapView = new OTP.map_views.OtpStopsResponseMapView({
        map: map
    });
    stopsRequestModel.on('success', function(response) {
        stopsResponseMapView.newResponse(response);
    });

    // create the main OTP trip plan request model and point it to the API
    var requestModel = new OTP.models.OtpPlanRequest();
    requestModel.urlRoot = OTP.config.otpApi + '/plan';

    // create and render the main request view, which displays the trip
    // preference form
    var requestView = new OTP.request_views.OtpRequestFormView({
        model: requestModel,
        el: $('#request')
    });
    requestView.render();

    // create and render the request map view, which handles the map-specific
    // trip request elements( e.g. the start and end markers)
    var requestMapView = new OTP.map_views.OtpRequestMapView({
    	model: requestModel,
    	map: map
    });
    requestMapView.render();

    // create the main response view, which refreshes the trip narrative display
    // and map elements as the underlying OTP response changes
    var responseView = new OTP.views.OtpPlanResponseView({
        narrative: $('#narrative'),
        map: map,
        topo: topoControl.getGraphElement()
    });

    // instruct the response view to listen to relevant request model events
    requestModel.on('success', function(response) {
        responseView.newResponse(response);
    });
    requestModel.on('failure', function(response) {
        responseView.newResponse(response);
    });

    requestModel.request();

    // make the UI responsive to resizing of the containing window
    var resize = function() {
        var height = $(window).height() - 30;
        $('#map').height(height);
        $('#sidebar').height(height);
        map.invalidateSize();
    };
    $(window).resize(resize);
    resize.call();
});


The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America has released a new study today, "Exploring Orthodox Generosity: Giving in US Orthodox Parishes." The 138-page report is accompanied by a brief summary that shares the highlights of the study. The study was prepared by the Assembly's research coordinator, Alexei Krindatch.
The summary can be read here.


The war between Birdman and Lil Wayne may soon be reignited, because the Cash Money boss is accusing Weezy of being involved in an elaborate scheme to try and get rich off a bigger share of Drake's royalties.
Cash Money is demanding Aspire's lawsuit against them be dismissed and unspecified damages for fraud, aiding and abetting a breach of fiduciary duty and interference with contractual relations.
Lil Wayne nor Young Money are a defendant to Cash Money's lawsuit, which is interesting because back in June, Birdman settled Wayne's extremely time consuming lawsuit over his record deal for more than $10 million.


text:
require 'spec_helper'

describe ImageEditor::FillRegionCommand do
  let(:image) {ImageEditor::Image.new(2,3)}

  before do
    ImageEditor.image = image
  end

  it "fills the region" do
    image.should_receive(:fill_region).with(1, 1, "A")
    ImageEditor::FillRegionCommand.run(x: "1", y: "1", color: "A")
  end
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Delta Adding Naloxone to On-Board Emergency Kits
A man passed out in the bathroom with a needle stuck in his arm on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles on Saturday.
Paul McCartney Writing 'It's a Wonderful Life' Musical
The star said the 1946 film is "a universal story we can all relate to."
Flights to London Have Resumed
Frank Augstein / AP Images
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the sky, the Icelandic volcano has grown stronger. Some flights resumed from Scottish airports, despite a new cloud of ash drifted south from Iceland. With conditions changing by the hour, the British opened airspace over Scotland for a few dozen flights around 7 a.m. and will reopen all British airspace at 10 p.m. local time. However, if conditions are bad enough, flights may be divereed to land in other locations. So far, 25 planes are en route and hoping to land in London. "This is an unprecedented situation, it is affecting the whole of northern Europe, so our priority is first, to make the most of the hole in the clouds that is going to emerge because of the temporary stalling yesterday of the volcano," Foreign Secretary David Miliband said.
Read it at The Guardian

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Is there anyone that will take donkeys if they were free?
You taking a poll or do you have some to get rid of?
In answer to your question, yes, I'd take a couple if they were free and close by our place.
I bet I could have 20 delivered free this afternoon if i wanted them.
Can not give them away around here.
Well, 3 years ago I accepted 2 mommas and a daddy (that's what I call them), they had babies, that gave me 5. This year had 2 more babies, that gave me 7. This past summer, I counted 2 extra mommas, don't know where they came from, I believe someone opened the gate and turned them loose. That gave me 9. Now, I'm seeing a new momma and baby!!!! That gives me 11. It's not that I mind them too much, but that's 11 more mouths to feed this winter, and I'm not getting anything in return. Although, I don't see any coyotes in my pasture, but I didn't see hardly any before.
jacka$$ and rabbits sure can multiply.
Bet you don't have any problems with coyotes now!!
The killer buyer here was taking them if you gave them to him. Not sure if they went on to be processed, or if he has some other outlet.
The wife has 3 German Shepherds, so I could use a donkey about every 2 weeks or so.
Good lord! that's half my herd in cows! Geld the males to start with!
I don't like it, but the ropers will take them for practice. I have had several ask for mine, but he's staying here.


text:
Active - 1934 - 1965 | Born - Dec 7, 1891 in Los Angeles, CA | Died - Apr 16, 1968 in Beverly Hills, CA | Genres - Drama, Comedy | Height: 5' 5"
American actress Fay Bainter was working in stock at age five, and by the time she was 19 was one of the privileged members of theatrical impresario David Belasco's company. First starring on Broadway in 1912, Bainter was cast in ingenue or romantic parts for the first portion of her career.
When she finally decided to give movies a try, it was as a mature, somewhat plump character actress. Her first film was This Side of Heaven (1934), after which, according to many historians she was established in kindly, motherly roles - except for those in which she wasn't so kind and motherly, which constituted the more interesting moments of her film career.
In 1938, Bainter made cinema history by being nominated for two Academy Awards in two different categories: As best actress for White Banners, a second-string Warners drama in which she played a "Mrs. Fixit", and as best supporting actress in Jezebel, where she had the somewhat harsher role of southern belle Bette Davis' remonstrative Aunt Belle. Academy members were confused by Bainter's dual nomination, the result being that the Academy was compelled to change its nominating and voting rules (P.S.: She won for Jezebel). Occasionally a star (The War Against Mrs. Hadley [1943]) and always near the top of the supporting-cast list, Bainter worked steadily in films until the early 1950s, shifting her attention at that time to television.
In 1958, she appeared in the touring company of the Eugene O'Neill play Long Day's Journey Into Night in the role of Mary Tyrone -- a difficult and demanding assignment even for a woman half her age, but one that she pulled off brilliantly. Bainter returned to films as an unsympathetic wealthy dowager in The Children's Hour (1961), which earned her another Oscar nomination -- this time in one category only.
One of the ten thespians to have been nominated for both a supporting and lead acting Academy Award in the same year for two different movies. The other nine are Teresa Wright, Cate Blanchett, Barry Fitzgerald (he was nominated in both categories for the same role in the same movie), Jessica Lange, Sigourney Weaver, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Holly Hunter, Julianne Moore and Jamie Foxx. Bainter was the first to have ever been nominated for both awards in the same year.
Presented the very first African-American winner with the Oscar statuette when Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind (1939) (February 29, 1940, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles).
[In 1938] "There comes a day when the flush of youth disappears from every woman's face. Most women dread it. I did. Like so many things, however, it is worse in anticipation than actual fact."
"Some of the young players that all that is required of them is learning lines and speaking them when their cue comes. They stand staring at you with vacant eyes, concentrating on what they have to say, instead of listening to and concentrating on what you are saying."


I am currently trying to fix an Acer laptop for a friend of mine and from what I can tell it looks as if her laptop continues to reset itself back to its original settings. For example, the desktop background goes back to the slandered picture, desktop icons that were once there are gone and programs have to be reinstalled. Neither of us have an exact cause for this issue, except she did mention how she had a router problem within the last week, but I wouldn't see how that would constantly be affecting the laptop itself when the router has been fixed. Every day the computer resets itself and its becoming a frustrating task for her and she's just about given up on it.
Is there, perhaps, a control I could change? Could it be a possible virus or malware issue?
Please help, I'm becoming a little desperate for help myself.
My clock keeps resetting to the wrong time zone! ???
Acer laptop keeps turning off & on. It won't load past the start up screen.


Derivative-free optimization refers to the solution of bound-constrained optimization problems using algorithms that do not require derivative information, only objective function values.
Rios, L. M. and Sahinidis, N. V. 2013. Derivative-free optimization: a review of algorithms and comparison of software implementations. Journal of Global Optimization 56(3): 1247 - 1293.


text:
Замок Кілкі (, ) — кашлен на Кілл Кахах — замок церкви Кахаха — один із замків Ірландії, розташований в графстві Кілдер, в 3,1 милі на північний захід від селища Кастлдермот, біля селища Кілкі, біля дороги Ахі — Таллоу. Це була колись потужна середньовічна фортеця феодалів ФітцДжеральд — графів Кілдер.

Історія замку Кілкі
Замок Кілкі збудував сер Волтер де Ріддлесфорд в 1180 році після англо-норманського завоювання Ірландії. Перший замок який був тут збудований був замком типу «Мотт-і-Бейлі» — дерев'яний замок на штучному пагорбі. Його онучка одружилась з Морісом ФітцДжеральдом — III бароном Оффалі. Тому замок і маєток Кілкі дістався у володіння феодалам ФітцДжеральд. ФітцДжеральди володіли цим замком понад 700 років.

Сер Томас де Рокебі — головний юстиціарій Ірландії використовував замок як свою резиденцію та головну військову базу і помер там у 1356 році.

Замок пов'язаний з усією історією Геральдинів — гілок роду ФітцДжеральд та їх прихильників і союзників. У замку жив Джеральд ФітцДжеральд — XI граф Кілдер, що ввійшов в історію як граф Візард — «Граф Чародій». Він став лідером Геральдинів у віці всього 20 років, після того, як його зведений брат Томас ФітцДжеральд — «Шовковий Томас» — X граф Кілдер зійшов на плаху і втратив голову в Тайберні в 1537 році після свого невдалого повстання проти короля Англії, яке ввійшло в історію як «повстання Шовкового Томаса». «Граф Чародій» поїхав на континент, щоб здобути освіту. Повернувшись в Ірландію він захопився алхімією та чорною магією. Про нього ходили зловісні чутки по всій Ірландії. Граф Чарівник помер 1585 року. Як стверджує легенда граф повертається в замок Кілкі кожні 7 років. Він приїжджає до замку на білому коні, на ногах у нього взуті черевики зі срібла. Він блукає замком Кілкі і щось шукає.

У 1634 році замок отримав в оренду орден єзуїтів. Оренду дозволила вдова XIV графа Кілдер. Єзуїти лишалися в замку до 1646 року. У 1646 році в замку жив архієпископ Рінуцціні — папський нунцій, посол святого престолу в Ірландській конфедерації. У той час вирувало повстання за незалежність Ірландії, була проголошена незалежна Ірландська конфедерація і кілька років de facto більша частина Ірландії була незалежною, поки Олівер Кромвель не втопив повстання у крові.

На початку XIX століття XIX граф Кілдер вирішив змінити резиденцію. Він переїхав в Картон-Хаус. Замок Кілкі орендували різні мешканці. Серед них був Томас Рейнольдс — торговець шовком з Дубліна, що був зрадником повстанців 1798 року. Під час цього повстання за незалежність Ірландії він ввійшов в довіру Едварду ФітцДжеральду, що був одним із лідерів організації Об'єднані ірландці. Він зрадив повстанців і англійська армія була проінформована про всі головні сили повстанців. Це було однією з причин поразки повстання, замок тоді був несподівано захоплений англійською армією.

У 1849 році в замку сталася пожежа. Замок відремонтував лорд Волтер — III герцог Лейнстер. Він жив у цьому замку, був засновником археологічного товариства Кілдера в 1891 році, був відомим букіністом і знавцем старовини Ірландії, був редактором часопису «Журнал асоціації охорони пам'яті мертвих в Ірландії» з 1904 року аж до своєї смерті в 1923 році. У 1949 році резиденція Картон-Хаус була продана і замок Кілкі став резиденцією VIII герцога Лейнстер.

У 1960 році родини ФітцДжеральд продала маєток та замок Кілкі. Замок переробили на готель, готель був збитковим і його закрили. Нині замок нікому не потрібен. Його виставили на продаж у 2009 році, але досі замок так ніхто і не купив.

Біля замку Кілкі народився полярний дослідник Ернест Шеклтон (1874—1922). Ернест народився в родині квакерів, що були мірошниками біля замку Кілкі більше 100 років.

Див. також
 Список замків Ірландії

Джерела
 The Haunted Hotel Guide
 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/After+the+'bad'+banks,+Nama+to+take+on+the+'zombie'+hotels.-a0232362397
 Donal Buckley (2013-06-13). «Market gets in the swing as deals are agreed for two golf courses». Independent.ie. Retrieved 2014-06-24.

Замки графства Кілдер
Засновані в Європі 1180

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Terrific Location to Downtown! This 7 Suite apartment building was built in 1930 and hosts four - 1 bedroom suites and three - 2 bedroom suites. Fridge and stove included in each unit, no laundry on site. Parking in rear of building. Water heater replaced in 2015 and furnace approx. 15 years old. Lot size 63ft x 120ft. Great Investment Property!


February 15-24, is Scouts Canada Week. This is a great opportunity to promote scouting programs across Canada. We appreciate the work of Scouts Canada and its volunteers in supporting young people.
As an Honourary Scout, I am happy to see young people benefitting from scouting programs.


text:
Q: TFS2010 - Correctly setting up Host Header We have a TFS2010 install on a Win2008R2 Server running IIS7.  I've created a host header for TFS and want to use that instead of machineName:8080.  I am getting weird behavior from it now.  Every other time I log in I get:

TF31002: Unable to connect to this Team Foundation Server: http://web2/tfs. Team Foundation Server Url: http://web2/tfs. Possible reasons for failure include: - The name, port number, or protocol for the Team Foundation Server is incorrect. - The Team Foundation Server is offline. - The password has expired or is incorrect. Technical information (for administrator): The request failed with HTTP status 404: Not Found.

I force a reconnect and voila - there it is.  Also, connecting to the web site rarely works but connecting via VS2010 works 50% of the time.
What do I need to change to stabilize this?

IIS Log File:
  Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.5
  Version: 1.0
  Date: 2010-05-17 19:47:51
  Fields: date time s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status time-taken
  2010-05-17 19:47:51 192.168.10.240 POST /tfs/Services/v3.0/LocationService.asmx - 80 - 192.168.10.62 Team+Foundation+(devenv.exe,+10.0.30319.1) 401 2 5 0
  2010-05-17 19:47:51 192.168.10.240 POST /tfs/Services/v3.0/LocationService.asmx - 80 MMNT_NET\Keith.Barrows 192.168.10.62 Team+Foundation+(devenv.exe,+10.0.30319.1) 200 0 0 109
  2010-05-17 19:47:51 192.168.10.240 POST /tfs/RIV/VersionControl/v1.0/repository.asmx - 80 MMNT_NET\Keith.Barrows 192.168.10.62 Team+Foundation+(devenv.exe,+10.0.30319.1) 200 0 0 218
  Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.5
  Version: 1.0
  Date: 2010-05-17 20:41:50
  Fields: date time s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status time-taken
  2010-05-17 20:41:50 192.168.10.240 POST /tfs/Services/v1.0/ServerStatus.asmx - 80 - 192.168.10.62 Team+Foundation+(devenv.exe,+9.0.30729.4413) 401 2 5 78
  2010-05-17 20:42:11 192.168.10.240 POST /tfs/Services/v1.0/ServerStatus.asmx - 80 MMNT_NET\keith.barrows 192.168.10.62 Team+Foundation+(devenv.exe,+9.0.30729.4413) 404 0 0 21466

I am not sure how to interpret it.  Looks like a 404 followed by a 200, or a 401, 404...

A: Thanks for the log info.  Try hitting this page directly in a web browser:  /tfs/Services/v1.0/ServerStatus.asmx. That's throwing a 401.2 which suggests that something is wrong with the configuration.  You can also try browsing to the /tfs/Services/v1.0 folder in IIS7 Manager.  If there is a config error, it should pop up with a message and details on what the issue is.

A: For the web2 website, what do the IIS logs give for a status code?  That should be telling as to whether the request makes it as far as the server, and if so, what error is throw from the TFS server.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in business law on Friday, April 19, 2019.
Corporations whose businesses require governmental permits must constantly pay attention to the attitudes of local government entities. such as county boards, city councils and local zoning boards. Nowhere has this necessity been more acutely illustrated than in the action of the Jefferson Parish board's decision to revoke a permit for a cyanide plant that it had unanimously granted in January 2018.
The controversy involves Cornerstone Chemical Company's intention to construct a $100 million plant directly across the Mississippi River from the Louis Armstrong International Airport. In January 2018, the parish board voted 7-0 to approve a special permitted use for the site. When the public learned of the plans for the expansion after the permit was granted, several citizens' groups began an intense lobbying campaign. On April 3, 2019, the board voted 6-1 to retroactively rescind the permit.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in divorce on Wednesday, April 17, 2019.
Most people in Baton Rouge understand that Louisiana is a community property state. Therefore, marital property must be divided equally in every divorce. Many people wonder why or how an appraiser could be used in a Louisiana divorce. The answer is not obvious, but reasons for using an appraiser in the appropriate situation are compelling.
Just because marital property must be divided equally does not mean that a couple will not dispute the value of their home or business property. To divide marital property equally between the divorcing spouses, the couple must either agree on the value or present evidence to the court supporting the value they believe is appropriate. In both cases, an appraiser may help the parties or the court choose the proper value.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in business law on Tuesday, April 2, 2019.
Many companies in Baton Rouge and elsewhere in Louisiana must obtain a variety of licenses from state, county or municipal governments in order to operate their businesses lawfully. Businesses that deal with hazardous materials are especially subject to governmental regulation. Modern American Recycling Services, a company in Terrebonne Parish that recycles industrial waste, sued the parish alleging unfair treatment in the handling of its recent hazardous waste permit applications for 2017 and 2018.
The issue involves the company's method of handling what is called "naturally occurring radioactive material." In the past, MARS has shipped equipment containing naturally occurring radioactive material to other sites for cleaning and then the equipment is returned to the company's plant in Gibson for final cleaning, dismantling and recycling. The company's first application for a hazardous waste permit was denied in 2017. A second application in 2018 was granted by the parish board but the parish president vowed to veto the permit. After the president's power to veto the permit was questioned, the parish staff issued the permit with some harsh conditions.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in divorce on Monday, March 25, 2019.
Child custody may be the single most emotional factor in any Louisiana divorce. Many couples are able to reach an agreement on how they will take care of their children after the divorce is finalized, but some couples are unable to put aside their anger toward each other in discussing child custody. Some parents attempt to use the question of custody as a weapon against the other parent. When mutual agreement is not possible, the parents must turn to the judge, and many parents want to know how a judge will evaluate the various factors in a custody dispute.
Every judge in Louisiana must adhere to a single standard in deciding custody disputes: what arrangement will serve the best interests of the child? The phrase "best interests of the child" is unfortunately vague, but the legislature has provided some additional guidelines that the courts often rely upon. If the child is old enough, the court will inquire about their preferences. The court will also pay attention to the mental health of the parents. Another factor is whether the child has any special needs. If the family is religious, the court will take into account how each parent will incorporate religious values into the child's life.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in business law on Tuesday, March 19, 2019.
The place where a lawsuit is heard can often have a significant impact on the outcome. A federal judge in Texas, in a little noticed order, has moved the venue of a class action against the Stanford Group to the U. S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. An examination of the potential effect of this order reveals the importance of the place a business law trial takes place.
The case involves the Stanford Group and the Ponzi scheme it used to rob investors of an estimated $1 billion. The founder of the firm was convicted of fraud and is now serving a life sentence in federal prison.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in divorce on Tuesday, March 12, 2019.
One of the most important questions in a Louisiana divorce is the division of the couple's property. Many residents of Baton Rouge understand that Louisiana is a community property state, but they usually do not understand how the law would affect the division of their property if they were to begin divorce proceedings.
Louisiana divorce law mandates that property owned by the spouses be divided into two classes: community property and separate property. Separate property includes all property owned by the individual spouses before the marriage occurs. Community property includes all property acquired during the marriage, including income generated by that property and property purchased with that income.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in business law on Tuesday, March 5, 2019.
Buying or selling a Baton Rouge business can be unexpectedly tricky. Many questions must be answered for both the buyer and seller. This post will not attempt to answer or even raise all potential questions; instead, the major questions involved in the two most frequently used sales contracts will be explained.
After an owner decides to sell all or a portion of their business, they must first address the price. The price can be determined by the owner or by retaining a business appraiser. The actual price will, of course, be determined by negotiations between the seller and the buyer. The second - and perhaps more important - question is the structure of the sale.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in divorce on Tuesday, February 26, 2019.
Residents of Baton Rouge who are contemplating a divorce may be uneasy about the anticipated stress, anxiety and anger that are the frequent but unwelcome components of the process. One of the most effective methods of eliminating these reactions from a divorce is the use of a trained mediator to assist in sorting through their issues. Many people view mediation as a surrender of their power to present their case to a judge, but, in reality, the mediation process enhances the power of each party to assert and protect their interests.
The first thing to understand about divorce mediation is that it is a voluntary process. While the court can order both parties to participate in mediation, neither the mediator nor the other party can force a solution that is opposed by the other party. The mediator cannot force either party to accept an outcome that either one views as distasteful or disadvantageous, and the result of the mediation must be voluntary for both parties.
Secondly, a mediation is confidential. The parties are negotiating a settlement, and all of the proceedings before the mediator are communications that cannot be disclosed to a court or used in evidence. A professional mediator will have the parties sign a confidentiality agreement prior to the mediation taking place.
Some parties hire a mediator on their own and go to mediation without the advice of an attorney. While this may save some costs, it is best to have an attorney either advise you prior to the mediation or attend the mediation with you, so that you are fully aware of your rights and obligations. Actually having attorneys for both sides at a mediation gives a better chance of the matter being resolved and the parties being ultimately more satisfied with the outcome, because they have been made fully aware of the pros and cons of their position by both their own attorney, the other side, and a third party independent mediator.
On behalf of Carleton Hebert Wittenbrink & Shoenfelt, LLC posted in business law on Monday, February 18, 2019.
ITEP. Many residents of Baton Rouge have never seen this acronym, and many who have do not know what it means. ITEP means Industrial Tax Exemption Program, but even the words behind the acronym do not add much clarity. ITEP is a series of programs intended to stimulate business development by giving businesses tax breaks for locating in a municipality. In 2016, Gov. John Bel Edwards revised the ITEP program over the loud protests of various business leaders. New regulations for the program were published in 2018, and many communities announced they were going to grant larger tax breaks than the reductions available under ITEP. Many state business leaders thought that the controversy had subsided, but two recent actions of the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board have reignited the dispute.
Exxon Mobil applied to the school board for two ITEP grants, actions that had been previously approved by the state. The school board denied the applications, and Exxon then withdrew its requests. Many observers thought that Exxon was attempting to bully the school board, but others have accepted the Exxon action at face value. Supporters of ITEP point to its benefits in spurring industrial development, generating jobs and generally energizing the local economy. Smaller businesses do not often seek ITEP grants, but they benefit when a large corporation uses an ITEP grant to subsidize investment in their business. ITEP grants are often used to finance physical expansions, which, in turn, create construction jobs and permanent jobs when the facility goes on line.


Our Coconut Flour is sourced from palms grown in Sri Lanka. In some areas, the humble coconut palm is called the 'Tree of Life', due to its huge variety of uses in both medicine and nutrition.
Nowadays, the main bulk of coconut production comes from India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Indonesia, and around 20 billion coconut fruits are grown across the world annually. The palms can generally be found growing in tropical, coastal areas, with high temperatures and humidity levels.
Coconut flour is fantastically economical to produce as it is simply making use of the coconut residue, which is the solid left once the coconut oil has been extracted. Throughout this process, absolutely no chemical treatments or preservatives are used, and all temperatures are kept at below 33°C.
Grown on the island of Sri Lanka, our finely ground powder lends itself perfectly as a high quality natural substitute for grain-based flours. Its creamy, soft texture and subtle, nutty taste makes it suitable for both savoury and sweet dishes, and can be used in anything from pastries and breads, to cupcakes and canapés.


text:
Steve Mentz
THE BOOKFISH
THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING
Humanities Commons
The sea! the sea!
Watery Thinking 3: Fluid Cognition
March 2, 2020 by Steve Mentz
[Guest Post from Douglas Clark]
[Written on a non-striking day from the United Kingdom]
Steve and Nicholas asked the participants of the 'Watery Thinking' seminar to explore the role that water 'as a metaphor and feature of the environment' took in early modern representations of cognition.[1] This stimulus offered an opportunity for the group to blend together scholarship from cognitive studies and the blue, or oceanic, humanities, to refine or perhaps redefine our understanding of period's literature. Lyn Tribble's previous blog post encouraged us as a group to reflect on the staging of immersion in early modern drama, and the broader interplay of 'imagination, physiology, skill and affect' in literary 'waterscapes'.[2] The papers in the 'Fluid Cognition' sub-group address the presence of hydrological thinking in early modern historical writing and the dramatic presentation of watery 'perturbations of the minde' in Shakespeare's canon.[3]
Stow's Survey of London (1598)
Andrew Brown's paper on 'Memory, Loss, and Infrastructural Thinking in Early Modern Texts' examines John Stow's Survey of London (1598) and Marc Lescarbot's Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609). Brown neatly demonstrates how the 'extraction and management' (page 2) of water is used in these texts to memorialise London's past, and to frame the interaction between French colonists and their attempted mastery over the environment of Nova Scotia. Fresh emphasis is placed on the role that subterranean waterflows take as active agents in the reformation of London's environment, in addition to the potential connections that may be made between the 'aquatic entertainment[s]' (page 8) produced in early seventeenth-century London and the French colony of Port-Royal. Attending to the shifting flow of waters in England and the new world may illuminate how key 'infrastructural thinking' (page 11) was to the early modern civic and colonial imagination. Taking Brown's thesis into account, I wonder what further work needs to be done to address the importance of hydrological thinking in early modern European historiography and literature. Brown's work opens up some exciting routes for future research to take.
Benjamin Bertram's paper, on the other hand, addresses a classic problem associated with character studies of early modern drama: how should we approach claims for the presence of psychological realism in Shakespeare's canon, and what place should the pursuit of identifying the genesis of "authentic" modes of subjectivity take in the field's development? Bertram places emphasis on the humoral and elemental construction of Richard of Gloucester's dramatic subjectivity through the Henry VI plays and Richard III, with the aim to 'rethink the human-centered narratives of Richard's development' (page 12) in line with an ecological understanding of emotional turmoil. Combining Bertram's approach with the scholarship already completed on grief, anger, and emotional affect could be profitable.[4] Bertram's stimulating reappraisal of Richard's psychogenesis also chimes well with the resurgence of critical interest in character studies, and the difficulties associated with appraising the psychological complexity of dramatic personae.[5] Bertram's work shows how the artifice of interiority presented in dramatic works may be further understood by attending to the liquid imagery associated with the presentation of self-knowledge.
Florio's World of Words (1598)
My own paper addresses the terms that we use, and that early modern writers used, to describe and define mental activity. I suggest that we may re-orientate the way we understand the texts of the period by attending to the definition that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers made between cogitation and cognition. Take John Florio's entry for these terms in his A World of Wordes (1598) for instance: 'Cogitatione, musing, thinking,cogitation … Cognitione, an acknowledgement, a recognison.'[6] This kind of distinction between 'cogitation' as 'thinking' and 'cognition' as the 'recognison' of knowledge is found in a range of early modern works. My paper attends to the place that concepts of cogitation take in early modern philological and philosophical texts, as a way to appraise incidents of mental disturbance and mind travel that centre around watery environments in Cymbeline and Merchant of Venice. Ultimately, I query what new directions may we take in our examination of the history of the mind by examining the cogitative principles of early modern writing.
All three papers in this sub-group address the preoccupation that early modern texts had with mental, corporeal, and environment disturbances caused by the flow and flux of water. I hope that this group's efforts help the seminar as a whole to think more fluidly about the place that watery modes of cognition took in the literature of the period.
[1] See the entry for Seminar 58: http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annual-meetings/seminars-and-workshops-2/.
[2] See 'Watery Thinking 2: Submersive Tendencies': https://stevementz.com/watery-thinking-2-submersive-tendencies/.
[3] James Perrott, The First Part of the Consideration of Humane Condition (Oxford: 1600), sig. G3v.
[4] See: Elizabeth Hodgson, Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women's Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008).
[5] Nicholas R. Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare's Characters (London: Palgrave, 2019); Jelena Marelj, Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
[6] John Florio, A VVorlde of Wordes (London, 1598), sig. G2v.
Hamlet at St Ann's
February 22, 2020 by Steve Mentz
Watching an oft-staged play like Hamlet for the nth time often carries a sense of being, as the not-penitent King says, "to double business bound," since I'm often half a line ahead in my imagination. Sometimes a familiar line breaks through, as when Ruth Negga's electric, energized, antic Hamlet sang out above a newly-dug grave,
I loved Ophelia!
Her cry started me counting under my mind's breath, how many brothers was it that Hamlet exceeds with his love? Five hundred? Ten thousand? Or was it —
Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum!
That seemed about right. Hamlet beats Laertes, played by Gavin Drea in an Irish production that arrived in Brooklyn from the Gate Theater of Dublin, by about 40,000. That's pretty much how I felt about Ruth Negga's coiled-spring performance. Diminutive and mobile, one of two dark-skinned actors (along with Steve Hartland as the Ghost) amid a pale Hibernian cast, Negga was at her best when she was antic and overflowing, dancing around her shocked mother in the closet scene, extending a kiss with an embarrassed Ophelia when almost sitting on her lap right behind me in the audience before they watched the Mousetrap, nimbly fencing in one of least exhausted stagings I've seen of the closing bloodbath. I gobbled up her performance of the soliloquies a bit less eagerly, because her Hamlet seemed uncharacteristically social and eager to reach others, from the Ghost he followed in act 1 to the false friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Director Yael Farber's decision to stage the first soliloquy — "O that this too-too solid flesh…" — to Ophelia rather than alone on stage was odd, and it made Hamlet's self-revulsion feel performative more than sincere. But in thinking about it now, I wonder if this Hamlet might just be less solitary than most versions of the role. Plus I'm not sure this play believes in sincerity very much.
In addition to Negga's stage charisma, another reason this Hamlet might feel more connected may have been the range and power of Aoife Duffin's Ophelia. I'm not sure I've ever seen this role played with more force, from the lingering kiss she planted on Hamlet before his first soliloquy, to her heart-wrenching songs, the lines of which she mostly spoke after a musical rendition from an off-stage performer, to the knowing smirks with which she managed her brother and father in the opening act. Ophelia's tragedy seldom finds as much room for itself as Duffin claimed for her in this production. Even though she ends up drowned and buried, this performance made me wonder about an Elsinore initially disrupted as much by the counselor's powerful daughter who isn't willing to accept her place as servant, as by the better-known melancholic prince.
Aoife Duffin as Ophelia and Gavin Drea as Laertes
It doubtless shows my age that I continue to appreciate a straight-backed Polonius, played by Nick Dunning as more master of courtly intrigue than foppish father — though his children do roll their eyes as they repeat along with him, "to thine own self be true" in act 1.
The royal couple itself felt a bit weaker to me, or at least less dramatically interesting than they can be. Owen Roe's stout Claudius wore a faux-Fascist military uniform, which seemed off since I think of Old Hamlet as the warrior among the brothers. Fiona Bell's Gertrude held her cards close with her brother-husband, then turned toward Hamlet's side in the second half of the play, but mostly without claiming much emotional investment, from me at least.
But that's probably because in this Hamlet I was as engaged as I've ever been by the young lovers, and the brutality of their separation by politics, revenge, and the prince's choice to heed dead voices rather than living ones. I'll remember Negga's Hamlet for a series of brilliant exchanges, hamming it up with the Players, teasing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the recorder, holding Horatio to his "heart's core." But when Ophelia first kissed him and he responded with the extended poetry that includes "Frailty, thy name is woman" it seemed clear that the prince who can reach everyone has lost track, at least until he out-faced Laertes at her grave, of the one figure who might have matched him.
Brooklyn Sunset
I think all the rest of the performances through March 8 are sold out — but if you're near the Brooklyn waterfront, it might be worth checking for cancellations!
Girl from the North Country (Broadway)
It may be that the warm glow I felt in the Belasco Theatre listening to "Idiot Wind" transformed into a love ballad, "Duquesne Whistle" as a show tune, and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" as chorus-backed hootenanny comes from my own many years of confirmed Dylan-o-mania, or maybe from knowing all the songs, or perhaps even from my eagerness to welcome the gorgeous new voices that subbed in for Bob's old man growl. But really — it was just lovely to hear.
Written and directed by Conor McPherson, the musical "Girl from the North Country" drafts twenty-one songs out of the Dylan catalog, from "Like a Rolling Stone" (1965), re-sung as a dirge, to "Duquesne Whistle" (2012). The selection is heavier from 70s-Bob than one might expect: it opens with two slow numbers from 1970's New Morning, "Sign on the Window" and "Went to See the Gypsy," and includes both the title number from Slow Train Coming (1979) and, somewhat oddly, three from 1978's Street Legal: "True Love Tends to Forget," which was an absolute show-stopper and maybe the most unexpectedly wrenching song of the night, "Is Your Love in Vain," and "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)."
The songs graft themselves onto an overflow of stories set in a 1930s boarding house whose owners, as well as its residents, present the full Dylan carnival: a slippery-tongued preacher, boxing ex-con, family with a damaged adult son with a secret, wise old town doctor, &c. Many stories circulate and overlap, but most of the night's pleasure was watching how each riff would set up another song. Mostly the turns were unexpected, which was nice.
Top singing marks go to Broadway veteran Jeanette Bayardelle, who also belted out "Pressing On" as an encore, though the whole cast was excellent. The most compelling character in the story was Elizabeth Laine, played by Mare Winningham, the owner's wife whose long standing mental instability represents just one of many crises in the boardinghouse while also making possible a lively, random, surprising performance, including the throw-away unsung non sequitur, "God said to Abraham, kill me a son."
I'm not sure the story will stay with me. But if you, like me, have been living with and loving these songs for a long time, it's worth paying Broadway prices to sit in a happy dark room and let them wash over you in new voices and arrangements.
Still in previews, which means it should be belting out gospel Bob and crooning the love songs through the summer!
Watery Thinking 2: Submersive Tendencies
One of our four paper-groups for "Watery Thinking" will explore the perils and possibilities of staging immersion. Lyn Tribble's essay provides a helpful overview of the "dramaturgy of immersion":
In Shipwreck Modernity, Steve Mentz writes that "wet representations emphasize the shock of immersion and its threat to human understanding and survival." On the early modern stage, the dramaturgy of immersion is complex because it cannot usually be directly staged. Thomas Heywood, naturally, is one of the few exceptions to this general rule; in The Brazen Age, he stages Hercules fording a river to save a nymph from the centaur Nessus. More often, immersion is either narrated by a character or a chorus or is represented through an off-stage on-stage transaction, an exchange between spaces, or as Lowell Duckert has noted, 'a before and after' (5). Many wet plays draw from the romance tradition, marked by a narrated or implied offstage shipwreck and subsequent rescue or rescues. Heywood's The Four Prentices of London presents no less than four such moments in the aftermath of a shipwreck of the brothers: their boats "split on strange rockes, and they enforc't to swim to / Save their desperate lives." The brothers are each rescued at "seueral corners of the world." Godfrey enters "as newly landed and half naked" in Bologne and helps to deliver the city from the Spaniards. Guy attracts the attention of the King of France and his daughter, who watch him come ashore on a raft and realize that although he is "basely clad" he has "sparks of honor in his eye." The stage direction reads "Enter the King of France, and his daughter walking: to them Guy all wet. The Lady entreateth her father for his entertainement: which is granted; and rich cloathes are put about him: & so Exeunt.Charles enters "all wet with his sword" and becomes the captain of a group of Italian banditti, while Eustace fetches up on the shore of Ireland. Eastward Hoe parodies such a scene, when Slitgut narrates from 'above' the fortunes of a set of drunken characters who struggle to shore off the Thames after their boats are capsized. The dynamic of a 'wet' character rescued on land and afforded with clothing is also featured in Pericles, in which the titular character enters wet and is furnished with a cloak by passing fishermen (who shortly fish up his armour in a net). So the romance dynamic of staged wetness involves the entry of a victim, 'naked,' half-naked or 'basely clad,' and a rescue that takes the character out of the watery margins and affords him with dry clothes or a cloak that reintegrates him into the dry world of the stage.
But immersion is not only a feature of the romance tradition; some characters are submerged in the everyday wetscapes of early modern England. Dunking is inherent comic and inherently humiliating. If being shipwrecked in the ocean in romantic, falling into a ditch or a pond or a lake — or ditch running by the Thames near Windsor — is a form of comic retribution. Such a fate befalls Cuddy in The Witch of Edmonton, who is lured by an evil spirit into a dark watery landscape and nearly drowns, as the title page of the play shows:
Detail from title page of The Witch of Edmonton
Cuddy's misadventure is a reminder of the grim statistics around drowning in early modern England. Drowning was one of the chief hazards of everyday life, accounting for up to half of all accidental deaths. Some drowned at sea or while pursuing occupations on the river, but many more died in more quotidian landscapes. Water was everywhere: water pits for household use, ditches, streams, standing water from rain, rivers. In Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, Craig Spence argues that despite the prevalence of drowning, "little attention was paid to those who suffered such a fate on an individual basis . . . .Perhaps a more difficult issue for early modern mentalities, and one that may go some way to explain this omission of cultural recognition, was the character of drowning as at once irreversible but also unavoidable."
Conversation around this group of papers will help us explore what Tribble describes as the "physiology of immersion" and the "nexus of imagination, physiology, skill and affect" in the waterscapes of early modern England.
For more fun with watery dramaturgy, here's a great blog post about back-stage possibilities for the opening scene of The Tempest, from Hester Lees-Jeffries.
Wet Logic (bitforms gallery through march 15)
Marina Zurkow's art explores the oceanic pressures and distortions that have become tangible in our age of climate disruption and global capitalism. She draws on the ideas many of the same scholars and thinkers that I do, including Phil Steinberg and Kimberly Peters' great essay "Wet Ontologies" and the works of Stacy Alaimo, Una Chaudhuri, Stefan Helmreich, and many others. I contributed to Marina's More & More project in 2016, and she contributed to my Oceanic New York in 2015.
Image from Oceans Like us
For all those reasons I was especially excited to see her new gallery show, Wet Logic, produced in collaboration with Sarah Rothberg, at bitforms gallery on the Lower East Side Thursday. It was stranger and more lingering that I had thought it would be. I'm still processing it, and I'm hoping to go back. How can we live in this world of broken and overflowing oceans? I glimpsed some parts of some answers that afternoon.
One of my favorite things about this show is how little it relies on language. I'm word-obsessed and mostly live inside phrases, syntax, and other linguistic genre-systems. A visual show like this one can be difficult for me to access or engage with — but that's the fun part. It's helpful to be pushed away from the tools I usually use.
The first element of the show is Zurkow's Accretions, reprised from 2016. These silk-screens on cardboard boxes represent, ="propositions for sculptural masses," or perhaps resonant objects from our present or future. Each cardboard square has one or several four-digit codes stamped onto it, which refer to the Harmonized System of the More & More project.
Toilet Joke 1, a collaboration between Zurkow and Rothberg in 2020, shows a toilet overflowing with plastic pellets in which float a cracked iphone, playing a video of the surf: "the ocean virtualized." Invitation to a slow-moving future?
Toilet Joke I
I wasn't able to fit the virtual reality goggles onto my too-big cranium, so I can't describe Sarah Rothberg's Water without Wet — but maybe some commentary will be forthcoming.
The heart of the exhibition features six screens of different sizes cycling through Zurkow's Oceans Like Us animations. Overflowing with shapes and figures that include humans, mermaids, jellyfish, kelp, dancing otters, "nervous squiggles" and many more, these video animations — Zurkow titles them "Love Me," "Milkcrate Plastisphere" and "Bow Null" — present an alien, enticing, startling, and deeply disorienting ocean. Sitting amid the screens feels like swimming in the ocean, in that it overloads the senses, pushes against the imagination, and leaves you unknowing but inspired.
I spent my time immersed in the screens thinking many different things, often about water's polarity and its capacity to serve as "universal solvent," the fluid that renders all things into their pieces. Oil and plastic appeared to displace the fishes and humans from their spaces at the centers of the ocean-screen. Mechanical images cross-hatched coral and plant life. Can the ocean be big enough — harmonized enough — to contain all these things? (In the front room of the gallery, the clogged and overflowing toilet joke kept its unmoving answer.)
Accretions (catalog page)
The last piece in the show, Study for Toilet Joke II, also produced jointly by Zurkow and Rothberg, features a whirlpool eddy "suspended in an infinite flush," inside a goldfish bowl. Its wet motion frames the plastic stillness and virtuality of Toilet Joke I on the other side of the gallery. Which future is our future? The neverending flush or the plastic stasis? Both, maybe?
I'm hoping to get back for more immersion in the screen-oceans. You should too! Get down to Allen St before it closes on March 15!
Toilet Joke II
"The African Company Presents Richard III" at Queens Theater
February 9, 2020 by Steve Mentz
What is Shakespeare for?
The question rattled around in my imagination last week as I was teaching for the first time Carlyle Brown's 1989 play, "The African Company Presents Richard III." Watching the play with students on Friday night at the Queens Theater intensified the conundrum. What is Shakespeare anyway?
In class in the morning, we'd talked about two competing but perhaps not contraditory ideas in Brown's play:
that Shakespeare's plays can be performed and embraced from many perspectives besides the one in which they were first written
that many other kinds of literature besides Shakespeare have claims on our attention, our stages, and our ideas of what literature has been or should be
Those two ideas swirled through Titan Theatre Company's forceful and compelling production in a tiny theater near the World's Fair site in Queens. I loved the show, and I kept trying to reconcile those two strains in it: the evident love of Shakespeare, and the equally strong — or perhaps stronger? — desire to write an independent history for African-American theater.
The Unisphere
The play re-stages the history of the African Company, founded by Billy Brown in 1820s New York. The story explores a night when their "Black Richard" was attempted to be played opposite Stephen Price's Park Theater production of Richard III, starring distinguished English actor Junius Brutus Booth. (That famous actor was also, although this detail goes unmentioned in the play, the father of John Wilkes Booth, another Shakespearean actor who was also Abraham Lincoln's assassin. The three Booth brothers, John Wilkes, Edwin, and Junius Brutus, Jr., famously appeared in a production of Julius Caesar in Central Park in 1864, playing the roles of Mark Antony, Brutus, and Cassius respectively. A year later John Wilkes shot President Lincoln. Shakespeare and white supremacist violence are often much closer to each other than we who earn our paychecks teaching the plays might wish.)
The modern play features a love story between Jimmy Hewlett, who plays Richard, and Ann, who plays Lady Anne. Darius Aushay presents a charismatic and compelling Jimmy-Richard, sliding in and out of the King's character with a hunch of his shoulder. But Psacoya Guinn's Ann was the scene stealer: composed, powerful, and with a keen stage presence, she performed her struggle with the part of Lady Ann — "I cannot be such a slack woman as this Lady Ann," she tells Jimmy — in a way that undergirded the play's larger struggle with the Shakespearean overplot. Why should she have to submit to the evil, manipulative King? Jimmy explains that everyone play-acts, that "This Ann, she ain't no different from Lady Ann" — but partly through Guinn's powerful performance, I could not help but feel that she had the better argument.
Another key character who jumped off the page to the stage was Papa Shakespeare, a formerly enslaved African who'd also live in the islands before he traveled to New York with Billy Brown in somewhat unclear circumstances. Papa Shakespeare, played with Falstaffian gusto by Anthony Michael Stokes, carries a drum and interweaves his own Afro-Caribbean musicality with his roles on stage (he plays Catesby in Richard III) and his sense of what Shakespeare means. He knows that his master in the islands "call me Shakespeare so to mock me," but he also asserts that "If Shakespeare was a black man, he would be a Griot," a traveling poet-performing in West African cultures.
Papa Shakespeare loves Shakespeare but also transforms him. Billy Brown's intentions aren't always clear. Jimmy insists that Billy wants to co-opt Shakespeare and Jimmy's performance as Richard III for his "great Negro revolt." Jimmy's not sure what he wants. "I get to be loved and to be accepted," he says to Billy Brown — but he's also playing an evil king, even if it is one one of Shakespeare's iconic roles. It's not always clear what Jimmy's Black Richard represents: rebellion against artistic limitations? an effort to connect with classical theater from the perspective of a formerly enslaved person? the more personal drama and exchange between Jimmy and Ann? All those things at once?
The African Company's production of Richard III ends up with the five actors in the Eldridge Street jail, but the modern play finds a new role for Jimmy. "The Drama of King Shotaway" is a now-lost play written by Billy Brown about an Afro-Carib revolution on St. Vincent in the 1790s, possibly witnessed by the historical Billy Brown, staged by the African Company in the 1820s. The play closes with Jimmy finding in these lines an even more regal voice than he'd had when performing Shakespeare:
Restore yourselves, your wives and your children to the inheritance of your ancestors, who inspire your fury and who show you the way. These marvelous, struggling spirits who suffered to you the air you breath; who knit time for you to walk on; who give you stars to cover your body.
Next week in class we'll go back to Shakespeare, finishing up Timon of Athens before turning to King Richard III. I can't teach King Shotaway because there's no extant copy. But I look forward to talking with my students about the ways that the plays we have can imagine themselves into conversation with plays we've lost, and those we do not know we've lost.
"The African Company Presents Richard III" has a short run and closes Sun Feb 9. Get there if you can!
Timon at Tfana
I went to see Timon of Athens in Brooklyn last night, as my phone chirped to me about the United Kingdom's Brexit out of the European Union and the United States Senate's willful refusal to perform its constitutional duty of hearing evidence about an out of control executive. Misanthropy and rage seemed like good ideas.
The play teems with anger, and I would have happily joined in bringing the wrath. Watching rich folks fiddle while the world burns feels pretty on point. The headline-quip from the Times review, that Simon Godwin's production, currently in Brooklyn after a run in Stratford-upon-Avon, is "Shakespeare for the Occupy era" feels right. Elia Monte-Brown's Alcibiades led her army against Athens bearing signs attacking the rich and support for the "dispossessed." It's necessary, I think, to re-imagine this play's combination of generosity and despair as a comment for our own age, in which catastrophic income inequality makes our political collective unable to respond to so many challenges. Rewriting Alcibiades as revolutionary required added some lines, and cutting some scenes, but overall I liked the Occupy-thread of this somewhat disjointed play. I'd like to see Monte-Brown play Henry V next!
Going into the play, I worried that the city scenes might be a bit dull. Many of them probably written by (the brilliant) Thomas Middleton, who collaborated with Shakespeare on the play. They are more spectacle than story, driven less by emotional connection than by Middleton's customary satiric bite. To my surprise, I loved the scenes that featured the full ensemble of actors, variously cast as artists, senators, dinner guests, soldiers in Alcibiades's army, and, memorably near the close, a trio of thieves ultimately converted away from the bad life by Timon's saintly example. TImon fixed them through a gorgeous rendition of one of my favorite speeches in Shakespeare:
Kathryn Hunter as Timon, digging for roots but finding gold
I'll example you with thievery:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n
From general excrement. Each thing's a thief. (4.3.430-37)
I've wrestled with those lines as a vision of destructive ecological connection, but last night I heard them more intensely in narrative context, as the disillusioned Timon's way to discourage petty theft. It was a good reminder of how such quotable poetry, which Nabokov used to create his novel Pale Fire, also has a purely local resonance.
The cast also performed gorgeously during the early scenes of Timon's opulence, including lively accompaniment by a three-piece band, and two musical renditions of Sonnet 53, performed in English in the first banquet and later in an abbreviated Greek version. The feeling of social play and cohesion, especially between the scam-artists Poet and Painter, who just want to get money from Timon, were strangely appealing. Even when they followed Timon into the woods in the second half, having heard a (true) rumor that he'd discovered more gold, they seemed excessive rather than rapacious. It was hard to hate them, even though they were parasites.
The play's core remains rage, but not at these hangers-on so much as the treacherous aristocrats, in particular at the Senators who won't loan Timon money, but more comprehensively at the human condition writ large. Kathryn Hunter gave a physically dazzling performance as Lady Timon, dancing on the table in the first scene, splashing bowls of blood in the middle, and heaving great shovels of dirt onto the stage toward the close. She's a powerfully generous actor, intent on connecting with other players on stage, as well as engaging the audience. At one point she handed me a pine cone and suggested that I feast with her in the woods. I was tempted to try a bite.
Did she reach the incandescent heights of Lear in the storm? At times I thought she played so generously that she couldn't quite get all the way to full misanthropy. Last spring I saw Glenda Jackson, another diminutive woman, play Lear on Broadway. I'm not sure if Hunter quite matched her. Hunter's Timon was more emotionally open than Jackson's Lear — but perhaps in these regal rage-beasts we in the audience need to feel that something isn't available to us, that we need to clutch and peer into a human darkness that isn't entirely open to be seen.
Timon's closest confidant in the play is the cynic Apemantus, played by Arnie Burton with a bounce in his step that echoed his turn as Autolycus in Tfana's Winter's Tale in 2018. When Apemantus got into a dirt-smearing fight with reclusive Timon in the woods, the production follows the play's insult-comedy patter — "Beast!" cries Apemantus; "Slave!" retorts Timon; "Toad!" "Rogue, rogue, rogue!" (4.3.369-70) — but the sentimental embrace between the two that ended this scene was the director's idea, not Shakespeare's or Middleton's.
It's hard to grudge solitary and doomed Timon a little affection. Though when I left the theater and walked out in damp drizzly Brooklyn in January, I could not help but feel that my intense disgust at this day of Brexit and impeachment hadn't quite been matched by this production. Maybe that's a tribute to the production's efforts to humanize the angry old aristocrat?
Get to Brooklyn before Feb 9 if you can!
Watery Thinking 1: What does water want?
Our deadline is today, and the trickle of papers for the #shax2020 seminar that Nic Helms and I are leading this spring in Denver started a few days ago. Our idea in "Watery Thinking" is to ask our esteemed seminar members to bring together two of our favorite things, the ecopoetics of water and the structures of human cognition. We're both interested in both of these things, even though I come to the seminar flying my blue flag and Nic has recently published an excellent book on Shakespeare and cognitive theory, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare's Characters.
Ben Wishaw as Ariel underwater (Julie Taymor's 2010 Tempest film)
Over the next few months, as an extended pre-game rollout before the seminar in April, Nic and I and some of our seminar members will be blogging about these topics, including new discoveries and ideas we find as we wade into the seminar's collective work.
As we wait to read the contributions of the seminar members, I thought I'd offer a few quick ideas, drawn partly from my own work but even more from thoughts sparked by reading abstracts and the bibliographies the group has been sharing.
Mindreading: Nic's book uses theories of cognition to explore what he calls "mindreading" as a way to reconsider the Shakespearean figures. Of particular interest in a watery context is his reading of the Jailor's Daughter's incoherent speech in Two Noble Kinsmen, which includes a vision of maritime crisis. When she displays her madness through the metaphor of a ship at sea — "Out with the mainsail! — Where's your whistle, masters?" (4.1.148) — she presents herself through a form of symbolic disorder that Nic powerfully links to Hamlet and Cordelia, among others. The explosive gap of "nothing" in the opening of King Lear may gesture toward the flooded landscapes of act 4 (that's my watery reading of the play) but Nic's focus on fractured cognition suggests that linguistic coherence flows both toward salty metaphors and into dramatic structures that represent thought.
Theatrics of Water: I'm looking forward to reading lots of papers on stage practices. There was a time, it seems to me, when every modern stage featured a water hazard. I think I first remember this sort of thing in a stage version of Ovid's Metamorphoses that I saw in New York around the late '90s (?), and I remember a production of Much Ado in London in which the ingenious Benedick, played by Simon Russell Beale, jumped into the pool when he needed a place to hide. At a certain point it seemed a bit gimmicky, though the recently-revived splash-tastic Tempest by Synetic Theatre in DC was pure genius. But I wonder — might these 20-21c tricks have something to say to the staging of water in the early modern period? Water is a resistant, resilient element: it gets everywhere (as a young padawan famously said about a dryer substance), and can't easily be contained. What's the place of water's movement within (or on top of?) the carefully controlled movements of a stage play? Does water represent the limits of acting, a nonhuman collaborator who, perhaps like the dog in Two Gents, always threatens to steal every scene?
Fluid Metaphors: "The sea is not a metaphor," cries Hester Blum in PMLA in one of the most influential critical statements in the development of the blue humanities. Her salutary focus on the material reality of the ocean, from the mast-head to the polar regions, has greatly influenced my thinking about oceanic cultures and literatures. But I also wonder, especially in an early modern context in which many of our writers were, unlike Melville or Conrad, not themselves sailors, about reversing her rallying-cry. The sea is always partly a metaphor, as in Shakespeare's "hungry ocean" (Sonnet 64) or Spenser's about-to-be-erased strand (Amoretti 75). For me, the overlap between metaphor and materiality gets at the heart of things. How much real salt is in that sonnet? How much poetry in the salt-stained journal of that young midshipman? What are the formal features of an ocean wave?
Thinking with Things: Though I worry that the pdf I shared with the seminar was hard to read, one of the most influential texts for the overlap between water and cognition that I've run across is Edwin Hutchins's great 1995 book Cognition in the Wild, which treats the human and nonhuman assemblages working together in a U.S. Navy ship. Hutchins's portrait of the ship responding to crisis emphasizes plural forms working on concert: "No single individual on the bridge acting alone — neither the captain nor the navigator nor the quartermaster chief supervising the navigation crews — could have kept control of the ship and brought it safely to anchor. Many kinds of thinking were required to perform this task" (5). The multiple humans and machines of the Navy ship may, in some ways, resemble the multiple humans and machines that make theaters work.
So many ideas! I can't wait to see the seminar papers! More in a few weeks as we start to read and think about the papers.
Image from a 17c sailor's diary (Caird Library)
Demons of #mla2020
January 13, 2020 by Steve Mentz
I walked into the empty room just before the apocalypse.
A (not-needed) ward against demons at s#666
I've never fully shaken the foreboding time-feeling of MLA, an anticipatory anxiety that lingers from my can-I-stay-in-this-profession early years in the '90s (when, I know, things were much less dire for me than they are now for the current academic generation). The feeling of disaster about to burst also echoes today's environmental bubbling-over, as bushfires and floods light up our screens large and small, even if we are lucky enough to be far from these catastrophes at least some of the time. I got to room 604 of the Washington State Convention Center early Sunday morning, wanting to set the scene for the beastly glories of session #666, lurking in the hangover slot to close out my MLA. The room was empty. I moved some chairs and appropriated a red "1 Minute" sign that, as it turned out, I would not need. The half-dozen demon-sharp speakers who would comprise the "Spenser, Ecology, and the Dream of a Legible Environment" panel filed in on time, with their brilliant talks that would take us from bleeding forests and courtrooms all the way to New Jerusalems and Silicon Valley's posthuman paradises. Our session was marked by the beast's number and haunted by visions of exhausted and "uninhabitable" earths. The panel didn't proffer facile optimism but did show us ways, to adapt Alex McAdams's great eco-analysis of the Legend of Temperance, to walk out "while weather serves, and wind" (Faerie Queene 2.12.88.9).
The panel's pattern of looming catastrophe confronted if perhaps not averted parallels my sense of this year's deeply engaging and mostly heartening MLA. The big conference provides snapshots of the states of our fields and subfields. There was much excellence on display. More than any MLA I've ever attended, the conversations I followed this year seemed driven by access and in particular a focus on new voices and methodologies. The continuing tide of eco-humanities was strongly present, and eco-trends have begun productively to engage with Critical Race Theory, feminism, globalization studies, and, to an extent that I hope will increase in time, Indigenous Studies. (I note also that this was the first MLA at which I heard, and delivered, land acknowledgments to the indigenous peoples of Coast Salish– though not at every session.)
View of the Sound
As an early modernist, I felt some of most influential voices at #mla2020 were a pair of women who were not there, Kim Hall and Ayanna Thompson, whose years of work, insight, and field-shaping advocacy shaped not only the three connected #racebeforerace panels sponsored by the 17c English forum but also many other panels and presentations, including a collaborative panel organized jointly by 16c English and the Global Arab and Arab-American forums, and Dyani Johns Taff's great talk on my own Eco-Spenser panel about the raced and sexed nonhuman bodies of Scylla and Charybdis. It was great to witness the groundswell of CRT-inflected early modern material being presented, driven and connected by the #racebeforerace and #Shakerace hashtags.
Thinking about the many panels I heard at the conference, the brilliance of early-career scholars and graduate students stands out. At this point, I can't claim to be surprised to hear incisive and tightly-crafted analyses by Ambereen Dadabhoy, but I feel fortunate to have listened to her speak twice in two days. Insightful thinking from Will Rhodes on Spenser's colonial ecologies, Connie Scozzaro on love drugs in Midsummer Night's Dream, Alex McAdams on time and ecology in Spenser, Katherine Cox on climate change in Paradise Lost, and Mira Kafantaris on the racial symbology of Spenser's Duessa confirms that we're in the middle of a surge of great new scholarship in early modern literary culture.
The old shadow-MLA of hotel room interviews wasn't as much in evidence this year, at least not for an old guy like me, but I can't help thinking there was a different ghost conference in Seattle this year. Sessions that addressed the state and emerging futures of the profession – the form of our scholarly lives, rather than the content of our analyses – were markedly less sanguine than those that dove into new analyses of literary texts. I believe deeply in the work we are doing collectively, in the values of words and stories to counter climate apocalypse and resurgent racism and misogyny – but it's hard to feel optimistic on the professional front. It's hard to be optimistic on many fronts, actually, though I also think one of the lessons of ecocriticism in the face of increasingly dire climate news is that too-simple optimism, visions of transformation or "discovery," tend to conceal violence and dispossession. We need to learn to live and work toward justice inside climate dynamism, not ascend to a catastrophe-free and morally purified future.
Humans in happy dialogue with not-humans, everywhere…
A notable session organized by Drew Daniel on "No Fear Shakespeare" represented a telling mixture of stirring content and dispiriting awareness of the cultural challenges alongside which we profess our profession. The pivot paper by Stephen Guy-Bray on what the No Fear paraphrases of the sonnets exclude was delicious and dazzling, a testament to Stephen's wit, insight, and abiding commitment to poetic beauty. Great as the talk was, however, I left wondering if he'd followed the easier path. The opening and closing papers by Ann Christensen and Christine Hoffmann turned from texts to classrooms and into the wilds of web culture to propose strategies for pre-emptive annotation (Christensen) or for sympathetic engagement with making Shakespeare less frightening in our interwebbed world (Hoffmann). Their presentations addressed, with difficulty and sometimes a sense of not being able to clarify or salvage everything, the mixed and messy cultural experiences that spill into our classrooms, not to mention our lives. I love the intricacy of poetic gems as much as Stephen does – or almost as much, maybe – but I also valued the effort in this panel to marry pedagogy, formal analysis, and web-inflected cultural breadth of vision. Can we do all these things at once? Let's hope so! But I think we can also expect not always to get everything right all the time.
MLA 2020 marks the end of my five-year run on the 16c English Forum board, which means I'll shift to a not-every-year MLA schedule and won't be conspiring on a pair of guaranteed sessions after next year. It'll be nice to be released from mandatory attendance, but I'm proud of the work the 16c English Forum has done over the years, bringing new people into presentations and board membership and sponsoring lively discussions on such always-fascinating topics as Tyranny, Flattery, and Radical Hope. (Not every one of these panels doubled as a how-to class, I'm happy to say.)
A good haul, even not counting what's being shipped
Chairing my final session for the 16c English forum about Spenser makes me want to find a suitable allegorical moment to enclose in transparent glass. What was the crystalline heart of #mla2020? I'm tempted to nominate the welcome choice of Jonathan Eburne's Outsider Theory as the James Russell Lowell prize-winning book. This book's focus on the strange and its possibilities shines light on the work of the University of Minnesota Press in supporting experimental, speculative, and inspiring scholarship, through the editorial leadership of Doug Armato and many other excellent people, past and present, at the Press. (Full disclosure: UMP published Shipwreck Modernity and most recently Break Up the Anthropocene, and I love working with them.)
But I can't helping thinking about a more enigmatic, and, alas, somewhat less hopeful, scene. Guided by Seattle native Lowell Duckert, a group of us found our way through rain and steep sidewalks into the enticing open glen of a local brewery the name of which is now lost to time. Surrounded by gleaming vats and hand-written signs on the wall. we sought to decipher the many IPAs on the chalkboard. Too soon, we realized that our cross-town dinner reservation was a full fifteen minutes away. Sadly beerless, we piled into cars & arrived just in time for a tasty and festive meal, though, more's the pity, at a spot that served cider instead of beer.
The moment in that allegorical cave when I lost my taste of Seattle's local brews to time accents the way that MLA always feels like a battle against temporal limits. There's just not enough time! As ecocritic Tobias Menely emphasized in his wide-ranging analysis of Paradise Lost and climate change, time remains our hardest and most urgent challenge in thinking ecologically, as well as in thinking about literary culture and perhaps also about the trials of the 21c professoriate. Shakespeare's sonnets, like ecological analysis, engage the paradoxes of multiple overlapping time spans, including the lives of poet, poem, beloved, and our ruined and ruinous earth. What do the riches of the beer unpoured promise, even as the door closes (forever?) on that secret taproom?
I know what I want from MLA and the future of our profession. I saw it in the work and imagination of so many colleagues, including the six demonic Spenser-lovers who found in the "dream of a legible environment" visions of possibility amid destructive change. I saw things to admire in the work of the brilliant alums of the new PhD program in English I have helped shepherd into being over the past decade at my home university of St. John's, including Dan Dissinger's expansive sense of writing studies, John Misak's gamified Hamlet, and Laura Lisabeth's ethical commitments to pedagogy and writing studies. I'll also shout out one more not-yet-graduate of SJU who I spotted amid the MLA press, Tina Iemma, for her #bigger6 work within and beyond Romanticism.
I'd like a profession welcoming enough to welcome them, and the other brilliant voices whose work I heard and learned from in Seattle this weekend, and over the past many years of MLA.
That's not too much to ask, is it?
The Decade in Bookfish
January 1, 2020 by Steve Mentz
I started this blog as a teaching-adjacent project for a study abroad course in London in 2008 that never happened. In 2009 it became an e-sideline and theater suggestions for a grad seminar. Starting around 2010 it slowly morphed into its current flow of theater reviews, academic conference commentary, and the occasional snippet from works-in-progress. I don't post as many weather pictures as I used to, but I still chronicle my travels, most of the time.
Remnants from the blaze that ended '19
The Bookfish now archives over 550 posts in the decade since Jan 2010, though as the posts have gotten more substantial over the years I've slowed down the volume. Forty-odd posts appeared in 2019, from Eco-Thoughts from Oaxaca to a series of comments about the Creating Nature conference at the Fogler to a triplet about my watery travels in the land of Oz this past October. A total of 13k pages views this past year, peaking in April (SAA-season). (I can't tally total page views for the decade because my analytics seems to have reset itself in early 2018.) Posting has fallen off a bit this fall — I have unfinished draft posts about my trip to Liverpool in September, and to Delaware in November that I still hope to put into the e-world — but now that a couple large-ish projects have migrated off my desk, I may have a little more time for Bookfish-ing.
A few highlights from 2019:
Theater Posts
Beach fireworks!
Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Nov, NYC)
Mayakovsky and Stalin (NYC)
King Lear (Broadway)
Julius Caesar (Theatre for a New Audience, NYC)
Twelfth Night (Yale Rep) and White Devil (Red Bull)
Makbet (St. John's)
Academic Event Posts
Low tide at midnight
ASLE 2019 (Davis, CA)
Creating Nature (roundup post)
#shax2019 (DC)
Revaluing the Ocean (Utah)
#mla19 (Chicago)
The swimming year has included some fantastic southern hemisphere immersion in and around Sydney, my first-ever dip in the North Sea (on the not-yet-blogged trip to Bristol in September), and less time in the pool than I might have wished, for assorted trivial reasons. More water miles in 2020!
Professor of English
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OCEAN Publicity
#SAA 2020: Watery Thinking
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Vineland Reread by Peter Coviello


Commissioner Gendron suggested in testimony this morning that while student test scores in Maine had been "flat" for a number of years prior to 2006, they are currently on the rise.
A recent report from the U.S. Department of Education suggests that Maine is among the states that have seen scores increase on state tests because standards have been lowered, not because performance has increased.
So, scores on the Maine test are going up, but scores on the national test remain flat.


As a features writer for the Hong Kong China Mail, Don North's first assignment as a war correspondent was in North Borneo with the British Royal Marines and Gurkas fighting the Army of Indonesia. For two years he was a freelance cameraman and writer in Vietnam and Indonesia and became Vietnam Staff Correspondent for ABC News in 1966. The Mel Gibson role in the feature film "The Year of Living Dangerously" is in part based on North's experiences in Indonesia. In 1967 he won the Overseas Press Club Award for his reports of Vietnam combat. During the Tet Offensive in January 1968, his report of the Viet Cong attack on the U.S. Embassy was the first broadcast on television in the United States.
In 1970, North was named Cairo Bureau Chief for NBC News and specialized in covering terrorism in the Middle East. He returned frequently to Vietnam . During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, he covered the advance of Israeli forces in the Golan Heights and at the Suez Canal. For three years, North worked as a producer on the 26-part series, "The Ten Thousand Day War," a television history of the Vietnam war which was first broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This series has been shown in many countries around the world and on Arts & Entertainment and commercial broadcast outlets in the United States. North has appeared as news anchor for CBC Montreal, KTTV Los Angeles and as host of numerous documentaries.
He established Northstar Productions, Inc, in Washington, DC in 1983 and has produced television news and documentaries about El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Lebanon.


A recent audit of Golden Valley's recycling done by Republic Services, the City's recycling provider, showed a contamination of needles in the material. The contamination caused a shutdown of operations at the recycling facility due to a health and safety concern for employees. The City of Golden Valley and Republic Services would like to take this opportunity to remind residents about what can and cannot be recycled.
Needles used for medical purposes are a recycling contaminant and pose danger to recycling facility workers. Hennepin County offers free needles and sharps drop-off facilities (learn more).
Plastic bags cannot be recycled in your curbside collection container. Plastic bags should be returned to the retailer or taken to a Hennepin County waste disposal facility.
The facility receives most of Golden Valley's recycling and is usually able to recycle most of the waste it brings in, but there is definitely room for improvement. For more information about recycling in Golden Valley, visit the City recycling web page.


The Proposal: We went to Philadelphia for the weekend. While wandering the streets of Society Hill, John found a quiet bench. We sat down and he proposed. It was not a surprise; we picked out the ring together and planned the majority of the trip together. The surprise was the exact timing and of course the lovely words he said while proposing! We celebrated with an amazing 7 course dinner at The Four Seasons in Philadelphia.
Lauren and John got married at the gorgeous La Ferme Restaurant in Chevy Chase Maryland. The weather was perfect, not too hot, not too cold, and just beautiful. These two are really welcoming and the kind of people you feel like you have known forever. They are the kind of couple who welcome anyone into their homes and have dinner with. Lauren was absolutely gorgeous on her wedding day and she has such a kind spirit about her that I loved so much. John is such a good soul and perfect gentleman you would think someone handpicked them because they are perfect for each other. They wanted their day to be intimate and celebrate with their close friends and family. Lauren wanted to make everything very personal to her so she made all the cookies for the favors herself and trust me they were delicious! La Ferme if you have not been there I highly recommend their restaurant. The staff and food are divine! They went far and beyond for every guest including their vendors. I was so honored to be a part of their day and hope to be a part of their new journey together.


Drawing objects on screen is a pretty basic feature of OpenGL, but you can do this with other Android graphics framework classes, including Canvas and Drawable objects. OpenGL ES provides additional capabilities for moving and transforming drawn objects in three dimensions or in other unique ways to create compelling user experiences.
In this lesson, you take another step forward into using OpenGL ES by learning how to add motion to a shape with rotation.
If your triangle does not rotate after making these changes, make sure you have commented out the GLSurfaceView.RENDERMODE_WHEN_DIRTY setting, as described in the next section.
// Render the view only when there is a change in the drawing data.
Unless you have objects changing without any user interaction, it's usually a good idea have this flag turned on. Be ready to uncomment this code, because the next lesson makes this call applicable once again.


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La Masia Blanca (Vilaür). Veïnat del municipi de Vilaür (Alt Empordà)
 La Masia Blanca (El Vendrell). Nucli del municipi de el Vendrell (Baix Penedès)


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Nintendo Switch Sold Over 1.1 Million Units in the US in November
All three models of the Nintendo Switch collectively sold over 1.1 million units, with nearly 550,000 of those being sold during the Thanksgiving and Black Friday week.
Posted By Shubhankar Parijat | On 14th, Dec. 2021
The Holiday season is one that traditionally sees video game consoles selling in droves, and the Nintendo Switch in particular has seen high sales during this period since its launch. Unsurprisingly, that's been the case this year as well. As revealed recently by the NPD Group, and then touted further by Nintendo in a press release, the Nintendo Switch was the highest selling console in the US in November 2021.
Collectively, the base Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo Switch Lite, and the Nintendo Switch OLED sold 1.13 million units in the region across the month, of which nearly 550,000 units were sold during the Thanksgiving and Black Friday week. Incredibly, this means the Switch has been the best-selling console in the US in 35 of the last 36 months (with the PS5 having outsold it in September 2021).
That said, hardware sales in general were down in the US during the month, which can be attributed to the significant supply constraints brought about by the global semiconductor shortage. As pointed out by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad on Twitter, even with its aforementioned sales figures, the Switch still sold less than what it managed in November of 2020.
Meanwhile, the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S put together were "barely" able to sell as much as the Switch did. Interestingly, the combined sales of all three put together are lower than the combined sales of the PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U in November 2021- and the Wii U was a notoriously low-selling console, to put it mildly.
Last month, Nintendo admitted that due to the global chip shortage, it would be unable to produce enough Switch consoles to meet global demand during the Holiday period. Read more on that through here.
If you want to know how bad the supply situation is:
– The Switch sold less than November last year
– PS5 + Xbox barely = what Switch sold in total
– The PS4, XB1 and Wii U (yes Wii U) sold more in Nov 2014 than Switch + PS5 + Xbox Series in Nov 2021. https://t.co/pX6rpKb8Nk
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 13, 2021
Tagged With: Nintendo, nintendo switch
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MintTwist MintTwist's blog An Interview with Dave Kirkwood
An Interview with Dave Kirkwood
Published on Friday, August 2nd, 2013 by Colin Chung
I'm a massive fan of Emma Kennedy – I have been since I became addicted to The Smoking Room – a BBC Three sitcom back when BBC Three wasn't all who to avoid and what not do on a holiday in Spain. If you haven't checked it out you definitely should. I follow her on Twitter and she always tweets really interesting, cool things.
This week she posted a link about a Micro Flash Mob through the power of Twitter. Immediately I was intrigued. Not only did it look amazing but the concept was completely novel to me. I clicked the link to find out more and was amazed at what I found.
The Micro Flash Mob is the idea of Dave Kirkwood, a graphic designer and artist. You might have heard of him as being the creator of 3hundredand65 (more on that later). Dave's Micro Flash Mob is an inspirational idea – raising awareness for Teenager Cancer Charities through the power of graphic design and social media. Dave is filling an A3 piece of paper by drawing tiny characters holding the Twitter handles of everyone that tweets a mention of #copingwiththeBigC. It's beautiful in its simplicity.
Dave's Micro Flash Mob is an inspirational idea – raising awareness for Teenager Cancer Charities through the power of graphic design and social media.
As soon as I read about it and saw the piece in progress I thought it was inspiring. I now have the great pleasure of introducing an interview with Dave where he discusses the Micro Flash Mob, 3hundredand65, and how social media has impacted fundraising and the creative arts. All images are courtesy of Dave Kirkwood.
MintTwist (MT) – Hi Dave, please can you tell us a bit more about yourself, your background and what you do?
Dave Kirkwood (DK) – I'm a graphic designer and artist, and currently work for myself. I have previously worked with blue chip companies and household brands – my real strengths are in brand development, launch strategy and building brands.
I'm now drawing stories. I created 3hundredand65 which became a phenomenal cult in 2012. It isn't finished yet we're still raising money and awareness for Teenage Cancer Charities. A book and art auction is due early next year. Very soon I will make something of Swimming Through Leaves. I'm helping Littoral save the Elterwater Merz Barn.
MT – Please can you tell us more about your Micro Flash Mob piece?
DK – A few months ago I agreed to do something to support Becki's work – she writes a blog called Coping with the Big C and is currently in the process of compiling a book. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoveEire4eva.
Dave Kirkwood's Micro Flash Mob in action
Becki had a benign tumour at 18 and Osteosarcoma at 21 but she's a fighter. She appeared in the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in London 2012 and works really hard on her other activities.
Within two days we had over one hundred mentions of support. I've changed the mission – instead of simply seeing how big the mob can get in two weekends I want to fill the A3 sheet. A full sheet should represent between 500 – 1,000 people.
The final drawing will be added to the 3hundredand65 auction next year so it will go on to help raise money for Teenage Cancer Charities.
"My original idea was to create a micro flash mob over the period of a weekend. I planned on asking as many people as possible to mention #copingwiththeBigC so that I could draw a tiny character holding each Twitter user name – effectively building a micro flash mob."
MT – It's amazing. How did you get inspired to do this?
DK – I love Moose Allian's worlds and Shaun Tan's work. I've wanted to try something like this since last year. It just happened naturally – seemed like a good idea at the time and people got behind it quickly.
MT – It's obviously grown significantly, are you regretting your commitment to a full A3?
DK – No. It's a lot of fun.
MT – How important do you think social media has been for this cause?
DK – Vital. Couldn't have happened without both Twitter and my WordPress blog.
MT – Please could you let us know a bit about 3hundredand65?
DK – In 2012 we did something incredible, we brought 366 people together to see if we could be the first group of people to write one long graphic novel on Twitter. We did it – we got through 366 days and came up with some great ideas, written by some amazing people along the way.
"We have already raised £13,000 for Teenage Cancer Charities, appeared on national radio several times, TV, the press and on hundreds of blogs. We're succeeding in raising awareness of Teenage Cancer and we're well on the way to our £125,000 target."
The story created in 2012 is here: www.3hundredand65.co.uk; Twitter handle is @3hundredand65
The book will be published in two editions: 365 hardback and 2,000 paperback.
This second half of the project will be even bigger than the first, as well as the book sales, the sketchbooks from last year, which include all the original drawings, will be auctioned along with artwork from the book and artwork based on the 3hundredand65 story donated by international artists from all over the world.
Some of the 366 writers include: Terry Pratchett, Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes, Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, Mark Gatiss, Rebecca Front, Neil Gaiman, Alison Moyet, Irvine Welsh, Caitlin Moran and Emma Kennedy.
MT – How do you think social media has impacted the creative arts?
DK – It's increased the number of channels. It's provided democratic, easy, cheap means by which likeminded people can share information and build knowledge/emotional communities so in a crass way it has created discreet markets. It is a wonderful source for inspiration and source material. It has created new platforms to experiment with and brings collaborators together. It also fuels debate which in turn challenges the reactionaries.
MT – How do you think social media has impacted charity and fundraising?
DK – I think it has given us platforms that are pretty much opt-in yet highly visible. So fundraisers can reach many more potential donors much more quickly than ever before.
Tweet using the hashtag #copingwiththebigc to get involved
It has brought together the different challenges presented by fundraising in to easily managed and low cost tools – advertising/PR/awareness/content distribution (and publishing)-analytics/donation collection/feedback/advocacy etc.
MT – Aside from Twitter, have you utilised any social media channels for your work? Twitter wouldn't seem to be the go-to platform for a visual campaign, have you considered Instagram or Vine?
DK – Twitter is connected to Vine, Instagram etc. and you can 'force' it to carry links to content very easily – everybody knows this and is used to it. Movement between different social media platforms is almost seamless so the quick answer is yes all those.
MT – Do you have any other ideas for future projects?
DK – Yes. But I'm not telling anybody what they are until I start them.
Again, you can find out more about Dave Kirkwood's work here, and don't forget to follow him on Twitter! We would like to extend a massive thank you to Dave for taking the time out to talk to us about this project and would wholeheartedly encourage you to get involved.
Colin Chung


Melissa Joy Manning is committed to sustainability, which is why she only uses traditional, time-honored techniques and recycled material when creating her namesake jewelry. Handcrafted from 14-karat gold, these earrings are centered with a dainty curved bar to resemble the shape of a crescent moon. Make them your everyday signature.
Shown here with: Maison Margiela Blouse.