text:
Debate has become a pain in the asterisk
There once was scandal in a magical kingdom. It was the realm of a legendary sports figure, not so saintly as he appeared, and it seems relevant to the Barry Bonds-with-an-asterisk issue that has dominated spring-training conversation.
The scene was West Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early '70s, a time when UCLA basketball ran roughshod over the competition. Coach John Wooden's club almost literally was unbeatable, with a stable of future NBA standouts that spoke brilliantly to his recruiting powers.
As it turned out, the Bruins didn't play by the rules. Over the years, it came to light that a wealthy alumnus named Sam Gilbert bestowed lavish favors upon players and potential recruits, from cars to free apartments to cold cash -- anything to maintain the party-hearty atmosphere that surrounded the team at that time.
As opposed to Wooden, who was interested only in the players' on-court behavior and deeply resented the student rebellion of the time, Gilbert was a friend and father figure who could talk to players about personal matters. And Wooden, it was always said, simply looked the other way.
In subsequent years, investigative pieces in the Los Angeles Times exposed Gilbert's activities as clearly illegal by NCAA standards, even quoting sources claiming he was involved with the Miami mafia. "For years, the NCAA ignored everything," said Mike Littwin, one of the Times' chief reporters on the story (the only sanction was to ban Gilbert from any association with the program). "They didn't want to mess with the Wooden legend."
We're not suggesting there was anything noble about UCLA's escape from scandal, or that there's a direct comparison between off-court shenanigans and the swirl of controversy surrounding Bonds and other ballplayers: performance- enhancing drugs. It's just that sometimes, the deed stands above suspicion. You can be suspicious (who among us feels that Bonds is completely innocent?), but in the end, is it that big a deal?
Put it this way: If you put an asterisk next to Bonds' record 73 homers in 2001, using the evidence we have to date, exactly what would it say?
* Played in the steroid era
* The man cannot be trusted
* Hoo boy, there's something fishy about this
Critics say it's missing the point that steroids won't help you hit the curveball. They can't get over the fact that Bonds (if, in fact, he's guilty) cheated time, that he slowed the aging process in his mid-30s by enhancing muscle mass. Still, what is any of it beyond speculation? When will things ever become clear, short of indictments on perjury charges? Until further notice, as colleague Ray Ratto likes to say, it's the "Innuendo Tabernacle Choir."
I'm not really wild about the notion of dim-witted athletes turning their bodies into cartoon figures for the sake of performance, but baseball is the simplest game to analyze. It's the sport in which you can trust your eyes. What you saw from Barry Bonds in 2001 -- and in any other game, any year -- was dead-solid real.
Either that, or the entire history of the game is fraudulent. Take your choice. Don't even think of bringing a purist's approach into this argument, because baseball is cheating, and always has been.
Baseball cheated a nation for years, eliminating wonderful ballplayers on the basis of race. It juiced up the baseballs so dramatically in recent seasons, 160-pound second basemen homered to the opposite field. Players have bet on games without being caught. Pitchers have nicked, scuffed and greased baseballs for years, operating clearly outside the rules. Legendary players have corked their bats, taken cortisone shots (a steroid, although not in the anabolic family) and downed amphetamines.
Give it some thought: Player A has serious problems at home. He hasn't slept well for weeks and he's in a terrible slump, but he wouldn't dare put a foreign substance into his body. When he heads up there against Joey Fireball in the top of the 13th, he just knows he won't connect.
Player B is in the same predicament, but he popped an amphetamine. Alertness means everything to a hitter, and thanks to his friendly chemicals, this guy's more wired than a hummingbird. You think he doesn't have an unfair advantage? I'd put the amphetamine-alertness factor right up there with bigger biceps, if you're looking for an edge at the plate. Who's to say Henry Aaron didn't take a little "juice," as they called it back then? It was ridiculously common.
Some other things to consider, before you sprinkle asterisks around the room:
-- Roger Maris played 12 seasons, never clearing 30 homers except for the period 1960-62, when he went 39-61-33. Doesn't that seem a bit radical? It's every bit as bizarre as Bonds' leap to immortality. There isn't one good reason (like an expansion year, or the fact that he drew no intentional walks) that fully explains Maris in '61. Only that it's baseball. It can happen.
-- More from the Ruth era, aside from no African Americans and precious few Latin Americans: No night games. No proliferation of split-fingered fastball specialists. No succession of effective relief pitchers over the late innings. Ruth and his contemporaries feasted off guys who threw their last good pitch in the fifth.
-- Bonds' 2001 season had some other conspicuous oddities, like Luis Gonzalez's 57 homers and Shawn Green's 49. Right. Two high-caliber citizens whose appearance didn't change over the years. The American League's home-run leaderboard looked like something out of the 1930s -- or '60s, if you prefer; nothing out of the ordinary.
Steroids might have been all the rage, but nobody came close to what Bonds did. He was playing in what is universally considered the toughest ballpark on home-run hitters. And if you watch the tape of all 73 home runs put together, they were absolutely crushed. Not a cheap-looking shot in the bunch (as in, "the steroids added a few extra feet"), and dozens bordering on genius.
-- A common accusation is that Bonds gained 35 pounds "overnight." Complete lie. It was a slow, gradual process over at least five years. Have you ever seen this guy work out? It's like he's getting ready for six triathlons in seven days. Nobody works that hard. The enlarged head might be a dead giveaway, but he's earned every single accomplishment in his career.
-- Exactly what did Bonds (if guilty) do that was illegal? There were no rules against performance-enhancing products until last year. As Expos manager Frank Robinson said the other day, "What guys were doing (with steroids) was taking advantage, which is different from cheating."
-- Bonds has never been anything short of a once-in-a-lifetime player who hits titanic home runs, often. I've never seen him hit a ball harder, or farther, than the one he put off the upper-deck faÁade of Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium one night. That was in July '86, off the Giants' Roger Mason. It was the eighth homer of Bonds' career.
-- Further studies might confirm a clear distinction between anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, the one many suspect Bonds of taking. Still, the accusations have him gaining longevity by warding off injuries. Yet, as we've seen in Jose Canseco, Ken Caminiti, Lyle Alzado and untold professional wrestlers, the hell of steroids is that the body breaks down. So which is it? Come on, make a choice right now.
-- The tone among crusading journalists can be almost insufferable. One went as far as to say, "What we are watching is a national change of mood." Where? At the Harvard library? Rich people are loading up on Botox, tummy tucks and Viagra. On the other side of the tracks, the real sporting America, you've got eight guys partying in a low-rent apartment with a beer-stocked refrigerator and a hint of weed in the air. These guys grew up watching people assault strangers, pack revolvers and rob convenience stores, taking any risk to get out of the neighborhood. Now you're telling them there's an athlete who wants to get stronger, and he's found just the ticket, and he broke no rules? Life is good!
-- Brady Anderson, a self-admitted creatine freak (that's legal) and workout fanatic who didn't gain any weight before his stunning 50-homer season in Baltimore, made an interesting point: "It was 26 more homers than I'd ever hit before, but that's just one more home run per week -- just one more good swing. The small difference between greatness and mediocrity."
-- How do you explain Bonds hitting .370? The balls were skipping a bit faster through the infield? Good grief, put down the science books. We were all there. We saw it. Bonds' performances reorganized our thinking about the all-time greats, and we put him in a class with Aaron, Willie Mays and Ted Williams. Now you're saying it was all because of steroids? That's insanity.
What do I know about steroids? I know nothing. I'm singing off-key harmony in the choir.
But I'm getting tired of the smirks and knowing glances. No asterisks, please. They go into the punctuation dumpster, right along with the lost commas and scorned apostrophes.
POWER SURGES Roger Maris Season Homers 1959 16 1960 39 1961 61(X) 1962 33 1963 23. Luis Gonzalez Season Homers 1999 26 2000 31 2002 57(X) 2002 28 2003 26. Brady Anderson Season Homers 1994* 12 1995* 16 1996 50(X) 1997 18 1998 18 * Denotes strike-shortened season. (X) denotes career-high homer season.


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text:
Audio: Karen Russell reads.
The young turf-cutter fell hard for his first girlfriend while operating heavy machinery in the peatlands. His name was Cillian Eddowis, he was fifteen years old, and he was illegally employed by Bos Ardee. He had celery-green eyes and a stutter that had been corrected at the state's expense; it resurfaced whenever he got nervous. "Th-th-th," he'd said, accepting the job. How did Cillian persuade Bos Ardee to hire him? The boy had lyingly laid claim to many qualities: strength, maturity, experience. When that didn't work, he pointed to his bedroom window, a quarter mile away, on the misty periphery of the cutaway bog, where the undrained water still sparkled between the larch trees. The intimation was clear: what the thin, strange boy lacked in muscle power he made up for in proximity to the work site.
Peat is harvested from bogs, watery mires where the earth yawns open. The bottom is a breathless place—cold, acidic, anaerobic—with no oxygen to decompose the willow branches or the small, still faces of the foxes interred there. Sphagnum mosses wrap around fur, wood, skin, casting their spell of chemical protection, preserving them whole. Growth is impossible, and Death cannot complete her lean work. Once cut, the peat becomes turf, and many locals on this green island off the coast of northern Europe still heat their homes with this peculiar energy source. Nobody gives much thought to the fuel's mortuary origins. Cillian, his mother, and several thousand others lived on the island, part of the archipelago known to older generations as the Four Horsemen. It's unlikely that you've ever visited. It's not really on the circuit.
Neolithic farmers were the first to clear the island's woods. Two thousand years later, peat had swallowed the remains of their pastures. Bogs blanketed the hills. In the Iron Age, these bogs were portals to distant worlds, wilder realms. Gods travelled the bogs. Gods wore crowns of starry asphodels, floating above the purple heather.
Now industrial harvesters rode over the drained bogs, combing the earth into even geometries. On the summer morning that Cillian found the Bog Girl, he was driving the Peatmax toward a copse of trees at the bog's western edge, pushing the dried peat into black ridges. True, it looked as if he was pleating shit, but Cill had a higher purpose. He was saving to buy his neighbor Pogo's white hatchback. Once he had a car, it would be no great challenge to sleep with a girl or a woman. Cillian was open to either experience. Or both. But he was far too shy to have an eye-level crush on anyone in his grade. Not Deedee, not Stacia, not Vicki, not Yvonne. He had a crush, taboo and distressing, on his Aunt Cathy's ankles in socks. He had a crush on the anonymous shoulders of a shampoo model.
He had just driven into the western cutaway bog when he looked over the side of the Peatmax and screamed. A hand was sticking out of the mud. Cillian's first word to the Bog Girl required all the air in his lungs: "Ahhhhhhfuuuuuck!"
Here was a secret, flagging him down. A secret the world had kept for two thousand years and been unable to keep for two seconds longer. The bog had confessed her.
When the other men arrived, Cillian was on his knees, scratching up peat like a dog. Already he had dug out her head. She was whole and intact, cocooned in peat, curled like a sleeping child, with her head turned west of her pelvis. Thick, lustrous hair fanned over the tarp, the wild red-orange of an orangutan's fur, dyed by the bog acids. Moving clouds caused her colors to change continuously: now they were a tawny bronze, now a mineral blue. It was a very young face.
Cradling her head, Cillian lost all feeling in his legs. A light rain began to fall, but he would not relinquish his position. Every man gathered was staring at them. Ordinarily, their pronged attention encircled him like a crown of thorns, making him self-conscious, causing red fear to leak into his inner vision. Today, he didn't give a damn about the judgments of the mouth-breathers above him. Who had ever seen a face so beautiful, so perfectly serene?
"Mother of God!" one of the men screamed. He pointed to the noose. A rope, nearly black with peat, ran down the length of her back.
Murder. That was the men's consensus. Bos Ardee called the police.
But Cillian barely heard the talk above him. If you saw the Bog Girl from one angle only, you would assume that she was a cherished daughter, laid to rest by hands that loved her. But she had been killed, and now her smile seemed even more impressive to him, and he wanted only to protect her from future harm. The men kept calling her "the body," which baffled Cillian—the word seemed to blind them to the deep and flowing dream-life behind her smile. "There is so much more to you than what they see," he reassured her in a whisper. "I am so sorry about what happened to you. I am going to keep you safe now."
After this secret conversation, Cill fell rapidly in love.
Cillian was lucky that he met his girlfriend on such a remote island. When these bodies are discovered in Ireland, for example, or in the humid Florida bogs sprinkled between Disney World and Cape Canaveral, things proceed differently. The area is cordoned off. Teams of experts arrive to excavate the site. Then the bog people are carefully removed to laboratories, museums, where gloveless hands never touch them.
Cillian touched her hair, touched the rope. He was holding the reins of her life. Three policemen had arrived, and they conferred above Cillian, their black boots squeezing mud around the bog cotton. Once it had been determined that the girl was not a recent murder victim, the policemen relaxed. The chief asked Cillian a single question: "You're going to keep her, then?"
Gillian Eddowis was on a party line with her three sisters. She tucked the phone under her chin and took the ruby kettle off the range, opening a window to shoo the blue steam free. In the living room, roars of studio laughter erupted from the television; Cillian and the Bog Girl were watching a sitcom about a Canadian trailer park. Their long silences unnerved her; surely they weren't getting into trouble, ten feet away from her? She had never had cause to discipline her son. She wouldn't know where to begin. He was so kind, so intelligent, so unusual, so sensitive—such an outlier in the Eddowis family that his aunts had paid him the modern compliment of assuming that he was gay.
Voices sieved into Gillian's left ear:
"You want to warn them," Sister Abby said.
"But, Virgin Mother, there is no way to warn them!" Sister Patty finished.
"We were all sixteen once," Cathy growled. "We all survived it."
"Cillian is fifteen," Gillian corrected. "And the girlfriend is two thousand."
Abby, who had seen a picture of the Bog Girl in the local newspaper, suggested that somebody was rounding down.
A university man had also read the story of the Bog Girl's discovery. He'd taken a train and a ferry to find them. "I've come to make an Urgent Solicitation on Behalf of History," he said. He wanted to acquire the Bog Girl for the national museum. The sum he offered them was half of Gillian's salary at the post office.
In the end, what had happened? Christian feeling had muzzled her. How could she sell a girl to a stranger? Or pretend that she had any claim to her, this orphan from the Iron Age? Gillian told the university man that the Bog Girl was their house guest, and would be living with them until Social Services could locate her next of kin. At this, all the purple veins in the man's neck stood out. His tone sank into petulant defeat. "Mark my words, you people do not have the knowledge to properly care for her," he said. "She'll fall apart on you." The Bog Girl, propped up next to the ironing board, watched them argue with an implacable smile. The university man left empty-handed, and for a night and a day Gillian was a hero to her son.
"So she's just freeloading, then? Living off your dime?" Cathy asked.
"Oh, yes. She's quite shameless about it."
How could she explain to her sisters what she could barely admit to herself? The boy was in love. It was a monstrous, misdirected love; nevertheless, it commanded her respect.
"The Bog Girl is a bad influence on him," she told her sisters. "She doesn't work, she doesn't help. All day she lazes about the house."
Patty coughed and said, "If you feel that way, then why—"
Cathy screamed, "Gillian! She cannot stay with you!"
It was gentle Abby who formulated the solution: "Put her back in the bog."
"Gillian. Do it tonight."
"Who's going to miss her?"
"I can't put her back in the bog. It would be . . ."
Silence drilled into her ears. Her family had a talent for emitting judgment without articulating words. When she was Cillian's age and five months pregnant with him, everyone had quietly made clear that she was sacrificing her future. She'd run away to be with Cillian's father, then returned to the boglands alone with a bug-eyed toddler.
"I'm afraid," she confessed to her sisters. "If I put her out of the house, he'll leave with her."
"Oh!" they cried in unison. As if a needle had infected them all with her fear.
"Do something crazy, stupid . . ."
Silently adding, Like we did.
"Now, be honest, you little rat turd. You know nothing about her." His uncle put a finger into his peach iced tea, stirred. They were seated on a swing in the darkest part of Cillian's porch. Uncle Sean was as blandly ugly as a big toenail. Egg-bald and cheerfully unemployed, a third-helpings kind of guy. Once, Cillian had watched him eat the sticker on a green apple rather than peel it off. Sean was always over at the cottage, using Gillian's computer to play Poker 3000. He smeared himself throughout their house, his beer rings ghosting over surfaces like fat thumbs on a photograph. His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air. Uncle Sean took a proprietary interest in anything loved by Cillian. It was no surprise, then, that he was infatuated with the Bog Girl.
"I know that I love her," Cill said warily. He hated to be baited.
Uncle Sean was packing his brown, shakey weed into the rosy crotch of a glass mermaid. He passed his nephew the pipe. "Already, eh? You love her and you don't know the first thing about her?"
What did he know about her?
What did he love about her?
Cillian shrugged, his body crowding with feelings. "And I know that she loves me," he added, somewhat hastily.
Uncle Sean's pink smirk seemed to paste him to the back of the wicker seat. "Oh?" His grin widened. "And how old is she?"
"Two thousand. But she was my age when they put her in the bog."
"Most women I know lie freely about their age," Uncle Sean warned. "She may well be eleven. Then again, she could be three thousand."
Gillian, plump and starlit, appeared on the porch. A pleasant oniony smell followed her, mixing with the damp odor of Sean's pot.
"Are you smoking?"
"No," they lied in unison.
"Tell your . . . your friend that she is welcome to eat with us." With a martyred air, Gillian lifted her kitten-print pot holders to the heavens. Cill smiled; the pot holders made it look as if she approved of the situation—two big thumbs-up! His poor mom. She was so nervous around new people, and the Bog Girl's silence only intimidated her further. She was insecure about her cooking, and he knew she was going to take it very personally when the Bog Girl did not touch it.
Dinner was meat loaf with onions and, for Sean, a thousand beers. It was not a comfortable meal.
Gillian, stirring butter into the lima beans, beamed threats at her son's new girlfriend: You little bitch. Crawl back into your hole. Stay away from my son.
"Biscuit?" Gillian asked. "Does she like biscuits, Cill?"
The Bog Girl smiled her gentle smile at the wall, her face reflected in the oval door of the washer-dryer. Against that sudsy turbulence, she looked especially still.
Three drinks in, Uncle Sean slung an arm around the Bog Girl's thin blue shoulder, welcoming her into the family. "I'm proud of my nephew for going after an older woman, a mature woman . . . a cougar!"
Cillian fixed his uncle with a homicidal stare. Under the table, he touched his girlfriend's foot with his foot; his eyebrows lifted in apology. His mother shot up with her steaming cauldron of beans, giving everyone another punitive lima ladle and removing the beer from the table. Their dog, returning from her dusk mouse hunt, came berserking into the kitchen, barking at a deranged pitch. She wanted to play tug-of-war with the Bog Girl's noose. "Puddles—_no! _" Cillian's vision was swimming, his whole body overheating with shame. He relaxed when he stared into the Bog Girl's face, which was void of all judgment, smiling at him with its mysterious kindness. Once again, his embarrassment was soothed by her infinite calm. His eyes lowered from her smile to the noose. Of course, she's seen far worse than us, he thought. Outside the window, insects millioned around the porch light. The bog crickets were doing a raspy ventriloquy of the stars; perhaps she recognized their tiny voices. Soon Uncle Sean was snoring lightly beside the pooling gravy, face down in his big arms. Cill sat slablike in the moonlight. The Bog Girl smiled blindly on.
For the first two weeks, the Bog Girl slept on the sofa, the television light flickering gently over her. That was fine by Gillian. She wasn't about to turn an orphan from the Iron Age out on the street.
Then, on a rainy Monday night, without warning or apology, Cillian picked up the Bog Girl. He cradled her like a child, her frondy feet dangling in the air. Gillian, doing a jigsaw puzzle of a horse and colt in the kitchen, looked up in time to see them disappearing. She felt a purple welt rising in her mind, the revelatory pain called wonder. Underneath the shock, other feelings began to flow, among them a disturbed pride. Because hadn't he looked exactly like his father? Confident, possessed. He didn't ask for her permission. He did not lie to her about what he was doing, or hide it, or explain it. He simply rose with the Bog Girl in his arms, nuzzling her blue neck. The door shut, and he was gone from sight. Another milestone: she heard the click of the lock.
"Good night, son!" she cried after them, panicked.
She could not reconcile her knowledge of her sweet, awkward boy with this wayward, confident person. Was she supposed to go up there now? Pound on the door? Oh, who could she call? Nobody, not even her sisters, would take a call about this problem, she felt quite certain. Abby's son, Kevin, met his girlfriend in church. Cathy's son, Patrick, has a lovely fiancée who teaches kindergarten. Murry's girlfriend is in jail for vehicular manslaughter—but at least she's alive!
In the morning, she watched the mute, hitching muscles of his back as he fumbled with the coffeepot. So he was a coffee drinker now. More news. He kissed his mother's forehead as he left for work, but he was whistling to himself, oblivious of her sadness, her fear, completely self-enclosed in his new happiness. It's too soon for this, she thought. And: Not you, too. Please, please, please, she prayed, the incomplete prayer of mothers who cannot conceive of a solution.
That evening, she announced a new rule: "Everyone has to wear clothes. And no more locked doors."
That Saturday, Cillian took the ferry three hours to a mainland museum. Twelve bog bodies were on display, part of a travelling exhibition called "Kings of the Iron Age." The Bog Girl had met his family—the least he could do was return the favor. Cill sneaked into a tour in progress, following a docent from sepulchre to sepulchre. Under the glass, the Kings of the Iron Age lay like chewed taffy. One man was naked except for a fox-fur armband. Another was a giant. Another had two sets of thumbs.
Cillian learned that the bogs of the islands in the cold Atlantic were particularly acidic. Pickled bodies from the Iron Age had emerged from these deep vats. Their fetally scrolled bodies often doubled as the crumpled maps of murders. They might have been human sacrifices, the docent said. Left in the bog water for the harvest god. Kings, queens, scapegoats, victims—they might have been any of these things.
"From the contents of his stomach, we can surmise that he last dined on oat gruel. . . ."
"From the forensic analyses, we can surmise that she was killed by an arrow. . . . "
"From the ornaments on this belt buckle, we can surmise that these were a wealthy people. . . . "
What? No more than this could be surmised?
The docent pointed out the dots and stripes on the potsherds. Charcoal smudges that might be stars or animals. Evidence, she said, of "a robust culture." Cillian took notes:
Back on the ferry, he could admit to his relief: none of the other bog bodies stirred any feeling in him. He loved one specific person. He could see things about the Bog Girl to which this batty docent would be totally blind—for example, the secret depths her smile concealed. How badly misunderstood she had been by her own people. She was an alien from a planet that nobody alive could visit—the planet Earth, in the first century A.D. She felt soft in his arms, bonelessly soft, but she also seemed indestructible. According to the experts, a bog body should begin to decompose rapidly when exposed to air. Curiously enough, this Bog Girl had not. He told no one his theory but polished it inside his mind like an amulet: it was his love that was protecting her.
By August, their rapport had deepened immeasurably. They didn't need to say a word, Cill was discovering, to perfectly understand each other. Falling in love with the Bog Girl was a wonderful thing—it was permission to ignore everyone else. When school started, in September, he made a bespoke sling and brought her with him. His girlfriend, propped like a broomstick against the rows of lockers, waited for him during Biology and Music II, as cool and impassive as the most popular girl the world has ever known.
Nobody in the school administration objected to the presence of the Bog Girl. Ancestral superstitions still hovered over the islanders' minds, exerting their quiet influence, and nobody wanted to be the person responsible for angering a visitor from the past. Soon she was permitted to audit all of Cillian's classes, smiling dreamlessly at the flustered, frightened teachers.
One afternoon, the vice-principal called her into his office and presented her with a red-and-gold badge to wear in the halls: "VISITING STUDENT."
"I don't think that's really accurate, sir," Cillian said.
"Oh, no?"
"She's not a visitor. She was born here." In fact, the Bog Girl was the island's oldest resident, by at least nineteen hundred years. Cillian paused. "Also, her eyes are shut, you see. So I don't think she can really, ah, study. . . ."
"Well!" The vice-principal clapped his hands. He had a day to live, quotas to fulfill. "We will be studying her, then. She will give us all an exciting new perspective on our modern life and times—Oh my! Oh dear." The Bog Girl had slumped into his aloe planter.
Cillian put the badge on her polyester blouse, a loaner from his mother that was vintage cool. Cillian—who never gave a thought to his own clothing—enjoyed dressing the Bog Girl for school in the morning. He raided his mother's closet, resurrecting her baby-doll dresses. The eleventh-grade girls organized a clothing drive for the Bog Girl, collecting many shoplifted donations of fall tunics and on-trend boots.
Rumorsprawl. Word got around that the Bog Girl was actually a princess. A princess, or possibly a witch. Within a week, she was eating at the popular girls' table. They'd kidnapped her from where Cillian had positioned her on a bench, propped between two book bags, and taken her to lunch. Already they had restyled her hair with rhinestone barrettes.
"You stole my girlfriend," Cillian said.
"Something awful happened to her," Vicki said reverently.
"So bad," Georgette echoed.
"She doesn't like to talk about it," Priscilla said, looping a protective arm around the Bog Girl. The girls had matching lunches: lettuce salads, diet candy bars, diet shakes. They were all jealous of how little she ate.
How had Cill not foreseen this turn of events? The Bog Girl was diminutive, wounded, mysterious, a redhead. Best of all, she could never contradict any rumor the living girls distributed about her.
"She was too beautiful to live!" Priscilla gasped. "They killed her for her beauty."
"I don't th-th-think," Cill said, "that it happened quite like that."
The popular girls adjusted their leggings, annoyed. "No?"
Cillian was dimly aware that other tables were listening in, but the density of the attention in no way affected him. "I am hers, and she is mine," he announced. "I have dedicated myself to learning everything about her."
A sighing spasm of envy moved down the popular girls' table—what boy alive would say this about them? A miracle: nobody mocked Cillian Eddowis. They were all starving to be loved like this. The popular girls watched him avidly as he ate a grilled cheese and waffle fries, his green irises burning. Between bites, his left hand rose to touch the Bog Girl's red braid, tousling it like the pull-chain of a lamp.
Gillian couldn't help it: she was heartbroken. The past that was most precious to her had filtered right through her son. The songs she'd sung to him when he was nursing? The care with which she'd cut the tiny moons of his fingernails? Their 4 A.M. feedings? Erased! Her son had matured into amnesia about his earliest years. Now her body was the only place where the memories were preserved. Cillian, like all sons, was blithe about this betrayal.
"There is so much about yourself that you do not recall," Gillian accused him after dinner one night. Cillian, writing a paper about igneous rocks at the kitchen table, did not look up.
"When you were my boy, just a wee boy," Gillian said in a voice of true agony, "you used to be terrified of the vacuum cleaner. You loved your froggy pajamas. You used so much glue on your art projects that your teachers—"
"Quit it with these dumb stories, Ma!"
"Oh, you find them dumb, do you? The stories about how I had to raise you alone, without a penny from your father—"
"You're just trying to embarrass me in front of her!"
The Bog Girl smiled at them from the amber armchair. Her leather skirt was outrageously short, a donation from tall Bianca. Decorously, Cillian had draped the cable guide over her lap. Bugs spun in her water glass; mosquitoes and dragonflies were always diving into the Bog Girl's food and drink, as if in strange solidarity with her.
Cillian drew himself up triumphantly, a foot taller than his mother. "You don't want me to grow up."
"What? Of course I do!"
But Cill was ready with his rebuttal: "You gave us rhyming names, Ma!"
This was true. Gillian and Cillian. She'd come up with that plan when she was a teen-ager herself, and pregnant with a nameless otter, some gyring little animal. A rhyming name had seemed just right then; she couldn't have said why, at seventeen. Had Cillian been a girl, she would have named her Lillian.
"You're so young, you can't know . . . " But what did she want to tell him?
Her body seemed to cave in on itself then, becoming smaller and smaller, so that even Cillian, fortressed behind the wall of his love, noticed and became alarmed. "Ma? What's wrong?"
"It's changing all the time," she murmured ominously. "Just, please, wait, my love. Don't . . . settle." What a word! She pictured her son sinking up to his neck in the reddish bog water.
She was hiccupping now, unable to name her own feelings. Without thinking, she picked up the murky water glass, drank from it. "Your potential . . . all the teachers tell me you have great potential."
Just come out and say it. "I don't want you to throw your life away on some Bog Girl!"
"Oh, Ma." Cill patted her back until the hiccups stopped. Her face looked crumpled and blue in the unlit room, hovering above the seated Bog Girl. For a second, they might have been sisters.
The Bog Girl floated, thin as a dress, on the mattress. Barrettes, pink and purple, were scattered all over the pillow. She smiled at Cillian, or beyond him, with her desiccated calm. Downstairs, Gillian was making breakfast, the buttery smells threading through his nostrils like an ox ring, tugging him toward them. But when she called up for him he was barely in the room. He was digging and digging into the peat-moss bog again, smoothing her blue cheeks with both hands, spading down into the kingdom that she comes from.
"Cillian! The bus is coming!" It should have taken him twenty seconds to put on pants. What was he doing in there? Probably jacking off to a "meme," whatever that was, or buying perfume for the Bog Girl on her credit cards.
"Coming, Ma!"
Cillian was always learning new things about his girlfriend. The longer he looked at her, the more he saw. Her face grew silty with personality. Although she was young when she disappeared into the bog, her face was plowed with tiny wrinklings. Some dream or mood had recurred frequently enough to hammer lines across her brow. Here were the ridges and the gullies her mental weathers had worked into her skin.
Cill studied the infloresences on her cheeks. Her brain is in there, the university man had said. Her brain is intact, preserved by the bog acids. Cillian spent hours doing this forensic palmistry, trying to read her mind.
"Will you have a talk with him?" Gillian begged Sean. "Something is going really, really wrong with him!"
"First love, first love," Sean murmured sadly, scratching his bubonic nose. "Who are we to intervene, eh? It will die of natural causes."
"Natural causes!"
She was thinking that the poor girl had been garroted. Her bright-red hair racing the tail of the noose down her spine. You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.
In mid-October, a stretch limousine pulled up to the cottage to take Cillian and the Bog Girl to the annual school dance. A techno-reggae song called "Bump de Ass!" filled the back seat, where half a dozen teen-agers sat in churchlike silence. The Bog Girl's reticence was contagious. Ambulance lights sparkled through the tinted windows, causing everyone to jump, with one exception: Cillian Eddowis's date, the glamorous foreigner, or native—nobody was sure how to regard her.
Since acquiring his far older girlfriend, Cill had begun speaking to his classmates in the voice of a bachelor who merely tolerates children. "Carla," he said, clearing his throat. "Would you mind exhaling a little closer to the window? Your smoke is blowing on us."
Two girls started debating whether or not a friend should lose her virginity in a BMW that evening. What was the interior of the car like? This was a very important question. The girl's boyfriend was a twenty-six-year-old cocaine dealer. Prior to the Bog Girl's arrival on the scene, everyone had found his age very impressive. The dealer boyfriend had been unable to accompany the girl to the school dance, so she had taken poor Eoin, her sophomore cousin, who looked near fatally compressed by his green cummerbund. The twenty-six-year-old would be waiting for her in the BMW, post-festivities. Should she deflower him?
"Wait. Uh. I think he's deflowering you, right? Or maybe you're deflowering each other? Who's got the flower?"
"Just do it, and then lie about it." Carla shrugged. "That's what I did."
"My advice," Cillian said, in the unfamiliar voice, "my advice is, wait. Wait until you find the person with whom you want to spend all your earthly time." The Bog Girl leaned against his shoulder, aloof in her sparkly tiara. "Or until that person finds you. If that's this guy, well, kudos. But, if not, wait. You will meet your soul mate. And you will want to give that person every molecule of your life."
The attempted conversion of the high-school gymnasium into an Arabian-themed wonderland had not been a success. Cill and the Bog Girl stood under a palm tree that looked like an enormous toilet brush, made of cellophane and cardboard tubes. Three girls from the limo came up and asked to dance with Cillian, but he explained that his girlfriend hated to be left alone. All were sulkily respectful of her claim on him.
The after-party was held in an old car-parts warehouse on the west side of the island, where everything was shut or abandoned; the population of the island had been declining steadily for three decades. The music sounded like fists beating at the wall, and the floor was so sticky that Cillian had to lift and cradle the Bog Girl, looping her silver dress around one arm. Cillian had never attended an after-party before. Or a party, for that matter. He surveyed his former tormenters, the seniors, with their piggish faces and their plastic cups. Some were single, some had girlfriends, some were virgins, some were not, but not one of them, Cillian felt very certain, knew the first thing about love.
Eoin the sophomore came over, his date nowhere to be seen. He was breathless in the cummerbund, in visible danger of puking up Bacardi. He rolled a bloodshot eye in Cill's direction, smiling wistfully.
"So," he said, "I'm just wondering. Do you guys—"
Cillian preëmpted the question: "A gentleman never tells."
It was a phrase he'd once read in a men's magazine, while waiting to get a root canal. In fact, his mother needn't have lost so much sleep to this particular fear. At night, Cillian lay beside the Bog Girl, barely touching her. A steady, happy calm radiated from her, which filled him with a parallel euphoria.
Cillian carried the Bog Girl onto the dance floor, her braided noose flung over his shoulder. And even Eoin, minutes from unconsciousness, could hear exactly who the older boy believed himself to be in this story: Cillian the Rescuer.
"Oh, damn! Wise up! She'll make you wait forever, man!" The lonely laugh of Eoin died a terrible death, like a bird impaled on a spike.
At 3 A.M., the lights were still on. Uh-oh, Cill thought. Mom got into the gin again.
Drinking made her silences bubble volubly. He almost got the hiccups himself, listening to her silences. Oh, God. There was so much pain inside her, so much she wanted to share with him. Cillian and the Bog Girl tried to tiptoe past her to the staircase, but she sprang up like a jack-in-the-box.
"Cillian?" She looked child-small in the dark. Her voice was tremulous and young, and her slurring reminded him of his own stutter, that undead vestige of his early years. His mother sounded like a sleepy girl, four or five years old. Her feet were bare, and she rose onto her stubby toes to grip his arm. "Where are you coming from?"
"Nowhere. The dance. It was fun."
"Where are you going?"
"Aw, Mom. Where do you th-th-think?"
"Good night!" she called after him desperately. "I hope you had a good time! You looked so handsome! So grown up!"
By early winter, the Bog Girl's stillness had begun to provoke a restlessness in Cillian, a squeezed and throbbing feeling. He was failing three subjects. His mother had threatened to send him to live with Aunt Cathy until he "straightened out." He didn't care. Waiting for the bus in the freezing rain, he no longer dreamed about owning a car. He knew what he would do with the summer money he'd earned from Bos Ardee: run away with her.
He'd flunk out of school and take the Bog Girl with him to the mainland. She'd be homesick at first, maybe, but they'd go on trips to urban parks. It was the burr of peace, the burr of happiness, goading him on to new movement. Oh, he was frightened, too.
In his fantasy life, Cillian drew the noose tighter and tighter. He imagined, with a strange joy, the narrow life they would lead. No children, no sex, no messy nights vomiting outside bars, no unintended pregnancies, no fights in the street, no betrayals, no surprises, no broken promises, no promises.
Was the Bog Girl a co-signer to this fantasy? Cillian had every reason to believe so. When he described his plans to her, the smile never left her face. Was their love one-sided, as the concerned and unimaginative adults in his life kept insisting? No—but the proof of this surprised no one more terribly than Cillian.
One night in mid-December, lying in bed, he felt a cobwebby softness on his left cheek. It was her eyelashes, flicking over him. They glowed radish-red in the moonlight. Cillian swatted at his face, his own eyes never opening. Still sunk in his dreaming, he grunted and rolled over.
The Bog Girl sat up.
With fluttering effort, the muscles of her blue jaw yawned. One eye opened. It studied itself in the dresser mirror for a long instant, then turned calmly back toward Cillian. Very slowly, her left arm unhinged itself and dropped to the plaid bedspread. The fingers curled around the blanket's edge, and drew it down. A blush of primal satisfaction colored the Bog Girl's cheeks as the fabric moved. She tugged more forcefully, revealing Cillian curled on his side in his white undershirt. Groaning in his sleep, he jerked the covers back up.
"Cillian," she said aloud.
Now Cillian was awake—he was irreversibly awake. He blinked up at her face, which was staring down at him. When they locked eyes, her frozen smile widened.
"Mom!" he couldn't help screaming. "Help!"
The Bog Girl, imitating him, began to scream and scream. And he could see, radiating from her gaze, the same blind tenderness that he had directed at her. Now he was its object. Something truly terrifying had happened: she loved him back.
For months, Cillian had been decoding the Bog Girl's silences. He'd peered into her dreams, her fears, her innermost thoughts. But her real voice was nothing like the voice that he'd imagined for her—a cross between Vicky Gilvarry and Patti LaBelle. Its high-pitched ululations hailed over him. In the kitchen, the dog began to bark. The language that she spoke was no longer spoken anywhere on earth.
He stumbled up, tugging at his boxers. The Bog Girl stood, too. The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life. An invisible woods was in the bedroom with them, the scent of trees multiplying. Some mental earthquake inside the Bog Girl was casting up a world, green and unknown to him, or to anyone living: her homeland. Her gaze drove inward, carrying Cillian with it. For an instant, he thought he glimpsed her parents. Her brothers, her sisters, a nation of people. Their cheeks now beginning to redden, every one of them alive again inside her village. Pines rippling seaward. Gods, horned and faceless, walking the lakes that once covered Cillian's home. Cillian was buried in water, in liquid images of her; he had to push through so many strata of her memories to reach the surface of her mind. Most of what he saw he shrank away from. His mind felt like a burned tongue, numbly touching her reality.
"W-w-who are you?"
"Heartbreak" is the universal diagnosis for the pain that accompanies the end of love. But this was an unusual breakup, in that Cillian's mind shattered first. The love that had protected him began to fall away. Piece after piece of it clattered from his chest, an armor rusting off him. What are you?
The Bog Girl lurched toward him, her arms open. First she moved like a hopping chick, with an unexpected buoyancy. Then she seemed to remember how to step, heel to toe. She came for him like an astronaut, bouncing on the gray carpet. The only English word she knew was his name.
Almost weightlessly, she reached for him. For wasn't she equally terrified? There was no buoy other than this boy, who had gripped her with his thin, freckled arms, bellying her out of the peat bog and into time.
Cillian hid behind the dresser.
Her fingers found his hand, threaded through his fingers.
He screamed again, even as he squeezed the hand back.
Her words rushed together, a thawing waterfall, moving intricately between octaves; still the only word he understood was his name. Perhaps nothing he had said to her, in their six months as a couple, had been comprehended. Cillian worked the levers in his brain, desperately trying to find the words that would release him.
"Unlock the door," his mother's beautiful voice called.
Cillian was frozen in the Bog Girl's grip, unable even to call out. But a moment later he heard the key turning in the lock. Gillian stood in the doorway in her yellow pajamas. With a panoramic comprehension, she took in what had happened. She knew, too, what must now be done. If she could have freed these two from the embrace herself, she would have done so; but now she understood the challenge. The boy would have to make his own way out. "Take her home, Cillian. Make sure that she gets home safely."
Cillian, his eyes round with panic, only nodded.
Gillian went to the Bog Girl, helping her into a sweater. "Put a hat on. And pants."
His mother shepherded them downstairs and onto the porch, switching on every yellow bulb as they moved through the cottage. It was the warmest December on record, rain falling instead of snow, the drops disappearing into the rotted wood. Cillian carried the Bog Girl to the edge of the light before he understood that his mother was not coming with him.
"Let her down gently, son!" his mother called after them.
Well, she could do this for him, at least: she held a lantern steady across the rainy lawn, creating a gangplank of light that reached almost to the larches. She watched them moving toward the inky water. The Bog Girl was howling in her foreign tongue; at this distance, Gillian felt she could almost understand it.
Oh, she hoped their breakup would stick. She had divorced Cillian's father, then briefly moved into his new house; it had taken years before their affair was truly over. You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.
This was a bad breakup. A quarter mile from the cottage, under a bright moon, Cillian and the Bog Girl were rolling in the mud, each screaming in a different language. Their screams twined together, their hands reaching for each other; it was during this undoing that they were, at last, truly united as a couple. His flashlight rolled with them, plucking amphibious red and yellow eyes out of the reeds. "It's over. It's over. It's over," he kept babbling optimistically, out of his mind with fear. Her throat was vibrating against his skin. He could feel the echo of his own terror and sorrow, and again his mind felt overrun by the lapping waves of time. She clutched at the collar of his T-shirt, her body covered in dark mud and cracked stems of bog cotton, blue lichen. At last he felt her grip on him loosen. Her eyes, opaquely glinting in the moonlight, liquid and enormous, far larger than anyone could have guessed before their unlidding, regarded him with what he imagined was a soft surprise, and disappointment. He was not who she'd expected to find when she opened her eyes, either. Now neither teen-ager needed to tell the other that it was over. It simply was—and, without another sound, the Bog Girl let go of Cillian and slipped backward into the bog water. Did she sink? It looked almost as if the water were rising to cover her. Her cranberry hair waved away from her scalp. As he watched, her body itself began to break up.
Straightening from where he was kneeling on the ledge of mud, he brushed peat from his pants. His arms tingled where her grip had suddenly relaxed. The clear rain drenched his clothing. The bog was still bubbling, pieces of her sinking back into the black peat, when he turned on his heel and ran. For the next few days, he would be quakey with relief; he'd felt certain, watching her sink away, that he would never see the Bog Girl again in this life.
But here he was mistaken. In the weeks and years to come, Cillian would find himself alone with her memory, struggling to pay attention to his droning contemporaries in the cramped classroom. How often would he retrace his steps, wandering right back to the lip of the bog, peering in? Each dusk, with their primitive eloquence, the air-galloping insects continue to speak the million syllables of her name.
"Ma! Ma! Ma!" That night, Cillian came roaring out of the dark, pistoning his knees as he ran for the light, for his home at the edge of the boglands. "Who was that?" ♦


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There was plenty of other events to keep us busy during the month.
Olivia turned 9. We celebrated our sweet young lady. She is such a joy to have in our family. She has talents that are growing and increasing. She is a great ball player and a huge help to me around the house. She is finishing third grade with good grades and looking forward to a summer in the pool! I love how she is sensitive to the Lord's leading and will speak up when she feels injustice. Her fashion sense keeps all of us on our toes too!


text: Two years ago, Rainn Wilson of The Office was the lead star in The Rocker, a movie that cost $15 million to make and only earned $6.8 million. It opened on 2,784 screens and earned $1,180,836 the first weekend -- only $424 per theater. Wilson didn't take the failure well, he recently admitted in an New York Magazine interview: I was literally in my car at five-thirty in the morning and I started to weep ... as I drove down the 105 Freeway. They said, "It's just like Kelsey Grammer when he did Down Periscope." And ... read more


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Kayak Essentials
quality coaching courses & resources
Essential Adventures
2019 Coaching Calendar
Dynamic Water Intro – Anglesey Adventure
Rough Water Skills – Anglesey Adventure
White Water Skills for Sea Kayakers
Coaching Essentials
2019 Coaching Calendar
Personal Skills Coaching
British Canoeing Sea Kayak Award
Dynamic Water Intro – Anglesey Adventure
Rough Water Skills – Anglesey Adventure
White Water Skills for Sea Kayakers
British Canoeing Sea Kayak Leader Awards
Sea Kayak Leader Training
Sea Kayak Leader Assessment
Advanced Sea Kayak Leader Training
Advanced Sea Kayak Leader Assessment
British Canoeing Coach / Instructor Courses
Coaching for Clubs & Centres
Essential Weekends 2019
Essential Frostbite Adventure Weekend – February 2019
Spring Essentials Coaching Weekend – April 2019
Essential Women's Sea Kayak Weekend – June 2019
Essential Sea Kayak Coaching Festival – September 2019
Sea Kayak Guide Training
DVDs & Downloads
Digital Downloads
Canoe Essentials DVD
Sea Kayak Essentials Vol. 1 DVD
Sea Kayak Essentials Vol. 2 DVD
Essential Info
2019 Coaching Calendar
Contact Us
Booking Info
Coaching Course Booking Form
Frequently Asked Questions
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Essential Weekends 2019
Great sea kayak coaching, the fantastic Anglesey coastline, a positive learning environment & plenty of fun – join our next Essential sea kayak coaching weekend!
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Coaching Essentials
Welcome to our Kayak Essentials coaching courses! Our high-quality coaching courses have an enviable reputation for success. Whatever your aims and experience, our coaching will help
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Digital Downloads
Our award-winning 'Essentials' instructional films are acclaimed for their high quality – clearly presenting skills progressions in kayaking, sea kayaking and canoeing. Get them here!
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Essential Adventures
Our Essential Adventures courses are a fantastic mix of skills coaching in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. With a focus on fun and adventure, we'll
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We stock merchandise which have been specifically developed for pets, have a confirmed and nicely established track record and give excellent quality and value for money. A fire at Pet World's former location at 711 W. 23rd St. filled the store with thick black smoke, killing numerous animals inside, such as various boarded pets. Once you have a pet you'll require to find out her unique cleaning demands and you'll need to keep those factors in a location where you can uncover them. When we attempt to stock all pet solutions to meet our customers' wants, we welcome new tips and special requests.
It appears that the pet shop business can be ruthless and some other close by shops have pulled some unscrupulous shenanigans. Ideal costs for Taste of the Wild 30-lb bags (less than $40) compared to on the internet rates & all the other pet stores in the Bay Location. But it is Wayne's warmth, caring, expertise and support that make this place the best location for pet food & gear. Pet X Talks is an ever developing collective of Pet Experts sharing their expertise, stories, inspiration and info with Pet Parents. Your pet will love all the comforts of house, such as invidual beds and television.
Emerson stated the store, which will be amongst Bikram Yoga and Lawrence Laundromat in the strip mall close to the intersection of 23rd and Louisiana streets, will give wing and exotic nail trims, feeder fish and crickets, aquarium water, water tests, basic food and supplies" and weekly specific orders to accommodate consumers. Animal Communicator Terri Steuben gives us a Pet X Speak about Animal Communicators, what they do, how they do it, why it can be so impactful and much more.
Throughout our network of stores, we stock thousands of competitively-priced, leading-top quality pet merchandise, as nicely as offering in-shop services, like pet grooming, worming and coaching. I do not need to have any pet food at the moment, but everybody PLEASE help this spot so that it stays open for when I do need dog/cat food. Pet Experts from every component of the Pet World are welcomed, respected and encouraged to share their experience directly with Pet Parents.
Some group members have also achieved an NVQ qualification in Pet Store Management – a nationally recognised and significant qualification inside the pet trade, frequently needed by local authorities when granting pet shop licences. We offer a comprehensive range of foods and accessories and are confident we can support you uncover exactly the right goods for your pet. Our website, , is also a major online provider of pet supplies and pet care information and facts.
For instance, a dog will have to have: Food, Exercising, Grooming, Bedding, Medical & Socialization even though your pet snake probably only demands medical & food. His tv appearances have included The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Geographic Explorer, Pets: Element of the Family, Petsburgh USA and Pet Project on Animal Planet. Guests are major specialists on subjects like pet behavior, nutrition and veterinary medicine.


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Contributions to any of the Or Chadash Temple Funds are welcomed and appreciated. Your contribution is a great way to show appreciation or to mark a significant event. All checks should be made out to Or Chadash – The Reform Temple of Hunterdon County.
A note will be sent to the recipient of the tribute, and the donation will be recognized in the Or Chadash Newsletter.
To make a donation, please choose a fund from the drop down menu and click submit, or choose a special dedication from the list below and click the appropriate link. You can enter your donation amount on the page that follows. You will also be given an opportunity to add comments, explanations, notations, or anything else that you want the Office to know about your donation.
Tree of Life
"It is a Tree of Life to those that hold fast to it, and all its supporters are happy."
– Proverbs 3:17-18
You may honor a special person or event, or remember a loveed one by purchasing an inscription on the Or Chadash Tree of Life. An inscribed leaf is $360.00; a small foundation stone is $1,000.00; and a large foundation stone for $1,500.00. A few examples follow:
|In honor of the naming of
Jane Smith
Born September 18, 2003
Grandma Jean & Grandpa Henry
|In honor of Jon Smith
Becoming a Bar Mitzvah
September 18, 2003
The Smith Family
|Celebrating the Smith's
Golden Anniversary
With love from
your adoring grandchildren
Click here to order your leaf or foundation stone.
Memorial Plaque
A Memorial Plaque dedication to honor the memory of a loved one can be purchased for $500.00.
Click here to add a special name to the Memorial Plaque.
Purchase and dedicate a Sanctuary Chair
You may dedicate a chair in the Sanctuary to commemorate an occasion, as a gift of gratitude or to honor the memory of a loved one. The cost of $218.00 includes a three line dedication on the chair.
Click here to purchase and dedicate a Sanctuary Chair.


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DJ Scholarship
As a queer black woman artist I bring an awareness of how gender, race and sexuality influences cultural production. My goal as a DJ and a scholar is to bring voice and visibility to the underground cultures that form the interconnected electronic music of the African diaspora which includes Dub, Hip-hop, Kwaito, Drum n' Bass, Jazz fusion, Techno and House. This is a large and ongoing project that I pull under the banner of The Afro Digital Migration. My scholarship has its origins in a diverse range of influences that include, yes my formal academic undergraduate and graduate education, but also, the equally credible informal education and skills I've developed diggin' in the crates, reading liner notes, studying album covers and chasing samples. The following projects have all been inspired by a desire to include the social and political context from where music is made.
The Global 80s
"The Global 80s" is a tribute to the bodies that disappeared from communities of colors for reasons that include HIV/AIDs, mass incarceration and xenophobic immigration policy. The objective is to explore the surge in musical creativity by communities wrought by grief yet inspired by resilience. Affordable products of technology from the 1980s supported creative ways to grapple with loss and DJs were on the frontline maintaining the community's musical archives and therefore its humanity. This project is anchored in the concept of the mixtape. A mixtape is a compilation of carefully selected songs blended together to create a sonic collage of themes and ideas from a specific time. Mixtapes are a public record of a community's sound. "The Global 80s" will take the mixtape to a new realm, creating musical essays that represent the social and cultural temperature of a city, documenting its music and specific difficulties faced between 1980-89. The project is a research based self-directed month-long artist in residency. I will travel to nine (Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Kingston, Lagos, New York, Chicago, Detroit, D.C.), cities, each chosen because of their historical relationship to DJ culture, and through informal collaboration and conversations with local DJs and activists produce a series of mixtapes that represent a specific community in each city.


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Gulfport, Mississippi 11/28/1943
Dear Mom,
Since I've been in the service, it seems I've developed an inclination
In spite of some disagreeable experiences, I can say, for the most part, it's been swell. Of course there were the usual disgusting sights, the drunks, the cheap women, and the filthy talk, but they were minimal and are easily forgotten. Certainly exposure
Thursday night was my final liberty. The Linfields had invited me
We arrived at the Linfields at , rather early, when the girls had just arrived home from a Gulfport High football game, which it lost. Mary, the younger girl, a senior, went upstairs
I was unable
Love, Hughie
Labels: Letters


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Help shape Blackstone's Vision
As part of our planning for 2018, we want to hear your ideas about the future of Blackstone. As a member of the 2017 committee, let us know your thoughts about Blackstone as we head into our 90th anniversary.
Send us your:
- Ideas for new events and initiatives
- What you think worked well in the past
- What you think could be improved
List as MANY ideas as you can! They can be dot-points, paragraphs, interpretive dance routines - we want to hear any and all ideas.
Your ideas can relate to any part of Blackstone (they don't have to be limited to your role or portfolio).


text: Our hotel in Perth is located on the banks of the Swan River on the eastern edge of Perth's shopping precinct. Facilities include a restaurant, bar, coffee terrace, outdoor swimming pool health and fitness centre, tennis court and spa. Rooms are equipped with minibar, air conditioning, television, hairdryer and tea/coffee making facilities.


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1916: A Rebel Librarian
Before The Rising
When you think of a librarian, you probably don't think of a daring young man, a member of the Irish Volunteers, Quartermaster for 'D' Company, 1st Battalion, who stole, smuggled and stored arms around Dublin City, a man who stormed a building with just 12 of his comrades and held it for three days under intense fire, like Paddy Joe Stephenson. But a librarian he was, and as it turned out, it provided a great cover for him at times.
Paddy Joe grew up on Upper Tyrone Street, now Railway Street, in Dublin's then-infamous 'Monto' red light district, the biggest in Europe at the time. Its size was accounted for by the volume of British troops training and posted in Dublin, and the residents would perhaps have had an unfavourable view of the behaviour of the soldiers in their community. This may also have contributed to the fact that the area was a hive of Irish Volunteer and IRA activity at the start of the 20th Century.
Stephenson attended the O'Connell School, which produced many notable Irish Nationalist figures including Eamonn Ceannt, Sean T. O'Kelly, Frank Flood and Sean Heuston. After leaving school, he became a trainee librarian with the intention of sitting the Dublin Corporation clerkship exams. Although Paddy Joe had been a member of the Gaelic League and the Fianna Boy Scouts from an early age, he did not join the Irish Volunteers at their inception in 1913, as he was engaged in his studies and working the late shift at Thomas Street Library. Having missed out on participating in the Howth Gun-running in 1914, the sight of his friends parading in uniform finally persuaded him to join the Volunteers.
Paddy Joe joined D Company, 1st Battalion of the Irish Volunteers, which was based in Colmcille Hall on Blackhall Street in Stoneybatter. The Captain of the company was Sean Heuston, who he remembered as an older student in the O'Connell School. Joining the Volunteers gave him for the first time, "a sense of belonging to something worthwhile". He quickly busied himself with republican activities and proved himself a trustworthy and useful soldier to his superiors.
Share the story here and join the conversation!
On one occasion, he accompanied Michael Staines, Quartermaster of the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers, on a trip to transfer a consignment of rifles, in a pony and trap, from Blackhall Place to Inchicore. Staines decided that the best way to complete this journey would be to take a shortcut straight through the 'Old Man's House', the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham. In addition to being a functioning hospital and home for aged and unwell British soldiers, the building housed the Commander-in-chief of the British Army in Ireland. Startled at the decision, the driver of the trap exclaimed "for god's sake Michael, are you out of your mind, we'll be pinched guns and all. Don't you know this place is lousy with tommies?". Staines replied; "There is not a chance in a million they will suspect us. They will never dream that we would drive through here if we were carrying guns. Go on, smile, and drive past those soldiers as if you were going to Strawberry Beds at Lucan". Amazingly, the men passed through the army checkpoints without arousing any suspicion. Staines, who went on to become the first Garda Commissioner, remarked; "the more openly you do it, the less you'll be suspected."
On another hair-raising occasion, Sean Heuston armed Paddy Joe with a revolver and asked him to accompany him to Kingsbridge Station (now Heuston Station). Heuston was wearing a long trench coat that reached down to the ground. Once at the station, the pair watched a party of British soldiers disembark a train and file into the canteen, throwing their kit bags on the platform and leaning their rifles against the station wall. Heuston marched down the platform and stealthily snatched a rifle from against the wall and hid it under his coat. The pair successfully made it out of the station and returned to Colmcille Hall.
These instances clearly proved Paddy Joe's mettle under difficult situations to the Volunteer leadership, and Heuston made him Quartermaster for the company. As the Rising approached and the search for weapons intensified, a tip-off was given about a young soldier who, having returned home to Dublin on leave from the trenches, intended to desert and wished to dispense of his uniform and gun. Paddy Joe along with his close friend and fellow company member Sean McLoughlin set out to the house specified, finding a young man of about eighteen huddled by a fire, wearing a uniform still covered in mud from the trenches. They gave the boy's mother two pounds and left with a Lee Enfield rifle and full soldier's kit including a sniper's sling full of ammunition.
Paddy Joe's efforts as Quartermaster ensured that D Company were a very well armed force, prepared for a large-scale engagement with the British Army. Planning for this rebellion was well underway, although the secretive nature of the IRB ensured they didn't know about the precise plans until the day they happened.
Easter Week
The confusion surrounding the mobilisation planned for Easter Sunday and its last minute cancellation left the rank and file Irish Volunteers in the dark as to what the eventual plan was. Orders were given to stand by and no one was to leave the city. That night, Paddy Joe attended the regular Sunday night Ceilí at Columcille Hall and noted "the dancing that night had a dash about it that was not usual. The rebel songs too were sung with greater defiance and the choruses made the roof ring"
Stephenson was one of a number of Volunteers who kept guard in the hall overnight and in the morning they were sent out as dispatch couriers. It was clear at this stage that something significant was underway, although the men were not entirely sure what was planned due to the secretive nature of the rebel leaders up to that point. One of the men boiled up some eggs for breakfast, which left Paddy Joe feeling violently ill after the meal. However, he was not about to let his sickness get in the way of him playing his part in what was to be a momentous occasion in Irish history.
He set out for Liberty Hall to deliver a message to Commandant Thomas McDonagh, and on arrival, met James Connolly standing on the steps, watching the sun rising across the Liffey. Stephenson later recalled; "He seemed without a care in the world, and I would not like to have to swear that he was not humming a tune under his breath." Having dispatched the message to McDonagh, he was given another communication to deliver to Liam Tannam in Wilton Terrace by the Grand Canal on the southside of the city. The message made clear that something serious was about to take place. Paddy Joe then disobeyed orders to return to Liberty Hall with a receipt from Tannam, preferring to return to his own company in Blackhall Street, anxious to fight alongside his comrades.
D Company marched along the river from Beresford Place, the men still unclear as to what exactly was happening. Concerns that it had been called off again grew as they marched further down the Liffey. However, these concerns dissipated when they drew level with the Mendicity Institute on the Quays adjacent to the Four Courts. Captain Sean Heuston turned to face the men and shouted "Company left wheel, seize this building, and hold it in the name of the Irish Republic."
The Volunteers rushed inside the building and set about fortifying it against the inevitable British attack. Furniture was upended and used to barricade the windows and glass was smashed out of their frames. Curtains were torn down and ornaments were smashed and piled up in the fireplace, to prevent against injuries from flying shards in gunfire.
A passing policeman stopped to investigate the disturbance and shouted in to Volunteers that they were "going too far with this playing soldiers". One of the men shouted back: "Don't you know the Republic has been declared and your bloody day is done!". This remark was underlined when the Volunteer fired his revolver in the air, causing the policeman to flee down the quays, losing his helmet in the process.
The Mendicity garrison now settled down into a state of nervous anticipation as they awaited their fate. The men knew that the Irish Republic would be declared at midday on the steps of the GPO, and their instructions were to hold the Mendicity and prevent troops coming from the Royal Barracks (now Collins Barracks) from marching along the quays towards the Four Courts and into the city centre. They knew that this engagement would come, and it was just a matter of waiting.
Finally, the Volunteers spotted a long column of Royal Dublin Fusiliers marching out of the Barracks onto the north quays. The orders were to wait for Heuston's signal, a whistle, before firing. The strain became too much for one man however, who fired a shot before the main body of troops had reached the intended position, which was to be when the Regiment had drawn level with the building. This first shot, that broke the silence on the quays and signalled the beginning of the violence for the Mendicity garrison, was followed immediately by a volley of others. All the men at the windows let go in a thundering barrage upon the troops across the river. Paddy Joe emptied his magazine in an un-aimed and automatic burst of firing. After this first fusillade the men steadied themselves into more careful and methodical firing, each shot aimed and with a purpose. The troops across the river took shelter behind the river wall and in a passing tram, which stopped and had been abandoned. Stephenson spotted one British soldier crawling along on the ground below the tram. The description he gave of his first experience of the grim realities of combat highlights how powerful an incident it was.
"The crawling stopped simultaneously with the sound of the shot. Whole he was being dragged back at the top of the tram the boots under the platform offered a too inviting target and by the time the eyes focused again on the gap at the top another victim was waiting and got it. Then the space under the front platform presented its sandy coloured target and you let go. For a long while this kind of grim triangular target practice went on without a single shot being fired back from the tram as it stood there mute and immobile".
The soldiers regrouped, and later from the bottom of Queen Street they began to attack the Mendicity with a machine gun. The front of the building was raked with bullets for an extended period of time, and all the Volunteers could do was take cover. Stephenson and Sean Heuston, anticipating a charge on the building, went to another room and prepared some of the homemade paint tin bombs they had brought. Paddy Joe reflected that if the bomb failed to go off, he could at least knock a soldier unconscious by dropping it on his head. The machine gun fire stopped, and the charge never came, for the time being at least.
This episode made clear to the men of D Company that their position in the Mendicity was a precarious one, as the building was open to attack from a number of vantage points. It was surrounded on all sides by a 6-foot stone wall, behind which soldiers could approach with enough cover to throw over grenades. Also, it was detached from neighbouring buildings and set back from the road by about 40 feet, so it would have been relatively easy to knock holes in their sides in order to have a commanding position to fire upon the building. The Volunteers had already experienced how vulnerable they were to attack from the opposite side of the Liffey.
With this information very much on their minds, a shout came from downstairs that the British were attacking their position, coming over the rear wall. As the men rushed down to defend the building, they realised it was Seán McLoughlin returning from the GPO with reinforcements. As they climbed through neighbouring gardens, they discovered a British soldier hiding in one. They took him prisoner and sent him over the back wall of the Mendicity first, causing alarm to those inside.
On Wednesday, Paddy Joe, in his role as Quartermaster, informed Heuston that there was no food to feed the garrison; particularly now that reinforcements had arrived. The 7-pound bag of rice he found in the kitchen at the start of the week hadn't held up long, so Heuston sent him and McLoughlin, who had already completed a number of trips across the city, out on a mission to the GPO for food. The pair were fired upon by British troops as they ran, and later they had abuse shouted at them by some local women standing in a doorway on the corner of Bridge Street and Usher's Quay. Eventually they made it across to the GPO, which they entered through a row of shops on Henry Street, and over a roof into the rear of the building.
Laden with food, they embarked on the dangerous cross-town trip once more. When they reached the river, they were disheartened to look across to the Mendicity to see a British sentry at the front door. The building had been taken while they were gone. Crestfallen, they joined the Four Courts garrison, consoling themselves with the fact that their perilous mission had in fact saved them from capture, and that they were still free to "have a whack at them for Heuston and the garrison of the Mendicity".
Paddy Joe's memoir ends here, although he continued to fight at the Four Courts and then in the GPO for the rest of the week, before finally surrendering with the rest of the Irish Volunteers on Saturday. After the Rising, he was interned in Frongoch, before eventually being released as part of the general amnesty in September 1916.
Close Brothers, With Differences
While all of this was going on however, a much more curious story was unfolding, one that would have a far greater impact on Paddy Joe and his family.
Paddy Joe's father, Patrick Stephenson Senior was employed as head stableman in Farrell's Undertakers, on Marlboro Street. A firm 'King and Country' man, he would have been proud of his son Edward, who joined the army and went off to fight in the trenches in France. However, Paddy Joe's membership of the Irish Volunteers would have been a point of contention between the two brothers, and with his father too.
During the Rising, Patrick Snr. decided to go to the stables on Marlboro Street to tend to the horses, as they hadn't been fed since the start of the week amidst the confusion and fighting. While at the undertakers, he performed his duties in the stables before gathering up what food he could find for himself and his family. However, as he left the stables, unaware that a curfew had been called during the time he was out, a soldier spotted him. Mistaking him for a looter, he shot him on sight. He was one of the hundreds of unfortunate civilian casualties that week.
Patrick's lifeless body lay on Marlboro street for the rest of Easter week. In a bizarre coincidence, his son Paddy Joe and Sean McLoughlin intended to pass down the street on their trip to the GPO in search of supplies. However, a British barricade blocked their way and they decided to take another route. Paddy Joe would not find out about his father's death until he was interned in Frongoch a number of weeks later.
Meanwhile, Edward received word that his father had been killed in a rebellion in Ireland and wrongly assumed that his brother had carried out the shooting. Returning home on compassionate leave, Edward intended to find Paddy Joe and kill him. However, when he arrived in Dublin, he realised that his brother wasn't the culprit, and was in fact a prisoner of the British Army due to his role in the Rising. Further to this, he realised that his father had been slain by a soldier of the same army that he had risked his life fighting with in the 'Great War'. Returning to his home, he walked out into the back garden and burned his uniform. He never returned to serve again with the British Army and had to leave the city as he was a wanted deserter.
Edward and Paddy Joe never harboured ill feelings towards one another after this incident and remained on good terms, although they would rarely see each other except for at family funerals or similar events. The incident could indeed have saved Edwards life due to him not going back to the horror of the trenches in Europe.
Mary 'Mamie' Kilmartin
A figure central to Paddy Joe's life from an early stage was his future wife Mary 'Mamie' Kilmartin. Mamie's mother, 'Granny Kane', was an ardent nationalist and a well known figure in the Stoneybatter area where she was the proprietor of Kanes fruit and vegetable shop. In the period leading up to the Easter Rising, Paddy Joe was able to use Kane's to store arms and supplies in his role as Quartermaster for 'D' Company, 1st Battalion.
Mamie was an active member of Cumann na mBan around this time, while her brother Patrick Kilmartin joined the Irish Volunteers. Her republican activities in the lead up to the Rising included the preparation of first aid kits and food rations. During Easter Week, she was a member of the first aid detachment tending to the wounded in the Four Courts garrison.
On the 17th of September 1917, just over a year after Paddy Joe's release from Frongoch Internment Camp, Mamie and he were married at the Church of the Holy Family on Aughrim Street. Paddy Joe's best man was his close friend Sean McLoughlin, with whom he had shared many perilous experiences during Easter Week 1916. After her marriage, Mamie ceased her republican activities with Cumann na mBan, as she put her responsibilities as a wife, and soon thereafter, a mother above all else. She did nonetheless fully support Paddy Joe in his War of Independence endeavours and continued to hold strong nationalist feelings.
Sean and Paddy Joe went on to become founding members of the Irish Communist Party, having been ideologically motivated by the socialist movement of the time. Mamie however, as a dedicated Catholic, did not agree with the principles of the party and gave Paddy Joe an ultimatum – to choose her or the Communist Party. He subsequently retired from the party and settled down to his work in the Dublin City library service.
Paddy Joe and Mamie were married for 43 years and had five sons, all of whom became extremely successful men in their own right. Their youngest, Sam Stephenson, became one of Ireland's best known architects, using the Modernist and Brutalist styles to create some of Dublin's most iconic buildings, including the Central Bank and Wood Quay offices.
- Written by Eoin Cody


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Nervous kids and lost balls, this World Cup business is a bit shady
Footie-phobe Barry Murphy on the assault on the senses that is the greatest expo on earth
Dutch striker Robin van Persie (centre) high-fives his dad in the parents' enclosure after scoring against Spain at the Arena Fonte Nova in Salvador, Brazil, 13 June 2014. Photograph: EPA
Ouch! Portugal's Fabio Coentrao was left reeling by a freak injury during the defeat to Germany at the Arena Fonte Nova in Salvador. Photograph: EPA
So here we are - another year, another International Contest of Soccer Games. With 2013's evidently lacklustre World Cup a fading memory - in fact, a quick internet search suggests it has been all but written out of history – it's time once again for some of the world's wealthiest athletes to get the hair done, strap on the runners with the pointy bits on the bottom, reluctantly (though contractually obligingly) chug down a lurid performance-enhancing elixir, and stride with pride into a neatly-cropped field with a nervous child.
For most keen football enthusiasts the comprehensive televisual coverage provides the perfect excuse to avoid participating in actual football, or indeed physical exercise of any kind, and instead indulge in a strict four-week regime of extreme couch or bar stool sitting. All fuelled of course by beer, crisps and, on bookie-win enhanced occasion, crispy-coated hot chili nuts (overpriced little tubs with deceptive raised bottom to give illusion of snack superfluity, lukewarm).
But spare a thought for those of us for whom this massively overexposed advertising, sorry, sporting contest is a baffling quandary of infinite "why?".
We face four long and often lonely weeks of intense bemusement fuelled by beer, crisps and, on particularly isolated evenings of self-doubting perplexity, crispy-coated hot chili nuts (reasonably priced family size bag, room temperature).
Spoiler alert: Ireland are not competing. For even the casual fan, this is perhaps something of a let down but once the telly is turned on, any sorrow is soon blasted into oblivion by a garish tsunami of inconsequential animated statistics and high-budget short films that have been created to remind you that, yes, fizzy drinks exist.
For the terminally disinterested, Ireland's shameful and unsportsmanlike boycott of the games is, in terms of summoning anything approaching mild enthusiasm, the equivalent of the dreaded third 'X' on the Family Fortunes board. Without Jackie's army to root for, you may as well be watching an 8-disc box set of televised paint-drying with the director's commentary turned on. Especially cruel is the missed opportunity of seeing a row of men with varying convoluted connections to the emerald isle lip-synch to their own internal and wildly off the mark interpretation of Amhrán na bhFiann. In other words, without Ireland's involvement you have to dig deep to get your *pauses, winks* . . . kicks.
The Holland & Netherlands V Spain (bit of an unfairly balanced fixture – what gives, FIFA?) provided some moments where, I'm almost certain, one of my eyebrows temporarily became more elevated than the other. One such moment was a spectacular airborne shot by a hovering Dutchman by the name of Van Persie – with his head no less! - which whistled comfortably past a disinterested Spanish gentleman who was loitering around the net.
In an amusing twist, the explosive glory of this goal was almost instantly diffused by Mr Van Persie's undignified belly-flop/faceplant combo, the shamefulness of which was redoubled by the subsequent inept, limp-wristed attempt to high-five his Dad in the parent's enclosure at the sideline.
It's not all physical comedy-based family entertainment, however. Regrettably, a long shadow was cast over yesterday's 5pm match between Germany and Portugal. Literally. Half the pitch was in near total darkness and the situation only worsened as the game progressed – a staggering oversight from the planning committee.
The striking ethereal whiteness of the German kit gave them a clear tactical advantage and one plucky chap got so carried away he scored three goals all by himself. An unfortunate Portugeezer was so confused in the dim light that he somehow lost a testicle during an awkward landing, incorrectly estimating the distance between his boots and the ground. Thankfully he was carried off to safety by some quick-thinking Good Samaritan-esque fans.
Nice to know the spirit of human kindness can occasionally prevail in the cynical and corrupt world of spectator sport. Naturally enough, it only grew darker in the stadium as the game continued, so presumably his ball is still at large – a fitting metaphor for the Portuguese campaign thus far.
Barry's World Cup column returns on Thursday.


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The AGA 60 means that everyone, wherever they live and whatever kitchen space they have available will be able to find an AGA that fits perfectly. The AGA 60 is everything you would expect from an AGA, but wrapped up in a smaller, more space-friendly package.
At just 60cm wide, the same size as a slot-in cooker or a standard kitchen unit, it's perfect for small spaces. And, just like other iconic AGA cookers, it's made from cast iron and employs radiant heat cooking technology, meaning food tastes so much better as all the goodness and moisture is locked in.
The new AGA 60 has two ovens, offering roasting, baking and simmering functions, the electric AGA 60 also features a hotplate which enables you to boil, whilst the Gas Hob AGA 60 has four ring burners for every type of hob cooking. Both cookers have an optional timer which allows programmability on the roasting/baking ovens, therefore no need to wait for the cooker to heat up.
In the winter you can enjoy the indefinable AGA warmth in the kitchen and in the summer your AGA 60 can be on when you need it and off when you don't.
The new AGA 60 offers cast-iron proof that you don't need to live in the country, have a Labrador or be a farmer to enjoy the AGA life.
How it Works
The AGA 60 couldn't be easier to use. With one control knob for the hotplates and another for the ovens, the cooker has been designed with simplicity in mind. The AGA 60's roasting/baking oven can be programmed using an optional Timer similar to that used for controlling a central heating system and can have up to three events programmed per day. This means the oven can be timed to come on and be ready to use when you are.
View this video to learn more.
Key Features
Just 60cm wide.
Two ovens.
The top oven can be switched between baking and roasting modes.
The bottom oven is for simmering.
The hotplate can be set either to simmering or boiling.
When in boiling mode, the surrounding top plate can be used as an additional area for simmering.
When the hotplate is in simmering mode, this outer area can be used as a warming plate, for example to melt chocolate or soften butter.
Uniquely and usefully, the top plate is made up of two cast-iron half-moon pieces, which can be removed and put in the dishwasher.
The ovens will take about 60 minutes to heat up and the hotplate 8 to 11 minutes.
Available in 16 beautiful colours.
All new AGA heat-storage range cookers come with a five-year parts and one-year labour warranty.
Depth, including handles (mm) - 620mm (640mm with gas hob model)
Height (mm) - 910mm
Width (mm) - 600mm
Weight (kg) - 223kg (215kg with gas hob model)
How the Hot Plate Works
The hotplate operates using a powerful heating element and can be set to either boiling or simmering mode. Around the outside of the actual hotplate is a further useable cooking area.
This area can be used to simmer on when the hotplate is set to boil, and as a warming plate when the hotplate is in simmering mode.
When set to boiling mode the hotplate reaches temperature in around 11 minutes from cold, while the simmering mode reaches temperature in around 8 minutes.
How the ovens work
Using the control knob on the far left of the top plate, the top oven can be set to roasting, baking or the off setting.
The roasting and baking settings can be achieved from cold in around 60 minutes.
From the baking setting, the oven can be switched up to full heat for roasting in again; around 40 minutes.
The simmering oven will be up to full temperature in around 40 minutes.
Oven Options
Top Oven
Roasting oven - The roasting oven grills, roasts and bakes bread beautifully.
Baking oven - A moderate oven for baking cakes and biscuits cooking fish, lasagne or a shepherd's pie. And cooking sweet and savoury dishes together is no problem as the flavours do not mix.
Bottom Oven
Simmering oven - The simmering oven is ideal for slow cooking, allowing flavours to develop and making even the toughest meats tender.
AGA 60 with Gas Hob
The AGA 60 couldn't be easier to use. With four control knobs to control each individual burner and another for the ovens, the cooker has been designed with simplicity in mind. The AGA 60's roasting/baking oven can be programmed using an optional Timer similar to that used for controlling a central heating system and can have up to three events programmed per day. This means the oven can be timed to come on and be ready to use when you are.
How the Gas Hob works
The heat on the gas hob of the 60 is regulated by means of a rotary control dial, one per burner. The burners are ignited when the dial is turned in the same manner as on other conventional cooker models. All zones feature a flame failure device for peace of mind which automatically turns off the gas supply in the event that the flame extinguishes. The Burners run on natural gas.
Gas Hob Options
Wok Burner
Semi Rapid Burner
Rapid Burner
AGA Demonstrations
If you are interested in knowing more about AGA cookers why not attend one of our demonstration held in our Showroom. AGA demonstrations are perfect for potential owners as they give a great insight into what AGA's are all about. To learn more please visit our Events & Demonstration page for more information.
Available in 16 stunning colours
Black, Cream, Pewter, Dark Blue, Pistachio, Heather, Aubergine, Pearl Ashes, White, Duck Egg Blue, Dartmouth Blue, Blush, Dove, Linen, Slate, Salcombe Blue.


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Ajith's "Vedalam" has created history at the box office by becoming the fastest Rs 100 crore Tamil grosser in nine days, beating the record held by Vijay's "Kaththi".
"Vedalam" collected a record-breaking Rs 78.15 crore in six days and according to the latest buzz, the flick has earned about Rs 25 crore in the next three days to take the totally tally to Rs 103 crore.
The flick was released in about 520 screens in Tamil Nadu and about 500 in the rest of the world.
Ilayathalapathy's "Kaththi" had earned Rs 100 crore in 12 days.
It had minted Rs 65.1 crore in Tamil Nadu, Rs 15.4 crore from the rest of India and Rs 20.2 crore from overseas collection centres. The movie directed by AR Murugadoss was released in over 1,000 screens. It has now been broken by Ajith's film.
Interestingly, both the films had hit the screens during Diwali.
Read about 'Kaththi' 100 crore collection
In Tamil Nadu, "Vedalam" has earned less than Rs 60 crore and the industry is curiously looking forward to see whether it can hit the Rs 100-crore mark in the state. It may require another week to register its name in the elite club.
"Vedalam" is one of Ajith's biggest box office hits. The movie has broken all the existing first day records and now heading to become the biggest Tamil hit of 2015.
While the budget of "Kaththi", which was produced by Lyca Productions, was said to be around Rs 70 crore, the makers of "Vedalam" invested a little over Rs 60 crore, say trade reports.
"Vedalam" has been written and directed by Siruthai Siva and produced by AM Rathnam. Shruthi Haasan plays the female lead in the movie; Lakshmi Menon also plays an important character.


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The PACK sent 4 members to San Antonio for CKIx 2017, and had a great time meeting members from all over the world! But, we also conducted official Circle K business.
The 2017-2018 International board was elected and the results are as follows:
- International President: Justin Crofoot (Alabama District)
- International Vice President: Eric Yan (Texas-Oklahoma District)
- Subregion A International Trustee: Josh Kim (Pacific Northwest District)
- Subregion B International Trustee: Banna Tesfay (Southwest District)
- Subregion C International Trustee: Trevor Nicholas (Minnesota-Dakotas District)
- Subregion D International Trustee: Linda Stevens (Texas-Oklahoma District)
- Subregion E International Trustee: Tim Peischl (Ohio District)
- Subregion F International Trustee: Karl Uzcategui (New England District)
- Subregion G International Trustee: Drew Kelley (Georgia District)
- International Trustee at Large: Sebastian Vazquez (Capital District)
Awards were given to deserving recipients for their efforts in the 2016-2017 year, and the PACK has winners!
- Outstanding Single Service Project: West Chester University, 3rd place.
- Growth Enhances Membership award: Edinboro University, 4th place, Sapphire Division.
Next stop: CKIx 2018 in Chicago!
Results from CKIx 2017!