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Posts from — July 2014
Irving S. T. Garp / Photographer
Hidden Portraits
I am a Belgian photographer, Bernard Caelen. My photographic alias is Irving S. T. Garp in reference to John Irving's novel "The World According to Garp." There is, I hope, a certain form of analogy between Irving's style and my pictural universe.
Some models sometimes want to try to get photographed naked. But the fact of showing their body bothers them. It's not modesty or shyness that holds them from doing it, it is the fear of being recognized by people they know, friends or family. In the series "Portraits Cachés" (Hidden Portraits), the models can be photographed naked and can hide their head in an original way.
In Irving's books, some worst disasters appear, unexpected, in the middle of sentences, slipped into a description of an common daily life. My photos are recognized by their original and offbeat staging.
Links to Caelen's works:
July 15, 2014 Comments Off on Irving S. T. Garp / Photographer
David Murphy/Photography
At the foothills of the Hindu kush.
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from Northern Afghanistan
David Murphy was born on Easter Sunday, 1983.
He is currently a renewing English Language Fellow in Toluca, Mexico. He previously worked in Afghanistan on a World Bank project and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In Afghanistan, he served as a consultant-lecturer, and, later, as Administrative Director of a World Bank project to develop higher education at Balkh University in Mazar-e-Sharif. In Riyadh, he worked as the Curriculum Supervisor in King Saud University, which, with 11,000 students, is the largest preparatory year in the Middle East.
In his free time, he skateboards and photographs people and places.
About the Photographs
These photographs were taken in northern Afghanistan, mainly in Balkh province, during an 18-month period from the summer of 2009 til December 2010. At this time, there was war in Afghanistan, and the entire country was classified as a conflict zone. The photographs were taken with two very specific intentions: to have fun with photography, and to show the dignity and human compassion of Afghanistan's people. Since the early 1970s, when Russia invaded Afghanistan, the country has been a fighting ground, and, while there are physical and mental scars to show the dearth that walks hand-in-hand with war, there are many Afghans who have grins on their faces, and the irrepressible happiness of the Afghan children brings hope and smiles.
Sometimes photographers are asked which is their favorite photo of the collection. Mine is that of the camels walking under the moon towards the mountains. The space south of Mazar-e-Sharif (provincial capital of Balkh and where the camel photo was taken) is one that lies at the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain chain, and the space is a green, fertile one in the spring and summer. These men with camels are traders, and the burlap sacks on the camels' backs contain straw. They make a regular trek back and forth to the city — each journey takes 18 hours, including the time spent in Mazar. The camels and men in this photo are walking south, and after a while, they will pass beneath an ancient archway made of clay bricks and stone that lies beneath a mountain pass, and, on the other side of this archway they will follow a river (when it has enough water to run), and into their small, green village which is built up on the interior of the mountain range. There, the weather is cooler and fresher, and there are sheep, heavy mists, and steep paths between the mud-brick houses.
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To the question, "What do you shoot with"?
"I shoot with a Canon 50D, with an 18 – 200 mm lens, which is a walk-around lens for most people, and one that, if I had the money, I would trade in for a smaller Leica M9 — which is less likely to get me shot if I'm taking photos in unfriendly places. Such big cameras attract too much attention."
See more of David's work at: https://www.behance.net/DavidMurphy13
July 15, 2014 Comments Off on David Murphy/Photography
Fred Russell/The Decency Factor
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by Fred Russell
"What America is left with is essentially what it calls its freedom, which comes down to saying whatever comes into one's head, in thousands of academic and popular journals, in the daily newspapers, in television studios, in blogs, and in the privacy of one's own home. None of this has the slightest effect on how the country is governed."
Sometimes the amateur anthropologist finds things where he isn't looking for them. METV – Middle East Television – is a Christian TV network transmitting from Cyprus to the entire Middle East. In addition to its Christian messages it broadcasts "wholesome family entertainment." This mostly consists of TV series from the 1950s – Lassie, The Lone Ranger, Andy Griffith, The Lucy Show – and films from the 1930s and 1940s, with a predilection for Westerns featuring John Wayne or Roy Rogers. One can't help thinking that METV must have gotten one helluva deal on these old films, buying up the entire lot probably, but that isn't the point. Clearly the clincher was their wholesomeness, for it goes without saying that anything produced for mass audiences back then must have reflected a "moral" America where sex was hidden and Christian virtues always triumphed. The value of these films and TV shows is that they serve as a barometer of the American psyche, for nothing reflects the basic, unspoken assumptions of American life more clearly than Hollywood films and the old family TV shows. What Americans responded to in those years tells us what America was. It documents, indirectly, how Americans saw the world, life, themselves, as no other source does.
You know how these Westerns operate. A morally and sexually pure hero overcomes the forces of evil and gets the chaste girl. This is the central myth of American life. The male audience lives vicariously through the hero. His triumphs, always involving violence, address the viewer's feelings of inadequacy and resentment, of smallness, especially when the villain is rich and powerful. The purity masks guilt. The Western is therefore emblematic, if not therapeutic, operating on an unconscious level. The viewer finds it satisfying but doesn't really know why, that is, doesn't make the connection between the hero and himself in any explicit way, though he identifies with him and often becomes a hero himself in his daydreams. The feelings of inadequacy and resentment derive from the sense of failure that most Americans live with, for the great prizes go to the few, not the many, and for most Americans the great dream is the dream of wealth and fame. These feelings have persisted into the present century and continue to be addressed by Hollywood. On the other hand, the idea of sexual purity and the anguish of sexual guilt went out the window in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The sexually pure hero is no longer a model, serves no purpose; the culture itself took care of the problem, setting up new norms, except among the Christian fundamentalists. Heroes, however, remain moral in the larger sense, as moral purity continues to remain an American ideal. Americans want to be decent but often are not. The hero – an honest cop, a crusading reporter, a self-sacrificing everyman – allows us to inhabit our better selves. The difference now is that the greater sophistication of Americans allows for a more realistic representation of moral ambiguity.
By reviving these films, METV does a great service, providing a snapshot of America's inner life at its crudest level. By studying them we can discover who we are. It is these films too that will be studied in a hundred and a thousand years to tell future generations what America was. Let us hope that METV preserves them.
The complaint of American conservatives that the mainstream media is "liberal" or even "leftist," heard roughly every
hour on the hour on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, highlights the inability of journalists to understand their own profession. The problem with journalists has never been their political leanings or biases. The problem has always been their competence. They are not, after all, historians or scholars or political scientists, or novelists or dramatists or film makers for that matter. Their ability to understand social or historical processes is limited, as is their knowledge of the world, given their inability to speak the languages of the countries they report from and comment on and consequently their ignorance of the culture, religion, history and politics of these countries. Their minds too, it must be said, are fairly commonplace, as evidenced by their use of language, which constantly falls back on platitudes in the absence of real perception. And yet, incredibly, it is they of all people who determine the way we see the world.
The biases of journalists, or the slant they give to their reporting and "analysis," are really limited in the harm they do, as their audience is as biased as they are and at the most picks up arguments from them to reinforce these biases. Certainly they can sway public opinion from one day to the next, among "undecided" voters, for example, and in this way influence elections, though the end result of the voting process is to elect representatives with whom the voters are invariably dissatisfied and who are held in very low esteem. It is therefore not by swaying public opinion, and certainly not by creating an informed public, that journalists exert their real influence but by contributing to the public's ignorance, that is, by presenting an extremely distorted picture of the world that the public uncritically accepts in the absence of any deeper knowledge. One might even say that the journalistic profession and the uninformed public deserve each other. If people really want to understand the world, they should try reading books instead of newspapers.
The belief that freedom of speech and public debate is the cornerstone of democracy is one of the great myths of American life, a self-serving myth that journalists are forever promoting to justify their existence and their methods. The cornerstone of a democracy is its legal system and the traditions that sustain it. The guardians of democracy are the courts. Criticism of politicians in the media has next to no lasting effect on American life. The media may "expose" politicians but insofar as it is their criminal activities that are exposed, what is being exposed is almost always an official investigation, making the exposure superfluous. Insofar as the media exposes what it deems to be moral turpitude or simply goes with a headline grabber – adultery, perhaps a homosexual affair, something about marijuana thirty years ago – it is questionable whether it is anyone's business. As for simple and common government mismanagement – waste and all the rest – the manner in which governments operate has not been influenced one jot by investigative reporting.
This is not to say that journalists do not occasionally hit a home run or take on needy cases and change lives by exerting pressure in the right places. That is fine, and if the media wish to invest their enormous resources in doing work that the police do infinitely better or pointing fingers and stirring up tempests in a teacup for no practical purpose or taking one out of a million Americans under their wing and solving his problems, that is their business. Admittedly they also manage to intimidate politicians, right up to the President, but the little dance that journalists and politicians do in no way improves the quality of government. In fact, the time and effort invested by elected officials in "spinning" stories represents an enormous waste of the taxpayer's money – hundreds if not thousands of aides playing the press every morning, rooms full of people dreaming up excuses for the President's latest mishap – not to mention often injudicious changes in policy or courses of action simply because of the way they might look in the press.
What is left at the end of the day is some drama and entertainment bought by the American public at an enormous price – the invasion of people's privacy by an army of reporters who will expose anything that gets them a screaming headline. Into the hands of these reporters has been placed one of the most important functions in a modern society – the control of information. Neither in terms of morality or capability are they the right people for the job.
Most politicians have the same social vision: to improve everything. That means less crime, less poverty, more health,
more education. Some even offer specific programs. None, however, has succeeded in improving the look of society in any significant way. This is not surprising. Politicians are not social scientists, nor are the bureaucrats who administer government offices. Tocqueville noted nearly 200 years ago that in America it is the least talented men who go into politics. Nothing has really changed, though it is true that as government expanded and offered greater opportunities to exercise power and enjoy prestige, it began to attract more talented individuals with successful careers behind them – businessmen and military men, for example. However, these governed no better than their predecessors, bringing to government skills that were not especially suited to governing a nation, as well as appetites and ambitions that overrode the will to serve. Of course, governments also enlist the services of experts – those same social scientists – but even these are tied to concepts that have never really worked.
Education, for example, is still tied to the old Church idea – propagated by countless generations of churchmen serving as teachers – that as a consequence of Original Sin all men are born evil and must therefore be coerced into doing what is good, an idea that produced rigidly structured educational frameworks where teachers hammered away at the captive child until his head was ready to explode, making study a burden and creating in the child an aversion to the learning process that persists to this day in these same rigid frameworks. The result is a nation of ignoramuses (40% of Americans don't know that Germany and Japan were the enemies in World War II). Health care, in America, has been so difficult to reform because America is tied to an ideology that makes the idea of socialized medicine anathema, an idea that one might say it took all 20,000 pages of the Affordable Care Act to get around under a system that, according to doctors' estimates, has been costing America approximately 20,000 lives a year as a direct result of inadequate health care. The inability of Americans to utter the word socialism has cost more American lives than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add to this the unwillingness of the government to clamp down on a food industry that is destroying the country's health and a drug industry that prefers to control rather than eradicate diseases for reasons of profit, and to close down the tobacco industry entirely, and you can only conclude that the government has consciously chosen economic stability over human life.
Crime and poverty in America are higher than anywhere in the West – violent crime five times higher than in Western Europe and poverty twice as high. The two are of course linked. In America, African Americans are poorer than everyone else and consequently commit more crimes than anyone else. Their condition is the direct result of the way they have been treated by the white population, but no government will ever have the courage to assume the moral debt of the American people to African Americans and make real financial amends to them. In all, about 100 million Americans are hovering around the poverty line – an absolute disgrace in what is the richest country in the world.
It can therefore be stated unequivocally that America is not going to solve its social problems. Things can get much worse but not much better because even when things are at their best the main beneficiaries are a relatively small economic elite. The most that middle-class Americans can hope for is a slightly larger margin of comfort, a little less financial pressure. This is the underside of the American Dream, a region inhabited by the overwhelming majority of Americans.
America's great comfort in these trying years has been the collapse of the Soviet Union, perceived as representing the defeat of Communism and the triumph of Capitalism. But what has been gained? Russia is still the same Russia, a formidable enemy that nothing short of a nuclear holocaust will cause to go away, and in the meanwhile China has produced an economic model – relative entrepreneurial freedom, a mobilized population and centralized, totalitarian, undemocratic government – that is very likely to gain ascendancy over the American model within a very few years, while Western Europe has produced a social model that is considerably more equitable than America's. What America is left with is essentially what it calls its freedom, which comes down to saying whatever comes into one's head, in thousands of academic and popular journals, in the daily newspapers, in television studios, in blogs, and in the privacy of one's own home. None of this has the slightest effect on how the country is governed.
America is unfixable. It cultivates the illusion that it is the greatest country on the face of the earth, and maybe it is in terms of wealth and power, but it certainly isn't in terms of its social fabric and the way ordinary people live. To fix itself America would have to do something that is almost unthinkable: liberate itself from the American Dream, for what ordinary people in America have seldom realized is that they can live fulfilling and even exalted lives by simply being decent.
About the author:
Fred Russell is the pen name of an American-born writer living in Israel. His novel Rafi's World (Fomite Press), dealing with Israel's emerging criminal class, was published in Feb. 2014 and his stories and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Polluto, Fiction on the Web, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ontologica, Unlikely Stories: Episode 4, Gadfly, En Pointe, In Parenthesis, etc.
July 15, 2014 Comments Off on Fred Russell/The Decency Factor
From the Edge/Bill Dixon
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The Life and Death
of Timothy T. Trout, Artist
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by Bill Dixon
I met Tim Trout perhaps twenty-five years ago, while walking the halls of the Fine Arts Department at The Ohio State University, looking for a young Chinese artist I had just met at a group art show in the "Short North" Arts District of Columbus, Ohio. We were in the show together; I had liked his work, and asked if I could see more of it. We'd scheduled a date and time to meet and I'd arrived early, as I almost always do. As I was walking to the rendezvous, I noticed a gaunt, tormented-looking fellow sitting on a table in the hallway. He was studying me, peering over a copy of The Lantern, the OSU student newspaper.
He asked if he could help me find what I was looking for and we fell into a conversation about art. It turned out he was attending art classes at the University on a scholarship. I later learned he worked as a janitor and, therefore, was eligible as an employee to attend some classes for free. He chose art classes. We agreed to meet later when he could show me his art. He tore off a piece of the newspaper he had been reading and scrawled his name, Tim Trout, and his phone number.
My afternoon appointment showed up and I left Tim to his newspaper. I went with the Chinese artist to see his paintings in a location farther down the same hall where I'd met Tim. We had a good chat, but after review, I decided the two paintings in the show weren't typical of his current work. I was collecting art then, as I still do, but didn't really care much for these efforts. The prices he had on the ones I did like, back at the Short North gallery, seemed too high, and we never did do any business.
I ran a real estate sales and management company at the time and the mid-Fall quarter was traditionally a slack time. With little to do, I found myself a few days later calling Tim to see when we could get together. He was home, and told me to come on over. He was living in a tiny efficiency apartment above a popular Greek restaurant on North High Street, in Columbus. It was in a largely student-populated area. I found his door, and knocked. The apartment looked like a bomb had just gone off. There was a grubby mattress on the floor, open boxes of food scattered around, dirty clothes, empty bottles and cans, dirty dishes, junk and bags of trash here and there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a roach scuttling to cover behind a stack of art materials. There were paintings everywhere, too. Some were hung, but most were strewn around the walls, leaned up, or set on top of his modest furnishings, which were mostly discards he'd found over time in the alley behind his apartment.
There was one chair in the room, a dilapidated, unsteady-looking armchair, that also held several of his paintings and a partial six-pack of beer, still held together by its plastic harness. Tim was sitting tailor-style on the floor, and gestured for me to sit down on an inverted plastic milk crate. I did so. We talked for some time. It became gradually apparent that he was either under the influence of alcohol or some other family of drugs, or just plain nuts. It also became clear, after several later visits and the passage of time, that it was probably all of the above. Well, I didn't have any problem with any of those things. As a child of the 'sixties, a time I loved, and about which I wrote what I consider my best book, I could deal with all those things. It was old hat for me and I felt right at home in Tim's place. Alcohol, drugs and insanity? Hey, no problem, dude.
I purchased several paintings that day. Tim was fascinated by violent weather and many of his paintings depicted storms and natural disasters. There also was a little semi-nude, crudely self-framed painting titled, "Bustle." It was reasonably priced and was the very first piece I bought from him. Loosely composed and colorful, every brush stroke was easily visible, bold and confident. There was no reworking or blending anywhere in the piece. Tim himself was not at all a confident person, however. He was, as a person, conflicted, unfocused and random. His paintings were the exact opposite of his outward persona. You could tell at a glance that he had painted rapidly, but with a vision of the final product in every stroke of his brush and in the application of every color he selected. It was amazing to me, his artistic creations were so totally different than his own outward appearance.
Several weeks later, I watched him paint a piece. It was a much larger work. He set the canvas on a crude easel he'd made from scraps of two by four lumber, and selected the oil paints to apply to his canvas, all in a rush, squeezing them onto his palette as if his life depended on the speed at which he worked. He attacked the canvas! He slashed and lunged at it in a frenzy, and I could see that in his mind, it was already composed as a finished work. It didn't take him long to complete that vision. He used lots of oil paint, and it would obviously take some time for it to dry enough for him to seal it with damar varnish. He finished in a flourish, and turned toward me. For a moment, he was confident, bold and triumphant. Then he receded into his usual character again, a timid, disoriented fellow, weighted down and transformed by his troubles, doubts and fears.
Over the next few years, I bought more than two hundred pieces from Tim, and still have almost all of them. They're in a temperature- and humidity-controlled storage facility, until I decide what to do with them, and when. Tim was what current parlance refers to as "high maintenance." He never knew what day it was, or what time it might be, and as a result, he'd call me at three o'clock in the morning to tell me that he had some pieces that he wanted me to buy so that he could pay his electric bill, or deal with some other personal crisis that had presented itself. Transportation was a major problem with Tim. He called me in the middle of the night once to tell me that someone had stolen his bicycle. He was obviously drunk , or otherwise impaired when he called. The bike was his only means of transportation and obviously very important to him. I got him a replacement and soon after, took it to him. Within a couple of weeks, although I'd also furnished him with a bicycle lock, it went missing. A friend of Tim's told me that Tim had lost any number of bikes. He'd get drunk or stoned and park his bike somewhere and by morning, forget where it was. I bought him three bicycles before deciding it was a problem I couldn't fix.
I started arranging art shows for Tim, too. I'd even price his pieces. He'd forget about the show dates, and I'd end up hanging his shows by myself, after transporting his work in my van to the show. When the shows closed, I would haul them back to his place. Sometimes, he'd forget where the show was, and never visit. The extra money that came from sales at these shows didn't benefit him. He'd drink up the proceeds, or buy various drugs when he had the ability and opportunity to do so. With liver problems or psychological swings, his visits to the hospital increased. It turned out that this wasn't a new problem, just one I didn't know about before, and the availability of the extra cash from sales of his paintings just shortened the time between hospitalizations.
Tim eventually acquired a similarly directed girlfriend. As unstable as Tim, she was younger and somewhat healthier, physically. They had met in a bar in the University area. He tried to protect her from her destructive proclivities, but that helped destabilize Tim further. She, like Tim, was also mentally ill, and would periodically cut him with a kitchen knife if they quarreled about something. It seemed that Tim couldn't help himself and no one else could help him, either, as trips to the hospital became more frequent.
A friend and fellow patron of Tim's, a professor at OSU, tried his best to help Tim out of his downward spiral, but the situation was hopeless. We kept one another up to date on the situation, but that was about all we could do. Then, disaster! A local bank sent Tim a credit card. He immediately used it to buy a broken-down car. Then, using his new credit card, he took the car to a garage to get it running. He had no driver license, of course, and shouldn't have had one. Shortly thereafter, he parked the car in a bus stop to go into a bar, and it was promptly towed away. He thought it had been stolen and called the police to complain. Since he hadn't registered the title, a further mess was created. Then he maxed out the credit card on the purchase of a new radial arm saw and an expensive violin he didn't know how to play but appreciated its beautiful appearance. He set up the radial arm saw on the floor of his tiny apartment. He told me that "now, he could make his own frames and stretchers, right there in his apartment." He would fire up the saw at all hours and cut wood that he found in the alleys. Neighbors in adjacent apartments complained to the landlord, who paid Tim, generally a month or two late on rent, a visit. There he discovered not only the source of the noise but a persistent roach infestation and promptly tacked an eviction notice on the door. Hapless Tim was terrified.
Somehow, Tim got reinstated, probably because cleaning out the place to re-rent it would have cost a lot, not including the time it went empty without income and would likely take two years to recoup the losses. The landlord took the violin and and radial saw in payment. But a couple months later, Tim called in the middle of the night to say he needed money desperately. Could I come over right away. He was being evicted again, and wanted me to buy the art he had left, specifying a dollar amount he needed as his price for everything left. He said he was going to stay with his mother in Marion until things straightened out. I drove to Tim's place the next morning, and bought the last of his art, mostly works on paper. The place was crawling again and I offered to spray, but he told me he had acquired a cat to kill the roaches and was afraid roach spray would kill the cat.
I took the last Trouts to an unheated garage, sprayed, and let everything sit for the winter. I got word a short time later that Tim was dead. He never left Columbus; I suspect he never intended to stay with his mother, that perhaps that she didn't exist, in Marion, or anywhere else. He'd made it one last time into University Hospital, where he died in his sleep, his suffering over. The last time I saw him alive, he tearfully said he was Jesus Christ, that "he hadn't asked for the job, but would now have to die for the sins of others." He showed me a new signature he would use on his art: "t.T.t.," which would symbolize the three crosses at the crucifixion, and his Christian name, timothy T trout. He also told me his Indian name was "Little Trout," and that he might begin using that signature on some "special" pieces.
Tim was a splendid artist, but so mentally unstable that unless he was institutionalized and drugged, he would continue to suffer the indignities and torments he experienced as a free man. He was in his thirties, I believe, and had somehow served in the United States Navy, on board ship. He implied the government gave him some sort of monthly income, on which he could survive, but you could never tell fact from fiction with Tim. Neither could he, I suppose. He described the world, on canvas, as accurately as he was able. It was a world of violent storms and unending tragedies, but sometimes, with graceful nudes who emerged from gardens of blooming flowers. I lived in a far different world, and tried to understand Tim's world to the best of my abilities, as he had tried to understand mine. Sometimes, we both missed the mark. He was a good person, gentle and generous, loyal to his friends, forgiving of those who mistreated him. He was marooned in a frightening, alien world, finding power in the paint brush he used to communicate with his demons, and the small group of fortunate people who understood and appreciated his haunting messages. Paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Each day, do the best you can, and tomorrow, put it behind you." I think, no matter how things turned out, that was what timothy T. trout attempted to do.
About the author:
Bill Dixon is a contributing columnist to Ragazine.CC. You can read more about him in About Us.
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July 15, 2014 Comments Off on From the Edge/Bill Dixon
Maggie's Wars/Phil Pisani
An Excerpt
from the Novel
During my turn in the bunk, I listened to the raging storm and thought of Maggie. I didn't want to but, as I lay awake in the late hours, I envisioned our lovemaking, especially our last time during the day. These thoughts turned me on, so I tried to concentrate on her face – her smile and how her forehead furrowed when she was searching for words. I missed her without wanting to, lonely the way only a man going to war can be. I wasn't sure she loved me, but felt she was close, so I used her for my girl anyway. I didn't think it harmed anyone, but the more I did it, the more I wanted to, the more I missed her, and the more I wanted to see her again. Loneliness is a strange bedfellow.
Loneliness also brought my mother with it. I thought of her as much as I thought of Maggie and with her, I was even able to bring in some smells. I would see her at the stove, fussing with the meatballs and sauce, and I swear I could smell the tomatoes simmering with basil and parsley right there on the ship.
My dad came to me in a dream one night when the weather was at its worst and several of the guys were puking. I had covered my head with the sheet to block the ubiquitous odor, and was dozing on the edge of wakefulness when the generator kicked off, cloaking the ship in darkness. In this place between wakefulness and sleep, my dad came to me.
He died before I really got to know him, killed in a building collapse when I was nine, but I was left with some warm memories. He was a small man, with thick forearms and fingers – he was a mason who could lay bricks faster than any guy I've ever known – teased because he was so good. They called him Brickyard because legend had it he could lay a yard full of bricks in one day. He liked his wine and his favorite food was roast chicken with oregano; he could eat two chickens if he was of a mind. I saw him do it once, after a full day of work in freezing weather. He came home and thawed out with wine, then sat down to eat. His cheeks were rosy from the cold and his hair was disheveled from his knit hat. His wool pants were too long for him and he had to cuff them up about eight inches, but he didn't care how he looked. He just wanted to be comfortable and warm while he worked.
The night he came to me, he had on his wool pants and flannel shirt, and his cheeks were rosy, just like the night he ate the two chickens. He stood there for a while, and I tried to talk to but nothing came out when I moved my mouth.
He looked at me and said, "Be careful." Then he turned completely around as if he were doing a little jig and said, very faintly, "Trust your instincts." He sat down at a round oak table and placed his hands face down on it, looking straight ahead, saying, "Fight like a rabid dog if they get you in a corner." A cloud of dust enveloped him at the table, and when it cleared, my father and the table were gone. Then I woke, and Thomas was puking below me.
By late afternoon, the storm had subsided and everyone was walking on the decks to breathe the fresh air. It was my turn in the berth again, but I couldn't get myself to go below, so I made it up to my favorite spot to watch the sea while I drifted to sleep.
I woke to choppy slaps of chilly air on my face. I had slept through the day, and the blue sky had been replaced by millions of blinking stars. I stroked my stomach, feeling tranquil as I listened to the swish of the waves and canvas flapping somewhere astern. A meteor streaked across the sky just as I heard my name whispered.
"Hello, Johnny Stone."
She stood before me like she'd been dropped off a star. She was wearing a military uniform, but her hair was loose and blowing around her shoulders. I froze, my mouth open in disbelief. I shook myself and started to rise when she stopped me.
"Just stay there for a moment, Johnny, while I look at you."
I listened, too stunned to do anything else.
"I saw your name on the roster. It took me a few days to pinpoint your berth. Your bunkmates directed me here."
"Thomas and Bobby?"
"Yes, and Stanley."
"Yeah, they're good guys."
"Funny, I come here at night, too, only I use the stern to watch the stars." She inched closer. "May I sit next to you?"
I was aching for her to sit, to let me kiss her and hold her. I moved to the side. "Yes."
She sat, drawing her knees to her chest, and wiggled next to me so we were just touching. "I missed you, Johnny, especially since our day together."
"I wanted to see you before I left, just in case something happened or we didn't meet for some time. I tried to see you, Johnny, honest. Everything happened so fast, I even missed the ship in New York."
"What, it was you at Ambrose Light?"
"Yeah, silly Maggie Hogan embarrassed to the hilt."
And just like that, she had me smiling. Imagining her unique gracelessness, I turned and hugged her to me. The embrace became a kiss and I knew instantly she had my heart, a good hook right into it. When our lips parted, she rested her head on my chest and gazed upward.
"I love looking into the Milky Way." She caressed my leg when she spoke. "See the constellations, Johnny? Orion, the Dippers, Draco, and Pleiades? They give me such a wonderful feeling." She turned to me. "I get the same feeling when I'm with you. I felt it the last day we were together."
She kissed me again and I lost it. I wanted to make love with her right there, but I pulled away as something nagged at me. She looked up at me and our eyes met. As the cool breeze caressed our hair, I swung her on top of me, her legs straddling mine, and kissed her again, our bodies pressed hard against each other.
Holding each other, we slept for only a few minutes. As the sun crept out of the ocean, we tried to part several times, but kissed again and again, waiting until the last moment when we had to part.
"We hit England tomorrow, so we can have tonight," she said with eager eyes and mischievous smile.
"Okay, we'll meet here?"
"Yes, I have dinner with the captain and the rest, and after that I'll be up. About nine, okay?"
"Yeah." The plan made it easier to part, but my time with Maggie compounded the confusion I had been living with. I knew I had to confront her, but wanted our final moments to be precious.
That night I told the boys they could use my bunk and slipped out. They didn't question me, and I was glad to avoid making lies and excuses.
It was the most beautiful night, with a light breeze that blew away the warm air, leaving it cool and fresh. The stars had multiplied from the night before, alive with brightness, and the ocean was calm so the ship rocked like a soft melody.
Again, Maggie appeared from nowhere with a wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She dropped it to the deck, sat and pulled me to her. I hiked up her skirt and began reveling in our love. Lit by the stars, we moved with the waves and touched each other like the gentle breeze. It was a perfect moment, a moment to take with us across Europe, loving one another like another day wouldn't come.
When we finished, she sat curled in my arms looking up into the sky. "I know that one," I said, pointing to a red star in the east. "Mars. My dad showed it to me from the Statue of Liberty one night."
"It'll be our star, Johnny."
"What's going to happen with us, Maggie?" It wasn't exactly what I meant to ask, but the words came out on their own.
"I don't know, baby, I don't know." She turned to me. "I have to tell you something. I see other men, but I love you, Johnny. I don't want to, but I do."
"Why don't you want to?" I was confused.
"I don't want to hurt you, or to have this get messy."
"Ah, naw, that's not goin' to happen. No, never, don't worry, I got it covered," I said, but she did have me guessing.
She kissed me. "Thank you, Johnny Stone."
"You're welcome, Maggie Hogan." I pulled her onto me yanking the blanket out from underneath and wrapping it around her. We moved slowly with the same sway as the boat
Moments later, she pulled back and sat up. "But you have to understand, Johnny, I'm still frightened of my duplicities. I mean, I love you, but saw other men to further my career. So, I'm scared of myself, really."
I really wasn't expecting what she said particularly at this moment. "Like you did to me with Petrillo?" She brought it up, so I figured I might as well ask.
She grabbed my arm. "Oh no, Johnny, I thought that too, but I know it's not true. I wish I got to him through someone else. Please don't think that I meant to use you, I love you, truly."
I shook my head; she was really something. "I don't know – "
"Please believe me. This world is a crazy mess, but even though we haven't known each other long, I think we love each other. I don't want it to be ephemeral. I want it to be real."
I saw her lip quiver in the glow of the bow light and held her tighter. "What's that mean?"
"Short-lived, like a flower, like a rose. I love roses."
"It's okay, baby, I'll live through it with you."
"Oh, Johnny you just don't understand. Listen to me!" She turned away and paced towards the stern and then turned and paced back her eyes both on fire and watery. "It's distance. After tomorrow, you'll be gone and as the longer we're apart, the farther we'll be apart. The distance will be a big problem, I feel it."
"Maybe you want the distance, maybe you love people who you know will be distanced from you." I felt her shudder when I said it.
"Why would I do that? It doesn't make sense."
Was I ever in new territory with that one. I'd never been in love before – I wanted to spend every minute of forever with her. So what I said was natural and true. "Maybe you're afraid of love."
It took her several moments to respond. "I don't know, Johnny. That's my honest answer, and I want to always be honest with you."
She was so beautiful, even her contradictions and duplicities, but especially her honesty. "We just have to keep telling ourselves love can bridge the distance." I was unsure if I believed it.
"That's pretty."
"So are you, baby."
She hugged me again. "You're not like other men. Tonight at dinner, the other journalists were awful. I don't understand them."
"Maybe they're jealous of your talent."
"No. They think I don't belong," she said.
"It's a male thing. Maybe it threatens them, you know – more competition and they get nervous about it." It was the only thing I could figure.
"I know," she said. "But I will succeed, no matter what it takes. And you know something else, Johnny?"
"No, what?" I loved listening to her: her defiance and enthusiasm charged through me like ungrounded electricity.
"I love the excitement of danger." She looked up at me, her smile full of impishness and rebellion.
There was nothing I could do, Maggie Hogan was going to break my heart.
Back at quarters, Crowley's voice came from nowhere. "Pero, get your stuff together quick and get above with the others." I looked around and there he was, standing near my bunk. "I don't know what you've been up to, and I don't really care. But now I'm watching. Is that clear?" Crowley's eyes were wide and his face red with anger.
I was shocked he was so mad. "Yes, sir." I grabbed my duffel bag and rushed up to the deck just behind Thomas.
Thomas glanced back as he was going up the stairs. "Crowley did a bed check while you were gone. I covered for you, but he knew. It's no big deal, but I think he's gotta show us he's in charge."
"It's okay. I'm alright," I said trailing him. "And thanks."
"You'll do the same for me sometime."
When we got to the deck, the sun had given way to mist and we were able to see land. "England," one of the sailors yelled from above. I stopped and, leaning over the railing, saw a thin strip of land to the east.
By mid-day, the thin line had turned into a harbor and we were moving into the docks. I smiled, knowing I had crossed the Atlantic, met and made love to the woman who was instrumental in changing my world. I won four hundred dollars and ninety-eight cigarettes and never got seasick. I was feeling pretty good when they dropped anchor. Maybe the next few months wouldn't be so bad.
July 15, 2014 Comments Off on Maggie's Wars/Phil Pisani
Writing Blue Highways
William Least Heat-Moon's Story
of How a Book Happened
by John Smelcer
In 1978, William Least Heat-Moon began a 14,000 miles, 38-state, multi-year journey in his van named Ghost Dancing. He took only lesser-traveled back roads, those indicated in blue on road maps. Along the way, he met people from all walks of life. As the miles accumulated, the idea for a book began to take root. The manuscript traveled its own journey toward publication. When Blue Highways finally came out in 1982, it spent 42 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. The following excerpt is from Heat-Moon's just-released Writing Blue Highways (University of Missouri Press, 2014), in which the author tells the story of how his masterpiece "happened." In this chapter aptly titled, "The Secret Society Begins to Emerge," the publisher (Atlantic Monthly Press) has been whittling down the length of the ponderous manuscript. Unexpectedly, the editor, Peter Davison, calls to deliver the devastating news that that they can't include any of the photographs in the book due to escalating printing costs. As a photojournalist, Heat-Moon understood the importance of the images and how much the book's success depended on them.
Although our paths had crossed a couple times in the past two decades, it wasn't until after I moved to Missouri in the summer of 2013 that Heat-Moon and I struck up a friendship, having occasional lunch in Columbia while discussing current writing projects, and even doing a book signing together. Blue Highways has long been one of my favorite books; I've taught it several times alongside Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. If it's one of yours and you want to learn more about the book's backstory, or if you are a writer who wants to learn about another writer's struggles to get his book published, read Writing Blue Highways.
– John Smelcer
From Chapter IX:
One afternoon Peter Davison phoned to say the price of the book would be $13.50. A couple of days later he called
again to say it would have to be $15.95. "There's an invisible seventeen-dollar barrier these days," he said, "and we can't let it go higher than that." The next week it did, and he phoned to take up the issue a third time. "Somebody here seriously underestimated the length of your manuscript. It's pushing two hundred thousand words. The ink on your pages weighs more than the paper."
My condensations and dumped widows had worked — perhaps too well. That was the good news. Then came the bad, the ugly: "The photographs are driving the price of the book too high. I'm sorry to tell you this, but we're going to have to leave them out. After all, the Atlantic proved they aren't necessary."
I'd humbugged experienced word-editors on the length of the book, and now the piper wanted his pay. A long silence before I could speak. Please don't do that. "We have to," he said. "The public's not going to pay seventeen dollars for this book. I know the decision upsets you, but there's no other choice." I thought before I answered. There is another choice. "Which is?" I'll withdraw the manuscript. The conversation had become strained. "You're making a mistake," he said. "A big, serious mistake." Click, line dead. Well, boys, there you have it.
That evening Lucy was unhappy: "After four years, you find an editor to believe in your book, and then in one phone call Mister Big-Time-Author casts him aside before the book even exists? Have you lost your mind? I wondered the same thing and tossed the issue around, but I couldn't see things as just a matter of money. The pictures of thirty-seven people, two cats, and one dog were integral and critical: A photograph can go where words cannot.
The incentive for the journey began with an urge to make environmental portraits of authentic habitants of the American backcountry. In the beginning was not the word but the image; when the book was without form, and void, there were photographs — "light-writing" — and the pictures gave off energy and sustained the journey when little else did. And on the road, the growing album gave purpose to mileage and promised a seed-bed for something larger as a gallery grew into a garden.
Those faces became prima facie evidence requiring more than just captions or notes; they demanded voice so they could attest to their lives, and even when words began rising to make affirming images subservient, to eliminate them was errantly wrong. Origins, seeds, and inceptive impulses belonged to the work as much as did their results: Blue Highways began not with a typewriter but with a camera.
When I went to bed that night, I told Lucy removing the photographs would be a death stroke to the book, and she said, "Saying no to a yes is also a death stroke."
A ringing phone pulled me awake the next morning. It was Davison whose hello was a grudging "You win." His fast turnabout removed any chance I would have to talk myself out of a sound principle.
My medieval notion about the Great Wheel — and one other thing — had me ready for the next rotation… My "next" was the Book of the Month Club turning down Blue Highways after two readers said they saw no significant audience for a story about "some guy in a truck going nowhere."
* * *
July 10, 2014 Comments Off on Writing Blue Highways


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Bike Share Philadelphia In the News 2008-2013
(a number of newspaper entries below have expired)
Awesome News: Bike share Is officially Set To Roll.., Kristina
Jenkins, UWISHUNU August27, 20013
Will bike sharing beat SEPTA smart cards.., Christine Fisher, PhillyPlan August 23, 2013
Plan in place for Phila. bike-share program, Bob Warner Philadelphia Inquirer August 23, 2013
Philadelphia's Bike Share Plan Moves Forward, Mike Dunn, KYW Newsradio, August 22. 2013
Editorial Philadelphia Inquirer August 18, 2013
Read about Bike
Share in the August 2013 Grid Magazine:
Page 15
"Nutter to seek Council appropriation for Phila. bike-share program" by P. Nussbaum Phila. Inquirer Dec. 9, 2012
"Bike share could be riding into Philly" by S. Leach, Philadelphia Metro, December 10, 2012
"Learn from other cities before bike-share begins" Editorial Philadelphia Inquirer, December 12, 2012
"Welcome to Bike-a-delphia" by Dan Eldridge, Keystoneedge February 11, 2010
"Study finds bike share feasible in Phila." by Vernon Clark, Philadelphia Inquirer February 25, 2010
"How to make bike sharing happen" Editorial blog, Philadelphia Inquirer March 5, 2010
"Pedal power possible" Editorial Philadelphia Inquirer March 6, 2010
"Bike Share host Demonstration at Penn" by Naomi Tarlow The Daily Pennsylvanian January 16, 2009
"Bike Share idea gets a Phila.Trial" by Melissa Dribben, Philadelphia Inquirer January 16, 2009
"Mayor Nutter Considers a "Bike Share Program in Phila." by Steve Tawa, KYW1060 January 17, 2009
"Bike share station gets a public viewing" by Mark Brakeman, Press/Review January 21, 2009
"How Many Miles to Bike Sharing, Philadelphia? by Ana Liss, Economic League October 23, 2009
"Philly bike sharing program in works" by Michael Hess, Drexel Triangle January 11, 2008
"Mayor supports bike sharing" by Michael Hess, Drexel Triangle January 25, 2008
"Promoting bike-sharing in Philadelphia" by Melissa Dribben, Philadelphia Inquirer January 16, 2008
"Share and Share a Bike" by Sam Tremble, The City Paper January 16, 2008
"Peddling a more efficient way to get around" by Kellie Patrick Gates for PhillyPlan January 21, 2008
"Citywide 're- cycling' idea 'best thing since sliced baguette' by Dafney Tales, Daily News January 18, 2008
Bike Sharing is Coming to Phila. by Hadas Kuznits, KYW 1060 January 19, 2008
Audio: "Morning Edition" Listen by Brenda Jorett, Bike Share Philadelphia WHYY FM January 23, 2008
"Envisioning better bicycling for everyone" by Mark Brakeman special to the Press/Review January 24, 2008
Audio: "Radio Times with Marty Moss- Coane" Listen, Care Share -Bike Share WHYY FM January 25, 2008
Penn Futures Bike Sharing Pod Cast by Christine Knapp, January 24, 2008
"Philly next to embrace public-use bicycles?" by Emily Schultheis, The Daily Pennsylvanian January 31, 2008
Video: "Alternatives to City Driving" Watch by Michelle Williams, WTXF-TV FOX29 February 14, 2008
"City talks bike share program funding" by Amanda Synder, The Temple News February 25, 2008
"Philadelphia May Considers Bike-Share Plan" by Jim Melwert, KYW 1060 April 28, 2008
"Advocates: Take a Bike" by Jessica Lawlor, Philadelphia Metro April 30, 2008
"Council Holds Hearing On Bike Sharing Program" by Leah Zerbe, nbc10.com April 30, 2008
"City Council hears about bike sharing" by Kellie Patrick Gates for PhillyPlan April 30,, 2008
"Wheels start turning on Phila. bike-sharing concept" by Jeff Sheilds, Philadelphia Inquirer May 1, 2008
"Bike-sharing program piques Council's interest" by Chris Brennen, Philadelphia Daily News May 1, 2008
"Bike share program gets support" Philadelphia Metro May 1, 2008
"Nutter Administration seeks more details on Bike-Share Plan" by Steve Tawa, KYW1060 May 1, 2008
"Wheel good idea" Editorial Philadelphia Daily News May 2, 2008
"Philly To Take Europe's Lead With SmartBike" by Patrick Walter of the AP, cbs3.com May 16, 2008
"City weighs large-scale bike-sharing program" by Patrick Walter for the AP, Philadelphia Metro May 19, 2008
"Now, street parking considered for Bike Share concept" by Mark Brakeman, Press/Review May 28, 2008
"Reinventing the Wheel" by Caitlin Meals, South Philly Review May 29, 2008
"Pedal Power" Editorial Philadelphia Inquirer June 9, 2008
"Cities take bike-transit plans for a spin" by Charisee Jones, USA Today June 26,2008
"Escaping the Gridlock while Going Green:" by J.T.Quigly, Spirit Community Papers July 11, 2008
"Test Drive: Trading in the Car for a Bike" by Kelly Wallace, CBS Evening News July 16, 2008
Audio: "Bike Sharing" Newsroom Report WHYY FM August 4, 2008
"Philly's pedaling toward bike-sharing program" by Natalie Pompilio, Philadelphia Inquirer August 28, 2008
GRID Magazine PDF Page 18 "Changing Lanes" by Will Dean, Fall 2008
"Will we be able to Pedal another World Series" by Frank Rosci, Jewish Exponent November 13, 2008

subset: commoncrawl


text:
City to Surf: Albany
Sunday, 22 July 2018
Middleton Beach, Albany, WA
The Chevron City to Surf for Activ in Albany, Western Australia on Sunday, 22 July 2018 is a 12km and 4km fun run/walk, and a 4km wheelchair event.
Middleton Beach will host the 2018 Albany Chevron City to Surf for Activ for the 4th year. The course was revised a couple of years ago and the flat, fast and protected pathway along the shores of the stunning coastline out to Emu Point produce quick times and make for an enjoyable morning whilst supporting Activ.
This event is part of the WA City to Surf series. Finish all five events in the series in one year and be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
City to Surf WA
- Next in series (29 July 2018)
4km Wheelchair


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The thing with art journaling though, is that you don't have to like the pages you create. It's about experimenting, playing and expressing what you're feeling in the moment. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist so that was a hard thing to deal with at first. I really recommend trying it if you have any interest in art journaling at all!
|Watercolour background with Dina Wakley bird stamp.
|Dylusions ink sprays with Dina Walkey stamp.
|Dylusions ink sprays and Typo stencil.
|Dylusions ink sprays with paint and stamp by Dina Wakley.
|Dylusions ink sprays
|Dina Wakley stamp
It's fun playing with patterns and just making backgrounds too. I have many unfinished pages that I don't know what to do with yet.
|Dylusions ink sprays
|Dina Wakley paint
|Typo stencil, Dylusions ink spray


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The Influence of Zen Buddhism on the Art of Georgia O'Keeffe
Long before Georgia O'Keeffe started painting flowers or the great landscapes of the Southwest, she explored total abstraction and monochrome palate. Beginning in 1912, she delved deep into the world of Zen Buddhist inspired art making to get to the very essence of thing, not an imitation, but the TRUTH…the Zen way of seeing the world…
"In Zen, the meanings often lie beyond language but can be revealed in visual form…To approach this reality with a Western background or common sense is not possible-in order to understand Zen one must experience it first-hand."
To read reviews, see press and trailer click here
"Costochondritis is not going to "go away" if you change your diet or take vitamins. Also, taking medication and/or cortisone injections for the rest of your life is also no solution. I believe there is a way to reduce inflammation and keep the pain away so don't fall into the autoimmune disease pitfall! While Costochondritis is a nightmare, I believe I found a way to deal with it and finally be able to live a happy healthy life and you can too." – Sharon M. Fitzgerald
I am a Costochondritis sufferer and in this book I will provide an overview of the condition based on some of the most reliable sources that I found. These sources include the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, American Family Physician, and Healthline amongst others. As you will note, I use endnotes citations that will direct you back to over 25 quoted and reliable sources on many aspects of the condition. I also have a Links & Resources section at the end of the book for further reading, exercises, videos and more.
To see the topics covered in the book and more HERE
Sex & Erotica in Ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) History of Prostitution, Poetry & Art
The purpose of this study is not to set out to be the definitive statement on erotica and prostitution, but rather an attempt to define how feminine sexuality and prostitution were conceived of and constructed through specific representation in Mesopotamia from approximately 2,000 to 1,250 BC. This study aims to examine laws, literature, erotic poetry, and images without trying to contemporize the topic. Rather, examine the primary and secondary sources of information to uncover a realistic portrayal of the situation as it had actually occurred.
The book contains eleven images, bibliography and footnotes. This is an art history book on ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). It features the history of prostitution, erotic art, erotic poetry and literature from sources including Lipit Ishtar & Middle Assyrian Laws Code, Reference in the Epic of Gilgamesh, sacred prostitution, prostitution institutions, plaques, seals and description of women in ancient society)
To read reviews, see press and trailer click HERE
Coming soon – Lost in Prague – Book trailer and details HERE
Coming soon – The Degenerate Art Exhibition – Book description and photo gallery here


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Many advisers will be acceptable to casting their acclamation on Nov. 6, but will they accept time to vote? Some states crave administration to accord workers time off to vote and, alike in states that don't, some businesses are award added means to get advisers to the polls.
With Acclamation Day about the corner, administration should be alert that, while no federal law provides advisers leave to vote, abounding states accept allowable laws in this area, said Marilyn Clark, an advocate with Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis. Depending on the state, administration may accept to accord workers notice about their voting rights and accommodate paid or contributed time off to vote.
Even in states area there is no voting leave law, it is acceptable convenance to let advisers booty up to two hours of paid time off to vote if there isn't abundant time for the agent to vote alfresco of alive hours. "Encouraging and not black advisers should be the accepted rule," said Robert Nobile, an advocate with Seyfarth Shaw in New York City.
Encourage Employees
"Here in the United States, too abounding bodies don't vote because they don't accept time due to jobs, adolescent affliction and added responsibilities," said Donna Norton, controlling carnality admiral of MomsRising, an alignment of added than 1 actor mothers and their families. "Getting to the acclamation can be abnormally arduous for bodies in rural communities [or] single-parent households, and those who are bamboozlement assorted jobs."
About 4 in 10 acceptable voters did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, according to analysis conducted by Nonprofit VOTE and the U.S. Elections Project. And aborigine assembly has been historically lower for midterm elections, such as this year's, which are captivated a the mean of a president's four-year term, according to Pew Analysis Center.
"Businesses can advice break this botheration by authoritative abiding that all advisers accept paid time off to vote," Norton said.
Some administration are alms solutions by authoritative Acclamation Day a accumulated holiday, alms a few hours of paid time off for advisers to vote and giving employees advice about aboriginal and absentee voting, according to The Washington Post.
Giving advisers time off to participate in borough or association activities tends to beforehand artisan performance, said Katina Sawyer, Ph.D., an abettor assistant of administration at George Washington University. Administration who are alms paid time off to vote will acceptable acquire the allowances through bigger agent attitudes and performance.
Know the Law
Employers in states with voting-leave laws should be accustomed with the specific requirements, as some accompaniment laws accept a lot of details. Alike in states after such laws on the books, administration should analysis to see if there are any bounded voting leave ordinances in their cities.
Employers appropriate to accord workers time off to vote should plan for able assignment advantage to ensure that all advisers can booty time off, Clark said.
In abounding states, the employer may ask workers to accord beforehand apprehension if they charge time off and may crave that workers booty that leave at a specific time of the workday. In some states area leave is paid, administration ability accept the appropriate to ask advisers to prove they absolutely voted. Best states prohibit administration from adorning or battlefront an agent who takes time off from assignment to vote.
"Ultimately, adopting an ambiance that about encourages advisers to exercise this important appropriate is a acceptable convenance to abate the accident of a abeyant backfire claim," Clark said.
[SHRM members-only resource: Leave Laws by Accompaniment and Municipality]
Although accompaniment laws vary, "the accepted affair beyond the U.S. with account to voting laws is that advisers will be accustomed time off to vote if there is bereft time amid the time the acclamation accessible and aing aural the accompaniment and the time advisers alpha and accomplishment work," Nobile said. "Typically, two to three after nonworking hours amid the aperture and closing of the acclamation is accounted sufficient."
Some accompaniment laws accommodate contributed leave to vote or do not abode whether the leave charge be paid. Oregon and Washington no best accept voting leave laws because they are "vote-by-mail" states.
In some states, such as California and New York, administration charge column notices in the abode afore Acclamation Day to acquaint advisers of their rights. Administration ability accept to pay penalties if they don't comply.
The after-effects for abstinent advisers their voting rights can be harsh, with some states alike arty bent penalties, Clark noted.
Create a Policy
At a minimum, administration should accept a activity spelling out the voting rights accessible to advisers beneath applicative laws, Clark said. For businesses that accomplish in states that don't accept a voting-leave law, administration may still ambition to accept a activity analogue their expectations about time off for voting.
Multistate administration may accept to accept a distinct activity that includes the best employee-friendly accoutrement of the accompaniment and bounded laws that awning them. "By demography this approach, administration abstain the authoritative accountability of adopting and promulgating assorted behavior for advisers alive in altered locales," Clark said. All voting-leave behavior should be abiding to accommodate able anti-retaliation provisions, which accomplish bright that the employer will not booty any adverse activity adjoin advisers for appliance their voting rights.
"It's important to bethink that the law sets the floor," said Bryan Stillwagon, an advocate with Sherman & Howard in Atlanta. "Companies with the happiest and most-engaged advisers admit that absolute assurance comes from accomplishing added than what is required."
Dana Wilkie contributed to this article.
What Will New Hire Request Form Template Be Like In The Next 12 Years? | New Hire Request Form Template – new hire request form template
| Pleasant for you to the blog, with this time I'm going to teach you with regards to new hire request form template


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Childcare HOME
Find a Daycare
Caregiver Resources
Parent Resources
Your One Stop Shop For Starting Your Own Child Care Facility
Equinox Child Care
Equinox Child Care
Phone :
Website :
Address :
, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Description :
We are a small Accredited child care facility with only 13 licensed spaces. We are cloth diaper/wipe and EC friendly. Currently we take children from 12 months to Kindergarten on a full time basis. We participate in Yoga classes, trips to the local Library and neighborhood parks. Equinox Child Care has a unique set up, as we were created to support the needs of the Environmental Consulting Company we share the building with. We do not provide lunches or snacks, all foods then are brought by the family for their child. This feature provides parents the opportunity to ensure nutritional balances, or special diet restrictions are adhered to for the child.
Reviews :
Rank and Review
Nick Name :
Momma T
Rank :
Comments :
Love this place! I feel like I am leaving my child with family :)
Nick Name :
Happy Dad
Rank :
Comments :
This is a fantastic facility. The staff is awesome!
Nick Name :
Louis' dad
Rank :
Comments :
I can't tell you how awesome this place is. The quality of the staff, the size of the facility and the amount of love for the kids is unbelievable. Hard to imagine a better facility anywhere.


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ABET Accreditation
The Biological Engineering Department here at Utah State University is ABET accredited until the year 2020.
Why Accreditation Matters to Students
Earning an engineering degree is a significant achievement and an important investment in your future. Since so much of your future success depends on your educational foundation, the quality of the education you receive makes a big difference. The Biological Engineering Program at Utah State University is an ABET-accredited engineering program.
ABET is the recognized accreditor for college and university engineering programs in the United States. Every program that ABET accredits - more than 3,100 programs at over 670 institutions in 24 countries - can be found in the ABET Accredited Program Search.
Earning an engineering degree from an ABET-accredited program:
- Verifies that the quality of the educational experience you've received meets the standards of the profession.
- Increases and enhances employment opportunities.
- Increases acceptance into advanced degree programs.
- Permits and eases entry to a technical profession through licensure, registration, and certification.
- Establishes eligibility for many federal student loans, grants, and/or scholarships.
More than 2,000 professionals from academe, industry, and government carry out every aspect of ABET accreditation. Because they know their profession's dynamic and emerging workforce needs, they review academic programs to ensure these programs provide students with the technical and professional skills they need to succeed.
- An ABET-accredited program assures prospective students that:
- the institution is committed to improving their educational experience
- the program is committed to using best practices and innovation in education
- the program is guided by its constituents – faculty, students, industry - through formal feedback
- the program considers the students' perspective as part of its continuous quality improvement process
ABET itself is accredited by the Council on Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). ABET has been recognized by CHEA as an accrediting organization since 1997. Information about ABET can be found at www.abet.org


text:
For fans of Hatchet and Island of the Blue Dolphins comes Theodore Taylor's classic bestseller and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner, The Cay.
Phillip is excited when the Germans invade the small island of Curaçao. War has always been a game to him, and he's eager to glimpse it firsthand–until the freighter he and his mother are traveling to the United States on is torpedoed.
When Phillip comes to, he is on a small raft in the middle of the sea. Besides Stew Cat, his only companion is an old West Indian, Timothy. Phillip remembers his mother's warning about black people: "They are different, and they live differently."
But by the time the castaways arrive on a small island, Phillip's head injury has made him blind and dependent on Timothy.
"Mr. Taylor has provided an exciting story…The idea that all humanity would benefit from this special form of color blindness permeates the whole book…The result is a story with a high ethical purpose but no sermon."—New York Times Book Review
"A taut tightly compressed story of endurance and revelation…At once barbed and tender, tense and fragile—as Timothy would say, 'outrageous good.'"— Kirkus Reviews
* "Fully realized setting…artful, unobtrusive use of dialect…the representation of a hauntingly deep love, the poignancy of which is rarely achieved in children's literature."—School Library Journal, Starred
"Starkly dramatic, believable and compelling."— Saturday Review
"A tense and moving experience in reading."— Publishers Weekly
"Eloquently underscores the intrinsic brotherhood of man."— Booklist
"This is one of the best survival stories since Robinson Crusoe."— The Washington Star
· A New York Times Best Book of the Year
· A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
· A Horn Book Honor Book
· An American Library Association Notable Book
· A Publishers Weekly Children's Book to Remember
· A Child Study Association's Pick of Children's Books of the Year
· Jane Addams Book Award
· Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
· Commonwealth Club of California: Literature Award
· Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People Award
· Woodward School Annual Book Award
· Friends of the Library Award, University of California at Irvine
The Cay
|Interest Level
|Reading Level
|Reading A-Z
|Word Count
|Grades 4 - 8
|Grades 4 - 8
Hardcover, 160 pages
Published on December 17, 1987 by Delacorte Books for Young Readers
69 Book Reviews
- acalzoaFriday, October 18, 2019 at 9:11 am4 starsI'm giving the book about a 4 it was a good book, the was one reason I didn't give it a 5 it was hard for me to understand and so of the words i did not understand. It has great information about it that why you should read the cay
- nnennaFriday, October 18, 2019 at 7:38 am3 starsI gave this book a three-star rating because it is a good book but it is not something I would read. I would defiantly recommend this book to someone else. it was a good book but just not the type I would read.
- russellolchawaFriday, October 18, 2019 at 6:22 am5 starsthis book is about Phillip ,Phillip lives on a small island in Curacao they have to move because WW2 is going on and it is going to be fighting they thought in their town so then they take a boat to go to somewhere else but then the ship gets torpedoed and it blows up Phillip ends up waking up on a raft with a black man so then he dosent like him at first so then they end up finding an island and they go there and it is small they get food shelter and water so then there is a hurricane hitting the island so then after the storm Timothy dies form being worn out i didnt connect to this book because nothing like this happend to me before i rated it a 5 star because it was interesting and scary and sad it was very good
- jalen30214Friday, October 18, 2019 at 5:58 am4 starsI give this book a four star because it shows how to live during hard times. It shows the struggle between Phillip and Timothy. Phillip's mother said to never go around black people. Phillip is blind, and Timothy gets Malaria and he goes running around everywhere. I think you should read this book because it seemed interesting.
- ahinoanimeFriday, October 18, 2019 at 5:56 am4 starsI give this book a 4 star rating, because the Cay told a story about a boy who has difficulties when trying to move different countries .The words were a bit too hard to understand when not being told what they mean beforehand, but the book was interesting with two people being stuck on a cay and finding out how to use natures materials.
- nnennaFriday, October 18, 2019 at 5:53 am3 starsThe reason why I rated this book a 3 is that it was a good book, but it is not something I would usually read. It was a book about a boy named Phillip who got stuck on a cay with a black name named Timothy. They have to figure out how to survive and get saved. In total, I would recommend this book to somebody, because I enjoyed it. It may not be something I would usually read but it was good.
- sheasheaFriday, October 18, 2019 at 3:54 am5 starsTheodore Taylor writes an amazing story about a young boy Phillip, and a man named Timothy that endured a terrible incident. Phillip had to overcome the racism he had been taught for years to rely on Phillip. Phillip used his life skills to keep them both alive as they were stranded. It is an exciting story of trust, an unlikely friendship and perseverance. I can relate to this story because I can find friendship in anyone that is trustworthy and honest.
- papasmurfThursday, October 17, 2019 at 8:35 pm4 starsI give this book a four star because it shows how to live with the resources around you. It talks about the struggle between two different characters. They have to rely on each other to survive. Phillip becomes blind, and Timothy has make sure he is ok. Timothy gets malaria and runs around screaming, and Phillip has to help him while helping himself.
- riley_108Thursday, October 17, 2019 at 6:24 pm3 starsI gave this book a 3 star rating ,because it was very hard to understand. The words were difficult to pronounce, because they were not spelled correctly. I like this book, because it very good information, if you are ever in a situation like Phillip I would recommend this book for you, if i was blind stuck on a island with nobody i would be scared if nobody was there with me. That is some information about the book The Cay, that is why you should read it.
- giannathecatzThursday, October 17, 2019 at 5:04 pm5 starsThis was an sad yet interesting book. It gave a great message that under different colored skin, we are all the same. At some parts, I almost cried and at other parts, and was very happy. I don't want to give away to much, but here's a little summary. A white boy named Philip gets stranded on an island with a black man named Timothy. Philip has learned to stay away from black people, but Timothy is quite different. They go through extraordinary things together and grow fond of each other. I would recommend this book to 4-6 graders and to people who like adventure and historical fiction. I personally loved this book.


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A wide range of supporters of Africa gathered on Sunday 9/9/07 to celebrate and promote African unity. Many members of the United African Congress added their voice.
To see photos, click here.
You can also find several videos on YouTube, including:
- Sidique Wai, president of the United African Congress at the African Burial Grounds in New York City
- Pouring libations
- Rev. Dr. Samson Slobert discussing African unity
- Baba Jagun, member of Fela Kuti's renown band, giving his opinions of Afrobeat
Enjoy the videos!


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So I'm happy to announce the websites new look. The original design had hints of the 2000's about it and so I hope this new design brings it up to about the 2011-12 period.
On some other news the freelancing is picking up pace and so I should have more money to put into development work.
Now the photo of the website for social media linking and those on mobile etc etc.


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OZNaturals is a brand we can't help but admire. Not only is this a holistic and environmentally friendly brand but all OZNaturals products are created using no potentially harmful synthetic chemicals, including parabens, phthalates, petrochemicals and sulfates. The entire product line is proudly cruelty free.
There are 4 serums in their reasonably priced line: Vitamin C, Hyaluronic Acid, Pro-Retaxinol Retinol Serum, and Vitamin C + AHA. They are only $17.95 – $19.95 which is a phenomenal price for such great quality.
All their serums are packaged in glass bottles (in amber glass if they need to be protected from light) and all come with a dropper delivery system that ensures freshness, potency, and ease of use.
We received two of their serums to use and tell you about.samples, affiliate links
There was a little bit of a battle between Lisa and I since we are both huge fans of Hyaluronic Acid but I gave in once I read the ingredients in the Vitamin C Facial Serum. Not only does it contain a unique stable for of sodium ascorbyl phosphate to ensure potency and effectiveness but it also contains Hyaluronic Acid along with a mix of antioxidants including green tea, rose hips and Vitamin E. I couldn't ask for better! "Our unique Vitamin C serum contains a proprietary blend of 20% Vitamin C and the super antioxidant Astaxanthin. We use the most stable and bio-available form of Vitamin C, sodium ascorbyl phosphate, ensuring our serum in always fresh and potent."
Why Vitamin C? Because it's a potent antioxidant that protects and brightens skin. I've made it a mission this year to have brighter skin and this OZNaturals serum is helping that fight. "Moisture is restored, wrinkles fade, and your face brightens as the benefits of Vitamin C take effect. This effective anti-wrinkle serum contains concentrated amounts of active ingredients to ensure efficacy."
The serum itself is very thin and has a watery consistency. One medium size dropper full is enough for my entire face. There's no fragrance at all and it dries very quickly. I like to layer serums and this is the first serum I'll use since it doesn't interfere with any others. Moisturizers don't ball up over it which makes a big difference when applying foundation.
One thing to remember when using Vitamin C is to use sunscreen during the day since your skin is more sensitive to UVA/UVB rays when using any vitamin C product. I'm a stickler about wearing SPF on my fair and easily freckled skin.
Like Marcia said, we had a few tense moments trying to determine who was going to get the Hyaluronic Acid Serum since we both know very well the miracles a great hyaluronic acid product can perform on skin. Plumped skin is healthy skin – you want it to hold onto moisture, because then you have less wrinkles and don't develop them as quickly, either. OZNaturals Hyaluronic Acid Serum has the highest quality hyaluronic acid because it's botanically derived. Added to this are the amazing antioxidants Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Rose Hips and green tea – making the Oz Naturals Hyaluronic Acid Serum a terrific serum indeed.
As skin ages, it loses hyaluronic acid which means less elasticity and more wrinkles. So adding hyaluronic acid back with a great serum increases collagen production, plumps up skin, and increases elasticity.
Our natural Hyaluronic Acid Serum for skin deeply hydrates and plumps skin to diminish the look of fine lines and wrinkles. Hyaluronic Acid is known as "nature's moisture magnet," an ingredient that can hold up to 1,000 times its weight in water. This potent serum delivers a surge of moisture-loving nutrients deep into skin. The powerful combination of Vitamin C and Hyaluronic Acid, leaves skin soft, smooth, and rejuvenated.
Hyaluronic Acid Serum benefits:
Plumps and hydrates dry, dull skin
Assists in balancing skin moisture levels
Speeds up skin-cell turnover, keeping new and healthy skin on the surface
Helps diminish the appearance surface lines and wrinkles
Naturally lifts and firms sagging skin
As with all OZNaturals products, the Hyaluronic Acid Serum has no fragrance and no parabens. I love that it isn't sticky or tacky, which happens a lot with hyaluronic acid serums. This is actually rather lightweight, and it soaks in quickly and easily. I use it every morning and every evening after cleansing and toning, before moisturizing. I especially concentrate around my eyes and lip area. I like that this isn't a one trick pony serum – not just hyaluronic serum, there's more in there:
Key Ingredients:
Hyaluronic Acid – Deeply moisturizes and plumps skin, while providing continuous moisture by binding up to 1000 times its weight in water.
Vitamin C – Provides protection from damaging free radicals and supports the production of collagen.
Vitamin E – Strengthens the skin's barrier function and helps prevent dehydration and damage.
Rose Hips – This natural source of antioxidant is high in essential fatty acids which are needed for healthy, beautiful skin.
Green Tea – Contains polyphenols which can prevent damage from UV light and other environmental hazards.
All in all, a really fabulous serum that makes skin look and feel terrific. You can't go wrong with either serum! Be sure to take a look at these serums and the rest of the excellent OZNaturals skin care line up – we are definitely impressed.
Available at both the OZNaturals website and Amazon with free shipping.


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The NASDAQ OMX Valueguard-KTH Housing Index(TM) is based on a statistical model that compensates for different types of homes sold during various periods. The aim is to provide as accurate a picture as possible of the actual underlying price trends.
The index offers a basis for new financial products such as insurance of the market value of housings and home saver accounts that follow developments on the housing market. The value of the underlying product – Swedish flats and single family homes – is large and comparable to the total value of all registered companies.
NASDAQ OMX Valueguard-KTH index family is developed to accurately track the price development of the housing market. There are separate indexes for flats and single family homes in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmoe as well as for medium-sized cities. There are also composite indexes for flats and single family homes in Sweden as well as HOXSWE, which is a capitalization-weighted price index for both flats and single family homes. For further information regarding how the indexes are constructed, please visit the Valueguard homepage.


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Earlier, we told you about the sudden, rapid expansion of Oliver Peck's Elm Street festival. This year, Reverend Horton Heat is onboard and helping curate five days of music at three venues in Deep Ellum from September 11 to 15.
Today, the full schedule has been announced. It's below, with three secret bands to be announced later. You can celebrate the prospects of this festival tonight at a party at Three Links. Those missing spots include Thursday's headliner at Three Links and a couple on Sunday, so it could be some big names. Tickets are available now through ticketfly.
Wednesday, September 11
Three Links 10 p.m. Thin White Dukes 12 am. Josh & Oliver Karaoke
Thursday, September 12
Three Links 8 p.m. Restvraunt 9 p.m. Hanna Barbarians 10 p.m. Mothership 11 p.m. The American Fuse 12 a.m. TBA
Friday, September 13
Trees 7 p.m. Broken Gold 8 p.m. Holy Moly 9 p.m. Drag the River 10 p.m. Gorehounds 11 p.m.Reverend Horton Heat
Three Links 6 p.m. Punk Rock Karaoke 9 p.m. The Draculas 10 p.m. Party Police 11 p.m. Plissken 12 a.m. Ishi
Wits End 7 p.m. Solomon 8 p.m. Silver Loves Mercury 9 p.m. Venomous Maximus 10 p.m. Maleveller 11 p.m. The House Harkonnen 12 a.m. Damage Case
Saturday, September 14
Trees 7 p.m. Black Habits 8 p.m. The Re-mo's 9 p.m. Phantom Rockers 10 p.m. Missile 11 p.m. Bowling For Soup
Three Links 9 p.m. Mo Robson 10 p.m. Sleepin Rattlers 11 p.m. Dead Flowers 12 a.m. King Bucks
Wits End 8 p.m. Sweatloaf 9 p.m. Restvraunt 10 p.m. The Phuss 11 p.m. Locos Gringos 12 a.m. Dallas Uber Alles
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Sunday, September 15
Three Links 9 p.m. TBA 10 p.m. Mike Herrera 11 p.m. Drag the River 12 a.m. Reverend Horton Heat
Wits End 9 p.m. Restvraunt 10 p.m. J Charles & the Train Robbers 11 p.m. TBA


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Andrew Nash, Transport and City Planner Transport and City Planning, European travel, restaurant reviews, European Railway trips, food, wine, beer
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Swiss Travel System Video Contest!
Here's my entry in the Swiss Travel System's video casting contest. Please take a look and rate the video highly ... extra points for those who know what I am alluding to ... send me a comment! Thanks, Andy
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Why blog? Social networking, what is it good for?
Great post about social networking from Seth Godin. Four short videos that explain blogging, social networking for business, etc. Here's the link to Seth's Blog always an excellent read.
Bus Meister
I've been interested in public transport priority for many years. The key problem with public transport priority, it seems to me, is that the projects needed to help make public transport more efficient aren't very sexy. It's all about the little things not the huge new light rail systems or metro projects. So, how to you make public transport priority more exciting?
How about developing an on-line game that people can use to model their own public transport line and linking that to a social networking system that brings people together to lobby effectively for implementation of the best ideas? That's the main idea behind the Bus Meister proposal I am working on.
There's already a game called Gridlock Busters about traffic congestion and social networking sites like see fix click designed to help generate "pressure" for improving urban infrastructure, why not combine the ideas and do something to improve public transport?
I submitted the idea to the ITS Transport Congestion Challenge - a competition where people vote on-line for the best solutions for traffic congestion. I would appreciate your comments and vote! Here's a link to Bus Meister on my website, it presents the whole proposal and gives instructions on how to vote.
Thanks, and please let me know what you think - I plan to continue working on the proposal!
Monday, July 20, 2009
Rovine Istria Croatia
We just returned from a short vacation in the city of Rovine, Croatia. Rovine used to be an island, but they filled in a narrow strip of water in the 1800s (?) so now it's a peninsula. The old city is the pretty much a pedestrian area of narrow streets and alleys. It's quite beautiful.
We also traveled around a little through the Istria region. Many of the cities have buildings that look like Venice, no surprise, the region used to be controlled by Venice. In fact, Italian is the second official language.
We stayed at a very nice B&B called Casa Garzotto in the old city. The 'staff' consisted of four young people who did everything possible to make our stay pleasant and memorable. They were really fun. Here's a photo of me with one of the nice espressos they kept making for me.
The water in this area is clean and refreshing. It's possible to go swimming all along the mostly rocky coast. Casa Garzotto has bicycles you can borrow and our best swimming was about 20-minutes south of the city via bike. coffee they kept making for me!
We ate at one of the restaurants that they recommended (Santa Croce) which was very nice, the restaurant's terrace consists of steps up from the main 'street' that act like risers so you can watch the parade of pedestrians as they stroll along through the night.
We also had two wonderful dinners at the restaurant Puntalina, the last building on the water side. A big electrical storm interrupted our last dinner there, so we needed to move inside. I made a film of some of the lightning, I'll post it on YouTube soon.
More photos are in my Flickr Croatia photos.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Hallwylerhof restaurant Zurich
I recently had dinner with friends in Zurich at a restaurant called Hallwylerhof. It was updated Swiss food, very nicely prepared and served. The workers were also very friendly and nice. However, the decor caught my eye.
As many of you know I collect photos of WC signs (website coming soon - I hope). I think that it's one of the few places people can be creative these days ... some people at least.
The Hallwylerhof restaurant had a very whimsical design where many items were painted in a sort of primitive style on the walls, for example three framed old postcards from the Swiss mountains with a simple drawing in the middle of them that looked like a postcard.
Given the quality and whimsical-ness of these paintings I knew I was in for a treat when I went downstairs to the WC (no comments please!). And, sure enough, some of the best WC signs I have collected ... my flickr Hallwylerhof photos and all my flickr WC sign photos.
Hallwylerhof Restaurant and Bar: Hallwylerstrasse 43, 8004 Zurich, www.hallwylerhof.ch
Museum Tauernbahn: Austrian Railway Museum
A couple weeks ago we visited the Museum Tauernbahn Salzburger Eisenbahnmuseum (the Tauern Valley Railway Museum). The museum presents the history of the railway line that connected Salzburg with routes to Trieste (the main port city for the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
The museum is small but quite nice. You can reach it by taking the train from Salzburg to Schwarzach St. Veit - about one-hour trip. The museum is a few steps away from the station. If you come by train they give you a discount (3 Euros instead of 4-5 Euros).
The museum focuses on building the rail line through the alps. It has an old tunnel drilling machine, describes the construction process, the history of selecting the alignment and has a model of one of the worker bedrooms. Outside you can climb on an old locomotive and there is an old maintenance hall with exhibits on the signaling/interlock technology, power distribution and a model "station". Upstairs is a model railway (currently being completed) of the rail line.
The museum is open from May to early October Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday (and some Thursday nights) - check the internet site for details. The descriptions are in German, but the people are very helpful and many of the exhibits are self explanatory.
Here are my flickr photos of Tauernbahn Eisenbahn Museum.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Model Trains Anyone?
Wired is having a new contest for people to upload photos of their model trains. We don't have a model train at home, but maybe you do? Here's the link to WIRED Model Trains.
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Google Docs Presentations allows PPT files only upto 10 MB in size while Slideshare imposes a 30 MB limit. What do you when your PPT file(s) exceed that maximum size limit?
Tools like PPTminimizer will quickly compresses your large PowerPoint Presentations into smaller files (without sacrificing quality) so that you easily send them as email attachments or upload to any of those PowerPoint hosting sites.
The software costs ~$30 but you can have it for free as we have ten licenses of PPTminimizer to give away. Just leave a comment below with your name, email address and website, if any. Would be wonderful if you can also share how you plan to use the software.
Here's how PPTminimizer works – You select one (or multiple) PPT files and drag them onto PPTminimizer. It will automatically optimize the graphics and embedded objects in the presentations which are generally responsible for the large size. It integrates with Microsoft Outlook and will auto-compress the PPT attachments before sending them in email messages.
Other than the standard ppt and pps formats, PPTminimizer 3.0 also support the new PowerPoint 2007 formats (pptx) and is compatible with Windows Vista. Geetesh has a more in-depth review of PPTminimizer.
We will get in touch with you later this week if you are among the lucky winners. Good luck.
Related: Reduce the size of PowerPoint files (manual tricks)


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- 2 cups Silk unsweetened soy milk
- 2 tablespoons Hershey's Dark Cocoa
- 2 tablespoons MLO Vegan Amino Acid Protein Powder
- 1 tablespoon Wholesome Agave Syrup
Simply mix all ingredients in a Magic Bullet or Ninja processor and enjoy a drink that will keep you fueled for a long time.
Nutritional breakdown:
320 calories
30 grams carbohydrates
10 grams fat
32 grams protein
450 grams of sodium
Recipe and images by Paulette L. Motzko.
Copyright March 2018.


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40 ft long roll measuring 11.5 in W x 1/2 in thick
This durable, yet flexible, Bumper, Column and Bollard Wrap softens the rough edges in your facility. Wrap concrete columns and structures in parking lots, warehouses, drive through areas, fueling stations and municipal barriers with this air filled protective wrap..
Protect beams, posts and bollards from dings and scratches. Eliminate the need for painting, protect customer cars while minimizing your company's risk! Your customers will appreciate the high visibility and cushion effect. Suitable for indoor and outdoor application while conforming to round or square barriers.
Ties are not included.
This durable 40 foot long roll also measures 11.5 inches wide x .5 inches thick.


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Guy Looney greets everyone with a warm, inviting grin.
He grew up in Niota, Tenn. – a one-stoplight town with a population of less than 800. People from his hometown are friendly, the type that have never met a stranger. Guy carries that philosophy over in his professional life with welcoming Southern hospitality that extends to his customers, partners, and fellow teammates.
He's a salesman at heart who lives out the Coke Consolidated Purpose statement to "Honor God in all that we do" every day. As a club account manager for
Guy started his career as a merchandiser for large stores like Kroger and Walmart in Dayton, Ohio in 2006. He quickly worked his way up to the role of account manager, selling incremental displays and equipment for upcoming advertising and promotions. Within five years, Guy was given the opportunity to join the Food Service account team out of Cincinnati as a market development manager focusing on business development. Several promotions and new titles later, Guy landed his present role as a Club Coke account manager with
"I love working for Coke Consolidated because I love the product and company philosophy," says Guy. "It also allows me to meet new people every day."
In his free time, Guy enjoys hunting, fishing and playing golf. He's married to the "woman of his dreams" and has three children. A true family man, Guy also coaches his son's basketball, baseball and football teams.
It is no wonder then that Guy is a "secret ingredient" of


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Eight months ago, I compared Bristol five-piece Undercut to Del Amitri. Rather disappointingly the band have neglected to mention this in their promotional material, preferring to be spoken of in the same breath as U2, the Foo Fighters and REM. Well, that's their choice. I feel duty bound, though, to point out that 'So Beautiful' and 'Backroom', B-sides to new single 'To Die For' (of which more presently), are about as Del Amitri as you get. Which is a good thing, if you're in any doubt.
But enough of that, it's the A-side you want my opinion of and that's an Undercut of a different colour. 'To Die For' is an unassuming and charming four minutes of pop-rock with a subdued but nagging chorus and slick production. U2 comparisons are valid, but pomp is kept to a minimum and the style never threatens to overwhelm the substance. Vocalist Johnny Benn has one of those voices that's effortlessly exquisite, coming in somewhere between Peter Gabriel and James Dean Bradfield with the merest hint of Chris Martin. Another winner from the band I like to refer to as This Year's Del Amitri.
7Nick Lancaster.'s Score


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Good Moments Tea Bar: steamed burgers fusion
Everyone around me is sucking boba balls
Ed Bedford 1 p.m., Dec. 12
Happy Ron's appearance on Sunday, January 18, at Clairemont's Blarney Stone Pub will be his 1000th open-mike performance.
"I started in 1997, and believe it or not, poetry open-mikes are the most borderline violent," says Ron. "I've really thought people were going to come to blows over poems. Last year in L.A., this one poet started badmouthing this other poet on the stage and wouldn't let him finish a sentence.… He rushed the stage like he was going to punch somebody, but the club kicked him out."
The worst local open-mike contestant Ron has seen calls himself the Wolf.
"This guy showed up for years at Hot Monkey Love [Café] and would put on a CD of random industrial music, with him saying, 'I am Luke Skywalker, I am Darth Vader, you must die' and flailing around stage with his light saber. It was interesting for 30 seconds, and then it got real uncomfortable."
One time, Ron says, "I was on stage at Fannie's, and I kept feeling that something was whizzing by my head. Then I heard this voice saying, 'Mom, quit throwing your tampons!' The club crew picked up numerous tampons as I was getting offstage, and I put them in my hat. Fortunately, they weren't used, and nobody was injured."
Another time, he says, "I was at Harbin Hot Springs for a retreat thing, and they had a talent night, so I performed in the nude, wearing only my hat, in front of a hundred mostly naked people.…
"My favorite open mikes are at Cosmos Coffee, where I've played most Tuesdays for more than four years. They have a salad there named after me, the Happylicious."
— Jay Allen Sanford
Thanks for the article.
If you wanna see the actual "tampon incident" referenced in this article, go to:
Or to see a non-drunked foolish halfway decent performance check out:
oops should be
for the best videos
The newest song posted at www.happyron.com is about the local music scene, entitled "If You're Bored in San Diego, It's Your Fault." Sample lyric:
"So breath that fresh air/We got plenty to spare!
Turn off that computer/And head down to Hooters.
We got a zoo/For people like you.
If you're bored in San Diego, it's YOUR FAULT"