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China – On the Threshold of Change
Elīna Zuzāne
Twenty years ago, art collectors from China were barely noticeable on the world-wide art market. Now, the most prestigious galleries, auction houses and even art fairs are all trying to squeeze into this Asian superpower. Why is that?
Exactly one year ago, it was forecast that there would be a great change in the global art market, due to China's closing in on the position of world leader. In 2010, the notable superpower had managed to take second place in the international art market, second only to the United States. If we take into account that in 2010, the global art market was valued at around 43 billion euros, the distance between the two top spots seemed stable enough. But, just as we can feel the coming of a storm on a hot and humid summer day, the art world was anticipating the big transition. And then it came, just as quickly and forcefully as rain falling from dark clouds. For the first time in the history of the world, China has become the leader in the global art market.
Although this comparison of China to an unpleasant weather event may seem a bleak view of the current situation in the market, it really isn't. As a result of the activity of, specifically, China's and America's collectors, the world art market managed to rebound after the crash of 2009 so quickly, that today it is barely short of the levels attained in the strongest of years. Of course, the downfall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 caused a short-term hesitancy in the consumption of art works, but that could also be seen as a sort of "catching of the breath" – necessary for a regrouping of strength. The rapid period of recuperation for contemporary art has proved not only the resiliency of this art market, but also its future stability. And in large part, thanks has to be given precisely to China. The parallels drawn between China and a menacing weather event should rather be understood as the curiosity and excitement that is often felt as a grandiose meteorological phenomenon advances.
The Flourishing of China
According to the latest research by TEFAF, last year 30% of trade in the global art market took place in China, surpassing the USA – 29%, the UK – 22%, and France – 6%. The value of the global art market last year also increased to 46.1 billion euros; that's 7% more than in 2010 and 63% more than in 2009, and just barely behind the record-setting amount set in 2007 – 48.1 billion euros. When speaking about China, one must always keep in mind the fact that the data published in this country are not always true. But even if these numbers are a bit exaggerated, even if they should actually be halved, the scope and influence of China are undeniable.
To a part of the art world, this rapid turn-around in the situation has aroused concern, but "everything isn't as simple as it may seem. China's collectors are spending huge amounts of money at China's auction houses, buying up the work of Chinese artists. This isn't a world-wide threat, however, because this growing activity is viewed as a phenomenon going on just within China itself," as Georgina Adams (art market correspondent for The Financial Times and independent editor of The Art Newspaper) told Arterritory.com at Stockholm's MARKET art fair last February. The high level of Chinese collectors' trust in their own artists has also made an impact on Artprice's annual list of artists most in demand – last year, ten of the fifteen top spots were held by artists of Chinese descent. Even the iconic Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, was outranked by the Chinese modernists Zhang Daqian and Qi Baishi. The total sum of works sold by these two ink painters in the last year – 500 million US dollars for Zhang Daqian, and 445 million US dollars for Qi Baishi – beat all previous records by a mile. Up till then, the record amount was set in 2010, when the total sum of all of Picasso's works sold in the 12-month period amounted to 360 million US dollars. This is only the second time in the last 15 years that Picasso has not held first place.
The competitive situation is similar among current contemporary artists. Last year's most sought-after artist, without any connection to China, was Jeff Koons, who generated interest amounting to 36 million US dollars; but this number pales in comparison to the numbers generated by Zao Wou-Ki – 90 million; Zeng Fanzhi – 51 million; Fan Zeng – 41 million; and Cui Ruzhuo – 39 million US dollars.
Of course, the collection of every art collector first concentrates on supporting artists of his or her own nationality, but then there arises the question – Will the frenzied Chinese art collectors also look to Western artists? The statistics have yet to answer this question, but examples from previous years, when some seriously established pieces came into the possession of Chinese collectors – including Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" (for 106.5 million US dollars) and "Femmes lisant" (for 21.4 million US dollars), as well as a drawing by Michelangelo (for 3.2 million British pounds) – indicates that such pieces are good for the wallets belonging to the new collectors from China. But only time will tell for sure.
Buying, But not Paying
Undeniably, every market has its own unique specifics, and in China's instance, one of the most salient problems is buyers refusing to pay off their winning bids. This occurs most often in the market for imperial art objects. One of the most visible cases had to do with Christie's 2009 auction of the Yves St. Laurent collection, in which two bronze sculptures – fountainheads depicting a rat and a rabbit – were sold for 40 million US dollars. After the auction, the new owner of the pieces of art, Cai Mingchao, refused to make payment of any sort on the lot, citing patriotic reasons: Mingchao maintained that these art objects once decorated the Zodiac Fountain in the Chinese emperor's "Summer Palace", but were looted by the French and English armies during the Opium War (around 1860).
Another, just as scandalous, case happened in November 2010, when an 18th century Qing Dynasty vase was sold at auction to the highest bidder – one of China's richest businessmen, Wang Jianlin – for 51.6 million British pounds. To this day, the owners of the vase and the auction house Bainbridges has yet to receive payment for the exclusive lot. The owners of the vase must now make a decision – how do they move forward? According to the statutes of the auction house, they cannot offer the vase for sale at other auctions, but if they try to sell through galleries or private dealers, they risk getting only a fraction of the so-very-tempting 51.6 million.
The forefront of this painting, done by the modern-day Chinese artist Zheng Hong Xiang (1983), is dominated by a person – powerful and resolute, but the face is covered by a red box. Why is that? If the box isn't supported by ropes or ties, why carry it along with you? It can be easily sensed that the young artist's works speak about modern-day China, but they are just as indicative of the region's art market. Viewing from the side-lines, the rest of the world has only a vague notion of the current market situation in China which, along with the turbulence in the nation's economic climate, is presently undergoing changes.
According to data collected by the Chinese Association for Auctioneers, it can be concluded that in the autumn of 2010, 40% of the works sold by China's auction houses – for a price of more than one million British pounds – were still not payed for six months after the auction took place. Taking into consideration that, in that year, there were approximately 685 transactions that fit into this exclusive price category, the degree of the problem is highly evident, as well as the non-transparency and imprecision of the auctions. In an attempt to halt the recurrence of situations like these, Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses brought into force a deposit system last year, in which everyone who wishes to bid on exclusive art works must register and deposit 25,000 US dollars as guarantee of payment. Recently, there have even been cases when potential bidders at Christie's have been asked to deposit 20% of the starting price for items that interest them. Since China now stands in first place, in terms of activity in the art market, such preventative measures taken by auction houses have some people worried about the possibility of pushing away active buyers, but a safer alternative has yet to be found.
Europeans may have a hard time understanding why somebody would want to pay millions for a porcelain vase and other similarly valued objects, but for China, these items are an important cultural legacy. Pieces such as these show up for auction just once in a decade, and it is this rarity that blows the price tags to immense proportions. It is, of course, also a chance to invest, but not only that. As Dr. Pi Li, owner of Boers-Li Gallery, revealed to Arterritory.com: "There are three reasons why people choose to acquire art – one is love, the second – investment opportunities, but the third – to validate their identity. On of these three reasons is always present, but not always is an art collector in possession of just the one. Often, collectors have a bit of all three leitmotifs, but the difference lies in their respective weight – maybe the love of art is more important to them than the opportunity to make money. This, of course, depends on the individual."
The Farsightedness of Western Collectors
Although domestic collectors dominate in the contemporary sector of China's art market (and not only here), the first wave of art collectors formed and led the market in 1990, lasting up to about 2005, when the largest part of buyers of Chinese contemporary art came from the West. Among these farsighted business-people was the Swiss citizen Uli Sigg, as well as the Belgian Guy Ullens, who in 2007 founded the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing. Although the acute Belgian collector has decided to distance himself from both acquiring Chinese contemporary art and the upkeep of an exhibition space, his previously acquired works of art are now worth tens of millions. When more than a hundred pieces from Ullens' collection were listed on Sotheby's auction program in 2011, their total selling price reached an impressive 54.7 million US dollars.
And then this last June, the art world was surprised to hear the news that Uli Sigg has decided to bestow his 167.5 million US dollar-worth art collection – which consists of 1463 pieces made by 310 different artists, including Ai Weiwei, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, Gu Wenda, Zeng Fanzhi and Xu Bing – to the as-yet-unfinished Hong Kong contemporary art museum, M+. Specifically, it was the museum's vision of the future, and its location in relation to mainland China, that persuaded Sigg to leave his collection to Hong Kong. (Uli Sigg has taken the role of consultant at such significant art museums as London's Tate and New York's MoMA). M+, aka the Museum of Visual Culture, is being constructed as part of Hong Kong's growing West Kowloon Cultural District, the planning of which was started already in 2006. The museum's new building is set to be finished no earlier than 2017.
Progressing Towards Hong Kong
It is already quite clear that Hong Kong's role as Asia's cultural center is gaining strength, which could be attributed to the city's historic relationship with Great Britain and its one-time position as Europe's most important access point to the whole region of Asia. The great metropolis now receives foreign investors and their business ideas, which wouldn't be able to be materialized elsewhere in China. Of course, the 0% import/export tax, which also applies to the selling of art works, is a very attractive bonus to the art industry. It is no surprise that the world's most premier auction houses have opened their affiliates in this city. According to the latest research by ArtTactic, last year Hong Kong also became China's main center of trade in contemporary art, taking 65% of the market share (in 2010, only 46% of China's transactions in contemporary art were done in Hong Kong).
In the last year, Hong Kong has also become more desirable in the eyes of Western gallery owners, whose newest business plans are no doubt aimed at the Kowloon peninsula. With a grandiose Picasso exhibition, an affiliate of the historic Parisian Galerie Malingue was opened in 2010, and last year, Ben Brown Fine Arts settled into its new home in Hong Kong's culturally historic Pedder Building, which also happens to house a branch of the esteemed Gagosian gallery. Gallery owner Simon Lee's latest venture has opened up in Hong Kong, as have exhibition spaces by the much-lauded brands White Cube and Emmanuel Perrotin.
"Western galleries are popping up in Hong Kong one after another, and that's great. They represent serious artists, and bring an international standard to the city. From these galleries, we can learn how to present an artist, how to put together an exhibition and its catalog – everything. The best of the best is being put before our eyes, and now we can see for ourselves why this art is in such great demand. Initiatives like this give Asia a lot of new impressions. Of course, it's also a challenge, but a challenge always brings new energy with it," Dr. Pi Li told Arterritory.com.
On the other hand, Li Danqing, representing the gallery Long March Space, chooses her words carefully, saying that "there is hope that these galleries aren't coming to Hong Kong just because of the clientèle – to get at their money – but that they contribute to the local art community. We hope that there will be more educational projects that will give local artists opportunities to show themselves also in London and New York; that there will be more interaction."
Coming Changes
Although the art world's current evaluation of the market is always based on past auctions and data that is accrued only quarterly or yearly, in reality, everything could already have changed. Since the data for 2012 will only be available in 2013, the Western art world must accept the assumption that these twelve months belong to China. But we already know that this Asian superpower is undergoing great changes.
Along with last autumn's auction season, a great slow-down in China's economic development was already visible, seemingly bordering with the crash of China's real estate market. The cool economic climate also brought a marked decrease in art market results, but the record-breaking spring of 2011 evened out the year, with profits, no less. The just-released data, compiled by ArtTactic, do, however, throw a veil of uncertainty over the future of the flourishing art market in this superpower. The "big four" of auction houses – Christie's, Sotheby's, China Guardian and Polly International – have confirmed that the performances of auctions held in spring 2012 fell by 32%, as compared to autumn 2011 (and by 43%, when measured against spring 2011).
When bankrupt businesses have foreclosed on the carcasses of "ghost towns", and the state has begun to take firm control of the real estate market, the storm clouds over China start looking truly threatening. The situation in not yet critical, but to escape from the harrowing clutches of an economic crisis, this great Asian country must implement changes. A crash in China's real estate market could, of course, shake the art world with the loss of several important collectors and their continuing buying ability. But there is another option – the limit on allowable investment in the real estate market could divert investors to alternative investment interests, such as art.
As the owner of the Boers-Li Gallery revealed to Arterritory.com: "We don't feel the down-slide. If it seems as if the market is slowing down, remember that these numbers are being generated by secondary art market statistics – data from auction houses that are available to all. But there is no doubt that the secondary market has suffered from the market down-slide. And, if we assume that the secondary market is the main guide in China's art market, then that is true."
"The current offerings up for auction largely reflect the past – the 80's and the 90's, but in my opinion, the art market and artists have now diversified themselves. Conceptual artists have come aboard, and China's artists are now actively cooperating with the West and international galleries," explains Li Danqing from Long March Space. "If I had to answer, then I'd say that no, the art market has not slowed down," continues the gallery owner, "but I would be happy to see changes – in which the primary art market would gain strength and the secondary one would become more rational. Everything depends on from which side you are looking at it."


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I have a question from my java course. I'm stuck on it and have read the chapter over and over again, and have tried searching the answer. I feel this is going to be a facepalm answer but here goes
The general term for methods that are invoked as a result of a user action is:
Tried: action event, action listener, instance, and many others, I'm stumped.... any hints are appreciated

subset: commoncrawl


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Custom Steering Wheels - Steering Committee
You're Spoilt For Choice When It Comes To A Kustom Wheel
Seems like every kustom we looked at this summer had a '59 Impala steering wheel. Apart from the fact that there must be an awful lot of '59 Impalas going around without tillers, it brought to our attention just how important the right steering wheel is when planning the look or period feel of a kustom. With that in mind, we started looking around at what's available, both in the aftermarket and restoration fields. So, whether you're building a period-correct kustom (from whatever period!) or are looking for a billet wheel that'll suit your build style, we've brought together a selection. Many of the suppliers featured here have a larger selection than shown, but we deliberately stayed away from banjo, classic Vette-style wood rim, and hot rod-style wheels, concentrating on the kustom stuff. Check out the various suppliers' Web sites-you'll be surprised at just how many wheels are out there.
You may want a wheel that has the look of an original, but in a smaller, more modern, diameter. They're available too, and in more styles than you may think. There are even companies that will reduce the diameter of a wheel you already have. Of course a large number of kustom builders will want an original wheel, be it the popular '59-60 Olds, '59 Impala, or '46-48 Ford wheel, or something more obscure, in which case you're probably going to have to trawl the swap meets or eBay. But once you find that coveted treasure, rest assured there are companies that can restore it to its former glory, or modify it and refinish it to suit your taste, or even supply a kit for you to restore it yourself. Whichever option you choose, your kustom can now have the wheel it deserves.
Grant Grant is a name that's been synonymous with aftermarket steering wheels seemingly forever. In fact, we'd bet that the first aftermarket wheel most of us bought was a Grant! The company's wheels shown here are 14 3/4-inch diameter with a 2 1/2-inch dish, and are new designs.
The Heritage Collection has 12 new models with two-, three-, and four-spoke designs. First up is the two-spoke Deuce (#15851), with polished aluminum spokes and a machined trim piece that simulates the look of a horn ring. The rim is leather with finger grips on the rear. The Two Tone (#15861) features black anodized spokes and polished billet trim piece. Once again, the rims are available in leather or mahogany, and are not partial aluminum, as used on many billet wheels. The modular construction of the Two Tone allows the spokes to be removed to be custom painted or even upholstered.
Billet Specialties Every Billet Specialties wheel is manufactured in the U.S., machined from a 6061-T6 forging, and then polished. Leather half-wraps are available in nine colors, as well as simulated carbon fiber and burlwood. Stainless steel countersunk screws hold the half-wrap to the wheel from the backside, where you'll find milled and polished finger notches. The wheels are available in many original styles in 14-inch diameters, with select styles in 15-inch. Shown here are the Classic and the all-new Profile Series Rat Tail, which features a new 3D machined profile. All three styles are offered in both diameters.
Because Billet Specialties steering wheels are made up of four separate components, all available separately, you can mix and match your choice of wheel, half-wrap, horn button, and adapter.
Budnik Budnik invented the Split Grip steering wheel to provide a leather front with smooth machined finger notches on the backside, while eliminating problems with stitched-on grips. With a patented horn button and adapter, the assembly is complete and ready to fit to your vehicle. Nine stock leather colors are available, or you can send Budnik your custom material to perfectly match the rest of your interior. Shown are the Crossfire and Saturn designs, both offered in 13 3/4- or 15 1/2-inch diameters to suit your needs.
Impy's Impy's billet steering wheels feature hand-sewn, leather-wrapped, cushioned grips for driving comfort along with three-dimensional, fully machined billet aluminum spokes. The spoke and wheel frames are constructed of one piece for maximum strength.
The Cruiser wheel shown comes in 14 1/2-inch diameter, while the Classic is available in 14 1/2- and 13 1/2-inch sizes. Stock colors are black, light gray, dark gray, tan, burgundy, blue, and white, but custom wrapping is available if you supply your own leather, with no extra charge, though it will take a little more time to process your order.
Classic Steering Wheels If you love the appearance of the '55-56, '57, or '58-60 steering wheel but would prefer a smaller diameter, Classic Steering Wheels has your answer, offering these wheels in 15-inch diameters instead of the stock 18-inch. Supplied with the chrome horn ring and center cap, these wheels are produced in black, though they can be painted to match your car, and fit the stock steering column using the original horn, nuts, and directional parts. They also fit ididit columns, using adapters available from ididit.
Mooneyes The California Metalflake steering wheel by Mooneyes is available in blue, silver, red, orange, and green, as well as non-'flake white and black. The rim is vinyl and the spokes are available either slotted as shown, or with round holes. There are also four sizes from which to choose: 10-inch diameter with a 5 1/2-inch dish, 12 1/2-inch diameter with a 3 1/2-inch dish, 13 1/2-inch diameter with a 3 1/2-inch dish, and 15-inch diameter with a 4 1/8-inch dish.
Pearlcraft Those of you with an interest in trucks may have seen Pearlcraft's work in the May 2007 issue of our sister publication, Classic Trucks, where Editor Rob Fortier had Pearlcraft work its magic on the rare '49 Deluxe accessory steering wheel from his '53 Chevy truck. Plying their craft for more than 30 years, the guys at Pearlcraft have perfected the art of finishing a wheel in a pearl or almost marble finish, in a variety of colors, even two-tone. They can also reduce the diameter of wheels, a trick that forms a big part of their modification work, in addition to straight restorations. Pearlcraft is based in Melbourne, Australia, but the additional shipping costs are far outweighed by the wow factor one of their steering wheels elicits. Just check out the before-and-after pictures of Rob's wheel, as well as the Caddy wheel in the lead photo of this article.
Colorado Custom Colorado Custom has more than 50 steering wheel designs, with matching road wheels, though we're looking at just two of them here. The duo-tone rim of the Classic Two Tone provides a 1950s look in 14-inch diameter and a billet wheel. In fact, both wheels shown here are 14-inch diameter. We said we weren't going to include banjo-style wheels in this article, but Colorado Custom's take on the banjo is certainly different and worthy of inclusion. Both wheels are available in 11 different colors of leather half-wrap or split-wrap.
LeCarra LeCarra Steering Wheels are available in a wide variety of styles, featuring select wood or fully padded, one-piece, hand-sewn premium leather wraps. For a truly custom look, LeCarra also offers a variety of accessories and steering hub adapters to complement the steering wheels and allow mounting in a wide range of vehicles.
The Mark 10 shown here harks back to an older era, and like the original equipment wheels of its time, it features a gloss-black hard rim and functional billet horn ring. It is also available primed and ready for your paint color of choice, or with a horn button instead of the billet ring.
DIY Repair Kit So you really want to use that old steering wheel you picked up for next to nothing, but it has huge cracks in it, smells bad, and generally looks more like garage wall art than something you'd want to put inside your kustom? Sure, it can be saved, as we've shown above, but what if you're the type who likes to do everything yourself? Then fire up the computer and visit www.POR15.com, where you'll find a steering wheel repair kit. Complete with instructions, the guys at POR15 have made sure the kit includes everything you'll need to bring your wheel back up to show-quality condition. The kit can also be used to repair other hard-rubber, Bakelite, or plastic parts, such as dash knobs, shift knobs, or radio buttons.


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Fuel Pump & EZ Hose - Reader's Tech Tips
EZ Tech Tips From Cirlce Track Readers
FUEL PUMP EXCHANGEWhen removing an old fuel pump, I found an easy way to hold the fuel-pump rod before you install the new pump. After you remove the old fuel pump, push the fuel-pump rod up and use the tip of a screwdriver to hold it. Turn the motor by hand until the rod is all the way in. In front of the motor, on the same side, there are two bolt holes, one can accommodate a long bolt. Remove the short bolt and replace it with a longer, threaded bolt to hold the rod in the up position while you install the new pump. It makes for an easier installation, but don't forget to put the short bolt back in.
Lance EcklesManteca, CADirt Late Model
EZ HOSE EXTENSIONI have a little tech tip I wanted to share with the Circle Track readers. As the picture shows, I take two pieces of plastic hose from a spray lubricant can, and a small section of electrical heat shrink tubing to make one long piece to get the hard-to-reach areas. I just butt them together and hit the heat shrink tubing gently with a lighter and voila, one long tube to get the deep reaches of the engine compartment. Enjoy!
Brent GleasonThompson, CTFord Mustang/Mini StockBuick Regal/Limited Sportsman
WANT A JACKET?Want a jacket? Got a Tech Tip? Send a brief description of your tip plus a clear photo or drawing to Reader's Tech Tips, Circle Track, 9036 Brittany Way, Tampa, FL 33619. Or, you can also email your tip to the editor at firstname.lastname@example.com. If you send photos by email please make sure they are high resolution (300dpi). Include any necessary dimensions or procedures as well as the following information:
NameEmail Address/Home AddressHome Track Car Make/Racing ClassYears in Racing
Contributions cannot be returned and become the property of Source Interlink Media. Selection of a tip to be published will be based on originality, creativity, and relevance to the circle track racer. In many cases, selections will be based on the quality of the illustrations or photos. Tips chosen for publication will automatically be entered in a quarterly random drawing to win an official Circle Track staff jacket with the winner's name embroidered on the front.


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Yeah, I'm pretty proud of my colleagues at The Denver Post for being awarded a Pulitzer Prize today for Breaking News Reporting of the horrifying Aurora theater shooting.
But there was other Pulitzer news today, among other things, about books. Here is a list of the winners!
Winner: "The Orphan Master's Son" by Adam Johnson: "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart."
Finalists: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," by Nathan Englander and "The Snow Child," by Eowyn Ivey.


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You need to download the materials with the links below:
Opera Mini 7.53 HandleUI.apk
UcBrowser 8.6 HandleUI.apk
Create Connection Settings with below ip and port
Then, Send Fb0 to 131 and wait till you receive a welcome message.
Launch your Opmin or UcBrowser HandlerUI and the child lock code is www.nextwap.net then insert below codes:
- Frontquerry: 0.facebook.com%2f%3a % 0 0 a@
- Then tick, remove port
- Select Real Host and input: 0.facebook.com
- Save the field setup and enter. Then start flexing.
- Download Sms scheduler from Play Store here.
- Then set it... Type the number which is 131, and the message which is fb0, then tap the date and move it to the next time, tap 3mins then add.
Never miss any of my latest update Click here to subscribe with your email address.
Use the comment box below to express your view after the above codes as been tested and don't forget to use Share/Like buttons for the benefit of others.


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Arthur Koestler was arrested by Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces in the city of Málaga on February 9, 1937. Koestler had come to Spain, in the midst of the Civil War, as a correspondent for a British paper called the News Chronicle, and although Málaga had been abandoned by Republican troops and most of its inhabitants several days earlier, and although the reporters Koestler was travelling with had fled, he had stayed behind. Why is not clear. Michael Scammell, in his compendious new biography, "Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic" (Random House; $35), suggests a number of possibilities: Koestler felt loyal to the acting British consul, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who had a house in the city and with whom he had become friendly; he was disgusted by the cowardice of the deserters and wanted to show bravery himself; he couldn't face the thought of leaving his typewriter behind; and he hoped to get a really big scoop. These motives—loyalty, courage, obsessiveness, and ambition—are all plausible, because they are all characteristic of the man.
He paid a price. The officer who arrested him, Captain Luis Bolin, had sworn, based on things that Koestler had already published about the Franco insurgency, "to shoot K. like a mad dog" if he ever got hold of him. Koestler was taken first to the Málaga jailhouse, which was crammed with prisoners picked up in the city and the surrounding villages during the Fascist advance. From his cell he could hear men being escorted outside to be shot, sometimes fifty at a time. In the week following the fall of the city, six hundred prisoners were executed. After a few days, he was transferred to Seville, to a prison that had been built by the Republican government and was now in the hands of the Nationalists.
He was placed in solitary confinement. For many weeks, he was not allowed out of his cell, a chamber six and a half paces long. He was verbally abused by the guards, ignored by the prison authorities, and led to believe that he had been sentenced to death. At night, he listened to men crying for their mothers as they were dragged out of their cells to be shot. Once, he heard a priest, accompanied by guards, going from cell to cell leading prisoners out to be executed. When they reached his door, the priest began to fumble at the bolt. "No, not this one," a guard said, and they moved on.
He considered suicide, and starved himself for weeks in the hope of simulating a heart condition that might get him into the prison infirmary. He eventually managed to get books from the prison library—the first one handed to him was a Spanish translation of the autobiography of John Stuart Mill—and he was allowed into the yard, where he got to know some of the other political prisoners. But he was given no reason to believe that he would be freed or that his life would be spared.
Meanwhile, Chalmers Mitchell had made his way to Gibraltar, where he telegraphed the News Chronicle about Koestler's imprisonment, and an international effort was begun to secure his release. William Randolph Hearst called Koestler's arrest an "unacceptable infringement of the rights of journalists to carry out their profession." The French government was urged to intervene, and Koestler's wife, Dorothee, enlisted British notables in the cause. The National Union of Journalists, in Britain, passed a resolution demanding that the British government intercede, and fifty-six Members of Parliament signed a letter in Koestler's support. Finally, following negotiations involving the League of Nations, the Red Cross, and the Vatican, a prisoner exchange was arranged. Koestler was taken to Gibraltar and remanded to the custody of British authorities on May 14th, after ninety-four days in captivity.
He returned to England to find himself famous. Three and a half years later, he published "Darkness at Noon," his classic novel about a man confined, interrogated, and executed in a Communist prison. Though the book did not do well in England, it was an enormous best-seller in the United States and, after the end of the Second World War, in France, and then around the world. It made Koestler financially secure for the rest of his life, and it has never gone out of print.
Koestler went on to publish several volumes of autobiography: "Scum of the Earth" (1941), "Arrow in the Blue" (1952), and "The Invisible Writing" (1954)—all popular successes. He produced other novels, including "The Gladiators," based on Spartacus' slave revolt (1939); "Arrival and Departure" (1943), about a young revolutionary who escapes from a Fascist prison; and "Thieves in the Night" (1946), a story set in Palestine. These books had an uneven reception. Isaiah Berlin thought "Thieves in the Night" "a detestable and vulgar book"; Clement Greenberg, in Partisan Review, was more critical. He was intensively involved with anti-Communist organizations after the war, notably the Congress for Cultural Freedom; but in 1955 he more or less retired from politics and began writing popular books on science, among them "The Sleepwalkers" (1959), "The Ghost in the Machine" (1967), and "The Case of the Midwife Toad" (1971).
Koestler's books explained science, but they also promoted his own views, and these inclined toward the heterodox. Among his enthusiasms were the Lamarckian theory of evolution (the belief that acquired characteristics can be inherited), extrasensory perception, levitation (he bought a sophisticated weighing machine for performing experiments), the cosmic significance of coincidences, and Eastern spiritual teachings, which he believed in theoretically but which he found, upon contact, somewhat alien to his temperament.
In 1976, he published "The Thirteenth Tribe," a book purporting to prove that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of eighth-century converts, the Khazars, who immigrated to Europe from the Caucasus. The book was a best-seller in the United States. Koestler, who was Jewish, claimed that his argument refuted anti-Semitism by showing that European Jews were not related to the Jews whom some anti-Semites blame for the killing of Christ. But the book was popular with Arabs, since it implied that European Jews settling in Israel were returning to the wrong homeland, and with neo-Nazis, since it suggested that Diaspora Jews constituted a pseudo nation constructed on a racial myth, and that Jews should either immigrate to Israel or assimilate—which is, in fact, what Koestler himself believed.
In 1983, afflicted with Parkinson's disease and chronic lymphatic leukemia, Koestler committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates with alcohol. His third wife, Cynthia, killed herself alongside him; she was fifty-five, and in good health. Koestler left virtually his entire estate, four hundred thousand pounds, to fund an academic chair in parapsychology, and there is today a Koestler Parapsychology Unit in the psychology department at the University of Edinburgh. Its Web site announces the recent award of a grant to study "alleged poltergeist experiences."
Covering this multifarious body of work—more than thirty books and hundreds of articles, many highly fugitive, in all sorts of papers and journals—is actually the easier part of a biographer's task. The hard part is keeping up with the subject himself. Koestler was the prototype of the rootless cosmopolitan. History made him that way. He was born in Budapest in 1905, but his family fled when the short-lived Communist government fell, in 1919. They moved to Vienna (Koestler's mother was from a prominent Austrian Jewish family), where Koestler attended the Technische Hochschule. In 1925, after his father's business collapsed, he was expelled for nonpayment of fees. He had been involved in Zionist organizations in Vienna, and he moved to Palestine, where he began his career as a journalist.
After several years spent travelling around the Middle East as a reporter, he worked for a year in Paris, then moved to Berlin. He arrived on September 14, 1930, the same day the National Socialist Party made its great gains in the Reichstag elections. He became the science editor at a major newspaper in Berlin. He was let go, for reasons that are unclear, in 1932, and he travelled through the Soviet Union, working on a book, and visited many of the republics, including Turkmenistan, in Central Asia. By the end of the trip, it was not safe to return to Germany, so he moved to Paris, which is where he met his first wife. He was living in Paris when he embarked on his Spanish adventure. Later on, he lived in France, Great Britain, and the United States, where he owned a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He travelled, in search of esoteric wisdom, to India and Japan. He even took a trip, as a reporter on the Graf Zeppelin, in 1931, to the North Pole.
Koestler wrote in German (the original language of "Darkness at Noon") and English. He spoke Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, and French, too. (Hebrew gave him trouble; characteristically, he blamed the language.) He was, in his own phrase, the "Casanova of causes," from Zionism to the campaign against capital punishment, and he donated generously to many of them. He maintained lifelong relationships (including the occasional feud) with the writers, scientists, and political activists he met in the various places he visited. And he was a social and sexual torpedo. Academics generally avoided him, but he socialized and debated—alcohol, generously administered, was a necessary lubricant and invariably made him obstreperous and sometimes violent—with nearly everyone else in midcentury intellectual circles, from George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre to Whittaker Chambers and Timothy Leary. He was married three times, and he had literally hundreds of affairs. He was the sort of person who records his liaisons in a notebook.
Scammell would therefore be entirely justified if he felt (a) proud and (b) exhausted after completing his biographical task, which has taken him, he says, to fourteen countries on three continents over a span of twenty years. (Scammell's previous book, a prize-winning biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was published in 1984.) Just getting the file cards in order would have challenged Hercules, if Hercules had been literate. Other reviewers may second-guess Scammell's take on, say, Zionist fraternities in interwar Vienna, but not this one. "Koestler" seems a prodigy of research, in many languages, and a scrupulous piece of fair-minded advocacy.
Still, there are challenges that even Hercules—even a learned and polyglot Hercules—might not have met with complete success. From 1914 until the Cold War froze the world temporarily into position, Europe was, politically, economically, and intellectually, a continent in extremis. It was not just a volatile and combustible place; it was an extremely dangerous place. For Koestler, violent political sectarianism was not a noisy backdrop to his books. It was the world in which he worked and risked his life.
He was a person who, in the course of his career, managed to attract the interest of the Gestapo, the Sûreté Nationale, M.I.5, and almost certainly the N.K.V.D. (He also had relations with the C.I.A., but these were mainly friendly.) He was imprisoned in three countries. He was living in France when the Second World War began, and in October, 1939, was arrested and placed in an internment camp, from which he was eventually released. When Hitler invaded France, in 1940, he was arrested again, only barely managing to escape to England. (In Marseilles, he encountered his friend Walter Benjamin, who gave him half of his morphine tablets, the pills that Benjamin used shortly afterward to kill himself.) When "Darkness at Noon" was published, that December, Koestler was in solitary confinement, as an undesirable alien, in a British jail. Arrogant as he could be about it, and annoying as it might be to people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who, even during the Occupation, led fairly cautious and secure lives, Koestler truly possessed street cred.
To capture Koestler biographically, therefore, you need to capture all of this (plus what was going on in Moscow under Stalin and in Palestine under the British Mandate)—not only the multitude of personalities and the internecine details of organizational intrigue, which crowd the pages of this book, and with which Scammell is admirably methodical, but also the sense of history being made, the moral and ideological weather, the existential stakes. There are two difficulties. The first is simply the demands that the material places on narrative technique. Scammell is a clear writer, but he is not a dramatic one. Koestler was, preëminently, both—and that is the second difficulty. The best biographer of the first half, the adventurous half, of Koestler's life is Koestler, which means that Scammell is often in the unhappy position of describing events that Koestler himself has already written about brilliantly and grippingly.
One of Koestler's finest books, for example, is the account of his Spanish imprisonment, "Dialogue with Death," published in England in 1942. The book is not really about politics. Koestler despised the Fascists, but he saw little to respect in the Republicans, either. The book is about what it is like to face one's imminent execution—it was admired by Sartre, among others, as a lucid statement of the existentialist situation—and, in this respect, it is a stranger and stronger book than "Darkness at Noon."
Koestler's Spanish experiences obviously informed "Darkness at Noon," but the novel has more to do with the fatal self-deceptions of Communist dialectics than it does with the sheer apprehension of death. And "Darkness at Noon" is a roman à thèse, in which every character is a type—the disillusioned old revolutionary, the soulless apparatchik, the doomed idealist. "Dialogue with Death" is just a report on a series of mostly horrible events, and the author is under no obligation to organize them, or even to make sense of them.
So a great deal of the accidental and absurd in life gets represented in the book—though, since it is life under immense pressure, the results are sometimes tragic or grotesque. One of the prison orderlies, Manuel, whom Koestler describes as "a little degenerate cripple," rumored to have been sentenced to life for "some sexual offense that had had a fatal outcome," is on duty with a particularly sadistic warder whom Koestler calls "Captain Bligh":
At half-past ten I heard subdued whispering, tittering, and very odd snuffling and smacking noises in the corridor.
I looked through the spy-hole.
In the empty, lighted corridor a scene was being enacted, strange as a hallucination: little Manuel and Captain Bligh were playing at "horses." Manuel was the horse, and had a string tied round him; Captain Bligh was holding the reins. They paraded like this up and down the whole length of the corridor; I could see them whenever they passed the line of vision of my spy-hole. The warder was holding a whip, he called out, "Gee up!" at every step and laid on with it. Manuel tittered, and whimpered with pain by turns. After having traversed the corridor three times, horse and driver went out into the empty patio. I could hear the crack of the whip and Manuel's whimpers. Then they came back.
This was about eleven. Then I fell asleep. Next day I heard that three prisoners had been executed shortly after midnight.
And there is the night during Koestler's stay in the Málaga slaughterhouse when he wakes up and hears a prisoner singing the "Internationale":
I had read descriptions of German prisons and concentration camps. The singing of the "International" as a political protest or as a last demonstration was frequently mentioned in them; but despite my profound respect for the German martyrs, such passages had always struck me as a little melodramatic and implausible. Now I myself was hearing a man who knew that he was going to die singing the "International." It was not melodramatic at all; the hoarse, unmelodious voice sounded wretched and pitiable. He repeated the refrain two or three times, dragging it out to make it last longer, to delay the moment when silence would return. I got up and posted myself by the door, and, my teeth chattering, raised my fist in the salute I had learned at meetings in Valencia and Madrid. And I felt that in the adjoining cells all the others were standing at their doors like myself and solemnly raising their fists in a farewell salute.
He sang. I could see him before me, with his unshaven, battered face and tortured eyes.
He sang. They would hear him outside and come and tear him to pieces.
He sang. It was unbearable. How we all loved him.
But none of us joined in the singing—fear was too strong.
There is no good way to retell these stories.
"We were never more free than during the German occupation," Sartre wrote in 1944. The remark seems a little self-dramatizing, a little unearned. But one doesn't feel that way about the words that Koestler published two years earlier: "Often when I wake at night I am homesick for my cell in the death-house in Seville and, strangely enough, I feel that I have never been so free as I was then." When he and the other prisoners knew that they were going to die, he says, and no longer feared dying, "at such moments we were free—men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man."
Still, there is some duplicity at work in "Dialogue with Death." It peeks through in the passage about the singer, in the phrase "raised my fist in the salute I had learned at meetings in Valencia and Madrid." Koestler didn't learn the "Internationale" or the raised fist in Spain, and his sense of solidarity with the condemned man was not merely fraternal. Contrary to what William Randolph Hearst and the fifty-six M.P.s may have believed, Koestler was not really a journalist. He was exactly what Franco suspected him of being: a Communist agent.
Koestler became a Communist in Berlin, in 1931, but he remained undercover, in order not to compromise his position at the newspaper, where it was felt he could be of most use to the Party. Once more, his own account of this chapter in his life is inimitable: it appears in what is, after "Darkness at Noon," probably the most widely known thing he wrote, the apologia for his Communist past in "The God That Failed" (1949)—a collection of essays by eminent former Communists, including Richard Wright and Ignazio Silone, which became a staple of Cold War literature.
Scammell does not even attempt to retell much of this episode. He has a cursory account of Koestler's assignation in the Schneidemühl paper mill with the boss of the underground Apparat N, and of his reports to the mysterious Edgar, delivered under the nom de guerre Ivan Steinberg. He passes over the story of Koestler's recruitment of von E., the son of a high-ranking diplomat, as an informant. Koestler always believed that he was fired from the newspaper because von E., panicked by his own role in passing information to a foreign power, turned him in. And one misses, too, touches such as Koestler's delightful explanation of how, in Party meetings, the problem of "the sexual urge" was solved by the operation of the dialectic, which, correctly applied, reveals that the counterrevolutionary bourgeois institution of marriage is transformed into a progressive one in a healthy proletarian society. ("Have you understood, Comrade, or shall I repeat my answer in more concrete terms?")
It was not because he was a Jew that Koestler did not return to Berlin at the end of 1933. It was because he was a Communist. The Reichstag fire, in February, 1933, for which Communist agents were blamed, led to a suspension of civil liberties (Hitler had come to power in January) and a crackdown on Communists. When he got to Paris, Koestler became an operative in the apparat of another German exile, the formidable Willi Münzenberg. It was Münzenberg's idea to send Koestler to Spain, in order to find evidence, to be used by the Party, of German and Italian support for Franco's insurgency. And it was Münzenberg who arranged, through an editor at the News Chronicle, also a Party member, for Koestler's press credentials, to be used as a cover.
When Koestler's wife campaigned for his release, she had both to conceal his Party affiliation and, at the same time, to fight against the Party's own preference, which was that Koestler be kept in prison as long as possible, or even executed by Franco, as a martyr to the anti-Fascist cause. Thus the somewhat incredible consequence: a novel about a Communist prison that was inspired by an experience in a Fascist prison and written by a man being held, as a suspected Communist, in a French internment camp.
"Darkness at Noon" is based on the Moscow show trials of the late nineteen-thirties. Orwell was an ardent admirer of the novel; he reviewed it when it appeared, and it was undoubtedly on his mind when he started writing "1984." Orwell's Big Brother is prefigured in Koestler's Stalin figure, called No. 1, whose picture hangs on every wall, and the interrogation scenes between Winston Smith and the Machiavellian O'Brien recall the two interrogations of Rubashov, the old Bolshevik, that structure "Darkness at Noon": with the cynical Ivanov, and then, after Ivanov himself has been executed, with the doctrinaire Gletkin, who methodically finishes the job. Like Winston's, Rubashov's last mental image, at the moment he is shot, is the face of No. 1.
It is certain that many of Stalin's victims in the show trials were physically tortured; Rubashov is not tortured. But many were broken in precisely the way Rubashov is broken in the novel, by the method known as "the conveyor"—hours of interrogation under bright lights in conditions of extreme sleep deprivation. After a week, most prisoners agreed to confess to whatever was put before them. Koestler was not interrogated in Spain, but he learned a great deal about the treatment of political prisoners in the Soviet Union from an old friend, Eva Striker.
Striker was, Scammell says, the chief cause of Koestler's "lurch to the left" in Berlin in 1931. Not long after converting Koestler to Communism, she moved to Russia to take a position as the director of design in a porcelain factory near Moscow. In 1936, she was arrested and thrown into the Lubyanka, then transferred to a prison in Leningrad, where she was placed in solitary confinement and charged with plotting to assassinate Stalin. She was abruptly released after eighteen months, when her interrogator was himself arrested and imprisoned. She met up with Koestler again in Vienna, and, as Koestler acknowledges in "The God That Failed," he used many details of her prison experience, including communication by rapping on cell walls, in "Darkness at Noon."
Koestler resigned from the Party in 1938, but the real break came for him, as it did for many Western Communists and fellow-travellers, with the Non-Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin, in August, 1939, the treaty that made possible Hitler's invasion of Poland. "Our feelings towards Russia were rather like those of a man who has divorced a much-beloved wife," Koestler wrote in his autobiographical account of those years, "Scum of the Earth." "He hates her and yet it is a sort of consolation for him to know that she is still there, on the same planet, still young and alive. But now she was dead."
The friend of his enemy was his enemy. "Darkness at Noon" is anti-Communist because it is also anti-Fascist. Koestler devoted the next fifteen years of his life and work, starting with the essays on the Soviet Union in "The Yogi and the Commissar" (1944), to persuading fellow-travellers like Sartre that the Gulag was real, that Soviet Communism was an economic failure, and that Stalin was evil.
As Orwell astutely noticed, in an essay on Koestler written in 1944, Koestler's rejection of Stalinism left him with no political party or platform of his own. He was anti-Communist, and he was (like Orwell) nominally a socialist, but there is a sense in which "Darkness at Noon" is a book that despairs not just of Communism but of politics. Like "1984," "Darkness at Noon" is partly a meditation on power, a meditation conducted by Rubashov mostly in his own head. The conclusion that Rubashov continually reaches seems to be that any politics, any system of governance, requires the sacrifice of a few for the sake of the many, demands the primacy of ends over means. Rubashov doesn't have an alternative political vision; he doesn't argue for democratic socialism, or for a regime of human rights. His imagined alternative is represented by vaguely spiritual and sensual things—a painting of the Pietà, the memory of a woman's body, what Koestler calls, borrowing from Freud, the "oceanic sense."
This is what Orwell was referring to when he complained, in his essay, about "a well-marked hedonistic strain" in Koestler's writings. Orwell suspected Koestler of believing that happiness is the object of life (not something that Orwell ever thought), and he concluded that this made him, despite his anti-totalitarianism, a utopian. Koestler admitted it. When he quit politics, he embarked on a quixotic crusade to rescue modern science from rationality and positivism, and to find, by deciphering what he called "the invisible writing" of the universe, a spiritual guide to conduct. This is what got him involved with characters like Chambers, whom he admired, and Leary, whom he came to distrust. Scammell's subtitle is inexplicable: Koestler was not a skeptic. He was a romantic, a searcher after the absolute.
One of the American intellectuals who joined Koestler in anti-Communist events sponsored by the C.I.A.-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom was the philosopher Sidney Hook. Hook admired Koestler for his views, his rhetorical skill, and his stamina. "There was, however, one aspect of his behavior," Hook wrote in his autobiography, "that I found so painful that I could hardly bear to be in the same room with him when he let himself go. This was his rude and cruel treatment of his wife, who though obviously hurt by his remarks seemed to dote on him all the more."
Scammell does not cite Hook's observation, but then he has plenty like it to choose from. The wife concerned was the former Mamaine Paget, a lovely Englishwoman whom many men found adorable. Edmund Wilson unsuccessfully proposed marriage to her (and Orwell unsuccessfully proposed marriage to her identically lovely twin sister, Celia). Though Koestler verbally and on a few occasions physically roughed up Mamaine, she was devoted to him, even after they separated, in 1952. (She died, following an asthma attack, in 1954.) Any number of women seem to have found Koestler irresistible, and many men had the same reaction that Hook did—they found the appeal mystifying.
Scammell is obliged to devote many pages to making sense of this aspect of his subject's life. After his death, Koestler was accused by one woman of rape, and though Scammell manages to throw some reasonable doubt on the charge, he does concede that Koestler's seduction methods, which he seems to have tried out on every attractive woman who crossed his path—"Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long," Cyril Connolly told Edmund Wilson, "one could not trust him half an hour with one's wife"—were based on the belief that "coercion added spice to sexual intercourse." In a letter to Mamaine after their first sexual encounter, Koestler refers, somewhat apologetically, to what he calls "an element of initial rape."
"I always picked one type," Koestler wrote in his diary after Mamaine died, "beautiful cinderellas, infantile and inhibited, prone to be subdued by bullying." This certainly describes Cynthia, his last wife, who committed suicide alongside him, and whom one of their friends described as a dogged Shetland pony. Koestler was an utter traditionalist about gender: he used his wives and mistresses as secretaries, demanded that they keep his house and cook his dinner, and, in bed, insisted (according to one unusually spunky partner) on being on top. "I said to him once: 'I want a change, I'm getting tired of being pinned down like a butterfly,' " this woman explained to Scammell. " 'Ah,' he said, 'but that's what I like, pinning you down like a butterfly.' " We can get another intimate view of our subject from Beauvoir, who spent one drunken night with Koestler. She made him into a character called Scriassine in "The Mandarins," her remarkable roman à clef about intellectuals in Paris after the Liberation. In his sexual encounter with the narrator in that novel, he is domineering, but also desperate. The woman gets no pleasure.
Scammell suggests that standards for sexual conduct have changed since the nineteen-forties and fifties, and it may be true that fewer men today regard physical coercion as a permissible, if inelegant, romantic technique. It might also be true, though, that opportunities for women of the kind who found themselves entangled with Koestler have changed, and that women like Mamaine Paget no longer feel that succumbing to the sexual demands of famous or interesting men is the only means of entry afforded them into a life of art and ideas.
Leaving aside the psychology of the women in Koestler's life, what about the psychology of Koestler? Scammell thinks that Koestler suffered from manic depression, and he cites the symptoms listed by Kay Redfield Jamison in her book "Touched with Fire": "an inflated self-esteem, as well as a certainty of conviction about the correctness and importance of their ideas . . . chaotic patterns of personal and professional relationships . . . spending excessive amounts of money, impulsive involvements in questionable endeavors, reckless driving, extreme impatience, intense and impulsive romantic or sexual relations, and volatility." Those characterizations do fit Koestler, right down to the reckless driving, but evidence of depression, although there are plenty of self-reports, is thinner. He agonized, but every writer agonizes. If we are clinically inclined, a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder might better meet the case (I quote from the D.S.M.): "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy."
Why did Koestler renounce political activism (and, with a few exceptions, live up to that declaration) after 1955? As Scammell explains, Koestler had encountered difficulties when he came to the United States because he did not recognize the difference between left-wing anti-Communists like the editors of Partisan Review, to which he contributed; liberal anti-Communists like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with whom he consorted; and right-wingers like Joseph McCarthy, with whom he also met. In the beginning, he probably didn't think American anti-Communist sectarianism was very significant. He had the view, not unreasonable, that an anti-Communist is an anti-Communist, whatever the color of his other views, and that anti-Communists ought to band together.
At some point, he must have realized that in a Cold War world the petty differences among European anti-Communists, a world he knew from the inside out, no longer mattered. The Americans were in charge. Events from now on would be dictated by American politics, not by the subtleties of French fellow-travelling apologetics. And so he set off after mind waves, alternative modes of consciousness, intelligent design—cosmic mysteries. He must, in the end, have been something of a mystery to himself. And, even after this exhaustive combing of the record, he remains something of a mystery to us—a slightly mad dreidel that spun out of Central Europe and across the history of a bloody century. It's a story that was worth writing and that is still worth hearing. ♦


text:
matthewtutt needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 414 designs submitted by 90 freelance designers.
"ITSY" ...... We are looking for a simple logo design for our gourmet sandwich outlet, the logo can be typeface only or can include a logo that can be used on printed material without the typeface, & still makes us instantly recognisable.
Logo in either UPPERCASE or lowercase, any colour choices, variations for us to consider most welcome.
Get your creative juices flowing.
Many thanks & good luck to all.
UPDATE: We are not warming to any "obvious" representations of food, i.e pics etc, it really makes the image less classy.
Also we are not getting many logo's with the typeface, and as per brief we are looking for that, if it is needed and enhances the design, MORE LOGO & TYPEFACE NOT JUST FONT IDEAS ARE NEEDED thanks
Accepted File Formats:
Vector Formats (.eps, .pdf or .ai); Layered Formats (.psd or .tiff)
We will rate & feedback ALL of your entries so you get an idea of which direction we are heading.
All entries regardless of star rating (unless dismissed) will be in the running as this is a joint final decision.
On previous contests we held, it really helped us visualise how the logo would work in the "real" world when the designs were superimposed onto generic promotional/vehicle/premises pictures. This is not mandatory at all, but if you have the ability to show us this, it really can swing opinion. (especially when there are more than one opinions to swing)
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


text:
First off, I need to make up soe questions. There can be a specific topic, or I can just choose anything.
As to the scoring, this is how I do it for each question:
First, I count up how many people gave each different answer. So four people might have said X, and three people said Y, with only one person saying Z.
Therefore, everyone who said X scores FOUR points for that question. The people answering Y get THREE points each, and the person answering Z gets ONE point. This is all very well for correct answers, but there will be occasions where someone gives an incorrect answer to the question. If a player gives an incorrect answer then they score TWICE the highest individual score for that question. So, in our example above the highest score was for X - four points. Therefore an incorrect answer to this question scores EIGHT points. (If every player has given a unique answer for one particular question, then incorrect answers get off lightly, as their score will only be TWO points.)
Repeat this process for the other nine questions, and you will have TEN scores for each player. Each player's ten individual scores are then MULTIPLIED together to give their final score. This means that in theory a player's score can be 1 (1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1) - ten unique answers. This is only going to happen if you give a wide choice of answers to a question. Of course, there is nothing stopping you only allowing three or four choices for the questions, but the final scores will be closer, and a lot of people will have the same score.
And that's more or less it. I'll try not to leave loopholes in the questions, as people like me will exploit them and demand one point for a unique answer.
- 1. Name a team in the top 4 English leagues who got promoted or relegated at the end if the 2015/16 season (top 4 leagues before relegation/promotion)
2. Name a player who has been bitten by Luis Suarez
3. Name a team who has won the Euros
4. Name a season in which Wanderers won the FA Cup
5. Name a ground that will host a European Championships match in 2020
6. Name country that has hosted the FIFA World Cup
And finally, 7. Name a team in the top 13 UEFA rankings as of the last time they were released


text: It's infrequent that a professional skateboarder is granted carte blanche to take over an art gallery. But in Ed Templeton's case, it's common enough, and with good reason. His work manages to be visually daring and experimental but never egregiously so. Opening Saturday night at Culver City's Roberts & Tilton, "Map of the Inner War" is characteristic of Templeton's exhibitions, collecting over 200 sculptures, silkscreen, photography, paintings and other media into larger installations classed as "image clouds." These image clouds indiscriminately group people, places and themes captured in Templeton's work to generate an exciting presentation of everyday banality. Also opening tomorrow night in the gallery's Project Room is Matt Leines' "The Great Gates of Zenith." Both shows run through mid-December.


text:
Are you in a new relationship? That's great! However, not knowing how to handle it is not so great. What should you say? What should you do? How should you act? Do not panic. You can handle a new relationship if you start by knowing each other, communicating and taking your time.
Method 01
Start to know each other
Be yourself. Let your new partner have the opportunity to know more about you and your virtues. Do not change just to please their tastes and desires. Remember that if you did not like what you really are, I would not be with you.
- Be honest about the things that you like and dislike, as well as about the things you agree with.
- For example, if you do not like basketball, do not pretend that you are excited about the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship.
- If you like to draw, show some of your drawings.
Converse Even if you know enough about your partner to be in a relationship, there are many things you do not know about her and vice versa. The more you know your partner, the better they can understand each other and their relationship will be even stronger.
- Talk about everyday things, for example, about how your day was, funny things your friends did or your plans for the weekend.
- Talk to your partner to find out more about their dreams and goals. Share your hopes and aspirations with her.
- Talk about your fears, worries and even about your mistakes. Sharing these things will form a bond between you.
Pay attention to the small details. You will learn a lot about your partner by listening to them, but you will learn a lot more by observing them and paying attention to other details about them. Realize what kind of music, movies and TV shows you like. What things make her laugh? What things make her angry? What things do you like or comment on online?
Do new things. Because your partner and you are two different people, they will have things in common, but they will also have different interests, opinions, among others. You should be willing to do things your way from time to time and maybe you could discover something that you like or learn something new.
- Let me tell you about your hobbies and teach you how to do them, as we all love to feel expert in something. You can also teach him how to perform your favorite activities.
- Listen and consider your opinion about the place you want to go, the activities you want to do, how to do certain things, among others.
- Do not feel pressured to do something you do not want. You can try to do new things without leaving aside your ethics, values and beliefs.
Spend time together. The best way to get to know each other is to spend time together. Try to interact in different environments so that you can experience its different facets. [3]
- Spending time alone will give them the opportunity to be able to pay attention to each other without distractions.
- Carrying out group activities will allow you to observe how you interact with other people.
- Not only pay attention to things that seem great, but also to the things that make her feel comfortable or uncomfortable, the type of activities or environments that she likes, among other things.
Spend a separate time. Although you probably want to spend all your time together, it's also a good idea to spend time apart. Doing so will allow them to have things to talk about when they are together. Also, this will give you time to reflect on your partner and their relationship.
- Do activities and go to different places without your partner. Remember that before you started your relationship you had certain interests. Do not abandon them.
- Give yourself time for your friends and family. Remember that, although you are in a relationship, there are also people in your life who need to spend time with you and who want to spend time with you.
- Make sure you give yourself time to take care of your responsibilities (clean your room, finish your homework, feed your fish, among other things).
Method 02
Learn to communicate
Speak and listen to her. Maintaining good communication will help you improve your new relationship and allow you to get to know each other better. It will also help them reduce misunderstandings and confusions. However, remember that communication is reciprocal. Make sure you listen to your partner as much as you talk.
- Even if it's just a text message that says "good morning" or an afternoon call, communicate frequently. Everyone likes to feel that someone thinks about them.
- Give yourself time to sit down and talk. Talk about your day, your goals, your fears, your friends, among other things.
- Listen to what I have to say and share with you. Use your conversations as a way to learn more about each other and support each other.
- Talk about serious and important things in person.
Say what you think. When something bothers you, say something about it. It is better to say what you think when something bothers you instead of letting it go and letting it become a big problem in the future. Remember that your relationship is still new and your partner still does not know all your limits.
- Tell him what you think calmly and privately, and do not use an accusatory tone.
- For example, do not shout something like "You're a thoughtless! You have told our problems to other people! "In the commercial center.
- Instead, wait to be alone and say something like, "Hello, honey, I want to tell you that it bothers me that you talk about our personal problems with strangers. Can we keep our problems between us? "
Disagree In any relationship, there are times when both will not agree and that is normal. The manner in which you communicate during a disagreement (rather than the simple fact of disagreement) will determine how long your new relationship will last. [8] Relationships are measured by the quality of reconciliation compared to the frequency or intensity of differences.
- The differences only mean that both are different people who have two different ways of seeing or doing things.
- Focus on what is right and not on who is right. To strengthen your relationship, it is better to try to solve the problem instead of blaming yourself.
- Speak with respect and avoid saying things just because you are upset or feel hurt.
- Be able to "agree to disagree" on certain topics. Accept that there are certain things that you will simply never see in the same way. If they are not important issues, it is good to accept that everyone has their own perspective.
- Focus on expressing all your feelings during a discussion. Express all your feelings, emotions and opinions about the situation. However, you must then focus on fixing your relationship.
- Call your partner after an argument. Ask him something like "Are you okay?" or "Is there something that bothers you yet?" Then, think of a special way to solve your discussion.
Forget some things. Although it is important that you share your concerns, it is not necessary that you signal every insignificant aspect. Surely there will be things of your partner that bother you, but there are things that are not worth discussing or mentioning. Accept that some things are just charming crazies of your personality, just like your partner does with you.
- If your problem is not against your ethics and values, it does not hurt anybody and does not merit them to end, try to forget it.
- For example, the way your partner says "peacefully" instead of "specifically" may be a bit annoying, but it is not a problem that you need to end your relationship, so let it go.
Method 03
Take the relationship calmly
Talk about your relationship. Because this is new, they need to talk about the things they want and agree to the terms of privacy. It may be a bit strange at the beginning, but this rules out any confusion or misunderstanding that may arise later on.
- Talk about the kind of intimacy with which you agree. For example, holding hands, hugging, kissing, and snuggling, among others.
- You can say something like "It's kind of weird to talk about this, but I want to tell you what things I agree with. I really like to hold hands, but I do not agree with …"
- Talk about how fast or slow you want things to move between you, as well as feeling confident in every step you take.
- For example, you can say something like "I want to take things slowly and enjoy the process of getting to know each other".
Take one step at a time. There is no reason to hurry. Of course they will want to have physical contact, but remember that they are just beginning a relationship and there is still a lot of time ahead. [11] Learn in other ways before having intimacy. Taking one step at a time will allow you to enjoy each step of the process of getting to know each other.
- Consider your emotional bond as a point of reference by which you can calculate if you are ready to have physical intimacy. Do you feel close enough, safe and open to express your feelings through physical intimacy?
- Remember that neither of you has to do something you do not want to do or rush if you do not feel ready.
- The simple fact that they have set limits does not mean that they should go straight to them.
- For example, if you agree that your limit is kissing, do not start by kissing. Start by holding hands for a while and enjoy that closeness. Then hug and finally kiss.
Take the first step. When you are in a new relationship, you may both feel a little nervous about taking the first step. Once you talk about your physical limits, you probably should (or want) to be the one who takes the first step.
- If you feel nervous, take a deep breath.
- You can ask him if it's okay to do it. It can be something very tender to say something like "Can I hold your hand?" Or "Can I kiss you?"
- Do not worry if you feel a little strange at the beginning, just remember that your relationship is new and you are still getting to know each other.
Method 04
Evaluate the relationship
Talk about your relationship. Although their relationship is new, talking about how things are going between you will help them solve any problem that comes close. Talk about what works and what they like about their relationship, as well as about things that displease them.
Talk about the future of your relationship. Have an honest and realistic conversation about the future of your relationship. Making sure they both think the same about the future of their relationship will allow them to build a new relationship.
Accept when things do not work. Sometimes, relationships do not work and the sooner you accept it, the better for both of you. If they have come to know each other, have tried to communicate, have spent time together (and separated), have talked about their relationship and neither of them feels happy, you should consider talking about the possibility of continuing or not with it.
- Carry out the interests and new things that your partner proposes in equal amounts (50:50).
- Try not to be nervous. Remember that you like that person and you love her. Just try to enjoy your new relationship.


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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN River Falls
Always for the students...
Always teaching to the best of our ability...
Always so our students may achieve their greater purpose.
In the fall of 1912 the Agriculture Department began classes in just three rooms in South Hall with two and one-half instructors. Fifty-three men enrolled for the first school year. In 2012, we marked 100 years since that humble beginning. While much has changed, much remains the same… our dedication to students, our passion for teaching, and our desire to help students fulfill their greater purpose.
Centennial Courtyard Dedication & Ice Cream Social
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
The year-long celebration of our Centennial began with our Annual Awards Banquet and the Rededication of the Agriculture Hall of Fame in April 2012. CAFES students, faculty, staff, and alumni alike participated in a myriad of events throughout the year from alumni receptions and reunions to contests and scavenger hunts! Here are some highlights of the past year's Centennial activities...
"Resolved that the following courses of study for a School of Educational Agriculture in connection with the River Falls State Normal School is hereby established to be put into operation as far as feasible September 1, 1912."
Board of Regents Minutes
June 1912
2012-2013 Centennial Celebration
CAFES History
Centennial Committee
Centennial Events
Get Involved
Capture CAFES Photo Contest
Centennial Scrapbook
Share Memories
Centennial Theme
Centennial Wallpaper


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How did the dastardly king of hay fever become so potent and so widespread?
Allergic Living investigates.
The ragweed in my backyard in the Ottawa Valley waves at me smugly every morning. It has formed a towering wall along the back corner of the small meadow we've let flourish as an environmental gesture. All the other wildflowers in the meadow co-exist happily, but the ragweed, which characteristically found a toehold in the least promising soil, has now started to elbow its way toward to the front. Unfortunately, its braggadocio is well-founded.
Not only is ragweed an aggressive competitor, it is an able procreator that produces pollen of unrivaled allergic potency. Its pollen triggers reactions in up to 75 per cent of hay fever sufferers, depending on where they live in North America, making this one weed to be reckoned with.
Operation Proliferate
The tens of millions of Americans who now suffer from ragweed allergies can thank Canada for their misery. Common ragweed's likely point of origin in North America was Ontario, according to Dr. Peter Creticos, clinical director of the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. He jokingly calls ragweed "Canada's gift to the colonies," referring to the plant's ability to dump hundreds of thousand of tons of dust-like pollen across up to 1,000 kilometres of the continent every year.
Now ragweed can be found all across eastern and central Canada and the United States, though there is thankfully little of it west of the Rockies. The crown-shaped seeds are highly mobile and have even deployed overseas, particularly near existing and former Canadian and U.S. military bases in Western Europe.
Creticos suspects the seeds hitched a ride on equipment shipped from North America during and after the wars, then launched a horticultural offensive into Eastern Europe, where it now enjoys a strong presence. For allergy sufferers, misery loves company.
Flourishing on the Farm
Back in North America, common ragweed and its big brother, giant ragweed, are causing havoc in the crop farming sector. Clarence Swanton, a University of Guelph professor and weed scientist, says ragweed grows well along roadsides and train tracks, but really loves the rich, loosely tilled soil of corn, soybean and cereal crop fields.
"Ragweed seedlings emerge early and therefore are very competitive with the crop for light, water and nutrients," he says. Swanton estimates bean crop losses in Ontario alone range from 8 to 30 per cent, representing millions of dollars annually.
The Ontario government's chief of weed control, Mike Cowbrough, says uncontrolled ragweed can cause yield losses of up to 80 per cent in some operations – a financial disaster for farmers. He says ragweed is one of the toughest weeds to control: it takes repeated mowings to prevent the plant from blossoming, its seeds can remain dormant for up to 50 years, and several strains have become resistant to traditional herbicides.
In the United States especially, some ragweed has even become immune to glyphosate (known in the retail sector as Roundup), once thought to be the magic bullet for weed control.
Frustrated farmers with glyphosate-resistant ragweed are creating herbicidal blends, incorporating older herbicides like 2,4-D and dicamba in hopes that their ragweed is not resistant to those mixtures. But farmers who market organic produce are in a conundrum, since herbicides are a no-no. Control often has to be done mechanically with a cultivator, which can speed soil erosion, or even manually.
Soybean farmers must also contend with ragweed's staining quality, which can turn the pristine white soybean – and the tofu it's used to make – to an unappealing shade of green.
Next Page: The Problem Grows


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Delivery Times
We strive to deliver between the hours of 8am - 4pm, Monday to Friday, with the exception of bank holidays and between Christmas and New Year. We deliver nationwide.
Our standard delivery service is within 7 working days, depending on product * this can vary due to stock levels, excessive demand, and adverse weather conditions.
Once your order has been processed and provided we have your contact details, we will email you with your expected delivery date. If your order is direct from a nominated supplier or courier, they will be in contact with you directly to arrange delivery.
Provided we have your details we will email you again to notify you that your order has been dispatched.
Delivery Specifics
* We aim to deliver any product that is either bespoke or handmade within 21 days, but occasionally if treatment is required, or it is complex in design, delivery times may increase. We will advise you of this at time of order.
Occasionally there may be times when you require orders to be split into two or more deliveries. If this is an option please contact our logistics team to discuss whether additional costs will apply.
Equally there may be times when our delivery team needs to part-deliver your order due to the complexity of own logistical dilemmas. You will not be charged for additional drops and again we will advise at this time of this necessity.
IMPORTANT: Please do not book tradesmen until your order has been received and checked by you as we cannot be held responsible for any third party charges whilst waiting.
Delivery Day
Our dedicated delivery team work solely for Wooden Supplies. Provided we have your contact details our helpful drivers will call you approximately an hour before your delivery is due. They will deliver your goods to either kerb side, or a driveway entrance.
If you require special arrangements please talk to our logistic team to discuss any specific requirements prior to delivery as this may incur additional costs.
It is imperative you inform prior to delivery of any potential access issues, loading restrictions, etc. that we need to be aware of to help us with the speedy delivery of your goods.
Delivery Costs
FREE delivery is available within selected delivery zones or order sizes.
Collection Service
If you have opted to collect your order from our store, please wait for one of our sales team to contact you before visiting the shop, just to make sure we have the whole order ready and waiting for you to collect.
Please click here for our Returns Policy and our Terms and Conditions


text:
Information from the CLG
About Us & Terms of Reference
Notts Wildlife Trust Presentation to CLG [Janice Bradley]
IGas Submissions & Responses from Authorities
Request for Scoping Opinion October 2015
Response fron NCC to Request for Scoping Opinion December 2015
IGas Publications
North Notts Newsletter [Dec. 2015]
Infrastructure Act 2015 Energy
Shale Gas & Water 2016
Lifecycle of A Shale Well (IGas video)
Brownfield Briefing Papers 2015
Clarifying Legal Issues Associated with Shale Gas Exploration in the UK [Eluned Watson. Pinsent Masons LLP]
Identifying Potential Contaminants of Concern & How to Manage Them [Sarah Scott.EA]
Implication of Fracking for Groundwater [Rob Ward.BGS]
Onshore Oil & Gas Exploration: Environmental Risks & the Regulatory Framework in England [Tony Grayling. EA]
Operational Perspective: Managing Environmental Risks Associated with Unconventional Oil & Gas Exploration & Production [Steve Thompsett. UKOOG]
Shale Gas & Water [Mike Summersgill. CIWEM]
Strategies for the Treatment & Disposal of Wastewater from Fracking [John Ord. MWH Global]
Unconventional Gas in Scotland – Environmental Risk & Regulations [Emma Taylor. SEPA]
What is NPL [Marieke Beckmann. NPL]
Brownfield Briefing Papers 2016
Update on Work Being Undertaken to Explore Traffic – Related Impacts from Fracking Operations [Dr Neil Thorpe, Dr Paul Goodman, Newcastle University]
Examining the UK Regulatory Framework for the Development and Exploitation of Unconventional Gas Sources [Emma Taylor, SEPA]
Legal Perspective: Examining Unconventional Gas Development Within the Current UK Legislative Framework [Elizabeth Shepherd, Eversheds]
Exploring the Latest Work Undertaken to Investigate the Effects of Fracking on the Subsurface [Mike Stephenson, BGS]
Strategies for the Effective Disposal & Treatment of Waste Water to Minimise Contamination [Anne Johnstone, Dan Price, Rambol Environ]l
Supply and Connection: Assessing the Challenges of Connecting Different Unconventional Gas sources to the Grid [Lorna Millington, National Grid]
Examining why Current Exploration Planning Applications have been Refused & Tips for Overcoming the Hurdles Going Forward [Mark Hill, North York Moors NPA]
Air Quality Impacts of Unconventional Hydrocarbon Extraction [Pete Edwards, University of York]
Managing Environmental Impacts Unconventional Gas Exploration & Production [Charlotte Danvers, EA]
Examining UK Framework Development & Exploration Unconventional Gas Sources [Bethan Winter, Wales & West Utilities Ltd.]
Managing Environmental Risks: Shale Gas Exploration & Production [Graham Dean, Reach Exploration]
Outlining H&S Regulatory Regime: Onshore Oil & Gas Developments [Tony Almond]
Misson Springs
Prof Smythe Report Misson Springs
Possible Impacts of Shale Gas
Shale Gas Rural Economy Impacts (Unredacted) DECC
House Prices. JLL Report
Investigating the traffic-related environmental impacts of hydraulic-fracturing (fracking) operations
The Regulators
Health & Safety Executive (Presentation CLG 11th February 2016)
HSE Guidance for Planners
HSE Guidance Installations & Wells Regs. 1996
Environment Agency (Presentation CLG 11th February 2016)
NCC Determination Documents
HSE Response
Coal Authority Response
All NCC Documents
Tinker Lane Restoration 18th July 2019
CLG Site Visit Tinker Lane 3rd July 2018
Eric_Walton_Hi. Res_6th_Nov
Phantom Video_8thDec
Hidden Rig Revealed
Doe Green Coal Bed Methane Demonstration Site
Privacy Policy
Now Two High and Growing?
October 25, 2018
Image from this morning.


text:
Global Electrodialysis Equipment Market report 2024 focuses on the major product Types and end-use verticals for the key players. Global Electrodialysis Equipment Market research report also provides an analysis of the market share, revenue forecasts, segmentation, and geographic regions of the market. The Global Electrodialysis Equipment market research report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of Global Industry. The report on Electrodialysis Equipment market claims this industry to emerge as one of the most lucrative spaces in the ensuing years, exhibiting a modest growth rate over the forecast period. Enumerating a highly exhaustive outline of this industry sphere, this report is also inclusive of the total valuation that the industry presently holds, a brief segmentation of this market, and growth opportunities of this industry in addition to its geographical expanse.
The Electrodialysis Equipment market can be segmented on the basis of product, end-use application, and geography. On the basis of product type, the Electrodialysis Equipment market can be categorized into Continuous Electrodialysis, Batch Electrodialysis. Based on the end-use verticals, the Electrodialysis Equipment market can be segmented into Seawater Desalination, Laboratory, Recycling Environments. Furthermore, on the basis of geography, the Electrodialysis Equipment market is classified into five major regions including the Middle East, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa, and Latin America. North America is the most dominant market for Electrodialysis Equipments owing to the presence of well-established Electrodialysis Equipment manufacturers.
Request a FREE Sample Report of Electrodialysis Equipment Market at: https://market.biz/report/global-electrodialysis-equipment-market-icrw/173629/#requestforsample
Electrodialysis Equipment Market Leading Manufacturers Are PCCell GmbH, Evoqua Water Technologies LLC, C-Tech Innovation Ltd, ASTOM, AGC ENGINEERING, EURODIA, MEGA, Hydramet, SnowPure Water Technologies, GE Water & Process Technologies, Saltworks Technologies Inc, Electrosynthesis Company, WGM Sistemas, Poromil, Innovative Enterprise, Shandong Tianwei Membrane Technology
Electrodialysis Equipment Market by Types:
Continuous Electrodialysis, Batch Electrodialysis
Electrodialysis Equipment Market by End-Use Verticals:
Seawater Desalination, Laboratory, Recycling Environments
Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers
1.North America (United States, Mexico, and Canada)
2.Europe (France, UK, Germany, Russia, and Italy)
3.Asia-Pacific (Korea, India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia)
4.South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, etc.)
5.Middle East and Africa (UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and South Africa)
Do Inquiry Before Purchasing Report Here: https://market.biz/report/global-electrodialysis-equipment-market-icrw/173629/#inquiry
Available Customizations:
With the given market data, Market.Biz Research offers customizations according to the company's specific needs. The following customization options are available for the report:
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text:
Sugarpill is one of those brands I had heard of many times but had never tried, even though their vivid colours are right up my street!
Sugarpill was created by Amy Doan, the designer behind clothing brand Shrinkle, is a cruelty free and vegan friendly range, with the emphasis on fun, bright colours. Their newest collection is called Cold Chemistry and consists of four shimmery eyeshadows – I have 2 here to show you.
The four colours:
Soot & Stars: Metallic gunmetal with prismatic sparkle.
Diamond Eyes: Satin white with crystalline sheen. An excellent brow highlight color!
Elemental Chaos: Deep grape shimmer with iridescent blue undertones.
Subterranean: Lustrous peacock green with navy blue undertones.
My first impression of Sugarpill is that it reminds me of Urban Decay, or at least Urban Decay a few years ago when it had a more raw, gothic edge. Even though the solo eyeshadows are in a plastic case with a clear lid (I sometimes find this cheap looking), these palettes are solidly made and don't feel cheap:
Looking at the eyeshadows at first glance, they looked very much like their descriptions.
Diamond Eyes:
A perfect shimmer white highlighter, very pearly.
It's sheer enough to look pretty – I find frosted whites can be unforgiving sometimes (even though they're very much just to highlight) and can look garish.
I love greens and blues – this looks like a dirty petrol green to me and it swatches as such. There is definitely black running through it:
Now on the first swatches I thought the eyeshadows felt a bit powdery – but after that initial tough, the eyeshadow underneath was super soft and extremely pigmented – no doubt about it, you wouldn't have to layer this colour too much!
As you can see there are glittery particles in the eyeshadow but they are fine and not bothersome. Sometimes my eyes find glitters uncomfortable, but this one applies well.
On the eyes – both colours. Sorry not the best application but you get the idea! The peacock shade is extremely pigmented and is one to be worn strong!
I also found these eyeshadows wore well (I just used concealer as a base) and they really clung on to my eyes.
I can't think of anything particularly negative about these eyeshadows, in fact, the colours are interesting and pigmented…what's not to like? I don't buy single eyeshadows often, not if there's nothing special about them (I prefer palettes) but these colours are definitely interesting enough to belong in their own pan!
I hope they bring out lots more shades in the future. Until then…I have my eye on their purples!
Available in a sleek new palette design with mirror (£24) and in individual compacts (£8.50).
See the range here.
*PR Samples


text:
Moderators: JohnV, Arron, garym
joycecaroll wrote:Wen't do a GP today. Fresh from med school. She gave me clinical and said it was ok, but she clearly saw twitches on my tonuge. She got worried and referred me to a neuro. Again. Said it might take a few months before I get an appt. I asked her what she saw, if it really was fasciculations. She said she saw twitches. Now I'm so scared. I thought I just had them when I felt them, but now I'm thinking I have them all the time and don't feel them.
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text: My friend Claire and I decided to be a little weird tonight. We decided to do a photoshoot-very fun! The theme of the clothes kind of changed from florals to 80's to, uh, birds, but it was extremely fun to do. We are calling it "Suburban Wasteland" and it will go in our in-the-making magazine...we have a lot of extra time, ha. A lot of these were found in a costume box in the dark of my basement, but here they are-enjoy!


text:
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text: Devalaous Posted September 2, 2009 Is the other TNT2 approved by TeamTNT like this is? If not, that would be the one to have to adjust the name in my view. Anyway, this needs a variation of Wormhole's concept, as that map is one of the defining TNT experiences to me (If you can make a new track for it that one-ups the current one, which makes the atmosphere go through the roof, you will have my respect for a long while). Other such things are the rudimentary beds, computer stations etc that give you a sense of where you are, but no so overly designed that the levle itself is compromised (Others may disagree, but I never got the feeling of "LOOK AT MY MAP, SCREW THE MONSTERS" that I get in some wads that do the same), lots of machinery (MAP06's pistony things, Shipping/Respawning's conveyerbelt, Steel Works's crushers. Alos on Steel Works, that level pushed out out of your comfort zones by forcing you back through a path made to make you think it was one-way only. Naturallly, thers also one token egyptian level. Just dont make it buggy ;] 0 Share this post Link to post