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It's indeed a rare thing when an entire silent film lost for over 80 years shows up in screenable condition, and that's exactly what the Nederlands Filmmuseum discovered just a couple of seasons ago. Milestone has secured the R1 rights resulting in this amusing and thoughtful DVD release. In this case, it isn't just a silent movie, it's a gushy romance starring two Hollywood greats, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. Not a whole lot of film from the early 1920s still exists of either of these stars.
The museum's restoration was accomplished with the help of ING Real Estate and Turner Classic Movies. Milestone sweetens the deal with a number of attractive extras, including an entire second feature (more below).
Devotées of silent drama will probably take Beyond the Rocks in stride, but the rest of us are going to need to do some adjusting, as Elinor Glyn's romantic fantasy definitely belongs to the tastes and manners of another age. Silent movie expert Robert S. Birchard used to describe 'naíeve' silent dramas as "simple stories for simple people," and that's exactly what Miss Glynn delivers. Beyond the Rocks gathers together several desired romantic clichés and doesn't waste time with psychological complexity or literary sophistication.
Actually, it's more like a fairy tale. The sweet young Theodora lives in a charming seaside cottage, thinks only of her father and romance, and is barely aware of the mercenary intentions of her female relatives. The film presumes that there is no life below a certain income level; one either has money or doesn't really exist. Theodora is tricked into thinking her father wants her to marry the portly and unromantic Josiah Brown.
But Fate cannot separate Theodora and Lord Bracondale; whenever one is near the other can think of nothing else. Bracondale dashes to her rescue not once but twice. He worships her favorite flower. She tries to send him away. He manages to take a role opposite her in a pageant-like outdoor play. Theodora finally writes two letters, one telling Bracondale that she loves him but must never see him again, and one to her husband saying she's hurrying to his side. A troublemaking friend switches the letters.
Beyond the Rocks is finely attuned to the expectations of the 1922 audience. Gloria Swanson's Theodora's typical "will she or won't she" dilemma is accompanied by much emotional suffering, in high-fashion gowns, of course. When the subject of conversation turns to romance in the time of King Louis, we're offered a brief 'reverie' scene of Rudolph and Gloria posed romantically in elaborate costumes from the French court. Rudolph's character is conceived completely from the female point of view. Always well dressed, he exists only to be handsome and seek the woman of his dreams. His love for Theodora is a refined impulse: Yes, he'd like to take her away, but only when she's ready. Watching Valentino's quietly simmering bedroom eyes, we understand completely the appeal of George Raft a decade later. In his early pictures the American actor seems to be consciously imitating Valentino's screen image.
Sam Wood (For Whom the Bell Tolls, King's Row) directs efficiently but without much of a hint of his later style. Exteriors are in general more expressive than the standard interior work. Mattes and good art direction suggest the various international locales. In the Sahara, Josiah Brown sees a few pillars in the sand dunes and remarks bitterly that his expedition hardly seems worth it. The cutaway shot that looks like a backyard miniature, but a few moments later we discover that the 'ancient ruins' are actually a full-sized set.
Beyond the Rocks also takes pains to work its way out of a story situation that censors might interpret as immoral. The cure for the technically unconsummated adulterous situation is a heavy dose of sacrifice all around. Discovering that Theodora's love is an illusion, the husband Josiah rushes off to the Sahara (exotic location #4) so as to become a victim of 'marauding Arabs.' Theodora and Bracondale catch up just in time to receive Josiah's blessing as he succumbs. The lovers are therefore left to pursue a presumably idyllic future. This rosy fantasy stands in strong contrast to the later fatalistic look at adultery in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. In that classic a dripping inter-title suggests a solution for an adulterous couple worrying about his wife: "She could get drowned."
Milestone and New Yorker's DVD of Beyond the Rocks is a fine transfer of the recovered film, 95% of which is in great shape. A few scenes are a bit shrunken, two brief sequences are marred by partial decomposition, and one scene is missing completely. An extra shows us that we needn't miss it -- it's the part of the outdoor play where Theodora discovers that Bracondale has replaced her 'co-star.'
Martin Scorsese is on camera to introduce the recovered and restored film. Composer Henny Vrienten has two different scores for the film, one with added sound effects. Beyond the expected galleries of art and stills are a docu on the restoration and on about the eccentric Dutch film collector in whose cache of films the feature was found. The collector's hobby elicits mixed feelings. On one hand we're grateful that the man preserved the films but on the other we have to realize that it was almost accidental: The collector's prints were in a disorganized state and haphazardly stored. That the 80 year-old film wasn't reduced to nitrate powder is a real fluke.
Milestone adds two more attractive extras. A 1955 audio recording of Gloria Swanson lasts a full 85 minutes as she talks about various aspects of her life and career. And the disc offers a second feature as well, a 54-minute 1919 Mae Murray comedy also co-starring Rudolph Valentino, The Delicious Little Devil. It has a newly recorded score.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Beyond the Rocks rates: Movie: Very Good Video: Excellent (from a good surviving copy) Sound: Excellent Supplements: Martin Scorsese introduction, artwork, stills, audio recording of Gloria Swanson, docus, bonus feature Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: July 21, 2006
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Rep. José Javier Rodríguez, D-Miami, is pushing for more accountability from the state's tax incentive program, which provides tax breaks for companies who agree to create jobs in Florida.
Under a bill field by Rodríguez, the state would have to provide detailed information about the type of jobs created by companies receiving taxpayer incentives. Florida would also have to launch an online database to allow taxpayers to track the progress of the companies receiving incentives. An online database was launched last year, but it has only limited information.
The tax credit program is facing renewed scrutiny this year, as lawmakers look more closely at the pros and cons of giving companies tax deals to lure them to Florida. Last year, one of the companies went bust after receiving $20 million in taxpayer funds from the state.
While Gov. Rick Scott and his top officials in charge of the incentives program say the tax incentives are helping to create thousands of jobs, several bills filed by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seek additional transparency. Sen. Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, is pushing a bill that would require an independent review of all incentives, providing information about the return on the state's investment.
"Our state's economic development programs are a major strategy for diversifying our economy and making it more competitive for the future" said Rodríguez, in a statement. "Evaluating taxpayer-funded incentives with maximum transparency is important for all Floridians but particularly for those Florida businesses whose competitors are receiving tax dollars to deliver on jobs or investment promises. This bill seeks to restore credibility to economic development programs which have recently come under fire for failing to fulfill their missions."

subset: commoncrawl


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Pending sales of US homes fell 1.1 percent in June; pace remains slower than in 2013
Fewer Americans signed contracts to buy homes in June, as the real estate market appears to have cooled off this summer.
The National Association of Realtors says its seasonally adjusted pending home sales index slipped 1.1 percent to 102.7 last month. The index remains 7.3 percent below its level a year ago.
Sales have been slowed by a mix of meager wage growth, rising home prices, and mortgage rates that rose steadily through the end of last year.
Pending sales are a barometer of future purchases. A one- to two-month lag usually exists between a contract and a completed sale.
Signed contracts in June fell in the Northeast and South. They rose slightly in the Midwest and West. Pending sales in all four U.S. regions are below last year's pace.


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Some said I was too young. But I think the fact that I was just twelve years old when I went to Tanzania and climbed Kilimanjaro with my dad meant that I still had that fleeting openness to life that comes from having a mind that is not yet fully formed. The scenes and experiences I took in over the course of that trip shaped me in a way that still persists today. I wrote a bit about what climbing Kilimanjaro meant to me in my story, "Discovering a Certain Grandness of Life," for Dreamers and Doers. This is a collection of stories, published by the Ladies Trekking Club, by women from across the world whose lives have in some way been shaped by the fact they climbed to the top of Africa; it is an anthology that is edifying, enlightening, and inspiring. But it's not actually necessary to travel halfway around the world in order to learn most of the personal lessons that we wrote about. Many of the benefits of travel and adventure can come from simply opening and reading a book. This is the gift this project aims to give to many children who have grown up living in the shadows of Kilimanjaro: every copy of Dreamers and Doers sold provides for a textbook that will be donated to a Tanzanian school. Take part in these ladies' adventures and give the gift of education by ordering a copy of Dreamers and Doers here. Comments are closed.
July 2016


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Paul Urich's show opens Jan 7th, 2011 @FFDG.
Nice to get visitors. Toby and Melika via Sydney, Just Another Agency, stopped by.
And I got a new camera.
Does great video... More of that in 2011 here on Fecal Face.
Poo's place while I do mine.
Tiny Fecal places.
Groshong holiday party thirty.
Jesse Balmer
Ashley and Brian
Working out the new camera on Steve and Gunderson.
Furie and Aiyana
Groshong and Heidi
Mr. Adam 5100
Fish, Irving and I forgot your name.
Tory and Lindsey
Seemed like a good idea.
Thanks but no thanks.
Maxie saying it's time to go.
Graduations at USF. Congrats, Kate on your masters!
Our friend Kate's mom lives down the street from Stephen Colbert in New Jersey... and she told us Steven teaches Sunday School at their church.
Poo digs bags
Breezy got older.
Kyle Ranson and Andrew
Love the Rite Spot.
Tara Foley
Kyle and Breezy
To rest our very hungover bodies, we went to Alameda and toured the USS Hornet... Visual eye candy.
Jessica touching history.
Wrapping up Jay Howell's show.
You order your "Creek Talk" zine by Travis Millard yet?
Speaking of ships. Check out the USS Trippe. She is just 1 of 4 ships named after John Trippe... Bad arse.
No photo of the first one built in 1812.
< Prev | Next > |


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Apple Pay on the Web
Give customers an easy and secure way to make purchases in Safari 10 or later. Apple Pay allows customers to quickly pay without entering payment, shipping, or contact information on supported websites from their Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Because card numbers aren't used and every transaction is confirmed with a fingerprint or passcode, Apple Pay is more secure than accepting credit and debit cards.
Picture in Picture
Now users can keep an eye on web video while they multi-task on Mac. Picture in Picture lets users float a video window from Safari over their desktop or full-screen app. Users can play video in any corner of their desktop and resize the window to see more or less of what's behind it. The window stays put even if they switch desktop spaces. The default HTML5 video player in Safari automatically supports Picture in Picture. And if you use a custom video player, it's easy to add a Picture in Picture control using the JavaScript presentation mode API.
Safari Extensions on the Mac App Store
For the first time ever, you can sell and distribute Safari Extensions through the Mac App Store. The future of extensions development takes place in Xcode, where you can bring new capabilities to your extensions using powerful native APIs and familiar web technologies. Xcode makes it easy to create Safari Extensions using App Extension templates. And if you've already developed an app, it's easy to give users access to your app's functionality and content, right in Safari.
HTML5 and Legacy Plug-ins in macOS
To deliver faster load times, better battery life, and stronger security, Safari is optimized for HTML5, and will load this content whenever it is available. For websites that use proprietary formats, Safari supports the use of plug-ins such as Flash. In Safari 10, plug-ins are supported for websites where HTML5 is unavailable and may be enabled by users for each individual website. Users can choose to enable plug-ins for one session or every time they visit a specific website. For frequently-visited websites, enabled plug-ins will remain active. For infrequently-visited websites, plug-ins will be disabled.
Content Blockers on macOS
If you previously created Content Blockers for Safari on iOS, you can easily bring them to macOS. You'll be able to distribute and sell Content Blockers through the Mac App Store. Just like the new Safari Extensions, Xcode makes it easy to create Content Blockers using App Extension templates.
Autoplay and Inline Video on iOS
To help users easily discover your video content, you can now autoplay videos and play them inline with other content on your webpages on all iOS devices. Safari supports autoplay on iOS devices for videos without sound, keeping down the number of distractions on the web.
Split View in Safari on iPad
Users can now view two websites at the same time on their iPad using Split View. Responsive Design Mode makes it easy to see how your websites will render in this view — just tap the iPad preview until it turns into a Split View.
Safari Technology Preview
Download Safari Technology Preview to get a sneak peek at upcoming web technologies in macOS and iOS and experiment with them in your websites and extensions.


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If you needed a reason not to park in front of a fire hydrant, here's one: you might get your windows broken.
Firefighters in Wilmington, Del. responded to a blaze along the 800 block of Van Buren Street at 11:21 a.m. on Friday to find the street's fire hydrant blocked by a white Ford Fusion sedan.
With heavy fire spreading through the three-story house and to a home next door, the firefighters broke the car's two front windows and fed their fire hose through to get water flowing.
Parking within 15 feet of a fire hydrant in Wilmington is illegal, according to the city's parking regulations.
Fire crews were able to get the blaze under control about 40 minutes later, officials said. No one was inside the homes at the time of the fire, but a dog was killed.
A firefighter also suffered heat exhaustion and was taken to Christiana Hospital for treatment, officials said. He was later released.
U.S. & World
Stories that affect your life across the U.S. and around the world.
As for the car, officials said police issued a ticket and that it was set to be towed.
Contact Vince Lattanzio at 610.668.5532, email@example.com or follow @VinceLattanzio on Twitter.


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Viewing entries from category: Gran Torino
WJEC AS Film Studies FM2 US Cinema Comparative Study: Dirty Harry and Gran Torino »
Categories: A Level, EDUQAS A Level, EDUQAS AS, FM2, Section C: US Film Comparative Study, Analysis, Film Analysis, Films & Case Studies, American, Directors, Clint Eastwood, Don Siegel, Hollywood Films, Dirty Harry, Gran Torino, Genres & Case Studies, Action, Action Thriller, Drama, Thriller, Western, Key Concepts, Audience, Film Language, Genre, Narrative, Representation
Dirty Harry (1971, Don Siegel) Gran Torino (2008, Clint Eastwood) Centres can choose from a range of different American film texts: the three main areas of study are Messages, Themes and Values, Narrative and Genre, Representation of Time and Place (often linked to messages and values) and Representation of Character. You can compare in Section B but in Section C you must. The above choice of texts reflects films belonging to the same genre but it is very possible to explore two films that…
[ read full article ] »
[ read full article ] »


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Crushers For Sale : Aggregate Equipment Guide
Aggregate Equipment Guide is the best source for news, howto's and equipment for the Aggregate Industry. We list equipment in all the major aggregate egories including conveyors, feeders, stackers, crushers, magnets, screening equipment, washing equipment, and more. Our website makes it easy to find the machines you need fast.


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Klagsbrun Symposium showcases authors
Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and artist, delivered the lecture "What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?" as part of the College's 2011 Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Creative Arts and Moral Vision. The symposium is free and open to the public.
The Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium was established in 1989 to create a positive, living memorial to Daniel Klagsbrun, a 1986 graduate of Connecticut College. Through the generosity and commitment of Daniel's parents, Emilie and Herbert Klagsbrun, the Symposium has brought to the College over the years an amazing array of authors, including Saul Bellow, Adrienne Rich, Elie Wiesel, Sandra Cisneros, Joseph Brodsky, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Cunningham, Dorothy Allison, Tobias Wolff and a host of others.
Student poets selected for the Connecticut Student Poetry Circuit
Andrea Amulic '11 was selected as one of five student poets by The Connecticut Poetry Circuit in 2011, a competition in which each college or university in Connecticut nominates a student poet. These students then give readings at various Connecticut colleges and other venues.
Caitlin Scott '10 was selected in 2010. Caitie, as she is known, illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of studying at Connecticut College; she took English courses to develop her craft, but majored in another discipline, religious studies.
Taylor Katz '08 was one of the five student poets who read their poetry on the 2008 Connecticut Poetry Circuit student tour. The group also opened with their readings the The Sunken Garden Poetry & Music Festival on the grounds of the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT.
In the last fifteen years, Connecticut College students have produced, on average, one honors thesis in poetry each year.
Endowed scholarship for talented writers and scholars
With a generous gift in honor of alumna Louise Rosenstiel Frank, Connecticut College has established a scholarship fund that will help needy students attend our highly selective liberal arts college and pursue majors in literature and writing.


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Pot Growers Destroying National Forests
Marijuana smokers might praise their drug of choice as "natural," but pot growers in national forests all over the country have caused "severe" damage to these natural treasures, according to testimony by the U.S. Forest Service's director of law enforcement.
"The illegal cultivation of marijuana on our National Forest System is a clear and present danger to the public and the environment," said David Ferrell, when he testified before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control Wednesday (Dec. 7).
The U.S. Forest Service is calling for increased cooperation between government agencies to prevent further forest damage, while some experts believe changing drug laws — including the legalization of marijuana — might reduce the need to grow marijuana in parks.
A 'growing' problem
"The attributes that make the lands of the National Forest System excellent producers of wildlife habitat and clean water are also prized by illegal marijuana growers," Ferrell said in his testimony. "The lands are remote with few people, the forest vegetation is dense, there is an extensive system of roads and trails (both open and closed), soils are fertile, and water for irrigation is available for the diverting."
The forestry service has seen serious pot-growing operations sprout in 67 national forests in 20 states, a steadily rising number due to increased acceptance of marijuana use, Ferrell said. People probably first started growing marijuana in parks sometime in the mid-1960s, forestry officials believe, but large plots weren't detected on national lands until 1995, in California.
"The Mexican cartels and other growers began to think to themselves that they could make more money and run less risk if they were to grow it stateside," Warren Eth, a lawyer who wrote a review of marijuana cultivation in national forests, told LiveScience. Increasing security at national borders could have played a role in U.S. marijuana cultivation as well, he said.
"There've always been people who use the parks to do bad things, be it moonshiners or marijuana growers," Eth said. "National parks and forests are vast lands that are sparsely policed. In some areas there is one park ranger for every 100,000 acres. No one can possibly police or patrol that area."
Ecological disaster
The growers clear plots to plant, destroying natural vegetation in the area and disrupting wildlife. They transport water from lakes and streams (an average plot of 1,000 plants requires 5,000 gallons, or about 19,000 liters, of water daily). Some growers also liberally apply toxic chemicals to keep their plots clear of weeds, bugs and rodents, according to Eth.
"The most disgusting aspect of it is the pollution," Eth said. "They just pour chemicals like nobody's business… and they get washed into streams that flow through national parks."
Specifically, increasing concentrations of the rat poison warfarin have been detected in a sensitive, and nearing endangered status, mammal called the fisher (Martes Pennanti) in California, Ferrell said. This poison could be contributing to the fisher's declining population.
The pot growers that live by the crops also poach wildlife (some endangered) from the area, leaving a carpet of animal carcasses behind, Eth told LiveScience.
Dangers to citizens
These illegal marijuana-growing operations aren't only endangering native plants and animals in the forests, but park-goers as well. [Photos: One-of-a-Kind Places on Earth]
"Many marijuana sites found on national forests are under cultivation by drug-trafficking organizations that are sophisticated and include armed guards, counter-surveillance methods, logistics support and state-of-the-art growing practices," Ferrell said in his testimony.
"Drug-trafficking organizations present a serious risk to national forest visitors and employees, as individuals are often armed with semiautomatic rifles and handguns," Ferrell said. The crops are also protected by "improvised antipersonnel devices," a technical term for homemade landmines.
Protecting our forests
In 2010, the cleanup of 335 California national forest sites removed more than 130 tons of trash, 300 pounds of pesticides, five tons of fertilizer and nearly 260 miles of irrigation piping from marijuana growing operation sites discovered on national lands. Cleanup and restoration costs between $10,000 and $15,000 per acre, the Forestry Service said.
These large sites range from 10 to 20 acres (4 to 8 hectares), leading to hundreds of thousands of federal dollars spent cleaning up each site, according to the Ferrell's testimony. Since 2005, the U.S. Forest Service has torn down 3,900 sites on national lands.
The forest service can't protect and eradicate these areas all on their own, Ferrell said, and asked the caucus for help, calling for increased partnership between multiple government agencies.
Large vs. small scale
Other experts have their own ideas of how to decrease marijuana growing in national parks. [10 Most Visited National Parks ]
Eth is calling for marijuana legalization, and the associated regulation and taxing that comes with it. "The strategy they are developing is one that one would have assumed should have been there since the beginning," Eth said. "If the country could sit down and look at the damage and the untold billions of dollars that are spent to combat it, perhaps we can come to a conclusion that we don't want this in our parks, that we don't want to spend billions upon billions of dollars on something that can be regulated and taxed."
Ralph Weisheit, a criminal justice researcher at Illinois State University, has a more middle-of-the-road perspective, saying that different types of growers should be dealt with in different ways. (Ferrell's testimony specifically covered large-scale cultivations, run by drug-trafficking organizations.)
"Some on both sides of the debate about legalizing marijuana see it as an all-or-none issue — either complete legalization or complete prohibition," Weisheit told LiveScience in an email. "We don't take such extreme positions with alcohol or tobacco, and I'm not sure why it's helpful to take such positions with marijuana."
He suggests specifically that law enforcement shouldn't waste their time regulating small scale operations: "These very large unregulated operations as described in the testimony are a concern and should be responded to by law enforcement," he said. "Of course, it is important to distinguish these very large operations from small ones on a variety of dimensions, including impact on the environment and potential for violence."
You can follow LiveScience staff writer Jennifer Welsh on Twitter @microbelover. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.
Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now
Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
Jennifer Welsh is a Connecticut-based science writer and editor and a regular contributor to Live Science. She also has several years of bench work in cancer research and anti-viral drug discovery under her belt. She has previously written for Science News, VerywellHealth, The Scientist, Discover Magazine, WIRED Science, and Business Insider.
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By Harry Baker
By Ben Turner


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Clown Quarter Contagion
August 12, 2018
In the comments, Farnsworth M Muldoon steers us to this unhappy development:
Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given "reverse mentors" to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new Government funded scheme. Under the project, white men in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor... Prof Jon Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hoped the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them "feeling quite uncomfortable."
Professor Rowe admits that no evidence of "overt prejudice" against women and minorities has been found, but nonetheless hopes to inflict discomfort on those deemed sufficiently pale. As if, in itself, this would be some kind of triumph. "We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful," says the professor. And so, rather than revisiting his own egalitarian assumptions regarding the distribution of interest, aptitude and talent, he and his team will be searching for witches and racial ectoplasm.
It's not unreasonable to assume that the role of "reverse mentor" will attract people already sympathetic to the hokum being peddled, and intrigued by the personal leverage it affords, and who may feel an ideological obligation to unearth some damning but invisible sin, fairly or otherwise, if only to validate their own conceits. Which is to say, the so-called mentors – who've agreed to participate in a project that by definition assumes white guilt - seem more likely to be racially bigoted than any random member of staff.
The speed with which patent woo can propagate among the supposedly intelligent is quite remarkable. The pseudoscience of "unconscious bias" testing and correction has been repeatedly exposed as both laughable and pernicious - a kind of diversity Scientology - and yet it spreads, thanks to ideological modishness and taxpayer funding. And when minority students reject the excuses and woo being peddled ostensibly for their benefit, they may find themselves denounced by their self-appointed saviours.
[ Expanded via the comments. ]


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No spray paint was involved and besides organizing them, no glue guns were used either. However, it was a busy weekend! In an effort to give a "holla!" to all the hard-working women out there (can you tell I've been listening to a lot of Beyonce this weekend?), I thought I'd share a little picture tour of my accomplishments.
Two kinds of people will appreciate this picture. 1. Anyone who lives in Michigan—no more boots! 2. Anyone who fights the daily war with shoes.
Just pretend this picture's obvious. I washed rugs this weekend. I hate washing rugs. It's a little disenchanting because now that means I have to tackle the floor underneath them, but at least that part is done.
I spent no less than three Beyonce songs (told ya) and two Justin Bieber songs (don't judge) turning this…
into this… More to come on this one.
There was a lot of this over the weekend. Why, exactly, did we think it would be such a great idea to have some land?
When summerizing the deck, my husband found this adorable little bird's nest.
Well, I guess little is a relative term here. It's not the first time, though. Remember??
What are the kids doing while we're slaving away? This. Don't ask.
Hopefully your weekend was as productive, yet more normal than ours! Orrrr…maybe you're like us and this is normal.


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Note: In case you missed it, here's Part 1.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a single weight-training movement that's more "complete" than the deadlift. It's not just an upper or lower back exercise, or a grip exercise, or a posterior chain exercise, or a core exercise; it's an everything exercise. To that end, it's a must-have in any lifter, athlete, or weekend warrior's training arsenal.
Unfortunately, as with any compound lift, the deadlift can get pretty technical. If you're going to be using big weights in hopes of getting big results, you need to make sure that you're lifting with proper technique.
With that in mind, I'm first going to show the entire (conventional-style) movement in still frames, and then I'll show it to you in video form at regular speed. Finally, I'll come back and list the common errors that people make when deadlifting.
Step 1
Step up to the barbell so that your shins actually touch it.
Step 2
Keep your chest high while pushing your hips back. Imagine someone has a rope tied around your waist and is pulling you backward.
Step 3
As your hips continue back, you'll need to bend your knees a bit to get you down to the barbell. Grasp the barbell with a grip that puts your forearms right up against the sides of your thighs; the further out they are, the harder it'll be for you to maintain neutral spine – and the further the bar will have to travel.
Keep the chest up and drop the hips down a bit. How far will depend on the build of the lifter, as I noted in Part 1. You should not look like you're trying to squat the weight up.
The elbows should be completely taut, with your eyes up and weight on your heels. Puff the chest up and tighten your triceps a bit to ensure that you're in the "locked" position.
Step 4
Take a big gasp of air into your stomach to help stabilize your spine, drive the heels into the floor, and push your hips forward as your knees extend. The hips and knees should extend simultaneously, and the shoulders and hips should rise together.
Note: Some lifters prefer to get their gasp of air before they descend to the bar.
Step 5
As you reach lockout, imagine pinching something between your buttcheeks at the top to lock the weight out. This glute activation helps to prevent you from leaning back to finish the movement (lumbar hyperextension) and stopping short (can lead to hamstring dominance and a host of problems). At lockout, your scapulae are back and down (not shrugged up) and you're standing tall.
Here's a bad lockout (stopping short):
Here's another bad lockout (leaning back/hyperextension):
Now, a good lockout (glutes tight and shoulders back; standing tall, but not shrugged up):
Step 6
Initiate the eccentric (lowering) portion of the lift by pushing the butt back to unlock the hips without losing neutral spine. Just imagine putting a stretch on your hamstrings without rounding the back.
Step 7
As the bar is lowered, don't worry about bending the knees until the bar has passed them. Once the bar has passed them, you can bend the knees to get the rest of the way to the floor.
Many individuals will lack the flexibility to pull from the floor initially, so don't force this exercise if you can't pull it without looking like a scared cat! For these individuals, substitute the rack pull (partial deadlift). The bar can be elevated on pins in a power rack, or aerobic steps, or plates on the floor. Gradually move the bar down to the floor as your mobility improves.
I'm going to put this in big, bold, capital letters:
I have nightmares of people skimming through this article and reposting them all over the internet. So, again, I certainly don't let my athletes and clients lift like this!
Okay, let's get to the troubleshooting.
The Shin Scraper
This is the guy who sets up too low and far away from the bar on his pull. He has too much dorsiflexion going on, so the knees are actually in front of the bar as he initiates the pull. As the bar comes up, it catches on the shins and makes for a bloody deadlift and some good battle scars.
These individuals also have a tendency to pull with flexed elbows (from dropping too low and creating slack) and a rounded lower back (need to find range of motion wherever they can in order to get the bar around the knees).
Conveniently, as I was writing this article, a new athlete showed up and displayed this form, so I scored a video:
The solution is to get the feet up closer to the bar and bring the hips up a bit higher without losing neutral spine.
Flexed Elbows
Deadlifts should be too heavy to curl, yet you'll still see people who allow their elbows to go on slack when they initiate a deadlift. This is a great way to rupture a biceps tendon and guarantee that you aren't pulling as heavy as you ought to be.
It's the weight-training equivalent of punching someone with a limp wrist. You can't effectively transfer force from your lower body and core to the bar if your elbows are flexed.
Here's a great video for a few reasons. One, it shows you that even tall guys can pull (Pieter Smeets, at 6' 5", pulled from the floor on his first visit to the facility). Two, he demonstrates the elbows-flexed deadlift on his first few reps, but cleans it up when I cue him to do so. The last few reps are much better.
By pulling the elbows taut at the beginning of the movement, the chest pops up and it's smooth sailing.
The Scared Cat
I seriously tried to get a video of this, and I've actually trained myself to the point that I can't make my lumbar spine round enough to do this article justice. Fortunately, there's someone you might recognize who's done a great job of demonstrating this flaw over the past year or so on the internet.
On the bright side, he's enthusiastic, so he'll probably get the back surgeons to get him in sooner.
Our lumbar discs actually handle compressive forces really well, just not when that compression is combined with flexion. If you're going to have any kind of flexion, it should only occur on max attempts in powerlifting populations, and only at the thoracic spine.
Those with a tendency toward the scared cat style need to improve hip mobility, lower body strength, and core stability.
Stopping Short
This problem is most common in females, as they tend to be very quad dominant and often tight in the hip flexors. The more quad recruitment and the greater the anterior pelvic tilt, the more likely an individual is to stop short on the deadlift.
The solution is very simple: hump the bar! Activating the glutes posteriorly tilts the pelvis to complete hip extension. Combined with scapular retraction, this yields an upright posture.
You'll commonly see diffuse lower back pain that's worse when standing with these individuals, and they'll sometimes present with anterior hip pain (femoral anterior glide syndrome).
Hyperextended Lockout
Closely related to the stopping short flaw is that of lumbar hyperextension at lockout. In these individuals, rather than stopping short, they just hyperextend the lumbar spine to compensate for the glutes not firing to complete hip extension. In the process, the knees may bend a bit and the end result is a backward lean.
Again, the secret is to hump the bar and stand completely upright.
While a shrug might be desirable in teaching Olympic lifting progressions, it's not what we want with a regular deadlift.
The shoulders should be pulled back and held down at lockout. This ensures optimal stability of the shoulder girdle. Just think about the last time you watched the farmer's walk or car deadlift at the World's Strongest Man contest. Did these guys carry the weight with their shoulders shrugged up, or were they in that "locked down" position?
Some people are built such that they need to initiate the pull with their hips higher. On the other hand, there are those who just turn everything into stiff-leg deadlifts. Basically, what you see is that the hips shoot up faster than the shoulders and the bar gets too far out in front.
This can happen for many reasons – a history of knee problems, posterior chain weakness, not pushing through the heels – but it's something that's relatively easily remedied by just checking the ego at the door. Drop the weight a bit and focus on the hips and knees extending simultaneously with the shoulders and hips rising at the same rate.
Knee Break Lowering
Believe it or not, a lot of people have more problems with the lowering component of the deadlift than the lifting portion. The most common flaw we see is those who break the knees too early and try to stay completely upright for too long.
When the knees break, the bar gets further away from the ideal axis of rotation (hips). In order to create the range of motion needed to get the bar around the knees, the lifter has to round the lumbar spine and/or markedly protract the shoulder blades. In both cases, the knees can get shredded up pretty good.
The solution is simple: push the hips back and keep the spine neutral. Don't break the knees until the bar has passed them. Then you can half squat, half deadlift the bar to the floor.
Lazy Upper Back Lowering
Sometimes we encounter people who have stiffness in their hips that doesn't allow them to get the range of motion necessary to take the bar all the way down to the floor. Or, they're simply too lazy to care about lowering the bar under control. Either way, they just round over to set the bar down – and usually pretty loudly.
Mobilize the hips, strengthen the upper back, and simply be patient, and this problem will resolve pretty quickly.
The Good Deadlift
Yes, it actually exists!
That wraps up our analysis of the conventional deadlift. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how many of these flaws you found in your own pulling technique), we've got literally hundreds of variations of deadlifts we can apply in our programming. In Part III, we'll cover several of them!


text:
Early Modern English
Early Modern English
- Terttu NevalainenTerttu NevalainenUniversity of Helsinki
In the Early Modern English period (1500–1700), steps were taken toward Standard English, and this was also the time when Shakespeare wrote, but these perspectives are only part of the bigger picture. This chapter looks at Early Modern English as a variable and changing language not unlike English today. Standardization is found particularly in spelling, and new vocabulary was created as a result of the spread of English into various professional and occupational specializations. New research using digital corpora, dictionaries, and databases reveals the gradual nature of these processes. Ongoing developments were no less gradual in pronunciation, with processes such as the Great Vowel Shift, or in grammar, where many changes resulted in new means of expression and greater transparency. Word order was also subject to gradual change, becoming more fixed over time.
- Historical Linguistics
- Morphology
- Phonetics/Phonology
- Sociolinguistics
- Syntax
1. Various Traditions
There is a long tradition of thinking of Early Modern English (EModE) as Shakespeare's English. This line of thought goes back to the 19th century, well before the division of postmedieval English into Early and Late Modern English. Another common approach in the literature has been to view the Early Modern era as a transitional period leading to Standard English. The period has also come to be characterized in functional terms as an era during which the use of the English language spread to all communicative purposes, including science and the law. Related to these developments are advances in communication technologies, notably the impact of printing, which was introduced toward the end of the 15th century.
These various approaches provide different answers to the question of how long a time span the EModE period covers. The answers also depend on whether we look for linguistic or language-external factors. Referring to cultural and political landmarks, the six-part Cambridge History of the English Language begins the period at 1476, when the printing press was introduced to England, and ends it at the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 (Lass, 1999). Purely linguistic factors are a good deal harder to pin down. Apart from citing various language-external factors, Görlach (1991, pp. 9–11) justifies his choice of 1500 as the beginning point for his Introduction to Early Modern English by referring to the increased homogenization of spelling and a sharp reduction in inflectional endings. He motivates ending the period at 1700 by pointing to the virtual disappearance of the remaining syntactic redundancies and the rapid redefining of the existing grammatical categories by that time. However, it is noteworthy that all these features represent processes that do not have exact beginning and end points.
Acknowledging that linguistic periodization is necessarily arbitrary because language change is continuous, EModE is commonly viewed as the period from 1500 to 1700. This is also how the period is delimited in this chapter, which provides a bird's-eye view of some of the major developments in English during these two centuries. These developments will be approached through some of the priorities set by earlier scholarship, showing how they have shaped—and continue to shape—our perceptions of this era in the history of English.1
2. Early Modern English as the Language of Shakespeare: Bridging the Gap
The first book-length discussions of Early Modern English are two grammars of Shakespeare's language: A Shakespearian Grammar by Edwin Abbott (1870) and the more comprehensive Shakespeare-Grammatik by Wilhelm Franz (1898). Abbott specifies his focus in the subtitle of his book: An Attempt to Illustrate Some of the Differences between Elizabethan and Modern English ("modern" here referring to Victorian English). Franz (1898, p. iii) similarly notes that he concentrates on those features in Shakespeare and the language of his period that have since fallen out of use and on those that were not "developed enough" to be understood by a modern educated reader. To bridge the grammatical gap between Shakespeare and his current audiences, more recent grammars such as Blake (2002) and Hope (2003) continue to address these issues, benefiting from a century of linguistic and literary scholarship on the topic.
There is wide-ranging agreement on a number of grammatical differences between Shakespeare's English and the present day. Scholars identify as particularly archaic, for example, (1) inversion questions, (2) the use of pronouns with imperatives, and (3) the use of modal auxiliaries as main verbs, but they also note that these and many other features display a fair amount of variation even within one and the same play (Busse & Busse, 2012, p. 817; their examples). In many cases, this variation could be taken as an indication of ongoing change in the language in Shakespeare's day.
While grammatical differences are relatively easy to discover and describe, vocabulary presents challenges of a different kind, most of them having to do with the data sources available to researchers. Views of Shakespeare's lexical innovativeness range from finding him the "greatest word-maker of them all" (Shipley, 1977, p. 28) to a perfectly average or even "almost aggressively normal" word-user (Syme, 2011). New resources such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) have helped update views on Shakespeare's neologisms based on historical dictionaries. Using this resource, which contains digital copies of most books printed in England before 1700, it is possible to explore the contemporary print record of words and review the datings given in historical dictionaries.
One of the neologisms attributed to Shakespeare is courtship (Garner, 1982). It appears in 1,599 documents in EEBO. The first occurrence is found in Anthony Munday's 1588 translation Palmerin D'Oliua ("Why Sir Knight, where learned you so little courtship. . ."). Shakespeare makes use of the word in the 1590s in Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's Lost, but so do George Peel, Thomas Nashe, and George Chapman in their plays published a few years before Shakespeare's. Some scholars argue for an earlier date for Love's Labour's Lost and suggest that a lost version may go back to 1588, the same year as Munday's text (Goodland, 2011, note 2). But publication dates do not tell the whole story about lexical growth, and a number of other issues need to be considered when counting coinages. Elliott and Valenza (2011, p. 49) list some of them:
Counting coinages has most of the problems of counting other words—making due allowance for corpus size, latency, inflections, multiple meanings and so on—plus special problems of its own, which are harder to do with computers and have been less explored: sorting out what counts as a word, whether it is one person's real coinage, and not another's, and deciding whether it has caught on.
There is thus more to bridging the lexical gap between Shakespeare and his modern audiences than looking for neologisms.
Describing what Shakespeare's language might have sounded like presents problems of yet a different kind: in the absence of any spoken records, the evidence has to be deduced from writing (spelling, rhymes, metrical evidence and metatextual commentary). Accounts of Shakespearian pronunciation have been compiled to serve both scholarly aims (Kökeritz, 1953; Cercignani, 1981) and the practical purposes of performing Shakespeare in the original pronunciation (Crystal, 2005). Opinions are nonetheless divided as to the degree to which the pronunciation of Shakespearean drama can be recreated and understood today (for some views, see Nevalainen, 2006, pp. 118–119).
3. Towards a Standard English: Spelling and Vocabulary
One of the recurrent topics of scholarly discussion of EModE is concerned with the standardization of the English language in that period. This is the story told in most textbooks from Wyld (1920) to Freeborn (1998), and many more. Wyld describes his object of study as follows:
It may be called Good English, Well-bred English, Upper-class English, and it is sometimes, too vaguely, referred to as Standard English. For reasons which will soon appear, it is proposed here to call it Received Standard English.
(Wyld, 1920, p. 2, original emphasis)
In tracing the history of Standard English, Wyld took a particular interest in pronunciation. He assumed that a spoken standard must have existed from the first half of the 16th century on, but also admitted that it allowed more variation than today and was largely confined to the Royal Court (Wyld, 1920, p. 103). Both Wyld (1920, p. 103) and Freeborn (1998) date modern-style standard pronunciation to the 18th century.
3.1 Spelling
If by a standard language we understand a variety with minimal variation in form and maximal variation in use, spelling is a much better candidate for Early Modern Standard English than speech.2 Spelling regularization can be approached as a process of focusing that had started around the mid-14th century, when English gained new functions as a written language. Both professional copyists and printers were instrumental in spreading southern forms and spelling conventions to the rest of the country. But the process was not straightforward: arising from the concerns of the teaching profession, the question of a spelling reform sparked heated debates in the 16th century. Those in favor of a reform argued that English spelling had become too far removed from the pronunciation of the language and that a closer connection should be (re)established. Those supporting established usage countered them by arguing that there was too much variation in speech to form a basis for a renewed orthography.
New means of regularizing established spelling conventions were introduced to show the "right writing" of words, notably word lists appended to teaching manuals such as Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie (1582). When analyzing this list of ca. 8,500 common English words, Barber (1997, p. 86) found that over half of them are identical with their modern standard spelling, and considerably more if the regular <i>/<j> and <u>/<v> alternations (see below) are excluded from the calculation.
Teaching manuals and spelling books made an important contribution to fixing English spelling norms in the 17th century. One worth mentioning is Edmund Coote's The English Schoole-maister (1596), which offers not only syllable and word lists displaying spelling rules but also a 1,400-word dictionary. Scragg (1974, pp. 78–80) attributes part of the success of Coote's manual—it went through some fifty editions in the 17th century—to his method of selecting for each word the spelling that was most common in print. Coote promoted, for example, spellings such as seem and seen instead of seme and sene, proposed by Mulcaster (1582)
In the course of the 17th century, the <u>/<v> alternation (<v> being used word-initially and <u> word-medially for both the vowel and the consonant) was also regularized to its modern standard form. Figure 1 shows the crossing over from the previously regular word-medial <u> to <v> in have in the EEBO-TCP database between the 1620s and 1640s. A similar process took place around the same time with the former use of <i> for both <i> and <j>.
These processes apply to spelling regularization in print, which displays remarkable stability by the mid-17th century. The same cannot be said about private spelling habits, which show much more variation depending on the writer's level of education. Moreover, punctuation and capitalization are standardized later than spelling in print as well. For example, the apostrophe only begins to be used to signal the possessive -s in the 17th century, earlier in the singular than in the plural, but it can mark the elision of the vowel in regular past participle forms (e.g., us'd for used) well into the Late Modern English period.
Looking at the big picture, Baron, Rayson and Archer (2009) calculated the relative frequencies of spelling variants over time in several corpora and databases, covering the period from 1400 to 1800 and including the Shakespeare Corpus and the EEBO database. On average, their data showed variation in some 50% of word types towards the end of the 16th century, and at the end of the 17th century variation was still found in about 20% of word types but in less than 10% of word tokens.3
3.2 Vocabulary
Automatic studies of spelling variation do not necessarily take into account the growth of English vocabulary over time, which vastly increases the number of rare words in the language in the 16th and 17th centuries. Vocabulary growth represents the widening range of domains of the vernacular, thus showcasing the tendency of a standardizing language to maximal variation in use. Lancashire (2012, p. 637) writes: "[t]he mother tongue remained small, well under 10,000 words, until the 17th century. Printed books, however, by saving and disseminating learned and technical words, expanded available vocabulary by 75% from 1500 to 1600."
Various aspects of this growth have been explored using the Oxford English Dictionary. Work on the new edition of this lexical resource (OED3) suggests that twice as many words were first recorded between 1550 and 1699 as in the previous 150 years from 1400 to 1549 (Durkin & Allan, 2016, p. 72). Dividing the EModE period into fifty-year subperiods, Durkin (2014, p. 34) shows that the frequency of new words peaks in the first half of the 17th century. Figure 2 presents a very similar overview based on the Chronological English Dictionary (CED; Wermser, 1976, p. 23; see Nevalainen, 1999, pp. 336–339). Lancashire (2012, p. 641) predicts that the process of antedating OED headwords "is spreading vocabulary growth out more evenly through the Tudor period and may diminish the 'acceleration' effect" found in the 16th century.4
Lexical innovations reflect the ongoing processes of modernization and vernacularization in the EModE period. The vernacular gained currency in a wide variety of specialist fields and replaced Latin and French, for example, in many legal, religious, and scientific domains. The growing range of specializations of contemporary knowledge is recorded in monolingual dictionaries and glossaries, which cover fields as diverse as alchemy and architecture, classics and cosmography, fencing and heraldry, hunting and falconry, mathematics and minerals, philosophy and poetics, and weights and measures (Nevalainen, 1999, pp. 342–347).
As English was spreading to a widening range of discourses, including the most prestigious ones, the "insufficiency" of the mother tongue became a common cause of complaint: English was felt to lack the prestige of Latin or French as a language of learning and literature. As a result, several often competing methods of vocabulary expansion were adopted, including both borrowing and coinages based on native word formation processes (Nevalainen, 1999, pp. 336–342). These means were used to introduce new lexis to meet the needs of vernacularization but also to consciously enrich and embellish the language. Deliberate learned loans also met with opposition and were branded as "inkhorn" terms (with reference to the common inkwell, originally made of a horn).
One of the early borrowers of the utilitarian kind was Sir Thomas Elyot, a scholar and diplomat. Most of the loans he used come from the classical languages, and include a number of words that are still current, such as encyclopedia, frugality, metamorphosis, modesty, and persist (Barber, 1976, p. 79). He was also among the first to use education in print (ex. 4):
Reflecting its cultural dominance at the time, Latin was indeed the primary source of borrowed lexis in EModE (Durkin, 2014, pp. 255–269). Beginning with Robert Cawdey's A Table Alphabeticall (1604), specialist vocabulary started to be coded in "hard-word" dictionaries in the 17th century for the benefit of the vast majority of the population who would not understand words borrowed from "Hebrewe, Greeke, Latine, or French," as Cawdrey pointed out in his preface. In The English Dictionarie (1623), Henry Cockeram also introduced a large number of new words into English by anglicizing Latin entries in Thomas Thomas's Latin–English dictionary.
Borrowing often resulted in native and borrowed lexemes co-occurring in the same lexical sets. Loan words typically appeared in technical uses, as in the following word pairs, where the first member has its roots in Old English and the second in Latin or French (the fields and dates come from the EEBO database): belly/ventral (fiction 1693, medicine 1695), book/bibliography (religious miscellany 1664), egg/ovum (biology 1672), naked/nudity (zoology 1607), saying/dictum (poetry 1586), and sun/heliocentric (travel, 1667). It is noteworthy that loan words did not necessarily have the same meaning as they have today. Bibliography, for example, was first introduced in the sense of 'the writing of books' (Nevalainen, 1999, pp. 362–364).
The case of ovum nicely illustrates the prevalence of Latin in the English print culture at the time; one of its first occurrences in the EEBO database goes back to a dietary guide from 1599, where it simply provides the Latin term for egg in a header. Well into the 17th century, the word appears in Latin passages or collocates such as malum ovum ('bad egg') in a wide variety of sources ranging from treatises on embryology, natural history, and theology to Latin–English dictionaries and textbooks. It appears as an integrated specialist term in English in the latter half of the century, the OED dating this technical use in Philosophical Transactions to 1672.
The fact that specialist terms are well documented does not mean that they have survived until the present. Analyzing The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Neuhaus (1971) found that between 1460 and 1620 many more new words were introduced than old ones lost. By contrast, between 1640 and 1680, words introduced after 1530 showed a higher than average rate of disappearance. This comparison suggests that the intensive period of vocabulary enrichment was followed by a corresponding increase in obsolete words. Most of them disappeared during their first decade, and many were cited only once. It would appear that they had never made it to wider use. This was true of one-third of the Latinate neologisms attributed to Shakespeare and of a large number of coinages introduced by lexicographers like Cockeram (1623), who endeavored to enrich the EModE lexicon with parallel formations (Nevalainen, 1999, pp. 340–341, 349).
Measured in terms of the intake of new words, lexical standardization remains an abstraction. It does not take place in a cultural vacuum but constitutes an ongoing process with both gains and losses, and takes its time to be integrated into actual use. Importantly, the expanding vocabulary of EModE did not become the property of the population at large; as Lancashire (2012, p. 643) notes, it rather shows the growth of an increasing variety of occupational sociolects.
4. A Variable and Changing Language: Pronunciation and Grammar
4.1 Pronunciation
If vocabulary growth did not directly affect all English speakers in the EModE era, changes in pronunciation and grammar did. As noted above, pronunciation can only be reconstructed from written evidence before it was integrated into monolingual English dictionaries using a systematic phonetic notation in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although there is a fair amount of commentary provided by early phoneticians and orthoepists, it is far from unproblematic. Lass (1999, p. 59) notes that we have to discriminate between
those who understood the difference between sound and spelling and those who didn't, those whose normative biases led them to propose purely 'theoretical' and non-existent pronunciations and more objective observers, etc.
Despite these problems of primary evidence, there are comprehensive studies, such as Dobson (1968), which derive their evidence from contemporary EModE grammarians, phoneticians, and spelling reformers.
Scholarly opinion agrees that while some major changes happened in the EModE vowel system, the consonant system remained comparatively stable.5 In all varieties, /r/ was pronounced after the vowel (car, door). There is, however, occasional evidence for /r/-deletion in private writings (e.g., skasely 'scarcely') and some phonetic weakening of /r/ in the 17th century. By contrast, /h/-dropping was common word-initially in weakly stressed words such as pronouns (e.g., hit > it). It was commonly dropped in French loan words (history, honor) but often reintroduced into these words on etymological grounds. Dialectally, /h/ could also be dropped from words of Germanic origin, such as hand and heart. Chronicling public events in 16th-century London, Henry Machyn, a merchant tailor, spells hard without an <h> but inserts one into playing so that it becomes plahyng (ex. 5; Nevalainen, 2006, p. 127). Shakespeare and other dramatists often drew on /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion for puns (air, hair, heir).
Just like today, unstressed syllables could be dropped in connected speech and grammatical words could assume their contracted forms (they are > they're). But preceding an auxiliary, the pronoun it was clipped (it is > 'tis), not the verb as today (it's).
The most dramatic changes took place in stressed syllables, as long vowels were redistributed in a series of processes which resulted in what is known as the Great Vowel Shift (GVS). The process was probably set in motion by the high vowels /iː/ and /uː/ in the late 15th century: the front vowel /iː/ came to acquire the quality of /ei/, and the back vowel /uː/ the quality of /ou/. The outcome was that words like /liːf/ (life) and /tiːm/ (time) were pronounced as /leif/ and /teim/, and /huːs/ (house) and /uːt/ (out) as /hous/ and /out/.
The rest of the long vowels systematically moved up one step in the vowel space: words with the high-mid front vowel /eː/ (meet, see) came to be pronounced with the high vowel /iː/, and those with the high-mid back vowel /oː/ (do, loose) with /uː/. Words pronounced with the low-mid front vowel /ɛː/ (meat, sea) in turn acquired the closer quality of /eː/, and those that had the back vowel /ɔː/ (boat, rose) were raised to /oː/. Finally, the low /aː/ vowel in words like make and name rose to low-mid /εː/.
It is noteworthy that the Great Vowel Shift was not completed in the northern dialects, where it affected the front vowels but not all back vowels. Long vowels also emerged from diphthongs (i.e., vowels with a changing quality). In almost all these changes, a Middle English diphthong was reduced to a pure long vowel. These processes resulted in vowel mergers, and many word pairs came to sound alike (see further Lass, 1999).
4.2 Grammar
Unlike pronunciation, grammar change can be observed in most genres and registers, from formal kinds of writing such as statutes to informal kinds such as comedy. Personal communication is available in correspondence and approximate records of speech in trial proceedings. The EModE section of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC) comprises fifteen different genres and has provided primary data for a large number of studies on EModE grammar. The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) in turn enables systematic historical sociolinguistic research into the Early Modern period, and speech-based data is included in the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED).6
There are some broad trends that characterize many processes of grammatical change in EModE. One of the most conspicuous is greater transparency. This analytic trend is found in many of the new forms and constructions that emerge in competition with older, more synthetic expressions in different grammatical domains. At the same time, certain grammatical distinctions are lost altogether.7
There are both gains and losses in the EModE system of personal pronouns. Perhaps the most noticeable loss is the second-person singular pronoun thou, which was replaced by the plural form you. Originally the polite form of address, you is the common form found, for example, in personal correspondence throughout the period, and thou only occurs in letters written by mothers to their children and by husbands to their wives. Example (6) shows both of them occurring in the same letter. Based on dialogues ranging from court proceedings to comedy, Walker (2007) draws the conclusion that social superiors could address their inferiors with thou but inferiors replied to them with you.
The generalization of you for singular as well as plural addressees also meant a loss in the number contrast in second-person pronouns. The case contrast between the subject form ye and object form you was also lost, and you began to be used in both functions. This process was completed in data sources such as personal letters in the 16th century, but ye was retained dialectally much longer (for example, in northern regional varieties), as indeed was thou.
Two other changes are connected with the trend of making a distinction between personal and nonpersonal reference. The personal pronoun system was enriched by the introduction of the neuter possessive pronoun its at the end of the 16th century. It replaced the historical form his, which had been used for both masculine and neuter referents, as in (7).
The same principle is manifest in the restriction of the relative pronoun which to nonhuman referents. The older use is still found in example (4), above: the chylde of a gentylman, whiche is to haue auctoritie. In the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, it came to be replaced by who, which alternated with the older that, as it continues to do today.
Verb forms also underwent changes. Verbal ‑s gradually replaced ‑th in the third-person present singular indicative (e.g., it cometh > it comes) and are replaced be in the present indicative plural of the verb to be. These forms were both originally northern dialect features. The southern forms were retained dialectally and in formal written contexts much longer than in speech (cf. the powers that be in the Tyndale Bible, 1534). Verbal constructions were also established, providing grammatical means of expressing the progressive aspect (be + ‑ing) and indicating future time by means of the be + going to construction. They are illustrated in (8) and (9), respectively. The new expression of future time was added to earlier ones, such as the auxiliaries shall and will.
A number of developments were connected with the order of sentence elements. The subject–verb–object order, with the verb following the subject, was established as the basic word-order type in EModE declarative sentences. The inverted order was still found after adverbs like here, now, then, and thus (10), but also after longer sentence elements. Bækken (1998, p. 60) estimated that the rate of inversion fell from the average of one inverted declarative main clause in five in 1500 to one in ten in 1700.
A converse development took place with initial negative elements such as neither, never, and nor, which started to require inversion in declarative sentences. This process also supported the rise of the auxiliary do in negative contexts. Examples (11) and (12) show how an individual who used the inverted word order after neither changed from main-verb inversion (11) to auxiliary inversion by means of do (12). The presence of an auxiliary also prevents the inversion of the subject and the main verb in interrogative sentences, and maintains the regular verb–object order in negative sentences.
The introduction of do into the verb phrase makes it more transparent, as the auxiliary then carries features such as tense (present vs. past), mood (indicative vs. subjunctive), and polarity (affirmative vs. negative). In the absence of another auxiliary, the use of do was first generalized in questions and, in particular, negative questions in the course of the EModE period. The process took longer in negative statements, where do was used in about two-thirds of the cases with most verbs at the end of the 17th century.
Running counter to this trend, do failed to become a regular feature in affirmative statements. After picking up in the 16th century, this use declined sharply in the course of the 17th century. At the height of its popularity, it was common in both emphatic and nonemphatic uses and in formal and informal contexts, as in (13) and (14), while today it is used systematically only for emphasis and contrast in this sentence type. It has been suggested that the rapid decline of do in affirmative statements was due to dialect contact or that it may have been a manifestation of some more abstract grammatical processes of change, but no definitive answer has been proposed so far (Warner, 2012).
The grammar of negation also underwent changes. Like today, not was used to negate the sentence in the 16th century, but when associated with indefinite expressions, it was often accompanied by other negative forms (no, never) rather than their nonassertive counterparts (any, ever). Multiple negation occurred in the writings of educated and uneducated people alike. The examples below come from the corpus of personal letters and date to the 1540s. The passage in (15) was written by a merchant's wife, and those in (16) and (17) by a bishop. Although the writers show different degrees of spelling variation, reflecting their differences in education, both of them use multiple and single negation side by side.
As shown by Figure 3, during the EModE period multiple negation as good as disappeared from simple contexts with indefinite pronouns like those in (15) to (17) in the personal correspondence of literate people. It was retained in coordinate constructions such as not. . . neither into the Late Modern English period. The use of multiple negation was also socially stratified: although it was generally on its way out, it disappeared from the language of the lower social ranks more slowly than from the higher and professional social strata (Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg, 2017, pp. 71–72, 145–146). Like many other recessive features, multiple negation persisted regionally and was stigmatized by prescriptive grammarians in the 18th century.
5. Expansion of English
It was not only the language that was transformed in the EModE period; remarkable developments can also be seen in the numbers and mobility of its speakers (Nevalainen, 2006, pp. 140–148).
In 1500, the population of England and Wales was just over 2 million inhabitants. Two hundred years later, in 1700, it reached 5 million. English was spoken not only in England and Wales but also in Ireland, and Scots-English was spoken in Scotland. These areas were still bilingual, as the Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish, and Scots Gaelic) predominated outside England. As the period advanced, English gained a strong position throughout the British Isles and was also transported to North America. The estimated number of emigrants to the New World was about 400,000 in the 17th century. How the language diversified as a result of these developments is beyond the scope of this chapter.
Further Reading
- Barber, C. (1976). Early Modern English. 1st ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Barber, C. (1997). Early Modern English. 2d ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Blake, N. F. (2002). A grammar of Shakespeare's language. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
- Lass, R. (Ed.). (1999). The Cambridge history of the English language: Vol. 3. 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Nevalainen, T. (2006). An introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Nevalainen, T., & Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (2017). Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. 2d ed. London: Routledge.
- Abbott, E. A. (1870). A Shakespearian grammar: An attempt to illustrate some of the differences between Elizabethan and Modern English. London: Macmillan.
- Bækken, B. (1998). Word order patterns in Early Modern English. Oslo: Novus.
- Barber, C. (1976). Early Modern English. 1st ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Barber, C. (1997). Early Modern English. 2d ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Baron, A., Rayson, P., & Archer, D. (2009). Word frequency and key word statistics in historical corpus linguistics. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 20, 41–67.
- Blake, N. F. (2002). A grammar of Shakespeare's language. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
- Busse, U., & Busse, B. (2012). Early Modern English: The language of Shakespeare. In A. Bergs & L. Brinton (Eds.), English historical linguistics: An international handbook: Vol. 1 (pp. 808–826). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Cawdrey, R. (1604). A table aphabeticall. London: I. R. for E. Weaver.
- Cercignani, F. (1981). Shakespeare's works and Elizabethan pronunciation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Cockeram, H. (1623). The English dictionarie, or, An interpreter of hard English words. London: N. Butter.
- Coote, E. (1596). The English schoole-maister. London: Printed by the Widow Orwin for Ralph Iackson and Robert Dexter.
- Culpeper, J., & Kytö, M. (2010). Early Modern English dialogues: Spoken interaction in writing. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- Crystal, D. (2005). Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe experiment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- Dobson, E. J. (1968). English pronunciation 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Durkin, P. (2014). Borrowed words: A history of loanwords in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Durkin, P., & Allan, K. (2016). Borrowing and copy. In A. Auer, V. González-Díaz, J. Hodson, & V. Sotirova (Eds.), Linguistics and literary history: In honour of Sylvia Adamson (pp. 71–86). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Elliott, W. E. Y., & Valenza, R. J. (2011). Shakespeare's vocabulary: Did it dwarf all others? In M. Ravassat & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Stylistics and Shakespeare's language (pp. 34–54). London: Continuum.
- Franz, W. (1898). Shakespeare-Grammatik. Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer.
- Freeborn, D. (1998). From Old English to Standard English: A course book on language variation across time. 2d ed. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
- Garner, B. (1982). Shakespeare's Latinate neologisms. Shakespeare Studies, 15, 149–170.
- Goodland, G. (2011). 'Strange deliveries': Contextualizing Shakespeare's first citations in the OED. In M. Ravassat & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Stylistics and Shakespeare's language (pp. 8–33). London: Continuum.
- Görlach, M. (1991). Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hope, J. (2003). Shakespeare's grammar. London: The Arden Shakespeare.
- Kökeritz, H. (1953). Shakespeare's pronunciation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Lancashire, I. (2010). Why did Tudor England have no monolingual English dictionary? In J. Considine (Ed.), Webs of words: New studies in historical lexicology (pp. 8–23). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- Lancashire, I. (2012). Early Modern English: Lexicon and semantics. In A. Bergs & L. Brinton (Eds.), English historical linguistics: An international handbook: Vol. 1 (pp. 637–652). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Lass, R. (1999). Phonology and morphology. In R. Lass (Ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language: Vol. 3. 1476–1776 (pp. 56–186). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Mulcaster, R. (1582). The first part of the Elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung. London: T. Vautroullier.
- Neuhaus, H. J. (1971). Towards a diachronic analysis of vocabulary. Cahiers de lexicologie, 18, 29–42.
- Nevalainen, T. (1999). Early Modern English lexis and semantics. In R. Lass (Ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language: Vol. 3. 1476–1776 (pp. 332–358). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Nevalainen, T. (2006). An introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Nevalainen, T. (2012). Variable focusing in English spelling between 1400 and 1600. In S. Baddeley & A. Voeste (Eds.), Orthographies in Early Modern Europe (pp. 127–165). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Nevalainen, T., & Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (2017). Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. 2d ed. London: Routledge.
- Oxford English dictionary. OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Rissanen, M. (1999). Syntax. In R. Lass (Ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language: Vol. 3. 1476–1776 (pp. 187–331). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Salmon, V. (1999). Orthography and punctuation. In R. Lass (Ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language: Vol. 3. 1476–1776 (pp. 13–55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Scragg, D. G. (1974). A history of English spelling. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
- Shipley, J. T. (1977). In praise of English: The growth & use of language. New York: Times Books.
- Syme, H. (2011). Shakespearean mythbusting I: The fantasy of the unsurpassed vocabulary. Retrieved from http://www.dispositio.net/archives/501.
- Walker, T. (2007). Thou and you in Early Modern English dialogues: Trials, depositions, and drama comedy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Warner, A. (2012). Early Modern English: Periphrastic DO. In A. Bergs & L. Brinton (Eds.), English historical linguistics: An international handbook: Vol. 1 (pp. 743–756). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Wermser, R. (1976). Statistische Studien zur Entwicklung des englischen Wortschatzes. Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten 91. Bern: Francke.
- Wyld, H. C. (1920). A history of Modern Colloquial English. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
1. There are three textbooks that discuss the Early Modern English period from 1500 to 1700 (Barber, 1997; Görlach, 1991; Nevalainen, 2006).
2. See further Scragg (1974), Salmon (1999), and Lancashire (2010). Spelling standardization is discussed in Nevalainen (2006, pp. 31–37) and in Nevalainen (2012).
3. The authors note that their results represent only approximate values because of the difficulties involved in automatic processing of spelling variants. Particular problems are caused by proper nouns, capitalization, and the use of foreign languages.
4. For quantitative information on lexical growth, see further Lancashire (2010), and on loan words, Durkin (2014) at http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/03/borrowed-words/.
5. The following discussion is based on Nevalainen (2006, pp. 118–131).
6. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (1991). Compiled by Matti Rissanen (Project leader), Merja Kytö (Project secretary); Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö (Old English); Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen (Middle English); Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Early Modern English). Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Retrieved from http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/HelsinkiCorpus/index.html.
⤴The Corpus of Early English Correspondence. 1998. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Project leaders); Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi & Minna Palander-Collin. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Retrieved from http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/index.html.
⤴A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. 2006. Compiled under the supervision of Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University). Retrieved from http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CED/index.html.
7. The discussion in this section adopts a broad view of grammar and includes both morphology and syntax. See further Rissanen (1999), Görlach (1991, pp. 79–135), Barber (1997, pp. 142–218), Nevalainen (2006, pp. 73–117), Culpeper and Kytö (2010, pp. 184–198), and, for a sociolinguistic perspective, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2017).


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Aircraft construction has come a long way since the panicked days of World War I, writes Pamela Wade
You're a German soldier on the Eastern Front in 1942. You've been fighting the Russians all day, you're hunkered down trying to get comfortable enough for some desperately needed sleep, you're drifting off ... and then there's a whistling sound getting louder, a black shape passes overhead and suddenly the night lights up orange, an explosion batters your ears, and your heart is going like the clappers. You've just had a visit from die Nachthexen - Night Witches - and you've learned they never come just once. That's your night's rest done for, and your morale.
The young women of 588th Night Bomber Regiment were one of Stalin's secret weapons, piloting wood-and-canvas biplanes, invisible to radar, to sneak up on the German lines, then cutting their engines to glide overhead while the woman in the back of the open fuselage heaved out the bomb she'd been nursing on her lap. It was primitive, but effective - just like the Polikarpov U-2s they were flying, one of which we're looking at as Roger tells us their terrific story. Small and sturdy, it's dwarfed by some of its neighbours at the Flying Heritage Collection near Everett, north of Seattle, but it's earned its place in this hangar full of combat aircraft.
A surprising number have come here via New Zealand: bought for this collection from Sir Tim Wallis' Wanaka museum by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and not short of a bob or two. Under the high roof are 16 fighters from the air forces of Britain, US, Germany, Russia and Japan, all of them not only meticulously restored to authentically airworthy condition, but also regularly flown from the aerodrome outside. This is some achievement: our elderly and enthusiastic guide, Roger, points out a cheerful yellow biplane with a wooden propeller and bungy cord shock absorbers. "That one was built in 1918 - it's the only one here older than me."
Each of the aircraft has a cracking story: the sinister grey Messerschmitt Bf 109 with the swastika on its tail crash-landed on a beach in northern France, disappearing into the sand until a wingtip was noticed poking out again in 1988. Painted with a toothy snarl, the P-40 Tomahawk was shot down over the Russian tundra where it lay for the next 40 years. The Spitfire, instantly recognisable, gave support to the D-Day landings, was badly damaged but limped back to England, leading its squadron to safety. Perhaps most moving of all, a video next to the Mustang with its garish yellow and black chequerboard-patterned nose shows the reunion in 2002 with its original pilot, Bud Tordoff, who hadn't seen it since the ceasefire. He lays his hand on its wing: "She always brought me home."
We could happily spend ages here nosing around, listening to Roger's stories, but we have an appointment with the opposite face of aviation: peacetime, mass transit, super-sized, high-tech. At nearby Paine Airfield is Boeing's assembly plant and Future of Flight centre where, in an impressive building, the first thing we see is a banner celebrating Air New Zealand's order for its first Dreamliner. Although a series of production delays have been followed by operational problems that have made headlines recently, the airline is still excited about receiving the first of its 10 787s mid next year.
The exhibition hall explains why: entering new territory in both design and engineering, the Dreamliner is a plastic plane. That's not how they describe it, of course. "Composite" is the more reassuring-sounding term for the construction material, stronger than steel, lighter than aluminium, saving 20 per cent in fuel while carrying 50 per cent more cargo. Inside, lower cabin pressure, higher humidity and body-clock-friendly lighting make passengers more comfortable. We look, touch and computer-design our own plane, and learn that William Boeing's first two planes were sold to New Zealand (and may still be hidden in a tunnel under North Head).
The real buzz of a Boeing tour, however, is in the assembly hall, the world's biggest building by volume. At 13,385,378 sq m, it's "big enough to fit the whole of Disneyland!" boasts Paul, our guide. It has its own climate, with rainclouds forming under the roof before ventilation fans were fitted. He divests us of cameras, phones and anything else we may drop over the balcony on to the workers or, worse, the planes four storeys below: "If you break, you buy." At a tidy $170 million for a Dreamliner, we co-operate fully. Eight planes are lined up in various stages of assembly, a clean, automated, orderly process. It's very different from how the Polikarpovs and Mustangs were thrown together during the war, but the aim is the same: bring the people home.
Getting there: Air New Zealand flies direct to Vancouver, from where rail connections go to Seattle. Make sure you have your ESTA visa waiver for the US: www.airnewzealand.co. uk/us-entry-and-transit-requirements
Accommodation: The Inn at the Market in Seattle has character, is comfortable and central:
Online: The Flying Heritage collection is just outside Everett, 44km north of Seattle.
Boeing's Future of Flight aviation centre is not far off Interstate 5, 40km north of Seattle.
* Pamela Wade visited Seattle as a guest of Washington State Tourism.


text: I'm Ryan Malley owner of 827INK.com. On June 24th, 2011 I flew to Melbourne, Australia with artist Sylvia Ji for her first Australian exhibit. For the past few years I've been working with a really amazing guy named Martin McIntosh, owner of Outre Galleries in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. Sylvia and I, along with Martin, thought it would be cool to have a Pop-up Ji show at his gallery in Melbourne. This is kind of a crazy post because after Sylvia's show I did an art/drinking tour of Australia.


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The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) will next week deliver its preliminary review of a new study which states concerns over the potential toxicity of an herbicide containing glyphosate and of glyphosate-tolerant GM (genetically modified) maize NK603.
That study has been widely criticized, including here.
A multidisciplinary task force will analyze the paper by Séralini et al. and publish an initial scientific review as the first step in a two-stage process. If information gaps are identified, EFSA will then contact the authors with a request for further details of the methodology used in the two-year study. This material would contribute to a more comprehensive assessment that EFSA will publish in the coming weeks as the second part of its evaluation. Throughout this process, the authority will work in close cooperation with member state food safety agencies.
The matter will also be raised with national representatives attending the Authority's Advisory Forum meeting this week. The group of EFSA scientists from the GMO, pesticide and scientific assessment units are reviewing the study and may call upon additional external expertise if needed. This work will address a request for scientific advice from the European Commission following publication of the Séralini et al. study in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology on Sept. 19, 2012.
EFSA has been asked to consider the significance of the study's findings as part of its ongoing remit to monitor scientific developments relating to its work.


text:
W. D. Richter
Review by Rumsey Taylor
Posted on 10 June 2013
Source MGM DVD
Categories Failed Franchises
The final credits of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! are prefaced with the announcement that the series will continue in another installment, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. If these titles seem a mouthful, know that they are entirely befitting to the enterprise, an ostensibly science fiction film that features neuroscience, a rock band in the middle of a national tour, John Lithgow at his most pronouncedly villainous, romance, the President of the United States, Jeff Goldblum dressed like a cowboy, and a choreographed dance sequence that amounts to the most cheerful ending I've ever seen in a movie. This sequel was never made, however, even though there would have been plenty of material from which to draw—as analogized in the film's exclamatory, seventeen-syllable title.
The film is essentially about an alien invasion, with the intruding party, Lectroids from the eighth dimension, unnoticed by the human race in the same illusory manner as the bug-eyed antagonists of They Live. They seek a technological marvel called the Oscillation Overthruster—a spaceship component that will enable them to return to their domain. Their plight is opposed by the eponymous Buckaroo, erstwhile bandleader, samurai, and accomplished surgeon who first demonstrates the device's capability by driving a jet-propelled Ford truck straight through a mountain, thereby traversing inter-dimensional space. At the end of this epiphanic experiment, the Ford has deteriorated some, and there's a gloppy, alien-looking ball that's affixed itself to the bottom of Buckaroo's truck. He plucks it off and regards it with suspicion, certain that more inter-dimensional visits are in his future. Unconcerned, in the very next scene he's with his band - the Hong Kong Cavaliers - at a rather handsomely populated show in which he performs solos on both a guitar and piccolo trumpet prior to sitting at a piano for a quiet ballad.
This sequence is one of the film's myriad highlights, and does well to summarize Buckaroo Banzai's near constant tonal variation. The Hong Kong Cavaliers are outfitted in a fashion that describes their preparedness were a music video to be filmed at any given moment (I should note that they're all dressed like this throughout the film). Behind the elaborate facade is a legion of humble, sympathetic men. Their second song, which mimics the opener in its pairing of a horn section with a guitar solo and keyboards, is quickly interrupted by Buckaroo, who - some twenty minutes into the film - subversively polls both his and the film's audience:
Excuse me. Uh, is someone out there not having a good time?
His question comes at a moment when the film has supplied enough action for the viewer to reasonably anticipate what's in store in its remainder, and if further exploits from Buckaroo, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, or the Lectroid invaders will be either entertaining or laborious.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! is overstuffed to a fault, and first-time viewers may be overwhelmed, audience to an in-joke of seemingly considerable import. But the film is coherent and unserious throughout, science-fiction by way of Wes Anderson and inhabited by Huey Lewis and the News. As it proceeds from one goofy set piece to the next, it grows more robust in its narrative scope, and when it ends only a few in its array of starting points reaches conclusion.
It is one of the most fascinating failed franchises, not for its cursed pride in announcing its sequel, but in how the film is about a franchise. The movie begins with Buckaroo Banzai at the height of his academic and popular renown, and it details the extent of this renown rather than in establishing it. Late in the film, when Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers are chasing after the Lectroids, committed to prevent their return to the eighth dimension, they do so in a tour bus that has their name emblazoned on the outside. (Conveniently and peculiarly, this same vehicle doubles as a mobile surveillance van.) It would not be out of character were Buckaroo, after having performed some legendary brain surgery, removed his scrubs to reveal a glittery suit and signed autographs. You get the sense that, had there been more films, Buckaroo Banzai would have been more about the exploits of someone who's a celebrity in all media than the adventures of an intergalactic hero.
The film ends in a wonderful digression, with Buckaroo walking through an aqueduct, his step perfectly in sync with the reprisal of the main theme. His bandmates, love interest, and remainders of the supporting cast join him in step. It's a sequence that would more than suffice as the intro to a television show, so for Buckaroo Banzai to have failed to mount any further adventures in the cinematic realm, this ending carries an aspect of great nostalgia.
Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter
1974Doc Savage: Man of Bronze
1975Flash Gordon
1980The Legend of the Lone Ranger
1981The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
1984Masters of the Universe
1987Howard the Duck
1988Dick Tracy
1990The Rocketeer
1991V.I. Warshawski
1991The Shadow
1998The Zero Effect
1998The Mod Squad
2003Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
2003John Carter
2012We don't do comments anymore, but you may contact us here or find us on Twitter or Facebook.


text:
Even before Disney showered him with the mother of all liquidity events, George Lucas was a very wealthy man.
According to Wealth-X, Star Wars creator George Lucas had about $1.4 billion in cash, investments and other assets before the deal. That didn't include the value of his private companies, which included LucasFilm.
As first reported by CNBC's Julia Boorstin, Disney is paying $4 billion for LucasFilm and its related companies. Fully $2 billion of that will be in stock and $2 billion will be in cash. Since George Lucas never sold stakes in his companies and never took venture capital money, he gets the whole check.


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Last Updated on October 2, 2022 5:57 pm
On Monday, June 16, the N.C. Department of Transportation will begin replacing a bridge on Beaver Dam Road over Little Beaver Dam Creek in Watauga County. During construction, a portion of Beaver Dam Road will be closed and a detour will be in place.
Motorists traveling south on Beaver Dam Road will be directed to take North Fork Road to Old U.S. 421 before turning onto Silverstone Road. The detour will then take motorists to Laurel Branch Road and then Forest Grove Road before returning to Beaver Dam Road. Motorists traveling north on Beaver Dam Road will reverse the detour.
Signs will be in place to help motorists navigate the detour and the road closure. The road will remain closed until the new bridge is completed in mid August.
The bridge being replaced on Beaver Dam Road was built in 1963 and is considered functionally obsolete and structurally deficient according to NCDOT. Although the bridge is safe for the traveling public, it was built to design standards no longer in use and requires costly maintenance to remain functional.
Photo: Kim Scott


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News flash: Matt Cassel is an inexperienced quarterback.
News flash: Bill Belichick is a smart coach.
News flash: The Patriots are capable of improving from week to week, and learning from their mistakes.
Today the Patriots adjusted not only to the mistakes they made last time out against Miami, but also to some miscues that had them trailing San Francisco early in this game.
Randy Moss has been making noise about wanting "touchdowns, not field goals," oh, and also the ball. Cassel went to Moss a couple times early on - once with a long bomb for a beautiful touchdown in the first half. But the next time he tried to go the long-bomb-to-Moss route, he got an interception for his troubles. He's not an experienced enough driver to take that particular high-octane vehicle out for a spin at will like Brady used to; that's just a fact.
By the end of the second quarter, though, the Patriots switched Cassel to a steady diet of short passes to Welker and Moss and gained traction with a balanced running game that saw contributions from Sammy Morris, Kevin Faulk, and LaMont Jordan, the latter before he went down with an injury in the second quarter.
The Patriots actually gained 233 of their 377 total net yards today on passes from Cassel, but two of the three touchdowns New England scored were rushing touchdowns. Factor in three field goals and that 111 of the total passing yards were gained by receivers--and you have a nice balance between Cassel showing improvement, and his veteran teammates and coaching staff also shouldering much of the load.
The game against Miami showed some defensive vulnerabilities, particularly against the running game, that were troubling. Give them two weeks, though, and the Patriots were not only holding San Francisco to a pathetic 3 first downs rushing, but the Patriots pass defense also showed an ability to stiffen up, holding the 9ers to an 11% third down conversion rate. Rodney Harrison in particular seemed to have shifted up a gear for this game, with a big interception in the third quarter.
It was also Harrison that delivered the final defensive coup de grace for San Francisco's QB, JT O'Sullivan, in the fourth quarter, first with a tipped pass that Deltha O'Neal caught for the third San Fran turnover of the game, and then by flying in out of nowhere to elbow the ball out of Arnaz Battle's arm in the waning seconds.
On the offensive side, the line also showed marked improvement over the previous ordeal against Miami. Matt Light was clutch, pancaking linebackers and opening holes for the backs. Most of the successful Patriots runs were off the left side today--including Kevin Faulk's touchdowns. They even took a page directly from Miami's playbook in week 3 for the second of those TDs, with a direct snap to Faulk on the 2-yard line.
Both the Patriots and 49ers entered this game in second place in their respective divisions, and both started inexperienced quarterbacks. But by the end of the game, only one of those QBs was looking rattled, while the other was holding his own, surrounded by veteran teammates.
Cassel's still wet behind the ears, and he's going to make mistakes. Gone are the days this team could be wholly focused on what to "take away" from opponents, and instead its vulnerabilities do sometimes take weapons away from them, like the long passing game today. But the all-or-nothing idea that this is a "lost season" for the Patriots without Brady is looking more foolish by the minute.