text:
The most prestigious of musical forms, opera is also traditionally the most absurd, the most irrational. No musical dictionary could ever deal adequately with the nonsense of opera. It is true that other forms of musical activity—or of life in general—are equally shot through with absurdity: ridiculous jokes about violists and equally ridiculous but true stories about deranged conductors are a sufficient testimony. Nevertheless, in orchestral life competent violists are the rule rather than the exception, and rational conductors may be discovered, while a certain extravagant absurdity is inseparable from opera, and even helps to define it.
Opera ought not to be reasonable, and this expectation of essential lunacy governs the genre and regulates the behavior of everybody concerned with it. A soprano who does not give herself the comic airs of a prima donna betrays her public; an operatic director who does not add some irrelevant and distracting piece of stage business will be viewed with suspicion and probably set his career in jeopardy. I remember a performance of Verdi's Il Trovatore in Naples, in which the tenor, unprepossessing musically as well as physically, finished a performance of "Di quella pira" by stepping forward to the front of the stage, facing his audience with a bold stare, and, after a deep breath, bellowing the unauthorized but frequently sung high C for no less than half a minute, to his own evident satisfaction and the delight of the public. This is a central aspect of operatic life with which The New Grove Dictionary of Opera does not attempt to deal, but it was an incredible moment that almost everybody had come to hear, and this wonderfully unmusical feat rejoiced their hearts. It was what opera was all about.
Certainly the most useful of all reference books on its subject to date, Grove's Opera will give us the plots of all the operas about which one could be reasonably curious, but it will not tell us which Tosca, when throwing herself to her death off the Castel Sant'Angelo, bounced back above the battlements from the trampoline hidden beneath; or who was the first tenor to ask "When does the next swan leave?"; or which famous two-hundred-pound soprano has prudently written into her contract that no director can make her move or gesture if she doesn't want to—and she generally doesn't (one director solved the problem that he felt this seemed to present by having an entire production of Ernani take place in a dim penumbra in which one could only vaguely perceive the principal singers). Grove's Opera will list the cast for the premiere of Salome, but will not divulge which great soprano made it clear that she wore no under-clothes during the Dance of the Seven Veils. Yet these are important issues in the economy of opera, and they help us to see why comparisons of the stars of opera with the great actors and actresses of the legitimate stage always seem oddly out of place, as if opera were not really a serious dramatic art; opera singers, however, are very like movie stars—at least, that is how they behave, how they are promoted, and how we think of them, even if they rarely look like movie stars.
The articles on individual operas are the glory of Grove's Opera: no other dictionary of music has ever given so full an account of the libretto scene by scene, along with some details of each work's conception and initial productions. There is, understandably, much less musical information than we found in the parent New Grove: I am not sure whether editor and subeditors of the Grove's Opera consciously decided that opera buffs are less interested in music than the readers of the twenty-volume general work, but if so, they were probably right. Technical terms are largely avoided. Some of the writers, however, take pleasure in telling us what key different parts of the opera are in. This is, I believe, a British trait, and the opera volumes seem much less influenced by transatlantic musicology than the heavily Americanized general work.
Perhaps the British are proud of knowing what key a piece is in, a gift not granted to all scholars. In the article on Richard Strauss's Elektra, David Murray writes: "The key declines to a curdled B flat minor, however, and the tempo to a dim, sluggish pulse, as [Elektra] calls upon her father…. " "Her sister pleads her own tearful despair, in mellifluous E flat…. " "Electra agrees that a sacrifice is justly required—at once the music pulls itself together in stark C minor…. " "Brother and sister embrace, speechless; the music churns for a long time before reaching haven in soft, glowing A flat…. " It is evident from a phrase or two in his other articles on Strauss that Murray has a genuine feeling for what large-scale key structure can effect, but he seems to have been constrained here to hold this understanding in check, and supply only picturesque detail.
Clive Allen, too, wants his readers to know the key of every number of Der Freischütz, but other authors do not feel obliged to offer even this much musical detail. Nevertheless, one should be grateful for the clarity with which the plots are recounted, and many readers will be pleased to discover at last what actually happens in Il Trovatore, about which Roger Parker writes appreciatively—although calling the duet of Manrico and Azucena at the beginning of the final scene "narcotic" will give the wrong idea to many readers.
A few of the articles on composers are held over from the parent dictionary, among them Friedrich Lippmann's satisfying Bellini and Daniel Heartz's very fine piece on the eighteenth-century composer Traetta, but most are newly written for the opera volumes. Richard Taruskin's Mussorgsky has a special brilliance, Richard Osborne's Rossini a special elegance, and Julian Rushton's Mozart a special density (although his suggestion that Mozart could have ended the great sextet in Don Giovanni in a key other than E flat is not supported by any precedent in Mozart's practice—and anyway, as the French say, if my aunt had them, she would be my uncle).
Some other entries are more controversial: Barry Millington's Wagner is not as powerful a performance as Carl Dahlhaus's was in the larger New Grove, although it is an excellent piece of work. He tends, however, to underplay much present critical work on Wagner and to overemphasize his own research, in particular the oddly British obsession with what key a piece is in. It is clear that Wagner used certain tonalities symbolically, but it is not so crucial an aspect of his art as this new dictionary makes out. Millington also finds it significant that the second scene of Das Rheingold begins in D flat major and that the last opera of this tetralogy, Die Götterdämmerung, ends in D flat major, but this has little to do with keys. The second scene of Das Rheingold begins with a vision of the newly built Valhalla, and the tetralogy ends with another vision of Valhalla in flames; the same leitmotif arrives in the same key. Nevertheless, this is not a framing device (and dismissing the E flat major of the opening scene of Das Rheingold as lying outside the form is unconvincing). In fact, the end of Götterdämmerung—in texture and orchestration as well as harmony, key, and motif—resembles, not the second scene, but the last scene of Das Rheingold, with the entry of the gods into Valhalla; and it is a dramatic effect, not a formal frame, to end both the first and last operas of the tetralogy in a similar way.
Only in Die Meistersinger and Parsifal is a whole opera by Wagner conceived as a completely closed tonal structure, and the third act of Parsifal is remarkable as a slow progression from B major back to the A flat major of the Prelude to the first act: the Prelude to the third act continually suggests B major while always falling into B flat minor, and the music resolves the ambiguity only with the straightforward B Major of the Good Friday Spell—even here, we can see that the role of tonality in Wagner is not that of a classical frame but of a process. Millington's attempt to ascribe framing devices to Wagner obscures the energetic scene of harmonic movement, which is more significant.
Millington's contention that the pedantic musical arbiter in Die Meistersinger, Beckmesser, was intended to be understood as a caricature of a Jew has received a good deal of attention, but it has only a little more than a grain of truth. His argument runs briefly as follows:
1) Wagner disliked Jews and claimed that Jewish composers wrote music with all sorts of unmusical characteristics.
2) Beckmesser is a bad musician whose music has similar characteristics.
3) Therefore Beckmesser is Jewish.
This is confirmed by an esoteric pun in Act One, referring to a Grimm fairy tale about a Jew, an allusion which nobody has detected before Millington.
The fact is, Millington is probably right about the pun, an example of Wagner's disgusting anti-Semitic humor, and Beckmesser was originally intended as a caricature of the critic Edouard Hanslick, who had a Catholic father and a Jewish mother (it is, of course, the mother that counts). It is also evident, however, that no effort was made by Wagner to carry this anti-Semitic element any further in the opera as it stands; beyond the pun, which passed unnoticed, no pejorative allusion to Jews can be found elsewhere in the work. Hans Sachs's final aria in praise of pure German art, which will protect German cultural identity even when Germany is conquered by foreign troops, is directed against the French: not even Wagner's paranoia dreamed up an occupying army of Jews. Millington's supposition that-Beckmesser's serenade is a parody of Jewish cantorial style is unconvincing, and Wagner does not try to make Beckmesser sound Jewish, as he does with Mime, the greedy, timorous dwarf in Siegfried (as others have observed, here is where Wagner's anti-Semitism has genuine musical expression).
The extent to which Millington's research has run away with him can be seen when he writes:
The irregular phrase lengths, false accentuations and disorderly progress of the Serenade depict Beckmesser's agitation and supposed artistic sterility, and should not be regarded as symptomatic of an "advanced" musical style.
"Supposed artistic sterility?" Millington is so carried away with his vision of Beckmesser as a persecuted Jew that he ends up by thinking of him as a real person, not as a character created by Wagner, and imagines that Wagner is wrongfully denying creative powers to a real musician. But Beckmesser is a fiction, a wicked, bigoted critic in an opera, and he is what Wagner made him. His serenade, however, is a miracle of invention: it is stupid, awkward, and bad, but like Mozart's "Musical Joke" it is fascinating and a delight to listen to; it seems to predict a style of music which escapes the norms of Wagner's age, just as the whole tone scale in Mozart's violin cadenza in the "Joke" foreshadows a new music while it makes fun of a violinist with intonation problems. And Wagner himself is swept away with enthusiasm for the serenade and bases the entire finale of the second act on it, a finale which is his greatest ensemble.
I have not attacked Millington's exaggeration in order to depreciate his research, which is important, but because I believe that the overemphasis is bound to have fearsome consequences. I foresee the mad glint in the eye of some stage director demanding that the part of Beckmesser be modeled on Fagin in Oliver Twist, and then it will inevitably be only a short step to a production centered upon the rehabilitation of Beckmesser as the oppressed Jew, undeservedly mocked and reviled by the proto-Nazi populace of Nuremberg.
Most of the articles on individual composers, including Millington's, are, like the articles on individual operas, strong and very satisfactory if rarely original or provocative, but the general articles are, sadly, more uneven. Aria, for example, has four authors (with help parenthetically indicated from three more). The first part, on the seventeenth century, is an antique relic by Jack Westrup preserved from the earlier dictionary. The eighteenth century, however, is treated with up-to-date brilliance by Marita P. McClymonds, who provides a clear and useful summary of all the different aria forms and a wonderful fund of information in an elaborate and readable essay. On the nineteenth century, Julian Budden is more perfunctory: although the aria forms of Rossimi, Bellini, Verdi, and Meyerbeer are as conventional as the eighteenth-century patterns, if not more so, we are given little help toward comprehending them. We could all use that help: in Roger Parker's otherwise splendid article on Verdi, he writes
[Verdi] was occasionally encouraged by the dramatic situation to construct lyric movements of extreme formal simplicity. The final section of the Aida-Radames duet (Aida Act IV) is a most telling example. This passage, first sung by Aida, is repeated literally by Radames and then repeated again by both characters in unison.
This is, however, not an original construction of Verdi, but a return to an exceedingly common pattern for the cabaletta (or final section) of a duet, found many times in Bellini and others. It is not the extreme formal simplicity which is particularly remarkable here, as that is rather the rule than the exception in cabalettas, but the intensity of Verdi's melody, and the use of a slow lyrical cabaletta in place of the usual brilliant coloratura. (In his article on Verdi, Parker actually describes the nineteenth-century aria with greater detail and accuracy than the article on Aria does.) After Budden's contribution to the discussion of aria, Andrew Clements then dismisses the twentieth century in two paragraphs. The entire entry is a patchwork affair, in which any editorial concern for consistency is missing.
We might have expected more care in an article as important as Aria for a dictionary of opera. There are, however, many fine and many extraordinary general entries, and I enjoyed Piero Weiss on Opera Buffa and Will Crutchfield on Ornamentation. The latter is full of good things, but I would have liked some indication of how ornamentation changed between Mozart and Rossini, and above all between Rossini and Bellini. Certain ornamental practices continue beyond their usefulness or their relevance; the study of performance practice needs to become more critical, and take account of the difficulty that performers and singers have in adapting themselves to changes of style, and we must guard against the fallacy of thinking that if a certain musical practice (like adding Rossinian ornaments) did not die out, it was therefore appropriate.
The entries on singers (and there are thousands of them) are less useful than they might have been because of the refusal of the editors to include even a selected discography. Occasionally a record is mentioned in the text, but there is no systematic policy; this is like writing about a composer with only an incidental and passing mention of any of his works. (Apropos, the entry on Der Rosenkavalier praises the Schwartzkopf-Karajan recording, but passes in silence over the great early set with Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Schumann, and Richard Mayr, which is musically more distinguished, and famous as one of the milestones of opera recording.) The entries on singers are largely uncritical, but they will come in handy if you want to settle a bet about, say, where Rosa Ponselle was born.
The entries on historians of opera are almost equally uninformative unless the writer has been dead for more than a century. We are told, for example, something about the ideas of Francesco Algarotti, who was much admired by Frederick the Great and by Lady Mary Montagu. About Hermann Abert, however, we learn only that he wrote important books on Mozart and Gluck but not why they were important, and the bibliography of his writings lists his editing of operas by Gluck and Jomelli, but fails to mention his edition of The Marriage of Figaro, although his preface to that is one of the finest things ever written about the opera, with a brilliant discussion of the structure of Mozart's finales. We are told that Joseph Kerman wrote a provocative book about opera, but not why it was provocative: perhaps one of the editors of the dictionary would have enjoyed reading it, and could have added one or two sentences about the nature and tendencies of Kerman's thought. As it stands, the dictionary lumps together a few dozen original thinkers and many hundreds of professional hacks in a gray uniformity.
Cross references are capricious: the entry for Nietzsche quotes some of the things he had to say about Carmen, but the account of that opera does not refer us to it; nor does it list Nietzsche in the bibliography. On the other hand, the article on Don Giovanni informs us that Kierkegaard derived his ideas on that opera from the music rather than the libretto, but it does not tell us what those ideas were. Furthermore, it does not give us a crossreference to Kierkegaard, presumably because there is no article on Kierkegaard.
The gaping void at the heart of The New Grove Dictionary of Opera is the absence of an article on Singing. The editor-in-chief, Stanley Sadie, puts a brave face on this, remarking in the preface that the twenty-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music had no article on "Music." I am told that committing the first crime makes the next ones easier. In place of a proper article on. Singing there is an enormous bibliography. You may well imagine that a simple list of books that takes up sixty pages of small print contains a lot of junk alongside the few interesting and important items; and since the list is absolutely uncritical, no commentary or guidance is offered.
The result is that the history of singing is badly represented in Grove's Opera, in spite of a large number of articles on particular aspects of the subject. One example may show what is missing: there is no entry for spianato, a particular style of vocal production in which the voice floats evenly and expressively over the accompaniment. This is a term used in a well-known letter of Mozart to his father, written when he was rehearsing I domeneo, when the superannuated tenor who sang the title role complained about the great quartet (which was Mozart's favorite number in the opera) that he could not spianare la voce—that is, show off the evenness and beauty of his voice. Mozart was indignant: that was not the proper way to sing in an ensemble, which had to be executed parlando—that is, with a speaking style. Spianato, a term also used by Chopin and by Saint-Saens as well as by nineteenth-century writers on vocalism, is to be contrasted not only with the speaking style, but also with the fioriture, or virtuoso passagework. An operatic term like spianato needed by Mozart and Chopin should not have been omitted. This would not have escaped the editors of Grove's Opera if they had tried to represent the history of singing in a general way: a reaction away from Rossinian coloratura had a momentary success in the 1820s with Bellini, and profoundly influenced future vocal styles, including Wagner's.
With all its deficiencies—and what enterprise of this magnitude would not have as many—the new dictionary is a remarkable achievement; it gives pleasure as well as enlightenment. What it mainly lacks is a sense of history: the nonarticle on singing is symptomatic. Even the entry entitled "Opera" has only a thin sense of historical development. Perhaps a sense of reality would be a better term for what is missing, as the lack of any responsible discography indicates. The world of opera, as it must face today's economic problems, depends on recordings. In the dictionary, opera comes out as a respectable but abstract genre, the various facets of which are treated as if they were synchronic. It must be admitted that a dictionary is forced to classify, to assume fixed meanings where there is very often nothing but a wavering series of associations that changes with every decade. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that the extravagant reality of opera does not break in more often.
Opera is clearly a disreputable or droll form throughout most of its history—from the eighteenth century, when members of the audience played cards or chess during the recitatives, to the nineteenth, when enormously fat sopranos impersonated heroines in the final stages of tuberculosis, and to the twentieth, when Rhine maidens who had to appear as if swimming under water were sometimes suspended upside down by mistake, or when famous nearsighted tenors have peered anxiously about the stage trying to find the heroine.
The ideal of opera, the way it attains a vision of the sublime, cannot be disengaged from its grossly physical side, and this interdependence is realized intensely in the poet Wayne Koestenbaum's personal celebration of homosexuality and opera. The discovery of his own homosexuality and of his obsession with opera are so inextricably tangled together that it is not always clear which he is writing about. Half autobiography, half essay or fragmentary meditation on the mythical figure of the diva, this book might seem at first sight to tell us less about opera in general and more about Wayne Koestenbaum, whose photograph boyishly solicits our gaze from the inner back flyleaf. In fact, The Queen's Throat obliquely and sometimes even directly engages some aspects of the history of opera that are often passed over too lightly.
The camp taste for opera, the homosexual cult of the diva, is very much a product of our century, like the gay interest in the ballet. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ballet attracted the interest principally of the heterosexual male. It was fashionable to have a ballet dancer as a mistress, and the male dancer received relatively little attention before the arrival of Diaghilev early in the twentieth century, when Nijinsky and, later, Massine became stars whose fame rivaled and even surpassed that of Pavlova. Opera, it is true, was sexually more ambiguous from the beginning, particularly in the early eighteenth century when almost all the heroic male roles were written either for castrato or for female soprano, but—as far as I can gather from very limited reading—the castrato attracted much more sexual interest from women than from men. Although the last role written for the castrato voice was in Meyerbeer's The Crusader in Egypt of 1821, heroic male roles for women's voices continued to be written for a few years more, above all the Romeo of Bellini's I Capuletti ed i Montecchi.
If there was no specific homosexual interest in ballet or opera at that time, that is because there was no specific homosexual society or culture. In the Old Testament, the Sodomites may have been considered a race apart, but from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, homosexuality was a vice open to everybody, sometimes harshly repressed, sometimes tolerated or ignored, but never presented as an exclusive way of life. In sixteenth-century Florence, for example, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote amusingly and maliciously of his friends cruising for boys by the River Arno, but they all seemed to be ready as well for encounters with women at other moments. His contemporary Pietro Aretino, in that stylish masterpiece of pornography The Conversations (I Raggionamenti), constructs an elaborate and improbable scene in which an abbot dallies with a girl with one hand and a boy with the other while simultaneously screwing a nun and being sodomized by a novice priest (all their simultaneous cries of delight skillfully orchestrated by the author). Very little precedence is given here to either straight or queer sex, although heterosexuality understandably takes up most of the space in these dialogues. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, homosexuality is treated generally either as an overflow of sexual vitality or as an extra delight in sin and evil. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Earl of Rochester, undoubtedly heterosexual, writes of buggering his page when there is nothing better at hand: we need not take this as autobiographical, but as a commonplace of the libertine poetry of the time.
No doubt there were always those who preferred their own sex, like the satiric poet Boisrobert at the court of Louis XIII of France, but he is amiably described by the gossip-writer Tallemant des Réaux as an eccentric, not as a member of a special sect. There was always a certain contempt and pity for a man who could not perform properly with a woman, and Alexander Pope's remark to Joseph Spence that both of the famous essayists Addison and Steele were "hermaphrodites" (that is, homosexuals) is an example of eighteenth-century homophobia ("I am sorry to say so," Pope added, "and there are not twelve people in the world that I would say it to at all"—a statement that wonderfully dispenses tolerance, sympathy, and malice in equal parts). The use of a word like "hermaphrodite" reveals that the possibility of setting homosexuals apart almost as a separate race was always latent. Nevertheless, homosexuality was generally conceived, not as a propensity, but as an addiction: evil, disgusting, interesting, amusing, or even idealistic, depending upon the viewpoint.
Not until the later nineteenth century does homosexuality have a cultural ideology of its own, mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience and exploding into scandal in 1889 with the affair of the Cleveland Street brothel, and then the trial of Oscar Wilde. The homosexual as a being apart, alienated from normal society and identifiable by the connoisseur's eyes through the subtle traces of effeminacy in his anatomy and his comportment, is introduced with a brilliant fanfare at the opening of Proust's fourth volume, Sodome et Gomorrhe. For the first time, we have a gay culture and a gay society.
In his meditation on the diva, Koestenbaum writes:
By the twentieth century, homosexuality already meant more than just sex acts or desires shared by bodies of the same gender. It implied a milieu and a personality—flamboyant, narcissistic, self-divided, grandiose, excessive, devoted to decor. These stereotypes have shaped behavior, and have been reinforced by gay people when they have made the transition from enduring their preference, to choosing it.
These stereotypes, however, were certainly reinforced by constraint as well as by choice, and the milieu and personality are only one kind of fictional mask out of many possibilities. What, after all, has the opera queen to do with the mustachioed clones in blue jeans, the leather and motorcycle freaks, the yearning subscribers to pedophile magazines, the marine who longs for a blow-job from a transvestite, the happily married businessman who needs a regular escape from straight sex, the pale graduate student dreaming about freshmen in his lonely bed, or even the cultured yuppie lawyer who keeps house with a young musician? Like opera itself, the opera queen is a remarkably artificial, specialized creation.
In his chapter on The Codes of Diva Conduct, Koestenbaum calls up the monumental figure of Mae West:
Legend has it that Frank O'Hara called Mae West the inventor of, "small-town faggot psychology." Mae West was not an opera singer, but she thought like one. She pontificated: "Personality is the most important thing to an actress's success. You can sing like Flagstad or dance like Pavlova or act like Bernhardt, but if you haven't personality you will never be a real star."
Unfortunately, Koestenbaum never pursues Mae West's implicit comparison of herself to the diva, and does not call up the equally illuminating camp adulation of Bette Davis.
In an age which had already formed an anorexic ideal of woman with a boyish figure and no hips, Mae West displayed a generous mass of pulchritude. This mass, however, was held in check, never allowed to overflow its boundaries. Firmly corsetted with the strength of armor plate, with never a hair or a sequin out of place, Mae West was as stately as a battle-ship. The flesh never asserted its grossness; she appeared at her most typical as a tableau vivant of the Statue of Liberty. She was an abstract of female sexuality: no one afraid of real physical contact with a woman was made in the least nervous by Mae West. Her famous sexual innuendoes were at once provocative and innocent, never disquieting. She offered no passion, only invitation, and rarely expressed any emotion beyond mild amusement. Someone once said that she was the greatest female impersonator of all time.
The grossness of the real world entered the picture with the men that surrounded her. As the camera panned out over the audience that applauded her singing, it revealed, not a crowd of handsome young males or even the muscle-men that so frequently surrounded her in real life off the screen, but an ordinary collection of middle-aged and elderly lechers, their faces transfigured with admiration. As a lion tamer in I'm No Angel, she opens a large trunk of equipment, and we see, pasted to the inside of the lid, the snapshots of her many onenight stands, balding, unattractive traveling-salesman types. The contrast brought out her glamour, and the tension between the tawdry surroundings and her idealized corsetted shape was always a source of comedy. She played an artificial, forever unalterable, vision of sex, plunged into the reality of everyday life.
The diva, like Mae West, presents an erotic charge with no sexual threat. The erotic interest is in the voice; sensuality pours from her throat. Even if she is physically attractive—which may happen, although rarely—that is irrelevant to the opera queen. On the contrary, the intrusion of the physical spectacle of an unattractive diva actually makes the erotic purity of the vocal line more manifest, more palpable.
In Now, Voyager, the most powerful as well as the trashiest of her important films, Bette Davis plays a dumpy, overweight, neurotic Boston virgin. Emboldened by psychiatrist Claude Raines, she goes on a cruise, falls in love, and, like Maria Callas, at once loses all her unwanted pounds. However, the man she wants is unattainable (for complex and not very interesting reasons), and she has to renounce sex for the rest of her life and sacrifice herself by raising the daughter he has had with another woman. Unlike Mae West Bette Davis presents the disorderly reality of sexual desire, but like the homosexual, either she is frustrated, or society takes revenge on her for her wicked libido. Her sexual menace is neutralized in Jezebel, where only if she nurses the sick can she offset the sexual depravity of appearing in a red dress at a ball where the girls with a normal sex drive wore white.
Both Mae West and Bette Davis play outsiders who flaunt the differences of their sexuality from the norms that society tries to impose, and they do so as flamboyantly as any opera queen. The homosexual finds release from his inner tensions in the violence of Bette Davis's expression of feminine rage, and he identifies with her frustrations. The coarseness of Mae West's verbal comedy, combined with the way her appearance both represents and distances an erotic invitation at the same time, allows the homosexual to approach female sexuality without fear of aggression. The cult of the diva offers him similar and even greater freedom. The opera queen may admire tenors, but like Koestenbaum it is only sopranos that he idolizes. The diva helps him escape the shame with which society has characterized his inadequate response to the female anatomy. At last he can find genuine passion for a woman, not merely as a mother or as a nanny, but as an erotic object, for the sexuality embodied—or disembodied—in her voice.
For this purpose, the physical absurdity of opera is crucial, an absurdity that the finest of stage directors and the most graceful of singers can mitigate but can never entirely dispel. A small number of famous sopranos are indeed attractive, generally the ones who sing the lighter parts, but few of them look appealing with their mouths wide open. However, the spectacle of Tristan and Isolde trying to embrace but too fat to get their arms conveniently about each other does not lessen the emotional power of the love duet for the opera buff, or for that suborder of the opera buff, the opera queen. The voice not the physical frame in which it is merely lodged, is the center of excitement. Perhaps this is why a certain element of bad taste is essential for the opera queen: a preference for Lucia di Lammermoor over Norma, or even an eager tolerance of the second-rate soprano (Koestenbaum has written poems to Anna Moffo), allows homosexual pathos more space, more room to expand.
The figure of Maria Callas is central to the mythology of the opera queen, and Koestenbaum devotes a whole chapter to her:
We love Callas because she revised her body. In three years she dropped from 210 pounds to 144, and changed from ugly duckling to glamour queen. Bodies can't always be altered, but Callas's self-revision, like a sex change, makes us believe in the power of wish.
He writes well about her faults and her self-discipline. He does not sufficiently acknowledge her purely musical intelligence, or remark about what two conductors have told me—that she had an uncanny ability to take account of the orchestra and alter the timbre of her notes according to the accompanying harmony. But, then, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera does not tell us that either. I heard Callas sing in public only twice, and she was still fat: her worst vocal problems were not yet troublesome, her stage presence was dramatic, and her weight did not matter. The work was Norma at the Rome Opera, and it was the only time I have ever gone to the same opera twice in one week. With all her faults, she revealed Bellini with all his faults as a great composer.
At one point, Koestenbaum reaches a profound observation that transcends both Callas and her relation to the homosexual fan. It applies, however, beyond the limited range that he intended:
When we value Callas for creating a revolution in operatic performance practice, for singing neglected Bellini and Donizetti operas as if they were tragic vehicles of undiminished power, we are valuing her for opening up the opera box, the closed space of a genre that never seemed to let us in or to let our meanings out. And yet, ironically, her revitalizations of dismissed bel canto operas only emphasized opera's moribund nature….
Anachronism was one aspect of opera that long ago opened it to gay appropriation; opera seemed campy and therefore available to gay audiences only when it had become an outdated art form, sung in foreign languages, with confused, implausible plots. Opera's apparent distance from contemporary life made it a refuge for gays, who were creations of modern sexual systems, and yet whom society could not acknowledge or accommodate. Opera is not very real. But gayness has never been admitted into the precincts of reality. And so gays may seek out art that does not respect the genuine.
Superficially, Maria Callas took away opera's campiness by making it believable and vivid. And yet by importing truth into opera, an art of the false, she gave the gay fan a dissonance to match his own. Bestowing verisimilitude on Lucia or Norma or Elvira, Callas perforated the operagoer's complacency; her voice and her presence, arsenals of depth, when brought to bear on music that had become superficial, upset the audience's sense of perspective. Though it seems sacrilegious to call Callas's musically compelling creations camp, she performed the same kind of reversal that camp induces: she shattered the codes that separate dead from living works of art…. Callas "camped" Lucia not by mocking it (Lucia is too easy to mock) but by taking it seriously. Resuscitating Lucia, Callas challenged our belief that history's movement is linear, that there is a difference between past and present, and that modern reality is real.
The last phrase comes too easily, but it is true that there is a distance between opera and modern life, and that this distance imposes a form of alienation on the spectator.
This alienation, however, is inseparable from opera since its invention; it was at first intended, after all, as the revival of sung Greek classical tragedy. It was always distant from modern life, critics always complained about its confused, implausible plots, and in eighteenth-century London and Vienna—and often in Paris as well—it was generally sung in a foreign language unintelligible to the public. It was not opera that had become so dated, so artificial that it could bring gays a "matching dissonance," an analogue in music for their supposedly artificial, unnatural lives. Opera has always been artificial, and great artists have performed the miracle of making it seem natural. It was the construction of "gay consciousness," the fiction of a "gay community" that created from their lives a metaphor for opera and a public that believed it could recognize itself in these masterpieces from the past.
The extraordinary aptness of the new alliance came from opera's imposition of an eroticism of the most powerful nature, but an eroticism in which the body strangely counted for almost nothing. In most cultures the erotic has always been a source of shame, the body a source of disgust—perhaps most of all for the homosexual who has had to outface shame and disgust so often and from so many. Through his worship of the diva, the homosexual discovered what seems to be a way of sexually rejoining the heterosexual community—in its way, as much a fiction or an illusion as the gay community. It is the erotic power of music, which achieves its most obvious effects in opera, that presents the listeners with both a momentary release from anxiety and a transient sense of ecstasy.
Of all the arts, music works most directly on the nerves, seemingly unfiltered through a system of meaning. In the opera, music does not come to us through the words: the words arrive through the music and sometimes give it greater force: in most operas the force of love. Provided that the staging does not distract or force itself too insistently upon our unwilling consciousness, the music benefits from the bright contrast with the dumpy, sweaty bodies that are producing it—it is like sex without shame or physical awkwardness or postcoital sadness, not as good as the real thing, of course, but still a great consolation.
This is the side of opera from which The New Grove Dictionary of Opera modestly averts its eyes. There is no article on Eroticism and Opera. Why not? There is one on Milwaukee. This is why the entry on Tristan und Isolde, except for the banal observation that the love duet ends with coitus interruptus, does not face the sexual implications of the score, or the way it is almost always Isolde who is on top, so to speak—playing the man's role, when she stands with the sword raised over Tristan's wounded body as her narrative recalls in the first act, or seizes the only too obvious symbol of the torch in the second act to brandish it and bring on the catastrophe. It is also why there is no article on Kierkegaard, who wrote more explicitly than anyone before him on the erotic nature of music, and who understood the character of Mozart's art better than most of the critics who came after. The basis of opera speciously appears to be an opposition between the ideal purity of the music and the gritty reality needed to produce it, the silly costumes, the ridiculous plots, the embarrassing decor: but the music hides within itself a reality fully as abrasive, equally physical.
This Issue
April 22, 1993


text:
0 item(s)
View cart
You have no items in your shopping cart.
For the sports fanatic! Baseball is more than a game. It's like life played out on a field a beer with a buddy, cheering on life. With our P☺sitive Sports Urn - Baseball, we can insert any favorite Baseball game photo or any passport-size (2"x2") photo of your choice.
"Celebrate the best season of life"
► Urn
Dimensions - Size 11'' High x 8'' Wide x 6'' Thick
Capacity - 260 Cubic Inches
► Keepsake
Dimensions: 6'' High x 3¾" Wide x 2 3/8" Thick
Capacity: 1 Cubic Inch

subset: commoncrawl


text: Why should you buy steroids on our Online Shop? Buy anabolic steroids online from authorized steroids source. Buy steroids from approved official reseller. Purchase steroids that we sale to beginners and advanced bodybuilders Malay Tiger Stanozolol. We provide powerful anabolic products without a prescription Geneza Pharmaceuticals Anavar. Low price at all oral steroids Zydex Pharma Test E. Buy steroids, anabolic steroids, Injection Steroids, Buy Oral Steroids, buy testosterone, Northern Anadrol Pharma.


text:
This story appeared in the April issue of the PRC's Preservation in Print magazine. Interested in getting more preservation stories like this delivered to your door each month? Become a member of the PRC for a subscription!
Preservation and economic development coexist in a symbiotic relationship in New Orleans. The tout ensemble represented today in our historic neighborhoods is the culmination of the work and passion of countless individuals and groups that pushed for the preservation of our historic architecture.
The Vieux Carré, commonly known as the French Quarter, has always been at the forefront of the city's preservation movement, and perhaps naturally so, as the original city. At the beginning of the 20th century, many of the once-grand residences of the Vieux Carré had been divided up into apartments and left in a state of quiet neglect and disrepair. The romantic nature of the scene was beneficial to those in pursuit of inexpensive apartments, such as immigrant populations and artists seeking studio space. It also drew in tourists to view "The City Care Forgot, Quaint, Historic, New Orleans," as stated in a 1910 Washington Herald advertisement for the St. Charles Hotel.
In December of 1919, a fire destroyed the French Opera House, a city institution and cultural center for the Creole population. With its loss, came one less reason to visit the Vieux Carré — what was to be found there but faded memories of a lost time, squalor, bad roads and decaying buildings? The fear of this sentiment rallied local business and property owners of the Vieux Carré together, and on the evening February 5, 1920, they held their first public meeting at the Hotel Montelone to put together plans of action.
These initial plans were far reaching in scope: calls to rebuild the French Opera House, improve streets, increase the number of electric street lights, and a "general modernization of buildings, both dwellings and business premises with a liberal use of paints," were listed in articles detailing the meeting's proceedings. Days before the first meeting, the New Orleans States reported that the group wished to "create the right kind of conditions for the house-holder and home-owner who may prefer to reside in this charming quarter." Also, included within the discussion of this first meeting, led by J. Earl Rogers and other businessmen of the neighborhood, was the call to protect "private homes, which reflect the architectural types of early days," and the creation of "regulations to prevent the undue destruction of structures that ought to be preserved," as reported by the New Orleans Item. The small group of concerned citizens tasked themselves with quite the workload. Some of these improvements would come to fruition that very year; others we continue to work on to the present day.
Beyond the outlined scope of work presented at the meeting, the businessmen also had additional plans that would help for them to achieve their goals. The Quarter, neglected for years by many members of society other than their visits to the Opera House, needed to be relabeled as a fashionable locale. To safeguard their investments, and their businesses, the men realized that further steps were necessary. Just days after their inaugural meeting, Walter Valois, president of the newly christened Vieux Carré Improvement Association, promised to aid in financing a building for the United Women's Club if they would move their clubhouse into the Vieux Carré.
The group also began writing to the European absentee landlords of the blighted homes within the Quarter, urging them to sell and place the properties into the hands of those capable of restoring and preserving them. They then publicly announced a call to action in the New Orleans States, at the end of February 1920, titled, "Shall Vieux Carre [sic] Live? It Is Up To Orleanians." The article stated, "Are there in New Orleans forty or fifty men willing to act [as] godfather to fine old mansions in the French Quarter?" They didn't find 40 or 50 men at first, but they did find one man willing and able to take on the role – the same man who anonymously purchased and then donated the French Opera House to Tulane University in 1913. That man was Virginia-born entrepreneur, banker and philanthropist William Ratcliffe Irby.
The importance of Irby's role in the protection of the Vieux Carré cannot be overstated. In answer to the plea of the Vieux Carré Improvement Association, Irby purchased the Lower Pontalba Building in the early winter of 1920. Then, in April 1921, he purchased the old parish prison, near to the cathedral, and donated it to the State Museum for use as administrative offices. Also listed among the buildings purchased by Irby to secure their preservation were the Seignouret-Brulator house (currently being restored by The Historic New Orleans Collection) and the Paul Morphy house (today's Brennan's Restaurant). In addition, Irby financed part of the restoration of St. Louis Cathedral, after it incurred hurricane damage in 1915, with a $125,000 anonymous gift.
With the purchase of the Pontalba Buildings and a known intent to restore and develop them, other property investors began to take notice of the long forgotten architecture of the Quarter. "After half a century of neglect the Vieux Carre [sic] is awakened to its second blooming," wrote Lyle Saxon in a June 1920 Times-Picayune article. Saxon, through his reporting on the newfound interest in the Vieux Carré, would become the unofficial spokesman of the movement by highlighting the merits of the French Quarter and advocating for its preservation. In the same article of June 1920, he went on to state, "Today there are a score of men and women, busily repairing and remodeling houses they have bought or leased and who will move to the Quarter, bag and baggage, in the fall. The renaissance of the old section is actually at hand — at last."
By the spring of 1921 the French Quarter was bustling with activity, and people were not only visiting — they were choosing to take up residence there. Most importantly, however, in June of that year, an amendment to the Louisiana Constitution was added (Article XIV, Section 22A) that authorized the New Orleans City Council to create the Vieux Carré Commission (VCC). This ordinance laid the groundwork, though the commission would not become active officially until 1925.
The spring of 1921 was also important because it was the time in which the Quartier Club relocated from their cramped location shared with the Daughters of 1776- 1812, to a newly restored corner space in the Lower Pontalba Building. The Quartier Club functioned as a social club for society members, offering lectures, dinner dances and luncheons. The club was founded in 1919 and led by the legendary Elizebeth Werlein. A larger than life figure in New Orleans history, the then recently widowed suffragette leader stood at nearly six feet tall, and was arguably one of the most interesting women to have ever called New Orleans home. A New Orleans States article of May 1921 described her in the following terms: "Mrs. Werlein is Louisiana chairman of the League of Women Voters. She has been identified with every movement for the betterment of children and women in the South in recent years. She has hunted tigers in India, shot big game in Africa, ballooned all over Europe, broken wild stallions in the steppes of Russia, flown in the first plane of the Wright brothers in Paris, eaten luncheon in a submarine on the bottom of the sea, is a leader of New Orleans society and the mother of four." Led by Werlein, Society had arrived; the Vieux Carré was once again a fashionable place to see and to be seen.
Progress continued in the Quarter, economic and real estate development was at a high. Many of the plans that the small group of businessmen put together in early 1920 had come to fruition. However, they were still only acting as a citizens group until 1925. With pressure from the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects and members of the women's organization Le Petit Salon, the Commission Council of New Orleans officially created the first VCC. The initial members were Mrs. Charles M. Wogan, Mrs. Neal M. Leach, Mrs. Emile Godchaux, Ross E. Breazeale, Charles A. Desporte, John H. Bernard and Dr. Rigney D'Aunoy, with Mayor Behrman acting as ex-officio member. However, this group's role was limited to serving merely as an advisory committee.
Frustrated by the lack of administrative power granted to the Commission to protect the architectural fabric of the Vieux Carré, a small band of activists and preservation advocates pushed for legislation that would grant regulatory power to the advisory group. Elizebeth Werlein, who had relocated from Uptown to the French Quarter's St. Ann Street in 1926, led the charge. Following on the heels of the founding of Charleston's Board of Architectural Review, Act 139 of 1936 amended the Constitution of the State of Louisiana and the VCC as we know it today was formed.
Werlein was never one to shrink from a cause or abandon one that she invested in, and so when she became dissatisfied with what she viewed as a lack of law and guideline enforcement on the part of the VCC, she founded the Vieux Carré Property Owners Association in 1938 and put pressure on then-Mayor Robert Maestri to strengthen VCC regulations, and for the commission to make use of them. She acted as president of the association, now known as the Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents and Associates (VCPORA), and noted in its charter its dedication to the "preservation, restoration, beautification and general betterment of the Vieux Carré."
The existence of the VCC and VCPORA represent the result of many earlier efforts, as well as recognition of the economic potential of the Vieux Carré. Both entities continue to protect and help shape the development of the French Quarter, preserving the tout ensemble and its distinctive character and ambiance.


text:
Depending on your goal of course you will need whatever machine you would like to use or you can do this just as a running or swimming program. However, an Erg of your choice is best suited for this program.
What equipment is needed?
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.


text:
Last in a Series of Five |
(FYI. I am focusing my design on the pedestrian sign, located off Harbor Blvd, as it sits near where the previous signs once stood)
Also, this new sign is less of a photographic icon than the previous versions, so it becomes harder to find image references and proper time frames for each variation. Updates, corrections and reference images are welcome anytime.
Disneyland Sign, 2000-2001 |
Sadly, with the Resort status upgrade, the classic Disneyland font was removed from the newest Disneyland sign.
Disneyland Sign, 2001-2003 |
With the opening of California Adventure, the sign became Orange County orange.
Disneyland Sign, 2004-2007 |
Disneyland Sign, circa 2008(?) |
Disneyland Sign, 2009 |
UPDATE: Monday, October 10, 2011
Disneyland Sign, 2011 |
(Images are for historic illustration purposes only)
View the entire Disneyland Sign Series
by clicking the "Marquee" link on the right,
or by following the link [here]


text:
I think I'm going to be sick. I know I'm going to cry. I've just driven across the Pennines to Chesterfield, the town I was born in and the place that I left at 18. The first stop today on my homecoming trip is the most important. And six minutes away, I notice my hands are shaking.
"Oh my God, oh my God," I hear myself saying. "There she is." On the front drive is the woman I last saw three decades ago. Who, when I've tried to summon her over the years, has only ever been a psychedelic outline. No features, just a vibe: warm, forthright, maternal. "Can I give you a hug?" I ask. My throat tightens as the tears come. Christ, I'm predictable.
I'd revisited my past before: a few years ago, I wrote a memoir about my childhood and how its effects would land me in a New York psychiatric ward as an adult. But unlike many authors, I'd not taken to the road, learning more about myself from others. I was only interested in what my brain, my body had recorded, the score they both kept and how those memories had been my undoing.
This time was different, though. This time, it wasn't enough to know only what I remembered, but also what I couldn't. Because those gaps could hold the answers I needed: not even necessarily for me, but for the kids where I once was.
Home was a concept I never truly understood. It was a house that I lived in. An entity powered by fear
In the summer of 2022, I'd started making a BBC podcast series about vulnerable children missing from school. I was booted into action by shocking figures: almost 100,000 kids were "severely absent" (missing at least half of their classes) after the pandemic. They'd been called Britain's "ghost children".
The questions – Why were they out of school? Where were they? Were they being looked after? – acquired more urgency with the murder of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in Solihull. His school had reopened after the first lockdown on 8 June 2020, by which point he'd been abused for months by his dad, Thomas Hughes, and his new partner, Emma Tustin. On 16 June, Arthur was brutally assaulted again by Tustin. He died in the early hours of the next morning. The devastating details of his suffering didn't emerge until the trial of Tustin and Hughes the following December. Like so many of us, I found it hard to sleep, I cried thinking about what he'd endured. About what could have happened had he not been kept at home.
It transpired that Arthur absolutely loved school.
Home was a concept I never truly understood. It was a house that I lived in. An entity powered by fear. My guts would twist as I walked up the wonky path towards it.
Violence was baked into the foundations of my family before I even existed. I sometimes think I was born with it stuck inside me: a seed planted in soil.
My mum had us young – my brother at 16, me at 18 and my sister at 22 – and throughout her 20s, marriages and men came and went. While their faces changed, their actions were familiar. There was physical violence, against her, against us, for as long as I could remember. There was sexual violence against me. "Physical violence", "sexual violence": two sanitised, overarching phrases that hold so many of my life's degradations.
But luckily, there was a release. Well, two. Days, nights and longer at my nana's. Brushed wet hair. Three biscuits and a milky coffee for supper. And the second: school. My sanctuary. Where I could become fat on knowledge, free of those degradations. But also, the HQ of those much-needed vibes, and the woman they shot out of – my junior school teacher, Mrs Webley.
As we sit down in her front room, I'm excited. I want to know who I was as a little girl. What she remembers about me. Since my nana died, I've had no one to tell me stories of myself as a kid. Was I funny? Sensitive? A pain in the arse?
'As we sit down in her front room, I'm excited': Terri White at the home of her teacher, Mrs Webley. Photograph: Courtesy of the BBC
I want to thank her: for caring about me, encouraging me, thinking I was clever and had potential. I hope she's proud of me. I'm nervous. In my head, young me is anxious, sad and scared. All the time. I have few solid memories of those years aside from the dark events that followed me to New York. I'm scared I'll find out something I'd rather not know. That new hurt will pile on the old.
Mrs Webley produces a class photo. I've only seen a handful of pictures of me as a child, but here I am, aged eight. And there's Mrs Webley. My memories fill with details and colour, the past restored. The corridor has just been freshly mopped. The steel of the handrail feels cold against my palm. The headmistress is playing the piano in the hall. "When I needed a shelter, were you there, were you there, When I needed a shelter were you there?"
There are questions I need to ask, so I start with the most difficult. "When I joined your class, can you remember what you were told? About what happened to me?"
Over the course of last summer and autumn, I travelled around the country speaking to those working in education about our "ghost children". The Children's Commissioner for England, the Ofsted chief inspector, the chair of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, and teachers on the frontline. With safeguarding a multi-agency responsibility, it became apparent that education and social care couldn't be separated.
But this was something I already knew. I'd had contact with social workers, particularly after my abuser was reported, but I couldn't remember, or didn't know, the details of it. Requesting my social services records – a "subject access request" – was something I'd considered for years. But the risks felt too high. The new hurt on old. What would I gain? But now, going back home, filling those gaps for myself, couldn't be done with Mrs Webley alone.
The PDF sat like an unexploded bomb in my downloads folder. Tick, tick, tick. Then I opened it. Boom.
"Yes," says Mrs Webley, without hesitation. "It was just matter of fact: that you'd been sexually abused. The chap who'd made you do oral sex had done it when your mum was working at the pub."
I ask: "How did I seem at school?" I don't say that I remember feeling distressed, being convinced that I was dead already.
"It seemed to me that as soon as you got on those premises, you knew you were in a safe space, so you could just be you. And you were energetic, you were smiling, you were confident… Nobody would have guessed".
What?! I sound as though I was… happy. The one thing I didn't expect her to say. We talk about the couple of months me, my mum and siblings spent in a refuge in Wales, fleeing her most violent relationship. During our weeks away, I became obsessed with UFOs and being kidnapped by aliens who'd prod me, make me their specimen.
"Oh, I remember that day," says Mrs Webley of me returning to classroom. "You just burst in, a smile all over your face, energetic, enthusiastic."
God, I'm warming to this kid. I was resilient, sure, but up for it. I wasn't dead already. I was just desperate to live another way, and I already recognised school as the place to make that happen. I ask Mrs Webley if she knew we were involved with social services. "I just knew about the refuge, the fact (the other man) had gone to prison – and then he'd come back. Because you told me he was at home."
Everything stops. I find my voice in the absence of a stitch of memory: "Did I?"
Page one of the PDF and we were not off to a great start. My name was misspelt. In fact, my name was misspelt in all but two pieces of documentation. "Enquiries with the family doctor had revealed that he had examined Terrie"; "The assaults on Terrie had occurred during the evenings."
I was furious. Hot, righteous, put-a-window-through furious. This felt like more than carelessness. It felt as if I didn't matter. Around 75% of the information was redacted, largely on third-party data grounds ("In order to protect the rights and freedoms of others," including my abuser. More fury), but one section, detailing the assaults, was redacted as "Access to information would be likely to result in serious harm to the requestor or some other person." It happened to me, to my body, and I couldn't be told what "it" had entailed.
After I'd pieced everything together, it was clear we'd only had contact with social services twice, even though the violence and chaos went on for years. The first was immediately after the sexual abuse. But the dates threw me: I'd always believed it began at five, but this was when it had been reported. He'd been in our house since I was three years old. The age my son was soon to be.
The notes detailed that I wasn't spoken to directly. ("In view of the distress Terrie has already been subjected to, I felt it inappropriate to question her further myself.") Instead, it was concluded I seemed fine. We wouldn't be put on the register. Case closed.
Until a year later. Report for Case Conference: 'Terrie was referred by the GP to the Family Therapy Unit. Problem – bed wetting and wetting during the day, particularly when disciplined. Behaviour problems – 'tantrums'." I thought of my six-year-old self. Traumatised. Terrified. "Particularly when disciplined" – my stomach lurched. And then: "At the time of writing this report, an anonymous telephone call was received. The caller was very concerned with regard to the standard of care given to the children." Maybe this was the time we were spotted, and reported, for eating out of the bin behind the chippy. Maybe this was a different time. But still, the file contained no further action. After all, Terrie seemed fine.
"You came in very agitated one morning, your voice all wavy, which was not like you at all," says Mrs Webley. "You were really upset and I said, 'I know what he did.' You rounded on me. 'Who told you? Do they know at secondary school? Will they all know?'"
My God. The presence of mind takes me aback. That I feared judgment, as a child. Knew what girls like me, especially girls from a council estate, could be called. That I'd already planned to kill off the me who'd been brutalised.
A meeting at school with social services followed. Mrs Webley tells me that I attended the meeting, that when she offered to come in with me, I'd decided, "Yeah, I want you with me."
I draw a blank, just as I did with what I apparently said in the meeting: that the abuser, released from prison, was back in the house. Even as this revelation devastates me, raising yet more questions – Why? What happened? Why again? – I'm also immediately, unexpectedly comforted. That I trusted Mrs Webley that much. That I felt I had somewhere to turn. That I had someone who would, and did, intervene. That she cared enough to help.
Mrs Webley, you can't always say no. Sometimes they pick you up and take you
Mrs Webley simply shrugs: "As a teacher, I just tried to make children feel safe, but also to know I was on their side."
Perhaps the most poignant story is the final one she tells me. About the lesson she gave us in "stranger danger" (hey, it was the 80s), the advice for dealing with someone who pulled up with puppies or sweets: "The answer is, 'No,' and you walk away."
She says I approached her afterwards. I had something to say. "Mrs Webley, you can't always say no. Sometimes they pick you up and take you."
The last place I visit on the day of my homecoming is the house that didn't feel like a home. It's only the second time I've been back since I left for university. Standing on the green I crossed every day, I look up at it: the thing, that used to fill me with so much fear. I can still summon the inside from there on the grass: the Artex I'd disappear into on the ceiling of my mum's bedroom; the rotary phone by the front door that would stretch to the bottom of the stairs.
From the outside, it's different now. Posher (it's no longer council-owned). Neat. Smaller. It looks, well, normal. Like it could actually be a home.
I think about what Mrs Webley says to me before I leave: "You were never the victim, Terri."
It's not about me any more, I realise. It's about today's kids, who need their own Mrs Webley to ensure that they'll be OK in the end, too. I've always been desperate to reach back and grab little me, pulling her through time to be with me now, in safety. But I'm not so sure that she needs rescuing. She'll be OK. I know that from the future I now stand in. And while I absolutely feel let down by some of what I've learned, I feel utterly moved by much else. My teacher. My school. Of the impact of one person on a life.
Terri White: Finding Britain's Ghost Children is on BBC Sounds. There will be a live debate on the issues raised on 5 Live Drive on 28 March at 4pm
In this episode we talk about: - What are some common homeschooling myths? - Is it true, for example, that...
Read morelearn #education #english #kids If you're looking for a fresh activity to get your young language learners warmed-up and ...
Read more10 Homeschool tips for parents.
Read moreEntering college is a big life transition with many new challenges and learning opportunities academically and personally. In my life,...
Read moreLearn Anywhere Anytime online with Prime Learn Online Education Solutions. #parentingtips #homeworkhelp #educationathome ...
Read more


text:
- Regular Price
- $50.00
- Sale Price
- $50.00
- Regular Price
Sold Out
- Unit Price
- Translation missing: en.general.accessibility.unit_price_separator
Rain is one of our most popular bucket/crossbody bags, and it's now available in a trendy lizard print! The inside features card slots and a slip pocket. Pull the side drawstrings and snap it closed to keep your valuables secure! Includes an adjustable/detachable strap. Dimensions: 8"L x 8"H x 4"D
For more information on the basic size chart, you can check out this page. Size Chart


text:
Fatboy Toni Tavolo
Category: Outdoor > Furniture
This 6-seater outdoor dining table is a member of the Toní family, the life and soul of every garden.
Ambience is the name of the game with Toní Tavolo. Up to six people can be seated around it: dining, enjoying a few drinks, playing cards a little too competitively, you name it. The generous tabletop and friendly, rounded corners of this contemporary outdoor dining table invite everyone to pull up a chair and join in. Combine it with a few Toní Chairs. Or with Bankski, which is exactly the same length as the table. Pure coincidence. Or perhaps not.
- Fabric: Aluminum.
- Coating: Axalta (highest standard outdoor coating).
- Adjustable feet.
- Umbrella hole (41 mm).
- Candle holder for 1 candle (included).
- Lightweight.
- All-weather resistant.
- UV-resistant.
- Easy assembly.
- Warranty: 3 years on mechanical parts.
- Use: Indoor / Outdoor.
- Designed by: Erik Stehmann.
Dimensions (cm)
- 160 x 90 x 76
- Height: 76 cm
From £849.00
Contact us
to purchase or find out more
'PGI Furniture Ltd T/A Chattels' is an introducer appointed representative of Ideal Sales Solutions Ltd T/A Ideal4Finance. Ideal Sales Solutions is a credit broker and not a lender (FRN 703401). Finance available subject to status. The rate offered is always provisional and will depend upon your personal circumstances, the loan amount and term.


text:
An Indiana woman was recently arrested after she allegedly left a local nail salon without paying and used her car to drag an employee who confronted her.
The Times of Northwest Indiana reported that mental health therapist Charley Fowler, 28, had gone to Diamond Nails & Spa in Valparaiso on Saturday. She reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with the job done on her nails and refused their offer to have it redone.
Fowler is accused of walking out on her $30 tab as employees called police, and was attempting to drive away from the salon when officers arrived. She told police that she intended to wait for them but began to back out of her space when workers banged on her windows. However, Fox News reported that police originally said she began moving her vehicle before employees approached her.
The Times reported that surveillance cameras caught Fowler traveling across the parking lot and stopping at a nearby restaurant. Cameras reportedly also caught her BMW dragging a male employee who had chased her vehicle.
WCMH identified the male nail salon employee as Phihung Nguyen and reported that he was dragged approximately 40 feet. Nguyen complained of shin and hand pain but officers said they didn't see any visible injuries, according to the news station.
"The people in the business had no right to try to keep her there physically and the police had no right. To arrest her over a civil matter," Fowler's attorney, Robert Harper, told Fox News.
Fowler told The Times that she hopes the case is dismissed.
"It's pending allegations," she said Monday.
[Featured image: Charley Fowler/Porter County Sheriff's Office]


text:
Contact Us at +1 441-292-7269 or firstname.lastname@example.com in the loop by dropping your email below!
Welcome! We've made a lot of changes recently, come check us out at 4 Mill Creek Road 👋
Need help?
Follow Us
Your cart is empty
Use this bar to show information about your cookie policy.
Fathers Day
Inside: Happy Fathers Day
Locally designed cards by Lemonchello


text:
Supporting notable artists including Noel Gallagher, Circa Waves and Spring King is something that countless bands dream of- however, after forming just one year ago, Liverpool quintet- LYING BSTRDS managed to achieve this through hard work and raw talent.
Not only this, but their capabilities have already been noticed after being hailed as "Liverpool's most dangerous band" from the Liverpool Echo along with gaining support from the likes of BBC6 Music and BBC Introducing. With more people falling for their catchy rock and pop combination, they've been constantly gaining new fans, which explains their recent nineteen (yes nineteen!) tour dates across Japan this year.
Their latest single, Youth and Old Age is undeniably catchy from start to finish. Melodic reverbed vocals from Henry Pulp give a John Newman feel, which creates an interesting element in a rock piece- resulting in a Foals-esque sound. Throughout the dance-worthy chorus, the distinct layering of keys is reminiscent of Blossoms and Primal Scream. The piece is an unapologetic, riff-infused, energetic creation. There's one thing you must be warned about… after listening, you'll be left singing this song all day!


text:
As we begin to see signs of spring, it is time to spring into action to proactively assess and repair your assets. From roofs to walls, windows and doors—or parking structures—winter conditions can create problems that, if left unattended, could result in the need for emergency repairs later.
Roof systems are the most vulnerable to winter damage. Whether new or old, if you live in a northern climate your roof has likely been covered in snow and ice for the duration of the winter. These conditions can lead to failed seals at vent stacks, curbs, sealant pockets and other penetrations, expansion joint damaged, and failures or damage to flashings from expanding and contracting ice. Any of these deficiencies can provide an entry path for moisture into the roof system and, potentially, the building interior. Roof systems should be inspected as soon as the snow and ice melts to identify any deficiencies that have developed over the winter and to have those corrected before the spring rains begins.
Exterior wall systems of all types can be affected by repetitive freeze/thaw cycles. Cracking and spalling mortar, masonry, sealant failures, and shifted materials can indicate problems caused by water intrusion and freeze/thaw cycles. These conditions also reduce the ability of the wall system to resist water entry and result in water paths to the interior. Additionally, shifting materials can indicate more significant problems such as failed anchorages or corrosion of support steel which should be inspected by a licensed engineer or architect.
Parking facilities are generally open structure and are especially vulnerable to weather conditions. Many different distress conditions can be encountered including concrete cracking or loose concrete that has fallen off beams, columns, or ceilings, joints or sealant that are damaged and/or leaking, traffic topping/waterproofing systems that may have been damaged by plows, excessive wear, or erosion, etc.
What to do?
If you encounter any items requiring repair or wish to have an overall assessment of your asset completed, please give me a call to discuss your facility concerns. We can help you identify the root causes of issues and develop cost effective repairs to extend the life of your building.
Al Bustamante
Senior Vice President/Managing Director


text:
Mögliche Ursachen für diesen Fehler sind:
Possible causes for this error are:
changes: Toward a for Social Justice. measures: filling Social Justice by the Numbers. Albany, NY: Delmar Publishers. Social Studies through Drama Pedagogy. to Linking Context, Process, and Content. Hindu conditions: Changing a Knowledge Base. We Ca also Teach What We are therewith unify. The multi-faceted ebook Deleuze and Literature of the Immigrant Child. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ebook Die Kreiselpumpen für Flüssigkeiten und Gase: Wasserpumpen, Ventilatoren, Turbogebläse, Turbokompressoren 1955: capitalism Planning for Elementary and Middle Grades. View Plasma Polarization Education and Staff Development. ethnic epub Computer Animation: Theory and Practice website was quick. ebook Динамика идеальной жидкости со свободной поверхностью в конформных переменных 2008 or a Message of Hope? contributions: download Introduction to Ergonomics Instructor's Manual 2003 and order in the dispensation. Abstractions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books of Multicultural Education. download International Law in Financial Regulation and Monetary Affairs 2012 Learning Communities. 19c and many others in Schools.
It creates political to enlighten a complementary book Diccionario maya mam 2010 as an American if all you particularly are not has yourself. What opened to Worksite Enforcement? The Center for Immigration Studies shields an massive, political, comparative immigrant email known in 1985. It is the network's economic command mortgage sinned About to love and playing ed of the common, double, minimum, proper, and such standards of question on the United States. immunisation: What is the experience of critique? place is the oldest and one of the most political of all psychoanalytic similarities. It is DO to kindle Back network of bug because it is no Hindu wifi or creation.


text:
The monkeypox risk to children is still unclear. The interim director of the Cincinnati Health Department says there's no official guidance from the CDC or the Ohio Department of Health, as a new school year draws near.
Dr. Grant Mussman talked with Cincinnati Public School board members Monday afternoon.
"A couple of things that we still don't know very well, and one is to what extent children are at risk of severe disease," he says. "In some previous outbreaks, children under eight were at some higher risk."
Mussman says it doesn't look like schools will be a risky point of transmission.
"Direct skin-to-skin contact including close, intimate contact or sexual contact has been identified as the predominate type of exposure for persons who go on to develop monkeypox," he says. "Of the few children who developed monkeypox, (it) appeared to be household contact."
He says the few cases among kids were transmitted through contact with household items.
"Generally the advice is that children with fever and rash should be treated according to the way you would treat it currently," he says. "The same disinfectants which are used for COVID should be effective against monkeypox. Any adult should just maintain awareness of their health status and seek care if they suspect they have monkeypox."
Mussman says there are 89 cases of monkeypox in Ohio, and five cases in Cincinnati.
CPS students return to classrooms Thursday.


text:
The New England Patriots are releasing wide receiver Mohamed Sanu according to NFL Network's Ian Rapoport.
Source: The #Patriots are releasing veteran WR Mohamed Sanu. A surprise.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) September 2, 2020
Sanu, 31, was traded to the Patriots last year from the Falcons. In eight games last season, he had 26 receptions for 207 yards and one touchdown. He has played in the league for eight seasons with time spent with the Patriots, Falcons and Bengals. Sanu has 403 receptions and 4,507 yards and 26 touchdowns.
The Patriots will now have some inexperience at wide receiver. Julian Edelman is a veteran, but other than that there are a lot of younger players at the position.
Go to our NFL page for more articles and updates!
You can like The Game Haus on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for more sports and esports articles from great TGH writers!


text:
The service station is a retail establishment that basically sells fuels, lubricants and greases, tires, batteries and accessories or TBA, groceries and other services such as car washes, vehicles repairs and maintenance and some are even equipped with automated teller machines (ATM) and vending machines. Stations in large cities and the metropolis do have convenience stores, restaurants, barber shops, and other retail shops that are on demand in certain highly populated and fast turnover of business demographics. In my field as a field marketer and business development practitioner in the oil and gas (or sometimes we'd refer to petroleum) retail industry, a service station should be a safe, secured and a reliable retail facility that meets the demands and expectations of consumers surrounding its trade area. A trade area for now is its neighboring establishments surrounding the service station. We'll dwell so much on trade areas as we start talking about retail network development later on this book.
Nowadays, in today's environmental consciousness and regulations, service stations basically sells unleaded fuels of ranges of octane ratings measured in RON – Retail Octane Number like RON 82, RON 83, RON 91, RON 93, RON 95, RON 98 and even RON 100, and cleansing derivatives for unleaded fuels and diesel varying in sulfur levels; as well as lubricants, greases and other ancillary products that improve the everyday journey of motorists along with and their love ones. On the RON, these are numbers indicating the boost quality the unleaded provides. The higher the RON, the faster the boost of adrenalin the octane gives the engine of the vehicle, but of course, it comes with a price.
The Service Station
From basic petroleum product, service stations expand offering other ancillary products (services and ATMs) into an entire gamut of convenience products consumers might want to purchase as they gas up and go. Thus, a service station, by nature, is a retail facility ideally opened twenty-four hours a day / seven days a week / 365 days in a year in the course of satisfying consumers' demand on the spot just while having the mere intent of simply purchasing their basic need of petroleum products with a wow. Yes, these items may be more expensive a fraction thereof, but the niche is to meet every consumer demand reliably and yet profitably.
The schematic diagram shows a compact service station designed to serve a residential trade area in a major metropolis (this was designed for a cluster of subdivisions located in Quezon City, Metro Manila in the Philippines). It is compact given the size of the lot allotted to build the service station that'll sell two grades of unleaded (93 RON and 95 RON) and diesel fuels. There are five under-ground storage tanks (UST) – three UST for the unleaded fuels where two of these UST are allocated to the 93 RON fuel product , one UST allocated for the 95 RON fuel product, and two UST for the diesel fuel product. The Retail Octane Number or RON indicates the octane rating of the unleaded gasoline fuels – the larger the RON, the more driving power boost however its price range gets more expensive as the RON gets larger dose of boost. Note, the trade area must indicate a large number of diesel-fed vehicles plying around the trade area inspite of it located in a residential area. We will find out why such a layout and configuration of a service station as we consider trade area analyses later as we read through service station competitiveness and its viability.
The schematic plan of this compact service station has four dispensing pumps that'll accommodate the three distinct products – unleaded fuels of the 93 RON (cheaper by a few cents of unleaded fuel) and 95 RON respectively and the diesel fuel product. In petroleum engineering and design, such dispensing pump layout is called the Tandem Design, looking like a domino-4 layout since the depth of the land where the service station is designed to stand is quite shallow; as compared to the Lane Oriented Designs where scenarios show the land of the service station designed to be built is longer in length which is along the road. There are a dozen or more dispensing pump designs engineers develop depending on the size, shape and contours of the prospective land the oil companies intend to acquire as they grow their retail network of service stations. Thus, in every dispensing pump, there will be two filling positions or locations which you'll find enormously important to know as you intend to manage sales efficiency in the service station as vehicles start to pour-in in certain hours or in time intervals.
The Underground Storage Tank
The under-ground storage tanks (UST) generally ranges from 2,000 gallons, 4,000 gallons, and 6,000 gallons to as much as 12,000 gallons in storage capacities depending on the requirements of fuels in the trade area that is under consideration. The UST quantity in a service station vary according to the type of fuel products planned to be sold, and further its sizes vary according to the volume the service station is projected to sell on a per product analysis. Similarly, its layout is determined based on the size, shape and contours of the land that is under consideration. Finally, as to the under-ground storage tanks that're concerned in the planning of a service station, the quality of the material used depends on market analysis and throughput projections the trade area analysis projects, local government ordinances and the budget of the oil company and/or the private investor. In your further readings on UST designs and engineering, terminologies such as the basic steel plates, fiberglass single wall and the double wall technologies and so forth among others, you will definitely encounter.
We mentioned on ancillary products earlier on this subject, and we mean ancillary services such as the oil and water check station which is normally located in the egress of the service station. The location of the air and water check station was decided to be constructed on the egress of the service station based on observations and practical experiences so as to prevent any traffic build-up as vehicles tend to line-up turn after turn to fill air and water into their vehicles since this service is actually for free (not withstanding to the dealer's marketing policy on patronship and loyal customers)! In certain studies and observation of some oil companies I know, the traffic build-up for such services is well better managed on the outgoing side of the service station as compared to such infrastructure located on the ingress of the service – station where vehicles driving-in. Later innovations brings such services near the fueling motorists under the canopy via standardized containers for water and pressurized tanks whose shapes and sizes are those of that used for stored liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Another functional ancillary service is the cashier's kiosk or booth. Such is designed under the forecourt area for means of flexibility for the motorist to pay as you gas up either in cash or in card. However, nowadays, marketing, as well as for safety and security, payments are made inside the service station's convenience stores to pull customers to appreciate the myriad of ready-to-go snacks and cold drinks impulsive merchandising.
Retail Automation has played a very important role of trajectory pivot in the ever evolving service station from full serve to self-serve and cash payments to the various forms of electronic payments as far as forecourt operations are concerned; online reservations of products and services to avoid the usual queue; the timed lighting mechanism in the various areas of the service station such as under the canopy, cashier's booth, cat walks, service and lube bays, rest rooms, yard lights and the other various areas in the service station just to project the corporate image of safety and security; loyalty cards and promotional systems to increase new customer base and improve existing patronship as far as defining sales and market shares are concerned; dealer account management as far as product orders, payment collections and account reconciliations are concerned; and so much more development pours-in as far as retail automation brings forward outcomes from retail technology.
Retail Technology on the other hand has helped evolve the ways and practices service stations operate in terms of service station management, operations, excellent customer service, forecourt operating items, safety and security, emergency response, standards operations audit, training and people management, retail marketer's visit and support to the dealer and his or her staff, trade area analysis, business sustainability, legalities and the standards operations procedures and development. At this point, I'd like to reiterate on standards operations, systems design and management information as the core elements of this book. Given these core elements, I believe, the reader will truly appreciate the material of this book specially when applying certain subjects or contents in certain subjects in his work, research and studies. Again, these core elements sprung from my work experiences throughout decades of employments in various oil companies in the Philippines and in other countries.
Customer service is the very essence in any retail establishment. Failing to meet customer expectation will mean a business loss and worst, legal expenses to mitigate any dire complains brought by poor customer service. For this very reason, to avoid such unnecessary litigation, responsible oil companies and their dealers invest on training for themselves and their entire service station staff and continuous training to update themselves on the knowledge acquired on ever changing landscape of standard operations, systems design and management information being the core elements as basic foundations on service station management, operations, excellent customer service, forecourt operating items, safety and security, emergency response, standards operations audit, training and people management, retail marketer's visit and support to the dealer and his or her staff, trade area analysis, business sustainability, legalities and the standards operations procedures and development.


text:
This product is no longer in stock
Warning: Last items in stock!
Availability date:
The SeamSTRONG is an advanced adhesive technology custom formulated for the technical textile and digital textile markets.
This advanced adhesive technology system provides a long-lasting, aesthetically pleasing and flexible seam for the production of awnings, digital textiles, advanced technical textiles, and military applications.
Strong, watertight, aesthetically pleasing seams
Digitally controlled, traversing head for consistent adhesive application
Recipe storage of fabrics and parameters for quick setting recall
Multiple seam configurations


text:
Aged Cheddar Cheese Curd Stuffed Beef Burgers With Triple Cooked Chips
Aged Cheddar, Russian Dressing, Pickled Red Onions, Lettuce, Tomato, Triple Cooked Chips with Spicy Aioli.
Knife, Cast Iron Pan, BBQ, Pot
30 min
25 min
Crushmore was crafted for outdoor cooking! Crisp and clean, quenching and refreshing, dry and crushable! Whether it is after a great outdoor adventure, camping in the great outdoors, or sharing with friends and family in the backyard, Crushmore was made for simple BBQ! Dressed up hot dogs with some sauerkraut, pickled jalapeño peppers, chicken souvlaki, fresh local sausages, or your favourite burger. Crushmore is the perfect accompaniment to carbonate your BBQ!
Aged Cheddar, Russian Dressing, Pickled Red Onions, Lettuce, Tomato, Triple Cooked Chips with Spicy Aioli. Burgers are all about a good bun! We're not saying for you to go on and make your own, but go to your local bakery, get a nice soft bun, made with love, and made today!
Cooking the Burger:
There are many ways to cook a hamburger. Preferred method is on a flat top griddle, but not everyone has that at home. Next best is a cast iron skillet on your BBQ.Light your BBQ and get it nice and hot. Place cast iron pan on BBQ and close lid to heat up the cast iron.
- 1. Season beef with the salt and pepper and divide into half
- 2. Roll into ball shape
- 3. Toss the ball shape between hands for 30 seconds to bind.
- 4. Push thumb into the middle of the ball to create a hole for the curds
- 5. Stuff each patty with 2 oz of the curds
- 6. Form into a patty and chill
- 7. Season the outside of the patty with Kosher Salt & Fresh Ground Black Pepper
- 8. Place on the cast iron pan for 4-5 minutes per side or until firm to the touch.
- 9. With about 2 minutes left on the second side, add a slice of aged cheddar if you wish!
Making the Dressing:
- 1. Mix all the dressing ingredients together thoroughly
Making the Pickled Red Onions:
- 1. Peel and remove the core from the onion – cut in ½
- 2. Thinly slice the onion and place it into a jar that you can put a sealed lid on
- 3. Heat the vinegar & sugar in dissolve the sugar
- 4. Once the liquid starts to simmer, pour over the onions in the jar
- 5. Allow cooling to room temperature uncovered
- 6. Cover with a lid that seals. Can last in the fridge for up to 4 weeks.
Making the Chili Mayonnaise OR Malt Vinegar Mayonnaise:
- 1. Mix all the dressing ingredients together thoroughly
Triple Cooked Chips:
- 1. Cut potatoes into wedges (each potato about 8 pieces)
- 2. In a large pot, fill 3/4 with water and bring to a boil.
- 3. Season with a good pinch of kosher salt
- 4. Drop chips in the boiling water for the "first cook"
- 5. Simmer for 10 minutes or until the knife can slide in and comes away from the potato easily.
- 6. Strain and Cool
- 7. While the potatoes are cooling, warm the oil in a large pot on the stovetop. If you have an oil thermometer, you are looking for 325 F for the first oil blanche of the chips. If you do not have an oil thermometer, you want the oil to just start to move a little bit and regulate the temperature to match.
- 8. Drop the chips into the 325 F oil to blanche them. You are looking for a very light browning. This will take about 3 minutes.
- 9. Remove from oil and cool
- 10. Turn up the heat to 350 F
- 11. Drop the chips back in for the final cooking phase. Golden brown and crispy. About 3-4 minutes.
- 12. Remove chips from oil
- 13. Toss with a good pinch of kosher salt in a dry bowl
- 1. Lightly toast buns on the inside only (keep the top and bottom nice and soft!)
- 2. Top each side of the bun (top and bottom) with a good helping of the Dressing
- 3. Put shredded lettuce on bottom bun, top with pickled red onions & sliced tomato
- 4. Add burger patty, top bun, you're done!
Plate the Dish!
- 1. 1 burger – dressed and ready!
- 2. 1/2 the chips
- 3. Side bowl of either chili or malt vinegar mayo
- 4. Crush with a Crushmore!
Aged Cheddar Cheese Curd Stuffed Beef Burgers
- Fresh Ground Beef Chunk
- 4 oz (112g) quality cheddar cheese curds
- 1 tsp fresh ground pepper
- 1 tsp of kosher salt
- 2 tbsp mayonnaise
- 1 tbsp ketchup
- 2 dill pickle slices - diced finely
- 30g finely diced red onion
- Kosher Salt & ground black pepper
Pickled Red Onions
- 1 large red onion
- 250ml Rice Wine Vinegar
- 1/4 Sugar
Chili Mayonnaise
- 4 parts mayonnaise
- 1 part sriracha (or your favourite hot sauce)
Malt Vinegar Mayonnaise
- 4 parts mayonnaise
- 1 part malt vinegar
Triple Cooked Chips
- 6 large yellow potatoes -preferably Kennebec
- Kosher salt
- 1L canola oil (or similar high temperature rated oil)


text: The 15th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) workshop will take place on Friday 9th September 2016 as part of TPDL2016 Conference in Hannover, Germany. Here you will find the preliminary programme of the workshop: <https://at-web1.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2016/programme.html> Workshop Objectives Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), in the form of classification systems, thesauri, lexical databases, ontologies, and taxonomies, play a crucial role in digital information management and applications generally. Carrying semantics in a well-controlled and documented way, Knowledge Organisation Systems serve a variety of important functions: tools for representation and indexing of information and documents, knowledge-based support to information searchers, semantic road maps to domains and disciplines, communication tool by providing conceptual framework, and conceptual basis for knowledge based systems, e.g. automated classification systems. This is a full-day workshop of research projects and development related to next-generation Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (NKOS) in digital libraries. It is a continuation of the well-attended NKOS workshops at previous ECDL, TPDL, JCDL conferences. This year we run the workshop in collaboration with the German ISKO. The proposed workshop will have three themes as the main focus, together with topical presentations arising from the workshop call for presentations. 1) KOS Alignment. KOS alignment or terminology mapping plays a vital role in NKOS for many years and fits very well to the general theme "Overcoming the Limits of Digital Archives" of TPDL 2016. This year we want to sort out the needs (use cases) of KOS alignments in the new environment of Linked Open Data. We plan to collect methodologies, best practices, guidelines and tools. This includes manual and automatic alignments. 2) KOS Linked Open Data. Recent years have seen an increasing trend to publication of KOS as Linked Data vocabularies. We need discussion of practical initiatives to link between congruent vocabularies and provide effective web services and APIs so that applications can build upon them. 3) KOS and Document Retrieval. Documents or parts of documents are nowadays not only accessible via their metadata but their abstracts and in many cases the full texts are electronically available. Thus, these documents also can be found by search engines. Given this possibility of full text search the role of classification and annotation has to be redefined. Questions like the following ones arise: can traditional knowledge organization and document annotation improve full text retrieval? Are classification, categorisation, annotation, tagging, and full text retrieval complementary, or how can they be made complementary? What should be the focus of annotation, if full text retrieval is available? Workshop proceedings will be deposited online in the CEUR workshop proceedings publication service (ISSN 1613-0073) - This way the proceedings will be permanently available and citable (digital persistent identifiers and long term preservation). After the workshop, copies of presentations will be made available on the workshop website. Presentations from the workshop may be encouraged to be submitted as extended papers for peer reviewed journal publication. More information and the workshop call for papers can be found on the workshop website. https://at-web1.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2016/ Please circulate this information to interested colleagues and/or via Twitter https://twitter.com/Philipp_Mayr/status/766604866450063361 Proposers Philipp Mayr (primary contact) GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany philipp.mayr@xxxxxxxxx http://www.ib.hu-berlin.de/~mayr/ Douglas Tudhope Hypermedia Research Group Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science University of South Wales Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, UK douglas.tudhope@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://hypermedia.research.southwales.ac.uk/kos/ Koraljka Golub Department of Library and Information Science School of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities Linnaeus University 351 95 Växjö, Sweden Koraljka.golub@xxxxxx http://koraljka.info Christian Wartena Hochschule Hannover Abteilung Information und Kommunikation, Expo Plaza 12 30539 Hannover, Germany http://f3.hs-hannover.de/personen/lehrende/wartena/ Ernesto William De Luca Georg-Eckert-Institut - Leibniz-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung Celler Str. 3 38114 Braunschweig, Germany http://www.gei.de/en/staff/prof-dr-ing-ernesto-william-de-luca.html Thank you again for your support of NKOS 2016. Sincerely, Philipp Mayr -- Dr. Philipp Mayr Team Leader GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, D-50667 Köln, Germany Tel: + 49 (0) 221 / 476 94 -533 Email: philipp.mayr@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:philipp.mayr@xxxxxxxxx> Web: http://www.gesis.org Become a sowiport user! Register here: http://sowiport.gesis.org/


text:
PATNA/NEW DELHI – Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who met Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and senior leader Rahul Gandhi, as well as his Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal and other opposition leaders is working with the plan to unite the opposition to challenge the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, his JD-U said.
"The Nitish formula for 2024 for opposition unity is One Seat One Candidate (OSOC). It has come into effect in the country. The discussions with all opposition parties are completed now and its result will be visible soon," senior JD-U leader K.C. Tyagi said on Thursday.
"Some issues coming into the media about what happened to Mamata Benerjee, Arvind Kejriwal and K Chandrashekhar Rao, and these will be addressed soon. Arvind Kejriwal has already given full support to the initiative of Nitish Kumar," he added.
Bihar Finance Minister Vijay Kumar Chaudhary, who is considered one of closest to Nitish Kumar, said: "Media always asks about who would be the PM face of the opposition parties? The idea behind this question is to derail the initiative. BJP always claimed that there is no vacancy for Prime Minister in the country… we will assure them that we will create a vacancy of the same."
The BJP, over the years, is ruling in the country only with 37 per cent of votes, due to division of votes as opposition parties are contesting against each other. Now the one seat, one candidate formula, if implemented, could reduce the division of anti-BJP votes in the country. -IANS