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John D'Agata has been campaigning for new approaches to fact-based writing since at least 2003, when he produced The Next American Essay, an offbeat anthology that juxtaposes work another editor might have included in a compilation of contemporary nonfiction—essays by McPhee, Didion, Dillard, and Lopez—with unclassifiable experimental texts and a number of pieces originally published as poetry or fiction. D'Agata's follow-up anthology, 2009's The Lost Origins of the Essay, extends his attempt to expand the form's boundaries by providing a lineage dating to the birth of writing itself, and again it mixes choices that are obvious with choices that are by any standard idiosyncratic. There are Seneca and Montaigne and Browne and De Quincey. There is also Zisudra of Sumer's 5,000-year-old list of dead elders' advice ("Neither should you buy your prostitutes from the street, for they are the kind that will usually bite"), and there is an excerpt from a 15th-century Aztec ethnography, "Definitions of Earthly Things," whose poetry feels unintentional ("Seashell: It is white. One is large, one is small. It is spiraled, marvelous. It is that which can be blown, which resounds. I blow the seashell. I improve, I polish the seashell"). And there are Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, Mallarmé's "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," and one of Beckett's "Fizzles."
Most well-informed readers would be unlikely to locate any unifying principle in these selections but for the mini-essays D'Agata writes in the gaps between pieces. They talk across the authors' works to one another, advancing an argument about the essay's definition. The details of the arguments vary relative to the two volumes' differing time horizons, but for practical purposes they are the same argument: the essay, D'Agata maintains, is "a form that's not propelled by information, but one compelled instead by individual expression—by inquiry, by opinion, by wonder, by doubt."
This idea is hardly objectionable on its face, so obviously applicable is it to the writing of Montaigne, Emerson, and others who have never been called anything but essayists. But D'Agata tilts the statement with an accompanying emphasis on the limits of fact. He wants to rescue the essay from its superficial family relationship to journalism, whose laws about verifiable detail are justifiably ironclad, in order that it might lay claim to the privileged status of its true sibling genres, fiction and poetry. This explains his proposition that the pieces of fiction and poetry he has included might as easily have been called essays. But the essay D'Agata envisions is no retreat into the foggy interior, where facts don't matter. Rather, he argues for a liberation from facticity while also insisting on the essay's "innate intoxication with the mathematics of language—the multiplication of data, evidence, argument."
This definition of the essay as a simultaneous embrace and devaluation of facts approaches sophistry in the abstract, but accompanied by examples it seems both clear and sensible. Reading Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—with its mix of prose proverbs and parables and its smattering of lineated verse orbiting a tight cluster of visionary theological notions—as an essay really does change one's sense of what the form might be. Blake believes that all scriptures have falsified the world by arbitrarily cordoning it off into the opposing dyads of body and soul, hell and heaven, and he offers not simply a straight theological argument against these notions but also a corrective blending of materials. Far from undermining his argument's seriousness, the use of verse lineation and invented scenes broadens its harmonics. If D'Agata's passion occasionally feels overdone—is the essay really more marginalized than poetry?—it makes for an exciting reading experience. The anthologies, like no others I am acquainted with, are best read in order, from cover to cover. And having finished them, it is hard to argue that a more prescriptive notion of nonfiction need apply to a prose writer with pretensions to art—or rather, with pretensions to the kind of art D'Agata proposes essayists should be making.
In other contexts, D'Agata's declarations about the essayist's exemption from the standards of factual verifiability come across very differently, as should be apparent from the mainstream press's hostile reaction to The Lifespan of a Fact, his recent collaboration with his one-time fact-checker at The Believer, Jim Fingal. That book, which consists of an essay D'Agata wrote about the suicide of a Las Vegas teen, "What Happens There," as well as the ensuing email argument he supposedly had with Fingal over the piece's factual inaccuracies, attempts to function as a case study in differing assumptions about work published as nonfiction.
The conceit does not work as planned. Fingal finds sufficient factual discrepancies to drive a 123-page book, and the sheer repetitiveness of his discoveries undermines D'Agata's authority well before the email exchange's designated moments of revelation, which break in the author's favor. D'Agata spends much of the exchange insulting Fingal, dismissing his concerns as trivial, and pulling rank, arguing in each case that beauty and poetry preclude factual accuracy. The particulars of his explanations are often laughable, so that by the time he gets around to developing his views about artistic license with any coherence, he is no longer a trustworthy speaker. Fingal, meanwhile, has the advantage of being the reader's stand-in. Though he comes across as an unappealing figure in his own right, he is defending the interests most of us bring to the book. Rather than giving us good reason to alter our opinions, D'Agata tells us, "I am an artist and cannot be bothered to consider your ideas. By the way, you are dumb."
So D'Agata makes it easy for reviewers to caricature him, and caricature him they have. Dan Kois of Slate calls him "a jerk" and "abrasive," Laura Miller of Salon "dickish" and "vain." Here is Hannah Goldfield, a fact-checker at The New Yorker:
The conceit that one must choose facts or beauty—even if it's beauty in the name of "Truth" or a true "idea"—is preposterous. A good writer—with the help of a fact-checker and an editor, perhaps—should be able to marry the two, and a writer who refuses to even try is, simply, a hack.
Goldfield develops none of these strong claims: about the preposterousness of D'Agata's argument, about the definition of a good writer versus a hack. (Hacks, it should be noted, rarely attempt to deconstruct existing genres or found new ones.) Presumably D'Agata's ideas are so antithetical to New Yorker policy that such judgments merely need stating.
And here is Jennifer B. McDonald, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, whose takedown of Lifespan was the lead review in the paper's Sunday February 26 issue:
Perhaps by now you're asking, Who does this D'Agata think he is? For one, he is a writing teacher at the University of Iowa. He is also a self-appointed ambassador of the essay, a literary form he feels has for too long been "terrorized by an unsophisticated reading public." He is quick to tell you he's not a journalist (and that's a fact). He is also, he explains, not running for office (thank goodness, although I'm sure he'd be great at it).
In other words, the book under review is not simply bad or misguided. Its author is tainted by association with academia, by his amateurish advocacy of a cause no one asked him to represent. He is as unprincipled as the most odious kind of politician. Who does he think he is? McDonald tars D'Agata as a nobody—and then she decides, a few paragraphs on, that he is "playing God" and, come to think of it, might have the power to wreck our entire culture's ability to communicate truthfully: "For as soon as any detail can be called arbitrary, what faith are we to put in words at all? Suddenly there is no difference between essaying the Truth and essaying Truthiness."
D'Agata's God-like reach must explain the appearance of a second Times takedown, in the magazine section, that same day. Here, Gideon Lewis-Kraus at least acknowledges D'Agata's considerable skills as a writer. Lewis-Kraus calls "What Happens There" "excellent" and identifies himself as "naturally sympathetic to a soft version of [D'Agata's] argument." But he attributes the shortcomings in Lifespan's actual argument to a distinction between what D'Agata might reasonably declaim "from his rostrum as an influential professor in the nonfiction program at the University of Iowa" and what it is acceptable to publish for a wide audience. Because D'Agata's writing can be published without controversy in university-affiliated journals that no one reads, Lewis-Kraus argues, and because paying outlets expect factual accuracy regardless of whether the writing under discussion is intended as art, journalism, or something in between, D'Agata should either change his approach to writing or be content with his status as an irrelevant academic.
Curiously, none of these reviewers pays more than passing attention to the "real" book in which "What Happens There" appears, 2010's About a Mountain. In the most rigidly localized view, this is defensible, since "What Happens There" is the text at issue and Lifespan the meta-text. But D'Agata's essay as published by The Believer is of only minor interest compared to the much more ambitious and accomplished About a Mountain. The violations of fact that Fingal finds in Lifespan will provide ample reason, in the view of many readers, for dismissing "What Happens There," but critics who thus encourage a dismissal of D'Agata's larger body of work are being at best willfully ignorant and at worst dishonest (even as they presumably get their facts right1).
Not only did the one book transparently seed the other, the one is the precondition for the other's presence in the public sphere: About a Mountain certainly found readers who are neither students nor teachers of creative writing, and it was widely reviewed. Most importantly, it deserves discussion in the context of Lifespan because it, too ,is about factual inaccuracy. About a Mountain documents D'Agata's attempt, while temporarily living in Las Vegas, to reckon with two forbidding bodies of fact: those surrounding the U.S. government plan to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, and those surrounding the suicide of sixteen-year-old Levi Presley. The latter, as I have mentioned, is the topic of the essay reproduced in Lifespan, and reviewers suggest that D'Agata's approach to the facts in that piece is the result of laziness or immorality. Even a cursory inspection of About a Mountain gives the lie to this position.
About a Mountain is as fact-laden as any John McPhee book, but where McPhee works to clarify domains of fact generally understood only by experts, D'Agata focuses on the insufficiency of facts as vehicles for understanding contemporary reality. He draws our attention to the conflicts and gaps in expert opinion and to the terminal slipperiness of the facts relating to some of civilization's most pressing issues. In the case of Yucca Mountain, there are actual facts that might inform government plans for the storage site: namely, scientists agree that the toxicity of nuclear waste will take one million or more years to recede. But because there could be no credible plan for the site utilizing such a time frame, the applicable federal agencies recommended that a figure of 10,000 years be used. There is no scientific justification for this figure.
So the technical data authorized at the highest levels of government, on the basis of which laws affecting Nevada's current residents and its countless millions of future residents are being made, are fictional. And even on this fictional time frame of 10,000 years, the idea that the site can be secured is laughable, since there is little chance of communicating with humans across such an expanse of time. "What we're dealing with here," an expert on nuclear waste told D'Agata, "is an exercise in planning for a nuclear catastrophe that is fundamentally rhetorical. It's theatrical security, because the preparations that are being made by the Department of Energy have no real chance of succeeding. They satisfy the public, however, because they're a symbol of control."
Our willingness, as a culture, to be satisfied with symbols of control is not limited to matters so large we can barely conceive of them. It translates into an unwillingness to assess uncomfortable matters more generally, including some that we might actually control, such as the extraordinarily high rate of suicide in Las Vegas. As D'Agata attempts to understand why Levi Presley threw himself from a shabby high-rise casino hotel, he learns that municipal and other local authorities actively work to obscure the fact that approximately 300 people kill themselves in the city annually, and he finds that correlations between cultural factors and suicide are poorly understood even by those who claim to be experts on the subject. His own attempt to understand Presley's suicide leads him to inconclusive but suggestive assessments of cultural factors, some of which wind up being false insights that he identifies as such. Though Lifespan's reviewers, for example, claim to be thunderstruck that D'Agata might wrongly peg the time it took Presley to fall from the Stratosphere Hotel at nine seconds, the mistake is part of the book's unfolding. D'Agata enlarges on that "fact," relayed to him by credible sources, with a weave of historical, mythological, and sociological significance, only to find out, at the conclusion of his research, that Levi Presley actually fell for eight seconds. D'Agata's book openly presents not accomplished factual knowledge but an attempt at understanding. By copping to his mistakes and factual liberties, both in the text of the book and in a lengthy appendix, he is quite clearly broadening the harmonics of his argument about the limits of fact.
D'Agata ends About a Mountain with a virtuosic re-creation, in a single unbroken paragraph, of Levi Presley's last hours. Various authoritative sources—coroner's report, the boy's parents and Tae Kwon Do teacher—supply different facts about those last hours, and this only enhances the poignancy of the depiction. The closing pages of the book represent a leap into uncertainty, an attempt to bridge the gaps between facts with other forms of understanding. This is what art alone can do, D'Agata suggests.
No matter how many facts we collect, no matter how much due diligence we conduct, we will fail to understand much of what is most vital to us. Indeed, a reliance on fact may distort understanding as often as not, and we may be more complicit in the distortion than we want to admit. Government-approved facts about Yucca Mountain encourage folly on the grandest imaginable scale; facts about suicide compiled by experts madly contradict one another. Those we elect or appoint to act on our behalf decide that we, the general public, want comfort rather than truth. So they give us facts.
It would be naïve, as D'Agata knows, to suggest that in place of facts art gives us truth. But it at least makes the effort.
In aesthetic terms, I see one serious potential objection to D'Agata's method. Does his interest in factually slippery portions of human experience justify his evasions of fact? I can imagine arguing, by contrast, that if one is concerned to illustrate the limits of fact, it makes more aesthetic sense to be as reliable as humanly possible, right up to the point where those limits take hold. Dramatizing our desire for factual verifiability and then showing its precise limits would, perhaps, more effectively demonstrate the necessity of using art to fill the gaps in our knowledge.
But this possible objection feels thin next to what is actually on the page. D'Agata successfully connects, via poetic association, domains of fact as disparate as real estate, the Hoover Dam, nuclear-waste disposal, Las Vegas' alarmingly high suicide rate, Edvard Munch, the metaphysics of screams, and the evolution and possible futures of languages. He arranges these materials so that they illuminate one another thematically but in an off-kilter way that never feels heavy-handed, and the end result is one of the most convincing metaphors for contemporary American reality that I have come across in any recent piece of writing. In short, I find him broadly and deeply trustworthy as an artist. My knowledge that he fabricated certain things doesn't make me doubt everything. Rather, I trust him to fabricate the right things. And having examined the appendix to About a Mountain, in which he details the factual inaccuracies that Fingal isolates in "What Happens There" as well as those in the book's other 180 pages, I am satisfied that this is the case.
About a Mountain indirectly and convincingly makes the case that Lifespan fails to make by a more direct route: if we hope to evaluate a work of fact-based writing as art, the question of factual accuracy must be an aesthetic one. D'Agata's critics completely fail to acknowledge that facts might function differently in different pieces of nonfiction writing. This is the surest sign that their denunciations of his position are about something other than art. They almost uniformly insist that factual accuracy functions as a useful artistic constraint, and the work of many talented writers stands as a testimony to this truth. But who decided that this constraint need be universal? When? Why?
We might simply maintain, with the detractors, that we already have categories for work that privileges artistic license over facts—fiction and poetry—and note that D'Agata can publish all he wants in small magazines without being bothered by fact-checkers. But this is more than a matter of asking him to re-label his work. (For what it's worth, my copy of About a Mountain is bizarrely labeled "Cultural Studies.") It is to suggest that he cede the right to define his genre to publishing conventions and prevailing cultural assumptions—again a sign that he is being asked to consider himself something other than an artist—and to forsake the goal of building a real readership. Why should he do this? Perhaps more to the point, why are the rest of us so ready to defend a set of standards for fact-based writing whose provenance we know so little about?
D'Agata's detractors do not argue for an explicit equivalence between nonfiction art and nonfiction journalism, but each invokes a so-called contract between the reader and writer that functions identically in both modes. That contract supposedly demands factual verifiability of any work published under the marketing designation "nonfiction," which designation, as D'Agata tells Fingal, dates only to the 1960s or so. The reasons for maintaining that nonfiction art and nonfiction journalism must share this constraint are nowhere addressed in the reviews of Lifespan. We are meant, instead, to share an assumption that journalism exists on a moral continuum with all of the various forms of nonfiction not primarily intent on communicating authoritative and actionable information. As far as I can tell, this assumption is based on no logic except that of the tables of contents of our more substantive glossy magazines.
D'Agata appeals, by contrast, to the capacious and established tradition of the essay in his set-to with Fingal (as in his anthologies), and he argues that many of that form's leading figures have shared his sense of artistic license:
And indeed, if we dig down into the history of essays we will find writers like Natalia Ginzburg and Mary McCarthy and George Orwell and Henry Thoreau and Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey and Daniel Defoe and Christine de Pisan and Sei Shōnagon and St. Augustine and Plutarch and Seneca and Cicero and Herodotus and dozens of other masters of this form who regularly altered facts in order to get a closer understanding of what they were experiencing.
Revealingly, just as they fail to address About a Mountain, few of the negative reviews of Lifespan seriously engage D'Agata's sense of the essay's history. To admit that he is not just an ambitious practitioner but a scholar of the form he advocates on behalf of would, indeed, make it more difficult to portray him as a lazy, entitled product of the MFA pyramid scheme. It might also point up the ahistorical nature of the claims being employed to discredit him.
De Quincey remained an opium addict while writing an account of freeing himself from the substance; Thoreau, in addition to creating composite characters and collapsing time, gives no indication that Walden Pond was part of his famous mentor Emerson's woodlot or that he went into Concord on virtually a daily basis during the two years that he lived there; Orwell's schoolmates argued that he invented much of his autobiographical writing. Is it possible to acknowledge these writers' work as literature of the highest order while suggesting that contemporary nonfiction writers who refuse to honor a contract requiring absolute factual accuracy are beneath contempt? If so, how? Does the passage of time change the contract between writer and reader? If so, how? Might it be possible that the contract can accommodate a tacit recognition that, as D'Agata puts it, facts need not always "function baldly as 'facts'"?
Even if we restrict our historical view of the essay to the fact-checking era, as D'Agata's detractors do, we find that many of the most gifted nonfiction writers from the 1930s onward have been accused of, or have admitted to, fictionalizing their material (and we find that more than one of them is or was closely associated with The New Yorker, which has for most of its existence set the industry standard for fact-checking): A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Hunter S. Thompson, Vivian Gornick, Janet Malcolm, David Foster Wallace. D'Agata's position, then, seems unique only in that he wants to have a conversation about the liberties he takes with facts, rather than simply taking the liberties and letting us decide whether to notice and discuss them. Perhaps he is guilty of bad form in bringing the issue up. Lifespan is, I think, a misconceived book that frames his argument poorly. But its tactical failure should not be construed as a sign that his position is bankrupt. If there is a convincing argument equating factual inaccuracy with artistic failure, I have not yet seen it.
Meanwhile we might simply read the work of some of the above-named writers, much of which joins About a Mountain in arguing strongly against any such equivalence. Take the great Joseph Mitchell, for my money the best New Yorker nonfiction writer of them all. The knowledge that some of his work is fabricated would seem to damn him more readily than most writers, given that he self-identified as a reporter. His portrait of the community surrounding the now-defunct Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, Old Mr. Flood, is a series of journalistic pieces anchored by the character of Hugh G. Flood, a 93-year-old resident of the Hartford House hotel adjacent to the market, who plans to live to age 115 on the strength of a seafood-only diet. "He eats with relish every kind of seafood," Mitchell writes, "including sea-urchin eggs, blowfish tails, winkles, ink squids, and barn-door skates. He especially likes an ancient Boston breakfast dish—fried cod tongues, cheeks, and sounds, sounds being the gelatinous air bladders along the cod's backbone." In one of the pieces, "Mr. Flood's Party," Flood pours a glass of Scotch and delivers perhaps my favorite monologue on the subject of alcohol in all of literature:
When I think of all the trouble it's caused me, I feel like I ought to pick some distillery at random and sue it for sixty-five million dollars. Still and all, there've been times if it hadn't been for whiskey, I don't know what would've become of me. It was either get drunk or throw the rope over the rafter. I've thought a lot about this matter over the years and I've come to the conclusion there's two ways of looking at whiskey—it gives and it takes away, it lifts you up and it knocks you down, it hurts and it heals, it kills and it resurrects—but whichever way you look at it, I'm glad I'm not the man that invented it. That's one thing I wouldn't want on my soul. . . . When you stop and think of the mess and the monkey business and the fractured skulls and the commotion and the calamity and the stomach distress and the wife beating and the poor little children without any shoes and the howling and the hell he's been responsible for down through the centuries—why, good God A'mighty! Whoever he was, they've probably got him put away in a special brimstone pit, the deepest, red-hottest pit in hell, the one the preachers tell about, the one without any bottom. . . . And then again, just as likely, he might've gone to heaven.
Though the Flood pieces were published as nonfiction in the New Yorker, Flood is fictional, a composite of fish-market denizens and Mitchell himself. It was, furthermore, Harold Ross—The New Yorker's founding editor, the person who built that most legendary of fact-checking departments—who apparently suggested this approach to the material.
Mitchell builds immense trust in ways literary artists always have, with his voice, his eye, his ear, and his understanding of humanity. I trust him to fabricate the right things. If the above monologue wasn't actually delivered by a human Mitchell came to know, it should have been. When the pieces were published in book form as Old Mr. Flood, the author appended a preface in which he declared, "I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts." He continued writing brilliantly for The New Yorker for another seventeen years.
Joseph Mitchell's artistic practices don't, of course, necessarily authorize D'Agata's position. Nor does Harold Ross's enthusiasm for publishing a hybrid of journalism and literature negate his successors' desire to publish only nonfiction whose factual accuracy is beyond dispute. Sixty years divide us from Ross's suggestion that Mitchell combine journalism with fiction. The publishing world of today bears little resemblance to the one Ross and Mitchell took for granted, and D'Agata must convince us of the rightness of his methods in today's terms. But those who have most visibly and forcefully dismissed his argument depend on an appeal to prejudice in which eternal factual integrity as epitomized by The New Yorker represents the unquestioned good.
It is obvious why otherwise astute people might embrace such an unsubtle position. The New Yorker, along with The New York Times and other custodians of Serious Journalism, represents the last redoubt of the reality-based community. We need these publications to put their factual bona fides beyond dispute. We undoubtedly need this more, right now, than we need them to support literature. But conflating literature with journalism or political speech, as D'Agata's detractors have done with varying degrees of explicitness, is a distraction at best. We silence D'Agata because we can't silence Murdoch or Rove. D'Agata himself might be proud of inventing such a clear example of purely symbolic control.
Mark Lane's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Oxford American, Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction, The New Orleans Review, and Harp & Altar, among others.
[1] Surely D'Agata's reviewers got their facts right, right? Two of them, Kois and McDonald, hypothetically enact D'Agata's contentions about artistic license, incorporating false facts and then telling us that they have done so. How would you feel if we all followed D'Agata's example, they ask? Perhaps they have inside information, but nowhere have I seen D'Agata advocate for the right of book reviewers to alter facts. Then there is the case of Miller, who claims that she "could barely finish" "What Happens There" back when it first came out, so she "abandoned the rest of the book." By "the rest of the book" she presumably means the rest of About a Mountain. "What Happens There," however, is intercut in chunks throughout About a Mountain's 200-odd pages, so this is a peculiar claim.
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Google App Engine programs are implemented using Python, Google says (a neat choice, I think; Python is an elegantly simple, and usually nice-to-read language). Note that Google's programming environment you can download to your computer simulates the Google App Engine, but you need to install Python first. You can then also utilize components for authentication, sending emails, or fetching other URLs. Another component called "webapp," along with the Django templating language, can be used as a wrapper to create web sites.
Here's a video show-casing a "hello world" sample application created with the App Engine:
(A sample chat application as part of the Application Gallery is live as well, though it didn't work for me.)
How much does it cost? Google says it's free to get started "with no obligation" and that a free account "can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month."
And what's in it for Google Inc? (Looking back to other now semi-canceled efforts, like the Google SOAP Search API, this is also interesting in terms of pondering the longevity of this service.) One goal for Google in the "near future," as they say, is to offer a paid service once your cross certain scaling limits. Another goal may be to standardize web apps in their favor; using the Apps Engine, it's only a small step to use the integrated libraries to switch to a Google Account for authentication for your site. And the more sites make use of the Google Account, the more powerful that account will become. Google writes:
Your application can allow a user to sign in with a Google account, and access the email address and displayable name associated with the account. Using Google Accounts lets the user start using your application faster, because the user may not need to create a new account. It also saves you the effort of implementing a user account system just for your application.
And who knows, maybe in future releases of the App Engine, using other services by Google – like their advertising framework – will also be made temptingly easy. Instead of just being one of the web's most successful players, perhaps Google continues trying to manufacture the board game itself. A Google layer in-between HTTP and the end user, with the potential to "tax" activity on that layer with micro-payments (e.g. the Google Checkout service) or Google ads (e.g. the AdSense that come with the Google AJAX Search API).
[Thanks Colin Colehour!]
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About Us
Saving energy by using the sun is the best way to go. Since 1976, Revco Solar has been providing service to many satisfied customers. These services are provided in Orange county, San Diego, Riverside, and Coachella Valley areas. Not only do we help encourage a cleaner world and sustainable future, but we will help you save energy with the power of the sun allowing a lower electricity bill.
Our services
We provide PV, which is solar electric, as well as pool solar. Solar electric can be used for your home which allows you to retain heat inside your home saving you money. Pool solar allows you to receive heat for your pool so you will have no problem going for a swim throughout the whole year. Both solar electric and pool solar are great purchases because you don't have to worry about your bill being too high and it lasts forever.
Revco Solar has been providing their service for 40 years and more to come. Revco Solar Engineering, Inc. has one of the oldest active C46 Solar Contractor Licenses that is still going strong. Don't forget to send us your information so we can set you up with an appointment to get your free quote so you are on your way to saving money and energy!


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Utopia Free
Conversation with
Lisa Sigal & Rachael Rakes
Friday 15 December 7-8:30pm
Join us for an evening of conversation with Lisa Sigal and Rachael Rakes, presented in conjunction with Utopia Free. The talk will revolve around Sigal's new plaster and cardboard works, which translate layers of architectural material into abstractions to reflect on "property" as a trait, a condition, something owned or possessed, and property rights. Together they will discuss contempoarary possibilities for addressing political and historical phenomena through abstracted forms. Utopia Free is on view through December 22nd.
_ _ _
"Curbside" is a series cast from, with, and on cardboard. Splayed and sprayed sections of the exterior and interior of shipping boxes hold an inventory of marks, branding, shipping labels, remnants of packing tape, stains and effects of weather. Like spongy palimpsests, the cardboard surfaces have absorbed impressions of past use, tracing records of times and places, and raising questions about systems of distribution. While remaining formally abstract, the graffiti-like scratches and outlines of fences, beds, and carts diagram the absence of an object. Multiple frames, filled with images hugging their edges, nest inside each composition, serving to merge the container with the contained. Imagery and its support contribute to a logic of material transformation by referring us to a cycle of transference and exchange outside the studio.
Mat (Utopia Free), part of "Curbside," is cast from cardboard pulp and ochre pigment, and resembles a flattened cardboard box. The piece functions like a shield or amulet to ward off the effects of capitalism. This hybrid image/object evaluates the things we prize as fugitive impressions, captured in a process on their way to the garbage, or renewed for future circulation in defense of meaning.
"Break It Down" is a series of wall sections possessing the characteristics and appearance of blighted houses. The term "blight," originally used to describe diseased and browning plants, has been appropriated by the state to describe dwellings occupied by predominantly low-income people of color. By focusing on cosmetic blight when describing individual or community-wide disinvestment, the state deflects attention from structural classism and racism.*
The plasters in "Break It Down" were made by sandwiching a core of plaster between sheets of heavy and translucent paper, mimicking the mechanical fabrication of drywall. These plasters explore a process of practical and experiential sensations of time and place, recorded on the most common and ubiquitous material. Painterly incidences of color, density, and luminosity alter the physical nature of the materials. Taken together, the works investigate how art can challenge set ideas about value, property, structure and containment.
*This definition of "blight" is featured in a glossary of development terms, which will be highlighted in Blights Out For Mayor, a billboard project in New Orleans. Blights Out (www.blightsout.org) is an activist, artist, and architect and citizen collective in New Orleans, cofounded by Lisa Sigal, formed to fight housing injustice.
Lisa Sigal is an artist based in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum's Biennial 2008, The New Museum, MoMa/PS1 Museum, The Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox , the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect .3 International Biennial in New Orleans, the DeCordova Museum in Boston, the Essl Museum in Vienna, LAXART space in Los Angeles, Samson Projects in Boston, The Mattress Factory and the most recent iteration of the Anyang Public Art Project, Korea among other venues. As part of the Percent for Art program Sigal's art will be permanently displayed by the MTA. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, Art News, Time Out and Modern Painters among other publications. Sigal is a 2015 Anonymous Was A Woman, grantee, 2012 Art Matters Foundation grantee and Creative Capital grantee, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship awardee, a 2002 NYFA grantee and received the Joan MItchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998. Sigal has been an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, the Skowhegan School of Art, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989. Sigal is a founding artist/activist of Blights Out a coalition of people generating art, dialogue and action around the issues of blight, housing affordability and gentrification and in support of housing as a human right.
Rachael Rakes is a curator, critic, and teacher from New York City. She currently serves as a section Editor for the Brooklyn Rail, Editor at Large for Verso Books, and Programmer at Large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Rakes has recently contributed criticism to Art-Agenda, Artforum, and Ocula, among other publications. She has recently organized exhibitions for A.I.R., ArtCenter/South Florida, The Knockdown Center, International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), Malmö Konsthall, and the Hessel Museum of Art. Rakes is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and currently teaches a critical history of socially-engaged art at The New School. She has recently been a Curator in Residence for the CPR: Mexico program, an Arts Writer in Residence for Contemporary Art Stavanger, a Fellow with the Bruce High Quality Foundation MFU in Miami, and Researcher in Residence at Squeaky Wheel Media Art Center. With Leo Goldsmith, Rakes is at work on a book on radical filmmaker Peter Watkins, which received a 2015 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. From 2010-2013, Rakes was the Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, and from 2012-2014 she co-directed Heliopolis Project Space in Brooklyn.
Image: Curbsides (cracked export) / Curbsides (orange salvage) -Installation view: Utopia Free at MILLER, laminated painted cardboard, handmade cardboard paper, each panel 60 x 40 inches, 2016. Courtesy MILLER.


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Sunday, September 19, 2010
Noodling the Film
During the first week of August, I spent a week down in the lovely city of Pauls Valley, OK. It's about 30 min. south of Norman. The reason for me being down there was that I was asked to be set photographer for the short film Noodling. This has only been my third time as a set photographer for a film, but it was a fantastic learning experience.
The main difference between this film and other films that I have worked on is that half of the crew was from L.A. Rebecca Eskreis, the director, became fascinated in the sport of noodling and decided to create a fictional short film around that subject. While I hesitate to call most L.A. of the crew professionals (since most were still in grad school), they were more familiar with the industry than the crew from Oklahoma. The days were long and hot, and the set was a little disorganized at times, but I was able to gain a further understanding as to how others create films.
Probably the most impressive part of the shoot was the G&E crew (Grip and Electric). They were in charge of C-stands, lights, diffusers, generators, and general gear that can be found on a film set. They were extremely organized and were on top of their game. If a diffuser needed to be removed from a window, David (our talented DP) would tell Justin, who would radio to metal Jeff, who would direct the crew outside. They were quick, efficient, and reliable.
Ok, so now my job was to take the most wonderful photos that I could. I wish I had better gear, but I think most of my photos turned out great. At least they better! I took around 3,700 photos. My philosophy, at least on set, is that if people are going to be in the photo, chances are that they are going to mess it up somehow. So I tend to take 3-5 shots of the same angle to cover my bases. I never know when someone is going to blink, or make a weird face, or turn away quickly. I have a general rule that if one person messes up a shot, I will not use that photo. I am picky and try to learn from my mistakes. I'm happy with the photos that turned out well. In the end, about 300 were chosen to share with cast and crew.
After looking back at how production went, I realize that some of the crew did not mesh well and not everyone was adequate at their positions, but I consider the shoot a success. The footage that I did glimpse through the monitor was great. I'm happy with volunteering to help out with the film. Even if people have ill feelings about how things went, I hope in the end they can be proud that they were able to help create a piece of art for all to enjoy. I'm crossing my fingers that I get another chance to help out with any films that are going to be shooting in Oklahoma. By then, I should be the proud owner of a new DSLR (I'm leaning toward the Nikon D7000, but that's for another post!). I want to get better and cannot wait to be back on another set! If anyone reads this and is interested in a set photographer, feel free to leave a comment or email me!
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College of Allied Health & Nursing
Find your passion in the College of Allied Health and Nursing at Minnesota State Mankato. Dedicated to promoting wellness and improving quality of life for individuals, families, and society, we offer opportunities for you to lead, partner and achieve big things. Fulfill your mission.
News & Events
College of Allied Health and Nursing Community Fair
Saturday, April 7th
10:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Academic Areas of Study
Whatever your passion, we have a program that will allow you to excel while helping others at the same time.


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Can't miss: Top stops on 2012 trail
The candidates may change every four years, but the presidential campaign trail routine doesn't.
For all the advances in the mechanics of winning elections, the early state primary election circuit remains remarkably untouched, representing a timeless retail politicking itinerary marked by essential local events, landmarks and eateries.
Story Continued Below
The 2012 presidential campaign is no different, and the GOP candidates — and their advance staff — are already paying homage to political tradition. Witness newly minted presidential candidate Rick Perry's Monday schedule — the Texas governor visited both the Hamburg Inn and the state fair, two Iowa campaign staples.
Below is POLITICO's list of the Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina places and events that 2012 hopefuls can't afford to miss — the must-stops on the presidential primary trail.
Iowa State Fair (Des Moines)
Perry has been a candidate for only two days, and he's already eaten a pork chop on a stick at the state fair. The 12-day-long event coincides with the annual straw poll in nearby Ames, the critical early test of support that broke former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's campaign Saturday. Every candidate must brave the August heat to stop by the Des Moines Register's soapbox — the newspaper's microphone and hay-bale platform where candidates for local and national office deliver speeches — and see the famous cow carved out of butter. Last Thursday, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney flipped pork chops. On Friday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin toured the cattle barn and Rep. Michele Bachmann had a corndog. In the previous campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama rode the bumper cars.
Blue Bunny Ice Cream Parlor and Museum (Le Mars)
Last time around, Romney ordered a chocolate shake. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson have also dropped by at various times. It just so happens that the self-proclaimed Ice Cream Capital of the World — Le Mars claims it produces more ice cream than any town in the world — is also in the heart of the Sioux City media market, a great way for presidential candidates to reach GOP voters in Iowa's conservative northwest. Bachmann, who's staking her bid on winning those voters, has been an announced candidate for just over a month, and she's has already been to Blue Bunny.
Pizza Ranch (most of Iowa's 99 counties)
At any one of this chain's locations, they'll have meeting space for a town hall event, they'll put your name on a marquee, and even name a pizza after you. The headquarters is in Sioux City, in one of the most conservative counties in the state, but you can take your pick of locations as long as you make sure to stop at one of them. Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad recently enjoyed a Branstad Bronco Pizza at the Orange City restaurant, and Pawlenty treated Republicans to lunch at the Newton location in April, a few months before former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum spoke to a GOP meeting there. Romney hit the Creston Pizza Ranch in 2007.


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Serves 6
1.5 pounds of jasmine rice
1/2 pound grated butternut squash
2 cups cilantro leaves
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup red bell peppers
6 duck confit legs, see below
2 ají amarillo, seeds removed and puréed
1/4 cup peeled fava beans
1/4 cup choclo corn kernels
1/4 cup peas
2 cups black beer
4 cups chicken or duck stock
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
Salt, black pepper, cumin
Heat the oil in a skillet and brown the duck confit. Remove legs, set aside and transfer hot oil to a deep sauce pan. Add chopped onion, chopped garlic and pureed aji amarillo and saute for few minutes, or until lightly browned. Then add the peas, fava beans, corn kernels, red peppers, grated butternut squash and rice and stir for two minutes. Add black beer and cilantro. Add stock, salt, black pepper and cumin and cook for 8 minutes more. Next return the browned duck confit legs to the pan and cook for an additional 7 minutes, or until the rice is cooked.
Serve with salsa criolla, below.
2 red onions, sliced in very thin half moons
1 - 2 ají or jalapeño peppers, sliced into very thin matchsticks
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro or parsley, or both
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
Soak the onions in salt water for 10 minutes. Drain and let dry. Mix onion with the rest of the ingredients, let marinate at room temperature for 15 minutes before serving.
Duck Confit
6 uncooked Peking duck legs
1 cup kosher salt
1 teaspoon lime zest
8 cloves crushed garlic
¼ cup black peppercorns
2 crushed aji panca seco (Peruvian dried aji panca)
Fresh thyme
Fresh bay leaf
50 ounces rendered duck fat
Rub the duck legs with kosher salt on both sides. Place them in a large re-sealable plastic bag. Add the lemon zest and slices, garlic, ají panca, black peppercorns, fresh thyme and fresh bay leaf. Seal and massage the duck legs through the bag until all of the ingredients are evenly dispersed. Refrigerate for 24 hours to marinate.
Preheat the oven to 200 Fahrenheit
Remove the duck legs from the marinade. Rinse them off and pat dry. Place the rest of the contents of the bag into the bottom of an oven safe dish just large enough to hold the legs in a single layer. Place the duck legs skin side down in the dish. Pour the duck fat into a small saucepan and warm over low heat until liquid. Pour over the duck legs until they are completely covered.
Bake for 6 to 7 hours in the preheated oven. Cool. Place in the freezer, where confit can be kept for up to several months.
View article: Emmanuel Piqueras — Made in Peru


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Well I had a busy day today. I had to do stocking today instead of cashiering b/c this guy I worked with hurt his foot and can't do much of anything. So I had to be the stocker and pick up heavy loads and get carts many times in the blistering winter heat. Then I had to do all my weekly paperwork as well. The whole day sucked as a whole.
Funshine Bear
- Current Mood: drained
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Opposite of mutual word list. Here are a variety of words whose meaning is nearly the opposite of mutual.
- detached
- disconnected
- dissociated
- distinct
- disunited
- separate
- separated
- severed
- sundered
- unconnected
- unreciprocated
- unrequited
- unshared
Hope the above listing of antonyms for mutual is useful. This page may interest people looking for the opposite of mutual and mutual opposite.Popular phrases for this post include, opposite of mutual, mutual opposite, what is the opposite of mutual, the opposite of mutual, antonym of mutual, mutual opposite word, opposite word of mutual.


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Spanish DancersBrights
Our Spanish Dancers designs are always one off pieces, we will never be able to replicate these exact colours again. Thus, you are sure to get a true piece of 'art on the floor'.
The rug is as rhythmical as the flamenco dance itself. Jenny was so fond of the Flamenco dancers during her travels in the area. This design is a favourite with many of our clients. It is a true statement piece, a true conversation starter.
Handspun Tibetan wool and pure silk
Tibetan knot
155,000 individual knots per square meter
Available to order in standard sizes:
180 x 270cm | 240 x 300cm | 270 x 360cm | 300 x 420cm |
Custom sizing availableSIZE GUIDE


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Management and Marketing Department
Welcome to the Department of Management and Marketing. The department serves over 1100 NDSU undergraduate students who major in Management, Marketing, or Business Administration; or minor in Business Administration or Logistics. Students can also pursue a second major in Global Business. Students looking for more specialized programs can pursue a Certificate in Professional Selling or a focus in Human Resource Management. Should a student wish to further their education, they may want to consider applying for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree.
The department has seventeen faculty members who teach and conduct research in Management, Marketing, Business Law, Managerial Economics, and International Business.
Vision Statement:
The Department promotes excellence in business education by providing a bridge between business knowledge and practice leading to enhanced experiences and outcomes for students through academic excellence, as well as synergistic connections to alumni and the business community.
The Department of Management and Marketing is accredited through the College of Business by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), which places it in the top 5 percent of business schools worldwide.


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|Courtesy: Image, CreditJesusQuotesGodinterest
|Courtesy: Image, CreditJesusQuotesGodinterest
In Romans 12:2, in Bible Christian believers are to be transformed and renewed in their mind by the word of God. As God's child, God's gives Peace of Mind, inbuilt and embedded in image of God reinforced by Godly thoughts through Christ. The mind is the great work of Almighty God Infinite Whose Words influence the brain in perfect congruent agreement with God. It is important to keep the mind transformed to avoid and overcome inherited sin nature of Adam and Eve unacceptable to God. Issues including drugs often create biochemical imbalances in the brain, so fix thoughts on God to avoid not being of the right mind by fear, depression, abusive behaviours. Guard heart, from it flows all thoughts in the heart. Build Godly wall in mind to save hearts from addictions. Read God's words to store in the mind.
The Bible says we must not conform to the secular world but be transformed by the renewing mind. Jesus continues to speak about importance of thoughts in mind state of our hearts. So ensure one guards the heart and mind from who speaks into heart and mind. Filter relevant, worthy thoughts to store and sift careless speaking not reflecting God. Automatic conversation, gift of garb neighbourly friendliness banter is associated with being civil and caring for others is good. What is shared is important and necessary to talk. But first carefully check words and your thinking are genuinely in line with God Words to build up your neighbour in God's Sight.
God's Wisdom reveals His Ultimate Source of knowledge to help solve problems of the heart. The heart stores thought from the mind. So Christ tells Christian believers to keep the heart and the mind safe in union with Christ Jesus for peace. Many varieties of Bible Christian books and also, some Christian music, movies, TV programs influence thoughts. So discern actions by carefully choosing what your eyes, ear gateways enter to care for heart. Avoid hardened regimented, insensitive thinking and actions, Jesus taught with quotes from Isaiah that people can honour with lips, but hearts far away." Parents following good news, teach children Jesus heals hearts because Jesus is in the business of heart-healing through Biblical meditation and prayer in Jesus Name.
Refocus, renew, transform mind heart as inner – heart thoughts do affect external the actions in life. Thoughts maintain lifestyle. So filter ideas through Christ blood. Jesus gives His Rich message of Grace to the church. So Christians pray and meditate on word of God as soul food. Read Bible daily as God is the greatest writer to truly experience happened in Bible be actively involved in process of faith journey true faith storyline. Remember where the mind goes body follows. Seek God; Seek His Word, Be lead by the Holy Spirit for within the pages of the Bible lies Godly Wisdom. Answers to life, health, work, family, business, wealth, riches, assets, property, all needs is in God.
There's a huge variety of books, movies, music influencing thoughts and actions. The eyes and ears are gateways to the heart so we care for the state of our hearts. To avoid hardened regimented, insensitive thinking actions, Jesus quotes Isaiah for people honour with lips, but hearts far away. The bible has so many good advantages and good side effects from Bible that impacts life positively. The issue is there are too many distractions vying for one's attention and focus so often the personal care of one's heart and mind is kept on the back burner. Then people wonder why they have no peace of mind.
Some want to indulge and do exactly as they feel based on human directions, opinions blame God if things go wrong. The Bible helps us to renew our mind in Jesus Christ because whatever is read is kept in mind. When Bible is read devotionally it keeps in mind what is read, watched, recorded stored in mind. Believers learn about brain from anatomy books to understand amazing miracle creative power of God. God sees, knows thoughts, emotions, feelings processed. As believers have to consider daily, moment by moment choices affecting the heart mind and body at all times.
God demands to use mental alertness and discipline as little thoughts become bigger issues of life. The mind, body, soul in union with Christ gives the perfect peace of God beyond all understanding in Jesus Name. The spirit and soul are eternal but work through the body, heart and mind. Thoughts take root to manifest in believer wholly accountable to God. Protect heart, inner- feelings and actions. The brain controls mind and thoughts so watch what one puts in. Feed the spirit of your brain mind with word of God and good reports. Be transformed and renewed in your thoughts, actions, and lifestyle. Spend time before you make or choose ideas or entertain any feelings you act upon. People are created in God's image and so filled with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ and the Holy Spirit. This means a person is not helpless if they choose to obey God. For obedience to God's words is a protection to life, blessings for good success and soul prosperity. Our brain means a lot to us for a sound mind gives peace, rest of God despite physical evidence seen. God speaks directly in His words in spirit mind dreams, visions. Both the physical and spiritual brain described in detail are in directly tuned in connection with God as Creator and Instructor.
The brain is compelling as seen here so imagine you are a neuroscientist studying the brain images of Christians. Like Dr. Majid Fotuhi, a pre-eminent voice in area of brain science gives advice on how to keep brain healthy. His latest book, "Boost Your Brain," is of great help to believers because of the amazing miracle wonders of God seen. The idea of expressing Godly thinking from the Bible is the written equivalent of reading a book then speaking about it publicly is a challenge for those who like to have their brain thoughts private not obviously predicted by others.
A standard Biblical life is observed and seen by others, who are a cloud of witnesses around believers who truly know God. In Acts unbelievers testify of knowing 'Paul and Apollos' as saints of Christ. whose influence demonstrate God's Power in actions and behaviour so as a person thinks so they are. The brain in detail reveals many aspects of God's creation beauty of life. Modern technology has managed to produce high tech. detailed images of the brain and the mind. These reveals the magnificent wisdom of God in His creation. So the mind controls what is seen, heard, thought and reflected upon.
God's provides resources to show in detail the fibrous mind to see enhanced images of the brain. This indepth details reveal the function of brain networks and how this monumental complexity might be understood. Scientists agree with God we must improve the value of boosting the brain to feed the mind. So healthy thoughts keep heart purely by feeding brain great soul food function and detect dementia, Alzheimer's the HCP early. Learning disabilities like dyslexia are marked by variations in the brain language pathways. So thought processing and word analyses of disability requires support and help. God's brain creation is so majestic nobody is capable of such highest intelligence and wisdom of God. So give God All Due Credit, Glory, Honour in Jesus Name.
In Psalm 105:1, O give thanks to God. Call upon His Name, make known His Deeds among the people. Thanks be to God for His Gifts it is good to thank God in all things. Thank God for good things happening. Thank God for strength to face challenges. There is so much to be grateful and thankful for during this season of Thanksgiving. We thank God for the good health, abundant joy and supernatural favour HE provided for our family during this year. We are so thankful for each of you who are part of this ministry. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you all readers, friends, supporters, fans for everything. God bless you abundantly in Jesus Name.
Courtesy:Image Credit
|A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye as the pupil, iris and radiating lines shows. Carrots greatly enhance blood flow and function of the eyes.
|A Tomato has 4 chambers and is red. The heart has 4 chambers and is red. Research shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopine as pure heart and blood food.
|Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.
|Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Te wrinkle folds on the nut are like neo-cortex. Walnuts help develop more than 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.
|Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.
|Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb shaped like bones target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. Enough sodium in diet, the body strengthens bones. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.
|Avocados, Eggplant and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female and look womb. An avocado a week balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents cervical cancers. It takes 9 months to grow avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. Avocado has 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition but studies named about 141 of them.
|Figs are full of seeds and hang in 2 when they grow. Figs increase mobility of male sperm and increase numbers of Sperm as well to overcome male sterility.
|Sweet Potatoes look like pancreas and balance the glycemic index of diabetics.
|Olives assist the health and function of the ovaries
|Oranges, Grapefruits, Citrus fruits look like mammary glands of the female healthy breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.
|Onions look like body's cells so helps clear waste materials from body cells. They produce tears which wash epithelial layers of eyes. Garlic, also helps eliminate waste materials and dangerous free radicals from the body.
1. Hands and Fingers: Bananas grow in a bunch on banana 'trees.' The scientific name for banana is musa sapientum, which means "fruit of the wise men." Bananas don't actually grow on trees they grow on plants. The banana plant is classified as arborescent tree-like perennial herb so the banana is considered a berry. The correct name for bunch of bananas is a hand of bananas; a single banana is a finger. Due to modern shipping practices, this tropical yellow berry, the banana is constant available. Nearly all the bananas sold in stores are cloned from one variety, the Cavendish banana plant, originally native to Southeast Asia. Next time you peel and eat a banana, take the time to savour its flavour and texture, and tell the next generations about the healthy snack encased in yellow flesh.
3. Energy and Mood Balancing: Research shows potassium packed fruit can assist in learning by making pupils more alert. 200 students at a Twickenham, Middlesex England, school were helped through exams this year by eating bananas at breakfast, break, lunch to boost brain power. Another benefit to bananas high potassium content derives from that mineral's role as an energy-supplying electrolyte. Since bananas also contain tryptophan, serotonin and norepinephrine, they help prevent depression while encouraging feelings of well-being and relaxation. In addition, the vitamin B6 in bananas helps protect against sleeplessness, mood swings and irritability. Potassium as vital mineral helps normalize heartbeat, sends oxygen to the brain and regulates your body's water balance. Reduce stress metabolic rate rise with potassium levels. Rebalance high-potassium banana snack high in B vitamins to calms nerves.
4.Overweight and at work: Studies at the Institute of Psychology in Austria found pressure at work leads to gorging comfort foods like chocolate and chips. Researchers found 5,000 hospital patients, most obese in high-pressure jobs, ate panic induced craving foods. So, we need to control our blood sugar levels by snacking on high carbohydrate foods every two hours to keep levels steady. One of the quickest ways of curing a hangover is to make a banana milkshake, sweetened with honey. The banana calms the stomach and, with the help of the honey, builds up depleted blood sugar levels, while the milk soothes and re-hydrates your system.
5Vision: Bananas, combined with the African herb orinol, have been used to treat cataracts in Nigeria. They also share with other fruits the ability to prevent macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in adults. According to a study published in the Archives of Ophthalmology in 2004, people who eat 3 servings of fruit per day are statistically unlike to develop the vision-diminishing disease.
6. Better Digestion: Bananas suppress acid in the digestive tract, alleviating heartburn and helping guard against ulcers. Bananas contain pectin as a soluble fibre, aid in elimination process, helping prevent constipation. High in fibre, so bananas in diet can help restore normal bowel action. Helping to overcome problem without resorting to laxatives. Bananas supply body with an abundance of fructooligosaccharide, a prebiotic substance encourages probiotics friendly bacteria in digestive system. As fructooligosaccharides ferment in digestive tract, they enhance body's ability to absorb calcium. The banana is used as the dietary food against intestinal disorders because of its soft texture and smoothness. It is the only raw fruit that can be eaten without distress in over-chronicler cases. It also neutralizes over-acidity and reduces irritation by coating the lining of the stomach.
7. Temperature control: Many cultures see bananas as a "cooling" fruit that can lower both physical and emotional temperature of expectant mothers. In Thailand, for example, pregnant women eat bananas to ensure their baby is born with a cool temperature. Bananas help to avoid morning sickness. As they are easily digested, bananas are a perfect food for babies just beginning to move to solid foods.
8. HIV Protection: The Journal of Biological Chemistry in March 2010 published a study revealing healing potential of BanLec, a lectin protein in bananas. Researchers found this protein binds to sugars and also bind to HIV-infected cells, enveloping them and preventing their replication and transmission.8. Blood sugar levels: Banana contains vitamin B6 which regulates blood glucose levels and can affect your mood. High in iron, bananas stimulate production of haemoglobin in the blood so helps in cases of anaemia. Snacking on bananas between meals helps to keep blood sugar levels up. Bananas can also help people trying to give up smoking. The B6 and B12 they contain, as well as the potassium and magnesium found in them, help the body recover from the effects of nicotine withdrawal.
9. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): Bananas can help SAD sufferers because they contain the natural mood enhancer tryptophan. According to recent survey undertaken by MIND amongst people suffering from depression, many felt much better after eating a banana. Because bananas contain tryptophan, a type of protein the body converts into serotonin, to make you relax, improve your mood and generally make you feel better. Bananas are high in B vitamins that can help calm the nervous system. Apply the inside of a banana peel to pimples to naturally dry out these skin blemishes. Before reaching for the insect bite cream, try rubbing the affected area with the inside of a banana skin. Many people find it amazingly successful at reducing swelling and irritation. Also, even the bananas peels of this fruit are good and useful as the peels make a wonderful fertilizer, particularly for roses.
Courtesy: Image, credit:
God's Health System.com
Dr Helen Pensanti M.D
Jesus calls the disciples to make them fishers of men. It Christ Jesus who enables and empowers to become efficient competent fishers of men. Matthew 4:19 states followers of Jesus Christ must be fishers of men like the disciples. The disciples were seasoned and experienced fishermen. While busy on the job at work, Christ called and chose them to become fishers of men. Fishermen are extremely hard working people. Most risk lives in all kinds of extreme weather conditions to bring best catch of fish to people to enjoy. Sometimes gone for weeks or months at a time into deepest waters chasing fish best environment.
Christ Jesus saw their natural desire and sacrifices to bring best fish qualified them as supernatural requires human fishing job description. Fitting perfectly qualities of endurance and those unpredictable experiences of fishing. No two days on the sea are quite the same. Some days have high tide, low tide, storms, avalanches, drought and even risk to life. They were suitable as fishers of men yet without guarantee of best fat cat multimillion bonuses paid by Christ for services. They had bounty days of abundance so abound yet other days of no catch so no source of income despite hard work and efforts put in.
For a controversial total stranger you never met or knew passing by to turn up at your office and workplace in almost talk to you seems a no no. To have the guts and audacity to demand you drop the only reliable job you ever knew for many generations to follow Him sounds almost ridiculous and insane. But that is Christ for you which is why the establishment and its system could not figure Christ out. Jesus did not follow high horse protocol standard selection sophisticated methods for high priests.Requiring years of Bible College Seminary training, induction, approval by executive committee board members hand picked by CEO. They go through a rigorous novitiate type apprenticeship training on job to qualify for their job status. Christ chose these fishermen for the spiritual and practical knowledge and track record. Christ knew their upbringing of Jewish Torah in the synagogue and at home prepared them for knowledge and understanding of the word of God. They were responsible for upkeep of family as responsible men so used to taking care of family.
Many feel I do not qualify to be a fisher of men because I cannot express myself well, has no College Education,did not go to Seminary of Bible College. Some feel they do not know or understand the Bible or feel mature spiritual to talk to others about salvation. Others may feel life circumstances are not yet in order or good to declare Christ to people. In extreme cases personal problems or the past seems to deter from facing others as fishers of men. They feel not perfect enough so unable to face the name calling. Some too comfortable in own skin may not bother to leave luxury cosy lifestyle. To associate with people perceived not of class, kind, status, wealth. To some it cost too much to declare boldly as fishers of men. Fiery furnace suffering, persecution trial in Christ cost too much to bear, so feel uncalled to fish for men. Thinking sheer burden privilege pressure managing fish school harvest outweighs material rewards. Yet to dedicate life to be responsible for maintaining harvest of fish is a great job. To ensure fish stays fresh, preserved in right environment, temperature, stored properly is not easy task. Fish stock's regular supply available prepared dressed to serve to impress Christ and God is tough job not for faint hearted. The fisherman equips the fish live in fresh, clean, pure environment. So appealing aroma of fragrance of Jesus in appropriate holy, righteous garments is a commitment and long-term process. So the cycle continues throughout the fishes' lifetime under management of the fisherman until the Master Jesus collects His fish order. The job descriptions as described means some count the cost. By worrying about implications, some abandon ship even before it sets sail. Yet billions of people need to hear Gospel Good news for personal salvation. Christian believer fish in the Strength of the GOD Almighty, through Power of the Authority of Christ Jesus Name as the Head of the Church. Fishers of men remain grounded and rooted in Christ as the branch of the True Vine. Secular worldly manipulation salesman tactics to get rich scum scheme will not work. Fisherman of Christ have an eternal calling beyond the material rewards of man -made get rich quick bonuses. This implies sacrifices, selfdenial opposed to selfserving aggrandisement, dedication, no cheering fans so accountable to God. Remuneration is excellent counted by number of souls won. So not popular with material monetary rewards wages, salary, and number of complementary benefit mechanisms. Prince of Peace Christ Jesus gives perfect Peace Passing all human understanding. God's people are created go live Peacefully in safe environments. When Jesus said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men. They obeyed immediately and gave also their ships and fishing nets lent to Christ Jesus to use to preach. By following Jesus in Luke 5:1-11 disciples caught more fish breaks all records. So had to call for more boats to collect extra harvest of fish landed.
Human fishing profession is greatest business for soul winning. Regardless of our profession or daily labour, the need for Jesus' followers is serving God doing work for the One true God. Simon Peter, like you and me understood the greatest honour and thanksgiving is to win souls for God as stars for Jesus. The fishermen had spent all night fishing, and now had beached their boats, and were off to the side cleaning their nets. They were able to harvest more than ever before. With Christ on their team their fate changed.Christ rewarded them so asked them to launch into the deep. As Christ feels and sees so meets all needs on the job. So put into action the characteristics needed to be a great fisherman, and see how they can also make you into great fishers of men so this word applies to all of us. To become a fisher of men you need to seek God's face and with the help of Christ you can in Jesus Name. With God all things are possible. When God calls He equips and provides Divine Helpers to team up with for God's Glory.
Jesus' sweet voice is calling and saying, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. It is is important to note although we are not made all we shall be, the fields are ripe for harvest. God is sounding a call to all Christians to participate in bringing in end – time soul winning. Courses specialize in training person-to-person evangelism. Get help if willing to accept and obey Christ's Command to be fishers of men.
Courtesy, Image Credit
Adriaen Van De Venne Fishing for Souls
The Holy Bible is the Preserved Living Word of God Written revealed to God's prophets and rabbis. The Bible is called Holy Scriptures, The Good Book, Sacred Book, God's Holy Supernatural Divine Truth, God's Communication. The Holy Bible is officially grouped together from works of 40 different authors living on 3 different continents Asia, Africa and Europe as God's chosen authors. The Holy Bible helps a Christian believer's eyes of understanding to open to know Perspective of God and How God Works among His creation. The Bible is the world's most widely printed Book of all time with prints exceeding 4 billion copies in thousands of languages and editions. The Bible is the first undisputed best-seller of all time so no other book takes God's Word's Place. The Bible is Inspired Word of God and self-proclaims God's Authority. In 2 Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness.
In John 1:1-5,"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood. Jesus Christ is the Word With God Since Eternity. Christ Highly Honours Word of God with Great Reverence as the Authoritative Source Word from which He quoted continuously throughout His ministry. As a Jew, Christ learnt from the Torah which is God's Holy Words to first the Hebrew people, the Greeks and all Gentiles from all nations all over the world. In John 16:13, The Holy Spirit of Truth, guides into all truth of God. He shall not speak of Himself but what He hears so Speaks to shows things to come according to God's Word.
The Holy Spirit, teaches, guides, reassures the Christian believer so confirms the Bible is the "Word of God."The Holy Bible is written between 1500 years by 40 writers often as scrolls or tablets. The Holy Bible Contains as divided into verses has the Old and New Testaments composed of 66 books not counting Apocrypha. The Bible contains the true living chronological history of God's Chosen people. 1,400 BC from The First Written Word of God, The Ten Commandments delivered to Moses. The Bible is translated from original Tanakh in Hebrew with some portions, Ezra 4:8-6:18 and 7 :12 -26, Jeremiah 10:11, Daniel 2:4-:28 in Biblical Aramaic of the Semitic world.The original Hebrew Bible was first written on stone by Moses, parchments and other Hebrew Biblical texts. The English word Bible is from Latin word, Biblia, as same word in Greek τὰ βιβλία ta Biblia, means Sacred Holy Book. In Latin biblia sacra "holy books" translates in Greek to τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ta biblia ta hagia, "the holy books."The word βιβλίον literally means "paper" or "scroll" so used as the word for the Books of the Bible.
The individual volumes of books of the Bible exist thousands of years. The testimony of the texts of the individual books of the 27 Books of the New Testament are dated to the 1st Century CE. The oldest surviving Hebrew manuscripts including the Dead Sea Scrolls date to about the 2nd century BCE as fragments and some are stored at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The oldest record of the complete text survives in Greek Translation called the Septuagint dating to 4th century Codex Sinaiticus. The parchment pages of the late 4th to 6th century biblical manuscripts, recently placed on view in the middle of the room, were originally intended to be handled and turned gently, most likely, as a part of the liturgy, by the monks that owned and read them. This parchments are now on display in the Smithsonian Library for people to view.
The Hebrew Bible is also recorded by various writers like Philo around 20 B.C. – 50 A.D. as a learned Jew of Alexandria and contemporary of Jesus. Josephus at about 37 or 38 – 101 A.D. as a non-Christian Jewish historian. Melito wrote in 170 A.D. about Bishop of Sartis Origen in 185 – 254 A.D Greek Biblical scholar Jerome 347 – 420 A.D. Latin Biblical scholar. The Bible is Absolute Accurate Word of God by human translation. Meaning may be influenced by limitation of languages but Bible is God's Real Words. Bible texts translate into languages: English, German, Swedish, Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Tagalog, Norwegian etc. The Bible is a Collection of God's Words written by God's Spirit Led Writers and Holy Spirit. The Bible in present form is modern compared with original. Latin Bible translations of Bible includes writer's own commentary on passages in addition to the literal translation.
By the 7th century, the Venerable Bede translation existed of scripture in Old Anglo-Saxon English. Aldhelm in 639–709 A.D. translated the complete Book of Psalms and large portions of other scriptures into Old English. In the 10th century translation of the Gospels was made in Lindisfarne Gospels. With word by word gloss insert between the lines of the Latin text by Aldred, Provost of Chester le Street said this is the oldest extant translation of the Gospels into the English. The Wessex Gospel or the West-Saxon Gospels contain full translation of the 4 Gospels into English. Produced in approximately 990, they are the first translation of all four gospels into English without the Latin text. In the 11th century, Abbot Aelfric translated much of the Old Testament in English. The Old English Hexateuch is an illuminate manuscript of the first 6 books of the Old Testament illustrations including translation of Book of Judges plus 5 books of the Pentateuch.
Recently the Yorkshire Post in Annals of secret history shows in Museum library, Gill Taylor reaching down to a heavy 1480's Holy Bible carefully placed on the table. It has exquisitely illuminated pages, with blue, yellow, green and red flowers blooming in a great curly capital E. In 1525, William Tyndale's Bible in English was first published to appear in print. Tyndale was a true scholar genius who felt GOD THEO was excluded in THEOlogy College in Oxford. Most people in Europe were unable to speak Latin so could not understand the Bible directly. The Church acted as mediator between God and people so Priests interpreted bible on behalf of congregations. The Wycliffe Bible of 1385 was based on the Latin Vulgate as the first hand-written translation of the Holy Bible into English. Tynedale, a reformer and genuine Godly spiritual leader. Tyndale holds distinction as the first man to ever print New Testament in the English language. On the left is Wycliffe's 1385 Bible and Tyndale's Bible of 1525 on the right.
Tyndale believed that ordinary people should be able to read the Bible for themselves. This spurred him to translate the Bible into English. So he wrote, 'the Church authorities banned translations of Bible in order to keep the world in darkness. So their intention was not let Christian know God's Words or talk to God directly. So they might sit in the consciences of the people. Trough vain superstition and false doctrine to exalt their own honour above God Himself. Tyndale's Bible was first considered illegal so banned and Tyndale was executed. Thanks and Glory to God Tyndale made God's Word available to Christian believers. King James after elimination of Tyndale recognised and impressed by his name in the Bible, ordered all homes in Britain have a copy of the Bible hence the Authorised King James Bible.
In Matthew 5:18, "For verily I say unto you, heaven and earth will pass but not one of God's Word, jot, content, title shall pass from God's Words till all is fulfilled." The Word of God fulfils all the promised prophecies as recorded in Old and New Testament and continues to do so until Jesus returns to set up Eternal Kingdom on earth. God's Word is Lamp to our feet and Light to direct our path in life to know and do God's Will. From writings of Moses through prophets and plus other 39 Old Testament books, God works exclusively through children of Israel and Christian believers. God even uses non believers and animals to do His miracles. The Jewish people gave us Bible and New Testament begins with birth, coming of Christ into the world as the prophesied Emmanuel God with us in the form of baby of Mary, Jesus. God took on body of human flesh in Jesus.
The New Testament is composed of 27 books and ushers in the church age. But the church opened up God's grace to whosoever would come. This includes non -Jews. The Bible is the only complete history book which tells past history and foretells future events that come to pass. All other history books record the past. It includes Gentiles of all nations and races. The history of the Holy Bible records the history of mankind from the beginning until the day this earth will pass away and a new heaven and a new earth will appear. It covers humanity from beginning to end. No other history book records future events.
Only God possesses such knowledge. He is the Alpha and Omega. The I AM of eternity. The Bible exist as the Word of God from time infinity so is written in from an eternal perspective. Only the Divine could have created this masterpiece. God is much more than His Name describes. In Psalm 138:2, The Bible proclaims God Honours His Word Above All His Names. God Magnifies His Word so Elevates His Word above His Name. God Reveals Himself to His people. God Highly Exalts the Word Christ Jesus by Giving Christ a Name Above all names. God gives us rest of His name with many commentaries and literature.
God's Words are so vast that all Jesus said has not enough space to put all into notes. The evaluation of God's Words shows God Himself made Provision in His Manual, the Bible to study and put His Words deep into our hearts. In John 21: 25 Jesus did so many things which, if they should be written the whole world is not big enough for all His books to be written. And the Christian believers are empowered by Jesus' Words in Spirit and in harmony with God's Spirit and comforted by the Holy Spirit. Many electronic and audio sound versions of Bible are available to buy or to get free from Gideon's Bible Charities. Christian believers access the Bible online, phone, on iPad, the internet, iPhone, android, and Jerusalem Nano Bible, tablet among others. Read and study the Bible everyday. Check the list of contents and various titles to learn about the relevant issues of your life. Stand on the Word of God to change your life in Jesus Name. Keep a note-book and memorize texts to recall when you need it to sustain you as soul food in Jesus Name.
Choose type of Bible preferred to read and understand. Many Bibles are available in print forms, scrolls, audio, on phones, androids, Jerusalem Nano Bibles, iphones, ipad, tapes, computer, tablet, internet, on line, Google Torah, Tanak, Bible word texts in music CD's, tapes, praise and worship. Read Bible everyday, pray to God, ask Holy Spirit to help better understand God's Words in Bible in Jesus Name.
Courtesy: Image Credit


text: Stuff like this (WSJ.com sub req'd) makes me wonder if the FASB is a group of dope addicts. Ummm, didn't they just make debt look more like equity, in terms of how it performs on the financial statements? I believe this is FAS 159, which I'll definitely be reading more about. However, between this and FAS 157, you have to think that the deck is stacked in the favor of the financials. While I'm not one to run around saying "its not fair", at the same time, these rules make the accounting quite a bit murkier.


text: Anyone who knows me will tell you about my love of fiction and fantasy. So it should be no surprise that Halloween is my favorite holiday. For the past few years I've started a little photo tradition, I do one special photo in honor of this fun holiday. This year the project is very "Shiva" inspired. Enjoy.


text:
Q. "If I submit an appeal explaining WHY the contravention occurred, will the charge be held at the lower sum pending the outcome?"
A. The charge will NOT be held. As stated on the rear of the PCN in no uncertain terms, by submitting an appeal you forfeit the early payment discount. Mitigating circumstances are not considered in contract law; therefore an appeal on this basis has no merit.
Q. "I was issued a notice for not displaying a ticket / permit correctly, if I send you a ticket will you cancel the charge?"
A. We will NOT cancel the charge if a ticket /permit is submitted. It is the drivers responsibility to take the due care and attention necessary to ensure that a ticket / permit is clearly displayed for inspection in order to avoid a charge. Careful placement and a brief glance after locking the vehicle is all that is required; it is unacceptable to blame the wind/passengers/pets.
You should appreciate that we have to account for the costs associated with issuing and administering the Parking Charge Notice, plus any subsequent administration costs thereafter; all as a direct result of the drivers negligence. Ultimately the charge was incurred due to a failure to DISPLAY… NOT failure to PAY / have permission to park.
Q. "I was getting change to buy a ticket, will you cancel the charge?"
A. There is no period of free parking, motorists are required to have sufficient change with them BEFORE arrival; appeals submitted on this basis will not be granted under any circumstances.
Q. "I parked in the manner in which the vehicle was observed as there was no where else to park (e.g. the car park was full or the car next to me had parked too far to the left/right), will you cancel the charge?"
A. No the charge will not be cancelled in these circumstances, if you are unable to adhere to the terms & conditions of use for any reason it would be prudent to either wait for an appropriate space to become available or seek alternative parking facilities.
Q. "The Pay & Display machine was not working, so I thought it would be ok to park for free; will you cancel the charge?"
A. No the charge will not be cancelled in these circumstances. If you cannot obtain a ticket for any reason, it would be prudent to call us for advice or find alternative parking facilities; a faulty machine does not automatically grant free parking. There is clear signage to this effect on all of our Pay & Display machines, therefore an appeal submitted on this basis will not be granted under any circumstances.
Whilst we take great care to ensure that the enforcement process is carried out accurately; we appreciate that errors can occur.
Therefore if you feel that the notice was issued incorrectly i.e the contravention did not occur; please write to us and we will investigate your claim.
All evidence will be reviewed, which may include (but not limited to) time stamped photographic images of the vehicle. We endeavour to respond to all VALID appeals within 28 days.
Please note, the following are NOT valid grounds for appeal under contract law, therefore appeals submitted on these alleged grounds will not be granted under any circumstances.:
- Explanations as to WHY the contravention occurred
- Requests for mitigating circumstances to be taken into account
- You disagree with the terms & conditions of use
Please provide the reference number, the drivers name & address, and any information that may assist us with our investigation. Correspondence submitted without all the requested information will not be addressed.
To reiterate the above, by submitting an appeal, you will forfeit the early payment discount should your appeal be unsuccessful.ONLINE APPEAL FORM


text:
...today was Saturday. ....this weird sinus congestion thing would go away.
...the ceremony and reception site were booked right now.
...I knew how to read different languages so I could make cute amigurumi like this.
...we were on our Caribbean (caps or no caps?) honeymoon right now.
...I was at the mall so I could try on this ring.
...I was a knitting daredevil so I could make dope things like this.
Ahh, I could wish forever.