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growing our downtown forest
Greening Lab
Green Minneapolis sees a green future for downtown, with tree-lined streets and active public spaces. Greening Lab is a pilot project that advances our goal to plant and maintain hundreds of street trees from North Loop to East Town and points in between.
Maintain, Engage, create
Greening Lab provides supplemental watering and maintenance for existing, young trees across downtown. We launched a mobile messaging and tree tag communication system to engage with residents and visitors and prompt real-time feedback about tree conditions. We also seek opportunities to plant new trees with effective planting methods throughout the city.
Our Partners
Greening Lab is produced in partnership with the Mpls Downtown Improvement District, with support from the City of Minneapolis, Downtown Minneapolis Neighborhood Association, Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board and Mississippi Watershed Management Organization.
Learn more about Greening Lab from the Mpls Downtown Improvement District.
2025 Leadership award
In 2018 Greening Lab was awarded a 2025 Plan Leadership Award from the mpls downtown council for advancing the greening and public realm initiatives outlined in the organization's 2025 Plan. Specifically, to "create and sustain a green infrastructure—and showcase the riverfront."


text: For the last few months, I've been living / traveling mainly in linen pieces, because they are just so comfortable! There are a few labels that specialize in one size fits all pieces and I really love these ones :) Sea side tones are a label who focus on the classic simplicity with a slight modern twist. They give off a beach / luxury feel with pre-softened linens, which feel amazing! Here is a little set of images we took in New Zealand amongst the beautiful mountains cape of Milford sound! Photographs by Christian Watson.

subset: commoncrawl


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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- Although it used to sail serenely above the Earth's weather in space, space shuttle Endeavour is finding its path to Los Angeles facing the same delays and cancellations that afflict all earthly flyers. The latest news? NASA now says it will be at least Wednesday before the shuttle takes off for its new home in California.
Endeavour, which is bound for a science museum in Los Angeles, was supposed to fly west atop is Boeing 747 carrier Monday with low flyovers and touchdowns at key NASA centers along the way. Bad weather delayed that flight first until Tuesday and now until Wednesday. Maybe. NASA said at an 11 a.m. CDT weather briefing that the takeoff is still go.
It won't matter to most Alabamians when the shuttle flies. Alabama is too far north to be in the flight path, although it's conceivable some people in the deep southern part of the state could glimpse its approach to a low-flyover of Stennis Space Center in south Mississippi. Click here to see
on why Endeavour's heading west.


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USB-C Car Charge Hardwired USBItem#:� YYD2-F7U006BT04BLKCA �|�Model#:�F7U006bt04-BLK
- Price:
- $31.99
- Shipping:
- Usually Ships within 48 Hours (Details)
Product Details
Product Type: Car power adapter
Weight: 1.76 oz
Enclosure Color: Sleek black
Power Device
Input Connectors: Automobile cigarette lighter
Output connectors: Total 2: 4 pin USB Type A, 24 pin USB-C
Power Provided: 15 Watt
Features: LED indicator
Equipment Protection Value: 2500 US Dollars
Cables Included: USB-C cable - 4 ft
Manufactured by: Belkin
Warranty provided by: Belkin
UPC No: 745883711819
Mfg Part No: F7U006bt04-BLK
Box Size:
( Length:6, Width:4, Depth:2)
Shipping Weight: 0.1500 pound(s)
Dimensional Weight: 1pounds
What is Dimensional weight?
Click here for full warranty and support information
- Belkin logos are registered trademarks of Belkin. All others trademarks and copyrights mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.


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Robert Griffin III is giving his NFL career another go in Baltimore.
The Ravens on Wednesday agreed to sign the former star quarterback to a one-year deal as a backup to starter Joe Flacco.
"We're excited about it," Ravens coach John Harbaugh said in a press conference. "We felt like we needed another No. 2 quarterback. Where we're at right now, I'm pretty excited about this player. I'm really feeling like we got a steal."
Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome said Griffin worked out with the team last week and will likely head to Baltimore early next week to sign the contract.
Griffin, 28, hasn't played since the final game of the 2016 season with the Browns, who released him in March 2017 to clear up cap space for fellow QB bust Brock Osweiler.
After winning the Heisman Trophy with Baylor in 2011, Griffin was drafted second overall by Washington in the 2012 NFL draft. He quickly emerged as a top NFL talent, throwing for 3,200 yards and 20 touchdowns along with 815 rushing yards and seven running TDs in his Rookie of the Year season. He led the team to its first postseason berth since 2007, picking up Pro Bowl honors along the way.
But injuries, which began at the end of his rookie season, have since plagued Griffin's career, as a sophomore slump and serious knee issues led to him being benched for all of 2015 in favor of Kirk Cousins. Washington then cut Griffin after the 2016 season.
After dealing with a dislocated ankle and a concussion, Griffin signed a two-year deal with the Browns that didn't fare much better. He was limited to just five games in 2016 after breaking a bone in his shoulder during the season opener.
Griffin told ESPN in December that he had received offers to play last season from both the Ravens and the Cardinals, but turned them down because he felt it wasn't the right time to attempt a comeback.
"It just wasn't the right fit and I had to make that decision for myself to say, 'Look, if I don't accept this offer, there's a chance I won't play football this year,'" Griffin said. "And I would talk to my family, and I was OK with that, OK with the fact that it might happen."
Clearly Griffin has changed his mind, and he didn't waste any time in sharing his excitement on Twitter following the Ravens' announcement.
"#PlayLikeARaven," he wrote.
Griffin joins a Baltimore team that missed the playoffs after a 9-7 regular season in 2017


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Grant Elementary
- 8511 County Road WW
- Wisconsin Rapids, WI 54494
- Phone: (715) 424-6766
- Fax: (715) 422-6384
- Principal
Timothy Bruns
Upcoming Events
Teacher Receives "Unsung Heroes Award"
A grant secured by a WRPS teacher is helping the Mead Outdoor Learning Center become a reality.
Free Developmental Screenings
The District is offering free developmental screenings for children ages 0-5.
City Seeks Crossing Guards for Upcoming Year
The City of Wisc. Rapids is looking to fill a vacant Crossing Guard and Alternate Crossing Guard position.


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Luxury Portfolio Summit – Fontainebleau, Miami
Approximately two weeks ago, I had the unique opportunity to attend the Luxury Portfolio Summit at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, Florida. The Summit is an opportunity for luxury real estate professionals to further educate themselves about the latest techniques and technologies as they relate to the marketing of luxury properties, and to network with other members of the industry. The topics included marketing and technology, but also techniques on how to best counsel luxury buyers and sellers, as well as a simple exchange of ideas during small break-out sessions. I learned a lot, and enjoyed the experience.
Our affiliation with Luxury Portfolio International, and Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, allows us to better serve our luxury buyers and sellers, including the ability to reach buyers worldwide. In addition, the relationship allows us to refer a buyer or seller to a qualified broker anywhere in the country or world. You can read more about the organization below:
"Luxury Portfolio International® is the luxury face of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® the largest global network of premier locally branded companies dominated by many of the world's most powerful independent luxury brokerages. Our award-winning website was launched in 2005 and in its first year featured more $1 million-plus residences than other luxury real estate organizations. The network continues to grow and now markets over 35,000 of the world's most remarkable homes annually and attracts over 3 million high-net-worth visitors a year by presenting a gallery of the finest luxury properties and brokerage worldwide, our brand is recognized throughout the world as the luxury standard of excellence.
In addition, we are unmatched in the global arena, with properties in almost all U.S. states, 50-plus countries, website visitors from over 200 countries/territories every month, site translation in nine languages, conversion to multiple currencies and a total inventory of available properties totaling over $48 billion with an average price over $2.4 million dollars.
The 200-plus selected luxury affiliates represent the luxury component of an organization which encompasses over 500 companies, 3,500 offices and 120,000 associates producing $321 billion in sales last year, with over one million transactions in over 50 countries. Based in the United States, Luxury Portfolio International® is backed by the experience of the most well respected and well known experts in luxury real estate in markets worldwide. This group collectively has decades of experience in the high-end luxury real estate market." – Luxury Portfolio International


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Blockchain's role in the future of medical data
Health and medical data is a resource which can deliver lots of value if shared and aggregated appropriately, whilst complying with individual privacy and patient confidentiality.
In early 2017 the North of England Connected Health Cities conducted a proof of concept project with the aim of sharing patient data but with granular patient permissions.
Such projects have the potential to enable patients to give fine-grained consent around which parties can use their data and for what purpose, across the NHS, research functions and pharmaceutical companies.
The project was based on a private blockchain used to store preferences and consent, rather than the actual patient data, and confirmed the technical feasibility of this approach.
Subsequently 2017 saw an explosion in blockchain innovation activity targeting healthcare applications. This spans such use cases as the Patient Health Record, device and pharmaceutical supply chain, care delivery, telemedicine, and into every corner of the $27Billion market for health IT solutions.
Much of this has been from start-up companies, evangelical about their technology and its disruptive and positive impact on the industry. Many such organisations have raised funding for software and solution development through Initial CryptoAsset Offerings (ICOs). This approach has driven rapid access to significant capital for idea and solution development, but is criticised by many as avoiding the governance and scrutiny of more traditional investment approaches.
By the beginning of 2018 we have found 42 Initial CryptoAsset Offerings (ICOs) had been conducted in the health care market, raising $100 of millions across US, UK, Russia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Estonia.
By any measure significant investment is being expended on building blockchain use cases in health.
Taking the widest possible view, the most concentrated efforts emerging in the blockchain healthcare application space are in patient health data governance, specifically in storage and integrity, record sharing and exchange, and the associated trust and permissioning of data.
One company, Guardtime, based in Tallinn Estonia, use DLT to record all updates to Estonian healthcare records. To citizens, this gives comfort that their data is being used appropriately. They can see its use through the eHealth portal, which professionals are also accessing for their personal or their children's health data, and their reasons for doing so. In this scheme, the actual data is stored in a conventional database. Guardtime's solution integrates at the database engine to create a cryptographic hash each time it is accessed or changed, to deliver a forensic-quality audit and integrity trail, based on a DLT patented by Guardtime (Keyless Signature Exchange). Guardtime are a start-up who partnered closely with the Estonian eHealth Foundation around this solution. The use of DLT in the Estonian model is specifically around audit of healthcare record access - storage, access control and any patient consent is delivered using conventional means.
Here in Scotland, the Digital Health and Care Institute (DHI) plans activity around using new technologies to give people easy access to and ownership over their health and care data through a "personal data store" or "personal health record". This work is underway, and a 'Connectathon' was held in March. At this event the DHI Demonstration and Simulation Environment was launched. We understand that this will provide a "sandbox" in which services and technology can be integrated to develop and demonstrate next generation infrastructure. The DHI has personal connections and ongoing knowledge-sharing exchanges and with Estonian Government and, in particular, its eHealth Foundation, including mutual interactions through Scotland and Estonia based Digital Health conferences, and a 2017 DHI-driven group fact-finding mission to Tallinn.
A workshop was conducted by the consultants on 27th November 2017 with a cross-disciplinary group led by Mr. Jonathan Cameron (Head of Service – Strategic Development) of NHS National Services Scotland. This group included clinicians, software professionals, and NSS Senior Management, with the objective of (a) sufficiently exploring the role, current application areas, and potential impact of DLT and (b) prioritising potential applications across Scottish NHS.
A shortlist of high-potential healthcare application areas were identified by attendees.
Asset lifecycle and transparency (Medical devices)
Visibility of prescription across health provision
Collaborative service provision (in crises management involving health, social care and police, and in cross-health-board scenarios)
Linking patient data for safety and efficiency, with appropriate confidentiality
Phil Couser, Director of NSS Strategic Business Unit, identified issues of information governance, data storage and access, as fundamental issues behind these application observations. He further suggested that the establishment of a new Scottish public health body would present both a growing challenge and opportunity in addressing these issues.
Several strands of DLT activity exist across Scotland within Health institutions which, based on the information available to us, could be considered as now entering the discovery phase.
Opportunities exist to better empower this discovery through:
increased involvement of stakeholders from across the Scottish Healthcare ecosystem and interested parties from academia and the technology industry
capitalising on the learnings from global investment in commercial and government sectors, who have moved beyond the discovery phase.
This blog was extracted from our Scottish Government research which is now available, sign up to receive it via email.


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Higher education 101 - Structure is everything
At this point in the Higher Education 101 series, incoming college students have been exposed to the process of college as it pertains to mindset, interacting with financial aid, and choosing a major. Now that those issues have been addressed, it's all about students starting the journey. Prior to the first day of classes, students have the freedom and responsibility of crafting their own class schedules for the upcoming semester. Unlike high school when a student's class schedule is laid before them, students have the freedom to dictate how their semester, months, weeks, and days can go as it pertains to building a class schedule.
Over the years, arguably the biggest lesson, the most instrumental component, for student success is structure. Structure is essential to students doing well in college and it begins with time management. Students often enroll as full-time students in order to meet various requirements including everything from residence hall requirements to scholarship requirements to athletic eligibility and academic eligibility requirements and more. A full-time schedule is 12 credit hours (in a semester term), which is roughly four classes. Students can structure their week to have 2 classes a day, back-to-back, and have the remainder of their days to do whatever their hearts desire. When it is broken down in such a fashion, yet witnessing students struggle and not do well, concluding in colleges being unable to retain them, is beyond mind-boggling. It's baffling, it's disheartening, it's a damn shame.
While students have the freedom to choose their own classes, when they go to classes, and how often they go to classes, there should also be guidance along the way to make sure students are setting themselves up to succeed. Too many times, students pick wild-ass days and times, with no rhyme or reason, simply due to having the freedom to make their own schedule (1). While it does teach students the concept of personal responsibility, folks who have been in the grind of what incoming students are sure to face can advise them on tips for course, day, and time selection.
For students living on campus and paying for meals in the cafeteria, they shouldn't start classes at noon. When would they go to breakfast if they don't start classes until noon? When would they go to lunch when their class schedule starts at noon and extends into the early evening? What's the point of paying for a meal plan if students have already missed two out of the three meals they are provided per day? There is no point, yet it is a common mistake that is made simply due to having so many options and not enough guidance and structure in the schedule-building process.
The thing about college is the blame game should end once students arrive in an institution of higher learning. People can argue all day about college readiness when students are coming up in elementary school, middle school, and in high school. It's not say those arguments don't have merit. It's more of a mindset that by the time they get to college, it takes a union, a village of sorts, to raise students once they arrive on campus anyway. As someone who makes working with college students a lifelong crusade, pointing the fingers at previous schooling is not something worth spending time on. What difference does it make? Okay, so such-and-such high school didn't get students ready for college? Well, those same students graduated from high school or earned a GED and enrolled junior college and were accepted due to open enrollment admissions (2). Whether they are ready or not, they are entitled to earn a college education if they want one. Everyone should prepared to take some accountability to provide students with realistic tools to succeed, but the work doesn't stop there. If anything, it's only begun.
Constant reinforcement, positive reinforcement, realistic expectations and patience for the process can help students do things they never thought were possible when they didn't know where the hell they would be going to college after high school and when they only planned on coming to junior college "to get some credits to transfer" to a four-year institution (3). Those qualities will help students and families who have trouble navigating the financial aid process. Those qualities relieve students of feeling pressure to choose a major before even being exposed to the characteristics which encompass a field of study. Once structure, true structure is established and students begin to understand the role that structure and personal responsibility plays in their lives as college students, the more students build confidence and see the process through.


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DE Sr. Project Manager Andrew Woodroof, P.E. has been instrumental in organizing and steering next week's Louisiana Civil Engineering Conference and Show (LCECS). The conference will be held September 27th and 28th at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner and will feature presenters from government, regulatory agencies, academia, and private practice as well as host opportunities for obtaining necessary ethics and professional development hours.
As Secretary of the ASCE New Orleans Chapter, Andrew has served this year's LCECS as a Steering Committee Member, Technical Committee Member, Moderator Coordinator, and Organizer of the Exhibitor Appreciation Event.
DE is proud of Andrew and his continued involvement in the local civil engineering community. Here's to a successful and impactful LCECS next week!


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Radiopharmaceutical for Pain Relief and Cancer control from Metastatic Bone Disease due to Prostate Cancer
Your doctor has recommended Xofigo® a radiopharmaceutical (RAY-dee-oh-far-muh-SUE-tuh-kol) to treat your bone pain, improve cancer control and decrease skeletal complications. A radiopharmaceutical is a radioactive drug that is given through an injection in your arm. Once injected, the medication travels through your body and settles in your bones, giving you relief from pain.
Your radiopharmaceutical injection will be done as an outpatient procedure. The procedure will take approximately an hour. You will be monitored for up to ½ hour after the injection after which you may go home. You may continue your normal daily activities with friends and family members after your injection.
This radiopharmaceutical is routinely prescribed as a six (6) injection course, four (4) weeks apart to help with bone disease and improve survival. Blood work will be required prior to each injection to ensure blood counts are stable. Your nurse will assist in coordinating the tests. Continue taking your current pain medication. You and your doctor will decide if the dose needs to be adjusted.
There are no restrictions regarding contact with other people after receiving Xofigo except as noted below.
For one week after each injection:
For patients who are sexually active, use condoms and make sure female partners, who may become pregnant, use highly effective birth control methods during treatment and for six months after completion of Xofigo treatment.
Call your nurse or doctor immediately if you have any of the following symptoms:
June 2013


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Udayagiri Odisha
Udayagiri is the largest Buddhist centre in Odisha located in the foothills of Jajpur district. This heritage tourist site in Odisha forms the very famous 'Diamond Triangle' of Odisha along with Ratnagiri and Lalitgiri. Udayagiri along with its adjacent hill Khandagiri houses a group of ancient rock-cut caves that were once the shelters of earliest groups of Jains. In total, there are 18 caves in Udayagiri and 15 in Khandagiri and are known by the name Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves. However, in the ancient inscriptions, these caves are called as Lena and the most famous of the group lies here in Udayagiri which is Rani Gumpha. Whereas, the other famous caves include Ananta Gumpha, Hathi Gumpha, Jaya Vijaya Gumpha, Ganesha Gumpha, and Bagh Gumpha.
Ancient monasteries and stupas are other prime attractions of the place. The monasteries in Udayagiri trace their history in between 7th to 12th centuries. Since 1958, the place has witnessed numerous excavation programs carried out by Archaeological Survey of India. In all those excavations, various ruins have been recovered that include antiquities, 23 ft stupa, images of Lord Buddha in Dhyani posture, monasteries, and the statues of various deities like Tara, Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara, Lokeswara, Jatamukuta, and more. At present, the complex of Udayagiri proffers a stunning sight of a large monastery. Along with that, the hidden treasure of more such enthralling ruins is expected to be buried under the land which is still unexcavated. These lands boast a mystery to all the art lovers and archaeologists.
Best Time to Visit
Just like the other heritage attractions of Odisha, winter is the best season to visit Udayagiri. The season starts in the month of October and lasts till March. Throughout these months, there remains a moderate temperature which results in an increase in tourism as compared to other seasons.
How to Reach?
The nearest railway station from Udayagiri is Ratnagiri which is located at a distance of 10 km. Moreover, those who're looking for the nearest airport, Biju Patnaik International Airport is the closest airhead located at a distance of 84 km from Udayagiri.
Nearby Tourist Attractions
- Ratnagiri: Located at a distance of just 12 km, Ratnagiri is also a part of Diamond Triangle of Odisha. The place houses a series of monasteries, shrines, temples, stupas, images, and sculptures that dating back to ancient times.
- Lalitgiri: A significant tourist attraction located just 10 km away from Udayagiri is Lalitgiri. Buddhist monuments, temples, caskets with bones, and various prestigious items like coins and silver can be seen here at Lalitgiri.
- Biraja Temple: Biraja Temple is one of the 18 Shakti Peethas. The prime deity of this temple is referred to as Biraja/Girija/Vairaja. Lord Shiva also resides at this place in the form of Lord Jagannath. The distance between Biraja Temple and Udayagiri is 56 km.


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Become a member.
Want to apply equity-centered practices to challenges in your city? Join our network to get exclusive benefits and attend exciting events with other equity-centered community designers.
Membership Benefits:
Learn more about the Equity-Centered Community here.
attend members-only events
- Virtual and in-person professional development on a range of topics such as (but not limited to): Equity-Centered Community Design, Civic Engagement, and Social Justice.
- Social Innovation Mixers to network with other members.
- Download our Community Designer Starter Pack and other tools for free!
- Get a 10% discount on all items that you purchase in our online store.
- Exclusive "Ask Us Anything" monthly sessions with the Creative Reaction Lab team.


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CEO & Founder - Blue Pie Productions USA LLC www.bluepie.com.au
Dip.Fin. 1987, Member Institute of Export APRA Full Writer Member 1997 Member of AIR Member of ARIA With over 30 years of IT & Music industry experience, Damien brings his vast network and business skills to the table to expand DJ Central TV's catalogue of content rights.
Media Manager - Blue Pie Records | DJ Central Records | DJ Central TV www.djcentral.tv
Edmund is the Media Manager for Blue Pie Records | DJ Central Records | DJ Central TV, and leads a small team of four people. He handles various tasks for DJ Central, Blue Pie, Metal Central, and other related companies, mostly in the form of social media strategy, planning, and execution. He also has written all the news articles, new releases, and newsletters for these websites since advancing to this role in January 2019, and believes in putting passion and creativity first.
Jingle Master – Blue Pie www.bluepie.com.au
When it comes to song writing Craig Fraser has a great talent for adding the colour, the twist or the quirkiness, which can transform a basic song into a memorable tune that will prick up a listener's ear and become firmly entrenched in their mind.
CLO - Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Affairs - Blue Pie Records USA
Colin graduated in law from Monash University and has been actively involved in the music and media industry for the last 25 years. He was Corporate Counsel and head of Legal and Business for Polygram Australia (now Universal Music) overseeing the Group's legal work for the recording, home video and publishing divisions as well as managing the catalogues of local and international copyrights, trademarks and related deal negotiations with licensors and other media groups such as TV and radio networks.
CFO and External Account - Blue Pie Productions USA
Rajeev Shirodkar, is a respected Business Professional within the Accounting and Finance industry in Australia and India. Rajeev's background is profound and widespread in the specialities of Finance, Accounting, Operational Planning, International and Domestic Business Development, Strategic Alliances, Business Growth and Venture Capital Raising.
Australia Consultants
Director of Corporate Cards - Blue Pie Investments - www.bluepie.com.au
Mr. Batten completed a military degree in Maritime Studies, and maintained an interest in broadcast and communications whilst building a career in the Royal Navy.
With over 15 years of experience in the entertainment industry, Sandra Wilmot brings to the table her vast knowledge of promotions and publicity in the expansion of the Blue Pie Records brand.


text: Pat Cates April 6, 2017 Moving Offices? Here's What You Need To Know For IT! Pat Cates April 6, 2017 Moving can be an arduous task, but also an opportunity to take stock of your technology needs. With that in mind, we've put together an office move checklist of IT related items.


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Dense Counseling was issued to the northern Florida areas until 8:00 a.m. Tuesday.
Dian Droma Counseling means that visibility is often reduced for one quarter or less.
If you are driving, the National Weather Service recommends ease, using your low-light headlights, leaving you a lot of distance.
It is hoped that the fog will arrive through the mornings of Tuesday. Then a shower line and a couple of thunderstorms will be moved through the WEAR TV viewing area in the afternoon before cold began.
.Leave a comment


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Mother's Day Breakfast 2018
As an expression of our gratitude and desire to honour our PCS mums, we invite you to our annual Mother's Day Breakfast. There will be beautiful food prepared and served by our Hospitality students, as well as other special activities. All mums will be blessed - don't miss this popular event!
WHEN: Friday 11 May, 2018
TIME: 8 am to 9 am
Spaces are limited.
Please CLICK HERE to book your place by 7 May
NOTE: Childminding is available but MUST be booked by 7 May via: trybooking.com/364895


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Junior Show, or J-Show, is a Mount Holyoke tradition that dates back to the early 20th century. Typical performances are entirely student-led and intertwine both comedy and student talent in a performance to both entertain the Mount Holyoke community and fundraise for the junior class. This year, however, the tradition was cancelled.
The Class Board of 2019 officially announced the decision on Feb. 13. "We were so excited to continue J-Show and to showcase our amazing, talented class," the class board wrote in an email. "But after three nights of failed rehearsals, continuous cancellations, and the general disinterest from our class, we feel that we have no choice but to cancel the show."
This year's show was going to be a variety show, rather than a written production with a central theme, as had run previously. Last year's show, for example, hosted by the class of 2018, had a "Mary Potter" theme and featured a magical title character who battled champions from UMass, Smith, Hampshire and Amherst to win the Sorcerer's Cup for Mount Holyoke.
According to the Mount Holyoke archives, J-Show was originally hosted in December, starting in 1901. At that time, junior and senior classes each hosted their own variety shows, but in 1912 the Senior Show became the exclusive class-led dramatic production. For the next eight years, there was no Junior Show at all, but it was revived in 1920 for a November production which would continue as an annual event, eventually becoming a spring semester tradition.
The decision to cancel this year's show came after a series of warnings from the class board. Applications opened for volunteers and performers for the show in October 2017, and on Feb. 8, the class board sent an email desperately pleading for volunteers, explaining that despite sending out polls and requests for participation, they "barely managed to garner any sort of response from the class." The Feb. 8 email said that the 2019 class board began rehearsals for the show with a group of 14 performers, a number which continued to decrease over the course of the week. By Feb. 12, only four performers remained.
"We didn't feel comfortable with the idea of getting up there and presenting J-Show as 20-30 minutes," said Kiera McCabe '19, president of the 2019 class board. "It would honestly be doing a disservice to the tradition."
A Junior Show handbook, circa 1935 that was passed down from class year to class year until 1984, walked generations of show organizers through preparing for the production. In the "Dress Rehearsal" section, one author wrote, "this is the worst night you will ever go through if your dress rehearsal is of the usual sort."
For McCabe, this statement was true. For two nights she sat from 6 p.m.-12 a.m. awaiting actors who had committed to perform acts as part of the production. Only two arrived. During the final rehearsal, about a week later, she waited another six hours, and only four acts showed up.
"To realize that so many people didn't really care about our traditions and even more so didn't care about their peers from the standpoint of already committing to that time... that was very disheartening," she said.
McCabe noted high levels of overcommitment in the student body, large numbers of students away on study abroad and a general lack of interest from the class of 2019 as factors that contributed to the show's cancellation. However, she also said that the apathy could represent a shift in tradition. "I know J-Show has been struggling for three years or so now," she said.
Although J-Show did not happen, the class board of 2019 welcomed their sister class, the class of 1969 to campus on the day the show was supposed to take place. They accompanied the alumnae into the new dining commons and to the quilt exhibition currently in the Mount Holyoke Art Museum.
Stirling Mackie '19 expressed disappointment that the tradition was cancelled. "I had been looking forward to this tradition since my first year," she said, "I was really excited to see it, because I didn't think I could really participate because I didn't have a talent to showcase."
Mackie commended the class board for their efforts in their efforts to continue the tradition. "I was very sad to hear about the lack of interest in this year's production," she said. "I wish very much that it had gone differently."


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60 Second Guide To Saving
So, you've created that budget and have a few dollars to save. What now?
0:60 Create a Rainy Day Fund
Boring though it may sound, we all need savings – and most importantly, a Rainy Day Fund/Emergency Savings account. While things may look rosy at the moment, we just don't know what's around the corner. How would you cope financially if suddenly faced with redundancy or unexpected medical bills?
Assuming you've repaid any expensive debts, consider opening an easily-accessible savings account and stash away between three and six month's worth of household expenses (check your budget for the sum required).
Should times get hard, you can tap into your Rainy Day Fund to pay your mortgage/rent, bills and other costs and hopefully avoid getting into debt until things settle down again.
Knowing it's there can even help you sleep better at night.
0:40 Saving
Once that's in place, it's time to save for the future – be it college funds for your kids, future plans or good old retirement.
As a rule of thumb, we should aim to save at least 10% of our income each month – on top of what you're squirreling away for retirement. But where you save it is up to you.
Cash vs Stockmarket
Any money you will need to access in the near future should be saved as cash into a savings account. You can even set up your bank account to 'sweep' the money over to it each month automatically.
But if you're looking at the long term (say for your baby's University education) you may choose to take a little more risk for potentially higher returns and try the stockmarket.
0:20 You don't miss what you never had!
Singapore's cost of living is pretty high though, and many of us find even after strict budgeting there's not much left over to put away. So how can we save more?
Try one of my favourite psychological tricks. Whenever you get a payrise, arrange to put some, or all of the extra into your savings immediately. You never had it, so how can you miss it?
Do the same with any bonuses, tax refunds, 4D winnings, inheritance money or other cash you come into and you'll find those savings build up fast!
And why not take a look around your home for any items you no longer use and sell them? You'll de-clutter your home and make a surprising amount of cash to boot.


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Category: Humor
Charity Phlegm
This is a gross understatement, but there are a lot of Ice Bucket Challenges circulating the internet right now. From innumerable athletes enduring the cold, to celebrities like Chris Pratt taking multiple buckets from their laughing wives, to that girl from elementary school you forgot you were Facebook friends with until you saw her screaming and racing circles around a yard for charity. The Ice Bucket Challenge is a veritable epidemic of good Samaritanism, and while I applaud these brave souls drenching themselves to support ALS patients, some critics note that because the trending sensation focuses primarily on the dousing and successive nominations, many participants may not know much about the cause they're freezing for.
That's why, when my mom sent a nomination my way, I decided that in order to steer clear of the desensitization taking place for many internet acolytes who merely scroll past the deluge of watery videos filling their newsfeeds, I'd have to conduct my own IBC very differently. With a humanitarian fire lit beneath me, I set to work learning all I could about the cause itself, researching ALS on various medical forums, catching up on Pete Frates biopics, and looking into the history of chilling challenges in general. It was and continues to be important to me that both those happy to take a bucket to the head and those quick to roll their eyes at "yet another viral campaign" understand why it's important to keep spreading the word about ALS.
Also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease for the New York Yankees' Iron Horse whose career ended with his diagnosis in 1939, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that impedes the brain's motor neurons from sending impulses through the spinal cord to the subject's muscle fibers. This neurological disease gradually atrophies, or decreases the size and in turn strength of the muscles that engender limb movement, swallowing, speech, and even breathing. There is not yet a cure for ALS, but aids and therapies exist to maintain degrees of independence and prolong survival.
As for the Ice Bucket Challenge itself, its inspiration Pete Frates began his crusade against ALS by calling for more attention and action on the Food and Drug Administration's behalf in the ongoing search for a cure. Once team captain and outfielder for Boston College, Frates' recession into immobility has necessitated the aid of a full time nurse, a feeding tube, and a computer for communication.
While the Team Frate Train helped skyrocket the Ice Bucket Challenge to this year's biggest viral sensation and catalyzed a hugely successful fundraiser for ALS research, shivering for charity has been an altruistic tool for numerous awareness campaigns. Since 1904, people have been plunging into icy waters for polar bears, dousing themselves for the Kay Yow Cancer Fund, laying in freezing tubs to garner fundraising for Madi Rogers, a victim of severe juvenile diabetes, and participating in Cold Water Challenges to induce philanthropic action for clean water, hospitals, and housing in Liberia.
Armed with this new knowledge, I set about dusting off my speech writing skills and spent an entire day crafting and then trying to memorize a four minute soliloquy that I hoped might educate viewers on ALS and the challenge taken in support of its victims. As the light of day waned into early evening, I tore around the house looking for ways to actualize my message. The only place I could conduct the challenge without damaging the downstairs neighbors' ceiling was in the shower; I no longer have a tripod so I'd have to stack packing boxes on top of a mini fridge to support the video camera; I'd need not one but two buckets to achieve my vision; and in case I forgot anything from my speech, I needed my laptop to serve as an amateur teleprompter and my boyfriend's assistance to operate it.
Finally ready, I called action, started my speech, and began to pour. What I hadn't anticipated was that four straight minutes of slowly dousing your skull with ice negatively impacts your memory the way the pretty lifeguard affected Squints in The Sandlot. Not to mention the fact that ice in your eyes makes it impossible to recover your forgotten material from the faux teleprompter that wavers between blurriness and brief clarity in the distance. I was able to get a lot of my speech out, but the moments where I had to stop and start over or spit out a watery word resulted in an editors nightmare, and I would never subject my Final Cut-savvy boyfriend to that torture. So I ended up having to scrap the project and conceptualize anew, devising a different approach to filming my speech that I looked forward to completing in a couple days' time.
Two days later, I woke up with the fingers of the common cold drumming at my throat. No stranger to sore esophagi after enduring them for eight years before realizing I was allergic to my mom's cats, I spent the rest of the day self-medicating with colloidal silver, cup after cup of tea, and day-long parades to bathroom. Regardless of my efforts, I drove to work the next morning sick as a dog, and despite my boss' repeated instructions to keep drinking water, I left unable to ingest anything without feeling like I was going to keel over and face plant my already fragile laptop. It was official: I had the flu.
I spent 48 hours being sicker than I'd been since last Valentine's Day when ol' influenza decided it wanted to attend the surprise getaway my boyfriend had planned. This time around, I ended up missing a day of work and had to conduct the next from home to keep my contagions to myself. DayQuil and NyQuil became my new best friends and the food I usually admire for its incredible versatility and piquancy was deemed an enemy. The heat of the Los Angeles summer made sleeping in bed with a high fever akin to sleeping in a muggy, half-filled kiddy pool. And bed-time became an ambiguous, all day affair.
When the flu finally began to subside and the virus returned to my throat–bringing along an inflatable bouncy house based on the scale of my swollen glands–I thought the end was in sight. Usually, my ailments start in the throat, escalate according to the virus I've contracted, and culminate in a day's worth of coughing. That's why when the coughing began and I traded my various Quils for Halls and vitamin C, I could have praised Allah: finally I'd be myself again in one last 24 hour cycle of hell!
But the weekend saw to it that I wouldn't get off the hook that easy, and as the days passed the cough increased until I was hacking up phlegm in a performance art homage to my fifteen year old do-si-do with pneumonia. At fifteen I held out against a trip to the doctor until I'd been afflicted with the illness for three months simply because my family believed more in vitamins and orange juice than professional care and pharmaceuticals. This time around I kept naysaying my boyfriend's wise suggestions that a medical opinion was warranted because I knew my Obama-ordered Oregon health insurance wasn't applicable in my new state of residence and copays are steep enough as it is.
On the morning when my coughs tried suffocating me awake, blood poured faucet-like from my nose, a very bizarre rash broke out all around my neck, and I'd somehow contracted pink eye on top of everything else, I gave in: it was absolutely time to visit Dr. Stranger. Per usual, the doctor was incredibly nonchalant about all of my symptoms, causing unnerving flashbacks to the time my consistently incompetent pediatrician misdiagnosed my bout of flesh eating bacteria as a temporary skin irritation (thank God for the Urgent Care doctor who thought to actually perform a biopsy). According to Dr. Stranger, my illness had started out as a run-of-the-mill viral infection contracted when a good friend's cold and my boss' fever of a week before combined to create my Super Flu. With my immune system weakened, bronchial bacteria had easily hopped on board to join the party and now I'd have to fill an antibacterial prescription to rid myself of bronchitis by the end of yet another week. The rash, he said, was totally unrelated and most likely an allergic reaction to… something. For this he prescribed Benadryl and Hydrocortisone and sent me off with the promise that I could come back for a real checkup should the rash persist or spread.
So here I sit three days after diagnosis and almost two weeks after those precursory inklings of a sore throat, my bedside table weighed down by a water-filled Tervis Tumbler, tissues, cough drops, multiple Vicks cold and flu remedies, Sovereign Silver, allergy medicine, anti-rash cream, Azithromycin that I pray will kick in soon, and floss. I myself am weighed down by phlegm and the regret that by failing miserably at my attempt to complete an educational version of the Ice Bucket Challenge, I'm letting down my mother, Pete Frates, and Chris Pratt.
That's why I'm glad there are still hundreds of people out there bolstering the internet's incredible ability to spread awareness and simultaneously proving that philanthropy is alive and well. While my personal icy contribution has been delayed, I hope that other participants go beyond the bucket to educate themselves and others about both the fight against ALS and all the charitable movements that people have been freezing for over the decades. Spreading not only nominations but new knowledge will add a whole new element of significance to the thousands of pounds of ice that have been dumped since Frates' recently deceased friend Corey Griffin first took up the challenge in Pete's name. Even if bronchitis or another ailment is keeping you from joining the soaking phenomenon, take a minute to find a new, creative way to support the research for ALS and other diseases that have yet to behold a cure.
Invader Pilgrim
When I wake up in the morning, my eyesight is equivalent to that of a right hook recipient when they blearily come to in an animated TV show. In other words, I haven't yet reached blindness on a bat's scale, but I'm getting there. This myopia results in lots of hilarious mishaps like putting tights on backwards, scrunching my face in a not-so-cute Renée Zellweger impression, and witnessing blurry somethings out of the corner of my eye that should not be there.
This morning, for instance, I ventured into the bathroom and immediately saw a big, dark shape moving like discolored lightning on the far side of the room. Being ballsy (or stupid, as many a horror film casualty has proven), I edged slowly up to my mystery beast to avoid instigating a predatory attack akin to the physics-defying dorm room spider that once leapt three feet from a wall to my face. Still unable to see the perp, I leaned down to the floor as close as I dared and adopted my habitual squint, prompting the question: What the hell is that thing?
Quick as a spooked whippet, I turned and darted for glasses to figure out whether my David would be up against a Goliath of a roach (I know I'm technically the Goliath in this situation but we're going by phobic proportions here), or if I'd merely trespassed on a butterfly mating ritual. While Hollywood proper is renowned for its household roaches, I'd had yet to encounter one in our current apartment, and my familiarity with the gargantuan palmetto bugs of Savannah and the millions of tiny brown roaches that hosted raves in the cupboards of my former downtown LA apartment still hasn't honed my mom's warrior woman ability to slap cockroaches to smithereens with her bare hands. Plus, I've always had a faux Buddhist sympathy for creepy crawlies that prevents me from crushing them unless they're presently engaged in sapping my veins dry or look like they're thinking about it (my hand is poised and ready for you, mosquitoes). So as I fled the bathroom in search of vision, my rationale was, "Let's take a real look at what I'm about to try and catch."
When I returned to the bathroom, four-eyed and ready to behold miniaturized Satan himself, horror ensued. The thing was now racing up the door that adjoined our roommate's bedroom to our shared bathroom, and damn was this bugger mobile. Long, jointed legs seemingly sprouting from every millimeter of its wriggling body, it looked like a spider that had been stretched by some sociopathic scientist bent on terrorizing domestic comfort. It was nothing like I'd ever seen before, and as such I had no name or knowledge of its toxicity. I'd need a good trap and possibly a shot of adrenaline to the heart to brave the act of catching this sucker.
So I hurried back to the bedroom knowing that my time was limited to the speed of Dash Incredible plus 30 legs, and proceeded to hunt for trapping tools. Because the law of situational necessity requires that the tools you need in a desperate moment must go into hiding, no handy cans or boxes made themselves apparent to me, and I was forced to sacrifice an Urban Outfitters candle that happened to have a lid. As I grabbed my cucumber-melon scented snare and swiveled back toward my hunting ground, I heard the unmistakable click of the door locking: someone was in there, unknowingly holed up with a monster.
I waited until a second click affirmed my reentry, and lo and behold, the fiend was nowhere to be seen…
Terrified that my latency might have unleashed a deadly pathogen-wielding demon into the house, I pulled on sneakers and practically flew over the gap between the bathroom and our bed, tucking my limbs up as far away from the floor as possible and wrenching open my laptop to devote myself to an hour of Google research. With no certain place to start, I used child logic to guess at the insect's species and plugged "Types of Centipedes" into the search engine. With a little digging through images of thick red, multi-legged, pincered behemoths, I came across my culprit, and thanks to the blog of biological science writer Madeline McCurry-Schmidt, I learned that my centipede went by the forename House.
According to McCurry-Schmidt and Kate Conway's similar xoJane article, the house centipede is actually a helpful arthropod in the business of eating other household pests, like cockroaches, silverfish, and poor, poor spiders (don't you know you could team up and hunt vermin together!?). House centipedes bleed purple (a good incentive not to squash them on that prized Van Gogh print), meticulously groom themselves (that there's a clean varmint), can reach speeds up to 16 inches per second, live from three to seven years, and lay up to 150 eggs at a time. 150 x 7 (assuming they're weird enough to reach reproductive maturity upon birth) equals 1050, so within the time it takes a puppy to turn 49, you could have a whole colony of house centipedes patrolling your hallways at night.
Fortunately, you won't have to worry about disgusting infections the likes of which nobody wants to see while scrolling through Google Images, because your new cohabitational battalion is harmless to humans. With fangs tailor made to gobble up the tiny insects their hind legs have lassoed into submission (because yes, that's how these bizarre creatures wrangle up their cockroach supper), their jaws are simply too small to penetrate human skin and the most damage they could inflict on our tough epidermises is a slight bee sting sensation or a brief allergic reaction. In fact, house centipedes are so nonthreatening when you inhabit our realm of giants that some Japanese people have taken to domesticating them for pest control purposes. Regionally known as "geji," house centipedes are even available for purchase beside your hackneyed song birds and passé kittens in Japanese pet stores. That means, if I ever catch my newest roommate, big bucks may ensue.
Armed with all my new knowledge, I felt a little better about returning to the bathroom once the heebie-jeebies started to dissipate–that is until I stepped into the shower and noticed the drain was completely uncovered, indicating the intruder's entryway. So we may have an infestation on our hands if 150 eggs just happened to be unloaded beneath our bathroom sink, but at least our new friends will continue to prevent our nonexistent cockroach problem. I'll just have to endure these phantom crawling sensations while little Mr. HC browses for comfortable real estate somewhere in the dark corners of my house.
May the Best Woman Win
Ever found yourself wishing that the cameramen of RuPaul's Drag Race would zoom in close enough to see the contestants' pores? Then thank your lucky stars, this is the blog entry for you!
On May 19th, my boyfriend and I treated ourselves to a Vegas road trip prompted by the siren call of the RuPaul's Drag Race Official Finale and Coronation Ceremony. What ensued was a raucous night of frenetic red carpet paparazzi, an endless parade of impressive cosmetic feats, and reality TV royalty stalking the stage with live, lip-synced, or comedic performances that surpassed the dollar bill-blanketed catwalks of my drag experiences past. I've never seen the lovely ladies of Drag Race so blatantly uncensored and so refreshingly unedited, but I intend to make it my business to behold these glamazonian television icons in the contoured flesh from here on out… Especially considering the fact that I have yet to check "drool uncontrollably before Sharon Needles" off my bucket list.
Thus, the following is something this writing-centric blog hasn't yet witnessed: a photographic overview of the night I finally got up close and personal to the drag competition that ran away with my heart one fateful college all-nighter of harried illustration. So without further ado, I give you the pretty young things and proceedings of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 6 Finale and Coronation…
The show kicked off with the arrival of comedic MC Shangela Laquifa Wadley and an array of beautiful guests.
As the evening progressed, reigning Northwest champion and narcoleptic drag superstar Jinkx regaled the crowd with a wit as vibrant as her orange mane and the reminder that Monsoon Season never truly ends.
Next we met Season Six' vying trifecta: the phenomenally fishy Courtney Act, "party" savvy mermaid Adore Delano, and–that night's big reveal–the newest member of Drag Race royalty and my ideal bosom friend, Bianca Del Rio!
Once all us avid Bianca fans dried our eyes, the performances began.
Kelly Mantle transported us to a swanky cocktail lounge while April Carrión lit a fire on stage with her incredible dance moves.
Joslyn Fox kept it "Big Spender" foxy (wah, wah!) with a burlesque performance that drew her new husband to the stage.
Lovely lady BenDeLaCreme stole my boyfriend's heart even more than she already has when she educated us on a drag queen's duality of self with a show tune performed by both Ben and DeLa.
Last in my queue of what turned out to be 1000 photos was Darienne Lake wowing the crowd with a Saharan themed getup and those elephant tusk earrings I covet so much.
Finally, if my camera arm hadn't been too weighed down and my figurative dogs too whimpery, the end of this photo montage would feature Courtney Act performing her single "Mean Gays," Adore Delano prowling the stage and gracing one shrieking fangirl with a lipstick-smearing smooch to the beat of "DTF," and newly crowed Bianca imbuing "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" with some crass Del Rio realness. Guess I just have to keep trying to convince my photographer sensibilities that sometimes the memory alone is worth a thousand once in a lifetime, dragtastic photos.
That, or thank god for everyone else's cell phone pics. At least by the end of the night this was one very happy drag hag.
"Shake it a-baby!"
As a species, humans have a baffling obduracy to live wherever we darn well please on God's green earth as long as Antarctic estates aren't included in the realtor's docket. From nomadic tribes to big business promulgators, we seem determined to plant our roots in every plot that fills both this planet and extraterrestrial acreage beyond–just as soon as lunar engineering is up to mass-developmental snuff. To top off our hunger for property, we play this game of land seizure with little regard for the progenitors of mythology: natural cataclysms that the cosmos allotted to each region of this planet long before we staked our mortgage claims.
In this country alone, the North bears the brunt of inhuming ice storms, the East is pummeled by hurricanes, tornadoes ramshackle the Midwest as they bypass the amicable route to Oz, the Northwest lives in the shadow of eight active volcanoes, tsunami-watch spans each coast, and here in California earthquakes reign supreme. Quite frankly, the United States is a veritable smörgåsbord of Mama Nature's paroxysms.
In a country so tempestuous–even when we eschew the hailstorm that is bipartisan politics–finding invulnerable settlement means betting on a game of renter's roulette. If someone ends up sowing their seeds in Tornado Alley, I understand that uprooting their entire life and relocating to milder climes when the cyclones amass is no cheap feat, but I can't help wondering what convinced our nation's migratory predecessors to hunker down in different disaster zones in the first place. I suppose when you contend with 23-foot long Ripper Lizards and giant sloths scrambling all over Pangea, the occasional lava flow is a small price to pay for a plot of arable land.
Personally, I took up residence in Los Angeles knowing that its toothy, clawed remnants of the Holocene epoch reside in the Page Museum and the only risky natural business I'd be facing was the fact that this be earthquake country. Besides the slight desk tremors that occasionally pique the excitement of Oregon school children, the first bona fide earthquake I ever experienced occurred at 6:30a.m. Hollywood time when our bed staged its own Evening with Fred Astaire and my boyfriend awoke with an inhuman, deep-sleep yell that aided the tectonic plates in rattling me to the core. This wake up call only reached a magnitude of 4.7 on the Richter Scale, but watching my Las Vegas memorabilia topple from the shelves and feeling the wall sway behind me was enough to instill an utter terror of bigger things to come.
And rumor has it in the scientific community that we SoCal residents ain't seen nothing yet. Based on the geophysical research of Stanford seismologists, apocalyptic tidings of a massive earthquake hitting Los Angeles sometime in the next 30 years have swept across the internet via scientific forums and volatile comment sections alike. Expected to exceed 8.0 on the Richter Scale, this prophetically minacious tremor is fanning the already voracious flames of Godzilla-esque destruction hypotheses–that is, if his latest film depiction hadn't been more aptly titled Hundreds of Humans and Their Tribulations, Two M.U.T.O.s, and Fleeting, Incessantly Interrupted Glimpses of Godzilla.
Some of the more imaginative voices of the online peanut gallery have taken these whisperings of catastrophic tectonics and ran with them until they've woven cautionary tales befitting Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Commenting on Tech Times' review of Ker Than's (associate director of communications for Stanford's School of Earth Sciences) take on the impending LA quake, one such doomsayer predicted that, "[a]fter only a few days the Los Angeles area will be like a war zone. Eventually it will become uninhabitable. Thousands will die not from the quake but from the aftermath… I have had a dream over and over of a very long mass of weary looking people walking east on the interstate up the grade toward Barstow and the refugee camps set up there by the government. When you look back to the west all one can see to the horizon is smoke rising up from what was once a modern civilization now destroyed by mother nature. It will happen. My dreams always come true."
Whether or not this commenter was film director Roland Emmerich posting under an alias is yet to be verified.
Unfortunately for us Angelinos, the aptly denoted "Big One" bodes more substantiated probability than the portentous theories that mankind will perish at the hands of bath salt zombies. According to Ker Than's article for Stanford News, scientists have found a way to predict a future quake's ground movement and shaking hazards by examining the ambient seismic field, or pressure pulses generated and projected through the earth's crust by colliding ocean waves. While these ambient waves are notably "billions of times weaker than the seismic waves generated by earthquakes," scientists like Marine Denolle have now learned how to mathematically compare these surface measurements to the temblor waves that occur deep within the earth.
By examining these "virtual earthquakes," scientists verified a supercomputer's prediction from 2006 concerning the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo Plain, northwest of Los Angeles. This prediction suggested that if said fault should rupture, the seismic waves produced by an earthquake would be "funneled toward Los Angeles along a 60-mile [sedimentary] conduit that connects the city with the San Bernardino Valley." To make matters worse, Los Angeles is a sitting duck atop a large sedimentary basin that study coauthor Eric Dunham compared to a jiggly dollop of gelatin in the midst of a plastic foam bowl. This means that if you're lucky enough to have set up shop in the plastic foam terrain that circumvents Los Angeles, you might not have to hold on as tight as we Gelatinites strike vogue poses in our doorways to fend off falling furniture. Other cities unfortunate enough to have been founded upon these suicidal basins of sediment include Tokyo, Seattle, and parts of the Bay area, all of which simultaneously stand on the tectonically fruitful circum-Pacific seismic belt. Home to 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes and 81% of the world's largest earthquakes, this horseshoe-shaped calamity hotbed is a natural exemplar for a sequel to Pacific Rim: Pacific Ring of Fire.
I guess the moral to this disastrously consequential story is hire some scientists to dig in your dirt before inspiring 10 million people to come inhabit your city, you technologically ill-adept Chumash, Tataviam, and Tongva tribes, Spanish explorers, and gold prospectors of yesteryear. That, or just relax all you internet harbingers of doom. For no matter how many Essential Survival Kits-in-a-Can we accrue from California Surplus Mart, Mother Nature is going to do her thing, and because we'll be a part of that natural ebb and flow no matter where we reside, there's little point in toiling our lives away in premature fear. After all, a major quake hasn't occurred along the San Andreas Fault in more than 150 years, and if that's not enough to smooth out your apprehensive gooseflesh, we still have a supposed grace period of three decades to decide whether volcano, blizzard, tornado, or hurricane territory would be a more suitable habitat for relocation.
- Doomsayer. "Dystopian Dream." Tech Times, Comment Section, 28 Jan. 2014. Web. 24 May 2014. <http://techtimes.com/articles/2967/20140128/los-angeles-brace-yourself-for-a-bigger-earthquake-scientists-predict.html>.
- Than, Ker. "Stanford scientists use 'virtual earthquakes' to forecast Los Angeles quake risk." Stanford News, 23 Jan. 2014. Web. 24 May 2014. <http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/january/la-quake-risk-012314.html>.
- "Is it true that scientists are predicting a really big earthquake will sink western California?" How Stuff Works, 7 Feb. 2001. Web. 24 May 2014. <http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/question567.htm>.
The Gripes of Wrath
In our contemporary blogosphere, it's becoming commonplace for opinion pieces to spark galled backlash. With these internet ripostes in mind, allow me to start by addressing a point that's heated "Jezebel" and "The Gloss" writers alike. I am now and have always been of the opinion that skinny female characters and the actresses who portray them can most certainly be strong. Some examples of this reality include Jada Pinkett Smith as The Matrix trilogy's Niobe: a skinny woman who's physically buff and whose on-screen presence as captain of the Logos packs a commanding wallop. Jennifer Lawrence as The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen: a skinny woman who exudes strength in controlled stoicism, perseverance, deft reflexes, and cunning. Emilia Clarke as Game of Thrones' Daenerys Targaryen: a skinny woman who commands dragons, the most powerful weapons in all of Westeros… when she can find them. In fact, my list of skinny badass women could go on for the duration of this entry because, quite frankly, skinny badass women proliferate the action genre. In some cases, the tiny but strong physiques that parade across theater screens are totally warranted, such as Katniss Everdeen's lifetime of meager rations and near-starvation, which produced not only her precision in archery but also her emaciated frame.
These rare cases of justified slenderness aside, last weekend I begrudgingly sat through an aspiring blockbuster which reminded me all too blatantly that in most cases Hollywood's coveted runway-ready action heroines possess slender builds that go without explanation, or outright contradict their characters' backstories. Said film that I knew I would execrate from the first teaser trailer was 300: Rise of an Empire.
Now in a continued effort to keep the peace, let me apologize henceforth to anyone who adored the second installment of the 300 franchise and warn anyone who's optimistically awaiting the DVD release that these next paragraphs aren't for you. I would hate to rain on anyone's pending parade but in my effort to lay down the skinny, an explanation is in order.
Perhaps my seventh grade history reenactment of the Battle of Thermopylae gives me a sense of personal connection to the story, or perhaps sneaking into the sold out premiere after enduring Wild Hogs and being forced to sit in my friend Davin's lap in the front row made it all the more exhilarating, but 300 is one of my all-time favorite movies. A hyper-stylized, Greco-fetishism action film whose place in my heart outlived my teenage affinity for violent, adrenaline-fueled cinema, 300 is like a classical painting injected with testosterone and set to a mashup of choral hymns and industrial guitar performed in a Mediterranean arena. Couple this with my Frank Miller phase sophomore year of high school, during which all my paintings suddenly looked like Sin City and all the dialogue in my stories had the private investigator timbre of a film noir revival, and it's a shoo-in that 300 would have me hooked.
As such, from the minute my ear registered the first inklings of a possible sequel, I knew I was in for a pile of sepia-toned, slow-motion dog crap. And when I broke down and saw the film as an escape from last Sunday's heatwave, my expectations were not disappointed. Seven years ago when it was released, 300 was something we hadn't seen yet. Sure Neo's back-bending, decelerated bullet dodge in The Matrix ushered in the stylized fight sequences that pervade action films to this day, but as far as I'm concerned 300 was a new form of visual gluttony that was candidly cool. From the sheer mythos of ancient Spartans, to the absorbing narration, to the gritty and simultaneously painterly aesthetic, to the machismo choreography, to Gerard Butler and his conical beard, and to the archetypal characterizations–every facet of this narrative oozed cool.
Zack Snyder may have taken the M. Night Shyamalan route and fallen quickly from a laudable perch in film esteem to directorial leper, but based on the utter disaster that is 300: Rise of an Empire, upcoming director Noam Murro could do with a touch of Shyamalan. Where 300 was fresh cinematic confectionery, 300: Rise of an Empire came seven years too late, after a horde of fanboys reproduced its aesthetic to death in both film and television, à la The Immortals and Spartacus. As if this latency weren't enough, 300: Rise of an Empire then took everything that was impressive about its predecessor and lamed it past the point of entertainment. Where 300 presented us with hardcore-by-definition Spartans, it's sequel centralized around the farmers and poets of Athens, and expected us to believe that men of these dispositions would possess the same chiseled and airbrushed abs of life-long, fanatical warriors. Where 300 brought us iconic dialogue to rev up battles of hand-to-hand combat and impossible feats of flight and strength, Rise of an Empire gave us horrendously convoluted and unimpressive speech, generally followed by tedious ellipses, before merely smashing their CGI ships into one another. Where 300 brought us powerful archetypes, such as the inexplicably behemoth god-king Xerxes, the sequel squandered said mystique with inane, humanizing backstories. Where 300 brought us bizarre, prosthetic monsters that served a purpose, the new release tossed in a couple half-attempts at poorly animated creatures that did nothing but hiss, spit, and disrupt deep sea dreams. And where 300 brought us female dynamism in Queen Gorgo's plight to aid her husband and her people by whatever means necessary, Rise of an Empire brought us Eva Green.
Prior to seeing the film, I read a review in the Los Angeles Times written by a woman who ranted and raved about Eva Green's magnetism as the Persian navy's most formidable commander. While it's nothing against Green's acting skills, I found both the writing and choreography for Artemisia dry and unimpressive, and the casting of waif-like Green (who attributes her paper-thin mien to her French affinity for "cigarettes and laziness") really got my goat for the very reasons I started this blog entry.
Artemisia is a Greek woman betrayed by her countrymen and hot on the trail of vengeance, and as such she's been training with the Persian herald (of all people) in combat since childhood. Her lifelong vendetta builds her up to be one of Darius' and Xerxes' most vicious soldiers, and when she's pitted against the Athenians at sea, her skill with a sword makes her a killing machine amidst the onslaughts of unexplainably robust seafarers.
With a backstory and profile like that, you're not pulling one over my eyes this time Hollywood. If Artemisia was a real woman who'd devoted her entire life to Greek-Decapitation Boot Camp, she would at least have arms like these female Adonises:
(And look Hollywood, you could even keep the cinched waist for sex appeal!)
For some reason, despite the beautiful, muscular women like the afore-pictured 1905 "circus strong woman" and 1890's Vulcana–a woman who actually looks like she beats foes to a pulp for a living, Hollywood insists on ignoring the characters' profiles and casting the Gal Gadots of the industry as Diana of Themyscira.
Occasionally Hollywood does get it right, utilizing Gwendoline Christie's striking height of 6'3″ to create a totally believable warrior in Brienne of Tarth, or casting stunt woman-turned-lead-lady Zoë Bell for her genuine physical prowess and ability to literally kick butt. More often than not, Hollywood makes feeble efforts at best, tailoring B-movies to women like mixed martial artist Gina Carano, whose leg locks far supersede her abominable acting. That, or they bypass accuracy altogether in favor of sex appeal.
As a girl who's been a limp noodle far more times in my life than that period of lopsided racquetball strength and that one year track and field made me muscular, I completely understand the argument that thinness does not equate to weakness. After all, there are numerous fighting styles out there that enable a narrow figure to bring down someone twice their size. Plus, there's always the fact that a thin actress can bulk up for a role. But I'm not going to kid myself into believing that Hollywood's decision to cast skinny women as beastly characters is an attempt to emanate female empowerment. Rather than utilizing low-weight modes of combat to their advantage or following in the BBC's footsteps and casting actors that realistically look the part of their roles, Hollywood is clearly only concerned with selling tickets via sex, and the current mainstream definition of feminine attractiveness is runway model thin… with breasts if she can manage to pull off that Victoria's Secret feat.
Thus, until the the media's interpretation of desirability begins to morph towards something of Polynesian proportions, I'll have to buckle down and swallow my gripes, watching adequately muscular film and television contenders get passed by in the casting hunt for the fiercest commanders of the shitty-remake sea.
Hungry Like the Digitally Domesticated Wolf
I live in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, capital of progression in entertainment. As such, I don't know if I could possibly be more saturated in a trend that future decades may well identify as the zeitgeist of our era. In the way that the 80s are stereotypically characterized by teased hair and overzealous synthesizers and the 20s are remembered for board-thin flappers and sexual revolution, I think our period might be historically defined by the beginnings of the technological takeover George Orwell prophesied. Only rather than relying on technology for every facet of both survival and comfortable living (as science fiction likes to predict) our era seems to utilize the majority of our technological strides for the very concept that makes my current hometown a tourist Mecca: entertainment.
In this day and age, we spend so much time sapping entertainment from our televisions, computers, and cell phones (more aptly known as "cellular devices" due to the increasing antiquity of actual phone calls), that it makes the deeply repressed wild child in me sick beyond Pepto-Bismol relief. So much so that I resorted to college-ruled paper for the crafting of this entry, just to spare my eyes the LED glare of my laptop as long as possible.
When I was a child, long before the invention of Smartphones, Rokus, iPads, and Netflix, I technically had far less access to information. In order to garner new knowledge via the answers to numerous queries, people and books already possessing said wisdom had to be sought out–and this process of learning could take far longer than tapping into your Wi-Fi and posting a thread on Yahoo Answers. But despite the hefty girth of old school dictionaries and the time it took to navigate them, the pre-MP3 world I was brought into was far more wondrous. For entertainment, we looked to nature to provide us with sand to sculpt, rocks to climb, mud to throw, trails to explore, and water to paddle. We looked to our toy box for blueprint-less Lego castles to build, Barbies to direct in plays, and whole worlds to fabricate from disparate pieces. We looked to our friends and relatives for tag between the cherry trees, trampoline acrobatics, and lava monster on the stairwells. And in the pursuit of new knowledge, where wise people and books were scant, personal experimentation in pursuit of an answer thrived. In all, it was a time when imagination and the endless joy you could glean from it ran rampant.
Now I'm not saying the child of my youth doesn't exist anymore. Trying my hand at teaching elementary and middle school art for several years has proven that there exist many amongst the post-millennium babies who still get a kick out of seed-spitting contests, capture the flag, and playing the time-resistant "house." But my observations have also yielded a great number of children taking cues from the modern adult: riveted with their iPhones, Angry Birds, Facebook, PSPs, and cable television. Sedentary hobbies that I fear may continue to escalate in child popularity.
Frankly though, I'm one to talk. My sister and I may as well have ushered in the child cell phone craze when at ages 9 and 11 we were envied by our peers as the only two children in school to possess brick-sized, antennae-toting Nokia 5110s. The year was 2001, Snake was one of the few 8-bit games a cellular device could support, and cell phones were still such an up-and-coming phenomenon that instead of confiscating mine when it went off in class one day, my fifth grade teacher merely laughed. But even as early prototypes of elementary school cellonistas, my sister and I only had them as safety precautions for the long, unsupervised walks home from school, not as idle distractions. And when cell phones began to proliferate throughout school systems by the eighth grade, my dad decided our exponential texting warranted the cancellation of our family plan, an act that may have deemed us social pariahs throughout high school, but ultimately did us and our eyesight a world of good.
Nine years later, sitting in a Hollywood apartment with my laptop blinking at me sleepily from the bed, my Smartphone sedate on the table, and my image reflected back at me on my boyfriend's flatscreen TV, the thought of pre-adolescent children fixating on their digital devices with the same vim the characters of Her demonstrated with their Operating Systems is a frightening notion. I'm 23 years old, living in the age that witnessed the birth and demise of CDs, DVDs, and Blackberries; an age in which the rapidity of technological advancement grants our lifestyles increasing facility on an annual basis. And yet rather than celebrating the ease with which I can archive my music or send my sister messages via satellite, all I really yearn to do right now is ditch the muffled television conversations that eek through every Hollywood wall, throw my phone and its tempting crossword puzzles to the wayside, bid adieu to the computer that served as my life support and safe haven throughout college, and take up residence in a remote, mountain-ringed field somewhere.
For as an active participant in the age of intensifying technological reliance and reproduction, it's nerve-wracking enough pondering ways to go about shielding my future children from the comparably substandard Harry Potter films long enough for them to read the books. With this and similar obstacles amassing by the day, it'll be a wonder if I can convince these pending Moon babies that racing you to the other side, climbing to the highest peak, and letting your imagination run away with you provides entertainment that simply can't be found by poring over an iPhone.
Cursed Be Thy Gifting
Through indeterminate acts of nature or nurture, some people are born or bred with the insatiable desire to knock themselves out… gifting. To some, if there isn't sweat when partaking in the sport of gift-giving, then you haven't combed the aisles or blinded yourself by the LED light of e-commerce long enough.
I first recognized this peculiar mania in myself when at age ten a friend expressed that she pined magazines or candy for her birthday. In a whirlwind of prepubescent energy and dishwashing allowance money, I proceeded to clean out a magazine stand of every teenybopper rag they possessed and fill a paper bag of Ikea proportions with the king sized candy bars that usually eluded me unless my dad took us trick-or-treating in the ritzy neighborhood. While adult retrospection notes that my friend's dentist probably would have preferred the gift of a couple magazines and one candy bar, child logic dictated that gift recipients should be spoiled to the same degree of rottenness that my family had always reserved for myself and my sister on gift-giving holidays. Even if money was tight, the little Moon sisters always had a staggering array of store-bought, hand-me-down, or homemade gifts to parade through like pint-sized kings every birthday, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter. And besides, buying my friend magazines and candy by the bucketful was way more fun than spending my chore money on yet another Now That's What I Call Music CD.
Thus, the gift-giving fever took hold and replicated throughout my genetic makeup over the next thirteen years, culminating in last Christmas's ardent desire to make everyone personally-tailored gift baskets (or gift crates and gift ice buckets in some cases). The overzealous process of analyzing each of my loved ones' personalities, brainstorming potential gifts, imagining up different themes and titles, and then organizing the baskets themselves proved to be so fun I don't know why I haven't started seriously considering a career as a professional basket case.
I know this passion (or outright obsession) is a little eccentric and I know I have to warn newcomers to my close circle about the overbearing nature of my gifting, lest they abandon our friendship or break up with me out of shock (because yes, I can count myself among the very few people on this planet who've been dumped solely for excessive gifting). But I assure those of you who are coughing "CRAZY" into your hands, I garner sincere pleasure from the chance to plan a gift for someone I care about, and when I have enough money, the right artistic tools for the task, and time aplenty to make everything just right, manifesting the present I'd long visualized is sheer bliss.
That is, when everything goes right.
To foster such a manic love for crafting or comprising pre-envisioned presents means that the collapse of said plans produces equally strong emotions… in the opposite direction. If anyone was ever to accuse me of bipolar disorder, the accusation would absolutely arise from a Christmas in which most of my loved one's gifts are executed to a T, but one gift goes horribly wrong. Then all that built up excitement and anticipation I'd been harboring for the gift's completion storms out as irate despair: a great surging, catastrophic, gift-mania flood that only my sister–or Emily's External Conscience–has ever had to witness. Fortunately for the sake of my sister and my future risk of stroke, my insane gift-giving schemes don't often backfire to such calamitous proportions, and if anything goes wrong at all, I'm usually just left to sour internal-monologuing about how I wish I could have afforded a nicer piece of jewelry, or how I wish I'd had more time to make that painting look more professional, or how I really wish I hadn't developed irreversible writer's block just before finishing that book seven years in the making that was intended as a giant, surprise anniversary present.
In recent years, however, I've added someone to my heart's Excel sheet of loved ones that God, Allah, and that sneaky, scheming Buddha seem intent on sheltering from my voracious attempts at gift-giving. And that person would be my boyfriend.
When you have a significant other and a major, albeit strange, facet of your personality is a life-fulfilling addiction to assembling gifts, the world suddenly embraces you in a haze of polychromatic zeal. Not only do you suddenly have more holidays for which to indulge in the joy of gifting (such as that day devoted to love that you previously spent commiserating with the first half of Bridget Jones' Diary or the anniversary that you're not sure whether to attribute to the first date or the first proclamation of, "What the hell, let's throw caution to the wind and make this official even though you're graduating from college and leaving in a month!"), but you also have the opportunity to make any old day a gift-giving day because he dotes on you so much that mere holiday gifting could hardly suffice. Thus, as anyone with a knack for algebraic algorithm could tell you, significant other + gift-giving psychosis = absolute, unadulterated euphoria.
Unless of course, you factor in unforeseen variables that hinder or outright sabotage almost every gift you've ever tried to give that special someone. Then absolute, unadulterated euphoria tends to be equal or lesser to sheer panic.
To exemplify this mathematical anomaly, let's examine the evidence. The first birthday present I ever tried to give my boyfriend should have been thwarted by the hurdles of that summer's time-consuming 16 hour work days, limited space for artistic production, and the 2,761 miles that separated Oregon from Maryland, but miraculously the whole thing came together, arrived on time, and resulted in perfect orchestration. Until I realized that after just four months of dating, I hadn't yet warned him that I'm a nutty fanatic prone to over-gifting, and had to suffer the consequences of my omission.
After surfacing from that debacle, I was determined to get things right five months later when Christmas rolled around. My first gift, a week-long trip to his family's beautiful home in Maryland, was set in motion without a hitch. I reserved my plane ticket well in advance, bought a myriad of warm clothes befitting an actual white Christmas (not that unreliable Portland, Oregon shit), put in my two week's notice a month in advance, and even booked a seat on my vehicular arch nemesis–a Greyhound bus–because the fifteen hour drive from Baltimore to Savannah would be an hour quicker than the three airport layovers that for some godawful reason decelerated what should have been a two hour flight. Ultimately, the planning was impeccable and I was so excited that the bank account I usually had to empty into my private college's pocketbook miraculously had the quan to fund my cross-country reunion. This gift was perfect.
Until a friend's birthday trip to Las Vegas gave me a dose of the flu to rival the scale of New York, New York, and the successive, germ-riddled flights from Vegas to Portland and Portland to Baltimore (first flight I've ever puked on!) only aggravated my condition, ensuring a good three weeks of fevered incapacitation. I still pity the unsuspecting Marylanders whose Christmas was sieged upon by my Vegas disease like the boa constrictor's invasive and carnivorous take-over of Florida.
But even if the biological warfare raging in my lymphatic system dared mar my boyfriend's Christmas, at least there was the physical gift I'd purchased online a month prior. The physical gift that, come to think of it, hadn't arrived in the mail in time for my departure to Maryland… In fact, no matter how much I heckled the seller, my purchase didn't arrive at my Portland address until March, when I was well entrenched in a heap-load of college torture in the city of Savannah. Despite my wonderful boyfriend's unyielding capacity for forgiveness, I was ready to crumple up Official Gift No. 2 and toss it in the dumpster where failed attempts at happy memories go to die for being both the most contagious and latest Christmas gift it had ever been my mortification to bestow.
Now Nutty Gifting Lady (less-famous cousin of Crazy Cat Lady) was really reeling to get things right. But the curse that catalyzes hyperbolic old wives' tales had officially set in. "Gift yer man wrong once, shame on ye. Gift yer man wrong twice, shame on he for not tossin' yer virus-plagued body out into the white Christmas ye ruined. Gift yer man wrong thrice, and it's gift-giving limbo ye've sentenced yerself to fer life, me dearie… Cookie?"
After a one-year anniversary gift I'd assumed wouldn't count in old wives' ledgers for having gone only slightly awry (arriving in shambles after the United States Postal Service forgot about that "FRAGILE" stamp I'd requested), it seemed certain: I was cursed to flub my man's gifts for the rest of eternity. Hence it came as no surprise when the next gift I purchased was charged to my card three times, succeeding my bank account and causing me to reevaluate my choice. Fortunately, the original idea I'd forgone due to sold out tickets suddenly opened up when scalpers began pawning off seats to The Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival featuring Dave Chappelle and Flight of the Conchords. Hadn't we been re-watching Flight of the Conchords and obsessing over Jemaine and Bret all summer? And didn't we love comedy!? AND WERE WE NOT ODD AS HELL!!!???
It all seemed too good to be true. Far too good to be true considering my nightmarish track record when it came to doting on my boyfriend. Thus, as the summer wound down and the date of the festival approached, I jealously guarded those tickets with my life, terrified that at any moment they might blow out the window or spontaneously combust, and absolutely petrified by the thought that my scalper tickets were fake and we'd be denied entry after three months of whooping and whinnying in excited anticipation. That would be the cherry on top of my attempted gift-gifting travesty, and it's certain I'd shrivel up and die of loss of identity right then and there at an irritable security guard's feet.
Looking back on it now, I really can't believe that The Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival didn't explode under the weight of all the old wives' points I'd racked up for being such a gifting failure. But I guess they'd decided to let me off easy for a change, and the only thing that was truly lamentable about the whole shebang was the abominable bubble font I added to the card.
Fortunately for the more malicious members of the Universal Fate Association (which in this blog entry seems to have witnessed a merger between superstitious wives and a couple vengeful deities), their contracts must have contained only one Let Her Off the Hook clause, and this past Christmas they obviously relished the chance to get back to their scheming.
À la the aforementioned Yuletide Gift Basket Extravaganza, I spent December running around Portland in search of an array of man-things for my boyfriend (tools, Irish whiskey, 2 liter flasks, the likes). The centerpiece of this man-thing assortment was to be a vintage drinking horn that I'd committed to memory months prior when my boyfriend glanced at it and compulsively said, "I want that," perhaps because it's Celtic accoutrements appealed to our collectively fervent pride in our Irish ancestry or perhaps because my boyfriend harbors a secret affinity for those Celt-murdering vikings. Either way, so began the drinking horn debacle that's aptly summed up by a review Amazon repeatedly refused to post until I whittled it down to two measly, inadequate sentences:
I suppose the entire drinking horn fiasco is a lesson never to trust any business that goes by the title The Man Cave (aren't man caves the dens men retreat to to actively avoid work?). But beyond the opposing concepts of business and men at rest, this experience and the shit storm of unsuccessful gift-givings past has taught me a larger lesson. In the realm of obsessive-compulsions, it's important to actively practice letting things go astray. While frenetic in its overbearing nature, my gifting isn't at the top of my obsessive-compulsions list, and as such, I should use its occasional divergence from The Plan as an opportunity to learn to readjust and not set such avid stock in the fate of material presents. After all, gifts are fleeting: physical objects get lost, break, pass from owner to owner, get shelved, and eventually lose their significance, and Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festivals only last one glorious day. So instead of melting into a melodramatic puddle that my sister has to mop into a dustbin every time one of my big present schemes goes amiss, I should work on my ability to ignore imperfection, to learn from and harness the outcomes of mistakes, and to ultimately accept failure, thereby making my relaxation, flexibility, and optimism one of the best and longest-lasting gifts I could possibly give those closest to my heart.


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Ruffians FC Monthly Match Highlights
I am going to do a monthly highlights video from the Ruffians FC matches. What I need the RFC players to do is to record their goals and match action (using the Xbox One game clip record feature) that they want included in the monthly highlight video. Then upload it to One Drive from your Xbox One (this is free and easy to do). Once you have it uploaded to One Drive you need to share it to my One Drive account. My account info you need is - firstname.lastname@example.com. Once it is shared I can use it and make the video and then use it on the Ruff Gaming video channel.
Any questions on regarding this feel free to ask me here or over twitter - @RuffianStew
Also once you have shared a video just let me know again by posting here or via twitter so I don't miss any clips.


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Motion Design
PAWS Chicago Year in Review 2018
Video was shared through email and social media in December of 2018 to conclude PAWS' Holiday Giving campaign and bring in the new year. Photos were not taken by me. View more work for PAWS Chicago.
World Polio Day 2017
Social media video create for Rotary International for World Polio Day. Videos were posted by Rotary International, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Bill Gates.
Cooking Channel Food Truck Fest
Event graphics created to go with my Cooking Channel rebrand. Food trucks are a modern and trendy source for inexpensive food. For a company like Cooking Channel, who want to market to young foodies, this event is a win-win for giving local vendors business while also marketing themselves to a young crowd. Motion graphics were utilized for this project because they make social media posts much more eye-catching and bring more dimension to the Cooking Channel brand.
Alliance for the Great Lakes Adopt a Beach
A promotional video for the Alliance for the Great Lake's Adopt a Beach Program. I developed the design style based off of the original brochure for the program and updated the style to better match the nonprofit's recent rebranding. Along with directing the style, I also created all of the icons for the video. My goal was to make the video appealing and upbeat, while also being informative. The circle motifs represent the Great Lakes and put the viewer within the lake for the duration of the video. This was animated in parts by two other people and me (my section being 0:20 to 0:52). The clips were edited together by me and sent to the client by me.
Sketch Life
A story about a doodle who feels alone in a sketchbook world. All of the elements were hand drawn by me and animated in After Effects. Many of the background images came from scans of my old sketchbooks.