text:
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Vocals Copycat Fail!
Now ask yourself: as appropriate as Abbath's voice is for Immortal's music, why would you ever want to try to reuse that sound for your own band?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
As the Palaces Burned: Rob Halford - Resurrection
Today's entry is Resurrection by Halford
As we previously covered, I was the only person upset when Rob Halford rejoined Judas Priest. I was happy seeing Priest in clubs kicking ass with Ripper, while Halford was an amazing and viable band in its own right. I would love to cover their misunderstood and highly underrated second album Crucible, but its 2002 release date falls outside the window of this series.
So we will look at Resurrection, the comeback record. I really like this album, and when I put it on again to write this I was pleasantly surprised at how well it holds up. It was a safety album. After leaving Judas Priest and releasing a the mediocre industrial goth album 2wo Rob Halford needed to re-establish himself in the hearts and minds of the Metal community. So what would you have done in 1999-2000? I would have done what Rob Halford did. Get together with Roy Z who re-energized Bruce Dickinson's career (this will be covered in great detail in a later entry), put together a heavy as balls band, and write a record that sounds as close to classic Judas Priest as humanly possible.
After years of hearing nothing from Rob Halford this song was leaked by the label.
Wonderful, right? I still get chills when I hear him scream "resurrection" at the very top of his vocal register. The rest of the album is a decent meat and potatoes hard rocking affair. My favorite song is the obviously "Electric Eye" influenced "Cyberworld" which has a wonderful chorus hook. "The One You Love to Hate" is a duet with Bruce Dickinson which truly exemplifies the "less is more" attitude of the album. There is no experimentation present anywhere. They saved that for album number two. This album's only purpose was to be a completely kick ass Metal record which would re-establish Rob Halford's career, and it worked.
It was official that the Metal God was back when he played as the first of three act at the sold out August 20th, 2000 Iron Maiden MSG show which we here at Baroque Bleak Brutal consider the spiritual rebirth of Metal. He was still a bit of an unknown quantity, and even at the ludicrously early 7PM set time the Garden was already packed. When his band started the opening notes of "The Hellion," the world's most famous arena got up on their feet and gave the man a standing ovation. I'm tearing up right now remembering the feeling of watching 15,000 Metal fans collectively have their own spiritual resurrection.
The One You Love to Hate (with Bruce Dickinson)
Geeking Out With Hail!
With all of those known names on stage playing such a wide variety of material, there were plenty of historical connections to be mined from the ores of metal lore. Here are a few of the more interesting ones we noticed:
- There were a few different songs where one of the band members had been in the band that recorded the original: Ripper was in Priest, Bello is in Anthrax, Kisser wrote the lyrics for "Territory" and co-wrote the music for "Refuse/Resist."
- Three of the covers were really covers of covers, done in the style of the band that did the first cover: "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)," originally by Fleetwood Mac but played in the style of the Judas Priest cover; "Symptom of the Universe," originally by Black Sabbath but played in the style of Sepultura; and "Got the Time," originally by Joe Jackson but played in the style of Anthrax. The later two songs get even more meta: each had a member of band who played on the original cover on stage to play the cover.
- Hail! did not play anything by Megadeth at this show, but they did play Metallica's "The Four Horsemen," which is based on "The Mechanix," a song written by Dave Mustaine and included on Megadeth's first album - which featured Dave Ellefson on bass.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Clip From Arch Enemy's Show at the Nokia Theatre
The microphone on the camera used to record this clip can't even hope to capture the magnificence of the sound coming from that stage, but you do get a sense of intensity. Arch Enemy has never been one of my favorites in recordings (maybe something about stuff all of that sound into one package is always a risk, whether it's a video camera or a recording studio?) but I've had the pleasure of seeing them live twice now - including the show on Friday that this clip came from - and both times their energy has blown me away.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Fun With Pandora
We're playing this track because it features hard rock roots, electronica influences, punk influences, a subtle uses of vocal harmony, varying tempo and time signatures, repetitive melodic phrasing, demanding instrumental part writing, a vocal-centric aesthetic, a clear focus on recording studio production, heavy syncopation, minor key tonality, a dirty electric guitar solo, a gravelly male vocalist, an aggressive male vocalist, an unintelligible vocal delivery, intricate arranging and many other similiarities identified in the Music Genome Project.For those of you unfamiliar with Pandora, the above is taken from one of the justification descriptions the software offers you when it plays a track. Writing about the odd things kicked up by an algorithm is like shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't really resist: based on that description, you'd think I'm listening to some sort of jazz fusion piece with a hypersexualized guitarist ("dirty electric guitar solo"? Really?), or maybe something really, really post-punk. The real answer: Zyklon's "Transcendental War - Battle Between Gods." Then it played a cover of "Dead Skin Mask" while showing me an ad for a dentist who I will never, ever want to visit.
Friday, January 22, 2010
If I Ever Want to Get Some Promo...
"It seems like these people, you know, they make their life on Blabbermouth. They make a name for themselves by bashing someone. It's really funny. It's like they are rock stars in their own little world, and it's just funny that someone would want to get on there and bash a band ... they don't really know. Maybe they were a fan of the band, and they just don't like them anymore. I don't know."I'm starting to wonder if they teach the Blabbermouth hater mention technique in schools for publicists.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Celebrating the Metallic-Era
I don't know how well the scheme worked from a sales perspective, but it got me while shopping in a now-defunct Circuit City in a Massachusetts suburb. Well, I say 'got me,' but the truth is that I was a teenager with an extremely limited music horizon who picked the album up because it had an association with a band I knew and loved, not because I had any of the history of the target audience. Besides, it had some funky cover art that mystifies me to this day: why would you take a money scale (a nice visual dig at Metallica) and stick a skull on it? Now how it will ever work? Besides, if you're going to attack the band's credibility, wouldn't you want to put the money on one side and some representation of integrity on the other?
In any case, the compilation - which I was listening to earlier today - turned out to be a fantastic investment: originally, of course, it was an introduction to a lot of great music. As time passed, however, I found that the track listing combined with the promo ads at the back of the CD booklet gave me enough of an education for me to able to talk a bit of the talk until we reached that magical time when old albums started growing on digital trees.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
You Could Bid on the Master of Reality Transfers - But Why Would You Want To?
All of this discussion, of course, ignores the question of whether or not you'd want to buy an item from a company with no feedback score that can't tell the difference between masters and transfers.
As the Palaces Burned: Testament - The Gathering
Testament.......I labored over this band, and how to approach their AtPB entry. I mean where to begin? Skolnick's last album with the band, 1992's grungy The Ritual? Their experiments with Pantera-esque modernization on Low?
Well, Low is a great under-appreciated album, but I'm not going to go there. The Ritual has some very funny moments that need to be written about, but that will be in my upcoming series about Metal bands who released Grunge albums in the 90s.
No, we're going to cover Testament when they were in the same position Voivod was in my column last week. Having been dropped and relegated to the CMC International/Spitfire records purgatory, a brand new lineup of Testament decided the best approach would be to modernize and play more of that death metal the kids are always talking about. Now Chuck Billy and Eric Peterson were well set up for this, with the secret weapon Gene Hoglan on drums, and a great working knowledge of the underground. However despite some great moments 1997's Demonic is not a great album. The approach is a bit generic. Some songs are great are still played in concert, such as "The Burning Times". Here, have a quick listen. It's good!
But the whole record isn't great, and doesn't make the cut as a lost classic.
Plagued with yet more lineup changes, Chuck Billy and Eric Peterson "gathered" (get it?) all their friends together. Grabbing no less than two ex-members of Death (James Murphy and Steve DiGiorgio) plus Dave Lombardo from Slayer, Testament released one hell of a war cry with The Gathering in 1999. To me it is a unifying statement which best sums up everything the band had been trying to say since Low. The aggression level is even higher than Demonic without that album's generic riffing. The thrash is back in full force but with the added power of Billy's newfound growl. Topping the whole album off with a delicious satanic cherry was the production of Andy Sneap, now recognized as the gifted master of aggressive recording.
Anyone who returned to the band with The Formation of Damnation needs to go back and fall in love with The Gathering. Starting with "DNR", still a favorite in modern set lists, you are hearing a band at the height of their Metal powers. The way thrash and death metal are so seamlessly merged on this record may seem pretty textbook now, but this is the band and the album from which those textbooks were written. And not enough can be said about the subtle virtuosity, especially in DiGiorgio's smooth yet violent bass playing. If there was ever any recorded document that Testament never deserved their reputation as Metallica-lite this is the album.
But enough tell, here's some show:
Sewn Shut Eyes!
DNR (Do Not Resuscitate)
Eyes of Wrath
And the song which should have been the "hit," True Believer. I think this was on the soundtrack to one of the Saw movies.......
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Lifetime: The Most Metal of All Women-Focused TV Networks
Friday, January 15, 2010
A Look At Ihsahn's Cover Art
Notice in particular the large pink stain on the cover of After, which is the biggest indicator that the art direction seems to have gone awry: the covers of The Adversary and angL are so dark; why the pink and white that suggests some sort of black metal princess cake? In addition, the photo seems a little incongruous: as Seth pointed out, using a cross makes the album seem like it's crossing in Black Sabbath territory. On closer inspection, I think there's a bit more linking the three, like the transition of living angel to angel statue to cross, the inclusion of color on the cover of The Adversary, the different mediums of the artwork (chalk drawing, sculpture, and photograph) and the bleakness of the photo on the cover of After, which I suspect is a reference - along with those dirgy saxophones - to the album's title. Still haven't figured out what that pink stain is supposed to mean, though.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Many Voices of News of the World
- "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions:" two of Queen's most well-known tracks have undergone a whole host of treatments, including various re-recordings by different versions of the Queen lineup years after the band's demise. I'm pretty sure I don't plan to go out and find any of them, either.
- "Sheer Heart Attack:" Helloween recorded a version, but the band that crept out of a dark recess of my mind when I thought about covers of this song was Sam Black Church, who released a live recording of the song as a bonus track on Superchrist in 1995.
- "Spread Your Wings:" Germans who love ostentatious metal seem to love Queen, too: Blind Guardian took the far more genre-appropriate "Spread Your Wings" and recorded a pretty kickin' version for Somewhere Far Beyond.
- "Get Down, Make Love:" much like The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)," Queen's psychedelic celebration of free love was begging to be re-recorded in a more twisted form by an artist with the right chops. Nine Inch Nails did so in 1990, releasing the cover as a b-side on the single for the equally bondage-heavy "Sin."
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
As the Palaces Burned: Voivod - Phobos
On September 24, 1991 Nirvana released Nevermind. Nine years later, a reunited Iron Maiden played
Today's entry is Voivod's brilliant 1997 album Phobos.
In 1994, after Snake and Blacky had both left Voivod, they were both replaced by one man, Eric Forrest. By playing bass and singing, he briefly led Voivod into the storied pantheon of Canadian power trios. Their first album with this lineup, 1995's Negatron, was a complete bust. The band opted for a traditional death metal sound which probably seemed like a solid commercial decision at the time, but fell completely flat, alienating those fans who chose to stick with this lineup.
Here is an example of the blah that was Negatron:
But after a few years off, Voivod came back with a vengeance, and in 1997 this lineup released Phobos. Not only did they get their groove back, it is one of the consistently strongest albums in their catalog. And it came in completely under the radar. Negatron built up so much bad will among the remaining Voivod loyalists that no one bothered to listen to this album the first time around. I bought it for the King Crimson cover when it came out ("21st Century Schizoid Man," it was hard to hear music in 1997 you didn't pay for) and wound up owning a masterpiece.
Everything about this album showcases what made Voivod great. The abstract sci-fi lyrics, snarling punk vocals updated with a bit of a death metal grunt, progressive time signatures, and that unmistakably Piggy riffing. Oh the riffs, they are killer on this album. Think Killing Technology, but updated for the death metal kids.
Although that first reunion record with Snake, 2003's self titled Voivod was great, I don't think that album touched the creative energy or tripped out intensity of Phobos. What a shame it went completely under the radar.
Title Track Phobos:
The Tower:
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The Internet is Full of Metal in the Strangest Places
Sunday, January 10, 2010
American Soldier Should Have Been More Like Passiondale
Friday, January 08, 2010
Again We Rise: Celtic Frost - Monotheist
In the measurement of an album's brutality, there are a few key ways for a release to stand out: it can hit you physically, executing a convergence of riffs and mix that feel like a beating; mentally, dazzling you with vision-generating atmospherics; or psychologically, daring you to confront the true meaning of emptiness. Metal being such a masochistic art form, all three methods are enjoyable, but it's the psychologically brutal albums that are perhaps the most effective - and of the past decade's releases, none were more effective than Monotheist. Fourteen years in the waiting and six in the making, the swansong album for Celtic Frost takes its surface character from the bone-dry distortion of a single shambling guitar and the tuneless chant of Tom Warrior, working in tandem to drive the listener slowly down the road to the abyss.
There are many strange and wonderful sights along the way, however that keep Monotheist from becoming a simple plodder: the opening of "A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh," where a few simple guitar counterpoints, the rumble of a bass, and a haunting melody sung by Martin Ain build to a crushing crescendo that they eliminate the potential cliché in the lyrics - "frozen is heaven/frozen is hell/and I am dying in this living human shell" - with mesmerizing ability.
The combination of feedback, analog keyboard pads, and a To Mega Therion-style female vocal in duet with Warrior's growl on "Drown in Ashes" becomes the aural equivalent of chasing will 'o the wisps through a swamp.
The sonic imagery of "Totengott," which might as well be the bedrock for the albums released by Teitanblood, Anaal Nathrakh, and 1349 last year.
"Winter," which sums up all of the emptiness Monotheist trumpets in spades with a simple 1:30 of droning, shifting strings.
If the contemplation of nothing and our insignificance in the face of that infinity that represents this contemplation at its truest had a soundtrack, it would be Monotheist.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Keep of Kalessin Gets a Little Old School
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
As the Palaces Burned: Judas Priest - Jugulator
Today's entry, Judas Priest's buried and forgotten classic, Jugulator.
Way before YouTube would make finding replacement band-members from tribute bands positively mainstream (hello Journey!) Judas Priest found their replacement in Tim "Ripper" Owens. At the time this got laughed at by the Metal community as "pathetic," but really, in 1997 there was not much Judas Priest could do that wouldn't have been mocked. At the height of Nu-Metal, Boy Bands and what was still called "Alternative" there was very little place for Judas Priest.
But they soldiered on, and made a true follow up to Painkiller. Still written by the core songwriting team of Glen Tipton and KK Downing, Jugulator is a sick album. It is heavier, faster and more explosive than anything Priest had ever done. The opening track "Jugulator" was not only a war cry for the band, but showcased that Ripper could absolutely hold his own on Halford's turf and in his upper tenor range. The songs varied wildly from the near grunge of "Blood Stained" and "Death Row" to the old school and epic closer "Cathedral Spires."
Ripper would end up getting his due in the Metal community much later for his work with Iced Earth and Yngwie, but "Jugulator" was an amazing work by a band inspired and at the height of their creative powers, even if no one was listening.
Again We Rise: Emperor - The Discipline of Fire & Demise
In the summer of 2000, I was working a job whose intellectual rigors were so intense that they permitted endless amounts of web surfing. On one of my journeys, I found an interview with Ihsahn where he discussed the dichotomy of quality: his dissatisfaction with the quality of Emperor's output to that point, but his hopefulness about the future, as each new release fixed the problems of the past. The statement related in part to the progress of recording Prometheus, which I bought a bit over a year later after hearing a sample of the first thirty seconds of "Thorns on My Grave" on Amazon: the layering of drums and guitar makes for such an impressively heavy composition that I had to hear more.
Despite my initial hopes, it took me a good four or five years to realize Prometheus's genius; perhaps because I was expecting another Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk or IX Equilibrium, I fell into later category of listeners described by the All Music Guide's John Serba:
"Those willing to invest a significant amount of time into Prometheus will be thoroughly rewarded on intellectual and emotional levels — especially when drawing parallels between the album's elaborate concept and Emperor's musical reign — while more practical listeners unwilling to slap on headphones and willfully ingest the lyrics will find the record impenetrable.""Impenetrable" is the word: the album's multitude of layers, swirling textures, and dueling instruments; its rampaging melodies that present a nefarious mindfuck by individually stretching the very concept of tonality while collectively delivering some of music's more glorious aspirations; the lyrics, where a concept just barely comprehensible when read on a page stands nearly veiled by the individual phrases that describe the action; these are not the elements of an easy listen. Digging further, phrases start to collect in the brain and continuity establishes itself - I can remember how "Depraved" sounds, for example, because I remember the feeling evoked by the chilling arpeggio that opens the track - but on the whole there is the whispered beginning that starts the record, the final rush that ends it, and the wonderful, bleak-as-hell maelstrom in between. That Emperor managed to put together such an effort is impressive enough; that they did so while walking the tightrope between wankery and creative desire and emerged with something complex and cohesive is almost unbelievable.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Age of Evil and the Dave Mustaine Doppelganger Conspiracy
Anyway, I bring all of this info up not just to bash Age of Evil's recording (because I kinda hope that with statements like, "But we give 150% every night we play," they have more energy on stage than they do on tape), but because in their video for "Living a Sick Dream," the band's guitarist bears more than a passing resemblance to Dave Mustaine...and Hail! features former Megadeth member (and on and off Mustaine feud target) Dave Ellefson on bass. A part of me likes to think the selection of Age of Evil as an opener was a really elaborate way for Ellefson to get a dig in on Mustaine and I will hold on to that hope if Age of Evil really does suck live.


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John Van Bibber's Gravestone:
Evergreen Cemetery
Victoria (Victoria County)
Victoria County
Texas, USA
Plot: Lot 29 #6
Rounded at the top, the stone depicts clasped hands above a draped shield with the words: Sacred to the memory of. Below in large bold raised letters is the name, John Van Bibber. Underneath the name is carved, "a Texas Veteran. Born March 12, 1797 at Point Pleasant, Mason Co., West Va. Died in Victoria, Texas Feb. 22, 1884."
Also at the gravesite is a foot marker with a small star and wreath erected by the State of Texas in 1962. It states: "Served in the Texas War for Independence. Escaped the Goliad Massacre in 1836." The James W. Fannin Society, Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Mrs. Ben T. Jordan, Chairman, furnished historical documentation for the marker.
"John Van Bibber served in the War for Texas Independence as a member of Captain B.L. Lawrence's Company of Tennessee volunteers that were organized at Nacogdoches in December, 1835 for fighting at San Antonio, but he did not arrive in time for the surrender of Bexar. His name appears on the rolls of Captain B. H. Duval, Colonel James W. Fannin's Command, as being in this company from December 25, 1835 to February 29, 1836 and has the notation in the "Remarks" column that he escaped the massacre. This escape can be explained by the fact that he was absent on sick leave at the battle on Coleto Creek, March 19, 1836. An unmarried man, he operated a grocery store, made a trip to California during the gold rush and it is said that he had some success."
Additional John Van Bibber Documents:
Muster Rolls of the Texas Revolution, ed. Daughters of the Republic of Texas (Lubbock: Craftsman Printers, Inc. 1986), 35.0
Republic of Texas Poll Lists for 1846, Victoria County, n.p.l.
Federal Census Records:
1860 Victoria County, Texas p. 36 dwelling #270, b. Va., Real Estate Broker, Personal Estate $5,000.00
1870 Victoria County, Texas p. 12, dwelling #90, b. Va., No occupation shown, Value of Real Estate $3000.00
1880 Victoria County, Texas p. 135, dwelling # 6, b. Va., father, mother, b. in Va., single, no occupation, age 83.
Victor Marion Rose, a Victoria newspaper editor, poet, and historian who knew John Van Bibber, mentions him in his collection of historical facts regarding the Settlement of Victoria, Texas. The first mention was 06 August 1840 when John aided Capt. J.O. Wheeler in escaping from the Comanche Indians in the Indian Raid on Victoria. "Capt. J.O. Wheeler was pursued by the Indians into the town of Victoria. . . and but for the fleetness of his horse, "Old Robin," and a prompt diversion created in his favor by Mr. John Van Bibber, must have been killed."
The next mention is when "a number of our citizens took the "gold fever," and went to California%u2014among whom were. . .John Van Bibber [and others]." Rose's mentions John again in 1883 because of his assets%u2014"John Van Bibber, $11,940."
Finally, Rose wrote a brief character sketch of John Van Bibber at the close of his book:
John Van Bibber was probably a native of Virginia, though it is thought he came to Texas immediately from the state of Kentucky, which removal was possibly early as the year 1835, as he was a member of the ill-starred Fannin's regiment; and escaped the Goliad massacre only by reason of his being absent on "sick leave." He located in Victoria, and opened a grocery store opposite the "Ingram house," soon after the retreat of the Mexican army; in which business he continued probably as late as the year 1847, when he went to California, as did P. Rose, the Lansing family; Wash Trayson, and others in Victoria, about that time, in search of the %u2018golden fleece." He returned about the year 1850; having augmented somewhat his future.
When the Comanches pursued J.O. Wheeler into Victoria, in 1840, Mr. Van Bibber ran to his rescue, which had the effect of turning his most determined pursuer, and doubtless saved his life, as the savage was fast gaining upon him. Mr. Van Bibber never married; and has pursued the "even tenor of his way," a familiar object on the streets of Victoria for over a half century. He is yet living, though past four score years of age, and in happy possession of all his faculties. A brother, from California, visited him in the winter of 1883, whom he had not met for over forty years. The changes that he has witnessed in Victoria alone would fill a volume, and prove of exciting interest to the reader. Alas, that none of our early pioneers were commentators, as well as actors in the drama of life! Mr. Van Bibber died in Victoria February, 1884."
A petition made by John Van Bibber to the Republic of Texas stating that he emigrated to Texas in the year 1835 and joined the Division of the Army under the command of Colonel Fannin at Goliad early in the month of January, 1836 under the command of Captain Thomas under whom he served until the 12th of February when he was discharged by Samuel Wilson, Lieutenant commanding and joined Captain Duval's company and was attached to said company until after the Declaration of Independence by the convention of the People of Texas and until his health disabled him from performing the duties of a soldier when he obtained a furlough from Colonel Fannin and a passport from Samuel P. Carson, Secretary of State of the Republic of Texas. He went on to say that in the year 1839 he applied to and received from the Board of Land Commissioners for Victoria County a certificate for one third of a League of Land as a first class head right and located the same in Victoria County. He was refuting a fraudulent claim against his right to the land by stating that the Commissioners refused to recommend his land certificate but that it was a genuine and good claim. He asked for a jury to try his right to a third of a League of Land, etc. The General Land Office in Austin verified his claim that he served faithfully and honorably in the Army of the Republic of Texas. The date of the petition was 20 August 1874. In 1852, for his service and having escaped the Massacre of Fannin, he received a Bounty Warrant #1073 for 320 acres of land in Goliad County near Media Creek. In 1853, he received 320 acres in Bee County, adjacent to Goliad County. When John reached the age of 77, he applied for a pension for his service in the Army of the Republic in 1836. His disposition was approved on 29 June 1871 and he received $250.00.
Probate Court Records in the Victoria County Courthouse reveal numerous files pertaining to the estate of John Van Bibber. There were records permitting John to receive and disperse any monetary sums belonging to or due his cousin, James Van Bibber, who also had come to fight for the Republic of Texas. Next is John's will written on 09 February 1884, shortly less than two weeks before his death, where he named John S. Munn as executor, and H.C. Cunningham, F.A. Fenner, and E.A. Thurber as witnesses. The legatees "devised by the deceased" in his will are as follows:
To the heirs of Joshua Rollins, residence unknown, five hundred dollars.
To the heirs of Cyrus Van Bibber, supposed to reside in Kentucky, five hundred dollars.
To the heirs of Rhoda Tanner, supposed to reside in Kentucky, five hundred dollars.
To the heirs of James Van Bibber, residence unknown, five hundred dollars
To Albert Van Bibber and his heirs three thousand dollars.
To Mrs. Emma Gentry whose maiden name was Emma Hall, five thousand dollars. The file date was 12 March 1884.
On 13 June 1884, Eugene Sibley entered the story. He appeared before the Court and claimed that John S. Munn had "wholly failed to qualify as said Executor and more than twenty days had lapsed since the probate of the will." He stated there were claims due to the estate that were necessary to collect, and sundry matters of business, which required settlement. He stated he was requested by the next of kin of the testators to administer the estate and asked to be duly appointed. On 05 August 1884, Sibley was appointed Administrator of the estate.
The next item was filed 07 October 1884 when Sibley made a report to the Court and stated that Albert Van Bibber, brother of the deceased, claimed one gold watch of probable value of eighty dollars. {There is some speculation that Albert is the brother who came from California to visit John in 1883%u2014the brother he had not seen in 40 years.} The probate note signed by Sibley also stated the whole of the estate consisted of money in the bank and claims in the form of promissory notes totaling $14,824.23.
A year and a half later on 18 January 1886, controversy set in when the heirs of Cyrus Van Bibber and other heirs of John Van Bibber's will filed a petition against Eugene Sibley, Administrator of John Van Bibber's estate, Mrs. Emma Gentry, one of the legatees, and Theodore Buhler, administrator representing Albert Van Bibber, now deceased. They asked that the probate of John Van Bibber's will be revoked and set aside. Their rationale for this request was based on the possibility of John's imbecility when he wrote his will. Cunningham and Tanner testified the will was true and legally executed. The Court denied the petition and ordered the administration of John Van Bibber's will be done without delay.
Three days later, on 13 January 1886, Eugene Sibley claimed that John Van Bibber's will had been duly probated and established in the Court giving legacies as follows:
To the heirs of Joshua Rollins five hundred dollars.
To the heirs of Cyrus Van Bibber five hundred dollars.
To the heirs of James Van Bibber five hundred dollars.
To Albert Van Bibber and his heirs three thousand dollars.
To Mrs. Emma Gentry five thousand dollars.
He further stated there were no debts against the estate yet unpaid and the estate was now ready for distribution among the legatees of the will and the heirs at law of the testator. He gave a lengthy account of the bills he paid and his efforts to locate the Van Bibber legatees. The balance on hand in the account was now $8,035.57.
Additional probate minutes concerned the distribution of the estate. A note of interest since Mrs. Emma Gentry is buried next to John Van Bibber in Evergreen Cemetery, is found on pages 43-44, 20 April 1886: "Mrs. Emma Gentry, a legatee of the Will of John Van Bibber, deceased, came into court and stated that she was living separate and apart from her husband, F.V. Gentry, who was for more than three years absent from this state and living in New Mexico, during which time he had contributed nothing to her support, and who took no care of her pecuniary interests. She prayed the court that the Administrator here in be ordered to pay to her in person the legacy bequeathed to her by said John Van Bibber." The court honored her request.
On 21 July 1886, more than two years after John Van Bibber died, the final accounting, partition, and distribution of his estate was completed and all surviving and deceased heirs are listed along with their current residence. It is a treasure of genealogical information regarding the siblings and heirs of John Van Bibber.
This is only part of John's story, a man born in Point Pleasant, Virginia (now WV) who came to Texas to seek his fortune; a man whose life was spared from the Goliad Massacre by illness; a man who made a place for himself in the history of Victoria, Texas. There is always more to discover, but thanks to the sharing of research by Gary and Earl, and Gary Dunnam of Victoria Preservation, Inc., and by digging into archive, land, and court records, we now have more of John Van Bibber's story, the story between the dashes on his gravestone.
Captain Duval's Company
(Kentucky Mustangs--First Regiment Volunteers from Bardstown)
Captured and Executed 27 March
Captain Burr H. Duval
Lieutenants Samuel Wilson, William Jefferson Merrifield
Sergeants George Washington Daniel, James S. Bagby, Enoch P. Gaines Chisum, William P. Dickerman
Corporals Norborne B. Hawkins, Abner B. Williams, A. H. Lynd, Richard G. Brashear
James Moss Adams, James S. Batts, Fred J. Bellows, William S. Carlson, Thomas T. Churchill, William H. Cole, John Donohoo, H. M. Downman, George Dyer, Charles Ready Haskell, Edward J. Johnson, James P. Kemp, Adams G. Lamond, James A. McDonald, William Mayer, Harvey Martin, Robert Smith Owings, Robert R. Rainey, Samuel Smith Sanders, Lawson S. Simpson, Lewis Tilson, B. W. Tolover, J. Q. Volckner, William Waggoner
Escaped during massacre 27 March
Thomas G. Allen, John Crittenden Duval, John C. Holliday, William Mason, Charles B. Shain, Augustus V. Sharpe
Spared execution by intercession 27 March
John Van Bibber (ill); Sidney Van Bibber, Ulrich Wuthrich
Spared execution for absence or illness 14-27 March
Dr. William H. Magee

subset: commoncrawl


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To quote from the book Regarding the Pain of Others written by Susan Sontag:
Much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. (90)
By the time that I had learned photography I had lost both of my grandparents, and I had missed the chance of registering their life and capturing their faces. However, after the death of my friend's grandmother when I visited her grandmother's house, I could not stop incarnating my own grandparents' thoughts and the memories of their house. That is why I decided to capture my friend grandmother's memories as though she is still present in her home before the house becomes someone else's home and is filled by new residents. And by making this documentary I tried to make a connection with the grandmother who has passed away recently and register her memories in my frame.
Jan. 2018


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M.A. Doran Gallery announces the opening of our annual National Contemporary Realism show May 11th – June, 2016. This exhibition will feature a number of America's most renowned living realist painters, and a select group of emerging artists.
The work featured has been hand picked by gallery representatives with the goal of showcasing work that is not typically seen in Oklahoma galleries and museums. The participating artists pieces highlight themes such as contemporary still life, portraiture, landscape, and conceptual yet tangible imagery.
A reception will be held on May 11th, from 5:00 until 8:00 p.m. Several of the artists will be in attendance.
Participating Artists
Christine Aria George Green Jeanette P. Sloan
Janice Anthony Tracey Harris Jacob Pfeiffer
Marjorie Atwood Virginia Harrison Sangita Phadke
Cecile Baird Richard Heisler Joel Daniel Phillips
Jennifer Campbell Amy Hill Mary Russell
Laura Christiansen Robert Jackson Laura Shecter
Emily Copeland Charles Jarboe Kendall Stallings
Ester Curini Larry Kagan Ben Steele
Nancy Depew Adonna Khare Skip Steinworth
Jeff Dodd Sherry Loehr Nancy Switzer
Otto Duecker Cynthia Marcoux Daniel Tennant
Michael Dwyer Denise Mickilowski Jeff Uffelman
Bruce Evans Matthew Pierog Sara VanderHelm
Scott Fraser Sara Scribner Vic Vicini
Brooke Golightly Shane Scribner Holly Wilson
Eric Gonzales Koo Schadler James Winn
Dennis Wojtkiewicz
William Wright
M.A. Doran Gallery
3509 S. Peoria Avenue
Tulsa, OK 74105
phone: 918.748.8700
Hours: 10:30 to 6:00 Tuesday through Saturday
Mobile Version


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Excerpt fromInferno
"What is it?" she asked uneasily.
Dray looked down and then slowly expelled the breath she'd been holding since the sensitive flesh of her inner arms had been caressed.
"I just... I'm not really comfortable with anyone touching me there. It doesn't hurt, it just brings back some bad memories."
Abby slowly moved her hands back up to touch the faint pink lines of the old burns. Dray flinched again and Abby could tell it was taking all her willpower not to push her away.
"I've seen scars before and they don't bother me, okay? I think you have the most beautiful body I've ever seen in my life. Nothing could ever detract from that. 'Sides, these are a part of you and I wanna know all of you, Dray. I don't know how to say this without sounding like some sort of... dork," she paused, biting her lip.
Abby's reluctance to continue peaked Dray's curiosity. "What is it?" she asked with a cock of her head.
"I... well, I felt this connection between us the first time I saw you but I thought it was your..." She cleared her throat, "...your shoulders and your smile. And, well, there was some sexual attraction going on. At least I sure felt it."
Abby saw the beginnings of a smile play over the decidedly luscious lips of her soon to be lover. Encouraged, she went on. "I don't know if you realize it but you have this animal magnetism thing working for you; it just exudes from every pore. And so I wondered what making love to you would be like. But I was also a bit...um...my life is kinda complicated right now. I don't...I'm not working, I don't really have a place to stay and, well, I don't need someone feeling sorry for me," she tucked a strand of hair behind an ear, "and getting involved didn't feel like the right thing to do right now."
"What changed?"
"You. I've seen the things you've done. Not just for me but for other people and I'd be a fool to throw that chance away. You know where I come from � no place special � but still you see something here in me. I gotta admit I like that feeling, too."
Dray felt the woman's soft fingers tracing her lips and smiled crookedly in acknowledgement. "Kinda scary, huh? But kinda nice."
Abby nodded, somewhat side tracked by the softness of the woman's lips. "I know it sounds strange...but it feels like I've been given a second chance to find something I didn't even know was missing. Like I found..."
Dray kissed the fingers covering her mouth and finished the sentence. "...The missing piece of the puzzle?"
Abby nodded softly.
Dray watched, as Abby's face seemed to light up, then the petite woman hugged her close again and Dray felt as if her heart was going to burst; this simple acknowledgement of their connection seemed to free them both from the latest tendrils of uncertainty.
"Hey you," murmured the firefighter, "you're turning blue. I'm sorry about the hot water. Maybe a bit later..."
Abby smiled and boldly took the woman's hands, leading her back into the main room towards the rumpled bed. "I think I have a way better idea for warming me up," she smirked.
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Page 2: GOT, Star Wars, Star Trek, Guillermo del Toro, Vacation, Despicable Me
Posted on Thursday, August 1st, 2013 by Peter Sciretta
Encino Man poster by Okpants
How Optimus Prime's Death Defined A Generation
The Wizard Of Ahhhs
Must Read: Arthur C. Clarke puts the smackdown on A.I. skeptics
Minion of the Dead t-shirt
'Lion King' show moving to new theater within Disneys Animal Kingdom!
The Voice of Winnie The Pooh Takes On Darth Vader
'Firefly' revived with first official video game, coming next summer to iOS and Android
Manga Leia t-shirt
Extensive Changes Coming to Exclusive Club 33 at Disneyland
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(Ae) Oversteps_1—23 Limited Edition Box Set of A6 Postcards
£40.00 / On Sale
As a final instalment of our TDR™ 30 celebrations we produced three limited edition box sets of lithoprinted (by our friends at Evolutionprint) postcards of recent TDR™ work with Autechre. Each of the three sets are limited to 100 bespoke stickered box sets of A6 postcards printed one-colour onto 350gsm Pure White Zen with rounded corners.
The (Ae) Oversteps_1—23 box set has a set of 23 postcards each with a different circle from the Oversteps album project artwork. Every surface of every format (covers, inner sleeves, labels, onbodies etc) had a different circles (as did every item of merch, every ad, every poster etc). the 23 circles featured are from the music packaging.
The box set compiles the artwork into a format including complete sets of Ae artwork unavailable elsewhere together.
The prices are based on an approximate price of under £2.00 per postcard plus collectors box — you can keep the box set for yourself as a collectors edition, or you can send the postcards individually to friends etc. The cards are not available individually.


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WWE announced the following on the role, noting that Charlotte will be playing a villainous character:
Charlotte Flair joins the cast of "Psych: The Movie"- Below are Birdie Joe's first official videos for The Bella Twins' YouTube channel. Brie Bella noted that she will be documenting more of the ups & downs of motherhood and the "Danielson lifestyle" in upcoming videos. The second video shows Brie breastfeeding Birdie Joe backstage at this week's SmackDown in Phoenix.
Four-time Raw Women's Champion Charlotte Flair appears in "Psych: The Movie" this December, joining the likes of John Cena, The Miz, The Bella Twins, Big Show, Stacy Keibler and Mickie James on the growing list of WWE Superstars to be part of the USA Network franchise.
The film stars original "Psych" cast members James Roday, Dule Hill, Timothy Omundson, Maggie Lawson, Corbin Bernsen and Kirsten Nelson. As first reported by TV Guide, The Queen will play a villainous character named Heather Rockrear.
"Psych: The Movie" debuts on USA Network this December. For more info and to watch Charlotte's video announcement of her exciting role, head over to TVGuide.com.
- Paul Heyman and his Looking4Larry agency brought their #HustleBootyTempTats social media brand to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas last year, doing photoshoots and other appearances with various bikini models and social media personalities. They started with weekend appearances but are now working with the hotel & casino weekly. Heyman recently invited Summer Rae to work with the brand after her appearance on the Maxim Hot 100 list and as seen below, Summer took Heyman up on the offer and did a shoot this week:
It's 109 degrees in Las Vegas ... and #YourHumbleAdvocate is representin' in a #TomFord suit with #Brioni tie. @HardRockHotelLV @WWE pic.twitter.com/v6ZadTEsJZ— Paul Heyman (@HeymanHustle) July 6, 2017
I LOVE THIS!! @HeymanHustle PLEASE become @RealSummerWWE's advocate upon her return!! pic.twitter.com/rf1ddwVnO5— Hunter Hensley (@xBlackStarPunkx) July 6, 2017


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This piece is my response to the devastation of boreal forest, wetlands, rivers and a way of life for people in Canada's Northern territories due to the tar sands industry.
This piece is a site specific installation created for a solo show at Winsor Gallery, Vancouver, Canada 2010. It was my intention in this piece to speak to deeper issues underlying my painting practice and to give voice to the inner conflict I experienced in the wake of the Gulf oil spill as well as emerging concerns over practices of oil extraction in my own country.
Heart Wide Open | Colour, Gesture, and Buddhist Influence: Gabryel Harrison's Poems for the Earth
by Alex M.F. Quicho
Gabryel Harrison works in an old fishery building on the banks of the Fraser River, tucked away in the bucolic landscape of aged houses and stables that make up Vancouver's Southlands. The decision to work out of the city, but still within arms' reach of it, is one that seems to possess those artists whose spiritual connection to their materials calls for quietude in their outer life: Jackson Pollock's chilly outpost in the Hamptons comes to mind. Here, she stocks the woodstove, stretches and sands her canvases, and tends to the bees that huddle in the small apiary at her doorstep. Time passes more slowly. The surrounding landscape, in its wintertime browns and greens, surfaces in Harrison's work: the slow glint of the moving river, the thatch of tall wetland grasses, the eagle-feathers that occasionally lie scattered like small treasures.


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Filed under: Favorite Longreads | Tags: edward stratemeyer, hardy boys, longreads, mildred wirt benson, nancy drew, reading, writing
Check back
every on occasional Wednesdays for a link to a new longread. Your thoughts on this week's read, and suggestions for future articles and essays, are always welcome!
When I was eight or nine years old and learned that Carolyn Keene wasn't the writer of Nancy Drew – that Carolyn Keene was, in fact, a name stamped on books written by a number of ghost writers – I was crushed. Briefly, I became suspicious of my other favorite series. Was Ann M. Martin not a real person? How about Francine Pascal?
I got over it in about a day, because I loved the Nancy Drew stories. What I most loved about them was that they seemed to never end. Whether I examined my reasoning or not, I came to accept that Carolyn Keene wasn't a real person because the number of writers working on the Nancy Drew books gave me so much more reading material than a single writer ever could. I could read the old yellow hardcover books, the newer trade paperbacks (whose numbers began where the hardcovers' left off), the mass market editions following Nancy through mysteries + romantic entanglements (The Nancy Drew Files) and college (Nancy Drew on Campus).
Enter Meghan O'Rourke's fun article, "Nancy Drew's Father," which is about not Carson Drew but Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of the syndicate that published the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, among others. O'Rourke does a great job of contextualizing Stratemeyer's success in producing these books, looking both at the company's workings and at the social changes that left a space for inexpensive hardbacks children would want to buy with their own money. The popularity of the syndicate's books is hard to believe.
In 1926, ninety-eight per cent of the boys and girls surveyed in a poll published by the American Library Association listed a Stratemeyer book as their favorite, and another survey showed that the Tom Swift books, which the syndicate launched in 1910, were at the top of the list.
Clearly there was a need and desire for the sorts of books Stratemeyer produced. As anyone familiar with the uproar over James Frey's syndicate knows, it's hard to feel entirely comfortable with the treatment of novels like any other assembly line product. Stratemeyer's books fascinate especially because some of them have lasted so long. It's hard for someone like me, who grew up reading the Nancy Drew books, to imagine a day when they're not being devoured by children. (To my readers who have children: do they still like these books?)
The Nancy Drew books had a clear house style, and the writers were tasked with filling in the details of the plot outlines provided them by Stratemeyer, producing books that would make a literary critic shudder but thrill legions of young readers.
Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and a basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who, for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the thing up and—slam-bang!—send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length; the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb "said" with "exclaimed," "cried," "chorused," and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter—usually framed as a question or an exclamation.
It seems to me that Stratemeyer got something right in the characters he was offering readers. Nancy Drew was someone a young reader could look up, could aspire to be, but she wasn't necessarily someone a mother or father would want their child turning into, despite her good manners.
I'm curious, if you grew up reading the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books: when did you figure out that Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon weren't real people, but pen names? Did that change the way you read the books, or not matter at all? And do you, like me, still hold that dream of writing as Carolyn Keene, despite the horrifyingly low pay and lack of creative freedom?
Read Meghan O'Rourke's "Nancy Drew's Father"
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Filed under: Chick lit, Literary Fiction, Ways of Reading | Tags: baby proof, book reviews, books, chick lit, emily giffin, heart of the matter, literature, love the one you're with, reading, something blue, something borrowed, why we read
As a reader who's been known to rail against "chick lit" as a worthy genre (this despite my weakness for the film equivalents of the books), it is with some shame that I admit I spent eleven full days doing little but reading the oeuvre of Emily Giffin. I know, I know; the distanced tone I'm trying to take here doesn't exactly fit with the fact that I spent a week and a half devouring her books, forgetting to shower until nearly 4 PM every afternoon (this being when my water goes out), and littering my talk of Albania after the fall of Communism* with references to Giffin's characters.
I gave Something Borrowed and Something Blue their own reviews on the blog. I was surprised, and really pleased, by how much I enjoyed the two books. Reading them, I felt like I was watching TV – but a clever show, one that delved effectively and sometimes movingly into its characters' psyches. I might have felt a little ill by the time I finished the books, but that was as much due to the speed with which I flipped pages on the Kindle (I never knew you could tire out a thumb…you can) as to the content of the books. Rachel and Darcy weren't always likeable characters, but I was able to maintain a certain admiration for them because they were both women with a focus on their careers and on bettering themselves, regardless of what dudes might be hanging around them. Rachel may have been the more sympathetic of the two (mainly because it's so easy to see myself in her; she lives in a crummy studio apartment, hates her job, and for most of her thirty years is a total failure, romantically speaking**), but both women were so carefully drawn by Giffin that it was hard not to be sucked in by their romantic plights.
As I kept reading Giffin's works – the other three being Baby Proof, Love the One You're With, and Heart of the Matter – they began to blend together. Also, I began to suspect that my constant queasiness wasn't only the result of my sore thumb and inability to tear myself away from the novels long enough to head out on milk and cereal and water runs, but of the novels themselves. The freshness that marked Giffin's first two novels mostly disappears in her later works. The women in them still feel real, and they're not bad people to spend a few hours with, but the situations Giffin was writing about seemed increasingly contrived.
Love the One You're With is probably the best of the bunch, following a recently married woman who runs into her first love on the street, then attempts to negotiate her feelings about this man (who suddenly seems to want her, and care about her, in a way he never did while they were together) and about the compromises she has to make as part of a married couple. In Baby Proof there's the seemingly well-adjusted and committed married couple who fall apart, and push through the quickest divorce on record, after the husband inexplicably decides that after over thirty years of not wanting children, he does, and becomes kind of an asshat when pushing his wife to want a baby as well. Heart of the Matter is unique among Giffin's novels for alternating chapters between two women, but the event on which the plot hinges – that the six-year-old son of one of these women falls into a campfire while at a sleepover, somehow managing to burn one side of his face and the opposite hand badly enough that he has to stay over a month in the hospital, and return for repeated follow-up surgeries – is shaky and hard to trust.
I think what it was, though, wasn't so much what was happening in these novels, as what Giffin's women began to look like. She has the habit of bringing former characters back in minor walk-on roles, presumably to allow her readers the pleasure of seeing where everyone wound up years later. (Not unlike the lame epilogue J.K. Rowling tacked on to the final Harry Potter book.) Rachel, Darcy, Ethan, Dex – all these characters from earlier books appear unreasonably happy and well-adjusted when Giffin reintroduces them, and this in some essential way cheapens their earlier stories by suggesting that after a few emotionally wrenching months, they are able to settle down to uninterrupted happiness. There's the fact, too, that Giffin seems to take some pleasure in removing her women from the workforce. Miserable as Rachel was at her job in Something Borrowed, it's unpleasant (at best) to see her reappear as a contented housewife, hanging out with the kids while Dex is at his high-powered job.
When Giffin writes about her later characters, though, they often struggle with these decisions about work that Rachel apparently has made so easily. Ellen of Love the One You're With attempts to give up her New York home and career (and, yeah, another thing about Giffin – she gushes about New York like nobody's business – kind of cheap, but also appealing to someone like me who sometimes gets mopey and misses the States on rainy days) to live with her husband Andy in Atlanta, Georgia, but fails miserably as she realizes that she isn't happy in the life that Andy is happy with, or that Andy's sister and her best friend is happy with. Tessa, of Heart of the Matter, has given up her job as an English professor to stay home with her children, and the degree to which she feels trapped by her decision is suffocating to the reader as well as the character.
If I read these books for escapism – and what else was I reading them for? – I have to wonder if I preferred Giffin's earlier books because they were about lives I could better imagine for myself. These were women who were a few years older than me, who were making decisions (about where to work, where to live, who to love and who to settle for) that I can see myself making when I am having my version of Rachel's thirtieth birthday party. Giffin's other characters, though, are all a bit too far from me; it's not that their lives are too good for me to imagine at this stage of my life,*** but that their lives are so far from anything I ever want to imagine for myself. If I was reading Giffin's novels to escape from the two weeks of rain Tirana saw (seriously. My entire apartment was leaking by the time it let up), the last thing I wanted was to escape to a stifling world of talking with four-year-olds and debating the best way of getting kids into the private preschools that would make their future. Part of me admires and appreciates that Giffin's characters have changed over time, and that she is not simply writing variations on the same story, told by the same few characters, again and again. But the rest of me – let's be honest, the bigger part of me – wants exactly that of Giffin. As well-read and culturally advanced as I may claim to be, it turns out that sometimes what I really want is the literary equivalent of Knocked Up**** – a story that I can turn to, again and again, with thanks for its repetitive qualities.*****
* To make myself feel cultured, I
allowed forced myself to read Albanian history as a counterpoint to the hundred pages of chick lit I was reading an hour.
** I should here mention that I actually live in a very nice apartment and have a jealousy-inspiring job (to sit around reading about Albania, and sometimes writing about Albania, with regular walking breaks), so what Rachel's life really reminds me of is when I was 22, living in a poorly placed and tiny apartment in Philly, with a not-exactly-dream-job job.
*** Being a 26-year-old fortunate enough to have lived abroad for coming up on three years, but with no prospects on the husband or baby fronts.
**** Which I have seen, probably, over twenty times by now. It is almost time for me to watch it again! And let me add, here, that one of my dream jobs is to one day be a writer for Judd Apatow's movies. How to achieve that?
***** With Knocked Up gaining those "repetitive qualities" (I am being so honest today) mostly…okay, entirely…because I've seen it so many times.
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Filed under: Story Sundays | Tags: FRiGG, keeping susie whole, literature, matt getty, reading, short stories, story sunday
Story Sundays is a weekly feature at Fat Books & Thin Women. Always short stories, always ones available online for free.
Matt Getty's "Keeping Susie Whole" is such a gorgeous and strange read. At first the central image of this story, that of a girl literally coming apart when she's upset, seems little more than a clever conceit. As the story continues, though, it becomes far more, a meditation on what it is to be a parent, to want something for a child, and to watch that child fail to meet unexpressed expectations and in time find her way to some private understanding of her self.
Really, what is there to say about the story? It opens with an image that seems, again, a play, but Getty never stops developing Susie, her relationship with her parents, and the ways she comes apart.
Susie was two when parts of her body started falling off. At first it was minor—fingertips, earlobes, the pinky toe on her left foot. Sheila and I would find them lying around the house, discarded, collected in small piles like forgotten toys, bits of cereal she'd spilled from the high chair.
What I like so much about this story is the very honest way Getty's characters shift in their attitudes and reactions towards Susie coming apart, and the ways that even those comings apart change over time. Susie, Susie's husband, and her mother and father, shift between accepting and promoting her gift, and wanting to keep it something hidden within the confines of their home, or tamped down altogether. And the early images of the narrator and his wife trying to fit Susie back together are simply remarkable.
Often, Sheila had to pin her shoulders as I struggled to snap her legs back into her hips. Other times she sat on Susie's feet as I pieced her face back together, eyebrows furrowing angrily as soon as I pressed them down, lips curling into a frown as soon as I pinched them back over the edges of her mouth, tongue thrashing about as soon as I'd anchored it back into her throat, giving voice to screams that made the hairs on my forearms stand up.
"Mine!" she shouted. "My face. No! No want face. Leave me alone. My face!"
A clever and moving story.
Read "Keeping Susie Whole" online
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Literary Fiction | Tags: albania, book reviews, books, gjirokastër, ismail kadare, lit, literature, reading, WWII
Ismail Kadare's Chronicle in Stone follows a southern Albanian city, Gjirokastër, through the occupations of the Second World War. Kadare, who grew up in Gjirokastër, offers as narrator a boy slightly older than Kadare himself at the time of the events he writes about. Although the narrator offers little real understanding of the war or the occupations, or of what these things mean for his town and for Albania, in its place he gives a certain personhood to the city itself. Chronicle in Stone is divided into chapters, featuring the boy's first-person narration, and of pages between those chapters composed of either anecdotes from the boy or selections of the local papers. These selections from the papers at times offer the reader a way of better understanding and placing the events the boy writes about, but even without them the novel would be one notable for the ways Kadare views history as almost a part of the landscape, and that landscape as having a selfhood all its own.
Time and again Kadare writes of the life the city holds. Although it would be hard to think of the Albanian mountains as offering any tenderness, over the novel's course the city begins to take on a sympathetic cast, appearing not so much harsher than the people living in its confines, despite Kadare's early description of the city and its people.
Everything in the city was old and made of stone, from the streets and fountains to the roofs of the sprawling age-old houses covered with grey slates like gigantic scales. It was hard to believe that, under this powerful carapace, the tender flesh of life survived and reproduced.
Kadare's prose manages to be both solemn and lighthearted, shifting easily from these moments of almost ecstatic description to jokes and off-color observations. Although the novel has been translated twice – from Albanian to French, from French to English – the translator, David Bellos, has done an admirable job keeping intact the text's unique style and description. See the continuing description of Gjirokastër:
It was a slanted city, set at a sharper angle than perhaps any other city on earth, and it defied the laws of architecture and city planning. The top of one house might graze the foundation of another, and it was surely the only place in the world where if you slipped and fell in the street, you might well land on the roof of a house – a peculiarity known most intimately to drunks.
Yes, a very strange city indeed. In some places you could walk down the street, stretch out your arm, and hang your hat on a minaret.
Gjirokastër during the Second World War is marked both by its occupations – with Italian, Greek, and German soldiers changing places so often and quickly that residents sometimes wake to find a new occupying force has moved into place – and by the growing forces of Communism. Enver Hoxha, the man who would make himself as Albania's dictator for forty years (entirely shutting the country off from the outside world, so that the only televisions and cars were owned by the State), came from Gjirokastër, and he and his partisan forces receive some attention near novel's end as the city's young men and women join the partisans in the mountains.
The narrator's version of these events, again, are curiously limited. This is a boy who never ventures out of the city, who early on questions, "What were the villages like? Where were they and why didn't we ever see them? To tell the truth I didn't really believe the villages existed." The world he describes in Chronicle in Stone seems formed as much by his reading of Macbeth as by the war; the city, and all the inanimate objects in and around it, take on their own personalities and reasoned actions in our narrator's eyes. When the occupying forces build an air field outside of the city, the boy writes lovingly of one of the planes:
Only the big plane was free of all suspicion. Even if all the other planes were evil, my plane couldn't be. I still loved it just as much. My heart swelled with pride when I saw it lift off the runway, filling the valley with its impressive din. I especially loved it when it came back exhausted from the south, where there was fighting.
Even memories and sentences take on a physicality, suggesting some sense of being:
Bits of memory, fragments of sentences or words, splinters of trivial events swarmed about, shoving and catching one another by the ear or nose with a brusqueness sharpened by the speed of my steps.
This sentence echoes an earlier one, when the boy is still reading a borrowed copy of Macbeth. It's the sense of the action contained within the book's covers that in time seems to spill out into the boy's world, rendering everything in it worthy of note and suspicion, down to the neighbor who regularly carries cabbages (reimagined as human heads) past the boy's house. The boy views the book with an absolute wonder that in time encompasses everything in his world.
I couldn't get to sleep. The book lay nearby. Silent. A thin object on the divan. It was so strange … Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices, nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The h's, r's, o's, t's gallop over the page. They gallop together to create a horse or a hailstorm. Then gallop away again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a ghost. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. Without end.
That is the same sense that emerges from the novel as a whole. Not of a story without end, but of a place without end. As the occupying forces move in and out, as the partisans become a part of daily conversation, the city sustains itself, carries on without end. There is a tremendous, indescribable beauty to the life Kadare has given his city in this novel, to the way even a war can seem a bit player next to the city's life. Kadare doesn't just offer beauty, of course; his description can veer sharply, shockingly, in the other direction, as when one character is shot while eating and "[m]orsels of half-chewed meat mingled with blobs of Azem's brain as they rained down together onto the low dining table."
Chronicle in Stone is a gorgeously imagined and written novel. The strength of the narrator and the ways he considers his world will stay with you long after you return the book to your shelf, as will Kadare's Gjirokastër, improbably holding strong to its mountainside perch, guarding its inhabitants but with little care of the world surrounding it.
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Filed under: Favorite Longreads | Tags: albania, blood feuds, kanun, longreads, scott anderson, shkoder, the curse of blood and vengeance, theth
Check back
every on occasional Wednesdays for a link to a new longread. Your thoughts on this week's read, and suggestions for future articles and essays, are always welcome!
I've been holding off on posting about Scott Anderson's "The Curse of Blood and Vengeance" for a few months now, because of the risk of reasserting or reaffirming some of the stereotypes about Albania. This is, to say it early and just one time, a beautiful country – one not without its problems, but home to some of the most welcoming people I've ever met. Anderson's article about Albanian blood feuds, published about thirteen years ago, gives a glimpse of northern Albania, and of traditional blood feuds, that makes for compelling reading. It is also a picture of Albania that is far different from the Albania of today. While the country has its problems – with building infrastructure, with education, with corruption – I doubt anyone would now describe Albania as "an economic ruin, its government is largely theoretical," as Anderson does in his article.
Anderson considers not only the question of blood feuds in Albania, but the question of what causes violence in the Balkans.
What is it about the Balkans that so defeats all efforts to calm them? In searching for an answer, observers have naturally focused their greatest attention on the succession of conflicts that have torn apart the former Yugoslavia. And in so doing, they have tended to conclude that the Balkans are singularly riven by centuries-old ethnic and religious hatreds — that these are people, or better, groups of people, who simply can't live together.
Rather than labeling Balkan violence the inevitable result of religious schisms, Anderson considers the issue from the city-village divide. He relies heavily on the idea of the kanun as the guiding force behind the blood feuds; as he writes:
…many Albanians […] once again openly embrace the traditional laws and loyalties of the village. These are spelled out in the kanun (pronounced ka-NOON), a book of rules and oaths. By the dictates of the kanun — there are actually several versions, most of which came into being centuries ago — one's primary allegiance is to clan and community, not to the state. In accordance with this allegiance, taking revenge in order to defend the honor of one's family is not only permissible but also a sacred duty. Of course, unlike medieval times, now that duty can be carried out with modern weaponry like assault rifles.
Anderson may rely too much on the idea of the kanun – as James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers write in The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans (I know, I know, I am dangerously far into "things none of my readers care about" territory) the kanun has essentially become an oversimplified lens Westerners can use when viewing Albania. The kanun may not be as wholly responsible for guidance of village life as Anderson writes, because during Enver Hoxha's Communist rule strong local power structures developed and were able to reemerge following the collapse of Albania's post-Communist government.
Anyway, back to the article! Anderson considers these questions of Balkan violence and what governs these northern Albanian towns and villages by writing about a blood feud in which a man was gunned down in one of northern Albania's larger towns, Shkodër. Anderson speaks with the families on both sides of the blood feud, and in doing so highlights some of the difficulties with these feuds – that they can go back and forth for years, as neither family is willing to abandon a "blood" after a member of their family has been killed. Anderson's visit to an Albanian man who negotiates ends to blood feuds is a telling moment, too, as the man describes having to bring the entirety of both feuding families together for a ceremony, to avoid the possibility that one absent family member will claim he is not tied to the peace settlement.
Anderson does an admirable job of reviewing Albanian history, from Hoxha's rule to the fall of Communism to the pyramid schemes that collapsed in 1997. This is an engrossing read whether or not you're familiar with Albanian history, and raises necessary questions both about the "Balkan mentality" and about the ties Albanians – that all of us, really – hold to family and community.
Read Scott Anderson's "The Curse of Blood and Vengeance"
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Nonfiction | Tags: book reviews, lit, mary roach, NASA, nonfiction, packing for mars, reading
Reading Mary Roach's Packing for Mars is like seeing the journalist version of my twelve-year-old self: Roach is endlessly curious, prone to digressions, and drawn to potty humor. This makes her a fantastic if sometimes frustrating guide through NASA's history, and training and testing processes. She alternates between making seemingly unconnected ideas and stories "click" into satisfying place, and leaving her readers with a mass of information on something connected to NASA in only the most generous of terms. Her habit of preceding some throw-off fact with "I read somewhere…" smacks of occasional laziness (just tell us where you read it!), but Roach always recovers herself through the sheer enthusiasm with which she attacks such topics as how to use a space toilet, and whether a Russian porn film was really filmed in zero gravity.
Still, there isn't anyone I would rather follow on a tour through NASA. Roach has an eye for the absurd and the uncomfortable, and appears to take some pleasure in noting how frequently her questions (about toilet use, sex in space, and so much more) are evaded. She provides a view of the astronaut's life that is sometimes startling for its divergence from the grade school dream. Astronauts, it turns out, spend most of their time not being in space – a disappointing discovery for someone like me, who maybe hasn't held close the dream of journeying to outer space, but who nonetheless never paused to think about how unromantic the astronaut's life is.
Roach's greatest discovery here, though, may be in finding the NASA employees who are as willing as she is to joke about the odder elements of life in space. She also has a special talent for finding the few worthwhile, gut-busting lines from transcripts that run for hundreds of pages, as when the Apollo 10 crew members find themselves plagued by some "floaters." (Seriously: shit, in space, does not always stay in the toilet or bag where it's been deposited.)
CERNAN: …You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of things. You can power down…And what's happening is –
STAFFORD: Oh – who did it?
YOUNG: Who did what?
CERNAN: What?
STAFFORD: Who did it? [laughter]
CERNAN: Where did that come from?
STAFFORD: Give me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air.
YOUNG: I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine.
CERNAN: I don't think it's one of mine.
STAFFORD: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.
YOUNG: God almighty.
[And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.]
YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime?
CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that – Here's another goddam turd. What's the matter with you guys? Here, give me a –
YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]…
STAFFORD: It was just floating around?
CERNAN: Yes.
STAFFORD: [laughter] Mine was stickier than that.
YOUNG: Mine was too. It hit that bag –
CERNAN: [laughter] I don't know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. [laughter]
YOUNG: What the hell is going on here?
Look, this space turd segment is, without a doubt, one of the greatest moments of Packing for Mars – I could not resist the temptation to quote it in full – and it highlights what makes Mary Roach such a fun writer. She knows no shame or boundaries, and she answers the questions we didn't even know we had. She mixes these (frankly hilarious) moments into more serious examination of all the things we don't know about space: what would happen to a baby conceived in space, how to keep the human body from deteriorating in zero G, how to handle multinational crews dealing with their fellow astronauts' cultural quirks, whether it is worth putting a half billion dollars into a mission to Mars that in all odds won't have any tangible results. Oddly enough, given the way Roach strips away many of our childhood images and myths of NASA, she imbues the organization with slightly more wonder than she pulls away. NASA is a bureaucratic engine, and one that perhaps takes itself too seriously; but even in this it offers us something new, as with the biblical instructions regarding sandwiches that can go into space:
The contraband Wolfie's sandwich violated no less than sixteen of the formal manufacturing requirements for "Beef Sandwiches, Dehydrated (Bite Sized)." The requirements cover six pages and are set forth in the ominous phrasing of biblical commandments. ("There shall be no…damp or soggy areas." "The coating shall not chip or flake.")
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction | Tags: book reviews, books, david mitchell, historical fiction, japan, lit, literature, reading, the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet
David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is such a detailed and well-crafted novel that it's hard, at times, not to feel you're watching a movie. Mitchell follows the titular character, Jacob de Zoet, as he moves to a Japanese factory town as a clerk for a Dutch shipping company. De Zoet has landed this job in an attempt to better himself and his prospects, so that at the end of five years he can return home and marry his sweetheart, Anna. Whether Anna feels Jacob needs to better himself or not, her father does. Jacob's work has, from the start, an air of the prison sentence to it – at least as far as his dealings with coworkers go.
Mitchell doesn't just follow Jacob, though, and it's his ability to move between characters and worlds that makes this novel such a remarkable one. Mitchell follows Jacob's travails as the hated assistant to a man who vows to clean up the Dutch company's work on Dejima (a factory town on an island off of Nagasaki) and get rid of employees seeking unfair profits; a Japanese midwife as she is forced to move to a shrine run by the Lord Enomoto, a fearsomely powerful man; and the attempts of a British naval captain, John Penhaligon, to rescue his career by taking over the Japanese trade controlled by the Dutch. Mitchell uses each of these characters, in turn, to look at types of power and how it is wielded. Penhaligon, for instance, hopes to both assert his own power over his crew and to declare himself a worthy captain when he arrives home. The longer Jacob is in Dejima, the more he realizes that his "power" is fleeting and dependent on a fickle superior. And the midwife, Orito Aibagawa, early appears to have an extraordinary amount of power and self-possession, though even this proves of slight value against Enomoto's wishes and her own desire to do right for those she lives with in the shrine.
As Greg at The New Dork Review of Books pointed out in his review of The Thousand Autumns, Mitchell exhibits some stylistic quirks that can impede the flow of the reading. The interruptions – characters talking over one another, characters' thoughts cutting into conversation, details of the world inserting themselves midway through a conversation – at times run on until it is hard to keep track of the original conversation. One meeting is broken up by numerous times:
'But what Yoshida-san proposes,' objects Dr Maeno, 'would require…'
A radical new government, thinks Uzaemon, and a radical new Japan.
A chemist unknown to Uzaemon suggests, 'A trade mission to Batavia?'
Yoshida shakes his head. 'Batavia is a ditch, and whatever the Dutch tell us, Holland is a pawn. […]'
Mitchell's style does sometimes prove a distraction, but at other times it affords a tremendous energy to the novel. These characters seem to live and breath, in their inability to censor either their thoughts or words. At other times, the sort of rapid-fire description to which Mitchell is prone provides a gorgeous backdrop for the characters. When de Zoet walks around Dejima, early on, it is almost as though he moves before an (very active) movie set:
In the garden, the cream roses and red lilies are past their best.
Bread is being delivered by provedores at the Land-Gate.
In Flag Square, Peter Fischer sits on the Watchtower's steps. 'Lose an hour in the morning, Clerk de Zoet,' the Prussian calls down, 'and you search for it all day.'
In van Cleef's upper window, the Deputy's latest 'wife' combs her hair.
She smiles at Jacob; Melchior van Cleef, his chest hairy as a bear's, appears.
'"Thou Shalt Not",' he quotes, '"Dip thy Nib in Another Man's Inkwell."'
The Deputy Chief slides shut the shoji window before Jacob can protest his innocence.
Outside the Interpreters' Guild, palanquin bearers squat in the shadows. Their eyes follow the red-haired foreigner as he passes.
Through scenes like this Mitchell gives us a view of the workings of the whole island, not just Jacob's small part of that world. It's these details, provided rapid fire, that make the story such an engrossing one. Whether or not you are interested in Jacob's early concerns with the trade mission, these descriptive sentences, sprinkled liberally throughout, offer a view of Dejima that is hard to resist.
As the novel progresses, Jacob becomes less a moving figure in front of the backdrop of Dejima, and more a part of that backdrop itself. He becomes involved, too, in the lives of Dejima's Japanese residents. Mitchell does this so carefully, so gradually, that you don't realize how fully Jacob has become a part of the island's life until long after he is.
Mitchell has so many parts of this story moving at once that some elements are left to the side after a brief moment as seemingly central elements to the plot. Even this seems carefully orchestrated; Mitchell may move away from certain storylines, most notably that of Orito and the shrine, but this has the feel, again, of real life. Some characters on missions we would expect to be vital elements of the plot are lost, killed, forgotten; but their missions and lives have ways of quietly reasserting themselves, later on, through different characters and at unexpected moments.
While it may seem at odds to say that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet reads like a movie, and that it reads very much like life, this is the only way I can think of it. In shifting between the vision of Dejima as a moving backdrop to the dull life of a shipping company clerk, and a vision of that same clerk as an integral part of life on Dejima, Mitchell makes clear the distinction between living somewhere and being a part of life somewhere. Mitchell has written a book that is at the same moment overflowing with intrigue (holy moly, is there a lot of that; and this review can't pass without a mention of Enomoto, perhaps best described as "dastardly" – one of the most fully and irredeemably evil characters I've ever read) and with the attempt to answer questions of how and where and why we choose to make our lives.
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AI to help researchers stop the decline of bees
AI to help researchers stop the decline of bees
Artificial intelligence and connected beehives could help stop the decline of the honey bee, with the launch of a global monitoring network to listen in to hives around the world.
Stuart McDill reports.
AI to help researchers stop the decline of bees
The global collapse of honey bee colonies around the world is causing widespread concern Now it's hoped big data and machine learning can help us understand why and help stop the decline In a world-first, researchers are eavesdropping on bees inside their hive - sending the data to the Oracle Cloud This colony in southern England is one of the first connected to the World Bee Project Hive Network with a series of remote sensors measuring temperature, rainfall, humidity and even its weight.
SIMON POTTS, PROFESSOR OF BIODIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY OF READING, SAYING: "What does a healthy honey bee hive look like?
It will have a signature in terms of the activity of the bees, the heat, the temperature and all those sort of things.
And an unwell hive will have a different signature and we can start to understand actually what constitutes that by looking across many, many hives in many, many different environments." A third of all honey bees in the US have died and England's bees are vanishing faster than anywhere else in Europe.
Loss of habitat, climate change; pesticides, pathogens and pests are blamed in much of the world - but not everywhere SIMON POTTS, PROFESSOR OF BIODIVERSITY, UNIVERSITY OF READING, SAYING: "So the real strength of this project is to give great knowledge in realtime to allow beekeepers to predict or get ahead of the game in being able to treat their bees in a way that will stop them going down the slope to being unwell.
And we cant really do that.
An experienced beekeeper will know the signs but many beekeepers maybe dont know all those signs and there can be beekeepers around the world that dont have access to that kind of knowledge so suddenly we have a chance to learn, to take this collective understanding from many, many hives and distil it into what are really the key indicators of health." Researchers hope the UK pilot scheme can be rolled out globally - generating huge amounts of data.
JOHN ABEL, PROJECT DIRECTOR, ORACLE CLOUD TECHNOLOGY, SAYING: "We want more and more data.
The better the data, the better the training which means at some point the human wont be deciding what the bee keeper needs to do with the data.
The machine will be learning itself.
And actually the volume we're looking at, the machine needs that volume of data to make sure its making the correct predictions.
We want quality of predictions as well as quantity of data to make those predictions." Ultimately, the World Bee Project Hive Network's goal is to share the knowledge in order to prevent the further decline of the world's honey bee populations.


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Many of us at Vancouver Coastal Health love pets and recognize the important role they play in our health and wellbeing. But not everyone shares our love of animals, some people suffer from allergies, and animals don't always fit well in our hospital's busy hallways.
Pets may be allowed to visit, but it depends on the unit and the hospital. Check with the manager of the unit before bringing in your pet for a visit.
Copyright ©
Vancouver Coastal Health. All Rights Reserved.


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From digital actuality to gamification to security techniques, libraries are utilizing the latest technology to have interaction patrons, improve privateness, and assist staffers do their jobs. One of many tech bracelet manufacturers also provides a free 24/7 operator who can relay an individual's medical data to medical providers over the cellphone. Nanomedicine Journal consists of abstracts of current research as well as many free articles. Her mission in schooling know-how consulting, as in life, is to empower academics to develop into their finest at digital literacy.
Columbus is attracting rising numbers of Millennials to fill high tech jobs as of 2016. Everybody ought to learn to code," as they like to inform us. Increased schooling is a bubble," as Peter Thiel has stated. Lots of the huge trends in know-how right now are a result of the proliferation of mobile gadgets around the world, venture capitalist Marc Andreesson instructed CNBC.
Successful in the tech area is now not merely a matter of understanding a customer want and utilizing a brand new expertise or channel to build a services or products value proposition to satisfy it. We'll match you with the certified tech talent you're lacking so your enterprise can reap the rewards these tech trends have to supply in 2017. Sadly, I assume as a result of technology has offered a platform for everyone to feed their minds with out tasting what they're consuming has lead to blind 'followers' of traits or beliefs which are boxed up in untruths.
In 2017 we'll see extra independent type options, folks-mover (think mini-bus and bus) and a cascade of deregulation in the nation. In 'homogenised' buying malls are all difficulties for physical retail to overcome. For instance, College of Michigan Library redesigned its hyperlink resolver interface in late 2016. Expertise fanatics and geeks flip to Wired magazine to seek out out about the latest traits in the tech way of life.
Now, our define isn't the precise demographic format—we did not take training or race into consideration for instance. These devices may routinely be set to silent in a meeting or cinema, offer a promotion to prospects as they move by a retail outlet, or a discount on a sluggish sales day. You elevate some very attention-grabbing pros and cons for on-line versus traditional schooling.


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Project Description
This deck extension was added to a Palm Beach canal estate. The extension has now improved the panoramic veiw of this water front estate and added value at the same time.
When building any extension, Gold Coast Building Inspector Constructions goal is to extend without considerable notice if any.
This is what makes us different from our competitors.


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Grant Review Process
The Banting Research Foundation Grant Review Panel consists of University of Toronto faculty members plus two additional faculty members from outside the University of Toronto. The normal term for panel members is three years, renewable once.
The Chair and Vice-Chair/Scientific Officer (SO) of the Panel, with the assistance of the Executive Director, review all applications for eligibility and assign the applications. The Chair runs the review meeting and the SO summarizes the panel discussion of each grant in a confidential report that is sent to the applicant.
Each panel member is sent a list of applicants and application titles and is asked to declare their level of expertise (high, medium, low or conflict) for each. Applications are assigned accordingly. Each panel member reviews approximately 12 grants in total, eight as Primary or Secondary reviewer and four as Reader.
Each application is reviewed by a Primary Reviewer and a Secondary Reviewer, who each complete a brief (1-2 pages) report, and a Reader who reviews the grant but does not write a report. The two reviewers use a scale of 0-4.9 to rate each application and provide an initial score:
- 4.5-4.9 Outstanding
- 4.0-4.4 Excellent
- 3.5-3.9 Very Good
- < 3.5 Not fundable
In addition, each Primary and Secondary Reviewer is asked to rank order each application of all applications they reviewed as Primary and Secondary Reviewer. Applications ranked in the top ~1/3 by both reviewers will be discussed at the Grant Review Panel meeting in order of the average initial rating scores, as well as any application ranked #1 by either reviewer. The other applications are not discussed but applicants receive comments from the two reports.
Applications are reviewed based on:
- Track record of the applicant and research environment
- Merit of the proposal and justification of the request
- Potential impact of the Banting Research Foundation funding on the research program
- The letter of support from the Institution is also taken into consideration
At the panel meeting, the Primary and Secondary Reviewers each declare their initial scores. The Primary Reviewer provides a brief summary of the applicant, the proposal, the potential impact of the funding, and their analysis of the application. The Secondary Reviewer comments on any points of disagreement. The Reader and other panel members provide additional comments. The SO summarizes the discussion and a consensus score is decided. Each panel member provides a confidential score +/- 0.5 from the consensus score, 4.9 being the maximum. The average scores are compiled by the Executive Director to come up with an overall rank order of all the applications that are recommended for funding to the Banting Research Foundation Board of Trustees. Funding is subject to approval by the Board of Trustees.
All applicants receive reviewer comments as feedback on their applications, with reviewers' identities removed.


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Cup. Tea. China.
Something about it
Reminds me of
Tea. Cup. China.
Not India?
Make it stop the mystery
Make it write a tragedy
Stories of secrets
Secrets of stories
Cup. Tea. Cup
Tea. Cup. Tea.
Something, anything
Make it into one thing
Make it stop
Bothering me
As I slowly drink it
And that is my non-rhyming poetic brilliance at the moment. I'm off to bed, I think. Happy dreamstuffits.


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|Version 2 (modified by Psih, 11 years ago) (diff)
My Ideas
just write down "Your" ideas here :)
- Add sections for variables. Idea is that you can group variables under one group name and drop them using that name by special function like xcache_delete_group($name) or set an expire time for whole group. Also if it is posible make nested groups (probably limited to 2 or 3 levels). By Psih.


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Source Naturals
Ultimate Ascorbate C (16 oz)
Ascorbate C is a natural and better form of vitamin C than ascorbic acid because it is pH neutral making it gentler on the digestive system. It is also more easily absorbed and utilized than ascorbic acid and provides key minerals which may aid vitamin C metabolism. Each ULTIMATE ASCORBATE C tablet and each 1/4 teaspoon of ULTIMATE ASCORBATE C Powder contain 1000 mg of vitamin C as a blend of five fully reacted mineral ascorbates. Vitamin C plays a vital role in collagen formation amino acid metabolism hormone synthesis and the body's immune system.
Suggested Use:1 heaping 1/4 measuring teaspoon mixed in water or juice as desired, preferably with a meal.
|Supplement Facts
Ultimate Ascorbate C
Serving Size:1/4 Teaspoon (Approx. 1345 mg)
|Vitamin C (from magnesium, potassium, calcium, zinc & manganese ascorbates)
|1,000 mg
|Calcium (as calcium ascorbate)
|34 mg
|Magnesium (as magnesium ascorbate)
|32 mg
|Zinc (as zinc ascorbate)
|3 mg
|Manganese (as manganese ascorbate)
|1 mg
|Potassium (as potassium ascorbate)
|86 mg
Other Ingredients:
Notes:If you are pregnant, may become pregnant, or breastfeeding, consult with your health care professional before using this product.
Do not use if either tamper-evident seal is broken or missing. Keep out of the reach of children.
Comments? Question?
Updated Mar. 31, 2016, about 3 years ago
Distributed or manufactured from Source Naturals. See more Source Naturals products.
Compare to these:


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N Wireless USB Adapter
F5D8053ak / {{blVariant}}
The N Wireless USB Adapter connects your desktop or notebook computer to a wireless network. Providing greater range and faster speeds, N offers an excellent solution for sending large files such as video, music, photos, and documents among the networked computers in your home.
Based on the 802.11n draft, N Wireless enables multiple receivers and transmitters to send and receive data using Intelligent MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) spatial multiplexing techniques which greatly increases speed, coverage, and the reliability of the wireless network.
Lifetime Warranty
Stream music
Share Photos
Enjoy online gaming
Surf the Web
Email and Chat online
|Network Standards
|IEEE 802.11n draft*
|Wi-Fi Range
|Up to 1,200ft*
|Security Features
|WPA, WPA2, 64-bit/128-bit encryption
|Max. Link Rate
|Up to 300 Mbps in 40MHz Channel Mode


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We are very proud about the meals at Nias Keyhole surf camp and have invested a lot of time and energy to ensure that our meals are healthy, plentiful and delivered in the most hygienic way possible.
Fresh fruit such as bananas, watermelon, apples or papaya is available for you to help yourself at all times or ask. Tea, coffee, fruit juice and bottled water is included in the Nias Keyhole surf camp package price and is available for you to help yourself to at all times all you need to do is ask one of our staff.
We generally serve breakfast in the balcony area as different menu every morning at from 7.00am to 10.00 am and it includes fresh fruit salad and various cereals such as muesli, corn flakes right through to bacon and fried or scrambled eggs, French toast, banana pancakes, omelets,porridge and jaffle/Hot sandwich. There is always plenty of fresh toast and as butter,jams, honey and vegemate.
Our lunches are generally served after guests return from the morning surf session. Lunch times from 11.30am to 1.30PM and are served in Balcony area.?The lunches change each day and you will generally not eat the same meal twice during your stay, we have everything from mie gororeng special, chicken salads, Keyhole triple decker sandwich chicken, fish burger,spaghetti bolognese,pizza through to enchiladas as well as mie goreng and traditional Indonesian Nasi Gorengs.
Dinner is the pride and joy of chef Santi/Mama and Renata and this is where it's no-holds-barred territory.?Whole grilled fresh reef fish, roasted meats, banquet style traditional Indonesian, mud crabs, lobster, curried fish, chicken curry potato, grilled fish, pasta dishes of every type, amazing potato salads, green salads, curry vegetables . Some of our well-traveled visitors claim the all foods and dinners at Nias Keyhole surf camp are the best food of any surf camp on the planet.
Generally a hand prepared sweet of some type. Santi (mama andy) and Renata they makes everything from ice-cream through to banana cakes, chocolate cake