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Tom Beckett: I'm interested in intersections, crossroads, points of connection and departure. Is there a place, for you, where poetry and philosophy meet?
Graham Harman: At times I wonder if they are different at all. This statement causes outrage for scientistic philosophy, with its insipid model opposing real facts outside the mind to arbitrary, decorative, poetic fictions inside the mind. I reject this scientistic model not for the "postmodernist" reason that everything is a poetic fiction inside the mind, but rather because everything is a poetic reality outside the mind. In other words, I don't see the real world as the brutal collision of physical chunks monitored by tough-minded researchers in white coats, cheered on by their philosophical sycophants. Instead, I see the physical world as riddled with cracks and fissures of the same sort that is generated by poets, and the great scientists know this as well. There is obviously something quite poetic about the ideas of Einstein and Bohr, for example.
We read lots of material during our education, but now and then there are books and essays that have the sound of doors opening onto strange new corridors. This is the special privilege of the young, and they don't appreciate it enough, not knowing how soon it will be lost. One of those moments for me came as a college freshman, eighteen years old, when I read an essay-length introduction to a book of poems by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset from his collection Phenomenology and Art. The seeds of my philosophy are in that essay, which I read before ever finishing a single book of Heidegger. Its topic is metaphor.
Ortega distinguishes between the reality of things as perceived, and their "executant" reality as just being what they are. The direct ("executant") experience of a toothache cannot be translated into any descriptions of it, no matter how detailed. Reading a 1,000-page Proustian novel about a toothache is not the same thing as experiencing that toothache first-hand. This point is now fairly standard among philosophers of mind who defend first-person "feels" against the hardcore eliminativists who want to reduce everything to objective third-person descriptions. But the important point with Ortega is that he did not limit this to human or animal consciousness. Instead, he says in the essay that everything in the cosmos can be viewed as an "I"– there is an "I box," an "I candle," and an "I star." Ortega was no panpsychist and didn't think that these things had feelings. He was simply making the point that nothing, not just conscious experience, can be fully translated into outward descriptions. The executant reality of things forever withdraws from access. The greatness of art, in Ortega's view, is that it gives us a special kind of simulated access to executant reality.
The essay is quite atypical of Ortega, and he never developed its themes any further. Most of the time he was a bit too obsessed with the mutual dependence of human and world. But in this one essay he touched upon a radical metaphysics that wasn't just interesting to my 18-year-old self, but deeply engrossing. For perhaps the first time, I felt myself in contact with a genuinely unexplored philosophical idea, and it seemed obligatory always to keep it in mind. The best essay I wrote as a freshman used Ortega's essay to interpret Paul Verlaine's poem "Pierrot." Only when writing Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), which contains a whole section on that Ortega essay, did I finally force myself to start putting my thoughts about it into words. That was nearly 20 years of incubation, and I reread the essay countless times along the way.
For me, art in general is a special way of breaking the bond between an object and its own qualities, and I believe it is now the central mission of philosophy to theorize the deformations and breakdowns in this bond. As I see it, they come in either four or ten forms, depending on how you count them. In this sense, aesthetics is first philosophy; aesthetics is not lipstick and jewelry worn by sober truths that can otherwise be stated as discursive propositions. Many literary critics already knew this, of course, but they tended to think that this was a special property of literature as opposed to science or philosophy (see Cleanth Brooks, for example). But in fact, not even science or philosophy are doing their jobs properly if they dish out nothing but straight literal propositions. The world is not made of propositions, but of animals, chemicals, sports teams, and bombs.
None of these things can be translated into words or perceptions without significant energy loss.
TB: The world is not made of propositions. Yet any person's experience can be conceived as being made of language. What is your sense of the limits of language in terms of your practice as a philosopher?
GH: The only limits of language in philosophy are the same limits found everywhere else– language cannot make the things directly present. The things cannot be transmuted directly into language. The attempt to set up rules for how to use language logically to refer to the real world rather than referring to mere illusions is hopeless. We need to be as inventive in our language as Picasso in his depiction of solid objects.
Different personality types dominate philosophy in different eras, as new needs come to the fore. The dominant personality type of recent decades has been the precise and assertive arguer who speaks clearly and likes to call people out on "nonsense." It's a personality that holds itself not to believe in very much, but to undercut the gullibility of other people's beliefs.
My view is that the era of this personality has now run its course, and has become a pestilence of sorts. What we need now is something more like the artist type, given to new ways of staging problems. We need to find the equivalent of "philosophy installations," whatever that might be.
There are too many calls in philosophy for clear writing, but rarely any calls for vivid writing. I agree that writing should be clear, but if this is your first priority, it means that you think the real problem with most philosophy is obfuscation, muddiness, evasiveness, and so forth. But the real problem with much philosophy is that it simply takes a position in some pre-existing trench war without innovating as to the terms of the problem. The result is an increasing supply of rational but boring assertions, not a fresh rethinking of the problem.
Philosophical language should be primarily vivid, and only secondarily clear. We should be clear when things are clear, but when we reach the edge of what is known, why pretend to know more than we do? I like a philosopher with a sense of when to use chiaroscuro. There are shadows in the world, and good writing should contain corners of shadow as well.
TB: I tend to read a difficult long poem—Pound's Cantos, say, Zukofsky's "A" , or Stein's Stanzas in Meditation—in the same way that I read a challenging philosophy text. I suspend any pretence of total understanding and forge ahead. I'm "studiously unprepared" to borrow a phrase from William Carlos Williams. I'm most engaged when I'm at least somewhat textually uncertain. I like having room for improvisational thought. But, you're right, what sustains me as reader in such situations is vividness. As, for example, your gorgeous invocation of Dante or of a giant ferris wheel in Circus Philosophicus. Among poets, some of us talk about the music of meaning. It seems increasingly that among the new philosophers, yourself and other "Speculative Realists," it is the chatter of objects that holds sway.
What is an object, anyway? And why should philosophy be oriented toward objects rather than language, social change, sexuality or animals?
GH: An object is a unified entity that has qualities differentiating it from all other objects. The majority of philosophies we see are attempts to annihilate most objects. This is done by those who want to say that there are no mid-sized horses, tables, and chairs in the world, but only tiny little particles or mathematical structures. But they fail in this effort, because larger-scale objects are not merely an illusory aggregate of the behavior of their tiny little components.
The other kind of reductionist works in the opposite direction. They say that there are no objects because objects are merely superstitious fictions posited as lying beneath whatever is presented to the mind, or whatever has real effects in the world. But they fail as well, because if objects were nothing more than their givenness to the mind or their effects in the world here and now, there would be no reason for anything ever to change. There would be no surplus in the present world capable of making things other than they currently are, just as Aristotle saw when critiquing the Megarians for saying that no one is a house builder unless they are building a house at this exact moment. (I simply disagree with Aristotle that "potentiality" is the way to solve the problem.)
Objects are paradoxes, because they are more than their subcomponents but less than their effects on other things. Objects live on the mezzanine level of the world. Or rather, there are countless mezzanine levels in the world, because a proton is an object no less than a horse is.
This makes some people worry, because they assume that this would lead to a wild proliferation of imaginary entities bloating the cosmos. But there is no problem here, since not all objects are real. If I conceive of some bizarre monster, it is no less an object than genuine trees and horses are. But whereas the trees and horses are deeper than any possible effects they might have (because they are real objects) and can act on each other even if all humans are dead, the same is not true of the monster in my mind (which Husserl called intentional objects, a term long since distorted to mean the same thing as "real," though it means exactly the opposite).
To answer your second question, the reason to focus on objects rather than on "language, social change, sexuality or animals" is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. "Language is the root of everything." Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and belief-systems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth.
All these other disciplines focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space.
TB: I began this interview wanting to pursue your ideas about language and the poetics of experience. Instead I find myself stuck on your idea of "philosophy installations" and imagining a room full of simultaneous translators amidst a giddy "carnival of things." Have you given any further thought to what form a philosophy installation might take?
GH: The closest we ever came to this in the history of philosophy was a strange manuscript by the young Leibniz in 1675, proposing a sort of carnival of knowledge. He mentions magic lanterns, optical exhibits, fireworks, and water fountains, along with gardens of medicinal herbs, laboratories, adding machines, and even including such sideshows as rope dancers, fire eaters, and "perilous leaps." Plenty of the activities at this circus would also be purely scientific, but always surrounded by the aforementioned carnivalesque entertainments, which Leibniz obviously took great pleasure in imagining.
If it were my carnival, I'd probably go about it a bit differently. For me, philosophy has a great deal to do with the tension between objects and their qualities, and with the various forms of breakdown in this tension. I would want exhibits that shed light on these processes somehow. Probably the easiest to envisage at this point would involve the "Heideggerian" sort of breakdown of environmental equipment when we least expect it.
My thoughts about this are rough and green, but given the increasing frequency of my contacts with artists of various sorts, it's probably just a matter of time before someone from the arts world comes and throws down the gauntlet and says: "we have backing for this, so what are your ideas?" And then I'll have to turn my energies very suddenly in that direction. It feels almost inevitable.
TB: I can't wait to see that eventual collaboration.
Meanwhile, at the end of Guerrilla Metaphysics, you wrote: "…although we have tried to undercut all claims for the preeminence of language in philosophy, it would still be important to know a thing or two about language even if it is no longer destined to play the starring role it has enjoyed for the past one hundred years." I took that to mean that you still have some issues that you want to work out regarding the role of language in philosophy. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on these matters at this point in time.
GH: Heidegger famously distinguishes between the "ontological" and the "ontic." The ontological is what pertains to being as such, while the ontic is that which is of relevance to specific beings.
What we saw during the very long Broadway run of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy was language elevated to an ontological role, with all philosophical problems reinterpreted as problems of language. Obviously, this is no longer allowed by object-oriented philosophy, which treats all objects as equally objects.
Nonetheless, our new ontological principle does not mean that all objects are equally interesting or important. We might say that language and aluminum cans are equally objects, but a philosophical exploration of aluminum cans is unlikely to bring much light into the world. Language, however, is an extremely interesting ontic topic even after being deprived of its ontological monarchy– just as Rome remains one very interesting city among others, even though it is no longer the center of the universe.
In this respect, language may still loom large in object-oriented philosophy even though it must be stripped of its transcendental-ontological constitutive power for everything else that exists.
TB: I understand that you're working on a study of H.P. Lovecraft. What instigated that?
GH: Most readers discover Lovecraft in adolescence, but I never read a word of him until my late thirties. My reaction to reading him was not quite immediate, but when I finally reached "The Call of Cthulhu" and also "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (perhaps the most underrated Lovecraft tale), the effect was powerful and lasting.
As the years passed, I found that I was rereading the best Lovecraft stories almost compulsively. And I found that he had little in common with what is usually called "pulp" literature. I saw Lovecraft not just as very imaginative, but as a literary stylist of the highest caliber.
Then, when the original speculative realist group started in 2007, we were astonished to discover that while there were no shared philosophical heroes in the group, we had all read and adored Lovecraft, even Meillassoux in Paris.
I wanted to share my enthusiasm for Lovecraft by someday writing a book about him. Thanks to the experimental spirit of Zero Books, the chance arose much earlier than expected.
The American University in Cairo has generous research funding available, and thus I was able to spend a large part of the summer of 2011 in Providence, Lovecraft's very formative home city, a place I had never been before. It's important to see the hometowns of authors you're writing about, I've found. You might not be able to put in words what you learn about the author from seeing the place where they were molded, but you can get a sense of the atmosphere– a glimpse of what they regarded as normalcy.
The atmosphere of Providence? Charming and a bit eerie. It's more quiet than I expected, and also incredibly hilly, at least in Lovecraft's part of town near the Brown University Campus.
Lovecraft is one of the greats in American literature. I don't think it's a stretch to put him in the same league as Poe, and I say that as something of a Poe-worshipper. And both Poe and Lovecraft are given too little credit as stylists. Everyone is in a rush to identify them as co-enthusiasts of "scary content." But what they really have in common is style, a certain way of hinting and alluding to make things more horrible than if they were directly stated.
Poe is the more polished high-literary figure of the two, but if Lovecraft is slightly more awkward at times, he makes up for it with a vaster cosmic vision than Poe ever attempted.
TB: China Miéville is a writer who emerges as a character in Circus Philosophicus. Does his fiction figure importantly for you too?
GH: I met China at a Lovecraft event at Goldsmiths College in London, just one day before the inaugural Speculative Realism event, and we've occasionally corresponded since then and I've met him a few other times in London. He's a well-spoken guy who makes a great impression. This may sound silly, but I met him without realizing how famous he was, so I asked him a dumb question: "Where can I find your books?" He answered graciously and humbly, but then I felt like an idiot on the way out of London when I saw his books all over Heathrow Airport.
I've read a number of China's books. My overall favorite is probably The City and the City, which uses a superb idea that someone should have come up with a long time ago. It changed my experience of daily walks, as I often try to practice "seeing" and "unseeing" people to imagine what it would feel like. But my favorite individual feature of any of the novels is probably the magnificent descriptions of music in his debut novel, King Rat. You wouldn't think that techno music could be described in words, but he pulls it off in that book. China has also written a treatise on international law with a strongly Marxist flavor, which is not as well known among his fans. He's charismatic, smart as hell, and I'm glad he's around. We're not close personal friends, but he did enjoy being put on an oil platform in Circus Philosophicus, which was a bit of a prank on my part.
TB: In the chapter on Humor in Guerrilla Metaphysics, you wrote: "In this book, we will have to bypass the topic of dreams, despite its obviously promising connection with two of our central topics, simply because a reading of Freud in terms of object-oriented philosophy would require more than a few pages." I'm wondering if you could at least provide a sketch of your approach to the subject.
GH: Allow me to begin with an anecdote. I didn't read Freud until my senior year of college, largely because he is one of those authors, like Marx, where you feel (wrongly) as though you already know what they're going to say, simply because they have permeated the culture. So, you grow up hearing that "Freud thinks everything is sex," and it sounds too robotic, and so you don't bother to read him. That was my own experience until I was 21 or 22 years old.
Then much to my surprise, I loved Freud. It was an immediate passion and a rather strong one. (Among other things, he was one of the best writers of the twentieth century in any genre, fiction included.) Along with the three works we read for class –On the Interpretation of Dreams and a couple of the case studies– I then spent the entire summer before graduate school reading pretty much nothing but Freud for three months.
But backing up to senior year, a gruff classmate of mine walked into my workplace on campus one day and asked what I thought of our Freud readings for class. I said I loved them passionately. His reaction was dismissive: "What? I thought you were a Heideggerian. What does it mean to say that a dream 'is' a wish-fulfillment?"
I didn't have a good answer to his question, and of course I did agree with the anti-reductionist sentiment behind the question. But I somehow felt there was something different going on in Freud from the reduction part of it. For me it was more the reverse movement that was underway in Freud: a system of translations, not of reductions.
An easy object-oriented critique of Freud would go something like this: "Last night I dreamed that I was a harpooner. But this dream cannot be reduced to a wish for mighty phallic prowess. Instead, it might also refer to a desire for adventure on the high seas, or to have a remarkable object of quest in my life analogous to Captain Ahab's White Whale. In many ways a harpoon is more interesting than genitals in the first place. Aside from that, the harpoon is a symbol resembling the trident, which through Poseidon is linked with horses and earthquakes. Indo-European anthropologists tell us further that earthquakes are connected symbolically with Such-and-Such and So-and-So, and these further symbols are more the meaning of the dream than any phallic connotations. Freud is wrong." And so forth. And all these critiques have been made many times, yet they somehow fail to make Freud uninteresting.
We would have to say not just that the harpoon symbol in the dream is irreducible downward to its libidinal causes and irreducible upward to its systematic anthropological interrelations. This is true enough, but something more is going on as well.
First, there is the fact that the "phallic" aspect of the harpoon is already an overly specific translation of a rather amorphous libido, which Freud knew can cathect objects in many different ways.
Second, it may very well be the case that the harpoon does serve as a kind of substitute satisfaction for whatever frustrated impulses the dreamer is undergoing. This idea of indirect fulfillment is what made Freud one of the greats, opening up a vast field of psychoanalytic study covering all of human culture.
But I would say that they are not just substitute satisfactions. They soon become real ones. If you become an ace harpooner on board the Pequod and begin to take real pleasure in it, perhaps your Freudian analyst in the morning will trace this back to some sort of compensation for organic inadequacy, and perhaps your Jungian analyst in the afternoon will tell you about the harpoon archetype (which I doubt even exists in Jungian circles; this is a made-up example just for fun). But maybe what is really happening is that an erotic wish has been transformed into a self-fulfilling love of the harpooner's career. And this leads me to a more basic idea that interests me in many different spheres.
There is a widespread tendency to think that if anything is moved in any way by ulterior impulses, then it must be entirely corrupted by those impulses. For instance, John Dean of Watergate fame came to lecture in Cairo six years ago. He was presenting himself to some extent as a hero for turning on the Nixon people and testifying against them in Congress. A rather cynical friend of mine said: "So what? He only did it to save his own skin."
To which I should have replied: "So what to you too?" The fact that something is guided initially by self-interest does not reduce it utterly to that aspect. For example, the initial reasons for St. Thomas Aquinas becoming a Catholic may have been something petty like the wish to please his parents and be treated as a good boy. Well, that hardly matters, does it? The origins of a thing do not always contain its truth. Supposing young St. Thomas wanted to please his parents, then enjoyed the praise he received during his studies, who cares if these were his original motives for extreme piety? Over time, it became something much more. We could say that the original incentives lured him into the profession, but then the profession became much more to him than the original lures.
To give another example, about twenty years ago I dropped by a co-worker's house after work. He had a number of ballet books on his coffee table, and in no way was he the ballet-loving type. I asked him about the books, and he candidly admitted that he had met a ballet dancer, found her extremely attractive, and was reading about ballet to impress her, out of purely sexual motives. He even chuckled about it in a way I found unpleasantly cynical.
Whether or not he succeeded with the young woman I don't know, but I'm sure he went nowhere in his knowledge of ballet. But what if he had? Let's say he had become fascinated by the books, forgotten the woman, and realized his vocation and become the world's greatest expert on Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." It wouldn't really matter how crude his initial motives were, would it? Aristotle is very clear about this. We become good by imitating good people, meaning that we're fakes and frauds in stage one, and become genuine only later. This is the main reason that it's unfortunately difficult to trust young people, because they're often at a stage of imitation or play-acting as a way of becoming the real thing, and you can never be sure if what you think you see before you is the genuine item, or just an assumed costume that will be reversed the next week under different impulses. Over time, we all become more and more who we are.
And so it is with desires, I think. The cynical approach would say something like: "Basically, all people care about is sex and power." Perhaps at some stage that is more or less true of everyone, but the lust for sex and power can be transformed by a kind of alchemy into a love of harpoons, Catholicism, or ballet. This isn't quite the same thing as "sublimation," which still assumes a kind of dualism, with the libido lurking underwater and ballet a pristine Other that provides substitute satisfaction. Instead, I would say that the libido is in the ballet, which isn't really sublimated at all, but simply a metamorphosis of the libido that has now become autonomous and self-contained.
The issue goes beyond dreams, and covers all transformation of one thing into another. I'm against the reduction of anything to its causes or foundations, but also against the idea that anything rises too far above those causes and foundations. A child can never be reduced to its parents, yet the child will always preserve a disturbing number of features and mannerisms from its parents. Do you ever cough and hear the sound of your father coughing, or recognize your mother's eyes when you look in the mirror? It would be like if you transmute lead to gold, but then the gold is still somehow lead at the same time.
To go back to the original anecdote, where my gruff classmate mockingly asked what it means to say that a dream "is" a wish-fulfillment, I would turn this around and ask: how does a wish turn into a dream? That's what I always loved about Freud: the fact that one thing always had the power to turn into another, especially if blocked or stymied.
TB: A final semi-articulate question, then. Where do you locate your hope(s) for transformation and change?
GH: In the avoidance of trench war, and that's what insight always means. There is a tendency to set oneself in opposition to a certain position and attempt to annihilate it, as if that were the work of thought. "If only there weren't so many stupid people who keep believing in irrational things like God, then everything would be OK."; "If only people would stop clinging to the pathetic illusion that a self exists, then we would make real progress." Look at the political sphere, and you'll find some examples of this as well.
But the key to overcoming trench wars is not to compromise with some watery hybrid of the two. This will always secretly favor one of the two sides. The golden example of such a gesture is correlationism, which claims to "overcome" the idealist/realist opposition, but is really just idealism with some defense mechanisms built in. "We're not idealists, we believe the self is always already outside itself in pointing at the world" (phenomenology); "We're not idealists, we believe in the Real as an originary inassimilable trauma" (Fichte, Lacanians).
No, the way out of the trench war is usually to adopt openly the "old-fashioned" side that is being critiqued, while finding some way to flip it completely into something strange. I think of Cézanne in painting, who amidst the impressionist revolution found a way to retrieve the solidity of objects without relapsing into academicism, and in doing so he paved the way for cubism. In philosophy I think of Leibniz, who amidst the general assault on substantial forms in the new physics, and the general assault on multiplicity in Spinoza (who has been a bit too much in vogue lately), revived substantial forms and the multiplicity of individuals. Instead of merely extrapolating from the general modern critique and pushing it a step further, Leibniz like Cézanne gave us an unexpected reversal. This is the only way to win a trench war, otherwise you're simply locked in a war of annihilation with an enemy defined as the evil that must be crushed so that things can turn out happy in the end.
Cézanne was really an impressionist, but he also understood what had been lost with the breakdown of three-dimensional pictorial space, and that forced him to discover an innovative way to render solidity simply because he had no other choice. Leibniz was really a modernist, but he had read Suárez like a fiend in his youth and understood how solid the Scholastics really were, and this led him to his strangely gorgeous retrieval of Aristotelo-Scholastic philosophy. These are my heroes: the people who look at first like throwbacks, but are actually more modern than the moderns, because instead of just tweaking daddy's nose, they also preserve the ways in which daddy was right, and thus go further than the more overt radicals.
And that's how it is with object-oriented philosophy, we hope. There has now been a long assault on objects, objectivity, essence, substance, and so forth. The cutting edge opposes these concepts and the supposedly gullible, oppressive patriarchs who champion them, and seems to think they are superstitions that must be put behind us forever. But history doesn't work by putting things behind us forever. It puts things behind us for awhile, and then they resurface in some non-archaic form suited to the new conditions. Who really thought that pirates would return as a major threat to the world, for instance? Who in 1965 would have guessed that political Islam would reappear on stage, at a time when the Arab world was in a socialist and secular phase? Who could have thought in 1646 that someone was being born that very year who would write great philosophy by retrieving the substantial forms, which modern thought was supposed to have exterminated? If you want to see the future, look for the supposedly naïve theories that have just been debunked, and try to figure out some futuristic way to modify them so that they would be feasible under the new conditions without being mere relapses.
And let me just add that I'm not sure how this would apply to the present political situation, which is one reason I've kept a certain distance from it (I'm against Badiou's conception of philosopher-as-militant, refreshing though it may be after decades of deconstruction). What is the truth here? Was Marx wrongly thought to have been refuted in 1989, and is now returning from the dead in novel and highly pertinent form? Or is it that the protestors, in letting their prefixes do the thinking for them ("neo"-liberalism), are missing the inner truth and greatness of liberalism?
There is undeniably a certain banality to the world in our time, a demoralizing commercial hustle. But I'm extremely suspicious of the near-unanimity that prevails in political views in world intellectual circles right now. The price of admission to these circles is a series of expected denunciations that reassure everyone that you're on their team. This is why I don't respond immediately to demands to provide a politics of OOO, because I suspect that I'm just being asked to provide the usual, predictable denunciations, just as if I were being ordered to wear a flannel shirt and beard stubble at a grunge music party. That's not intellectual debate, that's just group solidarity, and I don't care how good you think your group is– group solidarity is not a form of thinking.
For example, I'm writing this response from Istanbul, where I saw the 2011 Biennale yesterday. The theme was art and politics, and I was disappointed to find that all the political messages were exactly the same! Everything is America's fault, Israel's fault, capitalism's fault. So, is the answer really that easy, and all we need to do is join forces to fight all the stupid and greedy corporate interests that prevent the truth from prevailing? Maybe, but this smells too much like trench war to me. It looks too much like the very "failure of imagination" of which everyone is so quick to accuse the current system.
There's a wise old saying: don't become worse than what you're fighting. I would put a twist on that and say: don't become less imaginative than what you're fighting. This is the big danger for the political Left right now. I'm not interested in its moralistic self-congratulation, but only in what it can build. This is why I loved Žižek's speech at the Occupy Wall Street protest; he hit the spot and said exactly what needed to be said. Maybe this Left will be able to build quite a lot. We will soon find out, because they are probably on the verge of seizing the upper hand. What is now called neo-liberalism is a little over thirty years old: the California property tax revolt in 1978, Thatcher in 1979, Reagan in 1980. Like any way of looking at the world, it has turned into a robotic application of clichés and no longer seems to be up to the challenge. We are about to undergo a big Leftward swing. When that happens, let's see what people can do other than critique and oppose. They'll have about thirty years of leeway before they start to become completely banal themselves, and then we'll swing in the other direction again in about 2045, just as my own life is coming to a close.


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Astral Boutique in California and Vintage Style in trendy Tokyo
Sarah Deschamps and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Sasha Soukup is a very creative lady and if you visit Astral Boutique then you can feel her deep passion and artistic nature within the styles on show and the presentation given. Astral Boutique provides lovely vintage style clothes and accessories. Also, the impact of nature and aesthetics is clear for all to see within this fashion company. Therefore, while the Sierra foothills in California may appear to be distant from the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, in the world of fashion it is just a step away.
In recent years vintage fashion is impacting on the younger generation in trendy Tokyo and even in the Mecca of youth culture in Shibuya you will find vintage fashion. Also, in the smaller fashion districts like Nakameguro you will find the vintage style flourishing. This would certainly please individuals like Sasha Soukup because her company Astral Boutique caters for individuals who adore this type of fashion.
Sasha Soukup (http://www.etsy.com/shop/astralboutique) comments that "I have taken a winding road to end up at my happy home selling vintage clothing on Etsy. I always knew I was an artist, but for a long time it seemed impossible to blend my love of literature, film, dress-up, and magic into one "coherent" form. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I studied Cinema in college, worked in every strange job I could find in my 20s, studied Herbal Medicine, and developed my artistic life in musical performance. Eventually I could not resist the call of the Wild, and I moved to the forest in the Sierra foothills, in a very hippie-friendly community that is full of unique artists. I love my working life because I get to make magic and stories for a living, and sell clothes to happy people all over the world!"
Therefore, Sasha Soukup fuses nature, thought patterns, individualism, art, the environment, and other creative angles, in order to enhance Astral Boutique. In Tokyo you have companies like Grimoire, Hypnotique, Kinji, Panama Boy, Tarock, Cult Party, Qosmos, Kinsella, Monde Garage, Berberjin, Bubbles, and many others, which fuse aspects of vintage styles within the image of Baroque (Grimoire) or remain firmly within vintage fashion (Monde Garage). This creativity is in increasing demand and Grimoire which is based in the Shibuya area (near to Harajuku) is extremely passionate about their fashion designs.
Of course the trendy nature of Grimoire, which focuses on Baroque styles but creates individual designs, is clearly a million miles away from the vintage fashion of Astral Boutique. However, the connection is that past fashions have influenced their modern thinking and you can feel a connection with historical European fashion. Despite this, the beauty of companies like Grimoire is that their fashion is not only distinctive, but it is trendy in a special way and clearly this company is thriving.
The style of Sasha Soukup and her company Astral Boutique may be very different from some of the above mentioned companies in Tokyo. However, they all share an inner passion which is searching for something new but within the fusion of past fashion trends and designs. This in turn generates an individual style and creates fresh ideas which fit easily within "the many worlds of fashion." Therefore, many young Tokyoites are connecting with vintage styles and other types of products which belong to a different era but which continue to bless the modern world.
Sasha Soukup further comments that "I choose my vintage very carefully, based on timeless design, quality fabrics, and flattering color schemes. I follow current vintage trends, because they are fun, but also stock a lot of classic pieces that will never go out of style. I am a one person operation, and I do all of my photography, modeling, styling, customer service, and promotion myself! It is really fun doing outdoor photo shoots- I love the rural background for my clothes, especially because I carry so many pieces from the 1960s and 1970s "hippie" or "boho" days in California. The natural setting really complements the feeling of these special pieces. I love nothing more than hearing that someone has opened their package and fallen in love with the clothing inside- I think of myself as a channel for beautiful and unique vintage. It sounds funny to say that it is almost a spiritual thing for me, but clothing has a lot of energy! I like to keep it flowing, so I keep my prices very low."
It is extremely refreshing that you have fashion individuals like Sasha Soukup because just like the fashion company Grimoire in Tokyo, it is individuals and unique companies which are keeping the "heart of fashion alive" and this is essential. After all, behind all the commercialism are individuals who want to express aspects about themselves. This means that individual buyers who adore fashion can connect strongly with fashion companies like Astral Boutique because each individual item is based on passion and utmost care.
In Koenji which is an unusual fashion district in Tokyo you will see many aspects of ordinary life and people going about their daily life. However, amidst the mundane buildings you also have a flourishing fashion district whereby new designers are creating their own styles. Also, retro fashion is in huge demand and companies like Spank!s is showing another angle of Tokyo fashion.
The fashion district of Nakameguro is also blessed with companies which highlight vintage fashion, for example Monde Garage. Also, J'Antiques sells all sorts of different vintage products and if you shop around the old world will open up a new dimension.
Nakameguro, Daikanyama, Jiyugaoka, Kichijoji, Nakano, and Shimo-Kitazawa, are smaller fashion districts in Tokyo but they are enabling the uniqueness of fashion in this mega-city to shine. In truth, the beauty of Tokyo is that while Aoyama, Harajuku, Ikebukuro, Ginza, Omotesando, Shibuya, and Shinjuku, hog the limelight; it is the lesser lights which have enhanced the quality of life in Tokyo.
Takako Hotta, who is a stunning model and actress in Tokyo, simply adores shopping in districts like Nakameguro. One of her favorite boutiques is Monde Garage in this part of Tokyo. In her video Takako Hotta comments that "all the clothes are handmade" and this appeals greatly to this elegant and sophisticated lady.
This spirit is powerful and so is the importance of hand made products, individualism, and searching for something special. Of course, the trendy districts of Aoyama, Harajuku, Ikebukuro, Ginza, Omotesando, Shibuya, and Shinjuku, are all very special and you have amazing boutiques. However, for individuals who adore vintage fashion then companies like Astral Boutiques in California and Qosmos in Shibuya provide their own unique vibe and spark of creativity.
Returning back to the charming and sophisticated Sasha Soukup she comments that "I am lucky to have built a fan base of loyal customers from all over the world. The Etsy community is so friendly, and many fellow sellers and customers have become my "real life" friends! There is also an appreciation for artistic presentation on Etsy, and some people have even used my shop photos as templates for their paintings. It is a real artistic community, with inspiration shared all around."
Therefore, if you adore vintage fashion then please check the website of Astral Boutique because within each fashion item is an inner spirit of care and passion. Individuals like Sasha Soukup bless the fashion industry because buyers of vintage fashion, designers, people searching for old vintage styles, lovers of fashion, and so forth, all have their own part to play in order to maintain a diverse fashion scene. Also, the artistic images on her adorable website, highlights the vibrant spirit within Astral Boutique and this is most noticeable.
https://twitter.com/AstralBoutique Twitter account of Sasha Soukup
http://www.etsy.com/shop/astralboutique Astral Boutique (PLEASE VISIT)
http://www.style-arena.jp JAPAN STREET FASHION AND IMAGES
http://www.grimoire.jp/ GRIMOIRE
http://www.dokidoki6.com/ 6%DOKIDOKI
http://tokyofashion.com/ TOKYO FASHION IMAGES AND INFO
http://www.japanesestreets.com/ IMAGES OF STREET FASHION
http://www.lacarmina.com/blog/ La Carmina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYIqXrZ9G2Y Takako Hotta and Monde Garage
http://www.takakohotta.com/ Takako Hotta
http://moderntokyotimes.com/2011/11/28/tokyo-fashion-four-essential-websites-for-fashion-and-consumer-news/ MODERN TOKYO TIMES ARTICLE

subset: commoncrawl


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Great work Tyll. A complete report like this is worth 10,000 forum postings about mods. This consolidation of previous work and exploration of materials was very engaging.
My question would be: can one get good results with a notch filter? (Either in EQ or with a passive network.) Can you get closer to what you want from the HD800 with signal contouring or with acoustical modifications?


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Dominique Aurientis gold leaf hoops, c.1980's. Length 2 1/2"SOLD
For additional information, please email firstname.lastname@example.com or call + 1 323 655-0223. You may also visit us in person at Decades 8214 1/2 Melrose Avenue (2nd Floor) at Harper Avenue in Los Angeles, California. Please reference the description above, if calling or emailing. For email requests, kindly include your full name and phone number plus City, State, and Country from which you are contacting.


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The other night, when I had already finished cleaning up in the kitchen after dinner, something made me stop what I was doing and just take a good look around. I felt so content looking at the beautifully green avocados from my partner's parents' garden, a bunch of vibrantly red parrot tulips in a simple glass vase and the bright orange persimmons I had bought from a farm we visited recently. As I switched off the kitchen light I had a smile on my face just thinking of all the recipes I could use those persimmons for.
The following morning I picked up a bunch of mizuna greens from the farmer's markets. I love it's mustardy flavour and I thought it would go so well with the persimmons, the oranges and the pomegranate I also happened to have at hand. This is such a simple salad, but the fresh ingredients and the lovely combination of flavours makes it a perfect dish to serve at any occasion.


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Third time's the charm for actor Matthew McConaughey and his wife Camila Alves, as they get ready to welcome a new addition to their family.
The "Magic Mike" star took to Twitter Wednesday to share the news.
"Happy birthday America, more good news," the 42-year-old actor tweeted. "Camila and I are expecting our 3rd child, God bless, just keep livin."
U.S. & World
The actor and Brazilian-born model began dating in 2006 after meeting in a Los Angeles bar, and got engaged on Christmas Day in 2011. They are already parents to daughter Vida, 2, and son Levi, who turns 4 this week.
According to Alves, the couple initially was in no rush to get hitched.
"We've been living a married life for over six years now," Alves, 30, told ET Canada earlier this year. "We have homes together, we have family together, we have kids, we've built a life together. So we've been living a married life this whole time."
McConaughey and Alves exchanged vows on June 10 in an intimate ceremony at their Austin home.
Selected Reading: Us Weekly, Access Hollywood, ET Canada


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All together now: Awwwwww! What is it? Why, it's a muntjac! According to Zooborns:
The Red River Zoo in Fargo, ND announced the birth of a Muntjac fawn (pronounced munt- jack). The little female was born on February 24, to mom Jasmine. This Saturday, March 2, she weighed in at just 1 pound 10 ounces (.49 kg).
Native to Northern China, Northern Russia, Mongolia and Tibet, Muntjac Deer are among the oldest of the deer family - there's evidence of their existence from as far back as 15 to 35 million years ago! This exotic animal is also among the smallest; the average adult weighs only about 25 pounds (11.33 kgs). The males do have antlers and tusks which they use to fight for territory.


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Managing Director & Partner
Gabrielle Novacek is a core member and former leader of the Marketing, Sales & Pricing practice in North America at Boston Consulting Group. She is also a core member of BCG's Consumer and People & Organization practice areas, and previously served as the firms Global Ombudsperson.
Since joining BCG in 2007, Gabrielle has worked extensively in the consumer goods space, with a particular focus on retail strategy, sales and marketing organization and effectiveness, and brand transformation.
Her experience includes leading the go-to-market transformation for one of the world's largest food and beverage manufacturers, helping a Fortune 100 company transform its operating model, and realigning the organization of a global consumer packaged goods company.
Gabrielle has also worked with clients to create breakthrough brand-activation strategies, enhance strategic sales support capabilities, and develop key account strategies. In addition, she has deep expertise in postmerger integration and sales force reorganization.
Prior to joining BCG, Gabrielle received her PhD from the University of Chicago, where her academic research focused on the archaeology of the Middle East in the fourth millennium B.C. As an archaeologist, Gabrielle's field work took her to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey.


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Spring Cleaning Toxins from Your Home
Maylin Rodriguez-Paez, RNSpring is a time for, renewal, life, hope, and, well … deep cleaning, for some of us.
But rather than focusing on getting rid of that old sweater or TV set, perhaps you should consider approaching Spring cleaning in a different way this time around.
This year, why not make an effort to remove dangerous toxins from your home? We're sure you'll find plenty, since we're living in an increasingly toxic world.
Below, we'll go over a few ideas that may help you detox your living space this spring. Your body and home will thank you for it, so please give it a shot!
Be Picky When Choosing Cleaning ProductsYou know something's not right when the average household cleaning product will kill you if it's swallowed. Now, ask yourself, do things like this really belong in your home?
Here's a list of some "popular offenders" that is pretty shocking. And, by the way, this list only scratches the surface:
Common Toxins in Everyday Cleaning Products:
- Butoxydiglycol is linked to cancer and reproductive toxicity1
- Sodium hypochlorite "bleach" may cause severe burns and asthma.1 It's associated with cancer in animals.2
- Sodium Borate has potential endocrine disrupting and respiratory effects.1
- Ammonium Hydroxide may cause breathing problems and asthma.1,3, 5
- 2-Hexoxyethanol is associated with skin irritation and allergies, skin burns, and eye damage, and may cause central nervous system toxicity and kidney injury.1,4, 6
Clean with Natural IngredientsSince we've largely become a "germophobic" society, many of us have become convinced that we have to use caustic ingredients to clean our homes. In reality, this couldn't be any farther from the truth.
Look for products with naturally based ingredients. They do exist; it just takes a little bit of research.
Some brands favored by health enthusiasts include Bioshield and Ecover. Or, if you'd like to experiment, make your own cleaning products at home with the ingredients listed below.
But here's a little disclaimer. Based on my own experience, it takes a lot more effort to clean with natural ingredients. Don't expect stains to disappear with the spray of a bottle; be ready to do a lot of scrubbing. ;-)
Natural Cleaning Ingredients Worth Trying:
- Vinegar
- Glycerin
- Hydrogen peroxide
- Essential oils (tea tree oil, lemon, lavender, pine, spruce)
- Lemon juice
- Alcohol (vodka)
- Castile soap
- Epsom salts
- Baking soda
- Soap nuts
Detox Your Body by Supplementing With HerbsThere's no question that we all come across toxins on a daily basis. Why? Because it's impossible to live "toxin-free" in a toxic world.
So why not give your body's own detox system a natural boost? Here are some research-backed nutrients that can enhance the detoxification process of your own body.
Herbs for Detox:
What Works for You?Do you use natural cleaning products at home or make your own formulas? If so, we'd love to hear what you're using and how well they're working for you.
As you can probably tell by now, getting to a clear-cut "toxin free" cleaning regimen is no small task, so we welcome your ideas.
Got something to add? Please share it in the comments!
- Available at http://www.ewg.org/. Accessed March 15, 2012.
- Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1997 Dec 26;837:189-208.
- http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdb:@term+@DOCNO+5125. Accessed March 21, 2013.
- http://hazmap.nlm.nih.gov/category-details?id=3112&table=copytblagents. Accessed March 21, 2013.
- Available at http://hero.epa.gov/index.cfm?action=reference.details&reference_id=1060936. Accessed March 15, 2013.
- Available at: http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/r?dbs+hsdb:@term+@rn+112-25-4. Accessed March 15, 2013.
- Free Radic Biol Med. 2013 Mar;56:102-11.
- Phytomedicine. 2002 Dec;9(8):687-93.
- Nutr Res. 2010 Jun;30(6):435-40


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Volunteers join first 'Dirty Weekend' clean-up in Cambodia
Assistant Country Manager, Jo Walton, has been working in our Cambodian team after working for us in Sri Lanka for one year. Jo coordinated regular 'Dirty weekends' in Sri Lanka - a concept where a big group of volunteers generally get messy whilst helping one of our projects by cleaning, painting and numerous other activities. Here she tells us about the first Cambodian 'Dirty Weekend'.
The first outing for our brand new Projects Abroad Cambodia 'Dirty Weekends' is a clean up day at the Lighthouse orphanage just south of Phnom Penh.
The lighthouse orphanage is funded purely on donations from tourists, and as a result various aspects of it are in a terrible state of disrepair. The kids are happy, wonderfully welcoming, and mostly speak ok English, which makes a change! It is set in a spacious plot of land - there's a huge play area with volleyball net, a concrete classroom, a small farm that some previous volunteers set up, and recently a French couple has built a pig sty and donated them some pigs. The whole place is covered in asbestos, which the kids break up and play with it - a small girl came over to me the other day with a play dinner set with some dried fish (asbestos) and salad (chopped up nettles) and offered it to me. Nice.
Despite their huge smiles, some of the kids here look pretty grim. Many of them have rotten teeth, that cause them considerable discomfort, so we bought them soap and toothpaste and had some volunteers teach them the basics of keeping themselves clean. The older ones are pretty good at this, but some of the younger ones are more lax (understandably, how many 5 year olds do you know that don't have to be reminded to have a bath?). And so, one team of volunteers began the unenviable task of cleaning the children, laundering all the bed sheets and blankets, and doing locker inspections and sorting out the worst of their clothes to give them a scrub like they'd never seen before! I genuinely wouldn't have believed that their blankets were actually multi-coloured - the dirt was so engrained that I really thought they were all shades of brown and grey. I've also never seen the volunteers so clean either - none of them even had the traditional grubby flip flop marks!
Another one of the major issues here is that the pathway to the bathroom, via the pump where they get all their water from, is actually made of a pile of raised rubble and broken tiles, so the kids constantly cut their feet whenever they're running around, or every time they go to wash. Projects Abroad donated all the raw materials to build a proper concrete path over the whole area. After a bizarre start, which involved digging a big hole elsewhere and transporting more mud and broken tiles to the area (I don't know a huge amount about concreting stuff, but I'm not sure that's the way I would have started!), and naturally lots of tea breaks, Projects Abroad's Assistant Manager - Sophan, the volunteers and two of the orphanage staff got started.
Once they did, I'm amazed at how quickly it all went down. By the end of the day, they had a full path, about 1.5m across and 15m long, running from the play area to the bathroom, past the pump. The boys who worked on this deserve a medal! I've never seen people sweat so much and not give up. I think Sam can freely go around Phnom Penh this weekend using the phrase "I am all that is man" as much as he likes after that effort!
The final hurdle is the rubbish. Unfortunately, the Lighthouse is too far from the main road to have a rubbish collection. Since they're not allowed to dump rubbish at the main road for collection, and assuming that they'll start separating and recycling their rubbish is more than a bit hopeful, it was decided that the only alternative left was to burn it. Not exactly my favourite method of refuse disposal, being a bit of a green bean, but let's face it, this is Cambodia - anything else just isn't going to happen.
So, we hired a couple of guys to dig a nice deep hole for them to burn their rubbish in at the back of the farm area, well away from where the kids play. It was a slow start, I could be heard at various stages saying that in no uncertain terms, Cambodian builders were even slower than their British counterparts, and cursed myself for allowing myself to be talked into paying them by the day and not by the job. For the first few hours there was a single spade being passed around the four of them (despite the fact that there were three other spades leaning against the tree that they were sitting smoking under..), but once they got started... I've never seen anything like it! They basically dug an Olympic sized swimming pool out the back while I wasn't looking! The rubbish hole turned out to be in a handy location, as it dawned on the manager that it could double up as a run off for the pig manure from the new pig sty - not that I think they'll be making much manure for a while - they're soooo small!!
Even though we can't get them recycling, we can get them to separate out raw foodstuffs and leaves to make their own compost for the farm. Some old volunteers had set up a compost heap here, but due to the high winds blowing in plastic and all sorts, and the fact that it had no lid so the sun was cooking it everyday, it wasn't rotting down successfully. So we bought them three old oil drums with lids, that can be filled in succession, so that once the last one is full, the first will normally have rotted down sufficiently that they can empty the fresh compost, and start to fill it again.
This was by far the hardest part of my shopping list to get hold of (except possibly nit combs - try explaining what a nit comb is to a man who thinks you're already slightly bonkers without ending up in the hair accessories section of Olympic market doing impressions of small bugs, and demonstrating picking through someone's hair like a gorilla), so I'll have to admit I'm a little disappointed when they arrive and they're still half full of oil. Far be it from a bit of oil to get in the way of a Cambodian, and Sophan (who's in his element with all this manliness and I've never seen so excited - and excited is his default setting so we're going through the roof) runs off to get some laundry soap and a rag and proves to me that it can indeed (with plenty of water) get oil out of drums.
After a short tuition session on what asbestos looks like, why you shouldn't go near it if you come across it, and the doling out of heavy duty gloves and masks, all the volunteers take part in a final sweep of the whole area to remove all the rubbish that's blowing around the site. By this time, all the kids and their belongings are clean, the compost all separated, the path's well on it's way to being finished, and my lot are started to look more than a little bedraggled. So I collect everyone's Projects Abroad T-shirts (whose idea was it to make those white?!) to donate to my washing machine at home, which I don't think knew what hit it, and it's off home for a well earned shower.
All the volunteers who took part were taken out for dinner on us, to say thanks for all their huge effort. I'm not naïve enough to think that you can change the world in one day, but we put some basic things in place today that will hopefully encourage some grass roots change in the way they deal with their rubbish, made it safe for the kids to wash, and by getting the kids involved in the washing process in a fun way, hopefully inspired them to do it properly more often!
Thanks so much to everyone who helped out; Mr Lee from the orphanage asked me to pass on his gratitude to you all - he was really impressed by the way everyone got stuck in!


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Some people call this technique "gathering." Others call it "ruching." It's probably more accurate to call what I do on these pillows gathering, because ruching can also imply "pleating" or "laying in creases."
There are different ways to gather fabric. Many people swear by sewing machine attachments that do the job. I'm not going to rate the easiest or quickest way to gather fabric. I'm merely going to show you how I get the job done. I will attempt to give some basic steps on gathering techniques. I'll also throw in the process for how to make the front of the pillow above. There are a bazillion tutorials on the internet on how to put a pillow together, so I'll let the experts teach you how to finish the pillow by connecting the front of a pillow to the back!
There are two main things one needs to remember when gathering fabric:
1.) A good rule of thumb is to allow 2 ½ times the finished length for the piece of fabric you want gathered. A gathered piece of fabric that does not have enough fullness will end up looking skimpy and as if it has tucks rather than even gathers.
2.) Even, uniform gathers look best. It's best if gathers do not have folds of fabric mixed with flat fabric. The gathering should be evenly spaced.
For the front of the pillow, you will need the following cuts of fabric:
- Top & bottom gathered panels: Two pieces of fabric 4.5 inches x 45 inches
- Middle panel: One piece of fabric 8 inches x 18 inches
- Go to my tutorial for information on how to make the tattered muslin rosettes.
- Note: The two "gathered panel" lengths are 2.5 times longer (45 inches) than the middle panel length, which is 18 inches. If your fabric is only 44 inches wide, then just cut the gathered panels to be 44 inches long. One inch will not make any difference.
- All seams are 1/2 inches, unless otherwise noted.
Gathered panels:
1.) Sew a basting stitch (the longest stitch your machine will allow) along the length of both sides of each 4.5" x 45" panel 3/8" from edge. Don't snip the ends of the basting threads short as you will need them long in order to gather the fabric.
2.) Run another basting stitch along the length of both sides of each 4.5" x 45" panel 5/8" from the edge.
3.) You should have two 4.5" x 45" panels that look like this:
4.) To facilitate even gathers "divide" and mark the length of these gathered panels into four equal sections. See photo below. Mark quarter sections with a pen line being careful not to make the lines any longer than 3/8". (Pins are there to show the marked lines more easily.)
Middle Panel:
5.) Divide and mark with a pen the length of the middle panel the same way you did the gathered panels into four equal sections.
Gathering and attaching the gathered panels:
6.) On the wrong side of one 45" long panel, take the top two basted threads and pull those threads to gather fabric. Carefully pull threads, then ease gathered fabric toward the middle of the panel while holding the two threads tightly in your hand.
7.) Align the middle mark on your 45" gathered panel with the middle mark on your 18" middle panel and pin.
8.) Continue gathering fabric. Work one side of the fabric toward the center and then the other side of the fabric toward the center. Make sure all pen lines meet and pin. Short ends of panels will align. Gathers should be uniform and even. Pin gathered panel to middle panel.
9.) I always anchor the ends of my basting threads around the pin on the end of the fabric to hold it secure, like this:
10.) Change the stitch on your machine from the basting stitch to the regular setting. Sew seam 1/2" from edge. The needle should be running in between both basting lines.
11.) Remove 5/8" basting line which now shows on the right side of the fabric and press seam toward middle panel. Topstitch over seam and along edge of gathers on middle panel.
12.) Repeat Steps 1 - 11 with second 45" panel and attach to the other side of the middle panel.
As I said there might be easier or faster ways to gather, but this way creates luscious, full gathers, and I have found it to work well. Please let me know if you make any items using this technique. I'd love to know if the tutorial was helpful!
Get Your Craft on Thursday @ Life as Lori
Be Inspired Link Party @ Room to Inspire
Mother's Day Link Party @ Fireflies & Jellybeans
Get Your Craft on Tuesday @ A Silly Little Sparrow
Show & Tell @ Blue Cricket Designs
Boardwalk Bragfest @ Bobbypins Boardwalk
Woo Hoo! Wednesday @ Always Nesting


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A Trading Post! Not A Ranger's Cabin.stevejb68 on December 7, 2013 in collections, Holiday
I screwed up. I took out all my Scouting Village pieces this afternoon to set them up for Christmas. I was kind of excited because not only was I able to get all of this year's pieces but my local Scout Shop was able to find the piece I missed from last year, the lighted Ranger's Cabin. I thought I would be able to set up the whole collection!
I was wrong.
I discovered that I now own two Ranger's Cabins. I was not missing the cabin. I was missing last year's Trading Post! Arrrrrggggg! I should have looked in the cabinet one more time before I had the Scout Shop find me the piece I thought I was missing. I am rather upset with myself. I thought I would be able to post a picture to this blog featuring both year's collections.
I took a quick look on eBay and did not like what I found. People are selling the $12.99 Trading Post for $75.00 as a starting bid. The cheapest bidding I found was for $40.00, but there are three days left in the auction so I know where that is going. One seller posted a Trading Post as a "buy it now" purchase of $129.00. Sorry, but I am not interested in paying that much for one piece. This are not Dept. 56 Village pieces, you know.
Well, I guess my Scouting village will have two Ranger's Cabins. I will have to pretend that one is used as a trading post.


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DAVID Cameron has denied he will resign as Prime Minister if Scotland votes for independence in September.
The Prime Minister answered "no" when asked if would quit Downing Street immediately upon a Yes vote, insisting it was not his or any other name on the ballot paper on September 18.
Mr Cameron defended the decision to back a fair, legal and decisive referendum when the SNP was returned as a majority government in Holyrood in 2011.
Asked directly if he would resign, Mr Cameron replied: "No and I think it is very important people understand that because it is not my name or anyone else's name on the ballot paper.
"Of course, I want to see Scotland stay in the United Kingdom but I faced a choice in 2011 when the Scottish nationalists were elected to run the Scottish government. Do you have a referendum or do you have some massive fight with them saying 'no, no you can't possibly have this choice'?
"I thought the right thing to do, and this was backed by the other parties at the time, and I remain of the view it was the right thing to do, was to give the Scottish people a fair, legal and decisive referendum. That's what will happen.
"It was absolutely the right decision. You have to decide the prior question as it were - does Scotland want to stay in the United Kingdom or separate itself from the United Kingdom.
"Once you have settled that question, then you can properly engage with future acts of devolution - on which again I have a pretty good track record. We have a massive act of devolution coming through right now giving the Scottish Parliament far more power to spend money as it chooses."
Meanwhile, a spokesman for First Minister Alex Salmond: "What Mr Cameron does the day after a Yes vote in September is entirely up to him and his party.
"In the meantime, he should step up to the plate and agree to a head to head debate with the First Minister, as he will find it very difficult to defend his position following a Yes vote if he has not come out to bat for his side.
"So far, the succession of day-tripping ministers the Prime Minister has dispatched north have succeeded only in rallying more and more people across Scotland behind the Yes campaign."


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Meeting/Event Information
Illinois Chapter usually meets once each month, August through June, on Tuesdays. The Chapter's annual golf outing and fund raiser always takes place in September. Generally 70 to 80 members gather at monthly meetings, which makes them an excellent networking opportunity for members interested in meeting and developing other contacts in the industry.
The State of Illinois requires professional engineers to complete 30 PDHs (Professional Development Hours) of training for license renewal. The Illinois Chapter ASHRAE offers educational programs with more than enough PDHs to help engineers satisfy this requirement.
Presentations from previous Chapter seminars and meetings may be downloaded after logging into the "Member Area." The Illinois Chapter of ASHRAE stores past presentations. You must be a member to access them from this website. If you are not yet a member, sign-up today or contact us for more information.
|Past Meetings
This web site is maintained by the Illinois Chapter of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Inc. (ASHRAE). It does not present official positions of the Society nor reflect Society policy. ASHRAE chapters may not act for the Society and the information presented here has not had Society review. To learn more about ASHRAE activities on an international level, contact the ASHRAE home page at http://www.ashrae.org.


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Easy Crystal Experiments
You Can Share With Your Kids
By Aurora Lipper, Supercharged Science
This article teaches kids about the Crystal Farming and gives a handful of totally fun activities to experiment with for their homeschool science learning (including rock candy and homemade geodes). It's also good for boy scouts working on a badge, or for any kids that love science experiments. These experiments are part of a homeschool science program that I teach, and I promise your kids will love it.
Crystals are formed with atoms line up in patterns when the substance solidifies (or the liquid evaporates and leaves the rest behind). There are crystals everywhere – in the form of salt, sugar, sand, diamonds, quartz, and many, many more. But how do the atoms know how and when to line up (in a crystalline structure)? Let's take a closer look at atoms while teaching homeschool science:
Suppose we have a drop of water. If we look at it very closely, we'll see a drop of water, nice and smooth. If you grab your microscope and magnify it roughly 2,000 times (the drop is now 40 feet across, the size of a large classroom) and look very closely, we'll still see relatively smooth water, but there are wiggly things floating around (paramecia). We could stop here and study these interesting little critters, but then, we'd side-track ourselves into biology. So let's focus more on the water.
Let's magnify the water 2,000 times again, so it's roughly 15 miles across. When we look at it very closely now, we see what looks like a teeming mob of Super Bowl fans making their way to the nearest exit – lots and lots of movement, but it's still fuzzy and hard to make out. Now we'll magnify it another 250 times (for a total magnification of roughly 1 billion times), and we'll see two kinds of "blobsâ€
Easy Crystal Experiments
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Easy Crystal Experiments
As a teacher, homeschool science teacher, engineer and university instructor Aurora Lipper has been helping kids learn science for over a decade.
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One on One Talks Hot Stove Baseball with ESPN's Buster Olney
Mack Rosenberg and DJ Sixsmith talked about the moves the Toronto Blue Jays have made to put themselves in contention for the AL East. They discuss how Mets' fans should view the R.A. Dickey trade and what the Mets can expect from the prospects they recieved.
R.A. Dickey talks with WFUV's Kris Venezia at Knuckleball screening during Tribeca Film Festival


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Parallel Data Structures
In my first blog for Dr. Dobb's, I thought I'd forgo the standard introductory essay. If you don't know who I am, I'm easy to find online. (I just did a Google search on my name; my writing over at the Intel Software Network site, my book, and a video clip I did way back in 2008 all came up in the top five hits. That's me, professionally, at least.) I do work for Intel, but this will not be the place for me to play corporate shill. That's my day job.
My plan for this blog is to investigate parallel coding. Some algorithms will be simple and direct, others may be not so simple. I might start with something that I included in The Art of Concurrency and re-examine it in light of some new programming model, or attempt to redesign it in a way I hadn't thought of at the time, or maybe investigate an approach that I didn't have space to include. I can guarantee right now that not all of the parallel implementations I present will be the best, but that might be the point I'm trying to make. I will also try to mix up the parallel libraries used. If you stick with me long enough, you may notice that the Intel programming models will tend to be used in a majority of the code presented. That's only because these are the ones I'm most familiar with, not because I'm trying to push an agenda here.
For this first entry, I don't have any code to share. Instead, I figured I might try a thought experiment (which I shall be wont to do from time to time). So, today's point to ponder: Are there any truly parallel data structures?
I was brushing up my algorithmic complexity analysis skills by reading A Programmer's Companion to Algorithm Analysis by Ernst L. Leiss. While working through some tree and graph algorithm examples, I naturally thought about how I would make those algorithms parallel. In doing that, I also needed to consider how to make access to these kinds of shared data structures safe. Reading nodes in a graph or tree already constructed is one thing, but when you need to add nodes to a binary search tree or rebalance an AVL tree, while allowing other threads to be accessing nodes in the same structure, it can quickly become a complex programming task. Assuming you'd like to have some performance benefit from parallel execution, that is.
This got me thinking about how the design of these structures (and all other data structures I'm aware of) relies on serial execution. You can't blame the Computer Science pioneers who devised and developed data structures and the algorithms that we use to incorporate them into our applications. Sequential execution has been the standard model for computer algorithms and patterns since the beginning of modern programming (and even before that if you include the Turing Machine model).
For our parallel usage, we can take a "standard" data structure and add some synchronization primitives to make it thread safe. It's a necessary evil, but such synchronization often becomes a performance bottleneck. If our programming paradigm is shifting to concurrency and parallelism, shouldn't there be some data structure that is designed to be inherently parallel? I'm looking for something that can allow multiple threads to safely access the structure, read some of the contents, overwrite or insert others, handle conflicts, and do it all correctly without external synchronization.
Does the serial nature of our memory subsystems restrict how we approach design of data structures? Maybe the best we can do is to have some form of light-weight synchronization built into the structure and then utilized by the algorithms governing access and modifications to that structure. It's not the pinnacle of what I would hope for, but it might be the best we can do.
I wonder if our brains and thought processes will ever catch up to our software development tools. It might be that we're in a transition state, where everything we do is still going to start with a serial algorithm and then get translated to a parallel implementation down the road. We might not code the serial version directly, but the initial design could still have a basis in sequential execution or a linear ordering of steps. It's what we've been doing for over half a century and it's not going to change overnight. I think the same will be true of our data structures for the foreseeable future.
Will there ever be native parallel data structures, will we even need such beasts, or is this all just a pipe dream on my part? Who knows? I didn't have the grades to get accepted into Hogwarts Tech, so I don't have a crystal ball to foresee the resolution to technical questions. However, once a generation of programmers and computer scientists have been educated and practiced exclusively in a world where "parallel programming" is simply "programming," parallel data structures may naturally emerge.


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Lost in all the excitement about Sky is the new Add Photos feature in Google Earth version 4.2. This allows you to add photos in Google Earth that you can fly into and browse. This feature works great with high definition photos, as you can zoom deep into these images and view tremendous detail. Learn more about adding photos.
If you are just interested in viewing high definition photos, in the Layers panel, check the Featured Content > Gigalpxl and double click any Gigapxl icon (see below) in the 3D viewer. This layer includes some truly breathtaking images. Learn more about navigating photos.
Gigapxl icon
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Adding Photos
Posted by John at 5:45 PM
2 comments:
- Ron Schott said...
Hi John,
Do you have any insight on third party applications that will cut up high resolution ('gigapixel') photos into tiles and place these in the pyramid directory structure that GE uses for the PhotoOverlay ImagePyramid element?
- kurt said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
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Vancouver's Arcalife, and a British company, Firebird Media Ltd., have signed a deal which will bring the two companies closer together in archiving personal history on the Internet.
Arcalife will use Firebird Media's Memorybank to offer its customers a "people's archive", including sources of local history as well as their own personal history.
Arcalife CEO Paul Taylor says, "This is significant opportunity for both organizations. Many of our operational needs are similar and our services are complimentary, so it makes perfect sense".
I met Paul in Ottawa about a month ago while I was covering a meeting for the Canada 150 Project. At that time, he was busy getting his company out of the starting blocks in Canada, and was looking forward to a bright future.
It looks like he has struck his stride with this partnership.


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Character History
Degrassi: Season 4 and Season 5 (High School Years)
Claude meets Caitlin in the first episode of Degrassi High. After the hallway brawl between Erica and Liz, Caitlin breaks up with Joey to be with Claude. They start a relationship, but this causes Joey and Caitlin to fight and bicker. After Claude convinces Caitlin into vandalizing a factory, he leaves her to get caught by the police. He then refuses to go with her to her court date, so she breaks up with him, and hits him. In the next season, Claude continues to pursue Caitlin, but she does not want to go out with him anymore. This was the final straw for Claude.
School Shooting (Suicide)In Showtime (1), Claude brought a gun to Degrassi High, when Caitlin refuses to go out with him for the final time. He takes the gun into the boys' bathroom and shoots himself. The fatal gunshot can be heard in Mr. Walfish's class after Alexa makes a comment about a lecture they were talking about. Snake then asks if he could go to the bathroom. He is excused, and is the one that finds Claude dead. According to Snake, only part of Claude's face was there, indicating that Claude must have shot himself in the head. Snake runs and tells Mr. Raditch, and the police are called. The entire school is informed later that day, and school is let out early.
Caitlin tells Maya Goldberg that she is not planning to go to his funeral, and when she goes home, she finds flowers that were sent by Claude. He basically says that he hopes that she could forgive him for what he has done. This gesture disturbs Caitlin as the two had once been a couple, but eventually brings Joey Jeremiah and Caitlin closer together.
Degrassi (Mentioned)
In Ray of Light (2), Mr. Simpson mentions Claude, though not by name. Mr. Simpson says to Eli, "You know, we have a lot more in common than you think...When I was about your age, I found the body of a classmate who committed suicide."
Memorable Quotes
- Claude: "Caitlin, listen. Do you know Jean-Luc Godard?"
Caitlin: "Uh, no. Does he go to Degrassi?"
Claude: "Not quite. He's a French film director." - Dream On
- Caitlin: "I hate when you do that."
Claude: "That's why I do it." - Everybody Wants Something.
- Scott: "Hurry up, man. You're gonna be late for class."
Claude: "I'm not going to any more classes, what has this place ever done for me?"
Scott: "You're gonna get in trouble."
Claude: "No, I won't...." (last line) - Showtime (1).
- A New Start (1)
- A New Start (2)
- Breaking Up is Hard to Do
- Dream On
- Everybody Wants Something
- All in a Good Cause
- Testing One, Two, Three...
- A Tangled Web No Lines
- Crossed Wires No Lines
- Showtime (1)
- Showtime (2) Dream Sequence
- Claude is the first of seven characters to get shot. The other six were Jimmy, Rick, Sean, Spinner, Damon and Adam. He and Rick are the only ones to die of their gunshot wounds.
- After John Wheeler and Helen Wheeler, his was the third of ten deaths in Degrassi history, to be followed by Dr. Manning, Rick, J.T., Anson, Cam, Paula, and Adam.
- Claude Tanner was the first in the Degrassi Franchise to commit suicide. The second was Campbell Saunders.
- He was also the first character to be shot with his own gun. The second was Rick Murray.
- Claude was the first character to bring a gun to school. The second was Rick, the third was K.C., the fourth was Eli, the fifth was Vince and the sixth was Hunter.
- Claude is one of the many characters to have issues with his father.
- He had only been in one relationship before his death.
- Claude was one of twelve male characters to grow and wear his long hair. The other eleven were:
- He is the only student to die while attending Degrassi High School.
- Joey often deliberately mispronounced Claude's name to annoy Caitlin.
- He was a fan of the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman.
- Main article: Claude-Caitlin Relationship
- Caitlin Ryan
- Start Up: Everybody Wants Something (DH 105)
- Break Up: All in a Good Cause (DH 111)
- Reason: Claude leaves Caitlin hanging after a protest.


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NFL May Extend Rules for Hits to Knee to Protect Players
NEW YORK (AP) — The NFL will keep a close eye on hits to the knees of defenseless players this season, with the possibility of extending the rules protecting such players.
Chief of football operations Ray Anderson told The Associated Press on Tuesday that if the NFL's competition committee sees enough evidence this season that hits to the knees are "becoming a problem," it could take action.
The committee could make a recommendation next March to the owners to prohibit direct hits to the knees of defenseless players. The owners would then vote on such a change.
Currently, hits to the head and neck of defenseless players are outlawed. But two direct hits to the knee in preseason games that injured Miami tight end Dustin Keller and Minnesota defensive tackle Kevin Williams have drawn complaints from some players.