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Photo by Ben Glass © 2007 Element Funding, LLC
Call waiting: Demi Moore's detective tries to get a line on a mysterious killer in 'Mr. Brooks.'
Buttoned Down
Kevin Costner plays 'Mr. Brooks,' an unlikely killer with an evil alter ego
By Richard von Busack
THERE ARE more than a few movies around that suffer from Badly Integrated Subplot Syndrome, but the better than average Mr. Brooks represents a particularly fatal case of that malady. Kevin Costner's title protagonist is first heard, and then seen, mumbling the Serenity Prayer. His personal demon, Marshall (William Hurt)—a gum-chewing alter ego that only Brooks can see—requests him gently to cut the crap and do what he wants to do so badly. A glass of champagne waits for Brooks at his table—is it a forbidden drink that he craves? No. It's worse than that.
They sure know about recovery in the movie business. Mr. Brooks smartly suggests that a craving could strike during a moment of being honored. Being told that one is worthy is just another way of making the guilty temperament feel worse.
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Brooks, a wealthy Portland resident, is fighting with Marshall at the banquet where he is receiving a man-of-the-year award by a local group of businessmen. Brooks' well-preserved wife (Marg Helgenberger) is there, too, and she, too, can't hear Marshall urging Brooks very persistently to fall off the wagon.
Marshall and Brooks know about a couple—tango dancers who practice in the window of a dance studio downtown— and after Brooks' wife falls asleep, the team could have a little fun putting the couple to death in the usual manner: shooting them, photographing them and signing the work with a bloody thumbprint.
During the killing, Brooks makes a mistake: the exhibitionist victims had the curtains open while they were making love. The man next door spots Brooks in midcrime and tracks him down. The observer, who calls himself "Mr. Smith" (Dane Cook), turns blackmailer. Smith makes an unusual request for payment: he wants to watch some more killings.
So far so good, but we cut to Tracy Atwood, the copper looking for "The Thumbprint Killer"; sadly, she is played by the demi-actress, Demi Moore. A loopy bit of writing—meant to demonstrate something, but what?—makes Atwood a millionaire who became a homicide detective. She bears a beef against men, since her ex, a restaurateur (Jason Lewis), is suing her for palimony. This is good casting: Lewis, a model turned actor, has the exact spoiled, irritatingly too-pretty face they used to carve on plaster mannequins at medium-scale men's boutiques. Atwood's divorce upsets her so much that her superior tries to take Atwood off the case because of emotional stress. The superior officer ought to take over anyway: she is played by Lindsay Crouse, who looks like she could capture every killer within a radius of 500 miles, without backup or weapons.
Mr. Brooks insists on an elegant front despite a lean budget. How lean? So lean that Palo Alto is played by a road sign and an aerial shot of some Oregon pines. The older audience will be less interested in the distasteful blood than the delicious suspense. But somewhere, someone must have realized that the younger audience wasn't getting its customary gore. Thus the matter of the unintegrated subplot: enter a subsidiary villain called the "Hangman" (Matt Schulze)—a steroid rager who likes to leave his victim's bodies dangling. The Hangman leaves Atwood a Fincherized corpse, then turns up with a gun and hustles the detective into a torture van. The separation between these two plots makes the violence look like a last-minute insert.
Of course, one could have swiped the plot of Red Dragon, with Brooks siccing the Hangman on the detective, while he carries out his own killings. As it stands, the characters just keep bumping into one another. Portland is not that big a town ... and yet. And in any fiendish-genius movie, the cop ought to be as crazy and implacable as the quarry. Moore just looks out at the audience as miffed as an undertipped waitress.
By contrast, as a team, Hurt and Costner exhibit rare chemistry. With such a pairing, Hurt is no longer the most bottled-up actor in the room. Costner, drabbed to the point where he would be the worst-dressed man at a convention of vocational-guidance counselors, comes across as tangy and covert. During his crimes, a few interested bones are hurled to the audience: Brooks wraps the gun in plastic to avoid blowback, a new one on me. And he grumbles when something goes too easy. (Hacking into the DMV computer: "For all the money we pay the government, you'd think this would be harder.")
Director/writer Bruce A. Evans has had the kind of career that ought to have kept him in movie jail for the length of time Mr. Brooks belongs in actual jail. After working on Stand by Me, he perpetrated Jungle 2 Jungle, Cutthroat Island (no, it's not underrated) and the lamentable Christian Slater vehicle Kuffs, a finalist for my 50 Worst San Francisco movies list.
Calling this Evans' best movie in 15 years isn't saying a thing, but the howler moments are rare, and the thriller manifests the right sort of sardonicism. One can even find a sort of fun in the morality. In serial–killer movies, it's rare to see the dread weight of a killer's conscience counterbalancing the fun of doing someone in.
Mr. Brooks (R; 120 min.), directed by Bruce A. Evans, written by Evans and Raynold Gideon, photographed by John Lindley and starring Kevin Costner and Demi Moore, opens June 1 valleywide.
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Symply Adult Ocean Fish, Brown Rice & Veg Wet Dog Food
In stock
Symply Adult Ocean Fish with Brown Rice & Veg Wet Dog Food is a delicious complete and balanced recipe that is totally natural and healthy.
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- Suitable for dogs over 9 months old
- Complete and balanced recipe
- Wheat and gluten free
- Easy to digest
- Will offer a shiny coat and relief from skin conditions
Ingredients: Ocean Fish (min.81%), Brown Rice (5%), Peas (3%), Carrots (1%), Salmon Oil (1%), Seaweed, Minerals, Prebiotic - Fructooligosaccharide, Yucca
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Review: One Eight Distilling Ivy City Gin (2017) and Untitled Gin No. 2
As in many cities across the country, craft distilling in Washington, D.C. has taken off in recent years. Since 2011, no fewer than nine distilleries have opened their doors. One of the pioneers of this group is One Eight Distilling. The distillery gets its name from Article One Section Eight of the Constitution, which among other things established the District of Columbia as the nation's capital. For such a young distillery, One Eight has a wide portfolio including a vodka, a white whiskey, and nine different releases of sourced, finished whiskey. Earlier this year, they also released their own aged rye whiskey with plans to release their own bourbon in the near future. However, one of the areas where One Eight really shines is their gin.
Here's a look at two of them.
One Eight Distilling Ivy City Gin (2017) – Ivy City Gin is a new American dry gin distilled from locally-sourced grains (predominately rye). The botanical program for this gin includes the familiar juniper and lemon peel, among others, but also the somewhat unusual use of local spicebush, a member of the laurel family with aromatic berries. On the nose, the juniper is immediately present but almost smoky and complimented by notes of cracked black pepper and sweet licorice. The palate is light yet honeyed. The juniper is again present, but it's not the backbone of the spirit, while the malted rye complements the spicebush, delivering a great earthy quality. There's more licorice, but it's soft, not biting, as can sometimes be the case. Bright coriander and citrus notes and a little cinnamon round out the palate with a gentle heat on the finish. This is a great cocktail gin and easy to sip, although I'd probably prefer it at a slightly higher proof. 80 proof. B+ / $37
One Eight Distilling Untitled Gin No. 2 – Expanding into the barrel-rested gin category, One Eight now has three versions of their Ivy City that have spent some amount of time in oak. For the second release, One Eight used both ex-bourbon casks and new American oak casks. The nose on this gin is more honey and citrus than the Ivy City with just a little of the familiar peppercorn. On the palate, a caramel sweetness collides with the juniper and spicebush in a wave of initial heat and spice that is remarkably refreshing. The burst of flavor and warmth immediately gives way to softer clementine and vanilla notes with traces of dusty oak. Although some of the botanicals in the original Ivy City are diminished by the barrel influence, what is enhanced makes this a superior spirit. 112 proof. A- / $45


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We've seen little in the way of real excitement in the enthusiast CPU market for a long time. AMD's FX CPU architecture (which went under the successive names of "Bulldozer," "Piledriver," and "Steamroller") hasn't been able to match the silicon in Intel's Core i7 chips for quite some years now, going back to the initial release of the AMD FX-8150 in 2011.
On the other side of the CPU-silicon fence, Intel's latest architecture, the 7th Generation Core, or "Kaby Lake" (which is crested at the moment by the Intel Core i7-7700K we tested recently) saw mostly single-digit performance gains over equivalent 6th Generation ("Skylake") chips. Those gains were gleaned from slightly higher clock speeds and…well, not a whole lot else. The company's enthusiast-class E-Series chips, meanwhile, have pushed performance limits by adding ever more cores and threads, but at ever-more-outrageous prices. The latest E -Series chips are known as "Broadwell-E," and the alpha dog of that bunch is the 10-core, 20-thread Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition. The 6950X is a monster chip for serious, highly threaded workloads, but its roughly $1,700 price is enough to put off almost everyone other than well-heeled, very CPU-dependent professionals. And even they will look askance.
AMD waltzed into this party much later than we initially expected. (Its new "Zen" chips were expected to arrive in 2016.) But on its arm was a brand-new CPU architecture and three high-end Ryzen 7 chips, all with eight cores and 16 threads, topping out with the $499 AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, an impressive powerhouse that traded blows with Intel chips that cost more than twice as much, such as the Core i7-6900K. On the other end of the Ryzen 7 stack sits the Ryzen 7 1700 we're looking at here. It has the same eight cores and 16 threads as the two pricier Ryzen 7 offerings, and the same 20MB of combined L2 and L3 cache as those chips, as well.
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The primary downsides with the Ryzen 7 1700 over its sibling chips are its lower clock speeds (3GHz to 3.7GHz, base clock to boost clock), and the lack of support for XFR ("Extended Frequency Range") for this chip, indicated by the lack of an "X" on the end of the chip's name. (We'll explain XFR later, but in essence at this point, it allows some Ryzen 7 chips to clock 100MHz higher if they have a cooler that can keep temperatures low enough). The primary benefit that the Ryzen 7 1700 gains for its lower clocks and lack of XFR is a lower thermal design power rating (a.k.a. TDP, a measure of required heat dissipation). The Ryzen 7 1700 has a TDP of just 65 watts, while the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X both have 95-watt TDPs.
When it comes to pricing, the Ryzen 7 1700 doesn't have nearly the advantage of the Ryzen 7 1800X, a $499 chip that is aimed at (and pretty solidly matches or bests) the $1,050 Core i7-6900K. AMD is aiming the $329 Ryzen 7 1700 squarely at the Intel Core i7-7700K, which currently sells for about $350, and intermittently goes on sale for a little less than that.
Can AMD's entry-level Ryzen 7 chip take down Intel's mainstream Core i7 flagship, with its latest-gen "Kaby Lake" architecture and higher 4.2GHz-to-4.5GHz clock speed? The fact that AMD brings twice the cores and threads to the CPU matchup as Intel does certainly works in Team Red's favor. But to get a full sense of Ryzen's benefits, as well as where the Ryzen 7 1700 lags behind Intel (spoiler: single-core performance, and 1080p gaming), we'll have to dig deeper and look at some of the benefits of AMD's chipsets and motherboards, as well.
Chip Lineup Details: Ryzen 7, 5, and 3
The AMD Ryzen 7 1700 lands at the low end of the company's Ryzen 7 three-chip line, with the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X sitting above it. All three feature eight cores and 16 threads. Here's a look at all three Ryzen 7 chips, along with pricing and their basic specs, direct from AMD.
Of course, not everyone has the budget (or the need) for a CPU priced at $329 or more. So AMD will be offering six-core and four-core Ryzen 5 chips, as well, although pricing on those hadn't yet been announced when we wrote this. AMD says those chips will be available in the second quarter of 2017, with lower-end Ryzen 3 offerings coming in the second half of the year, as well.
A couple of features on all of these chips set them apart from Intel's competing offerings. For one: AMD says all the Ryzen chips will be unlocked for overclocking. And, at least from the details we have about the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 chips announced so far, all those chips will feature thread-doubling simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). SMT is similar to the Hyper-Threading technology featured in most (but not all) of Intel's mid-to-high-end Core desktop processors. Notably, the unlocked Intel Core i5-7600K lacks Hyper-Threading, leaving it stuck at four processing threads, while AMD's competing Ryzen 5 chips will have eight or 12 available processing threads, depending on the chip.
That will make testing those future chips against Intel's offerings very, very interesting. But of course, we're here to talk about Ryzen 7 for now, and the Ryzen 7 1700 in particular.
As noted up top, AMD is positioning its $329 chip against Intel's Core i7-7700K. That's also a four-core, eight-thread processor to AMD's eight-core/16-thread pairing. But the Intel chip has base (4.2GHz) and Turbo Boost (4.5GHz) frequencies that are both significantly higher than the base (3GHz) and boost (3.7GHz) clock speeds of the Ryzen 7 1700 at stock settings. The Core i7-7700K is also based around the company's latest Kaby Lake design.
That, plus similar pricing, makes for a tougher battle for the Ryzen 7 1700, compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, which competes with an Intel chip (the Core i7-6900K), that costs twice as much and is built on a "Broadwell" architecture that's effectively two generations behind Kaby Lake. When we reviewed the Ryzen 7 1800X, we said that that chip seemed to have a lot of things working in its favor. The Ryzen 7 1700 has much stronger winds in its face; its primary edge seems to be core count. But as we'll see in the next section, motherboard pricing can help AMD, as well, if you're building a brand-new system. And since Ryzen is a brand-new platform, that's exactly what you're doing if you're considering this chip.
The New AMD Chipsets: X370, B350, and More
As we noted in our Ryzen 7 1800X review, many of the new AM4 motherboards AMD's partners are rolling out around Ryzen are surprisingly affordable. But the pricing gap between them and the hundreds of Socket LGA 1151 boards that work with Intel's Core i7-7700K aren't as drastic as boards for Intel's enthusiast-class X99 platform. Those boards generally start at around $200 and go up drastically from there, rising into and above the $500 range.
Want a Ryzen-based board that lets you overclock and install a single high-end graphics card such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or one of AMD's upcoming "Vega" cards? That will set you back as little as $79 for the MSI B350M Gaming Pro. And lest you think that's a feature-starved board, it's equipped with an M.2 slot for fast PCI Express x4/NVMe boot drives like the Samsung SSD 960 EVO, plus a metal-reinforced graphics-card slot and some red LEDs. You can spend more than that, for sure; some initial AM4 boards are priced as high as $300. But we've seen several solid-looking options in the $100 range. Many similarly equipped Intel Z270 motherboards start at $140 to $150.
Technically, five new chipsets are on offer with AMD's new motherboards. Here's a look at their primary features and how they differ, direct from AMD.
Note that if you want to install multiple graphics cards, you'll need to opt for the top-end X370 chipset, but even those boards start at around just $150. The A320 chipset and the A300 don't support overclocking, and the latter lacks native support for USB 3.1 Gen 2, but those boards, when they arrive, will likely be even more price-aggressive, because they're a step down from the B350 boards, which start as low as $79.
These lower-end boards weren't yet available we wrote this, so we'll have wait to see where they land in terms of features and pricing. But we would not be surprised to see some of these boards priced as low as $50. Now, we're not suggesting you run out and grab the lowest-price board you can find, but the idea of dropping a $329 CPU into a $50 motherboard and getting similar performance to what you'd get with a $500 Intel CPU/motherboard combination has a lot of appeal.
How is AMD able to get its board partners to produce such comparatively inexpensive motherboards? Primarily, it's because AMD's Ryzen chips (and its upcoming "Raven Ridge" CPU/GPU chips, or APUs, which will use the same AM4 socket) integrate much of the electronics required for interfaces such as USB, SATA, and PCI Express into the chips themselves. As a result, far fewer electronics need to be built onto the boards.
Not everything here works in AMD's favor. These chipsets tend to have fewer PCI Express lanes and SATA ports than many enthusiast motherboard/CPU combos from Intel. The top-end AMD X370 chipset natively supports six SATA III ports and 16 lanes of PCI Express Gen 2 for speedy SSDs (on top of the 24 lanes of PCIe on the Ryzen chips themselves). Intel's X99 platform, in contrast, supports 10 SATA III ports and up to 40 PCI Express lanes hanging off the CPU. (The junior Broadwell-E chip, the Core i7-6800K, has "just" 28 lanes.) So, for those planning on shoving piles of drives and other hardware inside their systems, Intel's pricier platform will still hold plenty of appeal. But for the vast majority of users looking to drop in a CPU, one or two graphics cards, and a few drives, AMD's offering should more than suffice—usually at a lower price point than comparable Intel-based boards.
The Architecture Basics
As noted earlier, the Ryzen chips represent an entirely new architecture for AMD. Gone are the paired modules of cores sharing an L2 cache that was a hallmark of the FX processor line. Ryzen's cores are more independent, and they also introduce the thread-doubling SMT we mentioned earlier. (SMT is similar to Intel's Hyper-Threading, which allows demanding software that's written to take advantage of it to tackle two computing threads on each core.)
CPU-architecture details can get extremely technical as soon as you look any deeper than the the surface. But to give you a sense of how AMD has achieved its performance gains with its new Zen architecture, the company says it has incorporated an instruction-scheduler window that's 1.75 times larger, with a 1.5 times greater issue width, that enables AMD to send more work to the chip's execution units.
Here's a look at the Ryzen die layout, again direct from AMD...
This all sounds good, to the extent that it can be parsed and appreciated without a computer engineering degree. But power efficiency is another area in which AMD's FX chips have lagged behind Intel. The company's FX-8370 chip has a thermal design power rating (TDP) of 125 watts, while Intel's (very roughly comparable) Core i7-6600K has a TDP of 91 watts. And Intel's chip includes integrated graphics, while the AMD FX chips (as well as the Ryzen 7 models) lack that feature, requiring an external graphics card to plug in to a monitor.
On the surface, at least, it seems AMD has made up that ground, and then some. The Ryzen 7 1800X and Ryzen 7 1700X have a TDP rating of 95 watts, while the Ryzen 7 1700 we're looking at here drops the TDP to 65 watts. Intel's competing Core i7-7700K, meanwhile, has a TDP rating of 91 watts. Well, now.
How does AMD achieve its efficiency gains with Ryzen? For starters, these chips are built on a 14nm manufacturing process, the same as the Core i7-7700K, and a big, big leap over the 32nm process used for AMD's previous-generation FX chips. And AMD says this 14nm process has already been "density optimized" by the company's manufacturing partner, Global Foundries.
Other efficiency-focused features include a "micro-op" cache that keeps important instructions and data close to the cores, rather than having to reach out to comparatively far-off L2 or L3 caches; and aggressive clock gating, so that there's less wasted power in areas of the cores that aren't being used. Here's a visual look at how AMD aims to keep power draw down.
Better Clocks With Better Coolers: XFR
You may have noticed that the entry-level Ryzen 7 chip, the Ryzen 7 1700, lacks an "X" at the end of its name, unlike the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X. This X indicates the inclusion of a feature AMD is calling Extended Frequency Range (XFR).
XFR makes use of what the company is calling "SenseMI," sensors and algorithms that, among other things, measure voltage, power, and temperature in fine detail, a thousand times per second. The sensors monitor where the chip is situated within its power and heat envelopes, as well as where it expects to be in the near term.
When it comes to clock speeds, SenseMI allows the chip to "sense" when it has sufficient cooling and, assuming you have an XFR-enabled model (that is, one of those CPUs that end in "X"), to clock even higher than the top boost-clock speed. The idea, at least in part, is to reward buyers or builders who invest in large air coolers or liquid cooling to enjoy some performance gains.
Now, that sure sounds good. But, at least with this first round of Ryzen 7 chips, the XFR boost is locked at just an extra 100MHz. So the Ryzen 7 1800X can clock as high as 4.1GHz with a large cooler installed, rather than the 4GHz top stock speed with a more modest cooler installed.
Technically, the Ryzen 7 1700 actually does include XFR as well, though it's a smaller 50MHz boost, rather than the 100MHz of the two other chips that end in "X." Because it's a smaller frequency gain (and honestly, 100MHz is already pretty modest), AMD isn't advertising XFR with the Ryzen 7 1700.
We hope that future Ryzen chips get a bigger XFR boost, because the above seems like a long way to go, both in terms of underlying technology and the extra cost of a better cooler, to gain just an extra 100MHz (or for that matter, 50MHz). But of course if you do invest in a powerful cooler, you may be able to achieve higher clock speeds than what XFR offers via overclocking, if you're willing to take the usual risk of voiding your warranty and/or frying your chip if you don't pay close attention to your thermals and voltages.
Note that we did our benchmarks with a large 240mm self-contained cooler (shown in the image above), an EK Waterblocks (EKWB) model that AMD sent us for our testing. At the time we built our test system, it was the only cooler we had on hand that was designed for AMD's Ryzen chips.
Two things to note about the Ryzen 7 chips as a whole: These are CPUs only, with no onboard graphics, in the same mold as Intel's CPU-only Intel E-Series chips, or AMD's previous-generation FX models. You'll need to use them with a discrete video card. And the underside will look familiar to the AMD faithful; the Ryzen chips still use pins on the CPU itself, not the socket-side pins and on-chip contacts that Intel has long since moved to.
Performance Testing
For our test setup, we dropped the Ryzen 7 1700 into a Gigabyte-made Aorus AX370-Gaming 5 motherboard, along with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory running at 2,933MHz. An AMD Radeon RX 480 video card handled display output for our CPU-specific tests, and a Samsung SSD 750 EVO was the SATA-interface boot drive. We could have used a faster NVMe drive, but as we tested previous chips from Intel and AMD using SATA SSDs, we didn't want to drop in a speed demon and give the Ryzen 7 1700 an unfair advantage. SATA SSDs are still very respectable.
You'll also notice that we've added the $399 Ryzen 7 1700X "middle child" into the mix in our benchmark charts below. We're also working on a review of that chip. So if you're looking for a bit more performance than what the Ryzen 7 1700 offers, stay tuned for that review in the coming days.
Cinebench R15
First up in our testing regimen: Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads, using the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Along with the usual test that makes use of all available cores, we've added the single-core results here, to get a sense of how AMD's new chips fares in lightly threaded workloads.
Single-core performance was a sticking point of AMD's previous-generation chips, as evidenced by the AMD FX-8370 here. That older FX chip, the company's previous flagship (barring the 5GHz, 220-watt anomaly that was the AMD FX-9590), placed much lower than anything else in our chart. AMD's new Ryzen 7 1700 chip landed 46 percent ahead of the much higher-clocked (4GHz-to-4.3GHz) AMD FX-8370 on the single-core test. But the Ryzen 1700 fell well behind the Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K on the single-core test by a tough-to-dismiss 30 percent. Intel's edge is thanks to a combination of both better IPC (instructions per clock) in its latest architecture, and the fact that it's clocked much higher, with a 4.2GHz base clock to the Ryzen 7 1700's 3GHz base.
But when you switch over to the All Cores setting, letting AMD play to its strengths, things flip dramatically in Team Red's favor. There, the Ryzen 7 1700 bests the Core i7-7700K by more than 41 percent. We have a feeling this is a dynamic we're going to see recur a lot in the rest of our tests.
iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test
We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a single CPU core, as much legacy software still does.
Music encoding doesn't exactly push a modern CPU to its limits, and certainly not high-end desktop CPUs like those in our comparison charts here. But this test still illustrates that, for programs that are older or haven't been written to take advantage of multiple cores, the Core i7-7700K is still king, thanks to its higher clock speed and Intel's newest architecture.
That said, the AMD chip here managed to shave 40 seconds off the time of its previous-generation AMD counterpart, the AMD FX-8370. But even the dual-core, $180 Intel Core i3-7350K did much better here. AMD still has significant ground to make up for on single-core workloads compared to Intel's current-generation "Kaby Lake" Core desktop chips.
Handbrake 0.9.9
These days, our traditional Handbrake test (run under version 0.9.8) now takes less than a minute to complete with high-end chips. (It involves the rendering of a 5-minute video, Pixar's Dug's Special Mission, to an iPhone-friendly format.) So, we've switched to a much more taxing (and time-consuming) video-crunching test that uses a nice, big hunk of 4K video.
In this test, we switched to the newer Handbrake version 0.9.9, and tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-minute-and-14-second 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase short film Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video…
The previous test left us wishing for better performance from AMD's Ryzen 7 1700, but this result left us stunned by what AMD was able to deliver.
Not only did the Ryzen 7 1700 shave over nine full minutes off the time of its AMD FX predecessor on the same test, it was only 42 seconds behind Intel's $1,000-plus Core i7-6900K, and nearly three minutes (about 30 percent) ahead of the Core i7-7700K. In other words, the AMD chip definitely has an edge, thanks to its plethora of cores and threads, but you'll need to be running software designed take advantage of lots of cores to see much of a real-world benefit.
POV-Ray 3.7
Next up, using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV-Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing. After that, again to get a sense of how AMD's new chips handle single-core performance, we ran the same benchmark using the "One CPU" setting.
Once again, the Ryzen 7 1700 looks pretty good here on the All CPUs setting. It wasn't all that far behind the pricier Ryzen 7 1800X and the much pricier Core i7-6900K, and it was more than 30 seconds faster than the Core i7-7700K. But on the single-core test, the Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K is still king, with an edge of roughly 25 percent over the AMD chip.
Blender 2.77a
Blender is an open-source 3D content-creation program that can be used to design and create visual effects, animation, and 3D models for use in video games or 3D printing. We open a standard test file (it's of a flying squirrel) and time how long the test processor takes to finish the render.
We may be reaching the limitations of this benchmark. Either that, or Intel's chips have a strong edge here, because both of the Core i7 chips here took the same 24 seconds to finish. That's a little odd, considering the Core i7-7700K has eight fewer threads than the Core i7-6900K or any of the new AMD chips. While AMD's Ryzen 7 1700 didn't look its best here against the Core i7-7700K, it still landed just 4 seconds behind the showing of the top-end Ryzen 7 1800X. It was also ahead of both the Core i3-7350K and the previous-generation FX chip.
7-Zip 16.04 Benchmark
Last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file compression software and ran its built-in compression/decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's multi-core abilities.
On this test, the much pricier Core i7-6900K flexed its might (and higher clock speeds) to pull 22 percent ahead of the AMD Ryzen 7 1700. But again, the entry-level Ryzen 7 chip, with its eight cores and 16 threads, pulled almost 30 percent ahead of the Core i7-7700K's and its four cores/eight threads.
Based on our tests, it's clear that the Ryzen 7 1700 chip has strong edge on Intel's similarly priced Kaby Lake Core i7 chip in many CPU-demanding tasks. But if you aren't often doing those time-consuming CPU-intensive tasks—such as large media file conversions, high-end graphics work, or video editing—and are mostly using lightly threaded software, the Core i7 chip is still the better performer.
The tougher question is, given that most of today's non-intensive CPU tasks are "bursty"—that is, they hit the CPU quickly and are finished before you likely have a chance to blink—would you actually be able to tell the difference in everyday use between this AMD chip and its Intel counterpart without a benchmark? So long as both systems had similarly speedy solid-state boot drives and RAM allotments, we don't think you would.
Of course, gaming may be another matter entirely, given that most of today's games don't lean heavily on lots of cores. But before we get to our gaming tests, let's take a look at overclocking.
The Ryzen 7 1700 has the same number of cores and the same amount of cache as the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X, just with lower a lower clock speed than those chips. So we were wondering how close it could be pushed to its higher-end Ryzen 7 counterparts when overclocked. We fired up AMD's new Ryzen Master Utility (which bears a striking resemblance to the company's also relatively new Radeon Wattman graphics overclocking software) and found that, if our test chip is any indication, the Ryzen 7 1700 is an impressive overclocker.
After enabling the High Precision Event Timer (HPET.bat) file to enable most of the CPU's overclocking features (something that, at least for the moment, must be done via the command line), we started adjusting the core clocks, inching up the slider for all CPU cores as a unit. We liked that you can adjust clock speeds in 25MHz increments rather than winging it, so you can get pretty fine-grained in your tweaking, if that's your thing.
And while our Ryzen 7 1800X topped out at 4GHz, we were able to get our Ryzen 7 1700 chip nearly that high as well. It topped out at 3.85GHz, or 850MHz above the chip's stock base clock of 3GHz. Running any benchmarks beyond that resulted in a black screen requiring a hard reboot.
But our chip was very stable at 3.85GHz, which put it within striking distance of the stock performance of the $499 Ryzen 7 1800X, as well as the $1,050 Core i7-6900K on some tests. Running at 3.85GHz, in Cinebench R15 we saw the All CPUs score of the Ryzen 7 1700 jump from 1,401 to 1,622. That's an increase of almost 16 percent, and effectively tied with the 1,625 stock-clocked score of the Ryzen 7 1800X. The Core i7-7700K at stock is still faster on the single-core test at stock (190) than the overclocked Ryzen 7 1700 (154). But when overclocked, the Ryzen chip positively stomps the Kaby Lake i7 in the All CPU test, by more than 63 percent.
The overclocked Ryzen 7 1700 also saw its time on the POV-Ray All CPU benchmark drop from 1 minute and 29 seconds (1:29) to 1:16. The latter time is actually a second faster than both the stock-clocked Ryzen 7 1800X and the $1,050 Core i7-6900K.
AMD aimed the Ryzen 7 1700 at the Core i7-7700K, which makes sense given that the two chips have similar pricing. But if our chip is any indication, the Ryzen 7 1700 is capable of standing with even pricier Intel chips in multi-core-taxing tests when pushed to its limits and paired with a capable cooler. In a broad sense, that's where CPU muscle really matters these days, as most lightly threaded tasks are going to finish fast enough that you wouldn't likely notice the difference even if your CPU choice is significantly slower than the competition.
Still, in benchmarks at least, AMD's chip lags significantly behind the Intel Core i7-7700K on tests that don't take advantage of all available cores. And given the price difference between the two chips, we're less forgiving on that front than we were with the Ryzen 7 1800X, which costs about half as much as its $1,000-plus competition.
Gaming Performance
We don't ordinarily run graphics tests when testing processors without integrated graphics. That's mostly because graphics performance typically has much (much) more to do with what graphics card you have installed than what processor you're using—especially when you're using a reasonably high-end processor like the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 or Intel's competing Core i7-7700K.
But, as this is an untested platform, and the Ryzen 7 1800X exhibited some gaming-performance deficiencies at 1080p, we wanted to see if the Ryzen 7 1700 could deliver acceptable frame rates with a high-end video card. So we swapped out the AMD Radeon RX 480 that we used for the bulk of our benchmark testing, dropped in an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition card, and ran a few of the tests that we also use for graphics-card testing.
For comparison numbers, we did the same thing with our Intel Kaby Lake testbed running on an Intel Core i7-7700K. Both systems were tested using a Serial ATA-based boot drive and 16GB of RAM.
First, we fired up late 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 11 mode at the Very High preset and ran the built-in benchmark. In short, we found that—at least at 1080p—the Ryzen 7 1700 has the same issues as Ryzen 7 1800X.
Our Ryzen 7 1700-based rig averaged 105 frames per second (fps), two fps less than the Ryzen 7 1800X's 107fps, while the Core i7-7700K averaged 128fps. Obviously, knocking 23fps off your gaming performance is never a good thing—particularly considering how expensive high-end graphics cards are these days. Just like with the Ryzen 7 1800X, the Ryzen 7 1700 system delivered both lower minimum and lower maximum frame rates compared to the the same card in our Intel testbed.
But when we stepped up to 4K resolution (3,840x2,160), performance evened out (again, just like with the Ryzen 7 1800X system). At that higher setting, the Ryzen 7 1700 system delivered an average frame rate of 47.6fps, which is actually a frame higher than the 46.6fps average delivered by our Core i7-equipped test bed. That one frame is well within our general 2 percent margin of error.
Next, we switched to the game Far Cry Primal, on the title's High preset, and saw similar results as on Tomb Raider. Things looked significantly worse for AMD this time—though, again, still only at 1080p.
At 1080p in this title, the Ryzen system managed an average of 76fps, down from the 83fps offered up by the same system with the Ryzen 7 1800X installed. The Core i7-7700K machine tacked on a staggering 70 percent more frames, hitting 130fps. Jumping up to 4K resolution on Far Cry Primal, however, both the Ryzen systems again took a single-frame lead, delivering 49fps to the Intel machine's 48fps.
What do we glean from this? In short, just like the Ryzen 7 1800X, the Ryzen 7 1700's gaming performance is far from as good as we'd expect at 1080p. But note that, as we mentioned earlier, AMD has been out of the high-end-CPU realm for years, and we did our testing in the days around this processor's launch. Just as games aren't always optimized for brand-new graphics cards as soon as they launch (particularly if you happen to have a multi-card SLI or CrossFire setup), but are patched in the weeks that follow to deliver better performance, the same will likely happen on the CPU side of things—at least to a degree.
Also, if you're buying a $329 CPU and a high-end video card, you probably aren't gaming on a 1080p screen at this point—unless, perhaps, you're a fast-paced twitch-game aficionado with a very high-refresh-rate 1080p monitor.
If the latter sounds like you, this Ryzen chip probably isn't your best choice right now. (The Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K would be a better fit, at a lower price.) But everyone with a very-high-resolution (1440p or 4K) monitor should see much less variance between what Ryzen and Broadwell-E/Kaby Lake deliver when it comes to games running on these high-end chips.
Plus, let's not forget: Even if you are gaming on a 1080p screen, the 76fps-to-105fps performance we saw in testing is still very smooth, and close enough to what Intel delivers that you'd need both a fast-refresh monitor and extremely good eyesight to see it.
That said, there will certainly be more people wanting to game at 1080p with this chip at $329 than the $499 Ryzen 7 1800X. And we were fairly forgiving of the 1800X given the latter chip's $500 price difference between it and the Intel chip it's in competition with, money that could easily be used to upgrade to a higher-resolution monitor. The difference between the Ryzen 7 1700 and the Core i7-7700K, though, is currently $20 at most. That won't even buy you a recent AAA game title, unless you happen to snag one on a good Steam sale.
We came away pleasantly impressed by the performance of AMD's top-end Ryzen 7 1800X, and given its enthusiast price bracket and the $500 gap between it and the Core i7-6900K, we were willing to overlook what may well just be temporary gaming growing pains when running titles at 1080p. But when it comes to the Ryzen 7 1700, our feelings are much more mixed.
On the one hand, AMD's entry-level Ryzen 7 beats up the Core i7-7700K when it comes to tasks like rendering and video editing/transcoding. And if our review chip wasn't a fluke, the chip is overclockable to the point where it gets close to the performance of its $499 counterpart (and the $1,000 Core i7-6900K). If you plan on attaching a powerful cooler and are willing to shoot the overclocking dice, or you want a powerful but reasonably affordable CPU for heavy-duty computing tasks and some gaming on the side with a powerful card at 1440p or 4K, the Ryzen 7 1700 is a very good choice.
But this AMD chip is nearly the same price as the Core i7-7700K, which is faster at tasks that don't take advantage of lots of cores. And at least for the moment, the Core i7 delivers drastically better gaming performance at 1080p (at least in the two games we tested, although other reviewers saw similar results with other test titles). So if you don't often tackle time-consuming CPU-intensive tasks and you want the best performance for gaming at lower resolutions today, you should go the Core i7 route, even if you have to pay a little more for a motherboard.
That said, even if you're leaning in that direction, it may be worth it to wait a few months and see if AMD's 1080p gaming performance looks like it's improving, thanks to patches and driver updates. It's also possible that in that time Intel will drop the prices on some of its chips, now that Team Blue has some serious competition in the desktop-CPU market again. Because even if the Ryzen 7 1700 doesn't blow away Intel's Kaby Lake i7, it gives it some solid competition, which is something no Core i7 has had for a long time.
AMD's entry-level Ryzen 7 chip impresses on multi-core tasks, and our test chip overclocked to nearly 4GHz. But Intel's "Kaby Lake" chips are better at lightly threaded workloads and 1080p gaming—at least for now.
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Medtronic received FDA approval for its Amplia MRI Quad CRT-D SureScan and Compia MRI Quad CRT-D SureScan cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators, making them the only MRI-conditional CRT-Ds so far to be available in the U.S.
The indications allow scans of any part of the body, given certain precautions are taken.
The implants work with the company's Attain Perfoma MRI SureScan Quadripolar Leads that have themselves received FDA approval to be compatible with MRI scans.
From Medtronic:
The Amplia MRI device features the AdaptivCRT® algorithm, which has been shown to reduce a patient's odds of a heart failure hospital readmission (within 30 days) by 59 percent (versus echo-optimized CRT). The AdaptivCRT feature also has been shown to improve CRT response rate by 12 percent, and to reduce AF risk by 46 percent compared to echo-optimized BiV pacing.
With 16 pacing configurations and shorter spacing between the two center electrodes, these quadripolar leads have been shown to reduce the incidence of phrenic nerve stimulation (PNS), a potential issue associated with CRT therapy that results in muscle twitching, hiccups or shortness of breath. Attain Performa leads also include steroid on all four electrodes for lower chronic pacing thresholds, which contribute to greater device longevity and reduce the likelihood of PNS. The systems also include VectorExpress(TM) technology, an automated in-office test that reduces lead programing to two minutes, and reveals clinically actionable information to help physicians select optimal pacing configurations for each patient.
Via: Medtronic…


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|Unit Five Organizer: "CIRCLES AND GRAPHS"
(4 weeks)
This unit, which falls at the end of the second nine weeks, should be viewed as a "bridge" between units taught in the first semester
and the units to come. It addresses the geometry of the circle which will eventually be taught in the fifth grade GPS but is not currently
taught in the fifth grade QCC. Students will:
• Understand the relationship between the circumference and the diameter of a circle;
• Find the radius, diameter, circumference and/or the area of a circle given appropriate information;
• Organize data in grouped frequency tables;
• Create circle graphs to display data;
• Operate with fractions, decimals and percents to answer questions related to graphs;
• Evaluate, in context, algebraic expressions, including those with exponents; and
• Solve algebraic equations related to circles.
Students will discover Pi (π) and use the equation C/d = π to find the circumference, the radius and the diameter of a circle. They will
derive the formula for the area of a circle by cutting a circle into equal sectors and noticing that the more sectors into which the circle
is cut, the closer the area formed approximates the area of a rectangle. They will organize available data into a grouped frequency
table and represent that data with a circle graph.
To assure that this unit is taught with the appropriate emphasis, depth and rigor, it is important that the tasks listed under "Evidence of
Learning" be reviewed early in the planning process. A variety of resources should be utilized to supplement, but not completely
replace, the textbook. Textbooks not only provide much needed content information, but excellent learning activities as well. The
tasks in these units illustrate the types of learning activities that should be utilized from a variety of sources.
• The ratio of the circumference to the diameter of any circle is a constant approximately equal to 3.14.
• Formulas can be used to help us find missing measurements of figures.
• The area of a circle can be approximated using the area of a rectangle.
• Fractions, decimals and percents help us solve problems and make sense of data.
• Some data sets are best displayed using circle graphs.
• What is the relationship between the circumference and the diameter of a circle?
• How can we determine the formula for the area of a circle?
• When should I use a circle graph?
• How do circle graphs help me compare different groups?
• How can fractions, decimals and percents help me answer questions related to data?
|Mathematical standards are interwoven and
should be addressed throughout the year in as many different units and
as possible in order to emphasize the natural connections that exist among mathematical topics.
M6D1. Students will pose questions, collect data, represent and analyze the data, and interpret results.
b. Using data, construct frequency distributions, frequency tables, and graphs.
c. Choose appropriate graphs to be consistent with the nature of the data (categorical or numerical). Graphs should include pictographs, histograms, bar graphs, line graphs, circle graphs, and line plots.
d. Use tables and graphs to examine variation that occurs within a group and variation that occurs between groups.
e. Relate the data analysis to the context of the questions posed.
M6N1. Students will understand the meaning of the four arithmetic operations as related to positive rational numbers and will
use these concepts to solve problems.
d. Add and subtract fractions and mixed numbers with unlike denominators.
e. Multiply and divide fractions and mixed numbers.
f. Use fractions, decimals, and percents interchangeably.
g. Solve problems involving fractions, decimals, and percents.
M6M2. Students will use appropriate units of measure for finding length, perimeter, area and volume and will express each
quantity using the appropriate unit.
a. Measure length to the nearest half, fourth, eighth and sixteenth of an inch.
b. Select and use units of appropriate size and type to measure length, perimeter, area and volume.
M6A1. Students will understand the concept of ratio and use it to represent quantitative relationships.
M6A3. Students will evaluate algebraic expressions, including those with exponents, and solve simple one-step equations using
each of the four basic operations.
M6P1. Students will solve problems (using appropriate technology).
a. Build new mathematical knowledge through problem solving.
b. Solve problems that arise in mathematics and in other contexts.
c. Apply and adapt a variety of appropriate strategies to solve problems.
d. Monitor and reflect on the process of mathematical problem solving.
M6P2. Students will reason and evaluate mathematical arguments.
a. Recognize reasoning and proof as fundamental aspects of mathematics.
b. Make and investigate mathematical conjectures.
c. Develop and evaluate mathematical arguments and proofs.
d. Select and use various types of reasoning and methods of proof.
M6P3. Students will communicate mathematically.
a. Organize and consolidate their mathematical thinking through communication.
b. Communicate their mathematical thinking coherently and clearly to peers, teachers, and others.
c. Analyze and evaluate the mathematical thinking and strategies of others.
d. Use the language of mathematics to express mathematical ideas precisely.
M6P4. Students will make connections among mathematical ideas and to other disciplines.
a. Recognize and use connections among mathematical ideas.
b. Understand how mathematical ideas interconnect and build on one another to produce a coherent whole.
c. Recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics.
M6P5. Students will represent mathematics in multiple ways.
It is expected that students will have prior knowledge/experience related to the concepts and skills identified below. It may be
necessary to pre-assess in order to determine if time needs to be spent on conceptual activities that help students develop a
deeper understanding of these ideas.
• the number of degrees in a complete revolution
• measuring angles using a protractor
• drawing angles of a given degree
By the conclusion of this unit, students should be able to demonstrate the following competencies:
• Use the formula C = πd or C = 2πr to find the missing lengths on a circle;
• Find the area of a circle given the radius or the diameter;
• Organize data into grouped frequency tables;
• Display data using a circle graph;
• Evaluate algebraic expressions, including those with exponents; and
• Solve one step algebraic equations related to the formula for the circumference of a circle.
The following task represents the level of depth, rigor, and complexity expected of all 6th grade students. This task or a task of similar
depth and rigor should be used to demonstrate evidence of learning.
Culminating Activity: "Data and Circle Graphs"
Students will organize, represent and analyze a set of given data.
• Students should be actively engaged in developing their own understanding;
• Mathematics should be represented in as many ways as possible by using graphs, tables, pictures, symbols and words;
• Appropriate manipulatives and technology should be used to enhance student learning; and
• Students should be given opportunities to revise their work based on teacher feedback, peer feedback, and metacognition
which includes self-assessment and reflection.


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On 12/26/16 I got Geo. I so wanted a doggie for Christmas and it didn't look like I would get one, but my niece found Geo. His owners couldn't take care of him and she sent me a picture asking if I wanted him. It was Love at first sight. This year, on 12/26/17, we celebrate our anniversary.
Comments for My 2016 Christmas present-Geo
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|The way it used to be
Page 3 of 5
On the same road, close to Ashrafs, there was a narrow doorway behind which were steep, rickety steps going up to a flat roof where there were displayed magnificent carved wooden chests, tables, chairs etc and wonderfully woven carpets and brass ornaments. This was commonly known as Kashmir Joe's and I presume this was because most of the goods on sale came from Kashmir. Even today no home of a Bahrain expat anywhere in the world is complete without a camphor wood chest purchased from Kashmir Joe. I inherited my mother's and it now has pride of place in my home. When visiting Bahrain friends in the UK and elsewhere, I can be sure to see, as well as the camphor wood chest, at least one Bahrain friendship coffee pot.
Not far from the wiggly bridge on the same road was the Khamis Mosque which was still a busy, functioning mosque in the Fifties and very much a centre of the area. The open market alongside the mosque always seemed to be buzzing with people. It gives me great pleasure nowadays to see how sensitively this ancient mosque has been restored to its former beauty to become a much prized monument.


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Let The Fun Begin!
Join us now for an adventure like no other.
Play locations
Daily people access
Meet Our Founders
Speed has the power of speed and is the sponsor of all the rides.
Spin has the power of spinning things.
Swing has the power of swing and never feels dizzy.
More Fun From Al Hokair Group
- Snowy Forest
- Extreme Trampoline Park
- Flash Bowling
Snowy Forest
Snowy Forest is designed so kids aged 1-12 years old can get a lot of physical activity in a safe environment.Discover More
Extreme Trampoline Park
There aren't too many things in life that compare to being able to beat the normal laws of gravity and hop around in a manner that would otherwise be impossible in the outside world.Discover More
Flash Bowling
Drink a fizzy colorful soft drink. Dig into a yummy cold cuts sandwich. Maybe listen to loud music of your choice.Discover More
Our Exclusive Packages
Sparky's Events
The Spooky Halloween celebration in Sparky's was full of fun and different this yearز
Christmas in Sparky's is always different with the exciting games and competitions, and surprises!
Halloween party In Sparky's Mushrif – Khalidiyah Mall, Abu Dhabi – Lulu Mall, Fujairah Oct,2019.
Sparky's SUMMER Raffle Draw 2019 which had stared on August 1st
National Day Celebrations: A lot of entertainment, games, and gifts and surprises for all Sparky's visitors.
Al Hokair Group in partnership with Immotion Group plc launched a state-of-the-art technology based Virtual Reality Zone.


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Search all estates communities
Discover sophisticated style and exquisite amenities in our distinctive communities. Located in sought-after neighborhoods, our appealing apartment homes and condominiums are designed to enhance your contemporary lifestyle. Luxurious furnishings, resort-style surroundings and superior services create an unrivaled quality of life.
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What is Considered a Carry-OnBy Richard Corrigan; Updated June 08, 2017
Baggage size matters: What is considered a carry-on?
You can only bring so much with you on an airplane, and like all travelers, you want to get as much as possible out of your carry-on bags. So before you even start packing, it's important to understand how big your carry-on bag can be and how much you can put inside. Of course, it also doesn't hurt to know a few (completely legal) tricks that allow you to bring an extra item or two.
Carry-on sizes
With all the rules the Transportation Security Administration has regarding what you can and can't pack in your carry-on, it actually doesn't have any firm guidelines when it comes to how big your carry-on bag can be. That decision is left up to the individual airlines, and specific rules vary depending on who you're flying with. The maximum size is usually in the ballpark of 45 linear inches – the combined total of length, width and depth – but the specifics vary.
Weights and measures
Generally speaking, it doesn't matter how much your carry-on bag weighs, although if your bag is so heavy that you can't get it into the overhead bin without assistance, it's a safe bet that you'll be told you have to check it. Carry-on limits are usually based strictly on size, and the exact dimensions depend on the airline. United and American Airlines both have a carry-on limit of 9 by 14 by 22 inches, while Southwest Airlines restricts carry-on size to 10 by 16 by 24 inches. Be sure to check with your airline to be sure, and remember that the official dimensions of your bag include wheels and handles.
Personal items
Your carry-on bag isn't the only item you can take on the plane with you. Most airlines allow an additional personal item, which usually means a bag of smaller size, such as a purse, laptop bag, camera bag, briefcase or small backpack. Again, the exact size of this bag depends on the airline, so be sure to check. United Airlines allows a personal item up to 9 by 10 by 17 inches, while American Airlines allows it to be up to 8 by 14 by 18 inches. The general rule is that it has to be small enough to fit under the seat in front of you.
A few additional items are allowed on most flights and are not counted as either your carry-on bag or personal item. These include jackets and umbrellas, reading material, food and merchandise purchased at the airport, diaper bags, child safety seats and medical or mobility devices such as canes, crutches and collapsible wheelchairs. The numbers and types of additional items you can bring vary by airline.
A final precaution
Note that some airlines have restricted their basic or economy tickets to allow one personal item only. That means you can't bring a carry-on with you in the cabin; it must be checked in instead. Check your airline for its specific rules.


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Research Protocol
I left a full-time 7-year cycle of creation before becoming involved in teaching visual arts at Cégep de l'Abitibi-Témiscamingue. I noticed that this more conventional life had unfortunately entered me into the rat race and daily routine of commuting and work; a clear departure from my more anarchic lifestyle.
I have this clear image of a swimming pool in which everyone is turning in the same direction except me and a handful of other anarchists. I was the "committed artist" who swam against the current by reacting against the established social system, and even if it was sometimes exhausting to live with this reactionary energy, I had always valued and visualized my life as well. I felt like a salmon swimming upstream in keeping with its own purpose: the survival of its species.
To get me out of my daily routine of commuting and work, I created a research protocol with discipline worthy of a yogi in survival instinct. Since September 2014, I have collected photographs of dead animals when I walk and run; waste left on the side of the road, photos of scenes opposing an artifact-culture versus an artifact-nature, or any other object that is pictorially interesting where I invent a short story.
This process is a way for me to observe, question and beautify human behavior using visual artifacts, as if traces and waste left by humans were sociological and anthropological indices in order to understand and question it.
The Slow Down Time exhibition is the product of this research protocol. My collection of images shows images of truth. A selection was made to mount (stick) on a wooden stand. This allows me to get involved in painting and to incorporate a plastic language and a pictorial richness. Sometimes painting literally invades photography and sometimes photography remains master of the work and reveals the object of departure. We can perceive a dialogue between the abandoned real object and the plastic intervention that embellishes or destroys the object. Sometimes the work titles bear witness to the creation process and not the finished work. This way, I emphasize the life trajectory. The road traveled is more important for me than its purpose…I therefore subscribe to the philosophy behind the Slow…art movement!
This creation process has lasted 3 ½ years, which means that since that time, I have always, or almost always taken the same route to keep me aware of what is happening around me. Like Camus, I use the Sisyphus allegory. "Man is searching for meaning caught up in a repetitive journey he calls absurd. Does realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus replied: "No, it requires revolt." https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Mythe_de_Sisyphe
These snapshot images are authentic moments of experience to avoid sinking into the absurdity of this world that is devoid of meaning and spirituality, and often without any respect for the environment. It is through art that I am able to channel this energy of revolt and finally, to rediscover the salmon in me!


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LOS ANGELES (AP) — California's state epidemiologist is urging a halt to more than 300,000 coronavirus vaccinations using a Moderna vaccine version because some people received medical treatment for possible severe allergic reactions.
Dr. Erica S. Pan on Sunday recommended providers stop using lot 41L20A of the Moderna vaccine pending completion of an investigation by state officials, Moderna, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the federal Food and Drug Administration.
"Out of an extreme abundance of caution and also recognizing the extremely limited supply of vaccine, we are recommending that providers use other available vaccine inventory," Pan said in a statement.
She said more than 330,000 doses from the lot arrived in California between Jan. 5 and Jan. 12 and were distributed to 287 providers.
Fewer than 10 people, who all received the vaccine at the same community site, needed medical attention over a 24-hour period, Pan said. No other similar clusters were found.
Pan did not specify the number of cases involved or where they occurred.
However, six San Diego health care workers had allergic reactions to vaccines they received at a mass vaccination center on Jan. 14. The site was temporarily closed and is now using other vaccines, KTGV-TV reported.
Moderna in a statement said the company "is unaware of comparable adverse events from other vaccination centers which may have administered vaccines from the same lot."
The CDC has said COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects for a few days that include fever, chills, headache, swelling or tiredness, "which are normal signs that your body is building protection."
However, severe reactions are extremely rare. Pan said in a vaccine similar to Moderna, the rate of anaphylaxis — in which an immune system reaction can block breathing and cause blood pressure to drop — was about 1 in 100,000.
The announcement came as California counties continue to plead for more COVID-19 vaccine as the state tries to reduce its rate of infection, which has led to record numbers of hospitalizations and deaths.
California, with a population of 40 million, has shipped about about 3.2 million doses of the vaccine — which requires two doses for full immunization — to local health departments and health care systems, the state's Department of Public Health reported Monday.
Only about 1.4 million of those doses, or around 40%, have been administered.
So far. the state has vaccinated fewer than 2,500 people per 100,000 residents, a rate that falls well below the national average, according to federal data.
Although Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that anyone age 65 and older would be eligible to start receiving the vaccine, Los Angeles County and some others have said they do not have enough doses to vaccinate so many people and are first concentrating on inoculating health care workers and the most vulnerable elderly living in care homes.
On Monday, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District sent a letter to state and county public health officials asking for authorization to provide COVID-19 vaccinations at schools for staff, local community members and for students once a vaccine for children has been approved.
"Doing so will help reopen schools as soon as possible, and in the safest way possible," Superintendent Austin Beutner wrote.
California is nearing 3 million coronavirus cases and more than 33,600 people have died since the start of the pandemic last year, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
The death rate from COVID-19 in Los Angeles County — the nation's most populous and an epicenter of the state pandemic — works out to about one person every six minutes.
On Sunday, the South Coast Air Quality Management District suspended some pollution-control limits on the number of cremations for at least 10 days in order to deal with a backlog of bodies at hospitals and funeral homes.
"The current rate of death is more than double that of pre-pandemic years," the agency said.
On average, California has seen about 500 deaths and 40,000 new cases daily for the past two weeks. Although hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions remained on a slight downward trend, officials have warned that could reverse when the full impact from transmissions during Christmas and New Year's Eve gatherings is felt.
"As case numbers continue to rise in California, the total number of individuals who will have serious outcomes will also increase," the state health department said in a statement Monday.
Adding to concerns, California is experiencing new, possibly more transmissible forms of COVID-19.
The state health department announced Sunday that an L452R variant of the virus is increasingly showing up in genetic sequencing of COVID-19 test samples from several counties.
The variant was first identified last year in California and in other states and countries but has been identified more frequently since November and in several large outbreaks in Northern California's Santa Clara County, the department said.
Overall, the variant has been found in at least a dozen counties. In some places. testing has found the variant in a quarter of the samples sequenced, said Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
However, not all test samples receive genetic sequencing to identify variants so its frequency wasn't immediately clear.
However, health officials said it was linked to a Christmas-time outbreak at Kaiser Permanente San Jose that infected at least 89 staff members and patients, killing a receptionist. The outbreak has been blamed on an employee who visited the hospital emergency room wearing an air-powered inflatable Christmas tree costume.
The variant is different from another mutation, B117, that was first reported in the United Kingdom and appears to spread much more easily, although it doesn't appear to make people sicker.
That variant has already shown up in San Diego County and Los Angeles County announced over the weekend that it had detected its first case.
Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.


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Written by: Nic Aquiles Lange
Client consultations are a vital part of a colourist's daily life in the salon. When it comes to colour consultations, it is important to take into account the skin tone, eye colour and lifestyle of the client whom we are working with. Oftentimes, we come across a client who is not sure of the colour that he or she wants, and it may be challenging to determine exactly what your client will like. Read on for a simple way that will help guide you in the right direction towards a colour that your client will love!
Your client's natural hair colour, when and how their hair grays, their natural texture and abundance are all determined by a person's genetic coding. Determining your client's HAIR COLOUR TYPE is the easiest way to help you find their natural hair colour, which will then help you select the most flattering colour for them.
Generally, colourists use the method of the DEPTH SYSTEM to determine or identify their client's natural hair colour. The HAIR COLOUR TYPE assessment takes this process a bit farther by taking in to consideration the person's natural undertones to gain a greater understanding of the client's natural hair colour and potential amount of gray.
There are four HAIR COLOUR TYPES which you can generally categorise your clients in to: Black to Dark Brunette, Auburn to Warm Brunette, Sandy Brunette to Blonde and Red. Note that your client's hair can range from darker to lighter within any given HAIR COLOUR TYPE. In the following section, you will find a description of the four HAIR COLOUR TYPES, along with the recommended COLOR.ME SHADES that will best suit each type.
The Four HAIR COLOUR TYPES
Black to Dark Brunette
This individual is someone who was born with dark hair that remains unchanged throughout their lifetime until they begin to gray. This person generally likes natural-looking hair colours with cool tones, and traditionally does not like warm or bright tones resulting from lightening their hair. This client feels most comfortable with solid and opaque end-results.
COLOR.ME SHADES 5.7 with 5.86, 6.2 with 5.1
COLOR.ME TONER NATURAL and SILVER
Auburn to Warm Brunette
This client was born with reddish blonde to ashy brown hair, which darkens to a brown shade before they reach their teens. This individual would not consider themselves blonde in their teenage years, although their hair tends to lighten considerably from the sun. This client is more accepting of rich warm tones, because their hair lightens from the sun to a soft copper hue with muted gold undertones. Due to the fact that this individual goes through several natural hair colour changes, they tend to be more diverse when it comes to colouring their hair.
COLOR.ME SHADES 6.3 with 6.4, 8.31 with 8.2
COLOR.ME CLEAR for a sun-kissed effect
Sandy Brunette to Blonde
Those who fall into this HAIR COLOUR TYPE were born with blonde hair that remains blonde throughout their teenage years. In some cases, they will remain blonde throughout their twenties and thirties, but for the most part, their hair tends to darken while they are in high school. This person would consider themselves blonde during their high school years.
Because people in this HAIR COLOUR TYPE consider themselves blonde, they tend not to adjust well when their hair begins to darken. For this reason, a Sandy Brunette to Blonde person accounts for over 50% of salon hair colour clients, as they are constantly focused on the goal of remaining blonde. When someone with this HAIR COLOUR TYPE starts to darken, they will go to great lengths to keep their hair as blonde as it once was, which generally results in early hair colouring habits in a salon. This client typically aims for a smoky to creamy blonde.
COLOR.ME SHADES 10.1 with SOFT.VIOLET.BOOSTER
COLOR.ME HIGH.LIFT HL101 with SOFT.VIOLET.BOOSTER, HL108
This individual's range of red hair colour varies from strawberry blonde to deep or bright copper red during their teenage years. Because of the attention that redheads are used to receiving from their hair colour, they generally do not colour their hair until it starts to turn flat or gray. If they do colour their hair, they tend to colour it close to the same colour that they had growing up. Redheads account for 1% of the world's population, though it is important to note that those who are reddish blonde during their toddler years but turn dark before their teens would be placed in the Amber to Warm Brunette HAIR COLOUR TYPE. Redheads typically love multi-tonal peach tones, apricot coppers and rich crimson reds.
COLOR.ME SHADES 7.64 with 7.43, 10.3 with ORANGE.BOOSTER
COLOR.ME HIGH.LIFT HL100 with RED.BOOSTER in foil work
Knowing what HAIR COLOUR TYPE your client is will make it easier for them to express to you their desired colour result, as well as give you a better understanding of their natural hair colour so that you can be sure to send your client home with a colour that he or she will adore!
Still not sure what HAIR COLOUR TYPE your client is? Check out FRINGE.BENEFITS, our visual colour consultation tool and be sure to stalk COLOR.ME on Bangstyle and follow us on Instagram for the latest colour creations!


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Deaconess Dr. Chrissie Gillet, National Director of Word of Hope (a Lutherans for Life affiliate), joins Andy and Sarah to talk about her perspective on why suicide rates are rising and the unique message we can bring as Christians to those who suffer depression or suicidal ideation. Deaconess Gillet will be speaking on this topic at the National Lutherans for Life Conference this October! Learn more about Word of Hope at word-of-hope.org and register for the Lutherans for Life Conference at lutheransforlife.org/2018-lutherans-for-life-national-conference.
Have a topic you'd like to hear about on The Coffee Hour? Contact Andy Bates at email@example.com or call 314-996-1519.


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laundry basket cage (white) | Natural oak
Cage laundry basket is big enough to hold several pairs of jeans, long sleeve shirts and bed linen. The double thickness washable bag is made from heavy duty exterior fabric with taped and stitched seams and a smooth shear lining interior that won't snag your delicates.
The bag holds its shape; two handles lift it easily in and out, no wrestling required. For privacy, close the top by pulling the thick pull tie cord.
Available with either a soft white or black bag insert to keep your colours and whites separate.
Made from sustainably harvested natural American white oak and oak veneers, selected for their warm colour, beautiful grain pattern and traditional hardwood durability. All edges look crisp but are carefully hand sanded to make them soft to the touch. Finished with a matt, water resistant lacquer. Silicone rubber feet stop it slipping. Bag is washable. Design by Lincoln Rivers.
Dimensions: 31d x 63h cm
Product code: 63222.27
Other available finishes: Natural oak, Dark oak, Dark oak


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from Animal Liberation Frontline
Fur farmers distribute new "Wanted" poster to convenience stores, coffee shops, more.
The fur industry's hunt for the Animal Liberation Front just go weirder.
After the Fur Commission issued bulletins telling fur farmers to call the police if their address is on the internet, and to be on alert for the release of the new Earth Crisis album, they may have topped themselves with their latest move: A hilarious Animal Liberation Front "Wanted" poster.
Fur farmers have been sent this poster and encouraged to distribute it near their farms, hoping it will lead to the capture of the Animal Liberation Front. The Fur Commission has instructed farmers to:
"..post [the wanted poster] to bulletin boards in your area. All-night convenience stores on major highways are a prime location, as are coffee shops and 'vegan' restaurants/markets.'"
No explanation is offered as to why a Midwest gas station is a strategic location to court tipsters, why the word "vegan" is put in quotes as though it is obscure slang, or how a hokey stock photo of a burglar might aid in the ALF's capture.
The text of the poster reads:
Animal rights extremists have been attacking family mink farms all over North America. These attacks, besides being cruel and traumatic to the animals, are federal crimes and fall under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Hundreds of animals have now suffered and painfully died due to these assaults on hard working families and their farms. The perpetrators are not heroes, or idealists; they
are felons that break into and destroy people's livelihood, terrorizing families in the dead of night. In order to help stop these offenses, Fur Commission USA is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.
After 10 fur farm raids in 5 months, the fur industry has gotten desperate. So desperate, they are apparently willing to embarrass themselves by using a wanted poster template reminiscent of one used in mall photo booths in the vain hopes a tipster will stumble upon their plea at an Idaho gas station.
If you see the man in the above photo, you know what to do.


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Vancouver's Leader in Transition toward Strong, Resilient, Complete Communities
June 24, 2013 at 7pm to August 17, 2013 at 9pm – Kitsilano Showboat Kitsilano Showboat is a live outdoor performing arts theatre on the shores of Kits Beach. Free shows every Monday, Wednesday, Friday & Saturday night at 7:00 from June 24 to August 17, 2013. Fea… Organized by Barry Leinbach | Type: kitsilano, community, tradition, entertainment
August 4, 2013 at 1pm to September 21, 2013 at 1pm – Vancouver "Earthwalks Vancouver" July/August/September 2013 Back by popular demand! False Creek Watershed Society has once again partnered with Village Vancouver to offer a series of "Earth Walks". We live in… Organized by Celia Brauer | Type: all
August 13, 2013 to August 17, 2013 – OUR Ecovillage Social Permaculture with Starhawk and Charles Williams at OUR Ecovillage in Shawnigan Lake August 13–17. $799 includes camping and meals. In this five-day intensive, we'll explore how to structure ou… Organized by OUR Ecovillage | Type: workshop
August 14, 2013 from 6pm to 9pm – The Mighty Oak Come join us for a tour around Mount Pleasant of City Beet's front/side/backyard farms! RSVP on our facebook event >> After finding their farm legs during an organic farm internship on Reroot O… Organized by Vancouver Urban Farming Society, Young Agrarians, City Beet Farm | Type: mount pleasant, food, potluck, tour
August 14, 2013 from 6pm to 7:30pm – UBC Farm Join us at the UBC Farm for an evening dedicated to preserving and storing UBC Farm softneck garlic and flower harvests in a decorative way! Garlic braiding is a great skill either as a hobby or for… Organized by UBC Farm Community Engagement | Type: workshop, garlic, crafts, decoration
© 2023 Created by Yael Stav. Powered by


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Indian jeweller to the stars, Farah Khan Ali, set up her fine jewellery business in in Mumbai 18 years ago. Selling to India's elite, Farah Khan's style of jewellery is exuberant and picks up on Indian themes with a very contemporary twist.
Farah Khan adds carved gemstones and dragons to her menagerie of majestic animals in her new Le Jardin Exotique collection of summer jewellery.
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I still remember the front door of our first home. The house we brought our firstborn home to. The first home we renovated. The first home we shared together. It was painted a bright, sunny Dulux yellow and it made me feel happy every time I walked past it...
We used to get people knocking on the door asking us what colour the door was (you can see inside our old home on vogue.com.au here). The rest of the house was grey and white. When we moved down the road, it was the front door that I missed the most. Not for long – I love changing the interior of a home (I get it from my mum – she's been an interior decorator for over 25 years). My friends will know that I love to procrastinate by moving furniture around a room – you should see how many times I've redone the office only to move the desks exactly back to where they were. In our new home, we came up with a new colour scheme that was similar to the last one (lots of grey again – greys are the perfect neutral and an ideal background for accent colours – you can get more inspiration from Dulux here), but perhaps a little more traditional. If you were to wander through our home you'd find a mix of blues, pinks, yellows, greys, duck egg blue, white – it's a very calming home. While grey tones are my favourite base, there will always be colour in our home. Quite simply, because it makes me happy. When I first started working at VOGUE magazine when I was in my mid-20s, everyone wore head-to-toe black. The fashion editor loved colour, but she was the only one. I'd come from sunny Dubai at a time when DVF's bold wrap dress was all anyone (myself included) wanted to wear. I couldn't understand this obsession with black. For me, whether it's fashion or interiors, colour makes me smile. Our new home is much like our last – very classic but filled with pops of colour and print. When we first moved in, we actually painted the door black for something different. It looked smart, but I missed the colourful entrance. So recently, we decided to paint our door a bright shade of Dulux 'Silk Jewel' (I originally wanted the Dulux colour 'Hugo' but understandably, my husband didn't really fancy a pink door). The house is girly enough – I don't think he could handle more pink. The rest of the home is grey and white and upstairs, we injected some very soft blue (Dulux 'Elusive Blue') and a very soft shade called Ghost Town Quarter' in the children's room (it almost looks a little lilac). I love calming, neutral tones and then I'll add artwork or cushions to brighten up a room. In our sitting room, we've used a darker grey to create a more formal, luxurious mood. If I was ever to repaint this room, I'd go for Dulux 'Goyder Green' – how divine is this colour?! Downstairs is Dulux 'Lexicon Half' and it's more informal and fun. Ready for a tour of some of my favourite spaces in my home? Photography: Grace Alyssa Kyo | In association with Dulux | You can see Dulux's summer colour trends here
GET THE LOOK: Front door painted in Dulux 'Silk Jewel'
The formal sitting room
GET THE LOOK: Formal sitting room painted in Dulux 'Tranquil Retreat'
The dining area
GET THE LOOK: Dining room and cabinetry painted in Dulux 'Lexicon Half'
The children's room
GET THE LOOK: Children's room painted in Dulux 'Ghost Town Quarter'
The living room
SHOP: Family area also painted in Dulux 'Lexicon Half'
The outdoor area
GET THE LOOK: Outdoor wall painted in Dulux 'Wayward Grey'
The spare bedroom


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The gripping, decades-spanning inside story of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Prime Ministers who shaped Britain's post-war destiny.
The Crown tells the inside story of two of the most famous addresses in the world – Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street – and the intrigues, love lives and machinations behind the great events that shaped the second half of the 20th century. Two houses, two courts, one Crown.
A young Princess Elizabeth marries Prince Philip. As King George VI's health worsens, Winston Churchill is elected prime minister for the second time.View Scenes
With King George too ill to travel, Elizabeth and Philip embark on a four-continent Commonwealth tour. Party leaders attempt to undermine Churchill.View Scenes
With Elizabeth in a new role, Philip tries to assert some power. Churchill wants to delay the coronation. King George's disgraced brother arrives.View Scenes
When dense smog cripples London for days and creates a serious health hazard, Churchill's inaction leaves him vulnerable to his political enemies.View Scenes
Elizabeth rejects protocol by appointing Philip to coordinate her coronation, but his ideas create conflict. The Duke of Windsor returns to London.View Scenes
Margaret and Peter come to Elizabeth with a request. With a royal scandal about to break in the newspapers, the Queen Mother intervenes.View Scenes
As the Soviets test the H-bomb, both Churchill and Eden have major health crises. Angry about her inadequate education, Elizabeth hires a tutor.View Scenes
Elizabeth and Philip go on an exhausting world journey. Margaret takes over some of her sister's official duties and tries to liven things up.View Scenes
As tensions with Philip increase, Elizabeth spends time with her old friend Porchey. Churchill's portrait is painted for his 80th birthday.View Scenes
Margaret and Peter are reunited, but another obstacle stands in their way. Elizabeth is torn between her duty as Queen and her love for her sister.View Scenes
As Philip leaves for a long tour, Elizabeth makes an upsetting discovery. Prime Minister Eden wants to strike back after Egypt seizes the Suez Canal.View Scenes
Elizabeth feels disconnected from Philip. Eden copes with international pressure and ill health. An interview stirs up harrowing memories for Philip.View Scenes
Palace insiders try to prevent a scandal that could reflect poorly on Philip. Eden faces censure from his cabinet and the press.View Scenes
When Elizabeth and Philip throw a grand party for their 10th anniversary, both Margaret and the new Prime Minister experience romantic tribulations.View Scenes
After Elizabeth makes a tone-deaf speech at a Jaguar factory, she and the monarchy come under public attack from an outspoken lord.View Scenes
A secret World War II document opens Elizabeth's eyes to grim realities about a family member. The Duke of Windsor campaigns to re-enter public life.View Scenes
A letter from Peter Townsend spurs Margaret to make a bold proposal. Elizabeth has good news that causes complications for Margaret.View Scenes
Inspired by Jackie Kennedy and against her government's wishes, Elizabeth takes an unconventional approach to resolving an issue with Ghana.View Scenes
Philip insists that Prince Charles attend his alma mater in Scotland and reminisces about the life-changing difficulties he experienced there.View Scenes
A salacious government scandal hits close to home for Elizabeth and Philip. Elizabeth retreats to Scotland for rest during a difficult pregnancy.View Scenes
The royal family mourns the passing of Winston Churchill. The United Kingdom ushers in a new prime minister, the Labour Party's Harold Wilson whom Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth hear might be a Soviet spy.View Scenes
While Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon visit the USA, the queen, at the bidding of Harold Wilson, asks them to make a side trip to Washington, D.C. to ask President Johnson for financial assistance for the United Kingdom.View Scenes
A horrible disaster in the Welsh town of Aberfan leaves scores of children dead, but when the Queen takes a week to decide to visit the town to offer solace to its people, she must confront her reasons for postponing the trip.View Scenes
Left without a home by a political coup in Athens, Philip's eccentric mother, Princess Alice of Greece, is invited to live in Buckingham Palace by the Queen.View Scenes
While the Queen travels abroad to learn about horse training, unhappiness among the British elite with the devaluation of the pound involves Lord Mountbatten in a plan to oust Harold Wilson.View Scenes
Prince Charles is sent to Aberystwyth to learn Welsh from an ardent nationalist in preparation for the ceremony for his investiture as Prince of Wales.View Scenes
The 1969 moon landing occasions a mid-life crisis in Prince Philip, who thinks of the adventures he has missed as the Queen's consort.View Scenes
While Princess Anne dates her elder brother's polo rival Andrew Parker Bowles, Prince Charles falls deeply in love with Camilla Shand causing the Queen Mother and Lord Mountbatten to interfere.View Scenes
Charles visits the exiled Duke of Windsor in his Paris chateau, only to find him very ill. But will the Queen make peace with her uncle before he dies?View Scenes
As her marriage falls apart, Princess Margaret finds solace in the arms of a much younger landscape gardener. The Queen and the nation celebrate Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee.View Scenes
As Elizabeth welcomes Britain's first woman prime minister and Charles meets a young Diana Spencer, an IRA attack brings tragedy to the royal family.View Scenes
Margaret Thatcher visits Balmoral but has trouble fitting in with the royal family, while Charles finds himself torn between his heart and family duty.View Scenes
After Charles proposes, Diana moves into Buckingham Palace and finds her life filled with princess training, loneliness — and Camilla Parker Bowles.View Scenes
While Margaret Thatcher struggles with the disappearance of her favorite child, Elizabeth reexamines her relationships with her four children.View Scenes
As Thatcher's policies create rising unemployment, a desperate man breaks into the palace, where he finds Elizabeth's bedroom and awakens her for a talk.View Scenes
On a tour of Australia, Diana struggles to balance motherhood with her royal duties while both she and Charles cope with their marriage difficulties.View Scenes
Grappling with mental health issues, Margaret seeks help and discovers an appalling secret about estranged relatives of the royal family.View Scenes
As many nations condemn apartheid in South Africa, tension mounts between Thatcher and Elizabeth over their clashing opinions on applying sanctions.View Scenes
Charles is caught in a deadly avalanche, prompting both him and Diana to reevaluate their commitment to their troubled marriage.View Scenes
Amid a growing challenge to her power, Thatcher fights for her position. Charles grows more determined to separate from Diana as their marriage unravels.View Scenes


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Treat Your Bicycle to a Tune-Up at Irv's Bike ShopSeptember 01, 2020
Could your bicycle use a tune-up? Better visit Henry at Irv's Bike Shop. Owner Henry Ortiz has been a bike mechanic for over 33 years. He knows how to tune up, adjust, or overhaul your ride to get you back out onto the street in a hurry. And if you're new to the cycling game or ready to upgrade your model, Henry can help with that, too. The whole team at Irv's Bike Shop knows the store's inventory inside out, and can recommend the bike or accessory you need for your best ride. The difference at Irv's Bike Shop is really in the personal service and in-depth product knowledge that you simply won't find in a big box store or sporting goods retailer.
For the entire life of you bike, Irv's Bike Shop is your neighborhood partner to keep you safe, comfortable, and happy with your experience. Find Irv's Bike Shop on South Racine Avenue, right at the intersection of West 18th Street. The shop opens daily at 10 a.m.


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Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images are the bee's knees, that cat's meow. For those unfamiliar with those idioms, what I mean to say is that I love to use SVG images whenever possible.
There are a few reasons why SVGs are great:
- They can be scaled up and down without distortion.
- Vector graphics are usually smaller in file size.
- The ability to use animations and transitions on layers.
How to Optimize an SVG
As you develop your web application, the SVG files are usually exported from programs like Sketch or Adobe Illustrator. On the other hand, you could also be using icons from websites like Iconfinder or Flaticon. These files usually contain a rich set of metadata and paths that include points used by designers. Unless you are using those specific paths and points in your application, they can be optimized to further reduce the file size.
There is a really awesome tool called SVGO which will process and optimize your SVG files. It can remove excessive markup and metadata, optimize and clean paths, and minify the output. It can be included in your build process, or run independently.
Even better than the command line interface, is a website created by Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake), called "SVGO Missing GUI" or SVGOMG.
From here we can upload or paste our source code into the REPL, toggle the options, and easily gather the output for use in our HTML and JavaScript.
In the example above, we can see how it saved 68% for such a small icon. When you're working with a lot of icons, or larger vector graphics, it can make a noticeable impact on your overall application.
Better bundle sizes mean your web app is faster, more responsive, and reaches more customers around the world. 68% is great!
Try it for yourself!
Optimizing an SVG for React
If you're building your web application with React, it is not as easy to copy and paste the SVG output into your application. React uses the naming convention from JavaScript objects to create HTML elements. Instead of stroke-width, we use** strokeWidth** in JSX.
Fixing all of those attributes takes too much time, and so enter: React SVGR
Similarly, React SVGR is also a node API, command line client, and most importantly - a GUI playground. Using this tool, we can paste our SVG output from SVGO and it will output a React component.
Optimize with SVGO or SVGR Playground
In the example above, we can see that SVGR does have an integration with SVGO if you have a JSON config object on hand. However, I rarely carry that around with me as I am developing - so I generally optimize with SVGO first and then paste the output into SVGR.
Copy, Paste, Copy, and Paste Again
With these tools, you can deliver the most optimized version of vector graphics in your web application. Whether you're using React.JS, or vanilla HMTL and JavaScript - these tools have you covered.
Now we're cooking with some gas - You
Photo by Andrej Lišakov


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Oklahoma's Favorite Margaritas
It's OK To Be Salty Here
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Oklahoma's Mexican
Oklahoman's have chosen Chelino's for affordable, fast & delicious Mexican food since 1989! Experience the Chelino's difference today.
Hungry Yet?
This place is classic! Great food! Amazing service! The kids love this place too! Great salsa and queso set up too!
Very friendly staff at all locations. Yummy grub. Affordable prices. Highly recommend visiting any location.
Always my favorite Mexican food no matter what location!!
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