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Allah T'ala says in the Holy Quran:
O you who have believed, avoid much suspicion, for some suspicions are sins. Do not spy, nor should any one backbite the other. Is there any among you who would like to eat the flesh of his dead brother?' Nay, you yourselves abhor it. Fear Allah, for Allah is Acceptor of repentance and All-Merciful. (49:12)
Gheebat (back-biting) has been defined thus: "It is saying on the back of a person something which would hurt him if he came to know of it. " This definition has been reported from the Holy Prophet himself. According to a tradition which Muslim, Abu Da'ud, Tirmidhi, Nasa'i and others have related on the authority of Hadrat Abu Hurairah, the Holy Prophet defined Gheebat as follows:
"It is talking of your brother in a way irksome to him." It was asked: "What, if the defect being talked of is present in my brother ?" The Holy Prophet replied: "If it is present in him, it would be Gheebat; if it is not there, it would be slandering him."
In another tradition which Imam Malik has related in Mu'watta, on the authority of Hadrat Muttalib bin `Abdullah, "A person asked the Holy Prophet: What is Gheebat? The Holy Prophet replied: It is talking of your brother in a way irksome to him. He asked: Even if it is true, O Messenger of Allah? He replied: If what you said was false, it would then be a calumny."
These traditions make it plain that uttering a false accusation against a person in his absence is calumny and describing a real defect in him Gheebat; whether this is done in express words or by reference and allusion, in every case it is forbidden. Likewise, whether this is done in the lifetime of a person, or after his death, it is forbidden in both cases.
According to Abu Da'ud, when Ma`iz bin Malik Aslami had been stoned to death for committing adultery, the Holy Prophet on his way back heard a man saying to his companion: "Look at this man: Allah had concealed his secret, but he did not leave himself alone till he was killed like a dog!" A little further on the way there was the dead body of a donkey lying rotting. The Holy Prophet stopped, called the two men and said: "Come down and eat this dead donkey." They submitted: "Who will eat it, O Messenger of Allah?" The Holy Prophet said: "A little before this you were attacking the honor of your brother: that was much worse than eating this dead donkey."
The only exceptions to this prohibition are the cases in which there may be a genuine need of speaking in of a person on his back, or after his death, and this may not be fulfilled without resort to backbiting, and if it was not resorted to, a greater evil might result than backbiting itself. The Holy Prophet has described this exception as a principle, thus: "The worst excess is to attack the honour of a Muslim unjustly." (Abu Da'ud).
In this saying the condition of "unjustly" points out that doing so "with justice" is permissible. Then, in the practice of the Holy Prophet himself we find some precedents which show what is implied by "justice" and in what conditions and cases backbiting may be lawful to the extent as necessary.
Once a desert Arab came and offered his Prayer under the leadership of the Holy Prophet, and as soon as the Prayer was concluded, walked away saying: "O God, have mercy on me and on Muhammad, and make no one else a partner in this mercy beside the two of us." The Holy Prophet said to the Companions: `What do you say: who is more ignorant: this person or his camel? Didn't you hear what he said?" (Abu Da`ud). The Holy Prophet had to say this in his absence, for he had left soon after the Prayer was over. Since he had uttered a wrong thing in the presence of the Holy Prophet, his remaining quiet at it could cause the misunderstanding that saying such a thing might in some degree be lawful; therefore, it was necessary that he should contradict it.
Two of the Companions, Hadrat Mu`awiyah and Hadrat Abu Jahm, sent the proposal of marriage to a lady, Fatimah bint Qais. She came to the Holy Prophet and asked for his advice. He said: "Mu`awiyah is a poor man and Abu Jahm beats his wives much." (Bukhari, Muslim). In this case, as there was the question of the lady's future and she had consulted the Holy Prophet for his advice, he deemed it necessary to inform her of the two men's weaknesses.
One day when the Holy Prophet was present in the apartment of Hadrat 'A'ishah, a man came and sought permission to see him. The Holy Prophet remarked that he was a very bad man of his tribe. Then he went out and talked to him politely. When he came back into the house, Hadrat `A'ishah asked: "You have talked to him politely, whereas when you went out you said something different about him. " The Holy Prophet said, "On the day of Resurrection the worst abode in the sight of Allah will be of the person whom the people start avoiding because of his abusive language." (Bukhari, Muslim). A study of this incident will show that the Holy Prophet in spite of having a bad opinion about the person talked to him politely because that was the demand of his morals; but he had the apprehension lest the people of his house should consider the person to be his friend when they would see him treating him kindly, and then the person might use this impression to his own advantage later. Therefore, the Holy Prophet warned Hadrat `A'ishah telling her that he was a bad man of his tribe.
Once Hind bint 'Utbah, wife of Hadrat Abu Sufyan, came to the Holy Prophet and said: "Abu Sufyan is a miserly person: he does not provide enough for me and my children's needs. " (Bukhari, Muslim). Although this complaint from the wife in the absence of the husband was backbiting, the Holy Prophet pemitted it, for the oppressed has a right that he or she may take the complaint of injustice to a person who has the power to get it removed.
From these precedents of the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet, the jurists and traditionists have deduced this principle: 'Gheebat (backbiting) is permissible only in case it is needed for a real and genuine (genuine from the Shari'ah point of view) necessity and the necessity may not be satisfied without having resort to it". Then on the basis of the same principle the scholars have declared that Gheebat is permissible in the following cases:
(1) Complaining by an oppressed person against the oppressor before every such person who he thinks can do something to save him from the injustice.
(2) To make mention of the evils of a person (or persons) with the intention of reform before those who can do expected to help remove the evils.
(3) To state the facts of a case before a legal expert for the purpose of seeking a religious or legal ruling regarding an unlawful act committed by a person.
(4) To warn the people of the mischiefs of a person (or persons) so that they may ward off the evil, e g. it is not only permissible but obligatory to mention the weaknesses of the reporters, witnesses and writers, for without it, it is not possible to safeguard the Shariah against the propagation of false reports, the courts against injustices and the common people or the students against errors and misunderstandings. Or, for instance, if a person wants to have the relationship of marriage with somebody, or wishes to rent a house in the neighborhood of somebody, or wants to give something into the custody of somebody, and consults another person, it is obligatory for him to apprise him of all aspects so that he is not deceived because of ignorance.
(5) To raise voice against and criticise the evils of the people who may be spreading sin and immorality and error, or corrupting the people's faith and persecuting them.
(6) To use nicknames for the people who may have become well known by those names, but this should be done for the purpose of their recognition and not with a view to condemn them. (For details, see Fat-h al-Bari, vol. X, p. 362; Sharah Muslim by An-Nawawi; Riyad us-Salihin; al-Jassas, Ahkam al-Qur an; Ruh al-Maani commentary on verse wa a yaghtab ba 'dukum ba 'dan).
Apart from these exceptions it is absolutely forbidden to speak ill of a person behind his back. If what is spoken is true, it is Gheebat; if it is false, it is calumny; and if it is meant to make two persons quarrel, it is slander. The Shari'ah has declared all these as forbidden. In the Islamic society it is incumbent on every Muslim to refute a false charge made against a person in his presence and not to listen to it quietly, and to tell those who are speaking ill of somebody, without a genuine religious need, to fear God and desist from the sin. The Holy Prophet has said: If a person does not support and help a Muslim when he is being disgraced and his honour being attacked, Allah also does not support and help him when he stands in need of His help; and if a person helps and supports a Muslim when his honour is being attacked and he is being disgraced, Allah Almighty also helps him when he wants that AIlah should help him. (Abu Da'ud).
As for the backbiter, as soon as he realizes that he is committing this sin, or has committed it, his first duty is to offer repentance before Allah and restrain himself from this forbidden act. His second duty is that he should compensate for it as far as possible. If he has backbitten a dead person, he should ask Allah's forgiveness for the person as often as he can. If he has backbitten a living person, and what he said was also false, he should refute it before the people before whom he had made the calumny. And if what he said was true, he should never speak ill of him in future, and should ask pardon of the person whom he had backbitten. A section of the scholars has expressed the opinion that pardon should be asked only in case the other person has come to know of it; otherwise one should only offer repentance, for if the person concerned is unaware and the backbiter in order to ask pardon goes and tells him that he had backbitten him, he would certainly feel hurt.
In the verse, Allah by likening backbiting to eating a dead brother's flesh has given the idea of its being an abomination. Eating the dead flesh is by itself abhorrent; and when the flesh is not of an animal, but of a man, and that too of one's own dead brother, abomination would be added to abomination. Then, by presenting the simile in the interrogative tone it has been made all the more impressive, so that every person may ask his own conscience and decide whether he would like to eat the flesh of his dead brother. If he would not, and he abhors it by nature, how he would like that he should attack the honour of his brother-in-faith in his absence, when he cannot defend himself and when he is wholly unaware that he is being disgraced. This shows that the basic reason of forbidding backbiting is not that the person being backbitten is being hurt but speaking ill of a person in his absence is by itself unlawful and forbidden whether he is aware of it, or not, and whether he feels hurt by it or not. Obviously, eating the flesh of a dead man is not forbidden because it hurts the dead man; the dead person is wholly unaware that somebody is eating of his body, but because this act by itself is an abomination. Likewise, if the person who is backbitten also does not come to know of it through any means, he will remain unaware throughout his life that somebody had attacked his honour at a particular time before some particular people and on that account he had stood disgraced in the eyes of those people. Because of this unawareness he will not feel at all hurt by this backbiting, but his honour would in any case be sullied. Therefore, this act in its nature is not any different from eating the flesh of a dead brother.
(Tafheemul Quran)


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Authentic Blends
All our Blends Ingredients are sourced By A Tea Master, we make sure ever blend is Quality.
Digestive Ease
Roughly 1-3 tsp per cup.
For the optimum infusion use 85°C - 95°C
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Infuse for 1-3 minutes, Depending on the tea.
Sip hot or top with ice for iced tea
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Use 1 large tsp per cup, pour in slightly cooled boiling water and allow infusion for 2-3 minutes. |
Ingredients: | Peppermint, lemon balm, liquorice, yarrow, lime leaves. |
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If you are unsure on what blend will work for you we have created a table below to explain the difference between categories.
Herbal & Fruit | Rich in Vitamins & Antioxidant, Great for Relaxation. |
Oolong | High in Antioxidant, Great for Boosts your Metabolism & Promoting a Healthy Heart. |
White Tea | Rich in Antioxidants, Best to be had after or with Breakfast. |
Pu-erh | Cleanses Toxins & Free Radicals while Increasing Energy, perfect for an afternoon. |
Green Tea | Contains healthy bioactive compounds, which promote Fat Burning & Brain Function. |
Black Tea | High in Antioxidant, Great for Boosts your Metabolism & Promoting a Healthy Heart. |
Tea is made For Company
Grab some sweets, invite your friends around, enjoy the afternoon.
Oolong Tea Collection
Oolong tea is the middle ground between green and black tea. The leaves are oxidized after harvest, but not as much as with black tea. This helps to retain a level of delicacy in the flavour and means the leaves are a lighter colour. It has quite a fruity flavour and can be very delicate, but this depends on how oxidized the leaves are. The flavour becomes more intense the longer they're exposed to air.
- May help boost your metabolism.
- Known to aid digestion.
- High in Disease-Fighting Antioxidants.
- Decreases Inflammation.
Herbal Tea Collection
- Helps unwind after a day.
- Known to prevent some Chronic Diseases.
- Amazing fruitful flavours.
- Perfect to help with bed time routines.
White Tea
This perhaps makes it one of the better options to aid weight loss, but it can be beneficial for digestion too. White tea is a very subtle flavour because the leaves aren't processed that much, and are picked when very young. It contains many of the same ingredients as green tea.
- High in Antioxidants.
- Known to help with Weight Management.
- Known to Combat Skin Aging.
- Low in caffeine.

subset: commoncrawl


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HIB Policy, Resources, & Grades
Page Navigation
- Hasbrouck Heights School District
- HIB Home
Hasbrouck Heights Schools
Anti-Bullying Information & Dating Violence Information
Definition from NJSA: 18A:37-14: "Harassment, intimidation or bullying" means any gesture, any written, verbal or physical act, or any electronic communication, whether it be a single incident or a series of incidents, that is reasonably perceived as being motivated either by any actual or perceived characteristic, such as race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or a mental, physical or sensory disability, or by any other distinguishing characteristic, that takes place on school property, at any school-sponsored function, on a school bus, or off school grounds as provided for in section 16 of P.L.2010, c.122 (C.18A:37-15.3), that substantially disrupts or interferes with the orderly operation of the school or the rights of other students and that:
a. a reasonable person should know, under the circumstances, will have the effect of physically or emotionally harming a student or damaging the student's property, or placing a student in reasonable fear of physical or emotional harm to his person or damage to his property;b. has the effect of insulting or demeaning any student or group of students; or
c. creates a hostile educational environment for the student by interfering with a student's education or by severely or pervasively causing physical or emotional harm to the student.
L.2002, c.83, s.2; amended 2007, c.129, s.1; 2010, c.122, s.11.
Dr. Matthew Helfant
District Anti-Bullying Coordinator
379 Boulevard
Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 07604
HIB Mandatory Reporting Form 2023-24 School Year
HIB BOE Policy
338 Form for Families Portuguese
2021-22 HIB Grade


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Sausage, Apple and Blue Cheese Pizza
Apples and blue cheese pair well with fennel flavored sausage in this great pizza variation. Carmelized onions are a great topper for this enticingly scented pizza.
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 large red onions, thinly sliced
2 tsp. fresh thyme, minced
1 green apple, thinly sliced
1 cup blue cheese, crumbled
1⁄2 lb. fennel sausage, browned
Pizza dough for a 9-in. round
1. In a large skillet, heat olive oil. Caramelize red onion over low heat. Add fresh thyme, season to taste.
2. In a separate skillet, brown sausage; drain.
3. Work pizza dough into a thin 9-in. round. Place over a cornmeal-dusted pan or stone.
4. Layer pizza with sausage and apples, sprinkle with blue cheese and top with caramelized onions.
5. Bake in a 425° F. oven 15 min. or until brown and cheese is slightly melted.


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The Exchange Server 2010 MP was installed and in the services snap-in for that particular account it showed up, titled Microsoft Exchange Monitoring Correlation. But when I logged on to the same server with my account and opened the same services snap-in, this service wasn't to be found.
Logging on and off made no changes. The CE service wasn't listed at all even though the process related to the services showed up in Task Manager. And YES, I was logged on to the proper server (triple checked it ).
So something else – and dumb I guessed – was at play here. Somehow the services snap-in for my account got a bit lost. As a last resort, before taking a deep dive, I tried this simple approach:
- Opened the services snap-in > File > Options and got this screen:
- Hit the button Delete Files and got this warning:
> Yes, since it already looked like my profile was already damaged… - > OK. Closed the services snap-in and opened it again. AND now the CE service was neatly shown:
So whenever you bump into similar issues, simply clear the cache of the MMC and you'll be fine. Almost sounds like clearing the cache of the SCOM Console, doesn't it?


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White stoneware paper clay + matte green glaze
22cm H x 14cm W x 7cm D
Says Natalie Rosin: "The Tessellate series of sculptures are a body of work inspired by organic and graphic configurations. Each piece was formed with no beginning or end in mind, much like the cycles found in nature. When sculpting each work, I was unsure when to stop, forming new elements and stepping back after an additional section was added until completely sure this was a complete and whole sculpture."
Signed on base.
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This piece does not require framing.


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How to do luxe boho
I've tapped into my inner boho this weekend thanks to the stunning weather. Start with a groovy romper suit then ad Gladiator sandals & lace maxi summer cardy for the luxe element. "You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you." Isaiah 26:3


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Most people expect to spend less money after they retire. But that might not be the case — at least not at first.
Spending rose for more than half of taxpayers during the first three years after claiming Social Security, according to a report based on tax data and analyzed by economists at the Investment Company Institute and the IRS.
Those with lower incomes were most likely to be spending more than they were pre-retirement. Middle-income earners spent about the same, and the higher-income earners spent slightly less.
The report didn't measure actual spending, but how much income an individual had left after taxes. It included salary and wages, Social Security benefits, and distributions from retirement accounts and pensions.
"For many individuals, retirement appears to be a multi-year transition rather than an action taken at a discrete point in time," the researchers wrote.
In fact, nearly half of people were still working three years after claiming Social Security.
But this doesn't mean spending won't slow later in retirement, researchers said.
Of course, your spending could drastically fluctuate from year-to-year, especially if you plan to be retired for 30 years or longer. (Most people followed in this report claimed Social Security at age 62.)
It's tough to save for a moving target, but there is one rule of thumb experts recommend. It suggests people prepare to spend about 70% of your pre-retirement income in retirement.
People expect to spend less because they're no longer saving for retirement and your tax bill is likely to drop. Maybe your transportation costs will fall if you're no longer commuting to work. Or you could have your mortgage paid off.
But on the other hand, you'll have more time to travel and might spend more money on leisure activities — which could be more likely in the beginning of your retirement.
The median taxpayer's spendable income at three years after claiming Social Security was 103% of their income from one year before collecting, the report said. It followed individuals from 1999 to 2010.


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2020 HKDSE Results
2020 HKDSE Results
Hoi Ping scholars make history in HKDSE 2020
Today was a special occasion for Hoi Ping as our students' hard work and effort finally paid off. Their diligence and resilience during the periods of school suspension due to the outbreak of COVID-19 have enabled them to bring home the most impressive results since the start of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE).
The percentage of students attaining Level 5+ and Level 4+ have leapt to a record high of 31% and 71.8% respectively; 3.3% of students have attained Level 5**, which is our second-best performance since 2012. Of the 150 students sitting the HKDSE this year, 88% of them have attained the university entrance minimum requirement (33222), which is also our second-best performance. The percentage of our students scoring 22 points or above in their Best 5 subjects was 41.3%, with a rise of 8.4%. Among them, 26 students scored 27 points or above, with 6 of them scoring 30 points or above.
Hoi Ping students fared much better when compared to the overall statistics of Hong Kong candidates, with 81.9% of our students attaining Level 4+ in Mathematics (39.1% in Hong Kong), 77.2% in English (28.3% in Hong Kong), 63.8% in Chinese (31.7% in Hong Kong) and 59.6% in Liberal Studies (30.5% in Hong Kong). In particular, a record high of 40% of our students captured 5* or 5** in Mathematics Module 2 (M2), which is 24.9% better than the overall statistics in Hong Kong; as for English Language, the percentage of students capturing 5** has leapt to 4%, which was also record-breaking. The elective subject with the best performance was Economics, with a record high of 10% and 21.7% of students attaining Levels 5** and 5*+ respectively, compared to 1.9% and 7.0% in Hong Kong.
S6E Law Hiu Yan, Karen
Clear goals with versatility
Karen has attained four 5**, two 5* and one 5 in HKDSE 2020. Long before the release of HKDSE, Karen had already decided to step out of her comfort zone and broaden her horizons. She is going to pursue her studies in Business Analytics in the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Karen has nurtured a habit of being well-prepared for any challenge she faces since she was in S.4. Starting from the summer in S.5, she would deepen her learning according to the goals she set every day. In addition, she would set a strict time-table and do revision following a realistic study plan.
To relieve her stress from academic studies, Karen often listens to music and chats with friends so as to stay healthy – both mentally and physically – when facing the challenges in public examinations.
To cope with the ever-changing society and learning environment, Karen recommends her juniors to stay positive and improve their foundation by reading extensively and reflectively, as well as learning diligently and humbly.
S6B Tong Kun Chi, Alpha
Don't be afraid to make mistakes
Tong Kun Chi (Alpha) scored three 5** in Chemistry, Economics, and Mathematics (Compulsory); together with the competitive results in other subjects, he has been given an offer to read law at the London School of Economics.
Alpha's approach to the DSE was simple: instead of studying textbooks from the first page until the last, he quickly delved into past papers to revive long-forgotten memories, which helped him pin down what he was lacking and formulate an efficient revision plan targeting his needs. 'As a science student, it was important for me to write accurate answers by using keywords required in the marking criteria.'
More importantly,' he added, 'Don't be afraid of making mistakes. They let you know what kind of effort you need to make in order to be fully prepared.' This mindset came from Alpha's habit of doing self-reflection, prompting him to focus on the right things within limited time.
For most students, exams are very stressful; this year, DSE sitters were even faced with a pandemic of an unprecedented scale. What did Alpha do to get through it all? 'I adjusted my body clock day by day to ensure adequate sleep. I never overworked myself and studied obsessively. These created the perfect conditions for me to remain calm, even on the day of the exam.'
Alpha expressed that he looked forward to furthering his studies in a completely new environment--this determined young mind had already planned to challenge himself with more academic goals. We wish him all the best.
S6A Tsang Chin Yung Virginia
Diligence rewarded, dreams realised
Virginia Tsang has attained two 5** and three 5* in HKDSE 2020. She is an enthusiast in science and mathematics, having participated in a number of science-related competitions like Joint-school Science Exhibition and Chemistry Olympiad. She is keen on scientific research and would like to further her studies in Computer Science at university and pursue her goals.
When asked which subject she was most satisfied with, she said it was Mathematics; she likes Mathematics the most and spent a lot of time revising. Her efforts did pay off when she captured a 5** in Mathematics.
The lack of face-to-face lessons during the pandemic did not hinder Virginia. Instead, she kept reminding herself to establish daily routines and to ensure sufficient rest while working hard; this could keep her in a good shape when facing the public examinations. She would also like to encourage other Hoi Ping students to pay attention in lessons, enhance their self-directed learning skills, conduct pre-lesson preparation more often and do sufficient revision.
2020 中學文憑試學生成績綜合匯報
繼往開來 成績報捷
本年度共有150名學生參與中學文憑試,考獲5等或以上及4等或以上水平的比例分別躍升至31%和71.8%,為歷年新高!其次,有3.3%的學生考獲5 **;達到大學入學最低要求(33222)的比例達88%。以上兩項亦為2012年以來的第二佳績!在最佳5科中考獲22分或以上的比例為41.3%,增幅達8.4%。當中26人考獲27分或以上,其中6人更考獲30分或以上。
中六戊 羅曉欣
中六乙 湯貫之
湯貫之同學各科成績優異,化學、經濟和數學(必修)三科更獲得5 **佳績。憑著學業上突出的表現,他最終獲倫敦經濟學院法律系取錄。
中六甲 曾芊榕


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Gary Lineker Interview
Lineker Unloads
Page 1 of 2
Few people are better placed to pop themselves on a soapbox and let off a big old rant about the state of English football than Gary Lineker. Winner of 80 international caps (and a botched penalty away from being the nation's all-time leading goalscorer) and a Golden Boot, the 52-year-old has also presided over Match of the Day for the past 13 years. So, we fielded Lineker some topics, stood back and let him tell it as it is... Twitter...
How has Twitter changed the perception of footballers?
On Twitter it is just you, and it is easier to put across what you think. Twitter is an amazing thing, it brings footballers closer to the fans, because so many of them are on there. I was cynical about it to begin with, but I have been converted. Just say you are a Manchester United fan, recently I saw Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand, Gary Neville and one or two others having a conversation, and if you follow them you could listen in, and fans were saying their things. It was very human, and brings them closer to the fans.
But Twitter can cause problems too. Would you have got in trouble with Twitter when you played?
It wouldn't happen when I played because you don't have the immediacy of social networking. I didn't even have a mobile phone when I played. So if an event happened you would have time to calm down. You would have spoken to your family and agent, and put things in to perspective. It's different now.
But away from Twitter is there too much of a gulf between fans and players? Do footballers seem out of touch, living in their huge houses behind enormous gates?
They earn ridiculous amounts of money so they can build big houses with big gates. Of course it has changed, they earn stupid amounts of money compared to people who do real jobs, but that is the same with musicians, actors and businessmen, who also live behind big gates. Are people like Tom Cruise in touch with their public? I doubt it. Footballers are more like the rock stars of yesteryear, they are box office. Wayne Rooney was recently on the front page when it was announced he was having another baby, whereas when I played it was mentioned, but it was a tiny thing.
Is diving beginning to seriously blight the game?
There are two different forms of diving, going down when you don't get touched at all, and the (other) is different when using your own skills to gain an advantage. Half of it is enticing players to foul you, that's not diving, if you're clever enough to beat a player, and he puts a foot in and you hit that foot, that is a foul. It's always been the case if you get a decent touch and go down, but you could have stayed up. There is a fundamental difference between doing that, and knocking it past someone and just flying up in the air.
Did you ever dive?
No, I never dived, a dive is when there is no contact, but there have been plenty of times when I have known if I can just get the ball ahead of the goalkeeper he will hit me, but I could have leaped over him if I really, really had to.
Will manager ever condemn their own players for diving?
Managers will never see it; it is not in their interests.
What can be done to stop players diving?
Diving is a really, really difficult one, because a player is the only one who genuinely knows whether they have dived. You can look at it at 40 different angles and not know. And you can just fall over too. I fell over a hell of a lot when I played, because you are running at breakneck speed. Sometimes I would fall over when I shot with no one near me because you are running so fast when you hit it, it throws you off balance. I don't think many players, but there are obvious exceptions, will go out on the pitch and try and dive. Maybe it has changed a little bit in this country.
Would you admonish a team-mate for diving?
I remember Nayim at Tottenham dived all over the place, and we used to say to him "What are you doing?" You do talk about it. But [elsewhere] it's part of the game, it's how they grow up, in Argentina it is about tricking the referee, they would never have the debates we have about diving.
Have things changed at all? Would Steven Gerrard now talk to Luis Suarez and ask him to stop diving?
I don't know. I think Manchester United, with Ashley Young, I think they have said something, I think Ferguson would have said something, and said, 'Listen, you're not doing yourself any favours."
Would you support a retrospective three game ban for diving?
I think it has to be unbelievably obvious.
Sport Interviews
Sports commentary


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AJA Ki Pro Extends Workflow Flexiblity of JVC GY-HM700 ProHD Camcorder
Ki Pro Tapeless Video Device Boosts On-Set Performance and Productivity of Newest JVC Pro Camera
AJA Video Systems, a leading manufacturer of professional video interface and conversion solutions, announced compatibility of its Ki Pro portable digital disk recorder with JVC's new GY-HM700 camcorder. Ki Pro records files to the Apple ProRes 422 codec directly from camera and provides a new way of connecting production and post with its extensive analog and digital connectivity, delivering10-bit ProRes 422 media that is immediately available to edit within Apple's Final Cut Studio.
JVC's GY-HM700 ProHD camcorder delivers the fastest shoot to edit workflow of all professional camcorders in its class, recording natively in the Final Cut Pro .mov file format at 35 Mbp/s, 25 Mbp/s and 19 Mbp/s, and providing a full bandwidth 4:2:2 uncompressed signal. When used together with Ki Pro, the JVC 700 can also deliver files in the ProRes 422 format offering both a second level of redundancy and Final Cut edit-ready files. The GY-HM700 combines JVC's popular compact shoulder form factor with a new level of performance suitable for demanding applications in mainstream production, electronic newsgathering and cinematography. The camera also provides the convenience of solid-state recording, the economy of widely available SDHC media, and extreme versatility.
"Many of our professional customers have deployed Apple-centric editing workflows," said Craig Yanagi, Manager, Marketing and Brand Strategy, Professional Products Group, JVC U.S.A. "Ki Pro with the exoskeleton mounts seamlessly to the JVC GY-HM700 ProHD camcorder and enables filmmakers on set to walk away with both 35Mbp/s and ProRes 422 .mov files as they've been captured, providing a whole new dimension to high bandwidth image capture."
"The JVC 700 offers very powerful workflow options," said Nick Rashby, President, AJA Video Systems. "Together with the Ki Pro, the full potential of the JVC 700 can be realized by giving users 4:2:2 performance with immediate access to their files in Apple's ProRes 422 format."
Ki Pro allows filmmakers, broadcasters and video professionals and prosumers to skip the process of re-rendering to an editing codec by giving immediate access to 10-bit full raster edit-ready ProRes 422 files directly from camera. Ki Pro records hours of media to a removable storage module with built in FireWire 800 or to 34mm ExpressCard Flash. The device is a small, portable unit that can sit on a table, in a bay or mounted between a camera and tripod. Ki Pro is also ideal for on-set monitoring, providing instant access to multiple display devices simultaneously.
For a complete set of features and technical specifications, please visit www.aja.com.
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Ki Pro is priced at $3995 US MSRP and will be shipping in June of 2009. Ki Pro is a standalone unit that includes the Ki Pro Recorder, Ki Pro HDD Storage Module and an AC Adapter. Product options include: an Exo-Skeleton for mounting between camera and tripod; Ki Pro SSD Storage Module; extra Ki Pro Hard Drive Storage Modules; Ki Pro Rod Accessory Kit adding endplates to the Exo-Skeleton; and an AJA Lens Tap Cable Accessory allowing Ki Pro to connect between the lens tap control connector and a camera body.
About JVC U.S.A.
JVC U.S.A., headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey, is a division of JVC Americas Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Victor Company of Japan Ltd. JVC manufactures a complete line of video and audio equipment for the professional and consumer markets. For further product information, visit JVC's Web site at http://pro.jvc.com or call 1-800-582-5825.
About AJA Video Systems, Inc.
Since 1993, AJA Video has been a leading manufacturer of high-quality and cost-effective digital video interface, conversion and Desktop solutions supporting the professional broadcast and post- production markets. With headquarters in Grass Valley, California, AJA maintains an extensive sales channel of dealers and systems integrators around the world. For further information, please see our website www.aja.com.


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Dragon Age: Blood in Ferelden (PDF)
Dragon Age: Blood in Ferelden (PDF)
Authors: Walt Ciechanowski, Kevin Kulp, and TS Luikart
Format: 128-page, black-and-white PDF
Adventures are the heart of any roleplaying game but GMs on the go don't always have time to create their own. Blood in Ferelden contains three full-length adventures for the Dragon Age RPG, as well as three adventure outlines whose bare bones can be fleshed out for even more action. The player characters will visit savage borderlands like the Korcari Wilds and Frostback Mountains, as well as facing foes of a different sort in Ferelden's capital of Denerim. The adventures in Blood in Ferelden are suitable for characters of level 1-5 and add a wealth of detail to any Dragon Age campaign. But be warned: There will be blood!
SKU: grr2803e


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Smartphones already do too much. What a pain to open an app just to flip the channel and have a call or text come in right when you're doing it.
I have the Directv app on our tablet and use that about 10% of the time for browsing and switching channels.


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PEOPLE Magazine just named their Sexiest Man Alive for 2012 ... and, once again, it's not Ryan Gosling.
But this time around, we're gonna have to agree with the magazine a little more than we did when they picked Bradley Cooper, because this guy has had a stellar year.
And the winner is ... Channing Tatum!
That's right, "Magic Mike" himself is the hottest out there thanks to his killer physique and box office success in the last year.
Not only was his stripper movie a winner, but he also scored home runs with "21 Jump Street" and "The Vow" -- and it's rumored "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" was pushed back to give him more screen time.
"My first thought was, 'Y'all are messing with me,'" says Tatum about the honor.
And what does his wife think?
"People know him to be fun and sexy, but they don't know how emotionally deep and spiritually open he is," says Jenna Dewan-Tatum. "He is such an open-hearted person; what you see is what you get."
Check out some of Channing's sexiest (and shirtless) moments ever on film in the gallery above -- and some of his "Magic Mike" moves below. Do you think he deserved the honor this year?
And be sure to come back later today when we pick our choices for Sexiest Men Alive!


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About Quality Garage Door Service - Garage Door Parts Rancho Cucamonga, CA
Quality Garage Door Service made forays into Garage Door Service in Rancho Cucamonga, CA almost 10+ years back. Since then it has been going strong with an ever-expanding clientele. The reputation that we have built through the years is incomparable. No other service provider comes even near to what we have achieved. Our backbone is the use of sophisticated technology and skilled team of traditional or specialty garage doors. We offer repairs, installation, and maintenance solutions besides emergency intervention. We are your 24/7 garage door service providers.
We always strive to serve our community better with round-the-clock services that resolve your problems. Call us for residential, commercial, or industrial garage door requirements. Our support team is always ready to take your calls. We make sure that not even a single phone call to the help desk remains unanswered. Our experts will identify problems immediately. They will handle everything from simple tinkering to complete overhauls with aplomb. No challenge is too difficult!
Why us?
Garage doors serve both aesthetics and security purpose of our home or business. You need to have a sturdy door to make sure that both the property and your assets remain safe from intrusion. The functioning of the doors is quite complex and involves interlinking of various components that work in synchronization. This is extremely important for smooth operations of carriage house doors. Ineffectual or damaged components will simply make the door stop working. You do not want improper setting of opener, a loose spring or safety eyes malfunction to be the cause of injuries.
All this can prove to be disastrous. You require immediate intervention from experts. These are not DIY repair projects as you will not be able to understand the intricate mechanism and circuitry. Quality Garage Door Service is the dependable service provider for garage door opener gear replacement, garage door sensors fix, new torsion springs replacement and more. We have the skill and expertise needed for the job and that's what makes us the top choice for such services.
Service range
We take care of all sorts of issues related to the garage doors in Rancho Cucamonga, CA area with prompt response, and evaluation of situation from experts. We fix, install modern openers, custom doors, cables, high-strength springs and sensors. Based upon the conditions we will decide whether to replace the components or the door itself.
Skills you can trust
We have the skills, training and the commitment to resolve your issues immediately. We are your 24 hours garage door service providers in Rancho Cucamonga.
For affordable, quick response, and quality services give our experts a call today!


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Wendy Williams Returns to TV After Graves' Disease Diagnosis
Wendy Williams is back on TV following her Graves' disease diagnosis in February.
The 53-year-old television personality gave an update on Monday's episode of Good Morning America after taking a three-week hiatus from her talk show, The Wendy Williams Show, to focus on her health.
"It was the best prescription ever," Williams said of her break. "I met a full team that gave me a full work up."
"We as women, particularly if we have families ... we take care of everybody but ourselves. I'm not doing that anymore. Wendy first!" she added.
Williams, who struggled with thyroid issues prior to her diagnosis, said her health issues were "a perfect storm" that had been brewing since "late July." The television personality fainted during an episode of her show in October.
"I had missed three doctor's appointments with my endocrinologist. He's the one who handles the thyroid and the Graves," the star said.
"I'm functioning okay, I'm feeling a little weird but I'll get through it," she recalled. "And I went in February and that's where I found, whoa, your levels are way off."
Williams has hosted The Wendy Williams Show since 2008. She celebrated her return to the show in a post Monday morning.
"Grab a snack and come on back! #WendysBack #hottopics #wendywilliams," the star wrote on her official Twitter account.
By Annie Martin, UPI.com
Copyright © 2018 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved


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DOIThis article traces the life of a representationally elusive and stubborn landscape, the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, through various forms of visual culture. Beginning with its invisibility during the great period of landscape painting in England, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it examines how the Hoo Peninsula nevertheless appears multiple times in film during the twentieth century. Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Patrick Keiller, and Giuliana Bruno, it explores how the unique qualities of film as a medium have captured the mysterious and unstable nature of the Hoo Peninsula. It similarly shows that the very unpalatability of the marshy and sometimes dangerous landscape, which precluded it as a subject of traditional landscape painting, enshrouded it in a degree of invisibility that film directors later fruitfully exploited in both documentary and fictional film projects.
Introduction: "The Dark Flat Wilderness"
DOIWhen eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists were venturing out "en plein air" with the aim of capturing the sublime on canvas, the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, situated between the Thames and Medway estuaries remained stubbornly invisible (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).1 Yet where this landscape was mute as a source for painting, it later emerged as a subject matter in the medium of film. In different evocative manifestations, it was the opening backdrop in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946) and appeared as a fictitious Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987).2 It was also the subject of a film made in 1952, called The Island, to promote British Petroleum's new oil refinery in the area.3 This omission of the Hoo Peninsula—with its persistent, "brackish zone" of marshland and estuary waters—from painting, made it, nevertheless, ripe territory for film-makers (Fig. 3).4
In these three films, the camera lens functions as a memory tool, which captures the landscape in a unique synthesis of the real and the imagined. Operating beyond the limitations of painting, the medium of film allowed for the imagined and the real to become fluid and interchangeable. Film, for example, possesses a composited methodology of elements with which to articulate its work. It draws upon movement, light, sound, music, dialogue, costume, and scripts to unfurl its story. Familiar to the human experience, these elements shift between factual evidence and the imaginary with ease.
DOIFor the audience, film evaporates whereas painting is present. The mechanics of creating a film are largely hidden; painting, on the other hand, is subject to the tools and techniques of its trade. The materiality of the canvas, paint, and brushstroke are its purpose, focus, and pleasure. A frame around a painting maps the territory of the work and locates its physical presence in the space. It could be argued that a painting is reliant upon a more limited palette of tools and techniques to convey an image, and that whereas a film moves between any number of scenes, a painting must be an enduring image
DOIWhere the subject matter of the Hoo Peninsula was too unpalatable in what has been identified as the great period of landscape painting—the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—these qualities (e.g. "the dark flat wilderness" described in a phrase written by Charles Dickens) were readily utilized by film.5 If the landscape of the Hoo Peninsula was unattractive to the painters of the period, then its wilfully broad, flat marshland was an asset to the film-maker, who could render its pliable nature into a backdrop for an orphaned boy.
DOIAs an artist, I have been working in the Hoo Peninsula for over twenty years, continually drawn there to explore it, through the mediums of film and photography. At the start, the work was a visual exploration of the physical and material characteristics of the place but latterly it has focused on the aura that I experience there, which is unique to the peninsula. Using lens-based media is a means of unfolding the embodied nature of the place and navigating this "diffuse" atmosphere.6 A lens presents both a detached and a simultaneously intimate mechanism where I can observe, in close proximity, the detail of the Napoleonic fort's crumbling wall or position myself in the exposed marsh landscape and film container ships passing to Tilbury, beyond the seawall.
DOIMy work as an artist has piqued my interest in the Hoo Peninsula's absence from landscape painting and its emergence as a site of special interest in mid-twentieth-century film. Following Deleuze's work on the multifaceted nature of cinema, I argue that the filmic modulation of images through cutting, sequencing, and reorganizing creates a methodology for re-illuminating the landscape of the Hoo Peninsula. Drawing upon Giuliana Bruno's work, "Light spaces and Screen Surfaces: On the Fabric of Projection", I propose that the screen is the anchor point for the ephemeral experience of viewing the Hoo Peninsula on film. Building on the work of Jacques Rancière, Bruno develops the notion that the cinematic surface "comes into play as a partition that 'mediates' … [and becomes] … a form of dwelling in the material world."7
A Black Spot: Perceptions of the Hoo Peninsula
DOIThe Hoo Peninsula is an area of land in north Kent that is positioned between two river estuaries: the Thames and the Medway. In 2013, English Heritage described it as largely characterized by arable and marshland pasture of a low-lying nature with pockets of large industry. It was the site of prison hulks in the 1800s, a centre for the manufacture of cordite and ammunition in the early 1900s, and more recently, was proposed as a site for a new London airport.8
DOII had stumbled upon the Hoo Peninsula in North Kent in the mid-1990s, whilst living on a Dutch barge with my young family. Rising costs brought us to the cheaper moorings of the River Medway in Rochester, underneath the M2 motorway. One day, we cycled towards a place called Cliffe in the Hoo Peninsula—a village set on the edge of an open expanse of reclaimed marsh, bounded by the seawall in the distance. As we headed towards the seawall, we got hopelessly lost (we had no map) and our route became constantly thwarted by hidden creeks and drainage ditches.
DOIOn a summer's day, getting tangled up in the landscape with a bicycle was inconvenient, but never as foolhardy and threatening as it would have been on a winter's day in the 1500s. As early as the sixteenth century, the peninsula was regarded as an "unpleasant and unhealthy place" and the word "unwholesome" was used to describe it by William Lambarde in 1570.9 According to the academic Mary Dobson, marsh parishes such as those in the Hoo Peninsula, were "the most notorious black spots during the early modern period" (Fig. 4).10These black spots were often the result of malaria, known locally as marsh fever or the ague, as they were a breeding ground for mosquitoes due to the continual flooding of the land that breached ineffective sea defences in the sixteenth century. The fleets and ditches, characteristic of the peninsula, continued to provide perfect conditions for malaria into the present era, with the last case being reported in the 1950s. Even as late as the 1980s, lofts spaces belonging to houses in the Isle of Grain, on the edge of the Hoo Peninsula, were routinely sprayed to eradicate mosquitoes.11
Within this context of disease and a sense of unpicturesque flatness, we can begin to identify reasons why the landscape of the Hoo Peninsula was omitted from the great period of landscape painting in England. Edward Hasted noted that even vicars would not live in these marsh parishes.12 It was hardly the picture of pastoral England that might attract the artist. Arguably, apart from its coastal activity, the landscape itself also lacked the features that would attract the painter of the picturesque or the sublime of the period.
DOIHere was also a decided absence of Horace Walpole's "arrant strollers" gallivanting across the peninsula, who might stumble upon an example of William Gilpin's perspectives and prominences.13 With the exception of Cliffe (whose name is derived from its "cliff top position" 10m above sea level), and Northward Hill at High Halstow that overlooks Cooling and Halstow marshes, there were few elevated perspectives from which to view the largely flat, marginal landscape.14
DOIThe peninsula appeared void of those features that had come to define a "landscape" under the conditions of the industrial modern. Lacking either charming vistas or pleasant agrarian scenes of farming, it repelled the ideals of landscape as they were developed by artists, poets, novelists, and theorists from the eighteenth century onwards. It was hardly worth getting out a pencil for, never mind the bulky paraphernalia of the painter—or so it seemed for many. Even its proximity to London did not draw citizens from the city to dwell upon its unpopulated marshes.15 The natural philosophy that determined the "aesthetics of nature": "harmony, order, design and beauty" were evidently amiss in the Hoo Peninsula. As Harman notes in his work The Culture of Nature in Britain 1680–1860, the emergence of natural philosophy, a branch of "inquiry into the phenomena of nature and their causes" laid the groundwork for these ideals to emerge and subsequently, as scientific and industrial developments shaped society, the aesthetic values of "the natural world" became more desired.16
DOIThe Hoo Peninsula, however, was neither a "cultivated landscape of ordered farmland" or Ruskin's misty eyed "untouched pristine wilderness", but a "featureless" place.17 In a particularly low point for the peninsula, the apothecary Dr Thomas Johnson, who set foot from a boat on the Isle of Grain in 1629, to seek out plant specimens, noted its "inhuman wilderness", and he and his companions found little to "arouse our fainting spirits to any breath of hope".18 This perspective of a dark and untrustworthy place maintains a currency in the cultural psyche. In his book Thames: Sacred River (2008), the writer Peter Ackroyd reflects upon how the Hoo Peninsula "exerts a primitive and still menacing force, all the more eerie and lonely because of its proximity to the great city."19
DOIOn the final page, Ackroyd reaches the end of his Thames journey marked by an imposing obelisk, the London Stone (Fig. 5). It rises out of the mud, at Yantlet Beach between Allhallows and the Isle of Grain. An identical obelisk across the river, the Crow Stone in Essex, provided a boundary across the river, demarcating the edge of the city, asserting "the eastern limit of the city's jurisdiction from the 12th century to the mid-19th century". The stone is notoriously hard to access, and at low tide, the London Stone becomes marooned on the mud, its foundation of humble timbers incongruous with the stone obelisk above and its lofty pretensions to Ancient Egypt and Rome.20
The Island: Memorising the Landscape through Filmic Methodologies
DOIIn 1952, British Petroleum (BP) began to construct the Kent Oil Refinery on the Isle of Grain. To allay the fears of the local communities nearby and to promote its construction, BP commissioned a film that would document the refinery's development and subtly embed the message that change was inevitable and that progress for Britain was dependent on oil (Fig. 6).21
The film tells the story of the refinery through a tightly scripted narration, using a series of characters including the construction manager, workers, local farm labourers, and the Parish vicar. Directed by John Ingram and Peter Pickering, The Island is an artistically constructed film that cleverly manoeuvres the film camera between industrial progress and ancient landscape, persuasively presenting the argument that progress inevitably takes prominence over the irrevocable loss of landscape (Fig. 7 and Fig. 8).
Through numerous visits, I had become familiar with entering Grain through the threshold of industry before you could reach the village or coastline. I traced a pathway around the shoreline and came up against a whole section of ancient marsh compressed under concrete. The marsh, that had existed for thousands of years, was superseded by an oil refinery that existed for only thirty years and whose concentric pools of black liquid were reminiscent of the black spots of disease that had earlier been described in Dobson's marsh parishes (Fig. 9).
Initially, The Island, inhabits its purpose as a marketing tool for an oil company wanting to smooth the way for this "80-million pound job with 80 million headaches".22 The refinery was a huge feat of engineering and a substantial development in the Isle of Grain. It consumed a third of the land and required "the filling in of fleets and channels and the alteration of the coastline". Roads were moved and the population swelled as 1,000 construction workers arrived in Grain along with heavy machinery. This once remote and cut-off part of the peninsula was radically changed in a short span of time.23
DOIGetting beyond its matter-of-fact narration and reasoning as to why an oil refinery should be situated here, which is delivered largely in the clipped 1950s dialogue of male authority, I was strangely captivated by the film: viewing Grain through a camera lens, as a landscape in transition, that was captured at a critical point of change. As the camera recorded the activity, the memory of it became indelibly imprinted onto the celluloid, absorbing the transformation of landscape.
DOIIn The Island, there is a notable porousness of both past and present, between scenes where the landscape has changed very little in the Isle of Grain, contrasted with scenes where the landscape is mechanically manoeuvred into new geographies. From a position of posterity and time past, the immateriality of film (the act of its projection and viewing), has nevertheless portrayed a landscape that is evocative and provokes the palpable.
DOIIn his essay "Film as Spatial Critique", the artist Patrick Keiller discusses how film "offers possibilities … to experience spatial qualities no longer encountered in ordinary experience." "Spaces that no longer exist," he says, "may still exist physically but not socially or they may no longer exist at all..24
DOIThrough the medium of film, my encounters with the Isle of Grain were richer and more complex than what Keiller described as "ordinary experience".25 I could go beyond what I knew personally into an expanded experience. This multifaceted aspect of the cinematic is at the core of The Island, enabling a destabilising and disrupted sequence of events that shifts between the building of the oil refinery and the pastoral scenes of Grain. The viewer is presented with the future (the construction of the oil refinery) and the past (a bird watcher in the marshes or agricultural activities), although every scene was in fact filmed within the same period of time. It creates an altered "possible perception of life".26
DOIEntangled in the 26 minutes of irreversible change to Grain, I am suspended into in-betweenness that is a rhizomatic network of memory, of the mis-remembered, of archaeology and of the primary experience. It first manifests itself through a faded industrial past (the oil refinery being constructed in the film but now long since closed) and then a past/past of the pastoral before industry (landscapes of birdwatchers) set against my more recent time-frame of light/past experience in the landscape where changes continue, such as the recent demolition of the Grain Power Station. The effect is to linger (and toil) in this space of that which is experienced through the film, set against the embodied in the landscape and bringing these two things in parallel with each other at a jaunty angle.
DOIThe point here is that the scenes in The Island are temporally mobile, even if they are visually static. Of the few scenes where the camera is still, the landscape is in motion—even if not visibly so. The film's mobility, between scenes of disruption to the landscape in both the semi-permanent (the building of the refinery) to the settled and rooted (ploughing of a field) is an encounter through the film camera that pinpoints an anxiety about time.27
The Peninsula as a Backdrop: Setting the Scene for Dark Episodes
DOIThe Hoo Peninsula appears as a setting in the two feature films I have identified: Great Expectations (1946) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Where landscape painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was excited by the Claudian prospects and panoramas and later, by what Ann Bermingham described as "intimate and occluded views that presented nature as rough, shaggy and humble", the estuary's stark, uncompromising, windswept extremity could be put to good use for settings of dark and obdurate narratives.28
DOIIn the novel Great Expectations, Dickens builds a vivid visual image of the marshes in the opening chapters of the book, through the climatic phenomenon of fogs, bitter winds, and mists that are familiar motifs of the North Kent marshes. Dickens writes that: "the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and the lower leaden line beyond which the wind was rushing, was the sea." The few landmarks Dickens describes in this flat place fall to a beacon to guide ships and a gibbet to hang criminals from as an example to others.29
DOIIn 1946, David Lean created a film of the story.30 In the opening shot, we observe the central character, Pip, running along this "low leaden line" with an aural soundscape of an eerie wind, menacing music, and birdsong (Fig. 10).31 Lean faithfully recreated Dickens' evocative prose in this opening scene and, although I recognize the territory of the marshes, it appears as a disembodied and distinctly constructed image.
Where the real and the imaginary begin to synthesize is in a scene between Pip and Biddy, who comes to run the Gargery house when Pip's sister dies (Fig. 11). Lean has successfully embedded the subtleties and details of the place into the scene that are resonant in the contemporary landscape: the continual wind across the flat marsh, the very particular birdsong that you hear in summer, the light on Pip and Biddy's faces, the large open skies, and the line of reeds behind Pip.
In contrast to Great Expectations, where the location is critical to the story, the Hoo Peninsula featured in the film Full Metal Jacket as a stand-in for Vietnam.32 The film director of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick, was meticulous in his work and finding the right locations was critical. The choice for Kubrick to use Cliffe, a wide-open expanse of marsh in the Hoo Peninsula in one section of the film, seems pertinent. It was an area that he readily transformed into scenes of rural Vietnam and which came close to his original vision to film the authentic landscape of that country.33
DOICliffe Marshes is an open, expansive part of the Hoo Peninsula, of predominantly agricultural use with the remains of past industries—cement and munitions production—criss-crossed by channels of water. In a sense, it was already a scarred landscape with the physical marks of explosions from the nitro-cotton stoves of the Curtis and Harvey explosives factory active in the early 1900s; one could see the logic of Kubrick's decision to use it in a small number of scenes.34
DOIIn one particular scene, the camera frames three soldiers inside a military helicopter as one of them fires at innocent civilians below running over the terrain (Fig. 12).35 The scene is one of violence and menace, yet simultaneously, the mysterious landscape below is a counterpoint that Kubrick interweaves into a binary image. The camera shows the landscape at an alternative viewpoint and angle to its stubborn "flat" rhetoric of old, that might have emerged from painting and which had so irked the Hasteds and Johnsons of the past. The aerial shot from a dummy military helicopter momentarily produces a viewpoint that is a filigree of inlets and creeks, layered with a palette of pinks, greens, oranges, and browns—a rare glimpse only revealed through this bird's-eye perspective.
The multiple framing—of the camera's lens, the helicopter door, and of cinema screen—sets the landscape into an ambiguous position. I try to lay my own memory over the image from the screen, to visually register the Cliffe of Kubrick with my own mental images, never quite lining up the register perfectly, creating a double image that blurs at the edges. Kubrick frames the scene as though it is seen through the soft glow of a Claude glass and he achieves what Alexandra Harris, in her book Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies, attributes to the device: "an atmospheric viewing" of Cliffe.36 The Claude glass was surely a filmic device in its infancy, with its many ranges of tinted glass for all different scenes, and viewing strategies that distanced the user from the subject matter and created illusions of landscape.
DOIThe Claude glass, the painter's convex blackened mirror held up to the eye in order to view the landscape behind the user's head, is an early lens technology that "mediate(d) human perception in a new way", and chronologically sits somewhere between the invention of the telescope and the film camera.37 All of these lens devices became articulated by the body and situated the viewer in an embodied position.38 The development of the lens technologically produced new experiences of visualizing the world that not only revealed new phenomena previously unseen to the naked eye but also positioned a machine between the body and the object being observed. The lens then becomes an extension of the human eye, creating both an intimacy with the scene being observed and a physical distance through the intervention of a machine.39
DOIIn the helicopter scene of Kubrick's film, I experience this duality of intimacy and distance as the camera becomes what Giuliana Bruno describes as a "filament of visual existence", as if the camera was a speck of dust inside the helicopter and yet views the scene of Vietnam/Cliffe marshes below its aperture.40 Bruno says that, "film literally comes to life as light dancing on a surface-screen", and she cites Peter Greenaway's words that: "cinema is the business of artificial light … catching or trapping the light permanently on a surface".41 I can play this scene repeatedly and bring alive—through luminosity—this particular section of the Hoo Peninsula. Long after the film is finished, the image still dances on my eyes.
DOII might conclude that I have, in fact, contracted my own version of marsh fever, or the ague that Mary Dobson identified, because since that first bicycle ride I made, I have returned to the Hoo Peninsula regularly over twenty years, drawn to its awkward, strange, and flat vista. Early experiences of landscape through my grandfather's influence and subsequent Art History studies at A Level schooled me in the archetypal pastoral landscapes of Constable and Turner, not the "sunken levels" of the North Kent marshes; so how has this landscape become so resonant through film and in the broader concerns of this article? Can it be concluded that the Hoo Peninsula has been re-illuminated by film?42
DOIWorking in close proximity with the landscape of the Hoo Peninsula through painting would have presented a number of physical and cultural hurdles to overcome, which an embodied position of the film lens could navigate more fluidly. As a subject matter for painting, the Hoo Peninsula was, for example, too dull, too diseased, too dark, too incomprehensible. But cinema could, in its framing of narrative, embrace these negatives and exploit them for dramatic purpose.
DOIWhilst the Hoo Peninsula has remained on the periphery of painting, its invisibility has created the ideal setting for the works of film discussed in this article. The film-makers could utilize the Hoo Peninsula for their own motives. David Lean could draw upon the open and windswept marshes at dusk, to convey the vulnerability and terror that Pip experiences in the opening sequence of Great Expectations (1946). In Full Metal Jacket (1987), Kubrick pokes a camera out of a helicopter door and fictionalizes it as Vietnam; and in The Island (1952), the peninsula becomes a tool in the propaganda for convincing a small island of the merits of an oil refinery. Its relative obscurity allowed for these film-makers to imprint their individual motives onto the landscape. Furthermore, the very technique of manipulating time, light, and angles of vision, offered the possibilities to "alter the perceptions of life".43
DOIThe three films I have discussed in this article, feature the Hoo Peninsula, in various situations: as a key landscape for the story of a boy, who becomes a gentleman, in Great Expectations; as the place where change is inevitable in The Island; and as a fictitious Vietnam in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. In each of these examples, the Hoo Peninsula appears as both a backdrop for fictional stories and as a real place. The camera lens is able to navigate both of these expressions of the landscape convincingly and the qualities of the imagined and the real become fluid and interchangeable.
DOIAs an embodied medium, film produces an "instrument-mediated vision" that goes beyond what could be captured in a single moment by the eyes.44 Where the naked eye has a fleeting chance to take a snapshot of visual information, the camera has an ability to retain the information, to show things missed by the human eye, and then to replay that information. It can, as Deleuze asserts, use multiple angles, cuts, and construction to create a structured image of a scene.45 This is where I am arguing that the camera lens becomes a memory tool and where the synthesis of the real and the imagined can operate.
DOIFrom my own embodied position, when I work with the camera lens, it has acted as an extension and focal positioning of my gaze.46 It is a filter with which to organize the complex material of the landscape, and through this filtered viewpoint, what may be returned back to my own eye is an altered perspective of the scene. It cannot capture, for example, the clamminess of a marsh fog or the smell of the estuary's salty mud in Egypt Bay, but it can record multiple scenes that can be compressed into a film and then replayed.
DOIBruno suggests that there is a fascination with the surface that came to prominence in modernity and which resurfaces today. The cinematic surface allows for the landscape of the Hoo Peninsula to be re-illuminated, through filmic play and projection, so that using a variety of visions, perspectives, and treatments, the subject matter emerges through the porousness of not just past and present but fictions and narratives. The treatment of it in these fictions is, at the margins, authentic to its geography and to its memory in cultural terms. Caught in this obscure creek, the Hoo Peninsula remains elusive and ambiguous—a place of Kubrick's "functional unreality".47
DOII would like to thank Dr Terry Perk, Professor Andrew Kötting, and Dr Mary-Lou Barratt at the University for the Creative Arts for their support in writing this article. It was in conversation with the writer Iain Sinclair on a walk in the Hoo Peninsula that I learned that Cliffe Marshes was used as a location in Full Metal Jacket and I am very grateful to him for the generosity of his knowledge. I would like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre and British Art Studies for their support and encouragement, for the opportunities of presenting this article at the Landscape Now Conference in 2017 and for publishing this article.
About the author
Anna Falcini is an artist and PhD student of Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Kent.
Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 1–6, 87–105. See also Tate, Introduction to Plein Air, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/plein-air. Accessed 3 October 2017.
1 -
David Lean, Great Expectations (1946) DVD film, Carlton Visual Entertainment. Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket (1987) DVD film, Warner Bros.
2 -
John Ingram and Peter Pickering, The Island (1952) DVD film, from British Film Institute, In Shadows Of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951–1977 (London: BFI, 2010).
3 -
Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River (London: Vintage, 2008), 395.
4 -
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Ware: Wordsworth Press, 1992 [1868]), 3.
5 -
Gernot Böhme, "Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics", Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1 (1993): 113–126.
6 -
Giuliana Bruno, "Light spaces and Screen Surfaces: On the Fabric of Projection", in Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 13.
7 -
Edward Carpenter, Sarah Newsome, Fiona Small, and Zoe Hazell, Hoo Peninsula, Kent: Hoo Peninsula Historic Landscape Project (Eastney: English Heritage, 2013), 9–13.
8 -
Carpenter et al., Hoo Peninsula, Kent, 15.
9 -
Mary Dobson, "Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England", in Edward Carpenter et al., Hoo Peninsula, Kent: Hoo Peninsula Historic Landscape (Eastney: English Heritage, 2013), 15–16.
10 -
This information was gathered from a conversation with a resident in the Isle of Grain, during my exhibition, Coming Out of That Glistening Past, 24–25 September 2016 at St James Church, the Isle of Grain, as part of Metal Festival 2016.
11 -
Dobson, "Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England", 16.
12 -
Ann Bermingham, "System, Order, and Abstraction: The Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795", in W.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 87.
13 -
Rebecca Pullen, Sarah Newsome, Andrew Williams, and Wayne D. Cocroft, Curtis's and Harvey Ltd Explosives Factory, Cliffe and Cliffe Woods, Medway: Archaeological Survey and Analysis of the Factory Remains, Vol. 1 (Eastney: English Heritage, 2011), 8. See also Gravesend and Rochester: Hoo Peninsula (2015) OS Explorer, Sheet 163, 1:25 000 Scale, Southampton, Ordnance Survey.
14 -
Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 182.
15 -
Peter M. Harman, The Culture of Nature in Britain: 1680–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 4–5.
16 -
Harman, The Culture of Nature in Britain, 2–5. Carpenter, Hoo Peninsula, Kent, 19.
17 -
J.S.L. Gilmour (ed.), "Thomas Johnson: Journeys into Kent and Hampstead", in Edward Carpenter et al., Hoo Peninsula, Kent: Hoo Peninsula Historic Landscape (Eastney: English Heritage: 2013), 18.
18 -
Ackroyd, Thames, 396.
19 -
Peter Ackroyd, Thames, 400. Edward Carpenter, The London Stones: Marking the City of London's Jurisdiction over the Thames and Medway (Eastney: English Heritage, 2014), 1–12.
20 -
BFI Screenonline, The Island, directed by John Ingram and Peter Pickering (1952), http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1397294/index.html. Accessed 7 August 2018.
21 -
Henry Longhurst, Adventure in Oil: The Story of British Petroleum (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1959), 165.
22 -
Carpenter, Hoo Peninsula, Kent, 36.
23 -
Patrick Keiller, "Film as Spatial Critique", in The View From the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (London: Verso, 2013), 147–157.
24 -
Keiller, "Film as Spatial Critique", 149.
25 -
Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), 29–54.
26 -
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 43–46.
27 -
Bermingham, System, Order and Abstraction, 81.
28 -
Dickens, Great Expectations, 3–14.
29 -
Lean, Great Expectations.
30 -
Dickens, Great Expectations, 3
31 -
Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket.
32 -
In notes and correspondence about the making of Full Metal Jacket at the Kubrick Archive at University of the Arts London (ASCC), Kubrick proposes filming this scene in Vietnam and razing farmland to make it authentic to the original scenes of the Vietnam War.
33 -
Pullen et al., Curtis's and Harvey Ltd Explosives Factory, Cliffe and Cliffe Woods, Medway, 289.
34 -
In the manuscript for Full Metal Jacket, the scene is identified as Scene 41 and begins "Joker and Rafter Man look out of the open door of an S-55 helicopter".
35 -
Alexandra Harris, Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015), 192.
36 -
Don Ihde, Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 51.
37 -
Claude Glass, V&A Search the Collections, 2017, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O78676/claude-glass-unknown/. Accessed 4 June 2018.
38 -
Ihde, Postphenomenology and Technoscience, 51–52.
39 -
Giuliana Bruno, "Dressing the Surface", NECSUS (Autumn 2017) #Dress, https://necsus-ejms.org/dressing-the-surface/. Accessed 4 May 2018.
40 -
Bruno, Surface, 55.
41 -
My Grandfather was a trained artist who worked in watercolour, often depicting landscapes that harked back to the pre- and post-war period of change and transition in the British countryside.
42 -
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 31.
43 -
Ihde, Postphenomenology and Technoscience, 52.
44 -
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 31.
45 -
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1983), 185.
46 -
Jay Cocks, Full Metal Jacket: Between Good and Evil, directed by Gary Leva (Finland, Warner Bros, 2007) DVD.
Ackroyd, P. (2008) Thames: Sacred River. London: Vintage.
Bermingham, A. (1989) Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bermingham, A. (2002) "System, Order, and Abstraction: The Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795". In W.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
BFI (British Film Institute) (2010) In Shadows Of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951–1977. 4-DVD set.
BFI Screenonline (1952) The Island, directed by John Ingram and Peter Pickering, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1397294/index.html. Accessed 7 August 2018.
Böhme, G. (1993) "Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics". Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1: 113–126.
Bruno, G. (2014) Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bruno, G. (2017) "Dressing the Surface". NECSUS (Autumn 2017) #Dress, https://necsus-ejms.org/dressing-the-surface/. Accessed 4 May 2018.
Carpenter, E. (2014) The London Stones: Marking the City of London's Jurisdiction over the Thames and Medway. Eastney: English Heritage.
Carpenter, E., Newsome, S., Small, F., and Hazell, Z. (2013) Hoo Peninsula, Kent: Hoo Peninsula Historic Landscape Project. Eastney: English Heritage.
Cocks, J. (2007) Full Metal Jacket: Between Good and Evil, directed by Gary Leva. Finland, Warner Bros, DVD.
Colebrook, C. (2002) Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.
Dickens, C. (1992 [1868]) Great Expectations. Ware: Wordsworth Press.
Dobson, M. (2013) "Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England". In Edward Carpenter et al., Hoo Peninsula, Kent: Hoo Peninsula Historic Landscape. Eastney: English Heritage.
Gilmour, J.S.L. (ed.) (2013) "Thomas Johnson: Journeys into Kent and Hampstead". In Edward Carpenter et al., Hoo Peninsula, Kent: Hoo Peninsula Historic Landscape. Eastney: English Heritage.
Harman, P.M. (2009) The Culture of Nature in Britain: 1680–1860. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Harris, A. (2015) Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies. London: Thames and Hudson.
Ihde, D. (2009) Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Ingram, J. and Pickering, P. (1952) The Island. DVD film from BFI, In Shadows Of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951–1977, London, 2010.
Lean, D. (1946) Great Expectations. Carlton Visual Entertainment, DVD film.
Longhurst, H. (1959) Adventure in Oil: The Story of British Petroleum. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Keiller, P. (2013) The View From the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes. London: Verso.
Kubrick, S. (1987) Full Metal Jacket. Warner Bros, DVD film.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1983) The Structure of Behaviour. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Pullen, R., Newsome, S., Williams, A. and Cocroft, W.D. (2011) Curtis's and Harvey Ltd Explosives Factory, Cliffe and Cliffe Woods, Medway: Archaeological Survey and Analysis of the Factory Remains, Vol. 1. Eastney: English Heritage.
- Author
- Anna Falcini
- Date
- 29 November 2018
- Category
- Article
- Review status
- Peer Reviewed (Double Blind)
- Licence
- CC BY-NC International 4.0
- Downloads
- PDF format
- Cite as
- Anna Falcini, "Re-Illuminating the Landscape of the Hoo Peninsula through the Medium of Film", British Art Studies, Issue 10, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-10/afalcini


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