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The yarn is Knit Picks Simply Cotton leftover from a few other crochet projects. I stumbled across this granny triangle bunting tutorial via Pinterest a few months ago and thought it was just charming. The triangles were quick to make, and the crochet chain to join them was easy. The triangles initially looked a little lumpy and floppy. I wet-blocked them and used two or three applications of spray starch to give them more body.
The hard part? It took us a while to figure out how to affix it to the wall. Also, I just may have caused Paul quite a few hours of extra work of patching, sanding, priming, and painting when I pulled off 3M Command hooks incorrectly. Note to self: read directions! We ended up just using a few nails, which worked much better.


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subset: commoncrawl


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The following article by Austin Scaggs appeared in a June 2010 issue of Rolling Stone...
In a cavernous studio on West 26th Street in Manhattan, Sting is rehearsing for his ambitious summer world tour, in which he'll rework solo and Police hits with the 45-piece Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. As the massive band runs through his 1985 single 'Russians', Sting kicks his legs out like a Cossack dancer, and during the Police's 'Next To You', he playfully waves his arms like a conductor. Later, at his apartment on Central Park West, Sting explains that the idea of exploring his catalogue came in 2008, when he was invited to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "Hearing my music interpreted in that very lush, dramatic fashion was very powerful," he says. "It felt like being tied to the front of a train." Sting rests his feet on a coffee table, next to a stack of Mad Men DVDs. ("I love that redhead," he says.) Three basses lie around the room, and a lute sits on a couch opposite him. Despite his love of Elizabethan music, Sting insists his summer tour won't be a stodgy affair. "Certainly everyone should sing along," he says. It's not going to be a recital. It's going to be fun."
You've borrowed from classical music throughout your career. Where does that love come from?
"Stolen" is a better word. I wasn't educated to think that music should be split into genres - BBC radio played Beethoven's 'Fifth' alongside pop and punk. In the first live satellite broadcast, the Beatles played 'All You Need Is Love' with an orchestra, and that opened a lot of doors.
Can you go the rest of your life without playing with the Police again?
Why do you think that's important?
Because the reunion was insanely successful.
There are hundreds of musicians I have worked with successfully over the years - and no one has asked me if I'll play with those lads again. I'm not a great lover of nostalgia. I get bored easily. Some people find that certain chemistry, and they stay with it for the rest of their lives. That's not good or bad, it just isn't me. My MO is to surprise people, and that was the reasoning behind re-forming the Police: "What would surprise people more than reforming the band I said I'd never reform?"
What was the story behind the old Fender bass you played on that entire tour?
It's from 1954, slightly younger than me. I found it over 20 years ago, and it was like a little orphan that nobody wanted. I know for a fact that Leo Fender wound the pickups himself. That's a magician at work.
You're playing your 1996 murder ballad 'I Hung My Head' on this tour. What do you think of Johnny Cash's version of the song?
Who better to sing that song? He got one of the words wrong, though. He changed "stream" to "sheen". But I wasn't going to call him up and say, "Hey Johnny, you've got to re-record it!"
The song is about a man who accidentally murders someone. What inspired it?
It was just free association. It's not something I experienced firsthand - I wrote 'Tomorrow We'll See', about a transsexual prostitute, which is also something I've not experienced! I just thought 'I Hung My Head' offered an interesting moral argument: "Does this man deserve to die when it was an accident?" The song is really about the idea of guns having a totemic image that will attract their misuse. That's why I don't own any guns.
Is there a place where you like to go to feel the most creative?
When I'm walking. I'll listen to demos, and then I'll walk around with my iPod and mutter to myself like a crazy man. Right now I'm listening to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. It's minimalist and strange.
Any pop music blowing your mind?
I'm always looking for surprising bubblegum. For pop music to reach me, it has to surprise every eight bars. I really like Lady Gaga. She's clearly smart, and she can play the piano with authority.
I interviewed Madonna last year - she told me that she finds you a little intimidating.
I like Madonna, so I don't know why she's intimidating. It's not my intention. I'm just shy.
She told me you're always sitting in the corner playing some medieval 16-stringed instrument.
[Glances over at his lute] It has 26 strings.
© Rolling Stone by Austin Scaggs


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Pronounced SHOW-grins, Sjogren's syndrome is a disorder of the immune system, or an autoimmune disease, which causes the body's immune system to attack and harm the body's glands. Your glands are responsible for the production of saliva, tears, and other lubrication necessary for the proper function of the body.
Sjogren's Syndrome Symptoms and Side Effects
The two most common symptoms of Sjogren's syndrome are dry eyes and mouth. Eye dryness usually leads to an itchy, gritty feeling. Dry mouth causes a cottony feeling which can make regular speaking and swallowing difficult. In Sjogren's syndrome, the body's immune system first attacks the body's glands, but eventually might target other parts of the body like the liver, kidneys, joints, nerves, thyroid, skin, and lungs. In addition to dry eyes and mouth, people with Sjogren's syndrome might also experience one or more of the following:
- Dry cough
- Fatigue
- Swollen salivary glands
- Joint pain, swelling, and/or stiffness
- Dry skin and skin rashes
- Peripheral neuropathy
If left untreated, symptoms of Sjogren's syndrome, particularly dry mouth and dry eyes, can lead to further complications such as cavities, oral yeast infections, and corneal ulcers.
Causes and Risk Factors
Like many autoimmune diseases, the exact cause of Sjogren's syndrome is not understood. Research links the presence of a certain gene in the body to Sjogren's syndrome, but it may also develop with an undetermined trigger such as a bacterial or viral infection. Post-menopausal women over 40 are most likely to develop Sjogren's syndrome. Sometimes present alone, it often accompanies other autoimmune disorders such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.
An eye care professional usually diagnoses Sjogren's syndrome after a patient presents with dry eyes. After ruling out other possible causes such as medications, several tests will be performed to pinpoint Sjogren's syndrome, including:
- Blood tests for certain markers indicative of Sjogren's syndrome
- Schirmer's test to measure tear production
- Slit lamp eye exam
- Sialogram, an X-ray of the salivary glands
- Salivary scintigraphy, which tracks an isotope's journey through the body's glands
- Biopsy looking for inflammatory cells
No cure for Sjogren's syndrome has been developed. Treatment focuses on relieving symptoms. Treatments include eye drops and lubricants, mouth lubricants, immune system suppressants, medications to increase saliva production, and surgery to prevent tears from draining. Patients have also found relief by increasing water intake and wearing protective eye glasses or goggles outdoors.


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Desperate Living
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Desperate Living is a 1977 film about a mentally ill housewife and her maid who flee to a city full of hiding criminals after accidentally killing a character's husband.
- Written and directed by John Waters.
It isn't very pretty...
Peggy Gravel
[edit]- [the phone rings] Hello? What number are you calling? You've dialed the wrong number! SORRY? What good is that? How can you ever repay the 30 seconds you have STOLEN FROM MY LIFE! I hate you, your husband, your children and your relatives!
- [the children are playing doctor in the nude] Sodomites! Caught right in a sex orgy! You dirty filthy...! Is that what you learned in private school?! Nude, nude, nude! You could be pregnant, Beth! And as for you, I never thought you would rape your own SISTER! Oh God, the children are having SEX!
- Am I living in hell?! Is that it?! Have I gone straight to hell?!
- You know I hate nature! Look at those disgusting trees, stealing my oxygen!
- You're just like the rest of the common dykes in this town!
Grizelda Brown
[edit]- Good God almighty.
- [comes into the room wielding a broom] Back off, asshole!
- [while sitting on Mr. Gravel's face] Down, down, down, down, down, down, down! Down, down, down, down, down!
- [to Peggy] I am sick of listenin' to your bitchin'. The next time you feel a fit comin' on, go outside and bitch. Bitch at the air. Bitch at the trees. But don't bitch at us!
- ''to Mr. Gravel'' I don't want no white man lookin' at my Tampax!
- ''to Peggy'' I ain't your maid anymore, bitch! I'm your sister in crime!
Queen Carlotta
[edit]- Take them to our ugly expert, and give them a complete overhaul!
- [while having sex with one of her guards] Oh, that love muscle! Whip it out and show it hard! Oh come on daddy, fuck me! Oh grow little inchworm!
- That little MF!
- Hey morons, you got your clothes on backwards!
- I hope you didn't leave no pecker tracks on my gown!
- Seize her and fuck her!
[edit]- Come on, bitch! Eat some dog food! Eat it! Eat it, you bitch! Put my baby in the refrigerator!
- I'm so hungry I could eat cancer!
- [talking to her breasts] Hi big boys! I bet you didn't know Mommy won the Maryland lottery, yes! I'm going to be buying you lots of new push-up bras, so get ready for your new home! Things are going to be looking up for you two!
- Good old germ-carrying American currency!
[edit]- Now I won't have any organs! It'll be like having a Barbie doll crotch!
- I'm going to BLOW YOUR BOWELS OUT!
[edit]- Officer: You like lingerie?! How do you like these little numbers? I sent away to 'em from Fredrick's. They was expensive. I love the feel of cold nylon on my big butt!
- Princess Coo-coo: Herbert doesn't care if I have ears, he only cares about my mind!
- Flipper: You lazy bitch! I'm out working my tail off all day and you're in there fucking midgets!
[edit]- [a baseball breaks the bedroom window, where outside children are playing the sport]
- Peggy: I knew they'd try it! Try to kill me in my own home! It's like war! Don't tell me I don't know what Vietnam is like! [opens the window] Brats! Brats! Brats!
- Child: Oh, I'm sorry Mrs. Gravel. I'll pay for the window out of my allowance.
- Peggy: How about my LIFE? Do you get enough allowance to pay for that?! I know you were trying to kill me! What's the matter with the courts? Do they allow this lawlesness and malicious destruction of property to run rampant? I HATE THE SUPREME COURT! [moves away from the window in a rage and throws a vase, breaking it, then moves back to the window] Go home to your mother! Doesn't she ever watch you? Tell her this isn't some communist day-care center! Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I HATE YOU!
- Grizelda: We killed your husband, and I ain't your maid any more, bitch! I'm your sister in crime!
- Peggy: Please, don't sit on me!
- Peggy: We were raped! Please, give us shelter!
- Mole: You were raped?!
- Muffy: Sometimes I need a man.
- Mole: I'm a man, Muffy! A man trapped in a woman's body!
- Princess Coo-Coo: Herbert!
- Herbert: Coo-Coo, Coo-coo! Oh, Coo, I worship the ground you walk on. I couldn't keep my mind on my work all morning. Every piece of trash I had to pick up reminded me of you! An old candy wrapper made me think of how sweet you are. A snotty Kleenex made me realize how much I'd cry if we ever had to part. An old rubber made me think of all the nights of eros we have before us. I love you, Coo-coo.
- Princess Coo-coo: Oh Herbert, I masturbated 14 times last night just thinking of you, and when I finally did fall asleep, my dreams were not exactly dry. Take me now, Herbert! Take me in front of the whole town!
- Peggy: You obviously belong in a mental hospital!
- Grizelda: Look who's calling the kettle black! She's just upset, now be easy on her!
- Peggy: I will not! I don't want some renegade necrophile princess as my roommate!
- Muffy's Friend: Holy shit Mole, what happened to you?!
- Mole: Oh, Muffy just gave me an abortion.
[edit]- Liz Renay - Muffy St. Jacques
- Mink Stole - Peggy Gravel
- Susan Lowe - Mole McHenry
- Edith Massey - Queen Carlotta
- Mary Vivian Pearce - Princess Coo-Coo
- Jean Hill - Grizelda Brown
External links
[edit]- Desperate Living quotes at the Internet Movie Database
- Desperate Living at Rotten Tomatoes


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Technical overview
- Anti-aliassed.
- Configurable placement balance.
- Control physics aspects of falling snow.
- Animation mode (watch the snow fall down).
- Fully documented in help system.
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- Supports 8-bit RGB mode.
System requirements
- Operating system: Windows™ 95 or above (including all versions of NT, 2000+, XP, Vista™, 7, 8 and 10).
- Processor: Intel, AMD of VIA x86 compatible, 80486 or newer.
- Memory: 128MB or more. Recommended at least 1GB.
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Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK 1.1.0 with partitioning support
Published date: April 30, 2015
A new version of the Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK is available today via NuGet. The 1.1.0 release includes support for partitioning data by using the new HashPartitionResolver and RangePartitionResolver classes and the IPartitionResolver interface in the .NET SDK. These classes can be used to partition documents across multiple Azure Cosmos DB collections and route requests to the appropriate collections. To learn more about partitioning with the new Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK, you can:
- Read the blog announcement: Announcing partitioning support in the Azure Cosmos DB SDK
- Review the tutorial: How to partition data in Azure Cosmos DB with the .NET SDK
- Build the samples: Azure Cosmos DB Partitioning Samples on GitHub.
For more information about Azure Cosmos DB, visit the Azure Cosmos DB page.


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This entry is our analysis of a study considered particularly relevant to improving outcomes from drug or alcohol interventions in the UK. The original study was not published by Findings; click Title to order a copy. Free reprints may be available from the authors – click prepared e-mail. The summary conveys the findings and views expressed in the study. Below is a commentary from Drug and Alcohol Findings.
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Lopez-Quintero C., Hasin D.S., Pérez de los Cobos J. et al.
Addiction: 2011, 106(3), p. 657–669.
Unable to obtain a copy by clicking title? Try asking the author for a reprint by adapting this prepared e-mail or by writing to Dr Blanco at firstname.lastname@example.com. You could also try this alternative source.
The largest recent US national survey of drink and drug problems shows that outside the addiction treatment clinic, remission is the norm and recovery common. After 14 years half the people at some time dependent on alcohol were in remission, a milestone reached for cannabis after six years, and for cocaine after just five.
Summary Among the US general adult population, and for each of nicotine, alcohol, cannabis and cocaine (including crack), this study sought to estimate the time from onset of dependence to remission, the cumulative probability of remission in different racial/ethnic groups, and to identify factors related to the probability of remission.
It drew its data from the National Epidemiological Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) conducted in 2000–2001, which focused on drinking disorders but also asked about other forms of drug use and psychological problems. The aim was to interview a representative sample of civilian, non-institutionalised adults aged 18 and over living in households and group residences such as college halls, boarding houses and non-transient hotels. About 8 in 10 of the sample responded to the survey yielding 43,093 respondents. The featured report investigated the subgroups who had some time in their lives been dependent on nicotine (of which there were 6937), alcohol (4781), cannabis (530) or cocaine (408).
Dependence was defined as meeting the
dependence criteria
A maladaptive pattern of substance use, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by three (or more) of the following, occurring at any time in the same 12-month period:
• Tolerance, as defined by either of the following:
a need for markedly increased amounts of the substance to achieve Intoxication or desired effect;
markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of the substance.
• Withdrawal, as manifested by either of the following:
the characteristic withdrawal syndrome for the substance;
the same (or a closely related) substance is taken to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms.
• The substance is often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than was intended.
• There is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use.
• A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain the substance, use the substance, or recover from its effects.
• Important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of substance use.
• The substance use is continued despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance.
of the applicable version of the American Psychiatric Association's DSM manual, DSM-IV. 'Lifetime' dependence was diagnosed if the respondent reported having experienced at least three
specific signs
Such as tolerance, withdrawal, often using more of the drug than initially intended, not stopping use after repeatedly trying to do so, abandoning other pursuits.
of this syndrome within the same 12-month period at some point in their life. The age this first happened for any particular substance was the onset year, while the remission year was based on the age when the respondent's answers
Respondents who had been dependent on the drug at some time were asked, "about how old were you when you finally stopped having any of these experiences [dependence criteria] with [name of drug]? By finally stopped, I mean they never started happening again".
they had last stopped meeting dependence criteria for the drug, and had continued to do so for at least a year until interviewed for the survey – essentially, the most recent (at least so far) lastingly
Editor's note: It is possible that they had developed dependence on another category of drug and/or that later they relapsed.
remission. It was on this basis that the study calculated remission rates for individual substances and related them to the time between the onset of dependence and remission.
Within a year of first becoming dependent, 3% each of smokers and drinkers were in remission and remained so until they were surveyed. For cannabis the figure was nearly 5% and for cocaine, nearly 9%. After ten years the proportions in remission had risen to 18% for nicotine, 37% for alcohol, 66% for cannabis and 76% for cocaine chart. It could be estimated that by the end of their lives 84% of formerly dependent smokers would be in remission, 91% for alcohol, 97% for cannabis and 99% for cocaine. About 26 years after first becoming dependent, half the people at some time dependent on nicotine were in remission, a milestone reached for alcohol after 14 years, for cannabis six years, and for cocaine five years.
Once other factors had been taken in to account, for each of the substances, men who had been dependent at some time were significantly less likely than women to be in remission, especially in respect of the two illegal drugs, cannabis and cocaine; for every 10 women only about six men were in remission from dependence on these drugs. Black Americans once dependent on nicotine or cocaine were less likely to be in remission than white Americans – for cocaine, half as likely. After four years, about 50% of whites had sustained remission from dependence on cocaine; African Americans took nine years to reach the same milestone.
About 80% of people at some time dependent on nicotine or alcohol and almost all those once dependent on cannabis or cocaine had also at some time met diagnostic criteria for another psychiatric disorder, including conduct (antisocial behaviour in early life) and personality disorders. Once other factors had been taken in to account, people who had met criteria for conduct disorder were much more likely than others to have overcome their dependence on cannabis. In contrast, a diagnosis of a personality disorder was associated with a lower probability of remission from cannabis (and also alcohol) dependence. Having once experienced mood and anxiety disorders was unrelated to remission from dependence on any of the four substances.
The general picture is that the vast majority of people in the USA once dependent on nicotine, alcohol, cannabis or cocaine stop being dependent at some point in their lives, and this happens after fewer years for cannabis or cocaine than for nicotine or alcohol. Black Americans stay dependent longer on nicotine and cocaine than white Americans, and probabilities of remission are associated with social and psychological characteristics and dependence on other substances. However, the fact that that many people once dependent were no longer at the time of the survey should be interpreted with caution given the irregular course of addictions punctuated by remissions and relapses; their remission may have been temporary. Possible explanations for these findings are considered below.
More than two thirds of remissions from cannabis and cocaine dependence occurred within the first decade after onset of dependence, but only a fifth for nicotine and a third for alcohol. These differences may be explained in part by how quickly adverse physical, psychological and social consequences become apparent. For instance, the risk of early cardiovascular problems is much higher among individuals dependent on cocaine than among those dependent on nicotine or alcohol. Behavioural disturbances resulting from cannabis or cocaine dependence and their illegal status impose stronger social pressures to remit. The pervasive availability of alcohol and nicotine also means pervasive environmental prompts to using the drugs. Particularly for nicotine, perceived immediate benefits including anxiety and stress reduction, improved cognitive performance, and weight control, may initially outweigh perceived potential harms from long-term use.
Consistent with previous studies, black Americans once dependent on cocaine were less likely to remit than their white counterparts. Psychosocial factors that commonly affect black populations, including discrimination and lower levels of social capital, have been recognised as barriers to remission and triggers to use or relapse; genetic factors may also contribute.
Men were less likely than women to remit from dependence, perhaps because substance use is more damaging (physically, mentally and socially) for women, heightening motivation to stop using. Feelings of guilt and concerns about substance use during pregnancy and child-rearing may also play a particular part in prompting remission among women.
Individuals who met criteria for a personality disorder were less likely to remit from alcohol or cannabis dependence. This may be because characteristics of these disorders such as being impulsive, intolerant to stress, anxious, and craving new experiences, also predispose to substance use, and these characteristics tend to persist.
Among the limitations of the study were that it omitted institutionalised individuals including prisoners. People whose substance use led to their early death would also have been missed, as may some with severe but non-fatal consequences. These omissions may have caused an overestimation of the probability of remission across the entire population. The study also had no information on the number and duration of remission episodes over an individual's lifetime; it could only relate other factors to the latest of these remissions.
commentary The good news from this analysis is that, in the US context, rather than continued dependence, remission is the norm. Most people overcome or grow out of their dependence on the drugs analysed by the study – for cocaine and cannabis, after just five or six years, and for alcohol, after 14, and over their lives people continue to remit until nearly all are no longer dependent. But at least in respect of drinking, there are a set of multiply problematic drinkers who despite treatment, take many more years to stop being dependent. The findings on black versus white Americans suggest that remission rates depend on socioeconomic factors; sampled at another period in the USA's economic cycles or in respect of drugs used predominantly by more or less advantaged sections of the population, remission rates too might differ, and look more or less like the chronic disease model.
The data presented in the featured article did not show whether the user 'in remission' had simply become dependent on another drug. Within the set of illegal drugs and medicines, this seemed uncommon, because the total remission rate was so high. But it seems more than possible that some who matured out of illegal drug use instead took up heavy drinking, in social and legal terms, a dependence easier to live with as an adult.
An acknowledged weakness of the featured report is that it asked respondents to recall changes which may have happened many years ago. However, the survey was repeated about three years later when 87% of the people who still qualified for the survey were re-interviewed. The follow-up offered an opportunity to see how many dependent at the time of the first survey had recovered three years later. These analyses seem only to have been done for drinking, for which they confirm that most people cease to be dependent though most too continue to experience drink-related problems and to sometimes drink heavily, and remain vulnerable to relapse. This average impression results from the pooling of dramatically different trajectories, from older multiply problematic alcoholics who usually do not remit despite treatment, to youngsters who generally quickly remit without formal help. Details below.
Among the re-interviewed sample were 1172 of the 1484 people who had been dependent on alcohol in the year before the first interview three years before. Nearly two thirds were longer dependent in the year before the follow-up interview. So complete was their recovery that a fifth of those previously dependent had in the past year experienced no indications of abuse or dependence; of these, three quarters were still drinking. About 11% not only had no symptoms, but were exclusively drinking within low-risk guidelines, evenly split between those drinking moderately and those not drinking at all.
But this broad-brush picture hid substantial variation in the fates of different types of dependent drinkers. At one extreme were the most severely affected drinkers with multiple psychological problems and on average about nine years of dependence behind them, two thirds of whom were still dependent at the second interview. At the other were young adults and older drinkers with few complicating psychological disorders and few years of dependent drinking. For most of these the dip in to dependence was a phase which (at least for time being) was over by the the second interview, when just under 30% were still dependent.
At least for the three years between the surveys, remission was very stable. Among the re-interviewed sample were 1772 of the 2109 who three years before had been in "full remission" from past dependence on alcohol, meaning that even though they may sometimes have drunk above low-risk guidelines, for the past 12 months they had reported no symptoms of alcohol abuse or dependence. Of these just 5% had slipped back to being dependent in the year before the second interview, though a third who had been drinking above low-risk guidelines had re-experienced some symptoms of alcohol abuse or dependence. Most stable in their recovery were the abstainers, of whom just 1 in 50 experienced such symptoms. The much greater stability of recovery in abstainers and low-risk drinkers was confirmed when other factors had been taken in to account, but was not apparent among the younger adults in the sample.
Few dependent drug users recover through treatment and fewer still dependent on alcohol – in the NESARC survey on which the featured analysis was based, of those no longer dependent on alcohol, just 24% Calculated from table 2 of the cited paper. had at any time been in any kind of treatment for their drinking problems. Over two thirds of those who achieved more complete forms of recovery also did so without treatment.
While this shows that in the USA, treatment is generally not needed to recover from substance dependence, treatment may still make recovery more likely. In respect of dependence on alcohol, one analysis of data from the NESARC survey was consistent with formal treatment promoting recovery characterised by abstinence or low-risk drinking and no symptoms of abuse or dependence, but another and perhaps more reliable analysis found no such association.
Both however found that when treatment had been accompanied by attendance at 12-step mutual aid groups, recovery was more likely – especially abstinent recovery. These analyses could not however disentangle the possible effects of the motivation and conditions which drive someone to seek help, from the effect of actually receiving that help. Complicating the picture is the fact in this survey, the most severely affected and multiply comorbid drinkers with many years of dependence behind them were far more likely to seek treatment than less severely affected types of dependent drinkers. Despite seeking help, they were by a large margin the ones most likely to still be dependent when the survey was repeated three years later.
A notable omission from the illicit drugs included in the featured report was heroin and other opiates. Fortunately these were the subject of the greatest number of relevant studies in another review of follow-up studies of remission from dependence on amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine or opiate-type drugs. It included only studies of general populations or people who entered treatment in the normal way rather than enrolling in treatment trials.
Across the ten studies relevant to opiate-type drugs, every year on average between 22% and 9% of people were either abstinent or no longer dependent; the higher figure is the average of the proportions remitted among people who could be followed up, while the lower estimate includes cases who could not be followed and assumes they are still dependent. Generally the subjects were patients in treatment. Based mainly on patients in treatment, corresponding figures for cocaine were between 14% and 5%. The single study (from the USA) of a general population sample of cocaine-dependent people found that 39% had remitted four years after initially surveyed. For cannabis, the estimate was 17% per annum based on general population surveys and assuming people not followed up were still dependent.
In accordance with the featured article, such figures imply that within 10 years most dependent users of these drugs will no longer be dependent and may have entirely ceased use.
An analysis of data from the NESARC survey showed that taking alcohol and other drugs together, the longer dependence careers of black versus white Americans was associated with their having less social and socioeconomic resources, signified by fewer being married and fewer having completed their schooling. Once these were taken in to account, racial differences were no longer significant. The implication is that it is not race as such which makes the difference, but the position black people tend to occupy in US society. Given the same disadvantages, white Americans has dependence careers just as extended as black Americans.
Much in this analysis depends on the definitions used in the survey. Specifically, the probability of remission equates to the probability that someone will for at least the past 12 months have dropped below experiencing three or more dependence symptoms together in respect of the same drug. From the same survey, it is known for alcohol that many will still be consuming heavily, experiencing symptoms of dependence such as withdrawal and compulsive use, and suffering poor physical and mental health (1 2). They may be remitted from their dependence, but not according to most understandings, 'recovered'.
Had the line been drawn elsewhere, the chances of remission might have been substantially lower – for example, as commonly in NESARC reports on drinking (1 2 3 4), if remission had been defined as non-problem moderate use or abstinence.
The latest version of the DSM manual (DSM-5) softens this binary system by diagnosing a substance use disorder when at least two symptoms are present in the same 12 months, and rating this as moderate if there were two or three, severe if four or more. 'Abuse' and 'dependence' are now subsumed within this continuum. The change seems likely to bring many more less severely affected people under the same substance use disorder umbrella as the three-symptom population investigated by the featured analysis. Their remission rates too may differ.
It is also theoretically possible that 'remission' may partly reflect the lack of noticeable change or struggle as with the years dependence becomes more deeply embedded and dominant in one's life, and the change processes probed by some diagnostic questions cease to be live issues – not a sign of recovery, but of the lack such a prospect and the narrowing of life to substance use. For example, having plateaued in their use levels, long-term dependent users may no longer (or not for the past 12 months) have found themselves needing to take more of the drug to feel the desired effects, or taking more than they intended. Perhaps too in the past they had tried unsuccessfully to stop using, or had at least persistently wanted to, but now no longer tried or even wanted to. Ensuring a steady supply of drink or drugs they made no attempt to interrupt would minimise experience of withdrawal. They may also have no important interests and activities left to sacrifice to their dependence – all among the symptoms used to diagnose dependence.
Some findings from NESARC are consistent with this possibility. In the three years between the first interview and the re-interview, the alcohol dependence symptoms which fell away most often and most consistently across different types of drinkers were "taking alcohol often in larger amounts or over a longer period than was intended", "a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control use", and withdrawal.
Similarly, young adult dependent drinkers tend not to endorse the dependence symptom relating to inability to stop drinking or cut back, presumably because they have yet to try.
This data from the featured report has been reanalysed to show that for each of these drugs, the probability that someone would have ceased being dependent remained the same This assumption fit the data very well for alcohol, cannabis and cocaine but less well for smoking, which people were more likely to quit using in a dependent way in later life after having first become dependent 55 years or more ago, perhaps due to the onset of illness. Also, after many years since the onset of dependence, rates of remission for cannabis and cocaine were variable, perhaps because smaller numbers made the findings vulnerable to chance fluctuations. no matter how long ago they had first become dependent. For the author this falsified theories which assume that the longer it lasts, the deeper dependence becomes embedded in neural circuits or lifestyles.
The survey on which the featured article was based and other US national surveys were among those included in a synthesis of hundreds of studies of remission and recovery from substance use problems. This too concluded that "Recovery is not an aberration achieved by a small and morally enlightened minority of addicted people. If there is a natural developmental momentum within the course of [these] problems, it is toward remission and recovery".
Last revised 24 October 2013. First uploaded 19 October 2013
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text:
Measurement Specialties, a manufacturer in sensor-based measuring of pressure/force, position, vibration, temperature, humidity and fluid properties, has released the KMA36, a digital position sensor for precise rotational and incremental measurement of magnetic field fluctuations.
Using anisotropic magneto resistive (AMR) technology, the contactless sensor measures angles of an exterior magnet over a 360° rotation as well as incremental positions along a linear magnetic pole strip with a 5 mm pole length.
Housed in a standard TSSOP package and able to withstand harsh environmental elements, the low-power KMA36 is ideal for use in industrial, engine, robotics and motor machine applications. Specific implementations include potentiometer replacement, motor feedback control and gauge reading, precise linear displacement readings or steering wheel measurements.
The sensor can detect disturbances ranging from extremely weak fields, as found in traffic detection sensors, to strong field sensors used in precision encoders. The reliable unit is less susceptible to external noise, as found with Hall Effect position sensors, and its robust construction withstands harsh environments where optical sensor bearings fail.
The KMA36 is a system-on-chip that features an integrated analog-to-digital converter and signal processing capabilities. This provides easy sensor data access in analog signal or digital formats via the TSSOP pinheads, making it useful in a number of less rugged applications including laboratory research, medical equipment and conveyor instrumentation.
Included software features a self-diagnostic sequence at power-on that tests the electronic circuit before integration into the assembly and during field use. It also communicates faults and failures to the system with which it is interfacing.
Pricing for the KMA36 is $3.00 per unit in quantities of 10,000. Delivery times are dependent upon quantities ordered.


text:
William Shakespeare, Sonnet lxxxvii
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gav'st , thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but, waking, no such matter.


text:
Looking at the way the government is doling out money these days, I have a proposal to help improve people's health and our system of care. What if the government gave each person $365 of their tax money back to be spent on primary health care?Is his idea so far fetched?
That amount could be paid directly to each person's primary care doctor for a year's worth of services. Imagine if everyone in America could contract privately for medical care for themselves with a primary care doctor without government or insurance company red tape.
The patient would choose the doctor. The basket of services would be predefined, and the price would be locked in for a year, paid as a monthly subscription like cellphone service or movie rentals.
Money spent that way would cover a lot of preventive health, office visits, management of chronic diseases, email contact with the doctor, and after-hours advice. Make it tax deductible for individuals as well as businesses.
Doctors like the idea of universal coverage, but don't like the idea of unfunded mandates, like some programs to improve quality that cost physicians more to implement than can ever be recouped.
They don't want to be conscripted into a national program that pays them less than their costs. They don't see Medicaid or Medicare for all as solutions because those systems skimp on primary care and impose crushing paperwork and regulation.
But it seems to me that it is time to get beyond the argument of whether health care is a right or a privilege. We need to do something practical to bring affordable, basic health care to working people. Primary care isn't cheap, but it's less expensive than any other option.
We have had a financial stimulus package. My patients spent their $600 checks on $4 gas to get to work. A better and longer-lasting use of the money would be a health-care stimulus package.
The attraction for the doctor would be no billing hassles, no massive insurance coding system, no extensive overhead, and no bogus pay-for-performance schemes that cost more than they save. The infusion of money would also bolster primary care and might make it more attractive to new doctors over the long haul.
For primary care doctors, a $1 per patient per day would make for reasonable income from a smaller group of patients than most of see now. Patients would get more time with their doctor when they need it. There would be fewer office visits just so the doctor can get paid for giving advice.
I don't think so.
And yet, make no mistake, the push back will be substantial from those who benefit from the bureaucracy.
I am aware that even large physician groups such as ours, already equipped with the latest electronic gadgetry to track pay-for-performance initiatives, in their zest to go "all in" on the concept to earn their "gold stars" on the government's pitiful quality website (which is rarely consulted by patients, by the way), failed to cover the cost of implementing the initiative its first year. It's been just too many personnel, spending too many precious resources to gather data of limited value, rather than applied to the delivery of health care. (If you want to see just how bad it's become, check out the specifics over at the Happy Hospitalist.) This initiative has been a colossal failure in my book, but sold lock, stock and barrel to the populous by the policy wonks on Capital Hill.
So I can hear it now: "What will happen to all of those people paid to collect the data? They might become unemployed at this time of our colossal economic downturn! Our unemployment numbers will go up! We can't have that!"
We cannot afford NOT to make a significant change to the way we do health care today. I am convinced as Americans consider the options ahead of them, that they'll make the right choice and realize the consequences if they don't. Dr. Brewer's proposal makes a lot of sense.
After all, managing our own cash is looking pretty good right now.


text:
'Navvies,' John Ward once said, 'are not, like Hodge, priest-ridden, for religion is a thing they know little of.' Navvies, said every Christian, are godless pagans heading headlong for damnation. Christendom's counter-attack came in two phases: pre-Navvy Mission Society missions, and the Navvy Mission Society itself. '
The problem with the pre-Society missions was they were unconnected and haphazard: even the heaviest dose of religion was no good if the navvy never saw a Christian again. For this reason they were pretty ineffective, in spite of the fact there were plenty of them. In the late '60s, four separate missions competed for navvies on the short Kettering-Manton line, where Daniel Barren was the Bishop of Peterborough's appointee. He had a seven-mile parish and three chapels with wooden belfries hung with bells which chimed, not tolled, and flagstaffs for flying the cross of St George on Sundays. He opened his mission to a congregation of forty-two — of whom only the odd two were navvies, and one of them was so drunk he had to be led away, protesting he'd heard it all before — in jail.
What the Society offered when it came was a continuity of effort, aim, and house-style. Like booking into an international hotel you always knew what to expect on an Navvy Mission Society job. The trouble, then, was navvies liked the amenities that were offered more than the religion that was preached.
I never heard any one say anything against the Navvy Mission. It was a blooming good thing. They were always preaching at you at dinner time, that was all. I didn't want no bugger preaching at me while I was eating my bit of snap.
Nor did they always like what was preached at them — a [200/201] Christianity stripped to its Jewish and Iranian origins, full of eastern demonology and the promise of pain to come. It was this threat of never-ending violence against the person that most offended navvies: violence against people who never asked to be created — to be set up and knocked down like coconuts in a cock-shy — and then be tortured with inhuman cruelty for trivial offences in a pitifully short life in which they were chiefly preoccupied with staying alive. It was a kind of terrorism: people were terrorised into being Christian. Except many weren't, and wouldn't be.
'Do you mean to say,' a navvy asked the Rev. Fayers, on the Lune valley line in the '50s, 'that arter working on these railways, enough to pull a feller's heart out, we'll be hard worked in the next world?'
'Yes,' said Fayers — and repeated it to Old Alice, a middle-aged woman (prematurely old) bright in lindsey petticoats. Old Alice didn't believe him, either.
'Why I goes about the country for the good of old England,' she argued, 'I puts up with all they put upon me, and when navvies slope me, I bears it all, and shan't go to a bad place.'
'Jesus says no one can get to heaven but by him,' Fayers argued back, 'and the reason you hope to get there does away with Him altogether.'
'Nowt o' sort,' snorted Old Alice, pretty sure hardship now ensured and easy hereafter.
Apart from anything else it grated against a sense of fair-play. Unfairness was bad enough on earth, in heaven it was intolerable. 'They certainly wonder', said one lay preacher, 'that God should have made some rich and some so dreadfully poor.' Yet some Christians like Katie Marsh seem to have had no concept of equality at all, not even in death. Miss Marsh lived in constant terror she was less holy than her mother who, in consequence, would be graded so much higher than her in heaven's hierarchy they'd never meet again in all eternity.
Most navvies, as well, disliked parsons. How could leaning on a pulpit twice a week pay better than shifting two hundred and fifty tons of muck? 'Many of them regard a clergyman as their natural foe,' said the Rev. Munby, vicar of Turvey, in the early '70s. 'Once, I heard a party of them say: "Look, here comes the parson. Let's heave a truck at him.'" In return many parsons disliked them. 'Too bad to go among,' said a> Baptist minister. 'Not an atom's worth of honesty among them,' said the Rev Thompson, missionary on the South Devon [201/202] line, 1840s. 'Vile and immoral characters,' intoned the Rev Sargent, missionary on the Carlisle-Lancaster, also in the '40s. Navvies, on the other hand, were much more open to parsons' wives and daughters, untouchable in muck-long frocks, not unlike pedestals. In return, by accepting them, those wives and daughters made navvies more acceptable to society by changing people's perceptions of them. And a sense of acceptance by society must have made the navvy more receptive to society's religion.
Pre-Navvy Mission Society, there was Anna Tregelles (whose book, Ways of the Line, inspired the nameless authoress of Life or Death) and, above all, Katie Marsh. Contemporary with the Mission there was Elizabeth Garnett and the dozens of women who did the Society's donkey-work — from not-quite-gentlewomen like Katherine Sleight to bluebloods like the Countess of Harewood. Supreme among them, the navvy's arch-friends, were Katie Marsh and Elizabeth Garnett. Miss Marsh never married and though Mrs Garnett obviously did, her husband died on their honeymoon soon after her wedding. Both were daughters of> Anglican clergymen.
Katie Marsh, born in 1818 in Colchester, was always unintimidated by the great, accustomed as she was to the illustrious of the land through her father's connections, by marriage, with the nobility. She had, she said, no politics (just anti-Gordon-ics and anti-Bradlaugh-ics) though that didn't stop her telling Mr Gladstone to defy the electorate of Northampton and throw Bradlaugh out of Parliament. 'Save our country from the Apostle of> Atheism,' she told him.
At first she seemed an ordinary spinster-daughter of the parsonage and it was the shock of being thirty that turned her into one of the foremost evangelists of her day, influential both in Britain and the USA. Navvies were only a brief bit of her life: she knew them only when they came to re-erect the Crystal Palace near her father's parish of Beckenham and later when the Army Works Corps was drafted from there to the Crimea. By then she was in her late thirties, plump and plain, not unlike the later Victoria, with ballooning frocks and ballooning face.
Beckenham Rectory, a small mansion set in lawns dotted with disc-like flower beds, overlooked the rural hills of Norwood. Beckenham itself, still a village, housed some of the Crystal Palace navvies. Miss Marsh first met them one Sunday evening in March 1853, on the pretext of seeing a sick parishioner. [202/203]
'Harry ain't here now,' said the navvy who opened the door.
Could she wait?
'Well, you can if you like,' said the man, 'but we're a lot of rough uns.
'I don't mind that,' said Miss Marsh.
Nobody, least of all ladies tea-cosied in crinolines, spoke to navvies like that. Navvies were brutish half-men looming on the edges of mankind. The prognathous jaw that bit. The impact of her book about them, English Hearts and English Hands, was the greater because of her refinement and femininity (the impact of a book by a professional Christian, a clergyman in a stove-pipe hat, would have been that much weaker). From her book it was clear navvies were not Neandertals without the body hair: they were kind and manly, shy and simple (too ill-educated to be politicised like artisans), guileless but beguiling. Her book was a major navvy turning point. A turning point for others, too: Aggie Weston, foundress of the Sailors' Homes, admitted the book inspired her to begin her work for the Royal Navy.
Elizabeth Hart, later Mrs Garnett, was born at Otley in Yorkshire in 1839. Mr Hart, like Mr Marsh, was a vicar but more poorly connected. Where Miss Marsh spoke to most of the English-speaking world, Elizabeth Hart spoke mainly to navvies; where Miss Marsh scolded Prime Ministers, Mrs Garnett scorned the socialists of the Navvies' Union. Elizabeth Hart (Mrs Garnett) was a natural-born organiser, unasked, of other people's lives. If her husband, a clergyman, hadn't died on their honeymoon she would without a doubt have terrorised some hapless parish into Christianity through unbending good example and unending chiding. A small, strong-jawed, strong-willed woman; irrefragable; strong with the robustness of simplicity: the world's complexities always puzzled her.
Laws, she thought, were quite literally based on the laws of Christ yet it was awful to see, every day, his laws superseded by men's. 'Look at the newspapers', she would say, 'and they are full of disagreements and strikes, and quarrelling, everyone trying to get all for themselves. Men think everything can be done by law, and so they make laws until they law away all an Englishman's self-responsibility and freedom.'
Strife distressed her. Why must people argue when Christ instructed them to be friends ? 'Dear Friends,' she pleaded, 'do let us 203/204 navvies stick together, and be pleasant to one another. Give your contractors a civil bow. It's a very heavy burden to plan how to get you work to pay your wages. You know how hard many of these men's lives are,' she went on, turning to the contractors. 'Think for them. See there's plenty of skilly, and a dry cabin with a good tea-can stove for wet weather, and spin out the work in winter.' But if she was disingenuous she was also open-hearted with a deep abiding affection for these big and wayward men. She was genuinely appalled at their sightlessness in endangering their souls. How could men care so little for eternity, they wouldn't lace their boots to walk half a mile to be saved? So she hectored, scolded, nagged and bullied them. At times she sounded like a schoolmistress in charge of an unaccountably drunken hockey team; but she never looked down on them and her loyalty to them never slackened.
'We trust that you will feel when you receive this,' she told them in the first issue of the Letter, 'there are those in the world who love you still. Hitherto, as a class, the Navvies have not been duly cared for. That day is past.'
She was often — she was usually — indignant at their conduct and always shocked at any lack of pride in a navvy's calling. She called them 'mates'. She called herself a 'navvy'. They were her entire life.
I was for many years,' she said in 1898, 'the unpaid clerk. Librarian, Editor, Drawing Room Speaker, etc, besides being one of the Committee and Managers of the Society. I have never been paid one penny,' she went on, 'and if ever I get so poor that I have to be paid, it will be "good-bye" and you will not see me again. No, I will work for the love of Christ, and for the love of you, or not at all.'
To many she was the Mission: the one person they really knew (apart from the missionaries) because for nearly forty years she nagged them endlessly in the Letter, the Society's official magazine, which she edited all that time.
Until 1893 it was, more properly, the Quarterly Letter to Navvies/rom the Navvy Mission Society. That year Men on Public Works was substituted for Navvies in accordance with the new reality. Navvies now shared public works with black-gang men and other trades, all in need of saving. It was a small green-backed pamphlet only ever called the Letter, Navvies' Letter, Quarterly Letter or the Green 'Un. Its colophon was a diamond shape made of a round-nosed shovel, a pick, an axe, a saw, and a pan, with an open Bible in the middle. At first its bold lettering — of which there was a [204/205] lot: it was an emphatic publication — was in a heavy square-serif Wild West typeface which gradually thinned down as the magazine matured.
Mrs Garnett always suspected people read it, like the Chinese, from back to front. At the back were the endless lists of dead and injured and the scandal sheet: who'd eloped with whom, who'd sloped who, who'd gone missing, whose children were in the workhouse. At the front was the epistle-like 'letter' itself, often from Mrs Garnett, often from a guest writer. It was always uplifting. Drink was its big theme ('How many bundles of meat have the Bobbies walked off with this summer?' Mrs Garnett wondered in 1881, deploring another year of drunkenness) and it frequently carried moral tales, dreadful warnings, true-life confessions and recipes for cooling drinks for alcoholics wanting to dry out. In its summer 1903, edition it told the tale of a drunkard who cut his throat. He lay on his back, a look of dumb craving in his eyes, as his friends and relatives crowded round his death bed. "Do you want a minister?" asked the doctor. The man shook his head.'
' "Would you like a prayer said?" He moved his lips but no sound came. He was dying fast, and they could not make out his dying wish. The doctor stooped and put his ear down to the man's mouth, but he could not hear what he said. At last the man took his fingers and fairly pinched the wound close, and feebly said, "Doctor, for Christ's sake, give me another glass.'"
Then there was W-P-, a drunkard who died of drink. The autopsy showed his heart weighed only two ounces instead of eight. 'It was dried up with that stuff called whiskey. I thank my God He has kept me from the cursed cup.'
The Letter also printed what must be history's least sung anti-booze ballad, so appalling it could only damage sobriety's reputation. (To make it worse it was written by a Scot but attributed in the chorus to an Englishman.) It went to the tune "The Days We Went A-Gipsying":
Yes, I am an English navvy, but, oh, not an English sot,
I have run my pick through alcohol, in bottle, glass, or pot,
And with the spade of abstinence, and all the power I can,
I am spreading out a better road for every working man.
Sometimes they printed useful hints, like how to stop bleeding. On [205/206] the covers were the job lists that were, in fact, the navvy's best source of information about new jobs, old jobs, and where to tramp to next. These alone would have meant the Letter was widely read and its print runs were always high — 155,000 copies of one issue in 1904, its highest ever. Even at the outbreak of the Great War editions ran to a hundred thousand.
Mrs Garnett's involvement with the Mission was an accident of time and place which brought her, free and uncommitted, to the Lindley Wood dam where and when it began. She first saw the place one Saturday evening after dark in the fall of '71, when it was already cold with the coming winter. The gutter trench was being sunk, lit by the glare of the pumping engine fires. Feeble lights shone from the huts a mile or so away. The shingled church with its high pitched roof stood in a clearing in the woods above them. She thought she might be in Canada. It was a place she could never forget; the red huts in the sun, she remembered, and the wood itself blue with harebells.
The Mission was not yet founded though its founder, the Rev Lewis Moules Evans, was already at work at Lindley, already ill with tuberculosis, and the idea for it had already been given him by a navvy he met in a third-class railway carriage somewhere in the north of England.
'Outlaws, sir,' the navvy told him, 'that's what we are. Wanderers on the face of the earth, and outcasts from society. Decemberent people, them as lives in towns and villages and has homes of their own and no occasion to tramp, they gets a notion into their heads as we belongs to a different breed from what they do. They reckons us a sort of big strong beasts, very useful in our way, but terrible dangerous and not of much account except for strength.'
'Why, it was only t'other day as I heard a woman telling about a railway accident, and she said as there was three men killed and a navvy. We ain't men at all, we ain't got no feelings nor no souls, nor nothing but just strong backs and arms and a big swallow for beer.' — A common story. A twentieth-century version is set in a pub in Wales: 'Who's that coming down the mountain, landlord?' 'Two men and a navvy.'
He was middle-aged, middle-height, a man who'd been a navvy since he ran away from home as a boy. For years he'd been as roving, drunk and dissolute as the rest. Then one Christmas a year [206/207] or so ago he was dropping down through woods off the Yorkshire moors, on tramp and lost. Ahead of him through the trees he saw yellow candlelight spilling on the snow and he heard singing. A ramshackle chapel filled with navvies. He went in, glad to rest in its warmth, drowsy and half-listening until the clergyman said something that transformed his life. 'What he said sounded so strange and new to me,' said the navvy, years later in the third class railway carriage. 'He told us about the Saviour who came at Christmas time, all out of love for us: and he made it plain he meant us. I felt as if I'd found some one who cared for me.' The feeling transformed his life. He learned to read — he pulled a Bible and prayer book from his pocket — though still at times he was afraid. Places like that chapel were rare. 'What we want is more work like that,' he said. 'Regular work. We're most of us very ignorant, and it isn't likely as we can teach ourselves and we want some one to come to us and teach us.'
Around this time Evans was given the living of Leathley, a hamlet in the Washbourn valley where the Lindley Wood dam was being built for Leeds Corporation. Evans used to walk alongside the stream to the dam through the birches, oaks, foxgloves and bracken of Lindley Wood. He called himself a navvy — 'I work on public works.'
'I've come three miles to tell you something that will do you good,' he once told a navvv. 'Won't you come a few yards to hear it?'
'You see, sir, I've not got a hat,' said the man. 'It's not respectable to go to a place of worship bareheaded: now if I'd a tile . . . '
'Then here's mine.'
'Nay, put your hat on, sir. I'll come as I am.'
'I want you,' Evans told them, 'Not your jackets. Come just as you are.' Though he added, 'You need only leave your pipes behind.'
The Christian Excavators' Union, which predated the Mission, was also founded around this time at Lindley Wood. It was open only to working navvies, who wrote the rules.
'I desire by God's help,' aspirants testified, 'to serve the Lord Jesus Christ, and to lead others to do so.'
'To this end.'
'I promise to abstain from drink, swearing and ungodly living.'
'I promise never to neglect praying each morning and night.'
'I promise to keep the Lord's Day Holy and when possible to [207/208] attend a place of public worship.'
Each man had three months to clear his debts, prove himself, and make himself ready before he was accepted. Each carried a card and, after 1883, a badge (two hands clasped over a Bible) proclaiming his intentions. With it went the blue ribbon of temperance and the white ribbon of purity. Mrs Garnett always said they were the salt for Christ on public works. The Navvy's Guide said they were spies.
The Christian Excavators' Union began with thirty-seven members, rose to about three hundred in the early '80s and peaked at nearly seven hundred in 1913. By 1916 they were down to just over eighty. The War took a lot of them, old age the rest.
Evans must have had the Mission in mind for some time though he did nothing about it until the dam was nearly finished. Then he began with a market survey, in 1875. Questionnaires were sent to most of the public works he knew about. How many worked there ? How many churches? How many clergymen visited them? How many Sunday schools? How many day schools? Less than half the engineers answered but from those who did Evans calculated there were about forty thousand navvies in England. With women and children that probably meant a total of between fifty and sixty thousand people. Only three jobs had a child's day school, three had a night school, only one had a Sunday school.
Evans, already dying of tuberculosis, sheltered in Italy in the winter of 1874-5, before writing an article — "Navvies and Their Needs" — for the religious weekly, The Quiver, asking for help in setting up a Mission. This he followed with a leaflet, also called Navvies and Their Needs. 'Navvies,' it began, 'form a class by themselves, isolated: First, by the nature of their work, which is often carried on in places remote from towns or even villages. Secondly by their roving habits: and Thirdly by the belief, which commonly prevails among them, that they are looked upon as outcasts.' These were the key insights on which he built the working philosophy of the Mission. More important (initially) than being taught religion, navvies had to be taught they belonged. The roaring and the uproar had to stop. They had to quieten down to listen. For that they had to have more in their lives than drink and work. Evans proposed giving them drink-free mission rooms and night schools where they could learn to read and write, then libraries for when [208/209] they could. (And not just religious books either. Geology, unsurprisingly, was popular. Once the Mission was running properly Mrs Garnett sent whole 250-volume libraries, complete and catalogued, to most public works which had a missionary.)
It was to be a kind of nursing, a kind of therapy. But since the navvy moved too fast to give it time to work, the therapy had to be waiting for him wherever he went. What was wanted were mobile missions and nimble missionaries to meet the fleeing heathen wherever he ran.
Towards the end of 1877, Evans followed Navvies and Their Needs (article and leaflet) with a flurry of hand-written and printed appeals and within a few weeks — probably in November — he was able to set up his new Society formally, with himself as its first Secretary and the Bishop of Ripon on its first committee. By the summer of 1878 Evans, no longer coughing up dark blood, was fit enough to travel to the dams at Cheltenham, Denshaw, Fewston, and Barden Moor, fixing the society physically on the ground. Early that autumn he was even fit enough to make the sea-crossing to the Isle of Man Railway where, in spite of the sea, in spite of mountain air, soft dark gouts of blood began welling up into his mouth again, leaving him pallid and enfeebled, too weak to speak at that year's Church Congress in Sheffield. The Dean of Ripon spoke for him.
'Navvies are looked upon with suspicion,' the Dean told Congress, 'and are treated as if they were the wildest and the worst of beings — the poachers, the drunkards, the Sabbath-breakers, the brawlers and blasphemers, the adulterers, and heathen of the district. Thus a bad name is given to them, which they reciprocate, and keep themselves to themselves.'
Evans told everybody else — whatever he told himself — his lungs were sound and getting better. All he had to do was keep clear of damp. In November, which was both cold and clammy, he insisted on travelling to a Christian Excavators' Union meeting in Ripon and on the way home he had to wait in the cold on Otley railway station, pacing about in the oil-lit darkness, breathing wet Yorkshire air. As soon as he could he saw a doctor, afterwards telling his friends he was still on the mend. He died suddenly early in Decemberember and they buried him in his own graveyard, followed by mourning navvies. He was thirty-two. But his society was safely founded in spite of the contractors, engineers and city corporations who wished it wasn't. 'Of an evening the men should be in bed,' said one engineer. 'They are [209/210] better without reading.' 'Again and again,' Mrs Garnett recalled, years later,
we were refused even a bare old building for a day school (even though a friend was responsible for all expense) and we showed them the School Board Schools (just started) and the Parochial Schools both refused to admit our children on account of the room limit. It was hard to bear. Insults are not pleasant to the flesh, wrong motives were imputed and on all sides suspicion, and derision our portion, but if a work be God's, it will go on.
And go on it did. Within a year or so the Mission had its own house-style that lasted to the end. You always knew what to expect on a Mission job: a lay missionary (preferably ex-navvy) and a mission room, a library, a room to smoke and read in; schools for children; bible readings, concerts, tea parties and meat teas. The missionary, as well, was ready-made to run Sick Clubs, savings schemes, first aid and even violin classes.
Navvy Mission Room. Click on thumbnail for larger image.
Everything centred on the Mission Rooms: wooden huts furnished with wooden pews and harmoniums, heated in winter by iron stoves with long thin flues. In place of altars there were wooden pulpits draped with cloths embroidered with the Navvy Mission Society's entwined initials. On the walls were posters: 'Dedicating the Temple', 'Christ at the Feast', 'The Gracious Call'. Gothic-lettered texts read: 'By grace are ye saved', 'Learn from me for I am meek and lowly in heart', 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness'. [At least one mission hut survived, at least until 1980, at Hutton Roof on the Thirlmere pipe track of the north Lancashire fells. Until 1980, it was the Village Hall.]
To the Victorians the Mission was eminently worthy. It listed the Primate among its patrons, as well as the Archbishop of York, most of the English bench of bishops and sundry Lords and gentry. No navvy, however, sat on its committee and only one woman ever did: Mrs Garnett. Yet in spite of the male upper classes on top, at the bottom it was run by women and working men. The Society, essentially, was a loose collection of local Navvy Mission Associations coordinated from a central office. For many years this was wherever the Secretary lived — Ripon sometimes, Leeds and Warrington at others — until the Society took permanent desk space in the cellar of Church House, in the quad next to Westminster Abbey (image), in 1893. The central office, mobile or fixed, paid only a third of any mission's costs, and a third of every [210/211] missionary's eighty pounds a year wages: the rest was found locally by the local Navvy Mission Association — by cajoling contractors and city corporations, through public subscriptions and drawing room fund raisings. It was here middle-class women were pre-eminent.
Katherine Sleight, at first, was typical: a widow of private means attracted to the Mission when the Hull-Barnsley railway came near her home in Newint. She busied herself on the new Hull dock and railway, handling the Distress Fund in the hard times. She became a-typical when the loss of her private income made her take a salaried job as the Society's Association Secretary in London. She did well — doubling the number of bodies associated with the Mission, opening a fund to pay the wages of a nurse on the Thirlmere dam — but in time she got very fat and her feet became agonisingly tender (often she had to stop in the street and change her outdoor boots for carpet slippers.) On Christmas Eve 1897, she took to her bed clearly dying of dropsy and heart and liver disease. Beef tea, milk and oysters were all she could swallow and the swelling of her limbs grew grotesque. Finally her mind gave way and she thought she was back in Hull talking to her dead mother. She died in 1898, aged forty-six.
Left: Navvy Mission Room and Missionary. Right: Navvy Smith
Click on thumbnails for larger images.
Missionaries were black-suited, white-shirted, dark-tied working men who in summer wore straw boaters with a dove of peace badge pinned to the hat band. The whole Society, naturally in Victorian England, was very class-biased and once the navvy swapped his moleskin for semi-broadcloth he crossed into another lonely life. The navvies he left distrusted him as one of the others: the others refused to accept him as one of them. Ordination — self-betterment by class-hopping — was discouraged. David Smith was typical.
As a missionary he was nicknamed Navvy Smith and later — to his evident disgruntlement — Daddy Smith. He was born in 1866 in Newhaven, Sussex, where his father, a smith by trade as well as name, sub-contracted the iron-work in the new harbour. From Newhaven the family moved to Bristol where docks were building at Portishead, Shirehampton, and Avonmouth. Navvy Smith started work there, carrying bricks at the bottle works, and then carrying mason's tools to and from the blacksmith's shop on the New Dock. Navvy Smith, born in the '60s, became a Christian in the 70s, a smith in the '80s, a missionary in the '90s. In 1888 he was smithing on the Ship Canal when he met the Rev Robert Grimston, the [211/212] Canal's chaplain (later the Mission's Secretary), and the man who did more to alter his life than anybody else save William Perry, a squire's gardener near Bristol, who first converted him to Christianity. At the time he met Grimston, Smith was pushing an injured man home in a wheelbarrow. Grimston offered an unusually ineffectual hand before going off, more usefully, to commandeer a locomotive. Later, Navvy Smith became one of his missionaries on the Great Central, running the Good Samaritan Home for tramp navvies at Bulwell, north of Nottingham.
After that Navvy Smith ran missions at the Catcleugh dam in Northumberland, the Privett tunnel in Hampshire, at Sodbury tunnel, at Shirehampton docks and finally in 1906 and for the next twenty years in Birmingham. For four years until the War closed it in 1916 he was joint-editor of the Public Works Magazine (a missionary-level version of the Letter, as far as we can tell).
Tom Cleverley (sometimes spelled — and presumably pronounced — Cleaverley) was born a navvy at Penarth docks in 1855. For ten years or so he wandered about the country working first as a nipper then a full-blown navvy on railways, docks and dams until finally, all unknowingly, he wandered into the Lindley Wood settlement and a different way of living.
'In those days,' said Mrs Garnett, 'Sunday was called Hair-cutting and Dog-washing Day — hair cutting in the morning, dog washing in the afternoon, and a free fight in the evening.' One Sunday she met Tom Cleverley, at Lindley Wood, taking his dog for a walk. 'Now, Tom,' said she to him, 'will you come to the Bible class?'
'No,' said Tom, 'I'm going for a walk with my little dog.'
'I believe you care more for that dog than for your own soul,' Mrs Garnett told him.
For Tom Cleverley that was the turning point of his life. He went to the Bible class, became a Christian, then a missionary. As a missionary he worked at the Cheltenham dam, on the Oxted-Groomsbridge, on the Ship Canal, and on the Great Central. Within a couple of years of its founding the Society had twenty-one full-time missionaries, a figure which went up to fifty-four by the century's end. Numbers then steadied at fifty-three before dropping to forty in 1915.
The Society was always tremulous for success and counted wins and losses in a curiously actuarial way — lotting up lists of statistics about the number of people going to Bible classes, prayer meetings, [212/213] confirmations, and Sunday services. But if simple arithmetic tells us little, how effective was the Mission? To begin with the police always vouched for Mission jobs. Crime dropped when missionaries turned up. The Mayor of Ludlow even put a figure on it: police court cases were cut by two-thirds when the Mission opened on the Elan pipe track. Christianity didn't break out spectacularly — it didn't throughout the country — but most people on public works were Christian, in a confused non-sectarian way, in the end. Navvies were christianised, if not churched. 'Looking back over fifty years what changes one can see,' said Navvy Smith, in 1923.
The navvy is a far more sober man today; he is better dressed, better educated, takes a keener interest in his social well-being and enjoys a status in human society which he never thought of years ago. Who will deny that this is the outcome of Christianity and Labour marching hand in hand? [213/214]
Last modified 25 April 2006


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Thank you, Dr. Ron Paul
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Few men have done their fellow countrymen greater service than Dr. Ron Paul. In making his farewell speech to Congress, he articulated his vision and expressed his hope that, despite all his worst predictions having come true, the next generation will rebuild America. Apart from his repeating the common misconception that the Great Writ of habeas corpus originated with Magna Carta, I can find no fault with what he said.
You can watch the video or, if you find his oratory a little lacking (he's a gynecologist, not a lawyer), you can read his speech here. Either way, I urge you to take the time for, though he would laugh at the idea, this is an important man.
Violence, or rather the avoidance of it, is at the heart of his thinking;
The immoral use of force is the source of man's political problems. Sadly, many religious groups, secular organizations, and psychopathic authoritarians endorse government initiated force to change the world. Even when the desired goals are well-intentioned—or especially when well-intentioned—the results are dismal. The good results sought never materialize. The new problems created require even more government force as a solution. The net result is institutionalizing government initiated violence and morally justifying it on humanitarian grounds.
This is the same fundamental reason our government uses force for invading other countries at will, central economic planning at home, and the regulation of personal liberty and habits of our citizens.
It is rather strange, that unless one has a criminal mind and no respect for other people and their property, no one claims it's permissible to go into one's neighbor's house and tell them how to behave, what they can eat, smoke and drink or how to spend their money.
Yet, rarely is it asked why it is morally acceptable that a stranger with a badge and a gun can do the same thing in the name of law and order.
This is only his final speech in Congress. We shall hear more from him yet. He may even run for Governor of Texas in 2014. But it's not too soon to thank him for all the unsung work he has put in for what - for most of his life - has seemed the lost cause of liberty. I also thank the people of the great state of Texas who have given him the opportunity to defend the US Constitution to Congress (and by extension the principles of liberty it enshrines to the world) for twenty-three years out of the last thirty-six.


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By Astrologer & Energy Healing Practitioner Rebekah Muir *A note on gender and planetary pronouns: The 7 classical planets have traditionally corresponded with either a masculine or feminine gender,...
By Astrologer & Energy Healing Practitioner Rebekah Muir *A note on gender and planetary pronouns: The 7 classical planets have traditionally corresponded with either a masculine or feminine gender,...
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SPECIAL HOURS: Closing at 4pm on Christmas Eve & New Year's Eve, New Year's Day 11a-7p
Call us: 818-387-6201
Free Street parking on Fulton Ave. or metered parking on Ventura
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SPECIAL HOURS: Closing at 4pm on Christmas Eve & New Year's Eve, New Year's, Fourth of July
Call us: 323-663-6000
Street parking (free) on Hillhurst Ave. and side streets
Get all latest news, upcoming event updates and product sales.
We often hear that the leading cause of our problems is within ourselves. But so is the solution.
It may seem far-fetched, but the power to solve all of our physical and emotional issues, whether it's health, relationships, career, finances, self-esteem, or something else, is in our hands.
Metaphysical counseling helps us uncover the root of our suffering and address it accordingly. Let's find out how!
Great for: Transitions, getting to the next level, breaking free of limiting beliefs or blockages, empowering one to believe in themselves, having accountability through your goals
Metaphysics is the most abstract branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of existence. In Greek, the word metaphysics means "after the things of nature".
Metaphysics examines the very nature of reality. It offers explanations for phenomena that cannot be explained by "natural" science or that are "beyond the physical".
This science studies the individual as a whole, as a physical and spiritual being.
Certain types of chakra healing and other holistic, spiritual healing practices, personal development, and even business coaching are based on metaphysics. They typically include working on physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of one's being to resolve issues that person is facing.
The fundamental law of metaphysics is that every action or decision causes a reaction or an effect. Everything that happens to us (positive or negative) results from past actions or decisions in this lifetime or before the present life.
Similarly, everything we do now will have an effect on our life in the future. This law is better known as karma (action).
It is also believed that we must resolve our life's issues in this lifetime.
Metaphysical counseling is based on the principle that everyone is sent by the Soul (higher self) to grow at all levels of their being through their life experiences and the lessons they learn in life.
Sometimes referred to as spiritual or transpersonal counseling, it represents a whole person approach – body, mind, and spirit. This type of counseling helps us better understand our life experiences by explaining aspects that our senses cannot perceive.
To put it simply, metaphysical counseling is a form of therapy that empowers us to empower ourselves.
There are many ways metaphysical counseling can take place. This will depend on the practitioner you choose, the kind of spirituality they practice, and the specific issues you may be looking to address.
Some counselors will advise you on the use of crystals for healing, while others will stress the importance of prayer.
This is why it is essential to find a counselor whose beliefs align with yours. Otherwise, your counseling might not have the desired effect.
Metaphysical counseling is a type of holistic-approach therapy based on spiritual principles. This psycho-spiritual approach helps people live a more authentic life by making conscious choices.
It is a self-empowering therapy that gives us the tools to identify and address the imbalances in our belief system that cause conflict and prevent us from achieving success and happiness. These beliefs are so subconscious that we aren't always aware of them.
With the help of a therapist, people can discover the fundamental causes of their suffering and reach a solution through self-discovery.
It is all about learning to utilize our own self-healing power to reinstate harmony.
This can apply on multiple levels – physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. Good metaphysical counseling will address all of those.
A metaphysical counselor is capable of healing not only the human mind but the body as well. They can help with various mental issues, including depression, anxiety, and loneliness, or any physical illness, by offering guidance and support to their clients.
A metaphysical counselor can help us navigate our way to health, success, strength, or anything else we desire. They also help clients understand their spiritual nature in this lifetime and beyond.
Each counselor will have their own approach; some will focus on the metaphysical properties of the things around you and how to use those to your benefit, while others will prefer working on your own inner world.
We are all exposed to various positive and negative influences that shape our daily actions, thoughts, and reality. Negative impacts lead to issues like anxiety, negativity, and close-mindedness.
Metaphysical counseling aims to free people from these negative influences and their effects.
Gaining a better understanding of ourselves and our connection to the physical and spiritual world surrounding us with the help of a metaphysical counselor gives us the ability to recognize these harmful influences and build a defense mechanism.
The root of these problems lies deeper than the physical, mental, or emotional sphere. To find a solution, we must target the source. And that lies at the deepest and wisest level of our being – the level of the Soul. Many life situations can only be addressed through the metaphysical laws, and the soul factor is always present. Metaphysical counselors teach us numerous powerful techniques and spiritual principles we can utilize to find the greater good in any challenging situation.
They give us the tools to find a solution to our life issues without a struggle, using less energy in the process.
During the first session, the client answers a series of questions regarding their life and the issues that are troubling them.
The counselor listens attentively to understand not only the surface issue but also the stressful beliefs and patterns that are causing the problem.
Further steps depend on the specific type of counseling and the counselor you choose. But after a counseling session, the goal is for clients to experience a greater sense of inner peace and well-being.
Not a one-size-fits-all approach
Metaphysics is a versatile form of therapy, so it can be adjusted to the client's changing needs as the sessions develop.
Therapists use a variety of counseling skills and techniques. They usually determine which method is the most suitable, depending on the client's condition at that moment.
For example, you may focus on meditation to prepare yourself for success but turn to more conversation-based therapy to deal with anxiety.
As you and your counselor work together, you will find what works best for you personally. This is one of the significant benefits of metaphysical approaches – they are highly flexible.
Metaphysics can be applied to almost any condition and is incredibly helpful with issues regarding:
mental health
challenges in the workplace
relationship issues
dealing with stress and anxiety
understanding emotional reactions
unlocking habitual patterns


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GAIA Jerseys Sizes 2011 |
As you know, we carefully listen to every players feedback. Based on these feedbacks we improved the jersey sizes for 2011 to make the fit and feel of our high quality GAIA jerseys better one more time. Let us know if you have any kind of questions. These are the changes: MEN a) a bit narrower in the width
1) if you liked your 2010 size (or earlier) and just found the *width* to be a bit baggy or wide:
WOMEN a) no changes in width b) a bit longer, mainly for tall players
If you found your 2010 size (or earlier) to be quite right:


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Filters: Author is Alatalo, JM [Clear All Filters]
Komatsu, KJ, Avolio ML, Lemoine NP, Isbell F, Grman E, Houseman GR, Koerner SE, Johnson DS, Wilcox KR, Alatalo JM et al..
2019. Global change effects on plant communities are magnified by time and the number of global change factors imposed. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116:17867-17873.
Wilcox, KR, Tredennick AT, Koerner SE, Grman E, Hallett LM, Avolio ML, La Pierre KJ, Houseman GR, Isbell F, Johnson DS et al..
2017. Asynchrony among local communities stabilises ecosystem function of metacommunities. Ecology Letters. 20:1534-1545.


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These fresh, funky drum loops and fills were hand crafted from the ground up. Drag and drop them right into your funk, hip hop, rap and pop tracks with minimum effort and maximum FUNK!
You see, everybody knows that real funk has to be performed live with talented musicians who know how to play. That's what makes these drum loops so funky. You can hear how much fun our drummers had when they nailed a sweet groove, it's just GOT to be funky.
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- 528 Wav file Drum Loops (Acidized)
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We're talking 528 super funky drum loops that give you a massive range of different drum sounds and room acoustics. Lots of different drum sets, drummers and live rooms. All of this delivers the funkiest selection of drum loops and fills that you've ever heard.
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Stump Grinding Kirkintillock Glasgow
At CNJ Tree Services, we are the leading central Scotland based tree surgeons with a select group of superior tree surgeons. Contact us today. Stump Grinding Kirkintillock Glasgow.
The process of removing tree stumps, tree trunks, and Stump Grinding Kirkintillock Glasgow does not seem to be an easy task, in my opinion. However, with proper guidelines, it turns out that these activities are not as difficult as they seem.
How to handle felled trees
Before you start a Stump Grinding Kirkintillock Glasgow, you should have your reason. But for some reason, there are some things you should and shouldn't do. These rules are applied to ensure safety if you do not want to disconnect or hurt the process.
- Know your limits
If you don't know how to use the necessary machinery, such as a chainsaw, don't risk embarking on a wood project. It is better to seek professional help than to endanger your safety.
- Choose the right equipment
There is nothing wrong with following the traditional path while cutting down trees (using an ax). However, times have changed and there are facilities available for stunning and effective work. Equipment such as chainsaws. Clean the trunk of the lower branch
The branches of the trunk can affect the fall of the tree. The hanging branches need to be cut, but if you do, do not use the chainsaw in a high position.
Do not
- Do not neglect the safety device
Safety devices are important to your safety. Therefore, keep gloves, boots, long-sleeved shirts, overcoats and other safety devices at hand while cutting.
- Don't hurry when cutting
Before cutting, first look around. Make sure the environment is clean and the trees do not harm others. Don't ignore
If the activity is out of control, don't forget to seek professional help. How to get rid of tree stumps
After cutting down a tree, removing the stump looks like this, doesn't it? So how do you get rid of a tree stump? It can be shredded or erased by hand. And how to remove tree stumps by hand:
- Cut around the trunk with a chainsaw to remove the lower branches. Shovel around the trunk so that the roots are clearly visible.
- Cut the roots with an ax.
- Try moving the stump from that position to see if it moves.
- Shake as the tree stump moves. However, keep in mind that this method can only be applied to small tree stumps or age-sensitive stumps. What you need to know about blunt grinding
Dull grinding is a safer and more advanced form of dull removal. Stump Grinding Kirkintillock Glasgow can remove all stumps without leaving anything that could harm you or your property.
But this time it is done by a machine powered by a gasoline engine. The operation is left to the hands of a specialist as it can cause accidents if not handled professionally.
There is a clear difference between stump shedding and stump removal. The difference is that if the tree stump is large, the tree doctor recommends choosing a stump shed. In addition, it is advisable to save time, reduce stress and achieve the best results.
Stumps are crushed by a machine called a stump breaker, which cuts trees and grinds stumps.
This is best left to the Stump Grinding Kirkintillock Glasgow process handled by a professional tree surgeon.


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About the Artist
Internationally renowned artist Mackenzie Thorpe was born in the industrial town of Middlesbrough, England in 1956, where his father worked as a laborer and his mother as an auxiliary nurse. Life for the Thorpe family was no different to that of most of their community - at times a struggle. Mackenzie acknowledges mixed emotions about this period in his life. He remembers the strong feeling of community spirit, the warmth and humor that flourished in the face of adversity, as well as the loneliness and isolation. The need and compulsion to draw was obvious from an early age. As a child, he would seek out whatever raw materials he could find, drawing on cigarette packs with stubs of pencils, or using eye-shadow and lipstick illicitly obtained from his mum's makeup bag. Struggling from dyslexia throughout his childhood, Mackenzie found confidence in painting and drawing. Unsurprisingly, he left school without formal qualifications, taking on a variety of manual, unskilled jobs while continuing to draw and paint. Mackenzie eventually got the courage to enter the local art college. His lack of education and a barely readable application did nothing to warrant support, but the strength and volume of work that Mackenzie presented, won him a place at the Middlesbrough College of Art and, subsequently, the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. After leaving art school, he spent several years working with inner-city children in London before moving to North Yorkshire to set up a studio. Since then, he has become one of the world's most collected artists. His works express an entire range of human emotion, from the special bond of love and friendship, to the importance of self-reflection and individual triumphs. His works are a vivid expression of hope and the human spirit. Mackenzie's perspective on life is clear. He doesn't hide the fact that often life is a struggle, a dark tunnel which can seem endless. However, he passionately believes that our frail dreams are worth nurturing and that love and honesty will triumph over adversity. His appeal is simple; his work is honest, truthful and totally unique. Over the years collectors have commented that they find his work, moving, inspirational, powerful, honest, stunning and so much more. His artistic development continues, not in a neat step by step process, but rather as an unfolding and at times revisiting, exploration of style, technique and subject.