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Please be advised: This essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video content. You don't have to read it and are advised to take caution exploring further.
As someone who grew up on the internet, I credit it as one of the most important influences on who I am today. I had a computer with internet access in my bedroom from the age of 13. It gave me access to a lot of things which were totally inappropriate for a young teenager, but it was OK. The culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships which I consider to be central to my identity were shaped by the internet, in ways that I have always considered to be beneficial to me personally. I have always been a critical proponent of the internet and everything it has brought, and broadly considered it to be emancipatory and beneficial. I state this at the outset because thinking through the implications of the problem I am going to describe troubles my own assumptions and prejudices in significant ways.
One of the so-far hypothetical questions I ask myself frequently is how I would feel about my own children having the same kind of access to the internet today. And I find the question increasingly difficult to answer. I understand that this is a natural evolution of attitudes which happens with age, and at some point, this question might be a lot less hypothetical. I don't want to be a hypocrite about it. I would want my kids to have the same opportunities to explore and grow and express themselves as I did. I would like them to have that choice. And this belief broadens into attitudes about the role of the internet in public life as a whole.
I've also been aware for some time of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between younger children and YouTube. I see kids engrossed in screens all the time, in pushchairs and in restaurants, and there's always a bit of a Luddite twinge there, but I am not a parent, and I'm not making parental judgments for or on anyone else. I've seen family members and friend's children plugged into Peppa Pig and nursery rhyme videos, and it makes them happy and gives everyone a break, so OK.
But I don't even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down.
Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I've seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.
To begin: YouTube Kids is definitely and markedly weird. I've been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That's it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.
From the article linked above:
The maker of my particular favorite videos is "Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos," and since 2010 he seems to have accrued 3.7 million subscribers and just under 6 billion views for a kid-friendly channel entirely devoted to opening surprise eggs and unboxing toys. The video titles are a continuous pattern of obscure branded lines and tie-ins: "Surprise Play Doh Eggs Peppa Pig Stamper Cars Pocoyo Minecraft Smurfs Kinder Play Doh Sparkle Brilho," "Cars Screamin' Banshee Eats Lightning McQueen Disney Pixar," "Disney Baby Pop Up Pals Easter Eggs SURPRISE."
As I write this he has done a total of 4,426 videos and counting. With so many views — for comparison, Justin Bieber's official channel has more than 10 billion views, while full-time YouTube celebrity PewDiePie has nearly 12 billion — it's likely this man makes a living as a pair of gently murmuring hands that unwrap Kinder eggs. (Surprise-egg videos are all accompanied by pre-roll, and sometimes mid-video and ads.)
That should give you some idea of just how odd the world of kids online video is, and that list of video titles hints at the extraordinary range and complexity of this situation. We'll get into the latter in a minute; for the moment know that it's already very strange, if apparently pretty harmless, out there.
Another huge trope, especially the youngest children, is nursery rhyme videos.
Little Baby Bum, which made the above video, is the 7th most popular channel on YouTube. With just 515 videos, they have accrued 11.5 million subscribers and 13 billion views. Again, there are questions as to the accuracy of these numbers, which I'll get into shortly, but the key point is that this is a huge, huge network and industry.
On-demand video is catnip to both parents and to children, and thus to content creators and advertisers. Small children are mesmerized by these videos, whether it's familiar characters and songs, or simply bright colors and soothing sounds. The length of many of these videos — one common video tactic is to assemble many nursery rhymes or cartoon episodes into hour-plus compilations —and the way that length is marketed as part of the video's appeal points to the amount of time some kids are spending with them.
YouTube broadcasters have thus developed a huge number of tactics to draw parents' and children's' attention to their videos, and the advertising revenues that accompany them. The first of these tactics is simply to copy and pirate other content. A simple search for "Peppa Pig" on YouTube in my case yielded "About 10,400,000 results" and the front page is almost entirely from the verified "Peppa Pig Official Channel", while one is from an unverified channel called Play Go Toys, which you really wouldn't notice unless you were looking out for it:
Play Go Toys' channel consists of (I guess?) pirated Peppa Pig and other cartoons, videos of toy unboxings (another kid magnet), and videos of, one supposes, the channel owner's own children. I am not alleging anything bad about Play Go Toys; I am simply illustrating how the structure of YouTube facilitates the delamination of content and author, and how this impacts on our awareness and trust of its source.
As another blogger notes, one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it's Peppa Pig on children's TV or a Disney movie, whatever one's feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.
(Yes, this is the exact same process as the delamination of trusted news media on Facebook feeds and in Google results that is currently wreaking such havoc on our cognitive and political systems and I am not going to explicitly explore that relationship further here, but it is obviously deeply significant.)
A second way of increasing hits on videos is through keyword/hashtag association, which is a whole dark art unto itself. When some trend, such as Surprise Egg videos, reaches critical mass, content producers pile onto it, creating thousands and thousands more of these videos in every possible iteration. This is the origin of all the weird names in the list above: branded content and nursery rhyme titles and "surprise egg" all stuffed into the same word salad to capture search results, sidebar placement, and "up next" autoplay rankings.
A striking example of the weirdness is the Finger Family videos (harmless example embedded above). I have no idea where they came from or the origin of the children's rhyme at the core of the trope, but there are at least 17 million versions of this currently on YouTube, and again they cover every possible genre, with billions and billions of aggregated views.
Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. That is a whole strange world in and of itself. But it shouldn't obscure that there are also many actual children, plugged into iPhones and tablets, watching these over and over again — in part accounting for the inflated view numbers — learning to type basic search terms into the browser, or simply mashing the sidebar to bring up another video.
What I find somewhat disturbing about the proliferation of even (relatively) normal kids videos is the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here; how to parse out the gap between human and machine. The example above, from a channel called Bounce Patrol Kids, with almost two million subscribers, show this effect in action. It posts professionally produced videos, with dedicated human actors, at the rate of about one per week. Once again, I am not alleging anything untoward about Bounce Patrol, which clearly follows in the footsteps of pre-digital kid sensations like their fellow Australians The Wiggles.
And yet, there is something weird about a group of people endlessly acting out the implications of a combination of algorithmically generated keywords: "Halloween Finger Family & more Halloween Songs for Children | Kids Halloween Songs Collection", "Australian Animals Finger Family Song | Finger Family Nursery Rhymes", "Farm Animals Finger Family and more Animals Songs | Finger Family Collection – Learn Animals Sounds", "Safari Animals Finger Family Song | Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Zebra & Hippo! Wild Animals for kids", "Superheroes Finger Family and more Finger Family Songs! Superhero Finger Family Collection", "Batman Finger Family Song — Superheroes and Villains! Batman, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman" and on and on and on. This is content production in the age of algorithmic discovery — even if you're a human, you have to end up impersonating the machine.
Other channels do away with the human actors to create infinite reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What is occurring here is clearly automated. Stock animations, audio tracks, and lists of keywords being assembled in their thousands to produce an endless stream of videos. The above channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes — Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs, posts several videos a week, in increasingly byzantine combinations of keywords. They have almost five million subscribers — more than double Bounce Patrol — although once again it's impossible to know who or what is actually racking up these millions and millions of views.
I'm trying not to turn this essay into an endless list of examples, but it's important to grasp how vast this system is, and how indeterminate its actions, process, and audience. It's also international: there are variations of Finger Family and Learn Colours videos for Tamil epics and Malaysian cartoons which are unlikely to pop up in any Anglophone search results. This very indeterminacy and reach is key to its existence, and its implications. Its dimensionality makes it difficult to grasp, or even to really think about.
We've encountered pretty clear examples of the disturbing outcomes of full automation before — some of which have been thankfully leavened with a dark kind of humor, others not so much. Much has been made of the algorithmic interbreeding of stock photo libraries and on-demand production of everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs to infant onesies and cell phone covers. The above example, available until recently on Amazon, is one such case, and the story of how it came to occur is fascinating and weird but essentially comprehensible. Nobody set out to create phone cases with drugs and medical equipment on them, it was just a deeply weird mathematical/probabilistic outcome. The fact that it took a while to notice might ring some alarm bells, however.
Likewise, the case of the "Keep Calm and Rape A Lot" tshirts (along with the "Keep Calm and Knife Her" and "Keep Calm and Hit Her" ones) is depressing and distressing but comprehensible. Nobody set out to create these shirts: they just paired an unchecked list of verbs and pronouns with an online image generator. It's quite possible that none of these shirts ever physically existed, were ever purchased or worn, and thus that no harm was done. Once again though, the people creating this content failed to notice, and neither did the distributor. They literally had no idea what they were doing.
What I will argue, on the basis of these cases and of those I'm going to describe further, is that the scale and logic of the system is complicit in these outputs, and requires us to think through their implications.
(Also again: I'm not going to dig into the wider social implications of such processes outside the scope of what I am writing about here, but it's clear that one can draw a clear line from examples such as these to pressing contemporary issues such as racial and gender bias in big data and machine intelligence-driven systems, which require urgent attention but in the same manner do not have anything resembling easy or even preferable solutions.)
Let's look at just one video among the piles of kid videos, and try to parse out where it comes from. It's important to stress that I didn't set out to find this particular video: it appeared organically and highly ranked in a search for 'finger family' in an incognito browser window (i.e. it should not have been influenced by previous searches). This automation takes us to very, very strange places, and at this point, the rabbit hole is so deep that it's impossible to know how such a thing came into being.
Once again, a content warning: this video is not inappropriate in any way, but it is decidedly off, and contains elements which might trouble anyone. It's very mild on the scale of such things, but. I describe it below if you don't want to watch it and head down that road. This warning will recur.
The above video is entitled Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes. The title alone confirms its automated provenance. I have no idea where the "Wrong Heads" trope originates, but I can imagine, as with the Finger Family Song, that somewhere there is a totally original and harmless version that made enough kids laugh that it started to climb the algorithmic rankings until it made it onto the word salad lists, combining with Learn Colors, Finger Family, and Nursery Rhymes, and all of these tropes — not merely as words but as images, processes, and actions — to be mixed into what we see here.
The video consists of a regular version of the Finger Family song played over an animation of character heads and bodies from Disney's Aladdin swapping and intersecting. Again, this is weird but frankly no more than the Surprise Egg videos or anything else kids watch. I get how innocent it is. The offness creeps in with the appearance of a non-Aladdin character —Agnes, the little girl from Despicable Me. Agnes is the arbiter of the scene: when the heads don't match up, she cries, when they do, she cheers.
The video's creator, BABYFUN TV (screenshot above), has produced many similar videos. As many of the Wrong Heads videos as I could bear to watch all work in exactly the same way. The character Hope from Inside Out weeps through a Smurfs and Trolls head swap. It goes on and on. I get the game, but the constant overlaying and intermixing of different tropes start to get inside you. BABYFUN TV only has 170 subscribers and very low view rates, but then there are thousands and thousands of channels like this. Numbers in the long tail aren't significant in the abstract, but in their accumulation.
The question becomes: how did this come to be? The "Bad Baby" trope also present on BABYFUN TV features the same crying. While I find it disturbing, I can understand how it might provide some of the rhythm or cadence or relation to their own experience that actual babies are attracted to in this content, although it has been warped and stretched through algorithmic repetition and recombination in ways that I don't think anyone actually wants to happen.
Toy Freaks is a hugely popular channel (68th on the platform) which features a father and his two daughters playing out — or in some cases perhaps originating — many of the tropes we've identified so far, including "Bad Baby", above. As well as nursery rhymes and learning colors, Toy Freaks specializes in gross-out situations, as well as activities which many, many viewers feel border on abuse and exploitation, if not cross the line entirely, including videos of the children vomiting and in pain. Toy Freaks is a YouTube verified channel, whatever that means. (I think we know by now it means nothing useful.)
As with Bounce Patrol Kids, however you feel about the content of these videos, it feels impossible to know where the automation starts and ends, who is coming up with the ideas and who is roleplaying them. In turn, the amplification of tropes in popular, human-led channels such as Toy Freaks leads to them being endlessly repeated across the network in increasingly outlandish and distorted recombinations.
There's a second level of what I'm characterizing as human-led videos which are much more disturbing than the mostly distasteful activities of Toy Freaks and their kin. Here is a relatively mild, but still upsetting example:
A step beyond the simply pirated Peppa Pig videos mentioned previously are the knock-offs. These too seem to teem with violence. In the official Peppa Pig videos, Peppa does indeed go to the dentist, and the episode in which she does so seems to be popular — although, confusingly, what appears to be the real episode is only available on an unofficial channel. In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. A search for "peppa pig dentist" returns the above video on the front page, and it only gets worse from here.
Disturbing Peppa Pig videos, which tend towards extreme violence and fear, with Peppa eating her father or drinking bleach, are, it turns out very widespread. They make up an entire YouTube subculture. Many are obviously parodies, or even satires of themselves, in the pretty common style of the internet's outrageous, deliberately offensive kind. All the 4chan tropes are there, the trolls are out, we know this.
In the example above, the agency is less clear: the video starts with a trollish Peppa parody, but later syncs into the kind of automated repetition of tropes we've seen already. I don't know which camp it belongs to. Maybe it's just trolls. I kind of hope it is. But I don't think so. Trolls don't cover the intersection of human actors and more automated examples further down the line. They're at play here, but they're not the whole story.
I suppose it's naive not to see the deliberate versions of this coming, but many are so close to the original, and so unsignposted — like the dentist example — that many, many kids are watching them. I understand that most of them are not trying to mess kids up, not really, even though they are.
I'm trying to understand why, as plainly and simply troubling as it is, this is not a simple matter of "won't somebody think of the children" hand-wringing. Obviously this content is inappropriate, obviously there are bad actors out there, obviously some of these videos should be removed. Obviously too this raises questions of fair use, appropriation, free speech and so on. But reports which simply understand the problem through this lens fail to fully grasp the mechanisms being deployed, and thus are incapable of thinking its implications in totality, and responding accordingly.
The New York Times, headlining their article on a subset of this issue "On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters", highlights the use of knock-off characters and nursery rhymes in disturbing content, and frames it as a problem of moderation and legislation. YouTube Kids, an official app which claims to be kid-safe but is quite obviously not, is the problem identified, because it wrongly engenders trust in users. An article in the British tabloid The Sun, "Kids left traumatized after sick YouTube clips showing Peppa Pig characters with knives and guns appear on app for children" takes the same line, with an added dose of right-wing technophobia and self-righteousness. But both stories take at face value YouTube's assertions that these results are incredibly rare and quickly removed: assertions utterly refuted by the proliferation of the stories themselves, and the growing number of social media posts, largely by concerned parents, from which they arise.
But as with Toy Freaks, what is concerning to me about the Peppa videos is how the obvious parodies and even the shadier knock-offs interact with the legions of algorithmic content producers until it is completely impossible to know what is going on. ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.")
Here's what is basically a version of Toy Freaks produced in Asia (screenshot above). Here's one from Russia. I don't really want to use the term "human-led" any more about these videos, although they contain all the same tropes and actual people acting them out. I no longer have any idea what's going on here and I really don't want to and I'm starting to think that that is kind of the point. That's part of why I'm starting to think about the deliberateness of this all. There is a lot of effort going into making these. More than spam revenue can generate — can it? Who's writing these scripts, editing these videos? Once again, I want to stress: this is still really mild, even funny stuff compared to a lot of what is out there.
Here are a few things which are disturbing me:
The first is the level of horror and violence on display. Some of the times it's troll-y gross-out stuff; most of the time it seems deeper, and more unconscious than that. The internet has a way of amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires; in fact, it's what it seems to do best. I spend a lot of time arguing for this tendency, with regards to human sexual freedom, individual identity, and other issues. Here, and overwhelmingly it sometimes feels, that tendency is itself a violent and destructive one.
The second is the levels of exploitation, not of children because they are children but of children because they are powerless. Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you're someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many of these latest examples confound any attempt to argue that nobody is actually watching these videos, that these are all bots. There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I'm pretty worried about them too.
I've written enough, too much, but I feel like I actually need to justify all this raving about violence and abuse and automated systems with an example that sums it up. Maybe after everything I've said you won't think it's so bad. I don't know what to think any more.
This video, BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video, contains all of the elements we've covered above, and takes them to another level. Familiar characters, nursery tropes, keyword salad, full automation, violence, and the very stuff of kids' worst dreams. And of course there are vast, vast numbers of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, churned out at the rate of hundreds of new videos every week. Industrialised nightmare production.
For the final time: There is more violent and more sexual content like this available. I'm not going to link to it. I don't believe in traumatizing other people, but it's necessary to keep stressing it, and not dismiss the psychological effect on children of things which aren't overtly disturbing to adults, just incredibly dark and weird.
A friend who works in digital video described to me what it would take to make something like this: a small studio of people (half a dozen, maybe more) making high volumes of low quality content to reap ad revenue by tripping certain requirements of the system (length, in particular, seems to be a factor). According to my friend, online kids' content is one of the few alternative ways of making money from 3D animation because the aesthetic standards are lower and independent production can profit through scale. It uses existing and easily available content (such as character models and motion-capture libraries) and it can be repeated and revised endlessly and mostly meaninglessly because the algorithms don't discriminate — and neither do the kids.
These videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and whatever their conscious intention (i.e. to accumulate ad revenue) are feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to children for profit. The unconsciously-generated, emergent outcomes of that are all over the place.
To expose children to this content is abuse. We're not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or video game violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they're not what is being discussed here. What we're talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatize and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It's not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It's down to that level of the metal.
This, I think, is my point: The system is complicit in the abuse.
And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale. I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalization of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far shown absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it. We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I've used in this essay. The asides I've kept in parentheses throughout, if expanded upon, would allow one with minimal effort to rewrite everything I've said, with very little effort, to be not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies.
This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways. It is hard to keep faith with the network when it produces horrors such as these. While it is tempting to dismiss the wilder examples as trolling, of which a significant number certainly are, that fails to account for the sheer volume of content weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. It presents many and complexly entangled dangers, including that, just as with the increasing focus on alleged Russian interference in social media, such events will be used as justification for increased control over the internet, increasing censorship, and so on. This is not what many of us want.
I'm going to stop here, saying only this:
What concerns me is not just the violence being done to children here, although that concerns me deeply. What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we're still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects. As I said at the beginning of this essay: this is being done by people and by things and by a combination of things and people. Responsibility for its outcomes is impossible to assign but the damage is very, very real indeed.
James Bridle is an artist, writer, and publisher based in London. This article originally appeared on Medium and has been republished with permission.


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From January 2016 the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) is changing. Savers have one month left to adjust their bank deposits to the new limits. Here's the updated information posted to the FSCS website posted 5 July 2015:
"Savers are getting a new deposit guarantee limit from the New Year.
The current £85,000 level of protection continues until 31 December 2015. So there's no immediate change for consumers. That means people with more than the new limit have six months to spread their money around to keep within it.
The new limit will be £75,000, which will protect more than 95% of all savers. The overwhelming majority of people have £50,000 or less in savings.
The change comes under the European Union Deposit Guarantee Schemes Directive. It fixes a harmonised limit of €100,000 (or the equivalent) across Europe. The new UK limit is set today.
There's also other good news for some consumers with higher balances. People with some types of temporary high balances will have FSCS protection up to £1m for up to six months. Things like the proceeds from a house sale qualify for the new protection limit.
Large companies and small local authorities (such as parish councils) will also benefit from FSCS protection from today. FSCS will cover them up to the new limit of £75,000."
Other changes include:
From 3 July 2015, depositors with temporary high balances will be covered up to £1 million for six months from the date on which the money is transferred into their account, or the date on which the depositor becomes entitled to the amount, whichever is later. This is to ensure that depositors are protected when they deposit funds over the limit as a result of specified events, including following a house sale or funds received from a 'life event' such as a divorce settlement or inheritance, for a period of time until they have had sufficient time to spread the risk between institutions to appropriately protect these funds.
For insurance policyholders, the Prudential Regulation Authority has changed the insurance limits for FSCS compensation to increase protection for policyholders in the event of an insurer failing. This increases the limit to 100% of cover for all long term policies, for professional indemnity insurance and claims arising from death or incapacity. This reflects the potential for significant adverse consequences to policyholders, and the wider financial system, of cover being disrupted. The limits for all other types of insurance remain the same.

subset: commoncrawl


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This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Goshen • He'll turn water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana.
He'll pray in the Garden of Gethsemane.
He'll heal a lame man at the pool of Bethesda.
And he the actor slated to play Jesus Christ will do it all in rural Utah.
After months of construction, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will begin filming 55 educational vignettes about Jesus' life next week on a new movie set modeled mainly after biblical Jerusalem. The set roughly a football-field-by-a-football-field in size near Goshen, south of Utah Lake has been painstakingly erected by hundreds of workers in hope of bringing the holy city to life.
A thick, gnarled fake olive tree, for Jesus to pray beside, sits at the end of a pathway in the replicated Garden of Gethsemane. Large, faux stone walls line a maze of city streets, crafted to look rough and weather-beaten. A dozen heavy steps lead up to Solomon's Porch outside the Temple complex, which will be filled with 30-foot-high columns mimicking the actual 100-foot ones that stood in the ancient city.
"The goal of the church is to help people have a better understanding of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ," said Scott Smiley, producer of the project. "To do that, the most realistic appearance helps someone be able to transport [himself] to that time period, and understand what his life was like, what the lives of those around him were like and have a better understanding of his mission."
Construction started in October after church leaders ordered it to be built to film a series of New Testament stories for a sort of scripture video library to be used for purposes such as seminary classes, kiosks in visitor centers, general conference or by missionaries. The Salt Lake City-based faith already has a movie studio in Provo, but officials thought it would be handy to have something more permanent. Plus, the church already owned the land, which sits near a church dairy.
Producers expect the set to last for decades and be used for future church projects as well.
To achieve a lasting realism, creators consulted experts at Brigham Young University.
"A lot of study went into the architectural and archaeological findings," Smiley said.
They strived to get the details right, such as creating dozens of Corinthian capitals to sit atop columns based on those excavated in Jerusalem from the time of Jesus.
They situated the set, Smiley noted, so they could film from any angle with only the "almost Galilean hills" to the west in the background while avoiding the rockier mountains to the east.
Set designers also incorporated a bit of modern LDS history in the set. A tall, charred-looking post, for example, is visible along the wall of a curved street meant to represent a typical Jerusalem thoroughfare. The post is one of several salvaged from the Provo Tabernacle, which was destroyed in a fire last year.
"There's poetry in that," Smiley said.
Still, the producers know the ultimate proof of their work will stretch far beyond the sum of all those details.
"In a weird way, I hope they [movie viewers] don't think about the background at all," said John Uibel, executive producer and production designer. "I hope they walk away from this media with an increased understanding of Jesus Christ the Savior and his ministry."
Ultimately, the vignettes will feature about 65 actors and a couple of thousand extras, who have been working on sprouting beards and growing out their "missionary haircuts" to look more authentic, Smiley joked. He declined to name who will play Jesus Christ, saying only that he's an actor from New York.
It's not the only part of the project the church is keeping a mystery for now. The set is closed to the public.
Wendy Smith, postmaster at the small post office in nearby Elberta, said there is a lot of curiosity about the project in town. Everyone knows about it, but not many have visited it. Sometimes two or three people a day stop by her office to ask about the set, which despite its size, is invisible from the nearest road. Smith simply tells them, "They're just building little Jerusalem."
More photos online
O To view a photo gallery of the LDS Church's Jerusalem movie set, go to sltrib.com


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YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD the expression "long in the tooth." It conjures up the image of gum recession as a synonym for growing old, and yet gum recession isn't always connected to age. This oral health problem is when the gingival tissue shrinks away from the crown of the tooth, slowly exposing more of the root. The extremely gradual nature of gum recession is why we tend to associate it with age, but it can start as early as childhood for a number of reasons.
Genetics and the Risk of Gum Recession
One risk factor for gum recession that we can't do anything about is genetics. Some people are unlucky enough to have more fragile gum tissue or less jaw bone to support the gums all the way up to the crowns of their teeth. The good news is that other factors that contribute to gum disease are easier to control, so even those with a genetic predisposition can still minimize it.
Bruxism Is Bad for the Gums Too!
A chronic teeth-grinding habit, or bruxism, leads to a wide variety of oral health problems, including an increased risk of gum recession. The constant harsh friction of the teeth puts a lot of pressure on the gums and can damage them over time. Bruxism can be a very difficult habit to break, especially sleep bruxism. If grinding is something you struggle with, talk to the dentist! You have great allies in this fight.
The Damage of Overbrushing
A major contributor to gum recession can actually be brushing too much or too hard, leading to enamel erosion and wearing away of the gum tissue. This is why it's so important to use a soft-bristled toothbrush. Another important thing to remember is that cleaning your teeth doesn't require the same elbow grease that goes into scrubbing tile grout. If you're brushing hard enough to make your toothbrush bristles bend outward in a matter of months, you should definitely ease up. The same goes for flossing: daily flossing is essential, but be gentle. Use a C-shape and work your way down instead of snapping the floss directly onto your gums.
Gum Disease Makes the Gum Tissue Vulnerable
The more advanced gum disease becomes, the more it destroys the supporting gum tissue and bone around teeth, which is why it's ultimately the main cause of gum recession. The best way to maintain good gum health is by being diligent in keeping up with dental hygiene habits. Brush (gently) twice a day, floss daily, and make regular dental appointments a priority. The professional cleaning you get from the hygienist is essential because brushing and flossing alone can't remove plaque that has hardened into tartar. Plaque and tartar both cause irritation to the gums the longer they remain.
Gum Recession Can Happen to Kids?
The causes of gum recession in adults also apply to kids, which is why it's important to help them with proper brushing and flossing (especially avoiding overbrushing) and pay attention to whether they have a grinding habit. Childhood gum recession could also happen as the result of an injury to the mouth. The best treatment is prevention through building and maintaining good oral health habits.
Take Care of Your Gums!
If you want to learn more about how to prevent gum recession or you're worried that your gums may beginning to recede (remember that the process can be extremely slow, so it can creep up on you), schedule a dental appointment! The dentist can help you look after your gum health and discuss treatment options if they're necessary.


text: These beautiful and impressive carpets are hand-knotted in Iran, and are one of many typical Persian carpets. Keshan carpets are often characterised by a large, central medallion surrounded by beautiful floral design elements, giving them a distinctive Oriental feel. These carpets are usually red with a darker border, and sometimes have an all-over pattern with no central medallion.


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Google is known for doing many things right. Despite giving them a hard time over the years, it's undeniable that my life still revolves, in a very real way, around Google products. I use Gmail not only for, er, Gmail but I use Google Apps to run all my email services including my public email@example.com email.
Likewise, my analytics for this and other sites is Google Analytics (for those scared by big words, analytics is how I measure traffic and visitor interaction on the site). This blog, which is powered by WordPress, implements Google Gears to speed up transactions on the backend and Gears is used also to provide offline support to Google apps I run.
Google Search probably will never be replaced by Bing in my world.
My BlackBerry has a Gmail app and Google Maps, both of which I find to be imperative. Likewise, I use Google Talk for IM and I have apps for that on both my BlackBerry as well as my iPod Touch (The Jesus phone without the Great Satan called AT&T).
In other words, try as I might, I can't not love Google for so many things.
Yet… I just can't get excited about the announcement in recent days that Google is coming out with a new operating system, expected in 2010, that will be based on it's Google Chrome browser (which I don't use because it's Windows only).
For all that Google has done right, they completely just insulted us and most of us haven't even figured it out yet. We're all caught up in Shiny Object Syndrome, the likes of which are similar to Applegasms surrounding a new "Our Father who Art in Cupertino" product launch. We're just not thinking straight.
Here's why.
Google Chrome is a Browser. While it's a powerful browser, it is simply a browser. It cannot run applications. It cannot mangle CPU cycles, assign process IDs to other applications, or control memory allocation for an entire computer. It's not built that way. It's built to be a browser.
The evidence that Google knows this (and Fake Steve Jobs does a nice job of pointing out why Operating Systems take 20 years to build right) is that it plans to use a Linux kernel. There you have it. A Linux kernel.
Ah ha, you might say. Linux has been proven to be an exceptional embedded operating system over the years, and with that, I'll agree with you. It makes perfect sense why Google would build their new operating system on Linux. It's proven its ability over the years to be an operating system for many devices, computer and non-computer alike. Why change now. God, those kids are smart over at Google.
Here's the thing… All of the technology pundits, and Google themselves, are calling it a new operating system… when it's far from it.
In fact, Google should be calling it a new Desktop Manager similar to KDE, Gnome or, heck, even the desktop manager app that's built on Open BSD for the Mac OS X software. The operating system is Linux. For what it's worth, Mac OS X should probably be called a Desktop Manager software too because it's built on BSD, a Unix variant.
There is nothing about an upcoming Google Chrome OS that can operate a system. Not within a year. That's why they are using Linux.
I love Google, but folks need to step back and be a little objective. I mean, just a little.


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Everyone has their own opinion of what a miracle is…mine is "a shift in perception." When we have a shift in perception we create a space for wonderful things to happen. I believe living in love is a miracle. I believe forgiving someone is a miracle, I believe getting sober is a miracle, I believe my marriage of 39 years is a miracle and I believe making any major change in your life is a miracle. Again this is my opinion.
If you use the rule of five you can create miracles in your own life. Here is what happened with me.
If you would go to a very large tree take five swings at it every day with a very sharp axe eventually, no matter how large the tree, it would have to fall down.
"The rule of five," requires you to do five specific things daily that will allow you to achieve your goal. Doing five thing will keep you focused.
The top sales people at Keller Williams use the rule of five.
The five swings for selling homes include:
1) Make five visits in person to houses
2) Call five people
3) Write 15 thank you notes
4) View 5 new properties
5) Make 5 new contacts
This is how the top realtors at Keller Williams have become millionaires. With today's economy they may require even more of themselves.
On National Smoke Out Day, November 17, 1984, I chose to quit smoking. I replaced it with running. I wanted to run a 10K (6.2 miles) the following May in Grand Haven Michigan. It was their kick off to summer run.
My five swings included:
1) No smoking
2) Walk/Run six days per week (increasing mileage weekly)
3) Eliminate eating red meat
4) Increase fruits and vegetables
5) Eliminate sweets and fried foods
The weekend of the race hubs, my four daughters, and I camped at Lake Michigan. I didn't own any fancy running clothes or shoes. Race day was cold and rainy. My finish time was just over one hour. I was the final runner to cross the finish line. Yet in my family's and my opinion I was a winner!
I continued to run weekend raced with my family cheering me on. Six months later hubs quit smoking and began running as well. The girls ran the one mile, "fun runs."
I stopped running a couple of months ago due to a knee injury. My friend Lori, a former trainer figured out my injury was caused by the way I sit in a chair. Duh!
I currently walk, run and do yoga for runners. My plan is to take off the rest of the year, sit properly and begin swinging again January 1st, 2011.
Farnoosh from Prolific Living is offering a FREE e-book on Blogworld 2010. Check it out!
Is there a tree you want to begin swinging at with a very sharp axe? What five changes will keep you focused and bring down the tree.
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The track record is well known and sobering for any entrepreneur: 90 percent of all new ventures fail. It's not hard to see why. Start-ups often lack vital resources, must compete against established companies, and have little or no track record with which to woo customers and investors. So how do those one-out-of-ten firms grow into successful, sustained enterprises?
Assistant professor Mukti Khaire believes that small companies can grow by developing intangible social resources such as legitimacy, status, and reputation. In an interesting twist, her research on this insight is that these intangible resources may be best acquired by following a road of conformity in how your company is organized and presented to the outside world. In start-ups in established industries, conventional business titles such as Marketing Director work better than novel ones like Chief Evangelist.
"These social resources are acquired by mimicking the structures and activities of established firms, and by affiliating with high-status customers respectively," she wrote in the abstract to her recent paper, Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: Strategies for New Venture Growth. The paper was published by the Academy of Management (August, 2005) as part of its Best Paper Proceedings.
Her research on how young firms grow is based on data looking at new advertising agencies in New York and Chicago from 1977 to 1985. In this e-mail interview, Khaire discusses her work and its implications for entrepreneurs everywhere.
Sarah Jane Gilbert: How did you first become interested in studying growth in newly founded firms and young organizations?
Mukti Khaire: Only one out of every ten newly founded firms in the United States grows to a size of more than ten employees (Aldrich, 1999). Growth is therefore a critical issue for all young firms. Most firms start out small, and small size makes them vulnerable to failure. Large firms almost always possess sufficient slack resources that buffer them from the vagaries of their environment and have political advantages due to their size. Hence, it is in the interest of entrepreneurs to grow their firms to a size that sufficiently improves their chances of survival and success. Moreover, large firms are a source of employment, and hence new venture growth is important to society as well.
It is in the interest of entrepreneurs to grow their firms to a size that sufficiently improves their chances of survival and success.
The issue of growth in young firms is also interesting from an academic perspective. There is less research on growth of young firms, compared to survival of young firms. Moreover, a majority of studies focus on issues of well-established firms rather than young ones. Since well-established firms differ from young ones in their availability of resources, adaptability, and stability in the face of changing environments, the findings from those studies are not directly relevant to young firms. Hence, I became interested in studying this relatively unexplored area.
Q: Why did you decide to focus on entrepreneurship in the advertising industry in your research?
A: Advertising more than most businesses responds to the talents and personalities of individuals, particularly founders, in the early years of the agency. Agencies then often stumble when the founder leaves.
I was interested in understanding how firms, whose chief competitive assets are their founders' talents or skills, scale their operations and grow. Heavy dependence on individuals' abilities, rather than easily expandable assets such as equipment, implies that these firms would find it especially difficult to increase the scale of their operations and grow. Hence, understanding the factors that influence growth in such firms would be a conservative test of growth in other firms. Such firms are found especially in creative industries such as advertising and design, but are also predominant in human-resource-intensive industries such as law, publishing, and consulting.
Two other aspects of the industry made advertising an interesting context for research on new venture growth. First, it is an industry with low barriers to entry and hence high levels of entrepreneurial activity, which in turn gave me a large enough sample to work with. Second, it is not an industry where venture capital activity is very high, making it a good setting to study growth in the absence of financial slack. Financial constraints are common to all new firms, and it was valuable to be able to study growth in a context where growth had to be internally rather than externally funded.
Q: Can you tell us about the concept of intangible social resources and how they contribute to a young firm's growth? How does a firm acquire non-tangible resources such as reputation and status?
A: Intangible resources are non-financial, non-material assets that a firm possesses by virtue of the social structure in which it is embedded. Although firms are economic entities, they are nevertheless affected by social variables such as legitimacy, status, and reputation because all economic transactions are embedded in a social supra-structure. Since most young firms are financially constrained, intangible assets that do not require outlays of financial resources are especially critical to new ventures.
Entrepreneurs and managers should almost never shy away from stepping out of their comfort zone.
An entity is considered to have legitimacy when its actions are considered proper, acceptable, or desirable under a widely accepted set of beliefs and norms. A new, unfamiliar activity or entity does not possess legitimacy because of its inherent novelty. A new firm, therefore, lacks legitimacy and may be looked upon with suspicion by stakeholders. In order to gain legitimacy, a new firm is required to look like existing organizations, which possess legitimacy because of their familiarity to observers. Hence, mimicry of existing organizations' structures and activities to a certain extent is essential if new ventures wish to gain legitimacy. A new venture with legitimacy acquired in this manner is more likely to succeed because it then can channel its resources and energy towards its core activity, rather than towards establishing its propriety. By doing so, it can improve performance and grow faster than an organization that does not conform to industry norms. As one founder I interviewed put it, "Customers are used to doing things in a certain way [with established organizations], and if a new agency is too far and out, it will not do well."
High-status organizations tend to be buffered from environmental shocks and more likely to survive adverse circumstances and perform better than low-status organizations. Organizational status is usually a function of size and good past performance. However, young firms possess neither large size nor a track record of good performance. Although the benefits of status are crucial to their performance, they are unable to avail of them. An alternate way of acquiring status is through high-status affiliations. When a young, unknown firm has affiliations with high-status entities, stakeholders tend to impute the status of the latter onto the former, thus granting higher status to the young firm. I found that young agencies with high-status clients performed better and grew faster than agencies without high-status clients (controlling for the revenues brought in by each client). Thus, status acquired through affiliations provided young firms with the buffering advantage that larger, well-established firms enjoyed due to their status, and enabled them to compete in the same arena as much larger firms.
Q: How important is the location of a business? How much does this impact its success?
A: To answer that, I shall use the words of a founder I interviewed: "Clients want to work with New York agencies, just like you would want to make a movie in Hollywood, not in Toledo."
Thus, some locations have symbolic benefits for firms that establish there. Researchers have shown that benefits from knowledge spillovers explain why firms in an industry cluster in specific geographical areas—think Silicon Valley. In the advertising industry, however, knowledge spillovers within the industry are not as important as spillovers between agencies and customers, so agencies need not cluster as they do, for instance, on and around Madison Avenue. I reasoned that they do so because the pioneer agencies in the nineteenth century set up offices there, lending legitimacy to the location. Advertising agencies became associated in people's minds with Madison Avenue. (For example, a recent Wall Street Journal headline said, "Google Weighs on Madison Avenue," not "Google Weighs on Advertising Agencies.") New entrants to the industry need to be associated with legitimate locations in order to gain credibility and benefit from the cachet associated with that location. A new fashion designer in France aspires to set up shop in Paris rather than Lyons because of the cachet associated with being a fashion designer in Paris.
So in some cases the location of a new venture is a critical facilitator of success not just because of the tangible benefits that clustering offers, but also because of the symbolic benefits offered by an office address that is legitimate in the minds of stakeholders.
Q: Were there any findings in your results that surprised you?
A: One revelation was the strong positive effect that mimicking older organizations had on new venture growth.
While I expected this based on theoretical frameworks, we have come to associate entrepreneurship with novelty so strongly that I was nevertheless surprised to see that mimicry was beneficial even to young firms that typically do not possess historical institutional baggage. It did appear, as one of the founders I interviewed pointed out, that "it pays to be on the bandwagon."
The other thing that surprised me was that while legitimacy became less important to firms as they grew older, status, acquired through affiliations with high status, remained important to even older firms. This indicates to me that firms have to work at maintaining their status in the hierarchy, while legitimacy is a critical issue only in the early stages of firms' lives. Once a firm has become familiar to observers, it assumes a taken-for-granted position that enhances its legitimacy. After a point, actively acquiring legitimacy becomes less critical for firms. Not so for status: Firms have to keep up their efforts at maintaining their status.
Q: What are the implications for entrepreneurs and managers?
A: Mimicry is important. Many entrepreneurs strike off on their own because they get tired of the way things work in their previous organizations and are determined to do things very differently. My findings suggest that for new firms in established industries, there is value to doing some non-technical, symbolic things in the manner that is widely accepted, and to adhering to industry norms and culture. For instance, entrepreneurs often promote flat, non-hierarchical structures in the firms they start. However, if customers are used to dealing with titular "Vice Presidents" in other firms, they may be wary of meeting just "Joe." The presence of job titles, a workplace with a professional appearance, even a receptionist, increases the legitimacy of a young firm with an unproven track record and improves its credibility.
Another implication is that you can bite off more than you think you can chew. While having a large prestigious client may seem like a double-edged sword because of the power such a client has over a young, struggling firm, the signal that the prestige of the client sends out is more valuable than any potential negative impact. Hence, entrepreneurs and managers should almost never shy away from stepping out of their comfort zone and taking on large jobs, since the payoff does arrive.
In general, then, I found that entrepreneurs need to weigh the costs of short-run discomfort against the benefits of long-run viability and success. While the financial constraints they face early on may make having a nice office, or being a member of industry associations, seem like an extravagance, the intangible benefits of doing so can have a very tangible impact on their business.
Q: What research are you working on now?
A: There are three streams of research that I want to pursue:
1. The growth of founder-centric young firms: At present I am working on understanding how the career trajectories of founders affect the performance of their firms.
2. Entrepreneurship in creative industries: While this area is related to the first, I am particularly interested in creating accounts of entrepreneurship in these industries in developing economies where they are a novel phenomenon. Such entrepreneurs face more uncertainty than other entrepreneurs—they are embarking upon a new venture, in a new industry in economies that are emerging. The creative and founder-dependent nature of their products naturally adds another dimension of difficulty to their struggle to grow and succeed.
3. The impact of intangible assets on economic transactions: I plan to study commercial transactions in which finances are not the sole currency of exchange, and intangibles like status and reputation of the actors in the transaction play a pivotal role. An example of such transactions is real estate deals where the status of the buyer rather than the price is the most important aspect of the deal.


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I just picked up the Dungeon Master's Guide from the local gaming store last night (paying twice as much as I would have paid on Amazon, but the twin desires to support local business and have it right then won out), so I have had a chance to get into it any any detail, but on an initial flip-through, a few things are apparent:
- The contents are nice in the abstract, but their development isn't quite what I would have liked in several places. It's all well and good to say you can give XP for things other than killing monsters, but more robust guidelines would have been nice. Likewise with new race creation, since the races in the PHB seem to be built with some ideas of balance in mind, more specific guidelines would have been nice. I don't need a book to tell me I can make up stuff beyond what's in the book--but I'm probably not the audience for that sort of advice.
- In contrast to the race creation "rules," the monster creation stuff seems to be well done and reasonably detailed without going overboard.
- I like the sections on playing D&D in different genres of fantasy, but neither the genres nor the audience is served by having all of the examples be from D&D tie-in novels. I'm not against including those for commercial reasons, but having those be the only ones given seems a bit crass.
- I like the number of variety of variant rules, though I don't know that I'll use any of them.


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I usually have to brace myself to read the latest news and events of the world, so much of it shocking and senseless. Yesterday I learned about child marriage in northern India, girls who are wedded by their early teens, and have their pregnancies explained to them at the onset of labour. I also came across 'fracking', a new method of obtaining natural gas which turns tap water into explosive. And then there are the 25 dolphins that swam free days ago, and are now bound for the entertainment industry on Sentosa Island, Singapore, where the few who survive will be oohed and aahed at by visitors while they adjust to life in their swimming pool prison.
And I wonder, if you want to effect real change, how do you ask people to open up, past their fears, prejudices, beliefs, traditions, sense of selves embedded far deeper than vital organs, and re-examine their lives? To ask them to turn over each heavy stone of truth and see what it might really be made of? For a society to do this successfully, doesn't it have to happen within each individual too? And if we ask this of others, shouldn't we first ask it of ourselves? What might our own stones reveal, if we have the willingness to recognise them and the courage to examine their foundations?col-md-2


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Look, if we were a pair of big dollar authors, you'd almost expect us to find a co-writer to "flesh out" our expanding series of novels. Clive Cussler, Janet Evanovich, Tom Clancy – everybody who's anybody is doing it. (Almost everybody. J.K. Rowling has really missed a bet so far; if she'd signed Thomas Perry to knock out the first draft of her next novel, we could all be reading Harry Potter and the Big Bag of Gold by now.)
Sadness and gloom, we're not big dollar authors so we can't afford to hire a talented but poor-ish writer to pen our words. Hell, we're talented but poor-ish writers and currently available for hire. (If James Patterson calls, we've even got a title available: Alex Cross and the Big Bag of Gold.) But, even with an anemic bank account, we wanted to know what it felt like to have someone else do most of the work while we watched Age of Dinosaurs on Netflix.
So we went looking for someone to write our blog.
Why I'm Writing Someone Else's Blog for a Measly Five Bucks
By Cassysailermoon
Hi, my name is Cassy. You're probably wondering why Renée and Harrell are having me write their blog, and why I agreed to do it…for only $5. Let me explain. Renée and Harrell found me on a website called Fiverr.com. In their own words, they were "wandering through Fiverr and looking for someone who sounded up for a silly challenge." They found me, and asked if I would be interested in taking on this challenge. Of course, I agreed; I'm up for almost any challenge that someone makes me on Fiverr! Before I start rattling on, let me first explain to you what Fiverr is and how it works.
Fiverr is a website where sellers can sell their services, called "gigs," for $5, and, in turn, buyers can buy these services for only $5. People buy and sell all sorts of different things on Fiverr. Some people translate from one language to another, some people will take pictures of themselves holding a sign with your business name or URL written on it, some people will sing you a personalized song, and some people, like me, will write anything you want. I offer to write your essay, book report, speech, blog, or any other writing assignment up to 500 words for $5. Right now, I know you're thinking, "Wait?! This girl does all that work for just $5??" The answer to that question is yes. But wait! There's more! I actually don't make $5 per gig because Fiverr takes out $1 of every sale as their commission. So, essentially, I work for $4 a gig. You probably think I'm crazy that I work for so little money…and sometimes I think that too. But, to be honest, it's not all that bad. I'm good at writing, and I usually enjoy writing people's papers. It usually doesn't take me that long to write the papers either, so the dollars I make per hour is about what I would make at any gas station or grocery store job. Besides writing your paper, I also have other types of gigs. I will proofread and edit your writing, improve your Fiverr gig description, take pictures with your message, make video testimonials, write reviews, give piano lessons, and much more!
I found out about Fiverr from an article I read about how to make money online. I decided to give it a try. I didn't expect much success, but on my first day signed up, I got three orders, and after only one week, I made over $150! I am saving 100% of the money I make on Fiverr for college, which I will be starting in January. I'm very excited to start, but, as everyone knows, it's very expensive. However, the way things have been going with my Fiverr sales, it looks like I will make enough money to not need financial aid! This is extremely exciting for me! Fiverr has proven to be a great money maker for me, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to make some extra cash!
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So that was Cassysailermoon, wordsmith, making four dollars by writing our blog this Tuesday and – as you've noticed – moonlighting as a recruiting agent for Fiverr.com. Next time, we should slip her a few bucks to promote one of our novels. While we were pleased to have someone else do the heavy lifting this week, finances dictate that we write our own blog next week.
Unless, of course, James Patterson calls, excited about our Alex Cross suggestion. Then, who knows? Cassy might just become a regular.


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Music Store » Can You Feel The Love Tonight
This song includes more than one version!
For only $2.99 you can enjoy permanent, DRM-free downloads of ALL the following:
Can You Feel The Love Tonight (MIDI, Accompaniment)
4:02 Medium piano, drums, strings, vibraphone, oboe, horn
4:02 Medium piano, drums, strings, vibraphone, oboe, horn
Can You Feel The Love Tonight (MIDI, Piano solo)
3:21 Easy piano only
3:21 Easy piano only
Arrangement Guide
- For piano
- The piano part includes the melody (or memorable part) from the original.
- Easy piano
- Same as For piano but simplified to make it easier to learn.
- Piano solo
- All of the instruments from the original distilled into a single piano part. No background.
- Accompaniment
- The piano part complements the melody. The melody will play separately in the background.
Our MIDI files have been licensed for sale in the United States by RightsFlow®.


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Postbus 7891
1008 AB Amsterdam
Tea tin THEODOR - Black
Empty tea tin of Maison THEODOR (color: black), for about 100 grams of tea (depending on the variety of tea). A tea tin is the best way to preserve your tea. It keeps the product fresh and aromatic for a longer period of time; it also keeps tea away from light, air and humidity.
This tin has a dark-brown ribbon.
Also available with a giftbox, specifically designed for this tin.