text:
Firefly: Season One And Serenity Were Just The Prelude
I will always remember the first time I paused while flicking through channels and heard "boy, this planet really smells!" I was immediately hooked. And I spent the following long dark years before Serenity a fervent evangelist. That we even got our Big Damn Movie shocks me to this day and I want to make clear that I am more than content to sit back, wrap up my fandom with a little bow, put it on a shelf, and only ever trot it out when someone makes the mistake of asking the wrong question at a party. We got our ending–such as it is–and I have no illusions that our wildly successful cast will ever disentangle themselves from their various contracts in time to film anything other than Firefly: The Geriatrics.
That doesn't mean it isn't fun to consider the possibilities and the recent successful Kickstarter campaign for a Veronica Mars movie certainly set off quite a lot of chatter. What surprised me the most though were those who felt the story was finished and that any continuation would have to resort to the dark magic of prequeling, retconning or rebooting. That's patently ludicrous and I feel it warrants a moment's response. (Also–in a slightly more self-serving vein–the years have taught me that nothing revitalizes one's writing like tapping into some geek righteousness. Spend months crafting a very compassionately nuanced and analytical exploration of objectification and pornography, get ten reads; feverishly slobber off some drelk on Star Wars, get ten thousand a day. And while I don't have any illusions about the odds of striking readership gold again, that kind of piece always breaks my writer's perfectionism and boy could I use a hand there again.)
Honestly I see Serenity as the perfect launching point for a really solid series and/or sequels. Here's how Firefly continues in my head:
Remember that in all likelihood Mal and the crew are not famous. The whole point of Wikileaks was to keep B Manning's name out of the papers and it's very much not in the nature of Serenity's crew to stick their heads up further than absolutely required. All the rest of the 'verse knows is that a bit of video and possibly some boring records got leaked. Of course Mal's name is finally very much on the government's radar but there's some reticence towards generating another big splashy scene hunting the crew down. A Pentagon Papers scandal like Miranda generates the kind of turbulence that changes which corrupt and privileged politicians/businessmen are holding the reins of political power, but it hardly shoves the majority of those responsible or connected to those responsible into the wastebin. Key members of parliament are going to remain, more or less, key members of parliament. Thus there's incentive for the best repositioned factions of those in power to keep a walking potential after-tremor of the scandal like Malcolm, River and company alive and in play. It's not in anyone's interest to make Miranda into a truly tumultuous affair, no one wants systemic change after all, but once the news cycles have petered it out into background static, softly kicking the hornets nest again to re-malign one's competitors becomes a survivable tactic. Insofar as those with the most amount of power post-Miranda ever consider Mal and the crew, they like that they have a piece in play that could get Miranda mildly back into the news.
But of course this is a two-sided coin. While the upper echelons of the police/military aren't going to go on a land-burning and sea-boiling crusade for our Big Damn Heroes, there's lots and lots of space and motivation for other hammers to come swinging at them. Those with–for whatever byzantine reason due to the most current web of politics at any moment–a stake in not having Miranda come up will very much like to see Serenity snuffed out in a silent explosion out on the ass-end of the 'verse. As will any remnants of those with direct responsibility for Miranda carrying an itchy personal grudge at the notion of letting a flea get away after a bite. And of course River will remain–if not grow–both dangerous and valuable.
If Mal was unable to get underscrupulous jobs before because of his chaotic conscience and attention grabbing antics, now things are surely only peachy.
This is the real linchpin on which Serenity instantly transforms from a crescendo and coda to the opening salvo in our little old firefly's real journey. Whereas before the crew were junior-grade lumpenproles, in constant danger of being crushed by a stray step but capable of eking out an honestly dishonest living begging for warm bowls of crime-filled gruel and saluting passing cops with their best pearly-white smiles, now they're actual outlaws.
If Firefly was ever in any chance of returning as a series the first season or two after Serenity would be a tense affair of survival and piracy. Every relationship or period of sedentary safety would have an all-too-pressing expiration date and they'd have to be far more proactive about heists… and a little less discriminatory Sure the sense of soft familial love would be strengthened by Simon and Kaylee, but the tension of "me and mine" versus common humanity with strangers would be again be a salient running theme, and tensions of ends-and-means would surely heighten as the crew turns more and more to piracy.
But! Things are not quite so glum for our occasionally-intrepid mercenaries. There are alternatives to slowly filling the fleshy shoes of the Reavers, although perhaps even less palpable. In my mind Mal and the crew eventually find the kind of sponsors of hired-guns undaunted by the powers-that-be behind the Alliance: other Alliance powers-that-be. First corporate espionage/subversion/thuggery, and then later direct employ from figures inside parliament itself. Although the crew is never treated as anything more than a few steps removed pawn only sometimes on the edge of awareness of their situations, the potential for system-spanning plot entanglements and culture/paradigm clash is immense. As are the internal tensions and counter-schemes, because our Big Damn Heroes are hardly passive.
Firefly certainly did not die with Serenity, nor did the struggles of our crew.
There are quantum-telegraph cables to be cut, murderous gunmen to be tracked down, samples of vats of copyrighted plastics and proteins to be stolen, reavers dispersed by the Alliance into local raiding parties in garbage fields, denizens of small spacestations bandying together to fend off the thugs of spectrum monopolists…
I've always really, really wanted to see the crew rob a giant particle accelerator in space. I think there's so much potential there in the implicit cultural and paradigmatic clash. Firefly borrows strongly from Star Wars' complete disinterest in science, but explicitly contextualizes this tendency as a cultural and subjective perspective by working hard to make strides towards a believable scientific framework in the background. In much the same way that Joss Whedon is personally a fan of the Alliance's social democracy (with universal healthcare), yet the story is shot primarily from a libertarian perspective with the other aspects of the underlying reality obscured in what seem like minor details.
Neither Blue Sun nor the history of Shepard Book were sufficiently handled on by the comics–if they're even cannon–and there's so much more room to touch on them, if only fleetingly. Just as the first season built up a pile of references and floating plots, so too would one expect any new series to continue shaking in references and background details to entirely new aspects of their society and relationships with new characters. There's so much more to explore in the 'verse and so much more to be mined from the cultural, aesthetic and paradigmatic clash between periphery and core that made episodes like "Ariel" so popular.
Cosmopolitan revolutionary and radical movements surely exist in the core of the Alliance and I'd like to thing we'd get to see them open up and explore the reference implicit in Simon's friends. But sadly a treatment that looks anything like real revolutionary and radical groups rather than nth-iterated cartoonish abstractions of hollywood tropes kinda beggars belief. (It's still viscerally painful for me to watch those scenes in Children of Men, so embarrassingly unreal are the supposed radicals, excellent though the rest of the film is.) So maybe instead of coming into the ranks of radicals and revolutionaries, the final apex of the story is one of finally actually saving people instead of watching them die or telling their tale. I love the idea of a different sort of social landscape opening up in the border planets over the course of the story, of the sort of wildcat labor struggles that filled the wild west after the civil war was won and the railroads established. Futuristic struggles and battles between Wobblies and Pinkertons would nicely parallel the actual west, where a volunteer Confederate soldier and abolitionist like Albert Parsons could ride with the Texas cavalry, start a paper in Waco, fight the Klan, marry an unbelievably badass freed slave, and die on the gallows in Chicago as an anarchist union organizer.
Serenity framed itself and the prior prelude of Firefly as Mal's struggle to finally stand for something, to shake off the wounded defensive nihilism of the Browncoats' defeat and come back into the world. But it also brought to the fore River's similar but hidden journey in ways that hinted at her always being the main character, albeit temporarily obscured in the background detail. In that light Firefly Season One and its spectacular finale look a lot like opening chapter of a George RR Martin book: the person indicated to be of central narrative importance is there primarily to set things up and characters gonna die quickly.
Serenity ends with River exactly where Mal began five years before the show in that junkyard: a couple years after a personal hell, just beginning to coming out of her shell and looking up at what could be. That's a lot of seasons to come. I can't wait to find out what she finally comes to believe in.
Because that? That'll be an interesting day.
How Star Wars Should Have Ended: Reflections on Taste, The Expanded Universe & Radical Politics
I'm feeling profoundly under the weather so it's as good a time as any to indulge in that most venerable of radical pastimes, ranting about Star Wars.
I discovered Star Wars the same way any poor eight-year-old did in the early 90s, through the comics section at my local library. Dark Empire and Tales of the Jedi were richly watercolored and stunning in their scope. And eventually I got bored enough to follow up on their source films. It didn't take long for me to realize that Star Wars was an acceptable geekdom in the otherwise harsh projects. Star Wars was gangsta. And the root of this I suspect lies in its dramatically different character from Star Trek, Lord of the Rings or the myriad superheroes and chain-mail wearing dragon-slayers cranked out monthly. Star Wars feels familiar.
Having turned to the comics section only after exhausting the rest of the stacks, I was knowledgeable enough to recognize the technological trappings as laughable, but gracious enough to appreciate the sly self-effacing shrug in "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." The realism of Star Wars is its resonance with our common experience of 'how reality works.' Reality is complicated, gritty, lived-in, with more components than you can ever experience or understand. Obi-Wan and Luke don't know the names of all the alien species dicking about in Wuher's cantina and it wouldn't occur to them to try. The galaxy is a big place. And the Empire's success in this context is awe-inspiring and despair-inducing even while being obviously incomplete. Star Wars is what the world looks like to kids dealing dope on street corners. Scraping by in the chaotic brutal periphery, proud of the various impressions of home and community found there, using fantastic tools without the slightest understanding of how they work, in awe of the state while waking up every morning simmering in hate for it. Star Wars creates an environment in which the colors are brighter but everything else is the same. And then it wraps us up in the fantasy of meaningful resistance.
Maintaining this essential "tone" of Star Wars has been probably the most uproarious issue in the last three decades of popculture. Everyone knows the prequels dropped the ball, although the list of widely identified missteps is a bit shallow in description (more on that later). But Star Wars has been grappling with this burden from the very beginning. Some poor sod at Marvel Comics is told "we've got a license" and all of a sudden he's forced to make difficult decisions about what would best signify the "star warsness" of a story as opposed to a Buck Rogers story. It's not enough to draw some familiar outfits or even capture the characters' voices, what fans are addicted to is the feel of the world. And it's an inarguable fact that almost everyone has been failing to nail that in one way or another ever since.
Some Thoughts On The Newest Generation of SF
For all the talk of impenetrable singularity, it occurs to me that the modern milieu of SF writers is almost entirely preoccupied with futurism and future-shock, in contrast to yestergeneration's focus on allegory / thought experiment. (Perpetually lurking in the background are the marginal Clarkesque Big Damn Object trade shows.)
While my favorite collection of all time remains The Hard SF Renaissance I've never really bought the much vaunted Hard/Soft division. In my mind the SF booktag has always indicated the paradigmatic pop of a story — it makes little difference if it's political, anthropological, biochemical, astrophysical, etc. An arcane development in mathematics has as much pull as a sufficiently sharp twist on religion. This is what makes SF. The scope, audacity and originality of the concepts explored within an immersive story.
But there is a sharp distinction to be made between worlds contiguous with our reality and those allegorical to it. While the proto-SF of genre rags painted a picture of a gleaming future of rocketmen just around the corner, early SF writers were profoundly afraid to investigate anything close to the immediate future. It was almost dishonorable. The tropes of SF presented a vast sandbox to explore concepts at a distance — tying them to the present with "predictions" seemed both arrogant and pedestrian. If 40s proto-SF took place IN THE FUTURE!, the vast chunk of SF spanning the 60s-70s took place in hazily distant locales understood by author and reader alike to be no more than abstract myth settings. "A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away" except with intellectual pew-pews.
This still continues, but the modern age has given rise to a very distinguishable modern clique of SF authors interested in worlds with recognizable causal connections to our world. In a world deprived of anything more than an anemic NASA how we get there matters (or, alternatively, how it diverged). The other hallmark of the internet age is the density of the snarkiness, reference and speed of ideas — if Blade Runner signified the beginning of the shift away from abstraction with advertisements referencing real corporations, today's authors plaster their prose with injokes. Rather than trying to abstract away, they embrace our inherent ties to the world as it is in order to milk a higher density out of our shared language. The internet has given everyone the sensation of having passing knowledge in every field, and modern SF authors are expected to be versed and deliver on many if not all fronts.
There simply isn't the patience for limited-focus authors. And while I still heart Delany and Le Guin, I think this is a good thing. Nothing's worse than sitting through a work full of intellectual spark on one front to find it dead on another. A great mathematics twist matched with a ridiculous carbon copy of the author's culture transposed upon a ridiculously different environment. A finely constructed anthropological or psychological thesis with cliche and implausibly-portrayed tech.
Of course nobody's entirely gotten it right yet, and the most ambitious kids like Vinge, Stross and Macleod have often fallen far from the mark. But it's still a clear division.
Top 10 SF Films of the Decade
Serenity – At first it might seem ridiculous and fanboyish to place Serenity higher than Children of Men. Not only is the latter more finely composed, but on first appearance Serenity appears not simply ramshackle but less stalwartly Science Fiction. While there are necessary paradigmatic environmental changes (the G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorat, the psychic capacities of River Tam) they act less as central thematic drives than as crutches to drive events. If we take the old adage that a truly SF story is one that at its most basic and general can't exist without a change of paradigm, it's hard to evaluate Serenity because it's hard to narrow down just what Serenity's core is. Bad thing is done, man must expose? River finding family? Mal finding purpose? Blind faith? Totalitarianism? Tampering with natural order? There are so many disparate yet critical elements at work in Serenity and it moves so fast that one may be tempted to write it off as a desperate gasp than purely conceived and executed work. Yet I would argue that it is precisely Serenity's linear, unraveling, scattershot density that marks it as a unique product of SF and a solitary masterpiece in the realm of film. Serenity reads like a Charlie Stross novel. Jumpy and uneven, railroaded from point A to B, dense with separately established half-ideas… and unbelievably all the better for it. That is to say an approach to narrative that could only exist and function well in the last couple decades of literary SF. And there's no denying that Serenity functions well. Compressed seasons of Firefly or not, the film drips with the love it is clearly a labor of.
Children of Men - 2006 was a particularly good year for SF in the theaters and Children of Men was its crowning jewel. Everyone's already seen this film, and I think that's because it works so hard to encapsulate the everyday slowly decaying feeling of the Bush years. There is no scientific miracle or even new technology in Children of Men — consumer and industrial products are essentially the same, just with a different gloss, and a rainy, gritty, soggy wear and tear imposed over them. This is the future as the average person intuitively feels it. Exactly the same as today, just with the minor particulars evolved and the newspaper headlines darker. (To sustain this effect they had to remove the internet and infotech entirely.) Children of Men operates on the default assumptions you make when you first go to plot out your career or think about future generations. The world you directly touch will stay the same. And the rest of it will get worse, ultimately amounting to nothing. This is why Children of Men is without question the most accessible SF film of all time. It functions as a meditation on our relationship with SF and paradigmatic change more generally. The tediously building apocalypse beyond Britain, the paint-by-numbers insurgents within, the evolving fascistic state, all of these are operating within an antiquated context that has been dragged out for far too long. The absence of children is a vehicle for the exploration of the absence of ingenuity. Even though we assume they will and react negatively to claims that they won't, in secret we don't want things to stay the same. We want to be challenged by the new. The unseen. And its absence is the dissettling and unrealistic proposition.
A Scanner Darkly – The only Phillip K Dick film ever made. (It's a shame because you'd assume they'd do well in Hollywood.) A Scanner Darkly is a loving tribute to paranoid deterioration. The tragedy isn't that you don't care anymore — you care all too much — it's that you can't clarify just what it is you care about. You can't make sense of the world around you or even the particulars of your own life and your own identity because you're lost in possibilities. A Scanner Darkly is not just a documentation of this state of mind, but an exploration of the unrealistic but not fantastical notion that maybe it was for something, maybe you had a plan all along. Maybe someone out there really does care for you. Maybe you are making a difference. That is to say "making a difference" in some higher form than offing yourself with a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and an unfinished letter to Exonmobile protesting the cancellation of your gas credit. Mundane sunny, suburban California never seemed so orwellian. And rotoscoped slipping and sliding cartoons of stoners arguing about the Beatles never seemed so dissettling. The delivery is an amazing triumph of everyday dystopia. But A Scanner Darkly's core is a hauntingly utopian wish. That there was some unseen purpose, some triumph in failure. As the list of deceased scrolls by in PKD's dedication, he plantatively asks if there might've been some happiness stolen in the midst of their abject misery. What would that even look like?
The Butterfly Effect - You know what I don't give a shit. Ashton Kutcher made a good movie and you need to learn to accept that. The Butterfly Effect is the best time-travel film yet made, because it's the most realistic, elegant and ressonant of them. That's right, even with the ridiculous jumps forward it's more on ball than Primer. None of this macroscopic bodily transference bullshit. The Butterfly Effect is the pure distilled essence of the time-travel story — cliche surrender in the face of complexity and inexorable self-sacrifice included. That it has no definitive ending is, kitchsy as it sounds, part of the appeal. Evan's childhood is the whole point of the film, not whatever his ill-defined present might turn out to be.
Avatar - First, a bit on race: The rejected foreigner who is adopted by a tribe and fights his old tribe is an ancient and entirely valid plot concept. And there ARE plenty of Science Fiction or space fantasy stories told from the perspective of the colonized. It's just that the subjects are always human (cf Independence Day, The Mount) because doing justice to the truly alien defies the bandwidth of storytelling. Avatar's problem is that the Navi aren't alien in the slightest — they're deliberately made to be recognizable as our (simplistic, essentialist, idealic) impression of indigenous americans. This is both shallow and a bit fucked up. And it's the reason Avatar tragically falls short of being a great film. It is, however, a very good film. Alas, there is no central component that marks it as inextricably SF. Like Serenity, Avatar is composed of a jumble of concepts, themes and struggles that work well together but defy simple summation. Nevertheless it's worth pointing out just how positively many of them wax towards scientific inquiry and transhumanist self-expansion. Jake Sully is a broken, impoverished, outcast and marginalized man who desires nothing more than to excel — all his life he attempted this by following orders. But only by marrying his desire to self-improve with his twin brother's desire to learn does he transcend both their failures and achieve the freedom and community he craves. But Grace Augustine is really what makes this film for me. How many decades has it been since we had scientists — much less scientific inquiry itself — portrayed in a positive light? I almost cried. Avatar has the most beautiful and realistic starship ever portrayed on the screen. It has imperialist soldiers being taken out by pteranodons. What the fuck more do you want?
A.I. – Kubric's most surreal, ironic and pessimistic film ever required Steven Spielberg's robotically emotional packaging to truly shine. I mean let's be clear here. In the third act — in the frozen remains of an unsustainable civilization — it's revealed that the act of consciousness trancends itself to become an undying legacy embedded in the cosmos. And the ressurected toy robot impulsively responds by irreversibly destroying his owner's very soul so that he can experience a day's fleeting intimacty with her once again. Saccharine my ass. A.I. is a twisted, glossy dystopic tale that sets out to excavate the uncanny valley on all fronts. The question "Are they people?" is always a false front for are we machines? And A.I.'s job is to vacillate as wildly as possible on this in as many ways as possible all while telling a coherent, emotionally gripping narrative. It has to get you to continue caring about the protagonists even as your perspective on that emotional atachment fluctuates. This is no small task. And it succeeds brilliantly. Naturally, the product is deeply dissettling. The well-worn dismissal that A.I. should have ended with the second act is, in fact, partially indicative of how successfully anticathartic the ostensibly cathartic third act is. A.I. has its faults — much of the social landscape in the second act simply fails to hit its target. But as a whole it is simply the best exploration yet of the classical Asimovian blur surrounding the animate objects we sympathize with.
Moon – Sometimes an idea doesn't need to be that fresh, or even profound. Sometimes the smallest of twists can shine simply by fleshing it out well. Moon is not going to surprise you. It's going to walk you through the consequences so realistically that every scene will make that single thorny change stand out and impress you anew.
Primer - Primer has one trick: omission. It can make for a mildly challenging and sometimes even interesting puzzle, but cripples it as a dramatic. Primer is less Science Fiction than it is engineering fiction. An attempted study of time-travel mechanics (as opposed to coherent theory), it waxes into a study of the ever present paranoia and emasculation that is bourgeois geekdom. Of all the films to make this list Primer is the least in the vein of SF, and yet to omit it would be unconscionable. And not out of token appreciation of its twine-and-bubblegum-wrapper budget. Rather the film is this decade's rare good example of that overly ballyhooed and only marginally SF tradition: exploring effects of a subtle alteration to examine the world as it is. Primer is most impressive as an accidental critique of capitalist culture. An alienated, shallow world where the effects of true ingenuity can only be stumbled upon and then furiously exploited for social power. Where control of a situation is possible, but almost entirely arbitrary. And ultimately naught but a veneer on the underlying self-destruction. Even framing the plot itself as a puzzle — a competitive test — helps create a meta environment similar to that of Abe and Aaron. So, whether always consciously intentional or not, Primer's elements do add up to a neat trick and decent SF film. Would that we lived in a world where realistic dialogue and technical detail was anything other than an utterly unique breath of fresh air. Until then.
Sunshine – Oh, I know, it's shit. But it's a pile of shit that grows on you. Sunshine is Armageddon meets 2001. Without the upside of Bruce Willis but also without the sheer boredom of Clarke. It's almost fatally crippled by its third act lapse into giving a damn about a paleolithic irrelevancy (the religious). And the director's understanding of them scientists is lacking, to say the least. But somehow the film survives and arguably even flourishes. Yes, the material premise is borderline magical and only stated in its most cartoonish form on screen — strangelets be destroying teh sun — but if you knew anything about how little astrophysicists actually know about anything you'd be inclined to let it slide. But, the central premise of Sunshine is actually an aesthetic one: sunlight being more dangerous than darkness. It's a hack of our visual neurological architecture. A mildly SF conceit that could only function on screen. Of course, one wishes the genre of pretty, immaculate spaceships with pretty, immaculate scientists had more entries to choose from. But Sunshine is at least the most watchable of them.
Pitch Black – Pitch Black is just a very satisfying film. That's all there is to it. Characters are stranded and hunted by creatures. This vicerally delightful setup almost always works on the rare occasions it is truly embraced (Jurassic Park, Alien) because it negates post-modernism by directly tapping into simplistic material reason in a way that outright horror almost always fails. Horror films terrify by removing rules, by undercutting the security of our capacity to reason — either we stop being able to make sense of the world around us and default on animal instinct or we invest the entirety of our minds into understanding the twisted thinking of our enemy. In both cases there cease to be rigidly tangible rules, or at very least at times the utility of hard headed reason seems to be in question. Pitch Black, like the few adequately SF "being hunted by creatures" films before, generates fearful tension but never the intellectual abandon or psychological recursion of outright horror. The challenge faced is the natural world — an almost prototypical SF story. Granted some of the challenges are farfetched (the crazy orbital locking) and it's a bit vexing to only see pretty much only one type of life in the biota, but the peculiarities are the payoff in Pitch Black. The film takes for granted that we've played this game before and simply tries to change up the character dynamics and setting enough to refresh the experience. In this it does extraordinarily well. It left all of us with enough goodwill to see Vin Diesel though his ridiculous spinoff trilogy, but really, all the characters are awesome.
Notably omitted titles: The Fountain is not really SF because the sf story is an in-film allegory. Similarly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came close but was so introverted and surreally subjective in subject and approach that it might as well be magical realism. Star Trek, while fun, is not SF because it's fucking Star Trek.
Finally, District 9 hasn't sat well with me since viewing. The inclusion and portrayal of the Nigerians smacks of direct racism, and the central premise is both too different to allegorize and too allegorized. It of course means to be unsettling but in the process I think it fails at being substantive.
The Insular Decade
The 00s were a triumph of insularity.
Proudly insular politics. Proudly insular tastes & culture. Turning inward and accelerating in niche appeal. The oughties were the decade we realized that social relations are comprised of networks and awkwardly rushed to reframe all our relations upon that premise.
Rather than the tightening of cliques and tribes, the 00s saw a rapidly growing disinterest in common cultural currency. We stopped paying attention to the abstraction of what was popular in general and focused solely on what was popular with our friends and direct associations.
The oughties were the decade in which popular culture died. Even water cooler discussion became impossible. Subcultures were hardly immune because even they require the assumption of a shared venue. Something unto itself, with its own trends necessary to stay aware of in order to maintain the passive social connections it facilitated. A subculture was a vast expanse of shared popular culture, or reactions to that popular culture. Today there are just loose associations. A shared interest or common experience rarely comes bundled with many others. And what few bundles remain are seriously fraying.
Team spirit, despite some brief political upticks, was ultimately rolled back again and again, across the board. Our incomprehension of others outside of our immediate connections deepened. Our passive, dismissive hostilities increased, but in all directions, not to any net advantage.
Aimless, shallow, apathetic or fadishly political youth are nothing new, but those of this decade marched under no self-assumed collective identity. And what they held up as signifying their superiority was not an attitude or image, it was access to information itself. Reference was this decades' currency.
Rather than gaudy material wealth we decked ourselves our with gaudy informational reference. To us, gold chains, leather studs, armani suits and hemp rags were paleolithically monotone, a sign of almost third-world informational poverty. Instead we wore the equivalent of NASCAR jumpsuits bedecked with varying vintage shout-outs, bandoleers of band buttons and ironic body accouterments. If we could have actually had those shifting t-shirts from the Justice video we would have counted ourselves kings among men.
Poverty was chic, but utilitarian simplicity was suspect if not disgusting.
The oughties were a decade entirely defined by our hesitant first steps of acclimation to the internet. It saw the destruction of the common sphere, and the almost complete reconstruction of our relations around the limitations of dunbar's number. It saw the death of a certain type of empathy — the bland common ties of fellow citizens. …But at the same time the 00s saw the vast expanse of inquisitiveness in random directions and the accelerating spread of discourse.
We surf wikipedia for fun. Moderate liberals quote bell hooks.
We have less in common with strangers, and there are currently very prominent, very intentional and aggressive trends away from wider, deeper connection with others. But this decade's insularity was but the first reaction. We are still opening our eyes to the freedom the internet provides. Even now we are acclimating to information overload, to the immediacy and ease by which we can share in limited networks. We are learning, feeling out the limitations of these initial insular approaches and at the same time we are only beginning to address our thirst for substantive knowledge beyond the immediate. As we do we will become more and more fed up with the limitations inherent in relying on the trivial and stylistic as aids to connection.
The internet has shattered cultural content. Traditionally the sharing of such substance-less commonalities formed one of the most critical bases of social connection. But they have shattered too far to be of use much longer. The postmodern death spiral of insular reference cannot continue, because even the inherent diversity of individual experience and network-position will eventually pare the density of bundled culture in our various networks down to nothing. We are going to have to find new ways to connect with one another. To deal with all the strangers we're pressed up against. And that means a centuries — if not millennia — overdue resurgence of substance. The first strains of this will be apparent in the next decade as we remove the last presentational barriers to knowledge of any and all cultural content. As broadcast mediums are finally abolished, as the beast currently known as Yahoo Answers learns to stop drooling on itself. As classroom education slowly become superfluous. etc.
The strength of an ironic or obscure reference lies in the remaining social scarcities of access to information it operates within. When your t-shirt comes with tabs and tags to the next generation of tvtropes and pandora with extensive and easily accessible situating context, it's just so much noise. And not only are we learning to filter out noise and prioritize. We're becoming less and less tolerant of it.
A Few Notes On The Culture & Anarchism
Iain Bank's novels about an anarchist society called The Culture have garnered widespread literary acclaim and single-handedly re-launched Space Opera. They are stunningly popular and influential books (although still somewhat obscure in America).
But. While they've inspired much discussion about anarchy, they've been virtually ignored by the anarchist movement and what outside discussion has taken place has been passive and disconnected. This is not entirely surprising. Among the upper echelons of Science Fiction there are few undertakings considered more rude than tearing apart a piece of fiction to seriously dissect its politics. It is what it is. A constructed what if. If you didn't appreciate the nuances the first time through you're just an idiot. The insinuation that the author might straightforwardly engage in base politics is insulting. Nor is there anything in the anarchist movement less glamorous than utopian hypothesizing. Theory and futurism are considered meaningless pursuits hopelessly disconnected from the real world. Few within the modern milieu think it possible to wrestle anything of immediate substance or tactical value from such meanderings, thus they're largely derided as a waste of time.
Nevertheless there's no denying that Science Fiction and Anarchism have a long and twisted past together, from the more explicit black-flag-waving of Ursula K Le Guin and Ken Macleod to the more subtle explorations by Vernor Vinge, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Samuel R Delany and Bruce Sterling (to name but a few). As the cliche goes, the first science fiction author was the daughter of the first anarchist & the first feminist (Shelly, Godwin and Wollstonecraft). Besides being history's most prominent radical, individualist and forward-thinking identities, Science Fiction came into popularity about the same time Anarchism crashed and burned – leeching, one is forced to suspect, off the same idealistic current.
So I hope no one will mind if I turn a critical eye on The Culture and examine their utopia from an explicitly anarchist perspective. (Even if Iain Banks himself seems to hail from a more moderate socialist background, he and Macleod make a lot of noise about being comrades and the dreaded "A-word" has appeared more frequently in-text as his novels have progressed.)
First, a short overview of The Culture:
The Culture is a large, galaxy-spanning society devoid of laws and government, with a deep hostility to authority and coercion. More of a tendency than formal body its members are bound only by free association, often in differingly identified lumps and spread out in constant migration. Its ranks are largely split between three forms of existence: Mind, Human and Drone, (AI, biological & robot) with extensive self-modifications commonly taking place within each category. Its Minds tend to build giant ships or habitats around themselves. Its Humans alter their genetics extensively, often in pursuit of greater pleasure (drug glands, butterfly wings, etc). While its Drones favor using force fields to interact with the world. The Culture's citizens are used to social and material freedom and consequently they exhibit both extreme self-confidence and a subtle guilt complex, that is to say smugness and an overactive conscience. The latter of which leads them to meddle extensively in the name of Liberty & Progress. This often cold-hearted utilitarianism, coupled with their utopian success (and unacknowledged idealism) has left them the most respected and feared force in the Galaxy.
In short The Culture is equal parts an allegory to American Hegemony and an exploration of Anarchist Utopianism. But The Culture isn't just a wish-fulfillment exercise in which the Big Mean Perfect Anarchy goes around beating up Poor Little Evil Empires. The Culture is partially based in fantastical posits, but it also has some real-world grounding.
Things The Culture Gets Right:
1. Hierarchy is impeded by space. Three dimensions facilitates free association on a far qualitatively larger scale. Autonomous lifesystems/ecosystems provide an unprecedented level of self-sufficiency and independence. Relativity and the sheer size of space fundamentally restricts lines of control. Once a civilization moves to space it will very quickly be forced to dissolve all pretenses of centralized authority.
2. Space-faring societies would almost certainly abandon planets to build their own habitats. Gravity wells are disgustingly cost-inefficient. There's no point in setting up permanent, sedentary settlements on planets — much less struggling for domination over them — when far purer resources are scattered about in abundance. Unlike planets, asteroids and comets are decentralized, uninhabited and easily accessible.
3. Post-scarcity societies have no need for private property (as opposed to personal possession). When every individual controls the means to production, individually, occupation and use become the only relevant claims. When I can build anything I want whenever I want it, there's no real point in using force to maintain control over a surplus.
4. When anyone can record anything and transmit it freely, acts of aggression are effectively outlawed. If your every action taken in public is truly public, it's extremely hard to manipulate others or engage in violent coercion. Crime, in the common sense, is largely impossible and restitution quickly obtained. Free association is the most diffuse police system possible and maximizes both choice and personal responsibility.
5. Anarchies are more efficient than other forms of social organization. The more fluid and dynamic a society becomes, the better it's able to process and enact original or ingenuous ideas. Individual autonomy provides intellectual redundancy and best respond to local conditions, whereas hierarchical or collective processes minimize net intellectual capacity. Decentralized, bottom-up tendencies maximize evolutionary iterations. In wartime, anarchies tend to accomplish far more with far less.
6. Any sufficiently rigorous ethical system is indistinguishable from consequentialism. Deontology is just a retarded version of rule-utilitarianism, but the wider one's access to the context of an ethical act, the less such rules help. Granted, any moral good or base desire must take into consideration the present, the marginality of future predictions and the effect upon oneself, but that just makes it a particularly robust consequentialism. Whereas deontological approaches inherently flounder as context widens. All of us ultimately recognize — whether we judge ourselves capable of making an informed choice — that sometimes the ends do justify the means.
I don't really care that The Culture blows up stars, meddles with other civilizations, conspires to start wars and accidentally causes the occasional gigadeath. On the whole I'm willing to take them at their word that they do more good than bad (unlike America, whose state-power is based on exploitation and inextricably embedded in a deterministic negative-sum game of westphalian realism).
My concerns are more interpersonal and sociological.
Decidedly Un-Anarchistic Aspects To The Culture:
1. The separation of Minds, Drones and Humans is hierarchical because there's no in-betweens. While Banks makes vague handwavings about the infinite malleability of forms of existence within The Culture and we must cut him some slack as a writer, there's never even passing mention of Humans or drones self-improving to the point where they become Minds. If this is an oversight, it seems a monumental one. The Culture is endlessly cited as the most imminent thought experiment of a posthuman society (and often as proof that anarchism and transhumanism are exactly the same thing). But while The Culture is quite obviously posthuman, it doesn't focus on self-improvement, exploration and expansion the same way that transhumanism does. And, frankly, seems a little unrealistic. There's no way 40 Trillion people could have their hands on near-infinite technology without a significant portion of them setting off to better themselves.
2. The sedentary behavior of most Culture citizens is indicative of widespread self-restriction. Beyond showing no interest in becoming Minds themselves, The Culture's Humans and Drones tend to just dick about in hedonistic pleasure and ineffable arrogance rather than proactively striving to make a difference. Special Circumstances is always portrayed as a very small minority within The Culture, and while everyone tends to take pride in its accomplishments, almost no one set out to change things individually. While SC infiltrates and manipulates thousands of different cultures and civilizations, they don't go everywhere, and it's decidedly weird that more citizens don't strike out for themselves and have a personal go at fucking over teh Prime Directive. Even the Elench (a breakaway, more fervently Anarcho-Transhumanist tendency in The Culture) are practically defined by their conservatism. The Elench trawl the Galaxy for new experiences to help change and improve themselves, but are remarkably blase and limited about the whole thing, pretty much mirroring The Culture's ship + riders archetype. Worst of all, people across The Culture and its various offshoots tend not to seek the capacity to make particularly complicated things for themselves, but instead rely entirely on the Minds.
3. The Culture is repeatedly portrayed as depending entirely on an built-in tendency of Minds to like Humans. Banks offers up a multitude of reasons why the Minds have no interest in altering their core desires re: being nice to humans, but none of them are entirely satisfactory. At the end of the day the Minds' anarchistic benevolence is based on gut-level conservatism and laziness, not any objective morality. In short, The Culture's anarchy works because its most able citizens have yet to kill the cop in their heads. This is excruciatingly annoying and best demonstrates just how afraid Banks is of sounding radical. The only character I found sufficiently anarchistic was the Grey Area — the most despised and ostracized starship in the history of The Culture thanks to its unapologetic inhibitions when it comes to mind-reading. (Which it uses extensively, without consent, to track down, torture and kill fascists. As well as occasionally to repair relationships and help people overcome trauma and misconceptions.)
4. Such hostility to mind-reading and deeper forms of intimacy/honesty betrays The Culture's broader comfort with subtle forms of manipulation and secrecy. Culture citizens, being sedentary and bored, tend to pass the time with elaborate social and interpersonal games that are based on artificial scarcities of information. People engage in spats, cliques and conspiracies over the most meaningless and arbitrary stuff. And while this is realistic (just look at the present day Anarchist Milieu), their easy-going comfort with such acts of borderline cruelty is disturbing. Granted, there are limits to the degree of casual power-mongering Culture citizens consider acceptable, but even so they display no imperative or desire to reduce such behavior. At best there's a tired exasperation with it. Which is realistic, I suppose, given The Culture's weird preoccupation with more-or-less plain human existence. But it's still decidedly less than anarchist.
Banks portrays The Culture as being unique among galactic civilizations (dating back billions of years) for their suspicion that sudden technological raptures smack of coercion. Given his portrayal of such "Subliming" this certainly appears an admirable reaction. …But sometimes stagnation smacks of coercion too.
There are, of course, many setting criticisms to be made; FTL and hominids are entirely unnecessary but annoyingly still regarded as a reasonable crutch. (Probably because so many authors are still secretly infected with a lust for skiffy. It'd be nice if the Brits got over the influence of Blake's 7 sometime this millennia, I'm just saying.) Half the high-technology is utterly fantastical while the other half is perfectly reasonable, and the conjunction can be annoying. But most centrally, whenever Banks turns his attention to low-tech worlds they're invariably some cookie-cutter rendition the European Middle Ages (or, to shake things up, early 20th century Europe). Which is beyond lazy. I mean, seriously. Some level of anthropological awareness would be nice. The growth patterns of Western Civilization are hardly a-contextual historical inevitabilities, or even probabilities.
And this pertains just a teensy bit to Anarchism, as I hear tell it's arguably possible to have anarchistic societies without world-shatteringly advanced technology (!). Bank's explicitly mentions home-grown anarchists threatening the rule of their tyrants, but operatives from The Culture seem to default on liberal reformism. Generals replace Kings, and Presidents replace Generals, slowly preparing a society to understand freedom. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time swallowing the conceit that the poor weak-brained peasants need such coddling. And a harder time seeing The Culture as a singular apex of almost marxist development, so far removed from and inaccessible to lower tech societies.
Of course it's hard to look too closely at a fictional setting as vast The Culture's without feeling a little ashamed. Any nitpicking can generate its own excuse and on such decades-old thought experiments you have to cut the Author some slack. Still. SF is intended to thought-provoke and some of those trains of thought are worth hijacking.


text:
FRAZE·IT About Us
FrazeIt, with more than 100 millions sentences indexed, aims to be the world's largest and most comprehensive search engine for phrases
and sentences on the Internet.
Most of the sentences are coming from top daily news writers, so you get a nice way to see how words are used in everyday language by talented writers.
FrazeIt supports the languages below:
Each search result comes with a direct access to Google translate and define features as well as a context tab which displays the phrase in its original source.
Search results can be narrowed down by selecting one or more filters.
Current Filters include:
- Sources (generic or famous quotes)
- Contexts (business,science,health,etc)
- Forms (interrogative,negative, exclamative)
- Rules (starts with,ends with)
- Zones (US,UK)
Enjoy and write better phrases!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
1921-03-24; Clare Sentinel
|Save page Remove page
|1 of 9
small (250x250 max)
medium (500x500 max)
Extra Large
large ( > 500x500)
Full Resolution
This page
Loading content ...
: ^.^V*1; ~%t. V^?^'-. _,Cf^;vA S&''$. ??g«£? -•*"' Y Y.'-,.r<Vi£-:: r3pr»jei ■;-'-".V'j ■Ssm >IWMlir>f»r A-U .-*X. i^»»i^". w i»JL " i THE CLARE SDrnnTT r^-T^"1-^ w >*C ■3^ •*_.v"rr •y^^^g^yj;'*?. .>**- 1* ■-,"»*^>Jfr*»*^- 'iwi . w ml ry A A Official P&ef ^ j*.^ * « o* /- * I?" Glare County #~* v ** a 7£ ^ =tc Established JsWssaaasssawjssssw -vix\< • : 1878 CLARK, MICHIGAN. iHUBSDAYMURNING MAR. $4,. 1921. Haw Series: VoL S^HJ, 21 «■ - »^.. ALASKA Wis Not A Bad Investment It Appears. . COAL FIELDS P And Mines An Immense Source Of Wealth. ^' ~: We read In our histories tbat when Wm- H.8eward,t be secretary of state, negotiated s treaty with Russia for tbe purchase of Alaska, a territory tbat onr geographies called, * Russian America,11 it was felt that be bad made a mighty poor bargain. - S7,200,_ OQO was a good price to pay for icebergs with a few polar bears and seals thro a*n in. No one knew anything- abont its minerals; If it bad any* and no one thongbt of it eta -possessing any. ' agricultural possibilities. Its wonderful gold mines are matters of pretty general knowledge now while its immense coal fields, forests* and' faroiiug possibilities are littie known. Tbe following extracts from a railroad builder there.may interest many:. . Witb its untold coal tonnage, gi , Kantic - forests, fertile * agricultural and grazing lands, ' splendid • mercantile enterprises,., unsurpassed climate, and iniprovement appropriations by tbe United States government which -- represent a heavy total, Alaska is racing an extended era of prosperity, according to Frank' Baliaine, railroad builder and banker, of Seward,, v.-v.'i';.!'' >a-Aa.;:i:.\.:. ".' - "Alaska bas an area three tiroes the size of Texas, with a present population of but 50.000," said Mr. Baliaine. "Our mineral and agricultural resources are unlimited, and only time and labor, aided by capital, wiil reveal their true extent. The country, in spite of the. fact that it has been prominently in the public eye for 25 years, is stillfin an embryo state. .• y ■"'■*'■•'.■ - 'The clim&ts of Alaska is generally misunderstood by tbe people in the states. We have one of tbe most equable climates in tbe world. At Seward the average winter temperature is from 35 to to 40 degrees above zero, and the summer from €0 to 80 degrees. This is due to the close proximity of the Japanese current. For tbree months, May, June and ^Jult, we bave 20 hours of sunshine a day. TDe shortest .day of the year the sun shines from 9 o'clock in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. During fbe summer months - the foliage is tbe most luxuriant I have ever seen, almost every kind of wild flower blooming profusely. "Unquestionably the best thing Theodore Roosevelt did during bie term of office as president was the withdrawal of tbe coal lands of Alaska from settlement; ; At the time he was subjected to much criticism, but subsequent events have proven tbe wisdom of this action. The coal supply of the world is limited, and with the immense coal beds of Alaska in tbe bands of private capital no conservation wpuld be possible. ^ , "it is impossible to estimate tbe coal buried in Alaska., Some of tbe surface veins extend"32 feet in 'width. Coal can be placed On tbe docks in Seattle for not ta exceed ,$4; per ton.. When it is considered that tbe coal beds on tbe Pacific coast are practically nil tbe importance of this fact to the Coast country is easily see*** Secretary Daniels of the United States nary has worked bard 'for the new railroad project, because witb opening of tbe coal bed tbe navy fue supply will be solved*- ' At the present time a large quontity of the government coal is purchased in Wales, and costs from 98 to 19 per ton. "In lvL5 the salmon canning industry of Alaska represented a total of 915,000,000. The. halibut fisheriel also do a big business. The Grand i^--*Trunk railroad has a ' practical monopty on that, beause it can place tbe product In tbe eastern market 24 boors sooner than any otber Unas Tbe total volume of. business last year between Alaska and Seattle was mora than 970,000,000. '"Thousands of acres of spruce forests will furnish material for ptflp enough to supply the world witb paper lor many .years, and aa soon as : eraneportatlOn is established It is expensed large paper mills will b* esSahlished at Seward. •*Jfo uaoe of tbe old-time "wild aad wooly" western oamp fa die- '' oes irfbln tn itrrard The daaoa hall '-aad sasabUng. have bean eliminated Mi aba saoe* pnrttafnical~ 2i«w Bag- mtm wosUd ha saelened wish oor mefotfki BsWj'insiiiB».. Sowar* m two bavsini,. etty wasar syaeem. Of Road Commissioners On March 16. Met The board of County Road Commissioners met at Harrison on tbe 16tb inst. and transacted some little business of general interest, beside auditing bills. _ .*"-*':'':-*.o'< ■-"'. *• The three miles of road between Pratt's cornsr and Dover were added to tbe oouoty road system.- - On application of tbe township board of Grant township the building 5 dying in. infancy. of a mile uf road und^r tbe 50-50 plan was /approved, such 'road being described as follows: Commencing at the section corner common to sections 1 and 12 of Grant tovwnship snd 6 and 7 of Sberidan township-, thence west one mile. -«*—----; >. ..-.■•-...-.,.-. ' Under tbe same plan, tbere was taken over 1>£ miles ia Surrey township as follows: Commencing on tbe '■'AA Carl August Kapplioger. ' - -Carl August Kapplinger 'was born in Waldbacb, Wutaoberg, Germany, hfarch 16, IK50 and peacefully passed away at bis borne in Grant township, laat t Thursday / afternoon at 1:30 o'clock-. March 17, 1921, aged 71 years and 1 day. after five weeks of ssvere illness from pneumonia and asthma having been more or less helpless since be first took sick- He was married to Miss Caroline Rappoid Jan. 2S, 1875. Kigbt children came to. bless tbis union; one Tbw children living are, George, at home, Chris, Wm. ana Mrs. Emma Krell of Grant« Mrs. r KaroSIne " Eliedge of ELansas, III., Mrs. Rose > Weburg of South Haven, Micb., and Charles of Saginaw. Eitfbc grand children and one great grand caiid wbom he dearly loyed also survive him. ! '-• June 18, 1381 tbe family moved to Cbarlestown, III., residing on a farm BUSWESS FARMEB^y Retracts Statement Made Agsinst T. W. Michael. As announced |n a local laat week T. W. Michael had begun libel case against tbe Michigan Business Farmer for false statements made against him. .Below we publish a letter written by the editor of tbe Michigan Business Farmer to O. A. Reading' Attorney.^ In vi«w of the fact that - tbe Michigan Business Farmer is re- Vera GwendoJyo Raymond. Ionia arid Houghton * Lake State j for several, years, then moving to Road at the southeast corner .of the Gano, 111^ Jan. 15, 18H4 he moved to northwest quarter: of the northwest Clare, Mich , where he has resided quarter of Sec. 12, thence northerly j ever since. " , l —1— along said highway to tbe town line j- In youth Mr. Kapplinger was very common to Surrey and Lincoln town- devoted to bis home and parents and ships. ', "' ' '" ' ' "- " ' ■'1 The application of Hatton township for tbe building of 1%£ miles . of road, commencing at the northwest coi-usr of section five, tbeace east t?o tbe Pere Marquette railroad was rejected. . .. . ...^ ...;. A resolution was adopted* requiring ail:men doing ..maintenance and construction work to put ib tjen hours a day. '.. ►-■ ■•■:.•.'■:■ -- ■:-■■ Delbert Pendell. Was born in Mason, Ingham Co.. July 4, 1871, and died March 11, 1921, at the U. of M. Hospital at Ann Arbor, age 49 years, 8 montbs, 7 days. He lived at Mason till 9 year's of age when he canoe witb bis- parents to Gratiot Oo, where be lived till he was united in marriage with Mies Charlotte Bennett, Aug. 23, 1894. To "tbis union two children were born, Leonard Freeman at home and Mrs. Pheoba Augusta Cole of Alma. His father preceded him June 20, 1894, and bis mother Jan. 11, 1907. Mareb 28, 1902, be moved witb bis family to Clare Co. settling on the farm in Sberidan Twp. where he lived till his death, except nearly 4 yrs. be worked for Clark and Brooks on what Is now known as the Langwortoy farm. When he arrived at tbis place it could not be called a farm for there wae no clearing to speak of, but by hard work be succeeded in making a farm of it. He beld a scbool office till he was elected Justice of Peace 5 years ago, which he bas held up till bis death He leaves to mourn bis loss bis wife, two children, four grandchildren, a sister, Mrs. Alice Cunningham of Ithaca, three . brothers Leonard F. and Frank U. of Nortb Star, and Wm. Albert of Alma, wbo brought bis body from Ann Arbor to Clare Mareb 12 They were all presefltat tire funeral. Also many other relatives and friends. He was a loving husband and father and respected by ail who knew him. Tbe funeral was held in the Methodist, church at Clare, conducted by Rev. Frank Bates and the body laid to rest in Oberry Grove cemetery. .'•-. ■*•>■■-.: - , -' X. remained tbere until grown to msn- bood. :*>/ .- ' '..-■;■'■';> -^^f'A. ■■. '■•■>".'-•' Devoted to borne and family, be was a : splendid example - of tbat thrifty,reliable German stock, always busy, well grounded in morality and religion, be leaves a worthy heritage to those who now take up and carry on bis work. He was a good christian man and a member of St. John's Lutheran Church. ' Two weeks ago, the l daughter, Karoline, was called home and witb tbe family bave tenderly cared for tbeir loved one and done all that could , be done, but tbe Heavenly Father called blm home. . The funeral was conducted hy.Rev. H. Hoenecke and took place at tbe St. John's Lutheran Church Sunday afternoon after whicb he was laid to rest in Cberry Grove Cemetery. The flowers were many and beautiful and effectively showed the high respect in which the deceased was beld. * . . . , "Blessed are the dead which die in tbe Lord from henceforth: yea, saitb tbe Spirit, tbat tbey may rest from tbeir labours;- and their works do Waa born Jan. 16,1907, tn Sberidan Twp. Clare Co., where she bas always lived. She departed tbis li'e Mareb 15, 1821 at the age of 14 yr. 2 mo. Sbe waa a bright aod loyibg girl and bad many- girl friends and loved by all who know her and will be greatly miss6d in this community Sbe always attended the Elm Grove Snnday School until she was taken •ick In November. She was a patient sufferer op to tbe last. Sbe leaves to mourn, besides ber father and tracting their statements Mr. Micb- mother, two sisters, Mary and. Ava BYffiJBfJBAWHJET Last Week Said To Be A Great SUCC«3». . ael will drop proceeding against said paper.' y--.)..[.'. < 7 y: -'- ■•■ :'. '■'■'■'■■■•■:. -. Mt. Clemens, Mick * :''- -- ' ■■ a "A v'":; A;7 March 8, 1921 Mr. O. A. Reading, ^v^/ ;y Attoruey-and-CounseJlor-at-law, " Ciare, Michigan. ..:--■' -.-'.. /• ' ^ •" My dear sir: ~ ■•".-'. ,: ■ i .Your letter of February 19cb baa just been, called to my* attention upon my ■ return - from .tne hospital following an" operation. In reply thereto; I wish to empbatlcally' say* that we have no desire to do-Mr. Michael an injustice, - and I will be frank enough to state tbat the article to whicb you take exception should not bave been published. The only possible explanation I can give to tbe publication of this article, was tbat for a week or ten days prior to my going to the hospital I -was simply overwhelmed with work, which I was trying eo arrange to tide over my absence from office. Undoubtedly bad I given tbe matter a little fuller thought it would have been' handled in au entirely different way. ; " AVery truly yours Forrest Lord* - , Editor. :. just four days across death. The funeral was beld at the Kim Grove cburcb, conducted by Rev. Frank Bates, and tbe body laid to rest in Cherry Grove - cemetery witb just a driveway between tbe two- '" '-:■•. ;■ r ,7: *>y\'- ■ ■, - -x Y X. follow tbem. Tractor CATERPILLAR" Wiil Doubtless - Attention. X. Draw ORCUITC00RT Convenes.:' At -H arrison March 28. On CRIMINAL CASES Larger In Number This 1 ., ..Than Usual, Term nell. on* brotnor, Winston, all at bo mo two grandmothers,: one grandfather besides otber relatives. Her uncle, Delbert'. Pendell preceded ber Little did the people of this com munity realise bow many hobos tbey were harboring in their midst until tbe knlgbts of the road congregated i ~ at the K of P. castle bail last Monday ' A Big evening to attend tbe bobo banquet* j :"~; -, Tbere were bobos of every color* shape, size, nationality and dress. Some tbat were a combination of all tbis and some tbat bad uo::c ui tbe qualities at all. - - -<■ > • - The orderly manner in which the! large Crowd was bandied must be' exeditsd to tbe Chief of Police.' Jess SK AUCTION Sales Noted This Week For The Near Future. BOWLER SALES Affair Occupying Days. Two Church News, In tbis issue appears the half page ad of Tony Aboard, telling about tbe * Cletrac", a caterpillar, tractor, one of wbicb is at Clear Creek rancb - in service. Mr. Acbard informs us tbat Thos. Maltby of Lake used one of these.last summer and found it a great Buccess. P --,'...'■■'•; Notice."Of Election. In Metnoriam. Dearest Father thou bast left us, And our loss we deeply feel: '-".■■■ 1 But it's God that has bereft us, ' He can all our sorrows beal. Yet again we hope to meet tbee, When tbe day of life is fled: •When in Heaven in joy to greet tbee Where no farewell tear ie shed. ' Weep not tbat his toils are over, ". "..- Weep not that bis race is run; God grant we may rest as calmly When onr work, like bis, is done. . Till then we yield witb gladness, Our Father to Him to keep; And rejoice in the sweet assurance "He givetb His loved one sleep.'* ..:'.■' Mrs. Delbert Pendell -j . ■ 'A'■''■■ and Family. Millinery. Stylish prices. Bprlng bats, resvonable W. 5tb St. Mrs H C Ball: electric lighting plant, and all tbw comforts ot borne. "Living ia bat yery little higher tban In tbe states, and good wages prevail. -' •Tbe tourist trade is beoocnlg gutte a factor In Alaska's life, and wtU ba mora especially so when the raltread is completed to Fafrbaaka. i Osur sosneir wlg-bompara very fateinMf WatSv SbSt Wf BwUSQrtaaVd.* . Notice is hereby given to the electors of the city of Clare that at tbe annual election to be beld in this city tbe first Monday in April, tbe same be ing Monday April 4tb, the following officers will be voted for, viz: Mayor, Clerk, Treasurer. Justice of Peace, full term, also for eacb of tbe three wards of tbe city. Supervisor, Alder* man, and Constable, also tbe following State officers and amendments; two Justices of the Supreme Court, two Regents of the University of Michigan, Superintendent of Public Instruction, ' member of the State Board of Kdacatioo, two members of tbe State Board of Agriculture, State Highway Commissioner, also Justice of Supreme Court, to fill 31st 1923, also an .* amendment to. article ten of tbe constitution relative to paying compensation to persons who served in the late World War. ,, .-.,<.-:, -' .. ,. The aboye election will be held at tbe central polling place, city ball, in said city. * '7 ■■...■'- The polls will be open from seven (7) o'clock A. M. until flys (5) o'clock P. M. on the above said date. Dated tbis 17th day of March 1921. i-Xy^?-:: A. L. Rogers, City Clerk. ■'-.'' ' '21-2 Court opens on March 28 with a fair sized calendar for tbis county, including five criminal cases of small dimensions. As u»uait tbere are several cases tbat have been continued several times.' v ' > Cbimikal Tbe People vs. Eldoris Whittord. Assault, witb intent to do graat bodily barm. t The People vs. James Fitzpatrick. Assault and battery. ' r: . Tbe People Vs. Jobn Eifeer. Violation of liquor law. ' - The People . vs. Vivan Douglas. Grand larceny, y-' ■ \y The People vs. George Herdman. Gross Indecency*. -/ .;,.-.'■.- -^ Issues of Fact . Clare Hdw. and Imp. Oo. vs. C. A. Kleman. Assumpsit. Lewis Fairman vs. Floyd Graham et. al. Assumpsit. -Aaron O. Fish vs. Frank Sutton et. 1 . Trespass on the. case. ' . . s ;. - Albert H. Kidd vs. Settie Allman. Assumpsit. s''. *■'. t -;*•'" y Ellis M. Harrison va. Joseph- H, Russell. Assumpsit. Cbas. Klinger vs. Jas. A. Reeder. Trespass on the case. Jas. B. Grayes vs. King BlacKledge Assumpsit. Ohakckby * * Elmore S. Granger va. Eugene. Carpenter. BUI to set aeide fraudulent deed. .":. ^ , - y ,- Roy Bingham ys Oral Bingham, Divorce, *-■-•" .■ -■^=..-,-n.' Arthur H. Rose ts. Dan T. Cham- Card of Thanks We sincerely thank ail onr neigh, bore and frienda for their kindness and assistance In tbe sickness end death of- onr husband aad fatbatv ■specially - would . wt tbank all fair tea beautiful floral oflarUiga aad itrOas who fturnlsbsTd teams and i - Mgsy start snaapliagar aad OMIsWaa. ocrasiu. »u> «w Lizzie. Pcmeroy vs. Anson Pomeroy Divorce. Emily M. Sbafer vs, Jobn P. Sbaf- er. Divorce; Eldoris Whitford vs. Amy B. Field. Bill to qniet title. Ray Herr et. al. vs. Frank G. Rood et. al. Bill to reform dead. • George Abbott vs. Pearl Abbott. Divorce. - In the matter of the petition of tbe Auditor General for tbe sale of certain lands tor taxes. The .calender also contains live cases in whicb no progress bas been made during the year.* - * (All services on Central Standard time. ■■ -,.: • ., ;; :,4. _ MBTHODie'f EPISCOPAL. , -.'■,, REV. E. W- DAVIS. PASTOR. , - Morning watch service, 7 to 8 a. m. Morning worship, 10 a. no. . (Easter'theme) - -,'...•- . '-' Baptism an-3 reception of members. Sunday scbool 11:30. ': - ■ -.-,..>, . . .,, * A. Bruce Gibbs, Supt. Epworth League 6:00. Easter program 7 p, m. A welcome*to you- Wby not bring some flowers to church for Easter and distribute to thasidk. v - Ladies Aid meets-on Friday at tbe home of Mrs. Simpson. ' *'.'', HERRICK '.--•' -Sunday school 1:30. Lulu Badgley Supt. "- - ? '.'.*' ' ' 'v" .^-* r-■----- Easter program 2:30 . You are welcome. CONG RE QATIONAL Rev. G. P. Badgley, Pastor. At tbe morniQB service baptiBm will be administered to several candidates and several will be received into the church. Tbe special program will be tbe rendition of "Love Triumphant," a story of tbe first Easter tide, and adapted from Tor, a street - boy of Jerusalem. The reader, Mrs. Jas. Bicknell, will be assisted b y the Chorus Choir, directed by Mrs. O. M. Jones. A abort session ; of Sunday school will follow. Union meets with Mrs. Dr. Dunlop. Literary meeting. Tbe Ladies Missionary society with Mrs. Norris Elden on Tuesday. FBEB METHODIST '. REV. E1JUI3 MELLOTIE, PASTOR ' Sunday scbool at 10 a. m. followed by class meeting. ' Preaching in the evening at 7:00. Midweek prayer meeting Wednesday evening at 7:30. ^. CHUBCH OF GOD, ..•...." . Sunday services beld at tbe borne of W. S. Teeter, at 114 E. 5th street. Come and' .bring aume one with you. Strangers especially invited. s»unday Sohooi at 10:00, preaching at 11:00. . Evening service at 7:00 Cottage , prayer meeting,' Tuesday evening at the home of Mrs. Groves on W. Eighth St. '«•".,- '" >■; baptist - - • ... .... ^ Rev. J-"C. Sooney, Pastor.' , . Morning 'services at 10:15. Evening 7:15. - Prayer meeting Friday evening 7:30. Rev. Carl E. Dahl- Btroin will preach morning and evening. ; >. :--. ,\\ .- ... i. >J SBETaiDAN CHURCH Service at Sheridan cburcb at 2:30 p. m. Rev. Dablstrom will preach. • catholic . . -- REV. J. J. ttOALUBTSa, riSTCS Services 8:30 a, m. :- LUTH»*A!t ■ HUGO H. HOBKKCkJS, PASTOR. English service and Lord's Supper at 10:00 a.m. , •■• Snnday school at 11;16. HBRMANSDALE r : Services at 2:80 p. m. .. —-,:,..... the river of j Hampton, and his capable as-istant, y. j To Roland, Dyer goes the honor of the evening for tbe eats. Tbis was demonstrated by several wbo were seen to' make repeated trips for a third and 'fourth helping ot cbuw. Dne credit must be shown L S. Fa'r- man for to him was left tbe evening's entertainment and it sure was fine. -* K Judge Thurston and his baby were on tbe job. When his honor called court to order, the first prisoner before the har was the same child be bad < been fathering all tbe evening and wbo later turned out to be O. A. Derby. ■.••■-.,-<"-. v: -,.-.- • The leading entertainment of tbe evening consisted of three sparring - S.z sales noticed tbis week and to tnese we call the careful attention of our readers. ... 7AAA-yA7- qhab. A. Heiser - - --. —* j Tomorrow x Chas. Heiser, whose former sale was spoiled by a fierce storm, will offer a dne lot of stock, ; tools etc. at tbe (arm >£ mile south i of Artbur Town Hail. We trust bis j friends will make an extra .effort to i attend. .-■ V; :'' . - rj Wm J Maxwell On Tuesday, March " 29, Mr. Maxwell ban a large' sale just nortb of Herrick.- As will be: seen - from list* in tdis. jsAue. be bas a good lot of stock and a doe lot of tools. A farmer can Snd almost any - tool be desires bere. . sjale . oegins at 10 a. en. and lunch will be served. "1*hos. Groves Auctioneer.' r V. P. and J. C. Cash. On Mar. 23 these gentleman have a large sale at Sum mitt Station. ' The ... <xrj. matches i in Duncan's Anditorinm>-|-mot'0i. dar3 Wjh tttkte y<ra ^bere yery The first - preliminary was between Jacob Walker and Raymond Wilkinson wbile Alfred Doherty and Wiilard Bicknell opposed eacb otber in the second. Corkey Smith of Clare "and Kid Can of Cadillac were the participants in tbe last preliminary. Tbis was clean sport. The. bouts were not prize rights but sparring matches,- for points only, - - : .'-' --.._' X 'Now Another. Card of Thanks We wish to ybaok tbe kind friends atad neighbors for saaSr ktstfily aasist- aaoa aad sba beaatlfai flowers fas our loved one, also Bav. Frank Basse for •ortdas wards, sfja> JDalbetft PandaU '' SaHl*OfelMlSaV --.*.r-- ■- Hotel Proposition. ~" The Doherty*7 Hotel proposition in com en on ' witb practically all large business transactions, bas developed a few phases wbicL takes time to arrange. All parties concerned bave pushed tbe proceedings as rapidly as legal processes will permit. All necessary contracts will be signed and securities given just as soon &s every thing is legally ready, wbicb . will be in the near future. There has not been any laying down on the job by any one. These faces do not seem to be tborougtrdy understood by a few. We hope the citizens of Clare see this matter in the right spirit, and all keep boosting for tbe City of Clare. ' - ■'■' v r Com. - ' HILDA GERBER Does 'A Poultry Stunt Housekeeping. Beside We are informed that Hilda Gerber, a girl only twelve years old, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Geo. Gerber, has recently done something sufficiently commendable to deserve mention. In the sickness of her mother, sbe not only did the • housework ; and cared for the. Bick mother, but did a little. poultry business on tbe side. On the 5th of February she set two ducks on ben's eggs, one of them batching 15 chicks, the other 14 and these doing so well, sbe at oncje set two more ducks and already 19 more chicks have appeared. i These ducks must surely be setters. nicely, . As will be aeon by list, in this issue, toey o£l«r a good lot of stock, including a.regxater&d Percberr:. on mare and 100 breeding ewes, a good lot of tools, some nay and grain ' and a lot of household goods. Sale begins at 10 a. m. and lunch will be served. Geo. Davison 4s auctioneer. - .'* 'j-ASOJ-f T. 0"W?N On March 30, Jason T. Owen has a good sale op Sec. 31, Surrey town- ship.. Beside a good lot of stock,, tools, etc. be offers a Chevrolet car- Sale begans at 10 a. ; m." and lunch' will be servad at noon, j. Edgar York anccioneer. '.*."■".; Jas. M. Wellman - .! O-ving to the failure i of bis wife's health, Mr. Wellman bas-a sale on Mar. 31, selling a fire dairy herd: that he has beeo building up. . Seethe long array of tine cows. A fine lot of tools will also be sold aad some other things. People can again. use toe motors to reacn LiakeQeorge. JSaie begins at 12:30 with Thos. Groves.- auctioneer. " * - Bowleb Bros. As noted elsewhere,: Bowler Brosr^ bave transposed dates for tbeir two- bie sales. On Apr. 5 comes the big registered atock sale, beginning at 11 a. m. This certainly should attract an acre of- people. .-- On tbe day- following, beginning at 9 a. noi. willJ be the'general farm sale. . See Seftti- . nel for fail lists next week. - One year ago the township of Lincoln elected Mrs. Elisabeth Blsrly township clerk and Miss Lillian billgren township treasurer. So ably have they discharged the 'duties of their offices tbat tbey bave no opposition for re-election. This year, airs. Effia Durum baa been nominated Tar treasurer in Vernon. 1-here are so dutiee connected with this ofBoa ^bat cannot be performed witb entire ssuiafaction by a woman, aad no oaa be offered wby ajik raoaiva anbetaatlat alMa^atasbebaadiof taa . North-west Coldwater Mrs. John Keeper returned home last week after a 3 weeks visit with ber daughter at Crystal Lake and ber son at Flint* Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sherman returned to their borne at Weidman Tuesday after spending a week here with old neighbors and friends. '? " " Miss Lillian Dove spent over Sunday with friends in Saginaw. Tbe dance at Dan Beais last Saturday night was well attended. All report a fine time. Mr. and Mrs. Friend Murray and son ulenden spent over Snnday at tbe home of her father, S. H. Dove. The Misses . Linda Murray, L»ela Moore and Mav Sloans attended the spelling contest beld at Brinton laat Satarday. ..'....-.. SAD ACCIDENT Old Man Falls Into LJrowns. Well And A peculiar and most regrettable accident which coat the life of Andrew, J. Riggs, and aged man living about four miles southeast of Harrison took place last Saturday night. .. It seema the man and wife live alone and in the evening the man took a pail and went to a shallow well some little distance away for water.-. Not returning, the wife it is reported concluded he bad gone to a neighbor's and she re— tired, having no search made for him* that nigbt. Tbe next morning sfae> called on some of tbe neighbors an**, tbey found that the man bad pitched bead foremost into the well and of. coarse drowned. We know no. ether particulars save tbat the man was. partially blind which may nave uvea*, tbe cause of the tragedy. ; To The Electors of Vernon Twp... Mrs. A. EL Smith of Kipling, 8aek., is here visiting her sister. Mrs. Albert Lockwood. They have not seen each' other, for forty years. Mrs. HiUlard J^oidge of Ooborg, ;Ont., a cousin; also accompanied aer for an extended Viet*. •-■■*-•.-;. -» 8ATUWUY Ohlt-Wo. 3 Gal*aaiaed tuba 88e, No. » <*sJvaudaed*a^9tc. - Sarria eb Htrs, - ■ Box Social. Aproi* Sale. There will ba goods) sale at day, atar. St, apron »s store oa lr- Havinsr received the nomination oa, tbe Republican ticket for township- treasurer ana feeling myself conipe- • test to assume tbe dutiee of that office, I will appreciate your support, at the April election. : Mrs. Effle Durnin. 21-2. ' We intend to have a box social' at ths Brand for the benefit of the sobool. -Apr-. 1. ComawMh boa and enloy a nice time. ^^ aTNJ?a^ Ife^*.-^^^ ^Mv'^ &$&'
Object Description
|1921-03-24; Clare Sentinel
|R.G. & F.A. Jefferies
|Thursday, March 24, 1921 issue of the Clare, Michigan newspaper. Published weekly. Began publication in 1896. Previously known as Clare Sentinel and the Democrat-Press.
|Clare (Mich.) - Newspapers; Clare County (Mich.) - Newspapers;
|Copyright Permission
|This material is in the public domain.
|1921-03-24; Clare Sentinel
|R.G. & F.A. Jefferies
|Thursday, March 24, 1921 issue of the Clare, Michigan newspaper. Published weekly. Began publication in 1896. Previously known as Clare Sentinel and the Democrat-Press.
|Clare (Mich.) - Newspapers; Clare County (Mich.) - Newspapers;
|Copyright Permission
|This material is in the public domain.
V^?^'-. _,Cf^;vA S&''$. ??g«£?
-•*"' Y Y.'-,.r


text:
Ann Romney, wife of former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, will be Salt Lake City on Friday, Oct. 4 — one day before the beginning of LDS General Conference — to sign copies of her new cookbook, "The Romney Family Table: Sharing Home-Cooked Recipes and Favorite Traditions."
The signing takes place from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Deseret Book in City Creek, 45 W. South Temple. The the full-color, hardback book by Utah's Shadow Mountain Publishing, cost $29.99 and will be available at the event.
|Join the Discussion
|Post a Comment
"The Romney Family Table" includes personal memories, holiday traditions and family photos taken over the last four decades. The 125 recipes range from Mitt's favorite meatloaf to the buttermilk pancakes shared with the Secret Service details at the end of the 2012 presidential campaign.
Copyright 2014 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


text:
New Balance W780V4 Trainers
- In Stock
2 reviews
- Delivery
- Next day delivery available
New Balance W780V4
The W780V4 by New Balance is a neutral running shoe that's perfect for both runners who are dedicated to their after work route or training for a marathon.
Built to last these trainers feature superior cushioning and a no-sew overlay upper for a construction that fits like a glove. Lightweight and breathable the mesh upper ventilates the foot, keeping it cool, dry and comfortable, while the blown rubber outsole and injection-moulded EVA ensure this running shoe lasts as long as you do.
Wear these trainers with a pair of running tights, sports bra and blue tank top for a coordinated workout look this season.
- W780V4 trainers by New Balance
- Neutral running shoe
- Superior cushioning
- No-sew overlay
- Breathable, lightweight mesh
- Blown rubber outsole
- Injection-moulded EVA for durability and comfort
Reebok Classic Leather Seasonal Ladies Fashion Trainers - Blue
- In Stock
1 review
- Delivery
- Next day delivery available
Reebok Classic Leather Trainers - Blue
Classic by name, classic by reputation, these iconic Reebok trainers are back in all their glory with this iconic leather edition. In true Reebok fashion they deliver smooth sporting style in a cool blue colourway.
Constructed with a leather upper, flat sport laces and a padded tongue, they offer unrivalled comfort and protection. Perforations to the forefoot provide ventilation throughout the day, whilst the cushioned ankle collar and thick outsole ensure a secure fit. Finished with branded detailing to the tongue, side and heel, they present a definitive street style.
Team these urban essential fashion trainers with your go-to pair of skinny jeans and a printed tee to stay cool and casual this season.
Useful info:
- Classic leather trainers by Reebok
- Perforated forefoot
- Flat laces
- Padded tongue
- Cushioned ankle collar
- Branding to tongue, side and heel
adidas AdiPure Key Flex Trainers - Blue/Multi
The AdiPure Key Flex trainer by adidas is a versatile training shoe suitable for all kinds of training activities.
Made in a one-piece layered mesh design with protective overlays, these trainers are comfortable and keep your feet supported. Flex grooves along the midsole allow natural, unrestricted movement, while the cushioned sole increases shock absorption which makes pounding the treadmill or pavement easier on your joints.
Wear these Key Flex trainers with a pair of adidas running tights, high impact sports bra and muscleback top for a streamlined workout look.
- AdiPure Key Flex trainers by adidas
- All-over graphic print
- Soft one-piece layered mesh upper for comfort and breathability
- Synthetic overlays for added support
- Medial and lateral adjustable midfoot support
- Flex grooves along midsole for natural, unrestricted movement
- Cushioned sole for increased shock absorption
- miCoach compatible
- NON MARKING rubber outsole
adidas Originals Honey Stripes Low Training Shoes
- Low stock, selling fast
4 reviews
- Delivery
adidas Originals Womens Honey Stripes Low Trainers - Blue/White
In a laid back, low-top style these Honey Stripes trainers by adidas Originals give the classic 80s sneaker a modern makeover ready for the season.
In a nautical blue and white colourway, these sneakers are perfect for hanging out with friends come the weekend. The low profile is the ultimate in relaxed styles, great for just slipping on and going out. The rubber toe guard protects against scuffs and scrapes, while the vulcanised rubber outsole means these trainers are hard wearing and will go the distance.
Wear these low-top sneakers with denim shorts and an adidas tee, adding a Firebird track top as the day gets cooler.
- Honey Stripes low profile trainers by adidas Originals
- Blue fabric; contrast white 3-Stripes
- Rubber toe guard
- Trefoil logo to tongue
- Vulcanised rubber outsole
adidas Originals Tech Super Training Shoes
- Low stock, selling fast
1 review
- Delivery
adidas Originals Womens Tech Super Trainers - Navy/Green
Taking the running aesthetic of the '90s classic and combining it with a low profile, the Tech Super trainers by adidas Originals provide long-distance comfort in a casual, everyday style.
Featuring a navy and green colourway, these trainers are given a fresh update. The air mesh upper keeps your feet well ventilated, while the injected midsole provides lightweight cushioning under foot. With a grippy rubber outsole these sneakers are ideal on all surfaces helping to keep you on your feet.
Wear these Tech Super trainers with a pair of skinny jeans, adidas tank top and Firebird track top for a coordinated off-duty look this season.
- Tech Super trainers by adidas Originals
- Air mesh upper
- Visa® terry lining
- Injected EVA midsole
- Grippy rubber outsole
- 3-Stripes branding
Vans Authentic Trainers
- Low stock, selling fast
2 reviews
- Delivery
Vans Authentic Plimsolls - Blue
These Authentic plimsolls by Vans are statement making in their vibrant blue canvas upper.
Featuring a fresh blue colourway with contrast brown laces and trims these plimsolls give this season's style a smart lift. With all the staple features, including a toffee bottom sole, of the classic, these plimsolls see you through season to season in style.
Wear these plimsolls with a pair of skinny jeans, blue vest top and zip through hoodie for a street style ready look that's perfect for the season.
Useful info:
- Authentic plimsolls by Vans
- Canvas upper
- Contrast laces and trims
- Vans logo to heel
Nike Air Max Thea Trainers - Blue/Pink
The Air Max Thea trainer by Nike is perfect for women who want plenty of cushioning and support as well as a sleek, understated style.
The upper of these trainers combines minimal textile with synthetic and leather overlays for targeted support that maintains its lightweight appeal. Mesh to the forefoot and perforations to the heel maximise breathability from toe to heel, while the visible Max Air technology provides maximum impact protection as you pound the pavement. The Phylon midsole doubles as an outsole for traction, durability and reduced bulk.
Wear these Thea trainers with Nike shorts, high-intensity sports bra and bold pink racer back top for a coordinated and cool workout look this season.
- Air Max Thea by Nike
- Minimal textile-based upper for lightweight feel
- Mesh to forefoot and perforations at heel for breathability
- Visible Air-Sole unit to heel for maximum impact protection
- Phylon midsole for lightweight cushioning
- Solarsoft sockliner for superior comfort
- Phylon midsole doubles as outsole for traction, durability and reduced bulk
Vans Sk8 Hi Reissue Stars and Stripes Hi-Top Plimsolls
- Low stock, selling fast
2 reviews
- Delivery
Vans Stars and Stripes Reissue Hi-top Trainers
A reissue of a skate shoe classic, these hi-top trainers by Vans offer a pop of preppy Americana to your new season casual look.
The contrast stars and stripes create a fun patriotic feel to these women's trainers and they showcase your flirty laid back vibe. Made from textile, the upper is soft, durable and lightweight for a smooth, supportive and snug fit. Their chunky white rubber outsole supplies the cushioning needed underfoot and the branding to the tongue is an authentic Vans finish.
Wear these hi-top plimsolls with skinny jeans and a top for a coordinated, street-inspired off-duty look. Add a zip up hoodie on cooler days.
Useful info:
- Hi-top trainers by Vans
- Stars and Stripes print
- Branding to tongue
- White rubber outsole
- Trademark stripe to side
Nike Dunk Sky High Essential Ladies Trainers
- Low stock, selling fast
4 reviews
- Delivery
Nike Dunk Sky High Essential Ladies Trainers
Elevating your street style, these Dunk Sky Hi trainers from Nike feature a concealed wedge heel, front lace fastening, padded ankle collar and pull-on tab to the back keep you comfortable. Since 1985 the Nike Dunk has been breaking the rules and with contemporary zigzag patterning to the back, the Dunk Sky is no different. The famous Swoosh adorns the side and a branded tab is given to the tongue finishing a truly iconic look.Colour: Teal.
Nike Roshe Run Training Shoes
- Low stock, selling fast
3 reviews
- Delivery
Nike Womens Roshe Run Trainers - Navy/Pink
Designed to be ultra versatile, the Roshe Run trainers by Nike can be worn with or without socks, dressed up or down, for walking or just taking it easy.
With a full mesh upper these trainers are incredibly lightweight and breathable keeping your feet cool and comfortable, while the Solarsoft sockliner offers premium comfort. Inspired by the practice of meditation, the Roshe Run sneaker is all about simplicity - the sleek navy upper is understated letting the contrast pink branding make an impact and neon green stitching adds a vibrant twist.
Wear these Roshe Run trainers with your favourite skinny jeans and vest top for a laid back look this season. Add a hoodie on cooler days.
- Roshe Run trainers by Nike
- Waffle outsole for traction
- Full mesh upper for breathability
- Phylon midsole for lightweight cushioning
- Solarsoft sockliner for premium comfort
- Cushioned collar for protection around ankle
- EVA foam outsole for lightweight impact absorption and durability


text:
A Community prayer vigil will be held at Community Clubhouse in Crisp County on Sunday, September 14,2014 at 7pm.
August 6, 2007
Albany-- Albany and Dougherty County law enforcers come together to improve their communication and come up with ways to protect you better. They say cooperation is vital for them to be successful in fighting crime.
Dougherty and Albany Chiefs and other leaders emerged from an hour and a half closed door meeting at the Law Enforcement Center Monday afternoon. "We're trying to get together and get our ducks in a row," said Dougherty County Sheriff Jamil Saba.
All the safety big wigs were in one room discussing crime in our area and how they can work to curb it. "We do have a lot of crime in Albany that we don't need. We need to get rid of it," said Saba.
To get rid of it, each agency needs to find out what other departments are doing and then use that information to work together. "It's always good to sit down face to face and talk," said Dougherty County Police Chief Don Cheek.
That's the key they say-- communication.
"When a crime occurs in one jurisdiction, we give out a hot sheet immediately to all of our officers for safety more or less. When a crime occurs in the county, I want to know about it immediately," said Albany State University Police Chief Roberson Brown.
Although they wear different uniforms, crime doesn't have uniformity. It crosses city and county lines. "Bad guys don't look at city limits and county limits and they don't look at whether they're on campus or off campus," said Chief Cheek.
"We all have the same similar issues but working together as a team, that lets the community know that we're working to enhance the law enforcement service we provide," said Chief Brown.
These chiefs say the teamwork starts right now. "We already have a meeting scheduled for next month to come up with ideas and we have each other's e-mail so we can send out information," said Brown. So lawbreakers better beware.
"This is what we're here for, to fight crime. We're here to serve the people of this community and the way to serve these people is to get these hoodlums off the street," said Sheriff Saba.
You'll now have the green, the blue and whatever other color that fights crime, now all on the same team.
Some of those same safety leaders will meet again in the near future to discuss the reorganization of the SWAT team. They're expected to develop a written protocol on how the unit should be run.
feedback: firstname.lastname@example.com?subject=ChiefCommunication
P.O. Box 3130
Albany, GA 31706
(229) 446-1010
FCC Public File
(229) 446-4005
EEO Report
Closed Captioning


text:
Eagles Open 2009-10 Season versus Lincoln (Pa.)November 11, 2009
BALTIMORE -- The Coppin State men's basketball team will open its 2009-10 season on Friday (Nov. 13) as it hosts Lincoln (Pa.) in the opening round of the Coppin State Classic.
The Eagles and Lions will tip off at 7:30 p.m. following the Coppin State women's game against West Virginia State.
CSU will conclude Coppin State Classic play on Saturday (Nov. 14) as it hosts West Virginia Tech at 7:30 p.m. Both the games on Friday and Saturday will be played in the Coppin Center.
After tying for third place in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference during the 2008-09 season, Coppin State will look to move up the league standings as seven letterwinners and two starters return this season.
Coppin State advanced to the semifinals of the MEAC Tournament before bowing out against eventual champion Morgan State. The Eagles finished the season with a 13-19 overall record and a 9-7 slate in MEAC competition.
The biggest obstacle facing the Eagles entering the season will be attempting to replace Tywain McKee. McKee, who was named the 2008-09 MEAC Player of the Year, averaged 18.4 points, 5.7 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.8 steals per game last season. McKee, who earned all-conference honors four times, broke the schools career scoring record last season.
Coppin State also lost seniors Brian Chesnut (4.6 ppg) and Chuka Iloegbu (4.3 ppg) to graduation.
Junior Sam Coleman and sophomore Michael Harper each were named to the MEAC Preseason All-Conference team. Coleman was named to the first team, while Harper was named to the second team.
The Eagles return a pair of starters in Harper and junior Eddie Hayden and five other players that played in at least 22 games.
Haper earned preseason second-team honors after finishing second on the Eagles averaging 9.3 points per game on his way to being named to the MEAC All-Rookie Team last season. He was second in the conference shooting 41.4 (46-of-111) percent from the three-point line, while his field goal percentage of 46.2 (98-of-212) was 12th in the league.
Hayden played in 29 games and made 16 starts on the season. He averaged 3.3 points and 2.1 rebounds per contest.
Coleman, Vince Goldsberry, Mike Buckley, Lenny Young and Ceslovas Kucinskas also return for the Eagles.
Coleman was named to the preseason first team after averaging 8.2 points and 4.6 rebounds per game. He led the Eagles with 21 blocked shots and a 47.2 field goal percentage.
Goldsberry, a junior, averaged 7.1 points and 1.3 assists per game while playing in 31 contests.
Buckley was one of the Eagles top outside shooters last season having made 34.4 (22-of-64) percent of his three-point attempts. He averaged 7.0 points and 2.5 rebounds per game.
Young also is a solid outside shooter and averaged 3.8 points and 1.7 rebounds per game, while Kucinskas gives the Eagles an inside presence after averaging 1.4 points and 1.4 rebounds per contest.
Head coach Ron Fang Mitchell, who is in his 24th season as the head coach of the Eagles, brought in five newcomers to the program.
Junior college transfers Kareem Brown and Quinston Reggins along with freshmen Branden Doughty, George Jackson and Jonathan Landry round out the Coppin State contingent.
Coppin State will unveil the new 4,100-seat Physical Education Complex on Dec. 5 against rival Morgan State.


text:
Plastic surgeons say they have determined the proper way to perform the first full face transplant.
A few months ago surgeons in France performed the world's first partial face transplant. Now, by practicing on cadavers, researchers in the U.S. have outlined the steps necessary to replace an entire face with a donor face a transplant they estimate would take up to 15 hours.
Doctors are currently reviewing candidates for a full face transplant.
5600 Avenue A
All content © Copyright 2000 - 2014 Worldnow and KCBD. All Rights Reserved.
For more information on this site, please read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.


text:
Securely connects you to portions of your medical record:
Online second opinions from top specialists:
Securely request a copy of your Images Studies from our Images Library:
Physician-to-physician medical record access:
Medical record system for physicians in private practice:
Find phone numbers and email addresses for Cleveland Clinic Online Services:
Enter the first letters of a doctor's last name.
Use filters to find the right specialist.
Use filters to find a doctor in a particular department.
Use filters to find any doctor at a particular facility.
Use filters to find a family doctor, internist or pediatrician.
Use filters to find a primary care pediatrician or pediatric specialist.
Print a directory listing of all physicians for each institute.
Request an Appointment
Contact Us Online
Explore our new 3D Map
Research & Innovations
Toll-Free: 866.320.4573
Script section containing code for Liveperson Chat Solution
Call Us Toll Free:
866.223.2273 x1234
A Phase II Trial of Cytarabine and Clofarabine in Patients With Relapsed or Refractory Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)
Drugs used in chemotherapy, such as cytarabine and clofarabine, work in different
ways to stop the growth of cancer cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping them
from dividing. Giving more than one drug (combination chemotherapy) may kill more cancer
This phase II trial is studying how well giving cytarabine together with
clofarabine works in treating patients with relapsed or refractory acute lymphoblastic
Study Status: Completed
Verified by
Southwest Oncology Group
November, 2013
Study Type: Interventional
Study Design: Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment, Masking: Open Label, Primary Purpose: Treatment
Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer CenterCleveland, Ohio 44195United States
Community Oncology Group at Cleveland Clinic Cancer CenterIndependence, Ohio 44131United States
Cleveland Clinic - WoosterWooster, Ohio 44691United States
This information is abridged to display results relevant
only to Cleveland Clinic. To see complete record visit
Information obtained from ClinicalTrials.gov on
Link to the current ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Need Help Paying Your Medical Bills?
We comply with the HONcode standard
for trustworthy health information: verify here.


text:
Gissy @ Clarke QuayThis photo was shot on film. Taken by quaisoir with a Lomography Diana Mini (available in our Online Shop) loaded with Lomography X-Pro Slide 200 ISO (35mm) film in All Around Singapore, Singapore. These tags describe this photo: quaisoir, lomotion, diana mini, half frame, singapore, lomo xpro 200, people, and portrait. This photo can also be found in the album Laziza's Baby Shots.
Please login to get more out of this site
You are currently not logged in, do so now to add comments, like articles as well as photos, submit to competitions, translate articles and gain access to unlimited photo upload! If you are not registered yet, go here to find out more about Lomography and join now! If you just want a limited account for now you can use Twitter or Facebook. We would love to have you as a member here!
6 people like this photo
Liking photos helps us to present the best ones to you and others. 6 people like this photo. 6 people like this photo: lomoteddy, japsix, jorganelle, bkspicture, strummy, and devildi.
1 comment
cool shot!!!
Where is this?
Nearby popular photos – see more
Nearby LomoLocations
Urban Adventures in Tanjong Pagar KTM Railway Station
A railway station in the middle of the urban city that has a history dating back to the inde…
The Final Destination
The historical railway station located at Tanjong Pagar, Singapore is owned by Keretapi Tana…
Universal Studios Singapore
The 2nd Universal Studios theme park in Asia located in the Resorts World on Sentosa island,…
Take a Walk in Everton
On a fine afternoon, I was walking around hoping to find a suitable spot for shooting. I wal…