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Chapter 1 : King's Cross Station
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King's Cross Station
Damien looked around the busy train station, and turned back to look at his parents with a confused look. "What platform did the wizard say?" he asked again.
"I told you," his mother said catching up to him, and shooing him along. "Platform 9 ľ, he told us there is a barrier. Come on, we've only got fifteen minutes until the train leaves." She pushed him forward.
Damien's father came up behind them, pushing Damien's trolley in front of him. "He's nervous, leave him be Georgia." His father said, and stopped. "Here you go, you can push your own trolley."
Damien only nodded, and began to push his trolley closer to Platform nine. He quickly remembered the instructions given to them from the wizard, Neville Longbottom, who had come to visit them. He had told them that the brick pillar between Platforms nine and ten was the gate to the Platform for Hogwarts.
Quickly enough he spotted the barrier, and looking to his parents for more confidence, he saw them nod, and he quickly walked towards the barrier. He breathed in and out slowly as his trolley neared the wall, and closed his eyes quickly waiting for impact. But, instead he felt himself continue to go forward, and he fluttered his eyes open to let them fall on an amazing sight.
Students, adults, stood every where. Some wearing wizarding robes, and some wearing ordinary clothes; "Muggle clothes," Professor Longbottom had called them.
Standing still, Damien heard the amazed 'awes' behind him, and he looked to his parents quickly. "This is so cool!" he exclaimed with a grin.
His father chuckled, while his mother continued to look around amazed. They had never seen anything like it. Regaining his composer, Damien stepped further on to the platform, and with his parents following close behind he made his way towards the bright steam engine.
"Damien, wait." Both his parents said distantly behind him. He turned around quickly and saw that they were no longer following him, but standing further away. Quickly, not wanting to be separated from his parents, he made his way towards them. As he drew closer he saw why his parents had stopped.
There stood a familiar man, who Damien recognized to be Harry Potter, their old friend. He found it odd that he would be here, in a wizarding place, when it dawned on him; he was a wizard too!
"Ah," said Harry smiling, "this must be Damien. You've grown a lot since I last saw you."
Damien gave a small smile, feeling very shy suddenly. "Are you a wizard?" he asked without being able to contain himself.
Harry looked a little surprised by the question, but nodded. "I suppose this means your parents never told you that I was, huh?"
Damien nodded, and looked to his parents. "How come you didn't tell me?"
Georgia shrugged. "I never really thought about it. Though I did wonder if we would be seeing him here when we came. Is your son returning to Hogwarts this year?" Georgia asked looking back at Harry.
Harry smiled brightly. "Both of my sons; James is returning for his third year, and my second son, Albus, is coming for his first." Harry replied. "Hold on, I will go get them."
Damien watched as Harry left them and walked over to a group of redheads. There were two children though, who had the same head of black hair, but the other children and adults had red hair. Harry talked quickly to a pretty woman with red hair, and he watched as she looked over at them. She had a large smile on her face, and waved to them.
He saw from the corner of his eye his parent's wave back, and he continued to watch as the group of redheads and raven haired people move over to them. A small girl and boy, the girl with black hair and the boy with red, looked to be too young to be going to Hogwarts, but and older girl with brown hair, and a boy with black hair seemed to be about his age. A few paces behind them was an older boy with flaming hair as well, with glasses framing his brown eyes. Behind him stood thing adults, all smiling.
"Hello again," the woman who Damien guessed to be Mrs. Potter.
"Georgia, Adam, and Damien, I would like you to meet my sons James and Albus," he said pointing to the older boy and then the one to look about Damien's age. "My daughter, Lily," he said pointing to the younger girl. "My niece and nephew, Rose, and Hugo. I have an older one, Harry, but he's graduated from Hogwarts already." He finished pointing to the young boy and girl who looked his age. "Rose is entering her first year as well."
"Hello," she kindly, smiling at Damien.
"Hi," was all Damien forced himself to say. She seemed nice, and Albus looked just as shy as he was. But when Damien turned to look at him, Albus gave him a small smile, "I'm Damien."
Albus nodded. "Hi," he said quietly.
"Well, I guess you should all get on to the train." Harry said. Everyone began hugging their parent's goodbye, and Damien turned to his mother and father. He hugged his mother first, and just as he turned to his father, somebody screeched just behind him.
"Oscar, he's over there! I found him!"
Damien watched as a tall girl with long black hair run over to where James Potter stood. She crashed into him, throwing her arms around him, and quickly backing away grinning. "You told me you would be over there," she said, almost scolding him.
"Yeah, well, my parents dragged me over here." James explained, but he was smiling.
The girl looked to James' parents, still smiling. "Hello everyone," she said cheerfully.
"Hello Angela, excited for the new term?" Hermione asked.
"Oh yeah, James and I have been talking all summer about some great idea's to pra –er, I mean idea's to keep up with our studies." Angela smiled brightly, than grabbed James by the arm. "Hope you don't mind me stealing James away, Oscar is having a fit."
Ginny was smiling widely, as if she found something highly amusing. She merely nodded, "Yes, you can steal James."
"Great," Angela said shortly, "Cheers!" she said loudly as she and James walked away.
Damien shook himself out of his surprise, and turned to his father. With a quick hug, his father muttered in his ear, "You'll be fine."
Giving his father his half smile he had inherited, he picked up his trunk like the others were now doing.
"Come on, you can sit with us." Rose said smiling.
Looking back at his parents one last night, he followed Rose and Albus on to the train, and together the three of them dragged their trunks to an empty compartment and got settled. Rose and Albus quickly stuck there heads out the window, waving to their parents. Damien followed their actions, and waved to his parents. His father was smiling brightly, and his mother had tears in her eyes. The platform was empty of Hogwarts students, and the train gave a loud whistle and started moving.
Damien continued to wave until the train finally pulled out of the station, and was on its way to Hogwarts. Taking his seat near the compartment door, he watched as Rose and Albus took their seats across from him.
"So, Damien, what house do you think you will be in?" Rose asked, trying to shake the awkwardness from the situation.
"I'm not sure," Damien told her. Professor Longbottom, the man who had come to his home to teach him all about the wizarding world, had told him about the houses. He said Gryffindor was for the brave, Hufflepuff for the loyal, Ravenclaw for the intelligent, and Slytherin for the cunning. Really, he fit in with Hufflepuff best, he had thought. He could be brave when he wanted to be, but who wasn't like that? He wasn't all that smart, in Muggle school he had only been good at one subject, music, thanks to his parents talents. He had also done well in History, but that was it. He was sure that they would have no subjects like that in Hogwarts.
"Well, I hope I'm in Gryffindor." Rose said, realizing he wasn't going to build on his statement.
"Me too," Albus added. "My whole family was in Gryffindor."
"Same here," Rose said. "Well, I could get into Ravenclaw. Dad always said I was far too smart for my age."
"Yeah, but he said that after you managed to break into his broom shed and steal one of his brooms. That changed his mind real quick to Gryffindor." Albus smirked.
Rose rolled his eyes. "Well it did work didn't it? Ever since than he's been taking me on the broom when I ask him too. Mum got so mad that I had tried flying it on my own without any lessons. But I didn't crash into anything-"
"Yeah, but you only went like five feet in the air before your Dad grabbed you and pulled you down." Albus cut her off.
Rose huffed. "You are so annoying sometimes."
Damien sat rather still while he watched the two cousins argue, before the compartment door slid open haphazardly. Nearly falling off his seat from the surprise, he looked to the door frame.
"Hello," said the girl in the door frame. She was a pretty girl with short dark brown hair. Her skin was an olive colour, giving her an exotic look, though she spoke with a thick Irish accent.
"Olivia!" Rose exclaimed, and stood up to hug the girl named Olivia.
"Hey Olivia, how was your summer?" Albus asked once Rose let go of her. Olivia took a seat next to Damien while Rose took her old seat.
"It was fine. Da kept dragging us 'round on vacation to all these Quidditch places; nothing too exciting." Olivia explained, than looked at Damien. "And who are you?"
"Damien Collins," he said, surprised he was able to speak.
She smiled a dazzling smile, and stuck out her hand for him to take. "Olivia Wood, nice to meet you."
He shook her hand, and gave a small smile before she turned back to Rose and Albus. "Have you seen Oscar? He shaved off all his hair!"
"No, we haven't. We haven't left our compartment yet." Albus informed her.
Olivia shrugged. "Well I think he looks quite daft, but Mum thinks he's handsome. Never laughed so hard in my life." She giggled. "If he comes 'round you'll see what I mean."
"So, is James trying our for the Quidditch team this year?" Olivia went on, turning to Albus.
"He says he is." Albus replied. "I hope he doesn't get on, it will just be another thing he rubs in my face."
"Why would he do that?" Damien blurted out.
Everyone stared at him as if they just remembered he was in the compartment. But Albus answered anyhow. "He's real annoying, and because he's older he-"
"-takes the micky out of us a real lot. Well, not when Teddy is 'round. He idolizes him." Rose finished, with a grin.
"Who's Teddy?" Damien asked despite himself, and hoped they wouldn't get too annoyed by his questions and kick him out of the compartment. But Rose smiled again, making him feel as if it was okay. As shy as he was, he liked being part of conversations. Besides, these people all seemed rather friendly.
"My God brother," Albus explained. "But he's like a cousin to everyone in our family."
"Cool," Damien said. He wondered what it would be like to have a large family like Rose and Albus. It was really just his parents and he. A few of his parents' friends had kids, but no one his age or close to it, and no one he really saw on a daily basis. He had a few cousins who lived in Canada, but he wasn't really close to them.
The rest of the train ride passed slowly with easy conversation. Damien quickly learned that Rose was quick-tempered, very out-going, and also very smart – perhaps too smart for her own good. While Albus was shy, it wasn't enough to keep him from babbling on to Olivia about all the things he had done during the summer. Olivia was witty, and pretty, and loved Quidditch more then Rose seemed to.
"What is Quidditch?" Damien asked the three when they started talking in-depth about the game.
Albus and Olivia gaped at him, but Rose answered again. "It's a game witches and wizards play on brooms. There are seven players on each team. There are three Chasers, who have to play with a ball called the Quaffle and try and get it through one of the hoops on the opponent's side. Than there is the Keeper, one on each side. They stop the Quaffle from getting into one of the hoops. But they don't just play with Quaffle's. There are two other balls called Bludgers. They rocket off around the Quidditch pitch trying to knock players off their brooms. That's why they have two players called Beaters who hold bats and try and hit them away from their team members." She paused to see if Damien was following.
He nodded, "Three Chasers, one Keeper, and two Beaters." Damien reeled off.
Rose smiled, and continued. "Lastly there is the Seeker who has to catch another ball called the Golden Snitch. It moves real quick, and can be hard to see. But if the Seeker catches it he or she gives their team one hundred and fifty points, so they nearly always win. Once the Snitch is caught the game finishes. It's a hard position but-"
"My dad was Seeker." Albus interrupted. "So was our Uncle Charlie."
"Cool," Damien said. "Which House did they play for?"
"Both played for Gryffindor." Albus told him. "They were the best they ever saw. My father was the youngest player in a century."
"Wow," Damien said.
Albus smiled brightly, but Rose quickly pushed him off of his high. "Stop bragging about your father."
"I'm not bragging." Albus said hotly, his smile gone.
"Well that's what it sounds like." Rose told him a matter-of-factly.
"I was just telling him about my parents, that's all." Albus said, than looked back to Damien. "What about your parents? What do they do? Aren't they musicians?"
"Yeah," Damien said a bit shyly. He hadn't intended on bring up the fact, but he guessed he had to talk about it now. "They are in a band together called Taxi. But my Dad is in another band called 'How We Survive' that's pretty big in Canada – well, was, until they all went on hiatus. That happened when my parents moved to London." Damien explained.
"That's cool," Olivia said. "So you're from Canada? They have some okay Quidditch teams there; I really like the Moose Jaw Meteorites, and the Stonewall Stormers. They haven't got a lot of teams, but the ones they do have are great."
"If you didn't notice, Olivia, but he doesn't exactly have an American accent now does he?" Rose asked slyly.
"Yeah," Damien agreed. "Just my parents are from Canada. Well, actually, you could say I'm part Canadian, sort of. My mum is of the First Nations, so I guess you could say I'm part Canadian since they were there long before the Europeans."
Everyone gaped at him, and he quickly turned pink. Finally, Rose said something. "That is cool. My mum has a book all about Native Americans, and their different tribes. What tribe is your mother from?"
Damien was thankful for her interest whether is was genuine or not. "She's Métis, and a few of her cousins speak Cree. I've never met them before though. So that's all I really know about it."
"That's cool, the Métis are a mix of Native and French blood, right?" she went on, and Damien wondered what her motives were; she seemed too interested.
Damien ignored his thoughts and answered. "Yeah, my mum can speak okay French, but not very much. She doesn't really need to on a regular basis."
"Interesting," Rose said, and smiled at him. Damien smiled back, and fell silent again as Albus and Olivia started talking about Quidditch again. By then lanterns had flickered on in their room, and Damien could hear Prefects telling younger students to change into their robes as they would be arriving at the school.
"Come on Rose, let's leave the boys so they can change into their robes." Olivia said standing up.
"All right," Rose said following her actions. "We'll be waiting outside." She told them, and led the way out of the compartment.
With the curtains drawn, Damien and Albus quickly changed into their robes. They didn't say a word until the train slowed. Damien the laces on his trainers were tired and stood up looking at Albus who was smoothing down his robes.
"I hope we get into the same house." Albus said looking at him. "I don't want to be stuck with Rose as my only friend all year."
Damien let a smile fall on his face, and he laughed. Turning to the compartment door, he slid it open and found Olivia and Rose talking quickly to each other.
"Oh good, your finally done changing. Let's go, I can already hear Hagrid calling for first years." Rose said excitedly.
"Who's Hagrid?" Damien asked. It seemed he had a lot to learn, and that frightened him a little.
"You'll see," Albus said walking past him and out into the train hallway. "Come on," he said.
Damien took a deep breath and quickly hurried to catch up with his new 'friends' he assumed he could call them. Thinking back to the beginning, he now hoped that he would get into Gryffindor and not Hufflepuff. He had already some kind of relations with these people, and they seemed nice enough to let him sit with them. If it was the last thing he ever did, he was going to get into Gryffindor.
Author's Note: So here it is, the Sequel to Life Collides. As you have read, I have changed some things around (like names and ages) to fit with Deathly Hallows. If you go back and read the Epilogue to Life Collides you will see that I have changed it as well. The only thing that doesn't really fit into Deathly Hallows is that Hermione and Ron have an older son, Harry, and some other things that obviously didn't happen (or would ever happen) in the books, like Harry becoming a musician and going to Canada. But, I hope you liked this first chapter. I will tell you that this story is going to be a long one, and that Damien isn't going to be the main POV through out. All right, so that is all. I hope you enjoyed this, and please review letting me know what you think!
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Kate Ardissono wrote:
> She was basically told by several people that she could not use the name
> Hosta Lady as it belongs to someone else...
Hi Kate
I don't think anyone can claim that name as their own if they haven't
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they are anyway, used to be they made a big deal of it.
Bob Bob Axmear 208 2nd St Ne Waukon, Ia 52172
Hostasonline http://hostasonline.com/
Gardensights Websites http://gardensights.com/
Hosta Library http://hostalibrary.org/
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message text UNSUBSCRIBE HOSTA-OPEN

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Il Signo Cocco Taormina
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|Re:Job Performance
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This is an awesome place to take your family - of any age! There is something for everyone to see and lots to learn!
Winner of the 2014 TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Award
...and also voted...
Winner of the 2014 TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Award
...and also voted Indiana's #1 Summer "Gotta-Do" Attraction in a contest sponsored by the Indiana Office of Tourism & Development.
The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo is operated by the non-profit Fort Wayne Zoological Society under a cooperative agreement with the Fort Wayne Parks and Recreations Department. The zoo receives no tax funding for operations and operates solely on earned revenue and donations.
Our Mission:
Connecting kids and animals
Strengthening families,
Inspiring people to care.
The zoo is closed for the season. Plan a visit when we reopen for the season on April 25, 2015.


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Chris Drumgoole, chief technology officer of GE Digital, a tech division of General Electric, discussed why Providence was chosen for a GE Digital location with Providence Business News and the kind of work that will be taking place in Rhode Island's capital city. He also explained why GE is expanding into the tech arena. more
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Hi All,
Wanted to let you know the status of the 1953-2003 Geraniums Around The World Searchable CD Project.
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The 1953 - 2003 journals are at the professionals now, actually have been since the beginning of February, for the scanning and optical character recognition that makes them searchable, along with many other processes.
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We are hoping they should be to everyone in May.
Thanks so much for supporting this project. It will make retrieval of so much information so easy. And, if you find issues you are particulary fond of, you can still order back issues from the International Geranium Society. Now you will know which ones to order!
Thanks again.
Sandy Connerley and Cynthia Lohry


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Did this video player for a project but ended up not using it so giving the PSD for download. Check the attachments for larger preview.
Download here: http://365psd.com/day/2-363/
P.S. I am not sure where I got that photo (in the BG) from.
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Configure EMC CX500 and a CX300
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Our EMC CX500 and CX300 needs to be reconfigured.
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Above certain concentrations, ozone, PM, and CO can cause or exacerbate health problems and/or increase mortality rates, making their control an important goal under the CAA.
Ground-level ozone is the major component of smog. While ozone in the upper atmosphere (the ozone layer) occurs naturally and protects life on earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation, ozone at ground level is a noxious pollutant. Ground- level ozone is not directly emitted, but is formed by the reaction of NOx and VOCs in the presence of sunlight.
Ozone is a severe irritant, responsible for the choking, coughing, and stinging eyes associated with smog. Ozone damages lung tissue, aggravates respiratory disease, and makes people more susceptible to respiratory infections. Children are especially vulnerable to ozone's harmful effects, as are adults with existing disease. Even healthy individuals may experience impaired lung function from breathing ozone-polluted air. In addition to affecting human health, ozone harms vegetation, resulting in reduced agricultural and commercial forest yields, increased tree and plant susceptibility to disease and other environmental stresses, and potential long-term effects on forests and ecosystems. Peak concentrations typically occur in summer.
PM is the term used for a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air. These particles come in a wide range of sizes and can remain suspended in the air for extended periods. PM can be emitted directly by a source or formed in the atmosphere by the transformation of gaseous emissions, such as SO2, NOx, and VOCs.
Fine particles, fewer than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5), result from fuel combustion by motor vehicles and other sources, as well as transformation of gaseous emissions. Coarser particles up to 10 microns in diameter (PM10 ) generally consist of windblown dust and are released from agriculture, and crushing and grinding operations.
Particulate matter irritates the membranes of the respiratory system, causing increased respiratory problems and disease, decreased lung function, alterations of the body's defense systems, and premature mortality. Sensitive groups include the elderly, individuals with cardiopulmonary disease such as asthma, and children. In addition to health problems, airborne particles cause soiling and damage to materials and reduce visibility in many parts of the United States.
CO is an odorless, colorless gas that interferes with the delivery of oxygen to the body's organs and tissues. Effects of CO include dizziness, headaches, fatigue, visual impairment, reduced work capacity, reduced manual dexterity, and poor learning ability. The health effects of CO vary depending on the length and intensity of exposure and the health of the individual, and are most serious for those who suffer from cardiovascular disease.
The incomplete burning of carbon in fuels such as gasoline produces CO. High concentrations of CO occur along side roads with heavy traffic, particularly at major intersections, and in enclosed areas, such as garages and poorly ventilated tunnels. Peak concentrations typically occur during the colder months of the year when vehicular emissions of CO are greater and nighttime inversion conditions are more frequent.
NO2 is one of a group of highly reactive gasses known as "oxides of nitrogen," or "nitrogen oxides (NOx)." NO2 forms quickly from emissions from cars, trucks and buses, power plants, and off-road equipment. In addition to contributing to the formation of ground-level ozone and fine particle pollution, NO2 is linked with a number of adverse effects on the respiratory system.


text:
With Instructables you can share what you make with the world, and tap into an ever-growing community of creative experts.
here is a short tutorial in HOW to make a DIY 360° Time Lapse mount for 2€ You will need a IKEA STÄM Timer [ 2€ ] http://www.ikea.com/it/it/catalog/products/60152359/ and some LEGO ...
prepare 4 Brick 4x2 and one flat 6x9
Wrap with Paper tape and draw the center of the 2 brick that will attach to the timer's top
now drill the holes on the two bricks
now the two bricks will have a hole in the exact center
Now make a hole on the top of the timer
start to put all togheter
Get ready to test it
I use it with my Go Pro hero 3 Black edition to make TimeLapse but you can use it with whatever you want!:) FOLLOW, VOTE AND SHARE :) ...
360 Degree Panning Time Lapse for GoProby agalindo1
DIY Time-lapse - Rotation for GoPro, Actionpro X7 or any other action cameraby Ninjutzu
360° very cheap Time Lapse mount v2.0by focamonca
Join 2 million + to receive instant DIY inspiration in your inbox.
© 2016 Autodesk, Inc.


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|Message view
|« Date » · « Thread »
|« Date » · « Thread »
|Simon Willnauer <simon.willna...@googlemail.com>
|Re: Thread locking while merging (ConcurrentMergeScheduler issue?)
|Wed, 03 Aug 2011 21:45:24 GMT
On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Pierre-Henri Toussaint <email@example.com> wrote: > Hello, > > First many thanks for getting in touch. > > > Michael McCandless-2 wrote: >> >> It looks like merging is running too slowly in your environment, >> relative to indexing; all of your indexing threads are stuck wanting >> to launch a new merge but there's already the max allowed (1) >> concurrent merge running and so IW (intentionally) stalls them. >> >>>> It's exactly what I just noticed. And 5 indexing thread vs 1 merge >>>> doesn't sound fair. > I read ConcurrentMergeScheduler source code and found out that if > maxMergeCount is reached, incoming threads are forcefully paused, which > totally make sense. I should try to raise a little bit the maxMergeCount to > be accorded with indexing. > > However, I still don't understand why the merging take so much time (few > minutes to an hour). During that time, the IO are almost non existant and > CPU stays low. That's why I suspected an locking issue. > > > Michael McCandless-2 wrote: >> >> Are you sure you passed 2 for numThreads to ThreadedIndexWriter? I see 5 >> threads in your stack traces, I think. >>>> I actually passed 5 threads in ThreadedIndexWriter, my mistake. Post >>>> edited. > > > Michael McCandless-2 wrote: >> >> What kind of IO system do you have? >>>> slow macbook laptop harddrive. I'm actually just trying to get my grips >>>> with this wonderful library before, I hope, being able to use it on a >>>> proper system. > > > Michael McCandless-2 wrote: >> >> Can you setInfoStream in the IW and post the output? Could give more >> clues... >>>> will post that after my next test > > > Simon Willnauer wrote: >> >> can you explain your configuration as well as the problem? I see one >> thread merging (Runnable state) and three other merge threads that are >> waiting on a lock. it seems that CMS has put them into wait state and >> your indexing threads are blocking on a stall control (too many >> merging threads). is it possible that you are flushing very often ie. >> low ram buffer or low maxBufferedDocs so that many segments are >> created? >> >>>> I think the flushing is fine (RAMBufferSizeMB:256mb) > My configuration is a macbookpro 2.4ghz/4GBram. Not ideal, but the goal is > not to benchmark Lucene. I rather refer to your IndexWriterConfig here, can you post it and maybe tell me a little about how you index, what you index etc. how many segments do you have, if you optimize etc. not sure why this is happening but maybe something that looks unrelated to you can help? simon > > -- > View this message in context: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Thread-locking-while-merging-ConcurrentMergeScheduler-issue-tp3222427p3222946.html > Sent from the Lucene - Java Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: email@example.com > For additional commands, e-mail: email@example.com > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: email@example.com For additional commands, e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
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text:
Seedling is DESERT REALM X MONTEVIDEO.
It doesn't show very well in the photo, but the haft down to the end of
the beard is all freckles (not lines). It reminds me of the patterning
I've seen in photos of WILD JASMINE (not seen in real life).
DR is a dotted plicata with solid standards, parent of broken color
TIGER HONEY. I haven't noticed the 'underlay of deeper sanding' on the
standards mentioned in the R&I, but haven't looked for it either.
Apologies for the poor quality photos.
DESERT REALM (Schreiner's, R. 1985). Sdlg. R 773-B. TB, 35" (89 cm), M.
"S. soft rose tan, underlay of deeper sanding of same shade; F. light
yellow ground, precisely flecked and dotted warm rose tan, lightly
ruffled; deep yellow beard. I 1310-2: (Cracken x D 848-A) X Piute Pass.
Schreiner's 1985."
MONTEVIDEO (J. Ghio, R. 1986). Sdlg. 81-SS-03. TB, 38" (97 cm), L-VL.
Mid to dark orange; tangerine beard. (Act of Love x (Feminine Charm x
((New Moon x Ponderosa) x White Lightning))) X Coral Satin. Bay View
Gardens 1987.
Linda Mann east Tennessee USA zone 7/8
East Tennessee Iris Society <http://www.korrnet.org/etis>
American Iris Society web site <http://www.irises.org>
talk archives: <http://www.hort.net/lists/iris-talk/>
photos archives: <http://www.hort.net/lists/iris-photos/>
online R&I <http://www.irisregister.com>
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text:
Mims lled the Golden Eagles in scoring (18.9 ppg), rebounding (7.8 rpg) and three-point field goals made (41). Finished second in blocks (31). Scored in double figures in 22 of 25 games. Had three 30-point games.
Scored 20 or more points 12 times. Had four double-doubles.
Scored a career-high 35 points to go with 14 rebounds against South Florida.
Tallied 32 points and 10 rebounds against TCU. Scored 32 points vs. South Alabama. Had 26 points and 14 rebounds against St. Louis.
Scored 29 points vs. Memphis.


text:
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) – One person was treated as a local hospital after a car crashed into a building.
First responders were called to the area of 19th Street and Linden Street around 8:30 p.m. Friday.
When News 10 arrived, there was a vehicle lodged into a building near the intersection.
Police say the driver of the vehicle was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries.
A passenger did leave the scene, but was located by police.
The vehicle was removed from the building after a structure safety inspection.


text:
Skip to comments.FREEPER jveritas on KFI with John Ziegler -- talking about Iraq translated documents
Posted on 04/26/2006 8:21:45 PM PDT by doug from upland
click here to read article
Hopefully Tony Snow will have you front and centre at a White House brieing soon.
Again thank you for all of your hard work.
By Tony just knowing what the documents contain, without having to discuss them directly, it will give him more fortitude when dealing with the "Bush lied" morons.
Great work, jveritas. Great work.
Because they are of dubious truth. Or, you could believe there is some grand conspiracy afoot.
KFI has Ziegler's show from last night up on the web, but it cuts off right after he says, "When we come back, a fascinating story of a civilian who has been translating all those documents we've found in Iraq!!" Then the audio stops and that's it.
How annoying.
Thank you very much.
Jonathan Singer, weekend editor of the liberal site MyDD.com, was equally dismissive. ''The Hussein documents are not of great interest to me," said Singer, ''for the simple reason that they simply reinforce the notion that the Bush administration cherry picks intelligence to suit their needs."
English Translation: We don't care what evidence is found, or if Saddam, himself, shows us the video of his illicit activities; it doesn't matter--Bush lied, people died.
My Translation: Blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada....
Thank you for getting the word out, it needs to be known.
Have you contacted gunnybob at:
He has a good program and would understand what you are doing.
Your work is good and so very important.
Might want to ping your list. Jveritas' interview is up.
Thank you for your hard work!
Thanks. I'll do it now!
I'm listening to it in my office for the benefit of coworkers.
Joseph is translating the documents on the Pentagon website from Iraq and finding a lot more than the translators working for our government. How is this possible and what did he find? Listen to the interview.
Answer your PHONE NOW! Katie Couric is frantically trying to get ahold of you to be the first to break the news that Saddam wasn't the pussycat that "we" all thought he was!
Okay.... I was bored! ;-)
I think its all perspective. It will never be enough for the left who are totally dependent on their Bush lied mantra for their impeachment jihad.
But, IMO, jveritas has already found plenty of 'smoking guns'.
Great job today!
RE: "...getting paid by the government..."
Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, et al might just hurl their cookies upon reading that. Besides, the LAST thing we need is for this kind of mind to get sucked into the swirling vortex that is bureaucracy inside the Beltway.
Be assured, as The Good Book says, "The workman is worthy of his wages," and, at the rate this is taking off, there'll be more than ample wages soon enough; from the private sector.
Between the interviews, increasing exposure, and the "buzz", this will all build to something of financial substance without the government's involvement.
Speaking engagements. Consulting contracts. A book deal.
It'll come.
Thank you, I'm playing it now.
ROTLMAO........ :) Good one.
Thank you very much KG.
I've been busy for much and not around FR much for months. Is there a website that catalogues all the documents you've translated?
Thank you very much.
What you don't understand is that to the liberals, the documents are irrelevant. The documents don't serve liberal interests, therefore they are untrue. Truth is whatever serves teh party. That is adage numer uno in LibWorld. Adage numero duo is that if you repeat somethign enough it becomes true.
Therefore, teh documents tehmselves are lies because we know it's absolute truth that Bush lied, but the National Guard memos are absolutely true because we know that what they claim must be true.
After all, truth is whatever serves the party.
You should be hearing soon from Melanie Morgan in San Francisco to be on her morning show.
Thank you very much for your great work to get out the truth. I will wait for her call.
Excellent work!
Get the word out!
I am glad that Gunny Bob will be using your reports, he has a good program, but during this time of the year, I can only pick up the last half on my radio.
It is possible that he used it and I missed it.
If you could also send info to Dr. Bill Wattenberg at the:
radio station, he has his links there and as a nuclear weapon designer for many years, will be interested in your work.
Another that I listen to if I am still up, is Jim Bohannon, he is very good and does a good interview, always willing to learn and be fair.
Will you put these into a book?
Hey it looks like Freepers like John Ziegler! :)
It's so great how he has Ted Hayes on...
just heard Hayes was on his KFI show yesterday!
Good People sticking Together!
This just show that the people on FreeRepublic have more skills than the MSM.
Great American ping.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.


text:
- Email this
Receive the latest articles for free. Click here to get the Mobile Marketer newsletters.
Toyota sparks customized storytelling via 100,000 targeted video ads
By Chantal Tode
January 15, 2016
Toyota's customized video ads appear on Facebook
Working with 100 interchangeable clips, Toyota is reaching Facebook users with video ads for the RAV4 that are customized for each viewer, resulting in more than 100,000 different spots.
The campaign uses data to scale personalization, with each spot built from three clips pulled from the collection of 100 interchangeable clips to reflect a Facebook users specific interests while also highlighting the RAV4s product attributes. The campaign is an example of how savvy marketers are looking to create content that addresses the unique characteristics of mobile and social.
The majority of Facebook consumption is done through mobile devices, said Chris Pierantozzi, creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi LA. So we crafted a campaign that took into the considerations of not just the platform, but also the delivery mechanism.
Everyone is unique, he said. So why tell everyone the same thing.
With this program, Saatchi created custom-tailored content for potential RAV4 Hybrid buyers. Personalizing content is the key to creating advertising that people respond to, and theres no social platform that understands their customers better than Facebook.
Customized storytelling
The RAV4 campaign, which also includes typically broadcast spots, was created with Saatchi & Saatchi LA and features actor James Marsden.
The Facebook videos for the effort are built from a collection of 100 interchangeable vignettes, each between 15 and 25 seconds long.
To create so many videos, Saatchi & Saatchi LA partnered with Cloneless Media, a VFX and post-production platform company that has created a technology that accelerates broadcast-quality post-production and automates creative versioning.
As a result, Toyota is able deliver spots that share some aspects while also addressing the interests of the viewer with customized content based on their Facebook history. Some of the themes evident in the different spots include technology, adventure and style and shopping.
The copy accompanying the ads reinforces the customization. For example, the copy for one ad reads: Youre stylish and tech-savvy, just like the all-new RAV4 Hybrid."
Personalization at scale
The campaign also serves social videos on Twitters new auto-play video unit, positioning the RAV4 Hybrid as capable of doing everything a driver would want it to do.
Customized Facebook video ads are just the latest example of how Toyota continues to push mobile marketing forward.
In November, Toyota paired a secret emoji innovation on Twitter with a contest to band together sports team fans in a show of support (see story).
Last winter, Toyota was the first automaker to leverage technology enabling television viewers to interact with an ad using a mobile device or their remote control (see story).
The new RAV4 campaign was a significant effort from an operational standpoint.
It was a huge undertaking to pull this off behind-the-scenes, but we were able to do it with the help of our editing partner, Cloneless Media, Mr. Pierantozzi said. They were able to accelerate broadcast-quality post-production and automate the different combinations of stories to intelligently edit and deliver the spots.
Then, through an extensive review process, we culled the best ones to go live with, he said. From a writing and production standpoint, we shot 100 scenes in one day to develop 100 interchangeable clips to get to the total 100,000 ads.
The extensive script-writing was developed in a way that allowed for a constant and clear narrative through a wide range of clips.
Related content: Advertising, Toyota, Saatchi, Facebook, video, customization, RAV4, Chris Pierantozzi, mobile marketing, mobile
- Trackback url: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/trackback/22071-1


text:
October 23rd, 2014
Who needs makeup?
(submitted by Katie)
Who needs makeup?
(submitted by Katie)
An absence of "red eye" in one eye can be a symptom of retinoblastoma, a type of eye cancer that mostly affects kids under five. This picture seems old so it probably doesn't matter, but I thought I'd mention it just in case it's a current shot.
I know that baby! His name is Woody Harrelson…
And red eye too!
Boo Boo, Honey?


text:
- Description & Specifications
|Product Type
|Hydrazine detection badge
|Detectable Analytes
|For Use With (Application)
|Used to determine the exact exposure dose indicated on a SafeAir badge
|Measurement Range
|4.5 to 300ppm.Hour
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text:
Fewer than half of all adults are married, according to census data covering all four countries in the UK.
It found that 46 per cent of adults were married at the time of the 2011 census, the first time that the proportion has fallen below half. In 2001, the time of the last census, it was 51 per cent. The growth of co-habitation accounts for much of the shift, along with the greater number of single people.
The population of the UK was 63.2 million on census day, an increase of 7 per cent, or 4.1 million, since 2001.


text:
|Message view
|« Date » · « Thread »
|« Date » · « Thread »
|"Marcel Reutegger (JIRA)" <j...@apache.org>
|[jira] Closed: (JCR-265) Bug with textfilters and classloaders
|Wed, 02 Nov 2005 16:41:56 GMT
[ http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JCR-265?page=all ] Marcel Reutegger closed JCR-265: -------------------------------- Fix Version: 1.0 Resolution: Fixed >From now on text filter implementations must be configured in the workspace.xml file. Using the service registry does not seem to work stable enough with context classloaders. Sample configuration: ... <SearchIndex class="org.apache.jackrabbit.core.query.lucene.SearchIndex"> <param name="path" value="${wsp.home}/index" /> <param name="textFilterClasses" value="org.apache.jackrabbit.core.query.MsExcelTextFilter,org.apache.jackrabbit.core.query.MsPowerPointTextFilter,org.apache.jackrabbit.core.query.MsWordTextFilter,org.apache.jackrabbit.core.query.PdfTextFilter" /> </SearchIndex> ... Fixed in revision: 330282 > Bug with textfilters and classloaders > ------------------------------------- > > Key: JCR-265 > URL: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JCR-265 > Project: Jackrabbit > Type: Bug > Components: query > Environment: Eclipse RCP and anyother system that loads libraries within several classloaders > Reporter: Martin Perez > Fix For: 1.0 > > I'm having problems with text filter service. I built the contrib/textfilters package and I included the resulting jackrabbit-textfilters-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar in my application classpath. The problem is that TextFilterService class is unable to find any filters, even though that a services/org...TextFilterService file is wihin the META-INF jar's directory. > I think that this must to be with Eclipse RCP classloader mechanism, but the fact is that it does not work. I find a little bit strange this way to load services, and as you can see, it seems problematic in some scenarios. > ---- > Marcel Reutegger > <email@example.com> to jackrabbit-dev > More options 11:01 am (55 minutes ago) > Hi Martin, > we had a similar problem with the query languages, but I solved that one > by telling the registry to use a specific classloader. this seemed to work. > I'm not sure this will also work for the text filters, because the jar > file might be in another classloader. > could you please post a jira bug? I'll then change the discovery > mechanism to use good old xml config ;) -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators: http://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/Administrators.jspa - For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
|View raw message


text:
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Code MASSABOUTIQUE: 76480
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Cucinelli trousers made of soft wool, with front pleats, belt loops and adjustable drawstring at the waist.
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Remove all blog posts from site's RSS feeds, leaving only Pages.
'Only Pages in Feed' is a little plugin that modifies WordPress RSS feed to exclude all 'Post' types and show only 'Pages' in it. So if you are using WordPress as a CMS and want only Pages to appear in your site feed, this plugin is for you.
The plugin needs no configuration. Just activate it, and you are good to go. Deactivating the plugin restores RSS feeds to their default state.
SumTips (http://sumtips.com/wp-page-in-feed)
Requires: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Last Updated: 5 years ago
Active Installs: 40+
Got something to say? Need help?


text:
Rebecca Skloot's book The Immortal Life of #HenriettaLacks (soon to be released as a movie by Oprah Winfrey & HBO) has a complex yet satisfying structure and the author is breaking it all down for #SheWritesUniversity next week! Save…See More
Dear She Writers,
I can't believe that in about 3 weeks Oleander Girl will hit the bookstores!
Sometimes I'm elated when I think this; at other times I'm overwhelmed.
My brain is a constant flurry of trying to remember the million things that must be done before starting book tour--guest blog posts written, email interview questions answered, facebook entries made, friends in different cities informed of my events, flights and hotels booked, publicity questions handled, university meetings attended, novels blurbed, plants watered, bills paid, favorite meals frozen in Tupperware for my husband. (Yes, it's my fault--I've spoiled him.)
To counteract this making-myself-crazy, this week I've decided that I must find some quiet time for myself and purposefully do a few things that are healthy and healing for my harried mind.
The first is meditation. I have a regular meditation practice, but sometimes when things get too busy, it slips away from me. So from now through the end of the book tour, I'm determined to make a deliberate attempt to meditate each day, even if it's only for 10 or 15 minutes. Even if it's for five. I can already feel, after a couple of sessions, that it's centering me, helping me to keep things in perspective.
The second is exercise. I find that if I exercise regularly, I have more energy, think more clearly, and am calmer when faced with the unexpected. As part of my routine, I do weights, but my favorite activity is being on the elliptical machine.I find myself zoning out while I'm on the machine. It's very relaxing, and sometimes it brings me new writing ideas.
I've also decided to reward myself by reading some light, laugh-out-loud, non-intellectually challenging stuff, books that have been lying around the house. Books that when you read them, it's like sinking into eiderdown or biting into truffles. Right now I'm re-reading a book from the Harry Potter series, which I took from my son's bookshelf. I love children's books, the relatively unambiguous world they pull us into, the clarity of their focus.
Finally, I've decided to spend a couple of hours a day working on my next novel project. Even if I don't get very far ahead, being engaged in a creative activity calms me and makes me feel happy. It keeps me firm in my commitment to writing. It makes me keep things in perspective. Much as I love Oleander Girl, my new baby,it is only one among my other books, several of which are yet to come.
My current project, with the working title Under the Sorrow Tree, is a re-telling of the ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana, from a major woman character's (Sita's) point of view. I love messing with the perspective, seeing all those heroic battles and splendid killer weapons through a woman's eye. I've only managed to write three pages so far, but that's three more than nothing! In fact, every word that I put down makes me realize the real reason I'm doing the book tour: because my writing matters to me, and because I want to share it with others.
Friends, if you have strategies you use to stay calm during spikes in your writing life, I'd love to hear (and perhaps borrow!) them.
Views: 250
Marivi, thanks for the good wishes & the link. I'll check it out as soon as I have a little time.
Thanks for venting about pre-publication jitters, Chitra! Your post inspired me to finally complete my own blog on the the same topic, which I'd been putting off for weeks. If you find some time between the many other things you need to attend to before your book is released, please visit:
Congratulations in advance for Oleander Girl!
Congratulations on Fast Times in Palestine, Pamela! And on the marriage. Everything's happening at once for you. But like you wrote, these are all good things! And they'll soon be done. (That's what I keep saying, myself. I'll do my best, and then it'll be done. And the results are in the hands of the Universe.)
My book will be published in a couple of weeks (eek!), and I'll start a book tour of five weeks on the road, then three weeks making trips from NY to various places on the east coast. So much to do in the next two weeks, I've started having anxiety dreams, and I'm not exercising (which always makes things worse), and two weeks after the book tour ends I'm getting married... Really trying to breathe, but feeling a little suffocated sometimes. Trying to keep things in perspective -- book tours and weddings are Good Things, after all. But yeah, it's a lot. Glad to hear about other people's stories who are in similar boats!
Looking forward to a Big Exhale this summer. And finally having time to actually WRITE instead of all this peripheral (but alas, so important) publicity and marketing stuff.
Thanks, Kathleen. It helps me to know others are going through similar situations and handling them with grace. Good luck with the agent.
Sounds like you have a handle on it. I'm out in California helping a friend write a memoir, which is keeping me from going insane while an agent reads my novel manuscript. If I were in your shoes, I think I would just be insane. Looking forward to listening to your books. And I will try to keep your suggestions in mind if I'm ever in your position.
Sharon, So glad you are enjoying Sister of My Heart. Thanks for letting me know. And you go and enjoy that vacation. A lot of times when I don't think about writing, something happens in the subconscious, and wonderful ideas come, and I get re-energized.
Marci, Good luck with The Lake House--lovely title. It's wonderful when one finds an activity to lose the conscious mind in--that's meditation in movement. So glad for you that you have this.
Hi Nora,
Yes!!! great ideas.
Hi Marivi,
congratulations on The Mango Bride, and good luck with the tour. I have to confess, a lot of times I watch movies on Netflix while I'm on the elliptical. It's my "brain break." Yoga sounds like a great idea, too.


text:
Latest News
Droverspirit Band and Key Players Perform March 27
Published: Friday, March 23, 2007
Artscope Offers Summer Scholarships Through May 1
Published: Friday, March 23, 2007
CHICKASHA – With summer on the way, Chickasha's premier arts camp is gearing up for a fun two weeks by offering scholarships to the community. In its ninth year, Artscope is scheduled June 11-22 on the campus of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Enrollment for the camp is now open to the public.
USAO's Choir Debuts Spring Variety in April 3 Concert
Published: Thursday, March 22, 2007
CHICKASHA – Classical music meets classic pop when the Concert Choir performs its annual spring concert on April 3 at the University of Science and Arts. The free concert begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Alumni Chapel.
USAO Hosts Liberal Arts Symposium, Pulitzer Winning Author April 10
Published: Thursday, March 22, 2007
CHICKASHA – In keeping with its liberal arts tradition, the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma is hosting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr. Jared Diamond on April 10. The headlining speaker is one of several state and national guests planned for the daylong symposium focused on liberal arts in higher education.
Art Seniors Show 'Whodunit' With Exhibit at USAO
Published: Friday, March 16, 2007
CHICKASHA – Ten art students are joining forces to display pottery, photography, paintings and more as the culmination of their college experience at the University of Science and Arts. Beginning March 31, four graduating art seniors will share the USAO Art Gallery with six 2006 graduates to reveal "WHODNIT," through April 20.


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Indian Power Sector Buzzing
There seems to be a lot of focus on India's Power Sector these days with the government seriously considering changes [good or bad can be analysed separately] to finally put this sector on the right path.
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Conceptions of Plant-Life: An interview with Giovanni Aloi
August 17, 2016 · Print This Article
In one of my earliest conversations with Giovanni Aloi, he described the problem of being a plant studies person at an animal studies conference: by entertaining the subjectivity of plants, any moral high ground previously associated with vegetarianism/veganism get a little complicated. Undaunted, Aloi explores the mess of that new territory, tracing their appearance in contemporary art and art history. He is the Founding Editor of Antennae, a Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, teaches at The School of the Art Institute, works for Sotheby's Institute of Art, moonlights as an art expert on the BBC, and is on the verge of finishing two books on taxidermy and art, and plants and art.
Caroline Picard: You work at the intersection of philosophy, art history, and contemporary art. Why is the animal interesting to you within those fields?
Giovanni Aloi: Since I was roughly three years old two things would excite me like no other: nature and art. I drew animals, I looked for animals in paintings, photographs, documentaries, and everywhere else—there was nothing better than finding a grasshopper, a beetle, or a tree frog! Plants caught my attention a little later, but back then, I used to spend most of my evenings drawing animals.
CP: So art and animals were joined at the start in a way…
GA: As I grew up I fostered both interests but struggled to combine them in my work; animals in art were not taken seriously as an academic/artistic subject (and there's still much to be said about that lack of serious engagement today). In the late 1990s the emergence of animal studies placed that subject on the map. Jonathan Burt and Steve Baker have published important work in relation to animals and representation in art and film. Both, along with other scholars, contributed to the emergence of new aesthetic paradigms and practices challenging anthropocentrism and animal objectification in art.
CP: How would you characterize those early conversations around animals and art?
GA: The first ten years of analysis, which took place roughly between 1995 and 2005, focused largely on the deconstruction of metanarratives, the identification of objectifying tropes, and the representational friction between abstraction and figuration. Both, theory and practice, engaged predominantly in what I have called the "dismantling of the symbolic animal."
In my 2012 essay, "Deconstructing the animal in search of the real," I argued that following the dismantling of the "symbolic animal," a new and productive path of inquiry could involve "tracking animals" through networks of environmental relationships/reciprocal entanglements. Although the non-anthropocentric slant of animal studies was extremely refreshing from a philosophical perspective, I looked at early developments with some suspicion.
CP: Why?
GA: Personally, I believed that animal studies should be very weary of falling into the conceptual fallacy of proposing a zoo-centric system in place of an anthropocentric one. From earlier on, I thought that animal studies inquiries should unfold into rhizomatic networks of interconnectedness in which humans, animals, plants, and environments are equal parts.
CP: Do you feel like the animal studies conversation has shifted?
GA: Today, I am glad to see that contemporary theories and practices involving the non-human are indeed attempting to bypass zoocentrism in favour of a new holistic model. But this is happening outside animal studies. My impression has always been that re-thinking animals entails re-thinking everything. It is a deep ontological undertaking. Connections between the ways in which we treat animals and the ways in which we treat fellow humans have been exemplified by Agamben. But there is much more at stake.
CP: How so?
GA: Karen Barad's agential realism and Jane Bennett's vibrant materialism have both, in different ways, reconfigured our gaze to consider the atomic order and the invisible levels of interconnectedness that we are all enmeshed in, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi. This leaves the discipline of animal studies in an odd position. I am not entirely sure if this new shift could be incorporated by animal studies as a move away from the values of the first revisionist wave of animals in art, or if there will be space for an expanded scope that considers animals on similar ontological levels as plants and bacteria. Would that change optics in a productive ways? And of course, there's object oriented ontology, Morton's notions of hyperobjects, broader notions of anthropocene…I am yet to see any animal studies scholar engaging with these philosophical tools. The challenge is to adapt them to fit the task. My forthcoming book on taxidermy in contemporary art attempts to do just that. But in any case, I think that the disruption of anthropocentrism caused by animal studies, posthumanism, and by the new waves of speculative realism is essential to the definitions of new cultural directions. We have clearly messed up—the planet is telling us that very clearly. Global warming and mass extinction are clear symptoms of the urgency with which we need to find new ways to think about our relationship to what we call nature. But changing people's minds is one of the hardest things to do—especially when utilitarianism is involved.
CP: Do you mean that people have to change their way they think about the environment somehow? In other words, maybe like animals, there is a need to resist making the natural world purely symbolic? Even as I say that, it seems tied up with consumer culture…
GA: Capitalism has alienated us entirely from the plants and animals around us to a degree that, for too many people, looking into their phones or tablets is more interesting than looking at anything to do with the natural world. How can you care to preserve ecosystems when you don't even care for what's in your backyard or on your way to school or work? Capitalist normativity has reduced nature to a curiosity in urban reality and to a sublime escape in holiday adventures—this is the root of the problem.
CP: It's hard to think of ways to shift that paradigmatic approach to nonhuman (or more than human) landscapes. I'm always interested in articulating openings for agency but it's easy to feel daunted by the scale and conviction of capitalism.
GA: In truth, I believe that our anthropocentric miseducation begins in kindergarten or at primary school. The traditional education system is based on affirmation: children are trained to develop confidence through a "That is/I am" approach that promotes a pre-encoded identity formation necessary to the functioning of society. At this stage, nature is introduced as a series of objects to possess and exploit. Everything is thus reduced to cliché through the pre-coded work of symbolism. Children are taught that lions are brave, bears are ferocious, leopards are fast, butterflies are beautiful, spiders are scary, and snakes are disgusting. Thereafter, as John Berger famously argued in his essay "Why Look at Animals?", we grow up to become constantly disappointed with the lack of the promised sublimity of animals. We expect them to somehow perform for us or engage in emotional exchanges they have no stakes in. Beyond dogs, the animal world is generally understood as dumb or as edible. Thereafter, not being interested in animals becomes a key moment in the rite of passage to adulthood. Adults should be concerned with other matters: work, buying a house, careers, children… animals become the object of hunting or entertainment.
CP: What do we do with that? It seems sort of impossible to work out an alternative approach, especially if you are talking about a problem that starts in kindergarten.
GA: This is where the idea of unlearning comes from in my book Art and Animals (2011): you have to undo that very normative process that you grew up in, shattering certainty and picking up the pieces thereafter to re-configure yourself all over again, allowing for a different conception of non-human/human beings to arise. This conception is one in which representation is at a point of crisis, and to make things more complicated, you cannot rely upon the tropes of anthropocentrism to rebuild what has been dismantled. The process is long and laborious, and it involves the making of new and difficult ethical choices—choices that you might have to define for yourself in relation to your specific geographical situation, cultural make-up, and personal sense of urgency.
CP: Can you describe a bit about your transition from Animal Studies to Plant Studies? What are some interesting comparisons between the fields for you?
GA: I don't think I have transitioned from animal studies to plant studies. I am very critical of animal studies because I cannot ethically justify its zoo-centric scope anymore. Its reliance on post-structuralism almost 20 years on is becoming embarrassing. Personally, I don't care anymore about what Heidegger thought of lizards, Agamben of spiders, and Deleuze of wolves, as they all knew very little about these animals. They wrote about them in transcendental terms—in the singular/plural chimeric catch-all form that the word 'animals' inscribe. 10 years ago it was interesting to recover these animal-fragments from the thought of continental philosophers, it was necessary to validate the subject of scrutiny for the field, and to lay its foundations—but we should be done with that phase, now! In any case, I'm still in the field, as I understand animal studies to be an important component of posthumanism, but I like to think of myself as a "grumpy dissident" within the system. Some of my colleagues also share my views—I think something interesting might be happening soon. But ultimately, I am not very interested in the discourses of a discipline that places animals first in front of plants and other levels of interconnectedness between human and non-human beings.
CP: Why?
GA: That approach seems extremely out-dated considering the times we live in and the challenges we face. That is also why multispecies ethnography and new materialism are more interesting to younger scholars at present—these philosophical waves are at the cutting edge of contemporary thinking whilst animal studies currently seems to have shaped itself as a questionable ethical-minefield for vegan/animal rights ideologies. Those agendas are also mostly out-dated. Veganism refuses to acknowledge plant-intelligence because it causes the emergence of new and hard to negotiate ethical problems, whilst animal-rights is still bound to obsolete concepts like sentience, consciousness, and agency.
CP: Does plant-studies as run into similar problems as a defined field?
GA: I don't think a field of plant studies has actually shaped up yet. Michael Marder has done some important work recovering plants from a number of philosophical texts, thus mapping a base for discussion on the subject whilst a number of artists have—for years—engaged with plants, knowing that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. But there's no unified field yet. Plants still carry a cultural stigma imbedded in a number of popular culture-layers of validating disregard: the association between sociopaths and plants is a recurring cliché. There's also the gender connotation between plants and women imposed by patriarchal systems of value that still gets in the way. And the recurring notion that caring for plants too much would require an entire revision of ethical values involving animals and humans…the implication that self-aware (or even sentient) beings must act as an exploitable base for us to feel ethically relieved through the acts of basic subsistence. I am sure that things are just about to shape up; hopefully, plant studies will be a freer space in which to seriously consider non-human alterity beyond obvious anthropomorphic strategies and imbedded/obsolete ethical agendas.
CP: What do you mean?
GA: In a sense, animal studies and plant studies have thus far been shaped by the desire to recover specific narratives and reconfigure ontological strata. And that is pretty much what Marder has accomplished with his body of work for the field of plant studies already. Plants are the new animals—they push all the concerns involved with agency and anthropocentrism to a breaking limit: alterity, reciprocity, communication, co-existence, intra-action, and so forth…These are all new paradigms that have been explored in human/animal relations. But simultaneously, thinking about/with plants requires a more ambitious leap of faith. The hope for meaningful plant responses; responses that we can fully comprehend is very slim, much slimmer than in animals, but this should not put us off from being inquisitive and curious and from attempting, for instance, to envision what it might be like to be a plant beyond the tools of mimicry.
CP: I want to go back to the question of education again…like, how would plant-sympathy be taught if not through mimicry?
GA: One of the most glaring contradictions of animal studies is that the discipline, through its marked non-anthropocentric drive has identified science—and Cartesian thinking more specifically—as the humanist tool by which distance and objectification between animals and humans occurs. Yet, animal studies implicitly relies on the scientific definition of "animal" in order to retain topicality. That's a critical problem of some proportion. If the premise is to re-think animals beyond the scientific realm of inquiry, at what point do we begin to find the strength to tamper with the very last question (which should have perhaps been the first): "What is an animal?" Or is that taking the whole thing too far for the philosophical framework? At what point is an animal plant-like in a way that becomes interesting to us beyond scientific taxonomy? This gray area between zoology and botany contains a number of disregarded beings who rarely, if ever, emerge in scholarly discourses. Animal studies claims to have recovered repressed subjects, but it simultaneously represses those at the fringes of its implicit mammalian-normative approach. I guess that more generally, plant studies polarizes the already charged questions of animal studies through a stronger desire to develop a holistic approach, rather than a phito-centric one.
CP: How have you noticed plants appearing into contemporary art recently? Do you think plant's contemporary art appearance differs from past examples?
GA: Yes, there has been a substantial shift. One category I am interested in is postmodernist plants, like with Anya Gallaccio and Marc Quinn, whose work, in a sense, laid the foundation for what is being problematized today. Gallaccio was concerned with decay. Dutch still-life paintings, the beautiful vases of flowers that reminded us we would all eventually die, were painted at the height of their beauty and freshness. Postmodernism threw this lovely poetics up in the air by haunting viewers with the raw ugliness of decay in the gallery space or by upstaging the representational notion of the memento mori through the shock of materiality. Marc Quinn's Garden from 2000 amazed viewers by representationally suspending the lives of a multitude of wild and greenhouse-grown varieties of flowers in a massive tank of frozen silicon. The illusion was mesmerizing—but the shattering of the utopian narrative resounded loud and clear through the darkened gallery space. I feel that most postmodernist work involving plants, and I hate to generalize here, was more concerned with notions of realism expressed through materiality. Because of that, postmodernism laid the foundations for speculative realist tendencies in art.
CP: How?
GA: It is the mistrust for metanarratives and the iconoclastic slant nurtured by postmodernism that paved the way for what is happening today. Yet, Gallaccio's and Quinn's works are largely concerned with symbolic registers of representation that, despite the material presence of the plant in the gallery space, end up leaving the living-plant behind, so to speak. The symbolic order in which they operate, as it turns out, was not deployed towards a new conception/understanding of plant-life and its interconnectedness with humans and environments, but it ultimately was transcendental and inherently anthropocentric.
CP: Didn't you explore this question in the online journal you edit?
GA: In 2015, we dedicated two issues of Antennae to the importance of agential realism in contemporary art. We especially focused on the work of artists interested in reconfiguring the boundaries of nature within networks of inter and intra actions. Artists such as Janet Laurence have produced eco-artworks in which "care and caution" enable the abandonment of a human-centered view for a broader multi-species awareness. Patricia Adams has explored the challenges and productivities involved in transgressing the scientific protocol to tap into the potential to modify the human body through biotechnology. Claire Pentecost has turned her attention to the soil and to how what we take for granted from our anthropocentric conception is perhaps one of the most important sites of interconnectedness that we urgently need to reconsider. One of the most interesting and captivating works I have recently encountered surely is Revolutions by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (2015) exhibited at the last Venice Biennale. The installation enabled three pine-trees to move around and outside the gallery space through a wheeled-base guided by a complex electronic interface, which measured the speed at which their sap flowed. This type of work produces new connections between the old categories of nature and culture, and object and subject, blurring boundaries and posing important questions about agency, perception, ontology, and epistemology. There's a major difference between the new, speculative interest for plants now and past approaches.
CP: I'm always curious about what these artistic gestures do, somehow? Like, if it's true that the world is ending, why bother making art at all?
GA: Ultimately, I think that contemporary artists involved in this new register of criticality are mobilizing their efforts on two fronts: the conceptual and the methodological. Conceptually, a substantial urgency to solicit awareness in the viewer has become paramount. Artists seem to think more carefully about their local reality and the connections between their specific situation and ones that are broader and further afield. They aim to push their thinking, and the viewer's, toward under-scrutinized areas of discourse and practice in order to configure new connections between polarities. Sometimes these configurations reveal the absurdity of naturalized systems of knowledge, discourses, and practices; at other times they propose new alternatives.
Methodologically, artists like Heidi Norton, Jenny Kendler, Alyce Santoro, Suzanne Anker, Pierre Huyghe, and Andrew Yang are committed to rethinking our relationship with the non-human and are not interested in shock tactics or unnecessary theatricalities. Attention to their medium of choice is, in all instances, paramount and solidifies relationships that are developed over time, slowly, and meditatively. Thus the process becomes an intrinsic part of the artwork—sometimes this is visible in the works; at other times, it is embedded in the layers of complexity that characterize them. The general tendency, however, seems to revolve around time and slow consumption and production. This methodological choice implies that the speed at which our lives are consumed nowadays is one of the main factors that has led to the current climatic situation. Contemporary art thus becomes a place to experience a different rhythm in the hope of transposing that model to at least part of our chaotic everyday existence.
CP: You have two books coming out—one on animal taxidermy and one on plants. Since you have been working on them simultaneously, I'm curious about what kinds of connections you are making while working on both, even if those connections might not be apparent to readers?
GA: Yes, I do …and it is not something I would recommend. When I handed in my taxidermy in contemporary art manuscript to my editor she said: "Great! Now you can enjoy your summer!" to which I responded: "Not quite—plants have been haunting me for the past few months and I am not quite done with them yet!" But I think that in a way, one book has been productively informing the other. My book on plants in contemporary art is an odd hybrid between a monograph and an edited collection. I am basically writing a backbone for each chapter and have invited "guest authors" to contribute their own voices/experiences to each section. I wanted the reader's experience to be as varied and idiosyncratic as possible. I wanted to move away from pretending to own a truth about plants that is universal and singular. I truly believe that if we begin to seriously value personal experience as valid epistemic tools in the reconfiguration of anthropocentrism, we then have to also question the monographic approach to writing. Fragmenting and interspacing one voice with those of others seems essential to me, especially in certain circumstances. But my books also wanted to take animal studies to task and address its approaches to central question "what is an animal?" that it still evades.
CP: How does that tie in to taxidermy?
GA: Thinking about taxidermy, the ultimate "animal-made object" has substantially shaped my ideas on agency and passivity in contemporary art involving the non-human; whilst Jane Bennett's and Graham Harman's work have substantially expanded my views on objects and agency. I have also been thinking a lot about surfaces in contemporary art. Taxidermy is all surface—a practical and metaphorical totalization of animality whilst plants are all-surface in a more, "helpless" but nonetheless related way. So far these ideas have filtered in my "plant book" and are being further problematized by the elusive/ambiguous essence of plant-being. Foucauldian biopolitics is also essential to both books—there is something of an ontological parallelism between animals-made-objects and plants that can be explored through the materiality of bodies. Notions of space and epistemology define the encounter between us and plants or taxidermy objects. This approach replaced the more general idea of the "encounter in the gallery space" that characterized my earlier animal studies writing. In both books I am concerned with notions of materiality and resistance as well as power as a productive/shaping agent that actively molds human/non-human bodies, ecologies, and intermingling. Don't want to say much more yet…But I'm glad they came in that order: taxidermy first and plants after.
"I've been for a walk on a winter's day…"
October 18, 2013 · Print This Article
Guest Post by Jacob Wick.
So far, the things that have made the most sense in Los Angeles to me have been the things that make no sense at all. I'm writing about Juliana Paciulli's recent solo show at Greene Exhibitions, "Are you talking to me?" and Andrew Choate's poetry, like this one from Stingray Clapping:
more nipple than fig
more fig than nipple
dress up as fig
for Halloween
dress up as
nipple for birthd
Choate sings his poetry, or singsongs it, more of a sprechstimme than a musical. I've never seen him read the poem I have placed above, but there's probably a tune it goes along with, and somebody always snickers at it, as I have seen them snicker in, now, several situations in Los Angeles. It's the same kind of snicker, or nervous laugh or outright laugh, perhaps if one is confident, that happens at a total failure of communication, when there is some kind of sudden – perhaps sudden, perhaps dramatic, possibly completely banal, like being hungover or otherwise exhausted – breakdown in a conversation or scene.
A scene perhaps like that in the title video of Paciulli's exhibition. A teenage girl, wearing a sagging black American flag as a cape, stands in typical suburban house – indeed a suburban house so typical it played Ferris Bueller's house in Ferris Bueller's Day Off - rehearsing De Niro's famous scene from Taxi Driver. She raises her gun; the shot centers on it: it is a yellow watergun (full disclosure: my yellow watergun; fuller discloser: John Paul Glover's yellow watergun), apparently empty, or mostly empty. The shot returns to the girl's face; she finishes the scene, pauses, says "oh, ok," and looks down and away. A housecat jumps over the flag/cape, which has apparently fallen off.
More forceful, adjacent to the sags another black flag, printed on bamboo twill, with a banana-yellow QUACK printed across its lower third. The flag might signify something, maybe national pride or Jasper Johns or Black Flag, a band I very unfortunately saw recently – a bunch of pathetic, ridiculous old men prancing around the stage like a bunch of assholes, which they certainly appeared to be – but the QUACK arrests its signification in the act, leaving the viewer speechless, in the strange afterimage of a short-circuit of meaning.
It has been important, certainly since the turn of the 20th century, to ask what things – not just art, everything – mean. What does this abstract painting mean? What does this realist short story mean? What does this rock mean? I learned at the Santa Monica police station, from an incredibly chatty technician who gently rolled my finger on the scanner, that the print on my left index finger is of the sort that less than 1% of people have. I asked, laughing, but not really, I felt pretty serious about it – it was my first thought – "what does it mean?" She said, "oh, probably nothing." If I look it up online – I think it was a double loop or a Peacock's eye or maybe a tented arch, I wish I remembered or wrote it down, but I didn't – it might mean that I'm a perfectionist, that I'm indecisive or diplomatic, that I'm independent and inflexible, or that I am "fiery."
The trouble with asking what things mean is that they often mean nothing, and those things that don't mean nothing often could mean many things along a varying scale of possible validity. I once wrote a review, for a class in undergrad, of that Ann Hamilton piece that is a bunch of white shirts, seams opened and singed, on a table. I wrote that it "meant" something about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. You know: sewing machines, fire, melancholy, death, feminism. It's certainly possible that the piece meant something, and that that meaning had something to do with about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, but it's equally possible it meant something about self-image, about burning or singing the demand to appear a certain way, or even the privileging of appearance (it's on a table after all). I point this out not to champion a wry, pseudo-"ironic" approach, an approach that I find vapid and profoundly irritating – and completely dissociated from the actual function of irony, but that's another story – but rather to wonder if it is not more interesting, or exciting, or even relevant, to ask what things do, rather than what they mean. In the case of Choate and Paciulli, their work could mean a variety of things, doubtless some of which are fascinating, but what is most important – to me at least – is what they do: they short-circuit or gag the transmission of subjective information. In so doing, they resuscitate the possibility of gesture.
What is gesture? Giorgio Agamben, in his enigmatically unfinished "Notes on Gesture," refers to the ancient Roman philosopher Varro:
The third stage of action is, they say, that in which they faciunt "make" something: in this, on account the likeness among agere "to act" and gerere "to carry or carry on," a certain error is committed by those who think that it is only one thing. For a person can facere something and not agere it, as a poet facit "makes" a play and does not act it, and on the other hand an actor agit "acts" it and does not make it, and so a play fit "is made" by the poet, not acted, and agitur "is acted" by the actor, not made. On the other hand, the general [imperator], in that he is said to gerere "carry on" affairs, in this neither faciti "makes" nor agit "acts," but gerit "carries on," that is, supports, a meaning transferred from those who gerunt "carry" burdens, because they support them. (57)
The three categories of action are, then: to make or produce; to act or perform; to carry on or support. Agamben identifies gesture with support, with gerere, to carry or carry on. The error that apparently was being made in the first century BCE, that of confusing performing with supporting, is simply exacerbated in the twenty-first century CE, where that which is supporting simply disappears. We see the actor perform, and admire the poet who made, but we miss, or fail to focus on, the gesture that supports: the tone of voice, the rise and fall of an arm, a certain tenseness or relaxation. It is the gesture that finally closes the act of signification, and for Agamben, this carries tremendous weight. As that which supports or endures, the gesture "opens up the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human" (57). It is not – or should not be – the sphere of production, nor the sphere of praxis, that determines one's humanity, but rather the manner in which one supports or endures, one's gestures. It is in one's gestures that one's character appears.
"Notes on Gesture" tracks the disappearance or capture of gesture from the late 19th century to the present. Beginning with Gilles de la Tourette's catalogue of irregular gestures, which became the basis for what is now called Tourette's disease; to Tourette's catalogue of normal gestures, which he describes with pre-cinematic relish. According to Agamben, after numerous cases being reported in the late 19th century, cases Tourette's disease "practically cease to be reported" from the beginning of the twentieth century until Oliver Sacks reportedly noticed several apparent cases of Tourette's while walking down a New York street in 1971. Agamben suggests, somewhat amusingly – a nervous laugh, a snicker – that this could perhaps "in the meantime ataxia, tics, and dystonia had become the norm and that at some point everybody had lost control of their gestures and was walking and gesticulating frantically" (51). The reemergence of Tourette's in the 70s signals not a sudden gaining of control of gesture, but perhaps the moment when the obsession over gesture – as one obsesses over anything one has lost, as any lost thing becomes transfigured into "destiny" – reached some kind of mark.
In any case, the desire to reclaim gesture or the nostalgia for gesture propels cinema. Extending Deleuze's term "movement-image," which implies that cinematic images are themselves in movement, Agamben writes:
Every image, in fact, is animated by an antimomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reification and obliteration of a gesture (it is the imago as death mask or symbol); on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact (as in Muybridge's snapshots or in any sports photograph). The former corresponds to the recollection seized by voluntary memory, while the latter corresponds to the image flashing in the epiphany of involuntary memory. And while the former lives in magical isolation, the latter always refers beyond itself to a whole of which is it a part. Even the Mona Lisa, even Las Meninas could be seen not as immovable and eternal forms, but as fragments of a gesture of as stills of a lost film wherein only they would regain their true meaning. And that is so because a certain kind of litigatio, a paralyzing power who spell we need to break, is continuously at work in every image…
Cinema seizes and redeploys gesture, and as such "belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics" (55). For cinema suggests or imposes character, characters, ethos. For if it is through cinema, as Agamben so eloquently writes, that we dream of gesture; the question then becomes how to "introduce into this dream the element of awakening" (56). How do we, how can we, pinch ourselves back into awareness of our own gestures?
For Agamben, the key is to forget, or to remember, or to forget to forget, to forget to remember. Gesture appears involuntarily, in moments when we lose our track, when we are gagged, "indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor's improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak" (59). Perhaps this is what Cage dreamed of when he asked for silence. When we are gagged, when we forget suddenly or witness a forgetting – for the gag is more than the actor forgetting, it is everyone in the theater witnessing that forgetting, participating in it – we witness gesture as pure means, dissociated from production or praxis.
And if cinema is the tool by which we dream of gesture, then Hollywood is the capital of dreams, of dreams suggested or imposed; and if we consider gesture to be the sphere of politics, as Agamben does, or if we consider gesture to be the support or character of ideology, as I do – or both, for that is perhaps two ways of saying the same thing – then Los Angeles becomes perhaps the ideal place to think about gesture, or to focus on work that brings forward the possibility of gesture, work that stops us from explaining what it means and forces to encounter what it does.
Jacob Wick is a conceptual artist based in Los Angeles. For more information, visit jacobwick.info.