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The Freestyle Snowboarder Hat
by IrishgirlieKnits
Snowboarder's annual Christmas gift is a hat designed by me for when he hits the slopes. Requirements….it needs to have earflaps and look cool! Beyond cool! This year I didn't even check with him on the design. I just did it! Freestyle. And then I made one for my nephew. And then my sister. Freestyle works for everyone, don't you think?!
in ShibuiKnits Merino Alpaca, colorway Seaweed
provided by my fabulous local dealers ... Purlescence Yarns (thanks Nathania!)
in the gorgeous Plucky Knitter Merino Cashmere Nylon Worsted in the coveted colorway, Early Light
It was Rowan's birthday present! Cashmere, right?! Happy Belated Birthday little sis!
Yarn: Shibui Knits Merino Alpaca (50% baby alpaca, 50% merino), 132 yards/skein; 1 skein Pagoda and 1 skein Bark for toddler size; 2 skeins of Seaweed for adult large size; The Plucky Knitter Merino Cashmere Nylon Worsted (80% merino, 10% cashmere, 10% nylon), 185 yards/skein; 1 skein Early Light for adult small size
Needles: Size
Gauge: ~4" stitches/inch for toddler and adult large size; ~4 ½" stitches/inch for adult small size
Width: 7 ¼" inches for toddler size; 8 ¼" inches for adult small size; 9 ¼" inches for adult large size
Note: The adult small size was made by using a slightly lighter worsted yarn and reducing the needle size for a tighter gauge. Also, for the adult large size, less than half of the second skein was necessary (less than 200 yards needed for the hat).
Lil' Guy and his dad, Boondock Saint (he sooooo doesn't want a hat from me!)
Available for purchase here!
As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions at irishgirlieknits AT gmail DOT com
Happy Snowboarding!!
xoxo Irishgirlieknits


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A new map is available that shows many of the mesh nodes across the state of Utah. The map can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/jfvqx6s. Mesh operators can add a new node or manage existing nodes via the map as well. For details on how to do this expand the map description in the upper left corner of the map when it first loads.
You may be asking why this map was created. After all, there is an existing map on the Broadband Hamnet web page. The reason for creating this map is:
While basic maps are great, just knowing the location of a node does not give mesh operators the information they need to connect to a node. They need additional information like the SSID, where a directional antenna is pointing, frequency, etc. This map provides that information and more.
I want to see mesh succeed in Utah. I don't believe that can happen if we as mesh operators don't know where the mesh nodes are and how to connect to them.
I like the idea of having a map that is specific to Utah rather than covering the entire United States and in some cases the world.
So there you have it. My hope is that this map will prove useful to mesh operators around the great state of Utah. We all know a map won't do anyone any good if no one knows it exists. With that in mind, please tell any mesh operators you know about this map.
I have a new node up just south of Newton, Utah in Cache County.
Stock antennas only for now, but I have an omni and a 24db directional I'll be installing as soon as I know where to point (Nibley perhaps?).
To add nodes to the map, use the form at http://goo.gl/forms/G4AyoXa7d5.
To modify an existing node on the map, use the form at http://goo.gl/forms/xJHuiuKim4.
Be sure to click on any node icon to display the detailed information relevant to that node.
Be sure to click on any node icon to display the detailed information relevant to that node.
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South African Journal of Science
On-line version ISSN 1996-7489
Print version ISSN 0038-2353
S. Afr. j. sci. vol.105 n.1-2 Pretoria Jan./Feb. 2009
Water resources in the Klein Karoo: the challenge of sustainable development in a water-scarce area
David Le Maitre*; Christine Colvin; Ashton Maherry
CSIR Natural Resources and the Environment, P.O. Box 320, Stellenbosch 7600, South Africa
The Klein Karoo is situated in the Western Cape, South Africa, and is characterised by low rainfall (100450 mm yr1). The Klein Karoo is situated in the primary catchment of the Gouritz River. The mean annual runoff (MAR) for the three major tributaries of the Gouritz River arising in or feeding the Klein Karoo (Touws, Gamka, Olifants) is 540 Mm3 yr1. Groundwater recharge in the three Klein Karoo catchments is ±257 Mm3 yr1, but only a portion of this reaches the rivers. The very variable flows result in low 1:50 year yield of 161 Mm3 (30% of MAR). The current demand for water in these catchments is 182 Mm3 yr1, which exceeds the yield, and demand is projected to increase between 23% and 150% by 2025. Changes in the approach to water management are required, including improving the efficiency of irrigation and land restoration to improve water infiltration and reduce soil erosion. We believe that it is time to change to a water management approach that is designed to anticipate and manage the inherent variability in water resources in the Klein Karoo, thereby placing the region on a path to sustainable development.
Key words: water resource management, surface water, ground-water, variability, water demand, land management, sustainable development
The Klein Karoo is an ecologically and economically diverse region of South Africa situated in a broad eastwest oriented valley between the relatively well-watered Langeberg-Outeniqua Mountains in the south and the Witteberg-Swartberg Mountains in the north (Fig. 1). It lies within the Gouritz River system whose tributaries extend through the Swartberg Mountains into the Great Karoo. Three biomes meet in the Klein Karoo:1,2 Fynbos, Succulent Karoo and Thicket. Both Fynbos and Succulent Karoo are recognised as global biodiversity hotspots3 with a variety of plant species. The perennial reaches of the Gouritz River system are also important for the conservation of aquatic biodiversity, including a number of threatened fish species.3,4 A history of poor management has left much of the Klein Karoo degraded by over-grazing and poor cultivation practices.5 The riverine areas are the worst affected, with only 11% in a near natural state, almost all of which is in source areas which are too steep to cultivate and provide poor forage.5 Extensive land degradation has already altered the hydrology and geohydrology of the Klein Karoo and its aquatic and groundwater-dependent ecosystems.6,7 Vegetation loss and trampling by livestock have altered key processes such as water infiltration, increasing soil erosion and changing river flow regimes.
The Klein Karoo is a semi-arid to arid area and fresh water is a critical constraint to future economic development. Although water is widely recognised as a critical constraint, there is a dearth of information on the state of the water resources in the Klein Karoo. This paper reviews information on the water resources of the Klein Karoo, covering both groundwater and surface water, and highlights some of the key issues, knowledge gaps and future options. Recent overviews include the Water Situation Assessment8 and internal strategic perspective prepared for the Gouritz Water Management Area (WMA),9 which includes the catchments of some of the adjacent coastal river systems.
Study area
There are different definitions of the extent of the Klein Karoo, depending largely on whether the boundaries are defined geographically, biogeographically or hydrologically. This study uses hydrological boundaries based on the boundary of the catchment of the Gouritz River system,10 which falls within or overlaps the geographical boundaries of the Klein Karoo used by Vlok et al.1 Much of the water used in the Klein Karoo is sourced from catchments which are situated to the north of the Witteberg-Swartberg Mountain Ranges, including their northern slopes, so these catchments are included as well (Fig. 1). The exceptions are the catchments of the Kingna River (Montagu area) and the Tradouw River (Barrydale area), which are tributaries of the Breede River system. Detailed data on water use and demand for these specific systems are lacking so they are not dealt with in this paper. The focus of this study is on the major sub-catchments of the Gouritz River system within or supplying the Klein Karoo (Fig. 2): the Touws, Buffels and Groot Rivers (secondary J1); Dwyka and Gamka (J2) and the Olifants and Kammanassie Rivers (J3). The final sub-catchment is the Gouritz River itself, which is the secondary catchment J4, called the lower Gouritz in this analysis to distinguish it from the whole Gouritz River system (J). The WMA also includes the catchments of the Duiwenhoks River (H8), Goukou (H9) and the coastal catchments from the Klein and Groot Brak Rivers (K1) to the Keurbooms River (K6).
Data sources and methods
The primary sources of climatic data were the climate atlas11 and mean annual rainfall from Lynch.12 Additional climatic data for specific localities were obtained from the South African Weather Bureau13 and Wentzel.14 Hydrological data for surface water per quaternary (4th order) catchment and naturalised flows at dams and weirs were taken from Midgley et al.10 Data on river baseflows were taken from statistics calculated using the SPATSIM modelling framework software.15
Information on water use and demand was obtained from the South African Department of Water Affairs and Forestry overviews,8,9 supplemented with information from the Water Authorisation Registration and Management System (WARMS) database. A total of 8 325 registered water use points were obtained8,9 for the Klein Karoo, of which 93% fell within the study area and were used. The data have been provisionally reviewed, but because the information must still be verified, only comparative analyses are presented.
Data on groundwater recharge and contribution to baseflows were obtained from the Groundwater Resource Assessment (GRA).16 Groundwater quality data for boreholes in the study area were extracted from the WARMS database. The database contains a number of zero values in the case where only minor ions were analysed. In order to compensate for this, the zero values were deleted prior to calculating any statistics. This resulted in a total of 3 141 data entries. Where there was a time-series for the borehole, the values were treated as individual data entries. The WARMS database provides latitude and longitude data for borehole localities, which were used to allocate them to quaternary catchments and to principal aquifer types based on a 1:1 million scale geological map.17,18
Groundwater recharge was calculated using the GRA16 values of recharge per quaternary catchment and was spatially joined with the aquifer types to calculate the volume per polygon. The layer was then cropped to the Klein Karoo study area boundary, and the area values recalculated. A Microsoft® Excel 2003 pivot table was used to summarise the data. Average recharge (mm) per aquifer type was calculated by dividing the volume by the area of the aquifer.
Biophysical environment: climate and water resources
The Klein Karoo is characterised by marked orographic rainfall gradients and rain shadow effects. The upper slopes of the Langeberg-Outeniqua Mountain Ranges receive up to 1 650 mm and the Witteberg-Swartberg more than 1 000 mm but most of the low-lying central valley receives 100300 mm per year (Fig. 2). The driest areas are in the west where some parts get only 50100 mm. The seasonal distribution of the rainfall varies from winter-dominant in the far west (Montagu, Fig. 3), to bimodal (Ladismith), to summer in the east (Willowmore). The winter rains are brought by cold fronts associated with low-pressure systems and westerly winds.19,20 Summer rainfall is dominated by moisture from the east and convective systems which are less affected by orographic gradients. The rainfall regime is also characterised by extremely high rainfall events, associated with cut-off low pressure systems,20 which can result in major floods: e.g. Laingsburg to Montagu in January 1981, Montagu in March 2003 and Zoar in 2004.
The variability in the rainfall increases as the rainfall decreases. In areas with <300 mm per year, the coefficient of variation is 3640% compared with 1520% in the high rainfall areas.20 Areas receiving winter rainfall have more reliable rainfall than those receiving summer rainfall, and the difference increases as the mean annual rainfall increases.20,21 The Klein Karoo has a quasi 1012 year cycle: roughly five years with more and five years with less rainfall and a range of 1030% either side of the long-term mean.19,22
Temperature and evaporation
The mean daily temperature in February is >30°C in the lowlands and in the upper 20s in the mountain areas and the coastal side of the Klein Karoo11. In August the corresponding temperatures are 2022°C and 1214°C. The corresponding mean daily minima for January are 1416°C and 1012°C and for August 48°C and 22°C.
The area receives more than 80% of the potential solar radiation throughout the year,23 resulting in high evaporation rates. The potential evaporation (PEt, A-pan equivalents11) is more than 2 000 mm per year and exceeds 2 250 mm per year (>10 times the rainfall) in the dry central region. There is an eastwest gradient in the seasonal distribution where the ratio of the January to June PEt ranges from more than five in the west to three in the east, emphasising the greater seasonality in the west.
Surface water resources
Mean annual runoff
The Gouritz River system (catchment J) was estimated to have a mean annual runoff (MAR) of about 674 Mm3 (ref 10) although the most recent study9 gives 562 Mm3. Most of the surface runoff statistics were obtained from Midgley et al.10 so we have used the data from their study unless otherwise indicated. The MAR is equivalent to 12.5 mm or about 5.7% of the mean annual rainfall, substantially lower than the mean for South Africa of about 9.0%,10 but similar to arid parts of Australia.24,25
Spatial variation in surface runoff
The Gouritz River system has been divided into four main sub-catchments (Table 1). More than 90% of the Olifants and Kammanassie sub-catchment (J3, Fig. 2) lies to the north of the Swartberg, within the Great Karoo, but the flows supply the Gamkapoort Dam which supports irrigation in the Klein Karoo. The sub-catchments of the Dwyka and Gamka (J2) and the Olifants (J3) fall mainly within the Karoo, but sub-catchment J4 (lower Gouritz) is situated mainly south of the Outeniqua Mountains (Fig. 2). Although catchments in the Klein Karoo comprise only 43% of the Gouritz River system, they produce most (56%) of the runoff (Fig. 4) and capture more than 70% of the estimated recharge (Table 1) because they include a large proportion of the TMG aquifer.
Surface water flow variability
The volumes of runoff are not only low, they are also very variable, with the coefficient of variation (CV) for streamflow being 25 times the CV of rainfall, as found in other arid areas.24,25 Analyses of the naturalised runoff records in Midgley et al.10 show that the quaternary MAR varies between 1.1 and 2.8 times the median annual runoff.7 The CV ranges from 0.71.7 times the MAR and decreases as the amount of runoff increases. The drier catchments have a high percentage of zero flow months, some more than 25%. The high runoff in wet years or during floods is reflected in the maximum annual runoff being 212 times the MAR and the minimum 00.3 times.7
Multi-year trends in mean annual runoff
Analysis of the naturalised runoff and cumulative deviations from the mean volumes of naturalised runoff, measured at dams and weirs, highlight the spatial variability of the flows.7 Each of the records that was analysed had unique features (Fig. 5). Most of the flows have extended periods of below-average runoff, e.g. the Prins River from 19221936 and Calitzdorp Dam from 19401974. The high runoff measured in the Prins River in 1920 plays a dominant role in the pattern of deviations, as does the massive volume of runoff at Paardekloof (Olifants River) in 1980. If these exceptional values are replaced with the mean for those series, the cumulative deviations are negative for the Prins River until 1956; Paardekloof has a negative cumulative deviation until 1938 and then is positive until 1978, reasonably similar to the Kammanassie Dam.7 The high variability of the flows and the long-term deviations result in low reservoir yields (based on a 1 in 50-year failure probability), even from a reservoir with a capacity equal to the MAR (Table 2).25,26
Surface water quality
Much of the groundwater in the Klein Karoo is saline because the geological formations which form most of the aquifers give rise to naturally saline groundwater (e.g. the Enon conglomerate near Oudtshoorn)8 combined with high evaporation rates. This makes the water naturally poor quality for agricultural purposes. Natural salinity also affects the river systems draining the Great Karoo and has been increased by the return flows from the irrigated lands in the Touws, Buffels and Groot River catchments. The water quality is generally acceptable in the upper catchments, except for the Buffels River upstream of the Floriskraal Dam, and declines downstreambecoming unacceptable in the Groot River (J13).8 The water quality is unacceptable in the lower reaches of the Olifants River, largely due to the return flows from irrigated areas. No data are available for the main stem of the lower Gouritz River (J4) but the quality reaching the estuary is likely to be poor despite dilution by the better-quality water from the sub-catchments on the southern slopes of the Outeniqua Mountains.
Groundwater resources
Aquifer types
Groundwater in the Klein Karoo is stored in three types of aquifers. Primary aquifers are formed from unconsolidated sediments which have been deposited primarily as alluvium in the floodplains of the major river systems; these aquifers typically occur in low-rainfall areas and are mainly recharged during high flows and floods during the wet season. Secondary karstic aquifers are very limited in extent as they are only found in the carbonates of the Kango formation; dissolution fissures can store large volumes of water which flows relatively rapidly through them and results in springs and boreholes with high yields. Secondary fractured aquifers are the most widespread and extensive type in the Klein Karoo, including the Table Mountain Group (TMG) quartzites, Witteberg sandstones and the Bokkeveld shales. The water is stored in and flows through the fractures and fault systems; open fractures can store relatively large volumes of water but they represent only a small fraction of the total rock volume.
The quartzitic sandstones of the TMG and, to a lesser extent, Witteberg, form the bulk of the mountains and the relatively high rainfall they receive results in high recharge: about 10% or >50 mm per year. The estimated recharge derived for the GRA study16 is 305 Mm3 yr1 for the whole Gouritz River system and 257 Mm3 yr1 for the three main tributaries. This is equivalent to about 48% of the MAR for the latter catchments and is highest for the Groot River system (J1). A large but unknown proportion of the recharge is lost through transpiration by vegetation in the discharge areas, particularly riparian zones and floodplains which may explain why the base-flow in these catchments is only 95 Mm3 yr1.
The TMG receives more than 70% of the total groundwater recharge for the entire Klein Karoo. The extensive faulting and fracturing of the TMG results in relatively high deep-groundwater storage in discrete fault zones, and discharge from the TMG aquifers maintains the perennial flows in the main river systems. The groundwater flowpaths may extend for tens of kilometers and reach up to 3 km in depth as shown by the temperatures of the hot springs in the area, for example 50°C at the Calitzdorp hot spring.27
Groundwater yields
The Bokkeveld shales comprise much of the central area of the Klein Karoo and have low recharge (<6 mm per year). Boreholes typically have low yields (<1 l s1) although the Ceres sub-group has three formations with greater permeability and higher yields (>5 l s1).27 Yields from boreholes sited on water-bearing structures in the TMG may be higher. The TMG formations continue beneath the Bokkeveld in the synclinal structure known as the Outeniqua basin in the Oudtshoorn area. Estimates of the volumes of groundwater that could be abstracted from this basin, which is at least 1 000 mm thick, range from 58 to 320 Mm3.(ref 28) Ongoing exploration drilling should provide a better estimate of the sustainable yield of the deep aquifer.
Groundwater quality
Only the TMG yields high-quality groundwater for human consumption, with its median total dissolved solids of <260 mg l1.(ref 29) The groundwater from the Witteberg, Bokkeveld, and the Uitenhage Group, which includes the Kango formation and is found in the Oudtshoorn area, range from 261600 mg l1 (good) to 6011 800 (marginal) to >1 800 (poor to unacceptable) depending on the inherent salinity of the rock formations. In the case of the Kango formation the poor quality is due to high concentrations of carbonates rather than sodium. The groundwater quality is marginal over at least 60% of the study area. The limited data that are available indicate that most of the alluvial aquifers also contain marginal quality groundwater.
Water availability and requirements
The most comprehensive summary of the current availability and use of water resources is the data compiled for the Water Resource Overview8 and Internal Strategic Perspective.9 Unfortunately these sources use a grouping of sub-catchments where the lower Gouritz sub-catchment (J4) is combined with the coastal catchments.
The 2000 assessment of water availability highlights the limited amounts of water available. The low volumes, combined with the highly variable flows, account for the 1:50 year yields of only 161 Mm3 for the three main tributaries (Groot, Gamka, Olifants) (Table 3), which is only about 29.8% of the mean annual runoff. The impact of the environmental allocation (Ecological Reserve, National Water Act No. 36, 1998) on the availability of water is not seen as being a major issue except for the coastal catchments, where river and estuary requirements have been set at very high levels (Table 3). However, it is important to emphasise that full determinations of the ecological reserve are needed so that the required amounts can be determined with a reasonable degree of confidence.
Current water requirements
The best available information on the current demand is the recent overview8 (Table 4). The current total requirement for the WMA is 339 Mm3 yr1, about 30% of which is in the coastal catchments where there is high usage by the irrigation, urban and forestry sectors. The demand in the sub-catchments of the three main tributaries (Groot, Gamka, Olifants) was 182 Mm3 in 2000 at a 98% assurance, with 160 Mm3 for irrigation.8 The majority (73%) of registered water use is for river abstractions, 15% from schemes (including groundwater schemes such as the Klein Karoo Rural Water Supply Scheme), 8% from boreholes, 3% from springs and only 0.6% from dams. The currently available water resources, based on the estimates for 1:50 year yields (Table 3), are not sufficient to meet the requirements (Table 4). The result is that there is a net deficit of 64 Mm3 yr1 for the WMA, two-thirds of which is in the coastal catchments and the balance in the three main tributaries (Table 5). This means there is already a water deficit, at least in terms of the estimated demand and desired assurance of supply. This is particularly acute in the Touws-Buffels-Groot catchment and can be expected to result in a decrease in the sustainable yield, or a reduction in the assurance of supply that needs to be addressed.
Irrigation currently accounts for 75% of all the water used in the Gouritz WMA and 8492% of the water used in the three main tributaries. Although these figures must be interpreted with caution because the farmers generally operate with a low assurance of supply (because of the long periods in which there is below-average inflow into the dams), the pressure to retain all flood water in the dams does place a severe stress on the river systems and results in heavily modified flow regimes. In many cases the allocations exceed the available yields. For example, over-allocation within the Olifants River Government Water Scheme has resulted in the combined allocation from the Stompdrift and Kammanassie Dams being 87.7 Mm3 yr1, which is 266% of their combined 1:50 year yield.8 The high levels of existing demand and use are important because of the drive to establish new irrigation schemes for formerly disadvantaged farmers and develop the resource base of rural communities. Irrigated farming is seen as the only form of agriculture that is currently economically viable and could be used for this purpose.9
Urban water use for municipalities and industries is generally low in the Klein Karoo catchments, except where there are reasonably large towns such as Calitzdorp (Gamka) and Ladismith (Touws-Groot).8 Oudtshoorn accounts for almost all the 10 Mm3 yr1 taken from the Olifants River sub-catchment (J3) for urban use. Very limited population growth, or even a decline, is predicted for the Gamka and Touws-Groot catchments, but the population is expected to grow in the Olifants catchment.8 The available data show somewhat different trends; the population of Kannaland (Ladismith) in the Touws catchment increased from 21 105 in 1996 to 23 971 in 2001 (14%) while Oudtshoorn grew from 78 846 to 84 692 (7%).30 Migration of the rural populations to the local urban centres is expected to continue. Population densities are low, with 80% or more of the population residing in the towns.
The DWAF studies8,9 used crude estimates of the amount of groundwater available. Since then, the GRA16 study has provided estimates of the available resource based on recharge storage, but more detailed studies are required to determine sustainable yields. Data used in this study indicate that many of the Great Karoo sub-catchments and some of the sub-catchments close to Oudtshoorn are stressed, with more than 50% of recharge being registered for abstraction by users (Fig. 6). There is likely to be an overlap in total available water resources, where groundwater recharge contributes to surface water baseflow. This issue needs to be understood better to avoid over-allocation of groundwater resources in the future, and minimise the potential for significant adverse environmental impacts and clashes of interest between surface and groundwater users.
Impacts of invasive alien plants
The total flow reduction due to invasive alien plants is estimated at 121 Mm3 yr1 (ref 8) based on the data used for the Water Situation Assessment Model (which originally came from the study by Versfeld et al.31). The impacts on the 1:50 yields from the different sub-catchments are substantial (Table 3), especially in catchments which include the coastal mountain ranges where there are extensive invasions by Hakea species and by various Acacia species along the river systems.31 Clearing of the invaders in the different catchments could help by substantially reducing the existing deficits in the Olifants River system and in the coastal catchments. The impact of alien invasive plants on the 1:50 year yield in the three main tributaries is estimated at 15 Mm3.(ref 9) Large areas of the river bed and floodplain of the Olifants River, and to some extent the other rivers, have also been invaded by Arundo donax (Spaansriet), a species which probably has very high levels of water-use, but its impacts have not been quantified yet.
Impacts of climate change
The lack of information on the implications of climate change for the water resource situation in the Gouritz WMA was identified as an important issue.8,9 Assessments of the implications of climate change for South Africa have been done at a national scale3234 but none have focused specifically on the Klein Karoo. A recent assessment for the Western Cape Province predicts the following general trends:35 a reduction in winter rainfall; an increase in summer rainfall and rainfall intensity in the east; a monthly rainfall change of 10 mm or more; and an increase in air temperature, particularly the minimum temperature, by up to 23°C.
The decrease in winter rainfall will affect the western regions, the southern mountains and the Swartberg. The projected weakening of the cold fronts could be significant if this decreases the probability of them bringing substantial amounts of rain to the inland mountain ranges, which are important for surface water resources in the Klein Karoo (Fig. 2). The increase in air temperatures will substantially increase the evaporative demand, partially or potentially completely offsetting increases in summer rainfall and aggravating decreases in winter rainfall. The volumes of recharge to groundwater and runoff in catchments of the Klein Karoo are likely to decrease substantially, but montane areas may be less affected. The variability of river flows might increase with a tendency to more erratic flows and more frequent floods.
Water requirements in 2025
The projected water balance in 2025 was estimated using two different scenarios, one with limited increase in use and one with a high level of increase9 (Table 5). Both show clearly that the projected trends will lead to increasing deficits. The baseline scenario results in a 23% increase and the high-level scenario nearly 150%. Protection of the ecological integrity of the system (termed the ecological reserve), could be met by the approximately 120 Mm3 yr1 that would be released by complete clearing of invasive alien plants (see below), but the increases in yields will not be sufficient in most of the catchments and will not be of any use where their impacts are minimal (e.g. the Gamka catchment). About 22 Mm3 yr1 of the total increase could be made available, at a 1:50 year assurance of supply. The greatest benefits will be in the Olifants River system, where the increase in the 1:50 year yield of 4 Mm3 yr1 could help alleviate the problems caused by historical over-allocations, especially in the lower parts of the catchment.
Balancing supply and demand
As irrigation is the major water use, particularly in the inland catchments, it is clear that there will have to be a strategy aimed at improving water-use efficiency, which includes reducing the return flows of saline water that are affecting the river systems and downstream users.8 Urban water requirements are not expected to increase substantially and most of the projected increase is expected to be in the coastal catchments rather than in the Klein Karoo. Overall, the increases in efficiency are unlikely to have a significant impact relative to those in the agricultural sector. Rural water requirements are not expected to increase substantially and may even decrease slightly with the trend of increasing movement of people to the urban areas.
The overview report8 recommends that controlled burning of fynbos catchments to reduce the mean age of the fynbos and increase water yields could be investigated further. This intervention is unlikely to result in a substantial increase in water yields, as fynbos typically has a low biomass and relatively low water-use,36,37 and frequent fires could have adverse impacts on the biodiversity functioning of these ecosystems.
The water resource situation in the Klein Karoo is approaching a crisis. The current levels of demand have passed the stage of sustainable use and balancing of human and ecological requirements envisaged by the National Water Act. Water demand is projected to increase significantly by between 23% and 150% by 2025, although there is no way of meeting this demand without even more severely compromising the functioning of the river systems. The impacts of climate change are uncertain, but are likely to result both in a reduction in the available water resources and even greater variability in flow regimes and recharge.
There are various options for mitigating this situation. First, the efficiency of irrigation could be improved by ensuring that the most efficient technologies are used in both water delivery and application to maximise crop yields while minimising the volume of return flows and, thus, the salinisation caused by irrigation. The possibility of changing to crops with a higher water-use efficiency and value should be assessed. Second, although water consumption by urban areas is a small proportion of the overall use, upgrading of urban water service infrastructure to minimise water losses (e.g. leaking water mains) could be beneficial at the local scale as well as reduce the volume of water that needs treatment. Third, making use of managed aquifer storage, including artificial recharge, could reduce water loss through evaporation compared with storage dams.
Even aquifers which have naturally high salinities may be used for the artificial storage of good quality water because mixing rates are quite low.38 The Klein Karoo, with its very high rates of evapotranspiration, is well suited to subsurface storage of water in aquifers, particularly in alluvial aquifers, the TMG and the Kango carbonates.
Research is needed to get a better understanding of the dynamics of the groundwater resource, particularly recharge, and its sustainable yield in different parts of the Gouritz WMA.8 This includes research into the potential use of groundwater from the TMG aquifer, particularly the deep groundwater. Research into the potential environmental consequences of large-scale abstraction needs to be given a high priority. Implementing alien vegetation control, particularly in the rivers on the northern slopes of the Outeniqua Mountains and foothills of the Swartberg, could further alleviate the situation. Lastly, effective land-care programmes could explore the synergies between improving water infiltration; reducing soil erosion and vegetation or crop productivity at small scales; and decreasing sediment loads and increasing sustainable yields at the scale of water supply schemes.
The mitigation measures outlined above are necessary and beneficial, but they are not sufficient. The current approach to water resource management has been designed to maximise human exploitation of the water resources of the Klein Karoo. Floods, droughts and water shortages have been seen as abnormal events rather than as normal and inherent in the system. The same inflexible approach to natural resource management has been applied to other land resources (e.g. natural grazing) and the net result has been severe land degradation. We believe that only a fundamental re-appraisal of land-use patterns could place the Klein Karoo on a path to sustainable development.39,40 A partial solution could be the 'soft path'approach to water management,41 which emphasises the need to move away from hard engineering technology to community-scale resource management wherever feasible; decentralised and open decision-making; equitable pricing; increasing efficiency of water-use (both in volumetric and economic terms); and implementing strong environmental protection measures. These changes may entail shifts in both social and economic systems which will affect everyone involved in the Klein Karoo in some way or other.
This work was supported by parliamentary grant funding received by the CSIR. We thank the Department of Water Affairs for access to data from the Water Allocation and Resource Management System and National Groundwater Database on water allocations and water quality. We also thank our colleagues for useful discussions as well as the Klein Karoo Study Group, Gouritz Initiative and Arid Zone Forum for encouragement to pursue this work.
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8. DWAF (2003). Overview of water resources availability and utilisation. Gouritz Water Management Area Report P WMA 16/000/00/0203. Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, Pretoria. [ Links ]
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11. Schulze R.E., Maharaj M., Lynch S.D., Howe B.J. and Melvil-Thompson B. (1997). South African atlas of agrohydrology and climatology. Report No. TT82/96. Water Research Commission, Pretoria. [ Links ]
12. Lynch S.D. (2004). Development of a raster database of annual, monthly and daily rainfall for southern Africa. Report No. 1156/1/04. Water Research Commission, Pretoria. [ Links ]
13. SAWB (1998). Climate of South Africa. Climate Statistics up to 1990, WB42. South African Weather Bureau, Department of Environmental Affairs, Pretoria. [ Links ]
14. Wentzel R. (2005). Summary of climatic data for the Agricultural Experimental Farms associated with the Little Karoo. AgroMet-ISCW, Stellenbosch. [ Links ]
15. Hughes D.A., ed. (2005). SPATSIM, an integrated framework for ecological reserve determination and implementation. Report No. TT 245/04. Water Research Commission, Pretoria. [ Links ]
16. DWAF (2005). Groundwater Resource Assessment, Phase II: Methodology. Groundwater-surface water interactions. Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, Pretoria. [ Links ]
17. Council for Geoscience (1997). 1:1 000 000 scale geological map of the Republic of South Africa and the Kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland. Council for Geoscience, Pretoria. [ Links ]
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19. Tyson P.D. (1986). Climatic Change and Variability in Southern Africa. Oxford University Press, Cape Town. [ Links ]
20. Desmet P.G. and Cowling R.M. (1999). The climate of the karoo a functional approach, In The Karoo Ecological Patterns and Processes, eds W.R.J. Dean and S.J. Milton, pp. 316. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [ Links ]
21. Milton S.J., Yeaton R.I., Dean W.R.J. and Vlok J.H.J. (1997). Succulent Karoo, In Vegetation of Southern Africa, eds R.M. Cowling, S.M. Pierce and D.M. Richardson, pp. 131166. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [ Links ]
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23. Schulze R.E. and McGee O.S. (1978). Climatic indices and classifications in relation to the biogeography of southern Africa, In Biogeography and Ecology of Southern Africa, ed. M.J.A. Werger, pp. 1952. W. Junk, The Hague. [ Links ]
24. McMahon T.A. (1979). Hydrological characteristics of arid zones, In Symposium on the Hydrology of Areas with Low Precipitation, Canberra 1979, Publication No. 128, pp. 105123. International Association of Hydrological Sciences, Wallingford. [ Links ]
25. Görgens A.H.M. and Hughes D.A. (1982). Synthesis of streamflow information relating to the semi-arid Karoo biome of South Africa. S. Afr. J. Sci. 78, 5868. [ Links ]
26. Braune E. and Wessels H.P.P. (1980). Effects of land-use on runoff from catchments and yield of present and future storage, Workshop on the effects of rural land-use and catchment management on water resources. CSIR, Pretoria. [ Links ]
27. Meyer P.S. (1999). An explanation of the 1:500 000 general hydrogeological map Oudtshoorn 3320. Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, Pretoria. [ Links ]
28. Umvoto Africa (Pty) Ltd. (2005). Deep artesian groundwater for Oudtshoorn municipal supply, Phase D: target generation and borehole/Wellfield siting using structural geology and geophysical methods (DAGEOS Project). Report No. 1254/1/05. Water Research Commission, Pretoria. [ Links ]
29. DWAF (1996). South African Water Quality Guidelines. In Domestic Water Use, vol. 1, 2nd edn. Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, Pretoria. [ Links ]
30. Eden Municipality (2005). Final Draft Revised Integrated Development Plan 2005/2006. Eden District Municipality, George. [ Links ]
31. Versfeld D.B., Le Maitre D.C. and Chapman R.A. (1998). Alien invading plants and water resources in South Africa: a preliminary assessment. Report No. TT99/98. Water Research Commission, Pretoria. [ Links ]
32. Rutherford M.C., Midgley G.F., Bond W.J., Musil C.F., Powrie L.W., Roberts R. and Allsopp J. (2000). Plant Biodiversity: Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment. Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Pretoria. [ Links ]
33. Schulze R.E. and Perks L.A. (2000). Assessment of the Impact of Climate. School of Bioresources Engineering and Environmental Hydrology, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. [ Links ]
34. Scholes R.J. and Biggs R. (2004). Ecosystem Services in Southern Africa: A Regional Assessment. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria. [ Links ]
35. Midgley G.F., Chapman R.A., Hewitson B., Johnston P., De Wit M., Ziervogel G., Mukheibir P., Van Niekerk L., Tadoss M., Van Wilgen B.W., Kgope B., Morant P.D., Theron A., Scholes R.J. and Forsyth G.G. (2005). A Status Quo, Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessment of the Physical and Socio-economic Effects of Climate Change in the Western Cape. CSIR Environmentek, Stellenbosch. [ Links ]
36. Bosch J.M., Van Wilgen B.W. and Bands D.P. (1987). A model for comparing water yield from fynbos catchments burnt at different intervals. Water SA 4, 191196. [ Links ]
37. Le Maitre D.C., Van Wilgen B.W., Chapman R.A. and McKelly D.H. (1996). Invasive plants in the Western Cape, South Africa: modelling the consequences of a lack of management. J. Appl. Ecol. 33, 161172. [ Links ]
38. Pyne R.D.G. (1995). Groundwater Recharge and Well: a Guide to Aquifer Storage Recovery. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton. [ Links ]
39. Le Maitre D.C. and O'Farrell P.J. (2008). Social-ecological resilience in a dry environment: people and water resources in the Little Karoo, In Exploring Sustainability Science: A Southern African Perspective, eds M. Burns and A. Weaver, pp. 339381. African SUN MeDIA, Stellenbosch. [ Links ]
40. O'Farrell P., Le Maitre D., Gelderblom C., Bonora D., Hoffman T. and Reyers B. (2008). Applying a resilience framework in the pursuit of sustainable land-use development in the Little Karoo, South Africa. In Advancing Sustainability Science in South Africa, eds M. Burns and A. Weaver, pp. 383432. SUN MeDIA, Stellenbosch. [ Links ]
41. Gleick P.H. (2003). Global freshwater resources: soft-path solutions for the 21st Century. Science 302, 15241528. [ Links ]
Received 3 June 2008. Accepted 6 March 2009.
* Author for correspondence. E-mail: email@example.com


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Graphic Designers
Photo: courtesy Sulki & Min
Sulki & Min, Poster for the 24th International Modern Dance Festival, Seoul, 2005
Sulki & Min (with Paul Elliman), APAP 2007 catalogue cover (detail), 2007
Sulki & Min, Façade, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands, 2009
Sulki & Min, Bubbles, poster for a gayageum concert by Koh Jiyeon, Seoul, 2007
The graphic designers for the BMW Guggenheim Lab were Sulki & Min, based in Seoul.
Sulki & Min is a partnership established by Sulki Choi and Min Choi, who met as MFA students at Yale University in 2001. From 2003 to 2005 they were based at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands, where they participated in a research project for the cultural identity of the city of Leuven, Belgium; designed the academy's various publications and promotional materials; and, with Tamara Maletic and Dan Michaelson, designed the exhibition Welcome to Fusedspace Database at Stroom Den Haag. Their first solo exhibition, Sulki & Min: Factory 060421-060513, was presented at Gallery Factory, Seoul, in 2006, and received the 2006 Art Award of the Year from the Arts Council Korea. Their second solo exhibition, Sulki & Min: Kimjinhye 080402-080414, was held at Kimjinhye Gallery, Seoul, in 2008.


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Memory Eternal! His Grace, Bishop ELIAS (Najm)
Memory Eternal! His Grace Bishop ELIAS (Najm), Bishop of Apamea and Abbot of the Patriarchal Monastery of the Holy Prophet Elias in Dhour Shweir, Lebanon
It was with much sadness that we received the news of the falling asleep in Christ of our beloved brother, His Grace ELIAS (Najm), Bishop of Apamea, and Abbot of St. Elias Monastery in Dhour Shweir, Lebanon. His Grace was born in the village of Agmeed Shouf, Lebanon. He came from a priestly family. His father was a priest in the town of Bhamdoun, Lebanon. At the age of 14, he enrolled at the Balamand Seminary. After 5 years at the Balamand, he was sent by the late Patriarch ALEXANDER III (Tahan) to the school of Halki, Turkey, where he studied theology. After graduation he returned to the Patriarchate of Antioch, and was appointed Abbot of St. Elias Monastery where he served until his repose. He was very friendly, humble and loved by all people. We ask our brother hierarchs and beloved clergy and all faithful of this Archdiocese to remember him in their fervent prayers. We extend our deepest sympathy to his family and relatives. May his memory be eternal, and may his soul rest in peace.
Writing from Greece, Mano Arsenyadis reflects: "The falling asleep of His Grace Elias Najm has saddened me deeply. I'm an Istanbul Greek and the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. In early 50s His Grace was a student in the Theological School of Halki and as a deacon was sent to different churches on Sundays. This is how my family and I met him and became great friends. We could not wait for him to visit, particularly at Easter when the Gospel was read in different languages. Of course we all became familiar with the Arabic version of it. He was supportive throughout the troubles in September 1955 when our house was burned down along with the church where my father was the priest. He was never tired talking to us children even when we asked him to repeat stories about his native Lebanon that he loved so much.
May your soul rest in peace Abuna."


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Most methods (that I know of) of numerically approximating the solution of ODEs are "general linear methods". For this type of method, the so-called 'linear stability' is examined by applying the method to the linear, constant-coefficient, (complex) scalar ODE
$\dot{y} = \lambda y $.
Because the same procedure is used to generate a new approximation at each time step, the methods result in linear, homogeneous, constant-coefficient difference equations for the approximate solution values at each time step. As a result, linear stability analysis for these methods amounts to analyzing the solutions of constant coefficient, homogeneous linear difference equations.
If you vary the method randomly at each time step, the coefficients of the difference equation are no longer constant. For example, second order explicit linear multistep methods can be written as a one-parameter family. If you choose this parameter randomly at each time step, the difference equation looks like this
$y_{n+1} + F(a(n))y_n + G(a(n))y_{n-1} = 0$
where $a(n)$ is a random variable (the parameter in the family of methods) and the functions $F$ and $G$ are known. My main question is whether there is any theory giving conditions on $F$, $G$, and the distribution of $a$ such that solutions remain bounded in the limit of large $n$. It would be nice if the theory generalized to higher order difference equations too.
If you were to randomly decide to use second-order multistep versus second-order Runge-Kutta methods, for example, then $F$ and $G$ would also depend on $n$. A theory to handle that case would be welcome too.
Since the numerical analyst is free to choose the distribution of $a$, and to some extent also $F$ and $G$, I'm wondering if it might be possible to design 'random' methods that have better linear stability properties than the usual ones which repeat the same process over and over. I'm posting here because I know almost nothing about stochastic/random processes.


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LAS VEGAS (AP) — T-Mobile USA says it will stop selling its home Internet phone service, ending a near two-year attempt to enter the landline market.
The cellular carrier said Thursday that it will "soon" discontinue new sales of the AtHome calling service because of changing customer needs. The service costs $10 to $15 per month for T-Mobile wireless subscribers, who plug their home phones into an adapter that shuttles calls through a home broadband connection. T-Mobile says it will continue to support current subscribers.
In October, Verizon Wireless ended sales of a similar product, the Hub, after less than a year on the market. The market for landline phone service is rapidly shrinking, as consumers rely increasingly on their cell phones.


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The Buzz Business
Posted On Jun 24, 2002
Some people try to make a killing on killer bees
Author: Ray Ring, Northern Rockies editor for High Country News.
Source: http://www.hcn.org/issues/229/11291
TUCSON, Ariz. – Twelve years into the killer bee invasion of the United States, Tip Tisdale steers his pickup truck into the driveway of a custom home in the desert outskirts of this desert city. It's a hot Monday morning in late April and this is the U.S. city where the invaders, also called Africanized bees, are most established.
The bright yellow-and-black logo on Tisdale's truck, repeated on his T-shirt, identifies which side he's on – AAA Africanized Bee Removal.
With the bravado that characterizes the men on the front lines, Tisdale walks toward the buzzing sound without protective gear, his face, arms and hands exposed. Pausing on the porch steps, he scouts the enemy: a loose cloud hovering under the porch roof overhang, composed of maybe 30 to 40 bees.
Like the symbol for nuclear energy, electrons circling round and round, the bees occupy their air space and emit a feeling of contained energy that might explode any moment.
I'm hanging back a few feet behind Tisdale, here to research how the bees are succeeding in the city, how people are adapting, and why the great national media machine has forgotten this once-sensational topic. Knowing that killer bees can take up residence in any nook or cranny of civilization – in the eaves of buildings, in the cushions of sofas and chairs left outside, under storage sheds, in cardboard boxes, flower pots, light fixtures, old tires, utility boxes, bird houses, culverts, woodpiles, trash cans, towers and windmills, even in vehicles, including airplanes – I'm ready to run.
In a half whisper, trying not to trigger the bees, Tisdale explains what we're seeing. These must be foragers for a colony that's hidden inside the wall of the house. He points out that some are crawling into a hole gnawed through the wall. Inside the wall there must be a lot more bees carrying out a range of duties, and a queen. If the colony is only a week or two old, there are maybe 10,000 bees in the wall; if the colony is several months old, there could be 30,000.
"The foragers are bringing water in – see?" Tisdale says. Squinting, concentrating on the tiny moving shapes, I can make out water droplets on the bees' legs. If they were foraging for pollen, they'd have yellow sacks of it bulging on their legs. The water helps them survive the drought that has withered the desert for months; they haul the droplets from swimming pools, hot tubs and landscaping irrigation in this upscale neighborhood. They bring the water inside the wall and use their wings to fan and evaporate it, to keep the colony cooler than it would be otherwise. The insulation in the wall also helps.
"They like houses, because people provide cooling in the summer and heating in the winter," Tisdale says. "They are a tremendously intelligent animal."
He glances around, alert for any patrol bees that might be coming at us. Fully established colonies have storehouses of honey and brood to defend, and it begins with a perimeter of patrol bees. "The patrol bees look for trouble," he says. "They'll buzz in your face. If you don't react right or if they get a signal from you they don't like, they tag you." Meaning, they sting you.
He advises that we'd better stand still and hold our breath if any patrol bees check us out, because one thing the bees really don't like is any mammal's breath – mammals are predators who might be after the honey. We're lumped in with badgers, skunks and bears. Above all, we'd better not swat a patrol bee or even try to brush one off. Just one sting or one smashed or ticked-off patrol bee would send a chemical pheromone signal to the rest of the colony, and in a split second the next level of defense, many thousands of guard bees, would come streaming out.
"Every female with a venom sack would dump on you," Tisdale says.
So far, it's a Western thing. Since the bees invaded from Mexico, they've stung four people to death in Arizona (including one who was allergic to bee stings). As many as eight more people have been killed in New Mexico, Southern California and Texas. There is disagreement about how many deaths the killer bees can be blamed for: Do we count the bulldozer driver in Texas who jumped off to run from bees and got run over by his own machine?
As the bees continue to spread, several thousand people as far north as Las Vegas have been stung, many of them hundreds of times each, without dying. Tisdale, a lanky 53-year-old who has worked the front lines about five years, has been stung too many times to count, at times so severely that his arms swelled up painfully or his eyelids swelled shut for days.
At this house, where a family inside has called for help, only a few patrol bees come forward to check us. Tisdale says it indicates this colony has only been here a short time and doesn't yet have much stored up to defend. Even so, before proceeding any closer, it's time for us to suit up – thick cotton coveralls, canvas gloves to the elbows, pith helmets draped with hoods that seal to the coveralls, and strategically applied strips of duct tape.
Getting down to business, Tisdale closes in with spraycans of professional grade pesticides. He whacks down the bees we can see, climbs a ladder so he can spray into the hole, uses a prybar to widen the opening, keeps spraying. Alarmed bees pitter-patter against us, trying to sting us through our gear, but it is not the folklore classic killer bee explosion. In a few minutes the whole colony falls silent and still, and Tisdale presents the customers with the bill: $235.
The Triple-A dispatcher relays another call for help and we drive to another neighborhood, where there is another kind of problem – a swarm. Thirty times a year or so, a killer bee colony divides: Some of the bees swarm away with the queen looking to colonize new territory and the rest stay put and raise a new queen. It is a way they maximize their territory.
We find the swarm in the backyard, clinging to a tree branch. It's a writhing, solid mass of maybe 12,000 bees surrounding the migrant queen. The swarm is resting on the branch. Tisdale and Paul Gerard, another Triple-A pro who rolls in, discover that the swarm has just split from a big colony under a storage shed. We suit up again and the pros attack the swarm in the tree and then the colony under the shed. They use a smokepot to slow the bees, a soapy spray that clings to the bees and clogs their breathing, and the pesticides. Ripping up the floor of the shed to expose the colony, they find the eerily beautiful fins of honeycomb, pupae in the wax cells, and the emergent queen. It's sweaty work in the thick protective gear, staving off the bees' defense. Thousands of dead little bee bodies curl on the ground. But it only takes about an hour and half to do this job and present the bill: $600.
Tisdale's cell phone keeps jingling. On an average day, he estimates, he does six service calls; on a busy day, he averages 10 to 15. Triple-A's going rate is roughly $200 per hour per man on the jobs I observe, split between those on the front and the head of the company, who does the dispatching. Triple-A is probably the biggest anti-killer-bee company in the world, with five pros in Tucson and eight in the Phoenix metro area, a statewide toll-free number and 24-hour-a-day dispatching. Even the company's name is a marketing ploy – AAA to be first in the Yellow Pages when customers under siege are looking for bee removal in a hurry.
I'm beginning to see that this is a story not only of ecology, but also of the good old resilient American instinct to make a buck out of anything that presents itself.
"Gasping for air"
It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. And you could say that several times over.
When 26 bee colonies from Africa were brought to Brazil by a scientist in 1956, it was an attempt to boost that country's honey production, not to start other industries. But a year later, African queens escaped captivity and began spreading like crazy on their own, taking over regular honeybee colonies either by force or interbreeding and asserting dominant genes, and occupying many niches held by native bees. Soon, Hollywood was churning out cheap horror movies like The Swarm andDeadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare.
The front shifted from country to country as the Africanized bees picked up speed and killed an estimated 1,000 people in Latin America. They invaded Texas in 1990, Arizona and New Mexico in 1993, California in 1994, Nevada in 1998. Today the invasion threatens to cross the Arizona/Utah border, and has reached San Diego, Los Angeles and Houston.
"I think they are all the way upriver (along the Rio Grande to the Albuquerque area)," says Carol Sutherland, New Mexico state entomologist. "There's a lot of wild country (in central New Mexico) where people just haven't run into them yet."
Sketching a few of Arizona's spectacular incidents: An 88-year-old woman was found lying in the street in Apache Junction in October 1995, stung more than 1,000 times; she died. The same month, a 67-year-old man in Carefree was reading a newspaper on his porch when bees attacked him; he jumped into a swimming pool but they kept stinging him every time he came up for air; he also died. A 72-year-old man whose head was covered with bees pounded on the screen door of a neighbor's house in Eloy in 1997, shouting, "Help me! Help me!" A woman inside put on her wedding veil as protection and grabbed a garden hose to try to spray the bees off the victim, but he also died.
In Tucson, many dozens of dogs have been stung to death, ones that were leashed or penned in yards and couldn't escape bee explosions. Horses, chickens, pet geese, ostriches, pigeons, and at least one duck have been killed. Victims of nonfatal attacks include a golf pro and caddie during a tournament, and a man in a wheelchair who got stung about 500 times on his head.
"You feel burning, you feel hurting, and you're gasping for air," says William Anderson, describing how it felt when he ran into killer bees last summer at his house south of Tucson. As he carried groceries from his car, he felt one sting on the back of his head. He smashed that bee, and it set off thousands more that pursued him in and out of his garage and around his front and back yards.
"I just kept swatting and swatting at them, and it seemed the more I swatted, the more they came," says Anderson, who was 64 at the time. "I was yelling and screaming, covered head to toe with bees. They were going in my mouth and I was spitting them out again."
Police and a passing fireman finally got Anderson away from the bees and to a hospital, where medical staff "cleaned me up and counted roughly 800 stings, maybe more," he says. "I had stingers all over my eyelids, my tongue, face, neck, arms. They dug two bees out of my left ear and one out of my right ear."
The temper tester
Researchers try to measure exactly how these bees are different from the other 20,000 species of bees in the world, and especially how they're different from regular honeybees, which were first brought to this hemisphere from Europe more than 400 years ago, and are easier to get along with.
Our European bees are the same species (Apis mellifera as the African bees and have nearly identical shape, size, coloring and diet. The differences are mostly in behavior. European bees are relatively slow and steady, because they evolved in a cold climate, holing up in permanent colonies, with few predators.
African bees evolved in the superheated tropics, foraging year round, more on the move and facing a much wider array of predators. They reproduce far more quickly, and throw off 10 times more swarms. Each established colony deploys five times as many guard bees, and attacks three to 20 times faster when provoked. They're like regular bees on methamphetamine.
Instead of just landing and stinging, as a regular bee does, a killer bee zooms at you full speed, with its stinger aimed forward, and hits with a noticeable pop, driving the stinger deep. Even though the venom isn't more potent, due to the number of stings, it's often delivered in massive amounts.
Tucson is a treasure chest of such information, because fate had already dealt it the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Logically, the lab has become a world leader in killer bee research. Staffers have perfected useful tools such as the "temper tester" – a target you strap to your pith helmet to count stings per second – and they've analyzed how the venom acts. It acts like cobra venom, explains the lab's venom expert, Justin Schmidt, and "it generally raises real havoc."
Aside from the ouch, the venom attacks nerves and blood cells, flooding your bloodstream with crud. If you get enough of it, it stops your heartbeat. It can also cause intravascular coagulopathy: "Your blood suddenly starts coagulating, forming clots, and all your organs die at once," Schmidt says. "It's not a pleasant thing."
But when the victims merely suffer several hundred stings, the main medical problem, Schmidt says, is to re-establish the victim's "mental equilibrium."
The top competitors
It's been predicted that killer bees will eventually spread through much of the temperate habitat in the nation, including up the West Coast to Portland and Seattle. Their advance has slowed as they invade temperate areas and there is now disagreement about how far they'll get and what condition they'll be in, but Tucson is a model for what to expect.
The bees take to the city because people have created a jungle on the desert: The irrigation and landscaping create blooms year round, providing nectar and pollen, and there are many other sugar supplies – spilled Coke, ice cream, candy wrappers in trash cans * that are even easier to tap. All the buildings, infrastructure and junk piles provide crannies that can be occupied. This is the city where a killer bee colony built 300 pounds of honeycomb in the wall of the Delta Gamma sorority house. In an average square mile of Tucson, the pros estimate, there are as many as 12 killer bee colonies, plus swarms on the move.
People began to adapt as soon as the bees hit town. A local woman, Cassandra Garber, started producing killer bee T-shirts for sale through the Audubon Nature Shop. And a local fire department, Northwest Fire, perfected a method now used around the West. When people in a bee explosion manage to call 911, firefighters (wearing bee hoods and possibly duct tape) roll in and spray firefighting foam – having discovered that the foam clings to the bees, knocks them down and suffocates them. Fire departments can't hit the sirens every time a bee is sighted, though, so they've decided to respond only to actual or imminent explosions, such as a swarm at a daycare center. The government can't begin to handle all the killer bees – and that leaves a huge opening for private-sector entrepreneurs.
Most bee control used to be done for free, by beekeepers who wanted to collect any stray European bees. Today the Tucson Yellow Pages has a Bee Removal heading, listing 31 companies. The leading companies aren't general pest controllers who expanded to do bees; they specialize in killer bees.
At the top of the killer bee industry there's an edgy competition rich with irony. The top two companies are both run by bee scientists who morphed into businessmen: Tom Martin at AAA Africanized Bee Removal, and Steve Thoenes at BeeMaster. They're both hustling. This spring, Martin took a film documentary crew from New Zealand into the Arizona desert to see what he said was the world's largest killer bee colony; Thoenes hosted a BBC crew from England, gathering killer bees in a glass case so the crew could film a colony under construction. But the two men work with completely different mindsets. They're a study in human variability.
Martin, who has a master's degree in entomology, runs the biggest color ad in the Tucson Yellow Pages category, and an even more prominent Triple-A ad on the glossy binding of the Yellow Pages, and the same package in Phoenix and the directories for Phoenix suburbs. He also drums up free publicity, working with local TV news and local papers whenever Triple-A is handling a notable bee problem, constantly raising the alarm about how bad killer bees are.
"It's real important that the general public get warned appropriately enough that we don't get any more people killed," Martin says. "This is an emergency response business, not pest control. That's what drives me, why I work 16 hours a day, seven days a week."
Probably to compensate some for the ad budget, Martin bases his company in his home office, yet even there he's tightly wound, juggling calls on four phone lines. When I ask about Triple-A's rates of $200 an hour or more – high considering there is no government safety net for people who can't afford professional bee removal – he answers, "People who say, 'I don't want to spend the money or I can't spend the money, what can we do?' There is nothing they can do."
Thoenes, who has a Ph.D., is more laid back. At his 40th birthday party a couple of years ago, he served stingers. He has BeeMaster's headquarters hidden in a generic strip mall, with no sign on the door, and freely explains the low profile * if anyone in the area gets stung, they might blame a bee business. His mother, Ann, and another sweet, gray-haired lady, Elouise, answer the phones. But despite appearances, BeeMaster is a world center for a full range of killer bee services.
In BeeMaster's first year of operation, 1994, the company carried out 397 killer bee removals in the Tucson area. Last year, the company did about 4,500. Thoenes estimates that altogether the local companies handled 15,000 to 20,000 bee removal calls last year. "So it's a $3 million to $4 million industry in Tucson alone," he says.
Collaborating with researcher Schmidt, Thoenes is also breaking the bees' communication codes – analyzing the complex mixtures of pheromones bees emit for many purposes. Scout bees fly ahead of a swarm, for example, marking places to colonize, and Thoenes has concocted a mixture that mimics what the scout bees put out. He applies the mixtures to other inventions – killer bee glue boards and "swarm traps," which are cardboard pots with little entrance holes, just right for a killer bee colony.
If you're worried that killer bees will invade your property, which includes the worry that people might get stung and file lawsuits (a spinoff industry), you can hire BeeMaster to hang swarm traps and glue boards in your trees. Then any swarm that comes along will likely end up in a trap, and any scout bee will likely end up on a glue board.
"Eliminate the scout bees, you eliminate the information gatherer," Thoenes says.
On a wall map of the metro area, colored pins identify the clients of his protection service: country clubs and golf courses, apartment complexes, corporate campuses, airports, museums and a zoo, swimming pools and ritzy subdivisions. BeeMaster checks the swarm traps once a week or so and cleans out any bees trying to make a colony. Sample rates: $25 a month to establish a perimeter around your house, $150-$250 a month for an apartment complex, up to $1,500 a month for a large industrial complex.
"It's a full-service system," Thoenes says. "There's really nobody else who does what we do."
His swarm traps even hang around Disneyland, he says; he sells them in bulk around the Southwest and trains people to use them. He has seven employees and says he's ramping up, having just won a contract to do killer bee protection at more than 1,000 public schools around Arizona.
Yet Thoenes is also reflective about the business. He laments how some people are "trying to shock the public to get higher prices." For a basic bee removal, he charges about $100 – less than many of the other companies. Over the years he's been on NBC Nightly News, Hard Copy, Discovery Channel, and in U.S. News and World Report, but these days he rarely seeks publicity. "If my clients call me, they know they'll never be in the newspaper. That's part of the arrangement."
Asked if he's hurting his profits and training new competitors, Thoenes shrugs and says, "The bees are everywhere." He's got job security without the sensationalism. "If I wanted to, I could scare the wits out of anybody. But we can solve it through education and simple technology."
Bees cooling down?
Killer bees have tuned up the city. They're a force for urban renewal. People not only tread more carefully, they're a whole lot more vigilant about caulking their eaves, getting rid of old porch furniture and decrepit sheds and vehicles that don't run – reducing anything the bees might colonize.
Yet the bees are also affected by the people. As all the bee removers relentlessly kill the most ferocious and most obvious colonies and swarms, they subject the bees to tremendous evolutionary pressure.
"The Africanized bees in Tucson now are nothing like six or seven years ago," Thoenes says. "They're not nearly as mean, and they're much more cryptic," hiding better and not provoking the bee removers.
The pattern seems to be, when the killer bees invade a place, the first waves display the hottest temperament. Most of the human fatalities happen in the first years, then the people and the bees adapt.
"This thing is blown entirely out of proportion," says Schmidt. "We're not afraid of cars, nicotine, alcohol" – all of which kill far more people – "but we see a bee and all of a sudden, we're running around flapping our arms. It's innate in our genetics. We're afraid of things that would attack us."
Of course, Martin and other competitors don't agree that the bees have cooled down at all, and no one says killer bees have cooled off so much they're no danger. A few days after my visit to Tucson, five dogs penned in a yard got stung to death when a colony under a storage shed exploded. The cloud of bees was "20 feet wide and 60 feet long, they could hardly fly; they'd run into each other," says Ernest Kesterson, Sr., whose family battled the bees. "There was nowhere you could turn without getting into a mess of them."
Just AHBs
There are other angles. Killer bees have made the crisis in native pollinators even worse, by competing with native bees, bats, moths and other dwindling pollinators. They're a hassle for the beekeeping industry, making it harder to produce honey for market, harder to pollinate crops, and harder to find places to locate the hives where people won't rebel. Leonard Hines, who keeps 500 hives southeast of the city, says, "Here in southern Arizona, the chances are, every hive is Africanized to some degree."
Beekeepers, agriculture, the honey industry, as well as tourism and economic-development interests wish to downplay the dangers. Bee removers work the roofs of Las Vegas casinos and hardly ever make the news. It's hard to find anyone official calling the killer bees by that wonderful name anymore – now they're mostly called Africanized honeybees, or just AHBs.
The science effort is dwindling, with the Tucson lab down to three researchers (from a high of eight) and a threat that the Bush administration will close it and two other federal bee labs to save money.
But the relationship of the killer bees to the bee removers captures me. There is a sadness to it. Really, the killer bees are just trying to defend themselves. Every bee that reacts to a predator dies, once it delivers the sting.
Call a pro, by all means, but once they roll in, it isn't hard to kill a killer bee. The people who specialize, rattling around in their trucks loaded with ladders, prybars, saws, drills, and the chemicals and soapy sprays that do in killer bees with only a few wisps, understand. They deal with a creature they respect and sympathize with.
"When I was a kid (with a few hives), everyone saw honeybees as beneficial, a positive thing," Thoenes says. "Now they're seen as something to be killed as fast as possible."
Still in our grasp
Kent Griffith, a brawny, affable cancer survivor who is BeeMaster's point man in the field, mostly works in a T-shirt, gets stung maybe 100 to 150 times a day, and says you get used to it. It's as if he wants to give the bees a chance to leave their mark on him. Or, as if the bees help him feel alive after the cancer. After all, there are people who believe in the medicinal properties of bee stings. One day he demonstrates it to me – snatching a lone bee out of the air with his bare hand and rubbing it on his forearm, so the stinger tears out of the bee and lodges in his flesh.
I can see the tiny venom sack still attached to the stinger, still pulsing venom into him. As his flesh swells, it draws the stinger in deeper. "Still going," Griffith says. "I've timed it at over 10 minutes on numerous occasions." Different bees, different colonies, have different mixes in the venom, some hotter than others. "Wow!" Griffith says. "That has some zing."
Another sunny day, I go into the desert on the city's booming northwest side with Griffith, working a major contract that BeeMaster has with a developer – a thousand acres of cactus and cliffs in the beginning stages of being converted to multimillion-dollar homes. The planned roads have been staked out, and before the dozer drivers venture in, the killer bee colonies must be removed.
Griffith has hiked all over the rugged land, probing crevices, burrow holes and cavities in the cactus, locating colonies. "It's unbelievable, the population density," he says. "There are colonies that haven't been disturbed for years." These bees have plenty of honey and brood to defend, and they're direct descendants of the "leading edge" killer bees, he says. He got into a colony in a cliff a few days ago that was "spectacular." He got stung 300 times within seconds as he "nuked" it, he says. "At least I killed them with reverence."
Today we're checking the same colony, because Griffith has spotted more bee activity with his binoculars. It could be that the queen survived, and the colony is rebuilding. Apparently defying OSHA as well as death, Griffith props a ladder on a slanted boulder and climbs nearly straight up the cliff, 30 feet to the crevice, no rope belay. The bees are safe from everything but us. I climb as high as I can on the boulders nearby, so I can do my job of taking photos.
I hope for an explosion, but it's a little disappointing. The colony's defenses have been depleted. As Griffith stretches impossibly from the top of the ladder to reach into the crevice, he gets stung only a couple of dozen times. The crevice amplifies the buzzing of the alarmed bees as they cringe deeper into the honeycomb that is no refuge.
We brought the killer bees from Africa for our purposes and the truth is, honey production in Brazil has soared, just as the importer hoped, and the bees have not escaped our grasp. As Griffith finishes off the few thousand that are left in this place, several fly out far enough to pop against me. I watch one stinging my black leather camera strap with its incredible determination (many predators have dark fur) and listen to its high-pitched song, until it gives up the stinger and falls into the dirt.
Shortly, we get a call about a swarm in a tree in a Target store's parking lot. Off we go.


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By Rosamund Lupton
Piatkus, 2010.
This engrossing, haunting novel is told from the point of view of Beatrice, a young English woman who is a successful commercial art designer in New York, recently engaged to Tod. At the start of the novel, Beatrice is in her sister's London flat, looking out of the window at the hordes of media clamouring for a quote or interview. Tess, Beatrice's younger sister, has disappeared. We deduce that the circumstances are dramatic and awful; soon, via Beatrice's thoughts, we come to understand what has happened.
It is hard to write a review of this novel, because a bare plot description removes the many subtleties of the story of Tess's life (gradually uncovered by her sister in the days after Beatrice's precipitous arrival in the UK). Suffice to say that Beatrice decides to find out for herself what happened, dismissive of the official explanation which is universally accepted.
This novel is a very powerful, and convincing, account of a relationship between sisters as well as of grief and its after-effects. It is mostly told in the form of an internal letter from one sister to the other, which adds a beautiful element. There's also a very moving subplot about the redemption of another relationship – that of a mother and her daughter. The way in which one daughter gradually realises the truth about her childhood perceptions is quite marvellous.
I really loved this book, and would urge anyone to read it. I was lucky enough to start it on a day when I'd booked a holiday from work, as I spent quite literally all day reading it from page 1 first thing in the morning, to the last page in the mid-afternoon. The crime plot is not as good as the rest of the book – the identity of the perpetrator is too obvious; the much-discussed "twist" at the end not a proper twist; and unfortunately the area of clinical research is completely misunderstood (though the author does a good job on describing the science of a single-gene defect). The details of hospital practice and treatment of visitors are also somewhat inconsistent with what I know of reality.
The power of this novel is in its depiction of the relationships of a mother and two daughters, and the inner lives of the girls. I loved it, and am glad that the novel is enjoying such success as a result of being one of the Richard and Judy book club selections this year.
I purchased my paperback copy of this book.
Judy and Richard's reviews of this novel are here; and a synopsis/reader comments on it are here.
Video interview with Richard and Judy, and a conversation with the author.
Author website, including an extract from the novel.
Read other reviews of this novel at: The Independent (brief); Katie's Book Blog; Bioethics Bytes (unusual perspective); and A Booklover Talks.


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My dear friend and kindred spirit Mimi has invested so much of her heart and soul in this day, in these globes she has been collecting. And I love her dearly. I must be worthy of my Queen and such a noble cause.
I thought long and hard about today. I thought: "I should post something profound and inspired and wordy". Thoughts that are torture to someone like me, the non-writer. Thoughts that cause anxiety. What if... I mean... There's the distinct possibility that I'll fall short of such a monumental task. We ARE talking about bringing peace to the world, people. THE WORLD! PEACE! MOI! With a POST! *whimper* Some words I write and send out into cyberspace are meant to reach others, set off a chain reaction and inspire PEACE. -This is the point at which I start to hyperventilate and desperately look for something to keep me busy that will give me an excuse to step away from the blinking cursor (curse... how appropriate...) and my total and utter brain freeze (I have brain freeze, writers have writers' block, I have brain freeze and I didn't even get to eat some ice cream - how unfair!).
How? How do I pull this off? Me!
Think Anndi...
What it all comes down to is...
Her love for her Papa and his love for her, that's how this started. A love she then shared with us all, so very eloquently and generously.
Such small gestures can make a difference... and no one is too small to impact the world. Even a few words sent out into cyberspace. Setting off a chain of events. One small marble touching another after it is cast... Like in a child's game.
- Anita Koddick
So... I thought I'd bring you someone else's words. These are WAY better than anything I could have come up with.
Mother Theresa said it best...
That's exactly it.
Home... Love... Family...
Thank you, Mims... for everything.
Love you my friend!


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Adelphia Communications Corp. founder John Rigas and his son Timothy were convicted Thursday of conspiracy, bank fraud and securities fraud for looting the cable company and duping its investors.
The two were convicted of all 15 securities fraud charges against them and other counts. Another Rigas son, Michael, was acquitted of conspiracy charges in the partial verdict; the jury was undecided on most of the remaining counts against him.
Former Adelphia assistant treasurer Michael Mulcahey was found not guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud.
John Rigas, 79, and Timothy Rigas, 47, each faces 30 years in prison on the most serious charge, bank fraud.
John Rigas showed no reaction to the verdict, leaning forward in his chair and looking down at the defense table. Mulcahey, 46, hugged his lawyer and supporters in the courtroom.
The jurors returned the partial verdict after telling the judge they were having trouble reaching a decision on some counts. They had asked for guidance on how to reach a decision without revealing how they were split.
Judge Leonard Sand told them he would accept a partial verdict. It was the eighth day of deliberations following a three-month trial.
Sand said he would give further instructions Friday on the undecided counts against Michael Rigas, 50. He sent jurors home for the day and instructed them not to listen to media coverage of the case.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you've been working very hard, and your task is not over," he said.
The Rigases and Mulcahey were charged with hiding $2.3 billion in debt at the cable company, deceiving investors and stealing company cash to line their own pockets.
The verdict marked another success in Manhattan for federal prosecutors, who won convictions against Martha Stewart in March and former star technology banker Frank Quattrone in May.
The elder Rigas founded the company in 1952 in tiny Coudersport, Pa., and turned it into one of the nation's largest cable firms.
While most of the alleged fraud took its form in hidden debt, the trial was also notable for examples of the eye-popping personal luxury that has marked other white-collar trials.
Prosecutor Christopher Clark led off his closing argument by saying John Rigas had ordered two Christmas trees flown to New York, at a cost of $6,000, for his daughter.
Rigas also ordered up 17 company cars and the company purchase of 3,600 acres of timberland at a cost of $26 million to preserve the pristine view outside his Coudersport home.
Peter Fleming, his lawyer, told the jurors that the claim was ridiculous — "If you saw this on 'Seinfeld,' you'd double up" — and that the company simply wanted to keep the small town attractive to its employees.
Still, the Adelphia founder stole with such gusto from his company, prosecutors said, that Timothy Rigas became concerned and limited his father to withdrawals of $1 million per month.
The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of two former Adelphia executives, James Brown and Karen Chrosniak, to describe a complex scheme to lie on financial filings and hide Adelphia debt.
But Chrosniak, in tearful testimony, said John Rigas was "basically in the dark" about the company's money problems as its financial filings were being prepared.
Mulcahey was the only defendant to take the witness stand in his own defense, testifying that he answered to the Rigas family when tending the company's books.
"I understand the corporation is owned by the shareholders," Mulcahey said. "The owners of the company are indirectly my bosses, but that's not who I reported to."
Adelphia now operates under bankruptcy protection and has moved its headquarters from Coudersport to Greenwood Village, Colo.
In his closing argument on behalf of Timothy Rigas, lawyer Paul Grand tried to distance the Adelphia four from Enron Corp. officials, whom he called "real corporate villains."
And Mulcahey lawyer Mark Mahoney said the disclosure of financial problems at Adelphia in 2002 led to a drive by some employees to take down the Rigas family rather than fix the company.
"It wasn't regicide," Mahoney said. "It was Rigas-cide."


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Bam Margera -- Masturbatin' Intruder Secretly LIVED in My Tree
Bam Margera Masturbatin' Intruder Secretly LIVED in My Tree
The naked girl who allegedly broke into Bam Margera's house and masturbated on his bedroom floor didn't just appear out of nowhere -- she had secretly been LIVING in Bam's tree house for weeks ... the "Jackass" star tells TMZ.
As we first reported, cops arrested the 24-year-old woman Friday in the area surrounding Bam's Pennsylvania mansion ... and according Bam, the girl told police she had been living on his property for weeks leading up to her wild bedroom invasion.
Bam tells us ... the girl had been camping out in the giant tree fort on his property -- the same fort featured as Fast Eddie's Treetop Casino in an episode of "Viva La Bam."
After she was arrested on charges of burglary, criminal trespass, and stalking, Bam says cops found evidence the girl had been living in the tree house -- including clothes and garbage.
But she didn't just hole herself up in the treetops -- Bam says the girl had knocked on his parents' door a couple of weeks ago with luggage, claiming she had moved from Florida to marry her son. Bam says his mother sent the woman away ... after trying to set her up with a homeless shelter.
As for the woman, we're told she's still in custody -- being held on $50k bail.


text:
$4.99 Shipping on Orders $100+
Flash Sale Friday >
$19.99 for 960 Lumens >
LAPG Gift Certificates >
When the first Squirt E4 came out it seemed so unique to one kind of work we sold it only at specialty electronic stores. As time went on it became so popular and people (as with most Leatherman tools) found it to be so handy for all kinds of jobs, we opened up distribution to all kinds of stores nationwide. Now called the Squirt ES4 we added scissors to the tool making it even more versatile.Tools:
Leatherman Squirt ES4 Keychain Multi-Tool


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"Do yoga, and attain the body and life of your dreams!" blare headlines. Yet what if modern yoga's effects are not unilaterally positive? As a microcosm of life, any form of yoga may unwittingly engender or perpetuate the basic human tendencies to engage in competition, judgment, denial, or striving. With conscious practice of yoga, these patterns, or samskara, are elucidated and transformed. Yet cultural elements of "modern yoga" may actually exacerbate these samskara, blinding us to truth and perpetuating western cultural myths that engender more harm than good.
Prototypical yoga consumers are targeted by corporate progenitors of modern yoga (e.g., Lululemon), who traffic in stereotypical imagery of idealized bodies, promote cultural beliefs in unhindered agency, positive thought, and grit, and unabashedly cater to the exclusive, highly privileged group that comprises US yogis. In sum, very little challenges us to own yoga's true revolutionary potential, because this would require a paradigm shift in how we relate to ourselves and our "identities" as modern yogis.
This paradigm shift means acknowledging that our beliefs and worldviews are constructed and frequently unconscious, requiring unearthing and deconstruction as we peel the layers of our ego. It means accepting that we can't control everything 100% of the time; acknowledges that the universe is not our "shopping cart"; and nor, contrary to the tenets of our cultural conditioning, are we at the center of said universe. It necessitates that we fearlessly face hitherto repressed and uncomfortable aspects of ourselves as we increasingly embody our wholeness.
Indeed, authentic contemplative practices are far richer. With practice we may notice ourselves maniacally traversing the hedonic treadmill in futile efforts to maintain our defenses, privilege, bodily appearances, or economic status. Ideally, this noticing occurs with self-compassion, acceptance, and perhaps, a commitment to peer more fully into our souls, acknowledging that for every truth revealed to us, that much more remains unknown.
When we discover the uncomfortable truth that we aren't always in the driver's seat, we cloak ourselves not in the law of attraction's flimsy gossamer of "manifestation," but in humility, gratitude, grief, meditation, presence, breath, emotion, allowing, and reverence. When inevitably faced with our prejudiced thoughts, whether racist, sizeist, sexist, or so on, we face them courageously, inquire as to their origins, and invite ourselves to notice the subtle ways in which such thoughts interact with our behaviors towards others. And we forgive ourselves, recognizing the multiplicity of factors that gave rise to these beliefs.
I can understand why this is not such a popular path. It promises no perfect body or soul, no unlimited wealth, and no promises of unhindered control or agency. There are no fancy marketing campaigns selling the inner journey, or the presence, silence, spaciousness, and compassion that are its hallmarks. In this era that claims to sell certainty, a worldview that advocates living our way into the answers can be terrifying.
Yet this is also extremely powerful. When we can fully engage with life while stepping into the unknown, and surrender, we open fully to possibility. When we step away from "I" and "mine" as the center of the universe, and embrace ourselves as contextual beings whose well-being is inextricably intertwined with the well-being of all, our hearts can open to the truths, suffering, and joy of others, kindling our innate divinity.


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The Tower of London is an iconic landmark situated on the north bank of the River Thames, home of the Historic Royal Palace and The Crown Jewels as well other prominent and powerful entities through the years since it was built in 1078. Tricia and I embarked on a tour lead by a spirited Beefeater, wandered the green (noting the legendary ravens) and explored the Royal Armory. We were engrossed in tales of beheading among others told of London's past, and fascinated by the visual displays of all that accompanied a life of majesty.
The tower is worth a visit especially (or specifically) for a glimpse of the jaw dropping collection of Crown Jewels. The sheer beauty of these gems - among them diamonds, rubys and emeralds to name a few, set in regal purple crowns and gold encrusted wands with their perfectly cut shapes, massive size and intense sparkle factor, is unreal. (Too bad you can't photograph them.) What you can photograph is just about everything else, as shown in the Instagram collage below.
The majestic Tower Bridge can be seen from atop the fortress walls and around the outer perimeter of the area. This famous landmark is commonly mistaken as London Bridge, which is actually further down the river and not nearly as poignant. We didn't have time for a tour of the bridge on this trip, but to marvel in its presence felt like enough.


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Valentis 1999 Annual Report
Cahan and Associates, San Francisco, California, 1999
Valentis is a biotechnology company developing a broad technology platform consisting of several in vivo, non-viral gene delivery systems. The small format of the book was continued from the previous year and worked well given budgetary limitations. The strong geometric shapes and colors serve as a backdrop for the company's message to a target audience of stockholders, partners and employees.
Collections: AIGA 365: 21 (2000)
Repository: Denver Art Museum
Discipline: Corporate communications design
Format: Corporate communication, Booklet
- Design firm
- Cahan and Associates
- Art director
- Bill Cahan
- Designer
- Sharrie Brooks
- Project manager
- Kerrie Claeys
- Writer
- Bennett Weintraub
- Typeface
- Trade Gothic
- Trim size
- 5 1/2 x 7 inches
- Printer
- Color Graphics
- Paper
- McCoy Cougar
- Client
- Valentis


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Athens, Ga. – Jack L. Rives, executive director and chief operating officer of the American Bar Association, will deliver the keynote address at the University of Georgia School of Law's Commencement May 17 at 10 a.m. on the North Campus quadrangle in front of the law school. In the event of rain, graduation will be moved to Stegeman Coliseum.
Approximately 235 students will receive the Juris Doctor degree at this year's ceremony. Additionally, approximately 15 Master of Laws candidates, who have completed one year of graduate legal study, will be recognized.
A 1977 graduate of Georgia Law, Rives oversees a staff of more than 900 and a consolidated budget of over $200 million. He ensures the effective development and direct implementation of the association's strategic goals and is responsible for the programs and policy activities adopted by the group's governing and policy-making bodies as well as its membership.
Prior to joining the ABA, Rives served as the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Air Force. The first military attorney to serve in three-star rank (lieutenant general), he was the legal adviser to the secretary of the Air Force and all officers and agencies of this branch of military service. As the senior U.S. Air Force attorney, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal with oak leaf cluster and the Defense Superior Service Medal.
Rives earned both his bachelor's and law degrees from UGA.
UGA School of Law
Consistently regarded as one of the nation's top public law schools, the School of Law at the University of Georgia was established in 1859. With an accomplished faculty, which includes authors of some of the country's leading legal scholarship, Georgia Law offers three degrees-the Juris Doctor, the Master of Laws in U.S. Law and the Master in the Study of Law-and is home to the renowned Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy. The school counts six U.S. Supreme Court judicial clerks in the last nine years among its distinguished alumni body of more than 9,700. For more information, see www.law.uga.edu.


text:
Onomatopoeia…first time I'd ever heard that word before. Apparently that means words that imitate the sounds of noises, like the ones featured on this collar for your superhero pup!
Small 10 – 14"
Medium 12 – 19"
Large 16 – 24"
X-Large 20 – 28"
What makes this collar so special?
Handsewn with love by the designer personally
Sure to bring a smile to your face 🙂
Will look smashing on your pup!
Exclusively featured on Pet Gifter
Gift wrapped just for you
Product Details
– Please note: *1 inch in width for all 4 sizes
– High quality grosgrain ribbon sewn on to sturdy nylon webbing
– Black buckles are curved and designed to hug your dog's neck for ultimate comfort
– Stainless Steel D-ring for attaching leash & ID tags
– Collars are fully adjustable using the easily slidable triglide


text:
In Galatians 6:7 is found one of the key principles in Scripture — that of sowing and reaping.
It plainly says that what you sow, you are going to reap. This, of course, is taken from agricultural terminology in which if you plant corn, you will not reap wheat, but corn.
Spiritually speaking, which was the writer's main intent, when we sow certain things through our attitudes or actions, we will reap similar things. For instance, if we wish for others to extend mercy to us, we had better be a person who extends mercy to others. If we offer forgiveness to others, most likely others will offer forgiveness to us when we need it. If we sow kindness, peace and love toward others, we can expect to reap from others the same graces.
The same principle applies as it pertains to negative attitudes and actions. If we are rude in our responses to others, we will experience people being rude to us. If we are dishonest with others in our dealings, we will reap the consequences of people getting back at us.
This is similar to the golden rule, which says, "Treat others how you want to be treated." Former President George H.W. Bush made a statement years ago that I have never forgotten. He said what we need is a "kinder and gentler nation." I think what he was saying is that we need to learn to treat others with respect and dignity.
The truth of the matter is that if you and I practice this, others will respond with like attitudes, and then we will indeed experience a better society to live in.
The question is, will you be part of the problem or part of the solution?
In Galatians 6:7 is found one of the key principles in Scripture — that of sowing and reaping.