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The Man Who Grew His Beard (Fantagraphics) by Olivier Schrauwen
(Spoilers ahoy, though there may be little need for this disclaimer, so reliant is the book on the reader's first-hand experience of form clashing against form; nonetheless: "…warned…" etc.)
I'd consigned Olivier Schrauwen to a hazy and pleasant memory from a volume or two of MOME, so many thanks go out to Chris Mautner for pointing out this book's existence, Schrauwen's first actual stateside release (any stray copies of My Boy you wanna send my way are welcome, comickers), which escaped my notice when it was published a few months back.
It's a big batch of critic-friendly comic strips, comics which resemble curios excavated from some none-too-defined European past and more often than not have all the daring shallow-space visual syntax of a Garfield strip. They're less stories than contraptions that wear their artifice and structure on their sleeve, like those medieval homunculi which transparently show their cogs and mechanisms while making their programmed movements. You can get a decent grasp of the fundamentals of The Man Who Grew His Beard– its blunt force of two levels of reality interacting – from the panels below.
The man is what registers first – beyond the obvious trait of viewer identification, the man's physical form closer to our own than anything else on display, we can see that he's constrained to the literal edges of the frame, a far sturdier base for reality than the rickety (presumable) spatial dimension before him. You can see the shift in the blissfully shoddy environment to accommodate him from panel-to-panel, the ceiling of the crawlspace raised, which should give the nature of the sequence away, assuming it wasn't already clear – the man interacting with his own imagination, at the losing end of a conversation with himself. It works as shorthand for his character that he's at first obliged to obey its rules, fitting himself into the low crawlspace to speak to the mouse, with the ceiling shifting itself upward according to his instincts as he raises himself to react in the second panel.
Venture a bit further into the image and Here There Be Dragons. Seemingly, the mouse would appear to occupy the background, the average reader intuiting a man against the crudest of stage backdrops, with the mouse merely the liveliest element of that backdrop. And, were we compelled to squint more, we could place the mouse well in depth along the left-hand pathway, the key visual cue being the walls which recede away from us, the man's posterior at their meeting point, with him awkwardly chilling (as all talking mice do) flat against the corner where the floor meets the wall, his artist unable to give him a spot in the ample spatial dimensions provided. Of course, there's no guarantee that the spot below the mouse is space. It could be merely an inclined bit of floor, a ramp or ramp-like, which would place that damn mouse in the same foreground as our man – note how its textures match that of the ceiling, a ceiling which, no matter that it refuses to stand still, laughs at your attempts to gauge its dimensions. Maybe it's both, the man's imagination unable to settle – who knows? Everything is contrasting cues, dots that seem to connect but never quite.
It's a toughie!
Which is the point. What's presented here isn't the ugly-for-ugliness sake that comics often traffic in – the Panter/Brinkman/Chippendale/Nemoto/Rory Hayes/Everyone/Ever mold – placing the image in its sequential context foremost over any prefab notion of beauty, allowing moments of grace to arise as we perceive the relationship between one image and the next, creating its own makeshift vocabulary. Nope. It's just plain ineptitude, a deliberately charted system of not-living-up, ugliness which sticks its tongue out at both the man with the bad haircut and you, dear reader. It's not a representative sample but the idea of "worlds colliding" is plain to see, the fuel for every story – hell, every page – in the book.
This sequence is from "The Assignment" (click to experience it in full force), which may be the funniest strip in the book thanks, I suspect, to the contrast between the man's impotent and bewildered Little-Nemo-like panic and the all-declarative-statement insolence of his imagination. The man asking for the cheese is emblematic of the central character of most of the stories here, his physical features those of maturity but his mindset and social standing that of a twelve year-old, a succinct metaphor for arrested development who all throughout will maneuver his way through an environment which resists his control, albeit an environment that doesn't always wear its contrast as eagerly as the one above.
So yes – worlds colliding. Built around that basic structure at every story's center – the man, his will to control – is a binary opposition of perception, one representing reality and the other unreality: the terrifyingly mundane vs. fantastical exaggeration, a controlled rationality vs. a short-circuited imagination, reality vs. art, etc, with both sides of the marquee frequently defined in stylistic terms: one of them recognizable, easily equivalent to the world we know, its laws of logic, and the other dimension none-too-steady, impressionistic or grandiose or just continually shifting, ready to become something new in the next panel; Little Nemo's dilemma played out in seven variations. Surrealism is probably a faulty description – there's a ruthless logic underlying every detail, a sense of gamesmanship which ensures we always know where each element stands in relationship to its counterpart.
That system-frenzy might suggest a built-in sense of distance in the work, surface pleasure as something either glossed over for the sake of appreciation or ready to reveal itself under the amorphous term of "beauty", which is pretty far from one's actual first-hand experience; I may be speaking as someone who's clocked in a few thousand hours staring at art comics, but these are some mighty user-friendly strips – you might make your way through the hundred or so pages here in twenty minutes, the book humming along like clockwork, seemingly reading itself. The narratives tend to snap shut from the first panel on, the reader guided along helplessly through the story like Charlie Chaplin flowing through the gears, with one concept/style and another concept/style working in tandem, formal fireworks all ablazin'.
Most of the strips end as only such stories can – with Schrauwen undermining the system he's set up. Sometimes it's a bold rupture between boundaries, a sly authorial wink, or merely a concluding ellipsis, letting the matter at hand stand unresolved; extratextual gestures which allow both sides of the dualism at play an equal footing, if only to underline what we've been doing all along: watching drawings comment on other drawings. Little Nemo rarely wakes up here – he wasn't really sleeping. With the playing field leveled, the parity of style and content thoroughly established, you might be obliged to stare and stare again at these strips, parsing the overall patterns from the smallest details, discounting nothing: background pattern abstractions; the seemingly throwaway panels, very much akin to the apropos-of-nothing center panels you'd find in Krazy Kat, that begin and/or end various stories as punctuation; the specific symbolism behind page border design, etc. Is the final panel of "The Imaginist" – a series of yellow, blue, red, and brown watercolor smudges – abstract or literal? Either way, it may be the most moving moment in the book. Go too far into this mindset and you'll find yourself wondering whether you can extrapolate the conceptual thrust of a strip from the spatial relationship of an obnoxious mouse in a single image. Stay wary, readers!
It may be foolhardy to view them as anything other than top-down idea-first affairs, but it is fun – a sideways glance at them, with "equations" taken out of the equation, and it's easy to see each strip as a single-minded exploration of a different kind of space: "Outside/Inside", with its two halves at cross-purposes, is two iterations of the same idea – the borders of its panels as claustrophobic and imprisoning barriers; the final untitled strip shows space at its most inconsequential; "Congo Chromo": the traditional comic strip space, with the image lugged around by the characters at all times; etc.
Mautner mentions Yuichi Yokoyama as a point of comparison and you can see where he's coming from. Schrauwen's works aren't precise studies of hypothetical physical structures and forces in time, of course (though who knows? I've only read the one book), but you can tag them both as experimental, and that term here isn't a critical byword, ready for a blurb, but an exact description, each strip air-tight and controlled, everything you see wrung dry of any interfering association, all for the sake of effect. But if Yokoyama's consistency and uniformity (any glance at a Yokoyama image and you may not know what you're looking at but you know you're looking at Yokoyama) suggest the obsessive-compulsive m. o. of your average cartoonist, the stories in TMWGHB are as different as they are alike, enough to suggest seven twists of a kaleidoscope, a new and distinct pattern produced from the same specific set of elements each time around.
In this respect, Schrauwen seems closer in approach to Mark Newgarden (discussed aplenty here) – beyond their commitment to bringing the laffs, each are top-down technicians inclined to approaching their strips in a made-to-order manner, a specific style for a specific concept. Newgarden (The Man Who Grew His Nose?), though, is a postmodern man of tomorrow who works in an inveterate mode of pastiche, his bag of tricks diverse but (the key difference) limited, while Schrauwen footprints in TMWGHB are rarely in the same place twice – once a problem has been worked through, it's tossed and the roundelay begins anew. This may be a slight exaggeration – no aesthetic ground is ever completely salted, but, cursorily scanning the book, the variety and the widely dispersed skill set on display may suggest the work of three or four different cartoonists rather than a single antsy one.
It's not all novelty obviously – even beyond Schrauwen's reliable "x + y = z" structure, he'll gleefully repeat the same story, as evidenced by "Hair Styles" and "The Assignment", each a conflict between a good/rational student (apparently the same student in each, his beard and hair of considerable length and his eyes set at an unwavering intense gaze redolent of an emotional disorder) and a bad/irrational student, with their setting a school for artists/cartoonists (all meek men in suits, no ties) – both clear iterations of one basic scenario, but with different variables inserted, enough to imply a hypothetical Schrauwen-verse (where a Crisis of dimensions collapsing into each other is a regular event). "Hair Styles" is a sly and enigmatic point/counterpoint piece, bare bones and diagrammatic, and not only because about half of it is composed of illustrative diagrams – easy to digest but difficult to describe. In it a phrenological-type treatise on hair set forth by the good student bedevils the bad student, his own unruly hair placing him at a problematic place on the hair scale, the eventual punchline being how this sublimely ridiculous bit of categorizing devours both the bad student's form of rebellion against it, revealing it as entirely in key with his crazy hair nature, and, possibly, the narrative itself. "The Assignment", already discussed above, takes a less subterranean and more process-minded approach, hewing closer to the narrative rule of "show, don't tell": an assignment is proposed and the students navigate a psychological space dictated by their one-dimensional nature toward its completion.
"Outside/Inside" (a name which could apply to every story here), with its point of departure a school of man-boys, may form a triptych with those two, story wise, if not in point-by-point structure; it certainly is the most rigorously defined piece, with both sides, banality and delirium, given a thorough working over. It may be the best piece in the book or, more strictly, it has the best sequence – nothing can quite touch the strip's first half, a misbegotten journey from a school to a train station by one of Schrauwen's bearded man-children, a wordless set piece, all momentum, that can be boiled down to a camera eye glued to a character who only knows two actions – standing still and moving – with every page another chunk of spatial continuity livened up by a new angle. It's a combination that yields a fluid series of effects, at first registering as a nice and precise portrayal of the humdrum, our protagonist's steady movement across a continuous environment rendered moot from our perspective by the way he's glued to the same spot in each panel, and then shifting into something close to the climax of a Buster Keaton movie later in the sequence as he races to reach his train, now well in transit, running his legs to their limit across town, all the while seen in long shot against scenery that, no matter how much it changes, will always see him pinned roughly to the same damn location.
The second half ("Inside") is the expected inversion, a replay of the scenario from the boy's POV. If space overwhelmed our lad earlier, proving, in the end, victorious, here the boy conquers space, unreliable narrator-style, retaking those all-too earthbound events and enfolding them into a fantastical and outlandish self-serving story, expanding and eliding all the earlier po-faced ineptitude into a saga of triumph, replete with a faithful horse and an orgy scene. The earlier black-and-white naturalism and rhythmic beats follow suit, replaced by a thudding storybook style of stained glass pomposity, the ornate symmetrical page designs refitting all happenstance into moments of distinct dramatic purpose. The sum of it can't live up to the first part, but as a potent game of dueling authors – Schrauwen vs. our little man – it stands on its own, a mighty bit of conceptual stunt work in the Raymond Queneau mode.
Of all the stories in this book, "The Imaginist" comes closest to resembling a more typical Ware-inflected entry in the afore-mentioned MOME, the original stateside port of call for much of the book's contents, with its sympathetic positioning of a lone soul against the world in hand with a sense of the mundane close to the desultory static happening outside the window nearest to you right now, coming as it does with a familiar 21st-century setting (the only given status quo here which resembles our status quo) and stray bits of pop culture (dude, Extreme). It's a more conventional take on "Outside/Inside", or just more organic – another case of a coherent external environment juxtaposed with a frenzied subjective reality but with its emphasis on sensory immediacy over overt formalism, the two states at play not discrete but intertwined, intersecting. Squint a bit and you can see other traits transposed here and made literal, most plainly the earlier metaphorical stasis of our little man unable to escape the frame, a state which here becomes genuine physical stasis, our protagonist (the titular "Imaginist") a wheelchair-bound catatonic, his interior world another realm of glory, an oddly twee and mutable dreamscape both informed by the outside world and complete detached from it, a place of bright bright bright colors, endless airy movement, and rendezvous with pretty ladies, all prone to being continually affected/disrupted by the drab shit-colored actuality of his situation. As with everything else here, those interactions come with their own logic, with our hero reframing and readjusting any outside stimuli set to a steady lull into a dependable bit of joy and, whenever overstimulated, helpless before the turmoil of his perceptions, with a trip into the less familiar domain outside his apartment leaving him adrift in an ocean of synaesthetic chaos with only stray bits of coherence floating in and out of his frequency. The final frames are another reiteration of "Outside/Inside", the boy's imagined denouement here played absolutely straight in a key bit of uplift; too good to spoil in either case.
Loosen the tether of the reality principle and you'd get something like the untitled story at the end of the book, the closest anything here comes to empty calories, all exhilarating effect. Elements from earlier pieces – the teacher/student relationship, a male id running Duck Amuck – appear here, inserted into a sci-fi premise (the use of an old virtual reality machine which looks a lot like a beach ball drawn by C. F.), with everything attenuated into a quick thin-as-can-be pretext for the sake of the main event: Schrauwen's manipulation of a glowing garish beach scene, an image with the generic beauty of a postcard and the pictorialism of a diorama, two wide panels to a page, with every form therein in constant flux, subject to subtle or extreme shifts from panel to panel – a hermit crab becomes a crab and then a cartoon crab which is then slain with a trident by a sea god-type who emerges from the waves riding a giant sea horse; a monkey enters, changes into a Neanderthal and then into a mulleted party dude who proceeds to frolic with and fuck a bikini babe, along with five or six other variables, all against a mutable backdrop set to a prime directive of "beach scene. It's an overcaffeinated idyll which culminates as you'd expect – into chaos, our machine malfunctioning and the two-panel structure breaking down, the images stuttering into chaos in the familiar digital age error pattern and climaxing on what one imagines is an actual climax, a vision of our lovers embracing in endless repetition looping into the yellow static infinite. And then the teacher says stop and then it stops. End!
At the other end of the spectrum are "The Grotto" and "Congo Chromo", each, all things being relative, a step or so back from the dominant mode of full-blast formalism, the expected themes displaced not onto any erupting formal mechanisms but directly onto the subject and action of the story, matters of Ye Olde Literary Substance.
Of the two, "Congo Chromo" is both less traditional and more straightforward, a blunt-as-can-be satire about a comedy duo of hapless self-satisfied Belgian colonialists who blunder through a cartoon Congo, going about blindly as masters of their foreign domain and all the while getting their asses handed to them two or three times a page. And that's basically the whole of it, seemingly free from the prevailing conceptual schema – an odd characteristic for the first story in sequence, not where you'd expect to find an outlier. But a closer look and you can see the same preoccupations. The bulk of the story is long stretches of medium shot images of our pair gettin' into hi-jinx, their very physical form unstable all throughout, slipping and sliding from a default human form to the bodily proportions of big-headed kids or bloating up to Humpty-Dumpty size, a switch-up depending sometimes on their situation and other times, you suspect, just because Schrauwen felt like drawing them that way. Interspersed are occasional long shots of the scenes we've been watching, with our viewpoint loftier and all characters devoid of most features beyond their race – the Europeans rendered mainly in white and the Africans (who, significantly, only appear in these instances) all in brown; it's a sudden shift into understatement, past tense, with an absence of motion or caricature, a step back from the strip's de facto immediacy which places a frame of realism around this Silly Symphony, letting us feel the weight of history. In the end, thoroughly trounced by the unfriendly jungle, our beleaguered pair o' pals are only left with escape down the river, a voyage which leads not toward a confrontation with any Heart Of Darkness but, inexplicably, to a dreamlike European countryside, where we leave them – snug as a bug in the familiar complacencies of home. I think we can draw the necessary conclusions.
"The Grotto" isn't a top tier strip, but it's still pretty good, beginning with one of the odder things you'll encounter in a Schrauwen strip – a prologue – which may be a tip off that what follows may prove atypical. It's something like a fable – an alternate mythology of life on earth arising directly from ink on the wall of a grotto, humanity arising from that Platonic cradle, doing great deeds, and, in its twilight, receding back into it and then segueing into a performance by an artist who's seized upon that Promethean force of creation to conjure up butterflies, alien-types, a Pegasus, and various other cutesy forms, all coming alive to delight his adoring audience, with a lot of mileage from his hammy flair on stage before his fellow cave dwellers, part magician and part arena rock, tight leather pants and all (Hey! Photoreference!). Soon enough, our artist grows weary, realizes his "art" amounts to glorified balloon animals, and opts, like a prima donna God, to rest. He immediately makes a James Brown I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on about-face, casts his cape aside (sure!), douses himself with ink and dares to go even further, drawing a passageway into which he beckons his audience – to escape their comfortable self-imposed grotto prison and accompany him on a Journey Into Mystery into whatever lies beyond. As an aside to this concluding image of possibility, we see that the same inky medium which may carry us to transcendence can, perhaps, breed monsters as well, as seen with the spiders – formed from stray ink carelessly spilt – which crawl menacingly toward a lil' tot in the audience. Ambivalence!
And so it's the most ground-level strip, a shift in polarity from the pure play in the field of form we saw in the "day at the beach" story. The struggle for control which plays out everywhere else has here been won; rather than appearing as a language with its own grammar, the irrational is subjugated to the demands of the narrative, reduced to an adjunct of "the way things are", a given, domesticated into an entertainment. It's a "useful" story from which to learn, fraught with significance, lending itself to a one-to-one interpretation (slot "art" or "creativity" or whatever your preferred term is into the symbolism provided) rather than the book's more common self-sufficient experiential metatext. Fittingly, it ends the moment before every other story begins – poised before the entryway into the land of wonderful, horrible dreams.


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Tackle Required
Rope: 12 m; 22 m;
Carabiners / Maillons: 4
Deviation carabiners: 2
Traverse lines of dubious vintage aid the ascent from Birthday Pot, and also the traverse around Plant Pot. Both lines are fastened to IC bolts.
The bolts were installed as part of the IC resin anchor bolting programme.

subset: commoncrawl


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The only Specialist Outdoor Camping/Walking Shop in the Banbury area.
While you're here, check out the latest additions from Animal and Weird Fish
Arriving now, New Summer Ranges from Sprayway, Weird Fish and Jack Wolfskin!


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|"Devaraj Das (JIRA)" <j...@apache.org>
|[jira] Updated: (HADOOP-1027) Fix the RAM FileSystem/Merge problems (reported in HADOOP-1014)
|Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:42:06 GMT
[ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-1027?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ] Devaraj Das updated HADOOP-1027: -------------------------------- Attachment: (was: 1027.patch) > Fix the RAM FileSystem/Merge problems (reported in HADOOP-1014) > --------------------------------------------------------------- > > Key: HADOOP-1027 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-1027 > Project: Hadoop > Issue Type: Bug > Components: mapred > Reporter: Devaraj Das > Assigned To: Devaraj Das > Attachments: 1027-new.patch > > > 1) Merge algorithm implementation does not delete empty segments (sequence files with no key/val data) in cases where single level merges don't happen on those segments (due to the check "numberOfSegmentsRemaining <= factor" returning true). This affected the in-mem merge in a subtle way :- > For the in-mem merge, the merge-spill-file is given the same name as the name of the 0th entry file in the ramfs. If this file was an empty file, then it would not get deleted from the ramfs, and if the subsequent merge on ramfs chose the same name for the merge-spill-file, it would overwrite the previously created spill. This led to the inconsistent output sizes. > 2) The InMemoryFileSystem has a "close" method which is not protected (only method where pathToFileAttribs map is modified without first locking the InMemoryFileSystem instance) and that quite likely leads to ConcurrentModificationException if some thread calls InMemoryFileSystem.close (due to some exception) and some other thread is in the process of doing InMemoryFileSystem.getFiles(). However, this problem will not affect the correctness of the merge process (anyway the task is going to fail) and the more important thing is that some other exception happened (like insufficient disk space and so map outputs could not be written) which may not be related to the merge process at all. > 3) The number of outputs that is merged at once in RAM should be limited. This is to prevent OutOfMemory errors. Consider a case where there are 10s of thousands of maps and all maps generate empty outputs. Given the default size of the RAM FS as 75 MB, we can possibly accomodate lots of map outputs in RAM without doing any merge but it also results in the various other data structures exploding in size. We have to do a trade off here especially because the inmem-merging is done in the TaskTracker process which already is under a good amount of memory pressure. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.
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"O give thanks to the Lord for He is good!"
Thanksgiving thoughts from Tom…
I was at the station getting ready to do The Sunday Brunch and began thinking about our Week of Giving Thanks. One thought occurred to me: I know "what" we are doing, as Joe has communicated with you about that. He has given you the details of what to share but perhaps we have never really articulated the "why" of our Week of Giving Thanks.
Since the "why" is the foundation that all good "whats" are built upon, I figured I would just take a minute to articulate that to you.
Gratitude has been lost in our culture. Yet to have a strong biblical worldview, to truly love Jesus, is to be a grateful person no matter the degree of pain in our lives. There is no one who can reflect better what it is like to walk through pain and suffering then the Christian. In good and bad, the follower of Jesus should reflect gratitude, not with false religious piety but with the reality a realization that I can do all things through Christ who gives me the strength. (Phil 4: 13)
We live in a culture where much of the time gratitude is not valued which is why we want to encourage it. What about the person who is grateful and doesn't know God? They simply haven't come to realize yet that they are walking in the grace of God. You can't be grateful without God yet you can be grateful without recognizing Him in your life. It all comes from the Lord!
Anyone who has ever gone through recovery knows how critical it is to develop gratefulness. Blame no longer has the place in the life of the devoted follower of Jesus.
I have really appreciated the different thoughts that Angela has shared on the air about gratitude this past week especially, even this morning as I was driving in. My hope and prayer is that our staff and listeners will begin to recapture where gratitude comes from and why it is so important in our lives.
It is gratitude that gets us through the most difficult of times. If you read the "Pray for Listeners" page on our website you will see how desperate and difficult life can get. In it all we can find God through gratitude.
This is our fifth year of the Week of Giving Thanks and I would like to challenge you each day this week to list 5 things you are grateful for.
Day One for me:
1) That God saved me when I wasn't worth saving on 02/19/82.
2) My wife, who is my best friend and a VERY patient person.
3) The joy of working with such a dedicated team at the Sound of Life. They teach me a lot!
4) My Pastor, Ed Jones, another VERY patient person in my life.
5) The Walter Hoving Home – these ladies have taught me courage and what it really means to surrender to Jesus.
A blessed week of Giving Thanks to you and your family!
TMZ[contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"]


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The final gun that officially ends the Super Bowl starts up the longest month of the year for NFL fans and fantasy football fans alike. The month of February offers nothing outside of draft rumors, hearsay and a lot of recycled news for four weeks straight (Just watch ESPN). The 2014 NFL Free Agency period is really when things start rolling and excitement hits the air again. This year is no different as several big-name players are looking to make a big score money-wise with a new team, or make big bucks with their existing franchise.
- Category: NFL
- Tags:2014, ben tate, eric decker, free agency, nfl


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Arnold Bax and Ralph Vaughan Williams by Richard R. Adams
Arnold Bax and Ralph Vaughan Williams by Richard R. Adams THE SIR ARNOLD BAX WEB SITE Last Modified July 21, 1999 Sir Arnold Bax (looking typically pensive and uncomfortable) It is difficult to imagine two figures as different in their art and lives as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Arnold Bax. Take their physical appearances for example; from his photos, Vaughan Williams appears enormous, particularly in his later years. His features are smooth and benign. My favorite photo of Vaughan Williams shows him from behind, a massive giant looming over a small boy whose hand he is holding gently. Bax, in contrast, appears remote, his features are handsome but pensive. The fact that we rarely catch him smiling in his photos contributes to this impression. Their backgrounds are roughly similar in that both came from well-to-do families, both went to prominent music colleges in London and both married in their youth. Bax left his wife a couple of years into his marriage and ran off with the pianist Harriet Cohen, whereas VW remained devotedly attached to his wife, even throughout her long illness with arthritis. Ironically, it was the flighty Bax who fathered children while VW sublimated whatever parental urges he may have had onto a long line of students and burly felines. Bax's creative energies began to wane in his later years. He wrote little of substance after his Seventh Symphony in 1938. Whereas Vaughan Williams' music became increasingly visionary and even more youthful as he aged. Vaughan Williams was the undisputed leader of British music from the 1930s until the premiere of Peter Grimes but it was Bax who was knighted and became the Master of the Kings Musick. The most significant difference pertains to their popularity. The Vaughan Williams symphonies are widely performed in the United Kingdom and are beginning to catch on elsewhere, particularly in the United States. The seven symphonies of Bax are rarely performed even in the United Kingdom, a shameful situation I believe. This hasn't always been the case. Throughout the 1920s and early 30s, Bax was the preeminent composer of symphonies in England. His symphonies were premiered and championed by the greatest conductors of the time including Koussevitsky, Monteux, Reiner, Barbirolli, Harty, Beecham, etc. Ironically, it was the very symphony that VW dedicated to Bax, his Fourth, along with Walton's First Symphony, that diverted attention away from Bax and established VW and Walton as the leading figures of British music (Benjamin Britten would join them a few years later). Bax wrote only one more symphony (his Seventh) and his Violin Concerto after 1934 but very little after that which is of interest. Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, went from strength to strength; a period of creativity that culminated in his most acclaimed symphony, the Sixth Symphony from 1948. At the time of his death, Bax's headlong fall into neglect was nearly complete. There were the occasional performances of Garden of Fand and Tintagel but the symphonies never appeared on concert programs. Vaughan Williams' reputation suffered a little after his death but his symphonies continued to be performed and recorded and his popularity is now at an all-time-high. Bax has his enthusiastic band of followers and most of his major works are available on compact disc (surprisingly few in entirely successful renditions, in my opinion) but concert performances of his symphonies are very rare events. So what accounts for this difference in fortunes? Why has Vaughan Williams found an audience while Bax languors in the background? The answer depends upon whom you ask. It has been stated that Bax wrote the same symphony seven times. His symphonies have been described as a succession of beautiful episodes, loosely linked but lacking in real symphonic development. The only advantage given to Bax over VW is that he was the greater orchestrater, perhaps the greatest of his generation. Are these assertions fair? Not entirely. The attentive listener will discover an enormous range of emotions and textures within Bax's symphonies. Far from being carbon copies, each symphony clearly stands out from the others. A superficial description of each symphonies might go as follows: the First Symphony is a bitter lament; the Second Symphony is violently catastrophic; the Third Symphony is beautiful and otherworldly; the Fourth Symphony is an ecstatic celebration of love; the Fifth Symphony is legendary and northern in mood; the Sixth Symphony is a summation of all that has come before and the Seventh is nostalgic and resigned. The first four symphonies are richly colored and lush while the last three symphonies are lean and even terse. No less an authority than conductor Vernon Handley has challenged the assumption that Bax's symphonies are episodic and wayward in structure. While he admits the symphonies are loaded with beautiful melodies and luscious chromatic harmonies, he says Bax supports his material with a firmly-grounded structure that may not always be apparent upon first hearing but is there nevertheless. He points out that Bax often develops entire symphonies out of the material he presents at the beginning of each symphony. So while Bax's approach to symphonic development may be idiosyncratic, it does occurs. All agree he was a brilliant orchestrater but the same is true of Vaughan Williams as musicologist Michael Kennedy has so persuasively argued in his definitive study on the composer. Modern musicology is laying to rest these damning appraisals of Bax and Vaughan Williams -- and not a moment to soon! How did these two composers regard each other's music? We know they met around the time Vaughan Williams was composing his London Symphony. Bax's biographer Lewis Foreman has written that VW was unsure about a particular passage in his own symphony and Bax sat at the piano and improvised a counter melody on the oboe which VW liked but found too obviously Baxian to be of any use. Vaughan Williams returned the favor to Bax when the younger composer was at work on his Third Symphony. Vaughan Williams encouraged Bax to lengthen by sixteen bars the fortissimo orchestral tutti at the end of the First Movement. VW was not alone in his adoration of Bax's Third for it was also admired by Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Moeran but Vaughan Williams was the most demonstrative in his affection. He quoted two bars from the epilogue in the last movement of the original version of his Piano Concerto from 1931. This concerto was composed for Harriet Cohen and it came to represent the close bond that existed at that time among VW, Cohen and Bax, Foreman has said. Later VW revised the concerto and dropped the quotation saying its appearance in the concerto confused listeners and said its significance was more personal than musical and therefore didn't belong in the piece. Foreman says the astute listeners can still hear glimpses of the Bax epilogue in the Romanza movement from this great concerto. Shortly after the concerto was first played, VW composed his Fourth Symphony which he dedicated to Bax. Bax was obviously moved as he wrote back to the senior composer saying, "…this is the finest tribute of affection and comradeship that has ever been paid me, and I shall value it all my life. I need say no more than this." Around this same time, VW was quoted in the Radio Times as saying that Bax was worthy to stand beside his better-known contemporaries Schoenberg, Hindemith, Poulenc and Stravinsky. He added, "Personally, I do not consider that most of the names on that program are worthy to stand beside Bax, but this, of course, is a matter of opinion." I suspect at this time VW was seeking a confident with whom he could share his ideas and seek sound musical critiques as he had done with Holst and would later do with Gerald Finzi and Herbert Howells. But Bax was a very solitary figure - more involved with his various romances than being a soul-mate to the older English composer. I've also wondered if Bax began to resent VW's growing popularity and status as the "leading" British composer of the day. It couldn't have been easy for Bax to sit back and watch each new VW work being greeted with rapturous acclaim while his own works were being performed less frequently. At the time of Bax's death, VW wrote in a private letter to Michael Kennedy that while he was beginning to have his doubts about Bax, he still loved the Third Symphony which he considered the best among the symphonies. Bax enthusiasts have long argued that at his best, Bax is the equal of his British contemporaries and that his best symphonies are worthy to stand along side those of VW and Walton. So where should the uninitiated begin? Bax's most popular tone poem has always been Tintagel and the Third Symphony has been played more often than the other symphonies. As beautiful as both those masterworks are, I believe they are less personal than his very best scores. Bax was an extraordinarily passionate human being and those passions are best expressed, I believe, in his Second and Sixth Symphonies, Spring Fire, Mater Ora Filium, Winter Legends and November Woods. It is in the Second Symphony and November Woods, in particular, where Bax does battle against some particularly fierce demons. The turbulence of those scores and the power of the ideas and their expression place them at the very top of Bax's musical output. November Woods was first performed by Sir Hamilton Harty on November 18, 1920. The work was written in 1917 and this dark, foreboding music is unquestionably autobiographical. Bax was married at the time of its composition but he was in the midst of a passionate love affair with Harriet Cohen. Lewis Foreman has noted that during that time, Bax would frequently rendezvous with Harriet Cohen at the Crown hotel, Amersham. Evidently, he would travel there by bicycle over the Chiltern Hills and Bax himself stated it was those woods and the anguished emotions he was feeling at the time that inspired November Woods. In a letter to the critic Ernest Newman, Bax wrote that while the work may be taken as "an impression of the dank and stormy music of nature in late autumn," its origins "are connected with certain troublous experiences I was going through myself at the time and the mood of the Buckinghamshire wood where the idea of this work came, seemed to sound a similar chord, as it were. If there are sounds in the music which recall the screaming of the wind and the crackling of strained branches, I hope they may suggest deeper things at the same time. The middle part may be taken as a dream of happier days, such as sometimes come in the intervals of stress either physical or mental." Bax's unrivaled ability to translate natural scenes into aural impressions is at its most inspired in this score. The opening pages set the windy scene with muted strings and harp glissandi punctuated with whirling figures in the brass and woodwinds. All of this builds to an impassioned climax which is then followed by music of deep reflection and nostalgia. The storm music returns and builds to a surging, dynamic tutti that overwhelms all that has come before. With all energy spent, the scene changes and the landscape becomes remote and quiet -- the dark clouds and wind remaining for Bax gives us no relief from this brutal scene of nature. The music then fades away into a most ominous silence. This score has been recorded several times, most successfully, I believe, by Sir Adrian Boult on a Lyrita disc SRCD.231. Naxos has just released a new recording featuring David Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Scottish National. His interpretation is very tense and hard driven but seems to gloss over some of the more introspective passages of this great score. The new Naxos disc couples November Woods with Bax's Second Symphony. Admirers of Bax usually cite the Second and Sixth Symphonies as the greatest from his cycle. The Sixth is, along with the Seventh, the most formally satisfying of Bax's symphonies but the Second is unquestionably Bax's most personal and harrowing score. Bax began writing it in 1924 and it was completed in March 1926. It was dedicated to Serge Koussevitsky who premiered the work with the Boston Symphony in December 1929. Sir Eugene Goossens premiered the work in England in May 1930 and he remained an ardent champion of the work, giving memorial performances of it shortly after Bax's death in 1953. Bax uses a gargantuan orchestra which includes two harps, piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, gong and organ. Bax was literally possessed by this work during its two year gestation. He wrote, "I put a great deal of time and emotion in the writing, and it should be very broad indeed, with a kind of oppressive catastrophic mood." Bax was so exhausted by the composition of this score that he composed little else during those two years, a unique situation considering Bax's almost obsessive need to compose. Lewis Foreman has said that the Second Symphony "can be approached at a number of different levels, but at the very least it is music of such evocative power and impact as to make almost all contemporary works, at least by British composers, appear very pale." David Cox has described the work as an "introspective exploration of an inner world of nightmare and frustration." Those who respond to Vaughan Williams' two E minor symphonies should find much in Bax's Second that will impress for they allshare the same bleak and terrifying vision. Indeed, the epilogue from Bax's Second Symphony can only be compared with that of VW's Sixth in conveying absolute nihilism. Not all is despairing for there are moments of meditative calm in the first movement as well as some lyrical and impassioned music in the second movement butthere is nothing consoling about the violent and catastrophic music from the final movement of this symphony. The most dramatic moment of the entire work is near the end when there is a shattering outburst from the organ and brass which suggests, to this listener anyway, an image of harrowing defeat and complete chaos. This moment will shock those who perceive Bax as being nothing more than an idyllic dreamer. The final three minutes of this symphony make up the epilogue, which while brief, is unbearably affecting in its evocation of total resignation. Not even VW's Sixth or Ninth Symphonies are as dark and despairing. Bax's Second Symphony has been recorded three times. Lyrita recorded the symphony with Myer Fredman in the early 1970s and it is long out-of-print. It should be reissued on compact disc for it is a tremendously powerful performance, much more so than Bryden Thomson's overly expansive recording on Chandos. David Lloyd-Jones new recording features a similarly broad interpretation that is much more successful in conveying the dark turbulance and emotional grief that this work so powerfully portrays. This recent Naxos disc (8.554093) should be heard by anyone interested in hearing Bax's art at its absolute zenith. This text is copyrighted by Richard R. Adams


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Serta Gray & Black Orthopedic Foam Cuddler Pet Bed, (24" x 34")
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Spicer® drivetrain products are manufactured by Dana to the same high Standards as original equipment (OE), because they are OE parts. When a part is replaced with a Spicer product, you receive the durability you know with the quality and performance you expect.
With more than 110 years of experience, Dana continuously develops new designs, materials, and processes for Spicer products to provide more power, greater efficiency, and better overall performance. When choosing Spicer, customers know they are buying the highest quality products available.
Dana manufactures Spicer® driveshafts, axles, transmission parts, and related components for lightvehicle, Commercial vehicle, and off -highway applications.
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I think that science and experience has established that truth serum does indeed work. While it is not something that works as it is portrayed in movies, there are drugs that make a person much more amenable to coercion and as such are more likely to tell the truth to someone.
Truth serum is still a developing science. The beliefs about where truth in the brain comes from change too often for us to have figured out how to make people always tell the truth. It is too early for us to depend on truth serum for serious purposes like justice and interrogation.
I think that people who believe that truth serum is a real thing have essentially been watching far too much science fiction or Hollywood movies. Such a compound does not exist, nor would it be a moral thing to do if someone were to use it on someone else, I say.
There is not enough evidence to say that truth serum will work in every case. Sometimes it may, as all it does is lower a persons inhibitions, much like alcohol. The problem is that you do not know what to expect and the person in question may not be truthful, even after receiving a dose.


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Trudeau awaits fallout from disarmament flurry
Canadian leader Pierre Trudeau has given himself ''a couple of months'' to decide whether or not his disarmament campaign is working. The forthcoming NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels is the next crucial step, he believes, and he says he will be ready to fly to Moscow and Washington for talks with the superpowers after the middle of December.
Mr. Trudeau, eager to rebuild bridges between East and West and tone down the superpowers' angry rhetoric, has in the last month flown to six West European capitals, Japan, China, and the Commonwealth summit in New Delhi to push for more dialogue.
He has called for a conference of the five nuclear powers, a ban on ''star wars'' - antisatellite systems - and a boost to the Vienna talks on cutting conventional forces.


text: The BABYBJÖRN Wooden Toy for Babysitter is a toy for little ones who love to play. Delightful, spinning figures in happy colors capture your child's attention and make playing in the babysitter more fun. The wooden toy works with all Baby Bjorn babysitters and is fastened in a way that does not allow the child to remove it on his or her own. As with all Baby Bjorn products, the toy contains no harmful substances.


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Demineralizing Filter Cartridge 20"
Brand: Crystal Quest
Price: $45.00
Dimensions: 20"x2.5"
Weight: 2.5 lb
In stock
Mixed Bed DI Industrial Grade cartridge 20"x2.5". 20 inch Demineralizing cartridge is great to use in situations where water has a high mineral content and needs to be demineralized. DI Filter Cartridge removes Total Dissolved Solids ( TDS ) via a high quality mixed bed de-mineralizer resin.
Demineralizing " deionizer " filter cartridge for residential and commercial applications. 20" Demineralizing cartridge removes minerals and reduces limescale build-up that can cause excessive equipment downtime and increase maintenance costs. Cartridge is especially useful for applications such as car washes, pharmaceutical water filtration and low capacity steamers and warmers that are not emptied daily, where white mineral deposits are common and need to be removed.
Color indicator tells you when it is exhausted.
Capacity: 785 grains or 13,400 ppm
Maximum temperature: 100°F (38°C)
Minimum temperature: 40°F (5°C)
Maximum pressure:125 PSI (8.6 bar)
Minimum pressure: 20 PSI (1.4 bar)
Micron rating: 5 nominal
Designed flow rate: 1 - 1.5 gpm (gallons per minute)
Filter dimensions: 20 by 2.5 inches nominal, will fit a standard 20"x2.5" water filter housing.
Materials of Construction
• End Caps: Polypropylene
• Inner/Outer Wraps: Polyolefin
• Netting: Polyethylene
• Gaskets: Buna-N
To determine cartridge life, divide total capacity of cartridge (785 grains or 13,400 ppm) by the TDS in grains per gallon (gpg) or milligrams per liter (ppm), respectively.
Change cartridge every 6 months for preventive maintenance.
Mfg#: CQE-RC-04023 , CQERC04023


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UK lawmakers debated banning President Donald Trump from visiting the UK after a petition to ban him received over a million signatures. The petition floated around across the UK in response to Trump's travel ban against immigrants and refugees from majority-Muslim countries.
During Monday's debate, UK lawmaker Peter Grant criticized Trump as a "leader of what once was the free world [who] doesn't know the difference between" true Islam and what he referred to as "the poisonous perversion of Islam."
"As a Christian, I find that a repulsive, repugnant way to run a country," he said. Grant added that he doesn't see Trump as a Christian, even though Grant was "brought up to see the good in everybody."
"So much so, that if the Lord and savior that we follow was to turn up today at the American border, he wouldn't be allowed in because of his Palestinian passport," Grant said, calling Trump's ideology depraved and racist.
Grant continued to compare Trump's rhetoric about Muslims to the way Nazis "spoke of Jews in the 1930s," noting that "If those similarities aren't clear enough for everyone in here to understand or to see them, then they really shouldn't be involved in politics."
You can watch his full remarks below.


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Cope, you in-grown hair on Michael Moore's flabby ass,
I bet you wish I'd get lost and not send you letters anymore, don't you? Well your ain't going to be so lucky to have that happen, you sack of Saul O'Linksy's afterbirth. I did happen to move out of my mom's place in Homedale and got myself a pretty clean double-wide in Parma, but that's as far as I'm going. I'll be around for a long, long time to point out what a scrambled brain libber lips you are.
It's just like this U (suck) of I flagship thing what's come up and has all you Vandal losers all rawfed up over it. I bet you're right in there with them, aren't you? That's one thing what I know about you U (suck) of I graduators. You all act like you just got off the bus from Hoitytoitytown. Like the U (suck) of I made you better than normal people what didn't go there to collage. That's why you're all Hussane Obama voters, I bet. Because just like what Rick Santorum says about him, you are snobs.
As far as I'm concerned, calling the U (suck) of I a flagship should of never happened in the first place. Who do they think they are, calling themselfs the flagship univercity around here when they can't even get out of podunk Moscow? If they want us to think they are so almighty, why arin't they set up in a town big enough to have a hockey team, that's what I want to know?
Also as far as I'm concerned, this state doesn't not need no more univercities than one, which is the one we got right over there in Boise. If we Idahoers got to have a flagship, that's what ought be the flagship, good old Bronco State. So they ought close up the U (suck) of I for good, that's what I think. Lock the doors and send all the libtard professers back to San Fran Sicko and Maggot-Chusetts. We don't need whatever they been professering.
What do you think of that idea, you Al Gore humped-up envirowhack nut? To have us put your precious U (suck) of I out of its mizery?
--Signed: Dick From Parma
PS: Did you notice that every time I wrote U of I, I put (suck) in it so that how you say it is "U suck of I?" My roping partner thinks that saying ought be made into a T-shirt what I can sell at the Bronco store, that's how funny he thinks it is. And maybe I'll do that.
Dear Dick From Parma,
I'm happy for you that you were able to move out of your momma's house. Must be such a relief not having to flush the toilet every time you use it, eh?
I also commend you on that stroke of genius concerning the "U (suck) of I" logo. Funny stuff. Funny, funny stuff. But as to expanding your wit to the T-shirt genre, let me warn you it could backfire. Imagine how you would feel the first time you passed an answering T-shirt on the street, emblazoned with the design "BSUcks" on the front. What I mean to say is, once you elevate the old school rivalry to "you suck/no, you suck!" levels, who can say where it would end?
Now as to the "flagship" controversy: It may surprise you to know I agree the U of I should have never been called Idaho's "flagship university." My position is that maritime metaphorical references just simply don't resonate when describing anything that has to do with Idaho. After all, what does a "high tide mark" or "mizzen mast" have to do with a landlocked hinterland whose population looks to Lake Lowell for aquatic adventures? Why, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that in remote corners of Idaho--I'm thinking of Canyon County in particular--there reside people who are not even aware we are surrounded by oceans and seas. I ask you, what would "20,000 fathoms" or "batten down the hatches" possibly mean to such people?
Besides implicit within the image of "flagship" is the suggestion there is some sort of an assembly of other ships over which the flagship presides. See what I mean, Dick From Parma? A fleet, perhaps. An armada. A navy, even ... strong and proud with cruisers and destroyers, gallant galleons and formidable men-o'-war.
Ah, if only Idaho's dinky flotilla of ivied halls were so seaworthy. Aye, matey, I be afeered that with such land-lubber cabin boys as Luna, Otter and them Legislature scurvies setting the course and rigging the sails, our boats of higher ed have been run up onto the rocks. We be scuttled, and we're leaking students, curriculum offerings, qualified classroom instructors, and education opportunities like oil oozing out of the good ship Costa Concordia. Our advanced learning be on its way to Davy Jones, boy-o ... sunk to the bottom by scalawags who figure the less the passengers know, the better off the ship of state be. Argh!
Uh, pardon me, Dick From Parma. I believe I was momentarily possessed by Capt. Morgan.
Anyway, as to the point I was trying to make: However accurate it may be that the University of Idaho is the state's flagship university, her accompanying fleet amounts to a few junior college dinghies and a couple of overloaded garbage scows. So it is my opinion the word "flagship" should indeed be dropped from the school's mission statement and be replaced with something more appropriate to prevailing Idaho cultural sensibilities. Maybe, "Idaho's anchor store university." How about, "the state's Carl's Junior university"? Or, "the bishop university"?
As to closing down the U of I, Parma Dick, I don't think that would be such a good idea. Do that, and all we'd have left would be the dinghies and the garbage barges.
Comments are closed.


text: Hey B-Hatters: Some of you may already know about this site, but for those who are not aware of it, you definitely need to check it out. It is a blog dedicated to exposing the Internet Marketing gurus for what they really are. The author has a very lively and engaging style of writing and you can't help but chuckle at the tongue-in-cheek way in which he takes shots at these guys. Here is the site: Code: http://www.saltydroid.info Cheers! - "Wiz"


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At one time, small businesses opposed promoting wild places like Glacier National Park. That attitude has changed, as the link between protected wildlands and sustainable local economies becomes increasingly clearer every year.
North Fork of the Flathead River partners
The local Chamber of Commerce, the city of Whitefish, Montana, conservation groups and river guides understand the value of clean water. That's why they have united to ensure the free-flowing North Fork of the Flathead River remains unharmed by energy development and pollution.
Whitefish Range partners
We have started a new partnership to address restoration needs in the Whitefish Range and protect some of the wildest places in the Northwestern Crown. We are bringing lessons learned in the Southwestern Crown to bear in this equally important area.


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If you have fibroids, you may already be aware that your conventional treatment options are somewhat limited. Due to the very nature of fibroids, there is no cure which can be effected by either surgery or hormonal treatment, but both of these options can play a part in managing the symptoms. However, you may wish to consider natural management of uterine fibroids as an alternative.
Fibroids form as a result of a combination of various factors. There is no doubt that estrogen can play a large part in this jigsaw puzzle, but not all women with high estrogen levels will have fibroids. Other factors, such as an unhealthy lifestyle, your diet, environmental factors and your heredity will come into play and unless the factors which have caused your fibroids are eliminated, no amount of surgery or drug treatment will provide a cure, as in time, fibroids will regrow as the factors which have caused the fibroids in the first place will still be present. Unless, of course, you take proactive steps to do something about it!
Natural management of uterine fibroids works by systematically eliminating the very causes of your fibroids. By doing this, the fibroids will naturally shrink and, in some cases, disappear altogether. Techniques include a combination of dietary measures, increasing exercise and taking herbal supplements to help to reduce fibroid symptoms.
As estrogen plays such a large part in fibroids formation, natural management will look at ways of reducing this in the body. One simple way is to take a look at your BMI and if you are above the healthy weight range for your height, then losing weight will almost certainly lower your estrogen levels as fat cells are a secondary producer of this hormone. In addition, estrogen for many women originates from environmental toxins and pollutants which can become "locked" in the liver and mimic the action of estrogen. The only way to release this is to carry out a liver detox, and the herb Milk Thistle can be used as part of this process.
The benefit of a good healthy diet can sometimes be overlooked by women looking at the natural management of uterine fibroids. Sticking to the principles which we all know are right, such as eating a minimum of 5 portions of fruits and vegetables daily, drinking at least 2 liters of water and eating unprocessed foods which are organic where possible, will also help.
Although fibroids can cause debilitating symptoms, this is a condition which is very rarely life-threatening and this at least gives women the chance to carefully consider their treatment options before deciding on any form of invasive surgery, which can have a long recovery time and, with the exception of a hysterectomy, is never considered permanent.
Natural management of uterine fibroids is an option worth considering as if followed correctly, not only will it ensure that you get relief from your fibroids, but it will improve your overall health, and many women have reported feeling better than they can ever remember doing.
The lack of real, useful help for women with fibroids led an alternative practitioner to put together a 7 step plan to help women to treat their fibroids naturally at home. She was always inundated with requests for appointments at her busy clinic and decided that this was a way to reach out to help thousands of women worldwide, most of whom she had never met.


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Headed back to Quarry Lake in Canmore Alberta with my dad to see if we could land some Grayling from the pond. We fished the last hour and a half of light and caught four nice grayling all on bead head nymphs and chroni's. This lake has a bait ban and catch and release only as they use the eggs to harvest for the hatchery.
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6 January 2012
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) National Rural Faculty (NRF) has recently reinforced the need to eliminate long-standing health disparities between rural, remote and urban communities in Australia. In its submission to the Senate Inquiry, The factors affecting the supply of health services and medical professionals in rural areas, the NRF's paper calls on the Government to address the entire range of essential requirements specific to rural and remote communities, from workforce shortages to gaps in resources and services.
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When Union Terminal opened in 1933, it replaced five railroad passenger stations in Cincinnati. These stations, all built in the 19th century, were scattered across the city basin and supported the seven railroads that operated here: Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway (CCC&St.L, a.k.a. The Big Four) [later part of New York Central], Southern Railway (SR), Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), Norfolk & Western Railway (N&W), Louisville & Nashville Railroad (L&N), and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad (C&O).
These stations were cramped, inconvenient for connecting passengers, and frequently shut down when the river flooded, often because their tracks were underwater. Very few of the trains entering Cincinnati prior to the construction of Union Terminal were "through" trains, a mere 20 percent. This meant that many rail travelers would arrive at one of the five stations and then have to leave their train and be conveyed along with their baggage to another station to continue to their desired destination. This created a bottleneck that made Cincinnati a city to avoid when traveling by rail.
As early as the 1880s, people were talking about building a union terminal in the city to try and fix these issues. Many plans and studies were produced, but most of them failed for several reasons: they planned to build near the heart of downtown and they required that all seven railroads to agree on the location and to help fund the projects.
One plan, commissioned by local business leaders, was prepared by John Bleekman, a New York railroad planner, in 1910. It called for a massive terminal along the river front on Third Street between Main and Walnut. This building would combine both passenger rail and freight operations in one location. The building would be capped with a large office tower to accommodate the demand for a modern skyscraper in the city. Although the project had a lot of good points, its $30 million price tag made it impossible to finance without railroad support. The railroads, which had not been involved in the Bleekman Plan, showed little interest in the project. As a result, the project and other planning efforts languished until World War I, when the nationalization of the railroads temporarily ended the discussions.
After World War I, the idea reemerged with the return of civilian control of the railroads. The troop movements during the war had further highlighted the poor passenger rail situation in the city and local business and civic leaders felt that this, along with the scattered freight operations in the city, was earning Cincinnati a reputation as a city to avoid for both freight and passenger rail. In 1924, the Cincinnati Railroad Development Co. was incorporated and appointed local businessman George Dent Crabbs as president. Crabbs worked with the railroads and secured two important agreements that moved the union terminal project forward. In 1926 he got the railroads to agree on unified freight facilities and in 1927 the railroads also agreed to consolidate the passenger facilities. Following these agreements, the Cincinnati Union Terminal Company was formed, whose job would be to construct and then operate a union terminal.
The site chosen by the company for the new station fit with the site recommended by the 1925 City Master Plan, which shifted the terminal from its pre-WWI proposed downtown location, to a location just east of the Mill Creek in the West End. The site was considered ideal from a number of perspectives, not the least of which was the open space adjacent to the Mill Creek was ready for development and the cheaper prices of the property in that area. Also, four of the city's seven railroads already had tracks and facilities in the Mill Creek basin and the valley was wide enough for future expansion.
New York architects Alfred Fellheimer and Steward Wagner were chosen to design the new station and Paul Cret from Philadelphia was hired by the Union Terminal Company to advise Fellheimer & Wagner's designer, Roland Wank, on the proposed design. The initial proposal had called for a classical structure, which was very costly and by that time, fairly out of style. Cret and Wank were tasked to bring the design into the modern style, what we now call Art Deco. Ground was broken in 1929, just before the stock market crash.
As the rail yards in the Mill Creek valley were expanded, the existing viaducts that crossed over the tracks and Mill Creek required replacement. As part of the overall project, the Western Hills Viaduct was built jointly by the Cincinnati Union Terminal Company and the City of Cincinnati, so that Harrison Ave would still connect to the rest of the city.
During construction, four artists contributed outstanding examples of public art. German born artist Winold Reiss prepared paintings which were then turned into 23 glorious glass tile mosaic panels by Ravenna Tile. French born Pierre Bourdelle provided art for the Men's and Women's lounges, the three dining spaces, Newsreel Theater, as well as the alcove outside of a women's restroom located in the dining area. Sculptor Maxfield Keck carved the two massive bas relief figures on the front of the building, representing Transportation and Commerce. William Hentschel, who worked for Rookwood Pottery, created the designs for the tile installation in the Tea Room.
NEXT: A Temple to Transportation →
Image Citations
1 Post Card Collection Post card view of the proposed Court Street Union Depot. This artist's rendering of what the station might have looked like is as far as the project managed to get before failing.
2 Post Card Collection Another post card view, this time of the 1910 Union Depot proposal. This is one of the more detailed and sophisticated Union Depot plans that emerged in the years prior to the construction of Union Terminal. The design was heavily promoted, using postcards like this and other materials, to raise support and funding for the proposal.
3 Printed Works Collection Official City Plan of Cincinnati, Ohio adopted by the City Planning Commission, 1925 This is a map showing proposed urban development from the 1925 City Master Plan. While parts of the plan were never completed, several elements of the plan did become reality, including the placement of a future union terminal; 3 B-89-156 Transportation: Railroads | Union Terminal This is an artist's sketch from Fellheimer and Wagner's original Union Terminal design. The style they chose was beaux-arts. This shows how they envisioned the design of the rotunda in the original concept.
4 Krotty/Thorp Collection SC#20 This clay model represents what the exterior of the station would have looked like in the original design concept. While a vaguely familiar shape and layout, the beaux-arts elements give the building a completely different feel from the art deco style of the final design.
5 CUT Progress Photos SC#319 #8.91 Here we see the arch over Spring Grove Avenue under construction. The Western Hills Viaduct would cross the Mill Creek, the rail yard, and with its double deck design, connect traffic from Queen City Ave and Harrison Ave with Spring Grove Ave and Central Parkway.
6 CUT Progress Photos SC#319 #8.239 Here we see the east end of the upper deck of the Western Hills Viaduct under construction.
7 CUT Progress Photos SC#319 #8.220 This picture from the rail yard show part of the 3,500ft long Western Hills Viaduct crossing over the yard.
8 B-91-057 Transportation: Railroads | Interior This group of men was responsible for the installation of the mosaic murals. They worked for Ravenna Tile, the company that took Winold Reiss' paintings and translated them into the mosaic medium.
9 B-80-199 Transportation: Railroads | Union Terminal This is a construction photo of the two bas reliefs on the terminal façade, this one being the north relief representing Commerce, which was carved in place by Maxfield Keck.
10 Krotty/Thorp Collection SC#20 This is a photograph of Pierre Bourdelle, the artist responsible for the art work in many of the public spaces of Union Terminal, including the lounges and dining rooms.


text:
Skybus operates
a comprehensive bus service between Spencer Street Station terminus
and Melbourne Airport. It's coaches operate seven days a week,
24 hours a day. For most of the day, the coaches leave every 15
minutes. As at April 2008, a one-way fare cost $16.
Skybus also
operates a complimentary hotel/motel delivery and pick-up service.
On arrival in the CBD, visitors board a mini bus at the Spencer
Street station terminal, which then takes them to their hotel
or motel. Skybus will also pick up from a predetermined number
of departure points in and around the Central Business District.
In both instances, the service is free, including luggage handling.
You can use
Skybus website to plan your trip to and from the airport.
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text:
We've developed this belt and the leather its made from with a very specific set of design criteria in mind for quite an unusual set of circumstances, however the end result is a belt of exceptional quality, character and durability suitable for anyone looking a substantial belt. As worn by ultimate adventurer, Bear Grylls.
Please see here for buckle choices
Please see here for a concise guide to finish options
The Buckle chosen above determines the strap widths available
Please see our Concise Guide, or click here for our comprehensive guide
Please see our quick thread overview here
For a guide to thread colours please see here for Lin Cable, or here for Linen 18/3
A free running piece of matching leather to tuck the tail of the belt into.
* Required Fields
Our design goal was to make a belt for the gentleman traveler, someone whose journeys encompass both civilization with all its demands and the seriously uncivilized, with an entirely different and rather more arduous set of requirements. As such we have christened this belt The Scott, after Robert Falcon Scott, perhaps one of the greatest of the gentleman travelers, explorers and scientists of the 20th century. What we wanted this belt to be was;
We looked for years to find just the right leather to achieve this disparate set of goals and after a long search we've had our own custom version of Bakers of Colyton Oak Bark Tanned 5mm Harness leather developed with specific thought to the adverse climatic and conditions of use likely to be encountered and so the leather is just as we want it. We use harness rather than our normal bridle leather to achieve the weight and density of leather we wanted and the extra grease stuffed into the fibers of the leather in the finishing process. This has a number of benefits for the belt, most notably extra tensile strength, greater weather and neglect resistance and a greater flexibility to offset the added thickness necessary for strength. Harness leather like this would typically be used in high-stress applications in the saddlery trade like stirrup leathers or harness traces where failure of the leather can be life threateningly dangerous, so this is the perfect leather for our application where failure of the belt in a far flung part of the world would be unacceptable.
The Oak Bark tanning and hand aniline colouring used for this leather produces a genuinely beautiful and hugely characterful, naturally slightly variegated leather that shows the grain, marks and scars of the skin itself and of the exceptionally long 2 year tanning and finishing process that has made it. The leather and this rich, natural and interesting patina will continue to improve with age and use and is quite different to a mass produced leather and belt. The grease used in the finishing process helps makes what from another tanner would be a stiff and rather wooden belt, into a pleasure to wear and the tanners art locks the grease into the heart of the leather, keeping the outside grease free to touch. We have chosen a warm mid to dark brown as the most versatile colour that compliments both the nature of the belt and the wardrobe most likely to be worn with it. As much as this belt has been designed for very hard use the leather is in no way crude or utilitarian and will certainly not disappoint the lover of great leather. The belt will arrive with character built in and will carry the marks of both its life with you and of its years long creation process with good grace.
The Scott is available with a number of different styles of buckle, all of which are specifically chosen for their suitability for this weight of leather and for use in rugged and challenging environments whilst retaining the elegance of design to be expected of the classical English buckle.


text:
http://www.countbasietheatre.org/arts-i ... olarships/
2018 Arts Impact Scholarships:
Note: Applicants need not be pursuing a career in the arts or an arts related vocation.
• Monmouth Medical Center – RWJBarnabas Health Arts Impact Scholarship
• Monmouth County Freeholders Basie Scholarship for Continuing Education (For seniors pursuing higher education at a New Jersey college or university)
• Moser Taboada Arts Impact Scholarship
• Steven and Jaime Schultz Arts Impact Scholarship
Eligibility: Applicants must attend a Monmouth County high school, be graduating during the 2017-2018 school year, and be no older than 19 years of age. To qualify for the Monmouth County Freeholders' Basie Scholarship for Continuing Education, applicant must be attending a college located in New Jersey in the fall.
Count Basie Theatre Arts Impact Scholarships (by April 6, 2018)
Opportunities from local non-profit organizations
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text:
Another year has gone by and I have no awards to show for it; but that's OK with me because I didn't do anything to deserve special recognition. This attitude doesn't mean I'm opposed to rewarding people for outstanding performances on the job, in school, or in community service. But sometimes I think too much emphasis on self-esteem and positive reinforcement will end up burying our society under a mountain of superfluous trophies.
A news story that crossed the wires in October illustrates my point. According to the AP, a lavish party was hosted by the Transportation Security Administration in November 2003. At the gathering, awards were presented to 543 TSA employees and the agency paid an event-planning company $81,767 for plaques.
For that price, I hope the honorees got more than just blocks of wood with nameplates glued on the front. What we may never know is how many other award ceremonies were held around the country that same night. Does any agency monitor the total number of plaques handed out each week? I have a strong suspicion it is massive.
The tellers at my bank branch who are named "Employee of The Month" receive small, personalized, clear-plastic paperweights that are placed in public view at each window. I'm sure the bank sees the award process as a way to promote individual and company pride. But the obvious glitch in this situation is that before too long, top-performing workers will run out of display space and be forced to store their prizes elsewhere.
This is also a frustrating issue for parents who have children enrolled in organized athletics. Multiple offspring participating in numerous youth sports quickly adds up to an enormous amount of commemorative hardware.
Which brings us to the issue no family likes to think about: What to do with aging, unwanted trophies? Unless the item is on a par with the America's Cup or an Olympic medal, most museums probably won't take it as a donation, no matter how much you beg and plead. Tossing them in the trash seems crude and inappropriate. Ditto for placing them on the "Free" table at a yard sale, or donating them to the local high school drama department for use as props in their next production of "The Odd Couple."
Perhaps someday I will have to deal with these questions, but for now I'm satisfied with my role as a perpetual nonrecipient of awards. And for everyone else who didn't get into any winner's circle this year, don't feel let down. Go look in a mirror and remember that being here is what counts. You don't need a trophy. You are the trophy.
• Jeffrey Shaffer is an author and essayist who writes about media, American culture, and personal history.


text:
i like to thank for the nice new manual..
it is a good start for anyone who like to learn fmod designer.
there are quite a few (wording) mistakes, I probably email a list… but unfortunately "creating a cycle" exercise (page 115) the .wav files are missing? it would be good to have them so we can continue our training.
any help would be good…
- memyselfandi asked 12 years ago
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Scientific Workshop Programme
The MPI for Evolutionary Biology organises several scientific workshops per year on a regular basis. Researchers from all over the world and from a wide range of areas and disciplines gather in Plön to discuss latest developments in evolutionary biology.
On the following web pages you can inform yourself about the different topics and get to the respective registration pages.
For news from the workshop programme follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/WorkshopsPloen


text:
Restaurants in Selangor – 4956 Restaurants
Tokyo Secret
carene19 posted lovewinter19.blogspot.com 90 ReviewsSuperb
The cheese tart is still being the best one I have eaten. It tastes the best when it's freshly baked. Try their hazelnut-chocolate cheese tart and matcha flavour one too. Not recommend to take away if you plan to bring back home (with long distance) and warm it with microwave, the cheese tart will become overbaked.
Pantai Seafood Restaurant
Excellent!!! The Snow Crab is just fantastic!!! Really a must try. The kai lan is good too.
food2buzz posted foodtobuzz.blogspot.com 415 Reviews
The seafood was so fresh and we will definitely come back with more reviews
Restoran Angcle Peoh
taufulou posted www.taufulou.com 674 Reviews
Looking for authentic Penang Laksa, I am sure this is one of the place to be.
Restoran Extra Super Tanker
If you are wondering why this eatery uses Extra Super Tanker as a name, it is because the owner finds it rather unique and easy people to remember. Just like the distinctive of the name, the customers, in addition, said that the food they are serving also unique in taste and hardly can be found in any other restaurants. Opened in July 2004, Extra Super Tanker is a Chinese restaurant in general but well known for it Seafood menu. They however, do serve family-type food preparation too. The head of chef, also the owner of the restaurant, always make sure that the food is prepared in its best. Therefore, most of the menu listed is required to be advanced in booking.
PureGlutton posted pureglutton.com 234 Reviews
True enough, when I bit into them, the sweet bouncy fresh prawn meat took me quite by surprise, in a very good way, of course. I was told only live tiger prawn meat is used, none of the frozen kind. Known as "Prosperous Fatt Choy Dumplings", they are priced at RM8/piece and are perfect as a simple appetizer item.
Marhaba Yemeni Cuisine Restaurant Sunway
Puja G posted oneskinnyhippo.blogspot.com 10 ReviewsSuperb
This middle eastern restaurant has really wonderful dishes. About 8 to 10 Vege options among all the lambs, chicken and seafood. Great Taste!
Uncle Tetsu's Cheesecake @ 1 Utama
renaelyng posted thegardennom.wordpress.com 76 Reviews
The cake melts in your mouth the moment you consume it. The cheesiness is also the right amount. A fragrant cake that is worth eating, provided you have at least 1-2 hours to spare waiting.
Porcupine Place
Puja G posted www.oneskinnyhippo.blogspot.com 10 ReviewsSuperb
Vegetarian, Western with a Asian twist, nice desserts
Bingsu Cafe
taufulou posted www.taufulou.com 674 Reviews
Among many other bingsu I have tried, this is certainly one of my recommendations place to be, however it is certainly not cheap.
Coconut House (椰子屋)
Chiariyees posted chiariyees-coffeebread.blogspot.com 197 Reviews
The food has been on consistent (good) quality at this latest place. Another favourite place of mine run by artist. (Like Cozy in the Rocket)
A Pie Thing
posted muntalksfood.blogspot.com
Three years ago, when a Pie Thing just started business, I was tempted to try their sweet open faced pies when I tried their savoury pies but somehow did not manage it. Recently I was in the vicinity so I dropped by to try some sweet pies. They are open during lunch times now.
mimid3vils posted www.choiyen.com 419 Reviews
If you seek for a peaceful cafe to spend your day, this is the place.
Johnny Rockets
Johnny Rockets is an international restaurant chain that offers the food, fun and friendliness of classic, timeless, feel-good Americana. Johnny Rockets serves simple, great-tasting food from a menu of all-American favorites, including juicy burgers, classic sandwiches and hand-dipped shakes and malts! It's the place to go for friendly service, flavorful food, uplifting music and relaxed, casual fun. Not confined to any era, Johnny Rockets combines the best elements from a century of American dining history to create an experience and menu that are relevant today...and will be, for decades to come. We do not have halal cert in the restaurant because we have a bar that serves alcohol. However, all our food is halal since we purchase our meat and poultry from local suppliers that have gotten JAKIM Halal Certification.
Low Sze Shin posted bmf0827.blogspot.myGood
店家提供了两种面包选择,我的 The Original 就选了 wholemeal bun 配 beef patty 和味道很搭的酱。 此外,我把普通的 french fries upgrade 成 sweet potato fries。 微甜的 sweet potato fries 让人一口接一口的,是比较健康的 comfort food。
Rekindle Cafe
Coffee , Brew Bar & Comfort Food
posted partywah-eat-play-life.blogspot.com
Rekindle is a homey cafe with great coffee and cakes. Thus, don't forget putting it in your list for the next coffee session.
New Beggar's Delicious Restaurant 新家乡美味叫化鸡
The restaurant's signature dish is Beggar's Chicken which is cooked with chinese herbs.
d_luaz posted lxyummytummy.blogspot.com
The chicken was superb. It was a free range chicken. This bird is stuff with lots of Chinese herbs (there was yuk chok, kei chi, dong guai, yong sum sou, n a few more which im not sure what it is). It was cooked in few layers of tin foil and the soup was the key essences to it. The chicken meat was tender, the smell of the dish was amazing the minute the foil was opened.
Oriental Cravings
The food is good, but quite pricy Interior resembling some long-standing kopitiams, inclusion of some modernized outlook plus characteristics of Far East did paid off. Well, at least we're at ease
fatboybakes posted fatboyrecipes.blogspot.com 252 Reviews
Pumpkin, prawn and siu yoke fried meehoon... SWOON FACTOR, 9/10


text:
Late last month, Flying Lotus finally announced his fifth album, You're Dead! (that's its trippy cover art above) and now we've got some more news on it, including its guest stars. Not surprisingly, the album features appearances from Brainfeeder acolyte Thundercat, and Captain Murphy (which is really just FlyLo's alter ego), but then there are some real shockers such as Snoop Dogg, Angel Deradoorian, Kendrick Lamar, Niki Randa, and jazz great Herbie Hancock. Check out the full tracklist, plus a very violent and surreal animated album trailer (based on the gory "guro"-style manga of Shintaro Kago), which teases a few very nice-sounding songs.
You're Dead! Tracklist:
01. "Theme"
02. "Tesla"
03. "Cold Dead"
04. "Fkn Dead"
05. "Never Catch Me" (feat. Kendrick Lamar)
06. "Dead Man's Tetris" (feat. Captain Murphy & Snoop Dogg)
07. "Turkey Dog Coma"
08. "Stirring"
09. "Coronus, the Terminator"
10. "Siren Song" (feat. Angel Deradoorian)
11. "Turtles"
12. "Ready err Not"
13. "Eyes Above"
14. "Moment of Hesitation"
15. "Descent Into Madness" (feat. Thundercat)
16. "The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep" (feat. Captain Murphy)
17. "Obligatory Cadence"
18. "Your Potential//The Beyond" (feat. Niki Randa)
19. "The Protest"


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Charlie Wilson's War (2007)
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Charlie Wilson, an alcoholic womanizer and Texas congressman, persuaded the CIA to train and arm resistance fighters in Afghanistan to fend off the Soviet Union. With the help of rogue CIA agent, Gust Avrakotos, the two men supplied money, training a...
Deliverance (1972)
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In the unfamiliar Appalachian backwoods, a weekend of male bonding for four inexperienced campers turns into a gut-wrenching fight for survival against the merciless forces of nature and the brutality of man. Their only escape is a terrifying canoe r...
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The sequel to "Happy Feet," the Academy Award®- winning animated smash hit, "Happy Feet Two" returns audiences to the magnificent landscape ofAntarctica in superb 3D. Mumble, The Master of Tap, has a problem because his ti...
Rampart (2012)
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Los Angeles, 1999. Officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is a Vietnam vet and a Rampart Precinct cop, dedicated to doing "the people's dirty work" and asserting his own code of justice, often blurring the lines between right and wrong to...
Superman (1978)
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The infant Kal-El, of the planet Krypton, makes his journey to Earth in a ship constructed by his father, Jor-El, just as the planet explodes. Crashing down in the midwest United States, the boy is adopted by farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent. After J...
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In this blockbuster sequel, three escaped criminals from the planet Krypton test the Man of Steel's (Christopher Reeve) mettle. Led by Gen. Zod (Terence Stamp), the Kryptonians take control of the White House and partner with Lex Luthor (Gene Hac...
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Archbishop Mosley assigns Father Michael to a church in New Orleans in this supernatural horror film. The parish church was the site of the throat-slashing murders of two priests two years earlier. While Father Michael tends to the mostly impoverishe...
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In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in lines outside the prison in Leningrad [queuing to deliver food to or get news of imprisoned loved ones: in her case, her son Lev]. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
'And can you describe this?'
And I said: 'I can.'
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
-Poet Anna Akhmatova
On this date in 1940, the first name in Stalin's terror got his just deserts.
Well. The first name after Stalin's own, a point energetically made by Nikolai Yezhov's daughter* in her fruitless post-Soviet attempts to rehabilitate the man.
But clearing a fellow's name is a tough task when that name is the mother tongue's very metonym for political persecution: the Soviet Union's mind-bending late-1930s witch hunt for internal enemies, known as the Yezhovshchina.
From late 1936, when he eliminated his predecessor Genrikh Yagoda (later executed, of course), until his own fall from power in at the end of 1938, Yezhov presided over the apex of Stalinist terror, averaging hundreds of political killings daily — perhaps north of 600,000 for the two-year period, plus a like number disappeared into the Gulag's freezers. (Just browse this here site's '1937' tag for a taste.)
Departments and regions received quotas for executions as if they were tractor factories. Security officials well understood that their own heads would be next on the block for any perceived shortcoming; Yezhov had thousands of them arrested, too. (pdf)**
We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.
The "Bloody Dwarf" — surely there is some of Yezhov in the Master and Margarita character Azazello, the Satan/Stalin figure's murderous and diminutive attendant — rode this tiger unto his own destruction.
Stalin and other Soviet VIPs with (front right) Nikolai Yezhov.
The same photo 'updated' after Yezhov's fall. (For a similarly chilling photographic disappearance, see Vladimir Clementis.)
As Yezhov had once displaced and killed his mentor Yagoda, so Yezhov's own nominal underling Beria would displace Yezhov.
Power in the NKVD shifted towards Beria over the course of 1938 until Yezhov's own resignation that November. The former boss was quietly arrested the next April and barely troubled his skilled torturers before copping to the usual litany of official self-denunciations: corruption, economic sabotage and "wrecking", treasonable collaboration with the Germans, plus a bisexual personal life. (That last one was true.)
Bound for historical infamy, Yezhov salvaged a shred of dignity in the last, when he was "tried" a few hours before death and renounced those confessions — albeit from the twisted standpoint of a man still unquestioningly committed to the man and the system that had destroyed him.
It is better to die, but to leave this earth as an honorable man and to tell nothing but the truth at the trial. At the preliminary investigation I said that I was not a spy, that I was not a terrorist, but they didn't believe me and applied to me the strongest beating. During the 25 years of my party work I have fought honorably against enemies and have exterminated them. I have committed crimes for which I might well be executed … But those crimes which are imputed to me by the indictment in my case I did not commit …
My fate is obvious. My life, naturally, will not be spared since I myself have contributed to this at my preliminary investigation. I ask only one thing: shoot me quietly, without tortures …Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.
And indeed, Yezhov knew from plenty of personal experience how this script ended. It was called the Yezhovshchina for a reason.
The judges pretended to deliberate for half an hour. Ezhov fainted at the verdict, then scrawled a petition for mecy; it was read out over the telephone to the Kremlin and rejected. Ezhov was taken in the dead of night to a slaughterhouse he himself had built near the Lubianka. Dragged screaming to a special room with a sloping cement floor and a log-lined wall, he was shot by the NKVD's chief executioner, Vasili Blokhin. Beria gave Stalin a list of 346 of Ezhov's associates to be shot. Sixty of them were NKVD officers, another fifty were relatives and sexual partners. (From Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him
* Natalia Khayutina is actually Yezhov's adoptive daughter. Her birth parents were killed … in the Yezhovschina.
** "I purged 14,000 chekists," Yezhov later said. "But my guilt lies in the fact that I did not purge enough of them."