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Peter Moore's guest post does two things: first, he shows how far affiliate marketing companies are prepared to change their business models to maintain their paid search rankings and, second, he drums home the argument that it is content, and quality content to be specific, that is the best way to survive the judgement of Google's Quality Score.
It seems like a pretty harmless ambition until, as Peter argues, you realise that such ingredients are yet more competition for traditional media hoping to make a go of it online.
Peter's own blog is "My Digital Notebook".
At the start of last month, a new website called recombu was launched. It's a publication that deserves some attention.
Let's look at the facts
Recombu is a commercial site that is centred on a tight niche: mobile phones. There are mobile phone reviews, comparison tables and there are links to the latest mobile phone deals. The site also features news articles – by my reckoning there are about 50 of them so far – on everything imaginable to do with mobile phones.
You can get RSS updates of these latest articles, become a fan on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
The name 'recombu' is an amalgam of the words 'recommend', 'compare' and 'buy'. Andrew Lim, who was formerly the mobile phones editor at CNET, has been appointed recombu's editorial director and he has added various other notable journalists to the pack, including Susi Weaser – the former 'editrix' of Shiny Shiny.
A new business model
Nothing out of the ordinary so far, but when you dig into recombu's business model, then things get a little more interesting. Recombu has been built by UK Web Media, one of the UK's leading affiliate marketing companies. Jamie Harwood, UK Web Media's managing director, is one of the country's wealthiest Internet entrepreneurs. Therefore, the site follows the old affiliate model of driving its traffic to various different merchants – in this case Apple, Nokia, Blackberry and so on – but it differs from many other affiliate sites in one key point: recombu is one of the first clear attempt to create a brand, a true publication that can rival established websites for market share.
The high profile writers and emphasis on content will bring fast SEO rankings – the area where affiliates have usually performed poorly – and with Facebook and Twitter there is evidence that recombu is planning to build an online community through social media marketing. All of this is backed up, of course, by paid search. But what business do affiliates have stepping on the toes of specialist online publications, stealing their journalists and competing with them for readership? What is the point and what are the implications for online publishing? Let's go back to the beginning
Affiliate Marketing – a (very) quick history
Affiliate marketing is almost as old the modern Internet. It is based on a simple commercial chain: that one website (the affiliate) will drive traffic to another (the merchant). The merchant will then reward the affiliate with a percentage of the profits of any subsequent sale. Affiliate marketing is best explained as an application of online crowdsourcing. It was pioneered by the adult entertainment industry in the early 1990s before being adopted with great success by emerging e-commerce sites such as Amazon and CDNOW a few years later.
When Google launched AdWords in 2000, affiliate marketing became more widely accessible – affiliates were able to bid on keyword searches, amass traffic and direct it in great numbers towards a merchant's store page. AdWords was to affiliate marketing what the steam engine was to the industrial revolution – it allowed the affiliate model to work on a vast scale.
In the years since AdWords' introduction, the affiliate marketing sector has grown sharply. It is Google's primary source of income (it made the company $21bn in 2008) and in the UK econsultany estimated that the industry would be worth more than £4bn in online sales in 2009.
The Google Quality Score – (In the beginning)
In the early days of AdWords, anyone could drive paid search traffic. All you needed was knowledge of the relevant keywords and a well-written advert that appeared at the top of the Google search results. This changed in around 2004, when Google demanded that its advertisers create landing pages, to give consumers more information about a product before they clicked through to the merchant's page. These landing pages were often very basic and of poor quality: loaded with keywords and stuffed with outbound links.
It was not important for affiliate sites to rank highly in organic search results or to tempt their visitors back. With Google AdWords they could ensure that their page featured at the top of the search results every time. Their aim was to get visitors to click through as quickly as possible and hope that they completed a sale so that they could collect their slice. It was a numbers game. A gigantic scientific experiment.
Between 2000 and 2005 were the boom years for affiliate marketing. Hundreds of landing pages were created for almost every conceivable product. To counter to spam and to raise the quality of their sponsored links, in August 2005 Google introduced the Google Quality Score, an algorithm that rated each paid search landing page individually. In a blog post later that year Google explained its intentions:
Why are we doing this? Simply stated, we always aim to improve our users' experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads. Have you ever searched on a keyword, found an ad that seemed to be exactly what you wanted, and then clicked on it only to find a site that had little to do with what you were searching for? It's not a great experience.
Quality Score attacked poor quality affiliate landing pages. It awarded these landing pages with a score between 1 -10. The lower the score, the more expensive it was for a marketer to bid on a particular keyword term. Sites that only achieved a Quality Score of 1 for specific terms found that their cost per click (CPCs) rose massively – sometimes to as much as £5. Entire business models were wrecked in an instant. It was the start of a slow death for the first wave of link-heavy, keyword rich, and hastily assembled affiliate landing pages.
Quality Score and Online Publishing
From the start, Google was clear about what it wanted to see, demanding that their advertisers produce (1) relevant content that was (2) transparent and (3) easy to navigate. Although a list of these requirements was published on their website – the exact components of Quality Score were never revealed and inevitably it became the subject of endless speculation. It was the digital equivalent of the recipe for Coca Cola.
Many of the poorest quality landing pages were hit continuously in merciless attacks. These assaults, in the vivid vocabulary of the Internet, became known as the 'Google Slap'. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the Quality Score became a catalyst for development. Affiliates developed from one-man operations to full-sized companies: with custom-built technology supporting complete websites that included news, features, product reviews, comparison tables, blogs and photo galleries. To run these sites, affiliates hired copywriting specialists, talented designers and technological wizards in an attempt to make their sites Quality Score proof. It wasn't necessarily important that people read them; it was important that Google granted a high Quality Score and left them alone.
It was (almost) journalism by (complete) accident
It was worth it. At this point the industry was growing by around a billion pounds each year in the UK alone; more and more brands were investing vast budgets in digital strategies, and, in 2006, the power of the Internet was reflected when Google overtook British television channels as the largest recipient of advertising in the country. All the time the Quality Score was being strengthened. In July 2009, Google increased its power yet again. It hit almost every affiliate in the country. Perry Marshall, an author who has published a book about Google AdWords, wrote on his personal blog:
I got word from several affiliate marketers that Google dropped the hammer today on affiliate review pages. Many pages went from quality scores of 10 —> 1 overnight. And these were NOT skinny sites, rather well build [sic] out, consistently updated blogs with good navigation above the fold, xml site maps, high click through, hyper-relevant keyword mapping, low bounce rates, long average time on page … everything else Google loves.
The Future – blurred digital boundaries
There is far too much money in affiliate marketing for publishers to abandon the whole business model altogether. But while the boom years may be over, the industry is far from dead. If the choice is 'evolve or die', affiliate websites will evolve, and this will have consequences for other online publishers.
Recombu is not alone. There are many such affiliate sites currently appearing in all corners of the web, and their emergence is reflective of the growing power and evolving strategies of a number of the top affiliate and search marketing agencies. Whether or not recombu is a success is yet to be seen, but observers in traditional media should treat the development of these emerging affiliate websites with interest. By creating brands, hiring notable journalists and investing time in developing online communities, affiliates are taking a bold step into marketplaces that are typically the fiefdoms of specialist publications from the traditional media.
And while recombu has claimed the mobile phone sector, equal opportunities exist in any other vertical in which affiliates typically perform well: travel, computing, insurance and digital television are just a few. Publishers in these sectors would do well to take note. Affiliates are inexperienced at developing vibrant publications, they have little history of generating journalistic content or forming online communities and they have none of the authority or objectivity of traditional media. But they do have a tried and tested business model.
And, as I write, that is something that many of their competitors don't.
Also of interest might be:
Jeff Jarvis on The Link Economy and The Ethic of the Link


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Budget Battles
Medicaid Work Rules Approved for South Carolina
Chart of the Day: Drug Price Plans Compared
Watchdog Questions $6.7 Billion in Medicare Payments
House Passes Pelosi's Sweeping Drug Bill
Shocking Health Care Statistic of the Day
Ready to Rumble: How Pelosi's Drug Bill Sets Up Dems for 2020
Increasing Number of Americans Delay Medical Care Due to Cost: Gallup
Medicaid Work Rules Approved for South CarolinaBy Michael Rainey
The Trump administration on Thursday approved South Carolina's request to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid...
Buttigieg Calls for Twice as Much in New Taxes and Spending as Biden Does: Report
In his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Pete Buttigieg may be positioning himself as a moderate alternative to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but he still calls for more...
House Panel Advances Bill to Temporarily Repeal SALT Deduction Cap
House Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee voted Wednesday to advance a temporary repeal of the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction. The bill , which advanced largely along party...
Warren's Wealth Tax Would Raise Up to $2.7 Trillion Over 10 Years, but Less Than She Projects: ReportBy Michael Rainey
A new analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model finds that Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax would raise between $2.3 trillion and $2.7 trillion over 10 years, while reducing GDP in 2050 by...
The Fiscal Challenge for the Next Recession
The federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2019 was nearly $1 trillion. "In the next downturn, don't be surprised if this number hits $2 trillion," writes Nick Timiraos, The Wall Street Journal's...
Investors Eye Volatility from 'Fiscal Dysfunction'By Michael Rainey
Reviewing its outlook for 2020, the investment team at New York fund manager Neuberger Berman recently discussed the economic risks associated with "fiscal dysfunction" – the government's inability...
Biden: Trump Tax Cuts 'a Disaster for the Middle Class'By Michael Rainey
Joe Biden has been criticized by his fellow Democrats for insisting that as president he would be able to work with the Republican Party – the same party that rejected much of the Democratic economic...
After Trump's Cuts, US Taxes Are Fourth Lowest in the Developed WorldBy Michael Rainey
Total U.S. taxes as a share of the economy fell to 24.3% last year, thanks in large part to the tax cuts signed into law by President Trump in 2017, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and...
Biden Unveils $3.2 Trillion Tax Plan Targeting Corporations Like Amazon
Joe Biden rolled out a plan Wednesday to raise $3.2 trillion in additional taxes over 10 years, with the wealthy and corporations paying more to cover the cost of spending proposals on health care,...
Bad News for Charity on Giving TuesdayBy Michael Rainey
"Despite Giving Tuesday and despite all the charitable appeals that almost certainly landed in inboxes, charitable donations by individuals declined by slightly more than 1 percent in 2018, according...
Only One Demographic Group Opposes Warren's Wealth Tax
The idea of a wealth tax like the one proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren is popular with a broad swath of voters, Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley of The New York Times report . A new nationwide poll...
Chart of the Day: Record Low Poverty RateBy Michael Rainey
The extensive array of government assistance programs — including Social Security, unemployment insurance, veterans' benefits, nutritional aid, rental assistance and the Earned Income Tax Credit —...
Public Investment Is the Key to Avoiding Economic Stagnation: ReportBy Michael Rainey
Economic stagnation on a global scale is a growing threat, according to a new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The group's November economic outlook...
Pushing Back Against the Wealth Tax at the Dem DebateBy Michael Rainey
Sen. Elizabeth Warren defended her proposed wealth tax at the Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday night: "I'm tired of freeloading billionaires," Warren said . "I think it's time that we ask...
Democrat's New Taxes Wouldn't Hit Just BillionairesBy Michael Rainey
Some Democratic tax proposals are focused on making millionaires and billionaires pay more, but other households would be affected as well. Neil Irwin of The New York Times points out Tuesday that...
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subset: commoncrawl


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Silver plate is not solid silver. It is a ware made of a metal, such as nickel or copper, that is covered with a thin coating of silver. The letters EPNS are often found on American and English silver-plated wares. Sheffield is a term with two meanings. Sometimes it refers to sterling silver made in the town of Sheffield, England. In this section, Sheffield refers to a type of silver plate, usually English. The Victorian silver plate was either copper or a white metal called Britannia covered by electro-plated silver.
Enter your email below to receive Kovels Komments for the latest antiques & collectibles news, answers to readers questions, marks and tips. In your inbox every Wednesday.
Current & Past Issues
Buyer's Price Guide
Words of Wisdom (Letter to Lee)


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GOTEMBA — Japan's military showcased its ability to defend remote islands yesterday, as its role expands at home and abroad under new defense policies instituted by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that have divided the nation.
The military began large-scale annual "Fire Power" exercises at the foot of Mount Fuji aimed at repelling a hypothetical invasion of far-off Japanese islands, defense officials said.
Lt. Kunikazu Takahashi, spokesman for Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, said the exercises, which last until Sunday, follow new defense guidelines that emphasize island defense.
The defense plans, approved in December, reflect a shift in Japan's defense priorities from its northern reaches near Russia to the East China Sea, where Tokyo and Beijing are locked in a dispute over a chain of uninhabited islands. Under the guidelines, Japan is setting up an amphibious unit similar to the US Marines to respond quickly to any invasion of those islands.
"We believe such arrangements can discourage any foreign invasion," Takahashi said in an interview during the exercise. "It would be best if we can defend our land without fighting."
Abe's Cabinet approved in July a reinterpretation of Japan's war-renouncing constitution, which was drafted under US direction after World War II, to allow the military to defend foreign countries. The endorsement of what is known as the right to collective self-defense has sharply divided public opinion, mainly due to sensitivity over Japan's wartime past.
Air force veteran Toshiya Hamada, 80, welcomed the decision. "It doesn't mean we want to wage war, but we need to gain strength because we don't want to go to war," he said. "I know soldiers feel most strongly about that because they are the first ones to go to the front line."
But Naomi Uchida, 36, who came to see the exercise with her husband and two children, said she doesn't think Japan needs to expand its military role.
"Japan is safe as it is," she said. "I'm worried if my boy says he wants to join the army."
Fighter jets, attack helicopters and tanks, guided missile systems and artillery fired yesterday at targets at the base of Mount Fuji, where soldiers demonstrated tactics to fight off foreign invaders.
The live-fire exercises involve 2,300 troops, 20 aircraft and 80 tanks and armored vehicles, among other equipment.
Elsewhere in Asia, some 7,000 troops from China, Russia and four central Asia countries gathered yesterday in Inner Mongolia for anti-terrorism drills called Peace Mission-2014, China's Xinhua News Agency reported.
In South Korea, 50,000 members of the military and 30,000 American counterparts began an annual two-week computer-aided joint war exercise Monday to improve their preparedness for any hostilities with North Korea.
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Upcoming Events
Blue Crab Beach House on private beach. Natural relaxed setting with sand, sea, animals and birds. A short walk to Seine Village, a short drive to Placencia or Maya Beach, located right in the middle of Placencia Peninsula. Paved road, regular bus service, close to 3 grocery stores, restaurants, and art gallery.
Blue Crab Beach
"A wonderfully laid back atmosphere... Simple and clean"
Frommer's -
Blue Crab Beach House 011-501-523-3544 <email@example.com>


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Welcome to Al-Huda Elementary and Middle School.
Established in 1995, Al-Huda Elementary and Middle School covers grades Kindergarten through Eigth grade. Both schools have separate girls and boys wings. Al-Huda School is accredited by the Middle States Association - Council for Elementary Schools. Alhamdulillah we are up for re-accrediation this year. We are expecting a visit from the MSA-CES this spring in sha Allah. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the re-accreditation approved objectives.
Thank you for your ongoing support and dedication!


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Christian author, minister and speaker, June Uzzi Daniel, releases Havilah: Understanding the Mysteries of God. As a Christian minister, speaker and emerging prophetic voice, June Uzzi Daniel, gives keen insight from personal experience and revelation. His God-given purpose is to assist those in Christ to walk in the revealed truth of scripture, while challenging the Church to view accepted paradigms in new ways.
Havilah: Understanding the Mysteries of God was designed with you in mind. You have a purpose and a destiny to fulfill. Come hear the voice of God calling you into a deeper walk with Him filled with blessings. This book is truly a faith builder that will encourage, uplift and stir up the spirit within you-empowering you to live a victorious life in Christ.
Often described of as provocative and challenging, this book will open eyes, shedding light on revealed truth and principles set forth in scripture. Discover the blessings of God and how to remain on the narrow path, one that leads to life. Beginning with the Book of Genesis, the author, answers some age-old questions such as: "Where is the garden of Eden located?" "What is the forbidden fruit?" "What lessons can we learn from the revelation of Eden? "Why is sin such a hindrance to our walk with the Lord?" The author also takes a look at the revealed truths on the blood of Jesus, and delves into the Book of Revelation to give readers a deeper understanding of sometimes much misunderstood principles and truths found in scripture.
The author has designed this book to lead others into obedience and blessings. In fact, he even guarantees that if the book does not impact your life positively within 60 days he will "cheerfully refund" your money and you can keep the book. This is an awesome guarantee and one not readily offered. Take advantage of this highly proclaimed read and take the challenge: Did the book impact your life in a positive way? Who would not want their life to be impacted in a positive way?
This book will guide you into a deeper understanding of God, His principles and promises, giving knowledge to readers that, "All things work together for good to those who love the Lord and are called according to His purposes" (Romans 8:28).
For more information visit June Uzzi Daniel, at Havilah: Understanding the Mysteries of God. Havilah: Understanding the Mysteries of God is available at Amazon and other fine online bookstores.
June Uzzi-Daniel
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
A Christian Book Marketing Author Press Release, sharing Christian authors with the world.


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As I have understood,
$F(t)=m \cdot a(t)$
can have 2 different meanings:
When applying an external force $F$ on a point mass of mass $m$, the resulting acceleration of that mass at time $t$ is $a$.
If a point mass is going to be accelerated with $a$ (maybe by another force), the inertial force of the mass is $F$. (Pushing in the opposite direction of $a$).
Which one did Newton mean? Are these two distinct expressions, or am I thinking the wrong way?


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The conifer hedges in front of J. K. Rowling's seventeenth-century house, in Edinburgh, are about twenty feet tall. They reach higher than the street lamps in front of them, and evoke the entrance to the spiteful maze in the film adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," the fourth volume of her fantasy series. Rowling, who, at forty-seven, is about to publish her first novel for adults—it is set in a contemporary Britain familiar with Jay-Z and online pornography, but is shaded with memories of her own, quite cheerless upbringing—lives here with her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor, and their children. She has a reputation for reserve: for being likable but shy and thin-skinned, and not at all comfortable with the personal impact of having created a modern myth, sold four hundred and fifty million books, and inspired more than six hundred thousand pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction, a total that increases by at least a thousand stories a week. Ian Rankin, the writer of Edinburgh-based crime novels, became friendly with Joanne Rowling when they were neighbors in another part of the city; he recently described her as "quite quiet, quite introspective." He recalled urging Rowling to join him for an onstage interview at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, a few years ago. After Rowling watched Rankin being interviewed at a similar event, she told him, "I don't think I can do that." Rankin said, "I think she feels uncomfortable in a room full of adults. I've seen her in a room of kids, and she's in her element." Rankin noted that Rowling, in her writing, retains "the power of life and death over these characters." She is wary "of situations you can't always control—in the real world."
In the spring, nearly five years after the appearance of the seventh, and final, Harry Potter novel, Little, Brown, Rowling's publisher, announced "The Casual Vacancy," and offered a glimpse of the plot: an idyllic English town named Pagford; the death of a man named Barry; a parish-council election. In response, a British publisher announced "The Vacant Casualty," billed as a parody, if one can parody something whose contents are unknown. Commenters on the Guardian's Web site guessed at Rowling's likely models, with reference to Robertson Davies and "Desperate Housewives." One reader, playing on Rowling's word for non-wizard society, suggested an alternate title: "Mugglemarch." And the hosts of Pottercast, a popular American fan podcast, picked over the press release, registering both delight at fresh data—Rowling has written ten tweets in three years—and a hint of worry that an extraordinary global bond between an author and her readers, and between two generations, was about to be severed. They were opening an invitation to a party where they might not be quite welcome. During the podcast, they looked up "parish council" on Wikipedia, and established that the term refers to the lowest rung of English local government. One of the hosts, Melissa Anelli—a thirty-two-year-old who runs a Potter Web site, stages an annual Potter convention, and has published a sharp-witted book about Potter enthusiasts—pondered the title, asking, "What's casual, ever, about a vacancy?" She and her co-hosts wondered whether they'd go to a midnight party to celebrate the book's launch, as many fans had for the later Potter novels.
In Britain, Ian Rankin typically publishes a new novel in October, and it tends to go to the top of the best-seller list. He said that, this year, his publisher moved the date to November, fearing that the late-September launch of "The Casual Vacancy" will, for weeks, render all other fiction invisible to readers and to the media. Rankin was taken aback but glad for the extra writing time. He wondered if "The Casual Vacancy" might have a whodunnit air; Rowling has talked to him of her admiration for British crime writing of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. "She loves Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers," he said, adding that the Pagford setting had relieved him of his greatest fear: that Rowling had been working on a crime novel set in Edinburgh. He said, "I hope she'll create an English village that she will know intimately—and it will be real to us."
"I have drawn a map of Pagford," Rowling told me when we met, in late August. "It's one of the first things I did." We were not speaking in her Edinburgh house, or at her country place—which stands in grassland, overlooking a fast-running river in a valley north of the city—or in her home in an expensive part of west London. We were at her office, which occupies an unmarked Georgian building on a handsome street in central Edinburgh, not too far from a café that, in mockery of competitors, has hung a sign that reads "J. K. ROWLING NEVER WROTE HERE." The office has high ceilings, Turkish rugs over wooden floors, figurative oil paintings by modern Scottish artists, and the air of a small but very well-funded embassy. According to the London Sunday Times, Rowling is worth nine hundred million dollars.
An assistant had shown me to a front room on the parlor floor. Rowling was sitting at the head of a polished table, with a cup of black coffee and a newspaper; as I entered, she took off large black-framed glasses. She was slight, with her blond hair pulled back, and her V-necked sweater was pushed up at the sleeves to show freckled arms. She appeared to be wearing false eyelashes and rather heavy foundation. We talked at that table, and—after a brief, rainy walk—in the lounge of a nearby hotel. There was a stiffness to the transaction, but she was not unfriendly; she laughed now and then, and was clearly pleased to be able to talk about her book. It had been fourteen years, she calculated, since she'd been interviewed by someone who'd read the imminent novel. Once the Potter series had taken off, her representatives kept unflinching watch over Rowling's words, in order to enhance the drama of synchronized international releases, and to help suppress piracy. (It was in this context that, in 2005, a British security guard who had stolen two copies of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" from a book-distribution center fired a gun during negotiations to sell a copy to a reporter from the Sun.)
Her writing life was oddly self-contained, even if, by the end of the Potter series, she was receiving between one and two thousand pieces of mail a week. Rowling does not widely distribute her unpublished manuscripts, and her publishers seem to have processed them with little intervention. (Neil Blair, her agent, told me, "She takes a lot of time getting it right and then hands in a book that doesn't need much editing.") A few years ago, in a conversation with Melissa Anelli, the podcast host, Rowling criticized herself for not quite finishing "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." "I didn't do the final edit that I normally do before I hand it to the editors, and it definitely shows," she said, sounding almost like a self-published author. In 2007, more than twenty-five million copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" were printed, in the first edition, and Rowling estimated that only seven people in the world, including her British agent and her editors in New York and London, had read the novel before stores began selling it.
I asked her if publishing the new book made her feel exposed. "I thought I'd feel frightened at this point," she said. "Not just because it's been five years, and anything I wrote after Potter—anything—was going to receive a certain degree of attention that is not entirely welcome, if I'm honest. It's not the place I'm happiest or most comfortable, shall we say. So, for the first few years of writing 'The Casual Vacancy,' I kept saying to myself, 'You're very lucky. You can pay your bills, you don't have to publish it.' And that was a very freeing thought, even though I knew bloody well, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to publish it. I knew that a writer generally writes to be read, unless you're Salinger." After all the fretting—"Christ, you're going to have to go out there again"—she discovered that she was calm. "I think I've spent so long with the book—it is what I want it to be," she said. "You think, Well, I did the best I could where I was with what I had." She laughed. "Which is a terrible paraphrase of a Theodore Roosevelt quote."
In the decade or so after A. A. Milne published the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books, in the nineteen-twenties, he wrote several plays and novels for adults, as well as an autobiography in which he expanded on a thought expressed by a character in an Arnold Bennett play: that the artist who has early success with a painting of a policeman is expected to paint policemen forever. Milne wrote, "If you stop painting policemen in order to paint windmills, criticism remains so overpoweringly policeman-conscious that even a windmill is seen as something with arms out, obviously directing the traffic." He added, "As a discerning critic pointed out: the hero of my latest play, God help it, was 'just Christopher Robin grown up.' So that even when I stop writing about children, I still insist on writing about people who were children once."
I read "The Casual Vacancy," which is five hundred and twelve pages long, in the New York offices of Little, Brown, after signing a non-disclosure agreement whose first draft—later revised—had prohibited me from taking notes. (With this book, Rowling was hoping for a "more run-of-the-mill publishing experience," but that hope goes only so far.) Within a few pages, it was clear that the novel had not been written for children: "The leathery skin of her upper cleavage radiated little cracks that no longer vanished when decompressed." A little later, a lustful boy sits on a school bus "with an ache in his heart and in his balls." But reviewers looking for echoes of the Harry Potter series will find them. "The Casual Vacancy" describes young people coming of age in a place divided by warring factions, and the deceased council member, Barry Fairbrother—who dies in the first chapter but remains the story's moral center—had the same virtues, in his world, that Harry had in his: tolerance, constancy, a willingness to act.
"I think there is a through-line," Rowling said. "Mortality, morality, the two things that I obsess about." "The Casual Vacancy" is not a whodunnit but, rather, a rural comedy of manners that, having taken on state-of-the-nation social themes, builds into black melodrama. Its attention rotates among several Pagford households, in the Southwest of England: a gourmet-grocery owner and his wife; two doctors; a nurse married to a printer; a social worker. Most of the families include troubled teens.
Barry's civic influence is revealed by his departure, rather as George Bailey's is in "It's a Wonderful Life." The story is driven by the long-standing frustration that some of Barry's disagreeable and right-wing neighbors have about the town's administrative connection to the Fields, an area of public housing and poverty on the edge of a larger, nearby town. Historically, children from the Fields have had the right to attend primary school in Pagford, a place of flower baskets and other middle-class comforts, and the town has also supported a drug-treatment clinic that serves the neighborhood. In the absence of Barry's righteous influence, the anti-Fields faction sees an opportunity to rid Pagford of this burden. This is a story of class warfare set amid semi-rural poverty, heroin addiction, and teen-age perplexity and sexuality. It may be a while before we're accustomed to reading phrases like "that miraculously unguarded vagina" in a Rowling book, and public response to "The Casual Vacancy" will doubtless include scandalized objections to the idea of young Harry Potter readers being drawn into such material. "There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children's babysitter or their teacher," Rowling said. "I was always, I think, completely honest. I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write."
She was ready for a change of genre. "I had a lot of real-world material in me, believe you me," Rowling said. "The thing about fantasy—there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy. You don't have sex near unicorns. It's an ironclad rule. It's tacky." She then added, carefully, "It's not that I just wanted to write about people having sex." Rather, she began with the idea of writing about a local election, which gave her a "rush of adrenaline." The Harry Potter series had an alluring creation story, known to all fans: in 1990, on a delayed train between Manchester and London, Rowling was overwhelmed by the thought of a boy who learns, at the age of eleven, that he is a wizard. The idea for "The Casual Vacancy" also came to Rowling while she was travelling, but this time she was on a private plane, touring America to promote "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."
"It's been billed, slightly, as a black comedy, but to me it's more of a comic tragedy," she said. If the novel had precedents, "it would be sort of nineteenth-century: the anatomy and the analysis of a very small and closed society." A local election was "a perfect way in," she said. "It's the smallest possible building block of democracy—this tiny atom on which everything rests." One could say that national politics does not rest upon local politics, and that no modern British town is a closed society; some of Rowling's characters may seem eccentric for the earnestness with which they regard a local election. She acknowledged that the scale of parish-council decision-making is "easy to laugh at" but said that "part of the point is that those decisions that are being made do dramatically affect people's lives, up to life and death sometimes."
She said, "In my head, the working title for a long time was 'Responsible,' because for me this is a book about responsibility. In the minor sense—how responsible we are for our own personal happiness, and where we find ourselves in life—but in the macro sense also, of course: how responsible we are for the poor, the disadvantaged, other people's misery." Two years in, she picked up the standard British handbook for local administrators. "I needed it to check certain abstruse points. And in there I came across the phrase 'a casual vacancy.' Meaning, when a seat falls vacant through death or scandal. And immediately I knew that that was the title. . . . I was dealing not only with responsibility but with a bunch of characters who all have these little vacancies in their lives, these emptinesses in their lives, that they're all filling in various ways."
She added, with some passion, "And it's death! The casual vacancy, the casualness with which death comes down. You expect a fanfare, you expect some sort of pathos or grandeur to it. And, you know, the first big death I ever suffered was my mother's, and it was that that was so shocking: just gone."
Rowling is not a recluse: she read at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics; she was Harvard's commencement speaker in 2008; she appeared in a television documentary about her family tree. But she is not a part of everyday British cultural life. ("I'm not a natural joiner," she told me.) Her nonfiction canon adds up to just a few thousand words, and includes a single book review—she praised the letters of Jessica Mitford, the British writer and left-wing activist, for whom Rowling's older daughter is named—and a short essay in a collection of speeches by Gordon Brown, the former Labour Prime Minister, whom she admires, and whose wife, Sarah Brown, is a friend. She has given limited access to her personal history, and in interviews has tended to strike the same few notes: a friend in her teen-age years who freed the two of them by having access to a Ford Anglia, the same car driven by Ron Weasley, Harry Potter's friend; the train ride that delivered Harry to her; a difficult period, in the nineties, as a single mother. Last year, Lifetime constructed a biopic out of these fragments, filling the gaps with surreally misjudged approximations of a middle-class West Country childhood in the sixties and seventies: in the film, Rowling's secondary school has exposed timber beams, and people say "I love you" at the end of phone calls.
Rowling's father was an engineer at the Rolls-Royce aircraft-engine plant in Bristol, and Rowling and her younger sister, Dianne, spent their earliest years in villages just outside that city, which is two hours west of London. When Joanne was nine, the family moved a little farther west, to the edge of the Forest of Dean, a more rural and less prosperous district. Neither of Rowling's parents went to college, but her mother's family was solidly middle class and educated; Joanne's great-aunt Ivy was a classics teacher, and she introduced Joanne to Mitford's writing. The Rowlings now lived in a handsome Gothic Revival cottage, by a church, in the village of Tutshill. "My voice wasn't Forest of Dean, although it became Forest of Dean, believe you me, pretty damn quickly," Rowling said. Her accent is still subtly flexible, and at one point in our conversation she exclaimed like a Scot: "Och!" She said that, after the family's twenty-mile move, "I always felt an outsider." There's a resentfully uprooted teen-age Londoner in "The Casual Vacancy," and Rowling volunteered that this is a partial self-portrait.
Unlike other members of her family, Rowling regularly attended services in the church next door. At eleven, she enrolled at Wyedean, a new secondary school. Her mother—a woman of French and Scottish heritage with a smile that was slightly skewed, like her daughter's—later worked in the school, as a technician in the science department. Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when she first arrived, and has since become a writer with an interest in mythology and astrology, remembers Joanne as "not exceptional" but "one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English." Referring to Harry Potter's bookish friend, he said, "I suppose you could say she was a bit Hermione-like. I'd ask a question, and some hands would shoot up, and she was definitely one of the group." He recalled that the class read Stan Barstow's "Joby"—a realist story about a working-class Northern boy—as well as "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen," by Alan Garner (a wizard, dwarfs, witches), and "A Wizard of Earthsea," by Ursula K. Le Guin, whose hero attends a school for wizards. Eddy said that Rowling, when writing stories, was much more likely than other students to produce fantasy. At the time, she had little taste for realism.
Several of the key characters in "The Casual Vacancy" are in their mid-teens, and the novel seems most comfortable when it's with them. This is partly a question of grouping and movement; these are the novel's tracking shots, when it can follow children on bus rides, on bicycles, and along school corridors; their parents, understandably, are less dynamic. But Rowling also seems profoundly connected to her own teen-age self. ("What does that say about my arrested development, I wonder?" she asked.) One well-observed and recurring motif is the teen-age instinct to adopt, and find comfort in, the families of others—just as Harry Potter adopted the Weasleys. Rowling referred to Jessica, her daughter from her first marriage, who is now a college student but who, until recently, was in a group of friends who moved "from house to house, all of them being charming to everyone else's parents."
Rowling said that she "hated" being a teen-ager, but then criticized herself for exaggeration, and started again: "I wasn't particularly happy. I think it's a dreadful time of life." She added, "I came from a difficult family. My mother was very ill, and it wasn't the easiest." In 1980, when Rowling was fifteen, her mother was given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. She died a decade later, at forty-five. Rowling has occasionally talked publicly about her grief, and her regret that her mother never knew of her writing career. (Among other philanthropic activities, Rowling founded the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic, at the University of Edinburgh, with a gift of sixteen million dollars.) When Rowling filmed a touching episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?," the genealogical TV series, the research was all on the maternal line, with particular attention to her French great-grandfather, Louis Volant. The program showed Rowling's distress at learning that he had not been awarded a Légion d'Honneur, as family lore had it; she had repeated the claim in a 2009 speech, upon receiving her own Légion d'Honneur. And it revealed her pride on discovering that Volant had been awarded a Croix de Guerre, for bravery, in the First World War. "My children have very little sense of my side of the family," Rowling told me. "I married someone who's got a vast Scottish family—a clan, really—which is fabulous, and I love it, and I love them, but I wanted to have something I could show my children and say, 'Look, I also have a family, I also have a background.' Because there are very few people alive on my mother's side of the family. I have a sister, that's clearly very important, but above us nearly everyone's gone."
That show didn't mention Rowling's father, Peter. One of the more interesting characters in "The Casual Vacancy" is Andrew, a restless teen-ager with an abusive, belittling father. "Andrew's romantic idea that he'll go and live among the graffiti and broken windows of London—that was me," Rowling said. "I thought, I have to get away from this place. So all of my energies went into that." She has previously said that her father frightened her. When I asked her about him, Rowling said, "I did not have an easy relationship with my father, but no one in 'The Casual Vacancy' is a portrait of any living person." I asked if she was writing from experience when Andrew, having done harm to his father, then seeks to make peace with him.
"To a degree," she said. "If you've ever been there, if you've ever been in a difficult and complex family situation, you will understand. I suppose, to an extent, it's like Stockholm syndrome, isn't it? You have to make friends with the warders—this is a matter of survival. And Andrew, having dealt his father this body blow, then turns around and feels it's time to make an alliance. I think that's psychologically accurate. Some won't."
Her father remarried two years after Anne Rowling's death. He attended Joanne's wedding to Neil Murray, in 2001, in Scotland, but they stopped speaking about two years later. "We've not had any communication for about nine years," Rowling told me. She said that the break had already happened when, in December, 2003, Peter Rowling offered his Harry Potter first editions for sale, at Sotheby's; some of them did not sell, but others did, including a copy of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," given to him on Father's Day, 2000, and signed, "Lots of love from your first born," with a drawing of a hand reaching for a running gnome. It went for forty-eight thousand dollars.
Despite Rowling's difficult home life, she did well at Wyedean, where only a minority of students went on to college. But she downplayed the achievement of having been head girl, an appointment by school authorities. It meant, she said, "We have caught you once smoking at a bus shelter, and we think you probably won't go to Borstal"—juvenile detention. (Steve Eddy, the teacher, doesn't recall the school being so rough.) In 1982, she took the entrance exams for Oxford but was not accepted, and instead studied French at Exeter, a university with a reputation for being "frantically posh," as Rowling put it. She was suddenly among privately educated girls, in pearls and turned-up shirt collars. Paraphrasing Fitzgerald, she said that she reacted to Exeter "not with the rage of the revolutionary but the smoldering hatred of the peasant." (There's some of this spirit in Rowling's acidic portrait of the haughty youth of Slytherin House, at Hogwarts, Harry Potter's school.) Martin Sorrell, then a professor of French at the university, recalled a quietly competent student, with a denim jacket and dark hair, who, in academic terms, "gave the appearance of doing what was necessary." Her own memory is that she did "no work whatsoever." She wore heavy eyeliner, listened to the Smiths, and read Dickens and Tolkien. In retrospect, she thinks it was fortunate that she didn't get into Oxford: "I was intimidated enough by Exeter. Imagine—I would have fallen apart at Oxford, I never would have opened my mouth." Or might she have become academically inspired? "Well, that would have been nice," she replied, and laughed. "This isn't therapy! I don't want to be talked into eternal regret."
After graduating, in 1986, she worked for a while at Amnesty International, in London, on the research desk for Francophone Africa. In 1990, she had her Harry Potter inspiration, and began developing a detailed plan for a seven-book series. She also worked on an adult novel that she never finished. That year, her mother died. In 1991, she took a job as an English teacher in Portugal. "It was total fight or flight," she said. "I'd had a terrible time. Several things happened at once. My mother died, which was obviously the huge one. A long relationship I'd been in ended—and a couple of other things," including being made redundant from an office job in Manchester. In Porto, she met and married Jorge Arantes, a journalist. She taught at night, and during the day she wrote and listened to Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. Jessica was born in the summer of 1993, and the relationship with Arantes ended soon afterward. He was once quoted in the Daily Express describing their last night; he said that he had dragged her out of their home at five in the morning and slapped her hard.
Rowling warned me not to think of the Portugal period, and her first marriage, as a cautious person's regretted experiment in impetuousness—an E. M. Forster swoon in southern Europe. "I'll agree with you that going somewhere hot when you're British always seems like a good idea," she said. But "that certainly wasn't the first impetuous thing I've done. . . . I had leanings that way for a long time. It wasn't that Hermione suddenly broke out."
At the end of 1993, she returned to Britain with Jessica, and spent Christmas in Edinburgh with her sister, who was working there as a nurse. Rowling, who no longer owned a winter coat, had three chapters of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in her suitcase.
We sat in the hotel lounge, in low red chairs. In a neighborhood full of coffee shops, she had brought me to an empty room. She recalled her arrival in Edinburgh. "I was very depressed," she said. "I felt life was a train wreck. I'd carried this baby out of it, and I was in this place that was very alien and cold, and quite grim." She decided to stay, with the intention of becoming a schoolteacher; she would need to complete a one-year training course but chose to delay enrollment until she'd finished her book.
She signed up for welfare benefits, and found an unappealing apartment, where she lived for a few months. "I was trying to write through that time, and I did," she said. "But it was patchy and fitful and sometimes I just didn't have the focus to do it." (Rowling did write a long, illustrated astrological birth chart for the newborn son of a friend.) She said, "It was Jessica—I have to credit her with so much—that gave me the impetus to go and say to a doctor, 'I think I'm not quite right, and I need some help here.' Having done that made a massive difference." She began therapy, and "pressed on with the book, and things came together. In my head, at least. Externally, my life might not have looked a great deal better. My friend, I hope he wouldn't mind me saying, my friend Sean, my oldest friend, he lent me a deposit on a much better rented flat." (Sean Harris was the Wyedean friend with access to the Ford Anglia.) "And, you know, things slowly turned round." She finished "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in 1995, shortly before starting her teacher-training course. "Having that child forced me to finish the bloody book," she said. "Not because I thought it was going to save us but because I thought it was going to be my last chance to finish it."
In "The Casual Vacancy," Krystal Weedon is a teen-ager from the Fields, the housing project near Pagford, and she is the effective head of a household that includes a younger brother and their mother, a heroin addict. Rowling's descriptions of the family are almost ostentatiously unremitting: drugs, prostitution, the stink of diapers. A visitor notices, in the front yard, "a used condom glistening in the grass beside her feet, like the gossamer cocoon of some huge grub." There's little sense that anyone ever made a life in the Fields, or cracked a joke, or hoped for anything but the salvation of Pagford and the middle class; Rowling's empathy can feel like condescension. But there's no doubt that she has an understanding of the extremes of British poverty, from sources that include her husband's experience as a general practitioner in an Edinburgh drug-addiction clinic. (He now practices elsewhere.)
Rowling has mocked journalists who, in her view, overdramatize her period of hardship—"I laughed myself stupid," she has said, after a reporter suggested she couldn't afford to buy writing paper—but she has contributed to this confusion. In 2008, while in a New York courtroom to oppose the publication of an unauthorized Harry Potter encyclopedia, she testified that there had been times when she was "literally choosing between food and a typewriter ribbon." She has described her first year or so in Edinburgh as a time of "abject poverty," or "grinding poverty." Such language seems to blur the distinction between her life and Krystal Weedon's. When she spoke at Harvard, she declared that she had been as broke "as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless."
This self-portrait—and talk about life on welfare as "the most soul-destroying thing"—may reflect honorable British embarrassment about the scale of her earnings over the past fifteen years. It balances a private ledger of good fortune and bad fortune. Her account of economic despair, and recovery, may also have a noble political purpose: Rowling has publicly defended Britain's welfare system against threatened cuts. And it's true to say that she was a broke single mother, in poor accommodations, at a time of high unemployment. One could understand if she did not want this period to be mistaken for slacker slumming—and her depression may have obscured any advantages she had over other jobless Britons. But those advantages are clear in retrospect: she was a middle-class graduate, poised to start a teaching career, who claimed modest state benefits while she finished a novel, which she partly wrote in an upscale café owned by her sister's husband. (Such state benefits—for housing and living costs—were then more easily accessible to young British graduates at the start of a professional career than they have ever been in the United States.) This is hard to classify as abject poverty. She has said, "I had to decide whether my baby would rather be handed over to somebody else for most of her waking hours, or be cared for by her mother in far from luxurious surroundings. I chose the latter option." As she told me, of her time after Portugal, "There wasn't really any drift. I came back with a plan, I definitely came back with a plan."
"Dear Mr. Little," Rowling wrote, in a 1995 letter. "I enclose a synopsis and sample chapters for a book intended for children aged 9–12. I would be very grateful if you could tell me if you would be interested in seeing the full manuscript. Yours sincerely, Joanne Rowling."
Christopher Little, a fairly obscure London literary agent, took her on. A year later, he made a modest deal with Bloomsbury, a British publisher that was only a decade old. "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" appeared in 1997, with an initial print run of five hundred. It won Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, and a gold award in the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize, which is voted for by children. The book also sold to Scholastic, in New York, for more than a hundred thousand dollars. Rowling bought an apartment. She published the second novel, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," in 1998.
Maria Tatar, a Harvard scholar of children's literature, recently told me, "It took me years to like Harry Potter." She now includes the final Potter novel in an undergraduate course entitled "Fairy Tales and Fantasy Literature." When she first read the books, she recalled, she "could not remember anything." Then she listened to the audiobooks. "All of a sudden, I got it—I could remember it, and I could visualize it. So much of it is dialogue. It's not exploring minds. It's conversations and actions that drive these books." You're in the skin of a wizard—"You're moving along with Harry"—even if you have little access to his mind.
She added, "It's a strange combination of both superficial and deep. That's what people forget about children's literature. It is very surface-oriented, but the great writers, and I include Rowling in them, manage to get the depth in, too"—life and death, good and evil. "It's not a psychological depth but a mythological depth."
Tatar's students grew up with the books. "You can't imagine what happens when I just say 'Harry Potter,' " she said. "They're transported. And they start to speak Harry Potter among themselves, and I feel like an alien." Many of her students report that, as children, they learned about learning from the books' depiction of Hogwarts. "It reshaped their understanding of what education was about—and what adults were about. They could recruit these adults and have them help landscape their lives."
Rowling told me, "Very recently, I met a girl in a shop. She was in her early twenties, and she came up to me and said, 'May I hug you?' And I said yes, and we hugged. And she said, 'You were my childhood.' That's an amazing thing to hear."
Some people find this disheartening. In Edinburgh, I met Alan Taylor, a journalist and the editor of the Scottish Review of Books, who despaired of Rowling's "tin ear" and said of her readers, "They were giving their childhood to this woman! They were starting at seven, and by the time they were sixteen they were still reading bloody Harry Potter—sixteen-year-olds, wearing wizard outfits, who should have been shagging behind the bike shed and smoking marijuana and reading Camus."
The Harry Potter books are not rebellious. They validate the concerns of ordinary children: fascination with weird teachers, distress about bullies, desire for status objects. (Broomsticks stand in for the latest electronics.) And Harry, for all the Dickensian under-the-stairs trauma of his early years, starts the series as a winner; he's wealthy, athletically adept, and famous. Rowling's respect for a youthful world view never wavers, and her characters do not learn their way out of it. Her achievement is to transfer the everyday dramas of schoolchildren into an abundantly imagined parallel universe. Rowling describes at least four ways, including broomsticks, to move magically from place to place. She uses dozens of beasts from the mythological canon and establishes new myths with matter-of-fact ease. (The idea of a Parselmouth—a person who can speak to snakes—seems ancient and fully formed.) She uses plot devices that could each fuel countless romantic comedies: a truth serum, transfiguration, time travel, invisibility, immortality, alchemy. Readers of the series lived with Harry, but also with Rowling, as the almost-visible engineer of a great fantasy machine that, in the course of seven volumes, runs with remarkable smoothness. Even young enthusiasts seemed to become textual critics of a sort—alert to the idea of an author, at a desk, making decisions about who should live and who should die.
"I do think that's a lot of what children responded to—that sense that someone was in control," Rowling said. "That they were walking into a place where they knew the rules, or there were rules to be discovered." There's little irony, and the reader rarely knows more or less than Harry. In the seven novels, Christmas Day always falls midway. Stephen King and others have teased Rowling for overusing adverbs when describing speech. The habit seems to show a determination not to be misunderstood. So too, in a way, do her repetitions. (Over a few hundred pages, as Harry enters adolescence, Diggory reddens, Harry reddens, Ron reddens, and Fudge reddens; Percy goes slightly pink, then very pink; Hermione is slightly pink; Malfoy is slightly pink and then brilliantly pink; Hermione is very pink and then rather pink; Colin also goes pink; Hermione is, again, slightly pink; so is Ron, and then Hermione; and then she's flushed pink with pleasure. Lavender blushes, followed by Hagrid and Hermione.) And if Rowling's metaphors were sometimes grudging—"like some bizarre fast-growing flower"; "like some weird crab"—it may be because metaphors carry you away, for a moment, from the place where the story has put you. Rowling's goal was to keep you there.
Rowling's mindfulness about plot led her to have almost the same relationship with her material as an obsessive fan did. Ian Rankin recalled bumping into her one day in an Edinburgh café: "It was incredible to see her, writing longhand, doing this family tree for a character. I can't think of any other author I know who would go into that kind of detail for something that's not going to be there on the page." It was like a video game where you never got to the edge of the rendered landscape. Despite the thoroughness of the final reckoning in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," and its extended epilogue, there's much that Rowling knows but has not written. In 2007, after the final book was published, she announced that Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, was gay. I asked her if Dudley, Harry's cousin, had any children as an adult, and she told me that he had two.
"We coined the phrase 'denial marketing,' " Minna Fry, a former marketing director of Bloomsbury, recently said of the series. "The more people want, the less you give." Ahead of each publication, she said, "we were extremely tantalizing—releasing little nuggets." She laughed. "If you were really lucky, you'd get the title!"
As Fry remembers it, the phenomenon changed complexion with the appearance of the fourth novel, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," in the summer of 2000. It was the first time that the publication of a Rowling book was synchronized across the Atlantic. Between them, Bloomsbury and Scholastic printed a first edition of more than four million copies.
Bloomsbury decked out a steam train as the Hogwarts Express, and it took Rowling around the U.K. Bloomsbury was still a small company; Fry inflated the balloons herself. "We didn't have events managers," she said. On the first day, she and her colleagues were astonished by the size of the crowds at King's Cross. "We couldn't even get into the station. Can you imagine what it would be like now, with Twitter?" Fry found a reporter from an American newsmagazine hiding in the coal bin behind the steam engine, her face smudged black.
When the train made stops, children awaiting an audience with Rowling entered her rail car at one end, and left at the other end with a signed book. As Fry recalled, "There were parents beating up other parents to get in the queue." At one besieged stop, Fry was Rowling's decoy, waving to the crowd through a window at the front of the train while Rowling escaped from the rear.
Fry said that Rowling was unsettled by the disorder of the tour: "She loved bits of it. But I don't think any of us realized quite how freaked out she was." Fry learned this only later. "She was quite thin-skinned about something that we thought was quite funny. I think she thought we'd put her in jeopardy."
Fry had enjoyed a friendly relationship with Rowling, but after that book's launch Rowling "started to have these layers of people to protect her." She hired her own public-relations team, and became a little sequestered behind "people who I think made her feel safe." Unlike before, "we weren't able to ring her up and gossip. But she was still kind, funny—very funny—and slightly bewildered by the whole thing. And still deserving of all the good things." Fry recalled coming across Rowling and her children, not long ago, in a playground in a London park. Fry introduced her young son (who said, "You're not J. K. Rowling!"), and she was struck by the force of Rowling's attention upon him. "She was fascinated by everything he was doing, what he was wearing. He had a new toy. She wanted to know how it worked, everything about it."
When I asked Rowling about the period after "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," she said, "That was a really hard time for me. The pressure of it had become overwhelming, actually. I found it difficult to write, which had never happened to me before in my life. The intensity of the scrutiny was overwhelming. I had been utterly unprepared for that. And I needed to step back. Badly needed to step back." She had published four books in four years. "I said to Bloomsbury, 'There won't be a book next year, I can't do it,' which they were great about. It ended up being three years. So it was 2000 for 'Goblet of Fire,' and 2003 for 'Phoenix.' " In that time, Warner Bros. began releasing films based on the novels—with a predominantly British cast, thanks in part to Rowling's pressure. The movies have since made $7.7 billion.
She also met Neil Murray, a friend of her sister's. Rowling resisted being set up: "He was just out of a marriage himself—I just thought that would be complicated. I wasn't up for that." But they eventually found themselves seated next to each other at a charity event in Edinburgh. He was aware of the Harry Potter books but hadn't read them. The couple have a son and a daughter together. A few years ago, a documentary crew travelling with Rowling recorded what seems to be Murray's only public comment about his wife: "Jo detaches herself," he said, in her hearing, with a smile. "When she's very stressed, she'll detach herself and only trust one person, and that's herself. So everyone else gets blocked out and she becomes more and more stressed and less and less able to accept any help."
Late last year, Rowling appeared at the Leveson Inquiry into British press conduct, set up by the government in response to revelations about reporters hacking into celebrity voice-mail inboxes. Over months, scores of actors, politicians, and journalists offered evidence to the inquiry; Rowling appeared on the same day as Sienna Miller, the actress, and Max Mosely, a former car-racing administrator. Mosley described being secretly photographed with five women in a scenario that the News of the World described, falsely, as an enactment of a Nazi-related sexual fantasy with prostitutes. Miller said that, for years, she had to contend with ten or fifteen paparazzi outside her home; she had been chased by them, and even spat upon to provoke a reaction. Her phone was hacked. But Miller was careful to emphasize that others, including the family of Milly Dowler, a murdered teen-ager whose phone was hacked after her disappearance, had experienced worse.
Rowling's evidence was less startling, but it was delivered in a more harrowed, aggrieved tone. It may be that, because Rowling is quite unassuming, she has not thought to learn the art of appearing unassuming in public. (Indeed, her public posture is often that of someone wronged: she has described buying herself a big aquamarine ring as a "no one is grinding me down" gesture made in response to tabloid coverage, and has characterized moving from an apartment to a very large house as being "driven out" by the press.) She told the inquiry that, when Jessica was five, she once came home from school with a note from a reporter in her schoolbag, apparently placed there by the parent of a classmate. One can't argue with Rowling's unhappiness about the episode, but it seems a poor example of Fleet Street's darkest arts. A few years later, Rowling was photographed on a public beach in Mauritius. One published image showed Jessica, breaking a British press rule about paparazzi shots of children. (It was not republished.) More recently, Rowling and Murray were photographed on an Edinburgh street, and the published shot showed the face of their son, David, at nineteen months.
Rowling had other stories to tell, and spoke of the burden of having to take preventive measures to avoid further intrusion. But when she wrote, in her witness statement, that "it pains me that my family and I do not appear to have the choice of living our lives in the same way that other members of the general public do," the wealthiest novelist in history was perhaps asking for too much. She and her family have spent a private evening at the White House, and she told me that the Obama daughters like her books. Across the world, fans call her "My Queen." And if Rowling, by the standards of her fortune, lives quite modestly—Ian Rankin has told her that, in her position, he would buy a helicopter and gold-plated pinball machines—public documents show that, to expand the grounds of her Edinburgh house, she recently bought and demolished a modern, $1.6-million house that stood next door.
Her discomfort with fame can give her the air of being more caught up with the idea of her celebrity than those she's addressing. Encouraged by Lord Justice Leveson to make recommendations for reform, she said, "I can't pretend I have a magical answer," and added, "No Harry Potter joke intended."
If Rowling has become exasperated by the media, the feeling has been reciprocated. When the London Times interviewed her in 2003, it was asked to sign a contract that, according to an account later written by Brian MacArthur, then the paper's executive editor, "stipulated precisely when the interview would occur and who would be the interviewer and photographer; how and where it would be advertised and promoted in the paper and on radio; and gave Rowling full approval of captions, headlines, straplines, line drawings, graphics, headings, advance trails, quotes and photographs." Just before publication, there was a gruelling, six-hour argument in the Times offices about what, exactly, was meant by "quote approval." Rowling was represented by Neil Blair, a British lawyer and a former Warner Bros. executive who had worked on the Harry Potter films, and who joined Christopher Little's agency in 2001. Blair said that in the interview Rowling had misspoken about her contract with Bloomsbury, and, in insisting that the quote be revised, took a stance that MacArthur found extraordinarily aggressive. MacArthur wrote in his paper that this "left us feeling soiled," adding, "our self-respect was eroded, our journalistic integrity insulted." Minna Fry, who was also at the meeting, says that she was, at times, "astonished by what Neil was doing," and had her head in her hands. "I realized how much was now at stake." Blair, remembering that day, said he would "swear on the Bible that I was not aggressive at all." (For this article, Rowling sought quote approval, which was not given.)
Last summer, Neil Blair left Christopher Little and set up his own agency. Rowling joined him as the star client of the Blair Partnership. Little's statement, at the time, was that he was "disappointed and surprised." As Rowling described it to me, "Neil and Christopher reached a point where it wasn't working, the two of them together, and I had to make a decision. It was very, very difficult."
Many beloved children's stories describe an adventure in a supernatural or dreamlike realm, and then a return—with regret, or gratitude, or both—to the everyday. But we know that Harry Potter will be a wizard on his deathbed. For all the satisfying closure provided by "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," gloomier readers may still detect a note of melancholy; there is a narrowness of life for former Hogwarts students, whose career opportunities barely extend beyond the wizard civil service, wizard schoolteaching, and professional Quidditch. This magical society has no use for science; there's little commerce; and thousands of years of wizarding seems to have generated no culture beyond a short volume of fables and a tabloid newspaper. (Wizard technology is often a cutely flawed approximation of non-wizard technology—owls for e-mail—and one wonders how quickly Harry and his schoolfriends could have won their battles against the evil Lord Voldemort, given two or three cell phones and a gun.) In a time of wizard peace, at least, Harry's separation from the real world—even as he lives in it—can seem tragic.
When I asked Rowling if she'd ever regretted not being able to bring Harry back into ordinariness, she talked about him with surprising passivity: Harry was more a character with responsibilities than a person she knew. In the role given to him, she said, "Harry has that sort of Galahad quality. It seems that you can't escape it." Though it was possible to imagine Ron Weasley, Harry's friend, embracing a Muggle existence, "Harry, as a character, can't. The person who is leading the quest—it seems that they have to have this weird purity about them. And, after all, if Harry really had gone through everything he went through, he probably wouldn't be mentally healthy enough to survive anywhere, would he?"
We were walking along a wet Edinburgh street of pubs and sandwich shops, hemmed in by the construction of a new tramline. Rowling wore a tan raincoat and stiletto-heeled boots. She seemed like someone who would gratefully return to a pre-adventurous life. Referring to the Edinburgh apartment where she finished her first book, the one that she secured with Sean Harris's loan, she said, "I sometimes feel that everything that happened since I left that flat is a little bit unreal. And that's where I'd go back to if it all vanished." She once had the idea of publishing "The Casual Vacancy" anonymously but realized that her anonymity would be short-lived. "In the final analysis, I thought, Get over yourself, just do it." She is working on two books "for slightly younger children" than her Harry Potter readers, and she has begun her next adult novel—although she has written only "a couple of chapters," the story "is pretty well plotted."
"The Casual Vacancy" will certainly sell, and it may also be liked. There are many nice touches, including Rowling's portrait of the social worker's gutless boyfriend, who relishes how, in an argument with a lover, you can "obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision." The book's political philosophy is generous, even if its analysis of class antagonisms is perhaps no more elaborate than that of "Caddyshack." And, as the novel turns darker, toward a kind of Thomas Hardy finale, it hurtles along impressively. But whereas Rowling's shepherding of readers was, in the Harry Potter series, an essential asset, in "The Casual Vacancy" her firm hand can feel constraining. She leaves little space for the peripheral or the ambiguous; hidden secrets are labelled as hidden secrets, and events are easy to predict. We seem to watch people move around Pagford as if they were on Harry's magical parchment map of Hogwarts.
And a powerful and protected writer risks getting things wrong. One teen-ager bullies another on Facebook, anonymously and repeatedly, which could happen only if the victim refused to make use of the network's privacy settings. Some sentences cause you to picture a Little, Brown editor starting to dial Rowling's number, then slowly putting down the handset: "There, in his poky office, Simon Price gazed covetously on a vacancy among the ranks of insiders to a place where cash was now trickling down onto an empty chair with no lap waiting to catch it." And, in a tellingly odd turn, three characters read unwelcome, but essentially accurate, judgments about themselves on a tiny local Web site, and all three disintegrate into fear and fury. The novel seems to treat extreme touchiness as a default psychological setting.
Rowling declined, more than once, an invitation to appear at the opening ceremony of the Olympics. "I just thought, I can't. I'll wet myself or I'll faint or something." She agreed after meeting Danny Boyle, the show's director; she was asked to read a passage from "Peter and Wendy," in which J. M. Barrie writes that Neverland is "not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed."
Rowling thinks of herself as a "nervous and self-conscious" speaker. Seconds before she went onstage, she received a text message from a friend. It read, "Good luck, Hon, try not to fuck it up with the whole world watching." There were eighty thousand people in the stadium, and hundreds of millions watched on television. "That was what I was thinking as I started speaking: Don't fuck it up with the whole world watching." In a dark blazer, with her hair blown around by the wind, Rowling read her lines, in a slightly sad voice. When she finished, a hundred-foot-tall puppet of Voldemort rose from the stage floor. ♦


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BALTIMORE – Following a record-setting outdoor invitational season which included eight new school records and the team hosting its first meet in ten years, the UMBC track and field teams head to Upstate New York this weekend for the America East Championships. The two-day meet, which will be hosted at Binghamton University's East Gym Complex, will begin on Saturday, May 4 at 10:00 a.m. with the men's decathlon.
At the indoor championships in February, the Retriever women earned their best-ever showing in an America East meet, taking second-place overall behind sophomore Mercedes Jackson (Huntingtown, Md./Huntingtown) and senior Amanda Deller (Aberdeen, Md./Aberdeen) who earned the conference's top individual awards.
These two standouts have continued to shine in the outdoor season with Jackson taking the lead on the track, breaking her school records in the 100m (11.57) and 200m (23.60) dash events. The sprinter leads the conference in both events while ranking tied for 21st in the 100 and tied for 22nd in the 200 in the NCAA East Region.
Jackson will be joined in both races by freshman D'Nique Phillip (Elkton, Md.) who sits in eighth in the 100m (12.19) and third in the 200m (24.51). Meanwhile, junior Kirsten Jones (Brentwood, Tenn./M.L.K. Magnet) will compete in the 200m as well as the 400m events which she enters seeded in the top-four.
School record-holder Paulette Fogle (Washington, D.C./Bishop McNamara) leads the Retrievers in the 400m hurdles. After resetting her school-best time at the Duke Invitational on Apr. 5, she did it again the very next week at George Mason to lower it to 1:01.59, the third-fastest time in the conference. Junior Mary Katherine Kulp (Vestal, N.Y./Vestal), a newcomer to the event earlier in the year, recorded the fourth-fastest time in school history (1:04.21) at the Duke meet and comes into the weekend with the sixth-best time in the league.
Already a three-time champion in the outdoor shot put, and a seven-time champion in all America East meets, Deller enters the weekend with the top toss in the conference this spring. Despite missing a few weeks, the senior recorded season-bests each of the last two weekends, posting a throw of 14.18m (46'6.25) at the Penn Relays in her last competition. Deller will also compete in the discus and hammer at Binghamton and has recorded the fourth-best throw in the America East in each competition this spring.
For the men, sprinter Dennison Long (Greenbelt, Md./Eleanor Roosevelt/FIU) has continued his torrid pace outside to lead the Retrievers who are ranked 12th in the Mid-Atlantic region. After sweeping the 60m and 200m events at the indoor championships and earning Most Outstanding Male Track Athlete accoldaes, Long leads the league in the 100m (10.39) and ranks second in the 200m (21.14), qualifying for the IC4A meet in both events. Freshman Jenove Blanfort will run in both competitions after posting the ninth and ten-fastest times in the two events at during the invitational.
Senior Trae Proctor (Brandywine, Md./Thomas Stone) missed last year's outdoor season but looks poised to recapture his crown in the 110m hurdles after posting a school-record time of 14.12 at the Mason Spring Invite.
Indoor champion Andrew Smith (Chadds Ford, Pa./Garnet Valley) posted a career-best 800 outdoor time (1:52.19) at the Mason Spring Invitational to retake second in the UMBC record book. He, along with freshman Andrew Keresztes (Port Jefferson, N.Y./Port Jefferson) each enter the meet ranked in the top-three in the America East.
Freshman Hassan Omar (Frederick, Md./Thomas Johnson) has burst onto the scene for the Retrievers' distance crew and will run both the 5,000m and 10,000m. Omar travels to New York with the second-fastest time in UMBC history, as well as the America East this spring, in the 10,000 (30:54.82).
In the throws, junior Yao Adantor (Laurel, Md./Reservoir/Morgan St./Maryland) and sophomore Thor Serafenas (Olney, Md./Good Counsel/Clemson) will lead the Retrievers after breaking the school record in the shot put and hammer, respectively, this season.
Versatile rookie Vincent Renztsch (Oranienburg, Germany) will show off his talents this weekend while competing in the long jump, javelin, and decathlon. Rentzsch, who finished third in the heptathlon indoors, leads the league in the javelin after breaking the UMBC school record four times this spring. His top throw of 65.40m (214'7") earned him top honors at the Morgan State Legacy, the second time he won the event in 2013.


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arrowroot cookies/ baby mum mums, when?
Was just wondering as my babe turns 6 months on the 2nd, when is it appropriate to give arrowroot cookies or those baby mum mums for example? Or any kind of finger food for that...
Started by Kira on 09/01/2010 in Stay At Home Moms
Last update on 09/08/2010 by Kira


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"Women are structurally inadequate for intercourse. This is a pathological condition amenable by surgery," so claimed Dr. James C. Burt, a gynecologist and obstetrician, in his 1975 book, Surgery of Love.
Unfortunately, for many patients, Dr. Burt's genital reconstruction typically resulted in the exact opposite effect he proclaimed his procedures would have on them. Most of his patients suffered several side effects, including sexual dysfunction because of pain during intercourse, infection, and the need for corrective surgery after undergoing Dr. Burt's bizarre medical procedures.
Burt graduated from the University of Rochester Medical School in 1945. He joined the military, working for a time in the US Air Force Medical Corp. Several years later, he returned to the city of his birth, Dayton, Ohio, and it was there that he set up his gynecology and obstetrics practice in the early 1950s. The doctor was dramatically influenced by the Masters and Johnson research during the 50s and 60s and its focus on the clitoris, the nature of human sexual response, and the treatment of sexual dysfunctions and disorders.
Burt came to believe that women's bodies were not properly aligned for penetrative heterosexual sex and said his unique sexual enhancement surgery could correct this anatomical problem. He felt that the clitoris was positioned too far from the opening of the vagina for women to have enough clitoral stimulation during coitus in the missionary position. The doctor also believed that women lost all or part of their ability to have an orgasm following childbirth, as a result of their vagina becoming too loose post-delivery, claiming that women's vaginas were "large enough to drive a truck through sideways" after childbirth.
Dr. Burt wrote in his 1975 book, Surgery of Love, that his surgery could turn his female patients into "horny little mice" and he also claimed that "the difference between rape and rapture is salesmanship." A despicable doctor, indeed.
So Dr. Burt decided to fix all that. Between 1954 and 1966, Burt began experimenting on unknowing patients with his own variations of the standard episiotomy repair after child birth. Known for his heavy hand with anesthesia, Burt had human canvasses on which to experiment after delivery. He would increase the amount of stitches to make the vaginal opening smaller and tighter. He would build up the skin tissue between the anal opening and the vaginal opening to alter the walls between the rectum and vagina. He would remove the hood of a patient's clitoris to expose it, thinking it would enhance the pleasure of sexual intercourse for them. He would actually reconstruct their genitalia, changing the angle of the vagina's opening in order to move the vagina closer to the clitoris. He would direct the labia majora into the vaginal opening. He would tinker with these women's bodies and perform these experimental surgeries, which could last several hours after childbirth.
Incredibly, Dr. Burt was not even licensed as a surgeon. By the mid-1970s, he had performed his "love surgery" on almost all of his obstetrics patients and many of his other female patients who were scheduled for various types of surgeries. Burt himself estimated that he performed over 4500 love surgeries during this time.
By this time, Burt was so proud of his accomplishments that he began promoting his love surgery to women as a way for them to increase their sexual enjoyment. By the mid-1970s, Burt felt he had honed his unique love surgery techniques and tried to publish his findings in medical journals but was met with resounding rejections. So he published his own book on the subject to lend his makeshift cosmetic surgery some legitimacy. He claimed his surgical technique would revolutionize relations between the sexes.
What made matters worse was that a local daily newspaper in Dayton brought positive attention to Dr. Burt when it published an article about the doctor's love surgery. In the article, Burt was quoted as claiming that almost 100% of the women were ecstatic with the results of their operations. He slapped an official name on his genital reconstructive procedures, officially calling his technique "plastic surgical postero-lateral redirection extension vulvo-vaginoplasty."
His fourth wife, Joan (25 years younger than himself), was coauthor of this book that degraded women with many of its weird observations. Passages from the book report that Dr. Burt's vaginal tightening also accommodated men, stating that "men of any age" would be able to "love his woman to exhaustion," and that "every man can be a stud" as a result of his female sexual enhancement surgery. The book even bragged that his wife was one of the doctor's most successful patients and that "Joan has climaxed in elevators from the Southampton Princess in Bermuda to the Kuilima in Hawaii�more than many women do in their entire lives." Joan Burt also commented that her husband had "given women the opportunity to enjoy sex."
Burt boasted in his book that he could improve on what Mother Nature had given to women and that he could turn women who were "scared little mice" into "horny little mice." The man actually thought he was doing women a favor by increasing their sexual sensitivity (whether they wanted it or not).
As a result of his self-published book and the newspaper article, Burt appeared on the Donahue TV talk show and was also featured in an article in Playgirl. Burt's medical practice prospered. Women flocked to the doctor's office inquiring about his love surgery, hoping for a surgically enhanced, superior sex life. By 1978, about 200 women requested the surgery, yet, inexplicitly, Burt continued to perform his sex surgery on unsuspecting women who never requested it. In one case, Burt talked a woman into having a hysterectomy after she gave birth (so he could perform his love surgery on her unwittingly), telling the woman, "You don't really need to have more kids."
As a result of his prospering practice, Dr. Burt had his way with many of his willing as well as unsuspecting patients through the late 1980s. The insanity went on for over 20 years; most every one of his love surgeries did not boost sexual pleasure as promised. Instead, his genital modifications brought on nothing but pain, anguish, and misery. Patient complaints about his realigning, redesigning, and disfiguring their genitalia went unheeded�lost in the system. During this time, Burt lived a lavish lifestyle. Among other complications, most patients were left sexually dysfunctional, with "extensive scarring, chronic infections of the kidney, bladder and vagina and the need for corrective surgery in many patients," as reported in a New York Times article, which brought Burt's practice to the forefront and set off an avalanche of official complaints from his patients. Some patients reported that their marriages fell apart as a result of Burt's butchery because it strained their sex lives, as they were unable to have intercourse without excruciating pain. Ex-employees of Burt's practice corroborated many patient complaints. Malpractice lawsuits swiftly followed, including one in which 33 women reported that they never opted for their genital reconstruction.
Here is a sampling of quotes from victims:
"Right now I feel I've been raped."
"I thought I would die. The pain was unlike anything I had ever experienced in places I couldn't understand."
"The way I was deformed, I couldn't have sex. I ended up going through three different corrective surgeries."
"You're raised to trust your minister, your policeman and your doctor. He was the one with the degree on the wall. He knew medicine better than I did. I didn't think he would hurt me."
"I don't know why he did that, unless he hates women."
In court papers, one doctor commented that he had treated 150 women for injuries resulting from Dr. Burt's love surgery, also relaying that some of those women told him that they did not give their consent for such surgery. Another doctor said her patient's genitals looked like "a fileted fish." And another doctor who looked at Dr. Burt's handiwork called in one of the nurses and asked, "Have you ever seen anything like this?" Yet another doctor remarked that he had never seen such horrid work except in African tribes that practiced female genital mutilation.
In December 1988, the Ohio State Medical Board labeled Burt's conduct "grossly unprofessional or dishonest" and charged him with 41 violations of ethics or standards, stating that Burt often caused permanent physical damage due to his sexual surgeries and his crude experimentation. The board went on to allege that Burt practiced "experimental and medical unnecessary surgical procedures, in some incidents without proper patient consent," due to the fact that many women thought they were undergoing routine post-pregnancy repairs or hysterectomies.
In January 1989, Burt voluntarily surrendered his license, most likely to avoid a medical board hearing that might have uncovered damaging evidence against him. He subsequently divorced and declared bankruptcy due to a rash of victim malpractice lawsuits totaling over $21 million.
Even after surrendering his medical license, Burt maintained his innocence. He blamed his situation on an "unjustified crucifixion" and "an avalanche of yellow journalism." He insisted: "My medical practice has been conducted with great concern for the welfare of women. There are a lot of women with problems involving vaginal intercourse that are either not being adequately addressed or not being addressed at all." His son also came to his defense at the time, reporting, "There are hundreds and hundreds of Dr. Burt's patients, alive today, whose marriages and lives were dramatically improved by his wholesome restoration to their fully functioning sexual responsiveness, which most of those patients had previously enjoyed earlier in their marriages."(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3730017&forum_id=2#34198276)
like an IRL version of Dead Ringers, except even worse(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3730017&forum_id=2#34198488)
Unfortunately I don't know how to get a copy of this book (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3730017&forum_id=2#34199155)
i remember i was stitching up vaginal lacs after birth without using too much tension and the OB/GYN cut my sutures out. she told me to "tighten her up down there. she'll thank us later"(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3730017&forum_id=2#34199287)
A true scholar(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3730017&forum_id=2#34200361)
And no small dicked Melvins stood up for him(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3730017&forum_id=2#38816542)


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My mea culpa on the myth of $16 muffins
I was among the journalists who read an inspector general's audit of the Department of Justice conference spending last week and wrote about its findings.
Multiple mentions of the $16 muffins, as well as the a line item (below) that did the math, which I double-checked, led me to hold it up as the most egregious of examples of government waste outlined in the report.
Assorted Muffins 250 14.00 16.80 4,200.00
Turns out, that wasn't the whole story.
Late last week, Hilton Worldwide released a statement, challenging the auditor's math:
"In Washington, the contracted breakfast included fresh fruit, coffee, juice, muffins, tax and gratuity, for an inclusive price of $16 per person. Dining receipts are often abbreviated and do not reflect the full pre-contracted menu and service provided, as is the case with recent media reports of breakfast items approved for some government meetings," the statement said.


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Lagoon 52 F (2018)Sailing catamaran
WC / Showers
Eden Island MarinaVictoria, Mahe, Seychelles
Cancellation policy
Frequently asked questions
"From 2012 until March 2019 I had the pleasure to constantly provide a team, presently known as TheBoats.com, with yachts and services. For me as well as my colleagues that were providing the yachts and had the chance to witness the quality of their hard work, their personal values, their commitment to the task, the amount of money, time and energy invested on research it was clear from the beginning that they were to make a difference in this industry.
Being in bareboat charter business for almost 20 years, I have hardly met other people that combine "know how" and "want to" on such a high level. I would trust their advice with no hesitation as I know that they support their theoretical ground with personal experience. If they have an opinion on a matter it means that they have tested it!
I was excited when they decided to start TheBoats.com. They are just the right people for this and the yachting market really needs what they can offer. They are independent travellers, have sailed on charter yachts in so many parts of the world, have gone through the procedures themselves so many times, mostly important, they have faced the difficulties. They know what is needed, what can go wrong, where should one go and what to do there. I am looking forward to the next step!"


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Snippet Name: Data Files
Description: Returns data files and their sizes.
Comment: (none)
Highlight Mode: PLSQL
Last Modified: February 28th, 2009
Description: Returns data files and their sizes.
SET pages 99
col file_name format a45
col tablespace_name format a13
col tablespace_name heading ts_name
col blocks format 999,999
SELECT file_name,tablespace_name,bytes,blocks
FROM dba_data_files
ORDER BY tablespace_name,file_name
SQL University.net courses meet the most demanding needs of the business world for advanced education
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All things MMA go here.
All things MMA go here.
Last edited by ASUcruz; March 5th, 2007 at 11:17 PM.
Here is a link to my post with links to some of the fights from Pride 33.
I have to give Diaz credit, I hate the guy, think he's a poor loser who can't finish, but he destroyed Gomi, who had it coming. Especially since you have to beat Gomi twice to get the belt because Pride protects him
I'm also more than happy Hendo beat Silva, though it does ruin any hope, remote as it was, of a Liddell/Silva "SuperFight"
Noguiera getting jacked was a surprise as well, and I thought Overeem would win.
My dad absolutely HATES Overeem (and my dad is Dutch.. go figure!). He always gasses way too early and usually has boring fights.
And whatever happens to PRIDE, at least they went out with a great great show.
I am also kinda bummed that I will be gone this weekend, so I won't be able to see Coture/Sylvia. I hope Randy wins because Sylvia is another boring fighter. Sure he does just enough to win, but in my opinion, it is better to lose an exciting fight than win a boring one. Just ask Takayama.
Yea seeing Noguiera getting ktfo was surprising, especially since he was the guy that went toe to toe with Shogun in that war and never got stopped.
Wanderlei is a shot figther, I think it was actually the Arona fight that messed him up. Cro Cop just made things worse and now Hendo finished the job. The good thing for Chute Box is now Shogun will finally get his opportunity for the belt.
I'd love to see a Shogun-Chuck fight.
Should be some good fights tonight Even better since they went HD! woooot!
Randy may die...modo
he didn't win his last 3 hw fights
It's hard for me to see Randy winning tonight, altough I bet 98% of all MMA fans will be rooting for him. The UFC seems to have this tried and true formula for putting champions over the top with fans. They put the new young and rising star in with the old over the hill star who the fans still love or respect.
The young star wins and either is humble in victory or is a cartoon character and the fans love him either way. Examples of this are Tito and Ken, Royce and Hughes. Of course it has backfired before, Randy was supposed to lose to Tito and Chuck and he messed up the UFC's plans both times.
Will that happen again tonight? I don't think so, Randy moved down to LHW because the HWs were getting to big, now he comes back older and faces the biggest HW in the UFC. Randy says that he'll at the very least make Tim fight for the belt. I think that will hold true, Tim won't have an easy time in the ring and he'll fight his ass off because Randy will put a lot of pressure on him.


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GCAP Media in the UK a putting together a dolly tribute entry for the 2008 Brighton gay pride atteneded by over 150000 people. there will be 21 dolly's performing a dance routine.
We are desperatly seeking good quality dance remix's of dolly songs ............ can anyone help ?
Also we are looking for classic Dolly audio clips, such as " It costs a a lot to look this cheap" any any others can anyone help ?
Please email firstname.lastname@example.com