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Nature and Environment » Nature
Pages: « < | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | > »
The stuffy crude cellar with the walls covered with a rough building fur coat is a chamber №9 temporary detention facilities.
In the end of 1990, in the 33, I have changed a trade. From the designer with 17 - the summer experience of work at defensive factory I became the press photographer, have adjoined to journalism, other eyes have seen the world. So it has turned out, that
Notes from the past, thought something different in my head and climbed now climb. 15 years have passed, but like yesterday - all is relevant. Year 1995 - when it wanted to write, write about various things, but rather to record that the very head climbs.
What occurs to me again? I can not work. And how шаманские experts? So coffee to drink it is not necessary. I live in a new fashion, transition all - таки is notable. It is enamoured. So resisted actively. Swore and swore to itself, that I will not get us
Photo in the Web, reflexions Mikheyev's Genes. For those who anything positive to create is not able, destruction represents creativity replacement. This phenomenon was present always, even at ancient history, but during an electronic epoch it was showed
Camera EOS 5D Mark III in official sources is announced. Technical characteristics were dream of any photographer and firm Canon has tried to carry out this dream. The price for the camera is declared 3500 US dollars and will appear on sale in March - Apr
All articles
Moldova Photo Gallery - Best Photos of V.Corcimari.
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Objects created by "new" and "malloc" are allocated in the "heap" while others are allocated in the "stack". But where is the pointers returned by such functions are allocated in the memory. Pointers are also a type of variable as far as I know, so they need to be placed somewhere in the memory like other variable, but where? Is it "stack"?
Another question that confuses me is that when you create a object using "new" in a function, the object is allocated some space in the "heap" area, but why all the books and online tutorials are saying all the local variables are allocated in the "stack" area? So what's really been allocated some space in the "stack" ?
Thanks in advance!

subset: commoncrawl


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I found myself in a predicament the other day – it was 6:45 a.m. on a Tuesday and the house was completely silent.
My wife and sons were still asleep, and the dogs were out in the yard taking care of their morning business. I suddenly found myself alone in the house, or at least it felt like it, with nothing to do for what seemed like the first time in months.
The mornings are typically pretty crazy these days with 20-month-old and 8-week-old boys dominating all aspects of the house. This is to be expected, and we have come to understand life will take on a hectic pace for the foreseeable future.
On this particular morning, the house was so quiet I could actually hear the furnace kick on in the basement. I can't remember the last time I heard that.
It's not that Carson, the 8-week-old, is loud. He is rarely audible, unless something is bothering him, like a dirty diaper, hunger or this nasty case of reflux that has his parents a little on edge these days.
It's Beckett, the older brother, who is responsible for the noise in the house. While hilarious and a total joy to be around, he's anything but quiet. Along with always being in perpetual motion, he's also consistently got something to articulate and it's usually in a loud manner.
It might just be incessantly pointing out his parents in a photo in the house with a string of "mamas" and "dadas"; repeatedly saying "all done", which has oddly enough come to mean he wants a snack; or showing off his version of a vocabulary by identifying all the items on the Christmas tree. Whatever the case, he does everything a tad bit louder than he probably should.
During that recent prolonged quiet time, there were, of course, plenty of things I could have been doing with my free time on this particular morning. Rather than doing something productive around the house, like hooking up the new DVD player because Beckett destroyed the old one (it's a long story), I chose to actually retrieve the morning paper from the driveway before I headed off to work. Normally, I am too preoccupied and forget all about it until I walk outside to go to the office.
I even cracked the paper open, kicked my feet up with a coffee and read it for a while. Since my kids were born, I rarely read the paper in the morning. It usually ends up being read later in the evening. There's just not a lot of time on most mornings, and one sure way to upset my toddler is to try and read something when he's in the room. He is not going to allow that and will show his dark side if you even try.
After about 15 minutes of reading the paper on that peaceful morning, I couldn't relax and enjoy the downtime. I began to wonder when Beckett would start to make his presence known. I actually found myself wishing he would wake up soon so I could hang with him before going to work.
I knew the baby was fine because he was in a basinet in our bedroom with Pam. Those two needed to sleep as long as possible (you take it when you can get it), but I was starting to miss my morning antics with my oldest son.
Soon enough, as if on key, he started to make those familiar morning sounds and before long I could hear his "nana" song. By that, I mean he just repeatedly says "nana" in a variety of different pitches, ranging from whispers to shouts. He must get half of a "nana" every morning or he's just not right emotionally. We don't go for any more than half because he's just not regular the rest of the day physically, if you know what I mean.
Later on that day, I started to marvel over this turn of events. Would this be our new routine? Forty-five minutes of quiet time every morning to do whatever I wanted. Maybe even sleep in a little bit?
I was starting to get a little excited. Surely, whatever I decided to do, I would learn to crave every single one of those 45 minutes and relish the quiet time around the house.
It turns out I had less than 24 hours to contemplate that pleasant thought, which turned into more like a hypothetical, as the next morning, around 6:30, a contrasting scene had unfolded.
The house was hectic and loud. This was more like I was accustomed to in the morning. Pam was feeding a crying Carson, who appeared to be particularly famished, while I was making breakfast for Beckett, who woke up extremely needy and was throwing a variety of inexplicable temper tantrums.
These are the moments shared between a husband and wife that I presume will one day be special memories. However, in the heat of the moment, they can be quite stressful, not exactly cherished at the time and likely the source of some hair color changes for me.
I do imagine that one day we will laugh and get misty thinking back at that particular morning when Carson vomited all over his mom and Beckett knocked his bowl of oatmeal out of my hands in a fit of frustration over the sequence of events (mainly that he was not having his "nana" first).
As I drove to work on this crazy morning, I had to laugh at how I could not bring myself to enjoy a few minutes of peace around the house just the day before. I learned something for sure. Whenever the house is quiet because everyone is asleep, enjoy it, do whatever you want, even if it's sleep, for you never know when it might happen again.


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Business Administration (MBA) Faculty and Staff
Ting-ting (Rachel) Chung
Associate Professor of Business Coordinator of Data Analytics & MIS
Hometown : Pittsburgh, PA
Joined Chatham : 2013
Academic Areas of Interest
Information Systems, Phishing, Behavioral Genetics, Twin Study, Knowledge Management, Business Analytics, Information Security, Usability
Personal Areas of Interest
Cooking, hunting for dinosaurs with son Connor
Personal Website : Visit Website
Professor Rachel Chung, Director of Business Programs at Chatham University, is passionate about engaged scholarship and evidence-based decision making. Her research activities range from fundamental issues in Knowledge Management Systems and Cybersecurity, to community-based research that makes real differences in businesses and organizations. Professor Chung is highly engaged in the Information Systems community. She has served as associate editor for the European Conferences on Information Systems (ECIS), guest associate editor for the Omega journal, and as ad hoc reviewer for numerous journals, including MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Data Base, and Small Group Research. She has also served as reviewer for all major Information Systems conferences, including ICIS, AMCIS, and ECIS. In 2012 Professor Chung received a $10,000 research grant from the Institute of Fraud Prevention (IFP) for her research study on the genetic basis for Internet fraud detection with Professor Dennis Galletta of the University of Pittsburgh, and a BBC World News interview about this research study. In 2013, the project is funded as a signature project by the Grace Ann Geibel Institute for Social Justice and Responsibility. In 2013, Professor Chung received another $10,000 research grant from the Institute of Fraud Prevention (IFP) for her research study on the genetic basis for deception detection with Professor Chih-Chen Lee of Northern Illinois University. Professor Chung also received IFP's support for a global fraud research project with Professor Chih-Chen Lee of Northern Illinois University, and Professor Sunita Mondal of Slippery Rock University. In addition to academic research, Professor Chung is also very involved in the application of scientific research methods to solving business problems. Her MBA course Research has engaged students in over twenty client projects with executives from City of Pittsburgh, WQED, AllFacilities Energy Group, Ardex Americas, TingWall, and other organizations. Courses Professor Chung teaches include Information Systems and Analytics, Digital Marketing in the Global Marketplace, and Organizational Behavior. To support evidence-based decision making, and scientific thinking in general, Professor Chung has served as Grant Awards judge for the 2012 and 2015 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) and judge for the 2013 Pittsburgh Regional Science and Engineering Fair (PRSEF). Professor Chung is member of Association of Information Systems, Academy of Management, Association of Computing Machinery, Society of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, and Net Impact. Professor Chung was born and raised in Taiwan, and is a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese. Professor Chung moved to Pittsburgh, PA, on a full scholarship to the PhD Program in the Psychology Department at the University of Pittsburgh.
- Wilsey, S. A., Friedrichs, J., Gabrich, C., & Chung, T. (2014), 79-97. A Privileged Pedagogy for Privileged Students? A Preliminary Mixed-Methods Analysis Comparing First-Generation and Non-First-Generation College Students on Post-Evaluations of Service-Learning Courses. PRISM: A Journal of Regional Engagement, 3 (2).


text: The Attaboy is amongst the finest in apparatus, mental magic. The original concept is credited to Jack Hughes, who made several models working on the same basic priciple.This Bellboy model is based on the first and original model from which the trick gets it's name. The apparatus resembles a cut-out of a Bellboy, with two houlettes, one at his feet, and one near his hands. The houlettes hold a deck of cards, and cut-out fronts in the houlettes enable the audience to see what is inside the houlette. A pack of cards is displayed, which may be examined and shuffled by the audience. Spectators freely select one or more cards. Cards are noted, and shuffled back into the pack. The pack is placed in the houlette at the bottom. The cards are now taken from the houlette at the bottom, passed one at a time slowly in front of the Bellboy's eyes, and placed in the houlette on top. The spectators are invited to call "Stop" whenever they like. When they call stop, the card stopped at is turned around to show the face, and it is one of the selected cards. This is repeated for the other selected cards. The trick is absolutely amazing, because there is no force of a card, and the spectators are free to stop you at any card as you slowly transfer them one at a time from the houlette at the bottom to the houlette on top. The cards stopped at are the very same cards selected by the audience, - they may be signed if you so wish. The trick is absolutely mechanical in working, and requires no palming, switches, or any elaborate sleights. The apparatus we supply stands 20" high, on a base measuring approximately 4" x 6". It is constructed from plywood and solid wood, and hand painted. The base and cut-out open out for ease in transportation, with the cut-out simply plugging into the base for instant assembling. The apparatus is designed to be used with any pack of cards, - in bridge or poker size. Supplied complete with instructions, here is an apportunity to get a classic prop and an excellent magic effect at a most affordable price.


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Get more with British Airways
Travel with British Airways to St. Petersburg and enjoy award-winning service, excellent value for money and no hidden charges.
Travel with British Airways to St. Petersburg and enjoy award-winning service, excellent value for money and no hidden charges.
A treasure house for 300 years of Russian culture, St. Petersburg is packed with things to do. The quiet canals give this seacoast city a European flair, but the myriad gold architecture brings you straight back to the Soviet.
The Hermitage Museum's collection runs from ancient Greek statues up to a superb Matisse collection, while the Bronze Horseman, a statue showing a mounted Peter the Great riding a stone wave, and the golden needle spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress make walking through the city endlessly photogenic. While it's known for high cultural strongholds like the Mariinski Ballet, Petersburg also has many bars and nightclubs, including the ramshackle bohemian drinking holes of Dumskaya Street and Dunes, a quirky courtyard beach club. Shops along Nevsky Prospekt sell anything from international brands to old icons. Outside the city, there are opportunities for visits to palaces such Petergof Palace, the ancient cities of Novgorod and Pskov and boat cruises on peaceful Lake Ladoga.
The fruit of centuries of collecting by Tsars and Russian art enthusiasts, the Hermitage Museum has one of the world's best art collections, housed in the spectacular former royal residence at the Winter Palace. Equally splendid is the coastal Peterhof Palace just outside the city, with lavish interiors and a garden booby-trapped with trick fountains. The Mariinsky's Theatre, (formerly the Kirov) continues a long tradition as one of the world's best ballet centres, while the former homes of Pushkin and Dostoevsky give a fascinating glimpse into the world of Russian literature. Book onto a hop-on hop-off bus to explore the city.
ArtCity Souvenir Salon on the Moyka Embankment sells high quality Russian crafts, not just the usual nesting dolls and fur hats, but also orthodox icons and hand-whittled, lacquered boxes. The slightly misnamed Chocolate Museum is a shop selling St. Petersburg's best selection of high quality chocolate while Bon Vin on the Griboyedov Canal embankment has an excellent wine collection ranging from Grand Crus to bottles for everyday drinking. Sadovaya Street's Bee-Keeping sells everything that comes out of a hive from beeswax and pollen creams to fine flavoured honeys, and Vladimirsky Prospekt's Natalie Kvasova sells stylish winter hats that are very popular in the city.
Russians love Georgian cuisine, and Karavannaya Street's Kavkaz serves good cooking from the country in a relaxed basement dining room, including Georgian cheese bread and chicken in walnut sauce. Konnogvardeysky's Street's Lya Rus serves more local specialities, such as peasant soups and frozen, flavoured vodkas, in an appropriately folksy dining room that also hosts nightly performances of Russian song and dance. For more international food, Aquarel is housed on a boat on the Neva River and serves Asian/Mediterranean fusion dishes, while Marata Street's Orient Express sells Russian food with a Central Asian accent – look out for their charcoal grills – in a restaurant disguised as a luxury train coach.
Running off Nevksy Prospekt behind the Griboyedov canal, Dumskaya Street has some of St. Petersburg's best bars including the arty, decidedly lived-in three story Atelier and dark but friendly student hang-out Fidel. Griboyedov's location in a converted bomb shelter may sound grim, but this club and music venue is actually very friendly, hosting concerts and exhibitions for a quietly alternative crowd. For something more obviously cheerful, Konyushennaya Square's Dunes is a courtyard beach club, where summertime drinkers sprawl in hammocks and play badminton on shipped-in sand.
Within an hour of St. Petersburg, the splendid summer homes at Tsarskoye Selo's Catherine Palace and Gatchina show the vast wealth Tsarina Catherine the Great spent on herself and her favourites. Equally near is huge Lake Ladoga, whose frozen waters provided a relief route for supplies during World War II's siege of Leningrad. Beauty spots around the lake such as Valaam Island's monastery are reachable by day trip, as are the ancient cities of Novgorod and Pskov, each with Medieval cathedrals and their own miniature versions of Moscow's Kremlin fortress.
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Stock Exchange says soz for downtime
Back in time for lunch
Trading has restarted on the London Stock Exchange this afternoon after a systems failure closed it for business this morning.
At 8.03am the market was paused as technical problems became clear, by 8.33am trading was halted - see our story here.
Continuous trading restarted at 12.15pm this afternoon. The LSE said it had identified the source of the problem and "gained confidence in the remedial steps needed to restore market connectivity".
Xavier Rolet, CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group, said: "We sincerely regret the inconvenience that today's disruption to trading has caused our customers. We have resolved the real time data dissemination issue and our UK cash equity markets have now resumed trading. "
LSE has recently moved to a new trading platform called MillenniumIT.
There were also trading outages on Tuesday and Thursday last week.
And the LSE had problems in late January too. ®
Sponsored: From CDO to CEO


text: Photoshop CS4 All in One For Dummies Author: Barbara Obermeier Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0470448113 Release Date: 2011-01-13 Genre: Computers Download Your one-stop Photoshop reference, filled with the latest tips and techniques There's a reason why Photoshop is the industry standard for image-editing software. But it's also that big, Photoshop has so many facets and features that a handy one-stop guide is exactly what you need. And you'll love the "Putting It Together" exercises that give you hands-on experience – in rich, full color! Learn the parts — the desktop, menus, panels, and key tools, and how to use Adobe Bridge Make your selection — learn about each of the selection tools plus the powerful Pen tool and Paths panel Brush up — on the Brush and Pencil tools and how to create vector shapes, create and edit type, and put type on a path Restore and retouch — correct and enhance color, improve contrast, and use the Clone Stamp and Healing tools to fix flaws and damage Print it — learn how to get the right resolution, image mode, and file format, and prepare your work for printing Open the book and find: How to crop images and increase their canvas size Tips for creating gradients and patterns Advice on resizing images How to composite images with layers and blending modes Filter techniques to correct or alter images How the Vanishing Point feature makes editing easier Steps for making adjustments with levels and curves How to create contact sheets


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Welcome to VigrxExplained.com
अगोदर निर्देश केलेल्या बाबीसंबंधी बोलताना VigRX review page is basically devoted to giving in-debt excellent information about VigRX प्लस.
In this webpage you will discover helpful information,testimonials and recommendations as well as many more. This webpage is from the format of the weblog to ensure that each time i review brand-new facts, it will arrive at the very best of your front website page.This gives you the privilege to verify back again right here anytime to check out for new updates about the informative info and facts found here.
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12-item index predicts odds of dying
It turns out that answering 12 simple yes or no questions can give you a decent idea of whether you're going to be alive in 10 years, at least if you're older than 50.
UCSF researchers have created an index that may help predict the chances of older people living an additional decade.
The index is not exactly a crystal ball. But the hope is that doctors can use it to identify which patients may benefit from preventive interventions and which ones might not have enough years left to justify costly and burdensome screenings.
The survey incorporates the idea of "lag time-to-benefit," or the time between when a screening points to the emergence of a disease and when the patient starts having serious problems.
A colonoscopy, for example, might detect a small abnormal polyp that could develop into full-blown colon cancer in eight years, said Dr. Marisa Cruz, the lead author of the study. If that is the case, then it might not be worth the burden, risks and costs of close surveillance if the patient is likely to live five more years in the first place.
"If your life expectancy is less than the lag time-to-benefit, then those preventive interventions are more likely to expose you to harm than to improve your health outcome," Cruz said.
On the other hand, she said, if the index points to a longer life, then it may be worth being more aggressive.
All interventions carry the risk of negative side effects and many are expensive. Some, like colonoscopies, are burdensome. The stress of not knowing test results and of false positives also factor into the overall onus of the tests.
The index was reported this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers examined data from between 1998 and 2008 of 20,000 adults nationwide who were at least 50 years old.
Factors on the 12-item survey included age, sex, health history and lifestyle. The higher the score patients received - out of a total of 26 - the more likely they were to die within the next 10 years.
Men, you automatically get two points. Older people get more points, and people with chronic lung disease, non-skin cancers and heart failure have points tacked on. Tobacco use and diabetes add points. And trouble bathing, managing your finances, walking several blocks, and pulling or pushing large objects all add up to higher scores.
Women who scored a zero - healthy, fit and younger than 60 - had a 3 percent chance of dying in the 10-year period, according to the report. Younger and healthy men with just two points had a 6 percent chance of dying.
Anyone with a score of 14 or higher, however, had a 95 percent chance of dying in the decade.
"Preventive interventions, such as cancer screening, expose patients to immediate risks with delayed benefits, suggesting that risks outweigh benefits in patients with limited life expectancy," the authors wrote.
Lower health costs
Fewer procedures for people who do not really need them also mean lower costs. One person abstaining from an extra colonoscopy might not save substantial money, but thousands of people making that choice every year could lead to considerable reductions.
The survey was an update to a four-year mortality index released in 2006. The researchers found that the risk factors on the earlier index served as valid predictors of 10-year survivability rates.
"Both indices actually identified the same risk factors for intermediate longevity and long-term longevity," Cruz said.
Dr. Yusra Hussain, the director of the Stanford Senior Care Center, said the study affirmed what clinicians have been practicing for years with patients. She also said many patients decline tests on their own.
"They understand their limitations and they might find these interventions cumbersome," she said.
A 2001 study about cancer screenings in elderly patients also from UCSF researchers said, "Patients with life expectancies of less than 5 years are unlikely to derive any survival benefits from cancer screening." Aggressive diabetes therapies are another example of interventions that might not be worth their potential benefits for people with short life expectancies.
Time with loved ones
There are those, of course, who want every possible test and intervention, experts said. But most people prefer spending their final years at home and in places they feel connected to rather than in the hospital, said Karyn Skultety, the vice president of home care and support services at the Institute on Aging.
Skultety said that patients who at first want aggressive interventions may have a change of heart if they are getting the information about risks versus rewards from a doctor they are close to.
"As long as it's someone they trust, most people will make decisions about quality of life rather than quantity of life," Skultety said.
Calculating the odds of dying
UCSF researchers have developed a 12-item index to estimate the chances of someone 50 years old or older living an additional 10 years. Points are allotted based on age, gender, disease, overall fitness and tobacco use. The greater number of points a person is assigned, the more likely that person will die during the next decade. The goal is to determine which patients should consider preventive interventions.
-- 60-64 years: 1 point
-- 65-69 years: 2 points
-- 70-74 years: 3 points
-- 75-79 years: 4 points
-- 80-84 years: 5 points
-- 85 or older: 7 points
Men: 2 points
Current tobacco use: 2 points
Low body mass index: 1 point
Diabetes: 1 point
Non-skin cancers: 2 points
Chronic lung disease: 2 points
Heart failure: 2 points
Difficulty bathing: 2 points
Difficulty managing finances: 2 points
Difficulty walking several blocks: 2 points
Difficulty pushing or pulling large objects: 1 point
Drew Joseph is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: email@example.com Twitter: @drewqjoseph


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Symbolic by design, a Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is under construction in Florida. It will be the world's first-ever guitar-shaped building. Formwork systems from Doka give the complex its unique contouring.
In tough everyday construction site situations, everyone should be aware of the safety precautions needed for formwork that will ensure a safe jobsite. Worksite safety is the responsibility of all involved – from the engineer to the contractor to equipment suppliers and, of course, the workers themselves. The safer the work environment, the fewer accidents, or even better none at all, with the added benefit of increased productivity at the worksite.
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Doubleknot's applications are designed to fit into your existing computing environment and website. To provide the greatest flexibility, Doubleknot can also be integrated with popular back-office software including Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge* membership database and Gateway Ticketing Systems eGalaxy* print-at-home ticketing solution.
Doubleknot Connect for Raiser's Edge provides seamless, real-time, bidirectional data synchronization between Doubleknot and Raiser's Edge. With Doubleknot Connect, you can take advantage of Doubleknot's powerful tools for online donations and membership purchases with confidence that data is immediately available to either application.
Because every Blackbaud implementation is different, Doubleknot Connect for Raiser's Edge is designed with flexible mapping to ensure that the integration works exactly the way you need it to. As a result, you can offer better online services and increase efficiency with Doubleknot while still benefiting from Blackbaud's back-office features.
Doubleknot Connect for Gateway Ticketing provides seamless integration between Gateway Ticketing Systems' eGalaxy ticketing, admissions and capacity management features and Doubleknot's solutions for online registration, membership management, fundraising and more. By integrating Doubleknot and Gateway, you can:
Doubleknot has more than two decades of experience integrating our software with other systems. No matter what products you're using, we can develop a solution for Doubleknot to share data seamlessly with your existing systems. And, our API is available for your in-house IT staff.
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Now that my eldest sister, Maisha, was twelve, none of us knew how to relate to her anymore. She had never forgiven our parents for not being rich enough to send her to school. She had been behaving like a cat that was going feral: she came home less and less frequently, staying only to change her clothes and give me some money to pass on to our parents. When home, she avoided them as best she could, as if their presence reminded her of too many things in our lives that needed money. Though she would snap at Baba occasionally, she never said anything to Mama. Sometimes Mama went out of her way to provoke her. "Malaya! Whore! You don't even have breasts yet!" she'd say. Maisha would ignore her.
Maisha shared her thoughts with Naema, our ten-year-old sister, more than she did with all the rest of us combined, mostly talking about the dos and don'ts of a street girl. Maisha let Naema try on her high heels, showed her how to doll up her face, or how to use toothpaste and a brush. She told her to run away from any man who beat her, no matter how much money he offered her, and that she would treat Naema like Mama if she grew up to have too many children. She told Naema that it was better to starve to death than go out with any man without a condom.
When she was at work, though, she ignored Naema, perhaps because Naema reminded her of home or because she didn't want Naema to see that her big sister wasn't as cool and chic as she made out to be. She tolerated me more outside than inside. I could chat her up on the pavement no matter what rags I was wearing. An eight-year-old boy wouldn't get in the way when she was waiting for a customer. We knew how to pretend that we were strangers—just a street kid and a prostitute talking.
Yet our machokosh family was lucky. Unlike most, our street family had stayed together—at least until that Ex-mas season.
The sun had gone down on Ex-mas evening. Bad weather had stormed the seasons out of order, and Nairobi sat in a low flood, the light December rain droning on our tarpaulin roof. I was sitting on the floor of our shack, which stood on a cement slab at the end of an alley, leaning against the back of an old brick shop. Occasional winds swelled the brown polythene walls. The floor was nested with cushions that I had scavenged from a dump on Biashara Street. At night, we rolled up the edge of the tarpaulin to let in the glow of the shop's security lights. A board, which served as our door, lay by the shop wall.
A clap of thunder woke Mama. She got up sluggishly, pulling her hands away from Maisha's trunk box, which she had held on to while she slept. It was a navy-blue trunk with brass linings and rollers and it took up a good part of our living space. Panicking, Mama groped her way from wall to wall, frisking my two-year-old twin brother and sister, Otieno and Atieno, and Baba; all three were sleeping, tangled up together like puppies. She was looking for Baby. Mama's white T-shirt, which she had been given three months back, when she delivered Baby, had twin milk stains on the front. Then she must have remembered that he was with Maisha and Naema. She relaxed and stretched in a yawn, hitting a rafter of cork. One of the stones that weighted our roof fell down outside.
Now Mama put her hands under her shuka and retied the strings of the money purse around her waist; sleep and alcohol had swung it out of place. She dug through our family carton, scooping out clothes, shoes, and my new school uniform wrapped in useless documents that Baba had picked from people's pockets. Mama dug on, and the contents of the carton piled up on Baba and the twins. Then she unearthed a tin of New Suntan Shoe Glue. The glue was our Ex-mas gift from the children of a machokosh that lived nearby.
Mama smiled at the glue and winked at me, pushing her tongue through the holes left by her missing teeth. She snapped the tin's top expertly, and the shack swelled with the smell of a shoemaker's stall. I watched her decant the kabire into my plastic "feeding bottle." It glowed warm and yellow in the dull light. Though she still appeared drunk from last night's party, her hands were so steady that her large tinsel Ex-mas bangles, a gift from a church Ex-mas party, did not even sway. When she had poured enough, she cut the flow of the glue by tilting the tin up. The last stream of the gum entering the bottle weakened and braided itself before tapering in midair like an icicle. She covered the plastic with her palm, to retain the glue's power. Sniffing it would kill my hunger in case Maisha did not return with an Ex-mas feast for us.
Mama turned to Baba, shoving his body with her foot. "Wake up, you never work for days!" Baba turned and groaned. His feet were poking outside the shack, under the waterproof wall. His toes had broken free of his wet tennis shoes. Mama shoved him again, and he began to wriggle his legs as if he were walking in his sleep.
Our dog growled outside. Mama snapped her fingers, and the dog came in, her ripe pregnancy swaying like heavy washing in the wind. For a month and a half, Mama, who was good at spotting dog pregnancies, had baited her with tenderness and food till she became ours; Mama hoped to sell the puppies to raise money for my textbooks. Now the dog came inside and licked Atieno's face. Mama probed her stomach with crooked fingers, like a native midwife. "Oh, Simba, childbirth is chasing you," she whispered into the dog's ears. "Like school is chasing my son." She pushed the dog outside. Simba lay down, covering Baba's feet with her warmth. Occasionally, she barked to keep the other dogs from tampering with our mobile kitchen, which was leaning against the wall of the store.
"Jigana, did you do well last night with Baby?" Mama asked me suddenly.
"I made a bit," I assured her, and passed her a handful of coins and notes. She pushed the money under her shuka; the zip of the purse released two crisp farts.
Though people were more generous to beggars at Ex-mas, our real bait was Baby. We took turns pushing him in the faces of passersby.
"Aii! Son, you never see Ex-mas like this year." Her face widened in a grin. "We shall pay school fees next year. No more randa-meandering around. No more chomaring your brain with glue, boy. You going back to school! Did the rain beat you and Baby?"
"Rain caught me here," I said.
"And Baby? Who is carrying him?"
"Naema," I said.
"And Maisha? Where is she to do her time with the child?"
"Mama, she is very angry."
"That gal is beat-beating my head. Three months now she is not greeting me. What insects are eating her brain?" Sometimes Mama's words came out like a yawn because the holes between her teeth were wide. "Eh, now that she shakes-shakes her body to moneymen she thinks she has passed me? Tell me, why did she refuse to stay with Baby?"
"She says it's child abuse."
"Child abuse? Is she now N.G.O. worker? She likes being a prostitute better than begging with Baby?"
"Me, I don't know. She just went with the ma-men tourists. Today, real white people, musungu. With monkey."
Mama spat through the doorway. "Puu, those ones are useless. I know them. They don't ever pay the Ex-mas rate—and then they even let their ma-monkey fuck her. Jigana, talk with that gal. Or don't you want to complete school? She can't just give you uniform only."
I nodded. I had already tried on the uniform eight times in two days, anxious to resume school. The green-and-white checked shirt and olive-green shorts had become wrinkled. Now I reached into the carton and stroked a piece of the uniform that stuck out of the jumble.
"Why are you messing with this beautiful uniform?" Mama said. "Patience, boy. School is just around the corner." She dug to the bottom of the carton and buried the package. "Maisha likes your face," she whispered. "Please, Jigana, tell her you need more—shoes, P.T.A. fee, prep fee. We must to save all Ex-mas rate to educate you, first son. Tell her she must stop buying those fuunny fuunny designer clothes, those clothes smelling of dead white people, and give us the money."
As she said this, she started to pound angrily on the trunk. The trunk was a big obstruction. It was the only piece of furniture we had with a solid and definite shape. Maisha had brought it home a year ago, and always ordered us to leave the shack before she would open it. None of us knew what its secret contents were, except for a lingering perfume. It held for us both suspense and consolation, and these feelings grew each time Maisha came back with new things. Sometimes, when Maisha did not come back for a long time, our anxiety turned the trunk into an assurance of her return.
"Malaya! Prostitute! She doesn't come and I break the box tonight," Mama hissed, spitting on the combination lock and shaking the trunk until we could hear its contents knocking about. She always took her anger out on the trunk in Maisha's absence. I reached out to grab her hands.
"You pimp!" she growled. "You support the malaya."
"It's not her fault. It's musungu tourists."
"You better begin school before she runs away."
"I must to report her to you."
"I must to bury you and your motor-mouth in this box."
We struggled. Her long nails slashed my forehead, and blood trickled down. But she was still shaking the trunk. Turning around, I charged at her and bit her right thigh. I could not draw blood because I had lost my front milk teeth. She let go and reeled into the bodies of our sleeping family. Atieno let out one short eerie scream, as if in a nightmare, then went back to sleep. Baba groaned and said he did not like his family members fighting during Ex-mas. "You bite my wife because of that whore?" he groaned. "The cane will discipline you in the morning. I must to personally ask your headmaster to get a big cane for you."
A welt had fruited up on Mama's thigh. She rolled up her dress and started massaging it, her lips moving in silent curses. Then, to punish me, she took the kabire she had poured for me and applied it to the swelling. She pushed the mouth of the bottle against it, expecting the fumes to ease the hurt.
When Mama had finished nursing herself, she returned the bottle to me. Since it was still potent kabire, I did not sniff it straight but put my lips around the mouth of the bottle and smoked slowly, as if it were an oversized joint of bhang, Indian hemp. First it felt as if I had no saliva in my mouth, and then the fumes began to numb my tongue. The heat climbed steadily into my throat, tickling my nostrils like an aborted sneeze. I cooled off a bit and blew away the vapor. Then I sucked at it again and swallowed. My eyes watered, my head began to spin, and I dropped the bottle.
When I looked up, Mama had poured some kabire for herself and was sniffing it. She and Baba hardly ever took kabire. "Kabire is for children only," Baba's late father used to admonish them whenever he caught them eying our glue. This Ex-mas we were not too desperate for food. In addition to the money that begging with Baby had brought us, Baba had managed to steal some wrapped gifts from a party given for machokosh families by an N.G.O., whose organizers were so stingy that they served fruit juice like shots of hard liquor. He had dashed to another charity party and traded in the useless gifts—plastic cutlery, picture frames, paperweights, insecticides—for three cups of rice and zebra intestines, which a tourist hotel had donated. We'd had these for dinner on Ex-mas Eve.
"Happee, happee Ex-mas, tarling!" Mama toasted me after a while, rubbing my head.
"You, too, Mama."
"Now where are these daughters? Don't they want to do Ex-mas prayer?" She sniffed the bottle till her eyes receded, her face pinched like the face of a mad cow. "And the govament banned this sweet thing. Say thanks to the neighbors, boy. Where did they find this hunger-killer?" Sometimes she released her lips from the bottle with a kissing sound. As the night thickened, her face began to swell, and she kept pouting and biting her lips to check the numbness. They turned red—they looked like Maisha's when she had on lipstick—and puffed up.
"Mama? So, what can we give the neighbors for Ex-mas?" I asked, remembering that we had not bought anything for our friends.
My question jerked her back. "Petrol . . . we will buy them a half litre of petrol," she said, and belched. Her breath smelled of carbide, then of sour wine. When she looked up again our eyes met, and I lowered mine in embarrassment. In our machokosh culture, petrol was not as valuable as glue. Any self-respecting street kid should always have his own stock of kabire. "O.K., son, next year . . . we get better things. I don't want police business this year—so don't start having ideas."
We heard two drunks stumbling toward our home. Mama hid the bottle. They stood outside announcing that they had come to wish us a Merry Ex-mas. "My husband is not here!" Mama lied. I recognized the voices. It was Bwana Marcos Wako and his wife, Cecilia. Baba had owed them money for four years. They came whenever they smelled money, and Baba had to take off for a few days. When Baby was born, we pawned three-quarters of his clothing to defray the debts. A week before Ex-mas, the couple had raided us, confiscating Baba's working clothes in the name of debt servicing.
I quickly covered the trunk with rags and reached into my pocket, tightening my grip around the rusty penknife I carried about.
Mama and I stood by the door. Bwana Wako wore his trousers upside down, belted across his forehead; the legs, flailing behind him, were tied into knots and stuffed with ugali flour, which he must have got from a street party. Cecilia wore only her jacket and her rain boots.
"Ah, Mama Jigana-ni Ex-mas!" the husband said. "Forget the money. Happee Ex-mas!"
"We hear Jigana is going to school," the wife said.
"Who told you?" Mama said warily. "Me, I don't like rumors."
They turned to me. "Happee to resume school, boy?"
"Me am not going to school," I lied to spare my tuition money.
"Kai, like mama like son!" the wife said. "You must to know you are the hope of your family."
"Mama Jigana, listen," the man said. "Maisha came to us last week. Good, responsible gal. She begged us to let bygone be bygone so Jigana can go to school. We say forget the money—our Ex-mas gift to your family."
"You must to go far with education, Jigana," the wife said, handing me a new pen and pencil. "Mpaka university!"
Mama laughed, jumping into the flooded alley. She hugged them and allowed them to come closer to our shack. They staggered to our door, swaying like masqueraders on stilts.
"Asante sana!" I thanked them. I uncorked the pen and wrote all over my palms and smelled the tart scent of the Hero HB pencil. Mama wedged herself between them and the shack to insure that they did not pull it down. Baba whispered to us from inside, ready to slip away, "Ha, they told me the same thing last year. You watch and see, tomorrow they come looking for me. Make them sign paper this time." Mama quickly got them some paper and they signed, using my back as a table. Then they staggered away, the stuffed trousers bouncing along behind them.
Mama began to sing Maisha's praises and promised never to pound on her trunk again. Recently, Maisha had taken the twins to the barber's and Baby to Kenyatta National Hospital for a checkup. Now she had got our debt cancelled. I felt like running out to search for her in the streets. I wanted to hug her and laugh till the moon dissolved. I wanted to buy her Coke and chapati, for sometimes she forgot to eat. But when Mama saw me combing my hair she said nobody was allowed to leave until we had finished saying the Ex-mas prayer.
Ihung out with Maisha some nights on the street, and we talked about fine cars and lovely Nairobi suburbs. We'd imagine what it would be like to visit the Masai Mara Game Reserve or to eat roasted ostrich or crocodile at the Carnivore, like tourists.
"You beautiful!" I had told Maisha one night on Koinange Street, months before that fateful Ex-mas.
"Ah, no, me am not." She laughed, pulling down her jeans miniskirt. "Stop lying."
"See your face?"
"Kai, who sent you?"
"And you bounce like models."
"Yah, yah, yah. Not tall. Nose? Too short and big. No lean face or full lips. No firsthand designer clothes. Not daring or beautiful like Naema. Perfume and mascara are not everything."
"Haki, you? Beautiful woman," I said, clicking my fingers. "You will be tall tomorrow."
"You are asking me out?" she said in jest, and struck a pose. She made faces as if she were playing with the twins and said, "Be a man, do it the right way."
I shrugged and laughed.
"Me, I have no shilling, big gal."
"I will discount you, guy."
"Stop it."
"Oh, come on," she said, and pulled me into a hug.
Giggling, we began walking, our strides softened by laughter. Everything became funny. We couldn't stop laughing at ourselves, at the people around us. When my sides began to ache and I stopped, she tickled my ribs.
We laughed at the gangs of street kids massed together in sound sleep. Some gangs slept in graded symmetry. Others slept in freestyle. Some had a huge waterproof above their piles to protect them from the elements. Others had nothing. We laughed at a group of city taxi-drivers huddled together, warming themselves with cups of chai and fiery political banter while waiting for the Akamba buses to arrive with passengers from Tanzania and Uganda. Occasionally we'd see the anxious faces of these visitors in the old taxis, bracing for what would be the most dangerous twenty minutes of their twelve-hour journeys, fearful of being robbed whenever the taxis slowed down.
We were not afraid of the city at night. It was our playground. At times like this, it was as if Maisha had forgotten her job and all she wanted to do was laugh and playact.
"You? Nice guy," Maisha said.
I pulled at her handbag.
"You will be a big man tomorrow. . . ."
She dashed past me suddenly to wave down a chauffered Volvo. It stopped right in front of her, the glass rolling down. A man in the back seat inspected her and shook his bald head. He beckoned a taller girl from the cluster jostling behind her, trying to fit their faces in the window. Maisha ran to a silver Mercedes-Benz wagon, but the owner picked a shorter girl.
"Someday, I must to find a real job," Maisha said, sighing, when she came back.
"What job, gal?"
"I want to try full time."
She shrugged. "Mombasa? Dar?"
I shook my head. "Bad news, big gal. How long?"
"I don't know. Ni maisha yangu, guy, it's my life. I'm thinking, full time will allow me to pay your fees and also save for myself. I will send money through the church for you. I'll quit the brothel when I save a bit. I don't want to stand on the road forever. Me myself must to go to school one day. . . ."
The words died in her throat. She pursed her lips, folded her hands across her chest, and rocked from side to side. She did not rush to any more cars.
"We won't see you again?" I said. "No, thanks. If you enter brothel, me I won't go to school."
"Then I get to keep my money, ha-ha. Without you, they won't see my shilling in that house. Never." She saw my face, stopped suddenly, then burst into giggles. "I was kidding you, guy, about the brothel. Just kidding, O.K."
She tickled me, pulling me toward Moi Avenue. I held her hand tightly. Prostitutes fluttered about under streetlights, dressed like winged termites.
"Maisha, our parents—"
She turned sharply, her fists balled.
"Shut up! You shame me, you rat. Leave me alone. Me am not your mate. You can't afford me!"
Other girls turned and stared at us, giggling. Maisha strode away. It had been a mistake to mention our parents in front of the other girls, to let them know that we were related. And I shouldn't have called her by her real name. I cried all the way home because I had hurt her. She ignored me for weeks.
After Mama stopped celebrating the end of our debt, she fished out two little Uchumi Supermarket waterproof bags from the carton and smoothed them out as if they were rumpled socks. She put them over her canvas shoes, tying the handles around her ankles in little bows. Then she walked out into the flood, her winged galoshes scooping the water like a duck's feet. She started to untie our bag of utensils and food, which was leaning against the shop, her eyes searching for a dry spot to set up the stove, to warm some food for the twins. But the rain was coming down too heavily now, and after a while she gave up.
"Jigana, so did you see those Maisha's ma-men?" she asked.
"There were three white men, plus driver. Tall, old men in knickers and tennis shoes. I shook hands with them. Beautiful-beautiful motorcar. . . . I even pinched that monkey."
"Motorcar? They had a motorcar? Imachine a motorcar to pick up my daughter." She stretched forward and held my arms, smiling. "You mean my daughter is big like that?"
Otieno woke up with a start. He stood groggily on the cushions, then he climbed over Mama's legs, levered himself over me with his hand on my head, and landed in the flood outside the shack in a crouch. He began to lower thin spools of shit into the water, whiffs of heat unwrapping into the night, the cheeks of his buttocks rouged by the cold.
When Otieno returned to the shack, he sat on Mama's legs and brought out her breast and sucked noisily. With one hand, he grabbed a toy Maisha had bought for him, rattling its maracas on Mama's bony face. She was still looking ragged and underweight, even though she'd stayed in the hospital to have her diet monitored after Baby graduated from the incubator.
Mama took out our family Bible, which we had inherited from Baba's father, to begin our Ex-mas worship. The front cover had peeled off, leaving a dirty page full of our relatives' names, dead and living. She read them out. Baba's late father had insisted that all the names of our family be included in recognition of the instability of street life. She began with her father, who had been killed by cattle rustlers, before she ran away to Nairobi and started living with Baba. She called out Baba's mother, who came to Nairobi when her village was razed because some politicians wanted to redraw tribal boundaries. One day she disappeared forever into the city with her walking stick. Mama invoked the names of our cousins Jackie and Solo, who settled in another village, and wrote to us through our church, asking our parents to send them school fees. I looked forward to telling them about the lit parks and the beautiful cars of Nairobi as soon as my teachers taught me how to write letters. She called out her brother, Uncle Peter, who had shown me how to shower in the city fountains without being whipped by the officials. He was shot by the police in a case of mistaken identity; the mortuary gave his corpse to a medical school because we could not pay the bill. She called Baba's second cousin Mercy, the only secondary-school graduate among our folks. She had not written to us since she fell in love with a Honolulu tourist and eloped with him. Mama called Baba's sister, Auntie Mama, who, until she died two years ago of a heart attack, had told us stories and taught us songs about our ancestral lands every evening, in a sweet, nostalgic voice.
The sky rumbled.
"Bwana, I hope Naema put clothes on Baby before she left," Mama said to me, the middle of her sentence wobbling because Otieno had bitten her.
"She put Baby in waterproof paper bags. Then sweater."
Otieno, having satisfied himself, woke up Atieno, who took over the other breast, for they had divided things up evenly between them. Atieno sucked until she slept again, and Mama placed her gently near Otieno and began to shake Baba until he opened one eye. His weak voice vibrated because his face was jammed into the wall: "Food."
"No food, tarling," Mama told him. "We must to finish to call the names of our people."
"You'll be calling my name if I don't eat."
"Here is food—New Suntan Shoe kabire." She reached out and collected the plastic bottle from me. "It can kill your stomach till next week."
"All the children are here?"
"Baby and Naema still out. Last shift . . . and Maisha."
"Ah, there is hope. Maisha will bring an Ex-mas feast for us."
"Ex-mas is school fees, remember?"
Mama groped inside the carton again. She unearthed a dirty candle, pocked by grains of sand. She lit the candle and cemented it to the trunk with its wax. Taking the Bible, she began to read a psalm in Kiswahili, thanking God for the gift of Baby and the twins after two miscarriages. She praised God for blessing Maisha with white clients at Ex-mas. Then she prayed for Fuunny Eyes, the name we had given to the young Japanese volunteer who unfailingly dropped shillings in our begging plate. She wore Masai tire sandals and necklaces that held her neck like a noose, and never replied to our greetings or let our eyes meet hers. She prayed for our former landlord in the Kibera slums, who evicted us but hadn't seized anything when we could not pay the rent. Now Mama asked God to bless Simba with many puppies. "Christ, you Ex-mas son, give Jigana a big, intelligent head in school!" she concluded.
"Have mercy on us," I said.
"Holy Mary, Mama Ex-mas . . . "
"Pray for us."
It was drizzling again when Naema returned with Baby. He was asleep. Naema's jeans, mutumba loafers, and braided hair dribbled water, her big eyes red from crying. Usually, she sauntered in singing a Brenda Fassie song, but tonight she plodded in deflated.
She handed the money over to Mama, who quickly banked it in her purse. She also gave Mama a packet of pasteurized milk. It was half full, and Naema explained that she'd had to buy it to stop Baby from crying. Mama nodded. The milk pack was soggy and looked as if it would disintegrate. Mama took it carefully in her hands, like one receiving a certificate. When Naema brought out a half-eaten turkey drumstick, Mama grabbed her ears, thinking that she had bought it with the money she'd earned begging. Naema quickly explained that her new boyfriend had given it to her. This boy was a big shot in the street gang that controlled our area, a dreaded figure. Maisha and I detested him, but he liked Naema like his own tongue.
Now Naema wriggled and fitted her lithe frame into the tangle on the floor, and began to weep silently. Mama pulled the blanket from the others and covered the girl's feet, which had become wrinkled in the rain.
"Maisha is moving out tomorrow," Naema said. "Full time."
Mama's face froze. No matter how rootless and cheap street life might be, you could still be broken by departures. I went outside and lay on the row of empty paint containers we had lined up along the shop's wall, hiding my face in the crook of my arm.
Guilt began to build in my guts. Maybe if I had joined a street gang Maisha would not have wanted to leave. I wouldn't have needed money for school fees, and perhaps there would have been peace between Maisha and my parents. But my anger was directed at the musungu men, for they were the visible faces of my sister's temptation. I wished I were as powerful as Naema's boyfriend, or that I could recruit him. We could burn up their Jaguar. We could tie them up and give them the beating of their lives and take away all their papers. We could strip those musungu naked, as I had seen Naema's friend do to someone who had hurt a member of his gang. Or we could at least kill and eat that monkey, or just cut off his mboro so he could never fuck anybody's sister again. I removed my knife from my pocket and examined the blade carefully. The fact that it was very blunt and had dents did not worry me. I knew that if I stabbed with all my energy I would draw blood.
After a while, my plans began to unravel. I realized that I would never be able to enlist Naema's boyfriend. Naema herself would block the plan. In fact, until that night she had been taunting Maisha to move out, saying that if she were as old as Maisha she would have left home long ago. Besides, even if I fled to the Kibera slums, as soon as we touched the tourists the police would come and arrest my parents and dismantle our shack. They would take away Maisha's trunk and steal her treasures.
Baba started awake, as if a loud noise had hit him.
"Is that Maisha?" he asked, closing his eyes again.
"No, Maisha is working," Mama said. "My Maisha commands musungu and motorcars!" she said, her good mood returning.
"What? What musungu, tarling?" Baba asked, sitting up immediately, rubbing sleep and hunger from his eyes with the base of his palms.
"White tourists," Mama said.
"Uh? They must to pay ma-dollar or euros. Me am family head. You hear me, woman?"
"And no Honolulu business. What kind of motorcar were they driving?"
"Jaguar," I answered. "With driver. Baba, we should not allow Maisha to leave—"
"Nobody is leaving, nobody. And shut up your animal mouth! You have wounded my wife! Until I break your teeth tomorrow, no opinion from you. No nothing. Did you thank the ma-men for me?"
"No," I said.
"Aiiee! Jigana, where are your manners? Did you ask where they were going? Motorcar number?"
"No, Baba."
"So if they take her to Honolulu what do I do? Maybe we should send you to a street gang. Boy, have you not learned to grab opportunities. Is this how you will waste school fees in January? Poor Maisha."
He squinted incredulously, and lines of doubt kinked up his massive forehead. He pursed his lips, and anger quickened his breath. But that night I stood my ground.
"I don't want school anymore, Baba," I said.
"Coward, shut up. That one is a finished matter."
"What do you mean by no? You want to be a pocket thief like me . . . my son? My first son? You can't be useless as the gals. Wallai!"
"Me, I don't want school."
"Your mind is too young to think. As we say, 'The teeth that come first are not used in chewing.' As long as you live here, your Baba says school."
"La hasha."
"You telling me never? Jigana!" He looked at Mama. "He doesn't want school? St. Jude Thaddaeus!"
"Bwana, this boy has grown strong-head," Mama said. "See how he is looking at our eyes. Insult!"
Baba stood up suddenly, his hands shaking. I didn't cover my cheeks with my hands to protect me from his slap or spittle, as I usually did when he was angry. I was ready for him to kill me. My family was breaking up because of me. He stood there, trembling with anger, confused.
Mama patted his shoulders to calm him down. He brushed her aside and went outside to cool off. I monitored him through a hole in the wall. Soon he was cursing himself aloud for drinking too much and sleeping through Ex-mas Day and missing the chance to meet the tourists. As his mind turned to Maisha's good fortune, he began to sing "A Jaguar is a Jaguar is a Jaguar" to the night, leaping from stone to stone, tracing the loose cobbles that studded the floodwater like the heads of stalking crocodiles in a river. In the sky, some of the tall city buildings were branded by lights left on by forgetful employees, and a few shopping centers wore the glitter of Ex-mas; flashing lights ascended and descended, like angels on Jacob's dream ladder. The long city buses, Baba's hunting grounds, had stopped for the night. As the streets became emptier, cars drove faster through the floods, kicking up walls of water, which collapsed on our shack.
Back inside, Baba plucked his half-used miraa stick from the rafter and started chewing. He fixed his eyes on the trunk. A mysterious smile dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. Eventually, the long stick of miraa subsided into a formless sponge in his mouth. His spitting was sharp, and arced across the room and out the door. Suddenly, his face brightened. "Hakuna Matata!" he said. Then he dipped into the carton and came up with a roll of wire, and started lashing the wheels of the trunk to the props of our shack. For a moment, it seemed he might be able to stop Maisha from going away.
Mama tried to discourage him from tying down the trunk. "Bwanaaa . . . stop it! She will leave if she finds you manga-mangaring with her things."
"Woman, leave this business to me," he said, rebuking her. "I'm not going to sit here and let any Honolulus run away with our daughter. They must marry her properly."
"You should talk," Mama said. "Did you come to my father's house for my hand?"
"Nobody pays for trouble," Baba said. "You're trouble. If I just touch you, you get pregnant. If I even look at you—twins, just like that. Too, too ripe."
"Me am always the problem," Mama said, her voice rising.
"All me am saying is we must to treat the tourist well."
Atieno was shivering; her hand was poking out of the shack. Baba yanked it back in and stuck her head through the biggest hole in the middle of our blanket. That was our way of insuring that the family member who most needed warmth maintained his place in the center of the blanket. Baba grabbed Otieno's legs and pushed them through two holes on the fringe of the blanket. "Children of Jaguar," he whispered into their ears. "Ex-mas ya Jag-uar." He tried to tuck Atieno and Otieno properly into the blanket, turning them this way and that, without success. Then he became impatient and rolled them toward each other like a badly wrapped meat roll. Their heads were facing opposite directions, their feet in each other's face, their knees folded and tucked into each other's body—a blanket womb.
Mama reminded him to wedge the door, but he refused. He wanted us to wait for Maisha. He winked at me as if I were the co-sentry of our fortune. Mama handed Baby to me and lay down. I sat there, sniffing kabire, until I became drunk. My head swelled, and our roofwork relaxed and shook, then melted into the sky.
I was floating. My bones were inflammable. My thoughts went out like electric currents into the night, its counter-currents running into each other, and, in a flash of sparks, I was hanging on the door of the city bus, going to school. I hid my uniform in my bag so that I could ride free like other street children. Numbers and letters of the alphabet jumped at me, scurrying across the page as if they had something to say. The flares came faster and faster, blackboards burned brighter and brighter. In the beams of sunlight leaking through the holes in the school roof, I saw the teacher writing around the cracks and patches on the blackboard like a skillful matatu driver threading his way through our pothole-ridden roads. Then I raced down our lopsided, bald field with an orange for a rugby ball, jumping the gullies and breaking tackles. I was already the oldest kid in my class.
Mama touched my shoulders and relieved me of the infant. She stripped Baby of the plastic rompers, cleaned him up, and put him in a nappy for the night. With a cushion wrested from Naema, who was sleeping, Mama padded the top of the carton into a cot. After placing Baby in it, she straightened the four corners of the carton and then folded up our mosquito net and hung it over them. It had been donated by an N.G.O., and Baba had not had a chance to pawn it yet. Then Mama wrapped her frame around the carton and slept.
I woke Baba up when Maisha returned, before dawn. He had been stroking his rosary beads, dozing and tilting till his head upset the mosquito netting. Mama had to continually elbow or kick him off. And each time he opened his eyes with a practiced smile, thinking the Jaguar hour had arrived. The rain had stopped, but clouds kept the night dark. The city had gorged itself on the floods, and its skin had swelled and burst in places. The makeshift tables and stalls of street markets littered the landscape, torn and broken, as if there had been a bar fight. Garbage had spread all over the road: dried fish, stationery, trinkets, wilted green vegetables, plastic plates, wood carvings, underwear. Without the usual press of people, the ill-lit streets sounded hollow, amplifying the smallest of sounds. Long after a police car had passed, it could be heard negotiating potholes, the officers harassing and extorting their bribes—their Ex-mas kitu kidogo—from the people who could not afford to go to their up-country villages for the holidays.
Maisha returned in an old Renault 16 taxi. She slouched in the back while the driver got out. Kneeling and applying pliers to open the back door, the driver let her out of the car. Baba's sighs of disappointment were as loud as the muezzin who had begun to call Nairobi to prayer. My sister stepped out, then leaned on the car, exhausted. There were bags of food on the seat.
She gestured at Baba to go away. He ignored her.
"So where is our Jaguar and musungu?" Baba asked the taxi-driver, peering into the shabby car as if it might be transformed at any moment.
"What Jaguar? What musungu?" the driver asked, monitoring Maisha's movements.
"The nini Jaguar . . . where is my daughter coming from?" Baba asked him.
"Me, I can't answer you that question," he told Baba, and pointed to his passenger.
She bent in front of the only functioning headlamp to count out the fare. Her trousers were so tight that they had crinkled on her thighs and pockets; she struggled to get to the notes without breaking her artificial nails, which curved inward like talons. Yesterday, her hair had been low-cut, gold, wavy, and crisp from a fresh perm. Now it stood up in places and lay flat in others, revealing patches of her scalp, which was bruised from the chemicals. It was hard to distinguish peeling face powder from damaged skin. To rid herself of an early outbreak of adolescent pimples, she had bleached her face into an uneven lightness. Her eyelids and the skin under her eyes had reacted the worst to the assorted creams she was applying, and tonight her fatigue seemed to have seeped under the burns, swelling her eyes.
The driver could not easily roll up the window. He reached out to guard the food bags, his collateral. Baba brought out a six-inch nail and went for the worn tires. "What dawa have you given my daughter? She always comes home strong."
The driver crumpled immediately, his pleas laden with fright. "Mzee, my name is Karume. Paul Kinyanjui wa Karume. . . . Me, I be an upright Kenyan. I fear God."
"And you want to steal my daughter's bags?"
"No. Please, take the bags. Please," the man begged, trying to restrain Baba from bursting his tires.
"Aiie, Baba. You shame me. Shut up," Maisha said weakly, pushing the money toward the driver.
Baba collected the bags and strolled from the road, his nose full of good smells, until he suddenly broke into a run, to untie the trunk before Maisha reached the shack.
The driver got into his car and was about to put the money into his breast pocket when he started frisking himself. Baba stood watching from the door of the shack. Soon it was as if the driver had soldier ants in his clothes. He unzipped his pockets, then zipped them again quickly, as if the thief were still lurking. He removed his coat, then his shirt, and searched them. He recounted his itinerary to the skies with eyes closed, his index finger wagging at invisible stars. He searched his socks, then he got down on all fours, scouring the wet ground. He dabbed at the sweat, or tears, running down his face. "Where is my money?" he said to Maisha, finally finding his voice. "Haki, it was in my pocket now, now."
Maisha charged forward and screeched at Baba until his stern face crumbled into a sheepish grin. He returned the fat wad of notes, giggling like the twins. The driver thanked her curtly, brushing his clothes with trembling hands. As soon as he'd reconnected the ignition wires to start the car, he creaked off, his horn blaring, his headlamp pointing up and to the left like an unblinking eye.
Maisha staggered into the shack, holding her perilously high heels over her shoulders. Mama had made room for her and the bags, and had sprayed our home with insecticide to discourage mosquitoes. My siblings inside started to cough. As Maisha came in, Mama stood aside like a maid, wringing her hands. I could not look Maisha in the eye and did not know what to say.
"Good night, Maisha," I blurted out.
She stopped, her tired body seized by shock. She searched my parents' faces before tracing the voice to me.
"Who told you to talk?" she said.
"You leave full time, I run away. No school."
"You are going to school," Maisha said. "Tuition is ready."
"Run away? Jigana, shut up," Baba said. "You think you are family head now? 'All are leaders' causes riots. Stupid, mtu dufu! Nobody is leaving."
Maisha glared at us, and we all turned our backs to her as she opened the trunk to take out a blanket. The sweet smell of her Jaguar adventures filled the shack, overpowering the heavy scent of insecticide. Though her arrivals always reminded us that life could be better, tonight I hated the perfume.
"Me and your mama don't want 'full time,' Maisha," Baba said, picking his nails. "We refuse."
"Our daughter, things will get better," Mama said. "Thanks for cancelling our debt!"
"You are welcome, Mama," Maisha said.
Mama's face lit up with surprise, she was so used to being ignored. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Finally, she sobbed the words "Asante, Maisha, asante for everything!" and bowed repeatedly, her hands held before her, as if in prayer. The women looked into each other's eyes in a way I had never seen before. They hugged and held on as if their hands were ropes that tied their two bodies together. In spite of the cold, beads of sweat broke out on Mama's forehead and her fingers trembled as she helped Maisha undo her earrings and necklace. Mama gently lay her down.
I believed that Mama might have been able to persuade her to stay, but then Baba signalled to Mama to keep quiet so that he could be the negotiator.
"Our daughter," Baba said, "you need to rest and think carefully. As our people say, north ama south, east ama west, home the best. . . ."
"Maisha, no school for me!" I said. "I told Mama and Baba. They will return fee to you."
"Jigana, please, please, don't argue," Maisha said. "Even you. You cannot even pity me this night? Just for a few hours?"
My parents sat outside, on the paint containers. I stood by the wall, away from them. I wanted to see Maisha one more time before she disappeared.
Fog brought the dew down, thickening the darkness and turning the security lights into distant halos. We could hear Maisha twist and turn on the floor, cursing the limbs of her siblings and swatting at the mosquitoes. It was as if we were keeping a vigil of her last night with us. We were restless, the silence too heavy for us. Baba mumbled, blaming himself for not going more often to sweep the church premises. He agreed with Mama that if he had swept daily, instead of every other day, St. Joseph the Worker would have bettered our lot. Mama snapped at him, because Baba had always told her that he was not interested in St. Joseph's favor but in a clean place for people to worship. Then Baba blamed her for no longer attending the kanu slum rallies to earn a few shillings.
The night degenerated into growls and hisses. I preferred the distraction of the quarrel to the sound of Maisha's uneasy breathing. When she clapped one more time and turned over, Mama couldn't stand it anymore. She rushed inside, took the mosquito net off the carton, and tied it to the rafters so that my sister was inside it. She sprayed the place again and brought Baby out to breast-feed. The coughing got worse. Baba tore down some of the walls to let in air. Since the wind had subsided, it was of no use. He picked up the door and used it as a big fan to whip air into the shack.
In the morning, Atieno and Otieno came out first. They looked tired, and were sniffling from the insecticide. They stood before us, spraying the morning with yellow urine, sneezing and whimpering.
The streets began to fill. The street kids were up and had scattered into the day like chickens feeding. Some moved about groggily, already drunk on kabire. One recounted his dreams to others at the top of his voice, gesticulating maniacally. Another was kneeling and trembling with prayer, his eyes shut as if he would never open them again. One man screamed, and pointed at two kids, who were holding his wallet. No one was interested. His pocket was ripped to the zipper, leaving a square hole in the front of his trousers. He pulled out his shirt to hide his nakedness, then hurried away, an awkward smile straining his face. There was no sun, only a slow ripening of the sky.
The twins started to wail and to attack Mama's breasts. Baba spanked them hard. They sat on the ground with pent-up tears they were afraid to shed. Naema broke the spell. She came out and sat with me on the containers, grabbed my hands, and tried to cheer me up. "You are too sad, Jigana," she said. "You want to marry the gal? Remember, it's your turn to take Baby out."
"Leave me alone."
"Marry me, then—me am still here." She stuck out her tongue at me. "I'm your sister, too—more beautiful. Guy, do me photo trick . . . smile." She was well rested and had slept off her initial shock at Maisha's departure. Now she was herself again, taunting and talkative, her dimples deep and perfect. "You all must to let Maisha go."
"And you?" I said. "You only listen to Maisha."
"I'm big gal now, guy. Breadwinner. If you want school, I pay for you!"
She blew me a kiss in the wind. Maisha's creams were already lightening her ebony face.
Before I could say anything, Naema erupted with mad laughter and ran into the shack. She almost knocked Baba down as she burst out with the bags of food we had forgotten. She placed them on the ground and tore into them, filling the morning with hope, beckoning all of us on. Baba bit into a chicken wing. Mama took a leg. The rest of us dug into the sour rice, mashed potatoes, salad, hamburgers, pizzas, spaghetti, and sausages. We drank flat Coke and melted ice cream all mixed up. With her teeth, Naema opened bottles of Tusker and Castle beer. At first, we feasted in silence, on our knees, looking up frequently to monitor one another's intake like squirrels. None of us thought to inflate the balloons or open the cards that Maisha had brought.
Then the twins fell over on their backs, laughing and vomiting. As soon as they were done, they went straight back to eating, their mouths pink and white and green from ice cream and beer. We could not get them to keep quiet. A taxi pulled up and Maisha came out of the shack, dragging her trunk behind her. Our parents paused as the driver helped her put it into the car. My mother began to cry. Baba shouted at the streets.
I sneaked inside and poured myself some fresh kabire and sniffed. I got my exercise book from the carton and ripped it into shreds. I brought my pen and pencil together and snapped them, the ink spurting into my palms like blue blood. I got out my only pair of trousers and two shirts and put them on, over my clothes.
I avoided the uniform package. Sitting where the trunk had been, I wept. It was like a newly dug grave. I sniffed hastily, tilting the bottle up and down until the gum came close to my nostrils.
As the car pulled away with Maisha, our mourning attracted kids from the gangs. They circled the food, and I threw away the bottle and joined my family again. We struggled to stuff the food into our mouths, to stuff the bags back inside the shack, but the kids made off with the balloons and the cards.
I hid among a group of retreating kids and slipped away. I ran through traffic, scaled the road divider, and disappeared into Nairobi. My last memory of my family was of the twins burping and giggling. ♦


text:
KSystemLog - System Log Viewer for KDE
KSystemLog is a system log viewer tool for KDE 4.
It is now bundled by default with KDE 4.1 in the KDEAdmin module.
This program is developed for beginner users, who don't know how to find information about their Linux system, and don't know where log files are.
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KSystemLog has the following features :
- Show all logs of your system, grouped by General (Default system log, Authentication, Kernel, X.org...), and optional Services. (Apache, Cups,...)
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- Auto display new lines logged
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- Save, copy to clipboard and printing are of course available.
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- System logs
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In the future, KSystemLog should be fully integrated into the KDE Desktop Environment, to help users not only have a cute desktop, but also a graphical interface to manage and understand their GNU/Linux systems.
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text:
Chicago: Davanti Enoteca Raises the Rustic Pizza Bar in Little Italy
Davanti Enoteca
1359 West Taylor Street, Chicago, IL 60607 (map); 312-226-5550; davantichicago.com
Pizza Style: Thin Crust
Oven: Gas powered stone dome oven
The Skinny: Great toppings and pretty good crust make for some really good pizzas, but the rest of the menu is even better
Price: Pizzas range from $10 to $14
Twenty years ago (this very week), Scott Harris was a 30-year-old Chicago-bred chef just opening Mia Francesa in Lakeview with the help of two partners and some money they scraped together (Harris's share largely coming from what was left of his grandmother's life savings). The place was an instant success, with lines pouring out the door on a nightly basis. Fast forward to today and Mia Francesca is a small empire 24 restaurants strong that puts out solid, if unspectacular, "rustic" Italian food at very reasonable prices. The restaurants are plenty popular and there are massive expansion plans underway, but Harris is focusing his personal time on other projects.
In 2009, Harris embraced a different trend. I like to call it the open-a-shit-ton-of-niche-restaurants-and-if-people-don't-come-shut-them-down-and-open-something-else trend. In less than two years, Harris opened Dough Boys (pizza joint reviewed here), Salatino's (old school Italian), Fat Rosie's (Mexican), Nella Pizzeria Napoletana (since closed, reviewed here), Disotto Enoteca (wine bar and small plates), and two more restaurants that have since closed. He also joined forces with Jimmy Bannos to open charcuterie and small place mecca, The Purple Pig (reviewed here and here). And oh yeah, he's currently got three doughnut shops in the works. But the place that's most in line with his original vision, only a hell of a lot better, is Davanti Enoteca, a mostly small plates Italian restaurant that has lines every bit as long as the original Mia Francesca did 20 years ago.
The Pizza della Terra embodies earthiness. The white pie comes topped with a mess of "foraged" mushrooms along with braised leeks, taleggio cheese, and truffle oil. Everything about this pizza worked really well together. I'm generally not a fan of truffle oil because it tends to dominate, but Executive Chef Jonathan Beatty, a Purple Pig alum, understands the concept of restraint.
The quality and strength of the other toppings also helped out in keeping the truffle oil in check. I have no idea where these mushrooms are foraged from, but they were extremely flavorful. The braised leeks, which were virtually melted, added a touch of sweetness to the toppings. And the tangy tallegio, an under-utilized pizza cheese, stood up to the very flavorful toppings that would have rendered mozzarella useless.
The spicy salami pizza came with fresh mozzarella, tomato sauce, kale, garlic, and chili oil in addition to the excellent charcuterie—a combination that worked really well. The heat in the salami and the chili oil definitely gave this pizza a lip-tingling kick, but nothing too strong. The sauce, made from Carmelina San Marzano tomatoes, brightened up the pizza nicely. All together, it was a successful if fairly basic combination.
The toppings on both pizzas were truly delicious. The crust, while good, was not quite up to par. A bit more crunchy than chewy, it landed on the bland side. Part of that was surely because, in both pizzas I tried, it was topped with some fairly strong flavors. But even when I isolated the crust, I thought there was definitely room for more salt and a more developed yeast flavor.
Even with the less than stellar crust, I was a big fan of everything about Davanti Enoteca. From the interior design of the place (almost all of that wood is refurbished pieces of a 180-year-old barn) to the extremely attentive service, to the variety of rustic food, everything worked well. From a pizza perspective, the only real problem is that everything else I sampled from the menu was actually better. Not a bad problem to have at all.
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text:
The Flinders University Research Program for Disaster Nursing Centre is located at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. The Centre's mission is to enhance research, development and the recognition of the nursing contribution to disaster preparedness and response.
The Centre's goals are to enhance nursing practice through the development of ICNP® with a focus on specific areas of practice where the School of Nursing and Midwifery has expertise. Initially the goals will concentrate on disaster nursing, including strengthening communities through primary nursing care. The centre will be developing an ICNP® catalogue for disaster nursing harmonized with the WADEM and National Library of Medicine-led terminology consensus project. Another goal is to collaborate with ICN and ICNP® Centres for guidance and support in the development of the ICNP® catalogue for disaster nursing. The centre will update the catalogue regularly so as to reflect current concepts and developments in disaster nursing.
Flinders University Research Program for Disaster Nursing Centre
Flinders University, Adelaide
GPO Box 2100
Adelaide SA 5001
Dr Lidia Mayner
Associate Professor
College of Nursing and Heath Sciences
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text:
Brave New World (Bloom's Notes)
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Product Details
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About the Author
Hometown:New York, New York and New Haven, Connecticut
Date of Birth:July 11, 1930
Date of Death:October 14, 2019
Place of Birth:New York, New York
Education:B.A., Cornell University, 1951; Ph.D., Yale University, 1955
Read an Excerpt
Brave New World
By Aldous Huxley
Chelsea House PublicationsCopyright © 1996 Aldous Huxley
All right reserved.
Chapter One
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin fight glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The fight was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.
"And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room."
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absentminded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D.H.C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.
"Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently -- though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
"To-morrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, "you'll be settling down to serious work. You won't have time for generalities. Meanwhile . . ."
Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse's mouth into the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad.
Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn't arise; in this year of stability, A.F. 632, it didn't occur to you to ask it.
"I shall begin at the beginning," said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. "These," he waved his hand, "are the incubators." And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. "The week's supply of ova. Kept," he explained, "at blood heat; whereas the male gametes," and here he opened another door, "they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes." Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.
Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction- -"the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months' salary"; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa -- at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents reexamined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky's Process.
"Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks.
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a fall-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.
"Essentially," the D.H.C. concluded, "bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding."
Responds by budding. The pencils were busy.
He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another rack-fall was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed...Continues...
Excerpted from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Copyright © 1996 by Aldous Huxley. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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LONDON (Reuters) - Fifty percent off the first three months of cancer medicine. Buy a course of eye treatment and get extra injections free. A money-back guarantee if your erectile dysfunction pills don't work.
"Special offers" on prescription medicines are all the rage in state-backed healthcare systems across Europe as governments struggle to balance the books.
Such money-off and pay-for-performance schemes are being fuelled by both austerity budgets and competition from cheap generics, which are forcing drugmakers to be more inventive in showing that their expensive new medicines still offer value for money.
The complex schemes do nothing for transparency - something the European Union advocates in medicine pricing - but they often suit both governments and companies, with the latter keen to avoid commercially damaging cuts in list prices.
"Global companies do not want their list prices to drop because that will have a knock-on effect as different countries increasingly reference each other over drug prices," said Brian Godman, a researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
"The only way round that is for companies to enter into some form of arrangement with the authorities," according to Godman, who works with various health authorities across Europe researching drug pricing and reimbursement options.
Reference pricing is a growing headache for drugmakers because Greece and other indebted EU states are slashing the prices they pay for drugs, in some cases by more than a quarter, triggering a downward spiral internationally as other countries follow suit.
As a result, Europe's already fragmented pharmaceutical market is becoming increasingly opaque, although one thing is clear: the pressure on medicine prices across the continent is not going to end any time soon.
Drug companies are already hurting, with GlaxoSmithKline, for example, cutting its sales outlook for 2012 in July due to lower European prices.
Many of today's complicated pricing arrangements have their origins in pioneering work by Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which was set up in 1999 to systematically assess the cost-effectiveness of new drugs.
Its refusal to accept some pricey products has angered patients, and the tough line has forced drugmakers to find novel ways to make medicines affordable - either by offering discounts or making payment conditional on measurable benefits.
It is an approach now being adopted from Spain to Poland, resulting in a patchwork of schemes that can cause frustration among doctors struggling to assess the true cost of treatments.
"It is spreading pretty quickly," said Patrick Flochel, global pharmaceuticals leader at Ernst & Young. "There is a big push everywhere with healthcare reforms."
Britain remains the leader, but Italy has emerged as the second biggest market for so-called risk-sharing schemes, which have been embraced enthusiastically by the Italian Medicines Agency. One reason for this is that drug spending in Italy is tied by law to total healthcare expenditure.
Cancer drugs are a major focus, reflecting the dilemma posed by costly new treatments that may help some patients but often only extend life by only a few months.
Cancer accounts for 15 of the 25 special schemes detailed on NICE's website whereby drugs companies can offer patients ways to access high-cost drugs. It also dominates in Italy, where arrangements typically call for provision of cancer drugs at a 50 percent discount for the first two or three months.
For companies, getting the value proposition right in cancer is a delicate balancing act - and it can only get trickier.
Roche, the world's biggest cancer drugmaker, recently pushed into new territory with the U.S. launch of Perjeta, a new breast cancer drug designed to be used with its existing product Herceptin. It is the first example of a costly targeted cancer combination therapy from a single company.
The result is a treatment that is effective but extremely expensive, with a typical 18-month course of Perjeta plus Herceptin costing approximately $188,000.
Despite that price tag, Perjeta is winning sales in the United States. Europe, however, where the drug has yet to be launched, is likely to prove a lot more challenging.
Roche - which already has German and Italian schemes that cap the maximum price per patient of Avastin, another cancer medicine - will have to weigh more novel pricing schemes as such new combinations hit the market.
"The 10,000-foot view is that we just follow the science and do what's right for patients, and then figure out a commercial model that can work," Hal Barron, head of global product development, said in a recent interview.
Others have cut different kinds of deals.
GlaxoSmithKline struck an agreement with NICE in 2010 offering Britain's health service a straight discount plus an additional rebate if its new kidney cancer drug Votrient failed to match Pfizer's Sutent in a head-to-head trial.
To GSK's relief, Votrient was as good as the Pfizer rival when results were finally reported at a conference last month.
Novartis, meanwhile, pays for extra treatment with its eye drug Lucentis if British patients need more than 14 injections, while in Denmark various schemes tie payments to results for several drugs, including erectile dysfunction pills.
Tying payments to clinical results is an enticing idea for payers, though these schemes are complex to administer.
"There are genuine risk-sharing schemes, where there is real payment according to performance, and then there are a whole host of schemes which are essentially price cuts," said Gary Johnson, managing director of consultancy Inpharmation. "It's fair to say the price-cut type scheme is probably dominant."
Editing by Will Waterman


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