text:
Teen pot use rate climbs to new high
WASHINGTON (AP) -- More teens are smoking pot.
A new survey of young people by The Partnership at Drugfree.org says nearly 1 in 10 teens light up at least 20 or more times a month. The group also says abuse of prescription medicine may be easing a bit among young people in grades 9 through 12, but still remains high.
Partnership President Steve Pasierb says the mindset among parents is that it's just a little weed or a few pills, and it's no biggie.
"Parents are talking about cocaine and heroin, things that scare them," and not prescription drugs and marijuana, Pasierb said.
The group says the use of harder drugs -- cocaine and methamphetamine -- has stabilized in recent years, but the use of marijuana grew from 19 percent in 2008 to 27 percent last year.
Pasierb also says the percentage of teens smoking pot 20 or more times a month has jumped from 5 percent in 2008 to 9 percent last year.


text:
It appears our peers at Silicon Alley Insider got sucked into some sort of space-time vortex, tumbling out in a world without Google TV. But they've made it back! And they're here to spread the news: Google won't do it.
I'm still not exactly sure what this hurried warning means — is Google afraid in this parallel universe? Is Google a bakery in this bizarro world, and therefore unable to create an internet TV platform? SAI, if you can hear us through the multiverse, please clarify! [SAI]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Update: I'm hearing that trying to comment while using IE6 crashes the browser. My best suggestion is to try a different browser, but if you really can't do that and are dying to comment you can e-mail comments to me (katesblog at gmail), and I'll post them.
I'm still working on a final header design, but how are we all finding the rest of this layout? Readable? Good enough?
I've been dying to have a 3-column layout for ages, and this is the first one they've put out with a customizable header that I mostly like. If anybody's having trouble with it, though, let me know.


text:
They held a pre-launch event in the form of a mini concert at the Little Theatre, Taman Ismail Marzuki Jakarta.
In the mini concert, the beach wearing a mini skirt as she sat looking at singing her CD. Here's photos at concerts Tantri Kotak.
Tantri is the vocalist kotak Band, was born in Tangerang, August 9, 1989. Tantri original name Tantri Syalindri Ichlasari, and has started her career as a vocalist Ares Band from South Jakarta.
Tantri Kotak. "I refused to drink really cold water," said the girl was named the original Tantristalindri in Kebon Jeruk, Tuesday (19 / 1) night.
The reason is, cold water can speed Tantri inflammation of the throat exposed. "Especially if I'm more tired of plus and drink cold water so the effect is my recurrent strep throat," he continued.
Chanter song 'Action' is also said that he was difficult to exercise. "I was told to exercise if a little difficult, but if cigarettes and coffee I do not eat," he said.
In addition to abstinence consume cold water, apparently Tantri also consult with the band vocalist Gigi, Armand Maulana. "I often consult each kang Arman, he solutions that until now I eight hours of sleep a day. So the difference if a gig out of children in the street I went straight to bed," she said with a smile.
Tantri also claimed to have lost his voice, but it can be overcome. "The way it's been drinking warm water, eight-hour rest and eat and Praise my voice back," she closed.


text:
Even while we're driving the 991 generation 2012 Porsche 911, the company is releasing yet another last iteration of the 997 as it continues to build blitzkrieging race cars on the familiar platform.
Designed to compete in Le Mans, this GT3 RSR uses the 997's 4.0-liter six-cylinder, here making 460 HP. An all-new wide-body aerokit completes the roughly $700,000 package. The company plans to use the 997 as a race car until later next year or early 2013 when a new 991-based model is introduced.
If you can't swing the $700K, there's always the similarly-powered Porsche 911 GT3 4.0RS. Le Mans only comes around once a year, but pretending like you're running Le Sarthe is something you can do every day.


text:
Whatever others may have thought of the novels of Theodor Fontane—and the long-standing consensus is that they are, as one critic has noted, "the most completely achieved of any written between Goethe and Thomas Mann"—Fontane himself clearly thought that they were pretty unexciting. To his mind, "L'Adultera" (1882), one of the studies of tormented heroines on which his present-day reputation rests, was primarily about "the circumstantial and the scenery." He characterized "The Poggenpuhls" (1896), the story of an aristocratic family frantically maneuvering to extract itself from genteel poverty, as a book that "is not a novel and has no subject-matter." In May of 1898, a few months before he died, at the age of seventy-eight, he wrote a letter rather wearily describing "The Stechlin," the unusually "pudgy" tome (most of his fiction is bracingly short) that was the last work he lived to see published:**{: .small}
An old man dies and two young people get married,—that is just about all that happens in 500 pages. Of complications and solutions, of conflicts of the heart and conflicts in general, of excitement and surprises there is virtually nothing. . . . Naturally I don't claim that this is the best way of writing a contemporary novel but it is the one that is called for.
Even Fontane's characters are plagued by a certain anxiety about having nothing very exciting to talk about. In "Cécile," an 1887 novel about a good woman trying in vain to bury a bad past, a group of tourists in the Harz mountains are taken around a medieval castle; unnerved by a visitor's embarrassment that there's not much to look at, the tour guide "rapidly resumed his lecture in the hope of compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible items of interest."
Compensating by narrative skill for the lack of visible interest is an excellent way to sum up both the strangeness and the beauty of Fontane's fiction. The topography of his plots is admittedly as flat and monotonous as the notoriously bland landscape of his Prussian homeland, Brandenburg (about which he lovingly wrote in a multivolume work). Most of "Cécile" is devoted to the excursions and the chitchat of those hapless tourists; there's some gossiping, a halfhearted flirtation, and then everyone goes home to Berlin—the revelation of Cécile's sexually compromised early life arrives agonizingly late in the novel, and the dénouement, as often in Fontane, is swift, efficient, and a little surprising. In "Jenny Treibel" (1892), a wry social comedy with darker political overtones, a young woman makes a play for the son of the self-absorbed title character, one of the nouveaux-riches bourgeois—a class much loathed by Fontane—who dominated German society after Bismarck unified the nation. After the girl has done a good deal of scheming, her plan simply fizzles out. (Fontane loves to create plots in which the characters' own plots never quite work; for all the Poggenpuhls' agonized machinations, what saves them in the end is a fortuitous event.)
And in the 1895 novel "Effi Briest," considered by many to be Fontane's masterpiece, the suffocating dreariness of the young heroine's provincial existence is brilliantly conveyed precisely because the author isn't afraid to be dreary himself; by the time you've got through a few dozen pages in the Baltic town of Kessin, accompanied by Effi's excruciatingly correct, "frosty as a snowman" husband, you'll feel like breaking down in tears, too. Fontane's taste for withholding action, or at least delaying it improbably, is evident in the novel's most famous feature, a structural gambit of daring subtlety: the frustrated heroine's brief affair with a womanizing officer is never actually described—and is only discovered many years later, when Effi and her husband have settled comfortably into their marriage. (His pursuit of revenge is thus rendered all the more appalling—an effective vehicle for condemning ludicrous codes of masculine "honor.")
When "excitement and surprises" do occur in a Fontane novel, it's usually when the book is nearly over. The death, or suicide, or marriage, or resignation in the face of overwhelming social or familial pressure is a culminating little bump in the otherwise long, smooth, and highly scenic road. (He features more suicides than any other German writer of his century; even these are characteristically quiet.)
At first glance, it's hard to reconcile the sparseness of Fontane's plots, the way he prefers to linger over what he calls "the circumstantial," with the extravagant emotions his work has provoked in so many critics and writers over the years. (Thomas Mann: "No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue.") The key lies in his understated narrative style, in his paradoxically powerful "discretion," as some critics have called it: a gift for obliquity, for knowing what to leave out, and above all for letting the reader "overhear" the speech of his characters, rather than paraphrasing it for us—the last being a particularly effective alternative to the psychologizing observations of an omniscient narrator. It is this skill at delineating character through dialogue—one early scholar of Fontane's work calls a scene in "Effi Briest" "the greatest conversation scene in the German novel"—which creates the sense of intimacy that his novels have, the sense that you're in there with his characters: the attractive but somehow desperate wives, yearning for recognition in a society dominated by masculine and military codes; the minor nobles, hardworking seamstresses, and disdained intellectuals trying to keep their dignity in a world destabilized by the materialism and the militarism of Bismarck's Second Reich.
Fontane's courteous technique is ideally suited to his rueful wisdom. In his fiction, love doesn't triumph over class distinctions ("On Tangled Paths"), individual suffering inevitably yields to hard social and political realities ("The Poggenpuhls," "Effi Briest," "Cécile," "The Stechlin"), and climactic reconciliations don't quite take ("Irretrievable"). He's the great novelist of what you might call dignified defeat; his characters' failures outline a muted critique of politics and society. This preference for suggestive description over ambitious prescription set Fontane apart from other late-nineteenth-century realists. In an 1883 letter to his daughter—part of the voluminous correspondence that established him as one of the century's great letter writers—he remarked that he would have become a Turgenev or a Zola had he not been far more interested in individuals than in society as a whole.
Long revered on the Continent, Fontane has had a hard time catching on in this country. Although he lived to old age and published extensively from his youth until the time of his death, no major work of his enjoyed a complete English translation until 1964. It may be that, caught between Goethe's protean genius and Mann's fin-de-siècle neuroticism, Fontane simply isn't what we think of when we think of what a great German author ought to be. (If Mann has the temperament of a patient, Fontane has that of a physician. Ours is an age of patients.) The recent publication of two of his most delicate and beautiful novels will, with any luck, help turn the tide. One is the bittersweet romance, from 1888, "On Tangled Paths" (translated by Peter James Bowman; Angel Books; $21.95); the other is a curiously gentle tragedy called "Irretrievable," first published in 1891 (translated by Douglas Parmée; New York Review Books; $15.95). Together, they convey the distinctive allure of an author who prided himself above all on his "finesses" and whose two salient traits—a severe reserve and a profound empathy—stemmed from an unusual ability, as Mann put it, to see "at least two sides to everything in life."
Fontane himself was a mass of contradictions. He was a product of the middle class attracted to the aristocracy, a German patriot who admired England and came to detest Prussian militarism, a writer besotted with the "Romantic-Fantastic" who nonetheless had a zeal for collecting the hard facts of history, a liberal who spent much of his career working for an ultra-rightist newspaper, a well-known balladeer, a dogged journalist, an admired travel writer, and a prolific military historian whose extraordinary talent for writing fiction ripened only late in a life that had many more than two sides.
He was born on the next-to-last day of 1819 in Neuruppin, a military garrison town northwest of Berlin, to parents descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Prussia in the seventeenth century. Both his mother and his father, a rather eccentric apothecary, had firsthand experience of the Napoleonic wars, a national trauma that exercised a hold on the writer's imagination all his life. (His first novel, "Before the Storm," published in 1878, was a historical epic set during the wars, an attempt at a kind of Prussian "War and Peace.") From Fontane senior, the future writer received a peculiar but effective education: the father enjoyed reënacting great moments from the wars with his young son. At least some of Fontane's interesting bifurcations, political as well as temperamental, may be attributed to his mismatched parents: his father the Prinzipienverächter, the hater of rigid principle, his mother a Prinzipienreiter, a stickler for principles.
At sixteen, Fontane finished with his formal education and apprenticed as an apothecary. But his literary tastes and ambitions were already in evidence: he published his first story (about a quasi-incestuous brother-sister relationship) when he was not quite twenty, and in his mid-twenties he began publishing ballads and verses. In 1844, he was invited to join a Berlin literary club called Tunnel Over the Spree, and made the first of what would be a number of enthusiastic trips to England. (He had learned English by reading, and had translated "Hamlet" into German.) In 1848, that year of political upheaval throughout Europe, he had manned the anti-government barricades in Berlin, but his relationship to liberal politics, like everything else about him, was far from straightforward. The grandson of a courtier of the Prussian Queen Luise, for whom he maintained a lifelong reverence, and an on-again, off-again admirer of Bismarck, whose speeches he loved to read over breakfast (and whose style he compared, favorably, to Shakespeare's), Fontane had an abiding admiration for the values of the old Prussian nobility, the Junkertum: simplicity, honor, and directness. As the scholar Alan Bance has pointed out, these values surface in Fontane's greatest female characters, who often struggle to uphold them against the crassness of men, society, the new Prussian state.
By the time Fontane was thirty, he had decided to abandon the apothecary and embrace a life of writing. In 1850, he married Emilie Rouanet-Kummer, another descendant of French Huguenots, and soon afterward took a job in a government press office. A year later, when the first of the couple's seven children was born—four lived to adulthood—Fontane, eager for some financial stability, queasily accepted a job writing about English affairs for Die Kreutzzeitung, a government-run newspaper. ("I sold myself to the reaction for thirty pieces of silver a month," he wrote a friend.) He was in England for several months in 1852, and in 1855 he began a three-year stint there; his job was to plant stories favorable to the Prussian state in the British press. He spent a great deal of time going to the theatre, and—prompted by his impassioned reading of Walter Scott and Robert Burns, and English and Scottish ballads, all faddishly popular among Germans in the mid-nineteenth century—taking long walks in the Scottish countryside. These walks partly inspired his splendidly discursive and erudite "Rambles in the March of Brandenburg," whose combination of sentimental enthusiasm and the amateur's besotted aptitude for historical anecdote and geographical and zoological minutiae suggests a kind of proto-Patrick Leigh Fermor. (In an affectionate study of Fontane, the historian Gordon A. Craig retraced the author's steps.)
Fontane returned to Berlin in 1859 and (after briefly considering a post at the court of the mad Ludwig II of Bavaria) set to work on "Rambles," which occupied him for the next two decades. But this was also the period in which Prussian political and military ambition exploded, culminating in three major wars—against Denmark, in 1864; Austria, in 1866; and France, in 1870—and the unification of Germany under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns. Fontane published three major, exhaustively researched studies, one for each war. Contemptuous of "making books out of books," he conducted extensive interviews and visited various battlefields, sometimes before hostilities ceased; at one point, he was captured by French troops, and Bismarck had to intervene to get him released. Fontane later wrote a book about the experience. Despite his historian's admiration for Prussian warcraft, Fontane came to speak out with increasing vigor against the chauvinism, jingoism, and triumphalism that characterized so much contemporary writing about the wars. "The mere glorification of the military," he later wrote, "without moral content and elevated aim, is nauseating."
At the end of the eighteen-sixties, as he reached his fiftieth birthday, Fontane quit his post at the conservative, God-and-country Kreuzzeitung. (He waited to submit his resignation until the long-suffering Emilie—who wrote out the fair copies of each of his books and never quite believed that he would succeed as a writer—left for a vacation.) Soon afterward, he jumped at the opportunity to replace the recently deceased theatre critic for the liberal Vossische Zeitung: certainly because of the promise of a regular income but also, undoubtedly, because it provided an outlet for his love of the theatre. His criticism—conversational yet informed, often crustily amusing (he once wrote of a production of "Macbeth" that all the roles were played badly except that of the rain, which beat convincingly against the walls of the castle)—further increased his fame. He remained happily on the job for the next twenty years.Many critics have looked to various aspects of Fontane's life—not least, his French ancestry—for clues to a style that was so fresh, so lifelike: so different, in a word, from that of many of his contemporaries. (The author's relationship to his Frenchness was typically bifurcated: he liked to talk about his "essentially southern-French nature," but also called knowing French "a great virtue, which I do not possess.") But it seems clear that he owed much to his deep love of, and appreciation for, the theatre—instilled, you suspect, during those play-acting sessions with his father. His distinctive way of letting his characters reveal themselves through monologue and dialogue (or letters, or poems—anything that lets them speak for themselves) betrays an intuitive feel for the theatrical. "Jenny Treibel" opens with the title character, an arriviste with grand dynastic ambitions, bustling into the home of her childhood sweetheart, now a colorful old professor whose daughter, Corinna, will soon threaten Frau Treibel's plans:
My dear Corinna, how nicely you know how to do all this and how pretty it is here, so cool and fresh—and the beautiful hyacinths! Of course they don't go very well with these oranges, but that doesn't matter, it looks so nice. . . . And now, thoughtful as you are, you're even adjusting a pillow for me! But forgive me, I don't like to sit on the sofa; it's so soft and you always sink in so deeply. I'd rather sit over here in the armchair and look at those dear old faces there.
Fontane's novels are filled with characters who talk and talk and, in so doing, reveal themselves more damningly than an omniscient narrator could. Can you doubt that Corinna and Jenny will clash? Do you doubt who will prevail?
The years of theatre criticism, of having to articulate his responses to others' writing, were surely crucial to Fontane's evolution as a novelist, strengthening his sense of his own aesthetic responses, his own powers as a writer and thinker. "I have an unconditional confidence in the rightness of my feeling," he once wrote. "I am wholly free from veneration of names or the cult of literary heroes." An arresting passage in a collection of his critical writings suggests where Fontane's veneration did, in fact, lie. He recalled how he would sometimes go into one of the city's many Gothic churches to clear his head after a matinée. One day, following a particularly unsatisfactory performance of "Iphigenia in Tauris," he wrote of something that had affected him tremendously: "Hidden behind a pillar, I saw a man crying, which shook me more than three acts of tragedy."
It's a fascinating moment, because the best of Fontane's mature fiction is filled with eerie minor epiphanies that have a powerful effect on a given character—and on the reader. In "Effi Briest," the apparition in a window of the teen-aged heroine's twin playmates, at the moment she is to be betrothed to the much older nobleman her mother has chosen for her, seems to symbolize the poignant tension between the girlish "child of nature" and the social role she is still unprepared to play—a tension that ultimately destroys her. In "On Tangled Paths," the lower-class heroine, a seamstress involved in an impossible love affair, sees a young girl washing pots in the river, a vision that somehow irrefutably conveys to her the fact that there will be no way to flout social conventions.
Such moments represent a crucial facet of Fontane's art. He liked to say that he had a well-developed sense of Tatsächlichkeit, "factuality"; for him, the trick of literature was to "transfigure" everyday facts into something elevated, imbued with Rätsel and Halbdunkel, "mystery" and "twilight." ("A piece of bread . . . is poetry," he once wrote.) He disdained Turgenev—interestingly, Bismarck's favorite novelist—for failing to transcend Tatsächlichkeit, for having merely a "photographic apparatus in eye and soul." In the novels of Fontane, apparitions like the one he beheld in the church that day, essentially theatrical in nature, are instances of "facts" elevated into memorable art.
As he was nearing sixty, Fontane made the extraordinary announcement that he was ready to begin a new career—as a novelist. "I am only at the beginning," he wrote his publisher, Wilhelm Hertz, in 1879, with a touching combination of bravado and trepidation. "There is nothing behind me, everything is ahead, which is both fortune and misfortune at the same time." As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. For the next two decades, he and Emilie lived at 134c Potsdamer Strasse, where he produced the seventeen novels that marked him as a great writer.
It's not surprising that Fontane's first novel was a work of historical fiction: partly the factuality of the past, partly the twilight mystery of literary art. Some readers at the time found "Before the Storm" a disconcertingly becalmed work: the author's languid eavesdropping was, they found, ill suited to a subject that raised expectations of high color and excitement. ("Will they sit down at the table again? Will they go to sleep again?" one of Fontane's many correspondents wrote of the characters in that "silly" book.) It took Fontane a while to find the proper vehicle for his talent for depicting everyday realities imbued with the poetic—ordinary people reaching for (and, as often as not, failing to attain) transcendence. That vehicle, as the literary world soon discovered, was women.
As is the case with certain male writers famous for their female characters—Euripides, Tennessee Williams—women in Fontane's work often represent energies and emotions for which there is no room in the world created by men: the world of Realpolitik and bombastic officialdom, of matrimonial hypocrisy and erotic double standards. This is why, as with those other authors, Fontane's women are often both impressively self-aware and memorably broken. "If there is a person who has a passion for women," Fontane confided in some friends in 1894, "and loves them almost twice as much when he encounters their weaknesses and confusions, the whole enchantment of their womanhood in full flight, that person is I." It would be hard to think of a better way to describe the figures on whom the author's reputation as a master of characterization and delicate plotting is based. Such weaknesses and confusions, the feminine enchantment in full flight—in both their comic and their tragic expressions—make "On Tangled Paths" and "Irretrievable" small masterworks.
"On Tangled Paths" ("Irrungen, Wirrungen" in the original, a rhyme nicely finessed in an earlier translation, entitled "Delusions, Confusions") has a typically unfussy plot. Lene Nimptsch is a pretty young seamstress in love with Botho von Rienäcker, a dashing officer from an aristocratic family; he loves her. They spend time together; he teases her foster mother and the neighbors; the couple make an overnight excursion on the Spree. (Readers weren't the only ones outraged by Fontane's unsensationalistic depiction of the casual sexual relationship in the newspaper where the novel was first serialized. "Won't this dreadful whore's tale soon be over?" one of the paper's owners protested.) Eventually—and it takes some time—Botho's mother reminds him that he must marry a suitable girl. This he does, reluctantly at first: she's an airhead and a chatterbox. (Fontane just lets her rattle on.) Lene, for her part, ends up marrying a nice enough man. At the novel's close, both young people have accepted their fates, though not without complex emotions: "Our hearts have room for all sorts of contradictions." That could be Fontane's motto.So there aren't many visible items of interest; the immense pleasures of the novel lie in the author's cool-headed approach to what, in other hands, could have been a forgettable melodrama. As often in Fontane, the drama is internal, and, at first, internally generated; when the "excitement" happens—in this case, the intervention of Botho's mother (in a letter)—it's just an external correlative to something already present in one or more characters. The love affair in "On Tangled Paths" is shadowed from the start by the practical-minded Lene's unblinking understanding that a romance like theirs cannot last:
"One day I'll find you've flown away. . . . Don't shake your head; it's true, what I say. You love me and you're true to me—at least my love makes me childish and vain enough to imagine it. But fly away you will, I can see that very clearly. . . . You love me but you're weak-willed. We can't change that. All handsome men are weak-willed, and ruled by stronger force. . . . What is it? Well, either it's your mother or people's talk or circumstances. Or maybe all three."
It's a remarkable speech to encounter in the mouth of a young woman in a late-nineteenth-century novel. Botho, as it turns out, is weak-willed, and bows to his mother's demands. What saves him, and the novel—it's an element that makes for a more stimulating richness of perspective, and makes it harder to "blame" any given character—is that he is ultimately as realistic as Lene, if rather more prone to self-justification. "Do I mean to marry Lene? No. Have I promised her I would? No. Does she expect it? No. Or will parting be any easier for us if I defer it? No, no, and no again."
Lene suffers less than some of Fontane's women because of her class—because her horizon of expectations is narrower than that of Effi or of Cécile, those unhappy wives of high-ranking husbands. Like them, she's astute about the limitations that the world sets on her ambitions, but the ambitions are more realistic and the limitations more relaxed. The pleasure of "On Tangled Paths" is not the thrill of watching a female character struggle against social convention, as so many great heroines of nineteenth-century literature do, but the perhaps more complicated pleasure of recognizing a character who knows when to give in.
Still, a sadness hangs in the air, owing in no small part to the innumerable touches the author employs to build up his subtle but affecting portrait of a young woman who is ignorant but not stupid, romantic but not foolish. (She's the inverse of Emma Bovary—more interesting, too.) At one point, Lene uncomprehendingly examines the English captions on two prints in the room where she's staying with her lover—"Washington Crossing the Delaware" and "The Last Hour at Trafalgar." Fontane takes this casual moment and turns it, wonderfully, into a symbol of why the relationship can't last: "But she could do no more than combine the letters into syllables, and, trivial as the matter was, it nonetheless gave her a pang by bringing home to her the gulf that separated her from Botho." The book is filled with comparable moments of small facts transfigured into something magical.
"Irretrievable" takes the same elements—an appealing man, charming but weak; a clear-eyed, practical-minded woman, perhaps a little pessimistic; a relationship that can't go anywhere; resignation in the face of life's realities—and, as its stark title suggests, turns it into a tragedy. It's one of Fontane's most idiosyncratic achievements, and certainly one of the finest literary autopsies of a foundering relationship. (The New York Review Books edition is a reprint of a 1964 translation, more fluent and natural but more prone to infelicities than a new translation, "No Way Back," published last year by Angel Books.)
The novel has an odd, misty, rather "Pelléas et Mélisande" atmosphere that has much to do with its unusual setting. It takes place not in Berlin, or even in Germany proper, but in Copenhagen and in the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, a territory whose vexed history—it was the subject of a long series of ownership disputes between Denmark and Prussia, finally and forcibly resolved by the Danish War of 1864—serves as a metaphor for the condition of the main characters' marriage. The Schleswig-Holstein question, the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston once quipped, was so complicated that only three people understood it, of whom one, the Prince Consort, was dead; another, a foreign-office clerk, had gone mad; and the third, Palmerston himself, had forgotten the whole thing. There's always a background buzz of politics in Fontane's novels—a geopolitical correlative for the emotional drama.
Unlike the couple in "On Tangled Paths," this pair have no obvious impediments to happiness. Both are aristocratic, and they have in fact been long and happily married, with two attractive teen-aged children, all living in a replica of a Greek temple on the Baltic coast. Count Helmut Holk is charming and has many "likeable qualities," and would, his wife can't help thinking at the beginning of the novel, "certainly be an ideal husband—if he had any ideals at all of his own." The countess, Christine, is beautiful, younger, a bit too dogmatic and over-principled—as she herself recognizes. When the author deftly alludes to Christine's attitude to smoking—something "which the countess did not really allow indoors, although she never forbade it"—you have all the information you need about the passive-aggressiveness that will sink the marriage. In the erosive contest between the two spouses, it's hard not to feel the ghosts of Fontane's quarrelling parents, the Prinzipienverächter and the Prinzipienreiter.
Fontane charts the course of the Holks' marital decline in his usual desultory way—there's a slow accumulation of talk and events, and then that climactic fillip. The couple bicker about which schools to send the children to; Helmut, suddenly called upon to fulfill his duty as courtier, goes away to Copenhagen for some weeks, where he flirts inconclusively with his landlady's daughter and, more conclusively, with Ebba ("Eve"), a rather spiky lady-in-waiting to the elderly Princess whom they both serve. He doesn't write often enough to Christine; there's a fire in the castle where the Princess is holding court (no one gets hurt); in a fit of midlife foolishness, Helmut tells Christine it's all over and proposes to the lady-in-waiting, who then tells him off ("You're always sinning against the most elementary rules of the game"); eventually, he comes home to his wife. The moment of narrative "excitement" takes place five pages from the end of the book. As Holk's scheming landlady says of her daughter's wayward life, "It's something of a love-story but it's not a proper love-story."
As in "On Tangled Paths," the pleasure of the novel lies in its subtlety—in this case, a discreet exploration of marital psychology. Here again, trouble starts within and, like a dry rot, eats its way outward. The novel begins with one of Fontane's unemphatic epiphanies: in the course of an ordinary domestic conversation one day, Christine realizes that the terrain of her marriage has, somehow, shifted under her feet. "In spite of having the best of husbands whom she loved as much as he loved her, she yet did not possess that peace for which she longed; in spite of all their love, his easy-going temperament was no longer in harmony with her melancholy." The symbol of the fatal disharmony is the crumbling family vault, which Christine, her thoughts already in the grave, longs to rebuild in a grand way. Fontane's plots refer with striking frequency to cemeteries, graves, burials, funerals—even ghosts.The haunted perception of imminent emotional failure—which, typically, the more sentimental male character resists at first—colors everything that follows in precisely the way the bad faith of a crumbling relationship poisons even the most innocent exchanges. This phenomenon is, indeed, one that the novel evokes in harrowing detail. ("In my correspondence with Christine," Helmut heatedly writes to her brother, who is also his close friend, "I have never been able to strike the right note. As soon as one finds oneself suspected, it is very difficult to maintain the right tone and attitude.") And, as in "On Tangled Paths," Fontane gives us access to the kind of tortured emotional self-justification that unhappy lovers are prone to. Here is Helmut, "interpreting" the fact that he wasn't killed in the fire:
If all my feelings had been wrong all this time, punishment would have overtaken us and Ebba and I would have fallen unconscious and been suffocated and never found our way to safety. And if I understood Christine's last letter properly, she also feels that this will be the best thing for us to do. All those happy days we spent together mustn't be forgotten, of course not . . . but part we must and I think it is our duty to do so.
Masculine self-delusion masquerading as duty is a favorite target of Fontane's. (Holk's monologue is a grotesque inversion of Lene's coolly self-aware speech in "On Tangled Paths.") Here it's precisely the reagent necessary to ignite Christine's dangerous penchant for self-righteousness, with predictable results.
Well, not quite predictable: "Irretrievable" lingers in an unexpected cul-de-sac before it realizes the promise of its title. But even after the couple ostensibly reconcile, there's really nothing left; by the end of this mild yet anguished work, all that remains of the marriage is a lifeless residue of thwarted yearning—"nothing but the willingness to be happy." As so often in the fiction of Theodor Fontane, that's not enough to save the characters, but it's a marvellous subject for a novel. ♦


text:
I know this thread is months old but I finally decided to give Gnome 3 a go. It took some work to get all of the packages installed as they are still masked, but once I finally got that and Xorg to play nice I was able to get into gnome. I have to say that it's actually pretty nice. The hot corner works well for me and they have the same window placement options that Windows 7 has. (Bump top of screen for full screen, bump left/right side for half screen)
The bad news is that multiple monitor support isn't quite there yet. I wasn't able to setup the two monitors as independent workspaces so full screen isn't an option as it will stretch across both monitors. This also seems to break the bottom panel on my configuration so at first I didn't have a way to reopen windows that were minimized. Enter the best part about Gnome 3, gnome-shell-extensions. You can add the package to get some of the extensions, but there is also a website https://extensions.gnome.org/ which has hundreds of extensions to help customize the desktop the way you want it. It works incredibly well, just find the extension, turn it on, and it will automatically download and install it for you. I added Panel-docklet S and was able to configure a bottom panel that shows all of my open windows as well as have icons for my favorites. If you want to quickly turn on/off extensions you can use the gnome-tweak-tool.
Overall I'd say Gnome 3 is very usable once you add a couple of extensions and it's actually a bit nicer than 2 once it's customized. If anything it makes me more excited to give Windows 8 a try as there are a lot of similarities between them.


text:
But little besides politics emerged from the session, held in the Senate's made-for-television hearing room. Democrats, who hold majority power in the Senate and are trying to keep it, supported Sybrina Fulton's call. Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), said the matter should be left to the states that passed the laws.
Said Cruz: "This is not about politicking. This is not about inflaming racial tensions. This is about the right of everyone to protect themselves and protect their families." Cruz made reference to statistics that, he said, show that African Americans cite stand-your-ground laws in self-defense at least as often as whites.
Martin's mother told the panel that she attended the hearing so senators can "at least put a face with what has happened with this tragedy."
"I just wanted to come here to . . . let you know how important it is that we amend this stand your ground, because it certainly did not work in my case," Fulton said, speaking without consulting prepared remarks. "The person that shot and killed my son is walking the streets today. This law does not work."
Lucia Holman McBath, the mother of Jordan Russell Davis, implored the Senate to resolve the nation's debate. Her 17-year-old son was shot and killed nearly one year ago in Jacksonville, Fla., when Michael David Dunn, 46, allegedly opened fire on a Dodge Durango with four teenagers inside after complaining about their loud music and saying he saw a gun and thus a threat. Authorities never found a gun in the vehicle, the Florida Times-Union reported. Dunn's trial is set for next year.


text:
PORTSMOUTH — With just about three weeks before the big celebration, Pro Portsmouth continues to fundraise for First Night® Portsmouth 2013.
According to Executive Director, Barbara Massar, they remain shy of their $25,000 goal. "We're at $12,000 as of Monday morning," noted Massar, "We are taking a leap of faith by signing contracts for the fireworks and ice sculpture in the hope that supporters and sponsors will continue to come forward. Pro Portsmouth is extremely grateful to those who have already stepped in and stepped up to support this event."
For those who want to get involved in supporting First Night, shares in the event are still available. Shares not only benefit the event — the shareholder receives complimentary First Night® Buttons as well as print, Facebook and website recognition. And, if you're having trouble purchasing a gift for the person who seems to have everything, have no fear, Pro Portsmouth has the answer: give them the gift of 'fire and ice.' By purchasing shares in First Night®, you'll be giving them a piece of the Fireworks Display and Ice Sculpture.
A benefit of supporting First Night® Portsmouth is the "Show Us the Button" program. Shareholders and sponsors designate special deals on their products and services for a specific time frame in 2013 for folks showing the business owner their First Night® Portsmouth 2013.
"The feedback has been really good — we have hotels offering reduced room rates and restaurants offering specials like free appetizers with entrées." Massar noted this was an important way to reward supporters. "We've devoted web pages to Food & Lodging, IT and Logistics partners and now we proudly note our "Show Us the Button" participants with links back to their own sites," stated the Pro Portsmouth Executive Director. "We want our supporters to know that we're all in this together. So this means that folks counting on the outdoor free attractions (the fireworks and ice sculpture) to draw people into town for the First Night weekend need to get involved. After all, Pro Portsmouth can't charge people for gazing skyward at the fireworks display."
It is worth noting that the financial success of First Night® affects the overall financial health of Pro Portsmouth and its ability to produce their entire program of events.
"Each of our events helps build a foundation for the next one on our calendar," Massar stated. "We know all too well that a less than successful First Night® will impact our ability to events like Children's Day which is next on our program."
Information regarding First Night® shares and being a part of the Community Initiative for First Night® is available at http://www.proportsmouth.org/shareholders.cfm or by calling 603-433-4398.
All First Night® Shareholders are recognized at: http://www.proportsmouth.org/shareholders.cfm and http://www.proportsmouth.org/showusthebutton.cfm
The First Night® Button
Show your support when you buy and wear the First Night Button! The First Night® Button is your ticket for all entertainment. The Button is available online at http://www.proportsmouth.org/FirstNightButton.cfm. Locally, the Button may be purchased at Hannaford (Pic 'n Pay) on Islington Street and The Flower Kiosk on Market Street. A special thank you goes out to Peoples United Bank — once again the Button will be sold at their Seacoast area branches: Portsmouth (State & Lafayette Streets), Dover, Durham, Exeter, Hampton, Kittery, ME, Rochester, Stratham and South Berwick, ME. Pro Portsmouth also offers an online only 'Stocking Stuffer' special for First Night® Buttons through December 26th.


text:
April 3, 2007
Irvine, Calif. - Juniors Alison Bennett of the women's basketball team and Chris Minardo from the men's squad represent Cal State Fullerton on the 2006-07 Academic All-Big West Conference teams for winter sports.
To be eligible for the all-academic team, student-athletes must maintain at least a 3.2 cumulative grade point average, have attained at least sophomore standing academically and have competed in at least 50 percent of their team's contests.
Bennett, a 6-foot forward from Nordhoff High School and Ojai, California, is a kinesiology major. Minardo, a 6-foot-10 forward from Chino Hills, Ayala High School and Citrus College, is a business administration major.
Complete Big West Release in PDF Format
Download Free Acrobat Reader


text:
The Miners is a game inspired by Diggers - one of the best Amiga games released in 1993 by Millenium. Player leads team of 5 miners, who mines deeper and deeper for precious gems and other treasures. Excavations are performed on a small, but very rich in raw materials, planet called Morg. It is a perfect place for mining. Varied topography and beautiful scenery encourages for digging. Unfortunately, all what they mine is owned by The Mine. Suddenly, one day, owner of all mines on the planet, announced competition for the best mining team. Winner will receive the first prize - one of the richest mines on the planet! Additionally, that they will keep for their own all treasures found during competition. Why dig a whole life for someone, like you can dig for yourself and increase your treasury?
The Miners Demo contains 2 playable races and 2 maps (+tutorial map). Additionally some achievements have been allowed. Provides good view on a gameplay before you make a decision to buy a game.
Only registered members can share their thoughts. So come on! Join the community today (totally free - or sign in with your social account on the right) and join in the conversation.


text:
Every Tuesday, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
As an extension of our International Friendship Center, which offers ESL (English as a Second Language) classes where participants from over 42 countries over the years have met to improve English skills and learn life skills in an American setting, interested individuals join together to learn more about the love of Jesus in a loving and caring environment. The Bible class immediately precedes the ESL class every Tuesday. For more information, please contact Peter Harris at 248-651-7532.


text:
Q&A is here again. I wish every week could be Q&A, because on those weeks I can pick the questions that I actually have an answer for. I can also skip the ones that make me cringe in a "oooh, that's convicting" sort of way. Just kidding. Sort of.
But honestly, if I don't answer your question it's probably not because I don't like you or don't think you have a good question. There are only a few people in the world that I truly dislike, so the chances are very slim that you're on my list. If I don't answer your question, it's more likely because I didn't make it through the whole list or I just don't have a good answer for you. Either I struggle with the issue myself and haven't figured out how to solve it yet, or I have never faced the problem at all and have never even wondered how to solve it. Either way, I don't want to waste your time and mine. Well, unless I do. Like in the very first question below.
1. Sarah asked, Have you had to deal with food allergies/sensitivities with any of your kids?
Sarah, I'm thankful to say no. Well, not really, although Lydia seemed to be sensitive to milk when she was little. We removed major sources of milk from her diet, and she outgrew the symptoms by the time she was 4 or 5 and has been happily guzzling ever since. Becca also has some signs of allergies though we haven't pinpointed the source.
Since we're on the subject, does anyone think we should suspect allergies in the case of a 4yo who has multiple accidents each day? It seems like simple immaturity and she can help it if she really tries, but I can't help wondering if there might be a physical cause.
2. Kristi asked, Do you do the "Santa" thing in any form at your house?
Kristi, we don't do it seriously but it is a bit of a running joke in our family. One year a friend of ours showed up at our door in a Santa suit, and we didn't tell the kids who it was – though they knew there wasn't really an eternal Santa who snuck down chimneys bringing gifts to children. Somehow they learned who it was, but the next year a friend-of-a-friend did the same thing. This time were able to assure them it was not Mr. Smitty, and they were left to wonder.
We do enjoy teaching our children about the real Saint Nicholas and his doings. Sometimes truth is just as entertaining as fiction. 🙂
3. Shelby asked, How much do you usually spend on each child at Christmas? What types of gifts will you buy this yr?
Shelby, our budget is never set in stone – or even in mud. It depends on many factors, but we don't limit ourselves to the same fixed number for each child. In fact, our older girls started a fun tradition of pooling their funds to splurge on one person each year while buying more traditional gifts for the remaining members of the family.
Often, Perry and I choose to buy one big gift that all of the kids can share and enjoy, knowing that they will each receive several gifts from siblings, friends, grandparents, etc. One year it was a trampoline; another year, we bought a Wii and television.
We haven't really talked about Christmas gifts this year yet, but we have already contributed toward a large gift from one set of grandparents so our additional gifts to the kids will be modest. In light of all the new blessings in our lives right now, I think everyone in the house is happy with the idea of a smaller, simpler Christmas celebration this year.
4. Lindsey asked, How do you handle Christmas gifts in a large family? Do you set a limit on number per person? Do you draw names? Etc. What are some of your family's Christmas traditions?
Lindsey, in our own household Perry and I nearly always buy individual or group gifts for our children. Our children have drawn names for each other in the past, but generally prefer to buy gifts either for individuals or a group gift. The older girls like to pool their funds and buy one nicer gift for each family member.
In the extended family, we tend to alternate between giving a gift to each family, having just the children draw for cousins, and having everyone draw a name. When we draw names, we divide into age groups: little children, older children, adults (if participating).
Traditions? One sister and her husband have hosted a tamale party/gift exchange for the extended family for many years. Our church goes Christmas carolling in members' neighborhoods each year. We usually get our Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving, and always start listening to Christmas music on that day. We do Advent readings, though we don't always make it through all 25 days. Oh, and Perry wears a Santa hat on his commute to work every day, and requires the same of all his passengers. He's crazy that way.
5. Dede asked, What suggestions do you have for an 8 yr old boy? Gift wise. Also, winter exercises? (For kids, not me, LOL).
Dede, I've never had an 8yo boy. I'm still trying to think of gifts for a 6yo boy, but I suspect if a 6yo or 8yo can get hurt or get dirty using it, he'll like it. Also, if it makes you want to yell, "Be quiet!" or "Don't ever do that to your sister again!" it's likely to be a hit. Rubber band gun? Potato gun? Slingshot? Crossbow? Are you sensing a theme here? We've had all of these in our home, and while they may not help your sanity, I do have to confess that they were huge hits!
As for exercise, I constantly threaten to send my homebody kids outside if they don't sit still and find something quiet to do. It either works, or I make good on the threat and they get some exercise. 🙂
Honestly, they are all fairly active and can't stand to sit still too long. If they don't find a constructive way to burn energy (i.e. exercise) or take one of my suggestions (play basketball, play on the outdoor playset, play with the dog, play tag, etc.) I give them work to do and they get that sort of exercise. It all works out in the end.
6. Brittany asked, How do you respond to those (family and strangers) that don't agree with your choice of having so many children? or make comment when you are expecting…again? Thanks!!
Brittany, we've been blessed to have very supportive family on both sides so we never had to deal with that problem. However, I did see my parents deal with disapproving family members back when I was a kid and they were expecting their 5th, 6th, 7th child, etc. It was discouraging to them, especially when the criticism came during tough times. They were careful to remind all of us kids why they chose to have a large family and what blessings children were, while they minimized time with those who criticized their convictions. In time, friends drifted away and family members came around, and I don't remember this being a problem at all by the time I was a teen and our household population had reached double digits.
As for comments, I don't let them bother me – though I have never received an openly critical comment. They are usually more like, "I could never do it!" or "Better you than me!" It's not hard to come up with a witty or thoughtful reply to these, especially when you tend to hear the same 3 or 4 comments all the time!
7. Donna asked, how do you balance taking care of yourself and your kids when life also needs you to care for others?
Donna, this is a huge question for us right now. Calvin arrived during a very busy time of year for all of us, and I simply don't have the help I'm accustomed to. When I was in my 20's and had 6 little ones with no bigger helpers, days were hectic but I was able to keep up. I had more energy and less people in the house. Now when I'm flying solo with a bunch of little ones I still have to cook, clean and do laundry for 12 – with the energy level of a postpartum 40yo instead of a 20-something.
I freely admit I'm struggling, both in practical matters and in attitude. It's so hard to find the right balance between meeting present needs and taking care of myself so I can continue to meet needs tomorrow and next month. It's easy to make my health a priority just because I want to feel better, instead of so that I can serve God and others better. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel strong and healthy, of course, but it's vital to keep the true goal in sight. What glorifies God and furthers His kingdom in the long run?
I think I'm rambling and probably not even answering your question, but you touched a sore spot for me. It's one where I would love to hear from other moms, especially older ones.
8. Anna asked, Not sure whether you've covered it already, but suggestions for going from two littles to three. Does it work out OK having three children but only two arms? 🙂 Also, any bed/rooming suggestions for when you have three littles? (we'll have three girlies with the oldest 2 1/2 in Feb. so probably two in toddler beds and one in a crib once the baby hits 6 months or so, hopefully in the same room).
Anna, although I often worried about it ahead of time, I generally found that by the time a new baby arrived the child two spaces up the line was reasonably well trained. Ours were just over 18 months apart, so the child in question was always at least 3yo, able to follow simple commands. It was invariably easier than I expected, even though I asked myself the same question about having more children than arms. 🙂
Rooming together has always worked well for our children. After an initial adjustment period, they quickly learn to sleep through disruptions or go right back to sleep if awakened, and I think it makes for better sleep habits overall. One word of advice: you might find life easier if you don't insist your children go right to sleep when you send them to bed. We have always allowed them to talk softly as long as they stay in bed. Of course many parents will see it differently, but I love that my children enjoy each other's company and I don't want to discourage quiet conversation in the last moments of their day.
9. Sara asked, What do you do about a 9 year old telling you no and throwing horrible tantrums when Dad is at work?
Sara, this is an easy one for us. If a child is unrepentant and rebellious to me, Dad comes home. He considers this sort of situation a family emergency. It has only happened a couple of times, because our children understand just how seriously he and I take that sort of rebellion. He came home when he was over an hour away even though it meant losing vacation time or personal time and burning up $15-20 in gas going back and forth for a 3 or 4 hour lunch break.
Your turn. Agree or disagree? What did I miss? How would you answer these questions?
See what the other moms say:
Upcoming topics for 4 Moms:
- December 6 – Quick and Easy Holiday Crafts
- December 13 – Quick and Easy Holiday Recipes
Recent topics:
- November 15 – 4 Moms give food as gifts {linky}
- November 8 – 4 Moms on Helping Kids Keep Up With Technology (?!)
- November 1 – Q&A with the 4 Moms: competitiveness, pregnancy and newborns, Bible for little ones
- October 25 – 4 Moms: How do you keep the car clean?
- October 18 – 4 Moms on Food Preservation
- October 11 – 4 Moms: Introducing kids to technology
- October 4 – Q&A with the 4 Moms
- September 27 – 4 Moms address biblical femininity and modesty in girls


text:
De armentieres Surname Ancestry Results
Our indexes 1000-1999 include entries for the spelling 'de armentieres'. In the period you have requested, we have the following 1 record (displaying 1 to 1):
Try these...
de armenters de armentiers de arnholte dearham dearie deariloe dearin dearing dearinge dearinger dearings dearking dearl dearle dearlee dearley dearlin dearling dearll dearlove dearman dearmar dearmer dearmers dearmn dearmor dearmore dearn dearnaby dearnaley dearnally dearnaly dearne dearneley dearnes dearness dearnham dearniley dearningley dearningly
These sample scans are from the original record. You will get scans of the full pages or articles where the surname you searched for has been found.
Your web browser may prevent the sample windows from opening; in this case please change your browser settings to allow pop-up windows from this site.
Want to be alerted about new results for this search?
Subscribe to this web feed
Research your ancestry, family history, genealogy and one-name study by direct access to original records and archives indexed by surname.


text:
She's only 34, but Alicia Silverstone has waited decades for this moment.
The "Clueless" star and her hubby, Christopher Jarecki, are expecting their first child, Silverstone's rep told People on Friday.
Back in April, Silverstone told the mag even as a child she used to dream of the day she'd welcome her own little one.
U.S. & World
"I've been wanting to have a baby since I was 2 years old – I'm destined to be a mother," Silverstone said.
The former "Aerosmith" music video star wed Jarecki, a frontman for the band S.T.U.N, in Lake Tahoe in 2005 after eight years together, according to E! News.
The baby news comes as Silverstone is set to star in two new films. "Homework," a romantic comedy, debuts at the Sundance Film festival next week.
In the upcoming indie film "Butter," Silverstone portrays a mom opposite Jennifer Garner and Hugh Jackman, E! reported.
Over the years, the actress has become equally known as an animal activist and proponent of vegetarianism. Her vegan cookbook "The Kind Diet" became a New York Times bestseller.


text:
Somewhere in the middle pages of "1984," Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent "Brotherhood" of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O'Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn't intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell so that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren't bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too.
Fifty years later, we live in a wine world where, for the first time, there are wines that do taste like blackberry jam and are instantly intoxicating, or nearly so, and how these wines came into being is the subject of a new book, "Noble Rot" (Norton; $24.95), by William Echikson. The book tells the story of the wine life of the Bordeaux region of France over the past twenty years, and, though Echikson does not quite have the narrative skills to assemble it, he lays out all the pieces of a first-class Henry James comedy about the brutality of American innocence, the helplessness of French sophistication, and the need for intoxicants that are always called by some other name and claimed for some other purpose.
"Wine," Saul Steinberg once said, "is the only thing that makes us happy as adults for no reason." Wine books, on the other hand, find a hundred ways of making us unhappy for lots of reasons. The space between what the wine writers say and what the wine novice tastes is a standard subject of satire. (The best was written, exactly contemporary with Orwell, by Stephen Potter in the "Winemanship" section of his peerless "Lifemanship" books.) But some of the wine-writing weakness is more complex. Being an expert on wine and writing about it is what the English call "naff," embarrassing and uncool, while being a non-expert on wine and writing about it anyway sounds merely boozy. No subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom. A book on wine will always begin with the assurance that it is not like all those other books on wine, even though all those other books on wine begin by saying that they're not like those other books on wine, either.
Echikson is no exception, and includes a lot of normal-person-like-you, let's-demystify-this-stuff talk. But he also embarks on some absorbing storytelling, in a form now familiar from ten years of the little-thing/big-thing books: take a micro-history of something or other (cod, salt, the color mauve) and turn it into a macro-history of something else that provides, in parable, a mega-history of some larger third thing. Echikson's micro-history is that of Château d'Yquem, the Bordeaux château that makes the greatest sweet white wine in the world and that, in the past decade, passed from private hands into those of a conglomerate. ("Noble rot" is the term of art for the mold that settles occasionally on some Sémillon grapes and makes them sweeter.) His macro-history is that of the wine region of Bordeaux generally, which also got transformed, though for different reasons, and ended up making bigger, stronger, fatter blackberry-jammish wines. His mega-story is the canonical one of backward France and forward America.
Echikson's approach lands him with a problem that he never really solves: he is telling a big story about dry red wine through the vehicle of the small story of a sweet white wine. While, as a writer, Echikson is not a man who, seeing a cliché go winking by, can easily resist its charms—Gallic tempers rise, tensions flare at the top end of the market, and a golden world of the past seems lost, and that's all one page of the preface—he has the crucial journalist's knack for getting the confidence of people who ought to be wary of talking to him. (And who now are sorry they did: he is being sued for defamation in France.)
The story opens in the early nineteen-seventies, when the cult of claret—well-aged Bordeaux wine—was locked in place, especially in England, which dominated the wine trade as the Germans had earlier dominated the champagne trade. Bordeaux produced hard, tannic wines that often took a decade to be good to drink. (Then they were really good to drink.) Even when they weren't good, though, everyone went on drinking them, because they were claret. The best wines, if far from cheap, were available, not collector's items: anyone with a taste for wine could expect to drink Château Margaux or Château Cheval Blanc more than once in a lifetime, and the lesser grands crus were there for everyday drinking. The preëminence of French wines was simply taken for granted, like the skills of Jewish internists. Within Bordeaux, the classification of 1855—which had fixed the vineyards in a hierarchy of first-, second-, and third-growth classes—still hummed along, dominating everything.
Into this story come two new forces: Japanese money and American numbers. In the mid-seventies, the Japanese developed a taste for expensive French wine, and for buying the big names. This vastly expanded the market and seemed to justify investment in high yields, more grapes, and more land. But it was, as Echikson might put it, a poisoned chalice. It meant that the lower reaches of second- and third-growth wine were now, of necessity, being drunk by Americans in a less equable and accepting mood. In 1976, in Paris, an American Cabernet beat the French Bordeaux in a blind tasting. This was not quite the event that it has since come to seem—to the French winemakers, it was more like an American loss to the Lithuanians in basketball, wrong game at the wrong time—but it did mark a trembling of the earth beneath their feet.
More significant, a lawyer named Robert Parker, from the suburbs of Baltimore, began to mimeograph, and then publish, his own newsletter, The Wine Advocate, listing all the châteaux and grading them on a hundred-point system. His virtues were limited: he was a very ordinary writer with few pretensions to the grace notes of French, or even English, wine-writing. What he brought to the table was what Americans always bring: encyclopedic ambitions and a universal numerical system. Not since Bernard Berenson made his lists of true and false Italian pictures had an American expert on the arts so fundamentally changed the economics of European culture. As with Berenson, what mattered was not so much that the list was right—who could tell for sure?—as that the list existed.
In retrospect, it seems that Parker was doing to wine what Bill James was doing to baseball in the same years, and in the same way. Both Parker and James began, in the late seventies, as unknown amateurs with privately printed newsletters, rapidly found a hungry and enthusiastic audience, and by the mid-eighties had become the reigning authorities among people impatient with the old wisdoms. Both were uncannily successful because they were apostles of a radical American empiricism—an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you. James was weakly predictive, but brilliantly analytic: his explanations of why things had happened were mesmerizing and convincing, but his guesses about what would happen next were often wrong. (His system had the Brewers winning the '82 series.) Parker was weakly analytic but brilliantly predictive; he could never really explain why wines tasted good, but he claimed that the '82 vintage was going to be great, and it was.
The difference was that Parker's game had always belonged to the French. And from the French point of view he was poison. Like all Henry James heroes, Parker was a true American innocent, meaning only to help and purify his European friends. The wines that receive the most consistent and adulatory praise in his system are the conventional favorites of conventional French taste: Château Margaux and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. No one could have been more single-mindedly rapturous about Château d'Yquem. In France, though, the greatness of those wines was accepted not as effort well rewarded but as the natural order. There had to be not-so-good wines below to have great wines above; the hierarchy was part of the pleasure. Parker assumed that if some wines were not as good as others it was because some winemakers were not doing as good a job.
Although, in a defensive move, the French government gave him the Légion d'Honneur—he cried when he received it—his Francophilia did him no good with the French; the vintners set dogs on him. In the James story, he would marry a French comtesse with a fading château, and have to decide whether to be true to his system by rating her wines properly or be true to her and lie. (In the James story, he would lie, and suffer.) Without intending to, he was wrecking the second rank. He was able to do this because, for the first time, there was a solid second rank of claret-style wine in the world, and it wasn't the second growths of Bordeaux.
One common complaint has been that Parker's idea of good was too narrow. People who know wines now disparage Parker for preferring "flavor bombs," big wines that are exploding with fruit and alcohol, and which showed up better in tastings—with the not very convincing implication that there is something second-rate about liking such blackberry-jam wines. But the essential "character" of many of the wines that he ruled out was the quality of being not very good.
Meanwhile, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, there was more good wine around than ever before, and most of it was coming, as it still does, from the then underexploited warm-weather vineyards of other continents. It is hard to find a less than delicious bottle of Australian Syrah or South African Cabernet or California Zinfandel, or, these days, New Zealand Pinot Noir. Even Southern Italy, and Sicily in particular, began to fall into line. Mouton Cadet, the old standard Bordeaux plonk, has almost disappeared from dinner tables.
In this way, Parker's achievement wasn't so much to Americanize French wine as to Southernize Northern palates—to favor the fruitier and more forward wines common to South Africa and California and Australia over the drier and more astringent tastes of young Bordeaux and old Burgundy. He liked wines that tasted good. His favorite French wines, the ones he loves from the heart ("This is the kind of wine I would drink if I were not always tasting," he once wrote plaintively, apropos a simple Guigal Côtes du Rhône), are Southern, too, from the Rhône valley. An "educated" palate may seek to explain why this is a limiting taste, but is unlikely to win over the Winston Smiths. It is a little like the educated eye trying to explain why Poussin is better than Rubens; people may listen, but they look at those thighs, and doubt.
The French response to Parker and Parkerism is Echikson's real subject. Once Parker had established his reputation, the French had to decide whether to fight or to change, and they changed. Echikson's heroes are the garagistes and "right bankers," the winemakers from the wrong bank of the Gironde, who, one by one, are either taking control of old estates or making their own wine in the back yard. Following his heroes from château to château, Echikson gives a strong hint throughout that making good wine is more like making good peanut butter than it is like writing great poetry. Low yields (meaning not too many grapes per hectare), sweet fruit allowed to ripen as long as possible (there is always pressure on growers to harvest early, because of the threat of a late rain or an early frost), no stems, minimal "handling"—the formula is pretty simple. Wine is good grape juice gone bad, and, as many of the new French winemakers seem to suggest to Echikson under their breaths, there is something to be said for the Australian system where grapes are collected from around the country, sorted through, and fermented in great big well-controlled vats, and terroir be damned.
Echikson ends with a toast to "breathing new life into Bordeaux's old order." But the reader, even one with Parkerized tastes, may, on reflection, find the French objections to Parker's lists and numbers more complicated than Echikson allows. The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers. Everyone agrees that Parker is, on his own terms, a completely honest scorer; but by scoring he intends to serve the consumer, and makes the wine drinker into one. What consumers want is reliable beverage products, and, once wine is a reliable beverage product, it isn't quite wine.
Demanding absolute excellence on an unchanging universal numerical scale is not, after all, our usual measure of sensual engagement. A man who makes love to fifty-some women and then publishes a list in which each one gets a numerical grade would not be called a lady's man. He would be called a cad. And that, more or less, is how a good many Frenchmen think of Parker: they don't doubt his credentials; they question his character. A real man likes moles and frailties; a real man marries his wine, as he marries his wife, and sees her through the thin spots. Being impatient with the tannins in a Margaux is like being impatient with the lines on your wife's face. They are what makes it a marriage rather than a paid assignation.
For one of the defining characteristics of most French terroirs is not to make very good wine. To alter that is to put them in the beverage business. No one says this, exactly—but when you are handed a glass of thin and astringent country wine in France and asked to admire it for its character, there is a reasonable point in which its character does consist in its having some. The French connoisseur believes that, with his glass of turpentiney Gascon wine, he is in a truer relation to history and reality than the American searching for his jammy high-scorers. I wouldn't actually drink like this, but I understand it.
Of course, if the ladies were offering their favors at forty dollars a go, it would seem fair for somebody to grade them, and that is, more or less, what Parker's defenders say: a product that is being bought and sold should be subject to the market discipline of all other things that are bought and sold, and all the guff about earth and history and the ineffable singularity is just a way of avoiding giving the customer what he ought to get for his money.
Well, what does make wine taste bad or good? Is there really a standard, or a way to agree on one? Within the heart of every wine drinker, there is the suspicion that no one really knows. I was once at a dinner in Paris, seated by a big "name" in wine tasting, and, along about the third bottle, she leaned in and announced, half gaily and half conspiratorially, "You know, it's really all about the same." Of course, she didn't actually believe that—but I also had the sense that in another way she did believe it, that she was confiding something significant about her own profession.
As Calvin Trillin explained in these pages a while ago, if you simply put red food coloring in white wine, even experienced drinkers can't tell it from red wine. And, according to scientists who study smell and taste, that's just the beginning. Rachel Herz, a professor of psychology at Brown, conducts research into the effects of "frames" on the perception of smells. (Wine tasters are "noses" first of all.) Smells, she reports, "are so malleable when it comes to verbal context that when reasonable verbal information is available it will override and even replace the olfactory information." The effect is pronounced when the smells are, in some way, ambiguous—tell people that they're smelling vomit, and they'll smell vomit; tell them that the same smell is Parmesan cheese, and they'll smell Parmesan cheese. With wine, the most basic verbal categories (it comes from France, it comes from America, it's cheap, it's expensive) seem to be able to throw even an educated nose off track. The illusions, Herz suggests, "work the way, in a familiar illusion, arrowheads either going in or feathering out extend or shorten straight lines. Word labels on smells are the same kind of context effect, and these context effects are markedly more powerful with nose sensations than they are with other kinds."
To make things worse, the nose turns out to have the shortest memory of all the senses. A simple experiment, Herz suggests, shows just how powerful nose amnesia is: think of a familiar tune—say, "Yesterday." Now think of a familiar picture—say, the "Mona Lisa." Now think of the smell of a tuna-fish sandwich. You can do the last, of course, but where the other sensory memories are strong, clear, and sharp, the tuna-fish sandwich smell is general and vague. What the nose knows, in effect, is not much, and that soon forgotten. (Wine lovers protest violently when they are told this, but their protest, from the academic point of view, is a bit like the protest of eyewitnesses who are sure they saw what they say they saw.)
Yet to accept this is not to say that the elaborate language of wine evaluation is necessarily phony. It is exactly because smells are so labile and hard to grasp that they need more help from words than other sensations. When it comes to wine, we are all like early-Alzheimer's patients who have to be coaxed into memory and appreciation. ("Remember, Dad—that's the woman we saw on the beach at Wellfleet." "Oh, yes! Her.")
The real question is not whether wine snobs and wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive. Colors and shapes don't emerge from pictures in neat, particulate packages to strike the eye, either, any more than plots and themes come direct to the mind from the pages of books. Everything is framed by something.
Anyway, no elaborate rhetoric of compliments is meant to be "accurate"; it is meant to be complimentary. When Shakespeare compares his lover to a summer's day, he doesn't really mean that she (or he) is like a summer's day in that she is hotter in the middle and cooler in the end—though, then again, he might. Wine writing is of the same type: a series of elaborately plausible compliments paid to wines. When the French wine writer Eric Glatre declares, say, that in the aroma of a bottle of Krug "intense empyreumatic fragrances of toasted milk bread, fresh butter, café au lait, and afterthoughts of linden join in a harmonious chorus with generous notes of acacia honey, mocha, and vanilla," he is suggesting that, of all the analogies out there, this might be one that expands our minds, opens our horizons, delights our imaginations. He is offering a metaphor, not an account book.
In this way, the intersection of French sensibility and modern science suggests not so much the limits of Parker as the limits of naïve American empiricism: numbers and honesty and transparency only get you so far in the world. Our experiences of everything are too mediated—by contexts and intentions and likeness—to be summed up in a number. It is exactly the disputable quality of the compliments we pay to wine that makes them touch the lower edge of art. De gustibus solum est disputandum. Only matters of taste are worth arguing over.
Between the rhetorical and the real lies ritual. And wine is a ritual thing before it is any other kind of thing. In a remarkable new book, "Ancient Wine" (Princeton; $29.95), the archeologist Patrick E. McGovern shows that six thousand years ago an entire "wine culture" was already associated with special serving and drinking vessels. From the beginning, wine and wine culture has been a halfway house between the sacramental and the social. The question about ritualized aesthetic discriminations is not whether they exist—they exist in the minds of the people who feel them; that's enough—but what they are about. For the wine snob, they are about the ability to make them, and this is just sad. For the French wine critic—a generalized type, but one who exists—they are about the ability to put a map inside your mind: to taste tastes and see places. For the American wine critic, they are about the ability to offer consumers a quality beverage.
What they rarely seem to be about is drinking wine. Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker's and Echikson's, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk. To read wine writing, one would think that wine is simply another luxury food, like smoked salmon or caviar or chocolate; the one idea that is banished is that it is a powerful drug, which can wash away, in a few minutes, the ability to discriminate at all. The end of food writing is to turn eating into a metaphor for wanting, of all kinds. The end of wine writing is to turn drinking into a metaphor for judging. Since we know that this is false, we feel the falsity, and the pathos of the falsity.
For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. Without wine lore, and wine tasting, and wine talk, and wine labels, and, yes, wine writing and rating—the whole elaborate idea of wine—we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language—without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished—it would all be about the same, or taste that way. Wine talk and wine ceremony are not simply snobbish distractions that lead us away from the real experience; they are part of what lets the experience happen. To turn wine away from happiness is the drinker's sin. A good fruity bottle of a Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, with a pretty label and a decent story, makes us happy, and happier than that we don't really deserve to be. In that James story, of course, the innocent empirical American's reward and punishment would come when he marries that comtesse and retires to her château, where they spend the rest of their lives drinking nothing but water, for their health. ♦


text:
OWINGS MILLS, Md.—Despite a career-high 27 points from senior Griffin Schamp, the Birmingham-Southern men's basketball team fell short against Salisbury University, 75-72 at the Hoopsville National Invitational Classic Friday afternoon in Owings Mill, Md.
The Panthers fall to 2-1 with their first loss of the young season, while the Seagulls also move to 2-1. The National Invitational Classic is a prestigious 10-team event featuring some of the best Division III programs from around the country. The Panthers will face host Stevenson University tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern.
BSC pulled out to a quick 7-0 lead to open the game, but the Gulls quickly closed the gap with an 11-2 run to pull ahead 11-9 at the 14:53 mark. The Panthers answered with a layup to tie it 11-11, but Salisbury took the lead back again and scored seven unanswered points to go up 18-11. The Gulls stayed one step ahead of the Panthers after that, although BSC was able to cut it to one, 26-25, with 6:04 left in the half, and then tie it up, 35-35, with 51 seconds left before halftime thanks to two straight Schamp baskets. Salisbury pulled back up by five before the end of the half, 40-35, with five straight points in the last 44 seconds.
Salisbury pulled out to a nine-point 49-40 lead within the first three minutes of the second half for the largest lead of the game so far, and the Gulls achieved an 11-point lead, 64-53, at the 8:28 mark. The Panthers went to work, chipping away at the lead and tying it up 70-70 on a 17-6 run over the next four minutes. Sophomore Ross Welch hit a pair of free throws after that to give BSC its first lead since the 16:08 mark of the first half, but a Salisbury bucket tied it back up at 72-72 with 3:02 left to play, and the Gulls took back the lead with 1:09 left on a layup by Tim Harwood. BSC sent Salisbury to the free throw line with 33 seconds remaining, where Kyle Savercool made one of two, and the Panthers pulled down the rebound on the missed shot but were unable to get a shot to fall in the final seconds of the game.
Schamp led all players with his impressive 27-point performance, going 10-16 from the field and 7-11 at the free throw line. Junior Larry Thomas also added 17 points, and Welch recorded 13. Thomas led a balanced rebounding effort with six boards, and senior Jason Holland led with four assists.
The Panthers shot 53.1 percent (26-49) from the field, but only 25 percent (4-16) from three-point range and 76.2 percent (16-21) from the free throw line. The Gulls hit 48.4 percent (30-62) from the field, 31.8 percent (7-22) from beyond the arc, and 61.5 percent (8-13) from the line.
BSC led in rebounds, 30-28, including 23 defensive boards. The Panthers struggled with turnovers, losing the ball 18 times while Salisbury committed only 11 turnovers.


text:
Postal Cards + Invitations
You Click. We Stamp. We Send.
Our Postal Cards are
- Folded cards protected by clear envelopes
- Delivered by First Class mail, domestically and internationally
- Cost only $2.50 each, plus postage
How to send a Postal Invitation
- Once you've selected a design and added your details, input the name and address of your guest or recipient and we will address, stamp and mail them your invitation.
- Send Postal Invitations to your entire guest list or to a select few.
- Continue to collect RSVPs online. Each Postal Invitation includes a unique URL that your guests can use to RSVP so you can manage your event online.
How to send a Postal Greeting Card
- Choose your greeting card design, write a personal message and we will mail it for you!
- Simply select the 'Mail a Postal Greeting Card' option to order a printed version of that design and click personalize.
- You will be prompted to pay upon checkout.


text:
San Andreas
Rockstar slams BBC's GTA drama as "random, made up bollocks"
The BBC aired its docudrama based on Rockstar's legal fight with lawyer Jack Thompson last night – and the developer isn't too pleased with the way it's been portrayed.
San Andreas headlines
New GTA Online jobs are a throwback to San Andreas
Rockstar has revealed 10 new jobs for GTA Online which celebrate the 10th Anniversary of GTA: San Andreas' release on PlayStation 2.
Coming Soon to XBL: Gears 3, GTA IV discounts, Asura's Wrath and Reckoning demos
Major Nelson has posted a look at upcoming content for the Xbox Live Marketplace, kicking off today with a demo for Capcom's Asura's Wrath, available now for Gold members. A demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will also be made available next week on January 17.
Saturday Shorts: Rockstar, Bioware, MineCon, Batman corrupted, Hall of Play
Halloween weekend is here, and so are more shorts. We won't get to dress up or draw down the moon until Monday, but we're going to try and carve a pumpkin this weekend. It is NOT going to look anything like this though. Promise.
2,676 people claim on Hot Coffee "scandal"
According to this New York Times piece, a total of 2,676 people have claimed their $35 from Rockstar after being traumatized by the Hot Coffee scenes in San Andreas. "Am I disappointed? Sure," said Seth R. Lesser, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs. "We can't guess as to why now, several years later, people care or […]
More San Andreas references pop up in GTA IV
Kotaku's posted a shot of an advert in GTA IV offering flights to Los Santos for $299. Earlier this week, an image of an air ticket from Liberty City to San Andreas popped up, fueling obvious speculation that the upcoming 360 DLC will feature entire cities. We don't know. Neither do you. Fun though, isn't […]
Rumour: Niko's off to San Andreas
Someone over at the GTA Forums has noticed that on the Rockstar Social club site there's an image of a plane ticket for a Mr Niko Bellic – with the destination as San Andreas. Now, this of course substantiates nothing, but as you love us writing about everything and anything GTA IV, we thought we'd […]
GTA IV expansion will "completely redefine the idea" of DLC, says CVG
According to PlayThree.net, the CVG GTA special is out and claims that the Xbox 360-only DLC for GTA IV could contain an area as significant as Vice City or San Andreas. From the magazine: "Of course, to call games as vastly ambitious as Vice City or San Andreas mere 'expansion packs' seems childish, but nevertheless, […]
San Andreas latest
Rockstar slams BBC's GTA drama as "random, made up bollocks"
Coming Soon to XBL: Gears 3, GTA IV discounts, Asura's Wrath and Reckoning demos
Saturday Shorts: Rockstar, Bioware, MineCon, Batman corrupted, Hall of Play
GTA IV expansion will "completely redefine the idea" of DLC, says CVG


text:
With cold weather here, raccoons, squirrels and other animals will seek shelter in your home. Here's how to keep them out.
That odd scratching sound coming from your chimney might not be Santa Claus, stuck from his recent visit.
It might be coming from a more local visitor: a raccoon, bird or squirrel, for example.
Just as cold weather forces people indoors, it also can prompt wildlife to seek warmer refuge to wait out the snow, ice and wind. For homeowners, than can mean some unwelcome visitors in their attics, chimneys or under their porches if they aren't properly protected.
The No. 1 nuisance problem in the area, according to local wildlife control operators, is raccoons.
"Raccoons have no natural enemies, so there's nothing really to curb their population," said Tom Magro, a licensed wildlife trapper who has been in the nuisance control business since 1989.
"People don't raccoon-hunt like they used to. There's still people who do that, but it's nothing like it used to be 25 to 30 years ago. And with all the towns expanding farther into the countryside, their natural habitat has been depleted.
"But they are very adaptable animals."
Springfield, Ill.-based Magro, 59, said that he'll remove a couple hundred raccoons from people's homes each year. Typically, they enter a home by climbing up old TV antennas or right up the corner of the house if it has brick siding. If any trees on the property have overhanging branches, raccoons also can use those to get onto a property.
"There's not a lot of places they can't go if they decide that's where they want to be," he said.
Once they get into a home, raccoons can be destructive. They can rip out soffits, damage drywall, start a family in the chimney or insulation, and more. Sometimes, they can cause so much damage in an attic that homeowners will have to rip the insulation out completely and reinsulate, Magro said.
Travis Pierceall, a 32-year-old licensed wildlife control operator from Rochester, Ill., who has been trapping for most of his life and owns and operates an A-All-Animal Control franchise, said raccoons also can be hard on attic vents.
That's a common way they enter the attic, though he noted that a determined raccoon could also chew through the roofline to get inside.
"Right now, when it's cold … they'll get in and semi-hibernate, and they'll come out to feed when it starts to warm up and go right back in and semi-hibernate again," he said. "They'll get in through the attic vents or actually pull soffits down. Most of the time, behind the attic vents there'll be a window screen, and they'll just shred that, and they'll get in."
Raccoons also can create a health hazard to the homeowners, Pierceall said.
"They'll leave all that feces behind, and then that carries a parasite called raccoon roundworm. About 70 percent of adult raccoons carry it," he said. "When it's in the larvae stage and it becomes dry, it becomes airborne and it gets into your vent system and you can inhale and ingest it, and it's real hazardous to humans."
Pierceall said squirrels are difficult to remove from a home. They can chew up electrical wires and can get into the walls of a home.
Often, squirrels enter via attic vents that aren't screened properly or aluminum soffits that are down, or sometimes they'll chew through wood soffits if they are desperate enough and can find a weakness in the wood. Squirrels often seek refuge in homes beginning in mid-January as they prepare for their first breeding season, Pierceall said, and will drag in nesting materials.
Wildlife also can damage the skirting and flex ducts in mobile homes; pull down or break off louvers; and dig burrows under decks or into the foundation of your home, he said.
What you can do
Here are tips Pierceall and Magro suggested to prevent any unwanted visitors and any subsequent damage to your home:
If you suspect an animal has entered your home, Pierceall and Magro suggest contacting a licensed wildlife control operator to remove the critter properly and humanely while following all state laws and regulations. Amateur trapping often leads to an unsuccessful venture, and can be unsafe or even illegal.
After an animal has been removed from your property, be sure each and every critter is gone before taking the next step of sealing the home to prevent future wildlife visits, Pierceall said.
"It is vital that if somebody does notice something, to have the animal removed first," he said.
On the Web
Visit the University of Illinois Extension Web site at http://web.extension.uiuc.edu/wildlife/ prevent.cfm for more tips on protecting your home from wildlife damage or dealing with nuisance critters on your property.


text:
Squishy tech for the Cosmic Era's behind closed doors
Small identical wooden or metal discs with a strange pattern engraved upon them (do not appear to be coinage). The discs can be found all over the continent; a farmer typically overturns several dozen when ploughing a field. Though they are unnaturally hard to break, they have no known use and are widely used as good-luck charms: almost all households would have them on the doors and on mantle pieces; many people carry one or more on them, bound on to a belt, necklace or sewn on to their clothes.


text:
Original Trinity Hymnal, #261
Christ in his Word draws near;
Hush, moaning voice of fear,
He bids thee cease;
With songs sincere and sweet
Let us arise, and meet
Him who comes forth to greet
Our souls with peace.
Rising above thy care,
Meet him as in the air,
O weary heart;
Put on joy's sacred dress;
Lo, as he comes to bless,
Quite from thy weariness
Set free thou art.
For works of love and praise
He brings thee summer days,
Warm days and bright;
Winter is past and gone,
Now he, salvation's Sun,
Shineth on ev'ry one
With mercy's light.
From the bright sky above,
Clad in his robes of love,
'Tis he, our Lord!
Dim earth itself grows clear,
As his light draweth near:
O let us hush and hear
His holy Word.
Page number: Blue 261, Right-Click Here to Download MIDI File
|© 2019 The Orthodox Presbyterian Church
Chaplains and Military Personnel