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We at Axis value our trademarks and copyrights. We consider them to be crucial assets and make sure that we and our partners use them appropriately and with due care.
These guidelines are subject to change and it is your responsibility to make sure that you are in compliance with the latest updated version of the guidelines, available at axis.com. Notwithstanding the authorized use of Axis trademarks and copyrighted material stated in these guidelines, Axis reserves the right to withdraw such authorization at any time in its sole discretion. The authorizations set forth herein may not be transferred or licensed to any other party.
These guidelines are for Axis distributors, partners, resellers, licensees, developers, customers, media contacts, and anyone else who intends to use Axis trademarks, logos, or copyrights in any way, whether it is in digital or printed form, for advertising, marketing, promotional, informational, or collateral material, on products, or on packaging etc.
If you are an Axis partner, you can find additional partner-specific, co-marketing, and fulfilment guidelines on Axis partner pages (login), or contact your Axis marketing representative.
1. Axis trademarks
Axis owns registered trademarks all over the world, and we continuously update our trademark portfolio. Below is a non-exhaustive list of Axis trademarks.
AXIS®, ETRAX®, VAPIX®, ARTPEC®, 安讯士® (Chinese)
1.1 Authorized use of Axis trademarks
The Axis corporate logotype is our most important brand identifier and you should treat it with the utmost respect.
Generally, we do not allow third parties to use Axis trademarks. However, below you find limited exceptions, for which the use of Axis trademarks is allowed. The size may vary from one application to another, but you are not allowed to alter it in any way compared with the approved versions shown here. You will find more details on unauthorized use of Axis corporate logotype in the subchapters "Violations" and "Examples of logotype violations (non-exhaustive)".
Any authorization to use any of Axis trademarks is subject to complying with these guidelines in full. If you breach against any provision of these guidelines, connected to either trademarks or copyrighted material, or infringe Axis intellectual property rights in any other ways, the authorizations set forth in these guidelines will automatically terminate and your use of Axis trademarks will no longer be regarded as authorized.
1.1.1 Axis corporate logotype
You can use Axis corporate logotype on your website or in marketing materials to indicate that you are selling or supporting Axis products or services. But this is under the condition that you, on the same page or area, also include a logotype of at least one more company with whom you have a similar relationship. This is to avoid any doubt concerning your relationship with Axis and the actual seller of the products or services.
All other use of Axis corporate logotype is forbidden unless expressly approved by Axis. Whenever you use the Axis corporate logotype, always follow the rules below.
Approved usage
Whenever possible, use the color version of Axis logotypes on a white background. In exceptional cases, you may request to use one of the following alternative versions of our logotype:
- Line art – for monochrome printing
- Grayscale – for grayscale printing
- Negative (white) – for use on dark backgrounds or objects
- Engraved or embossed – for special purposes, that is, certain giveaways
The preferred logo on a white background.
Grayscale logo on a white background.
The logo reversed out of a sufficiently dark background.
The preferred logo on a sufficiently light background.
The logo reversed out of a sufficiently dark background (for use on 1-color material).
Black and white logo on a white background (for use on 1-color material).
Space and appearance
Allow enough clear space around the logotype. There should at least be a white space equal to the height of the X in AXIS between the logotype and the top, bottom, left, and right edge.
Violations to the logotype are unacceptable. Never do any of the following:
- Change any word or decoration element of the logotype
- Remove, modify or replace any word element
- Remove, modify or replace the pyramid
- Change the typography, color, proportions, or size of elements of the logotype
- Rotate or distort the logotype or use the pyramid from the logotype alone
- Combine Axis corporate logotype with any other elements, whether it is an additional word, figurative element, or the name of your own company or product
- Reverse the logotype on a background that clashes, is too light, too complex, or too dark
EXAMPLES OF LOGOTYPE VIOLATIONS (non-exhaustive)
The following are some of the examples of logotype violations. The same rules and examples apply to the Axis relationship logotype.
Reversed logotype on a background that clashes.
Reversed logotype on a background that is too light.
Logotype used on a complex background.
Logotype used on a background that is too dark.
Logotype missing one or several elements.
Logotype missing one or several elements.
Changed typography.
Changed color in one or several elements of the logotype or replacing it with a pattern.
New graphical elements or signage created with the pyramide from the logotype.
Distorted logotype.
Rotated logotype
Logotype where words or symbols are replaced with other elements
Logotype where words or symbols are replaced with other elements
Logotype where words or symbols are replaced with other elements
Elements of the logotype used in own mark
Elements of the logotype used in own mark
Elements of the logotype used in own mark
Elements of the logotype used in own mark
Word elements of the logotype transliterated or translated to another language
1.1.2 Axis relationship logotype
If you are an Axis partner, we authorize and encourage you to use your Axis relationship logotype in materials online or in print to advertise your membership in a partner program. You may only use the relationship logotype that corresponds to your partner status, and the use of any other Axis relationship logotype is prohibited.
If you are not an Axis partner, you are not allowed to use any Axis relationship logotype or in any other way falsely indicate your affiliation or partnership with Axis. This will be regarded as a serious act of trademark infringement and false advertising.
Examples of approved relationship logotype versions:
1.1.3 Axis word marks
When referring to AXIS as a trademark in a text for the first time, always use capital letters and the
® symbol.
|When referring to specific Axis product names, always use AXIS (all capitals) as a trademark
|AXIS A1001 Network Door Controller
|Axis A1001 Network Door Controller
When referring to AXIS as a trademark in text, never use it in the possessive or plural form and never combine it with other trademarks or symbols. The trademark AXIS is an adjective, not a noun. Always use the word mark AXIS together with an appropriate descriptor of the product. If you are not sure, consult the relevant product or service page on axis.com.
Please find below a summary of the rules and examples of right and wrong use:
|Never combine an Axis trademark with your own product or company name
|"MyCompany"'s software is compatible with Axis network video products
|The "MyCompany"-Axis software
|Use capitalized "AXIS" for product names as indicated on the specific product page on axis.com
|AXIS M3026-VE Network Camera
|Axis M3026-VE
|AXIS Camera Station
|Axis Camera Station
|Never use a trademark in a possessive form
|Features of the AXIS M3026-VE camera include…
|AXIS M30's features
|Axis autotracking is a great feature.
|AXIS' features
|Axis' autotracking is a great feature.
|Never shorten a trademark to an initial or abbreviation
|Never hyphenate a trademark with another prefix, slash symbol, or word
|This product is compatible with Axis cameras
|Never use as a noun, instead, use as a proper adjective with a generic descriptor
|I bought two Axis cameras
|I bought two Axis
The same rules apply to the word marks ETRAX®, VAPIX® and ARTPEC®.
1.1.4 Trademark attribution
Whenever you refer to Axis trademarks, include a proper trademark attribution:
AXIS, AXIS COMMUNICATIONS, ETRAX, ARTPEC and VAPIX are registered trademarks or trademark applications of Axis AB in various jurisdictions.
1.2 Unauthorized use of Axis trademarks
We treat our trademarks with utmost care, and we are therefore prone to make sure that no one is misusing or infringing on our rights. It is also important for Axis that no one is using our trademarks in a way that may mislead anyone concerning the origin of the product or the nature of the relationship withAxis.
Alongside with the proper use rules in the chapter "Authorized use of Axis trademarks", that should be followed at all times, below are the example cases of prohibited use that we will immediately act upon.
1.2.1 Use in company name, trade name, trademark, products or services
You may not use or register "Axis" or other Axis trademarks, products, features or technology names as a part of your company name, trade name, trademark, product or service name. The same is applicable for names confusingly similar to Axis trademarks, products, features or technology names (some of the examples are misspellings, translations, or transliterations).
1.2.2 Prominent use of Axis trademarks misleading customers
You may not use Axis trademarks on your website, in marketing and other materials in such a prominent way that may mislead customers about the nature of your relationship or co-operation with Axis and the actual seller or manufacturer of the product.
For example, always present enough information about your own company in all sales, marketing, and product materials, as well as on your website. If you are a partner, be clear about your role and use Axis relationship logotype. If you are not a partner but you are still selling Axis products, be clear about it. Never combine your own name or logotype with any Axis trademark.
1.2.3 Use of Axis trademark for products not made by Axis
You may not use an Axis trademark on a product or on marketing material for a product that only contains a part manufactured or developed by Axis and where the final product or solution is developed by your company.
In such cases, use your own logo or name for the product. You are still free to advertise which part of the product comes from Axis and use your relationship logotype if you are a partner.
1.2.4 Use in domain name, meta tag or hidden text in a webpage
You may not register any domain name containing an Axis trademark, even if this domain name redirects to a page on the Axis website or to a page on your website selling Axis products.
|Note that you are still allowed to use "axis" in a subdomain string directing to a specific page on your website dedicated to Axis products as long as it is not a separate domain name registration and is not likely to mislead customers.
|mycompany-axis.com, axisipcamera.org, axismycompany.com etc.
1.2.5 Replace or remove Axis corporate logotype from a product for resale
You may not remove Axis corporate logotype from a product or replace it with your own logotype. Axis corporate logotype is an important quality and brand mark for customers and should remain on the product at all times.
1.2.6 Use of Axis trademark in an altered or distorted form
You may not distort, change, or in any other way inappropriately use Axis trademark in violation of the rules in the chapter "Authorized use of Axis trademarks".
1.2.7 Translate Axis trademarks to other languages
You should only use Axis trademarks as they are without translating, transliterating or transcribing them.
1.2.8 Use on merchandise items
Unless expressly approved by Axis, you should not use Axis trademarks on merchandise items such as office utensils, apparel, souvenirs etc.
1.2.9 Use in an objectionable material
You may not use Axis trademarks in or in connection with any defamatory, scandalous, pornographic, or other materials of any sort that are likely to dilute, defame, disparage or harm the reputation of Axis.
2. Axis copyrighted material
Axis owns a substantial amount of copyrighted material from product images to collaterals, white papers, and website content. As a rule, Axis does not allow third party to use its copyrighted materials.
If you are an Axis partner, you can find detailed partner-specific information about access to Axis materials, fulfillment marketing, and co-marketing on the Axis Partner Pages (login).
2.1 Authorized use of copyrighted material
Any authorization to use any of Axis' copyrighted material is subject to complying with these guidelines in full. If you breach against any provision of these guidelines, connected to either trademarks or copyrighted material, or infringe Axis intellectual property rights in any other ways, the authorizations set forth in these guidelines will automatically terminate and your use of Axis copyrighted material will no longer be regarded as authorized.
This authorization applies only to you and does not include the right for you to authorize any third parties to further use the copyrighted material in any way. For instance, some online marketplaces request you to give a license for any uploaded copyrighted content, and Axis does not consent to such licensing.
2.1.1 White papers and technical guides and manuals
We do not generally authorize reproduction of Axis materials for commercial purposes in print or online. Nor do we permit local hosting of Axis materials on third-party webpages. Instead, we encourage and specifically authorize you to "deep link" to relevant webpages on axis.com. This allows your visitors to always access the most recent and updated version of all Axis materials.
2.1.2 Product images
You are allowed to use Axis product images located in the photo library, provided that you use them in accordance with the rules below:
- When you use our photos, you should accompany them by the credit line and notice 'Courtesy of Axis Communications AB. All rights reserved.'.
- The use cannot deride Axis in any way.
- The use cannot imply unfounded endorsement and be of any harm to Axis.
- The use cannot misleadingly imply any kind of relationship or affiliation between the third party and Axis if such relationship or affiliation does not exist.
- You cannot change or manipulate photos except for changing the size to fit the media.
- The use cannot infringe Axis registered trademarks.
The use of any other product images copyrighted by Axis is not authorized unless specifically confirmed to you by Axis.
2.2 Unauthorized use of copyrighted material
You are not authorized to use Axis copyrighted material in any of the following ways:
- Copy, reproduce, further redistribute, or publish any Axis materials, including content of webpages, white papers, guides, and manuals in whole or in part.
- Change or create derivative works of Axis materials, including but not limited to content of webpages, white papers, guides, and manuals in whole or in part.
- Copy, reproduce, or change source code or object code of Axis products unless this code is licensed as open source software where the license expressly permits these actions. In such cases, the rules of the specific license apply.
- Imitate the look and feel of Axis materials, including webpages, graphical user interface, and visual design of products by using the specific color combinations, layout, visual appearance etc.


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Let's get the sad part out of the way from the start: you can't buy this monstrosity. But it's nice to know that in the spring of 2011, with a bit of elbow grease and a $600 budget, some engineering students from the University Of Wisconsin were able to create a subwoofer with a cone 6 feet in diameter. It was simply called The Giant Speaker. Seeing as this was done on a shoestring budget, the best materials for the job couldn't be selected. The driver was made of fiberglass, instead of the preferable carbon fiber for instance. Still, the team used 24 Neodymium magnets to drive this giant cone with the voice coil driver being fabricated by hand with three layers of 18awg wire wound onto G10 form attached to a fiberglass disk for support. The giant speaker was then placed in an 8′ by 8′ by 2′ cabinet and set in motion by a "20kW PWM voltage sourced inverter (intended for motor drives and microgrids) which was powered by a 400V DC power supply. At low frequencies (~10 Hz) peak coil currents were 100A." Turn out it was able to run at frequencies between 5Hz and 50Hz, after which the inertia just became too much for the system to handle. In tests, the group found out that the resonant frequency of the building they were in was 7Hz, which resulted in several complaints from the other tenants and lots of high-fives from the students. No word on whether they found the Brown Note.
[ Project Page ] VIA DamnGeeky ]

subset: commoncrawl


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"We see the day coming when the majority of agency compensation will be linked to the returns our clients reap from our creative imaginations." Howard Draft of Draft FCB in todays NY Times Article here. (Sub. req'd) that reports how Ad Agencies are preparing for the shift to fees based on results and the impact they have on buyers. Talk about a large pill to swallow.
Ad Agencies and Accountability
Article No :161 | April 20, 2007 | by Howard Mann
April 23, 2007
Do you think more companies are going to have in-house advertising/design departments in the future?


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The largest prize that two sports teams have ever played for was twenty million dollars, in a cricket match held last November on a field by the airport in Antigua. The contestants were the English national team and the Stanford Superstars, a team selected from among the best players of the West Indies. The winning players got a million dollars each (there are eleven players on a cricket team); coaches, substitutes, and the cricket boards of each side split the rest. The losing players got nothing.
The field and the purse belonged to Robert Allen Stanford, a gaudy financier who is from Mexia, Texas, and lives on St. Croix. He is also a citizen of Antigua and Barbuda, a nation where he has owned a bank (with all its offshore advantages), an airline, a sports club, a newspaper, a couple of restaurants, and the cricket stadium. He has employed as many as a thousand of the eighty-four thousand people who live on the islands, more than any other citizen, and his relationship to the government has a vestigial, colonial aspect. The Prime Minister, Baldwin Spencer, once said of Stanford, "This man has a lien on our whole country." Stanford was knighted by Antigua, controversially, in 2006, and began having people call him Sir Allen. He is the chairman of Stanford Financial Group, a wealth-management company. According to Forbes's 2008 "Four Hundred Richest Americans" list, he was the two-hundred-and-fifth, with an estimated worth of $2.2 billion; a year earlier he had been the two-hundred-and-thirty-ninth.
If Stanford wasn't widely known in America, he is now. On February 17th, more than a dozen federal agents arrived at his offices in Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against him and two of his associates, saying they had engaged in a fraud of "shocking magnitude" involving the sale of roughly eight billion dollars' worth of certificates of deposit. (As of last week, no criminal charges had been filed against Stanford, although one of his associates had been arrested.) According to the S.E.C., two of the claims Stanford made to his investors—about how well one of his mutual funds performed and about where he would put the money––were pure deceptions.
In Antigua, Stanford is a commanding figure, with his own mythology. It has been reported that he carried a vial of blood that came from a stigmatic priest he had met. Stanford has said that he simply witnessed the priest's wounds and touched his head to his, thereby experiencing an affirmation of his faith. On the island, he tends to be either esteemed or reviled, depending on one's interests. "Some people love him, and some people love to hate him," Winston Derrick, the publisher of the Daily Observer, the paper in Antigua that Stanford doesn't own, told me.
Among the many people in Antigua who care very much about cricket, he is regarded as a savior. He has reportedly spent between sixty and seventy-five million dollars on cricket in the West Indies, which is Steinbrenner-scale money considering the size of the islands' population. Many of those less beholden to him think of Stanford as a shady offshore banker. In 1996, Stanford sued a writer named Klaus de Albuquerque, claiming that he had depicted him in Caribbean Week, a paper in Florida, as a money-launderer involved in the drug trade. The suit was settled out of court; the paper's owners agreed, among other things, to publish a front-page apology, to print twice as many copies of the issue as usual, to deliver a hundred copies of it to Stanford, and to pay his legal fees. In 1999, Stanford turned over to the Drug Enforcement Agency $3.1 million, after finding, according to the Times, that a former Mexican drug dealer had "hid or laundered money" at his bank in Antigua.
Some on the island have always thought of Stanford as a freebooter who has prospered magnificently on their shores. Jamaica Kincaid was born and grew up in Antigua, and wrote a fierce portrait of the island, "A Small Place." At the ceremony at which Stanford was knighted—with Prince Edward in attendance, and marching bands––Kincaid also received an award. When Stanford approached her, she refused to shake his hand.
"Your honor demeans my own," she told him.
Recently, when I spoke to Kincaid, who has written for this magazine, she said, "He's always been a crook and everybody knows it. Stanford is a standing scandal in Antigua—he's both a joke and a benefactor. In Antigua there's always a man, a person who comes in from the rest of the world––a pirate. Piracy is very close to Antiguan history. They've been coming and hiding money and stealing for hundreds of years. This man comes to Antigua and corrupts the place, and everybody's happy because they're making money.
"The ones who aren't benefitting from it, like me, are the opposition," she continued. "In the papers, after I refused to shake Stanford's hand, I was rebuked by Sir Vivian Richards, the great cricket player, who I had no idea was in with Stanford." She then brought up the airport, "the most holy place" in Antigua, she said. "What Stanford did was he bought land around the airport and transformed the airport. When you go into it now, there are those lovely gardens––he has great taste in gardens. When you came to it in the past, it was just sort of an airport in the tropics. People came to feel it was just a matter of time before Stanford called it the Stanford Airport. No longer, I suppose. I can't tell you how sweet it is."
When Stanford is in Antigua, he lives on his boat, the Sea Eagle, for which he has built an elaborate compound with a pavilion. To travel between the boat and the pavilion, he usually drives a golf cart. Riding beside him, I asked where the boat had been made.
"Holland," he said. "In the boat-building business, there's a saying: 'If it ain't Dutch, it ain't much.' "
Stanford has gone to ground since the S.E.C. charges were filed. I was able to meet him last fall because I was in Antigua to watch his cricket team compete against the English. We had been scheduled to have dinner the night before on his boat, but that was cancelled when the golfer Vijay Singh, who was negotiating a sponsorship deal with Stanford, flew in for the cricket match. When I arrived at the compound the next morning, Stanford was at a meeting across the road at his airplane hangar. He built his boat dock next to the airport, on landfill, so that he could fly in and be on the water in minutes. From a chair in the pavilion, I could see the Sea Eagle, gleaming and nearly motionless on the flat-calm bay. On its deck, a young woman in a skirt and blouse appeared. I watched her walk along the pier until she came up to my chair and asked me if I needed anything. Sir Allen, she said, would be along soon.
He seemed in a good mood when he finally showed up. Stanford is six feet four, with small blue eyes, brown hair cut short, and a mustache. His expression is open and enthusiastic, but there is a suggestion of watchfulness to it. He carries ten or fifteen pounds more than he once did, as a kind of sheen of prosperity. We spoke about the elections in the United States, which were just a few days away. He was concerned that Barack Obama would raise taxes on rich people. I mentioned the name of a hedge-fund manager who had made more than a billion dollars in a year—even if he'd had to pay half of it in taxes, I said, he'd still have more than five hundred million left. Stanford studied me for a moment, as if I were an odd sort of specimen, and then replied, "I just hope they don't squeeze the life out of the last engine in the economy that's got any gas left." Stanford reportedly owes the United States slightly more than a hundred and four million dollars in back taxes.
And yet, whatever secrets Stanford was keeping, he spoke scornfully of bankers who had invested in subprime mortgages. He had avoided those investments entirely, he said. "I'm in wealth management, and when I looked at those things"—he held his hand forward as if the dubious instruments were in his palm––"when I looked at those things, I couldn't even understand them, and I don't invest in anything I can't understand. 'This is not double-A, triple-A stuff,' I said, 'this is volatile.' We didn't invest a dollar in it. Being privately held, we haven't had to chase short-term yields to chase stock prices and give big bonuses."
We were sitting on the deck of the boat, by the stern. Stanford leaned on one elbow, reclining against some cushions, the very picture, I thought, of the rich man at leisure, tranquil and untroubled. (I guess I was wrong.) The sky was almost comically blue. I had not had time for breakfast at the hotel; someone in the boat's galley cooked me eggs and made me coffee. The young woman I had seen earlier stood at a kind of attention just beyond the range of hearing and periodically stepped forward and filled my cup.
Stanford continued to speak of his financial sagacity. "We don't use leverage," he said. "We go one to one. We're not a Vegas-style house. We're a quality investment firm. We believe in quality practices. I'm picking up stuff now for ten cents on the dollar."
Stanford is fifty-eight. I asked when he first came to the Caribbean. "I've been out here twenty-six years on either a full-time or semi-full-time basis," he said. "West Indians and Texans have a kindred spirit; it doesn't matter what you are, what you have, people take you for what's in your heart. I found a reason to have business here. I just felt very comfortable; I loved the weather. Who wouldn't love this?" He spread his arms, showing off the air and the water in a manner that conveyed a comfortable possession.
Stanford has said that he is related to Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University, and that he has a genealogist's research to prove it. The university says it has proof that he isn't, and filed a trademark-infringement suit against his company. Stanford's grandfather, Lodis, a barber, began selling insurance in 1932, and Stanford's father, James, worked for him. After high school, Stanford went to Baylor University, where, he told me, he played football. "I had an athletic scholarship. I put myself through school," he said. "I tore my rotator cuff and broke my collarbone as a quarterback; I got slammed down on the ground." Baylor has no record of Stanford's receiving a football scholarship. His name does not appear among the list of letter winners for football; nor does it appear in the team media guides from 1970 to 1974. A college spokesperson said by e-mail, "I haven't been able to find anyone who was associated with the team during those years who can recall him as a player."
Stanford said that to recover from his football injuries he swam in a college pool, and soon got himself certified as a scuba-diving teacher. Before long, he had five hundred students, he told me. "I was the only scuba-diving instructor within a hundred miles." By the time he graduated, he said, he was making more than his professors. "When I got out of college, before I got serious about what I'm doing, I just wanted to dive in as many exotic places as I could—the Indian Ocean, Seychelles, the Australia barrier reef," Stanford told me. "I was a dive bum."
After roaming and diving, Stanford joined the Stanford Financial Group in the late nineteen-seventies, when he was twenty-six. His father was the chairman. Stanford Financial Group was a small, prosperous insurance and real-estate outfit, with customers in Texas and Mexico. When oil prices collapsed, in the mid-eighties, so did the price of Houston real estate, and Stanford bought a lot of it. When the prices rebounded, he was reported to be much richer. In 1993, he took over from his father.
Stanford was welcomed to Antigua, in 1990, by the government of Sir V. C. Bird, who ran the country as if it were a family business. Stanford had just left Montserrat, where he'd had to surrender his banking license after a British investigation into a bank he'd started there. Antigua was known to have a more forgiving atmosphere when it came to offshore banking.
In 1994, Bird was replaced by his son Lester, who also encouraged Stanford's investments. Stanford proved a polite but touchy citizen. He reportedly paid consultants to help Antigua set up a new banking regulatory board, and sat on it himself for a time; that meant, in effect, that he had a role in regulating himself. He lent large sums to the government, and to two federal ministers. (According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Stanford Financial Group's political action committee and employees have also contributed $2.4 million to American political operations since 2000, and the company has spent $4.8 million on lobbying since 1999, mostly on issues related to money-laundering, financial services, and banking.) In 2004, Lester Bird was defeated in elections by Baldwin Spencer, who promised to attack the previous government's pervasive corruption. Spencer has tangled with Stanford, whom he described two years ago as "haughty, arrogant, and obnoxious," and said that he had grown weary of his "threats, innuendos, and, now, downright political interference in our nation's affairs." A politician named Steadroy (Cutie) Benjamin, the parliamentary leader of the opposition, put Stanford up for his knighthood, which Spencer opposed. Recently, though, they had maintained a kind of truce.
The smoky glass doors to the yacht's cabin separated and a boy of about twelve walked through them—Stanford's son. People who worked for Stanford told me that he hoped his son would take over for him one day. He was a pleasant-looking boy with straw-blond hair. Stanford has six children and is currently in the middle of a divorce. During the cricket tournament, the papers described an argument that Stanford and his thirty-year-old girlfriend, Andrea Stoelker, conducted in front of observers. The source of their tension, the papers claimed, was an affair Stoelker was carrying on with the captain of the Superstars. Stanford said that he and Stoelker, who was the director of the tournament, had never been happier. The previous evening, he had introduced her to me as his fiancée.
Stanford drove me back to the pavilion, and an attendant there gave me a tour of Stanford's hangar. There were two small jets and one the size of a commercial liner, all of them looking as if they had just been polished. The floor of the hangar looked as clean as that of an operating room. Several planes were elsewhere, the attendant said; Stanford, he added, had the largest private-jet fleet in the world.
During the years in which Stanford built up his business—Stanford Financial Group set up affiliates in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru—he made what now appears to be an effort to avoid oversight. On February 17th, the S.E.C. filed a complaint alleging that Stanford engaged in "a massive, ongoing fraud." The nature of the fraud was somewhat obscure, even, at that point, to the S.E.C. The main thing is that eight billion dollars seems to be missing. Stanford allegedly acted with the connivance of two associates, James M. Davis and Laura Pendergest-Holt. Davis, who is sixty, roomed with Stanford in college and has worked for him for thirty years. Pendergest-Holt, who is thirty-five, held the title of chief investment officer. She was hired in 1997, according to the S.E.C., having had no experience in the financial-services or securities industries. Subpoenas were sent to Stanford and Davis and Pendergest-Holt before the complaint was filed, but only Pendergest-Holt answered hers. Pendergest-Holt's appearance led people to wonder whether she would supply information against Stanford in exchange for leniency. (Through one of her lawyers, Brent Baker, Pendergest-Holt denied any wrongdoing. Davis and Stanford did not return calls.)
A substantial portion of the complaint attacks the assertions Stanford made to his clients. The returns of one mutual fund, as reported in Stanford's pitch books, were inflated or fictitious, the complaint said—false claims that helped the fund grow from ten million dollars to more than a billion in about five years, earning Stanford more than twenty-five million dollars in fees. In 2006, some investment advisers began asking why their clients were not receiving the returns the pitch books were claiming, so Stanford hired an "outside performance reporting expert," who, according to the S.E.C., told the company that the results included "unexplained 'bad math.' "
According to the S.E.C., Stanford told people buying his C.D.s that their money would be primarily invested in liquid assets, which are easy to sell, and that a committee of more than twenty analysts would keep track of the portfolio. Furthermore, Stanford said that the portfolio was subject to a yearly review by an Antiguan regulator. He sold roughly eight billion dollars' worth of the C.D.s. The S.E.C. says that most of the money was not invested in liquid assets—going instead to real estate and private equity, for example—and that the analysts only monitored around ten per cent of the investments; nor were they audited by the Antiguan regulator. The S.E.C. tried several times to call an accountant in Antigua who was supposed to audit the investment portfolio, but, according to the February 17th complaint, "no one ever answered the phone." The accountant died in January. His daughter, in London, had taken over his modest business, but she told British reporters that she didn't know anything about Stanford. When Pendergest-Holt was asked about the eight billion dollars, she said she didn't know where the bulk of it was––only Stanford and Davis knew.
The S.E.C. was still not sure what Stanford did with all of his clients' money. "We don't know what the components of his wealth are," David Peavler, an S.E.C. attorney, told me. "What we allege—and that is critical—is that the investment director could not explain where the money was."
For some cricket fans, Stanford's support, and, in particular, his promotion of a succinct, modern form of the game known as Twenty20, is about the only thing that still redeems him. In late February, a reporter for the Telegraph interviewed a British expatriate standing in line outside Stanford's bank in Antigua to withdraw his money—part of a general run on his banks. "Some people here have always believed he was a con artist and that his wealth was drug money," the man said of Stanford, but added, "When he did the Twenty20 cricket, he was a hero." Yet there are also many people in the cricket world who believe that Stanford has done more than almost anyone to damage a noble game—a charge as serious, in their circles, as anything the S.E.C. could come up with.
Stanford never cared much for traditional cricket, a game that can take five days and end in a draw—"I saw a few matches, and I didn't get that enamored," he told me—but he has embraced Twenty20 as a near philanthropy. Upon seeing it, he thought, "This is the future of the sport. It's only three hours long, it's intense, it will catch the world by storm, and off we go to the races."
Twenty20's most avid reception has been in India, the world's largest cricket market, but it was invented in England, in 2003, after the England and Wales Cricket Board, the E.C.B., learned from surveys that people wanted a version of the game that they could watch after work. A bowler in cricket throws a series of six balls to the batsman; then another bowler steps in. Each series is called an over. In Test cricket, the game's classic form, roughly four hundred and fifty overs are thrown in the course of a match. Twenty20 allows each side just twenty overs. It also rewards big hitters. To purists, it is a little as if baseball had been compressed to three innings, with every player encouraged to just swing for the fences.
Twenty20 emerged when West Indian cricket was in a long and severe decline. Thirty years ago, the West Indies dominated international Test cricket, the first black team to do so. (A single West Indian team represents fifteen nations and territories in Test matches.) The West Indies had four bowlers with frightening speed (the fastest bowlers throw the ball ninety miles an hour), and Sir Vivian Richards, an intimidating batsman (who was knighted by Antigua in 1999), all of whom arrived in the wake of Sir Garfield Sobers, who was perhaps the best all-around player ever. Sobers was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1975 for services to cricket. After these players retired, the West Indies went from playing twenty-seven Test matches in a row without a loss, then a record, to winning only one in fourteen.
Living in the Caribbean, Stanford saw the regard in which the great West Indian cricketers were held. "People lived and died on the pride of that feeling," he said. In 2005, he told me, friends of the West Indies Cricket Board came to him for help. He said, " 'Why would I want to do that?' 'Because our cricket is dead and dying,' they told me."
Stanford believed that to return to prominence the West Indians needed to train and play without worrying about money. The best cricketers in England sign contracts with the E.C.B. for up to eight hundred thousand dollars a year to be available for Test play. In the West Indies, players are paid by the match, usually three or four thousand dollars; in a year, they might play ten or twelve matches. In 2006, Stanford held a tournament among players from across the region and from it selected thirty-five players to attend tryouts for the Stanford Superstars. Seventeen were selected, from nine countries; the largest number, four, were from Guyana. He put them up at a hotel, gave them meals, and paid them two thousand dollars a week.
Stanford challenged South Africa to play the Superstars at Twenty20, and when they turned him down he challenged England. Whatever their ambivalence about what it was doing to cricket, the English were eager to receive the lucrative paychecks that came with playing Twenty20 abroad. A deal was soon struck: the English team would play the Superstars once a year, for five years, with twenty million dollars for each match, to be put up by Stanford. To publicize the agreement, Stanford landed by helicopter at Lord's in London––the Vatican of the cricket world––with a clear Plexiglas trunk containing twenty million dollars in cash.
The English players arrived in Antigua a week before the match, and well before the charges against Stanford were revealed. Each day, their relations with him eroded further. Nothing about Stanford seemed too insignificant for the British papers to deplore. His polo shirts were loud; he was "a self-obsessed buffoon"; he had turned cricket into "the new pornography." Furthermore, he had used cricket to make himself "the world's most famous 239th richest man in America."
Virtually the only cheerful voice belonged to the English captain, Kevin Pietersen. "Saturday is going to be a great day for the lads," he said. "We just have to do what we have to do." He seemed most worried about how his side might handle victory. Before they left England, he had warned them not to celebrate too exuberantly, lest they set a poor example during a distressing economic time.
The main match was preceded by five nights of lesser contests. During a match between Middlesex, an English county team, and Pietersen's side, the scoreboard screen suddenly showed an enormous image of Stanford on the terrace of the restaurant overlooking the field. On his knees sat an English player's wife, who was pregnant; he had each of his arms around the girlfriends of two other players. He was smiling broadly. The English looked stunned; the next day, their home newspapers carried many column inches of umbrage. One player said that Stanford deserved to be "chinned."
Peripheral resentments surfaced. The lights on Stanford's field were inadequate, the English said; Stanford could afford brighter ones. Furthermore, Stanford would stride into the English dressing room, which was, by tradition, sacrosanct, as if he owned the place. (It was pointed out that he did.) The English players began to feel that they were engaged in a garish spectacle. Lord Ian MacLaurin, the former head of the E.C.B., described the match as "a week's bash in the sun for a self-publicist knight."
"Will you be watching?" MacLaurin was asked.
"I shall not," he said.
It had rained the morning of the twenty-million-dollar match, and that evening there were still clouds on the horizon, but above the field the sky was deep blue. A steamroller was tamping down the pitch. On the sidelines were dancers in costumes, as at a carnival. The English are said to feel that the atmosphere for cricket in the West Indies, with the music and the dancing and the carrying on, is insufficiently reverent. They call it calypso cricket.
I found Giles Clarke, the chairman of the E.C.B., and David Collier, its chief executive, on the restaurant terrace overlooking the field. Clarke is tall, with lank brown hair, and Collier is short and round-faced, with glasses. I asked if they had a prediction. "We're going to win," Collier said, "but it will be very close, the one-seventies."
"Will you be surprised if you lose?"
"If we lose, we won't be surprised," Clarke said. "We'll be pissed off." Collier nodded emphatically.
England won the toss and chose to bat first. The teams took the field, the Antiguan anthem was played, and by five-thirty Ian Bell, the first English batsman, described in the program as "fluent and technically correct," was standing on the crease, tamping his bat on the pitch. The crowd was overwhelmingly behind the West Indians. When the Superstars collected the ball before the striker could run (a dot ball, that is), the waitress beside me shouted, "Good stop, good stop—go, Superstars!"
"A hundred countries this is going to," the announcer said. "Albania, Yemen, Mars, moon."
I saw Stanford on the other side of the terrace, with a small crowd around him. He came over and sat with me for a moment. "This is twenty years of my life to pull this together, and three years of my work," he said. His eyes were so wide he looked alarmed. "I'm at my maximum right now," he said. Then he tapped my knee and strode off.
I happened to look behind me into the restaurant. It was empty, except for a mild-looking black man in his seventies sitting on a couch in front of a television with his hands in his lap, as if waiting—Sir Garfield Sobers. It was a little like looking through the window of a bar and seeing Willie Mays alone watching a baseball game. In 1968, Sobers became the first batsman to hit six sixes in an over. (A six is like a home run.) I asked if I might join him. He nodded. When I asked why he wasn't watching from the terrace, he answered without taking his eyes from the television. "I like to watch cricket from in here," he said. "I can see what's happening behind the pitcher's arm. When you sit behind him, you can see the players move in and out, and if you sit outside you see it only from the side."
Pietersen, the English captain, and Owais Shah were the next batsmen up. "A lot depends on these two English batters," Sobers said. "If you can get these two out quickly, England will be in real trouble." For most of their first two overs, they nudged the ball around, getting mostly singles. Then Superstar Darren Sammy ("useful with the bat and capable of catching anything within range") bowled to Shah, who took a full swing. The ball flew high into the air, toward the boundary line. Two Superstars ran to it, apparently headed for a collision. In the last instant, one of them fell back, and the other caught the ball. A number of women in the crowd began doing a shimmying kind of dance.
"That was a great catch," Sobers said. "So often that will happen and the two fellows will give up—they see each other at the last. That determination is the kind of thing that wins matches." Shah left the field with England having only twenty-nine runs for just under six overs, with three batsmen out—not good at all. It was, Sobers said, "a tremendous start."
I asked Sobers whether the Superstars were bowling well, or the English batting poorly. The Superstars were bowling well, Sobers said. "Very fast, and they're concentrating just short of a length. The length is the length of the pitch. It makes it difficult for the batsman. You try and slip in the yorker—the one that goes down in the blocking hole, the place at the batsman's feet."
I could barely follow what Sobers was saying—it was the first match I had ever seen, and the complications of cricket make basketball look like jacks––but I followed as well as I could. During the next over, Pietersen managed only a single. In the following over, as the bowler, Darren Sammy, ran toward him, Pietersen aggressively hopped forward and planted his feet, intending to send the ball sharply to his left. Sammy threw the ball behind him, striking what is called the legside wicket—and Pietersen was out. The crowd stood and screamed.
"England shouldn't have a chance now, unless we bowl very bad," Sobers said cautiously, still not taking his eyes from the screen. "England still have some fairly good batsmen that can turn the tide, but now West Indies is in the box seat. Cricket is a funny game, though. Our fellows might come out and play as bad as the English have. It takes only one ball to hit a wicket."
The scoreboard screen showed Kevin Pietersen sitting glumly in the English pavilion. On the television, Stanford stood and punched the air above his head. "Sir Allen Stanford," the commentator said. "He's loving this!"
During the fourteenth over, the English player Luke Wright sent a ball in a long arc to the boundary. It went up through the black sky, past a crescent moon, as if in a children's book, past the fronds of some palm trees, and toward Darren Sammy. "That fellow doesn't drop," Sobers said. Sammy closed his hands around the ball.
"England's in real trouble now," Sobers said. "If they score a hundred and ten, that would be a lot of runs. But cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties."
Steve Harmison, the last English batsman, came out, swung at the fifth ball of the twentieth over, and missed. His wicket fell, and that was it. England had scored ninety-nine runs.
"If we can't make a hundred runs, we don't deserve to win," Sobers said.
In the bathroom, I heard a man at one of the sinks say gravely to a man drying his hands, "The money stay in the West Indies."
The Superstars needed only two batsmen to do it. Chris Gayle, the captain, and Andre Fletcher, a twenty-year-old who was more or less making his début, walked onto the pitch and never left. I had taken up enough of Sobers's time, so I went out on the terrace to watch. One ball after another rolled briskly along the pitch and past the boundary, or sailed through the sky and into the crowd. Each time it did, the spectators danced.
Stanford came by and said, "Have you met the Prime Minister?" He gestured toward a compact man in slacks and a polo shirt, who had been standing next to me—Baldwin Spencer. "Tonight has been something that has made the entire Caribbean proud," Spencer said.
The scoreboard showed the Superstars standing by their pavilion in a line with their arms around one another's shoulders, swaying like showgirls. The graphic on the scoreboard screen read, "Need five to win twenty million." Andrew Flintoff bowled and Gayle sent the ball on a high ride into the stands—it was clear even before it arrived that he had hit a six. Gayle turned and pulled the middle stump of the wicket from the ground and held it above his head.
The Superstars, Stanford among them, poured onto the field. In their elation, they looked like men who have reached shore after an ordeal. One of them fell to the ground and lay face down, weeping.
"We didn't just beat them," Stanford told me later. "We thrashed the crap out of them. Three years ago, the English would have thrashed us."
Behind the Prime Minister stood Giles Clarke and David Collier, of the E.C.B., who looked grim. Later, when the news of the charges against Stanford broke, there would be calls for their resignations, outrage that they had ever dealt with Stanford, and a hasty cancelling of all of the E.C.B.'s contracts with him. ("There's an awful lot of being wise after the event," Clarke told me last week. "In the end, sporting organizations take what they can get from sponsors—and it's not easy to get.") For the moment, though, amid the joyful crowd, they formed a huddle with Allan Lamb, a former English player, and the three of them began vehemently discussing who should never have been named to the team.
The victory over England may end up being the Superstars' last good memory of their sponsor and his circle. On February 26th, Laura Pendergest-Holt was arrested by F.B.I. agents and charged with obstructing the S.E.C.'s investigation. The complaint says that she had not been honest with the S.E.C. (She has pleaded not guilty. "She definitely denies committing any crime whatsoever," her lawyer Brent Baker told me.) Three confidential witnesses describe discussions that included Pendergest-Holt and "Executive A and Executive B"—clearly Stanford and James Davis. According to the complaint, at a series of meetings in Miami to prepare Pendergest-Holt's testimony, the witnesses "were surprised and unnerved" to learn how sketchy some aspects of the firm's investment portfolio were. One witness "described feeling like he 'had been kicked.' " Another broke down and wept, after which a Stanford lawyer "suggested that they begin to pray together." (Later, when a witness asked the lawyer why he wasn't smiling, he replied, "The party is over.") The portfolio, it turned out, included a loan of $1.6 billion to a shareholder. "More significant," the complaint says, was that the shareholder was "understood to be Executive A"—Allen Stanford.
What isn't yet known is the full consequences of the S.E.C.'s allegations. The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank has taken control of Stanford's bank in Antigua. Last Thursday, Baldwin Spencer convened an emergency session of parliament and recommended that Stanford's assets be seized. In Venezuela, the government has already seized the local Stanford bank, and plans to put it up for sale.
Stanford did not turn up until two days after the S.E.C. charges, when the F.B.I. found him in Fredericksburg, Virginia, at the house of a relative of his fiancée's. The agents who served him the papers said that he had been cordial and had told them to have a nice day. While Stanford was unaccounted for, his father, James, was interviewed. He said he had trouble believing that the allegations were true. CNBC reported that on the afternoon of the day the S.E.C. had charged him Stanford had tried to rent a plane to fly to Antigua. The jet owner insisted on a wire transfer, but Stanford had only a credit card. The S.E.C. had frozen his money. I found it strange to think of his fleet of planes––"the largest in the world"––locked up, and their owner being turned away at an airport. He has since surrendered his passport.
In recent days, Stanford has been compared to the alleged New York Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff. (Stanford's firm also lost money in dealings related to Madoff, according to the S.E.C., although he told clients he had no such exposure at all.) And, indeed, in an amended complaint filed last Friday the S.E.C. accused Stanford of running a "massive Ponzi scheme." It alleged that he and Davis had "reverse-engineered" their financial statements to match a "predetermined return." Madoff's case began at the end, apparently with a confession. Stanford's has just been launched; so far, he has admitted nothing.
Right now, the great mystery is the whereabouts of the eight billion dollars. According to the S.E.C.'s original complaint, after word of its interest began to circulate, Stanford falsely told at least one investor that he could not get his money because the S.E.C. had frozen the account. Another customer was told by the company that Stanford himself had ordered a two-month ban on redemptions. On February 17th, the government actually did freeze the assets of three of Stanford's companies. The Yankees outfielders Johnny Damon and Xavier Nady said that because their brokers had accounts with Stanford they couldn't access their money; Damon said that he hadn't even been able to pay his trainer.
"We have no comment on whether or not there are funds sufficient to cover the investors," David Peavler, the S.E.C. attorney, told me. Months, and possibly years, may pass before Stanford's finances are untangled. "Cases like this one take a long time," an attorney who has handled S.E.C. cases told me. "It isn't pretty, and it isn't quick, and the trustees can burn up a lot of the money."
Anyone who managed to get through to the company was told that it was in receivership; all questions were referred to the receiver, Ralph Janvey, a lawyer in Dallas, who did not respond to requests for comment. The only elaboration I received from many attempts to speak with Stanford's representatives was in an e-mail from one, who wrote, "I am so, so sorry, and so embarrassed."
A couple of weeks after the twenty-million-dollar match—and before the S.E.C. made its charges—I rode the A train to Queens to meet Lennox Cush, who sells real estate at a Century 21 office in Cypress Hills. Cush grew up in Guyana, and was a member of the Superstars—the only American who was. Warming up in Antigua last fall, he had twisted his knee and couldn't play against England. He was awarded about a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars as a backup player.
Cush's office had rows of cubicles, behind which sat men in dark suits. They regarded me without interest; whatever attribute it was that made someone look like a customer, I didn't have. Cush, who was tall and rangy, took me upstairs to meet his boss. Coming down, he took the steps slowly, and winced. When we got into his car, his X-rays were on the passenger seat. His phone rang, and he said to the person calling, "Can you leave me alone? I just got news that I got to get an operation. My A.C.L. and meniscus."
We drove past two- and three-story buildings until we came to the Hibiscus Restaurant and Bar. While Cush looked for somewhere to sit, I stood by the bar, listening to a man on his phone say that if his truck wasn't repaired by the end of the day he wasn't paying his bill. Several threats and a lot of profanity were involved. When he hung up, he turned to me and said, "I'm sorry, very stressful."
The booths that Cush would have preferred were all taken, so we found a table. A waitress brought us fried rice and vegetables. "I failed the fitness test for my knee one hour before the game," Cush said. When the Superstars won, he jumped into the air, and when he landed he remembered his knee. Then he walked onto the field as fast as he could manage.
I asked Cush about his impression of Stanford. "He's come out of the blue, and he's changed cricket and changed people's lives," he said. "He set all of us for life after cricket."
Two West Indian men walked through the door and came to our table. Cush rose to meet them. They congratulated him and shook his hand. One of them asked what he was going to do next. Cush started to say something, but the other man interrupted. "He's retired," he said. "He's a Twenty20 Stanford man now," and the three of them laughed happily.
We finished our meal and paid and went out on the sidewalk. I asked Cush if he brought his money home with him from Antigua. "No," he said. "We leave it in the bank with Mr. Stanford. He told us he will keep it safe until we need it." ♦


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Art history, Korean beef at The Prado
"San Diego's greatest sculptor, yet people like you don't even know him."
Ed Bedford 3:30 p.m., Oct. 16
After spending significant time in Prague, Czech Republic in 2000, Jesse and I were itching to go south to the Italian beaches, and decided to take a grueling 26-hour bus ride from Prague to Naples.
If you've never been on a bus for any period over 24 hours, don't. It's one of the worst things ever – especially when the movie they showed on the bus (Legends of the Fall) was in the extremely foreign language of Czech. Brad Pitt never sounded so funny!
The fun part of our trip, however, was sitting in the front seats looking out the window at the passing Austrian Alps and Italian countryside, drinking beer with the ever-present thought of clear blue Mediterranean waters on our minds. Since we'd arrived in Europe, roughly four months prior to our hellish bus ride, we had yearned for the southern waters of Italy and Greece.
We got off the bus in Naples and stepped onto Italian soil for the first time in our lives. It was the busiest, most crowded scene we had ever seen – cars, scooters, people and noise surrounded us immediately. This was Italy?! We wanted out.
We had our sights on Pompeii, so we jumped on the coastal railway and headed south via the Circumvesuviana train towards Sorrento on the Amalfi Peninsula. We didn't have much daylight left, so we decided to get off just north of Pompeii in the coastal town of Torre Annunziata, thinking it would be a nice beach to set up our tents and crash for the night.
The walk from the train station to the beach was an experience in itself. There are no rules of engagement in Italian traffic law; it's kill or be killed, whether on foot, bicycle, scooter or vehicle. We stuck out like sore American thumbs with large backpacks, travel gear and a look of complete bewilderment. I recall one street that zig-zagged down a hill to the ocean where we almost died a baker's dozen times with the passing traffic coming within inches of our oversized packs.
Once we reached the beach we breathed a sigh of relief. But we soon saw it was the most polluted beach we had ever seen! There was trash everywhere – our visions of beautiful Italian beaches diminished on the spot.
We knew we couldn't set up camp there, so we trudged back through the jungle of traffic to get some food and find a place to pitch our tents. We walked and walked until we found a small fenced-in area of brush and grass in a neighborhood. Alongside this oasis of a hectare we saw a line of cars all with semi-cracked, fogged-up windows, some of them even sporting makeshift curtains. We were on Torre Annunziata's lover's lane! So with a quick heave of our packs and gear, we scaled the ten-foot fence to set up camp in the middle of the field.
We'd set up our tents and got snuggled in our sleeping bags and were finally dozing off to sleep, when suddenly there was a rush of wind and a sound like a hurricane upon us, nearly blowing our tents over! "Jesse, what the F#$% was that?!!"
It turned out that our camp was about 40 feet from train tracks with high-speed trains passing every hour or so. We couldn't see the tracks through all the brush. Needless to say, it was an interesting night of sleep; however, the trains subsided come early morning.
When morning broke and the first high-speed train awoke us, we knew we needed to get on the road. Packing up my tent, I realized I'd set up my tent on a mound of red ants. Luckily I didn't get any ants in my tent, but I knew our time in Torre had expired and we were ready for Pompeii. We set off for a nearby market to get some bread, cheese, fruit and water.
While sitting on the stoop of the store soaking in the southern Italian sun, we witnessed our first genuine Italian verbal disagreement: A traffic policeman gave a woman a parking ticket. The woman came out of a nearby store to "let the policeman know" she shouldn't have gotten the ticket. A full-out verbal barrage with various hand gestures ensued. It was one of the most entertaining things I'd ever seen. It only get better when the proprietor of the market came out to throw in his two cents and the butcher next door came out to throw in his four. Then passers-bye stopped to engage in the brawl. The cop was still hissing at the crowd as he walked down the street to inevitably get into another altercation. The group of enraged civilians stood there complaining for another ten minutes and the policeman came back to the scene of the crime and got into it again with the group! We couldn't have asked for a better scene to start our day.
After our breakfast and a quick train ride we finally hit Pompeii. We had no idea this 6th century settlement was the size of a relatively small city. Just like a modern city there were the upper-class, working class and lower class neighborhoods – and, of course, the prostitute district. All the while the active volcano Mt. Vesuvius kept a close eye on us, letting us know she was still there with her half-blown mountain ridge from the 79 A.D. eruption that had deposited almost ten feet of ash on the beautiful city. The Italian National Park Service displayed glass cases of some bodies petrified in ash, where you could see gritted teeth and hands covering their faces.
It was one of the best days of our lives meandering through the streets of Pompeii. Like gladiators, we ran through the oldest, most complete pre-Coliseum style amphitheatre in the Roman world, built in 70 A.D. In full sprint, we dashed into the center of the 12,000-person amphitheater as if part of a gladiator ceremony, and did a parody of a bullfight with tourists cheering us on. We got lost in sectioned-off areas of the city with crumbling walls and stairs leading up to the sky. We accosted a stray dog, Snowball, that followed us throughout the city. (While in Italy we had four stray dogs become our friends – It's A Dog's Life in southern Italy.) To end our day, we found a bar right outside the Pompeii gates to drink some local wine and gawk about our amazing day.
We spent the next three days at a campground right on the cliffs of Sorrento, a small port town nestled into rock cliffs with lush vegetation throughout, which offered amazing views of the Tyrrhenian Sea and Mt. Vesuvius.
During our time in Sorrento, we dove off nearby cliffs into blue-green water (finally!), ate some of the best food we had ever eaten, drank some of the tastiest wine and simply enjoyed our surroundings. Our first days in Italy had greatly exceeded our expectations, but we knew in the back of our minds that this was just the beginning of our Mediterranean adventures. Greece was on the horizon, and we knew that we were in for some real debauchery.
Molto interessante!
Sounds like fun times! Pompeii's a great place. Your story brings back good memories. Is that you in the photo?
Yep, that's me in the photo!
Wow, this sounded like one heck of a time/advemture!
Reminds me of visiting Naples via Navy aircraft carriers Indepedence and Nimitz in the 70's. Took the train to Pompeii and Ercolano to see the ruins. Carriers must anchor out in the bay of Naples and ride to shore in "liberty boats" carried aboard the ship. The hulk of Mt. Vesuvius looms over the scene. Great memories!
I haven't been to Italy in more than 30 years. This engaging story brings it all back in vivid detail. The argument with the cop is classic! You're an excellent story-teller Matthew Veseskis!


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#1 House Democrats call for nationalization of refineries06-19-2008, 09:18 AM
House Democrats call for nationalization of refineries
Wednesday, Jun. 18 2008
House Democrats responded to President's Bush's call for Congress to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling. This was at an on-camera press conference fed back live. Among other things, the Democrats called for the government to own refineries so it could better control the flow of the oil supply. They also reasserted that the reason the Appropriations Committee markup (where the vote on the amendment to lift the ban) was cancelled so they could focus on preparing the supplemental Iraq spending bill for tomorrow.
At an off-camera briefing, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said the same. And a senior Republican House Appropriations Committee aide adds that "there were multiple reasons for the postponement" including discussion on the supplemental. But the aide said there was the thought that Democrats may wish to avoid a debate today on energy amendments.
Here are the highlights from briefing
Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), member of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the most-ardent opponents of off-shore drilling
We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.
Hinchey on why they postponed the Appropriations markup.
:mad:Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
~Winston Churchill
I believe Chavez has done something similar in VenezuelaGun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound - Unknown
The problem is Empty People, Not Loaded Guns - Linda Schrock Taylor
Oh good - so were going to $10.00 a gallon immediately then? Saves a lot of hand wringing. Add another buck on for sales tax while youre at it, because at that price you wont notice.At Coretta Scott King's funeral in early 2006, Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy, leaned over to him and whispered, "The torch is being passed to you." "A chill went up my spine," Obama told an aide. (Newsweek)
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- May 2008
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This just goes to show that these politicians do not know a damn thing about what makes up the cost of a gallon of gasoline. Refiners make very little profit because they have to buy the oil at market price. These yo yo's are nuts if they think that they can control the price of a barrel of oil.
A combination of things are driving the price of gasoline up like the falling dollar, the cost of drilling equipment has shot up, the cost of leasing equipment has greatly increased, the easy to find oil is gone ( drilling in harsher environments and deep drilling), federal, state taxes and finally dealing with the morons in DC.
Last edited by lacarnut; 06-19-2008 at 02:45 PM.
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- 194
Too bad the average voter is too stupid to understand the implications of such an act.
"He will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. - F HayekGun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound - Unknown
The problem is Empty People, Not Loaded Guns - Linda Schrock Taylor
It won't happen, but, damn, the Democrats are stupid.
If they took control of the refineries, they would all fall apart within five years.The Pittsburgh Penguins - 2007-08 NHL Eastern Conference Champions
If a Republican proposed this and wrapped it up in some free market, small government speak, 90% of CU would be all over it.
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NEW YORK, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. wildlife scientists say black bears living near urban areas weigh more, become pregnant at a younger age and are more likely to die violent deaths.
Wildlife Conservation Society researchers said they tracked 12 bears living in urban areas around Lake Tahoe, Nev., during a 10-year period and compared them with 10 "wildland" bears living in outlying wild areas. The study found bears in urbanized areas weighed an average of 30 percent more than bears in wild areas due to a diet heavily supplemented by garbage.
The researchers said that obesity led to pregnancies between 4 and 5 years of age, compared with 7 to 8 years for bears in wild areas. Some urban bears even reproduced as early as 2-to-3 years of age around Lake Tahoe.
The researchers also found urban bears tend to die much younger due mostly to collisions with vehicles. All 12 urban bears tracked by the study were dead by age 10 due to vehicle collisions, while six of the wildland bears still survived.
The study is detailed in the journal Human-Wildlife Conflicts.


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—From the San Diego County Probation Department's "Use Of Oleoresin Capsicum (OC) Spray" policy for juvenile facilities
The youth's name isn't Johnny, but that's what the former juvenile offender wants to be called as he describes what it's like to be shot in the face with pepper spray. In San Diego's East Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility, where he spent a year on charges of assault with a deadly weapon in 2010 and 2011, the spray is called simply "OC."
"On your skin, it's not so bad," Johnny, now 19, says. "But once that gets into your face, your eyes just, like, close up and they swell up and it's very watery, and the mucus is just pouring out of your nose, and it's hard to breathe. It pretty much restrains you from doing anything other than focusing on what's going on with you after you've gotten sprayed with the OC."
In corrections terminology, OC spray is considered a "chemical restraint," because a face-full of oleoresin capsicum—which is derived from the resin of red peppers—can be as debilitating as a pair of shackles. Under California law, it's classified as a form of tear gas.
"Some people tend to build a tolerance for it," Johnny says. "So, it might hurt some people more than others."
And there are plenty of opportunities for youths to enhance that tolerance in the five juvenile facilities run by the San Diego County Probation Department (two juvenile halls, three secure rehabilitation centers). Records obtained by CityBeat through the California Public Records Act reveal some of the highest levels of pepper-spray usage in the country. In 2011, the only year for which records were available, Probation recorded 461 incidents involving pepper spray. The East Mesa facility averaged more than five sprayings per week.
According to the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators (CJCA), only 14 states allow the use of pepper spray in juvenile facilities, but in most cases, it's a last-resort measure, limited to riot-level emergencies. Only five of those states, including California, allow staff to carry it on their person, as is the case in San Diego. CJCA notes in its 2011 report on the issue that no studies have been conducted on the safety of using pepper spray on juveniles and that most juvenile correctional agencies shun its use "because of the harm it causes to youths and the negative impact on staff-youth relationships."
Gladys Carrión, commissioner of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees 49 youth-detention programs, says that's why New York has never used it.
"It's dangerous," Carrión says. "I think it doesn't teach the young person a thing about how to manage their behavior. It really doesn't teach staff any skills to be able to engage with young people. I don't see it as an effective tool."
It recent years, many states have voluntarily traded OC spray for new interpersonal techniques designed to de-escalate conflicts. For other jurisdictions, it's taken lawsuits, federal investigations and court orders. In 2006, San Diego County Probation told The San Diego Union-Tribune that it was weighing sweeping revisions to its pepper-spray policies after a prisoner-rights group threatened legal action.
Today, San Diego County continues to embrace OC spray, even as nearby Los Angeles County's three juvenile halls have reduced usage from 1,431 OC incidents in 2001 to just 91 incidents in 2011 in the wake of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. San Diego's two juvenile halls experienced 378 incidents in 2011, four times as many for a population half the size. [See writer's note.]
On average, there's an OC incident in a San Diego juvenile facility every 20 hours.
"The key is you should not be using this as a routine behavior-management tool," says Barry Krisberg, director of research and policy for the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at UC Berkeley. "Those numbers look way too high."
Krisberg is the court-appointed monitor for the California Division of Juvenile Justice, which recently accepted a court order to bring down its number of OC incidents. Krisberg compares the two jurisdictions: Currently, the state-level juvenile system houses roughly 1,000 youths per day and records roughly 45 OC incidents per month. San Diego County, which houses 824 youths per day, averages 38 incidents per month.
"What we're looking at is a county detention system that is handling less-serious, less-violent youth than the state—the state has much more murderers, more armed robbers, more violent offenders—but, yet, the chemical use looks to be comparable," Krisberg says.
Last May, OC incidents peaked in San Diego County's juvenile facilities with 60 incidents, or two per day. Two-thirds of those occurred at the East Mesa facility.
"That's a very high number," John Rhoads, a former top-level juvenile-detention official in both Sacramento and Santa Cruz counties, says of East Mesa's 272 incidents in 2011. "I would be concerned that having that many incidents of use of pepper spray, that it appears to be something they move to too quickly."
Rhoads is currently a Reno-based consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which developed the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a set of standards aimed at reforming juvenile-justice systems to reduce overcrowding and recidivism, as well as the strain on government budgets. Currently, 150 jurisdictions in 32 states are implementing the standards, which also call for banning the use of OC spray.
"Those places spend a lot more time building better relationships with kids," Rhoads says. "They have a less-repressive atmosphere and are working on good programming so behavior is incentivized so they don't get into these extreme situations where there has to be restraint used."
County probation officials declined multiple interview requests and would answer only questions submitted via email. The responses signal the department has no intention of reducing the use of OC.
"The number of times OC spray is used in SD Probation's juvenile institutions is dictated by the number of incidents staff respond to where there is an immediate risk of injury to youth or staff and other options have been attempted and failed or the circumstances do not allow for other options," the department says via email.
In one sense, the policy has worked: In 2011, Probation recorded only two staff injuries that required medical treatment. No similar numbers were available for youth.
But the sheer number of OC incidents may indicate that pepper spray is not the when-all-else-fails tool that the county claims. Of the 461 incidents, 67 were classified as "non-fight," which covers situations such as escape attempts, suicidal behavior or a youth "instigating others to fight," as well as accidental discharges. Pepper spray is also routinely used when a juvenile refuses to leave his cell. Probation's "room extraction" policies dictate staff may fog the room with pepper spray, wait a few minutes, then enter and handcuff a ward.
The county's policies acknowledge that pepper spray can be especially dangerous when used on certain individuals, such as youth who suffer from asthma or are taking psychotropic medication. Probation confirms to CityBeat that OC spray has been used on some "OC Sensitive" wards, but "medical staff noted no lasting adverse effects."
Don Cipriani, a guest teacher who worked in San Diego's juvenile facilities in 2009, describes a "culture of maintaining control," in which he saw staff use the threat of pepper spray regularly to regulate day-to-day obedience, from preventing fights to enforcing how close a ward could stand to another. Juveniles were conditioned to hit the deck when they heard a guard call out "OC."
Cipriani, now a senior program officer who works on school-discipline issues for Public Interest Projects, a New York-based nonprofit, notes that pepper spray had a direct impact on education. Classes were regularly cancelled due to OC incidents, and education staff would often return to the teachers' lounge coughing and with irritated eyes because they had been too close to a spraying.
Critics of OC argue that it runs counter to the real goal of juvenile facilities, rehabilitating youth.
"You can't give a motivational interview with a tear-gas canister on your belt," Krisberg says.
Probation, on the other hand, doesn't see the two as mutually exclusive.
"Probation achieves its rehabilitative goals through rapport building with youth and a variety of programs and services focused on addressing delinquency risk factors for youth in custody," the department says via email. "Case plans are developed for all youth who remain on probation upon release, and work on those case plans continues with probation officers in the community."
Forget rapport, says one former juvenile-hall officer. Pepper spray leaves a residue of enmity.
"Once you have sprayed a kid, you have not made a friend; you have made an enemy for life," says G.R. Dean, who retired in 2003 after 25 years with the San Diego County Probation Department. "He associates you with serious pain. Worse than his parents have ever done to him. Worse than his gang rivals have ever done. You have exceeded that."
Writer's note: After I appeared on KPBS Midday Edition, my colleague Kelly Davis raised a question about a statistic I cited on the air. I'd said that L.A. County's juvenile detention system is 15 percent larger than San Diego's. I misspoke. As I reported in the print edition of the story, L.A.'s three juvenile halls are 35 percent bigger in terms of daily population than all of San Diego County's juvenile facilities combined. After a little more thought, I realized that while that figure was factually accurate, I was comparing apples to apples and oranges. San Diego has two juvenile halls and three so-called secure rehabilitation centers. In L.A. County, these type of rehabilitation centers are operated by a different department and therefore that population was not included in the totals for L.A.'s Detention Services Bureau.
If you compare L.A. County's juvenile halls to just San Diego's juvenile halls, the disparity becomes even more stark. L.A. County recorded 91 OC incidents in its three facilities, which have a daily population of roughly 1,130. San Diego County recorded 378 OC incidents in its two facilities, with an average daily population of 517.
That means San Diego facilities experienced more than four times as many incidents, even though the juvenile hall populations are less than half the size of L.A.'s. I've edited the story to reflect this more clearly.
Email firstname.lastname@example.com or follow him on Twitter @DaveMaass.


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Free shipping continues above € 99
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"mysqueeze", designed by Roland Kreiter, is a citrus squeezer is designed for use directly in your hand and was awarded the Pure Creativity 2009 award organised by Mydeco.com, awarded by a jury chaired by Philippe Starck and Sir Terence Conran. The reason "mysqueeze" won the prize was that, 20 years on, it can be the new icon, heir to the "Juicy Salif" designed by Philippe Starck, the citrus squeezer produced by Alessi which went on to become one of the most renowned icons of contemporary life in all four corners of the globe. "mysqueeze" is especially suitable for squeezing lemons, which often have to be squeezed for just a few drops of juice, perhaps directly over food. "mysqueeze" looks good directly at the table, on a saucer, ready for use.
Roland Kreiter, who was born in Romania in 1983 and brought up in Germany, is a trained model maker and is studying Industrial Design at Darmstadt. His first practical experience came when he worked for five months in Philippe Starck's studio in Paris. Kreiter's design is minimalist, authentic and emotionally influenced. He analyses and interprets his environment to inspire his audience.


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For Seniors: How to Install iTunes on a Computer
Download the iTunes application to your computer so that you use it to sync (transfer) downloaded content to your iPad. iTunes comes on your iPad, and it helps organize media — music, movies, audiobooks, podcasts, and such.
Installing iTunes on your computer enables you to transfer any media you download onto it onto your iPad.
1Using your web browser, go to Apple's iTunes site.
You're going to visit Apple's iTunes site and download the iTunes software so you can use iTunes on your computer. Don't worry — the software is free.
3In the dialog that appears, click Run.
The iTunes application downloads. When the download is complete, another dialog appears, asking whether you want to run the software.
5Click Next.
The second screen of the Installer appears. Make sure you read its contents carefully.
6Click the I Accept the Terms of the License Agreement check box and click Next.
The installation options appear.
7Review the installation options and click the Install button.
Take a moment to review all the installation options. Click to deselect the ones you don't want to use. A dialog appears, showing the installation progress.
8When a dialog appears and tells you that the installation is complete, click Finish.
You have to restart your computer for the configuration settings that were made during the installation to take effect.


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Cotton Blend
30cm x 24cm
This is only applicable to selection listed under wi-lifestylish.com.
Price is inclusive of FREE Postage.
Optional: Add $1.50 for mailing with tracking number.
Receive $1.50 OFF when you opt for self collection.
Apply discount code [ selfcollect ] upon check-out.
Above options are available upon check-out.
Q: Are the measurement and color accurate?
A: Please give an allowance of 2cm/1inch inaccuracy in measurement and color may be slightly different due to the monitor.
Tips: Once you have your measurements, use our size chart to match your size.
Q: How long it takes for the items to arrive?
A: Pre-order item will take 2 - 4 weeks to fulfill your order.
LOOK OUT FOR inStock .
Selective item are inStock and it takes 3 - 5 working days or earlier to reach in your letterbox.
Q: What are the payment options available?
A: We accept Bank Transfer, PayNow and Cards payment. Cards payment will incurred 3.2% + 57cents card fee. We strongly advise choosing other methods of payment such as bank transfer and paynow to avoid the fees.
Note that your card will not be charged till you've completed the revised invoice that will be forwarded via separate e-mail after check-out.
Q: Can I cancel my order and request a refund after I have completed my purchase?
A: Cancellation can be made within 12-hours and any payment made will be refunded after cancellation is successful. No refunds are issued after 12-hours as orders are in progress. Contact us with your order number promptly to process your request.


text: Science is one thread of culture – and entertainment, including graphic books, can reflect that. 'The Dialogues,' by Clifford V. Johnson (MIT Press 2017) January 18, 2018 New ways scientists can help put science back into popular culture Clifford Johnson, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences You might not think much about science topics as part of your everyday life. But science – like art, music, religion – is part of our culture, and scientists can help it reclaim its rightful place.


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This year, like most years, my father planted some Moonflowers (Ipomoea alba), hoping they would grow up the cedar trellises, built by my late grandfather, that stand against the railing on my folks' back porch. And, unlike most years, he's had a bumper crop of the giant, fragrant, nocturnal blossoms, topping out at 15 in one night. Sitting on the porch in the evening listening to a distant Carolina Wren singing is now made all the better by the pervasive scent of the gorgeous, moth-pollinated flowers.
To take advantage of the moths that pollinate them, Moonflowers, sometimes referred to as Moon Vines or Giant White Moonflowers, open in the evening and curl up and die when the sun rises. While they last they fill the air with a wonderful smell, again, not meant for human enjoyment, but to attract moths. But one needn't be a moth to appreciate their delicate and quickly-passing beauty.
The Moonflower above is just opening, a process that occurs remarkably quickly. In fact Moonflowers open in about one minute's time. You can see one opening in this video. Their lush, large-leaved vines flourish in the direct sunlight that the blossoms avoid and can be grown anywhere their close relative, the Morning Glory, grows. And, though eating their seeds does not cause hallucinations like the Morning Glory's seeds do, they are poisonous if ingested.
stamina of the Moonflower
So if you have an ugly fence or something else you want covered up with some nice climbing foliage consider the Moonflower. You won't regret it and neither will your neighborhood moths.
I saw a Sphinx moth on one of these at Beth's uncle's house.
Guess what?-I've got an ugly fence I want covered up!-Neat video and post.
Just an update, the moon flowers had slowed down to 3 or 4 a night , but with the recent warm weather we are back to around 8 -10 a night. Last night my wife and I watched several of these beautiful flowers spread their petals to the sky. I almost think I know now how Mr Wilson in Dennis the
Menace felt awaiting the midnight blooming of his rare flower.
I have found a type of moon Flower growing on a lease wild. It has the same flowers, only opens at night, and smells wonderful, but it is not a vine. Is it just another type or something else?
Hi Corey,
I was soaking some moonflower seeds overnight and one of my cats may have drank a little of the water in the bottom of the bowl when I drained them this morning. I don't know; he's a curious one. Might that have hurt him? What symptoms should I look for? And how soon would problems start to develop? Please reply.
hi corey =)
my close friend loves moonflower, and i want to get it for her as birthday present. however, i don't know where i can find the plant/seed =( can u please help me?
Amazing stuff. Never heard about Moonflower before. Just bought 3 at nextdoor village fete to replace my Morning glory which died while I was abroad. I got worried I bought bindweed which I fight most of the time :o) Do I understand well than I have to treat Ipomea Alba as annual here in England?
we had some moonflowers about three years ago and there was this big moth like insect sort of like a hummingbird there were about ten or more.
Now i know they were the Sphinx Moth by browsing the web the past few days .i learned alot more about these amazing flowers.
Mel Mel. The shrubby version you saw is also called Moon Flower but it is one of many "Daturas" that are easily grown if you can find someone who has one. The flowers are very large and open with a strong perfume at sunset and night. Unlike many other Datura species that hang their flowers this one has flowers that point up to the sky. Sorry I don't know the species name; I've been trying to get hold of one for years having grown successfully in North New Zealand I want to obtain it here in Australia where I've now made my permanent abode.
please, please, tell me : where can I get seeds for the moonflower ??
I saw this flower for the first time a week ago… The gal at the green house gave me two seed pods… I can't wait for spring 2010! I want these to grow up an older crab apple tree that is along a sidewalk. I am way to excited… is there anything I need to know??
I opened the moonflowers seed pods last fall and put all the seeds into a baggie with sand in it I left the baggie open all winter hanging in a dark basement closet. I want to get a start on growing them. I live in Iowa. We have had apx 60 inches of snow this winter. When? Where? and How can I safely start my new moonflower seeds? what type of soil ect…?
help me please? i moved 2 years ago from WV and i had what i thougt was called moon flowers. i now live in AR. and lost my seed in the move. what i have bought here are not the same. this are moonflowers that vine. the ones i am looking for are on long stems that kind bush out and grow very tall. i would love to have them again but every one here do's not know what i am talking about. is there any one how can help please email me at firstname.lastname@example.com.
hey steve do u no why kids around wher i live like to take my plant i wake up every day an more an more is gone off of it email me bout that some guys told me they trip off of them an i would like to no what they trip off of i googled it an it dont say nothing
Thanks for this post, which ID'ed these for me. I photographed some at Jefferson Market Garden in the East Village. Would love to go birding sometime.
Beautiful..but are they invasive like their relatives the morning glories?
I just have one question, I'm doing a report on endangered species for my science class and I had heard that Moonflowers were rare. So are they or not? I'm confused. Please help me.
I have moon flowers that aren't a vine they are a bush with thick stalkes and the seeds are in a prickley ball They bloom in the evening are these still moon flowers or something else. I have pictures of them.
I love growing moonflowers and this year my plants have a ton of buds. The problem I am having is the buds look like they should open up, but they just shrivel up and die. Any suggestions.
I seem to have planted these inside at the wrong time of year…?
Is their a way that I could pollinate this plant by hand?
I'm afraid if I leave it outside for moths to pollinate that it could get
damaged by the frost?
Moonflowers were my late husband's favorite flower. We owned a bed and breakfast and when he would welcome female guests arriving in the evening, he would pluck a moonflower and give it to them. Needless to say, they were charmed. I have sold the B&B, but in his memory, I kept the seeds from our last plants and planted them in my new home. They bloom profusely here in North Carolina, with 10-15 blooms on the plant at a time. I have to plant them in a huge pot on my deck to keep the deer from eating them. I harvest the seeds every fall and plant them again every spring and have always have good luck with them. I have given seeds to lots of friends and former B&B guests all over the south. I think my husband would be pleased.
I stumbbled across tje flowered plant that mel mel was speaking of. its only about 2 feet tall and spreads out pn the ground. im located in central oklahoma.
LOL! One of these plants randomly grew in my front yard, and I noticed they only bloom at night. I end up here to find that it is called a Moon Flower. They are so fascinating and do smell amazing. Now that the West Nile virus is spreading again, I don't think I want this plant though, even with all of it's glory… It's a really cool plant, I must admit. 🙂
I just noticed today 2 new moonflower plants growing in my flowerbox on my balcony . we never planted these , are they going to continue to spread ? and will they kill my other plants ? appreciate any thoughts.
hi there… I have the free standing breed that several of you folks are talking about. I can send you some seeds if you like. They grow like a tomatoe plant. From seed they grow 3-4 feet here. (Sarnia, Ontario, Canada). Mine usually get so heavy (many flowers) I end up staking them. If it is a mild winter, or you mulch them after you cut them down, they can come up from the root. If you do that, they can get 4-5 feet, have thicker stalks (no need to stake them), and get twice the flowers. Pinch back the wilted flowers. For every two you pinch, three new buds will set. They can self seed, or once you get your first pods, put some in a paper bag for the winter. Once they dry, the pod will explode in the bag, seeds and pith everywhere. They are easy. No diseases, no pests. If you transplant them, keep the ground wet until the leaves stop wilting. The leaves will be standing up in the morning but wilt once the sun warms them up. It takes 3-5 days to stablize them.
I would love some seeds from the breed you have, please! My email is email@example.com, please contact me for an address!!
I, too, would love some of your moonflower seeds if you still have them available!! I had a lovely plant years ago, but it will not come back..
My e mail address is email@example.com Please contact me. Thank you.
I beg to differ with Corey when he states that the Moonflower Vine seeds are poisonous if eaten. The young, tender seeds are eaten in several parts of the world. To numerous to post here, I will cite several references to that fact, should he chose to contact me by email.
i like this plant flower.this plant seeds are high cost.
© 2013 10,000 Birds. All words, images, and opinions are the property of their respective authors unless stated otherwise.


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Moving can present a tough decision; however, if you've been trying to find a location that will provide all that is needed when it comes to accommodations and real estate opportunities, you'll find that Midland, ON will more than likely be an excellent choice. This is a lovely area that is located right on the Georgian Bay in the southeastern area of Ontario Canada. Established in the late 1800s and incorporated in 1890, you'll find that this lovely area has a population of roughly 16,572 as of the 2011 census. Here, you'll discover more about Midland, so you'll have all that is needed when it comes to making this area your relocation choice.
* Community
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* Real Estate
When it comes to real estate, there is no better place that will provide you with bay-front properties, apartment complexes, condominiums, townhomes, and single and multifamily residences. As stated before, you won't find a more wonderful area in all of Ontario after seeing what Midland, ON has to offer. Whether you plan to live more towards Midland Point, Portage Park, or Sunnyside, you'll have a vast number of opportunities available to you, and all you'll have to do is choose among what will be available in those particular areas. Of course, real estate won't be the only opportunities you'll be able to take advantage of, because if you would like to simply invest in this beautiful area, you'll have those options available to you as well.
* Parks & Recreation
Parks and Recreation will not be a problem when it comes to Midland, ON. You'll find that the city itself encompasses Little Lake Park which consists of a large lake and a small park that is the home of the Huronia Museum & Huron-Quendat Village. This area will provide you with a lovely view as well as a variety of different opportunities that you and your entire family can get involved in. Of course, you aren't limited to the specific area because quite frankly, Midland is located right on the Georgian Bay where you'll be able to take advantage of all the different types of water sporting activities that are available in the area.
It's important to realize that Midland ON, although sought after by many as an excellent relocation choice, is an area that will provide a variety of different opportunities for those that would plan to live here. So if you've been trying to make a choice as to where you would want to live in this southeastern corner of Ontario Canada, you'll find that Midland will more than likely be an excellent choice and provide everything you and your family may need, as well as a whole lot more.