text:
|2013-01-03, 06:11
|Link #28521
Join Date: Sep 2009
Age: 24
|2013-01-03, 07:10
|Link #28522
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Paranaque, Metro Manila, Philippines
- First, while building the kit, you can start removing the nubmarks.
- Second, the snapbuild.
- Third, the detailing. This is the part where I put the decals, extra details and panel lines.
- Fourth, observe the kit properly, what are the parts that needs to be topcoated? This will save you the hassle of topcoating each and every part. Sometimes, even the underside has to be tocpoated so better be safe than sorry. This also saves you some topcoat because you don't need to topcoat everything.
- Fifth, I disassemble the kit, not totally, it might depend on the complexity of the kit. Sometimes, some exposed parts can't be reached by spray so you are really required to disassemble it so you can properly spray a coat on it.
- Sixth, check if every exposed part has been properly topcoated. This is also where you check if you missed some panel lines. Yes, you can still line the kit whatever type of finish you choose. Gloss is the easiest since you can erase the line with ease and making the matte/flat the hardest. Tocpoat again if you think it's necessary as panel lines tend to be shinier than the rest. I normally go for two coats as first coats normally don't cover everything.
- Seventh, assemble the kit. Be careful not to make any scratches.
- Eight, savor your hardwork. You'll stare ate it for about 1 week and congratulate yourself for a job well done.
I normally go for spray cans as I don't own airbrush and brushes aren't my specialty.
- Panel lining is ok as well as I have mentioned above.
- For sanding, well, you can. Be warned though that it might produce some discoloration (for flat coats only, I think). I have experienced this quite a lot and I have only experienced one major discoloration as I have already made two thick coats on the part, sanded down my mistake and recoated the area. BOOM! UGLY! Even from afar, the discoloration is quite obvious. Might get the pics later as my kit is in the office but I'm currently at home.
|2013-01-03, 07:55
|Link #28524
Join Date: Sep 2009
Age: 24
As for removing the parts - isn't that awfully hard? I've read that one can use a hobby knife to do so, but I'm really afraid of damaging the parts. I'm not sure if I want to try this on my HGUC Sazabi - I'm done with its head and torso, it looks so good just out of the box.
Thanks once again, that was really useful. I'm really busy right now, hopefully I'll be able to find the time to make a trip to my hobby store this week or the next to pick up some topcoat.
EDIT: In case you're wondering, all this fuss about polishing is because I sanded the chest portion of my HGUC Sazabi a little too much. I've sanded it to the point where it shines, but if you look closely you can see all the tiny scratch marks. (I'm OCD like that.) There's also some nub marks which I've left around the kit, which I usually do. Normally, I'd sand/file nub marks a bit and colour them with a marker to make them less obvious, not to remove them completely. I'd hate to have to take it apart. (Actually, Bandai did a really good job with the HGUC Sazabi - most of the nub marks are actually hidden. But the ones that are not, stick out like a sore thumb.)
|2013-01-03, 09:02
|Link #28525
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Paranaque, Metro Manila, Philippines
Sometimes, it does happen to me. Scratches that are deep down. What I do is I sand the part AGAIN with lower grit, then progress with a finer grit then another finer grit. I use 400-600-1000 grits. I'm not sure if it's the same scale that's available in your place, but that's what I use and maybe it could help. Usally, when I get lazy, I use 180 (for really hard nubs and I'm kinda rushing) then skip to 600. That's when that situation happens to me. I should've used 360 or 400 in the middle.
|2013-01-03, 10:07
|Link #28526
Master Grade Master
Join Date: Jul 2011
What do you guys think of my currently updated Wishlist?
|2013-01-03, 10:56
|Link #28527
Black Steel Knight
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Indonesia
|2013-01-03, 10:57
|Link #28528
Master Grade Master
Join Date: Jul 2011
But I will get to building them when I can, which is why I go for MG's only since they don't come out as much, thus reducing the odds of me overspending and overbuying...ultimately leading to a massive backlog.
|2013-01-03, 17:29
|Link #28529
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2011
TG and SS this early in the year is amazing and even if the rest of the year sucked I would still be incredibly happy with this year as far as Gunpla goes. Jesta and two more RG's for the rest of the year is only icning on the cake.
|2013-01-03, 18:37
|Link #28530
Master Grade Master
Join Date: Jul 2011
Also, what's up with God Gundam MG and Shining Gundam MG? Are they any good? I know that they're super super old and haven't gotten an updated release, and the series went from April 1, 1994 – March 31, 1995. It's been 17 years (give or take a few months). I think it's time? I don't want to buy those 2 kits and then realize how sucky it is compared to the 00, Wing, and Age MG's we got in 2010 ~ 2012 ya know?
|2013-01-03, 19:39
|Link #28531
Black Steel Knight
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Indonesia
Oh, also, can you post a more constructive or positive post in this thread? Almost all your posts here basically can be broken down into two patterns:
|2013-01-03, 19:46
|Link #28532
Join Date: Sep 2009
Age: 24
Don't feed the troll guys, you'll just encourage him to keep doing that.
Anyway, new pics of HG G-Xiphos!
Hope the HG Genoace O-Custom rumour is true. These 2 are some of my favourite AGE kits, glad Bandai finally decided to release them.
|2013-01-03, 20:06
|Link #28533
Master Grade Master
Join Date: Jul 2011
Transformers + Gundam = ?!
|2013-01-03, 20:31
|Link #28534
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Paranaque, Metro Manila, Philippines
Yes, you can topcoat the entire kit after assembly. Just make sure you cover everything and it's even. Avoid topcoating the clear parts. They don't have the same look when you topcoat then.
|2013-01-04, 09:48
|Link #28535
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2007
I have a problem I hope you guys can help me with. It's not a Gundam model, but it is by Bandai. I was able to put the model together uneventfully, but I ran into trouble with the decals.
At first sight, they looked like the wet transfer decals I had worked with in the past. But when I soaked these in water- for over a minute even!- the decal did not detatch from the paper backing. In fact, it pulled a layer of the paper along with it when it detatched. Then I found out I could actually rub away the layer of paper stuck to the decal without damaging the decal itself. But the decal has no adhesiveness.
So, does anyone have experience with this kind of decals from Bandai? What's the proper way to apply them?
|2013-01-04, 22:06
|Link #28536
Operation sneaky sneaks
IT Support
Join Date: Aug 2012
Location: Hic et ubique
|2013-01-04, 23:32
|Link #28537
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2011
For earlier topics: Whoa how come some of you guys use such rough grits? At MOST I use 600, thats when sanding down a big nub Im too afraid to cut with nippers or my hobby knife. From there (Or after I cut using aforementioned tools) I go with 1000 to 1500 and sometimes 2000, which takes some care because you may overpolish the part resulting in a shinier glossier finish (for topcoaters this wont matter too much)
|2013-01-05, 03:05
|Link #28539
Black Steel Knight
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Indonesia
If somebody out there knows more, your post here will be very much welcomed.
|2013-01-05, 03:39
|Link #28540
Seed seeder
Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: The country of beer !
|gundam, gunpla, model kit, toy
|Thread Tools


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Andrew Koenig
Andrew Koenig, 41. The former "Growing Pains" star was reported missing in Vancouver on Feb. 18, 2010; friends had last seen him four days earlier. His body was found in a park in the city on Feb. 25. "My son took his own life," Koenig's father, "Star Trek" actor Walter Koenig, said at a news conference. Related: 'Growing Pains' star Andrew Koenig missing, confirms sister'Growing Pains' star Andrew Koenig committed suicide, confirms fatherAndrew Koenig's parents walk out on 'Larry King Live'
Cawley Entertainment
Copyright © 2019, Chicago Tribune

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Duane Forrester, the Bing Webmaster Tools senior program manager, recently unveiled a slew of new tools that can be found within the Bing Webmaster Tools interface. As Derek Edmond put it in his recap of the SES New York SEO Tools of the Trade session, what caught my eye was:
Keyword Research: Bing Webmaster Tools is launching an organic keyword research tool with up to six months of historical data available. SEOs will no longer be limited to the last 30 days of data from "other tools". More importantly, this is ideal for long tail keyword research, since the data is based completely off of organic information and not paid data.
As an SEO, I find myself doing a lot of key phrase research and the tools of the trade seem like they change as fast as the search algorithms themselves. Over the years I've had the chance to get "down and dirty" with more than my fair share but also over that time more and more tools rely on data pulled directly from Google's AdWords Keyword Tool.
Now Google's keyword tool is a fine tool and has turned into the default for many an optimizer. I myself use it on a day-to-day basis for brief research (like keywords for a blog post). It's usable, but the numbers always seem "off." I'm not sure if it's the rounding, the averages, the paid search data, or the fact that time and time again I see SEOs ignoring the match types, but every time I use it, I just feel a little like Google isn't giving me the data that I'm trying to see.
That's why my ears perked up when I heard about the new Bing Keyword Tool. Through Microsoft Ad Intelligence, MSN has been giving away some actual numbers for years. However that Excel plugin has always been buggy and has worked as often as it hasn't for me so I was excited to see what might come from a web interface.
Bing Keyword Research Tool Highlights
Out of the box, here are the highlights of what you get from the new Bing Keyword Tool:
- Key phrase research based off of organic queries.
- Actual numbers, without rounding or averaging.
- Six months of historical data you can mine through custom date ranges.
- Global volume, or drill down by country.
- Language Filter.
- Export to .CSV.
- Last 25 searches are saved to your history.
Admittedly there are some really cool things here and as it's in "Beta", I'm hopeful that there are improvements still to come. It's very nice to see the actual number of queries a term gets and to sort by these as well.
One thing you should familiarize yourself with as you start to use this tool is the "Strict Mode" checkbox. I like it's placement in the interface as it stands out more than Google's "Match Type" menu but the functionality here is slightly different.
If you select the Strict Mode option, it will filter the results to show you only query volumes explicit to the keyword or phrase, excluding phrases which may include the original keyword.
For example, if you type in cars, and leave strict unchecked, the total query volume shown for the phrase cars shows an aggregate number inclusive of all phrases containing the word cars.
Selecting strict shows you only the query data for cars alone, exclusive of other phrases which may contain the word cars.
Got that? Let's run through another quick example:
With Strict unchecked:
With Strict checked:
I'll give you a second to run the numbers on that if you still don't see what's happening.
Another interesting feature of this the Bing Keyword Tool comes when you hover over any of the results. Immediately in the left column you will start to see an overlay that shows you how much your average bid and resulting CPC would have to be if you were to advertise in the MainLine (ads that appear above organic results) or in the SideBar (ads that appear to the right of results).
Bing Keyword Research Tool Limitations
It should be noted that there are some limitations of this tool and as I mentioned, they will hopefully be fixed when Bing moves this out of beta testing:
- You may only search on one phrase at a time. No, you didn't read that wrong. This can be crippling to a research project of any substance. (Bing, please fix this!)
- Results in my tests are all over the map. Sometimes spot on while other's not so much. This could turn into a very useful niche and long tail tool though. Your mileage may vary.
- Limits results to 100 phrases.
- The trend graph next to each result is essentially just a line with some arbitrary dots on it that isn't very helpful at all.
- Limited to either global results or a single country. If you want multiple countries, you must do them one at a time.
I'm glad that Bing has released its Keyword Tool out into its Webmaster center for free. It's overall functionality is behind that of Google's at this point but over time it could be smoothed out. I'd almost forgotten how refreshing real data can be too and even if it doesn't take over as your key phrase research tool of choice, it's a nice one to keep in your back pocket.
Related reading
4 Ahrefs and SEMrush alternatives that bring innovation to competitive analysis
You can never have enough of SEO research tools. 4 great Ahrefs and SEMrush alternatives / supplements are Serpstat, Rankedy, SpyFu, and CognitiveSEO.
Search industry news and trends: Best of 2018
A roundup of fan favorite articles on search industry news and trends from 2018. Feat: alternative search engines, algorithm updates, free courses and more.
SEO tips, tools, and how to's: Best of 2018
A roundup of fan favorite articles on SEO tips and tools from 2018. Feat: Google Analytics guides, meta tag tutorials, SPAs, keywords, local SEO, and more.
How to start your freelance SEO career
Thinking of starting to put your SEO skills to good use as a side gig? Here are some tips and resources for how to start a freelance SEO career.


text:
Her Vigilance with Product Ingredients Pays Off
Molly Row might be every physician's dream patient. The 52-year-old from northern California followed her doctor's instructions to the letter following her rosacea diagnosis in 2004.
However, while her flare-ups decreased dramatically in number and severity with medical therapy, she discovered within weeks that many skin-care and cosmetic products continued to cause her to break out.
"I got frustrated," Molly said. "Even products that were labeled for sensitive skin or hypoallergenic caused a reaction."
It was this frustration that led her to search the Internet for answers. She readily found lists of ingredients commonly used in facial products, including descriptions of their likelihood to cause irritation to sensitive skin.
Molly began to read ingredient lists and to use products that contained only substances with a low irritation potential. She said her resulting regimen for skin care and cosmetics made a huge difference in controlling her flare-ups.
"Without makeup my skin is still blotchy, but I can hide it all with makeup," she said. "People I meet have no idea I have rosacea."
Besides avoiding ingredients that irritate her individual case, Molly has been able to pinpoint a few of her other individual triggers.
"I know stress plays a role, but even though my stress has been off the charts the past two years between the downturn of the real estate market and the loss of my husband, I have been able to control my rosacea," she said. Molly also said she has spent her life in the sun, but she has always worn a hat and used plenty of sunscreen.
She never had a problem with her fair complexion until, early in her 40s, she woke up one morning covered in pimples, bumps and swelling. The symptoms came on so fast Molly was convinced it was the result of something she ate, but when the signs didn't quickly resolve, she saw a dermatologist who made the rosacea diagnosis.
When asked what advice she might have for fellow rosacea sufferers, Molly did not hesitate.
"They need to look at what they're putting on their skin," she said. "It's not about spending a lot of money but finding the right products for you."
Contact Us
- Phone:
- Email:
- email@example.com
196 James St.
Barrington, IL 60010
Our Mission
The National Rosacea Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve the lives of people with rosacea by raising awareness, providing public health information and supporting medical research on this widespread but little-known disorder. The information the Society provides should not be considered medical advice, nor is it intended to replace
consultation with a qualified physician. The Society does not evaluate, endorse or recommend any particular medications, products, equipment or treatments. Rosacea may vary substantially from one patient to another, and treatment must be tailored by a physician for each individual case. For more information, visit About Us.


text:
Based in New York City, the heart of the news, business and publishing world, our founders and executive management team feature sales, marketing and production professionals from the likes of The New York Times, Time Inc. and United Business Media. With our roots in publishing and our mission marketing, we maintain diverse industry experience and unparalleled insight into the market value of publication brands and coverage.
Continually pioneering new print and electronic offerings for more than 20 years, PARS now offers the industry's most aggressive suite of editorial licensing and permissions services. We continue to lead the revolution of digital media opportunities in video, on the Web and in social media.
PARS' reputation for outstanding service and professionalism has attracted the industry's most distinguished and loyal roster of publishing partners. We represent more "blue chip" publications than any other content marketer, helping publishers, advertisers and readers alike meet bottom-line goals and increase brand visibility.


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The biggest story of the week was by far the purchase of Sun, not by IBM but Oracle, which has many FOSS proponents worried about the Open Source projects that Sun is an integral part of. I agree with SJVN's take on it and it explains why Oracle had "Dr DBA" himself appear on stage at the MySQL annual conference only days later.
Red Hat commissioned the Georgia Institute of Technology to do a study on the use of Open Source software around the world and they have now published a map based on the information they gathered. Ever forgot your root password? don't feel bad, I did that once. Here are 10 ways of resetting a lost Linux root password that may help out. Linux Magazine has a two part interview with Linus Torvalds, here is Part 1 and Part 2.
We have Groklaw to thank for posting a most intriguing history of history of Microsoft's anti competitive behavior. Not to mention that if you end up with a computer that has Windows 7 Starter Edition, your going to have to learn to live with some limitations. There has been a sighting of a Netbook with Android pre-installed out in the wild and Steven Rosenberg sparks a good ole' fashion desktop environment debate with his "Xfce is light … but Fvwm is lighter".


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America since its very founding as a nation was predicated on the belief that our rights came from a Divine Creator, and not granted by a King or governments comprised of men. Further, our founders believed that the primary purpose of our government was to secure, protect, and defend those rights for all Americans. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson specifically penned in our founding document as a nation that paramount amongst those inalienable rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I shudder when I see what a tumble down the cliff we have taken in no longer protecting one of our most elemental rights since 1973 with the Supreme Court's finding of the "right" to abortion existing in our Constitution, via their landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
The right to life is the sine qua non of all human rights; that is to say that without the existence of this right, there can be no others.
Now the pro-life versus pro-abortion divide is not over whether government should prevent the killing of innocent human life. I think it is safe to say that nearly all Americans agree that innocent human life absolutely must be protected. The divide exists over how to define human life; or more specifically, how government should define that human life which deserves the protection of the law against its intentional destruction. In other words the debate regarding abortion typically comes down to when life begins. The question at hand is at what point of development of the fetus does abortion actually constitute the killing of a human life?
Many pro-abortion advocates argue that most pro-lifers are strongly guided or at least influenced by religious faith and subjective opinions instead of science with their unwavering stances against abortion. They decry that pro-life advocates want to remove the choice of a woman to abort her unborn child, and thus remove her right to control over her own body. The argument is that we don't know at what point a life is truly its own, so rather than succumb to religion and superstition, we should not infringe upon a woman's choice in what to do with her own body, accordingly.
I would argue that precisely the opposite is true. It is the pro-abortion advocate that is ignoring science and using subjectivity and human opinion in their determination of when human life begins in the womb.
Most pro-life advocates support the concept that life absolutely begins at conception. This position seems far more rooted in science and objectivity than does the pro-abortion stance. Indeed, at the very moment of conception there is the creation of a life that is genetically complete and distinct that comes into existence. The gender and most all physiological traits of that human are in place at that moment of conception. Before conception, there was not a separate and distinct life; after conception, there is objectively and scientifically a unique human life that will continue to develop and change incrementally until his or her death.
Indeed, after conception all further change will be incremental. There will be a moment before the first fetal heart beat and the moment after it. There will be the moment that a newborn will take its first breath of air and the moment immediately after it. There will be the first moment a middle aged lady finds a gray hair and the first moment afterwards. Each moment in development, maturation -- in life-- will be just one more incremental step before and after each subjective moment in a timeline.
Trying to determine at which other point beyond conception in that incremental growth timeline of a person that human life actually begins is purely subjective, no matter what government, advocates, judges, pregnant women, or even doctors opine on the topic. And indeed, they are all nothing but subjective opinions based on human determined criteria. Conception is absolutely and unequivocally the most scientifically verifiable and defensible position for when life begins. It is, therefore, at that moment of conception that life, HUMAN life, should and indeed must be afforded the protections that God has granted and our government was founded to defend. After conception, the choosing of a point to allow the abortion of a human life is relegated to personal opinion and is simply an elevation of that subjective opinion above that of objective science.
When subjective opinion and ideology are the factors that comprise the rationale for government's actions in their not exercising of a paramount responsibility, then all of rational government is jeopardized.
Now it may not seem intuitive or obvious to equate a newly conceived zygote with a twenty year old man, but from an objective scientific perspective, both are unique and individual creations of life. If left to take their natural courses, both will continue to mature, learn, love, and have the opportunities to reach their potentials for good or ill that they so desire. Aborting that unborn child, that zygote, is every bit the same as killing that twenty year old man in the fact that both lives are taken and prevented from ever further reaching that potential for which those lives were intended. Making a decision to abort that child based on some nuanced idea of viability or other subjective factor is absolutely wrong. I would far rather trust my stance on the abortion debate to be based on intellectually defensible science, accordingly.


text:
Connect to: Library Web Site✔
Library details: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Library is an Academic library.
This library is affiliated with University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (view map) .
Other Info: The library of UESTC was founded in 1956, incorporating the documents held by Jiaotong University, Nanjing Institute of Technology and South China Institute of Technology in the area of electronic science. As the result of constant accumulation for 50 years, now it boasts of a unique collection system characterized by documents and resources in electronic and information science and relevant disciplines.
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Academic Level: The library Serves an educational institution at the University level.
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text:
McHENRY – McHenry committed a few more turnovers (16) than it would have liked.
And it certainly could have done a better job at the free-throw line than 2 of 8.
Yet the Warriors were able to rely on their best friend, the 3-point shot, to overcome those deficiencies.
McHenry made 3s early and often as it held off Cary-Grove, 63-58, in a Fox Valley Conference Valley Division boys basketball game Wednesday night. The Warriors (8-8 overall, 1-3 FVC Valley) picked up their first division win by tearing it up from the field – 25 of 42 overall (59.5 percent) and 11 of 25 on 3s (44 percent).
Damian Zalewski hit 7 of 8 in the first half, with three 3s, and led McHenry with 19 points. Greg Johnson and Shane Varvil also had three 3s apiece.
"It's all about how we get to the basket," Johnson said. "Ryan Skinner drives the lane and gets those kick-out 3s all the time and really gets us going. And when we get those post touches to Damian and then he'll fan out. Getting the 3s really stems from them."
McHenry is shooting 35.8 percent for the season on 3s. Varvil leads the Warriors with 39, while Johnson has 30.
"We knew coming in that shooting the basketball would be a strength," Warriors coach Tim Paddock said. "Unfortunately, when we don't hit those it doesn't look good. But we have a lot of guys who can shoot."
Varvil hit two in the first quarter and Zalewski had three by halftime as C-G (9-8, 1-3) had only one lead, 7-6, in the game.
"We felt good coming out," Zalewski said. "Shane always hits them. If we play like that, it's amazing."
McHenry twice built its lead to 13 points, then the Trojans made runs of their own. But each time, the Warriors answered, usually with a 3.
"Coach keeps saying, 'Someone has to make a play,' "
said Zalewski, who added 10 rebounds, four blocked shots and seven assists.
C-G cut the lead to 50-45 at the end of the third quarter, but could not get closer than that.
"They shoot 3s whether they're up or down," Trojans coach Ralph Schuetzle said. "They keep shooting. It was the little things we didn't do. And we just weren't able to knock down enough shots. They did their damage with 3s, we did our damage with 2s."
Tyler Szydlo led C-G with 17 points, Dean Lee added 14 and Jason Gregoire had 10.
McHenry is averaging 7.3 3s a game and has a season-high of 18 against Round Lake.
"Running and shooting is what we have to do," Paddock said. "When it's going in, it's really fun."


text:
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
A few months ago I, madly, decided to sign up for a charity bike ride which takes place in September. It's 60 miles, from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Wonderful, I hear everyone say! What a great way to raise some money AND get fit.
So here is the problem - I am NOT fit and never have been. When arthritis joined in the party I gave all exercise up for a while because I felt awfully sorry for myself, didn't have a clue what was going on with my body and it was the start of a very long and snowy winter. I replaced the bike with chocolate - hello 6 pound weight gain!!
However, as Spring sprung, the days got longer and my joints settled down I decided to get back on my bike. I also started going to yoga and swimming. I was feeling pretty good but the last few weeks I've been slacking off (read that as 'spending every weekend out socialising drunk as a skunk').
I went cycling for the first time in ages last night and OH MY GOD. I didn't even go up any hills, just did a couple of laps around the park and I was exhausted. Did the same tonight and it was still pretty tough on my poor weak muscles.
As much as I am grateful for ANY day I am fit enough to go biking (and I am very very grateful), I need to step up my game. How will I be able to cycle 60 miles in 2 and a half months?! Just need to focus on my goal - half the money I raise is going to a cancer charity and half to Arthritis Care, so it'll be worth it in the end.
5 comments:
Hey! Here's a cycling training program I found that you can download. I used a similar type program for a 10km run I was training for years ago and the slow buildup worked for me (a total non-runner!). Good luck! :) LReplyDelete
This is awesome and I know you can do it!! I have several arthritis friends who bike and bike loooong distances; they love it, but it was definitely a slow build-up.ReplyDelete
Maybe in the fall you can head to Cali for our (Arthritis Foundation) 8-day, 525 mile Bike Tour, which rides down the beautiful CA coast from San Francisco to Santa Monica. This ride raises over a million $$ for arthritis!!
I volunteer during the ride (mainly make thousands of peanut butter and banana/jelly sandwiches), but plan to train for it in 2011!
more info:
P.S. Do you have an online fundraising page for this ride?
Thanks so much for the link Laurie, I've printed out the program. I only have 10 weeks but I can modify it!ReplyDelete
Jenn, wow that sounds amazing!!! I would love to do that, although there's no way I'd have the cash for it this year. But you've got me thinking about 2011, that would be such a cool thing to do. I was planning on visiting my friend in Toronto next summer, maybe I could have a mad North American adventure. Would have to get a lot fitter but hopefully this first ride will get me started.
I don't have a page yet, I'm going to set one up soon. :)
This is awesome! I love bike riding and am slowly trying to build my muscles back up so I can do the rides I enjoy. I am really impressed with you taking on 60 miles. I hope you will post your progress along the way so we can cheer you on!ReplyDelete
Aw thanks Cathy, I will definitely do updates. 60 miles didn't seem that far when I signed up in March but the closer that the date gets the longer it seems.;)ReplyDelete
I'm glad you're able to re-introduce cycling to your routine. Good luck with building up those muscles.. it's tough but we'll get there!!


text:
|Episode Description
|Friday, Nov 29, 2013 - 11:00 AM
"English Louisiana"
Though France and Spain are known for their Louisiana colonization efforts, the English had a significant impact as well, especially in the Florida parishes. Libby Dart, a historian from St. Francisville, shares the story of Louisiana's English heritage. D
|More on LEARN/CREATE (MT)
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text:
I'm sure you're seeing the pattern now; I seem to haul a ridiculous amount of eyeshadow, but you know as a beauty blogger, it's kind of what I do.
Sometimes something I buy or am sent to review really wows me – and these little solo eyeshadows from Etude House's Petit Darling range are absolutely gorgeous!
Matte Eyeshadows…I do like, in that, they have their place.
I used to do shimmer all over my eyelid – urgh, it was horrible, made my entire eye area pop. These days I really see how flattering matte with a hint of shimmer as as opposed to the all over glitter ball look.
I wanted these Etude House shadows for a while but because they seemed boring, I put it off until one of those late nights.
I bought three shades (I have since purchased Vanilla which is just a creamy off white):
Let's take a closer look!…I love the packaging of theses eyeshadows – they're kind of princessy and cute, although they are just plastic and not amazing quality.
In fact, my Vanilla eyeshadow came fully sealed but the clip was a broken (so it closed but wasn't being held in place). I wouldn't check any of these eyeshadows around…
Also in my carry round make up bag I wouldn't have room for all four of these; hence a multi shade palette would win.
The pigmentation of these eyeshadows is EXCELLENT, I'd even say that these are the nicest mattes I have used for a long, long time, if not EVER. They're just buttery soft and really pigmented – there's no chalkiness at all in these which is great considering the price (these are CHEAP in Korea, on eBay I paid about $9 each).
First shade is Cafe, a neutral beige, so perfect for toning down a bright or shimmery look. It's not nude enough to use all over; it'd look a bit dirty, but it's fine as a base for the lid or I use it with my dark/bright shadows above the crease area.
I like how all four shades in this range are neutrals, yes, but also punchy and totally useful for a number of looks. A highlight, a crease shade, a lid shade, a liner shade…you have everything you need really.
Cocoa is a rich coffee brown and it's just beautiful:
Charcoal is not a grey, rather a deep dark black infused with the slightest hint of a gunmetal shade. Can you use this instead of a black? Hell yes! It's way nicer than the MAC carbon shadow I recently bought. It's so richly pigmented…
Swatches – no primer or bases, just a quick sweep. In my experience mattes do not swatch so well but these are great:
In terms of lasting ability, I think these are as good as most eyeshadows – I always prime so these lasted all day.
Totally gorgeous pigmented, creamy mattes that I have searched for for a long time. It's a good price and the shades are completely useful for a number of looks.
Any down side?
The packaging is cute but not so sturdy, the prices are marked up from retail (but it's just one of those things unless you have a contact in Korea!).
I hope they bring out more shades in these beautiful mattes I'll be first in the (eBay) queue.
I bought these from eBay here.


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While many of Europe's largest banks were accumulating "toxic" assets in recent years, a gentler, quieter banking movement was emerging here that espoused a wholly different set of investment values.
Institutions such as Sweden's Ekobanken aim to not only keep clients' deposits safe, but also to invest in the "social economy," by funding projects like alternative energy, affordable housing, and organic farming.
Although some of the global financial giants have stumbled, these so-called social banks are reporting surprising successes.
"It's back-to-basics banking," says Kristoffer Lüthi, vice managing director of Ekobanken. "Lending out money to people and institutions you believe can pay it back, and not believing in a too-rapid financial development, because that's not sustainable in the long run."
A brisk business for Ekobanken
Located near Stockholm in the picturesque rural town of Järna, Ekobanken opened in 1998. In stark contrast to most of the banking industry "we've never had credit losses," Mr. Lüthi notes.
Last year brought a 12.5 percent increase in customers and a 38 percent jump in bank deposits, raising Ekobanken's balance sheet to about 400 million Swedish kronor (about $50 million). Since Ekobanken started, its balance sheet has risen by between 15 - 20 percent yearly.
Ulla Herlitz, chairwoman of Ekobanken's board, says, "We are working with the real economy and not the financial economy." When asked to define the term, "financial economy," Ms. Herlitz replies, "selling paper."
A May 2008 article in MoneyWeek warned that the world market in derivatives had grown to $596 trillion, noting that this was only "the nominal value of all the underlying assets against which bets have been placed."
Such numbers frustrate the leaders of Ekobanken, who believe many banks have effectively gambled away clients' funds.
"A very simple thing in banking is to know that you're dealing with other people's money," Lüthi says.
Lüthi feels their role should be more than just good-sense banking. It should be "about changing the minds of people, changing the consciousness around money, and also being a voice in society that shows it is possible to make things different," he says.
Operating an interest-free savings-and-loan program for its members since 1970, Sweden's JAK cooperative officially became a bank in 1997. Today, it has roughly $116 million in deposits from its 36,000-plus members. JAK's 2008 credit-loss rates have been less than half those of regional megabanks SEB and Swedbank.
"We think it's important to invest in member education instead of marketing," explains Ann-Mari Svensson, general secretary of the cooperative. "The bank holds seminars where interested members can learn more about the bank and finance at the bank's expense."
JAK's coordinator of international relations, Miguel Gonzo, says his bank is not trying to make a political statement. "Maybe, by what we practice, we're positively changing the society somehow. And if changing the society is political, we're political in this way."
A return to banking's past?
Although JAK and Ekobanken are relatively young, their emphasis on local investment has deep roots. About 150 years ago, small savings banks sprouted throughout Sweden's countryside, a result of financial resources being concentrated in cities. These banks transformed local money into local well-being.
According to Ekobanken's Herlitz, with the advent of globalized finance, local depositors' money began to leave the community. The local focus is good for the economy and a smart business practice, she says, because the banks possess a "better ability to judge banking needs and risks."
Lars Ingelstam, former professor of technology and social change at Linköping University, says that Sweden's sparbanks – its traditional community savings banks – have lost much of their local focus in recent years because of a series of mergers.
The Swedbank consortium now controls the bulk of the savings banks, Professor Ingelstam says. Through the mergers with Swedbank, the independent savings bank associations heavily concentrated their assets under the Swedbank umbrella. They have since been hurt by Swedbank's now diminished market value.
Ingelstam, who was the first director of the Swedish Secretariat for Future Studies, a think tank founded by former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palmé and Nobel laureate Alva Myrdal, observes that society has been "far too narrow-minded" in its evaluations of "social progress and the economic measurements and the figures we build up."
Not necessarily small
Yet a healthy bottom line and access to a vast pool of credit remain standard measures of success. Triodos Bank, a self-professed "ethical bank" founded in the Netherlands in 1980, has much to brag about. It's one of the largest institutions in the sustainable bank movement, managing about $5.6 billion in total assets and operating offices in Britain, Belgium, and Spain. Last year, Triodos grew by a quarter and its net profits rose 13 percent. On June 5, the Financial Times newspaper named it the overall winner of its sustainable banking award.
"We have had a very good year," says Triodos spokesman James Niven, who attributes the bank's success to its "not being involved in all kinds of financial instruments."
Triodos does not invest in the subprime market or derivatives. "We take in savings from different individuals, and we only lend them to businesses delivering positive change for people or the environment," Mr. Niven says.
Although these banks stress that their ideas are based more on sound and ethical business principles than politics, some analysts believe politicians ought to take notice. Jakob von Uexküll, founder of both the British-based World Future Council and Sweden's Right Livelihood Award (also known as the "alternative" Nobel Prize), argues that banking interests have become so powerful that they have been effectively able to "take over governments to get the kind of legislation they needed."
Referring to the megabanks, Mr. von Uexküll adds, "They need to be dismantled.... If an economic entity is too big that it threatens the state, it threatens democracy."


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Photo image taken last week in Nepal by my beautiful daughter Kelsey.
I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
In my inbox this morning was an email from Charity water. In April this year we did a post on clean water for people living in countries unable to access clean drinking water themselves. I thought i would copy you in on their email and add some links to this worthy cause. I urge our dear readers to tell everyone you know to support and be involved in this most basic necessity to life. My darling daughter Kelsey travelled with 13 of her friends to a village in Nepal 2 weeks ago to help in a school and one of the many orphanages situated up in the mountain. They played with the children, taught them some songs and craft and help paint the walls and add a few new supplies to their school. Her heart just broke the day they visited the orphanage and saw it laden with mould, children sharing beds and flies swarming the face of a tiny three year old girl sleeping in her cot. They too like many places in the world do not have the luxury of clean drinking water.
Here is what the foundation emailed me this morning.......
Hi Porch Light Interiors,
charity: water needs your help! We were so excited to see that you mentioned us in your blog post back in April, and although you may not even realize it, your post helped direct others to join in the mission to help end the world's water crisis. We need people like you to continue helping us spread the word.
I'm reaching out for your help with charity: water's biggest campaign, and to let you know by doing so, there is a chance to add your name to a drilling rig in Ethiopia!
At the start of this month we launched our 5th Annual September Campaign, our most ambitious campaign to date: we're trying to spark over 1000 individual fundraising campaigns to fund a $1.2 million drilling rig that will be able to dig 80 wells each year, that can provide 40,000 people clean water.
AND if we hit that fundraising target this year, a matching donor will buy ANOTHER rig, ensuring 40,000 more people a year with clean water.
So far we've raised over $400,000 and over 600 people have started fundraising campaigns. A good start, but we need more help! The campaign will remain open until October 31, and we need your participation to tell more people about it, to share the story, and hopefully to encourage people to join us in fundraising!
So this September 30 we're asking a few dozen bloggers we know care about our cause to write a post highlighting the September Campaign. We'll reward 3 of these blogs by putting their name on the drilling rig (and of course, we'll send you photos). The two posts that send us the most traffic this Friday, and the post our staff vote as their favorite, will win their names on the rig!
This Wednesday from 6:30-7pm ET we're hosting a special ustream chat session with our CEO and Founder Scott Harrison. We're opening this up exclusively to September Campaigners and those bloggers we feel can create a buzz about charity: water's September Campaign!
Just visit http://ustream.tv/charitywater at 6:30pm ET Wednesday September 28 to join.
We've got a lot of great material and information about the campaign for you to check out:
September Campaign site: http://charitywater.org/september
September Campaign Video (4 minutes): http://vimeo.com/28104222
Our 5th anniversary Thank You Video: http://youtube.com/charitywaterthanks
September Assets Page (photos, banners etc): http://charitywater.org/september/assets
Detailed blog post on the rig: http://www.charitywater.org/blog/sept-2011-costs/


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We can help you use electronic media to spread your message more quickly and effectively. We encourage participation in social networks, but hope that you'll follow our guidelines. If your account is not listed here but you think it should be, please register it with us here.


text:
About the Author
Daniel Hoffman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. His scholarship, teaching and civic engagement are based on ethnographic research in West Africa and his background as a photojournalist working in Southern and East Africa. Since 2000 Hoffman has conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Liberia on issues of youth mobilization during and after those countries' recent wars. The resulting research explores how young men participate in regional networks that make them—and their capacity for violence—available for various forms of work. These include labor in the region's resource extraction industries, labor on battlefields across West Africa and the labor of violent political campaigning. Hoffman's work in visual anthropology concentrates on the scholarly, artistic and popular representations of violence in still photography. The aesthetics so often used to represent African conflicts make simplistic portrayals of the continent unavoidable. In response Hoffman experiments in his own scholarship with the aesthetics of visual and literary ethnography, researching the work of African photographers and artists in an effort to develop alternatives for the representation of violence.
Reviewer Comments
Photographic Figure Studies as a Mode of Ethnography?
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, University of Michigan
"Beginning is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness."
Beginnings, Edward Said
This photo essay marks the beginning of a new section of the Cultural Anthropology website. As Said notes elsewhere, beginnings are not just something one does but also something one thinks about. My comments below are an engagement with this inaugural photo essay by Danny Hoffman and reflections on this section and visual anthropology more broadly. Beginnings present a time to think about parameters of enterprises—in this case, the potential uses of photo essays for anthropology. What will the norms of this new section be: Will the photographs always be by anthropologists? What makes a photograph ethnographically interesting? (This might be very different than the journalistic, historic, artistic or pedagogic value of a photograph.) Will the text, images and layout always be produced by the same person? Given the online presentation, will there be an opportunity to incorporate multimedia? In short, this particular beginning provides an opportunity to collectively think about the photo essay as a mode of ethnography and to reflect on the status of visual ethnographies within our discipline today.
Shaping a Body of Work
In his aptly titled "Corpus: Mining The Border," Danny Hoffman has given us a rich and provocative trove of text and images that compel us to reflect not merely on the labor behind war and mining near the Sierra Leone border, but also on the photo-essay as a mode of ethnography. Hoffman explores many borders here: borders between nations, between text and images, between diverse visual genres and between forms of work. Other viewer/readers will surely add to this list. I'd like to focus on what Hoffman identifies as his conceptual center. In identifying the rationale behind choosing a visual mode for this investigation, he remarks, "The centrality of the body to this mode of work, and the work that the mining does on the body of the worker, is what animates this project as a visual ethnography." It's precisely this issue of animation I will address.
The object of analysis in this ethnography is the material bodies of these young men and how they are shaped by their various labors of place-making, whether that place is a mine or a nation. Appropriately, then, these images of young West African male bodies laboring are deliberately not presented in one of visual anthropology's classic tropes: the step-by-step process or "mode of production" genre. Hoffman is not trying to teach us the process of how diamonds are mined. His investigation concerns the making of bodies, not diamonds. I take seriously Hoffman's statement that "This project is not a mediation on the photo-essay as such, but an effort to put the photo-essay to use as a mode of ethnography." However, a photo-essay is also a body of work and it is to the making of this kind of body that I want to turn briefly in order to better consider it as a mode of ethnography.
A photo-essay is a purposefully arranged collection of images often with text, a narrative in which visual elements create themes and dialogues. Hoffman is serving here as photo and text editor as well as anthropologist. Therefore, in order to engage with this photo-essay as a mode of ethnography, we need to think not only about the individual images but how they have been arranged. In other words, I believe what makes a photograph or particular set of photographs of interest to anthropologists is not only what is in the image(s), but also how they are put into dialogue with other images, text and/or anthropological questions. Fortunately, Hoffman's essay contains clues as to how this body of images has been worked on by the anthropologist. By sharing his visual strategies and editorial logic, Hoffman provides the project some reflexivity, even if he claims he is less interested in the photo-essay's capacity for reflexivity.
Working against the grain of narrative expectations inherent to the genre of photo-essay, Hoffman states that he does not intend for his photographs to include a narrative arc. His genre is "meditations on a theme," rather than "storytelling." He argues that this choice in synchronic visual genre is because "the work of mining itself has no narrative arc" and is "endlessly repetitive." Indeed, one of the most striking layouts in the essay is the arresting triptych on page four showing three men sifting sand and gravel in a flooded pit. Though they are a series of images, they could also be a single line of laboring bodies, the repetitive nature of their work making it impossible to know whether to read the triptych from right to left or vice versa. What Hoffman's photography therefore manages to convey is a sheer density of repetitive manual labor: clearly the three frames must have a chronology and, strictly speaking, some form of narrative arc and diachronic structure, but the triptych layout portrays not three individual bodies sifting sand in a particular place and time but functions as a synchronous representation of a workforce.
Hoffman's creative choice in layout allows him to represent not only laboring individuals but a workforce, a pool of available labor. The interchangeable photographs emphasize the interchangeability of laboring bodies, and visually reproduce a culture where Hoffman tells us young men cycle through the region's mines, men who "arrive and depart as strangers." In this triptych, as well as the two images showing bodies working side by side if not necessarily collaboratively (pages 6, 9), Hoffman is most successful at achieving "an ethnographic portrait of the shape and texture of work."
Such a project in still photographs is a very ambitious project, indeed. For while it is possible to photograph a human laboring, it is much harder to visualize the more abstract or diffuse political economy or the social circles that sustain diamond mining. Hoffman states that while text "can chart the larger political economy in which the mines and miners are situated," images alone are inadequate for the task. Instead he substitutes a disciplined study of the "raw physical power of human form." The resulting images are arranged as "a collection of figure studies." This borrowing of an artistic genre, figure study, is an opportunity to make explicit the potentially discomforting aesthetic nature of the project: here is an anthropological project asking us "as anthropologists" to look at chiseled black bodies and to take note of the pre-industrial work they are doing. Hoffman, in his own words, duplicates what he takes to be the visible work of the diamond mines. It is not merely Hoffman's professional photographs that render these bodies beautiful; rather, Hoffman informs us, "the work shapes the body in impossibly exquisite ways—though at great risk and expense." One form of production is substituted for another: chiseled bodies for chiseled stones. Both this work of photography and that of mining aestheticize preindustrial labor. The shapely bodies are visible; the risk and expense are not.
Trained by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins's (1993) seminal Reading National Geographic, we need to keep asking for whom and by whom the aestheticization is being done. The absence of even bare-bones captions with information about location and dates might contribute to what Hoffman assumes is a productive "disorienting abruptness" in these images of laboring bodies. Yet the lack of captions also leaves these photographs unmoored, possibly rendering visible a moment where the "temporal displacement" is also of those photographed by the anthropologist. Hoffman's discussion of startling preindustrial labor that he claims will be unimaginable to most viewers (despite the dense local and international networks his ethnography reveals) suggests that the critique contained in Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object remains relevant. While Hoffman's other work attests to his long and complex ethnographic engagement with young men in the region (Hoffman 2005, 2007a, 2011), there is little in the photographs or text here that explicitly contextualizes the figures he studies. For the viewer/reader, these human forms remain anonymous human forms. Put more provocatively, how do these photographs differ from Marey or Muybridge's late-nineteenth century studies of human locomotion? Notably, they are taken not in a studio but very much in the field with the men presumably in their everyday habits of dress (or undress). Nonetheless, the figures in the images remain equally anonymous and out of historical time.
Hoffman is not only a sophisticated and highly skilled photographer, but also a scholar aware of many different photographic traditions (see Hoffman 2007b), a position that requires us to take his editorial choices all the more seriously. He is no doubt very familiar with the oft-repeated criticism of images that render beautiful horror and hardship (such as excruciating physical labor), for he cites the single project at which such criticism has most publicly been leveled: Sebastiao Salgado's Workers project. Hoffman seems to be grappling in earnest with how to move beyond such debates that are productive as critique, but do not generate alternate ways of imaging. Encouraging either less aesthetic images or solely images of leisure and comfort, or else abandoning visual production altogether would surely be insipid solutions. After all, the photo-essay became a popular and highly influential form of visual communication in the mid-twentieth century partly because it provided aesthetic pleasure. Visual scholar Ariella Azoulay (2008) suggests doing away with the distinction between the aesthetic and the political, emphasizing that "no images can exist outside the aesthetic plane." Freed then from the aesthetic/political binary, we should instead rigorously engage with the political stakes of the aesthetic. Hoffman's project makes it incumbent upon us not merely to look at what is aesthetically pleasing, but to ask how what is aesthetically compelling came to be so. For whom is this beauty meaningful? For whom are these bodies "exquisite?" Where more apt for such a project than the diamond mines—that troubled site of the crossing of beauty with global politics and economics?
Figure Study as Participant Observation
Hoffman's idea of a photo-essay as a collection of figure studies is particularly provocative for anthropology. If figure study is "a representation made for study purposes with a live model as the subject matter," then is it not another mode of ethnography based on participant-observation. I'd like to return here to the issue of what animates a project as a visual ethnography. How is putting the photo-essay to use as a mode of ethnography different than illustrating fieldwork or anthropological findings? How might anthropological knowledge animate a photographic project whether the camera is in the hands of an anthropologist or not? Most importantly for our purposes here, what kind of scholarly engagement can a photo-essay animate in an audience of anthropologists?
Ariella Azoulay's (2008) work is an extremely useful provocation for visual anthropology.1 In her latest book, The Civil Contract of Photography, she is calling for an anthropological engagement with photographs without naming it as such:
The photograph bears the seal of the photographic event, and reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph. One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb "to watch" is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.
Watching photographs, for Azoulay, moves debates about photography beyond the dualistic relationship between the viewer and the photograph (as she claims is the case in the work of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag) to a space of social relations between the photographer, the viewer and the photographed. Azoulay insists the photographed is not merely a visible presence but an active participant. The universal validity and political ramifications of this larger claim merit a longer debate, one beyond the scope of this review. However, if, as in Hoffman's work here, we are concerned with photographs based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, taken by the anthropologist himself engaged in participant observation, Azoulay's claim that the photographed is an active participant would seem to be a given in putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography. In other words, having read Hoffman's other work, I have no doubt that his research is based on long engagements with his informants whose lives he has charted through significant transitions. But how is this visible in the photo essay before us? Watching Hoffman's photographs might entail what Deborah Poole (2005) calls a productive form of suspicion. For example, it might lead us to think beyond the usual critique of "fixing native subjects as particular racial types" instead to ask "how is it that photography simultaneously sediments and fractures the solidity of "race" as a visual and conceptual fact."
Of course, race is not something that Hoffman addresses explicitly, at least not in the text of this photo-essay, and yet it is part of the excessive description that cannot be edited out of his images. Hoffman acknowledges that these photographs represent a privileged gaze but wants them to not be about the (or his) gaze per se. Nonetheless, I am left wondering if the photo-essay as a mode of ethnography can ever escape being always also about the gaze. This is not an argument for explicitly self-reflexive work. Rather, it is a call for a reflexivity that does not revolve around a self—Hoffman's particular encounters in the field in 2010—but instead allows for the viewer/reader to reconstruct the photographic event as a thick description, a still image with all of the social and political context which it implies. Hoffman deliberately turns his attention away from the photo-essay's capacity for reflexivity in favor of its capacity for generative disruption. I am less convinced that these two are separable.
Hoffman writes that he eschews both reflexivity and a narrative arc because of his "desire to limit the scope to the material encounter of the miner's body with this mode of work and to explore its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor. " Now, even if it were possible for still photographs to make visible the material encounter of the miner's body with mining by showing the body in labor or being labored upon by the work itself, "its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor" is knowable to the viewer/reader only because of the anthropologist's textual reporting on his encounter with the miners. How might such an exploration also have been rendered more visible to the viewer/reader? While I concur wholeheartedly with Hoffman about the potential for the photo-essay to function as a mode of ethnography, in the spirit of contributing to a generative conversation about visually animated ethnography, I want to speak to a few areas in this particular photo-essay where I believe the visual ethnography might have been pushed even further.
How might the chains of labor in the makeshift camps or social circles that sustain the diamond economy be visualized? Hoffman mentions these things—limiting them, that is, to text—when he might have invited them into a more complicated visual field. The triptych on page 7 showing men commuting through the forest and playing soccer seems to be a beginning in this direction. What might photographs of the mentioned tents between old houses, or squatters in the ruins of the school or half-built mosque, have added to this essay? Would they detract anything?
Hoffman importantly analyzes the blurred boundaries between labor crews and militia squads and makes a striking argument that there is "a qualitative similarity for many young men between the tasks and rewards of war fighting and the tasks and rewards of mining, campaigning, or tapping rubber." Presently the visual argument for this lies in Hoffman's own interpretation of the first frame in the series. What we are to see here, according to Hoffman's textual "voiceover," is a collapse of the distinction between war and work on the part of the young men. Does the image in fact collapse that distinction? War is not visible in this frame but only in the author's comment. How would we react to a photo essay composed of photographs showing young men engaged in mining, fighting, campaigning and tapping rubber edited together? I am thinking here of Jean Rouch's brilliant use of juxtaposition to make visual arguments such as the famous cut between a Hauka spirit possession ceremony and a colonial British military procession in Les Maitres Fous (1954). How might such juxtapositioning function in a still visual medium?
Alternately, to keep the focus exclusively on the miner's body, are there bodily marks or gestures that blur boundaries between war and work? Scar stories, for example? Portraits of both war and work are differently told—though possibly not aestheticized—through the physical scars left on the workforce behind these activities. This type of photo-essay would almost certainly demand either significantly more ethnographic text for each image or possibly the addition of audio interviews. In fact, Hoffman's accompanying text begins with "the sounds of the mines" and is a paragraph-long meditation on what can and cannot be aurally registered at the Mayengema mines. Can we think of multimedia as a mode of ethnography? What might be lost or gained if this work were a multimedia piece, rather than a photo-essay? Would it animate a different form of engagement?
The Status of the Photo Essay
This review of "Corpus: Mining the Border" is written for the launch of the Photo Essays section of the Cultural Anthropology website. On the one hand, I am encouraged by this initiative and honored to be a part of this inaugural conversation. As a scholar committed to the visual as a field as well as a mode of inquiry and a form of ethnographic representation, I am inspired and heartened that one of the most prominent journals read by a wide range of sociocultural anthropologists should feature photo-essays. And yet I worry that there is a different, less serious, status being granted to projects like this photo-essay. What will viewers/readers make of the absence of a blind peer-review or editorial process? I'm not concerned merely with academic fairness, but rather, with how the lack of such processes germane to textual publishing contribute to the perception of visual scholarship.
We need to think critically not only about photography, but about how images are brokered. Image brokers are the people who act as intermediaries for images by moving them or restricting their movement, thereby enabling or policing their availability to new audiences (Gürsel 2012). By inaugurating this photo-essay form, Cultural Anthropology is serving as an image broker. What are the terms, then, of this brokering? Does this new online photo-essay format proposed by Cultural Anthropology promote visual ethnography or marginalize it further? For example, Cultural Anthropology published Hoffman's excellent article "Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in Contemporary West Africa" in the journal just a few months before this online photo-essay. The article contained no images. The photographs that comprise "Corpus: Mining the Border" are clearly informed by the same ethnographic research and theoretical concerns, yet they are being published separately, and evidently with a different set of academic—or is it aesthetic?—expectations. I invite us all to debate the merits and costs of this separation of images in the form of Cultural Anthropology's publication of this photo-essay and believe this is a very timely discussion for the discipline at large.2
A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Writing Culture has recently been published with a foreword (by the former editor of Cultural Anthropology) highlighting how it changed the face of ethnography. Interpretive anthropology was animated by a desire to "contribute to an increasing visibility of the creative (and in a broad sense poetic) processes by which 'cultural' objects are invented and treated as meaningful." Perhaps we ought to treat a twenty-fifth anniversary as a new beginning as well, not to return to the by now tired debates in which everyone has long ago staked their position, but to seize the opportunity to rigorously interrogate modes of ethnography for a new generation. Having thoroughly debated self-reflexivity, perhaps it is time for media/modal reflexivity.
It is time to begin evaluating anthropological scholarship not only on their content but also on their chosen medium.3 I certainly don't mean that all anthropology articles should now have superficial "visuals" or multimedia attached to them. (The rote colonization of classroom lectures by obligatory PowerpPint is proof enough that mandatory visuals are by no means necessarily illuminating.) Rather, at a moment when many anthropologists are engaging with different forms of media, it is now feasible and meaningful to make the choice of medium one aspect of evaluating anthropological work. There has been a lot of work done to legitimate visual work in anthropology. (See the AAA's "Guidelines for the Evaluation of Ethnographic Visual Media.") But I am asking if we have come to a moment where we ask not whether a particular visual ethnography is adequate or valuable or ought to "count," but rather begin with the question "what is the mode of this ethnographic inquiry, and how can we engage with it in an analytically rigorous way?" Different modes and mediums require that makers, brokers, and the reader/viewers develop new forms of rigorous analytic engagement. What do we still need to learn as a discipline to debate costs and benefits of using different media? Will we ever ask, "was text the best mode for this ethnography?" I believe that articulating answers to such a question will help develop analytic rigor across mediums. I hope that many of you will join this conversation and contribute to a discussion not only on "putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography," but also on the theoretical claims and ethnographic material Hoffman has shared in "Corpus: Mining the Border."
1. Azoulay's work is similar, in this sense, to the work of artist and critic Allan Sekula and art historian John Tagg, and indeed builds on the work of both.
2. It is true that films are corralled off at the AAAs, rather than integrated into panels. However, this is a new beginning and beginnings are a moment to reflect on forms.
3. My interest is in contributing to a debate about how visual scholarship can most effectively be part of a diverse range of anthropological conversations. I am inspired by Ethnographic Terminalia, its highly successful launch in 2009 and its development as "a project aimed at fostering art-based practices among anthropologists and other cultural investigators or critics" that is analytically sharp and highly media-reflexive. Their website has been central to their efforts to gain greater recognition for the work of visual anthropology and serves as both a tool for promotion and an archive for legitimation. Collectively, all those involved in Ethnographic Terminalia have creatively celebrated boundaries and borders without exalting them and have launched a generative conversation about the terms of ethnography. Yet that is a conversation happening on a different website, one that might not be sought out by those not already engaged in some form of visual anthropology. The beginning, of which this review is a part, requires the thinking of the stakes and productive possibilities of having similar formal conversations on the Cultural Anthropology platform.
Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gürsel, Zeynep Devrim. 2012. "The Politics of Wire Service Photography: Infrastructures of Representations in a Digital Newsroom." American Ethnologist 39, no. 1: 71–89.
Hoffman, Danny. 2005. "The Brookfields Hotel (Freetown, Sierra Leone)." Public Culture 17, no. 1: 55–74.
_____. 2007a. "The City as Barracks: Freetown, Monrovia and the Organization of Violence in Postcolonial African Cities." Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3: 400–428.
_____. 2007b. "The Disappeared: Images of the Environment from Freetown's Urban Environment." Visual Studies 22, no. 2: 104–19.
_____. 2011. "Violence, Just in Time: Work and War in Contemporary West Africa." Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 1: 34–57.
Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Poole, Deborah. 2005. "An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies." Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 159–79.
Not Just Bodies
Alan Klima, University of California, Davis
Danny Hoffman's broad strokes and starkly juxtaposed, figural swathes of color and shade are conscious and deliberate challenges for a conversation on possible meanings of the photo-essay for anthropology today.
I quite like the aesthetic eye of the images, understand the author's attempt to situate that style for the reader, and understand the author's attempt to explain why the style is not otherwise. Although sometimes reading like a strategic fending off of template criticisms readers might have come across in the past and tucked in their back pocket should they ever have the occasion to come across an image again, the ruminations on visual anthropology do accomplish, at the very least, this highlighting of Hoffman's strong sense of aesthetic purpose, one I would further call attention to in the abstract and formalist elements of his image composition. Although still resembling the aesthetic of photojournalism, to me these photos tip quite a bit toward the abstract in their broad patches of color and large shapes, and less toward the prosaic sensationalism that photo-journalism seeks.
I don't find the photographs the least bit shocking, except in the sense of "wow, soil can look like that!" And this is so even as I am surrounded by the equally brilliant, though red-tinted, soil in Thailand. Neither did I see the content or form of what is in the photographs as "qualitatively identical" to warfare nor that the image collapses the distinction between work and war (while text can only distinguish them), as the author asserts. In fact, contrary to the author's view, I would need it to be explained, in text, exactly why they are the same as war, otherwise I won't see it. And still, I am not sure that I would. As image only, I have to say I find them qualitatively identical to rice farming in rural Thailand, and it would take a whole lot of words to override my eyes.
The adamant style and stance of the images, themselves, however do accomplish his stated goal of providing a jarring impetus for new meaning of the reproducible image mode to anthropology. How he characterizes this intervention is, by contrast, worth questioning a bit.
His presumption seems to rest on an idea that the photographs are communicating brutal labor, and that this would be shocking to the viewer: "For most viewers, the image of bodies worked and working in this way is startling." Although I appreciate the photography very much, and do find something jarring about it, it is not due to the seeing of the harsh work depicted in them. What I see in any given photograph—as image, quite apart from what I am told is there—is people digging with shovels, sifting about in the water, etc., something I see all the time, and I imagine this is just as familiar to "most viewers." It is even more curious to be told that this is "not the productive work of post-industrial skilled tradesmen, the only form of manual labor that most residents of the global north regularly encounter." Never mind that this is an essay in Cultural Anthropology, given that most viewers probably are not confined to continual residence in the global north—my university home is in Northern California, where manual work in the hot sun abounds and can't not be seen. How many other places in the global north must there be like California? I grew up the son of an academic and an artist all the way on the other coast, and had to spend long periods of my youth, like many around me, in manual labor, bending sheets of metal to the same forty-five-degree angle for hours on end, or stacking mountainous piles of lumber, and damaging my body. Not that this helps me to assimilate or understand the reality of diamond mining one bit (well, a bit). It's that, without being told the story around the acts depicted in the photos, there is little to distinguish them from all the other forms of unskilled manual labor that are very close and common in the north, if you only look around a bit, and everywhere else for that matter. Destructive or productive, there is no way to tell from the image. People stand knee-deep in water and bend down in rice farming, and have for thousands of years. Alluvial diamond mining itself may be shocking, but these are not the kind of sensation-mining photos that can deliver it one swoop. The stereotypical photojournalist's goal of bringing shocking news, or the stereotypical ethnographer's goal of bringing exotic otherness, is simply not accomplished in these simple scenes of what are, visually alone, ubiquitous acts.
I do not deny, however, Hoffman's assertion that there is something jarring about this photography, nor does my intellect permit me to deny that there may be something here in this diamond mining that is, in truth, insanely harsher than anything I normally see among migrant workers on the hot, smoggy plains of California, or—certainly—have experienced myself. But we are supposed to understand that it is only the image that can communicate this material level of labor, a "materiality" that is ethnographically exotic to the north, and thus defines the purpose of this photo-essay: "overcoming the limits of text to visually explore the materiality of a border-form of work," where the "bodies of the miners are stripped to their essence by hard repetitive work and the hard repetitive landscape," and therefore there is "an excessiveness to the images that terms like work and labor, when rendered as text on the page, simply cannot register."
Yet what is jarring is not the unfamiliarity of unskilled manual labor, but the fact that it is actually not shocking at all to view these photographs, and yet somehow, it should be. This "it should be" is integrated into the composition and attraction of these photographs: the aesthetic shapes of the scenes, and especially that of soil and the body, strike the eye with form, and yet are not fully grasped, reckoned, realized as content, as real life experience, at least not as image: the lack of shock, moreover, is made all the more obvious by its pairing with abstract forms of aesthetic beauty. It is the beauty of the photographs, and simultaneous richness of presence to the soil and body, creating a jarring disjuncture that calls attention simultaneously to the struggle depicted in figure and ground, between the figures and the ground, and a struggle for the viewer to reckon with what powers and forces—not only matter, but energy too—are at work here.
This leaves the question of the experience of this labor open, because, in my view, there is also present in the images a human power that is truly awesome and beautiful and unfathomable and yet somehow carried in the photography.
And, which is quite unlike the stripped bare materiality of manual labor Hoffman asserts in his textually expressed views.
True, in repetitive, manual labor there are aches. There is exhaustion, and damage to the functioning of the body, but there are also all the thoughts and reactions to those sensations in the body, which in turn interact with them, amplify and alter them, a process that if watched carefully reveals that it is impossible to tell where one starts and where the other ends. And in any case, consciousness is required for there to be any feeling whatsoever, unlike a corpse, zombie, or patient under general anaesthesia, where "materiality" exists but pain and suffering does not.
The experience of manual labor is not a simple material fact and no worker is ever ground down to a pure material level. In fact, labor transpires in a mental medium, including all kinds of thoughts, reactions, and, indeed, stories. These miners are working within a story, even if it is not obvious. Even if there is no narrative arc to mining itself, there is for the miners.
And story, in manual labor, is perhaps the most painful aspect of it all. Whatever story is—and it is various and it can change—it sits over your shoulder, multiplying itself into more stories, into resistance to what is happening, longing for another kind of life, and all kinds of desperation. One procedure that is absolutely fundamental to performing brutal manual labor is shutting out this story (whatever it is), watching for its insistent return, and then banishing and re-banishing it, again and again. Some might be so good at it that they no longer realize what they are doing. Most people I have spoken to, however, never completely banish the stories, but they can shut them out for a time. If you can't do that, you can't work for long, because it will seize upon the so-called "material" sensations, that are themselves already mixed in a soup of mental reactivities, and tip the whole unbalance in a more calamitous way: more pain, probably injuries and sickness, and certainly no will to go on.
And so both the simple idea of material labor, and the idea Hoffman offers of story and narrative that are somehow not present in the arc of simple, repetitive digging in the soil (narrative as might be defined by pretending 20th Century literature never happened), close off too neatly the idea of labor in the material world in a way that has been too common for too long. It also fits neatly into the idea that the "material world" is the province of the image and photography. Each to its own place.
In the essay, the proper place for text is to describe the context, set the scene, explain the political and economic setting. To me, a most unfortunate career for writing.
Then, in comes the image: to do what text cannot, and the photo-essay becomes an essential antidote to the written word.
Actually, I share with Hoffman a hope for the photo-essay-- and any other manifestations of anthropology-through-image that may arise-- but if that hope is conjured in the figure of non-text, against text, with each given its appropriate purview, then old assumptions are re-strengthened, the same measures of inadequacy apportioned out, which marginalize the visual on the one hand, and flatten the textual on the other. In fact, no worse outcome for the revival of visual anthropology could be possible than reinforcing the atrophied and lifeless conception of text that, if not consciously held in the ethnographic mind, is nevertheless demonstrated to be dominant in a significant portion of anthropological prose.
Photography has more intrinsic value than as antidote to the inadequacies of prose. It can make a better case for itself than that in anthropology. And, after all, most of the "limits of text" Hoffman speaks of are, in anthropology, actually limits either in the writers themselves or in the system by which prose is selected and published, not of text itself.
Instead, photography should rise to the occasion and assert itself, make no excuses and no apologies for its existence. And to do that it might be helpful at the same time to recognize the immense power of writing, and accomplishments of writing. In fact, it is no easy thing at all to match the power of writing in addressing the experience of brutal labor (and such labor is never simply material, not for the people who do it). For Hoffman, through his photography, to have matched writing in this task is no small accomplishment, and it was not an accomplishment that was made simply by switching mediums.
Hoffman's images have risen to this occasion, and despite what he might say, open up for us our idea of labor and materiality rather than pinch them down into familiar tread.
And so, to return again to the photographs: rather than feeling shocked at the harsh labor I was visually exposed to-- actually a common photojournalist's goal I can assure you, having asked at least a few-- I found myself kicking myself, to try and force myself to feel the extremities of the experience here, but the wall of Hoffman's photographs was something I could not push myself through.
Of course, I am not so naive as to throw up my hands and declare photography inadequate.
Instead, I became all the more fascinated by the photographs and appreciative of the work Hoffman has done. And this continuously escaping affect, if you will, is no fault of the photography. In fact it is precisely this tension which is so subtly involving about the photos: that every piece of information was telling me that there was something extreme, special, alter, about the experience of the bodies in these pictures, and yet I am unable to pick it up, and instead see form. This discomfort itself is part of what is of value in the photographs for me, because nevertheless the constant beckoning of sweat and soil is so intensely present and would not let me stop trying.
A too-neat conception of "materiality" considerably closes these and other disjunctures, and closes off what should be an open question on the nature of labor, in a way Hoffman's photographs themselves do not.
This particular kind of openness is not as present in the early work of the great photographer Sebastião Salgado, for instance, where narrative within the frame is thick and obvious-- the gold mining scenes being the obvious comparison. How different, and how easy and comfortable in this sense, are Salgado's early and mid-career photos, where one gets an overload of meaning in a baroque sense of the fantastic and strange, even Bosch-like hell evoked at times, and magically so: surprisingly, through figures that can be only ever real, unlike Bosch who did it through imagined grotesqueries (or at least those who have not actually seen hell might believe). In Salgado, the radical alterity of brutal labor is spelled out for us, as it were, and it's shocking reality is indeed conveyed through the very surreality of the compositions.
If photojournalism has a most highest and unattainable level of heaven, it is Sebastião Salgado.
Something quite different is happening in these photographs. Context and strange awesome scenes are not attended to, and something much quieter remains, held in the hand of abstract form.
And that both is-- and isn't-- the materiality that Hoffman is right to say is an important evocation in the images.
Precisely: this pointing to the earth element of body and soil, the material aspect of it, and yet, with a tension-- and this is what is so jarring and challenging about the photographs-- because of course nothing is less suggestive of the earth element than the abstract shape and form and the aesthetic balances of light, dark, color and line of these photos. Whereas Salgado elided this tension through the immense storytelling functions of his photos, letting the baroque extravagance of his realism and the overflow of meaning almost deceptively distract from what can only be said to be an equal emphasis on figural form, Hoffman leaves us no out: either remain transfixed by abstraction, which he well knows is impossible for any caring individual to do, or jump ship, ponder the unattainable connection to the experience of this kind of work, this life situation, this labor.
As in the halting, liminal beginning and first picture of the series: not yet shocked by the wash of golden soil that is about to flail itself against the retina in the photos to come, the eye can at first pause, along with or behind a pause in the contemplative pose of the first figure, who is perhaps hesitant to begin work, who is perhaps surveying work to be done, or perhaps is marinating in that moment after hard work, a moment that lingers on longer than you intended, and it's so difficult to start up again.
Then the second photo in this mostly warmly-lit series: a distinctively cool color scheme, yet hitting off the first hint of what is really to come in the rest: broad swathes and patches of form and color in harsh juxtaposition. In this photo, one also picks up the first hint of struggle, perhaps with exhaustion, or with the limits of the body, perhaps with soil. In this figure of simultaneous work and rest, and like in most conventional narrative beginnings, it looks as though the strength and power of the protagonist may be defeated.
But this is all called into question with the frantic energy of the third photo, where—in an oddly angled shot and oddly angled act of work—plants spread their knives, competing against each other to mine the sun, and the body grows fingers in a frantic race to contact, one is told, diamonds (which we never see). In this strife, the plants seek contact with a sun that gives without receiving, in a project that can only ever end in their death, while the fingers that dig, sort, sift for limited, unseen objects, their project does not die. This search itself is as immortal as the desires and systems driving it are limitless, can never end, and will outlive these hands for sure.
In the fourth presentation, a series framed and colored in a way so reminiscent of the bathing scenes in Trinh's Reassemblage, there is juxtaposition of time-lapsed shots reminiscent of her break up of cinematic form, and yet in it's adherence to temporal series so unlike it is as well. Here the classic ethnographic narrative of, "this is how it is done: a, b, c" is adhered to, in thumbnail form appearing to be a strange panoramic shot but in close up actually an interested study in a complex action simply presented.
And for that, so disjunctive with the high-stakes flurry of the preceding image.
By the fifth photo there can be no doubt where the aesthetic allegiances lie. Here Grecian, statuesque attraction to the male body combines with the strongest attention to large swathes of aesthetic form, in the most abstract and yet most telling photo of the series. In the midst of all these large forms, the eye is drawn soon into something, tiny, intricate, and exuding from the surface, the sweat: a cool reminder of how inscrutable-- as photograph-- the experience of this labor is. No heat whatsoever is communicated in the formal line and shape, and yet, there it is: dancing on the surface, the indisputable evidence, all the clearer for not having been felt in the viewer, the indisputable traces scintillating in the power of labor meeting heat, and the struggle that began in picture two now looks like it might be swinging the other way: a power of unknown limits is at work here, under the skin. Which is more impressive? Is it the fact that this miraculous human power exists at all, and can be unleashed at will, as seen here, or is it the fact, more known through the political and economic context, that this miracle can seem to be chained, that there is-- in what is non-visible to this particular photo-essay: a power-harnessing-power, native to the social structures that render seemingly necessary this hard work in the sun, a power compacted by many confluences of fear of death with greed for shiny objects, with the numerical excitement for profit and wealth, with the ache to control land, people, other bodies. But I digress, as this photo does not call up that daunting awe. It is regnant with power, only power.
And so, in picture six, it is no surprise that—returning to the prosaic world—even a sea of golden dirt cannot defeat these slight figures, who, in a more staid, less sensational version of photojournalism, are demonstrating the action that defines them within their-life-in-this-text.
In the following, seventh presentation, a somewhat disjunctive series, in discontinuous semiosis:
The journey to the interior.
Then, a human will exacted upon nature, tearing like monster claws into the soil.
But . . .
not deep,
in the larger scale of things, and
Finally, the soaring life of—again—this power that cannot be contained within the frame of labor, not within the frame of exploitation: a power of amazing reach, unfurling itself in the failing light of day on a great peal of energy riding beyond pain, beyond all creaky calls of the body that is dying in every moment.
Dying, but it does not matter.
Not matter.
And now, in the eighth photo, returning again to the strange orange glow of the soil, there is something of a blow delivered here, but almost an afterthought. One foot barely hovering off the ground, still hints of soaring, but not high, not really flying at all, but propped on the weight of a force delivered into the soil, which, in this framing, no longer dwarfs and surrounds the man but appears to have already yielded to him.
Ninth photo: back to banality. It is work after all. Moments repeating themselves. Circles.
And finally, shadow upon swirling water, another figure of domination, posed in a mastery of the elements, and yet, as the final photo, suggesting also something of ghost, something of the acorporeal, just form of light, just shadow: which after all is all there really is here anywhere in the photos. That this is photography, light and shadow, is something we are not encouraged to forget for long in this photo-essay, if ever. And yet . . .
And yet still the seeping muck of water and mud, the fine as well as chunky granulations of the sun-baked soil all around, suggest so much of the elemental, the material as well, so resonant and goopy and almost palpable. Here, the soil is given power and presence, and the human: it remains a question. Power, and yet of what kind, what being?


text:
UCF Releases More Details on Planned Attack
A University of Central Florida spokesman says it appeared that a student who committed suicide there planned an attack on campus.
Spokesman Grant Heston says that materials found in the dorm room made it appear that a wider attack was planned.
Police say he pulled a gun on another student, who then called police.
Heston says the university was in the process of removing the 30-year-old student from the dorm before Monday. Campus Police Chief Richard Beary say four makeshift explosive devices were found in a back pack. Beary says he believes that the dead student pulled a fire alarm in the dorm to get other students out in the open for an attack.
The student was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound with guns and the explosives.
(Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)


text:
Gainesville Police arrested former standout Gator wide receiver Louis Morris Murphy Jr. early Sunday morning.
Gainesville Police arrested former standout Gator wide receiver Louis Morris Murphy Jr. early Sunday morning, charging him with possession of a drug without a valid prescription, failure to obey a police officer and resisting arrest without violence -- all misdemeanors.
Murphy, who plays for the Oakland Raiders, was taken into custody just after midnight.
Gainesville Police Officer Thomas Harrison said he spotted Murphy's Cadillac Escalade at 100 SW First St., with the stereo playing loudly. Harrison said he told Murphy, 23, to pull over, but then Murphy continued driving to a city parking lot, where he and his passengers got out of the SUV and walked away.
Harrison flipped on his lights and ordered Murphy and the passengers to stop. Harrison said Murphy refused to present identification and demanded to know why Harrison stopped him. Harrison said Murphy continued to refuse to show his ID and so Harrison attempted to place him in handcuffs, but, he said, Murphy refused to put his hands behind his back. It took three officers to place the 6-foot-2-inch, 180-pound NFL player into custody.
Harrison said Murphy consented to a search of his vehicle, where officers found a "non-labeled prescription bottle containing 11 individual pills later identified as Viagra." Murphy could not provide a prescription for it and allegedly told the officer that he had peeled the label off of the bottle "because he did not want his girlfriend to know he had a prescription for it."
This is Murphy's second arrest in Gainesville. The first one came in 2006, when he was taken into custody for possession of less than 20 grams of marijuana. In a plea deal, the state attorney's office later declined to prosecute if Murphy completed 12 1/2 hours of community service or paid $125 to "Project Payback," a juvenile program designed to monitor and enforce restitution to the courts.
According to a Sports Illustrated article, Murphy vowed to turn his life around when his mother was diagnosed with cancer a second time in 2007. She died in on Valentine's Day 2008. He grieved in the butterfly garden at UF's Museum of Natural History when he worked there as an intern for part of his sports event management degree. He was also captain of UF's football team that year, scoring a touchdown from a Tim Tebow pass in the BCS championship game.
Murphy volunteers in his off hours. Last year, he spoke with inmates at the Pinellas County Jail annex in Clearwater, telling them that everyone deserves a second chance.
Murphy's father is a pastor and he has said publicly that his faith shapes his life.
Contact Moore Wilmoth at 352-374-5036 or firstname.lastname@example.com.