text:
oceanography, study of the seas and oceans. The major divisions of oceanography include the geological study of the ocean floor (see plate tectonics) and features; physical oceanography, which is concerned with the physical attributes of the ocean water, such as currents and temperature; chemical oceanography, which focuses on the chemistry of ocean waters; marine biology, the study of the oceanic flora and fauna; and, in meteorology, the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean.
Oceanography as a comprehensive study dates from the Challenger expedition (1872–76), directed by the naturalists C. W. Thomson, a Scot, and John Murray, a Canadian. The term oceanography became current through reports of the expedition edited by Murray, who later became a leader in the study of ocean sediment. The success of the Challenger expedition and the importance of ocean knowledge to shipping, fisheries, the laying of telegraph cables, and climatological studies led many nations to send out expeditions.
Universities and private individuals, as well as governments, have established institutions for the study of the ocean; there exist today about 250 such institutions. One of the earliest was the marine biological station at Naples (founded 1872), which stimulated the founding of many other seaside stations, some of which, e.g., the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, Calif., have enlarged their activities to include all fields of oceanographic research. Other notable institutions in the field include the Oceanographic Museum at Monaco (1910); the biological station of the Univ. of Oslo; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Mass. (1930); and the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia Univ (1949).
The first international oceanographic organization was the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (1901). In 1966 the U.S. Congress created the National Council for Marine Resources and Engineering Development charged with exploring all aspects of ocean development, and authorized the National Science Foundation to sponsor sea-grant colleges analogous to the Dept. of Agriculture's sponsorship of land-grant colleges. Projects such as Conshelf, under Jacques Cousteau; Sealab, under the U.S. Navy; Tektite, a cooperative venture of the U.S. Dept. of the Interior and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Aquarius under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and others have established temporary stations in oceans to see whether humans can live and work underwater for extended periods.
Modern deep-diving equipment has been improved to permit descents to very great depths, such as the U.S. bathyscaphe, Trieste II, which descended to 35,798 ft (10,294 m) in the Marianas Trench in 1960. Smaller, remote-controlled craft, such as the Jason, which was used to examine the sunken steamship Titanic, explore natural and humanmade underwater structures. Deep-diving craft (see submersible) provide invaluable direct observations of the deep ocean bottom, mid-ocean ridges, and marine life. Recent oceanographic studies include drilling of the seafloor (see Deep Sea Drilling Project).
See M. G. Gross, Oceanography: A View of the Earth (1972); R. R. Ward, Into the Ocean World (1974); M. G. Gross, Oceanography (1990); R. A. Davis, Oceanography: An Introduction to the Marine Environment (1987, 2d ed. 1991); J. Cone, Fire Under the Sea (1992).


text:
Warren Manor Health And Rehabilitation Center is a 172 Bed Medicare And Medicaid Certified Nursing Home located in Selma, AL. Warren Manor Health And Rehabilitation Center is certified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and they provide skilled nursing services to patients in a post-acute care setting. Warren Manor Health And Rehabilitation Center can be contacted at (334) 874-7425 or submit a request for more information.
Skilled Nursing Facilities are one of the Medicare certified provider types who are participate in the CMS Quality initiatives in order to accept Medicare for payment. To learn more Skilled Nursing Facility quality measure performances, Medicare five star ratings, survey report information, patient-to-staffing ratios and more, please view the Medicare Report for Warren Manor Health And Rehabilitation Center.
The services provided by Warren Manor Health And Rehabilitation Center in Selma, AL may include: Activities, Blood Services, Clinical Laboratory, Dental Services, Diagnostic X-Ray, Dietary Services, Housekeeping, Mental Health, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Organized Family Member Group, Organized Resident Group, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, Physician Services, Physician Extenders, Podiatric, Other Activities, Social Services, Social Work, Speech Pathology,

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Sknight necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 1796 diseños de 310 diseñadores freelance.
One-stop shop for quality male grooming products and accessories for the modern man.
Males who care about their appearance aged 16-45.
Shipping throughout Europe although majority of orders to UK, France, Germany and Italy. Website launch Q4 2011.
Like the idea of using the SOS dots to symbolise rescue as our products will be rescuing every man from a grooming disaster. The international distress message is 3 spaced dots followed by three spaced dashes followed by a repeat of 3 spaced dots i.e. . . . - - - . . . Not sure how well this would work. Does it just need to be text? I like the idea of an accompanying logo although i am not sure what. I did originally suggest a life-ring for 'saving' and a male type symbol - this to date has not worked though. Have also just thought of a lighthouse type logo (to link saving), something abstract and perhaps casting a light over the text. Not sure how to achieve and whether this would look lame and send a confused message, i am guessing it needs to be very abstract! but i will let you creatives mull it over. None of these ideas need to be used! Can you think of anything else? Think of a logo that works and encapsulates our male grooming theme ensuring it looks classy, sophisticated and luxurious. Get creating those logos!
A strap-line might be good although cannot think of a good one! Suggestions welcome.
For an idea of similar product range check out current UK market leader http://www.mankind.co.uk
Thank you for your interest and I look forward to viewing your ideas.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


text:
Student or Learner
Hi all,
could anybody please explain what is incorrect about the sentence below. Also, as importantly, why is it wrong?
"Can I say you something?"
I would like to know what kind of classification this particular error would fall into.
An in depth as possible answer would be ideal.
Many thanks.
Remember - if you don't use correct capitalisation, punctuation and spacing, anything you write will be incorrect.
Thank you for your replies but I think the purpose of my post has been misunderstood. I'm well aware that it's incorrect, I'm English after all. I want to know what kind of error it is? Is this an example of poor semantics? If so, why? Along these lines.
@emsr2d2 I can understand why you would direct people to the search function but I couldn't actually find any relevant post from using it. Also, I suspect that I'm not going to find the kind of answer I want there as it's not a usage answer like what I imagine most of the posts you referred to will be.
Apologies, MrRubik, I didn't look at your member profile as I assumed you were a learner. No offence (!) just that the misuse of "say you" is something that crops up here so often from learners.
Remember - if you don't use correct capitalisation, punctuation and spacing, anything you write will be incorrect.
If you want to be technical about it, "tell" can take an indirect object, while "say" doesn't.
Why? It's just the way we use the words.


text: Accurist Home / Brands / Accurist / Accurist Expanding Bracelet Mens Watch 7080 Accurist Expanding Bracelet Mens Watch 7080 Product Code: 7080 Item In Stock: Only 1 Left! FREE UK Delivery *Order before 3:30pm for same day dispatch £64.99 Price Match Guarantee! Seen it Cheaper? Submit a Request No Hassle 31 Day Return Policy Gift Wrap Available at Checkout Proud to be Official Stockists Click and View in Store Available Details Specifications Reviews Delivery & Returns Order Info Accurist 7080 mens watch features a round case with a white colour full figure dial. The dial features silver colour hour, minute and second hands and a small date window positioned at 3 o clock. The watch is also water resistant to 50 meters. The expanding strap measures 20mm wide and features a clasp style back. Product Code: 7080 Collection: N/A Type: Wristwatch Gender: male Strap Type: Expander Bracelet Strap Material: Stainless Steel Main Colour: Silver Dial Colour: White Case Colour: Silver Strap Colour: Silver Case Material: Stainless Steel Display: analogue Movement: Quartz Battery Water Resistance: 50m Face Shape: Round Glass Type: Mineral Crystal Case Width: 39mm Stones: No Stones Plating: No Plating Date Feature: Date Alarm: No Chronograph: No Light: No Clasp: No Clasp EAN: 5051322070801 Warranty: Official 2 Year Accurist Warranty Packaging: Official Accurist Watch Packaging Not yet reviewed Write an online review and share your thoughts with other shoppers! Be the first to review this product Delivery & Returns UK Delivery Service, Times and Charges FREE Delivery is available on all UK orders. FREE Special Next Day Delivery (Guaranteed before 1pm) on all items above £150. For same day dispatch items should be ordered before 3:30pm (Monday - Friday.) All items purchased before 3:30pm must be completed in full and payment taken successfully before dispatch. Items purchased after 3:30pm will be sent on the next working day. Other UK Postage Options Express Tracked Signed For (1-2 Working Days) - £1.95 Special Next Day Delivery on Items under £150 (Guaranteed before 1pm Next Working Day) - £5.95 Guaranteed Next Day Saturday Delivery (Saturday Delivery) - £9.95 Collect in Store If you choose to collect your purchase from one of our high street stores, please use our View in Store page to select your collection point. We will confirm your earliest collection time before closing on the next working day. International Delivery Service, Times and Charges International Tracked Signed For (EU) (3-7 Working Days) - £10.95 International Signed For (Rest of World) (8-12 Working Days) - £14.95 The above international delivery services requires someone is present to accept and sign for your parcel when your postal service attempts delivery. If you do not receive your order within 12 working days, please contact your local delivery office. If you are still having problems, please do not hesitate to contact us. Our sales team are always happy to help. Please Note: We currently don't ship to the following: South America, Africa, Italy, Russia, Asia (Excluding Japan) Hassle Free Returns 31 Day Money Back Promise If for any reason you are unhappy with your purchase or it does not meet your requirements, you may return it for exchange or refund as per the Distance Selling Regulations and in accordance with your statutory rights. If you wish to return a purchase, please notify us within 7 working days of receipt and return it back to us within 31 days. Find out more info here. Order Information Payment Methods We use the Sage Pay secure checkout flow so you know your order is safe with us. Sage Pay allows payments from most major card providers. We know it can be stressful choosing the right piece let alone worrying about the cost, so we offer a range of payment methods from card payment, to Paypal, Amazon pay and Interest Free Finance via our trusted provider V12. Visit our Finance Calculator for details. Free Watch Strap Adjustment We offer a free watch bracelet adjustment service with all watches purchased from us. Once you add your order to the cart, simply use the additional comments section of the checkout flow to specify your wrist size and your purchased watch will be adjusted prior to dispatch. This service doesn't effect or delay the dispatch date, unless extra links are required to make the bracelet strap bigger. Price Match Guarantee We price match like for like, authorised retailers, so if you've seen something cheaper please contact us via our Price Match Form. We always aim to price competitively. View in Store If you wish to view an item before purchase you may do so by clicking the view in store button just below the add to cart. This will take you to the view in store form. Simply fill out the Form, select the best location & add your contact details so we can contact you and arrange a time that suits. 31 Day Return Policy We of course hope that you are completely satisfied with your item, but if for any reason you decide to return the piece, simply notify us within seven days. Post your item back to us within 31 days of receipt for a refund or exchange, but please note if the item has been personalised (e.g. Engraving) it is exempt from this policy. Earrings cannot be returned due to health and safety. Customers also Loved Accurist Rose Brown Leather Strap Ladies Watch 8088 Add to Cart £49.99 £79.99 Accurist Expanding Bracelet Mens Watch 7081 Add to Cart £69.99 Accurist Expanding Bracelet Mens Watch 7098 Out Of Stock £49.99 £74.99 Trustpilot


text:
By John Goralski
Sports Writer
Tom Gallagher picked apart the Newington defense with five goals and four assists while Indian defenders hog-tied Kevin Cop at the net. On Tuesday, May 14, Southington's offensive depth was put to the test as Newington held Cop to just one score in the regular season finale.
All season, this has been a question for Coach Ron Chase. He's never questioned the depth of his defense, but could the offense overcome a strong defensive effort?
Unleash the freshman.
With Gallagher carrying the load adn Cop swallowed up by defenders, Liam Delahunty sprinted onto the field in his first varsity contest. When the dust settled on the game, Delahunty had collected five Blue Knight goals.
As the Knights prepare to make an unprecedented postseason run, Delahunty was just what the doctor ordered.
"Kevin Cop's usually good for three or four goals a game. Gallagher did a good job, and he's playing really well right now, but our freshman really stepped up," said Chase. "He was huge for us, and I was really proud of him. We have a lot of things to fix. It was an ugly game today, but we found a way to win."
The game came on the heels of an 11-5 win over South Windsor on Tuesday. Gallagher scored four times. Jared DeFeo and Cop scored two goals apiece. Alexander Jamele, Nick Terry, and Will Thompson each scored, while Brian Mahon collected eight saves to get their 10th win.
The Knights are closing in on uncharted territory. With victories over South Windsor and Newington in the final week of the season, the Knights have secured the No. 7 seed in the upcoming Class L tournament.
At 12-4, they are tied with perennial powers like Greenwich and Xavier, and the Knights are just one game behind proven programs like Simsbury, Staples, and Fairfield Prep.
"We had four losses, so we didn't accomplish all our goals," Chase said with a laugh. "Any season that has double digit wins is a good one. It's going to be nice to get a home game. It's nice to get into our conference tournament as the No. 3 seed. That's a huge accomplishment."
The Knights have been there before. They've lost first round contests in the CCC tournament. They've earned home tournament games in 2005 and 2009, but both ended in a first round elimination.
But Southington finally broke through with a first round victory in 2011, and Chase hopes to raise the bar this spring. That's why he wants his team to stay focused on the conference tournament.
"That's all I want them to think about right now," he said. "The fact that we get to play again is great for us. We're going to keep practicing the way we've been practicing. Some teams may not get a good practice in over the next week and a half, but we're going to keep getting after it."
The real test begins now.
To comment on this story or to contact sports writer John Goralski, email him at jgoralski@ southingtonobserver.com.


text:
Hi, I am ☆Solar Dragon☆ . If you want to leave me a message, please use my talk page.
Contact me
I am Callum Walmsley, better known around the wiki world as Solar Dragon. I am a customer support member who is happy to help out. I'm from England and can only speak English so if you want to contact me, please do so in English. I am also the founder of Darren Shan Wiki.
Outside of ShoutWiki, I am best known as the head admin of Wikisimpsons where I have thousands of edits and have made hundreds of articles.
I am competent with wiki code and parser functions. If you need help with templates or tables, just ask. I'm also pretty good with CSS and have designed skins for a couple of wikis. I also have access to bot software. I have both AutoWikiBrowser and Pywikipediabot which I can use to make mass edits to pages if you want.


text:
Careers rarely develop the way we plan them. Our career path often takes many twists and turns, with particular events, choices and people influencing our direction.
We asked Mary McCaughey from EU Careers to give some advice for people considering this job:
Written interview unavailable...
Creative people are drawn to careers and activities that enable them to take responsibility for the design, layout or sensory impact of something (visual, auditory etc). They may be atrracted to the traditional artistic pursuits such as painting, sculpture, singing, or music. Or they may show more interest in design activities, such as architecture, animation, or craft areas, such as pottery and ceramics. Creative people use their personal understanding of people and the world they live in to guide their work. Creative people like to work in unstructured workplaces, enjoy taking risks and prefer a minimum of routine.
688118 Registered Members


text:
- Capital One Cup
Laudrup: Swans still have mountain to climb
Swansea boss Michael Laudrup warned his players they still face a "mountain to climb" despite shocking Chelsea 2-0 in the first leg of their Capital One Cup semi-final at Stamford Bridge.
A pair of Branislav Ivanovic mistakes ensured the Swans got full reward for a battling performance at the home of the European champions. Michu swooped on Ivanovic's initial error in the first half before Danny Graham gave the Welsh club a near-decisive lead in injury-time.
Laudrup said the performance was one of the best since he took charge in the summer, but warned his side could ill afford to begin thinking about a Wembley final.
"To be honest I'm delighted with the result,'' he said in an interview on Sky Sports. "I would lie otherwise. I think we have had some historic results already this season - winning at Anfield and at the Emirates. Winning at the European champions, though, is something very special.
"But there is still a mountain to climb. They have so much quality and we will have to play exactly the same, with the same intensity. They could still score three of four goals against us - but I am most happy about going into the second leg at home with a possibility to play a final at Wembley."
Laudrup offered praise for his side's defence, who restricted Chelsea's chances despite conceding the majority of possession.
"I think we knew it would be a difficult game," he said. "The possession they had was much more than us - that's obvious - but to be honest they only had three big chances.
"They gave us two goals, but you have to score them. They are two mistakes but even if you take away the two goals they only created three chances. It was a marvellous fight."
Defender Ashley Williams said the return leg in a fortnight would be one of the biggest occasions in the club's history.
"It will be a massive game. We're only half-way their in a massive tie," he said. "If we do get to Wembley it will be massive for everyone. We just wanted to get a result and bring them back top our place and try and finish the job.
"Tonight we just wanted to play our own game and not let the occasion get to us. We stayed calm and played the way we wanted to."


text: Charles DeVoise has had a passion for art from his early youth. Upon graduation from high school he traveled extensively throughout Europe studying works of art created by the great masters. Charles has also studied art at the University of Colorado and other colleges over the years. The love of painting has become something of an obsession for him as he continues to develop his artistic techniques.


text:
As international troops draw down in Afghanistan, peace talks with Taliban flounder
KABUL, Afghanistan – The Afghan peace effort is floundering, fraught with mistrust and confusion among key players even though the hard-line Taliban militants show signs of softening and their reclusive, one-eyed leader made a surprise offer to share power in a post-war Afghanistan.
The U.S. and its allies hope the peace process, which began nearly two years ago, will gain traction before most international forces withdraw from the country in fewer than 23 months. But although the Taliban appear more ready to talk than ever before, peace talks remain elusive because of infighting among a rising number of interlocutors — all trying to get some kind of negotiations started.
Members of the Taliban are in contact with representatives from 30 to 40 different countries, according to senior U.S., Afghan and other officials The Associated Press interviewed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moreover, the relationship among the key players — the U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan — is marked by distrust that keeps tugging momentum away from the peace process.
Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive contacts with the Taliban.
Finding a path to the negotiating table will be a topic when Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan President Asif Zardari hold a series of meetings beginning Monday with British Prime Minister David Cameron. The meetings in London come amid fresh tensions between Kabul and its western allies.
Karzai recently warned the West not to use peace talks as a lever against his government. As well, both Kabul and Washington are frustrated that Pakistan is not monitoring the whereabouts and activities of Taliban prisoners it released in recent months. Miffed by the criticism, Pakistan says it freed the prisoners at the request of the Afghan government and doesn't have the resources to keep tabs on them.
No one in either Pakistan or Afghanistan seems to know where the dozens of released prisoners have gone. Last week, the Taliban issued a statement by freed former Taliban Justice Minister Mullah Nooruddin Turabi on behalf of all the prisoners — an indication that at least some might have rejoined the ranks of the insurgency.
"There were no preconditions to their release and we are getting criticism from our own people inside Afghanistan about that and it is valid criticism," said Ismail Qasemyar, a senior member of the Afghan High Peace Council.
The peace council, which Karzai set up to carry out peace negotiations, handed Pakistan the list of prisoners, including Turabi, that it wanted freed. They have also asked for the release of the Taliban's former second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, but Washington has urged Pakistan not to release him, U.S. and Afghan officials said.
For its part, the United States has tried to accelerate the peace process by working with Britain, Norway and Germany to reach out to the Taliban, said a senior Western diplomat familiar with the negotiations. Both France and Tokyo have hosted meetings that have been attended by Afghan officials, opposition leaders and the Taliban, although the Taliban insist their participation should not be misinterpreted as negotiations.
One senior U.S. official said the process is so nascent and egos so fragile that it's like negotiating a minefield. A European diplomat told the AP that there are so many backdoor talks going on that it's hard to keep track of who is talking to whom.
This week, Karzai said he wanted an end to all these talks. Speaking at a water management conference in the Afghan capital, Karzai expressed suspicion that the peace process was being hijacked by the West to strengthen his opponents and undermine his government.
Karzai's spokesman, Aimal Faizi, told The AP in an interview on the sprawling palace grounds in Kabul that the president was frustrated by what he perceives are attempts by his political opponents and the West, including the United States, to use the peace process to lay the groundwork for a post-2014 Afghanistan led by those hand-picked by them.
This latest flap between Karzai and the West could halt or at least delay the official opening of a Taliban office in the Middle Eastern state of Qatar. The office is intended to give the Taliban an address from which they can conduct peace talks. Faizi said Karzai supports the office "in principle," with some conditions.
"This office should be used only as an address for talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban," Faizi said. "This office should not be used for any other purpose."
Faizi also said the president wants the Taliban to publicly announce that they will negotiate peace only with the Afghan High Peace Council. So far, the Taliban have resisted, although officials close to the president say privately that they appear to be softening their hard-line stance.
Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, seemed uncompromising when he spoke to The AP.
"There is no change in the policy of the Islamic Emirate of not talking to the Karzai government," he said "The Karzai regime is powerless and installed by others. Real parties to the conflict are those who have committed aggression."
But still the Taliban have shown signs of moderating their positions in recent months.
According to several Western officials, who are involved or knowledgeable about the process, the most telling sign of flexibility came in a statement issued late last year by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. In the statement marking the Islamic holy holiday of Eid al-Adha, Omar for the first time offered to share power. He also said he had no interest in starting a civil war.
"As to the future political destiny of the country, I would like to repeat that we are neither thinking of monopolizing power nor intend to spark off domestic war," he said.
While still firm on his demand for Sharia or Islamic law, in Afghanistan, the Taliban leader, who rarely speaks and has a $10 million bounty on his head, did seem to take a few steps back from the harsh and regressive edicts and interpretations of Islamic law that characterized the Taliban's five-year rule. Many of those edicts were directed at women, denying them education and the right to work. He also seemed to extend an olive branch to Afghanistan's other ethnic groups.
"We will guarantee rights of both male and female of the country, build economic structures and strengthen social foundations and facilities of education for all people of the country," he said.
But Omar's flexibility only went so far. He still insisted on an Islamic education system. While the West has been pressing for secular education, many of Afghanistan's current leaders support a Quran-based education system.
A senior member of the High Peace Council, who met with Taliban on the sidelines of the two conferences in France and Tokyo, said they also vowed to make child marriages illegal and outlaw a common practice among ethnic Pashtuns to use their daughters as barter to settle disputes.


text:
Review: Cold Pursuit Takes the Revenge Thriller for a Self-Reflexive Spin
It's the way the film's humor specifically subverts its genre's expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.3
In the decade-plus since Liam Neeson's avenging father from Pierre Morel's Taken, with his "particular set of skills," struck out to re-take his kidnapped daughter, an entire subgenre of action film has arisen around middle-aged male characters who inflict their hidden, superhuman capacity for violence on throngs of younger, often ethnically "other" goons. And these films have had a successful run, but the last stage of every genre's evolution is a certain descent into self-parody. And just as film noir's death knell was sounded by the wicked Kiss Me Deadly, and RoboCop prematurely announced the demise of the '80s action hero, so has Hans Petter Moland's Cold Pursuit gutted the revenge thriller that Neeson helped popularize, and with no small help from the actor himself.
Cold Pursuit's quickly disregarded MacGuffin concerns drug smuggling, which is appropriate given the way Moland and screenwriter Frank Baldwin use the guise of a straightforward revenge thriller to smuggle in a parody of the genre. Neeson plays Nels Coxman, a snow-plow driver living outside of Kehoe, Colorado, whose adult son, Kyle (Micheál Richardson), is murdered by drug dealers when his co-worker steals a shipment of cocaine. The killers fake Kyle's death as a heroin overdose, but Nels is unable to accept that his son was a junkie. He soon embarks on a predictable quest for vengeance, pummeling and shooting his way through a drug operation headed by a kingpin known as Viking (Tom Bateman).
The cues that Cold Pursuit is actually an irreverent comedy pile up over the first act—they snowball, one could say. At first, the film's humor scans as a misplaced tone. From the beginning, George Fenton's odd musical score—most prominently, a jaunty mandolin tune—repeatedly undermines the film's most harrowing moments. Strange, too, is that every character's death is marked by a venerating title card, which contradicts the action film's guiding ethos that some lives are worth more than others. And even when Moland stages a near-one-minute sequence in which characters wait in awkward silence as morgue attendants noisily work a foot pump to raise the trolley on which Kyle's body rests, you may not yet feel comfortable letting out a laugh. But that's the point at which the film most clearly announces it won't be treating even innocent deaths with any hand-wringing sentimentality.
The body count quickly escalates in Cold Pursuit, which memorializes each capped gangster as Coxman's hulking snow plow runs roughshod over moral considerations and narrative logic. Killing becomes for Coxman a kind of ritual, as after bludgeoning, strangling, or shooting a henchman, he somberly wraps him in chicken wire and tosses him into a waterfall, always at the same location. Ritualistic, too, is the film's recapitulation of the stock scenes of the hypermasculine action film: the avenger, seething with rage, confronts the arrogant murderer; the hero showcases his determination and know how by fashioning his unique weapon; and the villain wantonly murders an underling for a minute transgression.
Increasingly, the film exposes these overfamiliar tropes as shallow, indulgent fantasies of violence. Sometimes, Moland accomplishes this self-reflexive spin by ratcheting up the brutality of a scenario; at one point, after failing to kill his first victim, Coxman strangles the man again. But Moland also makes Coxman look ridiculous, having him slink incognito through a crowded nightclub in his conspicuously oversized parka, struggle with his cufflinks as he prepares to kidnap Viking's child, and break the laws of physics as his monstrous snow plow almost appears to teleport to the opposite end of a narrow mountain road.
In case it hasn't occurred to viewers by the end of Cold Pursuit's first act that they aren't watching the usual film about Liam Neeson righteously breaking people's bones, Moland pulls the rug out from under us, sidelining Coxman as the narrative pursues the sprawling consequences of the man's murders. Viking concludes that his lieutenants are being picked off by a gang of Native Americans headed by White Bull (Tom Jackson), and begins a turf war with them. The middle section of the film focuses almost exclusively on these rival entities and two Kehoe cops (Emmy Rossum and John Doman) who unnecessarily involve themselves in the investigation. The bodies pile up as the film willfully strays from its expected center, focusing on violent hijinks, one-off jokes, and conversations that turn out to be the setup not for weighty plot twists, but for brief, belated punchlines.
It's the way Cold Pursuit's humor specifically subverts its genre's expected emotional valences that makes it so effective. Much of its broader bits of business—funny gangster nicknames, crotch-punch humor, Viking's overreaction to the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup—could easily be transplanted unchanged to an earnest thriller, and often aren't funny on their own. But the persistence of this irreverent humor, and the deployment of irony at moments we would expect to be the film's dramatic anchoring points, estrange us from the story and let us see the brutality and emptiness of the genre that turned Cold Pursuit's star into a major box office draw. When, early in the film, Coxman's wife (Laura Dern in a regrettably minor role) absconds from their home, she appears to leave him a farewell card. Drawing it out of its envelope, though, Coxman finds it blank on all sides. The moment is humorous, but it also reminds us that revenge is a zero-sum game, an empty note in a blank envelope.
Cast: Liam Neeson, Laura Dern, Emmy Rossum, Tom Bateman, William Forsythe, Tom Jackson, John Doman, Raoul Max Trujillo, Julia Jones, Micheál Richardson Director: Hans Petter Moland Screenwriter: Frank Baldwin Distributor: Summit Entertainment Running Time: 119 min Rating: R Year: 2019 Buy: Video
Review: Zombieland: Double Tap Shrugs Toward the End of the World
Behind the film's self-awareness and irony is a hollow emotional core.1.5
"Double tap," the belated Zombieland sequel's namesake, refers to the rule of shooting a zombie more than once in order to ensure that it's dead. Like the rest of the rules devised by the series's dweebish protagonist, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), it's spelled out in large on-screen text, an amusingly self-aware touch in the original 2009 film that has, a decade later into our irony-poisoned present, lost its luster.
Part of that is because the sequel highlights these rules more frequently and prominently, injecting them with flashy text effects that are more distracting than funny. But it's also because self-awareness doesn't feel nearly as refreshing as it did in 2009, with seemingly every big studio movie nowadays winking and nodding at audiences, trying to swaddle us in layers of protective irony (that writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick went on to script the vacuous Deadpool films is no accident). Zombieland: Double Tap effortlessly operates in the same groove as the original, but that's less a compliment than a measure of a failure to evolve.
Revising the world of Zombieland feels like returning to a television program you gave up on watching; though the cast has aged, the character dynamics remain largely the same, if slightly more exaggerated and perhaps overly familiar. Boisterous gunslinger Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) is a little more cartoonish now, while Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) is all grown up. She's more than old enough to drive, and thus old enough to run away with a pacifist hippie, Berkeley (Avan Jogia), prompting Columbus, Tallahassee, and conwoman Wichita (Emma Stone) to track her down. They're a makeshift family now, despite still referring to one another by the city aliases that were meant to prevent getting too attached.
A newcomer to their group still goes by her real name, Madison (Zoey Deutch), and as a caricatured dumb blonde, she typifies much of the film's easy, uninspired comedy. The supremely overqualified cast powers through tiresome, pop culture-laden exchanges via sheer charisma; Stone, though unfortunately reduced to playing a "jealous girlfriend" type, is particularly expressive. But returning director Ruben Fleischer, despite pairing with the usually excellent cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, too often shoots the actors in close-up, robbing much of the film of the chemistry that the actors display in wider shots.
Double Tap also plays unthinkingly into the zombie fantasy as survivalist gun porn, even going so far as to add a Gen Z commune of idiot pacifists who melt down guns into peace symbols. This sequel, however, is too mediocre for such an idea to register with more than a shrug. The film isn't using the concept to make a point, after all; behind the self-awareness and the irony is merely a hollow emotional core, a lack of anything to say because saying something would require ambition rather than complacent winks and nods.
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone, Rosario Dawson, Zoey Deutch, Avan Jogia, Luke Wilson, Thomas Middleditch Director: Ruben Fleischer Screenwriter: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Dave Callaham Distributor: Columbia Pictures Running Time: 93 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Transforms Thorny Folklore into Fluff
In transforming folk metaphors into utilitarian attributes of an action hero, Disney exposes the emptiness of their product.1
"Once upon a time…or perhaps twice upon a time, for you may remember this story," begins the voiceover narration of Disney's Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. To its credit, the film opens by addressing the elephant in the castle: that we, as modern filmgoers, surely know this story well, through all its incarnations as old-fashioned fairy-tale romance and as insipid CG action-fantasy. But this sequel's attempt to deflect attention from its own tiresomeness only highlights the cynicism of a corporation that insists on franchising the reboots of its adaptations—on repeating the process of filtering the imaginative irrationality of folk tales through layers upon layers of calculation.
Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent, once one of the most deliciously evil villainesses in the Disney canon, who now—like Oz's Wicked Witch of the West—has been reduced to a mildly grumpy environmentalist. Disney has erected a mythos around the character to explain her malevolent deeds—or rather, to expose them as truly good. Channeling themes of historical revisionism and post-colonial white guilt, the Malefi-verse positions its title character as defender of the marshlands known as The Moors and its multifarious magical inhabitants, the Dark Fey, against the incursions and crimes of the late-Renaissance Europeans who live nearby. In the film, whose subtitle has virtually nothing to do with its plot, she's supplied with an army of fellow Feys primed to resist the destruction of their native lands by greedy humans. The deviousness suggested by Maleficent's occasional wry, sharp-toothed smiles and curling horns is hardly on display in her actions, which have thoroughly virtuous motivations.
Mistress of Evil posits a "true story" behind the official one recorded in the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, as rather than persecuting the princess subsequently known as Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent has adopted her and raised her. Aurora (Elle Fanning), though she's grown up among the Fey, has fallen in love with Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson). Throughout, we're given little evidence of their mutual attraction beyond the fact that they're both young humans, though Joachim Rønning's film does attempt to elicit our sympathies for their union with an early scene that stages a YouTube-ready surprise proposal. Though she harbors doubts about this union, Maleficent initially tries to play the good mother, reluctantly accepting the match. But then, at the engagement dinner, Phillip's mother, Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer), frames Maleficent for the sleeping curse that befalls King John (Robert Lindsay). Wounded in the subsequent confrontation, Maleficent flees and finds herself in an enclave of other vulture-winged, goat-horned Feys, led by Borra (Ed Skrein) and Conall (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
As played by Jolie, Maleficent is less a character than a pose. Rather than suggesting potency and confidence, the character's impassiveness conveys indifference, a disinterested neutrality that emanates from behind Jolie's green contacts and prosthetic cheekbones. Neither Maleficent's anger at the humans who framed her nor her muted concern for the oppressed Fey succeeds in selling the clichéd plotline concerning indigenous rebellion. As debate rages in the ranks of the outcast Fey regarding a prospective uprising against the murderous humans—the screenplay, of course, makes Conall's plea for a moderate response to creeping genocide more appealing than Borra's call for a revolution—Jolie's perpetually cool persona fails to anchor our feelings in the fate of the forest's denizens.
The rebellious Fey recruit Maleficent for the same reason that the humans fear her: the magical powers she possesses. Yet Maleficent's powers are ill-defined, the magical green tendrils that extend from her hands little more than a reference to visual effects devised for Disney's classic animated Sleeping Beauty from 1959. But aspects of the magic in Mistress of Evil still draw inspiration from its diluted source material: the Grimm brothers' fairy tale classic that the animated film was based on. In that story, the wise woman's curse not only puts the princess to sleep, but also freezes all life in the castle in place and envelops the structure in an impenetrable thorn bush. Many princes attempt and fail to forcibly enter the castle, hacking away at the bushes, but after a century, the brambles open up on their own, at last allowing a prince to enter the princess's chamber, so to speak.
In Mistress of Evil, we see the character that Disney has dubbed Maleficent deploy similar magical effects to much less metaphorical ends: She freezes a cat in the air mid-pounce to protect her were-raven familiar, Diaval (Sam Riley), and she conjures up spindly thorn branches to shield herself and Chonall from a volley of crossbow bolts. The filmmakers, no doubt, see such references to the original tale as forms of felicitous homage, but in transforming folk metaphors into utilitarian attributes of an action hero, Disney exposes the emptiness of their product. The film arranges a marriage between fairy-tale motifs and a CG-algorithm-driven plot that's as bland and arbitrary as the one it stages between its nondescript human couple, processing thorny folklore into smooth, consumable pop culture.
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sam Riley, Ed Skrein, Harris Dickinson, Robert Lindsay, Warwick Davis Director: Joachim Rønning Screenwriter: Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster, Linda Woolverton Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Running Time: 118 min Rating: PG Year: 2019
Review: Tell Me Who I Am Feels as One-Sided as the Curated Lie at Its Center
By focusing so narrowly on the Lewis brothers' relationship with their mother, the film inadvertently minimizes the scope of their abuse.2
When Alex Lewis was 18 years old, he was involved in a motorcycle crash that left him with a severe case of amnesia. When he awoke in a hospital following the accident, he couldn't recall where he lived or who his friends were. He didn't even know his name. As for the woman babbling and pacing around the foot of his bed, he was taken aback to learn that she was his mother. The only thing Alex did remember was that the young man standing before him, Marcus, was his identical twin, and that they had a special connection.
Upon returning to their family estate, Marcus began the lengthy process of reacquainting Alex with the particulars of his life, as well as re-teaching him the basics, like how to tie his shoes. And through it all, Marcus did his best to present a rosy picture of their parents, assuring Alex that their mother, Jill, was "cool" and that they took nice vacations to France when they were kids. It wasn't until after their parents' death that Alex began to suspect that their upbringing may not have been as pleasant as Marcus suggested. And after Alex discovered a cabinet full of sex toys in Jill's room and a photograph of him and his brother naked with their heads torn off, the horrible truth began to dawn on Alex: that he and his brother were sexually abused by their mother. Marcus would go on to confirm the abuse but refused to provide additional details, leaving his brother with questions that would haunt him for years.
Based on a book co-written by Alex and Marcus, Ed Perkins's Tell Me Who I Am tells the brothers' story with an Errol Morris-lite mix of expressionistic reenactments and interviews in which the subjects speak directly into the camera. Like the similarly themed Three Identical Strangers, the film parcels out disarming hints and shocking revelations at a steady clip, with a view toward maximizing the emotional impact of the material. It's undeniably effective and affecting, escalating toward a harrowing confrontation-cum-reconciliation between the two brothers in which Marcus finally reveals the full horror of what they endured as kids: that, in addition to being abused by their mother, they were subjected to sexual assaults at the hands of multiple abusers, in what essentially amounted to an elite pedophilia ring.
In its richer, more rewarding moments, Tell Me Who I Am hints at the complex relationship between memory and identity. Alex relies on photographs to fill in the blanks in his memory, and yet, these seemingly objective recordings of the past, curated for him by his brother, are as conspicuous for what they reveal as for what they don't. (As Alex muses at one point, "We take photos of weddings. You never take photos at funerals.") But for a film about the power of getting a full and accurate accounting of the truth, it's frustrating how little Tell Me Who I Am reckons with its own revelations. By focusing so narrowly on the Lewis brothers' relationship with their mother, the film inadvertently minimizes the sheer scope of the boys' abuse.
Tell Me Who I Am hints at the brothers having been caught up in a seemingly extensive sexual abuse ring, one involving aristocrats and at least one well-known artist, all of whom remain unnamed. It's a scandal reminiscent of recently exposed conspiracies of silence that surround wrongdoing, such as those involving Jeffrey Epstein, Jimmy Savile, and the Catholic Church. And while Perkins's film wants us to believe that the brothers' saga reaches a definitive conclusion when they tearfully embrace after Alex learns about what happened to him, it leaves the viewer with a host of unanswered questions. Who exactly was part of Jill's social circle? How extensive was Alex and Marcus's abuse? Were there other victims?
Even a cursory glance at news articles about the men and reviews of their book suggests how much Perkins has massaged the details of the Lewis brothers' lives to craft his sleek, emotionally punchy narrative. From watching Tell Me Who I Am, one wouldn't know that there was at least one other confirmed victim: Alex and Marcus's younger brother, whose existence the film doesn't even acknowledge. By forcing Alex and Marcus's story into such a rigidly linear narrative of redemption, the film ends up losing sight of its subjects altogether, reducing them to mere representations of its core theme: the brother who wants to learn about his past versus the brother who'd rather keep it buried.
That's why Tell Me Who I Am's attempt to end on a note of closure—"It's over finally," Alex says, as the camera tracks away from the house where he was abused—comes off as phony. Perhaps Alex feels that he finally understands who he really is, but the film leaves us with so many unanswered questions, it's hard not feel that the picture we've been given of these men is nearly as misleading and incomplete as the one Marcus provided to Alex all those years ago.
Director: Ed Perkins Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 85 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: The Gloss of Stuffed Is at Odds with Taxidermy's Inherent Boldness
Erin Derham's unadventurous aesthetic inoculates her from taxidermy's subversive spirit.1.5
Erin Derham's Stuffed opens with a montage of the various taxidermists she profiles throughout her documentary. This opening lays bare the film's argument in unmistakable terms: that taxidermy is an art form, closer to the work of Tim Burton than that of Norman Bates. But it also exposes the film's most unbearable flaw, as Derham supports her hagiographic argument by sewing together her case studies with a relentless, and relentlessly generic, score that speaks to her devotion to formula.
It's an unadventurous formula at odds with the documentary's attempts to establish taxidermy as a highly complex, anti-paradigmatic endeavor involving great amounts of scientific precision, as well as creative audacity and whimsical experimentation. Derham insists so much on taxidermists' labor being more than the mere production of replicas that her refusal to adopt a more playful aesthetic approach as she portrays the quirky imagination of taxidermists feels like equivocation. It's as if she approached the documentary's making with thick rubber gloves, thus inoculating herself from taxidermy's subversive spirit.
This may be the result of a certain courting, conscious or not, of digital streaming platforms through the mimicry of impersonally glossy production values. In any case, it leaves the viewer in a position akin to that of the fussy eater trying to pick unwelcomed ingredients out of their food. We want to savor the taxidermists' artistry, except the clichéd polish that envelops the film keeps getting in the way. It's an artistry that's bold by design, as the taxidermist utilizes dead matter not with the utilitarian goal of resurrecting it, but as raw material to sculpt something altogether new. If the Paris Museum of Hunting and Nature invited artists Sophie Calle and Serena Carone in 2018 to intervene in its collection of retired guns and taxidermic realism precisely because of the unusual juxtaposition of conceptual art and refurbished dead matter, moose in red gowns and all, Stuffed defines taxidermy itself as already marrying fanciful concepts with the illusion of beastly or avian resurrection.
Taxidermist Madison Rubin tells us she loves "seeing the insides and the anatomy of things" as she skins 11 ermines with the meticulousness of a sculptor, or a dollmaker. Others evoke the resurgence of taxidermy, which used to be particularly popular in the Victorian era, in these times of digital de-materialization. And some attest to the specificity of the medium—how no other art form can convey texture the way taxidermy does. Yet Derham seems more invested in glossing over the numerous chapters she's divided the film's narrative into than in exploring the depths of her story. Taxidermy and sustainability, taxidermy and climate change, the ethics of taxidermy, taxidermy and museums, taxidermy as a business, taxidermy in fashion—all of these get addressed too rapidly, sometimes in just a couple of minutes.
The rush feels particularly unfortunate when Derham turns her attention to rogue taxidermy, a Lynchean subgenre located at the intersection of dioramas, cabinets of curiosities, and surrealist art. Here, Calle and Carone's red ballgown-wearing stuffed roadkill would feel right at home—that is, delightfully out of place in the world. Instead, Stuffed quickly continues in its quest of a happy, peppy denouement to match the pristine porelessness of its sheen.
Director: Erin Derham Distributor: Music Box Films Running Time: 84 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Trick Will Treat You to Meatheaded, Commentary-Free Ultraviolence
Patrick Lussier's film is an incompetent, nihilistic exercise in gore and pseudophilosophy.0.0
In the 2000s, a film company called the Asylum flooded Blockbuster shelves with "mockbusters": cheaply produced, straight-to-DVD knockoffs of box-office dominators with titles such as Transmorphers, Ghosthunters, and Snakes on a Train. Patrick Lussier's horror mystery Trick feels like an Asylum spin on Todd Phillips's Joker, as both are about marginalized white guys who paint their faces, start killing people, and become kings of the incels. But where the licensed DC spinoff is an irresponsible and irredeemable pity party for a creep, this cheap lookalike is just an incompetent, nihilistic exercise in gore and pseudophilosophy, assembled crudely from horror and cop-movie clichés.
Trick opens with a handy list of the dictionary definitions of its title, hinting at the filmmakers' estimation of their target audience's intelligence. Trick is also the name of the film's villain, short for Patrick (Thom Niemann), an 18-year-old who, on Halloween night in 2015, attends a party with his classmates in their Hudson Valley town. During a game of spin the bottle—played with a knife—Trick is pressured to kiss another dude but instead starts stabbing and slashing everyone. (The subtext of repressed homosexuality is never alluded to again in the film.) Incapacitated and brought to urgent care, Patrick breaks free from his restraints and drops more bodies until police shoot him repeatedly in a hallway, knocking him out of a second-story window, neatly alluding simultaneously to both John Carpenter's original Halloween (the defenestration) and Rick Rosenthal's 1981 sequel (the hospital setting). Trick staggers to the river and vanishes, presumed dead.
But more killings follow, on or around Halloween, in towns downriver from the first. Detective Mike Denver, the only cop who believes Patrick survived, is played by Omar Epps, who credibly delivers preposterous dialogue like a pro. In the film's most ludicrous killing, Trick uses a crane to swing the tombstone of an F.B.I. agent (Vanessa Aspillaga) he murdered the year before through the windshield of a car in order to smash a wounded police officer (Dani Shay) sitting inside, a scene Denver sums up to a colleague: "He murdered your deputy with the gravestone of a fed I got killed. Who does that?" Then, after a beat, "What does that?"
Good question. To be scary, a horror villain needs either to be a credible menace or tap into a more primal social fear. But Trick is just implausible. He's resilient like Rasputin, more violent than a rabid animal. At a time when cellphones and social media are ubiquitous, no one ever got a photo of him, and his classmates can barely even describe his features, just that he was smart as fuck—like, smarter than the teachers. The film shows off his far-fetched cleverness when he kills a different F.B.I. agent (Robert G. McKay) with a Rube Goldbergian guillotine involving a sharp wire, a utility pole, and a bundle of cinderblocks. Its employment makes for Purge-level spectacle without the social commentary to back it up. The beheading is just meatheaded ultraviolence—as inane as any other aspect of Trick.
Cast: Omar Epps, Ellen Adair, Kristina Reyes, Tom Atkins, Max Miller, Thom Neimann, Jamie Kennedy Director: Patrick Lussier Screenwriter: Todd Farmer, Patrick Lussier Distributor: RLJE Films Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Robert Forster: Winning in the Late Innings
The Oscar-nominated actor brought a sense of honor and dignity to every role he played.
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive opens with a nighttime ride into oblivion. A limo drifts through the lightless void of the Hollywood Hills, red taillights burning in the blackness. An enigmatic woman, ebony hair and curvaceous red lips lending her the air of a tragic beauty, sits in the back by herself. The limo pulls over, and after the woman says, "We don't stop here," the driver aims a gun at her, but a gaggle of joyriding kids comes speeding around the curve and crashes into the vehicle. The woman climbs out of the wreckage stupefied and traipses into the hills, leaving behind the mangled metal and bodies.
Soon, a stoic detective arrives on the scene. He looks like a lawman, serious, a little sad, his face etched with the wrinkles of time. He examines the cars, offers a few terse observations, gazes out at the nocturnal city sprawling before him. It's Robert Forster's only scene in the film, and it's an indelible one, imbued with mystery and menace, an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Saying fewer than 20 words and appearing in only a handful of shots, he exudes an air of wisdom and weariness—that of an indolent man who's seen some shit and knows the horrors lurking ahead. In a film of dreamy logic and ineffaceable images, Forster's taciturn detective acts as the final glimpse of reality before we slip into a world of Hollywood hopes and fantasy.
Forster, who died of brain cancer at the age of 78 this past Friday, was a prolific actor who experienced a remarkable second act in his mid-50s after giving a deeply empathetic and vulnerable performance as a love-struck bail bondsman in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, a film populated by wounded characters leading unamazing lives, and who aspire to transcend mediocrity. "My career by then was dead," Forster told the AV Club's Will Harris in a 2011 interview. "No agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing…I could not believe that he [Tarantino] was talking about the Max Cherry role."
Like so many of Tarantino's films, Jackie Brown is replete with colorful, loquacious characters whose banter is clever, trenchant, and self-referential, but Forster's Max Cherry is reserved and crestfallen, a man who's settled into complacency and finds in Pam Grier's flight attendant an unexpected inspiration. It's one of American cinema's great unconsummated love stories. Forster is a subtle actor, playing Max as an Everyman who chases people for a living but never seems to find what he's looking for, and who willingly embroils himself in a dangerous situation because of love. He's smart, self-sufficient, a decent guy, and yet for Jackie Brown he's willing to risk his life, or whatever mundane existence he calls a life.
Forster was one of those great actors who appeared in far too few great films. His filmography is rife with bad films, though he was invariably a dependable presence in everything he did. He began his career promisingly, with a supporting role in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, and earned renown for his turn as an ambitious and ill-fated news cameraman in Haskell Wexler's incandescent Medium Cool. He played a private eye in 1930s Hollywood in the show Banyon (his role in Mulholland Drive almost feels like a brief homage to the short-lived series) and appeared in a slew of genre movies for the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. Of note is Lewis Teague's Alligator, in which a gargantuan reptile terrorizes a city, William Lustig's nihilistic grindhouse flick Vigilante, and a rare villainous turn in Delta Force, opposite the indefatigable Chuck Norris.
It wasn't until Jackie Brown and his subsequent Oscar nomination that Forster reentered the public consciousness. The way Tarantino exhumes old, often "trash" films when crafting his paeans to moving pictures, he also has a preternatural skill for resurrecting the careers of forgotten or faded actors. Tarantino fought for Forster to get the part. When news of Forster's death went public, the director said in a statement:
"Today the world is left with one less gentlemen. One less square shooter. One less good man. One less wonderful father. One less marvelous actor. I remember all the breakfasts we had at silver spoons. All the stories. All the kind words. All the support. Casting Robert Forster in Jackie Brown was one of the best choices I've ever made in my life. I will miss you dearly my old friend."
Forster appeared in a panoply of listless films and television programs throughout the 2000s (his appearance in Alexander Payne's The Descendants in 2011 being an exception) but became a household face again in 2018, when he took on the role of Sheriff Frank Truman, Harry S. Truman's brother, on the third season of Lynch's Twin Peaks. Whereas Michael Ontkean exuded a mercurial youthfulness on the original series, that of a warm-hearted, just man capable of fiery spontaneity, Forster plays the elder Sheriff Truman rather pensively, sagacious and serene. Which is to say, he acts with the wisdom accrued by experience.
Forster also appeared in a season five episode of Breaking Bad, as a vacuum store owner and "disappearer" named Ed who helps Bryan Cranston's Walt change identities. A stable presence amid the histrionic theatrics that defined the show's approach to acting, Forster gives an understated performance and a sense of the real-world left behind by Vince Gilligan's increasingly combustible melodrama. Forster reprised the part this year in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, the actor's final screen credit. In a film-stealing scene, Forster stands steadfast and stoical against Aaron Paul's desperate, bedraggled Jesse Pinkman, refusing to perform his disappearing service over a $1,800 discrepancy. The viewer is, of course, rooting for Jesse, yet one can't help but respect the conviction of Forster's unruffled professional. The actor brings a sense of honor and dignity to the role, as he did with every role. Forster was a safe, reliable presence, someone you trusted, unflustered, earnest, whether he was fighting monstrous alligators or swooning after air stewardesses.
Review: Cyrano, My Love Thinks Art Is Only Born of Romantic Passion
The film is imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls Shakespeare in Love.1.5
Alexis Michalik's Cyrano, My Love wears its fondness for Shakespeare in Love very much on its sleeve. Though it serves up nuggets of truth, its take on Edmond Rostand (Thomas Solivérès) and the turbulent circumstances surrounding his creation of Cyrano de Bergerac is an outlandish one, imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls John Madden's Oscar winner. And while Michalik positions Rostand as the story's triumphant artist, the French dramatist is often reduced to a skittish ninny—as opposed to the pompous ass that Joseph Fiennes's Shakespeare was positioned as—whose great art emanates not from the mind, but the cockles of the heart.
For a film so hellbent on the notion that Cyrano de Bergerac was inspired not only by actual events, but real emotions, there's surprisingly little effort made to articulate with any specificity the conflicted feelings behind Rostand's penning of what would become the most famous French play of all time. The initial catalyst for his play's central conceit occurs when he steps in to help an actor friend, Léonidas (Tom Leeb), struggling to find the words to woo a costume designer, Jeanne (Lucie Boujenah), on whom he has a crush. Rostand, in one of the film's many blatant nods to Cyrano de Bergerac, begins to feed his friend a barrage of romantic lines and relish the secrecy with which he can play out a love affair without disturbing his marriage with his endlessly patient and supportive wife, Rosemonde (Alice de Lencquesaing).
Yet, rather than teasing out the ample psychosexual baggage that should arise from the cognitive dissonance of Rostand writing daily love letters to Jeanne, his unknowing muse, while still professing, with complete honesty, that his only true love is his wife, Michalik pivots his focus to the swirling chaos of Cyrano de Bergerac's production. With Rostand's emotional conflict left fairly nebulous, Cyrano, My Love never quite gets to the root of the author's inspiration, leaving its familiar theatrical farce about the troubles of mounting a stage play grounded in neither genuine emotion nor any palpable stakes.
As the hurdles that Rostand and company face in staging Cyrano de Bergerac grow bigger and Rostand writes pages to be rehearsed before the ink dries, the film introduces a parade of quirky, ostentatious characters. From the historical, such as Sarah Bernhardt (Clémentine Célarié) and Anton Chekhov (Misha Leskot), to the imagined, such as a prostitute (Mathilde Seigner) who's foisted into the lead role of Roxane, each one is more thinly conceived than the next, with eccentricities dialed up to 11. The most egregious of these larger-than-life characterizations, however, is Monsieur Honoré (Jean-Michel Martial), the black café owner whose sole purpose is to repeatedly tap into his struggles as a minority as a means to galvanize the all-white cast and crew, who he then cheers on from the sidelines.
Cyrano, My Love's lone performative bright spot comes in the form of a surprisingly nimble turn by Olivier Gourmet, known primarily for his dour turns in many of the Dardenne brothers' films. Gourmet lends both humor and pathos to the play's famous but desperate lead actor, Constant Coquelin. But while Coquelin steals the spotlight in a number of scenes, Rostand remains little more than a perpetually anxiety-ridden artist who virtually stumbles into writing a masterpiece during a helter-skelter production. And with little care given to rendering the intense emotional tumult that spurred his artistic process, all the pandemonium of Cyrano, My Love proves to be much ado about nothing.
Cast: Thomas Solivérès, Olivier Gourmet, Mathilde Seigner, Tom Leeb, Lucie Boujenah, Alice de Lencquesaing, Clémentine Célarié, Igor Gotesman, Dominique Pinon, Simon Abkarian, Marc Andréoni, Jean-Michel Martial, Olivier Lejeune, Antoine Dulery, Alexis Michalik Director: Alexis Michalik Screenwriter: Alexis Michalik Distributor: Roadside Attractions Running Time: 112 min Rating: R Year: 2018
Review: In Greener Grass, White Picket Fences Cast Shadows Like Tendrils
In the film's world, there can be no real resistance, as the suburbs have already won.3
The opening credits of Greener Grass linger on a twitching, toothy smile covered in braces. Everyone in the film wears braces. Everyone drives a golf cart, too, and dresses in gentle pinks and blues. The lighting is soft and sun-drenched, an effect that's most pronounced during the film's soccer matches. In the opening of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, the camera creeps through a suburb's pleasant veneer to reveal the rot that festers beneath. But for Greener Grass co-directors, co-writers, and co-stars Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, the very surface is the thing that's so unsettling, a place populated by slithering, rictus-grinning meat puppets penned in by white picket fences and their own crippling need to conform.
The trouble, if you could call it that, begins when Jill (DeBoer) abruptly gifts Lisa (Luebbe) with her newborn baby as they watch their other children play soccer. This isn't, in the film's bizarre conception of suburbia, a particularly outrageous act. At worst, it's overly generous, like giving someone a gift more expensive than they're comfortable accepting; another neighbor, Kim Ann (Mary Holland), later laments that she wasn't given the child instead. The children in Greener Grass are essentially property, status symbols to reflect upon their owners in their pristine homes and yards, all of which feeds into an undercurrent of pervasive competition that nonetheless reinforces conformity and simply not rocking the boat.
Everything is seemingly interchangeable in Greener Grass. At a cookout, it takes a full conversation for Jill and Lisa to notice that they're smooching and hanging on the arms of the wrong husbands, Dennis (Neil Casey and Nick (Beck Bennett), respectively. And when Jill's young son, Julian (Julian Hilliard), inexplicably transforms into a dog, she's horrified, but Nick, the boy's father, seems pleased: Julian may no longer be able to take the advanced math class, but he's now a prodigy when it comes to playing catch in the backyard.
There isn't much of a traditional plot to the film, which plays more as a recurring series of sketches that subtly further Jill's downward spiral. DeBoer and Luebbe let their scenes linger long past the point of discomfort, both in the length of mannered dialogue exchanges and the amount of time they hold a shot without cutting; the camera gingerly pulls out or pushes in while characters perform odd actions in the background, like perpetually folding tighty-whities or fishing out a seemingly infinite supply of pocket change. It feels voyeuristic, and sometimes it is: In one scene, a hand appears to reveal that we're watching a POV shot, and in another, an off-screen voice begins breathing heavily and starts mock-repeating dialogue.
A schoolteacher, Miss Human (D'Arcy Carden), fixates on the deaths of American pioneers making their way to the West. In pursuit of "a better life," they lost things along the way, as the people of Greener Grass have lost themselves in their migration to the suburbs. The film is more unsettling for its lack of an ordinary plot structure where, say, Jill might break out of her suburban funk or get everything to explode with violence in a revolt against conformity. In the film's world, there can be no real resistance. Here, the burbs have already won, having already sent out the white picket fences like tendrils as far as the eye can see. There is no escape.
Cast: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe, Beck Bennett, Neil Casey, Mary Holland, D'Arcy Carden, Janicza Bravo, Dot-Marie Jones, Lauren Adams, Julian Hillard, Asher Miles Fallica Director: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe Screenwriter: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe Distributor: IFC Midnight Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: The Cave Pays Wrenching Tribute to the Doctors Saving Lives in Syria
Its depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after The Cave's doctors have left Ghouta.3
Feras Fayyad's documentary The Cave concludes with what almost seems like a non sequitur: After the staff at a Syrian underground hospital are finally forced to evacuate their war-torn city, the film fades to a low-angle shot of a submerged World War II bomber plane. Kjetil C. Astrup's camera tracks slowly past the moss-covered plane and an unexploded shell that lies nearby. Yes, it's a 1940s bomber, and The Cave is about Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, that's subjected to constant bombardment from contemporary warplanes, but what does this image have to do with the ongoing Syrian Civil War?
Given how instantly recognizable this bomber is, despite its present state of disrepair, speaks to how familiar we are with the massive political and moral sins of the 20th century. Fayyad's point would appear to be that these sins are being recapitulated today in the Middle East. It's not only the relentless bombing and devastating chemical weapon attacks captured in the film that evoke images of Europe during the West's greatest conflict, but also the treatment of people attempting to escape the horrors of the Syrian Civil War.
Over the image of the bomber plane, Fayyad places statistics about the tens of thousands of refugees who've drowned fleeing the conflict. As in the omnipresent WWII stories we repeatedly tell ourselves are warnings against ever letting such things happen again, thousands of people in the Middle East are trapped, starving, and suffocating, their homes and livelihoods destroyed by a global war being carried out over their heads.
By the time the submerged bomber appears on screen, those schooled in the history of occupied Europe (or who are simply avid tourists) may have already drawn another parallel, as The Cave, the name given to the underground hospital in Ghouta, evokes the Hospital in the Rock, the Budapest hospital built within a bunker under a hill in the leadup to WWII. From inside The Cave, where the camera keeps us for almost the entirety of the documentary, the sound of bombs is muffled, but their consequences are unavoidable. After every raid, the hospital's dimly lit underground hallway fills up with desperate families carting the wounded, weeping mothers shoving others out of the way to check on their dying sons, and orchestral music streaming on Dr. Salim's smartphone. The Mozart helps him focus and, he explains, replaces anesthetic, to which the hospital doesn't have access.
Heading the small staff that operates The Cave during the years-long siege of eastern Ghouta is pediatrician Dr. Amani, a physician so superhumanly dedicated that she'd come off as an idealized abstraction in a fiction film. Fayyad doesn't delve into her backstory, but Amani appears to come from a relatively privileged background: Her family, whom she speaks to regularly on the phone, seems to be in a safe place, and she's well-educated and a feminist, an inclination she expresses strategically to the camera and, when necessary, to defend her occupation against overtly misogynist patients. Despite her presumed access to avenues of flight, she's stayed behind to treat juvenile victims of bombing campaigns and malnourishment, even paying dangerous house visits to diagnose the children of women who can't leave their homes. Though brave and generous, she's no saintly paragon of modesty; on occasion, she rages against the regime and their allies, and the 30-year-old outwardly longs for a regular day-to-day life in which she might be permitted to wear mascara.
Fayyad saves its most graphic depiction of the consequences of the siege for the latter part of the documentary, as a chemical weapon attack perpetrated by the regime and its Russian allies sends dozens of choking people—many children—rushing to The Cave for help. Fayyad ratchets up the suspense with a booming score that crescendos as the staff gradually realizes they're handling patients who are choking rather than bleeding, and recognizes the smell of chlorine beginning to permeate the halls. Despite the real human suffering on screen, the whiff of rhetorical construction supplied by the score and the accelerating pace of the editing makes the scene feel a bit too much like a Hollywood trope, crafting suspense out of pain.
Perhaps, on the other hand, that moment of tension could be said to effectively convey some aspect of the events as the doctors felt it. Other excessively stylistic elements in The Cave, though, work against the urgency of its messaging. The handheld, intimate format of the bulk of the film is preceded by a still and distant opening shot of the Ghouta skyline, in which missiles are shown gliding into the mass of buildings and erupting into slowly moving dust and smoke. Ironically, this shot almost poeticizes the ongoing destruction of the city, its cool perspective conflicting sharply with the later close-ups of suffering bombing victims.
As the film goes on, the bombings draw closer to The Cave, part of which is actually destroyed by one raid. Samaher, the doctor put in charge of preparing the hospital's meager rations, cooks in fits and starts, running away from the stove whenever the sound of a plane rattles the nearby wall. Many of the male members of the team chide her for her skittish, sometimes nervously playful behavior, but candid shots pick up even the even-keeled Salim crying after a rare and brief Skype call with his family. The film's depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after Amani, Salim, and Samaher have left Ghouta.
Director: Feras Fayyad Distributor: National Geographic Documentary Films Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: The Addams Family Is an Ooky Show of Confused Messaging
Throughout, the film tirelessly hammers home the point of being true to yourself.1.5
The Addams family has always proudly embraced its otherness with a mix of confidence and indifference to the opinions of judgy neighbors. And Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan's animated The Addams Family is no different in that regard, setting up its fish-out-of-water scenario as soon as Morticia (Charlize Theron) and Gomez (Oscar Isaac) take off to New Jersey and settle into the Goth mansion where they'll raise their two children, Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard). All, of course, with the help of their loopy Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll) and loyal servant, Lurch (Conrad Vernon), whose rocking out on the mansion's giant pipe organ constitutes the majority of the film's score.
With the family's strict adherence to ceremonies steeped in their vaguely Eastern European roots, particularly the saber dance that Pugsley prepares for throughout the film, the metaphor for the immigrant experience writes itself. But The Addams Family's targets are ultimately not the seemingly resentful bigots who fear the Addamses' presence in their neighborhood, but an outmoded notion of suburban conformity that harks back to the 1950s. MAGA-esque indignation, which occasionally creeps in through a comment spewed from within an angry mob, is dwarfed by a distaste for, of all things, tract housing and HGTV-esque renovations.
In fact, the film's villain, Margaux Needler (Allison Janney), doesn't fear the Addamses for their cultural differences, but rather for the devaluing affect their eyesore of a house, perched on a hill, will have on the community of homes she's building nearby and planning to market on her hugely popular television show. While Margaux's town is called Assimilation, the lockstep conformity demanded here isn't one that requires the Addamses to reject any deeply held beliefs or cultural norms, merely to apply a quick slap of paint to their home and endure a wardrobe change or two. This leaves The Addams Family feeling pretty toothless, even for a family film, as it's unwilling to even pinpoint the true roots of the townspeople's fears. Its eventual forgiveness of their thinly veiled jingoism, passing the enraged residents off as otherwise friendly, well-meaning people who simply fell victim to the manipulations of the greedy Margaux, only further dilutes any potentially relevant commentary.
In a subplot involving Wednesday's venturing into Assimilation Middle School and befriending Margaux's daughter, Parker (Elsie Fisher), The Addams Family offers an intriguing twist on the idea of the Addamses as a perfect family. When Wednesday shows signs of accepting Parker's fashion advice, she finds in her family, particularly Morticia, the very same intolerance they're confronted with around town. But this nugget of wisdom is soon lost in the wind when Wednesday returns home to protect her family in their hour of need. Until the finale, the film tirelessly hammers home the importance of being true to yourself, yet its ultimate resolution, one of relatively uneasy compromise, confuses even that simple point. You be you, but eventually everyone wants to fit in one way or another, so maybe change just a bit?
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Nick Kroll, Snoop Dogg, Bette Midler, Allison Janney, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Elsie Fisher, Tituss Burgess Director: Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan Screenwriter: Matt Lieberman, Pamela Pettler Distributor: United Artists Releasing Running Time: 87 min Rating: PG Year: 2019 Buy: Soundtrack
Review: Catherine the Great Is an Alluring, If Shallow, Dip Into Russia's Golden Age
Review: The Addams Family Is an Ooky Show of Confused Messaging
Review: Destiny 2: Shadowkeep Is One Giant Leap for the Bungie Series
Blu-ray Review: Bill Forsyth's Local Hero on the Criterion Collection
Review: The Cave Pays Wrenching Tribute to the Doctors Saving Lives in Syria
Review: Ghostbusters: The Video Game Still Lacks Finesse in Remastered Form
Review: The Lightning Thief Struggles to Summon Epic-Scale Spectacle
Blu-ray Review: Lucille Carra's The Inland Sea on the Criterion Collection
Review: Zombieland: Double Tap Shrugs Toward the End of the World
The Very Queer In the Dream House Explodes Expectations of Memoir
- TV6 days ago
Review: Catherine the Great Is an Alluring, If Shallow, Dip Into Russia's Golden Age
- Film7 days ago
Review: The Addams Family Is an Ooky Show of Confused Messaging
- Games7 days ago
Review: Destiny 2: Shadowkeep Is One Giant Leap for the Bungie Series
- Video6 days ago
Blu-ray Review: Bill Forsyth's Local Hero on the Criterion Collection


text:
Stacey is a local artist who was born and raised in Modesto, CA. She took her first art classes at Grace M. Davis High School. After raising two children and pursuing a career she returned to her love of art through photography. Her photographs are of landscapes and flowers. Her interest in the beauty of nature led her to take painting classes outside of the area. After several years of research she is ready to share her self-taught painting techniques with others on their journey through art.
Back to All Events
Earlier Event: September 18Bay Meadows
Later Event: September 20Midnight Flowers


text:
- Font:
- +
- -
Federal Food and Drug Administration officials have admitted to U.S. senators that they should have taken stronger action to stop a Wisconsin firm from making and distributing medical products potentially tainted with life-threatening bacteria . The contaminated products have been blamed in lawsuits for serious infections and the death of a 2-year-old child.
Don't miss these Health stories
More women opting for preventive mastectomy - but should they be?
Rates of women who are opting for preventive mastectomies, such as Angeline Jolie, have increased by an estimated 50 percent in recent years, experts say. But many doctors are puzzled because the operation doesn't carry a 100 percent guarantee, it's major surgery -- and women have other options, from a once-a-day pill to careful monitoring.
- Larry Page's damaged vocal cords: Treatment comes with trade-offs
- Report questioning salt guidelines riles heart experts
- CDC: 2012 was deadliest year for West Nile in US
- What stresses moms most? Themselves, survey says
- More women opting for preventive mastectomy - but should they be?
Instead of simply holding a meeting last August with officials from H&P Industries Inc. and the Triad Group of Hartland, Wis., the FDA should have followed two worrisome inspections and the regulatory session with a formal warning letter, an enforcement action that requires prompt and thorough response, said Jeanne Ireland, the FDA's assistant commissioner for legislation.
Such a letter would have served to "reinforce FDA concerns about GMP [good manufacturing practice] deviations," Ireland said in a letter sent late Thursday to Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. The letter followed an "internal retrospective review" of the agency's oversight of the company, she wrote.
Instead, the Wisconsin firms, which are owned and operated by the same family, were allowed to pursue voluntary improvements in safety and sterilization procedures. As a result, the company continued to make and ship the potentially tainted products, records show.
The two senators had demanded explanations from the FDA earlier this year after residents of their states alleged they were sickened by bacterial contamination from alcohol prep wipes, swabs and other products recalled by the Wisconsin firm.
"The incidents relating to Triad wipes, as well as the recent recalls of children's medicine and deaths associated with heparin , remind us all too clearly that the supply chain for drugs and medical devices needs to be fixed," said Bennet. "The last thing families in Colorado and across the country should have to worry about is that the treatments they use may do them harm, or potentially worse."
Bennet and Alexander's attention followed a series of msnbc.com articles that reported that as early as July 2009 the FDA knew of problems with contamination and shoddy sterilization at the plants that made and distributed medical supplies and drugs widely used in hospitals, clinics and home care and sold by the nation's top drug and grocery store chains, including Walmart, Safeway, CVS and others.
In April, the FDA asked the U.S. Marshals to seize more than $6 million worth of H&P Industries Inc. products to prevent the firm from distributing products that may have been tainted with two dangerous bacteria, Bacillus cereus and Elizabethkingia meningoseptica, which can cause deadly infections.
Shortly before that, the FDA had asked the company to voluntarily cease all production and distribution. The firm halted operations on April 18, the FDA reported.
Special report: Tracking tainted wipes
Investigation finds lax oversight, rampant problems with contaminated wipes
Msnbc.com series reveals federal Food and Drug Administration officials knew about problems at Wisconsin plant for years before taking action to halt production, distribution.
- Smith & Nephew sues beleaguered wipe-maker
- Tainted wipes destroyed as firm moves forward
- Tainted wipe maker gets FDA nod toward reopening
- 11 deaths tied to alcohol prep wipes
- Investigation finds lax oversight, rampant problems with contaminated wipes
The moves follow massive recalls starting in January of all lots of alcohol prep products and, later, povidone iodine products because of potential contamination. The firm also recalled lubricating jelly commonly used in medical exams and procedures because samples were tainted.
Lawsuits in six states
A Colorado hospital was the first to confirm contamination in the alcohol pad products through laboratory cultures that showed two-thirds of Triad Group wipes tested were tainted with strains of Bacilllus cereus. A review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that doctors could not rule out that the pads had caused dangerous infections in children already being treated for cancer and other ailments.
At least half a dozen lawsuits in six states now allege that tainted Triad products led to serious infections caused by the bacteria Bacillus cereus. One lawsuit, filed in Houston, alleges that contaminated wipes led to the death of a 2-year-old boy, Harrison Kothari, in December, four months after FDA officials allowed H&P Industries to pursue voluntary compliance.
Four other suits, filed on behalf of patients with multiple sclerosis who used Triad wipes to clean their skin before necessary drug injections, claim that the wipes led to disfiguring and life-threatening infections. In Tennessee, one man filed suit after claiming he used Triad pads and then contracted a Bacillus cereus infection that led to open-heart surgery.
Recalls of affected products have extended to dozens of distributors of medical kits in several countries, including Canada. In the U.S., the recalls extended to some U.S. Veterans Health Administration medical centers and the agency's out-patient, mail-order pharmacy system. They've also affected widely distributed first-aid kits and veterinary kits used to treat horses and other animals.
A spokeswoman for H&P Industries and the Triad Group said the firms had not seen the FDA's letter to the senators and couldn't provide comment. The firms contend that no infections, injuries or death have been confirmed to have been caused by their products. They say they are working closely with FDA officials to resolve problems addressed in recent inspections and product seizures.
A spokeswoman for the FDA said the agency's review of the Wisconsin firms continues.
Follow health reporter JoNel Aleccia on Twitter @jonel_aleccia.
© 2013 msnbc.com Reprints


text: Dyer has the option of of sending out advertisements via direct mail. Advertisement is a process by which the consumers are made aware of the existence and benefits of a particular product of service. Direct mail advertisements are those which send advertising material via postal mail to the prospective consumer. The mail material may be advertising postcards, letters, mailers, circulars, samples, catalogs, CDs or other products. This is a form of direct marketing in Dyer, which facilitates a shorter connection arc between the producer and the consumer. Usually, this is refined into a tactic called targeted mailing, whereby the mail is only sent out after performing a database analysis, whereby the mail is only sent to those more likely to respond positively to it. This can also be used for political campaigns, as well as business-to-business mailings (B2B). One can maximize the effective reach of direct mailing by using the services of such a company in Dyer. The services offered includes creation of a mailing list, designing an advertisement that is interesting and likely to have a high recall value, the distribution of the advertisements via the postal system, and analyzing the feedback received. Direct mail advertisement is cheaper, more cost-effective, and can be used to supplement other methods of advertising followed by the parent company.


text:
Tue 26 Mar 2013
What A Complicated YearPosted by Michael under blogdom , books , cat-blogging , comics , gaming , life , media , NaNoWriMo , photography , politics , technology , the interwebs , writing
[1] Comment
Heavens. I can't believe I let this sit for 10 months. A quick run-down of the things that have happened since my last update:
- I won the 2012 Laine Cunningham Novel Award from The Blotter with my novel Perishables. It's three connected stories about various experiences of a zombie apocalypse. In one of them, a vampire is at a meeting of his homeowners' association when the dead rise. It's a little silly and a little funny and a little serious and it has terrible recipes in it.
- I published Perishables via Smashwords and Kindle and then decided to edit and publish the sequel, called Tooth & Nail. It's built on a heavily edited NaNoWriMo I did some years ago about the same vampire.
- I worked the partisan primary runoff election and my staff never mentioned the O'Keefe video. I'm sure they had seen it, but no one brought it up. I was intensely grateful.
- I worked the general election in November. Jesus H. Christ on a platinum surfboard, what a day. I've never been so busy. It was busier than the partisan primary but the county gave me lots of staff and we all survived. There were partisan observers from both major parties in my precinct but they were very kind to me and to one another. Again, I'm sure lots of those people had seen the video but no one said anything. I was at least ten times as grateful because I had plenty more to think about that day. I also passed the election without any major run-ins with campaigners though I did have a couple of really amusing conversations with them.
- I spent much of last autumn thinking about Tooth & Nail while I did a few promotional activities for Perishables: interviews on blogs and podcasts, for instance, and a few Google Hangouts with a group devoted to zombie fiction fandom. It was nice, after all the stupid bullshit of a year ago, to have a fictional world in which I could curl up and forget reality.
- I ran my first 5K fun-run last October and my friend who is 6'7″ and ex-Army Airborne had trouble keeping up with me.
- I spent November, December and January editing Tooth & Nail and dealing with my next-to-last class in the graduate certificate program I've been pursuing. I was kind of a stress ball.
- I've spent the spring semester dealing with my last class and I still am kind of a stress ball.
- I tried to play in two games of Call of Cthulhu at Dragon*Con last year, both of which were disastrous busts. I ended up running a one-shot for the Scourge of Nibelheim (aka "the Vampire group") a few weeks ago. I enjoyed it but it ran too long and I didn't get to include like half the stuff I came up with for it because I am just terrible at managing a game and remembering, you know, the poignant bits.
- I had Shadowrun pretty much ruined for me, and for all my friends, by one really terrible game of it at Dragon*Con. Way to stay classy, totally-separate-and-self-isolating-and-aggressively-dickishly-insular Shadowrun Dragon*Con gaming track.
- I ran my first timed 5K a few weeks ago and on a cloudy, rainy morning of running uphill at ~40F I clocked in at 25:13.6, 7th out of 46. I am extremely happy with that!
- I've learned to love Twitter. Seriously, I used to say it was the diametric opposite of what I wanted the Internet to grow up to be but it is pretty great.
- I gave a five-minute lightning talk at the opensource.com #cc10 get-together celebrating 10 years of Creative Commons:
- I'm approximately two years behind on reading comics. I plan to catch up as soon as I finish this graduate certificate program next month.
- I've been asked to contribute a short story to an anthology built around the theme of "invasion" and am currently mulling some ideas. I am super-excited!
- I attended my twenty year high school reunion and survived it and even reconnected majorly with some really wonderful people I knew back in the day. Facebook and life in general have gotten a lot more entertaining as a result.
- I've joined a queer softball league.
- I'm going to be a guest at ConCarolinas in Charlotte the weekend of 5/31 through 6/2!
- I want the word "marriage" and I want to win the Supreme Court cases, absolutely, but I am also a little bit afraid that the queer communities will be divided into "normals" and "freaks" if we win and that the Right will use our victory as an opportunity to draw a line between those of us who are already primed for idle conformity: relatively moneyed, adhering more closely to rigid gender roles and identities, white, middle-class, "safe". It will be vital, if we win this, to remember that it still must be okay to be different. Difference is what has given us the culture we create and celebrate together and difference has given us the advantages we are afforded by outsider status in the larger culture around us. We must continue to value people who have different families, different identities, different relationships (or none at all), different goals, different priorities and different beliefs. We do not all have to settle down into quiet, monogamous, dom/sub, top/bottom dichotomies defined by doggy day care and dinner parties. We have to stay freaks somehow.
- My house is ruled by my cats and sometimes I find that really frustrating but mostly I am thrilled beyond measure at their benevolent dictatorship.
- I've been watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 while at the gym and it is really fucking good.
- Last year I skipped NaNoWriMo – what would have been my tenth – to focus on editing Tooth & Nail. This summer I'm doing My Own Private NaNo to work on the first draft of a science fiction novel, the setting for which was developed in a two-session game of Microscope played by Scourge of Nibelheim.
- We tried Fiasco this year and it is so. Freaking. Fun.
- I bought a new camera – an Olympus – and I loooooove it.
Is that everything? I think that's everything. A year of blogging in a single post. Heavens, indeed.
One response to "What A Complicated Year"
There was Nibelheim AND I MISSED IT?


text:
Xspond Incorporated necesitaba un nuevo diseño de página web y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 37 diseños de 14 diseñadores freelance.
We have developed several web based tools to provide enterprise level marketing services to small and medium businesses. Tools include a highly customizable web to print system, automated marketing campaigns and profiling, and more. Services include marketing consultation, data management, etc.
This website needs to briefly touch on the products that we have to offer, as well as detail the services that we provide. It will also need to provide a way for users to access white papers, case studies, and other similar information.
The design should be simple and clean yet still sophisticated. Since our target audience is upper management of small and medium businesses, we need to make sure that users visiting our site see us as a professional and affordable (not cheap) company.
Our brand colors (matching our logo) for xspond are as follows: Blue (PMS 282), green (PMS 362), black, and white. We are open to the use of any complementary colors; however, we would like to see our colors tastefully incorporated into the design as well.
Please Note: If you go to our current site, we are in the process of rebranding all of products and services, so do NOT use the current design/styles or logos/branding. The only logo that you need to worry about is the xspond logo, which is attached
Primarily marketing decision makers, such as VPs of marketing, General Managers, Principals, and the like.
- See attached site map
Layout Consideration:
- Need to include the phone number somewhere so that it is easily visible without being overwhelming on every page
- Content
We would like to incorporate buttons or quicklinks to get users into the site and into our products as quickly as possible. (In this regard we really like how http://www.cobalt.com has handled this on their homepage) Also, we would like to integrate our twitter feed of updates on the site homepage containing relevant links, tweets, etcetera. We think that this would also be a good place to tease our most recent blog entry, or perhaps display the last 3 or 4 blog entry titles. In addition, we would like to feature a recent client/case study and/or product (or product update).
Please use your professional judgement as to which items to include/exclude if it seems that the homepage becomes too busy.
- Interior Page
We would like a page that fits in the layout as dictated by the homepage and allows for some simple content, a page banner, and perhaps screenshots or pull quotes. Use your discretion as to what looks best on this page.
Sites for Reference:
Feel free to message me at any time if you have any questions about the contest


text:
For Google's Self-Driving Cars, It's a Bumpy Trip
Vehicles to Comply With California's Steering-Wheel, Pedal Rules; Liability Questions Loom
Google Inc. caused a stir earlier this year when it unveiled a self-driving car without a steering wheel, or pedals for braking and accelerating.
But Google's goal of an autonomous car is bumping up against new testing rules from California's Department of Motor Vehicles.
The rules, which take effect on Sept. 16, require a driver to be able...


text:
bird on his head - Original Painting - 8x10
sold out
bird on his head - Original Painting - 8x10
8x10 Original Painting
Acrylic and oil-based paint pen on thick, sturdy cardboard.
This is an original, signed work of art. It is unframed.
The artwork will be packaged in a cello sleeve and shipped flat.
Framing: I recommend a simple, modern black frame with no glass. That'll look really sharp.
Add To Cart