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BriskBard Review
BriskBard Review
It is impossible to imagine the 21st century without the Internet; it is one of the main ways to get new info, watch movies, listen to music, send and receive mail messages, and so on. Special applications called browsers give us the opportunity to browse the World Wide Web.
There are a lot of advanced browsers on the software market now, for example, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc., which allow you to perform plenty of actions but, unfortunately, they lack some important features and as a rule you need to install and use other third-party applications, for example, email clients, FTP clients, media players, and so on.
But now you can forget all those disadvantages thanks to the most powerful and advanced web browser BriskBard which will give you everything not for safe browsing the Internet but also tons of other useful features and tools.
With the help of this browser you will be able to send and het mail messages, upload files by using an inbuilt FTP applications, watch movies, listen to music, chat with your friends, and much more. BriskBard offers ten powerful applications which are conveniently combined in one browser. BriskBard is a guide to the amazing Internet world and it will make this world more effective, faster and safer.
Download and Installation- the latest version of the Internet browser BriskBard is available for download on the official website; it is just about 5 MB in size. The trial version is fully functional without any limitations for 30 days.
Currently the program is offered only in two languages- English and Spanish but I hope, the developer will add more language support in the near future. It should be said that the program includes a special language manager; so if you want to translate the program into your own languages, you can easily to da that with the help of it.
The installation procedure of the program is very fast and easy. All you need to do is to select the installation language (there are only two options at your disposal- English and Spanish), accept the license agreement and finally choose the installation folder.
The Interface of the Program- The main user interface of the program is very simply designed and thanks to that fact you can conveniently and quickly browse the Internet pages, navigate between tabs, add bookmarks, and so on. After opening the program, you will find ten buttons which allows you to perform one of ten features offered by the program, for example, open a new Internet page or mail client, media player or FTP server, and so on.
BriskBard like other Internet browsers has got tabs (which are located at the top of the program). Thanks to these tabs, you can easily open a new page or navigate between pages quickly and effectively. Of course, you have the possibility to open and view several Internet pages at the same time.
Below the tabs there is an address bar for entering the Internet URL. This bar also allows you to bookmark the internet page or subscribe to RSS feed with just clicking on the special figures on the right end. On the upper left side, you will find some buttons which allow you, for example, reload the page or return to the initial page, and so on. Here you can also configure some features of the program, for example, security and privacy settings, certificates and connections, and some others.
The Main Features of the Program- BriskBard is not just an Internet browser for searching and viewing web pages; it is much more. BriskBard is packed up with plenty of features which allow you to perform a lot of different actions without using third-party applications.
The program provides you with ten useful tools. With the help of these tools you have the possibility to view your mails, send file online, watch movies, chat with your friends, and so on. All these features are accessible through the main page or a special drop-down button on the upper left corner of the program.
Browser Tab- BriskBard allows you to browse the web quickly and safely, just open a new tab and enter an URL address. That is all. And, of course, not only browse and view Internet pages but also perform different actions. With the help of the program, you have the possibility to copy a link to the clipboard, search for words, print the page or save it as an image, and so on. In addition, you can also view and save the page source.
Thanks to the advanced Bookmark Manager, you can bookmark any page and edit it, for example, its URL, name, etc. The program also allows you to import bookmarks into the browser XBEL or HTML file or from Internet Explorer favorites.
Email Tab- thanks to the program, you do not need to install any third-party email client because BriskBard provides you with very convenient email application which allows you to view, read and sent mails. All you need to do is to perform some easy configuration steps before using it, namely, firstly, in the first step, you have to enter some general info (i.e. name, email address and password), secondly, specify the settings of incoming messages (i.e. email protocol, server, and so on), thirdly, outgoing messages settings.
The email client provided by the program is very convenient and easy to use. You can perform practically all operations with your mails, i.e. get and send mails, import messages and contacts from other mail clients, manage mail contacts, write professional mails, and so on.
The program has a got a very convenient mail editor for composing mails. You have the possibility to manage and control font, alignment, add signatures and attachments, and so on.
Newsgroups Reader Tab- this very useful feature of the program allows you to access usenet newsgroups servers and subscribe to your favourite groups and download all their contents. The program provides you with a lot of servers to search for, but you can also to specify your own ones by entering their URLs.
Aggregator Tab- The program offers a very convenient and easy way to read and subscribe to any webpage news feeds. All you need to do is add this RSS to the program and view and read this news directly in the program.
Media Player Tab- You like listening to your favourite songs while browsing the Internet? If it is so you, you can take full advantage of this program's feature. It allows you to play media files without using any other media players.
The program supports a wide range of different media formats such as MP3, AVI, and so on. You have the possibility to play files from your local computer or from the Internet simply specifying their URLs. In addition, BriskBard provides access to various LAV filters to download and install which greatly increase Media player functionality.
File Transfer Tab- BriskBard includes a special tool which allows you to upload files to the Internet using FTP servers. All you need to do is to select files for uploading and specify some FTP server details, i.e. server name, your user name and password, and so on. This tool is very conveniently designed and even novice and unexperienced users can take full advantage of it and easily upload files online.
Instant Messaging tab- if you like chatting with friends, this tool is just for you. It allows you to connect to IRC servers (for example, Freenode, Rizon, and so on) and chat with them.
In addition, you have the possibility to open Telnet client, get domain's whois and name resolution information.
System Requirements
Windows XP- Windows 10
Any CPU- Pentium 3 or better
20 MB of free hard disk space.
Conclusion- Internet browsers offer the most convenient and fast way to access the Internet and enjoy it. That is why, it is very important to have a good and reliable browser which will give you everything not only for safe and comfortable browsing but also a lot of advanced tools. BriskBard is not just a simple browser; it is much more. BriskBard is equipped with a lot of additional tools which allow you to perform plenty of other actions.
BriskBard is a new all-in-one browser which greatly facilitates your online activity by providing you with common and necessary to tools for Internet browsing. It practically includes ten reliable tools and several developer tools. With the help of these tools you can perform plenty of operations without installing other third-party applications. For example, you have the possibility, to get and send emails, upload files to the web, subscribe to RSS feeds, chat with friends, and so on.
Truly saying, I like the program very much and I think that it will become better and better over time. I think it is worth trying it.
1. Advanced Internet browser with a lot of additional tools and features
2. Very convenient and user-friendly interface
Only two interface languages are available.


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I've been using a bullet journal for the past few years. A bullet journal helps my mental health as it allows me to be more organised, which combats my anxiety. But it also provides me with a creative outlet. (I don't think of myself as very creative but my bullet journal lets that small side of me out).
However, over the past few months, I haven't been so good at using my bullet journal. And I have really noticed a difference. I'm less organised, easily distracted and I've been falling into bad habits. So I decided to concentrate on setting up my bullet journal for May and I've committed to using it again.
I thought I would share with you my monthly set up for May. You can read all about my basic monthly bullet journal spread here. But I have added some extra pages to May's set-up. These pages are designed to help my mental health and to inspire me in day-to-day life.
My Monthly Bullet Journal Spread Set-up
Front Pages
This is where I can show my creative side. It is also where I record my to-do list for the month and the month's birthdays.
Monthly Future Log
As you can see in my basic monthly bullet journal layout, my future log ( a place to record events for that month) is laid out in a calendar format. That is how my brain works best. However, we already have a lot planned for June and I also wanted to have these dates written out in front of me. So I chose to record this in the traditional bullet journal future log format, as created by Ryder Carroll.
Bullet Journal Monthly Habit, Mood And Sleep Tracker
Monthly Habit Tracker
I've been failing to complete my habit trackers over the past month or so and I have really noticed how this has affected me. I've been disorganised, I've procrastinated more and I've achieved less. I've also fallen into bad habits such as eating food that isn't good for me, not exercising as often as I should and not cleaning the house at the times of day when I know I need to keep active.
Monthly Mood Tracker
My mood tracker also hasn't been completed recently. Which means I have failed to see patterns in my moods and I've sometimes felt that a bad or low mood has lasted longer than it has in reality.
Monthly Sleep Tracker
I also decided to add a sleep tracker, as I've recently been having some later nights and not getting as much sleep as I know I need. If I don't nip this in the bud, then it could escalate and I could start going to bed later and later. So I need to start recording the hours I sleep. This will give me physical proof of whether I am or am not getting the right amount of sleep.
Gratitude List – Finding Happiness And Chasing Rainbows
My gratitude log is another important page in my monthly bullet journal spread but one that I haven't completed for a while. And I miss recording the moments, memories and things that have brought me joy. Plus I have missed being able to write my Finding Happiness and Chasing Rainbows posts which come from this list.
Weight And Measurements Tracker
I'm trying to be healthier at the moment and I hope that this will help me lose a little bit of weight. As a result, I want to record my weight and body measurements. So I've created a new spread in my bullet journal to keep a note of these. This just goes to show how you can really make a bullet journal work for you. There are no rules. You can include as little or as much as you like. And if you want to note something down, then just create a page in your bullet journal.
Blog Planner, Blog Statistics And Blog Goals
I haven't really been filling in my blog planner recently and my blogging has felt disorganised. So I'm going to make a concerted effort to fill this in this month and to follow my blog planner. To spur me on I've also decided to record last month's blog statistics and to write myself a few goals that I am going to try to stick to.
And that is it! That is how my bullet journal is laid out for May. I've mostly kept to my basic layout but I've added a few new pages. So we'll see if they help me or not.
I hope you've enjoyed this tour around my bullet journal. Do let me know if you would like to see more posts about using a bullet journal. Do you use a bullet journal? I would love to know in the comments.

subset: commoncrawl


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Daily Paintings-Affordable, Original, Small Works of Life- Still life-Landscape-Mixed Media- Abstract......................................"All art is quite useless; so is a flower" Oscar Wilde
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
This time of year, we all get tired of cold and dreary days and look forward to the first signs of spring. I hope this little painting will put you in a "spring frame of mind". It won't be long...I can feel it!
Purchase here
Only a few more days to enter the drawing for one of my paintings at Art by Karena. Check out her blog for details in this great give-away.
14 comments:
- LindaHunt said...
This is a lovely painting, Carol! It does make me think Spring!!!
- March 8, 2011 at 5:56 PM
- Unknown said...
I am daffy for daffodils! Thanks for brightening up my day!
- March 8, 2011 at 6:14 PM
- Karena said...
Oh I love this Carol...... it is cold and rainy here today!! Ready for the bulbs to pop up!!
Art by Karena
- March 8, 2011 at 6:17 PM
- Shelley Smart said...
Aw-w-w-w. Love this! Love daffys! It so says Spring! It's beautiful!
- March 8, 2011 at 8:06 PM
Carol, a lovely bright and cheery piece!
- March 8, 2011 at 9:16 PM
- martinealison said...
Très jolie nuance de couleurs, qui fichtre, fera un pied de nez à Dame hiver pour accueillir Demoiselle printemps.
Gros bisous
- March 8, 2011 at 11:35 PM
- Jane said...
Gorgeous Carol, really popping out of the frame! And if this isn't "springly...
- March 9, 2011 at 1:33 AM
- Carol Blackburn said...
Very nice, Carol. We are expecting more rain today and saturday so hopefully it will melt the last of this snow and reveal my flower bed so the sun can nourish those bulbs.
- March 9, 2011 at 8:17 AM
- Ricki Treleaven said...
Carol, I love this one! :D
Ricki Jill
- March 9, 2011 at 9:18 AM
My favorite flower.
- March 9, 2011 at 10:40 AM
- Tina L. Hook said...
Gosh, I love that. I am very drawn to Orange these days.
I will be settling into a new house in September so keep in touch with me. I will be looking for artwork.
- March 9, 2011 at 12:58 PM
- Diana Marshall said...
Beautiful sign of spring, lovely.
- March 9, 2011 at 1:39 PM
- Catherine Jeffrey said...
I hear its pretty warm where you are! This flower certainly reminds me of spring. Love the way the white stands out against the dark greens...and the orange centre just pops. (I'll be thinking of spring as I trudge throught the slush and snow with the dog this morning :-)
- March 10, 2011 at 9:05 AM
- Donna MacDonald AFCA said...
Great painting Carol! I just bought some daffodils yesterday and patiently waiting for them to open so I can paint them too! Can't wait for Spring.....
- March 22, 2011 at 10:09 AM


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Tick-Tockality: (i.e. tick-tock momentum) The sense of dread created in a horror film through use of prolonged real time (or slower) narrative pacing, ideally beginning around the magic hour (twilight). First employed in horror by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton in The Leopard Man, and perfected in the early films of John Carpenter, the ideal tick-tocka momentum begins anywhere from 24 hours before to the late afternoon of, the climactic anticipatory night, i.e. Halloween or Carrie's Prom. The desired effect is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming at the onset of the darkness, imbuing even innocuous details with uncanny unease, ideally ending at dawn, ala Scream.
Part of the success of this strategy may stem from audience familiarity with tricks of Deleuzian 'movement-image', as seen in sprawling historical epics, wherein whole decades fly by between busy but static tableaux of eventful key moments (coming-out parties, weddings, dances, battlefronts, hospitals, front porches) such as seen in Gone with the Wind. Slower movement within a single 'ordinary' scene --where nothing special seems to be happening (such as Rhett's daughter's riding her pony around on the track while her parents watch) denote imminent tragedy, i.e. there's only one reason they'd show a close-up of Ruby Keeler's ankles walking down the dressing room stairs, and show the whole stairs in advance in a 30s show biz melodrama. Tick-tock momentum subverts our familiarity with this tactic: just keep showing foreshadowing details like the ankle, and keep going from there, each slow step, building the suspense with a progression of possible foreshadowing, yoked to our ancient anxiety about the coming of the night, `the sweet beauty a good cinematographer can get at magic hour making the sky blaze pumpkin orange.Maybe you need to have been an impressionable, easily-spooked kid in the latter part of the drive-in's heyday (the 70s), with its comfy old monster UHF afternoons punctuated by new, genuinely threatening monster R-rated TV spots, to resonate to the setting sun's weird power; the presence of fellow kids and family somehow only adding to the sense of vulnerability. Parents opening their coolers of beer and lawn chairs as the sun's last rays streaked away overhead, like a last chance to exit the ride over the cliff; the unsurmountable escape wall of the white screen looming overhead over the tattered swing set; the booming dim echo of the speaker boxes bouncing against the car windows--who knows what was going on in those other cars once the sun finally set? A child's imagination can be more real, more vivid, than an adult's perceptions of reality. Without video tapes to confirm or rewind, whatever we saw onscreen became the stuff of future summarizing; we would 'tell' movies to each other, especially if we were too young to see it ourselves, embellished a thousandfold as recess gossip. The special effects needed only suggest things for our rampant imagination to fill in the blank spots, which then assumed, through the telephone game-variations of memory, in relaying their plots and gore to fellow kids at recess, the stuff of shattering, true myth. The level of campfire terror we conjured up in each other was so intense it took me until I started drinking and smoking pot at age 17 to finally escape its squirrely, paranoid side effects.
|Ruscha gets it
I mention this because prior to directing and writing Phantasm (1979), Don Coscarelli was shooting kid movies, like Kenny and Co, in which he showed a real knack for connecting with 70s-style sci-fi fan reprobates -- the ones like me-- who would have punched you in the face rather than admit they cried at Benji (1974).
Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. So Coscarelli crafted his own dark fairytale about a tall strange visitor who comes to town and steals souls, setting it in a mortuary instead of a carnival and making the central relationship not between a couple of teens, all romantic and ridden with the usual sexual anxiety, but fraternal, an 'older brother' cinema, the relation between a kid, his cool older brother, and his cool friend, Reggie, an ice cream truck driver (any kid's ideal friend for his older brother). We hated to see kids in movies (too close to home!) but scrappy kids who could throw down in a fight, with his main worry being that his older brother--his sole caregiver--is going to drive off and leave him all alone in their suburban 70s shag carpet home.
Rated R as Phantasm may be, this is clearly a kid's nightmare: macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl, but with more genuine menace and garage lab gore than either. It's Over the Edge meets It Came from Outer Space. As boys learning about it from our own older brothers and babysitters, the film became the ultimate myth-a film about us but denied us until we were old enough, or until it showed up on TV, its fangs plucked for prime time. This time the kid isn't a sap; he's a plucky kid who is good with cars! He's afraid of his own shadow, but still brave enough to venture into a mortuary at night; he rides a motorbike! He's crafty enough to tape a hunting knife to his ankle (and smart enough to use a lighter to keep a coffin lid propped up just high enough see out of without drawing attention (and cool enough to have a lighter in the first place!) and with the chutzpah to run, hide, and fire shotguns through the sun roof of his older brother's speeding Barracuda. Plus the neighborhood There's an old lady fortune teller neighbor, and great moments like when Reggie drops by with his guitar for a quick porch jam.
The weird secrets of the other dimension and dead soul enslavement make a nice contrast to these cool moments, providing a fine metaphor for not just where parents go when they die but where they work, the void they disappear into for most of the week, before they come back beaten and bowed low, or even more immediate where older brothers go when they're off doing cool adult shit - and following the little brother as he follows the older one is a completely new-to-horror then or now kind of dread. Just as we dread the dark secrets our older brother is up to, yet crave to be let in on them, we fear having to get a job out there in that mysterious void, and sense in both a fear of the elderly and the slow but inexorable escalator and the fear we'll get sucked under those jagged teeth at the top (or bottom).
In the Spielbergian make-over of children's horror films in the 80s, kids lost that edge of looming responsibility, quick-thinking and readiness for violence (as opposed to being passive little bully magnets) but in the 70s we knew we weren't safe, and felt exposed to the dangers around us, but it made us sharp. All the joys of life were outdoors, ideally at night. We didn't have cell phones. When we had to sleep we clutched toy guns the way priests clutch crosses in the thick of an exorcism. Today's parents think any kid with a gun is going to cause a Columbine, anything too scary will give them nightmares. So fucking what if they do?! They should have nightmares! Kids are already scared, if they have any brains. Shit is scary out there and you're too little to do much about it except run; even old women are stronger than you in a fight. Spooky movies just remind them to stay on their guard, to not let the sameness of modern life trick them into slackening their grip on the door knob. Let the adults take the facade of death, the mausoleums and funerals, at face value, as kids we saw deeper, we noticed the little details didn't add up, and we knew nothing was ever as secure as the funeral director's measured tones tried to make it.
Halloween (1978), which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature in '79, may have launched a thousand slasher film imitators, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on this 'seeing deeper' tick-tock momentum aspect. They got the topography right--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the 'deeper' vision --the inexorable pacing Carpenter mastered, i.e. the deeper perception of being fully in the moment, and playing eerie synthesizer music during a slowed down suburban idyll until the unease and anxiety of nightmares formed out of thin air.
In its fuzzy horror glory, Coscarelli's Phantasm's mythos is totally unified even its freeform reversals and misdirections. Once can connect it to Lovecraft as well more recent 'nonfiction' writers like David Icke, Nigel Kerner, who theorize that after death our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light, and then used as fuel for UFOs, or ground up for experiments and recycling. Our souls could be picked over like the bloodless cattle mutilations. The main Phantasm bad guy (Angus Scrimm) known only as The Tall Man turns souls into weapons (the spiked, silver balls) and stores the crushed down bodies into kegs for easy shipping home to his dimension through a tuning fork gateway --the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, 'acoustic levitation' which ascribes the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states.
A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people
"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."
"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs or not; perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted), coupled to some direct film references, which to his credit Coscarelli doesn't deign to hide: the tall man's evil minions look like jawas (Star Wars was only three years old); the way darkness laps at the edges of the screen and the tick-tock score echo Halloween (the year before); an old lady fortune teller works one of those hand-in-the-box Dune fear-control tests on Mike. What Coscarelli does achieve all on his own is the way he removes any sense of inequality between waking and dreaming life: Mike's sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of a cheap scare for no reason like they do in American Werewolf in London or Cat People (1982), for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more 'true.' He's not just sticking this references in there to try and cover all his bases and provide weird trailer moments; Coscarelli's mythos is more paranormally cohesive than any of his predecessors' and more brave. They don't dare answer the big, final curtain question, the one children ask and adults never answer.
Coscarelli answers it, and he goes all the way.
Now, you don't need all that parapsychological theorizing to dig the mortal coil dread going on in the Phantasm series, in fact you can just dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2, a decision probably made due to Baldwin's non-movie star face and the bigger budget allowing the hiring of James Le Gros in the role), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but within the narrative span only a few weeks or months. These actors don't ever appear in much else, so it's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces and body language. Myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit hell cops. He looks beaten but still fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after kills foes of various sizes. Quips were stale by the later films, but Reggie didn't get that memo, but that's part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo.
|Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV
Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they, and part of that may come from our ancient use of male initiation ceremonies to demarcate the line between manhood and boyziness: girls don't need initiation since nature has menstruation to traumatize them, forever; but male initiatory tribal ceremonies understood the psychological need for such trauma in boys as well. It only survives today in the form of, alas, fraternity or military hazing, but those are rites initiated by choice; a boy in a tribal society has no choice--it's inescapable, and that dread's allowed to build and build. We then lost that sense of inescapable dread/initiation until the 70s when it was gratified by our dread of the gore in our first R-rated movie. We who trembled at the coming drive-in night were unique in that respect: R-rated films didn't even exist when our parents were kids, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it suddenly possible for our younger siblings to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. Any fear of R-rated gore never has any time to generate.
But in the 70s, just knowing hard stuff was only out there, at theaters that we couldn't get into, launched an electirc gravitic dread in our spines, like I get now only when looking straight down while leaning over a tall building without a handrail.
|The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind
But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching too many bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing, and from a kind of negative misogynistic osmosis, as well as a crushing disappointment that no amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with what we had imagined. And yet we had already seen too much and our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night. It had really begun, probably with renting A Clockwork Orange, and seeing the violent videos Alex sees, all raw and shocking yet dull and flat, they seemed like, real, as if a fake movie within a fictional film somehow created a double negative, and so these films played real. (the way they do with the snuff films found in the film, Vacancy [4])
So yeah, I attribute the rise in overprotective parental hysteria and nanny state fascism to the arrival of video rentals. We gained overexposure to imaginary danger at the expense of exposure to actual physical kind; in the process we also lost the rite of initiation. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene in a movie you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so there's nothing to have to use courage to overcome. It's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis. You might be building a tolerance for violent images, but that's not going to help with the initiation need that's stifling your soul; there's no ceremony to mark your courage. The first one I saw? Outland (1981), at 14. We heard guys exploded from exposure to space sans suits, and that's where the dread came from. It was something to boast of.
Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but even the shockmeisters knew that engendering the fear of what was coming was more important than the thing itself. Generating fear helps us realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place. Facing it, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see Dazed and Confused.) Running away from the fear stifles you and earns contempt. Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).
|This. This you can trust.
To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity, back before VHS and Betamax and cable. Return to the time horror movies created far more dread with a single modulating synthesizer than any John Williams-ish overthought orchestra, when R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, describing events from films they'd seen or heard about, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing on what they heard as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he hears the scraping of the branches on the window and tries to sleep; it comes to us as a half-dream hybrid myth, already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, it's fiction for the boy seeking initiation into guns, beer, muscle car engines, and beer--the lore of the cool American older brother. It's fiction, yet it still feels truer than anything contemporary adulthood has to offer.
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, movies I was sure were made up.
4. See: 2004: Collateral Torture (Bright Lights After Dark)


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County Commission to consider wind-energy tower regulations
Credit: By Elvyn Jones | Lawrence Journal-World | April 5, 2016 | www2.ljworld.com ~~
The Douglas County Commission on Wednesday will consider regulations for wind generation towers and systems.
Consideration of the text amendment to county zoning regulations will include a public hearing at the meeting, which starts at 4 p.m. Wednesday in the Douglas County Courthouse, 1100 Massachusetts St. With the wind farm issue having a long and controversial history in the county, no formal action is expected on the text amendments that will be coming before commissioners for the first time, a fact signaled by the County Commission's consideration at the same meeting of a measure to extend the moratorium on wind farms through July 31.
The county has had a moratorium on wind-generated energy systems since December 2013. The moratorium was in response to the county's lack of regulatory language concerning wind towers that came to light when NextEra Energy of Florida applied for a conditional use permit to install two meteorological towers to measure wind speeds in southern Douglas County.
The County Commission followed that initial action with a study session on wind energy development in February 2014 and extended the moratorium on several occasions before directing county staff to work on the new regulations last year.
The measure commissioners will consider would establish a two-tier approach to regulating wind generation towers. Proposed text amendment language will regulate those for personal and small commercial use, which are defined as towers with a generating capacity of 50 kilowatts or less for consumption on site. Those applications would be addressed with building permits, with language developed to address setbacks, height, appearance and other effects on neighboring properties.
Large commercial applications, such as the NextEra Energy proposal, will continue to be considered through the county's conditional use permit process. To make use of the conditional use permit process possible, the text amendment adds wind towers as a permitted CUP use. It also establishes the application process for developers, which requires a general concept plan, defined construction phasing, the amount of property to be disturbed or cleared and forbids transfer of the CUP without the County Commission's approval.
The proposed CUP language addresses the visual, noise, soil erosion, water quality, cultural heritage and infrastructure impacts of proposed towers.
The CUP process would require the developer to notify all property owners within a 1-mile radius of the proposed site. It would also stipulate towers be set back from adjacent property lines the distance equal to 110 percent of the towers' height plus the length of blades and that no residential structures can be closer than 1,500 feet to towers.
The CUP also has language regulating the decommissioning and removal of towers. Applicants would be required to maintain a surety bond with the county as payee to ensure towers would be removed.
NextEra Energy's initial CUP application has expired. It is noted in background information provided to the County Commission that the company has indicated to Douglas County Administrator Craig Weinaug that it still plans to explore the potential of wind power in the southern part of the county.
The company briefly did install a meteorological tower northeast of Baldwin City without a permit, which was removed in June 2015 with its discovery by county codes officers.
This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.
The copyright of this article resides with the author or publisher indicated. As part of its noncommercial effort to present the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development to a global audience seeking such information, National Wind Watch endeavors to observe "fair use" as provided for in section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law and similar "fair dealing" provisions of the copyright laws of other nations. Send requests to excerpt, general inquiries, and comments via e-mail.
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You will be amazed to see the number of e-pharmacies that stock sleeping tablets, especially considering the fact that a century ago, people were still blindly using the flawed methods suggested by some old wives' tales. If you purchase online sleeping tablets, UK and EU customers don't need to leave their house to get some of the best medication on the market. Here is a quick guide on how to go about buying treatment online.
1. Once you have typed "online sleeping tablets UK" in your search engine, you will see a list of e-pharmacies that mostly stock a range of products that sell for less than £1 per pill. Choose the e-pharmacy you trust.
2. Select the product you want to purchase and specify the desired quantity. Bear in mind that discounted rates are offered for large purchases.
3. Provide your credit card details and postal address. When you buy your online sleeping tablets, UK and EU residents receive free delivery in a matter of 2-5 days and 5-10 days respectively (excluding weekends).
Shopping online is easier than you think, and it comes with a number of added benefits that can make your shopping experience a preferable alternative to shopping at a regular pharmacy. Additional benefits of shopping online include: Unlimited access to 24/7 customer services that can help answer your questions if you have any. It is usually available in the form of a live chat or contact page.
Opportunity to buy a range of FDA brands and generics that can be bought without a prescription It's no wonder more and more people are using online platforms to buy their medication. Buy your sleeping tablets online today!


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Dear Dish-It,
Everyone in my school is white; I'm like the only one that is dark-skinned and I get picked on all the time. I'm getting tired of it, but I don't know what to do.
Dear KK63,
Picking on someone else because of the color of their skin is not only racist, it's also bullying. And both are very serious issues. Here's my best advice for you on what to do…
Bullying 101
Being bullied or picked on is no fun at all, and it happens all too often for a variety of reasons that usually have to do with being different in some way, shape or form. The first thing you need to know is that what's happening to you is NOT OK. Know that you are in the right and the kids that are picking on you because they feel you are somehow "different" than they are, are WRONG. With that knowledge, you can take the next step to correct the situation.
Tell Someone
It may seem scary to tell someone about what's happening to you, especially if you're worried that it will make the kids who are picking on you angry. But it's important to get the right people on your side – people who can really help to make the racist bullying stop. These people include close friends that you really trust and caring adults like your mom, dad, teacher, principal or school counselor. You can even tell your family doctor if you like – he or she will likely have some good advice for you. If you're worried, you don't need to let your bullies know that you are reaching out for help. You can do it without them knowing, and let the people who care about you start dealing with the kids at your school who feel that racism and bullying are OK.
Build Your Self-Esteem
While you let the adults handle the bullies in the appropriate way, there are things you can do to make yourself feel better about your situation at school and fitting in. Start smiling at and talking to kids in your class who seem friendly and see if you have anything in common with them. Better yet, join a club or after-school class or team that does something you're interested in – like band or arts and crafts or soccer – where you know you'll meet other kids who enjoy doing some of the same things as you. You can also work on self-improvement, which means learning and doing things to make yourself happy about being you, like taking a martial arts class or learning how to cook. Feeling better about yourself and knowing what a good person you are inside will help you to realize that people who bully you about something like your skin color are only doing so because, deep down, they actually feel really bad about themselves.
Have Your Say
Has this ever happened to you? Got any good advice for KK63? Leave your comment below!


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FreshBritain | New Client Announcement
Mountain Equipment is a brand steeped in mountain heritage.
It's a brand that has always remained true to its principles.
It's a brand we have always admired, so we are delighted to announce we are now working with Mountain Equipment to explore an exciting future.
More to come…


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Botox Cosmetic
Look refreshed and natural with Botox and Dysport treatment in San Mateo, CA
Do people ask, "What's wrong?" when you are not out of sorts? Do you look tired when you are well-rested? Botox and Dysport injections could be a simple, natural looking solution for you. At Allura Skin & Laser Center, this minimally-invasive treatment is popular with both men and women in the San Mateo, CA area and is administered only by a physician with years of experience.
About Botox
Botox and Dysport are neuromodulators – purified proteins that, when injected into skin, interrupt nerve signals that tell muscles to contract. As facial muscles relax, wrinkles on the skin's surface created by repeated expressions, smooth out.
Treatment involves shallow injections with a fine needle, into precise points on the face. Most patients report only a minor pinch, so topical anesthetic is not typically needed.
An injection session takes less than half an hour and there is no downtime. You can schedule neuromodulator treatment on your lunch break and return to work or other activities. Some individuals experience redness, bruising, itching, or swelling at injection sites, but this is generally mild and resolves naturally within a few days.
Within a week, noticeable change occurs. Results last three to four months and can be maintained with periodic re-treatment.
Experienced Botox treatment in San Mateo, CA
The Board-certified dermatologists at Allura Skin & Laser Center have decades of combined experience, from providing hundreds of Botox and Dysport treatments. They apply strong technical training, appreciation for the subtle differences in male and female facial anatomy, and natural artistry to neuromodulator treatment for:
- Frown lines – Vertical folds between the eyebrows.
- Worry lines – Horizontal forehead furrows, often the result of raising the eyebrows.
- Crow's feet – Crinkles at the corners of eyes from squinting.
- Lip lines – Fine lines radiating outward from lips; a product of puckering the mouth to smoke or drink from a straw.
Neuromodulators can also be used to improve a "gummy smile," bunny lines on the nose, neck banding, and more. This technique works well alone or as part of a comprehensive nonsurgical rejuvenation strategy.


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Sindh's local government elections, which were held in three phases on 31 October, 19 November and 5 December 2015, represented a large-scale undertaking and a long-awaited step towards political decentralisation in Pakistan.
From September to December 2015, Democracy Reporting International (DRI) deployed a small team of international and national experts and researchers to multiple locations across Sindh and Islamabad. The team assessed the legal framework governing the elections and its implementation. The assessment's conclusions and recommendations are made within the framework of international election standards and instruments of international human rights law to which Pakistan has subscribed. Recommendations are offered to help enable Pakistani lawmakers, government officials, the ECP and other electoral stakeholders to strengthen the framework and its implementation for future elections.
Download the report below, available in English and Urdu.


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Day 1 Video Devotional: A Blind Beggar Meets Jesus
Today is Ash Wednesday. We join with believers around the world in making a Lenten journey withe Lord Jesus. We have posted a brief video devotional based on the story of Bartimaeus, a blind beggar who met Jesus. He stands for all of us because we are all helpless and hopeless until Jesus passes by. After he received his miracle, Bartimaeus began to follow Jesus, not knowing where he was going. We need that same faith as we begin our Lenten journey because we are all called to follow Jesus wherever he goes.
You can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to sign up for the free email sermon.


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Nine years after the financial crisis, few consumers view the largest retail banks as trustworthy. New results from the first half of 2017, compiled by Landor Associates, a global brand strategy and design firm, put payment companies ahead of retail banks generally, with some notable exceptions.
Last week, Landor released selected results of its analysis of data from its BrandAsset Valuator (BAV), a proprietary database of consumer brand perceptions. The BAV has existed for 20 years and in the financial services sector compares consumer brand perceptions of 55 financial services brands.
Perceptions of trust have eroded in all industry categories over the past ten years, according to Maarten Lagae, senior manager of insights and analytics at Landor, but especially in the financial sector. The latest Landor analysis indicates that the trust issues that arose following the financial crisis of 2008 continue.
Financial services highlights
The BAV polls consumers who are familiar with particular brands, although they are not necessarily customers of the companies behind those brands. Landor does not release full results, only highlights, which mainly relate to individual companies, so it's difficult to draw too many conclusions. Here are some of the results Landor released:
• For the retail banks, the average percentage of consumers considering these banks trustworthy was 14.5% in 2017.
• The average in 2017 for all 55 financial services companies covered was 14.9%
• The average in 2017 for all financial services companies, leaving out "mobile payment apps," was 15.1%
Not huge differences at the average level but notable for being low levels of trustworthiness overall. More interesting were some of the individual company numbers released by Landor. One was Wells Fargo. The company's much publicized troubles have taken a toll. From a 23% trust rating in 2006, the bank dropped to 19% in 2016 and 14.5% in 2017. Also noteworthy, American Express had a trust rating of 17% this year, down from 24% in 2006.
The highest trust rating in the financial services group was PayPal at 30% in 2017. It was followed by: Visa, 25%; Mastercard 23%; Capital One and Chase, both 17%. Landor also included several e-payment brands in its research: Apple Pay and Google Wallet were both trusted by 13% of consumers; Venmo (a mobile person-to-person payment unit of PayPal), was trusted by 10%. Bitcoin brought up the rear at 6%.
Want more banking news and analysis?
Get banking news, insights and solutions delivered to your inbox each week.
What's behind the numbers
Banking Exchange spoke with Maarten Lagae and Louis Sciullo about the significance of the findings. Sciullo is executive director of financial and professional services at Landor.
Q.Were you surprised that banks appear to still be impacted by the financial crisis nine years later?
Sciullo: No. There has been a long trail of issues that come out periodically since then—for instance Wells Fargo's troubles—that reinforces that and keep it top of mind.
Lagae: It's much easier to lose trust than it is to build trust. Also, financial institutions are pretty terrible at differentiating themselves from one another. So it's no surprise that if Wells Fargo misbehaved, other companies get dragged into that perception.
Q.Does the survey break out results by size of institution?
Lagae: No, we haven't done that. But I think one of the reasons consumers mistrust the institutions covered is their size. You feel pretty powerless as an individual when dealing with an institution of that size.
Q.Bankers often say that even though consumers don't like or trust "bankers" or "banks," they like their banker or their bank. Do you see support for that in your study?
Sciullo: There will be individual cases where that's true—for example, with a community bank that's sponsoring things locally and whose footprint is visible to the community. If your bank is a big chain you may be less aware of the things that they do that help to grow the community. Certainly for a credit union or another financial institution facilitating finance for underserved markets I could easily see those customers feeling differently about it.
Lagae: A great way to gain trust and keep trust is to build more intimate relationships with customers. That might be something regional banks are much better at than national networks.
Living in Manhattan and dealing with Chase as my main bank, I don't think I've ever spoken to the same person twice. Every time I go in the person has been replaced or promoted.
It's impossible for me to build a personal relationship.
Q.Lack of a personal relationship is not the same thing as not trusting, however. Is there a distinction between distrusting and not feeling well served?
Lagae: I think there's an overlap.
Feeling not well served implies the company is serving its own agenda and not mine. But I do agree that it doesn't necessarily mean that I distrust the institution.
But there's a huge opportunity for Chase and other banks to think more about how they use the humans in their organizations to build those relationships of trust.
Trust is a very basic human emotion compared with some of the other things that a bank may want to promote.
Q. Several large banks are piloting, or have launched, digital advisors—chatbots. Capital One's "Eno" and Bank of America's "Erica" are two. Some people think this could help because today people relate more to a digital advisor than to a human. Do either of you agree with that?
Lagae: That's an interesting question, but it's early. Millennials as a growing segment for financial institutions are the first to adopt new services that are more transparent; they are just more open to change the way they do things and how they interact with companies.
Again, using my personal experience, we just adopted Alexa into our household. Amazon makes it an experience that reflects human interaction. It's voice-based, she has a name. Even though it's a piece of technology they're trying to make it as human as possible because that immediately triggers those warm feelings of trust and intimacy.
Our founder, Walter Landor, had this great quote: "Products are made in a factory, brands are made in the mind."
And that's exactly what this research is about. Brands as a mental construct bring up a lot of associations. Because of the 2008 events and other events those associations are less likely to instill trust in financial services than we would see in other industries.
Q.How do you define "trustworthy" for the purposes of the research?
Lagae: We ask consumers several up-front questions: "Are they familiar with a brand"; "Do they consider a brand to be a preferred brand in the category or one of many they would use?" And then we ask them to tell us which values or attributes they associate with that brand. The word "trustworthy" is one of the attributes listed.
Q.Even though some of the companies in the survey have low trust scores, they don't seem to be doing too badly in terms of business success—including even Venmo, which scored quite low. How would you account for that? How significant is being a trusted brand to a company's ability to succeed?
Lagae: Trust as a quality or a brand attribute usually isn't one where you would see customers coming to you because they trust you, but it is one of those factors where if they lack trust they'll leave for somebody else.
You're right that Venmo doesn't score very high but is growing rapidly. Just keep in mind that the BAV survey doesn't make a distinction between actual users versus the general public. In that sense, it's meaningful that Venmo has just been in the market for a couple of years versus some of these firms being in the market for decades if not a century.
Sciullo: Trust is something you earn. I think many disruptive players have yet to really see what can happen when something goes wrong—that's the true test of these things.
We have many things now that can go wrong that have never been the case before, like cybersecurity and fraud. So I think it's wait and see. Newer players get a "hall pass" on that for a while.
Lagae: Here at Landor, when we think about brand experiences we use a model where we look at different elements of the experience. We consider "trustworthy" to be a hygiene factor. In other words, if you have it, that's great, but nobody will ever be surprised by it. But the minute you fail on that basic factor, that's when things go really wrong, because consumers will question everything.
Typically in marketing and branding, you want to look more at differentiating or even delighting—things that only people who deal with you directly know, and for which they truly appreciate you. It's often something very emotional such as the way you are greeted or how they care about you.
But trust is a fundamental to any experience you can build. It's the start of all other things.


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Traveling by road is something that almost everyone in the world does. No matter how tiring and hectic it seems, the fun of a road trip is still unmatched. Although there are many verticals to take care of during a road trip, getting a good portable air compressor is very crucial as well. Accomplish all the necessary task related to your car done quickly as these compressors are the best in class.
Here you can find yourself a good option out of the top 10 portable air compressors available. All the advanced and effective features are included in each of these machines as well. Within a little bit of your time, you will find yourself your perfect match.
Top 10 Best Portable Air Compressors Reviews
|Foseal Portable Air Compressor Pump, 12V DC Digital Tire Inflator 150 PSI Auto Shut-off Easy to Use...
|Buy on Amazon
|EPAUTO AC 110V / DC 12V Dual Power Portable Air Compressor Pump w/Digital Tire Inflator, Support for...
|Buy on Amazon
|Kensun AC/DC Tire Inflator Portable Air Compressor Pump for Car 12V DC and Home 110V AC Swift...
|Buy on Amazon
|EPAuto 12V DC Portable Air Compressor Pump, Digital Tire Inflator
|Buy on Amazon
|Helteko Air Compressor Tire inflator DC 12V, Portable Car Tire Pump w/Emergency LED Light, Long...
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|VIAIR 300P Portable Compressor - 30033
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|Kensun AC/DC Power Supply Portable Air Compressor Pump with Analog Display to 100 PSI for Home...
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|Viair 00088 88P Portable Air Compressor
|Buy on Amazon
|Air Compressor, Portable, 3 Gallon Horizontal, Oilless, w/ 10 Piece Accessory Kit Including Air Hose...
|Buy on Amazon
|California Air Tools CAT-1P1060S Light & Quiet Portable Air Compressor, Silver
|Buy on Amazon
10. 12V DC Digital Tire Inflator Portable Air Compressors Pump
Get it now on Amazon.com
When you are traveling, it is very difficult to even calculate how your journey will be on the road. One of the major issues every car travel encounter is the unfortunate punctures and leaks. To insure yourself from these kinds of problems and issues, you should get hold of an air compressor.
You can connect it to a 12V adapter and solve all the issues of air in your tire. The digital portable air compressor readout helps you in better understanding of the tire pressure. And make sure you put in the right amount always.
In just about 3-5 minutes of your time, a standard-sized tire will be full when you are using this compressor. Also, the air is transferred without creating much noise. The smart design restricts the tires from getting heated up after the inflation is complete.
Key features:
- Small size compressor comes along with a storage bag and carrying bag for easy portability.
- Package includes 3 nozzles for bicycle tires, balls, etc.
- Long 11-ft cable helps in easy management and inflating of both front and rear tires.
9. EPAuto 12v Air Compressor Support for Cigarette Lighter Socket
Get it now on Amazon.com
Designed to meet your needs when you are on the road or home, this is an amazing air compressor that can do all. The compressor is compatible with the 110V AC at home and the 12V DC that is used by your car. All you will have to do it is plugged into the socket in your home or cigarette lighter socket that is there in the car. Moreover, the same compressor is used for different purposes like inflating of the tires in the car, bikes, SUVs, etc.
If you wish to inflate your basketball or football, you can do that with this as well. Something that you can trust when you are on the road, this is an efficient compressor with good power output as well.
Key features:
- Very easy to understand portable air compressor display units include PSI, KPA, BAR, KG/CM.
- Once the desired pressure is reached, the machine shuts off itself.
- Works in the ambient temperature range of 20°F – 120°F.
8. Kensun Portable Air Compressors
Get it now on Amazon.com
Do you like and want your air compressor to work both in your home and on the road? The Kensun air compressor will come in handy. It comes equipped with an innovative AC/DC switching option. As a result, you can conveniently choose between the 110V of home and the 12V of your car. Powered by a dual solid metal portable air compressor motor, the customers get an extraordinary power output in all situations.
Also, with the help of this, the whole inflation process looks much easier and gets completed faster. The whole compressor has been built to last and does justice to the test of time. Extremely durable in all verticals, this is an air compressor that you can trust and rely on.
Key features:
- Package includes adapters so that you can use the compressor for inflation of a wide range of things.
- Capable of measuring up to 120 PSI for more convenience.
- Designed with a bright and large pressure gauge for easy readability of the measurements.
7. EPAuto Portable Air Compressor Pump
Get it now on Amazon.com
EP Auto's air compressor is something that you can always trust when you are on the road. Although, there are multiple risks hazards, when it comes to solving your tire pressure issues, it can do all. The smart and innovative design allows you to use it directly in the cigarette lighter socket. Now, put the desired amount of pressure in the tires.
If your car tire falls under the pressure range of 70Psi, this compressor will work without any challenges or issues. Along with that, it is very safe to use without any risks. The overheat protection effectively stops the machine from getting overloaded when you are constantly putting in the air.
Key features:
- Portable air compressor LED flashlight on the compressor provides you with good light in the darkness.
- As soon as the desired pressure is reached the compressor auto-shuts off itself.
- Easy to understand and read 4 different display units.
6. Helteko Portable Air Compressor Pump
Get it now on Amazon.com
In unfortunate cases, if you have a flat tire in the middle of the road, the whole situation becomes very dangerous. Having this air compressor, there is the convenience of LED lighting so that other drivers have adequate knowledge of your situation. Also, the compressor does the job of inflation in a jiffy.
In just about 3-5 mins, any mid-size car tire will be fully filled to the desired pressure. The long 3.5m of cable it comes with allows you to work conveniently without any issues or hassles. All the units of pressure like PSI, BAR, KPA, and KG/CM will be displayed on the compressor.
Key features:
- Constructed with high-quality materials like ABS plastic and stainless steel that is very promising and durable.
- A large high-precision LCD display shows you all the important information.
- The auto-shutoff feature prevents any risks of damage to the tire or compressor.
5. VIAIR 300P Portable Compressor
Get it now on Amazon.com
A lot of off-road drivers reduce their tire pressure in order to get better traction and friction on the road. Once the job is done, with the help of this outstanding air compressor you can get the air back. Also, the overall design is quite innovative for easy and effortless usage.
The package includes many amazing accessories so that the inflation process does not happen very discomforting. With a set of dual heavy-duty portable air compressor battery clamps and a heavy-duty sand tray, you will feel much fewer vibrations on your hands.
Key features:
- 5 in 1 inflator/deflator open-ended air hose that also features 120 PSI gauge.
- Comes along with a deluxe zippered carry bag for easy portability.
- The 8-feet power cable is extremely easy to use and hassle-free as well.
4. Kensun AC/DC Portable Air Compressor Pump
Get it now on Amazon.com
An extremely reliable and amazing air compressor from the house of Kensun which you can use on the road. Also, it is perfect for both indoors and outdoors use. There are both AC and DC power cords in the package, thereby assuring easy workability without any issues on the roads.
With the analog pressure gauge, you can measure how much air has got in and work accordingly. The maximum pressure range offered is a massive 120Psi, allowing you to work with all kinds of vehicles.
Key features:
- Capable of working constantly for 30mins at 35Psi.
- 4-inches of the woven hose is durable and long enough for all kinds of work.
- Package includes a number of accessory nozzles as well.
3. Viair 00088 88P Portable Air Compressor
Get it now on Amazon.com
This is a very uniquely designed air compressor that works directly with car batteries. The included alligator clamps allow you to attach the compressor to the battery and get on with your air inflation. Also, there is a power indicator with a LED light which will inform you as soon as the inflation is completed.
No more risks of overinflating the tire and causing damage to the tire. From ATVs to SUVs and even sedans, this compressor can work with all sorts of vehicles.
Key features:
- Long 10ft cable is easy to work with and use in all situations.
- Comes with an inflation tip kit for supreme flexibility.
- Air hose is 16 ft long for easy air transfer.
2. Campbell Hausfield Air Compressor
Get it now on Amazon.com
For inflation of tires and even balls, you need a good quality air compressor like this at your disposal. This is the air expert that you can always trust and depend on when you need to put in the air inside the flat tires of your vehicle. The 3 gallon of the horizontal tank helps in getting that extra edge that you would appreciate during the process.
With a 0.36 CFM @90 PSI, this is a powerful and efficient machine that will take care of all your needs. The maximum PSI it can achieve is a huge 120 PSI, thereby delivering you that extra power you will require to do various jobs. Also, it has a thermal overload switch so that every time the machine tends to overheat, it can restrict that from happening.
Key features:
- Very useful 10-piece accessory kit contains all the important things you might need during inflation.
- Smart placement of the gauges helps to read the important readings easily.
- Extremely compact shape for ease of transport and portability.
1. California Air Tools Portable Air Compressors
Get it now on Amazon.com
California air tools are a reliable name and their portable air compressor is undoubtedly one of the finest things to choose from. It is extremely low in terms of the self-weight and serves the purpose of portability well always. Weighing just about 29.5 pounds, the low weight allows you to take it along during those long rides.
Next time when you are planning a road trip, make sure to ensure your journey with a reliable portable air compressor like this one. It is powerful on the inside with a 0.6HP motor that can churn out 1.20CFM @90 PSI. Getting confused with the technical terms? Just know that this is a powerful machine.
Key features:
- Creates a maximum noise level of 56dB which is convenient and safe enough.
- Requires no extra maintenance and servicing as the pump is oil-free.
- Large 1-gallon tank for fast inflation and the tank has steel construction.
Get the portable air compressors for cars and enjoy the trip without being worried. Now your journey will be super smooth.
Find More: Top 10 Best Moscow Mule Mugs Reviews


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On March 18, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved legislation governing how and when the city can use and operate surveillance equipment or aerial unmanned drones. But despite council assurances that the legislation would promote transparency and public awareness of new surveillance systems, the bill's vote was accompanied by angry chanting from the crowd.
"This isn't perfect legislation, but it's far ahead of the game of any other place in the country right now," explained the measure's sponsor, Nick Licata. It requires any drone-hungry city agency—e.g., the Seattle Police Department—to get council approval before purchasing new surveillance equipment. It also requires departments to adopt written protocols detailing how they will retain, access, and store data obtained through surveillance.
Earlier this year, council members were surprised to learn that the SPD had acquired several aerial drones through a federal grant, and Seattle residents discovered 30 surveillance cameras being erected along Seattle's waterways—most notably, along Alki Beach.
The ACLU of Washington urged the council to delay the vote until an auditing process was written into the legislation—specifically, that the city auditor oversee and report on all drone and surveillance use. "In order for the proposed ordinance to be effective, it must have teeth," said ACLU-WA deputy director Jennifer Shaw in a statement. Instead, the council agreed to revisit the legislation in a year and decide whether the auditor component was necessary.


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A Risk Assessment Based Model for Assessing the Environmental Sustainability of Tourism and Recreation Areas
Document Type
Theses, Ph.D
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence
Publication Details
Sucessfully submitted for the Award of Doctor of Philosophy to the Technological University Dublin, September, 2010.
Assessing the environmental quality of tourism and recreation areas is considered fundamental to the sustainable management of these resources. However, existing methodologies for such assessments rely on sets of environmental data that are often poorly linked and difficult to interpret and integrate in a holistic manner. Risk assessment is a concept that has developed to the point where it has the potential to address current limitations in environmental assessment methodologies. This thesis presents a new model for the application of risk assessment to the management and assessment of environmental sustainability in the tourism and recreation sector. This model was applied and tested at two contrasting tourism and recreation areas in Ireland and a detailed methodology was developed. The results of this research identify key problem areas with respect to environmental sustainability at the two study areas. These results also demonstrate the strengths of the risk assessment approach and indicate that this methodology represents a valuable alternative to existing methodologies.
Recommended Citation
Roe, P. (2010). A Risk Assessment Based Model for Assessing the Environmental Sustainability of Tourism and Recreation Areas. Doctoral Thesis. Technological University Dublin. doi:10.21427/D7530S


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15+ Best WordPress Food & Recipe Themes 2014
WordPress recipe themes are in demand right now because of the great popularity of lifestyle blogs and websites. And there is definitely an audience for them! Who doesn't like to find a good recipe or inspirational post? Think about all the recipes posted on Pinterest, a great source of traffic to your site or blog. (If you're actually looking for a WordPress restaurant theme, we've got you covered here!)
Food bloggers most often turn to WordPress themes for their sites. If you're topic is food and recipes, you 'll appreciate a clean, easy-to-use site theme that can show your images and organize your recipes well. Indeed, the foremost needs of the best WordPress recipe themes are these:
- Attractive featured image layout
- A recipe shortcode or plugin
- Either a magazine or blog-style layout
- Social plugin for sharing recipes on Pinterest
Those factors are going to make your blog life smooth sailing, for you and your readers! Depending on your purposes, you may also want to consider things like ad space. We've taken the guesswork out of finding a good WordPress food theme for you and compiled this collection of the very best. Read on for my roundup of the best WordPress food and recipe themes I've found in my search through dozens of WordPress theme seller sites and hundreds of developers. Just click on the image of any theme you like to take a closer look and download if you like it. Enjoy!
WordPress Recipe Themes
1. Foodie
The Foodie WordPress Theme is a food and recipe theme for the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. She's sleek and svelte with her minimalist approach and clean design, but she sure packs a punch when it comes to features. With 3 color options, ample ad space, widgetized home and recipe pages, and detailed documentation, you'll get the clean slate you need to build your brand at the low investment cost of a Genesis child theme.
2. Food & Cook
The Food & Cook WordPress Theme is your Multipurpose Recipes WordPress Theme. Sharing recipes and cooking tips can't get any easier than this. With Beautiful and Clean design its a Perfect display for your food catalog. Choose your favorite layout! There are 6 home layouts and 3 recipe layouts included. Not only the look, we do care about flexibility, Food & Cook allow you to build your own shop, choose custom background, edit layout system even your 404 page, allow your readers to submit their dish and build your recipe database together. A thorough, powerful, and complete theme.
3. FoodMagz
FoodMagz is a child theme of the Backbone Theme Framework, specially designed for food bloggers, food junkies, restaurant bloggers or general food websites. Whether you are a new food blogger without a high budget or an experienced food blogger who value a user-friendly way to add, organize and display recipes. Show recipes, featured videos (cooking tutorials), and more. Fully responsive.
4. TastyFood
The TastyFood WordPress Theme is a Food Blogging & Lifestyle WordPress theme. Every element of this theme is well crafted and makes your site look professional website and you get maximum exposure to your content. It has Rating & Review feature, Gallery and many more things which makes this theme perfect for your blog.
5. iCook
iCook is a Food/Recipe WordPress Theme with clean, responsive design and some nice features specially created for your cuisine related site. It includes a beautiful recipe gallery with filter; to categorize and showcase your recipes, custom shortcodes for recipes; to easily list the ingredients of your favorite dishes; popular recipes widget (based on views) and much more.
6. Petit
The Petit WordPress Theme is a theme full of features, enough to be used for a variety of purposes, but especially for a recipe website. In fact, its awesome features allow you to post nicely formatted recipes easily. It comes with a reviews system and recipe shortcodes! We like the recipe-related meta data that appears in the header. It includes a big featured area and a carousel that makes your homepage look like more than a blog.
7. Crave
With Crave's modern magazine-style layout and appetizing aesthetic, your readers will definitely be lining up for seconds. 3 delectable color choices and styling for all your favorite widgets makes Crave a theme that will leave any mouth watering.
8. Tasteful
Want your site to be as delicious as the posts and images you put on it? This is it! Tasteful is perfect for any food blogger to show off all those delicious recipes and will make your readers drool over not only your posts, but your site as well! It has nice recipe cards for your posts using the Easy Recipe plugin. Tasteful can also be used for any genre of blog… just change up the categories to your own and you're all set! This is a Genesis child theme and requires the Genesis framework, available here.
Example post with recipe card:
9. The Kitchen Table
The Kitchen Table is a super simple recipes theme for WordPress. Using built-in features of WordPress, The Kitchen Table is super easy to manage and control using the theme customizer.
10. Food Recipes
Food Recipes is a fully responsive, feature rich and beautifully designed WordPress theme for recipes related websites. This theme is perfect for professional Chefs and Cooking Experts. Food Recipe WordPress theme makes it very easy to share cooking knowledge with complete information and videos support.
Search Engine Optimized — This theme is fully hand coded and its HTML is written keeping in mind your sites good ranking on search engines. The theme has good use of h1,h2,h3 tags. The primary contents are above the secondary contents in markup. Recipes are managed properly my keeping in mind Schema.org.
11. Cooking Press
CookingPress is a WordPress theme for foodies. This recipe theme will let you share all your recipes and cooking tips with wide audience. It's one of the first WordPress recipe themes with support for Google Recipe View. What does it mean? it means that your blog will be understand not only by people, but also by search engines.
The above image shows how this theme can be customized to many different styles. And here's the default homepage style: Nice, isn't it?
12. Foodie (MintThemes)
Foodie is a blogging theme with a focus on food. Whether you are a seasoned chef, or just getting comfortable in the kitchen, Foodie allows you to showcase and talk about your latest creations, or the art of food in general.
The built-in recipe builder makes it incredibly easy to share recipes with your readers. Just enter the ingredient and amount, and create beautiful lists in seconds. Sharing photos and videos has never been easier. Foodie helps showcase your beautiful food with huge post images and video embeds, sure to catch the reader's eye.
But underneath it all, Foodie is a powerful blogging theme that can be utilized by anyone. Quickly change the site's style with a new background and widgets, and use Foodie to blog about anything.
Recipe Post View:
13. Arapah
Arapah is a clean, simple and fresh WordPress theme. Designed specifically to meet to many kinds of business projects. Responsive Design for tablet and mobile browser. Compatible with the latest 2014 version of WordPress.
14. Delicioso
Delicioso is a beautiful recipe theme for WordPress. It offers the user an easy way to create a recipe site and includes a bespoke delicious design, custom widgets, unlimited sidebars, a theme options panel and more!
15. Chardonnay
Chardonnay is an elegant theme created primarily for restaurants, but that would make an amazing WordPress Recipe theme as well. I can particularly see this being used for gourmet dishes.
16. Yumblog
The Yumblog theme has a tight integration with Recipe Schema, a plugin that allows users to enter recipes that contain all the schema.org requirements to present recipes to search engines the right way.
- Recipes appear in Google Search results with thumbnail
- Adds a print button to each recipe
- Styled with a handwritten note paper appearance
- Supports saving to Facebook timeline
- Support for Amazon Associate
- Support for Whisk
- WYSIWYG editor for ingredients and directions
WordPress food & recipe themes come in all shapes and sizes. Some are traditional with blog layouts, and others make use of Parallax effects and one-page design elements. This list runs the gamut, and we'll continue adding more themes as they are created by developers. Hopefully there is something in this list of the best WordPress recipe themes for you! Just click on the image of the theme you like to take a closer look at it and purchase and download if you like it!


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What is Manzanita?
Several species of ornamental plants are known as manzanita. All of them belong to the Arctostaphylos family of over 60 evergreen shrubs and small trees and include California sagebrush, chamise, bearberry, and coyote brush. These plants are native to western North America and are valued landscape plants due to their unique growth patterns and misshapen branches. They also have attractive flowers and fruit amid small, grayish green leaves and reddish bark that can either be peeling or smooth.
Manzanita wood bleaches when exposed to the hot sun and has a driftwood-like appearance. The wood is long lasting when exposed to water and resists rot; as a result, it is frequently used in aquariums as a decorative accent. The gnarled wood can be used to add an unusual touch to gardens and is used in craft projects and in large bird cages for perches. Smaller species can be pruned into bonsai or kept as potted plants on a sunny porch or patio. Gardeners who prefer to grow unusual, odd looking plants often have collections of several different species of this unique family of shrubs and trees.
Most varieties of manzanita are slow growing and very difficult to start from seed and usually need to be exposed to extreme heat or even fire before in order to germinate. They may be started from cuttings, although the easiest way to create new plants is by layering the branches. To do this, a branch is bent over while still on the tree or shrub, and the middle section is buried in the ground, leaving the top exposed. When the branch forms its own roots, it can be separated from the mother plant. These trees resist transplanting, so it is important to plant them where they are to remain.
All manzanita species are tender perennials and will need to be given winter protection in cold weather. They will not tolerate freezing temperatures, and are difficult to cultivate in many areas. Manzanita shrubs can be fussy and require low humidity and light acidic soil with good drainage.
Many manzanita species are endangered or threatened, and it is illegal to dig these plants and remove them from the wild. They must be purchased from nurseries or catalogs, and several species are commonly available. Varieties like Emerald Carpet are low growing and make excellent ground covers, while others such as Howard McMinn grow into small trees around 7 feet tall (2.1 m) and are best used as a hedge or small landscape tree.


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4 min read
Not many years ago, having a LinkedIn account was seen as a 'cool professional thing' that people used to socialize with folks from within the industry. But today, being on LinkedIn has become a must-have for anyone who wants to build a strong personal brand and expand your professional network.
As one of the older social networking sites, LinkedIn has undergone a myriad of changes – be it technology or design wise. It recently rolled out a couple of interface enhancements, which are already influencing the way you are connecting with people (even if you haven't realized it yet). So what do you drive home from this? That if a social networking giant like LinkedIn can revamp its look and feel in order to be more appealing to the professional zeitgeist, then it's time for you to give your profile the makeover it needs.
Maybe, you realize the importance of LinkedIn profile makeover but don't know how to do it. In that case, you need to hand it over to professionals who know how optimize your profile; in other words you need to outsource it.
Here are 10 reasons why should outsource your LinkedIn profile makeover –
The community is over 500 million users and counting!
Yes and the chances are that they are fine-tuning their profiles to increase the leverage of connections and grow their personal brand at this very moment and we see no reasons for you not to!
Your profile pops up on the first page of Google search results
We don't even need to elaborate on it. Appearing on the first page of Google isn't just a matter of pride but also a great boost for professional branding and yes just imagine the impression you'd be making on a potential employer when they find your name on Google.
LinkedIn is replete with great resources
As an entrepreneur, there are so many things on which you need to have your pulse on – be it finding the right kind of people to get into collaborations with or knowing what your competitors are doing to stay at the top of the game and LinkedIn will keep you abreast with all of that.
There are people looking out for you
There are companies, competitors, colleagues, and clients searching you. Your client may want to go through your profile before making up his mind to get back to you or a hiring manager will check your profile to see whether you can fit the bill or not.
It's the best place to build your personal brand
Be it sharing your brand's blog posts or videos, LinkedIn allows you to establish your brand's authenticity and credibility in front of over 500 million users that is so many times more that you can ask for!
It allows to stay connected with people who matter to your business
LinkedIn, as they say is the professional version of Facebook. It allows you to share updates, join field-centric groups, write your views on other's posts, and so much more. There's no better way of building and maintaining business camaraderie other than LinkedIn.
LinkedIn keeps you in the know about everything that you ever want to know
If you want to have your fingers on the pulse of the latest corporate happenings, then again, LinkedIn is the place. What you follow and view on LinkedIn also says a lot about you/your company; it is a tacit criterion of consideration that people searching for you look into.
Like your business, your LinkedIn profile calls for a tailored approach. Even if your LinkedIn profile is your online resume, it doesn't have to be a carbon copy of it. As a leading SEO and Digital marketing company, we can help optimize your LinkedIn profile and turn it into a prospect magnet.
Connect with us on 8888866110 or email us on email@example.com.


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Price from $99.99 on Amazon
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The Pros
- Dynamic background removal;
- Great audio and video quality;
- Affordable.
The Cons
- Difficult to stream in low light;
- Finicky to set up.
The Logitech C922 Pro Stream Webcam may ask for a patience to set up, but it's the cheapest alternative to a green screen for game streaming.
Despite the tedious setup process and a fair bit of software required for those without the wallet or space for a green screen, the Logitech C922 Pro Stream Webcam is the next best thing for an affordable price, and in fact, it looks pretty damn good as well!
The design of C922 is quite the same as the Logitech's C920. It is chunky, all-black casing, with microphones flanking both sides of the 1080p lens, as well as the same lengthy 6-foot cord sticking out the back. The camera onto your external monitor or your laptop lid is secured by the rear-mounted arm. However, C922 stands out with having a tripod, that features a 360-degree swivel mount and its legs can extend from 4.3 - 7.3 inches.
Picture and Sound Quality
The C922 takes excellent photos, and videos with clear audio. Whether you're holding a conference over Skype or playing Overwatch on Twitch, you're definitely going to look and sound good doing it. On the C922, the microphones record stellar sound.
Software and Streaming
The C922 comes with apps that are specifically designed for streaming. Logitech and Personify together built proprietary software called ChromaCam, that recognizes the streamer and creates a green-screen effect behind the person, which removes the background. In addition, you can pick various present backgrounds or upload your own image to serve as your backdrop. Logitech also adds a three-month license to XSplit Gamecaster and Broadcaster.
You are allowed to use XSplit for free and the subscription lets you edit recordings, remove backgrounds and get notifications about new followers. However, all this software might be overwhelming for those starting streaming setup from scratch. But if you already use XSplit Gamecaster or OBS to stream, adding ChromaCam is quite an easy process.
Also, C922 is more compatible with far more computers because the C922 opted for a software solution instead of Intel's processor-powered 3D RealSense camera.
As Logitech doesn't require Windows 10 or a 6th-generation Intel Core CPU, gamers with older rigs or running Windows 7 or 8 can easily use the C922 as well.