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An inspiring story of a mother's love.
In March, Wilkins launched Alagang Wilkins: Moms Know Best. They received stories that best embodies a mother's love and care for her family.
There was an enormous amount of support from moms nationwide. And that's no surprise as Wilkins is the most trusted water brand by moms.
The stories gathered serve as a reminder of how unconditional a mother's love is. You can be inspired by these stories from this link: http://bit.ly/YH4ZrU
More excitingly, Wilkins chose 1 story and turned it into a TVC mini-series. Watch out for it on the Alagang Wilkins Moms Microsite or by clicking here and see why a mother's love is truly the best.


text: The much-anticipated new trailer for Peter Jackson's first film in the new Hobbit trilogy has hit the web today. Unlike the previous trailer that focused pretty tightly on the Dwarves and setting them up as individual characters, this one is all action, with a bit of humor to boot. And, we get our first look at Radagast the Brown, another wizard (like Gandalf) whose place in the greater geopolitics of Middle Earth is only hinted at in the books, but whose character is being expanded in the movies.

subset: commoncrawl


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How To Pick Up Strong Essay Topics About Global Warming
Essays about global warming have to have a different approach, or a certain dimension to them so they can stand apart from all the rest of papers done on ecology. It is a very trendy subject to write about, so you will need a creative approach and fresh ideas, in order to wow your professor.
Read about things that interest you
First, star off with reading and informing yourself about the basics of global warming. Try to understand what is happening, what are the major concerns, the history of the problem and then try to look up for some popular solutions. If you read a lot of articles on global warming, you will start to think a lot about it. On multiple sites you will find data you need, and this online resource will help you with choosing a topic for your essay.
Look around yourself
Consequences of global warming are not easily detectable, but you can try to investigate if the village that you live in has changed over the past decades due to changes in our climate. Search the archives about the data that will prove that the weather has changed, and you will have a great topic that will revolve around your case study.
Friends can help
Global warming is not really that complicated, so most of your friends understand the concept of it and have probably taught about the importance it has on our lives. So you can ask them what would the like to learn more about, concerning global warming, and they will probably hive you some good ideas and topics you can write about.
Watch some documentaries
Watching documentaries about global warming can help you, especially if they explain the complicated science that hides behind it. You will easily understand some basic facts that you need in order to even start to write an essay. You can also learn where to find relevant data, or how to collect information that you need.
If I were the president
Brainstorming can be tiresome, but you can make it fun with imagining the situation in which you are the one making decisions about global warming issues. You remember many questions you would like an answer to, and think of many perils you could encounter when trying to come up with a global strategy.
If you fail to think of a great topic for your essay, you can always ask your teacher for help, or your parents.


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BUCKHANNON — Dr. Michael Karickhoff, 86, died Saturday, Dec. 31, at Waterford Health Center in Kokomo, Indiana.
Mike was born in Buckhannon, W.Va. on Feb. 26, 1930, the son of O. Earle Karickhoff and Myrtle Mauzy Karickhoff.
Mike was predeceased by his parents, sister Elizabeth Summers, niece Betsy Smith, and nephew Bradley Smith.
He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Susan Given Karickhoff; his son, Michael H. Karickhoff and wife Kelly of Kokomo, Ind.; and his daughter, Susan Elizabeth Pawlicki of St. Joseph, Ill.. Also surviving are six granddaughters and nine great-grandchildren.
Mike graduated from Buckhannon-Upshur High School in 1948 and West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1952. He received a Master of Science degree from the University of Maryland in 1955 and earned a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1958. He worked for E.I. DuPont as a polymer chemist in Circleville, Ohio, until 1970, when he became a research chemist for the Sherwin-Williams Company in Chicago until his retirement in 1990.
Mike was a member of the First United Methodist Church in Buckhannon, the West Virginia Wesleyan College Emeritus Club, the Kappa Alpha Order, the American Chemical Society, and the West Virginia Fossil Club.
Friends will be received Saturday, Jan. 14, 2017 from 10-11 a.m., the funeral hour, with the Rev. Steve Meadows officiating. Burial will follow in the Heavner Cemetery in Buckhannon. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations may be made to Crosslines, 68 College Avenue, Buckhannon, WV, 26201.
Online condolences may be made to the family at www.polingstclair.com. Poling-St. Clair Funeral Home is in charge of the arrangements.


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Group to shine light on economic effects of poor health in Tennessee
Tennessee ranks in the bottom 10 states for health in America. A high rate of health-related diseases costs Tennessee billions in economic impact, state studies show.
Those numbers have prompted a nonprofit group to educate residents on the economic effects of poor health. The Governor's Foundation for Health and Wellness organization, which advocates for Tennesseans to live a healthy lifestyle, is planning to hold roundtable discussions across the state.
The group's "State of the State's Health" roundtable events will take place in six cities during August, September and October.
"These roundtable events will engage community and business leaders in a discussion about the critical implications of Tennessee's poor health," said Richard Johnson, CEO of the Governor's Foundation for Health and Wellness. "For too long, we have not taken sufficient proactive action to address the very real health challenges facing our citizens."
The State of the State's Health discussions will take place in Knoxville and Kingsport on Aug. 21. The roundtable event's venue in Knoxville will be the Pilot Flying J Corporation. In Kingsport, it will be at the Kingsport Chamber.
During September, a discussion will be held in Jackson, Memphis and Chattanooga. On Sept. 11, the event in Jackson will take place at the Jackson Chamber. That same day, an event will be held at the Crosstown Concourse in Memphis.
On Sept. 13, a discussion will take place in the "Scenic City" at Volkswagen Chattanooga.
The final event will take place on Oct. 2 at Franklin's Nissan North America, Inc. corporate offices.
Laura Berlind, executive director of the Sycamore Institute, a Nashville-based research center, will present some of the Institute's findings during each of the six discussions.
In November 2017, the nonpartisan organization released a report showing that Tennessee's rates of chronic illnesses cost the state's economy more than $5.3 billion in 2015.
The state's health problems have also impacted kids living in Tennessee, according to The Governor's Foundation for Health and Wellness. The group said that Tennessee was named the state with the highest rate of childhood obesity in May. Thirty-eight percent of Tennessee's youth are currently overweight or obese, the nonprofit said in the event's press release.
"It is incumbent on all of us to work together to identify and implement actionable solutions that will help improve health outcomes in our state," said Johnson, the nonprofit's CEO. "We look forward to productive and collaborative conversations at each of these events as we discuss opportunities to effectively address this epidemic."


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Omg! Omg! Omg! Tullycraft has reunited our disenchanted hearts with the news that they will be releasing their first new recordings since 2007's Every Scene Needs a Center! And, truthfully, it couldn't come at a better time. The world needs Tullycraft to remind us that music is supposed to be fun and that straightforward, clever, well written songs are always, always welcome. And Sean Tollefson and his wonderful collaborators Jenny Mears, Corianton Hale, Chris Munford, and Jeff Fell are masters at the craft of the three minute pop song.
In 2013, we can expect both a 7" single in Jan or Feb and a full-length release titled Lost In Light Rotation. Mixed by the legendary Phil Ek (The Shins, Band of Horses, Built to Spill, Fleet Foxes, The Halo Bender), the album is being released on CD/LP on Magic Marker Records in the U.S. and Fortuna Pop in the UK. The official release date has yet to be set. There is also going to be a limited edition cassette version of the album on Fika Recordings in the UK!! With all of the chaos surrounding getting a new release together, I am surprised they had time to answer our highly dubious questions (after being so kind to us in 2009), but I am eternally grateful they did!
Chris: What do you mean absence? We've been doing things like being a band and making this new record! I guess we've also been doing things like getting married, having babies, moving to California, and trekking to Borneo to save wildlife, so not much.
Sean: I feel like I've been busy - buying a house, getting married, having a baby... adult stuff. But it's true, there were a few years that we did almost nothing as a band. Sometimes a band can be a difficult relationship and I think we all just needed a break.
Jeff: First, I don't appreciate the accusatory tone of the question. Second, let's use our big boy words. None of this "bleep" language. Each of us has been at our respective homes just living life and now we've made another album.
Viva: What is the first record you bought?
Chris: The first one I bought? Maybe The Knack? I loved it.
Jeff: I'm sure I've answered this question before and to tell the truth I couldn't definitively answer this right now but it would have been one of these four: The Soundtrack to Heavy Metal, Cheap Trick "Live at Budokan," AC/DC's "Back In Black," or Blondie's "Autoamerican." Those were quickly followed by Devo's "Freedom of Choice," Van Halen I, probably an Oingo Boingo record, most definitely Rush's "Moving Pictures" and Foreigner's first album because I love that stupid guitar break in "It Feels Like the First Time." But it wasn't all good. There was a Styx album in there somewhere too.
Sean: The first record I ever bought was "Hooligans" by The Who (on cassette). It was a compilation focusing mostly on singles they'd released in the 70's. I still love The Who.
Cori: Pet Shop Boys - "Actually" (on cassette tape)
Jenny: Probably Sting's "Dream of the Blue Turtles." I never was cool...
Viva: Unicorns vs. Narwhals? Who would win in a fight?
Cori: Depends on the terrain.
Sean: That's true. Where would this fight take place? In the Canadian Arctic or North Korea?
Jenny: Excellent question, Sean! Everyone knows the icy waters of the Arctic would favor the narwhal while the unicorn would dominate in Korea's marshmallow forests...
Chris: This really isn't my area of expertise.
Jeff: Nice try, Unicorns and Narwhals would never fight one another as they naturally see what they have in common. Why are you so intent on pitting them against each other?
Viva: If you could re-live your prom, what song would you want slow dance to?
Cori: What prom?
Chris: I'm not much of a slow dancer, and sincerely hope I never have to re-live either of the two proms I attended, BUT, I do like dancing! So, I am going to say I would dance to "Come on Eileen" most anytime.
Jenny: You'd be wearing overalls, right Chris?
Chris: Of course!
Jeff: I don't think I would wish a re-living of my prom upon anyone who was there. I don't even remember dancing. We left for a house-party pretty early on.
Sean: Oh! Jeff, you've told me your prom story before. Ouch! As for a song, I think I'd need to go with a time tested classic - "If You Were Here" by the Thompson Twins. You may think you don't know this song, but I'm sure you do - it played at the very end of 'Sixteen Candles.'
Viva: What would you do if Mayans predicted that one more Orange Cake Mix song would reset the doomsday clock?
Chris: I think I would question the accuracy of those Mayan predictions.
Jeff: Well, it's kinda out of our hands according to your supposition. So I would have a nice meal and hope for the best, I guess.
Sean: Jeff's right. I think the real question is: What would Jim Rao (aka Orange Cake Mix) do?
Viva: Who smells the worst in the van after a show?
Cori: Jenny
Chris: Jenny. Sorry J, you are however usually one of the top three best smelling in the van BEFORE the show
Jeff: I do. But Jenny takes the heat for me because she's swell like that.
Jenny: I am swell like that! Though my polyester dresses don't exactly smell like roses after a show...
-Tullycraft cartoon by Jake Rohdy


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Brand, Competitive Advantages, Deliberate Practice, Franchise, GARP, Moats, See's Candies, Strategy, Wide Moat
Buffett often holds out See's Candy as the prototype of the wide moat company. What lessons can be learned from this case study?
See's Candy manufactures, distributes and sells high quality candy through retail outlets. These retail locations are located primarily west of the Rockies and are heavily concentrated in California; 110 of its 211 stores are in California. The shops have a distinctive look with a black and white décor and an old-timey feel patterned after the founder's mother's kitchen. See's has a reputation in the West for high quality and the product is associated with holidays, namely Valentine's Day and Christmas.
The boxed chocolate industry in which See's competes is small. Sales are estimated at just under $2 billion per year with little growth. Its main competitors are Godiva, who maintains a luxury image and does not try to compete on price, and Fanny Mae who undercuts See's on price.
Buffett, through Blue Chip Stamps, acquired See's Candy in 1972. Since that time, See's has turned in an enviable long-term track record.
Quantitative Evidence of a Moat
(All numbers are per Warren Buffett's 1984 letter to shareholders and reflect the period 1973-1983.)
Key Stats:
Operating Margin (10 yr) 8.68%
Sales CAGR (10 yr) 14%
NOPAT CAGR (10 yr) 19%
Average price increase 10% (as measured by Pounds of Candy Sold/Sales)
One metric is worth discussing further. See's pricing power has often been extolled by Buffett. It can be seen here in the 10% annual average price increase. The ability to raise prices without hurting sales is one of the key hallmarks of a moat.
Qualitative Evidence of a Moat
1. Customer Captivity through Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty leads to customer captivity when frequent purchases of the same brand establish a deep allegiance that is difficult to undermine. Here, See's has produced legions have fiercely loyal customers by seizing a large portion of "mind share" in California. It did through association with positive experiences. "Every person in California has something in mind about See's Candy and overwhelmingly it was favorable. They had taken a box on Valentine's day to some girl and she had kissed him. If she slapped him, we would have no business. As long as she kisses him, that is what people want in their minds. See's Candy means getting kissed. If we can get that in the minds of people, we can raise prices."
A recent episode of "Mad Men" had a great description of this phenomenon of emotional attachment to a brand of chocolate. In the episode, the lead character, Don Draper, is pitching advertising work to two Hershey's (HSY) executive. He describes Hershey's chocolate as "the currency of affection." The description is just as apt for See's. The whole scene can be viewed here.
The psychological concept of "social proof" also seems to play a role here. Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. This effect is prominent in ambiguous social situations where people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior, and is driven by the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation. Consumers in California searching for an appropriate Valentine's Day or Christmas gift looked to the crowd to see what was socially acceptable. More often than not, the crowd told them if See's was not actually mandatory, it would not get them in trouble either.
In any case, as a business analyst, we are not as concerned with the causes of brand loyalty as we are in the simple fact that it exists. Brand loyalty can be as difficult to understand as it is to undermine.
2. Economies of Scale – Regional Dominance
While not cheap, See's can undercut its competitors like Godiva on price. This cost advantage is due to See's reaping the advantages of its regional dominance in California. The business gets better the more stores it has in play in a given geographic area. The lower costs derived from See's concentration strategy come primarily from three functions of the business. First, it spends less on distribution. The density of See's stores reduces the distance its trucks have to travel and, therefore, lower gasoline expenses. Second, advertising expenses are reduced. See's advertising expense is lower as a percentage of sales than its competitors because of the greater density of its stores and customers in the markets where they advertise. For example, See's has 14 retail outlets within 20 miles of my parent's house in Southern California. Godiva has 2. If we make the assumption that See's also has 7 times the number of customers as Godiva, each dollar of See's advertising in the region is reaching many more customers than Godiva. Even if we reduce the ratio by half, See's strategy of regional dominance is generating much more bang for each buck spent on advertising.
The scale advantages produce a volume-price-volume virtuous circle. See's achieves a cost advantage through scale and passes along its efficiency to customers through lower prices. These lower prices attract more customers, which further lowers the cost structure, permitting still lower prices and attracting yet more customers.
Capital Intensity
The capital needs of See's are ridiculously low. Here is Buffett on this subject in the 2007 letter to shareholders:
"The capital now required to run the business is $40 million. This means we have had to reinvest only $32 million since 1972 to handle the modest physical growth – and somewhat immodest financial growth – of the business. In the meantime pre-tax earnings have totaled $1.35 billion. All of that, except for the $32 million, has been sent to Berkshire (or, in the early years, to Blue Chip)."
Assuming a 35% tax rate, just 6.7% of See's net income was reinvested in the business from 1972 to 2007 despite a huge growth in profits.
Growth Opportunities Inside the Moat
As stated above, the boxed chocolate market in the US is growing very slowly – limiting See's opportunities for growth. Further attempts to expand outside the West have not gone well. An expansion into Japan was abandoned. A slow expansion into the Midwest and East is underway now with unknown results. Instead of investing its profits in expansion, Buffett merely tells See's management, Send the check to Omaha!
Capital Allocation
High returns on capital and excess cash flows are only useful if you have a management that is smart
about deploying it. Buffett's skills as a capital allocator are well known and have been covered in many other books, articles, blogs and websites. Needless to say, there is little to any risk of poor capital allocation.
Cash Management
The product is sold for cash, so there is no need for accounts receivable.
How would a competitor penetrate the moat? If we had 1 billion dollars, could we take on See's?
First, the boxed chocolate market in California is not big enough to attract much attention. Its not worth the trouble for a national or international competitor. This is true for many niche and local operators.
Second, It would be extremely difficult for a competitor to lure loyal customers away from See's. Brand X, if they had deep pockets, could spend millions of dollars in advertising to try and steal mind share from See's. Would it work? Could they build all of the retail outlets to compete with See's? Even if the advertising worked, the competitor would have to run losses for years as the advertising expense per customer would be very high. See's might very well respond to the competitive threat by lowering its prices. Unless Godiva or Fanny Mae have found a way to produce the item or deliver the service at a cost substantially below that of See's, which is not likely, either the price at which they sell their offerings or the volume of sales they achieve will not be profitable for them, and therefore not sustainable. While Godiva has a well-maintained brand and a luxurious image, this does not translate into profits in See's market area.
One competitor tried to compete on the cheap by simply copying the distinctive look of See's stores. This tactic was struck down in court as a trademark violation.
Disruptive Technology Risk
In many industries, there is a constant threat that our current understanding of the market and the participant could be completely disrupted by the emergence of a completely new technology. As a very mature low-tech industry, the risk of disruptive technology seems quite low compared to say, the PC industry.
Inflation Risk
While we have gotten used to rather low inflation, there have been periods in US history where this was not the case. At the time, Buffett purchased See's, in fact, inflation was high and would be for a number of years (see chart above). One of the great things about See's is that it is almost impervious to inflation. Buffett famously raises prices each December 26 come rain or come shine.
Management Risk
Does management understand the moat? Are they trying to widen it? Management widens the moat by ensuring that customers will only have positive associations with See's The company only sells candy of the highest quality. See's chocolates are all preservative-free, and each box has the date it was filled and location in which it was filled so that the customer can see that they are getting the freshest product. Ingredients from suppliers are carefully examined by quality assurance teams at the factories for microbiologic compliance and purity. The company also emphasizes customer service. Again, per Buffett: "If you are See's Candy, you want to do everything in the world to make sure that the experience . . . leads to a favorable reaction. It means what is in the box, it means the person who sells it to you . . . And if the salesperson smiles at that last customer, our moat has widened and if she snarls at 'em, our moat has narrowed. We can't see it, but it is going on every day. But it is the key to it. It is the total part of the product delivery. It is having everything associated with it say See's Candy and something pleasant happening. That is what business is all about."
Inventory Risk
One of the keys to the See's business is the freshness of the product. The freshness is maintained by keeping the stores near the factories. This also reduces inventory risk as the factories are able to maintain just-in-time inventory.
Unique Risks
See's relies on the addictive power of sugar to drive sales. This is a common characteristic of a number of Buffett's investments (ie., Dairy Queen, Coke, Heinz, etc.). (For whatever reason, making money off this addiction avoids the moral taint that comes with investments in tobacco companies or casinos.) Is it possible that Americans could reverse course on sugar as they did with cigarettes? Anything is possible, but we would not bet against sugar.


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This is a story about storytelling. Stories are how we learn and pass information down the generations. As a species, we educate our young this way. In the end, if we live long enough, we are all storytellers. We assume the archetype of wise woman or wise man, and try to pass what we have learned to the next generation.
Source: www.archetypeinaction.com
by Skip Conover
See on Scoop.it – Archetype in Action
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Parents in a custody proceeding may be awarded joint custody or one parent may be awarded sole custody.
What is joint custody?
- In Oregon, joint custody means the parents share decision-making responsibilities for a child.
- Parents may have joint custody even when a child lives exclusively with one parent.
- A judge cannot award joint custody in Oregon unless both parents agree to it.
- Joint custody does not do away with a parent's child support obligation.
- Child support is determined by the child support guidelines and is based on the parents' income, the amount of time that the child spends with each parent, and other factors.
What is sole custody?
- Sole custody in Oregon means that one parent makes all major decisions regarding the child.
- Major decisions include but are not limited to the child's religion, education, health care, and where the child lives.
- If either parent objects to joint custody, a judge must decide which parent will have sole custody.
Factors a judge will consider in a custody proceeding:
- A judge's primary consideration in awarding custody is the best interests of the child.
- In determining the best interests of a child, the court will consider numerous factors such as the emotional ties between the child and other family members and the parents' interest and attitude toward the child.
- The judge will also consider the conduct, marital status, income, social environment or lifestyle of a parent only if it is shown that those factors are causing or may cause emotional or physical harm to the child. Judges usually are reluctant to separate siblings.
- A judge cannot give custody to a parent just because the parent is the mother or father of the child.
- A judge may consider a child's preference about where he or she wants to live, but a judge does not have to follow the child's wishes.
- A judge may rely on the testimony of expert witnesses such as psychologists, social workers, teachers, counselors, or psychiatrists to decide what is the best custody arrangement for the child.


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It was late July, and this was how we wandered.
In the languid air that followed fitful rain, we commenced shoulder to shoulder, moving east on Thirty-second Street; concrete solid beneath our feet, vast sky overhead. We are about the same height, give or take a few centimeters, and I drew a keenly felt sense of camaraderie from our shared vantage, although he seemed guided by—and intimately attuned to—some impulse that I was not yet familiar with. He seemed at home with each step.
Walking is at the heart of the artist Adler Guerrier's practice. His art springs from his walks along varying paths and trajectories and the sundry pleasures they yield. He takes a granular view of things, focusing on the aspects of landscapes that are easily overlooked. Even things that most might casually tread underfoot—a truculent patch of weeds or dense foliage—are interesting to Guerrier, who pores over his surroundings with careful attention and alacrity. At the time of our first walk last summer, he had recently sold his car and remarked that his new daily commute, consisting of walks and rides on public transport, offered "the opportunity to observe little things." Over the course of two walks we took late last year near his studio housed in Miami's Bakehouse Art Complex, he discerned the difference that the time of day induces in the city's character, registered a host of flowering trees—almond and mango and tamarind, among others—and described the architectural styles of the facades of various homes, dating them to their approximate eras.
His figure, tall and lithe, struck a note of calm within the landscape. He was wearing a bright blue t-shirt that evoked summer and a pair of gray-white trousers that fell loosely about him. His deep brown face emitted an avuncular warmth, one that matched the afternoon's own. Here was a man who absorbed the tenor of his city and fashioned from it a propulsive energy.
Guerrier's stride is noticeably unhurried, graceful. His pace has none of the inelegance of the overly industrious walker, no movements strung to the stifling notion of productivity. He moves with even-keeled steps that convey an openness to things yet to be explored, the better to drink in the rhythms, textures, and sights of Miami and its environs, a place altogether remarkable for its geographic and cultural specificity. Guerrier moved to Miami from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as a boy in the late 1980s. He was twelve, and many members of his extended family had already settled in the city. As Guerrier once said to me, Miami is a place replete with potential pictures, composed of endless exposures—an abundance that informs much of his work.
We passed through rows of the winsome, modest single-story homes that line the streets, vivid in their mamey pinks, robin's egg blues, and other confectionery colors that comprise the city's unmistakable palette. Lately Guerrier has been fascinated with the creation of what he calls "immigrant space" within Miami's neighborhoods, and he is developing a film project centered on this phenomenon. For instance, much has been made of the way that people of the African diaspora adorn and furnish domestic spaces, but relatively less of how we fashion exterior space, which Guerrier believes is an equally viable realm for families to "insist on" their presence and sensibilities. He has referred to this as a kind of "projected poetics," a way to telegraph some measure of their desires and their ambitions. According to this speculation, the exteriors of immigrant homes take on a particular cast, with distinctive ornamentation and the preponderance of certain plants (sugarcane, St. Augustine grass, flowering shrubs) cultivated in stretches of yard that tell of life on a Caribbean island, of a long-ago departure that has settled into something like an arrival.
The Guerrier dérive proceeds at an easygoing clip. He roves purposefully for a few blocks in a single direction before abruptly pivoting to venture in another. He swivels his head, his eyes rivet on something, he sidles up for closer inspection, he crouches. He takes the occasional pause to orient himself, to check the direction of the wind. And then there's the sudden, almost absolute recognition that a given sight will yield a fruitful image. He takes a photo. He starts again. It's a kind of choreography that cannot be rehearsed.
For all its idiosyncrasies, Guerrier's walking is not without antecedents. With his activity, he files into a long, vagrant procession of walkers that stretches back to the nineteenth century, each ambling along through their respective milieux. The familiar figures pressed amid the throng: Baudelaire, the unnamed narrator of Poe's "Man of the Crowd," Walter Benjamin. Historically, urban walking has been alternately rendered as the lively, curious stroll, deadening traipse through the capital-blighted metropolis, or the nimble, brisk excursion into city streets; a means to elude the stultifying effects of modern life in the vein of the Situationists. Guerrier has engaged each of these traditions throughout his career. My first encounter with Guerrier's work was fortuitous. I was an undergraduate enrolled in a course called "Psychogeography's Prehistory." Throughout the semester we rooted around for strains of psychogeographic thought in the work of artists and writers who lived in the decades before the term was coined by the theorist Guy Debord in the late twentieth century. But no Black subjects were presented in this history; our investigations skirted the complications of race. One afternoon in the library, while I leafed through the catalog of Freestyle, an exhibition mounted at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, an image bolted from the page. Its caption read: Flâneur (nyc/miami), 1999-2001. There he was, a flâneur—a Black flâneur. Guerrier invites us to consider the contours of Black flânerie, its stakes and complexities, pleasures and constraints. As the essayist Garnette Cadogan has observed, "Walking while Black restricts the experience of walking, renders inaccessible the classic Romantic experience of walking alone."
The flâneur series is perhaps Guerrier's best-known body of work. In it, the artist wanders through a dozen urban landscapes in New York City and Miami, his back turned to us. He is dwarfed by gleaming skyscrapers that stretch to precipitous heights, set in stark relief as he approaches the lurid glare of a bodega; his silhouette drifts against the crepuscular glow of a Miami sky. In recent years, Guerrier's own body has mostly vacated the frame of his pictures. For about a decade, he has regularly produced a series of lush, close-up color photographs of vegetation. "The focus on botanicals and flowers," Guerrier told me, "became for me at one point a nice shortcut to talk about landscape." These photographs bear a startling resemblance to William Eggleston's Jamaica Botanical Series, a little-known body of early work taken in Jamaica in the late 1970s. Like Eggleston, Guerrier is less interested in abiding by conventional frames of reference for composing landscape scenes than in seizing on moments, often angular and oblique, that offer unique ways of seeing and apprehending the landscape. It's their obliqueness that unsettles our sense of place: How to distinguish these photographs from those taken in, say, Ìbàdàn or Houston? The images look as if they were sliced from a larger, more expansive tapestry. They nudge at the four edges that define them, gesturing to a world beyond the frame.
On our second walk, in late October, we headed west along Thirty-second Street, into the neighborhood traversed by I-95, which cleaves Allapattah from Wynwood. In the weeks since our first meeting, Guerrier had opened a pair of group exhibitions he'd organized that featured works by artists working primarily in Miami: the first, Notices in a Mutable Terrain, at Pablo Atchugarry Gallery; the second, between the legible and the opaque: approaches to an ideal in place, at Bakehouse. Guerrier had been turning over ideas for these shows in his mind for some time. "These are two shows that reveal themselves as being an extended essay that I've already had notes for," he said. As with other projects conceived by Guerrier, poetry provides a generative understructure. (He cited the poet Legna Rodríguez Iglesias as an influence). He does not consider himself a curator, nor does he overstate the need for expertise in the curatorial enterprise. Rather he relied on the relationships and experiences—the "texts that he consulted"—with other artists as he readied the exhibitions. The results were bracing: two varied, compelling shows in a city whose art scene and infrastructure is growing but remains fledgling. "There's a great desire among artists in this scene for such exhibitions," he told me. "They are not happening as much as they should."
Guerrier took less photos on this walk. We were largely preoccupied with our winding conversation and looking. The afternoon was blanketed by the raucous barking of numerous guard dogs. There were more houses, beautifully and eccentrically painted. There was a discarded bucket in which dried paint, glowing with an artificial pistachio hue, was suspended like stalagmites. There was the drone of cars and construction, occasionally muffling our voices.
Guerrier's method fittingly finds an analogue in poetry. He leads his walks with an air of deliberate suppleness, open to the inevitable drifts and detours that constitute a walk. In poetry, the volta marks a shift in tone, signals a digression. Abrupt and swift, it ushers the reader down some unexpected path. Guerrier, of course, is acutely sensitive to the ways that walking affords opportunities to engage the poetry of everyday life; he's never obdurate. Rather, like the volta, he swerves, rounds a corner, and is met with fresh possibilities.
July 2019. A low, rusting chain-link fence, beyond which stands a pair of rain-slicked, mismatched foldable chairs in a neatly trimmed yard. The fresh rain had pooled in the seat of one, reflecting the wide palm frond that hovered above it. "I don't see a giant pool, I don't see a bar pit here. I see a table and chairs," Guerrier said. "This signals sitting down, talking, and just listening to air passing through. It's just enough to say, '"I live here, and I use my space and, yes, you can see me, but it's not about you.'"
July 2019. A rain-swept dirt yard strewn with tiny multicolored toys, the kind belonging to dolls and dollhouses.
July 2019. A tall mango tree stands within a wide lot. Telephone wires lay aslant the scene.
"When I was a kid this right here was heaven. A big lot, open, no fence—"
"Soccer," I cut in.
"Well, soccer is one thing, though we would play American football on the street…"
"It has a mango tree," he continued. "Every kid in the neighborhood would be eyeing this tree."
July 2019.
October 2019. Two patterned dresses out to dry hang from a wrought iron covering, swaying in the breeze, possessing a quality one finds in the photographs of Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
October 2019. Baked goods arrayed around the base of a palm tree, an offering. The copper pennies glisten as they catch the light. There were other such offerings left at trees found along the same street. A scene deeply Miami in character, a startling reminder of the many Afro-diasporic religions practiced here.
October 2019. A shrub springs from a scant patch of ground, propped against a two-tone building. It looks as though it has burst open the iron gate that abuts it, hanging ajar.
October 2019.
This essay is part of Burnaway's yearlong series on States of Leisure.
Find out more about the three themes guiding the magazine's publishing activities for the remainder of 2020 here.


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The Classic carries four brace and is very stylish functional and comfortable to wear. It is designed and hand made in England by craftsmen with over 80 years combined experience and will give you many years of service.
Please Note: The Velveteen Classic in Forest Green is currently out of stock.


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Contrary to the growing view that low-income communities are dysfunctional and dependent, Church Action on Poverty's experience over the last 30 years has proved again and again that these communities not only understand the root causes of poverty, but are highly effective at creating lasting solutions to the problems they face.
The Manchester-based charity has worked alongside thousands of people from some of the poorest, most neglected communities across the north of England and beyond, supporting, educating and empowering individuals to effect change.
Instead of imposing policies or top-down solutions, Church Action on Poverty uses radical, participatory tools that help people in poverty access power and education, creating a network of social change that continues to grow. People like Sarah Whitehead. A 28-year-old mum-of one from Weaste, Salford, Sarah had some hopes and ideas for improving her neighbourhood, but little idea of how to make things happen.
She was encouraged to sign up with Church Action on Poverty's Community Pride programme in 2010. Over the next few months, Sarah developed the skills and confidence to transform her rubbish-filled alley into a community garden, inspiring others to do the same; she also helped create the Weaste Area Forum, who have set up a jobs centre, community gym, and cafe.
Sarah is now, in turn, running a Community Pride training programme for men in Salford who want to re-enter education and work.
She says:
Other people have come to me and said, 'You're an inspiration'. I want to be heard and have my say. Church Action on Poverty has helped me create changes with my voice. And that just proves to me that I can do it, and I should continue to.
Through the Changemakers programme, Kath Carter, of Stockton-on-Tees, has trained as a community leader; she is now a leading stalwart of Church Action on Poverty partner Thrive Teesside. She says:
I was the carer for my husband and son and still am, also looking after my grandchildren on weekends and school holidays. I had lost all connection with the outside world, and was watching it go by through the barriers of a window and a TV screen.
Thrive has allowed the dormant me to blossom again. Even though the problems of life have not changed, I feel valued and confident enough to enter full life again.
Last year, Thrive uncovered huge dissatisfaction amongst customers with the high credit charges, poor customer service, and a lack of transparency of a high cost lending company, Buy As You View (BAYV). Based in Cardiff, BAYV sells TVs and other household appliances to over 100,000 people nationally.
Most local projects would respond by encouraging customers to get help from the local Citizens' Advice Bureau and seek redress on an individual basis. But having been trained in community organising, Kath's response was to challenge the way the company itself operated – at the very top – by seeking a meeting with the boss of the company, Graham Clarke.
Kath and colleagues produced a spoof TV advert criticising BAYV, which was watched by over 1,000 people. CAP supporters in churches across the country then emailed and telephoned Mr Clarke, politely demanding that he meet with Thrive to respond to their concerns.
Mr Clarke agreed to fly his senior management team from Cardiff to Stockton, to meet with Kath and six of his customers. Having, in Graham's words, 'had thrown rocks at him' to get him to the meeting, he accepted the concerns of some of his most long-standing customers, and agreed to work with Thrive to bring together other high-cost lenders with the Office of Fair Trading.
This roundtable has spent the past few months developing an industry wide code for responsible lending, which will benefit up to 325,000 customers of high-cost lending companies.
This week – to mark its 30th anniversary – Church Action on Poverty is launching a new Powered by People UK network with partner organisations in Manchester, Teesside, Birmingham and North Wales. The charity is inviting churches and other groups across the country to partner with people in poverty to help bring about lasting changes to communities across the UK.
The message is clear: people power does work. The power of ordinary people; trained, encouraged and supported to challenge the practices of powerful institutions in society; to reclaim power.
Niall Cooper is the Manchester-based National Coordinator of Church Action on Poverty. To find out more, visit www.church-poverty.org.uk


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Global Arrays
Global Arrays, or GA, is the library developed by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for parallel computing. GA provides a friendly API for shared-memory programming on distributed-memory computers for multidimensional arrays. The GA library is a predecessor to the GAS (global address space) languages currently being developed for high-performance computing.[1][2][3][4]
|parallel, one-sided message passing, imperative (procedural), structured
|First appeared
|Stable release
5.5/August 2016
|Typing discipline
|static, weak
The GA toolkit has additional libraries including a Memory Allocator (MA), Aggregate Remote Memory Copy Interface (ARMCI), and functionality for out-of-core storage of arrays (ChemIO). Although GA was initially developed to run with TCGMSG, a message passing library that came before the MPI standard (Message Passing Interface), it is now fully compatible with MPI. GA includes simple matrix computations (matrix-matrix multiplication, LU solve) and works with ScaLAPACK. Sparse matrices are available but the implementation is not optimal yet.
GA was developed by Jarek Nieplocha, Robert Harrison, R. J. Littlefield, Manoj Krishnan, and Vinod Tipparaju. The ChemIO library for out-of-core storage was developed by Jarek Nieplocha, Robert Harrison and Ian Foster.
The GA library is incorporated into many quantum chemistry packages, including NWChem, MOLPRO, UTChem, MOLCAS, and TURBOMOLE. The GA library is also incorporated into sub-surface code STOMP[5]
The GA toolkit is free software, licensed under a self-made license.
- Nieplocha, Jarek; Harrison, Robert (1997). "Shared Memory Programming in Metacomputing Environments: The Global Array Approach". The Journal of Supercomputing. 11 (2): 119–136. doi:10.1023/A:1007955822788.
- Nieplocha, Jarek (2006). "Advances, Applications and Performance of the Global Arrays Shared Memory Programming Toolkit". International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 20 (2): 203–231. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.133.9926. doi:10.1177/1094342006064503.
- Nieplocha, Jaroslaw; Harrison, Robert J.; Littlefield, Richard J. (1996). "Global arrays: A nonuniform memory access programming model for high-performance computers". The Journal of Supercomputing. 10 (2): 169–189. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.41.5891. doi:10.1007/BF00130708.
- Tipparaju, Vinod; Krishnan, Manoj; Palmer, Bruce; Petrini, Fabrizio; Nieplocha, Jarek (2008). "Towards Fault Resilient Global Arrays". In Bischof, Christian; Bücker, Martin; Gibbon, Paul; Joubert, Gerhard R.; Lippert, Thomas; Mohr, Bernd; Peters, Frans (eds.). Parallel Computing: Architectures, Algorithms and Applications. Advances in Parallel Computing. 15. Amsterdam: IOS Press. pp. 339–345. ISBN 978-1-58603-796-3. ISSN 0927-5452. OCLC 226966397.
- "Gordon Bell Finalist at SC09 - GA Crosses the Petaflop Barrier". PNNL. 2009.


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Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs (Baylor University Press, 2013) analyzes Steve Jobs' uncanny ability to integrate philosophical and religious thought with technological genius, laying the groundwork for Apple's ubiquity today. As it turns out, culture was eager to find meaning in the burgeoning technological revolution, naming Jobs as its prophet and Apple's advertising as its gospel. Read as Robinson discusses the cult of Apple in its founder, Steve Job's, ability to combine art with technology as it analyzes the Apple store design and the modernity's effect on religion and social relationships. This excerpt is taken from the Introduction: Media Technology and Cultural Change.
In 2011 by one estimate the most photographed landmark in New York City was not Rockefeller Center or Times Square; it was the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. The shimmering glass cube is otherworldly. The $7 million structure stands thirty-two feet high and features a glass spiral staircase wrapped around a glass elevator. A glowing Apple logo floats in the center of the cube. Inside the store, there are no shelves or boxes, just wooden tables with Apple's glowing products on display. Faithful consumers wander the cavernous interior admiring Apple devices in a virtual "cathedral of consumption."
In his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo's archdeacon looks up at the Notre-Dame Cathedral with a book in his hand and says, "This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice." Hugo explains the archdeacon's comment this way:
It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable.
The cultural authority of the cathedral was giving way to the revolution of ideas unleashed by the printing press and books. Hugo's parable is instructive for the modern age as well. The authority of the printed page is now giving way to the universality of glass screens.
The transcendent Apple store design fits a historical pattern wherein the dominant media technology of an age acquires a sacred status. The baroque design of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the vaulted ceiling of the Long Room in Trinity College Library in Dublin are testaments to the sacred status granted to books as precious vessels of knowledge and cultural patrimony. When books were king, their homes were built in the highest architectural style of the day. Libraries were imagined as sacred spaces because they were instruments for transmitting culture to future generations, promoting community, and organizing chaos.
The Apple Store is a shrine to the modern media technologies that now perform these tasks. Computers and smartphones have become tools for living as they have been integrated into nearly every facet of social and cultural life in the technological society. The durability of stone and paper is giving way to the ephemerality of bits and screens. Book and screen will continue to coexist, but our modes of expression are progressively beginning to favor the screen over the page. Patterns of thinking once routinized by the linear and logical flow of print are becoming more nonlinear and impressionistic by virtue of our heavy interaction with screen media and interactive technology. We are beginning to think differently as a result of the new dominant media technologies.
The Apple Store design also resembles La Grande Arche in Paris, a massive cube built to honor the secular humanitarian ideals of postwar France. La Grande Arche is large enough to fit the Notre-Dame Cathedral inside its 348-foot-wide hollow center. La Grande Arche stands in stark contrast to the curvaceous Notre-Dame Cathedral, a baroque building representing old world tradition and fading cultural authority. The modernist cube buttresses the sky, not with spires and gargoyles, but with precise lines and angles, a symbol of rational and disenchanted cultural aspirations. Despite their aesthetic contrast with the cathedrals of old, La Grande Arche and the Apple Store both represent a social order that is deemed inviolable, clothed with an aura of factuality, and vigorously maintained by its adherents. Both monuments to modernism glorify technology and the secular ideals of the age.
Reading the Rhetoric of Technology
The beliefs and values of the technological age are embedded in a web of cultural relationships. The representation and practice of technology are composed of a diffuse set of rituals and rhetoric that resist tidy categorization. Architecture provides a few clues about the beliefs and values of a particular age, but it is in the popular texts of the mass media that a more detailed picture emerges. The images and slogans of technology advertising provide a computer catechism of sorts, teaching the consumer the goods (and evils) of different products and services. Just as the stained glass and statuary of medieval cathedrals educated converts and the illiterate, the iconic images and parables of advertising reveal the virtues of new technology to the buying public.
The iconography of the Apple computer company provides a fitting case study for looking at the ways in which technology and the sacred have been conflated in the modern age. The Apple brand is the latest in a long line of American symbols that have captured the national imagination and spawned a "cult" of loyalists. Well before Apple, the most photographed sites in the early twentieth century were places like the Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate Bridge, where tourists united in a collective sense of wonder and nationalism. Standing at the gaping mouth of the Grand Canyon evoked dread and awe, a mix of emotions that made for a sublime encounter.
The sense that the world is charged with grandeur and mystery has largely faded in the wake of a dogmatic deference to rationalism in the modern world. As a result, the world has lost some of its primordial magic. Thus, an electrifying encounter with a technological wonder reinvests the world with a transcendent significance. In a country with divergent religious views, these collective moments of wonder provide an important social bond.
One of America's great industrial feats, the Golden Gate Bridge, was an answer to the problem of isolation and disconnect. Suspended in the air, the bridge spans an immense physical divide, connecting two cities and millions of people. The bridge is a tremendous feat of art and engineering that fuels a collective faith in our ability to harness technology to overcome the chasms that separate humanity. Communication technologies work in much the same way. The metaphysical space that separates individuals is viewed as an obstacle to more empathic relationships and social cohesion. The imaginary bridges we build with media technologies seem to move us toward a more perfect communion. A noble aspiration to be sure, but it may not be true.
The orientation of personal technology is like its name, highly personal—directed toward the individual rather than the collective. It has led to what the famed sociologist of religion Emile Durkheim called the "cult of the individual." Durkheim saw the cult of the individual on the horizon as a strong theoretical possibility given the speed with which rationalization was draining religion of its power to provide a meaningful social bond. Transcendence was no longer something to be sought "out there." The sacred relocated to the subjective experience of the individual. With the advent of personal technologies—symbols of radical individualism realized—the theory appears to have some value.
The cult of Apple is shorthand for the devotion of Apple technology enthusiasts, but their fidelity and fervor point to a more fundamental link between the cult of technology and the cult of the individual. Apple founder Steve Jobs is an allegorical figure for reading the ways in which technology and individual value systems intersect to produce an implicit religion. Technology, like religion, becomes a site where the physical and the metaphysical meet. The promotion of modern technology revives dreams of communion brought on by networked information. The objects that transmit ephemeral bits of culture, promote virtual community, and organize the digital chaos have become sacred objects. Jesus Martín-Barbero puts it this way:
Despite all the promise of modernity to make religion disappear, what has really happened is that religion has modernized itself. . . . What we are witnessing is not the conflict of religion and modernity, but the transformation of modernity into enchantment by linking new communication technologies to the logic of popular religiosity.
The roots of technological faith can be found, ironically enough, in the romanticism of the mid-nineteenth century, a contemplative response to the technological and spiritual changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth-century American art and poetry echoed a romantic spirit of perfectibility and spiritual encounter between the virgin wilderness and the individual soul. Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau believed that religious institutions corrupted individual purity, and so they sought a self-reliant spirituality divorced of creeds and dogmas. Modern ideas about monism have their roots in this American romanticism, a spiritual reflection of democratic ideals and the sacred status of the individual in early American political thought. As railroads and telegraph lines transformed the natural landscape, the language of transcendence began to adopt technological metaphors. Emerson saw the new technologies as expressions of a new metaphysical view: "Our civilization and these ideas are reducing the earth to a brain. See how by telegraph and steam the Earth is anthropologized."
A century later, technology theorists like Teilhard de Chardin would revive Emerson's vision in the form of the noosphere, an idea that Earth was evolving toward a superconsciousness by virtue of electronic communication. The rhetoric of technology that emerged from the foment of the 1960s counterculture described a new nature that married the metaphysical and the technological. The 1967 poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Richard Brautigan combined computers with utopian aspirations: "I like to think / (it has to be!) / of a cybernetic ecology / where we are free of our labors / and joined back to nature, / returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, / and all watched over / by machines of loving grace." At the heart of the countercultural movement was something vaguely spiritual—a desire for more perfect communion with nature and with one another, a new consciousness.
The coupling of technology and romanticism, science and spirituality, has fostered what American sociologist Philip Rieff has called "the triumph of the therapeutic." Under these conditions, the moral ideal is a person of leisure, "released by technology from the regimental discipline of work so as to secure his sense of well-being in highly refined alloplastic ways." The high priests of such an age appear in the form of media icons like Oprah Winfrey, doctors turned mystics like Deepak Chopra, and technology gurus like Steve Jobs. Each of these celebrities supports the cult of the individual by offering psychological and technological salvation to a disenchanted world.
Technology has not always inspired loving grace and flights of spiritual fancy, however. The Luddite movement of the early nineteenth century in England saw textile workers engage in the destruction of mechanized looms in protest of the encroaching automation of labor. The Luddites feared for their livelihood as the Industrial Revolution introduced labor-saving machines that made many workers expendable. Such a dramatic change to a centuries-old way of life was a shock to the economic and cultural system and sowed the seeds for the romantic movement. It was art and poetry that rescued humans from their conflict with machines by invoking an escape into nature. Apple's Steve Jobs believed that combining art and technology would release people from the old antagonisms. The Apple narrative inspired by Jobs is mythic in its ability to reimagine technology, not as a dehumanizing force, but as something liberating and natural.
This excerpt has been reprinted from Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagiantion of Steve Jobs by Brett T. Robinson, published by Baylor University Press, 2013.


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Read it at CNN
The Obama administration will break the ice with Egypt's newly-elected government for the first time this week. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the country Saturday on a mission to highlight U.S. "support for Egypt's democratic transition," said her deputy William J. Burns. New president Mohammed Morsi needs all the help he can get, as he attempts to secure control over a nation with several well-resourced, well-armed stakeholders: from the military to his own Muslim Brotherhood. Clinton also plans to raise the issue of womens' rights in the new Egypt. In coming months, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will also make the trip, and a potential presidential meeting may be in the works.


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A small pure silver stud holds a handmade resin disc hanging at 2 inches long. Pinks and whites mix with holographic confetti. This creates an opalescent semi-transparent sparkle that reflects a rainbow of colors. This pair of earrings is totally one-of-a-kind, as part of my October study of color and light.
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Using over-the-air software updates to improve customer experience, enable cost savings and reduce carbon emissions
Key facts
- Tesla Motors¹ designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, pioneering electric vehicle technology, including batteries and periodic overthe-air software updates for select car models.
- Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, it has approx. 1,200 employees and has received $823 million in private funding and over $2.3 billion in government subsidies during their development stages.
- Tesla is the only manufacturer in the world providing automatic over-the-air firmware updates that allow the car to improve safety, performance and infotainment capabilities remotely.
- The company is using over-the-air updates to remotely improve original mechanical design features, including the look and feel of the touchscreen, which can be upgraded to continuously meet consumer expectations; Tesla recently launched an autopilot feature which controls the speed and position of the car when on highways, although the user still has to hold the wheel, the car controls everything else.
- Tesla's over-the-air updates save consumers time and money; they are also beneficial for the environment with fewer carbon emission being emitted from visits to the dealer.
- IHS estimates over-the-air updates will save manufacturers a collective $2.7 billion in 2015.
- To date, Tesla have sold over 50,000 vehicles on the road worldwide (2015) and it is forecast that over 500,000 vehicles will be in circulation by 2020.
- In 2012, Tesla launched the Model S designed from the ground up to be 100% electric.
- Since 2015, all cars are equipped with the combination of camera, radar and ultrasonic sensors that enable functions such as adaptive cruise control or automated lane-changing and further over-the-air updates.
- Tesla uses a lean development method for their software development. CEO Elon Musk explains how with software developments you can get amazing things done with small teams.
Tesla is one of more than 100 case studies identified as part of the World Economic Forum's Digital Transformation of Industries initiative. An overview of the DTI program can be found here.
1. Sources: Tesla, IHS, WEF/Accenture Analysis


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From Exuberant Hanging Gardens
Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my attention because she is such an attentive writer.
Leslie Williams's first book, Success of the Seed Plants, wields its words like an axe. Its dark and strange approach to the natural world shows grace and intelligence. It is a serious, mysterious, and spirited take on humanity through the subjects of plants, rural America, and the bargain people and their environment have struck. Williams is like a twenty-first century Transcendentalist, finding spiritual breath in all manner of leaves, flowers, and branches, yet—as in Hawthorne—a gloom always lurks just below the surface of the poems.
Williams is a master of diction, especially when she seeks the inscrutability of the natural world; this diction is connected to a tone that is neither affectionate nor menacing. The speaker, who is removed and speaks in the third-person in section one, and is a closer and more attentive first-person in section two, is so adept at precision and sensuality of her word choice, that they appear spontaneous, yet inevitable. The best poems in this book are all stark, shocking beauty and insinuating splendor.
Take, for example, the end of "Notes on the State of Virginia":
…left for dark
in Virginia's spelled heart, hoof-sweet—
while boundless July, laden with evenings, returns
with trinkets and wares, trundles out to her farthest
field with all the stars finespun, coming on—
the still pool still fringed
with the goldenseal, with scuppernong.
Williams alludes to the speaker's emotional state, and like the Transcendentalists' spirit at the poem's core, connects that state to the seasonal pleasures of the environment, and to language itself. The play with sound creates texture and visual interest not with rhyme, but with consonance. The double meaning of the word "still" in the last couplet make the reader aware of the speaker's ancestral attachment to the land, yet makes a point of her alienation from it.
Like many first books, Williams shows facility in a variety of forms, some of which are her own invention; these forms range from intimate couplets to sculptural tercets to freer spaced lines splashed across the page. Of this variety, I find her controlled forms, like the couplets, to be most effective given her subject matter and challenging, yet pliable language. Her more experimental attempts, where syntax is removed and replaced with white space, are less interesting and useful. These experiments feel like mere lists; since they are formless the content has nowhere to go. Fortunately there are not many of these, but "As in the Sidewalk Gardens" is one such poem. Without the architecture of lines to tether it, the subject matter, which includes such terrible topics as a rose, a dead bird, a trellis, "undue love," solitude, the phrase "a kind of" as a modifier, and the attempt at a narrative. Compared to the majority of poems here they are unreadable.
The book is intelligently organized, an immensely difficult task when a book is finally finished. Some of the strongest, most surprising poems appear in Williams's third section, such as "Pressing Flowers" and "Amaryllis is an Alias." These poems can be placed in a contextual conversation with perennial favorites like Marianne Moore's "Silence" or "O to Be a Dragon." Williams offers descriptions with such grace and accuracy that they sometimes astonish: "This flower is out for itself. Full velveteen throttle," she explains in a poem that discusses the sexual metaphoric power of a flower.
The threads in Williams's poem often allude to connections between the natural world and the world of culture, or human expression. Her poems therefore are self-referential pieces of evidence of these connections. For example, in "Small Diaspora" she relates boys playing little league baseball and the organization of suburban gardens: "From exuberant hanging gardens / populous with knaves— // rakes, lotharios, libertines, / paladins, princelings, brigands, rogues, / paramours, suitors swain—" Her deliberately Elizabethan language increases the formality and irony her point. Her sons in fact are part of an ordered natural world; the stakes and flowerbeds merely arrange elements of entropy and detritus: soil, decay, predation, unawareness. A couple of pages later, a poem called "The Rake" takes the double meaning of the first term in her list and employs it differently. Here, an especially trite Romantic idea—"Spring is sprung / from winter's prison!"—complete with exclamation point, is just the beginning of a meditation on the beauty and perhaps insignificance the speaker feels observing—perhaps feeling distinct and apart—a garden.
Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my attention because she is such an attentive writer. This attention is a form of generosity. She makes poems that are meant to be savored. She was a terrific choice for the Bellday Prize, but unfortunately the production quality of the book itself is unappealing. It has a plain green cover with Photoshopped images of spores and a amateurish, last-minute quality to the design. The matte cover, with its plain type, suggests a much weaker and more sentimental book than what the book actually is. In fact, the book is the complete opposite of what the cover suggests, which is a literal interpretation of "seed plants." This is a shame. The book is fantastic, careful, and a significant accomplishment.


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We offers Fresh Fruits in Navi Mumbai,Maharashtra,India
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Indian agricultural industry is one of the most trusted choice in the global marketplace. Each year, Indian agricultural domain offers world's market with a premium range of
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Fiery Passion Deer Bone Suncatcher
$ 82.00
This unique, one-of-a-kind, handmade suncatcher was created from ethically sourced deer jaw bone. It features lamp work glass beading, semi precious gemstones, high quality chandelier crystals and brass bells.
The piece measures at 24" from ring to the bottom crystal, each strand is between 12.5" - 15" in length and the dear jaw bone measures at 8" across.


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Out of Africa. Why People Migrate
The EU is struggling to cope with the so-called "migration crisis" that has emerged over the past few years. Designing the right policies to address immigration requires a deep understanding of its root causes. Why do Africans decide to leave their home countries? While the dream of a better life in Europe is likely part of the explanation, one also needs to examine the prevailing living conditions in the large and heterogeneous sub-Saharan region.
This Report investigates the actual role of political, economic, demographic and environmental drivers in current migration flows. It offers a comprehensive picture of major migration motives as well as of key trends. Attention is also devoted to the role of climate change in promoting migration and to intra-continental mobility (two-thirds of sub-Saharan migrant flows start and end within the region). Two country studies on Eritrea and Nigeria are also included to get a closer sense of local developments behind large-scale migration to Europe.
INTRODUCTION, Paolo Magri
1. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Why Africans Migrate, Giovanni Carbone
2. Demystifying African Migration: Trends, Destinations and Returns, Marie-Laurence Flahaux
3. Climate Change and Migration: Insights from the Sahel, Sara Vigil
4. The Hidden Side of the Story: Intra-African Migration, Blessing U. Mberu, Estelle M. Sidze
5. Fleeing Repression: Inside Eritrea, Nicole Hirt
6. Nigeria: Leaving Africa's Giant, Aderanti Adepoju
CONCLUSIONS. Policy Implications for the EU