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Hook– a catchy musical phrase which forms the basis of a popular song.
Most often when discussing the term "hook" in music it is to a catchy melodic part you remember. It might be a favorite song or those tapeworm-like parasites that won't leave you under threat of death. As I continue to explore the genre of progressive metal/dent/ambidjent, the concept of a rhythmic hook is forefront.
Two reasons for this; as a drummer, rhythmic hooks have been how I identify my favorite parts and players. The other is that the technical, detuned, heavy style of the genre depends on drones and simple octave patterns that lock rhythmically with the drums. Why is it so simple? Mainly because it sounds so heavy; but the style depends on a locked groove that communicates to the listener on a primitive level.
Groove– a pronounced, enjoyable rhythm.
Drums have been used for communication,worship,celebration, meditation and warfare. The open groove will cause a group to move in unison, clap, cheer. It's a heartbeat, a dance step , a call to arms. Even in these times of touchscreens and Twitter, the drum beat effects even the most stoic among us. What does this have to do with this rather small segment of the music making and listening public?
Almost all music is based on repetition. In rhythm, melody, lyric and form, you can recognize a part after it repeats a few times. Those catchy summer sing-a-longs would not be without it. A groove is extremely important in certain kinds of music, like funk and dance. Heavier music like metal, over its history, not so much. Yet a player like John Bonham of Led Zeppelin or John Stanier of Helmet groove like crazy. How can a genre both have or have not a groove? To me it is a matter of intent and syncopation on behalf of the drummer and the rest of the band. Head banging is a kind of groove but a real groove is deeper, pelvic, snake necking, sexual. For a form of music based on riffs, a groove should be a no brainier.
Scientifically: pulse (signal processing), a rapid and transient change from a baseline
In physiology, a pulse is the throbbing of arteries as an effect of heartbeat
In physics, a pulse (physics) is a single and abrupt emission of particles or radiation
In music. a pulse (music) is a rhythmic succession of sounds
Jazz and progressive music can lack pulse and groove but also include it, if that's the intent. These are words musicians love to argue about, like "swing" and "groove". In interviews Matt Halpern of Periphery discusses groove and pulse almost preliminarily , as he appears to have studied those who have come before very thoroughly. He also has another project called Bandhappy, an online education site that has student musicians able to study with their musical heroes. In this day of diversifying income for musicians, heres a way to augment their living even while on the road. I would have eaten this up as a youngster and in fact might pursue it as an old fart, as these guys came to play…
Ok, wandered off into a PSA…
This kind of music is busy and heavy, with necessary ebbs and flows along the way. The rhythmic busyness almost demands harmonic simplicity, as there has to be some form of space as relief and release for the rhythmic intensity. The drums and guitars lock into a pattern, propelling the sound forward, octaves leaps synced with the kick drums, the movement in the feet, the pulse in the chest, the complexity not in harmonic movement but rhythmic. Being a progressive form, this is the starting point. It comes in many favors from the gloss of Periphery to the grit of the more growly bands.
The influence of Meshuggah is pretty strong in many bands, which can be a good thing. The focus on rhythmic complexity does not eliminate harmonic risk, as the 7 and 8 string guitars detuned offer this palette of notes that certainly exist now, menacing, microtonal bending and the wonderful tendency of the low strings to strike sharp before they settle into pitch. This is a different complexity, driven by the instruments nature, the delight for the player as intense for the listener. Chugging against the low open string, the one key center strangely reminding me of African vocal groups who only perform in one key.
As polyrhythmic and odd time as this music can be, some of these drummers really make the effort for the pulse to play through. There are those that no matter how complex the pattern is approach it as 4/4, making the pulse job one with the accents a close second. As much as I am describing this music in traditional terms there is a different kind of composition here, born of the nature of the instrument. As David Byrne stated in an amazing TED talk, the change in venues changed the music written. I suggest that for some, the 7 & 8 string guitar and computer recording & amp modeling technology has effected the way the music has evolved. Now as these acts move from the bedroom to practice rooms to clubs to arenas, it's going to change even more.
There are moments of traditional song form and counterpoint but this style draws the writer back to that open string again and again, leaping and poking between the drums, a linear attack that pushes forward. As with most heavy music, the need for release brings quieter pulse free sections and this is one of the places where the ambient properties shine through. Projects like Cloudkicker and Chimp Spanner create atmospheres that are rather cinematic. In fact much of the visual elements for these bands are futuristic, off world graphics and the melding of computer filters and clearly non-acoustic percussive elements make me feel that part of the Blade Runner future is already here. With due respect, I have to point to David Torn and his deconstructive computer mayhem of his guitar years ago with Splattercell.
There is a vocal blast and release nature in this as well, the screams giving way to "clean" vocals. The problem with some of these bands is they end up sounding like Linkin Park. As I have stated in earlier posts, I am content with the instrumental tracks when a band is doing something interesting musically. Thanks to recording technology and Internet distribution, a band can offer a vocal free version of their album much easier than ever before. The genesis of these bands from instrumental demos on forums to finished album tracks is often followed by fans, a relatively new phenomenon for the end user. As these bands get signed/ distributed for the first time, the listener has already heard the raw riffs and now gets to see the final product, for better or worse,
I lean toward the more ambient offerings, either instrumental or the ones who howl less.
Last week I was truly fortunate to see Tesseract and Animals as Leaders, who are in heavy rotation on my iPod. They clearly can play their instruments and the intricate parts of their albums were clear and concise, maybe too much so. These are performances, the effort put into execution. I look forward to seeing one of these bands improvise a bit, as AAL hinted at.
Recently I began to really appreciate Uneven Structure, a French band who isn't afraid to slow tempos and sing in a normal register. Yeah, I know, I'm behind the curve. They are seen as being part of a Djent "Big 4" by some. I feel that, along with Tesseract, they stand apart vocally with better range and dynamics. The groove is there and melodically the ideas are more fleshed out than other bands. Another band, Monuments, (who are also from Milton Keynes like Tesseract) released an instrumental version of a song from their not yet released album Gnosis which shows the layering of groove, harmony and advancing composition quite clearly.
Add to that the release this week of Vildhjarta's first… This is a strong scene.
I have been fortunate to work with some pretty serious people over the years who are groove-by-trade types and the idea of heavy music that swings or grooves first has found its time. The rule rather than the exception; I can deal with that. Heres to another generation of players, not poseurs.


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Login with username, password and session length
Don I would like to give it a try but first how do you get an image to show up so that you can see the object you are modeling in front of the image. I inserted picture from file and no matter what angle I turn the model all I can see is the image with the model hidden behind it. It does not matter what plane the image is sitting on. Help!!!
how do you get an image to show up so that you can see the object you are modeling in front of the image.
That is pretty sweet Henry.Question, if you loft with Use Compound Profile engaged and you node edit the profiles, does the 3D object update as well?
It might be less lumpy if you were to loft the "more straight" sections, say the three profiles that comprise the handle, those down the leading edge, back edge and body adjacent to the sole, separately, then use face-to-face-lofted connections between them, Henry.
"a breeze to make in Moi with nurbs"What I would like is the ability to pull the edge of an object to conform with an edge of another. For example: The green plate at the bottom is wider in places that the main body of the iron and it is difficult to trace a spline to try and match it. Maybe constraints would do it and I have constraints on TCv12.5. I don't know how to match the two unless I try again and take more time. I'll look up Moi.John
Or you could make the iron in Moi .... a breeze to make in Moi with nurbs and networking.
What tools do you think the original designers of the iron (or is it the X33?) used?
Hi Don, Merry Christmas! Did you get a chance to check out the Moi Ferrari Tutorial?
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Having recently thrown the switch on DNSSEC and DANE/TLSA for a couple of domains, here are some random infos.
The setup of DNSSEC with Bind9 (Debian package bind9) is pretty well covered in various HowTos, so I won't repeat them here. One rather official one is at https://dlv.isc.org/about/using ("ISC does BIND" may sound like a movie title to you, but it's not).
Note: this doesn't work across ABI changes, i.e. when 3.2.0-4-amd64 becomes 3.2.0-5-amd64
Find the package version for the most recently installed kernel:
dpkg -l linux-image-$(uname -r) | awk '/^ii/{ print $3 }'
Get the same information from the running kernel:
uname --kernel-version | awk '{ print $NF }'
When switching some old Xen guests (domUs) to pygrub, some things to remember:
Error: Boot loader didn't return any data
Using backports is a nice way to get newer versions of software while continuing to use Debian stable. If you ever want to list the packages installed from the backports repository, aptitude can help:
aptitude search '~S ~i ~O"Debian Backports"'
You get the search term "Debian Backports" (the so-called origin) for the backports packages from the output of
apt-cache policy
For a list of valid origins depending on your APT sources, we can filter this by using grep and sort:
apt-cache policy | grep -o o=[^,]* | sort -u
So of course this also works to find out which packages got installed from other repositories.
If you're building packages on a recent Debian-based distribution and are getting
dpkg-deb: file `blah.deb' contains ununderstood data member data.tar.xz , giving up
when trying to install the package on an old system with dpkg version < 1.15.6, you can force the usage of the gzip compression algorithm by changing the dh_builddeb in debian/rules to:
dh_builddeb -- -Z gzip
If you do not have an old-style debian/rules files where all the dh_* calls are listed but only one generic stanza like
dh $@
then you can add
dh_builddeb -- -Zgzip
below that to set the option for dh_builddeb.
© 2004-∞ Wolfgang Karall-Ahlborn


text: Gear up with officially licensed Atlanta Braves Caps from MLB Shop! Browse a great selection of trendy Braves Hats for Men, Ladies, and Kids so every die-hard Braves fan can represent their team in style. From brands like Nike and New Era, you'll have no problem finding the perfect baseball cap to wear come game-day. Ranging from authentic Atlanta Braves Snapbacks and Adjustable Hats to Fitted and Flex Hats, we have any style to choose from. Stay warm with a Braves Beanie or show off your team spirit with Braves Novelty Headwear. No matter how you do it, MLB Shop is your one-stop shop for everything MLB and Atlanta Braves. Remember to check out the rest of our Braves gear to find Jerseys, T-Shirts, Hoodies, and more.


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The 2014 Appling County Recreation Department 13-14 Junior All-Star team won first place in the GRPA State Tournamanet completed in Baxley on Monday, July 14. Team members are Jason Ammons, Joshua Atkinson, Mikel Barlow, John David Black, Drew Dowdney, Price Eason, Hunter Griffin, Elljah Hale, James Jones, Hunter O'Berry, Micah Rentz, Holton Simmons, Tyler Thomason and Jakob Tomberlin. Coaches are Jay Powers, Aaron Kicklighter and Ken Thomason.
Junior Boys All-Star (13-14) Jason Ammons hits a ball against Jeff Davis in the championship game in Nashville/Baxley as the home plate umpire and Jeff Davis catcher Ryan Rush watch the hit.
Junior All-Stars win state
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When I came across the Boston memorial to the 206 Massachusetts victims of September 11, 2001, one day while strolling in the Public Gardens, I knew I had to share my photos and more importantly, the names of all those from Massachusetts who died. We will never forget.
|Taken today, September 11, 2012
Stephen G. Adams, Gertrude "Trudi" Alagero, Anna S.W. Allison, Barbara Arestegui,
The list of names came from 9/11 Victims With Massachusetts Ties (CBS Boston, September 11, 2011). Click on names to read their profiles. The Massachusetts 9/11 Fund has a few activities for tomorrow, September 11, 2012. I am posting this a day early so that some of you might wish to attend tomorrow.


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I will be out in Boulder CO for a work meeting this week, and plan to drive up to Eastern Wyoming from the 6th to the 8th. I am looking to knock three items off of my bucket list. 1) First, pan even a tiny flake of dust gold, with my own pan, out of a stream. 2) see the welcome sign for Yellowstone National Park (pretty easy). And 3) catch a cutthroat trout on a flyrod. I have fished 30+ days throughout Colorado and have never pegged that one off the list!!! Very frustrating, as each trip, I was certain that I would have caught the FINAL major trout species. But, this is the year!
A couple of questions:
1) Anyone living from Yellowstone south to Laramie that wants to go fly fishing or gold panning this weekend? I will, of course, contribute to costs and keep you laughing the whole trip. (Search my old posts. I am a good time.)
2) Anyone guide? I am not looking for a hand holding full day guided effort (actually, I wanted to avoid that). But I would certainly pay someone for a few hours of their busy time to take me to the proper location, point me in the right direction, tell me a tip or two, and then leave me there to figure it out.
3) perhaps there are other ideas that I am not thinking of. Thoughts?
Thanks! I can return the favor some day by taking you duck hunting in SE Missouri this or some future year! I do 10-20 days annually.
Some old posts, to make you laugh or go "hmmm":


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Check out the latest RPG news | Podcasts | Twitch Streams
Can you? Nintendo's website said something specific about that, but I can't remember what and now I can't find it...
Music isn't great and the animations are too slow.Otherwise, I'm really digging it.
Quote from: Ashton on January 17, 2013, 11:51:53 PMMusic isn't great and the animations are too slow.Otherwise, I'm really digging it.I actually like the music! Also, I could be wrong but wasn't there an option to speed up the animations? I didn't want to do that because I was really enjoying them, but I can imagine after 40 hours of play I'd want to speed it up.EDIT: I like the music, though I admit so far it's a bit sparse. The combat tune is fun though!
Woohoo!! I'm so glad to hear that so many people are liking the demo. Now I'm even more excited for the 4th.


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PHOENIX (Thursday, July 28, 2011) -- Attorney General Tom Horne says Arizonans who wish to contribute to the construction of a border fence should only contribute to the state's official website designated for that purpose. That website is: buildtheborderfence.com.
"In the past few days, some consumers may have become confused by a website with a similar Internet address as Arizona's official border fence construction site," Horne said. "That website made changes when the operator was alerted to the possible confusion, but consumers should always exercise caution when donating money. Make sure the entity you're giving the donation to is legitimate and will use the funds for the purpose intended. In the case of the border fence construction, the official website has the Arizona State Seal and the az.gov website banner. Consumers should be wary of any other website that claims to support funding for the border fence."


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We are about to welcome in a brand spankin' new year and people are tossing around resolutions. Many are the same resolutions that are made every year and broken before mid month. Sound familiar? Be honest! We've all done it!
What's my resolution? I am so glad that you asked! I really don't make resolutions because, like you, I break them! I choose, instead, to set a series of small goals that I can easily check off my list once they are accomplished. I already workout so my goal is to be more effective in said workouts. I run so my goal is to sign up for a race and then train like a crazy woman. I don't eat well at all so I want to make better choices to fuel my body.
There are, however, bigger goals that are meant to be on-going throughout the year and mine is a whopper! I want to be the change that I expect to see happen. Whoa! Told ya it was a biggun! I want to be a "doer" not a "sit and complain" type of person. I want to see a need and design a solution. I want to help change the world one hand up or one smile at a time.
I know that changing the world is a tall order but I believe that we all possess some ability on some level that can be used to fuel change! Let me be clear, you do not have to fly half way around the world to "be the change", there are opportunities in each of our backyards. Really all we have to do is open our eyes and bravely take that step, out of our comfort zone, and just do it (sorry Nike)!
Happy and Blessed New to you all! Now, go be the change!


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Louvering A Lid - RamRodder, Part XIV
When the body of our '50 Plymouth came back from the strippers there was some good news and some bad news. The good news was the 61-year-old body shell didn't have a dent to be found. The bad news was it didn't have a floor either and there was some rust in the quarters and below the trunklid. The fabrication of the new floor was shown some time ago and the repairs to the back of the body were documented last month.
With what was done so far we were feeling pretty good about the overall condition of the body—at least until we took a closer look at the trunklid, which hadn't been stripped. When we went to reinstall and check the fit nothing lined up like we remembered. We knew the handle and latch had some issues and suspected the lid had some surprises hidden under the poorly applied filler and dull beige paint. Upon closer inspection our suspicions were confirmed, we found our coupe had been clobbered right in the trunk handle.
It was obvious the trunklid was going to need some work, but that was OK. Plans called for punching some louvers in the lid and straightening the sheetmetal around the handle and license plate indentation wasn't a big deal. While we were at it we were going to lose the Plymouth nameplate (it was broken) and the original trunk handle (also broken) so the holes would have to be filled. All that could be handled, but what had us stumped was why the trunk fit so poorly now when it wasn't too bad originally. It now sat too low in the opening, well below the edge of the body.
The root of our fitment issue became clear when we used some paint sticks to establish a standardized gap all around the edge of the lid before tightening the screws holding it to the hinges. The assist springs had been removed from the hinges when the body was dipped and we left them out while fitting the lid. What we found was even with the attachment screws tight the lid moved up and down in the opening. Take a look at the following photos and you'll see the problem and how we fixed it.


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I'd like to personally thank you, my "Friends and Followers"
for your kind support and patience to put up with my intermittent
lapses in posting as of late.
and I owe it all to YOU.
to ear, actually I am, on the inside, seems I was not gifted with this
outward ability at birth and unfortunately there's no way to download
DNA updates .................pity! LOL!


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What Kinds Of Stress Reduction Techniques Work Best For Cardiac Patients?
Dr. Redford Williams answers the question: 'Best Stress Reduction Techniques?'
-- Question: What kinds of stress reduction techniques work best for cardiac patients?
Answer: We don't have the kind of clinical trials with stress reduction techniques for cardiac patients that we do for drugs like the statins, beta blockers, aspirin, those sorts of things. What we do have is evidence that training people with heart disease in coping skills, and coping skills that can help them to identify those situations that are stressful for them when they're experiencing the stress, so they can evaluate their reaction to that situation and make a rational decision -- whether they need to do something to change the stressor or they need to do something to change that reaction, that frustration, that anger, that adrenaline that they're doing, and not engage in those unhealthy behaviors.
If people can learn to use these kinds of skills to manage stress better, there is evidence from randomized, controlled trials in heart patients, that anxiety levels go down, depression levels go down, social support levels go up, perceived stress levels go down. All of these are subjective reports that people give after the training in these coping skills.
But you can't fake your blood pressure. And these same randomized trials showed that people getting this kind of coping skills training -- patients who have heart disease -- show a decrease in not only their resting blood pressure and heart rate, but also the amount of rise in blood pressure and heart rate when they are stressed in a laboratory mental stress situation.
So there's reason to believe that these kinds of coping skills -- if mastered by people with heart disease -- at least do have the potential to improve the prognosis and to make them more resistant to stress. What we need now, given these encouraging early studies, are larger studies that will document that, in addition to reducing your depression and your blood pressure and your blood pressure reaction to stress, that they also improve your prognosis. And that's the work that needs to be done now.
Next: Are There Different Types Of Stress And Do These Affect The Heart Differently?
Previous: How Does Stress Affect Heart Conditions?


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Preliminary evidence suggests that voting turnout among all Americans was up in the November 2010 election. Compared with the last non-presidential election (2006), both voting turnout experts (Curtis Gans and Michael McDonald) agree that turnout among eligible voters rose 1.1-1.2 percentage points (based on preliminary estimates that will obviously change as all ballots are counted and certified). Regardless of whether one likes the outcome in 2010, it is civic good news that more Americans got involved.
Preliminary evidence suggests electoral turnout rose in at least nine states, and significantly in Texas, Florida and Minnesota. Ohio and Pennsylvania, among other states, seems to have experienced a turnout decline. [Curtis Gans projects voting turnout at 42 percent of registered voters; Michael McDonald believes that 41.5% of voting-eligible Americans turned out to vote.] Note: McDonald has now lowered his turnout estimate 1.2 percentage points to 40.3% (VEP Highest Office Turnout, as of 11/8/10).
But the bad news is what voices are being heard or not heard. Voting turnout rates were down among young voters (18-29) and blacks made up a lower percentage of voters in 2010 than in 2008 when Obama's candidacy excited African-Americans to vote. For example, blacks made up 12% of voters in 2008 and appeared to make up just 10% of voters in 2010 (based on exit polls). This drop, if it holds up in more authoritative numbers like the Current Population Survey would negate this encouraging finding reported in 2008 that the black-white voting gap had disappeared. [Exit polls suggest that Hispanics maintained their share of the electorate, rising from 7% in 2008 to 8% in 2010, although one would have to compare this rise against their expanding voting-eligible numbers to truly understand whether their political voice was diluted, and if so, how much.] It wasn't a simple story of the richest folks' accounting for more of the votes, since those earning $100,000 or more accounted for 26% of the votes in both 2008 and 2010, but due to the elimination of restrictions on corporate campaign contributions in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United case, the wealthy disproportionately had chances to influence election outcomes even before voters got to their polling places.


text: Tell us About You Listing your venue on our website is as easy as 1-2-3! Make sure you list all the relevant details which best describe what makes your venue a cut above the rest... Full Name Email Phone Number Next Tell us About Your Event Date of event Number of Guests Start Time Why are you planning this event? Business Pleasure Is your date flexible? Yes No Will you need food for this event? (Optional) Yes No What type of drinks will you need for this event? (Optional) Alcoholic Cocktails Beverages Tea & Coffee Other Do you need event management? Yes No Will you need audio and visual equipment at your event? Yes No Any other Message back Request a Booking Thank You! One of our venue experts will be in touch with you shortly.


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Data Outbox
You have no data files selected for downloading. While browsing data, you can download files immediately or add them to your download list. When you see the icon, clicking it will add the simulator file to your outbox and bring you back to this page.
You can find data files contributed for individual motors by using the regular Motor Search. If you prefer to download files in bulk, you can use the search form below to find data files directly.


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Explore what is changing the lives of tens of thousands of people in more than 170 countries around the world.
Explore what the 3 key tools of Access are and how you can use them to start creating the change you desire.
Receive tips of what you can choose to get started. You know what will work for you!
Hear from people all over the world about how they are different after Access Consciousness.
Read news articles, watch videos, listen to pods and radio shows – you can find Access Consciousness in many media channels!
Explore some of the most frequently asked questions about Access Consciousness.
There are thousands of Access Consciousness events and classes offered weekly around the world. You can search for a class by topic, facilitator, language or location in our class calendar.
Gary Douglas travels extensively facilitating advanced Access Consciousness classes as well as a range of evening and several day workshops on specific topics from Choice and Possibilities, to Money, Benevolent Capitalism, Relationships and more.
Dr. Dain Heer offers classes on a wide array of topics through out the world and is best known for his transformation process The Energetic Synthesis of Being as well as the Being You, Changing the World events.
Simone Milasas travels extensively facilitating advanced Access Consciousness classes as well as a range of evening and several day workshops on specific topics from Choice and Possibilities, Relationship Done Different, Business Done Different, Getting Out of Debt Joyfully and more.
Brendon Watt travels extensively facilitating beginning advanced Access Consciousness classes as well as a range of evening and several day workshops on specific topics from The Foundation, Choice and Possibilities, Relationship Done Different, and more.
The Access Bars are the very core and foundation of Access Consciousness. It can be the starting point of a great adventure and it can be something you add to your life that will assist you in creating a greater ease with everything.
Dr. Dain Heer offers classes on a wide array of topics through out the world and is best known for his transformation process The Energetic Synthesis of Being (ESB).
Dr. Dain Heer offers classes on a wide array of topics through out the world and is well known for his Being You, Changing the World events, based on his bestselling Being You, Changing the World book.
The Speciality Programs are branches of Access Consciousness where you can dive deeper into particular topics with specialized facilitators. Each program offer introductory classes, advanced classes and certification facilitator training.
Access Consciousness offers classes on an infinite array of topics. There are many types of variety classes available.
Access Consciousness have many ways of engaging with the tools worldwide via expos, meet ups, radio shows, tele summits, google hangouts and more.
Each Access Facilitator is facilitated by the creators of Access Consciousness, Gary Douglas and Dr. Dain Heer. There are several license types for Access Consciousness Core Classes as well as Specialty Programs and Special Topic Classes.
Are you looking for more change? Use our search function to find a facilitator near you.
Access Consciousness has over 8,000 facilitators and practitioners in more than 170 countries. Find all their specific certifications and licenses here.
Find an article on almost any topic you could think of! Where would you like your adventure to begin?
We created a special log in help page to assist you!
*Our videos are subtitled in several languages. Choose settings in the lower right corner of the video to turn the subtitles on and to select a language.
The World Health Organizations estimates that more than 800,000 individuals each year take their own lives. These tragedies occur all over the world; in low- and high-income areas; to women and men, and in all age groups. Although there are country-centric patterns, there does not appear to be one, definitive reason for suicide.
Eighteen years ago, Dr. Dain Heer, co-creator of Access Consciousness®, felt so depressed and hopeless that he had set a date for his suicide. "I gave the universe six months or I was going to kill myself", Dain explains. "I had two chiropractic practices, a bit of money, a wonderful girlfriend – I had everything I thought would constitute a perfect life. But, inside, I was dying."
Sign up for a free email series by Dr. Dain with tools for overcoming depression naturally.NEVER GIVE UP
However, after one single session of Access Bars®, a gentle therapy that changes brain waves to a relaxed theta state, Dain changed his entire perspective on life and realized that everything was ok. "One tool, one thing, a process that took about an hour… and it changed the energy of what I knew was possible", Dain remarks.
*Our videos are subtitled in several languages. Choose settings in the lower right corner of the video to turn the subtitles on and to select a language.
Eighteen years after it saved his life, Dain hopes these free sessions will ignite optimism, happiness, and greatness in those who have fallen into despair. "It changed my whole life. This is the experience I would like to share with you all!", he says.
Access Bars is the very core of Access Consciousness®. It was developed by the founder Gary Douglas, and is a process that allows your body to process and receive the changes you are choosing with ease.
Access Bars are 32 points on your head which, when gently touched, effortlessly and easily release anything that doesn't allow you to receive. These points contain all the thoughts, ideas, beliefs, emotions, and considerations you have stored in any lifetime. This is a possibility for you to let go of everything!
Each Bars session can release 5-10 thousand years of limitations in the area of your life that corresponds with the specific Bar being touched. This is an incredibly nurturing and relaxing process, undoing limitation in all aspects of your life that you are willing to change! How much of your life do you spend doing rather than receiving? You could have everything you desire (and then some!) if you are willing to receive lots more and maybe do a little less! Receiving The Bars will allow this and so much more to show up for you.
Today the Bars has assisted thousands of people change many aspects of their body and their life including sleep, health and weight, money, sex and relationships, anxiety, stress and so much more. At worst you will feel like you have just had the best massage of your life. At best your whole life can change into something greater with total ease.
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Every Japanese grade schooler lugs around a big leather backpack called a "randoseru" (ランドセル). They're sturdy and pricey, because they're supposed last all six years of primary school.
Girls usually get red or pink randoseru, while boys get black or blue. Robots? Well, they get randoseru from retail chain Nitori—complete with a six year warranty!
The robots featured in the commercial are from Osaka robot company Vstone, and the commercial's jingle apparently uses virtual idol Hatsune Miku, too.
As a parent of a grade school Japanese kid, the obvious comparison of robots to school kids is mind reeling—cute, but mind reeling.
ニトリの 2013年モデルランドセル「わんぱく組」 TVCM [YouTube via Kotaku Japan]
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.


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FOCUS ON: Mini Excavators
Can you dig it?
Don't let their size fool you. Mini excavators offer lots of power as well as versatility for lots of tasks. And their small size allows them to go where other machines can't. They can fit in tight places and through small openings to get to hard to reach jobs. They combine power and versatility in a compact piece of equipment. Compact excavators are powerful enough to complete a wide range of jobs and offer landscape professionals various attachments and digging depths. Take a look at what manufacturers are offering. If you need more information about the following compact excavators, use the circle numbers provided at the end of each product description.
The ASV RC-60 Rubber Track Loader is designed to be a platform for utility excavation, with 1,770 inches of track on the ground, which allows the machine to be stable with a backhoe attachment. The Quick-Attach Backhoe includes a remote operator station in front of the machine cab. The remote station allows visibility for maximum productivity. Dig depth of the backhoe is up to 8 feet. Hydraulically extendible outriggers are included for added stability. Five pin-on buckets are available for the RC-60 Backhoe, ranging from 9 to 24 inches wide.
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Bobcat Company introduces the 430 and 435 FastTrack ZHS Excavators, which feature an all-hydrostatic drive system. Equipped with separate piston pumps and high-torque drive motors to power the left and right tracks, the FastTrack system replaces the conventional hydraulic drive system found on other excavators. The ZHS series of excavators feature improved dual-blade cylinders mounted on each side of the backfill blade. This design reduces the amount of dirt and debris that can build up on the top of the blade structure.
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Case CX compact excavators offer zero tail swing and a center-swing boom for maximum productivity in even the tightest working spaces. The five models deliver from 11.9 to 36.5 net hp, bucket digging forces up to 8,747 pounds and dig depths from 6 feet 11 inches to 11 feet 11 inches. All are equipped with a hydraulically controlled backfill blade for added machine stability and light dozing work.
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IHI introduces 12 mini excavators that come equipped with digging depths of 5 feet 2 inches to 14 feet 1 inch and powerful bucket forces of 2,160 pounds to 14,730 pounds. IHI offers smaller units to appeal to small utility contractors and also provides larger units to meet general contractors' deeper digging depth and power requests. Even with such compact designs, the excavators have all of the features of a larger mini excavator.
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Ditch Witch announces the release of the MX272, MX352 and MX502 mini excavators that come equipped with Komatsu engines. These units are configured with a tight tail swing that can be converted to zero-tail-swing by removing the standard integrated counterweight. The full-circle operator station rotation and pivoting boom design enable the operator to make offset excavations adjacent to foundations, fences and other obstacles, and also permit digging and depositing soil by the machine without having to reposition it. An optional cab comes equipped with a large rear glass, for visibility and protection from the elements, and an upper-rail sliding door.
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Caterpillar introduces the 301.6 and 301.8 Mini Hydraulic Excavators that feature 22 percent more bucket digging force and greater than 10 percent more stick digging force than the previous models. Designed to get more work done faster, the new machines have about 4 percent more horsepower (to 18.1 hp) and increased hydraulic flow and pressure. The units offer spacious operator compartments, suspension seats and ergonomic controls. A choice of stick lengths, Cat Work Tools and dozer float function increase versatility.
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Gehl Company introduces the 503Z, 603, 753Z and 803 excavator models. These machines include zero-tail-swing and short-tail-swing models in 5-, 6-, 7- and 8-metric ton classes. The excavators are equipped with Yanmar TNV Series Tier II diesel engines, which range from 47 to 69 hp. These engines are completely isolated from the operator's compartment to minimize high temperatures and noise in the cab. The cab is ergonomically built with an adjustable seat headrest and armrests, to accommodate the operator with the optimum height and position. Ample legroom and a comfortable operator's seat provide for operator comfort and increased productivity.
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Kubota's K008-3 ultra-compact excavator is powered by a Kubota liquid-cooled, 3-cylinder, 10.2-hp diesel engine. With an operating weight of 2,200 pounds, the K008-3 can operate on sensitive surfaces without damaging the ground. Despite the machine's compact size, its maximum digging depth is rated at 5 feet 8 inches, maximum reach at ground level is 9 feet 11 inches, maximum digging height is 9 feet 5 inches and maximum dumping height is rated 6 feet 8 inches with bucket breakout force of 2,200 pounds.
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Ranging in size from 3 to 5 metric tons, the John Deere 35D and 50D zero-tail-swing compact excavators provide reduced cycle times; better comfort with updated controls and cab; and lower operating costs with the introduction of auto-idle and longer oil change intervals. A new, long arm and heavy counterweight option provides an additional foot of dig depth and reach. Automatic shifting between high and low travel speeds allows the machine to automatically shift into low when more power is needed. The D-Series machines are powered by Yanmar large displacement, Tier II compliant engines with a higher torque curve than previous models.
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Komatsu introduces the PC09-1 compact hydraulic excavator for contractors in a variety of construction, utility, land-scaping and other small- to mid-sized applications. The PC09-1 has an overall width of 2 feet 4 inches and has a slender tail design. Its expandable undercarriage allows passage through narrow doorways, while offering expandability for increased stability during excavation. Its triple flanged bottom track rollers aid in machine stability when traveling or excavating. The auxiliary hydraulic flow of 5.8 gpm supplies hydraulic speed. The machine has an operating weight of 1,960 pounds and a bucket breakout force of 2,370 pounds.
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Mustang Manufacturing introduces the 5003ZT, 6003, 7503ZT and 8003 compact excavators. Models 5003ZT and 7503Zt have a zero-tail-swing design, creating improved maneuverability and visibility for the operator. Models 6003 and 8003 have a short-tail design that helps improve maneuverability and visibility while maintaining lifting capacity. The side-mounted engine compartment on each model was designed with a built-in barrier that limits engine noise and vibration.
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The PT-2430 bucket loader/backhoe from Power Trac may be small in size (8 feet 1 inch long and 4 feet 5 inches wide), but with its 1,200 pounds of lift capacity and lift height of 8 feet, it is big in performance. The backhoe has a breakout force of 3,000 pounds, a 9-foot 10-inch reach and a digging depth of 7 feet. The 4-wheel hydrostatic drive tractor has a 30-hp diesel engine and a sturdy steel frame. Along with a removable backhoe, there are over 40 front-mounted attachments available including buckets, forks, trenchers and tillers.
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The EH15.B, EH27.B, EH30.B and EH50.B compact excavators from New Holland Construction have the size and power to make quick work of tough jobs. With standard auxiliary hydraulics and pattern control changer, these machines are suited for smaller scale excavation needs. With their zero-tail-swing design, the EH.B Series compact excavators can move and work in tight spaces without damaging the machine or the job site. The models range from 3,240 pounds to 10,384 pounds and produce 11.9 to 40.8 net hp. They provide bucket breakout forces up to 8,914 pounds and maximum digging depths from 6 feet 11 inches to 11 feet 9 inches.
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The CX219z compact excavator from Vermeer Manufacturing features variable-width tracks for increased stability, auxiliary hydraulics for attachment add-ons, SEA/ISO controls and working lights as standard equipment. The CX219z weighs 3,968 pounds and is 3.3 -feet wide. It has the ability to dig to a depth of 8.3 feet, has 12.4 feet of reach and the bucket breakout force is 3,307 pounds. The maximum digging height of the CX219z is 11.4 feet and it has a dumping height of 7.8 feet. The machine has the ability to swing up to 50 degrees to the left and 85 degrees to the right. The excavator can also fit into and maneuver through smaller spaces to get the job done.
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Takeuchi introduces the TB135 compact excavator that incorporates a variety of new safety and performance enhancing features. Safety features include standard travel alarm, TOPS/FOPS canopy or cab, retractable seat belt and control tower lockout system of the excavator's operating controls and travel levers. Electrohydraulic control buttons for the auxiliary hydraulic circuit, horn and engine decelerator buttons are all conveniently located on the joystick for improved operator comfort and control. The TB135 also features a tilt-up operator's platform for quick service access and an engine shutdown/return to idle system, which helps guard against abnormal engine temperature or oil pressure conditions.
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Thomas Equipment's T75 excavator weighs in at 16,667 pounds and is available with a choice of either rubber or steel tracks. The T75 has 11,668 pounds of breakout force and a digging depth of 14 feet. Two-speed travel combing with a reach of more than 22.5 feet and a high-loading height of more than 15 feet ensures quick cycle times and maximum productivity. Low noise levels as well as a certified ROPS/FOPS cab complete with heater and air ventilation system are standard equipment along with a comfortable suspension seat and AM/FM radio. The ergonomically designed hydraulic pilot operated control levers provide smooth, precise control or all excavator functions.
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Checking Up on Amici's East Coast Pizzeria, a San Francisco Bay Area Mini-Chain
Amici's East Coast Pizzeria
Multiple Bay Area locations, plus one arriving soon in San Diego; location reviewed: 216 King Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 (map); 415-546-6666; amicis.com
Pizza style: New York-style
Oven type: Gas
The skinny: It's not the standout pizza it may have seemed when it opened 25 years ago, but it's far better than typical chain pie.
Price: Large pies: $21.75 to $27.75
For certain long-tenured Bay Area residents, Amici's East Coast Pizzeria represented a savior during the region's barren pizza landscape of the late-eighties and nineties. Some even continue to swear by its supremacy. It's funny, because as a more recently-minted Bay Area inhabitant, I have always dismissed Amici's, with its thirteen locations, as a generic chain. Of course, the truth lies somewhere in-between.
Walk into Amici's and you do feel like you're entering a chain restaurant, but it's the kind of chain that belongs upstairs in the mall, under the skylight, not down in the basement food court. You won't find any rough edges—or much character—amongst the granite tabletops and blond-wood walls. The only personality comes from the black-and-white sports photos they hang throughout the restaurant. In my few visits, I have found myself a bit peeved that this mishmash of memorabilia places New York sports stars alongside Boston stars, as if there's no competitive rivalry there. Like calling itself an "East Coast" pizzeria, it smacks of trying to be all things to all people. Yet the restaurant did come into existence through the joint efforts of a New Yorker and a Bostonite, so maybe they don't actually have to pick a side.
In either case, despite nodding to an entire seaboard with their name, the Amici's slogan is, "A taste of New York," and so it's clear that New York-style pies represent their touchstone. Indeed, on our plain pie, the crust came out thin and enjoyably crisp, with enough give to prevent it from becoming crunchy. The slices could be folded without suffering a destructive crack along the spine.
A quick skim of Yelp reviews reveals complaints about burnt pies. We did find some heavy charring in places where the sizable nubbins of cornmeal on the undercarriage had been sparsely applied, as well as on the edge of the pies that spent longest near the open flame of the Woodstone gas oven. It became a topic of debate at our table, but we ultimately decided that the carbon deposits were small enough to be considered seasoning, rather than a flaw.*
*Note: Amici's offers the option of requesting a "light" crust for those who do not like charring on their pie.
Our Amici's plain pie—called the New York—ran just a bit heavy on the cheese, but not to the degree that the character of the sauce became completely lost. Once we found a solo clump of sauce big enough to do a proper tasting, we discovered that the tomatoes struck a nice a middle ground between acid and sugar. The shredded mozzarella was tangy enough that we asked our waiter if another cheese was hiding in the mix. (There wasn't.) Most importantly, the layer of intermingled tomato and cheese on this pie contained enough salt to entice us back for multiple bites.
Amici's honors a number of East Coast cities with their topping combinations. They serve a Boston pie topped with fried eggplant, and two different clam pies, one inspired by New Haven, the other by Manhattan. During our meal, we looked further south, ordering a Philly pie topped with roasted green peppers, caramelized onions, and a choice of mild or spicy Italian sausage. Spicy proved the right decision to balance the sweetness from the vegetables. It did not distract, however, from the difficulty that the crust had supporting this heavier array of toppings, as it quickly turned soft and then mushy. This very short shelf life made me worry how any of the Amici's pizzas might fare if placed in a box for delivery or take-out.
Frame of reference matters when choosing where to get a slice, and the San Francisco pizza scene has changed for the better since the first Amici's opened up in 1987. But, in my case, I entered the restaurant expecting lifeless chain pizza and, on this count, I certainly need to recalibrate my opinion of Amici's upwards.
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


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A dozen pictures from today's very successful osprey hunt await you at the end of this short writeup!
I got to the club around 2 and after a few hellos to friends who were there, I got my stuff together and got ready to head out for a nice afternoon of seeing the ospreys in person. Pete P. happened to turn up at the same time so we paddled together, I wasn't up for organizing anything today but it's always nice to have company.
We did a big loop around the islands of the western section of the bay, ten miles or so, moving along at a good pace without much in the way of breaks. Dinner tasted really good and I don't think I'll have any trouble sleeping tonight!
It was a gorgeous, gorgeous day out there, a few other kayakers were out, plus a couple of fishing boats and there were tons of people on the trail around West Pond - including a couple who'd brought their kitty, 'cause what would a kitty like more than a trip to a bird sanctuary?
The photos below were all taken with my Optio. I had the Panasonic with the zoom lens with me and when one of the Canarsie Pol pair landed on the nest just as we passed by, I told Pete that I was going to land and get out the good camera to see if I could get a better shot - but just as we headed for shore the osprey flew off the nest and over to the shore, where it landed and started just walking around on the beach like a seagull. At that point I figured that if we landed it would scare the bird, who looked very relaxed picking at something on the waterline, so we paddled on. Tons of ospreys - there was one flying overhead before I even left the dock!
BTW, the osprey photos remind me of a rather funny Tugster post when Will was complaining about how hard it is to take a picture of a boat without some pushy famous landmark photobombing your efforts. It was a lovely clear day. Pete and the NYC skyline was intentional. The final picture with the flock of brants and the NYC skyline was intentional. I didn't realize I was getting WTC1 and the Empire State Building in my osprey shots until I got home!
No more writing after this, you can click on the first picture and view them in the slide show version without missing anything.
Being the Continuing Adventures of a Woman and her Trusty Kayak in New York Harbor, the Hudson River, and Beyond. (with occasional political rants just to keep things lively!)
Sunday, April 06, 2014
Osprey Hunt Success!
Labels: Jamaica Bay, trip report, Urban Wildlife
4 comments:
saw your photo on http://offmetro.com/ny/2014/03/31/day-trips-from-nyc/
- bonnie said...
Thanks for the heads-up! They did credit me and link, that's all I usually ask for.
- clairesgarden said...
I don't think I would take my cat... firstly I would be frightened it would run off and not be found again.
- bonnie said...
Oh, the cat we had when I was a kid would've left you bleeding and been so very, very gone. I was amazed at the placidity of this guy.
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- The Third Man
- Director: Carol Reed
- Date: 1949
- Studio: London Films Productions (UK)
- Genre: Film Noir, Mystery, Drama
- Cast: Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White
- Format: Black/White, Standard
- DVD Format: NTSC, R1 (Criterion Collection)
"Is that what you say to people after death? 'That's awkward.' " – Holly
"Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals." – Major Calloway
"Look down there, would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 [English Pounds Sterling] for every dot that you stopped – would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend?" – Harry Lime
Holly Martins (Cotten) is a down on his luck American writer who jumps at the chance when his old childhood friend, Harry Lime, offers him a job in post-World War II Vienna. He arrives in a city that's still literally digging out from the destruction and rubble of war, and a city that's split into British, American, Russian, and French zones (so having your passport handy is of vital importance), only to find that his friend, Harry Lime, is dead. The police believe it to be an accident. Holly has trouble believing his old friend is dead. He starts to investigate – at first, merely to learn what happened. He talks to various people, the porter at Harry's building who witnessed a few things about the time of the accident, Harry's girlfriend, Anna Schmidt, other friends of Harry's, and becomes suspicious that not only was Harry's death not an accident – but that something odd is going on in Vienna.
Harry also has several encounters with Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) a member of the British police for the British section, and his aide, Sgt. Paine (Bernard Lee). When he takes his suspicions to the police, he's told, not unkindly, that even if Lime was murdered, the police won't waste resources investigating – because the man was a racketeer, involved in the Black Market, and most importantly he was involved in a scheme to steal, cut, and re-sell penicillin to sick and injured men, women and children – that resulted in several deaths, and a number of children with meningitis. As first, Holly doesn't believe his old friend would be involved in such a scheme. Later in the film, Major Calloway shows him proof of Harry Lime's involvement, and Holly reluctantly believes it. Still later on – Calloway takes Holly to a hospital ward filled with children who were left mentally disabled because of the tainted medicine and the resulting meningitis. There is considerable restraint in the scene, the audience doesn't see the sick children – only doctors and nurses tending to them, some shadows and medical charts, and the reactions of Holly, Major Calloway, and Sgt. Paine.
Holly also spends time with Anna, Harry's girlfriend. He begins to develop feelings for her – and she seems to return those feelings, but it's not to be.
About halfway through the film, when Holly's considering leaving Vienna altogether, he actually meets Harry Lime, who isn't as dead as everyone thought.
The second half of the film turns into more of a moral dilemma for Holly. Harry wants him to join him in another scheme to make money, that would probably harm as many people as his last one if not more. Holly tries to get Anna to go with him – but she's still in love with Harry. Anna's been having her own problems – she's living with a false passport, perhaps even a false name – because, as a Czechoslovakian she would be sent to Russia. Anna's reactions throughout the film are influenced by her blaming Holly somewhat for getting her in trouble with the police and her undying and unexplained love for Harry Lime.
Meanwhile, Major Calloway holds his duty to turn Anna over to the Russians, because she's an illegal immigrant, and the carrot of arranging her freedom over Holly as well.
Holly agrees to set-up Harry after Major Calloway presents him with proof of Lime's involvement in the drug stealing and selling scheme. They also discover that the person buried in Harry's grave is the missing hospital porter Calloway's been looking for.
However, an encounter with Anna again shakes Holly's resolve, he meets with Harry Lime, who turns out to be a real sociopath. Harry does not take up Lime on his implied offer to go into illegal business together someplace outside of Vienna.
Holly goes back to Calloway – who this time shows him the children in the hospital. Holly resolves to set-up Lime to help the police, especially as Calloway lets him have Anna's passport back.
Anna – gets off the train (Calloway had also supplied a ticket out of Vienna), she sees Holly and blows up at him because she knows he's setting up Harry. She even rips up her forged passport.
The conclusion of the film is a chase in Vienna's sewers, as Holly, then the Major and his troops, then police from the other districts of Vienna all chase down Harry Lime.
The brilliance of this film isn't in the overall plot, though the dead man who isn't dead was probably somewhat novel at the time – the brilliance is in the details. The cinematography of this film is just incredible. Director Carol Reed uses all sorts of unusual, tilted, and strange camera angles, which alongside the strange score, act to put the audience at unease. This odd setting emphasizes for example, Holly's isolation and grasping need to trust somebody. It sets all the characters apart, especially Harry Lime who towers over the film, despite not really being in it all that much. Lime is the "Third Man" of the title – referring to a Third Man who witnessed Harry's death as described by a witness, whom everyone else involved denies was even there. The discovery of a "Third Man" is an early clue that Holly discovers and uses to try to find out who "killed" Harry Lime.
The setting of this film is also unusual. Vienna is literally pulling itself out of rubble. Piles of concrete, and stone dust, and bombed out buildings are in nearly every shot. Nothing looks new and almost nothing is whole. There is evidence of war in nearly every scene. Oddly enough, the sewers are the only structures that seem solid, not crumbling or broken – and they are far underground. But it isn't just the buildings that are destroyed – the faces of the people, all very old or very young (except the main leads who are all probably in their 30s) – are a visual hint that the able-bodied men are all gone – and good young women don't appear on the streets. Anna, who works in a theater singing comedy opera in German, isn't exactly what the times would have called a "good woman". The faces of the bit players, and the few people in the streets, have character – but they have also seen pain and destruction.
Overall, I would highly recommend watching The Third Man at least once. Visually it's a film not to be missed, despite the bleak setting. I'd say it really needs to be seen because of the bleak setting.
Recommendation: See it
Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
Next Film: The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)


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- Mad Science
- 7 Other Mad Scientists
- Owen Holland, Robot Man
- Brian McConnell, Space Cowboy
- Marla Spivak, Bee Queen
- Ed Adams & Dan Miller, Snow Bombers
- Wes Jackson, Green Thumb
- Zhenan Bao, Skin Jobber
- Myhrvold's Team and Its Tools
The perfect french fry—golden brown, surpassingly crispy on the outside, with a light and fluffy interior that tastes intensely of potato—is not easy to cook.
Here's how most people do it at home: Cut some potatoes into fry shapes—classic 3/8-inch batons—and toss them into 375-degree oil until they're golden brown. This is a mediocre fry. The center will be raw.
Here's how most restaurants do it: Dunk the potatoes in oil twice, once at 325 degrees for about four minutes until they're cooked through and then again at 375 degrees to brown them. This is a pretty great fry.
But let's get serious. The chef Heston Blumenthal—owner of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, holder of three Michelin stars—created what he calls triple-cooked chips. (He's English.) The raw batons are simmered in water until they almost fall apart and then placed on a wire rack inside a vacuum machine that pulls out the moisture. The batons then get the traditional double fry. You need an hour and a $2,000 vacuum chamber, but these are the best fries in the world. Or rather, they used to be.
The new contender was created by Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft. Myhrvold cuts his potatoes into batons and rinses them to get rid of surface starch. Then he vacuum-seals them in a plastic bag, in one even layer, with water. He heats the bag to 212 degrees for 15 minutes, steaming the batons. Then he hits the bag with ultrasound to cavitate the water—45 minutes on each side. He reheats the bag in an oven to 212 degrees for five minutes, puts the hot fries on a rack in a vacuum chamber, and then blanches them in 338-degree oil for three minutes. When they're cool, Myhrvold deep-fries the potatoes in oil at 375 degrees until they're crisp, about three more minutes, and then drains them on paper towels. Total preparation time: two hours.
The result is amazing. The outside nearly shatters when you bite into it, yielding to a creamy center that's perfectly smooth. The key is the cavitation caused by the ultrasonic bath—it creates thousands of tiny fissures on the potato's surface, all of which become crunchy when it's fried. When Plato saw the shadow of a french fry on the wall of his cave, the guy standing behind him was snacking on these.
The recipe is one of 1,600 in Myhrvold's new cookbook, Modernist Cuisine. It's a big book—2,400 pages big. Six volumes big. Big like the original slipcase failed Amazon .com's shipping tests and had to be replaced with acrylic. Big like it weighs nearly 50 pounds and costs $625.
This is the way Myhrvold operates. After leaving Microsoft with all the money in the world, he started a company called, immodestly, Intellectual Ventures and turned his attention to busting some of the biggest problems in science and technology. And he dove into a few hobbies. Now most of us, if we were to get interested in cooking, might start to putter around the kitchen at home or do a little reading. Maybe we'd take a class. Because cooking is primarily a craft, dominated by artisans—or artists, if that's how you view what a chef does. Every once in a while, a chemist drops in to take a look or heads for the world of industrial-scale food.
But Myhrvold—a theoretical physicist and computer scientist—has the lifestyle flexibility of a multimillionaire and the mental discipline of a world-class researcher. To him, cooking is about fundamental interactions in the material world: How heat enters food. How you mix two separate materials most effectively. How water molecules interact in a solution. You see a pork chop and some mashed potatoes; he sees a mesh of proteins that coagulate at a specific temperature next to an emulsion of starch and fat. "Chefs think about what it's like to make food," Myhrvold says. "Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works." To him, a kitchen is really just a laboratory that everyone has in their house. And when you have that attitude with that brain and those resources, well, you might not be the best cook in the world, but you just might put together the best cookbook.
If Modernist Cuisine lives up to Myhrvold's hopes when it's published this March, it'll be the definitive book about the science of cooking—the Principia of the kitchen. It's dense and beautiful and inspired, and even though Myhrvold assembled a team of 50 chefs, writers, photographers, designers, scientists, and editors to create it, the final product is in fact an eerily accurate recapitulation of how Nathan Myhrvold thinks.
Which is to say, the man thinks big about nearly everything. And he wants his french fries to be perfect.
Modernist Cuisine started with a problem.
In 2003, Myhrvold was building his dream house on the shore of Lake Washington outside Seattle, stocking it with esoteric kitchen equipment. One of the toys was a temperature-controlled water bath used for a technique known as sous vide, vacuum-sealing food in plastic bags and cooking it for a long time at relatively low temperatures. Done correctly, it lets a chef precisely control the temperature of the food, so the final product comes out perfect every time.
Myhrvold had come across the technique while studying cooking in France, but he needed information on how long to cook various foods and at what temperature.
And that was the problem. There wasn't any information.
For Myhrvold, that's not acceptable. He's a creature of knowledge; talking to him is like taking a graduate seminar. Actually, it's like taking every graduate seminar at once. He bounces from topic to topic as if someone were clicking the remote control through 500 channels of really high-end BBC documentaries. Here's a lunchtime conversation, only slightly edited:
"Alaska has had more than 10 times the number of botulism cases of New York state. But its population is a few percent of New York state. It's because they eat a lot of crap up there... The most thermally diffusive thing that heat travels fastest in is diamond, by a big margin... Suppose you have a broiler with a bunch of separate rods. Turns out there's an optimal distance away from them to have the most even heat. And it's 44 percent of the distance between them, plus 5 millimeters... The big innovation in the 20th century wasn't in high-end food, it was in industrial food... Our Carolina barbecue sauces are very thin. We made them authentic thickness. But then we have a note that says 0.2 percent xanthan gum will give you something that clings to your meat and makes your shirt less dirty. Ba dum ba dum ba dum."
That's how Myhrvold cuts off a lot of his own sentences, with what sounds like a kettledrum sound effect for a cartoon somersault. It's not an ellipsis; it's more like his brain has accelerated past the rest of the information. The proof is left as an exercise for the student.
After finding only a couple of articles and one book (in Spanish) about sous vide, Myhrvold posted a message on the high-end culinary discussion forum eGullet asking for sources, recipes, anything. "I sort of naively thought that sous vide was well understood," Myhrvold says. "You heard about people using it, so I figured they clearly must understand it. Well, I discovered that they didn't."
He was no stranger to kitchens. Growing up in Santa Monica, California, with his mother, a model and schoolteacher, Myhrvold started cooking at an early age, checking out cookbooks from the library and preparing elaborate Thanksgiving meals when he was 9. While at Microsoft, he moonlighted in the kitchen of a leading French restaurant in Seattle for nearly two years.
But he's primarily a scientist. Myhrvold has a master's degree in geophysics and space physics and another one in mathematical economics. He got his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton at 23 and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. He started a software company that Microsoft bought in 1986, founded Microsoft Research in 1991, and left the company as its CTO and chief strategist in 1999. He has hundreds of patents issued or pending. Oh, and he's also a photographer, a patron of paleontology research, and a world-champion barbecue chef. Seriously.
So Myhrvold the cook and Myhrvold the scientist went to work. Chicken and salmon and beef all got sous vided, with temperature probes inserted so Myhrvold could track how the heat moved through the food. He wrote a program using Mathematica to model the heat transfer through various shapes and sizes of food without actually having to cook. "I got kind of carried away," he says.
Almost a year and a half after asking his question on eGullet, Myhrvold answered it himself, posting the results of his experiments—charts that showed how long and at what temperature to cook a certain piece of food to get to a desired final temperature. Instantly, the thread became the definitive reference to sous vide.
By the time someone online suggested that he write a book based on the information, Myhrvold had already moved on to looking at food safety concerns raised by the low temperatures used in sous vide. He was even helping chefs convince food inspectors that the technique was safe. "From there I sort of decided, hey, why not do the whole thing?" Myhrvold says. "It made sense at the time."
The Intellectual Ventures lab, hard by a tennis practice facility and an auto-repair shop on the outskirts of Bellevue, Washington, isn't just easy to miss—it's almost as though it was scientifically designed to look as nondescript as possible. Inside the former Harley-Davidson garage, though, is 27,500 square feet of thinking space—as much a physical manifestation of Myhrvold's polymath mind as the cookbook is a literary and photographic one. Just inside the front door are the wet chemistry lab, the physics lab, the repair shop, and the laser testing rooms. A space farther back and to the right is crammed with computer-controlled milling machines that carve objects from metal or plastic with millimeter precision and a giant water-jet cutting table. It's hundreds of thousands of bucks worth of gear—a factory for fabricating anything a scientist might need.
Inside, dozens of PhDs work on a bevy of projects. One group is trying to perfect an idea that scientists have been hammering on since the 1950s—a traveling-wave nuclear reactor. It could, in theory, run for 50 to 100 years without needing to be refueled, primarily on uranium 238, which is a cheap, non-weaponizable byproduct of the uranium-enrichment process. The TerraPower project, as it's called, should yield a prototype reactor by 2020.
Then there's the Salter Sink, which is supposed to lessen the impact of hurricanes by funneling warm water from the ocean's surface into the colder water below. And there's the solution that the company has proposed to slow global warming: Pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to mirror the cooling effect caused by large volcanic eruptions. Al Gore told the authors of SuperFreakonomics that the plan was "nuts," but that's of little consequence to Myhrvold; several Nobel laureates agree with him that the sulfur scheme might work.
Scientists at Intellectual Ventures have invented a new x-ray scanner that produces clearer images, surfaces that sterilize themselves, a portable freezer that keeps vaccines active without electricity, and even metamaterials that could reverse light, creating a cloaking device. But perhaps the flashiest creation from the lab is a bug zapper called the photonic fence, which Myhrvold unveiled at the TED Conference in 2010. It's a result of the company's ongoing work to eliminate malaria in response to a challenge from Myhrvold's old boss, Bill Gates. At a brainstorming session in 2008, someone suggested that lasers could kill mosquitoes before they could spread the disease—a kind of insect-world Star Wars laser-defense system.
The team pulled together parts from consumer electronics and eBay to develop a prototype—one that could even determine if a mosquito was male or female (only the females bite humans). The females would be blasted out of the sky; the males would be left alone. It's a massively clever bit of engineering and coding—and the parts are cheap and getting cheaper. Like the other gadgets, it's so crazy that it just might work.
Malaria is the focus of a lot of effort at the lab. Across the street in the annex (a former interior-design showroom that still has some cabinet display models on the walls) is the company's supercomputer, built from 1,000 Xeon core processors, which mathematician Philip Eckhoff is using to model the spread and potential eradication of the disease.
Almost all of these inventions have one thing in common: Intellectual Ventures doesn't want to manufacture them. The company's business is making money from ideas, not from the products that the ideas could generate.
Myhrvold says that the company is trying to create a capital market for inventions, a market for intangible intellectual property like the one that grew around software in the 1980s. But Intellectual Ventures isn't just doing its own research and brainstorming leading to patents, it is also (much more controversially) buying up thousands of patents from outside inventors, which it then licenses to technology companies like Apple, Google, and Sony.
To Myhrvold, this is an elegant, scientifically minded hack of the patent system—where people can patent not only products but ideas. To intellectual property purists, though, that sort of behavior is called patent trolling—gathering the rights to ideas and then forcing companies to pay up when those ideas actually appear in the world and are about to be turned into usable technology. And indeed, in December, Intellectual Ventures filed three lawsuits claiming that nine companies were infringing some of its patents.
But the accusation of trolling has become increasingly frustrating to Myhrvold. "If you look at the list of people who have been called patent trolls," he says, "it's everyone who's ever filed a patent suit." He points out that his company applies for patents on 500 of its own inventions every year. And anyway, he says, the system is designed for this kind of transaction. "Some people think it's scandalous. 'Oh my gosh, they buy patents!' Well, yeah. And publishers buy books from writers," Myhrvold says. "I've never gotten it, except that there are people who have ideological—bordering on religious—ideas about intellectual property, most of which are in my view not very deeply thought through."
That's Myhrvold. On one hand, there's the fevered imagination and brainstorming, invention and science, the quest to change the world. But on the other hand, there's the aggressive businessman who isn't just around to create cool stuff—he's looking to make a ton of money, too.
Writing about sous vide led Myhrvold to think more deeply about how heat moves through different media (which is why Modernist Cuisine may well be the only cookbook ever published with a long disquisition on Fourier's law, the equation for calculating heat transfer). That led to food safety, and that led to a more general exploration of the microbiology of food. Myhrvold soon realized that his ambition for Modernist Cuisine had outstripped his ability to write it alone. "It's like writing software," he says. "If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn't that interesting."
A chef would have built a kitchen; Myhrvold built the Cooking Lab. He carved out a corner of the Intellectual Ventures lab and filled it with gear—not just stoves and ovens but industrial-grade homogenizers, freeze-driers, steam-heated ovens, and vacuum distillation machines. If Thomas Edison and Martha Stewart built a house, this is what the kitchen would look like.
And then, like the primary investigator in an academic laboratory, Myhrvold started hiring researchers. He began with Chris Young, a 34-year-old with degrees in math and biochemistry from the University of Washington and one of the plummest jobs in cooking, running the development kitchen at Blumenthal's Fat Duck. But in 2007, he was ready to come home. Five years in the town of Bray, 30 miles west of London, was enough for Young; he was set to move to a job at a San Francisco Bay Area restaurant when he emailed Myhrvold, with whom he had corresponded about food science, to give him his new coordinates.
Three minutes later, a message from Myhrvold appeared on Young's screen. It had the subject line "Crazy Idea." The note was one line long: "Why don't you come work for me?"
Young signed up and brought in Maxime Bilet, a young chef he had worked with at the Fat Duck, to run the kitchen day to day. Wayt Gibbs, a former editor at Scientific American who works at Intellectual Ventures, was drafted to handle the editing, while photographer Ryan Matthew Smith joined the team after responding to a craigslist job posting.
Myhrvold then let them explore largely on their own. "Nathan creates a dynamic, free-thinking environment here," Young says. "This is a unique place to work. You'll be in the kitchen, and then someone like Neal Stephenson will wander by." So, for example, when the chefs were working on the part of the book focused on gels and thickeners, Myhrvold was having them concentrate on exotic hydrocolloids like agar or gellan. But then Bilet and the culinary team came to him with a suggestion. They wanted to add egg gels—custards, basically. "They're just as valid," Bilet told Myhrvold. "They're just as cool." Myhrvold gave them the green light, and the team hit their library of hundreds of food science books to see what people already knew about eggs and how they cook.
Then they started collecting data, cooking hundreds of batches of egg custard. Each time, they tweaked a variable—temperature, yolk-to-egg-white ratio, amount of liquids.
It took them two weeks, all for a deceptively simple chart. Temperatures are on one axis and the ratio of egg to liquid is on the other; cross-reference the two and you can choose a texture, from a runny crè8me anglaise to a firm flan. "All that work and it condenses down into this one little teeny table," Myhrvold says. Of course, that table is an unprecedented master course in egg cookery. "It's really cool to be in an experimental kitchen like this," Young says. "If you need to, you can talk to an engineer or a physicist. We have access to all of their analytical tools, and if our equipment breaks, we have these PhDs here to help us fix it. It's just really eclectic."
Working next to all those other projects has required a few adjustments, however. One night, the cookbook team was in the kitchen late, testing new recipes. The photonic fence team was also working late, seeing if their tracking software could follow mosquitoes at long distances. They had put a box filled with bugs at the top of a set of stairs at one end of the 100-foot-long Cooking Lab and set up their laser at the other end. As the chefs stood at their stoves, the beams started flashing above them. "I guarantee that we are the only kitchen in the world that had lasers overhead," Young says. "They told me they were firing at a nonkilling intensity."
Lunch at the cooking lab: First comes raspberry gazpacho with piquillo peppers and macadamia nuts. Foie gras and horse mackerel are served with sous vide ponzu. Mushroom omelets are cooked in a steam oven, keeping them moist and tender. Comte cheese is turned into an aerated sponge with a vacuum machine and is served with hazelnut cakes. It's 12 courses overall, each one highlighting a different cutting-edge tool or technique.
When spot prawns and carotene butter show up—cook carrots in butter and then separate out the solids with a centrifuge—Myhrvold takes a bite, thinks for a moment, and then asks Bilet to hang on a second. "This is great, Max," Myhrvold says. "You know what I think it needs? It needs something crunchy."
"A little texture?" Bilet asks.
"Yeah. How about some freeze-dried carrot? Little chunks."
Bilet hesitates, looking at the dish. He seems dubious.
"Either that or something else crunchy," Myhrvold says. "Because it's fantastic but could use a texture element."
"We could do something with coconut," Bilet suggests. "To balance the carrot. Maybe a savory coconut tuile with freeze-dried prawn powder."
"That would do it," Myhrvold says. He goes back to eating.
Myhrvold is not a professional chef, but he's turned himself into a professional eater—thousands of hours of culinary training and meals at hundreds of the world's best restaurants. He's a scientific Falstaff, a rare combination of rationalist and sensualist. In fact, lunch at the lab would stand up to the food at some of the most avant-garde restaurants in the world. That's an abiding passion of Myhrvold's, right there in the title of the book. For him, there's nothing in the food world more exciting than the science-driven cooking he calls modernist.
Over the past two decades, a wave of chefs—Blumenthal, Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea, and Ferran Adrìa, whose restaurant El Bulli in Spain is considered one of the world's best—have looked beyond tradition for ways to manipulate their food. Adriè0 uses everything from industrial food additives to freeze-drying in the pursuit of otherworldly effects, like a soup that changes temperature in your mouth as you eat it. It's what some writers (though not the chefs themselves) called "molecular gastronomy," and a major thrust of Modernist Cuisine is to explain just what the hell is going on in these high-end kitchens. "There's a set of cooking techniques that go back 20-some years that are hugely interesting to people, very useful, poorly understood, and almost impossible to learn," Myhrvold says. "The best you can do is to go cook at a few restaurants that do this, and you come away with like 1 percent of it."
Until now, there's been no comprehensive reference. And the ingredients require a precision unfamiliar to many cooks. As Myhrvold observes, "It's a superbad idea to put a 'pinch' of xanthan gum in something." Modernist Cuisine sets out to explain and expand the chef's toolkit. "One of the wonderful things about the book is that it makes it clear what these things are good for, what they're not good for, what their strengths and weaknesses are," says Harold McGee, author of the seminal food science book On Food and Cooking. "I think it will go a long way toward demystifying and also expanding the number of people who can play with them and come up with new things."
That's a big change from cooking's artisanal roots. "You were taught how to make a hollandaise sauce, and you were never really taught why it works," says Thomas Keller, who runs Per Se in New York City and the French Laundry in Northern California and is generally considered the best chef in the US. "You were just taught how to make it, and you were taught how to fix it if it broke, and that was it." Myhrvold and his team want cooks to understand the science behind the technique. So Modernist Cuisine explains the avant-garde by emphasizing the most basic elements of cooking: heat and water.
Myhrvold has a favorite riddle: "If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook?"
If you said the thicker steak takes twice as long, you're making the same mistake most cooks do. "It's four times as long. It goes roughly like the square," Myhrvold says. "How come cookbooks don't tell you that?" he asks, nearly bursting with indignation. The fundamental laws of heat, he figures, are the fundamental laws of cooking. "The physics of heat is diffusion," Myhrvold says. "So that's also the physics of drying things or of marination. They're all about diffusing things. The physics of heating things is also the physics of cooling things. It's the same basics over and over."
Then there's water. "Three things about water affect almost all of cooking," Myhrvold says. "First are the hydrogen bonds, which is why it has an incredibly high boiling point. Another is that it's a polar molecule, so that it dissolves a lot of things, and there are things that won't mix with it. And then there's how much energy it takes to heat water. That's why steaming food works; that's why pressure cookers work."
This isn't like most writing about food science. McGee's science-minded On Food and Cooking is a de facto reference in every professional kitchen—and many amateur ones. McGee says he's a fan of Myhrvold's work; the two men are friends, in fact. "I'm much more interested in the chemistry of flavor than Nathan is," McGee says. "That has to do with the diversity of compounds that you find in nature, how they get there, and how we detect them."
It's a polite sort of turf-carving, and Myhrvold is in just as much of a rush to establish his own. "In terms of broadly looking at food science and chemistry, and trying to explain it to a lay audience, Harold led the way," Myhrvold says. "But we have a physics-oriented book." Most cooks focus on the difference between filet mignon and rib eye. Myhrvold and his team want you to comprehend the whole cow. "If all you want to do is follow recipes, you don't need insights," he says. "If you want to do new things, you have to understand what the hell you're doing."
The ambition, the sheer bigness of Modernist Cuisine, does trigger the oh-come-on meter just a bit. Saying cooks need to understand the physics of diffusion is a little bit like saying a home woodworker needs to understand quantum mechanics. Sure, Planck's constant helps explain how nails go through maple, but calculating the one doesn't help you hammer the other.
Ironically, Modernist Cuisine will start tormenting UPS drivers with its bulk at the same time that the movement it celebrates—avant-garde, science-driven cooking—is waning. Ferran Adriè0 is closing El Bulli this year. Achatz is opening a new restaurant this spring that won't emphasize the techniques he helped popularize. "I think the book will have long-lasting importance in gastronomy," Achatz says. "But the particular style of cooking that it highlights might not. It's clear that the tide is turning. I don't think many chefs will continue to take the wholehearted scientific approach."
The tools and techniques that chefs like Adrià and Achatz popularized are trickling down. Flip on Top Chef and you're likely to see someone mucking about with liquid nitrogen and vacuum sealers. But the artistic part, the creativity of avant-garde chefs that Myhrvold finds so inspiring, seems to be shrinking. If that's so, Modernist Cuisine isn't the Principia of the kitchen but its Consolation of Philosophy, the book that collects and summarizes all the knowledge in a field at the moment the field implodes. It's a eulogy.
Myhrvold has certainly considered that possibility. To get this book out, he spent hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, hiring staff, building a lab, setting up a separate company to self-publish it. And while he might be relatively immune to financial pressures, there's another judgment that the market will make. "One of the names for small-volume personal publishing is vanity publishing," Myhrvold says. "So, is this useful to people, or is it entirely vanity? That's a fascinating question. If no one wants it, you have to ask yourself, what am I doing it for?"
It's almost impossible to comprehend all of Modernist Cuisine. It seeks to be the first and last word in its field, to settle every argument, to capture all of human knowledge about cooking. And, ultimately, it's a book that utterly reflects Myhrvold. "We had a focus on physics. We had a focus on computer modeling. We had a focus on photography," Myhrvold says. "Those are all things that I'm completely into. We had a focus on the history and the philosophy of this kind of cuisine. Again, that's totally what I'm into." That's why the criticisms won't matter too much to Myhrvold. In the end, Modernist Cuisine is more than a cookbook. It's an autobiography—the world's most oblique memoir, so accurate a reflection of its creator that he might be the only person in the world who fully understands it.
Special projects editor Mark McClusky (email@example.com) wrote about Nike+ and Apple in issue 17.07.


text:
When it comes to holidays, there's no better recipe than the one you grew up with.
Same is true for latkes.
So, tonight, when Hanukkah begins at sundown, folks around the globe will be firing up the frying pans to create the ultimate potato pancake.
Some began cooking the Hanukkah delicacy even before the Jewish Festival of Lights began.
"We cooked 6,000 yesterday," said Evan Bloom, who co-owns Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen in San Francisco with partner Leo Beckerman. "And we'll probably be making more."
The secret to the Wise Sons latkes? "We try to keep it very simple," Bloom said, adding that the real trick is to squeeze any liquid from the potatoes after grating them, so that they taste "crispy, not soggy."
And of course, he uses oil. Lots and lots of oil.
And although schmaltz, the Yiddish term for rendered chicken fat, was recently touted in the New York Times as gaining a comeback, Bloom said he and his cooks tend to stick with regular cooking oil for their latkes.
"We use schmaltz in a lot of things, like our chopped liver and matzo balls, but not in our latkes. There are so many vegetarians, and so many people are afraid of it."
But there are all sorts of ways to make latkes. Here is a small round-up of some popular latke-making videos.
From upscale (with Parmesan cheese, chives and Tabasco)...
To India-inspired (with carrots and coriander)...
Lest your Bubbe should see, she just sticks to the basics: potatoes, oil, flour, salt and pepper.


text:
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As always, superior service from all, from begining of sale through to pick up.
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Fab hot chocolate!
My customer experience with Tom Park was excellent, from seeing the vehicle advertised to driving off the forecourt, I would encourage anyone to try City Motors
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WELCOME to beneschwood.com- also known as BENESCH CREATIVE ENTERPRISE online store. NEW ITEM-8 piece Wooden Train Set. We specialize in hand crafted hardwood trucks, log trucks, baseball coat racks, napkin holders, nautical theme items, and many more unique products. All our products are made in the U.S.A. in the southern Adirondacks in Holland Patent, New York. Most of our trucks can be personalized very reasonable. You can email for pricing on the personalizing. We have trucks for children of all ages and for the collectors of fine trucks. Many of our trucks would be enjoyed by truck drivers who collect trucks. We also have many other items we make. Thank you for visiting our site. GET YOUR ORDERS IN EARLY AS WE ARE VERY BUSY. THANK YOU
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The 5 star Leisure Resort at Hopton-on-Sea
5 day Holiday
Monday 6 January £269
Monday 30 March £329
Monday 18 May £359
Monday 13 July £379
Monday 21 September £379
Single supplement NIL
Supplement Bungalow Plus £25
INSURANCE £29 inc IPT
4 nights Full Board
Potter Leisure and Entertainment Programme
Day 1 Monday
Travel to Norfolk, arriving at Potters mid afternoonD
Days 2 - 4 Tue - Thu
At leisureB, L, D
Day 5 Friday
Leave mid morning for the return journeyB
B=Breakfast, L=Lunch, D=Dinner
www.PottersHolidays.com. Set in 65 acres stretching down to the sea, the countrys only 5 star Holiday Village is at Hopton-on-Sea in Norfolk. Privately owned Potters offers a complete holiday: Comfortable accommodation is in bungalows, first class entertainment every night in the Atlas Theatre, breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, a wide range of leisure and sporting facilities and numerous daytime activities
Below is a list of pick-up points available on this tour.
Below is a list of pick-up points available on this tour.
|Contact Details
|Ashingdon Golden Cross
| Golden Cross, By Fox (Welcome Homes)
|Barking, North St
| North Street, Barking,outside St Margaret's Church
| Barkingside, Fulwell Cross, by Swimming Baths
|Basildon Trafford House
| Trafford House (Adjacent to Basildon Rail Station)
|Billericay Sun Corner
| Sun Corner, Laindon Road, Billericay
| Brentwood High St, by Argos
|Canvey Island - Canute
| King Canute PH, Canvey Island
|Canvey Island - Haystack
| Long Road, Canvey Island, Haystack
|Chalkwell Park
| Chalkwell Park Bus Stop
|Chandos Garage Hockley
| Chandos Garage Hockley
| Victoria Road (coach bays)
|Cricketers Westcliff
| Cricketers Bus Stop, Southend on Sea
|Dagenham Wood Lane
| Wood Lane, Dagenham, Opp Morrisons
|Eastwood - Kent Elms
| Kent Elms Corner, Eastwood, Rayleigh Road
|Eastwood - Rochford Cnr
| Rayleigh Road, Eastwood, Rochford Corner
|Eastwood Jones Corner
| Eastwood, Rayleigh Road, Jones Corner
Bus Stop by Brookside Tavern
|Grays Oak PH
| Oak PH, Socketts Heath, Grays
|Hadleigh - Vic House Cnr
| Vic House Corner, Kiln Road, Hadleigh
|Hadleigh Church
| Hadleigh Church, Bus Layby
|Harold Wood
| Harold Wood, Bus Stops, Harold Wood Station
|Hockley Spa
| Spa Road Bus Stop, Hockley
|Hopes Green, S Benfleet
| High Road, S Benfleet, by Benfleet Tvl opp Shell G
| North Street, Hornchurch, Fire Station
| Clements Road, Ilford, by Travelodge IG1 !BA
|Kents Hill Lights
| Kents Hill Lights Bus Stop, London Road, Benfleet
|Kiln Road (Kenneth Road)
| Kiln Road (Kenneth Road) - Thundersley
|Leigh on Sea - Elms
| Elms PH, London Road, Leigh on Sea
|Leigh on Sea - Thames Dr
| Thames Drive, Leigh on Sea
|M25 Thurrock Services
| M25 Thurrock Services Coach Park
|North Shoebury Road
| Bus Stop , outside Asda (St Marys)
North Shoebury Road, Shoeburyness
| Old Granada Bingo, Pitsea SS13 3AH
|Rayleigh Websters Way
| Websters Way, Rayleigh, opp Rayleigh Lanes
|Rochford Station Bus Stop
| Rochford Station Bus Stop, Bradley Way
| St Edwards Way, Romford, Bus Stop 'H'
| Shenfield Station
|Shoeburyness - Kathryn Ct
| The Cambridge.(Kathryn Ct.), Shoeburyness
|South Benfleet Clare Rd
| Tarpots Coach Stop (opp Clare Road), Sth Benfleet
|South Benfleet St Marys
| St Mary's Church, Layby, South Benfleet
|Southchurch Tyrrel Drive
| Southchurch Road - Tyrrel Drive (Swintons)
|Southchurch White Horse
| White Horse Bus Stop, Southchurch
|Southend Airport
| Bus Stop, Southend Airport, Eastwoodbury Crescent
|Southend Queensway
| Bus Layby, Rear of Sainsburys, Southend
|Stanford le Hope Rookery
| Rookery Corner, Stanford le Hope (St Cleres Hall G
|Thorpe Bay Station
| Station, Acacia Drive, Thorpe Bay
| St Mary's Lane/Bell Corner, Upminster
|Vange Barge
| Vange Barge Bus Stop, High Road, Pitsea
|Wakering Crouchmans
| Wakering High St/ Crouchmans Avenue
|West Leigh Schools
| West Leigh Schools, London Rd, Leigh on Sea
|Westcliff on Sea Bell PH
| Bell PH, Rochford Road Bus Stop
|Westcliff on Sea Palace
| Palace Theatre, Westcliff on Sea
|Wickford Halls Corner
| Halls Corner, opp Police Station, Wickford
|Departure Date
|Pick-up Time
|Set-down Time
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|Room Types
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