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Outspoken Advocates for Diversity in Beer Enter 2020 Cautiously Optimistic Expanding diversity in craft brewing among those who make it as well as those who enjoy it is not a silent matter. Data from a 2019 survey from the Brewers Association (BA), the Boulder-based trade organization for craft brewers and publisher of CraftBeer.com, shows that brewery employees skew heavily white-male, and the attitude that craft drinkers are also white males has yet to disappear from marketing campaigns, media coverage and taprooms. But as we launch into a new decade, leaders in beer diversity are sharing a general sense of cautious optimism for better representation and more equality from the brewing space to the public space. Exciting initiatives have joined a roster of organizations and movements that have had their theoretical noses to the grindstone for years, from Queers Makin’ Beers to the Pink Boots Society to the relatively newer Fresh Fest. In 2020, we get to see all these projects in action. We’re talking to the leaders behind movements including #IAmCraftBeer, the Diverse Beer Writers Initiative, and Beer. Diversity. to examine where they gauge the community is in the push for greater inclusion in craft beer and what we have to look forward to in 2020. #IAmCraftBeer: From Twitter Hashtag to Meetups On September 9, 2019, Chalonda White — a.k.a. Afro Beer Chick — tweeted out a racist email she had received. Replies were of shock and disgust at the message as well as support for White, but the conversation didn’t end there. The Brewers Association’s Diversity Ambassador Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham saw the tweet and started the hashtag #IAmCraftBeer as a way for those who don’t feel represented in the beer scene to see each other. “[I] think it’s really important to highlight the diversity that is already in the industry that perhaps we don’t see,” Jackson-Beckham says. “The hashtag was really more of an effort to say, ‘You know what, in this industry where we have lots of opportunities in front of us and lots of work to do and progress to make, to make sure everybody feels that they have space.’ It’s not like there’s no one in craft beer and it’s not like the people in craft beer are all the same person. I just thought it made sense to take a moment and highlight the fact that we are all already very individual, unique people.” Craft beer drinkers of every background emerged to tell their stories, which Jackson-Beckham has been archiving. “I am so happy that something so ugly turned out to be something so beautiful,” White says. “People are always going to have their opinions who should and shouldn’t belong. At first I wasn’t even going to share the tweet, but I’m glad I did. […] When Dr. J started the whole hashtag, you’re seeing that it’s not just bearded white dudes drinking beer. It’s a lot of other people–people of different races, religions, cultures, colors. Beer is a rainbow, and I’m loving it.” As inspiring as #IAmCraftBeer has been, White stresses that the movement must extend beyond social media to have a lasting impact. “The conversation needs to kick off change. That’s what I’m not really seeing too much because I’m starting to see that people are using this diversity and inclusion as a trend,” she says. As far as bringing a Twitter initiative to life in the real world, White has been taking charge alongside fellow advocates like Liz Garibay, curator of History on Tap and founder of the Chicago Brewseum. White and Garibay organize #IAmCraftBeer events at breweries in different cities where all beer drinkers can come meet each other. “There are a lot of people who are talking about stuff, and there are people who are actually doing it,” Garibay says. “You need both. When you actually physically come together and inform yourself and educate yourself, that’s when real change happens.” Opportunities to Affect Change Jackson-Beckham, White and Garibay are all busy both talking about and acting on ways to improve representation, diversity and inclusion. Also an assistant professor of communication studies and beer scholar at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, Jackson-Beckham runs her own diversity consultancy called Craft Beer For All. Coincidentally on the same day that White received the email that catalyzed #IAmCraftBeer, Jackson-Beckham launched the nonprofit Craft x EDU, offering grants, scholarships, education, support and resources to people of all backgrounds looking to work in beer. The work that Jackson-Beckham is doing intersects frequently with the rallying and unifying that White and Garibay do with their own projects and their enthusiastic #IAmCraftBeer outreach. #IAmCraftBeer’s mission also includes partnering with breweries to brew collaboration beers for which the proceeds support the breweries’ local nonprofits as well as the upcoming #IAmCraftBeer innovation grant fund. All three advocates express optimism about the year ahead along with specific areas where they see immediate opportunities for improvement. “One of the things that I find interesting and often frustrating is the way that we perceive and talk about inclusion, equity, diversity efforts,” Jackson-Beckham says. “We tend to think of them as very end-goal … We expect that all of a sudden, places will immediately look different very quickly and that’s just, for me, both dangerous and wrong-headed. Equity and inclusion, diversity, these are organizational business goals. This is not a cheerleading effort that you lay on top. These are things that affect your profitability, they affect your compliance with federal law, they affect your human resources, they affect your corporate culture.” Two specific actions White is calling for are improved representation in beer festivals’ advertising, and for breweries to seek out partnering with black-owned breweries. “I’m telling these beer fests, ‘When you send me your media kit, if I do not see people that look like me, then don’t invite me,’” she says. “Some of these beer fests I have attended, I know people of color are there, I’ve taken pictures with them, so why is it that when you’re advertising for your beer fest, we are not included?” Regarding collaborations as a conduit for representation, White tweeted her idea and says she immediately started hearing from breweries like 2nd Shift Brewing asking her for information on black-owned breweries they could contact. “What happens is you’re bringing them into a community that might possibly often overlook them,” White encourages. “Beer is the perfect place to set an example for other industries to start making some changes and bring people together.” Liz Garibay “People are really into this. They want to see change, they want to see different types of people in those spaces and different people making beer,” Garibay says. “They’re really rooting for more female brewers and more brewers of color—we want that, we want to see that sort of rainbow. This is the place for it to happen. Beer is more than just a beverage–it’s a powerful cultural force with the ability to bring people together and the power to make change. This issue of diversity is one of those things that completely encompasses that mantra. Beer is the perfect place to set an example for other industries to start making some changes and bring people together.” The Diverse Beer Writers Initiative Yet another positive movement that sprung from #IAmCraftBeer is Beth Demmon’s Diverse Beer Writers Initiative. Demmon is a journalist in San Diego focusing largely on craft beer, and often specifically on diversity in beer. She wrote about #IAmCraftBeer for Vice’s food and drink vertical, Munchies, and one response to her story got Demmon thinking. “I saw there was a woman who works in the beer community who is black and she basically said, ‘Why is there a white writer talking about a black beer issue?’” Demmon recalls, paraphrasing the question. “At first, I was a little upset. I was like, ‘Well, I’ve worked hard to build relationships with editors and I’m using my privilege to amplify a very important movement taking place. Then, I had to take a step back and say, ‘Well, you know, should I be the person talking about these types of issues? Who else could be a better person within that community to discuss this on a much wider platform?’” Demmon was one of two recipients of the North American Guild of Beer Writers 2019 Diversity in Beer Writing Grant; her article about parenting in beer published here on CraftBeer.com. She experienced firsthand how such an initiative can open the beer world up to fresh voices. “It is difficult to break into beer writing or any media because there’s a lot of gatekeeping in media and editorship,” Demmon says. “That’s not a critique, that’s just the way that it is … So when the North American Guild of Beer Writers puts together an opportunity that is open to anybody and is specifically looking to amplify underrepresented voices with kind of no strings attached, that’s the beauty of a grant, there’s no ulterior motive. Demmon wanted to play an active role in welcoming more diversity into beer writing, seeking to help others receive opportunities similar to hers through the NAGBW grant, and to work toward more representation in the discussions we have about craft beer. “I thought, if I’m really serious about changing the landscape of the craft beer community as a writer, as a consumer, as an advocate, I need to put my money where my mouth is and help promote the writers who don’t have the connections or the experience that I do to be able to tell [these] stories,” she explains. Demmon launched the Diverse Beer Writers Initiative in which she offers free consulting to anyone from anywhere in the world looking to write about beer. The range of advice she offers caters to total beginners as well as more experienced writers, pertaining to everything from monetizing a blog to finding publications to write for. Demmon is excited about what she has seen people she’s worked with accomplish. Some have applied for the guild’s 2020 Diversity in Beer Writing Grant while others are pitching editors. Between the Diversity in Beer Writing Grant and movements like Demmon’s initiative, 2020 offers hope that beer lovers will continue to hear more diverse voices and perspectives when they read about beer. Ren Navarro’s Beer. Diversity. Ren Navarro entered the craft beer world through sales. On the side, she began doing talks as Beer. Diversity., focused on improving inclusion in the community. She thought consulting on and discussing diversity in beer would be a side hustle, but by May 2018, it was clear that enough breweries and businesses in the U.S. and Canada (where she calls home) had the need for guided conversations about representation. Beer. Diversity. became Navarro’s full-time calling. Through Beer. Diversity., Navarro not only speaks at breweries and on various panels, but she also helps organize events aimed at speaking to underrepresented communities who work in or want to work in beer. One initiative is focused on bringing those voices to conference stages. (Find a U.S. Brewery: Brewery Finder) “You’ll look at a conference and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s this guy who always speaks at this thing, that’s that same guy who always speaks at that thing.’ We thought we’d just kind of divert it. Say we want a group of indigenous brewers speaking–[or] I want a group of black women. So, we have people who don’t normally get up on stage to be like, ‘Hello, this is my experience.’” Through Beer. Diversity., Ren wants to reach both brewers and drinkers, encouraging breweries to expand their demographics and the general public to go out into the world and discover new breweries where they can be seen and participate in the beer community. Navarro teaches staff workshops to help breweries assess how they hire, how they address the public, and how they treat their employees. She says it’s important for these small businesses to create an open dialogue so everyone is heard. Navarro says another vital goal for 2020 is continuing to “make room at the craft family table … I would really love to see more people of color, more differently-abled people, more LGBTQ+ people, more indigenous brewers.” Navarro doesn’t want to see complacency hinder progress, but she’s cautiously optimistic about the year ahead. “I’m still getting booked,” she says. “Until I don’t get booked, I don’t think we’ve done it yet. My calendar is filling up, I’m booking into the summer. That tells me that we’re not at that point where people are like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got it.’”

Did you know that the human body was literally designed to experience pleasure? I know this might sound odd given that we give such little attention to our physical pleasure, but it’s really true. A great example of this is the sheer fact that women possess a clitoris- a pleasure-center that is only found among female mammals. It serves no reproductive purposes, and simply exists to create intense and pleasurable physical sensations. But what is it that sometimes blocks us from being able to truly experience pleasure? One of the largest inhibitors of feeling pleasure on a physical and emotional level, is the presence of shame. When you experience the feeling of shame, it can instantly block the pleasure receptors, and stop you from being able to fully experience the positive effects of physical touch. If a person feels shame about his or her body, it could instantly translate to a loss of pleasure in the bedroom. In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded by images of perfect, airbrushed bodies with teeny waistlines and six pack abs. We see advertisements of toned people who never seem to age, and we are constantly comparing ourselves to them. It’s no wonder that we feel ashamed of our natural bodies! It’s impossible to measure up! But the fact of the matter is that humans come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and like it or not, we are aging. On the journey to experience your physical body’s full pleasure capacity, it is important to rid yourself of your body-shaming habits, and begin an intentional quest towards self love. Try the following exercises from Chapter 3 of my new book, Living an Orgasmic Life to begin to overcome body-shame, and to love your body exactly the way it is: - Grab a pen and paper, and write down all of the the things that you love and adore about your body. Be as specific as possible. If you love your hair, get detailed about what it is that you love, such as “I love the way that my hair has natural bouncy curls that frame my face”. - Look into a mirror, and use this list to affirm yourself, preferably out loud. Take some time to admire the parts of your body that you love, and to really allow the feelings of speaking kind words to yourself to fully sink in. - Send some loving thoughts to the parts of your body that perhaps you don’t love as much. Instead of ridiculing yourself, make it a point to pause at that part of your body and think “I am sending love there.” - Continue to reach for self-love verbiage as a habit, anytime your negative self-talk begins to creep in. By doing this and forming a habit, you can slowly cultivate some serious body love! - If you struggle with body image issues, check out my colleague Elle Chase’s awesome blog, www.ladycheeky.com. Elle is a body image and pleasure advocate and the author of Curvy Girl Sex. False Beliefs & Judgments Judgements that you have about what is “right” and “wrong” about different types of sexual experiences is another place where shame can hold you back from pleasure. Perhaps your sexual blueprint and past experiences have lead you to believe that certain sexual experiences are taboo. One of my clients fantasizes about a nurse/doctor scene, but she feels too embarrassed to ask her partner to engage in this role play with her, holding her back from experiencing her true erotic desires and her pleasure. I used to think that flogging was only for masochists, but then I experienced it myself and was shocked at how much erotic pleasure I derived from it. The next time that you notice your own judgment coming up, take note of your resistance and remember that your body is designed for pleasure. You may also wish to take time in the future to journal about your sexual experiences, and your own understanding of what you perceive to be right or wrong in terms of your sexuality. Is there something in your belief system that you feel is holding you back? Note whether it’s your own belief or one that is imposed upon you. Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken Simone de Beauvoir

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Return to Transcripts main page President Trump Holds Campaign Rally In North Carolina; President Trump Attacking Election Eight Weeks Before Votes Are Cast; President Trump Says We Will Build Up Our Military One Day; Top Vaccine Maker Pauses Coronavirus Vaccine Trials; President Trump Trying To Stoke Fears Ahead Of Election; The Department Of Justice Wants To Defend President Trump In E. Jean Carroll Defamation Lawsuit. Aired 11p-12a ET Aired September 8, 2020 - 23:00 ET THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. DON LEMON, CNN HOST: But in spite of the coronavirus pandemic and a mask requirement in North Carolina, very few people in the crowd wore masks and there was practically no social distancing. Trump trying to stoke fear among his base claiming Democrats are out to destroy America's suburbs and blaming the pandemic for a tough re-election bid. Every once in a while the mask he refuses to wear slips. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I got to tell you, I was sailing to an easy election. This was going to be so easy I probably would have not been here tonight. I would have said no we don't have to bother. This is going to be -- now we have to work. (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: The president and his top aides falsely claim that voting by mail leads to massive fraud. The example they give to back up their false claims, well, they just don't check out. They do that because of the pandemic knowing millions of Americans are planning to mail in their ballots this year and since it will take time to count all those ballots there is a very good chance we won't know the winner of the election on election night. So, we are going to take a look at what may happen here in this hour ahead for you. So, make sure you stay tuned. Joining me now CNN White House Correspondent, John Harwood and also Marc Caputo, senior political reporter for Politico, Florida. Good evening to both of you gentlemen. So happy to have you on. I hope you had a great Labor Day weekend. John, let's see, let's start with you. We have seen clashes between Trump supporters and protesters recently and tonight as the campaign really kicks off now here's what the president is saying. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Watch those ballots. I don't like it. You know you have a Democrat Governor, you have all these Democrats watching that stuff. I don't like it. Watch it. Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do. Because this is important. We win North Carolina we win -- (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: So this is not -- it's not really hard to see how this could get volatile here and create an atmosphere of intimidation at a time there is already a ton of concern about voter suppression. What do you think, John? JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I agree with you, Don. Look, you can hear in the president's tone of voice that he was acting. That was performance art schtick that he was doing for the crowd. But all of that schtick has gotten increasingly raw both in terms of protests in the cities talking about anarchists and people who are going to, you know, threaten your physical safety, talking about suburbs getting demolished, talking about thieving and robbing at polling places. You could see just as he has encouraged that sort of vigilante activity in the streets that we saw cost the lives of two people in Kenosha and cost the lives of one of the vigilantes and then later the person who shot him in Oregon, you could see that kind of disorder occurring on Election Day. And together with the president's suggestion that people who have already sent in absentee ballots going to their polling places to see if their ballots have been cast and of course in some cases the ballots would not have been recorded. Because they may not have been received and marked in the poll book when people show up you could see him setting the stage for real chaos at polling places that's consistent with his statements that, well, it is going to be a rigged election and that is the only way I can lose trying to cast doubt over the legitimacy of the electoral process and also perhaps the administration of the electoral process. LEMON: Marc, let's bring you in. I'm going to put up this new poll out today shows Trump and Biden tied in the battleground state of Florida. You say this race is much closer than people think. What are you hearing from Florida voters? MARC CAPUTO, FLORIDA PLAYBOOK CO-AUTHOR, POLITICO: Well, probably hearing what your poll or what the Marist poll what you are featuring is showing. It kind of depends on who you talk to. This kind of state where you can go and let's say southwest Florida which is kind of blood red Republican country and you would ever wonder why Joe Biden would have a chance. But then you could wind up in Broward County and wonder how on earth it could be that President Trump would get any votes in Florida. We're pretty evenly divided states, certainly on this question. For some time, Biden has been leading marginally, that is within the margin of error on the polls but they appear to be tightening up, they kind a feel to be tightening up. And Florida is one of those states that you kind of flip a coin and it can wind up on its edge. That is usually how close our elections come. You know, in 2018 we had two top of the ticket races. Actually three top of the ticket races that were decided by half a point or less. I'd be really surprised if anyone either Biden or Trump won by two points or more here. LEMON: My goodness. Let's talk more about this poll. It shows Trump is leading among Latino voters in Florida with 50 percent support. Biden has 46 percent. But in 2016 in the exit polls it showed that Hillary Clinton had 62 percent support of Latino voters in Florida. How worried should the Biden campaign be about this, Marc? CAPUTO: Well, they shouldn't be that worried about that poll when it comes to Latino voters. Understand about 17 percent of the registered voters in the state are Hispanic. About 15 percent of the actual votes probably going to be cast by people who classify themselves as Hispanic. You know, that poll there has fewer than 150, 180 Latino respondents. The margin of error is going to be all over the place. A pretty big sample size poll out last week by (inaudible) research (inaudible) lab showed Joe Biden up by about 17 points. That is pretty good. It sounds pretty good. But it's probably not good enough if he wants to win the state and it is still worse than Hillary Clinton did. That having been said, while Joe Biden appears to be under performing with Hispanic voters relative to Hillary Clinton. He is over performing with non-Hispanic white voters that is still the super majority in the state. Now, so for every let's say presumptive of the Hispanic vote he loses, quote-unquote, and Joe Biden picks up with white voters, he is kind of making up a net of about four votes. So that is a pretty good deal he's got so far. Now, I would just urge everyone to understand these are polls. They're snapshots in time. They have margins of error. The smartest and dumbest thing said in politics is it's all about turnout and we are going to see what happens on Election Day. It could be so close it might take a few extra hours or even a few extra days to declare the winner, but Florida will have probably at least 75 percent of the vote in before Election Day both cast by absentee ballots in the mail or in-person early votes. We are going to probably have a pretty good idea who the leader is but it could be so close that people are going to have to be a little patient and we in the news media have to be pretty cautious about declaring who the winner is on election night. LEMON: That sound you're hearing, people are going no. It's everybody watching the show who is -- they don't want that to happen. Marc, we thank you. John, we'll see you soon. Both of you thanks so much. I want to get to now, General Wesley Clark the former NATO supreme allied commander. General thank you so much, I appreciate you joining us here this evening. President Trump is claiming that he rebuilt the U.S. military at his rally tonight. Well, he did it at a rally tonight, claiming that he rebuilt the military. It is one of his go to campaign lines but very different from what we heard from him, this was just yesterday. Watch this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: I'm not saying the military is in love with me. The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: That's got to be galling to leaders who have dedicated their lives to protecting this country. Why is he saying that? WESLEY CLARK, RET. GEN. FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: Well, he is saying it as, just to attack an elite that he considers -- he is trying to reach beyond the commanders and get to the level of the soldiers and the Jr. Leaders I guess. But it's also part of the incoherence that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth. Maybe he thinks if he were a general what he'd be worried about is how to make money as a general. He doesn't understand the first thing about the ethics of the United States armed forces. The ethics of the armed forces are about accepting responsibility, being competent, caring for others. He doesn't do any of that as a leader, and Don, I will tell you that he's making a big mistake saying that he rebuilt the armed forces, because they were there before he was elected and the people who were in it are highly offended and I'm not talking about top brass. I'm talking about people in the middle. People near the bottom who came in under Obama. They worked. They went to war. They suffered. Donald Trump didn't change that. The Pentagon always is looking to have more money for research and development and so forth. Because we are now reordering against China and Russia but he didn't transform the military and they are deeply offended that he says that. I will tell you that some of the middle range officers, they see him for what he is. They know he doesn't represent their values. He is the antithesis of everything they stand for. And rather than duty, honor, country they say he stands for lie, brag, and blame. CLARK: And that's his methodology. He's got it exactly wrong. He's treated with respect by the senior generals around whom he works and who give him policy proposals. They may not like it but further down I think he's really lost the respect of the men and women in uniform down the rank. LEMON: Let's talk about this a bit more, because the president, general, he can claim the reporting first detail in the Atlantic is fake. He can do that all he wants, but the tape doesn't lie. Just listen to candidate Trump talking about military leaders announcing their intention to attack ISIS. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Whatever happened to the element of surprise? The element of surprise. What a group of losers we have. We have a bunch of babies running our country, folks. We have a bunch of losers. They're losers. They're babies. (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: And so, you know, when you hear that and you hear the president say I've never called anybody a loser. I haven't done that and then he is doing it on tape, clearly criticizing leadership then. Didn't stick, right, in 2016. But this time he called those killed in action losers and suckers. The people who were killed in action. Will this time be different? CLARK: Well, I don't know. I mean, I think that in 2016 he still had a certain aura he brought in from TV. I think now he owns it. You know when you're a company commander in the United States army, you get a couple weeks, maybe 30 days, and then everything in that unit belongs to you. When you're the president of the United States if they're looking at you and four years later you're still blaming your predecessor. It's your problem. They know he treats people this way. They know he says these things. People in the middle, this has gone through the armed forces. The Jeff Goldberg story, that came out because it was widely talked about by many people in the armed forces that he had insulted those who had served and suffered and died. LEMON: You had heard that before the reporting? CLARK: Yes. I mean, this is something that's been going through the ranks I'm told and people have -- this is what happens when a man has the characteristics of the entertainer that Donald Trump has and he shoots off his mouth and says a million things and says things in public and in private. Look, if you're president of the United States you owe the deepest respect and gratitude for these men and women in uniform. They're putting their lives on the line and they're trusting and their families are trusting you to make those decisions. And that is the way it's been since we fought the revolutionary war. And it's been tough. And some of the decisions that are made aren't good. It is a sacred duty of the president to respect these people and their sacrifices and he hasn't done it and they know it. And it's going to get worse and he is going to lose more and more respect as this election campaign continues. LEMON: Well, that's his big concern here, and it was just mind boggling to me to hear him say, only an animal would say something like that, and then someone plays a tape of him saying the exact same sort of thing in the next breath. Unbelievable. General as always thank you for your service and thank you for appearing. I appreciate it. CLARK: Thanks, Don. LEMON: Thank you. Millions of students across the country going back to school today but a whole lot of them will only be learning online. Coronavirus and the administration's handling of the crisis will be a huge issue this fall. Where America stands on that as the campaign heats up. That's next. LEMON: The president has been out in the field talking about a possible coronavirus vaccine before the election. Well, tonight we got the news that a drug company AstraZeneca is pausing its coronavirus vaccine trial due to an unexplained illness in a participant. Its vaccine is one of the three in late stage phase three trials in the U.S. That as kids across the country face a whole new reality in the era of the coronavirus. Here is CNN's Nick Watt. NICK WATT, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Millions of students back in school today but most aren't actually in school. They're online only. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALERGY AND INFECTOUS DISEASE: If you are in the red zone you really have to be very careful before you bring the children back because you don't want to create a situation where you have a hyper spreading event as you might have in the school. WATT: Hartford, Connecticut planned a hybrid model but a cyber-attack just forced a delay. MAYOR LUKE BRONIN (D), MAYOR OF HARTFORD, CT: As difficult as that was in this year when so much work has gone into preparing for the first day of school. WATT: Tens of thousands of confirmed cases now at colleges. West Virginia University just suspended nearly all in-person teaching at one campus for two weeks. Friday night a COVID positive frat member told to isolate went to a party anyway. Nationally case counts are still headed in the right direction for now. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But we are beginning to do things we haven't done since the start of the pandemic. WATT: Like opening some schools and colleges and moving indoors in colder weather. In New York, sheriff's deputies will now stop buses arriving from a staggering 33 states and territories. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They will be pulling over buses before they arrive and they'll be giving out those traveler health forms to get people right away to sign up so we can make sure they quarantine. WATT: Eleven states are right now seeing a rise in average case counts. Arizona and Florida, success stories of the late summer ticking up again. FAUCI: We need to hang in there together. This will end. And it will end even sooner if we continue to go by the public health measures that have begun for so many months. WATT: A new study of cell phone data suggests people staying home in the spring did slow the spread of this virus. They saved lives. But the president thinks shutdowns are ridiculous, claims Democrats are using them just to hurt him. FAUCI: We've got to regain the trust of the community. WATT: So the CEOs of nine pharma companies racing to produce a vaccine just signed a pledge that they won't submit too soon for approval, suggesting they won't bow to any political pressure. They hope to help ensure public confidence in the rigorous, scientific and regulatory process. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is you are right, it is unprecedented moment and it's a historic pledge. We saw it was critical to come out and reiterate our commitment that we will develop our products, our vaccines using the highest ethical standards. WATT: Nick Watt, CNN, Los Angeles. LEMON: That's Nick Watt. I want to bring in now Tom Bollyky, Director of the Global Health Program at the Council of Foreign Relations. Also the author of Plagues and the paradox of progress. Tom, good to have you here. Let's start with this new development tonight, AstraZeneca pausing all of its global vaccine trials after a British volunteer got sick. What does this mean for this vaccine and others going forward? TOM BOLLYKY, DIRECTOR OF THE GLOBAL HEALTH PROGRAM, COUNCIL OF FOREIGN RELATIONS: Well, for this particular vaccine we don't know. It means delay for certain. There will be an investigation to identify whether this severe, adverse event was related to the vaccine or just something that happens when you have 30,000 people that you're watching. So that will be delayed. What it does suggest is the risks that are inherent to vaccine development and the importance of conducting these trials to their conclusion. LEMON: The president is pushing the timeline for a vaccine again tonight. Let's listen to this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: We're producing a vaccine in record time. This is a vaccine that we are going to have very soon, very, very soon. By the end of the year but much sooner than that, perhaps. (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: But this was just this afternoon. This is Dr. Anthony Fauci, what he said about a vaccine before Election Day. Watch this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) FAUCI: I think that's unlikely. I mean, the only way you can see that scenario come true is that there are so many infections in the clinical trial sites that you get an efficacy answer sooner than you would have projected. Like I said, it is not impossible, duly, but it is unlikely that we'll have a definitive answer at that time. More likely by the end of the year. (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: So, Tom, the question is, what does this do to the confidence in the vaccine when you hear the president pushing for it and the cautions, you know, the cautious warnings from his own advisers? BOLLYKY: So the president's pushing isn't helping. To be a success, a vaccine needs to be proven safe and effective. But it also needs to be trusted. It's possible as Dr. Fauci said that with the Pfizer Moderna vaccine the clinical trial recruitment has gone fast enough, it is possible that they could demonstrate enough evidence if they're really highly effective and there are a lot of infections among the trial subjects that they could have enough to overcome the hurdle for an emergency use authorization from the FDA. However, the question is, will the public trust it? Particularly after we have had bad results with convalescent plasma, with the authorization of that, and hydroxychloroquine. So what you saw today from the nine pharmaceutical companies putting out a statement was trying to reassure the public that they get it. That public trust, that they're willing to earn the public trust through the development of this trial. Pfizer's CEO actually went further later in the day where they said they will not seek authorization prior to the conclusion of the phase three clinical trial. I just wish the president would express similar caution. LEMON: Tom, always a pleasure. Thank you sir. BOLLYKY: My pleasure. LEMON: Fear and division. We are going to go inside the president's playbook in his attempts to stay in office. Plus, how the Justice Department could be skewing norms to protect the president again. LEMON: The president playing hard to his base as the election draws closer trying to stoke fears about violence in America's streets and falsely claiming Democrats would destroy the suburbs. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: They want to destroy your suburbs. You know, the rule, the regulation that I just terminated, they want to build low income projects in the suburbs. They've been doing it. They've been destroying suburbs. If the left gains power they will demolish the suburbs. The suburbs are next. If you elected this guy the suburbs would be overwhelmed with violence and crime. If they win, the mobs win. (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: Joining me now to discuss, CNN's Political Analyst, Toluse Olorunnipa, and CNN Political Commentators, Tara Setmayer and Amanda Carpenter. OK. It's just -- anyway. I'll let you guys discuss this. Hi. How are you? It's just so ridiculous. He is pretending now that he isn't president and I -- whatever. Toluse, so talking about low income housing, violence and crime coming to the suburbs. It is not even a dog whistle, it is a bull horn. Is this going to win back any suburban voters? TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, CNN POLITICAL ANALSYT, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, BLOOMBERG NEWS: Right. There is not a lot of nuance in this argument from the president. He is essentially saying that poor people means crime and that means that your suburbs are going to be destroyed essentially trying to equate, you know, the idea of poor people and for the president that's code for minorities coming into the lily white suburbs and destroying these bedroom communities. Obviously, it's not quite like that in reality, but that's the argument that he's making. It is a very purely political argument and has not worked for him in the past. The reason he is being so blatant about trying to win back the suburbs is because he has seen what's happened since 2016 and 2018. The suburbs were the strongest sort of pushback against his presidency as Republicans and moderates in suburbs went against his campaigning. They essentially sided with Democrats. They ousted a bunch of House Republicans and put in new Democrats in gubernatorial seats all across the country. The president sees that. He sees the writing on the wall. Now, he is trying to scare these suburban voters into coming back to his camp. There are not a lot of indications that it's working, but he is not slowing down on his efforts to scare suburban voters back into his camp. LEMON: Amanda, I think it is interesting because I've had very similar thoughts. That this was -- you say that this is a caravan 2.0, right? Remember the caravan coming across the border in 2018? This is what -- this is the 2020 version of that. AMANDA CARPENTER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR, FORMER SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS ADVISOR AND SPEECHWRITER FOR SENATOR TED CRUZ: Yeah. In 2018, he wanted suburban voters to be afraid of illegal immigrants coming over in a caravan, and his messaging was very direct. The Democrats are going to let MS-13 into the suburbs. They're going to go after your children, et cetera. A lot of Republicans followed that messaging, including in Virginia where Democrats had big wins and took over the state. And so he saw it didn't work. But Donald Trump doesn't really have any new tricks. He is just swapping racist tendencies toward Hispanics or racist tendencies toward Blacks, right? It is not the Hispanic caravan you have to be afraid of this time. It is the black mob that is coming to your house. And now, the McCloskeys in St. Louis are heroes for waving guns at those people, right? So it is the same playbook. Toluse is absolutely right. It didn't work for Trump in 2018. The Democrats flipped the House. They took 41 republican seats with the biggest voting margin win, I think, since Watergate. And so they're just swapping out different things to be afraid of. This will be a fear election. I have no doubt. But the ultimate decision will be -- who are voters more afraid of, Joe Biden or Donald Trump? I think the polling is showing us who they fear and who they would, you know, think to replace him with. LEMON: Hi, Tara Setmayer. So, the president also went after Senator Kamala Harris at his rally tonight. Listen. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You know what? People don't like her. Nobody likes her. She could never be the first woman president. She could never be. TRUMP: That would be an insult to our country. (END VIDEO CLIP) LEMON: Again, he is denigrating a woman, this time a black woman, as an insult to the country? What does that mean? TARA SETMAYER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You know this is what Donald Trump does. He otherizes everyone in order to gin up this us versus them. He does it all the time. And we see that he is using a modern day southern strategy, I would say. This is straight out of the playbook of the 60s where Richard Nixon ran on the idea of law and order because of the riots that were going on in the 60s in various cities and that helped propel Nixon into office. So Donald Trump, remember, is surrounded by people who were part of that Nixon era like Roger Stone, and not anymore, but Roger Ailes was also part of that. So he is seeing -- he saw what that did and how that worked then. I just don't -- I just wonder whether that five percent to seven percent of people who are undecided are looking at Donald Trump's America and saying that this is what they want. This is either a changed election or do you want it to stay the same? And the right track/wrong track that we see right now shows that people think that 70 percent of Americans think this country is on the wrong track. That is never a good thing. So Donald trump using racist issues and cultural division is a very narrow path to re-election. But what does concern me, where it could work, is where you continue to see the looting and rioting in certain places like Portland and others, of people who may be agitators, but it doesn't matter because perception is reality. If people continue to see that this is out of control, it could work for Trump. They have to stop these violent looting and rioting, rallies in places like this, because all it is doing is fueling Trump's campaign. He'd have nothing if it weren't for that. LEMON: Toluse, the president has been using his Twitter feed to boost images of violence across the country, to Tara's point, saying that Biden would mean more violence. LEMON: He is acting like he is not the one in office right now, as I said, and it is not like Americans can forget who's been president for the last three and a half years or more. OLORUNNIPA: Yeah, we keep hearing this from the president in his campaign. You will not be safe in Joe Biden's America. Obviously, the Biden campaign has hit back and said this is Donald Trump's America. Everything that's happening, whether the president and his allies say this is happening only in Democrats' cities, this is all happening under the president's watch. So, it is a hard argument for him to make and say that this is all about Joe Biden's America. But to Tara's point, it is all about sort of otherizing the opponent, calling Kamala Harris incompetent, saying that she would be an insult to the country. It is sort of this idea that, you know, Kamala Harris, someone who was elected statewide multiple times in California, a senator from the largest state, the fact that she is not, you know, competent enough to be president, this argument of sort of us versus them. This is Democrat cities versus the rest of the country. The president is trying to draw a clear line and divide the country to try to slice up the votes that he thinks that he will need to get to 270 electoral votes. It is a very sort of cynical strategy. He seems to think it worked for him in 2016. He is trying to run that playbook again. But as Amanda said, the electorate has changed significantly. It will be very interesting to see if the president can do the same thing in 2020 when we are facing so many different challenges than we faced in 2016. LEMON: Thank you. Listen. If we had more buy-in from the American public, I might have again gone to spend Tara's wedding anniversary with her again this year. But we couldn't, Tara. LEMON: So, happy anniversary. I am sorry I didn't get to see you guys. SETMAYER: Thank you. LEMON: Thank you. SETMAYER: That's OK. Thank you. LEMON: It was a tradition for a moment and then, you know. SETMAYER: It was. LEMON: COVID. Thank you. LEMON: When people say the United States justice department is acting like the president's personal lawyer, well, listen to this next story about how they're now seeking to defend the president in a defamation case he faces over a sex assault accusation. LEMON: Breaking news tonight. The justice department is seeking to take over President Trump's defense in a defamation lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of sexual assault. Let's discuss with CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, a former prosecutor. Elie, good to see you. Thank you so much. ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Hey, Don. LEMON: Let's talk about this justice department. Does the justice department now defend President Trump in the personal legal cases he faces? HONIG: They are trying to, Don. Look, this is sheer lunacy. Here is the way it is supposed to work. If you're a federal official and you get sued for something you did on the job, for example, if the president got sued because he issued an executive order or signed a law, then the justice department properly represents you. But if it relates to something that you did in your personal capacity, a car accident, a contract dispute, then the justice department has no business. Look what's happening here. The president got accused of rape. He called the accuser a liar. Now, he is getting sued for defamation. Bill Barr and Donald Trump say, just another day at the office of the presidency. I mean, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln must be spinning in their graves. LEMON: Is there -- have you ever seen the justice department get involved in such matters, a president's personal affairs or personal legal affairs or personal business affairs? HONIG: No. This is a new low. I mean, every time you think Bill Barr has gone as far as he can possibly go to turn DOJ into the president's own private law firm to politicize DOJ, he goes a little lower. And Don, by the way, added bonus here. Guess who is picking up the tab for this one? Don Lemon and Elie Honig and everyone else -- HONIG: -- who pays their taxes. DOJ is picking up this representation, and we are all paying for it. LEMON: Mm-hmm. Wow. So it's free. I don't know. He's getting free advice or free legal -- I guess legal work from the taxpayers, right? It is a -- HONIG: Yeah. Free to him, not free to the taxpayers. HONIG: Sure. Look, this is the opposite of what the justice department is supposed to do. The justice department is supposed to be dispassionate, non-political, and independent. I don't know how much clearer it could possibly be. What Bill Barr is all about, what he has turned the justice department into and how he has really debased the justice department to just do whatever is necessary to get the president's back no matter how outrageous. LEMON: The term I was searching for then would be legal welfare is what the president -- LEMON: -- is on. People complaining about what they call welfare. The president is getting legal welfare right now. LEMON: So, we watched the attorney general distort the facts and the law regarding the Mueller report, Ukraine, the firing of Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and mail- in ballot fraud. Is that happening here? Is that -- what is going on? HONIG: Yeah, Don. This is part of a pattern. This is nothing new for William Barr. This is what he has done through his entire tenure. This guy has no bottom. He will twist the facts. He will twist the law. He will make up garbage like this, what it takes to defend the president. It is no different than the way, like you said, he spun the Mueller report, he tried to squash the Ukraine whistleblower complaint, he jumped into the Flynn and Stone cases, and he tried to fire the boss of my old office, the SDNY. HONIG: I mean there is no end to this. I want people to understand, William Barr is different not just in degree but in kind from any A.G. who came before him. I served under three Republican AGs, one democratic-appointed A.G., none of them came anywhere near William Barr's level of corruption and abuse of power. LEMON: Here is what an attorney for Miss Carroll statement there released says. "Trump's effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent, and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out." Is there any precedent for this, Elie? HONIG: No. I mean, if you look at Bill Clinton versus Paula Jones case, which is probably the closest factual scenario, a civil suit, DOJ did not handle Bill Clinton's personal representation in that case. They filed briefs in the case, but Bill Clinton had his own private lawyers. He paid for his own lawyers. Look, I think the attorney for Jean Carroll is right. It tells you something when one party here, E. Jean Carroll, is desperate to get a DNA sample, and the other party is desperate to avoid giving a DNA sample. I mean, those arguments in themselves, I think, tell you something about who is situated where in this case. LEMON: And once again, as you said, I think loudly for the people in the back, taxpayers picking up the tab to defend the president in this suit. HONIG: It's on you. It's on me. None of this is normal. None of this is acceptable. LEMON: Elie Honig, everyone. Elie, thank you. Good to see you. Appreciate it. HONIG: Thanks, Don. You, too. LEMON: Election experts warning a clear winner on election tonight isn't likely, and considering the president's attacks on mail-in voting, what comes after that could get ugly. LEMON: President Trump tonight launching another baseless attack on mail-in voting, an attack on the election, encouraging supporters in North Carolina to become poll watchers, falsely claiming Democrats will attempt to commit fraud at polling locations. More on the election from CNN's Pamela Brown. PAMELA BROWN, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tonight, the final sprint to Election Day is on. BROWN (voice-over): But this year, it's not just campaigning that looks different. Already, the incumbent in the White House is laying the groundwork almost daily for chaos, even encouraging voting twice, which is illegal. TRUMP: So, let them send it in and let them go vote. And if their system is as good as they say it is, then obviously, they won't be able to vote. BROWN: That prompted strong resistance from even Republican election officials. FRANK LAROSE, OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE: Don't test our boards of elections. They're good at this. Go ahead and submit your ballot once. BROWN (voice-over): On Monday, Trump once again railed on mail-in ballots. TRUMP: Just sending 80 million ballots all over the country, 80 million ballots, not requested. BROWN (voice-over): Trump is referring to the nine states, plus Washington, D.C., that will soon be mailing out ballots to every registered voter, a change this year in some places in response to the pandemic. The president is undermining mail-in ballot voting in states where it could hurt him and encouraging it in states where it could help him. Earlier this year, he admitted why. TRUMP (voice-over): The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you'd ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again. BROWN (voice-over): While the president and his allies claim, without evidence, the inquiries in mail ballots will lead to widespread voter fraud, there is evidence of widespread rejection of mail-in ballots because of human error. In this year's primary, more than half a million ballots were reportedly thrown out for simple mistakes, such as signatures not matching the state's records, a missing signature, envelope problems, and ballots arriving after the deadline. NILS GILMAN, BERGGRUEN INSTITUTE: You have to go through a process to verify that the ballot is legitimate. And of course, you know, human beings, being human, sometimes make mistakes. BROWN (voice-over): Election experts say one likely scenario is what is known as the blue shift. With Trump ahead, winning on election night in the rural states, where he has more supporters, and Biden pulling in front, winning after election night, through mail-in ballots. Counting of those ballots does not begin in key battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania until Election Day. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Barack Obama, 47 years old. UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Donald Trump wins the presidency. BROWN (voice-over): Meaning a declared winner on election night is highly unlikely. GILMAN: In some swing states, Trump is plus 40 among voters who plan on voting on Election Day and whose votes will be counted election night, and minus 60 among voters who are planning on voting absentee or by mail. BROWN (voice-over): The transition integrity center, who has played out these scenarios in mock elections, says if the election count is close, every scenario it has gamed out shows a political crisis and street violence will ensue. GILMAN: You have two totally different narratives being promoted by different media ecosystems, and people are living with really different factual understandings of what took place on Election Day. BROWN (on camera): And, Don, even though the election is November 3rd, voters in North Carolina can already send in their vote through mail- in ballots. And early voting starts soon in several states, including the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Now, election experts say you should plan to vote just like you would plan to go to the grocery store during the pandemic. And they say if you are voting by mail, to read the instructions carefully to make sure your ballot counts. Don? LEMON: All right. Pamela Brown. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. The president's former lawyer warning he'll do anything to win. Make sure you tune in for more from Michael Cohen right here on this show at 10:00 p.m. And thank you for watching, everyone. Our coverage continues.

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Most definitely, " was all that I was able to state as I nodded my head vehemently in agreement. He continues to yammer on about alliances or something and you guess you can sound engaged without listening, like you do if a Jehovah's Witness stops by for a chat. You make guttural noises like" huh! " " hmmm" and" ohhh, " for the first half hour, and then you realize you need to say voice or he'll get suspicious, in order to hear the odd Whitewood Saskatchewan live local free sluts and comment thoughtfully. You need to stay sober. If a date is what you desire, so that you understand you want to have the ability to make a clear- headed evaluation of this person whilst. Additionally, it is important to keep your wits about you for safety's interest. In demonstrating thatyou're somebody A profile goes a long way. That's why you needton't have images on Facebook. Many times, I have observed guys putting up heaps of pictures of these partying on Facebook. This may force you to appear interesting, but sometimes, it only indicates thatyou're a party person and is not in relationship, serious. Don't give it all away As you should get to the stage whenyou're trying to engage people who are interested in you. You need to retain some sort of puzzle for the man. The ball is dropped by A lot of girls at this guys and time end up dating women that may not seem all that sexy but understand how to play the puzzle game. " Looks like we're sweetie. " Replied Nadine because she kissed me harder and stroked my cock. " Looks like we are! " The entire event might have been opportunistic, it might have been proposed, it may have only been two horny friends on a whim, but it never occurred again, although I did call Emma and suggest it made excuses and eventually we drifted out of contact with nothing but another incredibly naughty night to remember.

A transgender California woman is garnering national attention after making her debut on a junior college basketball team. The Contra Costa Times is just one of a number of publications to feature the story of 50-year-old Gabrielle Ludwig, who participated in the 19th annual Comet Classic tournament championship on Dec. 1. Ludwig, who is twice divorced and has three children, last played college basketball in 1980, more than 20 years before she transitioned, USA Today points out. Though Ludwig is decades older than some of her teammates (and, at 6ft 8in, substantially taller), coach Corey Cafferata nonetheless praised her to the Times as possibly going on to become "the most dangerous player in the state." Ludwig told USA Today she hoped to set "an example" for transgender youth. "If they see me as a normal person and we are not the bogeyman and love life and raise kids just like you, maybe some of this mystery of who these people are will be taken away and there can be more blending into society," Ludwig said. "People are afraid of what they don't know. I am willing to put myself out there. It was not like that before. It was just about playing basketball. It's about more because I see an injustice." BEFORE YOU GO How to vote Vote-by-mail ballot request deadline: Varies by state For the Nov 3 election: States are making it easier for citizens to vote absentee by mail this year due to the coronavirus. Each state has its own rules for mail-in absentee voting. Visit your state election office website to find out if you can vote by mail.Get more informationTrack ballot status In-person early voting dates: Varies by state Sometimes circumstances make it hard or impossible for you to vote on Election Day. But your state may let you vote during a designated early voting period. You don't need an excuse to vote early. Visit your state election office website to find out whether they offer early voting.My Election Office General Election: Nov 3, 2020 Polling hours on Election Day: Varies by state/localityMy Polling Place

The Owl Field is a company specializing in binaural audio (3D sound) and their free story “Overnight” makes things even more immersive by making you the star! The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets have created a radio play which ties into their Lovecraftian science fiction RPG Spaceship Zero and I highly recommend it. The website Bleeding Critic offers many streaming audio tales in addition to its news and reviews. In honor of these works often being referred to as “Horror Medication,” I have selected the story “Chest Pains.” Similarly, Irrational Fears has a streaming audio book presentation of Elias Witherow’s “Seven Minute Sacrifice.” Mabel describes itself as a podcast about “ghosts, family secrets, strange houses, and missed connections” while That Horrible Woman refers to itself as the “new vibe of horror and speculative fiction podcast.” Return Home is a serialized tale of a man who returns to his home town after many years of being away. But when the name of said town is “Melancholy Falls,” you know it won’t be a pleasant experience. Diary of a Madman is, as the name implies, a collection of recorded audio diaries from an unnamed madman. The Wicked Library has a wealth of horror story readings (including some appearances by people whose work I’ve covered in the past). Both A Night of Horror and FateCrafters Studios are home to many a scary tale. Spotify has so many wonderful audio stories. Both the Sleep No More collection of classic horror stories, the popular Little Evil Things series can be found there. That’s right, Volumes II, III, IV and V are available as well! Mike Arnzen has a Bandcamp page where you can stream several collections of his short stories and poetry, including the expanded digital edition of AudioVile! The Atlanta Radio Theatre Company is another old friend with a Bandcamp page full of streaming goodness, along with a “Name Your Price” download of The Dweller in the Depths. The Elegant Skulls specialize in both music and poetry (as read by Boneyard the Poet Ghoul). Although Boneyard’s reading of “The Raven” can only be streamed for free, the reading of “The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly” by Vachel Lindsay and the audio drama special Halloween Extravaganza can be downloaded for free. Since it would be obnoxious to keep specifying what can be downloaded for free and what can’t, I’m just going to focus on the content from here on. The Elegant Skulls aren’t the only band with some audio goodness for you. Matt Abott and Wesley Slover have a chilling take on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space “ and Covered In Bees have a short comedy skit called “Dude Meets Dracula.” The Mechanism’s short retelling of Frankenstein is very different from the original while Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks’ Halloween Is Here is a hilarious parody of old Halloween records (complete with a few stories). Mark Binder’s tale The Zombie Cat is much longer (and more gory) than one might expect from the name and Drew Chial has a nifty tale of soul selling called Terms and Conditions. M. Amanuensis Sharkchild’s audiobook adaptations of “The Unlike Light” and The Spirit Collectors are sure to enthrall you. Let’s move on to SoundCloud. Blue Hours Productions’ revival of Suspense is well worth your time. Big Finish has the full Doctor Who audio drama Last of the Titans, along with the complete first parts of The Rani Elite and The Highest Science. They have a festive offering from their The Confessions Of Dorian Gray line called Trick or Treat available as well! RadioCliff has a live radio drama performance of Dracula, David Graey reads H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon,” Chris P. Fuchs created a radio play called “Dark Nights” and Nate Edmondson has an abridged version of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” Lukas Arbogast’s original audio tale “Shadow Over Brooklyn” feels like a portion of something bigger. That reminds me, both Colin J. Schwager’s “I love you” and prologue for “They Walked Among Us” were definitely made to promote a larger future work. Kid Congo Powers, of Kid Congo and The Pink Monkey Birds fame, has launch a podcast on iTunes where he reads poetry by Edgar Allan Poe (and other authors). iTunes also brings us The Lost Cat, The Bridge, Tunnels, The Magnus Archives, A New Winter and Spines. Still not satisfied? Not only is the Six Foot Plus 2016 Halloween special available, but there’s plenty of other audio dramas to be found at Audio-Drama.com. As a final bonus, here are all of the installments of Za Frûmi’s dark fantasy albums I could find on Bandcamp: You might recall how one of the members went on to form Atrium Carceri. I will leave it up for you to decide if these mark a new form of audio drama or if they are just music tracks that are heavy on dialogue. As always, Gravedigger’s Local 16 is not to be held responsible for anything that may occur (be it good or bad) as a result of downloading or streaming from any links given here. Attempt at your own discretion. Some downloads may not work in certain regions. Blah blah blah…

- Monthly Theme: Vampires - The Film: Strigoi - Country of origin: U.S.A. - Date of U.S. release: October 2009 (festivals only) - Studio: St. Mortiz Productions - Distributer: Breaking Glass Pictures (DVD) - Domestic Gross: ? - Budget: ? - Director: Faye Jackson - Producer: Rey Muraru - Screenwriter: Faye Jackson - Adaptation? No. - Cinematographer: Kathinka Minthe - Make-Up/FX: Kristyan Mallett - Music: ? - Part of a series? No. - Remakes? No. - Genre Icons in the cast? No. - Other notables?: No. - Awards?: Vision Award at the 2010 Neuchâtel International Fantasy Film Festival. - Tagline: “Real vampires don’t just drink your blood.” - The Lowdown: Strigoi is British director Faye Jackson’s feature-length debut. It concerns Vlad (Cătălin Paraschiv), a med school dropout who has returned to the Romanian village of his childhood after spending time abroad in Italy. Once there, he begins to suspect that the recent death of an elderly man in the village might actually be a murder the villagers are trying to cover up. As he investigates the case, he comes into conflict with a corrupt local priest (Dan Popa), the town’s mayor (Zane Jarcu) and his henchmen, and Constantin Tirescu (Constantin Bărbulescu), a wealthy land baron who used to rule the area during the Communist era. What Vlad begins to realize is that both Tirescu and his wife were murdered by the villagers and have returned as strigoi – undead blood-drinkers from Romanian folklore. If you haven’t seen Strigoi our discussion will include massive SPOILERS. Sean: So I have no idea what you might have thought of Strigoi… Kristine: I liked it. It wasn’t amazing, but I thought it was solid and had some great moments. And you? Kristine: That sounds about right… Sean: I’m struck by how it uses the tropes of horror movies to tell a story that really, at the end of the day, isn’t quite a horror story. It’s a story about the internal lives of the characters and about the history of the region. It’s very allegorical. Kristine: I agree and I thought the allegorical elements were woven into the movie really successfully, while still keeping the entertainment value high. Sean: In fact, I’ve seen it a few times and I still couldn’t explain all the land stuff or some of the finer details of the plot mechanics. For a little movie, it’s pretty dense. Everyone has a backstory, there’s a lot of political maneuvering, a lot of conflicting motivations. Especially in Vlad’s relationships with the priest, the cop and the Mayor of the town, who are our three key supporting players. And of course also Constantin Tirescu, the lead strigoi (a.k.a. vampire). Every character is connected to everyone else, and we’re always dealing with how the Communist-era history of the region hangs over the present-day events. Kristine: Right, exactly. But it stays entertaining, don’t you think? Sean: Yes, totally entertaining and, I think, very funny and charming. Mara stole my heart and I am in love with Vlad. Cătălin Paraschiv, the actor who plays Vlad, is a fantastic lead. Kristine: Well, I was just going to ask you to plumb the depths of the plot, since you’ve seen it more than once… but maybe you were just imagining Vlad plumbing your depths. He is a beautiful man, by the way. Sean: Right? And I love the character of Vlad a lot. He’s a really great hero and the moral center of the movie without being preachy or annoying. Rewatching this with you, it struck me how very rare it is to get a real hero character in a horror movie. Usually everyone is morally compromised in some way (like Frank in Super or Bart in The Revenant). Horror is a genre of anti-heroes. It is sweet and refreshing to put a truly moral and good-hearted man at the center of a horror movie. Kristine: Agreed. I really loved Vlad’s story arc – he leaves this backwards village to get a higher education and live in a glam Italian city but then ends up back in the village, having to accept that the “old ways” that he finds repugnant might actually be true. What did you make of it? Sean: I love the way you just put that. That’s a great encapsulation of his arc, and it also reminds me that even though he’s a “good man,” he’s still flawed. He’s lost, adrift, almost a slacker. But that dilemma – being close to middle age and finding yourself back home and a bit lost – feels both very of-the-moment (this is the Age of Apatow, after all) but also hit pretty close to home for me. Maybe too close. Kristine: Um, yeah. Agreed. Sean: The movie refuses to follow conventional story beats for the horror genre. Strigoi really is its own little animal. I thought it was very striking that when the moment comes for a violent, bloody climax with Constantin, the evil land baron/vampire, Vlad refuses to commit any act of violence and that is heroic. I just love the kind of masculinity that Vlad embodies – he’s defined by his humanism and his sense of morality. I also thought that the movie made clear that Vlad was the brave and moral man and that all the older men calling him “pussy” were the monsters. Kristine: I was just going to mention that awful flashback when Vlad’s grandfather calls him a pussy and makes him slaughter the chicken? I wanted to cry. Is that what your dad was like? Sean: No, my dad would never have done that. He wasn’t invested in “butch” like that. He would have berated my meager intellect for not being able to figure out math problems correctly. I actually thought that flashback about killing the chicken and the through-line of the missing dog/the dead chickens was a really wonderful bit of business. The specter of violence, and how the daily rhythms of village life are built upon a fundamental violence, is expressed really well by the movie. Returning again and again to the dead chickens both reminds us of that traumatic memory from Vlad’s childhood, but also reminds us that there’s an unchecked violence “loose” in the community. Of course, all this violence is linked to the masculine and Vlad is the “new” kind of man, whose own conception of his masculinity isn’t based on being “tough” or violent. Kristine: Yes, and that’s evident in the contrast between Vlad and his grandfather, who is also portrayed in a very humanistic way, despite the fact he is this “monster.” But um… the scene when Vlad wakes up and Grandfather is feeding on him? Didn’t it look very… Umm… Sean: Yes, it was gnarly and incestuous. But also unclear whether it was a dream or not, which I loved. Despite that creepy moment, Vlad’s grandfather was adorable and amazing. At the beginning when he insists that a gypsy or commie broke in to steal his one cigarette…? Kristine: Yeah, I loved him. And correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t his “strigoi-ism” explained as occurring because of the extreme trauma he has endured in his life? And I was totally going to bring up the commie/gypsy thing. I almost texted you when we were watching to say, “See????” In Eastern Europe, commies and gypsies are considered to be equally depraved and evil. Sean: The actual workings of vampirism in the movie are still unclear to me… I mean, Vlad has those horrible herpes bumps all over his body and some of the village men have the bumps on them when they’re all dancing at the end. So are they all “infected”? Kristine: Well, there are the “undead” strigoi and the living strigoi. But yeah, I didn’t get the full meaning of the bumps either, and whether or not they were involved with turning you into a strigoi. I am guessing they are not connected? That would make the ending so bleak, and that feels out of step with the tone of the movie, which I might describe as jaded but optimistic. I don’t know. Because the camera/Vlad’s gaze does dwell on the bumps like they are menacing… but that’s not how the Tirescus were “turned.” Oh wait, they were already living strigoi before they became undead strigoi, right? I’m confused. For the record, I thought Mrs. Tirescu was a way better vampire/monster. Her eating scenes were amazing. Disgusting and scary and comic all at once. Sean: Well the questions about the “rules” of vampirism are, to me, directly connected to the allegorical nature of the movie and how the movie is about village life in post-Communist Romania. The specter of communism, and its legacy, are exactly what the movie is about. I think that’s made clearest towards the end when Vlad confronts Constantin Tirescu and accuses him of never wanting to see anyone else prosper (remember, he was a land baron before the fall of communism) and then Vlad hisses, “You have always been strigoi.” It’s clear there that the movie is using the supernatural as a metaphor for real-world political circumstances. Bringing this all back to the mysterious bumps on people’s bodies, I was thinking that the bumps are some indication that their own past/legacy has “infected” them and that the shadow of their communist past stains all of them (which is very Cronenbergian, I might add). Kristine: Ah, that makes sense. I really liked how at the beginning of the movie, when the villagers are about to execute the Tirescus, we are invited to assume that they are a brutal, ignorant mob lashing out at something they don’t understand because of doltishness and greed. And then it turns out… not exactly. Things are a lot more complicated than that. I think that reversal is reflected in Vlad’s own conflicted views of the villagers, his “people.” He is suspicious of them as well, and does not want to be anything like them. All that was very well done. I also want to say that the dancing scenes (when they are raiding the Tirescus’ house and again at the end) could have been dumb but I found them delightful. And in terms of the finale, a totally believable response to realizing how fucked up the world is and being like, well I guess we should just enjoy ourselves? Sean: I love the dancing. And I love the song choices, especially “Spirit in the Sky” in the beginning sequence. Did you love Mara? Kristine: Yes. I loved her a lot. She reminded me in some ways of my Polish grandma, though my grandma would never dance adorably. But totally with the obsessive cooking and showing love through feeding people. I just want to say that anti-Russian sentiment is still very common in Poland. Oh, and I want to ask you – what did you believe when watching the opening scene? That the villages were barbaric thugs? I thought maybe Constantin and wife were Jewish or something,.. Sean: Yes, that scene when Vlad first arrives back in town and Mara is feeding and feeding him and sweeping up crumbs and doting over him says so much about the world of the characters and the way things are there. One thing I really admire about this movie is just its world-building ability. All the minor characters feel vivid and fleshed out and the place feels and rings totally authentic. Those men sitting around the casket drinking vodka and shooting the shit? So great. Kristine: Yeah, and I loved the one slightly younger guy in the track suit. So other, more oblique, ways the movie reminded me of my grandma? Kristine: The suspect priest. My grandma, probably like many other Polish ladies of her time, was absolutely Catholic. Her kids went to Catholic school, she went to church all the time and volunteered polishing pews, always had a framed pic of John Paul in her house (by the way, for Polish ladies, John Paul is the only and forever pope). However, she was totally not spiritual. This was all cultural and an expression of her lifestyle. I don’t know if it is a direct causal relationship but she was always deeply suspicious of the clergy. She wouldn’t let my dad be an altar boy because the priest “did things.” Later in her life, when her mind was going a bit, she would talk about looking through a window in the church, or whatever the place is called when the priests live, and seeing them all drinking wine and doing… weird stuff. When she was in her 90s and her church got a new, young priest she was convinced he was interested in her and not in a flattering way. In a “he wants to brutally ravage me” way. So I found the character of the shady village priest very interesting. Sean: Yeah I love how the movie is not precious or sacred about any institutions. But also, the characters are sort of humanized even when they’re corrupt. Though the fate of the priest is really ambiguous – the last we see of him he’s walking off on the dark road and it seems like someone’s following him (I think it’s Vlad’s grandfather) and I think we’re supposed to think he’s going to be killed? I was unclear about that… Kristine: Me, too. Sean: But I love the detail when Mara tears the candlestick out of the guy’s hands so he can’t brain Vlad with it, so then the priest hands the guy the Bible and he knocks Vlad out with that. Kristine: I am trying to remember what was said during the confrontation between Constantin and the priest. What was the priest’s motivation for killing the Tirescus? I know money, but I don’t remember the specifics. Sean: I’m serious, I’m still not sure on all those plot details. My understanding is that is all has to do with land ownership and who holds the title to the land. Kristine: Right. So, I was shocked when you pointed out this is only the second movie we have watched for horror movie club that was directed by a woman (thought I shouldn’t have been shocked, I do live in the real world). I’m curious what made Faye Jackson choose this world to focus on for her first feature. The movie is totally male-dominated. Mara and Mrs. Tirescu are the only ladies around. This is not a critique or problem I had with the movie, I’m just curious about her decision. I think Strigoi is an accurate portrayal of rural village life, even today. Do you have thoughts? Do you know much about Faye Jackson? Did you notice the total boy’s club? Sean: Yes I certainly noticed all that and have thought about it. In fact, the first time I saw the movie I just watched it and when I really liked it I went to find out about the director and was surprised when it was a woman. Just because the sensibility of the movie is not overtly “feminine” or “womanly.” Even when I assumed the director was male, I noticed that the movie had gender on its mind. Upon revisiting the movie I was struck by how rarely you get a main character like Mara, a middle-aged women who is just like, a normal person. Sean: I love all the scenes of her and Mrs. Tirescu in the kitchen, where the domestic space is turned into this site of monstrous consumption and anxiety. I also love the way all the status symbols of capitalism – the kitchen appliances, in particular – play a role in that part of the movie. Kristine: Agreed. Totally. I guess my real point is that I think this movie is, at its core, about masculinity and I think it is interesting that a woman made it. Sean: Yes, agreed. I think it is about masculinity. Though I think Mara is a main character, an important one, and our other “protagonist.” It’s Vlad and Mara’s movie. Kristine: Can I give some examples to clarify what I mean? Sean: Yes please. Kristine: Vlad is, according the world of the movie, an emasculated male, right? He was “pussy” as a child, he went to med school but couldn’t get licensed or pass finals or whatever because of his fear of blood, and then he returns home and becomes this heroic vampire killer who carves the heart out the “monster.” Again, I think it’s interesting that even though the movie definitely critiques grody, violent he-man manifestations of masculinity, it also shows Vlad, the hero, as taking on those characteristics, however unwillingly, and becoming “a man.” The other thing I really noticed was how Constantin (both the individual and as a stand-in for corrupt institutionalized power) emasculates the men in the village by stealing their land. I was struck by the contrast between Constantin in his fancy house with all his appliances and poor Nicolae, Vlad’s grandfather, in his dingy little room with his little twin bed after his property was taken. Yes, the men are trying to get money and their property back by killing Constantin, but I also think they are trying to reassert their masculinity. And on that note, back to your point about how the movie uses the status symbols of capitalism, my number one favorite re-occuring detail was that gaudy disco boom box. Sean: Love that boom box, all flashing in the background as it plays Romanian music during all the Mara/Mrs. Tirescu kitchen scenes. But I agree with all of your points about the movie’s approach to masculinity. I like how the movie complicates the gender stuff though – like Vlad’s lab partner in med school, who offers to take over for him and make the incisions into the cadaver, is a pretty young woman… So it is more about Vlad’s sensitivity and aversion to gore/blood. But the movie does “cure” him of that when he cuts out Octav’s heart. That heart-cutting scene, by the way, might be my favorite in the whole movie. Such a hilarious and gnarly take on the age-old vampire-killing scene, like when Vlad is awkwardly trying to sever the large arteries connected to the heart with like, a steak knife and it is so gross and terrible. But I certainly agree with you that land and power in this movie are very much a function of and way of measuring masculinity. Mara is the only one to feel remorse for their killing of the Tirescus (and you’re absolutely right that the opening scene is great because at that point we don’t know why they’re being assassinated and so all kinds of evil reasons – like that they’re Jews and this an act of anti-semitism – float through our heads). Mara returns the garbage bags full of appliances and clothes that she stole from their house and I loved how when she finds the resurrected Mrs. Tirescu in her fridge she tears off the blouse she stole from the Tirescus’ house and tries to hide it under the kitchen table. Kristine: Oh, the red blouse. Yes. Mara is very interesting. She has all these very stereotypical maternal traits, like always being framed in the kitchen, her need to feed and nurture, etc. But she is also very strong. She is the one who tells Vlad to cut the hearts out, correct? And also, my understanding is that Vlad’s father is alive somewhere in the vicinity and Mara is remarried (to the guy Vlad steals cigarettes from while he’s asleep/passed out on the couch). So I interpret that as Mara left Dad because he was abusive, which I imagine is not the norm in small villages. One Mara detail that cracked me up and illustrates this dichotomy – after Mrs. Tirescu “visits” her and eats all her food, Mara is only concerned that she won’t be able to feed the funeral party. Not that a fucking vampire/strigoi wants to suck her blood. I like how that scene pairs Mara’s domesticity with her strength. In Mara’s world, life must go on and food must be cooked and people must be fed even if there are strigois on the loose wanting to suck your blood. That world-view is repeated when she initiates the dancing in the final sequence. Sean: I totally agree that the domestic world is a source of strength for Mara and that’s she got a steely core. And I love those food details too. Were the strigois scary? Kristine: Umm… Kind of. Like I would be scared if Mrs. Tirescu showed up in my kitchen. But I wasn’t scared watching this movie. I actually thought Granddad feeding on Vlad while he was sleeping was the scariest scene. Sean: Yeah, the granddad scene was really creepy and gross. Would you agree that this movie is a total antidote to the franchise movies we watched last month? Kristine: Oh yes. Absolutely. Especially with the Mara character. Sean: Character-driven, full of ideas… I seriously would watch a tv show set in this world and following these characters. Kristine: Oh, I would love a Strigoi tv show. Sean: I seriously think the actor who plays Vlad has star quality and should be in things. Kristine: Things like gay porn? Sean: Hmmm… Anyway, what do you rate this? Kristine: Well, there were a few things that I didn’t love about the movie. I didn’t care about Octav, Vlad’s cop friend, for example. There were a couple of slow moments, too (mostly involving Octav). Sean: I loved Octav. Sean: I just did. I liked their camaraderie. Vlad needed a friend. Like the rest of our directors this month (Prior, Gunn, West) I am very excited to see what Faye Jackson does next. She’s one to watch. Kristine: Totally agreed. The Girl’s Rating: More feminist than you’d think AND Better and weirder than I expected The Freak’s Rating: More feminist than you’d think AND Better and weirder than I expected

Yeah, it's a kids book. Usually this kind of stuff Allison handles, and I get the scary mature readers only comics. But when this comic dropped into my lap, it was just too much fun to resist. Batman: Li'l Gotham is great! Written by Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs, with moody but kid-friendly cartoonish art by Nguyen, Batman: Li'l Gotham is the perfect counterpoint and companion to DC's other kids favorite Superman Family Adventures by Franco and Art Baltazar (who also brought us Tiny Titans). Nguyen and Fridolfs brings us two relatively in-continuity tales of autumn holidays, Halloween and Thanksgiving. There is lots of fun stuff here for both adults and kids of all ages. Batman teaches Damian about Halloween and the Penguin attacks the Thanksgiving Day Parade. It's almost a wonderful throwback to the good old days when heroes didn't have to die and world was always in peril - just fun adventure. And I loved the Halloween full page with the Golden and Silver Age Flashes holding hands, Darkseid chilling with a Slurpee, and Hush and a mummy checking each other out. Didn't I tell you this was fun? Batman: Li'l Gotham #1 is on sale this week at All Things Fun!, make sure you get down there and pick up your copy today. Originally only available digital, here's your chance to have a copy of your very own, to hold in your hands, and share with your family. By Glenn Walker Has the furor died down yet? Is it safe to talk about it yet? Yeah, it might be time. There was a week or two there if you mentioned the kiss, also known as the Superman/Wonder Woman power coupling in the final few pages of Justice League #12, by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, you might as well be wearing asbestos - because flames will fly. A month and a half having gone by however, it may just be safe to think about this one. I am a hardcore Wonder Woman fan, and I'm a firm believer that Superman and Lois Lane belong together. I've labored on about that last point before, both here and other places. Whether Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor should be together is a whole other argument, but just for simplicity's sake, let's just say, in a perfect world, they too belong together. However, in the New 52 DC Universe, neither couple is together, in the former case, have never been together… so it might work out for Supes and WW… or would it? To figure out the present, as always, we must look to the past. Despite both superheroes being around since the Golden Age, they never really had much interaction until the 1960s, and then to be honest, very little. Sure, both Superman and Wonder Woman were members of the Justice Society of America, but rarely appeared in the same issue. Superman's appearances were rare, as he was an honorary member. Things were slightly different in the Silver Age's Justice League, but comics were simpler then, all about story, less about character interaction. By the time things had changed, and the way comics were written was more mature and character driven, the couple's positions almost reversed, with Diana becoming an ex-member of the League while she was without super-powers. Again, the two rarely saw each other. Probably the first time I saw Superman and Wonder Woman together, outside of the League, was in Lois Lane #136, sadly the second to the last issue of that series. In that story, the two heroes announce their engagement, much to the heartbreak of Lois. In the end it's all a ruse to lure out a psychotic killer who wants to marry Superman herself. Silliness, yes, and typical of Lois tales of the time, but the cover betrays something more. As the power couple save Lois from certain doom, she thinks in a good old-fashioned though balloon, "Now I know why Superman is marrying Wonder Woman instead of me… they're a super-team!" There you go, power couple, so much in common, etc. It does make sense. They are both strangers in strange land, both gods among mankind, and in the same profession, and both keeping big secrets. Of course they would fall for each other. That issue of Lois Lane was a hoax, but later, in the post-Crisis era, the powers that be tried to put them together again, but this time explaining why not. It was in Action Comics #600, in a story by John Byrne and George Perez. Their big kiss this time was awkward, like a brother kissing a sister, as it is with most co-workers who try to make things happen. It's kinda ick. Much later, in the classic alternate future epic, Kingdom Come, by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, Superman and Wonder Woman do actually wind up together, and work well together as both a team and a couple. There is one prime plot point that allows this to happen. In that story, Lois is dead, and if Diana had someone, they are also long gone. They are the perfect second chance couple, as long as their first choices are unavailable. Now, we have a new continuity in the New 52. In this world, Superman and Lois Lane have never gotten together, and Wonder Woman has a tenuous if any relationship with Steve Trevor. In Justice League #12, the two come together out of loneliness and battle fatigue, as well as that old bugaboo, familiarity. But I doubt it will stick. In the new 52, these two characters are not the same as they were. Given the Kingdom Come example, those two would get together under those circumstances, but in the New 52, they are now completely different people. Neither one of them is completely human. This should evident to anyone who reads their solo books. Superman is more alien than ever, and Wonder Woman is more god than ever. This might stand for now, but my prediction - doomed romance, at least in the New 52. You'll just have to stay tuned into upcoming DC Comics to see if I'm right. By Glenn Walker It is a good time to be a comic book archer. Green Arrow is coming back to the TV screen with a series called "Arrow" in the fall, and this summer Oscar winner Jeremy Renner blew us all away as Hawkeye in the big screen version of Marvel's The Avengers. They have both come a long way from being just Batman with a bow and the low man in Iron Man's rogues gallery. The Archer, or the Bow and Arrow Guy, is one of the comic book hero templates. When the average comic book reader thinks 'archer' or 'bow and arrow guy,' they think Green Arrow or Hawkeye, depending on whether you're a DC or Marvel fanperson. The truth is that's only the tip of the arrow so to speak. Welcome to a handy tour of the bow and arrow folks of the comic book world, and trust me, there are a lot of them… but we'll start with the big guns, ahem, bows… Green Arrow has been rebooted, revamped, re-thought and (this one is for you, Allison) re-jiggered several times, but for the most part, his origins remain the same. Green Arrow was created by Mort Weisinger and George Papp, and first appeared in 1941's More Fun Comics #73, which coincidentally also featured the first appearance of Aquaman. Spoiled brat millionaire Oliver Queen was stranded on a deserted island (or another similar isolated nowheresville) and had to learn archery to survive. His rescue usually happens at the hands of criminals whom Queen takes down with his mad archery skillz, and is thus inspired to become a full-time crimefighter, the Green Arrow. Along the way, Queen built an arsenal of trick arrows, a secret headquarters the Arrowcave, specialized vehicles like the Arrowcar, the Arrowplane, and even the Arrowboat, and his adopted ward, also trained in archery, became his sidekick, Speedy. Quickly Green Arrow was looked upon as nothing more than Batman with a bow, or worse yet, a knock-off Batman. Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams changed all that with their late 1960s take on the character, giving him a new costume, facial hair unheard of for superheroes, and a liberal attitude in a time when comic book characters did not have social consciousnesses. The new Green Arrow became wildly popular, was eventually paired up with both Green Lantern and romantic interest Black Canary in the award-winning Green Lantern/Green Arrow series. In one story, he was conflicted by Speedy's heroin addiction, an event which would follow that character for the rest of his career. The Justice League's resident archer and left wing voice of reason remains an iconic hero today, recently conquering live action prime time as supporting cast in "Smallville," and soon to return in a new vision in "Arrow." In the comics, he has his own title in DC Comics' New 52, albeit younger, slicker, and less liberal - more Tony Stark than Oliver Queen. Times change, I guess. I've talked about Hawkeye the Marksman here before briefly. Hawkeye AKA Clint Barton was introduced as a reluctant foe of Iron Man in 1964's Tales of Suspense #57, and created by Stan Lee and Don Heck. After a few more less villainous appearances, he became an Avenger in the first major membership shake-up of that team, becoming one of 'Cap's Kooky Quartet.' There, training by Captain America was joined by his weapons mastery taught him by the villain Trick Shot (another archer) and future Avenger the Swordsman. While like Green Arrow, Hawkeye made use of gimmicked arrows, his character was more fleshed out by his abrasive personality. He was always the stirrer, the smart aleck, and always bucking to lead the Avengers over Captain America. Ironically, years later, Hawkeye would become the leader of the West Coast Avengers, a product of having Cap as a role model. While Green Arrow may have preceded Hawkeye by decades, the latter's emergence as a fully formed character preceded that of the former. Also on the copycat scale, Hawkeye's romantic interest for some time was the Black Widow, and later he married Mockingbird, both characters having more than a passing similarity to Green Arrow's Black Canary. The Avengers resident archer has become one of the most reliable and stalwart members of the team. Whether he goes by the name Hawkeye, Goliath, or Ronin, he can usually be found at the front of the fight, charging headlong into battle, no matter if Ultron or Kang will just laugh off a trick arrow or not. That's just our Hawkeye, brave beyond reason. Archers of the Golden Age Back over at DC, that company published adventures of the original heroic archer, Robin Hood, as early as 1938. Robin Hood Tales was originally published by Quality Comics but eventually by DC after they acquired several of their characters and magazines. Of course, Robin Hood being a public legend, copyright is kinda off the table, but there you go. Quality also had a feature called "Alias the Spider" in Crack Comics. Created by Paul Gustavson, Tom Halloway fought crime with his bow and arrows, his valet Chuck, and a cool car called the Black Widow. In modern times writer James Robinson retconned the Spider into a foe of The Shade, and not necessarily a hero or even a nice guy at all, in his amazing Starman series. Grant Morrison also created a legacy of the character with I, Spyder, however briefly, in his Seven Soldiers. Quality also had The Marksman. Fawcett Comics featured Golden Arrow. Centaur Publications had The Arrow, also created by Paul Gustavson, who was briefly revived in the 1990s by Malibu Comics. He can also be seen in Dynamite's comic featuring public domain heroes, Project Superpowers. There was also the Huntress in Yellowjacket Comics from Charlton, not to mention Young Robin Hood, and the Green Knight, all costumed crimefighters of the Golden Age who used the bow and arrows. Sidekicks and Legacies The aforementioned Speedy was Roy Harper, Oliver Queen's ward. He had two different origins, both similar, much like his mentor's various beginnings. Eventually he grew up to become Arsenal, and then Red Arrow, a full-fledged member of the Justice League. Later GA took on another sidekick named Speedy, this time the teenaged runaway, Mia Dearden. The second Speedy was notable for being both a child prostitute and one of the few HIV positive characters in comics. Much like Batman in this regard, Green Arrow has not only been sidekicked by three kids, but one of them is also his son. While GA was dead (don't ask, you know how death works in comic books, it's temporary at best) his son Connor Hawke took up the bow and mantle of Green Arrow, and like Roy Harper years later, Connor also took Ollie's place in the Justice League for a while. Not to be outdone, while Marvel's Hawkeye was dead (I did tell you not to ask, didn't I?), Kate Bishop in the Young Avengers took up the bow, as well as several other weapons, and began calling herself Hawkeye. It should be noted at this point, that Hawkeye, like Roy Harper, is an expert of all projectile weapons, not just arrows. Daredevil's arch-foe Bullseye's whole schtick revolves around this particular skill. One more legacy, and it's another embarrassing reminder of the days when Green Arrow was just Batman with a bow. He too had international counterparts who were inspired by him. Where Batman has the Batmen of All Nations, which eventually evolved into Batman Inc., Green Arrow had the Green Arrows of the World. Their membership included the Ace Archer of Japan, the Phantom of France, the Bowman of the Bush, Verde Flecha, the Bowman of Britain, and the Polynesian Archer. Hey, Grant Morrison, wanna write Green Arrow next? There have been a fair amount of baddies who have used the bow and arrow motif for evil as well. The Golden Age Superman and the 1966 television Batman were plagued by the villainous Archer. Also in the Golden Age, Wildcat's foe, the Huntress (also known as Tigress) used a crossbow. This choice of weapon was passed down to both her daughter, Artemis, as well as her heroic namesake, the Huntress. Many of the villains with bows however were members of Green Arrow's mostly forgotten rogues gallery. Among them were Black Arrow, the Crimson Archer, Cupid, Ape Archer, Funny Arrow, the Iron Archer, John Centaur, most lost to the sands of time. The most known of these would probably be the Rainbow Archer and Red Dart (who our buddy Grant Morrison actually did dig up for his JLA run). Later on there was also Shado, GA's on again/off again lover; Natas, who trained Green Arrow and Deathstroke among others; and Merlyn the Magician of the League of Assassins, one of the hero's most dangerous foes. In the old days Green Arrow frequently faced a female rival named Miss Arrowette, whose daughter Arrowette with a bit of retconning became a major player in Young Justice. Combined with the aforementioned Huntress' daughter, she is the inspiration for the double agent character of Artemis in Cartoon Network's "Young Justice" cartoon. There was also the Blue Bowman, in reality Batman foe the Signalman, who got the idea of being a bow and arrow villain by being cellmates with Green Arrow enemy Bull's Eye. There are many other archers, on both sides of the law. I've haven't covered Artemis who was once Wonder Woman, Yondu the Alpha Centaurian archer from the 31st century's Guardians of the Galaxy, Firestorm foe Moonbow, White Feather of the Inferior 5, brief Justice Leaguer Maya, any of the Old West archers, Shaft, Archer (sans Armstrong), Legolas, or even Xeen Arrow, the Green Arrow of Dimension Zero yet. But there's only so much space. Be assured there have been many behind the bow in the comics, and there will be more. I'll see y'all next time. I'm off to the movie theater to see Brave. I hear that Princess Merida is a heck of a shot too… Now most of you are aware of Earth 2 #2 because it features the big reveal of the Alan Scott of Earth 2, soon to be that alternate world's Green Lantern, as a gay and out character. But there are many other reasons you should be picking up this particular comic book. See the arrival of Michael Holt, Mister Terrific, on Earth 2, as well as cameo appearances by a few surprise guests that will whet your appetites for future issues of this series. But the big draw in this issue by writer James Robinson and artist Nicola Scott is the new origin of young Jay Garrick as the Flash of Earth 2! If you're not already reading the hottest comic of the week, you need to pick up Earth 2 #2 for new adventures of new takes on the beloved Golden Age superheroes of the Justice Society - Enter the New 52 era! By Glenn Walker The thought occurred to me on a recent episode of the All Things Fun! New Comics Vidcast that not everyone knows who the Vision is, or why he is so important to the Avengers. As I said on that episode, when it comes to the Avengers in the late 1960s, the 1970s, and the early 1980s -- the Vision is the fo-shizzle. The origin of the Vision is one of the first to be mostly retcon: that's retroactive continuity for folks not familiar with comic book lingo. It means that the story we're now told comes from slightly altering or bending events already established as history in the comics. It's made to fit with what we already know, but it's a story that is being told later. Got it? Good, we'll get to that part shortly. Outside of comic book continuity, the Vision's origin is part of what was called a secret crossover. Back in the dark ages, before cross-company crossovers happened on a semi-regular basis, sometimes writers would get together and do them subtly for their own entertainment. The introductions of the new Vision in Avengers #57 by writer Roy Thomas and the new Red Tornado in Justice League of America #64 by Gardner Fox was one such event. Both characters had several similarities. They were both androids who were taking on the names of long forgotten Golden Age heroes, sent by villains to infiltrate a superhero team and destroy them, but eventually they each turned good and joined that team. Both had super powers their namesakes did not, both were struggling to become human, and both would eventually find love. They appeared within a month of each other, with the Red Tornado beating the Vision to print by a month. The Vision, at first, was the creation of the Avengers' arch-foe Ultron, itself an artificial intelligence built by Hank Pym, Goliath at the time. The Vision was an android, technically a synthezoid, an artificial being who had seemingly plastic-like flesh and blood organs beneath his crimson skin rather than gears and machine parts. He possessed complete molecular control over his body. He could become intangible and float or fly, and become as hard as diamond. He was sustained by solar energy through a gem in his forehead and could discharge powerful solar beams from his eyes. His deadliest attack by far was passing a hand into a victim intangibly then solidifying, disrupting the target on a molecular level… painful. The Vision quickly became one of the most popular characters in the Avengers, so popular in fact that it was his image that appeared next to the price and Comics Code info on the cover of the title for almost a hundred issues. The Vision was the Avengers. Rarely an issue went by without him in it, or on the cover (besides the corner image). He was one of the most powerful Avengers, humbled only briefly by bouts of unexplained claustrophobia, a drive to become more human -- and love. Yes, perhaps the most important factor in the Vision's life was his love for the Scarlet Witch. Two outcasts from society, non-humans, the android and the mutant, found love in each other's arms. It was a not-so-clever analogy for interracial relationships while mixed into the Marvel Universe world of superheroes. Their forbidden love shocked the world, alienated Quicksilver, the Witch's brother, and endeared the Vision and the Scarlet Witch to Avengers readers everywhere. Around this time, the Avengers came into conflict with Kang, and the Legion of the Unliving. The Legion included beings plucked from time just before the moment of their deaths to serve Kang and destroy the Avengers. Among them were Wonder Man, whose brain patterns were used by Ultron to create the Vision's mind, and the original android Human Torch. In the battle, the Vision had been nearly destroyed, yet was saved by the above two, along with the Frankenstein Monster, all of whom felt some sort of kinship to the fallen Avenger. The Monster perhaps sensed another artificial being. Wonder Man maybe understood on some level that they shared a mind. The Human Torch saw something very disconcerting. He saw himself. The Vision's crimson body was in fact his own! The truth became very evident that Ultron had used the Torch's inert android body to create the Vision. The android Avenger's weakness of claustrophobia was clearly inherited from the Human Torch from years of being trapped underwater. The Legionnaires, after saving the Vision's life, were returned to their proper places in time. Wonder Man would return from the dead, vying for the Scarlet Witch's affections, and adding more of a soap opera element to the Avengers comic. It was an intriguing dilemma, as they were essentially the same man. Circumstances made it so the Vision was dismantled at one point, and his wife fell fully for Wonder Man. Things got worse for the Scarlet Witch as time went by. She became more and more powerful, eventually gaining the power to alter reality itself. She had had this power all along, having created children for herself and the Vision with it. Once she realized that her children were not even real, she snapped, and snapped hard. In the event called "Disassembled," the Scarlet Witch succeeded in doing what no other villain -- not Kang, or Ultron, or the Masters of Evil -- had been able to do: She defeated the Avengers. Amongst the rubble was her former husband, the Vision, torn apart by the enraged She-Hulk, as both were manipulated by the Scarlet Witch. As with most Marvel superheroes, everyone got better eventually. The Vision's recovery was easier, being a repair rather than an out and out resurrection. Early events in Avengers Vs. X-Men have the Vision and the Scarlet Witch confronting each other for the first since the events of "Disassembled," a moment Avengers readers had been waiting for for years. What happens next is anyone's guess, but I hope that the Vision returns to his status of greatness among the Avengers. Time will tell… By Glenn Walker One of DC Comics New 52 coming in September is Blackhawks written by Mike Costa with art by Ken Lashley and Graham Nolan, among others. DC describes it like this: Welcome to a world waging a new kind of war that’s faster and more brutal than ever before. It’s fought by those who would make the innocent their targets, using computers, smart weapons and laser-guided missiles. The new enemy is hard to find – and closer to home than we think. Between us and them stand the Blackhawks, an elite force of military specialists equipped with the latest in cutting-edge hardware and vehicles. Their mission: Kill the bad guys before they kill us. Sounds a bit vague, doesn't it? It's obviously a war comic, but… really what is it? Mike Costa is a fairly new name in the world of comics, but what he has done more than prepares him for the book described above – he's writing G.I. Joe Cobra for IDW. Yeah, now it makes sense, doesn't it? Costa has given several interviews talking up the new Blackhawks. He's very excited, and is hoping for the best with this new series. I'm excited too, not necessarily for the new series, although it is one of my most anticipated comics of the relaunch. It's the name I'm excited about; yeah, I'm an old-school Blackhawks fan – and I'm not talking about Chicago hockey either, folks. It's time for another history lesson from the Glenn Walker Vast Storehouse of Useless Knowledge. Blackhawk is a very old and legendary name in the world of comic books. Blackhawk had his own movie serial, radio show, prose novel, action figures, animation, toys – and along with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Green Arrow, was one of the handful of heroes to survive the Golden Age through into the Silver Age. All this, and he's not even a costumed superhero. Blackhawk debuted in Military Comics #1 in August 1941, another in the wave of aviator heroes we've talked about before. However, the character stood out and above others of his ilk, experiencing phenomenal popularity, as evidenced in the radio, movie, and other exposure of the time. His adventures continued throughout the decade in both Modern Comics (changed from Military after the war) and his own self-titled comic. When Blackhawk's publisher, Quality Comics, closed up shop in 1956, DC Comics bought them out and kept publishing Blackhawk without missing a beat. The character of Blackhawk himself has gone under a number of identities, and it's debatable which one is real in the original continuity. But, one thing is sure: Blackhawk is a hero, a defender of freedom, and one of the best pilots in the world. Before and during World War II he leads a squadron of pilots against the Axis powers. This squadron, known as the Magnificent Seven before any movies co-opted the name, was the Blackhawks. Each member represented a nation subjugated by the Axis. The Blackhawks included Andre from France, Olaf from Sweden, Stan from Poland, Hendrickson from Denmark, Chuck from the U.S., and Chop-Chop from China. Blackhawk himself was rumored to be Polish, American, or both. One-time squad members also included Boris, Zeg, and Gaynor, as well as allies Lady Blackhawk, Miss Fear and the team's hawk mascot, Blackie. Created in the less-than-enlightened 1940s, the ethnic stereotypes were rampant, and especially hurtful when it came to poor Chop-Chop. Retcons and more contemporary stories changed things for the better in later decades. After the war, and especially after DC's ownership, the Blackhawks began to face a variety of costumed villain more familiar to comics readers, and Blackhawk became less a war comic and more an adventure series in the vein of the superhero genre. Sales declined as the years progressed, and as the "Batman" TV camp craze was in full swing, editors made the decision to turn the Blackhawks into super-powered heroes. It was a change that killed the book. Not even a last minute return to stories of World War II could save Blackhawk from cancellation. The Blackhawks vanished from comics shelves and racks for the first time in decades. DC Comics revived the team as contemporary mercenaries fighting high tech terrorists in 1976. This was my first exposure to the team, and in this short run, just under a year, I fell in love with the characters. It was something new to me, and discovering their long history became a journey that many comics readers experience when they find a favorite hero or heroes. These were regular guys, but heroes just the same, fighting a more realistic threat (still super-powered to an extent) than the ones Superman and the Justice League usually fought. I was sold. The Blackhawks were revived again, again set in war stories, but again disappeared after a while. War comics were no longer in vogue in the 1980s sadly. Late in the decade Howard Chaykin completely revamped the team in a more realistic style that stuck for a little while, re-introducing the Blackhawks to a new generation of readers. The characters became a solid part of DC Comics history and continuity, even appearing in a few episodes of Cartoon Network's popular "Justice League" animated series. Continuity has established that at least some legacy of the Blackhawks exists in the current DCU, as part of an elite military force using high-tech jet fighters, and also as a courier service called Blackhawk Express. And even more recently, a time-tossed Lady Blackhawk has become a major player and team member in Gail Simone's Birds of Prey series. Literally, the Blackhawks seem to be the characters that never say die. The newest incarnation of the team might not have any (if at all) relation to the originals, but one can hope. Either way, I'm looking forward to it. The new Blackhawks debuts on comic shop shelves, and especially at All Things Fun!, on September 28th. Check it out! And if I may quote the original Blackhawks' battle cry, "Hawkaaa!" By Glenn Walker With Memorial Day looming my mind turns to the men and women who protect our nation's interests here and abroad, and to those who gave their lives for our freedom. What does this have to do with comics, you might ask. Well, whether you know it or not, there were and are a lot of comics about those folks. Today when people think of comic books, they think of brightly costumed superheroes flying around and hitting bad guys, but comics weren’t always all about the superheroes. They covered a myriad of genres from crime fiction to romance to jungle adventures to horror to westerns to war stories. And that last category was a big seller even in the industry of the superhero. With film, it has often been theorized that in wartime, fantasy is big because people want to escape, and in peacetime, war stories are big because people have forgotten the horror of war. This is not necessarily the case with comics. War comics have always thrived, until the past few decades at least. In some cases, like during the Vietnam War, they flourished. At the dawn of comics, back in the Golden Age, one of the prototype heroes was the ace pilot. There was Hop Harrigan, and later semi-costumed pilots like Blackhawk, Airboy, the Phantom Eagle and Captain Midnight, and of course all of these were in the style of Tailspin Tommy. Aviators were hot when it came to war comics back in the day. Even Steve Trevor, who was the first outsider to find Paradise Island and bring Wonder Woman to America during the Second World War, was a pilot. And Wonder Woman herself was one of the first of another kind of war hero – the patriotic superhero. Heroes who cloaked themselves in the colors of the American flag to fight not only crime, but also the enemies of America. The most famous of these would be upcoming movie star, Captain America. Others who followed in his footsteps included The Shield, Uncle Sam, Miss America (DC's and Marvel's), the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, the Patriot, the Fighting Yank, Minute-Man and the Spirit of '76, among others, just to name a few. These heroes and others of the era would join forces to fight the war as well, at the time, and in retcon. Tales of the All-Star Squadron, the Invaders, the Justice Society/Battalion, the All-Winners Squad, the Freedom Fighters, the Young All-Stars and The Twelve are still being told today, but that's not really the kind of hero I'm talking about. The other type of war hero back in the day was closer to the real thing, just a regular joe, the fighting man, the soldier. In World War II, comics were sent overseas to our fighting forces, just as they have been in the decades since, and these pulp heroes were the ones that our heroes could identify with. The more famous of these soldier heroes didn't appear ironically until after the Second World War and into the 1950s and 60s, but still, their names are with us today. Marvel Comics' most famous soldier was Sgt. Fury who led the Howling Commandos in the War. He has endured and Nick Fury is one of the major players in Marvel's movie universe, played by Samuel L. Jackson in Iron Man 2 (2010) and rumored for his own movie as well. Nick Fury, as well as many of his men, formed the basis for SHIELD in the Marvel Universe. Over at DC Comics, Fury's counterpart would be Sgt. Rock and his Easy Company. Rock forms the foundation for DC's much larger universe of WWII heroes. While Rock remains an average soldier, although with great leadership and heroic qualities, he is joined in the fight by more interesting compatriots. Among them are the Haunted Tank, the Losers, the Unknown Soldier, Mademoiselle Marie, the original Suicide Squad and later G.I. Robot and the Creature Commandos. Veering off-topic for a moment, DC also did some innovative comics featuring the opposing forces in war with Enemy Ace and Blitzkrieg. The later, however interesting, was short-lived. These characters still appear from time to time. Rumored to have died on the last day of World War II, someone claiming to be Frank Rock led a version of the Suicide Squad and worked in the Luthor Administration. Vertigo Comics presented a new version of the Losers that proved so successful it was made into a feature film. Most of the war comics so popular for almost four decades died out in the 1980s. I guess political correctness had taken its toll, or perhaps the stories no longer had resonance for the current generation reading comics. There have been occasional forays into the genre. Marvel's The 'Nam stands out, as do the few one-shots of Sgt. Rock that DC has done lately. Sgt. Rock, Sgt. Fury, Easy Company and the Howling Commandos – those are just a few of the heroes of our armed forces in the comics, most of whom were inspired by the real heroes of our world, specifically our nation, who we remember this and every Memorial Day.

20. It runs in the family I kiss my wife soundly, knowing that I am a blessed man. Now I do not merely have one child, but two children. A son for me, and a daughter for my wife. How sweet they are when they sleep, so innocent. But soon Haldar will be grown, I will teach him how to fight and he will be a brave man. Haleth will be a beautiful woman and she will marry a good man. When I look at you now, so small, I wonder if your lives will be as easy as your father wishes. But for now you will have my protection. I shake my head, twins with different genders. You look so perfect in your mother's arms, my little half-elf, so at peace. She lets me hold you and I count ten little fingers and ten little toes. Finally your eyes open and I see that they are the colour of the grey sea, intelligent eyes in a soft face framed by a tiny bit of black hair. I look at my lovely Elwing who is smiling at me, then back at you and decide that I will always be there for you. "I name you..." I look at the nurse and realize that she holds something that looks suspiciously like a baby. You will bring joy into this valley, my firstborn son. And you will grow up in peace far away from war together with your mother and me. You will grow up like a prince, my dear pen-neth, but neither must you forget your legacy. I will name you Elladan, for you are descendant from the Edain as well. This reminds me that I have to tell Valandil, he will want to know. "Elrond? Elrond!" I must not have heard her the first time. "I want you to meet someone, my dear. And as I look at her I see another baby in her arms. "Ai Valar, twins?" Today I can rightfully consider myself as the happiest man in Arda. I have been waiting for you for so many years, and now I hold you in my arms. Is this not a wonder? You are so beautiful, ion-nin. I caress your ear and your nose, and as I look up I see your beautiful mother smile at us. Just like her. Suddenly a wave of protection washes over me and I never want to let you go again. "Just like you, Estel. But there is someone else who craves for your attention, Ada." At my look of surprise she begins to laugh wholeheartedly. Well, a boy and a girl! I join in her laughter. This is not unheard of in this family. This is a work of fan fiction, written because the author has an abiding love for the works of J R R Tolkien. The characters, settings, places, and languages used in this work are the property of the Tolkien Estate, Tolkien Enterprises, and possibly New Line Cinema, except for certain original characters who belong to the author of the said work. The author will not receive any money or other remuneration for presenting the work on this archive site. The work is the intellectual property of the author, is available solely for the enjoyment of Henneth Annûn Story Archive readers, and may not be copied or redistributed by any means without the explicit written consent of the author.

Concerts / Events Ki Tae Young and Eugene get married! SCRAP, SHARE & LIKE On July 23rd, Eugene and Ki Tae Young met with fans and reporters before their wedding at the Seoul Central Church in Anyang, Kyungki-do, thanking them all for their support. Ki Tae Young began, "Thank you for coming despite the hot weather." His wife-to-be Eugene added, "We will show a positive image in the future. Thank you." The two didn't hesitate to kiss before their fans, which drew cheers of admiration for the brave new couple. At 1 PM KST, the two were wed by the church's priest, with Eugene's younger sibling and friends from Guam singing at the wedding, followed by a performance from Big Bang's Taeyang, who sang a song that he had composed himself. The wedding was closed off to the public. The two had previously alerted fans of their marriage by sharing their love on their fancafes. Ki Tae Young had written, "I've found someone that I've always dreamed of, someone who I can create a family with. A wise and realistic woman. A woman who's wise and obedient to her husband, and a husband who's caring and devoted to his wife. Someone I never imagined has come into my heart." Eugene meanwhile wrote fondly of her love for her husband-to-be, stating, "I've met someone that I want to spend the rest of my life with. He's someone who can fill what I lack." The two began dating in January of 2010 after the conclusion of their MBC weekend drama, 'Making a Lover'. The two had actually attended the same church, and after a year and a half of dating, finally decided to tie the knot today. The couple will leave on the 25th for their honeymoon in Europe. Check out the photos of the happy couple and their guests below! [gallery] Source + Photos: Star News via Nate, TV Report via Nate There are 0 comments

You need to select more athletic females and only throw junk at the males to even the odds. Glad Jill is back. Have less sport feats that require long legs. The 2014 season was the best. After the first episode each season, quit spending so much time reviewing how each obstacle course works. Just let us see more of the action. It is a unique idea and is one of my favourite shows to watch. However it's major flaw is the most important part of the show, the final round If you fall on one of the obstacles you can swim to the next one. People win this by swimming faster than others. I could watch any swimming show or go to my local pool if i wanted to watch that. Now there is no real winner, just a faster swimmer. The winner if the win a date episode just swum his way to the finish because he said he's been swimming since he was little. This is not the old show, and I understand shows have to grow and change to keep it interesting but making the final round complete waste of time, and so that the entire competition is inaccurately judged is not a beneficial change. I hope they realise this fix this flaw because the amount of frustration it puts on the viewers is not worth watching. If the contestants fall, which they do a lot, instead of just swimming along to the next obstacle they should have to redo the last obstacle once more or twice more. That way you are judging them on they're ability to do the obstacles, not swim past them. Especially when they fall of at the very beginning, they hardly even try Please take my review into consideration because I really didenjoy this show until recently My five year old grandson loves this show. He does not watch Go Diego Go, Dora the Explorer or Team Umizoomi his previous favorites anymore. He can't wait until he is old enough to be a contestant. The Spring Wipeout are his favorite episodes. I'm a 15 year old high school student and I am a funny and daring person and I love challenges and a challenge like this would be so much fun to try. I just want to have fun. Wipeout is an amazing TV show. I love it. It would be one of my dreams to go on the TV show. My email is . Please, it would be amazing if I could get on! I'm a 22 year old free-lance Photographer. My days consist of change diapers, clean house, change diaper, sleep! I NEED THIS!!!!! Pick me to join your team and you WONT be sorry! Watch this unathletic hot momma jump and dive into a pool of humility! im a 20 year old pacific islander i would like a chance to play im not really interested in the money im more interested in the course i've been watching your show and its seems pretty easy & FUNNY!!! give me a chance and you may never know what might happen! if you decide to pick me please contact my email... SI YU'US MA'ASI I do gymnastics and Parkour and free running I am 19 years old and I would love a shot at the money I know I would win I do crazy fun things like this for a hobby and I enjoy it and I have skills you don't wanna miss my balance is from another world and I kid you guys not so please give real talent like me a shot at it and I will give you guys a show you will never forget thank you very much cast from wipeout and true tv if you guys decide to give me a shot please contact my email thank you My husband is a CNA at a local nursing home and loves watching wipe out... he keeps saying i could of done that so i wonder if he really could... He's interested in going on your show... Please let us know if you'd be interested!!!! Mr. & Mrs. Weathers Hi my name is Natalie Paige Harris im 12 years old and i think that you should have a grandma and grandkid one... Cause me and my grandma think that we would be really good at it and would like to try something new and diffrent.. If you can yahoo me at lol i watch this show whenever its on is hilarous!! i also think this show is very orignal not all shows like this are entartaining and i like it because its very hard and and hilarous! so anyway 24 diffrent people have to go thru a obsatcle course for a chance of winning 50,ooo dollars! i would love to go on that show it looks alot of fun but i know that im underaged to go there so oh well(lol) anyway i love this show because of the funny hostes the contestents and the obstacles they have to go thru sorry about this review im not good at making reviews! Love your show it has it comedy, drama, sex, drugs, rock/roll AND big balls! What more could we want out of a TV show. On that note I thought you might want to know that last month I discovered an ancient set of five big balls while hiking in a remote area of Central America. These big stone balls have been carbon dated to being over 2000 years old!. Could it be that you are not the first ones to have Wipeout? I have photos that I will send to you if u like... . Paulo I love Jill too so take a number in fact I'm going to win Wipeout for Jill AND afterwards we will marry and I will take her to see the ancient big balls in Central America and we will make love all day and night, forever, so bugger off! Hey my name is Trey, and I really want to be on this show!! My friends and I always watch this show and end up crying from laughing at it. I am almost 100% positive that I could win this show, I'm athletic and a really great swimmer. Plus, it would be really funny watching myself wipe out on tv. Hey, I really love ya'll show. I really want to get my sister into this if she can because she thinks she can beat it. She is an army girl and I wanted to know how far she could make it.. I want her to be apart of it. Can you please email me if we can sign up for it.. , Thank you. (: This is a very fun show to watch! Color commentary is provided by John Anderson, John Henson, and Vanessa Minnillo. The contestants really take a beating on this show. The men have a definite physical advantage over the women, but sometimes a woman will win it. It is fun to watch the wipeouts and listen to the goofy commentary provided by the hosts! I would love to be a contestant!!! If it's zany, crazy, and off the wall you're looking [email protected] I'm the one to pick!!! Plus my kids would love to see their dad WIPEOUT!! Please read the following before uploading Do not upload anything which you do not own or are fully licensed to upload. The images should not contain any sexually explicit content, race hatred material or other offensive symbols or images. Remember: Abuse of the TV.com image system may result in you being banned from uploading images or from the entire site – so, play nice and respect the rules!

Eros Ramazzotti, Dropping Panties at James L. Knight, This Friday Ever notice how Italians think they're so cool, what with their incredibly delicious food, super sleek sports cars, their country shaped like a boot and their immigrants dealing in "waste management?" Not to mention the way they're always so suave with the ladies. Case in point, Eros Ramazzotti. Aside from being one of the biggest stars in his native country and around Europe, the 46-year-old silver fox is also huge in the world of Latin music as well. He croons those heartfelt love songs he pens not only in Italian but in Spanish as well, making him doubly dangerous. Want to see a woman melt quickly? Get tix to his upcoming gig at the James L. Knight Center this Friday, front and center, so the lucky lady can be one of those whose eyes he looks longingly into while singing about love. At times it'll be in at least one language she doesn't understand--though that won't matter--a la "Una Storia Importante" and "Un'Emozione Per Sempre." Naturally, he tends to break out a lot of the Spanish language material for our shores, though. You know, on second thought, maybe you'd do better to put a little distance between you and the front of the stage. That nasaly-voiced bastard is just a little too smooth, and a little too good-looking for my taste. Erol Ramazzotti on Friday, May 14 at 8 p.m. Ticket prices $77-$127. At the James L. Knight Center, 400 SE 2nd Ave., Miami. jlkc.com Get the Music Newsletter Keep your thumb on the local music scene each week with music news, trends, artist interviews and concert listings. We'll also send you special ticket offers and music deals.

Call it the Bard Bout of the Centuries: Shakespeare vs. Fakespeare. Scholars have been duking it out over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays for 400 years. And to date, Shakespeare’s ranking as the world’s greatest playwright remains undefeated. But a controversial new movie is dusting off the gloves like never before. And “Anonymous” goes for the knockout. Not only does the film make the case that Shakespeare did not write one word that has been attributed to the world’s greatest playwright. He’s also portrayed as a fraud, a drunk, an extortionist, a blackmailer and, oh yeah — quite probably the murderer of his contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Director Roland Emmerich presents Shakespeare as the barely literate front for “the real” author of Shakespeare’s sonnets and 37 plays, the scandalous nobleman Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who couldn’t claim authorship in life because playwriting was considered an unseemly and seditious pursuit. As an excoriation of Shakespeare, the movie pulls no punches. But Stratfordians, as Shakespeare’s defenders are known, are hardly throwing in the towel. Experts are calling “Anonymous” a heavyweight film that packs a lightweight punch. “It’s kind of entertaining rubbish,” said Murray Ross, veteran artistic director of Colorado Springs’ TheatreWorks. “If I worked hard enough at it, I could probably make the case that Shakespeare was actually written by a cross-dressing Peruvian dwarf.” To Ross, the issue of authorship is dead, even if the film does bring Shakespeare’s era to thrilling cinematic life. The far more enduring mystery to him isn’t who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. “It’s how did anyone write these plays?” he said. “They are just that good.” Colorado Shakespeare Festival producing artistic director Philip Sneed has a vested interest in the issue of authorship — as would anyone with “Shakespeare” in his job title. In assessing the new film, Sneed barely got out the words, “I do think it’s possible that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays . . .” before Ross admonished him with, “You’re out of your mind!” to the laughter of an invited Denver Post panel that watched the film together last week, including Denver Center Theatre Company actor Drew Cortese, Shakespeare youth teacher Rebecca Mason Salomonsson and Colorado Shakes costumer Clare Henkel. Sneed revels in the debate, and the interest it will surely spark in his favorite writer. That Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone treatment can only add to his coolness. “But in the end, I’m not sure that it matters who wrote the plays, any more than it mattered who Homer was,” Sneed said, and Cortese agrees. “The important thing is that we still have the plays,” said Cortese. “The academics can debate who wrote what, when and why, but practitioners need to concern themselves most with telling 400-year-old stories and making them relevant for today’s audiences. That’s on us.” But it matters to Ross, because if De Vere were empirically proven to be the author of Shakespeare’s plays, he said, it would force a reinterpretation of every line ever written, through De Vere’s rather sordid biography. And it matters deeply to Salomonsson, who runs the Arvada Center’s teen Shakespeare summer camp. “I tell my students every day that, yes, it matters,” she said. Shakespeare was the uneducated son of illiterate parents, and the film claims it would take a writer of “educated genius” to compose plays of such depth of intellect, comedy and philosophy. It’s a theory first posited decades ago by a schoolteacher named J. Thomas Looney, and it drives our schoolteacher named Salomonsson, well, loony. “That implies that anyone who is not powerful enough and not wealthy enough can’t possibly achieve genius,” she said. But neither Ross nor Sneed think this film is a game-changer or that it will legitimize De Vere’s backers, also known as “Oxfordians.” “It’s possible that the movie plays so loose with the historical record that the Oxfordians might feel that it actually hurts their case,” said Sneed. So much so, Ross added, that the film at times seems like a put-on. After all, the film suggests De Vere wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as an amusement for Queen Elizabeth — his mother and the future mother of his own child — when he was 9! Emmerich, best known for “Independence Day,” “2012” and “Godzilla,” has said he’s a filmmaker, not a scientist — and that his sole goal is to provide entertainment. But “Anonymous” isn’t a yarn about fake aliens and monsters. He’s toying with sacrosanct English culture and history (as did Shakespeare, ironically). And Emmerich has powerful players with clout aboard. His cast includes knighted English actor Derek Jacobi, 2011 Tony winner Mark Rylance, and Vanessa Redgrave (as the incestuous queen). In 2007, Jacobi and Rylance signed “The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt,” which says the question of authorship is uncertain enough that it should be regarded as a legitimate subject for academic research. Redgrave told the BBC last week there’s as much evidence that De Vere wrote the plays as did Shakespeare. Both she and Cortese doubt Shakespeare could have written all those plays while also working full time as an actor. But in the film, authorship is but the subtext for the larger political thriller at play — who will be the next king? It contends that De Vere wrote “Richard III” as a hunchback as both a humiliation of his courtly nemesis, Robert Cecil, and as a means for inciting the masses to rise up against him. And here’s where Sneed finds real value in the film: “Ten thousand men listening to one man’s words,” De Vere says in it. “That’s power.” In one scene, we see a crowd so riled up by Rylance as Henry V, they’re ready to take up arms against the French then and there. “The takeaway from this movie is the power of words to change things,” Sneed said. And as a film, it is undeniably fun — “pulpy,” Ross calls it. And the more she enjoyed it, the more trouble Salomonsson knew she was in for, “I was watching it, thinking, ‘This is a really good movie.’ And now I am really scared because I think it is going to sway my impressionable young teenagers. I do hope they see it. I just don’t want them to take it as the truth.” Complicating that issue is that the filmmakers are producing a package of lessons for American high schools, to further their theory as academic fact. Pop culture has a long record of supplanting the historical record dating back to, well, Shakespeare’s twiddling with English history. “Isn’t Richard III forever sullied by Shakespeare’s depiction of him?” Sneed asked. And on that point, Ross said, Sneed is not out of his mind. “People learn their English history from Shakespeare just as we learn our Civil War history from ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” Ross said. Even if it muddies the waters, Sneed encourages people to see the film. And if they do, Ross is sure of one thing: “This movie will do nothing to derail the Shakespeare express,” he said. “This thing has been running strong for 400 years.” The case against Shakespeare *Not a single manuscript exists written in his own hand.He made no provisions in his will for the fate of his plays. *He had no education, never owned a book and was the son of illiterate parents. *Contemporaries Ben Jonson and Edmund Spencer were regarded enough to be buried in Westminster Abbey, but not Shakespeare. The case for Edward de Vere (Oxford) *Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was an educated nobleman and statesman who wrote the plays over a lifetime, but in anonymity. His goal was to incite political change. “Anonymous” posits that De Vere chose Jonson to be his frontman, but Shakespeare stole the opportunity at the conclusion of the first performance of “Henry V.” The case against De vere *Earl of Oxford was dead by the time Shakespeare wrote “Macbeth” and his other nine final plays. “Macbeth” was written during the political upheaval after King James I took the throne. In it, he makes deliberate reference to the Gunpowder Plot, which didn’t happen until after the Earl of Oxford died. John Moore: 303-954-1056 or [email protected] Post’s John Moore among nation’s most influential theater critics The Denver Post’s John Moore has been named one of the 12 most influential theater critics by American Theatre magazine, in part for the multimedia innovations he has implemented at denverpost.com/theater. Moore, who returned to The Denver Post in 1993 as an assistant sports editor, was cited for his ability to cover the news related to more than 100 active theater companies in Denver and to provide clear-eyed criticism of their productions. Read more about it: on our Running Lines Theater page and here’s the link to the complete American Theatre story. This week’s theater openings Opening Wednesday, Nov. 2, through Dec. 4: National touring production of “The Lion King,” at the Buell Theatre Opening Thursday, Nov. 3, through Nov. 13: Red Rocks Community College’s “Pieces of Eight,” a collection of original short plays Lakewood Opening Friday, Nov. 4, through Nov. 20: 73rd Avenue Theatre Company’s “Billy the Poet” Westminster Opening Friday, Nov. 4, through Nov. 19: Longmont Theatre Company’s “Frost/Nixon” Opening Friday, Nov. 4, through Nov. 6: National touring production of “South Pacific,” at the Lincoln Center Fort Collins Opening Friday, Nov. 4, through Dec. 11: Germinal Stage-Denver’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” Opening Friday, Nov. 4, through Nov. 19: Devil’s Thumb’s “Accomplice,” at the Dairy Center Boulder Opening Friday, Nov. 4, through Nov. 13: Southern Colorado Repertory Theatre’s “Trinidad: Our Stories, Vol. One,” at Mount Carmel Community Center Trinidad Opening Saturday, Nov. 5, through Dec. 10: Curious Theatre’s “Collapse” This week’s theater closings Today, Sunday, Oct. 30″ Denver Center Theatre Company’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” at the Stage Theatre Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Vintage Theatre’s “The Grapes of Wrath” Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Cherry Creek Theatre’s “The Unexpected Guest” Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Springs Ensemble Theatre’s “Coronado” Colorado Springs Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Heritage Square Music Hall’s “Who Done It at the High School Reunion?” Golden Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Arvada Festival Playhouse’s “Charles Dickens’ Ghost Stories” Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Front Range Theatre Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Castle Rock Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Backstage Theatre’s “Cannibal, the Musical” Breckenridge Today, Sunday, Oct. 30: Thin Air Theatre Company’s “The Vampire of Cripple Creek” Cripple Creek Monday, Oct. 31: Mercury Cafe Motley Players’ “Making a Killing” Saturday, Nov. 5: Boulder’s Dinner Theatre’s “Slow Dance with a Hot Pickup” Saturday, Nov. 5: Byers-Evans’ “An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe” Saturday, Nov. 5: Shadow Theatre’s “The Final Mile to Providence,” at Su Teatro’s Denver Civic Theatre Sunday, Nov. 6: Denver Center Attractions’ “Blind Date,” at the Galleria Theater Sunday, Nov. 6: Creede Repertory Theatre’s “The Road to Mecca,” at the Arvada Center Sunday, Nov. 6: TheatreWorks’ “Church” Colorado Springs Sunday, Nov. 6: PHAMALy’s “Vox Phamilia: Quadrapalooza,” at the Avenue Theater (also plays Nov. 7-8 at Wit’s End, Westminster) Sunday, Nov. 6: Nov. 6: Ignite Theatre’s “A Chorus Line, at the Aurora Fox Sunday, Nov. 6: Evergreen Players’ “Brighton Beach Memoirs” Sunday, Nov. 6: Union Colony’s “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” Greeley Sunday, Nov. 6: Theatre Or’s “Apples from the Desert,” at the Mizel Center’s Pluss Theatre Most recent theater openings “Church” In this one-act “story,” bear witness as rising playwright Young Jean Lee transforms her life-long struggle with Christianity into an exuberant church service featuring one charismatic preacher and three members of his vestry. This experimental play, not a simple parody, is designed to test the expectations of religious and nonreligious alike. Through Nov. 6. The playwright leads a pre-show talk at 2:30 p.m. Sunday (Oct. 30). Presented by TheatreWorks in the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater, corner of Union and Austin Bluffs Parkway on the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs campus, 719-255-3232 or theatreworkscs.org “Hello, Dolly!” This classic Broadway musical is a whirlwind race around New York at the turn of the 20th century, following the adventures of America’s most famous matchmaker. Songs include “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” and “Before the Parade Passes By.” Through Nov. 12. StageDoor Theatre, 27357 Conifer Road, Conifer, 303-886-2819, 800-838-3006 or stagedoortheatre.org “Kama Sutra” Pamela and Tristan have been strolling down the path of monotonous monogamy for 25 years. One day, Pamela comes across the “Kama Sutra” in the library, sending her on a journey of sexual exploration. Through Dec. 18. Dangerous Theatre, 2620 W. 2nd Ave., 720-233-4703 or dangeroustheatre.com “Proof” David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winner about a young woman who has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable mathematician father. After his death, she wonders how much of his genius — and madness — she has inherited. Through Nov. 12. Presented by the Coal Creek Community Theatre, Louisville Center for the Arts, 801 Grant St., Louisville, 303-665-0955 or ccctheater.org “The Rocky Horror Show” Brad, Janet, alien transsexuals from the planet Transylvania and Dr. Frank N. Furter. Songs include “Time Warp.” Through Nov. 27. Presented by OpenStage at the Lincoln Center Mini-Theatre, 417 W. Magnolia St., Fort Collins, 970-221-6730 or openstage.com “Vox PHAMILIA: Quadrapalooza” The handicapped theater PHAMALy’s fourth annual fall evening of sketch comedy. Their original material, written from personal experience and honed into an evening of short scenes by director and comedian Edith Weiss, skewers the absurdities of their everyday lives with brain injuries, diseases, mobility issues and more syndromes than you can count. Recommended for 16 and older. Through Nov. 8. Presented at the Avenue Theater, 417 E. 17th Ave. (through Nov. 6) and at the Wit’s End Comedy Club, 6080 W. 92nd Ave., Westminster (Nov. 7-8). 303-321-5925, (303-430-4242 for Wit’s End); phamaly.org and here’s our preview story Complete theater listings Go to our complete list of every currently running production in Colorado, including summaries, run dates, addresses, phones and links to every company’s home page. Or check out our listings by company or by opening date The Running Lines blog Catch up on John Moore’s roundup of the latest theater news: denverpost.com/runninglines

CREIGHTON, DONALD GRANT, university teacher, historian, and author; b. 15 July 1902 in Toronto, second of the three children of the Reverend William Black Creighton and Laura Harvie; m. 23 June 1926 Luella Sanders Bruce in London, England, and they had a son and a daughter; d. 19 Dec. 1979 in Brooklin, Ont. John Creighton, Donald Grant Creighton’s great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side and his great-grandfather on his father’s, emigrated from Tamlaght O’Crilly parish, County Derry (Northern Ireland), in 1832. He left for the usual reasons: he was pushed out by Ireland’s precarious rural economy, and he was pulled by British North America’s promise of land. Two years later John was joined by three of his five children. His son James bought a 100-acre lot in North Dorchester Township, Upper Canada, which over time he would transform into a successful farm called Hillside. James’s fifth child, Donald’s father, was born there in 1864. Through his mother, Donald was descended from James’s brother Kennedy. The Creightons had been Presbyterians, but Kennedy converted to Methodism and became an itinerant preacher. His daughter Eliza Jane* married railway conductor John Harvie* in 1861. By all accounts, Lizzie, as she was known, had a powerful personality – Donald once described his maternal grandmother as the only woman he ever feared – and she became a leader in Toronto’s social-reform movement. The Harvies’ children spent their summer vacations at Hillside. Here Laura and William Black Creighton met and fell in love. When he had completed degrees in arts at Victoria College in Cobourg and in theology after the institution moved to Toronto, they were married in 1895. For a few years William held charges in rural Ontario, but in 1900, after laryngitis threatened his career as a preacher, he obtained the position of assistant editor of the Christian Guardian (Toronto), the Methodist Church of Canada’s weekly paper. He, Laura, and their young son John Harvie (Jack) moved to Toronto, where two years later Laura gave birth to a second child. “I was born,” Donald Creighton once said, “into a household in which books, history, biography, literature were all about.” His father, who was elected editor of the Christian Guardian in 1906 over several other clergymen, received dozens of volumes directly from publishers anxious to see them reviewed in a Canadian newspaper. Years later Creighton could still picture those books, neatly wrapped in brown-paper packages, which his father brought home to their house in Toronto’s west end. His mother was something of a bookworm herself, and from their earliest years she read to her children and, as they got older, with them. Dickens and Tennyson were perennial favourites. So too were British children’s magazines: Chums, Chatterbox, Boy’s Own Paper, and Little Folks. Growing up with these books and periodicals meant experiencing what scholars now call the “British world.” Forged in childhood, Creighton’s understanding of the imperial connection – Canada’s political, material, cultural, and psychic links with Great Britain and the British empire – would last over the course of his life, and the relationship became a recurring theme in his scholarship. He was too young to serve in World War I, but the conflict was, he said, “a personal and family affair.” His father, through the Christian Guardian, led a crusade in support of Canada’s war effort and Prime Minister Sir Robert Laird Borden*, the Union government, and conscription. In August 1914 W. B. Creighton told his readers, “We are British! and we will stand by the mother land in this greatest campaign of all time.” Donald’s elder brother, Jack, received a lieutenant’s commission in the 48th Highlanders, went overseas in August 1916, and fought in the battles for Loos-en-Gohelle, Hill 70, and Passchendaele. During the last of these engagements he suffered a massive concussion when an exploding German shell threw him against a wall, and in early 1918 he returned to Canada. That summer Donald answered the call to “do his bit” by working as a labourer on a farm east of Toronto, almost certainly through the Canada Food Board’s program Soldiers of the Soil, which placed teenaged boys on farms across the country. Five decades later he would speculate that the key to understanding World War I and “the appalling mass slaughter” on the Western Front lay in the manner the struggle had been idealized. Not just Canada, he said, but the west in general “thought differently about the First World War than it had ever thought about any war in the past and will probably ever think about any war in the future.” After graduating from Humberside Collegiate Institute in 1920, Creighton enrolled in the four-year honours program in English and history at Victoria College, his father’s alma mater and now the Methodist college at the University of Toronto. He quickly caught the attention of his professors, who recognized his fine mind and unusual felicity as a writer. His first interest was in English language and literature, but about his third year he began “to swing towards history” under the influence of several enthusiastic instructors – John Bartlet Brebner*, Humphrey Hume Wrong*, and George Malcolm Smith – who, he later recalled, “conceived of history as drama” and “converted me to their cause.” In addition to excelling academically, Creighton edited Acta Victoriana, the college’s undergraduate literary magazine, in his senior year. Inspired by Smart Set (New York), an avant-garde literary journal that advertised itself as a “magazine of cleverness,” and its famous co-editor, H. L. Mencken, Creighton’s Acta was distinguished by mockery, satire, and irreverence. In his first editorial he announced an “unnatural prejudice against the stodgy and the profound.” In other words, he said, “weighty” articles on “the merits or otherwise of co-education” or “elaborate” histories of the Student Christian Movement were not wanted. When he learned some months later that Acta under his editorship had proved to “tax the brains” of its readers, he proceeded to publish “a simple bed-time story” about a dim-witted hunter who was eaten by a grizzly bear. In the fall of 1924 Creighton applied for a Rhodes scholarship. The Reverend Richard Pinch Bowles, president of Victoria, in his letter of reference, described Creighton as a “brilliant student.” “In the estimation of all his teachers he holds a place of rare distinction,” Bowles wrote. “His gifts are not ordinary. For wide reading of English Literature, for insight and appreciation of its values, and for ability to express himself in excellent style, it is doubtful if we have ever had his superior among our students.” The selection committee for Ontario found itself “deadlocked” between Creighton and another Toronto candidate, classicist Louis Alexander MacKay, who was a lecturer at Victoria College. In the end it chose MacKay, the “worse” of the two, in Wrong’s opinion. In response, Wrong, together with members of the department of history and Charles Vincent Massey*, who chaired the Edward Kylie Award committee, arranged for Creighton to receive this scholarship, which had been established in memory of University of Toronto professor Edward Joseph Kylie*. It was intended to ensure that deserving students, preferably in modern history, could pursue their studies in Britain. On graduating in the spring of 1925, Creighton also received the Regents’ Gold Medal from his college. His fellow students, in keeping with tradition, provided his description in Torontonensis, the university yearbook: “In years about twenty, in looks much older, and in conceit at least two hundred.” Having been admitted to Balliol College at the University of Oxford that February, Creighton looked forward to a relaxing July and August at the family cottage on Lake Muskoka, where he summered for most of his life. Then, completely out of the blue, he fell in love. His sister, Mary Isabel, brought a friend home to lunch. Donald knew Luella Bruce, who was a year behind him at Victoria, but not well. She was the daughter of James Bruce, a blacksmith in Stouffville. Her mother, Sarah Luella Sanders, had died from puerperal fever two days after Luella was born. Unable to care for an infant, James left her with her maternal grandparents, who raised her like a daughter. Five years later James remarried and sent for Luella; from that point on, her childhood was unhappy. Her stepmother was a religious zealot, and as she grew up, Luella resolved to escape the older woman’s emotional abuse and the cultural confinement of small-town Ontario, go to university, and live her life on her own terms. She would eventually have a career as a writer of historical fiction and non-fiction. According to family lore, it was Lizzie Harvie who first thought that Donald and Luella would make a good couple. “Don’t you think Miss Bruce is nice?” she asked her grandson. The two young people went to Centre Island, across the Toronto Harbour, on their first date. Again according to family legend, they fell in love before they even got there: during the short ferry ride they both “just knew.” A short time later, on 22 August, they became engaged. “I can tell you quite honestly and sincerely,” Creighton confided to a friend, “that I’m happier than I have ever been in my life.” In the fall of 1925 he went to Balliol, where he read modern history. His principal tutor was Kenneth Norman Bell, who had lectured at the University of Toronto from 1909 to 1911 and remained a conduit of sorts between the department of history there and his Oxford college. The actor Raymond Hart Massey* would later remember Bell fondly. He was, Massey recalled, “not only a brilliant scholar but a remarkable human being, kindly, witty, humorous and understanding.” In those days Oxford tutors were not expected to publish; rather, their goal was to instruct young men, to instil in them what one scholar has called “nation, duty, character and confidence.” As a teacher, Bell aimed “not to impart knowledge but to make us think,” Massey said. Creighton did well at Balliol, both academically and socially. “I got a very good report from my tutor,” he proudly announced in November. “He said that my work had been ‘admirable’ and that he had no criticisms to offer. Not so dusty, eh?” Balliol was not only about studying; it was also about playing field hockey (“you’d laugh if you saw the funny little stick,” he told his father), going for walks in Christ Church Meadow, having friends to his rooms for afternoon tea, and taking in the excitement of Eights Week, the annual rowing regatta. Meanwhile, he and Luella maintained a transatlantic love affair. Letters were exchanged, promises made, and plans finalized. Shortly after her graduation in the spring of 1926, she travelled to London, where on 23 June they were married at Wesley’s Chapel on City Road. After a wonderfully romantic summer in a small coastal village in France, Donald returned to Oxford, while Luella stayed in Paris to study art history. They wrote to each other every day. Although difficult, their separation did not prove “one fifth as hard” as it had the previous year. Indeed, Creighton found himself invigorated and focused. “I am working this year about twice as well as I did last,” he told his mother. He spent the spring of 1927 in Saujon, a small village in the south of France, preparing for his “schools,” his written and oral examinations. “Don is working at a terrific rate,” Luella wrote to her mother-in-law. “I don’t know how he keeps it up – and there are still two months and a half till the ghastly strain is over.” In the end Creighton achieved second-class standing, not a first, and would be awarded his second ba in 1929 (an ma from Oxford would follow in 1931). Few Canadians earned a first, and some even ranked third. They were at a disadvantage: they could do well on the written examinations but lacked the verbal skills of their British counterparts, and it was the viva voce (oral examination) that usually tipped the scales. It is difficult to say what exactly Oxford meant to Creighton. Certainly, he cherished his time there. A sensitive, even emotional man, he was moved by the city’s ancient beauty, its colleges and libraries, its architecture and cobblestone streets. That Toronto was not Oxford and Victoria College not Balliol neither made him feel inferior nor reminded him of his colonial status, and he never overcompensated in an effort to fit in; that is, he did not try to out-English the English by adopting a fake accent or imitating their mannerisms. In point of fact, he found English people “all right,” if a little too complacent: “Particularly when I am at tea somewhere I do wish I had a bomb to explode and wake them all up. They’re nice, but very satisfied.” According to Kenneth Bell, Creighton remained “a thorough Canadian rubber neck,” even after he had been at Oxford for a year and a half. Nevertheless, the experience confirmed his Britishness and deepened his appreciation of Britain’s place in the world. It was, however, a Canadian Britishness: rather than something imposed from outside, it emerged from within. Being both British and Canadian was not contradictory but hybrid. Creighton returned to the University of Toronto in the fall of 1927 as a lecturer in the department of history and would be made an assistant professor five years later. He planned to complete a phd in French history at the Sorbonne under the supervision of Albert Mathiez, one of the foremost experts on the French revolution, and the following year he and Luella spent the summer in Paris. His thesis was to focus on Jean-Marie Roland de La Platière, a leader of the Girondist faction during the revolution. Luella even mused about writing a companion biography of Mme Roland, who was in some ways the intellectual force behind her husband. Creighton’s topic was an interesting choice: the Girondists represented bourgeois interests, defended the rights of property, and over the course of the revolution became the voice of order and conservatism. Although he spent long, hot days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, “plowing,” a friend said, “through piles of proclamations and pamphlets,” Creighton did not finish the research. With their money running out, he and Luella returned home in steerage. Since he had no access to grants, he had to abandon his interest in European history. “So I decided to find a Canadian subject,” he later remarked. “It was a poor second. I had a real sense of deprivation.” At this point William Paul McClure Kennedy, who taught law and political institutions at the University of Toronto, suggested that Creighton study the career of Lord Dalhousie [Ramsay*], governor-in-chief of British North America in the 1820s. Dalhousie’s papers had recently been acquired by the Public Archives of Canada, and in them might be a chapter on the country’s constitutional history. Creighton was intrigued. He could write a short book and, at the same time, earn a doctorate (he was never, in fact, to do so). He spent the summer of 1930 in Ottawa, but he found the going tough. Dalhousie was a sententious bore, constitutional history did not really interest him, and Ottawa was not Paris. “After Paris,” he said, “I hated the runty little town.” More than once he was on the verge of packing it in and returning home. Then something caught his attention. Looking beyond the narrow world of politics, with its petitions, acts, and assemblies, Creighton observed a more fundamental theme in the history of Canada: the development of a trade network based on the St Lawrence River system. “Suddenly I realized I had an enormous and wonderful subject. I saw it extended back in time to the start of the French regime, and forward into the future.” For the next seven years, Creighton jealously guarded his time. The demands of a young family (his son, Philip, had been born in 1929) and a heavy teaching load – his students would remember his lectures as carefully planned and recall him as a “dramatic performer” – left few opportunities for research and writing. Avoiding the temptations of articles and reviews, he set his sights on a more distant horizon: the publication of a book. To get there would take years, not months. The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760–1850, issued in 1937 as part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s series on Canada–United States relations, established Creighton’s reputation as his generation’s finest historian. Inspired by his friend Harold Adams Innis*’s The fur trade in Canada … (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1930) and its conclusion that Canada “emerged not in spite of geography but because of it,” Creighton argued that the nation was achievable only because of the St Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. The sole waterway to penetrate the centre of North America, it made an east-west transcontinental and transatlantic commercial empire – and, ultimately, Canada – possible. “It was the one great river which led from the eastern shore into the heart of the continent. It possessed a geographical monopoly; and it shouted its uniqueness to adventurers. The river meant mobility and distance; it invited journeyings; it promised immense expanses, unfolding, flowing away into remote and changing horizons. The whole west, with all its riches, was the dominion of the river.” Here, in a nutshell, was the Laurentian thesis of Canadian history: out of the St Lawrence River valley and the Great Lakes basin, out of the Canadian Shield, came the nation. Struck by the originality and forcefulness of its argument and moved by the daring reach of its creator’s imagination, readers generously praised The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence. Historian Arthur Reginald Marsden Lower*, then at Wesley College in Winnipeg, called it brilliant. “If more books like this one are written,” he declared, “Canadian history will be in danger of becoming interesting.” Herbert Heaton, from the University of Minnesota, described it as “a brilliant piece of analysis, synthesis, and interpretation.” At a banquet to celebrate the publication, Frank Hawkins Underhill, a colleague at Toronto, delivered an address on the art of history and proclaimed Creighton its “white hope.” Later he took the author aside to tell him that his was “the best book of Canadian history ever published.” But there was also criticism. Military historian Charles Perry Stacey* observed that because Creighton told his story so consistently from the perspective of the merchants, “the reader is sometimes allowed to lose sight of the importance of the opposing interests,” especially that of French Canadians. Gilbert Norman Tucker, of Yale University, was more pointed. He detected in Creighton a distinct lack of generosity towards French Canada. “The [British] decision to respect the cherished institutions of the French Canadians,” he wrote, “is run through the mill of adverse criticism and comes out ground exceedingly small.… Surely the decision has a smack of generosity and tolerance about it which merits a kind word.” For Creighton, French Canada was incomprehensible. He could not ignore the subject – after all, it ran through Canadian history – but neither could he understand it. Instead, he relied on a series of stereotypes to explain the region and its inhabitants. French Canada was a feudal remnant of the ancien régime in North America, and French Canadians were “simple, docile and politically unambitious”; “untutored, biddable peasants”; “aloof, dogged and apprehensive”; “sullen, suspicious and unresponsive”; “obstructive, unprogressive and anti-commercial.” The British conquest of New France, moreover, was not the “supreme catastrophe” that historian Abbé Lionel Groulx* believed it to have been. In Creighton’s view, it was epiphenomenal. “The conquest,” he wrote, “could not change Canada.” It could not alter the “fact of all facts in the history of the northern half of the continent”: the role played by the St Lawrence River, the Great Lakes basin, and successive attempts to realize a commercial and territorial empire. In many ways, Creighton’s view of French Canada and French Canadians resembled that of Lord Durham [Lambton*], who, in his Report on the affairs of British North America (London, 1839), famously described the French-speaking population of Lower Canada as a people “with no history, and no literature.” Creighton accomplished for the St Lawrence what Thomas John (Tom) Thomson* and the painters of the Group of Seven had realized for the Canadian Shield: he mythologized it, making it an element of the English Canadian imagination. The “river of Canada” was an ongoing argument against continentalism and prevented the country’s absorption by the United States. It represented Canada’s very purpose: to maintain a separate political existence in North America. But Creighton reminded his audience that the north-south pull of continentalism was powerful and that Britain mattered to Canada. What he concluded about the 19th century – that “Canada was virtually meaningless apart from the imperial connection” – applied equally to the 20th. Following the publication of The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence, Creighton contributed a background paper on British North America at the time of confederation to the royal commission on dominion-provincial relations, chaired first by Newton Wesley Rowell* and then by Joseph Sirois*. Next, he wrote Dominion of the north: a history of Canada (Boston, 1944), a volume intended for the general reader that extended the Laurentian thesis back to New France and forward into the making of modern Canada. As he told his publisher, “the main purpose of this book” is to show “why Canada is and will desire to remain a separate North American nation.” The work also reflected Creighton’s maturing conviction that history was a branch of literature, not a social science. He deliberately avoided the temptation to break his subject into a series of topical, loosely connected chapters. Treating history in this way, he said, was “both historically and artistically bad.” Narrative history, although more challenging to write, was truer to the past. After all, the past was not broken up into topics; it possessed, he said, a “basic unity.” Dominion of the north met a kind fate. The New York Times gave it a glowing review on 23 April and said that its author was a “good prose man”; the Montreal Gazette on 21 July described it as “history in the grand style” and commented on its “brilliantly worked pages”; and historian Alfred LeRoy Burt told Creighton that it was “a capital piece of work which ought to have a wide sale.” Although Creighton felt that his publisher, the Houghton Mifflin Company, might have pushed the book more aggressively, especially in the United States, it did quite well: between 1944 and 1953, when it went out of print, over 10,000 copies were sold, and Creighton earned $2,100 in royalties. A publisher in Buenos Aires brought out a Spanish translation in 1949 titled El dominio del norte: historia del Canadá, and an updated and expanded version was issued by the Macmillan Company of Canada in 1957 and by Houghton Mifflin as A history of Canada: dominion of the north the following year in an attempt to reach the university- and college-textbook market in Canada and the United States. Creighton’s personal correspondence from the 1940s does not survive, and it is difficult to know precisely how he responded to World War II. At the time he supported the war effort; later, however, he would come to criticize Canada’s agreements with the United States, among them the Permanent Joint Board of Defence, as nails in the coffin of Canadian independence. In July 1945, as the conflict was coming to an end, he was appointed full professor at the University of Toronto, a designation he thought long overdue and which he received only after McGill University in Montreal had offered him similar status. He was also beginning a project that would consume the next decade of his life: a biography of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald*. “History,” he argued, “is not made by inanimate forces and human automatons; it is made by living men and women, impelled by an endless variety of ideas and emotions, which can be best understood by that insight into character, which is one of the great attributes of literary art.” Taking his inspiration from German composer Richard Wagner’s use of a leitmotif, a recurring theme in musical or literary composition, Creighton begins the first volume of his biography of Macdonald where The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence ends: with the river itself. “In those days they came usually by boat. A few immigrants may have made the long journey from Montreal by land, taking several weeks and stopping at a score of friendly farm-houses as they pushed their way through the green forest. But most people travelled westward by the river.” He concludes the second volume where the first one starts: “Beyond the dock lay the harbour and the islands which marked the end of the lowest of the Great Lakes; and beyond the islands the St. Lawrence River began its long journey to the sea.” In the intervening 1,059 pages of text, it is a heroic Macdonald who listens to the St Lawrence and struggles to realize the river’s promise and extend it westward, from sea to sea, by means of a transcontinental railway; who understands that the threat to Canada’s independence in North America, its separateness, comes not from Britain but from the United States; and who finally, because he alone can see the larger horizons, overcomes the objections of reluctant New Brunswickers, the opposition of obscurantist Nova Scotians, the challenges of provincially minded premiers, and the armed rebellions of the Métis. John A. Macdonald: the young politician (Toronto, 1952) and John A. Macdonald: the old chieftain (Toronto, 1955) each won a Governor General’s Award for academic non-fiction. Both did exceptionally well in the general market. By 1960, sales had topped 11,000 for volume 1 and 10,000 for volume 2, and Creighton had pocketed more than $14,600 in royalties. In his review of the first book, Oxford scholar Max Beloff described Creighton as “one of the half-dozen best historians now writing anywhere in the English-speaking world.” Also at Oxford, philosopher Isaiah Berlin announced to his students that, “on the strength of this one volume, I can say that I have been communing this past weekend with the greatest historical writer of our time.” The centre had recognized the margin. But amid the general chorus of praise there was censure. Creighton had overemphasized Macdonald’s role in confederation; he had ignored the legitimate and thoughtful opposition from New Brunswick’s Albert James Smith*, Nova Scotia’s Joseph Howe*, and Lower Canada’s Antoine-Aimé Dorion*; he had denigrated Macdonald’s political opponents (Ontario’s Oliver Mowat*, for example, was described as parading in triumph in 1878 “like some fabulous eastern war-lord, laden with booty and rich in territorial conquests”); and he had treated Louis Riel*, the Red River uprising of 1869–70, and the North-West rebellion of 1885 with an uncomprehending insensitivity. Indeed, Creighton never understood Riel’s 20th-century transformation into a sympathetic, even heroic, figure. As he told fellow historian Ramsay Cook, “The best that can be said for Louis Riel – a strange recommendation for a hero – is that he ought to have been in the loony-bin!” Creighton’s biography of Macdonald, for all its faults, confirmed his reputation as a brilliant writer. Bowles had been right: Creighton’s gifts were not ordinary. He did not attempt to situate his interpretation of Canada’s first prime minister in the existing academic literature, nor did he burden his text with references to secondary material; he did not reduce his Macdonald to a thesis statement at the end of an introductory chapter or cite external authorities on the particular strengths of this theory or the unavoidable limits of that source. In this sense, the biography reads like a novel. Indeed, Creighton borrowed techniques from the novelist, including suspense, climax, and denouement, to carry his audience forward; he carefully added details about the weather or the location of the sun to establish setting and mood; and he deliberately referred to physical characteristics to convey an individual’s personality. “I think that history’s closest association is with literature,” he once said. “I think a good historian ought to be substantially educated in English and French literature, particularly in novels in which the author views society in a wide scope and tries – sometimes in a series of volumes – to convey an impression of an entire age in the history of a nation.” He was unapologetic about the liberties he took as a writer. “People sometimes say to me, ‘How do you know Macdonald was thinking that at this particular moment?’ And I freely admit I don’t know it. What I do know was that these were his thoughts on this particular subject and that as an historian I may choose the moment when I’m going to have him explain himself.” At the same time Creighton insisted on “the most careful, exhaustive and meticulous research.… You have to soak yourself in the records of the time, printed and written, and this must go on and on, until you know these people almost as well as you know your contemporaries. Unless you do that and carry it down to the last particular of evidence, you have no right to try to get back into their minds.” He always did his own research; everything beyond basic statistical data must be found by the person writing the history, he believed. The Macdonald biography set Creighton apart from fellow historians Frank Underhill and Arthur Lower. These two men interpreted Canadian history as the story of the country’s emancipation from Britain. Although it remained a constitutional monarchy and did not seek to become a republic, Canada was a North American nation. As Underhill observed, Canada and the United States were not fundamentally different. “It was not the Declaration of Independence which made the Americans a separate people, it was the Atlantic Ocean; and Canada is on the same side of the Atlantic.” Lower agreed. Not insignificantly, while Creighton called his one-volume history of Canada Dominion of the north, Lower titled his Colony to nation (Toronto, 1946). In 1954 Donald Creighton had got what he wanted (and what he had thought was rightly his two years earlier, after Chester Bailey Martin* retired as head of history) when Sidney Earle Smith*, president of the University of Toronto, offered him the chairmanship of the department, effective the following year. “A very important day in my life,” Creighton wrote in his diary. Status mattered to him. However, he inherited an unhappy department. Senior members took exception to his appointment, feeling that George Williams Brown would have made a more effective chairman; junior members did not object to Creighton, but they continued to resent their tenuous positions and low pay; and both groups lamented the administration’s failure to consult them. For his part, Underhill soon retired on short notice when he agreed to become curator of Laurier House in Ottawa [see William Lyon Mackenzie King*]. As he told a colleague, “I haven’t looked forward with great joy to continuing in the present department with Don Creighton as head.” The intellectual disagreements between these two giants – Underhill, who defended the policies of the Liberal Party and accepted American leadership in the Cold War, versus the Tory Creighton, who condemned the Liberals for breaking the imperial connection and lining up like so many errand boys for Uncle Sam – had become personal. It bothered Creighton that, while all seemed to respect him, they loved Underhill. In a small department, whose members met regularly for afternoon tea in the basement of Flavelle House [see Sir Joseph Wesley Flavelle*] and socialized through the undergraduate Historical Club, his jealousy could only grow. In time, it consumed him and, ultimately, diminished him as a person. Creighton, it turned out, was not a leader. He could not manage strong personalities, and he lacked the guile necessary to succeed at departmental politics. Mercurial, thin-skinned, and hell to get along with, he became a lightning rod. Added to the politics was the heavy workload: committee meetings, budget estimates, staffing concerns, curriculum debates, salary negotiations, leaves of absence, grant applications, library acquisitions, office space, and student requests dogged him for the better part of four years. “If DGC is not careful,” department member John T. Saywell told a colleague, “this job will kill him.” Indeed, it nearly did. The stress was overwhelming. Creighton developed psoriasis on his scalp, an itchy skin condition that demanded special shampoos. More seriously, he acquired an extremely painful, but mercifully episodic, stomach ailment that was variously diagnosed as a gastric ulcer and a severe gastrointestinal infection. Whatever the cause, it defied treatment and could only be controlled. Historian Margaret Evelyn Prang*, then a graduate student, recalled watching him, in the middle of a seminar, take great swigs of “some horrid-looking green medicine” in an effort to lessen the sharp, twisting pain. His daughter, Cynthia Flood (born in 1940), remembered her father as a very unhappy person throughout his tenure as chairman. “Coming home from school and entering the house, I looked for his galoshes. If they were there I had to prepare myself, brace myself, for whatever might be waiting for me. He could be in one of his sour, difficult moods. But if the galoshes weren’t there, well, I could relax and go upstairs to see my mother.” By 1959 Creighton had had enough, and he asked, in his words, “to be relieved of the chairmanship.” He wanted, he said, to devote himself to what he did best: writing. He was replaced by James Maurice Stockford Careless*, a member of the new, post-war generation Creighton himself had taught. At the same time as he was struggling with departmental problems, Creighton was growing increasingly concerned about Canada, its place in the world, and its status within North America. In an address in August 1954 to the annual conference on public affairs held at Lake Couchiching, Ont., he questioned the world leadership of the United States and Canada’s willingness “to accept the latest advices from Washington as the modern equivalent of divine revelation.” He observed his country’s weakening connection to Britain and its strengthening ties to its southern neighbour, “a shift,” he said, “that was, to a considerable extent, the personal accomplishment” of Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Two years later Creighton’s worst fears were confirmed: during the Suez crisis of 1956 Canada sided, not with Britain, but with the United States. Its decision not to support the militarism of a fading imperial power is now considered the right one, and external affairs minister Lester Bowles Pearson’s diplomacy is regarded as a golden moment in Canadian foreign policy; Creighton, however, saw his country abandoning Britain in its hour of need. In larger historical terms, the episode marked a critical point in what historian José E. Igartua has called “‘the other Quiet Revolution’: the dissolution of English-speaking Canada’s self-representation as a ‘British’ nation.” Creighton witnessed English Canada’s reinvention of itself evolving around him – how, for example, “dominion” had become a foreign word. He protested against what he believed to be its rejection of its past and the complicity of the historical profession in this process. Against this backdrop he delivered his presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association in 1957. He excoriated Canadian historical writing in the previous half-century for what he called its Liberal bias. According to the Liberal interpretation, or “authorized version,” Canadian history delineated the country’s emancipation from British imperialism: successive Liberal prime ministers were applauded for their contributions to this story of freedom, defenders of the imperial connection were condemned, and Canada assumed its continental destiny as a North American nation. But the Liberal interpretation and its historians – principally those he described privately as that “pot-bellied little bastard,” Frank Underhill, and the “pestiferous” Arthur Lower – ignored the fact that Canada was not only a North American nation and that the imperial connection mattered to its independence. Their interpretation negated what, in John A. Macdonald: the old chieftain, Creighton had called the “prime purpose” of Canada: “to achieve a separate political existence on the North American continent.” Changes in English Canada were part of a much larger reordering of the world as the British empire faced its Waterloo in the wake of World War II. India had been granted its independence in 1947, and the difficult and often protracted process of African decolonization had begun. It was in this context that Britain in 1959 appointed an advisory commission on the review of the constitution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, better known as the Monckton commission after its chairman, Lord Monckton. Anxious to secure representation from the Commonwealth and expertise in federalism, Britain approached Donald Creighton. It was a great honour, and despite certain misgivings – he knew nothing about Africa, and his stomach continued to bother him – he agreed because he very much wanted to serve the mother country. Appealing to his sense of history, the British secretary for the Commonwealth informed Creighton that the commission represented a historic occasion, that it was “an exercise comparable to the Durham Report.” He was out of the country for eight months, from February to September 1960. The first three were spent in Africa meeting with politicians, local officials, farmers, and students. Creighton took the assignment seriously: he kept detailed notes, asked pertinent questions, participated in committee meetings, and offered insights based on Canadian precedents. Preparing the final report in London occupied the next five months. The commissioners recommended a number of important changes to the federation’s constitution to accommodate African national sentiments, including the right to secession. They recognized that unless changes were implemented quickly, only force could keep the federation together. In the sense that it appealed to a multiracial future, the Monckton report was no Durham report. African nationalism and decolonization in the 1960s inspired many French-speaking Quebecers to ask why, if former colonies such as Northern Rhodesia were becoming independent, they could not. The Quiet Revolution – the rapid transformation of the province into a modern, secular, bureaucratic state – and the emergence of separatism transformed Canada. As early as 1962, three years before he entered politics, Quebec intellectual Pierre Elliott Trudeau* had warned English Canadians that they must change or face the consequences: they, “with their own nationalism, will have to retire gracefully to their proper place, consenting to modify their own precious image of what Canada ought to be.” Donald Creighton, however, refused to retire, gracefully or otherwise. He objected – passionately, even stridently – to what he perceived as a massive strategy of appeasement on the part of English Canada. The debate over a new national flag in 1964 [see Pearson], for example, infuriated him. It represented a rejection of the country’s history, on the one hand, and a misguided effort to accommodate French Canada, on the other. “Donald terribly depressed at flag controversy,” Luella recorded in her diary on 7 May. “Feels Canada a wretched place, wishes he had lived anywhere else.” A few weeks later Creighton, together with 11 other leading figures, including constitutional scholar Eugene Alfred Forsey*, historian William Lewis Morton, and political scientist Denis Smith, signed an open letter to Prime Minister Pearson urging him not to change the flag; the proposed maple leaf design was “insipid,” and the new flag would “subtly undermine the Canadian will to survive.” When asked about the letter by a Conservative mp in the House of Commons, Pearson gave a short, dismissive response: “I know the weakness of professors of history when they start mingling with contemporary events. Perhaps their letter indicates it.” In 1965 Creighton was invited to become a member of the Ontario Advisory Committee on Confederation, a group of disinterested experts who would provide Premier John Parmenter Robarts* with advice on federalism and the constitution. He accepted the invitation for a number of reasons: he wanted to be useful; he felt that, despite Pearson’s strictures, historians should involve themselves in contemporary affairs; and he believed that English Canada was prepared to accommodate Quebec nationalism at the expense of its own self-interest. The royal commission on bilingualism and biculturalism, appointed by Pearson in 1963 and chaired by André Laurendeau* and Arnold Davidson Dunton*, was the proof in Creighton’s pudding. In his opinion, it neither represented “the values and interests of English Canada” nor respected “the conception of Canadian nationality on which Confederation had originally been based and with which it continued for over ninety years.” The Ontario advisory committee, during its five-year existence, produced a number of research reports and background papers, but it confirmed Creighton’s suspicion that English Canada was too willing, in Trudeau’s words, to modify its image of what the country ought to be. For example, on the question of extending French-language instruction for Franco-Ontarians to the secondary-school level, Creighton found himself alone and isolated; he opposed the idea on the grounds that it would handicap students in a predominantly English-language labour market. Lord Durham had made the same argument when he recommended assimilation. “The language, the laws, the character of the North American Continent are English,” he wrote. It was the “language of the rich and of the employers of labour.” Bilingualism, biculturalism, and Quebec nationalism; Pearson, the flag debate, and constitutional reform; Canada, the United States, and continentalism – it was in this context that Creighton wrote his last great book. Canada’s first century, 1867–1967 (Toronto, 1970) saw him return to the Laurentian thesis, which he had developed more than 30 years earlier. In The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence, Creighton had located the reason for Canada’s separate existence in the St Lawrence River. But at the same time he had found “some primitive defect, some fundamental weakness, in the society of the St. Lawrence, in the resources which it could bring to bear upon its problems, and in the very river itself which had inspired its entire effort. The St. Lawrence was a stream which dashed itself against the rocks and broke the hopes of its supporters; and all the long struggle, which had begun when the first ships of the French sailed up the River of Canada, had served, in the end, to establish a tradition of defeat.” The Montreal merchants who in 1849 sought annexation of the Province of Canada to the United States [see John Redpath*] were the first in a long line of people prepared to abandon the promise of the St Lawrence River. Let us seek, they said, “a friendly and peaceful separation from the British connection and a union upon equitable terms with the great North American confederacy of sovereign states.” Annexation did not occur; this outcome delayed but could not preclude the inevitable. Canada’s first century documents that inevitability. And it lays a large measure of the blame at the feet of those Creighton privately called the “bloody Liberals”: in his view, prime ministers Mackenzie King, Louis-Stephen St-Laurent, and Lester Pearson had systematically rejected Canada’s British inheritance. He reserved particular animus for King. Inspired by Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, he presents the former prime minister as Alberich, the ugly, wretched dwarf who renounces love for power. King was, Creighton wrote, “a short, stoutish man, with a torso like a barrel,” whose appeals to moral pieties masked a brutal quest for power and who, through a series of wartime agreements with the United States, “effectively shackled” Canada to its southern neighbour. St-Laurent and Pearson finished the job: through their actions, they further linked Canada to the United States and ultimately severed its ties to Britain. They are Hagen figures. It is Hagen, Alberich’s son, who, by plunging a spear into Siegfried’s back, kills the beautiful, youthful hero. The last sentence of Canada’s first century finds continentalism moving “towards its final triumph.” Creighton’s own Ring cycle was complete; George Parkin Grant*’s Lament for a nation …, which had been published in Toronto five years earlier, was Creighton’s requiem for his country. Creighton’s anti-Americanism struck a chord with many young people and the new left. Although Tory and new-left nationalism differed in many ways, they converged on the question of Canada’s independence – what Creighton called its separateness – in North America. Influenced by left-wing political scientist James Laxer’s exposé The energy poker game: the politics of the continental resources deal (Toronto, 1970), in October the same year Creighton delivered a convocation address at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., on the American takeover of Canada’s natural resources, particularly its energy supplies. After he finished speaking, the audience broke out in a spontaneous rendition of “O Canada.” Like Grant, Creighton was a heroic figure to young people concerned about the country’s future. Author and journalist Larry Zolf has said that it was the historian and his vigorous defence of Canada that “made me a real Canadian at last.” Donald Creighton retired from the University of Toronto in 1971 after 44 years of teaching. But in many ways he did not slow down. That year he was one of three historians interviewed by Ramsay Cook for a film titled The craft of history, which explored, among other themes, the relationship between the historian and nationalism. The following summer he travelled from Newfoundland to British Columbia and north to Dawson in the Yukon for the filming of Heroic beginnings, a one-hour television program produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1973 in which he acted as a guide to 11 national historic sites that documented key moments in Canadian history. The publication of The craft of history (Toronto, 1973) and Canada: the heroic beginnings (Toronto, 1974), an expanded narrative based on 51 historic sites that was issued by Macmillan together with the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and Parks Canada, testified to Creighton’s status as English Canada’s leading historian. He also continued to write – Towards the discovery of Canada (Toronto, 1972), a collection of essays; The forked road: Canada, 1939–1957 (Toronto, 1976), his volume in the Canadian Centenary Series, directed by W. L. Morton, for which he served as advisory editor; and Takeover (Toronto, 1978), a novel about the proposed sale of an old Canadian distillery to American interests – and he continued to brood about Canada and its fate. Following the victory of the Parti Québécois, led by René Lévesque*, in the provincial election of November 1976, Creighton published a scathing attack in Maclean’s magazine (Toronto). The time had come, he said, to negotiate secession. English Canada should reject any notion of economic association with an independent Quebec. “There is something peculiarly offensive in the calm assumption of the leaders of the Parti Québécois that Quebec should be able at one and the same time to enjoy all the political liberties of independence and all the economic advantages of union.” His friends were angry (Cook called the article “pathetic”), but he was unrepentant. To focus on the public figure, however, is to obscure the private man. Behind the outspoken and uncompromising social critic was a warm, generous, and hospitable individual. Anticipating his retirement, he and Luella had bought a historic house in the small town of Brooklin, east of Toronto, in 1962. They enjoyed nothing more than opening their home to their many friends. Luncheons, dinner parties, and receptions were wonderful affairs at which lively conversations ranged from politics to literature and from gardening to music and art. Many of those welcomed into his home were former students. Creighton took teaching seriously, especially at the graduate level, and he directed 22 phd candidates, including historians P. B. Waite, Ramsay Cook, H. V. Nelles, and J. R. Miller. Creighton was, Miller remembered, a wonderful supervisor. When the young student started sending him chapters of his thesis, “he was marvellous. He would return a chapter in a matter of days. And he would make suggestions, but he would always add something like, ‘Now remember, these are suggestions, not instructions.’ He really treated me like an equal, like a colleague.” Waite recalled that Creighton “respected evidence; you could tell him anything if you could prove it from the documents.” Punctilious and thorough, he was also avuncular and solicitous. He worried about the effect that reading much microfilm might have on one student’s eyesight, he reminded another to eat properly and pace himself, and he advised a third not to worry about his thesis but to enjoy time with his new baby. As well, Donald and Luella indulged their interest in travel. At least once a year from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s they took a European vacation. In September 1970 they went to France, where they visited their old haunts in Paris and took a day trip to Chartres. At the cathedral there Creighton found himself overwhelmed with grief. He was reminded of the time, 18 years earlier, when he and Luella had taken a 12-year-old Cynthia to see this magnificent building. The image of his daughter bathed in sunlight that entered through one of the many stained-glass windows had stayed with him all these years. Now she was a grown woman and a Trotskyist. Creighton felt, he said, as he had when he read the casualty lists from the Great War in old newspapers. He loved his children, but he was a difficult man, and his daughter, who now lived in Vancouver, had put a continent between them. Over the course of his long career, Creighton received many awards, including the J. B. Tyrrell Historical Medal, presented by the Royal Society of Canada for exceptional work in Canadian history, in 1951; the University of British Columbia President’s Medal in Biography in 1955; and the Molson Prize, awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts for outstanding contribution to Canadian arts and letters, in 1964, the first year it was given. He was among the inaugural group of companions chosen for the Order of Canada when the honour was established in 1967, and the following year the University of Toronto appointed him university professor, only the second person, after Herman Northrop Frye*, to be so designated. Institutions across Canada, from Memorial University of Newfoundland to the University of Victoria in British Columbia, recognized him with honorary degrees. Donald Grant Creighton died from colorectal cancer at his home on 19 Dec. 1979. In an editorial the following day, the Globe and Mail (Toronto) described him as “one of the first of Canada’s great historians,” and it promised that his “pen will make Canadian history live for Canadians not yet here when he laid it down.” In fact, although The empire of the St. Lawrence and Creighton’s biography of Sir John A. Macdonald have remained in print, his books are now rarely read or even consulted by historians, and his central theme, the Laurentian thesis, has been all but consigned to the dustbin. Historian Fernand Ouellet, in his Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760–1850: structures et conjoncture (Montréal, 1966), disputed particular facts in The empire of the St. Lawrence, such as Creighton’s location of the decline in the importance of the fur trade to Montreal in the last decade of the 18th century. More crucially, Ouellet did not assign a national vision to the Montreal merchants. Nor did his student Allan Greer, who noted in Peasant, lord, and merchant: rural society in three Quebec parishes, 1740–1840 (Toronto, 1985) that “Creightonian ideologies to the contrary, there was nothing very revolutionary, heroic, or even progressive” about the intrusion of mercantile capital into the St Lawrence River valley. And according to historian Michael Bliss, the Laurentian thesis was always a thesis in search of evidence. The Montreal merchants, he observed, did not envision a northern nation; rather, they “thought first, and often last, in terms of the health of their enterprises,” and it is a romantic fantasy to assert otherwise. From a later, anti-national perspective, Creighton’s quest for a nation makes him at best quaint and at worst exclusionary. But he was a product of his time, and among his contemporaries no other historian wrote as well or reached as many readers. In 2006 the Literary Review of Canada ranked The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence and the two Macdonald volumes among Canada’s 100 most important books. A full-length biography of Donald Grant Creighton by the author is in preparation. The principal manuscript sources for Creighton’s life are the Donald Grant Creighton fonds (R5269-0-3) at Library and Arch. Can. (Ottawa) and the Luella Creighton fonds (GA 99) at the Special Coll. Dept. of the Univ. of Waterloo Library, Ont. Creighton’s daughter, Cynthia Flood, published “My father took a cake to France,” a short story based on her interpretation of an episode in his life as he described it to her. It is available in the collection My father took a cake to France (Vancouver, 1992), 41–54. In addition to the works mentioned in the text, Creighton is the author of Harold Adams Innis: portrait of a scholar (Toronto, 1957), The story of Canada (Toronto, 1959), The road to confederation: the emergence of Canada, 1863–1867 (Toronto, 1964), and essays in edited collections and scholarly and popular journals. His book The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760–1850 (Toronto, 1937) was republished as The empire of the St. Lawrence (Toronto, 1956), and The story of Canada also went through later editions (1st American ed., Boston, 1960; new and rev. ed., Toronto, 1971). Creighton’s talks with Paul Fox on CBC television in 1959 were issued as A long view of Canadian history … (Toronto, 1959). A list of his academic publications to 1970 can be found in Character and circumstance: essays in honour of Donald Grant Creighton, ed. J. S. Moir (Toronto, 1970), 235–39. A collection of previously published essays appeared posthumously as The passionate observer: selected writings (Toronto, 1980). Several works by Creighton have been translated into French. In chronological order they are: L’Amérique britannique du Nord à l’époque de la confédération: étude préparée pour la commission royale des relations entre le dominion et les provinces [translation of British North America at confederation: a study prepared for the royal commission on dominion-provincial relations] (Ottawa, 1939); Canada: les débuts héroïques [translation of Canada: the heroic beginnings] (Montréal, 1979); Take-over [translation of Takeover], Jacques de Roussan, trad. (Montréal, 1980); and the two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, which is translated under the main title of John A. Macdonald: le 1er premier ministre du Canada, with the subtitles Le Haut et le Bas-Canada and La naissance d’un pays incertain, Ivan Steenhout, trad. (Montréal, 1981). Library and Arch. Can., R2285-0-0. Univ. of Oxford, Balliol College Arch. & mss (Eng.), Student files, D. G. Creighton. Univ. of Toronto Arch. and Records Management Services, B1997-0031; B2005-0011; B2006-0015. Victoria Univ. Arch. (Toronto), Fonds 2021. Acta Victoriana (Toronto), 49, no.1 (October 1924): 18; no.6 (March 1925): 21. Carl Berger, The writing of Canadian history: aspects of English-Canadian historical writing since 1900 (2nd ed., Toronto, 1986). Sarah Bonesteel, “Luella Bruce Creighton: a writer’s diary: a feminist study of the life and experiences of a twentieth century Canadian author” (ma thesis, Univ. of Waterloo, 2001). Robert Bothwell, Laying the foundation: a century of history at University of Toronto (Toronto, 1991). Lionel Groulx, La naissance d’une race: conférences prononcées à l’université Laval (Montréal, 1918–1919) ([Montréal], 1919). J. E. Igartua, “‘Ready, aye, ready’ no more? Canada, Britain, and the Suez crisis in the Canadian press,” in Canada and the end of empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Vancouver and Toronto, 2005), 47–65. Raymond Massey, “My Oxford,” in My Oxford, ed. Ann Thwaite (London, 1977), 35–58. Philip Massolin, Canadian intellectuals, the Tory tradition, and the challenge of modernity, 1939–1970 (Toronto, 2001). Kenneth McNaught, Conscience and history: a memoir (Toronto, 1999). “Out of the turmoil comes a new awareness of ourselves,” D. [G.] Creighton interviewed by Allan Anderson, Univ. of Toronto, Graduate (Toronto), 1, no.4 (June 1968): 38–46. Reba Soffer, “Nation, duty, character and confidence: history at Oxford, 1850–1914,” Hist. Journal (Cambridge, Eng.), 30 (1987): 77–104. Charles Taylor, Radical Tories: the conservative tradition in Canada (Toronto, 1982). P. E. Trudeau, “New treason of the intellectuals,” in his Against the current: selected writings, 1939–1996, ed. Gérard Pelletier, trans. George Tombs (Toronto, 1996), 150–81. P. B. Waite, “Donald Grant Creighton, 1902–1979,” Royal Soc. of Can., Proc. (Ottawa), 4th ser., 18 (1980): 73–77. Donald Wright, The professionalization of history in English Canada (Toronto, 2005).

A BODYGUARD OF LIES (release: Jan. 13th) has a dual setting, a contemporary one and a WWII/London setting. It's a blend of romance, mystery and WWII espionage. I researched it while in England, Ireland and Germany in 2009. The story involves a Jewish-American FBI analyst, who's recruited by MI-5 to go undercover and investigate a naturalized American grandmother. The elderly woman is suspected by MI-5 of being a notorious Nazi spy never caught by the Allies during the war, who caused the deaths of thousands and is wanted for war crimes. Jake Bernstein runs into a series of unexpected obstacles and complications: This spy knows a secret that could endanger the royal family; the old woman has a beautiful granddaughter who threatens to derail his investigation; a neo-Nazi group in Ireland known as the Celtic Wolves; and a clever, cagey old woman who's not as weak as she looks Here is my review of A Bodyguard of LIES: This books pulls you right in. Jake is an FBI analyst, he is undercover and needs to meet and form a friendship with a beautiful young woman and her grandmother. Will his attraction to Mary cloud his judgement. This book is action packed and an easy read! The major handed Jake a secure mobile phone, which he tucked into his jacket’s inside pocket. Acknowledging the older man’s military background and bearing, Jake gave a quick half-salute, biting back the sarcastic retort that sprang to mind. I’m thirty-two, Major, not thirteen. “Will do, Major,” he said and grabbed the handle of his suitcase. “Where the hell is this motor coach going, anyway? Besides the Republic of Ireland?” Major Temple’s bushy gray eyebrows arched. “No, didn’t have a chance to read the itinerary. Too busy with the files.” Temple chomped on his pipe, one side of his mouth upturned in another wry smile. Jake sensed the man was holding something back. “Southwest England, Wales, Republic of Ireland, a bit of Scotland. Two weeks’ worth.” “And if I conclude this investigation in less time?” “Then we debrief and back home you go. We’ll handle the filing of charges and arrest warrants if needed. Extradition, if necessary, for Mrs. Snider. Well then, good luck, ol’ man.” Jake nodded and took his leave. Outside, he hailed the guide, a friendly, outgoing sort who introduced himself as Robert Morse. The man quickly turned the suitcase over to the driver, who stowed it in the storage bin at the side of the motor coach. As soon as Robert checked him in and indicated that he could take on board his carryon, Jake moved to the coach’s front door. He suddenly stepped aside as a young, very pretty blonde climbed down, spun around and helped an elderly woman descend. “Sorry, Robert, my grandmother has to visit the restroom.” The blonde glanced over at Jake, grinned in greeting, then took her grandmother’s arm and followed the direction of Robert’s sweeping arm. The two women entered the glass-fronted hotel lobby and walked slowly around the corner of the lobby’s counter. Jake’s gaze clung to them. So there they were. Mary McCoy Snider and her granddaughter, Meghan Larsen. What a hottie! “Quite a looker, that one,” Robert murmured them, his eyes following their progress as well. An understatement, Jake thought as he nodded to the man in agreement. The granddaughter was lovely—had the face and figure of a Hollywood starlet. She had a wholesome but sexy look about her. The red lipstick she wore accentuated her full, sensual mouth; her deep-set blue eyes were large and luminous. A boxy navy-blue pea jacket concealed some of her curves, but the overall effect of a beautiful, symmetrical face, a tanned complexion, long blonde waves partly covered with a large, black beret, and graceful motion was powerful. Like a slap of warm sunshine in this cold, damp country. Seduc—er, schmoozing that girl was going to be a perk, not a chore. Already, he was warming to this assignment. The grandmother, bulky in a long wooly coat, looked attractive despite her purported eighty-five years of age. The elderly woman was well preserved, he decided, and must have been quite a beauty in her youth. Like her granddaughter, she would’ve turned men’s heads and carried her power over them like a Hollywood pinup girl. “Would you care to board, Mr. Schoenberger?”offered Robert, the tour guide, interrupting his reverie. “Call me Jake. I’ll wait until the women return.” The tour guide tossed him a knowing smirk. A few minutes later, Jake was helping the elderly woman up to the steep first step. Mary McCoy Snider paused on the steps, holding onto the railing on the coach’s door, and looked back at Jake, her dark blue eyes sharp with intelligence. “Thank you, young man. What’s your name?” she asked, a slight Texas drawl softening her naturally strong, clear voice. “Jake. Jake Schoenberger from Virginia.” He smiled up at the elderly grandmother, who then nodded and moved up into the coach. He slid his gaze down to the granddaughter, who’d paused at the coach’s door. The top of her head came to his jawline. “Thanks for helping, Jake,” she said, blinking up at him before climbing the steps herself. Her long honey-blonde hair brushed his shoulder when she moved past him. There was a self-conscious shyness in her manner. Which Jake found odd, for such a beautiful woman. Wow. His pulse revved up. Dude, you’re on duty. Wasn’t that why they chose him? Get close, peel off the layers of distrust... He proceeded up after Meghan Larsen, appreciating the rear view. Too bad, he thought, when the two women took seats near the front of the packed coach. The one vacant double-seat was in the rear of the coach. He nodded a friendly greeting to all of the passengers as he passed them on his way to the back. They were mostly couples but another single man, an older guy in his fifties, sat alone at the halfway point in the coach. Two women of about the man’s same age—maybe mid-forties—were behind him. They perked up as he walked by, shot him wide smiles beaming with anticipation. He knew that look. After stowing his carry-on underneath the empty seat next to him, Jake sat down. His long legs brushed against the seat in front. Damn, like traveling in coach. Two weeks in this freakin’ bus—how was he going to stand it? He leaned over. From his vantage point, he could see the blonde’s wavy locks falling about her shoulders. She was sitting on the opposite side of the coach in the aisle seat, her grandmother in the window seat. Damn, he’d have to find a way of sitting closer to them. Maybe their seats on the coach weren’t fixed ...or he could feign motion sickness and ask Robert to place him further forward. As he was plotting a way to chat up Mary Snider and her granddaughter, the blonde swiveled her upper body and looked down the aisle. Their eyes locked together briefly and she smiled. Despite a night without sleep and heavy with jet lag, his pulse kicked up. Something lurched in his chest. His groin clenched. Jake returned the smile. Good, he thought, she noticed me. Contact with targets made. Donna Del Oro spent her childhood in two places, Silicon Valley, CA and the countryside of East Texas, as her father tried several job opportunities. Finally settling in Silicon Valley, she grew up in a bilingual, bicultural world--Spanish on her mother's side and English on her father's. Comfortable in both worlds, she decided upon retiring from teaching to write about her Hispanic side. Four women's fiction books resulted and a series about professional singers, their careers and love lives. Retired and devoting much of her abundant free time to exercise, writing, singing and her grandson, Donna has finally reached a point in life that totally satisfies her. Life is good and she has no complaints, just a lot of gratitude for her many blessings.

I recently came across an article that listed 20 things that each woman should do before they get married. I not only printed out the list, but it inspired me to create my own of things that I would like to accomplish before I make the plunge. 20 Things Each Woman Should Do before They get Married: 1. Live by herself for at least 1 year. 2. Live with someone else for at least a year. 3. Recover from a broken heart. 4. Have a vacation fling. 5. Take a road trip with girlfriends. 6. Relish sleeping in a queen-sized bed by herself. 7. Get her finances in order. 8. Learn to love her body. 9. Have sex with at least 1 person she'd never want to marry (or introduce to her mom). 10. Find a reliable birth control. 11. Pay off as much credit card debt and student loans as possible. 12. Spend way too much on something frivolous. 13. Exorcise all past relationship demons. 14. Travel somewhere exotic. 15. Establish a strong circle of friends. 16. Forgive her parents for not being perfect. 17. Have at least one night she can't remember. 18. Experience some really bad first dates. 19. Find hobbies that fulfill her. 20. Celebrate her 25th birthday. I sent this list to a few of my friends and their responses to the list made me laugh. Each woman's response to how many things she had already completed was directly proportional to how ready they were for marriage, or in some cases, how much they wanted to be ready for it. Some said they had accomplished all the items, some said they completed most, and others, like myself, started to over analyze and think about what constitutes an "exotic vacation" - I went to Costa Rica a few years ago, but that just didn't seem exotic enough for me. Ironically, and to no surprise to a lot of my friends, this list wasn't enough for me, I needed to add on my own things. I guess I just felt like this list wasn't going to give me enough time. So, here are the 10 additional items that I came up with. What things would you add to the list, if anything? Here's my additions, if you need some inspiration :) 1. Move out of Philadelphia. 2. Be happy on my own (without a boyfriend). 3. Get a job outside my current industry. 4. Live in Chile for an extended period of time. 5. Learn Spanish. 6. Learn love my faults and learn from them. 7. Go to Bikram Yoga instructor training school. 8. Go on a bike tour throughout Greece. 9. Be my own best friend. 10. Be able to make a teapot in my pottery class. *11. Celebrate my 27th Birthday. Granted a lot of these things I can do when I'm married or have a serious boyfriend, but for some reason these seem like things I'd like to accomplish on my own. I added an eleventh item just for good luck. Enjoy reading the list and thinking of your own!

On sale 2/16 at 10am: http://bit.ly/2snolHv All ages / Doors at 7pm Olivia Jean is a multi-instrumentalist originally signed to Third Man Records, who began her songwriting career as a solo artist in Detroit, Michigan. Olivia's solo act [Idée Fixe] consisted of instrumental surf songs which she wrote and recorded. She soon caught the attention of Jack White - celebrated musician and founder of Third Man Records. At age 19, she was signed to Third Man. Olivia's first project on the label was front woman and songwriter of The Black Belles. The Black Belles released their debut album in 2011. Their song "What Can I Do?" became the theme song for Elvira's Movie Macabre TV show. The Black Belles were also Steven Colbert's backing band for his comedic song "Charlene (I'm Over You)". In addition to her solo career, Olivia Jean has been a session musician for several artists including Jack White, Wanda Jackson, Karen Elson, Kate Pierson, & The Secret Sisters. In 2014, Olivia Jean released her first solo album on Third Man Records named "Bathtub Love Killings". The album is an eclectic mix of modern rock, surf guitar tones, garage rock rhythms, and 1960's girl group melodies. Olivia Jean is currently recording her second solo album in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Last Spring a colleague of mine finished her 8-hour shift at a Minneapolis group home, drove to a nearby bridge and jumped. It took days to find her car, parked by the riverbank with a neatly typed suicide note lying on the dashboard. "Had she typed it at work?" There was talk of a kidnapper or a homicidal husband...or did she have a boyfriend? No one really knew for sure. She kept to herself a lot but she always smiled and said she was "fine." But who really goes around work being how they really feel? Answer truthfully to: "How are you?" and get labeled social sinkhole faster than the woman who walks around work all day with her skirt hem caught up in the waistband of her tights. Originally published by Polygon in Scotland, Janice Galloway's novel, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, is the story of Joy Stone, a 27-year-old drama teacher who is trying to seem "normal" and go on with her life following the accidental drowning death of her married boyfriend. First day back this term I wore a dress. I was neat. I handed in his music room keys and scored his name off the staff list with a single black line. I was discreet.... The smiling could only be accomplished by grinding my teeth. Galloway has Joy narrate her own story, describing in lyric detail all the things she must do to seem "fine" and letting us in on how she really is anything but. Throughout the novel, Galloway uses different fonts and type sizes, indented paragraphs and scrunched jumbles of words that flow into the margins and sometimes off the page as if even the words have lost their way. Writing in a style that often seems more akin to poetry than prose, Galloway has been compared with writer Sylvia Plath. "I clean the kitchen till my hands are swollen from cold water, red as ham." And, after a long day of pretend smiling at work: "I wait while it gets dark, trying to get out of my own skin and reach the corner of the room." Stylistic Galloway/Plath comparisons seem warranted. And the two have also written about women dealing with severe depression. But it seems to me that Galloway's, Joy Stone, conveys a sense of hope - even as she starves herself to bones and runs about collecting her falling-out hair and rotten teeth - that Plath's characters do not. Plath's depression always seemed unrelenting and bottomless. Joy's depression is situational, even though she has endured many situations prior to her boyfriend's death. Like Galloway's own mother, Joy's mother tried to kill herself by walking into the sea. "She didn't die right away. At the funeral, the man I lived with shook my hand. I left him." Joy wonders what allows other people to lead normal lives. She makes decisions to try and stay alive. She sees the doctors. She checks into Foresthouse, the psychiatric hospital, where she is given pink pajamas and red and yellow pills. The doctors are bored and then defensive when Joy asks about treatment. She calls them by number instead of name: "Dr. Two tells me he has been talking to his colleagues. They were agreed about one thing. I am definitely depressed...." The patients not only have names, they have hairstyles and friendships and inpatient love affairs. They become more than diagnoses and that's hard in this atmosphere of "get 'em in, get 'em out" health care. (At one point in the book a doctor books a "double appointment," that's 20 minutes, because Joy seems so distraught.) Galloway's novel tells us in raw and honest language what anyone, who has ever felt like giving up already knows. Sometimes the only thing to do is to just keep breathing. Janice Galloway, author of The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (first published in 1989), is currently working on a novel based on the nineteenth-century musician Clara Schumann. Her novel Foreign Parts (1994) won the Mc Vitie's Prize. She has also published several collections of short stories. Meleah Maynard recently left the mental health field to pursue her first love, writing short stories and book reviews. For the past seven years she has worked as a day treatment counselor in Minneapolis, teaching people living with schizophrenia how to write creatively, cook a well-balanced meal and scrutinize the next bunch of candidates who hope to be our next President. To discuss this book or the review you have just read, join the Metapsychology Discussion E-Mail Group by going to this URL: http://www.onelist.com/subscribe/metapsy-discussion

Levy lives in a museum of his own creation. Surrounded by keepsakes he has gathered throughout the years and records that he listens to on a ritualistic basis, he has a quiet little existence that is minimal and modest. And then he meets Lillian (Barbara Eda-Young) and her teenage son, Yidl (John Magaro). Lillian Yuralia is a character-driven play written by Barbara Eda-Young and directed by Austin Pendleton that blows the dust off the surface of a man’s life to reveal all the untold stories and quietly dying memories that lie underneath. Eda-Young’s story, which runs only one hour and fifteen minutes long, crams a host of complexities from three individual lives into a tiny, succinct package that never once says too much or too little. Lillian and Yidl barge into Levy’s life after they are evicted from their apartment. Moments before they must leave, Lillian overdoses on poison and awakens to hear her son sobbing and Levy (Ben Hammer) pouring a bucket of cold water over her. Panicked, they stumble into his one bedroom apartment against a flurry of objections. Within moments of their arrival Lillian is vomiting in his bathroom, peeling off her wet gown and drying herself in Levy’s ankle-length robe. Yidl makes a beeline for a shadowy corner where he sits, silently sobbing. Levy stares, barely able to comprehend what has just blown through his door. Eda-Young is both the star and playwright, which gives her exceptional insight into her flighty, but well-meaning character. She embraces Lillian’s faults without excusing them. Her pain as a mother and ruined woman is evident in her strained, desperate smiles. She steals longing glances at Yidl from across the room, searching for the carefree child she used to know. Levy senses that something is amiss, which both sobers and baffles him. His guests eventually have a train to catch. He knows their presence is only temporary but what should he do with them in the meantime? Offer them tea? Insist Yidl sit on the chair when he seems determined to remain hunched on the floor? While Levy tries to asses the situation Lillian gives him her lists of grievances: she fell in love with a man, they had a son, he took care of them, loved them …but he wouldn’t leave his wife. And then he died, too suddenly to provide for them. Yidl read about it in the papers, the truth knocking the words right out of him. In a matter of days he lost his father, his home and everything he knew to be true. Though Lillian and Yidl’s unraveling relationship is the main focus of the story, it is Levy who provides the bittersweet center. He watches as Lillian brushes the hair off her son’s face, choking on some suppressed emotion. His family was killed in Jewish riots when he was only a teenager. Watching Lillian and Yidl together seems to stir something within him, perhaps because everything they are losing now reminds him of everything he has lost over time. Levy spends most of Lillian’s visit trying to resist her incessant probing. He says, “I don’t remember,” when asked anything about his past. But when the topic comes to his family he remembers everything: his sister’s bright blue eyes, the sun on his mother’s face as she looked out the window and the games he played with his siblings in a meadow with flowers. The play’s climatic end comes suddenly and unexpectedly. Until one small, but pivotal moment, it is not clear what kind of terms these new acquaintances will part on. Then something happens, a simple gesture, but enough to alter life’s course and leave the audience with some hope for the characters' futures. Like Lillian Yuralia, this gesture is unassuming and straightforward in its execution but deeply significant and heartrending in the purity of its meaning.

Maternal Health Risk Factors in Communities Across Texas Access to high-quality and timely local data is critical to improving the health of communities, providing them with the information needed to make the best decisions. These data inform policies and resource allocations at the state and local level, and can help strengthen the design and evaluation of interventions to meet specific community needs. They are also the basis for community health needs assessments that shape local health improvement plans. An important source of health-related data at the local level are birth and death records, which are collected by the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS). Information included in birth records can be used to calculate maternal risk factors that impact the health of both mothers and their babies. These measures also offer a window into the health status of the entire community, as mothers are a subset of the larger population. In order to increase the availability and accessibility of local data, UT System Population Health used the 2013-2015 Texas birth records to generate ZIP-code-level measures of three maternal risk factors: pre-pregnancy obesity, smoking during pregnancy, and prenatal care utilization. Each of the measures was calculated by year at the ZIP-code-level for ZIP codes with at least 100 births in that year. These measures were also calculated by racial/ethnic subpopulations for ZIP code areas with at least 100 births to mothers of that racial/ethnic group. Prior studies suggest that birth certificates are a good data source for these three maternal risk factors. Year-to-year comparisons showed that each measure was stable across years. However, data users should be aware that birth certificates are known to contain errors that impact the accuracy of derived measures. Data for all three years by race/ethnicity are provided in downloadable files, and 2015 data are presented in an interactive map on the UT System Population Health website. The pdf document provides summary descriptions of each measure for 2015, details on the data source, and definitions of each measure. This project is the second of a series of local area data projects by UT System Population Health. The first project provided ZIP-code-level infant mortality rates for 2011-2014 (available at utsystempophealth.org/imr-texas) We hope these data are a useful resource for public health practictioners and researchers working to improve the health and wellbeing of all mothers and infants in Texas. One marker of a mother’s health as she becomes pregnant is her pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI). A woman in the obese range of BMI when becoming pregnant is at an increased risk for a variety of maternal and fetal complications, including preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, congenital anomalies, and fetal death. The local variation in pre-pregnancy obesity is dramatic across the state. In 2015, the prevalence of pre-pregnancy obesity in some ZIP codes was less than 10% while in others it was more than 40% (Figure 1). While pre-pregnancy morbid obesity is less common and shows less variability, in 2015 the prevalence was more than 10% in some Texas ZIP codes (Figure 1). Left: Distribution of ZIP-Code-Level Percentages of Live Births to Mothers Who Were Obese Pre-Pregnancy: Texas (2015) Right: Distribution of ZIP-Code-Level Percentages of Live Births to Mothers Who Were Morbidly Obese Pre-Pregnancy: Texas (2015) Figure 1 illustrates one example of local variation of pre-pregnancy morbid obesity prevalence. Within ZIP codes with at least 100 births to Hispanic mothers in 2015 in Bexar County, the percent of live births to Hispanic women who were classified as morbidly obese prior to becoming pregnant ranged from a low of 1.1% to a high of 9.3%. Figure 1. Percent of Live Births to Hispanic Mothers Who Were Morbidly Obese Pre-Pregnancy: Bexar County, Texas (2015) Smoking during pregnancy has important effects on fetal growth and long-term health. Smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of low birth weight, preterm birth, and certain birth defects, and may increase a child’s risk of obesity, asthma, and high blood pressure later in life. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of women who smoked during pregnancy in Texas in 2016 was one of the lowest in the country.3 In 2015, over 30% of ZIP codes with at least 100 births met the Healthy People 2020 target of no more than 1.4% of pregnant women smoking during their pregnancy. An additional 48% of ZIP codes had a prevalence of smoking during pregnancy that was lower than the 2016 national prevalence of 7.2%.3 However, in 12% of the included ZIP codes, more than 10% of infants born were exposed to prenatal maternal smoking. Distribution of ZIP-Code-Level Percentages of Live Births to Mothers Who Smoked During Pregnancy Figure 2 illustrates one example of local variation in the prevalence of smoking during pregnancy. Within ZIP codes with at least 100 births to white mothers in 2015 in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area, the percent of live births to white women who smoked during pregnancy ranged from a low of 0.0% to a high of 25.5%. Figure 2. Percent of Live Births to White Mothers Who Smoked During Pregnancy: Dallas/Fort Worth Metropolitan Area, Texas (2015) No Prenatal Care Prenatal care is important to the health of the mother and the baby. During these visits, women with chronic health conditions or complications during pregnancy can be medically managed to reduce the negative outcomes for the baby. Inadequate prenatal care utilization increases risk of prematurity, neonatal death, and infant death.¹ In half of the ZIP codes in the state with at least 100 births in 2015, fewer than 2% of infants’ mothers had no documented prenatal care. In 5% of ZIP codes, however, more than 10% of births in 2015 were to a mother who had not received prenatal care (Figure 5). Distribution of ZIP-Code-Level Percentages of Live Births to Mothers With no Reported Prenatal Care Figure3 illustrates one example of local variation in prenatal care utilization. Within ZIP codes with at least 100 births to black mothers in 2015 in Harris County, the percent of live births to black women with no reported prenatal care during their pregnancy ranged from a low of 0.0% to a high of 10.1%. Figure 3. Percent of Live Births to Black Mothers With No Reported Prenatal Care: Harris County, Texas (2015) All measures were calculated using birth records provided by the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS). The dataset only includes live births that occurred in Texas to a woman who was a Texas resident. Live birth is defined as “the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a product of conception, irrespective of the duration of pregnancy, which, after such separation, breathes or shows any other evidence of life such as beating of the heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, whether or not the umbilical cord has been cut or the placenta is attached; each product of such a birth is considered live born.”¹ Each measure is given as a percent of all live births during the specified year to mothers who resided in the ZIP code at the time of birth, excluding those with missing data for the specific measure. For measures by racial/ethnic subpopulations, only births to mothers of the specified racial/ethnic group are included in the denominator. Mother’s racial/ethnic category is categorized by DSHS, based on information on the birth certificate. In these categories, mothers with more than one race listed are included in the “other” category if they did not identify as Hispanic. Pre-pregnancy obesity and morbid obesity Pre-pregnancy obesity categories were assigned based on maternal age (in years) at delivery. For mothers ages 20 years old or older, body mass index (BMI) was calculated as pre-pregnancy weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared; obesity was defined as BMI ≥ 30.0 and morbid obesity was defined as BMI ≥ 40.0. For mothers younger than 20 years old, BMI percentile for age and sex was calculated using the CDC standard growth charts for adolescents; obesity was defined as BMI percentile ≥ 95th BMI percentile for age and sex, and morbid obesity was defined as BMI percentile ≥ 120% of the 95th percentile for age and sex. Smoking during pregnancy Any smoking during any trimester of pregnancy reported on birth certificate. No prenatal care visits Zero prenatal care visits reported on birth certificate. Data Suppression and Interpretation In order to protect confidentiality and reduce spurious data variability, rates were suppressed for geographic areas with fewer than 100 births in a given year. This suppression rule was also applied to all of the race/ethnicity calculations. Therefore, rates by race/ethnicity are only available for ZIP codes with a large number of women in that racial/ethnic category. Standard errors and 95% confidence intervals were calculated using a Poisson mean and the normal approximation method. All rates that survive the suppression rule but have a relative standard error of the rate (RSE) of 30% or greater were flagged as unstable in the dataset and on the maps. Flagged rates should be interpreted with caution. Texas ZIP-code-level(a) Distribution of Maternal Risk Factors as Percentage of Live Births (2015) a Only ZIP codes with ≥100 births in 2015 are included. For prevalence measures by race/ethnicity, only ZIP codes with ≥100 births in 2015 to mothers in that racial/ethnic category are included. b Measure of absolute geographic inequality. c Measure of relative geographic inequality. * Value cannot be calculated due to zero in denominator See Technical Notes section for measure definitions. Suggested citation: Nehme E, Mandell D, O’Neil M, Elerian N, Patel D, Karimifar M, Lakey D. (2018) Maternal Health Risk Factors in Communities Across Texas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler/University of Texas System.

(Photo Details: Subway home from the Yankee's game two years ago, back when I was actually young.) Only seven years ago, people used to say, upon hearing that I was retired, “Wow, you are so young to be retired.” At some point over the last seven years, that stopped happening. Maybe a couple of years ago, I’m not sure. But no one really says that anymore when I mention that I am retired. Last year, when I was here in New York with my friend Kendra and her daughter Taylor, there was an incident on the subway. An incident. I thought it was a fluke. We were riding the Lexington Avenue Express down to The Stand comedy club--forgive me if I’ve already told you this story, that sometimes happens with us old people. As the subway pulled out of the 86th Street station, a woman--who had to be in her mid-to late-60’s--leaned past Taylor, past Kendra and said, directly to me, “Would you like to sit down?” I looked around. She was definitely talking to me. She was offering her seat to me. She wasn’t just offering it to me, she was leaning all the way across the subway car to get my attention--around Taylor, and around Kendra--who by the way is only one year younger than I am. Did I mention, I was only 50 at the time? I was at least a decade younger than this woman. She had some nerve. New Yorkers are very polite in this respect. I often see someone giving their seat to a pregnant woman, a disabled person, and yes, the elderly. I’ve done it myself. But when did I become that elderly person? (Trust me, she didn’t think I was pregnant.) I kind of forgot about this incident, even wrote it off as just a whacky New York experience, of which I’ve had many. But then two nights ago, Doug and I went down to dinner at Bond Street, a hip sushi restaurant we both love. The 6 train was under some construction this weekend, so it was not making stops between 14th Street and Brooklyn Bridge. Although we had already walked seven miles of Manhattan streets that day, we decided to walk from 14th street. That’s how young and vibrant we are. At the restaurant, the hostess asked us to wait in the bar—our table would be ready in about 10 minutes. So we squeezed around some people and found a place out of the way of the front door and—here it comes—a young woman offered me her seat in the bar! At least this woman was actually younger than I am--by several decades. But still . . . Last night we went to the Comedy Cellar. And after the show, we walked over to another cool Chinese restaurant that we love in the West Village. When we used to come to New York, before we started using home exchange, we always stayed downtown. We hardly ever ventured above 14th Street. Maybe to go to a Broadway show, or to go to our favorite jazz venue in Columbus Circle. But that was it, all the action is below 14th Street: the late-night dining scene, the jazz clubs, the comedy clubs, the vibe, the buzz. We only started staying in the Upper East Side (a neighborhood I had previously written off as too old for us) because that’s where we found home exchange partners that wanted to exchange with us for a month every year in August. But last night, while sipping my shiso cucumber martini and enjoying the Katz’s pastrami eggroll at RedFarm, I looked around. Doug and I were the oldest people in the restaurant. By a lot. Given the chance, these people would likely offer their seat to me in the subway. I realized that sometime over the last five years of our home exchanges to New York, it happened. We actually belong in the Upper East Side now. How did this happen? I still feel young. I still feel healthy. In fact I am healthy--my cholesterol is low, my blood pressure is low, and no, I don’t need your seat on the subway! But there it is. I’m a person that defines healthy with words like cholesterol and blood pressure. These are terms that wouldn’t even occur to an actual young person. So now I know, there are three phases of aging. The first phase is where you feel young because you actually are young. The third phase is where you feel old because you actually are old. And the phase in-between is where you feel young but everyone thinks you need to sit down. Can’t keep track of my non-existent posting schedule? Subscribe—it’s free!

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Student story: Corelle Forster Undergraduate engineer at Leighton Contractors (a CIMIC Group company) Currently studying a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Civil Engineering "I'm now in my final year of the four-year civil engineering degree. When I relocated to the NSW North Coast several years ago with my husband (from Parkes in Central NSW) it was an opportunity to change career. Having already been in the workforce in an office environment I wanted to have a career where I could work both outside and inside. SCU was offering the engineering degree which was right up my alley. "I was fortunate to get work locally on the construction of Roads and Maritime Services' Pacific Highway upgrade project near Ballina. As an undergraduate engineer, I get to work with planners and construction crews involved in the construction of roads and bridge structures. Some of the things I do include the creation of construction lots, collation of works to be completed, including organising materials, and labour required to complete works. Once the work starts, monitoring is conducted through testing and documentation. At the end of the job, paperwork is completed with appropriate approvals for the completion of works. It's a rewarding process as you get to arrange the job, see the job happen and finalise the job. "Working part-time while studying has been fantastic because uni gives me the theoretical knowledge and my job gives me the practical experience and enables me to see engineering in action. When I'm at uni I'm able to ask more in-depth questions and get a deeper understanding. "My employer fully supports my studies. They know it's a good thing because when I've finished my studies I will have greater knowledge of engineering in construction. They give me time off for my exams and to study. Communication and time management are most important, so when I have free time I let them know and they take me up on those extra days. "My favourite part about my job is the people I work with. Not only do I get to learn road and bridge construction from them, but I get to see and be part of the human side of engineering. I am part of a great team. It's not just about building stuff but also how it is built, which is all about people. "Engineering and, in my experience, construction is often viewed as a man's job. Being a woman in this industry can be viewed as a negative thing. I have found it to be an advantage. Many companies know the value a woman's perspective can bring to a team, and that not having a good balance of men and women on a team could be a disadvantage. Therefore many companies have a desire to employ more woman. This to me is an advantage. It means if I do well and prove my abilities I have as much of an opportunity to make a difference in the engineering field as anyone else. "SCU Lismore campus for engineering students is fantastic. Along with the Learning Centre, we have a new engineering building with state-of-the-art labs and all the equipment you can think of. "The course is stimulating, I've learned lots. It's driven me to strive for bigger and better things. For me university is also about the people and the friendships. I love the networking opportunities that come from being at uni and forming bonds with friends who will be lifelong connections."

After police officer Jeff Waters’ wife leaves him, a darkness descends over him, causing anger and hate to to rage within. His self-control is tested both on and off the job, putting his life, as well as the lives of others, in jeopardy. Liam and Adela, two former Angels of Death, have been reluctantly transformed into Angels of Affection – those angels who help humans fall in love – to assist in the war against the hate taking over Earth and the self-destructive nature of humans. Their first assignment: helping Jeff Waters find love and saving him from the darkness threatening to overtake him. Excerpt © 2014 by Carly Fall All Rights Reserved As Adela and Liam flew through time and space, Jeff Waters sat in the psychiatrist’s office on Earth. He had just completed his shift and was now fulfilling his mandatory counseling. Jeff’s wife, Sara, had left him four months ago for another man, and he was having issues. Actually, he was depressed as hell, and those “issues” and anger consumed him. His shift in behavior had caught the eye of his superiors. It was one thing to be angry; it was another to be an angry police officer. One of the people he ticketed the other day called in not to complain about the ticket, but about Jeff’s rude demeanor. His captain had summoned him into the office to discuss it, as well as talk about how bad Jeff looked and ask if he was sleeping. He had demanded that Jeff started seeing the department psychiatrist to help get a handle on the issues. Or issue. The only issue was his wife running off on him. God, he wanted to hate her, but he couldn’t. He still loved her. The pain lancing through him overshadowed any hate he could muster up. As he sat in the psychiatrist’s waiting room, he thought about his recent shift and was happy it had been steady and nothing too dangerous: a couple of accidents, a stolen car, and a drunk and disorderly who became very cooperative once Jeff rolled up on the scene. “Come in, Jeff,” the shrink said. The guy was such a stereotype, with his glasses, salt-and-pepper hair, and mustache. “I’m Dr. Fitzgerald.” Jeff shook his hand and moved past him into the office. It was small, maybe about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. The walls were painted a creamy white, and two dark green La-Z-Boy chairs sat in the middle of the room. Jeff’s shoes clacked on the hardwood floor, and he noted the wall of diplomas the good doctor had earned. Jeff stood in the middle of the room. “Which chair do you want me in?” he asked. “Which chair would you like?” Jeff felt the anger within him come to a slow boil. Not only did the guy look the part of psychiatrist, but he acted it by answering a question with a question. “Just tell me where to sit, okay?” Jeff said. “You can take the one on the left.” Jeff sat down and leaned his head back against the soft leather, closing his eyes. He was tired. “So, your captain said that you’re having some trouble, Jeff. Tell me about it.” Jeff opened his eyes and shrugged. “Not much to tell. My wife left me for another guy. I’m depressed and pissed off. That about sums it up.” “How did you meet her?” Jeff had met Sara when he stopped at a downtown diner for a quick bite to eat during his shift. He usually worked the east side of Phoenix, Arizona, but that day he had been assigned to the west. The day had been hot, and he had an urge for a good, old-fashioned chocolate milkshake. He had spotted the small diner nestled into a row of shops and immediately pulled over. The outside of the building looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the 60s or 70s, and he hoped the inside was the same. As he walked into the small building, he let his eyes adjust from the sunlight. There were a handful of people in the diner, but no one paid him any attention. He slid into a stool at the counter, the blue vinyl creaking under his weight. He was pleased to see that the interior looked like something out of a classical magazine. Black-and-white pictures of the icons of the fifties—Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis, and a few faces he couldn’t quite place—decorated the walls. There was a black-and-white tiled floor, and the booths and chairs were a light sky-blue vinyl. Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” floated from the silver jukebox in the corner. Sara came out of the back carrying a piece of pie and a cup of coffee for another patron. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she had said to him with a smile. He noted her blue fifties-style uniform hugging her slight curves, and although she wasn’t the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, there was something about her that he was immediately attracted to. And she made a mean chocolate milkshake. As they chitchatted, Jeff was already making plans to come back again the next day. And he had. “In fact,” Jeff said, “I gained five pounds before I got up the nerve to ask her out.” Dr. Fitzgerald smiled. “Go on.” They dated six months, and at age twenty-eight, he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. They went through the same trials and tribulations all newlyweds went through, and the first year was hard. It took a lot of getting used to living with one another, and she yelled at him about whiskers left in the sink after shaving, and he got irritated with her nit-picking about putting his dirty clothes in the laundry basket. After the first year, they seemed to settle into a groove and the bickering stopped. They were a good pair and lived another year in relative happiness. “So what happened, Jeff?” He noticed a slight shift in Sara after she’d decided to go back to school. They had discussed it at great length, and at thirty years old, Sara was ready to go back to college and find out what she wanted to do with her life. She’d attended a community college in her early twenties but never received a degree. “She was tired of waitressing and felt like her life was slipping away,” Jeff said. “And how did you feel about that?” “I supported it. I always knew I wanted to be a cop—there was nothing else. Some people take time to find out what they want to be when they grow up.” “Very true,” Dr. Fitzgerald said. “Did she keep her job?” Jeff nodded. “I told her she didn’t need to. Things would be tight, but we could make it.” Six months after Sara started school, she began to stay late to study. Jeff noticed she seemed to take a little longer to get ready in the morning and wore a little more makeup than she usually did to work. “She’d start work at six at the diner, head to school for her three o’clock class, and then sometimes I wouldn’t see her until midnight.” “Yeah, except she wasn’t studying English or accounting like she said she was.” “No. She was studying human sexuality with some douchebag named Phillip.” “I see. And how did you find that out, Jeff?” Jeff rubbed his forehead feeling a headache coming on. The visions exploded behind his eyes, and he tried to push them away. He didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to think about it. “Jeff, would you like to continue next time?” Exhaustion overtook him, and he nodded. “Yeah. I’ll tell you the rest next time.”

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by: Kelli Scott Released: September 2012 Jennifer's always been big on helping people. Becoming a pen pal to a Marine overseas seemed like a good idea. Before long, they hit it off, and through their communications, something more than friendship was formed. She was even eager to meet him in person when he got back. But that was before the accident that left Jennifer scarred both inside and out. Feeling like an outcast and unwilling to deal with Gage's pity, she keeps the accident a secret and cuts off all ties with him. Too bad for her he's not willing to give up on her that easily. Now back in the States, he attends a costume ball and meets Jennifer. Behind their masks Gage can find out what really happened to make her pull away, and Jennifer can pretend she's not flawed. And when passion flares and they fall into bed together, masks and all, Gage is sure those walls have crumbled. But in the aftermath of passion, he must use all his skills if he has any chance to keep the one woman who made his time overseas bearable, and makes him believe that a future with this stunning woman is possible. This was a tender love story about healing our wounds, and believing in someone enough to not give up on them, no matter how bad it gets. You can feel Jennifer's pain as she struggles to break ties with Gage, knowing she doesn't want to. And seeing Gage unwilling to give up on her makes you really believe in the power of love. Carla gives this book a

I recently polled everyone I know to come up with a definitive list of the best haircuts ever to appear on television. And by “best,” I mean “worst.” I probably should have just written that in the first place. Also, I didn’t poll anyone. This is completely my own list, and I have undoubtedly left out a few egregious ’dos; please point out any glaring omissions in the comments section. And feel free to call me out for how my hair looked in my appearance on Beat the Geeks. But first, a few quick notes about the selection process. Unintentionally terrible haircuts are what I’m counting down here, so greatly discounted are the many ugly shags that are the result of actors and producers hoping to create a “look” for particular characters. This is why Mr. Spock and Paulie Walnuts don’t appear on the list, for example. Also, cartoon characters and other non-humans have been limited to the most ridiculous examples and have been inserted here and there mainly as palate cleansers, while characters from The Simpsons have been banned from consideration out of fear that this would turn into a list entirely comprised of terrible Simpsons haircuts. And in general, hair hubris—the phenomenon that occurs whenever people think their locks are stylish yet they are anything but (yes, we’re talking to you, #1)—scores a lot of points. And we’re off, like a toupee blowing in the wind! 30. John Stamos (Full House) It’s hard to believe this vomitus of a haircut was a major factor behind Uncle Jesse blossoming into a sex symbol, but hey, it was the late 1980s. 28. Marina Sirtis (Star Trek: The Next Generation) If Counselor Troi was truly an empath, then why did she fail to sense how revolted the audience was by the ever-changing bird’s nest on her head? 27. Chris Berman (ESPN) Berman: rockin’ the clueless comb-over since 1979. 26. Zoot (The Muppets) This sax-toting Muppet’s yarn hair just screams, “Pass the doob, man.” 25. Sebastian Oppenheim (NYC Prep) This jerk-off was made out to be some kind of a hunk, but he’s really nothing more than the second coming of Billy Zabka from The Karate Kid. 24. Mario Lopez (Saved by the Bell) Slater’s early-period mullet is hereby dubbed “The Icky Wrestler.” 23. Patti Stanger (Millionaire Matchmaker) Wig? No. The hair of Bravo’s most neurotic dating guru just plays one on TV. 22. Gabe Kaplan (Welcome Back, Kotter) Has TV ever seen a more legendary—or grody—Jew ’fro? Is Gabe Kaplan funny? 21. Donald Trump (The Apprentice) The Donald would rank much higher if his meta-coiffure hadn’t already been a national joke when he joined the NBC family. 20. Derrick Tribbett (Daisy of Love) Tribbett, better known as nu metal musician Sinister, made it to Daisy’s final four despite the snakepit he tries to pass off as hair. 19. Robby Rist (The Brady Bunch) I mean, just look at this photo of jinxed cousin Oliver. 18. Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver) This image will soon be appearing on Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians. 17. Erin Moran (Happy Days) Chachi was no prize, but it was always a bit confusing how he could possibly love someone with this thing on her head. 16. Simon Cowell (American Idol) Simon Cowell’s bristly ’do is the hair equivalent of William Hung. 15. Nancy McKeon (The Facts of Life) Jo was supposed to be the tomboy, sure, but this mannish mane is worse than every single women’s college basketball coach added together. 14. George Clooney (The Facts of Life) Even the mask on the wall behind Clooney is laughing. And yet just ten years later, every woman in America wanted to sleep with him. 13. Prince Adam/He-Man (He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) By the power of numbskull! 12. Adam Curry (MTV) How was this ever allowed to happen? 11. Gene Shalit (The Today Show) He’d certainly rank higher on the list of worst TV mustaches of all time, but his amorphous afro has been causing morning sickness since joining The Today Show in 1973. 10. Markie Post (Night Court) And yet her unmistakable beauty is somehow still beguiling. 9. Shawn Southern (Tool Academy) Obviously, this guy was on the right show. 8. Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) This hairstyle doesn’t even remotely resemble a kangaroo’s! 7. Jesse Camp (MTV) Probably due to a glitch in the space/time/hair continuum, this loon managed to beat the very likable Dave Holmes in MTV’s Wanna Be a VJ contest. 6. Bob Ross (The Joy of Painting) Fact: Bob Ross stored his paintbrushes in his afro. 5. Adam Lambert (American Idol) Somehow, even this guy’s haircut can be blamed on Paula Abdul. 4. The Gotti boys (Growing Up Gotti) The really strange this is, they actually use zero hair product. 3. Sanjaya Malakar (American Idol) See description for #5. And oddly, #8. 2. Christian Siriano (Project Runway) If he could only design a hat that would forever cover this fierce hot mess of hair. 1. Kate Gosselin (Jon & Kate Plus 8) The haircut alone is grounds for divorce.

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It is an idea, an undying answer to those who are need of a safe space, of acceptance and acknowledgement of your pain or shared with others like you. It is the force that bashes back, that doesn't give in, that raises a fist against every oppressive force trying to drive you back into the cultural rot so you can degrade in ignorance and in false messages that claim you're unworthy or that who you are isn't good enough. This is you, this is me, this is every follower that I have in a collective of uncensored beauty that doesn't follow the direction label of the magazine rack. This is the be who the fuck you want to be so long as you're not hurting anyone else mentality. This is the stand up for the people around you mentality. The fuck you I'm queer mentality. The I don't always love myself but today I might mentality. The I'm fucking fabulous mentality. This is the change in perception, the challenge of social norms that dictate how you think, and breathe, the acknowledgment of institutional oppression and every voice that has had the courage to speak up about it, mentality. The world is unbalanced my friends. We have been lied to on countless occasions. Just know that here, you are never alone and that if you ever need it, I'm never too far. My ask is always open and you're more than welcome to add me on my messenger accounts. - Skinny = unhealthy, anorexic, bulimic OR - Skinny = better, superior, beautiful, healthy - Not skinny = average - Too much of not skinny = ugly - Fat = unhealthy, lazy, self-infliction, ugly OR - Fat = better, beautiful, real, healthy I’m not in the mood to elaborate, but hopefully it doesn’t get too confusing. The word healthy has been so falsely correlated to skinny and fat people solely based on outer appearance, it’s horrible. I totally wrote the same thing down in my AP Psychology notes. x] My friend made a comment that really bothered me, that my sister was so skinny that she was far from being a ‘real woman’. Because ‘real women’ have curves. Now my friend is not tiny, so I asked her if Jamie said that she [my friend] was too big to be considered a real woman, would she be offended? She said yes, said it was obvious, then said that it was a completely different thing. NO IT’S NOT. I know for a fact my sister would love to be a curvy girl, but she wasn’t built that way, and she will never have big boobs or an ass or hips, and frankly, she is still beautiful and she is a still a ‘real woman.’ I hate that, people think that just because girls are skinny it’s ok to make negative comments about their body. They think it’s ok to call them anorexic or bulimic or tell them to eat a sandwich, etc. etc. It’s not. It’s not ok to make negative comments about anyone else’s body, we all have our issues. We’re all aware of our bodies and it does still hurt to hear things like that, no matter what size or shape you are. Stop it. Just stop it. Nobody wants to hear they are too fat or too thin or too short or too tall or whatever. Just get over it, all of our bodies are different, and that doesn’t make you any more or less of a woman. So what is your ‘friend’ implying? She’s a fake woman? Even more so, who is she the one to judge what constitutes as a ‘real woman’? Where is she getting her definition from exactly? Who says it’s right to define a woman by the curves she lacks, or has, her organs, her hair, or any other small detail that has nothing to do with her cuntmentality? Women cannot be defined. What makes up a woman is her own individual thoughts, experiences, life, and so many other beautiful things. We come with too many talents, too many flaws, imperfections, sizes and shapes to cluster our beauty in one single definition. I hate when someone puts real in front of woman. No shit we’re real! This isn’t a fantasy, we live in reality. And in this real world, you’ll find so many different types of women it’ll blow your mind just thinking about it. I’m sure that your sister is fine just the way she is, and all the woman anyone will need. Your sister is very lucky to have you, not a lot of people would challenge what their friend might say, even if it’s about a loved one or they know it’s wrong.

Due to the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States, today's episode of The Young and the Restless was preempted. There will be no "lost" episodes as a result of this programming change and broadcasting will return to a regular schedule on Tuesday, January 22, picking up where the Friday, January 18 episode concluded. Sharon went to the tack house to escort Faith to school. Noah was home alone and explained to his mother that Summer had already left with Faith. Sharon was disappointed because she'd been working so hard at Newman that she'd missed spending time with Faith. When Noah's phone rang, Sharon noticed that he was distracted by the identity of the caller. Sharon suspected that Adriana had left Noah a message. Noah told Sharon that he was through with Adriana. Sharon was ticked off by Adriana's actions, but Noah assured Sharon that since Adriana had played him for a fool, he was not going to get involved with her again. Sharon admitted that she and Nick had had many problems when Noah was a child. Sharon believed that they hadn't set a good example for Noah. Noah didn't hold Nick and Sharon's problems against them. Sharon thought that Adriana had treated Noah badly. Sharon wished that she could go after Adriana and give her a piece of her mind. Noah told his mother that he accepted that his relationship with Adriana was over and he was moving on. Sharon felt that Noah was a lot smarter than she had been at his age. Noah pointed out that Sharon had been ill and was finally straightening out her life. Returning to the subject of Adriana's pursuit of Noah, Sharon reminded her son that Adriana might not be ready to accept that their relationship was over. At Crimson Lights, Kevin happily smooched with Chloe behind the counter. Kevin complimented Chloe on her brilliant plan to keep the stolen money without having to launder it. Kevin wanted to spoil Chloe by taking her on an exotic trip, like flying to Hawaii or Belize. Kevin and Chloe agreed that they couldn't risk flaunting their new money, so Kevin had a counter offer for Chloe. Kevin suggested that they get a babysitter for Delia and plan a romantic night at home, just the two of them. Adriana went to the counter and ordered a cup of coffee from Eden. Adriana pretended to be friendly as she struck up a conversation, asking Eden questions about how much money she earned at the coffeehouse. Eden admitted that she counted on big tips from the patrons. Without a reply, Adriana turned and walked away. Chloe approached Kevin to let him know that she'd arranged for Delia to spend the night with Esther at the Chancellor house. Kevin and Chloe were giddy as they joked about using a secret code when talking about their plan for the stolen money. Adriana was drinking her coffee on the patio when Alex confronted her to demand that she turn over the stolen money. Alex asked why Adriana had involved a nice kid like Noah in her criminal activities. Alex threatened to arrest Adriana if she refused to give him back the drug money. Adriana boldly dared Alex to arrest her because she said she didn't have the money. Alex didn't believe Adriana and warned her not to test him. Inside the coffeehouse, Chloe and Kevin were kissing and laughing when Alex interrupted to ask them what they were up to. Kevin and Chloe told the New York cop to stop pestering them, but Alex was relentless. Alex joked that he was learning to like the coffee at Crimson Lights, even though it was lousy compared to New York coffee. Kevin wondered why Alex didn't just go back to Manhattan. Alex tried to pay for his coffee, but Chloe told him to keep the money and just leave. Alex was curious that Kevin and Chloe were turning away business when their house was on the verge of foreclosure. Kevin was ticked off that Alex had been snooping into their lives, but Alex said it was all part of the job. At the Athletic Club, Neil flirted with Leslie and wondered if she was going to back out on their new romance. Neil explained that he was fully prepared to talk her out of it, but Leslie surprised Neil by saying she didn't want to end their affair. Leslie was enjoying her time with Neil as much as he was. Leslie reiterated that as long as they kept their romance out of the Jabot offices, she was happy to continue dating Neil. At Jabot, Tyler asked Devon about Lily's whereabouts. Devon explained that one of the twins was sick, so his sister had decided to stay home. Tyler approved of Lily's commitment to her kids. Devon laughed about Tyler being a "mama's boy," prompting Tyler to flare. Tyler believed in the importance of mothers. Devon was surprised by Tyler's comments, but Tyler was deadly serious. When Tyler left, Devon assumed that he'd struck a nerve with Tyler. Later, Devon apologized to Tyler for his joke. Leslie revealed that her and Tyler's mother was dead. Neil hadn't known about Leslie's mother and asked if Leslie wanted to talk about her. Leslie declined and returned to work. Later, in the Jabot lobby, Devon observed that Neil and Leslie were too close for comfort. Leslie and Neil denied that they were violating any Jabot work policy. Tyler agreed with Devon about how cozy Neil and Leslie were on the job. Tyler asked why Lily and Cane were allowed to fraternize on company time. Neil reminded Tyler that Lily and Cane were married, so it was cool. Later, Devon reported to Neil about the new ad campaign. Off the record, Neil asked Devon if he was happy at Jabot. Devon said he enjoyed working with Neil and Lily, but he didn't like the corporate politics. Neil knew that Jabot had been crazy of late because of Cane's promotion and Neil's return. Devon assumed he'd adjust in time. Alone, Leslie warned Tyler to keep his cool about their past. Tyler handed Leslie a cup of coffee, and she reiterated to her brother that Lily was off-limits to him. Leslie said that Tyler had to respect Lily's marriage to Cane. Tyler resented the way Neil and Cane treated Lily as a pretty thing when it came to business. Tyler was also ticked off that Leslie assumed that he only wanted a one-night stand with Lily. Leslie told Tyler that they'd had enough troubles in the past, and Tyler had to keep away from Lily at all costs. At the Athletic Club, Noah found a box with torn concert tickets inside. Without warning, Alex appeared and got in Noah's face. Noah was unhappy to see the cop again and asked him to go away. Alex had a warning for Noah. He advised him not to get involved with Adriana because she was not trustworthy. Alex knew that Adriana had been saying that he was a dirty cop, but Alex was simply doing his job. Alex said he was not after Noah, but he urged Noah to find the money and return it to the New York Police Department. Alex asked Noah to tell him the truth about making contact with Adriana. Noah admitted that he had met with Adriana a few times. Noah explained to Alex that Adriana had claimed that she'd found the money in her New York apartment. Alex was stunned by Adriana's lie and told Noah that Adriana had stolen the money from her drug dealer boyfriend. Alex offered to put in a good word for Noah with the authorities if Noah handed over the money. Noah confessed that Adriana had sent him the money from New York, but someone had stolen it from Noah. Alex urged Noah to get Adriana to find the money because Alex had to get it back to New York. At home, Chelsea was very happy to see Adam and assumed that he was ready to go forward with their plans to move to Paris. Adam informed Chelsea that Jack had returned to Genoa City, but Jack had stepped down from Newman Enterprises, leaving Adam and Billy in charge. Chelsea feared that Adam was too committed to Newman and doubted that she and Adam would ever move to Paris. Adam said that he was indebted to Jack for having given Adam a chance when nobody in his family would give him the time of day. Chelsea wanted Adam to put her first, but Adam was determined to take care of Newman business. Adam assured Chelsea it was just a temporary situation, but Chelsea didn't believe Adam. Adam said he was not choosing Newman over Chelsea. Adam asked Chelsea to stay there with him and build a future in Genoa City. Adam wanted to run Newman and remain married. Chelsea pleaded with Adam to fly to Paris with her immediately. Adam said he couldn't do that, assuring Chelsea that he loved her but needed to stay at Newman. Chelsea didn't think Adam could have both. When Chelsea asked Adam for a divorce, he refused to give up on them. Chelsea declared that Adam loved Newman more than anything else. Adam said he needed Chelsea to live, but she disagreed and turned her back to him. Dejectedly, Adam left the house. At Newman Enterprises, Sharon walked into the CEO's office to tell Adam about an upcoming trade show. Sharon saw that Adam was drunk, and he admitted it was true. Sharon realized that Adam had failed to honor his commitment to go to Paris with Chelsea. Sharon told Adam he'd made a big mistake, and she removed the scotch bottle from Adam's hands. Sharon told Adam to go after Chelsea while he still had the chance. Adam knew that he was an idiot because he should go after Chelsea, but he said he couldn't do it. Adam grabbed the bottle back from Sharon and took another drink. Adam finally revealed to Sharon that Chelsea had asked him for a divorce. Adam said he'd fought to save his marriage, but he'd lost. Sharon blasted Adam for his attitude and announced that maybe she should just quit her job at Newman. Adam tried to make Sharon understand that his chasing after Chelsea would be an exercise in futility. Sharon believed that it was time for Adam to walk away from Newman Enterprises. Adam said that Newman was his name, and it was his legacy to run the company -- something his siblings were unwilling to do. Adam believed that he was the right man to run the company because he'd put Newman first. Sharon responded that Newman was only a name and a building, and neither could ever love Adam in return the way Chelsea did. Adam concluded that if Sharon quit, she'd be punishing him just like everyone else in his life had. Adam asked Sharon to save him by staying at Newman. At Crimson Lights, Adriana asked Kevin why the place was so quiet and wondered if he made any money selling coffee. Kevin replied that he made money on the muffins. Later, Kevin asked Chloe to meet him in the kitchen. As she turned to follow him, Chloe received a call from Chelsea. Chloe had to turn down Chelsea's invitation to stop by because she had plans with Kevin. Chelsea understood Chloe's predicament and said they could meet the next day. Angry and upset over Adam, Chelsea began throwing the framed photos of her and Adam around the room. At the Athletic Club bar, Adriana asked Noah if he'd received her gift. They reminisced about the good times they'd shared in New York. Adriana said that she missed Noah and felt that he missed her, too. Adriana wanted to reconcile with Noah, but he was worried about the missing money. Adriana believed that the money was in Genoa City. At the coffeehouse, Kevin confided to Chloe that he'd recognized Adriana from the photo Alex had shown him. Kevin knew that Alex wanted to find her because she was connected to the stolen money. Kevin told Chloe that Adriana had been fishing for information about Kevin's money. Chloe was concerned, but Kevin said they could handle the situation. Kevin asked Eden to manage the shop for him so he and Chloe could go home. Eden agreed, and when Alex saw that Eden had gone into the kitchen, Alex searched behind the counter for the stolen money. While having coffee at Crimson Lights, Phyllis stared at the envelope from her attorney's office. She knew it contained her final divorce decree from Nick and was reluctant to open it. When Avery walked into the coffeehouse, Phyllis called out to her sister to let her know that Nick would be free just as soon as Phyllis signed the papers. Avery tried to reach out to Phyllis, but Phyllis mocked Avery's sympathy because she felt it was insincere. Phyllis said that Avery had angled to steal Nick from her. Avery believed that Nick was happy with her and felt Phyllis should approve of that. Phyllis did want Nick to have a good life, but she resented that Avery was involved with her husband. Avery asked Phyllis to be fair and treat Avery better. Phyllis was intent on inciting a fight with her sister, but Avery refused to play along. Avery announced that she had a deposition to attend to and left for work. Phyllis opened the envelope, looked at the divorce papers and contemplated signing the document. Victor went to the Underground and told Nick that he'd heard about the catastrophic opening. Nick said it had been a disaster. Victor was not there to gloat, but he felt Nick was wasting his time. Victor said that he wanted Nick working by his side again at Newman Enterprises. Nick pointed out that Jack owned the company. Victor said that Jack wouldn't have it much longer, and Nick assumed that Victor had some leverage over Jack. Victor predicted that Nick's venture was destined to fail. Nick didn't want Victor's opinion about the Underground. Victor told Nick that Nick had experience in the boardroom, handling major deals. Victor believed that Nick belonged at Newman Enterprises. Nick said that Newman was Victor's dream, not Nick's. The Underground represented a dream of Nick's own. When Victor labeled the Underground a dive, Nick defended his bar as a sanctuary for people who needed to unwind after working at places like Newman. Disgusted, Nick walked away from Victor. Victor called Billy and left a message, demanding that Billy force Jack to resign from Newman immediately -- or else. At the Athletic Club, Jack greeted Congressman Marcus Wheeler and expressed his regret over Stephanie's death. Marcus didn't want to exchange pleasantries with Jack because he knew that his daughter had died at Jack's home. Marcus had known that Stephanie was a prostitute, but he didn't want her name dragged through the mud. Jack said that he'd stepped forward to confess his involvement in Stephanie's death. Marcus thought that was a mistake because of the scandal that would follow. Marcus said that more than anything, he resented that Jack had dumped Stephanie's body in an alley like she was a piece of garbage. Jack felt horrible about that and asked what he could do for Marcus. Wheeler told Jack to keep the story out of the media. At the Athletic Club bar, Paul was stunned but pleased when Christine sneaked up behind him to say hello. Paul said he'd missed Christine terribly while she was away. Christine was glad to be home and anxious to speak with Michael about getting a job working in the D.A.'s office. Paul explained that Michael wasn't at his office because of Jamie's fall. Paul said that Lauren and Michael felt responsible for Jamie, and Paul was worried that the Baldwin marriage might be in trouble. Christine listened as Paul explained that Fenmore might have been involved in Jamie's accident and that was putting a strain on the marriage. Christine asked if Fenmore's relationship with Lauren and Michael reminded Paul of his with Ricky. Paul said that he had been having memories of Ricky, but that the situation was different. Paul said that Jamie's demons had been external, explaining that he'd been bullied all his life, starting with his father. Paul pointed out that Ricky's troubles had been all in his mind. At the hospital, Lauren found Michael asleep beside Jamie's bed. Lauren awakened Michael and learned that Jamie had yet to regain consciousness. When Michael asked about Fenmore, Lauren reported that he'd locked himself in his room and didn't want to talk. Michael told Lauren he was going to go home to shower and change. Lauren promised to stay with Jamie in case he rallied. Later, Lauren tried to talk with Jamie, asking him to wake up and be okay again. Jamie's eyes fluttered, and Lauren asked Jamie to stay awake. Just then, Paul walked into the room and heard Jamie say Fen's name. Michael went to the Athletic Club to meet with Jack about the Stephanie Gayle case. Jack wondered if he needed to get his affairs in order before being incarcerated. Michael told Jack that he'd studied the case and, based on the coroner's report, Stephanie had consumed the drugs that had killed her hours before even meeting Jack. In Michael's opinion, arresting Jack would be a mistake. Michael disapproved of Jack having moved her dead body, but Michael was not going to take the case to court. Jack was surprised that he was free. At home alone, Fen looked at his phone, and there was no news about Jamie. Fen was in tears over what he'd done. A short time later, Michael was home and forced Fenmore to talk with him about the Jamie situation. Michael informed his son that Jamie had not regained consciousness and was in serious condition. Michael asked if Fenmore had been jealous of Jamie because Lauren and Michael were trying to help Jamie. Fenmore said that it had been cool with him, but Michael wasn't sure. Fenmore glared at Michael even as Michael admired how well Fen had always adjusted to difficult situations, like changing schools. Back at the hospital, Jamie slipped back into unconsciousness, saying nothing more about Fen. Paul told Lauren that perhaps Jamie had mentioned Fen's name because he'd been on the roof with Jamie. Lauren defended Fenmore, saying that there was no proof to back up that claim. Paul reminded Lauren that Fen had expressed his anger at Jamie to Paul. Lauren thought Paul was trying to imply that Fen was like Ricky. Paul was stung by her reference to his son, and Lauren apologized for having been insensitive. Still, Lauren believed that Fen was innocent. Still at home, Michael assured Fen that he was loved. Michael said that he and Lauren loved Fenmore unconditionally, and there was nothing that Fen could ever do to change their feelings. Michael wanted Fen to trust him with the truth, no matter what it was. The phone rang, and Michael learned from Lauren that Jamie had regained consciousness. Later, Michael and Fenmore arrived at the hospital and went to Jamie's room. Lauren told them that Jamie's condition had stabilized, and he was going to recover. Lauren believed that Jamie would be able to tell them what had happened on the roof when he awakened. Fen asked for some money so he could get something to eat. Alone in Jamie's room, Lauren and Michael discussed Fen's possible involvement in Jamie's fall. Lauren was certain that Fen had had nothing to do with it, but Michael said he'd seen fear in Fen's eyes when they talked about that night. Paul reappeared in Jamie's room and said he'd gone back to the roof to investigate. Lauren wanted to know if Paul had found anything. Paul showed Lauren and Michael a camera that was on the roof. It contained a photo of Jamie. Michael looked at the camera, and he and Lauren agreed that it was the same one that they'd given to Fenmore for Christmas. Out in the hallway, Fen was eavesdropping on his parents. He heard that Michael was suspicious of Fen's involvement in Jamie's fall, while Lauren declared that the camera didn't prove anything. Michael wanted to question Fenmore about why his camera had been found on the roof. Lauren didn't want to do anything to alienate their son. Later, Fen walked into the hospital room and stood by Jamie's bed. Jamie opened his eyes and looked at Fen. Victor went to Newman Enterprises to confront Jack. Mason let Victor into the CEO's office. Jack asked Victor what he wanted. Victor threatened to tell the press and the police all about Jack's involvement with Stephanie Gayle unless Jack stepped down as CEO of Newman. Jack informed Victor that he was too late because Jack had already decided to walk away from the company. Victor wasn't satisfied. He told Jack that he had to get rid of Adam as co-CEO, too, or else Victor would let the world know that Stephanie had died in Jack's home. Jack asked Victor "what the hell" he was trying to pull and why he was so determined to smear Stephanie's name. Jack asked Victor not to exploit Stephanie's death for his own selfish desires. Victor said he'd do anything to get his company back, even destroy the reputation of a hooker. Jack warned Victor that Congressman Wheeler would not appreciate it if Victor pushed his agenda. Victor didn't care about Wheeler's feelings. To Victor, Wheeler was just a politician and easily replaced. Jack had no respect for Victor and wondered when they'd ever end their feud. Victor scoffed at Jack, not buying his sudden change of heart about their feud. Jack told Victor that if he wanted Newman Enterprises back, he'd have to deal with Adam, because Adam was running the show. Later, after Jack had left the building, Victor spoke with Mason about the future. Victor informed him that Jack was leaving Newman Enterprises. Victor predicted that Adam and Billy would be out very soon as well. Victor told Mason to be prepared. At the Underground, Nick was on the phone with the electrician trying to fix the problems at the club. When Avery walked in, she was glad to hear Nick fighting to keep the place open. Avery had been concerned that Nick was throwing in the towel after the rough opening night. Nick said that he'd thought about quitting, but then Victor had visited unexpectedly and referred to Nick's new business as a disaster. That convinced Nick to keep the Underground going no matter the obstacles. Avery was proud of Nick. Nick mentioned that he'd received the divorce papers, and Avery told him about Phyllis' reaction. Nick felt bad for Phyllis, but he was ready to move forward and start a new chapter in his life. Avery was pleased to hear Nick say that because she had a big surprise for him. Tyler walked in and explained he was the marketing genius who would be putting the Underground on the map, making it the hottest club in the Midwest. Nick asked what Tyler had in mind. Tyler's main idea was using disk jockeys and mixtapes that were the hottest thing in nightclubs. Nick was unimpressed by mixtapes and deejays, but Avery said that it was the latest thing. Avery said that Nicki Minaj had gotten her start as an underground deejay. Tyler showed Nick some designs he'd created for the Underground, too, images that would be placed all over the Internet. Avery urged Nick to approve Tyler's campaign because she was sure that it was cutting edge and bound to succeed. Nick was caught up in Avery's enthusiasm and gave Tyler the go-ahead. Tyler anticipated that the Underground was going to blow up big time, with everyone wanting to hang out at the club. Tyler left and Nick thanked Avery for her help. Nick wondered how Avery had known that he wasn't going to close the Underground. Avery said she'd suspected that Nick wasn't a quitter. In a motel room, a man looked at a photo of Avery and Nick in the newspaper. Christine walked into Crimson Lights and was disappointed to see that Phyllis was there. Christine declared that if there were any justice in the world, Phyllis would be behind bars for having run down Paul and Christine with a car. Phyllis laughed at Christine and then brought up the fact that Christine had dumped Danny for Paul. Christine realized that Phyllis had brought up Paul and Danny because Phyllis had lost Nick. Christine noted that Phyllis had been living a great life with Nick and their children until Phyllis threw it away by having a fling with Ronan. Christine went to the hospital and saw Paul. Christine explained that she was upset that she'd dropped the civil suit against Phyllis. Paul thought that Christine had gotten over that. Christine said she'd seen Phyllis earlier, and it bothered Christine that Phyllis had gotten away with attempted murder. Christine added that she knew that Phyllis would receive a huge settlement from Nick in their divorce, meaning that Phyllis was being rewarded for her bad behavior. Christine had decided she was going to sue Phyllis over the hit-and-run accident. Jack met Phyllis at Crimson Lights and told her what had happened with Victor at Newman. Jack also let Phyllis know that Michael would not be prosecuting Jack for Stephanie's death. Phyllis was alarmed to hear that Victor had threatened to go public about Stephanie's death unless Jack gave Newman Enterprises back to Victor. Jack informed Phyllis that he was still backing away from Newman, leaving it to Victor and Adam to fight it out. Jack wanted to do something meaningful, and that was why he was going to return to his father's company, Jabot. Phyllis insisted that Jack complete his recovery before resuming work. Jack assured her that he would, and he credited Phyllis with saving his life. At Newman Enterprises, Tucker arrived for a meeting with Jack, and he was resentful when he learned that Jack had asked Adam to handle it. Tucker noticed that Adam seemed under the weather, and he questioned whether Adam was drunk. Tucker bellowed that he wasn't reassured about the millions he'd invested, and Adam informed him that Jack had stepped down and had left Adam and Billy in charge. Tucker predicted that Billy and Adam wouldn't be able to work together. Tucker termed Billy stubborn and sometimes clever, but he doubted that Billy would give up, and he expected that Billy and Adam would fight over every decision. Adam countered that Billy was a lightweight who would soon be out of the company. Adam suggested that he and Tucker coordinate to oust Billy and to stop Victor from taking back the company, and in return, Adam promised that Tucker would have a greater voice regarding the company's direction. Tucker found Adam's plan intriguing, but he had to consider Katherine and Devon's feelings. Adam remarked that father-and-son relationships could get messy, and he wondered whether either Katherine or Devon had ever approved of anything Tucker had done. Adam advised Tucker to write off the people who wanted to hold Tucker back, because they would never love or respect Tucker. Adam bitterly added that he knew exactly how it felt to have people try to turn him into something he wasn't. At Crimson Lights, Jack and Phyllis slowly pulled back from their kiss, and he gushed that he was grateful to have her back in his life. She wasn't sure that it was a good idea to get involved, and she pointed out that he wasn't supposed to make any big decisions for at least six months during his recovery. Jack commented that life was short, and he didn't want to waste it. Phyllis reminded him that she was going through a divorce, and she needed time. She worried that they would just hurt one another, but he thought things were working between them already. Phyllis insisted that they weren't working and that they never would work, and she ran out. Neil and Cane scrambled to prepare for a meeting at Jabot, and they were surprised to see Lily, who had been home with the twins. She said that the kids had been feeling better, so she'd called a sitter so she could hear Tyler's marketing pitch. She expressed concern that other working mothers would resent her taking time off, and Tyler remarked that management should be nicer to all moms in the company. Devon interrupted and asked to talk to Neil right away. Devon pulled Neil aside and reported the rumor that Jack intended to step down at Newman Enterprises and return to Jabot. Devon questioned what it meant for them. During the marketing meeting, Tyler suggested that Jabot stage the construction of spontaneous art in a public parking lot, using materials like chalk and ice to depict Jabot products. Neil compared Tyler's idea to a flash mob, only involving art instead of music and dance. Tyler explained that the art would quickly vanish, except in photos that they would post on the Jabot website. Tyler and Lily excitedly tossed around ideas about hosting a competition and utilizing guest artists. After the meeting, Tyler referred to the rapport that he and Lily had shared. He complimented her instincts, and he asked for her feedback about his marketing ideas for the Underground. She said that she had to get home, but Cane overheard and offered to check on the twins. Tyler was clearly disappointed when Cane and Lily tenderly kissed. Lily looked through Tyler's files and was impressed. He found her equally impressive, and he admired her for balancing motherhood with a challenging career. She was glad that she didn't have to choose, thanks to Cane's support. She asked about Tyler's childhood, and he vaguely replied that his mother had worked full-time just to keep him in line. She expressed condolences that his mom had passed away. Later, Tyler burst in to talk to Lily about an idea that he'd brainstormed while thinking about his childhood in Milwaukee, but she had thought that he had grown up in Detroit. He quickly claimed that he'd spent a lot of time with his grandparents in Milwaukee, but he was obviously unnerved. Jack arrived at Jabot and wanted to speak with Neil. Neil suspected that Jack wished to fire him, but Jack apologized for rejecting Neil's help, and he declared that he was on the mend and on his way back to Jabot. Jack continued that he wanted Neil there with him, but Neil balked at the idea of being second fiddle. Jack confided that he planned to start a fashion division and to have Neil run it. Neil noted that it would be a major change, but Jack insisted that he needed a seasoned executive like Neil at the helm. At Crimson Lights, Devon approached Tucker's table on the patio. Devon revealed that he'd obtained advice from a wise person after he'd last spoken to Tucker. Tucker guessed that Devon had spoken with Katherine, and Devon reported that she had counseled him to give Tucker another chance. Tucker hoped that one day she would give Tucker one herself. Tucker asked whether Devon had thought about his job offer, and Devon admitted that he was interested. Devon inquired why Tucker had offered him the position, and Tucker explained that Devon had the right education and experience. Tucker warned him not to take too much time to consider the offer, and Devon hesitantly thanked him. Tucker asserted that he wanted Devon to be happy doing something he loved, and he was sure that Neil would respect any choice that Devon made. Later, Tucker called Adam and refused to help him get rid of Billy, because his family was too important to him. Adam said that it was Tucker's loss, but Tucker didn't agree. Adam made arrangements to meet with someone the next day. Over a meal at the Athletic Club, Leslie asked Neil about Jack's return. Neil doubted that he could work out his issues with Jack. Neil remarked that he was too young to retire, and she wondered whether he had any hobbies. He said that he enjoyed music and reading history books, and she jokingly congratulated him for having the same pastimes as her grandmother. He asked if her grandmother was still around, but Leslie replied that she wasn't. Neil asked if Leslie and Tyler had family, and she responded that they only had a couple of distant aunts. Neil wondered if Leslie's mother had made Leslie the successful, driven person she had become, but Leslie didn't want to dwell on the past. Neil commented that she had an air of mystery, and Leslie said that it kept their relationship fresh. Neil said that he already knew the truth about her, and she looked nervous. Neil speculated that the CIA had planted Leslie at Jabot to uncover a way to turn lipstick into a weapon. Devon interrupted and reported that Tucker had offered him an incredible job. Devon added that he wanted to stay at Jabot, but he would reconsider if Jack made changes that affected them. Neil sensed that there was more to the story, and he suggested that Devon question where he wanted to do something he enjoyed doing. Devon told Neil to ask himself the same thing. At the Abbott home, Jack hugged Kyle, who had returned from Maui. Jack explained that his recovery was still in progress, but his doctor had granted approval for him to finish it at home. Kyle noticed the pile of boxes in the living room, and Jack disclosed that he had packed up his office and had left Billy and Adam in charge of Newman. Jack announced that he was going back to Jabot, and he wanted Kyle to join him. Kyle was unsure of all the changes, but Jack was positive that it was the right step to take. Later, Adam stopped by to see Jack, who said that Marcus wanted to keep Stephanie's death out of the press. Jack added that Michael didn't want to subject Stephanie's family to a trial, so no one would ever know that Adam had moved the body. Adam thanked him, and Jack said that he wouldn't forget that they'd protected one another. Adam warned Jack to watch his back, but Jack already knew that Victor wouldn't stop seeking revenge. Jack expected Victor to go after Billy and Adam, but Adam disclosed that he might have a way to block Victor from making a hostile takeover. Jack scoffed at the idea that Adam would hand over the company and become Victor's "number one son." Adam vowed not to become another child cast in Victor's shadow, and he recognized that Victor would always find a way to be disappointed in him. Adam accepted that Victor needed Adam to be the outcast and that Adam needed Victor to be the evil father. Jack wondered if Chelsea was up for it, but Adam divulged that they were getting divorced. Adam stated that she wanted him to be someone he couldn't be, so Newman Enterprises was all he had left. Avery arrived at the Athletic Club and spied a balloon delivery. Phyllis spotted her, and she asked if Avery planned to call someone with birthday wishes. Avery said that she'd already sent their mother a gift, and she believed that Lydia would like to hear from Phyllis. Phyllis snapped that Lydia had stopped being her mother when Lydia had taken George's side over hers. Phyllis lamented that every mistake she had made had been because of her family, and Avery assumed that she was referring to the divorce. Phyllis wailed that she'd turned out just like her parents. Phyllis asserted that her family had taught her to get things by lying and cheating, and as a result, she wasn't a good wife or mother. Avery said that wasn't true, but Phyllis pointed out that Summer gravitated to Avery. Phyllis insisted that she had tried to be okay with Nick and Avery's relationship, but she accused Avery of taking over her life. Avery argued that Phyllis' marriage had been over, but Phyllis believed that Avery had deliberately tried to hurt her. Phyllis snarled that she hated that Nick and Avery were together. Avery admitted that she had ignored Phyllis' feelings, but Phyllis was certain that Avery had been aware of Phyllis' pain all along. Avery conceded that she had justified everything to be with Nick, and Phyllis cried that it had killed her when her husband had moved on so quickly. Avery suspected that Phyllis hated her, but Phyllis denied it. Phyllis explained that she'd been through a lot with Jack, who appreciated the woman she was. Avery asked whether Phyllis could forgive her. Once alone, Phyllis finally signed the divorce papers. She received a text message inviting her to "come be with family," but she quickly realized that it was an advertisement for the reopening of the Underground. Meanwhile, Jack took his withdrawal medication. Phyllis called and asked if he would attend the reopening with her. He said it was a date, and she repeated his comment that life was too short. She vowed to spend it with the people who made her happy. At the Underground, Nick raved to Noah that Tyler had done a great job with the marketing materials for the club's reopening. Nick marveled that if the Underground generated even half the business Tyler had projected, he would need more staff, and he decided to hire more bartenders. Noah observed that Nick seemed more optimistic than he had been in a long time, but Nick replied that his attitude had been "sunshine and bluebirds" compared to Noah's. Noah didn't want to talk about his problems, but Nick gently pushed to find out what was going on. Noah felt that he was blind regarding women, and he regretted letting Adriana walk all over him. He wanted to move on, and Nick sympathized that it wasn't easy. Nick assured Noah that Adriana wasn't right for him and that Noah would learn from his mistakes. Noah confessed that he'd gotten into a situation and that he had to pretend that he still cared for her, but he was afraid that he would fall for her again. Nick asked what dangerous game Noah had to play, but Noah said that he didn't have a choice. Noah walked out, and Nick left a message for Alex to warn him to stay away from Noah. Later, Noah thanked Nick for the advice about Adriana, and he resolved to take it. Noah left, and a clearly downtrodden Avery entered. She reported that she'd had a long talk with Phyllis, and she felt guilty for hurting Phyllis by jumping into a relationship with Nick. He pointed out that Avery had been hesitant, but Avery acknowledged that she hadn't been able to wait to get involved, and she wished that she could take back the pain she'd caused Phyllis. Nick asked whether Avery was breaking up with him. Nick protested, but Avery clarified that she didn't want to end things. She stated that Phyllis wanted him to be happy, and he said that he was happy with Avery. Avery murmured that she was happy with him, too. She gushed that she had the most wonderful man in her life and that she and Phyllis were putting the past behind them, so they could all have a great future. In a hotel room, a mysterious man clutched a pass to the Underground reopening. At the Underground, Avery admired Nick's positive attitude. He was determined to make sure that there were no catastrophes at the reopening, and she had no doubt that it would be a huge success. Nick reported that Tyler had been getting the word out, and Avery half-heartedly declared that she was happy for Nick. Nick observed that she seemed down, and he asked what was wrong. Avery disclosed that she had to go out of town for the Innocence Foundation. She explained that while she no longer worked for the foundation, she still donated her services when she could help exonerate someone who had been wrongly accused. Nick amorously stated that her use of law terms was sexy, and in between kisses, she stated that the foundation's cause had inspired her to become an attorney. She added that her work had helped her get through the rough times after she'd messed up her marriage. Nick asked about Avery's case, and she revealed that an innocent man had been in prison for twelve years on a murder charge. Nick said that if anyone could help the man, Avery could. Nick suspected that she would be gone for a while, but she promised that she would only be away for a day or two, and then she'd be back for the festivities. They kissed, and she swore that nothing could keep her away. Nick and Avery made out at the bar, and she promised that she wouldn't be gone long. He kissed her neck, and she warned that she would rip his clothes off if he kept it up. He didn't think she had the guts, but she asked if he was as brave as she was. He said that he had a lot of courage, and he removed her jacket. She unbuttoned his shirt and remarked that it was getting hot. They dared one another not to chicken out, and they started to make love. After Nick and Avery made love in the office, Nick admitted that the atmosphere had been more comfortable upstairs. She joked that she would have to leave more often, and he affectionately told her to get out, or he wouldn't get anything done. She teased that he'd had his way with her and then just wanted to toss her aside. He kissed her and told her to return home soon. Billy found Adam staring out the window at Newman Enterprises. Billy asked whether he was thinking about jumping, and Adam conceded that no one would try to stop him, but he wouldn't give Billy the satisfaction. Adam disclosed that he'd called an emergency board meeting earlier that morning, but a skeptical Billy said that Victoria had been unaware of it. Adam revealed that a few board members had been absent, but there had been enough present to hold a vote, and they had appointed Adam as the sole CEO. Billy thought that it had been difficult for Adam to pull off a vote without Victor and Victoria's knowledge. Adam said that it didn't matter how he'd done it, but the board was aware that Adam had excelled at keeping the company running. Adam mentioned that Billy had passed along inside information to Victoria and had left the company open to a takeover. Billy argued that Jack had set him up and had eventually forgiven him, but Adam contended that the board wouldn't forgive Billy's actions, and the deal was done. Billy doubted that the board would remain loyal to Adam, but Adam asserted that the board wanted stability after the CEO position had become a revolving door that had hurt them in their bank accounts. Billy blamed Sharon, and he pointed out that Adam had rehired her, but Adam countered that both Billy and the board had signed off on the hire. Mason announced Sharon's arrival, and she entered for a staff meeting. Billy said that Adam and Sharon were all that was left of upper management, and he warned that they wouldn't last. Billy exited. Sharon couldn't believe that Adam had managed to get rid of Billy. Adam said that he and Billy would have just butted heads and that the board had recognized that Adam was the next generation of leadership. He added that Victor might have built the company, but Adam intended to lead it into the future. She gushed that Adam deserved it, but she warned that Victor would gun for him one day. Adam proclaimed that he was ready, and he wanted Sharon to be by his side, but he understood if she didn't want to get involved in a family squabble. Sharon said that she wanted her kids to be proud of her and that her work was more than just a job to her, so she wasn't going to quit. She pledged to deal with Victor, and she credited Adam with helping her to become tougher, but Adam replied that she'd done all the work. Sharon asked if he'd talked to Chelsea, but he said that there was nothing to talk about. He acknowledged that he couldn't make Chelsea happy, and he and Chelsea couldn't pretend otherwise. Adam suggested that they get back to work. Adam and Sharon discussed how to better incorporate social media and modern technology into the company. Mason entered and suggested that he order food from a Cajun place that had a chef from New Orleans. Adam and Sharon were both clearly affected by the memories of their time in New Orleans, but they covered their discomfort and asked Mason to select some dishes for them. Over lunch, Sharon reported that their research team appeared close to approving one of the projects Adam had supported. He crowed that he'd had a sixth sense about it. She marveled that it had been a long time since she'd had such delicious gumbo, but her voice trailed off, and he realized that the last time had been when they had been in New Orleans together. After an uncomfortable silence, he wrapped up their meeting, and she stammered that they'd covered a lot of ground. Adam headed out, but he told Sharon to stay and finish eating. They looked at one another for a moment, and he said that he was glad that she was back in his life. She praised him for being a good friend to her when everyone else had treated her like trash, and she was happy to repay the favor. She expressed condolences that his marriage hadn't worked out, but he said that things had worked out the way he had deserved, and he left. Sharon daydreamed that Adam returned and said that he couldn't stay away. He confessed that he and Chelsea hadn't split up because of Newman, but because he still loved Sharon. He pulled Sharon into a passionate kiss, and they began to make love on his desk. Sharon suddenly snapped out of her fantasy and composed herself. Meanwhile, Adam chugged a drink at the Athletic Club bar. He forlornly looked down at his room key, and he ascended the stairs. Victor kissed Nikki good morning at their penthouse. She worried that there was still a lot of wedding planning to do, and he inquired whether Victoria had been helping, but Nikki griped that both Victor and Victoria had been caught up in Newman Enterprises business. Nikki was grateful that Victor had called off the press conference regarding Jack's addiction, but Victor said that it no longer mattered, because Jack had stepped down. Nikki demanded to know what Victor had done. Nikki assumed that Victor had forced Jack's hand. Victor explained that Jack had made his own decision to resign, but Nikki didn't believe him. Victor continued that Jack had gone back to Jabot and that Adam and Billy were running Newman Enterprises, but he would take care of them in time. Victoria arrived with news about the emergency board meeting. Victor was only surprised that it had taken Adam so long to make his move. Victoria doubted the legality of the board meeting, but Victor said it had been legitimate if there had been a majority vote. Victor suggested that he and Victoria talk later about how to deal with Adam, and she departed. Nikki snapped that nothing she had said to Victor had gotten through, because he was still playing the same game with different players. Nikki understood why Victor wanted the company back, but she had hoped that they could take a long honeymoon. She was angry with herself for ever believing that it could happen. Victor assured Nikki that they would have their honeymoon, but he needed time. Nikki ordered him to stop making promises that he couldn't keep. She recalled seeing him in the hospital after he'd collapsed, and she had thought that he was going to die. He said he that he hadn't, but she fretted that his craving for control would consume him again and eventually kill him. He stroked her cheek and implored her not to worry. He swore that he would get his company back and that they would go on their honeymoon. He pulled her into a hug, but she looked unconvinced. Nikki warned that although Victor thought he controlled everything, he wasn't immortal, and Adam was a formidable foe. Victor calmly responded that their wedding would be a celebration of both their love and his regained power. He kissed her and went upstairs. She called someone and whispered, "I couldn't tell him. Not yet." Victor called Mason, who reported that Adam was pleased with himself for ousting Billy. Mason added that Adam had met with Billy and Sharon that day. Victor asked about Sharon's behavior, and Mason noted that she seemed to be doing just fine. Victor divulged that she had serious psychological problems, and he instructed Mason to find out what medication she was taking. At Crimson Lights, Cane greeted Eden, and he noticed that Lily wasn't there yet. Eden hoped that Lily would stop by with the twins, but Cane explained that Lily had started working at Jabot and that she planned to go straight to the office. Eden inquired whether he was okay with the situation, and he insisted that he was fine with Lily balancing the kids and her career. Eden surmised that Lily and Cane's lives were insanely busy, but he said that they always found time for one another. Eden remarked that Lily was lucky to have him, but Cane replied that he was the lucky one. Cane called Lily, and he understood when he learned that she was too busy to meet him for coffee. He said that he loved her, and Eden noted that he'd been stood up. He explained that Lily had to meet a deadline, and Eden sympathized. He recalled that Lily had waited for him many times when the roles had been reversed. Eden realized that Cane was disappointed, but he reasoned that Lily's work was important to her. Eden commended him for being so supportive of Lily. A concerned Chloe stopped by to see Chelsea, and she spotted the framed photos smashed all over the floor. Chelsea stated that her reconciliation with Adam was off because he was never going to change. Chelsea regretted that she hadn't listened to Chloe's warnings about Adam, and Chloe assumed that Sharon had been the cause of Adam and Chelsea's split. Chelsea bitterly remarked that Newman Enterprises and Victor had an even stronger hold on Adam. Chelsea admitted that she had been wrong to think that their life together had been more important to Adam than the company. Chloe and Chelsea lunched at the Athletic Club, but Chelsea remained miserable. Chelsea thought that she should have known that things wouldn't work when Adam had kept stalling. Chelsea struggled against tears at the thought that he'd chosen Newman Enterprises over her. Chelsea pulled herself together, and Chloe stated that at least Chelsea couldn't die of a broken heart. Chelsea thought breaking up would get easier, but Chloe sympathized that it always hurt to lose a loved one. Chelsea couldn't believe that she had ruined her picture frames, but she admitted that her tirade had made her feel a little better. Chloe encouraged her to release her anger, but Chelsea preferred to channel her emotions into their design business. Chelsea resolved not to fall apart just because her marriage had, and she announced that Adam would foot the bill. Chloe eyed Cane across the room and suggested that Chelsea take the next step by having revenge sex. Chelsea gasped in shock and whispered that Cane was married. Chelsea added that Chloe had faked a pregnancy and had nearly ruined his relationship with Lily. Chloe wanted Chelsea to find someone handsome and disposable, but Chelsea decided to focus on something other than her personal life. Chloe asked how serious Chelsea was about having Adam pay, and Chelsea wanted to spare no expense. After Chloe had left, Chelsea sipped coffee and looked over at Cane. She deliberately spilled her drink and made a big fuss, and he offered her his handkerchief. She claimed that she didn't want to get it dirty, but he noted that was its purpose. She thanked him and gave him a sly look as he returned to his table. Victoria arrived home and offered her support to Billy. He said that it hadn't been the first time he'd been canned, but she was furious about how he had been treated. He rationalized that he had only been at Newman for Victoria and Jack, and Jack had left on his own. Billy regretted that he had let Victoria down, but she vowed that Adam wouldn't win, and she was grateful that Billy had tried to help. He said that he couldn't deny her anything. Chloe arrived to see Billy and declared that he had something she wanted. Chloe mentioned that Billy was selling Restless Style, and she wondered if he was also selling the building, because she wanted to buy it. She explained that she was starting a business with Chelsea, who planned to divorce Adam. Billy blasted Adam for choosing Newman Enterprises over his wife, but Chloe blurted that Chelsea intended to take Adam for every dime she could get.

I’m sorry guys. Every time you flood me with emails attempting to convince me Palin can not win; is too toxic, not smart enough, a hypocrite and is only in it for the money, the courageous woman boldly does another extraordinary interview that makes me stand up and cheer, “Sarah Palin, you go girl! I love you!” On the Hannity show, Palin launched another “in your face” attack on Obama, the GOP and the liberal media. I LOVE IT! http://fxn.ws/cxt8dv Nothing frustrates me more than GOP candidates walking on eggs cautious not to offend or anger the despicable, lying, agenda driven and evil liberal media. Why should we show respect for characterless people who are committed to lying and putting a negative spin on everything we say and do? The liberal media’s mission is to politically “kill” the tea party. Get it? Sarah Palin gets it. Palin does not give a rat’s behind about what the liberal media thinks of her. On numerous occasions, without the slightest hint of reservation or FEAR, Palin has attacked Obama “the man”; his lies, his anti-American associations, his socialist agenda, his assault on our freedom, liberty and culture and his horrific record, thus far. Thank You Sarah Palin! God bless you! I realize I sound like a broken record, but I can not express the following point strongly enough. To beat Obama and “his media” in 2012, our candidate MUST embrace Palin’s aggressive fearless battle plan. It has been said, only a fool brings a knife to a gunfight. Without restraint or mercy, Obama, the democrats and Obama’s liberal media gang will show up at the 2012 DC fight for the White House with mega guns firing at the tea party and the republican presidential candidate. Any republican presidential candidate who is timid due to the historical context of Obama’s presidency saying, “God bless Obama’s heart. He meant well, but his policies have failed” is like entering this crucial battle for our country with a butter knife. Such a restrained effort would insure political death to our side and the end of America as we know it. Patriots, we need a fearless political gunslinging hero. And so far, our heroic pistol packin’ mama is Sarah Palin. Lloyd Marcus, Proud Unhyphenated American Vice Chair, www.CampaignToDefeatObama.com

Storm Thorgerson - My art on their sleeves Pink Floyd, Muse, Biffy Clyro... graphic artist Storm Thorgerson on his iconic cover designs Friday 19 March 2010 I have made over 400 album covers and as Pink Floyd said, "We've been trying to get rid of him for years, but haven't been able to." It took Pink Floyd three minutes to decide on the album cover for The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. My memory is a bit hazy, but I think we gave them seven ideas to choose from, including a surfer on a big wave, based on a Marvel Comics superhero called the Silver Surfer. I wish I had kept them because, of course, they would have been a piece of history – but they are long gone. It's not as emotional as some of the other album covers I did for Pink Floyd, such as Wish You Were Here, or even as powerful as The Division Bell or as funny as Animals – but I feel proud of it because it is strikingly graphic. As long as it doesn't alter an idea, then I'm very happy to cooperate with the musicians, because we are trying to represent their music. Muse's drummer, Dominic Howard, saw a little sketch of shadows passing over somebody on my website and he asked us to develop it for their album Absolution. We turned it into a real event; the band wanted the watcher in the picture to be a pilot, while the squadron of flying magical people above him was my idea. The cover of Muse's single "Uprising", showing teddy bears emerging from a field, plays with the idea of uprising and revolution. It was meant for their latest album, The Resistance, but it didn't work out that way. For Biffy Clyro's single "Saturday Superhouse" there is a dog in the picture, which represents someone living with their demons. When I asked the singer Simon Neil what the song was about, he emailed me three words: sanity, grief and anger. That was all he said, but I immediately saw this picture. The cover of Disco Biscuits' Planet Anthem was shot on a beach in South Africa. You can see Table Mountain in the distance. The promotional poster for Pink Floyd's back catalogue, with various Pink Floyd album covers painted on the backs of a row of women, is a silly joke really. It is slightly erotic and I thought it made a change to see women's backs rather than their breasts, but I don't think it is exploitative. In fact, we double checked with my wife and her friends who confirmed that it wasn't. Storm Thorgerson: Right But Wrong, Idea Generation Gallery, London E2 (Ideageneration.co.uk) 2 April to 2 May Film review Michael Glatze biopic isn't about a self-hating gay man gone straight Arts & Ents blogs - 1 Germanwings crash: Captain of doomed plane was only 'on board because he changed job to spend more time with his children' - 2 Ohio Democrat Teresa Fedor speaks out during abortion debate to reveal she has been raped – and is interrupted by laughter from Republicans - 3 Gamers confess the worst things they've done in The Sims - 4 Germanwings crash: 'Andreas Lubitz planned to marry pregnant girlfriend', claims German report - 5 Germanwings plane crash: Transcript reveals passengers 'screamed for over five minutes' before plane crashed into mountain Cassetteboy joins forces with Russell Brand for Emperor's New Clothes film Poldark, review: Demelza’s insouciance is almost as impressive as Ross’ pecs Jay Z launches streaming service Tidal with help from Kanye West, Rihanna and Coldplay Fifty Shades of Grey movie shows first sex scene 'after 40 minutes' Menstruation-themed photo series artist 'censored by Instagram' says images are to demystify taboos around periods Ukip supporters are 55 or older, white and socially conservative, finds British Social Attitudes Report JK Rowling responds to fan tweeting she 'can't see' Dumbledore being gay Street preacher quoting from the Bible fined for calling homosexuality an 'abomination' Jeremy Clarkson sacked live: Alan Yentob 'wouldn't rule out' ex Top Gear host's BBC return Woman filmed launching racist tirade against men on the Tube for speaking in 'own lingo' The West has it totally wrong on Lee Kuan Yew

Copyright © 2009 A.Matheson. All Rights Reserved. Feedback: good/bad/ugly, all welcome if constructive. Though flattery is sought. by Antonia Matheson Part three: The TOUR Living in a box (sort out a nicer van? Sorted) The rushes of the first night were looking good, Kirstin thought, kicking her feet up as she idly skipped through the footage on screen. She was lounging in the back of the large, and rather plush, live truck they had commandeered for the US side of the tour. It was familiar territory for her and would probably act as their 'hub' from now on. The majority of their equipment had been packed in the larger lorry that had gone ahead of them the night before, but Kirstin had been insistent they be able to work while on the road. There would have to be a lot of work done between shoots to be able to keep on top of all the footage they were already generating. For the moment however, there wasn't much to be done except review what they had captured so far. This is good, Kirstin thought again. There was a lot of it, and most of it would eventually be scrapped, but being able to give her crew permission to shoot everything and anything that they could was certainly going to have its advantages. Unfortunately this meant trawling through reels and reels, as well as tapes and tapes, looking for the perfect moments. That was where Suze came in. With the pair of them able to keep an eye on the cameras, or at least be in radio contact, they could bookmark each great moment or shot as it happened, meaning they could refer to it much more quickly later on, when they came to putting the piece together. It was like the clapperboard equivalent for unscripted, live film. 'Bitch fest' was one of those very book-marked moments. Kirstin smiled to herself as she flicked over to the feed that had come from Kate's camera. Kate was good. Her framing was impeccable; not too contrived and with a keen sense of where the action was headed without entirely pre-empting it. That was hard to do in a live situation. Kirstin congratulated herself for chasing Kate down for this project. It hadn't been easy, but Kirstin could be very persuasive when she needed to be. She gave her elbow a rub, remembering the arm wrestle that had sealed the deal. Watching the scene replay again Kirstin couldn't help but laugh at Meg; the girl that had once been so dour. She was still a little droll at times, perhaps, but she had lost the inherent sadness that Kirstin had always thought lurked somewhere beneath that angry teenage exterior. Now there was a distinct glint behind her eyes, a confidence in her manner, and even a certain grace in her usually awkward frame. Maybe that's what popularity gives you. At school they had both been outsiders in one sense or another; Kirstin because she was essentially English, which either courted intrigue or ridicule, and Meg because she wanted to be. Or at least that's what Kirstin had assumed. Meg had once been at the core of a very popular crowd at school, but one day she had fallen from grace. Kirstin had never really worked out why, and she had certainly never asked, but what she did seem to think was that if Meg hadn't been so stubborn she could have regained her position. Instead she seemed revel in her outcast status, and the girl she once bullied had almost become her friend. Almost. 'Preppy'. Jeez. Kirstin rolled her eyes. “I mean yeh I studied a lot…” she thought out loud. She stopped the tape and switched to the onstage camera they had set up. Shooting TV style did lack the quality that Kirstin craved, and was certainly capable of, but in many ways she understood that limitations like these often lead to better innovation; if you weren't lazy and had the inclination. Kirstin was far from lazy. The footage they had so far was divided between the live digital video they had been watching on the monitors, and some 35mm film they had thrown in for good measure. As the tour continued she hoped the majority of it could be done on real film. Working out how to combine the two styles without a huge leap in quality was going to be her main concern, she decided. But there were a few ideas to mess with and she certainly wasn't worried about the content at this point. That seemed to be taking care of itself. “…Check out Billy he's got - nothing to say, But I like his soul and I like his shoes. Well check out Billy he's going it alone today Cos God knows Billy's got nothing to lose…” The on-stage sound hadn't been mixed in yet, but the camera sound wasn't bad considering its position. Kirstin found herself tapping a foot along to the song she was watching. Jess really was a great front woman, she worked the crowd easily and it all added to the raw edge that Grapple clearly had. Bluesy, and at moments almost fragile, smattered with punchy full-on punk-rock angst. Her voice was hauntingly hollow. No wonder there are people shouting her name. “Hey!” It was Suze climbing through from the front of the truck where she'd been snoozing. Kirstin chewed at the pencil in her mouth, oblivious and evidently enjoying herself. “Oi, take your cans off…” Suze said nudging her with a foot to get her attention. Kirstin turned to her in surprise and frowned, “Huh?” Suze pointed to her ears. “Oh, oh, sorry…” said Kirstin taking off the large headphones she was wearing. “Sorry, what's up?” “We're stopped if you wanna stretch your legs a little?” “Oh, yeh, I suppose I should, right?” “Yes, you should. You having fun?” Suze smiled at her taking a look at the screen she had been so engrossed in. “Actually, yes - yes I am,” Kirstin said flicking a few switches on the equipment in front of her. “They're pretty good,” she commented nodding to the screen. “I told you, didn't I?” “Yes. Whatever.” Kirstin answered curtly, not so neatly brushing her ignorance aside. “And you found some great moments Suze,” she went on, changing the subject, “I particularly like the bit where Jess is like being all cocky just before they go on stage and then apologises seconds later.” “Ah, you can thank Josh for that. He pretended to turn the camera off to see if she would drop the act…” Kirstin turned off the monitor she had been viewing and grabbed her wallet from the table quickly shoving it in her back pocket. “You know, I'm not so sure it is an act…” Kirstin breathed as she pulled open the large metal side door with some effort and kicked down the steps. A burst of white sunshine greeted them. “Well, we'll see I guess.” They both squinted in the morning sun as they walked over to the sister bus that had pulled up a few metres ahead. It was a lot warmer outside than it has been in the dark, air-conditioned truck. Quite a stark contrast in fact, Kirstin noted as she migrated to the shade of the other bus. There was a muffled shout from within. Kirstin and Suze looked up at one of the smoked-out windows where they could just about make out Josh being manhandled by Kirstin's camera girl of the moment, Kate. He was calling to them both for help, and only really half joking. She seemed to have a hold of his grey hoody. “Oh my God, can't she give it a rest?” sighed Suze. “She's worse than the talent!” Kirstin laughed, giving Suze a sideways look. “She's ok. A bit of a punk maybe, but I like it,” Kirstin's eyes widened in excitement, “she's wily!” Suze glanced round at Kirstin, unhappy that she didn't share her irritation. “What?” Kirstin asked bluntly, “I thought you two got on?” “Humph.” Came the response. “She has way too much energy for me at the moment,” Suze glared. Ooh, something's got her, thought Kirstin, wondering briefly if it might have something to do with Josh. “Well maybe we should put that energy to good use then…” she said with a sparkle in her eye. The other five crew members stepped off the bus to join them: Kirstin's runner James, then sound guys Gerard and Seth, followed by her two camera operators; Josh, who was pushed out, and Kate who jumped out after him. Yes, I have a job for you young lady, thought Kirstin. Good morning Megan – get permission from the naked girl Meg was ever so slightly hung over. She hadn't meant to be, but in retrospect it seemed inevitable. She lay still for a moment, aching slightly, deciding whether or not to seriously consider moving. She decided to consider it, but not seriously. A shout came from somewhere further down the bus. “Crap!” And then quite a lot of giggling. “Shut up, fuckers!” It was Jess's voice; she sounded almost as bad as Meg felt. Meg's consideration of movement became more serious when she realised how desperately she needed the bathroom. Turning over to get out of her double bunk she collided with what must have been last night’s object of affection. The face squinted back at her and started laughing. “Nice do,” the girl pointed to Meg's mess of hair. Meg began to put the evening back together in her head. “I thought you were with Ben?” she said. “I was,” said the girl. “Ugh, sick! What are you doing in here?! We didn't??” “He snores,” she said simply in answer to her question. Meg relaxed for a moment. “You're a better kisser though…” Meg closed her eyes momentarily and shook her head, not really wanting to think about what might have happened for her to know that. Not really wanting to know if that comment was even true or not. But slightly flattered all the same. “Don't say that to him…” she said crawling over her to pull the curtains aside and jump down. She was confronted by a ‘Jess’ with a very wet face and torso striding towards her up the gangway. “What in the hell happened to you?” she asked. “OJ,” Jess glared unhappily. “The juice of a goddamned orange happened to me.” She stopped in front of Meg and they both regarded one-another. Meg was the first to smile, though she was trying not to. “Stop it…” Jess frowned trying not to smile back, “it went in my eye, it hurts…” she moaned. “Well, now you know how that feels don't you?” “Humph. Yeh. Ok, it's probably karma…” she said pushing past Meg toward the bathroom, “Nice hair by the way,” she said shutting the door behind her. Meg decided she needed to check it out. Ducking down she caught a glimpse of herself in the window opposite. Nodding at her reflection she gave her hair a quick ruffle. “Yep, pretty damned sexy!” she mumbled, then was reminded why getting up had been so urgent. “Ah fuck… JESS! Hurry up, I need to pee!” She turned back to face the bathroom door momentarily, but realising she'd be waiting a while she span back round to go and join Ben at the front of the bus. It was at that point she met with the second collision of her day. “Agh! What in the Hell?” she bellowed, narrowly avoiding a full-on impact. “Hey Meg!” the voice said brightly in a true Texan style. “When did you get on??” she said screwing up half her face as a beam of sunlight hit her. Kate stepped back a little to give her space and brought the camera back to her shoulder, “At the last service station. Do you mind?” “Uh…” Meg, though half asleep, realised she probably didn't have a choice, especially since Jess and Ben had clearly agreed it was ok. “I've been doing a post-gig type piece with the other two down the front,” she continued, “Well, I say two, you seem to be multiplying!” “Huh?” Meg looked past her to see a few of extra bodies lounging there. “Man, I can't believe you slept in here…” Kate said capturing some shots of the bus. “It's really not that bad,” Meg stated with a deadpan face. Feeling devilish she pulled back the curtain on her bunk to reveal a large comfy bed with a cute girl still lounging in it. “Sometimes we have to, y'know?” she said in earnest, quite pleased that Kate just smirked from behind the camera. “Do you make a habit of that then?” Kate asked nodding at the girl. “I don't even remember this one,” Meg joked flippantly, and with that she turned again on her heel. Unashamedly still in her PJ substitute of vest and shorts, she headed down the bus to Ben and whomsoever she might find, leaving the girl in her bed to pull faces at the camera. “Mistaken identity…” the girl slurred at Kate. “Aha…” Kate raised an eyebrow from behind the eyepiece. Kate panned round quickly to catch Meg still swaggering down the aisle. “Nice idea!” Suze commented as Kirstin turned up the sound on Kate's live feed coming from the tour bus ahead of them. The tour was practically in convoy, but since they had a satellite link if they needed, it didn't much matter. “Yeh, well, I know I said I'd wait before we became too intrusive, but to be honest, judging by the behaviour of this band, pretty much anything seems to go. I think they'll be more than happy to chuck us out when they get bored, or if we get too close.” “They have quite a reputation you know?” Suze dropped her voice for effect as she settled down in the seat next to Kirstin. “I'm beginning to get that impression…” Kirstin nodded slowly. “Have you read their website?” “Nope, but I've a feeling I might not have to…” Kirstin said raising an eyebrow at Suze who was already flipping open her laptop. “Ha, look at this!” Kirstin nudged at Suze who looked up just in time to see Meg pull back a curtain to reveal a half naked girl. “Oh my lord, has it started already?” “Apparently so. That's one consent form we definitely need,” she said scribbling a note to remind herself to do just that. “Do you think she slept with her?” Suze cocked her head and mockingly frowned at her. “You're kidding right?” Kirstin smiled. “No, I'm not that naive Suze, it's just a bit weird to realise she's gay.” Suze laughed. “You mean you couldn't tell just by looking at her?! I thought you were supposed to have that 'dar' thing?” “Nooo. I mean - yes it makes sense, but I just never really thought that about her. It didn't occur to me she might be, she used to be pretty straight.” “Kirstin I don't think this girl's ever been straight. I mean look at that walk!” The shot on screen followed Meg as she walked down the aisle of the bus. “No straight woman could ever pull that off.” “Trust me, her prom date was very much a guy…” “That doesn't mean anything… we both know that. Wait a minute… that's not even on the website. How do you know that?” Kirstin turned to look at her. She took a breath while she decided how much to reveal, before blurting out the beginning of the truth. “She used to live next door to me…” she answered candidly, also wondering just how well Suze had studied the band's site. Suze's face was a picture. She half snickered. “I'm sorry, you used to know her?” “Yes. In a way.” “When was this?” “A long time ago, when we were kids, when I lived in Buffalo.” “You lived in Buffalo??” “Yes, Suze,” Kirstin said drolly and explained again, “I lived in Buffalo when I was a kid and Meg here,” she pointed at the figure on screen who was rubbing her eyes, “lived next door.” “Wow. That's kinda weird.” “Yes, I know. It is.” “I never knew you were from Buffalo!” Kirstin frowned, confused at how her having once lived in Buffalo was more interesting to Suze than the fact that she had a weird affinity with the subject currently on screen. “I'm not from Buffalo. Not really. Clearly not really.” Kirstin said referring to her English twang. “And I didn't stay after high school anyway, so I don't really think it counts.” “Oh, I dunno,” Suze mused, “You suddenly gained a little street cred with me.” “Shut up!” Kirstin shoved her shoulder lightly. “So come on, lets see what you've found out then.” Suze turned the PowerBook towards her and opened up the website. “Fl-ashy…” Kirstin remarked sarcastically. “Fu-nny!” Suze imitated as the graphics of the front page swam about to reveal the navigation bar. She clicked on the button marked “fan fact/fiction”. “Fan fiction?? I thought that was uber cyber stories?” she remarked, elongating the strange word. “You're such a geek.” Suze smirked under her breath before continuing, “This is a neat little take on reality. Some fact, some fiction,” she explained. “Ok, so basically this is like a forum where people trade their stories of meeting the band. Most of them are very basic and cute. Some of them are like blogs, some of them are well written like reviews or articles, and some of them are more like literature. There are lots of styles, and basically anything seems to go. The thing is most them are based on real accounts, but they label it 'slash' fiction because some of it is potentially libellous.” Kirstin's brow furrowed. “And by this you mean?” “By this I mean references to meeting them at parties and drinking excessively, or taking drugs, and even on occasion sleeping with them.” “Huh…” It was Kirstin's turn for her face to be a picture. “Mostly the band places a 'no comment' tag at the end of the post. I was guessing that this made for better publicity 'cos it makes them look rock n roll, y'know?” She clicked through a few pages looking for a particular post. “The lamer ones they usually 'verify' as true, and on occasion they deny some of the blatantly stupid ones. But then I came across a few that even I was shocked to find they verified. Ah, here we go, read that!” She pushed the laptop over for Kirstin to peruse, watching her intently. It was a piece of rather well written prose, describing in no uncertain terms a very sexual meeting between the writer and two of the band members. It wasn't pornographic, but it was very clear about the interaction that had ensued: “It hadn't been my intention to be flirtatious, but the raw sexual energy that seemed to bleed from every pore of her made it impossible for me not to be suggestive. Before I knew it I was holding onto her hand and pulling her to one side, kissing her fiercely. She had no idea that not five minutes ago I had been all over her band member. When it became apparent to her that this was the case, she didn't seem to mind and even suggested we all go up to her room…” Kirstin blinked. She scrolled down quickly to read the tag that Jess had left there “Verified - I have to admit, this one is true.” Kirstin's eyes quickly flicked to the authors name. “Oh my god…” She breathed, “The Maggie Gustov? The writer?” Suze nodded her head. “Yep.” She answered succinctly. “How do you know it was really her that wrote this?” “I emailed her…” “You what?” Kirstin asked incredulously. “She said it was the best lay she's had in a long time and if we wanted to interview her for the documentary, she'd find some time for us…” Suze waited. Kirstin just started laughing. “I have no idea what to do with this information,” she said shaking her head, “except to say that I don't wanna read anymore of it…” she pulled a half pained face through the pursed smile that remained and pushed the laptop back. “I'm telling you, this part of the site is legend. It doesn't even matter if most of it isn't true, so long as some of it is. And when you have someone like Maggie writing something like that? It pretty much sets the rest in stone, true or not. If it's a publicity stunt, then it's a very well thought out one.” “Is Maggie bisexual?” “I have no idea, but it seems that Jess must be…” “I think Jess is omni-sexual,” Kirstin said in a serious tone. “It certainly explains a few things.” “The way Ben looks at her sometimes, I knew there was some chemistry going on there.” “Oh, yeh, I thought that too. At first I thought it was a little weird, but it looks like they must've had a relationship at some point.” It's still a little weird. Kirstin was lost in many a thought. “So you wanna interview Maggie?” She snapped back into the moment, “Um, yeh, I mean, I guess we don't have to use it, right?” The question was clearly rhetorical so Suze didn't bother to answer. “I don't see any harm. Though I have to say I'm not sure we should linger too much on the sexual content of their lives, you know?” Suze nodded in agreement. “And yet it seems we apparently can't ignore it!” She muttered distracted by a glimpse of Ben on screen, kissing the girl that had been in Meg's bunk. “What in the Hell have we gotten into?” Kirstin asked the ether. Suze just bit her bottom lip. Break a leg The tour was going very well. It had been four weeks since they'd pushed off in L.A and there wasn't a single venue that hadn't been a sell out. Kirstin was beginning to build a satisfactory picture in her head of the profiles of each band member and how they lived. She was also getting to know not only the tour crew, but her own crew a lot better. The long journeys were spent editing out all the unusable footage from the dates before and logging the interesting bits. She already had quite a pile of definite contenders, but even now she knew she'd have to throw half of it out in the final edit. A picture was slowly surfacing of a band that had made it on the underground music scene and taken the industry by surprise. These were the stories legends were made of. Heroes and villains over-living life, teetering on the edge in the glare of the cameras. She had started out thinking that Jess's antics were all an act; that she played at being rock and roll on stage and for the cameras, but actually deep down the girl was seriously sassy and had played the media for all they were worth. What Kirstin was now beginning to realise was that Jess just felt she'd gotten lucky. She only snapped into civilised behaviour because she knew that she should behave, not because she had an underlying agenda. She really had to work at curbing her language and her antics, and when she was on stage she knew she was allowed to let them rip. Something she certainly did. It was curious Kirstin thought, to find that Jess's act was actually performed off-stage. Similarly Ben joined in with the musical theatrics, but he wasn't quite so concerned with curbing them off-stage. However to be fair he wasn't as brash as Jess, he had a far gentler manner, so it wasn't quite as noticeable. Meg was harder to work out. Her job seemed to be the straight-guy, ironically. Deadpan. Get on with the job, keep the beat going, allow the other two to shine. And yet she was capable of upstaging them both with just a couple of well-chosen words, or at times with something as seemingly small and insignificant as a smile. When you demonstrate rarely, what little you do show seems to yield greater impact. The thought reminded Kirstin of the advice her mother had once given her on the art of wearing clothes. Some rules are cross platform I guess. Less is more. But it was a fine line to tread between intrigue and boredom. There had to be a handing out of little tit-bits here and there, not too many, but just enough. Meg walked that line of mystery very well. Kirstin had found herself wondering if she even knew it. Smoothly wasn't a course Kirstin expected things to follow, so she was unsurprised in Tennessee when Kate radioed through to the live truck during a show to tell her she had a serious problem. “Do I need to dial 911?” Kirstin asked calmly. “Yes, fuck yes!” came the hurried response. “Shit!” Kirstin hissed ripping off her headphones, “Suze, you're going to have to take over.” Suze jumped right up as Kirstin grabbed the venue radio she'd been handed the day before and flung open the live truck door. “I need a call for 911,” she stated. There was a crackle as the radio came alive. “Hello, report the incident please,” a deep voice buzzed back. “I have a sound man down backstage. He was in the fly rigging, and we're not entirely sure where he is now, but he seems to have hit base.” Kirstin tried to keep calm, but Kate had been close to hysteria and it was hard not to think the worst. She was running through the front of house entrance holding the radio in one hand and showing her pass to whoever cared with the other. “We have issued a call Miss Hart, a medic is on his way. Back-up won't be long.” “Thanks,” she shouted and clipped the radio to one of her jean pockets. Heading backstage she could hear the muffled commotion already. “Kate?!” she shouted heading towards a group of people huddled in the darkness. The band were still on stage. Kate turned round from the back of the cluster and rushed to her. “I don't know what the hell happened Kaye, he was right behind me one minute and the next I just hear a load of clattering.” She was clearly in shock, but Kirstin was more concerned with seeing Gerard, wherever the fuck he was. A large man was pulling what looked like a chunk of metal off the figure she could now see lying limp on the floor. Fuck! Oh, sweet Jesu. “Excuse me,” Kirstin pushed her way through with ferocity to reach the scene. There was Gerard, covered in a heap of mangled metal and broken plastic. But it was a moving heap. He's breathing, good, fucking good! She instinctively began helping the larger man remove debris from the area, and when it was clear enough she knelt down over his head. “Gerard, can you hear me?” she muttered. “Hey lady, you a doc? I don't think you should move him,” the large man said. “Lets make sure that's he's alive before we worry too much about that, hey?” Gerard was alive, that was the good news. He was covered in cuts that he'd gained while falling the twenty-something feet from the fly tower ladder, hitting almost every obstacle on the way; he was severely winded and had some sort of trauma to his left leg, but he was alive. It was the obstacles breaking his fall that had saved his life, so the medic had said. She was sure Gerard wouldn't see it that way. Sparing a brief glance upward before she followed his stretcher to the ambulance, Kirstin could see where he'd fallen from and she was fully aware of how close to death he had come. Kirstin arranged for someone to pick up the camera Kate was still clutching in order to take it back to the truck. She put an arm around her. “It's not your fault Kate.” She just shook her head. “We should have checked it was ok up there before we went.” Her usually bright, deep southern tone sounded disconcertingly lifeless. “Look, it could have been a lot worse, trust me. And it's the venue’s responsibility to shut off any area that's deemed unsafe. They knew we were all running around, and they gave permission to access the fly tower. Like I said, it isn't your fault ok?” she assured her. Kate sniffed and nodded. Kirstin turned to the paramedic, “Where are you taking him?” “Nashville General,” he smiled easily, “it's only a few blocks away.” “C'mon, we'll get a cab ok?” Kate nodded again. Let your hair down No matter how hard Kirstin tried to change it, all the figures proved to her that she had no choice but to board tomorrow's flight back to NYC. The band were scheduled to be on The David Letterman Show and Kirstin simply had to be there, it was too good an opportunity to leave to fate, on many levels. She had originally planned to leave before the rest of the crew and allow them to finish up in Nashville. That, it now seemed, was just not going to be possible. She simply didn't have time. “Welllll… Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuckety fuck-fuck,” she grumbled in a clipped version of her usually gentle English accent. A head peeped around the connecting door of her hotel room. “Auditioning to be Hugh Grants wife?” Kirstin swung round in the big leather chair she was seated in. Meg smiled at her broadly. The filmmaker was a little shocked to discover how pleased she actually was to see her. Then she remembered the question. “What?” she asked her, a little confused. Meg imitated her “Fuck, fuck!?” “Ah, the bumbling English idiot… no, not exactly, but coming close…” she sighed waving her in to the room as she swung back and hit enter, sending the email she'd been writing off on it's way. “Everything ok? We thought you'd been gone by now but Suze,” she directed her thumb at the conjoining room she had come from, “mentioned that you were going to be around tonight after all?” “Ah, yes. Yes I am. Unfortunately, for both him and me, Gerard managed to break his leg yesterday. Which has left him laid up, and me not only down a sound operator at short notice, but also with a small accident claim to deal with.” “Ooo, fuck… I mean we all knew he got hurt, but ouch!” Kirstin turned back to her. “Mmm. Legal needs a pile of paperwork. Hence the swearing.” Meg nodded sympathetically. But mostly I'm not too keen on flying and now it seems I don't really have a choice, thought Kirstin, feeling a little guilty that her fear seemed more important right now that Gerard's leg. Meg took a glance around Kirstin's room. It was in a more conservative state than her own room, but was pretty much the same except for the laptop and a pile generally geeky items Kirstin had set up on the desk. “Well,” Meg slouched to one side like a kid asking if her friend could come and play, “we reckon you should come and join us for a night of frolicking as soon as your done doing… whatever it is you need to do…” she gestured to the air. Kirstin smiled at her thankfully. She reached behind her without looking and shut the laptop with a click. “I'm done,” she winked. “What's on the menu?” She was rewarded with a genuine smile, “Well, if the preppy can take it, we all thought we go find us some food, some pool and maybe a movie?” “In that order?” “Yes, in that very order,” Meg smiled even more broadly, having already cottoned on to Kirstin’s obvious love of food. “Right now?” she asked, realising how late it had gotten. “If you're ready, yeah.” “Gimme two secs,” Kirstin said taking a quick look down at herself and stealing an even quicker look at Meg's chosen attire. She grabbed a clean set of clothes from her case and headed to the bathroom. Meg waited for her patiently, suddenly feeling a little uncomfortable invading Kirstin's privacy. Oh fuck it, she's seen me on camera almost every morning in my kecks for the last month, this is hardly an invasion. But the feeling somehow managed to pervade. There wasn't much of Kirstin in the room she conceded, it was a hotel room after all, and they had only been there a couple of nights. Yet it still seemed that a lot of Kirstin lingered here despite that fact. Meg noted the lack of personal effects; no pictures, no books. She reasoned that Kirstin was probably too busy to think about things like that, she was working after all, unlike the band who felt like touring was their reward for all the hard work building up to it. It was the smell Meg decided. She hadn't realised it until now, but it was apparently Kirstin who was responsible for supplying the fresh trail of subtle, sweetness that was quite noticeable after being surrounded by hardworking techies in dark, dank venues. Kirstin had a very distinctively sweet and alluring smell. It made Meg smile, again. “Ok, will I do?” Meg turned around feeling a little caught out. Kirstin had changed from her half suited attire into a more comfortable jeans and tee ensemble. “You'll more than do,” she smiled at her. “You ok?” Kirstin asked, sensing Meg was not quite there. “Sure, sure, I'm just hungry,” she answered hurriedly. “Oh good!” Kirstin exclaimed. “Me too. I haven't had anything since the lunchtime hospital visit.” She grabbed a brown leather jacket that was hanging from the back of the door and pulled it on. Meg followed her. “Is he going to be ok?” “Gerard? Oh, sure. I mean, they pinned some stuff back together, he was a bit of a mess, but he's off the morphine now,” Kirstin replied, patting her pockets, checking for her wallet and keys. “Fuck…” Meg shook her head, wincing slightly at the thought as she held the door open for Kirstin. “Yeh… FUCK indeed.” Meg stopped suddenly before she closed the door behind them. “Is it usual for you to hang out like this with the 'talent'?” Kirstin turned back to regard her. “The 'talent'?” she repeated, the word sounding inappropriate coming from Meg's lips. “I know that's what you call us.” Kirstin smiled cheekily. “Do you indeed?” “It kinda seems like a fully-loaded, backhanded compliment.” “It's not really a compliment at all,” Kirstin admitted. “So I gathered… thanks for the confirmation.” “Where'd you hear that?” Meg didn't answer, causing Kirstin to qualify herself. “It's just a term we use. To be honest I don't think it really applies to you guys.” “Thanks!” Meg said turning and shutting the door. “I don't mean you're not talented…” Kirstin added quickly. “Yeh, yeh whatever,” Meg said swinging back round and holding her hand up to stop the apparent insult, but smiling nonetheless. Kirstin licked her lips and smiled back at her, realising Meg was pulling her leg a little and that she didn't really take it personally. “I actually happen to think you guys are really good,” she said with sincerity. “And in answer to your question: It's not unusual for people like us to hang out together, but in all honesty the 'talent' tends to stick to it's own, and so do the crews.” “People like us?” she teased, bumping Kirstin's shoulder with her own as they wandered down the corridor towards Suze's room. “You know what I mean drummer girl.” Meg just smiled back at her. A thought suddenly occurred to Kirstin. “Why didn't we just go through the joining door??” Kirstin shook her head. “Uh, I have no idea?” Meg pulled a face. “You came through it didn't you?” Kirstin poked. “Yeh, but I was distracted.” Kirstin looked at her through narrowed eyes before tapping lightly on the door in front of her. “You’re cocaine, you prob’ly think this song is about you” They had all gone for dinner at a Thai place in the city. Sitting at a huge ornate table, they had been spinning shared food round and clinking glasses for an hour or so. It was one of the first evenings that both teams were able to relax and just enjoy the city. Most people had spent their day discovering the underground markets at the edge of the city zone, Kirstin discovered. She herself had been tied up first at the hospital, and then later in meeting with a solicitor. She was regretful because she felt she'd missed out, judging by the stories. She fully intended to make up for it however. The food was good, which always improved Kirstin's mood, and she had found a much-appreciated dining ambassador in the shape of Amie, the bands lighting engineer, who had apparently been a chef in a previous life. She was half Puerto-Rican and Kirstin had already decided that at some point she was going to have to get Amie to cook for her. “Yes! I totally love that little place!” Kirstin exclaimed. “How can you possibly know about it? There's like ten people in the world that know about it!” Amie beamed back at her. “Right,” Kirstin hit the table with her free hand, “that's where we're going when we get to England, okay? No matter what happens, we'll bum a ride out there. If for nothing else than the cheesecake!” “Oh, god, don't even get me started on the desserts!” Amie scrunched up her face. “No, really please, don't get her started on the desserts!” piped up Laura, who looked like the female version of Josh except that her blond hair was in dreads. “She wants to taste everything on the menu, but she can't eat it all and then I get drafted in to help!” Kirstin had worked out a week or so earlier that Laura was Amie's girlfriend, or she was fairly certain of it anyway. “Oh you and I need to hang out more,” Kirstin nodded at Amie. “Trust me I can definitely help you out in that department Laura!” she winked and patted her stomach neatly. Kirstin caught the gaze of a pair of blue-grey eyes from across the table. Meg had been watching her in wonderment. She was astonished at the ease with which Kirstin seemed to command the attention of the table without even realising it. She stuck the tip of her tongue out briefly before being coerced into a whispered conversation with Ben. “What?” Meg asked him. “Oh, right… really?” “If you want, I'm just saying, didn't want you to feel left out,” he growled in an effort to be discreet. Ben looked quite out of place in this restaurant, Kirstin thought, but in a really good way. The choppy jet-black hair and stylised beard complimented his Mediterranean skin tone, and the camera certainly loved him. Tall, dark and broody, but with such a kind face it almost betrayed his chosen array of piercings and tattoos. He and Jess never failed to look like they were in a band. They were always with the make-up-from-the-night-before look. Though Kirstin had to concede it usually was from the night before. Meg on the other hand was much more subtle she thought. She suited the onstage look, but she scrubbed up just as well without it. Meg pushed back from the table, tossed her napkin down and headed off for the restroom. Ben rubbed his nose and repositioned his tall frame to accommodate the long legs that carried it under the table. He must be easily six foot four, Kirstin thought. He almost dwarfed Meg and she wasn't exactly short. Kirstin tried her best not to stand too close to him on the rare occasion she needed to, on account he made her neck ache. Meg pushed open the restroom door. It was a pretty posh place. She based a lot of her opinion of a place by the quality of its bathroom, and this was very nice indeed. Large ceramic sinks that acted as basin and dryer in one, set in the same carved dark wood found in the main restaurant. Stone floor, stone tiled walls, tinted mirrors, and very large cubicles. It was almost an invite. “Jess? You here?” A door un-clicked and a naughty looking face peeped out followed by a hand that grabbed her and pulled her inside. Jess giggled and sat back down on the already lidded toilet. “Want some?” she asked innocently, as if she was offering her potato chips. Meg's eyes flicked to where Jess was gesturing. There was a line already laid out for her on the top of the paper dispenser in Jess's special silver coke tray. “Sure,” she said taking the already rolled $100 bill that Jess was offering her. “Is this the same stuff?” she asked as she leaned over to inhale. The rolled up note already reeked from last nights binge, a rich, heady scent of money and drugs. The good thing about high class establishments was that no-one would be checking for more than one pair of feet under the door. In fact the door was ceiling to roof and the cubicle was well lit and spotless. It was almost as though the owners expected it. Fools if you don't. “Yeh, same stuff. We've loads left,” she smiled through half hooded eyes, swallowing the chalky taste as it dripped slowly down the back of her throat. “I just need a little something to keep me awake after last night, I figured we could sleep if off tomorrow.” Jess fiddled with the fabric of her mesh skirt. She looked fucked, but then, Meg considered, she always did, that was her look wasn't it? “Yeh, I'm up for that,” Meg answered standing upright again and sniffing hard one more time for good measure. “I'm having a good time. You got any spare I can take with me?” “You got someone you want to share with?” Jess asked seductively, rising up to meet her and wrinkling her nose. “Not yet, but who knows?” Meg rolled her eyes suggestively. “You going out after this?” “Yeh,” Jess breezed reaching for the coke tray, tapping it and folding it up. She took out a small clear bag from one of the top pockets in her shirt and carefully transferred some of the contents of the tray into it. “Ben's found a little dive he wants us to 'discover',” she said studying the journey of the white powder intently. “You coming?” “Nah, not really up for a club. I think I'll stick with the others and checkout movie-land.” “Ok, pussy,” Jess joked sealing the bag and handing it to her. She lifted up her chin. “Check?” Meg took a look, “All clear, me?” she responded and raised her own chin. Jess took a good look. “Just a li-ttle here,” she said wiping a smudge of white dust from under Meg's nose with her fingertip. “Thanks,” Meg said reaching behind her and unlocking the door. “You're welcome. Shall we?” As they headed back to the table they noted the bill had been taken care of. “Who paid?” asked Jess boldly. No-one apparently knew. “Nah, c'mon guys, seriously, who paid?” Again she was greeted with no claimants. “Honestly, we don't know,” confirmed Amie, “the guy just came over and told us it'd been taken are of.” “Mystery kindnesses eh? Ok, well, thanks!” she shouted out to the restaurant. The place was so busy no-one else really heard her. “Ok, cool. Well, I know you guys planned to go off to a movie but if anyone wants to join us me 'n Ben are hitting the town,” she announced to the table with a flourish. Kirstin waited to see what other people were doing. Josh and Suze both shook their heads, Amie declared she was a little weary, which counted her and Laura out. Seth the other sound operator looked a little at a loss since he'd been hanging out with Gerard who was now laid up. He looked over to Kate. “I will if you will?” she whispered. He nodded. “Ok, we're up for it,” she grinned at Jess who gave her the thumbs up. Kirstin was pleased she had perked up a little since the day before. James, Kirstin's runner had taken a fancy to Sally the band’s instrumental engineer, and he jumped on board the second she did. Since Pete, the tour manager, and Sam his head roadie had taken for an early night that only left Meg and Kirstin. Meg looked at Kirstin, almost willing her not to go. “I'm good thanks,” Kirstin eventually told Jess when she turned attention to her. Good, thought Meg smiling to herself, not realising she was still looking at Kirstin who puckered her brow in silent question. Meg turned to Jess quickly, “Like I said, I'm gonna stick with these guys,” she directed at Jess. “Ok, well, I guess we got ourselves some more recruits anyways,” Jess said, “Have fun, give us a call if you get bored.” She picked up her coat and the others followed her cue. “See you back at the hotel I guess?” “Sure, ok,” Meg affirmed. “Do you always talk so much in movie theatres?” “Um… actually I'm usually a lot worse,” Kirstin dipped her head and flashed Meg a sheepish grin as they walked ahead of the others to find a cab. They'd chosen to sit together in the cinema since they were with, to all intents and purposes, two other couples: Amie with Laura, and Suze with Josh. Kirstin didn't let the latter go unnoticed and she engineered the seating perfectly with a sly wink at Josh who just shook his head but was grateful. Meg had been more than helpful in the orchestration of her little plan. Kirstin was very pleased, not only with her match making but also for herself. She was really beginning to like spending time with this new Meg who was polite and smiled a lot. “Can I ask you a question?” Meg looked at her, “Sure. Go ahead.” “Are you high?” It wasn't what she had expected. Caught. Shit. Oh well, what's she going to do? Meg giggled nervously and nodded. She cocked her jaw, “Yeh. I'm sorry. How could you tell?” She didn't think it had been that obvious. “It's ok,” Kirstin waved off her worry. “The sniffing had a bit to do with it, plus I never knew anyone that could sit through a whole movie with me without mentioning my constant second guessing and shot commentary.” “Oh, no, I actually kinda thought that was cute.” “No, trust me, no-one thinks it's cute unless they're drunk, or high.” Meg laughed openly. “Ok, then I guess we'd better do this again sometime when I'm not high. Test your theory.” “I'd like that.” Kirstin answered quietly. Meg took a quick look behind them to check how far away the rest of the group were. “Do you want some?” she asked Kirstin in a hushed tone. “What?” she asked, before realising, “Oh, um… well, what is it?” “It's just coke,” Meg said quietly, “but it's good.” Kirstin thought for a second. She reasoned she was going to feel awful tomorrow anyway. It had been a while since she'd taken anything, and right now, in this minute, the thought of escaping on a medium coke high was very appealing. Even if it was a Sunday. “Sure, ok. Thanks,” she nodded. Meg suddenly got a second hit, it rushed through and she with smiled with wild abandon. “Hell yes, gimme some of that!” Kirstin laughed. Meg's room was the safer place Kirstin had told her. Even though Suze was thoroughly liberal, Kirstin was still her boss and she was technically still in charge. Doing cocaine in the room next door to Suze seemed to her a little wrong. The main reason however for the departure to Meg's room was that she knew Suze would try and stop her in view of the flight she had to take the next day. And if she were Suze, she'd do the same. But she wasn't. And if Kirstin had already done it… well, then the decision had been made, hadn't it? “So you can get drunk, but you can't get high?” “Um, yes, I do see the discrepancies…” Kirstin's said pulling on her lip. She was sat on the end of the plush double bed in Meg's hotel room leaning over a long line that she'd only half made her way through. “Technically I shouldn't get drunk either…” she smiled looking up at Meg devilishly, “except on my day off.” “You rebel! Isn't this your day off though?” “It should be yes…” she said putting her head back down and finishing up. “Ooo, that's good stuff…” she breathed. “I know, and I'm so glad you're going to be on my level now, I was beginning to feel a little lonely…” Kirstin got up and went to retrieve her jacket from the table where she'd slung it ten minutes earlier as she'd rushed off to the bathroom. “You may as well leave that, we'll probably come back up for some more right?” she asked hopefully. “Oh, ok, cool, I didn't wanna presume, y'know?” Meg ducked down to meet her face to face. The blond filmmaker was a good couple of inches shorter than her. “It's cool, okay Kirstin? It's not even mine really. If you wanna invite anyone else for some that's ok too,” she smiled at her. “What happened to Preppy?” Kirstin enquired, ruffling the hair off the back of her neck. “Preppy has its place, I think preppy might just be a daytime thing,” she shrugged. “Now come on, Jess just text me, they're headed back.” “Are they high too?” Kirstin asked, suddenly a little nervous that it might be obvious to everyone else. “Yeh, relax,” she breathed. “It brings out the green in your eyes.” “Shut up!” Kirstin almost squealed, hitting her on the shoulder. “Go on, get outta here!” Meg laughed and duly obliged, trying to sober up quickly when she was met with a porter in the hallway. “Hi,” she spat suddenly, realising he wasn't at all convinced. Kirstin was glad of the seat, and of the beer. It had been a long weekend, but a relaxing evening. It was certainly good to have an evening off, even if there was an underlying worry about the next days travel. Thanks to the company, and the newly found energy boost, her mind had been quite pleasantly occupied. The rest of the gang had rejoined them and those that were still in the mood for socialising had moved to the Hotel Bar. The whole place was, by any standards, pretty hip and it was mostly populated it seemed by non-guests. This apparently served to advertise how cool the hotel was; if you couldn't afford to stay here, you at least tried to drink with the people who could. Over the course of the last hour or so their group had slowly diminished as people sloped off to their respective rooms. The hardcore crowd remained, just sitting, relaxing, drinking and chatting. Meg and Kirstin had been nipping upstairs every half hour or so, to top themselves up. Jess and Ben had joined them on a couple of occasions, but even Ben by now had decided he needed to flake out. There were only a few of them left: Sally, Adie, Jess, Laura, Kate, Suze, and Meg. Kirstin noted that there were no boys left at the table and laughed to herself. She wondered how the evening had gone for Josh and resolved to ask him in the morning. It was nice, Kirstin thought, that they all seemed to enjoy one another's company. She had known most of her own team for years, but rarely got opportunity to relax with them like this. She liked it. Even if she was in a slightly heightened state. The voice was low, and slightly hoarse. They had been having what Meg would term as a thoroughly sickly discussion about love and more specifically about there being one true love for everyone. Meg hated 'the one' conversations, she liked to put them to an abrupt end once they were out of control. Since people were beginning to raise their voices in volume as well as pitch in an effort to be heard, she had decided they had reached the point of her intervention. Especially since a few people had started to make references to their own sickening relationships. They all turned to look at her. “What?” asked Sally, James's crush, speaking for most of the group who were equally baffled by Meg's understated conversational entry. Kirstin figured James must've gotten bored of trying it on with her. Meg repeated herself, “Love's disgusting,” she said simply. They all regarded her, still bemused. A few of them exchanged looks. There was a brief silence passed between them all. “Love's insane,” Kirstin offered. She was staring at the floor apparently fascinated by her feet, fingering the glass in her hand. Meg cocked her head as she turned to her, and smiled. Kirstin looked up and met Meg's eyes evenly, tucking some hair behind an ear. Now they all looked at Kirstin. Meg nodded, “A humiliating business,” she returned. Kirstin almost started laughing, “Oh, how true…” “Ok, ok,” Jess interjected, “enough of this. Who said that?” She hated being left out and was fully aware they were quoting something. “A poet,” Meg answered dismissively, her eyes never leaving Kirstin, who returned the gaze with a warm smile. “A poet?” Jess was bewildered. “Since when did you start reading poetry? And, more to the point, quoting it?” she laughed. Meg turned to Jess and raised an eyebrow, “There's a lot you don't know about me Jessie…” “I'm beginning to realise that!” she said. Leaning over she took hold of Meg's collar in a playful way, “who is this pansy and what have you done with my friend?” Meg laughed at her. “Ok, so it's not exactly poetry…” “I knew it,” Jess was triumphant. “It's a song, right?” she guessed. “Yes,” She answered quickly, “now would you shut up?” she pleaded, her brow knitting together. Jess assessed the situation and reasoned it was probably an embarrassing song so she uncharacteristically let the matter go. She too was bored with the love debate. “I think there are LOTS of 'ones',” Jess threw out to the group. “Different kinds of 'ones'. They all serve a purpose, but they're not all for the duration. I don't think anything really lasts forever…” “You're so cynical,” Sally shook her head, “look at Adie and Laura,” she pointed out. “Ugh.” Jess rolled her eyes. Adie turned to Jess, “What was that for?” she inquired a little defensively. Jess had hit a nerve. “You guys just make me sick,” Jess pulled a face. “Ten years,” Laura said joining in, “you can't argue with that.” Jess was feeling bolshy and she rolled her eyes again. “You know what?” she asked rhetorically, “You guys are gr-eat at playing mushy-mushy.” Adie looked a little uncomfortable, clearly sensing something brewing. “Do you have a problem with that?” Laura questioned her. Jess raised both eyebrows and pursed her lips pulling another face. “Ok look, if you have a problem with us just say…” Laura continued, clearly not willing to let the matter drop. Jess sat silent. This annoyed Laura even more. She narrowed her eyes. “Are we too 'coupley' for your gang? Is that it?” Jess just laughed at her, which angered Laura more. “Cos we all know how you like your single status. Are we not cool enough now?” Jess bit her tongue and repeated herself, “All I said was you guys are good at playing mushy-mushy.” Suze and Kate were feeling a little uncomfortable and made gestures of needing to get a drink to Kirstin and Sally who could do nothing but sit there. The two of them slinked off toward the bar conveniently disappearing into the crowd, leaving Kirstin envious. Kirstin tried to keep her head down. “What exactly are you saying?” shot Laura. “That's what I'm saying!” replied Jess clearly aggravated. Adie heard Jess's meaning loud and clear and tried to diffuse the brewing argument “Can we just drop this and talk about it some other time?” “No!” Laura raised her voice. “If she's got something to say she can say it right here.” Though still seated her posture became threatening as she squared up to Jess. Jess shook her head “Don't push me Laura ok?” she warned. “Don't push you?” she asked incredulously. “I mean it…” Jess was twisting the bottle in her hand. “I'm sick of taking your crap!” “You're really something you know that?” Laura spat. “What you don't have or can't understand you just have to shit on don't you?” Jess cleared her throat, “I'm sorry, what?!” she exclaimed, turning to engage with her. That was a red a rag. “Are you trying to say I'm jealous of you and Adie?” Adie looked a little scared of where this was heading. “Because in all honesty I don't see what's so damn good about your relationship anymore.” Jess gave Laura her full attention. “From what I can tell the only thing keeping you two together is this DAMN tour!” she threw back at her. “What?!” snapped Laura her voice rising in shock. Jess continued, “I mean when was the last time you guys actually FUCKED?” Oh dear. That was low. This was getting serious. Kirstin edged her body away from the incident, shying from the drama. She saw Meg close her eyes briefly in what looked like a moment of despair. They could all see things getting ugly very quickly, Meg interjected now, “Hey c'mon Jess,” she reasoned, “not here, huh?” “No!” Jess was angry, “I'm sick of those two giving me disapproving looks, like I'm wrecking people's lives, like they're better than me cos they're stuck in a relationship that's past its sell-by.” She took a swig of beer, briefly noting Laura's surprise. “Everyone can see it,” she gestured. Adie jumped in as calmly as she could manage, “You're out of order Jess,” she stated. Laura was upset, and she wasn't too happy herself. “Fine, sure. Whatever. But you know what?” she looked at them both in turn, “in future, do me a favour and rather than boring me to death with your moaning and your insecurities, try talking to each other!” Laura couldn't believe what she was hearing, she sat there shaking her head. Adie got up from her seat and went over to her. She took a hold of her hand to pull her up. “Grow up Jess!” she glared at her. “C'mon,” she said softly to Laura pulling her away. Laura was in too much shock to fight her and allowed herself to be led out of the bar, the sting of tears clearly visible. Sally, Meg and Kirstin collectively but silently sighed in relief that they hadn't been asked to take sides and that a full-blown fight had been at least postponed, if not averted. Jess acted nonchalant. Meg looked at her a little disgruntled. “What?” shrugged Jess. “Go and apologise,” she said flatly. “What?!” Jess said in disbelief, “No! YOU didn't hear the lecture I just got from 'holier than thou' Laura just now in the toilets. Why do you think we were having this conversation when you came back from the bar?” “Look,” Meg said, “I know she can be an ass sometimes, but did you ever think part of the reason she's like that is because what you're saying holds more than a grain of truth?” Jess sighed begrudgingly. “She's your friend Jess.” Meg kicked her gently from across the floor table. “Now go and apologise or she'll make Adie shine lights in your eyes for the rest of the tour. And your eyes are the same as my eyes, okay?” “Jeeesss…” Meg pushed her. “Okay, okay! Jesus,” she hissed. “I'm not taking it back though,” she grumbled as she got up to follow them. Satisfied that Jess would sort it out, because she always did, Meg turned back catching Kirstin's eye. “Ouch,” Kirstin remarked, “sounds like that's been brewing for a while.” Meg snorted, “Yeh, you could say that,” she answered. “I suppose they know each other too well. It's best just to stay out of it I find.” “I can imagine,” agreed Kirstin. “Sheesh. Well, now that was just too exciting,” remarked Sally, “I think I need to go pee…” she excused herself leaving Meg and Kirstin alone. They both watched her wind in and out of the crowd until it became inconceivable that either of them could see her any longer and they both had to turn and regard one another. Not before each taking a breath and regarding the room first of course. They both knew they were doing it. They both knew the other knew it too. When their eyes eventually did meet they both started laughing. “Are you still… ? “Yeh,” Meg nodded. Kirstin tried to suppress a grin. She had the urge to go and join Meg on the sofa that she was now occupying on her own, but she figured it might seem a little inappropriate. “Does that happen often?” Kirstin asked more to break the tension than out of curiosity. “Ah, they're two sides of the same coin is all, they've known each other so long that they know the right buttons to press when they piss each other off. It's not always bad thing.” “Actually, I kind of admire Jess for saying exactly what she thinks.” “She could have chosen more appropriate company. Or maybe just less company!” “I guess. But if Laura really was giving her an earful in the toilets I can see why she did it.” Meg shrugged and took another slug of beer. “So which side of the coin are you on Meg?” It was quite a personal question, but Kirstin was feeling a little tipsy and the coke had kicked her head into talk-mode. She was interested in what kind of person Meg had become. She saw the everyday façade, but she knew enough to know that a little of the girl she had once known still lingered. Somewhere. “Whaddya mean?” Meg looked at her with intrigue. “Are you the settling down and nesting kind, or the young, free and single, sleeping around kind?” Meg seemed lost for a moment, looking at Kirstin, the smirk slowly fading from her face as she contemplated the question. “Ha!” she half snorted. “Y'know, I don't think that's any of your business,” she stated, changing her tone drastically. Kirstin was unnerved and a little flustered. “I'm sorry, I wasn't meaning to pry.” Meg sighed and briefly looked away in thought. Kirstin was suddenly made aware of a boundary that she hadn't known existed. She admonished herself for not realising that it should. “I'm sorry,” she repeated. “I wasn't thinking, what with the stuff ‘n all… You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to. I'm not trying to trick you Meg, I was just interested.” “It's ok,” Meg said, turning back to her. She took a breath of decision. “You should know I'm not quite as into the whole 'lets-expose-our-life-on-screen bullshit' as Ben and Jess are. I'm not opposed to it, I just like to keep some things to myself, you know?” “I get it, really, I shouldn't have asked. I just took my professional hat off for a moment and forgot to tell you… I can't expect you to know that. I'm sorry.” Meg nodded. “It's ok. And I'm hoping it's a good couple of hours since you took that hat off,” she smiled at her kindly. There was a long silence between them. The room seemed to swell with people. Kirstin felt the need to say something, or rather for something to have been said. “You know, just for your information, and you can be as cautious as you want to be, and I won't be offended, but as far as I'm concerned: if it wasn't caught on camera it didn't happen.” Meg allowed her eyes to once again settle on Kirstin's. She had an intensity that Kirstin found hard not to surrender to. “There are many ways to reveal yourself, Kirstin. Words are the simplest, but in my case they are often the most confusing. I'm not very good with words. It's not about being on camera. But I appreciate what you're trying to say.” You're just the Hobnob of cookies to break aren't you? Thought Kirstin. “You know I think I kinda broke the mood,” Kirstin said putting her drink back on the table. “I think I'd better take myself off to bed.” “Oh no you don't!” Meg said leaning over and putting a hand on her arm to stop her from getting up. Kirstin took a breath a little confused. “Ok, look. Sit back down, ok?” Kirstin didn't look too certain. “I'm going to answer your question, and you're going to stay.” Kirstin shook her head, “You don't have answer my question, it was a stupid question…” “No, I know I don't have to answer it, but I kinda feel like I do.” Kirstin frowned in further bewilderment. Meg pulled her gently back down and over to the sofa where she was sitting, making her sit and putting the glass she'd laid down on the table back in her hand. Kirstin gave in. “See, I told you I wasn't very good with words… what I mean is, I know I don't have to, but I kinda feel I should, or I want to. Or something like that.” “Because…” she let the word hang there suddenly not sure why she'd dragged Kirstin back. “Because?” Kirstin encouraged. “I don't know,” she answered honestly. “I changed my mind. Is that okay?” She laughed back at her kindly. “Yes. Yes, that is totally okay. And anytime I ask you anything you don't want to discuss, it's okay. Okay?” “Right.” She regarded her. “I'm sorry, I think the coke made me a little defensive or something…” Kirstin sighed audibly and furrowed her brow, “It's okay, I think it made me a little too inquisitive! I hope you have some dope, because I'm not looking forward to knocking on Josh's door in search of some later…” Meg looked guilty. “Um… I think we may have to…” Kirstin closed her eyes and leant back into the comfort of the deep leather. They both looked out into the crowd for a moment, silent, in thought. It was Meg's turn to break the stillness. “This is kinda weird Kirstin,” she said turning to her. “Even though it's been like what, nine years?” “Something like that…” “A lot of things have happened in that time, and I think we're probably really different people, but when I look at you, or talk to you I still get this feeling of being like sixteen again.” “Mmm,” Kirstin had to agree with her. “But I know we're not those kids anymore.” “Noooo, you're a whole lot nicer to know!” Meg pulled a disbelieving face. “Here I am trying to open up to you and I get shot down!” she laughed. “Oh, how the tables have turned…” Kirstin teased before draining her glass. “Is it just me or have we been here for a while now, on our own?” “You make a very good point. I don't think any of them are coming back!” Meg breezed. Kirstin allowed herself to be secretly quite happy about that. “So you said if I stayed you'd answer my question…” Kirstin reminded her, taking the bottle from Meg's hand and taking a sip. Meg accepted the new drug induced intimacy for what it was. “You said I didn't have to…” “I changed my mind! C'mon, keeper or player?” Meg laughed, “What?! Keeper or player?!” “Yeh, are you a keeper or a player?” “Can I be both?” “No! That's such a cop out.” “Ok, well I'd like to think I was a keeper, but I expect I'm thought of as a player.” “How very bashful, best of both worlds eh?” “You're so sarcastic.” “I know. Problem?” Meg just smiled. She decided she was doing that a lot recently. She liked it. Balconies aren’t always for watching Having secured themselves a little green to help them both sleep, Meg and Kirstin soon realised that they couldn't really smoke it in the building. Though for a moment they had both seriously considered it. “I mean what are they going to do? Throw us out?” “Yes, yes I rather think they might!” Meg had smirked at her. Instead they snook out to the roof yard on the 6th floor and found a sneaky corner in the bushes with a bench. “You think they put this here on purpose?” Kirstin asked innocently. “Yes, but not for smoking pot…” Meg answered drolly. “Oh, oh, right. Jeez.” She laughed in the face of her own naivety. “So we should be kissing not smoking right?” Meg looked at her. Kirstin didn't seem to look as stoned as Meg felt, she still seemed bright, and flushed, and with it. Meg ignored the comment anyway. She was feeling a little heady with the combination of intoxicants, and as usual the wacky was giving her goldfish syndrome. “Where's Jess?” she asked instead. Kirstin looked at her, “We don't know…” she said tapping her brain with a finger. Meg put the last hour back together briefly in her head until she'd made sense of it. “R-ight…” then quickly forgot it all again. “You know what this reminds me of?” Kirstin asked Meg, hitching one foot up on the bench and turning to her slightly. “The Prom… do you remember?” Meg took another long drag on the well-sculpted reefer and sat back, smiling. “Yeh, I remember the Prom,” she said the memory somehow much easier to access than the last four hours. “How could I forget?” she said, passing the dooby back. “I totally hated my date!” “Me too, boys that age are so lame.” Kirstin giggled, “I found you skulking around up in one of the old theatre boxes…” “I was hiding, not skulking, you make it sound like I was waiting to pounce on you.” “Ha!” Kirstin laughed. “Well if you had've the whole evening would have been a lot more exciting!” There was a brief moment of silence. “We threw water down onto the kids on the dance floor from the balcony!” Kirstin said giving the water bottle in her hand a squeeze and causing it to ejaculate over the bush in front of them. Meg burst out laughing. She grabbed a hold of the water bottle and looked for a target in the garden below. They both heard a woman shriek and ducked down in their seats trying to suppress their giggles. Meg silently punched the air in triumph. “Was that the first time you smoked?” Meg whispered as the hilarity died down. “Yeh…” Kirstin admitted shyly. “Hey, I thought that was a daytime thing?!” “Oh, I change my mind all the time, don't count on any consistency from me…” she warned shaking her head and reaching to take the joint back off Kirstin. “Especially when drugs are involved.” “I'll keep that in mind,” Kirstin vowed. “That's the last of it,” Meg announced chucking the butt in the bush. They headed back through the fire escape on to the landing and took the elevator to the 9th. Kirstin suddenly felt very tired. “Hey, I need my jacket,” she remembered. They reached her room and Kirstin leaned lazily in the doorway waiting for Meg to retrieve her coat. As Meg sauntered back over with the item in question Kirstin took it and looked up to meet her eyes. “I had fun tonight,” she said looking at her seriously. Meg stopped. “So did I,” she answered simply. They both lingered in the doorway for a moment. Kirstin smiled briefly. “I'll see you tomorrow then.” “Yeh. Sleep well.” “You too,” Kirstin added turning and heading back down the corridor. Meg smiled to herself, again, and shut the door with a click. Continued in Part 4 Return to the Academy

Joined: 28 June 2011 Riddhima couldn't believe her luck. Pinned against the wall by the sexiest, cutest, hottest creation of God that evoked every girl's darkest fantasy and all that came to her mind were curses--four lettered, expletive, obscene curses. "Let go of me you dumba**, everyone is watching." She pushed against his solid chest but to no avail. All she got for a response was a cold I'm-about-to-kill-you-right-now stare. His hold tightened on her wrist as he pressed his body even closer to hers so that his mouth was a mere two inches away from hers. "For god's sake, we're in a library. Don't create a scene." She hissed at him, trying to create a little distance between them. She glanced outside the glass of the study room and sure enough hordes of nosy people had their eyes fixed on them. God, people mind your own d****d business. They're behaving like they've never seen a guy manhandle a woman before. Well, maybe they had, but no one would pass up a chance to see their favorite football star manhandle a woman who should really think through her plans before acting on them. "So, Ms. Birthday present, we can do this the easy way or the hard way." He squeezed her wrists to make the meaning clearer. "Who are you? And why did you do this?" His voice was filled with contempt but all Riddhima could focus on was thanking her stars that he was still unaware of her identity. Her heart was hammering against her chest but thankfully her voice was clear and calm when she answered. "This has nothing to do with you. Whatever happened doesn't concern you anymore." Oops wrong thing to say, if he had been mad first now he was enraged. His voice was venom filled when he snarled back at her. "Nothing to do with me? Not my concern? It is bloody well my concern when some miserable excuse of a woman uses my body. My body!! To do what? Get pregnant!! I swear if you weren't a woman then I would smash your face in right now." "If I wasn't a woman then we wouldn't have this problem. Plus, it would make you gay and possibly traumatize thousands of women in America. Although I believe gay clubs would get even more popular." "SHUT UP! Im sick and tired of your smart a** answers. Answer me right now woman or I swear to God'" He left the threat hanging and Riddhima realized she'd pushed him to breaking point. "Let go of me first then I'll answer," he moved away from her and the blood rushed to her numb fingers. "Jesus, you could have broken my wrist. Seriously, don't you have any respect'" She stopped as she saw him approaching closer again. "Okay, okay can we sit down atleast?" She plopped into a chair while he took the one opposite her and fixed her with a hard stare. Riddhima glanced outside and great, reporters, the icing on the cake. Riddhima looked into his eyes, "You know we should talk in private. Look, the paparazzi are here too. They're going to hound you for answers and sooner or later they'll get them. I would have never told anyone you know." He spared a bored glance at the scene outside and turned back to her. Of course, he doesn't care; Riddhima thought to herself, a dumb jock has bigger problems than reporters. "Cut the crap and come to the point. What do you want, money? Cars? Shoes? Clothes? Fame? Is that why you're doing this? I've never met a more shameless woman in my life before." Riddhima saw the disgust in his eyes and her temper flared, how dare he? "How dare you? You think I'm just a cheap woman like those other bimbos you date. Well listen to me mister, I don't give a d*** for your money or your stupid fame. Im telling you I don't want anything. I can take care of this child on my own. And you better think twice- if you have the brains for it that is- before you spit that type of crap about me." He smiled a lopsided smile that she would have found irresistible under other circumstances; but concerning the circumstances now she just wanted to smack it off of his stupid adorable face. "Well, miss, as they say 'actions speak louder than words'. And in your case your actions have definitely spoken because the stunt that you just pulled is not respectable'just plain dirty, that no respectable woman would ever think of doing. So you know what that makes you? You don't know? Okay I'll tell you. That makes you a slu'" "If you say s**t, I swear to God, Armaan I will make sure that the luscious hair you have on your head will never be able to grow back again." Still smiling, "Is that a threat?" "No, it's a promise." He looked at her for a moment and then got up surprisingly, grabbing his jacket from the chair. "I don't have any more time to waste on you. My lawyer will contact you and if you know what's good for you, you will abort this child" Riddhima was about to lash out but he put up a hand and continued, "Or else, I will personally make sure that everything, and I mean everything, you love or care for will disappear. I will make your life a living hell'and that's a promise." With one last glance at her, he opened the door and everyone cleared the way for him'even the reporters. While back in the study room Riddhima dropped her head into her hands and uttered one word that described the situation perfectly, "S***!!" Okay well tell tell! How was it?...Please :) Note: pm for this ff will be sent from Live_N_Luv. so just add this account and you will get the links for both AR/ArSh version. iNTRO pg 1 Part 1 pg 3 Part 2 pg 5 Part 3 pg 6 Part 4 pg 7 Part 5 pg 9 Part 6 pg 11 The following 32 member(s) liked the above post: anum_026, mahi530, peachgirl, prayasbanetta10, bubblysifu, lifesucks123, Access_Denied, Super.woman, cutie13, rosyammy, Redrose21, meeru_s_armaan, trouble_006, dimpledsmile, Altaira, mansibharti, iceprincess101, akshad, cutiepreet, KaJen_addiction, m4manju, sweetnandu, shonagudia, tehzeebkhan, cant.be.assed., divkashfull, Ethereal-Path, SweetAddiction., -Aliya-, MrMrsChiping., Mrs.Hulk, -GoogleWithMe-, Joined: 27 August 2010 Joined: 16 May 2010 Joined: 05 May 2011 Joined: 04 June 2011 Joined: 10 August 2009 Joined: 08 April 2011 Joined: 06 January 2009 Love, Lies and Deceit-Thread 2 Part 39 pg 64 9/12 Author: crystal-rose Replies: 592 Views: 64442 |crystal-rose||592||64442||17 October 2014 at 6:25pm by BrainEaterOwl| The Art of Telling the Truth with Lies (ArSh) Author: mak3mesmile Replies: 176 Views: 14199 |mak3mesmile||176||14199||24 January 2013 at 9:49am by teenorchid| ff Love,Lies and Deceit-LLD A Maneet Story Author: crystal-rose Replies: 1210 Views: 155408 |crystal-rose||1210||155408||05 April 2012 at 10:21am by mandakini_march| Love, Lies and Deceit Thread 2 Author: crystal-rose Replies: 0 Views: 514 |crystal-rose||0||514||21 November 2011 at 12:10am by crystal-rose| Love, Lies and Deceit- A Maaneet Story Author: crystal-rose Replies: 1 Views: 523 |crystal-rose||1||523||18 September 2011 at 11:20am by ixiaa| Popular Channels :Star Plus | Zee TV | Sony TV | Colors TV | SAB TV | Life OK Quick Links :Top 100 TV Celebrities | Top 100 Bollywood Celebs | About Us | Contact Us | Advertise | Forum Index

ABOUT THE BOOK The boyhood friends have been estranged as adults because of their mutual love of another woman (now dead) some years before. History seems destined to repeat itself, with Marie in the thick of it. Her involvement in the lives of the two men, as well as in the community, leads to a range of exciting relationships and lands Marie in the center of the mystery of a long-unsolved local murder. Eventually she must make her decision: with whom will she cast the lot of her future? ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Phillips has been writing in the Christian marketplace for 30 years. All told, he has written, co-written, and edited some 110 books. Phillips and his wife live in the U.S., and make their second home in Scotland. If you would like to read the first chapter of Angel Harp, go HERE

If a journalist’s mission is to inform, a writer’s passion is to connect. Carefully chosen words can evoke emotions that affect the reader for a few minutes, or last a lifetime. Over time, newspaper clippings yellow, but stories posted online stay as fresh as the day they debuted. Your work lives forever, but that is not always a good thing. Sometimes, you can’t shake free of a story. Those perennial paragraphs you penned stick like gum residue on the bottom of your shoe. For me, it was a simple re-write of a Georgia Department of Natural Resources news release about a new program matching hunters with farmers plagued by wild hogs. It’s been well over two years since the story posted on macon.com, but I continually get calls from hunters at the ready. “Hello. I’d like to come kill your hogs,” is an example of what the usually male voice says. “No, I don’t have hogs for you to shoot. I’m a reporter,” I tell them. Each time, I direct them to the website for the Georgia Department of Agriculture that is listed in the story. One thing I’ve learned in nearly 35 years of reporting is that people don’t always hang onto every word, but they can find your phone number and email address. If I ever lose my day job, maybe I should become a modeling agent. Multiple pictures of smiling youngsters have infiltrated my email ever since I wrote about a back-to-school fashion show at a local department store. “Everyone tells me my son should be a model,” one proud parent emailed months after the event. I even received photographs from a family in England. We can always tell when a co-worker gets one of those inquiries. “I don’t grind my own wheat. I am a reporter,” our business writer recently told a caller. She had no idea where that call came from. It had been years since she wrote about a woman who made her own wheat flour. Don’t get me wrong. I love hearing from people and relish that they find something of interest in what I wrote. So, keep those calls and emails coming. Most times the conversations are timely and even helpful in gaining a greater insight on a topic. When they are not, it’s just comic relief and grist for the journalists’ mill in the ever churning wheel of modern media.

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Last edited: 11th July 2019. *Trigger warning: this post discusses narcissists and narcissistic abuse. You can read about ‘How to Spot Narcissistic Abuse’ here http://bit.ly/2WfnxhC Note: I originally wrote this post to set myself free from an emotionally abusive relationship and to hopefully help others recognise that they may be involved in an unhealthy situation with a narcissist, male or female. The main problem with narcissists is that despite how charming and considerate they can appear (when they want to), they only ever really think of themselves and they always think they can do whatever they want and get away with it (they are so persuasive that is often the case). Once involved with them, it can be difficult to extract yourself but narcissists are incapable of loving you more than themselves regardless of the sweet-nothings they say. A relationship with a narcissist can be very damaging so watch out for the warning signs and protect yourself. Trust me, life without having to deal with a narcissist is much happier. Take care. I’m sure we all have nightmare stories of dates gone awry and relationship disasters we could share but I feel fully qualified to offer my perspective on how to date an arsehole as it seems to come so easily to me. Some would call it a gift. For someone so smart and perceptive – I like to think so anyway – I have shockingly rubbish taste in men. I’m not ‘anti-men’ but I am a little over the fact that I seem to be a sucker for a certain type of highly intelligent narcissistic controlling manipulative man-child having encountered more than one in my dating lifetime. You would think with my track record, I would be able to spot them a mile away or have developed some sort of immunity (ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the ‘anti-arse’!) but sadly it appears that this is not the case. It can actually take me a couple of years to realise oops I’ve done it again. Once I’ve fallen for someone, I develop blinkers – or rose-tinted glasses if you will – and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge their flaws, continuing to make excuses for the poor way they treat me until I have some irrefutable evidence to the contrary: a Facebook message from another girl telling me she spent the previous weekend with my boyfriend who had told me he was having a lads weekend away, or making a concerned friend take a pregnancy test only to be told when the result was positive that the guy I’d been seeing for a few months was the daddy, or the flatmate who told me he had overheard me and my boyfriend having noisy sex the night before when it hadn’t been me who had stayed over… And each one of these guys I let talk me round and took them back – until there were further misdemeanours and they had to go. What can I say, I always try to see the best in people and no one really wants to acknowledge that they have wasted time on a douchebag. Speaking of douchebags, one ex tried to sleep with me a few weeks before he got married (to the girl he two-timed me with btw), he got knocked back, and then after he was married, he thought it was acceptable to send me a video of him pleasuring himself. It was not acceptable and when will guys learn that most women do not appreciate being sent dirty videos and dick pics? He is the sort of idiot the block button was invented for. Someone I definitely should have blocked and walked away from sooner was my married boss, who had the audacity to slide into my FB DMs to initiate an affair and arrange a rendezvous – whilst rocking a loved up profile picture of him and his wife. That should have told me all I needed to know about the kind of man he was but unfortunately not. I blindly fell head over heels into the ‘Dicksand’ (a definition for those of you who don’t know what this is: “It’s like every time the guy looks at you, you forget who you are and are like ‘ahhh’ and you get sucked into their world” – Rebel Wilson, ‘How To Be Single’… We’ve all been there). Biggest mistake of my life though thankfully, I was smart enough not to sleep with him. Narcissists will cleverly try to talk you into getting what they want from you and before you know it, you find yourself doing all you can to please them to retain their attention and affection. They, in turn, demand more and more. It’s not a healthy or satisfying dynamic and you can end up feeling drained trying to fulfil their wants and needs, without your own being taken care of in return. Narcissists will dominate and absolutely suck the life out of you if you let them. You have been warned. Mr Control was not a cheater that I know of (I have my suspicions…) but he was certainly a narcissistic man-child. He swept me off my feet, repeatedly told me he was in it for the long haul and then when the honeymoon period was over and we were in a rut after 18 months, he buggered off ‘to find himself’ – with another girl I should add! He had a way of reasoning with me that meant he just always got his own way and for a quiet life I let him. I always had to stand on the right side of him when we walked around holding hands for example. A small thing but illustrates the way everything always had to be on his terms. If he didn’t get what he wanted, if I didn’t do as I was told, he would sulk, be coldly dismissive or highly critical of me. I remember being told one night, out of the blue, during a romantic dinner that my breath had stunk that morning. His deadpan expression and tone of voice revealed he wasn’t joking. I felt like I’d been slapped around the face. It was the ultimate mood-killer but more than that, it was the disdain that wounded. This led to a row and he made me cry. I’ll never forget the image of him standing over me in a busy London street (he was tall, around 6ft 2 and I’m not, a petite 5ft 2) with a sneer on his face saying contemptuously: “Look at you, playing the victim”. When we met he had made me feel on top of the world with his admiration and adoration. Friends were envious of the way he looked at me. He couldn’t do enough for me – buying in soya milk for me to have for breakfast, giving me lifts to work and so on. As the relationship progressed, all of that changed. It was so gradual and subtle I didn’t even realise what had happened until it was over and I’d had time to reflect. I had been love-bombed by a narcissist until he no longer required my attention. As he painfully knocked me off my pedestal, he started to make comments on my weight, asked why I didn’t wear low-cut tops or false eyelashes, made little critical asides that slowly dented my self-esteem. He isolated me from my friends, making no effort to get to know them whatsoever as ‘he had enough friends’, preferring us to spend time alone or with his friends. Looking forward to spending our first anniversary together, I had pictured being wined and dined and then presented with a thoughtful gift. Instead I was informed that he was going on a lads holiday that weekend – though he did put a surprise bouquet of flowers in my apartment to soften the blow. He just always did what he wanted and I was expected to accept that. When we were at the mall on my birthday, the last one we spent together, the only treat I had wanted that day was to get my nails done. After being told at the salon that I wouldn’t be able to get an appointment for an hour, he behaved like a sulky teenager, refused to let me wait for the treatment I wanted, insisting instead that I go with him back to his apartment as he “loved me and wanted me all to himself” – how manipulative and selfish. And it was him that ended the relationship. Hilarious! Throughout our relationship, I was not allowed to put a picture of the two of us as my profile picture on Facebook because ‘when it’s on the internet it is out there forever’ he said, though I found it very easy to delete all pictures of him from my page when we broke up… You don’t need a guide on how to date an arsehole. Arseholes are everywhere. Just be a kind genuine person and they will hunt you out. I hope if and when that happens though, you are smarter than me and run for your life. After some of my experiences, I might have gotten quite cynical about the quality of men out there but I am an eternal optimistic, certain that there is a good man out there for me (or good woman – I’m open-minded) who will come along when the time is right. In the meantime, I shall stay happily single and play ‘dodge the dickhead’ along with all the other lovely single ladies out there deserving of being treated right. So back to the title: How To Date An Arsehole. My advice: Don’t! Take care, Lisa.

New album release Big Daddy Wilson – Neckbone Stew special guest Ruthie Foster & Eric Bibb. Produced by the Goosebumps Brothers alias Cesare Nolli & Paolo Legramandi Take a Cadillac ride through the Southern States and you’ll hear a thousand flavours of music on the breeze. Listen to Neckbone Stew and you’ll hear them expertly stirred into one record. “It’s a mixture of all the spices and good stuff you’ll find in most Southern kitchens,” says the award-winning US bluesman Big Daddy Wilson. “To make a good stew, you need a little bit of everything, and this was the idea I went with for my new CD. A beautiful mélange of blues, spiritual, roots, soul and reggae. I just felt like mixing it up this time.” Released in 2017 on Ruf Records, Neckbone Stew is the latest twist in a fascinating life story. Wilson was raised a “real country boy” in Edenton, North Carolina, but fate had other plans. By 1979, the young Southerner had escaped the grinding poverty of his hometown, enlisting in the US Army and relocating to Germany, where he fell for the raw power of live blues. “I met the blues here,” he remembers. “I didn’t know what the blues was before. It was here that I found a part of me that was missing for so long in my life.” Wilson had sung in church as a child – a precaution by his mother and grandma to keep him “away from drugs and off the streets” – but his natural shyness meant he’d never considered stepping onstage. Now, he discovered a talent for songwriting and an unmistakable voice that soon won praise from the iconic Eric Bibb: “As soon as you hear Big Daddy Wilson’s voice, whether speaking or singing, you hear his southern country roots. It’s a voice baptised in the river of African-American song, a voice with the power to heal”. That’s a sentiment echoed by the thousands who have watched the Big Daddy Wilson Trio perform on stages across the USA, Europe and Southern Hemisphere over the last two decades. Working from his adopted home in Germany, meanwhile, the expat bandleader has also earned acclaim for studio albums like 2009’s Love Is The Key, 2011’s acoustic Thumb A Ride, 2013’s I’m Your Man and 2015’s Time. And yet, according to the man in the hat, Neck Bone Stew is the jewel in his back catalogue. “For me,” he says, “it sits on top. The latest is always the greatest. I was in the mood, like John L. Hooker said.” If Neck Bone Stew brings together a variety of genres, then it also unites a dream-team of musicians who helped these 13 songs soar. Led by the multi-instrumental talents of Wilson himself on vocals, guitar and percussion, long-standing Trio members Cesare Nolli (guitar) and Paolo Legramandi (bass) brought fire and flair to sessions at Italy’s Fire Place Room. “These guys are just incredible musicians and great to work with,” reflects the bandleader. “I have some special guests, too. The phenomenal Ruthie Foster. Mr. Staffan Astner. One of my blues heroes, the great Eric Bibb. And this CD is produced by the Goosebumps Brothers. It was a piece of cake – or should I say, Cookies Gone Kill Me. Thanks to the local café who supplied all the cookies…” As for the songs, they run the gamut. There’s the rolling acoustic blues of Cross Creek Road. The exuberant brass lines, wah guitar and bad-luck lyric of 7 Years. The melancholy clipped chords of Damn If I Do, with its depiction of a lover brought his knees (“You got your hooks so deep in my heart/You got me crawlin’, but still you won’t stop”). The album’s musical variety, meanwhile, is exemplified by the magical moment when the title track switches from an aching slide-blues into a reggae strut, with lyrics describing a lover who “got them big old hips, look just like two battleships”. Wilson is equally adept on the sun kissed balladry of I Just Need A Smile, which pairs lush chords with a lyric that implores us to ditch our gadgets and reengage with our humanity. “It’s all about life,” decides the bandleader of the album’s subject matter. “But there are two things you need in a good blues CD – a woman and some food.” At a time when most mainstream music fails to satisfy, Neckbone Stew will give Big Daddy Wilson’s growing army of global fans the soul food they’ve been craving. “Throughout my career and journey,” he reflects, “I’ve been influenced and inspired by so many different and talented people, places and things. And somehow I wanted to bring it all together on this album. To put it all in the Stew…” Video: Big Daddy Wilson – NECKBONE STEW Big Daddy Wilson – Neckbone Stew Label: Ruf Records Release date: 27 January 2017 01. Cross Creek Road 02. 7 Years 03. Neckbone Stew 04. I Just Need A Smile 05. Tom Cat 06. He’ll Make A Way 07. Give Me One Reason 08. Running Shoes 09. My Babe 10. Damn If I Do 11. Cookies Gonna Kill Me 12. The River 13. Peanut Butter Pic Video: Official Album Teaser Website Big Daddy Wilson : https://www.bigdaddywilson.com/

North Conway NHOfficial North Conway Area Guide North Conway NHOfficial North Conway Area Guide Settlers Green Outlet Village Tax free Shopping at Name Brand Outlets in North Conway NH Settlers Green Outlet Village has been a landmark shopping experience in North Conway since their opening in 1988. Located at 2 common Court, North Conway, NH (Just off Route 16 , also known as White Mountain Highway), Settlers Green plays host to 70 unique outlet stores. Settlers Green Outlet Village is a major hotspot for locals and vacationers alike to enjoy a fun fueled day of tax free shopping. Among its vast array of stores, you are sure to find what you are looking for and maybe another bargain or two! Across the road from Settlers Green outlet Village you will find another shopping plaza called Settlers Crossing. This plaza is anchored by the L L bean Outlet Store and also includes Clarks Bostonian, Walgreens, Starbucks, Black Cap Grille, and REI Co-op, their first-ever outdoor experience center. Settlers Green Streetside Recently opened is a 50,000 Sq Ft expansion of Settlers Green Outlet Village called Settlers Green Streetside. This new plaza features Polo Ralph Lauren, Columbia Sportswear, Francesca’s. the LOFT Outlet, Regatta Great Outdoor, Michael Kors, Kate Spade New York, Skechers and thinkkitchen. If you want a bite to eat, visit Barley & Salt Tap House and Kitchen or Trails End Ice Cream for sweets and treats. Settlers Green Outlet Village Hours of Operation for 2020 Hours of operation for Settlers Green Outlet Village are as follows: Store hours at restaurants and services as well as Settlers Crossing may vary from these hours. Jan 2, 2020 thru March 29, 2020 Monday-Thursday: 10AM – 6PM Friday & Saturday: 10AM – 8PM Sunday: 10AM- 6PM March 30th -June 21, 2020 Monday-Thursday: 10AM – 7PM Friday-Saturday: 10AM – 8PM Sunday: 10AM – 6PM Easter- April 12th – Select stores open 10AM-6PM Memorial Day- May 25th- 10AM-6PM June 22, 2020 thru September 20th, 2020 Monday-Saturday: 9AM – 9PM Sunday: 10AM- 6PM July 4th- 9AM-6PM Labor Day- Sept 7th- 9AM-6PM September 21st, 2020 thru December 31st, 2020 Monday-Thursday: 10AM- 7PM Friday-Saturday: 10AM- 8PM Sunday: 10AM- 6PM Columbus Day: 10AM-6PM Bring A Friend: 8AM-8PM (Sat), 8AM-6PM (Sun) Veterans Day: 10AM-6PM Wednesday, November 25: 10AM-6PM Black Friday: 6PM-8PM Saturday, November 28: 10AM-8PM Sunday, November 29: 10PM-6PM Christmas Eve: 10AM-5:00PM Christmas Day: Closed Holiday Break, December 28-30: 10AM-8PM New Year’s Eve: 10AM-6PM New Year’s Day: 10AM-6PM The following is a list of stores in Settlers Green Outlet Village: If it’s Accessories and Jewelry you are after here are some outlets to pop into: Claire’s Accessories: From tween’s to teen’s this store is where mom can even find some fashion trends such as earrings, necklaces and more! Coach: Need the newest design of handbags? Wallet or scarf? Come on in for all your fine fashion tastes. Kay Jewelers Outlet: Your trusted source for engagement and wedding rings, diamonds, charms and all types of jewelry. Sunglass Hut: Need some new shades for that beautiful sunny weather out and about in the White Mountain Valley? Go right on in and see what the Sunglass Hut has to offer you and your family! If you are looking for those Fashion Needs here are some wonderful outlets to enjoy. American Eagle Outfitters: The place to shop for men’s and woman’s jeans, tees, shoes and more! Banana Republic Factory Store: Has all your latest fashion needs to suits, casual wear and accessories to match! Brooks Brothers Factory Store: Here you can find wonderful dress shirts and other apparel of all styles for everyone in your family as well as suits, dresses, and even styles for your Country Club’s needs. Carters: Did you and your family welcome a new born or a family friend? Or even have a little tyke, Carters is one of several stores for small children’s dress needs. Champion Outlet: Has shoes to running gear, to work out outfits, Champion will help you suit your needs! Chico’s: Ladies this outlet is for you! Chico’s has a wide variety of outfits from sweaters, pants denim and accessories you are sure to love. Christopher and Banks: Comfortable, affordable, casual women’s clothing. Columbia Sportwear: Columbia sportswear and hiking clothing. Dress Barn: Is for the career woman and her dressing needs or for any fashion to casual wear. Eddie Bauer Outlet: Looking for casual wear with style? This outlet has it all from shoes to swim wear and more. European Fashion Avenue: A modern clothing boutique offering a variety of high-quality and stylish clothes and accessories for women. Express Factory Store: Find the best men’s and women’s fashion clothing to get you to the next level. Francesca’s: Collection of clothing, jewelry, handbags, shoes & unique gifts. Gap: Who can resist a great deal for clothing at Gap with everyday great savings? Haggar: From casual shirts to dress pants, Hagger has the styles you love and want. Hanes Brands: Has a variety of garments for you and your family to pick and choose from. J. Crew Factory: How can anyone resist J. Crew’s fashionable sensible styles for any event in your life? From casual to evening wear and even accessories. Jockey: Has your active wear to casual wear for great prices! Justice: For the young girl in your life this store has all her fashion needs. Kate Spade New York: A global life and style house with handbags, jewelry, footwear, home decor and more. Levi’s: Is jeans you need? Levi’s has all the styles you and your family will love. LOFT Outlet: Women’s clothing that is feminine and casual. Maiden Form: Ladies, this store has all your undergarment needs to even sleepwear you will love. Michael Kors: Luxury accessories and ready-to-wear from award-winning designer. Old Navy: Has all the hottest styles you and your family will love with everyday great prices. OshKosh B’Gosh: For kids 0-12, OshKosh B’gosh offers timeless and trend-right clothing grounded in an authentic American heritage. Polo Ralph Lauren Factory: Clothing for men, women and children from Ralph Lauren. Regatta Great Outdoors: affordable clothing to live happy and healthy lives in the great outdoors. Rue 21 Company Store: Has great styles of clothing and accessories for everyday wear at everyday great prices. Talbots: Ladies you will love this store with its chic look and accessories. Tommy Hilfiger: Has all the latest fashion from casual to dress wear and so much more. The Children’s Place: High quality, value priced clothing and accessories for boys and girls. Sizes 0-14. Under Armour: Has all your athletic needs for outer wear for the active person. Van Heusen/IZOD: Has a variety of other brand names you love from causal and dress with more accessories. Wilson’s Leather Outlet: Has wonderful style leather jackets, bags and wallets. Looking for some gift idea’s Here are some outlets to check out while you are shopping in Settler’s Green. Corningware Corelle & More: Carries all World Kitchen brands Fragrance Outlet: Genuine designer fragrances. Kitchen Collection: This store has all your cooking items from pots, pans to even cooking stones you will love with so much more. Lindt: Chocolate lovers enjoy Lindt’s delicious Swiss chocolate and its wide variety to enjoy. North Conway Olive Oil Co.: The freshest olive oils and balsamic vinegars in the world complete with tasting bar. Percy Paws: A fun, happy pet store to bring your doggies and kitties for a cool shopping experience. Stonewall Kitchen: Has your cooking essentials needs from homemade jellies to a variety of baking mixtures, this place has it all! ThinkKitchen: Everything from serveware, barware, cookware, bakeware, dinnerware and kitchen tools. Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton: Shop for crystal, stemware, china, vases, gifts and more! Yankee Candle: This store has a huge selection of candleswith abundant scents, accessories and gifts! Looking for Footwear and Shoes and accessories? Adidas: Looking for new sports gear and apparel? Adidas has just what you are looking for from shoes, to clothing and more. Crocs: Come shop for their innovative casual footware for men, woman and children! Famous Footwear Outlet: Has a wide variety of brand shoes you love with great prices. G.H. Bass & Co. Outlet: Come shop for all of your shoe and accessory needs. Gold Toe: The place to find the largest selection of socks for men, woman and children. New Balance Factory Store: Come on in for premium New Balance footware and apparel. Nike Factory Store: Has all your physical activities needs from clothes to shoes and more. Skechers Outlet: Trend-right sneakers, dress shoes, sandals and boots for men and women. Timberland Factory Store: Has rugged boots, shoes, clothing, backpacks , luggage and accessories. Need a bite to eat and drink or maybe need a snack? Barley & Salt: Lofty, brick-lined location offering elevated pub plates with global flavors and 30 craft beers on tap. FIRE by Wicked Fresh: Food truck fare such as tacos, burritos and bowls. The Met Coffehouse: Trails End Sweets & Treats: White Mountain Cupcakery: Come on in and taste their award-winning cupcakes in a variety of enticing flavors!

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Cosby released from prison, Geraldo Rivera Praises Bill Cosby’s Release, Bette Midler’s allegation of being groped by Geraldo July 6, 2021 Comments Off on Cosby released from prison, Geraldo Rivera Praises Bill Cosby’s Release, Bette Midler’s allegation of being groped by Geraldo Cosby released from prison Geraldo Rivera Praises Bill Cosby’s Release Bette Midler’s allegation of being groped by Geraldo Bill Cosby is a free man after Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturns sex assault conviction By Ray Sanchez, Sonia Moghe and Kristina Sgueglia, CNN June 30, 2021 Bill Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned his sexual assault conviction, saying the disgraced actor’s due process rights were violated. The stunning decision in the case of the man once known as “America’s Dad” reverses the first high-profile celebrity criminal trial of the #MeToo era. The panel of Pennsylvania State Supreme Court judges said in their opinion that a former Montgomery County district attorney’s decision to not prosecute Cosby in 2005 in return for his deposition in a civil case was ultimately used against him at trial. “In light of these circumstances, the subsequent decision by successor D.A.s to prosecute Cosby violated Cosby’s due process rights,” the judges wrote.Cosby was sentenced in 2018 to 3 to 10 years in a state prison for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004…. For victims who sought closure in the case’s resolution, the ruling represented “a slap in the face” in the words of Lisa Bloom, the attorney for three accusers. Bloom said she thinks it could be “a very hard day” for all the women who accused him of sexual assault…. “My hope is that this decision will not dampen the reporting of sexual assaults by victims. Prosecutors in my office will continue to follow the evidence wherever and to whomever it leads. We still believe that no one is above the law — including those who are rich, famous and powerful.” Constand and her attorneys said the decision to vacate Cosby’s conviction is disappointing. “Today’s majority decision regarding Bill Cosby is not only disappointing but of concern in that it may discourage those who seek justice for sexual assault in the criminal justice system from reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant or may force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action,” Constand and her attorneys said in a statement. Geraldo Rivera Praises Bill Cosby’s Release, Says Harvey Weinstein ‘Unjustly Convicted’ Lindsey Ellefson Thu, July 1, 2021 Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera said Wednesday that he supported Bill Cosby’s release from prison, decrying what he called the “mob justice” of the comedian’s 2018 conviction on sexual assault charges. While many expressed outrage at Cosby’s release and the overturning of his conviction, Rivera said that the comic’s prosecution “never should have happened” and asked: “How is he going to get back the two years that he has lost now?” He also suggested that Harvey Weinstein was “unjustly convicted” and that the disgraced mogul might find similar recourse in appealing his own 2020 conviction on rape charges in New York. John Roberts, who was anchoring “America Reports” at the time of Rivera’s comments, responded, “You say, ‘How is he going to get back the two years that he has lost while being in prison?’ How will the 58 women who say he did to them what they say he did ever get back any sense of justice here, and any sense of ever being whole again?”…. Cosby’s case is one of the most high profile of the #MeToo era. He was convicted in 2018 of drugging and sexually assaulting a former Temple University employee, Andrea Constand, at his home in 2004. Though the case involves just one woman, at least 60 women have come forward to accuse the former entertainer of sexual assault….https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/geraldo-rivera-praises-bill-cosby-130136897.html Geraldo Rivera Apologizes to Bette Midler for “Embarrassing Her All Those Years Ago” “Geraldo may have apologized for his tweets supporting Matt Lauer, but he has yet to apologize for this.” By Hilary Weaver November 30, 2017 Geraldo Rivera tweeted an apology to Bette Midler Friday for an alleged incident of inappropriate sexual behavior that she described in a resurfaced 1991 interview with Barbara Walters…. On Wednesday, Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera posted a series of tweets in which he defended Matt Lauer, who had been fired from the Today show following reports that Lauer had displayed “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.” Rivera later apologized for his defense of Lauer, but his apology was too little, too late for Bette Midler who, in her own tweet, reminded her followers of an incident she says she experienced with Rivera years ago…. “O.K., get in a little trouble,” Midler said. “Well, Geraldo and his producer came to do an interview with me . . . This is when he was very sort of hot. He and his producer left the crew in the other room. They pushed me into my bathroom, they broke two poppers and pushed them under my nose, and proceeded to grope me . . . I did not offer myself up on the altar of Geraldo Rivera. He was unseemly. His behavior was unseemly.”… Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse, Ghislaine Maxwell’s Deposition (Jeffrey Epstein), Murdered 1.7 million Jews, QAnon Misinformation To Spread Hate, North Korea detainees ritual torture and sexual assault October 27, 2020 Comments Off on Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse, Ghislaine Maxwell’s Deposition (Jeffrey Epstein), Murdered 1.7 million Jews, QAnon Misinformation To Spread Hate, North Korea detainees ritual torture and sexual assault Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse, Ghislaine Maxwell’s Deposition (Jeffrey Epstein), Murdered 1.7 million Jews, QAnon Misinformation To Spread Hate, North Korea detainees ritual torture and sexual assault – Ex-members of Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse People of Praise hire lawyers to investigate historical sexual abuse allegations as former members speak of ‘emotional torment’, “deep concern regarding the culture of secrecy, abuse of power and male-dominant hierarchy” at People of Praise, Members who admit to having gay sex are expelled from the group, which staunchly opposes same-sex marriage. – Read Ghislaine Maxwell’s Just-Unsealed Deposition Accused sex traffic king accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was put under oath for a lawsuit by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims four years ago. – QAnon Is Using Misinformation To Spread Hate – The Way Cults Do “if you are speaking out against QAnon I’m glad, but PLEASE don’t discredit satanic cult survivors while doing so. We are still fighting to be believed and heard, even after everything we’ve survived.” – In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the Jews in the General Governent. This plan was codenamed “Operation Reinhard.” Camp personnel murdered approximately 1.7 million Jews as part of Operation Reinhard. The victims of the Operation Reinhard camps also included an unknown number of Poles, Roma (Gypsies), and Soviet prisoners of war – Catholic Church Richmond Diocese to Pay $6.3 Million to Sexual Abuse Victims – North Korea detainees subjected to ritual torture and sexual assault – rights group Revealed: ex-members of Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse People of Praise hire lawyers to investigate historical sexual abuse allegations as former members speak of ‘emotional torment’ Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington Wed 21 Oct 2020 Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court has prompted former members of her secretive faith group, the People of Praise, to come forward and share stories about emotional trauma and – in at least one case – sexual abuse they claim to have suffered at the hands of members of the Christian group. ‘It instilled such problems’: ex-member of Amy Coney Barrett’s faith group speaks out In the wake of the allegations, the Guardian has learned that the charismatic Christian organization, which is based in Indiana, has hired the law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct an “independent investigation” into sexual abuse claims on behalf of People of Praise…. Barrett’s father has served as a leader in the community. Barrett was also listed as a “handmaid” in a 2010 directory, or female leader, served as a trustee at a school associated with the group, and has been featured in People of Praise magazines that were removed from the group’s website following her appointment as an appeals court judge in 2017. The Guardian has confirmed that Barrett lived in a household led by one of the founders of the People of Praise, Kevin Ranaghan, while she was a law student at Notre Dame, and lived with another People of Praise family – Barbette and William Brophy – in Virginia after she graduated. Proponents of the faith community have said in other press reports that they are misunderstood, and that it is a close-knit community that seeks to support other members “financially and materially and spiritually”. For Sarah (Mitchell) Kuehl, a 48-year-old former member who grew up in the community, discussions about Barrett’s possible nomination prompted her – after years of trying to figure out how to address it – to send an email on 23 September to Craig Lent, the current head of People of Praise who also works as a professor at Notre Dame. In it, Kuehl claimed she had been sexually abused decades earlier by a “household member”, a male member of “the community” who had lived with the Mitchell family as part of the group’s communal living practices. Single people were expected to be celibate and live in family households which were expected to provide an example of married life, former members say. After her alleged abuser – who along with her family was technically a member of a precursor group called Servants of the Light/Lord that merged in 1984 with People of Praise – admitted to her father that he had been molesting Kuehl, he was moved to another household and eventually had a marriage “arranged” for him, she said. She was four years old when the abuse began and it lasted for two years. At the time, her family also lived with other single men and women…. Kuehl told the Guardian she was eager not to be seen as seeking revenge on People of Praise, or questioning Barrett’s character, intelligence, or her legal mind. As a devout Catholic who regularly attends mass and is a mother of five, she is also not anti-religious, but rather feels a “deep concern regarding the culture of secrecy, abuse of power and male-dominant hierarchy” at People of Praise. But former members paint a different picture. Allegations and concerns center on claims of the intense subjugation of women by the community leaders; control of members’ lives and decisions, including marriage, living arrangements, and child rearing; and in one case, the mishandling of allegations of sexual abuse. Members who admit to having gay sex are expelled from the group, which staunchly opposes same-sex marriage. Read Ghislaine Maxwell’s Just-Unsealed Deposition IN HER OWN WORDS Tracy Connor Executive Editor Oct. 22, 2020 Accused sex trafficking accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was put under oath for a lawsuit by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims four years ago. Her testimony was placed under seal, but on Thursday, it was made public by court order…. QAnon Is Using Misinformation To Spread Hate – The Way Cults Do By Cheryl Rainfield, October 2020 A personal plea: if you are speaking out against QAnon I’m glad, but PLEASE don’t discredit satanic cult survivors while doing so. We are still fighting to be believed and heard, even after everything we’ve survived. Misinformation is a powerful tool used to discredit people speaking out about oppression and misuse of power, and because it usually draws on people’s insecurities and feelings of powerlessness, it often spreads quickly. QAnon creates and spreads conspiracy theories, including that Trump is supposedly fighting a secret band of pedophiles, satanic child-sex trafficking rings, and murderers who are high-ranking US Democrat politicians, Hollywood actors, and philanthropists. This is particularly absurd when the people QAnon are targeting are fighting against oppression, and Trump is the one who is openly spreading hatred, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and violence, while encouraging white supremacy. And the people QAnon are attacking are the ones that they think will bring down Trump. QAnon is anti-Semitic, drawing heavily on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory used by Hitler—and saying that the Rothschild family control all the banks. They are also racist, saying that the Black Lives Movement is responsible for all sorts of ills including wildfires, that Black Lives Matter members are pedophiles, and that Jewish people or Chinese people intentionally created the coronavirus…. I am a cult torture survivor; my parents and extended family were part of intergenerational, interconnected cults. A satanic cult was only one of the cults that my abusers were members of. They were also involved in KKK, Nazi, Masonic, and other cults. It took me years of remembering the abuse, which I dissociated to survive, running away from my abusers, being found and re-abused, running away again and remembering more, to finally get safe. I spent years fighting against lies they told me, such as that they would kill me if I remembered and talked about the abuse. And there are many more survivors still struggling to get safe, or who are suffering in silence, afraid of people’s reactions when they do speak out. We know well how people don’t want to believe that such extreme, horrible acts of abuse and torture can still occur or be perpetrated by abusers who look like regular people. We know how hard it is to find the courage and strength to talk about the abuse, only to be not believed. I have been dismayed by the number of normally oppression-aware people who—in their attempts to prevent disinformation and conspiracy theories spread by QAnon—completely dismiss cult torture survivors by saying it is all “satanic panic,” and that cult abuse doesn’t really happen. This discredits cult torture survivors like me, and it’s exactly what cults want to have happen. Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard)In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the Jews in the General Governent. This plan was codenamed “Operation Reinhard.” Three killing centers were established as part of this action: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Operation Reinhard marked the deadliest phase of Nazi Germany’s intention to commit genocide against the Jewish people. Key Facts 1 Operation Reinhard was the code name for the German plan to murder the approximately two million Jews living in German-occupied Poland. 2 Under Operation Reinhard, three killing centers, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, operated between 1942 and 1943. Nazi officials employed carbon monoxide gas generated by motor engines to kill their victims. 3 In all, camp personnel murdered approximately 1.7 million Jews as part of Operation Reinhard. The victims of the Operation Reinhard camps also included an unknown number of Poles, Roma (Gypsies), and Soviet prisoners of war. Richmond Diocese to Pay $6.3 Million to Sexual Abuse Victims By The Associated Press • Published October 16, 2020 The Catholic Diocese of Richmond announced Thursday that it is paying $6.3 million to 51 people who experienced sexual abuse as minors by clergy. North Korea detainees subjected to ritual torture and sexual assault – rights group Prisoners considered ‘less than an animal’ by regime, according to interviews with 15 former detainees by Human Rights Watch Justin McCurry in Tokyo Sun 18 Oct 2020 uspects in North Korea are subjected to ritual torture, humiliation and sexual assault by a criminal justice system that considers them “less than an animal”, according to the first-ever report detailing the brutality of the country’s pretrial detention conditions. The US-based Human Rights Watch [HRW] said people who are arrested and sent to pretrial detention are placed in cramped, unhygienic cells, forced to confess and denied proper food and clothing. “Prisoners literally waste away from lack of food unless they can bribe guards to have their families send food,” Phil Robertson, HRW’s Asia deputy director, told reporters on Monday. The report is based on interviews with 15 women and men who were detained in the country, as well as former officials with knowledge of the criminal justice system….. Former detainees said they were forced to sit still on the floor of their cell, kneeling or with their legs crossed, for up to 16 hours a day, with the slightest movement leading to punishments ranging from hitting – using hands, sticks, or leather belts – to forcing them to run in circles around a yard up to 1,000 times. “If I or others moved, the guards would order me or all the cellmates to extend our hands through the cell bars and would step on them repeatedly with their boots,” said Park Ji-cheol, a former detainee…. April 9, 2020 Comments Off on All the Women Who Have Spoken Out Against Joe Biden, Former Staffer Says He Sexually Assaulted Her Tara Reade, the former staffer in Joe Biden’s Senate office who has come forward with allegations that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993….Reade told journalist Katie Halper in an interview published Tuesday that Biden repeatedly touched her without her consent and sexually assaulted her. Reade approached the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund in January looking for assistance, but was reportedly told the fund could not help her because Biden is a candidate for federal office, and pursuing a case could jeopardize the fund’s nonprofit status. Reade says she learned from The Intercept report that the public relations firm representing Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund is SKDKnickerbocker, whose managing director, Anita Dunn, is top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign. Published on Tuesday, April 07, 2020 by Common Dreams Yes, we are in the middle of a contentious primary season and a presidential election with much on the line. And, yes, allegations of sexual assault or rape against the current leader in the Democratic primaries are inconvenient. But rape is even more inconvenient. by Anthony Zenkus Ahead of former vice-president Joe Biden’s expected 2020 presidential bid, women are speaking out about their personal interactions with him — alleging he physically touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Weinstein gets 23 years in sentence hailed by accusers, Stop Misinformation Against Survivors of Trauma March 13, 2020 Comments Off on Weinstein gets 23 years in sentence hailed by accusers, Stop Misinformation Against Survivors of Trauma Weinstein gets 23 years in sentence hailed by accusers By MICHAEL R. SISAK, TOM HAYS and JENNIFER PELTZ March 11, 2020 NEW YORK (AP) — Harvey Weinstein was sentenced Wednesday to 23 years in prison after breaking his courtroom silence with a rambling plea for mercy in which he professed to be “totally confused” by the #MeToo movement that spelled the Hollywood producer’s downfall. His accusers — those who testified against him and many others who have spoken out elsewhere against the former Hollywood mogul — hailed the near-maximum punishment for his rape and criminal sex act convictions as long overdue. The 67-year-old Weinstein, who arrived at the courthouse Wednesday in a wheelchair and was taken to a hospital after complaining of chest pains hours after the court hearing, could spend the rest of his life behind bars. He was convicted last month of raping a once-aspiring actress in a New York City hotel room in 2013 and forcibly performing oral sex on former TV and film production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in 2006. He faced a minimum of five years and a maximum of 29 years in prison. The conviction marked the first criminal fallout from a raft of allegations that the Oscar-winning movie producer used his clout to lure women, sexually assault or harass them and then silence them. “Although this is a first conviction, this is not a first offense,” Judge James Burke said in imposing the sentence…. Both of the women Weinstein was convicted of assaulting told the court about the damage he did to them, and the empowerment they felt when testifying against him. “Rape is not just one moment of penetration. It is forever,” said the 2013 rape accuser, who recalled a moment during the trial when she left the witness stand in tears and then could be heard screaming from an adjacent room. It was, she said, “the day my voice came back to its full power,” she said. Asked later about her reaction after the sentence, she wiped her eyes, raised her arm and nodded her head. Haleyi broke down in tears as she told the court the 2006 attack scarred her deeply and “stripped me of my dignity as a woman.” The encounter made her rethink her career in the entertainment business and left her feeling afraid of retaliation, she said…. Years of whispers about Weinstein’s alleged behavior burst into public view in The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2017. In the aftermath, more than 90 women, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and other actresses, publicly accused Weinstein of sexual assault and sexual harassment. The takedown energized the #MeToo movement for speaking up about sexual assault…. Weinstein was convicted on two counts: criminal sex act and rape in the third degree. He was acquitted of the more serious charges against him of first-degree rape and two counts of predatory sexual assault. Now that Weinstein has been sentenced, his lawyers can move forward with a promised appeal. He also faces rape and sexual assault charges in California, where Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey tweeted Wednesday that her office was working on extraditing him. No arraignment date has yet been set. Petition: Stop Misinformation Against Survivors of Trauma and Their Helpers by The Satanic Temple’s Grey Faction February 24, 2020 § Leave a comment Harvey Weinstein found guilty on 2 counts, not guilty on more serious charges Harvey Weinstein was on trial for rape in Manhattan. By Chris Francescani and Alexandra Svokos February 24, 2020 The jury reached a verdict in the New York rape trial of Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced former Hollywood mega-producer. Weinstein, 67, was found guilty of criminal sexual assault and of rape in the third degree. He was found not guilty of the more serious charges of predatory sexual assault and of rape in the first degree…. The criminal sexual assault charge came from Miriam “Mimi” Haleyi, who was a production assistant and said that he assaulted her in 2006. That charge came with sentencing guidelines of five to 25 years. The charge of rape in the third degree came from another, unnamed accuser, and came with sentencing guidelines of probation up to four years…. Weinstein was charged with raping one woman in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and performing a forcible sex act on a different woman, who has since identified herself as Haleyi, in 2006. He pleaded not guilty to all charges and claims any sexual encounters were cosensual. In addition to the two women behind those charges, four others testified in support of prosecutors’ efforts to demonstrate a pattern of sexual predation…. Survivors of Epstein’s Abuse – she spent summer at Mar-a-Lago Trump’s resort, Rep Jim Jordan denies ignored report – told “directly about sexual misconduct by Strauss,” Child Abuse WhatsApp group, Why child abuse survivors keep and break silence – 24 years to reveal secret December 11, 2019 § Leave a comment – ‘This Is Not Our Shame’: Five Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s Abuse on Trauma, Justice, and Sisterhood “She was introduced to the financier Jeffrey Epstein through Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the British media titan Robert Maxwell. (Epstein, charged with sex trafficking girls, some just 14 or 15, reportedly committed suicide in jail over the summer.) Giuffre was 16 at the time, spending her summer as an attendant at the spa at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s resort. According to the deposition, Maxwell told Giuffre she wanted to hire her as a masseuse.” – Members of child abuse WhatsApp group arrested in 11 countries – Rape and sexual assault – Rep. Jim Jordan denies he ignored report that Ohio State doctor performed sex act in shower “misconduct by Strauss, who was found by independent investigators to have sexually abused 177 male students over two decades… second person to say he told Jordan directly about sexual misconduct by Strauss “ Members of child abuse WhatsApp group arrested in 11 countries 10 December 2019 Spanish police say 33 people have been arrested globally in connection with a WhatsApp group for images of child sex abuse and other violent content. The many “extreme” images shared in the group had been “normalised by most of its members”, the force said. Arrests were made in 11 different countries across three continents, but the majority – 17 – were in Spain. Many of those arrested or being investigated in Spain are themselves under 18, including a 15-year-old boy. In Uruguay, police arrested two people – one of whom was a mother who abused her daughter and sent images of this to the group. In another case, a 29-year-old man was arrested for not only downloading the images, but also encouraging other group members to make contact with young girls – particularly migrants who would be unlikely to go to the police. What did the group share? In a statement, the police said the group shared “paedophilic content, sometimes of extreme severity, together with other content that was legal but was not suitable for minors because of their extreme nature”. Some group members had even created “stickers” – small digital images that are easily shared, similar to emojis – of children being abused…. ‘This Is Not Our Shame’: Five Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s Abuse on Trauma, Justice, and Sisterhood Stories about Epstein’s accusers tend to have their own lexicon, filled with phrases designed to shame and titillate—sex slave, victim, troubled. With the world watching, Virginia Giuffre, Teresa Helm, Rachel Benavidez, Marijke Chartouni, and Sarah Ransome want to reframe the narrative—and reclaim their power. By Mattie Kahn December 10, 2019 Giuffre first came forward in 2015 and her account is best known; in a sworn deposition taken in 2016, she said she was introduced to the financier Jeffrey Epstein through Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the British media titan Robert Maxwell. (Epstein, charged with sex trafficking girls, some just 14 or 15, reportedly committed suicide in jail over the summer.) Giuffre was 16 at the time, spending her summer as an attendant at the spa at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s resort. According to the deposition, Maxwell told Giuffre she wanted to hire her as a masseuse. She promised Giuffre travel and an education. Giuffre accepted the offer. The abuse, she recalls, started soon after, with Epstein demanding sexual services for himself and some of his friends. In the deposition Giuffre said, “My whole life revolved around just pleasing these men and keeping Ghislaine [Maxwell] and Jeffrey [Epstein] happy. Their whole entire lives revolved around sex.” (Maxwell has denied the allegations.)…. Rep. Jim Jordan denies he ignored report that Ohio State doctor performed sex act in shower Jordan continues to insist he knew nothing about what Dr. Richard Strauss did to the male athletes and others. Nov. 12, 2019, By Corky Siemaszko Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has dismissed as “ridiculous” a claim by a professional referee that he told the congressman directly that Dr. Richard Strauss had masturbated in front of him in a shower at Ohio State University. Jordan addressed the allegation in an interview with his hometown newspaper Monday, just days after NBC News reported that the referee claimed in a lawsuit that the congressman, who was then an assistant wrestling coach, barely blinked when he described his encounter with the sexual predator. “Yeah, that’s Strauss,” Jordan and the head wrestling coach replied dismissively, according to the lawsuit, which does not name Jordan as a defendant…. NBC News has reached out for the comment to the referee, who is a respected member of Ohio’s wrestling community and who has known Jordan for decades. Identified in the court papers as John Doe 42, his allegation about Jordan’s alleged indifference was part of the lawsuit filed last week by 43 survivors against Ohio State. It charged the university’s “ingrained culture of institutional indifference” enabled Strauss to sexually abuse well over 100 students and athletes from a half-dozen sports over two decades. The referee is the second person to say he told Jordan directly about sexual misconduct by Strauss, who was found by independent investigators to have sexually abused 177 male students over two decades. Other former Ohio State wrestlers have said Jordan had to have known about Strauss because he shared a locker room with them and took part in discussions about the doctor, who died in 2005. Jordan has repeatedly denied knowing anything about what Strauss did to the wrestlers and has called allegations that he turned a blind eye to the abuse politically motivated. Ohio State spokesman Ben Johnson said last week that the university “has led the effort to investigate and expose the misdeeds of Richard Strauss and the systemic failures to respond, and the university is committed to a fair resolution…. Rape and sexual assault ‘You grow up hating yourself’: why child abuse survivors keep – and break – their silence The average victim takes 24 years to reveal their secret and disclosure is often the key to recovery Earlier this year Erin Delaney revealed on Facebook a secret she’d kept from almost everyone. As a child she suffered physical and emotional abuse and severe neglect. The neglect had significant consequences, including a fractured skull from falling – which was only picked up when, after she vomited at school the next day, a member of her extended family intervened and took her to hospital. The emotional abuse included both parents telling her at different times that the other was dead, or that they weren’t her real parents; the physical abuse – the hitting, the kicking – depended on their drug use and moods. “It was,” the 36-year-old Sydneysider says now, “a challenging journey through life. I never felt safe and I never felt grounded. You grow up hating yourself and thinking you caused it and you deserve it…. Delaney, who suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, says society treats different medical conditions unequally. “One of my old school friends had cancer a few years ago and everyone offered to help, while my emotional injuries are a source of shame and isolation.”…. Dr Cathy Kezelman, president of the Blue Knot foundation, a national organisation helping adults recover from childhood trauma, says Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse had found it takes an average of 24 years for people to speak about their abuse. “Some never do,” she says. The Blue Knot helpline has received calls from people disclosing for the first time in their 70s, 80s and 90s. “We have a society that hasn’t wanted to hear about it,” she explains. “As we saw in the royal commission, a lot of people giving testimony spoke about trying to speak out as a child. Many were punished, they weren’t believed and their concerns were dismissed or minimised…. Grey Faction, Satanic Temple and Lucien Greaves Fact Sheet Prince Andrew email surfaces as American woman alleges “disgusting” sexual assault, Epstein accused by nine more women, Trump and Prince Andrew, Epstein’s and Norwegian Royal Family December 5, 2019 § Leave a comment – Prince Andrew email surfaces as American woman alleges “disgusting” sexual assault – Jeffrey Epstein Accused of Sexual Abuse By Nine More Women in New Lawsuit – ‘I Don’t Know Prince Andrew,’ Trump Says. Photos Say Otherwise. – Royal scandal: Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s link with Norwegian Royal Family Prince Andrew email surfaces as American woman alleges “disgusting” sexual assault CBS News December 3, 2019 London — Britain’s royal family was reeling from yet another damning interview on Tuesday morning. This time it was an American woman who accuses the queen’s son, Prince Andrew, of having sex with her when she was just 17 years old. Virginia Roberts Giuffre spoke out in the interview with the BBC about what she says the prince did to her, and what he may know about Jeffrey Epstein. “I had just been abused by a, a member of a royal family,” Roberts Giuffre said, fighting back tears. As CBS News correspondent Imtiaz Tyab reports, the American woman described being forced to have sex with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, three times while she was still a teenager. “It didn’t last very long, the whole entire procedure. It was disgusting. Um, he wasn’t mean or anything, but he got up and he said, ‘thanks,’ and walked out. And I sat there in bed just horrified and ashamed,” she told the BBC…. In a now notorious interview last month Prince Andrew denied ever meeting Roberts Giuffre — despite being photographed with her — and claimed that due to a “peculiar medical condition” he was physically unable to sweat “at the time.” He did admit to spending time at Epstein’s homes, where he said he never witnessed any suspicious behavior or saw anything unusual about the young women in the properties. “I thought they were all staff,” the prince claimed. Now, five more American women have said Prince Andrew witnessed abuse at Epstein’s home, and their lawyer has called for Andrew to testify. Meanwhile, an email has emerged this week, buried in thousands of U.S. legal documents, that was sent by the prince in January 2015 to his long-time friend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was a close associate of Epstein’s. In it, the duke said: “Let me know when we can talk. Got some specific questions to ask you about Virginia Roberts.”…. Jeffrey Epstein Accused of Sexual Abuse By Nine More Women in New Lawsuit December 3, 2019 By Althea Legaspi Suit claims the late financier targeted victims as young as 13 years old The late financier Jeffrey Epstein has been accused of sexually abusing nine more women in a new lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Reuters reports. The incidents began as early as 1985 and targeted victims as young as 13 years old, according to the suit filed against Epstein’s estate. The women, identified as Jane Does in the filing, allege the abuse spanned more than two decades. Six of the women claim they were raped. One alleges she was sexually assaulted, abused and battered beginning in 1985; another said she was age 14 when the abuse began around 1990 and a third alleges she was age 13 when she was abused around 2003…. The nine women in the new lawsuit are among more than 20 women to date who are legally seeking compensation from Epstein’s $577 million estate, according to Reuters…. ‘I Don’t Know Prince Andrew,’ Trump Says. Photos Say Otherwise. Speaking to reporters in London, President Trump denied knowing Prince Andrew, despite having been photographed with him on several occasions. By Iliana Magra Dec. 3, 2019 LONDON — President Trump denied on Tuesday that he knew Prince Andrew, the son of Queen Elizabeth II who has become entangled in sexual abuse accusations against the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein….. Royal scandal: Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s link with Norwegian Royal Family JEFFREY EPSTEIN’s royal connections went beyond that of with Prince Andrew, it has been revealed. Here are the disgraced sex offender’s ties with the Norwegian Royal Family. By Amalie Henden Tue, Dec 3, 2019 On Monday, leading business daily Dagens Næringsliv (DN) revealed Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit had met Epstein on multiple occasions. Mette-Marit, who is married to Crown Prince Haakon, the heir to the Norwegian throne, told the publication she was “sorry” for having had several meeting with the late financier. In a statement she said: “I never would have associated with Mr Epstein if I had been aware of the seriousness of the crimes he committed. “I should have investigated his past more thoroughly, and I am sorry that I didn’t.”….. Mette-Marit has said she now regrets her association with Epstein. In the statement, she expressed her “deep sympathy and solidarity” with Epstein’s victims. She said: “Through my longtime work with international health issues, I have seen the great damage that sexual assault does to children and women. “We all share responsibility to fight sexual assault and support victims, and I want to express my deep sympathy and solidarity with the victims of the assaults Jeffrey Epstein has carried out.” Information on Neil Brick In 1995, Neil Brick founded the SMART newsletter. In 1996, SMART was on the Internet and in 1998 SMART started having ritual abuse conferences. https://ritualabuse.us/smart/neil-brick/ Dr. Barto sentencing sexual assault two dozen children, Shambhala Buddhist org. allegations of sexual assault, Syracuse Diocese ritual abuse, Bill eliminates statute of limitations child sex abuse “ritual abuse of a minor”, Ritual Abuse Conferences 2019 March 20, 2019 § Leave a comment – Dr. Johnnie Barto, a sexual predator pediatrician, gets up to 158 years in prison – Shambhala discloses allegations of sexual assault, child abuse within Boulder-born Buddhist organization’s ranks – Bill giving victims more time on child sex abuse lawsuits, criminal cases gets support – Ahead Of Diocese Report, Reaction To Syracuse Abuse Compensation Program – The 2019 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference – The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference Dr. Johnnie Barto, a sexual predator pediatrician, gets up to 158 years in prison “He held himself out as a pillar in his community — a family pediatrician, an elected member of the school board, a regular attendee at church,” the state attorney general said. Dr. Johnnie Barto heads into Cambria County Courthouse in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 2019, for his sentencing in the sexual assault of more than two dozen children. March 18, 2019 By Corky Siemaszko A Pennsylvania pediatrician who admitted to molesting several generations of children was sentenced Monday to spend the rest of his life in prison after 18 now-grown women took turns pleading with the court to throw the book at him, with many calling him a “monster.” Dr. Johnnie “Jack” Barto, 71, was hit with a sentence of 79 to 158 years in prison, virtually guaranteeing that he will die behind bars, Attorney General Josh Shapiro said…. Barto’s sentencing came a day after several women — who said the doctor molested them when they were children — described in a lengthy interview with NBC News how the Johnstown community rallied behind him in 2000, the first time he was accused of abusing children. Twenty years ago, this predator could have been stopped,” Jennifer Goetz, 42, said on the steps of the Cambria County Courthouse. Goetz, who said she was about 8 when Barto violated her in 1984, said, “Today is a bittersweet day for me.” Erika Brosig, who said she was 12 when Barto molested her in 1994, said the doctor had enablers who also need to be called to account. “Parents were making complaints frequently about Dr. Barto,” she said. “We want to find out who did know and what was the level of their responsibility.”…. arto was hit with the staggering sentence two months after he first pleaded guilty to molesting the two relatives, and no-contest to three other allegations brought by children he was accused of sexually abusing at his practice. Under questioning, Barto also admitted to sexually assaulting dozens more children during the four decades he practiced medicine in and around Johnstown, Shapiro said. Barto targeted girls and boys, most between the ages of 8 and 12, the chief prosecutor said. The youngest victims were a toddler and a 2-week-old. Most of the assaults happened after Barto got his medical license back in 2000. It had been suspended after he was accused the first time of sexually abusing three children in 1998. His license was restored in 2000 by the Pennsylvania Board of Medicine. “When he was first accused in 1998, Barto thought he was immune from prosecution and played a long game to make sure the families thought well of him and allowed their children near him,” Shapiro said. Despite the rumors that Barto was still molesting children, he managed to elude law enforcement until Dec. 21, 2017, when a 12-year-old girl told her mother that at the end of an examination, the doctor had her sit on his lap while he molested her, according to a probable-cause affidavit. Barto was arrested by the Richland Township police Jan. 18, 2018. That same day, The Tribune–Democrat newspaper reported, a “Support for Johnnie ‘Jack’ Barto” page went up on Facebook, complete with testimonials from local parents whose children were his patients. The page quickly came down after Barto finally admitted his guilt. Shapiro noted that in addition to the 31 incidents of assault charged, at least a half-dozen other cases could not be charged because of the criminal statute of limitations laws in Pennsylvania…. Shambhala discloses allegations of sexual assault, child abuse within Boulder-born Buddhist organization’s ranks Report by An Olive Branch includes unsubstantiated allegations, details failure to address issues By Jackson Barnett The Denver Post March 19, 2019 Shambhala, the Buddhist organization founded in Boulder in the 1970s, released a report Tuesday detailing — but not substantiating — new allegations of sexual assault and child abuse within the organization, along with an internal failure to adequately address that abuse…. Allegations of abuse within Shambhala — now based in Halifax, Nova Scotia — first were brought to light last year by Buddhist Project Sunshine, which published anonymous allegations of sexual abuse by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the organization’s leader, and other high-ranking teachers. In July, Mipham acknowledged he had caused “harm” in relationships and would step aside from his leadership position. Shambhala then retained the Canadian law firm Wickwire Holm to conduct a third-party investigation. The firm, in a report released last month, found two credible claims of sexual abuse and a pattern of inappropriate behavior by Mipham, but its investigation was criticized for being too narrow in scope by former Shambhala members…. The report that contained self-reported accounts of abuse found several “themes” of abuse, including sexual misconduct by Shambhala teachers and staff, child abuse and abuse of power. People who self-reported also claimed backlash, concerns about speaking up and efforts by Shambhala to protect teachers and the organization from accusations. Unverified firsthand stories included acts ranging from unwelcomed kisses from older teachers to child molestation. The report did not include the names of those accused nor the locations where the alleged abuse occurred. An Olive Branch said it reported crimes that had been brought to its attention to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. The report also found that many people did not trust Shambhala to execute proper procedures to address abuse…. An Olive Branch also noted that Mipham in 2015 was excluded from signing Shambhala’s pledge to understand and abide by the policy and not have sexual relationships with students…. Beyond the Buddhist organization’s own internal reviews, an investigation by the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office into “possible criminal activity” at the Shambhala Mountain Center near Red Feather Lakes remains ongoing. And Boulder police earlier this year arrested a former Shambhala teacher, William Karelis, 70, on charges of sexual assault on a child by someone in a position of trust…. Ahead Of Diocese Report, Reaction To Syracuse Abuse Compensation Program By Gabe Altieri (WSKG) March 19, 2019…. This month, the Syracuse Roman Catholic Diocese hopes to release a report on how its settlement program for people who have been abused by clergy has gone. It’s called an independent reconciliation and compensation program, or IRCP. The Syracuse Diocese covers part of Central New York and the Southern Tier including Binghamton and Cortland. WSKG looked into how this program went for the diocese and those who participated. A listener note: this story contains graphic details of sexual abuse. ….What happened to Lightbody is detailed in her testimony to the independent mediator who ran the victims compensation program for the Syracuse Diocese. ….This was the early 1970s. She was about ten years old. “It was not typical, what you consider typical sexual abuse,” Lightbody said. “What he did to me was ritual abuse which involves physical abuse, sexual abuse, mind control and brainwashing.” ….Here’s what we know about her alleged abuser: his name is Paul Slavetskas. He served at Blessed Sacrament in Johnson City from March 1973 until September 1974. Slavetskas died in 2015. The Syracuse Diocese put his name on a list of priests with credible accusations against him. That was released in December. Lightbody’s testimony is the only known abuse claim against him. Bill giving victims more time on child sex abuse lawsuits, criminal cases gets support PHOEBE TOLLEFSON Mar 14, 2019 ….The bill, HB 640, would eliminate the statute of limitations for criminal cases and extend from age 21 to age 27 the time frame during which a victim can sue over alleged abuses. It makes no change to current law that allows victims to sue after the statute of limitations has expired, but within three years of recognizing their abuse. Experts say victims can repress memories of abuse and struggle to come to terms with its lifelong impacts. The bill beefs up penalties against mandatory reporters who fail to act by making it a felony in cases involving sexual abuse allegations. ….The bill pertains to victims younger than 18 of the following crimes: sexual assault, sexual intercourse without consent, aggravated sexual intercourse without consent, indecent exposure, sexual abuse, ritual abuse of a minor, incest and sexual exploitation. Clinician’s Conference – Friday May 3, 2019 Deception by Organized Abuser Groups: Helping Yourself and Your Clients Think Through the Issues by Alison Miller Deception by Organized Abuser Groups: Helping Your Front People and Your Insiders Recognize the Lies and Tricks Which Keep You Enslaved by Dr. Alison Miller Kevin Spacey Faces Felony Charge – accusation of sexual assault, Harvey Weinstein judge declines to dismiss charges in rape case, Paedophile ring “conspire to abuse babies, toddlers and young children” December 25, 2018 Comments Off on Kevin Spacey Faces Felony Charge – accusation of sexual assault, Harvey Weinstein judge declines to dismiss charges in rape case, Paedophile ring “conspire to abuse babies, toddlers and young children” Kevin Spacey Faces Felony Charge in Misconduct Case By Sopan Deb Dec. 24, 2018 Kevin Spacey will be charged with a felony following an accusation of sexual assault made public last year, the authorities in Nantucket said on Monday. The charge, first reported by The Boston Globe, is in connection with an accusation of misconduct that was made by a former television anchor, Heather Unruh, who said that Mr. Spacey sexually assaulted her 18-year-old son in July 2016 at a bar in Nantucket. Michael O’Keefe, the Cape and Islands district attorney in Massachusetts, said in a statement that Mr. Spacey would be arraigned on Jan. 7 for one charge of indecent assault and battery, the first criminal charge levied against him as a result of sexual misconduct allegations. The statement also said there was a public show cause hearing in Nantucket District Court last Thursday, after which Clerk Magistrate Brian Kearney issued the criminal complaint. A representative for Mr. Spacey did not respond to a request for comment. But the actor has apologized for one incident and denied at least one other accusation of wrongdoing…. Kevin Spacey scandal: A complete list of the 15 accusers Maria Puente, USA TODAY Nov. 7, 2017 The first accusation of sexual misconduct against Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey landed on Oct. 29, and a little more than a week later more than a dozen men — including five who said they were teens at the time — have come forward to allege he sexually harassed, assaulted or attempted to rape them. Here is a list of accusers, some of them named, some of them anonymous…. Harvey Weinstein judge declines to dismiss charges in rape case, sets pretrial hearing for March By Eric Levenson and Elizabeth Joseph, CNN Thu December 20, 2018 New York (CNN)Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul whose downfall helped launch the #MeToo movement, is due back in New York court on March 7 after a judge Thursday morning ordered a pretrial hearing in the rape case. The proceedings lasted just 10 minutes, a remarkably quick resolution to a highly anticipated and pivotal appearance that the defense had hoped would end with the charges against Weinstein getting dropped. “We are obviously disappointed that the court did not dismiss the indictment, but Judge (James) Burke has ruled, and we intend to continue to vigorously defend this case to the best of our ability,” Weinstein’s attorney, Ben Brafman, said outside the Manhattan courthouse. Weinstein, 66, has pleaded not guilty to five felony charges, including predatory sexual assault and rape, in connection with two women in separate incidents. Thursday’s hearing came in response to a motion filed by Brafman to dismiss the remaining counts or to hold evidentiary hearings on whether certain witnesses can testify. The judge denied both requests, saying the defendant can explore witness credibility issues at trial, court documents show…. Eighth member of paedophile ring – including Hull man David Harsley – jailed for plotting to rape baby David Harsley and six other members of the gang were jailed in 2015 By Sophie Corcoran 29 NOV 2018 The eighth member of a sickening paedophile ring who plotted to rape a seven-month old baby has been jailed today. Matthew Law, 50, worked alongside seven others, including Hull man David Harsley, to conspire to abuse babies, toddlers and young children. The gang used encrypted communication and the dark web to evade detection, and were branded ‘monsters in disguise’ after grooming mothers to gain their trust so they could have access to their children unsupervised. Harsley, 55, a hospital worker, befriended a “vulnerable” pregnant and single woman at a social club. He was looking after the boy and committed a sex act in front of the child while fellow gang members John Denham and Matthew Lisk watched over Skype…. Hollyson admitted filming himself raping a three-month-old baby in what the judge at the time called one of the most horrific abuse cases on record. The seven men were jailed for a total of 78 years after Adam Tom’s confession sparked an investigation into the gang, who have now been revealed to have drugged babies and toddlers. The gang would groom mothers – some while they were still pregnant – to gain unsupervised access to their children…. One baby was raped and sexually abused by three of the gang members over a period of months. The others watched on live internet feeds…. Psychiatric Impact of Organized and Ritual Child Sexual Abuse, Spain police bust ‘Black magic’ prostitution ring, North Korea: Sexual abuse of women ‘common November 1, 2018 § Leave a comment

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I had to look it up. The Affordable Care Act says "preventive" and I have always said "preventative". According to Grammar Girl, preventive is preferred by grammar snobs, but both are now considered acceptable. Now you know, just like me. YAY. PS: I can NEVER spell Jeapordy right. Ever. I wanted to hum the Jeapordy theme song after the question, but I can’t do it. Jeopardy. There we go. Spelling check can luckily spell it. If you are in pediatric OT, or interested, consider joining this Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/search/keyword/?q=pediatric%20occupational%20therapists The Facebook group name is "Pediatric Occupational Therapists", it’s got over 11,000 people in it, and surprisingly it’s closed? Meaning you have to ask to join and see the posts, if I understand correctly. The posts are frequent and typically high quality in the responses/comments (of course it depends on the question as to how many responses you get). I learn a lot from that group, although the hardest part is the blows to my self-esteem as I see how incredibly knowledgeable most of the posters are!! One in particular, Linda Nelson, is an incredible stand-out with her evidence-based resources. She posts articles constantly. She overwhelms me with her awesomeness. Another wonderful poster is Beverly Moskowitz, who runs realotsolutions.com, and is the inventor of the Size Matters program. She has so much experience and writes very thoughtful posts. Seriously I am overwhelmed with how wonderful the posters are. And underwhelmed with my grammatical ability. But I figure, perhaps incorrectly, that I would rather post with some unedited writings than only post when I have time to edit them perfectly. Because I would never post if so, this is just a side hobby! Anyway, I highly recommend this group for ped OTs or those interested. Test to see if this posts via e-mail. 1. I survived four long days in Utah (left day before/day after so really 6 days)! I met all the people in my post-professional doctoral OT program (OTD) and everyone was incredibly nice. Like sickeningly nice. Like amazingly nice. 🙂 Only a few of us (38 people I think?) had less than five years of experience. Many had decades of experience. Some were directors, or long-term managers, or owners of clinics…a very impressive crowd. We all fly in once a semester for a multiple day on-site learning experience. This was the first one. 🙂 The entire visit was phenomenal. Utah was beautiful, and the employees of Rocky Mountain University of Health Professors (RMUoHP) were all stellar. I feel like I’m being paid to write this because it sounds so over the top. But it’s true. Every single person we encountered was friendly and knowledgeable and went above and beyond. Not a whiff of incompetence was found. Of course, meeting the cohort and our professors was incredible. I really enjoyed getting to see everyone’s personalities up close and personal! Our two program directors seem as different and as similar as can be. They seem like they are an old mostly happily married couple that make their shared life work, even though I get the feeling their personality traits may vary widely. Like that TV couple where one is messy and one is clean? I am thinking Felix and Oscar or something, but that sounds like two men. I’m getting confused. We also met our two statistic instructor, both having to do with evidence-based practice/analysis/design. Dr. P is absolutely hysterically funny and I think one day she and I will be BFF. Even if it’s one-sided and I just follow her around like a stalker puppy, wide-eyed and pawing at her ankles. I guess I would be a teacup sized puppy. She is French-Canadian and talked about having a cat in her throat. Turns out she meant frog. I love her. She is also good about making statistics feel more or less approachable/doable. The other instructor, Dr. V, is not as into humor, although she does seem to appreciate it. In other words, she doesn’t hate me. Since I don’t know how to be serious to save my life, she clearly tolerates humor. She is very knowledgeable and she does not mince words. (I feel like mincing words is technically a way to be concise, because it’s like you chop them up. So why is NOT mincing words meant to be conciseness? Am I confused yet again?) I appreciate her style and intent/approach to learning, and she was at times amusing. She taught us a lot about critical appraisal and opened our eyes to how often and how easily abstracts/results/discussions are manipulated. Startling. I do have to say that I am pretty sure this instructor is not someone you want to mess with. As in, if she ever got mad at me, I would probably instantly jump off a cliff because I will otherwise die a slow and painful death. I know this because there is apparently a researcher she despises, and based on the examples and explanations she provided over the course of our day with her, it was clear this researcher will live in torment until the day he dies. 🙂 I’m kidding, of course. I think. I hope. Trying to teach statistics to post-professional students, some of whom (grammar?) have not been in school in like 20 years, is like trying to teach ducks how to sit in a row on a tightrope. There are a lot of falls and a lot of heads smashing into things. Mostly its the instructors smashing their heads into walls though, not so much the ducks. Us ducks just fall, look stunned and confused, then shake our heads and waffle our feathers. I hear teachers have a high rate of alcoholism, and I wonder how many of them taught statistics to students of social sciences. There is a reason vodka is called "teacher water"!! No seriously. I loved loved loved my cohort and instructors in real life. I loved loved loved the people at Rocky Mountain, and the views of Utah from campus were stunning. Oh, and the other two highlights? One was meeting Jan who does the distance learning technology components, and she is an incredible and fun woman devoted to helping us "learn how to learn" in a distance education model. The other was meeting JOY, the medical librarian. She is aptly named. She is quite possibly the funniest person in the entire world. She is the other person who has to be my post-graduation BFF, again it’s fine if it’s one-sided. I will follow her around like a teacup puppy as well. But I guess I will have to clone my little puppy self first since I can’t follow around two people at once. I have to also be a puppy with thumb opposition, since I have to write down everything they say. So I think this stalker-teacup-clone-puppy-with-opposable-thumbs plan of mine is becoming increasingly unlikely. Joy is from the South, and she has the honeyed accent to prove it. She’s smart as a flagellated whip and every cell of her body is filled with sass. She knows how to correctly assert the librarial power of her glasses/bun combo. But she’s an adorable blondie so the whole "mousey" part of the stereotype doesn’t apply. "Remember the bun," she would assert, pointing at it while fixing us with a steely glare. Our eyes would widen in fear at the thought of ever doing something wrong, like forgetting the PMID number in our article requests. She was a crack-up, and everything is always exaggerated when a slow drawl is involved. Overall I would say that I love my RMUoHP program for the post-professional OTD. I wasn’t sure what to think as I hadn’t met anyone who had done their program. I am relatively sure it is not as rigorous as a program run by some heavy hitter in the AOTA world, like Karen Jacobs (Boston I think?). There are some pretty high-profile OT celebrities and I bet their programs are insanely challenging. I don’t know for sure though since I don’t know how to compare it. And different programs have slightly different lengths depending on how they structure it, ie how many credits a semester. Our program is plenty challenging in lots of ways, although academics are a strength for me, so doesn’t feel that horrible. The time it takes is the biggest issue. I do know that if I were working full-time with a family, that this program would throw me over the edge. A LOT of the people in my cohort are in that boat, and I am so impressed they are surviving. I have the energy capacity of a 90 year old, so I get tired just thinking about their lives right now. Anybody who can do a post-professional OTD while working full-time is a superhero in my eyes. So apparently there are a lot of superheroes out there. I have pictures from the trip, but my blog is being weird. We had to increase some server stuff (don’t ask me the technical details, I just do the social parts!!) and now the pictures bounce. I have posted several things lately that I then had to go back and turn into drafts, because the pictures didn’t show up. 🙁 Grrr. It’s in progress. The other major stressor I survived, was that less than a week later, I presented at state conference to over 200 OT Students. It’s Tonya’s fault (therapyfunzone.net) as I was her co-presenter. She is amazing too. It’s funny that I can do what many others can’t, stress-wise, like present in front of hundreds, and work on a doctorate. Neither of those are THAT stressful to me. Yet what normal people do every day, like get up and go to work all day, and do basic and instrumental activities of daily life? Kills me. I freak out. I get overwhelmed. I panic. A lot of it at this point seems to be sleep-related, so we’re working on figuring that out. Speaking of which, it’s nearly 2am. I’ll have to talk more about the presentation soon. In conclusion. I survived two big events. They were major tests of my current stress tolerance, and I passed. 🙂 But I have to work on better tolerating the daily stressors. In more conclusion, I love my OTD program. Ask me again tomorrow though when I finish a few assignments. AHAHAHHA This is a 45 second screencast I made that just quickly shows how to do a proper hanging indent (for APA style references in Word document) in Microsoft Word 2011 for Macs. Don’t forget you can also search the Help toolbar in Word, Google (which brings up the tutorials that Microsoft Word has on its website), and Youtube, for help. I’m having to re-learn all these APA pieces for the post-professional doctorate of occupational therapy program (OTD), because I last did these things five years ago! Many of the post-professionals in my cohort are a little older and are learning the APA formatting in Word for the first time, so I’m trying to help out where I can with mini screencasts like the one linked above. I’m not great at it myself, but I can usually figure it out with some searches on Google. There are many post-professional occupational therapy doctorate programs (versus entry level), and I think the vast majority of them are online. However, some have an in-person component at least once a semester. I chose one that did, because I hear that it is really helpful to meet your cohort and professors. It helps you learn who everyone is, and better appreciate their input and collaboration. I have now spent five weeks in my OTD program and have encountered all the names of different people, but I cannot keep them straight to save my life. I know that there are quite a few men in the program (semi unusual in typical OT world), and that I don’t have much experience in comparison to most of my cohort. Many of them have been in practice 20+ years and are managers/directors. A surprising number of them seem to be school-based. Only three names so far have stood out to me. Let’s just call them Anna, Banna, and Danna. Anna is always the first to post on every forum and I know nothing about her, but I know if I see a single posting on a newly opened forum for that week’s work, that it’s her! I can’t figure out how she does it! Banna is a therapist in the “small world” category who knows one of my former fieldwork supervisors and lives in Tennessee where I used to live. She has ten trillion years of experience and very quickly emerged as an outstanding engager/encourager. Danna is a sweet and enthusiastic younger therapist (I think), who has tried doing some affirmation writing with her students after I brought it up, and I can tell by our interactions that we have some similarities in our mindset. There are tons of other great people, I just haven’t had their names pop out at me. Because there is no scaffolding to any of these people (in my head that is), I haven’t been able to link their information to a name, and even though I’ve seen their name and info in tons of forums, I just keep not attaching it as data about the person. They should require us to write a quick biography, with a clear picture, that we all get a copy of in one accumulated file! Because we all wrote one in like four different forum spots, but it got confusing quickly. So, now it’s time to go meet everyone! (Hey, robbers: I don’t live alone, sorry.) The last few days have been super stressful trying to catch up, and I’ve been overwhelmed, but I know everyone is. And I am proud of myself for not “shutting down”, and doing my best to get on top of things. I worked hard to preview and plan for all my typical anxiety triggers, and got a lot of resources (internal and external) to help me handle the energy conservation components. I realized, for example, that on Wednesday night, there is a big dinner reservation at a local restaurant and I had said I would go. But when I thought about it, I realized that with my fatigue issues and how much anxiety I expend on such a dinner (getting there, interacting with everyone socially in a large environment, the challenge of dividing a large bill correctly, and the drastically decreased amount of time to rest), that it will overdraft that day’s energy budget, and I will be at a deficit for the next day. So I won’t go after all. I did bring my hula hoop, all coiled up for travel, but it’s a little big for my bag so cross your fingers that it’s not irretrievably warped when I get there. Very good for stress relief/fun. 🙂 I wanted to bring a giant one, but even coiled it was way too big for my suitcase. This is kind of like a business trip, and I realized today that I’ve never been on one! They want us to dress business casual and I had to go back and dig through my closet to find some. I was trying on clothes this morning and it was very Goldilocks. “These pants are too small…these pants are too big…these pants are juuusttttt….more or less….right.” The woman next to me in the airport just commented on her missing daughter and said, “it must be a long cigarette she’s smoking.” AHAHAHAHAAH yikes. My plane is running late – was supposed to join a few others on a shuttle, but it’s not looking good. Oh well, hopefully it will work out! I already took the less drowsy Dramamine – the 45 minute shuttle ride will otherwise be an issue. I love Sharpies, because I always get confused as to what Dramamine is drowsy versus not drowsy when it’s not in its original box and is just in the silver poppies because its just the ingredient. So I Sharpied it on the silver poppy and that made my life easier today. ::beams:: Also fun to sharpie gift card balances on the gift card. Okay I don’t have ADD but I am bouncing around. Because I can. And wow, really I should be studying right now. So I will stop writing this insanely long message. All I can say is, I know I will be glad to meet everyone, and I also know it will be a major test of my functional capacity these days! Update: Made it to Utah and am in my hotel room. Unfortunately there were some delays/misses but alas, alas is well. Time to look at stats ::whimpers:: 🙂

Who is Althouse? * View only LAW posts * Contribute * Shop AMAZON* Rush is not jumping on the Kristol band wagon. I think he is troubled too. I like Sarah Palin a lot. I think she has a political future. But if this was her way to run in 2012 for President, it was a mistake. I'm enjoying this meme that we're all shaking in fear of Palin. It will be fun to see how many ways and in how many situations people will slip that in. It's like that old therapy trick, where someone tells someone else "You're in denial!" "No, I'm not." "See! You are! You just denied it!" You don't spend lots of time and energy demonizing somebody you don't fear. He is really fat and unattractive.Who would fuck him?I guess for money anyone would fuck anyone. Mr. Hands RIP I wouldn't do a horse or any other animal.Thank you. I know almost nothing about the woman, except that she is vilified and abused by liberals.When and if she runs for something again I will pay attention. Until then, this is just a media feeding frenzy like Michael Jackson's death. He is still dead, right? The more Palin is attacked the more I pledge to support her. I can't understand the "she used her children as props argument."Sure, a good case can be made for that; more than a good one. And perhaps she went further than other candidates have.But is this unique? Never been done before? Trotting out the spouse and kids? Nothing about the entire Palin matter - her fervent supporters or her equally fervent opponents - makes sense to me.I don't get it... except that she is vilified and abused by liberals.Any by McCain's campaign staff, and other conservatives as well. "He is really fat and unattractive."Not really fair. That's a still picture and he's been on a diet. He's lost 80 pounds. Bet he wouldn't have given that exclusive interview if he'd known they were going to use that crappy still. Any by McCain's campaign staff, and other conservatives as well.For completely different reasons, though.And unnamed/anonymous staff, by the staff. I'm not gay, and I'm not a woman. While I was listening to Rush and looking at his pictures, I was thinking to myself how statesmanlike and beautiful he looks -- in kind of a classical way. He should be wearing a toga. Then I read the comments, and thought how out of touch I must have become in my old age. He needs to lose about 30 more pounds for the sake of his health, but he's a very handsome man. He looks kind of like the guy who played the lion in The Wizard of Oz. There is no bad publicity, and anyone living in the 21st century with a modicum of cultural awareness knows this.Well anyone other than the fans of her oppositional party, apparently. "except that she is vilified and abused by liberals."Any by McCain's campaign staff, and other conservatives as well.She won the governorship of Alaska by running against corruption in her own party, so why should it be expected that people in her own party can't be afraid of her, too?I suppose for some conservatives who wish she'd go away it's a matter of being "afraid" that she's going to split the party, divide the base and weaken future chances for Republicans to win elections. What if enough people listen to her?And wouldn't that be what most liberals are worried about, too? For all that a couple of our local persons insist that Democrats would *love* to have her run for President I really don't see any confidence that she's not a threat or any confidence that if she got the nomination that it would be an automatic win for whoever ran against her.There are people from the last campaign cycle I'd vote for before her. Althouse mentioned Fred. I'd vote for Giuliani. Enough other people apparently wouldn't, or were convinced by others that *other* people wouldn't vote for them so it was all wasted... and we ended up with McCain.(Which is one reason I've got no sympathy and no time for anyone on "our" side that spends time and energy using the same arguments against Palin. We'd be better off if people stopped making their decisions based on speculation about some other person's vote.) He also is starting to look like Churchill did later in life. Maybe it's the adult beverages. Anyway, I apologize for diverting everyone from the substance of his remarks. Normally I agree with Rush, but I do think Governor Palin went on at great length about her reasons for resigning. Does Rush think that she was not being candid? If so, I'd agree with him. Well of course Rush it is all speculation. You built an entire career in entertainment on that!You can not watch Sarah Palin's rambling, contradictory and ultimately bizarre press conference from Friday and not speculate about what is up. It clearly was not well planned and suggests that it was arranged to be preemptive. Synova wrote"For all that a couple of our local persons insist that Democrats would *love* to have her run for President I really don't see any confidence that she's not a threat or any confidence that if she got the nomination that it would be an automatic win for whoever ran against her."Well by all means call our bluff and make her the Republican nominee.I dare you.In fact I double dare you! I love this idea that everyone is "attacking" her. How should the media cover her? What should they say about her? What would an ideal news report on this person quitting her job sound like? ZPS, pull an AL and pretend that the entire scope of the conversation is her recent announcement.It may sound clever to you, but everyone else realizes what you've done. I see you working Beth - just because some anonymous assclown on McCain's campaign was abusive towards her, then all liberals are excused for abusing a woman who has the temerity to go off the reservation.Hope the corrupt commies you elected are doing a good job reinforcing your levees. Oh, right, I don't give a shit about anyone stupid enough to live below sea level. It looked to me like the sort of bad decision you get out of the blue one day from a girlfriend.She didn't explain herself, and the assumption is that she can't; and that, she should have addressed.Hence Dowd's take on it.It wasn't the time for inarticulateness.We had enough of that from Bush. Rush is just making allowances for girlfriends. It very well might have been exactly the time for inarticulateness, if it avoided yet another ethics complaint of "speaking while governor".:-P I love this idea that everyone is "attacking" her. How should the media cover her? What should they say about her? What would an ideal news report on this person quitting her job sound like?If Obama had received even 10% of the press scrutiny Palin received, I doubt he would've been elected. Instead, Obama got and continues to receive the longest Press blowjob in history. Any by McCain's campaign staff, and other conservatives as well.Well considering his campaign staff ran one of the most awful campaigns in recent memory, their opinions really don't hold much weight. I'm not familiar with other conservatives who don't like her. But Beth you really have to admit, do you recall any other vice presidential candidate that has generated as much hate from the other side like she has? I mean it's 8 months after the election and liberals still froth over her. And please spare us the 'she's stupid' meme considering the complete moronic statements that Biden utters about every 7.9 seconds. He is really fat and unattractive.In fact, he has a fine featured, intelligent face. But to see that would require actually looking at the man, getting beyond the instructions from homo headquarters to vilify him. ZPS, pull an AL and pretend that the entire scope of the conversation is her recent announcement.No clue what you're talking about...but I was being sincere. Let's say the media collectively apologizes for being so mean to Palin and they start from scratch. OK, so, how do they cover this person? Look at her record, look at everything she has done. How do they do it? It doesn't matter than she didn't explain herself, rh. What matters is that Sarah Palin has left her box, and any other box that may have been created for her.Let's see how she does with fresh air. Hope the corrupt commies you elected are doing a good job reinforcing your levees. Oh, right, I don't give a shit about anyone stupid enough to live below sea level.Golly, commie levees.I've heard of cajun/coonass levees before but never commie levees.So, Boudreau goes out fishing one day and has a heart attack and dies. Yep, goner.His wife writes an obituary for the paper. It said, "Boudreau died yesterday while fishing."The newspaper editor calls her up and says, "M'am, you can put more in the paper than just that.""Okay", she says.The next day the obit reads:"Boudreau died yesterday while fishing. Boat for sale." Zachary Paul Sire,I love this idea that everyone is "attacking" her. How should the media cover her? What should they say about her?I'm gladdened to read that you're curious about this topic. Let me illustrate, with examples even, how the press should exhibit professionalism.Principle #1 - When specific information is available, then that information should be included in a press report rather than preferring a general description.Example form this Associated Press report today:During a sometimes rambling statement, she cited ongoing ethics complaints and the financial toll they were taking on the state and her personal finances. She also blamed the media for sensational attention and attacks on her family, although she didn't offer details.Let's note the injection of opinion on the quality of the statement, the rambling comment, but that isn't the worst offense. Here's the meat of the claim of lack of professionalism - the reporter notes ethics complaints filed against her and then reveals no further information. The implication is that the complaints are warranted and that Governor Palin is unethical. The reporter, being in possession of more specific information, such as the fact that all 15 complaints filed against her were dismissed and that the nature of many of the complaints were farcical, including wearing a jacket, holding a fish, etc, should have included this information into the report in that specific information is more valuable to a reader than general and vague information.Secondly, the reporter notes that Governor Palin blamed the media for attacks on her family. This is general information. The reporter has a plethora of examples of media attacks on Palin to choose from so as to give the reader specific information.Contrast the reporting on Palin with the reporting on Obama's Afghanistan initiative. This reporting is chock full of specific details:For the past four days, 4,000 U.S. Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers have been fighting their way into the southern reaches of Afghanistan's Helmand River Valley, hoping to clear out insurgents there. . . .Now read the following statement and speculate on who is being quoted:The next step in the new Afghan war will be a comprehensive strategy that helps the Afghan government deliver the stability that comes from economic opportunity and a working justice system that allows Afghans to benefit from those opportunities. That kind of strategy, however, takes far more time than a military operation and requires patience - both for Afghans and the U.S. administration that is footing the bill.That sure sounds like an Obama Administration official, doesn't it? Well, many of us would agree that the reporter who is editorializing his opinion here, is indeed acting as though he is an Obama official.Narratives are being crafted and some of the tools being used are editorial techniques. Slanting and generalizing are deployed to marginalize Governor Palin and cheering and specificity are being used to champion President Obama, for his war in Afghanistan is different (that's the editorial slant) and then the specific details are marshaled to buttress that editorial slant. I don't know what the gay organization has to say because they hate me and I hate them.All I know is Rush is unattractive. You can tell Rush has a small peepee too. Hello fellow repubicans, a man got fucked by a horse?Does anyone else find this disturbing? Well, obviously you don't find it disturbing or you'd shut up about it. Let's say the media collectively apologizes for being so mean to Palin and they start from scratch. OK, so, how do they cover this person? Look at her record, look at everything she has done. How do they do it?As with any other Governor, or President, they can focus on political achievements and failures. What eluded every other Alaska Governor over the last 34 years was brought to fruition by Governor Palin, the pipeline deal. This is a huge political achievement in Alaska, as well as an achievement that will produce beneficial consequences for all of America. Reporting can focus on how she was able to bring about a deal that eluded her predecessors for 34 years. But Beth you really have to admit, do you recall any other vice presidential candidate that has generated as much hate from the other side like she has? I mean it's 8 months after the electionBeth is trying out the secondary meme - NKVD has her number.Gail Collins piece in the New York TImes was perfect example of the fear that liberals have of Sarah Palin - they hate that she is not bowing to their idols.So yes - they are scared - which means Beth is eating more than usual right now - she's another liberal scared shitless 2 days ago.. How should the media cover her?Maybe swoon when she has a night out with her husband?Spend hours chronicling the family hound?Rave about her toned arms?Go on at great length about all the glamor nonsense?Quit assuming that it's ok for the MSM to act like the whack job Richard Melon Scaife as long as it's about Palin?Look the other way when she keeps in place the same policies she vilified during the capaign?Where to begin? Glenn Reynolds gives a lot of space (for Glenn) to some unknown person named "READER PAUL LEE" who thinks that Sarah Palin will try to start a new Tea Party in August.http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/81381/Glenn then expresses some doubts about Reader Paul Lee's theory. But I think that Glenn at least wants to believe it. Me too. It sends shivers down my leg. "She didn't explain herself, and the assumption is that she can't; and that, she should have addressed.Hence Dowd's take on it."But you were able to say that Palin didn't explain herself, presumably because she couldn't, without resorting to phrases like "Caribou Barbie" and "nutty puppy". So, no, hence Dowd's being like Captain Ahab to Palin's white whale about it.As to her "trotting out" her children (what are they, ponies?), men have brought their children onstage with them since forever and I don't remember the term "trotting" ever being used. Were they trotting them any differently than Sarah did? Could this be sexism from the left? "OK, so, how do they cover this person? Look at her record, look at everything she has done. How do they do it?"However they do it, they need to do it the same way for Obama, McCain, and Biden as well. I'd dearly love to see someone do a poll (broken down by age) on how many people who voted in 2008 know why Biden dropped out of the Presidential race in 1988. I'll bet you a month's salary that of the under 40 age group less than 20% know why. If you're reading this (not necessarily you as an individual, ZPS) and don't know what I'm talking about, look it up and then ask yourself whether you think this person should be holding any office. And if you're reading this and do know what I'm talking about and think it doesn't matter then you won't mind the consequences of living in a "society" where the Sec. of the Treasury is a tax cheat and the VP is, well, what he is. Fuck it. From here on out I intend to take full advantage of the "opportunities" such a "society" provides. As the Steely Dan song goes; "It's your game, the rules are your own, win or lose." When I don't pay my taxes or when I steal somebody else's work I damned well expect to get away with it. They've set rules, win or lose. And I damned well don't intend to lose. "Hello fellow repubicans, a man got fucked by a horse?"Trying to entice a comment from Sir Archy? I'm so sorry I've not been following the Palin saga and who's been saying what about her the past couple days.The weather here for this weekend has been stellar. A little bit of light rain on the 4th in the morning when I was golfing with the son, but dry and very temperate yesterday for the neighborhood games, parade and potluck. Today I did laundry and had a 2-hour nap. Is there anything better than snoozing on a warm summer afternoon?And I saw a hummingbird in the garden this morning, attending to the bee balm. That was before I walked on the bike path and ate black caps.Summer is divine.I hope you all had a perfect weekend. Happy 4th! Today's thread proves the proverb that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The lib activists cannot see past Sarah Palin as being a silly and erratic female lost in the male political Big Leagues, and not able to leave the bare foot and pregnant women's quarters called Wasila Alaska. Tina Fey proved that was all there is to see in her Palin impersonations. On the other hand,the traditional Americans, who are married to another gender, and are bringing up their beloved children and grandchildren, see in Palin one of themselves being crudely marginalised by arrogant con-men and thieves that cannot hold a candle to Sarah in true emotional intelligence and in a special leadership style that combines a well dressed beauty who can stay compassionate under fire with a protectors heart that puts our well being first. The visionary Titus of this blog sees in Palin's style a lot more than her critics will give her credit for. It is true that she will have the albtross of evangelical christianity to live down in the academic/NPR circles. But she will be more than a winner by sticking to her guns there. All of the believers in other faiths also understand and admire a person with the honest faith that made America what she is today, and which in the time of a crisis is a rock to keep one steady and not a shameful weakness. When it's all been said and done, the strong Palin will be standing, and all of today's prophets of Palin's demise as a quitter who failed will only be seen as persons croaking out the wishful thinking of cowards who want a bold one to fail. SMGalbraith wrote "coonass". You must be a liberal to write such racist garbage. SMGalbraith wrote "coonass". You must be a liberal to write such racist garbage.Didja' have a Happy Fourth?BTW, Cajuns aren't a race. Be sure to yell out "coonass" the next time you are downtown, then explain that you meant "cajuns".And Boudreau would end in an "x" if you were serious about mocking our friends formerly from Acadia. Be sure to yell out "coonass" the next time you are downtown, then explain that you meant "cajuns".And Boudreau would end in an "x" if you were serious about mocking our friends formerly from Acadia.Have a good day. TangoMan, I totally agree with what you say.Sorry, with me, there is always a "but".In fairness, we need some better way to differentiate fact gatherers and fact sharers from those that analyze and offer opinion. Think Shepard Smith on Fox as an example. While conservatives think this gentleman doesn't "fit". He is only trying to be Fox's version of the nightly news, and entertainingly neutral.I am not sure exactly where this will all lead, other than where it has lead so far. EVER more analyzers and commenters than those bringing us "facts".No wonder the AP is looking to make some money from this. AS THEY SHOULD! You too, Michael Yon.Analysis and commentary are a dime a dozen. Fact finders? Not so much. "(Rush) doesn't know what it means, but clearly a lot of people are afraid of her:"scinfinity said... You don't spend lots of time and energy demonizing somebody you don't fear.But WHY do you fear someone?With politicians that are charismatic and attract Cults, like John Edwards, Obama, Sarah Palin, and Jesse Jackson - people's visceral antipathy comes from fear of what that person might DO - if they ever are in charge.Obama kept his Cult, but Axelrod and other clever handlers made sure he said the right soothing words to lure in traditional ethnic Dems, moderates, independents, even Republicans that thought neither McCain or Palin was up to the job.Palin is right where Jesse Jackson was. Have a solid Cult, but so intent on feeding the Cultists the right slogans so they become even more beloved in "the tribe" - they fail to address the fear and dislike by showing they:1. Have the brains to do the job.2. Can articulate thoughts past rhyming slogans or red meat slogans directed at their Cults w/o broadening their support elsewhere.3. Can stick with a job rather than quitting. (Jesse bailed from races, declined shots at office, bailed from his proclaimed DC 'shadow Senator' position within months, quit working on "causes" he grew tired of. Focused on making Jesse Rich and being a media whore, and being a Power Broker for "His People".) "Analysis and commentary are a dime a dozen. Fact finders? Not so much."Don't hate me for quoting myself, I can do that for you.I am offering this up as my best advice for those worried about just how they might be able to keep their financial heads above the waterline.You can call us "hunter-gatherers" if you wish.I've been called worse. You can speak for yourself. The Palin family have lots of connections with OxyContin dealers, which may be one of the reasons Rush is so chummy with them. Titus...We Republicans don't think what a man and his horse do between themselves in the privacy of their bedroom is anyone elses business. There were rumors about Gene Autry's love songs to his horse, who many believe to have been an Argentine mount. And besides the don't ask. don't tell policy, we only see the definition of marriage to be at stake in the stud motels. Seriously,you either have to laugh or cry. Harvard Professors are leading the way as usual to develop the courses teaching our future leaders the "Ethics of Beastiality." So far Sarah Palin's alma mater has ignored this area of progressive education so desparately needed in Boston. It would be great to have her as president. Finally, a woman president! Change! Real Change! Why would we be afraid of Palin anymore? She just wrecked her national political career and has been a bigger laughingstock than Dan Quayle for quite some time now. That said, it was totally rational to fear Palin before the last election, because this unqualified, unprepared woman came scarily close to being VP under an elderly prez. And now that we see how she quit as governor, it's even more scary to think how close she came to being Commander in Chief in such a dangerous world. The GOP were playing reckless with our nation and it makes me sick. But thank the Lord she'll never get there now. Still can't wait to hear the real reasons she flaked out on her job. It can't be good, given how she threw that strange speech together in haste and gave it on the eve of a holiday. Sarah Palin's national political career may be over, but I'm sure she'll still bring the lulz for some time to come. BTW, has Althouse ever posted negative commentary on Palin? I'm asking sincerely, because I don't read every post. It just seems like she goes out of her way to be kind to Palin in ways she doesn't do for other politicians. Is it because so many of her commenters worship Palin? Is it because she's under the influence of Paglia (who also shares Althouse's fondness for Rush)? Or did I miss a lot of posts where she's been critical of Palin? "because this unqualified, unprepared woman came scarily close to being VP under an elderly prez."Good thing we've got a qualified, prepared man as prez, with a VP even dumber than the Wasilla Snowbilly. God love 'im! Ezra KleinWhat's the difference between a pitbull going for a walk and Sarah Palin? The pitbull has a plan. Fellow Republicans I am still having a hard time dealing with a man diein as a result of getting fucked by a horse.I don't consider myself that puritanical but Jesus Christ, what the hell is going on when a man dies getting fucked by a stallion. "Is it because so many of her commenters worship Palin?"While I gather you don't care for Palin, you really should come over some time and see tha altar I've erected. I think it's quite impressive. And if you can manage to coordinate your visit with my lunar calendar, you might even get to watch one of the blood sacrifices. Face it, with the full power of the Dark Lord behind her, you libs don't stand a chance in 2012! LoafingOaf - "The Palin family have lots of connections with OxyContin dealers, which may be one of the reasons Rush is so chummy with them."Talk about discrediting yourself with extreme prejudice. You've done it. I'd advise you against defamation, but insanity may be a defense a court would recognize. I watched the man getting fucked by a horse on video on the internet and I am seriously fucked up about it.I can't even put a finger up my ass.Dear Lord, this world is in a tailspin. Violet at Recusive Leftist tries to explore the depth of the pathology of the responses to Sarah Palin, something that some of the posters here still seem to be clueless about. The comments are interesting.RL is a feminist site.Of note is her claim that people could easily determine that much of what is foisted as being her positions are, quite simply lies. (And Violet is not a political supporter.)I am wondering how much the blind hysteria about Palin is beginning to be seen by others than her fan club. That will make for a different landscape.And MoDo should stick to her area of expertise. Oh. Right. She is. Over the top ad hominem. Tiring. I am so not horny.Rush is still fat. Which even makes me less horny. "Any by McCain's campaign staff, and other conservatives as well."Uh... where did you find a conservative on McCain's staff? That would be a neat trick.The Left wants very, very much to run against a Republican in any race they can.A conservative, now, that's another color of horse entirely...... and that's why they fear Palin."Why would we be afraid of Palin anymore? She just wrecked her national political career and has been a bigger laughingstock than Dan Quayle for quite some time now."Alinsky much, Oaf?Lets see where The Won polls come the third quarter, shall we?"Political laughingstock". I think that will be the the most lighthearted epithet hurled at TOTUS. Jim: Talk about discrediting yourself with extreme prejudice. You've done it. I'd advise you against defamation, but insanity may be a defense a court would recognize.What defamation? Rush was proven to be a massive OxyContin fiend. And, Palin's family is conntected with OxyContin dealers (Levi's mom), and media reports say one or more of Sarah Palin's children have been OxyContin fiends (Track, especially). Despite Sarah Palin's and your wishes, we still have a First Amendment in the USA, and I don't expect to be hauled into court for posting my opinions on her. But we have to be kind to the woman who tried to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists. She's such a nice woman and Good Christian who never says a mean or unfair word about anyone else. Is anyone listening?A man died getting fucked by a horse.Hello?What is wrong with you people?It happened in this decade.I am still reeling from this news. The only thing that scares me more than the man dieing while getting fucked is Utah.Are there any blackies in Utah? Is Rush on a golf outing, or did he head back to South America with piles of Viagra as he's done in the past...for Lord knows what reason. "But we have to be kind to the woman who tried to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists."Well, having one ghost write your political biography isn't necessarily evidence of an affectionate relationship. Or working in the same office for several years, redistributing public money to teach inner city youth about Marxism. But since the same terrorist launched the Won's career out of his living room, I'd have to go with "fan of ONE terrorist" here, Alex. Sending a letter to Ahmedinejad making an appointment to negotiate AFTER Liesure Suit Larry got that election bullshit out of the way is "fan of terrorist" stuff in my book, too.Oh, and going to a church that raised funds for Hamas? Yet more terror fanboi stuff. Titus, have you seen the under-appreciated movie Freddy Got Fingered? It has some horse cock scenes you might enjoy. :)This oneAnd this one Note with Oaf that he isn't naming sources. No, he comes out and claims drug connections, then just restates his claim with no sources. Yes, I am sure that everyone in the fervid swamps of the wacko left side of the blogosphere knows all the specifics of this - except that, of course, there are no actual verifiable sources for any of this. And, if we are going to go far enough out to pick up the other grandmother of Palin's grandson as an example of substance abuse, then maybe we should be looking a bit closer at the siblings, and half siblings, of Obama, Clinton, and Carter. And doesn't Obama have an aunt who is living in the U.S. illegally? Oh, and isn't Track Palin the one who was off to fight for us in SE Asia (as well as one of McCain's boys)? Do realize Romney is a QUITTER and therefore unqualified to run for President? Did one term as Gov, then quit.And of course, Palin is sooo stupid. Sure she's been elected Gov of Alaska and selected as VP, but what's that compared to posting at Althouse or writing a column at the NYT's? And of course, I agree high intelligence is very important in a President. That's why one genius POTUS had to resign (Nixon),the nuclear engineer gave us double digit inflation and unemployment (Carter), another Genius POTUS got impeached, and then there's the "Great Engineer" and the Great Depression.We need high IQ people to run for office, maybe we could get Ginsburg or Chomsky to run. Palin is pro-life. My sense is that she is a true believer and unlike Romney, Palin will not waiver.I like that she's not much of a polished speaker, most people arent.I like that she is good looking. Unlike Maureen Dowd I left in my high School locker the meme that because a girl is good looking she must not have a brain or worse she's a slut. Reminds of Malena. I like that Palin has a family with all the wants and excess that go with it like most people in this country. God bless the Obamas for their perfect home, not everybody can pull that off.Other than that it's just my gut instinct telling me Palin would be a good president. "Other than that it's just my gut instinct telling me Palin would be a good president."Me too.Which is why the poltical establishment types are terrified of even the possibility of her entering national politics with her own agenda.Letterman would be wise to upgrade his security. He'll probably be blamed for goading Palin into the fray, and do you know what? That might just be true.Don't attack kids if you don't want to deal with mom. Forget Letterman for a moment, or even his asswipe writers. The entire Smart Folks establishment laughed and laughed, and then damned Palin for taking offense.I have long thought that many Leftists are incapable of understanding family any more. Too many broken homes hurts, but once you've decided it's cool to kill your kids for your own convenience, or really any old reason at all - because you just can, there's a whole lot of reality you stop paying attention to - right up until it lands on you with all the claws and teeth out, of course.They hate her. But it's out of fear first, and for the more honest of the pack, envy runs a close second. "And, Palin's family is conntected with OxyContin dealers (Levi's mom).....But we have to be kind to the woman who tried to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists."I'm trying really hard not to be abusive in constructing a reply, or to sound pedantic. Let's assume Levi's mom, who would likely have been Palin's COS if McCain had won (see, I can just make shit up too), is the head of the worldwide OxyContin cartel. Definitely a strike against the Wasilla Snowbilly. But I defy you to produce a citation for "the woman who tried to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists." OTOH, it is an undisputed fact that Obama is friends with an unrepentant terrorist (or "freedom fighter" if you're a seditious POS), and that he has deliberately tried to obscure that fact. He wasn't just some guy who happened to live in the same state or any other such bullshit excuse as was offered. They worked on the CAC together. Obama is a liar with regards to this issue. Why? Is it just possible that the great majority of Americans would be horrified and disgusted if they knew who Ayers was and how close Obama was to him? Try to imagine how totally unhinged you would become if the Wasilla Snowbilly had a friend who has estimated that 25 million Americans might have to be liquidated in order to bring about his Marxist utopia. Also try to imagine how many voters would know that fact about her friend. I'm betting the uproar would far exceed that necessary to force her out of the race. But if it's Ayers: [yawn]. Must be okay to hold such genocidal opinions because he's a hi-falutin perfesser. Remember, I didn't set the rules, but I damned well expect them to be applied fairly and uniformly. I'm sorely tempted to do the experiment. Publicly voice the same sorts of opinions Ayers has only coming from the lunatic fringe right side of the spectrum rather than the Pol Pot school of thought. I'd like to see just exactly how long it would take for me to be fired from my tenured faculty position. Give me one good reason why I should be fired and he shouldn't. In fact, give me one good reason why that seditious POS and his equally seditious POS wife shoud have ever been hired in the first place. It's amazing that the very same people who think it's perfectly fair to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists get mad when you say Rush was an OxyContin fiend and Palin's family is associated with OxyContin dealers. I'm just trying to figure out what's fair and what's unfair. If I follow you guys: Obama is pretty much a terrorist lover. That is perfectly fair. Anyone can do Google searches on Track, Levi's mom, etc, and see their problems with OxyContin. But I see that is out of bounds. I'm sorry, and I'll reform myself. I'll post all over the Internet that Obama is in love with terrorists and is not even a legit prez because he is not a U.S. citizen, and I'll get pat on my back by you guys. I just wanna make sure my comments are nice and fair, as I fear I lost my "moral compass" -- that shit you right wingers are always going on about. "It's amazing that the very same people who think it's perfectly fair to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists get mad when you say Rush was an OxyContin fiend and Palin's family is associated with OxyContin dealers."And just who exactly are these people? Name names.Or I can play the game your (dishonest) way and take you to task for claiming that Palin's hooked on OxyContin. But I defy you to produce a citation for "the woman who tried to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists."Palin ran all around the country screaming that Obama is a big pal of terrorists. No he isn't. Obama doesn't aprove of or like terrorists at all. He's more serious about al Qaeda in Afghanstan and Pakistan than Bush/Cheney were (the Bush White House's own assessment found Bush's policies to be a failure with respect to al Qaeda in Pakistan). But Palin is married to someone who is down with a secesionist political party in Alaska. Even McCain's own staff said she tried to lie about that. As for the person hyping Track's service in the armed forces, the media reports suggest he was sent to the military due to his OxyContin addiction and other troubles with the law. Track and Levi's mom aren't public figures beyond being convenient pawns to attack Palin with. They also don't have the opportunity to destroy the U.S. economy, either.So pardon if I don't see any logic to your statement. Not that you ever honestly intended there be any.Terrorist "lover?" I never said that. The public record is that he consorted with and received support from one. Whether or not they are swapping the soap is neither here nor there. (Gee, if it came out that something like that was actually the case, maybe those dumbass LGBT whiners would STFU about DADT... Axelrod and Emmanuel have to fly that idea by the TOTUS, see if they could package it right...) The One and Ayers were a team back in the day, and we only have a press release and the shield of press non-coverage to assume that Ayers and Obama aren't still working together.So... I think involved with a terrorist is accurate. And timely.And in a nation with its head out of its ass, a disqualifying fact for a presidential candidate.Sure is dark in here, ain't it? If Obama had received even 10% of the press scrutiny Palin received, I doubt he would've been elected. Instead, Obama got and continues to receive the longest Press blowjob in history.Ain't that the truth!If you compare Obama's accomplishments and Palin's, Palin wins hands down. If you compare Obama's "negatives" and Palin's "negatives," again, Palin wins hands down.The problem for Palin, I think, is that Obama is a far far better salesman for the liberal agenda than Palin is for the conservative agenda...well that, and the fact of the MSM being in the BHO camp. Oh, I hear you, Titus, but since we have edged on into fantasy? (Way too easily, I might add)I met a horse once. That by itself is not unusual. What was really weird was how much this horse looked like a horse! It had a shiney, well groomed tail, it had a toothy grin and even some nice shanks as I recall. It seemed ready for some mutual nuzzling, an apple and a nice pat on the behind to set him off to the pasture. Greener? Oh who knows. Prior to this, I assumed all horses looked like that Jessica-Parker person. Her fist name escapes me? "Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous."Enough on that. They also don't have the opportunity to destroy the U.S. economy, either.Hey, smarty, the U.S. economy went down the tubes before Obama was sworn in. I guess that would make it...Bush's fault, not Obama's. "No he isn't. Obama doesn't aprove of or like terrorists at all."You, sir, are either 1) a liar; 2) misinformed; or 3) under the opinion that Ayers and Dohrn are not terrorists.In any case, pay very close attention to what I'm about to write.I don't think Obama would approve of bombing the Pentagon, the Capitol, a military installation, etc. I don't think Obama thinks we need to liquidate 25 million Americans to enact his agenda. I don't think Obama would dedicate a book to Sirhan Sirhan (anybody ever get Teddy Kennedy's opinion on that? Or is it asking to much for a "journalist" to pose such an uncomfortable question?). I don't think Obama would express approval and admiration for what Manson's lunatics did to Tate, et al. But it is an indisputable fact that his friends not only would but did. I question his judgement, and the judgement of anyone who doesn't shun those seditious pieces of garbage. "Enough on that."No, not enough on that. My last comment and then I'll shut up as I realize I'm making an ass of myself.I'm not trying to connect Obama to events that happened forty years ago. I'm pointing out that he is friends with the perpetrator of those events. The fact that he doesn't find Ayers and Dohrn to be vile and disgusting excuses for human beings is what troubles me. If you don't mind a President with psychopaths for friends, then I bet you're a real hoot to hang out with. LoafingOaf,But Palin is married to someone who is down with a secesionist political party in Alaska.You mean the same party that elected a Wally Hickel to the Governorship in 1966 and 1990?This party's support is much like the support enjoyed by Canada's Bloc Quebecois Party. Most of the voters who send Bloc MPs to Ottawa to sit in Parliament are not sending them there to advocate for separation, rather they're sending them there to advocate for Quebec-only interests, or Quebec-first interests. For instance, 70% of the land in Alaska is owned by the Federal Government and thus the citizens of Alaska have little to no say about land use decisions, which are made by bureaucrats and politicians in DC.Do you prefer to argue from ignorance because your ignorance supports your bias, or do would you prefer to argue from facts and let the facts shape your arguments? To me it seems that you're preferring the former. "What defamation? Rush was proven to be a massive OxyContin fiend. And, Palin's family is conntected with OxyContin dealers (Levi's mom), and media reports say one or more of Sarah Palin's children have been OxyContin fiends (Track, especially)."A clue, Oaf?Citing rumors is not a defense against a charge of defamation. CRA, 1979, with a healthy assist from Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd between 2002 and 2005. That's where you can start drawing the picture.Use the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Justice department as a club to coerce banks into making bad loans...that was farce. But what the next three decades wrought was even worse. The institutions acted to protect their interests, and that meant making donations and lobbying for law with the end result that the Federal government became the guarantor of all the bad loans that were originally the fault of the regulators.It isn't any one party's fault that we are ... maybe a quarter of the way down the stairs to the economic cellar. It was and is an institutional failure based on hack graft and corruption, driven by hazy progressive class war politics, and assisted every step of the way by a media comfortable fulfilling a narrative rather than doing a journalist's job.Bush isn't the guy who will go up on a lamp post in the next few years. They should be building extras on the Mall right now, just to get ready.We've seen NOTHING as far as this collapse goes yet. And The Won is still writing checks as fast as the Treasury can print cash. rcocean said... Do realize Romney is a QUITTER and therefore unqualified to run for President? Did one term as Gov, then quit.There is a difference between Palin and people like Romney, Reagan who served out the term of office they promised the people they would fill to the best of their abilities.Reagan and Romney fulfilled their oath and promises, and announced they wouldn't be running again so they could do other things.Not dump the job as too much to handle.Plenty of governors have resigned or been impeached. Palin is the 1st I've ever heard of simply to say "Fuck it". In reflecting on my recent blathering, I apologize to LoafingOaf if I was needlessly combative, abusive, insulting, or unfair. I'm just so damned frustrated by it all, and certainly know less than I think I do.But I still think I'm smarter than Biden. i have a question.what is wrong with being batshit crazy?I have been in the crazy farm twice. Not for drugs. Not for alcohol., but for being batshit crazy. Is that a reason not to take me serious? ever?I also lived in a subdivision in a house which most families could only manage where both couples worked. Many of the people on the street where i lived were vice presidents of a fortune 500 company or doctors or lawyers and the wife worked, too. My former husband was middle management and i stayed at home with three boys. We had a credit rating that was near perfect because i took care of the day to day duties and never bought more than we could handle.yet, I am batshit crazy. Now i am divorced and no one would hire me for freelancing design or anything after seeing my blog and copying my ideas. I live on about `12K a year. Yes, i am batshit crazy. The president and congress are spending money like crazy. The supreme court and lawyers are ruled with money in mind and not fairness.guess, what i am bat shit crazy , but i think they are super bat shit crazy. because the country is a mess compared to my apartment. I apologize to LoafingOaf if I was needlessly combative, abusive, insulting, or unfair.Your posts were perfectly appropriate considering Floating Loaf's slanderous remarks and indifference to facts. His 8:59 post alone is a virtual tidal wave of drivel. Keep up the good work. Your cause is just and even if you "know less than [you] think [you] do," you know more than he does. SMG @ 6:09 pm - ha! Hoosier, my comment was in direct response to another, which said essentially that all the commenter knows about Palin is that liberals attack her. I added something else for that person to know - that she's attacked by more than just liberals. Don't put words in my mouth, don't change the topic and then accuse me of not addressing what interests you. That's trolling. My comment was clear, to the point, relevant to another one, and that's it. I am struck by how hard some people try to twist others' comments or opinions to fit their own agenda. That's some lame, weak-ass behavior. The best thing I have read all week about Palin was from a blogger known as the Reclusive Leftist. She says"My own reaction to Palin’s convention speech was the polar opposite. I can honestly say that, aside from Nixon’s resignation speech, Sarah Palin’s address at the convention is the only Republican speech I have ever enjoyed. Or even been much interested in. I don’t agree with Republicans on politics — not by a long shot — but as a person, I found Palin charming in a Harry Truman, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Erin Brockovich kind of way. How could you not? Especially after the goons had spent the previous weekend in a misogyny fest of lurid speculation and grotesque sexual insults about her and her family. I was proud of her for her courage, as well as for her personal accomplishments as a working-class regular person who went into politics and succeeded. Her speech also delivered some welcome punctures to the national gasbag known as Obama. And that’s another thing: it has not escaped my attention that many of the things Palin is accused of, falsely, are actually true of Obama. This is a guy who, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, didn’t even know which Senate committees he was on or which states bordered his own. (And don’t even get me started on Joe “The Talking Donkey” Biden, who thinks FDR was president during the stock market crash and that people watched TV in those days.) I’m not saying Obama’s a moron, but he’s sure as hell no genius. People say Sarah Palin rambles; excuse me, but have you actually heard Obama speak extemporaneously? As for being a diva, surely we all remember the Possomus sign and the special embroidered pillow on the Obama campaign plane. The fact is, Obama is an intellectually mediocre narcissist with a thin resume who’s lost without a teleprompter and whose entire campaign had all the substance and gravity of a Pepsi commercial. Yet people say Sarah Palin is a fluffy bunny diva. So: are we back to Obama after all? Is this a transference thing? Are people subconsciously frustrated by the fact that Obama is an empty suit, and are they transferring that rage to Palin? "http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2009/07/04/feminists-and-the-mystery-of-sarah-palin/#more-4325Leftists know Obama is an empty suit and an afirmative action baby. They hate that fact and can't admit the ugly truth. So they transfer it to Palin. LoafingOaf isn't trying to argue: he's trying to goad you.He repeatedly uses the "media reports" lie when, in fact, no reputable media has ever reported any such thing about Track. The fevered swamps of dailyKos are awash with all sorts of lies and insinuations, but there isn't an iota of proof to back them up.He knows all of this. He can't back up a single allegation against Track, but that's not going to stop him from repeating them.Just consider the source, and give his lies all the consideration they deserve: absolutely none.[Remember that this is the same crowd who was abosolutely sure that Palin was going to be indicted any day. Right up until the FBI proved that they were liars and vicious smear mongers. Whoops. Not so much as a mea culpa.And he's still trying to push the "I'm sure there's something bad about to come out" BS. Yeah. That's some serious credibility for you.Just put him on ignore. "Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous."But he had fund raisers and was close friends witht he people who did do all those things. So what if he "condems violence". What does that mean when he is willing to associate with people who did such violence. Are all Obama supporters this dumb? SMG @ 6:09 pm - ha!Hey, as I posted previously to you, I was born in New Orleans and my mother's maiden name is Caillouette. I know me some coonasses.Actually, I think I heard that one first from the late Justin Wilson. John - "So what if he "condems violence".And so what if he's lying about when the violence took place. Members of the Weathermen were actively committing violent acts right up until the early 80s. Coincidentally right about the time that Obamam first met Ayers. I'm not saying he took part, but this "40 years ago" stuff is an intentional deception to avoid the fact that he was hanging out with Ayers during the time that members of his group were still involved in violence.But somehow Palin was wrong when she pointed out the obvious truth. Maybe if she experienced more of the alternate reality that the "reality-based community" lives in she would know that pointing out inconvenient truths about Leftists is "lying" or proof of being an idiot, or racist, or bigoted, or whatever epithet they're using that particular day.Maybe if they didn't use it to describe everyone who disagrees with them, those words might have some meaning or sting left in them. But all it means these days is that you've hit a little too close to the bone. This is amusing to watch people who can't defend Barracuda on the merits have to attack others. Look over there McCain's people were mean to her! Look over there Romney quit too! Look over there Obama despite being a state Senator and a Senator doesn't have much more experience! Look over there Obama is a terrorist sympathizer because he knew a guy so radical at the time that he was funded by St. Reagan's best friends!Divert all you want, but America now see's Sarah for the dimwitted lazy quitter that she really is. Good luck with trying to "effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities – and so we will, for Alaskans and for Americans. " or whatever that means. Hey, thanks for the link to Reclusive Leftist. I read her whole darned post, and darn it. This was a feminist who was actually having her own thoughts. I couldn't believe it. And the comments thread was marvelous. Actual, sentient, human beings.I didn't think they existed any longer. How amazing. I guess it's like that moment in Terminator 3 when John gets the call from the Montana National Guard, and there's still a human being out there.Thanks! I loved it.I'm going to post a link to her.Someone already gave it (I think it was Crimso) but here it is again. Really worth a look if you are amazed that there are still feminists who actually want to be fair and think things through. Quite an amazing thing, really, you have to see it for yourself!http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2009/07/04/feminists-and-the-mystery-of-sarah-palin/#more-4325 Invisible, you're conflating redirection with a refusal to accept abject hypocrisy. The defenses put forward here, as I am reading them, don't say "Hey look over there and not here." They're saying, the left has been defending much much worse and now thinks it has latched onto something damaging. But time will tell. Frankly, I don't understand any of it, including why anyone would pursue a career in politics, given the sheer hatefulness of it all. In fact, I have no interest in political science whatsoever. What does concern me, though, is the frothy spitefulness that comes across so clearly. But I'm glad you and others are so amused. what the hell is going on when a man dies getting fucked by a stallion.The guy obviously had delusions that he was Catherine the Great. SMG - what a beautiful name. I'd hate to live anywhere else in part because I'd miss the wonderful names. Frankly, I don't understand any of it, including why anyone would pursue a career in politics, given the sheer hatefulness of it all.Agreed. Politics is unfortunately a blood sport that quite frankly I'd never put my family through despite my interest in it. But yeah, the hypocrisy probably is the more relevant point. To segway, the fact is that as anyone has seen on this blog, the Right in their name-calling ("The One") and their ad hominem attacks ("Socialist/Fascist") and even their attack on family members (Michele hates her country, remember that) are no wallflowers. Also, as its been pointed out Sarah has had no problem throwing hateful comments to her red meat audience when necessary either. To now act as though its unfair just seems silly and hypocritical when looking at the evidence on both sides of the aisle, which is why this won't work outside the base.Obviously at this point, Sarah has attempted to sell herself up as some martyr and obviously some on the Right in their intense need to feel victimized by THE LEFT are buying. I don't think that this strategy is going to help either her become President or the Republicans to re-group as a national party, but I guess we should just sit back and let the pity-party dance the night away. How can "fascist/socialist" be an "ad hominem" attack if it addresses political thought? To segway, the fact is that as anyone has seen on this blog, the Right in their name-calling ("The One") and their ad hominem attacks ("Socialist/Fascist") and even their attack on family members (Michele hates her country, remember that) are no wallflowers.Well, the best description of Obama's theory of governance really is Fascist socialism. Before he was elected, I think that a lot of us thought that he would turn out more like a communist/socialist (esp. given his friendship with Ayers and Dorne), but his socialism has taken on a much more Fascist tinge since he was sworn into office. Of course, if you want to compare and contrast different brands of socialism and suggest one that Obama has come closer to than the Fascist brand, I would be interested in your arguments. A good place to start would be Hayek and his Road to Serfdom, written contemporaneously with the peak of Fascism and Naziism. As for Michelle, I find it interesting that she is off limits, but Palins kids are not. So far, we have had one accused of having her mother's kid, then of having a drug crazed grandmother of the kid she actually did have, then having a popular late night host suggest that another, underaged, daughter be raped by a baseball player during a game they attended, and most recently, that the boy fighting for our country was addicted to drugs. But somehow, Michelle is off limits.But she isn't, because she was being quoted accurately. If she didn't want to be attacked politically about what she said, then she should have just kept her mouth shut. She is an Ivy League lawyer, and should know how to do that. Finally, calling Obama "the one" is no different than all the "Princess" comments we have seen here about Mrs. Palin. No better, and no worse. Not that I advocate it, but fascism is a valid political system. So a fascist is not desirable, but I wouldn't consider it an "ad hominem" attack.Sorry if I'm not clear, I'm pretty drunk. So much for the Althouse vortex. You're nothing compared to Palin. Invisible,Sarah Palin is a decent governor from a small population state. She's physically fit, a good role model for young girls, in a committed marriage, and a non-smoker.She has religious faith, but hasn't let that overrule the rights of her constituents. Her feelings on gay marriage, birth-control and abortion are the same as our current President's.Her political ambitions are great, and her political skills are fantastic for office in Alaska, but need more polish for the national stage. She's young enough that she will have years for that. A flagging McCain campaign picked her as a Vice President before she was ready. That's more of a reflection of the utter failure of the McCain campaign, as they needed to find someone charismatic and energetic enough to offer any chance of success.She was and still is a fantastic fund-raiser. She does a fantastic job at personal appearances. She draws crowds of blue-collar conservatives. She appears to have boundless energy and an great attitude. If we take her speech at face value, people were abusing an Alaskan ethics law to hinder her ability to govern the state. If we read it a layer deeper, Republicans were turning on each other and using her as an excuse for their failures. Though, I'd place more emphasis on how Republicans squandered their control of Congress and the Presidency during the G W Bush years. But that's just me.ps. Titus, sorry you watched the Mr. Hands movie. I felt the same way when some bastard showed me the Budd Dwyer video without any warning. Xmas: Great comment, neatly summarizing Palin's qualities and overall situation.Now, on to what I was going to say:Plenty of governors have resigned or been impeached. Palin is the 1st I've ever heard of simply to say "Fuck it".Sorry, Cedarford, but as a Massachusetts resident, I can tell you about Bill Weld.Weld was a popular and effective Republican Governor, elected in 1990, who quit in the middle of his second term for at-the-time obscure reasons. It turned out he was going through an apparently difficult and slow break-up with his wife, but most people were unaware of it, Weld being the low-key and private sort he is.Everybody knew Weld had Senatorial ambitions, so it was no surprise when he ran in 1996 against John Kerry. Weld had remained in the Governor's office during the race, but he quit after he lost the Senate bid, turning the office over to Lieutenant Governor Paul Celucci, who was fairly well-known and popular, but no match for Weld in intellect, vote-getting power, or charm. A lot of us who were Weld supporters were very irritated with him, as it seemed the main reason he quit was that he became bored with the job of Governor. I think almost no one realized that his odd behavior was probably triggered by his rather private personal problems. Weld then embarked on a bizarre campaign to have President Clinton appoint him Ambassador to Mexico. Clinton nominated him, but Jesse Helms, partly at the behest of Ed Meese, who had been investigated by Weld when he was U.S. Attorney, effectively blocked Weld's confirmation in the Senate. Weld then moved to New York to pursue his finance and law career and replenish his very old-money family coffers, depleted by his years of public service.I think Weld wanted the Mexico appointment mainly to just get away from it all, and sort out his personal issues away from the scrutiny a Governor is always under.As it turned out, Weld's resignation had the effect of ensuring Republican control of the Governorship through Mitt Romney's term, so it accomplished what Sarah Palin proposes to do in Alaska: Preparing the ground for the next Republican Governor, who would then have the advantage of incumbency going into an election.So, yes, Bill Weld was a real quitter, not having anything like the serious problems of Sarah Palin.And people ragging on Palin, especially other Republicans, should realize that Mitt Romney, while he didn't resign, might as well have, as it was perfectly obvious since day one that he was using the Massachusetts Governorship as a launching pad for his Presidential run. Romney was extremely irritating in this: It seemed he was out of the State more than he was in it, and showed a palpable distaste for actual Massachusetts politics, spending most of his efforts burnishing his policy positions to suit his national ambitions. A lot of us had been burned by Weld, and really resented another Governor who treated the job with disdain. If the Governorship of Massachusetts is that inconsequential, then perhaps the rest of the bloated and expensive Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is as well, and ought to be reduced to a part-time and low-paid status, as befits a State this size.But that, as they say, is another story. rhhardin said... Ezra KleinWhat's the difference between a pitbull going for a walk and Sarah Palin? The pitbull has a plan.So now we have established that you find it acceptable to compare some women to dogs. Pardon me for not knowing the term "coonass". I naturally assumed it applied to blacks, not Cajuns.I have spent only a few hours in your blighted state and will never again visit your socialist paradise. I don't care what you call your levees, your locals or your overlords. It is not my problem. Carry on - you get what you deserve. So now we have established that you find it acceptable to compare some women to dogs.Of course. The joke, however, was clever because Palin compared herself to a Pit Bull in the convention speech.Moreover it was a positive because it proved she actually knew something about Pit Bulls, one thing being tenaciousness, and another being good character. The left knows of no such virtues.Klein's transformation even keeps that virtue in Pit Bulls, and claims Palin's fault is that Palin doesn't have them. Hey, smarty, the U.S. economy went down the tubes before Obama was sworn in. I guess that would make it...Bush's fault, not Obama's.Obama was a Senator. Feel free to name the policy he voted against that caused the problems.As for the "He was only 8 when Ayers did what he did" nonsense --- I bet if somebody had G. Gordon Liddy as a close personal friend, even if he was not born during Watergate, you'd find that relevant.And, Palin's family is conntected with OxyContin dealers (Levi's mom)So, daughter's ex-boyfriend's mom is part of "her family"?Does that mean Althouse is personally responsible for the families of anybody her children ever spent time with?I also find it amazing that you hold Palin responsible for what her daughter's ex-boyfriend's mom did --- but have no problem with the assorted sleazebags the current President personally palled around with.Despite Sarah Palin's and your wishes, we still have a First Amendment in the USA, and I don't expect to be hauled into court for posting my opinions on her.You're publicly saying her son is an Oxycontin "fiend".I HOPE you get sued.But we have to be kind to the woman who tried to say Obama is a huge fan of terrorists. She's such a nice woman and Good Christian who never says a mean or unfair word about anyone else.Can you point to her saying he is a fan of terrorists?He was FRIENDS with one. That is undeniable.It's amazing that the very same people who think it's perfectly fair to say Obama is a huge fan of terroristsCan you back up this claim just once?Anyone can do Google searches on Track, Levi's mom, etc, and see their problems with OxyContin. But I see that is out of bounds.Discussing unquestioned facts about the President and searching for dirt on civilians aren't actually that similar.Try as you might, though, to believe they are.I'll say it: I've heard, from excellent sources, that LoafingOaf is a pedophile. Several media sources have made the claim. Now, you can't get mad since I have the same backing of my claim that you have for the claims you're making.Palin ran all around the country screaming that Obama is a big pal of terrorists. Is Ayers a terrorist? If not, why do you feel he is not?"Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous."Ironic. I bet that if somebody abhorred anti-abortion terrorism BUT was still friendly with guys like Randall Terry...their claims wouldn't be enough for you.Call it a really safe hunch.and even their attack on family members (Michele hates her country, remember that) are no wallflowers.So, they attacked Obama's kids?No?Then, no, they aren't comparable. Mmm, look, honestly of all four people on the big tickets last time, i would have preferred palin to be president over the other options. She had more administrative experience than all of them combined. Certainly she couldn't have done worse than Obama has.But... I can't see this as any kind of brilliant political move. Remember Ross Perot. Perot had a real chance at winning it, until he did something that destroyed him: he quit. sure, he came back a few weeks later if memory serves but after that he lost any chance at viability.So if she is a political animal, she just did something stupid. So i have to assume she didn't do it for political reasons. Really all things considered, I think she is actually quitting.Which on one hand i can completely understand. I mean if you look at all the feces dumped on her since she dared have the temerity to harm "the one" by existing, you could understand why any normal person might say "who needs this?"But on the other hand, there is something to be said for deciding not to let the bastards win. The best revenge on Letterman, for instance, wouldn't be an apology, it would be becoming president. I can't help but join the chorus of people who say that her dropping out sends all the wrong messages to the ugliest parts of the political spectrum.And please, if you don't think she faced an unprecedented amount of shit for a candidate, you are probably one of the people who gleefully dumped it on her. Obama was a Senator. Feel free to name the policy he voted against that caused the problems.Is it your position that the current Economic problems are the fault of the Senate -- because of something they did or did not do? Im not sure if Palin ever had aspirations to be President. She is much better suited leading an organization, such as the tea parties.If she isn't governor, its much harder for Obama and the democrats to investgate her. Well, the best description of Obama's theory of governance really is Fascist socialism. Before he was elected, I think that a lot of us thought that he would turn out more like a communist/socialist (esp. given his friendship with Ayers and Dorne), but his socialism has taken on a much more Fascist tinge since he was sworn into office. Bruce, if you can't describe his policies easily as one thing or another, I believe that this pretty much proves, on its face, that we aren’t dealing in actual facts but with petty descriptions of characterizes and beliefs used to substitute for substance. Look it up, that’s what an ad hominem is.Mussolini was a fascist, Lenin was a communist and Hugo Chavez is a socialist. Obviously, you know so little about what actual socialism, communism or fascism is that depending on some feeling in your gut you think that you can label Obama as one another. You only display your ignorance and your inability to critique your political opponents substantively with rambling posts like your previous one. Is it your position that the current Economic problems are the fault of the Senate -- because of something they did or did not do?Do I think that the Congress is responsible, largely, for the economic policies passed?Yeah, I actually do....given that the President can't cut a tax, raise a tax, or spend a dime without their permission.Mussolini was a fascist, Lenin was a communist and Hugo Chavez is a socialist. Obviously, you know so little about what actual socialism, communism or fascism is that depending on some feeling in your gut you think that you can label Obama as one another.Mussolini was an ardent Socialist who started the Fascist party following a fallout with the Italian Socialist party over World War I (a war supported by many ardent "progressives", such as Mother Jones). Mad Man:Folks like Ted Kennedy, Biden, McCain, Specter have been in Congress forever.During their time in Congress, social security and Medicare have stayed on a path to insolvency even while they have increased and increased the respective tax rates that find these programs.This is just one example. So yes I feel they share a big big portion of the blame. Satan was and still is a fascist/socialist. And a "progressive". Funny how the left always forgets that. Mmm, as for the fascist v. socialist issue, um, isn't this all a silly game of definitions? Isn't the issue the strangling of freedom and whether you call a freedom-strangler a socialist, fascist, communist, or whatever, well, who cares? I mean does anyone say, "well, sure, i am being tortured for criticizing the government, but thank God its not by fascists?" i think the destructon of freedom is the destruction of freedom is the destruction of freedom.Now those of us who work in the trenches are taken aback by the gleeful way the Obama administration is intruding into the economy, which is a kind of destruction of freedom, but its not like as if i am about to be arrested for critiquing "The One." And of course people say worse things about him all the time.I mean the sound of the destruction of freedom isn't typically a bunch of people whining about their loss of freedom. the sound is usually nothing, as in silence, because you are not even free to say that. i remember jousting with dems during the bush administration, and hearing them constantly complain that they can't criticize him and i am like "well, I assume you are writing from prison, where you were thrown for criticising him, right? Because otherwise, you are a person free to speak your mind and have chosen to use that freedom by being a drama queen." Whatever other limitations she might have, Palin is a genius when it comes to self-interest. Without knowing the specifics of her decision, I am confident that her resignation is the best choice for her, whether the primary motivation was for her family or her professional ambitions. The speculation is natural and has been, for the most part, reasonable. The most lurid idea I have seen was Rick Sanchez's suggestion that she might be pregnant again. TriangleWhy would being pregnant be even a problem?I mean, Andrew Sullivan's head would explode, but if he suddenly died, the sanity and the intelligence of the blogosphere would take a giant leap upward, so that ain't something i am very worried about. The fatal flaw of fascism is its lack of a succession of power system, except for murder by police state violence with requisite Show Trials for the defeated to confess their Crimes before being killed. Other than that and the inability of the Supreme leader to operate by delegation to trusted men under him (because he fears everyone), fascism works just great...ask their propaganda apparatus. Too bad for America that Obama simply does not care what happens to anyone except a small cadre of New Aristocrats. He does empathize with Chavez and Ahamadinegad because he faces their same problems caused by his chosen style for governing in America as they do in Iran and Venezuela. The blame should ultimately rest on the voters who keep them putting them there. As Walt Kelly would say....Anyway, if you think Congress is responsible for Economic woes, stop blaming the President.I think a better tack would be to analyze what is and is not working, and then convincing Congress that the analysis is correct. It is unfortunate that there are so many others in Congress that are working to pursue their own goals. The whole thing stinks, which is why I vote against incumbents whenever possible.I'm not sure what this has to do with Palin. Madison man... Palin has nothing more to do with the current corruption in Congress than Andrew Jackson had to do with the Bank of the United States that a corrupt Congress had created prior to Jackson's running for national office. Anyway, if you think Congress is responsible for Economic woes, stop blaming the President.Perhaps if he stopped naming czars for every industry possible to override Congressional oversight, we would.Obama is an economic idiot. He is also a foreign policy idiot. I can't say McCain would be a lot better, but it'd be literally impossible for him to be worse.Bush at his worst is better than Obama at his best.And, again, constantly referring to Palin as an idiot when we see our current "brilliant" administration constantly screwing up everything they touch, it hardly seems fitting. Mad Man:Congress is not solely to blame. We The People did put them there. scifinityMmm, the other laughable thing was to hear people say that Palin didn't have enough experience. Cognitive dissonance can be amazing, sometimes. Perhaps if he stopped naming czars for every industry possible to override Congressional oversight, we would.Here's an idea: Congress can stop the funding for those czars.For 10 or so years Congress has been rolled by the Executive Branch. High time it stopped. @AaronWhy would being pregnant be even a problem?You are asking me to speculate about a speculation? I don't know. Maybe she would prefer just being pregnant to being pregnant and a lame duck Governor. F.A. Hayek in his great book The Road to Serfdom argues that socialism is always fascism, and that socialism always lead to a one-party state, because it's the only way they can ram through the redistribution of wealth that they so desire, and then make sure the wealth remains redistributed. Hayek taught at the University of chicago. His book sold a million copies in the 40s. It's a hard read, but he clarifies all these issues.He argues that Hitler's thought came out of socialism, and that Nazism -- National Socialism -- was identical to Stalin's communism. It was the same thing.Liberalism, which he defines as being about the individual, is totally against collectivist thought. He does a very good job of clearing up all these definitions. I wish people would read that book again.The way we use "liberal" now is to lump it with socialism, but it shouldn't be lumped in that manner. Liberalism is about freedom for individuals, plus it's about laissez faire economics (using Adam Smith and John Locke).Socialism, like fascism, is about collectivist thought, with a single party state, ruling in perpetuity.F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom clears all that up, and shows how already in the 1940s these definitions were slipping, partially because the socialists were pretending to be liberals in this country, and in England, in order to seize power and begin their redistribution plans, which is well under way in this country, but still faces a strong opposition. Kirby - "The way we use "liberal" now is to lump it with socialism, but it shouldn't be lumped in that manner. Liberalism is about freedom for individuals, plus it's about laissez faire economics (using Adam Smith and John Locke)."Dead on. It's the reason that I use the term "Leftist" when posting about the current policies of the Democratic Party rather than the more common "liberal." Many Democrats claim they're liberals, and too many Republicans inaccurately describe them as such. To say they are liberals is to give them credit for beliefs they do not hold. Thay are statist, authoritarians: not individual freedom.The number of actual "liberal" Democrats is exceedingly small, and restricted to the rank-and-file. There is no doubt that the leaderships of the Democratic Party and the their attendant special interest groups are Leftists. Don't put words in my mouth, don't change the topic and then accuse me of not addressing what interests you. That's trolling. My comment was clear, to the point, relevant to another one, and that's it. I am struck by how hard some people try to twist others' comments or opinions to fit their own agenda. That's some lame, weak-ass behavior.I didn't put words in your mouth. I'm sorry you feel I exhibit lame weak ass behavior. I'll spare you from it in future discussions. "If she isn't governor, its much harder for Obama and the democrats to investgate her."Joe The Plumber might disagree."erhaps if he stopped naming czars"I've become very irritated with the use of the term "czar." The U.S. equivalent to Czar would be the title "President." More apt terms might be "Rasputin" (as in Drug Rasputin or Compensation Rasputin) or perhaps "Reichsmarshall."It's clear that the sophomoric (a term I only ever use in the true tense of the roots of the word) people of the last eight years who wailed about that Fascist Bush can't or won't see that the current government's overall economic goals are by definition Fascist. I'll let others decide what other aspects of Fascism can be accurately applied to either Bush or Obama. Hayek taught at the University of chicago. His book sold a million copies in the 40s. It's a hard read, but he clarifies all these issues.Yes, because if Hayek said so it must true. HE SOLD A MILLION COPIES! IN THE 40'S!. He's like a tenured, Conservative Jesus that guy.Seriously, "individual freedom" from people who bought Bush's bag of goods that warrantless wiretaopping was teh best idea ever. People who worship at a television station, where the headliner wrote "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism". I'm glad you and Hayek's animated corpse are there to explain what a liberal is. This is what Limbaugh thinks people are afraid of?Palin to quit the job to which she had been elected because:•She did not want to be one of those governors who “just accept that lame-duck status, and they hit the road, they draw a paycheck, they kind of milk it”•“Life is too short to compromise time and resources”•(Unnamed) people have been mean to Trig•She’s “doing what’s best for Alaska”•She’s “taking [her] fight for what's right for Alaska in a new direction.”•She knows “when it's time to pass the ball—for victory.”•“Only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’"Perhaps feeling a little guilty about all this—or maybe wishing Michael Jackson had managed to live for another week—Palin came back Saturday with a Facebook update explaining:•“It’s about country”•She “never thought [she] needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America”•She is “now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values…”Oh, and don't forget: "Quitters never win and winners never quit." "If she isn't governor, its much harder for Obama and the democrats to investgate her."Where do you idiots come up with this insanity? Invisible> Seriously, "individual freedom" from people who bought Bush's bag of goods that warrantless wiretaopping was teh best idea ever.Mmm, don’t look now, but “The One” apparently agrees.Oh, and warrantless survelliance has been done since the beginning of the republic. So please stop being such a drama queen about it. “Oh! Oh! I am so oppressed. Because people are listening to me! I can’t stand it!”Gee, why can’t I call Uncle Osama without some federal looky-loo sticking their nose in my business?> People who worship at a television station, Yeah, while you are able to be a polytheist, worshiping NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WAPO, Chi Times, Chi Sun, LA Times, Newsweek, Time, AP, AFP, Reuters, and so on...Your message must be pretty lame, if you are so terrified of one voice of dissent.Crimso> I've become very irritated with the use of the term "czar." Maybe it is not quite accurate, but its been used since at least the Reagan admin. I don’t see a good reason to stop. Jeremy spoke in class today...Um, gee, maybe it comes from the fact that someone thought that it was worth investigating whether she tried to get the guy who threatened to murder her father fired? Aaron said..."Um, gee, maybe it comes from the fact that someone thought that it was worth investigating whether she tried to get the guy who threatened to murder her father fired?"This is your theory as to why Princess Sarah up and quit?What a dummy. Pure speculation. Palin is going to start a new national party with the goal of making inroads with midterm elections in 2010, 2012 and 2014 with her eyes on 2016 (maybe 2012, but hopefully she understands that a grass roots movement needs time to incubate.)I'm actually not a huge fan of Palin, but if she does this AND if it concentrates on being a new federalist party, I'll join. If it concentrates on being an evangelical movement, I'll stay away. JeremyYou need to pay attention to your own questions. You asked why conservatives felt she was overly investigated. There is a perfect example. Firing the man who threatened to murder your father from the police force. OMG! Investigate her!So be careful who you call a dummy.Or are you too slow to understand that many of those kinds of questions become mooted when you leave office? Invisible man -- your ad hominem attack on Hayek for being conservative is noted. But if you don't agree with his definition of liberal, why don't you supply one based on your own reading of history?Ad hominem attacks are basically all that the left now has -- he must be wrong about history because I don't agree with his political position since it doesn't accord with mine.Would you under any circumstances allow anyone who doesn't agree with you on every particular to speak? From this post of yours it doesn't appear to be likely. scinfinity said... You don't spend lots of time and energy demonizing somebody you don't fear.'Oh posh. No one and I mean no one fears Sarah...unless it has to do with a high heel and some baseness in her spirit (both likely).do one demonizes her. pity, yes. scared of her? nada.She is a cypher in the world of intelligence and her political "instincts" are about as refined as a pig at the trough.We don't hate or anything. what we really think is that she is pathetic at best and dangerous at most. burying her in the grave of non-starters is actually more than she deserves.for the life of me I can't find her attraction. I really can't. Why Ann cares what Rush Limbaugh thinks is the mystery. Fear? Really, big guy? I honestly hope the Repubs nominate her in 2012. That would be excellent because it would be a historical drubbing of a candidate that sums up the modern Republicant Party. Fred Barnes is not impressed: But personal magnetism is only one of the legs, or underpinnings, for a successful race for the Republican nomination. The other two are experience in office and enough knowledge of foreign and domestic issues to talk about them persuasively. By stepping down, she's cut her experience short: it now consists of a meager two and a half years as governor of a thinly populated state. And, from all appearances, Palin has made little headway on the issue track. .Time for The Base to attack Barnes, I guess.p.s. And, no-one needs pity Sarah Palin. She takes care of that, herself. Oh posh.See conservatives spending a lot of time demonizing Dennis Kucinich?No. Because nobody actually takes him seriously.There is a reason why Palin is Enemy #1 and somebody like Ron Paul isn't. There is a reason why conservatives don't spend a lot of time making sure every inane thing our current mentally deficient VP says --- because who on God's Earth takes Biden seriously?She is a cypher in the world of intelligence and her political "instincts" are about as refined as a pig at the trough.I could mention that she pretty clearly explained what Obama would end up doing in office far better than most of his supporters did.Much as I respect our host here, Palin understood Obama's actual policies better than she did. The "intelligent" conservatives like Brooks, Buckley, and Parker who mocked her for being such an idiot about Obama are slowly learning --- OK, Parker isn't, but she is a true moron --- that Palin's comments about Obama under-estimated what he wanted to do.It's ironic watching the Left demonize somebody who ended up being correct. We saw McCarthy demonized for being, honestly, spot-on accurate and have patently false things claimed about him...the Right isn't going to sit back and watch it happen again. Scinfinity,right on. I was going to quibble about the inclusion of Buckley, but then I realized you meant the son (o! how unlike the father!), so I give you my unquibbling adulation. Even Fox News has started to turn on Sarah Palin. In the midst of a segment about the Alaska Governor's battle against "liberal" attacks, Liz Trotta went off-message.Frankly, "the woman is inarticulate, undereducated," Trotta said, arguing that for once liberal criticism was "well-deserved.""I think all the liberal stylists ... really have a case. She just begs for adjectives like flaky and wacky." When pressed, she added, "We're talking about somebody who, right from the get-go, has been a flashy person who gets into a lot of trouble and really has no credentials for any job." Hoosier, I apologize for the characterization. But please, support your assumption that I would pull out "she's stupid" as a comment on Palin. I hate, hate, hate the way the Palin threads turn into baiting, trolling, and all sorts of ugly accusation throwing. My comment was quite specific, and I am determined not to be herded in a direction I don't intend to go in, or cast as holding a view I don't hold, for the benefit of someone else's desired point. I'm not going to be your strawman, in essence. scinfinity said..."You don't spend lots of time and energy demonizing somebody you don't fear."So Fox News is afraid of Princess Sarah?And when did saying someone is a quitter...rank as a form of "demonizing?"She herself has proven that very trait to be true. Palin holds a press conference one day and the very next day releases this self-pitying statement:"How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make."So, she spends her entire time talking about herself (or how the troops have something to do with her resignation) and then whines that people think it was about her! Palin 2012! The I-Quit-A-Rod rolls on!!! My comment was quite specific, and I am determined not to be herded in a direction I don't intend to go in, or cast as holding a view I don't hold, for the benefit of someone else's desired point. I'm not going to be your strawman, in essence.You are correct and it is I who should apologize as I shouldn't have done that. Its just that questioning her intelligence based upon the same kind of gaffes every pol makes seems to be the boilerplate reponse. I should not have done that with you and I stand corrected. JeremyUm, one, in case you missed it, Fox news allows for a diversity of views, which is a little different from the other networks. So one fox news analyst saying something that by the way doesn’t seem actually true is meaningless. I mean I love this one:> no credentials for any jobWow, the cognitive dissonance you display by posting her comment is amazing. People have been saying for over a year now that Obama had not credentials to be president, that he would be untested, that other leaders would test him (his running mate said that one), and that he would have no idea what to do. And guess what? They were right. Obama has not done one sharp thing since he entered office. Could Palin have done better at his job? Honestly, I don’t know how she could have done worse.The only nice thing I can say about obama is that after he does something really, really stupid, he has very often changed his mind. Dontchya feel better?> And when did saying someone is a quitter...rank as a form of "demonizing?"Straw man. And if you don’t know about the actual demonization that has been going on, then surely this is news to you too: Michael Jackson is dead.Sad, huh? "Michael Jackson is dead. Sad, huh?"Not really. Blogger Threatened With Palin Lawsuit: In a yet another completely tone-deaf move hailed by GOP sycophants as cagey, Sarah Palin complained about the mean ol' bloggers chasing after her and sic'ed her lawyer after them, threatening lawsuits. Palin's lawyer, in point of fact, put out a four page letter (.pdf) outlining the "defamatory" charges against his client that would embarrass a first semester law student.One of those in Palin's crosshairs is blogger Shannyn Moore. Shannyn has one message for Palin: Bring it on. "On the Fourth of July, when Americans everywhere were celebrating our most sacred national holiday with parades and barbeques, Governor Sarah Palin was busy having me, Shannyn Moore, declared an Enemy of the State. In a rambling quasi-legal letter, the most powerful person in this state accused me of defaming her for pointing out the fact that there have been rumors, -rumors- of corruption, rumors that have been around for years. When Sarah Palin gave her three-weeks notice to the people of Alaska, aborting her term as Governor, a lot of people wondered why she quit. Mid-level managers turn-in their notice, not elected public officials. It didn’t make sense. It still doesn’t. People have been trying to guess why she really quit, and everyone in Alaska has been playing the guessing game. They’re rumors. There are a lot of rumors. And with all the corruption we’ve had here in Alaska, of course we wonder what’s really behind her resignation. Governors don’t just quit. But Governor Palin did.[..] Sarah Palin is a coward and a bully. What kind of politician attacks an ordinary American on the Fourth of July for speaking her mind? What’s wrong with her? The First Amendment was designed to protect people like me from the likes of people like her. Our American Revolution got rid of kings. And queens, too. Am I jacked-up? You betcha. Sarah Palin, if you have a problem with me, then sue me." Moore's comment would be more convincing if she actually posted the letter. but at the moment i can't find it. Aaron said..."Moore's comment would be more convincing if she actually posted the letter. but at the moment i can't find it."It is posted.You're just not bright enough to find it. Well, jeremy, its not on Moore's site, or on the tpm cafe which quoted from it. And you provided no links. so where is it, genius? Aaron: The MudflatsTiptoeing Through the Muck of Alaskan Politicshttp://www.themudflats.net/2009/07/05/threatened-by-palin-a-blogger-speaks-out-shannyn-moore-meet-the-press/ That's strike two. neither of those sites have it.This is the second time today you have personally insulted my intelligence, only to turn out to have screwed up yourself.maybe hoss, you should hold fire with them ad homs from now on, huh? Ah, found it via LGF. Was that so hard?http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/palin_release_070409.pdfAnd, btw, it is not nearly as bad as billed. shocka. So, let's see here, if intelligence is marked by one's ability to actually find the pdf, then i guess i am the smarter one.heh.Now question 2: do we have a transcript of moore's comments, to see which version of the facts line up with the truth? Aaron said..."That's strike two. neither of those sites have it."Bullshit.Both sites have it.You're rather dense, aren't you? Aaron - It's all over the internet.You can't be this dumb. So Fox News is afraid of Princess Sarah?Yes. One person saying something negative is a network going after her.Now, if you said MSNBC, then yes, you'd be accurate.But the odds of you being accurate are, well, nil.In a yet another completely tone-deaf move hailed by GOP sycophants as cagey, Sarah Palin complained about the mean ol' bloggers chasing after her and sic'ed her lawyer after them, threatening lawsuits.GO SARAH GO!Defamation is not legal. It should be dealt with. Sue them into oblivion.I just find it funny watching a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome like Jeremy calling anybody dumb. Jeremystrike three. you are out, and you are not only a moron, but an agressively stupid one to boot. neither site had it. period. Ha-ha! The "Iquitarod!"Ha ha!. She quit 4 colleges, her oil and gas commission position, what else? Did she quit being mayor because she was elected governor or just because she was a quitter? I'm not sure. http://shannynmoore.wordpress.com/She gets a LOT more comments than Althouse! Aaron, there was no defamation, just whining. Otherwise, Bill Clinton would have had a case against all kinds of people for claiming he had Vince Foster killed, trafficked in cocaine, blah, blah, blah. Alpha -Evidently neither you, nor Shannyn Moore has the first clue about defamation law. Here's a cut and pasted selection for you:Some people think they can repeat false information as long as they say it is a rumor or they can’t swear it’s true. That doesn’t protect them from a defamation suit. For instance, where a corporate chairman notified the board of rumors circulating about the corporate president, to the effect that he was rumored to have engaged in an insurance kickback scheme, and the rumors eventually left the workplace and were heard at a credit union convention, the corporation was held to be liable for defamation. Where a competitor spread rumors about a businessman that he suspected the businessman was bankrupt, he was liable for defamation. Even the implication that a person left under a cloud can be defamatory. In one case, where a lawyer was described as having “suddenly resigned”, the terminology implied that he had left under a cloud of suspicion or scandal which harmed his professional reputation, and was determined to be defamatory. Before you open your trap on a subject of which you have zero understanding, both you and Shannyn ought to understand that not everyone else shares your ignorance. Jim Palin would never actually win a defamation suit against anyone at this point. People said and wrote a lot of nasty things about her [I'll agree] but people have said worse about others - Bill and Hillary, for instance, were accused of murder. So while technically your legal posting is of interest the stuff said about Palin is not enough [in my opinion] to constitute a successful lawsuit. Palin would never actually win a defamation suit against anyone at this point. Well probably any public official probably can't but reading Moore's whine fest about being silenced on the fourth of July was funny. I mean I really laughed out loud listening to a leftist getting her panties in a twist over that.I mean its not like Palin had her people go out and dig up dirt on her, have government officials open up records on her or anything. But that's where political discourse is nowadays plus you can say anything you want about someone and couch in as a rumour or from 'an anonymous source'. Considering how much of the 'news' over the last decade has been flat out fabricated Moore just shows herself as a typical hack who just likes to throw shit on the wall. I guess that's the equivalent of journalistic performance art. Jim:Where did you copy and paste that from? Usually people say that. How many elected officials have successfully won defamation cases? That's pretty tough, as you must know (being the expert you are). Plus, Shannyn, who is now openly inviting the lawsuit, clearly stated that the rumors were "rumors." Which was entirely true, which makes your lawsuit more difficult. You seem to be saying that pols should be able to sue those who state rumors exist. Only conservatives pols? Or do you want a double standard for Palin? Don't answer that; we know. Also, Jim, your expert doesn't address elected officials. They do live by a different standard in defamation suits, for good reason. So, did Palin serve out her second term as Mayor? I've seen allegation not, but Wikipedia is vague on the subject, yet listing 2 terms at a total of six years. Also, Jim, your expert doesn't address elected officials. They do live by a different standard in defamation suits, for good reason.Bristol is an elected official?Willow is one?Trig is one?Track is one?...because the Left has smeared all four of the kids, too. Hey, look at the bright side, this might finally rid of us of that drama queen Andy Sullivan. scifinity, the defamation talk was over the rumored FBI investigation of Sarah. No-one said the kids were under investigation. We know you want to talk about how awful you think the kids were treated. Got it. Anne Coulter thinks this move by Palin was brilliant:http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/coulter-thinks-palins-resignation-wa Matt & Alpha - "So while technically your legal posting is of interest the stuff said about Palin is not enough [in my opinion] to constitute a successful lawsuit."It may or may not be. I'm not enough of a lawyer to say definitively one way or the other. However, it's a pretty clear standard that Moore broke.The primary hurdle in a defamation suit is proving the malice. Given that the woman is employed by the political opposition and her prior history with Palin as well as what she's said on the subject since, I think that's a pretty easy hurdle to clear. I highly doubt that anyone could seriously argue that she was acting as a "journalist" rather than as a partisan attack dog.With reference to elected officials, there is a different standard in order to protect journalists doing legitimate investigative work and to allow for legitimate political discourse. That necessitates a slightly different standard than for a private citizen. However, that standard doesn't give carte blanche license to anyone to print any lie they choose to fabricate whether they disingenuously hide behind 'rumors say' or not. I'd be interested in any citations which prove otherwise, but I find it difficult to believe that such a law exists.Moore's whining primarily consists of "I said 'rumors,' so I'm untouchable." That, in fact, was the position that Alpha and others have taken in her defense as well. My point in the previous post was to show that it's a bogus defense based on a complete lack of understanding of defamation law.Lawsuits aren't always just about winning and losing. Even an unsuccessful lawsuit can be just as good as a successful one. Given what defamation actually is as opposed to what Moore and her defenders say it is, Palin has - at the very least - the grounds to file a defamation suit. It might ultimately be unsuccessful, but it would certainly include a right to full discovery of Moore's own contacts with the Democratic Party, what they knew, what role they had - if any - in passing along those rumors, etc.I suspect that Palin knows full well to what extent the Democratic Party participated/pushed Moore in her blog postings and that the "threat" issued was primarily a reminder to them that they were vulnerable on this issue if they continued to push those rumors.On a final note, just because Bill and Hillary didn't sue doesn't mean they didn't have a case. My guess is that the reason they didn't sue is because there were so many other skeletons in their closets (Rose Law Firm, cattle futures, etc.) that they knew that the discovery process would wind up being far more damaging than simply marginalizing their accusers and discrediting their claims. They chose the politically expedient route, but I don't recall anyone ever actually asserting that they didn't have the right to seek legal redress if they had chosen to pursue it.[Before the Leftists get started, Palin doesn't have the same option because the Clintons had a media that was ready and willing to help marginalize their attackers. Palin, on the other hand, has no such advantage.] Ri-i-i-ight. A case is a good case even if it loses. Clintons had a friendly press. The same press that attacked him as he continued to have high approval ratings throughout the blow job scandal. How is the weather in your alternate universe? Hoosier, thanks for accepting my apology. All's good, yes? Alpha - "Ri-i-i-ight. A case is a good case even if it loses."If a plaintiff achieves the desired result, then for them it is a good case. Forcing discovery on Moore and the Democratic Party would undoubtedly reveal a whole lot of nastiness that they don't want to see the light of day. It's the very same reason that many companies settle lawsuits out of court - especially the tobacco and asbestos companies. It's not that the necessarily think that they couldn't ultimately prevail, it was always the discovery process they feared. Just look at the hay that the anti-tobacco ads from thetruth.org (?) are making from the discovery from tobacco executives. You may not like it, but I'll bet there are a ton of lawyers who have filed similar suits and gotten out of court settlements based solely on the threat of discovery who could explain it to you if you still don't understand the concept. "Clintons had a friendly press. The same press that attacked him as he continued to have high approval ratings throughout the blow job scandal."First, you mean the perjury scandal. Let's not mix apples with oranges. Second, they may have criticized Clinton's personal foibles but groups like NOW and the like were always there to support his presidency. Much like Obama, they were invested in a Democrat sitting in the White House. The difference was that then they at least pretended that they were objective, now the facade is stripped away completely. How is the weather in your alternate universe?Sunny and bright. What color is the sky in your world? Hoosier, thanks for accepting my apology. All's good, yes?Of course. Like I said, I was the one out of line ;-) scifinity, the defamation talk was over the rumored FBI investigation of Sarah. No-one said the kids were under investigation. Man, I bet the Left is going to regret all of those posts discussing how much they hate her, huh?Might make proving malice MUCH easier. AlphaI haven’t read the original statement, so I can’t judge. Certainly the letter is not as laughable as claimed, so Moore is being dishonest on that part of it.I mean hell, Moore was claiming that she was being declared an enemy of the state. Drama Queen much?And, by the way, it is undeniably true in our legal system that you can “win” a case and still lose. Trad Guy: "On the other hand,the traditional Americans, who are married to another gender, and are bringing up their beloved children and grandchildren, see in Palin one of themselves being crudely marginalised by arrogant con-men and thieves that cannot hold a candle to Sarah in true emotional intelligence and in a special leadership style . . ."As a traditional American male who has been married to my wife for 40 years, raised two self-supporting children and is now enjoying my grandchild (with, it is hoped, more on the way), I could not disagree with you more strongly. Post a Comment

Watching My Wifebydesired_scarlette© After a passionate night of love-making with his wife, Steve wakes up to the blurry red numbers on the clock. It reads 2:21 AM. Steve shakes his head, and looks at the clock again. Something clicks into his brain, and he realizes that his flight leaves at 3:30 AM. "Ah, shit!" Steve gently pries Annabelle off of him, and jumps out of the king-sized bed. This job is what he has been waiting for since he got married to his sweet Anna. It was a hell of a fight already to get her hand in marriage--as her father would not agree. Anna was a stickler to tradition, and if her father didn't agree, she wouldn't either. Anna's father was a rich and wealthy man, but Anna and Steve agreed only to ask him for help when we absolutely needed it--and we were almost there. Steve has been married to Anna to three years. She wants to be a mother to many children, but the couple do not have the money to fend for another mouth, as sad as it sounds. It hasn't been a fun ride for Steve, either. They have been using condoms, since Anna is allergic to birth control. There were many times where they were lucky, but they couldn't push it. Steve quickly got out of the shower and dried himself off. He rushed to the closet and saw his suitcases on the floor, already packed. He looked to his wife, sleeping soundly, thanking his lucky stars that he was married to a woman like her. She must of packed his stuff before they had their little fun. Right next to the suitcases were a list that he created of the things he needed, all of which were crossed out, saying: "All of these things are in there, Steve!" He will be forever grateful of his wife. He made a mental note to bring her flowers and chocolate when he comes back. Steve brushed his teeth, put on deodorant, and got dressed. The clock read 2:43 AM. He had to get to Sea-Tac (Seattle-Tacoma) very fast. He couldn't be late. This was their one shot. He was going to close a deal in California, and if he does end up being successful, a promotion is promised and the pay will triple. Steve picked up his suitcases and put them down on the floor next to Annabelle. His sweet, faithful, beautiful, Annabelle. Sometimes, he called her Annabel Lee. "Annabel Lee, honey," Steve shook her. She yawned, looking at her husband with her beautiful blue eyes. "I'm late. I'm going to go now, okay? I'll call you when I got off of the plane. I promise. I love you!" He kissed her rosy cheeks and rushed down the stairs. As Steve passed the living room, he heard a rough voice yell out. "Fuck college!" Steve passed his younger brother, ruffling his hair. His younger brother was staying with them. It didn't hurt their pockets, as Dave helped a bit. Dave was kicked out of the house he had a room mate with because Dave was caught having sex with the room mate's girlfriend of five years. He was beat to the pulp, really. When he came to the couple in that sort of manner, it was impossible for them to say no to helping him get back on his feet. Anna liked him around when Steve was gone, as she liked the company. It was win-win for all of them, especially when he offered what little he had to help pay the bills. They got Dave back into college again, and he seemed to be working extra hard on an essay, even though he seemed a little bit angry. "Bye, bro!" Dave waved, a little bit too excited. Steve dismissed the thought. He's probably finishing up his essay. "Take care of Anna," Steve yelled, grabbing his keys and rushing out to the car. He had to do this for my future family, and for his beautiful Anna. Pulling out of the driveway, Steve couldn't help but think about her. Anna was 5'4". She had beautiful breasts, and a firm ass that begged you to grip them. Her blue eyes stared right into your soul, and she had a habit of opening and closing her mouth when she was concentrating. Her full, plump lips were amazing. Her hair was dirty blonde, and it went down to her belly button. She was a minx, even if she didn't want to admit it. Steve almost feel bad leaving her, since she is a cock-hungry slut, but he know that in the long run, this will benefit for both of them. She was faithful, and he's sure that she will remain faithful under any circumstances. She fills his heart, and he hers. Not to mention that she always mentions how his cock always fills her, too. Steve snickered. Steve wouldn't dare ask Anna, but sometimes he wondered if she ever thought of him as a potential partner. She brings up Dave a lot, but it shows that she loves him as her own. Dave looks at her all the time, as if he's seeing an angel, but Steve guessed that's okay. As long as they aren't going to do anything. The ring on Anna's finger proved that. Steve remembered when he visited his parents at the age of 26. His mother's cancer was back, and she needed all of the support she could get. He walked in on Dave wanking, and his dick looked about 8 inches. Dave just turned 17. Steve doesn't know if Dave can help it, but he has a bit of a reputation to break up relationships, and Steve hopes it never crossed his mind to break up my marriage. Anna is truly the one for Steve. Dave was only 23 to Steve's 32, and he was lean and muscular. He had dark brown eyes, and the way he carried himself suggested that he was tough. He was confident in his actions, and could always find a way to justify them. Steve hopped on the freeway. He hoped that Anna and Dave remembered to pick up the car back from the airport. My phone rang, and the tone suggested that it was either Anna or my boss, Frank. Steve answered the call on his bluetooth. "Steve, it's me, Frank," Frank sounded disappointed. Steve felt a pang of fear. "Yes, Frank? What's wrong?" Steve tried to keep the nervousness out of my voice. "They postponed, Steve," Frank sighed. "They want to check with other corporations before they make a deal with ours. I'm sorry, Steve. I'll reimburse you for the money you have spent out of pocket for the whole year. I know you and your wife are trying to start a family together." He sounded sincere. "Triple the money and you'll have your deal," It was what he did Persuade. Steve kept a light-hearted tone, even though he was completely shattered. At least he was giving him money back from it. "Haha, Steve," Frank laughed. "I'll double it, not triple it. You'll be getting the money in your bank tomorrow at noon." He hung up the phone. He looked back at the suitcases. So much for packing, eh? Steve went to the florist he usually went to, Nadia, and he asked her for Forget-Me-Not flowers. It was sort of an inside joke between Steve and Anna. He went and bought her Godiva chocolate. He headed home. Steve pulled up to the driveway and noticed Dave's car was still there. He usually went to the gym at this time. Steve would never understand why someone would wake up so early to work out. He quietly opened the door. Something told him that something was off. Being in business, Steve learned that you had to listen to your gut. The computer Dave was on was still on, and his books were still scattered across the table. Steve looked at the computer, only to see that Dave wasn't even close to being done on his essay. He heard creaking coming from the basement. It was a gaming area, with a few couches and a love seat. Steve silently walked towards the basement, his heart hammering inside his chest. He heard moans, and he sped up. What was going on? When the door was opened to the basement, all you can see at first is a love seat facing away from you. What shocked Steve was what he saw on the love seat. Dave and Anna were on it, fucking like wild animals. A love seat isn't made to stretch out long ways, so they were in missionary position. Dave was on top of her, his head on her shoulders, grunting. Steve could already tell that they were fucking hard by the sounds they were making. They couldn't see Steve, as they were faced away, but he saw Dave's gigantic balls slap her clit over and over. The sound was mesmerizing and so was her moans. "Fuck me, Dave! Your cock is so good in my pussy!" It was as if Dave was doing push ups after a while, only much faster. He rose swiftly, but dropped as if there was a bomb headed towards them. His cock, now looking a little bit bigger than Steve last saw it, would penetrate Anna's lovely cunt, and the push up would start all over again, each time harder and faster than the time before. They both were naked as the day they were born. Anna's legs were pointed straight at the air. Dave seemed to be getting tired, as he stayed down after the push up and started rocking side to side. Anna groaned, as she loved getting fucked this way. Steve would know. She met his thrusts, and soon they started making out. They unlocked their lips and sucked on each other's tongue. Steve was angry. Why would they do this to him? He noticed that he still had the flowers and the chocolate in his hand. They meant nothing now. But as Steve looked at them, sucking each other's tongue, he realized that he felt his erection pressing against his slacks. That made him even more angry. He turned around, being quiet. He had to throw the flowers and the chocolate back into the car, and park it the next block over so they wouldn't happen to see it. For some reason, Steve realized that he wanted to see what would happen. Would they bring Steve up? There were many reasons, but most of all: he was horny. He liked watching them having sex. Even though that pissed him off, he was drawn to it. He quickly exited the house, being sure not to make any noise. He threw the flowers and the chocolate in the back of the car with disgust. He parked a block over and found himself jogging over to the house. When he entered his house, he crept back to the basement. When Steve peeked in, his heart began to sting. Anna loved it. He could tell. She looked happy, and her cunt looked happy. It was dripping wet. Out of no where, Dave stopped rocking side to side and braced himself on the couch seat. He set his feet on the floor, and began making powerful strokes, a mixture between short and long. He began fucking her faster, and harder. She thrust up to meet his hips, and by the look on their faces, it was the ultimate position. Anna started screaming, and her toes curled up. She was cumming on Steve's younger brother's cock. Dave followed her after, slamming his cock in her over and over again. He grabbed her by the hips and strained his body against hers. He grunted over and over, and Steve was sure that each time he grunted, a string of cum entered his wife. After a few more moments, they both sighed and clung to each other. Steve was shocked. He witnessed his younger brother cumming inside of his wife. What was happening? Anna slid down Dave, and took his cock into her mouth. She has a suppressed gag reflex, and often used that to her advantage. She took him in her mouth, with an intention of cleaning him. She never does that to Steve. Dave looked down at her with love, and Anna looked at him with the same amount of love that Steve gave her. Gave both of them. Dave brought Anna back up and stood up with her in his arms. He picked her up and she put her legs around her waist. Steve backed up as soon as he saw Dave turn around. He sprinted up the stairs, and hid in the bathroom. They passed him, and it looked like they were going to the master bedroom--Anna and Steve's bedroom. He waited a couple of seconds and peeked in the doorway. It seemed as if Dave put his cock into Anna on the way here, as Steve saw that his cock was in her pussy when he laid down with Anna on top of him. Anna rocked back and forth, relishing in the moment. They began doing the sucking each other's tongue thing, and Steve realized that he began to touch himself through his slacks. He felt a jolt when he saw Anna start rising and falling on Dave's cock. There was nothing that was going to stop Steve from watching this. There was a very high chance that Dave would feel someone watching them, and he would look at the doorway and catch Steve looking. What would Steve do, then? He didn't know himself. His own 5 inch cock was no comparison to his big one. Dave seemed to have whispered something to Anna, and then she started moving, up and down, up and down, tip to hilt. Steve's new favorite sound in the world was the sound of their laps making noises. Dave started slapping Anna across her face, and her moans became even louder. Was that it? Did Anna crave pain? Dave grabbed her hips once more and started jack hammering her into oblivion. Steve could tell that her tight cunt would soon take a toll on him. He would eventually cum inside of her, again. Something clicked in Steven's brain, again. He realized that Anna was allergic to birth control pills. . . and Dave is fucking her unprotected. Is this what she wanted? To have her children by another man? Her husband's younger brother? The thought was sickening, but it turned me on even more. It disgusted Steven. "Oh, yes, Dave, fuck me like my husband never can!" Anna screamed out. Dave obliged, fucking her harder and faster. Anna once again met his thrusts. Anna was really enjoying herself, and Dave obviously was. Anna screamed out and curled her toes again. This time, she grabs the sheets with a death grip and freezes up. Dave didn't care, but Steve has never seen Anna cum like this. As Dave hit the third thrust since Anna froze up, she went wild and started thrusting, cumming like never before. Dave pulled out and Anna squirted all over him. Dave had a wide grin on his face that Steve wanted to punch right off. Steven has never seen her squirt! Steven looked down at his pants, and he realized that he just came himself. Dave put his cock back in her pussy and yelled out. "I'm going to fuck that pregnant pussy of yours, sister-in-law! What are you going to do when my brother finds out that your pregnant with my baby, huh?" Dave came inside of her, and he gripped her tight to his chest. "You're mine."

The early part of the twentieth century was a period of upheaval and unrest in the Indian subcontinent. Politically, Bengal was particularly vulnerable: it was facing partition by India's British rulers even as societal and family values tugged and pulled at the heartstrings. Rabindranath Tagore -- keenly observant and mature in his early forties -- was at a creative high. Quick to sense the restlessness and changes, he penned a series of short stories and novels, including Chokher Bali, Nashtaneer and Gharey Bairey, which portrayed a new discord brewing within the family and society at large as its characters were pitched against an impending political unrest. Along with the onset of liberal tones came the inevitable: a breakdown of old customs and values leading to an upsurge of promiscuity and lascivious self-indulgence. Widow remarriage, female education and the European missionary influence had a liberating effect. Passion in all forms found itself suddenly out of the closet. Rituparno Ghosh's film adaptation of Tagore's Chokher Bali dwells on such turn-of-the-century syndromes that seem to reshuffle human society and its beliefs nearly every hundred years, bringing forth a new social order with its new set of interpretations, morals and value systems. Ghosh deftly weaves an interplay of the six cardinal human passions and of impassioned nationalist ideals in his screenplay, manipulating the years slightly to make use of the political crisis of the age. Chokher Bali was first published serially in Banga Darshan between 1901 and 1902. Ghosh sets the film between 1902 and 1905. In the film, the 1905 Partition of Bengal is the litmus that tests the troubled waters on the home front. Mahendra (Prosenjit Chatterjee) and Ashalata's (Raima Sen) conjugal bliss is cloying and suffocating in its sweetness. After the first physical urge and its instant consummation amidst a whirlpool of immature, adolescent sentimentalism, the couple soon exhaust the fire in their relationship. They fall prey to the first whiff of external influence, the young and beautiful widow Binodini (Aishwarya Rai). The situation is akin to yet another passion play by Tagore, Gharey Bairey, where Nikhilesh exposes his wife to the outer world and she is soon engulfed by the flames of a complex love triangle created by the lust and cunning of Nikhilesh's friend, Sandeep. In Chokher Bali, Mahendra's mother Rajlakshmi (played by Lily Chakrabarty) is the third woman playing a key role in this complex jigsaw. It is partly her jealousy and meanness that act as powerful catalysts. Mahendra, a victim of the Oedipus complex, is torn between his childhood craving for his mother and his natural youthful urge for his wife's companionship. By following the novel closely, Tagore and, to an extent, Ghosh, provide an excuse for Mahendra's slips and follies. Ashalata is too naive, simple, and armed with little education to counter the all-perfect Binodini. But reality is often more complex than what meets the eye. Tagore was heavily influenced by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's Bishbriksha (The Poison Tree), a predecessor to Chokher Bali and published serially in Banga Darshan from the first issue (April 1872). Chattopadhyay makes it amply clear that novelty and change are the key driving forces behind matters of the heart, as Tagore does later in Gharey Bairey. In Chokher Bali, Binodini reads Bishbriksha. That is where all reference ends. In the film, the Bishbriksha reference is left unattended. Ghosh ends up structuring the complexities in the relationships through a different mode. Binodini actually orders a tree cut to allow air and light into Mahendra and Ashalata's richly furnished but dark and stuffy bedroom. The interplay of light and shade and the streak of the golden sunset glow that lights up Binodini and Ashalata are beautiful and, at the same time, a clever projection of the various hues and shades of the relationships. Behari, the fifth character in this drama, has been given little space and time. Tota Raychaudhuri as Behari, Mahendra's childhood friend and confidant, is apt and precise. The character could have been given the scope it needed. A scar in a conjugal relationship, however shortlived, runs deep enough to create future disharmony. The young bride Ashalata comments resignedly, and with a hint of pessimism, on the nationalists' efforts to prevent the political divide. Young and inexperienced, she can sense the temporary patchwork in her relationship with her husband is a momentary truce. Future tensions and rifts may continue to plague her seemingly blissful little world. All the characters are inconsistent in their dealings and thought patterns. Rightly so. Inconsistency is what the novel and the film deal with. Raima Sen excels as Mahendra's naive young bride in a balanced yet singularly sensitive portrayal of her character. Sen deftly expresses Ashalata's low self-esteem, her pains and tribulations. Paradoxically juxtaposed against the freshness of her youth is her simple native wisdom and a spontaneity that is frivolous and at the same time a positive binding force. Binodini is a complex character. Her complexities are more inborn than the result of her plight as a lonely young widow. Intelligent, moderately educated, and exceedingly beautiful, Binodini's sense of dignity and mental strength belie her age and social position. She is also an enchantress, a fatal attraction for all those who happen to come close to her. The director's choice of Aishwarya Rai as Binodini raised eyebrows while the film was being made. It will continue to do so as long as Binodini retains her intriguing appeal. Perhaps Ghosh equates the quicksilver quality of Rai's screen presence with the ephemeral existence of Binodini in Mahendra's household. Binodini makes an almost silent entry. She is sometimes as unreal and flighty as a wood nymph. Rai exudes this nymph-like aura all through the film. That is about all she contributes to the role. The various shades in Binodini's character are beyond the reach of many actors. Rai, with her modest acting abilities, just about meets the director's careful instructions regarding dialogue delivery and movement of the eye or hand. Also, one does feel like questioning (this is more to do with Ghosh's dubbing instructions than Rai's portrayal) Binodini's English-speaking skills. A few years of training at home with an English nun does not normally enable an Indian girl in the first decade of the last century -- unexposed to Western society at large -- to speak English with a perfect accent, stopping only to fumble with the word 'spleen'. Prosenjit Chatterjee is credible as the 'spoilt' Mahendra driven by a passionate lust for life to an extent where he gets caught in his self-created web. Ghosh's special ability is his eye for detail and his research. He creates an unquestioned authenticity (with art director Bibi Roy's innate sense of aesthetics and history) in the film, which has been mainly shot indoors (with the ghats of Varanasi and the garden house picnic episodes the only exceptions). One might choose to relate to Satyajit Ray in both these episodes -- the use of the opera glass and the swing at the picnic with Ray's Charulata, the barge and the ghats of Varanasi with Aparajito and Joy Baba Felunath -- since Ghosh's obsession with Ray is well-known. The tea-making scene and the red jacket episode between Binodini and Ashalata are subtle hints at the artificial ostentatiousness in the relationships that the women of the household share with each other. Binodini's control over Ashalata and her love life have been finely portrayed. The paradoxical association of Ambubachi with menstruation and the rigours of widowhood could have been left unsaid. Perhaps Ghosh was thinking of a larger, uninitiated audience who would fully appreciate the pains of a young widow only through strong visuals. Debajyoti Mishra's background score is a big draw. His choice of song sequences from Tagore's musical Mayar Khela enhances the film's appeal and essence as a play of passions and a game of enchantment and definitely not as one of a freedom struggle for oppressed women. The inherent storyteller in Rituparno Ghosh has successfully transcended the bounds of a period piece to make credible interpretations and universal statements. Cast: Aishwarya Rai, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Raima Sen, Lily Chakravarty, Tota Raychaudhuri Producers: Shrikant Mohta, Mahendra Soni Director: Rituparno Ghosh Music: Debajyoti Mishra Cinematography: Aveek Mukhopadhyay Would you like to review this film? Here's your chance!

This past Saturday, I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader in digital 3-D. Many things struck me about this movie. There was the beautiful music, the breathtaking effects, the edge-of-your-seat battles, and, of course, the dashing Edmund Pevensie. ;-) There was, however, one aspect of the film which I did not expect to be so caught up in. This was the character of Lucy Pevensie. I enjoyed Lucy in the previous two films: she was cute, kind, and ever faithful when it came to Aslan. But I really was not prepared to experience her as a realistic role model in this third Narnian installment. You see, Lucy is really a one-of-a-kind girl in today's silver screen world. She is essentially an opposite of every popular female character. Now I've yammered on for far too long. Let me actually get to the point and tell you why she's so different. 1. SHE HAS FLAWS. Unlike Megan Fox's role in Transformers, who is stunningly, almost frighteningly beautiful, and obnoxiously good at everything. (Including fixing hard-core cars and looking seductive simultaneously without getting oil all over her barely-there clothes). Lucy is not particularly attractive. If anything, I'd call her cute. She has blah colored hair and a pug nose. She is quite jealous of her older sister Susan's classic beauty, a vice which nearly leads to her own downfall. She isn't constantly making eyes at the camera, and doesn't always know what to say. And I, for one, love her for it. I mean, really. Lucy is someone I, and most likely millions of other girls, can relate to. We all have the sister and/or friend who far exceeds us in beauty. We don't always have kick-ass come-backs on the tips of our tongues. We sometimes get in the way when people more talented than us have work to do. But here's the best part: rather than bringing Lucy down to our level, we are brought up to her's. Meaning, Lucy embraces or overcomes her flaws, depending on what they are. With her faith in Aslan, she triumphs over her desire to look like Susan and embraces her true self. She joyfully learns to become who Aslan (or God, if we look at this allegorically), truly meant her to be. Sure, I'm a sap. But I still left that theatre thinking "I don't want to be anyone else. I want to be me, the best way I can." "Be who you are, and be that well." ~St. Francis De Sales 2. SHE IS ONE TOUGH COOKIE -- BUT IS AWESOMELY FEMININE. In a world which insists that you can either be a loser 1950's housewife or a kick-butt feminazi, Lucy sure proves otherwise. She is a totally awesome "watch-your-bad-guy-back" fighter. She's got a sweet dagger which any ninja would be jealous of. She goes on scouting expeditions with the men, and never goes down without a fight. She makes heavy decisions and is High Queen of Narnia, for crying out loud!!!!! But she also holds herself with incredible dignity, and never speaks harshly of anyone or to anyone. She dresses practically, yet modestly -- befitting a young woman who's saving the world from evil. She is never too old to exhibit inspiring, childlike faith. She is always the instigator of peace, and embraces her feminine desires for beauty, mercy, and love. She displays strong and touching maternal instincts and sympathies. (Which, I might point out, none of the men even thought of doing!). What the best part of this is, is that Lucy finds the perfect balance between "tough cookie" and "feminine grace." She doesn't have a split personality, and she doesn't behave contrastingly. She behaves as a whole. The numerous attributes which she possesses are all part of her as a true woman. This is Lucy behaving as the woman God meant her to be. I could go on for a while here. I mean really, I actually had 3 other things I wanted to talk about. However, this has ended up being so long that I think I'll just leave it here! Thanks for reading. :-) Feel free to comment -- positive or (constructively) negative! I hope you enjoy Narnia, also!!! WATCH THE TRAILER HERE

Synopsis: The Rangers of Laerean are the protectors of the people, the heroes of Hir. Their exploits are legendary and their great deeds recounted in tales across the ages. These are the stories that will be told for generations. When the Ranger Baric meets the exotic and alluring woman from Vaar’da, Whisper, he agrees to assist her on what seems a simple rescue mission that soon turns into something far more complicated than he expected. Seeking the source of her recurring nightmares, they discover an artifact of unimaginable power that was likely the cause of the Great Disruption, which destroyed all of Hir, over two thousand years ago. Their journey soon becomes a deadly and suicidal quest into the Great Divide, an area of Hir where men fear to travel, into the realm of the demonic Manenase, who live under a great volcano in the center of the Boiling Sea. Gathering a small army of Rangers, they delve deep into the bowels of the volcano, Mount Scorch, on a journey to prevent another earth-shattering disruption that could destroy their entire world. The fate of Hir depends on the courage and skills of the heroic Rangers and their small Vaar’da companion, as they struggle to save the world from impending disaster and face their greatest challenge, and where Baric must face the destiny he foresaw in a dream, many years before. Review: A Whisper in the Shadows by Tom Fallwell was an immense pleasure to read. As a long-time Epic Fantasy fan, I was immediately intrigued by the blurb and impressed by the cover. This action-packed novel begins with a meeting with the Rangers of Laerean and an extremely alluring Vaar’da woman named Whisper (Raimerestha). Although the Vaar’da are described as arrogant and even elitist (and not too fond of humans), the rangers agree to a meeting and ask for possible volunteers (Baric) to aid the Vaar’da. Baric is immediately captivated by Whispers’ beauty, exoticness, and nickname. In fact, after learning first hand how that nickname was earned, he decided to aid her in this quest…an enigmatic quest that was deceitfully represented, delineated in mistrust, and inundated with dangers—both physical and supernatural. A Whisper in the Shadows will titillate every fantasy fans’ senses with numerous epic battles, magical elements, awesome creatures, new species, shadow walking, and shadow beasts. However, author Tom Fallwell has managed to integrate meaningful, ethical lessons in a manner that flows with the plot, resting beneath the layers of a magnificently crafted story. Highly recommended for not merely fantasy fans (and Tolkien lovers), but also readers who love a well-told engrossing tale. There’s even a hint of romance to tickle the hearts of readers while delving into the greater aspects of the story. I’m on to book II! ~The audiobook is magnificent. I truly enjoyed Douglass Pullar’s narration. He has fantastic range and brought this story and its characters to life~ Author: Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1951, Tom Fallwell spent much of his career as a software developer and programmer. Now retired from that field, he has taken up writing, which he had always loved to do, but did not have the time to indulge himself in. Now he is writing the stories he had always wanted to write. Still living in Oklahoma, Tom is active in church, running the sound system and sometimes teaching adult Sunday School. He has always had a love of fantasy and science fiction, both in reading and in movies. His love of story telling came as a result of playing table top role playing games with friends, in which he created adventures for the other players to experience.

A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature I: The forms of great epic literature examined in relation to whether the civilisation of the time is an integrated or a problematic one 1. Integrated civilisations The structure of the world of ancient Greece Its historico-philosophical development 2. The problems of a philosophy of the history of forms The epic forms 3. The epic and the novel Verse and prose as a means of expression Given totality and totality as an aim The world of objective structures The type of the hero 4. The inner form of the novel Its fundamentally abstract nature and the risks inherent in this Its process-like nature Irony as a formal principle The contingent structure of the world of the novel and the biographical form The representability of the world of the novel; means of representation 5. The historico-philosophical conditioning of the novel and its significance The intention of the novel The historico-philosophical place of the novel Irony as mysticism II: Attempt at a typology of the novel form 1. Abstract idealism The two principal types Its relationship to the chivalrous epic The successors of Don Quixote (a) the tragedy of abstract idealism (b) the modern humorous novel and its problematic Pontoppidan's Hans im Glück 2. The romanticism of disillusionment The problem of the romanticism of disillusionment and its significance for the novel Jacobsen's and Goncharov's attempts at a solution L’Education sentimentale and the problem of time in the novel Retrospective examination of the problem of time in the novels of abstract idealism 3. Wilhelm Meister's Years of Apprenticeship as an attempted synthesis The idea of social community and its form in literature The world of the novel of education and the romanticism of reality Goethe's attempt at a solution and the overlapping of the novel form into the epic 4. Tolstoy and the attempt to go beyond the social forms of life The novel as polemic against convention Tolstoy's concept of nature and its problematic consequences for the novel form Tolstoy's dual position in a philosophy of the history of epic forms Dostoevsky: an outlook THE FIRST draft of this study was written in the summer of 1914 and the final version in the winter of 1914-15. It first appeared in Max Dessoir's Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in 1916 and was published in book form by P. Cassirer, Berlin, in 1920. The immediate motive for writing was supplied by the outbreak of the First World War and the effect which its acclamation by the social-democratic parties had upon the European left. My own deeply personal attitude was one of vehement, global and, especially at the beginning, scarcely articulate rejection of the war and especially of enthusiasm for the war. I recall a conversation with Frau Marianne Weber in the late autumn of 1914. She wanted to challenge my attitude by telling me of individual, concrete acts of heroism. My only reply was: 'The better the worse!' When I tried at this time to put my emotional attitude into conscious terms, I arrived at more or less the following formulation: the Central Powers would probably defeat Russia; this might lead to the downfall of Tsarism); I had no objection to that. There was also some probability that the West would defeat Germany; if this led to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, I was once again in favour. But then the question arose: who was to save us from Western civilisation? (The prospect of final victory by the Germany of that time was to me nightmarish.) Such was the mood in which the first draft of The Theory of the Novel was written. At first it was meant to take the form of a series of dialogues: a group of young people withdraw from the war psychosis of their environment, just as the story-tellers of the Decameron had withdrawn from the plague; they try to understand themselves and one another by means of conversations which gradually lead to the problems discussed in the book—the outlook on a Dostoevskian world. On closer consideration I dropped this plan and wrote the book as it stands today. Thus it was written in a mood of permanent despair over the state of the world. It was not until 1917 that I found an answer to the problems which, until then, had seemed to me insoluble. Of course it would be possible to consider this study simply in itself, only from the viewpoint of its objective content, and without reference to the inner factors which conditioned it. But I believe that in looking back over the history of almost five decades it is worth while to describe the mood in which the work was written because this will facilitate a proper understanding of it. Clearly my rejection of the war and, together with it, of the bourgeois society of that time was purely Utopian; nothing, even at the level of the most abstract intellection, helped to mediate between my subjective attitude and objective reality. Methodologically, this had the very important consequence that I did not, at first, feel any need to submit my view of the world, my scientific working method, etc., to critical reassessment. I was then in process of turning from Kant to Hegel, without, however, changing any aspect of my attitude towards the so-called 'intellectual sciences' school, an attitude based essentially on my youthful enthusiasm for the work of Dilthey, Simmel and Max Weber. The Theory of the Novel is in effect a typical product of the tendencies of that school. When I met Max Dvorak personally in Vienna in 1920 he told me that he regarded my book as the movement's most important publication. Today it is no longer difficult to see the limitations of this method. But we are also in a position to appreciate the features which, to a certain extent, justified it historically as against the petty two-dimensionality of Neo-Kantian (or any other) positivism in the treatment both of historical characters or relations and of intellectual realities (logic, aesthetics, etc.). I am thinking, for example, of the fascination exercised by Dilthey's Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung(1) (Leipzig 1905), a book which seemed in many respects to open up new ground. This new ground appeared to us then as an intellectual world of large-scale syntheses in both the theoretical and the historical fields. We failed to see that the new method had in fact scarcely succeeded in surmounting positivism, or that its syntheses were without objective foundation. (At that time it escaped the notice of the younger ones among us that men of talent were arriving at their genuinely sound conclusions in spite of the method rather than by means of it.) It became the fashion to form general synthetic concepts on the basis of only a few characteristics—in most cases only intuitively grasped—of a school, a period, etc., then to proceed by deduction from these generalisations to the analysis of individual phenomena, and in that way to arrive at what we claimed to be a comprehensive overall view. This was the method of The Theory of the Novel. Let me quote just a few examples. Its typology of novel forms depends to a large extent on whether the chief protagonist's soul is 'too narrow' or 'too broad' in relation to reality. This highly abstract criterion is useful, at most, for illuminating certain aspects of Don Quixote, which is chosen to represent the first type. But it is far too general to afford full comprehension of the historical and aesthetic richness of even that one novel. As for the other novelists placed in the same category, such as Balzac or even Pontoppidan, the method puts them into a conceptual straitjacket which completely distorts them. The same is true of the other types. The consequence of the abstract synthesising practised by 1 'Lived Experience and Literary Creation' (trans.) the 'intellectual sciences' school is even more striking in the treatment of Tolstoy. The epilogue in War and Peace is, in fact, an authentic conclusion, in terms of ideas, to the period of the Napoleonic Wars; the development of certain figures already foreshadows the Decembrist rising of 1825. But the author of The Theory of the Novel sticks so obstinately to the schema of L’Education sentimentale that all he can find here is 'a nursery atmosphere where all passion has been spent', 'more melancholy than the ending of the most problematic of novels of disillusionment'. Any number of such examples could be supplied. Suffice it to point out that novelists such as Defoe, Fielding and Stendhal found no place in this schematic pattern, that the arbitrary 'synthetic' method of the author of The Theory of the Novel leads him to a completely upside-down view of Balzac and Flaubert or of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, etc., etc. Such distortions must be mentioned, if only to reveal the limitations of the method of abstract synthesis practised by the 'intellectual sciences' school. That does not mean, of course, that the author of The Theory of the Novel was precluded in principle from uncovering any interesting correlations. Here again I will give only the most characteristic example: the analysis of the role of time in L’Education sentimentale. The analysis of the concrete work is still an inadequate abstraction. The discovery of a 'recherche du temps perdu’ can be objectively justified, if at all, only with regard to the last part of the novel (after the final defeat of the revolution of 1848). Nevertheless we have here an unambiguous formulation of the new function of time in the novel, based on the Bergsonian concept of 'durée’ This is the more striking as Proust did not become known in Germany until after 1920, Joyce's Ulysses not until 1922, and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain was not published until 1924. Thus The Theory of the Novel is a typical product of 'intellectual science' and does not point the way beyond its methodological limitations. Yet its success (Thomas Mann and Max Weber were among those who read it with approval) was not purely accidental. Although rooted in the 'intellectual sciences' approach, this book shows, within the given limitations, certain new features which were to acquire significance in the light of later developments. We have already pointed out that the author of The Theory of the Novel had become a Hegelian. The older leading representatives of the 'intellectual sciences' method based themselves on Kantian philosophy and were not free from traces of positivism; this was particularly true of Dilthey. An attempt to overcome the flat rationalism of the positivists nearly always meant a step in the direction of irrationalism; this applies especially to Simmel, but also to Dilthey himself. It is true that the Hegelian revival had already begun several years before the outbreak of the war. But whatever was of serious scientific interest in that revival was largely confined to the sphere of logic or of the general theory of science. So far as I am aware, The Theory of the Novel was the first work belonging to the 'intellectual sciences' school in which the findings of Hegelian philosophy were concretely applied to aesthetic problems. The first, general part of the book is essentially determined by Hegel, e.g. the comparison of modes of totality in epic and dramatic art, the historico-philosophical view of what the epic and the novel have in common and of what differentiates them, etc. But the author of The Theory of the Novel was not an exclusive or orthodox Hegelian; Goethe's and Schiller's analyses, certain conceptions of Goethe's in his late period (e.g. the demonic), the young Friedrich Schlegel's and Solger's aesthetic theories (irony as a modern method of form-giving), fill out and concretise the general Hegelian outline. Perhaps a still more important legacy of Hegel is the his-toricisation of aesthetic categories. In the sphere of aesthetics, this is where the return to Hegel yielded its most useful results. Kantians such as Rickert and his school put a methodological chasm between timeless value and historical realisation of value. Dilthey himself saw the contradiction as far less extreme, but did not (in his preliminary sketches for a method of a history of philosophy) get beyond establishing a meta-historical typology of philosophies, which then achieve historical realisation in concrete variations. He succeeds in this in some of his aesthetic analyses, but, in a sense, he does so per nefas and is certainly not aware of inventing a new method. The world-view at the root of such philosophical conservatism is the historico-politically conservative attitude of the leading representatives of the 'intellectual sciences'. Intellectually this attitude goes back to Ranke and is thus in sharp contradiction to Hegel's view of the dialectical evolution of the world spirit. Of course there is also the positivist historical relativism, and it was precisely during the war that Spengler combined this with tendencies of the 'intellectual sciences' school by radically historicising all categories and refusing to recognise the existence of any supra-historical validity, whether aesthetic, ethical or logical. Yet by doing so he, in turn, abolished the unity of the historical process: his extreme historical dynamism finally became transformed into a static view, an ultimate abolition of history itself, a succession of completely disconnected cultural cycles which always end and always start again. Thus with Spengler we arrive at a secessionist counterpart to Ranke. The author of The Theory of the Novel did not go so far as that. He was looking for a general dialectic of literary genres that was based upon the essential nature of aesthetic categories and literary forms, and aspiring to a more intimate connection between category and history than he found in Hegel himself; he strove towards intellectual comprehension of permanence within change and of inner change within the enduring validity of the essence. But his method remains extremely abstract in many respects, including certain matters of great importance; it is cut off from concrete socio-historical realities. For that reason, as has already been pointed out, it leads only too often to arbitrary intellectual constructs. It was not until a decade and a half later (by that time, of course, on Marxist ground) that I succeeded in finding a way towards a solution. When M. A. Lifshitz and I, in opposition to the vulgar sociology of a variety of schools during the Stalin period, were trying to uncover Marx's real aesthetic and to develop it further, we arrived at a genuine historico-systematic method. The Theory of the Novel remained at the level of an attempt which failed both in design and in execution, but which in its intention came closer to the right solution than its contemporaries were able to do. The book's aesthetic problematic of the present is also part of the Hegelian legacy: I mean the notion that development from the historico-philosophical viewpoint leads to a kind of abolition of those aesthetic principles which had determined development up to that point. In Hegel himself, however, only art is rendered problematic as a result of this; the 'world of prose', as he aesthetically defines this condition, is one in which the spirit has attained itself both in thought and in social and state praxis. Thus art becomes problematic precisely because reality has become non-problematic. The idea put forward in The Theory of the Novel, although formally similar, is in fact the complete opposite of this: the problems of the novel form, are here the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint. This is why the 'prose' of life is here only a symptom, among many others, of the fact that reality no longer constitutes a favourable soil for art; that is why the central problem of the novel is the fact that art has to write off the closed and total forms which stem from a rounded totality of being—that art has nothing more to do with any world of forms that is immanently complete in itself. And this is not for artistic but for historico-philosophical reasons: 'there is no longer any spontaneous totality of being', the author of The Theory of the Novel says of present-day reality. A few years later Gottfried Benn put the same « thought in another way: '. . . there was no reality, only, at most, its distorted image'.2 Although The Theory of the Novel is, in the ontological sense, more critical and more thoughtful than the expressionist poet's view, the fact nevertheless remains that both were expressing similar feelings about life and reacting to the present in a similar way. During the debate between expressionism and realism in the 19305, this gave rise to a somewhat grotesque situation in which Ernst Bloch invoked The Theory of the Novel in his polemic against the Marxist, Georg Lukács. It is perfectly evident that the contradiction between The Theory of the Novel and Hegel, who was its general methodological guide, is primarily social rather than aesthetic or philosophical in nature. It may suffice to recall what has already been said about the author's attitude towards the war. We should add that his conception of social reality was at that time strongly influenced by Sorel. That is why the present in The Theory of the Novel is not defined in Hegelian terms but rather by Fichte's formulation, as 'the age of absolute sinfulness'. This ethically-tinged pessimism vis-à-vis the present does not, however, signify a general turning back from Hegel to Fichte, but, rather, a 'Kierkegaardisation' of the Hegelian dialectic of history. Kierkegaard always played an important role for the author of The Theory of the Novel, who, long before Kierkegaard had become fashionable, wrote an essay on the relationship between his life and thought.3 And during his Heidelberg years immediately 2 From: Bekenntnis zum Expressionismus (Expressionist Profession of Faith), in: Deutsche Zukunft, 5.11.1933, and Gesammelte Werke, ed. D. Wellers-hoff, Vol. i, Wiesbaden 1959, p. 245. 3 Das Zerschellen der Form am Leben. (The Shattering of Form against Life.) Written! in 1909. Published in German in: Die Seele und die Formen, Berlin 1911. before the war he had been engaged in a study, never to be completed, of Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel. These facts are mentioned here, not for biographical reasons, but to indicate a trend which was later to become important in German thought. It is true that Kierkegaard's direct influence leads to Heidegger's and Jaspers' philosophy of existence and, therefore, to more or less open opposition to Hegel. But it should not be forgotten that the Hegelian revival itself was strenuously concerned with narrowing the gap between Hegel and irrationalism. This tendency is already detectable in Dilthey's researches into the young Hegel (1905) and assumes clearly-defined form in Kroner's statement that Hegel was the greatest irrationalist in the history of philosophy (1924). Kierkegaard's direct influence cannot yet be proved here. But in the 1920s it was present everwhere [sic!], in a latent form but to an increasing degree, and even led to a Kierkegaardisation of the young Marx. For example, Karl Lowith wrote in 1941: 'Far as they are from one another (Marx and Kierkegaard, G.L.), they are nevertheless closely connected by their common attack on existing reality and by the fact that both stem from Hegel'. (It is hardly necessary to point out how widespread this tendency is in present-day French philosophy.) The socio-philosophical basis of such theories is the philosophically as well as politically uncertain attitude of romantic anti-capitalism. Originally, say in the young Carlyle or in Cobbett, this was a genuine critique of the horrors and barbarities of early capitalism—sometimes even, as in Carlyle's Past and Present, a preliminary form of a socialist critique. In Germany this attitude gradually transformed itself into a form of apology for the political and social backwardness of the Hohenzollern empire. Viewed superficially, a wartime work as important as Thomas Mann's Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen 4 (1918) belongs to the same tendency. But 4 'Meditations of an Unpolitical Man' (trans.) Thomas Mann's later development, as early as in the 19205, justifies his own description of this work: 'It is a retreating action fought in the grand manner, the last and latest stand of a German romantic bourgeois mentality, a battle fought with full awareness of its hopelessness . . . even with insight into the spiritual unhealthiness and immorality of any sympathy with that which is doomed to death'. No trace of such a mood is to be found in the author of The Theory of the Novel, for all that his philosophical starting-point was provided by Hegel, Goethe and Romanticism. His opposition to the barbarity of capitalism allowed no room for any sympathy such as that felt by Thomas Mann for the 'German wretchedness' or its surviving features in the present. The Theory of the Novel is not conservative but subversive in nature, even if based on a highly naive and totally unfounded utopianism—the hope that a natural life worthy of man can spring from the disintegration of capitalism and the destruction, seen as identical with that disintegration, of the lifeless and life-denying social and economic categories. The fact that the book culminates in its analysis of Tolstoy, as well as the author's view of Dostoevsky, who, it is claimed, 'did not write novels', clearly indicate that the author was not looking for a new literary form but, quite explicitly, for a 'new world'. We have every right to smile at such primitive utopianism, but it expresses nonetheless an intellectual tendency which was part of the reality of that time. In the twenties, it is true, attempts to reach beyond the economic world by social means acquired an increasingly pronounced reactionary character. But at the time when The Theory of the Novel was written these ideas were still in a completely undifferentiated, germinal phase. If Hilferding, the most celebrated economist of the Second International, could write of communist society in his Finanzkapital 5 (1909): 5 'Finance Capital' (trans.) ‘Exchange (in such a society: trans.) is accidental, not a possible subject for theoretical economic consideration. It cannot be theoretically analysed, but only psychologically understood'; if we think of the Utopias, intended to be revolutionary, of the last war years and the immediate post-war period—then we can arrive at a Historically juster assessment of the Utopia of The Theory of the Novel, without in any way modifying our critical attitude towards its lack of theoretical principle. Such a critical attitude is particularly well suited to enable us to see in its true light a further peculiarity of The Theory of the Novel, which made it something new in German literature. (The phenomenon we are about to examine was known much earlier in France.) To put it briefly, the author of The Theory of the Novel had a conception of the world which aimed at a fusion of 'left' ethics and 'right' epistemology (ontology, etc.). In so far as Wilhelminian Germany had any principled oppositional literature at all, this literature was based on the traditions of the Enlightenment (in most cases, moreover, on the most shallow epigones of that tradition) and took a globally negative view of Germany's valuable literary and theoretical traditions. (The socialist Franz Mehring constitutes a rare example in that respect.) So far as I am able to judge, The Theory of the Novel was the first German book in which a left ethic oriented towards radical revolution was coupled with a traditional-conventional exegesis of reality. From the 1920s onwards this view was to play an increasingly important role. We need only think of Ernst Bloch's Der Geist der Utopie 6 (1918, 1925) and Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution 7, of Walter Benjamin, even of the beginnings of Theodor W. Adorno, etc. The importance of this movement became even greater in the intellectual struggle against Hitler; many writers, 6 'The Spirit of Utopia' (trans.) 7 'Thomas Munzer as the Theologian of Revolution' (trans.) proceeding from a 'left' ethic, attempted to mobilise Nietzsche and even Bismarck as progressive forces against fascist reaction. (Let me mention in passing that France, where this tendency emerged much earlier than in Germany, today possesses an extremely influential representative of it in the person of J.-P. Sartre. For obvious reasons, the social causes of the earlier appearance and more prolonged effectiveness of this phenomenon in France cannot be discussed here.) Hitler had to be defeated and the restoration and the 'economic miracle' had to occur before this function of 'left' ethics in Germany could fall into oblivion, leaving the forum of topicality open to a conformism disguised as non-con-formism. A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the 'Grand Hotel Abyss' which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as 'a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.' (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft 8, Neuwied 1962, p. 219). The fact that Ernst Bloch continued undeterred to cling to his synthesis of 'left' ethics and 'right' epistemology (e.g. cf. Philosophische Grundfragen I, Zur Ontologie des Noch-Nicht-Seins 9, Frankfurt 1961) does honour to his strength of character but cannot modify the outdated nature of his theoretical position. To the extent that an authentic, fruitful and progressive opposition is really stirring in the Western world (including the Federal Republic), this opposition no longer has anything to do with the coupling of 'left' ethics with 'right' epistemology. Thus, if anyone today reads The Theory of the Novel in 8 'The Destruction of Reason' (trans.) 9 'Fundamental Questions of Philosophy: The Ontology of Not-Yet-Being’ (trans.) order to become more intimately acquainted with the prehistory of the important ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s, he will derive profit from a critical reading of the book along the lines I have suggested. But if he picks up the book in the hope that it will serve him as a guide, the result will only be a still greater disorientation. As a young writer, Arnold Zweig read The Theory of the Novel hoping that it would help him to find his way; his healthy instinct led him, rightly, to reject it root and branch. Budapest, July 1962. THE FORMS OF GREAT EPIC LITERATURE EXAMINED IN RELATION TO WHETHER THE GENERAL CIVILISATION OF THE TIME IS AN INTEGRATED OR A PROBLEMATIC ONE HAPPY ARE those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning—in sense—and complete for the senses; rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts; rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closed circumference round itself. ‘Philosophy is really homesickness,’ says Novalis: ‘it is the urge to be at home everywhere.’ That is why philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determines the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed. That is why the happy ages have no philosophy, or why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the Utopian aim of every philosophy. For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that archetypal map? What is the problem of the transcendental locus if not to determine how every impulse which springs from the innermost depths is co-ordinated with a form that it is ignorant of, but that has been assigned to it from eternity and that must envelop it in liberating symbols? When this is so, passion is the way, predetermined by reason, towards complete self-being and from madness come enigmatic yet decipherable messages of a transcendental power, otherwise condemned to silence. There is not yet any interiority, for there is not yet any exterior, any ‘otherness’ for the soul. The soul goes out to seek adventure; it lives through adventures, but it does not know the real torment of seeking and the real danger of finding; such a soul never stakes itself; it does not yet know that it can lose itself, it never thinks of having to look for itself. Such an age is the age of the epic. It is not absence of suffering, not security of being, which in such an age encloses men and deeds in contours that are both joyful and severe (for what is meaningless and tragic in the world has not grown larger since the beginning of time; it is only that the songs of comfort ring out more loudly or are more muffled): it is the adequacy of the deeds to the soul’s inner demand for greatness, for unfolding, for wholeness. When the soul does not yet know any abyss within itself which may tempt it to fall or encourage it to discover pathless heights, when the divinity that rules the world and distributes the unknown and unjust gifts of destiny is not yet understood by man, but is familiar and close to him as a father is to his small child, then every action is only a well-fitting garment for the world. Being and destiny, adventure and accomplishment, life and essence are then identical concepts. For the question which engenders the formal answers of the epic is: how can life become essence? And if no one has ever equalled Homer, nor even approached him—for, strictly speaking, his works alone are epics—it is because he found the answer before the progress of the human mind through history had allowed the question to be asked. This line of thought can, if we wish, take us some way towards understanding the secret of the Greek world: its perfection, which is unthinkable for us, and the unbridgeable gulf that separates us from it. The Greek knew only answers but no questions, only solutions (even if enigmatic ones) but no riddles, only forms but no chaos. He drew the creative circle of forms this side of paradox, and everything which, in our time of paradox, is bound to lead to triviality, led him to perfection. When we speak of the Greeks we always confuse the philosophy of history with aesthetics, psychology with metaphysics, and we invent a relationship between Greek forms and our own epoch. Behind those taciturn, now forever silent masks, sensitive souls look for the fugitive, elusive moments when they themselves have dreamed of peace forgetting that the value of those moments is in their very transience and that what they seek to escape from when they turn to the Greeks constitutes their own depth and greatness. More profound minds, who try to forge an armour of purple steel out of their own streaming blood so that their wounds may be concealed forever and their heroic gesture may become a paradigm of the real heroism that is to come— so that it may call the new heroism into being—compare the fragmentariness of the forms they create with the Greeks’ harmony, and their own sufferings, from which their forms have sprung, with torments which they imagine the Greeks’ purity had to overcome. Interpreting formal perfection, in their obstinately solipsistic way, as a function of inner devastation, they hope to hear in the Greek words the voice of a torment whose intensity exceeds theirs by as much as Greek art is greater than their own. Yet this is a complete reversal of the transcendental topography of the mind, that topography whose nature and consequences can certainly be described, whose metaphysical significance can be interpreted and grasped, but for which it will always be impossible to find a psychology, whether of empathy or of mere understanding. For all psychological comprehension presupposes a certain position of the transcendental loci, and functions only within their range. Instead of trying to understand the Greek world in this way, which in the end comes to asking unconsciously : what could we do to produce these forms? or: how would we behave if we had produced these forms? it would be more fruitful to inquire into the transcendental topography of the Greek mind, which was essentially different from ours and which made those forms possible and indeed necessary. We have said that the Greeks’ answers came before their questions. This, too, should not be understood psychologically, but, at most, in terms of transcendental psychology. It means that in the ultimate structural relationship which determines all lived experience and all formal creation, there exist no qualitative differences which are insurmountable, which cannot be bridged except by a leap, between the transcendental loci among themselves and between them and the subject a priori assigned to them; that the ascent to the highest point, as also the descent to the point of utter meaninglessness, is made along the paths of adequation, that is to say, at worst, by means of a long, graduated succession of steps with many transitions from one to the next. Hence the mind’s attitude within such a home is a passively visionary acceptance of ready-made, ever-present meaning. The world of meaning can be grasped, it can be taken in at a glance; all that is necessary is to find the locus that has been predestined for each individual. Error, here, can only be a matter of too much or too little, only a failure of measure or insight. For knowledge is only the raising of a veil, creation only the copying of visible and eternal essences, virtue a perfect knowledge of the paths; and what is alien to meaning is so only because its distance from meaning is too great. It is a homogeneous world, and even the separation between man and world, between ‘I’ and ‘you’, cannot disturb its homogeneity. Like every other component of this rhythm, the soul stands in the midst of the world; the frontier that makes up its contours is not different in essence from the contours of things: it draws sharp, sure lines, but it separates only relatively, only in relation to and for the purpose of a homogeneous system of adequate balances. For man does not stand alone, as the sole bearer of substantiality, in the midst of reflexive forms: his relations to others and the structures which arise therefrom are as full of substance as he is himself, indeed they are more truly filled with substance because they are more general, more ‘philosophic’, closer and more akin to the archetypal home: love, the family, the state. What he should do or be is, for him, only a pedagogical question, an expression of the fact that he has not yet come home; it does not yet express his only, insurmountable relationship with the substance. Nor is there, within man himself, any compulsion to make the leap: he bears the stain of the distance that separates matter from substance, he will be cleansed by an immaterial soaring that will bring him closer to the substance; a long road lies before him, but within him there is no abyss. Such frontiers necessarily enclose a rounded world. Even if menacing and incomprehensible forces become felt outside the circle which the stars of ever-present meaning draw round the cosmos to be experienced and formed, they cannot displace the presence of meaning; they can destroy life, but never tamper with being; they can cast dark shadows on the formed world, but even these are assimilated by the forms as contrasts that only bring them more clearly into relief. The circle within which the Greeks led their metaphysical life was smaller than ours: that is why we cannot, as part of our life, place ourselves inside it. Or rather, the circle whose closed nature was the transcendental essence of their life has, for us, been broken; we cannot breathe in a closed world. We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our thinking follows the endless path of an approximation that is never fully accomplished. We have invented the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete. We have found the only true substance within ourselves: that is why we have to place an unbridgeable chasm between cognition and action, between soul and created structure, between self and world, why all substantiality has to be dispersed in reflexivity on the far side of that chasm; that is why our essence had to become a postulate for ourselves and thus create a still deeper, still more menacing abyss between us and our own selves. Our world has become infinitely large and each of its corners is richer in gifts and dangers than the world of the Greeks, but such wealth cancels out the positive meaning— the totality—upon which their life was based. For totality as the formative prime reality of every individual phenomenon implies that something closed within itself can be completed; completed because everything occurs within it, nothing is excluded from it and nothing points at a higher reality outside it; completed because everything within it ripens to its own perfection and, by attaining itself, submits to limitation. Totality of being is possible only where everything is already homogeneous before it has been contained by forms; where forms are not a constraint but only the becoming conscious, the coming to the surface of everything that had been lying dormant as a vague longing in the innermost depths of that which had to be given form; where knowledge is virtue and virtue is happiness, where beauty is the meaning of the world made visible. That is the world of Greek philosophy. But such thinking was born only when the substance had already begun to pale. If, properly speaking, there is no such thing as a Greek aesthetic, because metaphysics anticipated everything aesthetic, then there is not, properly speaking, any difference in Greece between history and the philosophy of history: the Greeks travelled in history itself through all the stages that correspond a priori to the great forms; their history of art is a meta-physico-genetic aesthetic, their cultural development a philosophy of history. Within this process, substance was reduced from Homer’s absolute immanence of life to Plato’s likewise absolute yet tangible and graspable transcendence; and the stages of the process, which are clearly and sharply distinct from one another (no gradual transitions here!) and in which the meaning of the process is laid down as though in eternal hieroglyphics—these stages are the great and timeless paradigmatic forms of world literature: epic, tragedy, philosophy. The world of the epic answers the question: how can life become essential? But the answer ripened into a question only when the substance had retreated to a far horizon. Only when tragedy had supplied the creative answer to the question: how can essence come alive? did men become aware that life as it was (the notion of life as it should be cancels out life) had lost the immanence of the essence. In form-giving destiny and in the hero who, creating himself, finds himself, pure essence awakens to life, mere life sinks into not-being in the face of the only true reality of the essence; a level of being beyond life, full of richly blossoming plentitude, has been reached, to which ordinary life cannot serve even as an antithesis. Nor was it a need or a problem which gave birth to the existence of the essence; the birth of Pallas Athene is the prototype for the emergence of Greek forms. Just as the reality of the essence, as it discharges into life and gives birth to life, betrays the loss of its pure immanence in life, so this problematic basis of tragedy becomes visible, becomes a problem, only in philosophy; only when the essence, having completely divorced itself from life, became the sole and absolute, the transcendent reality, and when the creative act of philosophy had revealed tragic destiny as the cruel and senseless arbitrariness of the empirical, the hero’s passion as earth-bound and his self-accomplishment merely as the limitation of the contingent subject, did tragedy’s answer to the question of life and essence appear no longer as natural and self-evident but as a miracle, a slender yet firm rainbow bridging bottomless depths. The tragic hero takes over from Homer’s living man, explaining and transfiguring him precisely because he has taken the almost extinguished torch from his hands and kindled it anew. And Plato’s new man, the wise man with his active cognition and his essence-creating vision, does not merely unmask the tragic hero but also illuminates the dark peril the hero has vanquished; Plato’s new wise man, by surpassing the hero, transfigures him. This new wise man, however, was the last type of man and his world was the last paradigmatic life-structure the Greek spirit was to produce. The questions which determined and supported Plato’s vision became clear, yet they bore no fruit; the world became Greek in the course of time, but the Greek spirit, in that sense, has become less and less Greek; it has created new eternal problems (and solutions, too), but the essential Greek quality of topoz nohtoz is gone forever. The new spirit of destiny would indeed seem ‘a folly to the Greeks’. Truly a folly to the Greeks! Kant’s starry firmament now shines only in the dark night of pure cognition, it no longer lights any solitary wanderer’s path (for to be a man in the new world is to be solitary). And the inner light affords evidence of security, or its illusion, only to the wanderer’s next step. No light radiates any longer from within into the world of events, into its vast complexity to which the soul is a stranger. And who can tell whether the fitness of the action to the essential nature of the subject—the only guide that still remains—really touches upon the essence, when the subject has become a phenomenon, an object unto itself; when his innermost and most particular essential nature appears to him only as a never-ceasing demand written upon the imaginary sky of that which ‘should be’; when this innermost nature must emerge from an unfathomable chasm which lies within the subject himself, when only what comes up from the furthermost depths is his essential nature, and no one can ever sound or even glimpse the bottom of those depths? Art, the visionary reality of the world made to our measure, has thus become independent: it is no longer a copy, for all the models have gone; it is a created totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres has been destroyed forever. To propose a philosophy of history relating to this transformation of the structure of the transcendental loci is not our intention here, nor would it be possible. This is not the place to inquire whether the reason for the change is to be found in our progress (whether upward or downward, no matter) or whether the gods of Greece were driven away by other forces. Neither do we intend to chart, however approximately, the road that led to our own reality, nor to describe the seductive power of Greece even when dead and its dazzling brilliance which, like Lucifer’s, made men forget again and again the irreparable cracks in the edifice of their world and tempted them to dream of new unities— unities which contradicted the world’s new essence and were therefore always doomed to come to naught. Thus the Church became a new polls, and the paradoxical link between the soul lost in irredeemable sin and its impossible yet certain redemption became an almost platonic ray of heavenly light in the midst of earthly reality: the leap became a ladder of earthly and heavenly hierarchies. In Giotto and Dante, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Pisano, St. Thomas and St. Francis, the world became round once more, a totality capable of being taken in at a glance; the chasm lost the threat inherent in its actual depth; its whole darkness, without forfeiting any of its sombrely gleaming power, became pure surface and could thus be fitted easily into a closed unity of colours; the cry for redemption became a dissonance in the perfect rhythmic system of the world and thereby rendered possible a new equilibrium no less perfect than that of the Greeks: an equilibrium of mutually inadequate, heterogeneous intensities. The redeemed world, although incomprehensible and forever unattainable, was in this way brought near and given visible form. The Last Judgement became a present reality, just another element in the harmony of the spheres, which was thought to be already established; its true nature, whereby it transforms the world into a wound of Philoctetus that only the Paraclete can heal, was forgotten. A new and paradoxical Greece came into being: aesthetics became metaphysics once more. For the first time, but also for the last. Once this unity disintegrated, there could be no more spontaneous totality of being. The source whose flood-waters had swept away the old unity was certainly exhausted; but the river beds, now dry beyond all hope, have marked forever the face of the earth. Henceforth, any resurrection of the Greek world is a more or less conscious hypostasy of aesthetics into metaphysics— a violence done to the essence of everything that lies outside the sphere of art, and a desire to destroy it; an attempt to forget that art is only one sphere among many, and that the very disintegration and inadequacy of the world is the precondition for the existence of art and its becoming conscious. This exaggeration of the substantiality of art is bound to weigh too heavily upon its forms: they have to produce out of themselves all that was once simply accepted as given; in other words, before their own a priori effectiveness can begin to manifest itself, they must create by their own power alone the pre-conditions for such effectiveness—an object and its environment. A totality that can be simply accepted is no longer given to the forms of art: therefore they must either narrow down and volatilise whatever has to be given form to the point where they can encompass it, or else they must show polemically the impossibility of achieving their neces- sary object and the inner nullity of their own means. And in this case they carry the fragmentary nature of the world’s structure into the world of forms. The Problems of a Philosophy of the History of Forms AS A result of such a change in the transcendental points of orientation, art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic; the course of this dialectic will depend, however, on the a priori origin or ‘home’ of each genre. It may happen that the change affects only the object and the conditions under which it came be given form, and does not question the ultimate relationship of the form to its transcendental right to existence; when this is so, only formal changes will occur, and although they may diverge in every technical detail, they will not overturn the original form-giving principle. Sometimes, however, the change occurs precisely in the all-determining principium stilisationis of the genre, and then other art-forms must necessarily, for historico-philosophical reasons, correspond to the same artistic intention. This is not a matter of a change in mentality giving rise to a new genre, such as occurred in Greek history when the hero and his destiny became problematic and so brought into being the non-tragic drama of Euripides. In that case there was a complete correspondence between the subject’s* a priori needs, his metaphysical sufferings, which provided the impulse for creation, and the pre-stabilised, eternal locus of the form with which the completed work coincides. The genre-creating principle which is meant here does not imply any change in mentality; rather, it forces the same mentality to turn towards a new aim which is essentially different from the old one. It means that the old parallelism of the transcendental structure * Throughout this book, ‘subject’ means ‘artist’ or ‘author’, i.e., the individual whose subjectivity creates the work; ‘object’ means the work itself, or, sometimes, an element in the work, such as a character or plot. TRANS. of the form-giving subject and the world of created forms has been destroyed, and the ultimate basis of artistic creation has become homeless. German Romanticism, although it did not always completely clarify its concept of the novel, drew a close connection between it and the concept of the Romantic; and rightly so, for the novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness. For the Greeks the fact that their history and the philosophy of history coincided meant that every art form was born only when the sundial of the mind showed that its hour had come, and had to disappear when the fundamental images were no longer visible on the horizon. This philosophical periodicity was lost in later times. Artistic genres now cut across one another, with a complexity that cannot be disentangled, and become traces of authentic or false searching for an aim that is no longer clearly and unequivocally given; their sum total is only a historical totality of the empirical, wherein we may seek (and possibly find) the empirical (sociological) conditions for the ways in which each form came into being, but where the historico-philosophical meaning of periodicity is never again concentrated in the forms themselves (which have become symbolic) and where this meaning can be deciphered and decoded from the totalities of various periods, but not discovered in those totalities themselves. But whereas the smallest disturbance of the transcendental correlations must cause the immanence of meaning in life to vanish beyond recovery, an essence that is divorced from life and alien to life can crown itself with its own existence in such a way that this consecration, even after a more violent upheaval, may pale but will never disappear altogether. That is why tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel. The complete change in our concept of life and in its re- lationship to essential being has, of course, changed tragedy too. It is one thing when the life-immanence of meaning vanishes with catastrophic suddenness from a pure, uncomplicated world, and quite another when this immanence is banished from the cosmos as though by the gradual working of a spell: in the latter case the longing for its return remains alive but unsatisfied; it never turns into a hopelessness rooted in certainty: therefore, the essence cannot build a tragic stage out of the felled trees of the forest of life, but must either awaken to a brief existence in the flames of a fire lit from the deadwood of a blighted life, or else must resolutely turn its back on the world’s chaos and seek refuge in the abstract sphere of pure essentiality. It is the relationship of the essence to a life which, in itself, lies outside the scope of drama that renders necessary the stylistic duality of modern tragedy whose opposite poles are Shakespeare and Alfieri. Greek tragedy stood beyond the dilemma of nearness to life as against abstraction because, for it, plenitude was not a question of coming closer to life, and transparency of dialogue did not mean the negation of its immediacy. Whatever the historical accidents or necessities that produced the Greek chorus, its artistic meaning consists in that it confers life and plenitude upon the essence situated outside and beyond all life. Thus the chorus was able to provide a background which closes the work in the same way as the marble atmospheric space between figures in a relief closes the frieze, yet the background of the chorus is also full of movement and can adapt itself to all the apparent fluctuations of a dramatic action not born of any abstract scheme, can absorb these into itself and, having enriched them with its own substance, can return them to the drama. It can make the lyrical meaning of the entire drama ring out in splendid words; it can, without suffering collapse, combine within itself the voice of lowly creature-reason, which demands tragic refutation, and the voice of the higher super-reason of destiny. Speaker and chorus in Greek tragedy are of the same fundamental essence, they are completely homogeneous with one another and can therefore fulfil completely separate functions without destroying the structure of the work; all the lyricism of the situation, of destiny, can be accumulated in the chorus, leaving to the players the all-expressive words and all-embracing gesture of the tragic dialectic laid bare—and yet they will never be separated from one another by anything other than gentle transitions. Not the remotest possibility of a certain nearness-to-life such as might destroy the dramatic form exists for either: that is why both can expand to a plenitude that has nothing schematic about it and yet is laid down a priori. Life is not organically absent from modern drama; at most, it can be banished from it. But the banishment which modern classicists practise implies a recognition, not only of the existence of what is being banished, but also of its power; it is there in all the nervous words, all the gestures outbidding one another in the endeavour to keep life at bay, to remain untainted by it; invisibly and ironically, life nevertheless rules the bare, calculated severity of the structure based a priori on abstraction, making it narrow or confused, over-explicit or abstruse. The other kind of tragedy consumes life. It places its heroes on the stage as living human beings in the midst of a mass of only apparently living beings, so that a clear destiny may gradually emerge incandescent from the confusion of the dramatic action, heavy with the weight of life—so that its fire may reduce to ashes everything that is merely human, so that the inexistent life of mere human beings may disintegrate into nothingness and the affective emotions of the heroic figures may flare up into a blaze of tragic passion that will anneal them into heroes free of human dross. In this way the condition of the hero has become polemical and problem- atic; to be a hero is no longer the natural form of existence in the sphere of essence, but the act of raising oneself above that which is merely human, whether in the surrounding mass or in the hero’s own instincts. The problem of hierarchy as between life and essence, which, for Greek drama, was a formative a priori and therefore never became the subject of dramatic action, is thus drawn into the tragic process itself; it rends the drama into two completely heterogeneous parts which are connected with one another only by their reciprocal negation and exclusion, thus making the drama polemical and intellectual and so disturbing its very foundations. The breadth of the ground-plan thus forced upon the work and the length of the road which the hero must travel in his own soul before he discovers himself as a hero are at variance with the slenderness of construction which the dramatic form demands, and bring it closer to the epic forms; and the polemical emphasis on heroism (even in abstract tragedy) leads, of necessity, to an excess of purely lyrical lyricism. Such lyricism has, however, yet another source which also springs from the displaced relationship between life and essence. For the Greeks, the fact that life ceased to be the home of meaning merely transferred the mutual closeness, the kinship of human beings, to another sphere, but did not destroy it: every figure in Greek drama is at the same distance from the all-sustaining essence and, therefore, is related at his deepest roots to every other figure; all understand one another because all speak the same language, all trust one another, be it as mortal enemies, for all are striving in the same way towards the same centre, and all move at the same level of an existence which is essentially the same. But when, as in modern drama, the essence can manifest and assert itself only after winning a hierarchical contest with life, when every figure carries this contest within himself as a precondition of his existence or as his motive force, then each of the dramatis personae can be bound to the destiny that gives him birth only by his own thread; then each must rise up from solitude and must, in irremediable solitude, hasten, in the midst of all the other lonely creatures, towards the ultimate, tragic aloneness; then, every tragic work must turn to silence without ever being understood, and no tragic deed can ever find a resonance that will adequately absorb it. But a paradox attaches to loneliness in drama. Loneliness is the very essence of tragedy, for the soul that has attained itself through its destiny can have brothers among the stars, but never an earthly companion; yet the dramatic form of expression—the dialogue—presupposes, if it is to be many-voiced, truly dialogical, dramatic, a high degree of communion among these solitaries. The language of the absolutely lonely man is lyrical, i.e. monological; in the dialogue, the incognito of his soul becomes too pronounced, it overloads and swamps the clarity and definition of the words exchanged. Such loneliness is more profound than that required by the tragic form, which deals with the relationship to destiny (a relationship in which the actual, living Greek heroes had their being); loneliness has to become a problem unto itself, deepening and confusing the tragic problem and ultimately taking its place. Such loneliness is not simply the intoxication of a soul gripped by destiny and so made song; it is also the torment of a creature condemned to solitude and devoured by a longing for community. Such loneliness gives rise to new tragic problems, especially the central problem of modern tragedy—that of trust. The new hero’s soul, clothed in life yet filled with essence, can never comprehend that the essence existing within the same shell of life in another person need not be the same as his own; it knows that all those who have found one another are the same, and cannot understand that its knowledge does not come from this world, that the inner certainty of this knowledge cannot guarantee its being a constituent of this life. It has knowledge of the idea of its own self which animates it and is alive inside it, and so it must believe that the milling crowd of humanity which surrounds it is only a carnival prank and that, at the first word from the essence, the masks will fall and brothers who have hitherto been strangers to one another will fall into each other’s arms. It knows this, it searches for it, and it finds only itself alone, in the midst of destiny. And so a note of reproachful, elegiac sorrow enters into its ecstasy at having found itself: a note of disappointment at a life which has not been even a caricature of what its knowledge of destiny had so clairvoyantly heralded and which gave it the strength to travel the long road alone and in darkness. This loneliness is not only dramatic but also psychological, because it is not merely the a priori property of all dramatis personae but also the lived experience of man in process of becoming a hero; and if psychology is not to remain merely raw material for drama, it can only express itself as lyricism of the soul. Great epic writing gives form to the extensive totality of life, drama to the intensive totality of essence. That is why, when essence has lost its spontaneously rounded, sensually present totality, drama can nevertheless, in its formal a priori nature, find a world that is perhaps problematic but which still is all-embracing and closed within itself. But this is impossible for the great epic. For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle; it is empirical at its deepest, most decisive, all-determining transcendental base; it can sometimes accelerate the rhythm of life, can carry something that was hidden or neglected to a Utopian end which was always immanent within it, but it can never, while remaining epic, transcend the breadth and depth, the rounded, sensual, richly ordered nature of life as historically given. Any attempt at a properly Utopian epic must fail because it is bound, subjectively or objectively, to transcend the empirical and spill over into the lyrical or dramatic; and such overlapping can never be fruitful for the epic. There have been times, perhaps—certain fairly-tales still retain fragments of these lost worlds—when what today can only be reached through a Utopian view was really present to the visionary eye; epic poets in those times did not have to leave the empirical in order to represent transcendent reality as the only existing one, they could be simple narrators of events, just as the Assyrians who drew winged beasts doubtless regarded themselves, and rightly, as naturalists. Already in Homer’s time, however, the transcendent was inextricably interwoven with earthly existence, and Homer is inimitable precisely because, in him, this becoming-immanent was so completely successful. This indestructible bond with reality as it is, the crucial difference between the epic and the drama, is a necessary consequence of the object of the epic being life itself. The concept of essence leads to transcendence simply by being posited, and then, in the transcendent, crystallises into a new and higher essence expressing through its form an essence that should be—an essence which, because it is born of form, remains independent of the given content of what merely exists. The concept of life, on the other hand, has no need of any such transcendence captured and held immobile as an object. The worlds of essence are held high above existence by the force of forms, and their nature and contents are determined only by the inner potentialities of that force. The worlds of life stay as they are: forms only receive and mould them, only reduce them to their inborn meaning. And so these forms, which, here, can only play the role of Socrates at the birth of thoughts, can never of their own accord charm something into life that was not already present ink. The character created by drama (this is only another way of expressing the same relationship) is the intelligible ‘I’ of man, the character created by the epic is the empirical ‘I’. The ‘should be’, in whose desperate intensity the essence seeks refuge because it has become an outlaw on earth can objectivise itself in the intelligible T as the hero’s normative psychology, but in the empirical T it remains a ‘should be’. The power of this ‘should be’ is a purely psychological one, and in this it resembles the other elements of the soul; its aims are empirical, and here again it resembles other possible aspirations as given by man himself or by his environment; its contents are historical, similar to others produced in the process of time, and cannot be severed from the soil in which they have grown: they may fade, but they will never awaken to a new, ideal existence. The ‘should be’ kills life, and the dramatic hero assumes the symbolic attributes of the sensuous manifestations of life only in order to be able to perform the symbolic ceremony of dying in a sensuously perceptible way, making transcendence visible; yet in the epic men must be alive, or else they destroy or exhaust the very element that carries, surrounds and fills them. (The ‘should be’ kills life, and every concept expresses a ‘should-be’ of its object; that is why thought can never arrive at a real definition of life, and why, perhaps, the philosophy of art is so much more adequate to tragedy than it is to the epic.) The ‘should be’ kills life, and an epic hero constructed out of what ‘should be’ will always be but a shadow of the living epic man of historical reality, his shadow but never his original image, and his given world of experience and adventure can only be a watered-down copy of reality, never its core and essence. Utopian stylisation of the epic inevitably creates distance, but such distance lies between two instances of the empirical, so that the sorrow and majesty created by this distance can only make for a rhetorical tone. This distance may produce marvellous elegiac lyricism, but it can never, in itself, put real life into a content that transcends being, or turns such content into self-sufficient reality. Whether this distance leads forward or backwards, upwards or downwards from life, it is never the creation of a new reality but always only a subjective mirroring of what already exists. Virgil’s heroes lead a cool and measured shadow-existence, nourished by the blood of a splendid ardour that has sacrificed itself in order to conjure up what has vanished forever: while Zolaesque monumentality amounts only to monotonous emotion in face of the multiple yet simplified complexity of a sociological system of categories that claims to cover the whole of contemporary life. There is such a thing as great epic literature, but drama never requires the attribute of greatness and must always resist it. The cosmos of the drama, full of its own substance, rounded with substantiality, ignores the contrast between wholeness and segment, the opposition between event and symptom: for the drama, to exist is to be a cosmos, to grasp the essence, to possess its totality. But the concept of life does not posit the necessity of the totality of life; life contains within itself both the relative independence of every separate living being from any transcendent bond and the likewise relative inevitability and indespensability [sic!] of such bonds. That is why there can be epic forms whose object is not the totality of life but a segment of it, a fragment capable of independent existence. But, for the same reason, the concept of totality for the epic is not a transcendental one, as it is in drama; it is not born out of the form itself, but is empirical and metaphysical, combining transcendence and immanence inseparably within itself. In the epic, subject and object do not coincide as they do in drama, where creative subjectivity, seen from the perspective of the work, is barely a concept but only a generalised awareness; whereas in the epic subject and object are clearly and unequivocally distinct from one another and present in the work as such. And since an empirical form-giving subject follows from the empirical nature of the object seeking to acquire form, this subject can never be the basis and guarantee of the totality of the represented world. In the epic, totality can only truly manifest itself in the contents of the object: it is meta-subjective, transcendent, it is a revelation and grace. Living, empirical man is always the subject of the epic, but his creative, life-mastering arrogance is transformed in the great epics into humility, contemplation, speechless wonder at the luminous meaning which, so unexpectedly, so naturally, has become visible to him, an ordinary human being in the midst of ordinary life. In the minor epic forms, the subject confronts the object in a more dominant and self-sufficient way. The narrator may (we cannot, nor do we intend to establish even a tentative system of epic forms here) adopt the cool and superior demeanour of the chronicler who observes the strange workings of coincidence as it plays with the destinies of men, meaningless and destructive to them, revealing and instructive to us; or he may see a small corner of the world as an ordered flower-garden in the midst of the boundless, chaotic waste-lands of life, and, moved by his vision, elevate it to the status of the sole reality; or he may be moved and impressed by the strange, profound experiences of an individual and pour them into the mould of an objectivised destiny; but whatever he does, it is his own subjectivity that singles out a fragment from the immeasurable infinity of the events of life, endows it with independent life and allows the whole from which this fragment has been taken to enter the work only as the thoughts and feelings of his hero, only as an involuntary continuation of a fragmentary causal series, only as the mirroring of a reality having its own separate existence. Completeness in the minor epic forms is subjective: a fragment of life is transplanted by the writer into a surrounding world that emphasises it and lifts it out of the totality of life; and this selection, this delimitation, puts the stamp of its origin in the subject’s will and knowledge upon the work itself: it is, more or less, lyrical in nature. The relativity of the independence and the mutual bonds of all living beings and their organic, likewise living associations can be superseded, can be elevated into form, if a conscious decision of the creative subject brings out an immanent meaning within the isolated existence of this particular fragment of life. The subject’s form-giving, structuring, delimiting act, his sovereign dominance over the created object, is the lyricism of those epic forms which are without totality. Such lyricism is here the last epic unity; it is not the swallowing of a solitary T in the object-free contemplation of its own self, nor is it the dissolving of the object into sensations and moods; it is born out of form, it creates form, and it sustains everything that has been given form in such a work. The immediate, flowing power of such lyricism is bound to increase in proportion with the significance and gravity of the life-segment selected; the balance of the work is that between the positing subject and the object he singles out and elevates. In the short story, the narrative form which pin-points the strangeness and ambiguity of life, such lyricism must entirely conceal itself behind the hard outlines of the event; here, lyricism is still pure selection; the utter arbitrariness of chance, which may bring happiness or destruction but whose workings are always without reason, can only be balanced by clear, uncommented, purely objective depiction. The short story is the most purely artistic form; it expresses the ultimate meaning of all artistic creation as mood, as the very sense and content of the creative process, but it is rendered abstract for that very reason. It sees absurdity in all its undisguised and unadorned nakedness, and the exorcising power of this view, without fear or hope, gives it the consecration of form; meaningless-ness as meaninglessness becomes form; it becomes eternal because it is affirmed, transcended and redeemed by form. Between the short story and the lyric-epic forms there is a clear distinction. As soon as an event which has been given meaning by its form is, if only relatively, meaningful in its content as well, the subject, falling silent, must again struggle for words with which to build a bridge between the relative meaning of the event and the absolute. In the idyll such lyricism merges almost completely with the contours of the men and things depicted; it is this lyricism that endows these contours with the softness and airiness of a peaceful seclusion, of a blissful isolation from the storms raging in the outside world. Only when the idyll transcends its form and becomes epic, as in Goethe’s and Hebbel’s ‘great idylls’, where the whole of life with all its dangers, although modified and softened by distance, enters into the events depicted, must the author’s own voice be heard and his hand must create the salutary distances, to ensure that the hard-won happiness of his heroes is not reduced to the unworthy complacency of those who cravenly turn their backs on an all-too-present wretchedness they have not overcome but only escaped, and, equally, to ensure that the dangers of life and the perturbation of its totality do not become a pale schema, reducing the triumph of deliverance to a trivial farce. And such lyricism develops into a limpid, generously flowing, all-embracing message only when the event, in its epic objectivation, becomes the vehicle and symbol of unbounded feeling; when a soul is the hero and that soul’s longing is the story (once, speaking of Charles-Louis Philippe, I called such a form ‘chantefable’); when the object, the event that is given form, remains isolated as indeed it should, but when the lived experience that absorbs the event and radiates it out also carries within it the ultimate meaning of life, the artist’s sense-giving, life-conquering power. This power, also, is lyrical: the artist’s personality, conscious and autonomous, proclaims its own interpretation of the meaning of the uni- verse; the artist handles events as though they were instruments, he does not listen to them for a secret meaning. What is given form here is not the totality of life but the artist’s relationship with that totality, his approving or condemnatory attitude towards it; here, the artist enters the arena of artistic creation as the empirical subject in all its greatness but also with all its creaturely limitations. Neither can a totality of life which is by definition extensive be achieved by the object’s being annihilated—by the subject’s making itself the sole ruler of existence. However high the subject may rise above its objects and take them into its sovereign possession, they are still and always only isolated objects, whose sum never equals a real totality. Even such a subject, for all its sublime humour, remains an empirical one and its creation is only the adoption of an attitude towards its objects which, when all is said and done, remain essentially similar to itself; and the circle it draws round the world-segment thus selected and set apart defines only the limits of the subject, not of a cosmos complete in itself. The humorist’s soul yearns for a more genuine substantiality than life can offer; and so he smashes all the forms and limits of life’s fragile totality in order to reach the sole source of life, the pure, world-dominating T. But as the objective world breaks down, so the subject, too, becomes a fragment; only the T continues to exist, but its existence is then lost in the insubstantiality of its self-created world of ruins. Such subjectivity wants to give form to everything, and precisely for this reason succeeds only in mirroring a segment of the world. This is the paradox of the subjectivity of the great epic, its ‘throwing away in order to win’: creative subjectivity becomes lyrical, but, exceptionally, the subjectivity which simply accepts, which humbly transforms itself into a purely receptive organ of the world, can partake of the grace of having the whole revealed to it. This is the leap that Dante made between the Vita nuova and the Divina commedia, that Goethe made between Werther and Wilhelm Meister, the leap Cervantes made when, becoming silent himself, he let the cosmic humour of Dan Quixote become heard; by contrast, Sterne’s and Jean Paul’s glorious ringing voices offer no more than reflexions of a world-fragment which is merely subjective and therefore limited, narrow and arbitrary. This is not a value judgement but an a priori definition of genre: the totality of life resists any attempt to find a transcendental centre within it, and refuses any of its constituent cells the right to dominate it. Only when a subject, far removed from all life and from the empirical which is necessarily posited together with life, becomes enthroned in the pure heights of essence, when it has become nothing but the carrier of the transcendental synthesis, can it contain all the conditions for totality within its own structure and transform its own limitations into the frontiers of the world. But such a subject cannot write an epic: the epic is life, immanence, the empirical. Dante’s Paradiso is closer to the essence of life than Shakespeare’s exuberant richness. The synthetic power of the sphere of essence is intensified still further in the constructed totality of the dramatic problem: that which the problem decrees to be necessary, whether it be event or soul, achieves existence through its relation to the centre; the immanent dialectic of this unity accords to each individual phenomenon the essence appropriate to it depending on its distance from the centre and its relative importance to the problem. The problem here is inexpressible because it is the concrete idea of the whole, because only the polyphony of all the voices can carry the full wealth of content concealed in it. For life, the problem is an abstraction; the relationship of a character to a problem can never absorb the whole fullness of that character’s life, and every event in the sphere in life can relate only allegorically to the problem. It is true that in the Elective Affinities, which Hebbel rightly called ‘dramatic’, Goethe’s consummate art succeeded in weighing and ordaining everything in relation to the central problem, but even these souls, guided from the start into the problem’s narrow channels, cannot attain to real existence; even this action, narrowed and cut down to fit the problem, fails to achieve a rounded totality; to fill even the fragile shell of this small world, the author is forced to introduce extraneous elements, and even if he were as successful throughout the book as he is in certain passages of supremely skilful organisation, the result would not be a totality. Likewise, the ‘dramatic’ concentration of Hebbel’s Song of the Nibelungs is a splendid mistake which originated pro domo: a great writer’s desperate effort to rescue the epic unity—disintegrating in a changed world —of an authentically epic text. Brunhilde’s superhuman figure is here reduced to a mixture of woman and valkyrie, who humiliates her weak suitor, Gunther, and makes him completely questionable and feeble; only a few fairy-tale motifs survive the transformation of Siegfried the dragon-killer into a knightly figure. The work is saved by the problem of loyalty and revenge, that is to say by Hagen and Kriemhild. But it is a desperate, purely artistic attempt to create, with the means of composition, structuring and organisation, a unity that is no longer organically given: a desperate attempt and a heroic failure. For unity can surely be achieved, but never a real totality. In the story of the Iliad, which has no beginning and no end, a rounded universe blossoms into all-embracing life. The lucidly composed unity of the Nibelungenlied conceals life and decay, castles and ruins, behind its skilfully structured façade. The Epic and the Novel THE EPIC and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature, differ from one another not by their authors’ fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficial—a matter of a mere artistic technicality—to look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is written in verse or prose. Verse is not an ultimate constituent either of the epic or of tragedy, although it is indeed a profound symptom by which the true nature of these forms is most truly and genuinely revealed. Tragic verse is sharp and hard, it isolates, it creates distance. It clothes the heroes in the full depth of their solitude, which is born of the form itself; it does not allow of any relationships between them except those of struggle and annihilation; its lyricism can contain notes of despair or excitement about the road yet to be travelled and its ending, it can show glimpses of the abyss over which the essential is suspended, but a purely human understanding between the tragic characters’ souls will never break through, as it sometimes does in prose; the despair will never turn into elegy, nor the excitement into a longing for lost heights; the soul can never seek to plumb its own depths with psycho-logistic vanity, nor admire itself in the mirror of its own profundity. Dramatic verse, as Schiller wrote to Goethe, reveals what- ever triviality there may be in the artistic invention: it has a specific sharpness, a gravity all its own, in face of which nothing that is merely lifelike—which is to say nothing that is dramatically trivial—can survive: if the artist’s creative mentality has anything trivial about it, the contrast between the weight of the language and that of the content will betray him. Epic verse, too, creates distances, but in the sphere of the epic (which is the sphere of life) distance means happiness and lightness, a loosening of the bonds that tie men and objects to the ground, a lifting of the heaviness, the dullness, which are integral to life and which are dispersed only in scattered happy moments. The created distances of epic verse transform such moments into the true level of life. And so the effect of verse is here the opposite just because its immediate consequences—that of abolishing triviality and coming closer to the essence—is the same. Heaviness is trivial in the sphere of life—the epic—just as lightness is trivial in tragedy. An objective guarantee that the complete removal of everything life-like does not mean an empty abstraction from life but the becoming essence, can only be given the consistency with which these un-lifelike forms are created; only if they are incomparably more fulfilled, more rounded, more fraught with substance than we could ever dream of in real life, can it be said that tragic stylisation has been successfully achieved. Everything light or pallid (which of course has nothing to do with the banal concept of unlifelikeness) reveals the absence of a normative tragic intention and so demonstrates the triviality of the work, whatever the psychological subtlety and/or lyrical delicacy of its parts. In life, however, heaviness means the absence of present meaning, a hopeless entanglement in senseless casual connections, a withered sterile existence too close to the earth and too far from heaven, a plodding on, an inability to liberate oneself from the bonds of sheer brutal materiality, everything that, for the finest immanent forces of life, represents a challenge which must be constantly overcome— it is, in terms of formal value judgement, triviality. A pre-stabilised harmony decrees that epic verse should sing of the blessedly existent totality of life; the pre-poetic process of embracing all life in a mythology had liberated existence from all trivial heaviness; in Homer, the spring buds were only just opening, ready to blossom. Verse itself, however, can only tentatively encourage the bud to open; verse can only weave a garland of freedom round something that has already been liberated from all fetters. If the author’s action consists in disclosing buried meaning, if his heroes must first break out of their prisons and, in desperate struggles or long, wearisome wanderings, attain the home of their dreams— their freedom from terrestrial gravity—then the power of verse, which can spread a carpet of flowers over the chasm, is not sufficient to build a practicable road across it. The lightness of great epic literature is only the concretely immanent Utopia of the historical hour, and the form-giving detachment which verse as a vehicle confers upon whatever it carries must, therefore, rob the epic of its great totality, its subjectlessness, and transform it into an idyll or a piece of playful lyricism. The lightness of great epic literature is a positive value and a reality-creating force only if the restraining bonds have really been thrown off. Great epic literature is never the result of men forgetting their enslavement in the lovely play of a liberated imagination or in tranquil retirement to happy isles not to be found on the map of this world of trivial attachment. In times to which such lightness is no longer given, verse is banished from the great epic, or else it transforms itself, unexpectedly and unintentionally, into lyric verse. Only prose can then encompass the suffering and the laurels, the struggle and the crown, with equal power; only its unfettered plasticity and its non-rhythmic rigour can, with equal power, embrace the fetters and the freedom, the given heaviness and the conquered lightness of a world henceforth immanently radiant with found meaning. It is no accident that the disintegration of a reality-become-song led, in Cervantes’ prose, to the sorrowful lightness of a great epic, whereas the serene dance of Ariosto’s verse remained mere lyrical play; it is no accident that Goethe, the epic poet, poured his idylls into the mould of verse but chose prose for the totality of his Meister (master) novel. In the world of distances, all epic verse turns into lyric poetry (Don Juan and Onegin, although written in verse, belong to the company of the great humorous novels), for, in verse, everything hidden becomes manifest, and the swift flight of verse makes the distance over which prose travels with its deliberate pace as it gradually approaches meaning appear naked, mocked, trampled, or merely a forgotten dream. Dante’s verse, too, is not lyrical although it is more lyrical than Homer’s; it intensifies and concentrates the ballad tone into an epic one. The immanence of the meaning of life is present and existent in Dante’s world, but only in the beyond: it is the perfect immanence of the transcendent. Distance in the ordinary world of life is extended to the point where it cannot be overcome, but beyond that world every lost wanderer finds the home that has awaited him since all eternity; every solitary voice that falls silent on earth is there awaited by a chorus that takes it up, carries it towards harmony and, through it, becomes harmony itself. The world of distances lies sprawling and chaotic beneath the radiant celestial rose of sense made sensuous; it is visible and undisguised at every moment. Every inhabitant of that home in the beyond has come from this world, each is bound to it by the indissoluble force of destiny, but each recognises it, sees it in its fragility and heaviness, only when he has travelled to the end of his path thereby made meaningful; every figure sings of its isolated destiny, the isolated event in which its apportioned lot was made manifest: a ballad. And just as the totality of the transcendent world-structure is the pre-determined sense-giving, all-embracing a priori of each individual destiny, so the increasing comprehension of this edifice, its structure and its beauty—the great experience of Dante the traveller—envelops everything in the unity of its meaning, now revealed. Dante’s insight transforms the individual into a component of the whole, and so the ballads become epic songs. The meaning of this world becomes distanceless, visible and immanent only in the beyond. Totality, in this world, is bound to be a fragile or merely a longed-for one: the verse passages in Wolfram von Eschenbach or Gottfried von Strassburg are only lyrical ornaments to their novels, and the ballad quality of the Song of the Nibelungs can be disguised by compositional means, but cannot be rounded so that it achieves world-embracing totality. The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life. The given structure of the object (i.e. the search, which is only a way of expressing the subject’s recognition that neither objective life nor its relationship to the subject is spontaneously harmonious in itself) supplies an indication of the form-giving intention. All the fissures and rents which are inherent in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor should be disguised by compositional means. Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel’s heroes: they are seekers. The simple fact of seeking implies that neither the goals nor the way leading to them can be directly given, or else that, if they are given in a psychologically direct and solid manner, this is not evidence of really existent relations or ethical necessities but only of a psychological fact to which nothing in the world of objects or norms need necessarily correspond. To put it another way, this ‘givenness’ may be crime or madness; the boundaries which separate crime from acclaimed heroism and madness from life-mastering wisdom are tentative, purely psychological ones, although at the end, when the aberration makes itself terribly manifest and clear, there is no longer any confusion. In this sense, the epic and the tragedy know neither crime nor madness. What the customary concepts of everyday life call crime is, for them, either not there at all, or it is nothing other than the point, symbolically fixed and sensually perceptible from afar, at which the soul’s relationship to its destiny, the vehicle of its metaphysical homesickness, becomes visible. The epic world is either a purely childlike one in which the transgression of stable, traditional norms has to entail vengeance which again must be avenged ad inftnitum, or else it is the perfect theodicy in which crime and punishment lie in the scales of world justice as equal, mutually homogeneous weights. In tragedy crime is either nothing at all or a symbol— it is either a mere element of the action, demanded and determined by technical laws, or it is the breaking down of forms on this side of the essence, it is the entrance through which the soul comes into its own. Of madness the epic knows nothing, unless it be the generally incomprehensible language of a superworld that possesses no other means of expression. In non-problematic tragedy, madness can be the symbolic expression of an end, equivalent to physical death or to the living death of a soul consumed by the essential fire of selfhood. For crime and madness are objectivations of transcendental homelessness—the homeless-ness of an action in the human order of social relations, the homelessness of a soul in the ideal order of a supra-personal system of values. Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence; every form restores the absurd to its proper place as the vehicle, the necessary condition of meaning. When the peak of absurdity, the futility of genuine and profound human aspirations, or the possibility of the ultimate nothingness of man has to be absorbed into literary form as a basic vehicular fact, and when what is in itself absurd has to be explained and analysed and, consequently, recognised as being irreducibly there, then, although some streams within such a form may flow into a sea of fulfilment, the absence of any manifest aim, the determining lack of direction of life as a whole, must be the basic a priori constituent, the fundamental structural element of the characters and events within it. Where no aims are directly given, the structures which the soul, in the process of becoming-man, encounters as the arena and sub-stratum of its activity among men lose their obvious roots in supra-personal ideal necessities; they are simply existent, perhaps powerful, perhaps frail, but they neither carry the consecration of the absolute within them nor are they the natural containers for the overflowing interiority of the soul. They form the world of convention, a world from whose all-embracing power only the innermost recesses of the soul are exempt, a world which is present everywhere in a multiplicity of forms too complex for understanding. Its strict laws, both in becoming and in being, are necessarily evident to the cognisant subject, but despite its regularity, it is a world that does not offer itself either as meaning to the aim-seeking subject or as matter, in sensuous immediacy, to the active subject. It is a second nature, and, like nature (first nature), it is determinable only as the embodiment of recognised but senseless necessities and therefore it is incomprehensible, unknowable in its real substance. Yet for creative literature substance alone has existence and only substances which are profoundly homogeneous with one another can enter into the fighting union of reciprocal compositional relationships. Lyric poetry can ignore the phenomenalisation of the first nature and can create a protean mythology of substantial subjectivity out of the constitutive strength of its ignorance. In lyric poetry, only the great moment exists, the moment at which the meaningful unity of nature and soul or their meaningful divorce, the necessary and affirmed loneliness of the soul becomes eternal. At the lyrical moment the purest interiority of the soul, set apart from duration without choice, lifted above the obscurely-determined multiplicity of things, solidifies into substance; whilst alien, unknowable nature is driven from within, to agglomerate into a symbol that is illuminated throughout. Yet this relationship between soul and nature can be produced only at lyrical moments. Otherwise, nature is transformed—because of its lack of meaning —into a kind of picturesque lumber-room of sensuous symbols for literature; it seems to be fixed in its bewitched mobility and can only be reduced to a meaningfully animated calm by the magic word of lyricism. Such moments are constitutive and form-determining only for lyric poetry; only in lyric poetry do these direct, sudden flashes of the substance become like lost original manuscripts suddenly made legible; only in lyric poetry is the subject, the vehicle of such experiences, transformed into the sole carrier of meaning, the only true reality. Drama is played out in a sphere that lies beyond such reality, and in the epic forms the subjective experience remains inside the subject: it becomes mood. And nature, bereft of its ‘senseless’ autonomous life as well of its meaningful symbolism, becomes a background, a piece of scenery, an accompanying voice; it has lost its independence and is only a sensually perceptible projection of the essential—of interiority. The second nature, the nature of man-made structures, has no lyrical substantiality; its forms are too rigid to adapt themselves to the symbol-creating moment; the content of the second nature, precipitated by its own laws, is too definite to be able to rid itself of those elements which, in lyric poetry, are bound to become essayistic; furthermore, these elements are so much at the mercy of laws, are so absolutely devoid of any sensuous valency of existence independent from laws, that without them, they can only disintegrate into nothingness. This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet senseless like the first: it is a complex of senses—meanings —which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of long-dead in-teriorities; this second nature could only be brought to life— if this were possible—by the metaphysical act of reawakening the souls which, in an early or ideal existence, created or preserved it; it can never be animated by another interiority. It is too akin to the soul’s aspirations to be treated by the soul as mere raw material for moods, yet too alien to those aspirations ever to become their appropriate and adequate expression. Estrangement from nature (the first nature), the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projection of man’s experience of his self-made environment as a prison instead of as a parental home. When the structures made by man for man are really adequate to man, they are his necessary and native home; and he does not know the nostalgia that posits and experiences nature as the object of its own seeking and finding. The first nature, nature as a set of laws for pure cognition, nature as the bringer of comfort to pure feeling, is nothing other than the historico-philosophical objectivation of man’s alienation from his own constructs. When the soul-content of these constructs can no longer directly become soul, when the constructs no longer appear as the agglomerate and concentrate of interiorities which can at any moment be transformed back into a soul, then they must, in order to subsist, achieve a power which dominates men blindly, without exception or choice. And so men call ‘law’ the recognition of the power that holds them in thrall, and they conceptualise as ‘law’ their despair at its omnipotence and universality: conceptualise it into a sublime and exalting logic, a necessity that is eternal, immutable and beyond the reach of man. The nature of laws and the nature of moods stem from the same locus in the soul: they presuppose the impossibility of an attained and meaningful substance, the impossibility of finding a constitutive object adequate to the constitutive subject. In its experience of nature, the subject, which alone is real, dissolves the whole outside world in mood, and itself becomes mood by virtue of the inexorable identity of essence between the contemplative subject and its object. The desire to know a world cleansed of all wanting and all willing transforms the subject into an a-subjective, constructive and constructing embodiment of cognitive functions. This is bound to be so, for the subject is constitutive only when it acts from within—i.e. only the ethical subject is constitutive. It can only avoid falling prey to laws and moods if the arena of its actions, the normative object of its actions, is made of the stuff of pure ethics: if right and custom are identical with morality: if no more of the soul has to be put into the man-made structures to make them serve as man’s proper sphere of action than can be released, by action, from those structures. Under such conditions the soul has no need to recognise any laws, for the soul itself is the law of man and man will behold the same face of the same soul upon every substance against which he may have to prove himself. Under such conditions, it would seem petty and futile to try to overcome the strangeness of the non-human world by the mood-arousing power of the subject: the world of man that matters is the one where the soul, as man, god or demon, is at home: then the soul finds everything it needs, it does not have to create or animate anything out of its own self, for its existence is filled to overbrimming with the finding, gathering and moulding of all that is given as cognate to the soul. The epic individual, the hero of the novel, is the product of estrangement from the outside world. When the world is internally homogeneous, men do not differ qualitatively from one another; there are of course heroes and villains, pious men and criminals, but even the greatest hero is only a head taller than the mass of his fellows, and the wise man’s dignified words are heard even by the most foolish. The autonomous life of interiority is possible and necessary only when the distinctions between men have made an unbridgeable chasm; when the gods are silent and neither sacrifices nor the ecstatic gift of tongues can solve their riddle; when the world of deeds separates itself from men and, because of this independence, becomes hollow and incapable of absorbing the true meaning of deeds in itself, incapable of becoming a symbol through deeds and dissolving them in turn into symbols; when interiority and adventure are forever divorced from one another. The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never an individual. It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community. And rightly so, for the completeness, the roundness of the value system which determines the epic cosmos creates a whole which is too organic for any part of it to become so enclosed within itself, so dependent upon itself, as to find itself as an interiority— i.e. to become a personality. The omnipotence of ethics, which posits every soul as autonomous and incomparable, is still unknown in such a world. When life quae life finds an immanent meaning in itself, the categories of the organic determine everything: an individual structure and physiognomy is simply the product of a balance between the part and the whole, mutually determining one another; it is never the product of polemical self-contemplation by the lost and lonely personality. The significance which an event can have in a world that is rounded in this way is therefore always a quantitative one; the series of adventures in which the event expresses itself has weight in so far as it is significant to a great organic life complex—a nation or a family. Epic heroes have to be kings for different reasons from the heroes of tragedy (although these reasons are also formal). In tragedy the hero must be a king simply because of the need to sweep all the petty causalities of life from the onto-logical path of destiny—because the socially dominant figure is the only one whose conflicts, while retaining the sensuous illusion of a symbolic existence, grow solely out of the tragic problem; because only such a figure can be surrounded, even as to the forms of its external appearance, with the required atmosphere of significant isolation. What is a symbol in tragedy becomes a reality in the epic: the weight of the bonds linking an individual destiny to a totality. World destiny, which in tragedy is merely the number of noughts that have to be added to i to transform it into a million, is what actually gives the events of the epic their content; the epic hero, as bearer of his destiny, is not lonely, for this destiny connects him by indissoluble threads to the community whose fate is crystallised in his own. As for the community, it is an organic—and therefore intrinsically meaningful—concrete totality; that is why the substance of adventure in an epic is always articulated, never strictly closed; this substance is an organism of infinite interior richness, and in this is identical or similar to the substance of other adventure. The way Homer’s epics begin in the middle and do not finish at the end is a reflexion of the truly epic mentality’s total indifference to any form of architectural construction, and the introduction of extraneous themes—such as that of Dietrich von Born in the Song of the Nibelungs—can never disturb this balance, for everything in the epic has a life of its own and derives its completeness from its own inner significance. The extraneous can calmly hold out its hand to the central; mere contact between concrete things creates concrete relationships, and the extraneous, because of its per-spectival distance and its not yet realised richness, does not endanger the unity of the whole and yet has obvious organic existence. Dante is the only great example in which we see the architectural clearly conquering the organic, and therefore he represents a historico-philosophical transition from the pure epic to the novel. In Dante there is still the perfect immanent distancelessness and completeness of the true epic, but his figures are already individuals, consciously and energetically placing themselves in opposition to a reality that is becoming closed to them, individuals who, through this opposition, become real personalities. The constituent principle of Dante’s totality is a highly systematic one, abolishing the epic independence of the organic part-unities and transforming them into hierarchically ordered, autonomous parts. Such individuality, it is true, is found more in the secondary figures than in the hero. The tendency of each part-unity to retain its autonomous lyrical life (a category unknown and unknowable in the old epic) increases towards the periphery as the distance from the centre becomes greater. The combination of the presuppositions of the epic and the novel and their synthesis to an epopoeia is based on the dual structure of Dante’s world: the break between life and meaning is surpassed and cancelled by the coincidence of life and meaning in a present, actually experienced transcendence. To the postulate-free organic nature of the older epics, Dante opposes a hierarchy of fulfilled postulates. Dante— and only Dante—did not have to endow his hero with visible social superiority or with a heroic destiny that determined the destiny of the community—because his hero’s lived experience was the symbolic unity of human destiny in general. The Inner Form of the Novel THE TOTALITY of Dante’s world is the totality of a visual system of concepts. It is because of this sensual ‘thingness’, this substantiality both of the concepts themselves and of their hierarchical order within the system, that completeness and totality can become constitutive structural categories rather than regulative ones: because of it, the progression through the totality is a voyage which, although full of suspense, is a well-conducted and safe one; and, because of it, it was possible for an epic to be created at a time when the historico-philosophical situation was already beginning to demand the novel. In a novel, totality can be system.atised only in abstract terms, which is why any system that could be established in the novel—a system being, after the final disappearance of the organic, the only possible form of a rounded totality—had to be one of abstract concepts and therefore not directly suitable for aesthetic form-giving. Such abstract systematisation is, it is true, the ultimate basis of the entire structure, but in the created reality of the novel all that becomes visible is the distance separating the systematisation from concrete life: a systematisation which emphasises the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one. Thus the elements of the novel are, in the Hegelian sense, entirely abstract; abstract, the nostalgia of the characters for Utopian perfection, a nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality; abstract, the existence of social structures based only upon their factual presence and their sheer ability to continue; abstract, finally, the form-giving intention which, instead of surmounting the distance between these two abstract groups of elements, allows it to subsist, which does not even attempt to surmount it but renders it sensuous as the lived experience of the novel’s characters, uses it as a means of connecting the two groups and so turns it into an instrument of composition. We have already recognised the dangers that arise from the fundamentally abstract nature of the novel: the risk of overlapping into lyricism or drama, the risk of narrowing reality so that the work becomes an idyll, the risk of sinking to the level of mere entertainment literature. These dangers can be resisted only by positing the fragile and incomplete nature of the world as ultimate reality: by recognising, consciously and consistently, everything that points outside and beyond the confines of the world. Every an form is defined by the metaphysical dissonance of life which it accepts and organises as the basis of a totality complete in itself; the mood of the resulting world, and the atmosphere in which the persons and events thus created have their being, are determined by the danger which arises from this incompletely resolved dissonance and which therefore threatens the form. The dissonance special to the novel, the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life, produces a problem of form whose formal nature is much less obvious than in other kinds of art, and which, because it looks like a problem of content, needs to be approached by both ethical and aesthetic arguments, even more than do problems which are obviously purely formal. The novel is the art-form of virile maturity, in contrast to the normative childlikeness of the epic (the drama form, being in the margin of life, is outside the ages of man even if these are conceived as a priori categories or normative stages). The novel is the art-form of virile maturity: this means that the completeness of the novel’s world, if seen objectively; is an imperfection, and if subjectively experienced, it amounts to resignation. The danger by which the novel is determined is twofold: either the fragility of the world may manifest itself so crudely that it will cancel out the immanence of meaning which the form demands, or else the longing for the dissonance to be resolved, affirmed and absorbed into the work may be so great that it will lead to a premature closing of the circle of the novel’s world, causing the form to disintegrate into disparate, heterogeneous parts. The fragility of the world may be superficially disguised but it cannot be abolished; consequently this fragility will appear in the novel as unprocessed raw material, whose weak cohesion will have been destroyed. In either case the structure remains abstract: the abstract basis of the novel assumes form as a result of the abstraction seeing through itself; the immanence of meaning required by the form is attained precisely when the author goes all the way, ruthlessly, towards exposing its absence. Art always says ‘And yet!’ to life. The creation of forms is the most profound confirmation of the existence of a dissonance. But in all other genres—even, for reasons we can now understand, in the epic—this affirmation of a dissonance precedes the act of form-giving, whereas in the novel it is the form, itself. That is why the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the creative process of the novel is different from what it is in other kinds of literature. There, ethic is a purely formal pre-condition which, by its depth, allows the form-determined essence to be attained and, by its breadth, renders possible a totality which is likewise determined by the form and which, by its all-embracing nature, establishes a balance between the constituent elements—a balance for which ‘justice’ is only a term in the language of pure ethics. In the novel, on the other hand, ethic—the ethical intention—is visible in the creation of every detail and hence is, in its most concrete content, an effective structural element of the work itself. Thus, the novel, in contrast to others genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in process of becoming. That is why, from the artistic viewpoint, the novel is the most hazardous genre, and why it has been described as only half an art by many who equate having a problematic with being problematic. The description may seem convincing because the novel—unlike other genres —has a caricatural twin almost indistinguishable from itself in all inessential formal characteristics: the entertainment novel, which has all the outward features of the novel but which, in essence, is bound to nothing and based on nothing, i.e. is entirely meaningless. Other genres, where being is treated as already attained, cannot have such a caricatural twin because the extra-artistic element of its creation can never be disguised even for a moment; whereas with the novel, because of the regulative, hidden nature of the effective binding and forming ideas, because of the apparent resemblance of empty animation to a process whose ultimate content cannot be rationalised, superficial likeness can almost lead to the caricature being mistaken for the real thing. But a closer look will always, in any concrete case, reveal the caricature for what it is. Other arguments used to deny the genuinely artistic nature of the novel likewise enjoy only a semblance of truth—not only because the normative incompleteness, the problematic nature of the novel is a true-born form in the historico-philosophical sense and proves its legitimacy by attaining its substratum, the true condition of the contemporary spirit, but also because its nature as a process excludes completeness only so far as content is concerned. As form, the novel establishes a fluctuating yet firm balance between becoming and being; as the idea of becoming, it becomes a state. Thus the novel, by transforming itself into a normative being of becoming, surmounts itself. ‘The voyage is completed: the way begins.’ The ‘half-art’ of the novel, therefore, prescribes still stricter, still more inviolable artistic laws for itself than do the ‘closed’ art form, and these laws are the more binding, the more indefinable and unformulable they are in their very essence: they are laws of tact. Tact and taste, in themselves subordinate categories which belong wholly to the sphere of mere life and are irrelevant to an essential ethical world, here acquire great constitutive significance: only through them is subjectivity, at the beginning of the novel’s totality and at its end, capable of maintaining itself in equilibrium, of positing itself as epically normative objectivity and thus of surmounting abstraction, the inherent danger of the novel form. This danger can also be formulated in another way: where ethic has to carry the structure of a form as a matter of content and not merely as a formal a priori, and where a coincidence, or at least a marked convergence between ethic as an interior factor of life and its substratum of action in the social structures, is not given as it was in the epic ages, there is a danger that, instead of an existent totality, only a subjective aspect of that totality will be given form, obscuring or even destroying the creative intention of acceptance and objectivity which the great epic demands. This danger cannot be circumvented but can only be overcome from within. For such subjectivity is not eliminated if it remains unexpressed or is transformed into a will for objectivity: such a silence, such a will, is even more subjective than the overt manifestation of a clearly conscious subjectivity, and therefore, in the Hegelian sense, even more abstract. The self-recognition and, with it, self-abolition of subjectivity was called irony by the first theoreticians of the novel, the aesthetic philosophers of early Romanticism. As a formal constituent of the novel form this signifies an interior diversion of the normatively creative subject into a subjectivity as interiority, which opposes power complexes that are alien to it and which strives to imprint the contents of its longing upon the alien world, and a subjectivity which sees through the abstract and, therefore, limited nature of the mutually alien worlds of subject and object, understand these worlds by seeing their limitations as necessary conditions of their existence and, by thus seeing through them, allows the duality of the world to subsist. At the same time the creative subjectivity glimpses a unified world in the mutual relativity of elements essentially alien to one another, and gives form to this world. Yet this glimpsed unified world is nevertheless purely formal; the antagonistic nature of the inner and outer worlds is not abolished but only recognised as necessary; the subject which recognises it as such is just as empirical— just as much part of the outside world, confined in its own interiority—as the characters which have become its objects. Such irony is free from that cold and abstract superiority which narrows down the objective form to a subjective one and reduces the totality to a mere aspect of itself; this is the case in satire. In the novel the subject, as observer and creator, is compelled by irony to apply its recognition of the world to itself and to treat itself, like its own creatures, as a free object of free irony: it must transform itself into a purely receptive subject, as is normatively required for great epic literature. The irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world’s fragility: inadequate relations can transform themselves into a fanciful yet well-ordered round of misunderstandings and cross-purposes, within which everything is seen as many-sided, within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life, as flowering and as decaying, as the infliction of suffering and as suffering itself. Thus a new perspective of life is reached on an entirely new basis—that of the indissoluble connection between the relative independence of the parts and their attachment to the whole. But the parts, despite this attachment, can never lose their inexorable, abstract self-dependence: and their relationship to the totality, although it approximates as closely as possible to an organic one, is nevertheless not a true-born organic relationship but a conceptual one which is abolished again and again. The consequence of this, from the compositional point of view, is that, although the characters and their actions possess the infinity of authentic epic literature, their structure is essentially different from that of the epic. The structural difference in which this fundamentally conceptual pseudo-organic nature of the material of the novel finds expression is the difference between something that is homogeneously organic and stable and something that is heterogeneously contingent and discrete. Because of this contingent nature, the relatively independent parts are more independent, more self-contained than those of the epic and must therefore, if they are not to destroy the whole, be inserted into it by means which transcend their mere presence. In contrast to the epic, they must have a strict compositional and architectural significance, whether this takes the form of contrasting lights thrown upon the central problem (as with the novellas included in Don Quixote) or of the introduction, by way of a prelude, of hidden motifs which are to be decisive at the end (as with the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul). The existence of the relatively independent parts can never be justified by their mere presence. The ability of parts which are only compositionally united to have discrete autonomous life is, of course, significant only as a symptom, in that it renders the structure of the novel’s totality clearly visible. It is by no means necessary in itself for every exemplary novel to exhibit this extreme consequence of the novel’s structure. Any attempt to surmount the problematic of the novel by insisting exclusively on this specific aspect must, in fact, lead to artificiality and to excessive obviousness of composition, as with the Romantics or with the first novel of Paul Ernst. This aspect is only a symptom of contingency; it merely sheds light upon a state of affairs which is necessarily present at all times and everywhere, but which is covered over, by skilfully ironic compositional tact, by a semblance of organic quality which is revealed again and again as illusory. The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. The fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness because completeness is immanently Utopian, can be objectivised only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography. In a world situation where the organic was the all-dominating category of existence, to make the individuality of a living being, with all its limitations, the starting point of stylisation and the centre of form-giving would have seemed foolish—a gratuitous violence inflicted upon the organic. In an age of constitutive systems, the exemplary significance of an individual life could never be anything more than an example: to represent it as the vehicle of values rather than as their substratum, assuming even that such a project might have been conceived, would have been an act of the most ridiculous arrogance. In the biographical form, the separate being—the individual—has a specific weight which would have been too high for the predominance of life, too low for the absolute predominance of the system; his degree of isolation would have been too great for the former, meaningless for the latter; his relationship to the ideal of which he is the carrier and the agent would have been over-emphatic for the former, insufficiently subordinated for the latter. In the biographical form, the unfulfillable, sentimental striving both for the immediate unity of life and for a completely rounded architecture of the system is balanced and brought to rest: it is transformed into being. The central character of a biography is significant only by his relationship to a world of ideals that stands above him: but this world, in turn, is realised only through its existence within 1 that individual and his lived experience. Thus in the biographical form the balance of both spheres which are unrealised and unrealisable in isolation produces a new and autonomous life that is, however paradoxically, complete in itself and immanently meaningful: the life of the problematic individual. The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another. If the individual is unproblematic, then his aims are given to him with immediate obviousness, and the realisation of the world constructed by these given aims may involve hindrances and difficulties but never any serious threat to his interior life. Such a threat arises only when the outside world is no longer adapted to the individual’s ideas and the ideas become subjective facts—ideals—in his soul. The positing of ideas as unrealisable and, in the empirical sense, as unreal, i.e. their transformation into ideals, destroys the immediate problem-free organic nature of the individual. Individuality then becomes an aim unto itself because it finds within itself everything that is essential to it and that make its life autonomous —even if what it finds can never be a firm possession or the basis of its life, but is an object of search. The surrounding world of the individual, however, is the substratum and material of the same categorical forms upon which his interior world is based, and differs from them only in its content; therefore the unbridgeable chasm between the reality that is and the ideal that should be must represent the essence of the outside world, the difference of their materials being only a structural one. This difference manifests itself most clearly in the pure negativity of the ideal. In the subjective world of the soul the ideal is as much at home as the soul’s other realities, But, at the level of the soul, the ideal by entering lived experience can play, even in its content, a directly positive role; whereas in the outside world the gap between reality and the ideal becomes apparent only by the absence of the ideal, in the immanent self-criticism of mere reality caused by that absence; in the self-revelation of the nothingness of mere reality without an immanent ideal. This self-destruction of reality, which, as given, is of an entirely intellectual dialectical nature and is not immediately evident in a poetic and sensuous way, appears in two different forms. First, as disharmony between the interiority of the individual and the substratum of his actions; the more genuine is the interiority and the nearer its sources are to the ideas of life which, in the soul, have turned into ideals, the more clearly this disharmony will appear. Second, as the inability of the outside world, which is a stranger to ideals and an enemy of interiority, to achieve real completeness; an inability to find either the form of totality for itself as a whole, or any form of coherence for its own relationship to its elements and their relationship to one another: in other words, the outside world cannot be represented. Both the parts and the whole of such an outside world defy any forms of directly sensuous representation. They acquire life only when they can be related either to the life-experiencing interiority of the individual lost in their labyrinth, or to the observing and creative eye of the artist’s subjectivity: when they become objects of mood or reflexion. This is the formal reason and the literary justification for the Romantics’ demand that the novel, combining all genres within itself, should include pure lyric poetry and pure thought in its structure. The discrete nature of the outside world demands, for the sake of epic significance and sensuous valency, the inclusion of elements some of which are essentially alien to epic literature while others are alien to imaginative literature in general. The inclusion of these elements is not merely a question of lyrical atmosphere and intellectual significance being added to otherwise prosaic, isolated and inessential events. Only in these elements can the ultimate basis of the whole, the basis which holds the entire work together, become visible: the system of regulative ideas which constitutes the totality. For the discrete structure of the outside world is due, in the last analysis, to the fact that any system of ideas has only regulative power vis-a-vis reality. The incapacity of ideas to penetrate reality makes reality heterogeneous and discrete. And this incapacity creates a still more profound need for the elements of reality to have some definite relationship to a system of ideas than was the case in Dante’s world. There, life and meaning were conferred upon each event by allocating to each its place in the world’s architecture, just as directly as, in Homer’s organic world, life and meaning were present with perfect immanence in every manifestation of life. The inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself, the road from dull captivity within a merely present reality—a reality that is heterogeneous in itself and meaningless to the individual—towards clear self-recognition. After such self-recognition has been attained, the ideal thus formed irradiates the individual’s life as its immanent meaning; but the conflict between what is and what should be has not been abolished and cannot be abolished in the sphere wherein these events take place—the life sphere of the novel; only a maximum conciliation—the profound and intensive irradiation of a man by his life’s meaning—is attainable. The immanence of meaning which the form of the novel requires lies in the hero’s finding out through experience that a mere glimpse of meaning is the highest that life has to offer, and that this glimpse is the only thing worth the commitment of an entire life, the only thing by which the struggle will have been justified. The process of finding out extends over a lifetime, and its direction and scope are given with its normative content, the way towards a man’s recognition of himself. The inner shape of the process and the most adequate means of shaping it—the biographical form—reveal the great difference between the discrete, unlimited nature of the material of the novel and the continuum-like infinity of the material of the epic. This lack of limits in the novel has a ‘bad’ infinity about it: therefore it needs certain imposed limits in order to become form; whereas the infinity of purely epic matter is an inner, organic one, it is itself a carrier of value, it puts emphasis on value, it sets its own limits for itself and from within itself, and the outward infinity of its range is almost immaterial to it—only a consequence and, at most, a symptom. The novel overcomes its ‘bad’ infinity by recourse to the biographical form. On the one hand, the scope of the world is limited by the scope of the hero’s possible experiences and its mass is organised by the orientation of his development towards finding the meaning of life in self-recognition; on the other hand, the discretely heterogeneous mass of isolated persons, non-sensuous structures and meaningless events receives a unified articulation by the relating of each separate element to the central character and the problem symbolised by the story of his life. The beginning and the end of the world of a novel, which are determined by the beginning and end of the process which supplies the content of the novel, thus become significant landmarks along a clearly mapped road. The novel in itself and for itself is by no means bound to the natural beginning and end of life—to birth and death; yet by the points at which it begins and ends, it indicates the only essential segment of life, that segment which is determined by the central problem, and it touches upon whatever lies before or after that segment only in perspective and only as it relates to that problem; it tends to unfold its full epic totality only within that span of life which is essential to it. When the beginning and the end of this segment of life do not coincide with those of a human life, this merely shows that the biographical form is oriented towards ideas: the development of a man is still the thread upon which the whole world of the novel is strung and along which it unrolls, but now this development acquires significance only because it is typical of that system of ideas and experienced ideals which regulatively determines the inner and outer world of the novel. Wilhelm Meister’s existence in literature stretches from the point at which his crisis in face of the given circumstances of his life becomes acute to the point at which he finds the profession which is appropriate to his essence; but the underlying principle of this biographical structure is the same as in Pontoppidan’s Hans im Glück, which begins with the hero’s first significant childhood experience and ends with his death. In either case the stylisation differs radically from that of the epic. In the epic, the central figure and its significant adventures are a mass organised in itself and for itself, so that the beginning and the end mean something quite different there, something essentially less important: they are moments of great intensity, homogeneous with other points which are the high points of the whole; they never signify anything more than the commencement or the resolution of great tensions. Once more Dante’s position is a special one; in Dante, principles of structuration which tend towards the novel are re-transformed back into the epic. The beginning and the end in Dante represent the decisive points of essential life, and everything that can acquire significance by having meaning conferred upon it takes place between those points; before the beginning there lay unredeemable chaos, after the end lies the no longer threatened certainty of redemption. But what is contained between the beginning and the end escapes the biographical categories of the process: it is the eternally existent becoming of ecstasy; whatever the novel might have taken hold of and structured is, in Dante, condemned to absolute inessentiality by the paramount significance of this experience. The novel comprises the essence of its totality between the beginning and the end, and thereby raises an individual to the infinite heights of one who must create an entire world through his experience and who must maintain that world in equilibrium—heights which no epic individual, not even Dante’s, could reach, because the epic individual owed his significance to the grace accorded him, not to his pure individuality. But just because the novel can only comprise the individual in this way, he becomes a mere instrument, and his central position in the work means only that he is particularly well suited to reveal a certain problematic of life. The Historico-philosophical Conditioning of the Novel and its Significance THE COMPOSITION of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again. The relationships which create cohesion between the abstract components are abstractly pure and formal, and the ultimate unifying principle therefore has to be the ethic of the creative subjectivity, an ethic which the content reveals. But because this ethic must surmount itself so that the author’s normative objectivity may be realised, and because it cannot, when all is said and done, completely penetrate the objects of form-giving, and therefore cannot completely rid itself of its subjectivity and so appear as the immanent meaning of the objective world—because of this, it needs a new ethical self-correction, again determined by the work’s content, in order to achieve the ‘tact’ which will create a proper balance. This interaction of two ethical complexes, their duality as to form and their unity in being given form, is the content of irony, which is the normative mentality of the novel. The novel is condemned to great complexity by the structure of its given nature. What happens to an idea in the world of reality need not become the object of dialectical reflexion in every kind of literary creation in which an idea is given form as reality. The relationship between idea and reality can be dealt with by means of purely sensuous form-giving, and then no empty space or distance is left between the two which would have to be filled with the author’s consciousness and wisdom. Wisdom can be expressed through the act of form-giving: it can conceal itself behind the forms and does not necessarily have to surmount itself, as irony, in the work. For the creative individual’s reflexion, the novelist’s ethic vis-à-vis the content, is a double one. His reflexion consists of giving form to what happens to the idea in real life, of describing the actual nature of this process and of evaluating and considering its reality. This reflexion, however, in turn becomes an object for reflexion; it is itself only an ideal, only subjective and postulative; it, too, has a certain destiny in a reality which is alien to it; and this destiny, now purely reflexive and contained within the narrator himself, must also be given form. The need for reflexion is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel. Through it, the writer’s naivety suffers extreme violence and is changed into its opposite. (This is only another way of saying that pure reflexion is profoundly inartistic.) And the hard-won equalisation, the unstable balance of mutually surmounting reflexions—the second naivety, which is the novelist’s objectivity—is only a formal substitute for the first.- it makes form-giving possible and it rounds off the form, but the very manner in which it does so points eloquently at the sacrifice that has had to be made, at the paradise forever lost, sought and never found. This vain search and then the resignation with which it is abandoned make the circle that completes the form. The novel is the form of mature virility: its author has lost the poet’s radiant youthful faith ‘that destiny and soul are twin names for a single concept’ (Novalis); and the deeper and more painful his need to set this most essential creed of all literature as a demand against life, the more deeply and painfully he must learn to understand that it is only a demand and not an effective reality. This insight, this irony, is directed both at his heroes, who, in their poetically necessary youth-fulness, are destroyed by trying to turn his faith into reality, and against his own wisdom, which has been forced to see the uselessness of the struggle and the final victory of reality. Indeed, the irony is a double one in both directions. It extends not only to the profound hopelessness of the struggle but also to the still more profound hopelessness of its abandonment —the pitiful failure of the intention to adapt to a world which is a stranger to ideals, to abandon the unreal ideality of the soul for the sake of achieving mastery over reality. And whilst irony depicts reality as victorious, it reveals not only that reality is as nothing in face of its defeated opponent, not only that the victory of reality can never be a final one, that it will always, again and again, be challenged by new rebellions of the idea, but also that reality owes its advantage not so much to its own strength, which is too crude and directionless to maintain the advantage, as to the inner (although necessary) problematic of the soul weighed down by its ideals. The melancholy of the adult state arises from our dual, conflicting experience that, on the one hand, our absolute, youthful confidence in an inner voice has diminished or died, and, on the other hand, that the outside world to which we now devote ourselves in our desire to learn its ways and dominate it will never speak to us in a voice that will clearly tell us our way and determine our goal. The heroes of youth are guided by the gods: whether what awaits them at the end of the road are the embers of annihilation or the joys of success, or both at once, they never walk alone, they are always led. Hence the deep certainty with which they proceed: they may weep and mourn, forsaken by everyone, on a desert island, they may stumble to the very gates of hell in desperate blindness, yet an atmosphere of security always surrounds them; a god always plots the hero’s paths and always walks ahead of him. Fallen gods, and gods whose kingdom is not yet, become demons; their power is effective and alive, but it no longer penetrates the world, or does not yet do so: the world has a coherence of meaning, a causality, which is incomprehensible to the vital, effective force of a god-become-demon; from the demon’s viewpoint, the affairs of such a world appear purely senseless. The demon’s power remains effective because it cannot be overthrown; the passing of the old god supports the being of the new; and for this reason the one possesses the same valency of reality (in the sphere of the only essential being, which is metaphysical being) as the other. ‘It was not divine,’ Goethe wrote about the daemonic, ‘for it seemed irrational; it was not human, for it had no reason; not devilish, for it was beneficent; not angelic, for it often allowed room for malice. It resembled the accidental, for it was without consequence; it looked like providence, for it hinted at hidden connections. Everything that restricts us seemed permeable by it; it seemed to arrange at will the necessary elements of our existence; it contracted time, it expanded space. It seemed at ease only in the impossible, and it thrust the possible from itself with contempt.’ But there is an essential aspiration of the soul which is concerned only with the essential, no matter where it comes from or where it leads; there is a nostalgia of the soul when the longing for home is so violent that the soul must, with blind impetuousness, take the first path that seems to lead there; and so powerful is this yearning that it can always pursue its road to the end. For such a soul, every road leads to the essence—leads home—for to this soul its selfhood is its home. That is why tragedy knows no real difference between God and demon, whereas, if a demon enters the domain of the epic at all, he has to be a powerless, defeated higher being, a deposed divinity. Tragedy destroys the hierarchy of the higher worlds; in it there is no God and no demon, for the outside world is only the occasion for the soul to find itself, for the hero to become a hero; in itself and for itself, it is neither perfectly nor imperfectly penetrated by meaning; it is a tangle of blind happenings, indifferent to objective existing forms of meaning. But the soul transforms every happening into destiny, and the soul alone does this for everyone. Only when the tragedy is over, when the dramatic meaning has become transcendent, do gods and demons appear on the stage; it is only in the drama of grace that the tabula rasa of the higher world is filled once more with superior and subordinate figures. The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero’s psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality. These are merely different ways of saying the same thing. They define the productive limits of the possibilities of the novel—limits which are drawn from within—and, at the same time, they define the historico-philosophical moment at which great novels become possible, at which they grow into a symbol of the essential thing that needs to be said. The mental attitude of the novel is virile maturity, and the characteristic structure of its matter is discreteness, the separation between interiority and adventure. ‘I go to prove my soul,’ says Browning’s Paracelsus, and if the marvellous line is out of place it is only because it is spoken by a dramatic hero. The dramatic hero knows no adventure, for, through the force of his attained soul that is hallowed by destiny, the event which should have been his adventure becomes destiny upon the merest contact with that soul, becomes a simple occasion for him to prove himself, a simple excuse for disclosing what was prefigured in the act of his attaining the soul. The dramatic hero knows no interiority, for interiority is the product of the antagonistic duality of soul and world, the agonising distance between psyche and soul; and the tragic hero has attained his soul and therefore does not know any hostile reality: everything exterior is, for him, merely an expression of a predetermined and adequate destiny. Therefore the dramatic hero does not set out to prove himself: he is a hero because his inner security is given a priori, beyond the reach of any test or proof; the destiny-forming event is, for him, only a symbolic objectivation, a profound and dignified ceremony. (The essential inner stylelessness of modern drama, and of Ibsen in particular, derives from the fact that his major figures have to be tested, that they sense within themselves the distance between themselves and their soul, and, in their desperate desire to pass the tests with which events confront them, try to bridge that distance. The heroes of modern drama experience the preconditions of drama; the drama itself unfolds in the process of stylisation which the dramatist should have completed, as a phenomenological precondition of his work, before beginning to write it.) The novel tells of the adventure of inferiority; the content of the novel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence. The inner security of the epic world excludes adventure in this essential sense: the heroes of the epic live through a whole variety of adventures, but the fact that they will pass the test, both inwardly and outwardly, is never in doubt; the world-dominating gods must always triumph over the demons (‘the divinities of impediment’, as Indian mythology calls them). Hence the passivity of the epic hero that Goethe and Schiller insisted on: the adventures that fill and embellish his life are the form taken by the objective and extensive totality of the world; he himself is only the luminous centre around which this unfolded totality revolves, the inwardly most immobile point of the world’s rhythmic movement. By contrast, the novel hero’s passivity is not a necessity; it characterises the hero’s relationship to his soul and to the outside world. The novel hero does not have to be passive: that is why his passivity has a specific psychological and sociological nature and represents a distinct type in the structural possibilities of the novel. The novel hero’s psychology is the field of action of the demonic. Biological and sociological life has a profound tendency to remain within its own immanence; men want only to live, structures want to remain intact; and because of the remoteness, the absence of an effective God, the indolent self-complacency of this quietly decaying life would be the only power in the world if men did not sometimes fall prey to the power of the demon and overreach themselves in ways that have no reason and cannot be explained by reason, challenging all the psychological or sociological foundations of their existence. Then, suddenly, the God-forsakenness of the world reveals itself as a lack of substance, as an irrational mixture of density and permeability. What previously seemed to be very solid crumbles like dry clay at the first contact with a man possessed by a demon, and the empty transparence behind which attractive landscapes were previously to be seen is suddenly transformed into a glass wall against which men beat in vain, like bees against a window, incapable of breaking through, incapable of understanding that the way is barred. The writer’s irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god. It is an attitude of docta ignorantia towards meaning, a portrayal of the kindly and malicious workings of the demons, a refusal to comprehend more than the mere fact of these workings; and in it there is the deep certainty, expressible only by form-giving, that through not-desiring-to-know and not-being-able-to-know he has truly encountered, glimpsed and grasped the ultimate, true substance, the present, non-existent God. This is why irony is the objectivity of the novel. ‘To what extent are a writer’s characters objective?’ asks Hebbel. ‘To the extent that man is free in his relationship to God.’ A mystic is free when he has renounced himself and is totally dissolved in God; a hero is free when, proud as Lucifer, he has achieved perfection in himself and out of himself; when, for the sake of his soul’s free activity, he has banished all half-measures from the world whose ruler he has become because of his fall. Normative man has achieved freedom in his relationship to God because the lofty norms of his actions and of his substantial ethic are rooted in the existence of the all-perfecting God, are rooted in the idea of redemption, because they remain untouched in their innermost essence by whoever dominates the present, be he God or demon. But the realisation of the normative in the soul or the work cannot be separated from its substratum which is the present (in the historico-philosophical sense), without jeopardising its most specific strength, its constitutive relatedness with its object. Even the mystic who aspires to the experience of a final and unique Godhead outside all formed concepts of a God, and who achieves such an experience, is still tied to the present God of his time; and in so far as his experience is perfected and becomes a work, it is perfected within the categories prescribed by the historico-philosophical position of the world’s clock. Thus his freedom is subject to a double categorical dialectic, a theoretical and a historico-philosophical one; that part of it which is the most specific essence of freedom—the constitutive relation to redemption—remains inexpressible; everything that can be expressed and given form bears witness to this double servitude. The detour by way of speech to silence, by way of category to essence, is unavoidable: when the historical categories are not sufficiently developed, the wish to achieve immediate silence must inevitably lead to mere stuttering. But when the form is perfectly achieved, the writer is free in relation to God because in such a form, and only in it, God himself becomes the substratum of form-giving, homogeneous with and equivalent to all the other normatively given elements of form, and is completely embraced by its system of categories. The writer’s existence and its very quality are deter- mined by the normative relationship which he as the form-giver has with the structural forms—by the value technically assigned to him for structuring and articulating the work. But such subsuming of God under the technical concept of the ‘material authenticity’ of a form reveals the double face of an artistic creation and shows its true place in the order of metaphysically significant works: such perfect technical immanence has as its precondition a constitutive relationship (which is normatively, but not psychologically, a preliminary one) to ultimate transcendent existence. The reality-creating, transcendental form can only come into being when a true transcendence has become immanent within it. An empty immanence, which is anchored only in the writer’s experience and not, at the same time, in his return to the home of all things, is merely the immanence of a surface that covers up the cracks but is incapable of retaining this immanence and must become a surface riddled with holes. For the novel, irony consists in this freedom of the writer in his relationship to God, the transcendental condition of the objectivity of form-giving. Irony, with intuitive double vision, can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God; irony sees the lost, Utopian home of the idea that has become an ideal, and yet at the same time it understands that the ideal is subjectively and psychologically conditioned, because that is its only possible form of existence; irony, itself demonic, apprehends the demon that is within the subject as a metasubjective essentiality, and therefore, when it speaks of the adventures of errant souls in an inessential, empty reality, it intuitively speaks of past gods and gods that are to come; irony has to seek the only world that is adequate to it along the via dolorosa of interiority, but is doomed never to find it there; irony gives form to the malicious satisfaction of God the creator at the failure of man’s weak rebellions against his mighty, yet worthless creation and, at the same time, to the inexpressible suffering of God the redeemer at his inability to re-enter that world. Irony, the self-surmounting of a subjectivity that has gone as far as it was possible to go, is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God. That is why it is not only the sole possible a priori condition for a true, totality-creating objectivity but also why it makes that totality—the novel—the representative art-form of our age: because the structural categories of the novel constitutively coincide with the world as it is today. ATTEMPT AT A TYPOLOGY OF THE NOVEL FORM THE ABANDONMENT of the world by God manifests itself in the incommensurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure—in the absence of a transcendental ‘place’ allotted to human endeavour. There are, roughly speaking, two types of such incommensurability: either the world is narrower or it is broader than the outside world assigned to it as the arena and substratum of its actions. In the first case, the demonic character of the problematic individual setting out on his adventurous course is more clearly visible than in the second case, but, at the same time, his inner problematic is less sharply obvious; his failure in the face of reality looks at first glance like a merely outward failure. The demonism of the narrowing of the soul is the demonism of abstract idealism. It is the mentality which chooses the direct, straight path towards the realisation of the ideal; which, dazzled by the demon, forgets the existence of any distance between ideal and idea, between psyche and soul; which, with the most authentic and unshakeable faith, concludes that the idea, because it should be, necessarily must be, and, because reality does not satisfy this a priori demand, thinks that reality is bewitched by evil demons and that the spell can be broken and reality can be redeemed either by finding a magic password or by courageously fighting the evil forces. The structure-determining problematic of this type of hero consists, therefore, in the complete absence of an inner problematic and, consequently, in the complete lack of any transcendental sense of space, i.e. of the ability to experience distances as realities. Achilles or Odysseus, Dante or Arjuna—precisely because they are guided along their paths by gods—realise that if they lacked this guidance, if they were without divine help, they would be powerless and helpless in the face of mighty enemies. The relationship between the objective and subjective worlds is therefore maintained in adequate balance: the hero is rightly conscious of the superiority of the opposing outside world; yet despite this innermost modesty he can triumph in the end because his lesser strength is guided to victory by the highest power in the world; the forces of the imaginary and the real correspond with one another; the victories and defeats are not contradictory to either the actual or the ideal world order. When this instinctive sense of distance, which is an essential factor in the complete life-immanence, in the ‘health’ of the epic, is lacking, the relationship between the subjective and the objective worlds becomes paradoxical; because the active soul, the soul that matters from the point of view of the epic, is narrowed, the world—as the substratum of its actions—likewise becomes narrower for that soul than it is in reality. But since this reduction of the world and every action which follows from it and which is aimed only at the reduced world must fall short of the real centre of the outside world, and since, too, such an attitude is of necessity a subjective one, leaving the essence of the world untouched and offering only a distorted image of it, all that opposes the soul must come from, sources which are completely heterogeneous from it. Thus action and opposition have neither scope nor quality—neither reality nor orientation—in common. Their relationship to one another is not one of true struggle but only of a grotesque failure to meet, or an equally grotesque clash conditioned by reciprocal misunderstandings. The narrowing of the soul of which we speak is brought about by its demonic obsession by an existing idea which it posits as the only, the most ordinary reality. The content and in- tensity of the actions which follows from this obsession therefore elevate the soul into the most genuinely sublime regions whilst at the same time accentuating and confirming the grotesque contradictions between the imagined and the real. And this is the action of the novel. The novel’s discrete-heterogeneous nature is revealed here with maximum vividness; the sphere of the soul—of psychology—and the sphere of action no longer have anything whatosever in common. Furthermore, in neither of the two spheres is there an element of immanent progress or development, either within itself or arising from relationships with the other. The soul is at rest in the transcendent existence it has achieved on the far side of all problems; no doubts, no search, no despair can arise within it so as to take it out of itself and set it in motion. Its grotesque, vain struggles to realise itself in the outside world will not really touch such a soul; nothing can shake it in its inner certitude, because it is imprisoned in its safe world—because it is incapable of experiencing anything. The complete absence of an inwardly experienced problematic transforms such a soul into pure activity. Because it is at rest within its essential existence, every one of its impulses becomes an action aimed at the outside. The life of a person with such a soul becomes an uninterrupted series of adventures which he himself has chosen. He throws himself into them because life means nothing more to him than the successful passing of tests. His unquestioning, concentrated interiority forces him to translate that interiority—which he considers to be the average, everyday nature of the real world—into actions; in respect of this aspect of his soul he is incapable of any contemplation; he lacks any inclination or possibility of inward-turned activity. He has to be an adventurer. Yet the world he is obliged to choose as the arena for his adventures is a curious mixture of the richly organic, which is completely alien to ideas, and of those self-same ideas (the ideas which lead their purely transcendent life inside his soul) petrified into social convention. This is what makes it possible for his actions to be spontaneous and ideological at the same time: the world he finds is not only full of life, but also full of the semblance of the very life which exists inside him as the only essential life. However, this capacity of the world to be misunderstood is also the reason why he can so grotesquely act at cross-purposes with it: the semblance of an idea collapses in face of the absurd, petrified ideal, and the real nature of the existing world, the self-maintaining, organic life that is alien to all ideas, assumes its appropriate all-dominant position. It is here that the ungodly, demonic character of such an obsession is most clearly revealed, but so also is its likewise demonic, confusing and fascinating resemblance to the divine. The hero’s soul is at rest, rounded and complete within itself like a work of art or a divinity; but this mode of being can only express itself in the outside world by means of inadequate adventures which contain no counter-force within them precisely because the hero is so maniacally imprisoned in himself; and this isolation, which makes the soul resemble a work of art, also separates it from all outside reality and from, all those other areas of the soul which have not been seized by the demon. Thus a maximum of inwardly attained meaning becomes a maximum of senselessness and the sublime turns to madness, to monomania. Such a structure of the soul completely atomises the mass of possible actions. Because of the purely reflexive nature of the soul’s interiority, outside reality remains quite untouched by it, and reveals itself ‘as it really is’ only as an opposition to every one of the hero’s actions. Nevertheless this outside reality is no more than a sluggish, formless, meaningless mass entirely lacking any capacity for planned and consistent counter-action, and the hero in his demonic search for adventure arbitrarily and disconnectedly selects those moments of this ‘reality’ which he thinks most suitable for ‘proving himself. Thus the hero’s psychological rigidity and the mass of action which has been atomised into a series of isolated adventures mutually determine one another and, as a result, clearly reveal the risk inherent in this type of novel: the risk of ‘bad’ abstraction, ‘bad’ infinity. The reason why this danger is avoided in Don Quixote, the immortal objectivation of this type of hero, lies not only in Cervantes’ genius and the extraordinary tact with which he overcomes the danger by means of the impenetrably deep yet radiantly sensuous interweaving of divinity with madness in Don Quixote’s soul, but also in the historico-philosophical moment at which the work was written. It is more than a mere accident of history that Don Quixote was intended as a parody of the chivalrous novels, and its relation to them is more than an essayistic one. The chivalrous novel had succumbed to the fate of every epic that wants to maintain and perpetuate a form by purely formal means after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic. The chivalrous novel had lost its roots in transcendent being, and the forms, which no longer had any immanent function, withered away, became abstract, because their strength, which had been intended for the creation of objects, was exhausted by its own objectlessness. The great epic was replaced by entertainment literature. Yet behind the empty shell of these dead forms there had once been a pure and genuine major art form, even if a problematic one: the chivalrous epic of the Middle Ages. We have here the curious case of a novel form existing in a period whose absolute belief in God really encouraged the epic. It is the great paradox of the Christian universe that the fragmentariness, the normatively imperfect nature of earthly life, its enslavement by error and sin, is opposed by the eternally present theodicy of the life of the beyond. Dante succeeded in capturing this dual world-totality in the purely epic form of the Divina. Commedia. Other epic writers, who remained on earth, had to leave the transcendent in a state of artificially untouched transcendence and so could only create sentimentally conceived life-totalities which were desired but which lacked any existing immanence of meaning. They created novels, not epics. The unique quality of these novels, their dreamlike beauty and magic grace, consists in the fact that all the seeking which is in them is, after all, only a semblance of seeking. Every errant step of their heroes is guided and made safe by an unfathomable, metaformal grace; distance, losing its objective reality, is turned into a darkly beautiful ornament, and the leap necessary to bridge it is turned into a dance-like gesture—both distance and leap are transformed into purely decorative elements. These novels are in substance vast fairytales, for in them transcendence is not captured, made immanent and absorbed in the object-creating, transcendental form, but remains in its undiluted transcendence; the shadow of transcendence decoratively fills the cracks of earthly life and turns the matter of life—because of the dynamic homogeneity of every true work of art—into a substance that is likewise woven out of shadows. In the Homeric epics the omnipotence of the purely human category of life embraced both men and gods and made purely human beings out of them. Here it is the elusive divine principle that dominates, with the same omnipotence, both the life of man and its need to go outside itself, to complement itself; and this creates a flatness, robs the human characters of all relief, transforms them into pure surface. The safe, rounded irrationality of the entire cosmos, as reflected in these novels, makes the glimpsed shadow of God appear demonic: he cannot be comprehended and fitted into some kind of order from the perspective of earthly life, and therefore he cannot reveal himself as God. Nor is it possible, as it was in Dante—because these novels are centred on earthly life—to use God as the starting point for finding and uncovering the constitutive unity of all existence. The chivalrous novels against which Don Quixote was in the first place a polemic and which it parodied had lost the necessary transcendent relationship, and given this loss—unless everything, as in Ariosto, was to become pure, ironically elegant play—their mysterious and fairy-tale like surfaces were bound to degenerate into banal superficiality. Cervantes’ creative criticism of the triviality of the chivalrous novel leads us once more to the historico-philosophical sources of this genre. The subjectively incomprehensible, objectively secure existence of the idea is transformed into a subjectively clear, fanatically maintained existence, lacking any objective relationship. The God who, because of the inadequacy of the material enfolding him, could only appear as a demon, actually becomes a demon, arrogating to himself the role of God, in a world forsaken by providence and lacking transcendental orientation. This world is the same one which God had previously transformed into a dangerous but wonderful magic garden; now, turned into prose by evil demons, this world yearns to be transformed back again into a magic garden by faithful heroes. That which, in the fairy-tale, had only to be guarded against so as to preserve the beneficent spell, here becomes positive action, becomes a struggle for the existing paradise of a fairy-tale reality which awaits the redeeming word. Thus the first great novel of world literature stands at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere; when the world, released from its paradoxical anchorage in a beyond that is truly present, was abandoned to its immanent meaninglessness; when the power of what is—reinforced by the Utopian links, now degraded to mere existence—had grown to incredible magnitude and was waging a furious, apparently aimless struggle against the new forces which were as yet weak and incapable of revealing themselves or penetrating the world. Cervantes lived in the period of the last, great and desperate mysticism, the period of a fanatical attempt to renew the dying religion from within; a period of a new view of the world rising up in mystical forms; the last period of truly lived but already disoriented, tentative, sophisticated, occult aspirations. It was the period of the demons let loose, a period of great confusion of values in the midst of an as yet unchanged value system. And Cervantes, the faithful Christian and naively loyal patriot, creatively exposed the deepest essence of this demonic problematic: the purest heroism is bound to become grotesque, the strongest faith is bound to become madness, when the ways leading to the transcendental home have become impassable; reality does not have to correspond to subjective evidence, however genuine and heroic. The profound melancholy of the historical process, of the passing of time, speaks through this work, telling us that even a content and an attitude which are eternal must lose their meaning when their time is past: that time brushes aside even the eternal. Don Quixote is the first great battle of interiority against the prosaic vulgarity of outward life, and the only battle in which interiority succeeded, not only to emerge unblemished from the fray, but even to transmit some of the radiance of its triumphant, though admittedly self-ironising, poetry to its victorious opponent. Don Quixote—like almost any truly great novel—had to remain the only important objectivation of its type. This particular mixture of poetry and irony, the sublime and the grotesque, divinity and monomania, was so strongly bound up with the historical moment that the same type of mental structure was bound to manifest itself differently at other times and was never again to reach the same epic significance. The adventure novels which took over its purely artistic form became just as devoid of ideas as its immediate predecessors, the chivalrous novels. They, too, lost the only fruitful tension—a transcendental one—and either replaced it by a purely social tension or simply found the motivation for action in a spirit of adventure for adventure’s sake. In either case, and despite the genuinely great talent of some of the writers involved, an ultimate triviality, an ever-increasing similarity between the great novel and the entertainment novel, and the final merging of the two could not be avoided. As the world becomes more and more prosaic, as the active demons withdraw from the world leaving the arena free to the dull opposition of an inchoate mass to any kind of interiority, the demonically narrowed soul faces a new dilemma: either it must give up all relationship to life or it must lose its immediate roots in the true world of ideas. The great dramas of German idealism chose the first path. Abstract idealism lost even the most inadequate relationship to life; in order to come out of its subjectivity and prove itself in struggle and defeat, it needed the pure essential sphere of the drama: interiority and the world had come to be at such cross-purposes with one another that their situation could be given as a form of totality only as part of a dramatic reality specially designed and constructed to that end. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, artistically a major work, shows to what degree the situation of the time demanded that the hero’s psychology should become a matter of purely individual pathology, so that the epic form, had to become that of the novella. In this form, as in any dramatic form-giving, the profound interpenetration of the sublime and the grotesque must give place to the purely sublime: the monomania is so acute, the abstraction so extreme, the idealism inevitably becomes so thin, so contentless, so generalised, that the characters move very near the frontier of unconscious comedy and the smallest attempt at irony would banish the sublime and transform them into embarrassingly comic figures. (Brand, Stockmann and Gregers Werle are cautionary examples of this possibility.) Marquis Posa, the true descendant of Don Quixote, lives in an entirely different form from his ancestor’s and, in terms of art, the problems of the destiny of these two souls which are so alike are utterly different. If the narrowing of the soul is a purely psychological phenomenon, if it has lost any visible relation to the existence of the world of ideas, then it has also lost the ability to be the sustaining centre of an epic totality. In this case the inadequacy of the relation between the hero and the outside world is further intensified, but in addition to the actual inadequacy (which in Don Quixote has been merely the grotesque counterpart of an adequacy that was continually demanded and insisted upon as ideal), there is also an inadequacy at the level of ideas: the contact between the hero and the outside world becomes a purely peripheral one: the hero is merely a necessary secondary figure adorning a totality and contributing to its construction, but remaining only a brick in the edifice, never its centre. The consequent danger, artistically speaking, is that the centre which is now needed has to be something that has meaning and value, but not something which transcends the immanence of life. This change in transcendental attitude means in terms of artistic method that the source of humour is no longer the same as that of poetry and the sublime. Grotesquely depicted characters either become innocuously comic, or else the narrowing of their souls, their all-devouring concentration upon a single point of existence, which no longer has anything to do with the world of ideas, produces pure demonism, and the characters, however humorously treated, become representatives of the ‘bad’ principle or of the pure absence of ideas. This negativity of the central characters requires a positive counterweight and, most unhappily for the modern humorous novel, this ‘positive’ counterweight can be nothing else but the objectivation of the bourgeois concept of decent behaviour. A true relation between this ‘positive’ element and the world of ideas would destroy the immanence of meaning in life, and, with it, the novel form. Cervantes (and, among his successors, perhaps Sterne) was able to create such immanence only by blending the sublime with the humorous, the narrowing of the soul with its relationship to transcendence. This is the artistic reason why Dickens’ novels, so marvellously rich in comic characters, seem in the end so flat and moralistic. He had to make his heroes come to terms, without conflict, with the bourgeois society of his time and, for the sake of poetic effect, to surround the qualities needed for this purpose with a false, or anyway inadequate, poetic glow. Gogol’s Dead Souls had to remain a fragment for probably the same reason: it was impossible from the start to find a ‘positive’ counterweight to Chichikov, a character who is, artistically speaking, wonderfully fertile and well-realised, yet undeniably ‘negative’. In order to create a real totality such as Gogol’s authentically epic intention demanded, a balance was absolutely essential; without it, the novel could not achieve epic objectivity or epic reality: it would remain a purely subjective work or a satirical tract. The outside world today has become so exclusively conventional that everything, positive or negative, humorous or poetic, can take place only within the sphere of convention. The demonically humorous is nothing other than a distorted exaggeration of certain aspects of convention or its immanent (and therefore in turn conventional) denial and rejection; and the ‘positive’ is a coming-to-terms with it, the semblance of an organic life within limits clearly laid down by convention. (This historico-philosophically determined conventionality of the modern humorous novel should not be confused with the form-determined and therefore timeless conventions of dramatic comedy. In the latter, certain conventional forms of social life are merely the formal-symbolic conclusions of the rounded essential sphere of the drama. When all the major characters with the exception of the unmasked hypocrites and villains marry one another at the end of the great comedies, this is just as much a symbolic ceremony as the hero’s death at the end of tragedy; both are no more than symbols indicating the drawing of a boundary, the drawing of the sharp outline required by the sculptural essentiality of the drama. It is a characteristic fact that as the conventionality of real life and of the epic increases, so the endings of comedies become less and less conventional. The Broken Jug and The Inspector-General can still use the old unmasking technique, but The Parisienne—not to mention Hauptmann’s or Shaw’s comedies—is as contourless and unfinished as today’s tragedies, which do not end with the hero’s death.) Balzac chose a completely different path towards epic immanence. For him the subjective-psychological demonism which is characteristic of his work is an ultimate reality, the principle of all essential action which objectivises itself in heroic deeds; its inadequate relation to the outside world is intensified to the utmost, but this intensification has a purely immanent counterweight: the outside world is a purely human one and is essentially peopled by human beings with similar mental structures, although with completely different orientations and contents. As a result, this demonic inadequacy, this endless series of incidents in which souls are fatally at cross-purposes with one another, becomes the essence of reality, and we obtain that strange, boundless, immeasurable mass of interweaving destinies and lonely souls which is the unique feature of Balzac’s novels. By this paradoxical homogeneity of the material of these novels, which in turn results from the extreme heterogeneity of its con- stituent elements, an immanence of meaning is rescued. The danger of an abstract, ‘bad’ infinity is avoided by a great concentration of events (as in a novella) and a genuinely epic significance is thus attained. However, this triumph of form occurs only in each individual novel, not in The Human Comedy as a whole. True, the prerequisite for it is there: the magnificent unity of the work’s all-embracing material. This unity is not merely realised by means of the repeated appearances and disappearances of individual characters in the infinite chaos of the different stories; it also takes a form which is completely adequate to the innermost essence of this material, that of chaotic, demonic irrationality. And the content which fills this unity is that of the authentic great epic—the totality of a world. But ultimately this totality is not born purely out of the form: what makes the whole truly a whole is, in the end, only the effective experience of a common basis of life and the recognition that this experience corresponds to the essence of life as lived at that moment. Only the details are epically formed, the whole is merely fitted together; the ‘bad’ infinity, surmounted in every individual part, defeats the whole as a unified epic work: the totality rests on principles which do not belong to the epic form, on mood and insight, not on actions and heroes, and so the totality is not complete and rounded in itself. None of the parts, seen from the viewpoint of the whole, possesses an organic necessity of existence; if it were not there at all, the whole would not suffer; conversely, any number of new parts might be added and no evidence of inner completeness would prove them superfluous. The totality here is the sense of a life order, which we feel as a great lyric backdrop behind each individual story; it is not problematic, it has not been achieved by difficult struggles as in the great novels. The totality of The Human Comedy as a whole, with its essentially lyrical nature that belongs outside the epic, is naive and un- problematic. And if this totality is inadequate for the novel, it is even less adequate for the epic. A static psychology is the common feature of all these attempts at form-giving; the narrowing of the soul is a given, unchangeable, abstract a priori condition. It was natural, therefore, that the nineteenth-century novel with its tendencies towards psychological dynamism and psychologistic solutions should depart increasingly from this type and should seek the causes of the inadequacy between soul and reality in quite other directions. Only one great novel, Pontoppidan’s Hans im Gliick, represents an attempt to treat this type of soul structure centrally and to portray it through movement and development. Pontoppidan’s manner of posing the problem leads to a completely new method of composition: the point of departure, the subject’s com-letely [sic!]secure bond with the transcendent essence, becomes the final goal, and the demonic tendency of the soul to divorce itself completely from anything that does not correspond to this a priori condition becomes a real tendency. Whereas in Don Quixote the basis of all the hero’s adventures was his inner certainty and the world’s inadequate attitude towards it, so that the role of the demonic became a positive, dynamic one, here the unity between basis and end-goal is concealed, the divergence between soul and reality becomes mysterious and apparently quite irrational; the demonic narrowing of the soul manifests itself only negatively, by the hero having to abandon everything he achieves because it is never what he wants, because it is broader, more empirical, more life-like than what his soul set out to seek. Whereas in Don Quixote the completion of the life cycle is the same adventure repeated over and over again in different ways and extended until it becomes the all-containing centre of the totality, here the movement of life shows a definite and unmistakable progression towards the purity of a soul that has attained itself, learning from its adventures that only it alone, rigidly confined within itself, can correspond to its deepest, all-dominating instinct; that the soul is bound to be imprisoned and ultimately destroyed in a world which is alien to its essence: that every refusal to seize a conquered piece of reality is really a victory, a step towards the conquest of a self freed from illusions. Pontoppidan’s irony lies in the fact that he lets his hero succeed all the time, but shows that a demonic power forces him to regard everything he has gained as worthless and inessential and to throw it away as soon as he has gained it. The curious inner tension of the book is due to the fact that the meaning of this negative demonism is revealed only at the end, when the hero achieves complete resignation, thus giving restrospective immanence of meaning to his whole life. The revealed transcendence of this ending and its evident pre-stabilised harmony with the soul give an appearance of necessity to all the confusions that preceded it; indeed, seen from, the end, the dynamic relationship between the soul and the world is reversed; it looks as though the hero had always remained unchanged, quietly watching the passing events from within himself; as though the entire action consisted merely in removing the veils in which his soul was wrapped. The dynamic nature of psychology is thus shown to be only apparently dynamic, but not until— and this is where Pontoppidan’s great mastery lies—it has rendered possible a journey through a really vital and dynamic life-totality by its semblance of movement. This explains the isolated position of Pontoppidan’s work among modern novels, its strict insistence upon action which is reminiscent of novels of the past, its rejection of mere psychology, and —in terms of mood—the profound difference between the resignation which is felt at the end of this novel and the disappointed romanticism of other contemporary works. The Romanticism of Disillusionment IN THE nineteenth century novel, the other type of the necessarily inadequate relation between soul and reality became the more important one: the inadequacy that is due to the soul’s being wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it. The decisive structural difference is that here we are not dealing with an abstract a priori condition on the face of life, a condition which seeks to realise itself in action and therefore provokes conflicts with the outside world which make up the story of the novel; but rather a purely interior reality which is full of content and more or less complete in itself enters into competition with the reality of the outside world, leads a rich and animated life of its own and, with spontaneous self-confidence, regards itself as the only true reality, the essence of the world: and the failure of every attempt to realise this equality is the subject of the work. Thus we have here a concrete, qualitative a priori attitude vis-à-vis the world—a matter of content, a struggle between two worlds, not a struggle between reality and a general a priori state. But this makes the divergence between inferiority and the outside world even stronger. When the inferiority is like a cosmos, it is self-sufficient, at rest within itself. Whereas abstract idealism, in order to exist at all, had to translate itself into action, had to enter into conflict with the outside world, here the possibility of escape does not seem excluded from the start. A life which is capable of producing all its content out of itself can be rounded and perfect even if it never enters into contact with the alien reality outside. Whereas, therefore, an excessive, totally uninhibited activity towards the outside world was characteristic of the psychological structure of abstract idealism, here the tendency is rather towards passivity, a tendency to avoid outside conflicts and struggles rather than to engage in them, a tendency to deal inside the soul with everything that concerns the soul. In this possibility lies the central problematic of this type of novel: the disappearance of epic symbolisation, the disintegration of form in a nebulous and unstructured sequence of moods and reflections about moods, the replacement of a sensuously meaningful story by psychological analysis. This problematic is further intensified by the fact that, given the relationship between the two, the outside world which comes into contact with such an interiority has to be completely atomised or amorphous, and in any case must be entirely devoid of meaning. It is a world entirely dominated by convention, the full realisation of the concept of a ‘second nature’; a quintessence of meaningless laws in which no relation to the soul can be found. And this means that all formal objectivations of social life lose all significance for the soul. They do not retain even their paradoxical significance as being the necessary arena and vehicle of events whilst having no essence at the core. Thus, a character’s profession loses all importance from the point of view of his inner destiny, just as marriage, family and class become immaterial to the relationships between characters. Don Quixote would be unthinkable as anything other than a knight, but the story of his love is unimaginable without the troubadours’ convention of adoration of the woman; in The Human Comedy, the demonic obsession of all the characters is concentrated and objectified in the structures of social life; in Pontoppidan’s novel, even though the social structures are unmasked as inessential for the soul, it is nevertheless the struggle concerning them—the recognition of their inessentiality and the effort to reject them—that fills the hero’s life and the novel’s action. In the type of novel which we are now considering, all the relationships have ceased to exist from the start. The elevation of interiority to the status of a completely independent world is not only a psychological fact but also a decisive value judgement on reality; this self-sufficiency of the subjective self is its most desperate self-defence; it is the abandonment of any struggle to realise the soul in the outside world, a struggle which is seen a priori as hopeless and merely humiliating. This attitude is so intensely lyrical that it is no longer capable of purely lyrical expression. Lyrical subjectivity has to go for its symbols to the outside world; even if that world has been made by subjectivity itself, it is nevertheless the only possible one; subjectivity, as an interiority, never confronts in a polemical or negative way the outside world that is co-ordinated to it, it never takes refuge inside itself in an effort to forget the outside world; rather, it proceeds as an arbitrary conqueror, it snatches fragments out of the atomised chaos which is the outside world and melts them down—causing all origins to be forgotten—into a newly created, lyrical cosmos of pure interiority. Epic interiority, by contrast, is always reflexive, it realises itself in a conscious, distantiated way in contrast to the naive distancelessness of true lyricism. Therefore its means of expression are secondary ones—mood and reflexion—which, despite some apparent similarities to those of pure lyricism, have nothing whatever to do with the essence of the latter. Reflexion and mood are constitutive structural elements of the novel form, but their formal significance is determined precisely by the fact that the regulative system of ideas on which the whole reality is based can manifest itself in them and is given form through their mediation; in other words, by the fact that they have a positive, although problematical and paradoxical, relationship to the outside world. When they become an end in themselves, their unpoetic and form-destructive character becomes clearly obvious. This aesthetic problem, however, is at root an ethical one, and its artistic solution therefore presupposes, in accordance with the formal laws of the novel, that a solution has been found to the ethical problem. The hierarchical question of whether inner reality is superior to outer reality or vice versa is the ethical problem of Utopia: the question whether the ability to imagine a better world can be ethically justified, and the question whether this ability can serve as the starting point for a life that is rounded in itself, not one which, as Hamann says, has been stopped by having a hole put in it instead of coming to an end. From the point of view of epic form the problem can be posed as follows: can this rounded correction of reality be translated into actions which, regardless of outward failure or success, prove the individual’s right to self-sufficiency—actions which do not compromise the mental attitude from which they sprang? To create, by purely artistic means, a reality which corresponds to this dream world, or at least is more adequate to it than the existing one, is only an illusory solution. The Utopian longing of the soul is a legitimate desire, worthy of being the centre of a world, only if it is absolutely incapable of being satisfied in the present intellectual state of man, that is to say incapable of being satisfied in any world that can be imagined and given form, whether past, present or mythical. If a world can be found that satisfies the longing, this only proves that the dissatisfaction with the present was merely an artistic quibbling over its outward forms, an aesthetic hankering after times when the artist could draw with more generous lines or paint with brighter colours than today. Such longings can indeed be satisfied, but their inner emptiness becomes apparent in the work’s lack of idea, as is, for instance, the case with Walter Scott’s novels, well-told though they are. The flight from the present is of no use whatever in solving the central difficulty. The same problems—often giving rise to a profound dissonance between behaviour and soul, between outward destiny and inner fate—are evident in distantiated works, whether monumental or decorative. Salammbô or C. F. Meyer’s novels (which are, it is true, designed as novellas) are characteristic examples of this. The aesthetic problem, the transformation of mood and reflexion, of lyricism and psychology into genuinely epic means of expression is therefore centred on the fundamental ethical problem—the question of necessary and possible action. The human type of the central character in works of this kind is in essence a contemplative rather than an active one, and so the epic representation of such a type is faced with the problem of how his rhapsodically retiring or hesitant behaviour can be translated into action; the artistic task consists of revealing the point at which such a character’s being-there and being-thus coincides with his inevitable failure. The completely pre-determined nature of this failure is the other objective difficulty of purely epic form-giving. The danger of a subjectively lyrical attitude towards events, instead of a normatively epic attitude of absorption and reproduction, is much greater when fatality is predetermined —whether this fatality is affirmed or negated, lamented or scorned—than when the outcome of the struggle has not been decided in advance. The mood which carries and nourishes such lyricism is the mood of disillusioned romanticism, an over-intensified, over-determined desire for an ideal life as opposed to the real one, a desperate recognition of the fact that this desire is doomed to remain unsatisfied, a Utopia based from the start on an uneasy conscience and the certainty of defeat. And the decisive feature of this certainty is its inseparable connection with moral conscience, the evidence that failure is a necessary consequence of its own inner structure, that it is, in its finest essence and highest value, condemned to death. That is why the attitude both towards the hero and towards the outside world is a lyrical one, compounded of love and accusation, of sorrow, pity and scorn. The inner importance of the individual has reached its historical apogee: the individual is no longer significant as the carrier of transcendent worlds, as he was in abstract idealism, he now carries his value exclusively within himself; indeed, the values of being seem to draw the justification of their validity only from the fact of having been subjectively experienced, from their significance to the individual’s soul. Si l’arche est vide où tu pensais trouver la loi, Rien n’est réel que ta danse: Puisqu’elle n’a pas d’objet, elle est impérissable. Danse pour le désert et danse pour I’espace. The precondition and the price of this immoderate elevation of the subject is, however, the abandonment of any claim to participation in the shaping of the outside world. The romanticism of disillusionment not only followed abstract idealism in time and history, it was also conceptually its heir, the next historico-philosophical step in a priori utopianism. There, the individual, the vehicle of the Utopian challenge to reality, was crushed by the brute force of reality; here, defeat is the precondition of subjectivity. There, subjectivity gave rise to the heroism, of militant interiority; here, a man can become the hero, the central figure of a literary work, because he has the inner possibility of experiencing life as a literary creator. There, the outside world was to be created anew on the model of ideals; here, an interiority which perfects itself in the form of a literary work demands from the outside world that is should provide it with suitable material for thus forming itself. In Romanticism, the literary nature of the a priori status of the soul vis-à-vis reality becomes conscious: the self, cut off from transcendence, recognises itself as the source of the ideal reality, and, as a necessary consequence, as the only material worthy of self-realisation. Life becomes a work of literature; but, as a result, man becomes the author of his own life and at the same time the observer of that life as a created work of art. Such duality can only be given form by lyrical means. As soon as it is fitted into a coherent totality, the certainty of failure becomes manifest; the romanticism becomes sceptical, disappointed and cruel towards itself and the world; the novel of the Romantic sense of life is the novel of disillusionment. An inferiority denied the possibility of fulfilling itself in action turns inwards, yet cannot finally renounce what it has lost forever; even if it wanted to do so, life would deny it such a satisfaction; life forces it to continue the struggle and to suffer defeats which the artist anticipates and the hero apprehends. This situation gives rise to a romantic lack of moderation in all directions. The inner wealth of pure soul-experience is seen immoderately as the only essential thing; the futility of the soul’s existence in the totality of the world is exposed with an equally immoderate ruthlessness; the soul’s loneliness, its lack of any support or tie, is intensified until it becomes immeasurable, and, at the same time, the cause of this condition of the soul in a specific world situation is mercilessly revealed. Compositionally speaking, a maximum of continuity is aimed at, since existence is possible only within a subjectivity that is uninterrupted by any outside factor or event; yet reality disintegrates into a series of mutually absolutely heterogeneous fragments which have no independent valency of existence even in isolation, as do the adventures of Don Quixote. All the fragments live only by the grace of the mood in which they are experienced, but the totality reveals the nothingness of this mood in terms of reflexion. And so everything has to be denied, for any affirmation will destroy the precarious balance of forces: affirmation of the outside world would justify the mindless philistines who accommodate themselves to reality, and the resulting work would be no more than cheap, slick satire; straightforward affirmation of romantic interiority would give rise to formless wallowing in vain, self-worshipping lyrical psychologism. But the outside world and the interiority are too heterogeneous, too hostile to one another to be simultaneously affirmed, as can happen in novels that overlap into the epic. The only way left is to deny them both, and this merely renews and potentiates the fundamental danger of this type of novel—that of the form becoming dissolved in dreary pessimism. The purely artistic consequences of such a situation are inevitably, on the one hand, the disintegration of all secure and unconditional human values and the revelation of their ultimate nullity, and, on the other hand, the overall dominance of mood, that is to say of impotent sorrow over a world which is inessential in itself and which has only the ineffective, monotonous brilliance of a surface in process of decomposition. Any form must contain some positive element in order to acquire substance as a form. The paradoxical nature of the novel is most strikingly revealed in the fact that the world situation and the human type which most closely correspond to its formal requirements—for which it is the only adequate form.—confront the writer with almost insoluble problems. Jacobsen’s novel of disillusionment, which expresses in wonderful lyrical images the author’s melancholy over a world ‘in which there’s so much that is senselessly exquisite’, breaks down and disintegrates completely; and the author’s attempt to find a desperate positiveness in Niels Lyhne’s heroic atheism, his courageous acceptance of his necessary loneliness, strikes us as an aid brought in from outside the actual work. This hero’s life which was meant to become a work of literature and is instead only a poor fragment, is actually transformed into a pile of debris by the form-giving process; the cruelty of disillusionment devalues the lyricism of the moods, but it cannot endow the characters and events with substance or with the gravity of existence. The novel remains a beautiful yet unreal mixture of voluptuousness and bitterness, sorrow and scorn, but not a unity; a series of images and aspects, but not a life totality. Goncharov’s attempt to fit the magnificently, truly and profoundly seen character of Oblomov into a totality by introducing a positive counter-figure was likewise doomed to failure. The memorable recurring image of Oblomov lying on his bed—an image which forcefully and sensually conveys the passivity of this type of character—cannot save the work as a whole. In face of the depth of Oblomov’s tragedy— Oblomov whose innermost experience is so direct and bears so exclusively on essential things, yet who has to fail so abysmally whenever he is confronted with the smallest manifestation of outward reality—in face of this the triumphant happiness of Stolz, his ‘strong’ friend, becomes trivial and flat. At the same time, Stolz has just enough real strength and weight to reduce Oblomov’s fate to pettiness; the terrifying comic quality of the divorce between interior and exterior, symbolised by Oblomov lying on his bed, increasingly loses its created depth and greatness as the real action of the novel proceeds—namely, Stolz’s attempt to reeducate Oblomov and the failure of that attempt. Oblomov’s tragi-comic destiny is increasingly reduced to the indifferent fate of a character doomed to failure from the start. The greatest discrepancy between idea and reality is time: the process of time as duration. The most profound and most humiliating impotence of subjectivity consists not so much in its hopeless struggle against the lack of idea in social forms and their human representatives, as in the fact that it cannot resist the sluggish, yet constant progress of time; that it must slip down, slowly yet inexorably, from the peaks it has laboriously scaled; that time—that ungraspable, invisibly moving substance—gradually robs subjectivity of all its possessions and imperceptibly forces alien contents into it. That is why only the novel, the literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea, includes real time— Bergson’s durte—among its constitutive principles. In another context1 I have pointed out that the drama does not know the concept of time: it is subject to the three unities and, provided these are properly understood, the unity of time signifies a state of being lifted out of the duration of time. The epic, it is true, appears to allow for the duration of time—we need only think of the ten years of the Iliad or of the Odyssey. Yet this time has as little reality, as little real duration, as time has in drama; men and destinies remain untouched by it; it has a dynamic of its own, and its function is solely to express the greatness of an enterprise or of a tension in a meaningful way. The years are necessary to make the listener understand the real meaning of the capture of Troy and the wanderings of Odysseus, just as the large number of warriors or the vast areas travelled are necessary for the same purpose. But the heroes do not experience time within the work itself; time does not affect their inner changes or changelessness; their age is assimilated in their characters, and Nestor is old just as Helen is beautiful or Agamemnon mighty. It is true that the characters of the epic know life’s painful lesson of growing old and dying, but 1 A modern drama fejlödésének története (History of the Development of Modern Drama), 2 vols., Budapest 1912. The introductory chapter is available in German under the title Zur Soziologie des modernen Dramas in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik XXXVII (1914), p. 303 ff., p. 662 ff. to them it is mere knowledge, mere recognition; what they perience and the way they experience it has the blissful time-removed quality of the world of gods. The normative attitude towards the epic, according to Goethe and Schiller, is an attitude assumed towards something completely in the past; therefore its time is static and can be taken in at a single glance. The author of an epic and his characters can move freely in any direction inside it; like all space, it has several dimensions but no direction. And the normative present tense of the drama, likewise laid down by Goethe and Schiller, transforms time into space (as Gurnemanz says). Only the complete disorientedness of modern literature poses the impossible task of representing development and the gradual passing of time in dramatic terms. Time can become constitutive only when the bond with the transcendental home has been severed. Just as ecstasy elevates the mystic into a sphere where all duration and all passing of time have ceased and from which he must fall back into the world of time only because of his creaturely, organic limitations, so any close and visible connection with the essence creates a cosmos which is a priori exempt from this necessity. Only in the novel, whose very matter is seeking and failing to find the essence, is time posited together with the form: time is the resistance of the organic—which possesses a mere semblance of life—to the present meaning, the will of life to remain within its own completely enclosed immanence. In the epic the life-immanence of meaning is so strong that it abolishes time: life enters eternity as life, the organic retains nothing of time except the phase of blossoming; fading and dying are forgotten and left entirely behind. In the novel, meaning is separated from life, and hence the essential from the temporal; we might almost say that the entire inner action of the novel is nothing but a ruggle against the power of time. In the Romanticism of disillusionment, time is the corrupt- ing principle: poetry, the essential, must die, and time is ultimately responsible for its passing. That is why in such novels all value is on the side of the defeated protagonist, who, because he is dying, is endowed with the beauty of wounded youth, while coarseness, harshness, the absence of an idea, belong entirely to time. Only as a post-facto correction of this one-sided lyrical opposition to the victorious power does self-irony turn against the dying essence by endowing it, negatively, with the attributes of youth; the ideal is said to be constitutive only for the soul in a state of immaturity. The overall design of the novel is bound to be deformed if positive and negative values are so distinctly divided between the two sides of the struggle. A form cannot really deny a life principle unless it is capable of excluding it a priori from its realm; as soon as it has to admit that principle, it must admit it as positive; and so this principle, not only as an opposing force but in its own right, becomes a precondition of the realisation of value. Time is the fullness of life, although the fullness of time is the self-abolition of life and, with it, of time itself. The positive thing, the affirmation which the very form of the novel expresses no matter how inconsolably sad its content may be, is not only that distant meaning which dawns with a mild radiance on the far side of the search and the failure to find, but also the fullness of life which is revealed precisely through the manifold failures of the struggle and search. The novel is the form of mature virility: its song of comfort rings out of the dawning recognition that traces or lost meaning are to be found everywhere; that the enemy comes from the same lost home as the knight and defender of the essence; that life had to lose its immanence of meaning so that it might be equally present everywhere. Thus it is that time becomes the carrier of the sublime epic poetry of the novel: it has become inexorably existent, and no one can any longer swim against the unmistakable direction of its current nor regulate its unforeseeable course with the dams of a priori concepts. Yet a feeling of resignation persists: all this had to come from somewhere, must be going somewhere; even if the direction betrays no meaning, it is a direction none the less. From this feeling of resignation mixed with courage there spring experiences of time which are authentically epic because they give rise to action and stem from action: the experiences of hope and memory; experiences of time which are victories over time: a synoptic vision of time as solidified unity ante rem and its synoptic comprehension post rem. In re, there can be no simple, happy experience of this form or of the times which have produced it. Experiences of this kind can only be subjective and reflexive; nevertheless there is always in them the form-giving sense of comprehending a meaning; they are experiences in which we come as near as we can, in a world forsaken by God, to the essence of things. Such an experience of time is the basis of Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, and the absence of such an experience, a one-sidedly negative view of time, is what has ultimately been responsible for the failure of the other major novels of disillusionment. Of all great works of this type, L’Education sentimentale appears to be the least composed; no attempt is made here to counteract the disintegration of outside reality into heterogeneous, brittle and fragmentary parts by some process of unification or to replace absent connections or valencies of meaning by lyrical mood-imagery: the separate fragments of reality lie before us in all their hardness, brokenness and isolation. The central figure is not made significant by means of limiting the number of characters, by the rigorous convergence of the composition upon the centre, or by any emphasis upon the central character’s outstanding personality: the hero’s inner life is as fragmentary as the outside world, his interiority possesses no lyrical power of scorn or pathos that might set it against the pettiness of reality. Yet this novel, of all novels of the nineteenth century, is one of the most typical of the problematic of the novel form; in the unmitigated desolation of its matter it is the only novel that attains true epic objectivity and, through it, the positiveness and affirmative energy of an accomplished form. This victory is rendered possible by time. The unrestricted, uninterrupted flow of time is the unifying principle of the homogeneity that rubs the sharp edges off each heterogeneous fragment and establishes a relationship—albeit an irrational and inexpressible one—between them. Time brings order into the chaos of men’s lives and gives it the semblance of a spontaneously flowering, organic entity; characters having no apparent meaning appear, establish relations with one another, break them off, disappear again without any meaning having been revealed. But the characters are not simply dropped into that meaningless becoming and dissolving which preceded man and will outlast him. Beyond events, beyond psychology, time gives them the essential quality of their existence: however accidental the appearance of a character may be in pragmatic and psychological terms, it emerges from an existent, experienced continuity, and the atmosphere of thus being borne upon the unique and unrepeatable stream of life cancels out the accidental nature of their experiences and the isolated nature of the events recounted. The life totality which carries all men here becomes a living and dynamic thing: the expanse of time which the novel covers, dividing men into generations and integrating their actions in a historico-social context, is not an abstract concept, not a unit conceptually constructed after the event like that of the totality of the Comédie humaine, but a thing existing in itself and for itself, a concrete and organic continuum. This totality is a true image of life in the sense that no value-system of ideas enters it except in a regulative function; the only idea immanently contained within it is that of its own existence, that of life as such. But this idea, which reveals more brutally than anything else how infinitely remote we are from the true systems of ideas that have become ideals in the minds of men, at the same time makes the failure of all endeavours seem less desolate. Everything that happens may be meaningless, fragmentary and sad, but it is always irradiated by hope or memory. And hope here is not an abstract artifact, isolated from life, spoilt and shopworn as the result of its defeat by life: it is a part of life; it tries to conquer life by embracing and adorning it, yet is repulsed by life again and again. And memory transforms the continual struggle into a process which is full of mystery and interest and yet is tied with indestructible threads to the present, the unexplained instant. Duration advances upon that instant and passes on, but the wealth of duration which the instant momentarily dams and holds still in a flash of conscious contemplation is such that it enriches even what is over and done with: it even puts the full value of lived experience on events which, at the time, passed by unnoticed. And so, by a strange and melancholy paradox, the moment of failure is the moment of value; the comprehending and experiencing of life’s refusals is the source from which the fullness of life seems to flow. What is depicted is the total absence of any fulfilment of meaning, yet the work attains the rich and rounded fullness of a true totality of life. Herein lies the essentially epic quality of memory. In the drama (and the epic) the past either does not exist or is completely present. Because these forms know nothing of the passage of time, they allow of no qualitative difference between the experiencing of past and present; time has no power of transformation, it neither intensifies nor diminishes the meaning of anything. This is the formal meaning of the typical scenes of revelation and recognition which Aristotle shows us; something that was pragmatically unknown to the heroes of the drama enters their field of vision and, in the world thus altered, they have to act otherwise than they might wish to act. But the force of the newly introduced factor is not diminshed by a time perspective, it is absolutely homogeneous with and equivalent to the present. Similarly, the passage of time ‘alters nothing in the epic. In adapting the Song of the Nibelungs, Hebbel was able to take over without change Kriemhild’s and Hagen’s inability to forget—the precondition of their revenge—because such an inability belongs essentially to drama. In the Divine Comedy, the remembered earthly life of each character is as present to their souls as is Dante, to whom they are speaking, or as is the actual place of their punishment or reward. As for lyric poetry, change alone is essential for any lyrical experience of the past; lyric poetry knows no object, structured as such, that might exist either in the vacuum of timelessness or in the atmosphere of passing time: it gives form to the process of remembering or forgetting, and the object is only a pretext for lived experience. Only in the novel and in certain epic forms resembling the novel does memory occur as a creative force affecting the object and transforming it. The genuinely epic quality of such memory is the affirmative experience of the life process. The duality of interiority and the outside world can be abolished for the subject if he (the subject) glimpses the organic unity of his whole life through the process by which his living present has grown from the stream of his past life dammed up within his memory. The surmounting of duality—that is to say the successful mastering and integration of the object—makes this experience into an element of authentically epic form. The mood-conditioned pseudo-lyricism of the novel of disillusionment betrays itself most obviously by the fact that subject and object are sharply separated in the experience of remembering; memory, from the viewpoint of present subjectivity, grasps the discrepancy between the object as it was in reality and the subject’s ideal image of it. The harsh and depressing quality of such works is therefore due not so much to the intrinsically sad nature of the content as to the unresolved dissonance of the form—to the fact that the object of experience is constructed in accordance with the formal laws of drama, whereas the experiencing subject is a lyrical one. Drama, lyric poetry and the epic, whatever the hierarchy in which we may place them, are not the thesis, antithesis and synthesis of a dialectical process; each of them is a means, qualitatively quite heterogenous from the others, of giving form to the world. Each form appears positive, because it fulfils its own structural laws: the affirmation of life that seems to emanate from it as a mood is nothing other than the resolving of its form-conditioned dissonances, the affirmation of its own, form-created substance. The objective structure of the world of the novel shows a heterogeneous totality, regulated only by regulative ideas, whose meaning is prescribed but not given. That is why the unity of the personality and the world—a unity which is dimly sensed through memory, yet which once was part of our lived experience—that is why this unity in its subjectively constitutive, objectively reflexive essence is the most profound and authentic means of accomplishing the totality required by the novel form. The subject’s return home to itself is to be found in this experience, just as the anticipation of this return and the desire for it lie at the root of the experience of hope. It is this return home that, in retrospect, completes everything that was begun, interrupted and allowed to fall by the way—completes it and turns it into rounded action. The lyrical character of moods is transcended in the mood of experiencing this homecoming because it is related to the outside world, to the totality of life. And the insight which grasps this unity, because it is thus related to the object, rises above mere analysis; it becomes an intuitive, premonitory comprehension of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life—the innermost core of all action made manifest. A natural consequence of the paradoxical nature of this art form is the fact that the really great novels have a tendency to overlap into the epic. L’Education sentimentale is the only real exception to this and is therefore best suited to serve as a model of the novel form. The tendency occurs most obviously in the representation of the passage of time and in the relation of time to the artistic centre-point of the entire work. Pontoppidan’s Hans im Glück (which, of all nineteenth-century novels, comes closest, perhaps, to Flaubert’s great achievement) determines the goal, the attaining of which justifies and completes the life totality of the hero, too concretely as to content, with too much emphasis on value, to achieve perfect, genuinely epic unity at the end. For this hero, the journey through life is more than just an inevitable complication of the ideal: it is the necessary detour without which the goal would be empty and abstract and its attainment valueless. But the hero himself has value only in relation to this specific goal, and his value is only that of having-grown, not of growing. His lived experience of time therefore has a slight tendency to overlap into the dramatic— to separate critically what is sustained by value from what has been abandoned by meaning. Pontoppidan checks this tendency with admirable tact, but its vestiges, as incompletely surmounted dualities, are still present in the work. Abstract idealism and its intimate relation with the transcendent homeland which lies on the far side of time makes this overlapping of the novel with the epic necessary. That is why the greatest work of this type, Don Quixote, overlaps still more obviously into the epic in its formal and historico- philosophical foundations. The events in Don Quixote are almost timeless, a motley series of isolated adventures complete in themselves, and while the ending completes the work as a whole as to its principle and problems, it does so only for the whole and not for the concrete totality of the parts. Therein lies the epic quality of Don Quixote, its marvellous hard serenity which is outside any atmosphere. Of course it is only the created work itself that reaches beyond the passage of time and into purer regions: the life base which supports the work is neither timeless nor mythical, it belongs to time passing and everything bears the traces of its origin in time. The light of a demonic, irrational faith in a nonexistent transcendent homeland absorbs the shadows and reflections of this origin and puts sharp contours round every image. But it cannot make us forget that origin, for the work -owes its inimitable blend of wry serenity and powerful melancholy to this unique and unrepeatable victory over the gravity of time. Here as in everything else, it was not Cervantes, the naive artist, who surmounted the dangers—unsuspected by him—of his chosen form and found the way to an improbable perfection: it was Cervantes the intuitive visionary of the unique historico-philosophical moment. His vision came into being at the watershed of two historical epochs; it recognised and understood them, and raised the most confused problematic into the radiant sphere of a transcendence which achieved its full flowering as form. The formal ancestor and the formal heir of Don Quixote —the chivalrous epic and the adventure novel—both demonstrate the danger inherent in this form, the danger which arises from its overlapping into the epic, from its inability to give form to the durée: the danger of triviality, of being reduced to mere entertainment. This is the necessary problematic of this type of novel, just as disintegration and formlessness, which are due to a failure to surmount time as a too-heavy, too strongly existent factor, are the dangers inherent in the other novel form, the novel of disillusionment. Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship as an attempted synthesis Wilhelm Meister stands aesthetically and historico-philosophically between these two types of novel. Its theme is the reconciliation of the problematic individual, guided by his lived experience of the ideal, with concrete social reality. This reconciliation cannot and must not be the result of accommodation or of a harmony existing from the start which would make it a modern humorous novel (a type we have already described), except that, whereas in such novels the preexisting harmony is a necessary evil, here it would become the central good. (Freytag’s Soll und Haben is a classic example of such objectivation of the lack of idea and of the anti-poetic principle.) The type of personality and the structure of the plot are determined by the necessary condition that a reconciliation between interiority and reality, although problematic, is nevertheless possible; that it has to be sought in hard struggles and dangerous adventures, yet is ultimately possible to achieve. For this reason the interiority depicted in such a novel must also stand between the two previously analysed types: its relation to the transcendent world of ideas is neither subjectively nor objectively very strong; the soul is not purely self-dependent, its world is not a reality which is, or should be, complete in itself and can be opposed to the reality of the outside world as a postulate and a competing power; instead, the soul in such a novel carries within itself, as a sign of its tenuous, but not yet severed link with the transcendental order, a longing for an earthly home which may correspond to its ideal—an ideal which eludes positive definition but is clear enough in negative terms. Such an interiority represents on the one hand a wider and consequently more adaptable, gentler, more concrete idealism, and, on the other hand, a widening of the soul which seeks fulfilment in action, in effective dealings with reality, and not merely in contemplation. It is an interiority which stands halfway between idealism and Romanticism, and its attempt, within itself, to synthesise and overcome both of them is rejected by both as a compromise. It follows from this possibility, given by the theme itself, of effective action in social reality, that the organisation of the outside world into professions, classes, ranks, etc., is of decisive importance for this particular type of personality as the substratum of its social activity. The content and goal of the ideal which animates the personality and determines his actions is to find responses to the innermost demands of his soul in the structures of society. This means, at least as a postulate, that the inherent loneliness of the soul is surmounted; and this in turn presupposes the possibility of human and interior community among men, of understanding and common action in respect of the essential. Such community is not the result of people being naively and naturally rooted in a specific social structure, not of any natural solidarity of kinship (as in the ancient epics), nor is it a mystical experience of community, a sudden illumination which rejects the lonely individuality as something ephemeral, static and sinful; it is achieved by personalities, previously lonely and confined within their own selves, adapting and accustoming themselves to one another; it is the fruit of a rich and enriching resignation, the crowning of a process of education, a maturity attained by struggle and effort. The content of such maturity is an ideal of free humanity which comprehends and affirms the structures of social life as necessary forms of human community, yet, at the same time, only sees them as an occasion for the active expression of the essential life substance—in other words, which takes possession of these structures, not in their rigid political and legal being-for-themselves, but as the necessary instruments of aims which go far beyond them. The heroism of abstract idealism and the pure interiority of Romanticism are therefore admitted as relatively justified, but only as tendencies to be surmounted and integrated in the interiorised order; in themselves and for themselves, they appear as reprehensible and doomed to perdition, as also is philistinism—the acceptance of an outside order, however lacking in idea it may be, simply because it is the given order. This structure of the relationship between the ideal and the soul relativises the hero’s central position, which is merely accidental: the hero is picked out of an unlimited number of men who share his aspirations, and is placed at the centre of the narrative only because his seeking and finding reveal the world’s totality most clearly. In the tower where Wilhelm Meister’s years of apprenticeship are recorded, those of Jarno and Lothario and others—both members and non-members of the League—are recorded too, and the novel itself contains, in the memories of the Canoness, a close parallel to the story of the hero’s education. It is true that in the novel of disillusionment, the central character’s position is also often accidental (whereas abstract idealism has to make use of a hero marked out and placed at the centre of events by his loneliness); but this is more a means of exposing the corrupting nature of reality: where all interiority is bound to come to grief, any individual destiny is merely an episode, and the world consists of an infinite number of such isolated, mutually heterogeneous episodes which have only the fatality of failure in common. Here, however, the philosophical basis of the relativity of the hero’s position is the possibility of success of aspirations aimed at a common goal; the individual characters are closely linked together by this community of destiny, whereas in the novel of disillusionment the parallelism of their lives had only to enhance their loneliness. This is why Goethe in Wilhelm Meister steers a middle course between abstract idealism, which concentrates on pure action, and Romanticism, which interiorises action and reduces it to contemplation. Humanism, the fundamental attitude of this type of work, demands a balance between activity and contemplation, between wanting to mould the world and being purely receptive towards it. This form has been called the ‘novel of education’—rightly, because its action has to be a conscious, controlled process aimed at a certain goal: the development of qualities in men which would never blossom without the active intervention of other men and circumstances; whilst the goal thus attained is in itself formative and encouraging to others—is itself a means of education. A story determined by such a goal has a certain calm based on security. But this is not the calm of an a-prioristic world; the will towards education, a will that is conscious and certain of its aim, is what creates the atmosphere of ultimate security. The world of such a novel in itself and for itself is by no means free from danger. In order to demonstrate the risk which everyone runs and which can be escaped by individual salvation but not by a-prioristic redemption, many characters have to perish because of their inability to adapt themselves, whilst others fade away because of their precipitous and unconditional surrender in the face of reality. Ways towards individual salvation do exist, however, and a whole community of men is seen to arrive successfully at the end of them, helping one another, as well as occasionally falling into error during the process. And what has become a reality for many must be at least potentially accessible to all. The robust sense of security underlying this type of novel arises, then, from the relativation of its central character, which in turn is determined by a belief in the possibility of common destinies and life-formations. As soon as this belief disappears—which, in formal terms, amounts to saying: as soon as the action of the novel is constructed out of the destinies of a lonely person who merely passes through various real or illusory communities but whose fate does not finally flow into them—the form of the work must undergo a substantial change, coming closer to that of the novel of disillusionment, in which loneliness is neither accidental nor the fault of the individual, but signifies that the desire for the essence always leads out of the world of social structures and communities and that a community is possible only at the surface of life and can only be based on compromise. The central character becomes problematic, not because of his so-called ‘false tendencies’, but just because he wants to realise his deepest inferiority in the outside world. The educative element which this type of novel still retains and which distinguishes it sharply from the novel of disillusionment is that the hero’s ultimate state of resigned loneliness does not signify the total collapse and defilement of all his ideals but a recognition of the discrepancy between the interiority and the world. The hero actively realises this duality: he accommodates himself to society by resigning himself to accept its life forms, and by locking inside himself and keeping entirely to himself the interiority which can only be realised inside the soul. His ultimate arrival expresses the present state of the world but is neither a protest against it nor an affirmation of it, only an understanding and experiencing of it which tries to be fair to both sides and which ascribes the soul’s inability to fulfil itself in the world not only to the inessential nature of the world but also to the feebleness of the soul. In most individual examples the dividing line between this post-Goethean type of novel of education and the novel of disillusionment is often fluid. The first version of Der Grüne Heinrich shows this perhaps most clearly, whereas the final version stands definitely upon the course required by its form. But the possibility of such indeterminacy (although it can be overcome) reveals the one great danger inherent in this form because of its historico-philosophical base: the danger of a subjectivity which is not exemplary, which has not become a symbol, and which is bound to destroy the epic form. The hero and his destiny then have no more than personal interest and the work as a whole becomes a private memoir of how a certain person succeeded in coming to terms with his world. (The novel of disillusionment counteracts the increased subjectivity of the characters by the crushing, equalising universality of fate.) Such a subjectivity is even more difficult to surmount than that of the impersonal narrative: it endows everything—even if the technique is perfectly objectivised —with the fatal, irrelevant and petty character of the merely private; it remains a mere aspect, making the absence of a totality the more painfully obvious as it constantly claims to create one. The overwhelming majority of modern ‘novels of education’ have completely failed to avoid this pitfall. The structure of the characters and destinies in Wilhelm Meister determines the structure of the social world around them. Here, too, we have an intermediate situation: the structures of social life are not modelled on a stable and secure transcendent world, nor are they in themselves an order, complete and clearly articulated, which substantiates itself to become its own purpose; such a world would exclude any possibility of the hero’s seeking or losing his way. But neither do these structures form an amorphous mass, for then the interiority oriented towards finding an order would always remain homeless and the attainment of the goal would be unthinkable from the start. The social world must therefore be shown as a world of convention, which is partially open to penetration by living meaning. A new principle of heterogeneity is thereby introduced into the outside world: a hierarchy of the various structures and layers of structures according to their penetrability by meaning. This hierarchy is irrational and incapable of being rationalised; and the meaning, in this particular case, is not objective but is tantamount to the possibility of a personality fulfilling itself in action. Irony here acquires crucial importance as a factor in the creation of the work because no structure in itself and for itself can be said to possess such meaning, nor not to possess it; it is quite impossible to decide from the start whether any structure is thus eligible or not, and only its interaction with the individual can reveal this. The necessary ambiguity is further increased by the fact that in each separate set of interactions it is impossible to tell whether the adequacy or inadequacy of the structure of the individual is due to the individual’s success or failure or whether it is a comment on the structure itself. But such an ironic affirmation of reality—for this uncertainty lights up even a reality totally lacking in idea—is, after all, only an intermediate stage: the completion of the process of education must inevitably idealise and romanticise certain parts of reality and abandon others to prose, as being devoid of meaning. Yet the author must not abandon his ironic attitude, replacing it by unconditional affirmation, even when describing the eventual homecoming. This objectivation of social life is merely the occasion for something which lies outside and beyond it to become visible, fruitful and active, and the earlier ironic homogeneisation of reality, to which the homecoming owes its character of reality—its nature which always remains opaque to subjective views and tendencies, its independent existence vis-à-vis them—cannot be abolished even at the eventual homecoming without endangering the unity of the whole. And so the attained, meaningful and harmonious world is just as real and has the same characteristics of reality as the different degrees of meaninglessness and of partial penetration by meaning which preceded it in the story. In this ironic tact of the Romantic presentation of reality lies the other great danger inherent in this form of the novel, which only Goethe—and not always he—succeeded in escaping. It is the danger of romanticising reality to a point where it becomes a sphere totally beyond reality or, still more dangerously from the point of view of artistic form-giving, a sphere completely free from problems, for which the forms of the novel are then no longer sufficient. Novalis, who rejected Goethe’s work as prosaic and anti-poetic precisely on these grounds, sets the fairy-tale—transcendence realised in reality—as the goal and canon of epic poetry against the method used in Wilhelm Meister. ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship,’’ he writes, ‘is in a sense a completely prosaic and modern work. The Romantic element is absent from it, and so is the poetry of nature—the miraculous. It deals only with ordinary, human things; nature and mysticism are quite forgotten. It is a poeticised story of bourgeois domestic life. The miraculous is dismissed from it as mere poetry and exaltation. Artistic atheism is the spirit of this book ... It is at bottom . . . unpoetic to the highest degree, however poetical the writing may be.’ And again, Novalis’ own harking back to the age of the chivalrous epics was not accidental but the result of that enigmatic and yet so deeply rational elective affinity between an author’s fundamental intention and the matter of his works. Novalis, like the authors of those epics, wanted to create a totality of revealed transcendence within an earthly reality (although we can speak only of an a priori sharing of aims, not of any direct or indirect ‘influence’). His stylisation, like that of the chivalrous epics, had therefore to be oriented towards the fairy-tale. But whereas the intention of the authors of the medieval epics was epic in a naively natural sense and consisted in giving form directly to real life (the glimpsed presence of the transcendent and, with it, the transfiguration of reality into a fairy-tale being merely a gift they received from their historico-philosophical situation), for Novalis this fairy-tale reality as a re-creation of the broken unity between reality and transcendence became a conscious goal. And this is precisely why he could not achieve a decisive and complete synthesis. His reality is so much weighed down by the earthly gravity of idealessness, his transcendent world is so airy, so vapid, because it stems too directly from the philosophico-postulative sphere of pure abstraction, that the two are unable to unite in a living totality. And so the artistic fault which Novalis so penetratingly detected in Goethe is even greater —is irreparable—in his own work. The triumph of poetry, its transfiguring and redeeming domination of the entire universe, has not the constitutive force to make all earthly and prosaic things follow it into paradise; the romanticising of reality merely gives reality a lyrical semblance of poetry, but this semblance cannot be translated into events—into epic terms; and so the genuinely , epic in Novalis’ work suffers from the same problematic as in Goethe’s (but to a more acute degree) or is evaded altogether by lyrical reflexions and mood-pictures. Novalis’ stylisation remains a purely reflexive one, superficially disguising the danger but in fact only intensifying it. Lyrical, mood-dominated romanticising of the structures of social reality cannot, given the fact that reality at the present stage of development lacks pre-stabilised harmony, relate to the essential life of the interiority. Since Novalis rejected Goethe’s solution of seeking an ironical, fluctuating balance maintained from the point of view of the subject and touching as little as possible upon the actual structures of society, no other way was left open to him but to poeticise these structures in then-objective existence and to create a world which was beautiful and harmonious but closed within itself and unrelated to anything outside: a world connected only reflexively, only by mood, not in any epic sense, with the ultimate realised transcendence or with the problematic interiority: a world which therefore could not become a true totality. The surmounting of this danger is not entirely problem- free even in Goethe. Although he places strong emphasis on the merely potential and subjective nature of the penetration of meaning into the social sphere in which the hero finds fulfilment, the notion of community on which the whole edifice is based requires that the social structures should here possess a greater, more objective substantiality and, therefore, a more genuine adequation to the normative subjects, than those spheres which have been overcome. This objective removal of the fundamental problematic brings the novel closer to the epic; yet it is impossible for a work which began as a novel to end as an epic, and it is likewise impossible, once such overlapping has occurred, to make the work homogeneous again by the renewed use of irony. This is why, in Wilhelm Meister, the world of the nobility, which does not belong completely to the novel and so is somewhat fragile, has to be set as a symbol of active life-domination against the marvellously unified atmosphere of the theatre, which is born of the true spirit of the novel form. Certainly, by the nature of the marriages which conclude the novel, the nobility as a social estate is interiorised with the maximum epic and sensuous intensity, so that the objective superiority of a class is transformed to mean a better opportunity for a freer, more generous way of life for anyone possessing the necessary inner potentialities. But in spite of this ironic reservation, a social class is nevertheless raised to a height of substantiality to which it cannot inwardly be equal. Within this class, although confined to a small circle of its members, a universal and all-embracing cultural flowering is supposed to occur, capable of absorbing the most varied individual destinies. In other words, the world thus confined within a single class—the nobility—and based upon it, partakes of the problem-free radiance of the epic. Not even the supreme artistic tact with which Goethe introduces new problems at this late stage in the novel can alter the immanent consequences of the novel’s ending. The world he describes, with its merely relative adequation to essential life, contains no element that can offer a possibility for the necessary stylisation. This is why Goethe was obliged to introduce the much-criticised fantastic apparatus of the last books of the novel, the mysterious tower, the all-knowing initiates with their providential actions, etc. Goethe makes use here of the methods of the (Romantic) epic. He absolutely needed these methods in order to give sensuous significance and gravity to the ending of the novel, and although he tried to rob them of their epic quality by using them lightly and ironically, thus hoping to transform them into elements of the novel form, he failed. With his creative irony, by means of which he was able everywhere else to give substance to things that were in themselves unworthy of artistic treatment and to control any tendency to go beyond the novel form, he devalued the miraculous by revealing its playful, arbitrary and ultimately inessential character. And he could not prevent it from introducing a disrupting dissonance into the total unity of the whole; the miraculous becomes a mystification without hidden meaning, a strongly emphasised narrative element without real importance, a playful ornament without decorative grace. This was more than a concession to the taste of the period (as many have claimed in apology), and after all it is quite impossible to imagine Wilhelm Meister without this miraculous element, however inorganic it may be. An essential formal necessity forced Goethe to use it and its use had to fail only because, given the author’s fundamental intention, it was oriented towards a less problematic form than that imposed by its substratum —that is to say, the historical epic. Again, the author’s Utopian outlook prevents him from stopping at the mere portrayal of the time-given problematic; he cannot be satisfied with a mere glimpse, a merely subjective experience of an unrealisable meaning; he is forced to posit a purely individual experience, which may, postulatively, have universal validity, as the existent and constitutive meaning of reality. But reality refuses to be forced up to such a level of meaning, and, as with all the decisive problems of great literary forms, no artist’s skill is great and masterly enough to bridge the abyss. Tolstoy and the attempts to go beyond the social forms of life THE OVERLAPPING of the novel form into the epic, such as we have discussed, is rooted in social life; it disrupts the immanence of form only to the extent that, at the crucial point, it imputes a substantiality to the world it describes which that world is in no way capable of sustaining and keeping in a state of balance. The artist’s epic intention, his desire to arrive at a world beyond the problematic, is aimed only at an immanently Utopian ideal of social forms and structures; therefore it does not transcend these forms and structures generally but only their historically given concrete possibilities—and this is enough to destroy the immanence of form. This attitude appears first in the novel of disillusionment, where the incongruence of interiority and the conventional world leads to a complete denial of the latter. But so long as this denial signifies no more than an inner attitude, the immanence of the novel—provided the form is successfully achieved—remains intact, and any lack of balance is more a question of a lyrical and psychological general disintegration of the form, than of an overlapping of the novel into the epic. (We have already analysed the special case of Novalis.) Such overlapping is, however, unavoidable if the Utopian rejection of the conventional world objecti vises itself in a likewise existent reality, so that polemical refusal actually becomes the central form of the work. No such possibility was given by the historical development of Western Europe. This Utopian demand of the soul is directed at something unattainable from the start—at an outside world which might be adequate to a highly differentiated, refined soul that has become an interiority. The rejection of convention is not aimed at conventionality itself but, in part, at its divorce from the soul and, in part, at its lack of refinement. Its character, which is that of civilisation but not of culture, and its dry and arid lack of spirituality are both rejected. Apart from purely anarchistic tendencies which could almost be called mystical, what is desired is always a culture objectivis-ing itself in structures which might be adequate to the interiority. (This is the point at which Goethe’s novel connects with this particular development, except that in Wilhelm Meister such a culture is actually found, which gives the book its singular rhythm: layers of social structures, which become more and more essential as the hero matures and gradually discards abstract idealism and Utopian Romanticism, increasingly surpass his expectations.) Criticism (rejection) of this kind can only express itself lyrically. Even in Rousseau, whose Romantic world view entailed the refusal of all cultural structures, the polemicism. takes the form of pure polemicism, i.e. it is rhetorical, lyrical, reflexive. The world of Western European culture is so deeply rooted in the inescapability of its constituent structures that it can never adopt any attitude towards them other than a polemical one. The greater closeness of nineteenth-century Russian literature to certain organic natural conditions, which were the given substratum of its underlying attitude and creative intention, made it possible for that literature to be creatively polemical. Tolstoy, coming after Turgenev—who was an essentially Western European novelist of disillusionment— created a form of novel which overlaps to the maximum extent into the epic. Tolstoy’s great and truly epic mentality, which has little to do with the novel form, aspires to a life based on a community of feeling among simple human beings closely bound to nature, a life which is intimately adapted to the great rhythm of nature, which moves according to nature’s cycle of birth and death and excludes all structures which are not natural, which are petty and disruptive, causing disintegration and stagnation. ‘The muzhik dies quietly,’ Tolstoy wrote to Countess A. A. Tolstoy about his story Three Deaths. ‘His religion is nature, with which he has spent all his life. He has felled trees, sown rye, reaped it, he has slaughtered sheep and sheep have been born on his farm, children have come into the world, old men have died, and he knows this law from which he has never turned away as the lady of the manor has done, he knows it well and has looked it straight and simply in the eye . . . The tree dies quietly, simply and beautifully. Beautifully because it does not lie, makes no grimaces, is afraid of nothing and regrets nothing.’ The paradoxical nature of Tolstoy’s historical situation, which proves better than anything else how much the novel is the necessary epic form of our time, manifests itself in the fact that this world cannot be translated into movement and action, even by an author who not only longs for it but has actually seen and depicted it clearly; it remains only an element of the epic work, but is not epic reality itself. The natural organic world of the old epics was, after all, a culture whose organic character was its specific quality, whereas the nature which Tolstoy posits as the ideal and which he has experienced as existent is, in its innermost essence, meant to be nature (and is, therefore, opposed, as such, to culture). This necessary opposition is the insoluble problematic of Tolstoy’s novels. In other words, his epic intention was bound to result in a problematic novel form, not because he failed to overcome culture within himself, not because his relationship to nature as he experienced and depicted it was a sentimental one—not for psychological reasons—but for reasons of form and of the relationship of form to its historico-philosophical substratum. A totality of men and events is possible only on the basis of culture, whatever one’s attitude towards it. Therefore in Tolstoy’s epic works the decisive element belongs, both as framework and as concrete content, to the world of culture which he rejects as problematic. But since nature, although it cannot become an immanently complete totality, is objectively existent, the work contains two layers of realities which are completely heterogeneous from one another both as regards the value attached to them and the quality of their being. And relating them to one another, which would make it possible to construct a work that was a totality, can only take the form of the lived experience of going from one reality to the other. Or, to put it more precisely, since the direction chosen is a given result of the value attached to both realities, it is the experience of going from culture to nature. And so, as a paradoxical consequence of the paradoxical relationship between the writer’s mentality and the historical age in which he finds himself, a sentimental, romantic experience finally becomes the centre of the entire work: the central characters’ dissatisfaction with whatever the surrounding world of culture can offer them and their seeking and finding of the second, more essential reality of nature. The paradoxy arising from this experience is further increased by the fact that this ‘nature’ of Tolstoy’s does not have a plenitude and perfection that would make it, like the relatively more substantial world at the end of Goethe’s novel, a home in which the characters might arrive and come to rest. Rather, it is a factual assurance that an essential life really does exist beyond conventionality—a life which can be reached through the lived experiences of a full and genuine selfhood, the self-experience of the soul, but from which one must irremediably fall back into the world of convention. With the heroic ruthlessness of a writer of historic greatness, Tolstoy does not flinch from the grim consequences of his world view; not even the singular position he allocates to love and marriage—a position half-way between nature and culture, at home in both spheres and yet a stranger in each —can mitigate these consequences. In the rhythm of natural life, the rhythm of unpathetic, natural growth and death, love is the point at which the dominant forces of life assume their most concrete and meaningful form. Yet love as a pure force of nature, love as passion, does not belong to Tolstoy’s world of nature; passionate love is too much bound up with the relationship between one individual and another and therefore isolates too much, creates too many degrees and nuances; it is too cultural. The love which occupies the really central place in Tolstoy’s world is love as marriage, love as union (the fact of being united, of becoming one, being more important than who it is that is thus united), love as the prelude to birth; marriage and the family as a vehicle of the natural continuity of life. That this introduces a conceptual dichotomy into the edifice would be of little importance artistically if it did not create yet another heterogeneous layer of reality, which cannot be compositionally connected with the other two spheres, in themselves heterogeneous from each other. The more authentically this layer of reality is depicted, the more strongly it is bound to be transformed into the opposite of what was intended: the triumph of such love over culture is meant to be a victory of the natural over the falsely, artificially refined, yet it becomes a miserable swallowing-up by nature of everything that is great and noble in man. Nature is alive inside man but, when it is lived as culture, it reduces man to the lowest, most mindless, most idea-forsaken conventionality. This is why the mood of the epilogue to War and Peace, with its nursery atmosphere where all passion has been spent and all seeking ended, is more profoundly disconsolate than the endings of the most problematic novels of disillusionment. Nothing is left of what was there before; as the sand of the desert covers the pyramids, so every spiritual thing has been swamped, annihilated, by animal nature. This unintentional disconsolateness of the ending combines with an intentional one in the description of the conventional world. Tolstoy’s evaluating and rejecting attitude extends to every detail he depicts. The aimlessness and insubstantiality of the life he describes expresses itself not only objectively, for the reader who recognises it, not only as the lived experience of gradual disappointment, but also as an a-prioristic, established, agitated emptiness, a restless ennui. Every conversation, every event bears the stamp of the author’s verdict. These two groups of experiences (the private world of marriage and the public world of society) are contrasted with the experience of the essence of nature. At very rare, great moments—generally they are moments of death—a reality reveals itself to man in which he suddenly glimpses and grasps the essence that rules over him and works within him, the meaning of his life. His whole previous life vanishes into nothingness in the face of this experience; all its conflicts, all the sufferings, torments and confusions caused by them, appear petty and inessential. Meaning has made its appearance and the paths into living life are open to the soul. And here again Tolstoy, with the paradoxical ruthlessness of true genius, shows up the profoundly problematic nature of his form and its foundations: these crucial moments of bliss are the great moments of dying—the experience of Andrey Bolkonsky lying mortally wounded on the field of Austerlitz, the sense of unity experienced by Karenin and Vronsky at Anna’s deathbed—and it would be true bliss to die now, to die like that. But Anna recovers and Andrey returns to life, and the great moments vanish without trace. Life goes on in the world of convention, an aimless, inessential life. The paths which the great moments had revealed lose their direction, their reality, as the great moment passes. Such paths cannot be trodden, and when people believe they are treading them, their experience is a bitter caricature of what the revelation of the great moment had shown. (Levin’s experience of God and his clinging to what he has thus attained—despite the fact that it is slipping from his grasp—stems more from the will and theory of Tolstoy the thinker than from the vision of Tolstoy the artist. It is programmatic and lacks the immediate conviction of the other great moments.) The few characters who are capable of really living their lived experiences—perhaps Planton Karatayev is the only such character—are, of necessity, secondary characters: events leave them unchanged, their essential nature is never involved in events, their life does not objectivise itself, it cannot be given form but only hinted at, only defined in concrete artistic terms in contrast to the others. They are not realities but marginal aesthetic concepts. These three layers of reality correspond to the three concepts of time in Tolstoy’s world, and the impossibility of uniting them reveals most strongly the inner problematic of his works, rich and profound as they are. The world of convention is essentially timeless; an eternally recurring, self-repeating monotony, it proceeds upon its course in accordance with meaningless laws of its own; eternal movement without direction, without growth, without death. Characters come and go, but nothing happens as a result of this constant flux because each figure is as insubstantial as the next, and any one can be put in the place of any other. Whenever one walks on to this stage, whenever one leaves it, one always finds—or has to reject—the same motley inessentiality. Beneath it flows the stream of Tolstoyan nature: the continuity and monotony of an eternal rhythm. That which changes in nature is the individual destiny, and this, too, is inessential. Individual destiny, caught in the current, rising or sinking with it, possesses no meaning founded upon itself; its relation to the whole does not assimilate its personality but destroys it; as an individual destiny, rather than as an element of a general rhythm side by side with innumerable other, similar and equivalent lives, it is completely immaterial. The great moments which offer a glimpse of an essential lif e, a meaningful process, remain mere moments, isolated from the other two worlds and without constitutive reference to them. Thus the three concepts of time are not only mutually heterogeneous and incapable of being united with one another, but moreover none of them expresses real duration, real time, the life-element of the novel. Going outside and beyond culture has merely destroyed culture but has not put a truer, more essential life in its place; the overlapping into the epic only makes the novel form still more problematic, without coming concretely closer to the desired goal, the problem-free reality of the epic. (In purely artistic terms Tolstoy’s novels are novels of disillusionment carried to an extreme, a baroque version of Flaubert’s form.) The glimpsed world of essential nature remains an intimation, a lived experience; it is subjective and reflexive so far as the depicted reality is concerned; but in a purely artistic sense, it is nevertheless of the same kind as any other longing for a more adequate reality. Literary development has not yet gone beyond the novel of disillusionment, and the most recent literature reveals no possibility of creating another type that would be essentially new; what we have now is an eclectic, epigonic imitation of earlier types, whose apparent productive force is confined to the formally inessential areas of lyricism and psychology. Tolstoy himself, it is true, occupies a dual position. From the point of view purely of form (a point of view which, in Tolstoy’s special case, cannot possibly do justice to what matters most in his vision or in his created world), he must be seen as the final expression of European Romanticism. However, in the few overwhelmingly great moments of his works—moments which must be seen as subjective and reflexive in respect of each particular work as a whole—he shows a clearly differentiated, concrete and existent world, which, if it could spread out into a totality, would be completely inaccessible to the categories of the novel and would require a new form of artistic creation: the form of the renewed epic. This world is the sphere of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as a social being nor as an isolated, unique, pure and therefore abstract inferiority. If ever this world should come into being as something natural and simply experienced, as the only true reality, a new complete totality could be built out of all its substances and relationships. It would be a world to which our divided reality would be a mere backdrop, a world which would have outstripped our dual world of social reality by as much as we have outstripped the world of nature. But art can never be the agent of such a transformation: the great epic is a form bound to the historical moment, and any attempt to depict the Utopian as existent can only end in destroying the form, not in creating reality. The novel is the form of the epoch of absolute sinfulness, as Fichte said, and it must remain the dominant form so long as the world is ruled by the same stars. In Tolstoy, intimations of a breakthrough into a new epoch are visible; but they remain polemical, nostalgic and abstract. It is in the words of Dostoevsky that this new world, remote from any struggle against what actually exists, is drawn for the first time simply as a seen reality. That is why he, and the form he created, lie outside the scope of this book. Dostoevsky did not write novels, and the creative vision revealed in his works has nothing to do, either as affirmation or as rejection, with European nineteenth-century Romanticism or with the many, likewise Romantic, reactions against it. He belongs to the new world. Only formal analysis of his works can show whether he is already the Homer or the Dante of that world or whether he merely supplies the songs which, together with the songs of other forerunners, later artists will one day weave into a great unity: whether he is merely a beginning or already a completion. It will then be the tusk of historico-philosophical interpretation to decide whether we are really about to leave the age of absolute sinfulness or whether the new has no other herald but our hopes: those hopes which are signs of a world to come, still so weak that it can easily be crushed by the sterile power of the merely existent.

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LONDON — Kate Middleton may have introduced the world-at-large to a small British label called Issa, but that bright, royal blue jersey dress the young royal-to-be donned on Nov. 16 is a longtime fashion favorite — with something of a dramatic past. Brazilian-born, London-based Daniella Helayel, Issa’s founder and designer, recalls that when she first introduced her now famous collection of figure-flattering, brightly colored silk jersey dresses in 2001, hardly anyone even noticed. This story first appeared in the December 28, 2010 issue of WWD. Subscribe Today. “The first collection I ever showed was filled with leather and suede pieces and jersey dresses that were easy to pack, easy to take away on a trip. I thought it was a fabulous idea,” said the stylish and ever-smiling Helayel over lunch at an old-time Italian restaurant in London’s Chelsea. “The show was at the [Hôtel de] Crillon in Paris. Just one shop — in Brazil — bought the collection. I cried,” recalled the designer, who was dressed for lunch in a fire-engine red knit Issa wool dress nipped at the waist, knee-high black boots and a little black mink jacket. Long before Middleton discovered the label — “Kate found us through friends,” Helayel said, declining to elaborate — Issa was a growing business built on those same, brightly colored or printed jersey dresses that initially flopped. And Middleton is only the latest in a line of celebrities to don the label; others include Madonna — who wore Issa’s teal, pheasant-print jersey dress on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2006; Scarlett Johansson; Kylie Minogue; Keira Knightley; Sharon Stone, and Jemima Khan. British princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are also converts to Issa, and regularly pop up in the front row at the brand’s London Fashion Week shows. Next year, Helayel plans to relaunch her business in the U.S.; introduce e-commerce on the Issa Web site; open the first of six stand-alone stores in Brazil; begin selling a children’s collection called Baby Issa, and transform what’s now a clothing label with 200 stockists into a global brand. And contrary to British press reports, which have named her as one of the front-runners to design Middleton’s wedding gown, Helayel has not launched a stand-alone bridal collection. “I’ve done one-off designs for friends. That’s all,” she said. Marc Abegg, the firm’s chief executive officer, declined to reveal annual sales. “It’s a small — but growing — business, and we’re on the lookout for licenses,” he said. Abegg, who recently inked a deal with Havaianas to produce Issa-designed flip-flops for the Australian and Brazilian markets, said the brand also is looking to launch fragrance and eyewear collections, and to license the children’s collection, which will be introduced early next year at Harrods. After that first show at the Crillon, Helayel mothballed her collection of dresses and turned her back on jersey altogether. For the next few seasons, the designer — a Rio de Janeiro native who began her career in New York sourcing fabrics, finding factories, and buying clothes and accessories for Brazilian companies — worked with Swiss cottons, peasant-inspired patchwork dresses and lace. She sold to stores including Barneys New York, Maria Luisa and Intermix. But those collections were often difficult to deliver or to produce, and she eventually ran out of money. It was Laura Moltedo, the former president of Bottega Veneta — and the mother of Helayel’s friend, accessories designer Gabrielecorto Moltedo — who took a 10 percent stake in her business and urged her to carry on. That investment dovetailed with a growing interest in the mothballed jersey collection on the part of Helayel’s London friends. “I couldn’t even bear to look at those dresses anymore, but people began asking me about them,” she said. Her friends — some of whom were stylists and public relations reps — wore the dresses and started a trend. Helayel began showing her collections during London Fashion Week in 2003, and by 2005 was dressing a host of London celebrities and society types including Camilla Fayed, Francesca Versace, Olympia Scarry, Tatiana Santo Domingo and Josephine de la Baume. Her design philosophy has never changed. “I love making clothes to hide defects and enhance the positive qualities,” she said. “For me, it always goes back to making a woman feel less fat and more secure about herself.” Her initial inspirations were Pucci, Seventies Diane von Furstenberg, Averardo Bessi and Paganne, all of whose vintage pieces she collected. The bright blue, belted dress that Middleton wore for the engagement photo with Prince William, she said, has been a bestseller since 2004, when it was introduced, and retails for about 400 pounds, or $630 at current exchange. Its product number is DJ-157: Helayel loves to dance, and said the dresses are great for “spinning on the dance floor,” hence the DJ coding. As for her royal tie-up, Helayel would only say she was “flattered and honored” that Middleton chose the dress for such an important occasion. “In Japan, in particular, the shops went mad immediately. And around the world, everyone who had the dress sold out,” she said. The dress was immediately knocked off by British stores including Tesco and Peacocks and sold for a small fraction of the original price. Abegg declined to comment on whether the company was taking legal action. “Issa has in the past shown a strong arm towards copycats,” he said. Retailers would argue that Issa dresses were doing just fine before the Middleton bounce. The multibrand London designer boutique Matches had already sold out of a dress similar to the one Middleton wore weeks before Prince William’s fiancée even donned it. “Issa does brilliantly at retail,” said Bridget Cosgrave, Matches’ fashion and buying director. “It’s one of those stealth sellers. It performs quietly and consistently, has such a broad appeal, and the prints are amazing — they have a very young take.” Cosgrave added that while the brand has always been a big seller, the sell-throughs are now 100 percent, and the store is boosting its orders for next season. In addition to stocking about eight dress styles a season, Matches sells Issa bikinis and beachwear. For fall, Helayel said she’s going back to her roots, dipping into the archives and retooling her classic silhouettes — including the DJ-157, the halter dresses, gowns and caftans — with old and new prints. “I’ve got an amazing print archive and hundreds of dress shapes — most of which have never been used,” she said.

On this week’s episode of Slate’s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen, Josh Levin and Stefan Fatsis spoke with David Epstein, author of the books The Sports Gene and Range, about the controversial ruling that could end the career of two-time Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya. Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland declared that some female track athletes—including Semenya—with naturally elevated testosterone levels may not compete in certain events if they don’t reduce how much of the hormone is in their bodies. Levin, Fatsis, and Epstein discussed the implications of that ruling, the argument for why the CAS got it wrong, and what’s next for Semenya and other athletes. A transcript of that discussion is below. The conversation has been condensed and edited. You can listen to the full conversation by clicking on the player below. Josh Levin: Why don’t you start, Dave, by explaining what the Court of Arbitration for Sport just ruled, and what its explanation was for making that ruling? David Epstein: What they ruled was that women with a specific DSD, which is a difference of sex development, in which they have XY chromosomes but still develop as women and are partially sensitive to testosterone, must lower their testosterone. That excludes women with XX chromosomes but who have other conditions that raised their testosterone anyway, and it excludes women who have XY chromosomes but are insensitive to testosterone. So actually this ruling is very narrowly applied to women with XY chromosomes and elevated testosterone to which they are at least partially sensitive, and only if they are competing in a small range of events from the 400-meters to the mile. Stefan Fatsis: There seems to be some disagreement over the quality and consistency of the science being applied here. Can you help walk us through some of the complaints? Epstein: We know that testosterone impacts performance. For example, nobody’s arguing, for the most part, about the rules for transgender athletes. Athletes that were designated male at birth and transitioned to female and undergo testosterone suppression—there are studies that have tracked the performance deterioration as they undergo that suppression. But in this case, with athletes of differences of sex development, where they have testosterone levels that are basically between the typical female range and the typical male range, we don’t know a lot about exactly how that impacts performance. In 2015, the IAAF [International Association of Athletics Federations], the governing body for track and field, put into place regulations that said that athletes with this condition need to lower their testosterone below a certain level. Those regulations were thrown out by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which said basically, Go away for two years. Come back with evidence of exactly what the performance benefit is. The IAAF did the study, but it’s not very good. It actually did not look at athletes with differences of sex development. It looked at testosterone just in female athletes and tried to correlate that to performance. But the data is a mess. Levin: There’s a lot of polarization about what the CAS should’ve ruled. On one side of that debate is Paula Radcliffe, who holds the world record in the women’s marathon. She says she respected the court “for ruling that women’s sport needs rules to protect it.” On the other side, Caster Semenya herself said, according to the New York Times, that the rules are “medically unnecessary as well as ‘discriminatory, irrational, unjustifiable’ and a violation of the rules of sport and universally recognized human rights.” Epstein: On Twitter, a lot of people were sharing a picture of Michael Phelps’ arms, with people saying, “He’s got long arms, and that’s natural. So why would we regulate Caster Semenya for high levels of testosterone?” Well, on the Paula Radcliffe side, the problem with that argument is that we don’t divide sports by arm length. We do divide it by sex. If you’re going to have a female classification, it has to mean something. The reason we have the female classification is because there’s tremendous value in having women’s sports. If we only had one competitive classification for all comers, then the best women wouldn’t be able to compete with the best man. The question is, how do you define who is allowed entry into that female classification? Again, we don’t divide sports by arm length or height. But testosterone is not height. A man in the low level of the typical male testosterone range still has testosterone several hundred percent higher than a woman at the top of the typical female range. I think the Paula Radcliffe side is saying, We need the women’s classification to mean something. Testosterone is a reasonable surrogate marker for differences of biological sex. On the other side is the argument that this is a natural advantage. And you’re putting an athlete here, a perfectly healthy person, in the position of being medicated. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that let’s err toward not forcing healthy people to be medicated. Fatsis: That’s one of the great ironies here, isn’t it, Dave? We’ve spent decades now arguing and debating and regulating and testing against the consumption of drugs that enhance an athlete’s performance. And here, the highest judicial authority in sport is effectively mandating that certain athletes be drugged. When we talk about clean sport, and wanting athletes to be just natural, that’s one thing that really leaped out at me here. Epstein: The World Medical Association actually said after the ruling that they’re advising doctors not to cooperate, because this is essentially saying that they should be prescribing medication for an unapproved off-label use. Levin: An important thing to remember here is Semenya’s personal history. When she first came on the scene, it was in 2009 at the track and field World Championships. This was a historically great performance, both in terms of the time and how striking it was to watch. After that, there was what was supposed to be a secret assessment of her biology that kind of harkened back to the old times of how sex assessment happened—just a very intrusive biological exam. Then this shift to the testosterone standard happened. It was a way for these sports governing bodies to say, We’re not saying you’re not a woman. We’re using this marker that’s associated with performance. Epstein: One of the very common responses I’ve seen online is just go with the chromosomes. But one of the seminal cases in sex testing in sports came in the 1980s and involved a Spanish hurdler named Maria José Martínez-Patiño. She was given what was then the standard sex test. She turned out to have XY chromosomes and was essentially banned from athletics. She was eventually reinstated because it turned out that she had total androgen sensitivity, meaning her body could not use testosterone at all. There are all these nuances. You run into these incredible layers of classification problems. Fatsis: You also run into the problem of, where do you apply this? This is limited right now, according to the CAS ruling, to some middle-distance running events. But isn’t there risk here that every sport could do this? That a woman that has a naturally elevated level of testosterone in ice hockey or soccer or volleyball could wind up facing some sort of medical regulation? Epstein: Definitely. Rulings from the Court of Arbitration for Sport are not supposed to establish precedent, but in practice that is how it has worked. I think every sporting body will be looking to what’s going on here, to think about what they’ll do when the ball’s in their court. Levin: Semenya does have the right to appeal this ruling, and it seems that she will. She seems very adamant that she will not suppress her natural testosterone levels, and she also seems very adamant that she’s not going to stop competing. So there’s a fundamental conflict there. Epstein: Well, maybe. Lots of middle-distance runners have moved up and tried the steeplechase, the 3,000-meter steeplechase. When she said, “Hell no, I’m not going to lower my testosterone,” we don’t know if that means she’s planning on moving up to the steeplechase or the 5K. If she does that, then what? Are we going to see them just regulate whatever event she runs in? Fatsis: It could get ugly. If they start chasing Caster Semenya to regulate her and her alone, then we’ll know what the purpose of all of this was.

“Loving yourself is the greatest revolution.” ~Unknown I’ve spent most of my life struggling with my weight and trying desperately to fit the idealistic image of beauty that our culture celebrates. As a young teen, I was obsessed with magazines and all their secrets to be prettier and have a better butt and get your crush to notice you. I see now how desperate I was at such a young age to feel beautiful. Nothing seemed to work, though, as years passed and my need to fit the ideal beauty image only increased. In high school I learned to skip meals, and in college I learned to combine food restriction with exercise. Even then, I don’t remember being happy with my body. Over many years my body and my weight have changed drastically. Also, struggling with depression and anxiety has meant trying different prescriptions, all with weight gain as a side effect. It’s contributed to more body changes, especially in recent years. The more my weight changed, the harder it became to reside in my own body. I didn’t feel like myself anymore, and I didn’t look or move like I once did. I looked back on when I was thinner and remembered that I was unhappy at that size, but now I’d kill to have that old body back. It was painful to look at myself in photos. I started avoiding old friends and acquaintances because I didn’t want anyone to see my new body. Every pound I weighed carried shame and self-blame. My body was the enemy and I was at war. In the midst of trying new ways to manage my anxiety and depression, I came across yoga therapy. It was life changing for me. I found that I felt better after every session, even amid a severe depressive episode. To feel a mood shift in the slightest degree was miraculous, and I was hooked. I needed more yoga in my life and, being the academic that I am, I decided to study it. I found a local program that specialized in training yoga teachers and yoga therapists, and a new journey began. The first thing I learned was that yoga means union. It aims to unify the mind, the spirit, and (lucky me) the body. As a woman currently waging war on her body and studying yoga at the same time, things were about to hit the metaphorical fan. Not too many months into my yoga studies, I found myself in treatment for an eating disorder. I had to learn, or in some ways, re-learn, how to connect with my body. Turns out there are a variety of sensations and sensitivities in the body that we can (and should) tune into. Our bodies give us subtle cues all the time, and when I started approaching my body mindfully, I became more aware of them. For example, as I was more mindful of my breath, I noticed that I’d stop breathing when I had a difficult thought or when I challenged my body to do something it wasn’t ready to do. My body responded to every negative thing I did to it. When I starved myself or pushed my body past its limits, it responded with headaches and overuse injuries. Once I realized these things were all related, I began to ask questions: Why am I so tired? Why do I feel so overwhelmed? Why am I pushing myself so hard? How do I begin to recharge? How do I honor my own needs? This body I’d been at war with for so long turned out to hold the key to healing many wounds. When I began listening to my body’s limitations and needs, I began to change. Learning to honor my body gave me the confidence to ask for what I needed. I tuned into when I was tired or hurting, and I set up new boundaries. Taking breaks when I needed them and stepping back from certain relationships actually left me feeling more connected and capable. I realized it was time to end the war. My body deserved peace. It deserved compassion. All those years of struggle have left a mark on me. I still tend toward eating disordered behavior from time to time, and still find myself comparing my body to those around me. Sometimes the body-hate speech in my head can still get so loud that I can’t hear myself think. In my recovery, I’ve realized that countering negative self-talk is key. I’ve found a few things that help, and I’d like to share them in hopes of helping someone else who needs it. 1. Every time you notice body envy, thank your body for something it does well. This will require you to be mindful about when you are comparing yourself to others or checking yourself in a mirror. Take a moment to purposely think about something your body does that is good for you. Doing this may not create an instant change in mindset, but it will, over time, help to re-wire some old thought patterns. Some things you could thank yourself for are breathing, talking, hearing, and thinking. Maybe thank your body for transporting you from place to place, walking, frolicking, twirling. Feel free to be creative! 2. Find body movements that suit you. Bodies are magnificent! They are capable of doing so many things. When we tune into our body’s capacity for movement and we’re active, we feel more connected to our bodies. In those moments of connection, we are more likely to be proud of what our bodies can do instead of ashamed of how they look. Not every person is a natural athlete, so I’m not going to insist everyone start running marathons. You know your body and you know what you’re capable of doing. Personally, I love yoga, as all good yoga teachers do. I also love the camaraderie of running activities, but I’m a walker. I walk 5ks and am planning to participate in a walker-friendly half marathon within the next year. It’s accessible to me and I feel good doing it. Maybe for you it’s swimming or dancing or hiking. You don’t have to be the best at it, just enjoy it. 3. Scrub your social media feed. Nourishing ourselves goes way beyond just what we put in our mouth; it includes what enters our minds. Nearly everyone has some contact with social media these days whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. These places are ripe for talk of new diets and weight loss before and after photos. Of course, it’s mostly full of weight loss stories because no one seems to post their weight gain to social media. Anyway, I find it important to unfollow anything that’s unhelpful to you. If it elicits negative feelings about yourself, I beg you to consider deleting or unfollowing. Replace these feeds with more body neutral or body positive or health-at-every-size feeds. Add stories and images of successful people who look like you and who behave in ways that make you feel good. 4. Buy clothes you feel comfortable in. I am so uncomfortable in tight fitting clothes, and I’m not present when I wear them. My mind is constantly focused on how others may be seeing me or interpreting my outfit when I’m uncomfortable in the clothes I wear. So, I recommend going out and going shopping for a few new pieces that make you feel good. Ignore the numbers and go by how it makes you feel. Take a friend with you for support if you need it. It does improve your confidence when you wear clothes that really fit you. 5. Have honest conversations with your loved ones. Set boundaries around diet talk. If certain topics and conversations trigger you to feel poorly about yourself, it’s important to talk to people you trust about your sensitivities. Loving friends will want to support you in this and are often really receptive. I’m lucky to have lovely friends who are respectful of my boundaries and who are honest with me when I ask them questions about my insecurities. I’ve asked my friends not to discuss diets around me and to avoid calling themselves “bad” for having seconds or eating dessert. Also, we agreed not don’t put our bodies down. Those things really affect me, so I’m grateful to have friends that understand that. I encourage you to find people you can trust and let them support you. Finding ways to stand up to your own body-hate speech is so important. These little exercises may seem small, but over time can help make a difference. When we habituate self-compassion, our lives will change. Sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest impact.

Noisy, vibrant and truly multicultural, London is a megalopolis of people, ideas and frenetic energy. The capital and largest city of , and of the wider , it is also the largest city in Western and the European Union. Situated on the River Thames in , Greater London has an official population of a little over 8 million, but the estimate of between 12 and 14 million people in the greater metropolitan area better reflects its size and importance. Considered one of the world’s leading “global cities”, London remains an international capital of culture, music, education, fashion, politics, finance and trade. Among international tourists, London is the most-visited city in the world. The name “London” used to refer only to the once-walled “Square Mile” of the original Roman (and later medieval) city (confusingly called the “” or just “The City”). Today, London has taken on a much larger meaning to include all of the vast central parts of the modern metropolis, with the city having absorbed numerous surrounding towns and villages over the centuries, including large portions of the surrounding “home counties”, one of which – Middlesex – being completely consumed by the growing metropolis. The term Greater London embraces Central London together with all the outlying suburbs that lie in one continuous urban sprawl within the lower Thames valley. Though densely populated, London retains large swathes of green parkland and open space, even within the city centre. Greater London is all of the area surrounded by the M25 orbital motorway, and consists of 32 London Boroughs and the City of London that, together with the office of the Mayor of London, form the basis for London’s local government. The Mayor of London is elected by London residents and should not be confused with the Lord Mayor of the City of London. The names of several boroughs, such asor , are well-known, others less so, such as or . This traveller’s guide to London recognises cultural, functional and social districts of varying type and size: Vibrant historic district made famous by a group of turn-of-the-century writers and for being the location of the British Museum, the University of London and numerous historic homes, parks, and buildings. Part of the Borough of Camden. The City is where London originally developed within the Roman city walls and is a city in its own right, separate from the rest of London. It is now the most important financial centre in the world, but an area where modern skyscrapers stand next to medieval churches on ancient street layouts. One of the main shopping and entertainment districts. Incorporates some of London’s theatreland. Part of the City of Westminster and Borough of Camden. Buffer zone between London’s West End and the City of London financial district, home to the Inns of Court West End district comprising Leicester Square, Chinatown, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus and the centre of London’s cinema and theatre land Some extremely well-heeled districts of west central London and most of the city’s premier shopping street Lively market, interesting history, the world famous carnival and a very ethnically diverse population Largely residential district of northwest central London with lots of mid-range accommodation, famous for its canal and houseboats. Dense concentration of highly fashionable restaurants, cafés, clubs and jazz bars, as well as London’s gay village all mixed in with a cluster of sex shops and seedier adult entertainment venues. Soho is also home to many TV production facilities. The name South Bank is usually used to refer specifically to the complex around the National Theatre near Waterloo and the London Eye. The wider area South of the Thames, including Bankside (Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre) and up to Borough, was historically the location of the activities frowned on by the Puritans who exiled theatre, cock-fighting and bear fights from the original walled City of London to the south of the river. An extremely well-heeled inner London district with famous department stores, Hyde Park, many museums and the King’s Road A city in its own right, the seat of government and an almost endless list of historical and cultural sights, such as Buckingham Palace, The Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) and Westminster Abbey. A diverse area of north London that includes eclectic Camden Town A traditional working class heartland of inner London to the east of The City, made famous by countless movies and TV shows, and home to trendy bars, art galleries and parks, especially in the Shoreditch, Hoxton, and Old Street area. On the pretty southern banks of the Thames; location of the Greenwich Meridian, Observatory, and the National Maritime Museum. Hackney has become fashionable in recent decades and is home to a thriving arts scene as well as many trendy cafés, bars, and pubs. Borough in west London with a diverse population and the home of the BBC, plus a hotbed for professional football. Literary north London and the wonderful open spaces of Hampstead Heath. Area to the north of Clerkenwell that has undergone huge gentrification since 1990. A diverse multicultural district to the south of the River Thames; includes LGBT-friendly Vauxhall, more middle class Clapham and the Caribbean flavours of Brixton. Inner southern districts of London; traditionally residential, with a large melting pot of communities. The area retains some leftfield, quirky attractions. You can find a restaurant from just about any ethnic group in the world. Grand Thames-side areas and open green parks in the north, and dense housing in south. Largely made up of lush green middle-class/bourgeois suburbs, many of which were formerly part of the counties of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire before being absorbed into Greater London. Containing many commuter suburbs with housing in varying styles, as well as the buzzing urban centres of , , and , all four having cultural facilities in their town centres with leafy residential neighbourhoods fanning out from them. Mostly originally part of the county of Essex, taking in former industrial areas on the upper Thames Estuary such as Beckton, Barking and Dagenham. To the North East lies the gateway to the affluent Epping Forest area. Taking in much of the ancient English county of Middlesex (which many local residents still identify with rather than “London”) and former parts of Buckinghamshire. Heathrow Airport is located in this part of the city. Home to the annual tennis Championships and wombling Wimbledon Common Leafy Thames-side scenery, Hampton Court Palace, the botanical gardens and some major parklands - “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford” — Samuel Johnson Settlement has existed on the site of London since well before Roman times, with evidence of Bronze Age and Celtic settlement. The Roman city of Londinium, established just after the Roman conquest of Britannia in the year 43, formed the basis for the modern city (some isolated Roman period remains are still to be seen within the City). After the end of Roman rule in 410 and a short-lived decline, London experienced a gradual revival under the Anglo-Saxons, as well as the Norsemen, and emerged as a great medieval trading city, and eventually replacedas the royal capital of England. This paramount status for London was confirmed when William the Conqueror, a Norman, built the after the conquest in 1066 and was crowned King of England in . London went from strength to strength with the rise of England to first European then global prominence, and the city became a great centre of culture, government and industry. London’s long association with the theatre, for example, can be traced back to the English renaissance (witness the Rose Theatre and great playwrights like who made London their home). With the rise of Britain to supreme maritime power in the 18th and 19th centuries (see ) and the possessor of the largest global empire, London became an imperial capital and drew people and influences from around the world to become, for many years, the largest city in the world. England’s royal family has, over the centuries, added much to the London scene for today’s traveller: the, , , , , and being prominent examples. Despite the inevitable decline of the British Empire, and considerable suffering during(when London was heavily bombed by the German Luftwaffe in the Blitz), the city is still a top-ranked world city: a global centre of culture, finance, and learning. Today London is easily the largest city in the United Kingdom, eight times larger than the second largest, , and ten times larger than the third, , and dominates the economic, political and social life of the nation. It is full of excellent bars, galleries, museums, parks and theatres. It is also the most culturally and ethnically diverse part of the country, and arguably of the whole of Europe as well, making it a great multicultural city to visit. Samuel Johnson famously said, “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. Whether you are interested in ancient history, modern art, opera or underground raves, London has it all. The City and Westminster If you ask a Londoner where the centre of London is, you are likely to get a wry smile. This is because historically London was two cities: a commercial city and a separate government capital. The commercial capital was the. This had a dense population and all the other pre-requisites of a medieval city: walls, a castle (The Tower of London), a cathedral (St Paul’s), a semi-independent City government, a port and a bridge across which all trade was routed so Londoners could make money (London Bridge). About an hour upstream (on foot or by boat) around a bend in the river was the government capital (). This had a church for crowning the monarch (Westminster Abbey) and palaces. As each palace was replaced by a larger one, the previous one was used for government, first the Palace of Westminster (better known as the Houses of Parliament), then Whitehall, then Buckingham Palace. The two were linked by a road called The “Strand”, old English for riverbank. London grew both west and east. The land to the west of the City (part of the parish of Westminster) was prime farming land (and for example) and made good building land. The land to the east was flat, marshy and cheap, good for cheap housing and industry, and later for docks. Also the wind blows 3 days out of 4 from west to east, and the Thames (into which the sewage went) flows from west to east. So the was up-wind and up-market, the was where people worked for a living. Modern-day London in these terms is a two-centre city, with the area in between known confusingly as the West End. Despite a perhaps fair reputation for being unsettled, London enjoys a mild climate on average. As much as one in three days on average will bring rain, though sometimes for only a short period. In some years, 2012 being an example, there was no rain for several weeks. The fact that Londoners would find this remarkable should be an indication to visitors from drier climates of what they may be in for! Extreme weather is rare. Occasionally there may be heavy rain that can bring localised flooding or strong winds that may down trees and damage roofs, but overall you are unlikely to encounter anything too lively. Winter in London is mild compared to nearby continental European cities due to both the presence of the Gulf Stream and the urban heat effect. The average daily maximum temperature is 8°C (46°F) in December and January. The coldest temperature recorded in London stands at −16.1 °C (3.0 °F) and was recorded at Northolt during January 1962, but this occurred during one of the coldest winters ever seen in the UK. Daylight hours become increasingly shorter with darkness falling at 15:00 in December. Days continue to be short up until March when sunset starts to occur after 19:00. Snow does occur, usually a few times a year but rarely heavily (a few years being exceptions such as the winters of 2009 and 2010, with temperatures dipping down to sub-zeros regularly). Snow in London can be crippling, as seen at the end of 2010. Just 7 cm (3 in) of snow will cause trains to stop running, airports to see significant delays, and the postal service to come to a halt. London is a city which does not cope well with snow; walkways, stairs, and streets will not be cleared by shovels or ploughs. The streets will be salted/gritted, but will remain slick and snow/slush covered until the sun melts it away. This is due to a lack of widespread snow-clearing infrastructure as the city does not often see snow. Spring in the capital can be something of a weather rollercoaster with big variations in temperature day by day. It can be a very wet time of year, but the increases in day length from March onwards and steady temperature increases as the season progresses can make it a pleasant time to visit. Days can be mild and warm, but the temperature will often dip at night as the sun’s warmth dissipates. The beginning of spring in March can be as cold as winter, so be sure to bring something warm to wear! Summer is perhaps the best season for tourists as it has long daylight hours as well as mild temperatures. The average daily high temperatures in July and August are around 24°C (75°F). The highest temperature ever seen in London stands at 38.1°C (100.6°F), which was recorded on 10 August 2003 at Kew Gardens. Humidity across the city can increase and stay high over the course of several days and nights, leading to unexpectedly muggy conditions. Also, upon occasion, clouds of dust from storms in the Sahara desert can be blown across Europe and lead to increases in pollution levels. Despite the increased warmth, the weather in summer can be variable. Occasional prolonged instances of rain and unexpected dips in temperature can occur. If you’re coming during the summer it is still advised to dress in layers and bring some waterproofs! Autumn in London can vary from year to year: In some years September and October can see temperatures not far below those seen in summer due to a phenomenon known as an “Indian summer”, but in other years the temperature can decrease rapidly to winter levels and stay there. Autumn tends to be the wettest and windiest season but, again, this can vary from year to year. Day length at the beginning of autumn is near that of summer, meaning that a September trip can still be as easy to plan as an August one. Mid-autumn is also a wonderful time to wander one of London’s many tree-filled parks as the leaves fade from green to gold. Another benefit of a September trip is that school-aged children return to school at the beginning of the month, meaning that some tourist attractions may be quieter. It’s best to see autumn in London as being like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get! Tourist information centres London has no centrally located tourist information centre. The City of London Information Centre, as the last remaining information centre in any of the Central London boroughs, is now the only impartial, face-to-face source of tourist information in Central London. It is located in St. Paul’s Churchyard, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and is open every day other than Christmas Day and Boxing Day, M-Sa 09:30-17:30 and Su 10:00-16:00. There is no office for tourist information for the UK or for England. Map of London London receives more flights than any other city in the world. It is served by five airports (all airports code: LON). Travelling between the city and the airports is made relatively easy by the many public transport links. If transiting through London, check the arrival and departure airports carefully as transfers across the city may be quite time consuming. Other regional UK airports are conveniently accessible from London. They offer a growing number of budget flights, which may be faster, depending on where in London your destination is. National Express offers fast, direct inter-airport coach service between Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton at least hourly. Heathrow-Gatwick take 65 min (£18), and Heathrow-Stansted services take 90 min (£20.50). Services between Stansted and Luton run every two hours. It’s essential to allow leeway, as London’s motorways are often congested to the point of gridlock. Some of these coaches have toilets on board. - Main article: Heathrow Airport ( ). London’s largest airport and the world’s busiest airport in terms of international passenger movements, with services available from most major airports world-wide. More than 77 million passengers used Heathrow Airport during the period of Jul 2016 to Jun 2017. Passengers travelling from Middle East can book flights with Etihad Airways and Oman Air through Abu Dhabi and Muscat respectively. Heathrow has 4 active terminals. Terminal 1 has been closed and is being demolished. - Terminal 2, the Queen’s Terminal is the Star Alliance terminal. - Terminal 3 has a few Oneworld flights: Virgin Atlantic, British Airways (Barcelona, Budapest, Gibraltar, Helsinki, Lisbon, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw), various international carriers such as American, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Qantas. Some Delta flights. - Terminal 4 is the SkyTeam terminal. It is located to the south of the airport. - Terminal 5 is the Oneworld terminal. It is west of the airport, close to the M25. Here’s a quick summary of transport options from Heathrow to central London: - Fastest: by Heathrow Express rail (Paddington Station – Heathrow 1, 2, 3 & 5), ☎ . Every 15 min, journey time 15 min. Travelcard & Oyster card not valid. These train lines terminate at London Paddington. They are often not the fastest way to a final destination in London. One way, adult prices: £5.50 (90-day advance purchase), £18 (if purchased online or from ticket machine/office), and £23 when purchased onboard; round trip is £34. - Second fastest: by Heathrow Connect rail (terminal 3), Arriva Hotel (Paddington Station – Heathrow 1, 2, 3 & 4), ☎ . Travelcard & Oyster card not valid to Heathrow. Often requires a change for Terminals 4 or 5. Follows same route as Heathrow Express but stops at several stations to London Paddington so journey is 25 minutes and trains less frequent. Heathrow Connect trains are poorly marked at the airport and at Paddington. Ask a Heathrow Express attendant how to get to the train from the airport. For the return trip, Heathrow Connect leaves from Paddington Platform 12. One way £9.10, round trip £17.80. - Cheapest: by London Underground (Piccadilly line), ☎ . Every few minutes, journey time ~1 hour, depending on your destination. For the cheapest single fare ask for an card (£5 refundable deposit). A Zone 1-6 Travelcard is valid. Train for central London M-Th 05:02-23:45, and non-stop F 05:02 to Su 23:28. When travelling from central London, some Piccadilly trains don’t go to the airport. During the day trains are at least every 10 minutes and usually more frequent. Weekend engineering works can result in replacement buses being run in place of the trains – check with the Transport for London website beforehand. With Oyster one-way £2.90 (off-peak) to £4.80 (peak). - Bus N9 operates service from midnight-05:00 between Heathrow and Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, roughly following the Piccadilly Line into central London. Buses depart every 20 minutes and take ~1hr15min to reach central London. Flat fare of £1.50, accepts Oyster Card or Contactless Credit/Debit, but not cash. - Taxi. A taxi (“black cab”) from Heathrow to central London will cost £45-60. You may wish to consider taking a taxi if you have a lot of baggage or small children. - Pre-booked Mini Cab. A booked sedan transfer from Heathrow to central London will cost £39-44. The fare is fixed, regardless of traffic conditions or route. There are dozens of companies serving Heathrow, just google ‘heathrow minicab’. Once booked, the driver will be waiting for you with a sign bearing your name in the arrivals area. Tipping when using minicabs is not required, although it is certainly welcome. - Also: to South London, ☎ . Bus 285 or taxi to Feltham railway station (20 min) then a train to London Waterloo on the or Clapham Junction in . Bus X26 is an express route calling at Hatton Cross, Teddington Broad St., Kingston Wood St., Kingston Cromwell Rd., New Malden Fountain, Worcester Park, Queen Victoria, Cheam Broadway, Sutton Police Station, Carshalton High St., Wallington Green, East Croydon & West St Michaels bus station. Zone 1-6 Travelcard valid on all London buses and trains. £2 single. - Airport Parking. Heathrow Terminal 5 Parking. - Main article: Gatwick Airport ( ). London’s second airport, also serving a large spectrum of places world-wide. It is split into a North Terminal and South Terminal. The two terminals are linked by a free shuttle train (5 minutes). The British Rail train station is located in the South Terminal. Transport options into central London: - By rail: Gatwick Express, ☎ . Every 15 min, journey time 30-35 min. To London Victoria. Travelcard not valid. One way £19.90, round trip £33.20, for the cheapest fare visit their website. - By rail: Southern Railway, ☎ . At least every 15 min, journey time 35-40 min. To London Victoria via Clapham Junction (same route as Gatwick Express – but with intermediate stops). Much cheaper than Gatwick Express – £13.50 (cheaper if booked in advance). - , ☎ . To London Bridge, Blackfriars, City Thameslink, Farringdon, St Pancras International, Luton Airport and further north. Much cheaper than Gatwick Express – about £10 (they occasionally have advance tickets priced at half that). - By bus: easyBus. Every 15-20 min, journey time 60-90 min. To Earl’s Court/West Brompton. One-way prices start from £2. Book online. - By bus: National Express. Every 30 min, journey time 75-110 min. To London Victoria. One-way prices start from £7. Book online. - By Minicab, ☎ . Journey time 90-120 min. ~ £70. - By car. 47 km (29 mi). - By cycle. There is a long-distance cycle path into Central London, but as it involves an indirect route, going over the North Downs and through South-East London, it will likely be quite a ride. For adventurous people. When departing, no drinking fountains are to be found in the South Terminal departure lounge after passing through security. - Main article: Transport options into central London: - By rail: Stansted Express to London Liverpool Street, ☎ . Every 15 min, journey time 45-60 min. Single £23.40, return £37.50. Book 30 days in advance: single £8, return £16. Travelcards not valid. First class fares available. Children aged 5-15 travel at half fares. Most budget carriers’ websites offer reduced price deals for the Stansted Express.. - By rail then London Underground: Stansted Express to Tottenham Hale then London Underground (Victoria line), ☎ . Every 15 min. If you are going to South London, the West End or West London then take the Stansted Express to Tottenham Hale then the London Underground (Victoria line). At Tottenham Hale ask for an card for the best fare. Single £21.00, return £33.50, then £3.20 (peak)/£2.70 (off-peak) for single Oyster fares to central London by Underground. Cash Underground fares cost considerably more.. - By coach: National Express, ☎ . Every 15-30 min. Journey time to Stratford: 1 hour. To Liverpool Street: 80 min. To Victoria: 90 min. To Stratford (tube: Stratford) or Victoria (tube: Victoria). Folding bicycles only. To Stratford: £8 single, £14 return. To Liverpool Street: £7.50 single (online in advance?). To Victoria: £10 single, £16 return. Travelcards not valid. - By minibus: EasyBus. To Baker Street (tube: Baker Street) From £2 (advance web purchase) to £8 single. Travelcard not valid.. - By taxi, ☎ . Journey time 90-120 min. The airport is a long way from central London. It’s normally a better idea to take a train to Liverpool Street and continue by taxi from there. approx £70. - By Minicab, ☎ . Journey time 90-120 min. Stansted Airport Cars, located just outside of the terminal complex. approx £70. London Luton Airport ( ). is London’s fourth airport after , and . It’s nearer to central London than the latter two airports at 35 mi (57 km) north of central London and situated 1.7 mi (2.8 km) east of town centre. It’s a major hub for easyJet, Ryanair, Wizz Air, Thomson Airways and Monarch Airlines. The vast majority of routes served are within Europe, although there are some charter and scheduled routes to destinations in Northern Africa and Asia. Like Stansted, it is commonplace for some passengers on early morning flights to sleep in the terminal before their flights. There can be heavy traffic congestion on the access road caused by the surge of early flights. The Parkway Airport station, which serves the terminal, is about 20 minutes walk back into town, although there is a regular shuttle bus charging £1.60 to take you to the station. If your train ticket says Luton Airport (rather than Luton Airport Parkway), then the bus ride is included in the ticket. Other airlines using the airport include Aer Arann, FlyBE and El Al, to cities primarily in, Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin. If leaving on a morning flight (departing between 07:00-08:30), it is advisable to leave extra time to check in and clear security. - By rail. Journey time: 20-55 min. £12.50 one way. Travelcard not valid. The airport has its own railway station “Luton Airport Parkway”, served by trains 24 hours a day from Central London using “Thameslink” or “East Midlands Trains”. There are up to 10 trains an hour, depending on the time of day. All trains go to London St Pancras International, but many also continue on to Blackfriars, London Bridge and Elephant & Castle, Gatwick Airport and Brighton. The station is nearly 2 km (1 mi) from the terminal building, a shuttle bus service connects the terminal and airport every 10 min, costing £1.60 each way. At rush hours this journey can take up to 25 min. Railway ticket offices sell through tickets to Luton Airport that include the shuttle bus, although some ticket office staff may not be aware of this if the station doesn’t have direct trains to Luton. If the destination on your ticket says “Luton Airport” the shuttle bus is included, but if it says “Luton Airport Parkway” you will have to buy a bus ticket. - By coach: Green Line number 757, ☎ . Every 20 min, journey time 90 min. To Victoria (tube: Victoria) via Brent Cross, Finchley Rd tube station, Baker St, Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner. £14 one way if bought from the driver, tickets can be purchased in advance online from £2. Service is run by Greenline and in conjunction with easyBus (but can be used by all travellers regardless of airline you travel with). Travelcard not valid. - By coach: National Express, ☎ . Every 20 min, journey time 90 min. To Victoria (tube: Victoria) via Golders Green and Marble Arch. From £1 (advance web purchase) one way. Travelcard not valid. - By car. 60 km (34 mi) north of London, just off the M1 motorway which connects London with the Midlands and the North of England. Depending on where you are travelling from in London and time of day, journey times take 45-90 mins. Road users should plan their journey and check traffic conditions, as if an incident occurs on London’s busy roads, journey times can dramatically increase. It costs £2 to stay in the “drop off zone” for a maximum of 10 minutes (non-extendable without penalty). There is also a short stay car park nearby. The “Medium stay” car park allows a short period of free parking (30 minutes), so passengers may be left here to catch the shuttle bus to the airport and collected, if the arrival time is known with certainty. No parking or drop-off is permitted at any other roadside locations – this is enforced by cameras and “parking charges” of £80 (£40 if paid promptly). London City Airport London City Airport ( ). London’s fifth largest airport. A commuter airport close to the City’s financial district, and specialising in short-haul business flights to other major European cities. There are also routes to holiday destinations that include , and . The airport is located 11 km (6.9 miles) east of the City of London and a short distance from Canary Wharf. It mainly offers flights to major European cities by full service carriers. British Airways operates two services a day toon weekdays and a daily service on weekends using an Airbus A318 in an entirely business class configuration. You may find that this may be your cheapest London airport to fly to, especially if you add £10 or more in transfer costs from outlying airports. The airport has its own station on the Woolwich Arsenal branch of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR). Minimum check-in time for most airlines is around 30 minutes, with some offering 15 minute check-in deadlines. Queues for security can be long at peak business times. Touchdown to the DLR (including taxi, disembarkation, immigration and baggage reclaim) can be as fast at 5 minutes, although 15 minutes is normal. To get to the city centre the following options exist: - By Docklands Light Railway (DLR). See also: . The DLR runs to Bank and Stratford stations. You can change to the Jubilee line at Canning Town which heads to Canary Wharf and then on into central London. Travelcard valid. - By taxi. Journey time approximately 30 min. £20-35. - By car. 10 km (6 mi). - By bus. Take the 474 bus to Canning Town station and then the 115 or N15 into central London. See also: . Travelcard valid. Other airports near London - London Southend Airport ( ), ☎ , e-mail: [email protected]. airport serves a range of destinations in Europe with Aer Lingus Regional and easyJet. By rail, a journey time of 55-65 min. Travelcard not valid. The airport has its own railway station “Southend Airport”, and is served from Liverpool Street, via by trains 17 hours a day. There are up to 8 trains an hour, depending on the time of day. The station is ~200 m from the terminal building. - Lydd Airport ( ). (aka London Ashford Airport) has seasonal, limited services and is used primarily for businesspeople. - Southampton Airport ( ), ☎ . Every 30 min, journey time 1 hour. This is not a London airport, but it is accessible enough to serve the capital, especially South West London. A couple of budget carriers serve European destinations are based here. Direct trains connect Southampton airport to London Waterloo station. £30-35 round trip. Bournemouth Airport similarly operates a couple of Ryanair flights and others, and is not too far west on the train line from Southampton. - Birmingham International Airport ( ), ☎ . Every 20 min, journey time 72 min with Virgin Trains. This is another non-London airport worth considering as a less congested and hectic alternative to Heathrow, being just over an hour away from London. As a major airport serving the UK’s second largest city, there is a good choice of long distance and European destinations. Direct trains connect Birmingham International to London Euston and Watford. The train station is connected to the terminal via a free shuttle train (2 min). From £10 (advance web purchase) one way, £35-100 round trip. - Other small airports, such as Oxford Airport can also be useful. Kent International Airport and Shoreham Airport (near Brighton) are similarly small. - In terms of reachability from London, the Paris airports (which are connected to London by RER and then Eurostar) can also be an option. However, Eurostar does not offer any kind of combined tickets bundling airfare and the train ride and Eurostar can be quite expensive. Wikivoyage has a guide to. London is the hub of the British rail network – every major city in mainland Britain has a frequent train service to the capital, and most of the smaller, provincial cities and large towns also have a direct rail connection to London of some sort – although the frequency and quality of service can vary considerably from place to place. Rail fares to London vary enormously from very cheap to prohibitively expensive – the golden rules are to book Advance tickets for a particular train time, don’t travel into the city on Friday afternoons and Sundays, and avoid leaving buying tickets until the day of travel. There are three basic types of ticket, which are summarised below. Much of the advice applies to rail travel in general within the United Kingdom. - Anytime – travel on any train, any operator at any time, returning within one month with few restrictions. Very expensive however – on a long distance journey from Northern England or Scotland for example – an Anytime return ticket to London won’t leave you with any change out of £250! - Off-peak – travel on certain trains within a specific time-frame; again returning within one month. Typically this excludes anything that arrives into London during the morning rush hour (before 10:00 typically), or any train which departs during evening rush hour (16:30-18:30). Weekends generally carry no restrictions on the use of Off-Peak tickets. There are however, a monumentally complex number of exceptions for which Off-Peak tickets are and aren’t valid which are barely fathomable to the British, never mind overseas visitors. If you are in any doubt at all about the validity of an Off-Peak ticket, ask a guard at the station or a ticket office before getting on a train – as on-train conductors can be notoriously unforgiving. Super Off-Peak tickets have further restrictions on the time at which they can be used and differ depending on the train operator. Again, ask at the ticket office or the guard before boarding the train. - Advance – travel on a specific day and train time, booked up to 12 weeks in advance either in person at a railway station, over the telephone, or online. Two Advance single tickets for the outward and return legs of the journey are generally cheaper than the Off-Peak return ticket. Better deals can often be had by going directly to the train operator’s website. The earlier you book, the more you save – you can get down to as little as £12.00 one-way from Scotland for example, but these tickets are non-refundable, and cannot be used on anything other than the date, train time and operator that is printed on the reservation. Go on any other train and get caught and you will be obliged to pay the Anytime fare for the journey you are making – which, as we’ve said before, is hideously expensive! The local and commuter rail companies within the London and Home Counties area also have a bewildering array of special fares which are all in essence, variations of the Off-Peak ticket and are far too detailed to cover here – go directly to the website of the operator concerned for more information. If you only intend to use trains within the Greater London boundary, then the Oyster Card (explained below) is by far the easiest and cheapest option to use. Seats can be reserved for free on all long-distance trains to London – the reservation is always issued automatically with an Advance ticket, and with most Off-Peak and Anytime tickets bought on-line. If, for whatever reason you hold an Anytime or Off-Peak ticket and there is no seat reservation coupon, then it is highly recommended you get one from any railway station ticket office – if you want to avoid camping out in the vestibule for all or part of the journey! First Class is available on all long distance services to London, the standard of service varies from operator to operator, but in general you get a wider, more comfortable seat, free tea/coffee for the duration of the journey, and some sort of complimentary catering service. If can be great value if you get an Advance first-class fare, but it is extremely expensive otherwise, and to be honest – not really worth it. You can pay a Weekend supplement (generally £15-20) to sit in the first class section of the train on Saturdays and Sundays, – useful if the service you are on is hideously overcrowded – but you don’t get the same catering service as during the week. If you are the holder of a Britrail pass, things are simpler – reservations are not required. However, if you wish to be guaranteed a seat, rather than standing for a lengthy journey (trains can be very busy, especially at peak times) then you can make a seat reservation at any station. If you intend to use the overnight Sleeper trains to London, you will have to pay a berth supplement for every member of your party – provided there is berth availability on the train. London has one international high speed rail route (operated by Eurostar) that runs from St Pancras International station to (2hr 15min), (4hr 21min, most journeys require a change of train at Lille station), (1hr 50 min) and a selection of cities. It dives under the sea for 35 km (22 mi) on the Kent coast via the Channel Tunnel. Despite it being considered a significant part of the route, the train only passes through the Channel Tunnel for about half an hour and most of your journey will be spent above ground whizzing through the countryside. There are airport-style security checks prior to boarding. Although they’re not as strict, leave ample time before your train departs for your belongings and yourself to be scanned and for your passport to be checked. Eurostar advises its customers to be at the security check 30 minutes ahead of departure for standard class and 10 minutes for the most expensive fares. Like all train services various fares are available depending on the time of day and how far you book in advance. There are three classes of ticket available: Business Premier (the most expensive), Standard Premier, and Standard. Seats are available both with tables and without and it’s recommended to book far in advance if you require a table. If you are on a train direct to Disneyland Paris then Disney cast members will come through and speak to you about having your luggage transferred to your hotel so you can go pretty much straight into the parks. There are through tickets available even for places not served by Eurostar itself, for example Deutsche Bahn offers tickets from any station in Germany to London with the finale part of the trip on Eurostar at special prices “from” 59.90€. Eurostar likewise sells tickets to Amsterdam even ahead of the planned Easter 2018 launch of direct connections. Main London terminals For domestic train services, there are 12 main line National Rail terminals. With the exception of Fenchurch Street (Tube: Tower Hill) all of these stations are also on the London Underground with most being on the Circle line. Clockwise starting at Paddington, major National Rail stations are: - London Paddington, serves South West England and including Slough, , , , , , , , and and . Also the Central London terminus of the Heathrow Airport Express (see above) and serves some suburban stations such as Acton Main Line and Ealing Broadway. - London Marylebone, serves some north western suburban stations such as , Harrow on the Hill and Wembley Stadium. Also serves , , , and the city of . It is much cheaper but slightly slower to take a train from Marylebone to Birmingham instead of a train from London Euston. - London Euston, serves the Midlands, north-west England and west Scotland: , , , , Oxenholme , , , and for connecting ferries to/from both the and . Sleeper trains to Scotland leave from Euston. - London St Pancras International, serves , , , , , , and on the European continent, as well as Luton Airport, Bedford, Brighton, , several destinations in and the : , , and back in the UK. - London King’s Cross, serves , north-east England and east Scotland: , , , , , , and . Platform 9 3/4 from the Harry Potter books is marked with a special sign and a trolley half-pushed through the wall, although platform 9 itself is actually in the fairly unpleasant metallic extension used by Cambridge trains. - London Liverpool Street, serves : and . Also the Central London terminus of the Stansted Airport Express. - London Fenchurch Street, serves commuter towns north of the Thames estuary to . - London Bridge, London Cannon Street, London Waterloo East and London Charing Cross, serve south and south east London and England: , , , and . - London Blackfriars, serves Gatwick Airport and Brighton. - London Waterloo, serves south west London and southern England: , , , , , and Exeter. - London Victoria, serves south east London, Kent and Sussex Brighton, Dover, , and . Also the Central London terminus of the Gatwick Airport Express. Most international and domestic long distance coach (U.S. English: bus) services arrive at and depart from a complex of coach stations off Buckingham Palace Road in London Victoria Coach Station, which actually has separate arrival and departure buildings. Some services by smaller operators may use the Green Line Coach Station nearby. Listed below are the main coach operators. It is strongly recommended to book your travel in advance: fares can be much cheaper (even a day or two can make all the difference) and you avoid ticket office queues and potentially sold-out coaches. All large and many smaller coach operators allow passengers to show tickets on their mobile phone, and all will allow passengers to print tickets at home.close to London Victoria rail station. Virtually all services operate from - National Express, ☎ . By far the largest domestic coach operator and operates services throughout Great Britain. Fares are fairly low (although usually higher than Megabus): especially when booked in advance via the web. - Megabus, ☎ (answered by Citylink). Operates budget coach services between London and various other UK cities, and even to get to Inverness in the Highlands. Fares are demand responsive but can be very cheap (£1.50 if you book far enough in advance). - Eurolines, ☎ . An associate company of National Express, it runs coach services between London and various cities in , the and continental Europe (with direct services extending as far as in Romania). - Flixbus, ☎ . is a German bus company which in 2016 took over Megabus services to and from continental Europe (coaches may still carry Megabus branding). Services to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Cologne. - OUIBUS. is a coach company owned by the SNCF (French Railways), competing on the routes to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. They offer newer coaches with plug sockets, Wi-Fi and reserved seating (which is especially useful for those travelling as a couple or group). - IC Bus. is a coach company owned by DB (the German Railways), operating a daily route to Essen and Düsseldorf. - Sindbad, ☎ . operates coach services to cities throughout Poland from Victoria Coach Station. - RegioJet, ☎ . (formerly Student Agency) is a Czech operator with a daily service to Prague, departing from the Green Line Coach Station. London is the hub of the UK’s road network and is easy to reach by car, even if driving into the centre of the city is definitely not recommended. Comparatively few people drive into (or anywhere near) the centre of London. The infamous M25 ring road did not earn its irreverent nicknames “The Road to Hell” and “Britain’s biggest car park” for nothing. The road is heavily congested at most times of the day, and is littered with automatically variable speed limits which are enforced with speed cameras. Despite the controversial “congestion charge”, driving a car anywhere near the centre of London remains a nightmare with crowded roads, impatient drivers and extortionate parking charges (if you can find a space in the first place, that is!) From Monday through Friday, though, parking in the City of London is free after 18:30; after 13:30 on Saturday and all day Sunday. Drivers can also use shared parking services such as YourParkingSpace, Parkonmydrive or Parkingspacerentals to secure a parking space when none is available. Renting a car Greater London is encircled by the M25 orbital motorway, from which nearly all the major trunk routes to Scotland, Wales and the rest of England radiate. The most important are listed below. - M1: The main route to/from the North, leading from the East Midlands, Yorkshire and terminating at Leeds. Most importantly, Britain’s longest motorway – the M6 – branches from the M1 at Rugby, leading to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, the Lake District and onwards to the Scottish border and ultimately Glasgow. - A1/A1(M) The A1 is the original, historic “Great North Road” between England and Scotland’s capital cities and has largely been converted to motorway standard; it runs up the eastern side of Great Britain through Peterborough, York, Newcastle and continues north through Northumberland and the Scottish Borders to Edinburgh. - M40/A40: Arrives in London from a north westerly direction, linking the city with Oxford and providing an additional link from Birmingham. - M4: The principal route to/from the West – leading to Bath, Bristol and cities South Wales (Cardiff and Swansea). It is also the main route towards Heathrow Airport. - M3: The main route to London from the shipping port of Southampton. - M2/M20: Together, these motorways are the main link to the coastal ferry (and Channel Tunnel) ports of Dover and Folkestone from Continental Europe. - M11: The M11 connects Stansted Airport and Cambridge to London and terminates on the north-eastern periphery of the city. A roads are major roads which can vary in scale from local routes to major thoroughfares. - A10: Begins at the Monument in central London and heads north through Islington, Hackney, Haringey, Enfield and then out of London into Hertfordshire and onto Cambridge. Connects to the M25 in Enfield. North Circular Road (A406)/South Circular Road (A205) The North Circular Road and South Circular Road are two roads are connected at the east end of the circle in North Woolwich by the Woolwich Free Ferry. The ferry runs approximately every 10–15 minutes and is free of charge, but has limited space and can get very busy at peak times. The ferry stops running after 22:00, so at night it’s advisable to travel through Docklands and use the Blackwall Tunnel instead. - A406: The A406 is a major road that passes through north London connecting east and west. It is a dual carriageway for most of its length and has direct connections with the M4, M40, M1 and M11 motorways as well as numerous other A roads. It is one of the main routes to Brent Cross Shopping Centre. - A205: While the A406 is mostly a fast purpose-built road, the A205 was not fully built and instead incorporated local roads of varying width. Due to this it can become heavily congested. The road picks up where the A406 terminates at the opposite end of the Woolwich Ferry and passes through Woolwich, Catford, Dulwich, Clapham, Wandsworth and Richmond. It re-joins the A406 at the Chiswick Roundabout. London is the home of the famous Tube map, and TfL produce some excellent maps to help you get around: Some parts of the Underground and Overground are frequently closed at weekends to allow engineers to upgrade and repair the track (the Underground is 150 years old, so it takes a lot of work to keep it running!) Usually there will be enough of the network still running to make most destinations accessible. If you are not in a hurry, this is a good reason to consider taking a bus instead. Always check before you travel. You must have a valid ticket at all times when travelling by bus, tram or train in London. If you don’t show a valid ticket or a validated Oyster card when a ticket inspector asks to see it, you will have to pay a Penalty Fare, which is usually £40 (increased to £80 if it isn’t paid within 21 days.) When travelling by train in London, always buy your ticket before you get on the train. If using an Oyster Card, ensure that you touch in and out on a yellow reader before and after travelling by Tube or train, even if there are no barriers or they are left open. London has one of the most comprehensive public transport systems in the world. Despite residents’ perpetual (and sometimes justified) grumbling about unreliability, public transport is often the best option for getting anywhere for visitors and residents alike. In central London use a combination of the transport options listed below – and check your map! In many cases you can easily walk from one place to another or use the buses. Be a Londoner and only use the Tube as a way of travelling longer distances. You’re here to see London – you can’t see it underground! Transport for London (TfL) is a government organisation responsible for all public transport. Their website contains maps plus an excellent journey planner. TfL publishes a useful ‘coping guide’ specially designed for travellers who wish to use public transport during their visit to London. This can be downloaded in PDF format and printed as an 18-page brochure. TfL also offers a 24-hour travel information line, charged at premium rate: tel +44 843 222 1234 (or text 60835) for suggestions on getting from A to B, and for up to the minute information on how services are running. Fortunately for visitors (and indeed residents) there is a single ticketing system, Oyster, which enables travellers to switch between modes of transport on one ticket. The main travel options in summary are: - By bus: This is the cheapest and usually the best way to get around London as a tourist: on the Underground, you won’t see anything! - By Tube / Underground: 11 lines cover the central area and suburbs, run by TfL. - By Overground: Urban rail system, part of TfL’s network. - By National Rail: A complex network of suburban rail services, privately run and not part of the TfL network, although all operators now accept Oyster payments within Greater London. - By Docklands Light Railway (DLR): An automatic metro system running from the City to East London via the Docklands. - By foot: In central London, walking to the next Tube station often takes under 5 minutes, and is more scenic than going underground. The street layout is confusing, so a street map is essential; many stations have central London maps for £2. - By boat: Commuter ferries and pleasure cruises along the River Thames. Some services accept Oyster cards, but special fares apply, so check before you travel. - By bicycle: There are hire bicycles (known to Londoners as “Boris bikes”) operated by TfL available for pick up in inner London. You will need a credit or debit card with a PIN. If you bring your own bike, there are plenty of cycle lanes and traffic is normally considerate. - By tram (Tramlink): A tram service that operates only in southern suburbs around Wimbledon and Croydon. Oyster is a contactless electronic smartcard run by Transport for London. Unless you have a contactless credit card (see above), Oyster is the most cost-effective option if you plan to be in London for any more than a couple of days, or if you intend to make return visits to the city: the savings quickly recover the initial purchase cost. You can buy an Oyster card from any Tube station for a deposit of £5. You can “top up” an Oyster card with electronic funds. This money is then deducted according to where you travel. The cost of a single trip using the Oyster card is considerably less than buying a single paper ticket with cash. Prices vary depending on distance travelled, whether by bus or Tube, and on the time of day. You can also add various electronic seven-day, 1 month and longer-period Travelcards onto an Oyster, and the card is simply validated each time you use it. The deposit is fully refundable if you hand it in at any staffed Tube station’s ticket office, and you will also get any pay-as-you-go credit refunded. If you have less than £10 credit on your card, you can claim an instant refund of the credit and deposit at some ticket machines after 48 hours of purchase of your Oyster card. However, your Oyster card, and the credit on it, never expires, so keep it around in case you return to London. Be prepared to give your signature on receipts or even show ID for refunds over a few pounds. Oyster is valid on all red London buses, and almost all trains in London: a list of destinations is available on the London Tube and Rail Services map. Oyster is not valid on buses or trains outside London: if you need to travel beyond the stations on the map, you will have to pay for a paper ticket. (If you do not, you may be liable for a penalty fare or prosecution!) Oyster is also not accepted on long-distance coaches, nor on tour buses, charter buses or on the community bus route 812 in Islington. Also, Oyster cannot be used on: - the Heathrow Express; - the Heathrow Connect, beyond Hayes and Harlington; If you have a National Railcard, such as the 16-25 Railcard or the Senior Railcard, you can register this with your Oyster card at a Tube station (members of staff near ticket machines can do this) to receive a 33% discount on off-peak pay-as-you-go fares. Visitor Oyster card Visitor Oyster card is a version of normal Oyster card targeted to travelers. This version of Oyster could be purchased from some travel agents outside London and overseas or ordered by mail. Also this card could be send back to TFL by mail after a trip to London to claim a refund for a card and its unused balance. Visitor Oyster cards come pre-charged with with pay as you go credit: £10, £15, £20, £25, £30, £35, £40 or £50. The card itself costs £3 plus postage. With a Visitor Oyster card you can get some discounts in various venues across the city. Using your Oyster When using your Oyster card to travel, make sure the reader is displaying an orange light, then place it flat against the reader. Listen carefully for a single beep, and watch for a green light: if this happens, it means your card has been accepted, and you can proceed. If you hear two beeps and see a red light, this means your card has not been accepted. Take the card off the reader, wait for the orange light, and try again; if this continues to happen, ask for help from a member of staff. You can sign up for contactless and Oyster account. This will allow you track your journeys and apply for a claim of some money for incomplete journeys (see below). When getting on any kind of train, such as the Tube, the DLR, the London Overground or National Rail, you must touch your Oyster card on the yellow circular reader at the start and end of your journey: - At stations with ticket gates, these readers will be on the right-hand side of the gates; - There are no entry or exit gates on some stations in the outlying parts of the city. There will be on free-standing cabinets next to entrances/exits which are clearly signposted. If you are caught not having paid, you could be charged a Penalty Fare or prosecuted. Equally, failing to touch out when you leave a station will result in you being charged a maximum fare for your journey, since the system doesn’t know which station you left at. The exact value of a maximum fare depends on a station where you started a journey and it can be between £5.40 and £14.20. Usually you will not need to touch your Oyster card on a reader when changing trains. However, some stations have pink Oyster “route validators” on the platforms: if you are getting off one train and getting onto another at one of these stations, touch your Oyster on the pink reader so that the system charges you the right fare for the route you have taken. There are a few other situations where you might need to touch out when changing trains: always ask a member of railway staff if you are in doubt. On bus and tram When using a London bus or a tram, you only touch in once, when getting on it. You don’t need to touch out when you get off the bus – if you do, you will be charged twice. Most buses have their Oyster reader next to the driver. Trams and some buses have Oyster readers on poles next to the doors. Some buses on routes 9 and 15 in central London are operated by heritage Routemasters. These buses have only one entrance, at the back, and are operated by conductors. Simply take your seat on the bus, and have your Oyster card ready: the conductor will take your card and scan it with a hand-held ticket machine. You can make a change to another bus or a tram free of charge during one hour. You’ll still have to touch your Oyster at the 2nd bus or tram, but no money will be deducted then. - Don’t try to insert your Oyster card into the slot at the ticket gates! Touch it flat against the yellow reader, and wait for a single beep and a green light. - You should always keep your Oyster card separately from your wallet with your bank cards, cash, identity documents, etc. This is because if you take your wallet out to touch in at busy stations it makes you a prime target for pickpockets. It also means that if your wallet is stolen you will lose your means of travel as well as your money! Always keep your wallet in a secure inside pocket or a closed bag, and keep your Oyster card in a separate pocket. (If you buy your Oyster from a Tube station, it will usually come in a wallet of its own.) - You should also be very careful if you have contactless credit or debit cards or RFID identity cards from your employer, as these can interfere with your Oyster if you keep them in the same wallet. This usually results in an error message but may mean you get charged the full fare from your contactless credit or debit card instead. - Be careful standing near the readers on some buses – they are often quite sensitive and may read your card from several centimetres away, even if you did not intend this. - Try not to keep your Oyster in your back pocket. Not only does this make it easy to pickpocket, it also means it is likely to crack or bend when you sit down. You can top up your Oyster card with cash at any Tube station ticket machine or ticket office (you can use a credit card if it has a PIN number) with Oyster pay-as-you-go, also known as PrePay. Money is then deducted from your Oyster card each time you travel. When travelling by train, the fare is calculated based on where you started and ended your journey. Pay-as-you-go is much cheaper than paying by cash for each journey. For instance, a cash fare on the Tube in Zone 1 costs £4.70, while with an Oyster Card it costs £2.40. Bus fares are flat and you will be charged the same fare every time you get on the bus, regardless of distance. The amount of Oyster credit deducted from your card in one day is capped at the cost of the equivalent day Travelcard for the journeys you have made. This means that on a day-to-day basis, you will always get the best fares when using Oyster pay-as-you-go. If you travel by bus only, your total fares are capped at £4.40 each day: this makes bus travel very good value in central London if you are making lots of journeys. Don’t forget: when travelling by train, make sure you touch your Oyster in and out at the start and end of each journey, or you will be charged extra! A Travelcard gives you unlimited travel on trains within the relevant zones, and unlimited travel on all red London buses, even outside the zones of your Travelcard. You can have your Travelcard loaded onto your Oyster, or you can have it as a paper ticket. For periods longer than 7 days, you will usually need to register your Oyster card or provide some form of photographic I.D. Especially for the Zone 1-2 tickets, the paper Day Travelcard is substantially more expensive than the maximum Oyster fare (£12 vs. £6.40). Therefore, an Oyster card will generally offer much better value. |Zones||Day Travelcard||Day Travelcard (off-peak)||7 Day Travelcard||Monthly Travelcard||Annual Travelcard| The above prices are adult prices and are correct throughout 2015. For an up-to-date and comprehensive list of fares, see TfL’s web site. If you are using Oyster and travel beyond the zones of your Travelcard, you will be charged an extension fare from your pay-as-you-go credit when you touch out at your destination. If you are using a paper Travelcard and need to travel beyond your zones, you should get off at the boundary of your last valid zone and buy a ticket for the rest of your journey: if you do not, you will be charged a penalty fare and may be prosecuted! Contactless payment cards A contactless payment, debit or credit card can be used directly to pay fares on buses, trains and the Underground. Some pre-paid cards may work as well. A contactless card bears a four-waves logo on it and there is a RFID chip fitted in. Most Visa, MasterCard, Maestro or American Express cards issued outside the UK are accepted. Some cards, such as Visa contactless cards (including mobile wallets) issued in the United States, will not work. When you enter a station or get on the bus, touch the card against the yellow validation reader, as if it were an Oyster card. The price is the same as with an Oyster card. The price per day is automatically capped at the price of a day ticket. You also avoid the queues at ticket machines, the £5 deposit for an Oyster card, and you never have to top it up. A Travelcard can not be loaded onto a contactless card. The same card cannot be used by two or more different passengers. Using a contactless card may be tricky though. Your bank may be asking for additional confirmations, so TfL may suspend accepting a card until you release a pending payment. Also sometimes you may end up with an unfinished journey even though you’ve touched an exit gate probably because a card may require a bit longer to process after a gate is opened. Keep your card at a reader until the gate opens fully. You can sign up for contactless and Oyster account to check for these issues. It’s still possible to pay for a journey by a paper single or return ticket albeit it makes sense perhaps if you make only a couple of journeys on public transport during your trip to London as they cost significantly more in comparison with the other means of payment. Day Travelcards, One-Day Bus & Tram passes and season tickets could be also purchased in paper. The following table summarises the validity of the different tickets you can use on Oyster. For most tourists, trains and buses are the only transport you will use, but Oyster is not valid at all on airport express trains to Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted or Southend. However, Oyster is valid on the Piccadilly line to Heathrow Airport, as this is an Underground train. |Bus||Tram||London Underground||London Overground||National Rail||DLR||Airport Express trains| |Bus & Tram pass||yes||yes||no||no||no||no||no| The London Underground has connections to all terminals at Heathrow (including Terminals 4 & 5) and most major London rail termini, with the exception of Fenchurch Street. Interchange hubs are also served, (such as Farringdon, Elephant & Castle, Harrow & Wealdstone and Stratford. London is a surprisingly compact city, making it a walker’s delight. In many instances, walking is the quickest method of transport between two points. Because Britain drives on the left hand side of the road, for most foreign visitors it can be all too easy to forget that traffic will come at you from the opposite direction than you are used to when crossing a street – for this reason remember to look right when you cross the road. If you are using a pedestrian crossing, don’t think it’s safe to risk it, even if you can’t see any traffic coming: always wait for the green man to appear, and then cross quickly and carefully. Particularly on Central London’s busiest streets, it is easy to spot native Londoners as they weave in and out of the large crowds at fast speed; tourists who cannot will stand out. Make sure you’re aware of your surroundings when in London—Londoners are usually very considerate, but a group of tourists standing in the middle of the pavement can be a major annoyance! Try standing to the side of busy pavements and footpaths, especially if you’re with a group. Walking alternatives to the Tube In some instances it can be more pleasant or faster to walk your intended route instead of taking the Tube. Walking to another Tube station can also help you to avoid crowds. By looking at a map you’ll notice that some central London Tube stations are very close to each other. TfL have produced a map detailing the walking time and number of steps between various popular stations. Here are some more specific instructions for some of the stations that tourists use: - Leicester Square station – Covent Garden station: Come out of the station with the Hippodrome casino behind you. Cross Charing Cross Road and walk up Cranbourn Street. Walk straight over at the junction and continue onto Long Acre. Walk straight up Long Acre to arrive at Covent Garden station. Approximate walking time: 5 minutes - Embankment station – Waterloo station: Come out of the station onto Victoria Embankment, walk up the stairs and head across the River Thames using the Hungerford Bridge. At the other end of the bridge keep walking straight and away from the River Thames. Follow the railway line. You will come to some blue metal work and a walkway underneath the railway line called Sutton Walk. Follow this, cross the road and Waterloo station is ahead of you. Approximate walking time: 15 minutes - Westminster station – Waterloo station: Come out of the station and head across the River Thames using Westminster Bridge. Keep heading straight until you come to a junction. Turn left and walk down York Road. Stay on York Road until you come to a railway bridge. Waterloo station will be on your right. Approximate walking time: 15 minutes - Green Park station – Hyde Park Corner station: Come out of Green Park station onto the road. This is Piccadilly. Walk west along Piccadilly following the edge of Green Park. When you come to a roundabout head straight across it. Hyde Park and Hyde Park Corner station will be on your right. Approximate walking time: 10 minutes - Queensway – Bayswater: Turn to the left when exiting the station and keep walking. This is a very alternative way if you want to change really fast, but not change at Notting Hill Gate. Approximate walking time: 1 minute Oxford Circus station Oxford Circus station can become extremely busy on weekday evenings and, if convenient, it is worth walking to other Tube stations. - Oxford Circus station – Bond Street station: Head west along Oxford Street from the road junction. You should see the London College of Fashion and BHS. Keep walking west and you will come to Bond Street station. Approximate walking time: 10 minutes - Oxford Circus station – Tottenham Court Road station: At the road junction head east along Oxford Street heading past Topshop. Keep walking past H&M and McDonalds and you will eventually see a skyscraper (surrounded by a construction site)- this is Centre Point. Keep heading straight and Tottenham Court Road station is on the road junction here. Approximate walking time: 25 minutes The London Underground, known popularly as the Tube due to its tube-like tunnels drilled through the London clay, is a network of 11 lines which criss-cross London in one of the largest underground rail networks in the world. It was also the first: the oldest section of the Hammersmith & City Line opened as the Metropolitan Railway in 1863. The Tube is an easy method of transport even for new visitors to London and is equivalent to subway and metro systems in other world cities. The routes operated by the London Underground fall into 2 broad types: the older “sub-surface” lines, encompassing the Metropolitan, District, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines, date from the 19th century. The “deep level” routes were largely constructed in the early-to-mid-20th century. The sub-surface lines are usually accessed by walking down a short set of stairs, whereas the deep-level lines are accessed by a complicated network of escalators or lifts. It is the deep lines which are served by the iconic tube-shaped trains which, despite their small size, can only just fit through the tunnels. Each line has stations with interesting architectural and artistic features typical of the era they were opened. As you travel around the network, look out for Victorian finery, Edwardian glazed tiles, smooth Art Deco symmetry, and striking modern masterpieces. Various conservation pieces are also present, such as the heritage 1900s station name roundel sign at Caledonian Road on the westbound platform. Trains on most days and on most lines run from around 05:30 to about 01:00. They are usually the fastest way to travel in London, the only problem being the relative expense, and that they can get extremely crowded during rush hours (07:30-10:00 and 16:30-19:00). On warm days take a bottle of water with you, as there is no air conditioning on most of the trains. Engineering works which can’t be completed overnight usually take place during weekend. TfL’s website has a notifying tracking delays, closures and planned engineering works, which you should check if you plan to travel on a Saturday or a Sunday, when entire lines may be shut down. In central London, taking the Tube for just one stop can be a waste of time; Londoners joke about the tourists who use the Tube to travel between Leicester Square and Covent Garden stations, a journey which can take over 10 minutes on the Tube, despite the two stations being only a couple of minute’s walk apart. This is especially true since the walk from a Tube station entrance to the platform at some central stations can be extensive. The Tube map also gives no information on London’s extensive bus and rail network. For more information see the ‘By foot’ section. The Night Tube, introduced in 2016, is a limited 24-hour Tube service that operates on certain lines on Fridays and Saturdays. Night Tube fares are the same as the off-peak fares during the day. Day Travelcards are valid on the day they were issued (using the date printed on the card) and for journeys starting before 04:30 the following day. For example, if you buy a Day Travelcard at 11:00 on Friday, you can use it until 04:29 on the following Saturday. Daily capping on Oyster cards and contactless payment cards also applies. As of August 2017 the Night Tube runs on the following lines: - Victoria line: Trains run every 10 minutes on average along the entire line - Central line: Trains run approximately every 10 minutes between White City and Leytonstone and approximately every 20 minutes between Ealing Broadway to White City and Leytonstone to Loughton/Hainault. There is no service between North Acton and West Ruislip, Loughton and Epping, and Woodford and Hainault. - Jubilee line: Trains run every 10 minutes on average - Northern line: Trains run on average every 8 minutes between Morden and Camden Town and every 15 minutes from Camden Town to High Barnet/Edgware. There is no service on the Mill Hill East and Bank branches. - Piccadilly line: Trains run every 10 minutes on average between Cockfosters and Heathrow Terminal 5. There is no service on the Terminal 4 loop or between Acton Town and Uxbridge. Travel on the Tube system will always require the purchase of a ticket or the use of an Oyster card or contactless payment card if you have one; fare evasion is treated as a serious matter. Single tickets are charged at two rates, depending on the payment method. Cash fares are zonal, Zones 1-2 being £4.70 between any two stations in those zones, a zone 1-6 single ticket is £5.70. Single Oyster fares are charged by the number of zones crossed, starting at £2.20 for 1 zone up to £5 for 6 zones. There are additional fares payable for zones beyond 6, but these are mostly outside what is considered London. Paper travelcards valid for 1 day, 3 or 7 days are also available and can also be used on buses, National Rail trains, the DLR and Croydon Tramlink. They are priced by zones: a 1-day travelcard for Zones 1-2 costs £9 (Day anytime). Under operator-specific schemes, registered students, seniors and the disabled can claim specific discounts by showing a suitable photocard having been obtained in advance of travel. Almost all stations have automatic ticket barriers. If you pay by Oyster card or a contactless payment card, just tap your card against the yellow pad to open the barriers (ensure that you do this upon both entrance and exit). If you have a paper ticket, insert it face-up into the slot on the front of the machine, and remove it from the top to enter the station. If you have a single-ticket it will be retained at the exit gate. If you have luggage or if your ticket is rejected there is normally a staffed gate as well. Paper tickets can be purchased from vending machines in the station’s ticket hall. There are two types of machine: the older machines that have buttons for different fare levels and accept only coins and the new touchscreen machines that have instructions in multiple languages, offer a greater choice of ticket and accept bills and credit/debit cards (if your card has no embedded microchip, you cannot use these machines and you must pay at the ticket counter). If you have a national train ticket, which involves travelling across London (e.g.to ), you may be able to travel on the Tube across London, from one London terminus to another. If your train ticket has “Any permitted †” (with the dagger symbol) written in the “Route” section (at the bottom of the ticket), then you are able to travel on the Tube without buying another ticket. These can be used at the ticket barriers in the same way as the paper tickets described above. All lines are identified by name (e.g. Circle line, Central line, Piccadilly line). Many lines have multiple branches rather than running point-to-point, so always check the train’s destination (which is shown on the front of the train and the platform indicator screens, and will be broadcast on the train’s PA). Some branches, such as at High Street Kensington station, run as shuttles and require a transfer onto the “main line”. Signs can be seen to be vague, especially if you are unfamiliar with what compass point direction (e.g. northbound) you’re travelling in, as these are most often given rather than destinations. A person new to the Tube can become very frustrated trying to work out where a particular connection at a particular station is found. Even regular travellers will tell you they can become confused when going to unfamiliar stations. Just be patient and realise mistakes can be made and you can recover. Each station is staffed by at least two personnel at all times who can advise you on your route and full system maps are on the walls of every platform and ticket office. Additionally, on every platform, there are individual line maps showing all the stations served by trains calling at that platform. The Northern line has two routes through central London which split at Euston and rejoin at Kennington. One (the Charing Cross Branch) runs through the West End, while the other route runs via the City of London (called the Bank branch, or the City branch). It is fairly easy to work out which way your train is going; check the signs above the platform, and on the front of the train. The train’s destination and central branch will also be announced on board, for example “This train is for Edgware, via Charing Cross.” The Tube is made up of 11 lines each bearing a traditional name and a standard colour on the Tube map. You can change between lines at interchange stations (providing you stay within the zones shown on your ticket). Since the Tube map is well designed it is very easy to work out how to get between any two stations, and since each station is clearly signed it is easy to work out when to exit your train. The Tube map is a diagram and not a scaled map, making it misleading for determining the relative distance between stations as it makes central stations appear further apart and somewhat out of place – the most distant reaches of the Metropolitan Line for example are almost 60 km (40 mi) from the centre of the city. Tube maps are freely available from any station, most tourist offices, and are prominently displayed in stations. The National Rail map also shows National Rail services is displayed as a large poster at most Tube stations. Finally, direction signs for the platforms indicate the geographical direction of the line, not the last stop of the line. It is always advisable to carry a pocket Tube map to help you with this. Be considerate of your fellow passengers as best you can. Pushing and rushing are seen as extremely rude – there’s not much need to run for a Tube train unless it’s the very last one of the day! Also, trying to strike up a conversation with strangers is seen as peculiar and will instantly mark you out as a tourist. Despite having a reputation as being aloof Londoners are usually happy to help out if you have a problem, but otherwise they’d rather you didn’t try be overly familiar. Although the doors on some Tube trains have buttons, they have been disconnected from the electricity & don’t do anything. Pushing a button will only mark you out as a tourist. If the train pulls into the station and the doors don’t open immediately then wait for a few seconds – the driver undershot the station and will need to drive the train forward a short distance. Tube safety and etiquette Crime, safety, and accidents Crime levels on the Tube are comparable to but typically lower than in many other subway systems, and traveller advice about watching luggage and valuables is reasonable. Owing to a heightened security climate, and a history of political violence targeting the Tube, unattended baggage may be treated as a suspect or explosive device and may be destroyed. Lost items (if not destroyed) will end up at the Lost Property Office (Tube: Baker Street). You fill in a form online describing your lost item and TfL will contact you if it is found. The Tube system is covered by an extensive CCTV system, although it is not advised to be reliant on this fact when travelling. The London Underground considers its safety record to be a matter of professional honour, major accidents being incredibly rare. Front-line staff are well trained for emergencies and will follow well rehearsed procedures. In addition front-line staff are generally appreciative of traveller vigilance, if concerns are politely expressed. If you notice something that concerns you please speak to a member of staff or a British Transport Police officer. On the wall of the platforms (or possible freestanding on outdoor platforms) there will be a round, white device labelled Help Point with two buttons and a fire alarm. Press the green button to alert staff to an emergency and press the blue button to ask for non-urgent assistance. If you see smoke or fire always use the fire alarm first. Illness and injury If you or a fellow passenger is injured or taken ill on a train then it’s easiest to leave the train at the next station and seek help on the platform. If there is a biohazard (blood and other bodily fluids) inside the train it will need to be taken out of service, so please inform staff. In hot weather it is always recommended to carry a snack and a bottle of water with you. Dehydration can set in quickly in the hot underground environment, especially when it’s busy. Passenger emergency alarm On Tube trains you will notice that there is a red handle you can pull to alert the driver to a serious incident or accident occurring on the train. If the train is in a tunnel the alarm should only be used in dire emergencies that require immediate attention, as pulling the alarm will activate the train’s brakes. In practice a driver will move forward into the next station where help can be obtained. Therefore, the alarms should mostly be used in stations if the need arises as passengers will be able to escape the train quickly if need be. TfL advise travellers to carefully consider their usage of the passenger alarm and, if suitable, leave the train at the next station and seek help from station staff instead. Because trains on the London Underground are run close together any delays can have serious knock-on effects for the rest of the service. In contrast, train drivers vary in their opinion as to when the alarm should be used: Consensus tends to be that if it’s something you would run down the train to tell the driver then the alarm should be used. Although there is no specific bylaw barring casual photography, owing to the increased threat from terrorism, all front-line staff will be understandably vigilant about the intent and nature of photographers. If you are visiting a station for the sole purpose of photography, or you plan to be in the station for some time, you should let a member of front-line staff know your intentions. At busy stations you should take care not to cause an obstruction. Under no circumstances should direct photography of security critical equipment (such as CCTV cameras) be taken, and it is advised to ask before photographing front-line staff. Large scale or commercial photography requires a specific permit which can be obtained through TfL. Permits are also needed for “filming”. More information about filming on TfL property is available at this website. London’s iconic red buses are recognised the world over, even if the traditional Routemaster buses, with an open rear platform and on-board conductor to collect fares, have mostly been phased out. These still run on the central section of route 15 daily between about 09:30 and 18:30, every 15 minutes. Buses are generally quicker than taking the Tube for shorter (less than a couple of stops on the Tube) trips, and out of central London you’re likely to be closer to a bus stop than a Tube station. Most buses in London are very frequent (at least every ten minutes.) Buses are usually accessible for buggies and wheelchairs. Buses also have a flat rate fare which stays the same no matter how far you travel (you will need to pay the fare again if you board a different bus). Using the bus Transport for London produces all Bus route maps Over 5 million bus trips are made each weekday; with over 700 different bus routes you are never far from a bus. Each bus stop has a sign listing the routes that stop there. Bus routes are identified by numbers and sometimes letters. Buses have very clear blinds on the front, with their route number and their destination. When you see your bus approaching, signal clearly to the driver that you intend to get on their bus: the way to do this is to stick your hand out, with an open palm. The driver will indicate and pull into the stop. Most buses have two doors. Form an orderly queue at the front door: when you reach the driver, touch your Oyster or contactless card on the reader, or show them your Travelcard or pass. Some buses are worked by the ‘New Routemaster’: you can get on this bus at any of its three doors, as long as you touch in your Oyster or contactless card as soon as you board. Some buses on routes 15 over the central section from Trafalgar Square to Tower Hill are run by the original heritage Routemasters: take a seat on the bus, and wait for the conductor to come round to scan your Oyster card. Always wait for people to get out of the bus before you enter. Hold on tight – especially if you can’t find a seat! Buses can accelerate and brake very fast so always grab hold of one of the handrails. Most buses have a system that provides visual and audible announcements of the bus’s destination at every stop, the stops and nearby landmarks. On Routemasters, the conductor will usually make announcements. When you are nearing your stop, press one of the red “STOP” buttons on the handrails once only. You’ll hear a bell, or a buzzer, and the words “Bus Stopping” will appear on the iBus screen. Get off the bus using the middle or rear door. If you’re travelling on a heritage Routemaster, there are only two bell-pushers: alternatively, there is a cord hanging from the ceiling on the lower deck which you can pull to ring the bell. Be very careful only to ring it once: two bells is the signal the conductor uses to tell the driver to continue past the next stop! Finally, always watch out for moving traffic when you get off the bus, especially if you are on a bus with an open platform at the back (a Routemaster or a New Bus for London) Don’t try to get off the bus until it has stopped, or is moving very slowly, and always be careful of cyclists and pedestrians. - If you are taking a pram/buggy with you, you must be prepared to fold it and carry your child if the bus is crowded or if a wheelchair user needs to get on the bus. - Smoking and drinking alcohol is not allowed on buses. Non-alcoholic drinks and most food is fine, but be considerate: fast food is often smelly and leaves a mess. - Stand on the lower deck only. - Don’t speak to the driver or try to get their attention when the bus is moving unless it is an emergency. - Some buses terminate early and don’t run the full length of the route. Always check the destination blind on the front of the bus, and if in doubt, ask the driver or the conductor. Drivers will usually announce a change in the bus’s destination – but not always! - You should always signal to the driver very clearly with your hand if you want the bus to stop, especially at quieter bus stops. The driver might drive past the stop if no one does this and no one on the bus is getting off. - If your bus terminates early and you have paid using Oyster or contactless debit/credit card, ask the driver for a continuation ticket, sometimes called a transfer ticket. This will will allow you to board another bus of the same route number to reach your destination without paying again. It is not possible to buy tickets for cash on the bus so you must have a valid Travelcard, Oyster card or contactless credit or debit card before you get on. Alternatively, tickets may be purchased from most newsagents in London, or from ticket machines at certain central London stops. The adult bus fare is £1.50. Unlike on the Tube, you are charged for each bus you travel on. If you change buses then you will normally be charged a new bus fare up to the daily/weekly price cap. However, the Hopper fare allows you to make two bus or tram journeys for the price of one if you use an Oyster card or contactless payment method. Your second journey must be made within an hour of touching in on the first bus or tram you are travelling on and you must also use the same card for both journeys. If you have a seven-day or monthly Travelcard or Bus and Tram Pass on your Oyster, that includes free bus travel across all of London, even outside the zones of your Travelcard (buses aren’t subject to zones). You still need to touch in when you get on the bus, but you won’t be charged. If you do not have a Travelcard, the fare of £1.50 is taken from your Oyster pay as you go credit as soon as you touch in when you get on the bus. The most you will be charged for single bus journeys in one day is £4.40: daily bus and tram travel is ‘capped’ at this level. If you have some money on your Oyster, but not enough for the full fare, the system will let you go into a negative balance to make one more journey, but you will not be able to use your Oyster again until you top up to clear the negative balance. You should be given a paper slip telling you that it is time to top up when this happens. Touch your Oyster on the reader as soon as you get on the bus or may be liable to a Penalty Fare or prosecution. Contactless credit, debit or prepaid cards You can also pay for with most contactless debit, credit or prepaid Visa, MasterCard/Maestro or American Express cards. You touch the card flat against the reader, like you would with an Oyster card, but your account is charged instead. Some foreign-issued cards will not work for contactless payment. The total charges for that day are calculated and taken out of your account overnight. As with Oyster, you are charged £1.50 for each bus fare, up to a cap of £4.40 each day. In addition, a weekly price cap applies from Monday to Sunday, so you will never pay more than £21 for bus travel on a contactless card in any one week. See above for further information on contactless payment. Children aged 10 and under travel for free on the bus when accompanied by an adult. Children between the ages of 11 and 15 must touch in using a Zip card, with which Tube journeys charge £0.85, yet journeys are still free on buses. If they do not have a Zip card they must pay the full fare using an adult Oyster or contactless card. 16-18 Student Oyster cards (only available to students studying in London) go up to age 18 and journeys are still free. Residents of England who have an ENCTS free bus pass (for the elderly or disabled) also get free travel: simply show your pass to the driver or conductor. Standard bus services run from around 06:00-00:30. Around half past midnight the network changes to the vast night bus network of well over 100 routes stretching all over the city. There are two types of night buses: 24-hour routes and N-prefixed routes. 24-hour services keep the same number as during the day and will run exactly the same route, such as the number 88, for example. N-prefixed routes are generally very similar to their day-route, but may take a slightly different route or are extended to serve areas that are further out. For example, the 29 bus goes from Trafalgar Square to Wood Green during the day; however, the N29 bus goes from Trafalgar Square to Wood Green and then continues to Enfield. Night buses run at a 30-minute frequency at minimum, with many routes at much higher frequencies up to every 5 minutes. Prices stay the same, and daily travelcards are valid until 04:29 the day after they were issued, so can be used on night buses. Most bus stops will have night bus maps with all the buses to and from that local area on it, although it is good to check on the TfL website beforehand, which also has all those maps easily available. While Britons on public transport are normally a model of reserve, those using night buses have a bit of a reputation for loud and rowdy behaviour. This is mainly because these passengers are often people who have been having a good time in central London’s clubs and bars; particularly true on buses leaving central London between 01:00 and 03:00. While the buses are normally quite safe, if this is a concern for you, consider taking a pre-booked minicab instead, or failing that stand on the lower deck of the bus nearer the driver. Always call out to the driver if you are pickpocketed, threatened or attacked. Docklands Light Railway (DLR) is a dedicated light rail network operating in, connecting with the Tube network at Bank, Tower Gateway (close to Tower Hill station), Canning Town, Heron Quays (close to Canary Wharf Tube station), and Stratford. As the trains operate automatically, it can be quite exciting – especially for children – to sit at the front and look out through the window, whilst feeling as though one is driving the train oneself. The DLR runs above ground on much of its route, and travels through many scenic parts of London, including the Docklands area where most of London’s skyscrapers are located. The DLR can be a little confusing as the routes are not easily distinguished. Check the displays on the platform which will show you the destination and the wait for the next three trains, and also check the destination displays on the front and side of the train and listen for announcements. At busy times, some trains do not run the full length of the route. In this instance you should take the first train, listen for announcements, and change where necessary. Be extra careful at Canning Town station as it is very busy and the line divides into two sections – one heading to Woolwich Arsenal and the other heading to Beckton. Always check the destination on the front of the train before getting on, especially at off-peak times when there may not be a return train for a good few minutes if you end up on the wrong branch. Unlike on the Tube, most DLR stations do not have ticket gates (except for Bank and Stratford). Also, unlike the Tube, you do need to push the buttons to open the doors. You can top up an Oyster card, buy a Travelcard or buy a paper ticket (at a substantial premium) from the ticket machines at the station. Most stations are unstaffed, so if you want to pay by cash then make sure you have plenty of change! As there are no gates, when travelling by Oyster you must always remember to touch in at the start of your journey and touch out at the end. Even if you are changing to the Underground at Canary Wharf/Heron Quays, you must still touch in/out at the DLR station: the system will recognise that you have made an interchange between the two stations and treat it as part of the same journey. Wikivoyage has a guide to, with information applicable to using the National Rail system within London. The British railway system is known as National Rail (although some older signs still refer to it as “British Rail”). London’s suburban rail services are operated by several private companies under tightly-written government contracts, and mostly run in the south of the city, away from the main tourist sights. Only one line (Thameslink) runs through central London – on a north-south axis between London Bridge or Blackfriars stations, and the underground level of St Pancras main line station. There is no one central station – instead, there are twelve mainline stations dotted around the edge of the central area, and most are connected by the Circle line (except Euston, Fenchurch St and those South of the river like Waterloo and London Bridge). Most visitors will not need to use National Rail services except for a few specific destinations such as Wimbledon, Hampton Court, Kew Gardens (Kew Bridge station), Windsor Castle, Greenwich, or the airports, or indeed if they are intending to visit other destinations in the UK. It’s important to know that the quickest route between two stations is often a combination of the Tube as well as National Rail trains. For instance, if you are going from central London to Wimbledon, it will usually be much quicker to go to Waterloo and take the first Wimbledon train (around fifteen minutes, maximum) rather than take the District line, which can take up to 45 minutes. Your pay-as-you-go Oyster card is valid in London zones 1-6, but not beyond, so be careful—if you want to travel beyond, you will need to buy a paper ticket from the ticket office at the station. If you travel beyond the London zones with no valid ticket, you will be charged a Penalty Fare (on National Rail services this is usually £20), you will have to buy another ticket for the remainder of your journey, and you will also be charged the maximum Oyster fare because you didn’t touch out. This adds up to a lot, so be careful and make sure you plan your journey! If in doubt, ask at the ticket office. There are express trains to Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports. Tickets are often sold at a substantial premium, so you may want to consider taking the slightly slower ‘stopping’ services instead: for instance, an Anytime single from Victoria to Gatwick costs £19.90 on the Gatwick Express, and only £14.40 when marked “Route Southern Only”—taking a Southern train to Gatwick is only eight minutes longer. Don’t forget: Oyster cards are not valid to the main airports, except for London City Airport and to Heathrow when travelling by Tube. Don’t throw your ticket away until you’re out of the station at your destination! Many stations have ticket gates which you will need to put your ticket through to exit; also, you need to retain all the parts of your ticket throughout your journey, as a member of railway staff may need to see it. In common parlance, Londoners may refer to travelling by “overground”, meaning going by National Rail (as opposed to going by Underground). However, only London Overground is a Transport for London rail service, which serves most boroughs of the capital. Oyster cards are accepted. Trains will usually run a minimum frequency of every fifteen minutes, and some stations have a considerably more frequent service. The trains have big windows allowing for great “urban scenic” views. The Overground appears on the Tube map as a double orange line. TfL also produces a map only showing Overground services. At many stations, trains leaving from the same platform will go to different destinations, so listen carefully for announcements and always check the destination on the front of the train. The Overground can be a great way to avoid changing trains in central London by skirting around the centre. It’s also well-connected: you can frequently change for Underground trains, other Overground destinations, or for mainline National Rail services from Stratford, Clapham Junction and Watford Junction. The Tramlink network is centred on, where it runs on street-level tracks around the Croydon Loop, providing transit to an area not well-served by the Tube or National Rail. Route 3 (Wimbledon to New Addington – green on the Tramlink map) is the most frequent service, running every 7 or 8 minutes Monday to Saturday daytime and every 15 minutes at all other times. Beckenham is served by Routes 1 and 2 (yellow and red on the Tramlink map), which terminate at Elmers End and Beckenham Junction respectively. All services travel around the Loop via West Croydon and run every 10 minutes Monday to Saturday daytime and every 30 minutes at all other times. Between Arena and Sandilands, these two services serve the same stops. Cycling in the United Kingdom The rules for cyclists are available in the British Government publication The Highway Code Due to the expense of other forms of transport and the compactness of central London,is a tempting option. Free cycle maps can usually be obtained from your local Tube station or bike shop. Most major roads in London will have a bus lane which is restricted to buses, taxis and bicycles. Many improvements have been made for cyclists in the city over the last few years, Noticeably, there are many new signposted cycle routes and new cycle lanes as well as a review of junctions considered dangerous for cycling. Despite recent improvements, however, London remains a relatively hostile environment for cyclists. The kind of contiguous cycle lane network found in many other European cities does not exist. The safest option is to stick to minor residential roads where traffic can be surprisingly calm outside rush hours. Critical Mass London is a cycling advocacy group which meets for regular rides through central London at 18:00 on the last Friday of each month. Rides start from the southern end of Waterloo Bridge. The London Cycling Campaign is an advocacy group for London cyclists. With active local groups in most of the city’s boroughs, it is recognised by local and regional government as the leading voice for cycling in the capital. Normally a cyclist should keep to the left of the lane when cycling on a road with traffic, to allow faster-moving traffic to overtake. However, it is legal for a cycle to dominate a lane by maintaining a central road position like any other vehicle. This will make you unpopular with any traffic behind you but it is recommended in London on approach to right-hand turns at junctions. Making a right-hand turn from the normal left-position means crossing the lane of traffic, which may often ignore you and any turn signals you might have been using, leading to potential accidents. Taking bikes on trains Permission to take bikes on trains is very limited in London due to overcrowding. Non-folding bikes can be taken only on limited sections of the Tube network, mostly only on the above-ground sections outside peak hours. For this reason, folding bicycles are becoming increasingly popular. Most National Rail operators allow bicycles outside peak hours. London offers a bicycle hire scheme known as Santander Cycles (colloquially referred to as “Boris Bikes” after Boris Johnson, a former London mayor), operated by Transport for London. Docking stations can be found across central London and slightly further out into areas such as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and Hammersmith. The bikes, all coloured a distinctive red, can be unlocked and ridden around the city with a credit card. A bicycle is hired from automated docking stations around the city. After a each journey it must be returned to some docking station of the network by locking the bike into the rack which must be confirmed by a green light at the dock. There are 2 payment plans: - Daily. Gives access to the system for unlimited number of rides during 24hr. A fee for the first 30 minutes an each ride is included into the initial payment (i.e. “free”). Every other 30 minutes above it costs extra £2. - Yearly. For a full year. £90. A Santander Cycles app can be used to make hiring process faster. Sometimes the app doesn’t show a journey as finished even if the bike was successfully docked back at a station. If in doubt it’s better to check your activity log at their official site. Cycle lanes provide on-road and off -road routes. The network is not comprehensive, and on the road lanes vary in quality and size (normally 1-2 m wide). Some are indicated just with an stencilled image of a bike on the road. If the line between the traffic lane and cycle lane is solid, then vehicles may sometimes enter the space. A dashed line indicates a recommended cycle lane and motorists may make use of this road space, but it’s recommended that they don’t. Cycle Superhighways are cycle routes that run into central London from outer London and across the capital. They are designed to provide safe, fast routes for cyclists who commute and are painted blue to indicate where they are. Some are segregated from the road but some may be on the main carriageway. Lists and maps of all routes are available here. Quietways are similar to Cycle Superhighways. They link key destinations in the capital but utilise side streets, waterways and parks instead of busy roads. As of February 2017 there is only one designated route – Waterloo to Greenwich – but more are due to follow. Click here for a map and more information about the scheme. The towpaths in north London along the Grand Union Canal and Regent’s Canal, and in London’s parks and other green areas, provide a traffic-free cycle path through the capital. The Grand Union canal connects Paddington to Camden and the Regent’s Canal connects Camden to Islington, Mile End and Limehouse in east London. It takes about 30-40 minutes to cycle from Paddington station to Islington along the towpaths. Pedestrians have a priority on towpaths – respect their right of the way! London has two types of taxis: the famous black cab, and so-called minicabs. Black cabs are the only ones licensed to “ply for hire” (i.e. pick people up off the street), while minicabs are more accurately described as “private hire vehicles” and need to be pre-booked. The famous black cab of London (not always black!) can be hailed from the kerb or found at one of the many designated taxi ranks. It is possible to book black cabs by phone, for a fee, but if you are in central London it will usually be quicker to hail one from the street. Their amber TAXI light will be on if they are available. Drivers must pass a rigorous exam of central London’s streets, known as ‘The Knowledge’, to be licensed to drive a black cab. This means they can supposedly navigate you to almost any London street without reference to a map. They are a cheap transport option if there are five passengers as they do not charge extras, and many view them as an essential experience for any visitor to London. Black cabs charge by distance and by the minute, are non-smoking, and have a minimum charge of £2.20. Tipping is not mandatory in either taxis or minicabs, despite some drivers’ expectations – use your discretion. If you like the service you may tip. If the ride has been uncomfortable or unsafe, or if the driver was rude, don’t. Most Londoners will simply round up to the nearest pound. Taxis are required by law to take you wherever you choose (within Greater London) if their TAXI light is on when you hail them. However some, especially older drivers, dislike leaving the centre of town, or going south of the River Thames. A good way to combat being left at the side of the curb is to open the back door, or even get into the cab, before stating your destination. Minicabs are normal cars which are licensed hire vehicles that you need to book by phone or at a minicab office. They generally charge a fixed fare for a journey, best agreed before you get in the car. Minicabs are usually cheaper than black cabs, although this is not necessarily the case for short journeys. Licensed minicabs display a Transport For London (TfL) Licence – usually in the front window. One of the features of the license plate is a blue version of the famous London Transport “roundel”. A list of licensed minicab operators can be found at TfL Cabwise. Some areas in London are poorly served by black cabs, particularly late at night. This has led to many illegal minicabs operating – just opportunistic people, with a car, looking to make some fast money. Some of these operators can be fairly aggressive in their attempts to find customers, and it’s now barely possible to walk late at night through any part of London with a modicum of nightlife without being approached. These illegal cars are also regularly unsafe: women are assaulted every week by illegal minicab operators (11 per month) and there is also a risk of robbery. You should avoid minicabs touting for business off the street and either take a black cab, book a licensed minicab by telephone, or take a night bus. Always remember: if it’s not licensed and it’s not pre-booked, it’s just a stranger’s car. Never get into an un-booked minicab. TfL operate a service called Cabwise, which will determine your location and provide three local, licensed cab numbers. If you have an iPhone or an Android smartphone, you can use the Cabwise application (search your platform’s app store) or text CAB to 60835 (be careful – this might not work from some phones!) You can also use an app such as Hailo, which allows you to summon a black cab to your location and will provide a map and approximate wait time for your taxi to arrive. Most railway stations will also be able to provide a list of good local cab firms (many will display this outside the station, even after the last train of the night has gone.) Londoners who drive will normally take public transport in the centre; follow their example. Unless you have a disability, there is no good reason whatsoever to drive a car in central London. Driving in central London is a slow, frustrating, expensive and often unnecessary activity. There are many sorts of automatic enforcement cameras and it is difficult and expensive to park. Driving outside of central London is easier, but traffic can still be an issue and most tourists won’t head out that far unless they have a reason. For those with disabilities driving can be much more convenient than using public transport. If disabled and a resident of a member state of the EU then two cars can be permanently registered, for free, for the Congestion Charge. Driving into central London on weekdays during daylight hours incurs a hefty charge called the Congestion Charge with very few exemptions. Rental cars also attract the charge. Cameras and mobile units record and identify the number plates and registration details of all vehicles entering the charging zone with high accuracy. The Central London Congestion Charge M-F 07:00-18:00 (excluding public holidays) attracts a fee of £8 if paid the same day, or £10 if paid on the next charging day. Numerous payment options exist: by phone, online, at convenience stores displaying the red ‘C’ logo in the window, and by voucher. Failure to pay the charge by midnight the next charging day incurs a hefty automatic fine of £80 (£40 if paid within 2 weeks). Despite the Congestion Charge, London – like most major cities – continues to experience traffic snarls. These are, of course, worse on weekdays during peak commuting hours (i.e. between 07:30-09:30 and 16:00-19:00). At these times public transport (and especially the Tube) usually offers the best alternative for speed and reduced hassle. One good tip is, that outside advertised restricted hours (usually on a Sunday), parking on a single yellow line is permissible. Parking on a red line or a double yellow line is never permissible and heavily enforced. Find and read the parking restrictions carefully! Parking during weekdays and on Saturday can also mean considerable expense in parking fees – fees and restrictions are ignored at your extreme financial peril – issuing fines, clamping and towing vehicles (without warning!) has become a veritable new industry for borough councils staffed by armies of traffic wardens. Also watch out for marked parking bays as these always have restrictions. Many are “Resident Parking Only” between certain hours and you will be fined if you park in these hours without a permit. Some bays also have restrictions on how long you can park in them for and these can be confusing. If in doubt: Don’t park! If you are driving to your destination then it’s safest to find a dedicated private car park nearby. These may be eye-wateringly expensive, but parking on the roads is a lottery with low odds of you winning. Two large car park operators are NCP and Q-Park. Motorcycles and scooters Motorcycles and scooters are fairly common in London as they can pass stationary cars, can usually be parked for free, and are exempt from the Congestion Charge. Scooters and bikes with automatic transmission are much more preferable – a manually-geared racing bike is completely impractical unless you have excellent clutch control (although it has to be said you will see plenty of them being ridden aggressively by motorcycle couriers and locals as it can be the fastest way to get around!) Likewise to bicycles, car drivers can sometimes show disregard to anyone on two wheels and larger vehicles have an unwritten priority so take care when crossing junctions. Crash helmets are mandatory. Parking for bikes is usually free – there are designated motorcycle-parking areas on some side-streets and some multi-level car parks will have bike parking on the ground level. London is now promoting a network of river bus and pleasure cruise services along the River Thames from Hampton Court in the west to Woolwich Arsenal in the east. London River Services (part of Transport for London) manages regular commuter boats and a network of piers all along the river and publishes timetables and river maps similar to the famous Tube map. While boat travel may be slower and a little more expensive than Tube travel, it offers an extremely pleasant way to cross the city with unrivalled views of the London skyline. Sailing under Tower Bridge is an unforgettable experience. Boats are operated by private companies and they have a separate ticketing system from the rest of London transport; however if you have a Travelcard you get a 33% discount on most boat tickets. Many boat operators offer their own one-day ticket – ask at the pier kiosks. Generally, tickets from one boat company are not valid on other operators’ services. Oyster cards can be used as payment for the ‘Clipper’-styled commuter services but not for tour boats. All the central London sights in Westminster and the South Bank tourist attractions are easily accessible by boat as are: Consider a trip along an old Victorian canal through the leafy suburbs of North London. The London Waterbus Company runs scheduled services (more in summer, fewer in winter) from Little Venice to Camden Lock with a stop at the London Zoo (pick up only). The 45-minute trip along Regent’s Canal is a delightful way to travel. Inline skating on roads and pavements (sidewalks) is completely legal, except in the “square-mile” of the. Roads are not the greatest but easily skateable. Central London drivers are more used to skaters than those in the outskirts. By cable car The Emirates Air Line is a cable car that runs across the River Thames in east London and connects the Greenwich Peninsula on the south bank (near The O2) and the Royal Docks on the north bank (near the ExCeL Exhibition Centre). The Greenwich Peninsula terminal connects to the North Greenwich Tube station on the Jubilee line. The Royal Docks terminal connects to the Royal Victoria DLR station. Although it is part of the TfL network and uses Oyster cards, the Air Line is mostly used by tourists and is therefore usually at its quietest during the week. It tends to be busiest when there is a large event at the ExCel Exhibition Centre. If you are travelling to The O2 for an event that finishes late, the Emirates Air Line service usually finishes much earlier than the Tube and DLR. You should have an alternative for getting back across the river. |Day||2 October to 31 March||1 April to 30 June||1 July to 1 October| |Monday to Thursday||07:00-21:00||07:00-22:00||07:00-23:00| |Saturday and Bank Holidays||08:00-23:00||08:00-23:00||08:00-23:00| I have sailed the world, beheld its wonders —Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd London with children London can be stressful with kids – checkfor slightly less stressful sightseeing. However, it is a breeze with children over 7. Transport for London Itineraries Feeling overwhelmed? Not sure how to begin planning your trip? Transport for London have produced their own useful list of itineraries for tourists. They include famous landmarks and iconic transport icons on their various public transport networks, among others. London is a huge city, so all individual listings are in the appropriatearticles and only an overview is presented here. - Buckingham Palace. The London residence of the Queen, in . Open for tours during the summer months only, but a must-see sight even if you don’t go in. (Tube: Green Park) - London Eye. The world’s fourth-largest observation wheel, situated on the of the Thames with magnificent views over London. (Tube: Waterloo) - Marble Arch is a white Carrara marble monument designed by John Nash. It is located in the middle of a huge traffic island at one of the busiest intersections in central London where Oxford Street meets Park Lane in . (Tube: Marble Arch) - is one of the most photographed sights in London. The Shaftesbury Memorial, topped by the statue of Anteros (now popularly identified as Eros), stands proudly in the middle of Piccadilly Circus while the north eastern side is dominated by a huge, iconic neon advertising hoarding. Occasionally there will be scaffolding or fencing around the Eros statue in order to protect it during times when large crowds are anticipated. (Tube: Piccadilly Circus) - St Paul’s Cathedral, also in , is Sir Christopher Wren’s great accomplishment, built after the 1666 Great Fire of London – the great dome is still seated in majesty over The City. A section of the dome has such good acoustics that it forms a “Whispering Gallery”. There is also a viewing area that offers views of the surrounding area including the Millennium Bridge that lies nearby. (Tube: St Paul’s) - Tower Bridge. The iconic 19th century bridge located by the Tower of London near website or at the bridge. (Tube: Tower Hill) . It is decorated with high towers featuring a drawbridge. The public are allowed access to the interior of the bridge via the Tower Bridge Exhibition, tickets for which can be purchased on the - Tower of London. Situated just south east of , is London’s original royal fortress by the Thames. It is over 900 years old, contains the Crown Jewels, is guarded by Beefeaters, and is a site. It is also considered by many to be the most haunted building in the world. If you are interested in that sort of thing its definitely somewhere worth visiting. Sometimes there are guided ghost walks of the building. You can even have a good meal in one of the buildings on the property. (Tube: Tower Hill) - . Home of Nelson’s Column and the lions, and once a safe haven for London’s pigeons until the recent introduction of hired birds of prey. The “Fourth Plinth” has featured a succession of artworks since 1999. Overlooked by the National Gallery, it’s the nearest London has to a “centre”, and has been pedestrianised. (Tube: Charing Cross) - Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster, including the Queen Elizabeth II Tower (the clock tower commonly known as the name of its bell, Big Ben) and the Houses of Parliament, in . The seat of the United Kingdom parliament and site, as well as setting for royal coronations since 1066, most recently Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The Palace of Westminster is open to the public only for viewing parliamentary debates, tours of the building are available in July – August when Parliament is away on summer recess. Westminster Abbey also has a restaurant and a café that both serve good food. (Tube: Westminster) - 30 St Mary Axe or The Gherkin, a peculiarly-shaped 180 m (590 ft) building in the City. There is no public access to the building itself but it can be viewed from the roads and small paved areas directly in front of and behind the building. Security guards can be overzealous in this area and you may be asked to move on or stop taking photographs if you are doing so (although this may seem overbearing, it is private land and they can ask you to leave if they wish). Commanding views of this building can also be obtained from public roads near the site such as Leadenhall Street. Of minor interest to history fans is an inscription on Bury Street dedicated to a young Roman girl who was found buried here by archaeologists in 1995. Her remains were moved to the Museum of London while the Gherkin was being constructed, and were reburied in 2007 at the original site. (Tube: Aldgate) - The Shard, e-mail: [email protected]. 1 April – 31 October 10:00 – 22:00, 1 November – 31 March 10:00 – 19:00. A futuristic triangular skyscraper that dominates the London skyline and is the tallest building in the EU. There is a viewing deck on the 72nd floor that is open to the public, tickets for which must be booked via the website. There are also restaurants and the expensive luxury hotel Shangri-La on the lower floors. (Tube: London Bridge) Museums and galleries Central London hosts an outstanding collection of world-class museums and galleries, several of truly iconic status. Even better, London is unique among global capitals in that the majority of the museums have no entrance charges, allowing visitors to make multiple visits with ease. Special or temporary exhibitions usually attract an admission charge. London museums and galleries with no general admission charge (free entry!) include: - (Tube: Holborn)—a treasure trove of world cultures from across the ages, on a par with the Paris Louvre and New York’s Metropolitan Museum - (Tube: Charing Cross)—houses the national collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the 13th to the 19th centuries - (Tube: Charing Cross) - (Tube: South Kensington) - (Tube: South Kensington) - (Tube: South Kensington) - (Tube: Southwark, Blackfriars) - (Tube: Pimlico) - (Tube: Marble Arch) and most museums in. Aside from these world famous establishments, there is an almost unbelievable number of minor museums in London covering a very diverse range of subjects. The British Government lists over 240 genuine museums in the city. Notable smaller museums - London Transport Museum (Tube: Covent Garden) - Museum of London (Tube: Barbican or St. Paul’s) - Museum of London Docklands (DLR: West India Quay) The “green lungs” of London are the many parks, great and small, scattered throughout the city including, and . Most of the larger parks have their origins in royal estates and hunting grounds and are still owned by the Crown, despite their public access. - make up a huge open space in central London and are very popular for picnics. (Tube: High Street Kensington, Marble Arch, Green Park or Hyde Park Corner) - is wonderful open park in the northern part of central London.(Tube:Camden Town, Regent’s Park) - has charming and romantic gardens ideal for picnics and for strolling around. St. James’s Park is situated between Buckingham Palace on the west and Horse Guards Parade on the east. - is a huge open green space in north London. It’s mot a tended park as such and is remarkably wild for a metropolitan city location. The views from the Parliament Hill area of the heath overlooking the city skyline are quite stunning. (Tube: Hampstead, Overground: Hampstead Heath, Gospel Oak) - also is a huge green space, but has a thriving deer population that is culled in the spring. Excellent place for cycling. (Tube:Richmond then Bus:371) - , near to Hampton Court Palace, is the second-largest park in London. More low-key than its larger cousin, Richmond Park, it too has a large deer population. Bushy Park contains numerous ponds, bridleways, two allotments, and at its northern edge, the National Physical Laboratory. English Heritage runs the Blue Plaques programme in London. Blue Plaques celebrate great figures of the past and the buildings that they inhabited. These are among the most familiar features of the capital’s streetscape and adorn the façades of buildings across the city. Since the first plaque was erected in 1867, the number has grown steadily and there are now more than 800. Recipients are as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sigmund Freud, Charles de Gaulle, Jimi Hendrix and Karl Marx. Look out for these around the city. Whereas some London museums offer free entry, some other top London attractions are ridiculously expensive. For example, entry to Westminster Abbey costs £20 per person (adult), and entry to the Tower is £21.50 per adult if bought online (2017). These prices can be sometimes mitigated by a purchase of London Pass, which needs to be done at the London Pass website. The pass comes in several varieties and gives access to over 60 attractions, including both Westminster Abbey and the Tower. For example, a day pass costs £62 for an adult (2017). The best strategy, if one wants to visit several expensive high-profile attractions, is to buy a day pass and to try visiting all of them in the same day. This requires some advanced planning and will not give you much time at each place you visit – for example, it can take an hour on public transport to travel between the Tower of London and London Zoo. London is a huge city, so all individual listings are in the appropriate Time Out London website also has major shows listed. There is also a Time Out iPhone/iPod app available although the print version tends to be more detailed.articles. To make the most of the city’s tremendous cultural offerings (performing arts, museums, exhibitions, clubs, eateries and numerous others), visitors will do well to pick up a copy of a cultural magazine like Time Out London (available at most corner shops and newsagents) which gives detailed information and critiques on what’s around town including show times and current attractions. The London is one of the best cities in the world for concerts, spanning from new musical trends to well known bands. Between huge concert facilities and small pubs, there are hundreds of venues that organise and promote live music every week. Many concerts, especially in smaller or less known places are free, so there is plenty of choice even for tourists on a budget. London has long been a launchpad for alternative movements, from the mods of the 1960s, punks of the 70s, new romantics of the 80s, the Britpop scene of the 90s, and the indie rock movement spearheaded by The Libertines and their ilk. It has one of the world’s most lively live music scenes: any band heading a British, European or World tour will play London, not to mention the local talent. London’s music scene is incredibly diverse, covering all genres of music from electro-jazz to death-metal, and all sizes of bands, from the U2s and Rolling Stones of the world to one man bands who disband after their first gig. This diversity is reflected in prices. As a rough guide: £20 and up for ‘top 40’ bands in arena-sized venues, £10 and up for established bands in mid-sized venues, £6 or more for up-and-coming bands and clubnights in smaller venues, £5 and up for new bands in bars and pubs. London has hundreds of venues spread out over the city and the best way to know what’s going on where is to browse online ticket agencies, Music Magazine’s gig directories and bands’ MySpace pages. A few areas which have higher concentrations of pubs and venues than others. Kilburn in North West London has long been known as an Irish area; though their numbers have somewhat declined, a visit to a local pub will show their influence remains today. Kilburn’s The Good Ship is a favourite place for young aspiring bands to try to get a foot off the ground, due to its inclusive policies and fair payment system. Good for those who would like to see bands “before they were big”, who appreciate £5 entrance fees, good beer and friendly staff. One of the easiest to use and most comprehensive listings websites is LondonEars. The West End, especially the areas concentrated around Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Shaftesbury Avenue and Haymarket, is one of the world’s premier destinations for theatre, including musical theatre. Covent Garden has the only actor-sponsored school in the city, the Actors Centre, which also gave way to the London Acting Network, a London acting community support group. In the centre of Leicester Square there is an official half-price TKTS booth. Be wary of other ticket offices -including those claiming to be the “Official Half-Price Ticket Office” – as these may have higher prices, and have been known to sell fake tickets. For up-to-date listings see the weekly magazine Time Out or check the Official London Theatre site. The South Bank is another area well known for world class theatre, and is home to the National Theatre and the Globe Theatre, the latter of which is London’s only thatched building and an attraction in itself. Each Globe performance has over 700 £5 tickets. London’s theatre scene outside of these two main districts is known as “the Fringe”. Several of the larger and more established fringe theatres are an excellent way to see top quality productions of plays that may move to the West End, but at lower than West End prices. The most significant of these are: - The Royal Court (Nearest Tube is Sloane Square). This theatre specialises in new writing, and recent productions that have transferred to great acclaim include Enron by Lucy Prebble and Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, which had long runs in the West End and on Broadway. - The Menier Chocolate Factory (Short walk from London Bridge station). This small theatre adjacent to Borough Market has done spectacularly well with revivals of musicals, including Sunday in the Park with George and A Little Night Music both by Stephen Sondheim and which had runs in the West End and Broadway. - The Lyric Theatre (Short walk from Hammersmith Tube station), e-mail: [email protected]. Not to be confused with its West End namesake this fascinating theatre comprises a Victorian interior transplanted into a modern office building. It offers a mix of modern interpretations of Shakespeare, musicals (Sprink Awakenings was a notable success) and plays that reflect the multicultural nature of its location, in particular serving the Asian and Afro-Caribbean populations of West London. Other things to do - Changing the Guard, Buckingham Palace SW1A 1AA. Buckingham Palace: alternate days 11:30 (except daily May-Jul). Horse Guards Arch: M-Sa 11:00, Su 10:00. The 45 min ceremony which occurs every morning outside Buckingham palace often features Guards regiments with bearskins and red tunics together with military bands. All these soldiers are fighting troops and there will be times when other regiments mount the guard at Buckingham Palace while units are deployed on active service overseas. In Whitehall, cavalry of the Household division on horseback and foot make the formal changeover between the previous guards on duty and the new guards at Horse Guards Parade. The Household division has guarded the royal family since 1660 and continue to do so today. - Take a walk through London’s Royal Parks. A good walk would start at Paddington station, and head through Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park (passing Buckingham Palace) and St James Park before crossing Trafalgar Square and the River Thames to the and Waterloo Station. At a strolling pace this walk would take half a day, with plenty of places to stop, sit, drink, eat en route. - Watch a film. As well as the world-famous blockbuster cinemas in the West End, London has a large number of superb art house cinemas. In the summer months, there are often outdoor screenings at various venues, such as Somerset House and in some of the large parks. - Watch football. Take in a home match of one of the city’s 15+ professional football clubs for a true experience of a lifetime as you see the passion of the “World’s Game” in its mother country. London will have five clubs in the top Premier League in the upcoming 2017–18 season—Arsenal, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Tottenham Hotspur, and West Ham United. A level down, in the Football League Championship, finds Brentford, Fulham, Millwall, and Queens Park Rangers (QPR). Five other clubs are in lower levels of the professional league system—Charlton Athletic in Football League One; and AFC Wimbledon, Barnet, Dagenham & Redbridge and Leyton Orient in Football League Two. Many of the bigger clubs will require booking in advance, sometimes many months ahead, but smaller clubs allow you to simply turn up on match day and pay at the gate. (Owing to strict anti-tout regulations, the resale of tickets is not allowed.) You will be able to find a ticket to a quality football match on any Saturday during the season. - Wimbledon. Wimbledon is the oldest tennis tournament in the world and is widely considered the most prestigious. Naturally it is a regular feature on the Tennis calendar. London goes “tennis crazy” for two weeks when the competition commences in late June and early July. One of the greatest traditions is to eat Strawberries and Cream with sugar. (Tube:Southfields) - Open House London Weekend. Explore many of the city’s most interesting buildings during the London Open House Weekend – usually held on the third weekend of September. During this single weekend, several hundred buildings which are not normally open to the public are opened up. See website for details of buildings opening in any given year – some buildings have to be pre-booked in advance – book early for the popular ones! - Winter skating. London has a outdoor ice rinks that open in the winter months. Considered by some to be somewhat overpriced and overcrowded, they nonetheless have multiplied, easing congestion and increasing competition. Most charge from £10-12 (adults) for an hour on the ice, including skate hire. See the district articles for the , and . - Summer skating. In summer (and also in winter, for the more dedicated) there is also a thriving roller skating (on inline and traditional “quad” skates) scene in London, catering to many disciplines including street hockey, freestyle slalom, dance, general recreational skating (including three weekly marshalled group street skates) and speed skating. This mostly centres around Hyde Park (on the Serpentine Road) and Kensington Gardens (by the Albert Memorial). See the district articles for and . - Tours. If you don’t feel like splashing out on one of the commercial bus tours, you can make your own bus tour by buying an card and spending some time riding around London on the top deck of standard London buses. Of course you don’t get the open air or the commentary, but the views are very similar. You will likely get lost but that is half the fun; if it worries you go for a commercial tour. One tour, for instance, can be obtained from The London Pass. There is a website for this company. Essentially what it does is sell a 24-hour ticket to use the company’s buses to see the essential sites of London and a boat tour on the Thames (with the same ticket) provides a river tour of some of metropolitan London. Taking a tour like this is a good way to spend much of a first day in London, so you can decide what you want to see up close later. Other commercial tours offer similar services. - Spitalfields Markets, 65 Brushfield St London E1 6AA (Straight down Bell Lane past 66-68 and keep walking). Visit the thriving old Spitalfields markets which were the original London fruit markets. They have a daily market selling amazing vintage odds and ends and new fresh clothes! Visit 66/68 Bell Lane nearby to see a wealthy merchants house, rumor has it John Lennon once played on the roof of this building with Yoko Ono. - Insider London deliver a range of unique alternative London walking tours. Tours include London Street Art, London Underground}, Sustainable Architecture, Death and Debauchery and bespoke tours. - NFL International Series. NFL ( ) games held in Wembley and Twickenham Stadiums. In the upcoming 2017 season, two games will be played at Wembley and two at Twickenham. Usually held on Sunday evenings or afternoons between October and December of each year. Universities in London London attracts more students from overseas than any other city in the world, and is home to a huge variety of academic institutions. Its universities include some of the oldest and most prestigious in the world. The University of London is a federal university system with many constituent colleges, though for all practical purposes each constituent college operates as a separate university. London School of Economics and Political Science is located on the boundary of Covent Garden and Holborn in Westminster, 18 Nobel Prize winners and 50 world leaders have studied here. The School offers a well regarded lecture programme that is open to the public. Speakers have included Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Paul Krugman. Event schedule and ticket information available from the LSE website. University College London academic research is cited more than any other university in the UK, and its courses are regarded as among the best in Britain. The campus is located just north of the British Museum in the literary area of Bloomsbury. Notable alumni include Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Graham Bell and the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose mummified body is on display at the school in a wooden cabinet called the “auto-icon”. Imperial College London is the UK’s leading university specialising in science, engineering, business and medicine. The campus is located in a beautiful area of South Kensington, surrounded by numerous cultural institutions including the Natural History Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Notable alumni include Sir Alexander Fleming, Thomas Henry Huxley, and H.G. Wells. Others include King’s College London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Queen Mary, University of London, London Business School and the University of Westminster London is a natural place to learn and improve spoken and written English. There are a huge range of options, from informal language exchange services to evening classes and formal language schools. There unaccredited schools charging hefty fees and offering qualifications that are viewed as worthless. If choosing a course from a privately-run school or college, it is important to ensure the institution is accredited by the British Council. Some links to British Council accredited schools: - Linguaenglish London. Lingua London is a family-run English language school and has been teaching English only courses in London for over 10 years. - Rose of York. Rose of York has been teaching English language courses for over 21 years and they offer full-time, intensive or part-time English courses London is one of the world’s leading financial centres and so professional services is the main area of employment, although this sector has been hit hard by the global financial crisis. As of mid-2010, the job market in London has recovered somewhat. It is best to check with recruiters and staffing agencies. London is hugely popular as a working holiday destination – work in bars and the hospitality industry is relatively easy to find. Wages are generally higher in London than the rest of the UK, in part due to the addition of London weighting, although the cost of living is higher still. London is one of the world’s most fashion-conscious cities: it has an abundance of clothing shops from the flagship stores ofto the tiny boutiques of . Though not particularly known for bargain shopping, nearly anything you could possibly want to buy is available in London. That being said, during major sales, such as the annual Boxing Day sale after Christmas, prices for certain items have been known to be slashed by up to 70%, meaning that it is possible to find bargains for genuine luxury-branded goods if you are there at the right time. In Central London, the main shopping district is the West End (Bond Street, Covent Garden, Oxford Street and Regent Street). On Thursdays many West End stores close later than normal (19:00-20:00). - Selfridges, John Lewis (includes a food hall), Marks & Spencer and other department stores. It is best to shop here in the morning as the street becomes increasingly busy during the day. (Tube: Oxford Circus) . Main shopping street, home to flagship branches of all the major British high street retailers in one go including - Liberty, and the London Apple Store. (Tube: Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus) (between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus). Includes such gems as Hamleys, considered to be London’s flagship toy store spread out on seven levels, the iconic luxury department store - . Some of the world’s most luxurious designer stores such as Cartier, D&G, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton and Versace. (Tube: Bond Street) - . Contains some of the world’s most luxurious designer interior stores such as Heals, whilst the southern end is famous for its large concentration of hi-fi, computer and electronics stores. (Tube: Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street) - . Fashionable area home to quaint outlets and relatively expensive designer stores. Around Seven Dials, chains include Adidas Originals, All Saints, Carhartt, Fred Perry, G Star Raw and Stussy. For shoes head for Neal Street. Also the London Transport Museum whose gift shop has some of the best souvenirs in the city (old maps, vintage Tube posters, etc.) London’s second Apple Store is located here as well. (Tube: Covent Garden) - (near Covent Garden). Traditionally a book lover’s haven, it still has the giant general bookstore Foyles, and a few specialist and antiquarian shops survive south of Cambridge Circus and on the side streets to the east. (Tube: Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square, or Charing Cross) - Fortnum & Mason. (near Piccadilly Circus). Home to the luxury department store - Denmark Street (at the north end of Charing Cross Road near Tottenham Court Road station). Also known as Tin-Pan Alley, this is a music lover’s paradise with an amazing array of music shops, bars and clubs in one short street. (Tube: Tottenham Court Road) - . Offers alternative music and clothes. Now home to Chappell of Bond Street’s historic music shop. (Tube: Oxford Circus) - . Alternative clothing and other alternative shopping, popular with teenagers and young adults. Has the headquarters for Cyberdog – a large shop which sells clothing and accessories for the club and rave scene. Camden Lock Market is also worth a visit to see independent artists plying their wares. (Tube: Camden Town) - . The King’s Road is noted for fashion, homeware and children’s clothing. On Wednesday many stores close late. (Tube: South Kensington) - Harrods (includes a food hall) and Harvey Nichols. On Wednesday many stores close late. (Tube: Knightsbridge) . Department stores include the world-famous - Fortuny. (Tube: Knightsbridge) . Shop where royalty and celebrities shop! One of the world’s most unique and famous streets. It is known as one of London’s most fashionable and distinctive streets, housing some of the best known names in London fashion, interspersed with trendy restaurants, jewellers and speciality shops including - . Some of the world’s most famous shirts are made on Jermyn Street. Savile Row is home to some of the world’s best men’s bespoke tailors including Henry Poole, Gieves & Hawkes, H. Huntsman & Sons, and Dege & Skinner. (Tube: Westminster) - Westfield London in Shepherd’s Bush is one of the two largest shopping mall complexes in Greater London. It is served by the London Overground and the Underground. It is easiest to get here via public transport, but there is reasonable car parking space available. (Tube: Shepherd’s Bush) - Westfield Stratford City in Stratford is a large shopping mall complex located on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. There is ample car parking and you can also park here to access the Park itself. This Westfield is easier to access by car due to its close proximity to the A12 road. (Tube/DLR: Stratford) food market, offering fruit, vegetables, cheese, bread, meat, fish, and so on, much of it organic. The market opens Th-Sa. For market shopping, it’s best to go in the morning, or after 14:00, since it starts to get very crowded by around 11:30 when the lunch crowd comes in. Lunch here is good though because there are many stalls that offer fresh made fast food on the spot; from ostrich burgers to falafel, most tastes are catered for. (Tube: London Bridge)is a great (if expensive) market for clothes from up-and-coming designers, records, housewares, food, and all things trendy. Find it at 65 Brushfield St, E1 6AA (straight down Bell Lane past 66-68 and keep walking). Visit 66/68 Bell Lane nearby to see a wealthy merchants house, rumour has it John Lennon once played on the roof of this building with Yoko Ono. (Tube: Liverpool Street)is an excellent Also be sure to check out, and . Tax-free shops in airports are not strong in variety, prices are equal to London, and they close rather early as well. Shop listings at airport web sites can help to plan your tax-free (vs traditional) shopping. In the evening allow an extra half hour as closing hours are not always strictly respected. Many big department stores in central London have an information booth where they can give you the paperwork needed to reclaim tax on purchases made at the store when you get to the airport. London, like the rest of the UK, uses the British Pound Sterling. Retail prices for most items, with a few exceptions, always include VAT (at 20%). Visa and MasterCard/Maestro are the two most commonly-accepted debit/credit cards, although most large shops will also accept American Express. If your card does not have a microchip (for Chip & PIN) some machines (for instance, at Tube stations) will be unable to read your card. Some shops may ask you for additional identification, especially in relation to high value items, or items that are under age-related restrictions. Most shops no longer accept personal cheques. Contactless or NFC-enabled VISA and MasterCard cards can also be used for purchases of usually up to £20 in lieu of Chip & Pin, even on London Underground fare gates and buses. £50 notes are not often used in everyday transactions and most shops will not accept them. When exchanging money at a bureau de change make sure to ask for £5, £10 and £20 notes only. The Bank of England’s guide to bank notes may be of use. |This page uses the following price ranges for a typical meal for one, including soft drink:| It is a huge task for a visitor to find the “right place” to eat in London – with the “right atmosphere”, at the “right price” – largely because, as in any big city, there are literally thousands of venues from which to choose, ranging from fast food joints, pubs, and mainstream chains all the way up to some of the most exclusive restaurants in the world which attract the kind of clientele that don’t need to ask the price. Sorting the good from the bad isn’t easy, but London has something to accommodate all budgets and tastes. As London is one of the world’s most multicultural cities, it is possible to find virtually every cuisine from around the world here if you look hard enough. Following is a rough guide to what you might get, should you fancy eating out: Smoking is illegal in all enclosed and indoor public spaces in the UK. - Up to £5 – you can get a good English pub or cafeteria breakfast with a rack of bacon, beans in tomato sauce, egg, sausage, orange juice and coffee or tea. Most pubs stop this offer at 11:00, but there are literally hundreds of backstreet cafes (colloquially known as “greasy spoons”) which will serve this sort of food all day. Most supermarket chains offer a “meal deal”, consisting of a sandwich, a drink and a bag of crisps or fruit for £3 together, while buying the sandwich only can be the same price. If you are going to be on a budget for several days, the supermarkets are a good option. - £7 – will buy you a couple of sandwiches and a soft drink, some takeaway fish and chips, or a fast food meal. There are also mostly Chinese restaurants which serve an all-you-can-eat buffet for around this price. These are dotted about the West End and it is well worth asking a member of public or a shopkeeper where the nearest one is. These restaurants make much of their revenue on drinks although these are usually still moderately priced. The food while not being of the finest standard is usually very tasty and the range of dishes available is excellent. There are literally thousands of so-called takeaways in London and are a cheap alternative to a restaurant meal. Check with your hotel management if they allow food deliveries before ordering in. Most takeaways will offer some form of (usually very limited) seating, but not all do. - £6-10 – will get you a good pub meal and drink or a good Chinese/Indian/Italian/Thai/Vietnamese buffet. Many pubs have a buy-one-get-one-free offer, and you can either order two main dishes for yourself or bring a friend. - £15 – some more expensive French, Mediterranean and international restaurants do cheaper two or three course lunch menus. - £25 – offers you a lot more choice. You can have a good meal, half a bottle of wine and change for the tube home. There are plenty of modest restaurants that cater for this bracket. - £50 (to almost any amount!) – with more money to spend you can pick some of the city’s finer restaurants. It may be a famous chef (like Michel Roux, Jr, or Gordon Ramsay) or simply a place that prides itself on using the finest ingredients. Worth the splurge to impress a special someone. These establishments often need to be booked well in advance, and most will enforce a dress code of some sort, like Rules of Covent Garden, the oldest restaurant still extant. Prices inevitably become inflated at venues closest to major tourist attractions – beware the so-called tourist traps. The worst tourist trap food, in the opinion of many Londoners, is served at the various steak houses (Angus Steak House, Aberdeen Steak House, etc. – they are all dotted around the West End and near the main train stations). Londoners wouldn’t dream of eating here – you shouldn’t either! Notorious areas for inflated menu prices trading on travellers’ gullibility and lack of knowledge are the streets around the British Museum, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Even the major fast food chains charge a premium in their West End outlets – so watch out. Pubs in the touristy areas of London are usually a poor choice for food although there are some brilliant “gastro-pubs” hidden away. In general avoid all pubs that have graphic-designed and printed menus. Look around you – see any locals tucking in? No? – then you shouldn’t either. The other rule to follow when avoiding poor food is the same as in any other part of Europe – is the menu available in multiple languages? If yes then start running! In the suburbs, the cost of eating out is reduced drastically. Particularly in large ethnic communities, there is a competitive market which stands to benefit the consumer. In East London for example, the vast number of chicken shops means that a deal for 2 pieces of chicken, chips (fries) and a drink shouldn’t cost you more than £3 especially on Brick Lane. Brick Lane is also known for being home to London’s version of the beigel (spelt “bagel” in the United States and Canada, but pronounced the same way), with Brick Lane Beigel Bake and Britain’s First & Best Beigel Shop being among the sole remnants of what was once a thriving Jewish community in the neighbourhood. Both shops are also known for their salt beef, London’s version of Jewish-style cured meats, and a popular filling in their beigel sandwiches. Another good (and cheap) lunch option is a chicken or lamb doner (gyro) at many outlets throughout the city, though meat quality is often poor. For more authentic Cockney food, try pie and mash, which originates from the working-class in the East End. Usually minced beef and cold water pastry pie served with mashed potato, mushy peas and “liquor” gravy, it tastes a lot better than it sounds. Some of the best pie houses are M. Manze in Peckham or F. Cooke in Hackney Broadway Market. Water Souchet and London Particular (green-pea and ham) are classic Cockney soups, though hard to find on menus. For those game, jellied eels, pickled-cockles and whelks are all traditional London seafood. It’s people’s experiences in these kind of places that gives Britain a bad name for food! Central London’s Borough Market offers wholesale produce as well as individual stalls that sell small bites and drinks for a casual and cheap meal. Kappacasein Dairy has a popular stand in the market famous for their grilled cheese which has earned the praise of Giada De Laurentiis and Ruth Reichl. Of course, the quintessential British dish fish and chips is widely available in London, but the standards can be pretty disappointing in the tourist trap pubs. The best-rated fish and chips shops in London are generally located in the suburbs, away from all the tourist fare in central London. Tipping may also be different than what you’re used to. All meals include the 20% VAT tax and some places include a service fee (10-12%). The general rule is to leave a tip for table service, unless there’s already a service charge added or unless the service has been notably poor. The amount tipped is generally in the region of 10%, but if there’s a figure between 10-15% which would leave the bill at a conveniently round total, many would consider it polite to tip this amount. Tipping for counter service, or any other form of service, is unusual – but some choose to do so if a tips container is provided. While central London is full of restaurants and cafes, there are some areas where the majority of diners are Londoners, rather than tourists, and in general you will get a much more pleasant, better value, and less crowded eating experience than you will find in the West End. These places are best visited in the evenings. Clapham Junction is not just a train station, but also home to many good restaurants and bars, in particular on Lavender Hill and Battersea Rise. (Overground: Clapham Junction) Drummond Street in the Euston area has a fine mix of Indian restaurants – a short walk from Euston railway station. (Tube: Euston) High Street Croydon Croydon is derided by most Londoners, however this suburban gem of a road has at least 30 decent restaurants, including three Argentinians, a South African curryhouse, a couple of fancy modern European brassieres, and just about every other type of cuisine you can think of. (Overground: East Croydon) extends on to Chiswick High Road from Hammersmith Tube Station and is one long road of a choice of restaurants at very reasonable prices, some bargain mentions are the Thai restaurants offering 2 course lunch for £7. Nearby Shepherds bush is about a 15 minute walk and is alive with bars and pubs in the evening. (Tube: Hammersmith) Lordship Lane in East Dulwich provides a good selection of European restaurants and a few award winning gastropubs. (train: East Dulwich) Upper Street in Islington has dozens of excellent restaurants, popular with young professionals. (Tube: Highbury & Islington, Angel). Wardour Street, in Soho, is full of nice cafes and restaurants. (Tube: Piccadilly Circus) As one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, you can find restaurants serving food cuisine from nearly every country, some of it as good as, if not better than in the countries of origin. Indian food in London is especially famous and there is hardly a district without at least one notable Indian restaurant. If you are looking for other particular regional foods these tend to be clustered in certain areas and some examples are: - in is famous for Bangladeshi curries. (Overground: Shoreditch High Street) - for African/Caribbean. (Tube: Brixton) - Chinatown just off for Chinese. (Tube: Leicester Square) - Edgware Road in and is popular for Middle Eastern cuisine. (Tube: Edgware Road, Paddington) - Drummond Street (just behind Euston railway station in the district) has lots of vegetarian restaurants – mostly Indian. (Tube: Euston) - and nearby areas, for Greek and Turkish. (Tube: Finsbury Park) - for Jewish fare. (Tube: Golders Green) - for good cheap Vietnamese. - , East Ham, and Southall for authentic & cheap Indian eateries including South Indian restaurants serving hot pongal, dosas, idlis and other South Indian “tiffin” items. Other nationalities are equally represented and randomly dotted all over London. It is usually wisest to eat in restaurants on main thoroughfares rather than on quiet backstreets. Like other capitals in the world, London has the usual array of fast food outlets. Sandwich shops are the most popular places to buy lunch, and there are a lot of places to choose from including Eat and Pret a Manger. Some Italian-style sandwich shops have a very good reputation and you can identify them easily by looking at the long queues at lunchtime. If all else fails, central London has lots of mini-supermarkets operated by the big British supermarket chains (e.g., Sainsbury’s, Tesco) where you can pick up a pre-packed sandwich. Fast food with an Asian flair is easy to find throughout the city, with lots of Busaba Eathai, Wagamama, and Yo! Sushi locations throughout the city. Nando’s, a popular pseudo-Portuguese restaurant chain, has spicy peri-peri style grilled chicken. For burgers, GBK (Gourmet Burger Kitchen) has been joined by other franchises such as Byron and Haché. List of popular chains - Subway. Offers hot and cold sandwiches for takeaway and limited sit-down eating. Store locator on website is a bit iffy but there are multiple central London locations including one at Tower Hill. - McDonald’s. Perhaps the most famous and recognised burger chain in the world. Serves a consistent menu at consistent prices. Locations pretty much everywhere. Some restaurants are open 24 hours a day. - Burger King. Another famous burger chain with a similar ethos to McDonalds but fewer locations. The most central one is located in Leicester Square while others are more scattered. - Gourmet Burger Kitchen, ☎ , e-mail: [email protected]. This chain is more expensive and with less focus on takeaway. Multiple central London locations. They can also be found in both Westfield London and Westfield Stratford. - Five Guys. A recent arrival from the United States. Has multiple London locations but only a few in central London. You have to phone ahead to order takeaway. - Domino’s. A popular takeaway only pizza chain. Multiple locations with fairly big delivery areas. - Pizza Express. Very popular sit-down restaurants offering more “gourmet” pizzas (but not too gourmet) in multiple central London locations. They are family friendly as well. - Pizza Hut. Offers both takeaway and a few sit-down restaurants. Has seven sit-down restaurants in the central London area. - Giraffe. Family friendly sit-down restaurants. Offers a variety of food including brunch, burgers, burritos, and ribs. - Wahaca. Sit-down restaurants offering Mexican market food. Multiple central London locations. - Zizzi. Sit-down restaurants that serve Italian food. Not many restaurants in central London but there are lots scattered across the city including one at Tower Hill. Vegetarian and vegan London has plenty of vegetarian and vegan restaurants many of them championing organic foodstuffs, and a quick search in Google will produce plenty of ideas, so you never have to see a piece of cooked meat all week. If you are dining with carnivorous friends most restaurants will cater for vegetarians and will have at least a couple of dishes on the menu. Indian/Bangladeshi restaurants are generally fruitful, as they have plenty of traditional dishes (good Indian/Bangladeshi options can be found in the Brick Lane area of Spitalfields or further afield in East Ham, Tooting Broadway and Southall. These also tend to be very cheap eats with authentically prepared dishes with a true local ambience). There are also many vegetarian Thai buffet places where you can eat fake meat in tooth-achingly sweet sauces for under £5. These can be found on Greek and Old Compton Streets inand . Mildred’s is a great veggie restaurant in the back streets of Oxford Circus. Due to the mix of cultures and religions, many London restaurants cater well for religious dietary requirements. The most common signs are for Halal and Kosher meat, from burger joints to nice restaurants. There are lots of Halal restaurants and shops all over London including Whitechapel Rd and Brick Lane in , and in many parts of . There are plenty of Kosher restaurants in , and along with some central delis such as on Charing Cross Road. Convenience stores and supermarkets Convenience stores such as Tesco Metro, Sainsbury Central/Local, Budgens, Costcutter, SPAR, Co-op, and privately-run “corner shops” will sell pre-made sandwiches, snacks, alcohol, cigarettes, drinks, etc. Most are open from 05:00-23:00 although some such as Tesco Metro or convenience stores located at petrol stations may open 24 hours (although some will stop selling alcohol after a certain time). Whistlestop convenience stores (located in or around train stations) are notoriously overpriced and should be avoided. If using a petrol station convenience store late at night (i.e. after 23:00) the store will be locked and you should order and pay through the external service window. Although Tesco, Sainsbury’s and other supermarkets run smaller stores in central London, full-size superstores (including Morrisons and ASDA) are rare in the city centre and you will usually have to take a 15-20 minute Tube ride to reach them. The closest large stores to central London are: - The ASDA store close to Crossharbour DLR Station on the Lewisham line. This is about a 15 minute ride from Bank station or at the end of the 135 24-hour bus route. - The Tesco in the Surrey Quays shopping mall which is next to Canada Water station on the Jubilee line – again about 10–15 minutes from the centre of town. - There are larger Sainsbury’s stores in both Whitechapel (Tube: Whitechapel) and in Camden Town (Tube: Camden Town). Both of these stores are located in Travelcard Zone 2. Marks & Spencer also operate food halls branded as “Simply Food”. They can be found across central London. The smaller ones, such as those found in train stations, tend to focus mostly on “ready to eat” food such as sandwiches, drinks, and snacks. London is home to a great many pubs, bars and nightclubs. The online city guide View London and the weekly magazine Time Out tell what’s going in London’s night life, as well as cultural events in general. Pubs and bars London is an expensive place and your drink is likely to cost more than its equivalent elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Expect to pay around £4 for a pint of lager or Guinness (or around £3.50 for a pint of ale) in an average pubs. As with restaurants, pubs close to major tourist attractions cash in on travellers’ gullibility so be on your guard for the tourist traps where higher prices are not unheard of. Despite this however it is still possible to find a sub-£3 pint in central London – it takes some determination. If you’re looking to save money and meet travellers then pub crawls are guided tours that run nightly in central London. You’ll save the ticket price on the savings you get from discounted drink deals and what you would have spent on club entry. The “1 Big Night Out” pub crawl is the biggest operator and starts from near Leicester square underground station. Many local pubs, especially those run by chains like Wetherspoons and Scream tend to be more reasonably priced with good drink promotions on weekday nights and during the day. As with the rest of the UK, chain pubs abound which Londoners tend to avoid like the plague. A good place to get cheap beer is at any one of the Sam Smith pubs found across Central London, including Soho and the City. In the, check out The Court (near the north end of Tottenham Court Road) and The Rocket (Euston Road). Both are fairly cheap to drink at, given that they cater for students of the adjacent University College London. Directly opposite the is The Euston Flyer, popular with locals and commuters alike given its close proximity to railway station. Classier bars and pubs can be much more expensive. However, the cost of alcohol drops significantly the further away you go from the centre (tends to be an exception, with prices pretty much the same as the centre). For a more reasonably priced (but brilliant) cocktail bar than you’ll find in the central and West End areas Lost Society in situated on Lavender Hill, cocktails here cost around £7-8 each. Two historic London breweries are Young’s and Fullers. Young’s was founded inin 1831 (but has relocated to ) and nowadays it has 123 pubs in central London alone. The Founder’s Arms next to the Tate Modern on the river embankment, is one of the brewery’s most well known establishments with a great view of the River Thames. Fullers was founded a bit later in 1845 at Chiswick (where you can take a most enjoyable tour of the brewery, including beer-tasting) and the jewel in its crown is probably the Grade I listed Old Bank Of England on , thanks to its breath-taking interiors. Fuller’s flagship beer is the famous ‘London Pride’, however to try a truly authentic Cockney pint, ask at bars if they serve a seldom seen now Porter, a dark style of beer originating in London in the 18th Century, similar but less heavy then a Stout. For a different taste, try a gin and tonic. It’s hard to say which pub in London is truly the oldest but it’s easy to find contenders for the title. Many pubs were destroyed in the Great Fire of London – indeed, Samuel Pepys supposedly watched the disaster from the comfort of the Anchor in. Pubs were rebuilt on sites that claimed to have been working pubs since the 13th century. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in is on the site of an old monastery and its cellar dates back to the 13th century. The Princess Louise and Citty of York are two lovely pubs close by, along High Holborn with interesting decor; as is the Jerusalem Tavern of Farringdon, a converted Georgian coffee shop, which sells the Norfolk beer, St. Peters. The Royal Oak of Borough, is another pub which is the only representative of an out-of-town brewery in London, that of Harvey’s of Lewes. The food is fantastic as is the atmosphere. Those interested in London’s historic and literary connections can’t miss The Spaniard’s Inn in . Dick Turpin is said to have been born here; John Keats and Charles Dickens both drank here; it’s mentioned in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Goose at , was reputedly a favourite hole of Karl Marx. For the best view in the city, try pubs on the banks of the Thames. Thehas lots of good bars with plenty of iconic bridges and buildings in sight the cocktail bar in the OXO tower is a secret that most tourists walk by everyday. Heading towards , pub crowds become a little less touristy. If you’re after gastropubs, you may like to visit London’s first, The Eagle, in, established in 1991. You can also try Time Out’s favourite newcomer, The Princess Victoria on Uxbridge Road, . The “Bermondsey Beer mile” is home to many craft breweries which are open in the middle of the day most Saturdays. Situated under the railway arches on lines going to London Bridge, these quaint breweries are home to high quality beer at cheap to average London prices (~£2.00 per half). Best places include Kernel Brewery and Brew by Numbers. Wine buffs can enjoy the famous Davys wine bars that dot the city. The company, established in 1870, import wines and own over thirty bars in the centre. Other big names in wine include the Michelin-starred Cellar Gascon and Vinoteca, both in. For a posh wine tasting experience, there is Vinopolis by Borough Market, though a tour price will be as eye-watering as the produce sampled. Big hotels, such as The Langham, The Dorchester and The Ritz, and upmarket clubs aroundand are reliable bets for a date at the bar. The Connaught Hotel in boasts its house bar, plus the Time Out magazine favourite, The Coburg. Still in Mayfair, The Polo Bar at The Westbury is very intimate. You can rely on most up-and-running bars to offer a short cocktail menu and there are also bars that position themselves as cocktail specialists. Nightlife is an integral part of London life and there are countless nightclubs in and around Central London with music to suit even the most eclectic of tastes. Districts in London tend to specialize to different types of music. Thehas many clubs playing drum and bass, techno, house and trance music and is home to the superclub Fabric. The clubs in this area are often home to the world’s top DJs and attracts a lively, hip and friendly crowd. Big name drum and bass, house and techno DJs also appear at clubs scattered around Kings Cross (Egg, Scala), Elephant (Ministry of Sound, Corsica Studios), Southwark (Cable), Whitechapel (Rhythm Factory), and at mixed nights at the Vauxhall clubs (see below). Nights are also hosted in disused Hackney warehouses or south London car parks. The area aroundis home to the more upmarket clubs in London. This area attracts a rather more showy crowd who love to flaunt what they have and is a must go to celebrity spot. Beware that drinks are ridiculously expensive and many clubs operate a guestlist-only policy. Music played here is often of the commercial chart, funky house, hip hop and R&B genre. Notable clubs include China White, Luxx, Maddox, Jalouse, Funky Buddha, Whisky Mist, Mahiki, No 5 Cavendish Square, Embassy, Vendome and Maya. Nightclubs around thearea hold the same music policy, but are rather more accessible, with numerous club and pub crawl promoters scattered around the area offering deals on entry. Notable clubs are Cafe De Paris, 1 Big Night Out pub crawl, Penthouse, Sound, Tiger Tiger, Zoo bar and Ruby Blue. Thearea is home to clubs which play Indie, metal and rock music and notably the Electric Ballroom, the world-famous Koko (Fridays) and Underworld. Camden clubs are mostly shut (or empty) on the weekdays.In South London, London’s Afro-Caribbean centre is home to numerous venues with all kinds of music, including a particular presence in reggae, ska, afrobeat, hiphop, and dubstep. In recent years more venues have opened in Peckham and New Cross.Sleep |This guide uses the following price ranges for a standard double room:| |Mid-range||£70 to £140| London has hundreds of options for accommodation to suit all budgets from hostels through historic bed and breakfasts (B&Bs), mainstream chain hotels and apartments all the way to some of the most exclusive luxury hotels in the world such as The Savoy, The Ritz and Claridges where a stay in a top suite will cost upwards of £1,000 per night. The average cost of hotel accommodation in London is higher than in any other major British city. Prices invariably become inflated close to major sporting tournaments (such as the London Marathon, Wimbledon or major England football/rugby fixtures), or other important events taking place in the city – so it pays to plan your trip around such occasions or book your accommodation well in advance. In general, most people tend to stay within “Zone 1” of the underground, however do your research carefully – sometimes being that extra five minutes away from a station can make the difference in cost and quality of local food and drinking options. In any case, you can always catch a bus anyway – by far the best way to see the city and get about generally. Your budget will have a lot to do with what part of London you will want to stay in. Tourist-standard prices range from £20-200 per person per night. Expect smaller than average rooms especially at the low end of this range. As a general rule, expect to pay between £75-150 per night for a 2 or 3 star hotel in the central area of the city. Many of the big name chain hotels now offer substantial discounts (with rates often down as low as £30-£50 per room per night) if you book well in advance, but the drawback is that you have to pay the full amount upfront at the time of booking and there are no refunds if you cancel. The heart of the West End is the most expensive place to stay and most hotels are either 4 or 5 star and most will command a hefty price premium. can also be very expensive during the week, as it relies heavily on the business market but prices often drop over the weekend and it can be a good way of getting into a higher standard of accommodation than you could otherwise afford. Bear in mind though that this part of central London becomes a ghost town over the weekend, and you will find that few (if any) bars and restaurants will be open. A top tip however is to always check the likes of LondonTown.com, Expedia and LateRooms as well as the hotel’s own website – since there are often deals to be had which can reduce the costs significantly. The extra cost of getting around is probably not significant compared to savings made by staying in a hotel further out near an Underground or railway station. Always be sure though to check where the closest Tube station is to your hotel. Staying further out will be cheaper but when travelling in allow 1-2 min per Tube stop (near the centre), around 2-3 min per stop (further out) and 5-10 min per line changes. This can easily total up to a 1 hour journey if there is a walk at each end. There are many hotels close to transport hub stations such as Stratford, Greenwich, Ealing Broadway, Wimbledon and East Croydon. A more imaginative alternative could be to stay in a nearby town with quick and easy train travel to London. For example, lively(otherwise known as ‘London by Sea’) is only an hour away, but your budget will go much further and there are excellent accommodation options. Some of the better value options are to be found in the following central districts: - . Relatively quiet district with a wide range of accommodation, and has enjoyed a surge in popularity following Eurostar’s move to St Pancras International station. Cartwright Gardens features a dozen small B&Bs in historic houses. Many budget options are located on Argyle Square (just off the Euston Road). Gets a little seedy towards and beyond King’s Cross railway station. - in west central London. Budget and modest accommodation as well as good 4-star hotels. Be careful with the cheapest accommodation in this area though as it will likely be very seedy indeed. - in north west central London. Has undergone a lot of change largely resulting from the Heathrow Express train coming into Paddington station. Good hotels can be found in the immediate area of the station and in quieter spots a short walk away as well as in the traditional mid-range accommodation area further south in Bayswater. - . Lots of small B&Bs around the back of Victoria railway station in the Pimlico area. A slightly left-field option is to check the Landmark Trust, a building preservation charity who purchase notable old buildings in the UK, renovate and run them as holiday lettings. An interesting approach to saving old buildings for sure. Try booking a hotel in Canary Wharf if you are staying for the weekend – 4* hotels can be very cheap due to a lack of business customers. This also goes for the small area around Bank tube station. Not necessarily as unpleasant as you may think, and as long as you don’t mind sharing with others, they are the most cost-effective option and also offer breakfast, and kitchens for self-catering. There are independent hostels throughout the city which are listed in the relevant district articles. In the summer season, many of the colleges and universities in Central London open up their student halls of residence as hotels during vacations, at usually much lower rates than proper hotels, but expect very basic facilities (e.g. communal bathrooms, no catering facilities), but you will get the personal privacy that you don’t get in hostels for not very much more cost. Some apartment-hotels offer good value accommodation for those travelling in a group – often better quality than many hotels but at a cheaper individual rate per person. Capsule-style crash spaces are just arriving, but they are only in central locations. Short-term apartment or flat rentals are an attractive option for many travellers to London, and there are innumerable agencies offering them, almost all of them nowadays through the internet. A key consideration for renting a short term flat is if you are visiting in a large group or a family. In such cases a short stay in London can be more affordable compared to staying in a hotel. Your best protection is to deal only with London apartment rental agencies which have been recommended by independent sources you feel you can trust, and to deal only with those that accept confirmations via credit card. Travellers can choose from a variety of homestay styles such as homeswapping (lovehomeswap.com), living in a temporarily vacated room (anyfriendofours.com) or the high end version where companies specialize in homestays with full hotel services such as housekeeping and concierge (viveunique.com). Most of the time these options are safe but it is important that guests and homeowners take equal precaution to ensure their valuables are safe guarded. Homeowners should always provide guests with terms and conditions of their live-in house rules to ensure there are no mishaps and both parties are at ease. This new trend allows guests to enjoy a less touristy version of London as most of these homes will be in residential areas which each have their own unique charm and experiences. Hotels are generally expensive in London when compared with other European cities. As a result the city has a vast number of self-catering accommodation on offer, many of them are apartments in various central areas of the capital. Well established local sites include Holidaylettings.co.uk, Perfect Accommodation,Space Apart Hotel, Owners Direct and Alpha Holiday Lettings. If you are looking to stay in just a room or part of the property, Airbnb matches holiday makers with hosts who only rent out part of their homes. London is unfortunately not noted for free public wifi access – although the number of hotspots is continuing to grow. - O2 Free Hotspots. O2 offers free WiFi around London’s busiest streets including parts of Oxford- and Regents Street. Click on the link to see the map. Free. - Online-4-Free.com. One of the most promising (it seems) for traveller-frequented areas, a service that provides blanket coverage along the banks of the River Thames (and some surrounding streets) from Millbank down to Greenwich Pier, and a small ‘cloud’ in Holborn – the free service asks only that you view a short advertisement every half hour to get 256 kbit/s (higher rates and ad-free come at a small charge). Free. - Tate Modern. Offering for a trial period free wi-fi internet access. - British Library. Offers free internet access throughout the library with registration. - Royal Festival Hall at Southbank Centre. Offers free unencrypted wi-fi throughout the building without registration. - Apple Store Regent St (tube:Oxford Circus). The Apple Store on Regent St offers free wifi and has a theatre at the back of the first floor where you can sit and spend an hour or two. - London Underground. Virgin Media offers wifi access at Tube stations. Some mobile phone networks offer free access, otherwise you have to pay. - Free wifi is also available in many cafes, and the following chain outlets: McDonald’s, Pret A Manger, JD Wetherspoon pubs, Costa Coffee, Caffe Nero, Starbucks. In an emergency, telephone “999” (or “112”). This number connects to Police, Ambulance and Fire/Rescue services. You will be asked which of these three services you require before being connected to the relevant operator. Like many big cities, London has a variety of social problems, especially begging, drug abuse and theft (mobile phones are a favourite, often snatched by fast-moving cyclists). London has the oldest police force in the world, The Metropolitan Police Service, and on the whole, London is a safe place to visit and explore. Alongside the regular Police, there are over 4,000 Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) that provide a highly visible presence on the streets and can deal with low-level crime. Normal precautions for the safe keeping of your personal possessions, as you would in any other city, are suggested. The Metropolitan Police have placed significant resources in combating street level crime. Working in conjunction with borough councils, they have brought the level of theft andin major retail areas in London to a manageable level. Pickpocketing in London is in general not as rampant as in other major European cities, though it still pays to be vigilant and take the usual precautions in securing your valuables. Street gang culture is a growing problem in London as with many other cities in England. While most groups of youngsters are not likely to present any danger to tourists, some people feel the need to be slightly more vigilant in certain areas, especially certain outer suburbs. Violent crime is in general not common, and typically occurs in impoverished neighbourhoods that tourists are unlikely to wander into by accident. Main precautions to take Keep valuables out of sight: Many crimes are opportunistic – a lot of mobile phones are snatched from restaurant tables. By keeping items such as cash and mobile phones out of sight theft can easily be prevented. Don’t flash your cash unnecessarily! Keep bags zipped up and close to your body: If your bag is hanging open it’s like putting up a flashing neon sign saying “Steal from me!” Use zips and inside pockets to secure items wherever possible. Never leave valuables such as mobile phones, wallets or travel documents in an outside section of your bag. Be aware of your surroundings: Before using your mobile phone have a look around you. Put your back against something solid such as a wall or window so you can’t be approached from behind. Constantly look around you even if you are in a busy area. Don’t walk and talk/text! Late at night If you’re planning to go out late at night and are worried about safety try to frequent crowded areas such as the West End. There are always plenty of people on the street, even at 04:00. Generally, outside central London, the South, and East suburban areas are considered more dangerous, notably, and , although some parts of North-West London such as and are also known trouble spots. The main problem right throughout London to various degrees is drunken behaviour, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights and after football matches. Loud and rowdy behaviour is to be expected and fights and acts of aggression also occur. If you are harassed, it is best to simply ignore and walk away from those concerned. Trouble spots can be expected around popular drinking locations such asand in various suburban centres. Scams and cons London has a large number of con artists around, all trying to convince you to hand over your money one way or another. In general you should never give cash or your bank/credit card detail to people on the street no matter how genuine they seem. Cup and ball game: This is perhaps the most common scam and is frequently seen on the busier pedestrian bridges such as Westminster Bridge. A person will lay out a mat with three cups on it. They will pretend to hide a ball under one of the cups, move the cups around, and then ask you to place a bet on where the ball-containing cup has landed. There is no ball – the con artist will have spirited it away! This con always has people acting as lookouts in the crowd and they will pretend to win every now and again so it looks like the game is winnable. Also beware if you are just stopping to watch as you could be pick-pocketed! The best defence is to walk straight past these events and not engage at all. If you have a mobile phone/cellphone that works in the UK you can phone the police on 101 (the non-emergency equivalent to 999) and report them, but it is advised to move away to do this as you may be harassed by the con artist or their lookouts if they overhear you. Overzealous street performers: Most street performers are happy to just do their thing, let you watch, and then you can throw them a few coins if you liked the show. However, some street performers will actively grab and harass passers-by in order to get attention and money. They may forcefully pose with you and ask you to take a photograph and then demand money for the photo opportunity. They may also take this opportunity while you’re distracted to pick-pocket you. Don’t engage with any street performer who is pushy or forceful – try and walk away, or call out “Get off me!” or “No!” and draw attention to yourself if you can’t escape easily. Again, you can report these bogus street performers on the 101 number as above. Tissue sellers on trains: Beggars will get onto a train and place tissues on the seats with a note begging for money. They want you to feel pity for them and buy the tissues, but this is an organised scam and the money goes towards criminal enterprises. If you see this happening on a train don’t buy the tissues and ignore anyone who asks you for money for them. If you’re above ground you can text the British Transport Police on 61016 to report it. “Clip joint”: ‘Every night,presents a particular danger: the “clip joint”. The usual targets of these establishments are lone male tourists. Usually, an attractive woman will casually befriend the victim and recommend a local bar or even a club that has a “show”. The establishment will be near-desolate, and, even if the victim has only a drink or two, the bill will run to hundreds of pounds. If payment is not immediately provided, the bouncers will lock the “patrons” inside and take it by force or take them to an ATM and stand over them while they extract the cash. To be safe, if a woman you just met suggests you a place, try to recommend a different bar. If she insists on hers then walk away and do not listen to her suggestions. Sometimes this con trick takes place when someone is lured into a private club with the promise of something perhaps more than a drink (like a ‘private show’ or sex for a small amount of money). A ‘hostess fee’ will appear on the bill for several hundred pounds, even though there has been nothing more than polite conversation. “Stress tests”: If anyone offers you a free “stress test”, they are likely trying to recruit you into the Church of Scientology. The best option is to walk away or just say “No thank you” politely, as people are commonly harassed into giving personal details. Needing money for phone/train tickets/the bus/et al.: A man or woman will approach you asking for money for public transport. They will claim that they have lost their Travelcard or that it has been damaged somehow. Most people upon losing their Travelcard will seek aid at a train station and not approach random strangers! Another variant of this scam exists wherein a man or woman will ask for change so they can make a call at a phone box (this is a frequent scam in the Shoreditch area). Occasionally a person with a very convincing fake gash on their arm or head will ask for money so that they can get a taxi to hospital (strangely refusing the offer of you calling an ambulance for them, as you would do for most injured people in the street). Ticket machine scam: One of the most popular scams in London is the ticket machine scam: While buying a ticket at a train station someone will approach you and act as if they want to help you buy the right ticket. In reality they will wait until your money is in the machine, then lean across, cancel the transaction and pocket your cash. Say “No thanks” politely – you know what ticket you want to buy! Selling/asking for a donation for “lucky heather”: This scam, usually operated by women, involves someone handing you “lucky heather” (a small flower usually wrapped in foil) and then either trying to sell it to you or asking for a monetary donation. They will come up with a vague charity (“money for sick children”, “money for orphaned babies”, and so on) and show you a purse full of supposed “donations”. If you are handed one of these flowers either hand it back or drop it on the ground and leave. Be aware that you if you take the flower and leave without “donating” you could be chased and harassed by the people involved in the scam. This scam has been seen in Chinatown around the time of Chinese New Year. Although not illegal, London is a known hotspot for charity collectors, some of whom can be extremely persuasive in trying to obtain a donation; therefore they have earned the name “charity muggers” or “chuggers”. If you do not want to donate, be polite but forceful, and under no circumstances provide any form of bank details. Larger charities ask their collectors to have specific and verifiable identification. Don’t take illegal minicabs (see Get around for details). Minicabs are not allowed to ply for trade on the street and any minicab doing this should be avoided. Travelling on the lower deck of a night bus is generally safer, as there are more passengers around, and you are visible to the bus driver. If you have been the victim of crime on the railways or the London Underground you should report the crime as soon as possible to the British Transport Police, who have an office in most major train and Tube stations. Or if you have been a victim of crime in the City of London you should report the crime to the City of London Police. Elsewhere, you should report your crime as normal to the Metropolitan Police. If you’ve lost an item on the Underground, Overground or Docklands Light Railway, in a licensed black cab or on a red London bus you should contact the TfL Lost Property Office (Tube: Baker Street) as soon as possible. In respect of other rail and coach services, the relevant service operator should be contacted. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) will provide emergency treatment for anyone in the UK, irrespective of whether they reside in the UK, but if you are not UK resident you will be expected to make a contribution (up to the entire cost) towards such treatment. The UK Government has, as of 2015, announced it intends to start charging for the use of the NHS (including emergency treatment) by visitors from outside the EU, to reduce the impact of so-called “health tourism”. You can find NHS services near you here. For a serious medical emergency (unconsciousness, stroke, heart attack, heavy bleeding, broken bones, etc.) dial 999 or 112 and ask for an ambulance. These numbers are free of charge from any telephone. When you call, the operator will ask for details about the patient(s) and your location. As emergency response is prioritised in London the operator needs to know what resources they need to use and how quickly you need help. London’s ambulance coverage is excellent with highly trained and friendly staff. For instances of major trauma there is also London’s Air Ambulance, two helicopters that can deliver an advanced trauma team within minutes to anywhere in London. At night the helicopters do not fly and a rapid response car is dispatched instead. Emergencies can also be dealt with at most NHS hospitals with an A & E (Accident & Emergency) department. In A & E, be prepared to wait for a long time (the average is 4 hours) during busy periods before being given treatment if your medical complaint is not too serious. For less serious problems, try a GP’s (“General Practitioner”, or family doctor) surgery, Urgent Care Centre, or a high-street pharmacist. Major A & E hospitals in London are: - Charing Cross Hospital, Fulham Palace Rd, Hammersmith, W6 8RF - Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, 369 Fulham Rd, Chelsea, SW10 9TR - St George’s Hospital, Blackshaw Road, Tooting, SW17 0QT - Homerton University Hospital, Homerton Row, Homerton, E9 6SR - King’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, SE5 9RS - University Lewisham Hospital, High St, SE13 6LH - Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Stadium Road, Woolwich, SE18 4QH - Royal Free Hospital, 23 East Heath Rd, Hampstead, NW3 1DU - The Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, E1 1BB - St. Marys NHS Trust, Praed St, Paddington, W2 1NY - St. Thomas’ Hospital, Lambeth Palace Rd, South Bank, SE1 7EH - University College London Hospitals NHS Trust, 25 Grafton Way, Bloomsbury, WC1E 6DB - Whittington Hospital, Highgate Hill, Archway, N19 5NF General medical advice For advice on non-emergency medical problems, you can ring the 24 hour NHS Direct service on 111. Treatment for non-emergency conditions, or for hospital admissions resulting from emergencies, is normally free for people holding a European Health Insurance card (EHIC) issued by most European governments, or certain other countries listed here. In the absence of such a card you would be well advised to get private travel health insurance. At large organised events, and in many theatre productions, basic medical assistance and first aid is provided through the support of organisations such as St John Ambulance or the stewards for the event. Pharmacies (often referred to as chemists) are found across London, with chains such as Lloyds Pharmacy and Boots being prevalent. Many independent pharmacies also exist. Most large supermarkets also have pharmacy counters, although these do not stock some of the stronger remedies. Unlike other European countries, pharmacies are often not marked by prominent neon ‘green cross’ signs. Pharmacists are also able to offer advice on many health problems and recommend medicines that might help. For certain remedies (for example stronger painkillers) you may have to ask at the counter, as for regulatory reasons these can only be sold by pharmacists under strict protocols. Don’t be alarmed if the pharmacist asks some basic diagnostic questions, or for ID. If you need to see a GP but either don’t have time to or can’t register with an NHS GP, a new service called DocTap exists in which you can book with a 15 minute appointment with a private GP in one of the service’s central London clinics. London is also home to some of the most renowned – and most expensive – private medical treatment facilities, the most notable of which being the host of private consultants and surgeons on Harley Street in . Embassies and High Commission Some countries have a separate consulate for issuing visas, passports, notary services, etc., found in a different location than the main embassy/high commission. It is advised to check their website or call them ahead of time if you need these services. - – Historic market town, 35 miles north-west of London. - . Roman relics, rich in Georgian architecture and makes an easy day trip from Paddington station. - – Historic market town, features the ruined castle of William the Conqueror, canal-side pubs and Ashridge Forest. - . Boasts many events, pubs and clubs, and shopping opportunities. Trains can take as little as 85 minutes from Euston or Marylebone or a coach from Victoria takes 3 hours. - . Large beach resort on the edge of the , with seven miles of golden sand. Only a two hour ride on the train from Waterloo station. - . Fashionable beach town about 90 km (55 mi) south. Less than an hour by train from Victoria station. - ( ) Only 2 hours via Eurostar from St. Pancras Station. - . Site of the foremost cathedral in England, constructed during the 12th-15th centuries. - . A leafy, seaside resort town, of ‘timeless’ Victorian architecture, with a lovely pier and bandstand. Famous for chalk cliffs, popular viewing platform and suicide spot! - . Seaside town, famous for the Battle of 1066. - . 30 miles north of London, a small town dating back to the 8th century. Also home to the UK’s largest indoor ski slope. - . About 55 km (35 mi) west of London, a quaint and typical English town, great for walks by, and aquatic activities on, the Thames. Home to the famous boating Regatta in Summer - . Delightful mid-Sussex town, with a picturesque brewery and the famous Guy Fawkes festival in November. - ( ). Only 1 hour 20 minutes via Eurostar from St. Pancras Station. - . If you have time it is worth visiting Britain’s other great cities and Manchester has very much to offer. Manchester can be reached in around 2 hours by train and is about 320 km (200 mi) to the north. It is the second most visited city in England (after London). - , county town of , known as the Garden of England. - and , twin seaside resorts of the Isle of Thanet in . - ( ). Only 2 hours via Eurostar from St. Pancras station. - . Has a strong naval history in , with medieval attractions like Rochester Cathedral and Castle. Has a strong literary connection with Charles Dickens, you can visit his museum and a former residence. - and . The university cities make for ideal days out of London. - . Home of the Royal Navy and of real interest to nautical enthusiasts. Also offers access to the . - . A very traditional town full of medieval black and white timber-framed buildings along winding, steep, narrow streets set on the River Severn easily reached by taking the train (change at Wolverhampton or Crewe) from Euston. - . Small, quaint “cathedral city” just north of metropolitan London. Easily accessed from J22 on the M25 motorway or about 30 minutes on the train out of Farringdon station. - . Among the most famous landmarks in England. The mysterious stone ring was built thousands of years ago, today it is a . You can get there by a guided bus tour or by train (1 hr 30) to the nearby city , where you can also visit the 13th-century cathedral with the highest spire in the country. - and North Downs National Parks offer beautiful, rolling chalk hills for a day’s stroll or longer hikes. - . An seaside town with pebble and sand beaches, fairground rides, arcades, and the longest pier in the world. Make sure to grab yourself a delicious Rossi ice cream – a local delicacy since 1932 – while you’re there! Only 40 minutes by train from Fenchurch Street station. - . One of the oldest and highest towns in Britain. This small town has been described as “beautiful” by visitors. - . Former capital of England and attractive “cathedral city” with lots to see. About an hour away by train from Waterloo. - . Nearby Thames-side town with magnificent castle and Royal residence located only one hour by train outside of London. Makes for a very easy day trip.

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Last year, embattled Arizona lawyer Charles Carreon brought a lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, doubling down by suing anonymous Internet commenters and even two charities, the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. (The whole crazy story also involved a cartoon of an obese woman asking a bear to "Come hurr and love meeee!") Things got even weirder when Carreon threatened Chris Recouvreur, also known "Satirical Charles," who had created a website mocking Carreon. Recouvreur then sued Carreon in federal court for a declarative judgement that his site was not libelous. Now Carreon says he regrets the entire affair. Why? Largely because it has unleashed the wrath of angry people on the Internet and has subsequently damaged his reputation online. “I genuinely say it was a dumb thing,” Carreon told Ars. “This is not a soluble problem. This is not a problem that is soluble with a legal cease-and-desist letter, or a counter cease-and-desist letter. I would not have sent that and I really reassess the decision thoroughly. It was not a good idea. You really are dealing with a situation that is not amenable to legal resolution.” “I made it worse” Carreon was a little-known lawyer until June 2012, at which point he began representing the website FunnyJunk.com and sued Matthew Inman, demanding $20,000 over comments Inman had made about FunnyJunk's habit of hosting Inman's cartoons. Inman then turned around and raised $100,000, giving that money to charity instead of to Carreon, at which point Carreon escalated his legal filings. At one point, Carreon even threatened to subpoena Ars Technica. (Ars’ collected coverage of the entire affair can be read here.) In a 30-minute phone interview with Ars on Wednesday, Carreon lamented that, as a result of this entire sordid affair, his professional reputation has been damaged—or as he calls it, "rapeutated." In fact, Carreon has a colorful website at Rapeutation.com that includes an elaborate chart with a new, long, and extensive list of all the so-called “rapeutationists,” including yours truly and two more Ars staffers. If you'd like to see a picture of Carreon's critics—including an Ars Technica writer—spewing fecal matter out of their mouths, that too can be accommodated. In short, Carreon portrays himself as the victim here—he’s now become the victim of the Streisand effect, or as it might now be called, the Carreon effect. “So when you take a situation in which the legal rules don’t impose any effective sanctions on people for that kind of behavior, mob behavior on the Internet, then a legal analyst like myself should look at that situation and say: ‘You can’t fix everything that’s broken,’” he said. “There is not a proper legal remedy for it. I attempted to do something and I made it worse.” “It’s an insoluble problem,” he continued. “It’s is not remediable. As long as you keep punching ‘Charles Carreon’ into Google, there’s just more stories about this nonsense. How can anyone get their message through? I’ve written hundreds of works. You can’t find them. Is that helpful? No. Now it’s difficult for prospective clients to see that I’m a relatively erudite person. Since then, some Amazon reviews of my books have, in bad faith, been given one star—I don’t sell many books anymore. Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone would say that Charles Carreon is a pretty bright guy.” But lest the Internet think that Carreon is a bad guy with a continual ax to grind, he suggested that his Buddhist religion can help him forgive those who have wronged him. “If I feel that something that I have said should not have been said, and somebody calls it to my attention, I generally will alter or retract it,” he said. “[Similarly,] if anyone wants to contact me in any reasonable manner, I will be happy to hear it. The point of speech is to spark discussion. My goal is to help people to realize that you’re not the only person who gets rapeutated. You need to put on your own psychological resources together to survive it. Of course this is difficult. The fact that I try to bear it with aplomb, it is difficult. Yeah, I have a lot of shit to process—I’m glad I'm a resilient person.” “It doesn’t matter what my intentions are,” he added. “I’m learning the rules of the game. I’ve learned about mobs. I’ve learned about how blithely we can deal with other people. I never thought that people would say things about me that they did. I’m always learning. If I didn’t learn, I would truly be stupid. The fact that I learn slowly or don't know things that other people know, that doesn't make me genuinely stupid, it makes me situationally stupid.” The easy way or the hard way Though the legal battles sparked by Carreon's actions have ceased, it's up to Recouvreur's attorney, Paul Alen Levy of Public Citizen, to recover the money. Levy told Ars on Wednesday that it would be very easy for Carreon to finally wrap up this entire story. “He makes a payment, we agree that he’s made the payment, and there’s a satisfaction of judgement,” Levy said. “That’s the simple way to do it.” If not, Levy will have to go through legal discovery to determine the size of Carreon's assets. Levy said there isn’t a chance that he and his client will allow the case to be dropped without any consequences for Carreon. “Given the amount, it’s hard to walk away from it,” he said. “We’re not willing to let the money just sit there. I really don’t know at this point what assets [Carreon] has. He has a law practice. Presumably he’s getting paid at his law practice—but you hate to think about that.” As for Carreon, he wouldn't be pinned down on whether he would pay, but he did say that the whole ordeal had been a strain. “Whenever you have to spend a lot of time doing stuff that is not remunerative, that is financial hardship,” Carreon said. “If somebody is making me do stuff by suing me, sure, it’s taking a bite out of my time.”

Q: I’ve been shocked to learn that the metro Atlanta area (including the suburbs) is a hub for sex trafficking and the exploitation of children in that “trade.” I had no idea it was right here in my community and in such numbers. I guess I didn’t know because it is so well-hidden. What in the world can an everyday person like me do to combat this evil? A: I’ve asked Lisa C. Williams, one of the nation’s leading voices on the subject, to respond to your question. Here is her reply: “There is a problem right under our noses. It includes torture, rape, brainwashing, forced tattooing and branding, and other heinous tactics used by traffickers/pimps, adults and others who aim to profit from the victimization of our children and those most vulnerable in our communities. It is called sex trafficking. “This is not an easy or popular subject, but it is a growing problem that crosses streets, cities, states and countries. It does not discriminate by zip code, race or economic status. And it most often targets our youngest citizens—those who are not even old enough to vote or drive. Sex trafficking snatches our children’s freedom and decimates their human rights. “Victims of sex trafficking are often runaways or throwaways. They were often seeking to escape homes where they have been emotionally abandoned or physically and sexually abused. However, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes they were just naïve children who made bad decisions, which led them into unimaginable circumstances. “The average age range in which a girl first becomes a victim is 12-14 and for boys it is 11-13. The 2011 FBI report on trafficking indicates that approximately 293,000 U.S. children are at risk of being exploited and trafficked for sex. One child at risk of being bought or sold is one child too many. “Trafficked youth endure a brutalized existence, constantly subjected to pregnancy, forced abortions, compulsory drug use, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS and the threat of death to themselves or their families. There are minimal chances of them being identified or rescued once they have been abducted or lured away because they are imprisoned, and well-hidden as you pointed out, in homes, hotels or on business premises. “For those who are found, law enforcement and community grapple with how to best help victims and combat the demand — those buying our children for their sexual perversion or profit. But there is hope. People speaking up and asking, “How can I help?” is the first step. Taking any of the steps below is the next. - Monitor your children’s computer, Internet-based games and cell phone usage. Speak with them about the dangers of online recruitment. - Store the Human Trafficking Hotline number 1 (888) 373-7888 in your cell phone to promptly report suspicious activity. Contact your local law enforcement as well. - Get informed and share facts with your circle of influence (i.e., your family, house of worship, school, workplace, etc). - Use social media to inform your friends and networks. Follow us @LivingWaterGirls and other organizations that work to combat trafficking and get useful information and resources. Share articles and images that raise awareness about the atrocities of sex trafficking on your social media pages. - Volunteer with organizations that promote self-esteem and self-worth among young people. - Recognize and share warning signs with other responsible adults — invite them to get involved. - Contact your local, state and federal elected officials and policymakers. Let them know you support legislation that brings justice for the victim and holds the perpetrator legally accountable for their criminal activity. “Most importantly, now that you know, don’t forget. Sex trafficking only remains hidden as long as we refuse to see it. “Be vigilant and be a voice. Together, we can save and restore our children.” Lisa C. Williams is the founder of Living Water for Girls, a program of Circle of Friends: Celebrating Life, a nonprofit organization based in Georgia. Send your questions and comments to [email protected]. Lauretta Hannon, a resident of Powder Springs, is the bestselling author of The Cracker Queen — A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life and a keynote speaker. Southern Living has named her “the funniest woman in Georgia.” See more at thecrackerqueen.com.

Kitab-i-Aqdas: its place in Bahá'í literaturepublished in Bahá'í World, 1992-1993, pages 105-117 Baha'i World Centre, 1993 Nineteen ninety-two marked the centenary of the passing of Bahá'u'lláh. In the past hundred years, the Faith He founded has grown from an obscure movement in the Middle East to the second most widespread of the world's independent religions. [footnote (#1): World Christian Encyclopedia, 1982; Encyclopedia Britannica, 1992.] The Bahá'í community, which embraces people from virtually every racial and tribal group, and has maintained its unity in doing so, very likely represents the most diverse organized body of people on the planet today. The centenary coincides with the appearance of the first authorized English language edition of the book that is central among Bahá'u'lláh's writings, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas ("The Most Holy Book"). Nucleus of a body of writings supplementing and explaining it, the Aqdas was first published in its original Arabic, in Bahá'u'lláh's lifetime. As the Bahá'í community emerged throughout the world, the book's provisions determined its shape and development, through the insights provided by 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'u'lláh's son and great-grandson. Both were successively appointed under His authority as the interpreters of His message. The newly published volume is extensively annotated on the basis of Bahá'u'lláh's own amplification of the text and the work of His two interpreters. Translations into other languages will quickly follow. The expansion of the Bahá'í community has brought the teachings of its Founder to the attention of an ever-widening public. Frequently cited among these themes are the oneness of the human race, the equality of the sexes, and the essential harmony of faith and reason. Perhaps especially familiar are concepts of the underlying unity of all religions and the common purpose of the Prophets who have inspired them. Bahá'u'lláh's teachings on the evolutionary process provide a helpful context for an understanding of the purpose of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. The human race as Bahá'u'lláh describes it has neither fallen from some primordial perfection nor is it the product of socio-economic forces. As the arrowhead of evolution, human consciousness has latent within it all of the attributes of a Divinity whose essence is forever unknowable. What should be recognized, Bahá'u'lláh says, is that these capacities have owed their cultivation chiefly to the driving force provided throughout history by successive interventions of that same ultimate Reality. Associated with the missions of such transcendent figures as Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, the phenomenon of Divine Revelation is an ever-recurring one. Without either beginning or end, it is an integral feature of the evolutionary order and the ultimate cause of the civilizing of human nature. Bahá'u'lláh's writings describe humanity as today entering on its collective coming-of-age, capable of seeing the entire panorama of its development as a continuum. The challenge of maturity is for the peoples of the world to accept that they are one race, and to build together the foundations of global civilization. The influence that is awakening this consciousness throughout the world is that universal Revelation of God which was promised in all the scriptures of humanity's past. Bahá'u'lláh writes as its Spokesman, in the line of Divine Messengers stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history. In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas the Divine guidance for the age of humanity's collective maturity is endowed with a system of law, precept, and institutions capable of bringing into existence a global commonwealth ordered by principles of social justice. "This is a Book," its concluding pages state, "which hath become the Lamp of the Eternal unto the world, and His straight, undeviating Path amidst the peoples of the earth. Say: This is the Dayspring of Divine knowledge, if ye be of them that understand, and the Dawning-place of God's commandments, if ye be of those who comprehend." [footnote (#2): Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre, 1992), The Kitáb-i-Aqdas makes its appearance in a world which, since the Enlightenment's rejection of religion as the ultimate moral authority, has engaged in an increasingly urgent search for an alternative place to stand. Today, it is apparent that this effort has failed. Neither Marxist determinism nor popular faith in situational or consensus ethics offers a basis upon which the system of values required by an emerging global society can be erected. Bahá'u'lláh reasserts the sovereignty of God as the sole authority governing moral life. God exists; He is the Source of all that is; He reveals through His Messengers those laws and principles that are primarily responsible for the civilizing of human nature. The autonomy of the individual is conditioned, therefore, not only by the limitations of the natural world he or she inhabits, but also by a spiritual universe that transcends and pervades it. "Hold ye fast unto His statutes and commandments," is the counsel of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, "and be not of those who, following their idle fancies and vain imaginings, have clung to the standards fixed by their own selves, and cast behind their backs the standards laid down by God." [footnote (#3): Ibid., 25.] Fundamental values around which all past societies have organized themselves are reformulated in the Aqdas to meet the needs of a planet contracted into a single homeland and a human race awakening to greatly enhanced powers of reason and perception. New laws and concepts are enunciated whose aim is to free human consciousness from culturally conditioned patterns of response and to nurture the emergence of global civilization. The Aqdas is not a systematic code of law. Guidance that relates to details of individual life or social practice is set in passages which summon the reader to a challenging new conception of human nature and purpose. Evgenii Eduardovich Bertels, the nineteenth-century Russian scholar who first attempted a translation of the book, compared Bahá'u'lláh's pen writing the Aqdas to a bird, now soaring on the summits of heaven, now descending to touch the homeliest questions of everyday need. The book's prescriptions range across subjects as varied as aesthetics, weapons control, sanitation, penal law, and the need for an auxiliary, international language. The inextinguishable human proclivity toward ritual is directed into a few areas of personal life. Various prohibitions inherited from earlier religious traditions are annulled and the door is firmly shut on the emergence of a professional clergy. The principal themes addressed in the Aqdas, however, are those great issues that are the dominant concerns of all Bahá'u'lláh's writings and of contemporary society: justice, government, law, liberty, belief, education, family, and the promotion of GOD IS HOLDING, IN WHICH ALL WHO ARE IN THE HEAVENS AND ALL WHO ARE ON EARTH ARE WEIGHED" [footnote (#4): Ibid., 86.] Throughout the ages of its long journey from barbarism, the human race has been sustained by the promise--enshrined in the scriptures of all the great religions--that an age of justice would one day come. The central thrust of Bahá'u'lláh's writings is that we are witnessing its dawn. Through travail and suffering the peoples of the world are being purged of anachronistic habits and attitudes and awakened to the possibilities that their common humanity confers. They are being prepared to accept both their own oneness and their ultimate dependence on the justice of a loving and unfailing Creator. Justice is conceived by Bahá'u'lláh as the foundation-stone of the coming global civilization. It is the essential means for the integration of the diverse peoples and communities of the planet. "The purpose of justice," Bahá'u'lláh's writings state, "is the appearance of unity among men." [footnote (#5): Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh Revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre, 1978), 67.] Love, mercy, and forgiveness are among the qualities that must distinguish human beings in their personal relationships one with another; the gradual cultivation of such responses in human nature has been one of the primary objects of the successive revelations of the Divine will. For these qualities to flourish as the distinguishing features of human life, however, each member of society and each component group must be able to trust that he or she is protected by standards that apply equally to all. The concepts, laws, and principles enunciated in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas are intended to provide the spiritual bedrock of this assurance. The book represents, in its own words, "the infallible Balance which the Hand of God is holding, in which all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth are weighed ... Through it the poor have been enriched, the learned enlightened, and the seekers enabled to ascend unto the presence of God." [footnote (#6): Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, 86.] HIGHEST MEANS FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF ORDER IN THE WORLD AND THE SECURITY OF ITS PEOPLE." [footnote (#7): Ibid., 19.] The Aqdas reiterates Bahá'u'lláh's endorsement, expressed in a number of places in His writings, of the principle of democratic and constitutional government. Its prescriptions envision the State as the servant of God and an instrument ensuring the rights of all of society's members. Several passages of the book make reference to monarchs of the nineteenth century. They are warned that through historical processes over which they will have no control, the governors of human society will be compelled to recognize that they are essentially "vassals" of God answerable for the powers they exercise. [footnote (#8): Ibid., 49.] These passages are best appreciated in the context of a larger body of major writings addressed to these same rulers. In them, Bahá'u'lláh insists that the real "treasures" of any land are its people. [footnote (#9): Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1976), 236.] Governments are warned "not to deal unjustly with any one that appealeth to you"; they are called on to recognize that "the poor are the trust of God in your midst"; the growing burden of public taxation is declared to be "wholly and grossly unjust"; should any government commit aggression, the rest are called on to "rise ye all against him, for this is naught but manifest justice." [footnote (#10): Ibid., 251-254.] Against this background the Kitáb-i-Aqdas admonishes the arbiters of human affairs to defend the rights of the helpless and disadvantaged. Governments are not only summoned to "bind ... the broken with the hands of justice," but also have the moral right and obligation to "crush the oppressor" who is responsible for such abuses, "with the rod of the commandments of your Lord." [footnote (#11): Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, CODE OF LAWS. NAY, RATHER, WE HAVE UNSEALED THE CHOICE WINE WITH THE FINGERS OF MIGHT AND POWER." [footnote (#12): Ibid., 21.] As Western civilization has spread, legal codes everywhere have parted company with the metaphysical moorings that originally anchored them. A consequence has been that the concerns of law have come to focus chiefly on the tasks of deterring crime and settling disputes. In practice, even this relatively limited resolve has steadily weakened in the face of accelerating social breakdown. The behavioral sciences, however valuable, have not fulfilled their early promise as a sufficient source of relief. Elaboration and full codification of the Divine Law revealed by Bahá'u'lláh is a task for posterity, and much of its application envisions a condition of society that will emerge only in the distant future. Its essential nature, however, is already apparent. The Kitáb-i-Aqdas reasserts both man's moral responsibility for his actions and the right of society to enforce those laws established for the maintenance of the general well-being: "Beware lest, through compassion, ye neglect to carry out the statutes of the religion of God; do that which hath been bidden you by Him Who is compassionate and merciful." [footnote (#13): Ibid., 36.] The fundamental purpose of the Divine commandments, whether or not they carry legal sanctions, is to awaken the rational soul to its own real nature and to the powers latent within it. The Book of God is thus the "quickener of mankind," the "source of true felicity." [footnote (#14): Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1957), 215.] When seen with the eyes of the spirit, it is "the Bounty of God." "Consider the mercy of God and His gifts," [footnote (#15): Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, 87.] the Aqdas counsels: "He enjoineth upon you that which shall profit you, though He Himself can well dispense with all creatures." [footnote (#16): Ibid., 40.] DOWN UNTO THEM FROM THE HEAVEN OF REVELATION, THEY WOULD, OF A CERTAINTY, ATTAIN UNTO PERFECT LIBERTY." [footnote (#17): Ibid., 63-4.] One of the central dilemmas of Western civilization is society's need to draw a clear line between freedom and licence. Civil and other legitimate human rights have come to be used as justification for the expression of almost any human impulse. At best, the accepted limit on the individual's rights is the point at which these claims infringe on the rights of others. Such a standard, even if it could be achieved, assumes a human race that is capable of determining, in most areas of moral decision, behavior that will serve its real needs. Thus, analogies are frequently drawn to various fields of scientific activity, the implication being that objective standards exist for attaining a reasonable measure of consensus on the promotion of human well-being. But science is admittedly amoral and the cultural perceptions of humanity widely divergent. We confront again in Bahá'u'lláh's writings His fundamental assertion that moral insight and coherence come only as the gift of that Divinity which "chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him--a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse ... underlying the whole of creation." [footnote (#18): Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings, 65.] It is in this perspective that the Kitáb-i-Aqdas condemns strongly attempts to invoke "liberty" as justification for conduct that "causeth man to overstep the bounds of propriety," conduct that "debaseth him to the level of PAST, ETERNAL IN THE FUTURE." [footnote (#19): Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, 85.] The Revelation of God for the age of humanity's collective maturity, Bahá'u'lláh says, transcends the diverse sectarian systems inherited from past ages. As there is but one ultimate Reality, and one human race inhabiting our planet, so the relationship between them has always been one and unbroken. The primary purpose of the Messengers of God has not been to teach different religions but progressively to unlock a wider range of capacities within human consciousness and human society. In a commentary related to the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Bahá'u'lláh states: "The Prophets and Chosen Ones have all been commissioned by the One True God ... to nurture the trees of human existence with the living waters of uprightness and understanding, that there may appear from them that which God hath deposited within their inmost selves." [footnote (#20): Ibid., 139.] The investigation of truth is, therefore, a right and responsibility of the individual conscience. No person or agency can claim the authority to coerce belief or compel uniformity of opinion. It is in this spirit that the Aqdas urges: "Consort with all religions with amity and concord, that they may inhale from you the sweet fragrance of God," [footnote (#21): Ibid., 72.] and that it counsels: "Beware lest any name debar you from Him Who is the Possessor of all names." [footnote (#22): Ibid., 80.] Its sharp warning to clergy and theologians of the world's diverse religious traditions must be read in this same perspective: "Weigh not the Book of God with such standards and sciences as are current amongst you, for the Book itself is the unerring Balance established amongst men." [footnote (#23): Ibid., 56.] OF THEM THAT UNDERSTAND..." [footnote (#24): Ibid., 87.] Bahá'u'lláh's writings declare education to be the right and obligation of every person, woman and man alike. "Knowledge is as wings to man's life, and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone." [footnote (#25): Bahá'u'lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1979), 26.] An age has dawned, He says, in which "the secrets of the earth are laid bare," [footnote (#26): Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh, 39.] and their exploration in a spirit of service to humanity is an act of worship. The most important goal of education is the discovery and cultivation of the moral capacities latent in human nature itself. In consequence of the universal Revelation of God, "a new life is, in this age, stirring within all the peoples of the earth." [footnote (#27): Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings, 196.] A revolution in information, arts, and technologies has been set in motion that will most greatly advantage those who learn to function as moral beings, committed to the ideal of global unity. It will be through the acquisition of knowledge, not through privileges of sex, race, or wealth, that the true empowerment of the world's peoples will increasingly come. Such education calls for the exercise of self-discipline. The motivation that will make the effort possible is love for God. The Divine commandments, the Aqdas says, are no "mere code of laws," [footnote (#28): Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, 21.] but the "lamps of My loving providence among My servants, and the keys of My mercy for My creatures." [footnote (#29): FORTH ONE WHO WILL MAKE MENTION OF ME AMID MY SERVANTS." [footnote (#30): Ibid., 41.] "God hath prescribed matrimony unto you," the Aqdas says, "... that ye may bring forth one who will make mention of Me amid My servants." [footnote (#31): Ibid.] Bahá'u'lláh envisions the re-emergence of the extended family as the norm throughout the world, and various ordinances of the Aqdas reinforce this ideal. While the selection of a marital partner rests with the son or daughter concerned, for example, the requirement to seek parental consent aims at creating a family investment in the success of the marriage. The provisions of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas relating to family must be read in the context of Bahá'u'lláh's general teachings. "Women and men," He writes, "have been and will always be equal in the sight of God." [footnote (#32): Translated from an unpublished Tablet of Bahá'u'lláh.] Justice today demands that society so reorganize its affairs as to provide equality of opportunity to all persons, without regard to differences of sex. Should financial resources be so limited that choices must be made, educational priority should be given to girls over boys. The latter injunction relates to certain responsibilities and claims that attach to sexual identity. The education of girls is particularly important because, although both parents participate in the education of children, mothers have the predominant influence during the earliest years. They are the primary agents of the civilizing process. Similarly, men are called on to assume the chief responsibilities for the maintenance of families' financial well-being, and a number of provisions in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas take this particularly into account. THE VIBRATING INFLUENCE OF THIS MOST GREAT, THIS NEW WORLD ORDER." [footnote (#33) Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, 85.] A common feature of all of the great religions of the past has been the teaching that the purpose of human life is for the soul to know, to love, and to worship its Creator. Bahá'u'lláh's writings on this theme are particularly rich and evocative. They emphasize, however, that this inner spiritual quickening must motivate each human being to respond in his or her own way to the truth that: "All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization." [footnote (#34): Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings, 215.] Capacities as yet undreamed of are awakening in the peoples of all races and cultures; their blending will transform the very nature of cultural experience: "This is the Day in which God's most excellent favors have been poured out upon men ... Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead." [footnote (#35): Ibid., 6-7.] As the peoples of the world are drawn inescapably into a single planetary society, they are being challenged to free themselves from cultural limitations and prejudices, and to embrace the message of God that alone can unite their hearts and minds. In the words of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas: "0 peoples of the earth! ... Cast away that which ye possess, and, on the wings of detachment, soar beyond all created things. Thus biddeth you the Lord of creation, the movement of Whose Pen hath revolutionized the soul of mankind." [footnote (#36) Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, 39.] "The earth," Bahá'u'lláh says, "is but one country, and mankind its citizens." [footnote (#37) Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings, 250.] Today, His teachings find expression in the life of a united worldwide community representing the entire diversity of humankind and established in every part of the globe. Its achievements in such matters as racial integration, the equality of the sexes, and the promotion of education are particularly noteworthy. The distinguishing feature of the Bahá'í community, however, is the administrative system with which its Founder endowed it. Operating on consultative principles taught by Bahá'u'lláh, the community is administered by democratically elected councils at the local, national, and international levels. It has no clergy. Its activities are supported solely by the financial contributions of its own registered membership.p> The system is based on explicit provisions of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas: "The Lord hath ordained that in every city a House of Justice be established ... It behoveth them [its members] to be the trusted ones of the Merciful among men and to regard themselves as the guardians appointed of God for all that dwell on earth." [footnote (#38) Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, 29.] To the Faith's international governing body, the Universal House of Justice, Bahá'u'lláh entrusted the function of deciding on all matters not explicitly revealed in the Text itself. Thus He ensured that, until the advent of the next Manifestation of God a thousand or more years hence, the World Order He founded will be equipped with a legislative authority able to keep it abreast of the needs of a rapidly changing world.

Sullivan analyzes her subsequent objectification through a mistaken cyber identity producing strange results. I was interested in how the men didn’t “get it” after she inserted links that would lead the gazer through her intended assignment as an exercise in hypertext and techno-web-creation. Why don’t they get it? Sullivan wasn’t so much interested in this universality as other aspects of her work, such as the cybersexism occurring within the male dominant network and the inherent female objectification such power structures will exert. I couldn’t help thinking about how cultural the implications of Sullivan’s work are, especially when confronted with the detail of the 40 year old woman who faced pressure to cut her hair because she was too “old” to have long hair. The societal notion of how women should appear and at what age is the double standard made famous by the Ally Sheedy character in, The Breakfast Club, “if you haven’t you’re a prude, if you have you’re a slut.” The utmost impossible standard for women to achieve – and be advised ladies, if you are indeed one of those blessed hotties, your crown is destined to usurped by the culturally unkind Father Time, who only doles out moments in the sun to women, however men are free to be “distinguished” looking well into their 50’s. Sullivan has definitely perked my interest in her work on the dominant male cyber gaze, its ensuing power structure, and the cultural peculiarities bred by the medium that is the world wide web. “Revolutions provide opportunities for the marginalized to participate in the rearrangement of the social, political, and economic hierarchies that affect their lives, and a media revolution is no exception.” (Romano 252). Romano refers to marginalized with access to the media revolution, of course. The revolutionary opportunities are powerful and subject to a global gaze, however this particular type of activity Romano refers to is absolutely contingent upon a working computer literacy, and only those in the know and with all the expendable time to create these websites will have a global audience. Romano has factored in the actual physical exertion and difficulty faced by some women to gain access, and that leads naturally to the spending of time as a commodity – spending time to gain the access and spending time to fudge with the programming. Personally, I have spent hours attempting to come to a certain end in the act of techno creation – Once I even heard, the notorious super-bad agent of technology, Avery LaBad, to whom all technologies lie prostate at his feet, remark that he had spent hours getting his Comic Life slide show just right. If the legendary Avery LaBad spent hours, I would spend months, maybe even up to a year to accomplish such a slide show. And I question to what group do these represented feminist activists belong? Romano writes to a specific audience of digital pioneer women, who is inclusive of the term “pioneer?” Do they have representative Holly Hobby avatars complete with bonnets and aprons? Where did they get those old fashioned tights? “As women visually construct themselves online, what issues of representation should they consider and how do they understand other’s online construction of them?” (Hawisher/Sullivan 269). The study examined professional English Department women’s web pages and recognized a rigidness to their visual representations which is the expected manner of representin’ oneself in academe. While reading about visual rhetoric among different types of institutional sites, personal homepages, Victoria’s Secret catalog page, and etc, I was thinking about the dating websites. In a discussion with a friend, who had actually gone beyond the faceless chatting on the dating sites and met some people, he described his experience as every meeting the person had misrepresented themselves in a most negligent manner. I laughed as he told me that each person had aged 10 years and gained 100 pounds, within the 2 week time frame between “meeting” on the site and physically meeting in person. Although dating sites are not included in the Hawisher/Sullivan study, they are the most interesting of visual rhetoric because there is more at stake than the other types of sites studied. After all, an individual has a chance to find, “the one.”

Lea Moore McCarthy SafeHollow Emergency Rescue Division, Brunswick, Ga "Saves homeless animals other rescues won't take! I am sending this in to acknowledge Lea Moore McCarthy/SafeHollow Emergency Rescue Division, Brunswick, Ga. Although I've only known Lea for 2 years, I KNOW that this woman has a rare story! She is rescue coordinator for SafeHollow and Lea has a life mission to rescue, rehab, and rehome the animals who are special needs cases that other rescues won't take. This summer was a very busy summer and a perfect example of her exemplary ethic regarding saving homeless animals. With the help of donations and foster homes, we rehabbed about eight groups of puppies, a few dogs that needed amputation, several dogs needing surgeries and other medical attention, and many dogs were saved from Death Row at several of the animal shelters near us. We have teamed up with Animal Aid USA to send many pups up north to find their forever homes but we get no funds in doing so. Personally, Lea is a single mother of five children, two of those being special needs children. Lea works as an EMT for the ambulance service in her town which means she's on call 24/7 and not only saves k9 lives, she saves humans as well! There's SO much more I could write about the good that I've seen Lea do for animals, all without a second thought of how we will pay the bills. My favorite quote of hers is: "we don't have money but we'll put a fundraiser out there, we'll sell something, we'll make it happen". It is because of her selflessness and her dedication to saving animals that we are able to help save so many, but at the same time, our vet bill from the summer is over $5,000 and we are drowning at another vet in Hinesville as well. Unfortunately, we are now on standby for taking in any other homeless pets in need as we fosters are all full, and due to donations being very slim this past year, our resources are tapped out. So, that's why I'm entering Lea's story. I'm believing that we can get that money, pay the vet bills off, buy medical supplies and medicines, and be able to continue doing what we all love to do... saving lives...one homeless, needy animal at a time. Thank you for your time.

Making a Difference in the Middle East and Beyond Serial Entrepreneur Uses Social Media to Grow Her Business and Philanthropy Globally by Patricia Green, US Correspondent, Middle East Business News Roné de Beauvoir is French-African American, with dual citizenship. Her reach has no boundaries, evidenced by having lived in 22 countries. A successful serial entrepreneur, Roné is part of an exclusive group of roughly 6.3 million Americans who live and work abroad. Her expertise reads like a who’s who of global leaders: business coach, global cuisine chef, award-winning speaker, social media guru, author, brand strategist, indie filmmaker, empowerment lecturer, and global humanitarian. To describe Roné in a few words is impossible. Yet, this savvy businesswoman is building a strong presence in the Middle East, where her social media seminars are drawing huge audiences. Even more, she uses her philanthropy to support the world’s most impoverished citizens. Middle East Business News interviewed Roné recently to learn about her entrepreneurial style and differentiator, what fuels her many passions, and future plans, including the charity event she is hosting in Dubai in February 2017. - How would you describe your entrepreneurial leadership style? How successful are you financially and with respect to relationships you have built with customers and other market segments? How do you measure success? My entrepreneurial leadership style is best described as “Democratic,” or participatory, where team members are respected and given the opportunity to have their voices heard. There are other leadership/entrepreneurial styles, for example, laissez-faire which focuses on business and problem solving, and where leaders show others how to follow them. Another one is paternalistic. This is a dominant style that displays power and influence while expecting loyalty and obedience, and lastly, the authoritarian controls everything leaving no room for participation from others. I have been very successful financially due in part to the great relationships I’ve created with clients and their employees. I have always valued those who do the work and complete the work. They are the people without major titles to their names, or, as some would say, the working class. They are the backbone of a successful business. I measure success from my business relations, results, and opportunities enhanced for growth. Additionally, the ability to provide support and direction to a struggling enterprise and/or a rapidly growing one is very fulfilling. My company earnings are at seven figures currently. I am working toward doubling that, worldwide, through my social business initiatives. - At what point in your life did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? What were the deciding factors? In 1984 when I heard about and later met Dottie Walters, Author of Speak and Grow Rich, she became my coach and mentor for a short period. From her expertise, I learned about professional paid public speaking and how to build a profitable business that could expand beyond any borders. In fact, it is because of Dottie that I had the opportunity to live in 22 countries. While she is no longer living, I’ve always valued and remembered the things she taught me, and I use her teachings to this day. - Who were your early influencers and why? Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief, Vogue; Queen Elizabeth II of England; Rosa Parks, Freedom Fighter; Margaret Thatcher, Former Prime Minister of the UK; Coco Chanel, Designer; Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Democracy Movement. Each of these women had a huge impact and influence on my life many years ago because of their VISION, FIGHT, and DISCIPLINE. They brought light to darkness and change to many nations. - So you lived in 22 countries. What drove you to live so many places? What did you learn about cultures through these experiences? I chose to live in all those countries because at the time I was attempting to build my credentials as a speaker, and I wanted to grow and develop into an international woman exposed to the world. I wanted to see the world and live in it. I wanted to break bread with people who did not look like me, who did not speak my language, and who had a different religious belief system from mine. I was seeking to learn more about myself and whether or not I could hold on to my value systems. The woman that I am today would never have been had I not lived abroad around the world in actually over 22 countries. - I am aware that you have multiple businesses. What are they and what is your key to success in owning and running multiple global enterprises? Yes, it’s true. I do own a few businesses, some of which are small and serve a single purpose i.e. web hosting company and publishing company. These two companies help facilitate various websites needed for my different companies and ebooks along with paperback books I’ve written over the years. These companies are no cost to me and have supported the interests of others such as clients who are speakers, and/or business owners looking to enhance their brand awareness. I also own a media consulting company, a catering company, and a dining dating service. - Many define you as a Renaissance Woman. Why that description? I was given that title after a training event several years ago. I described all the various businesses that I owned at the time and mentioned plans to launch a few others. During a break, a small group of women stated they could never handle such an overload and conveyed to me that I was some kind of Modern-Day Renaissance Woman. I will admit my feelings were hurt until I discovered Oprah Winfrey and Angelina Jolie were both known and named as modern-day renaissance women. In that moment of discovery, I decided to embrace the title and I continue to use it today. - You are an entrepreneur and philanthropist. How do you marry the two? What causes do you support and why? I can marry the two easily because one does not exist without the other. I believe firmly that an entrepreneur’s first responsibility is finding ways to help and support others, while expecting nothing in return. The causes I support are too many to mention, however, to name a few, Kids with Cancer is a huge passion of mine, along with child slavery and refugee children. In fact, while speaking in Amman, Jordan recently, I was approached by the Action Aid Arab Regional Initiative where I have become actively involved, and it has become, to some extent, my own Initiative, as I love so very much what I’m doing to save lives. I also support global education founded by Malala and a few more such as Dubai Foundation for Women and Children. - How does social media enhance your business goals? Share some of the ways you use social media, which social media channels, and the impact. Social media platforms have opened doors I could not have imagined. For example, I’m very active on Twitter, Periscope and Snapchat. These platforms alone have created new speaking opportunities, business connections, consulting and business development. While Facebook and Instagram have also added additional value, the greatest of these for my business are Twitter, Periscope and Snapchat. - You are doing quite a bit of work in the Middle East. Is the Middle East a growth market for women? What barriers exist for women business owners conducting business in the Middle East? I’m doing a great deal of public speaking, seminars and development of my franchise for a healthy eatery. I chose the Middle East for its opulence, but more importantly the Middle East is a growing force to be reckoned with, and I want to be part of their growth while adding additional value in areas of business that may be lacking. I think the attributes one should have to navigate business opportunities in the Middle East would be to first embrace the culture. Learn what you don’t know, and use your new knowledge to strengthen your business goals and objectives. In other words, seek first to understand and afterwards to be understood. I would say “yes” the Middle East is a great market for women. For example, one of my favorite global leaders is Lubna Khalid Al Qasimi. She is the Minister of State for Tolerance and previously was Minister of State for International Cooperation and Minister of Economic and Planning of the United Arab Emirates. She, along with Queen Rania of Jordan, set the tone for my vision with regard to the possibilities for business in the Middle East. Lastly, I think the greatest barriers for women business owners conducting business in the Middle East is a lack of cultural competence, especially relevant to women of western cultures. Many times, what is misunderstood is actually the cultural norm. 10. What business tools should one have that are portable no matter the country where they are working/consulting? The best portable tools no matter where you are in the world would be as follows: - Knowledge of the culture and country - Develop conversational skills of the country’s language - Let performance create your reputation - Allow respect to speak when language is a barrier - Use value as your focus - Let excellence be your product - Allow results to lead the way - Tell me about your February 2017 summit in Dubai. Who are the audiences you are supporting? What are your financial goals? What influencers are lending support and in what way? Our world summit, to occur February 22-23, 2017, in Dubai, will feature livestream technology and social business initiatives to raise funds in support of people in impoverished areas of the world. Among our speakers will be dynamic thought leaders and global influencers representing various sectors, from corporate executives to NGOs, yet with shared commitment to integrate business and philanthropy for the greater good. Over the years, my businesses have contributed to most of the charities the summit will support. Livestreaming allows us to broaden our reach through the power of the Internet, educate, and raise critical funds for charities, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. Our financial goal is six figures in the first year with capacity to grow even larger in years to come. About Roné de Beauvoir Roné de Beauvoir is a modern-day Renaissance woman and more. Yet she never forgot her roots, emphasizing that her parents raised her to be confident in herself and her dreams. They also raised her to speak the language of respect. No matter the countries visited and lived in, Roné has carried those values, significant for anyone doing business in the international sphere, vital to building and sustaining relationships by, as Roné says, being “culturally competent.” As she expands her business presence in the Middle East, through social media presentations, teaming relations, her healthy food enterprise, and her philanthropy, she does so in an area of the world where some speak of gender barriers while she sees only immense opportunities.

Much like my review of Upstream Color, I fear at this point I have to install not just a POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT, but this analysis is hopefully a thorough one with details some might just want to witness first on the big screen so THIS IS A SPOILER ALERT! A SPOILER ALERT! DANGER, WIL ROBINSON! However, Only God Forgives is not based on any spoiler per se. My analysis is based mostly on my own readings and my own film critical viewing background. Watch the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhRKlwr1-KM My one problem with Only God Forgives was that it was sold as a hyper violent action, kickass fight flick with an intelligent twist. It’s not. It’s hyper violent and intelligently done. There’s little fighting in it though and you’re not going to get a hero. Looking back at a history of Nicolas Winding Refn flicks, who wouldn’t expect something akin to the Pusher trilogy with a dash of Bronson and Drive? Refn is auteur who is not just an art house director, but a continual film fan/student. Therefore, like with most of the riskier directors these days (ie. Steve McQueen, Shane Carruth…I’m just thinking of films I’ve seen recently), Refn utilizes influences while still pushing boundaries within them. More on that later. Refn’s own explanation for the basis of this film: “The original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God. That is, of course, a very vast obstacle but when I was writing the film, I was going through some very existential times in my life – we were expecting our second child and it was a difficult pregnancy – and the idea of having a character who wants to fight God without knowing why very much appealed to me. With that as the concept, I elaborated by adding a character who believes he is God (Chang), obviously the antagonist, with the protagonist being a gangster who is looking for religion to believe in (Julian). This itself is, of course, very existential because faith is based on the need for a higher answer but most of the time, we don’t know what the question is. When the answer comes, then, we must backtrack our lives in order to find the question. In this way, the film is conceived as an answer, with the question revealed at the end.” 1 For those of you who haven’t seen the film, but are still reading this analysis: Julian (Ryan Gosling) is an American working at a boxing academy in Thailand. It’s not entirely sure if he’s a former boxer, but it’s implied in his knowledge of boxing and his mother saying, “He was never a good fighter.” His brother, Billy (Tom Burke), has a penchant for brutalizing people, especially underage girls, and he works there too. Billy goes too far one night and murders a sixteen year old prostitute. Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), an inexorable chief officer, brings in the girl’s father and instructs him to kill (to put things right), Billy. Chang then amputates girl’s father arm (by an ever hidden, yet present, sword) to atone for his sins (sins being that his daughter shouldn’t have become a prostitute in the first place). Julian finds the girl’s father for revenge, but let’s him go after being told of Billy’s own deeds. Julian’s mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), appears and upon hearing of Julian’s inability to deal vengeance, looks for it herself by hiring her drug goons to do it for her. Julian is a man in search of God/religion/spirituality. His brother lacked all sense of morals, was a lowlife who beat up and murdered a child. Chang is a police official who is godlike and believes in putting things right karmically, at least in his own sword loving version of karma. So let’s start there: Julian searches for God and finds it in Chang. Chang is an interesting character. He’s superhuman: in a scene where he uses his sword to kill a man who was hired to shoot him, he cuts right through his rib cage in one swift motion (you can see his ribs sticking out as the blood spurts from his carcass). Chang also senses when things are about to happen and has a heightened sense of perception: he feels danger before gunfire erupts at a restaurant; with one look at Julian he knows that he wasn’t the one that killed the dead girl’s father. He’s calm. He’s cool. Chang is a collected man. He’s badass evil Highlander. The biggest clue is that hidden sword. Where does he hide it? Before we ever see him pull it out, Refn gives us many shots of Chang’s back. There’s no holster. There’s no bump to see where he’s pulling it out of his shirt and jacket. There’s no way Chang can pull the sword out that cleanly through a collared shirt and the collared suit on top of it. It’s either an invisible, magical ethereal sword, or the sword doesn’t exist (which, when you think about it, maybe Chang since he’s a godlike figure, maybe doesn’t exist either). Julian sees Chang in a vision before he even meets him. Chang appears in a black doorway (reminiscent of the all encompassing black of Kubrick’s monolith from 2001), and amputates Julian’s arm as he reaches out. Later, when Julian sees Chang in person, he watches him greet the children from the boxing academy (they bow down to him in either reverence or respect). As Chang passes Julian he says, “He isn’t the one,” and keeps walking. The camera goes right to Julian, his chest visibly heaving while his eyes open wide with a sort of wonder and admiration. He’s just met God and as he stands there in the lobby of the boxing academy the audience perceives Julian’s bellicose stance: Julian wants to fight God. In turn, Julian gets the chance to fight God (“Wanna fight?”), he loses to him, almost on purpose, making himself humble before his God/father/circumstances. Is Julian in hell? Maybe just a version of it. The colors of the film are saturated red, green and yellow with hints of green (Refn is somewhat color blind, but highlights natural color to give an allusion/contrast of realism versus imagination). I gave up on looking for symbolism with the colors because they were inconsistent. At first I thought that blue was a sexual situation, but then red becomes the focus more when Julian watches his prostitute/hired girlfriend, Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam), masturbate in front of him. I believe the colors here are mostly stylistic in nature. Cinematographer Larry Smith (was a gaffer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, chief of lighting for Barry Lyndon, and lighting cameraman for Eyes Wide Shut, and cinematographer for Bronson and Fear X), almost pays tribute to Kubrick through the intense reds and fluid panning shots along walking subjects. The camera holds steady on focus to the characters while the background looms bright, illuminating filigree more like tarot card portraits of elementals rather than humans. These can be seen as character snapshots, but they’re meant to be more of a visual feast. Refn is also highly influenced by Martin Scorsese: He once stated that his greatest source of inspiration is Martin Scorsese and his films. As a salute to him, he used the main theme from Scorsese’s Casino (1995) in the opening sequence of Bleeder (1999). 2 The famous massacre scene from Taxi Driver is referenced with the spurting gore in which the red of the blood is sometimes neutralized by blue or hyper dark lighting. When the violence happens, it is alarming and abrupt. I see a lot of the Taxi Driver anti-hero in both Drive and Only God Forgives, but what most people forget are that these anti-heroes are psychopaths. This is the brilliance of both Scorsese and Refn: to make a character that is disturbingly relatable. Peripherally, Only God Forgives can be seen as a revenge flick, but in reality it’s the existential tale of a murderous psychopath in search for God. As told by Crystal, Julian killed his father with his own hands under her direction. I’m not entirely sure (maybe due to Gosling’s lack of emotion), but he does seem to express a desire for redemption. Since he can’t seem to come to terms with his existence or what he has done himself, “only God forgives” and only God can give him that absolution. He has Mai tie his hands before she masturbates for him. Julian clenches his hands continuously like a man unable to control his urges and fighting with the monster (the psychopath) within. Hints to his mother inappropriate relationship with her sons are littered throughout the film. Instead of having sex with Mai, Julian envisions himself probing her with his hand (the hand that gets cut off in the vision), and in turn uses that hand to penetrate the wound he inflicts on his dead mother. The same soft lilting music wells up during these scenes alluding to a need for love, a need for a mother, a need for a purpose beyond Julian’s inner demons. In the end, his never ending visions become somehow true as he feels the innards of his mother/where he came from, the birth of a monster, creates a hyper real dream: he gets both of his fists amputated by a worthy god. Why? Either to keep him from becoming who he truly is or for ultimate redemption. Many critics have complained of Gosling’s and the rest of the cast’s lack of expression. Some may see it as a blank canvas, a mask that can inhabit our own anxieties. Scary, if you enjoyed this film, is that this effect makes it more comfortable for the audience to place themselves in Julian’s shoes, then want to immediately step out, then go hide themselves in Chang shoes, and immediately run away from that too. You keep away from Crystal. You…you just do. I usually have an issue with the Lady Macbeth trope. It’s overused and an easy way for directors or storytellers to create sympathetic beasts. However, Thomas is a relish to watch. She plays that character like she invented her and slashes and dices with words the way Chang does with his sword.3 Crystal who goes out of her way to go beyond the archetype or trope. She’s the one who begins this mad chain of events. I’ve never cheered for such an evil character and when she spits out “cum-dumpster” at Mai, I almost leapt to my feet. I don’t know why, I just felt compelled to. Crystal got under my skin. I get what Refn was creating here with Crystal, and I’ve yet to see him “get women right.” They’re either pure evil or pure helpless waifs. I suspect Refn of misogyny. (“It’s like pornography. I’m a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me. What I want to see. Very rarely to understand why I want to see it and I’ve learned not to become obsessed with that part of it.” 5 (Read the rest of that article and tell me you don’t think he might be too.) I have no problem with pornography (Porn is awesome!). But if we’re thinking of Refn struggling with inner demons and using women in his films to either “save” or “as emasculating bitches,” as a pornography then we can suspect what those demons may be.) The reason I don’t have a problem with this trope here is because Thomas portrays her character as an entirely self-made person. Sure, she’s a villainous, vengeful drug dealer, but she’s her own boss. She snakes through each of her scenes like she owns the whole production and for that, it’s a commendable performance. Magical realism is a big part of Only God Forgives and this maybe the main tribute to his friend, director Alejandro Jodorowsky. Almost every scene has a distorted reality. In some scenes, Julian wears a white shirt and then is seen with a black shirt/suit. People sometimes glide instead of walk. Characters stare at each other for extended periods of time, almost as if they are relaying intuitive messages to each other. Where Jodoroswky goes all alchemy and scatalogical, Refn goes incestual and bloody violent. Actors are merely devices to a larger picture, but the picture, although dreamlike is all too real and archetypal that it’s hard not to try find meaning within the transfixing images these directors focus on. While Julian lives in his version of hell on Earth, Chang is a supernatural being outside of the world like God would be, yet their conflicts become less about plot devices and transform into the base ideals/horrors within ourselves. This all makes the film more like a hermetic exegesis of a tarot card reading more than a story and that’s why I loved it. The Cliff Martinez score is rife with Wendy Carlos love, it’s not even funny; it’s amazing. Just give me scenes with any of these characters, or just even Eyes Wide Shut hallways, violins, and Kraftwerk synthesizers and I am so there forever (make sure to splice Kristen Scott Thomas saying “cum-dumpster”). I’m running out to get the soundtrack as soon as I can. Should I touch on the infusion of karaoke? Chang sings and his minions listen attentively, almost appreciatively. The scenes are very David Lynch (another influence that is seen and is also mentioned in the credits). I don’t see it so much as a contrast or as detail to Chang’s “softer” side, but rather since besides being God and stuff, he’s also an angel of vengeance, he must sing and sing like an angel. The scenes in the karaoke bar are still. No violence occurs inside of them. It’s God’s sanctuary and all are invited, but only God can sing. So as you can tell, I really enjoyed Only God Forgives (as I’ve seen it two times in two days). I could have hated it if I was expecting an action revenge flick, but I wasn’t. I expect risky directors to push the bar and bounce from the foundations they’ve set. I honestly would like to see Refn do something better with women. I know he was interested in doing Barbarella and Wonder Woman, but seeing as those are both seen as more sexual beings than “heroes” I hold little hope for that. I do enjoy Refn films because when I see film, I see gender as a secondary thing and in my head can easily place a woman in Julian’s shoes. I think it’s frightening for a lot of people to see a Julienne, raped by her father, become a psychopath searching for her God. She wants her hands chopped off for killing her mother and in the end, she violates her father and vision quests the demons out of herself or becomes a true killing machine. See? It’s not so hard. Just too risky, perhaps. 3. I admit to giggling every time I typed “his sword.” I’m not sorry.

If you’re digging for dirt then you’re going to miss the Gold I was watching one of the many T.V. cop shows the other night and they were ‘digging for dirt’. The detectives were scouring over the history of a suspect looking for any dirt they might have. Old evidence, convictions, witness statements all being examined for clues that they could arrest, convict and punish. What about yourself and the relationships you are in? What the relationship you have with yourself? Do you dig for dirt? Do trawl over your life and others examining for any trace of dirt. Knowing that you can then arrest, convict and punish. Having good Mental health is not keeping a list of wrongs about yourself and others. There was a “troubled couple who visited a Christian counselor for help. The wife’s physician had advised her to see a counselor because she was developing an ulcer that apparently had no physical cause. During the session, the wife slammed down on the counselors desk a manuscript ‘one-inch thick, on 8½ by 11 paper, typewritten on both sides…a thirteen-year record of wrongs that her husband had done to her. The counselor could immediately see that the wife’s resentment of her husband’s many faults and her meticulous documentation of each one had made her bitter. Keeping a record of her husband’s sins had only made matters worse, to the point of causing this woman to become physically ill.” [Quoted in Alexander Strauch’s Leading with Love, pg. 72] That is an extreme case of not just a ‘digging for dirt’, but of storing it up for continued consumption. We may not keep a written list, but do we keep a mental list? ‘She did this, he did that, I did this or that’ just sitting there, in the thought blender, chugging round and round. Paul in writing about love tells us this. Love … keeps no record of wrongs 1 Corinthians 13:5 But I want to keep a record of wrongs. I want to prove my case is watertight. If I don’t have the evidence then they might just get off without any consequence. You see my life is all about me and the hurt done to me. They owe me and I have the evidence. I need to be control of my world, I alone can keep myself safe. The great distinctive of the love of God is that there are no strings [or records] attached to it. God simply loves humans. God created us for a love relationship with the Divine Self, and nothing that we can do—or not do—changes the love God bears us. God loves sinners, redeems failures, delights in second chances and fresh starts, and never tires of pursuing lost sheep, waiting for prodigal children, or rescuing those damaged by life and left on the sides of its paths. Dr David Benner 4 Keys to Ripping up a ‘Record Book’ Mentality. Ask yourself why ‘record keeping’ is important for you. What is driving you to keep account? What fruit does it give you? Unless you know what this behaviour offers you in return then you are bound to repeat it. Trace, face and displace those motivations with Gods truth about you. Look for gold and diamonds. If you’re constantly looking for dirt then guess what you’re going to find – DIRT! Start right now by looking for gold or diamonds. Look for the positive! Paul tells us Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Philippians 4:8 I wonder what the wife who had the stomach ulcer would have been like if instead of keeping a list of wrongs she wrote a list of rights. Optimism is a learned skill. I need to encourage myself and tell myself the truth What I focus on gets me. Focus on the negatives/ challenges will always take me down. Focus on the positive/ good things will always give me hope Be thankful for all the gold and diamonds in your life. Turn your gold and diamonds into praise and thanks to God. Make it a habit. Pray and ask God for an increased supernatural ability to forgive. We are made in the image of God who has the ability to choose to forgive. That being the case then we can be of the same mindset. Pray, ask God to transform your mind, to change the mental neuron mapping of your brain that habitually goes down that ‘record keeping’ pathway. Together with God you can change the way you think, neuron by neuron. A few final thoughts Grace is totally alien to human psychology. We want to get our house in order and then let God love and accept us. Dr David Benner Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive. C.S. Lewis Good Mental health is not keeping a list of wrongs. Do you? Questions to consider and leave a comment Why do people keep a ‘record of wrongs’? Do you think God, in partnership with you, can change your thinking? Why is it that what you focus on will always take you to that place? What do you focus on? Photo Credit: Second-tree via Compfight cc To get daily insights and quotes Follow me on Twitter Facebook Google+ Get my blog posts sent to you. Sign up to receive my blog posts for free via e-mail and get a copy of my popular e-book on Depression FREE.

||Дата: Пятница, 03.03.2017, 06:30 | Сообщение # 1| |March 8 - International Women's Day National holiday| International Women's Day in Russia International Women’s Day in Russia honors women’s achievements on March 8 each year. International Women's Day (IWD), originally called International Working Women's Day, is celebrated on March 8 every year. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women for their economic, political and social achievements. An effective Women's Day was the 1975 Icelandic women's strike which paved the way for the first female president in the world, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. In some regions, the day lost its political flavor and became simply an occasion for people to express their love for women in a way somewhat similar to a mixture of Mother's Day and Valentine's Day. In other regions however, the political and human rights theme designated by the United Nations runs strong political and social awareness of the struggles of women worldwide are brought out and examined in a hopeful manner. Some people celebrate the day by wearing purple ribbons. The earliest celebration was held as a Socialist political event in 1909 in New York City. Declared a national holiday in the Soviet Union in 1917, it spread to other nearby countries. It is now celebrated in many Eastern countries. The earliest Women's Day observance was held on February 28, 1909, in New York. It was organized by the Socialist Party of America in remembrance of the 1908 strike of the International Ladies Garment Worker's Union. There was no specific strike happening on March 8, despite later claims. In August 1910, an International Women's Conference was organized to precede the general meeting of the Socialist Second International in Copenhagen, Denmark. Inspired in part by the American socialists, German Socialist Luise Zietz proposed the establishment of an annual International Woman's Day (singular) and was seconded by fellow socialist and later communist leader Clara Zetkin, although no date was specified at that conference. Delegates (100 women from 17 countries) agreed with the idea as a strategy to promote equal rights including suffrage for women. The following year on March 19, 1911 IWD was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire alone, there were 300 demonstrations. In Vienna, women paraded on the Ringstrasse and carried banners honouring the martyrs of the Paris Commune. Women demanded that they be given the right to vote and to hold public office. They also protested against employment sex discrimination. Americans continued to celebrate National Women's Day on the last Sunday in February. In 1913 Russian women observed their first International Women's Day on the last Saturday in February (by Julian calendar then used in Russia). Although there were some women-led strikes, marches, and other protests in the years leading up to 1914, none of them happened on March 8. In 1914 International Women's Day was held on March 8, possibly because that day was a Sunday, and now it is always held on March 8 in all countries. The 1914 observance of the Day in Germany was dedicated to women's right to vote, which German women did not win until 1918. In London there was a march from Bow to Trafalgar Square in support of women's suffrage on March 8, 1914. Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested in front of Charing Cross station on her way to speak in Trafalgar Square. In 1917 demonstrations marking International Women's Day in Saint Petersburg on the last Thursday in February (which fell on March 8 on the Gregorian calendar) initiated the February Revolution. Women in Saint Petersburg went on strike that day for "Bread and Peace" – demanding the end of World War I, an end to Russian food shortages, and the end of czarism. Leon Trotsky wrote, "23 February (8th March) was International Woman's Day and meetings and actions were foreseen. But we did not imagine that this 'Women's Day' would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date. But in morning, despite the orders to the contrary, textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for support of the strike… which led to mass strike... all went out into the streets." Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai and Vladimir Lenin made it an official holiday in the Soviet Union, and it was established, but was a working day until 1965. On May 8, 1965 by the decree of the USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet International Women's Day was declared a non-working day in the USSR "in commemoration of the outstanding merits of Soviet women in communistic construction, in the defense of their Fatherland during the Great Patriotic War, in their heroism and selflessness at the front and in the rear, and also marking the great contribution of women to strengthening friendship between peoples, and the struggle for peace. But still, women's day must be celebrated as are other holidays." From its official adoption in Russia following the Soviet Revolution in 1917 the holiday was predominantly celebrated in communist and socialist countries. It was celebrated by the communists in China from 1922, and by Spanish communists from 1936. After the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949 the state council proclaimed on December 23 that March 8 would be made an official holiday with women in China given a half-day off. In the West, International Women's Day was first observed as a popular event after 1977 when the United Nations General Assembly invited member states to proclaim March 8 as the UN Day for women's rights and world peace. But women of Eastern European origins in North America were celebrating International Women's Day decades earlier than that. During World War II, some Western countries marked the date with an emphasis on women's contributions to the war effort and to the defeat of Fascism. Eleanor Roosevelt praised such celebrations of women's worldwide unity in her "My Day" column in 1944. Official UN themes Year - UN Theme 1996 - Celebrating the Past, Planning for the Future 1997 - Women and the Peace Table 1998 Women and Human Rights 1999 World Free of Violence Against Women 2000 Women Uniting for Peace 2001 Women and Peace: Women Managing Conflicts 2002 Afghan Women Today: Realities and Opportunities 2003 Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals 2004 Women and HIV/AIDS 2005 Gender Equality Beyond 2005; Building a More Secure Future 2006 Women in Decision-making 2007 Ending Impunity for Violence Against Women and Girls 2008 Investing in Women and Girls 2009 Women and Men United to End Violence Against Women and Girls 2010 Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All 2011 Equal Access to Education, Training, and Science and Technology: Pathway to Decent Work for Women 2012 Empower Rural Women, End Poverty and Hunger 2013 A Promise is a Promise: Time for Action to End Violence Against Women 2014 Equality for Women is Progress for All 2015 Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it! 2016 Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality 2017 Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030 On the occasion of 2010 International Women's Day the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) drew attention to the hardships displaced women endure. The displacement of populations is one of the gravest consequences of today's armed conflicts. It affects women in a host of ways. Events took place in more than 100 countries on March 8, 2011 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. In the United States, President Barack Obama proclaimed March 2011 to be "Women's History Month", calling Americans to mark IWD by reflecting on "the extraordinary accomplishments of women" in shaping the country's history. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the "100 Women Initiative: Empowering Women and Girls through International Exchanges", on the eve of IWD. In the run-up to 2011 International Women's Day, the Red Cross called on States and other entities not to relent in their efforts to prevent rape and other forms of sexual violence that harm the lives and dignity of countless women in conflict zones around the world every year. In Pakistan, the Punjab Government Project Gender Reform Action Plan (GRAP), Gujranwala District celebrated this day at the GIFT University Gujranwala. Shazia Ashfaq Mattu, MPA and GRAP officer Yasir Nawaz Manj organized the events. Australia issued an IWD 100th anniversary commemorative 20-cent coin. In Egypt, however, the day was a step back for women. In Egypt's Tahrir Square, hundreds of men came out not in support, but to harass the women who came out to stand up for their rights as the police and military stood by watching the events unfold in front of them. "The women – some in headscarves and flowing robes, others in jeans – had marched to Cairo's central Tahrir Square to celebrate International Women's Day. But crowds of men soon outnumbered them and chased them out", wrote Hadeel Al-Shalchi for The Associated Press (AP). The UN theme for International Women's Day 2012 was Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty. In that year, Oxfam America invited people to celebrate inspiring women in their lives by sending a free International Women's Day e-Card or honoring a woman whose efforts had made a difference in the fight against hunger and poverty with Oxfam's International Women's Day award. On the occasion of International Women's Day 2012, the ICRC called for more action to help the mothers and wives of people who have gone missing during armed conflict. The vast majority of people who go missing in connection with conflict are men. As well as the anguish of not knowing what has happened to the missing husband or son, many of these women face economic and practical difficulties. The ICRC underlined the duty of parties to a conflict to search for the missing and provide information to the families. The Google Doodle for March 8, 2012 had an International Women's Day theme. The UN theme for International Women's Day 2013 was "A promise is a promise: Time for action to end violence against women", while International Women's Day 2013 declared the year's theme as The Gender Agenda: Gaining Momentum. The 2013 International Women's Day, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) draw attention to the plight of women in prison. The UN theme for International Women's Day 2014 is "Equality for Women is Progress for All". The Google Doodle on the eve of IWD 2014 (March 7, 2014) featured an International Women's day doodle video, showing images and videos of women from around the world, with music by Zap Mama. American singer Beyoncé also posted an International Women's Day video to her YouTube account. Throughout the video, her song "***Flawless" plays, which includes a portion of the "We Should All Be Feminists" speech given by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knowles is a modern-day feminist. The UN theme for International Women's Day 2015 is "Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it!". Governments and activists around the world will commemorate the 20th anniversary year of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, an historic roadmap that sets the agenda for realizing women's rights. The International Women's Day theme for 2016 is "Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality". An independent campaign, separate from the UN, is being run by financial firm EY with other corporate partners, organizing events around a #PledgeForParity hashtag. The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, in his message issued on the eve of International Women's Day said: "On the occasion of International Womens Day, I extend warm greetings and good wishes to the women of India and thank them for their contributions over the years in the building of our nation." The ministry of women and child development announced the setting up of four more one-stop crisis centers on March 8, in addition to the eight already functioning across the country. Ahead of Women's Day, the national carrier Air India operated what it claimed to be the world's longest non-stop flight where the entire flight operations were handled by women, as part of International Women's Day celebrations. The flight, from Delhi to San Francisco, covered a distance of around 14,500 kilometers in around 17 hours. The Google Doodle of IWD 2016 (March 8, 2016) featured an International Women's day campaign, #OneDayIWill. Google users were able to watch a short video in which some women are seen sharing their aspirations, completing the sentence “One day I will…” by clicking on the play button on the Google Doodle. In modern culture The day is an official holiday in Afghanistan, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macedonia (for women only), Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Nepal (for women only), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Zambia. In some countries, such as Cameroon, Croatia, Romania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria and Chile, the day is not a public holiday, but is widely observed nonetheless. On this day it is customary for men to give the women in their lives – friends, mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters, colleagues, etc. – flowers and small gifts. In some countries (such as Bulgaria and Romania) it is also observed as an equivalent of Mother's Day, where children also give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers. In Armenia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union celebrations of IWD were abandoned. Instead, April 7 was introduced as state holiday of 'Beauty and Motherhood'. The new holiday immediately became popular among Armenians, as it commemorates one of the main holidays of the Armenian Church, the Annunciation. However, people still kept celebrating IWD on March 8 as well. Public discussion held on the topic of two 'Women's Days' in Armenia resulted in the recognition of the so-called 'Women's Month' which is the period between March 8 and April 7. In Italy, to celebrate the day, men give yellow mimosas to women. Teresa Mattei chose the mimosa as the symbol of IWD in Italy because she felt that the French symbols of the day, violets and lily-of-the-valley, were too scarce and expensive to be used effectively in Italy. Yellow mimosas and chocolate are also one of the most common March 8 presents in Russia and Albania. In many countries, such as in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Colombia, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine the custom of giving women flowers still prevails. Women also sometimes get gifts from their employers. Schoolchildren often bring gifts for their female teachers, too. In countries like Portugal and Italy groups of women usually celebrate on the night of March 8 in "women-only" dinners and parties. In Pakistan working women in formal and informal sectors celebrate International Women's Day every year to commemorate their ongoing struggle for due rights, despite facing many cultural and religious restrictions. Some women working for change in society use IWM to help the movement for women's rights. In Poland, for instance, every IWD includes large feminist demonstrations in major cities. In 1975, which was designated as International Women's Year, the United Nations gave official sanction to, and began sponsoring, International Women's Day. As for efforts to achieve official recognition in the United States of America, actress and human rights activist Beata Pozniak worked with the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Governor of California to lobby members of the U.S. Congress to propose official recognition of the holiday. In February 1994, H.J. Res. 316 was introduced by Rep. Maxine Waters, along with 79 cosponsors, in an attempt to officially recognize March 8 of that year as International Women's Day. The bill was subsequently referred to, and remained in, the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service. No vote of either house of Congress was achieved on this piece of legislation. The 2005 Congress (conference) of the British Trades Union Congress overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for IWD to be designated a public holiday in the United Kingdom. Since 2005, IWD has been celebrated in Montevideo, either on the principal street, 18 de Julio, or alternatively through one of its neighbourhoods. The event has attracted much publicity due to a group of female drummers, La Melaza, who have performed each year. The internationalwomensday.com digital hub allows registration for IWD events. The IWD website adopts an annual theme that is globally relevant for groups and organizations and has the further objective that women and the media can learn about local activity. In Taiwan, International Women's Day is marked by the annual release of a government survey on women's waist sizes, accompanied by warnings that weight gain can pose a hazard to women's health. The Scottish Women's Convention (SWD) celebrates IWD on the Saturday nearest to 8 March. Over the past 10 years, women from throughout Scotland have met in the Scottish Parliament in a celebratory event organised by the SWC. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, huge Soviet-style celebrations were held annually. After the fall of Communism, the holiday, generally considered to be one of the major symbols of the old regime, fell into obscurity. International Women's Day was re-established as an official "important day" by the Parliament of the Czech Republic in 2004 on the proposal of the Social Democrats and Communists. This has provoked some controversy as a large part of the public as well as the political right see the holiday as a relic of the nation's Communist past. In 2008, the Christian conservative Czechoslovak People's Party's deputies unsuccessfully proposed the abolition of the holiday. However, some non-government organizations consider the official recognition of International Women's Day as an important reminder of women's role in the society. International Women's Day sparked violence in Tehran, Iran on March 4, 2007, when police beat hundreds of men and women who were planning a rally. (A previous rally for the occasion was held in Tehran in 2003.) Police arrested dozens of women and some were released after several days of solitary confinement and interrogation. Shadi Sadr, Mahbubeh Abbasgholizadeh and several more community activists were released on March 19, 2007, ending a fifteen-day hunger strike. A popular apocryphal story which surfaced in French Communist circles claimed that women from clothing and textile factories had staged a protest on March 8, 1857 in New York City. The story alleged that garment workers were protesting against very poor working conditions and low wages and were attacked and dispersed by police. It was claimed that this event led to a rally in commemoration of its 50th anniversary in 1907. Temma Kaplan explains that "neither event seems to have taken place, but many Europeans think March 8, 1907, inaugurated International Women's Day." Speculating about the origins of this 1857 legend, Liliane Kandel and Françoise Picq suggested it was likely that (in recent times) some felt it opportune to detach International Women's Day from its basis in Soviet history and ascribe to it a more "international" origin which could be painted as more ancient than Bolshevism and more spontaneous than a decision of Congress or the initiative of those women affiliated to the Party.

I kept pace and a map in my hand. I was intent on avoiding major roadways, and to my joy the most direct routes were the "scenic" ones. Incredible was each moment as I peered across new lands. I saw lakes populated not with people but with animals. I saw farms and forests and mountains and barren lands. I had set up my hotel reservations and made a rough plot of how to go the night before I left. Anticipating what I might see was nothing like actually entering it. I left Salem at 12:08 Sunday afternoon, intent on reaching Phoenix by 2:45 the next day. I took I-5 down to Eugene, OR where I diverted permanently forthwith from any daytime interstate traveling. I found that Route 58 is a lot more mild in incline and descent than Route 22 or Route 20. Additionally it meanders southeast instead of taking me along rigid southernly or easternly directions. This hooked me up with Route 97, and coupled with the backside of the Cascades from 58, it made for several hours of pine forest and flat terrain. I drove past Crater Lake and flinched a bit, knowing I'd miss it. It was exchanged for arriving at Klamath Falls and crossing the California border at about 5:30 PM. I took Route 39 which morphed into 139 across the border. My goal was to reach Reno by sundown. I didn't make it. I was well in the interior of Northern California before I lost all light. I could see forests in the dark, and was completely delighted. I drove past Eagle Lake in the dark. I could tell it was there. The moon was full, and it was following me over my left shoulder all the way. It lit up the lake like a silver cloud. I realized how high Modoc Forest really was when I descended from up high with sharp turns into Susanville. I ate dinner for 4 bucks and called my kids who were going down for the night. From Susanville to Reno it took another couple hours. It was nearly 10 PM by the time I escaped the time trap that Reno is (it is blocked for easy freeway access on the west side by the Sierra Nevada Mountains - and the only other route south starts about 40 minutes east of Reno). My husband Ben signed off as I began the southernly way past Reno. On mapquest I had noticed that it should take seven hours of driving and in a sense my heart sank. Looking back however, this was one of the greatest parts of the trip. The first thing I noticed was that I was crossing BLM lands. I remember my dad making me read various news articles when I was growing up. Thanks to that education I remember learning how environmentalists battled heavily with ranchers over their cattle's access to graze on public lands, and making a profit to boot. They had cattle guards on Highway 395 south that kept them from entering the towns. In the dark I saw: This, I had never done before: share the road with cows. "Okay, here we go," I said to myself as I leaned forward trying to see any odd forms in the headlights. It was a little disconcerting when the highway dipped down with a short horizon. I imagined coming up over an incline and discovering a cow in the road. I was a little stressed, but really excited all at the same time. It got even cooler. Next I saw this sign: I knew that deer are the cause of accidents, so I was even more excited, and scared. A little while later, I saw neither cows nor deer, but I saw these: The cottontail rabbits were cute and small, but the jackrabbits were huge, like maybe two feet tall with its ears? They were all alongside the road, looking around and making decisions on whether they were going to cross, or just watch the show of cars go by. Honestly, I saw a car once every couple minutes maybe. I was almost completely alone except a multitude of rabbits. I started coming around the side of a rocky protrusion and saw another sign: Wow! I couldn't believe it! Wild bighorn sheep, living in the desert? Now I'm even more excited... and scared on what I'd find in the road in the dark! Will I see one? Well, I didn't. I did see one of these, though: Clear as day. This guy was shooting straight across the road in a gallop right between me and the oncoming car, who may have had to show down. Amazing! I had no trouble seeing him in the headlights, for sure. Almost as tall at the withers as my German Shepherd. My heart was thrilled! I was still making my way south. The last sign I saw, I was most confused by. "What?!? What IS that? Cattle, deer, rams, jackrabbits... what more is out here?" I'm not kidding. The sign I saw was a lot like this only more vague. I described it later to a woman in Nevada saying "it has big horns coming out of its head and has a giddy-up in the back [and i bent my leg up behind me for effect and gave myself devil horns to demonstrate]. Do you know what that is?" I was told it could be antelope. It wasn't till I got home and did a little research - did you know that there are wild burro herds that rome Nevada? I never knew that! So awesome! Beatty was the last major town before reaching Las Vegas, and Vegas is where my hotel reservation awaited. I knew what Beatty was. Beatty was the gateway to Nellis Air Force Base, which houses the infamous Area 51 - the place where they stockpile and perform tests on captured aliens and UFOs. I only spent like 15 years of my life learning all about it. Oh yes - I, in my former unsaved life, was an alien enthusiast. I can still tell you gobs of established fact concerning extraterrestrials. Let me tell you something pertaining to Area 51: There are stories of floating lights at the base of the mountains, and no one can explain their odd movement. As soon as I noticed mountains on my left (to the east), it was time to rally my spirits and pretend like I believe that all of that is false. Too late - as soon as I arrived what did I see but the most awkward lights - huge, bright lights - just sitting there on the mountains. Why. Tell me. What's so necessary to turn on a blazing light on the side of the mountain in Nevada in the middle of the night, pray tell? My conspiracy radar flared up. I wondered if it was propaganda, to try and discredit those who make honest reports. Sure, shine the most average light which is completely explainable. If the government can get worried people to report on these, they might wipe away all the cases as nonsense. Of course! "I know what you're up to, sneaky dudes," I said in the dark... scared. Oh no; I don't believe in aliens (yeah right!). |"Toja," short for "I told you so"| Just about when I hit the horizon in approach of Las Vegas I had to stop for another power-nap at the desolate entrance to a Native American reservation. When I woke up, I was sad to see dawn break. Las Vegas was absolutely amazing. Every sign is designed with light bulbs. I had reserved my room for a whopping $30. 'Course, the stay was bittersweet, beginning at 6:30 AM and ending at 8:00 AM, just long enough for a leisurely freshening up - no sleep. It was alright. The sun was out and it was bright, and I was headed for Hoover Dam! Worshiping the LORD while driving across was a flooring experience. The drop beneath was deep, I dare not look - but I saw the mountains! Crossing into Arizona, it took several hours to reach Kingman which intersects with historic Route 66. Instantly I was reminded of the fictitious "Radiator Springs" in the animated Disney Pixar movie "Cars," and the mountains (near Needles, CA) in the background sealed the deal. |photo by Kathy Weiser| It was the Free Grace Alliance National Conference that brought me all that way, and the meet wrapped up on Wednesday at 2:30. I knew the trip back was going to be awesome but I had no idea how so. I took the testimony of John Doan and his wife Kathy. John is at almost every conference, because he's the A.V. tech. He goes to New Harvest Church in my hometown and it is always great to reconnect with him. He said Sedona was just amazing. So I decided to go home differently and head due north to Flagstaff. I'm so glad that I went that way, because the cactuses were unbelievable. I got out of my car at a vantage point and was warned not to veer too far because of poisonous animals which lurk in the desert. Unfortunately for me I was stuck in rushhour in Phoenix, so I didn't arrive in Sedona till the end of daylight. My eyes drank in things I had rarely seen before. I began the uncanny sense from our LORD that being in 24/7 worship on this trip was going to bring me unprecedented delights, and His inclination in my soul came about. Take a look: SR 89A took me through a ravine with tall coniferous trees - I almost felt like I was home as I went around turns at 25 mph. All except for that red rock! Everything about the landscape was dramatic in this place. I was sure to grab specimens: I had so many other adventures in mind, but it was night! All I cared about was figuring out which city to spend the night. At 7:30 I called El Portal which had the best rate, but they were already full! So I called Motel 6 and reserved a room (warning - I'm arriving late!). Beatty closed down at about 8 PM, and they only had five motels to choose from; otherwise, off to the next city which was a good two hours away. They assured me they would be there to check me in no matter what. Even then, my adventures were not done for the night. On the way, the LORD showed me a shooting star! I've only seen that a few times in my life! How cool! Packing in and packing out of the hotel was so easy - usually I am not organized but my two pink duffle bags kept things really simple. That's the nice thing about not having to fly: you can bring as many beauty products and shoes as you want. It's the way to go! In the morning I spent a good hour and a half investigating for evidence of belief in aliens. This was all I found, and most places weren't even opened yet. Beatty is important to me because of the novel PAWN, which my dad wrote in the late 90's. No, it didn't create a big fan base. The main characters debate the merit of staying in the "seedy motel at the edge of town." An overweight lady in a pink bathrobe is the motel's manager. She greets them and memorable dialogue takes place. Where is this motel? Where is the woman in the pink bathrobe? Both sides of town had brand new motels, so that didn't fit. I went in the mart adjacent the town's only gas station, looking for alien memorabilia. Nothing to see. The chamber of commerce was open. It was a small house with not much to look at, but I had a wonderful talk with an overweight gal in a pink tanktop! Close 'nuff! 395 was calling me north and for a bit the roads were empty. Guess what crossed the road? Aww! This baby coyote was spry in his wisdom to get out of the way! Traffic slowed for construction soon after, delaying me a whole hour. We picked up speed and in another twenty minutes they tried to do it again. Pulled the map out because Route 6 was a hundred feet behind me. Chills took over - I was going to take it. I was headed straight for the White Mountains - a route through the eastern Sierras of California! |Roy Tennant, 2011, FreeLargePhotos.com| I noticed fields of pure white that looked like snow on the peaks, only they settled in depressions along the foothills of many mountains. No one was around. Curiosity and joy took control, and my former coffee cup received the content of discovery. The soil underneath was a rich, even moist clay, which partially explains why this area experiences flash floods. Ever so lightly I touched the white dust with a fingertip for scientific precaution. Next, inserted in mouth - salt for sure! Words are unfair. Just before reaching California I drove alongside Boundary Peak. I gulped when I saw how approachable it looked - how high must I be? The mountain scattered boulders of white granite with mica flecks that glimmered in the sunlight. Stopped to search some smaller samples. Route 6 took me straight to a former mining town, Benton. Was amazed to find a historic building as old as my hometown. |photo by jimmywayne| I felt like I couldn't breathe. Of course, this area looks exactly like the places they're pictured to roam. My eyes opened wide as I searched for them on every hill, unfortunately I began to weep which made it more difficult to see. The desert prairies turned over into what I call the Land of Paintings. There were a few varieties of ground cover, red and purple in color. It took me awhile before scale set in to see that the yellow dusting the mountains were not midstory shrubs, but deciduous canopy - probably aspens. It is October. I wept. How come I'm here? I didn't have to try, and here I am. It's unfair that I should be. "It's a gift," I said aloud, but the Holy Spirit already knew that. Every turn gave me new reason to cry joy. I had no words, only awe and gratitude. The switchbacks got more intense and the rocks turned a beautiful windblown. Sagehen Summit came at 8,139 feet and ushered a new land to the west. Mono Lake in the foreground beckoned me to return to the lofty Eastern Sierras beyond. Before descending too far I stopped at a historical marker, Mono Mills. I needed to take a walk to settle the tears. In 1881 teams of horses prepared lumber at this remote mill to lay a local railroad. I imagine that when it was completed they released the horses into the wilderness, and their descendants can be seen in the mountains to this day. I wanted to search for items to remember the place. These are my treasures: The picture has no scale, but the pinecone is larger than my hand. There were occasional samples of the rock to the left; a sedimentary rock of pink feldspars and quartz. The wood I collected off the floor was proximal to an interesting twisted tree. I didn't know till writing this post that it is not legal to do so, nor what species it is. This piece is from a bristlecone pine tree. It is the oldest living organism in all of planet earth. The oldest individual is dated to 4,700 years old and named "Methuselah," after the oldest living person in the Bible. I blink my eyes and shake my head as I write this. When I was a teenager I began to dream of seeing it for myself and all I knew was that it grew "somewhere in California." Not just anywhere, but in this select part of the Sierras. When I wasn't striving, I saw. Hmph.... As I rounded Mono Lake I passed the entrance to Yosemite National Park short about five minutes of entering it. Ascended via 395 back up into the mountains. The road traveled alongside a creek and mountainsides with interesting striations. I decided to stop for a traditional roll-the-pant-legs wade in the creekbed. I'll always be good for this in California, which most often delivers. Unlike Oregon, with the Cascade's boring igneous basalts. These ones turned out to be uniformly disinteresting to me, so I went on my way. 395 descended into uppity Carson City sprawl and I tried to not let it get me down. Had a nice conversation with some believers at the gas station. Pushed arduously through Reno in rush hour. Came out the other side with the goal of reaching the Oregon border by dark. Not quite - I lost all light in Modoc forest. No matter - the full moon was now over my right shoulder and I could see many things including this little guy. Grey foxes live in the area. I thought it was a cat and it was about as tall as one, but as it scurried into the grass on the shoulder, its tail seemed abnormally long and poofy, and he utilized it to center his movements. Hello, fox! I saw you! My spirit is different after this. I feel like I've lived a lifetime in a few days. I can't explain the peace and happiness that lingers. I love people, because God loves them. If however I had brought a friend or family with me, it wouldn't have been the same. Precious was this escape into my joy in Him. God's word to me was this trip was all about His joy in me. Will I ever know love intensely like this in some other way, again? His ways are different than mine, and His heart is set for it. To know the God we know.... What compares?

November 19, 2012 marked yet another wonderful chapter in the ongoing saga of the Crandall Public Library Monday Evening Book Discussion Group. The festivities focused on Paula McLain’s historical novel The Paris Wife. It proved the perfect foil for an evening of literary love and learning. Richard “The Professor” Schneider spoke about the relatively new paradigm of reader response criticism, which places heavy emphasis on perception of a work, and casts readers as co-conspirators in the artistic process. Although one might debate the value of reader response as a metric of a literary work’s value, it is, without any doubt whatsoever, the essence of a successful book discussion. In fact, our discussions often remind me of the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Each of us latching on to a portion of the prose pachyderm, feeling that we truly understand the whole of a written work, but much like the blind men, not fully understanding the business at hand, until it’s illuminated by the light of collaboration. Of course, mutual respect for the notion that everybody brings something worthwhile to the table is a must, as it fosters the sort of dialogue where all involved feel safe to share their opinion. Such a setting is capable of manifesting muse, of creating a shared synergistic understanding. I think that famed photographer Ansel Adams spoke of much the same thing, when he explained that: “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” In any case, I don’t believe that the chemistry between members has ever been finer, and the conversation created was equal parts personal, passionate and profound. Bravo! Topics touched on during the course of the evening include the following: - The Paris Wife: Highbrow Chic Lit - Hadley Behaving Sadly - Polyamory Paris Style - The Lost Generation - Left Bank Literati - Polarity: Public Perception Versus Private Persona - Bullfighting as Metaphor - Hemingway’s Work: Technical Considerations - Midnight in Paris Ms. McLain Speaks NY Times Review Paris Without End by Gioia Diliberto A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Hemingway: The Paris Years by Michael Reynolds I am looking forward to our final discussion of 2012, which is slated for December 17, and will feature Robin Oliveira’s novel My Name is Mary Sutter. It’s the story of a strong woman during difficult days, tends toward graphic at times, and the faint of heart may want to sit this one out. In any case, I am hoping for a platoon of brave readers to soldier on, as this is a fantastic work of fiction. According to Amazon: “Rich with historical detail-including cameo appearances by Abraham Lincoln and Dorothea Dix, among others-My Name Is Mary Sutter is certain to be recognized as one of the great novels about the Civil War.” Oh yeah, did I mention the drawing for a signed first edition of the new James Howard Kunstler book – Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation? All I can say, is that you got to be in it to win it!

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In "Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In," corporate lawyer Anjali Kumar takes us along on her quest for spiritual meaning and purpose in the universe. It’s a book that anyone seeking anything can relate to. And where it ends up is downright profound. I’ll be honest — at first, the idea of a spiritual journey quest book didn’t inherently appeal to me. While Kumar starts her book with the startling realization that she’s lost in the spiritual wilderness, I myself am happily tucked under a warm blanket of spiritual blankness, sitting near a roaring fire of not giving a shit. It’s not that I don’t care if there’s a God or something bigger out there, I just have other things to focus on —and if there is a God, I reckon she/he/it isn’t really bothered by whether I’m paying attention to her/him/it or not. Because I also figure God has other things to focus on, too. To me, God has always felt like that second cousin twice removed who I love and wish the best for, but don’t really think about much and for all I know could be dead, I haven’t Googled recently to find out. Meanwhile, Kumar was an attorney at Google and was used to Googling everything, figuratively and literally — used to always having the answers to whatever questions came up. So when her daughter was born and Kumar realized she didn’t know what she would eventually tell her about God and existence and belief — Kumar herself having been raised in a hodgepodge of religions — she set out to answer for herself what Google could not. And thus begins an uproarious romp through the spiritual fringe of the universe — not the mainstream religions, which Kumar thought she had already exhausted, but, as Kumar writes, "looking elsewhere and everywhere." She has her aura cleaned by a virtual healer, participates in a potluck dinner with a coven of witches, tries to sweat her way to enlightenment in a Mexican sweat lodge, and hires a medium to convene with the dead. "Nothing was off-limits or too unorthodox," Kumar writes. She documents trying to find the spirituality in so-called spiritual pursuits like Burning Man and Soul Cycle, and traveled all the way to Brazil to confer with one of the world’s most infamous faith healers, a guy named John of God who millions of people from around the world — including Oprah — have visited. She even drinks his patented blessed water, which apparently sells for $3 a pop. Mostly, Kumar’s book is just fun. In one vignette, a guru named Paramji — whom she describes as looking like an Indian Santa Claus — tells her that she was named wrong and should change her name to something beginning with Bu or Bhaa or Pha or Dha. He tells her this before literally climbing on top of her and chanting into her throat as other people sit positioned at her chakras to echo the chanting, in what is supposed to heal her yoni, aka, basically, her vaginal energy. It’s a hysterical scene, like many in the book. But when you stop and think about it, it’s unsettling. Here’s a dude guru telling a woman she’s somehow inadequate or incorrect from soup to nuts, so to speak. At the same time I was laughing, I started wondering how many of these spiritual gurus are sought out by women who believe there’s something wrong with them, not because there actually is, but because society has told them there is. How much of our seeking culture stems from our perpetual sense of inadequacy? This is true of fitness and fashion crazes, yes, but seems especially pertinent to the realm of spirituality, something that inherently can only be found within. And yet, so many of us spend so much effort and agony — not to mention money — trying to grasp it from others. This is what actually needs fixing. Kumar’s book left me wondering why we crave deeper meaning and whether that’s ultimately a good thing — a way for us all to connect to some bigger purpose and to each other — or a scam, forcing us to bury ourselves in mountains of self-help to get at some itch we can never quite scratch. "Stalking God" left me less curious about what the answer is than why we all, fairly universally, ask the question. What does that say about us as people? Ultimately, Kumar addresses this in what is perhaps the most transcendently spiritual part of the book, and writes beautifully and, well, spiritually about the surprise lesson she ended up taking away. I won’t spoil it for you. But while the entire book is enjoyable as a breezy travelogue about the weird experiences Kumar collects and her witty observations about them, the end of the book is as intimate and attention-getting as an Indian Santa Claus chanting into your chakras; an arresting revelation about humanity that has stuck in my mind ever since. Personally, I don’t know what I would call this. But if you called it spirituality and meaning, you wouldn’t be wrong. You can buy "Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In" here.

During a recent appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", "Spider-Man: Far From Home" star Jacob Batalon admitted that the impact of "Avengers: Endgame" on his upcoming film had created "one of the biggest plot holes of all time." Specifically he was referring to how "Avengers: Endgame" takes place five years after the events of "Avengers: Infinity War" (and thus six year after the events of "Spider-Man: Homecoming," which I loved) and yet the characters from the first film are still in high school. This isn't the only plot hole caused by "Avengers: Endgame," or even the most notable one. Indeed, when "Avengers: Endgame" is analyzed in the clear light of day, its biggest flaw is just how often its plot is either illogical or shortchanges important characters and questions. One of the challenges of reviewing a movie like "Avengers: Endgame" is explaining what works and doesn't without delving into spoilers. While usually a mid-review spoiler warning will suffice, films like "Avengers: Endgame" aren't mere works of popular art; they're cultural events, perhaps even historic moments, and people are so emotionally invested in them that it becomes necessary to exercise an excess of caution to avoid accidentally ruining someone else's experience. Having said that, there is something else that can ruin the experience of watching a movie, a point that I made in my spoiler-free review of "Avengers: Endgame" and can elaborate upon here — namely, the aforementioned unsatisfying character resolutions and plot holes. The story arc for Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is most egregious because it contains both of those flaws. The most obvious is the ending in which Captain America returns the Infinity Stones to the points in time where they had been apprehended by the Avengers and decides to move back to the 1940s to marry his longtime romantic interest Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell). While this decision could have had a logic to it had there been an in-story reason for Rogers to hang up his shield, within the context of the "Captain America" series it feels like a sudden abandonment of his historic mission. It makes sense only because we, as moviegoers, know that Evans' contract to play Captain America has expired and the actor wanted to provide the character with a resolution. That said, as a development in the story we've seen since the first movie in 2011, Captain America's choice seems both abrupt and at odds with the internal logic established for that character. Indeed, the problems with Captain America's decision go beyond the fact that he has randomly decided to stop being a superhero, despite zero indication that the world needs him less than it once did. Even though it had been clearly established that creating alternate timelines would be dangerous in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Rogers' choice to stay in the past creates a massive alternate timeline that effectively alters every event of the 70-plus years since his disappearance at the end of "Captain America: The First Avenger." Even if one assumes that Rogers was super-careful about not meddling with most aspects of the past as it had been, it is unlikely that he wouldn't have made any changes (even inadvertent ones) over the period of nearly eight decades spanning from his disappearance in 1945 to the events of "Avengers: Endgame" in 2023 (do the math, that's when "Avengers: Endgame" takes place). If nothing else, we already know that he marries Carter, which at the very least nullifies the events of the "Agent Carter" TV series and has unsettling implications regarding the brief romantic relationship Rogers shared with Carter's grand-niece Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War" (who, for all we know, may accidentally get poofed out of existence because of Rogers' new presence in the elder Carter's timeline). These facts make Captain America's choice not simply short-sighted, but borderline evil. Nor is Captain America the only character to be shortchanged in "Avengers: Endgame." It's not a plot hole, but it is disappointing how Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) is killed off in a way that is meant to seem tragic but instead feels like an insult. By having her character arc end in the overused sexist trope of a woman losing her life to further a man's journey (in this case, that of her friend Hawkeye/Clint Barton, played by Jeremy Renner) — a trope known as "fridging" — the Marvel Cinematic Universe shortchanged one of its earliest and most prominent female badasses. Similarly, after spending five movies building up the hostile relationship between the Hulk and Bruce Banner personalities in the Incredible Hulk character (Ed Norton in the first film, Mark Ruffalo in the subsequent four), "Avengers: Endgame" abruptly introduces him as Professor Hulk — a best-of-both-worlds hybrid of Banner's brains and the Hulk's brawn. While this is an effective resolution to the character's central dilemma, all of the work in seeing how Banner merged with Hulk occurred off-screen, with Ruffalo giving audiences an exposition dump instead of actual character development, which would have been more satisfying. This isn't to say that all of the character arcs fall flat. The ultimate sacrifice made by Iron Man/Tony Stark to defeat Thanos is poignant and moving both because it proves with finality that he has overcome his self-absorbed past and because audiences have grown to love his character over eight previous films (the three "Iron Man" movies, the previous three "Avengers" movies, plus his roles in a "Captain America" and "Spider-Man" movie). As I've discussed at length already, Thor's character arc is a comical yet touching look at how even the godliest of heroes must cope with feelings of failure, one that humanizes a superhero who when first introduced to audiences seemed stuffy and remote. Paul Rudd is quite likable as the relatable and down-to-earth Ant-Man/Scott Lang, who shrugs off his status as one of the less-popular Marvel heroes with charming self-deprecation (and mild embarrassment). Finally there is the standout performance by Karen Gillan as Nebula, who has evolved from a teeth-gnashing villain in "Guardians of the Galaxy" to a psychologically complex antihero struggling with unimaginable personal trauma. The underlying problem here is the same one that existed in "Avengers: Infinity War" — when you have so many different characters competing for attention, some are bound to be shortchanged. While "Avengers: Endgame" is superior to "Avengers: Infinity War" in large part because it reduced its cast list for most of the running time, it still struggles with doing justice to more than a half-dozen major characters who would normally be the protagonists of their own films. It's why templates like those in the last two "Avengers" movies set such an ominous precedent for Hollywood. If even a studio as talented as Marvel can't effectively juggle so many different characters and not drop the ball on any of them, one shudders to imagine the kind of movies that lesser studios will churn out when they stuff too many characters into their overwrought epics in an attempt to mimic the success of the last two "Avengers" films (see "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice"). There are also the numerous plot holes created by the film's time traveling premise. According to an interview with GQ by co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo, "if you go back to the past, you simply create a new reality. The characters in this movie created new timelines when they went back to the past, but it had no effect to the prime universe. What happened in the past 22 movies was still canon." Professor Hulk tries to make a similar point during a crucial scene, explaining that "if you travel to the past, that past becomes your future, and your former present becomes the past, which can’t now be changed by your future." This is all well and good on paper, but the film shows the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) initially refusing to give one of the Infinity Stones to Professor Hulk because she explains how creating alternate timelines establishes countless unknown dangers for inhabitants of the new timelines. Setting aside the already-established problem with how Captain America created a major alternate timeline anyway, the movie tries to resolve this by having Professor Hulk promise to return the Infinity Stones to the exact moments when they were previously extracted. Even if we take it for granted that Captain America was later able to do this without a hitch, the nanoseconds when those stones would have been gone would still create alternate timelines with potentially unforeseeable consequences. Beyond that, as the trailer for "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and reports about the upcoming "Loki" series clearly establish, alternate timelines were established anyway. And unless Captain America-as-an-old man somehow traveled from his alternate timeline to the "Avengers: Endgame" one, the audience is left to assume that the alternate timeline he created by marrying Peggy Carter in 1945 is one and the same with the primary timeline from the first 22 movies — which contradicts the notion that the changes made by the Avengers in extracting the Infinity Stones from the past won't alter the present. With that factoid in mind, we arrive at the problem with the paradoxes created by the deaths of 2014's Thanos, 2014's Nebula and presumably a number of other 2014 characters once they are transported to 2023 to fight the Avengers in the last battle. Even if one assumes that 2023 Nebula killing 2014 Nebula doesn't create a paradox for 2023 Nebula due to the reasons that Professor Hulk stated, it doesn't explain the other ramifications that this would have for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Nine whole years of story have been effectively wiped away by Thanos and company leaving 2014 to travel nine years into the future, an impact that would still be felt by every character who isn't in the special timeline created by the "Avengers: Endgame" protagonists going back in time. Numerous events caused in subsequent films by Thanos' actions will have now never happened unless an alternate timeline was indeed created, and if the Ancient One's warning to Professor Hulk is to be taken seriously, that either establishes a whole new world of dangers or establish a major paradox for literally trillions of living creatures in the existing continuity. Finally, there is the fact that having half of all life in the universe vanish for five years would drastically alter the world we live in. Indeed, Thanos' finger snap would be regarded by every intelligent civilization in the universe as one of the most important historic events of all time — nothing else would even come close, even after all of Thanos' victims were brought back from the dead (which would, incidentally, be another major historic event, with Professor Hulk being a historic figure of equal significance to Thanos himself). Yet while there are a few moments where the film shows people feeling depressed, as well as a brief line referencing to some ecological improvement, for the most part "Avengers: Endgame" totally ignores the real-world ramifications that would exist both due to Thanos destroying half of all known life and Hulk bringing them all back. How did the vanished reintegrate into their lives after the universe had moved on without them? How did the survivors cope with their return? How had the political, social, economic and cultural changes that countless societies had made due to half of all life vanishing adjust to Professor Hulk's snap? This is usually the point where fans of a movie will say that I should turn off my brain and just enjoy the show — and make no mistake about it, I did my best. I recommended "Avengers: Endgame" in my review and feel the same way after having seen it again. It's a fun, visually spectacular and emotionally satisfying adventure film, and the strengths of moments with characters like Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man and Nebula outweigh the weaknesses in how it depicts Captain America, Professor Hulk and Black Widow. Yet while it's one thing to nitpick a film for its own sake, a movie is flawed if its plot holes and unsatisfying character resolutions are so glaring that they detract from your ability to fully enjoy the film while you're watching it or diminish it in retrospect.

My friend and fellow Poisoned Pen Press author Betty Webb has just had her fifth Lena Jones book released, the amazing Desert Cut. Following is a conversation Betty and I had about Lena and Desert Cut, Betty’s upcoming series, and the writing life. Enjoy. Donis: Your fifth Lena Jones mystery is quite an eye-opener. Tell us about it. Betty: There’s been so much fuss about illegal immigration, very few people have bothered to take a look at the kinds of people we’re allowing into the U.S. legally. Some of these folks are from cultures very, very different from ours… cultures where it is legal to beat your wife and trade your 12-year-old daughter for a cow. Many of these cultures continue these practices in America, and to make a long story short, that’s what Desert Cut is all about. Donis: When did the idea for Desert Cut begin to form in your mind? Betty: I’d been reading some odd newspaper stories about child abuse cases across the country — odd because the specific type of abuse was never described. When I contacted journalist friends in those cities, they told me what had been left out of the story, and I was absolutely floored. That was around 4 years ago. Desert Cut has been percolating in my mind ever since. Donis: In the book, Lena confronts a horrifying practice that has been perpetuated on children in some cultures for thousands of years, yet most Americans are totally unaware that it is going on right in this country. How were you able to research a topic that so many go to such lengths to keep hidden? Betty: Again, many of my friends are journalists, and they told me what they’d been forced to leave out of their stories. They also directed me to organizations that had collected a lot of information about this practice. There really is a lot out there if you know where to look. Donis: Your books concern socially relevant topics. You seem to have a well-developed social consciousness and like to shine a light on the darker corners of human behavior. In fact, you’ve actually seen your fiction contribute to social change. Tell us a little about what happened with your second book, Desert Wives. Are there as yet any indications of something similar with Desert Cut? Betty: It’s a little early for Desert Cut to have an impact yet, since it’s only been out for two weeks. It took almost a year for Desert Wives to get a law written against polygamy. Donis: Lena is an interesting character – a troubled former foster child who literally doesn’t know who she is. In each of your books, Lena finds out a little more about her past. Will she eventually find out her whole story? Do you intend to end the series when Lena learns what happened to her? And just for the sake of those of us who care about her, I hope you’ll let her love life take a nice turn for the better. Betty: Yes, Lena will eventually find out her own back story in book number ten, Desert Redemption. And believe me, it’s a pip! I may or may not end the series there, though. When Lena finds out where she came from, and what really happened to her, she will face enormous problems. As to her love life, many readers don’t like Warren and still miss Dusty. That cowboy has a lot of women half in love with him. Maybe he’ll come back, maybe he won’t. As for Warren… at this point, the less said about his future in the series, the better. Donis:You were and still are a journalist, a book reviewer, and a writing teacher. What made you decide to go over to the dark side and become a novelist yourself? Betty: After reviewing novels for about 10 years, I finally said to myself, “Girl, you can write a better novel than half this slush you’re reading.” Easily said, not so easy to accomplish. But I gave it, and am still giving it, the old college try. Donis: The Lena Jones series is quite intense, but I hear you have a second series in the works that is a complete change of pace for you. What do you have planned? Betty: You must mean The Anteater of Death, my first attempt at writing a traditional mystery. The first of a series set in a coastal California zoo, it will be released by Poisoned Pen Press in March of 09. If the Lena Jones series is tales from the dark side, the zoo series could be called tales from the light side. The book was inspired by my volunteer work at the Phoenix Zoo, and I had almost as much fun writing it as I’ve had working in (don’t laugh) Monkey Village. Each book in the series will highlight a different animal. Obviously, a giant anteater from Belize leads off the first. In a way, the zoo is the Cabot Cove of zoos. People keep dying. Donis: As a book reviewer, you must read innumerable books a year. Do you ever get the chance to read just what you want to read? Whose work do you particularly like? (present company excepted, of course) Betty: I’m always swamped with books, and I do have my favorites. Leaving aside the mysteries (and possible political problems!), I tend to enjoy what is loosely called “literary fiction.” People like Carol Shields, the farther reaches of P.D. James, Wallace Stegner, John Updike… they’re my heroes. As for not being able to read what I want to read when I review, I’m very fortunate in my work for Mystery Scene magazine that they let me send in a list of people whose work I like, and they make sure I get their books… as well as books similar to theirs. Therefore, I am very seldom, if ever, put in the position of reviewing something I loathe. Donis: You always ask the authors you interview if they have any advice for aspiring writers. I’ll ask you the same. Betty: If you want to write good books, READ GOOD BOOKS. And a lot of them. In my writing class, the first thing I ask my students is how much they read and what they read. If they are not reading at least 5 books a month, their future as a writer is dim. And they should be reading RECENT books that have won prizes in the genre you want to write in. It’s all very well to read Dickens, but today’s reader is not a Victorian lady reclining on a chaise in the conservatory. She’s most probably a married (or divorced) woman with kids who holds down a full time job. She doesn’t have time for books that take 100 pages just to get off the ground — she wants action, and she wants it fast. Readers’ tastes have changed dramatically over the past 150 years, and publishers know that. Look at it this way: would you buy a car designed by an automotive engineer who had only studied and designed Model T’s? Of course not. Sad though it may seem, the same is true of writers. If you are writing from a 150-year-old (or even 20-year-old) paradigm, don’t expect to find a publisher. Writing is a business, just like everything else. Publishers aren’t in the field for “literary” or charitable reasons; they’re in it to make money. Period. Stay current in your reading, and write at least 3 hours every single day — it’ll take you that long just to write your way through the cliches. If you don’t have the discipline to write for hours every day, then choose an easier profession — like brain surgery. Donis: My sentiments exactly. (“Brain surgery…” I love it!)

Start #BingeReading the Second Circle Tattoos series by Scarlett Cole with the new box set containing all four novels and an exclusive extended epilogue with your favourite heroes! Get all four books in the series now for a discounted price! The tattoo artist with a heart of gold. The playboy with his own hidden scars. The international rockstar who longs for a home. The mechanic with a dark past. These are the heroes of Second Circle Tattoos. Trent, Cujo, Dred, Reid. And now all four books are together for the first time in a fabulous, low priced eBook box set featuring an exclusive epilogue. Why pick one book boyfriend when you can have all four? The Strongest Steel Harper Connelly never expected to find herself outside of a tattoo parlor at one in the morning. The scars that decorate her back are just one more reminder of things she’d rather forget, the past she wants to leave far behind her, but before she can move on, she needs him. Trent Andrews has his own reasons for specializing in inking over scars. And there’s no way in hell he’s going to turn Harper away. Being with Harper is like going ten rounds in the ring—exhilarating, powerful, and dangerous. She stirs feelings in him he thought were long gone… if he can only get past her carefully constructed defenses. The Fractured Heart Tattoo artist Brody “Cujo” Matthews knows how to keep things simple. In life and in love.That all changes when he meets Drea Caron, the definition of high maintenance and sizzling curves. And the one woman he doesn’t want to walk away from. Andrea “Drea” Caron is broke and tired. After years of caring for her ailing mom, she’s at the end of her rope trying to manage the piling medical bills, two jobs, and a life placed on hold. She certainly doesn’t need the added frustration of a sexy playboy tattoo artist messing up her carefully balanced life. Too bad the universe has other ideas. The Purest Hook Rugged, hot, and rock hard, Dred Zander is exactly the type of man that normally sends Pixie running. Not dreaming about running her hands down his washboard abs…and lower. The lead singer and guitarist for the band Preload embodies trouble behind his quick smile and guarded eyes, and Pixie left trouble behind her years ago along with the name Sarah Jane Travers and the pathetic trailer her mom called home. But Dred has other ideas. Pixie’s sweet hazel eyes, purple hair and kaleidoscopic tattoo of exotic flowers that swirl up her arm haunt his dreams, and he’s ready to fight like hell to keep that feeling. The Darkest Link When her car breaks down off the side of a lonely highway far from her sunny Miami home, tattoo artist Lia never expected her very own white knight to ride up on the back of a barely street-legal motorcycle…and she never expected to fall for her dark savior. A bruised heart Lia is not looking for forever, and the hot mechanic, with his sexy scruff and shaggy hair, is simply impossible to resist. He’s the perfect candidate for a mind-blowingly-perfect, no-strings-attached one-night stand. But when their fling becomes something more and Reid surprises her at her tattoo studio, Second Circle Tattoos, he’s in for a shock—and a fist to the face—when his past and present collide. Get your copy today! “So, I don’t want you to get mad, Shortcake, but I have a surprise for you,” Cujo said. Nervously, he ran his hand through his blond hair as the opulent elevator of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas took him and his unsuspecting soon-to-be fiancée up to their room. He studied Drea’s hazel eyes. Eyes that lit up when she smiled, that became red and blotchy when she cried, and went wide when she came apart in his arms like she had in bed that morning. Right now they looked at him suspiciously. “More of a surprise than this morning when you woke me and told me I had an hour to pack and get ready?” She grinned at him and flicked her long-layered hair over her shoulder. “A surprise I am very grateful for. It’s a nice break before I go back for my second year of school.” Confidently, Drea stepped toward him, lifted up onto her toes, and brushed her lips against his in a kiss which had him second guessing the surprise waiting for them in their room. He should have ensured it would be empty so he could throw her down on the bed, claim one more state on his places-I-fucked-Drea map. But that was going to have to wait, because first he had to get down on one knee and ask the one question he’d been so certain she’d say yes to when he’d put all of the plans in place. Now he was less than ten minutes away from doing the deed, he wasn’t feeling quite so confident. He loved her with every fucking cell in his body and was certain she felt the same way. So why was asking her to confirm that with a ring so nerve-wracking? He’d inked her name on his body. Hell, all the tattoos on his left arm were dedicated to her. So why should putting ink on a piece of paper, a marriage certificate, feel so much more important? Copyright © 2017 by Scarlett Cole One grand prize winners will receive a $10 Amazon Gift Card and the runner-up prize will be a copy of the box set including all four books in the series and an exclusive extended epilogue. Coming soon from Scarlett Cole: Jordan Reclaimed (Preload #1)! Jordan Steele’s life began when he was ten. When he was taken from his parents and a house that was never a home. When he met his brothers, the other lost and abandoned boys in his group home. When he learned what friendship and family and love looked like. Now he’s made good, touring the world with the band he and his brothers formed in that crowded group home. No one but his found family really knows the man under the fame and fortune, the scars he hides behind the rockstar lifestyle. Until he sees her through the windows of the National Ballet, dancing, and suddenly the world doesn’t seem so dark. Aleksandra Artemov ticks all the ballet boxes. Father a legendary Kirov dancer. Check. Prepping since birth for classical ballet. Check. Compulsive control over the food she eats. Check. Principal dancer at The National Ballet of Canada. Check. But what she craves is freedom. She craves Jordan. Everything about him should terrify her. His size, his tattoos, his edge. But he doesn’t. He stirs her very soul. Jordan has nothing but himself to offer her, and he’s never been good enough for anyone. Can he figure out how to face his own demons before he loses his light for good? Pre-order your copy today! About Scarlett Cole: Scarlett Cole is a writer of contemporary romance and a two-time RITA finalist. Her debut, THE STRONGEST STEEL, has already become an Amazon best seller in romantic suspense, was a Best Debut Goodreads Author Finalist 2015, and Authors On The Air Global Radio Network Contemporary Romance Pick of 2015. When Scarlett isn’t writing, she spends her time reading, hoarding mason jars, and working out to off-set an epic sour candy habit. She likes hot men, cold beer, and expensive shoes. Having travelled the world for work and fun, Scarlett is a citizen of both Britain and Canada. A true city-dweller, she considers Toronto and Manchester home and likes to set her books in vibrant locations such as Miami and Los Angeles. Rep’d by Beth Phelan at The Bent Agency, and published by St. Martin’s Press. She’d love to hear from you on twitter @itsscarlettcole

18 Burst results for "Jeff Hall" "jeff hall" Discussed on WBT Charlotte News Talk "Assault charges that carry a life sentence oxes Christina Coleman two dozen now dead in those fires around Australia bit every we finally here in Australia in terms of the weather the temperatures out here have had cooled off significantly and rain if you hours ago there's more rain in the forecast the fire service here in New South Wales saying that that shifting weather has helped firefighters gained the upper hand on several fires but many are still burning out of control those firefighters warning that this shift in weather likely won't be enough to extinguish the massive threat from these ongoing fire stance Jeff hall in New South Wales line Jane this is in the name the spinners the spinners for nineteen fifty four and incredibly are still active today although only one original member to their long careers they've had various it singles and albums especially during the sixties and seventies to avoid confusion with the U. K. group of the same name they sometimes go by the Detroit's mentors or the Motown spinners the name itself was thought to be inspired by dancing spinners was a car term referring to chrome Cadillac hubcaps believe it or not in two thousand twelve one artist premiered their song from Mars the first on to debut quite literally on another planet possibly been from. Suspect freed in Texas homecoming party shooting that killed two "Investigators taking another look at the evidence in the hunt county after their number one suspect that a mass shooting was set free the sheriff's office said there was not enough evidence to bring charges against twenty three year old Brandon Gonzalez now they're looking for the man who opened fire on a crowd at a party venue near Green fall October twenty sixth killing two people and injuring a dozen former fort worth police chief Jeff hall stead understands why it's tough to get witnesses many people have to think outside who the shooter is related to is it a criminal syndicate as a drug is it a total for gang related they don't know the sheriff is complain there were seven hundred fifty people at that party but very few are helping "jeff hall" Discussed on NewsRadio 1080 KRLD "This month Jeff hall is the national employment director for the D. A. V. E. carefully as much Kerr asked him why this new thirty six page guide was necessary all these years after the eighty A. became law well lot of a lot of it is that it there's a lot of stigma around specific disabilities head veterans encounter because of their missing you know military service that you wouldn't necessarily encounter or encounter in at a different way you know combat related disabilities versus non combat related disabilities or somebody that you know is ginger or disabled in the civilian sector so I think of for a lot of it is just trying to do a checks and balances because when when folks in general look at this and this is not a negative thing this is just you know a perception all looked towards disabilities that are visible to the naked eye mmhm the overwhelming majority of disabilities which are invisible you can you know whether it's an illness or whether it's a different type of an injury or this guide that we have dispelled a lot of those myths and things stigma that surrounds that I've talked to people in the past to have said that one of the big issues is that some employers are fearful if that's word I can use about hiring someone who might be dealing with PTSD we do it dress posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD as well as T. B. I. but I will just say this in short as I have with many companies the common misunderstanding is that P. T. S. D. as a military related disability and it is not right right there there are so many people out there that work right there in your own company to have post medic stress disorder maybe it's not being treated because they don't recognize it the way the veterans recognize it or the way that organizations like be a B. recognizes it but it exists it's very you know promenade it could be from a car accident could be from an assault of many many things that can cause it but it is not a military related disability and that was one of the first things that we encounter and the question was posed to me how to we screen those people out and it would make me very sad because that question even came up in the way that it did I understand why the person had asked me the company itself and asked me in the way that they asked me it doesn't make it right because you're talking about a full blown discrimination type scenario when I'm asked is there anything special we need to do in the hiring process one of the things that we do recommend it is included in the guide is to include veterans specifically veterans with disabilities that are in your workplace how can people and get this free guide is an online it's available free for download it's very easy it's a PDF W. W. W. dot jobs dot D. A. V. dot org starting Monday those vehicles have been stuck in the Dallas salon City Lights apartment building garage will finally be removed after a construction site crane slice into a Dallas apartment building killing one person during a storm back in June that crane collapsed and winds up to seventy miles an hour pulverizing numerous units and turning the parking garage into a heap of concrete and smashed vehicles video footage captured the crane slowly tilting in the year before toppling and then smashing into the five story apartment building across the street from the construction site coming to rest like a mangled skybridge between the two structures the blow completely decimated several units and caused all five floors of the parking garage to cave in according to Dallas fire rescue spokesman Jason Evans the crane collapse killed one person and displayed five hundred other people mark Willis news radio ten eighty K. A. R. L. D. we'll be keeping a close eye on the resumption of trade talks the deputies talk. "jeff hall" Discussed on Newsradio 1200 WOAI "Death penalty even cooperating from the get go highly unusual in in many cases with the shootings that the gunmen will either kill themself or die in the gunfire while exchanging gunfire with the police he actually gave himself up to authorities and has been cooperating with them to route this investigation former fort worth police chief Jeff hall says that he never considered this to be a suicide mission for the shooter those threats were just big talk the video the still images of the suspect walking and with his weapon he was wearing your protection and that would lead me to believe he did not want to kill himself or be taken he wanted eager to surrender or make his statement and not have its own life taken away and speaking of the manifesto is rambling anti Hispanic creed posted on what's called eight chan right before the shooting in it the gunman said he was radicalized by reading a book called the great replace but to work by a French the condiments who said that the current worldwide surgeon migration is the conscious work of major corporations who want to dilute and eventually eliminate the Caucasian race the el Paso gunmen he's now looking out both state and federal death penalty charges el Paso county DA hi may Esparza the state charges capital murder and so he is eligible for the death penalty we will seek the death penalty US attorney John bash says the suspect will be facing two separate federal counts. "jeff hall" Discussed on NewsRadio 1080 KRLD "In Gilroy California and a person killed at a festival in Brooklyn New York over the weekend as well Gary Lee is Mitch car talked with former fort worth police chief Jeff hall said about personal safety at any major event you know this is a conversation that continuously you have to have with your friends family and loved ones at your Kenny at that wet so as you're walking into the event please pay close attention to your fastest and most strategic exit because you always want to make sure you get out of the threatening environment but also look around and see how much security is in place how many uniformed officers personnel are they wanting people as they go when dosed should give you a little more sense of calm but still discuss the plan with your loved ones in your friends and family if catastrophe X. happened this is our plan because hoarding them all together and trying to leave together is not going to be effective at the time of the crisis happening right so let's let's talk this through because in the case of Gilroy it appears that this guy cut through the fence in order to avoid the this the one thing that was going on the metal detectors then you have course right Las Vegas comes to mind where you didn't even bother going to the van he was in the hotel across the street so as well as we go into the place you're talking about finding those points of exit and and maybe those places to hide correct yeah I would never recommend the hiding I would want to make sure I continuously effectuate the area from where the shots. "jeff hall" Discussed on NewsRadio 1080 KRLD "Your news now. Degrees at eleven thirty good ides of March to you. I'm Jerry Hotchkiss. Here's the latest on the unfolding situation in Christchurch. New Zealand CBS news update the gunman in the bloody attacks on onto mosques in New Zealand livestream. His assault on social media and prime minister Jacinta are dir-. Now wants to know if the suspect may have previewed is attention intentions online. I have asked our agencies this morning twigs swiftly on a ceasing. Whether there was any activity on social media or otherwise that should have triggered a response. That work is already underway. Forty nine people were killed twenty eight year old Brenton Tarrant was in court in Christ Church and was charged with one count of murder. CBS's? Steve Futterman is there. The twenty eight year old prime suspect in the killings here. In Christ's church legally obtained the weapons he used in the killings. He was a licensed gun owner. The prime minister has said. Gun laws. The New Zealand will change as a result of this thirty nine people remain hospitalized. CBS news update. I'm Pam Coulter. After the deadly attack on the two mosques New Zealand religious groups and police are on alert in Texas. Former Fort Worth police chief Jeff Hall stead says communications with members of the congregation is creek Q crucial. They have to let all the petitioners members know these are the steps we're taking visas the threats that we're aware of and do not keep anything from them because they need to be an alert status as well. Halston says mosques, churches and temples should make use of surveillance technology to improve their security. He says that's more cost effective than expensive renovations. And adding staff taking a look at fuel prices in the metropolitan area here in Dallas called in the current local average in North. "jeff hall" Discussed on WTVN "Six ten. I want to go back to college. That's what I wanna do yesterday. My oldest daughter graduates from college in may. Get your degree at a university down in Kentucky. She wants to go to physical therapy school. She applied for states, physical therapy school and hasn't heard back from them yet. I suspect she's not going to get in and get an entry point there. And quite honestly, my opinion is such that it's real simple that if you wanna get into Iowa State, you either have to be an out of state student or foreign students a money grab they're trying to only admit those generally who pay more to get in. I real problem with the state support university like a norm, not the only one that opinion. But it's a very strong opinion. I think they're they it's a money Graham. That's what's going on in our universities were paying taxes to universities. So that they can further that, and I think that's absolutely wrong. So my daughter's probably not going to get into OSU's my guests so yesterday she had a visit at OU Ohio University. You know, my story I actually went to graduated from. Oh, you nineteen eighty two. So I go down with my daughter. She wants get in physical therapy school. She has her interviews yesterday. And while she's there donor interviews mrS West side, and I could not be with her and along with her. So we went over to the east green where I lived for many years and went into Jeff Hall Jefferson hall in watch the football game the Oklahoma game. And I said to MRs west side I wanted to or the campus a little bit and see how it looks. I wouldn't into my dorm Lincoln hall actually went up to the room that I lived in for three years, there's room number one forty four knocked on the door for the hell of it. My daughter thank God wasn't with me. She'd been embarrassed to all hilt that I knocked on the door. A guy gets out of bed comes over opens the door and has a long hair scraggly looking guy just woke him up, and he says, yeah. And I said this may be really awkward, but I lived here for three years in college. I'm here visiting campus just wanted to knock on the door. And see if anybody who lives here. I'd like to see my dorm. If that's okay said, yeah, come on in. He's from reynoldsburg. I appreciate him allow me doing that. It's roommates. From cleveland? So I stood there and talked to a couple of guys for a little while we're talking about the room and the difference in college today and after talking to him for a few minutes. I said where do I go watch the game? And they said next door to Jeff Hawke has got great TV rooms. I went what he said. Yeah. So go over to Jeff Hall and east green of OU any tell me more about it. So I go over and Jeff Hall, and here's what I see I walk into where the dorm used to be the main lobby area and to to the right when I went to college there was the dining hall area. Now, it's called Jefferson marketplace, it looks like it looks like the marketplace at giant eagle it looks like a Kroger the places special spectacular. It's unbelievable. My wife, and I walk through there going. Oh my God. I said I want to move back to college. I don't want to be in the daughter anymore. I don't want to be in the workforce anymore. I don't wanna see here and do this more. I would go back to college and live in the dorm and do that as I walk. Through their through this. Marketplace one things off to the side. I see is a big old room with TV cameras and lighting and stuff like that that they do live shots from. So it's almost remind me of what food TV food network would look like saying walkout in the marketplace grocery store in the first floor of the of the dorm and buy anything they want and take it in their cook. And do a live TV show. Wow. For me to go to college getting radio TV and experience that would have been phenomenal. Then I'd go to the other end of the dorm, and they've TV rooms playrooms all kinds of study rooms, and it was just amazing to me to see. "jeff hall" Discussed on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 "You know, what's crazy, though daffodils talking about weed is legal inner punishment do for a whole year, but it's still beat steak girl, a domestic charge the legal anywhere. Big listed, a do who smokes. So the media's lost. I crazy. Can't go out your drunk and ball from you could. But you know, what I'm saying? Like, it affects your body will cramp up everything you say you smoke a book before he played ain't nothing. Yeah. Oh, good. The calls are obtained by the Boston Globe. An NFL spokesman tells the globe their medical staffs, but the health and safety of players I and that any claim or suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong pouncey currently plays for the chargers are anandas took his own life while behind bars last year. Search and recovery teams looking for human remains through much of California were to wildfires continue to burn forty four people killed so far the Red Cross has been helping those in California affected by the wildfires providing shelter and emotional support for those evacuated. Jeff Hall of the Massachusetts Red Cross has volunteers from here are headed there. The requests are very day to day we have four people that have left for California. So far, they talked to the to the woman in charge of deploying people yesterday, and she believes we'll have requests for more volunteers mainly work in shelters to start helping those displaced trying to make people comfortable and listening. The Red Cross also has a safe and well program where people evacuated can indicate that they are safe and allows search for loved ones. Ben Parker WBZ NewsRadio ten thirty nine thirty three on this Tuesday morning.. "jeff hall" Discussed on KOMO "A triple a welding company in Kent bird in an early morning fire. Komo's cutting Johnson reporting from the scene is a devastating day for Jeff Hall, owner of this family operated business here onto twenty-six than eighty fifth place south wants to Saul thinks we're kind of regroup and these guys are my crew, and my guys are all made iron that's tough resilient. And we will be back in business. We just gotta find another spot for the time being many hours after the flames were knocked out. Fire crews continued to shoot water from an overhead ladder truck concerned about anything combustible inside still being hot and potentially exploding. Like we had early on with this two alarm fire. There is no word yet. What started it and adjacent business until they glass? Etching business. Also has some thyroid damage in cans. Carleen johnson. Komo news music fan spent three hours last night, urging city leaders to save the show boxer protesting developers plan to demolish the longstanding live music venue in favor of high rise apartments. I don't think we need any more billionaire terrariums or. Overprice condos with subways and nail salons at the bottom of them. I think music is a much more about your aspect to one of dozens who spoke at the public hearing at city hall. The building your first in pipe protected for the next ten months onto under a temporary expansion of the pike place market historical district. Local researchers have traced the food chain of orcas hoping to find a link between recent reports of sick whales and what they're eating orcas nearly exclusively each salmon Chinook feeds on bottom dweller known as the sand. Lance. Fish. Rather. "jeff hall" Discussed on Liberty Talk FM "The hydration the city encouraging those without air conditioning to seek out one of the many cooling stations especially infants the elderly and those with a chronic illness laura despite the heat tens of thousands of people took to part in marches across the nation demanding the trump administration and the zero tolerance policy work faster to reunite separated immigrant families i don't believe in this this is not america this is not our country this is not what we should be doing every time we come out protests it has an visit vans people together as a community to see other people care one of the larger rallies was in los angeles many families out here in particular hoping that their voices would be heard out at its peak organizers estimate more than fifty five thousand folks were in attendance they were gathered here to protest zerotolerance policy that is separated more than two thousand immigrant kids from their parents was also a lot of looking ahead to november several politicians took to the stage where they pushed the crown cost change using their ballot knee upcoming midterm election fox's jeff hall president trump is claiming he never pushed house republicans to vote for immigration bills it failed last week the president tweeting from his new jersey golf club he didn't press him because it wouldn't have cleared the senate also tweeted that when people come into our country illegally that must be immediately escorted out without going through years of legal maneuvering fox news fair and balanced mexico dow the lens of liberty here's helen krieble there are one so many highway billboards that people complained of signed pollution so today many cities have restrictive sign codes but i think about highway beautification or about government picking winners and losers hounds from redmond washington the fairfax virginia allows signs along the streets for political campaigns and for real estate but not for any other businesses why didn't town allowed employees tax. "jeff hall" Discussed on No Laying Up "You know players just the cuts they just had too many parfives really that's that's what it came down to i mean in relation to scoring again to me that doesn't really mean anything but for so many people at it did but the the open championship scores are low all the time and nobody cares because let the conditions dictate the scoring if the wind blew it aaron hill's winning score might have been eight under so sixteen i means nothing to me complained about phil stetson setting the open scoring record correct and yet people complain about aaron how's all the time why not your grandfather's us open so i this is what he said he goes he goes one of the questions i know we're going to get is so i'm just gonna hit it straight on would be what happened in that final note for so you just did it in the preamble goes this quote was it was a different time it was different people it's just like i mean it wasn't all different just like centers talking on the range like we still don't know who's decision it was water that career i thought it was just funny i mean he was they were totally cool i think like and also jeff hall of really owned the dj thing i think you ask them about jay's like you know what actually happened on the green was not that bad compared to our management like our management of the that issue basically said i asked him what have you learned from the if that happened again how would you handle the differently and basically said you know when that happened like we were like scattered to the wind all throughout the course the people who are gonna make decision and so it took us like an hour to get everyone together be like all right yes he should be penalized for this and we're gonna make and meanwhile hit play on so now like if that happened they would basically make the decision rules wise like while the player was walking off that grain and also the rules are different now to where if a guy steps up to a putt rolls backwards he's just allowed to place it notice he snuck in like you know if player moves the ball. "jeff hall" Discussed on Only A Game "We spent the whole next week telling everyone what happened to us because you know scientific commitment to honesty so we couldn't just say oh yeah it was great now we had to say i got something to tell you seven years would pass before ross bash halls dual loves of science and sports would collide again in a big way this time it happens on the basketball court here's hall michael is told a story about how the reason we got into research was via pickup basketball and that's a bit overstated the year was nineteen eightytwo ross bashing hall were in the habit of playing pickup basketball games at the gym at brandeis they'd play with other professors and grad students and with a group of workers from the phone company and after those games in the locker room well here's how ross bash remembers it well let me put it this way on monday morning the at and t guys would would often discuss in graphic detail sale their exploits dates from the weekend ross bashan hall sat one row over in the locker room and they're conversations often concerned genetics remember jeff hall's research had to do with fruit flies for flaws have an elaborate courtship ritual the male sings a song to the female so while the at and t guys talked about human mating rituals ross bash hall would discuss the mating rituals of fruit flies jeff hall was fascinated by research he learned about while doing his post doc at caltech it had to do with fruit flies in the circadian rhythms that regulate sleep wake cycles but ross bash says nobody understood what mechanism actually kept that biological clock running he compares it to not understanding how a watch works what is the courts crystal or if you like what are the gears how the gears connected together during those locker room conversations. "jeff hall" Discussed on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 "Their power to come back on the red cross is responding jeff hall is with the american red cross of massachusetts cross has five emergency shelters open in south east massachusetts the cape was pretty heavily affected by power outages so we had over one hundred and fifty people spend the night in shelters last night on the cable loan we have shelters and fall river harwich in hyannis open helping people stay warm have have a one place to sleep at night and and hot food to eat red cross shelters are also open in plymouth and sandwich over and bill ricca they're working twenty four seven to get all the streets in town passable earlier today i spoke with ed tyranny from the town's dpw it's not bad it's you know some of the side streets whether you have the smaller pickup trucks that have trouble moving it we didn't know we were going to get as much so they didn't push it back right away and by not doing that it became a problem leaving the storm is now we have a lot of areas that are real tight and qantas tucked in and it's tough to get down some of these side streets and we're going to need to send in some front end loaders and backhoes of course some towns north of town getting almost to feed in some cases over two feet of snow north and west of the the city so be sure to stay with wbz all afternoon we'll bring you updated power outage numbers the latest on storm cleanup efforts and of course traffic and weather together on the threes wbz news time to eleven today hundreds of students parents and their supporters rallied outside the state house for tougher gun laws a school massacre in parkland florida was one month ago today students across the country also left their classrooms to protest the lack of political action in chicago many kids kids have dealt with gun violence starting from a very early age among them fourth grader zion heart who saw his grandmother injured because our right because usually other people grandmothers is up and is not right drew institutes is a high school senior in fort wayne indiana he participated in today's walkout in memory of the. "jeff hall" Discussed on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 "In the cold and dark following mother nature's one two three punch powerful storms of the past week and a half governor baker is due to arrive this hour on the cake where some residents are preparing to be in the dark for days eversource spokesman my grand says crews have their work cut out for the war out there working there's a lot of damage has a lot of work in front of us but we are out there as for national grid they say that all of their customers should be on back by midnight tonight now for cape cod residents who will be dealing with dark and cold for days there are options jeff hall is with the american red cross the red cross has five emergency shelters open in south east massachusetts the case was pretty heavily affected by power outages so we had over one hundred and fifty people spend the night in shelters last night on the cable loan who have shelters and fall river harwich and high hyannis open helping people stay warm have have a one place to sleep at night and and hot food to eat fewer outages in the merrimack valley where the snow was lighter fluffier and as a result piled a lot higher but it's wbz's carl stevens reports from bill record those communities have their own challenges with more than two feet of snow here bill rick looks like a winter wonderland we haven't died a storm like this in a while deputy fire chief tom ferraro says it's important with all the snow piled up against houses to clear out side vents the carbon monoxide issue with the new self fending furnaces with a lower to the ground you have to make sure you clearly events so you can get the in and out you also asked residents to dig out fire hydrants because when crews are responding to a fire every second makes a difference from bill rookie carl stevens. "jeff hall" Discussed on AM 570 The Mission "He did not dismiss his tolls then his reputation and liberty were in jeopardy is not just collusion governor it's collusion but it's also threats i mean this is this is really kind of 'extraordinary use of executive power not that we didn't see a lot of that on obama's watch but to go after a single citizen saying you're not allowed to talk about what you know although extortion which is a crime the key thank heaven is going to be well there be a up courage in the justice department to pursue this knowing meaty will beat him up sank why are you going after the clintons hillary didn't win there's nothing to see here which move along but there is no such a statute of limitations uh jeff hall is you lost an election right you did something that was criminal in nature losing an election does not give you a get out of jail free pass it wouldn't for you it wouldn't for me i mean today the irs apologize admitting that they didn't at target ensure now i know he is is eight long along tenure of persecution against people that were the political enemies of the previous administration and it back jeffco's unchecked and we say well ellery not in office obama's gone it doesn't matter heaven it does matter because the future of our republic orange on the wall being equally apply to the people at the top as much as it is that the people at the bottom okay 10milliondollar question governor my wife wakes up this morning she sees i put something on social media and she goes so is it going to matter or these are these guy or any of these guys go into jail is is lynch shareholder obama hillary going to be going to buy are they going to be accountable for anything what's your what's your hunch in terms of the groups that are investigating it and what kind of what kind of outcome is that we can can we expect here my honest answer i hope that it won't be a totally great furious that there will not because there will be this you that uh is not in geneva game but there is something to be gained. "jeff hall" Discussed on WAFS Biz 1190 "The reasons that it's hard and conservative politics to get legislation passed such as the repeal and replace of obamacare because there's a lot of people who feel it should be more than that rand paul to his credit feels like we promised repeal and this is not repeal so i'm not going to vote ford i'm going to vote only for what we promised and voters will support him on that democrats they'll pass something just to say they've done it they'll support something just to be part of the clique in the team even if it's more damaging than doing nothing that's really what's happening in washington right now and for trump to prove his leadership effectiveness he's got to figure out how to kohl or less that into unison support of his measures or his leadership we'll have been a failure i don't think we can judge him in the first year mean held the first six months of his presidency he was essentially attack from all sides on things that have turned out holy to be untrue coming up next the atlanta mayor's race there was a forum last evening eleven alives jeff hall and your conducted a number of the candidates were there they answered some tough questions including the one about atlanta mayor feeds veto legislation to decriminalize marijuana 15 to nothing vote in the council mayor read vetoes does it and the question is why did mayor read veto something that seemingly is a liberal causes or at least a libertarian and liberal 'cause i have the answers the why read vetoed it and it speaks the future political aspirations but also some of the audio from last night from the candidates they want to be the leader of the eight largest metropolitan area and city in. "jeff hall" Discussed on AM 970 The Answer "With jeff in flushing good morning jeff hall crank uh longtime listener and kill any fell late on jon rahm thank you very much a crank i want you to know that um i've been a veteran and a victim of the landlord and and in a court and at the rent therein is also having worked for a tiny background um and my packed i can't give you any legal advice lobby i can only draw on my own experience um volume um i'm just curious have you got any thought of bomb attack him on the rent regulation a standard in the rent stabilization when you say protection wh what do you mean exactly i'm in a go that a condom or something none no no not not only when i mean it are you will in fact subject to winning rent stabilization no no no okay holder her a augusta um ali that you have with an owner oral building manager given him all right um my understanding and i have to pay a with what was given to you uh and and by earlier on in his followed on i would say that regardless of the fact that you on nato run stabili all rent controlled that you're on nevertheless i'll entitled on state law who way warranty of habitability and that means that your apartment have to be little um both the question that comes to my mind or all the hand and i hope you will not mind me acting in if he upon and more in a state that it within why did you annual longtime companion to to take the upon well first of all excellent question were very few people i think jeff checked the washer drier and run a load of laundry in it before they move away i understand that what did you do they do leave the door mentioning yes yet will you should have seen when we first took a tour of this the prior tenants were evicted so it was in terrible shape much worse than it is now the carpets were a nasa i mean it was i mean it were more problems with it that i could less than a four hour shell and what the the broker the real estate agent told us at the time was that um that it would all be fixed by the time. "jeff hall" Discussed on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe "To add firm to confirm your suspicion and make sure you're you're doing the right thing so the right thing at you're not mistake nursing i think another really good example of that would be if anybody has read the book by oliver sacks or seen the movie awakenings i'd have it goes through his process of figuring out what this post since athletic fever was that was misiag nosed and all these people 'cause nobody had really to find it before but when he started to see these core features that they all were embodied even though they had all these different diagnoses and different small things could be pulled out he saw oh there's a pattern here and eventually was able to to diagnose that yeah that's a great movie by the way if you've never seen a i offer referenced that movie announ getting to the point where medical students haven't seen it and they're looking leg momentum guy when ozone layer by references were getting old robin williams and robert de niro like honestly at some of their finest like its whole welltimed you need a box of kleenex when you watch that movie has hardly ready for that india area are a while before we go on with the news i just i just want to mention that we have a great interview coming up later in the show with jeff hall who is the director of the lowell observatory we're going to speak out about some astronomy especially with the upcoming eclipse and all squeezed but let's get onto some news items j you're going to tell us about how our brains or wired for taste yesterday ours rather factor are i just stand this out that our ability to taste isn't just because we love to eat meatballs watermelon ya.

On December 28 1992, Madonna was named one of the 25 Most Intriguing People In The World For 1992 by People magazine. Here’s what People had to say about Madonna in 1992: The Movies! The Album! The Naughty Pictures! Once Again Madonna Was Everywhere, Shouting, “Look at Me—Every Inch of Me!” Intriguing: suggests an air of mystery. Madonna: does everything in public but floss her teeth. Intriguing: wrapped in enigma. Madonna: not wrapped in anything. Intriguing: means doesn’t appear on-camera in romantic encounters with Evian water bottles. Madonna: does. OK—so what’s so intriguing about somebody who lets you know that her lovers require a five-cent deposit? For one thing, she made ya look. Consider Sex, the photo book in which she had her picture taken doing everything but blushing. Besides proving that a naked Madonna could arch backward over a pinball machine without mussing her hair, it also pushed the envelope out to the size of a circus tent. And when the crowds came pouring in, there she was at center ring, cracking her whip. It only served her purposes that Sex earned sniffy reviews like “The Empress Has No Clothes” and that it was banned in places such as Japan and Ireland. Coming on the heels of her summer film hit, A League of Their Own, the fuss over her book helped to launch her new album, Erotica, and primed the movie audience for her next assault on their sensibilities, Body of Evidence. Her success at getting the world to subsidize her sexual preoccupations—to say nothing of her mammoth self-absorption—is what makes her worth the $60 million deal she cut this year with Time Warner (the parent company of PEOPLE). Madonna is not the first star to find the bucks in buck nakedness. But no one before her has capitalized so well on human willingness to have our fears and desires repackaged and sold back to us. Yet this most public of women still strains to be a mystery. This year she went through more faces than Lon Chaney—one minute in Baby Jane pigtails, a cupcake from hell; the next in sour milkmaid gear, Heidi with a mean streak. Her changing gallery of faces is one reason that she’s a sex symbol who inspires a lot of heavy breathing from intellectuals. One landmark of the 1992 publishing list—The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Sub-cultural Identities and Cultural Theory. You didn’t get this sort of thing for Petula Clark. But does she really throw such a mysterious light on our culture? More likely it’s just the glinting gears of a giant publicity machine. Yet the sheer magnitude of her achievement in that regard is, well, intriguing. And the grinding of those gears is surely too loud to be ignored. “I’m a revolutionary,” she once sighed. “And yes. it’s a burden.” Sometimes it’s a burden for her, we sigh in return, and sometimes for us. Madonna was a busy woman in 1992! What did you enjoy most? A League Of Their Own? This Used To Be My Playground? Erotica? Sex? Body Of Evidence?

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You will feel convinced! TAKEAWAYS Your brain is very strong, but you have to realize thatyou're in full control of what is finally saved and returned to you when required. What you've read here should help you realize when you do, that nothing happens and start to know why it's critically important that you face fears. It is equally important that you begin to retrain your ideas from negative to positive therefore that your returned reactions are positive, not negative. Let's go back to where we began. Bear in mind, this is a opportunity to discover a partner for life so before we get the right abc online dating, that we might need to develop many plants. We are not talking about two- timing here. What is meant is that instead of placing all your eggs in 1basket, keep the avenues open. Because if that does not work out, you might just drop heart, don't just bank on one individual. You can hope for the best, but expect the opposite too. It's best to create a new email address specifically for that account, when you join with an online dating website. This speech shouldn't contain your Columbus hot naked local sluts teenage hookers or any other info regarding you. Your identity must be the same fuck buddy luring la Columbus Georgia you use on the dating site( never use your real name as your handle there either! ) . This way, if you decide to stop communications with someone your identity remains a secret and you can just close the account. Actions Take some time now to list some activities that you would like. Examples include going dancing, working out, playing sports, joining an exercise class, or walking through the neighborhood three times a week. Good times to take a couple of minutes feel and to look what's on your vision board are first thing in the morning whileyou're still wakening up, and last thing before you go to sleep at night. Your subconscious is accessed at those times. The moment I got inside, Michael turned and congratulated me and said, " You're the guy, " then he smiled. I was confused with this particular fuck buddy in trinity Columbus. Did he understand what happened or he thought I slept with her? I had been restless. He seemed angry although some minutes later, Columbus GA putin prostitutes returned. The next thing he did was to inquire who pushed at the blossom on the ground, but I dismissed. Obviously, the question is: Why are they and other men and women flirting? People today log in their profiles for lots of reasons: to clean out old messages, to browse messages from those who have written to them and say" no thanks" , to continue conversations with people that they were speaking with earlier. Many sites have blogs and busy forums as well as matchmaking services. OkCupid spent years positioning itself as as networking in Columbus dating apps college to a dating site. And yes, they might be logging into search for or upset with other men and women. Is it likely that they're available for reasons other than to fulfill men and women? To be honest: no. Probably not. However, the fact of the matter is. Allyou're doing is increasing your anxiety over this person, a person who you know. I understand the urge to inspect along with the fear they may decide to ditch you. But constantly assessing their profile( and showing up in their visitor's logs) isn't likely to prevent them from seeing different people. And to be okcupid dating apps tinder, if they do decide to explore things it is just an indicator that you two were compatible in the first place and it would not have worked out. Apart from because they are talking about- or even going out with- someone else, it doesn't mean they're not going to decide they'd rather pursue a relationship with you. For all you know, date that flirtation might be the moment that makes them understand they really like you. Nothing occurs without relaxation. Nothing. You start a conversation with her and If you walk up to some girl, it's to be expected that she will be a little worried as to whyyou're currently speaking to her. She won't be familiar with the situation from the return. Acknowledge this, if you are the driving force behind breaking the rules and ask God to save you from local free sluts Columbus GA, the rebellious soul, and excitement. If you can honestly say it's your date who continues to nudge( or drag) you within the established boundaries, this can be manipulation. It is unloving, and selfish, disrespectful, so your date is not at least not without damaging this lapse of integrity. Admission Don't confess to finding her attractive quickly. On the flip Columbus, do not be too late either! Make sure you have spent excellent time to find her worthy of being a spouse. Yes, she could be the proprietor of a smoking booty along with assets, but chances are high that she won't take you seriously should you confess your love based on just her physical features. Bear in mind that there is a woman utilized to appreciation and pampering in general. There must be a hundred men falling for her left and centre. Ensure that you are different. Sexual slavery into the sexual slavery can get In the pursuit of love. This international problem doesn't lose its significance. Of course, sell, take off and nobody lies in await the girls in the alleys to catch. But there is the Internet, where slavers hookers caught on camera Columbus Georgia their victims with job offers in a model service or a firm outside of your country, a wages is large, the experience is not needed. Many of these girls come across these ads. Usually" caring" employers draw up files; assist with the purchase of tickets. However, actually, the online dating answering questions is waiting for no model agency, but she needs" work" in a brothel. Should they get offers on the 15, girls ought to be very, very careful. Think that a high- paying and esteemed job can not be hired without education and experience. If you've had the" conversation" or have had local sluts classified Faribault, then you are likely to have to come up with a different story. You could let them know that you'd logged into work out the way to delete your profile. Or you wanted to send a rejection you had a couple of dates with before them. You use your willpower up. Good for you! But then you go on one or two dates that don't work out. That is right, your motivation levels go down, and your willpower starts to local sluts hook up free Columbus. Provided that you may pink sheet hookers give up as you understand that willpower and motivation are not enough to get you through your sessions that are down as you pursue your objectives. How can you work the numbers to your advantage? Well, think about the filtration procedure as a giant funnel. The wider you can find the funnel to be, the higher the likelihood that there will be a large flow of quality applicants that endure the filter. In case you've got a very small funnel, then you would be lucky if one man appears once every blue moon. That's not for. Screening Women Red Flags Learning to display women properly is among the most important skillsets you will ever learn. The reason being that, simply put, you don't need a girl in your life! I have seen many guys become ruined by a toxic, manipulative woman, and many men never completely recover as sad as it is to say this. The Phone Number from the Homework test. Is it a test? She is testing him to see whether he will pay attention that she just might have prostitutes caught having sex her telephone number. This can be more or less a try to see if he's into checking out particulars completely( she's something of a detail oriented individual, so she's hoping he'll be, too) , or if he's more of a gloss it over, summarizing the big picture kind of man. This is a clue, even for those who are out of college. If the gal appears to do hint or anything meticulously at things, she very detail oriented and leaves nothing to chance. And it might be the evaluations she participates in may involve this character trait. As a value woman, you ought to be smarter than this. Don't local dirty sluts Vestavia Hills AL low by behaving. Be careful and Columbus Georgia sg geylang prostitutes about the consequences of your actions. Trying to look for evidence of his love will push at great guys off. A side that wants to be gloomy and do things that their mother and daddy would NEVER approve of. . . along with a bad boy is the no condom fuck buddy man to bring that out naughty side! Bad boys make girls feel a DEEP SEXUAL ATTRACTION that they don't feel with guys. Time Frames Now it is time to prioritize. , in an ideal world, you may need these things, but there'll also be. Be sure to place those dates in the" Absolutely Necessary" column. DON'T LIE ABOUT YOUR AGE When you begin a relationship with a lie, it makes it difficult to build any sort of trust. It's, although you might not think lying about your age is a huge deal. So why not be upfront, you can't lie forever? He's going to know, if a guy is looking for a woman in her thirties. The issue with online dating is that it places right up front and centre a bunch of info that is extraneous that could derail a possibly lovely relationship. After we're online, due to the overabundance of choice, we tossing contenders out in the slightest provocation. Ew. Watches reality TV? Spare me. Delete. Allow me to give you an example: several guys approach a girl, take her number and complain when the next day she does not answer to their messages. The unconscious mechanism that snaps to a lady's head is this: " He made me feel something WHEN he talked to me on the road? That is great, here's my number.

If the animal in question is a human, look carefully at your heart. Virgo is the planet of love, or the lion’s cub, and the love of your life, or your most precious possession. When you look at your heart, you will discover that your love for your pet is more important than anything else in the world. However, if you are a virgo, your heart is in the wrong place. That’s why Virgos are also the world’s most honest people. They just don’t like to hide anything. The virgo is a human who has always lived the way he wanted, had the right things to do, and made the right choices. So be careful what you say. Always keep your heart on the line. The most important thing about the virgo is that you’re able to get away with it. You can get away with it by making other people mad, and then being able to get away with what you’re doing. That’s why I love them. There are many other people who can’t be mad at this, and therefore they’re just as mad as you are. It’s only by being able to be mad with you that you can get away with it. Virgo horoscopes are usually based on the same principles as astrology, but the main difference is that in virgo horoscopes they are written to give specific information about a person, while astrology is all about predicting the future. Virgo horoscopes are also not so many that you can get a rough idea of who they actually correspond to. In virgo horoscopes, we get a random person or group of people based on their own experiences and beliefs. We use the same logic for all of the other types of horoscopes, but with a different way of putting it. We have that same logic for the real world, which is where we get the person we want, the person who is actually telling us about it. Virgo horoscopes are a big part of our time travel. One of the reasons why the world ends up being so full of people around it is because of the fact that you want to send that person somewhere else. And it’s probably the way you’re sending someone when you want to travel to some place other than your own head. And you’re sending them somewhere else because you want to get a sense of who you’re connecting with. Virgo horoscopes are usually the way to go, but you have to be very good at reading them to actually get the person you want. I once read a Virgo horoscope that was meant to be a woman. I thought it was a woman and I was thinking “I want this woman, she sounds really sexy.” Then it turned out I was thinking “oh, this woman is kinda hot. I want her, she’s got a sexy body. The Virgo Horoscope Animal is actually a very useful tool for getting into relationships, but it may not be what you want to use it for. I was going to show a Virgo horoscope for a man and the guy I met is pretty cool. But he was a Virgo horoscope animal for a woman and I was actually thinking about doing a Virgo horoscope for a woman and a guy I met. The Virgo Horoscope Animal is a great tool for getting into relationships. When you make an announcement or you make an announcement that you’re going to be a Virgo horoscope animal, then you’re going to have to make a decision on how you’re going to behave if you’re going to be a Virgo horoscope animal, so you can choose to be a Virgo or a Virgo woman. And you can choose to be a Virgo or a Virgo woman.

Happy Tuesday, Shelfies! Today, I’ve invited contemporary inspirational romance author Jill Lynn to By Her Shelf to talk about her upcoming release, The Rancher’s Unexpected Baby. Grab your coffee (or tea, or beverage of choice) and get to know Jill By Her Shelf! What’s the elevator pitch (short summary) of The Rancher’s Unexpected Baby? From the back cover: After his marriage ended, Gage Frasier vowed he’d never remarry or have children—but now he’s guardian of an orphaned baby boy. Thankfully, his friend’s sweet sister, Emma Wilder, offers to nanny while Gage seeks a more suitable family for the child. But soon Gage finds himself bonding with his new son…and with Emma. Parenthood surprised Gage, but will love sneak up on him, too? The Rancher’s Unexpected Baby is book two in the Colorado Grooms series. How did you come up with the concept for this series, and how many more books can readers expect as of now? Goodness, I wish I knew better where my ideas come from. 😊 I’m a day dreamer, and I pretty much constantly have book ideas floating through my head. I loved the idea of a guest ranch setting, so the series idea came from that. Each of the Wilder siblings needed their own story, and Emma Wilder and Gage Frasier were the perfect opposites. He’s wounded and she’s giving. He’s lost his faith and she has enough for the both of them. Between the two of them, I hoped for healing and growth and a new future that surpassed what either of them had expected. Currently there’s three books in the series for the three Wilders. We’ll see if anything else comes of the town of Westbend in the future… Where did you get the inspiration for your hero and heroine, Gage Frasier and Emma Wilder? Emma is so sacrificial, and I am not. So definitely not from me. 😉 I wanted to represent a woman who’s always done everything for others…and eventually has to take care of herself and stand up for herself. Gage was inspired by the idea of a man who’d been through a disastrous marriage. Someone who no longer had faith in relationships. Can God show up even in the roughest of ruins? What interesting fact(s) did you learn while researching The Rancher’s Unexpected Baby? After drafting book one, I visited Lost Valley Guest Ranch. Gorgeous place and wonderful people. I learned that they constantly have guests in the summer. Guests leave on Saturday, the staff does the turnover, and the new guests also arrive on Saturday. I’d already written my series as guests leaving Saturday with new guests arriving Sunday (and it fit my storylines) so I left it. But man, do they work hard! What can you share about upcoming releases? The third book in the Colorado Grooms series will release in September 2019. It’s currently being titled, and I’m excited to share that news with my readers soon. -print, eBook, or audiobook? Print is my first choice. I like to read in the bath, so if it’s a library book, I’ll choose an ebook so that I’m not ruining it with any water. And I prefer audiobook for non-fiction. 😊 -Buy or borrow from library? Both! If it’s an author I know I’ll read again, then I’ll purchase the book. But I read so much that I definitely take advantage of the library. We’re huge library fans at our house—and we go often. Especially in the summer. -bookmark, dog ear, random paper or other to hold your place? I would never dog ear, but I rarely have a bookmark nearby, so I’ll use whatever I can get my hands on for a bookmark. -write/highlight in a book, or leave it pristine? For non-fiction, I definitely underline or highlight. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with fiction! -worst reading habit? Not hearing anyone around me when I’m reading. It drives my husband crazy! I tune the world out. What book made you fall in love with or reignited your love of reading? I can’t remember a specific book as a child, but I do remember books in general. I read the Babysitter’s club series, the Nancy Drew Series. I even dipped into the Hardy Boys once Nancy ran out. I read the Little Women series numerous times. I would come home from the library with so many books. I just loved to read. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelf? I struggled with flying for a while, so I have a non-fiction book called Soar that was written by a pilot. An interesting and knowledgeable book. What are you currently reading? Cold Case Christmas by my dear friend Jessica Patch. What book is currently on top of your TBR pile? Didn’t See it Coming (non-fiction). Upcoming releases you can’t wait to read. Becky Wade’s Sweet on You. Denise Hunter’s Summer by the Tides. Lee Tobin McClain’s Low Country Hero. Jill Lynn is an author of small-town romances filled with faith, humor and happily ever after. She has a bachelor’s degree in communications from Bethel University and lives near the beautiful Rocky Mountains with her husband and two children. Jill loves to connect with readers on social media or at Jill-Lynn.com. Follow Jill on Facebook or Instagram. Current Giveaway & Newsletter: http://jill-lynn.com/news/

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- 1942: A LOVE STORY - Naren Singh (Anil Kapoor) is about to be hanged. He apologizes to his mother for failing her. She says he is giving his life for the motherland - what mother could ask for more? Naren's father tells him if he reveals the names of the traitors, his own life will be spared. Naren tells him that he is the only traitor Naren knows. The crowd rallies to the slogan "Victory to India" as Naren mounts the scaffold. Flashback - The Quit India movement is spreading across India, burgeoning in a direct correlation to the rising number of British atrocities, which are being committed largely under the direction of General Douglas. He kills freedom fighters who, till the end, chant proudly, "We'll do or we'll die!" - Indian patriots are appalled to discover that Gen. Douglas is being called home to England for a promotion. Before his departure, a farewell parade is scheduled in his honor at a hill-town called Kasauni. Raghuvir Pathak and his band of patriots make plans for one of their own (a man called Shubhankar) to assassinate Douglas there. Pathak will travel there under the pretense of taking a medical rest in order to prepare for the - In Kasauni. A riot ensues when soldiers pull down the flag symbolizing the Independence movement. Naren Singh (whose father Dewan Hari Singh, a British toadie, gave the orders to pull down the flag) interferes despite his apparent ambivalence to the Independence movement when it becomes clear that a child's life is at stake. During his struggle, he catches the eye of a beautiful woman (Manisha Koirala). - Dewan Hari (from now on, DHS) is very upset with his son. DHS shows no sympathy for his starving tenants because their son is part of the Independence movement. Naren rides back into town to find the girl, but she's nowhere to be seen, though he does find her earring. Later he tries to tell his driver and best friend, Munna, how beautiful the girl was, but cannot think of a description to do her justice. That night, he tosses and turns as he seeks the words to describe her (SONG: EK LADKI TO - The next day, Naren goes to Munna's house so they can begin the search for his mystery girl. He spies her, but loses sight of her soon afterward. Her name is Rajeshwari, and she is the daughter of the patriot Pathak. He has revealed the plans for assassination to the man he is staying with (whose name is Govind), but she still believes that he has come to Kasauni to seek medical treatment. - Munna finds out that Rajeshwari has gone to the library, and arranges for Naren to intercept her there. Rajeshwari is both flattered and alarmed by Naren's admiration (SONG: RUUT NA JAANA). - Pathak meets with a town man named Baig, who gives him a map of the hall where Douglas will be officially welcomed to Kasauni, and materials to make a bomb. Baig, who is putting on a play in the hall for Douglas as a pretext under which they can lure the General to a pre-arranged site, tells Pathak that in order to allay suspicion they will exchange messages through Rajeshwari. Later, Rajeshwari tells her dad that she likes Kasauni very much. Pathak tells her that she must go help Baig tomorrow with the play, and asks her to tell Baig that he's forgotten to give Pathak "the - The soldiers fortify the hall. Baig reassures the Major that nothing will happen. The Major tells him that he underestimates the revolutionaries - one has already infiltrated the theater! Baig, horrified, asks carefully, "Who?" The Major points out his own daughter, who has the role of Juliet in the play, and they share a good laugh. - Naren tries to ditch rehearsal to go find Rajeshwari, but his intentions quickly change when Rajeshwari appears at the theater. Rajeshwari gives Baig the message about the white powder, and he asks her to be on book for the actors. He then tells his co-conspirator Shankar to take some phosphorous to Pathak. Meanwhile. Naren is reciting the most romantic lines in "Romeo & Juliet" directly to Rajeshwari. - Back in her room, Rajeshwari confides to her journal that she knows Naren wasn't acting - he truly loves her. Naren throws a note inside her room which says much the same thing. She tries to get him to leave, but he makes her promise to come to the performance hall tomorrow before everyone else. (SONG: DIL NE KAHA CHUPKE SE) - At the army headquarters. The army has found out about the plan to kill Douglas. They are ordered to shoot to kill. - The police search all the houses. Meanwhile, at the play rehearsal, Naren accidentally says "Rajjo" instead of "Juliet." Horribly embarrassed, Rajeshwari storms out. Naren catches up with her, confesses his love, and asks her to marry him. (SONG: RIM JHIM RIM JHIM) - Govind, Pathak's host, advises him to leave town ASAP. Pathak refuses to leave until the mission's completed. - Next day. Munna tells Naren he saw Rajeshwari's luggage being loaded onto a bus. Naren runs to the station, but misses her departure. Crushed, he returns to the theater to find her there - she was just seeing her aunt onto the bus. Incredibly relieved, he begs her to promise him that she'll never leave him (SONG: KUCH NA KAHO). Chanda, the Major's daughter and his co-star in the play, overhears their protestations of love and is - The Major stumbles onto his daughter crying. She lies, saying she's upset because she can't remember her lines. He comforts her and says the trick to life is to persevere despite adversity - as he did after her mother's death. "Besides, I can bear to see everything - except tears in your eyes." - The army learns of two revolutionaries coming tonight - they track them down. One man manages to escape to Pathak's house. Rajeshwari sees him die and realizes the truth. Her father asks her if she's with him. Meanwhile, the police have surrounded the house. They search it, but find nothing inside - Rajeshwari and Pathak have dragged the body into the woods. - Rajeshwari tells Naren everything, and ends their relationship, saying, "Forget you ever loved the daughter of a revolutionary." Later, her father is outraged that she told Naren the truth - he fears Naren will go to the police. Naren shows up to tell him that he'll never repeat anything Rajeshwari told him. Pathak says it's very difficult to trust those who have sold their souls to the British. Naren replies that he has come, and his soul is there with him. Pathak says he sees that. Naren says, "No, sir, you don't." Pathak turns to look at him and says, "Now I see. So tell me what you have to say." Naren: "I respect your ideals and patriotism..." Pathak threatens him: "Never see Rajeshwari again or..." Naren: "Or you'll kill me. Go ahead. But I'll say unto my death that I love Rajeshwari and want to marry her." Naren: "You fool! When all of India's in an uproar, you're bothering with romance?" Naren: "Love isn't a sin." Pathak: "It is! A man who doesn't love his country can't love anybody!" Naren: "That's unfair! Your love for your country is immensely great - I can understand that - so try to understand my love! I'm my father's son - Rajeshwari can't join our world - but I can join hers! I'll leave everything behind - wealth, family, everything! But you cannot separate us! I'll come tomorrow. Once I've sought my mother's blessings, I'll come to seek yours." - Naren tells his mother that he's leaving. She tells him to bring Rajeshwari here - that she'll convince his dad - but he tells her truth about why he can't bring her. Meanwhile, Pathak suffers ana ttack of conscience - realizes it wasn't the English who killd his son - he did, by instilling his own ideals in his son - and he killed his wife too, by making her wait and worry. He then tells Rajeshwari that it's her right to live her life as she pleases. She says her life is with him, and that had he told her of all this scheming before, she never would have looked at Naren, much less loved him. She offers to forget Naren. But Pathak says no - Naren is a good boy, willing to sacrifice everything for her, and it won't make Pathak happy to see his daughter sacrifice such a good man. - The next day. Naren's mother gives Naren vermilion for Rajeshwari's hair (a husband applies vermilion to his wife's hair parting) and sends him off with her blessings. Naren shows up at Rajeshwari's - she is decked out in style to greet him - and they are ambushed by soldiers. Rajeshwari thinks Naren has betrayed them - her father begs her to flee - he sacrifices himself. Shubhankar shows up to drag Rajeshwari away. - In the mountains. Shubhankar tells Rajeshwari he understands what she's going through. He saw his own father die, but the death of a coward, and as he stood there and watched, it was Pathak who gave him strength. Today, Shubhankar says, he is proud because Pathak is a martyr - and one doesn't cry for martyrs. Flashback to when Douglas hanged Rajeshwari's brother. Pathak tells his son's corpse: "I'm not saddened by your death - you died for your country." And then he tells Rajeshwari, "Don't cry - one doesn't cry for martyrs; it's an insult to them. Promise me you'll never cry." Back to present. Rajeshwari, stirring from her memories, says, "I promise, I'll never cry again... Dad said as long as he and I were alive, you weren't alone, Shubhankar. So together we'll make Dad's dream come true." (SONG: YEH SAFAR BAHUT HAI) - Naren's dad is made a lord for his actions in reporting the traitors. He plans a huge celebration. Naren decides to leave home to search for Rajeshwari. He makes Munna stay behind so his mother won't be lonely. Later, Naren finds Baig digging up the bomb from the ruins of Rajeshwari's home. - Govind is tortured, but refuses to say anything. His wife begs DHS for his life. DHS is unmoved. Meanwhile, Naren has followed Baig home. He defends himself against Baig's accusations of treachery, and asks where Rajeshwari is so he can go to her and defend himself to her as well. Shankar comes to tell Baig that Govind is being tortured and his wife is unconscious in the road. Baig, overwhelmed, tells Naren that Rajeshwari is - Shubhankar plans to kill Douglas as he enters the town. Rajeshwari assures him that he's not alone in this. He thinks to himself that she'll always be with him - but he must wait until Independence is gained - and then they will settle down as husband and wife. He tells her that she must get the bomb from Baig and bring it to him at the bus station. - When Baig leaves to deliver the bomb to Rajeshwari, Naren follows him and sees her. He gives chase - Shubhankar stops Naren from following, and the police go after Rajeshwari and Shubhankar. They forcibly deboard the bus they've taken shelter in, and Naren steps forward and offers to identify the terrorists. When Shubhankar is brought before him, he lies and says he's never seen the man before. The bus driver refuses to open his tool box for the police - runs away and is shot. The Major asks Naren if the driver was the terrorist. Naren says yes, that was him. - Baig is despondent - they have no weapons left. Naren shows up - Shubhankar and Rajeshwari hide. They overhear Naren defending himself again. Rajeshwari realizes he is innocent. - Douglas arrives. He calls for the suspect they have in custody (Govind) and demands to know everything. Govind says if he had his way, he'd kill Douglas. Douglas retaliates to this verbal attack by killing Govind. Munna, seeing this, loses his cool and rushes Douglas. Douglas shoots him. Munna spits on Douglas (as he had vowed to in beat 4) and dies in Naren's arms, proclaiming with satisfaction that "I am not a - Chanda confronts her father about the day's events. He says he's an army officer and must do his duty. She replies that if his duty is to shoot unarmed men, then she must do her duty - her duty as an Indian - and stand with the townspeople tomorrow when they cremate Govind and Munna. Alarmed and angered, the Major tells her she'll do nothing of the sort - that the play rehearsals were just a front for assassination - and his own friend Baig was behind it. - Shankar breaks under torture and tells the army everything. The Major sends his men after Baig. Meanwhile, Shubhankar has fashioned a knife for a last, desperate attempt on Douglas's life. The soliders come to arrest Baig, and Shubhankar kills them. They flee across town. Shubhankar refuses to leave Kasauni until Douglas has. In the town square, they are spotted by the Major. Baig tells Rajeshwari and Shubhankar to keep walking, and assures them that since he and the Major are old friends, he'll be all right. The Major tells them to stop - begs them to stop, warns them that he'll be forced to shoot otherwise - and just as his daughter and Naren shows up, shoots Baig. As Baig dies, Naren promises him that he, Naren, will get a pistol - At Naren's house. He tries to pick the lock to the cabinet in which his father stores his gun, but his mother interrupts him and gives him a key. She tells him that she and her husband live the bent-headed life of slaves, whereas he stands upright and honorable. He takes the gun in hand and tells her Rajeshwari is alive, and if she were to meet Rajeshwari, please tell her that he's not a traitor to his country. Meanwhile, his father has woken up, and tells Naren that he'll leave this house over his father's corpse. Naren says, "As you wish... I kept quiet when Pathak was blown to bits... when I lost the love of my life because I was your son... But now it is a question of Douglas - of our independence - our nation - and I won't be stopped... decide whose side you are on... ours or the English... if it's the English, I will leave over your corpse." His father, shaken, stammers, "I'm with you, son." "So say it," Naren demands. "Say 'victory to India.'" He says it, and Naren leaves. - Douglas's procession. Shubhankar prepares to kill him. Rajeshwari promises that she won't cry. Naren shows up about the same time that his dad does. DHS tells the Major that his pistol was stolen last night by his son. The soldiers move out to find Naren, and attack him just as he's about to give the gun to Shubhankar. Douglas demands that Naren tell him who is with him in this conspiracy. Naren replies, "The - SONG: KUCH NA KAHO. Back to the beginning of the movie. Naren is brought to the scaffold. On the way, he apologizes to his mother and calls his father a traitor. The town turns out in force for the funerals of their dead. Douglas orders the blood cleaned off the stairs. - Shubhankar has an idea. He fills the water skin with the petrol that is being used to light the funeral pyres. He then sends the water carrier up to "clean" the stairs with the petrol. Shubhankar then lights it on fire, charging inside the building to spread the gas. Down below, all is chaos as Douglas orders the soldiers to fire into the square. Chanda begs her father to stop the shooting - and then is shot herself. The Major runs down and begs his daughter's forgiveness. She says he did nothing - he was only doing his duty. He remembers her words of last night - that she would do her duty, the duty of an Indian. He changes allegiance and rallies the crowd to him. Between his actions and those of Rajeshwari, Naren, and Shubhankar, the patriotic Indians take over the building and save the day. Douglas is hanged. The end.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me A partridge in a pear tree. On the first day of Christmas, your true love sent to you, a partridge in a pear tree! We want to know what your partridge looks like. My partridge looks like David Cassidy. No, just kidding! I couldn't resist. According to Wikipedia, there are two types of partridge commonly found in North American as game birds. One is colorful and the other one is gray. The partridge in my pair tree would have bright feathers and would be a talker just like me. It would never shut up. Q.1 When did you decide you wanted to be a nurse? I guess I was around 4 years old. I come from a family of nurses. Imagine a room full of woman talking about the nursing profession. That was my life, and why I became a nurse. Q.2 What’s the best part of your job? The worst? Best part of the job: I get to see the best of humanity. Worst part about the job: I also get to see the worst of humanity. Q.3 Did you have another career before you became a nurse? No. I've been a nurse for 30 plus years. Q.4 Is this really a true story? A nurse caring for a woman from Kentucky asked, "So how's your breakfast this morning?" "It's very good, except for the Kentucky Jelly. I can't seem to get used to the taste," the patient replied. The nurse asked to see the jelly and the woman produced a foil packet labeled "KY Jelly." I'm sure it's true. You wouldn't believe what happens behind hospital walls Q.5 A lot of people get to my site after googling things like “hot nurses”. Y’all seem to have quite the reputation. Do patients ever hit on you? Not now. I'm old and wrinkled, but guys use to hit on me all of the time when I was in my prime. It was funny. All I had to do was put on my nursing uniform and go shopping. I'd always come home with some guy's phone number in my pocket Q.6 When did you first hear the expression “nurses eat their young”? I first heard that expression when I was in nursing school. It's sad but true, some old nurses get off on beating up on young nurses. It's like a power trip. It's sick, and I confront people on their behavior when I see it going on. Q.7 What’s the most useless thing you have ever bought? A stove. I don't cook. Q.8 If you could have a superpower, what would it be? The power to read minds. I'm around some people that I just don't understand. Q.9 Tell us about the most embarrassing thing that has happened to you on the job. I can't remember. I've obviously repressed that memory. Q.10 What food do you absolutely hate and will never eat? Hundred Year Egg. Q.11 What’s the name of one movie that you watch over and over? The Devil Wears Prada Q.12 For the most part, nurses and doctors don’t really bitch about each other in the medblogs. Is that because there is not that much to bitch about or are y’all just playing nice on your medblogs? I think it's because we are all on the same page when it comes to wanting what is best for our patients. We can't deliver the best care because our health care system is broken. Q.13 What do your co-workers do that really irritate you? They don't advocate for themselves or for your patients. Q.14 Tell me the craziest thing you have ever seen at one of those wild hospital Christmas parties I’m always hearing about. I never go to Christmas parties. EVER! Q. 15 Do you play a musical instrument? Holiday Quickfire Questions. a. reindeer: Dancer b. cookie: Raisin c. carol: Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer d. holiday television show: Charlie Brown Christmas e. activity: Sleeping through Christmas Thank you for being my first day of Christmas! Mother Jones, RN photo: That's Shirley Jones. Get it? Partridge. Mother Jones...

By G. Michael Dobbs Road maps are available A note to Michael Sullivan and Daniel Winslow: Gentlemen, I applaud the fact the Republicans now have three candidates for the Senate, all of whom seem to be actually credible. As a life-long Democrat, I will admit I'm willing to vote for a Republican if that person is the best candidate. Having said that, if you want to actually consider your candidacy as a voter rather than a news guy, I would strongly suggest you actually campaign in the western part of the state. There's a novel idea. Gabriel Gomez at least had the courtesy of making his announcement in various parts of the state; something that makes political sense if your intent is to be the senator for the entire Commonwealth. I'm happy there is apparently one debate slated here between the Republican candidates on March 28 in Springfield. I have no further details at this time, but will share them as soon as I'm told. Still I'd like to see more of these candidates and I hope they will be here often – along with their Democratic counterparts. Our votes do matter as much as those cast east of Worcester. Who wants to be mayor? With the announcement that Mayor Michael Bissonnette and Alex Morse will be running for re-election, the question will be how many possible opponents will they face? Jim Santiago has announced his intentions to face Morse, but so far no one is talking about running against Bissonnette. Considering the rancor frequently demonstrated by members of Chicopee City Council, I would imagine there should be at least several contenders from that body yearning to unseat Bissonnette. Of course, it's still early, but an opponent to that incumbent would have to start now in order to raise the necessary money and to assemble the volunteers. Who will it be? What are your predictions, Chicopee readers? I'm looking forward to seeing how The Republican spins or minimizes the MGM presentation on traffic and how the Penn National proposal will be superior. Just remember folks, the Flying Buendo Brothers have NOT made a real estate deal with any casino developer, unlike our print competitors – not yet at least. Rand Paul's moment in the bipartisan sun The idea the federal government could use drone aircraft domestically in actions taken against American citizens is, of course, repugnant to me. So, I guess I should feel all warm and cozy about Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster over the issue. Plenty of liberal/progressives have saluted the man since this issue cut across party lines. I will give him credit for making administration be clear on this issue. Before all of us begin sending contributions, though, I think Paul's stand is the political equivalent of a broken clock, which is right twice a day. Paul may be a libertarian who rallies against the government retreating from the private and business life of Americans, but he believes the government should dictate whether or not a woman can have an abortion. Right now, the decision is left to the woman. If his "personhood law" were ever passed it would end legal abortions. Again, as a libertarian one might think he wouldn't want the government to meddle in the relationships of consenting adults, but he is against same sex marriages. So the government dictating elements of a person's private life is OK in some instances, but not in others? Agree? Disagree? Drop me a line at [email protected] or at 280 N. Main St., East Longmeadow, MA 01028. As always, this column represents the opinion of its author and not the publishers or advertisers of this newspaper.

Comments by DougPeek Posted on June 23 at 10:20 p.m. (Suggest removal) I only met her once at a party I had for a friend at my house in Albany.... And she was so nice and friendly!!! She was with Ken Screven and Liz Bishop and they were just fun down to earth folk. Totally forgot she was a news personality, maybe the infectious laugh. First impressions count, and I could tell she was as the saying goes the real deal. Posted on February 20 at 8:53 a.m. (Suggest removal) It was wonderful. Saw it Wednesday night. Wow..the voices superb and acting was engaging. I hope this sells and the word gets out. Posted on November 20 at 12:42 p.m. (Suggest removal) Posted on October 12 at 9:16 a.m. (Suggest removal) Great stuff!!! I can't wait. Thank you Philip Morris and Proctors. People should not judge a show ahead of seeing it. There are some shows offered that people may not know of that were great. Like the Rich Little "Jimmy Stewart and Friends Show" -:) Posted on October 7 at 8:20 a.m. (Suggest removal) She is a gem. Multi-talented and a pleasure to know. Posted on June 2 at 9 a.m. (Suggest removal) I agree with SAFNY comments! Posted on April 30 at 12:10 a.m. (Suggest removal) it was never really that great unless you had a vehicle with a huge gas tank. most cars have a tank under 20 gallons. spending 100 dollars to save two dollars is not worth it. And it is limited to Sunoco gas which is not the cheapest around. Price Chopper's problem is it got complacent and service declined. You can get faster check outs at Shop Rite and Hannaford with more courteous cashiers! Posted on April 18 at 9:16 a.m. (Suggest removal) GREAT !!!!! Good news. Hope graffiti clean up is on the list as well. thanks! Posted on January 4 at 10:54 a.m. (Suggest removal) People who visit cant be expected to live here if Schenectady is a graffiti and trash strewn city. I am a Democrat that supported the Democratic team AND voted for Riggi. Love his stand on quality of life. Clean the graffitti city wide AND maintain Central Park. Gets lots of visitors. It is a s__t hole. Crumbling stone bridges, trash that blows all, over broken windows in restroom buildings and graffiti all over the buildings. Pornographic graffitti on kids slides and other playground equipment. Really not something the person in charge of parks should be proud off. Hopefully the new administration and council will hold people in charge accountable all the way around. Posted on November 17 at 9:20 a.m. (Suggest removal) Will city officials please enforce traffic laws. Last night walking dog on upper Union st. a speeding red jeep suv turning onto side street by Gershon's almost run us over. it almost seemed on purpose. i shop on Union and the Merchants as well are upset with speeding traffic that blow tru redlights. After all the money spent downtown and on upper union, can't Police enforce and traffic planners do something to make it safe to live, walk, and shop in Schenectady. how many other folks like that poor 19 year old woman have to be run down in the streets by speeding lethal weapons called cars/trucks.

When the title “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” is heard it is expected for something, well, incredible, or at the least have some incredible aspect. This movie, however, was nearly the opposite. The movie had a promising cast, including Steve Carell (“Hope Springs”), Steve Buscemi (TV’s “Boardwalk Empire”), Jim Carrey (“Mr. Popper’s Penguin”) and Olivia Wilde (“People Like Us”). But it somehow all went awry within the plot somewhere. The movie begins with a powerful scene. Bullies are chasing Burt (Carell) through the streets. The viewers feel their hearts ache in pity for the young boy. It is clear that Burt had a difficult childhood, and does not have many friends. Even his mother has better things to do than to spend his birthday with him. However, when Burt meets Anton (Buscemi), another nerdy schoolboy like himself, they become friends instantly and bond through magic tricks. Together they dream up a future where they become incredible, famous magicians. The two manage to make their dreams come true. The duo becomes one of the most famous acts on the Vegas strip, where they have a theater named after them. This story could have been about how anything is possible, showing how friendless, nerdy boys can make their dreams come true through faith and determination. Perhaps this is part of it, but the main theme remains unclear. By the time the two have grown up, the potential for Burt turning into a nice, respectable magician vanishes. Burt’s character is the downfall of the entire movie. The audience wants to have a protagonist who they can feel compassion toward and relate to. Burt Wonderstone is the opposite. He is a slimy man who objectifies women in his sexual tendencies, and treats his best friend like scum. The duo begins to lose popularity when a new magician takes on the street crowds with his amazing acts. Steve Gray (Carrey) is a grotesque character whose show is called “Mind Rape.” The name in itself has something to say for the disgusting acts that he does, such as sleeping on burning coals and cutting his own flesh open. The scenes with him are not the slightest bit enjoyable, and make the audience sick to their stomach. This is not magic; certainly not the same magic that originally enticed Burt and Anton into the trade. When the act falls apart with Burt and Anton getting in a fight, Burt’s entire career crumbles to pieces. He resorts to living in a run-down motel, which is quite contrary to the lavish lifestyle; he led before with the largest bed in Vegas. It is hard to feel any remorse or sorrow for the man since he is such a repugnant character. After this traumatic event, there is a glimmer of hope for Burt. He refrains from wearing his glittery show attire and settles back into a normal human life where he is no longer upon a pedestal above everyone else. Perhaps his faith is restored when he stumbles across the man who he idolized as a boy, and whose magic set had gotten him into doing magic tricks in the first place. He finds Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin, “Stand Up Guys”) in a nursing home where he found a job entertaining the elderly. Burt has an upcoming event where he is to perform magic at his ex-bosses son’s birthday party. Rance agrees to practice tricks with Burt, and go to the birthday party with him. In the usual way-too-frustrating manner of the entire movie, Steve Gray shows up and steals all of Wonderstone’s glory, outdoing every trick that he does. The end finally pulls at the audience’s heartstrings when Anton and Burt reunite and agree to try again, but this time with their beautiful old assistant Jane (Wilde) who has been aspiring to be a magician herself. In the past Burt has snubbed her because she was a woman and obviously could not be a successful magician. Burt actually falls in love with Jane, so this shows that his womanizing days are finally over at long last. The cheerful and inspiring ending does not make up for the torture that was endured throughout the duration of the film. The unlikable characters and the lack of storyline make for a mediocre film at best.

Let’s talk about application. What does this look like for you and for me. The first is this principle of, you might write the word in, accountability. It’s a concept of judgment. Often we think, as I at least meet with believers, and since I didn’t grow up reading the Bible, when I thought of judgment, I thought there was just this one big judgment. Those who go to heaven and those who are separated from Christ forever. That is not true and I can’t develop it all, but let me tell you that the Bible is very clear. There are at least five different specific judgments. There are different people groups involved. The judgment of sin at the cross. But the one I want to talk about is the judgment of a believer’s works. Namely, that you and I will be held accountable for how we live our lives from the moment we trust Christ until the moment we see Him. Now, open your Bibles with me, if you will, I Corinthians chapter 3. Let me let you see this firsthand. If you’re a note taker and you’re going to share this with someone at work or in a Bible study, jot down II Corinthians 5:8 and 9. You’ll find the same judgment. I Corinthians chapter 3, Paul has helped birth this church, there are a lot of divisions, a lot of struggles, this is a corrective letter to get them back on the same track. And he is going to make the point, all this division, Christ, the foundation of Jesus, His work, His resurrection, is the foundation for all life. Now what he wants to say is, “We all have a ministry in other people’s lives. Be careful how you build.” And this is the idea of your life in Christ. Picking it up at verse 11, follow along. It says, “ For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Christ Jesus. Now, if any man builds upon the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident for the Day of judgment will show it. Because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.” Not only what you do, but the quality, the “why you do it.” “If any man’s work or woman’s work, what she or he has built upon it remains, he will receive a reward.” This is for believers. You’re going to get a reward. “If any man or woman’s work is burned up, he shall suffer loss but he himself shall be saved – yet as through fire.” The key word here is fear. Go ahead, write it out. Fear. I don’t know about you, I don’t know if you’ve thought about it much. I don’t think we think about it a whole lot. But there is going to come a day. Your salvation isn’t in question, but there is going to come a day when you are going to stand before a holy God and He is not your cosmic buddy; He’s not your little good friend up in the sky; He’s not an old, wise man with a white beard that really hopes things go okay with you; His dream for your life is you get an SUV, a minivan, live in a nice place and have a good, comfortable income, and your kids turn out right. That is not His plan for your life. If you happen to get all that, thank Him for it and be a good steward. Nothing wrong with it. But that is not God’s agenda. And the day will come when you stand before Him, and I will stand before Him, and He will get right down to, in the words of Jesus, Matthew 12:36 and 37, Jesus said, “Every careless word that men shall speak, they will render an account for it in the Day of Judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Every act, every thought, every dollar, not only what you did with your spiritual gifts, with your time, with your energy, with your talent but why you did it. See, I shared last week about my journey with being a workaholic. And the phone rang and I got it! And the people at that little church, they thought I was wonderful! They said, “Jump!” And I said, “How high? I’ll be there for everyone! I can do a funeral in the morning, a marriage at night, a pre-marital counseling in the middle of the night. Call me! I’m your savior, baby!” And I thought I was just the greatest little pastor in the whole world. Exhausted. And you know what? They did too. I’ve got news. When I stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ – those early years in Kaufman, Texas – wood, hay, stubble. Whoo. It’s going to get burned up. I didn’t answer those calls, I didn’t do those things because I loved God. I hope there was some loving God in there somewhere. I did it because I wanted their approval. I did it because I wanted people to accept me. I did it because it felt a lot like love and I didn’t really believe, down deep, God loved me even though He did. I did all kinds of things, not for motives to honor God and please God and deeply care about people. I did all kinds of things to meet inner needs in my heart and deficits. And you know something? Fire, whoo. There’s no reward there. There’s no reward there. I didn’t model any kind of lifestyle that I would want anybody, except another insane person, to live like me. How about you? Did you ever give much thought? In fact, I remember a time I was in school and we had one of those very, some professors you kind of categorize as an “egghead.” This guy has a doctorate from Dallas and another doctorate from Jenner, Oxford and another one from Cambridge. And so he does a chapel, I’ll never forget this chapel. He says, “Men, forgive me,” he’s in the Hebrew department, he said, “I would like to do a word study.” And he goes through in Hebrew, the word fear means and in Greek the word fear means, in Ugaritic the word fear means. And he gets all the way to the end and you know what? He wasn’t an egghead, he was smart. He said, “Men, I want you to know, from the original text, what the word fear means. It means fear! It means fear!” When you meet people in the pages of Scripture and they come face-to-face with God, they fall flat on their face! We have a culture with Evangelicals, they meet God face-to-face, “Hey, high-five, baby, what’s happening with You? What have You done for me lately? Genie in the bottle. Make my life work out. By the way, have You heard? I’ve got a few things that aren’t really working out right now and I want them now.” He is not your cosmic buddy. He is a God to be feared. The writer of Hebrews says to a group of believers, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” He loves you, He is good, He is powerful, He is all-knowing, He is just, but He is a just, holy, judge. And you know what? That guilty feeling stuff? It doesn’t work. And that, “meet my own needs” stuff? It doesn’t work because it all really revolves around short, little, above the water changes. I’ll tell you something. I got serious about core issues in my life when I realized, not only was I destroying my life, destroying my family, and not really helping the Church. I’m going to stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ and give an account and you know what? I had a holy fear come over me. When was the last time you had one of those experiences? You want to be motivated to get in the Scriptures? You want to be motivated to have your life match what you say you believe? Spend some time thinking about fear. Fear. It’s a powerful motivator. I majored in psychology. The greatest motivational techniques we can learn are negative consequences along with positive reinforcement. You do all the tests with animals and all the rest. If you have negative consequences intermixed with positive reinforcement, that’s how you train. That’s how you train things. And when you look at what God says, there are some negative consequences to living our lives apart from the will of God. My father, I’ve told you a little bit about him, but he smoked three and a half packs a day, of Lucky Strike, for thirty years. “Forget them filters! Them are for wimps!” And he was a science teacher. Now, he joined the Marines when he was sixteen and he said, “Man, I wasn’t trying to learn to smoke. The only way you could a break was to take a smoke. And so when my unit stopped and they passed out cigarettes, give me one. You know?” So he is teaching science. He’s got thirty years under his belt. And they had this exhibit. And in one of those big jars with formaldehyde in it, was a lung of a person who died of cancer. Well, what they had in the lung was a person who smoked one pack a day for ten years. My dad also taught math, so he did the math. And it was black as the ace of spades. And he looked at that jar and thought to himself, What must be inside of me? And guess what? He got afraid! He had tried every possible way to quit smoking. Guess what happened? He quit. God wants you to know He loves you and you are a steward. And the day will come, you will give an account. That’s a lasting, highly motivating, prioritizing way to have your life and your belief system match up. Now, that’s sort of the negative side. Let’s look at the positive side. The second principle is the principle of rewards. This is the concept that we reap what we sow. You might jot down Galatians 6:7 and 8. He says, “God will not be mocked; as a man or a woman sows, so shall he or she reap. If you sow to the flesh,” you sow to selfish ambition, you sow to things you know aren’t really good for you but they feel really good right now, it reaps death and corruption. “If you sow to the Spirit,” follow after the things of God, do the things that are hard, honor Him with your time, develop the kind of relationships you know that matter, he says, “it brings life and it brings peace.” And so there is this sowing and reaping and the problem is you never reap in the same season that you sow. And so what I am going to tell you, like I told people last week. Last week, people said, “You know, I want to get really honest,” and there was a lady midway through this row and I was kind of just saying hi to people as they came in this morning. And she said, “Well, God must really be working.” I said, “Why do you say that?” She goes, “I did one of those real honest inventories and I made some pretty difficult decisions.” She said, “All hell broke loose in my week last week.” I said, “That’s pretty predictable. One, you got someone’s attention and, two, you’re now swimming upstream.” See, once you start moving in ways that are very positive that will have long-term, great blessing and great reward, it’s hard! It’s difficult. And the early consequences are usually, it’s just like your human body. Anybody decide to get in shape, haven’t done it in a while, decide to go out and jog, like, two or three miles? Now, what happens? Your body has now gone into shock. What happens the next morning? Oh! I’ll tell you what has happened. You have pushed muscles, those muscles are filled with lactic acid. Muscles, the way they grow, they are fibers and they are split. And the way they grow is they split and you keep working on them, then they grow, and that’s how they are enlarged. Short-term pain, long-term gain. And God says there is this principle of rewards and the key word here is hope. And here is what keeps me going. When I didn’t feel like reading my 3x5 cards, when I didn’t want to read a book on this, when I didn’t want to say, Okay, I am not going to answer that phone. I’m going to stay at the table with my family. What kept me going was the certainty and hope that if I will do life God’s way, there is reward. And the word hope, I use that in a biblical sense. We use the word like, “I wish.” I hope the 49ers win, I hope my marriage gets better, I hope my kids turn out right. Well, that is a good wish. The word hope, in Scripture, has to do with an absolute certainty that because it is absolutely certain, I am going to hang in here because God promises He will make it happen. Jot down Philippians 1:6. Paul says, to a group of people going through some not very easy times in the New Testament times, he says, “For I am confident of this thing that He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. God is on your team! He loves you! He is good! You think you know what a good marriage would look like? His is better and bigger. You think your life affecting other people might be something exciting? His is bigger and better and more exciting. But the pathway there is doing it His way. Romans 8:28, we always quote that to people in the hospital. We ought to quote it to people going through life. “God works all things together for good, for those that are called, for those that love Him.” That means He is working in your job situation, your marriage situation, your singleness, your struggles, your temptation, your boss, your kid that is giving you a hard time, the part of your body that is not working very well. He is working all things together for good, including the stock market. To orchestrate, not that everything works out fine, but to orchestrate the person of Christ being birthed and fully formed in you to make you like Him. And if you will sign up, if you’ll not bail out when it gets hard and say, “Since there is a great reward down the road, I am going to hang in there. I’m going to hang in there.” See, that’s why I could read my 3x5 cards. I didn’t feel like it. We are living in a culture of, like, emotional namby-pambies. I don’t know about you, but a lot of things I do, I don’t feel like doing it. What do you say to your kids when one of your kids gets up and says, “Mom, Dad, I don’t feel like making my bed.” And I tell my kids, “You don’t have to feel like it, honey, just knock it out and when you’re done, come to the breakfast table. I love you.” If you wait until you feel like doing things, it’s called a fruit of the spirit, it’s called self-discipline. Doing what you are motivated to do doesn’t take a lot of self-discipline. But as you take yourself into training, and you sow and you do it God’s way, and this concept of an all-knowing, just, loving Father who is good and all-powerful and longs to give the best, it motivates you to endurance over the long haul. I decided about eight years into being a Christian, maybe seven, not because I ought, not because I should, not because others thought, but after I went through this deal with being a workaholic, I decided, and I knew, I don’t get any brownie points for this. I’m not better than everyone else. Everyone gets to decide what you want to do with your life. And I would make this assertion. However your life is coming out right now, you are designing your time and energy and focus to produce exactly the results that you’re getting. See, if sports are really important to you, you have designed your life around reading the sports page every day, watching three or four ball games, and being in two or three leagues. Well, great! If money is important to you, you must read the Wall Street Journal, you check this, this, this, and this, and you read books in Fortune 500. Now, is there anything wrong with either of those? I don’t think so. If soap operas are important to you, you will get Soap Opera Digest, you’ll watch so many, you’ll tape the ones that you miss, and you’ll watch them so that you can be up on soap operas. Here’s the deal. When your life ends, wherever you invested it, then you reap either a reward or some sorrow. But even better, way before your life ends, however you have designed your life, you’re going to hit the target that you’re aiming at. And so about eight years into my Christian life, I decided, not ought, should, not going to feel guilty, don’t care what anybody else does, I made a decision. It really flew out of I Corinthians 9:24 to 27, the apostle Paul said, “A lot of people run the race of life but only a few win the prize.” I am going to run life in such a way to win. Not to just be a spectator, not just to be in the game. I want to run to win. And so I buffet my body and I set goals and I box not like in air, I come up with strategic, clear-cut goals and targets about what God wants and I am going to go after it. And I decided, from inside, that’s what I wanted to do. I decided I want to be a man of God, I want to be an effective father, I want to have an intimate marriage, and I wanted to take the spiritual gifts that I could identify and I wanted to flat out steward them to the max. And then I arranged, and then I got out my schedule. And I didn’t care what was on Monday night or Thursday night or Friday night. I didn’t care what anybody else was doing. I got out my schedule. To be a man of God, I need this much time in the Scriptures. Here’s where I need to grow. These are the kind of people I want to be around. And I put it in my schedule. To be an effective father I am going to just design a day where I’m going to meet with each of my kids, I’m going to come up with a strategy, I’m going to decide what they need, what I need to give to them, and who I am going to expose them to. If I am going to have an intimate marriage, it doesn’t matter what is on TV, it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing, I’m going to read these books, go to these conferences, build in two or three times away with my wife and I’m going to put it on the calendar. If I am going to steward my gift, I am going to practice it, I’m going to read up on it, I’m going to go to conferences, and I am going to say, God! Help me be a man of faith. And for the last twenty years, I decided that was my target. Now, I didn’t feel like it a lot of times. I have gone, at times, for two or three years without watching TV. It didn’t make me more spiritual. I just found it was hard hitting my targets and watching a couple of hours of TV a night. I found I could go to bed at nine o’clock and get up very early in the morning and have three or four hours before everybody else knew what was going on. I just found that putting aside that time with my kids, it was hard and I was a terrible person and all the other kids got to do this and my kids and I was this taskmaster and I was this terrible father. I’m kidding. I mean, that’s how it felt because I asked my kids to be counter-culture. And I got deeply engaged in their lives and I gave them what they needed instead of what they wanted. Very imperfectly with lots of ups and downs. Here’s what I want to tell you. Just please hear this. I don’t know how to get my arms around this. I just want to tell you. I sat around the table at Christmas and my one boy came in from Nashville and the other from Chicago and I heard what was on their heart and I heard how God is using them. And hearing their prayers and sensing the unity and I looked across the table at a woman that I have busted it with for twenty of the twenty-two years we have been married. And I see things that I have begged God, for breakthroughs in our relationship that took not three, not four, not eight, it took ten and fifteen years. And I’m looking across the table and thinking, I never dreamed, I never dreamed God would bless in ways beyond my wildest imagination. I never dreamed God would put on my kids’ heart what it is and I never dreamed He would take my gift and steward it and multiply it and have emails from around the country and around the world. That’s not something that happened overnight and it’s not because I’m better than anything or anyone. It is all the grace of God. But hear it! If you believe there is a reward for walking righteously, then you just decide, This is what I am going to do. And what keeps you going is, God is good, God is faithful. What He wants to give you is so great. But there is a price tag. There is a price tag. It’s hard work. “Discipline,” the Bible says, “discipline yourself unto godliness.” Bodily discipline has some merit, for a time. But spiritual discipline has great impact, not only for this life, but the next. And so what I see is, I am watching the Church sort of float around and people not realize that you are going to stand before God, I am going to stand before God. I don’t know about you, that’s a lot better than guilty feelings. I get motivated. And the flip side is, God loves me so much, most of us are experiencing this and God wants us to experience THIS. But you have to go into training for the things that count! And you say no to putting junk in your body and you say no to putting stuff in your mind. And you say, “I’m not going to do that, this is what I am going to do, and I am going to do it with a group of people.” And you align your priorities that way and in three or four weeks, I will guarantee, if you decide to do this, your life will be terrible. And some of the people that are closest to you that are Christians will start calling you a fanatic and, “I think you’re taking this a little too far.” Yeah, okay. Look at where their life is. Look at where their marriage is. Look at where their kids are. And you ask yourself where you want to be. Where do you want to be? The fundamental question in life is: Where do you really want to be and how badly do you want it? You can be as righteous as you want to be. That’s not heresy. That’s from the lips of Jesus. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. They will be” – what? “satisfied.” Heaven is not saying, “Oh, man, we’ve got too many people pounding on the door to want to be like Christ, we just don’t have enough grace to go around!” The fundamental problem is most of us want God to come through and work out our life our way, under our conditions, with our priorities, and our expectations, instead of saying, God, I want to seek first the kingdom of God and Your righteousness. And then as I do that, I’m going to trust that promise of reward. All these other things will fall into place. You know how much money I need, You know where I need to live, You know the issues of my baggage and my background, You know my parents, You know my kids, I’m going to trust You. So where do we go from here? What do you do? The motivation is fear, stand before God. The motivation is hope! There is a great reward. Where do we go from here? The last principle is the principle of what I call strategic application. And where I get this is James modeled it for us. He hits it. I don’t know about you but this is hitting me pretty hard. So where do you begin? You heard Jim talk about drugs and alcohol. What if you’re here and you have a drug or alcohol, or a sexual addiction. What if you’ve got a marriage on the rocks? Or a single person living in a way that you know is not healthy? Or what if you have an eating disorder? Forget eating disorder, you just eat a bunch of junk and you don’t want to but you keep doing it. Or what if you want to be in the Bible but you can’t do it more than about two days in a row? You want to learn to pray or you have made all these promises and guilty feelings and trying to fulfill yourself have never worked. Where do you go from here? What do you do? After James gave this on motivation, the very first thing he talks about is the tongue. Because the tongue, according to Jesus and James reveals that which fills your heart. And it will help you see core issues. I call it the “logjam illustration.” Picture water coming down a stream and there are all these big, huge logs. There are two ways to get a logjam unhooked, isn’t there? One is you take one off, one off, one off and in about thirty years, you get it done. The second is you ask an engineer to come. And you say, “Dear engineer. Would you look at this and let me know which log is strategically placed that when we pull it out, boom, boom, boom, boom, all the logs go? See, God wants no one walking out of here thinking, I have to change my eating habits, my media habits, my this habits, my this habits. I don’t know what to do. Ah! You know what He wants you to do? Strategic application. Start with your relationship with God. You get that one in line, you will be amazed. He can solve your financial, marital, single, financial, work issues. I want to close with one of the greatest pictures I have ever received. I got it this week. There was a fellow, I got to meet him, this was just a humbling deal. There was a guy who was homeless, living on the street in a place where he could see our church. His wife and he married about nine years, two kids, she leaves him, he is desperate. But he sees this parking lot every day, he said in his letter. It’s empty, filled. Empty, filled. He said, “Something has got to be happening over there.” So he decided he would come to church. So he comes to church and of all Sundays, are you ready for this? Remember the Malachi 3 challenge? He came that week. Oh no! One week and we are going to talk about God’s view of money. I’m thinking, Oh man. But you know what? See, God talks a lot about money and when people are desperate, he heard the truth. He didn’t hear anything bad. He didn’t have anything. Two kids and he’s on the streets. He said, “At the end of the message,” he said, “I heard you say, ‘Test God. God wanted to show up for me. And God would prove Himself.’” And he said, “I reached into my pocket and I had seventy-five cents. And it’s all I had.” And he said, “I felt foolish and I put that seventy-five cents in.” He said, “The next day, God gave me seventy-five dollars.” And I said, “Well, I made that promise. I took seven-fifty and I gave it to help someone.” He said, “Then the next day, “God gave me another seventy-five dollars.” And so I took seven-fifty of that and I tried to help someone else.” He said, “Then I came over here and I thought, Gosh, I don’t know what’s happening. I’ve never seen anything like this. Wow. So I came and talked to Jim and I found myself at Celebrate Recovery,” and he was an addict, both he and his wife. And so he said, “I tell my story and while I’m leaving, people stick money in my pockets and I look in, well, there is seventy more dollars.” Now he goes on to say that in the last six weeks he has delivered ten bags of groceries to fellow homeless, hurting people and with each bag, he tells them, “This is what God has done for me.” Sowing, reaping; sowing, reaping; reward, joyful. And he said, “And by the way, all my kids have now gotten connected. I really don’t know much about God,” but this body, you all have loved him, he said, “We are in God’s will, we have come to know Christ.” And then after the last service he said, “I thought you might want to put a name with the face.” And, man, he just gave me a big hug. And you know what he reminded me? He reminded me, strategic application. It’s not about changing big, big, big, all, all, all. It’s about, What is the seventy-five cent issue? What is the one thing, as I have been talking and the Spirit of God has been moving, that you know, I need to do that? And you do that, watch out. One, it won’t be easy. Two, it will be great. Because God wants to make you like His Son a lot more than you really want to be like His Son. But it’s awesome. It’s awesome.

XVIII. Old and Young Women. "Why stealest thou along so furtively in the twilight, Zarathustra? And what hidest thou so carefully under thy mantle? Is it a treasure that hath been given thee? Or a child that hath been born thee? Or goest thou thyself on a thief's errand, thou friend of the evil?"-- Verily, my brother, said Zarathustra, it is a treasure that hath been given me: it is a little truth which I carry. But it is naughty, like a young child; and if I hold not its mouth, it screameth too loudly. As I went on my way alone to-day, at the hour when the sun declineth, there met me an old woman, and she spake thus unto my soul: "Much hath Zarathustra spoken also to us women, but never spake he unto us concerning woman." And I answered her: "Concerning woman, one should only talk unto men." "Talk also unto me of woman," said she; "I am old enough to forget it presently." And I obliged the old woman and spake thus unto her: Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution --it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man? Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly. Too sweet fruits--these the warrior liketh not. Therefore liketh he woman;--bitter is even the sweetest woman. Better than man doth woman understand children, but man is more childish than woman. In the true man there is a child hidden: it wanteth to play. Up then, ye women, and discover the child in man! A plaything let woman be, pure and fine like the precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come. Let the beam of a star shine in your love! Let your hope say: "May I bear the Superman!" In your love let there be valour! With your love shall ye assail him who inspireth you with fear! In your love be your honour! Little doth woman understand otherwise about honour. But let this be your honour: always to love more than ye are loved, and never be the second. Let man fear woman when she loveth: then maketh she every sacrifice, and everything else she regardeth as worthless. Let man fear woman when she hateth: for man in his innermost soul is merely evil; woman, however, is mean. Whom hateth woman most?--Thus spake the iron to the loadstone: "I hate thee most, because thou attractest, but art too weak to draw unto thee." The happiness of man is, "I will." The happiness of woman is, "He will." "Lo! now hath the world become perfect!"--thus thinketh every woman when she obeyeth with all her love. Obey, must the woman, and find a depth for her surface. Surface, is woman's soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water. Man's soul, however, is deep, its current gusheth in subterranean caverns: woman surmiseth its force, but comprehendeth it not.-- Then answered me the old woman: "Many fine things hath Zarathustra said, especially for those who are young enough for them. Strange! Zarathustra knoweth little about woman, and yet he is right about them! Doth this happen, because with women nothing is impossible? And now accept a little truth by way of thanks! I am old enough for it! Swaddle it up and hold its mouth: otherwise it will scream too loudly, the little truth." "Give me, woman, thy little truth!" said I. And thus spake the old woman: "Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"-- Thus spake Zarathustra.Next

|Taking a Break in Bighorn Pass| I woke up to the fragrant smell of fresh shit. Chloe had left a present for me right outside my tent. In fact, it was so close that I struggled to imagine how she could have squatted that near the tent without falling through the screen door. I guess the paper lady was right and it was my fault for feeding Chloe that stinky fish. I dragged my tent away from the putrid pile and packed up to leave. By this point, I had gotten pretty good at rapid camp set-ups and tear downs. |Awesome Curves Ahead| Hester and I headed east on highway 14 towards Sturgis. The route took me through Bighorn National Forest and over the 9,000+ foot high Bighorn mountain pass. This was a stellar sixty mile ride that I didn't even know existed. The horseshoe curves, switchbacks, and elevation changes were the most extreme I had ridden in all of the previous 7,000 Alaskapade miles. Fortunately, these roads were all paved and in great shape with no gravel sections or pot holes. When I saw what was in store for me on the GPS display, I stopped at a scenic spot to rest for a second and to mount my helmet cam under the right footboard. I had fabricated a mount there before I left, having anticipated the cool views it would capture on roads just like this one. The road was so tight that it took me over two hours to ride sixty miles and I loved every second of it. Actually, there were a few tense seconds when I played a game of chicken with Bambi. I had just negotiated a tight uphill curve and finally passed a slow moving cage that had been holding me up when I saw the deer standing at the edge of the rocks on the road on my right. I eased back on the throttle and kept a steady eye on the deer. It stared at me; I stared at it. I had horsepower, but this was the deer's turf. I remembered that deer usually wait till the last second to react, so I approached with even more caution. Just as expected, it darted in front of me the instant I was next to it and glanced the leading edge of my right saddle bag. I looked behind me and saw the deer spinning on its side in the middle of the road. It jumped up and limped off the road just before the cage I had recently passed rolled up. That was a lucky deer. I was a luckier rider. The video camera caught it all. |A Deer Playing Chicken| |Bighorn Pass - Adventure at Every Turn| The Bighorn run was a mix of painted rocks, canyons, snow capped mountain crests, and jagged cliffs that reached vertically downward into roaring rapids of water that were as blue as the sky above and randomly topped with white foam. I saw numerous trails leading from the roadside up to caves in the sides of the mountain walls an I was tempted to pull over and climb up for a closer view. Highway 14 dumped me out on highway 90 near Sheridan, WY and I found myself rocketing towards Gillette. I crossed I-25 and realized that I was intersecting the exact same spot I had ridden on day two of the Alaskapade. At 2:00pm on Friday July 1st, a copper wire snapped inside Hester's fairing and the music which had violently shattered the tranquil silence of the unsuspecting countryside with blistering rock music all the way from Texas to Alaska and back to Wyoming and all the while entertaining your humble writer - was suddenly silenced. At the next gas stop, I checked my cigarette lighter and it had no power. Way back on day three of the Alaskapade, the auxiliary cigarette lighter and USB power ports I had wired-in had melted in my glove box. In a rush, I had stuffed a bunch of cables into the the glove box and one of the USB plugs dropped into a 12 volt cigarette lighter socket and shorted out. I saw smoke billowing out of the glove box and damn near had a heart attack. I pulled the melted cable out and saw that the plastic power housing I had installed had actually melted into the glove box. Since that happened on day three of the Alaskapade, I had been swapping out charging cables in the stock cigarette lighter on the left side of the fairing. It was difficult to keep all my cameras and bluetooth headset charged when I was tent camping without electricity. Now, my last source of recharging power was gone. There was a Harley dealer in Gillette, so I stopped in and checked my fuse in the parking lot. The fuse was fine, but the circuit was dead. I resigned myself to riding the rest of the trip without music. I could play the tunes though my bluetooth headset, but the audio quality sucked. I had plenty of audiobooks to keep me entertained and was in the middle of Atlas Shrugged (from which I stole the opening line to this paragraph). At 67 hours, there was plenty to keep my mind occupied for the rest of the trip. A service tech who was smoking a cigarette outside the dealership walked over to talk to me when he saw the Alaskapade.com logo on the trunk. "I'm guessing by the look of that bike that you really rode it to Alaska" he said. I replied that I had, suppressing a prideful look and acting cool about it. The next question he asked was common among bikers. "Where did you get that windscreen?" I told him that it was from MadStad Engineering and that I wouldn't own a bike that didn't have a MadStad screen available for it. A sales rep came out, took pictures of it, and wrote down the name. The coating of bloody, squashed bugs probably didn't make for a very good representation. Perhaps my testimonial and recent miles lended a bit of credibility. I rolled out from Gillette and made my way to Devil's Tower. I've been fascinated by this monument since seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind in high school and I wanted to see it first hand. I took a thirty mile detour off the highway to get Hester's picture with the monument in the background. The line of cages waiting to pay to get into the park was half a mile long. After my experience in Yellowstone, I wasn't falling for that again. I rode on the shoulder, stopped at the monument park entrance sign, took a picture, and turned around to head for Deadwood. It was worth the extra miles. |The Devil & Miss Hester| I exited off the interstate and took highway 85 into Deadwood. Honestly, I had never heard of Deadwood until the HBO series aired a few years ago. I had heard cool stories about the place since then and it was on the way to Sturgis, so I thought I'd drop in. Deadwood was bustling with tourist buses, bikes, and pedestrians. As far as I could tell, the only attraction to Deadwood was the mere fact that it was Deadwood. Still, I found it cool and enjoyed riding the main street. I must have found the back way in because on my way out, I saw a nice Deadwood sign atop a hill and had to stop to get Hester's picture there. I just had to stop. The wind was gusting up pretty good and I wondered if we would get some rain. I pulled Hester in front of the sign and dismounted. While I stood fiddling with my camera, a blast of wind blew Hester right over. I literally screamed "FUCK!" so loud I was sure it echoed all the way back into town. Bruce Banner had nothing on the rage I was feeling and I thought I was going to Hulk out right there on the side of the road. I had ridden over 7,000 miles through hell and back with no problems and now Hester was dropped by the f-ing WIND? I struggled to pick her up on my own. I tried everything I learned in the Motorcycle Safety Foundation class I took thirty years ago. The Honda XL-100 I rode back then was much easier to lift than Hester was. The rage I was feeling and the physical conditioning I had put myself through in the months prior to this day were no match for Hester's weight. I struggled for several minutes on my own before another rider stopped to help me stand her up. I was as embarrassed as I was outraged, but I was also grateful. I dusted Hester off and hit the road heading for Sturgis. I've never been inclined to be in Sturgis during the corporate mess that the rally has become, but I wanted to see the place nonetheless. Up until Hester's fall, I was in a great mood. I had ridden through the most incredible mountain pass I've ever seen that morning and I had spent the rest of the day knocking off places that I've wanted to see for years. I was still fuming and was in no mood to let myself enjoy the moment. It was a good thing I was riding alone because I was not fit for company. I rolled into Sturgis and it was empty. A month before the rally, I didn't expect much of a crowd, but I figured this being a holiday weekend, there would be a few bikes. I found it odd that Sturgis was the ghost town and Deadwood was the boom town. As Hester and I rolled down Main street, I envisioned pictures I had seen where tens of thousands of bikes were parked on both sides and down the middle. Now, Hester and I rode solo down the empty street, stopping every fifty feet at each of the legendary annoying stop signs. I rode through town avoiding blinking so as not to miss it and headed for the Full Throttle Saloon. I had watched every episode of the Full Throttle's reality TV show and was looking forward to seeing the place in person. Of course it was pretty much empty, but wandering around the place and seeing all the landmarks I had watched on TV was pretty cool. I bought a t-shirt and remembered when I met the Full Throttle Saloon owner Michael Ballard at the Lone Star Rally in Texas last year. I wanted a shirt then, but told him I would buy it on site in person. I have a few Harley shirts given to me by friends, but I only buy biker shirts for myself from places I've actually been. I bought my shirt, snapped a few photos, and mounted up planning to head for Mount Rushmore. |Hester in a Ghost Town Under Threatening Skies| Then I looked up. The skies to the east were black and hung low on the horizon. The air was dead still and in the silence that was the emptiness of Sturgis, I could hear my heart beating. I topped off Hester's tank and asked a local at the station if he thought it looked like rain. He replied "Are you kidding? This is Sturgis, man." I was already in a fowl mood and I didn't need this. My plan (born out of anger) was to ride to Mount Rushmore, find a nearby place to camp, and then just head towards home in the morning. I had accomplished my goal if riding to the Arctic Circle a week ago and in my angered state, I convinced myself that Ill these extra stops were just gravy. Nevertheless, the weather altered my plan and now I needed to find a place to stay. None of the popular Sturgis campgrounds were open yet as the rally was over a month away. Despite the date, the hotel rates were all still ridiculously high. I rode back across town to look for a tourist information center I had seen earlier on my way into town, hoping they could point me towards a campground. As I sat at a traffic light, a pickup truck with a dog in the back rolled up next to me. This was one of those dog mixes that defied breed classification; a real dog's dog. His coat had more colors than Cyndi Lauper's hair, he had one white eye, and proudly wore an old bandana around his neck. This was one happy dog. He looked thrilled just to be alive in the back of that truck sniffing the world as it passed by. His little stub of a tail wagged so hard that his whole rear end shook. One ear stood tall and the other hung folded over, half erect. His tongue hung out of one side of his open mouth as he panted and it looked as if he was actually smiling. When the truck stopped next to me, the dog stepped up on the side of the bed and stretched himself as close to me as he could without falling off. As I reached over to pat his head, I wondered if I would draw back a nub. I could see a young boy in the truck's cab peeking at me through the passenger mirror. His head was resting in the crook of his folded arm at the bottom of the open window and his face was devoid of expression. I thought to myself, what a contrast. The dog was thrilled to be alive and the mere site of a person on a bike patting him totally made his day. The boy remained stoic as the light changed and the truck and dog drove off. For some reason I felt better. My anger over Hester's fall had passed. I missed my dog Zeus. On the way to the visitor center I saw the Sturgis RV Campground up on a hill above town. I rode up and down the street looking for the road to get there. The skies were growing darker by the minute and the wind was really picking up. Long, thin forks of bright lightning were streaking from the sky to the ground in the distance. I was mesmerized by the sight of the lightning. It appeared to me as a 3D special effect projected against a constantly morphing bruised backdrop of grey, blue, and black curtains. I snapped back to reality and realized I was in trouble. I could either ride west in an attempt to escape the storm or find a place in Sturgis to hunker down and ride it out. |The Previous Name & Sign of the Sturgis RV Park| I finally found the road that led up to the RV park. It was a brand new road that wasn't on my GPS. I rode in and figured it was open because there were a handful of large campers there. The office door was unlocked, but the office was empty. I decided to pull Hester in under the porch overhang and ride out the storm there. A woman exited a camper parked immediately across from the office and asked if she could help me. I looked up and said "Tell me you allow tent camping and you can definitely help me." She replied that they had tent spots with water and electricity and the rate was $10.85. "Per hour?" I said. I mean, this was Sturgis. "That's the daily rate through July" she replied. I was stupefied. She said that there was only one other tent and that I could have any spot I wanted. I found a place near a tree and quickly set up my tent. It was only 4:00 in the afternoon, but it looked much later because of the approaching storm. As large raindrops began to fall intermittently, I used all the stakes in the tent package to anchor it to the ground. The gusting winds were already making it difficult to set up the tent. I placed as much gear from Hester's saddle bags and trunk as I could into the corners of the tent to weigh it down. It was starting to rain pretty hard by then, so I rolled Hester up to the large tree, sat her up on the center stand, covered her, and used my tie downs to strap her against the tree trunk. I had learned my lesson about high winds well earlier today. As I went to crawl into my tent, I noticed all sorts of stuff blowing off the picnic table adjacent to the only other tent in the complex. There was a small bike trailer there and a canopy was erected over the table, but no one was around. I slipped on my rain suit top, walked over, and placed as much of the stuff as possible under the table and then took some rocks from the fire pit and used them to anchor the outside corners of the tent. It was almost completely dark by then and the approaching wall of the storm was hanging directly over the edge of the RV park. The air was dead still. The only sound was the faint hint of music emanating from an empty bar across the street. I heard sirens and wondered what happened. I quickly realized that these were storm sirens. Did they have tornadoes in South Dakota? I was about to find out. I high tailed it to my tent, crawled in, zipped up, and hunkered down. Once inside, I inflated my air mattress and unrolled my sleeping bag. I made a dizzy mental note to buy an air compressor before my next trip. Of course, with no auxiliary power, I'd be blowing the mattress up manually this time anyway. I realized it was really dark, so I cranked my wind-up lantern, slipped off my wet jeans, and started nesting. The winds continued to pick up and the sound of the rainfall pounding the top of the tent grew louder. Within minutes, I was under the full rage of the storm. The wind blew between the rain cover and the vented top of my tent and swirled inside around me, making for a strangely comfortable breeze. The thunder was as loud as I had ever heard. The tent was being hammered by winds from one side and then the other as if trade winds were taking turns testing my planning and the anchoring stakes. Suddenly, one corner of the tent rose up tossing the helmet and leathers that had been placed there to hold the corner down into my lap. The thin metal stake had loosened in the soggy ground. Then the opposite corner lifted up and I found myself sandwiched like shivering meat in a flimsy vinyl and nylon taco. I tossed the helmet and leathers back into the corner hoping to regain some stability. No dice. I briefly considered crawling out of and dropping rocks on the corner like I did the other guy's tent. At that instant, a huge series of flashes illuminated the inside of my tent providing a strobe light effect that allowed me to clearly see the violent shaking the tent was receiving. The lightning was followed almost instantly by enormous, seemingly endless claps of percussive thunder, telling me just how close the strikes really were. Another corner of the tent let loose. My attempts at replacing the items into the corners were fruitless. I stretched out, lying flat on the tent floor extending my hands and feet as far into each corner as I could reach in an attempt to hold them down. The wind was howling, thunder was clapping, and lightning seemed to dance indiscriminately just outside my little two person tent. I was lying there wondering how long I would have to hold that awkward position when my yank and crank lantern died. Darkness. I considered crawling out and running to seek shelter in the office. I considered putting on my helmet. I considered how stupid I would look if I was found dead wearing a helmet spread eagle in my tent in my underwear, snuffed out by lightning electrocution and/or fright. I found myself counting the sound of my heartbeats. Then it struck me that I could actually hear my heartbeat and I realized that the wind and rain stopped as suddenly as it had started. What seemed like hours was in reality, mere minutes. I retracted my arms and legs and fought the urge to roll up into a fetal position. It was dead silent outside and I wondered if this was just the calm between the storms or if it was over. I unzipped the door to the tent and crawled outside to see the damage. To my amazement, there was none. The skies were clear and deep blue and there was a light breeze in the air. It appeared as if nothing had happened, until I looked at my poor little tent. It took about twenty seconds for me to shake it back into shape and it popped back into its dome like structure as if it had never been molested by the wind and rain. Indeed, nothing inside was even remotely moist with the possible exception of the spot where I had been lying holding the corners down. I glanced down and checked my drawers; no stain. An older gentleman from one of the campers walked over and asked if we were OK. Standing there in my underwear, I replied that I was alone, that the other tent was unoccupied, and that I was fine. I've always joked that I wear black underwear to hide the skid marks. In this case, it was no joke. I checked Hester and she was still parked on her center stand with her vinyl rain cover still in place. The straps I had placed around her and the tree were unnecessary. I was hungry. No, I was starved. I couldn't remember when I last ate anything other than peanuts and Slim Jims. Even the fish offered to me the night before in Greybull was starting to sound good. People were stirring down on the street across from the RV park. I decided to go find a real meal. At a traffic light, I was once again greeted by the same pickup truck with the same dog in the back. This time, there was no passenger staring me down from the side mirror in the cab and the dog in back who had seemed so happy a couple of hours earlier, was now slumped over, dripping wet; his dusty bandana soaked and dripping. Unlike before, both of his ears were drooping and his nub of a tail was tucked tight against his speckled rump. I reached out to him like before and he just laid his head on the side of the truck bed. Apparently, he was as afraid of the storm as I was, but I had shelter from it that he apparently did not. I thought of my dog Zeus and how as fiercely protective as he is, he's still terrified of thunder. A strange but somewhat familiar feeling rumbled inside me and it wasn't hunger. The cook came out and sat across from me in the booth. "Didn't like it, huh?" he joked. "No. Can I send it back?" I replied with a grin. He told me that he had been in the Army, stationed in Texas and had come to Sturgis for a rally twenty years ago and never left. Even compared to me at that instant, this was a rough looking character. His faded do-rag covered his sparse grey hair and reached down over his forehead, almost touching his unibrow. He had old piercings in both ears that appeared to have closed up years ago. One looked as if an ear ring had been torn clean through the ear lobe. Strangely, he had no tattoos; at least none that I could see in his short sleeves. His face held deep cracks, surrounded a cauliflower nose that appeared to have been broken more than once, and bore no facial hair. He had scarred hands with thin rings on several fingers and on one thumb. His fingernails looked as if they had been nervously chewed way too far down. His dark, narrow eyes seemed to lighten and widen a bit as I described my trip; where I had been and where I was heading. He asked for details about all my stops and seemed genuinely interested in my response. As we talked, I considered the other people I had encountered in Sturgis. Everyone there seemed like voluntary inmates in some sort of Twilight Zone prison camp without walls. It occurred to me that their entire lives revolved around ten days in August. I remembered the old woman in the window back at the Hot Spot on the Dalton Highway in Alaska. She was stuck in the middle of nowhere. But these people could drive thirty minutes to the east or to the west and be in a world that had a purpose year round. It seemed to me when I spoke with them that they secretly relished their voluntary vassalage, yet they intentionally projected a sense of emulous despair to people like myself who were only passing through. It made me glad to have a home to go to. I realized that this as-of-yet unrecognized feeling that had been developing within me over the last two or three days - was me starting to miss it. One exception to the depressed Sturgis residents was the park manager. She and her husband were retired snow birds who lived in Florida during the winter and managed the RV park through the summers. She was a gracious and kind woman who seemed genuinely interested in the Alaskapade and for my safety after the storm. She had the appearance and demeanor I expected from the voice on the phone the night before. If I ever go back to Sturgis, I will stay at this RV park. I saddled up on Hester and rode back to the RV park. The ground was dry and there was no evidence whatsoever of the violent storm that had rocked these grounds less than two hours before. The summer sun was setting to the west, but it was still bright out. This struck me as a stark contrast to the seemingly absolute darkness I had encountered only hours before. The skies had faded from a deep blue to a warm orange, which made the few clouds that dotted the sky seem even more voluminous and closer to the ground, yet peacefully harmless. When I arrived at my tent, I felt a peculiar sense of security. I felt like I was in a familiar place. It wasn't home, but it was strangely common and comforting. I was again reminded of my dog Zeus. He always felt at home wherever his bed was. My tent was my comfy, familiar dog bed. As euphoric as I found myself feeling when I rode through mountains and scenic landmarks each day, every night that I had to seek a place to camp generated an uneasy sensation in my gut. It was an insecure feeling to which I was not accustomed. I felt homeless. I had money for hotels, but I wanted to stick to my plan and more importantly, I needed to stick to my budget. The uneasy feeling seemed to dissipate almost instantly whenever I secured a place to sleep;even if that place was just a cut-out on the side of the road. I have yet to put my finger on the exact reason for my insecurity in this regard, but the feeling was as deep as any other emotion I had experienced on the Alaskapade. Needless to say, I was happy to be back at hotel Hester in the Sturgis RV park. I saw a bike and realized that the other tent's occupant had returned. I wondered where he had ridden out the storm. He saw me and came walking over. We introduced ourselves and made smalltalk about the weather. Ed was retired from the utility industry in Florida and was on a long bike trip across the country, riding a Triumph Rocket III. He rode out the storm at a card table in a casino down in Deadwood. I mentioned that I tried to put his things back where they were before the storm. He was appreciative, but I think he still wondered how his camp survived. Ed and I talked quite a while and the topic turned to where we had been and where we were going. He said he planned to ride the Spearfish Canyon scenic loop, to the Chief Crazy Horse monument, and to Mount Rushmore the next day, which was Sunday. I said that I planned on breaking camp in the morning and heading to Rushmore myself before starting the final 1,200 mile ride home to Texas. Ed mentioned that we could ride it together if I wanted. We talked more about our respective journeys and I was somewhat taken by Ed's relaxed demeanor. It occurred to me that I was in no real hurry to get home and that I enjoyed Ed's company. I decided on the spot to stay through tomorrow and ride with Ed to all the places he mentioned. I would drop by the office in the morning and pay for another night. |Ed From Florida| Ed and I talked a while longer and I decided I needed to charge up my goodies and try to get on line to update this blog. The Sturgis RV park had an excellent WiFi network. Earlier in the afternoon before the storm, I was geeking out looking at the antenna array with its directional patches broadcasting to the various camping areas and the backhaul antennas that connected their signals between the network equipment and the antenna towers. I wanted to ask the hostess if I could get a look at the network gear, but I figured she already thought I was weird enough as it was. In the background, a band could be clearly heard playing in a bar across the street. I considered walking over to give them a listen as I love live music. Hearing all the great classic rock tunes made me really miss playing my drums. I blew off walking over, electing instead to enjoy the music from a distance. I sat back in my tent with all the flaps open, letting the light breeze blow through. The air was scented with a fresh, clean-smelling post-rain fragrance. It was if I was living in a TV ad for fabric softener. The bright orange sky gave up its battle against nightfall and darkness fell over the camp. Sturgis had a great starscape. The clearly visible constellations in the deep black night sky reminded me of camping trips I took with my uncles when I was a kid. My uncle King would point at stars and make up ridiculous stories about them, all of which I believed wholeheartedly. It struck me that in less than an hour, I had experienced an emotional 180. I had a comfortable, safe place to sleep without the threat of finding wildlife, derelicts, or dog shit outside my tent the next morning. I was relaxed, confident, and looking forward to a full day of relaxed riding with absolutely no agenda. My belly and my heart were full and my spirit was recharged. I quickly fell asleep staring up at the new moon through the open tent flaps.

Sunday Spotlight is a feature we began in 2016. This year we’re spotlighting our favorite books, old and new. We’ll be raving about the books we love and being total fangirls. You’ve been warned. 🙂 Pretending He’s Mine by Mia Sosa is the second book in the Love on Cue series and we’ve been hearing such great things about both the author and this series. We’re pretty excited to share an excerpt from the book for you lovely readers so please enjoy!Pretending He's Mine (Love on Cue, #2) by Mia Sosa Series: Love on Cue #2 Published by Harper Collins, Avon Impulse Publication Date: April 10, 2018 Genres: Contemporary Romance Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Ripped Bodice | Google Play Books Mia Sosa returns with another fun, flirty romance in her critically-acclaimed Love on Cue series! For Hollywood agent Julian Hart, representing his best friend—megastar Carter Williamson—means it’s nearly impossible to keep his personal life and career separate. To make matters worse, Carter’s younger sister has been starring in Julian’s wildest fantasies more often than he’d care to admit. He knows she’s off-limits, but when Ashley shows up on his doorstep, needing a place to crash… suddenly his greatest temptation is sleeping down the hall. Free-spirited Ashley Williamson doesn’t do commitment. Jobs, apartments, men… why let herself be tied down? But she’s had a crush on her older brother’s best friend for years and she’s committed to making Julian want her, one towel-clad midnight encounter at a time. But just as things start heating up, their steamy flirtation is interrupted by Carter’s east coast wedding. Ashley has no desire to go home and face her reputation as the family disappointment. But living with—dare she say dating?—a successful, sexy film agent could give them something else to talk about. Julian can’t believe he agreed to fake a relationship with the one woman he can never have. And it’s going to take more than a little willpower to remember it's all pretend. Or is it? Order the Book: PRETENDING HE’S MINE by Mia Sosa A woman in my condo is experiencing a toe-curling orgasm—and to my knowledge, this is the first time I’m in no way responsible for it. Because this dumpster fire needs more tinder, the person bringing herself pleasure within the confines of my not-so-humble abode is my best friend’s younger sister. I’d prefer to sustain a thousand paper cuts than listen to her moans, the catch of her breath, the rustling of the sheets around her body. But she’s crashing at my place, and she left the door of the guest bedroom open—just a tiny, torturous crack. The sliver of soft light coming from the adjoining bathroom beckons like a portal to another world. Come, the deep, booming voice of James Earl Jones says. The embodiment of your hidden and fucked-up fantasies lies in this realm. I squeeze my eyes shut. Dammit. This isn’t right. It’s a personal moment, and I shouldn’t be privy to it. Summoning what’s left of the self-control that’s served me well for more years than I’d care to admit, I turn away from the light and slink down the short hall to my kitchen. There, I refit my wireless headphones and find a tall glass for the water that brought me out of my room. I’d resigned myself to remaining as far away from Ashley as possible while she stayed the night. Instead, an innocent trip to the fridge has left me thirsty for something else altogether. I’m not even sure why I took off my headphones as I passed her room. But I did. And now I know what she sounds like when she comes. I need to shut down this line of thinking immediately. But hell, the portal is open, and despite my good intentions, I’m tempted to step through and explore this other world. No. I shouldn’t. I really shouldn’t. Picture her in pigtails and remember what it was like to help her stand after an epic fall on the bike she loved to ride. Forget that she’s now a sexy woman, and banish any inappropriate thoughts about her to a parallel universe that will never intersect with this one. Although temporary, the solution is simple. Fifty push-ups will round out my workout and help stifle my libido. With my get-over-my-lust-for-Ashley plan in place, I set the glass in the sink, cut the light switch, and spin around. A warm body skids into me, its owner’s soft mouth brushing against my bare shoulder. She shrinks back and yelps. Instinctively, I tug Ashley forward, steadying her and mentally unbalancing myself in the process. With my chest flush against hers, I try to memorize the way we fit together, greedy to gain something from this unexpected contact. “Julian? Please tell me it’s you.” The tremor in her voice pulls me out of my stupor. I breathe heavily through my nose as I drop my arms and step back slowly. Turning to the counter and grasping it for support, I eke out, “It’s me, Ashley.” As she sighs in relief, the memory of her curves imprints itself in my brain like a freshly inked intricate tattoo, simultaneously mesmerizing and painful. Fuck the fifty push-ups. I’m going to need a hundred. From PRETENDING HE’S MINE. Used with permission of Avon Impulse. Copyright © 2018 by Mia Sosa. Love on Cue We’re giving one lucky winner their choice of one of our Sunday Spotlight books. Use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter for one of this month’s features. Are you as excited for this release as we are? Let us know how excited you are and what other books you’re looking forward to this year! About the Author Mia Sosa is an award-winning contemporary romance writer and 2015 Romance Writers of America® Golden Heart® Finalist. Her books have received praise and recognition from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, The Washington Post, Book Riot, Bustle, and more. A former First Amendment and media lawyer, Mia practiced for more than a decade before trading her suits for loungewear (okay, okay, they’re sweatpants). Now she strives to write fun and flirty stories about imperfect characters finding their perfect match. Mia lives in Maryland with her husband, their two daughters, and an adorable puppy that finally sleeps through the night. To learn more about Mia and her books, visit www.miasosa.com.

Probably know best by his work The Metamorphoses, the famous Roman orator Ovid, born in 43 BC, discussed current social and dermatological practices in the Medicamina Faciei Femineae (Cosmetics for the Female Face). Ovid describes how and why a woman should take care of her skin outlined in elegiac couplets – a style of lyric verse traditionally reserved for love poetry. From his writings, he defines four common ailments along with four mixtures for a solution including a skin whitener, a cure for pimples, one for blackheads, and a poppy mixture for a red blush (1). Although these exact ingredients and prescriptions may not be used anymore, a key component is still commonly used in modern skincare today: honey. However! Honey was not originally intended to be used for the benefits presented, but to adhere the other ingredients together! From this, the Romans saw results. Big time. Reason being, honey is filled to the brim with natural antioxidants, warranting moisturizing and anti-aging benefits. Also, honey is a known natural antibiotic making it wonderful for acne prone skin, a humectant, meaning the molecule itself holds and retains water moisturizing skin for hours on end, and a finally reparative, as it can help heal sunburns, reduce oxidative damage. Moreover, this may come as a surprise to you, but the Romans also commonly used, as well as today in many Asian skincare products, sheep (and sometimes human!) placenta. Yes, you read that right. Placenta. To a non-skincare enthusiast you may cringe and throw up a little in your mouth, because it’s fairly difficult to understand. It’s like that women who went viral for using semen on her face as a facemask (yeah, crossing the line much??). Placenta’s usefulness derives from two sources: stem cells found within the placenta or in an extract formulated into a serum for regular use. From this, a sheep’s placental extract can help give anti-aging benefits and help calm acneic skin from over-exfoliation. Although crushed poppies may no longer be the main ingredient in blush, or barley as a cure for pimples as suggested by Ovid, ancient skincare wasn’t entirely flawed with useless ingredients. However, with the lack of scientific skincare knowledge known to the Romans, I personally think they did one heck of a good job. - Ali FR, Fox J, Finlayson AET. Medicamina Faciei Femineae: Roman Skin Care. JAMA Dermatol.2013;149(5):591. doi:10.1001/jamadermatol.2013.350 - Tenerelli, Mary J. “Ancient Ingredients with a Modern Twist.”Global Cosmetic Industry, vol. 165, no. 6, 1999, pp. 34, ABI/INFORM Global.

January 1, 2006 Happiest of salutations and many happy returns for the new year! Dramatic, n'est pas? Well, it was a big event at IROC, doing the same thing I did last year. I, along with a slew of other volunteers, babysat about a hundred and fifty kids for the big New Year's Eve bash. There were games and music and dancing and prizes and food and food and more food. I certainly ate way more than my dietary quota of brownies and pizza, but those calories don't count since it was a holiday, right? Sure they don't! Well, as for my thing with Deveney on Friday, I waited for an hour after she was supposed to have shown up, and then finally I decided I had been stood up and just went grocery shopping. That kind of sucked, but she probably had a good reason. I still haven't heard from her, so I'll have to wait and see, but I sure hope it was a good reason. I've decided to give her the benefit of the doubt, as tragedy seems to follow this girl to no end. In health news, I've been doing very well with my diet and exercise (with last night's exception), but I haven't had a chance to weigh in just yet. Hopefully I lost some weight this week, but I'm not holding my breath. My anticipation and hopefulness always seems to end up in the gutter, so I'm not counting my chickens just yet. My scars are healing nicely, and in fact, I've healed faster from this surgery than anyone before. The swelling is already almost gone, the scar has been completely healed for about a week and a half, and it's only been three weeks since I had surgery. Yesterday I was bored, so I learned the Japanese alphabet, Hiragana, but I still have the other two to learn. It only took about an hour, but now I have to ask this guy I know if he will give me lessons so I can keep going with it. He's married to a Japanese woman, and as far as I know, speaks it fluently, so I hope he'll consent. I've known him almost my whole life, though not closely, but I'm crossing my fingers. I would really like to become fluent, or at least proficient, in at least one Asiatic language before I turn twenty-five, and since that's only eight and a half months away, I better get cracking. I reckon that's the excitement for today. Domo arigato Mr. Roboto... (I just know I'm going to look back on the sentence one day and cringe at my stupidity, but that's what youth is all about, right?) January 9, 2006 Man, this year is just dragging on forever, huh? Well, maybe not, but this month sure seems to be for me. It's probably because I've been so busy, and there's a lot that's been going on in such a short time. I had another follow-up on my thighplasty, and I have a consult for my chest and arms on the sixth of next month. Three of the doctors there have told me they think I'd be a perfectly ideal candidate for the surgery, so now I only hope my insurance company agrees. I haven't worked out in nearly two weeks, which is so weird because I had been going so religiously when it was a big swollen challenge. And I guess I'm going to be shaving my head with my friend, as she has to undergo some chemotherapy, and I offered. I'm a little nervous about it for some reason. God, that just proves how shallow I've become. I'm glad to do it, and honestly, I couldn't think of anybody I'd rather do it with more (except the circumstances it has to be done under), but I remember once when I was about ten years old, I got a normal haircut that was very short, and I was so embarrassed afterward that I walked around all day at school with my jacket pulled over my head. It's not that I mind, I'm just anxious about what it's going to look like... sheesh, like I'm some kind of supermodel or something. Man, I make myself sick sometimes. And when I think of my friend and the hell she'll have to go through, I get even more sick thinking about it. We have a great rapport, and I'm so glad I can be there for her in this time of need. I know how important my supporters during my time of need. Keep laughing and keep fighting, that's what's important. "We're gonna make it after all!" (A little Laverne and Shirley for those of you wondering where that came from.) I really care about her a lot and I hope it helps that I do this with her. And I was supposed to have my first cathechism class tonight, but it got cancelled on account of the snow that stopped hours ago and turned to rain. That's very abnormal for Vermont this time of year. Not that I'm complaining. I hope it warms up to eighty degrees! You know I hates me some snow! And I did another personal training session with Faith a couple of days ago. She likes doing them with me because I don't let her slack. I'm fat and saggy, so she knows when I say something, I must mean business. Ha ha, who would have ever thought I'd be giving workout lessons to anyone, much less somebody who is in much better physical condition than I am. I'm glad to do it, though. I only need to get my own pudgy ass back in the gym! I have been slacking off myself entirely too long with absolutely no good reason. Tomorrow is the day, and I will be back in that room! I have goals to meet, and lawd knows my ass isn't going to eat itself! Oh, and in about a week, a couple Peruvian guys are coming up to my house to hang out and spend the night. I met one of them online a couple of months ago, and they are having a horrible adjustment period (just like all of us travelers seem to), and this is my way of helping out. Apparently they are only here working until March, but they already want to find a different place to work. I don't know how that's going to work out for them, but I hope they can adjust somehow. They have some different kind of names, which is cool. Edwar and Yon Carlo... or something similar, but that's how the second guy pronounces it. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. Oh, and Mom and Dad are going to Florida at the end of February with their friends, my brother, and his girlfriend. I'll be watching the three little kids, which I don't mind so much, but they'll be on vacation then, as well. I hope nobody dies, is all I'm saying. At least I hope it's not me who bites the big one. Ugh, I love the chitlin's... when they're not mine... and I don't have to deal with them... and I can view through a powerful telescope or some sort of television screen connect to an OFF button. It probably won't kill me, but I'm being paid mega bucks to do it, so I guess I should stop bitching already. I mean, think of all the games of Disney Trivia I'll get to play! HELP! SOMEBODY SAVE ME RIGHT NOW BEFORE IT GETS HERE! I CAN'T DO IT! KILL ME, KILL ME NOW!!! OKAY, OKay, okay, I can deal with this. I just need a big ruler and a Walter Mathau expression. That'll get me through. We like discipline! God, they're gonna eat me alive... January 12, 2006 The best of all possible news came out today. My friend is cancer-free! Her biopsy came back negative, though her doctors had been sure she had the disease. It's so fantastic that I could cry tears of joy for her! I had actually started looking forward to shaving my head with her, a real bonding thing (weird, I know), but I am simply ecstatic for her. We're going to get together soon and life will be great for her again. I haven't worked out yet. I have simply gotten lazy, and we all know what word goes with lazy: fat! Though all fat or lazy people may not necessarily be the other, that tends to be the way it goes in my life. In depth reading into that meaning only leads to one conclusion, and that is the fact that I'm going to get fatter if I don't start working out more. Shame on me! I also had a great French lesson with my friend, Ahn-Thu, the other day. And I've been studying German like a fiend, trying to take advantage of the time my new friend, Leonard, will be here. I also met this Vietnamese kid, but I don't know if I could pull in another language at this point. Well, I probably could, but it would be a lot of time and hard work, which I could really focus on the two I'm already improving. You may have guessed that I gave up on the Japanese for a while. The other two teachers are just so readily available, and I can do a lot of that work on my own as I've already studied both of them in depth before. Exciting, I know... And now I'm off to the grocery store! January 15, 2006 I'm bored and frozen, but that second part is a given. Today I had so much planned, but the universe (or I should say, my stupid car) is working against me. I went to Church this morning, but only after it took me about fifteen minutes for it to start. Then the driver's side door wouldn't shut because it was frozen open. So I locked it, and it stayed shut... permanently. When I arrived at Church, the stupid thing was frozen shut. Well, after Church (and climbing in and out of my car through the passenger's side door), I filled up with gas and came to IROC. I left the car running, but some guy said I shouldn't do that, so I went back out to take the keys out. After I closed the door, I decided to re-open it just a crack so I could be sure I could get back in... but the door had frozen shut instantly and wouldn't re-open. I was less than happy. So now I'm waiting for Dad to come and tow the piece of crap and bring it back to me after it thaws out. I'm meeting Deveney at her cousin's Special Olympics practice this afternoon, then we're going out for pizza. That is, we are if my car gets back in time. And in other of life's recent events, I still haven't been working out. I'm sure I've gained at least five pounds, if not more. I have to weigh myself, but I can't today because the guy that has the scales I use isn't here. It's not like I'm dying to find out, anyway. Laziness is seriously addicting. I also watched Monster's Ball last night. It was an okay movie, but I don't think it was necessarily an Oscar-worthy performance. But who am I to judge? Considering Halle Berry won that like two or three years ago. But I don't think I know anybody who even saw it. Though I suppose she probably did deserve it just for making out and pretending to have sex with Billy Bob Thornton. I mean, he's pretty nasty. Frankly, I can forgive her overrated performance just for having to go through that. I'm also trying to have this little party for these international highschool students I've met. The only problem is that their host-mother is this ancient, lonely, single, super-religious woman who doesn't trust anybody. I've met her a couple of times, but she said she doesn't know me well enough to decide if they can go or not. I'm not sure what she exactly wants me to do. I mean, we're just going to sit around, watch movies, play boardgames, and eat pizza. Leonard, the German kid, told me she said she has to pray about it and wait for the answer to come from God. I hope He's in my corner, ha ha. Sheesh, you'd think I wanted to take 'em out boozing for women, the way she's acting, but whatever. It's not the end of the world if they don't come, but they've told me that they are bored to death with sitting in her house all the time. All they do is study, come to IROC, and go to Church. Well, I'll have to wait for divine inspiration to come, I guess. And whatever weather may come, I still plan to go to get the Peruvian guys. It's supposed to re-warm up to around fifty degrees the day I have to go, but that usually equals icy roads. However, I don't have to leave until the afternoon, so hopefully the ice will be melted by then. Exciting, I know! Sha-sHA! January 22, 2006 Has this been the most eventful week in my recent life? Sure thing. First I went to my Cathechism class to find that the host-mother to those kids is also in the class. Talk about divine intervention, though she still hasn't decided either way, as far as I know. Then I met the Peruvian guys, they stayed a night at my house, we drove the next day to Burlington in an ice storm, stayed the night at Rodrigro's girlfriend's house, then I finally drove them back to Windsor and returned back to Newport. I was so tired I slept ten and a half hours that night, leaving me with a splitting headache for the next two days from sleeping so much. But it was all worth it, because I had a great time and met the most awesome people at Carla's house. The first is Maritsa, who I shamelessly flirt with at a constant rate, and I know I can woo her with my charmin' ways... (slipped into my Ernest P. Bass accent there for a second, sorry.) She's super cute and funny and just a lot of fun to hang out with. I'm not in love or anything, but it would be cool if we could see each other a little more. All of them are only here until early to mid-April, but we could have fun while it lasts. Anyway, I also met a bunch of other people, including Fermin, who I am sort of giving English lessons to on the side. He speaks significantly less English than anyone else in the house, but they are all working together at the ski lodge up the road before they head back to Peru to start the new semester. I've been speaking almost solid Spanish for a week, and it's actually a little difficult trying to get back into English completely when I'm at home. On top of that, I got an official date to get fitted for my leg brace on February 9th, and then it should be about a month until I see the finished product, or at least a version of it. I'm really getting excited about the prospect of walking full-time again. It's been so long that, in a way, it's like returning to my childhood. I'm really looking forward to it, though. I also reconnected with an old friend from college who is now married and living in Switzerland. He's trying to learn German while living there and teaching English to the locals. He invited me to come visit him, so who knows? I'm might just get my shit together, finally, and plan a big cross-European extravaganza for next year, or something, because not seeing it is simply getting ridiculous. I figure I could cheap-o my way across the continent over a few months, or maybe even a year, if I plan it right. I'd just have to seriously tighten down the budget here at home for now, but it's certainly feasible. Mom and Dad are falling apart worse than ever, but I honestly haven't been all that involved in it. I'm supportive and helpful where I can be, but staying out of the middle of it was the best decision I could have made. I sat down with Dad yesterday to plan out our trans-America trip. If we go roughly according to the route I've mapped out, I will have visited all lower forty-eight states by the time we get back from month-long gallavant. I'm beginning to look forward to it now. I'm thinking we should leave around mid-April and be gone exactly four weeks. We'll see the places each of us wants to see and then head home. Couldn't fail, right? Ha ha, depends, of course, on the weather more than anything else. Hopefully blue skies will be smiling at us, but the way things have been going for me lately, that shouldn't be a problem. Famous last words, right? The calm always comes before the storm? Well, there's been nothing but a storm for quite some time, now, so I figure we're due for a longterm calm. Here's hoping. January 31, 2006 Wow, how life seems to have changed in such a relatively short amount of time. Once again I saw a picture of my friend, Luis, while online. He looks bigger and better than ever in his new fitness lifestyle, and it reminded me of an article I read in a magazine not too long ago. There was a guy who had become like a model after his previously sedentary life. He said that anybody can do it if they are simply willing to do what it takes. It's a conscious decision to eat right and exercise and put up with the hard parts that go along with it. So I wrote out a very simple eating plan, six small meals a day, and totaling a little less than a thousand calories. I haven't lost any weight in a while, now, and there were good reasons for it. Even when I was working out before, I wasn't very strict with my diet. Don't get me wrong! I was eating pretty healthy and certainly better than I ever had before surgery, but I wasn't doing what it takes to get the body I want. Well, I told myself that I knew what it would take, I would have horrible cravings and muscle aches in the beginning, but it was something I have wanted for a very long time. I want that discipline and the body that goes along with it. I don't want to end up like so many gastric bypass patients that I have met, who have started gaining back the weight and are upset about it happening. I see it more and more. Between two and three years out, there is a crossroads. If you go left, you mentally choose to do what is right with diet and exercise. If you push hard enough, you will get the results you want. If you go right, you forget that the surgery was never meant to be a long-term solution, but merely something to set the foundation for a lifestyle change. I had started to go right. I had started gaining a little weight and then refocusing to relose what I had gained. Well, I've done a complete turnabout now, and I'm headed in the right direction, finally. I've lost four pounds in the last week and a half, and I know I'll keep losing as long as I do what it takes and make the sacrifices. I won't ever let myself be out of control again, like I was before. I simply won't let it happen. And you know what? I feel better than I ever have in my entire life! I was a little sore the first day or two, and the cravings for junk food were out of this world, but I mostly stuck with the plan like I had written it. Now I did cheat on three occasions over the week. The first time I had a fatty stew at Heather's house. It was delicious and I felt sick for about three hours afterward. I haven't gotten sick from fat/sugar content in nearly two years. I went to McDonald's with Deveney and had chicken nuggets and part of a double cheeseburger. I thought I was going to die. Then I went to a party and accidentally got drunk. Very drunk. Very accidentally. (Since then, I've resolved not to drink anymore. It has too many calories, I don't really get anything out of it but sickness, and I'm getting too old for that shit anyway.) Life isn't perfect and I know I'll stumble now and then, but I'm now reaffirming my commitment to this new life and its style. And I'm so happy for it! I look and feel better than ever, and it can only get better!

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March 15, 2020 – Third Sunday of Lent Readings: Exodus 17:3-7, Romans 5:1-2, 5-8, John 4:5-42 The following homily was originally delivered at St. Pius X Parish, Indianapolis, IN in 2014: When I am driving in the car, I often listen to sports talk radio. The day after the Colts or Pacers win, the callers are singing the praises of the coaches and players. The players are awesome! Best team we’ve had in years. The coach should be Coach of the Year. The day after a loss, the coach doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s running the wrong offense. He’s the worst coach we’ve ever had and he should be fired. The day after a loss, the players stink and they all need to be traded. How quickly these sports fans forget. We live in a world that asks, “What have you done for me lately?” It appears as though this same sense of entitlement was alive and well as far back as 1500 BC. In the first reading from the Book of Exodus we hear that the Israelites were thirsty. It reads: “The people grumbled against Moses, saying, Why did you ever make us leave Egypt?” Make them leave Egypt? Really? In the time leading up to this grumbling, God, working through Moses, had delivered the Israelites from over 400 years of slavery, spared the lives of their firstborn sons, parted the Red Sea to allow them safe passage, destroyed the Egyptian soldiers who were pursuing them, made quail available for them to eat in the desert, and dropped manna from the sky. Each time God saved them, the Israelites sang His praises. But how quickly they forgot these many blessings from God. Now, when they were thirsty, their praises quickly became, “But what have you done for me lately?” Just like the fickle sports fan, they grumbled and said God should be traded or fired. The mistake the Israelites made, and that we often still make today, was in thinking that God was only involved in the extremes of their lives. They only recognized His presence in the highest of highs, and considered Him absent in the lowest of lows. They praised Him for the highs and cursed Him for the lows. They paid Him little attention otherwise. Why should they? After all, God is really only a factor in our time of need. When those times pop up, we call on Him for help. Sometimes He delivers and sometimes He doesn’t. Is that how we view our relationship with God? He is only with us in the highs of our lives and abandons us in the lows? Where does He go in-between? Where is He hiding? What we often lose sight of is that God is always with us. There are countless moments in our lives when God reveals Himself to us and is truly present. On the morning of the Israelites’ grumbling, God had already revealed His presence in the form of many gifts: The fact that they woke up at all – God had given them the gift of another day. The gift of the earth upon which they walked. The gift of time with their family. God was present to the Israelites through these gifts. We are given these same types of gifts daily. Unfortunately, these everyday gifts from God often get lost in the chaos and messiness of our lives. They are gifts that should be cherished, but are all too often missed. What exactly are we expecting when we think of God’s presence in our lives? To see a burning bush? To experience a flash of light? To hear a voice from the clouds? These would all be really cool, but it is unlikely to happen that way for us. God is much more likely to present Himself to us disguised as our spouse, our children, a friend, or even a passerby on the street. We are much more likely to experience Him in the breeze, in a whisper, or in the silence. He is right there in the middle of all of the chaos and messiness. He is present in the everyday events – in the simple, yet powerful moments he inspires. God is there when I watch my children hold their own children, and I am witness to the genuine love between them. When I am fishing on a calm lake at 5:00 in the morning, God is there. When a student looks at me, smiles, and says “Good morning,” God is there. Dinner with friends, praying with Carol, watching my granddaughter fall asleep in my arms, family game night, a long run, and in the silence that rarely comes – God is there. And in sickness, and death, and financial struggles, and relationship problems, and when experiencing the pain of feeling that no one loves us – God is there too. In the big blessings and the small blessings, in the challenges and the suffering, God is there. God doesn’t make happenstance appearances in our lives and then abandon us. He is in it for the long haul, every step of the way. Paul confirms this in his letter to the Romans, saying: “The love of God has been poured out into our hearts.” What a beautiful image. This love is the living water, the gift of God, which Jesus describes to the woman at the well. Maybe it was not a physical thirst that the Israelites were experiencing, but a spiritual one. Perhaps they were afflicted with a thirsty heart. The Israelites were not open to experiencing God all around them. Their hearts were not open to the love God was pouring out, and so had dried up and hardened over time. Most of us won’t have the opportunity to hear God speak directly to us like He did to Moses and the prophets, or be able to walk side-by-side with Jesus and hear Him teach like His disciples; but that does not mean He is not with us. If our hearts are open, we will experience His presence in the gifts He gives us daily and in the sacramental moments He inspires. Then we will receive the love that God is pouring out into our hearts. That is what He has done for us lately.

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