text:
Readers of The Travel Photographer blog know of my current long term involvement in documenting Chinese Opera of the diaspora; an involvement that will culminate into the production of a coffee-table book bearing the same title. It is for this reason that the blog has been recently populated with posts with excellent work of Chinese opera by travel and documentary photographers.
One of the facets of my photography is the one that involves fashion, travel, tradition, culture, history and last but certainly not least, storytelling. Despite searching for similar work on the internet, I wasn't able to find an equivalent for such a production. Sure, there are many extremely talented photographers who specialize in awesome fashion and glamour imagery, and some who even go to striking artistry with fantastical extremes in makeup and elaborate backgrounds (such as the well known Japanese photographer Haseo, as an example).
Long-haul flights are brutal to your body, and jet-lag can cripple your productivity while you acclimate to your surroundings. I was practically giddy this week when I found a flight to South Africa a mere 36 hours long — 12 hours shorter than I had anticipated. After spending two or three days in transit, it typically takes me a day to feel functional again, and a week to feel normal.
rove, stray, roam, vagabond, wander, swan, ramble, range, drift, tramp, cast, roll - move about aimlessly or without any destination, often in search of food or employment; "The gypsies roamed the woods"; "roving vagabonds"; "the wandering Jew"; "The cattle roam across the prairie"; "the laborers drift from one town to the next"; "They rolled from town to town"
When I was just eight years old I would flip through the pages of National Geographic and imagine being a photographer in Africa. I was captivated by the faces and places that seemed worlds apart from my typical Middle American hometown. Fast forward years later, and I'm living the dream as a travel photographer working throughout Africa and Europe. If you've ever wanted to travel the world with your camera, here's my advice to help you get started and thrive in professional travel photography.
On the two recent occasions I was in Shanghai, I was thrilled by the abundance of candid street photography opportunities that presented themselves in its old neighborhoods. The narrow lanes crisscrossing these neighborhoods are called lòngtáng (弄堂) or alternatively, lilong (里弄), where whole communities live and sometimes work. The Shanghai lòngtáng can either refer to the lanes that its houses face onto, or to a group of houses connected by them.
In March 2018, I traveled to Shanghai to give a lecture and a street workshop at Imaging Group, and recall doing some location scouting in Laoximen with Tamia Tang (my assistant). We met an elderly resident who had lived in her small rooms virtually all her life, and had been told that she would have to vacate them soon. She claimed satisfaction that the city would be offering residents alternative housing or monetary compensation as the weather in Shanghai was too cold for her.
When you really love photographing a certain subject, it shows in your work. If you've built a cohesive collection of images around a particular people or place, consider hanging it in a gallery or selling prints or photo books online. Share your work with artist's galleries in and around relevant locales until you find someone who bites. Southwestern USA photographer Brett Edge took it a step further and opened his own gorgeous fine art gallery in Moab, Utah. Photographer Vivienne Gucwa published a coffee table book featuring her New York City photography. Just getting started? Share your work online for exposure, and upload it to print-on-demand websites for effortless print sales.
In the late 16th century it became fashionable for young European aristocrats and wealthy upper class men to travel to significant European cities as part of their education in the arts and literature. This was known as the Grand Tour, it included cities such as London, Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome. However, The French revolution brought with it the end of the Grand Tour.[7]
My personal opinion -after having met many such characters- in India; either in Varanasi, Rishikesh, Vrindavan et al, as well as at the Kumbh Mela, is that the majority of them are fake in the sense that they're not dedicated ascetics, but individuals who are adopted a vagabondage lifestyle, begging for alms and food...under the guise of being holy and religious.
Travels (published in 1988) is a nonfiction book by Michael Crichton that details Crichton's attempts to leave his medical education at Harvard Medical School, followed by his subsequent travel to Los Angeles and adventures continuing his professional writing career, beginning with The Great Train Robbery (1975). After his initial book became a movie starring Sean Connery, Crichton describes his adventures over the world, and ultimately his experience with mysticism, including out-of-body experiences, astral projection, and fortune-telling.
Unfortunately, due the language barriers I wasn't able to interview either of these two actors to gain an insight on their lives and background. They also seemed reluctant to allow me more than a few minutes to photograph them, either because they were waiting to perform (as in the top photograph) or just uncomfortable with the the attention of a stalking photographer (lower photograph).
Some of these 'singalong' parlors still exist, faded and tired but otherwise unchanged, offering a taste of popular and cheap entertainment from a past era. How these survive in anyone's guess. The parlors usually have an organist (who can also play a guitar) and a handful of habitual customers who sing Cantonese songs...and occasionally Western oldies such as "Sealed With A Kiss" by the Canton Singing House organist.
Whether you're booking at the last minute, you're not sure what is a good deal, you're departing from a remote city with few options, or you need any help at all, give us a call. We're here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Flight Network is a member of TICO and has been awarded a rating of A+ by the Better Business Bureau of Canada which we've held for the last 10+ years.
The Beijing style of opera, widely known as Peking Opera, was popularized under the Qing Dynasty, which was brought down by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. It had ample support from the court and spread because it was sung in a language widely understood across China, while regional varieties such as Cantonese, Shanghainese and Sichuanese opera stuck to their own dialects and songs.
Contacting editors via email can be the best way to have your work seen. Be sure to know the publication before you approach them, and then send through an email with a story/photo feature idea that you believe will fit their publication perfectly. Make sure your pitch is relevant, straight to the point and time sensitive; most print publications will have issues ready months in advance so it's worth checking their advertising cut-off dates in order to work out what type of content they'll be after at what time of year. Pitching a summer photo feature when they're working on winter destinations won't get you very far!
The Lower Omo River in south west Ethiopia is home to eight different tribes whose population is about 200,000 and it is there that they've lived there for many centuries. The tribes such as the Daasanach, Kara (or Karo), and the Mursi live along the Omo river and depend on it for their livelihood. The annual flooding of the Omo River feeds the biodiversity of the region and guarantees the food security of the tribes especially as rainfall is low and erratic.
late 14c., "to journey," from travailen (1300) "to make a journey," originally "to toil, labor" (see travail). The semantic development may have been via the notion of "go on a difficult journey," but it may also reflect the difficulty of going anywhere in the Middle Ages. Replaced Old English faran. Travels "accounts of journeys" is recorded from 1590s. Traveled "experienced in travel" is from early 15c. Traveling salesman is attested from 1885.
Flight Toronto - Fort Lauderdale (YHM - FLL) C$ 254+ Flight Toronto - Fort Lauderdale (YYZ - FLL) C$ 269+ Flight Montreal - Fort Lauderdale (YUL - FLL) C$ 304+ Flight Halifax - Fort Lauderdale (YHZ - FLL) C$ 329+ Flight Ottawa - Fort Lauderdale (YOW - FLL) C$ 340+ Flight Calgary - Fort Lauderdale (YYC - FLL) C$ 353+ Flight Vancouver - Fort Lauderdale (YVR - FLL) C$ 374+
Travel photography is a genre of photography that may involve the documentation of an area's landscape, people, cultures, customs and history. The Photographic Society of America defines a travel photo as an image that expresses the feeling of a time and place, portrays a land, its people, or a culture in its natural state, and has no geographical limitations.[1]
Finally I promised one little girl, who made a long journey to see me and prefer her request, -- and she is a "Dorothy," by the way -- that when a thousand little girls had written me a thousand little letters asking for the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman I would write the book, Either little Dorothy was a fairy in disguise, and waved her magic wand, or the success of the stage production of "The Wizard of OZ" made new friends for the story, For the thousand letters reached their destination long since -- and many more followed them.
Travel may be local, regional, national (domestic) or international. In some countries, non-local internal travel may require an internal passport, while international travel typically requires a passport and visa. A trip may also be part of a round-trip, which is a particular type of travel whereby a person moves from one location to another and returns.[11]
To be honest, I do not think I will ever make it as a travel photographer. I love travelling and I love capturing my adventures in pictures. And I know that I have some decent ones, but selling them seems like a daunting task. I think I might be better off as a travel journalist, to be honest, if only because that's an area where I am more confident (and in a way, this article applies to becoming a travel journalist as well). I have, however, tried selling pictures through microstock sites. Getty Images, Shutterstock and Adobe Stock are the ones I have uploaded the highest number of images to. From my experience, these websites require you to spend a long time creating hashtags and correctly labeling your photos for very little reward. It is great because once the work is done, you can earn money forever. But chances are high that you will only get a few cents, if any at all. I think if you are serious about being a photographer, this one is not an option to consider.
Love your site! How do you go about not needing work visas to do photography for tourism boards, hotels etc? I see a lot of travel photography in foreign places, but in most countries its illegal to work there and next to impossible to get a work visa as a photographer. Any advice on reaching out to brands/hotels/tourism boards etc overseas without finding myself being deported for working in their country?


text:
Biden to nominate Werfel to lead IRS, Post reports
By Federal Times staff
Washington — President Joe Biden will nominate Daniel Werfel to lead the Internal Revenue Service, the Washington Post reported, citing a senior administration official.
Werfel worked at the White House Office of Management and Budget and at the IRS during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, according to the report. He was acting IRS commissioner in 2013, taking over after senior agency officials resigned over a controversy involving scrutiny of conservative groups, it said.
He now works at the Boston Consulting in the firm's public sector practice.
Bring objectivity to public policy coverage
We are used to having objective insights in coverage of science, but not always in our national dialogue on public policy.
By Danny Werfel
The nomination comes at a critical moment for the embattled revenue agency. The IRS is set to receive $80 billion in new funding over a decade as part of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act to help strengthen enforcement.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the higher funding would increase revenues for the U.S. Treasury by some $200 billion over those a decade.
Congressional Republicans vowed to resist the changes and devoted much their 2022 midterm campaign message to attacking Biden's plan. A GOP-led House could launch major battles against the tax agency, the Post said.
IRSBiden
Ex-student gets 8 years for spying for Chinese government

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: subtype value can assignable to parent type variable? subtype value can assignable to parent type variable, on the contrary can't, is that true ? i'am confused, if that's true and document say that all types in TypeScript are subtypes of a single top type called the Any type, why any type value can assignable to all other type variable ?
interface A {
    name: string,
}

interface B extends A {
    name: string,
    age: number,
}

let a: A = {
    name: 'pony',
};

let b: B = {
    name: 'jack',
    age: 10,
};

// a = b; // OK
// b = a; // fail

A: You can assign any type to anything simply because using this type is an opt-out from the type checking mechanics of TypeScript. It doesn't mean it will be a correct code. Just the TS won't complain about breaking the rules of polymorphism.
There's a nice explanation of the use of any in the TypeScript's docs.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Mark Woodhall: Using RavenDB in Clojure, part two.
Using RavenDB in Clojure, part two.
This is the second part of "Using RavenDB in Clojure", you can find the first part here.
In this part we will carry on from where we left off with our ravendbtest project. Lets cd into the ravendbtest directory and get going.
If you are familiar with RavenDB you will know that as well as loading documents using their keys you can also query indexes. This is how we can do that using the clj-ravendb client.
Start a clojure REPL again using lein repl, require and create a client to consume the northwind database.
Now, lets create a few documents that our index can cover.
We will create an index to cover documents "placedBy" Mark.
The index we create is represented as a map. It has a :name, an :alias that we can use to identify a document, a :where clause and a :select that projects the data items we can query.
Putting the index returns us a map with a :status, in this case a HTTP 201.
Since we have created a new index we can now query it.
In this example we ask it to query the :index we just created, "MyOrders" and we request only orders that have a :cost of 102.
This returns us a map that contains a :status and the :results of the query.
Note. We also get a :stale? key and value in the returned map. As RavenDB indexes data asynchronously in a background thread there is the potential to query a stale index. This :stale? key value indicates if the query results are stale.
The following should be considered when querying indexes.
It is likely I'll make some more changes to index querying as the functionalty is quite narrow. Currently it only supports an "equals" operation against a projected data item.
In the next post, I'll cover two more topics. We will talk about the ability to "watch" documents/indexes for changes and replication.
« Using RavenDB in Clojure, part one.


This statement is a Disclaimer which clarifies your rights and obligations with using the DirectLaw.US Web Site.
Our sites and services provide access to independent attorneys, self-help services, including general information related to the law, legal forms, and lawyers designed to help users solved their legal problems. DirectLaw, Inc. also provides services to lawyers by providing lawyers with a virtual law firm platform that enables them to offer legal legal services online.
We are not lawyers or a law firm and we do not provide legal advice. None of our representatives are lawyers and they also do not provide legal advice. No attorney-client or confidential relationship exists or will be formed between you and us or any of our representatives. The accuracy, completeness, adequacy, or currency of the content is not warranted or guaranteed. We recommend you consult a lawyer if you want legal advice. We are not a lawyer referral service and the sites and services and other resources and information are for personal use only.
The DirectLaw.US website offers you several ways to identify and locate an attorney (or other legal services), including advertisements for lawyers, and a searchable directory of lawyers and law firms. The decision to retain an attorney is an important one, and one that you must make carefully based on your own judgment and evaluation of that attorney. If you are using the lawyer services, you should read the following terms and conditions below. If you disagree with these terms and services, please do not use the lawyer services.
You understand any attorney listings or directories are provided by third parties and may contain inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated information. You must independently verify the accuracy of any information you obtain from our sites and services.
Lawyer services and the individual attorneys represented by them provide information to our sites, which we do not verify, validate, or confirm, except as expressly stated in our sites.
We do not endorse any particular attorney or legal service and make no representation, guarantee, or warranty (express or implied) as to the legal ability, competence, quality, or reliability of any legal services provided by any of these lawyer services.
If you use lawyer services, you agree that: IN NO EVENT WILL WE BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, LOST PROFITS OR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES) ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE LAWYER SERVICES OR for any advice, information, or services provided to you by any attorney with whom you may make contact through our sites and services. TO THE EXTENT THE FOREGOING LIMITATION OF LIABILITY IS PROHIBITED, OUR SOLE OBLIGATION TO YOU FOR DAMAGES WILL BE LIMITED TO $100.00.
If you are an attorney participating in any aspect of our sites or services, including but not limited to interactive areas, (a) you agree not to provide specific legal advice in any of your content and to draft content which is appropriate, educational, and in accordance with your state bar's attorney ethics requirements; (b) you represent and warrant that you are an attorney in good standing with a license to practice law in at least one of the 50 United States of America or the District of Columbia; (c) you agree to promptly notify us of any grievance, claim, reprimand, or censure brought against you, as well as resignation or other loss of license; and (d) you acknowledge that the Rules of Professional Conduct of the jurisdictions where you are licensed ("Rules") apply to all aspects of your participation and that you will abide by these Rules. These Rules include, but are not limited to, the rules relating to advertising, solicitation of clients, rules regarding the establishment of attorney-client relationships, failure to maintain client confidences, unauthorized practice of law, and misrepresentations of fact. We disclaim all responsibility for your compliance with these Rules. You further agree and acknowledge that when you participate on our sites, that you will not offer legal advice, but will only provide general information. We highly recommend that you include a disclaimer regarding the aforementioned advertising and ethics issues. We will have no liability to you arising out of or related to your compliance or noncompliance with such laws and rules, or related to our inclusion or failure to include a disclaimer.


The annual meeting of the Bermuda Collectors Society is to be held on May 4-6 at the Philatelic Show at Boxborough in Massachusetts.
Bermuda Collector Society speakers and exhibitors needed.
The Philatelic Show is a 3 day event being held from 4th May to the 6th May 2018 at the Boxboro Regency in Boxborough MA. This event will feature exhibitors from different states and regions in the country will be coming forward to attend the event in order to not only display their collection but bag the awards for the best exhibitor from the eminent jury as well. Seminars, meetings and other interesting programs will be a part of the regular proceedings of the three day event. The exhibitors will be able to talk directly with some of the top professionals from the philatelic societies.


Shelflife Online Store presents the Happy Socks Big Dot Low Sock BD05-099. Add a sprinkle of colour to your daily look with our Big Dot Low socks. These socks are lower than our regular pairs, so they're ideal for wearing with sneakers or casual outfits. We think these are good enough to eat, with dots in pastel shades of lemon, light pink, ice blue, orange, cream and light grey studded across a black background. Finished with a black toe and heel, and made of cozy combed cotton. Available in men's and women's sizes. Buy your pair of Happy Socks Big Dot Low Sock BD05-099 online! Worldwide shipping and free delivery in South Africa.


Lori C. Thomas J.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Thomas is the Director of Forensic Services at Wynns Family Psychology, a child and adolescent psychology practice located in North Carolina, with offices in Cary and North Raleigh. She provides psychotherapy to children and their families, conducts private and court-ordered psychological evaluations and custody evaluations, works with high conflict families, and is a trained parent coordinator. Dr. Thomas is a volunteer presenter at a divorce and custody workshop and has collaborated with attorneys in her local area on public education presentations for families parenting after divorce.
Dr. Thomas holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Drexel University and a Juris Doctorate from Villanova University School of Law. She has had diverse professional experiences and has worked with diverse populations. She has been a Director of Development for a non-profit organization serving victims of domestic violence; a team leader for an intensive outpatient program at a private facility specializing in the treatment of eating disorders; an adjunct professor of psychology for undergraduate students at large universities in Pennsylvania and Delaware; an evaluator for a private behavioral health corporation; a guest presenter for groups of lawyers and judges; and a trained divorce and custody mediator.
Dr. Thomas is a graduate of the American Psychological Association's Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology and has been active in leadership at the American Psychological Association (APA). She has served on APA boards and committees including the Committee on Legal Issues and the Policy and Planning Board. She has served in a myriad of leadership roles in APA's Division of Psychologists in Independent Practice including, President of the division in 2016, and coordinator of a speed mentoring program at the division's conference. She has received accolades and awards for her leadership in the division.
Dr. Thomas is a disaster mental health volunteer, a trained martial artist, an avid student of dance, and self-professed creative chef.


Discussion in 'MacBook Pro' started by htchang1987, Mar 3, 2009.
I am still in the 14 days period as I received my 2.53 last Friday. I didn't even boot up the macbook pro nor taking out from the box. However, I have cut (unsealed) the sticker OUTSIDE the box but not anything inside the box. May I know where can I find any policy state inside the Apple website talking about this changing policy and could my situation allow me to change to a 2.66 free?
Looks like I'm not the only one here in this situation after all.
So do you think can refund??????


I saw that just a few minutes ago! So rad!
Got mine today and the fit is amazing!
I'm a lanky fucker (185 cm 70kg) and the size small was perfect! Thanks, Skully!
Ahhhh comfy and fits so good. Great t-shirt brand.
resincum wrote: still have shirts available?
Buy both and give one to a tiny friend.


Come test drive this 2019 Toyota RAV4. Smooth gearshifts are achieved thanks to the 2.5 liter 4 cylinder engine, and for added security, dynamic Stability Control supplements the drivetrain. It's equipped with tons of terrific amenities, but it won't break your budget. Such as remote keyless entry, a rear window wiper, a tachometer, a trip computer, air conditioning, tilt steering wheel, power door mirrors, and cruise control. Audio features include an AM/FM radio, and 6 speakers, enhancing the audio experience throughout the interior. Toyota ensures the safety and security of its passengers with equipment such as: dual front impact airbags, head curtain airbags, traction control, brake assist, ignition disabling, an emergency communication system, and 4 wheel disc brakes with ABS. Sophisticated all wheel drive assures superb handling in any weather condition. We pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service. Please don't hesitate to give us a call.


Vicky Kaushal, who is gearing up for his upcoming film Uri: The Surgical Strike, said the best takeaway from the film was the long late-night chats he had with real-life army men while prepping for the film. the Aditya Dhar film releases on January 11.
Vicky Kaushal starrer Uri: The Surgical Strike is slated to release on January 11.
Donning the army uniform for the thriller Uri was more than just slipping into a new character for actor Vicky Kaushal. In this interview, the actor reveals he undertook a personal, introspective journey while shooting for the Aditya Dhar directorial.
As a citizen, Vicky always had his own take on patriotism, but working on Uri made him see things in a new light.
"I always thought that it was more important to feel patriotic. But when you have to play an army guy, it is different from how we sit at home and feel patriotic. This is about action. It is because of our conditioning that we automatically respect our soldiers.
"But for them, it is a job that they do. They are always on the trigger. They have to protect. Their outlook towards patriotism is so much more concentrated. They are so into it. They live patriotism," the actor said.
Uri, which also stars Yami Gautam, Paresh Rawal and Kirti Kulhari, is based on the Indian Army's surgical strikes on terror launch pads across the Line of Control, days after the Uri attack.
Vicky Kaushal said the team was aware that this project had to be dealt with a huge sense of responsibility because patriotic films in India are more of a sentiment than a cinema-viewing experience for the audience.
"The topic of patriotism is so relevant today. It is like we are defining what patriotism is. Is it about showing and expressing patriotism or about feeling it? In times like today where we are more vocal about patriotism, it was a huge task to tell this story and convey the message more responsibly. And hats off to Ronnie Screwvala to back this project and to Aditya Dhar for doing this," he said.
Ruminating on his personal experience of playing an army officer, the actor said the best takeaway from Uri was the long late-night chats that he had with real-life army men while prepping for the film.
"What happened to me personally was something. My outlook towards the military has changed. I always had respect for them, but now portraying their life in such a personal way, it just gave me an opportunity to play so many different shades of their lives – their family life, their life at the war front, their training, and everything to do with them.
"It is when they (soldiers) start telling their stories, you realise how fascinating their stories are. I was all ears. I realised they are not normal beings. They are just something else. Their way of living, the way they follow etiquettes, their discipline, the way they respect women, it is outstanding. After talking to them, when I would come back home, I would be full of stories and would share my experiences with my family and it was all awe-inspiring," Vicky Kaushal said.
There are still days left for Uri to arrive in theaters (January 11), but the army has already given the film a thumbs-up.


Thimble Club members help create the beautiful and delicious lunch at the Victorian Tea, Saturday, April 21.
The Thimble Club ladies enjoyed remarkable enthusiasm from the community in response to their Victorian Tea fundraiser held Saturday, April 21, at the Anza Valley Christian Fellowship Church. Having initially requested a printing of 85 tickets, more had to be ordered, and all tickets were sold out before the event.
Graceful ladies attired in festive hats and long, colorful dresses enjoyed delicate cucumber sandwiches with herb cheese, turkey and cheese sandwiches, strawberries with Chantilly cream, chocolate raspberry tartlets, lemon tea cakes, cookie butter balls and caramel cream scones topped with a rich orange compound butter. Tea was served steaming hot with all the necessary additions.
Students from Hamilton High School graciously and efficiently served the guests. Associated Student Body students Cheyenne Cole, Nolan Grant, Sterling Estrada and Tyler Boulton poured tea and delivered the individual plates, checking frequently to make sure no detail was overlooked.
In keeping with the Victorian theme, beautiful centerpieces designed by Sally Kaspar and Marge Buschmann graced the 14 tables.
The meal was designed by Thimble Club member private chef Laurie Knight.
"I love designing my own recipes," Knight said. "My specialties are French entrees, meat, barbecue, pastries and Victorian tea. I joined the Anza Thimble Club in 2017. I love being part of such a wonderful group of ladies."
The fun began as mistress of ceremonies Joan Kessman chose the winning tickets for door prizes. Yoga Skies donated four tickets, each good for one class in yoga, Tai Chi, etc., and five tickets were donated by the Thrift Shop.
"This is the most fun I've had in months," Shaaron Chambers said.
While attendees enjoyed the luncheon, Shannon Paster introduced the LuLaRoe line of clothing, and Thimble Club members Rika Anctil, Val Andrews, Jackie Braatan, Marie Ghysels, Sally Kaspar, Carol Wright and Kathy Wood modeled the selections.
"Anyone who knows Laurie is familiar with her outstanding skills as a professional chef, and we certainly weren't disappointed," Kathryn Allen said. "The lunch was delicious!"
Following the meal, guests enthusiastically shopped the numerous racks of clothing and hats.
Thimble Club member Annie Ashby mingles with the guests, making sure everything is perfect at the Victorian Tea, Saturday, April 21.
The finale of the event was the raffle drawing. Enormous gift baskets were handed out to the winners.
"It was a lot of fun," attendeee Rosalind Moore said.
The Thimble Club intends for the Victorian Tea to become annual event.
The Anza Thimble Club, established in 1912, is the oldest service club in Anza. It was founded by several ladies who used the excuse of doing their mending to get together for a visit. Since then, they have become a well-loved charitable organization donating much-needed funds back into the community.
For more information about the Thimble Club, contact Sally Kaspar at (817) 366-6413 or Carol Wright at (951) 551-9623.


Go to Mang's Bat Page to check out the 61st Carnival of Space, a weekly tour around space-themed weblogs.
And, while I'm linking, don't miss Amir Alexander's update on the status of funding for the Arecibo telescope; A. J. S. Rayl's monthly update on Spirit and Opportunity; and this week's Planetary Radio interview with space scientist and artist William Hartmann.
Finally, I should mention that I am leaving tomorrow for a two-week trip to visit family. I plan to work throughout the trip, but my posting schedule may be somewhat more erratic than normal; I'm unlikely to post anything tomorrow.


text:
Tunisia Information
History of Tunisia
Climate in Tunisia
Economy of Tunisia
Culture of Tunisia
Religions of Tunisia
Education in Tunisia
Cities & Places in Tunisia
Tunisia officially the Republic of Tunisia, is the northernmost country in Africa. It is an Arab Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area is almost 165,000 square kilometres (64,000 sq mi), with an estimated population of just under 10.7 million. Its name is derived from the capital Tunis located in the northeast.
Tunisia is the smallest country in North Africa. The south of the country is composed of the Sahara desert, with much of the remainder consisting of particularly fertile soil and 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) of coastline.
Tunisia has an association agreement with the European Union and is a member of the Arab Maghreb Union, the Arab League, and the African Union. Tunisia has established close relations with France in particular, through economic cooperation, industrial modernization, and privatisation programs
La Goulette
Ksar el Koubait
Tamazrat
Al Marsa
Aghir
Midoun
Ile Chergui
Dougga
Sidi Bou Sa
» More Cities in Tunisia
Travel Destinations in Tunisia
Bizerte Bulla Regia El Battan El Borma El Hamma El Kef Gabes Gafsa Guellala Hammam Sousse Hammamet Houmt Souk Kasserine Ksar el Koubait La Goulette Mide Monastir Nabeul Sbeitla Tamazrat Tataouine Tidjma Tozeur Zaghouan Zarzis


Grab your running shoes! If you're runner and who likes to run in beautiful paradise-like locals with perfect sunny weather, the Los Cabos Half Marathon offers 21.097 km of historical sights, natural beauty and an incredible route.
Kicking off and ending at Plaza Mijares on February 11, the route, which includes San Jose del Cabo´s historical downtown, its hotel area and the Puerto Los Cabos Marina, provides one of the most scenic marathon routes in the world. The mostly flat route also includes two short slopes, which are both challenging and exciting for even for the most experienced runner.
For an easier yet just as fun race, the entirely flat 10K and 5K routes go across San Jose del Cabo´s historical downtown and Paseo San José (hotel area).
Are you ready for the destination race of a lifetime? For more information or to sign up for the race, visit loscaboshalfmarathon.com.


Please purchase tickets from Tickets for Good.
A fundraising evening of theatre and music, co-organised with Sheffield Anarchist Bookfair and featuring a one-woman theatre show 'Buried Sunshine' about coal mining in Colombia. This dramatic tale of coal, courage and criminals takes the form of 4 linked monologues. It has been performed elsewhere to great acclaim, by Scarlet of Coal Action Network, including actually inside Britain's largest opencast coal mine!
There will be a performance by Sheffield Socialist Choir to kick off the evening and some additional acoustic music at the end (watch for announcements). Meanwhile there will be a bar with alcoholic and other drinks, and tasty cakes and snacks to buy.
This is part of SCA's contribution to Global Divestment Day, 5-13 May 2017. We are campaigning for our local South Yorkshire Pension Fund to withdraw its investments in BHP Billiton, one of the companies behind the massive Cerrejon opencast mine in Colombia. Join our petition here if your pension is with SYPA.
Please book a ticket, invite your friends, and donate generously!


Buy now with and pay 2249,58 SEK monthly. Applicable within Sweden and Finland.
This is an authentic CHANEL GST Grand Shopping Tote Black Caviar Leather Bag. The Chanel Grand Shopping Tote GST is crafted of luxurious and sturdy quilted caviar leather and matching silver-tone hardware. This amazing bag features a Chanel front interlocking stitched CC-logo and two braided shoulder straps with comfortable shoulder pads. The bag opens to a spacious and practical interior with pockets. There´s also a large zipped middle compartment to carry your everyday essentials. This timeless and elegant handbag is the ideal every day tote from Chanel.
Details- Very good to excellent condition. Surface wear and creases on leather, corner wear, scratces on hardware and light wear to the inner lining.
Measurements-(LxHxW) 34x25x16 cm/ 13" 10" 5"


text:
Team Drive-Away Selected For "5000 Fastest-Growing Companies In America"
Team Drive-Away
Team Drive-Away of Shawnee, KS has been honored with a recognition by Inc.com in its selection of "5000 Fastest-Growing Companies In America."
SHAWNEE, Kan., July 30, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Announcing a special recognition appearing in the September, 2012 issue of Inc.com published by Mansueto Ventures LLC. Team Drive-Away was selected for the following honor:
"5000 Fastest-Growing Companies In America"
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130730/DC55721)
A spokesperson from Team Drive-Away commented on the recognition: "This is quite an honor for us. The fact that Inc.com included Team Drive-Away in its selection of "5000 Fastest-Growing Companies In America," signals that our constant efforts towards business excellence are paying off. We are proud to be included in this recognition."
About Team Drive-Away: a short profile by and about the honoree:
Team Drive-Away has been honored by Inc. Magazine for three straight years as one of America's 5000 Fastest Growing Companies and just recently by Ingram's Magazine as one of the 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Kansas City. Team Drive-Away has earned this honor by providing "Best-in-Class" customer service and delivering the most reliable "On-Time" truck transportation in the industry. If you need trucks moved in a hurry; singles, booms or decks, you should contact Team Drive-Away today.
Following the publication of Team Drive-Away's selection for Inc.com's 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies In America list, American Registry seconded the honor and added Team Drive-Away to the "Registry of Business Excellence™". An exclusive recognition plaque, shown here, has been designed to commemorate this honor.
For more information on Team Drive-Away, located in Shawnee, KS please call 913-825-4776, or visit teamdriveaway.com.
This press release was written by American Registry, LLC with contributions from Team Drive-Away on behalf of Team Drive-Away and was distributed by PR Newswire, a subsidiary of UBM plc.
American Registry, LLC is an independent company that serves businesses and professionals such as Team Drive-Away who have been recognized for excellence. American Registry offers news releases, plaques and The Registry™, an online listing of over 2 million significant business and professional recognitions. Search The Registry™ at http://www.americanregistry.com.
SOURCE Team Drive-Away


text:
Student Texts (25)
Race & Ethnicity (110)
(-) Religion (25)
Rights & Activism (103)
The Atlantic Slave Trade: What too few textbooks told you
Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but the Atlantic slave trade-which forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas-stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Anthony Hazard discusses the historical, economic and personal impact of this massive historical injustice.
Anthony Hazard
Race & Ethnicity Religion Class Immigration
Identity Diversity Justice
Shulamit Aloni
Aloni has spent her life challenging what she views as the "retreat from the secular liberal ideals envisioned by Israel's founders." As a teacher, lawyer, member of parliament, as well as resistance movements, and lecturer, she has become one of Israel's best-known champions of human and civil rights.
Religion Gender & Sexual Identity
In the City of Brotherly Love
"The Irish and the English share a long legacy of conflict." And this conflict extended across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World as a wave of Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1820s.
Religion Class Immigration Bullying & Bias Rights & Activism
When Loud Music Turned Deadly
This op-doc about the murder of Jordan Davis is compiled from home videos, interviews with Davis' father and footage of Michael Dunn, the man who murdered Davis. The video includes Davis' father speaking about his young son, as well as Dunn describing the events leading up to the murder.
Orlando Bagwell and Marc Silver
Race & Ethnicity Religion Rights & Activism
"To the Dead We Owe the Truth"
In this segment from 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, a jury delivers the verdict in the case about the murder of Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn.
Marc Silver
Justice Action
"Thug Is the New N-Word"
In this segment from 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, the viewer gets multiple perspectives about the murder of Jordan Davis. This clip focuses on his parents' reflections on his birth, their reactions to his murder and testimony from the trial of Michael Dunn.
A Backlash Against Arab Americans
In this essay, the author details how tension built and violence erupted—specifically against Muslim Americans—in the days following the September 11th attacks.
Race & Ethnicity Religion
No Place to Pray
In this essay, the author details the kind of systematic persecution that Hutterites endured after settling colonies in the West in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Religion Rights & Activism
Diversity Justice


text:
@interface APRemoteBrowserWindowController () <NSTableViewDataSource>
@property (nonatomic, readwrite, weak) id<APRemoteBrowserDelegate> delegate;
@end

@implementation APRemoteBrowserWindowController

- (id) initWithServiceNames: (NSArray *) serviceNames
                   delegate: (id<APRemoteBrowserDelegate>) delegate
{
    self = [super initWithWindowNibName: [self className]];
    if ( self == nil )
        return ( nil );

    _serviceNames = [serviceNames sortedArrayUsingSelector: @selector(caseInsensitiveCompare:)];
    _delegate = delegate;

    return ( self );
}

- (void) windowDidLoad
{
    [super windowDidLoad];

    // Implement this method to handle any initialization after your window controller's window has been loaded from its nib file.

    // make double-clicking a row the same as selecting it and clicking 'Connect'
    [self.tableView setTarget: self];
    [self.tableView setDoubleAction: @selector(connect:)];
}

- (IBAction) connect: (id) sender
{
    NSString * name = [_serviceNames objectAtIndex: [self.tableView selectedRow]];
    [_delegate remoteBrowser: self connectToServiceNamed: name];
}

#pragma mark - NSTableViewDataSource Implementation

- (NSInteger) numberOfRowsInTableView: (NSTableView *) tableView
{
    return ( [_serviceNames count] );
}

- (id) tableView: (NSTableView *) tableView objectValueForTableColumn: (NSTableColumn *) tableColumn row: (NSInteger) row
{
    return ( [_serviceNames objectAtIndex: row] );
}

@end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
IIT Hyderabad: A step closer to oral administration of Kala-azar drug
by Prasad RavindranathPosted on August 3, 2019
The drug-loaded tablet showed antifungal activity on days 1,3 and 7 (left column) compared with control (right column).
Using a novel drug-delivery approach, IIT Hyderabad researchers have made oral administration of the drug Amphotericin B for treating Kala-azar and fungal infection possible. The drug encapsulated in polymer nanofibres and made into tablets was released in a controlled and sustained manner for 10 days.
By encapsulating an antifungal drug in polymer nanofibres, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad have been able to achieve controlled and sustained release of the drug for up to 10 days. As a result, no fungal growth was seen up to seven days when the drug (Amphotericin B) was encapsulated in the polymer. The encapsulated drug can also be used for treating Kala-azar.
Most importantly, the antifungal activity against Candida albicans was observed when the encapsulated drug was compressed to form oral tablets. This would mean that oral administration of the drug might become possible if initial results achieved in the lab can be replicated in animal and human clinical trials. Currently, oral administration of the drug has major challenges — high toxicity, reduced bioavailability in the body due to poor solubility in water and high cost.
Researchers from IIT Hyderabad led by Prof. Chandra S. Sharma and Prof. Saptarshi Majumdar from the Department of Chemical Engineering produced nanofibres containing the drug by electrospinning the drug- gelatine polymer solution. The gelatine polymer is extremely water-loving (hydrophilic) and so is not stable. To increase the stability and allow the drug to be released in a controlled and sustained manner, the researchers used a commercially available crosslinker.
"The drug is found on the surface of the gelatine nanofibres but remains encapsulated when compressed into tablets," says Prof. Majumdar.
"The cross-linked polymer matrix allows the drug to diffuse slowly when the polymer degrades. We have controlled the diffusion rate so it is released over a period of 10 days," says Prof. Sharma. Only in vitro studies have been carried to test the stability of the tablet and controlled release. The results of the study were published in the journal Nano-Structures & Nano-Objects.
Since the main goal was to study if the drug can be administered orally, the researchers tested the stability of the tablet for eight hours at extremely acidic condition (1.5 pH). The stomach has acidic pH and the polymer should be stable for up to four hours. After eight hours at low pH, the tablets were kept for 10 days in an alkaline medium of 7.4 pH. "The tablets were stable for eight hours at low pH. The polymer matrix showed signatures of degradation after the sixth day but was stable for 10 days," says Mrunalini K. Gaydhane from IIT Hyderabad and one of the first authors of the paper.
The researchers found that each day 10% of the drug was released from the polymer through diffusion. The drug was completely released from the polymer matrix at the end of the 10th day.
"We had used mice fibroblast cells for testing toxicity of the drug. There was negligible toxicity to cells even at the end of five days. In fact, the cells continued to multiply," says Gaydhane.
Only 20 mg of the drug in 500 mg of polymer was used for making the table used for testing. "Our next target is to achieve the same drug release profile with dosages used for therapeutic purposes," Prof. Sharma says.
The chemical crosslinker used in the study is highly toxic. In order to reduce toxicity, the researchers exposed the gelatine polymer to saturated vapour of the crosslinker for just six-eight minutes. In the conventional process, crosslinking takes 24 hours to complete. "Reducing the time taken to cross-link reduces toxicity. But we are now looking at increasing the stability of the polymer matrix without using any crosslinker," Prof. Majumdar says.
Published in The Hindu on August 3, 2019
Posted in Drug delivery, IIT Hyderabad, Kala-azar, Nanotechnology, Research, Science
Published by Prasad Ravindranath
Science Editor with @The_Hindu, Chennai, India. Do get in touch with me at PRASAD.THEHINDU@GMAIL.COM if you have some interesting results that can be published in The Hindu and also in my blog. You can also reach me on Twitter @RPrasad12 and Facebook /prasad.ravindranath. I write on science, health, medicine, environment, and technology.	View all posts by Prasad Ravindranath
Prev ICMR-NICED scientist has 16 papers with duplicated, manipulated images
Next Toxic mercury in fish increases with ocean warming, overfishing


The hydroelastic stability of flexible panels exposed to high-velocity mean flow is of fundamental significance to hull design. It is well-known that a simply-supported flexible panel exposed to increasingly high velocities will succumb to a divergence or static buckling-type instability at a particular critical flow speed. At a higher flow speed the panel will experience violent oscillatory flutter-type instability. In this paper we briefly present a recently developed approach and its new extension to theoretical modelling of the fully coupled interaction between a simply-supported flexible panel and a fluid flow. Structural inhomogeneity is incorporated as an additional single-spring support to the panel. The dependence of instability onset flow speeds, and the forms of divergence and flutter instabilities, upon the added spring stiffness and its location are then investigated. Results show that this particular form of structural inhomogeneity can be very effective in controlling the critical flow speed. This suggests a practicable strategy for designing out damaging hydroelastic effects in high-speed marine applications.
Tan, B.H. and Lucey, A.D. and Pitman, M.W. 2011. Controlling hydroelastic instability of hull panels through structural inhomogeneity, Royal Institution of Naval Architects International Conference 2011, Mar 2 2011, pp. 51-60. Fremantle, WA: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects.


Pick a meal plan depending on your body goal or dietary preference.
Chose your duration and delivery days.
renew your plan through our app.
What happens to my meals when I am travelling?
You can pause your subscription by giving us five hours notice prior to your delivery timing. Any requested cancellations will be carried forward and extend your subscription.
What if I want to cancel the service before the subscription ends?
You can cancel your subscription anytime by writing to us. You will be eligible for a refund after converting the serviced meals to the retail price of the same or similar meal. We follow the practice to ensure that users do not abuse the subscription benefits.
Can I subscribe for lunch and dinner?
Yes, you can buy two subscriptions and choose different delivery timings in a day.
What if I want fully customized meal packages that cover my full nutrition?
You can drop us a line at info@fig.delivery and our meal planner will immediately get back to you.


text:
Q: How to print all the values in the structures in single attempt? In this I will have an output of 4,5,6,25.
How to print all the members in the structure in single attempt rather than accessing single member of the structure each time.
like if i need the output for row as [4 5 6] and age as 25.
Please help!
#include<stdio.h>

typedef struct person
{
  int row[3];
  int age;
} PERSON;

int main()
{
  PERSON p;
  PERSON *pptr=&p;
  pptr->row[0] = 4;
  pptr->row[1] = 5;
  pptr->row[2] = 6;
  pptr->age = 25;
  printf("%d\n",pptr->row[0]);
  printf("%d\n",pptr->row[1]);
  printf("%d\n",pptr->row[2]);
  printf("%d\n",pptr->age);
  return 0;
}

A: You can use multiple format specifiers in a single printf statement
printf("[%d, %d, %d], age=%d\n",
       pptr->row[0], pptr->row[1], pptr->row[2], pptr->age);

A: printf ("[%d  %d  %d]\nage: %d", pptr->row[0],pptr->row[1],pptr->row[2],pptr->age);

A: There isn't a way  to print "at once", without accessing  each member, but you
can reduce this code a little  by using multiple specifiers. Consider creating
a function (or even  a macro) if you need to print  values of multiple structs
and this shall help reducing the amount of code.
void
print_person (PERSON *p)
{
    printf(
        "[%d %d %d] %d\n",
        p->row[0],
        p->row[1],
        p->row[2],
        p->age
    );
}

print_person(&my_person);

Using the pointer approach avoids copying  the whole structure as an argument.
But you  may prefer  to keep it  simple with these  simple structs.  The macro
approach:
#define PRINTP(p) printf("[%d %d %d] %d\n", p.row[0], p.row[1], p.row[2], p.age)

PRINTP(p);

A: If using glibc (GNU libc, and therefore only available when using gcc, and though not portbale) is it possible to define and register "new" conversion specifiers to be used with glibc's implementation of the printf familiy of functions, that are capable of what the OP is looking for.
For more on this please read here: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Registering-New-Conversions.html#Registering-New-Conversions and here: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Defining-the-Output-Handler.html#Defining-the-Output-Handler
An example can be found here: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Printf-Extension-Example.html#Printf-Extension-Example

A: Within langages that let you use metaprogramming and traits, you can do that but in C there're no way to do such a thing. The simonc answer is the solution almost everyone uses.

A: C doesn't provide an automatic way to do this.
Of course, you can write your own print_struct_person function, but you have to write one function for every function you want to print.
If you're doing this for debugging purposes, you should try a real debugger: debuggers can do it.

A: Try this:
void print_at_once(PERSON *pptr)
{
  int i=0;
  for(i=0;i<3;i++)
    printf("%d\n",pptr->row[i]);
  printf("%d\n",pptr->age);
  return;
}


text:
Category: Artist
link to What DAW Does Chainsmokers Use?
What DAW Does Chainsmokers Use?
The Chainsmokers are hitmakers when it comes to EDM and they topped the charts for a very long time with "Closer". The DJ and producer duo bought in a fresh style of EDM tracks and I was always...
link to What DAW Does Zedd Use?
What DAW Does Zedd Use?
If you don't know who Zedd is then you probably won't be here. So, I am going to assume you obviously know who Zedd is and you can skip reading his DAW, Gear, and Plugins. If you want to know more...
link to Charlie Puth – DAW, Plugins & Gear
Charlie Puth – DAW, Plugins & Gear
Charlie Puth is a pop music producer, artist, singer & songwriter. Charlie has a lot of great hits and has written songs for a lot of mainstream artists. He rose to fame when the song "See you...
link to Deadmau5 Software – Plugins, VST, DAW
Deadmau5 Software – Plugins, VST, DAW
Deadmau5 is an EDM Producer and DJ. Deadmau5 is the 26th most popular EDM artist and has some crazy hits such as Strobe, Ghosts n Stuff, Faxing Berlin, and the list goes on. If you are a fan of...
link to What DAW Does Diplo Use?
What DAW Does Diplo Use?
Thomas Wesley Pentz aka Diplo is a successful American DJ, songwriter, and record producer who has a huge number of hits under his belts. He is also the co-creator of Major Lazer. This article is...
link to What DAW & Plugins does David Guetta Use?
What DAW & Plugins does David Guetta Use?
David Guetta is a No.1 DJ in the world according to djmag.com and sold over 9 million albums worldwide along with 30 million singles. The French DJ was born on November 7th, 1967, and rose to the top...
Page 1 Page 2 NEXT »


White puer is "raw", like green puer, but mostly tips are used and the leaves are not allowed to wither quite as much. With a gentle walnut-shell flavor reminiscent of a White Peony or a fine Darjeeling, we recommend to you this heart-warming addition to our menu.
Place 5 – 8g of tea in a warmed pot or Gai Wan type bowl and pour over water that has just been brought off the boil. The recommended time for steeping is 2 – 3 minutes. Serve with a burner and pot of hot water for further infusions.


text:
by Alice Munro
(est. reading time: 18′ 37″)
When my mother was growing up, she and her whole family would go to dances. These would be held in the schoolhouse, or sometimes in a farmhouse with a big enough front room. Young and old would be in attendance. Someone would play the piano — the household piano or the one in the school — and someone would have brought a violin. The square dancing had complicated patterns or steps, which a person known for a special facility would call out at the top of his voice (it was always a man) and in a strange desperate sort of haste which was of no use at all unless you knew the dance already. As everybody did, having learned them all by the time they were ten or twelve years old.
Married now, with three of us children, my mother was still of an age and temperament to enjoy such dances if she had lived in the true countryside where they were still going on. She would have enjoyed too the round dancing performed by couples, which was supplanting the old style to a certain extent. But she was in an odd situation. We were. Our family was out of town but not really in the country.
My father, who was much better liked than my mother, was a man who believed in taking whatever you were dealt. Not so my mother. She had risen from her farm girl's life to become a schoolteacher, but this was not enough, it had not given her the position she would have liked, or the friends she would have liked to have in town. She was living in the wrong place and had not enough money, but she was not equipped anyway. She could play euchre but not bridge. She was affronted by the sight of a woman smoking. I think people found her pushy and overly grammatical. She said things like "readily" and "indeed so." She sounded as if she had grown up in some strange family who always talked that way. And she hadn't. They didn't. Out on their farms, my aunts and uncles talked the way everybody else did. And they didn't like my mother very much, either.
I don't mean that she spent all her time wishing that things weren't as they were. Like any other woman with washtubs to haul into the kitchen and no running water and a need to spend most of the summer preparing food to be eaten in the winter, she was kept busy. She couldn't even devote as much time as she otherwise would have done in being disappointed with me, wondering why I was not bringing the right kind of friends, or any friends at all, home from the town school. Or why I was shying away from Sunday School recitations, something I used to make a grab at. And why I came home with the ringlets torn out of my hair — a desecration I had managed even before I got to school, because nobody else wore their hair the way she fixed mine. Or indeed why I had learned to blank out even the prodigious memory I once had for reciting poetry, refusing to use it ever again for showing off.
But I am not always full of sulks and disputes. Not yet. Here I am when about ten years old, all eager to dress up and accompany my mother to a dance.
The dance was being held in one of the altogether decent but not prosperous-looking houses on our road. A large wooden house inhabited by people I knew nothing about, except that the husband worked in the foundry, even though he was old enough to be my grandfather. You didn't quit the foundry then, you worked as long as you could and tried to save up money for when you couldn't. It was a disgrace, even in the middle of what I later learned to call the Great Depression, to find yourself having to go on the Old Age Pension. It was a disgrace for your grown children to allow it, no matter what straits they were in themselves.
Some questions come to mind now that didn't then.
Were the people who lived in the house giving this dance simply in order to create some festivity? Or were they charging money? They might have found themselves in difficulties, even if the man had a job. Doctor's bills. I knew how dreadfully that could fall upon a family. My little sister was delicate, as people said, and her tonsils had already been removed. My brother and I suffered spectacular bronchitis every winter, resulting in doctor's visits. Doctors cost money.
The other thing I might have wondered about was why I should have been chosen to accompany my mother, instead of my father doing that. But it really isn't such a puzzle. My father maybe didn't like to dance, and my mother did. Also, there were two small children to be looked after at home, and I wasn't old enough yet to do that. I can't remember my parents ever hiring a babysitter. I'm not sure the term was even familiar in those days. When I was in my teens I found employment that way, but times had changed by then.
We were dressed up. At the country dances my mother remembered, there was never any appearance in those sassy square dance outfits you would see later on television. Everybody wore their best, and not to do so — to appear in anything like those frills and neckerchieves that were the supposed attire of country folk — would have been an insult to the hosts and everybody else. I wore a dress my mother had made for me, of soft winter wool. The skirt was pink and the top yellow, with a heart of the pink wool sewn where my left breast would be one day. My hair was combed and moistened and shaped into those long fat sausage-like ringlets that I got rid of every day on the way to school. I had complained about wearing them to the dance on the grounds that nobody else wore them. My mother's retort was that nobody else was so lucky. I dropped the com- plaint because I wanted to go so much, or perhaps because I thought that nobody from school would be at the dance so it didn't matter. It was the ridicule of my school fellows that I feared always.
My mother's dress was not homemade. It was her best, too elegant for church and too festive for a funeral, and so hardly ever worn. It was made of black velvet, with sleeves to the elbows, and a high neckline. The wonderful thing about it was a proliferation of tiny beads, gold and silver and various colors, sewn all over the bodice and catching the light, changing whenever she moved or only breathed. She had braided her hair, which was still mostly black, then pinned it in a tight coronet on top of her head. If she had been anybody else but my mother I would have thought her thrillingly handsome. I think I did find her so, but as soon as we got into the strange house I had to notice that her best dress was nothing like any other woman's dress, though they must have put on their best too.
The other women I'm speaking of were in the kitchen. That was where we stopped and looked at things set out on a big table. All sorts of tarts and cookies and pies and cakes. And my mother too set down some fancy thing she had made and started to fuss around to make it look better. She commented on how mouthwatering everything looked.
Am I sure she said that — mouthwatering? Whatever she said, it did not sound quite right. I wished then for my father to be there, always sounding perfectly right for the occa- sion, even when he spoke grammatically. He would do that in our house but not so readily outside of it. He slipped into whatever exchange was going on — he understood that the thing to do was never to say anything special. My mother was just the opposite. With her everything was clear and ringing and served to call attention.
Now that was happening and I heard her laugh, delightedly, as if to make up for nobody's talking to her. She was inquiring where we might put our coats.
It turned out that we could put them anywhere, but if we wanted, somebody said, we could lay them down on the bed upstairs. You got upstairs by a staircase shut in by walls, and there was no light, except at the top. My mother told me to go ahead, she would be up in a minute, and so I did.
A question here might be whether there could really have been a payment for attending that dance. My mother could have stayed behind to arrange it. On the other hand, would people have been asked to pay and still have brought all those refreshments? And were the refreshments really as lavish as I remember? With everybody so poor? But maybe they were already feeling not so poor, with the war jobs and money that soldiers sent home. If I was really ten, and I think I was, then those changes would have been going on for two years.
The staircase came up from the kitchen and also from the front room, joining together into one set of steps that led up to the bedrooms. After I had got rid of my coat and boots in the tidied-up front bedroom, I could still hear my mother's voice ringing out in the kitchen. But I could also hear music coming from the front room, so I went down that way.
The room had been cleared of all furniture except the piano. Dark green cloth blinds, of the kind I thought particularly dreary, were pulled down over the windows. But there was no dreary sort of atmosphere in the room. Many people were dancing, decorously holding on to each other, shuffling or swaying in tight circles. A couple of girls still in school were dancing in a way that was just becoming popular, moving opposite each other and sometimes hold- ing hands, sometimes not. They actually smiled a greeting when they saw me, and I melted with pleasure, as I was apt to do when any confident older girl paid any attention to me.
There was a woman in that room you couldn't help noticing, one whose dress would certainly put my mother's in the shade. She must have been quite a bit older than my mother — her hair was white, and worn in a smooth sophisticated arrangement of what were called marcelled waves, close to her scalp. She was a large person with noble shoulders and broad hips, and she was wearing a dress of golden-orange taffeta, cut with a rather low square neck and a skirt that just covered her knees. Her short sleeves held her arms tightly and the flesh on them was heavy and smooth and white, like lard.
This was a startling sight. I would not have thought it possible that somebody could look both old and polished, both heavy and graceful, bold as brass and yet mightily dignified. You could have called her brazen, and perhaps my mother later did —that was her sort of word. Someone better disposed might have said, stately. She didn't really show off, except in the whole style and color of the dress. She and the man with her danced together in a respectful, rather absent-minded style, like spouses.
I didn't know her name. I had never seen her before. I didn't know that she was notorious in our town, and maybe farther afield, for all I knew.
I think that if I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened, I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn't need.
Of course, if I had lived in the town, instead of just going in and out every day for school, I might have known that she was a notable prostitute. I would surely have seen her sometime, though not in that orange dress. And I would not have used the word prostitute. Bad woman, more likely. I would have known that there was something disgusting and dangerous and exciting and bold about her, without knowing exactly what it was. If somebody had tried to tell me, I don't think I would have believed them.
There were several people in town who looked unusual and maybe she would have seemed to me just another. There was the hunchbacked man who polished the doors of the town hall every day and as far as I know did nothing else. And the quite proper looking woman who never stopped talking in a loud voice to herself, scolding people who were nowhere in sight.
I would have learned in time what her name was and eventually found out that she really did the things I could not believe she did. And that the man I saw dancing with her and whose name perhaps I never knew was the owner of the pool room. One day when I was in high school a couple of girls dared me to go into the poolroom when we were walking past, and I did, and there he was, the same man. Though he was balder and heavier now, and wearing shab- bier clothes. I don't recall that he said anything to me, but he did not have to. I bolted back to my friends, who were not quite friends after all, and told them nothing.
When I saw the owner of the pool room, the whole scene of the dance came back to me, the thumping piano and the fiddle music and the orange dress, which I would by then have called ridiculous, and my mother's sudden appearance with her coat on that she had probably never taken off.
There she was, calling my name through the music in the tone I particularly disliked, the tone that seemed to specially remind me that it was thanks to her I was on this earth at all.
She said, "Where is your coat?" As if I had mislaid it somewhere.
"Upstairs."
"Well go and get it."
She would have seen it there if she herself had been upstairs at all. She must never have got past the kitchen, she must have been fussing around the food with her own coat unbuttoned but not removed, until she looked into the room where the dancing was taking place and knew who that orange dancer was.
"Don't delay," she said.
I didn't intend to. I opened the door to the stairway and ran up the first steps and found that where the stairs took their turn some people were sitting, blocking my way. They didn't see me coming — they were taken up, it seemed, with something serious. Not an argument, exactly, but an urgent sort of communication.
Two of these people were men. Young men in Air Force uniforms. One sitting on a step, one leaning forward on a lower step with a hand on his knee. There was a girl sitting on the step above them, and the man nearest to her was pat- ting her leg in a comforting way. I thought she must have fallen on these narrow stairs and hurt herself, for she was crying.
Peggy. Her name was Peggy. "Peggy, Peggy," the young men were saying, in their urgent and even tender voices.
She said something I couldn't make out. She spoke in a childish voice. She was complaining, the way you complain about something that isn't fair. You say over and over that something isn't fair, but in a hopeless voice, as if you don't expect the thing that isn't fair to be righted. Mean is another word to be made use of in these circumstances. It's so mean. Somebody has been so mean.
By listening to my mother's talk to my father when we got home I found out something of what had happened, but I was not able to get it straight. Mrs. Hutchison had shown up at the dance, driven by the pool room man, who was not known to me then as the pool room man. I don't know what name my mother called him by, but she was sadly dismayed by his behavior. News had got out about the dance and some boys from Port Albert — that is, from the Air Force base — had decided to put in an appearance as well. Of course that would have been all right. The Air Force boys were all right. It was Mrs. Hutchison who was the disgrace. And the girl.
She had brought one of her girls with her.
"Maybe just felt like an outing," my father said. "Maybe just likes to dance."
My mother seemed not even to have heard this. She said that it was a shame. You expected to have a nice time, a nice decent dance within a neighborhood, and then it was all ruined.
I was in the habit of assessing the looks of older girls. I had not thought Peggy was particularly pretty. Maybe her make-up had rubbed off with her crying. Her rolled up mousey-colored hair had got loose from some of its bobby pins. Her fingernails were polished but they still looked as if she chewed them. She didn't seem much more grown up than one of those whiny, sneaky, perpetually complaining older girls I knew. Nevertheless the young men treated her as if she was someone who deserved never to have encoun- tered one rough moment, someone who rightfully should be petted and pleasured and have heads bowed before her.
One of them offered her a ready-made cigarette. This in itself I saw as a treat, since my father rolled his own and so did every other man I knew. But Peggy shook her head and complained in that hurt voice that she did not smoke. Then the other man offered a stick of gum, and she accepted it.
What was going on? I had no way of knowing. The boy who had offered the gum noticed me, while rummaging in his pocket, and he said, "Peggy? Peggy, here's a little girl I think wants to go upstairs."
She dropped her head so I couldn't look into her face. I smelled perfume as I went by. I smelled their cigarettes too and their manly woollen uniforms, their polished boots.
When I came downstairs with my coat on they were still there, but this time they had been expecting me, so they all kept quiet while I passed. Except that Peggy gave one loud sniffle, and the young man nearest to her kept stroking her upper leg. Her skirt was pulled up and I saw the fastener holding her stocking.
For a long time I remembered the voices. I pondered over the voices. Not Peggy's. The men's. I know now that some of the Air Force men stationed at Port Albert early in the war had come out from England, and were training there to fight the Germans. So I wonder if it was the accent of some part of Britain that I was finding so mild and entrancing. It was certainly true that I had never in my life heard a man speak in that way, treating a woman as if she was so fine and valued a creature that whatever it was, whatever unkind- ness had come near her, was somehow a breach of a law, a sin.
What did I think had happened to make Peggy cry? The question did not much interest me at the time. I was not a brave person myself. I cried when chased and beaten with shingles on the way home from my first school. I cried when the teacher in the town school singled me out, in front of the class, to expose the shocking untidiness of my desk. And when she phoned my mother about the same problem and my mother hanging up the phone herself wept, enduring misery because I was not a credit to her. It seemed as though some people were naturally brave and others weren't. Somebody must have said something to Peggy, and there she was snuffling, because like me she was not thick-skinned.
It must have been that orange-dressed woman who had been mean, I thought, for no particular reason. It had to have been a woman. Because if it had been a man, one of her Air Force comforters would have punished him. Told him to watch his mouth, maybe dragged him outside and beaten him up.
So it wasn't Peggy I was interested in, not her tears, her crumpled looks. She reminded me too much of myself. It was her comforters I marvelled at. How they seemed to bow down and declare themselves in front of her.
What had they been saying? Nothing in particular. All right, they said. It's all right, Peggy, they said. Now, Peggy. All right. All right.
Such kindness. That anybody could be so kind.
It is true that these young men, brought to our country to train for bombing missions on which so many of them would be killed, might have been speaking in the normal accents of Cornwall or Kent or Hull or Scotland. But to me they seemed to be unable to open their mouths without uttering some kind of blessing, a blessing on the moment. It didn't occur to me that their futures were all bound up with disaster, or that their ordinary lives had flown out the window and been smashed on the ground. I just thought of the blessing, how wonderful to get on the receiving end of it, how strangely lucky and undeserving was that Peggy.
And, for I don't know how long, I thought of them. In the cold dark of my bedroom they rocked me to sleep. I could turn them on, summon up their faces and their voices—but oh, far more, their voices were now directed to myself and not to any unnecessary third party. Their hands blessed my own skinny thighs and their voices assured me that I, too, was worthy of love.
And while they still inhabited my not yet quite erotic fantasies they were gone. Some, many, gone for good.
Taken from 'Dear Life' by Alice Munro
Canadian writer and Nobel Prize winner


[Infographic] Is Your Website Stuck In The Slow Lane?
We've been talking a lot recently about how consumer expectations are changing. Primarily due to mash-ups, partnerships, and technology which are enabling previously unrealistic products and services.
I saw a brilliant example of this happening last weekend which really encapsulated how a range of consumer behaviours/traits have evolved. But also how these changes are affecting our expectations across the board with all companies we choose to use.
Last weekend Uber ran a lovely little PR campaign. They offered a real 5ft Christmas tree for just £10 (around £20-£40 under the price of the tree alone) with delivery to your door in around 10 minutes. WOW.
I've never had a real Christmas tree. I don't own a car (I live in a flat in Manchester city centre) and I don't own a single Christmas tree decoration. But this offer was too good to pass up and more than anything, I wanted to see what happened when I tapped the button. I didn't even really want a Christmas tree but as the saying goes, 'curiosity killed the cat', which is ironic considering we found out that Christmas tree's are toxic to cats and my mog is a tree eating maniac! (He's fine – no cats were harmed in the writing of this post).
After a bit of back and fourth about whether we should get one, I swiped to "trees" and requested it. I became overwhelmed with Christmas spirit, which for those who know me, is unusual. At the time of ordering I was unashamedly still in my PJs and in the time it took me to throw on some clothes my Uber delivery was outside! My husband and I were really chuffed and told everyone we knew about our Uber Christmas tree because who wouldn't get excited about getting a beautiful tree delivered to your door in 10 minutes! Pretty cool.
This got me thinking about how my expectations of companies has changed and continues to change everyday with experiences like this. Here are a few themes I've noticed and some tips on how to keep up with such rapidly changing expectations.
We've probably all experienced getting nowhere when something goes wrong. We've all called a customer services line and been put on hold for 20 minutes before speaking to someone. But things have changed; savvy consumers know that through the likes of Twitter, most companies aim to respond to complaints within minutes (AO.com aim to respond within 10 minutes!).
But it's not just the response times that have changed; through social media channels, we've been "rewarded" for complaining making us more likely to complain. Companies are more likely to react favourably and go further to please us when were tweeting publicly about being unhappy. Despite the Uber Christmas tree being a limited promotion, there were quite a few angry tweets aimed at Uber over the weekend when people weren't able to get a tree. In the past, I don't think I would have spent 20 minutes on the phone to their customer services department to complain (rather unfairly) that I didn't get one of their promotional items. Today however, sending a tweet to Uber with the likelihood they will go above and beyond to get me a tree and turn my vocal unhappiness into happiness, is something I'm more likely to try.
Outside of the Uber example, consumers are learning new behaviours from the way we build marketing campaigns online. The above advert from Barclays even recommends not purchasing items you've added to your basket as a lot of retailers have re-marketing campaigns which offer a discount to those who have left the site with items still in their basket. Again, changing the way we shop online.
Top Tip: Ensure everything you do is transparent. In the Uber example, being clearer upfront on the number of trees available on the promotion with a live counter to show how many were left as they were delivered, could have helped to prevent the frustrated backlash. Also, don't think your consumers are stupid – be careful how you incentivise and reward certain behaviours – make sure it's a behaviour you want to encourage.
Putting aside the PR issues Uber has had, for the majority of it's unwitting users Uber is creating great brand experiences, things we can connect with, traits we want to be aligned with. Fans.
Consider this for a moment; when was the last time you loved a taxi company? You might have liked the odd driver and thought they offered a good service, but did you talk about it down the pub and show your friends? That's because Uber isn't a taxi company. Its brand and marketing make it more than that. As one tweeter above said – it's a great lifestyle app.
Top tip: To survive in 2016 (no matter what your business is), think about how you can enrich your customers lives. Provide memorable experiences. Don't just offer them what they want; go above and beyond what they expect from you. Think: Mini, AO.com, Innocent Smoothies, Ocado etc.
If I can get a Christmas tree delivered to my front door in under 10 minutes, why do I have to wait 9 weeks for my sofa to be delivered from a warehouse in Birmingham?
An interesting study from Uber themselves shows that in cities where Uber has been, people have become less patient when ordering taxi's. Uber is actually shifting our tolerance and expectations about how long is "too long"; a worrying trend for any business who delivers their products to consumers. Amazon itself has taken notice, spurring on their advancements to make deliveries even quicker with a range of trials from drones to paying ordinary people to deliver packages.
But it's not just Amazon and Uber leading the way. High street retailers are also forging ahead, with Schuh having 13 different delivery options (including Sunday deliveries), one hour buy and collect and 90 minutes shutl delivery. AO.com offer next day delivery on over 3500 products up until midnight the day before.
Yes, Uber Chopper is what you think it is. A helicopter transport service as an alternative to your UberX and XL (currently available in Dubai). For a lot of businesses, innovations are limited by short-sightedness. "How could we ever do that?", "that will never scale!", "how could we make money doing that?!" I've seen it and heard it a hundred times. I think these were probably the damning words from the blockbuster execs. Don't be limited by what you think is possible and don't think about it in isolation of your current market.
Top Tip: Got a great new idea for a product extension or service? Get something spun up quickly and then use A/B testing to gauge your consumers appetite and validate your idea before investing any capital into it. This way you'll be able to get a business case behind your idea as well as feedback from your customers as to whether it works for them or how you could improve it.
We recently recorded two webinars with our testing tool partner Qubit around the #TheExpectationEconomy which go into more detail about the subjects above. The first webinar discusses the state of expectations in this new economy & the consumer psychology behind it (here) and the second discusses what strategies businesses can implement to be successful (here).


"There's no better feeling in the world than a warm pizza box on your lap", a quote once said by Kevin, an American actor and politician.
But what if that pizza is 'cold'? Will that turn your best feeling into worst?
This incident which took place in Kharar, a district in the state of Punjab, will give answers to all the above questions.
According to police, a law student staying on rent in Desumjara, Kharar had ordered one bread cheese dip and two pizzas from Dominos in Kharar's Gilco Valley.
20 minutes later, the pizza was delivered.
The student is identified as Sanam Setia, who refused to make payment, fell in an argument with the delivery boy Saheb Singh, claiming that the pizza was 'cold'.
Setia made the delivery boy call his manager Jasbir Singh and abused him.
When Jasbir along with two other staff members reached Setia's house, he misbehaved with them too.
In the heat of moment, Setia got his licensed revolver from his house and fired shot at Jasbir and his colleagues.
Luckily, they escaped unharmed and called the police.
Taking a quick action, police registered the case under section 307 of IPC and various sections of Arms Act in Kharar police station (sadar).
Khaira Ji To Now Break Ties With BSPA Too? Honor Sacrifice?


text:
Author: Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich
Dr. Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich is a political scientist, public policy specialist and award-winning journalist. She served as the Deputy Mayor of Philadelphia, Commissioner of Housing for New York, Executive Director and COO of the National Black Leadership Forum, a tenured Professor at several distinguished universities and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, where she oversaw the creation of America's first National Urban Policy. She earned her Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich
My grandfather was certainly a card-carrying feminist and an early consciousness-raiser. His writing in the 1890's focused on the importance of women and their accomplishments—and my family is committed to keeping his book, Women of Distinction, in present mind.
Extolling and Expanding Our Icons: A Primer on Black Women's Political Leadership
Black women icons, many of them now in a shared state of permanent repose, still serve as models for those of us who remain—but we must publicly and repeatedly acknowledge additions to this expanding reservoir of talented, dynamic, dedicated black women who now are leaders in their own right, and have added strength to our country and our communities.


Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy song download 320kbps, A Single track from Punjabi genre sung By R Nait Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy mp3 download. Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song 2018 R Nait Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait status Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy by R Nait. Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new Av Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait status Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy by R Nait. Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new song Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new song thuglife R Nait new song 2018. Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy New song Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new song 2018. Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait full.
Tags: Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait download Mp3 Song , Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy Single Track , download free Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy Track, R Nait Top Songs , R Nait New Song Download - DJJOhAL.Co.In. Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song download, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy djjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song djjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait, R Nait Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy latest song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy mp3 song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait, R Nait Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy song download, single track Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy by R Nait, R Nait new song Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy, djjohal Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy status video, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait video song, R Nait new song, R Nait status video Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mp3 song, R Nait mp3 download Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mp3 song download, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait full song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait best song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait 320 kbps song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait 128 kbps song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait 48 kbps song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait free download mp3, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait djjohal.co.in, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait djjohal.com, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mr-johal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mrjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait dj johal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait djjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song download mp3, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait download Mp3 Song , Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy Single Track , download free Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy Track, R Nait Top Songs , R Nait New Song Download - DJJOhAL.Co.In. Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song download, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy djjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song djjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait, R Nait Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy latest song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy mp3 song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait, R Nait Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy song download, single track Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy by R Nait, R Nait new song Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy, djjohal Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy status video, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait video song, R Nait new song, R Nait status video Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mp3 song, R Nait mp3 download Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mp3 song download, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait new song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait full song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait best song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait 320 kbps song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait 128 kbps song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait 48 kbps song, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait free download mp3, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait djjohal.co.in, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait djjohal.com, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mr-johal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait mrjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait dj johal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait djjohal, Tera Pind Ft. Pavvy R Nait song download mp3.


The congregation was predominately Gentile, but they have been taught by some Jewish Christians that they must first conform to the Jewish law if they are ever to be "real Christians." There were probably some dietary restrictions but the primary area of conflict was over circumcision. Paul never says who these missionaries were, but he rails against their teachings. And that is the substance of the letter, that what these Jewish Christians were teaching was false. Paul attacks them with emotion and intensity not really seen anywhere else in his writings.
He is trying to remind the Galatians of the supreme authority of the gospel of grace. He tells them they don't need to add anything to grace – that, in fact, if they do try to add anything to it, they are demeaning it. He reminds them what that grace has bestowed upon them – heritage and freedom – and goes on to explain what both of those things mean.
The false teachers are not trying to demean grace; they are trying to prepare the people to receive that blessing through the discipline of Jewish law. Paul makes the point over and over that they don't need to do anything else to receive the grace of God once they have committed themselves to Christ. By accepting the teachings of the false prophets, they would be trying to substitute their works for the commitment of faith. That is the only response to the acceptance of grace, to have faith and allow that faith to guide you. Grace > Faith > Love. That's how it works.
Galatians is unique in the fact that it skips the usual pleasantries. The situation is distressing, and Paul wastes no time trying to set it straight. He starts right out by describing his amazement that the Galatians have fallen from faith so quickly.
Those must have been harsh words for the Galatians to hear. They'd been trying to do what they thought would make their community more special. Then Paul's letter arrives telling them that everything they were doing in an attempt to justify themselves to God was actually demeaning Christ's sacrifice. You are failing to grasp the fact, Paul tries to explain to them, that Christ died for their sins – thereby eliminating the need for us to do these other things in order to justify ourselves before God.
Paul moves from that intro to the main body of the letter quickly. What seems to be a harmless addition is in truth a total distortion of the message. There can only be one Gospel, and that bears witness to the love of Christ. It is nothing but an invitation to experience the grace brought to us by his dedication. Christ died for us, as Paul says repeatedly. We don't have to do anything; in fact we can't do anything that would make that more special than it already is. The Gospel is more than a set of propositions; it is a description of the divine activity by which people are drawn into the realm of God's grace.
Paul gives a brief description of his background, probably not for the first time, and how he came to be an apostle. He talks about the conflicts he had on his way, including those with Peter and James. He does this to establish for them, once again, his authority to speak on this topic. Paul is not interested in comparing his office to that of Peter and James, because they don't have the power to grant that office. That comes from Christ Jesus alone. Paul is more concerned about the unity of the church than he is about who is a better apostle. The function of an apostle is not to interpret the doctrine of the church, but to preach the gospel. And that, above all, is what he is doing.
He makes the case that in his world, before he became a follower of Christ, he was a good upstanding man. We often tend to look at what he is doing now as atonement for his previous persecution of the early Christians. But Paul never sees it like that. He says that he had made serious progress in his previous life, and was moved by his deep convictions to do what he did. But then Christ came into his life and showed him the error of his ways, not to heap guilt upon him but to help him to see that he was on the wrong path, and how to get on the right one.
It is that experience Paul is trying to share with the Galatians. It was not his decision to become an apostle, but God's decision made for him. God's voice called him and set him on a new path. It gave him direction and purpose, and provided him with enormous support for doing what needed to be done. Over and over he tries to make the point that such decisions don't really belong to the person, but to God who calls that person.
Paul's conversion and his commission was not a two-step process; it was one event. His response to that calling can often be confused as his labor and his effort. It is not Paul's effort that shows forth; it is Christ's love shining through to the world. He says the love manifest in him is the love that comes from the one true God, the God of Israel, but the experience of that love has been eternally changed by the experience of Jesus.
Paul talks about his visit to Jerusalem for a specific purpose. He wants to establish that the apostles there did not grant him the authority to go preach the gospel. That came from Christ alone. That is the only place that it can come from. Hence they have no authority to direct his mission or to tell him what to say.
Struggles with the Jewish/Gentile problem at the time were straining the church to the breaking point. Paul uses this section of the letter to outline the reasons for his trip – namely, that he was not called to justify himself to the leaders in Jerusalem and that his authority comes by revelation. That is why he makes so much of the conflicts with Peter; he is making the case for the authority of revelation.
Titus, his companion, does not need to be circumcised any more than do any of the Galatians in order to receive the blessings of grace. Paul's point is that the church is built on the gospel of grace, not on acts by man. In spite of anything the Jewish Christians are trying to teach the Galatians, everyone is acceptable in the sight of God. This is the great difference Between Paul's message and that coming from Jerusalem. The uniformity comes in a like perception of morals, styles of life, and conduct that comes in response to the gift of grace.
Grace pushes Christians towards unity, not away from it, because it joins people, not to each other, but to Christ. Yes, disagreements must be explored in order to find the path to walk. That's how Christians unify themselves, by exploring all those other approaches that seem so inviting but holding on to each other while they explore the excesses that they can lead to.
Unity is discovered in the context of mission. It involves mutuality and participation. You can't go do this on your own. It is not to be confused with tolerance of or indifference, to the absence of strife. It is about embracing the process that leads to a further understanding of how God works in the world.
It is important for us to see that even in the early church conflicts existed, and that through those conflicts the early Christians learned the mission that Christ would have them fulfill. That is true both for them in their time and for us in ours.
The Galatians have fallen into the trap of letting other people define for them who they are, and what they are to be. Paul says that to follow those who are insisting on circumcision would be "upokrisis," usually translated as hypocrisy but which really means a "defiance of God." What causes him the most concern is that these people, Peter among them, are sincere in their teachings. But in their sincerity, they are blind to the results of their teachings. The Galatians need to remember that, in the end, they are not accountable to the people in Jerusalem but to God. Paul would never agree to unity for the sake of unity. He would never compromise the Gospel just to have a nice, peaceful church. People need to be in a right relationship with Jesus Christ, which is the bottom line. Jesus' death becomes the model of the life that Christians need to follow.
Paul holds before them the dichotomy of "works of the Law" and "faith in Christ." Works of the law, he states, require no faith, just conformity and obedience. Faith in Christ requires a commitment to follow into places that are not clearly defined. A much harder thing to do. The only way to obtain salvation is through God's grace, and that experience is only had through faith. Salvation through works is an insidious form of idolatry. It counts on the strength of the person, rather than dependence upon the strength of God. They become, in a strange sort of way, their own god.
Faith is the response of people to the gift of grace from God. It is not something that the person owns or can be seen as a means of status in the church. Faith is not a form of self-justification; it is a humble acceptance that you can't do a darn thing to ensure your own salvation. Faith is not a reliance on one's accomplishments or on one's lack of accomplishments. It is an experience of trusting in the accomplishments of God.
How can I, a sinful person, find acceptance in the eyes of a holy God? Only through the experience of Christ Jesus. But that answer is a two-edged sword, because it extends His grace to all, even to those we don't think should get it. Paul says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female. We are all one in Christ Jesus – which also means this is never a solo performance. All of us are dependent upon each other to see our common dependence upon the Lord.
The gifts of righteousness can never be separated from the Giver. And in order to accept this gift, we must be willing to follow the path that Christ lays before us, a path that will inevitably lead towards the cross. There is no triumph in that, that is soteriology, how God saves us. We are saved not by our efforts, but through the kindness of God.