text:
A centre outside the city centre
Residence archive
many possible cities
BowLand live
Sun 07 July 2019
bowland
The main entrance for events is via delle Cascine, 33
Sunday 7 july sees the arrival at Manifattura Tabacchi of BowLand, the Iranian-Florentine trip-hop group which brings together elements of found sound and ethereal vocals, all backed up by rich rhythmical grooves.
BowLand is a musical project that was founded in Florence by three friends who all grew up in Tehran whilst also taking in musical influences from the West. Lei Low, Pejman Fa and Saeed Aman have carved out their own musical space in which fluctuating atmospheres and unusual sounds meld with ethereal vocals and rhythmic grooves, a dreamworld they somehow arrived at without planning to.
The band's first album, Floating Trip, was released in 2017, bringing together their artistic influences such as Gorillaz, Portishead, CocoRosie and Nicloas Jaar. The album featured tracks in which the lyrics came about as a direct consequence of the music, and which showed their middle-eastern roots without drifting into forced stereotypes.
In 2018 the group made the final of X-Factor Italia and in December they released the EP Bubble of Dreams, preceded by the single Don't Stop Me, an original track from BowLand that was produced by Pino "Pinaxa" Pischetola.
Lei Low: lyrics, vocals
Pejman Fa: didgeridoo, mouth harp, kalimba, beatboxing, percussion, vocals
Saeed Aman: guitars, synths, percussion
The concert from BowLand will take place during the second edition of Many Possible Cities, a series of talks and workshops at Manifattura Tabacchi revolving around ideas on urban regeneration and how multifunctional spaces and fluid communities can create cultural, economic and social capital.
Tickets will only be on sale at Manifattura Tabacchi on the night of the concert, the ticket office will be open from 7pm to 10pm.
Thu 27 February 2020
In order to facilitate the real estate redevelopment of the complex which housed Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence, a joint venture was established between the Cassa depositi e prestiti Group, through its subsidiary Cdp Immobiliare, and Aermont Group, an independent investment management fund which specialises in real estate and real estate related activities, and which is responsible for overseeing the development.
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Dsgn & Dvlpmnt Lcd / Firenze


Er zou meer onderzoek moeten worden gedaan naar taalgebruik in brieven ("There ought to be more research into the language of letters").
I wrote this in 1987: now, twenty-five years later, much research has indeed been done, and this blog will present that research but also show what more research can be done. First, to make a start, invitations are out for people to send information on publications that they have, so that between us we can compile a good working bibliography on the subject. So: please feel free to get in touch via this blog.
Source of the image: google books.
This entry was posted in 18th-century letters, 19th-century letters and tagged periphrastic do. Bookmark the permalink.


text:
Papis to replace injured Gil de Ferran for IRL's season-ending Chevy 500
Veteran open-wheel driver Max Papis will replace the injured Gil de Ferran with Marlboro Team Penske in the season-ending Chevy 500 on Sept. 15 at Texas Motor Speedway, Penske Racing, Inc. officials said Sept. 10.
Papis will drive the No. 6 Marlboro Team Penske Dallara/Chevrolet/Firestone as a teammate to Indy Racing League championship contender and two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves. de Ferran, third in IRL points, suffered injuries in a crash during the Delphi Indy 300 on Sept. 8 at Chicagoland Speedway and was not cleared to drive at Texas by Dr. Henry Bock, Indy Racing League director of medical services.
"Obviously, I am extremely disappointed that I will be unable to fight for our third consecutive championship," said de Ferran, who won CART titles in 2000 and 2001. "I respect Dr. Bock's decision and want to thank the medical staffs of the Indy Racing League, Chicagoland Speedway and St. James Hospital in Olympia Fields, Ill. I was in good hands throughout this difficult process.
"I sincerely wish that my teammate Helio Castroneves can bring the championship home for Marlboro Team Penske, and I'm sure that Max Papis will do a good job for our team."
Said Tim Cindric, Penske Racing president: "We understand that Dr. Bock's decision was made for the right reasons. We are also quite fortunate that a driver of Max's caliber was available under these circumstances. Although we share Gil's disappointment in not being able to compete for the 2002 IRL championship, ultimately Gil's health and well being is our primary concern."
This season Papis has competed in the Indianapolis 500, the CART series and was a winning driver in the Rolex 24 at Daytona. In his six-year open-wheel career, Papis has compiled three wins, two pole positions and 11 top-three finishes.
"I am extremely disappointed for Gil that he cannot continue his battle for the championship," Papis said. "But it will be an honor for me to represent Marlboro Team Penske and (team owner) Roger (Penske) at Texas Motor Speedway this weekend. I look forward to working with Philip Morris again as they have supported me through various stages of my career, including Formula 3 and CART."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


You are allowed to bring a MAXIMUM of 6 (six) guests with you for a PRIVATE civil ceremony.
The fee for a PRIVATE civil ceremony is $150.00 (includes our witnesses).
These ceremonies are ONLY performed at our Downtown Detroit Office.
If you call ahead and make an appointment, please have your ENTIRE PARTY PRESENT at your designated time, or you will have to wait until another opening is available.
To make an appointment, please call (313) 224-4680.
Walk-in PRIVATE civil ceremonies are offered Monday through Friday from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. Please DO NOT arrive ANY LATER THAN 2:15 PM if you would like to participate in a walk-in PRIVATE civil ceremony.
You are allowed to bring a MAXIMUM of 4 (four) guests with you for a MASS civil ceremony.
The fee for a MASS civil ceremony is $100.00 (includes our witnesses).
You must arrive or register by 1:00 PM on Friday to participate in a MASS civil ceremony.
Your ENTIRE PARTY must be PRESENT by 1:00 PM in order to get married during a MASS civil ceremony.
Please call (313) 224-4680 with any further questions.


No matter how shiny and safe a city gets, no matter how high its housing prices climb, how fast its crime rates fall and how many of its corner stores are turned into buzz-before-entering boutiques dedicated to clothing the "urban baby" or are replaced by franchised coffee shops with WiFi hot spots for laptop-toting Beat poets, there is one sort of room at the city's very core whose design schemes rarely shift upscale and whose typical occupants — be they real or fictional — resist much gentrification of the soul, let alone beautification of the hair. The walls of such rooms are dull, their lights are harsh, and hunkered down in most of them are a jittery suspect and two clever cops, one of whom tends to act hostile and volatile, the other one solicitous and calm. Over this trio hangs a plain round clock.
Sometimes the hands move slowly, sometimes swiftly, but when they're controlled by a serious storyteller, they always tell the same time: too late, too late. That's the lesson of these ugly pens. A case may be cracked and the motives behind it exposed, but the greater mysteries always go unsolved: what good are answers when what's done is done and something just like it, or worse, will happen tomorrow?
In "Lush Life," Richard Price's eighth novel, the resurfacing project that caps the same old potholes (and threatens to collapse in certain areas, potentially creating immense new craters capable of swallowing small crowds) targets the tangled, once tenement-lined streets of New York City's Lower East Side. In Realtor-speak, the district is "in transition," which means in Police Department terms that its college-educated young renting class and bonus-gorged co-op-owning elite can still score narcotics from the old-guard locals, whose complexions are generally darker than the new folks', making them easy to spot on party nights but tricky to ID in photo lineups come the red-eyed mornings after. Keeping such bloody collisions of class and color to an acceptably inconspicuous minimum is the job of the so-called quality-of-life squads that Price — a consummate stalker-realist who seems to have written the book from stoops and doorways; his gaze is that pathologically focused, his ear that tuned — portrays as a nincompoop nouvelle constabulary whose stakeouts are so light on lock-and-load moments they'd put even the Hardy Boys to sleep. Down on newly hip Orchard and Eldridge Streets, among the exclusive no-signage clubs and Zagat-rated fusion eateries, what was once an authentic urban jungle has almost themed itself out of existence, turning a lot of the cops into park rangers.
But once in a while the cooped-up cats still pounce, tempted by so much slow-moving, pampered prey, all sodden with money and novelty martinis. The lights go on in Price's interrogation room after just such an ambush.
The victim — the one who lives — is Eric Cash, in his own mind an emerging writer but known to the world as a veteran restaurant manager. In his mid-30s, the descendant of Jewish ghetto-dwellers who lived and died on the same city blocks where Eric is riding out his undiscovered phase along with 20,000 other tip-dependent would-be screenwriters, he heads out one night with two pals into the Disneyhood and suddenly finds himself in Scorceseland. A gun comes out, a brown finger on its trigger, and the next thing Eric knows he's in the ugly room recounting the mugging and murder of his friend Ike to a female officer, Yolanda, and a more traditionally male and Irish fellow, Matty Clark. Eric thinks he's a witness but really he's a suspect, and Price provides the taut, triangular dialogue, which at first sounds a bit like standard noir talk (Price writes for the cable crime drama "The Wire") but soon grows bushier, thornier and taller in a way the screen can't quite contain because of its horizontal orientation but which fits with the verticality of the page and sometimes, as the book goes on, climbs clean off it and up into the sky.
Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price's skull, as well he should be, given such gloomy doings, but in the enormous, cross-sensory architecture of the last three words above, one detects Saul Bellow's vision, too. Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the Masonic keystone of his novel is a box-shaped N.Y.P.D. office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn't just present a slice of life, he piles life high and deep. Time too. The past is rendered mostly as an absence, though, as a set of caverns, a hive of catacombs. Some of his characters' ancestors are down there, but the main way we know this is through the hollowness of the new neighborhood built over their crypts.
Should it even be called a neighborhood now? Price asks. That's the grand question the book sets out to answer by way of a thousand other tiny questions about who did it; who saw it; why it happened; and whether — in the case of Ike's stricken, delirious father, who is the novel's master character even if he doesn't dominate its stage — its human consequences can be endured.
For quite a while the answer is "no"; the Lower East Side is a real estate designation, an emotionally vacant quality-of-life zone that used to be woven together by kinship ties, religious, racial and familial, which have since been dissolved by the acids of selfishness. That's been the true transition in the precinct, from an ethic of mutual survival to an obsession with personal enjoyment. The delinquents from the projects, the crooks and the perps are more durably unified, one feels at times, than the unattached brats whom they pick off one by one as these slummers vomit $12 cocktails into the gutters after nights out with friends they met only yesterday and who moved into town only the week before.
Tentatively and gradually, however, fragile, improvised bonds begin developing like laundry lines strung between apartment windowsills. Catalyzed by a miniature crisis that means nothing in the scope of history but everything down on the sidewalks and the streets, detectives align themselves with victims' families, freed suspects with the officials who once suspected them, managers with the workers whose tips they skim. The transient, self-serving affinities that pass for affection just before the bars close and the showy displays of grief that intensify when the media are around melt and trickle away over the curbs, where they're splashed into vapor by the trucks and cars supplying the place with its goodies and its shoppers. There's an orthodox leftist sentimentality here mixed up with a certain primal conservative yearning, but they react in solution toward the end to form a raw and slightly unstable new compound that Price isn't shy about valuing higher than mere gold — which, despite its shiny, alluring heft, ultimately weighs us down until we can only stand in place, envious, anxious, cocky and alone.
455 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.


Showing results for tags 'winter training'.
It's December the 28th today and many are going to set their New Year resolutions, which I'm not a great fan of, but I've prepared a series of training sessions for anyone, who wants to get into a great shape throughout the winter. The series starts with the workouts for newbies and will get more advanced as we move on from week to week. CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN BEFORE ATTEMPTING ANY INTENSIVE WORKOUTS! Workout 1/1 preparing and organizing your training space, getting to know your turbo trainer - changing the resistance vs changing the gears, inertia, cadence - leg speed, position on the bike. Workout 1/2 preparing for the FTP test (Functional Treshold Power), PACING - crucial part of an successful test, learning to slightly change the cadence. Workout 1/3 FTP test - 20 minutes, how to use power meter, heart rate monitor or just a speed sensor for the test, estimating your training zones: https://datacranker.com/cycling-power-zones/ Workout 1/4 riding through 6 training zones, intervals examples.


Our REST API exposes the metadata that members provide Crossref when they register their content with us. And it's not just the bibliographic metadata either. Funding data, license information, full-text links, ORCID iDs, abstracts, and Crossmark updates, are all available, if included in members' metadata.
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Search, facet, filter or sample metadata from thousands of members via our REST API. The information is continually updated as members update and add to their metadata with us. The REST API helps unlock the value behind the information members are depositing, by making it available to query easily and to integrate into other tools and services.
No sign-up is required to use the REST API, and the data can be treated as facts from members. Therefore it is not subject to copyright and available to use for whatever purpose you may have.
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If you develop headaches before a big storm or when flying, these headaches might be due to barometric pressure. Although they're caused by a dramatic change in the air pressure around you, you can treat a barometric pressure headache like other types of headaches. Take and over-the-counter medication or use a natural treatment to manage your pain. To prevent future barometric pressure headaches, become aware of air pressure changes and make simple lifestyle adjustments.
Take over-the-counter (OTC) medications. You can buy several kinds of medication from your local pharmacy to treat your barometric pressure headache. Try OTC non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs) such as aspirin or ibuprofen. You can also take OTC pain relievers such as acetaminophen.
Follow the manufacturer's dosing instructions.
For barometric pressure migraines, take an OTC combination medication designed specifically for migraines. Migraines usually start with aura and cause severe throbbing pain.
Spread an analgesic product over painful areas. Because severe headaches can slow down your digestion, it may take longer than usual for oral medications such as ibuprofen or aspirin to begin working. For faster pain relief, buy analgesic cream or gel. Follow the product instructions to spread the analgesic on your temples, neck, head, or forehead.
You can also try nasal sprays that contain capsaicin as long as you follow the product instructions carefully. Studies have shown that this treatment quickly relieves severe headaches.
You can purchase a natural topical pain reliever, such as a product that contains capsaicin.
Use anti-nausea medication. If your headache makes you nauseous and you can't keep your pain relievers down, consider taking anti-nausea medication. This will prevent you from vomiting so that oral pain relievers can work faster to relieve your headache.
You can stagger your treatments. For example, take the anti-nausea medication 15 minutes before taking the OTC pain relievers.
Give yourself a cranial massage. Massaging your head may help to relieve your headache by easing the tension in the muscles and improving cranial blood flow. Regular massages may even reduce the frequency of your headaches within 1 week.
If you suffer from regular barometric pressure headaches, then giving yourself a daily cranial massage may be a good idea.
Inhale the scent of peppermint. Try applying a few drops of peppermint oil to your temples and wrists, and then breathe deeply. The scent of the peppermint may help to ease your headache. You may notice that the intensity of the headache decreases within 15 minutes of applying the oil.
Apply an ice pack to your head or neck. Get quick pain relief by wrapping a cloth or towel around an ice pack. Hold the wrapped pack over the part of your head that's throbbing or aching. Keep the pack on your head for 20 minutes.
Reapply the ice pack throughout the day if your headache returns.
Take a warm bath or shower. Some people find that relaxing in warm water can relieve the pain of a barometric pressure headache. If you prefer, use hot water since the steam may help open your sinuses.
Soak or shower for as long as it's comfortable.
Eliminate gluten from your diet. Undiagnosed celiac disease may cause severe headaches or migraines. If you want to know for sure if this might be contributing to your headaches, you will need to get tested for the condition by your doctor. If that is the case, then eliminating gluten from your diet may help to prevent your headaches.
Even if you do not have celiac disease, a gluten sensitivity may cause you to experience headaches as a result of consuming gluten.
Take a vitamin B-complex. B vitamins may help to reduce the effects of stress, which may include preventing headaches. Try taking a daily B-complex multivitamin to see if this helps to reduce the number and intensity of your barometric pressure headaches.
Buy a barometer to monitor changes in air pressure. Purchase a small barometer that you can install at home. Pay attention to whether the pressure drops or rises suddenly before you develop a headache. Then in the future, take preventative headache medication at the first sign that the pressure is changing quickly.
Check to see if your cell phone has a barometer app. This can alert you if the pressure begins to rise or drop.
It's also a good idea to watch the weather predictions for pressure changes.
Drink more water than usual. Because dehydration is a common headache trigger and hydration is key in managing a headache, men should drink 15 cups (3,500 ml) of water a day while women should drink 11 cups (2,600 ml).
Staying hydrated is especially important if you notice that increased humidity triggers your headaches.
Avoid glare and sudden changes in lighting. If you've noticed that bright light, glare, or sensitivity to fluorescent lights triggers your headache or makes it worse, pay attention to weather changes. For example, if the weather has been overcast and a bright, sunny day is predicted, be prepared to take medication, stay indoors, or wear sunglasses.
Extreme changes in weather can also bring changes to humidity, pressure, and temperature which can affect your headaches.
Can barometric pressure cause dizziness?
Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 18,103 times.


text:
Share Print Page Options Listen to Ephesians 4:7-16
7 But (A)to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. 8 Therefore He says:
(B)"When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts to men."
9 (C)(Now this, "He ascended"—what does it mean but that He also [a]first descended into the lower parts of the earth? 10 He who descended is also the One (D)who ascended far above all the heavens, (E)that He might fill all things.)
11 And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, 12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, (F)for the [b]edifying of (G)the body of Christ, 13 till we all come to the unity of the faith (H)and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to (I)a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; 14 that we should no longer be (J)children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of (K)deceitful plotting, 15 but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the (L)head—Christ— 16 (M)from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.
Ephesians 4:9 NU omits first
Ephesians 4:12 building up
Ephesians 4:7 : [1 Cor. 12:7, 11]
Ephesians 4:8 : Ps. 68:18; [Col. 2:15]
Ephesians 4:9 : Luke 23:43; John 3:13; 20:17; [1 Pet. 3:19, 20]
Ephesians 4:10 : Acts 1:9
Ephesians 4:10 : [Acts 2:33; Eph. 1:23]
Ephesians 4:12 : 1 Cor. 14:26
Ephesians 4:12 : Col. 1:24
Ephesians 4:13 : Col. 2:2
Ephesians 4:13 : 1 Cor. 14:20; Col. 1:28; Heb. 5:14
Ephesians 4:14 : Rom. 16:18
Ephesians 4:15 : Eph. 1:22
Ephesians 4:16 : [Rom. 12:4]; Col. 2:19
7 However, he has given each one of us a special gift[a] through the generosity of Christ. 8 That is why the Scriptures say,
"When he ascended to the heights,
he led a crowd of captives
and gave gifts to his people."[b]
9 Notice that it says "he ascended." This clearly means that Christ also descended to our lowly world.[c] 10 And the same one who descended is the one who ascended higher than all the heavens, so that he might fill the entire universe with himself.
11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God's people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God's Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.
14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won't be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.
4:7 Greek a grace.
4:8 Ps 68:18.
4:9 Some manuscripts read to the lower parts of the earth.
7 Yet grace [God's undeserved favor] was given to each one of us [not indiscriminately, but in different ways] in proportion to the measure of Christ's [rich and abundant] gift. 8 Therefore it says,
"When He ascended on high,
And He bestowed gifts on men."(A)
9 (Now this expression, "He ascended," what does it mean except that He also had previously descended [from the heights of heaven] into the lower parts of the earth? 10 He who descended is the very same as He who also has ascended high above all the heavens, that He [His presence] might fill all things [that is, the whole universe]). 11 And [His gifts to the church were varied and] He Himself appointed some as apostles [special messengers, representatives], some as prophets [who speak a new message from God to the people], some as evangelists [who spread the good news of salvation], and some as pastors and teachers [to shepherd and guide and instruct], 12 [and He did this] to fully equip and perfect the saints (God's people) for works of service, to build up the body of Christ [the church]; 13 until we all reach oneness in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, [growing spiritually] to become a mature believer, reaching to the measure of the fullness of Christ [manifesting His spiritual completeness and exercising our spiritual gifts in unity]. 14 So that we are no longer children [spiritually immature], tossed back and forth [like ships on a stormy sea] and carried about by every wind of [shifting] doctrine, by the cunning and trickery of [unscrupulous] men, by the deceitful scheming of people ready to do anything [for personal profit]. 15 But speaking the truth in love [in all things—both our speech and our lives expressing His truth], let us grow up in all things into Him [following His example] who is the Head—Christ. 16 From Him the whole body [the church, in all its various parts], joined and knitted firmly together by what every joint supplies, when each part is working properly, causes the body to grow and mature, building itself up [a]in [unselfish] love.
Ephesians 4:16 See note v 2.
Ephesians 4:8 : Ps 68:18
Listen to Ephesians 4:7-16
7 But to each one of us(A) grace(B) has been given(C) as Christ apportioned it. 8 This is why it[a] says:
he took many captives(D)
and gave gifts to his people."[b](E)
9 (What does "he ascended" mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions[c]? 10 He who descended is the very one who ascended(F) higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.)(G) 11 So Christ himself gave(H) the apostles,(I) the prophets,(J) the evangelists,(K) the pastors and teachers,(L) 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ(M) may be built up(N) 13 until we all reach unity(O) in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God(P) and become mature,(Q) attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.(R)
14 Then we will no longer be infants,(S) tossed back and forth by the waves,(T) and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.(U) 15 Instead, speaking the truth in love,(V) we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head,(W) that is, Christ. 16 From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows(X) and builds itself up(Y) in love,(Z) as each part does its work.
Ephesians 4:8 Or God
Ephesians 4:8 Psalm 68:18
Ephesians 4:9 Or the depths of the earth
Ephesians 4:7 : 1Co 12:7, 11
Ephesians 4:7 : S Ro 3:24
Ephesians 4:7 : S Ro 12:3
Ephesians 4:8 : Col 2:15
Ephesians 4:10 : Pr 30:1-4
Ephesians 4:10 : Eph 1:23
Ephesians 4:11 : ver 8
Ephesians 4:11 : 1Co 12:28; Eph 2:20; 3:5; 2Pe 3:2; Jude 17
Ephesians 4:11 : S Ac 11:27; Ro 12:6; 1Co 12:10, 28; 13:2, 8; 14:1, 39; Eph 2:20; 3:5; 2Pe 3:2
Ephesians 4:11 : Ac 21:8; 2Ti 4:5
Ephesians 4:11 : Ac 13:1; Ro 2:21; 12:7; 1Co 12:28; 14:26; 1Ti 1:7; Jas 3:1
Ephesians 4:12 : S 1Co 12:27
Ephesians 4:12 : S Ro 14:19
Ephesians 4:13 : ver 3, 5
Ephesians 4:13 : S Php 3:8
Ephesians 4:13 : S 1Co 2:6; Col 1:28
Ephesians 4:13 : Jn 1:16; Eph 1:23; 3:19
Ephesians 4:14 : Isa 57:20; Jas 1:6
Ephesians 4:15 : ver 2, 16; Eph 1:4
Ephesians 4:15 : S Eph 1:22
Ephesians 4:16 : Col 2:19
Ephesians 4:16 : 1Co 12:7
7 But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.
8 Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.
9 (Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?
10 He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.)
11 And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;
12 For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:
13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:
14 That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;
15 But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:
16 From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.


text:
17 April – 23 April: LNA claims it will intensify assault on Tripoli
Apr 23, 2019 | Libyan actors
On 22 April, the Libyan National Army (LNA) spokesman, Ahmed al-Mismari, claimed the LNA would intensify its assault on Tripoli. This statement comes as Government of National Accord (GNA) forces reportedly drove LNA forces back from Ain Zara, a district in south Tripoli which has been at the heart of the fighting. However, the LNA spokesman denied its forces retreated and called upon reservists to open new fronts on the capital.
On 22 April, Government of National Accord (GNA) Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj stated he wouldn't negotiate with Khalifa Haftar until his forces have withdrawn from the capital. In the interview he stated he had a cordial conversation with Haftar days prior to the Libyan National Army (LNA) assault and felt as though he had been stabbed in the back. In the same interview Serraj expressed his concern that the crisis would turn into a proxy war, suggesting foreign backers provide Haftar with weapons and other supplies.


text:
It Doesn't Have To Be Right…
… it just has to sound plausible
by iansales	5 Comments
Anatomy of a Story: A Cold Dish
Back in October 2009, I wrote a piece on my first Euripidean Space story, 'Thicker than Water' – you can find it here. 'A Cold Dish' was the second of my stories set in that universe, and it too was published in Jupiter magazine – in Jupiter 28, April 2010.
'A Cold Dish' is based on the play The Suppliants by Euripides. The play recounts how Theseus approaches the king of Thebes in order to ask for the bodies of the Seven Against Thebes, the seven leaders of an army which failed to invade the city-state. In Ancient Greece, burial rites were very important, and wars fought over dead bodies were not uncommon in the literature of the time. Unfortunately, this plot didn't translate well to my Euripidean Space universe. It wasn't really dramatic enough. Further, the need to bury dead heroes is not a cultural urge which translates to modern Western European culture.
In the universe of my Euripidean Space stories, the Earth has locked itself off behind a firewall for reasons unknown. This has left a number of off-planet settlements – on Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn – struggling to survive. Patrolling the Solar System is an alien sentinel, origin unknown, which appears to exist solely to protect a number of alien artefacts. Unfortunately, these artefacts are not obvious – some of them could be somewhat unusual natural phenomena. In 'Thicker Than Water', for example, the artefact was a sea of buckminsterfullerenes on the moon of Tethys.
I'd already decided what the alien artefact would be in this, my second Euripidean Space story, and that dictated its setting. The Saturnian moon Mimas is sometimes known as the "Deathstar moon" because it features an enormous crater, Herschel, which covers a third of its face – as is obvious from the photo below. Herschel resembles a huge radio-dish, like Arecibo or Jodrell Bank. Identifying the artefact gave me part of the story's plot – the "seven" would attack Mimas to prevent the Mimanteans from experimenting with the artefact. Herschel Crater also gave me the story's title: 'A Cold Dish'.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
But it still wasn't enough. Happily, the title of the story – it was originally only a working title – provided the answer: revenge. Theseus's mission to Mimas would be partly to retrieve the bodies of the dead heroes, but would also be driven by revenge. My Theseus analogue I named Spiro Maris – the Spiro, I suppose, from his adventures in the Labyrinth on Crete. I don't recall why I gave him the family name Maris. The other characters in 'A Cold Dish' also bear names derived from their Greek counterparts. The Seven of Euripides play were Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Hippomedon, Parthenopeus, Polynices, Eteocles and Tydeus. Not all are named in 'A Cold Dish', but of those that are… Capaneus was known for his immense strength, so I called him Armstrong. Amphiarus means "twice-cursed", which became Bimalison. Hippomedon… well, "hippo" is horse, so I named him Steed. The two Foote brothers are so named because their father was Oedipus, or "swollen-footed".
As an example of "just enough information": in 'Thicker Than Water', I'd named the settlement Torus for its carousel living-quarters. This phonetically aped Tauris, the name of the city where the Euripides' play I'd based the story on had taken place. I felt I needed something similar for 'A Cold Dish'. The Suppliants takes place in Thebes, but I couldn't find any reference to the name's meaning. So I decided to use the name as is for the Mimantean settlement. But I called it The BES, without actually bothering to work out what the acronym meant. The Built Environment System? It didn't really matter.
As for "too much information". I realised I didn't know how large Saturn would appear in the Mimantean sky. The moon orbits at a mean distance of 185,520 kilometres, so I suppose I could work it out. Or I could finesse it, of course, and simply not mention it. But it felt like a useful detail. Instead, I went hunting on the internet, and on the JPL-NASA website found this:
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
The webpage here contains a number of artist's impressions of the surfaces of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
I had a plot, a cast and a location. Now I needed an opening. I had this image in my head of figures in spacesuits encrusted with ice, so that's what I used. Maris is inspecting the frozen bodies of the Seven, and then returns to the BES to negotiate with the Mimanteans. The rest of the story more or less wrote itself. I needed a Greek chorus. In 'Thicker Than Water', I'd used Saturn's radio noise, but I wanted something different. So I decided to have all voice communication in the BES broadcast throughout the settlement. That allowed me to insert the grieving mothers, who provide the chorus in Euripides' play, into the story and, as a bonus, gave me some pointers to the character of the Mimanteans. I also managed to include a reference to Theseus's boat (also known as Granny's broom).
The more I read up on the Ancient Greek characters on whom I was basing my cast, the more information I could insert into the story regarding their backgrounds. For each of the Greek city-states, I picked a moon: Athens became Rhea, Troy is Iapetus, Sparta is Hyperion, for example. Likewise with the personalities from the myths: Oedipus I renamed Rex Foote, Agamemnon is Stanovsky, Helen of Troy is, er, Helen Bright, Paris is Alexander Lek… Some of these may well make appearances in other Euripidean Space stories.
Some might say I've put far too much into 'A Cold Dish'. All the references to Euripides' play and Greek myths, which most readers won't actually spot, some might consider those irrelevant in "a fun pure SF piece" (as Rich Horton described it on sfsite.com). But I believe stories should be more than just "fun". I'd like to think there's plenty to unpack in my stories, not just what appears on the surface. I feel that enriches the reading experience.
Categories: my fiction, science fiction, short stories, writing | Permalink.
by iansales	19 Comments
A literature of ideas
They say science fiction is the literature of ideas. They say every science fiction text is about two dates: the date it is set, and the date it was written.
Yet when discussing a science fiction text, it is generally the "big themes" which are addressed: identity, the survival of the human race, the invasiveness or pervasiveness of technology in society, the nature of the physical universe, etc… While it's true that the concerns and issues of "the date it was written" are typically present, as major themes of a work those concerns are usually sadly lacking. Tackling those issues head-on might well date a novel, although, to be honest, it seems many of the problems affecting modern-day society are, if not perennial, at least recurring. In the relatively short term, that is – say, a few centuries.
So where are the science fiction stories and novels which deal directly with the problems affecting readers today? Why must space operas be based on centuries-old political structures? Why must they refight wars long since lost or won? Why must cyberpunk novels wallow in the economics and geopolitics of the 1980s? Why must hard sf pretend the 1960s has lasted for fifty years? Why must sf ignore existing difficulties and challenges and invent entirely new and irrelevant ones?
I look around and I see that we are failing as a species. We are rendering our planet uninhabitable, and yet are making only token efforts to find solutions. We're not even looking seriously at off-planet as a possible escape route. Thousands of years of civilisation and we have yet to eradicate wars, hunger, poverty, disease, inequality, slavery… Solutions to all these lie within our grasp, but we refuse to do anything about them. Do these not count as "ideas"? Are they not fit subjects for genre fiction?
True, science fiction is neither predictive nor didactic. It has not been since the 1920s, but I sometimes wonder if it needs to be once again. Back then, it was a marketing gimmick, a way of selling the newly-formed genre to readers of electronics and popular science magazines. Now, the genre has grown far too sophisticated for the simplistic agendas of Gernsback and his contemporaries. As a literary mode of fiction, it has evolved a vast repertoire of tropes, an extensive toolkit, and a lexicon that is in many ways peculiar to it. And along with this increase in sophistication has come a shift in viewpoint from the immediate to the abstract.
Abstract commentaries, however, often yield abstract results. Neither prediction nor didactism are useful tools in today's fiction market, but that doesn't mean sf should ignore the immediate. At a time when science itself is coming under attack, perhaps the genre which includes "science" in its name should take up arms once again. I see labels such as "speculative fiction" and "strange fiction", and all I see is a move to define the genre by its aesthetics.
Science fiction is not fiction which incorporates a defined catalogue of tropes. It is not fiction which features science, or which is about science. It is fiction that once battled for science, which was once a soldier in science's army. Science fiction is every mode of fiction, every trope, every writing tool, which was invented in order to win that struggle. And, once upon a time, it fought the good fight, inspiring generations to take up careers in science and engineering – including those who made the Apollo lunar landings a reality. Sadly, it could not sustain the offensive, and the war has long since been lost.
This is not to say the genre is as uniform as the above might suggest. Like any movement which has evolved, which has been in existence for more than eighty years, it is varied and disparate. It is a house of many rooms. And a great many people live in that house.
Not everyone is a spectator. I like to think I've done my bit, that I've contributed something. My story 'Through the Eye of a Needle' was a direct attack on climate-change deniers (see here). My Euripidean Space stories are based on the latest data on the moons of Saturn (see here). My story 'Human Resources' comments on capitalist economics (see here). I wrote a story to celebrate the achievement in 1960 of Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh (see here) – although the story has yet to find a home.
I plan to contribute much more.
Categories: science fiction | Permalink.
by iansales	Leave a comment
Des Lewis has started a "Real Time Review" of the Winter 2010 BFS Journal (see my photos of it here). So far, he's read the first eight stories from New Horizon. Which includes mine, 'Barker' – about which he writes:
"A claustrophobic vision, this time in a punch-drunk comic-strip rocket. Real history and real names in retrocausality. To my hindsight surprise, I enjoyed it thoroughly as a lighter part of these movements in a dark symphony."
I'm not entirely sure what the "dark symphony" is in reference to, but I'll take my compliments where I find them.
Full review here. You'll need to scroll down to see Des's comments on 'Barker'.
Categories: my fiction, science fiction, short stories | Permalink.
Paying the piper
My review of Music for Another World, a themed anthology edited by Mark Harding, is now up at SFF Chronicles here. This is the anthology which contains 'Arrhythmia', Neil Williamson's BSFA Award shortlisted story.
Categories: book review, fantasy, science fiction, short stories | Permalink.
Cor. Swag.
Today, postie brought me the amalgamated British Fantasy Society Journal. The three magazines – Prism, Dark Horizons and New Horizons – are now a single hardback book. And very smart it looks too. See:
And what's this on page 22? Why, it's a story by Yours Truly: 'Barker', an alt history about the Space Race.
And while I'm at it: M-Brane SF Quarterly #1 is also now available in the UK:
With two of my stories in it: 'Through the Eye of a Needle' and 'Human Resources'.
Go on, you know you want a copy…
Women in sf reading challenge #1: The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein
I forget where I first came across mention of The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. It was in the last year or so, although the book was originally published in 1989. I do know that it's not well known in the UK. But whenever, and whatever, I read about it, I decided it might appeal, and so determined to keep my eyes open for a copy. Which I found several months later in a local charity shop.
It is not a book , if I had known nothing of it, that I think I would have looked at twice. Had I not known of it when I found it in that charity shop, I would not have bought it. I'd heard it was quite good – but how often do you hear that about books, which promptly disappoint? I'd heard it read as fantasy but was really science fiction – but there's so much room for manoeuvre in that statement, it's hard to take it as any kind of useful description. Something brought The Steerswoman to my notice, something persuaded me it was worth reading…
And I'm glad I did. The Steerswoman is a gem. It's by no means great literature, but it is most definitely appealing.
Rowan is the steerswoman of the title. Quite what these are, or how they came about, is never fully explained. They travel the land, observing, gathering facts, drawing and redrawing maps. Any one can ask them questions, and they must answer to the best of their ability. Should, however, they ask a question and are refused, then they can ban that person from ever being answered by a steerswoman again. There are, incidentally, steersmen, but they are greatly outnumbered. (In fact, The Steerswoman states there are three during the period the story takes place, and that it's the largest number they've had in the organisation's history.)
While investigating the origin of a strange blue jewel she has found, Rowan comes to the notice of the wizards. She is attacked by one of their soldiers but, with the help of new-found companion, Bel, a barbarian warrior woman from the Outskirts, she fights off the attacker. This only makes her more determined to solve the puzzle presented by the jewel. She returns to the steerswomen's Archive to discuss her problem with her colleagues.
Bel has told her of a large bed of such jewels in the Outskirts. Rowan and Bel head for that bed, in disguise since the wizards are still after Rowan. En route, they are joined by William, a fourteen-year-old boy who has run away from home with the intention of being taken on as an apprentice by a wizard. He has magic of his own – charms which can do everything from crack stone to make things disappear noisily. En route, they are attacked by more soldiers, but win the fight. They trail the surviving soldier to the wizards' keep and infiltrate it. But Rowan is captured, and subsequently learns some of the secrets behind the wizards' powers…
The world The Steerswoman presents is a standard Dark Ages fantasy. People fight with swords, use candles to light their homes, and ride on horses when travelling great distances. There's nothing especially original or distinctive about it. The wizards are not the rulers of the world, but they are an elite who appear to control everything. They are also split into two factions, Red and Blue, who periodically fight each other.
The Steerswoman is cleverly revealed as science fiction as the story progresses (unlike the cover art to the US paperback). There is nothing overt about this. William's "charms", for example, from their description are clearly chemical explosives. The magic lighting in the towns is plainly powered by electricity. The wizards, then, are a technological elite, presenting their science and technology as magic (rather than as, say, divine powers, as in Roger Zelazny's Lord Of Light ).
This slow evolution to science fiction is more subtle and immediate than in Jim Grimsley's Kirith Kirin , which opens up its story's universe in a series of appendices and so becomes almost a space opera; or even the hints dropped regarding the Age of Legends in Robert Jordan's bloated Wheel of Time series.
The Steerswoman is not a novel whose prose shines; but neither does it put a foot wrong. It may resembled some sort of McCaffery sf lite/romance, but it is not in the slightest bit mushy – it features several graphically-described swordfights and a torture scene, for one thing. The protagonists are engaging and the mystery is enticing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Kirstein went on to write three sequels to The Steerswoman : The Outskirter's Secret , The Lost Steersman and The Language of Power . All four are available in an omnibus volume, The Steerswoman's Road . I shall have get me that omnibus volume. (Edit: apparently the omnibus only contains the first two books. Ah well. I shall try to find all three books, then…)
A good start to 2011's reading challenge.
Categories: 2011 reading challenge, book review, science fiction, women in sf | Tags: rosemary kirstein | Permalink.
A short post on the BSFA Award short lists
Yesterday, Torque Control posted the short lists for the BSFA Awards – novel, short fiction, non-fiction, and artwork. Since I'm a member of the British Science Fiction Association, and usually attend the annual Eastercon, they're the only awards in which I have any input. Congrats to all those short-listed.
The Windup Girl , Paolo Bacigalupi (Orbit)
I bought a copy of this last week in Waterstone's 3 for 2, so I fully expect to have read it by Easter.
Zoo City , Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
I've heard this is good; must pick up a copy.
The Restoration Game , Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
My review here.
The Dervish House , Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
Not read this. I was waiting for the paperback, and then I was almost certainly going to buy it.
Lightborn , Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)
Not read this, either.
Best Short Fiction
'Flying in the Face of God', Nina Allen (Interzone 227, TTA Press)
I remember reading this one and… I didn't like it. It was about an astronaut, and the details didn't convince in the slightest. That threw me straight out of the story, and as a result I didn't care about the characters or the relationship between them.
'The Shipmaker', Aliette de Bodard (Interzone 231, TTA Press)
Have yet to read this. Will rectify that this week.
'The Things', Peter Watts (Clarkesworld 40)
This was one of last year's stories in Torque Control's Short Story Club. Most seemed to think it good, but I wasn't so impressed. The conceit just didn't seem strong for a story, and its unremitting grimness struck me as a poor reason to bother trying to write one.
'Arrhythmia', Neil Williamson (Music for Another World, Mutation Press)
The best story in a good anthology. And to my mind the only story which really belongs on this short list.
Best Non-Fiction
Blogging the Hugos: Decline, Paul Kincaid (Big Other)
This series of four articles I read as they were posted, and enjoyed. I also agree with Kincaid's conclusions. And yet… In 2009 Kincaid was short-listed, but did not win, for What it is We Do When We Read Science Fiction , a much more substantial work – in fact, the posts above would likely have been no more than a single essay in that book.
Review: With Both Feet in the Clouds, Abigail Nussbaum (Asking the Wrong Questions Blogspot)
I have not read the book of which this is a review, nor was I especially interested in doing so. I'll read the review now, but only because it has been short-listed. Which sort of misses the point a little…
Review: Wheel of Time, Adam Roberts (Punkadiddle)
Roberts' reviews of eleven books of Jordan's Wheel of Time may well have changed the way many people think about the series. I remember reading the books myself. They were pretty bad – derivative, flabby, badly-written, full of dumb writing tics – but the story pulled you through Jordan's eye-burning prose. I've never really understood the series' great popularity and while Roberts' reviews didn't explain that, they were certainly more entertaining than the books themselves.
Red Plenty , Francis Spufford (Faber and Faber)
I must pick up a copy of this, it does sound as if it would appeal to me.
The Notes from Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K Wolfe
An odd choice – not the podcasts themselves, but a list of the contents of the podcasts. Is that not a bit like nominating the contents page of an anthology?
EDIT: apparently the nomination is for the podcasts themselves, and just wrongly titled to refer to the notes giving their contents. That makes more sense.
Cover for Conflicts, Andy Bigwood (Newcon Press)
Cover for Fun With Rainbows by Gareth Owens, Charlie Harbour (Immersion Press)
Cover for The Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Dominic Harman (Gollancz)
Cover for Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes, Joey Hi-Fi (Angry Robot)
'A Deafened Plea for Peace', cover for Crossed Genres 21, Ben Greene
Cover for Finch by Jeff Vandermeer, Adam Tredowski (Corvus)
And now a few thoughts: the novels show a good spread across the genre. Enough said. The short fiction… two from Interzone, one from an original (small press) anthology, and one from an online magazine. I'd have expected more from online sources. Perhaps BSFA members still prefer printed fiction. Except four of the five non-fiction short list are from the Web. Were there so few works of relevant non-fiction published in 2010 that only online reviews/articles were nominated? I would have expected something more… substantial to have made the cut.
I also think it may be time to limit BSFA nominations to UK-only published works. And perhaps even limit the number of nominations per member. But that's a post for another day…
Categories: 2011 bsfa award | Permalink.
Find Me In…
Postscripts 20/21 Edison's Frankenstein
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Alt Hist
Catastrophia
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Vivisepulture
The Monster Book for Girls
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Because of What Happened
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A la deriva en el mar de las Lluvias y otros relatos
Interzone #262
Ian Sales's 2010s – A Son of the Rock -- Jack Deighton on 100 books, part 5
iansales on Moving pictures 2019, #34
Mark on Moving pictures 2019, #34
Redhead on Best of the year 2019
Scrum_Jet on Best of the year 2019
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In what may not be much of a surprise after the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook's VPN service, Onavo Protect, may be syphoning your data even when it is turned off!
Onavo is an Israeli analytics company that was bought out by Facebook back in October 2013, in turn, this meant that Facebook acquired their VPN service Onavo Protect.
Onavo was initially acquired by Facebook to use their analytics tools to internally monitor competitors and gain insight into possible acquisitions for the social media platform. An example of this is thought to be the acquisition of the huge messaging service, WhatsApp.
What Data is Facebook Syphoning?
Unlike hide.me, Facebook's Onavo Protect keeps all sorts of logs and data when you are using their VPN service. This isn't just connection logs either, Onavo Protect is keeping usage logs, this means that they are tracking and taking note of every single website you visit, and all the data you enter.
Even more worrying is that it has been discovered that Onavo Protect is monitoring data even when the app is not in use. Security Researcher, Will Strafach discovered this happening with the iOS app for Onavo Protect.
Onavo Protect logs information such as your normal daily Wi-Fi and cellular use. Even more inexplicably, Onavo Protect sends Facebook data of when you turn your screen on and off.
Essentially, Onavo Protect is nothing more than another platform for Facebook to track all of your data and sell it off to the highest bidder. Allowing Facebook to have an even tighter grasp on our personal information than it already has.
We here at hide.me completely respect your privacy, and the ability to use a VPN without having to worry about your browsing habits being tracked and sold off.


Move Better to Feel Better.
1. Figure out and treat the Root of whatever is causing your current "issue."
Issue being anything from poor sleep to headaches, chronic back pain to plantar fasciitis, or sciatica to poor digestion, etc.
2. Treat the Branch aka the "issue" that brought you here.
Modalities include postural education, structural tissue manipulation and movement repatterining.
My rigorous academic study of the human body has led me to understand the body as an autobiography, unconsciously written in the present moment with past thoughts, emotions and movements that linger to distort the body and mind. I believe that with a nuanced understanding of how the body works, you can more consciously become the author of your body's story with movement, bodywork and breath as the pencil AND eraser.
I understand that for movement of any kind to be functional, it must first be available and sometimes that requires manual manipulation of the tissues through hands on bodywork, sometimes through postural retraining and sometimes through movement. My desire is to facilitate the limitless transformation that mindful movement & bodywork can bring.
I am grateful for the guidance and wisdom from all my past teachers, but would especially like to thank Schuyler Grant for teaching me an advanced, creative sequencing that flows with the breath, challenges the body and stimulates the mind. Jason Brown of ASFYT for giving me a thorough understanding of the bones, muscles, connective tissues, common injuries and modifications for the yogic body. Zachary Dacuk for expanding my understanding of anatomy from a reductionist, individual muscle approach, to the complete myofascial system of conscious embodiment. Zach also taught me to recognize where the body deviates from neutral alignment with postural assessment and how to bring it back through movement. Diana Zotos and the teachers of Threes Physiyoga Method for sharing their knowledge of pathologies, assessments of imbalances/suboptimal patterns and a systematic approach to bring about less pain and more strength into the body through movement. Last, but not least, the many instructors at CenterPoint Massage & Shiatsu Therapy School & Clinic for providing me with in-depth knowledge surrounding the soft tissues of the body through Shiatsu, Swedish Massage and Therapeutic Bodywork including Trigger Point Therapy, Myofascial Release and Craniosacral.


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Live Q&As
What's Stopping Us From Doing the Best Work of Our Lives?9 min read
Vanessa Childers July 21, 2019
Stakeholder EngagementWorkplace Culture0 Comments
Aaron Dignan, author of "Brave New Work," has the answer.
Interview by Meghan French Dunbar
Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready, an organization design and transformation firm that helps companies like Johnson & Johnson, Charles Schwab, and Airbnb break free of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and a compliance mindset and create cultures built on autonomy, trust, and transparency.
In his new book "Brave New Work," Dignan outlines a new way of thinking about people and organizations — one that trades the illusion of control for something far better: a more adaptive and human way of working.
Photo courtesy of Aaron Dignan
What is your own personal story of coming to realize that the way that we work isn't working?
Aaron Dignan: Earlier in my career, I worked with really large companies like American Express, GE, PepsiCo, and the Gates Foundation, helping them think about digital change, how it might affect them, and how they could take advantage of it. We got a front-row seat inside really large — and in many cases really old — businesses. What we found was a lot of frustration; people who were stuck in an elaborate set of policies, procedures, practices, and norms that were getting in the way. There was a lot of trapped capacity and trapped human potential.
At the same time, we were building our firm. In my desire for it to be great, I tried to control every aspect of it. On one hand, we were progressive about the culture, how people dressed and spoke, and what they worked on. We threw very young people in the deep end of sophisticated client work and let them figure it out for themselves. While it wasn't an overtly controlling culture, I was still thinking in a very paternal way about how we developed people and gave feedback. While it worked on one hand — we did have a successful business — on the other hand, I was exhausted and my team was stuck at a level of development and performance that was limited by my imagination and the space I made for them. Eventually I got fed up and looked ahead to what we might become, thinking, "There's got to be a better way."
So, I went on a walkabout. I looked at biomimicry, complex adaptive systems theory, and unusual organizations around the globe. I found that there were systems in nature that were adaptive at scale. I also found organizations and institutions in almost every industry and geography that were doing things differently, that had "flipped the table over" on bureaucracy. I became enamored with that. The problem with our clients, ourselves, our culture, wasn't any one thing. It wasn't digital. It wasn't Millennials. It wasn't the change du jour. It was our inability to adapt and be human at work.
For the owner of the small to mid-sized enterprise, where are some good places to start that aren't as scary as flipping tables over?
AD: One of the safest places to start is with meetings. Meetings are a microcosm of the organization as a whole. It's people coming together to solve a problem, create something, or decide something. We bring all of our social dynamics with us to meetings. We bring our titles, interaction styles, and biases. This may sound brain-dead simple, but a good practice to start with is checking in and out of meetings. We check in and out by asking a question and hearing from everyone in turn. This isn't about the question at all. It's about making space for everyone to use their voice. One of the things we know about work is that loud voices and personalities tend to dominate conversations and limit the diversity of thought in the room. Within the Fortune 500, there are more CEOs named James than there are female CEOs in total. We have an inclusion problem. One of the ways to fight that is with equality of voice. Studies like Project Aristotle at Google have shown that having equal talk time within teams is one of the best predictors of team success. We know this is a good idea. The trick is to almost prime each meeting by starting that way.
Should there be weekly, monthly, quarterly check-ins to help people integrate purpose into the everyday lives of all the team members?
AD: The most important thing about purpose conversations is that they happen. Most people take purpose — and strategy for that matter — and turn it into another pyramid. We say, "Oh, we have to take the purpose and unpack it from the CEO's office down into each group, and every group's purpose statement has to match exactly." We turn it into this big daisy chain of compliance and conformity instead of just saying, "We have a purpose at an organizational level; we need to agree on a purpose at a team level. that either supports that directly or diverges from it deliberately." As individuals we have intent, purpose, and things that drive us. If we can talk about how those do or don't fit together, then we'll have shared consciousness about what's going on.
The purpose of the firm is made up of the commitment of all these individuals who have their own callings. As we change the membership and the anatomy of the organization, and as the world changes, that purpose is always morphing a tiny bit. We need to be checking in about that. There's a way of looking at purpose called essential intent that comes from the book "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown. It makes things a little bit more practical. Vision and purpose can be quite amorphous, like "nourish people and the planet" at Whole Foods, for example. That is motivational, and I can understand how that might be manifested over decades, but it's also very open-ended. Then there are short-term goals: what's the project I'm trying to finish? What has to happen this quarter? And so on. What essential intent does really well is say, "What would need to happen in between — in the next 2 to 3 years — for us to be on track to achieve our purpose? Can we keep an eye on that so that we have a source of medium-term motivation?" It's not completely pie-in-the-sky, and it's not completely tactical.
What advice do you have for leaders who want to bring these new best practices into their work but who also feel under-resourced?
AD: When looking at new ways of working, people often think, "We'd have to invest all of this time to unlock a new kind of performance, but I'm really busy right now." Yes, there's an investment, but a lot of that investment, frankly, is emotional and energetic. You get immediate gains in time back, productivity, and creativity. The metaphor I use is the traffic light versus the roundabout. The traffic light represents that, "I have to make sure we do everything just right, because if we don't, we'll have an accident and we're all going to die." It's compliance-based, and it's a more untrusting approach. By and large, it works. But the second way, the roundabout, works a lot better in so many contexts. It has 80 percent higher throughput. It has 95 percent fewer fatal collisions. It's cheaper to build and maintain. It works better when the power goes out. Everything about it in most situations — not all, but in most — is superior. It creates a couple of enabling constraints around the participants and then lets them show up and use their judgment to solve the problem.
In the traffic light model, yes, I'm complying, but I'm not always present. I'm waiting for instruction. I'm on my phone while the light is red. I'm not really in the moment. In the roundabout, I'm present the entire time. I have to be. I'm fully engaged. I'm fully committed. I'm giving it everything that I've got, basically, to be a responsible participant. That's the leap. We're basically saying, yeah, I have a team of two, or 10, and we're redlining. We can keep doing the stoplight model, and we can make sure everyone is complying and in a pigeonholed role with a pigeonholed set of accountabilities, or we can acknowledge the complexity in the situation; we can wear multiple hats. We can let people use their judgment. We can set up just enough enabling constraints to keep us safe but leave a lot of room for interpretation and collaboration, and ask that people show up fully to the problem and the opportunity. That is, in my view, the superior way to do it.
Do you see any way to get out of the trap of shareholder supremacy?
AD: Well, we got into it; I think we can definitely get out of it. It's actually a relatively recent phenomenon. It's in the last 50 years that shareholder supremacy has been born and metastasized. I think the issue is two-fold. One is: what do we as shareholders want? I think we need to do a lot more work as shareholders to define what that is. What do we value? What does winning look like? If winning just looks like great returns at any expense, then we're not going to like the drinking water in another 50 years. If we change our conversation at a cultural level about what we expect and what we want to celebrate, then that's one way to get at it. The other way is just to recognize that it doesn't work. Even from a purely greed-based standpoint, shareholder supremacy is a strategy that kills businesses over time.
The most successful businesses don't really sweat what their shareholders want. They care what their customers want. They're playing long games. They're investing in moonshots. They're doing things that the traditional Milton Friedman investor would frown upon, and they're saying out loud, "We don't care what the analysts think." A lot of the founders of these companies are keeping supermajority voting control of their companies as they go public for this reason. Most of the firms that are dominating the covers of magazines today are firms that have avoided going public for as long as they possibly can and have been figuring out how to do it in a way where they don't have to be subjected to shareholder demands. In the future, I think we're going to see a lot more privatized systems, employee ownership, cooperatives, and people closer to the business and the community the business impacts. In the meantime I think we will see the broader market and some of the startups that are achieving these great heights going the route of Eric Ries's long-term stock exchange, or staying private longer, and finding sources of funding that want to tell a different story.
Vanessa Childers
Vanessa Childers is the Editorial Director of Conscious Company Media, where she bolsters digital brand awareness and drives the overarching content strategy.
Dual-Career Couples Are the New Norm: What Business Leaders Need to Know
Genevieve Smith and Ishita Rustagi January 16, 2020
The Wisdom of Women: Jessica Day, Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer of IdeaScale
LaKay Cornell January 10, 2020
Emotional Intelligence: The Key to Transforming Organizational Culture
Colin Ellis January 7, 2020
Parental Leave and a Women's Attachment to the Workforce
Kat Ventoruzzo January 3, 2020
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Defossé, G.E., M.B. Bertiller, and R. Robberecht. 1995. Germination characteristics of Festuca pallescens, a Patagonian bunchgrass with reclamation potential. Seed Science and Technology 23:715-723.
Summary. The influence of light, temperature, and soil water content on the germination of Festuca pallescens, an important forage species native to the steppe zone of Patagonia, Argentina, was examined in the laboratory. Seeds of F. pallescens, collected along an elevational gradient from 650 to 950 m a.s.l. on the Media Luna Ranch (43°36´ S, 71°25´ W) were tested for viability and germination. In petri dishes containing top soil of the collection area, 10 seeds were sown at a depth of 5 mm (dark treatment) and 10 on the soil surface (light treatment). The experiment was replicated five times at soil water contents of 4, 8, and 16% and temperatures of 5, 10, 15, and 20°C. Seeds were considered germinated when either the coleoptile reached 5 mm for the light treatment or when it protruded the soil surface for the dark treatment. Festuca pallescens seeds showed a viability of 99.5%. Exposure to continuous light delayed the beginning of germination, but had no influence on total germination percentages. A soil water content of 16% and medium to high temperatures (10, 15, and 20°C) rapidly promoted germination, which reached 97% after 20 days of incubation. Germination was reduced by 40% at a soil water content of 8%. In all cases, a 5°C soil temperature delayed the beginning of germination and slightly reduced its final germination percentages. Sporadic germination occurred at 4% soil water content at 10°C, and none at any other temperature. Under field conditions, sowing should be practiced during the fall, when soil moisture and temperatures are optimum for germination.
This research was supported with grants from Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Téchnicas (CONICET; PID 3058100/88), Argentina, and the Idaho Forest, Wildlife and Range Experiment Station.


Get a hold of the 'Psalm 119′ Gospel Wallpaper'!!! Share this on your desktop, iPad, iphone or device to encourage yourself or those that view! Check out the links below to download it for free! Continue to put in front of yourself the Word of God.


March 26, 2019: The CDC and Alumni Affairs department hosted a Corporate Connect Series session as part of the Personal Effectiveness (PE) course in collaboration with Visiting Faculty, Ms. Nadia Sayeed at the IBA Karachi main campus.
The session was conducted by Managing Director - MenaPakT & Asia at Yum! Brands, Mr. Sabir Sami. Mr. Sami delivered a talk on 'Global trends in marketing strategy and consumer preference'. He expressed his views on the impact of social media and technology on consumer behavior. He shared his perspective on societal changes likely to incur in the coming years. He mentioned speed, ease and convenience to be the top consumer preferences in influencing the external world and internal business.
Mr. Sami concluded the session by advising students to master mindset, power of people and time management to be a successful leader. Mr. Sami delightedly visited the IBA boys hostel to replenish his hostel memories.
Mr. Sami is an IBA alumnus from the class of 1988 with majors in Marketing. With a career spread over 30 years, he has diverse international senior management experience in marketing, operations and general management with global consumer goods companies including P&G, Cocoa-Cola, Reckitt Benckiser and Yum! Brands. His areas of expertise are strategy development, organizational change management and people development.


18 inch play doll with sleep eyes, rooted hair, soft body, and joints at neck, shoulder, and hip.
If your child is an aspiring dancer, she will love this fun and stylish Dollie! This Dollie is showing her unique style with colorful hair dye and the layered skirts with rainbow organza.
This stylish and sassy Dollie is wearing a black and blue toned downtown girl outfit with a big star graphic and sparkly blue cap and scarf. She is also carrying a matching clutch purse!


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Best of 2019 Awards
It's that time of the year again, when media outlets award their, "best of," awards for this and that. Rather than enthrall you with dramatic prose, drum rolls, or drama–I'll get to the point. Here are the best things I encountered over the course of 2019. I hope you find some of these helpful.
Best book (Christian): Confronting Christianity: 12 Tough Questions for the World's Largest Religion, by Rebecca McLaughlin. It's an apologetics book that is just flat out useful. Her doctoral degree in Renaisssance Literature (Cambridge) is obvious through her quick, polished prose. It's an efficient work that gives the reader a great set of answers for today's most frequently asked questions about the faith. It's the kind of book you can confidently put in the hand of someone with questions about faith. The first two chapters alone are worth the price of the book: 1) Aren't we better off without religion, and 2) Doesn't Christianity crush diversity? It isn't a long read, but it super helpful–blowing away several popular doomsday myths even Christians circulate–like the immanent death of Christianity among young people.
I hope other writers see fit to write similar works in the days ahead. Christians need accessible books with sound thinking they can give to people who have profound questions about the faith. Rebecca McLaughlin's work delivers. Bravo.
Quote: "My secular friends are twice as likely to raise children who become Christians as I am to raise children who become nonreligious. And the kind of religious beliefs people hold today are not the kind that fit comfortably into the "Coexist" bumper sticker. In North America, partly thanks to immigrant believers, full-blooded Christianity is outcompeting theologically liberal faith. . . . The question for the next generation is not How soon will religion die out? but Christianity or Islam? (13, 14)"
Best book (Non-Fiction): Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business, by Rita McGrath. Rita McGrath is not a familiar name to many among this readership. I would encourage you to become familiar with her work. I was fortunate enough to study under Rita's tutelage at Columbia Business School over the course of 2019. She is one of the most brilliant business minds on the planet, but also a delightful person. If I gave out "Best of," awards to people, she'd get one 🙂 Thinkers50 ranks her the #5 management thinker in the world, and the leading mind on strategy. Seeing Around Corners is already mentioned as a top business book of the decade. If you could see what is coming long before it happened, would that be helpful? Answer: Yes. Her observations like, "Snow melts at the edges," helps people understand the nature of inflection points and how to recognize them. Changes happen gradually, then all at once. I love the title so much, I'm using the primary title as the title for my New Year's sermon series on hope at New Vintage Church. There is a ton in this volume that translates to the church context. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.
Best movie – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's harsh at times (language, themes), but it's just a gem. Music, acting, creativity, cinematography, casting…the entire package. The Irishman is the movie I thought I would choose when I learned of its release. But, it's my second choice. Early nominations tell me I wasn't the only one who really thought OUATIH was great. Both DiCaprio and Pitt do a typically exquisite job acting, but Brad Pitt really makes the movie. He should receive a best supporting actor nomination. The soundtrack is also fantastic, complete with vintage ads that gives the feeling of listening to a vintage radio station as you work your way through it. From top to bottom, Tarantino created a real work of art. For me, it's the top movie of 2019.
Best Album: Candidly, nothing really jumped out as an instant classic this year. From a straight musical artistry standpoint, I'd give the nod to two albums whose verbal content I couldn't commend: Brittany Howard's, "Jaime," and Lana Del Rey's, "Norman F*&?#@! Rockwell." Both are wonderful musically, but I can't sit back and listen to them on repeat due to content. I do hope Brittany Howard goes back to Alabama Shakes–one of my favorite bands. She is better with them, and they with her. 2019 wasn't a great year for new music, to me. If you have an album you loved, drop it in the comments.
Song of the Year: "Still," by Oja Gjeillo. Gjeillo's music is some of the best study music available. Some of it dabbles in choral music, but most of it is instrumental composition. The simplicity of, "Still," on a rainy day with a cup of coffee and a fire place is niiiiiice. His new, full album is out in January. For pop, I'd go with Lana Del Rey's remake of Sublime's, "Doin' Time." As a Long Beach kid who grew up during Sublime's peak, I was skeptical. Well, it's fantastic–one of the smoothest songs to come out in some time.
Best Podcast: Business Wars, by Wondery. I stumbled across Business Wars by accident, and I'm so glad I did. It's a documentary that, "…gives you the unauthorized, real story of what drives these companies and their leaders, inventors, investors and executives to new heights — or to ruin." Miller vs. Budweiser, Facebook vs. Snapchat, Nike vs. Adidas (particularly good), and more. You will learn a lot about the companies whose products you use everyday, and their story. You will learn a lot about leadership, and wondering how you plowed through those eight episodes so quickly.
Best Productivity App: Monday.com. We have moved our church project management to Monday.com. I love it's visually appealing, bright, clean layout in table format. However, one of it's best features is the ability to switch between views of your project, including a Kanban board view. It has a series of other unique features and integrates with other to-do apps. However, because Monday.com is still relatively new, there are a few small features missing. However, Monday.com is growing rapidly and keeps adding features all the time.
Runner up: a blank journal with nice paper, dot grid, and a good pen. Yep, analog is still hard to beat.
What are some of the best things you encountered this year? Movies, music, books, lifehacks, etc.? Drop them in the comments.
In: Leadership
Tagged: best of 2019, Leadership
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Home » Should You Buy a 360 Camera in 2018?
What's up with 360 cameras these days? It seems like everybody and their Grandma are manufacturing 360 cameras. There are dozens of models available at varying degrees of affordability, but are they even useful for us "video hobbyists" who don't shoot virtual reality stuff or real estate photography? Should you buy a 360 camera in 2018?
Should you Buy a 360 Camera?
As summer has officially begun its wind down, I'm left with gajillobytes of video footage from what I called my "Epic Summer of Awesome." For the most part, I used my GoPro Hero5 Black, Karma Grip, and Hero 2018 to capture my trip to the GoPro Mountain Games and family trips to Gettysburg, PA and our camp in the Adirondack Mountains.
But for our trip to Hidden Valley Animal Adventure Park in Varysburg, NY I changed things up a bit and brought along my Rylo 360 camera!
Rylo sent me their 360 Camera so I could get to know how it works and post a review on the VidProMom YouTube channel and here on my blog. This post is not a review (that's coming soon!), but by law, I have to tell you that Rylo did provide me with their 360 camera.
To get more acclimated and familiar with consumer level 360 cameras, I did a bunch of research (via YouTube reviews and articles) to see what's up with 360 cameras and what all the hubbub is about. This video on the VidProMom YouTube channel along with this blog post kicks off a 360 Series. I will be posting my Rylo review, a Rylo tutorial, and perhaps a 360 video editing tutorial as well.
Did you know…? You can subscribe to the VidProMom YouTube Channel so you can stay up to date with my new How-To Videos & Tutorials! Click here to subscribe now so we can stay in touch and you won't miss out on anything!
Well, that sounds like a really silly question, doesn't it? "Everybody" knows a 360 camera is a device that captures an image (photo or video) 360 degrees around itself. Usually, a 360 camera has two very wide-angle lenses to achieve this. Imagine you are standing on the inside of a globe, and you can look up down, left, right, all around to get a whole experience. This video format can be used with Virtual Reality headsets, or for real estate listings (imagine looking around a whole entire room instead of just the crappy awkward angles that real estate agents take??).
So why do you and I need one? Well, I'll be honest with you. For a couple of years, 360 videos and 360 video cameras seemed gimmicky to me. I once borrowed a Ricoh Theta (like 2 years ago) from a friend, and eh?? I didn't really see the point for everyday use. Editing 360 video was confusing and it all just seemed too cumbersome to be work the aggravation.
It wasn't until last year when GoPro released the Fusion, their 360 camera, that I could start to see this concept of shooting everything around you, all at once, and then later choosing what to have in the frame of your final video.
Up until late last year, I had been thinking about 360 video all wrong… this is a completely new an different way to capture an experience and create a sharable video.
But when I used the 360 camera from Rylo along with the Rylo app… the concept of 360 video and editing kinda blew my mind.
Like I mentioned, I'm going to publish a Rylo review and tutorial later, so this post is not about the Rylo specifically.
The reason why 360 video cameras and the apps that go along with them blow my mind right now is that the magic is in what you do AFTER you shoot 360 video. So if you're considering should you buy a 360 camera, it's more than just the camera to think about.
You're capturing EVERYTHING around the camera (up-down-left-right-all around) so you're not moving the camera to make sure the good stuff is in the shot. There is no worry about keeping your kid in frame or losing an epic shot because your camera was angle slightly off. It's after you shoot that you decide where the camera's frame is.
Pretty cool right!?! I feel like 360 cameras, gear, and 360 video editing is going to become more of a thing… the cameras out there right now are constantly getting updates to their firmware, and new camera models are released all the time! It's like the golden age of 360 Video cameras right now.
When it comes to the best 360 cameras on the market right now, there are a couple of factors you want to look at. There is a very wide range of pricing on these things right now, but you absolutely cannot compare them based on price alone.
To compare 360 cameras, look at the camera specs like resolution and frame rate. Some 360 cameras shoot in 4K, others only in 1080. The Rylo shoots in 4K but your final edited video will only be 1080. Should you buy a 360 camera, you need to take these kinds of things into consideration!!
The other thing to consider is what is available to you after you've shot your 360 videos. For example, GoPro and Rylo have fantastic apps that work seamlessly to help you take your footage and turn it into something watchable and shareable. GoPro also has desktop software that allows you to edit your 360 footage easily. Having only used the Rylo app, I can tell you it's SO easy to use and very intuitive.
So should you buy a 360 camera, you should first compare 360 camera ratings, be sure you're comparing the ratings of their editing system as well.
If you've had your eye on the 360 camera market lately and you're wondering if they are worth it, I say yeah, what a fun new gadget!! Some of the best ones you'd want to look at right now are: the Rylo, the GoPro Fusion, the Samsung Gear 360, the Ricoh Theta V, the Garmin VIRB, the Insta360 One, and even Kodak is in on this game.
Of those models mentioned, the Rylo is the only one I've used so I can't vouch for any of the others.
So there you have it! Should you buy a 360 camera?? In 2018 I say sure, but… I also think there is merit in waiting a little bit to see what 2019 and 2020 bring us because there are a lot of horses in this race.
Hey, let me know down in the comments if you have a 360 camera already: what model do you own? How's the app? Let me know YOUR review, which helps me make decisions about what I buy and create content around in the future.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE my Rylo. Since buying it this summer I haven't touched my GoPro's. They're not dead to me, but they're close. Sure the Rylo hardware isn't the best, but who cares, watching on a phone it's fine. It's so much better than the Fusion in terms of usability and editing with Rylos software. For the family man, weekend warrior, it's perfect.


Spring Break getaways are on the horizon so we asked Stacey Stark, director of marketing at Lexli, to share her list of skin care travel essentials. Read on for some great recommendations.
Skin care is one of those things many of us don't give a lot of thought to before we go on a trip. However, to ensure our skin not only looks its best during our getaway but is also protected from all that time outdoors, packing the right products is a must. Here is my personal list of Lexli products that always accompany me on vacation.
If there's one product that absolutely comes with me any time I travel, it's the Starter Kit. It includes TSA-approved sizes of Cleansing Lotion, AloeGlyC®, Day Moisturizer with SPF 15, Night Moisturizer and Tone & Balance - the basics I need for my morning and evening skin care routines and while en route to my destination. Tone & Balance stays in my handbag and is reapplied during the flight to keep my skin hydrated and comfortable; the perfect antidote to stale airplane air. My husband and kids even use it. Day Moisturizer with SPF 15 gets thrown in my beach bag. I love to use it as my facial sunscreen. Cleansing Lotion doubles as my body wash.
Sunscreen Spray has permanent standing in my beach bag and the entire family uses it. The fact that it's water resistant makes it perfect for use on the kids, while the spray makes it convenient for use on, well, everyone.
If I had to pick just one favorite Lexli product, this would be it. Revital-Eyes is packed with outstanding ingredients to fight the signs of aging. On vacation, however, its superpower is the ability to help the eye area look refreshed after a late night. Trust me, you'll be happy you brought it with you.
The change in climate combined with eating rich foods, indulging in cocktails and time spent in the sun often leaves my skin a bit more sensitive than usual. By using Moisture Intensifier Serum under my moisturizer each day, my skin feels more hydrated and looks less inflamed.
This is another product I don't leave home without. I'm prone to dry hands year-round and Hand & Body Lotion is my go-to product for instant relief. I also use it immediately after showering. While at the beach I use it under sunscreen to keep my skin hydrated.
Another one of my favorites! I turn to a Lightening Lift mask any time I need some stress relief and before a big event. Therefore, it's the perfect accompaniment to vacation time. Use it before getting ready for an evening out or at the end of the night while you're relaxing in that amazing deep soak tub in your room.
We'd love to hear your skin care travel essentials! Leave us a comment on Instagram, Facebook or send a direct email. If we feature your travel essentials list, we'll send you a $25 Lexli gift card.


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A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the 9/11 Memorial, Grosvenor Square, London
None of us will ever forget where we were or what we were doing when, on that otherwise ordinary day and out of a clear blue sky came so much premeditated death and destruction – on a scale and in a way that shocked the entire world.
Prime Minister, Ambassador, Ladies and Gentlemen,
But at the heart of all those endless and rather impersonal news reports lay the shattered lives and hopes of all those who we join here today, both in London and New York; those whose loved ones were so cruelly, brutally and pointlessly torn from them. That was ten years ago, and for so many of those left behind it must be an eternity; a continuing, awful agony that has to be endured day by day.
To say that we understand; that we sympathise; that we hold you in our thoughts and prayers is true, but I know it is hopelessly, utterly inadequate.
I can at least understand something of what you have been through and of how the wounds never really heal – because back in 1979 my greatly loved Great Uncle, Lord Mountbatten, and one of my young godsons were torn from my own family – and others in their group also killed or horrifically injured – by a terrorist bomb while sailing peacefully in his boat off the coast of County Sligo in Ireland.
At the time, I remember feeling intense anger, even hatred, of those who could even contemplate doing such a thing. But, then, I began to reflect that all the greatest wisdom that has come down to us over the ages speaks of the overriding need to break the law of cause and effect and, somehow, to find the strength to search for a more positive way of overcoming the evil in men's hearts.
Of course, this is far easier said than done, and yet I find there are many of us who are not only tired of the perpetual killing, maiming and senseless terrorism that blights the human family, but bewildered by it too – simply because our instinct tells us that seeking revenge never actually achieves peace in the end. It is, surely, only by avoiding vengefulness that we can rebuild what has been lost... and save it from being lost again.
Indeed, I recall that President Abraham Lincoln once spoke very powerfully of having "wasted valuable hours imagining revenge or confusion." He spoke of the practical importance of "a forgiving spirit" to dissipate anger and resentment.
I can't help feeling he was right. For is it not strange that, although that dreadful act of violence was meant to divide us, it has actually drawn us together – one person to another, one community to another. As it has today. On this anniversary, we are drawn to you, in our thoughts and in our prayers, knowing that we cannot change the past, but that through struggling to find a light that can lighten the darkness we may ultimately bring the healing the world so desperately needs…


Software that is available free of charge but that encourages the user to make a monetary donation to a particular charity. For example, the VIM text editor asks people to donate to orphans in Uganda. Also called "helpware," "goodware" and "careware." See VIM.