text:
SS 2nd elimination

3 09 2007

With the ladies’ first elimination round, this week we will witness the Guys’ first SS elimination.

A Hooligan, a Hen-pecked Hubby, a Cynic, a Mummy’s Boy and a Rich Heir – that’s what you’ll get when the guys take to the stage on Tuesday Sept 4 for Star Seach 2007! Setting will be bustling Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s.

Likewise, the first five guys – M1 Chang Haoyi, M2 Marcus Chang, M3 Reeve Huan, M4 Jerry Yeo and M5 Andie Chen – will be judged on their image (25%), their talent performance (25%) and acting skills (50%).

The Performers

2nd elimination

In the skit, Haoyi will play a mummy’s boy; Marcus a righteous hooligan, Reeve a cynical artist; Jerry a hen-pecked husband and Andie a rich heir.

View their interview video here

This time round, it is much more difficult for me to guess the top 3 winners.. unlike the ladies’ first round. Maybe then is more obvious.. coz of woman can see woman better?? Haha Or maybe I tend to concentrate more on the Guys’ 2nd elimination..

Competition is sometimes not fair.. Not everyone suits the image of Shanghai oldies.. That is life!! Anyway all will also depend on the actual day’s performances and luck – Good luck guys!! =D

Presenting M1 to M5

Anyway just for the sake of guessing.. and based on brief impression, my choice (in order) : M3 Reeve Huan, M1 Chang Haoyi, M5 Andie Chen, M2 Marcus Chang, M4 Jerry Yeo

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: text/html

WARC-Truncated: length

WARC-Type: response

text:
10 Saturday Morning Date Ideas

Every time The Mister and I have a Saturday morning date, I always wonder why we don’t do it more often. Most of the time, morning dates are cheaper(and if you need a babysitter, cheaper too!) and if you’re doing an activity there seems to be a lot fewer people which is a huge win for this introvert. I’m also much more of a morning person, so I love morning dates!

Here are 10 Saturday morning date ideas:

1. Morning movies
Saturday morning movies are cheaper AND there are very few people in the theatre. It’s seriously a win-win for me! Plus you aren’t usually tempted by the usual theatre food so the date can be really cheap.

2. Brunch
Brunch is everyone’s favourite meal of the day. That’s a fact. Brunch can be a cheaper meal than dinner too. Of course, you can always go to a fancy brunch restaurant and spend some cash too.

3. Morning at the beach
Catching a sunset on the beach may be the most spectacular and romantic date night possible. Of course, even if you go later in the morning, you’ll be able to enjoy the sunshine and fewer people still.

4. Picnic at the park
If movies have taught me anything, picnics in the park are literally the second most romantic date night possible. Pack your picnic basket with your favourite food and bring a blanket and enjoy some good conversation.

5. Workout session
The couple who sweats together, stays together. Get your endorphins going with an at-home workout or go to a fun workout class and sweat together.

6. Take a bike ride together
A lazy bike ride is a great way to get outdoors with your spouse. It’s also an activity if you can’t get a babysitter that’s great for all ages.

7. Take a walk in nature
If you’re not into biking, taking a walk holding hands is a great way to have some great conversations. And, just like the bike ride is something you can do with your kids if you can’t get a babysitter.

8. Coffee and donuts
Coffee and donuts go hand-in-hand. It’s also super cheap if you’re broke, and can be done even before work if there’s time.

9. Dessert for breakfast
Donuts are not the only kind of sweet food that’s acceptable at breakfast. Dessert food is good at any time, but there’s something about eating dessert for breakfast that feels SO right.

10. Thrift store shopping
Yard sales or thrift store shopping is a fun date idea for the cheap at heart. You can spend as much or as little as you want.

Making time to spend as a couple is vital to a happy marriage, but if you’re broke or you have kids it gets a bit more challenging but having morning dates is a great way to keep dating your spouse at all stages.

So tell me, what are your favourite Saturday morning dates?

Follow Me: Bloglovin// Facebook // Instagram // Twitter // Pinterest

22 thoughts on “10 Saturday Morning Date Ideas

  1. My husband made me realize that any ‘occasion’ can be considered a date if we choose to look at it. Friday afternoons we like to do our groceries and we make a ‘date’ out of it, do a bit of shopping too, make sure to have fun… I love the idea of Saturday morning dates too – just this past Sunday we went to the gym together and then ran errands and it was so nice!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I totally agree! My only stipulation for a “date” is being able to actually talk with each other for at least part of the time we’re together, so errands totally can become a date night!

      Liked by 1 person

  2. We love going to Saturday morning movies! Unfortunately, we’re usually too excited to see whatever movie we want to see to wait till Saturday. Once, we bought Saturday morning tickets to The Avengers: Age of Ultron in advance. On Thursday night, we kept seeing all our friends posting on Facebook about going to the premier that we decided we couldn’t wait. We got tickets for that night and still went on Saturday… Instead of saving money, we spent more. Oops. The rest of these ideas area also awesome! We love doing brunch. And sometimes that brunch is coffee and doughnuts. lol

  3. It’s Saturday morning here and we just went out for breakfast at a local Indian restaurant–yum–roti and nasi lemak! We try to do that pretty regularly, and it’s a favorite tradition!

    Liked by 1 person

  4. I love the “couples who sweat together, stay together”! my husband and I do the Saturday ParkRun in our area every Saturday with a coffee and brunch date (even at homes sometimes) afterwards. I think that it is so vital for a healthy marriage to keep on dating, I love it when my husband calls me randomly at work and tell me to not make plans for Friday night and then surprises me with a dinner date 🙂

    Thanks for sharing great ideas!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-149-109-157.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-05
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


text:
Julia Evans

How to filter packets super fast: XDP & eBPF!

Hello! Today I am at the netdev conference, and this is the second day.

I’m going to write about the Most Exciting Thing from today, which was a great hour-long tutorial about eBPF and XDP by Andy Gospodarek and Jesper Dangaard Brouer. I thought it was so exciting I wanted to write a whole blog post just with my notes from that tutorial.

This tutorial walked us through how to build a simple DDoS prevention XDP filter! This was amazing because there were talks yesterday about how to build DDoS prevention yesterday kind of abstractly, but they showed in this tutorial exactly how you build a simple example and talked about a lot of the details. The application they built had:

  • an XDP program (that runs in the kernel, written in eBPF) that filters out packets (more quickly and more flexibly than iptables does!) from some IP addresses you specify
  • a userspace command line tool that lets you add & remove IP addresses to be filtered
  • counters so you can see how many packets have been blocked by the filter

They were pretty clear that this is just a demo / example to understand the concepts, not something to immediately start using in production :)

All of the code for this tutorial is on GitHub in their prototype-kernel repo.

intro to eBPF

eBPF is a virtual machine in the kernel. It’s pretty flexible (you write eBPF programs by writing C code, so you can do a lot!) but there are limitations. Some important limitations/facts to know about eBPF:

  • all interactions with userspace happen through eBPF “maps” which are key-value stores
  • there are about a dozen different kinds of maps you can use right now
  • eBPF doesn’t have loops, so every eBPF program will finish within some bounded execution time
  • in particular eBPF isn’t turing complete :) :)

intro to XDP

XDP is a new system in the kernel, that lets you write custom eBPF programs to filter network packets. We’ll call those “XDP programs”. The XDP programs run as soon as the packet gets to the network driver (so very very quickly).

When an XDP program, it needs to exit with either XDP_TX, XDP_DROP, or XDP_PASS. There might be more return codes in the future.

They said Ubuntu 16.10 has XDP – IIRC the earliest kernel version with XDP support is 4.8.

our XDP program: getting started!

For this program, we want both kernel code (the XDP program, which is going to run inside the kernel) and userspace code (for us to run to tell the program in the kernel which IP addresses to block).

You might think that the command line tool would need to run as root (because it’s talking to the kernel), but it turns out that the command line tool works by updating the BPF maps! And the way you update the BPF maps is through a file interface in sysfs (/sys/..something..). And if you’re updating something through a file, you can just change the permissions / ownership of that file!

So the command line tool to add new IP addresses to blacklist doesn’t need to run as root.

Okay, so what is this BPF map we’re updating? It has type BPF_MAP_TYPE_PERCPU_HASH. This map is going to have IP addresses as keys and how many packets we’ve blocked for that IP address as a value. This is a hash that is, well, per cpu. So every CPU has its own map. This means that our userspace tool that reports how many packets have been blocked will need to add up all the values for each CPU.

I think having the map be per CPU is more efficient or something.

So our map has: (the definition is here

  • key size: 32 bits (an IPv4 address)
  • value size: 64 bits (a count)
  • max entries: 100000

Seems reasonable!

writing our XDP program for real

So how does this XDP program work?

Almost the first line in this program is (from here) struct ethhdr *eth = data

The beginning of any packet is an Ethernet header. We need to parse that Ethernet header. The really interesting point that they made here is – XDP programs are compiled inside the kernel tree. This means that you have access to all the kernel data structures! And the kernel already has a struct that represents an Ethernet header, so you don’t have to write that much fancy parsing code, you can just reuse that struct from the kernel.

The heart of the XDP program is this part (from line 227): where we look up the source IP address in our BPF map. If it’s there then we increment the value (so that we can know how many packets were dropped!)

value = bpf_map_lookup_elem(&blacklist, &ip_src);
if (value) {
  /* Don't need __sync_fetch_and_add(); as percpu map */
  *value += 1; /* Keep a counter for drop matches */
  return XDP_DROP;

This whole program that parses the packet, finds the IP address in the IP header, looks it up in the BPF map, and returns is only 270 lines of C! That seems really reasonable!!

Also there are no loops because this is eBPF and loops aren’t allowed, which makes it even easier to understand.

One very interesting thing that they pointed out is this check:

if ((void *)eth + offset > data_end)
  return false;

This is basically making sure that you’re not going outside of the packet. The interesting here is that if you don’t do your bounds checking properly, the kernel will reject your code – since eBPF code is running inside the kernel, it needs to make sure that it’s not accessing any data it shouldn’t. So it somehow does static analysis on your program to make sure it’s not doing anything illegal. That’s super interesting and I would like to learn more about how this works! Let’s keep going, though.

getting the XDP program into your kernel

Okay, so we’ve written an XDP program, compiled it to an object file kern.o, and we want to get it into the kernel. They said there are 2 ways to do this:

  • use iproute2 (though they didn’t say how exactly)
  • write your own code to load it (what they did)

This is the user code linked before.

Basically what I understood in this part is that there is a (userspace) library provided by the kernel for loading BPF code. They copied it out of the kernel and made some changes because they wanted it to be different. bpf_load.c

I’m kind of fuzzy on what’s involved in the userspace part right now but the code is there, so I can read it later if I need to know more. The point is that the program loads the object file into the kernel.

how do you know your XDP program is loaded?

So we wanted to attach this XDP program to a network interface. How do we know if it worked?

When I run ip link list on my laptop, I get a list of all network interfaces:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode
DEFAULT group default qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: br0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP mode
DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether c6:f7:88:c6:d6:97 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: mlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode
DORMANT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 18:67:b0:10:e8:eb brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
5: [email protected]: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue
master br0 state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether c6:f7:88:c6:d6:97 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff link-netnsid 0

This shows all these settings for the interface, like mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP.... If there’s an XDP program running on that interface it’ll also say xdp in there.

eBPF/XDP tips

Here are some tips they gave!

tip 1: if when your BPF program is running it says __bpf_prog_run in perf top, you should turn on the kernel JIT. Running your BPF code through the JIT will make everything way faster

tip 2: if your ulimits aren’t high enough you’ll run into problems. I’m a little fuzzy on what a ulimit is still but this seems like a good tip. You can look at ulimits with ulimit -a

tip 3: dump out kern.o maps with readelf / objdump to look at them. “It’s just an ELF file, it’s not magic”. when you do, you can see the section with the XDP program and the section with the BPF maps! you can also see the eBPF bytecode in the maps section but it’s not that human readable :)

tip 4: you can use bpf_trace_printk to print debugging message. These don’t actually get printed, but they end up in the kernel tracing system at /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace_pipe

Also, man bpf is a good reference

tip 5: You can blacklist subnets! There’s a trie BPF map type

tip 6: you can persist your BPF maps when the XDP program is attached/detached.

They wrote a filter that filters all UDP traffic (or some UDP traffic? unclear). They tried implementing the rule in iptables and compared it to their custom XDP approach.

  • iptables: 4.5 million packets/second
  • XDP: 9.7 million packets/second

so this XDP program really was more than twice as fast as iptables! Cool!

performance definitely isn’t the only benefit over iptables though – it’s definitely really important that with XDP you can write arbitrary code.

that’s it!

I really liked that this tutorial focused on demystifying how this stuff works – they said it’s really useful to use readelf/objdump to look at the ELF files that are generated along the way to understand how they’re structured.

I still don’t understand everything but this made the idea of writing eBPF programs to make my kernel filter packets seem WAY more concrete/feasible. Probably some things in this post are wrong but I hope you have learned something anyway!

netdev conference, day 2 netdev conference, day 1


text:
You are here

Share Share Share Share Share Share Share

The Hip Hop Violinist

Reading about the Washington Jewish Music Festival (which, incidentally, sounds fabulous), I learned about Miri Ben-Ari, aka the Hip Hop Violinist. Classically trained on the violin, at age 18 she decided to explore a different way to use her music. She moved to New York City, added some bling to her instrument, and began collaborating with artists including Kanye West (with whom she earned a Grammy), Alicia Keys, Wyclef Jean, Jay-Z, and others.

I like how this self-proclaimed "bad girl of violin" has found her own voice and joined it to a musical community that would not be an obvious place for her. I also like how she uses her talent and particular mode of expression to make political statements (somewhat hackneyed as they are), like in these videos below, the first in support of Obama's candidacy and the second using historical clips of Martin Luther King, Jr., to make a more general statement about a "symphony of brotherhood" -- a message which makes sense for a white Jewish chick who has found her musical home in the hip hop community. She's hot, she's savvy, and as we say here in Boston, she's "wicked talented." I love this hip hop Jewess! If you're in DC, check out Miri Ben-Ari at the Washington Jewish Music Festival!

Share Share Share Share Share Share Share
More on: Popular Music, Violin
Subscribe to Jewish Women, Amplified and get notifications sent to your email.

How to cite this page

Rosenbaum, Judith. "The Hip Hop Violinist." 20 May 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on January 20, 2018) <>.

Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women.

donate now

The JWA Podcast

listen now

Who is your favorite historical Jewish feminist named Emma?

Sign Up for JWA eNews

16 hr
, stellar writer Cynthia Ozick received a well-deserved award!
17 hr
Why does artist Marlis Glaser spend her days painting portraits of Jewish women who have changed history? Because "…
19 hr
"Summer," a short film by Pearl Gluck about two girls at a Hasidic sleepaway camp who explore their sexuality, prem…


text:
You are here

Share Share Share Share Share Share Share

Ruth Gruber

Ruth Gruber didn’t just record history, she made history as the youngest-ever PhD, an honorary general, and the reporter who covered the famed voyage of the Exodus 1947. Gruber graduated from NYU at eighteen and travelled to Cologne, Germany to study German philosophy and English literature, witnessing Hitler’s rise to power while becoming the youngest PhD in the world at age twenty. Working for the Herald Tribune, she became the first foreign correspondent allowed to travel to the Soviet Arctic, studying conditions in Stalin’s gulags. In 1944, the US government gave her a general’s rank to avoid being killed as a spy while escorting European refugees to America. Gruber was deeply moved by the stories of the refugees and recorded them in her book Haven. She continued documenting Jewish stories in the years leading up to Israel’s independence, visiting concentration camps and DP camps, and profiling David Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders for American readers. She was chosen as the American correspondent to cover the unfolding crisis of the Exodus 1947, and her book became the basis for Leon Uris’s novel and the award-winning movie. In 1985, she helped rescue Ethiopian Jews, again recording their stories with her accustomed courage and powerful prose.

Ruth Gruber, circa 1944
Full image
Journalist and writer Ruth Gruber, photographed circa 1944 when she escorted Jewish refugees to the United States.
Courtesy of Ruth Gruber
Ruth Gruber, 2015
Full image
Journalist and writer Ruth Gruber in New York City, August, 2015.
Courtesy of Cynthia S. Yoken
Date of Birth
September 30, 1911
Place of Birth
Brooklyn, New York

How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Ruth Gruber." (Viewed on January 20, 2018) <>.

Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women.

donate now

The JWA Podcast

listen now

Sign Up for JWA eNews

Discover Education Programs

Join our growing community of educators.

view programs


text:
Miscarriage RSS feed for this section

Honoring Your Miscarriage This Holiday

Missing a loved one at the “most wonderful time of year” is always hard. Grief loves to squeeze into the happy moments and remind us that they could be a little happier, “if only…” When you’ve had years of holidays with someone, their absence is blaring in how it changes the holiday season. You’ve got […]

Continue Reading 0


text:
How Can We Encourage Co-Creation in EdTech?

It’s been a long week for me. I’ve been working on the next big thing that we’re launching next week at Balefire Labs. I won’t give it away here, but suffice it to say that only something really cool brought me up for air and inspired me enough to write about it.

Most of you know that I think the distinction between “content” and “creativity” educational technology resources is pretty bogus. I’ve written about it before (here, for example) so I won’t rehash all of that with you today.

Well, last week Tom Vander Ark, over at the Getting Smart blog, wrote an article called, “What If Kids Co-Created Customized Learning Pathways?” He talked about a bunch of different learning arrangements, but the one that really jumped off the page at me was adaptive learning. Tom’s point was that an educational resource is co-created if the learner controls some aspect of how use of the resource plays out, such as pace or path.

I hadn’t really thought about adaptive learning as co-created before, but doesn’t it make total sense? The whole point of an adaptive program is that what happens next depends on the behavior of the learner. Each learner brings something unique to the learning situation. When you consider that a learner makes a unique response at each response opportunity, and then compile that across many response opportunities in an adaptive program, well, you can see how the path of the curriculum could be completely unique for every learner. And how could that be anything but co-created?

Here’s how I envision it:

Individual Learner + Adaptive Learning Curriculum = Customized, Co-created, Learning Path.

What do you think?

What makes me happy when I think about this is that it helps provide nuance for the discussion about “content” resources. I hear about it mostly around educational apps being inferior if they are “just” content and not “creativity” resources. So this idea that apps that have been considered “merely” content apps provide the opportunity for “co-creation” is huge. This helps make the distinction between apps that truly are just for consumption purposes (think of a video or an ebook) versus apps that provide adaptive learning for skills (e.g., Native Numbers, an app I wrote about last year here). This helps us be more sophisticated in how we think and talk about digital resources.

I think of it a bit like scaffolding learning. Initially kids use apps that provide more support…co-creation apps. And when the skills required for those apps are mastered then the kids can move on to the apps in which there is no support…straight creativity apps. Levels of support are faded out as the kids become more independent. Isn’t this consistent with how we treat learning more generally?

What do you think of this concept of “co-creating?”

About karen mahon

i am a behavior and learning scientist. i hold an ed.d. in educational psychology and am trained as an instructional designer. i have spent more than 15 years working in education and instructional software design.
This entry was posted in Instructional Design, Learner Behavior, Technology and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to How Can We Encourage Co-Creation in EdTech?

  1. Lisa Williams says:

    I like how you think about this. I hand;t really given it much thought before – when I was teaching – but, this is exactly how I subconsciously (or consciously depending on how you look at it) approached teaching and my kids. They have to guide you because they are the ones taking this journey of education… you, as the teacher, area just along for the ride. 🙂 It’s amazing to me how many teachers will allow themselves, though not completely their fault, to succumb to the rigorous methods imposed on them. Take a step back, look at your kids, let them be a part of their learning, and then… watch. Enthusiasm, creativity, effort, determination… it all takes place in a learning environment where the teacher partners with the student to help them on their journey.

    I love this… thanks for sharing and enlightening me.

    • karen mahon says:

      Lisa, thanks for commenting. To build on what you’re saying, the way I look at it, the teachers set up the environment for maximum learning…then our job is to keep rearranging the environment for more and more success as the kids progress. I don’t so much think of teachers as being along for the ride as I do…hmm, it’s almost like teachers are laying out the tracks in front of the train as it’s moving. The kids guide the teachers by showing us what they can do at any given point in time and our job is to “engineer” the next step depending on those capabilities. Does that make sense? We are still the ones defining the desired outcomes and skills, but the route of the track may be very different depending on what individual kids bring to the table.

      In a sense, I think of this approach as the MOST rigorous, though allowing for the most flexibility. The method is very rigorous, in that my response as teacher is determined by the response of the learner, which is very labor-intensive. But the path is flexible in that it can be different for every learner. In other words, it is the least like a “one size fits all” approach. My impression from your comment is that the “one size fits all” is also what you object to, is that correct?

      • Lisa Williams says:

        Yes, that is precisely what I was going for. “One size fits all” is what I often see when observing teachers and listening to their stories. It’s not so much that they aren’t trying to differentiate and tend to the needs of each student, but more so that they are confined to the core standards and not sure how to deviate from that so their students can flourish. The flexibility you referred to is not eveident, and thus, they are not able to lay down those tracks.

        I refer to being along for the ride because I believe it is a journey that both the students and the teacher take together. The teacher is the conductor and it is very labor intensive, but learning is also a shared vision on the classroom and therefore, (we) both are learners.

        I’m right with you in that it is rigorous, but how teaching is approached, and the methods used, is more the direction I was trying to take. 🙂

  2. Lisa Williams says:

    … shared vision IN the classroom…. 🙂

  3. Pingback: How Can We Encourage Co-Creation in EdTech? | A...

  4. Pingback: How Can We Encourage Co-Creation in EdTech? | Balefire Labs

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: application/xhtml+xml

text:
Posted by: katiecrawford | April 27, 2009

Strong Jobs in the Economy

JobsToday I read an article by Robert Half International titled 6 Strong Jobs Despite the Downturn. This article listed six jobs in the areas of accounting and information technology (IT)  that are very important to firms in our current economy. The six strongest jobs included:

  • Senior accountants: (“hired to handle projects ranging from maintaining general ledger systems to analyzing and preparing financial statements”)
  • Senior auditors: (“changes in legislation related to taxes, financial reporting standards, business investments, mergers, and other financial events continue to fuel demand”)
  • Web developers: (“rise of social media…fueled further growth in Internet technologies”)
  • Programmer analysts: (“needed to write code, test and debug software applications, and analyze business application requirements”)
  • Administrative health care positions: (“medical facilities seeking administrative professionals with health care experience…include medical file clerks, medical secretaries, patient admissions clerks, and credentialing specialists”)
  • Project managers: (“advertising agencies and marketing departments need project managers who can ensure that projects will come in on time and within budget”)

All of these jobs on lacking workers in these field and are very much needed at this difficult time in our economy. So fear not America, there are still jobs that need workers. If you currently have a job be thankful because there are a lot of people out of work at this very moment. This is a scary time in our economy and we must do all that we can to help it! Get out there and get to work America! We can do it! As President Obama said “YES WE CAN”!

  1. Katie– Good job on your blog! I love the layout; it looks nice! This was an interesting article. It’s good to know that there are still some strong career fields in these hard economic times!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:


text:
Review: ‘John Peel’s Shed’ by John Osborne

You’d be forgiven for thinking that there had been a revival of classic kitchen-sink drama ‘Look Back in Anger’ when you see John Osborne’s name appearing in ‘What’s On’ guides at theatre near you. However, the talk  I went to last night at a snow covered Lowry in Salford couldn’t have been more different. His namesake has an awesome vinyl record collection and speaks passionately about a subject close to my heart – radio! All presented enthusiastically in an enjoyable one-hour monologue called “John Peel’s Shed.”

The book Radio Head is what the show is based on. This was the first book that I read about radio back when I was starting out. In the summer of 2009, I had already been bitten by the radio bug and had just been promoted to Head of Marketing at my student radio station Fuse FM. With such a rich landscape and history to this medium I was eager to learn all about it. I headed off to Borders book store (remember those?) in Stockport’s appropriately named ‘Peel Centre’ to find out more. Among an array of television literature in the media section there was just one radio book available for me to devour:  Radio Head. I must have been fate. I bought it, trying to convince myself that they were going to help with my dissertation research at university, which it did actually, so that was an added bonus!

The tagline is “Up and down the dial of British Radio”. It’s such a brilliant concept for a book; each day John listened to a radio station for the entire day and notes down his findings. As radio is such a fast moving medium this is now slightly dated but the stories are timeless. All types of stations are given the radio head treatment, from Virgin Radio (now Absolute) and Classic FM to the acclaimed community arts station Resonance FM. The foundations of radio are built on stories and each chapter is a fascinating culmination of the stories that happen on-air at each station the day that John was listening. As well as including special chapters devoted especially to topics like the ‘Test Match Special’ and an interview with Tommy Boyd speaking frankly about ‘Human Zoo’.  As John recalled:  all the best presenters speak to ‘you’ (singular) through the radio but Tommy actually was speaking to me!

John’s monologue delivered in ‘John Peel’s Shed’ contains nuances of his book as well as expanding on certain points too. He speaks about how he always wanted to be part of the community of listeners that tuned in to John Peel’s shows but initially found it all “too loud”. He preserved and it was only when he has an “epiphany” and connected with the lyrics in The Smiths’ song How Soon is Now? that he became hooked. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t have won the competition to win a box of records from John Peel’s shed, that form the soundtrack and backdrop to this trip down memory lane. A special mention must go out to Oi-Zone – a punk rock cover band inspired by Boyzone!

If you haven’t heard of Resonance FM then you must tune for the experience. It is an arts based project broadcasting to the South Bank and Bankside of London on 104.4 FM and online at This station shows the depth of what community radio can do. While researching for his book John speaks of how on the day he listened to Resonance they broadcasted a show called ‘Me and My Floor’ which did exactly what it says on the tin, each week featuring a different floor. Yes, the whole show consisted of the sounds made up from a microphone placed on the floor in the presenter’s house! Remember, this is an award winning arts station and they are incredibly good at what they do. I’ve said it before and I don’t mind saying it again, this shows the real depth of what community radio really can explore. I know some community and student stations can be a little rough around the edges but because they are not restricted by having to deliver RAJAR listener figures, TSA reach and the like then this allows for innovation and creativity, if done well. This is why community radio is so important as part of the radio landscape.

FEB lowrySpeaking about BBC Radio 1, John recalled the dismissive comments he made about the station at the time his book was published. (See Here)  I personally think that something so subjective as taste can never be criticised; if it is different to our own then this doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The Radio 1 faithful also had much to say about this. Having  been ‘forced’ to listen to the station everyday while working in a warehouse John now understands their way of thinking… as well as being there during the rise of Justin Beiber.

Delivered with passion and gusto, what makes John’s stories so fascinating is how life, radio and music are all seamlessly entwined. This is not just engrossing for anoraks like me but it can be appreciated by anyone who has ever listened to the radio. Whether you realise it or not, radio is part of all our lives. It’s with you when you wake up in the morning, it’s there as you drive home from work, part of your routine as you tune in to a specific show each night. Do you notice when your favourite presenter is off? When you miss a show must you catch up on the podcast? If any of that sounds familiar then you are a radio head too.

John Osborne’s own blog about the show is available HERE

If you want to go up and down the dial of British radio yourself then check-out John’s brilliantly witty and informative book Radio Head.

About Katy Booth

BBC Broadcast Journalist who has worked extensively in newsrooms of BBC local radio, regional television and commercial radio. BJTC accredited, from The University of Central Lancashire.

Posted on February 7, 2012, in Radio, Review and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:


text:
you're reading...

Public Schools in Missouri and Kansas Could Lose $76.5 Million If Congress Jumps Over the Fiscal Cliff

The fiscal cliff is looming over public education nationwide, and local districts may lose millions of dollars in federal school funding. Image credit: mrincredible / 123RF Stock Photo

Even before the votes were counted last Tuesday, pundits began talking about what would come next. Although there was the expected disagreement about politics, most agreed that as soon as elections were over our government representatives old and new would immediately turn their attention to the looming fiscal cliff. If the U.S. Congress fails to find a compromise and does jump off that fiscal cliff in the first week of the New Year, then the consequences both for the economy in general and public education in specific will be severe.

Public school administrators on the state and local levels have known about the pending budget crisis since last year, when a bipartisan committee failed to reach agreement about how to reduce the national deficit. Because of that failure, automatic federal spending cuts will drop into place in the first week of 2013 unless Congress is able to agree on a compromise. As part of those cuts, federal funding for public education in Kansas and Missouri would decrease by at least $71.5 million.

So important is this issue that the fiscal cliff was the topic of Barack Obama’s first speech after being re-elected as President. On Friday, he told the U.S. people, “I expect to find willing partners in both parties, so let’s get to work,” adding “I’m open to compromise.”

In his own remarks to the press that day, John Boehner — Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives — said he and Obama “think we both understand that trying to find a way to avert the fiscal cliff is important for our country. And I’m hopeful that productive discussions can begin soon so that we can forge an agreement that can pass the Congress.”

Whether other members of Congress will be open to compromise, however, is uncertain. During an interview Friday, Mitch McConnell — Republican leader of the U.S. House — told a Wall Street Journal reporter, “I am not willing to raise taxes to turn off the sequester. Period.” And Republican congressional leaders are scheduled to meet with President Obama next Friday to discuss whether they are willing to — as McConnell put it in his interview — engage in “Thelma and Louise economics.”

Because the federal government has already allocated funds to public schools for the current academic year, any cuts would not affect education until next fall. No one knows exactly how much those spending cuts would be. However, Tom Harkin — chairman of the U.S. Senate subcommittee that appropriates federal funds for education — last summer released a report estimating the fiscal impact on the states.

In Kansas, Harkin’s report estimates the loss of more than 250 education jobs and almost 500 in Missouri. In both states, most cuts would be to services for the most vulnerable, including disadvantaged and special education students as well as English languages learners. Federal spending cuts in both states would be about 8 percent, which means that Kansas would lose about $23.7 million, and Missouri would lose about $52.8 million.

Such cuts would be easier for districts to absorb in a healthy economy. However, since the start of the Great Recession, state tax revenues have been down, so Kansas and Missouri have not been able to fully finance their school funding formulas. And the situation in Kansas is exacerbated by the fact that the state legislature last session cut income taxes, hoping that move would attract business to the state. However, last week the state’s Consensus Estimating Group released a report predicting a $5.2 million revenue decrease next year.

To read more about how sequestration of federal funds could affect students and districts in the Kansas City metropolitan area, click HERE.

Read our Twitter feed for more education news from local, regional and national sources:http://twitter.com/#!/JW_Martinez

Or you can subscribe to the daily KC Education Enterprise roundup of local, state and national education news on paper.li: http://paper.li/JW_Martinez/1322883462

About jwmartinez

JoLynne is a journalist and educator. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Kansas and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Park University and is certified to teach high school journalism and English. Former employment includes work for Cable News Network and the University of Missouri-Kansas City in addition to freelancing for clients such as the Kansas City Star and The Pitch.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Publisher & Editor

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 244 other followers

%d bloggers like this:


text:
Posted: January 21, 2009 in Gaming

Isaac’s eyes strained against the
darkness.  Were things moving in there, or were his eyes flashing
phosphenes again?  The tiny circle of light on his plasma cutter was
woefully insufficient.  The tool had served him well in his work as an
engineer, and was now serving double-duty carving the limbs off of the Ishimura’s
former crew, but a work light will always be just that.  The speed of
the tentacle was beyond belief.  The pressure suit that had saved Isaac’s
life time and again in the past few days on the nightmarish mining ship kept
him conscious as his legs were yanked out from under him.  His head hit
the deck with a cartoonish bonk, and then the rigid plates on his suit alerted
him that he was being dragged.  The motion was erratic at best, but Isaac
knew he had to get free.  Whatever was at the end of this tentacle
probably didn’t want casual conversation.  He clenched his abdomen and
sighted along his legs until he could see biomass in the spotlight of his
plasma cutter.  The snaking tentacle combined with the dragging motion to
ruin his aim, but the cutter was a forgiving weapon in this respect.
Isaac fired every charge in the power cell at the horror around his
ankles.  Nine eighteen inch long planes of energized matter raced along
the path of the light.  Deck panelling melted, pipes and cabling
separated, and finally a shot hit home on the tentacle.  The crushing
pressure eased off of his ankles, and the remnant of whatever beast had grabbed
him raced away like a loose firehose.  Isaac guessed something else would
have to kill him.

So I finished Deadspace a while back.
I also decided I was probably going to write about it, and at 4 AM on the
morning of the first day of my semester, I started.  Nice timing,
huh?  I’d like to start out by saying that generally speaking, I hate
survival horror.  The first Resident Evil (the remake for Gamecube) did
not have enough ammo to kill all the monsters in the game.  I don’t mind
ammunition being tight all the time.  Pressure to perform well as an
unquiet corpse lurches at me is what I’m looking for.  I want to be
scared, but I play games as entertainment because I want to be part of a
story.  I’m even ok with death in the story, so long as it isn’t an
ignominious end at the hands of some mook in the early game.  No bullets
takes the survival out of survival horror.  While I’m beating this
particular horse, I also don’t want to put up with some “unique to only
this game” control scheme if I’m not even going to have enough bullets to
get through the game.  The STARs are supposed to be like a SWAT
team.  Let them move as such!

Now then:  Deadspace scratched an itch
I wasn’t sure I had.  RE(GC) was pretty but had the problems I just
mentioned.  Deadspace is gorgeous (at least, as ruined mining ships in
terrible states of disrepair and infested with alien zombies go).  The Ishimura
is a Planet Cracker mining ship that has lost contact with the company and the
player steps into the pressure suit of Isaac Clarke, engineer extraordinaire.  Isaac has an ulterior motive for going, and
he obsessively replays the last transmission from his estranged significant
other who is stationed on the Ishimura.
Naturally, the approach to the disabled ship goes poorly, and renders
Isaac unable to leave the ship.

The game is fairly forgiving of death.  There is the capability of saving at any of
the reasonably frequent save stations, but if one were to go for an hour or
more without saving and then die, the game sticks you back at the last
checkpoint.  There is no blatant alert as
to where these checkpoints are, because great pains have been taken to enhance
the immersion factor of the game.

There is no HUD in this game.  The visual real estate is wholly devoted to
the world that Isaac is in.  The player
can monitor Isaac’s healt and stasis charge via a bar running up the spine of
the suit, and a crescent on the left shoulder, respectively.  When our hero steps into a vacuum, a
holographic timer is projected from his back showing the amount of available
breathable air.  All of the weaponry have
ammo counters on the weapons themselves.
Even the inventory screen is a holographic projection.  On a related note, bringing up the inventory
list (or activating any device, really) in a room that hasn’t been swept is a
short trip to the land of the seriously dead.
The world doesn’t stop just because you need to use a stasis

The writing isn’t the most unique thing in
the universe, but then there aren’t very many new ideas left in the world at this
point.  I feel like Isaac is the right
man for the job, and the setup is believable enough.  There were plot twists, mostly late in the
game, that may have been obvious if I was looking for them, but honestly I was
too focused on individual encounters with the necromorphs.  For a change, Isaac is never asked to do any
of the things that virtually ensure one’s death, and indeed <spoiler> the moment Isaac’s helmet comes off he’s lunch </spoiler>.

The sounds of the game were both brutal and
excellent.  Corpses squished, machinery
ground, and weapons sounded like they would hurt.  Particularly impressive was the way sound in
vacuum was handled.  When in an airless
environment, the only sound to be heard is Isaac’s labored breathing in his
helmet.  Every other noise is either
muffled or muted, giving credibility to the claim that in space no one can hear
you scream.

I know that only a few people read this,
and that they have already made their choices regarding this particular
game.  I just want the world to know that
I loved it, and that EA is capable of doing something right once in a
while.  Although, the law of averages
says they were due anyway.

challenge: Deadspace on super-hard difficulty.
I sure could go for the title of Epic Tier 3 Engineer.  I’ll wait a bit though to restore the impact
of the terror inducing moments of the game.

  1. Heidi says:

    i am glad you loved it. thats all that matters!!! let me know when you make it to epic tier 3 engineer!!!(whenever that may be)

  2. Sam says:

    Thanks again for letting me borrow it. Right now that knucklhead MF is playing right now, and is once again ahead of me in the game by a chapter. Damn him! *shakes fists*

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Cill Iníon Léinin

Ken writes: I don’t think we’ve mentioned yet that the other day (10.08.2008), after visiting friends, as we were walking down Marino Avenue West we stumbled across the ruins of the original monastic site that gives Killiney its name: Cill Inion Leinin (Church of the daughter of Leinin – I think). It was odd, since we’d walked that way a few times before, but never noticed it. More unusually, we had a camera handy. So here are some pictures.

One thought on “Cill Iníon Léinin

  1. katimum

    What had you done to Hugh to make him look so fiercely disapproving? He has the expression of a cat required to remove himself from the Welsh Dresser shelf. (Tybalt has recently adopted it as his new ‘nest’ despite vigorous opposion from those who prefer less cat hair in their fruit basket and toaster.)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Word of the day

Ken writes: My friend Niall told me of an interesting word yesterday: ‘Bejesuit’, which is a verb meaning ‘To initiate in Jesuitism; to work upon by, or subject to, Jesuits.’ (OED). He and his girlfriend were bejesuited recently because they want to get married, but not in a Catholic ceremony, which would involve pledging loyalty to the Catholic church. They were having a meeting with a Jesuit priest to find out if there was any way their marriage would be recognised by the Catholic church. His mother is a committed Catholic, who would worry about them ‘living in sin’ so they have to be married in a way recognised as marriage by the Catholic church. Unfortunately, it turns out that, because he is a baptised Catholic, he has to be married in a Catholic ceremony (or else renounce the church -not a mother-pleasing option). Interestingly, the Catholic church would recognise Dot’s and my Church of England marriage, even though the Church of England is merely an ‘ecclesial community’ according to Benedict the 16th (I’ve also heard that it is possible to be a married Roman Catholic priest, if you were married first as an Anglican priest and subsequently convert to Catholicism).

Catholicism is like the Apple Computer company. They both sell a complete package and you have to buy the in-house options and can’t customise. And they both have their passionate adherents!

7 thoughts on “Word of the day

  1. Hmmm, tricky one. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: from the Catholic point of view, abjuring your faith – apostasy – sends you straight to Hell; as does living in sin; leaving you with the dubious possibilities of some sort of sham (and, again, being Hellbound).
    For two sound atheists, one possibility might be to undergo a Catholic marriage (with conversion of one of the parties, as needs be). In that if one doesn’t believe, and indeed if there is no God, then it doesn’t matter.
    And good results, as a mother is made happy. (I for one definitely believe in human happiness and unhappiness, and a duty of care to fellow human beings, especially The Aged.)
    This only works if the Catholic party makes a convincing return to the fold, and if the other party makes a convincing conversion. Public declarations of religious renunciation beforehand, and discussions with Jesuits, might be a bit of a hindrance.
    That slight hitch aside, this is actually a rather Jesuitical solution. Those who care about such things are happy with the “Catholic” marriage. Those who don’t should have no issue with saying things they don’t believe, because these things are not – in their belief, or rather, non-belief system – true. Those who are suspicious cannot prove anything one way or t’other – if the couple have been sufficiently convincing, this will have to be concluded to be a matter between each individual and God.
    The gamble: this kind of concerted action might make The Couple stronger or pull them apart. Particularly if the Catholice party becomes squqamish: Any niggling doubts about saying things one thought one didn’t believe – and a fear of divine retribution – suggests one might not be as fully lapsed as one thought … leading one back to Mother Church’s tender embrace as a repentant sinner.
    Beyond Pascal’s wager, this is a win-win for the Church.

  2. Some of our friends were surprised to learn that their civil marriage in New York was not recognised by the Catholic Church, necessitating a full marriage ceremony rather than the mere blessing they sought.

    As an unreconstructed disrespecter of all sacrednesses dearly held, I say they should lie like dogs, get married under the auspices of the Church, then repudiate the whole mess before God and all his yeomen. This would offend the sensibilities of the Church and the Mother and deeply pad the tally of reason and logic.

    Or rudeness. Or both.

  3. kenanddot

    I expect they will probably get married in a civil ceremony and then work on his mother’s issues with a civil wedding later. That might formalise their commitment to each other enough to reassure his mother that they are not just `living in sin’. Probably an old-fashioned, which is not to say `wrong’, attitude to the moral issues is responsible for some of his mother’s concerns.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Monthly Archives: April 2009

Toffee Walnut Brownies

I recently bought some cocoa powder from Ambrosia Natural Foods and really wanted to make something that showcases chocolate so I could find out if I liked it or not. I thought, what better than brownies to find out! So I dug around all my recipe books and all my bookmarked pages of recipes to find a good brownie. Then I remembered that a blog I visit frequently had a dark chocolate brownie recipe posted a few days ago! How perfect. So I got everything out and started making them. Here is the recipe from Pumpkin and Spice:

Bittersweet Chocolate Browniesimgp21352
Makes one 9×13 pan

  • 10 oz dark chocolate, melted
  • 2 sticks butter, melted
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 1/2c sugar
  • 1t vanilla
  • 3/4c flour
  • 1/2c cocoa powder
  • 1t salt
  • 1t baking powder
  • 1c semi-sweet chocolate chips (or toffe bits or walnuts)

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9×13 pan well.
Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Add the chocolate and butter and mix well.
In a different bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Add to the chocolate and egg mixture and mix until just combined. Fold in the chips (or bits or nuts) and pour into the prepared pan. Smooth the top.
Bake for 30min. (A skewer inserted in the center will still come out moist- the brownies will set up when they cool.)

(The recipe does call for 10 oz of dark chocolate, but I only had 5 oz of Scharffen Berger left, and it was rich milk chocolate instead of dark. I decided to go ahead and just use what I had. I also put in about 1/2 cup of toffee bits AND walnuts! Yum!)
When I opened my bag of cocoa it was a deep rich brown, I had never seen cocoa like that since what we usually buy is just really average cocoa. You know, nothing special. It smelled amazing and way better than the stuff I have sitting in my cupboard right now. I figured that with this cocoa, 5 oz less of melted chocolate wouldn’t hurt. It turned out to be the darkest brownie batter I have ever seen! And oh my god when they were in the oven I wanted to take them out half-way through and just eat the half eaten brownie batter. When the timer went off I was so happy. Excited to try the brownies! I let them cool for a bit in the pan, and then cut them up and lifted them out. Took the biggest one for myself of course, put it on a plate and grabbed a glass of milk. It looked pretty so I took a picture too, which is at the top of this post. It was heavenly! Very similar to the Barefoot Contessa ‘Outrageous Brownies’ but those make a LOT of brownies. This recipe is great for a smaller batch, and quick to make too! And while these are delicious brownies, the only downside for me is that I prefer my brownies to be more fudgey and less…crumby? Maybe they are this way because I only added 5 oz of chocolate instead of 10. I’ll have to try them again some other time and compare! So for now:

I give this recipe 4 Pastry Mice out of 5!

Leave a comment

Filed under baking

Sweet Potato Pie

I was watching Paula Deen on the food network a few days ago, and they were talking about sweet potato pie. I’ve never had it, and actually had never heard of it, so of course it sounded interesting to me. I wondered what it would taste like and I figured it would be something like a sweeter version of the yams* my mom makes at Christmas and Thanksgiving for my sister, but in a pie crust. I figured I had nothing to lose if I made one, someone would eat it if it didn’t go over well at my house. So I turned to one of my favourite recipe websites, allrecipes! And I found one with a lot of reviews and a 5 star rating. So I made it! The only thing I did differently was add a bit of flour because it was REALLY runny, and I put the mixture through the blender to smooth it out as it had a lot of sweet potato lumps in it.
Here is the link to the recipe! It’s really yummy 🙂

I did have a slight problem however…The first inch of the crust on the bottom of the pie pan was stuck and would not move. I have no idea how this happened. But I couldn’t even cut out a nice slice since the first part of the crust would stay on the pan, and the slice would be falling apart. I had to do something to salvage this delicious pie! And I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be nice if  I had a big 8 inch round biscuit/cookie cutter?”. And since I don’t, I thought cutting out small circles would be just a cute, if not cuter since they’re small! So I did, and I managed to get most of the pie back to an appetizing appearance. Only a small bit was un-salvageable and had to be thrown away. The end product would have been much cuter had I had some whipped cream to pipe in a fluffy mound on top and sprinkle with cinnamon. Oh well! Now I know for next time. But here is a picture of what is left of the saved pie.

I did a messy job at cutting out the circles!

But at least it tasted good! So:

I give this recipe 4 Pastry Mice out of 5!

Next time, BROWNIES! mmmm!!!

*I really don’t know the difference between yams and sweet potatoes, I looked it up on Google and just got more confused 🙂

Leave a comment

Filed under baking

My Favourite Coffee Cake

(not a good picture. I’m not a very good food photographer at night! This was just made, came out of the oven about 20 minutes ago. Superb!)

This recipe comes from a family-made cookbook on my Mom’s side, so it’s full of delicious Dutch recipes, and some other fun things.  It’s a sour cream coffee cake, with the standard brown sugar/cinnamon layer inside. I still remember the first time I made this cake. I was in grade 3 and my Oma was coming to visit us from B.C. And when my Oma comes over, that means a lot of tea will be made. (I’m somewhat of a tea granny myself, can’t get enough of the stuff.) I wanted to make something for us to have after dinner with our tea while we were playing Scrabble. I pulled out the cookbook that I had never really noticed before, and found this recipe. Even though it’s a “coffe cake”, I figured it would still be good with tea! And it was. Everyone loved it! It’s a really moist cake, not too sweet, and the perfect texture a coffee cake should be (according to me anyways!).

Sour Cream Coffee Cake:

1/4 c  margarine
1 c sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 c flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 c sour cream

1/2 c brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Cream the butter, and then add the sugar. Add the eggs in one at a time, making sure everything is fully mixed together. In a separate bowl, mix together the dry ingredients. Then alternately add the dry ingredients and sour cream to the butter/sugar mixture.

Mix the brown sugar and cinnamon together in a small bowl. Sprinkle half of the mixture into a greased tube pan, then add half of the batter and spread carefully and evenly. Sprinkle the rest of the mixture on that and cover with the remaining batter. (If you really wanted to, you could make a little extra topping and sprinkle it on the top, which becomes the bottom anyways.)
Bake in a 350°F oven for 40-45 minutes in the lower third of the oven until a toothpick or thin knife comes out clean. You can eat it right out of the oven or room temperature! It’s awesome either way.

My favourite thing about it is that the brown sugar sprinkled on the bottom of the pan makes a sweet and crunchy crust on the outside of the cake. I love it!

I give this recipe 5 Pastry Mice out of 5!

Eet Smakelijk!

(that’s like “bon appétit” in Dutch!)

Leave a comment

Filed under baking

A Polar Bear

She says she knows what she wants.
But the truth is she has no idea.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

What To Do, What To Do…

So I’ve taken a year off. And now I have no idea of what I want to do with my life.  I’ve looked over hundreds of programs offered at universities and colleges, and none of them really appeal to me or make me say “OH WOW I WANT TO DO THAT!” I have no idea what to do. I do know some things though.
1. I don’t want to work for someone else (but I’m sure I will have to at least for a little bit.)
2. I want to make a liveable amount of money, doesn’t have to be extravagant though.
3. I feel limited for some reason. Are there actually things in my way or am I just holding myself back?

*sigh* maybe I just don’t know how to go about achieving what I really want. Kevo tells me I need to talk to a pastry chef who has opened up their own shop. I agree, but don’t quite sure know how to do it, or how to pick one that I really like and admire. I want to go to Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa. But I am not quite sure I want to take out a student loan from the bank to pay it off at once.($23,000 at once is a big amount!!). I guess I should just suck it up and join the rest of the crowd and end my post-secondary schooling with a huge loan.  I will just be like all the other fish in the sea who are plagued by debt and horribleness.  Hooray for me!!

Secondly…should I…should we…should we cut down our trip of 2 months long and only go for like..3 weeks or just 1 month? It would save money for sure..more money for LCB!

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized


text:
Kiolbassa Beef & Cheddar Smoked Sausage

Beef & Cheddar Smoked Sausage

Few things go better with all-beef sausage than a fine piece of good cheddar. So we add genuine Wisconsin cheddar cheese to our best beef smoked sausage and created an instant Kiolbassa classic. So rich, so cheesy, so delicious! Its mild, tempting taste is a favorite of young and old alike.

Purchase in our Kiolbassa Classic Box!


text:
January TBR!

So I’ve come up with a TBR for this month. Even though we are 13 days in and I may not finish these before next month, I’m still adding them to my TBR for this month. I have recently begun receiving ARCs from Netgalley and Edelweiss and am so excited to read some and post reviews on them! I posted beside them if they are an ARC.

So, without further ado….

January ’17 TBR–tbr

The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett // Chelsea Sedoti(ARC)

City of Glass// Cassandra Clare

Love and Gravity // Samantha Sotto(ARC)

Kin of Cain // Matthew Harffy(ARC)

Cold Summer // Gwen Cole(ARC)

Clockwork Angel // Cassandra Clare

Always // Sarah Jio(ARC)

That’s the list! I hope I can do it. But if I can’t, they will just get pushed into February and I will just figure it out lol. I am almost done with City of Glass and I love it so much. I am really enjoying Cassandra Clare’s writing style and am deeply attached to the characters in the Mortal Instruments series. I don’t know quite what to think about the Infernal Devices series but I hear that it is best to alternate back and forth after City of Glass so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m also really excited to read Love and Gravity as it sounds like my kind of story. I will be posting reviews as I get these knocked out. 🙂

Happy Reading! And do subscribe, I will gladly subscribe back! 🙂

<weirdness>I want nothing more than to discuss books with you! 😉 </weirdness>

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
375 Hosmer Pond RD $37,500

375 Hosmer Pond RD Camden, ME 04843

Square Footage: 0 sq ft
Lot Size (Acres): 0.4000

Partially cleared lot, 3 miles from the Village of Camden, and drilled well already on site. Just a short distance from Hosmer Pond, and The Camden Snow Bowl.

Town: Camden
Zoning: RU-1
Taxes: $630
Tax Year: 2016
MLS ID: 1317709
½ Baths: 0
Kessler Horty
Camden Real Estate Company

Sometimes you have to sail away from the safe harbor and experience the world on your own before you can realize that the town you grew up in (if it’s anything like the town of Camden) is one of the best places you can choose to be. And that’s exactly what Kessler did.

Growing up in a family passionate about art, architecture, and real estate helped shape Kessler’s interests from a young age. However, Kessler wasn’t so sure how he would use these foundations in his own career until he graduated from Ithaca College and moved to Huntington Beach, California where he began his real estate career.

After a few years, Kessler decided to relocate back to Maine so he could experience the four-seasons again. Upon returning, he moved to Portland and obtained his Associate Broker’s License. He worked as the team coordinator for the number one RE/MAX team in New England for two years, and enjoyed every minute of it.

Returning to Camden was a natural progression from there. Kessler is proud to be a part of the wonderful business he has watched his father create, and he is happy to return to the close-knit community he has always called home.
Kessler is an active, upbeat, team member with a distinguishable laugh. He loves to talk about houses, but he can also catch you up on the latest sports news. He will work hard to answer any questions you may have, and he places a high value on providing excellent customer service.

When he is not working with the team, Kessler enjoys working on home improvement projects and spending time outdoors with his wife, Adrienne, and Bernese Mountain Dog, Mady.


text:
APEX Express

APEX Express – December 16, 2004

How does being Korean American and an adoptee get worked into a
comedy routine? Find out as Apex talks with Kevin Shea. Also featured is Genny
Lim, poet and author of the award-winning play Paper Angels, who’ll also read some
of her works. Plus music, calendar and more.

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Hard Knock Radio

Hard Knock Radio – May 31, 2006

this episode is no longer available

Davey D speaks with a panel of folks about June 1st’s "Silence the Music," in conjunction with "Silence the Violence Day" on June 1st. Also ABB Recording artist Lizz Fields speaks with Weyland about her album, "By day, By night".

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Terra Verde

Terra Verde – January 23, 2009 at 1:00pm

Despite already being highly developed, the Bay Area has one massive untapped area to grow fresh produce: its rooftops. Terra Verde talks to experts about the new frontier of green roofs.

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Sing Out

Sing Out – September 9, 2009

this episode is no longer available

Among other delights, “Sing Out” looks at the new Michael Tilson Thomas/SF Symphony recording of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with insight from guest Howard Kadis, the master mandolinist, playing a tiny instrument in a massive work with 100 musicians and 200 singers!

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Pushing Limits

“Blind Man’s Bluff” Part Two, Peutz-Jeghers Syndrome Community

First, we join our heroine Geri at her job interview at the local Independent Living Center as we play another scene from our original play, “Blind Man’s Bluff”.  Starring Kris Yates, Mary Ann (Tidwell) Boussard, Doyle Saylor, Leah Gardner, Jan Santos & Patty Nash. From the memoir of the same name by Geri Taekens.

Then Adrienne Lauby talks to Stephanie Sugars about a community of people
living with a rare genetic disease, Peutz-Jeghers Syndrome.  The e-group she facilitates is
celebrating its tenth year anniversary this month.

These 250-300 people, who live with Peutz-Jeghers Syndrome, face decades
of dangerous medical procedures and difficult reproductive questions.  They engage with each
other from many countries, ages and income levels.  How do they handle the news of a miracle cure misinformation about medical procedures, abortion & fertility topics, death among their members and other potentially dangerous moments?

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Living Room

Living Room —Guest Host Veronica Faisant discusses ‘Positive News with Ilonka Wloch – November 24, 2011

Guest Host Veronica Faisant chat with Ilonka Wloch, editor of Positive News, a not-for-profit newspaper published in the Bay Area. Veronica opens the phone lines and discuss the challenge of embracing gratitude in these difficult times with listeners.

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Crack O Dawn

Crack O Dawn – May 4, 2012 at 12:00am

this episode is no longer available

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Hard Knock Radio

Hard Knock Radio – June 10, 2013 at 4:00pm

this episode is no longer available

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
Film Schooled

Film Schooled – May 21, 2016

A show on the latest independent media, with a focus on documentaries and discussions about interesting feature and short films.

• Rapid Response Phone Numbers for ICE Raids      • The cost of independent media is high. Donate today to KPFA!      • Get Woke with Rising up with Sonali at 5 am, Democracy Now at 6 am, Upfront at 7 am and Democracy Now again at 9 am

Share This


text:
for Professional Event and Meeting Planners

Event Master

For an event to be a success – proper management and building client relations are most crucial factors. Besides when you’re planning an event, you select from many different revenue strategies to monetize your event and position it in your overall marketing plan.Imagine, you planning an event that showcases several masters in your niche. Each of these masters may provide keynote speeches, run mini-conferences or sessions, or use the venue to otherwise market their products.

Events Master offers event planners a one stop, subscription-based online service to conveniently plan and manage multiple events concurrently. Designed and field tested, Events Master has everything you need to plan, publish, invite and track events as well as manage event expenses thereby saving time and money.Joining Events Master is as easy as 1, 2, 3, and 4.

An event planner’s main need is to manage all the details that go into making of a successful event. At Events Master, you can master your events at one place, no hassles of roaming around at different places and increase your expenses.

Events master provides many positive benefits for you as the organizer, including building credibility and providing an excellent revenue stream. If you’ve decided to host an event but haven’t yet determined how it will fit into your overall marketing strategy or how you’ll generate revenue, consider This event is a great way for you to establish yourself in your field on an equal-footing with these masters, and go on to host your own successful events marketing and selling your own products. These events come with a built-in audience and list-building benefits, and provide a great revenue stream for new event organizers.

Features includes

  • Manage event Activities, Expenses, Suppliers, Sponsors, Exhibitorsetc
  • Manage Onsite Advertising
  • Event Programs
  • Sell Passes & Tickets
  • Dashboard
  • Sticky notes
  • Personal Notes
  • Event Contest
  • Reports – Business intelligence
  • Multi-users environment

About Events Master

Events Master provides tools to plan, publish, invite, and track, feedback, measure activities and event expenses thereby resulting in saving time and money. It only takes few minutes to get you started using Events Master to create and manage your next successful event.

Events Master is easy to use. With built-in video tutorials and step-by-step instructions and FAQ, users can adapt quickly with Events Master. It has simplified workflow and has reduced the repetitive tasks thereby saving your time. It has flexibility and provides customers complete control to manage events as per their needs. Several special features are available at your disposal to make your event a great success.

It is always worth taking some time to a bit of research on event organizing tools. See if they have done similar events to your and ask if they can provide testimonials. You really don’t want egg on your face when it comes to the big day in question so make sure that you do your homework. There is an excellent website at, where you can see all that they have to offer.

For More Details Visit: –

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
AF3364 flight schedule & details

Air France domestic flight AF3364 served route Detroit to Milwaukee. This is archive flight and it is currently unavailable. Last known departure date was 28th October, 2017.

Flight AF3364: Detroit - Milwaukee

Departure day 28th October (Saturday)
Departure time 19:55 (7:55 pm)
Departure terminal Terminal «EM»
Airport name Wayne
Airport IATA code DTW
City Detroit
State / Province MI
Country United States
Arrival day 28th October (Saturday)
Arrival time 20:08 (8:08 pm)
Arrival terminal N/A
Airport name General Mitchell
Airport IATA code MKE
City Milwaukee
State / Province WI
Country United States
Flight number AF3364
Airline name Air France
IATA carrier code AF
Flight type Domestic
Airplane type Canadair CRJ 900
Arrival day Same day
Flight duration 1h 13m
Distance 382 km / 237 mi.
Operated by Delta flight DL4470
Flight AF3364 route from Detroit (United States) to Milwaukee (United States)

See also

All non-stop flights from Detroit to Milwaukee Return flights (Milwaukee to Detroit)

Search more flights with KvikrFlights™

Privacy Disclaimer


text:
EY5664 flight schedule & details

Etihad Airways international flight EY5664 served route Brussels to Paris. This is archive flight and it is currently unavailable. Last known departure date was 17th April, 2017.

Flight EY5664: Brussels - Paris

Departure day 17th April (Monday)
Departure time 15:17 (3:17 pm)
Departure terminal N/A
Airport name Brussels-South railway station
Airport IATA code ZYR
City Brussels
Country Belgium
Arrival day 17th April (Monday)
Arrival time 16:54 (4:54 pm)
Arrival terminal Terminal «TN»
Airport name Charles de Gaulle
Airport IATA code CDG
City Paris
Country France
Flight number EY5664
Airline name Etihad Airways
IATA carrier code EY
Flight type International
Airplane type Train
Arrival day Same day
Flight duration 1h 37m
Distance 240 km / 149 mi.
Flight EY5664 route from Brussels (Belgium) to Paris (France)

See also

All non-stop flights from Brussels to Paris Return flights (Paris to Brussels)

Search more flights with KvikrFlights™

Privacy Disclaimer


text:
FA264 flight schedule & details

Safair domestic flight FA264 serves route Johannesburg to Durban. The flight departs one times per week (and Saturday). Provided details are valid for the flight departing on 20th January, 2018.

Flight departure days

Select your flight departure date in the calendar. Note that some flights may have different arrival & departure times, terminals, durations and even airports depending on departure date. Selecting proper date ensures you get correct information.

Flight FA264: Johannesburg - Durban

Departure day 20th January (Saturday)
Departure time 06:00 (6:00 am)
Airport name OR Tambo
Airport IATA code JNB
City Johannesburg
Country South Africa
Arrival day 20th January (Saturday)
Arrival time 07:15 (7:15 am)
Airport name Durban
Airport IATA code DUR
City Durban
Country South Africa
Flight number FA264
Airline name Safair
IATA carrier code FA
Flight type Domestic
Airplane type Boeing 737-800
Arrival day Same day
Flight duration 1h 15m
Distance 478 km / 297 mi.
Flight FA264 route from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Durban (South Africa)

See also

All non-stop flights from Johannesburg to Durban Return flights (Durban to Johannesburg)

Search more flights with KvikrFlights™

Privacy Disclaimer


text:
FI7407 flight schedule & details

Icelandair international flight FI7407 serves route Copenhagen to Dusseldorf. The flight departs approximately one times per week (and Monday). Provided details are valid for the flight departing on 22nd January, 2018.

Flight departure days

Select your flight departure date in the calendar. Note that some flights may have different arrival & departure times, terminals, durations and even airports depending on departure date. Selecting proper date ensures you get correct information.

Flight FI7407: Copenhagen - Dusseldorf

Departure day 22nd January (Monday)
Departure time 16:50 (4:50 pm)
Departure terminal Terminal «3»
Airport name Copenhagen
Airport IATA code CPH
City Copenhagen
Country Denmark
Arrival day 22nd January (Monday)
Arrival time 18:05 (6:05 pm)
Arrival terminal N/A
Airport name Dusseldorf
Airport IATA code DUS
City Dusseldorf
Country Germany
Flight number FI7407
Airline name Icelandair
IATA carrier code FI
Flight type International
Airplane type Airbus A320-100/200
Arrival day Same day
Flight duration 1h 15m
Distance 621 km / 386 mi.
Operated by SAS flight SK627
Flight FI7407 route from Copenhagen (Denmark) to Dusseldorf (Germany)

See also

All non-stop flights from Copenhagen to Dusseldorf Return flights (Dusseldorf to Copenhagen)

Search more flights with KvikrFlights™

Privacy Disclaimer


text:
TG473 flight schedule & details

Thai Airways International international flight TG473 serves route Bangkok to Brisbane. The flight departs four times per week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday). Provided details are valid for the flight departing on 21st January, 2018.

Flight departure days

Select your flight departure date in the calendar. Note that some flights may have different arrival & departure times, terminals, durations and even airports depending on departure date. Selecting proper date ensures you get correct information.

Flight TG473: Bangkok - Brisbane

Departure day 21st January (Sunday)
Departure time 00:01 (0:01 am)
Departure terminal N/A
Airport name Suvarnabhumi
Airport IATA code BKK
City Bangkok
State / Province
Country Thailand
Arrival day 21st January (Sunday)
Arrival time 12:05 (12:05 pm)
Arrival terminal Terminal «I»
Airport name Brisbane
Airport IATA code BNE
City Brisbane
State / Province QLD
Country Australia
Flight number TG473
Airline name Thai Airways International
IATA carrier code TG
Flight type International
Airplane type 787
Arrival day Same day
Flight duration 9h 04m
Distance 7252 km / 4506 mi.
Flight TG473 route from Bangkok (Thailand) to Brisbane (Australia)

See also

All non-stop flights from Bangkok to Brisbane Return flights (Brisbane to Bangkok)

Search more flights with KvikrFlights™

Privacy Disclaimer


text:
UA8512 flight schedule & details

United Airlines international flight UA8512 serves route Toronto to Miami. The flight departs daily. Provided details are valid for the flight departing on 20th January, 2018.

Flight departure days

Select your flight departure date in the calendar. Note that some flights may have different arrival & departure times, terminals, durations and even airports depending on departure date. Selecting proper date ensures you get correct information.

Flight UA8512: Toronto - Miami

Departure day 20th January (Saturday)
Departure time 17:00 (5:00 pm)
Departure terminal Terminal «1»
Airport name Pearson
Airport IATA code YYZ
City Toronto
State / Province ON
Country Canada
Arrival day 20th January (Saturday)
Arrival time 20:17 (8:17 pm)
Arrival terminal N/A
Airport name Miami
Airport IATA code MIA
City Miami
State / Province FL
Country United States
Flight number UA8512
Airline name United Airlines
IATA carrier code UA
Flight type International
Airplane type Airbus A321-100/200
Arrival day Same day
Flight duration 3h 17m
Distance 1986 km / 1234 mi.
Operated by Air Canada flight AC1644
Flight UA8512 route from Toronto (Canada) to Miami (United States)

See also

All non-stop flights from Toronto to Miami Return flights (Miami to Toronto)

Search more flights with KvikrFlights™

Privacy Disclaimer


text:
The Vogeler

It's All About Technology

Com 495 – Top 5 Helpful Sites for Blogging December 12, 2009

1) Youtube – After learning how to put youtube links in the blog  (i.e. and seeing how easy this becomes this has been one of the most helpful for me in blogging. It is nice to have a visual representation of what I am talking about so that everyone knows what I am talking about.

2) Slideshare – Call me crazy but I had never used this site before taking Com 495 at the University of Washington. I never realized it was so easy to share on wordpress. This was a great tool for sharing picture too. This is definately something to explore.

3) Zamzar – When you need to convert files in order to use on your blog, this site is great for this! I have struggled with the conversion of files so much in the past that this has been a godsend when it comes to doing this.

4) Creative Commons – For this, two sites actually are important.

4a)One is the creative commons licensing that I learned how to copy paste into my site. This allows other readers to see what my policy is on using my work.

4b) Flickr – The other site is flickr because this site also lets users to an advanced search by creative commons pictures. Before this class, I had no idea that I should have been more careful with copyright and use these tools, not only to protect my work but to prevent me to taking unlawfully others work. Plus, it has loads of picture to choose from.

5) Delicious – Finding new stuff to explore, discovering new content. Plus bookmarking it. This site helps bloggers do it all is seems.

I am pretty sure everyone in our class has explored all of these sites at this point, but if you haven’t take a look again. For instance, create a powerpoint with music, put it on slideshare and post it on wordpress. This process before seemed too difficult and now it is a reality. I have learned a lot about blogging in this course and I hope to find many more sites that are just as helpful.


text:
European Elections

[Michael Calderbank, Brent Central CLP, examines the numbers and assesses their significance for next year’s General Election]

Following a distinctly mixed set of results at the locals , the European elections gave Labour a meagre 1.4% lead over the Tories. We would need to be substantially further ahead to feel confident of winning an outright majority at next year’s General Election. Meanwhile, UKIP’s victory – topping the national poll on 27% – was the first time since 1910 that a national election had not been won by one of the big two parties. Excluding the particularly strong support in London, Labour’s lead would have evaporated, demonstrating just how much work the Party still has to do. If UKIP can poll even half as strongly next year this could determine the fate of a number of key target seats. There is a real danger that UKIP could consolidate itself as the voice of protest in working class areas previously loyal to Labour.

FarageCleggOur own campaign said next to nothing on Europe or why it might be important to elect Labour representatives to the European Parliament. The debate between Farage and Clegg showed how weak the mainstream case for continued membership of the EU has become, amounting to little beyond “we must stay in because it’s good for business”. Implicitly accepting there was no popular case to be made on Europe, Labour had little left to say. Compounding this difficulty, Miliband distanced himself from the idea of giving a chance for voters to have their say on membership of the EU via a referendum. We cannot afford to repeat such mistakes in our campaign at the General Election; we must offer positive reasons to vote Labour.

Rather than make concessions on immigration to try to win back support from UKIP, we must come forward with a bold and popular series of positive reasons to vote Labour. This means taking to task the bankers and bosses whose greed led to the economic crisis and austerity cuts, rather than scapegoating immigrants or benefit claimants.

LePenThe success of UKIP can be seen as part of a wider backlash against EU institutions which was felt across much of Europe. This saw opinion increasingly polarised with support growing for candidates of the far right and radical left. Shockwaves were sent across France, as Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale topped the poll, scooping up a quarter of all
votes compared to just 14% for the ruling party of Francois Hollande, with Jean-Luc Melenchon’s Front de Gauche on a disappointing 6.3%. In Germany the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party had its first MEP elected. Although on just 1% nationally, they were comfortably outpolled by Die Linke on 7.4%. The far right Danish People’s Party also won out as the largest party on 26.6%.

Elsewhere in Europe, it was the left that benefited from the mood of opposition. In Greece, Syriza beat the right wing New Democracy to become the biggest party, while the social democratic opposition in Portugal benefited from the backlash against the governing party and its EU-driven austerity measures. One impressive result was in Spain where Podemos, founded only three months ago, came from nowhere to take 8% of the vote and five MEPs, showing clearly the potential if left parties were to focus on hope rather than fear.

SYRIZAWith the EU increasingly seen as promoting an antiworking class agenda, it is only to be expected that voters start to look to oppositional forces. People are intelligent enough to know that to a large extent the European Parliament is a powerless talking shop, while the real power lies with the unelected Commission and the European Central Bank. If the radical left chooses to hold the skirts of the EU nurse for fear of finding something worse, it will invite the very triumph of the far right which it most fears.

Left candidates running against Labour made little impact at either the local or European levels. The “NO 2EU – Yes to Workers Rights” platform managed just 0.2% in the European elections – comfortably less even than the English Democrats or BNP. Other sectarian left parties did even more miserably.

MorellAt the local level neither the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC ) nor Left Unity made much progress. One notable exception was the re-election of Councillor Keith Morrell in the Coxford ward of Southampton Council. Keith had been a Labour councillor who was suspended, and subsequently expelled, for opposing cuts which would have meant the closure of a much valued local swimming pool in his ward. He stood as an Independent on the ballot paper – though with the support of TUSC – and was elected with 1,654 votes, a 43% share of the vote. Keith clearly still enjoys the backing of Labour supporters in his ward, and must be readmitted to the Party. His example should give confidence to other Labour councilllors that it is possible to fight back and keep the support of the community.

This entry was posted in News and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Archive for the ‘fair chase’ Category

The sport of hunting

This came up in my “research” on US hunting culture (along with the fact that not many people hunt/stalk, and the number of hunters/stalkers is declining due to loss of habitat and change in lifestyle).

“Fundamental to ethical hunting is the idea of fair chase. This concept addresses the balance between the hunter and the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken.”

“The Rules of Fair Chase”, Chatfield, Minnesota: Pope and Young Club. Archived from the original on 24 May 2012. Retrieved 24 May 2012:

One hunting club declares that a fair chase shall not involve the taking of animals under the following conditions:

  • Helpless in a trap, deep snow or water, or on ice.
  • From any power vehicle or power boat.
  • By “jacklighting” or shining at night.
  • By the use of any tranquilizers or poisons.
  • While inside escape-proof fenced enclosures.
  • By the use of any power vehicle or power boat for herding or driving animals, including use of aircraft to land alongside or to communicate with or direct a hunter on the ground.
  • By the use of electronic devices for attracting, locating or pursuing game or guiding the hunter to such game, or by the use of a bow or arrow to which any electronic device is attached.

One of the issues raised with the change in self-defence laws to allow for deadly force is that the number of sporting shooters is declining. The market is more than saturated for sporting firearms, which means there needs to be a new market found to sell weapons.

Posted 04/03/2017 by lacithedog in fair chase, hunting, Uncategorized


text:
2018 Honda CRF150R

Competition • New

Request More Information

Request Information Calculate Payment
Schedule a Test Ride Insurance Quote
It's Never Too Early For A Big Advantage.

What parent doesn’t want the best for his or her kids? You try to give them every advantage you can—a safe place to live, a good education. You try to be a good role model. You teach them that if they’re going to try, they should try their hardest. And nothing delivers that lesson like competition.

Honda’s CRF150R is designed to give your young Red Rider the biggest advantage ever on the motocross track. It’s not just an off-road bike with a low seat height; it’s a serious competition machine tailor-maid for young racers. Designed around a single-cylinder Honda Unicam engine, it offers all the performance your riders need to keep them at the front of the pack and get them on top of the podium. For 2018 we’ve updated the CRF150R’s look with new graphics right in line with our open-class CRF450R’s.

Plus, since the right-sized bike is critical, to fit a wider variety of riders, we also make the CRF150R available in a second version: the CRF150R Expert, featuring bigger wheels, a higher seat and longer swingarm.