text:
Spring 2.5 ships with great support for integration testing through the classes in the org.springframework.test package. These classes allow you to dependency inject your test cases off of your existing Spring configuration, either by using your production Spring configuration file or one you've defined especially for the test case. This post explains how to annotate your JUnit 4 test cases to be autowired, but there's a lot more too the new spring-test.jar and it works with JUnit 3.8 also.
This service is defined in a Spring XML configuration file as:
public class MyService {
private final String name;
public MyService(String name) {
this.name = name;
public String getName() {
return name;
To have Spring dependency inject our test case, we're going to have to annotate it with a little information. We'll use the standard JUnit @RunWith annotation to tell JUnit to use the Spring TestRunner, the Spring @ContextConfiguration annotation to indicate the TestCase needs injection, and the Spring @Autowired annotation to inject the MyService field by type.
<bean id="myService" class="org.sample.MyService" >
<constructor-arg value="simple service" />
There are a variety of ways to have Spring run your test. Besides SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class there are also abstract TestCase objects you can inherit from, including some that will expose the ApplicationContext to you. By default, the spring configuration file for the test case will be [TestName]-context.xml. You can easily override this to point the test at your production configuration file. Also, the @Autowired annotation autowires the field by type. In the case of conflicts, you can specify the bean name using the @Qualifier annotation. Consider the following Spring configuration where there are two beans of type MyService in a file named applicationContext.xml:
public final class SimpleAutowireTest {
private MyService service;
public void testServiceName() {
assertEquals("simple service", service.getName());
The JUnit test now requires the @Qualifier field annotation and a configuration file location as an @ContextConfiguration parameter:
<bean id="deliveryService" class="org.sample.MyService" >
<constructor-arg value="delivery service" />
<bean id="accountingService" class="org.sample.MyService" >
<constructor-arg value="accounting service" />
To note: if you point the test to the production Spring configuration, then you're running integration tests and not unit tests. Integration tests are valuable and necessary, but are not always a wholesale replacement of unit tests. There's still value in isolation testing each of the components with mock dependencies. What I like about using Spring for the integration tests is that it validates the Spring mapping at test time. On my projects, we occasionally have the unit tests all passing but the Spring configuration contains a circular dependency, and we don't find out until the build hits QA. A Spring integration test pushes up error time to the test phase, when a developer can take quick action and long before QA is held up.
@ContextConfiguration(locations = {"applicationContext.xml"})
public final class AdvancedAutowireTest {
private MyService service;
public void testServiceName() {
assertEquals("delivery service", service.getName());
As is standard with JUnit, each test method runs within its own instance of the TestCase. However, the Spring TestRunner will only create one ApplicationContext for all the instances of the test method. This means that if you're test method destroys the state of a singleton bean, then downstream tests methods using that bean will fail. The way to work around this is to annotate your method with the @DirtiesContext annotation. This tells the Spring TestRunner to reload the context between test methods. For instance, these tests will pass when annotated, but fail when not:
There's a lot more in spring-test, but this is a good starting point. The transaction annotations look especially promising, including the ability to open and rollback transactions per method. The only reference I know for spring-test is the Javadoc at http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/springframework/test/package-summary.html. Those looking for a Spring starter lesson might consult the DZone RefCard.
private MyConfigurableService service;
public void testServiceName1() {
assertEquals("configurable service", service.getName());
service.setName("Updating Name");
public void testServiceName2() {
assertEquals("configurable service", service.getName());
service.setName("Updating Name");
The dependencies for spring-test are: junit, spring-context, spring-core, spring-beans, spring-tx, and commons-logging. A sample Gradle script for your build is at href="http://svn.assembla.com/svn/SampleCode/spring-test/build.gradle.
All the code for this post (including Gradle build script and IDEA project) is posted at http://svn.assembla.com/svn/SampleCode/spring-test/ and can be downloaded through subversion with the following command:
svn co http://svn.assembla.com/svn/SampleCode/spring-test


text:
Friday 25 January
|Equus (1)
The African wild ass (Equus africanus) is the ancestor of the domestic donkey (4), and has a similar stocky body shape. The short, smooth coat is a light grey to fawn colour, fading to white on the undersides and legs (2). Both subspecies have a dark stripe across their back and the Somali wild ass (E.a.somalicus) also has horizontally striped legs like those of a zebra (2). The ears are large and bordered by black whilst the thick, upright mane is also black at the tip (2).
African wild asses have a fluid social arrangement and often form temporary aggregations of one or both sexes, which last no more than a few months and can contain as many as 50 individuals (4). Mature males however, tend to occupy large territories that are often situated around a water supply; these allow them to attain access to any receptive females passing through the area (5). Other males form bachelor groups and females may group with other females or with their own offspring. Mares tend to produce one foal every two years and births occur during the wet season (4).
Active in the cool of dawn and dusk, African wild asses seek shade in the heat of the day and are able to survive without water for a few days at a time (2). These grazers eat a variety of grasses and herbs, and in captivity have been known to live for 40 years (4).
Previously found across northern Africa, from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to Sudan and Somalia (4). Today, the African wild ass is restricted to scattered populations in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia and is regionally extinct in Egypt and Sudan (1).
The African wild ass inhabits arid areas such as hill and stony deserts, semi-arid bushlands and grasslands, where there is access to surface water (2).
The African wild ass is classified as Critically Endangered (CR) on the IUCN Red List (1) and listed on Appendix I of CITES (3). Subspecies: Nubian wild ass (E. a. africanus) and the Somali wild ass (E. a. somalicus) are both classified as Critically Endangered (CR) on the IUCN Red List (1).
African wild asses have been captured for domestication for centuries and this, together with interbreeding between wild and domestic animals, has caused a distinct decline in population numbers (4). There are now only a few hundred individuals left in the wild (4) and the species is under threat of extinction. These animals are hunted for food and for traditional medicine in both Ethiopia and Somalia, where recent civil unrest has led to an increased number of weapons in circulation. Competition with domestic livestock for grazing, and restricted access to water supplies caused by agricultural developments, pose further threats to the survival of this species (4).
The African wild ass is legally protected in the countries within which it is currently found (4), although these measures often prove difficult to enforce. More effective protection measures need to be adopted if the status of this species is to improve. A protected population of the Somali wild ass exists in the Yotvata Hai-Bar (Wildlife Preserve) Nature Reserve in Israel, to the north of Elat (6). This reserve was established in 1968 with the view to bolster populations of endangered desert species (7). Populations of horses and asses are fairly resilient, and if the species is properly protected it may well recover from its current low (5).
Learn about efforts to conserve the African wild ass:
This information is awaiting authentication by a species expert, and will be updated as soon as possible. If you are able to help please contact:
Image credit
© Åke Lindau / www.ardea.com
Ardea wildlife pets environment
59 Tranquil Vale
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 208 318 1401
Link to this photo
Embed this Arkive thumbnail link ("portlet") by copying and pasting the code below.
Terms of Use - The displayed portlet may be used as a link from your website to Arkive's online content for private, scientific, conservation or educational purposes only. It may NOT be used within Apps.
Read more about
MyARKive offers the scrapbook feature to signed-up members, allowing you to organize your favourite Arkive images and videos and share them with friends.
Play the Team WILD game:
This species is featured in:
Friday 25 January
Friday 05 October
Monday 24 September

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Little-known Taiwanese manufacturer Inhon is laying claim to the title of world's thinnest and lightest laptop after launching the new Blade 13 Carbon notebook.
The 13-inch Windows 8 device boasts a slimline frame of just 12.88mm, which the company said is a full 2mm thinner than its nearest rival, the NEC Lavie X.
It's also lighter than any other laptop ever, according to Inhon, weighing in at 1.9lbs (870g), which is a full pound lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Air and beats its nearest rival, the NEC Lavie Z, by around 5g.
Despite its svelte Carbon frame, it isn't shy on including some heavyweight specs. It's got a 1080p HD screen, Intel i5 or i7 processors, upto 256GB of SSD storage and 4GB of RAM.
No international release?
International availability of the device has not been announced, but Engadget reports it'll go on sale for the equivalent of $1,350 in its homeland (around UK£886, AUD$1,314).
There's also a cheaper fibreglass-built alternative, with a 1600 x 900 display that'll cost around $1,000 (UK$656, AUD$973), but that ups the weight to 2.6lbs.


text:
The Web
Click here to visit the Ning and check things out!
Click here to join the Ning and receive a free monthly writing lesson.
Always Write
(Grades K-12)
Start to Learn
(Primary Grades)
Making Mathematicians
(Grades K-12)
Learning is Messy
(Grades 4-6)
Write in the Middle
(Grades 6-8)
Classroom writing assignments can feel very unauthentic to our students. Think about it. Students generally feel as though they--a single voice--are writing down their words to hand to an audience of one--the teacher--for evaluation. And let's face it. Usually the writing turned in to the teacher would register pretty low on Bloom's Taxonomy; like it or not, most student writing assignments ask learners to do little more than regurgitate information from notes or research. In the real world, no one writes like this, and thus, school writing assignments can feel very contrived. And our students are much more aware of this than we give them credit for.
Enter the RAFT writing assignment. Its sole purpose is to make writing feel more authentic in two ways: 1) students are asked to think and write from a real world person's perspective, and they are asked to shape their ideas to appeal to an audience outside the classroom; 2) because they are considering perspective as they go through the writing process, students are being asked to think at a much deeper level of Bloom's Taxonomy. It's no wonder R.A.F.T. writing assignment have become very popular in the last decade, especially with content area teachers who are looking for ways to use more writing across the curriculum in their classrooms.
What is a RAFT Writing Assignment? R.A.F.T. writing prompts challenge students to assume a Role before writing, to write for an imaginary Audience, to write using a given Format, to write about a certain Topic. This is a simple but powerful technique that will inspire more thoughtful writing from yourself or your students.
A Bonus Letter! Sometimes you might also assign your students a Strong Verb to keep in mind as he/she writes, transforming the R.A.F.T. prompt into a R.A.F.T.S. prompt. If you assign strong verbs like convince, encourage, assure, or sway, then you have just transformed the prompt into a persuasive writing activity, which registers even higher on Bloom's Taxonomy. In Northern Nevada, we features R.A.F.T.S. writing prompts at our Persuasive Writing In-service Classes and Workshops, and our math, science, and social studies teachers always find great value in designing thoughtful RAFTS together. On our R.A.F.T. Homepage, you can access the worksheets we use when we help teachers design these thoughtful, content-based writing prompts.
You can also let the interactive machine below help you design a serendipitous R.A.F.T.S. prompt. The five buttons below, once pressed, will help you begin to imagine a R.A.F.T.S. writing prompt about a science topic for you or for your students to write about. If one of the button's choices doesn't seem to work, feel free to click it again. Your job here is to create a R.A.F.T.S. writing prompt that you or someone else could actually write about and learn from while writing.
Ready to try? Start clicking the buttons below until you have an idea for a R.A.F.T.S. assignment to be used in class.
We also feature a...
Our Favorite Book for Encouraging Writing Across the Curriculum:
51 Wacky We-Search Reports by Barry Lane
Want a lesson e-mailed to you every month?
Join our Writing Lesson of the Month Ning by clicking here, and start enjoying this free feature.
You will write as though you are...
Writer's ROLE for this Assignment
...writing something to be read or heard by...
Writer's AUDIENCE for this Assignment
The writing will take the form of...
The Written FORMAT for this Writing Assignment
...and will be about...
The Writer's TOPIC for this Assignment
Your piece of writing's purpose will be to...
The Writer's STRONG VERB to Achieve with this Writing
If you haven't already, be sure to check out...
The NNWP's 140-page Print Resource:
The 2005 Writing Across the Curriculum Guide
(Click on the cover below to find out how to order a copy for your classroom or school.)
This print resource contains five modules on different ways to write meaningfully in all curriculum areas. The fifth module of the WAC Guide is entirely devoted to the topic of R.A.F.T. Writing Assignments.
Here are several complimentary resources from the NNWP's
Writing Across the Curriculum Guide:
Back to the top of the page
© Copyright 2015 - WritingFix- All Rights Reserved.
Please, share the resources you find on these pages freely with fellow educators, but please leave any page citations on handouts intact, and please give authorship credit to the cited teachers who created these wonderful lessons and resources. Thanks in advance for honoring other educators' intellectual property.


text:
Top flight deals to Thessaloniki (SKG)*
Fly to Thessaloniki with KLM
Thanks to our global network, as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines we always offer convenient flights to Thessaloniki, serving Thessaloniki Airport (SKG) in Greece (formerly known as Mikra Airport). Want to ask us something about your flight or anything at all? We're available 24/7 in several languages on Facebook, Messenger, Twitter or WhatsApp.
Top Thessaloniki attractions
- Church of Agios Dimitrios: a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the main church sits above a museum, which used to be a crypt.
- Archaeological Museum: one of the largest Grecian museums; showcases unique and ancient Greek artefacts.
- Ladadika District: full of nightlife and eateries and also the most popular spot for shopping.
- Aristotelous Square: situated in front of the waterfront promenade and surrounded by mansions.
- White Tower: built in the early 1500s and formerly part of the city's ancient ramparts.
What's the best way to get around Thessaloniki?
Getting around the city is easy and public transport is well-organised. Buses run frequently throughout the city, and a daily ticket is very affordable. Thessaloniki's blue and white taxis are always available. There's a lot of traffic in the city, so walking might be a good option on busier days.
What's the weather in Thessaloniki?
You'll want to bring your swimming suits if visiting in July as the average sea temperature is 26°C (79°F). July and August are the hottest months with similar temperatures to the sea and boast about 12 hours of daily sunshine. As for rain, it's most frequent in November. Although temperatures don't dip below 0°C (32°F) in the winter, it can still be very cold.
Weather in Thessaloniki
Powered by: OpenWeatherMap.org
31 °CWednesday12/08/2020
32 °CThursday13/08/2020
30 °CFriday14/08/2020
30 °CSaturday15/08/2020
28 °CSunday16/08/2020
27 °CMonday17/08/2020
28 °CTuesday18/08/2020
*All amounts are in NAD. Taxes and carrier surcharges included. No booking fee applicable.


text:
Coving F2 Polyurethane NMC Decoflair :
This decorative coving for wall and ceiling is very easy to install and allows you to quickly get a professional result.
Product characteristics :
Application :
The usual use of covings is to place them in the corner formed by the wall and the ceiling, but you can give free rein to your imagination: create indirect lighting, hide imperfections, stylize the frame of a door, design a Mirror frame, enhance the top of a piece of furniture ...
Paint :
Polyurethane products are primed in the factory so you don't need to apply a layer of primer first. They may be painted with every type of paint (it is nevertheless advisable to do a preliminary test).
Required glue quantity :
For the reference F2 you need approximately 100 g/m of glue. For the 2 m of this package, you approximately need 200 g of glue, which represents 0,5 of glue cartridge ADEFIX or CM500.
Manufacturing quality :
Manufactured in Europe, NMC mouldings in polyurethane meet the requirements of European quality standards.
Installation instructions :
The required installation accessories to get a professional quality installation are the glue ADEFIX or CM500 as well as the suggested cutting tool for each product.
In addition to the measuring and marking tools, consider equiping yourself with some complementary tools such as : a cartridge gun, a spatula, a ponge.
Manufacturer :
La Company NMC is the european leading manufacturer of decorative polystyrene and polyurethane mouldings.


text:
|Walt Disney World Dining Menus - The Friar's Nook
theDIBB publishes a list of the Disney menus available from Disney for the various theme park and resort restaurants.
Quick Search
Search for Restaurants, Areas, Cuisines or even Specific Dishes (i.e. New York Strip, Lobster Bisque)
Updated: 5th January 2020
|Latest News
Virgin Atlantic Could Face Formal Enforcement Action By Civil Aviation Authority regarding Customer Refunds
Posted in Airlines
On 3rd August 9:48am
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has conducted a review into airline refund practices during the... Read More »
Posted in Disneyland Paris
On 1st August 1:13pm
With the new Ratatouille ride coming to EPCOT at Walt Disney World, Disney has released... Read More »
Posted in Walt Disney World
On 30th July 9:26am
Disney has not only been welcoming guests back to their theme parks, they have also... Read More »
|theDIBB Menu
|Exchange Rates
US Dollar Rates
Euro Rates
|DIBB Premium Membership
|Did you know you can help support theDIBB with Premium Membership?
Check out this link for more information and benefits, such as...
"No adverts on theDIBB Forums"
Upgrade Now


text:
This Queensland couple just bought a house, paying for it in full with more than $400,000 cash.
"It's across the road from the water. We call it our million-dollar view without the price tag," Monique Kinerson, 45, says of the Gold Coast property.
They're a phenomenon in a country that owes about $32 billion on credit cards. We owe banks an average of $4300 per card holder, according to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Kinerson, who works part time as a consultant in the health space, admits the couple make a game of saving. "We joke that we're living beneath our means."
The couple and their young child almost never eat out and buy mostly second-hand rather than new. They collect and use discount vouchers, they don't have the internet connected at home (only using the data on their phones) and even turn off appliances at the power point.
"We also negotiate interest rates with the banks on our small mortgage in Sydney. Sometimes the bank agrees to reduce our fees for three months, but I diarise to call them after that time and renegotiate. They quibble a bit, but I go in with evidence that I can get a cheaper rate elsewhere, and I'm always prepared to move, and it works. I've only had to move banks once. We do the same with insurance. If you don't ask, you don't get."
The Queensland training manager has always been a saver, having been raised in a single-parent family.
"We were always watching out for money. There was no way my mother would have been given a credit card by a bank back in the 1970s, and we never bought something new out of the blue. I guess it just rubbed off."
While some Australians know their parents are a realistic financial back-up plan, Kinerson just knew she'd have to look after herself financially.
She started a corporate training business at 35. "While I was struggling to get my first client, I never worried about paying the bills, as I always had saved enough to last a year, just in case."
Growing up, Rachel Smith never saw anyone with a traditional income. Her parents and grandparents were all self-employed. She describes her parents as financially organised and conservative.
"I never saw someone in a traditional job, getting paid the same amount every week. I think that changes your attitude, because you see the financial results of hard work."
My no buying experiment really enforced that we need very little to be happy.Rachel Smith
Smith helped her mother document household expenses in an exercise book each week. "Mum was very open about expenses. She treated running the household like running a business," the Brisbane saver says.
Smith had two jobs by the age of 13. "I've always been a bit frugal. As a kid I'd write down what I wanted to buy on a three-month waiting list. If I still wanted and needed the item after three months, I bought it. Nine times out of 10, I no longer wanted or needed it. My no-buying experiment really enforced that we need very little to be happy."
In 2013, Smith set herself a goal not to buy anything new, but failed by late April. She tried again in 2014 with a new mindset, and succeeded, saving about 38 per cent of her take-home salary - tens of thousands of dollars.
In 2015, when she took a redundancy as an engineer, she already had more than two years' worth of salary in a long-term savings account.
"I bought a house in Brisbane where I live, and paid for half of it in cash," the contract transport engineer says.
Smith published a book called Underspent about breaking her shopping addiction, released in 2015. She also recently launched a 10-week online program that helps people change their spending habits. Sixty people are doing the course, which is in Beta testing.
Brisbane man Ross Marais also adopted saving habits early, stashing away $4000 on minimum wage as a university student for a six-week African holiday.
He was taught the value of money by being paid a small sum for doing chores around the house from the age of 10.
"This taught me how money is exchanged in the real world, and I've always been willing to save for something larger."
Marais has forged a career in financial planning with his father, launching a business together in Brisbane, More Time Financial. He specialises in helping Generation Y with their financial goals.
An ME Bank research report found that more than seven out of 10 Millennials didn't consistently keep a good record of monthly expenses, and more than two out of three didn't regularly set a weekly or monthly budget.
"If you get paid on a Thursday night, set up a direct transfer Friday morning so that by the time you check your account, the money has already been saved, so you won't be tempted to spend it," Marais says.
He also advocates the importance of setting up sub-accounts for each of your savings goals, being aware not to incur additional bank fees.
Interestingly, all three fanatical savers advocate the importance of having financial goals, and always knowing what you're saving for.
"You can't hit a goal if you don't know what you're saving for," Marais says.


text:
I was exchanging recently with fellow presentation specialist Alex Rister, who was asking me how I go about convincing people to change. I had just given a Presentation 2.0 talk to a group of management consultants, who are usually among the worst offenders when it comes to Death by PowerPoint, and not only did they get it – they even asked me back for another session on storytelling.
Pleasantly surprised, Alex asked me for the magic keys to convince an audience to change. After some thought, this is my answer.
There are four keys to convince any audience to start, stop or continue doing something. They are all necessary. Together, they make the acronym CARE: Credibility, Action, Reason, and Empathy.
If you have no credibility in your audience's eyes, your message will (at best) go in one ear, and out the other.
Imagine you pass a shaggy smelly tramp in the street, who is shouting "The world will end tomorrow!" Do you pay much attention? No, because he has no credibility to deliver that message. Now imagine the US President making a televised address saying exactly the same thing. Now do you pay attention? The difference is not the message: it is the credibility of the person delivering it.
Imagine you are pregnant, and a friendly lady gazes at your tummy and exclaims "Ah, it must be a boy!" Do you believe her? Now imagine a gynecologist who, after performing an ultrasound scan, announces "Ah, it must be a boy!" Do you believe her? The difference: credibility. And not only does the gynecologist know what she is talking about: she also performed a credible check to draw her conclusion. She has evidence.
Credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. My Parisian consultants gave me credibility to talk about business communication because I have many years of management and sales experience, I've successfully sold major contracts up to $100M, and I teach at the world's number one business school just down the road, quite apart from running one of Europe's leading presentation firms.
All that was important in their eyes. Perhaps an audience in Latin America might never have heard of HEC Paris, so that wouldn't lend me any credibility with them. Perhaps my business-to-business sales management experience wouldn't be worth a lot when talking to a children's charity. Perhaps my Executive MBA would actually count against me when speaking to some groups. So I don't automatically have credibility with all audiences for all kinds of messages. But with this audience, my experience resonated with them, and they therefore listened seriously to what I had to say.
Sadly, if you are an intern with little or no experience, and you give exactly the same talk with the same slides to the same audience, you will probably fall at the first hurdle because of your lack of credibility. It doesn't matter whether you are right. Nobody believed Ignaz Semmelweis when he suggested surgeons should wash their hands between patients in order to save lives, but he was right. Nobody believed Barry Marshall when he suggested stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria, partly because the idea was ridiculous but particularly because he was just a simple unknown researcher in Western Australia of all places. He was right, but nobody listened.
The conclusion is simple. Without credibility, your audience will not accept your request to act. Speak about subjects where you are credible, and ensure that you establish credibility in your audience's eyes right at the start of your talk. And if the message is important but you have little hope of being taken seriously, find somebody else whom the audience will listen to and believe.
Now that you have credibility, you need to ask the audience to act. This could be to stop doing something, start doing something, continue doing something, or do something differently.
First, you need to be clear in your own mind about what action you want them to take. Complete this sentence:
"After my presentation, my audience will…"
Do you want them to buy something? Use a different piece of software? Try a different sales approach? Be careful about strange men offering to drive them home? Recycle their kitchen waste? Give to charity? Choose brands which are ecologically responsible? Reflect on how social media can drive sales? There has to be something. Find it and make this the foundation of your talk. (If you find nothing at all, cancel the presentation because it will be a waste of everyone's time.)
Next, you need to make it clear what action you want the audience to take. Your talk should not be a cryptic crossword. Don't leave them guessing what you expect them to do. Ask them clearly. If you want them to invest $200k in your start-up, say so. If you leave them to guess, they might guess wrong, or they might not bother guessing at all.
So you need a clear action which you are asking your audience to take afterwards, you need to spell it out clearly – and of course, you need to have credibility to ask them to take that action.
The next key is a Reason. No matter how much credibility you have, your audience will not do what you ask them to do unless they actually want to do so. The reason might be more stick than carrot – "If you don't meet your sales quota this quarter, you're fired!" may not be an effective motivation tool (cf Drive by Dan Pink), but it does at least give people a reason to want to sell more – but carrots usually work better, and social psychology is even more powerful. For example, the best way to get people to recycle more is to explain to them that their neighbours are recycling more than they are. (Thanks to the fantastic Olivier Oullier for this example – more of him on the blog soon.)
Whatever your reason, it will clearly need to resonate with the audience. Think carefully about what will work best for them. When selling print services, the usual pitch was an annual hard cost saving which would appeal to the CFO and usually to the CIO. One company's CIO had a carbon reduction target. We showed him how he could save money AND save CO2 by optimizing his print environment. That was a much more powerful reason than cost savings alone, although it was specific to that CIO's own context. What will work with your audience?
So you not only need to ask them to take an action: you also have to give them a reason for wanting to do so. A request for action without a strong reason leads to no action at all.
The final part of CARE, then, is Empathy. In order to find an action which the audience will benefit from taking, a reason they will accept, and the necessary elements to convince them that you are a credible person to deliver this message, you first have to put yourself in their shoes, and get inside their heads.
What are their needs? Their desires? Their fears? Their concerns? Their problems? Their aspirations? Their objectives? How will they react to your request to act? What would make them listen to someone asking them to do it?
Think what reasons they might have to resist taking your desired action. There is always one huge one: doing nothing (or changing nothing) is always the easiest option, so beware of the principle of least effort. There may be many other reasons as well. Don't dismiss or reject them, even if they are plain wrong. As we saw earlier, being right doesn't actually help you to generate action. Right or wrong, your audience is emotionally attached to their reasons to resist, and if you tell them they are wrong, they will cling on to them even more strongly.
So for each reason for resistance, you need to show that you understand that reason, and that you respect it. (Never skip that step.) Then find a way to add new information which gets them to think that perhaps they didn't have the whole picture before. And get them to realize that in fact their reason for resistance isn't so valid after all. It has to be their realization, not your affirmation.
Here's an example, again from my print services experience. Selling for HP meant trying to convince customers that they would be better off with a 'balanced deployment' of distributed printers with some multi-function print-copy-scan devices, whereas the many copier-vendor competitors were pushing a more centralized approach, getting rid of the distributed printers and keeping only a few of these big multi-function devices (e.g. one per floor). In terms of pure hard cost-per-page, the centralized approach was usually cheaper.
So when selling 'balanced deployment' to an IT or facilities manager who believed that a centralized approach was the cheapest, it usually didn't help to claim that they were wrong. It was much more effective to give them ideas like this:
"It's true that if you reduce your devices to the bare minimum, of course it will be cheaper in terms of hard cost. The cheapest of all would be to put one big multi-function device in the building reception, and have everyone walk to it and queue up. Is that what you were thinking of? No? Of course not – in fact we've seen plenty of situations where companies have consolidated too much, and it has a number of bad results. First, people waste more time walking to devices, and then queueing up. Meetings get delayed because just as someone wants to print a few one-page handouts before going into the meeting room, someone else starts making 250 copies of a training manual. People near the copier complain because there are always people queueing, chatting and complaining. And when it breaks down – let's face it, all devices break down sometimes – the impact is huge because the nearest alternative device is on another floor or even in another building. That means huge waste and loss of productivity. But that's not all. Then, managers get fed up, and decide to buy printers on their own budgets for their teams' convenience. One company in Switzerland ended up with just as many printers as they had before the consolidation, but the IT department had much less control, less standardization, more printer drivers to manage, and – worst of all – it ended up costing more than before. So you see, in theory it's quite right that the centralized approach looks cheaper, but in practice, it doesn't usually work out that way."
Convincing through empathy means not telling people they are wrong. It means stepping into their shoes, understanding their reasons and showing respect for them, and then metaphorically putting your arm around their shoulder and guiding them gently towards your desired action.
So that's how to handle your audience with CARE. Establish your credibility in their eyes; ask them clearly to take an action; give them a reason to take the action; and use empathy to understand how best to influence your audience, and to take them respectfully towards your desired outcome. If you CARE for your audience, they'll CARE for your message. And that's something you should certainly CARE about.


text:
Seven Seas Pure Cod Liver Oil High Strength with Omega-3 Fish Oils and Vitamins D and E.
Seven Seas has been supporting family health since 1935. Our carefully crafted Pure Cod Liver Oil has been loved by families and passed down through the generations. It is a rich natural source of Omega-3 that includes the nutrients EPA and DHA.
Important - Please read before purchase
While we try to ensure that product information is correct, on occasion manufacturers may alter their ingredient lists. For additional information about a product, please Contact Us on 0800 252 875.
Content on this site is for reference purposes and is not intended to substitute for advice given by a medical practitioner, pharmacist, or other licensed health-care professional. Discontinue use and consult a doctor if adverse reactions occur.
Information stated regarding dietary supplements is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or health condition.
Keep out of reach of children. Store in a cool, dry place. Do not use if seal under cap is broken or missing.
UK delivery
Standard delivery (Orders under £20): £3.50 · Delivery time: 3-5 working days
FREE delivery (Orders over £20): FREE · 3-5 working days
International delivery
We ship worldwide! Delivery times vary from 4-8 working days for Europe and 5-14 working days for the rest of the world. Flat rate delivery charges can be found here.


text:
KAO CORPORATION S.A. Fertiliser Division has swiftly developed one of the largest ranges of chemical products aimed at assisting fertiliser producers to improve the quality of their end-products.
Our chemical additives have been developed in order to solve the day to day problems which appear in the fertiliser industry during production, handling, application chain, storage and transportation of fertilisers in all forms: granules, prill, liquid, etc.
This range encompasses cationic, anionic and non-ionic surfactants sometimes blended with oils/waxes and marketed under the SK FERT® and URESOFT® brand-names.
In summary, these ready-made mixtures include:
- Anti-caking agents for Urea, AN, CAN, NPK, NP, PK, KCl, MAP and DAP
- Anti-dusting agents for all fertiliser products
- Hydrophobic agents (to prevent moisture pick-up)
- Processing aid agents (improving drying kinetics, change crystal behaviour, etc.)
- Porosity and thermostabilizer agents for AN technical grade (low density)
- Anti-caking agents for low density AN
- Anti-foaming agents for phosphate rock
- Anti-corrosive agents for liquid fertilisers
More than 40 years' experience in this market has given us the know-how in the treatment of a wide range of fertilisers. We provide full technical support to carry out laboratory and industrial trial tests.
By working directly with customers, KAO has been able to perfect tailor-made products for fertiliser industrial uses.


text:
In "The Magic of Belle Isle" Morgan Freeman reunites with director Rob Reiner – they previously worked together on 2008's "The Bucket List" – to play a role unique to his filmography: a verbally precise, wheelchair-bound author of Western novels who, following the death of his wife, develops a greater taste for alcohol than for life. But a summer stint house- (and dog-) sitting at a lakeshore cabin threatens to reawaken his passions, thanks to a beguiling neighbor (Virginia Madsen) and her three young daughters.
The 75-year-old performer talks to PopcornBiz about getting into the head space of a writer, carrying rare romantic moments and, with "The Dark Knight Rises" around the corner, what his soon-to-end stint in Gotham City meant to him.
With this movie you break W.C. Fields' two cardinal rules –
Well, his rules were never mine anyway. [Laughs]
Is it a good thing to work with children and animals?
It's not a good thing to work with animals necessarily – unless you're in a western and you're riding a horse. Other than that I wouldn't fool around with animals for the most part. I think Clint [Eastwood] did a good thing working with the orangutan. They're smart. I had a good experience with a dolphin, which are smart. Dogs – you really have to find a smart dog… Children actors, they're fine. There's no problem at all working with children. I think that Fields meant that if you're going to work with children and animals they're going to pull focus.
How would you characterize your working relationship with Rob Reiner?
It's a love relationship. I love the man! He's a big, old teddy bear. He loves to hug. He's very conscious of the world and how we're treating it. He's very socially involved. I think he's a cinematic Mahatma – that's a term that I've coined today. He's a great soul, caring, and as a director this all flows in with at the same time as his ability to function quickly. He's like Clint in that he wastes no time, just getting in and getting it done and moving on. There's no dilly-dallying around, doing takes just to see what will happen and things like that.
Rarely does an actor get to play a character that speaks this articulately and eloquently. How did you land on the voice you had for this film and relish the words you were given?
I asked Rob when I saw a run-through early on, I said, 'Where did you get the voice from?' He said 'That's your voice. We didn't do anything to it.' So I don't really know where it came from. I know the guy is a drinker, and so I think all I did was that I got a little guttural in the speech, but the microphone doesn't pick it up as guttural. It picks it up as very clear. I thought, 'Okay, that's nice. Good.' He speaks like a writer who writes well.
Did you get a different understanding of the writer's mentality from this film?
I have over the years, from my high school days, tried my hand at writing. I remember in this class we had to write short stories and stuff, and as an actor I've always wanted to do certain things that I didn't see me in. So as a historian I've tried to write stuff and I just never could get past about 40 or 50 pages. I know that it's lonely. I know that it takes an enormous amount of time that you're going to be sitting in front of a typewriter, trying to get into a character that will write itself. I think it's probably the same thing with story. If the story develops itself then okay, fine, you can do it, but if you have to work too hard at it…What that tells you about writers is that they have to write, and I don't have to write. I'm an actor. I have to act.
You have some great chemistry with Virginia Madsen. What was special about getting to have that romantic lead role onscreen this time?
I didn't think of it as a romantic lead, really. It didn't start out to be romantic. Virginia just shifted the whole thing on her own. She said she didn't really make a choice, but that it just happened. We were in the situation where she was saying goodnight and she just came over and gave me this kiss, and the movie went from here to there right there. So she turned me into a romantic lead.
With "The Dark Knight Rises" on the way, how was working on all three of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, being a part of something so hugely commercially and admired artistically?
It was a very pleasant experience all the way through. Chris [Nolan] is, gosh, a very bright man and so relaxed, so easy on the set. It was a joy working with Chris and with Wally [Pfister] and that whole crew, Christian [Bale] and Michael [Caine]. We've sort of gelled over the time that it's taken to make these three movies. So coming together again, making this third one, people ask if we're sad that it's going to be the end. No, we're not sad at all about it. But I'm very happy that I was involved.
Morgan Freeman Brings Magic to 'Belle Isle' and Ends His Tour of Gotham City
The actor talks working with children and animals, and the end of the Batman trilogy.
In "The Magic of Belle Isle" Morgan Freeman reunites with director Rob Reiner – they previously worked together on 2008's "The Bucket List" – to play a role unique to his filmography: a verbally precise, wheelchair-bound author of Western novels who, following the death of his wife, develops a greater taste for alcohol than for life. But a summer stint house- (and dog-) sitting at a lakeshore cabin threatens to reawaken his passions, thanks to a beguiling neighbor (Virginia Madsen) and her three young daughters.


text:
Web design for business
-powered by Rabideagle Enterprises, LLC.
Does your business need to create a web presence, or upgrade an existing site that no longer suits your business needs? We can help.....
Does your business need to create a web presence, or upgrade an existing site that no longer suits your business needs? We can help.....
Rabideagle Enterprises provides fully managed hosting solutions for business. Our hosting packages provide flexibility to suit your business requirements.
Unsure what your business website requires? No idea how to set up email accounts? No problem, our support staff will provide answers to your website questions.
Constant interaction with social media will help drive traffic to your business website. Don't have time for Facebook and Twitter? Social media management is just one of the many other services we can provide.
Our county resource sites are quickly becoming very popular. Targeted traffic from these sites provide local businesses with affordable advertising solutions.
From simple blog style websites to a complete e-commerce solution for business, Rabideagle Enterprises can provide the web design. Using the latest web design technology and working with our customers we have already created affordable web design solutions for more than 20 Altoona and State College area businesses. We are now also proudly serving business clients in Florida, Illinois and Delaware as our web design reputation continues to grow thanks to our many satisfied customers. Learn more about our web design services.
We can provide a hosting solution to meet the needs of small business by providing custom setup hosting accounts. Our services can include full site migrations, email setup, back up services and include easy access support for all hosting questions. View our available hosting options.
Hosting and design are recognized as the most important of the web services, however we also provide services that will assist your business in realizing a return on the investment of a website. Simply building a website will not generate results. Working to maintain things like Search Engine Optimization, valuable inbound links and social media interaction will allow your website to show a return for the time and money you've invested. We can also implement and train your staff on tools like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools which allow your business to track the actual results from your site. Review our available web services.
We have been very busy the last several months developing new Altoona business websites as well as growing our County Spot Directories. More local business owners are turning to our supported hosting services for their Altoona area websites. Our hosting services, website management and email solutions continue to attract new customers. We've even added several new social media clients who have found that it is easier to outsource Facebook and other social media marketing.
Since our last update we have completed new web designs for Burchfield's Truck Sales, Cottage Photography and Lingenfelter Awnings in Duncansville. We also developed a brand new e-commerce website for The Anser Decoy Company based in Huntingdon PA. All of these sites were built using the latest in Joomla templates with easy to update pages and SEO rich content to drive traffic to the business.
Lingenfelter Awning and Cottage Photography both include image display modules in the web design to accent the services of these local businesses. The new website for Burchfield's Truck Sales includes a full vehicle management component which we developed specially for their truck and equipment sales inventory. The easy to manage site provides an on-line gateway to customers and shows off their inventory in a very inexpensive manner.
The new web site for The Anser Decoy Company includes a fully functional ecommerce solution incorporated in the Joomla site which allows for online sales, payment solutions as well as fully integrated shipping solutions right from the site. Full support and training for the ecommerce solution by Rabideagle Enterprises has allowed The Anser Decoy Company to kickstart their online sales site.
Our list of satisfied clients continues to grow, more updates coming soon!
Web designs starting as low as $300.00!
Why not contact us for a free consultation on improving your web presence with a new or upgraded design? Contact us today!


text:
This is what evangelcal broadcaster Dean Ohlman says on facebook
My Top Ten Problems with Hellfire Christians
1. Many seem to take devious delight in consigning people to hell.
2. Many of those who don't delight in it still seem to like the idea of eternal torment instead of being horrified by it.
3. Man...y claim to know who will be in heaven and hell--and can name several individuals whose destiny they seem to know (Gandhi and Hitler, of course, being two).
4. Many who hold fast to believing in the eternal torment and torture of unbelievers seem to forget that the Bible does not make any of our traditional church-contrived "mercy affirmations": our belief that children under the "age-of-accountability" and the severely brain-damaged will not go to hell, since we are sure God would not hold any one accountable who does not know how to understand the options. In these instances they are universalists who believe love wins.
5. To be a good hellfire Christian, you have to hold that everyone, regardless of age or capacity to understand the gospel, goes to eternal torment. (Strict hellfire Calvinists have it easy: God elects a few for heaven and the rest He elects for everlasting darkness, fire, torment, and separation from God).
6. Many make no distinctions between the devilish evil of people like Charles Manson (the wicked that we believe deserve hell) and the innocent ignorance of a poor, young Hindu mother who dies never having heard the name of Jesus. Both get the same eternal torment. Hellfire Calvinists call them both "totally depraved," so they both get what they deserve (Calvinists being glad, of course, that they received God's amazing grace—and their children and grandchildren too—that the others were not so lucky to receive).
7. Many (helped by John MacArthur and John Piper) believe Rob Bell is a heretic, liar, and an unbeliever (hence deserving hell), in spite of the fact that he makes the same conclusions C. S. Lewis does and his mentor from the grave, George MacDonald, who could not believe that God's love could ever leave any of the souls He created suffering for eternity. They demonize Bell and idolize Lewis.
8. Many made decisions for Christ because they didn't want to go to hell but show very little evidence that their "faith" is anything more than "fire insurance."
9. Many don't realize that the evangelist Paul's two clear definitions of the gospel do not make mention of hell: "Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God–which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures–concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles, for His name's sake" (Romans 1.1-5). "Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor. 15.1-4)
10. Most hellfire Christians are not content to consider the issue of final judgment as something we have only scant understanding of and that the risen and coming Christ is the one who makes the final call: "I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death" (Rev. 1:18).
I thought you would like this. I have met Dean who is upsetting creationists as he is one of those who is pro-geology and a little bit anti-evolution. He made me a walking pole 10 years ago and is blackballed by BJU.
Just to show good can come out of fundies and not all American fundies are rapture -ready and hold lighted matches


text:
Enjoy the power and fun of a Polaroid camera without the Polaroid camera. This little standalone photo printer connects to your phone or tablet via Bluetooth, and is powered by a rechargeable lithium polymer battery, so it's designed to be portable, easy and fun to use. On a single charge the gadget will print 25 photos -- without ink. Instead, it uses heat to produce deep, vibrant colors that are completely smudge-proof, on 2x3 paper that is waterproof, tear-proof and backed with adhesive so you can peel-and-stick for added fun. Paper is easy to find on Amazon and comes in packs of 20, 30 or 50 (on sale here). A compact and protective carrying case is also available at what seems to be a reasonable price (found here). The Polaroid ZIP mobile printer currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 1,400 customers (read recent reviews). Its typical list price of $129.99 has been reduced by 21% to $102.14, a price you'll reveal only after adding the product to your cart. If you're looking for a fun and unusual summer gift idea for yourself or someone on your list, see the discounted Polaroid ZIP mobile printer now on Amazon.
This story, "21% off Polaroid ZIP Mobile Photo Printer with ZINK Zero Ink Printing Technology - Deal Alert" was originally published by TechConnect.
- Log in to post comments


text:
Those are, in order: the number of abortions that took place in 2010 in New York State, abortions specifically in New York City, and the percentage of pregnancies in the City that end in abortion. Stated in such bald terms, they are appalling, and each one of them represents a tragedy to mothers, fathers, and the unborn children.
We want the number to be zero, of course, but you would think that even for a "pro-choice" politician with any sense of balance and sanity, those numbers would be too high.
Apparently not for for our ideologically committed and politically ambitious Governor Andrew Cuomo. He appears to be fine with even more abortions.
In his State of the State speech last week, the Governor literally shouted his support for a woman's "right to choose", and called for the passage of a bill named the "Reproductive Health Act". The better name for the bill is the "Unlimited Abortion Act", because it would remove any limitations on abortion, and prevent any further limitations.
This bill has nothing whatsoever to do with reproductive health. It is an extremist bill that would:
People need to let their elected officials know that we don't want any more abortions in New York. There are too many already. An easy way to contact your representatives is through the New York State Catholic Conference's Catholic Action Network.
Pro-abortion politicians used to posture that they wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare". But our Governor doesn't even pretend to care any longer about how rare abortion should be. He doesn't seem to want any limits on it — even laws that have been proven in other states to reduce the number of abortions and that are supported by wide majorities.
How many abortions are enough for our extremist pro-abortion Governor? To even have to ask such a question is the essence of the modern tragedy of the Culture of Death.


text:
Vermont Folklife Center - Digital Archive
About the Digital Archive :
Searching and Browsing the Digital Archive :
Browse Collections :
Browse All
Advanced Search
Vermont Folklife Center - Digital Archive
Browse Items for 'Gagne, Laurianne' (1 total)
Browse All
Browse Collections
Browse by Creator
Browse by Contributor
Browse by Coverage
Browse by Subject
Que de joie et de bonheur [first line] (AU1998-1070-006)
Excerpt from interview of Alberta Gagné (TC1998-1070-006) by Martha Pellerin. Part of a project (VFC1998-0007) on Franco-American song in New England funded by the Vermont Folklife Center and undertaken by Pellerin. Interview is one in a series of…
88 Main Street, Middlebury, VT 05753 802.388.4964
Proudly powered by


text:
They Dream Only of America
Hazel Smith: On "They Dream Only of America"
In this poem there is one very obvious metonymic string (burns/ash tray/cigar) and the possibility of one or two others (sign/key), but on the whole new metonymies proliferate, constantly pushing the poem outward. There is therefore considerably less sensation of the poem being pulled back into metaphorical cohesion than there is, for example, in 'Chez Jane'. A number of critics have attempted to read this poem metaphorically, but the poem does not lend itself as a whole to metaphorical interpretation. '"They Dream Only of America"', inhabits the extremes of deconstruction; it does not move in and out of deconstruction and reconstruction.
From Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference/Homosexuality/Topography. Liverpool UP, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Hazel Smith.
David Lehman: On "They Dream Only of America"
… Shoptaw's allegorical interpretation of "They Dream Only of America" is a bit like the symbol-hunting of the New Criticism at its most exasperating. It is not that the interpretation is wrong: it is that the poem gives rise to any number of competing narratives, which the reader may be prompted to provide. The poem can be read less tendentiously and less fancifully as an allegory about growing up; as in a particularly eerie kind of fairy tale, there is an emphasis on clues and signs, only here the horror of imprisonment is matched by that of the promised liberation. But I prefer to read the poem as precisely a truncated narrative lacking a key, a dream that haunts the waking person because it exists only in fragments whose relation to one another remains mysterious. The strangeness of the adverb in the line,
"please," he asked willingly,
is not easily explained and that is one of its virtues. And if one notices that
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat"
is metaphorically a taste of brandy, and if one learns that this was something Martory said in all innocence at breakfast one morning, one still has not explained the effect of trembling significance these lines achieve.
From David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 157-158.
Donald Revell: On "They Dream Only of America"
In writing, Ashbery teaches me to desire not an increase in my individual portion of imaginative freedom but an increase in the stock of freedom available to anyone.
There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.
And I am lost without you.
("They Dream Only of America," TCO 13)
Because freedom is intentionless, its accomplishments, "our liberation," require nothing of us. Yet in a further variation of inversion technique, Ashbery establishes this nothing as neither nugatory nor still. It requires great effort, a redoubling of negative capability, to articulate phrases, lines, and stanzas without resort to the reassurances and little victories of expressed intent. That is why Ashbery poises the line "There is nothing to do" as a positive, proposing absolute indeterminacy as a task—the nothing that somehow must be done. Here, as everywhere in The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery reminds me that the imagination is not an inward quality in search of expression but, rather, an event that occurs when perception contacts the world with the force of desire in the form of words or paint or sounds. Imagination defines itself in what it does, participating in liberty as liberty. Desire declares the unsatisfactoriness of the present moment (emotion "recollected" is not emotion) and directs the mind toward its liberation from that state. And where can the mind go but to the world, and how can it travel but indeterminately, dissatisfaction being the sum of what has been determined? Just as "nothing" is a task, so waiting is an activity, a pioneering. The imagination happens, poems happen in the time pried open by waiting, time made porous to accidents and to new juxtapositions by the deferral of particularity. There, words contrive new syntaxes and thus new meanings because none has been prescribed. There, the mind moves more ways than one.
This multiplicity is the primary prerequisite of imagination, a "horror" owing to the utter defenselessness it prolongs and prolongs. Where there is no horror, no uninterpreted, there is only the awful and unacceptable condition of certainty: that isolated, final, and feckless utterance "And I am lost without you." If I have no single destination, I cannot be lost, only en route. As long as I am waiting, anything may yet arrive. As America failed in the moment it became an ideality instead of a plurality of discrete, then overlapping, events (a city on a hill instead of an explorer's beautiful misinterpretation), voices and poems fail when they reconcile themselves to a solitary posture. Closure victimizes thought. Something victimizes the nothing in which and by which our liberation persists. Every final word expresses defeat. John Ashbery does not deny that a final word always gets said. The trick is to prolong the dream, the recital, the ice storm, all the unfinished originals. The trick is to write as far into the accidents as one can before collapsing into statement. Poetry stops where nothing cannot be said any longer or in only one way: "And I am lost without you."
From "Some Meditations on Influence." In Schultz, Susan M. (ed.) The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995.
Andrew Ross: On "They Dream Only of America"
In reading such poems, we are shown how and why language has nothing at all to do with unmediated expression, except when it chooses to voice parodically the fallacy of such an idea. This paradox is best demonstrated in some of the most celebrated lines of The Tennis Court Oath, the opening of "They Dream Only of America":
They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat."
Four different, and successively more marked, levels of conventionality are stressed here, from the general assertion of the freestanding first line to the specific, quoted, emphasized, and dependent clause of the fourth; each line is decontextualized, automatically, as it is succeeded by the next. Because of the syntactical "rhyme" between the two couplets, moreover, the stanza is allowed to flaunt its own symmetry. But it is only under the pressure of this stanzaic logic that the aching lyricism of the first couplet prefigures and is thrown up against the deadpan irony of the second. Semantically, of course, the reader has the choice of naturalizing the various elements of meaning suggested in these lines. An "American dream" (exceptionalist—"they dream only") of pastoral innocence and plenitude (the land of milk and "honey") is stripped once again of its hopes of a Whitmanesque pluralism by the reality and sheer numericality of mass culture ("thirteen million"), while the new consumer religion either chemically simulates or doctors "natural" products in ways that are harmful to our health ("burns the throat"). To recuperate the world of meaning in this way is, however, to short-circuit those strategies of poetic artifice which offer us less in the way of interpretive freedom than does the acte gratuite of the more discontinuous areas of The Tennis Court Oath. What we are asked to accept and acknowledge in this passage are the various levels of artifice and convention which separate us from any unmediated expression of sympathy with, or complaint against, the protocols of mass culture. To recognize this is doubly important if it involves the reader in critically following through exactly the same procedures by which we constitute ourselves conventionally as citizens in a mass consumer society. Writing and reading at the beginning of the 1960s, this consumer imagination made all the difference for involved readers who were not only aware of the limited democracy of the historical avant-garde project but also responsive to the demotic passion of those artists and writers, like Ashbery, busy revising the medium forty years later.
From "Taking the Tennis Court Oath." In Schultz, Susan M. (ed.) The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995.
John Shoptaw: On "The Dream Only of America"
[Shoptaw's study is especially valuable because he worked with Ashbery to obtain manuscripts of his poems, and on occasion he interviewed him about his intentions. He develops the idea that "because Ashbery leaves himself and his homosexuality out of his poetry, his poems misrepresent in a particular way which I will call 'homotextual.' Rather than simply hiding or revealing some homosexual content, these poems represent and 'behave' differently, no matter what their subject. With their distortions, evasions, omissions, obscurities, and discontinuities, Ashbery's poems always have a homotextual dimension" (On the Outside Looking Out, p. 4).]
… [I]f "'They Dream Only of America'" is only an assemblage of all-purpose stories (perhaps merely linguistic), what can it mean to its maker? How does the poet fit himself into his one-size-fits-all poem? The way Ashbery in particular figures in the poem may be deduced from certain biographical details [that Ashbery volunteered in answer to Shoptaw's query]. The poem was written in Paris in the summer of 1957, probably on his thirtieth birthday (July 28). That day [French experimental poet and close friend] Pierre Martory, to whom [Ashbery's second collection] The Tennis Court Oath is dedicated, made the luminous remark, "This honey is delicious / Though it burns the throat." In the summer of 1957 Ashbery was preparing for, and doubtless dreaming of, revisiting America; he did so from the fall of 1957 to the spring of 1958. Martory himself made a first, unplanned visit to America that spring. Though they traveled separately, the little poem looks forward to a fantastic voyage and an Edenic destination.
The misrepresentations of " 'They Dream Only of America'" are homotextual. The "thirteen million pillars of grass" suggest not only Whitman's Leaves of Grass but the "pillar of salt" to which Lot's wife, no pillar of the community, was reduced for looking back on the destruction of Sodom. "Was the cigar a sign? / And what about the key?" In this cluttered poem, in which every personal pronoun except "she" is represented, the spermal "honey" and phallic props ("pillars," "key," "cigar," "leg") take on a parodic significance. The dismembered names of the perpetrators, "Ashbery"a nd "Martory," may be partially reconstructed from the line "And the murderer's ash tray is more easily – ." The romantic secrecy of the fugitive gay lovers is parallel here to the French Resistance (Martory fought in its ranks, after his escape to Algeria) waiting for America's liberation. Though the term "gay liberation" had not yet been coined, this poem seems tow ait for its minting. The utopian "American dream" here fantasizes a time and a place where gay lovers could come out of their lilac cubes.
But the homotextual orientation of Ashbery's misrepresentations, even with biographical particulars smoked out, does not finally crack or unlock " 'They Dream Only of America.' " Ashbery's poetry contains no secret to which only an inner circle of readers has access. The compound of inside and outside in this poem is highly unstable. Or one thing, the outside is displaced into the imagined future or the remembered past, or even into the present – once looked forward to or some day to be looked back upon. When and where is (or was or will be) the liberation? Was it when the American Ashbery arrived in Paris? Will it be when "they" arrive in America? (But Ashbery had left the United States partly for relief from its repressive political climate.) In the barns of Ashbery's childhood in rural upstate New York? In the dandified countryside of Martory's prewar France? It is always elsewhere, a state better dreamt-of than reached. "they" do not wait in "hope" but in "horror" of the "liberation." Remaining in romantic seclusion, creating the illusion of hidden meanings, may in fact be preferable to the "horror" of exposure, where love and potry may be impossible. But is "he" or are "they" even in "there" while "we" readers investigate out here? In the fifth stanza, "He" himself is elected to investigate, peering inside with us, uncovering not the literal truth, or a body, but a letter. Yet if liberation is forever out of reach, pleasure is not. "'They Dream Only of America'" continually intrigues with its narrow escapes and near disguises. The ceaseless activity of its tenses, discourses, and roles presents ample evidence that the fugitives' love is there to stay.
From John Shoptaw, "Private Investigations: The Tennis Court Oath" (Chapter 2) in On the Outside Looking Out (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1994), 65-66.
Alan Williamson: On "They Dream Only of America"
… How many movies have we all seen on the subject of runaway children who cross paths with a murderer – a subject whose appeal, surely, is to our own anxiety about the relation between normal venturesomeness and the completely out of bounds?
And hiding from darkness in barns They can be grownups now And the murderer's ash tray is more easily – The lake a lilac cube.
When the children " can be grownups," the evidence of evil is at once "more easily" – and I think the missing word has to be "found" or "recognized." So that again it is precisely the recognition scene that is averted – averted by stopping time, freezing the journey of escape in an eternal present of pastoral beauty. And one notices how the same detail that makes the last line suggest an abstract painting also betrays the effect of psychic containment: the lake water held to the dimensions of a cube.
"'They Dream Only of America'" is one of the most clearly structured poems in The Tennis Court Oath, possessing essentially a traditional double plot. The story of the children and the murderer reflects the shadowy story of the narrator's friend, whose journey to lose himself in America, driving "hundreds of miles / At night through dandelions," becomes more and more terrible, as he takes everything that happens for a "sign" (presumably of impending evil, the broken leg mentioned in the last stanza). He ends, like the children earlier, paralyzed between alternatives of ecstasy and destructiveness: "There is nothing to do / For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it."
I do not mean to maintain that all interrupted stories in Ashbery can be ascribed to psychic censorship. Often, the uncertainties of paranoia, the elusivness of essentially nostalgic desires, provide more relevant explanations. My point is that it is the imitation of psychological tension – approach and avoidance, affirmation and denial – that gives Ashbery's disjunctiveness a force far exceeding mere aesthetic novelty.
From Alan Williamson, "The Diffracting Diamond: Ashbery, Romanticism, and Ant-Art" (Chapter 6) in Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1984) 121-122.
"They Dream Only of America"
David Herd on "They Dream Only of America"
"'They Dream Only of America"' has been much interpreted, especially by critics and poets associated with LANGUAGE poetry. For Andrew Ross the poem, and in turn the book, show 'how and why language has nothing at all to do with unmediated expression, except when it chooses to voice parodically the fallacy of such an idea'. For Bruce Andrews, putting his argument in the fragmented style of the book, "'Now he cared only about signs." Well, not true, not even here, but he does care very deeply and seems suspicious of their instrumental value.' The volume as a whole, as Andrews sees it, makes the argument that 'Description would be choiceless, "unintentional". Personhood might be mere transmission . . . But a critique in action of the representational capacity of language seems to reaffirm personhood, as choice itself.' This gets the wrong end of the stick: the wrong end, one might say, of the blind man's cane.
Certainly the poem is centrally concerned with signs, consisting, as it does, of a series of now conventional images of America: Whitman's ('To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass'), Twain's ('hiding from darkness in barns / They can be grown ups now'), Chandler's ('And the murderer's ash tray is more easily'), Stevens's alliterative version ('The lake a lilac cube'), and the Beats' ('We could drive hundreds of miles / At night through dandelions') (TCO, 13). Ashbery cares about these signs. They are, after all, his literary background. The point of the poem is, however, to indicate what happens if such signs come to dominate. Thus whenever in the poem the speaker seems to be growing too fond of signs and symbols—at each point at which they seem in danger of preoccupying him—he receives a painful reminder that such fondness is inappropriate, dangerous even, insofar as it causes one to neglect the reality of the situation. Just at the point at which he gets carried away with Whitman's honeyed homoerotic pastoral, so at that point the honey'burns the throat' (TCO, 13). Likewise just as the Kerouac-like road-trip begins to exert its symbolic allure, so the driver's headache gets worse, and the travellers have to stop at a 'wire filling station' (TCO, 13). And most painfully of all, just as the speaker, seduced by the Freudian cigar, starts thinking of the wrong kind of 'key' ( of the key to the detective mystery, not the key to the door he is opening), so he stumbles and breaks his leg, The experience is painful enough to influence the poet's attitude to language, and so, fond as he is of signs and the symbolic worlds they conjure, he is reminded also that language must sometimes be more matter-of-fact, hence his prosaic account of the incident, '"I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen / Against the living room table . . ."' (TCO, 13). To become too attached to signs, it would seem, is to become so detached from the world of objects that one is likely to do oneself an injury. One is likely, that is, to find oneself disabled.
"'They Dream Only of America"' is one of the strongest poems in The Tennis Court Oath. This is partly because it is more like the poems in Some Trees than most of the other pieces in Ashbery's second volume. Like 'The Picture of Little J.A.', the poem absorbs its literary background, constituting itself in a series of allusions which are the history of its coming into being. It is also both a more affectionate and a more intimate account of America. Shoptaw reads the poem as a love lyric, identifying the 'They' of the title as Ashbery and Martory dreaming of a projected visit to America. This is not the whole truth of the poem, but perhaps it helps us understand what that whole truth might be. If Ashbery is, in this poem, 'dreaming of' in the sense of yearning for America, then for once he has a meaningful link with the cultural condition so many of the poems are keen to address. Mills said of this cultural condition that 'mind and reality' have become 'two separate realms'. Which is as much as to say, from the poet's point of view, that '"They dream only of America"'. The implication of Andrews's account is that this is a state of affairs The Tennis Court Oath means to argue for, on the grounds that a language detached from reality is free to be manipulated by the user. The truth is more like the opposite: the blind man stumbling about his room and the speaker breaking his leg on the bed being symptoms of a linguistic condition to which the poet means to offer a cure.
from John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester University Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by David Herd


text:
School News
- Beijing Film Academy holds a lecture on drama and drama Academic Symposium2017-06-07
- "Meet with you, work together" The Party Member Service Station Service Month Special Knowledge Lecture was successfully concluded2017-06-07
- Chinese Festival Image_ - Dragon Boat Festival VR record film opening! 2017-06-06
- Photography Department successfully held an international film photography workshop >2017-06-05
- Malaysia Education Delegation Visits Beijing Film Academy2017-06 -05
- Congratulations to our students for making great achievements in the capital college martial arts competition2017-06-05
\u0026gt;More Admissions Information
- 2017 NEXT IDEA Youth Screenwriting ContestCall for Papers (Designated Art Academy...2017-06-06
- Beijing Film Academy 2017 Accept the equivalent of graduate students...2017-04-12
- Beijing Film Academy 2017 College degree incumbent undergraduate qualified list and...2017-06-02
- 2017-2018 Semester Animation Academy Refresher Course and Teacher Training Course Guide2017-05-18
- Beijing Film Academy 2017 In-service junior high school entrance exam three test list2017-05-24
- Beijing Film Academy Director"s Department 2017 Guide to Evolution Course Admissions2017-05-16
- The 9th Video Photography Professional Skills Intensive Course Guide 2017-05-11
- Admissions Guide for the Photographic Photography Training Course of the Beijing Film Academy in 2017 a>2017-05-08
- The 9th Video Photography Professional Skills Intensive Course Guide2017-05-08
- Beijing Film Academy, college degree, undergraduate, undergraduate, 2017 admissions brochure2017-05-02
- Beijing movie College Study Abroad Base 2017 Study Abroad Program...2017-01-10
- Beijing Film Academy 2017 Ph.D. Admission Test Initial Test Venue Schedule2017-04-21
- About inquiry 2017 Notice of the qualification information for the undergraduate and higher vocational admission examinations2017-04-14
More \u0026gt;\u0026gt; Academic activities
- The second batch of reports from the Beijing Film Academy"s 2017 graduation joint operation Screening Notice2017-06-06
- The first batch of reports from the Beijing Film Academy"s 2017 graduation joint operation Announcement2017-05-26
- Performance Academy 2016 Performance Training 1 Graduation Drama "Jujube" 2017-05-26
- Digital Media Academy and JAUNT China - VR Film and Television Joint Lab Conference ...2017-05-25
- Lecture Preview: Chinese Style in Contemporary Art2017-05-09
- "Natural Growth": Graduate School of Photography, Beijing Film Academy 2017 Graduate Student...< /a>2017-05-09
- Beijing Film Academy Performance Academy 2016 Performance Training 2 Class Graduation Play. ..2017-05-07
- The 8th Young Screenwriter Support Program Finalist is announced2017-04-18
- The 4th National Film Science Young Scholars Forum Call for Papers2017-04-20
- The 16th Beijing Film Academy International Student Film and TV Exhibition Exhibition2017-04-17
- The 16th Beijing Film Academy International Student Film and Television Exhibition (ISFVF) invites...2017-04-17
- Event Preview| Beijing International Film Festival Jury Chairman"s Works Screening and Exchange2017-04-17
- Emile Library Stirica, Paul Genovese Masters Forum2017-04-17
< A hrefxxf="" target="_blank">Fifth FAN, issue 17 "No problem" (below)
media viewpoint< a hrefxxf="" target="_blank" style="float:left;">More\u0026gt;\u0026gt;More More \u0026gt;\u0026gt;Special Focus
- [" "Ideological and Political" topic] study and implement the important speech of General Secretary Xi in the China University of Political Science and Law
- ["Ideological and Political" topic] Ministry of Education The Party Group learns and implements the spirit of the important speech of the General Secretary at the China University of Political Science and Law
- ["Ideological and Political" topic] Xi Jinping: Ideological and Political Work Throughout the whole process of education and teaching
- ["Ideological and political" topic] follow the good way to improve the old method and explore new ways Li>
- ["Imagination" topic] Always adhere to the direction of socialist education
- ["Ideological and Political" Topics] Adhere to the path of higher education development
- ["Imagination" topic] Lide Tree people, provide talent support for national revival
- ["Ideological and Political" topic] The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued the "Opinions on Strengthening and Improving the Ideological and Political Work of Colleges and Universities in the New Situation"
- The Beijing Film Academy in the first half of 2017 Theoretical Learning Program


text:
Fly Through
Simulated endoscopic views of the bronchi, vessels, colon and other hollow structures. Multi-modality application for CT, MR and 3D AX data.
Fully integrated into the familiar syngo 3D workflow and user interface.
Requerimientos Generales
Minimum Software Version
syngo MR A25
syngo MR B15
syngoMMWP VE22A
Also available for:
MAGNETOM Prismafit
MAGNETOM Skyrafit
MAGNETOM Avantofit
syngo 3D VRT package,
syngo MultiModality Workplace,
MAGNETOM Symphony 1.5T
Please Note: Additional technical pre-requisites may apply. Upon receiving your request, your local Siemens representative will clarify whether your system meets the requirements.


text:
VANCOUVER - The City of Vancouver will work with neighbouring municipalities to develop a ban on the sale of shark-fin products, mayor and council agreed Tuesday.
"This is not an attack on culture," said Coun. Kerry Jang, who proposed the idea of a joint ban with Richmond and Burnaby on the controversial delicacy.
"Rather, it is a recognition of an ethical issue that effects all of us, no matter who you are."
Within Chinese culture, serving shark fin has long been viewed as a means of honouring a special guest or occasion.
But with millions of sharks killed globally to support the tradition, Jang said it's time the old ways were changed.
"There are so many ways to say to a guest 'You are really special' without having to eat this," he said.
Under mounting public pressure, top restaurants around the world, including Hong Kong, have voluntarily removed shark-fin products from their menus. The Chinese government has also announced its intentions to phase out serving shark fin at official banquets within three years.
Locally, Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond have the largest number of businesses selling shark- fin products. All three municipalities have agreed to work together to support a ban.
Port Moody, North Vancouver and Coquitlam have already banned the sale of shark-fin products.
Animals rights groups immediately hailed the move as historic, saying it will eliminate a huge market for the Asian delicacy and help save sharks from extinction.
"A prohibition on shark fin trade in Vancouver, Richmond and Burnaby will be a monumental step forward in saving countless sharks from the cruel and ecologically devastating practice of shark finning," said Gabriel Wildgen, of Humane Society International/Canada.
But David Chung, a restaurateur and head of the B.C. Asian Restaurant and Cafe Owners Association in nearby Richmond, vowed to fight any ban and is already working on a petition.
People should have a right to choose the food they eat, he said.
He vowed to organize protests and even take legal action if a ban is imposed.
"If the petition doesn't work, we'll demonstrate, if demonstrations don't work we'll go to legal action."
Chung said all the products he serves come with a certificate of origin and are inspected by government officials. None is obtained through the process of finning —where the fins are cut from the shark and the animal is thrown back in the water to die, he said.
He said a ban would be "culturally insensitive."
"When you thank somebody who has done you a favour, you want to show them your appreciation, you don't treat them to sweet and sour pork . . . because that's not enough to demonstrate your sincerity," he said.
"So you treat them to something better, more expensive. So shark fin soup is one of those items."
Coquitlam, Port Moody, North Vancouver City and Maple Ridge already support shark fin sales bans in their cities.
Six cities in Ontario have shark fin bans, including Toronto, and the states of Washington, California, Oregon, Illinois and Hawaii also ban shark fins.
Some Vancouver area business associations representing Asian restaurants say they do not support a shark fin ban.
Jang said he'll be in Victoria next week at the annual Union of British Columbia Municipalities convention to support a motion that seeks a provincewide ban on the possession, sale and distribution of shark fin
North Vancouver City Coun. Craig Keating said UBCM delegates who represent the province's cities, towns and villages will be asked to support a provincewide shark fin ban that says "shark fin harvesting is an inhumane and wasteful practice serving a very narrow and sometimes criminal marketplace."
Keating said he was convinced the shark-fin market threatens the survival of the shark species and impacts the future of other species.
The UBCM motion also calls on the federal government to ban the import of shark fins into Canada.
with files from The Canadian Press


text:
My husband D found these illustrations featured on "boingboing" and called me over right away. For those who have already seen them, I know you won't mind enjoying them again, and they're worth passing on for any who haven't encountered them yet.
Apparently, illustrating the Russian translation of The Hobbit (published in 1976) was young artist Mikhail Belomlinsky's first big job out of art school. These illustrations, while they have much in common with the look of relief prints, were actually done with scratchboard. The only time I've ever tried working with scratchboard was when I did a Greek vase project with my seventh grade students. School art budgets being what they are, we had the cheapest scratch paper I could find. The project was fun, but it was next to impossible to get a clean white without scratching right through the paper. I'd love to try some high quality scratchboard some time, and see how it compares with carving relief blocks. Both techniques make white marks on black background, and both have an emphasis on strong areas of black against white and white against black, with no grey. You can see the use of black and white beautifully demonstrated in one of my favorites: this image of Laketown burning. I love the way the layers of dark and light provide backgrounds for each other.
Check out all(?) the illustrations in the book at "English Russia."
You can visit the artist Mikhail Belomlinsky's own web site here.
And finally, thanks to "boingboing" for bringing this treasure to my attention.
And finally, thanks to "boingboing" for bringing this treasure to my attention.
(Thanks to D, too!)
[Pictures: Laketown burning and Gollum, scratchboard by Mikhail Belomlinsky, from The Hobbit, 1976.]


text:
The DS1013G has all the features of the DS1003 with the addition of WiFi capability. The wireless connectivity means that you can build fail-safe control systems that switch communication types automatically. For example, if Ethernet goes out, it can switch to WiFi.
The DS1013G is a 4-port programmable industrial controller designed primarily for serial-over-IP and serial control projects. It comes pre-loaded with a fully functional open-source serial-over-IP application.
The four opto-isolated ports of the DS1013G can be programmed for RS232, RS422 or RS485. Four terminal block adapters are included for you to use instead of the DB9 connectors built in.
The DS1013G is programmable in Tibbo BASIC and/or Tibbo C which also provides a complete IDE for debugging. The functionality of the DS1013G is determined by whatever Tibbo BASIC/C application it is running. It is perfectly suited for work as an intelligent serial controller, a serial device server, or a serial communications gateway.
It requires 10-18V DC power, which can be provided through a 3.5mm coaxial jack (center positive) or a two-pole screw terminal.
View the TIDE, TiOS, Tibbo BASIC and Tibbo C Online Manual.
View Tibbo BASIC Introduction Videos.
View a video of the Serial-over-IP application showing WiFi support.
View a video of the Tibbo Connection Wizard showing how to create a Virtual Serial Port and link it with the Device Server.


text:
Louisiana Angler Lands Latest ShareLunker
March 21, 2013
Larry Hodge, 903-676-2277, firstname.lastname@example.com
Note: This item is more than seven years old. Please take the publication date into consideration for any date references.
ATHENS—Donald Deville of Ville Platte, Louisiana makes regular visits to Lake Fork with friends and family to fish for big bass, but he had never landed a double-digit fish.
Until March 20.
The 14.06-pound largemouth bass he caught mid-morning of the group's first day on the lake is now Toyota ShareLunker 547. The fish was 25.75 inches long and 22 inches in girth. It was held for pickup at Lake Fork Marina, an official Toyota ShareLunker Weigh and Holding Station.
Deville caught the fish in five feet of 58-degree water using a Brush Hog.
"It was about my third cast," Deville said. "I was fishing with one of my sons, and he threw on the left side of the stump, and I threw on the right. And I got the big lunker to bite."
Deville fought the fish for some time. "She didn't wrap on anything, but she took a lot of drag," he said. "Finally we saw her and how big she was, and we got really excited."
Deville was not familiar with the Toyota ShareLunker program, but some members of his group were and advised him to take the fish to Lake Fork Marina to be weighed. "I'm really excited about the way Lake Fork Marina handled the fish and the care they took of the fish after we got it here," he said.
Deville said he intends to keep returning to Lake Fork as long as he is able. "Hopefully my grandchildren can enjoy that," he said.
The fish is the eleventh entry into the Toyota ShareLunker program during the current season. Average weight of the entries this season so far is 13.85 pounds, and the largest entry weighed 16.04. Two 14-pounders and one 15-pounder have also been entered.
Anyone legally catching a 13-pound or bigger largemouth bass from Texas waters, public or private, between October 1 and April 30 may submit the fish to the Toyota ShareLunker program by calling the ShareLunker hotline at (903) 681-0550 or paging (888) 784-0600 and leaving a phone number including area code. Fish will be picked up by TPWD personnel within 12 hours.
ShareLunker entries are used in a selective breeding program at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center (TFFC) in Athens. Some of the offspring from these fish are stocked back into the water body from which they were caught. Other ShareLunker offspring are stocked in public waters around the state in an attempt to increase the overall size and growth rate of largemouth bass in Texas.
Anglers entering fish into the Toyota ShareLunker program receive a free replica of their fish, a certificate and ShareLunker clothing and are recognized at a banquet at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens.
For complete information and rules of the ShareLunker program, tips on caring for big bass, a list of official Toyota ShareLunker weigh and holding stations and a recap of last year's season, see tpwd.texas.gov/sharelunker. The site also includes a searchable database of all fish entered into the program along with pictures where available.
Information on current catches, including short videos of interviews with anglers when available, is posted on www.facebook.com/sharelunkerprogram.
The Toyota ShareLunker Program is made possible by a grant to the Texas Parks & Wildlife Foundation from Gulf States Toyota. Toyota is a long-time supporter of the Foundation and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, providing major funding for a wide variety of education, fish, parks and wildlife projects.


text:
Stroom is a free wordpress magazine theme with premium features such as animated gallery, post thumbnail, featured video, latest tweets, social bookmark, popular posts and more. View the list of features below.
Type : Semi Magazine (uses excerpt at blog index)
Functionality : Blog
Stroom Wordpress Theme 1.1
[ Downloaded 3318 times | ]
Check back soon, an important update (wordpress thumbnail feature and version checker) is rolling out to all Zenverse themes, starting from the latest theme.
License: Free to use must keep footer intact AS IS
To make your blog looks better, you need to include a manual excerpt for every post (like my blog). You can add that while editing or adding new post. You can, however, leave your excerpt empty and wordpress will automatically make an excerpt for you, but all HTML tags would be auto removed.
Post Thumbnail is a square image of size 125 x 125 pixels, shown at blog index, related posts and search.
Post Image is an image of size 550 x 190 pixels, shown at single post page, below the post title.
To beautify your blog, try to include post thumbnails for every post (if possible).
In most cases, not all your featured posts are in the same category. You can create a new category (let's say I called it : Featured) and choose it as the "Featured Category" at the theme option page.
Step-by-step guide to activate Featured Gallery
Some users reported that WP-PageNavi plugin causes the sidebar and footer to be missing. If you have WP-PageNavi plugin installed, you should deactivate the plugin.
Version 1.1
- Fixed the possible problem: site become blank after loading
Version 1.0
- First version
Free theme support service has been stopped. If you need some tweaking or want to add features, please contact me. *Depending on the matter, you might need to buy me a cup of coffee or 3
I spent a lot of time making themes and plugins. If you like this theme and would like to support my works, you can donate via PayPal using the button below.
Thank you.
or Subscribe to specific category only :
Love your templates
it has been really helpful
hope to see more soon ..
That's amazing stuff
You must be logged in to post a comment.


text: I've been practicing making fins just so when I want a cool fin I can hopefully pull it off decently. It's damn hard to make a good fin. Honestly a well made fin is with every penny. This is my first take at making a blef fin. It's gonna get sanded down to nothing but it's my testimony to how complex making that shape is