text:
The Blyton'd, Potter'd childhood
When I last worked with young children, I put to them, for discussion, that I didn't really enjoy reading children's books that said that it was up to children to save the rainforest or about small furry animals that had lost their mothers. Neither was I particularly excited by invisible possums who visited casinos or stories about how important it was for children to share or to have good manners. With the exception of some Dr Seuss, I was also pathologically averse to stories written in rhyme. None of this was an expression of a latent fascism on my part, but part of a process of engaging with children in a genuine discussion about books: what goes in them and how it gets there, which is a discussion of some interest when you're four years old or if you're interested in literature as politics. The politics of who children are and what they want, as opposed to what we say they want, is something that is rarely discussed publicly, perhaps because children's thinking has become an unthinkable subject. Of which more some other time.
Anyway, at the urgent request of several children who brought books in from home, I did read Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree series over a period of several weeks, lying on a couch with four- and five-year-olds crowded along its back and arms like starlings. The events of The Faraway Tree were the cause of much discussion. One of my colleagues began to extemporise his own stories about the characters of The Faraway Tree, to the amazement of the children, stories that they couldn't get enough of, stories that went on for two years and were debated at great length, in which Silky the Fairy got pregnant and wouldn't tell anyone who the father was and so on (though a baby with a spherical head would have been a dead giveaway).
It was reported a while back that Enid Blyton's books, starting with the Famous Five, are to get something of a makeover, updating certain turns of phrase and terms of reference and so on. 'Mother and Father' for example will become 'Mum and Dad.' 'Tinkers', a somewhat patronised group in Blyton, will become 'Travelers'. I look forward to the rewriting of the scene in one of the Famous Five books where a swarthy spy is hauled off for apparent execution to the glee of the children. Perhaps he'll be rebranded a terrorist and packed off to Guantanamo.
Blyton has always been fair game for this kind of rewriting. The Faraway Tree's Jo, Bessie, Fanny and Dick were some time ago quietly renamed Joe, Beth, Frannie and Rick. The problem is, in a sense, that Blyton's books have remained incredibly popular in the way that Biggles books, books of a similar vintage, have not. The racism in Biggles is something to behold. I remember one tale in which Biggles and chums machine-gun a charging army of Zulus. And Biggles in Australia has become notorious for its astounding racism and colonialist condescension.
Blyton's popularity in recent years has been eroded by JK Rowling's highly derivative Harry Potter books, I suspect, because they stake out the same kind of territory. Rowling's literary lineage has roots that can be nakedly seen in George Orwell's essay 'Boys Weeklies' and Orwell's insights into the Billy Bunter stories have great resonance for the Potter books, and for Blyton, too. For example, in both Blyton and Rowling continental Europeans are either Gaelic types who 'jabber' when they talk or are stiffly Teutonic. Likewise, there is much repetition of stock scenes including private school inter-house rivalry, must-win sports finals, school villains, endless meals with lashings of decent heavy duty Anglo-Saxon food and so on.
But the singular truth about children's literature is that it is literature that adults have created, vetted and paid for. As Jacqueline Rose once wittily remarked, children are very much portions of adult desire. Part of the stratospheric popularity of the Potter books lies in their uptake by adults, not just as their preferred books to read to children, but also as books to read for themselves (that is, without the presence of children as an excuse). Blyton's work used to occupy some of this ground: books you introduce to your children as a sort of passing on of the idea of an idyllic childhood you wish you'd had but didn't, and now want to convince yourself that your children will have/already have.
Both the Potter and Blyton books are about the childhood we can't get over, the childhood that still marks us. A childhood that we want to relive in idealised and anaesthetised ways, but, unfortunately, can't help reliving in ways that are more troublesome and unavoidable. And the same could be said for many of those who ostensibly write for children, who in doing so always reveal what they think of children, and what they think of where they themselves have come from, and where they wish they had come from.
What the ubiquitous Blyton and Rowling childhoods have in common is their English origins, a version of childhood that has become our universal fantasy. Blyton's template may not be enough now to cope with the nightmares that have begun to haunt British childhood in the past few decades, so Rowling has come to the party. Instead of Blyton's smugglers, burglars, swarthy spies and obnoxious and unhappy rich kids, we have a whole raft of sociopathic wizards, freaks and evil-doers, hysterical griefs, anodyne representations of adolescent sexuality, creepy depictions of adult sadism and obnoxious and unhappy rich kids.
And it's still, strangely enough, a white world. Rowling's clunky placement of non-Anglo characters is embarrassingly tokenistic. Compared to Ursula Le Guin's much earlier Earthsea books, a series that also concerned itself with boy wizards (and with disruptive and marginalised women to boot), where nearly everyone is non-Caucasian, Rowling's books look even more Blyton-ish. Or as Le Guin put it a few years ago, 'stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.'
But we love these descriptions of childhood. Our own are presumably too weird, too unimaginable, too shameful or just too plain boring to really examine with any kind of clarity. Our childhoods seem to exist on a separate planet and we no longer have the language to describe where it was we lived.
Childhood as a time of joyful innocence / childhood as a time of hardship and pain: merely two of the many possible representations of the social construction of childhood; whereas children before the C19, apparently, were seen as little people (as with the construction of the teenager in the mid C20). Not too many so-called children's book (as you rightly say) written by adults focus on the hardship and pain aspect of childhood (or the other possible variants), unless disguised as goblins and witches etc. Which demonstrates how, as with most adult literature, sublimation trumps cognition. For mine, the best literature has a balance of both, yet the cognitive aspect too often goes missing (perhaps because cognition can't be measured, quantified in terms of reading demographics and sales figures etc) which makes thinking about literature in general unthinkable, and not only in relation to children. Of course there are universities and schools, but they are fast becoming corporate bodies, like most aspects of public life. Which makes me wonder where you are going with this post, which is different from previous posts of yours which I have read, in that it seems totally unobjectionable? The way your posts usually play out makes me think you'd make a great writer of political soaps a la Dickens, and you'd make a fortune too. That's not meant as a put down, and I know you'd get no joy from such a happiness, but other people might, and not only at a subliminal level of awareness.
Thanks for this – it is a really interesting subject. When I was doing my PhD through the Open Uni in the UK there was a wonderful lady whose name I have sadly forgotten who was writing a brilliant thesis about the Elinor M Brent-Dyer chalet school books. She dissected them carefully and precisely and I realised that I had really enjoyed them because they were like another universe compared to my life. They were almost like science fiction. Total escape.
At the other end of the scale, and intended for older children, were the Adrian Mole books which are very much of their time (the early 80s) so will my children get the jokes? Time will tell. Sue Townsend originally wrote them with an adult audience in mind. Maybe that is the difference.
How would you position Roald Dahl's works on the children's literature shelf?
Roald Dahl is a very odd writer. Stylistically he has a lot in common with Frank Richards (Billie Bunter), with his repeated use of 'terrific' and so on and many exclaimation marks. But he does manage to address, intuitively rather than consciously, a lot of childhood anxieties; that your parents would rather you weren't around (Matilda), that there is something out there in the world that is malign to children (the Enormous Crocodile), and so on. He used to be pushed a lot by teachers and librarians desperate to instill in children A Love of Books and Reading, who latched onto Dahl following the stereotype that children love books about guts and gore. So I think Dahl was successful for many reasons, perhaps none of which he understood. If he had, The BFG wouldn't have had the Queen in it. And he was successful for reasons which teachers and other institutional adults didn't get either; that children's thinking is an unspeakable subject
Childhood as a time of joyful innocence / childhood as a time of hardship and pain: merely two of the many possible representations of the social construction of childhood; whereas children before the C19, apparently, were seen as little people (as with the construction of the teenager in the mid C20). Not too many so-called children's book (as you rightly say) written by adults focus on the hardship and pain aspect of childhood (or the other possible variants), unless disguised as goblins and witches etc. Which demonstrates how, as with most adult literature, sublimation trumps cognition. For mine, the best literature has a balance of both, yet the cognitive aspect too often goes missing (perhaps because cognition can't be measured, quantified in terms of reading demographics and sales figures etc) which makes thinking about literature in general unthinkable, and not only in relation to children. Of course there are universities and schools, but they are fast becoming corporate bodies, like most aspects of public life. Which makes me wonder where you are going with this post, which is different from previous posts of yours which I have read, in that it seems totally unobjectionable? If a language to talk about something doesn't exist, then it needs to be invented: that's what poetry and literature (even something like Twitter) is for. The way your posts usually play out makes me think you'd make a great writer of political soaps a la Dickens, and you'd make a fortune too. That's not meant as a put down, and I know you'd get no joy from such a happiness, but other people might, and not only at a subliminal level of awareness.Childhood as a time of joyful innocence / childhood as a time of hardship and pain: merely two of the many possible representations of the social construction of childhood; whereas children before the C19, apparently, were seen as little people (as with the construction of the teenager in the mid C20). Not too many so-called children's book (as you rightly say) written by adults focus on the hardship and pain aspect of childhood (or the other possible variants), unless disguised as goblins and witches etc. Which demonstrates how, as with most adult literature, sublimation trumps cognition. For mine, the best literature has a balance of both, yet the cognitive aspect too often goes missing (perhaps because cognition can't be measured, quantified in terms of reading demographics and sales figures etc) which makes thinking about literature in general unthinkable, and not only in relation to children. Of course there are universities and schools, but they are fast becoming corporate bodies, like most aspects of public life. Which makes me wonder where you are going with this post, which is different from previous posts of yours which I have read, in that it seems totally unobjectionable? If a language to talk about something doesn't exist, then it needs to be invented: that's what poetry and literature (even something like Twitter) is for. The way your posts usually play out makes me think you'd make a great writer of political soaps a la Dickens, and you'd make a fortune too. That's not meant as a put down, and I know you'd get no joy from such a happiness, but other people might, and not only at a subliminal level of awareness.
HI Dennis
Unobjectionable hey? Well, the OL blog has been a bit quiet lately and I figured that with WW3 possibly imminent in the Middle East people might need lightening up. And I also tend to shift around a bit in the focus of my bogs cos I'm not quite sure where I fit as far as the OL audience goes.
Actually I think I might be saying something objectionable, which is that generally we spend a lot of our adult lives covering up and lying about our childhoods and politically nullifying them. Rowling is part of that project I think. Even though she purports to be writing about the traumas of childhood she's more in the Blyton tradition, and I strongly suspect that more of her readrs are adults than are children. Recently I gave a seminar in Melbourne for Melbourne Free U, on schools and childhood as locations of national and adult anxiety, and Australia as historically the country where large numbers of children were kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured etc. The discussion afterward was very lively but I was struck by the disclosures that began to come out towards the end; people's sense of emptiness when they reflected on their school childhoods and their feelings of betrayal that they had been sold a lie about what life was for and how childhoods should be spent, and the realisation that they has spent the entirety of their childhooods at SCHOOL. Anoher hour of discussion and would really have gotten somewhere I think.
I'd never thought of myself as a nascent Dickens, Dennis. Though potboilers is probably all I'm good for its true
discussion and we would have eally gotten somewhere.
I love it when The Land of Stephen Wright's Mind comes around! Hurrah! I say and bring me some toffee shocks at once. Wisha wisha wisha … I'm a Blyton'd child … not just Joe (garden), Bessie and Fanny (helping mother unpacking cousin Dick's clothes) where my radicalisation began *Mum, that's not fair!* but also those subversives Binkle & Flip (what a marvellous, loving partnership!), that nature-creature Pip and who could forget Hop, Skip and Jump, Brownies exiled in search of their 'goodness'? George from the Famous Five was my hero & I kind of despised how mean the kids were in the Secret Seven — Julian a far superior leader than that odious Peter (was that his name?). And I am still, sadly, searching for my Jolly the sailor doll to save me (Tiptoe the fairy) from being burned with the Christmas tree, so we can build ourselves a life together in Toyland.
Dame Slapalot comes to mind: a clear picture of the impossibility of school for many a child … as does that Angry Pixie (Enid, the writer, herself, perhaps?)
Clearly, my childhood books had no influence on me whatsoever and were quickly forgotten…
Hi Clare
And that's my point. That the innocuous events of childjhood live on now (the past not even being past as Faulkner said) and have political import, ie: help construct who we are now, and shouldn't be dismissed. Blyton in childhood makes us as much as Stendahl (see previous post) in adulthood.
I don't knw enough about the history of children's lit, but I suspect Blyton was the first mass writer for children, and hence shaping images of childhood. As a writer she seems to me to have more in common with Neli Gaiman – ie: a chucker out of ideas, but you wouldn't trust to write a sentence if your life depended on it.
The Faraway Tree's rotating lands is a great metaphor for the Overland blog isn't it?
Jo, Bess, Fanny and Dick being the site visitors, the bloggers being the Lands at the top of the tree – and you, Jeff, Jack, Rjurik and Jane as the inhabitants of the tree. That woud make Jeff, Moonface, You can argue among yourselves who is Dame Washalot, Saucepan Man, Silky the Fairy and the Angry Pixie. I have my own theories.
Yes, what a trip. How important, then, that children spend time in gardens, nature, et al … hey! the Children from Cherry Tree Farm (& Willow Farm) with the animal-whisperer, Tammylan comes to mind: argh! I am a living breathing example of your 'point'.
As to the Overland/Faraway tree … baha!
Hmm, I never got as far as Cherry Tree Farm. But your pointing to it makes me see that Blyton's children spend all of their time outside, far from the gaze of adults.
These days, outside being considered a place of anxiety, danger, weirdness and general mayhem, I guess is one reason why Rowlings spend most of their time inside locked up with psycho wizards, and running around labyrinthine buildings.
Yes, the children in the stories are very free (even Milly Molly Mandy is allowed to go off blackberrying and down to the shops to buy something, unaccompanied).
Enid's outside was also a place of anxiety, danger, weirdness and general mayhem — and Famous Five/Secret Seven had their fair share of power-crazed adults. But generally, yes: a boiled egg in your pocket and a bottle of milk and off you went.
Ha! Obviously part of my mind lives in a Blyton universe. The Guardian tells me this morning that it is the Famous Five's 70th anniversary – which I swear I didn't know. And that Hodder still sell half a million Blyton books a year!
There's a line from Trotsky's My Life about how for children of the ruling class childhood was a time of bliss – a sort of endless summer – while for the vast majority it was a tunnel of hunger and misery. He, inevitably, described his own childhood as belonging to neither category, which is revealing in a way. I remember thinking that there was a dimension missing from his categorisation which especially applies to a place like contemporary Australia where, although there are many miseries attendant on a working class childhood, hunger is less common. My own memory of childhood is of the unremitting boredom of suburbia – far harder to escape from as a child than it would prove to be as an adolescent or a young adult.
All the books that appealed to me as a child had a common theme. They all had protagonists who were transported from a miserable and limiting existence to a magical world of adventure and excitement.You walk through a closet, a wizard comes visiting, or an owl brings a message. Even Ursula Le Guin follows this formula in her Earthsea books. My own favourite as a kid was not "magical" in that literal way. I began reading for myself as a 7 year old with Henry Treece's viking books. These involved a young viking whose family is kiled in a raid and who is forced to go a viking.
What seems to vary is the nature of the world into which the protagonist escapes. Treece's protagonist roamed 9th century Europe getting into adventures and managing to find treasure without raping or pillaging.
The suburban prison in which I read these books had a view. I grew up on what was then, in the '50s and '70s, the south-western edge of Canberra and we had, always in view the giant Brindabella ranges, covered in forest and snow capped in the winter. As a primary school kid I had fantasies of simply walking into those mountains and discovering something exciting there. Later, as a teenager, my imagination stimulated by Kerr's sacking of Whitlam, I would fantasize about leading a guerrilla in those ranges resistance after a military coup.
All of which brings us back to the inevitable separation that has to be made between the fact of escape and what is being escaped into. Tolkein's protagonist escapes into a world of feudal hierarchy and Manichean struggles with a disturbing racial element, Le Guin's protagonist escapes into a world far more complex and challenging.
But there's nothing wrong with wanting to escape, and there's nothing wrong with "escapist" literature as such. What sort of literature would be produced in a world from which escape was not desirable is another question. Unfortunatley it's not a question likely to be resolved anywhere soon.
Hi Robert, and thanks for this. I really appreciate your use of the books you read when you were a child. The theme of escape is always pertinent in children's literature I guess, because for a child there are so many ways of being imprisoned. There's nothing 'wrong' in that sense with children reading Rowling or Blyton – though adults reading Rowling begs a lot of interesting questions and 2nd guesses. (It occurred to me this morning that girls in Blyton are somewhat more thoughtfully represented than in Rowling.)
Yesterday after I had posted this to OL, I came across John Christopher's 'Tripods' trilogy in an op shop, a series of books I had read as a young boy. The metaphor of escape is apparent there also; adults manipulated by mysterious but visible and sinister outside forces, which a child seeks to escape from and also confront, an image that tells me more about myself as a child than I would have thought. (Tell me what you read as a child and why, and I will tell who you were and what you might be). I'm relieved to say that the representation of women in Christopher weirded me out then as it does now, though back then I there wasn't a lot I could do with that feeling but feel odd. And if Christopher had stayed within his own metaphors instead of getting all didactic (a bit like Dahl) they would have been much better books.
Edward Said showed me that fiction writers often don't know the half of what they are saying. Children's fiction writers even more so I think. More irony and less lessons would have been useful
but is it up to children to save the rainforest. who else has the time? i got places to be
hey. I missed this comment. It wasn't flicked to my email. Children's books, especially picture books, are full of didactic stories about How You Shouild Behave, and often the portray the warm fuzzies that will be yours if you…..have good manners, are kind to whales, etc. Most picture books are written for adults not children, eg: Mem Fox, Graeme Base and a zillion others.
One thing I love about To Kill A Mockingbird is that it honors the life of the child.
No bratty TV kids.
Interesting portrayals of children in fiction are hard to come by aren't they? I prefer the slightly perplexed take ('I can't quite get down in words how weird it is to look at my childhood as an adult') such as Gunter Grass' Oskar, as opposed to the 'I'm hip with children's inner life', as with Safran Foer's Oskar.
Carson McCullers nailed something in Member of the Wedding, I think
Active/passive; inside; outside etc… depends on your generation, but I wouldn't be extolling Blyton's & Co's virtues endlessly. All I can remember being available to read in school and public libraries, as well as bookshops, were the colonising schoolboy stories of conker games and Fibbs Major and Lyes Minor fagging, play up and play the game, there's a good chap, and the lashings of sandwiches Blyton served up for little Ann to make and clean up after the adventures because George was pretending to be a boy. Phew! After that Wind in the Willows and Pooh Bear were blessed relief.
I think that's a good point Dennis, that for a long time Blyton and various school stories (and Biggles) was always there was. Probably an indication of how childhood was policed. These days, it seems that Rowling is all there is. She's become the default writer for children: I need to be reading to my kids at night, I know I'll read Harry Potter.Teachers and reading advocates have often extolled Rowling in this way as the person who has Got Kids Reading Again.
Childhood is policed in more polymorphous ways – but children's literature is still a way of attempting it.
Wind in the Willows and Pooh are different kettles of fish aren't they?
Don't know that Wind in the Willows and Pooh books are "different kettles of fish" as you say. Certainly AA Milne wrote the Pooh Bear books with the experience of both his and his son's childhood in mind, and road tested them in his own house; and the tragic story of Kenneth Graham is well known in relation to his own son, and how he wrote Wind in the Willows as a response to a life of "playing around with boats". The fact that there is a connection between Milne and Graham due to Milne scripting and staging an adaptation of Toad of Toad Hall (if I remember correctly), is not the point of those books not being different kettles of fish.
You can't have a structure, a relationship that enables a link to a different order of adult reading experience, if you are stuck in the same popular mire reading the same type of book, smoking the same brand of cigarette, forever. The philosophy and satire of my early reading of Pooh Bear, and the poetry and philosophy of Wind in the Willows, lead me to the realisation of a literature beyond a childhood reading experience. After those two books I read nothing, until I moved in my mid teens to Ulysses and Voss (both via circuitous routes), modernist poetry and theatre, and social theory. I can't say for sure, but what I can say is reading Pooh Bear and Wind in the Willows killed fantasy stone dead for me. I was like the boy who had killed a living thing. So the Tolkien "Rings" hippy craze had no appeal to me (I read The Magus and French Lieutenant's Woman instead); my understanding being that Tolkien was simply fantasising an escape from his own dreary suburban London (?) existence, rather than directly critiquing the social malaise of his times.
That may not help the discussion here; but that was effect of a different order of childhood reading on me.
I think that Grahame and Milne are very different kettles. And pretty fishy. As you say,to get from Blyton or Potter to things more various, one needs a disruptive experience. So its possible for literature to disrupt itself – which doesn't happen as often as one would like.
You know, when Mole leaves his home for the first time after the spring-cleaning and runs into the rabbits barring the road, he bowls them over while sneering 'Onion sauce!' It took me some time to realise that onion sauce is of course what rabbits are served up with.
It's probably a bigger jump from Ulysses to Voss than it is from Wind in the Willows to Ulysses.
I don't think you killed fantasy. You probably killed Fantasy. A different kettle of fish.
How to put this: clearly you've thought more about this so-called children's lit thing more recently than me; and are thinking more about it than I've bothered to for a long time; so I'll concede the Ffantasy point: well made; as well as conceding my initial point about the unobjectionability of this post, as I've once again been sucked into the discursivity of your argument (not that it isn't pleasant: au contraire- far more so than doing sudoku). The "different kettles of fish" metaphor, however, I'm not ready to concede, yet.
As I see it there is no essential generic or kettle difference between Pooh / Willows and Blyton & Co, because the difference is a question of reading actively: choosing to see the difference in the act of reading or not, as a process of cognitive readiness. Its like the old Lao Tsu / Donovan thing- first there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; then there is- where the middle, transformative stage is a long process of complicated critical-theoretical reflection, before a simple clarity returns once more (if it ever does). Again, as you more neatly reframed it, that transformation depends on a disruptive reading experience. And as a further aside, there is a nice story by Borges ('Averroes Search'), where an Arab scholar studying Aristotle (the Arab world not having a strong background in theatre, apparently), tries to imagine what a tragedy is without understanding the accompanying need for an understanding of theatre, the evidence of which lies in front of his eyes but he can't see it. That seems to be to the situation of the disruptive reading experience too: you need to get up behind the bowler's arm to see what is being done with the ball of language that makes matters difficult or uncomfortable for a receiver or not. My thinking being also that the more time a child spends in the first, fantasy stage of reading, absorbing a rich and positively diverse literature unreflectively (as opposed to critical-theoretical reflection),even into adulthood, the better. My own grief being that I was forced beyond an early pleasure due to the paucity of childhood reading matter available; so agreed, I was able to actively perceive a reading difference between Pooh/Willow and Blyton, but only because I was forced to due to reading starvation, and not due to any essential generic difference, because Pooh/Willows and Blyton, at the time of reading, were both labelled and marketed as children's literature.
My overall point being that yes, children can engage with a far richer and more diverse positive reading experience at the fantasy stage than we give them credit for, as long as they have the accompanying requisite language and cognitive processing skills available to them at the time.
Well, I can meet you half-way on this one Dennis. I think the difference between Pooh/Willows and Blyton/General children's lit, is that Grahame and Milne demonstrated a kind of intensity of vision matched with a very even tone. In much of what is regarded as children's lit an untempered display of one's own strange inner states is considered enough. If, in your attempts to overcome the paucity of reading material had come across Harry Potter you may have been consumed by Rowling's very weird and occasionally sadistic treatment of childhood. It's Rowling's sadism (as well as her interminable narrative style) that weirds me out.
I take your point on the state of the reader, but I don't see reading as an act of cognitive readiness. The whole experience of reading has to be meaningful in some way. You know that whole middle-class thing about reading to children at bedtime (why bedtime?) as some kind of act of 'reading readiness' is bullshit. Attaching a priority and pleasure to reading has more to do with how reading is situated for a child; who around them reads and why, how the act of reading is constructed. For some of us, perhaps early readers, reading can be a way of creating a sort of skin in place of another kind of skin which hasn't been sufficiently wrought for the child his his or carers. This was probably the case for me, and perhaps for you too. (This process happens quite commonly with children who walk exceptionally early,an event usually rapturously praised by adults, but which I would view as something of a signal of alarm). Either way there's a lot of unconscious meaning to reading, because it's a complex activity that we start at developmentally a very early period in life. Its not just about a use of language, but also a way of managing a lot of primitive interior states, and others not-so primitive.
*Donovan* said that about mountains being mountains etc?
Mmm. I don't want to idealise Blyton as Dennis warning butr I have to admit that when I was reading Blyton to my 4 and 5 year olds at their request, I was happy to do so. I think I would have strongly objected if I'd been asked to read Potter
Thanks Clare. Capitalism explained! What immediately came to mind was a sequence with cute rabbits etc in their little white-picket town playing with iPads, with a charming Scarry-esque factory labelled Foxconn (run by foxes) on the opposite page, where other rabbits drop dead, etc
Interesting to see the doctored pics, as with Blyton's re-issues.
"We spend a lot of our adult lives covering up and lying about our childhoods and politically nullifying them."
Stephen, that is the 'controversial' point, in your own words. Some might disagree with this statement (and this, might pick an overt debate with you) but I reckon more often and more insidious is that we go a bit further than you suggest in that: we also spend a lot of our lives covering up and lying about the covering up and lying we are doing. Double repression I guess.
So I thinking that naming clearly some ways that this happens, can help out here.
* Telling children What To Do
* Shaming or Praising them if They Do what we have told them about What To Do
* Treating them like they are Empty Vessels to be Filled by Us Who Know More or treating them like Deviant Derivations that Need To Be Set On the Straight And Narrow.
There's not much open space for any sort of relating-to-the-other-coming-into-being for children, or anyone really. Children, and anyone with less-rather-than-more grip on power centres, probably just get the most over forms of all this.
For instance, I was at a kindegarten once, played with some kids in the sand pit cum mud bath due to a nearby hose turned on, when Adult Who Knows Better came up and said, in a 'nice, enthusiastic' tone of voice: Oh, that's so messy!…
My analysis: right… so to you, dear adult, the earth in a fluid state, in contact with our skin and clothes, is a mess (and thus: could be cleanier, tidier, better).
What about observing the activity, without the morality… Oh, that's so squishy, perhaps.
But then, why come up and tell/narrate/dictate the experience and terms of engagement to the children?? I'm thinking this is a version of empty vessel (must gives the kids an Idea of what they're doing, like they don't already know), mixed with deviant derivation (must make sure kids don't enjoy this do much, and that they knows what's the better, stable state).
So, better to be a humble observer, or join in with what's already happening, or just not come over.
I provide this analysis — I'm guessing of no surprise to you Stephen — just to sure how dodgy adults can be with children, even when appearing pleasant/genuine and certainly within all the Educational Standards put in place.
Lots of kids books are like this I reckon. Which is just to agree with you, Stephen, I'm thinking.
What I like is:
> Little Prince
> Where the Wild Things Are (especially as the film, scripted by the original author, who has some pretty interesting things to say about kids books — http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/20/maurice-sendak-wild-things-hell)
> Dr Suess when he gets weird and dark (eg, The Things You Can Think), so too Roald Dalh
> others less well-known, but with some kind of space for people (in the stories and the book's readers) to think and feel without judgement.
Hi Luke
I think that if there's one thing a majority of families do well, its successfully rewrite family history as the children get older.
There's that last long sentence at the end of the Knoxville 1915 prologue of James Agee's Death in the Family, where the child protagonist (Agee) says (eventually) no-one would tell me who I am. I don't have a copy so can't quote it exactly. Anyway, I always took this to mean that the adults around him would tell him how he was supposed to be and he is always trying to guess who he is supposed to be, but never finding anything that feels like him, like his inner experience.
I suppose I just wonder what it would be like for children to choose what they read, to have a breadth of exploration and possibility so that choices can be made. And what it would be like to discuss those choices with them – not in an 'educative' way, but just in a 'what do you like about this and why' kind of way.
Whenever I come across someone who is just humbly themselves when spending time with children, I'm always sure I've just come across someone who is basically sane.
How interesting, reading all of these comments! I spent the first ten years of my life on an outer London housing estate and disliked, after trying to read, The Wind in the Willows and Pooh Bear, and also Swallows and Amazons. They are about peoples and a places I simply didn't recognise and couldn't identify with, and somehow felt were inimical to me and the way my family lived and that class distinction was embedded in them (ie the weasels in Wind in the Willows-heard on a little 45 record.) I did read Blyton eventually (after my family came to Australia)with a sort of long-distance interested disgust. I loved books with animal subjects, otters and eagles in Scotland and so on, and books about wilderness, and travel to distant lands. As an adult, I can't stand the Harry Potter books which are in a similar English tradition as previous commentors have noted, but are also derivative of Terry Pratchett's books (Hogwarts:Hog father, and so much more). AS Byatt has stated that the adult obsession with the Harry Potter books reflects the infantilisation of adult life. This is particularly of middle class educated readers(my comment)and if escapism is so much a part of these books, then what these readers are escaping from is their future.
Carol, the Potter obsession might also be part of the infantilisation of childhood too.
The difference between Potter and Pratchett is that Pratchett can be funny, Rowling is only unintentionally funny. I remember one page where Harry enters a room after hearing a noise within, but finds only "disturbed mice."
There are so many books available to children these days in all genres and for all ages – thousands of them in fact, so I am not sure why anyone would say that Harry Potter is all kids have to contend with. My daughter is 10 and she reads a novel a week, has done since she was 5 and she has never read or shown a desire to read any of the Harry Potter series. Just wanted to pipe up and say that Rowling – though popular – is just one example in a sea of childhood literary options.
Janet, I think this might prove my argument – that adults promote Potter to children and that in the absence of said promotion Potter is just another hefty tome.
Hi (again, Stephen. There was no 'reply' tab to your last comment in response to my comment so I'll start another stream. Hadn't intended to- not argument by force but the force of the better argument is always my tack- so to tack once more.
In all my comments I've never considered reading as anything other than making meanings from, with and by text-which may be any piece of written, spoken or visual material. How do you ever know that you have taught or imparted the point, meaning or thing you may have intended, however casually or conversationally? As far as I know, the C20 philosophical problem of other minds was never solved. Often we simply get off on our own train of thought or ego; being obtuse (particularly with children), or in total ignorance of the thought capacities of an other (which may be greater or lesser than our own). Try teaching the concept of colour to a child before she or he is ready- you'll go bananas. Often young children's questions are not questions at all- more statements about their current developemental stage of awareness and understanding.
Dennis, the reason why teaching children a concept of colour drives you nuts is because its not something that can be taught didactically. Only an adult would think that teaching colours to children was a necessary activity. Really, when I see an adult trying to teach such a thing (and 'numbers and letters' to children)I start thinking that we need a new category of mental illness.
I have always thought of children's questions as exactly like adult's questions – except that children are more likely to want to explore the metaphor of whatever image is used in the question and whatever meta-cognitions and unconscious imagery is associated with the question. Most adults of my acquaintance don't.
I suppose, often questions in blog comments are not questions at all – more statements about the poster's current development stage of awareness and understanding.
It seems rude to throw this at you Dennis, so why throw it at other people (like children)?…
You've got me there!
er…Stephen and Luke, irony is not the meaning of life and QED etc. I would prefer, perhaps over realism and politics, the liberation of metaphors, analogies, a story within a story. Potter is perhaps, as many feel, a good story, but within, as Stephen feels, a pretty dismal story.
Yes, Stephen, I take your point. Took me a while to get back to this one, so it's hard to pick up the thread of the argument again.
I have never actually tried teaching the concept of colours to a child; one of my children asked me once (she was about 18 months) and I tried explaining and realised the futility of the exercise due to the child's lack of understanding. That was not my point though: I was re-emphasising my earlier point about stages of cognitive development. Sounds Piagetian, I know, and I know also how that has been discredited; and although it is the meaning making of the child that is of greater importance, I would argue still that there are stages of cognitive development that can be ignored at a child's peril. I asked my Latin teacher once why we had to learn Latin, and he replied, "Because it is boring already." Meaning that Latin had successfully short-circuited the ways formal teaching makes things boring. What teaching isn't didactic at some point? Are you arguing that all teaching is mental illness? Who was it who said that if you want to exploit someone you have to teach them first? There are different ways teaching, so different ways of exploiting people, many seemingly benign. And where we're at in terms of this blog's brief I don't know.
I seem to like quoting Borges's story, "Averroes Search", and in that story Abdalmalik, unable to explain a point he is pursuing, "becomes the apologist of a performance he scarcely remembered and which had annoyed him quite a bit". I feel a bit like that over this sticking point, and although this Blyton-like adventure has been torturous at times (perhaps of my own making), it has, as usual, been engaging and pleasurable.
Thanks for picking up the thread Dennis. Sometimes I get comments on old posts that always throw me into confusion; What post was this? I don't remember writing this post! What was i saying again Etc.
I'f argue that a lot of pedagogical activity is more about cultural anxieties than any kind of process of active meaning-making. I'm not saying that there aren't critical points in human development, but that it's difficult to separate 'cognitive development' out from meaning-making generally, that it's meaning-making that is the crucial factor and that we don't have enough theories of meaning-making. Education students when observing children are routinely taught to write down the behaviours being observed and then tag them as 'cognitive development', 'emotional development' etc etc. Thus is deeply stupid.
Irony's not the meaning???? Shit, I'm in deep trouble.
I always liked the Angry Pixie. We never knew exactly why he was angry, but he certainly was. Similarly, the saucepan man never seemed to sell many saucepans; he just liked the noise. This was not irony (or even iron-mongery) it was just pure excess. These weirdnesses fascinated me as a child. They made the boring plots bearable. I could go on about Rabelais or something to clothe this love of eruptive excess in later knowledge, but that would be disloyal to the child I remember. She just liked stroppy pixies and clanging pots.
Penelope – as I recall in my enforced reading of The Faraway Tree to a bunch of 4 and 5 yr olds, it was the Angry Pixie and the Saucepan Man who were of greatest interest. After all, children are always interested in excess and adults in limiting excess. Both the AP and the SM get to do things children don't get enough – get angry at adults and have it heard, and make a lot of noise for no reason than because they can.
So the Angry Pixie and the Saucepan Man have a lot in common with many blog conversations then, especially when it ends up in capitals and multiple exclamation marks and name calling. (Present blog excepted of course.) I'm not sure that adults are always interested in limiting excess though, Stephen. Depends on the adult. And the excess. But I won't descend into anecdotes.
Perhaps if we thought about childhood states of mind in a different way and young children were acknowledged the space and capacity to lose it sometimes and not feel the world has fallen apart, we wouldn't throw so many exclamation marks at each other as adults. I think generally adults will seek to limit what they see as excess in children – which is not to say that is excess, just that excessive children seem to cause excessive adult anxiety.
In The Book of Brownies, you meet Saucepan Man in his own place – I remember as a child being quite astounded by that, him having a life outside of the Faraway Tree trilogy. It was high up a cliff, I remember, and the stairs were all made of saucepans (of course). I wasn't much of a fan of the Angry Pixie because I didn't want ink on my party clothes (no wonder I thought they were all horrible to poor Connie, must've been a priss at heart).
Ta for that. Tell me who you identified with in Enid Blyton and I will tell you who you were…
What's this were rubbish? I am always and forever an Angry Pixie. Wanna make something of it?
Sorry. I can't hear what you're saying Penelope. I've always been more of a Saucepan Man, making so much noise I can't hear myself think


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Posts tagged 'jersey boys'
Nights in Rodanthe NYC Premier and best-selling author Nicholas Sparks Interview highlights
Tuesday- Sept. 30th – Expect the Unexpected! – On tonights show I'm dishing about my trip to NYC for the world premier of Nights in Rodanthe, my star sightings (Richard Gere and Diane Lane), touring the Big Apple, the Broadway musical Jersey Boys. Plus, I'm giving details about my interview with the best-selling author Nicholas Sparks. Today marks the release of his latest novel *The Lucky One*, whose central character is a United States Marine.
Have you ever experienced something unexpected? We want to hear from you! Join the conversation!
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Gilgamesh gĭl´gəmĕsh [key], in Babylonian legend, king of Uruk . He is the hero of the Gilgamesh epic, a work of some 3,000 lines, written on 12 tablets c.2000 BC and discovered among the ruins at Nineveh. The epic was lost when the the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal was destroyed in 612 BC The library's remains were excavated by British archaeologists in the mid-19th cent., the tablets were discovered, and the epic's cuneiform text was translated by British scholars. It tells of the adventures of the warlike and imperious Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu. When Enkidu suddenly sickened and died, Gilgamesh became obsessed by a fear of death. His ancestor Ut-napishtim (who with his wife had been the only survivor of a great flood) told him of a plant that gave eternal life. After obtaining the plant, however, Gilgamesh left it unguarded and a serpent carried it off. The hero then turned to the ghost of Enkidu for consoling knowledge of the afterlife, only to be told by his friend that a gloomy future awaited the dead.
See verse translations by H. Mason (1970), D. Ferry (1993), and S. Mitchell (2007); prose translation by N. K. Sandars (1960); A. Heidel, Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (2d ed. 1949); D. Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007); T. Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic (2011).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Folklore and Mythology


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Grilled Ham Sandwich with Skewered Fruit
|Bread, Meat, Fruits
|Day Part
|Dinner, Lunch
|Menu Part
|Cuisine Type
A touch of the tropics is added to the common ham sandwich by broiling the meat and a fruit skewer with peach or plum slices, grapes, and pineapple wedges, both flavored with an orange juice and mustard sauce.
2 lb. unsliced ham or Canadian bacon
1 cup honey mustard
3 tbsp. orange juice
4 peaches or plums, sliced
1⁄2 lb. grapes
1⁄2 fresh pineapple, cut into wedges
2 tbsp. chopped cilantro
2 tbsp. chopped scallions
Leaf lettuce
6 sesame buns, toasted
1. Slice ham or Canadian bacon into 1⁄3-in. thick rounds. Combine mustard and orange juice; brush a little on each ham slice and reserve.
2. Thread peach or plum slices, grapes, and pineapple wedges on small skewers. Brush with some of mustard mixture and reserve.
3. Dice remaining peaches or plums and combine with enough of remaining mustard mixture to moisten. Stir in cilantro and scallions; reserve relish.
4. Per order, grill or broil one ham slice and two fruit skewers until heated through and lightly glazed, turning to brown evenly.
5. Serve ham on toasted buns with lettuce and fruit relish; accompany with fruit skewers.


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Bank trust companies are doing well, but threats for RIAs linger, according to Cerulli Associates, which estimates bank trust assets reached $2.3 trillion in 2012.
"Collectively, bank trusts manage an estimated $2.3 trillion in assets as of 2012, which is just shy of pre-2008 crisis levels," Donnie Ethier, senior analyst at the Boston-based research firm, said in a statement. "Bank trusts have long been regarded as an important destination for wealth management among high-net-worth institutions and individuals."
Cerulli defines a bank trust organization as a division of a bank or registered broker-dealer that provides fiduciary wealth management advice under the '40-Act exemption, which exempts them from securities registration.
"Understanding the bank trust channel is crucial regardless of whether an asset manager is seeking a new distribution outlet, an established bank trust is in the midst of strategic planning, or a competing provider is contemplating the creation of a trust company to expand its offerings to savvy HNW investors," Ethier said.
Cerulli predicts "modest growth" for bank trust assets, although there are several issues that could alter the anticipated growth to the benefit or detriment of the channel. Competition in the space is intensifying, including the increasing presence and threat of RIAs and the direct channel. This competition may increase even more as investors seek greater fee transparency and younger generations continue to inherit wealth.


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KWIK-STIK™ 2 Pack
Catalog No. 0331P
Paeniclostridium sordellii derived from ATCC® 9714™*
In Stock
2 Pack EA
General Information
Culture Method
All Product Formats
General Information
Biosafety Level2
Product FormatKWIK-STIK™ 2 Pack
Test MethodMicrobial Identification
Catalog number0331
Price CodeP-D
Culture Method
MediaAnaerobic Blood Agar
Growth Time48 to 72 hours
Additional TipsSome obligate anaerobes may require 5 to 7 days to demonstrate sufficient growth.
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All Product Formats
Paeniclostridium sordellii derived from ATCC® 9714™*, SKU: 0331KKWIK-STIK™ 6 PackDETAILS
*The ATCC Licensed Derivative Emblem, the ATCC Licensed Derivative word mark and the ATCC catalog marks are trademarks of ATCC. Microbiologics, Inc. is licensed to use these trademarks and to sell products derived from ATCC® cultures. Look for the ATCC Licensed Derivative © Emblem for products derived from ATCC© cultures.


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Foote, Julia A.J.
The author of this sketch is well known in many parts of Ohio, and in other days was known in several States, as an Evangelist. The purity of her life and the success of her labors are acknowledged. After severe mental and spiritual conflicts, she obeyed God, in public labor for his cause, and still continues in this, although, with many, she is thereby guilty of three great crimes.
1. The first is, that of Color. For, though not now the slaves of individual men, our brethren continue to be under the bondage of society. But if there be crime in color, it lies at the door of Him who "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth," and who declares himself to be "no respecter of persons." Holiness takes
2. In the next place, we see the crime of Womanhood. As though any one, with heart and lips of love, may not speak forth the praises of Him who hath called us out of darkness into light! The "anointing which abideth" unseals all lips, so that in Christ "there is neither male nor female." Praise God forever!
3. In the last place, our sister, as stated, is an Evangelist. We respect the pastoral office highly, for we know the heart of a pastor; but while the regular field-hands are reaping, pray, let Ruth glean, even if "her hap is to light on a part of the field belonging to Boaz."
If you cannot, in the harvest,
Garner up the richest sheaves,
Many a grain, both ripe and golden,
Will the careless reapers leave;
Go and glean among the briers,
Growing rank against the wall;
For it may be that their shadow
Hides the heaviest wheat of all."
Our dear sister is not a genius. She is simply strong in common sense, and strong in the Lord. Those of us who heard her preach, last year, at Lodi, where she held the almost breathless attention of five thousand people, by the eloquence of the Holy Ghost, know well where is the hiding of her power.
This is a simple narrative of a life of incidents, many of them stirring and strange. We commend it to all; and with it, the soundness of the doctrine and exhortation with which Sister Foote enforces the sublime cause of Holiness.
Christian Harvester Office
Cleveland, June, 1879


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Shane Crotty is a Professor with tenure of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Dr. Crotty's research focus is on the underlying immunology of vaccines, particularly the development of potent antibody responses and memory, with a predominant focus on the important role of CD4 T cells in these processes. By better understanding these processes, Dr. Crotty hopes new and better vaccines can one day be developed, particularly against deadly diseases like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, where no good vaccines currently exist.
Dr. Crotty received his B.S. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996. He also received a B.S. in Writing from MIT the same year. Dr. Crotty undertook graduate work in virology at the University of California, San Francisco in the Program in Biological Sciences. There he discovered the mechanism of action of the antiviral drug ribavirin, widely used to treat chronic hepatitis C infections. Dr. Crotty earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2001. He then pursued postdoctoral work at the Emory University Vaccine Center with Dr. Rafi Ahmed from 2001 to 2003, studying aspects of the generation and maintenance of immune memory after viral infections. In 2003, he accepted a faculty position at LJI.
The Crotty lab has helped established that follicular helper T cells (Tfh) are a distinct type of differentiated CD4 T cell uniquely specialized in B cell help, and that Tfh differentiation is controlled by the transcription factor Bcl6 (Science 2009). He has made major advances in the area of T cell help to B cells, and through this work has become an internationally recognized leader in the field of Tfh cell biology (Annual Review of Immunology 2011). Dr. Crotty was named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences in 2005, and was the recipient of the annualAmerican Association of Immunologists (AAI) Investigator Award for outstanding early-career research contributions to the field of Immunology in 2012.
Dr. Crotty is also the author of Ahead of the Curve, a biography of Nobel laureate scientist David Baltimore, published in 2001, and reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Nature, The Washington Post, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Nature Medicine, and Discover Magazine.


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The demands of keeping up with a growing practice—adding staff, adding clients, meeting regulatory requirements—can become burdensome. As practices grow, many look for operational efficiency gains in all aspects of the business, one of which is monitoring personal trading.
As you know, SEC and FINRA regulations require investment advisors, broker/dealers, hedge funds and other asset managers to supervise employee personal trading activity.
Advisor activities at RIA firms are governed by Rule 204A-1 under the Investment Advisoers Act of 1940 which requires the establishment, maintenance and enforcement of a written Code of Ethics. This Code of Ethics includes provisions that require "access persons" to report their personal securities transactions and holdings periodically.
Rules regarding personal trading for registered representatives of a broker-dealer are spelled out in NASD Rule 3050 and NYSE Rule 407.
Small Firm Personal Trading Compliance
To ensure compliance with regulations, firms gather information on employees' personal accounts from hard-copy statements, an emailed PDF or electronic feed a few days after the settlement date of a transaction. Manually scanning for restricted securities or trades during black-out periods can pinpoint inadvertent issues that could cause a regulatory problem.
To cut down on the manual process of collecting and monitoring this activity, many firms restrict employee trading to a single (or limited number of) brokerage institution(s) where electronic access is available. Others may also adopt the approach of using their portfolio management system (PMS) for manually tracking employee trades.
Restricting employee trading to specific brokerages can be a barrier to attracting top talent as the practice grows. Moreover. tracking trades in a PMS is still a manual and potentially time consuming activity.
Recognizing the Burdens of Growth
As the co-founder of four businesses, I can tell you from firsthand experience that there comes a point in the lifecycle of a business when running a firm can distract you from growing it. It is the responsibility of the CEO/founder/owner to recognize this pivotal point (or have it brought to his/her attention) and then to introduce needed operational efficiencies.
Though it can differ by the firm, in many cases when an advisory practice surpasses a handful of employees, monitoring personal trading can become a distraction from spending more time with clients or more time on marketing and business development activities. Often this is the point that many firms consider using a rules-based platform – an employee trade tracking tool. An Automated Personal Trading Approach for Growth
There are several providers of rules-based personal trading software. Many offer a variety of services and support—from pre-clearance authorization, to transaction review, to reporting— to help ensure documented compliance for firms subject to personal trading regulations.
Advisory practices that are ready to use employee trade tracking tools to scale for growth face the task of making smart decisions for the future of their practice. Consider the following:
- How many accounts do you need to monitor on a daily basis?
- Do you need access to accounts in brokerages where no direct feed is available?
- Do you need a tool that provides access to thousands of brokerages?
If you need access to multiple brokerages, another consideration when evaluating solutions is whether a personal trading software provider offers integrations with data aggregation services. With data aggregation built into the tool, not only do transactions and holdings flow into the system daily, but they also have the ability to retrieve data from literally thousands of custodians; as opposed to a the limited, fixed number of institutions otherwise accessible to applications without an integration with an aggregation provider.
What's more, no additional paperwork or authorization agreement with the carrying brokerage may be necessary. Aggregation services also solve the problem of monitoring trades in a scalable way.
As a CEO, I am always on the look-out for operational efficiency gains, because at the end of the day, my goal is to create a smoothly running business that can be effectively scaled for growth. With the right solution to fit the needs of the firm, using technology can be the right move, especially when adding staff isn't scalable.
Do yourself a favor by investigating services that could save you time in the future.
If you'd like more information on personal trading monitoring, click here to read my interview with Dan Bernstein, director of research and development at MarketCounsel: "PERSONAL TRADE MONITORING: Compliance Officers Implement Leading Practices to Better Manage Risk"


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Hey guys, let $F: \mathcal{A} \rightarrow \mathcal{B}$ be a left exact functor between abelian categories with enough injectives, let $K \in Kom(\mathcal{A})$ be an unbounded complex, I've heard that you can construct resolutions and define a derived functor $RF$ for $K$ but I was wondering:
1 - Are the resolutions similar to Cartan-Eilenberg resolutions for bounded complexes, where you find an injective (projective) resolution for each member $K^i$ of $K$ and check it satisfies certain properties?
2 - Can you define filtrations, and a spectral sequence to compute the derived functors?
Any good references on this?


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Components Banners Banners Edit/fr
From Joomla! Documentation
Components Help Screens
- Components Associations
- Components Associations Edit
- Components Associations Options
- Components Banners Banners
- Components Banners Banners Edit
- Components Banners Banners Options
- Components Banners Categories
- Components Banners Categories Edit
- Components Banners Clients
- Components Banners Clients Edit
- Components Banners Tracks
- Components Check in Configuration
- Components Contacts Categories
- Components Contacts Categories Edit
- Components Contacts Contacts
- Components Contacts Contacts Edit
- Components Fields Field Groups
- Components Fields Field Groups Edit
- Components Finder Manage Content Maps
- Components Finder Manage Indexed Content
- Components Finder Manage Search Filters
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- Components Installer Configuration
- Components Joomla Update
- Components Language Manager Options
- Components Menus Configuration
- Components Messages Configuration
- Components Messaging Inbox
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- Components Post installation Messages
- Components Redirect Manager
- Components Redirect Manager Edit
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- Components Search
- Components Search Manager Options
- Components Tags Manager
- Components Tags Manager Edit
- Components Tags Manager Options
- Components Template Manager Options
- Components Version History
- Components Web Links Manager Options
- Components Weblinks Categories
- Components Weblinks Categories Edit
- Components Weblinks Links
- Components Weblinks Links Edit
- Fields Fields Edit
- Users Access Levels
How to Access
To 'add' a new Banner or 'edit' an existing Banner, navigate to the Banner Manager:
- Select Components → Banners
Click the 'New' button to create a new Banner. To 'Edit' an existing Banner, in Banner Manager click on an Banner's Title or click the Banner's check box and then click the Edit button in the Toolbar.
Used to add or edit banners which can be displayed on your Joomla! website. Remember to create at least one Banner Client and one Banner Category before creating any Banners.
Image Type
Custom Type
Details Sidebar
- Status. (Published/Unpublished/Trashed) The published status of the item.
- Category. The Category this item belongs to.
- Pinned. (Yes/No) Whether or not the Banner is "pinned". If one or more Banners in a Category are designated "sticky," they will take priority over Banners that are not sticky.
- For example, if two Banners in a Category are pinned and a third Banner is not pinned, the third Banner will not display if the Banner display module setting is "Pinned, Randomise" or "Pinned, Ordering." Only the two pinned Banners will display. If the pinned banners have a fixed number of impressions, once those impressions are used up, the pinned banners will no longer display, and the non-pinned banners will begin displaying automatically.
- Language. Item language.
- Version Note. Optional field to identify this version of the item in the item's Version History window.
Details Tab
- Name. The name of the Banner. This is the name that will display in the Name column of the Banner Manager.
- Alias. The internal name of the item, also used in the URL when SEF is activated. Normally, you can leave this blank and Joomla! will fill in a default value. The default value is the Title or Name in lower case and with dashes instead of spaces. You may enter the Alias manually. The Alias should consist of lowercase letters and hyphens (-). No blank spaces or underscores are allowed. Non-Latin characters can be allowed in the alias if you set the Unicode Aliases option to Yes in Global Configuration. If this option is set to No and the title includes non-Latin characters, the Alias will default to the current date and time (for example "2012-12-31-17-54-38").
- Type. The type of banner to display. Options are an image file or custom HTML code.
- Image. Image file to display for the banner. Click the Select button to browse and select the image file to use. Use the Media Manager to upload Banner image files to your site. Images for Banners have to be in the /images/banners/ directory.
- Width. The fixed width to resize the banner image to. Leave this blank if you want to use the actual width of the banner image file.
- Height. The fixed height to resize the banner image to. Leave this blank if you want to use the actual height of the banner image file.
- Alt Text. Alternative text used for visitors without access to images.
- Custom. Select Custom if you want to enter a custom code for your banner.
- Custom Code. Use {CLICKURL} and {NAME} to merge 'Click URL' and 'Name' values respectively into your custom code. For example: .
Another option is to enter an HTML custom code. For example:

- Custom Code. Use {CLICKURL} and {NAME} to merge 'Click URL' and 'Name' values respectively into your custom code. For example: .
- Image. Image file to display for the banner. Click the Select button to browse and select the image file to use. Use the Media Manager to upload Banner image files to your site. Images for Banners have to be in the /images/banners/ directory.
- Click URL. The URL to navigate to when the User clicks on the Banner.
- Description. Enter a description for the Banner.
Banner's Details Tab
- Max. Impressions. The number of Impressions purchased for this Banner. Impressions are the number of times a Banner will be displayed on a page. Check the 'Unlimited' checkbox if an unlimited number of Impressions is allowed.
- Total Impressions. The number of times this Banner has been displayed on a web page to a user. No entry is allowed. You can reset this number to 0 by pressing the 'Reset impressions' button.
- Total Clicks. The number of times this Banner has been clicked. No entry is allowed. You can reset this number to 0 by pressing the 'Reset clicks' button.
- Client. The Client for this Banner. Clients are entered using the Banner Client Manager.
- Select one from the drop-down list box of existing Clients.
- Purchase Type: The purchase type of the banner. This is used to indicate how the banner client purchased the display time for the banner.
- The following options are: (-Use Client Default-, Unlimited, Yearly, Monthly, Weekly, Daily).
- Track Impressions. Whether or not to track the number of times the banner is displayed to web site visitors.
- Track Clicks. Whether or not to track the number of times the banner is clicked by web site visitors.
Publishing Tab
- Start Publishing. Date the Banner will publish and be available for website.
- Enter the date (time optional) in format year-month-date hrs:min:sec as '2013-01-07 14:10:00' or alternatively, use the modal 'pop up' window and select a date from the calendar.
- Finish Publishing. Date the Banner will stop being published and will no longer be available for website.
- Enter the date (time optional) in format year-month-date hrs:min:sec as '2013-01-07 14:10:00' or alternatively, use the modal 'pop up' window and select a date from the calendar.
- Created Date. Date the item (Article, Category, Weblink, etc.) was created.
- Created By. Name of the Joomla! User who created this item. This will default to the currently logged-in user. If you want to change this to a different user, click the Select User button to select a different user.
- Created by Alias. This optional field allows you to enter in an alias for this Author for this Article. This allows you to display a different Author name for this Article.
- Modified Date: (Informative only) Date of last modification.
- Modified By: (Informative only) Username who performed the last modification.
- Revision. (Informative only) Number of revisions to this item.
- Meta Keywords: Optional entry for keywords. Must be entered separated by commas (for example, "cats, dogs, pets") and may be entered in upper or lower case. (For example, "CATS" will match "cats" or "Cats"). Keywords can be used in several ways:
- To help Search Engines and other systems classify the content of the Article.
- In combination with Banner tags, to display specific Banners based on the Article content. For example, say you have one Banner with an ad for dog products and another Banner for cat products. You can have your dog Banner display when a User is viewing a dog-related Article and your cat Banner display for a cat-related Article. To do this, you would:
- Add the keywords 'dog' and 'cat' to the appropriate Articles.
- Add the Tags 'dog' and 'cat' to the appropriate Banners in the Banner Manager New/Edit screen.
- Set the Banner module Parameter 'Search By Tags' to 'Yes' in the Banner Module Edit screen.
- For articles only, in combination with the Related Articles module, to display Articles that share at least one keyword in common. For example, if the current Article displayed has the keywords "cats, dogs, monkeys", any other Articles with at least one of these keywords will show in the Related Articles module.
- Use Own Prefix. Whether or not to use the banner's prefix or that of the client. Select No if you want to use the prefix of the banner client.
- Meta Keyword Prefix: When matching meta keywords, only search for meta keywords with these optional prefixes. This improves performance.
At the top you will see the toolbar:
The functions are:
- Save. Saves the banner and stays in the current screen.
- Save & Close. Saves the banner and closes the current screen.
- Save & New. Saves the banner and keeps the editing screen open and ready to create another banner.
- Save as Copy. Saves your changes to a copy of the current banner. Does not affect the current banner. This toolbar icon is not shown if you are creating a new banner.
- Versions: Opens the Item Version History window to show any prior versions of this item. This allows you to view older versions of this item and, if desired, restore from an older version. See Version History for more information.
- Close. Closes the current screen and returns to the previous screen without saving any modifications you may have made.
- Help. Opens this help screen.
Quick Tips
- Banners are placed on specific pages by adding Modules of type 'Banners' using the Module Manager.
- If you have a series of Banners that you would like to display on one or more pages in random order:
- Create the Banners you wish to include, making sure they have the same Client and Category.
- Create a Banner Module for this Client and Category, and in the Menu Assignment pick the Menu Selections for the module to display on.
- In the Banner Module, set the 'Randomise' value to 'Sticky, Randomise'.
- With these settings, the different Banners for that Client and Category will display on the selected pages in random order.
Related Information
More Component Banner Help:
|Related Help Screens
|Components Banners Banners
|Used to view a list of existing Banners, edit current and create new Banners. There must be at least one Banner Client and Banner Category before a Banner can be created.
|Components Banner Manager Options
|Global options (configuration) for Banner Clients.
|Components Banners Categories
|Used to view a list of existing Banner Categories, edit current and create new Banner Categories. Note that Banner Categories are separate from other Categories, such as for Articles, Contacts, News Feeds, and Web Links. There must be at least one Banner Client and Banner Category before a Banner can be created.
|Components Banners Categories Edit
|This is where you can add a new Banner Category or edit an existing one. Note that you need to create at least one Banner Category before you can create a Banner. Also, Banner Categories are separate from other types of Categories, such as those for Articles, Contacts, and News Feeds.
|Components Banners Clients
|The Banner Client Manager is where you can edit existing Banner Clients or create new ones. Note that you must have at least one Banner Client and one Banner Category defined before you can add your first Banner.
|Components Banners Clients Edit
|This is where you add a new Banner Client or edit an existing one. Note that you need to create at least one Banner Client before you can create a Banner.
|Components Banners Tracks
|Used to view a list of existing Banner Tracking information.
To place Banners on Pages:
|Related Help Screens
|Extensions Module Manager Banners
|The Banner Module displays the active Banners from the Component.


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The Secretary of the Interior is authorized to make a reasonable allowance for office rent for each consolidated land office; and when satisfied of the necessity therefor, to approve the employment of one or more clerks, at a reasonable per diem compensation, for such time as such clerical force is absolutely required to keep up the current public business, which clerical force shall be paid out of the surplus fees authorized to be charged by section 84 [1] of this title, if any, and if no surplus exists, then out of the appropriation for incidental expenses of district land offices; but no clerk shall be so paid unless his employment has been first sanctioned by the Secretary of the Interior.
43 U.S. Code § 129. Office rent and clerk hire for consolidated land offices
(R.S. § 2255; 1946 Reorg. Plan No. 3, § 403, eff. July 16, 1946, 11 F.R. 7876, 60 Stat. 1100.)
References in Text
Section 84 of this title, referred to in text, was repealed by Pub. L. 86–649, title II, § 202(b), July 14, 1960, 74 Stat. 507. See section 1734 of this title.
R.S. § 2255 derived from act Feb. 18, 1861, ch. 38, § 2, 12 Stat. 131.
Transfer of Functions
For transfer of functions of other officers, employees, and agencies of Department of the Interior, with certain exceptions, to Secretary of the Interior, with power to delegate, see Reorg. Plan No. 3 of 1950, §§ 1, 2, eff. May 24, 1950, 15 F.R. 3174, 64 Stat. 1262, set out under section 1451 of this title.
Words "by the register" following "to approve the employment" omitted on authority of section 403 of Reorg. Plan No. 3 of 1946. See note set out under section 1 of this title.
[1] See References in Text note below.


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The DFSA expects regulated DIFC participants to evidence a strong compliance culture, and to recognise that it is in the interests of the financial services industry for them to meet or exceed the required standards. When these standards are not met, enforcement action may become necessary.
The DFSA is empowered to conduct investigations into suspected contraventions of the legislation it administers, and may exercise its powers to conduct inspections, compulsorily obtain books and records, or require individuals to participate in interviews under oath or affirmation. The DFSA refers any conduct which could constitute a breach of criminal law to the relevant local, Federal or international authority.
In general, the DFSA uses its enforcement powers only to the extent that is necessary to achieve its objectives, and in a way that ensures the legitimate activities of participants in the DIFC continue freely.
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Different types of cookies do different things. Our cookie makes sure that when you revisit the DFSA's webpage, you will see it in the language you selected on your earlier visit.
We take your use of the DFSA's website to mean that you consent to having these cookies on your device.
© 2020 DFSA refers to the Dubai Financial Services Authority, a body established under Dubai law as the independent regulator of financial services and related activities for the DIFC.


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If you're planning on being one of the 1 million centenarians projected to be living in the U.S. in 2050, you might want to take your lifestyle cues from Stamatis Moraitis, a Greek veteran of World War II.
Diagnosed with lung cancer while living in the U.S. in the 1960s, Moraitis forewent chemotherapy and drugs and, still more, the entire Western diet and lifestyle and moved to the Greek island of Ikaria, his birthplace.
Living the simple life of the Ikarians, who reach the age of 90 at two-and-a-half times the rate of Americans, Moraitis lived another 45 years cancer-free — outliving his doctors, who gave him just nine months to live.
A new report titled "The Four Keys to Longevity" produced by BMO Wealth Institute for clients of BMO Harris Financial Advisors cites a study of these long-living Ikarians, combined with its own survey of 1,000 Americans on aging, to present a view of what might constitute successful longevity.
The first of those keys, what BMO calls the "master key," is the body. Observing that "stress factors such as daily schedules don't exist on Ikaria" and that "vigorous activities [are] never considered exercise," the BMO report finds that most Americans (89 percent) have taken steps to help them live longer.
The most common initiative is healthy eating (53 percent), though Americans may have a way to go before reaching the Ikarian diet of "fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices and local honey, which are all products of weekly harvests that every citizen contributes to and benefits from."
The second key, which BMO dubs "the fundamental key," is the mind. BMO's survey found that "the loss of mental ability was the biggest concern that respondents had about living to 100 and beyond."
The report cited research that aerobic exercise and not smoking were related to cognitive function and stressed the importance of maintaining an active mind through memory, reasoning and speed-of-processing training, as well as engagement in social networks through work or volunteer activities.
The third key, dubbed "the key to enjoying life" in the BMO report, is social. Citing research that found "retirement to be associated with a significant increase in clinical depression and a decline in self-assessed health," the report looked at social connectedness as a means to avoiding these risks.
Survey respondents expressed a number activities they desired in retirement to achieve this aim, with spending more time on hobbies leading the pack (62 percent), followed by taking on a part-time job (25 percent).
The BMO report cited as a demonstration of the link between work and longevity the example of the Italian wine-growing region of Chianti:
"While the elders may leave the more taxing jobs to the youngsters, they never fully retire. The older members of the family continue to walk the rows of vines to make sure the grapes are in good condition and participate in tastings to ensure the quality of the wine, and they remain involved in important business decisions. Many locals claim it's their ongoing daily involvement that is responsible for their exceptionally long and healthy lives."
While social connections foster health and happiness, the report cites University of Chicago research indicating that its absence is related to "increases in stress, hardening of the arteries and inflammation in the body" as well as diminution of "the brain's executive function, learning and memory."
Survey respondents cited a number social activities they expect during retirement, led by spending their time with family (57 percent). Asked what the most important factors for an ideal retirement lifestyle, staying in contact with family again was the most cited (36 percent), followed by financial security (23 percent).
And indeed, financial security is the report's fourth key to longevity, what it calls the "key to success." The report noted that women valued this lifestyle factor more than men (27 percent vs. 19 percent), suggesting that women's higher relative longevity might be the reason.
Other variables in the importance placed on finances are age and wealth. Those who have higher levels of either are more concerned about financial security, the report finds.
Survey respondents expected to spend, on average, $5,822 a year on out-of-pocket health costs — a figure the report says squares with an independent study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). Crunching the numbers based on Medicare reimbursement rates and expected out-of-pocket costs, EBRI estimates that a 65-year-old couple would need $283,000 to fund 25 years worth of future health care expenses (not including long-term care).
The BMO report stresses the value of a financial advisor in assuring this fourth component of well-being in old age and says only a minority of Americans have availed themselves of the opportunity (with just one-third of pre-retirees having a retirement plan.)
The survey found that respondents with greater confidence in their future financial security were more likely to have a financial plan (27 percent of them did) versus those lacking that confidence, just 8% of whom have a plan.
The report concludes that "the need for all of us to have a better overall plan when it comes to the four key components of longevity" are among the "lessons to learn from the resiliency found in the people of Ikaria."


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I can't even approach the writing of this article without the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" leaping from synapse to synapse—its infectious, rhythmic charm has become embedded in my gray matter, and to tell the truth, I have no idea when it took up residence there. Needless to say, as the holidays approach, the pull of the Nutcracker has me in its grip: the dreamscape of mice and toy soldiers fighting, shimmering snowflakes, twinkling Christmas trees—they all collide to form a young girl's adventure on Christmas Eve.
For the last 16 years, the Staller Center at Stony Brook has been transformed by the Seiskaya Ballet into a mystical and magical wonderland for one of the most heralded productions of Nutcracker on Long Island. The production was designed specifically for Staller, according to Dimitri Papadakos, the administrative director of the ballet. "We are the only organization that draws all the dancers and participants from its own organization thus providing continuity of style among the corps de ballet. Unquestionably, the sets, drops and costumes set a new standard," he said, adding, "Valia Seiskaya's choreography is unique with a lively pace throughout the production."
Tickets are on sale now at the Staller Center Box Office at 631-632-ARTS and at www.nutcrackerballet.com. Performances are Friday, December 16 at 7 p.m., Saturday, December 17 at both 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., Sunday, December 18 at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m., and Monday, December 19 at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $40 for adults, $34 children and seniors and $30 for groups of 20 or more.


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The latest commentary from famed money manager Bob Rodriguez is far from blue skies and sunshine, taking specific, and at times personal, aim at Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.
"My worst fear is that fiscal gridlock continues, coupled with the policies of this activist Fed chairman," Rodriguez, FPA Capital's managing partner and CEO, wrote on Thursday in response to the central bank's announcement that it would initiate a third round of quantitative easing. "Today's Fed actions add to my anxieties. 'All in' may be a good strategy for poker but not for this economy."
After a brief history of economic stimulus since 2009 and a discussion of market reaction late last week to the Fed's latest announcement, Rodriguez bluntly stated the challenges he sees for the economy.
"The Fed chairman recently expressed the opinion that he does not view unemployment as structural. However, he is using this 'All In' approach to shock the economic system. This reflects something other than normal times. He believes if the Fed gets interest rates low enough for a sufficiently long period, the recovery will finally gain traction. This is pure speculation. I view this approach as highly dangerous, misdirected and untested."
Rodriquez noted that Bernanke is held in high esteem by the consensus, but that, "As usual, I am not with this consensus."
"He refuses to admit the Fed made monetary policy errors that helped create the housing bubble," he wrote. "He maintains it was a worldwide savings glut that caused it and not the Fed. In fact, for both 2005 and 2006 he held the view that there was no housing bubble—a major miss.
"In contrast, at FPA we were of the opposite opinion and took action in the portfolios to hopefully protect capital before the bubble burst. The only retraction Bernanke has made was in reference to his May 2007 comment that he thought the subprime mortgage mess would be contained. I publicly expressed the opposite view and said that subprime was the canary in the credit coal mine."
Turning to investment managers and their non-reaction to the threat he feels Fed action poses, Rodriguez then said they "do not appear particularly concerned with, [or] worried about, the finer nuances of an academic debate between two different schools of economic thought. It is all about not underperforming the market or a benchmark, so don't fight the Fed. Unfortunately, a strategy of following the Fed's urging to take on greater risk will likely end in heartbreak.
"Should the stock market continue its upward march, both our clients and FPA's portfolio managers will be tested. This is a time for discipline. Given that economic growth is languid at best and is likely slowing, the divergence between the stock market and economic reality cannot be sustained. One or the other has to adjust." The Fed's actions today are but another attempt to "reshape the yield curve," he wrote.
"Some would say manipulate. The end goal is to improve housing demand via lower interest rates and spur capital spending and risk taking. The shape of the yield curve will be an important indicator of things to come. If the Fed is successful in bending the curve downward with lower long-term rates, this will place extraordinary pressures on fixed-income investors and financial organizations. It will enhance the 'risk trade,' and I believe it will result in creating financial cancers because capital is or will likely be deployed in an unbalanced risk fashion, resulting in a duration or credit risk mismatch. Call it a bubble of another sort that will result in unintended consequences.
Should the yield curve steepen, with 10-year bond yields moving above 2% while short-term rates are anchored near zero, it would imply that a longer term inflation fear is re-entering the market. Inflation fears are not just driven by improved economic expectations. The Fed believes it can manage this risk. It also believes it can manage the unwinding of its massive QE portfolio without market disruption. This is opinion and not fact based. Intelligent people can disagree about this view."
Getting to the heart of the matter, Rodriquez concluded by writing that it's time for Bernanke to go.
"Future outcomes will also be materially affected by whether Chairman Bernanke remains in office next year, the composition of the new congress and who will be president. I believe that Chairman Bernanke should be replaced with a new far less monetary-policy-intrusive chairman. The composition of the Congress and who the next president is will likely shape how or if a fiscal Grand Bargain can be achieved. Chairman Bernanke has consistently argued that any expenditure cuts should do no harm to the nascent recovery. As is typical in Washington, postpone the tough decisions. 2013 is a critical moment in time. If a material and timely fiscal restructuring does not take place by next September, I fear and believe that it will not occur before 2017."


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Sadly 'M' iCantSay has not received any gifts yet
Posted on January 1, 2011 at 10:36pm 2 Comments 0 Likes
I just finished watching a show on the Discovery Science channel, the show was about the mission in 2009 to fix the Hubble telescope and to replace the cameras on it, the show was called "Mission critical: Hubble" if any of you wanted to check it out.
The show began and the shuttle launched. The astronauts had a camera so they can document of course, but the man who was the most in front of this camera had a floating cross necklace, which took my attention and made me think…Continue
Posted on December 18, 2010 at 2:32pm 5 Comments 0 Likes
Muslims believe that when an eclipse happens, it means that allah is angry, furious!
They believe that because allah told them in his book! So they go and pray "the eclipse prayer" in mosques!
Does that mean that by predicting the lunar eclipse this tuesday (december 21 2010), humans are actually predicting god's "mood" on that day?
Posted on December 16, 2010 at 7:10pm 25 Comments 0 Likes
Personally, I can't tell people that I'm an Atheist -except you guys on TA- so no one has asked me this before, but I always watch and read debates and discussions between Atheists and theists. And I see that this question "What if you die, then you find out that there is a god? What would you tell him?" is always asked.
In Islam specially -and I think other Abrahamic religions- they say that people have free will but they contradict that by saying god writes everything each…Continue
Posted on December 15, 2010 at 7:35pm 2 Comments 0 Likes
Islam is instinctual, there is a hadith that says a newborn is born instinctually, unless his parents raise him as a jew, christian or a majoosi(it's an arabic word for people who worship fire).
So if you let a baby grow up with no teaching of any religion, he/she will become a muslim eventually.
But then when I was just 5-7 years old & I was told that god(allah) created everything, why did the first thing that came to my mind was "who created god?" ? Wasn't…Continue
Hey, I'm fine thanks for asking.
Being an Ex-Muslim, I find nothing more pleasurable than seeing an atheist from Saudi Arab. It's a blessing. :-) Nice to see you around.
Okay. I understand better now. :-)
Judging by your profile and status comments, you are subject to Shariah law. Right?
As long as you remain anonymous, I think you should be safe. Or are you afraid the authorities can discover who you are?
Welcome to TA!


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I've received so many emails with this subject and these images that I had to translate them (they were originally in Spanish) and create a post. Bic pens have always been the best! I guess no explanation is needed…
Is a completely SFW post and in my opinion a very good way to explain to your daughters/sons the different types of sex that exist.
In how many of the cases above have you been part of?
Yes, we forgot one!
Thanks John Mercer


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For AL and Rivera, All-Star Game pitch-perfect
- Mariano Rivera had another stellar outing in his final All-Star outing as the AL beat the NL 3-0
- Rivera pitched the eighth inning and got a standing ovation from both players and fans
- Dominant pitching highlighted the game%2C which was short on offense from both teams
NEW YORK — It might have been Mariano Rivera's emotional going-away party, but after getting a first-hand glimpse of the dismal state of offense at Tuesday's All-Star Game, he may want to delay those retirement plans.
The American League suffocated the National League's offense in their 3-0 victory at Citi Field, giving up just three hits, the fewest since 2001, while ending its three-year losing streak, giving the AL home-field advantage in the World Series.
"They call it the year of the K for a reason,'' Baltimore Orioles slugger Chris Davis said of the record-setting strikeout total in the first half, with 15 strikeouts Tuesday. "There's a reason for that. There's good pitching. It's good for baseball.''
As he departed Citi Field's visiting bullpen, Metallica's Enter Sandman rumbled through the stadium sound system to the delight of the crowd — and every All-Star.
"That's why I'm here," said Rivera, the last man who will ever wear Jackie Robinson's No.42 in an All-Star Game. "That's what I love to do."
He came out of the bullpen gate with his entrance song blaring on the speakers and stood on the mound alone. It was nearly a minute before anyone even came onto the field, with players from both teams standing on the dugout rail.
Yes, after four All-Star saves, he got his first hold in 11 years.
"Hey, I'm still not sold it's his last year," Boston Red Sox All-Star second baseman Dustin Pedroia said. "He's dealing."
Then again, so was every other pitcher Tuesday night, reminding everyone why the Home Run Derby is such a sensation.
It's the only time fans get to see anyone actually hit. The NL managed four baserunners the entire night, and they barely averted tying the All-Star record of fewest hits in a game.
WATCH:Matt Harvey pranks fans
"Now they get to see what we have to deal with,'' Detroit Tigers All-Star outfielder Torii Hunter said. "We've got to deal with that pitching all of the time.''
The AL's three runs will hardly be preserved on any highlight reel, but it was their biggest offensive output in four years, scoring just one run in the previous 23 innings.
The scary part for those baseball purists who like to see an occasional run, there's a good chance these same dominant pitchers will be around for quite a while. New York Mets pitcher Matt Harvey, 24, was the youngest to start and All-Star Game since Dwight Gooden in 1988, and seven All-Star pitchers were under 25.
"These guys are here for a reason,'' Minnesota Twins All-Star catcher Joe Mauer said. "It was just fun catching them. I just kept shaking numbers down there, and they kept saying yes.''
The AL pitching staff was so dominant that until Rivera's entrance in the eighth inning, the only real drama in this game occurred in the first inning when Mets starter Matt Harvey drilled Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano in the right leg. He was forced out of the game with a bruised quadriceps.
PHOTOS: 2013 MLB All-Star Game
It immediately launched a conspiracy theory on social media. Let's see, Harvey happens to be a Scott Boras client. Cano left Boras for Jay-Z. So, retribution?
Uh, no. Harvey apologized. And Cano accepted.
"Obviously, that was the last thing I wanted to do,'' Harvey said, "go out there and possibly injure somebody. Obviously, I apologized and made sure that he was ok. It definitely was not intentional.''
Said Cano: "I know he doesn't want to hurt anybody. It's just part of the game. Luckily it hit the quad. If it had been something where I couldn't walk, then I would have been worried. Thankfully I was able to walk.''
And, yes, throbbing leg and all, Cano still hung around to the end of the game, wanting to see his teammate one last time, old No. 42.
"For us, to see him out there,'' AL starting pitcher Max Scherzer said, "we all had chills down our back. We got to watch the greatest closer of all time pitching his last All-Star Game.
"You know you're never going to see it again.''


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A two year old girl somehow crawled into one of those claw machines you often see in arcades—you know, with stuffed toys which you try and pick up with a claw—and had to be rescued by the fire-department.
Rescuing a girl from a toy machine is probably one of the stranger emergency calls made to Robinson Township's fire department in Pennsylvania, but Moon Run Fire Chief Paul Kashmer said she was "the cutest little girl," so presumably it wasn't too gruesome an effort, spending 15 minutes removing the girl from the machine.
Naturally, the girl's mother has taken to her pedestal on the various news circuits, urging shopping mall managers to haul the machines away, for fear of the same cute little catastrophe from happening again. Kashmer himself said the hole in the machine, which she crawled through, is large enough for two toddlers to squeeze inside—which would just make for an even sweeter jackpot for the winning gamer, surely. [WPXI]
Image Credit: Spookyamd


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View basket "Painted Polka Wrap Set" has been added to your basket.
Pyramid Wrap Set
Luxury ivory wrapping papers with a striking graphic design and complimenting kraft gift tags.
Sold in packs of 2 neatly folded sheets with 2 complimenting kraft 'for you' gift tags
Printed on 100gsm paper | 500 x 700mm
Proudly made in England.
SKU: KL-GS60 Categories: Gift Wrapping, Wrapping Paper, Gift Wrap Tags: MONOCHROME, GIFT TAGS, GIFT WRAP, B&W