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The Salam School
This was published at the National.
Syria is my father's country, where I spent an important part of my young adulthood, where my son was born. Living there was inspiration for my first novel (though it's set mainly in London). In fact, I fell in love with the country – with its enormous cultural and historical heritage, its climatic extremes, and its warm and endlessly diverse people. Of course there were moments – for example, visiting a broken man who'd been released after 22 years imprisonment for a 'political offense' – when I felt like getting the next plane out. And before too long I did move on, because a stagnant dictatorship was no place to build a future.
Then in 2011 the revolution erupted. This instant of hope was followed by a counter-revolutionary repression of unprecedented ferocity. How to respond? For a long time I wrote and spoke to anyone who would listen on one theme: the necessity of funding and arming the Free Army – civilian volunteers and defectors from Bashaar al-Assad's military. Nobody did arm them, not seriously, and as a
result the Free Army lost influence and Islamist factions filled the gap. Assad's calculated manipulation of sectarian fears and hatreds produced a Sunni backlash. Al-Qa'ida franchises set up emirates near the Turkish border, and the West increasingly understood the Syrian drama not as a battle for freedom, but as a security issue. In illustration of this fact, I was stopped at Edinburgh airport as I started my most recent trip to the Turkish-Syrian border, in December, and questioned under the UK's Terrorism Act. "Which side do you support?" they asked me. I explained there are many sides now, but the question seemed to be either/or: either the regime or the jihad – and support for the (genocidal) regime was the answer which ticked the 'no further threat' box.
They also asked why I was going. The answer: I was lucky enough to know a group of committed and talented Syrian-Americans, including Chicago-based architect and writer Lina Sergie Attar, interviewed below, founder of the Karam Foundation. Karam delivers aid and opportunity to war-struck Syrian communities, and I was on my way to participate in its Zeitouna programme.
How do you act usefully in the face of a tragedy which unfolds on an incomprehensible scale? Syrians and their friends were forced to address this question as Assad's genocidal repression transformed the popular revolution into a civil war, and as an unthinkable third of the population were made refugees. Every city except two has crumbled in whole or in part under bombardment. Ancient mosques and churches have been reduced to dust. The country's multicultural social fabric appeared to dissolve.
Syrians inside the country were propelled into actions they would have formerly found inconceivable: selling a car to buy a Kalashnikov, leaving a teaching job to join a militia, abandoning a proud home for a tent by a border fence. Some have discovered themselves as beasts driven by fear or prejudice: torturing children in dungeons, raping women at checkpoints, slitting old men's throats, and firing artillery, scud missiles and sarin gas at their neighbours. Many others have revealed unsuspected reserves of compassion, courage and creativity. I've met some of these extraordinary ordinary people. A man, for instance, whose immediate family was annihilated in bombing, who now publishes newspapers for adults and children because he believes the right to self-expression is the only important thing left. A man who stays on after his family fled to run a free bakery without which many would starve. A nurse who serves (unpaid of course) in field hospitals, the blood never dry on his hands, who hasn't dared cross a checkpoint to visit his mother in over a year.
"It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little," wrote 19th Century clergyman Sydney Smith. "Do what you can." Hazar Mahayni is a Syrian-Canadian pharmacist, a widow in late middle age bursting with energy and good cheer. In October 2012 she also became the organising intelligence behind the Salam School for refugees in Reyhanli, on the Turkish side of the border. This school was the site for December's Zeitouna activities.
The school is a rented one-storey villa, with new walls to make more classrooms, a small olive grove, and even a menagerie containing rabbits, hens and two goats. It serves 1200 children who crowd the classes in three three-hour shifts, the youngest first. The demographic stretches from the Damascene bourgeoisie to the poor peasantry, but most are from the rural north, the governorates of Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo.
There are over 700,000 refugees in Turkey, some in camps, others living in towns and cities. Turkish prime minister Erdogan's government has been much more generous than others in the region, allowing Syrians to set up schools, businesses and charities. In Reyhanli I visited a new orphanage and the Watan wool workshop, which sells knitwear produced by refugee women. Just as they are inside the country, Syrians are organising themselves for survival. In the Salam School, a man interrupted my classes twice to ask, first, which children had no fathers or whose fathers had no work, and second, which children had no gloves.
The last is a necessary question because the Levantine winter is bitterly cold – a dry, bone-deep, biting sort of cold. A winter storm struck while I was there, and children froze to death in the snow-covered camps on the Syrian side. The children in Reyhanli are slightly better off. Depending on their resources, they live in rented houses, rooms, shops or warehouses, often separated from the next family by only a curtain. But most refugees have no school to attend. Very young and ragged children in open-toed sandals beg at the traffic lights.
The Salam School's children are as noisy, as full of tears and laughter, as children anywhere, but many are traumatised or simply lacking care. In one class, a heavy boy called Abdullah got into three fist fights in the first five minutes. I put him outside for a while, then brought him back and focussed some attention on his work. This was enough to make him smile and cooperate.
The school has a warm, humane, and Islamic atmosphere. I witnessed one instance of Muslim obsessive-compulsive disorder, when a small girl leapt to show a teacher a picture she'd drawn of Cinderella. "I'm glad to see you've given her a long skirt," the teacher said in a kindly tone. "But you should have put a scarf on her head too." Otherwise the environment was openminded, tolerant and cheerful. One drawback is that everyone (as far as I could see) is a Sunni Muslim – nothing unusual for the rural areas, but city kids used to live in more mixed neighbourhoods. And this isn't the school's fault, but the demographics of Assad's expulsion.
Our days began with revolutionary chants ("The revolutionary generation welcomes you!") and Quranic recitations. The teachers teach what they can of the Syrian curriculum, stripped of its hagiography of Assad pere and fils and of the propagandistic 'Nationalism' subject. Corporal punishment (standard in the old education system) is forbidden, but old habits die hard and it still sometimes occurs. Management and teachers are refreshingly open and honest about these challenges.
Hazar says it's been difficult to involve the teachers – trained to follow orders in Assad's system – in collective decision making, but that now they're making headway. She sees the development of cooperative self-organisation as a revolutionary cultural process every bit as necessary as winning the physical battles.
The staff includes men who have participated in the actual warfare, like Ustaz Ahmad from Banyas, the coastal city where Assad's shabeeha militia committed throat-slitting massacres. Ahmad slipped away because he was wanted at checkpoints ("They're still looking for me," he laughed. "They think I'm still there…") and joined the Free Army on Jebel al-Akrad. His group ran out of ammunition and then out of food, so he came to Turkey twenty days before I met him.
Or there was the teacher whose husband was once an officer in the national army. He defected because he didn't want to murder his neighbours. He was captured. Seven months later he died under torture. His body was thrown in a mass grave.
Given that the teachers themselves are traumatised and have lost almost everything, it's remarkable that so many can smile – more than in an average British school. A teacher called Abdul-Jabbar wins the prize for the most infectious and enchanted smile, something like a flock of birds raising the spirits of all around.
I was in the school for a week as part of the Karam Foundation's Zeitouna project. Six months ago a five-member core delivered workshops in the tented classrooms of Atmeh camp, just inside Syria. This time our numbers were up to 40 volunteers, and included obvious foreigners, and this time too al-Qa'ida franchises are kidnapping people in the border areas, so Karam decided for our safety we should work on the Turkish side. A series of fortuitous circumstances established a relationship with the Salaam School.
Max Frieder's Artolution organised large-scale canvas painting (I saw it done but still couldn't understand how the hands of hundreds of babbling children created pictures that made coherent sense) while the AptART team involved the children in designing and painting a mural for the school wall. The result was impressive, something every child will remember in future years – an uplifted face on a background of calligraphed phrases (In the name of God the Compassionate the Merciful, Cooperating for a Better Future, Love, Hope, Dignity…), upraised hands, grinning faces, and the towers and minarets of a cityscape.
There were workshops in football, calligraphy, digital photography, trust games and journal writing. Game-inventor Rory O'Connor workshopped his wonderful Story Cubes, and left hundreds of these imaginative tools behind to liven Reyhanli's cold nights. The dental hygiene workshop distributed toothbrushes, while the dental team (all Syrian-Americans) made themselves unpopular by extracting over a hundred teeth daily.
Mine was a storytelling workshop based on the notion that a story needs six things: hero, assistant, problem, secondary obstruction, solution, and conclusion. Among the children's chosen protagonists were Robin Hood, Batman, my brother the martyr, my father the martyr, and (most often) Sponge Bob. Among the problems to be solved were a dinosaur eating people, a car hitting a pedestrian, my house being shelled, and my cousin stuck in prison.
The activity gave them a way to exercise their fantasy and also to process their real-life stories. And every child has one. When you ask why they came to Turkey, they answer "because Bashaar kept on shelling us," and then go into specifics. Because we haven't experienced it, we must imagine here what 'shelling' means – not a word in a news story or an element of fantasy-drama but the actual ceiling coming in, a home transformed suddenly into sky cracks and screams. This is what these small children are so matter of fact about, though their eyes flicker and adjust as they speak.
There were stories everywhere I turned. You don't need a fixer to find victims on the Turkish border, you just ask any man or woman on the street. Even to the last moment, to the cab driver who took me from my friend's place in Antakya to the airport. Abu Ali was from Lattakia and he happened to know my family. He and his 15-year-old son were arrested together. "They beat my son until he was nearly dead. They beat me until I wished I were dead." In a cell with 50 others and a hole in the floor as a toilet, which they had to use in front of each other, and nobody was able to wash in the two months Abu Ali was there. Two months of beatings, insults, humiliation, and near starvation. Then father and son were released, for which he thanks God profusely, because "so many die in their prisons."
This horror has displaced two million outside the country, almost six million inside, and made Syrians the boat people of the decade. While we were there one of our Syrian-American dentists learnt that his nephew had died when the boat he'd hoped would smuggle him to Europe capsized in the winter Mediterranean.
Our work at the Salam School was one drop in a red ocean of suffering which will expand so long as the regime and its backers are permitted to continue their scorched earth policy. Five thousand more refugees leave Syria every day. It puts me in mind of a less optimistic quote, from Henry Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
Interview with Lina Sergie Attar
Tell me about the Karam Foundation.
Karam is a non-profit organization founded in 2007. Karam means generosity, and its mission is to spread generosity across the world. Although most directors are Syrian-American, our work was first focused on international aid projects. After 2011, we focussed on Syria's humanitarian crisis. Karam raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid. In 2013, Karam launched a new initiative called Zeitouna.
So what does Zeitouna do?
Zeitouna is a mentorship program for displaced Syrian children. Artist Kinda Hibrawi and I decided to bring them creative mentors to instill a sense of hope. Millions of children have been displaced in the last two and a half years. They have lost everything: their homes, their friends, their communities, even their innocence. Some of them have been displaced for over a year and a half. The lucky ones attend overcrowded, understaffed schools. This is the environment that Zeitouna works within.
Last year we organized two missions: in the summer, in the Atmeh camp in Syria, and in the winter, the Salam School. We also raised enough funds to build a playground and soccer field in Atmeh, install heating in the Salam School, and send thousands of winterization packages into Syria.
What does Zeitouna mean to the children?
The experience has a profound effect on both children and mentors. I met girls who love science and math and want to become doctors and engineers. It's important to encourage these girls to stay in school and pursue their dreams despite the hardships. We create powerful bonds with the children. They are the hopes of the future and the ones who will eventually return and rebuild Syria as they desire.
What's next?
We are planning Zeitouna Summer 2014. Our mission is to reach as many as possible while building lasting bonds with those we have already worked with.


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Geary, John White
Geary, John White gēr´ē [key], 1819–73, American politician and Union general in the Civil War, b. Mt. Pleasant, Pa. In San Francisco from 1849 to 1852, Geary was the first U.S. postmaster, the last alcalde, and the first mayor. President Franklin Pierce appointed him governor of
bleedingKansas in July, 1856. His energy and firmness brought peace to the territory for the first time in many months, but the meeting of the determined proslavery legislature (Jan., 1857) and the discovery that little antislavery support could be expected from the incoming President James Buchanan led Geary to resign (March). In the Civil War, Geary was made a brigadier general of volunteers in Apr., 1862. He was wounded at Cedar Mt. (1862), commanded a division of the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1863), distinguished himself under Joseph Hooker in the Chattanooga campaign (1864), and fought in W. T. Sherman's campaigns (1864–65). He was made major general of volunteers in Jan., 1865. Geary was elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1866 and held that office until shortly before his death.
See biography by H. M. Tinkcom (1940); J. H. Gihon, Geary and Kansas (1971).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: U.S. History: Biographies

subset: commoncrawl


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Twitter has set its IPO price at $26 per share, a dollar above the top end of the price range it predicted earlier this week.
The company said Wednesday that it plans to sell 70 million shares to the public starting Thursday. Underwriters have the option to sell an additional 10.5 million shares during the first 30 days.
With the price announced, all eyes will be on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning to gauge investor reaction and demand for the stock, which will trade under the symbol TWTR.
Pre-IPO demand for the shares is reported to be several times the number of shares available.
The final IPO price is above the $23-to-$25 range anticipated by Twitter on Monday. That range had already been raised from between $17 and $20 per share because of demand.
By raising the price to meet demand, and perhaps hype, the company is walking a fine line between IPO success and failure.
Other tech darlings' IPOs
The May 2012 debut of Facebook, which was the last major public offering of a social networking company, resulted in a string of investor lawsuits sparked by a fast slide in the company's share price on opening day.
The debuts of other popular social media companies, including Groupon and Zynga, were also clouded by a gradual drop in the share price over the following months.
Twitter continues to take in and lose larger amounts of money each quarter. Revenue from July to September was $169 million, just over double that achieved during the same period a year earlier and a quarterly record for the company. But Twitter racked up a net loss of $64 million in the three-month period, almost as much as it lost in the previous six months combined.
Mobile success
Twitter is seeing success in mobile. Sixty-five percent of the company's ad revenue comes from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, Twitter revealed in its IPO documents.
That's leaps and bounds ahead of Facebook, which had almost no mobile ad revenue when it went public.
The exodus of consumers from their desktop PCs to mobile devices is a strong trend right now, but making money from ads on a smaller screen is seen as a challenge for many Internet companies.
To succeed as a public company, Twitter needs to demonstrate to investors that it can continue to grow its revenue on both mobile devices and desktops, as well as its user base in the U.S. and overseas.
More than 75 percent of Twitter's 218 million monthly active users reside outside the U.S., the company revealed in its initial documents. International revenue, however, constituted only 25 percent of the company's total sales for the three months ended June 30, 2013. That's a big gap Twitter needs to fill.


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For the past several posts I've been talking about "how to not die" in honor of the ten-year anniversary of my rock climbing accident. Part five is almost done. Today, however, I want to take a brief break from my story to share some breaking news:
I just got rejected. Again.
Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know that, back in December, I applied for graduate school at Berkeley. I thought getting my masters in journalism would be a step towards something I desperately want—which is, of course, to write.
I looked at many programs. There were thoughts of MFAs in Creative Nonfiction (an elusive degree that doesn't exist in many locations), MAs in International Affairs (I do want to go abroad again), and, what seemed most practical, journalism. Continue reading


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Polish qualifier Janowicz stuns Murray to reach Paris Masters quarters; Berdych, Simon advance
PARIS – Andy Murray wasted a match point against a qualifier ranked 69th and quickly lost his composure.
Not exactly a recipe for victory.
Jerzy Janowicz of Poland rallied to stun the U.S Open and Olympic champion 5-7, 7-6 (4), 6-2 Thursday in the third round of the Paris Masters.
A day after second-seeded Novak Djokovic lost to big-serving American Sam Querrey in the second round — his worst result since March 2010 — the third-seeded Murray lost to a player who opened the year taking part in Futures tournaments and is still struggling to find sponsorship back home.
"This was the most unbelievable day in my life. I beat Olympic champion, U.S. Open champion. Unbelievable feeling for me," Janowicz said. "Still, I have feeling like in few minutes I'm going to wake up and it's gonna be everything gone.
"I don't know actually what I supposed to say because it's really hard to describe this feeling," added Janowicz, who also beat Philipp Kohlschreiber and 13th-seeded Marin Cilic in the first and second rounds. "It's not easy for me to talk about this week, because I had really tough moments in my life. This is like really, like a movie for me."
Murray had not lost to a player ranked so low since Guillermo Garcia-Lopez — then ranked 92nd — beat him in the second round at the BNP Paribas Open in March.
Janowicz said his parents, who were professional volleyball players, sold shops and apartments they owned to help his career take off.
"I'm from Poland and I know it's not easy to become professional tennis player," Janowicz said. "Actually, I have problem with sponsors. I was fighting my whole life with money, so this week is really important for me to get some sponsors, to get some help."
Murray served for the match at 5-4 in the second set, but totally lost his composure and the ensuing tiebreaker as Janowicz evened the match.
"I needed to focus well on my serve. I did that for the most part, and then when I served for the match I didn't play a particularly good game," Murray said. "He probably gained some confidence from that and played a good tiebreak, played aggressive. He hits a very flat ball, so when he's hitting it well it comes through the court a lot."
It was also the third straight match Murray has failed to convert match points. He squandered two against Milos Raonic in the Japan Open semifinals and five against Djokovic in the Shanghai Masters final.
"I have to make sure I tighten that up next week (at the World Tour Finals in London) if I get that opportunity," Murray said. "Make sure I don't let it happen at the 02 (Arena)."
With Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal not playing in Paris, none of the Big Four are left. However, fourth-seeded David Ferrer, fifth-seeded Tomas Berdych, No. 6 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and No. 8 Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia reached the last eight.
Also, seventh-seeded Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina lost 6-4, 6-3 to Frenchman Michael Llodra on a day of upsets.
Janowicz had the momentum after controlling the tiebreaker and broke Murray twice in the deciding set as he raced to a 5-1 lead.
"He's maybe a little bit more unpredictable than a few of them from the back of the court," Murray said. "He tried a lot of drop shots and went for winners when he was out of position that maybe some of the others don't."
Serving for the match, Janowicz saved three break points and secured the win on his second match point with a forehand winner. He slumped to the ground and broke down in tears as he held his head in his hands.
It was only his second match against a top-10 player — the first was against Murray in the 2009 Davis Cup.
As he did back then, Murray looked to be coasting to victory at the Palais Omnisports.
Serving for the match, Murray started to get flustered and his temper got the better of him as he smacked his hand against his forehead and then muttered to himself after Janowicz saved a match point. Two unforced backhand errors from Murray then helped Janowicz break for 5-5.
"I need to make sure I'm a little bit sharper when I'm in those positions than I have been the last few weeks," Murray said.
For the first time, the tournament will feature three French players in the last eight — Tsonga, Llodra and Gilles Simon.
Tsonga beat 11th-seeded Nicolas Almagro of Spain 7-6 (4), 7-6 (3) and next plays Ferrer, who beat 16th-seeded Stanislas Wawrinka of Switzerland 6-2, 4-6, 6-2.
Tipsarevic beat ninth-seeded Juan Monaco of Argentina 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 and next plays Janowicz, while Llodra takes on Querrey, after he beat 14th-seeded Milos Raonic of Canada 6-3, 7-6 (1).
In a matchup of two big servers, Querrey had 12 aces to Raonic's 10.
Earlier, Berdych recovered from a poor first set to beat Kevin Anderson of South Africa 1-6, 6-3, 6-4 and next plays Simon, who advanced when Kei Nishikori of Japan pulled out because of a recurrence of his right ankle injury.
With so many big names out of the way, Berdych is in a strong position to add to his 2005 title and Tsonga to his 2008 success.
Thanks to their wins, Tsonga and Tipsarevic took the final two spots for the season-ending World Tour Finals in London.


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If you're presently taking the "blood thinner" medications in this news item, it may be in the best interest of your health, and life, to reconsider and stay with warfarin/coumadin.
At least with warfarin/coumadin, we have an antidote, and it has far fewer risks associated with it.
In short, it has evidence for greater safety.
Here's the long & short of it:
Deaths associated with Warfarin/Coumadin in 2011 = 72
Deaths associated with Praxaxa in 2011 = 542
There was NO OTHER MEDICINE with such a high rate of death associated with death.
Annual Cost of Medicine: Pradaxa & Xarelto = $3,000
Annual Cost of Medicine: Coumadin/Warfarin = $200
You do the math.
Wanna' be a statistic?
Insight: Top heart doctors fret over new blood thinners
By Ransdell Pierson
NEW YORK | Thu Jun 14, 2012 1:37pm EDT
(Reuters) – For millions of heart patients, a pair of new blood thinners have been heralded as the first replacements in 60 years for warfarin, a pill whose hardships and risks have deterred many from using the stroke-prevention medicine.
But growing complaints of risks and deaths tied to the new crop of drugs have made some top U.S. cardiologists hesitant to prescribe them. Some are proposing a more rigorous monitoring regimen for when they are used.
Most concerns revolve around Pradaxa, a twice daily pill from Boehringer Ingelheim that was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October 2010 to prevent strokes in patients with an irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation. It was the first new oral treatment for that use since warfarin was introduced in the 1950s.
"The good news is you now have an alternative to warfarin," said Dr. Alan Jacobson, director of anti-coagulation services at the Veterans Administration (VA) healthcare system in Loma Linda, California. "The bad news is you can kill a patient as easily with the new drug as you could with the old drug" if it is not handled properly.
"The average patient doesn't understand anything Read the rest of this entry »


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Throughout his career, Truman Capote remained one of America's most controversial and colorful authors, combining literary genius with a penchant for the glittering world of high society.
Though he wrote only a handful of books, his prose styling was impeccable, and his insight into the psychology of human desire was extraordinary. His flamboyant and well-documented lifestyle has often overshadowed his gifts as a writer, but over time Capote's work will outlive the celebrity.
Truman Capote's early career
Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote was abandoned by his mother and raised by his elderly aunts and cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. As a child he lived a solitary and lonely existence, turning to writing for solace. Of his early days Capote related, "I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it."
In his mid-teens, Capote was sent to New York to live with his mother and her new husband. Disoriented by life in the city, he dropped out of school, and at age seventeen, got a job with The New Yorker magazine. Within a few years he was writing regularly for an assortment of publications. One of his stories, "Miriam," attracted the attention of publisher Bennett Cerf, who signed the young writer to a contract with Random House. Capote's first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published in 1948. Other Voices, Other Rooms received instant notoriety for its fine prose, its frank discussion of homosexual themes, and, perhaps most of all, for its erotically suggestive cover photograph of Capote himself.
"Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "In Cold Blood"
With literary success came social celebrity. The young writer was lionized by the high society elite, and was seen at the best parties, clubs, and restaurants. He answered accusations of frivolousness by claiming he was researching a future book. His short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), took much of its inspiration from these experiences. With the publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's and the subsequent hit film staring Audrey Hepburn, Capote's popularity and place among the upper crust was assured. His ambition, however, was to be great as well as popular, and so he began work on a new experimental project that he imagined would revolutionize the field of journalism.
In 1959, Capote set about creating a new literary genre — the non-fiction novel. In Cold Blood (1966), the book that most consider his masterpiece, is the story of the 1959 murder of the four members of a Kansas farming family, the Clutters. Capote left his jet-set friends and went to Kansas to delve into the small-town life and record the process by which they coped with this loss. During his stay, the two murderers were caught, and Capote began an involved interview with both. For six years, he became enmeshed in the lives of both the killers and the townspeople, taking thousands of pages of notes. Of In Cold Blood, Capote said, "This book was an important event for me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry." In Cold Blood sold out instantly, and became one of the most talked about books of its time. An instant classic, In Cold Blood brought its author millions of dollars and a fame unparalleled by nearly any other literary author since.
Truman Capote and the Black and White Ball
To celebrate the book's success, Capote threw what many called the "Party of the Century," the famous "Black and White Ball." This masked ball, at New York's elegant Plaza Hotel, was to be the pinnacle of both his literary endeavors and his popularity. Overwhelmed by the lifestyles of the rich and famous, Capote began to work on a project exploring the intimate details of his friends. He received a large advance for a book which was to be called Answered Prayers (after Saint Theresa of Avila's saying that answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered). The book was to be a biting and largely factual account of the glittering world in which he moved. The publication of the first few chapters in Esquire magazine in 1975 caused a major scandal. Columnist Liz Smith explained, "He wrote what he knew, which is what people always tell writers to do, but he just didn't wait till they were dead to do it."
With these first short publications Capote found that many of his close friends and acquaintances shut him off completely. Though he claimed to be working on Answered Prayers (which many imagined would be his greatest work), the shock of the initial negative reactions sent him into a spiral of drug and alcohol use, during which time he wrote very little of any quality. When Capote died in 1984, at the age of fifty-nine, he left behind no evidence of any continued progress on Answered Prayers. Though many feel that Capote did not live up to the promise of his early work, it is clear from what he did write that he was an artist of exquisite talent and vision. With both his fiction and his non-fiction, he created a body of work that will continue to move readers and inspire writers for years.


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Growing up, fruit was often the core component of dessert after our meals. My grandmother tended a wonderful orchard, full of luscious delights — crisp, sweet apples; juicy pears, plump cherries, amazing berries, grapes swelled to bursting. We supplemented Midwestern fare with citrus fruits and bananas. Fruit was a sweet treat that took the place of cakes and candy (though it promoted pie to primary prominence). Whenever I hear the metaphor of fruit from scripture – especially as used by Jesus and Paul, my mind takes me immediately to the bountiful fruit of my youth and it fills me with nostalgic joy and hope. However, as with many house rules, the path to dessert always ran through the somber and difficult terrain of the vegetable. "You can't have dessert until you finish your vegetables," was spoken in my home no less than 24,357,615 times. I am not sure any other phrase was declared more often. No one ever had to talk me into eating fruit, but vegetables were a different matter. It made little difference how "good for me" vegetables were, I enjoyed but few — corn (almost as sweet and juicy as the finest fruit), asparagus, crisp lettuce, snap peas, and cauliflower. I could gag down a raw carrot or two, but never cooked. Brocoli seemed (then and less so now) like a bad idea. Popeye could keep his spinach. Brussels sprouts? Zucchini & squash were unpalatable then (though I have grown to enjoy both). No, most vegetables were a challenge, and those I disliked ever seemed to outnumber those I liked. It is no wonder that our scriptures never refer to the "vegetables of the Spirit."
But, what would the vegetables of the Spirit be? I speculate here – let's pretend we discovered Paul's lost letter to the church at Cappadocia — and read what Paul might have written:
Certainly, brothers and sisters, we all seek the fruit of the Spirit; to live in a world of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, but we cannot enjoy the fruits without first suffering the vegetables. As children we indulged ourselves in treats, ignoring that which is necessary to keep us strong and healthy in favor of that which is sweet, but will give us a bellyache if we indulge too much. No, our Father who knows what is good for us gives us the important, which is often not sweet or good tasting, so that we might thoroughly enjoy the good, which fills us with delight. Mature Christians, brothers and sisters, live a balanced diet, producing both the fruits and the vegetables of the Spirit.
Now the vegetables of the Spirit are these: duty, commitment, justice, perseverance, mercy, sacrifice, compassion, tolerance, and accountability. By these things you will be known as people who have truly given themselves to God. The more you attend to these things, the quicker you will come to enjoy the fruits that accompany them. So deny not these vegetables, but produce them in equal measure to the fruits. (Cappadocians 4:13-17)
Fruits were always easy to swallow — many vegetables were difficult to choke down. Fruits were good; many vegetables simply necessary or required. Fruits – positive; vegetables – negative. Fruits – benefits; vegetables – costs. Talk to any kid. At least nine-out-of-ten of them will concur. And yet, they ARE good for us. We DO need them for good health. They do end up making the sweet sweeter, if for no other reason than the fruits erase the icky taste of the vegetable.
Duty — doing that which is right and necessary, not because we want to, but because it is our responsibility. There is much in our life of faith that isn't fun or fulfilling, but it is required nonetheless. Without a sense of duty, we become complacent consumers, not disciples. Without a sense of responsibility we are more than happy to leave the work of Christ to someone else. Why should we bother? Someone else can do it for us.
Commitment — a level of caring that gets us up off our butts and out of our comfort zones to do the unpleasant and difficult jobs as well as those we like and enjoy. Being the body of Christ is not all about basking in the warm glow of the Spirit. We will get our hands dirty, our legs and back aching, and our psyche scrubbed. True Christianity is WORK. Sticking with it and doing it well means we will need to make it a priority and give up some other things — things we might enjoy more — in order to serve and please God. (And one hour every few weeks probably doesn't count as commitment…)
Justice — the dawning realization that our faith isn't all about us and that Jesus was actually serious about caring for the poor and marginalized and those whom the system crushes and disadvantages. We might have to grant a higher premium to being "fair," than to being "right." We might learn that it is not only more blessed to give than to receive, but it is expected. To do right is more valued than being righteous. To care more for another — whether he or she deserves it or not — may be our highest goal and greatest challenge.
Perseverance — sticking with the difficult tasks regardless of whether we like them, are affirmed by them, or desire them. Disciples never retire and they don't look for the next generation to come along and relieve them. They don't cut their losses, give up, or take their ball and go home. Disciples strive to find solutions, build bridges, repair broken systems and heal broken relationships. Not everything in the disciples job description is fun or easy.
Mercy — giving people what God wants rather than what they deserve. Discerning the difference between consequences and punishment; accountability and judgment; correction and vengeance. Allowing that each person is a valuable creation of God and that were the situation and our roles reversed, we would hope for every benefit of the doubt and measure of forgiveness. To operate by grace rather than law is truly countercultural and counterintuitive.
Sacrifice — giving instead of getting is anathema to most human beings. To let go — of possessions, principles, pride, power, position or popularity — offends every sensibility of our human nature. We want, we desire, we need — we are the center of the collective universe and to do without, to relinquish, to self-deny is crazy. Sacrifice moves us from the center and God's will to the center. It reorients our entire life from receiving to giving, from hoarding to sharing, from comfort to true community.
Compassion — that level of empathetic connection that moves us into relationship with those in greatest need. We no longer decide who to help, but how to help all in need. We are motivated to go where the need is, to work alongside those in distress, and to offer aid and comfort wherever and whenever possible. Hunger, thirst, disease, emotional distress, displacement, homelessness, mental illness and economic injustice become our sworn enemies, and we rest only when each and every one is eliminated (i.e., never).
Tolerance — more than merely putting up with those we dislike or with whom we disagree, tolerance creates an environment where we strive to coexist, collaborate, and cooperate beyond our differences. Tolerance says that we will accept one another in our respective brokenness and disconnection, working to bridge differences and focus on common aims. To tolerate is to not merely allow another to be present, but to seek rapport with shared values and vision. We agree to disagree; we allow everyone the right to even be wrong; and, we acknowledge that "different" doesn't mean "bad."
Accountability — holding one another faithfully to the promises we make to God and one another, accepting that all actions — positive and negative — have consequences and that we must live with the decisions we make. Reward and punishment are a part of life — receiving accolades when we perform well, approval when we do as we have promised, and paying the price when we fail to perform well or perform badly. The pathway to Christian growth and development means we must do what we say, and if there are no consequences to breaking promises, failing to uphold vows, or ignoring commitments, we will never become who God calls us to be.
Vegetables rarely have the same appeal as fruits, yet they are every bit as important, nutritious, and necessary. Yes, we will be known by the fruit we bear — but what about the vegetables? How might our faith communities change were we to become a bit more vegetarian in our spiritual formation? May we make sure we clear the plate, giving as much attention to the veggies as we do the fruits (and the meat and grains and poultry and fish), and maintain a more balanced diet in our Christian living.
Categories: Congregational Life, Core Values, Devotional Reflection, spiritual practices


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Restoring the Balance begins with tension and gentle unfolds into an all-out epic fanfare, complete with trumpets, french horns, flute, and a full orchestra. Perfect dramatic action/adventure piece to add energy to your project! Thanks for listening.
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Composed at The Story Shop.


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The fabrics shown in this post were given to me by Island Batik.
Last January Island Batik gave me a secret bundle to hold onto till November, it was Tropical Escape shown above. I sat and looking at the bundle of gorgeous fabrics, waiting for them to talk to me. The goal is for me to introduce the Tropical Escape fabric line by making a quilt showcasing as many of the 20 fabrics as possible.
I decided to use Studio 180 Design's BlockBuster pattern #29 Pointsettia. This block requires the Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star, Split Rects and Tucker Trimmer I tools. You can download the BlockBuster pattern below:
I loved that the Poinsettia block could be made in 7″, 14″ or 21″ finished blocks. I chose the 21″ blocks.
Time to break out the paper plates. I sorted my fabrics by color and value, pairing a light/medium value with a darker value. This would allow me to use 16 different fabrics to form the flowers. I would use the lighter value fabric for the Lemoyne star quarters and the darker value fabrics for the split rects units.
My tip for staying organized while making Lemoyne stars is to label two paper plates, one "A" & one "B". Follow the Lemoyne star tool instructions. When you come to Step 7, make one 45 degree cut – then imediateley reposition your ruler to cut the side triangles as you go.
If you are right handed the "B" strip was on the bottom & the "A" strip was on top. Place the "A" unit on the plate marked "A" and the "B" unit on the plate marked "B", place one triangle on each plate also. (If you are left handed the "A" strip would be on the bottom and the "B" strip would be on top). Continue cutting your units, placing each unit on their assigned plate. Construct the Lemoyne units as instructed. Throughout the process you will always know which units are "A" and which are "B". This is important for knowing which way to press your seams. Another tip for pressing the lemoyne star units is to "remember, the Lemoyne star point should always be pointed to the left". To make Lemoyne star quarters you will square them up using your Tucker Trimmer 1 before stitching them to the split rects units.
Layout your Lemoyne quarters with your mirror image split rects units and stitch together.
Press seams as shown above.
Continue making your Lemoyne star quarters/split rects units. They are all constructed the same way.
Stitch a background rectangle with each Lemoyne quarter/split rects unit as shown. Follow block assembly instruction in the BlockBuster #29 pattern.
At first I decided to make 6 – 21″ blocks measuring 60″ x 83″.
But I discovered I had enough units to make 9 blocks with left over Lemoyne quarters for the use in the outer border. Quilt measures 83″ x 83″.
It's funny how this quilt came about. It stared with Island Batik's fabric line: Tropical Escape; BlockBuster's Pointsettia block (a Christmas flower); and it is named after a canyon in Arizona. I named this quilt Copper Canyon Blooms as I think they look like desert blooms! In the supply list below I've given you fabric requirements for both the 6 block top and the 9 block top.
#islandbatik #bestofbali #tropicalescape #studio180design #blockbusters #EQ8
I visited the Oneida County Historical Society to take this photo on the steps.


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The Lamborghini Aventador J is an absolute one-off: a one-of-a-kind piece of art.
It combines the overwhelming performance of the Lamborghini Aventador with the most intense experience of power and dynamics imaginable in an automobile.
The Lamborghini Aventador J is a radically open automobile – exterior and interior meld into each other. The designers and engineers in Sant'Agata Bolognese have not only dispensed entirely with the roof, but also with the front windshield. Drivers must have the right equipment for driving at top speeds higher than 300 km/h.
The unique expertise of Automobili Lamborghini in the field of carbon fiber reinforced polymers is evident not only in the hi-tech monocoque, but also in the research into further innovative solutions. Unlike traditional seats, the Aventador J seats are made of Forged COMPOSITE®, with inserts of flexible carbon fiber fabrics: a result of an innovative Lamborghini patent.


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Or, the inaugural edition of a recurring series.
The Beckett Update
Meant to mention this last week but, well, you know how it goes. If you haven't seen it yet, Peter Gammons spoke with one member of the Red Sox front office who's of the opinion that after Beckett's current deal expires in 2010, we'll be unable to sign the righthander.
"We'd better enjoy [Josh] Beckett the next three years," one Boston Red Sox official said, "Because we won't be able to sign him after his deal is up after 2010."
Which is a grim prospect, not only because the Yankees will presumably have interest, but also because that's just about the time that Tampa will be getting good (but more on that later).
Now even I can acknowledge that a problem three years away is a problem for another day, and I won't get in a twist about it. At least, no more than usual.
But I think it's worth noting that the $30M deal Beckett signed – much lamented by the Sports Guy during Beckett's rough introduction to the AL – was in retrospect a masterstroke. Even if Beckett is hurt for a significant portion of it.
The Catching Update
In celebration of Truck Day, I treated myself to a copy of the Baseball America Prospect Handbook for 2008. It's mildly alarming just how excited I was to get home and crack it, but that's a subject for another day. Of greater interest was the catching depth chart, which BA lists as follows:
- Mark Wagner
- George Kottaras
- Dusty Brown
- Tyler Weeden
- Jon Egan
The good news is that – as previously discussed – Wagner owns the #20 spot on Boston's Top 30 prospects list. The bad news is that Kottaras was last year's #12, and Egan was last year's #24, and both failed to make this year's list. It would be inaccurate to say that it's entirely a reflection on their respective seasons, as the overall depth of our system took a step forward last year, but neither did they progress as anticipated.
BA shares my concern about our catching depth, saying:
"the only unsettled long-term position on the Red Sox is catcher, where there's no clear heir apparent to Jason Varitek. Wagner is the leading candidate to fill that role, as he has the most well-rounded game among a group of catching prospects that also includes Dusty Brown, Jon Egan, George Kottaras, Jon Still, and Tyler Weeden."
Their prediction is that Wagner will be up in Portland this year, so I'll try and get down to see him.
While it's nice that BA shares my concern, the Red Sox front office is a bit more important in the overall equation. Since they're in a position to do something about it, and so on. Anyhow it appears that they are applying the same shotgun approach to catching that it does to the bullpen: the more candidates you have, the better the chance that one proves viable. Back in October, we signed 24 year old Dennis Blackmon out of the independent leagues, and three days ago there was word we were close to bringing in Hayato Doue (see above video), a 25 year old Japanese catcher from the independent leagues over there.
Personally, I like these deals. True, the odds of Blackmon or Doue contributing in the long term are thin. But catching is in short supply, and I'd prefer to at least make the effort at finding a diamond in the rough. If we end up discovering nothing, and are forced to trade a Gold Glove caliber CF for a mediocre backstop like Gerald Laird (lifetime OBP of .297) so be it. But let's at least look around first.
The Schilling Update
Generally, when someone medically trained characterizes a tendon in your shoulder as "irreversibly diseased" and "separate[d] into these bands of spaghetti" it's not good news, but bad news. Which is what the news on Schilling is, quite obviously. It's worth noting, as Buster Olney writes, that given the fact that Morgan is legally prevented from speaking without Schilling's go ahead the aforementioned interview is essentially PR by proxy. Schilling apparently wants Red Sox fans to know that he does not agree with the diagnosis, but is unwilling to do more than hint at said disagreement on his blog, preferring to leave the direct messaging to an authorized mouthpiece. Ok.
Given everything Schilling has pitched through in his career, no one can ever question his ability to pitch with pain: the procedure that resulted in the bloody sock, after all, was first practiced on a cadaver. Seriously. So I have to believe that the big righthander honestly trusts Morgan that surgery offers him a legitimate chance at pitching this year.
Irrespective of what Morgan – and presumably Schilling – would prefer to do to address the current condition, however, the club and the player are apparently going ahead with a cortisone powered rehab.
When asked when Schilling would be able to pitch again using this approach, Morgan's optimistic answer was: "never." A real sunbeam, that guy. The guess here is that the two surgeons recommending this course of action are only slightly more hopeful than Morgan when it comes to rehab, but it's obvious that they are spectacularly less positive about the prospects of a return this season if surgey is pursued. Ergo, the last ditch attempt at rehab.
Don't know about you guys, but it sounds like it's time for Plan B here.
The Yankee Update
Leave it to Peter Gammons to explain why it is my fondest wish that Brian Cashman and the Yankees part company, the sooner the better:
As he has done his entire tenure as general manager of the Yankees, Brian Cashman has spent the offseason doing what he believed was in the best long-term interests of the Yankees. Because he eschewed the Santana trade, Cashman's job now is likely tied to Phil Hughes, Chamberlain, Ian Kennedy, et al. But Cashman wants to build a long-term pitching staff, then take money and fill where he needs to build as the Yankees see a number of big contracts go away in the next two offseasons. With close to a half-dozen pitchers making less than $500,000 in 2009, Cashman next winter will be able to go get Mark Teixeira, C.C. Sabathia and even Joe Nathan, if he so chooses.
I much preferred a Yankee club that spent and spent in a vain effort to solve more fundamental underlying problems. You know, just like our country does.


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Ok, so please accept my apologies, this blog has turned into an essay and it has been a long time coming. I've wanted to write about the ideas behind the science concepts and suggestions which feature in my book Anomaly (The Soul Prophecies) now for a while, but you know, life gets in the way, and hammering out the thoughts in my head in a way that would make sense to everyone has been tricky. The certified physicists struggle with the physic topics that I've attempted to write about and I'm wholly unqualified to explain them. Therefore I am going to try and approach this from a philosophical point of view and hope that someone out there can understand my reasoning, thought processes and amateurish diagrams. I know that a fellow physics enthusiast has questioned me about the science in my book and has written a wonderful blog about it at https://thesaganist.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/could-dark-energy-be-another-dimension-of-time/ for anyone who is interested. With that being said, let's get on with it.
For those of you who haven't read my book, Anomaly is about death and the decisions that you make throughout your life. It is about the possibilities and probabilities associated with the path your life has taken and the many paths your life could have taken. Anomaly is also about the decisions others have made and their varying degrees of impact on everyone else. Anomaly explores time as we know it, past, present and future, and separates time into two timelines, the first being human time and the second being Nowtime, a timeline which holds every single physical and imaginary possibility. Within Nowtime, Anomaly looks into human thought, emotion and the imagination, and lastly, Anomaly covers the idea of an afterlife governed by the laws of physics, as opposed to an almighty god-like deity. A lot to digest in a few short sentences, and I've barely scraped the surface of the concepts and ideas hidden behind Anomaly.
Death is a morbid topic to consider especially for an early twenty year old, but I began to think about death and what, if anything, could be logically left of 'us' when our biological bodies die. I consider humans to be more than just their biological bodies, I consider humans to be minds made up of thought, emotions and memories, which are influenced and gathered throughout an individual's life and experiences. So, if the biological body perishes, what happens to all the thoughts, emotions and memories that we have built up over our lives? We can all agree that they weren't there when we were initially born, or at least, not in the same way. Do they simply disappear and cease to be? Is the energy just taken back and spread out across the universe? Or if our thoughts, emotions and memories remain and exist after the body dies, how and in what form?
For Anomaly I drew upon the idea of the soul, not a new idea or concept, but my idea of a soul is more like a bubble of energy which contains everything that makes up a person that is not physical, so thoughts, emotions and memories. If everything is made up of the fundamental particles, essentially vibrating bits of energy according to the string theory, then by that logic, thoughts, emotions and memories must also be made up of fundamental particles. This led me to think about how the soul would exist and where exactly? It's not like people claim they can see the dead on a regular basis, so souls in this sense would have to exist in a way that is invisible to living humans. This wasn't a particularly hard thing to decide, the human eye can only see a limited range of wavelengths, so a deceased soul could be invisible if it existed outside of those wavelengths. The next thing to consider was what and how the laws of physics would govern this form of energy, considering souls would not have a visible physical body and next to no mass.
The imagination has no bounds, and time works differently within the mind. Each one of us can imagine ourselves on the other side of the world instantly, whereas in reality it would be impossible to do this with our physical bodies without the aid of some sort of teleportation device. Emotions, thoughts and memories can all be called upon instantly within the mind, despite the resulting chemical and biological reactions that also take place. You can imagine anything you want, meaning that these imaginary possibilities are limitless. Since in Anomaly, the soul is a person's thoughts, emotions and memories, it would mean that the soul too works as the imagination does. Just like the physical world and it's dimensions is the 'field' the living body walks upon, the imagination and soul would have their own 'field' too, unbound by the physical dimensions and laws that we all know and take for granted, in Anomaly I call this field the creative field or the imaginary field.
If you consider your life for a moment and all the decisions and experiences which have led you to this moment right now, then you can see that certain decisions that you did and didn't make influenced where you are today. If you can't think of anything in particular then think about the subjects that you chose and could have chosen when you were taking your GCSE's or equivalent examinations. Every decision you make, no matter how small, has an impact on the rest of your future. Some decisions are referred to as sliding door moments, where a decision or series of decisions can lead your life in a completely different direction, like coming to an intersection, or walking down a path that suddenly divides into two. Most of the decisions we make on a daily basis don't affect us very much, or at least, don't lead to negative consequences. Now think about the decisions your parents made, grandparents and great-grandparents. Every decision your ancestors made and those closest to you, have had and still have an impact on the you that exists now. I think of it as great webs of interlocking decisions where your decisions have good, bad and neutral effects on those closest to you, your descendants, and the rest of the world.
Even our smallest decisions have an impact on the rest of the world, it is called the butterfly effect, and some decisions carry more weight than others. Whilst the majority of us never have a big impact on humanity as individuals, there are certain people who have had great impacts on the world, usually rulers, scientists, artists, celebrities, etc. There are also people who have had great impacts on the world who have never been recognised or remembered for them. Think how different the world would be today had Hitler never been conceived or born? Or if Franz Ferdinand hadn't been assassinated? Or if Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election? Different decisions could have been made; different futures and possibilities may have been our reality today.
For every individual living person, there are both physical and imaginary possibilities open to them in any given moment. If you opened the contact list on your phone you could (hopefully) choose from a number of friends and family to call in any moment, that is a physical possibility that is open to you. Other physical possibilities could include how you decide to travel to work one day, will you cycle? Walk? Go by train? Take the bus? Or will you drive? How about when you go to the shop to get lunch, will you pick up the healthy salad or go for the bacon sandwich? These are all physical possibilities that could be open to you in one particular moment of time throughout your day. These physical possibilities are less and more likely, so some have a higher probability of occurring than others. For example, if your office place happens to be 50 miles away, it's unlikely that you will wake up early enough or be willing to walk or cycle all the way to work. You are more likely, as long as it's available, to go by train, take the bus or drive in this scenario.
In any moment throughout our lives there are possibilities like this, where some have a higher probability of actually happening than others, regardless of how big or small these possibilities may be. However, it is the rare and remote possibilities that usually have the greatest impacts on our lives. This is effectively quantum tunnelling in action. For example, if an ordinary person purchases a lottery ticket, they have a remote chance of winning the jackpot. If they do happen to pick the winning numbers then the impact a jackpot win will have on their lives and potentially their descendants would be enormous. Extreme positive and negative events like this are events that happen away from the norm, the events which don't happen on a day to day basis. They are also the reason that we tend to forget the mundane ordinary but the extremes often stick out to us and are easy to remember. The media in particular, love to emphasise the negative events happening throughout the world.
The creative or imaginary field in Anomaly is, in a nutshell, information – it's entropy. The field itself is a lattice, linked and woven within what scientists recognise as the quantum field. It behaves like a network of particles, very much how neurons connect in the brain. These particles are tiny particles with varying frequencies and exist in various states simultaneously. You can picture the creative/imaginary field like this; it is a snapshot of a single moment within the entire universe, taking into account all the events that ever happened and could happen. The information held within each snapshot increases with each passing fraction of a moment. This is why the characters Kyle Hunter and Sophia Leto in Anomaly describe Nowtime as time which spirals around human time, in a vortex shape.
Nowtime shown in red in the diagram to the left is separate but linked to human time through the creative/imaginary field. Everything inside Nowtime is the creative/imaginary field shown by the blue grid pattern in the diagram below. The vertical space/distance between each loop of Nowtime is a single planck's length graphically speaking, this is actually planck time – the time it takes for light to travel a single planck's length (which is really, really, really small). Nowtime contains information – all events past and present plus all possibilities that can happen in a single moment Planck-time after. Each loop of Nowtime gets bigger because there is more information/entropy in the universe as human time moves forwards into the future. I also believe that Nowtime would run with the cosmological constant in General Relativity.
If we were to take a cross-section, a slice through Nowtime, and take a snapshot of that moment, then the middle would be human time, the outside coil would be a circle which is Nowtime, then everything inside would be the fields of science – the Higgs field, the quantum field and within that, the creative/imaginary field. You could think of Nowtime as an extra time dimension that has always been there, even before the Big Bang, everything is held and exists within Nowtime.
Before the Big Bang, I imagine Nowtime as being a single loop of time with no human time. The Big Bang is mankind's reference point after all, and at the Big Bang or just before, the single loop of Nowtime split and began to spiral, and human time was effectively born. Why did this happen? Well because of quantum tunnelling, something that has a one in a billion chance of occurring actually happens many times when there are quadrillions of possibilities, those 'anomalies' then happen more often than we would have initially thought. As I mentioned before, the rare, long odds have the greatest impacts on us and the universe, like creating the universe for instance. In this sense Nowtime is effectively 'God' it is omniscient and omnipresent, it holds all the information in the universe, past, present and future.
In Anomaly, deceased souls exist within the creative/imaginary field and can create their own afterlife by imagining whatever they want into existence. In this sense the creative/imaginary field is like a giant, unlimited sandbox for the dead. Whatever you can imagine within your mind, can become your reality. So where is this field exactly? Technically it would be all around us, however in Anomaly the deceased exist in space, invisible and undetected by the living, orbiting the planet and very much like a blanket around the Earth's atmosphere. They are held there with what I describe in Anomaly as Positive energy and the Positive force; however this is not the same as positive/negative energy described by physicists. To try and avoid further confusion I shall simply refer to Anomaly's version of Positive energy and force as 'Good' and Anomaly's version of Negative energy and force as 'Bad'.
The deceased soul would need to be some form of energy, and to be able to create their existence using some form of energy and by manipulating some form of particles. The soul's energy would need to be either self-sustaining, or the soul would need to get its energy from somewhere else in order to continue existing. In Anomaly, a Good/Positive soul is one that is self-sustaining due to 'Good' energy. A Negative/Bad soul is one that is not self-sustaining due to 'Bad' energy. This 'Good' and 'Bad' energy is directly linked with human emotions, and is what pulls the afterlife towards Earth. Sounds too airy fairy doesn't it? One of the best examples of what I am referring to in this blog/essay as the 'Good' force and energy is the 'home advantage'. If you were to look at the statistical data for a number of sports teams you would find that teams that play at their home ground appear to perform better and win more often than the away teams. They seem to have an advantage over the away teams. This can be explained in part due to a number of physical and psychological factors, pressure from the crowd may affect the referee's judgement, weather differences, and the fact that the away team may have travelled further just to participate. However, because this works both ways, a team that's out of form, will feel increased pressure from the crowd and therefore will be prone to mistakes and bad decisions. We have all been there before, where we have felt under pressure to perform well and have made silly mistakes as a result. It happens all the time in sport, where a person seems to have the 'Midas touch' and can't lose, so they win every consecutive event they participate in. It also happens in reverse where a person just can't seem to win, and consistently loses for a period of time and seems to have a 'bad run' so to speak.
In Anomaly, the concept can be described as follows, because there are more home fans 'hoping' and cheering on the home team, there is more 'Good' energy which gives the home team a slight advantage. As the game/event progresses, if the home team scores this 'Good' energy is amplified, the home fans don't simply believe their team will win, they start to think it is certain. The away fans as a result, still 'hope' that their team can pull it back, but they are starting to feel doubtful about their chances. However when the home team scores again, then there is a sudden shift in energy. Confidence soars with the home team and pretty much vanishes with the away team. This energy spirals very quickly in a 'Good' way for the home team and a 'Bad' way for the away team. The home team scores again and then again and is way ahead by the time the game/event finishes.
So what emotions are the home fans and away fans feeling? Both have equal passion, love and confidence in their teams at the start of the game, but these emotions quickly change depending on who scores and when. With the first goal for the home team, the passion, love and confidence increases with the home fans. The away fans however, start to feel anxious and doubtful. The second goal and the home fans feel certain that they will win, and the away fans reluctantly feel they are doomed to lose; they start to feel demoralised and saddened. With the next goals scored by the home team, the atmosphere shifts completely, the away fans may even start to leave rather than see their team defeated by the final whistle. People notice this 'Good' and 'Bad' energy intuitively all the time, we can pick up on tensions when we walk into a room, and we recognise when we feel comfortable or uncomfortable around certain people, even if we don't know them very well.
Confidence is a big part of 'faith' and 'belief' as a whole. The more you believe you can do something, the more likely it is to happen, within your own abilities of course. In reverse, if you have a bad run and believe or expect things to go wrong, they often will go wrong. Again, most of us have had days where everything just seems to go right and others when everything just seems to go wrong. You're subconsciously aiding your own chances of success and failure. Just like the home fans who cheer on their team and believe in their success, prayer works in the same way, or when people collectively send their 'best wishes' to someone who is unwell and recovering in hospital. It is a combined energy of 'Good' emotions and thoughts which acts as a force to influence events. It cannot yet, be fully understood by science, but it can be measured scientifically and the results are seen constantly in the world around us, the placebo effect is another good example. This same 'Good' energy is what pulls you towards your friends and loved ones; you want to be close to the people who you care about and who make you feel good. Similarly, you try to stay away from those who you don't like. These 'Good' feelings and thoughts is what bonds people together, and is the same energy which bonds the afterlife and the deceased to the living, like micro webs of energy/attraction.
There are then, 'Good' and 'Bad' emotions, but it is not black and white. In Anomaly, 'Good' emotions are love, compassion, kindness, selflessness, etc. 'Bad' emotions are anger, frustration, hatred, envy, selfishness, etc. However it often depends on the context as to whether or not an emotion could be described as 'Good' or 'Bad', and often emotions don't appear on their own either, they're coupled together or several can be interlinked. We recognise that when we're feeling 'Good' we are able to achieve more and feel great about ourselves and our lives. When we are feeling 'Bad' however, we do not feel great about ourselves and our lives, we sometimes become depressed. When someone is extremely depressed sometimes they don't want to eat, they don't want to get up, and they don't want to face the world. Their emotions are literally telling them to destroy themselves and their bodies. In this sense 'Bad' emotions are destructive; hence why in Anomaly these 'Bad' emotions which feed the Negative/Bad energy and force mean that this energy and force are not self-sustaining, they are destructive in their very nature. The same is true in reverse for 'Good' emotions which feed the Positive/Good energy and force. This 'Good' and 'Bad' energy and force, although linked with the human conscience and emotions now, haven't always been, and these forces existed before the Earth was created. These forces and energies have evolved just like humans and the human conscience has evolved.
So in Anomaly's version of the afterlife, 'Good' souls are self-sustaining and can use the creative field as a means to create their own personal afterlives. I may do a blog at a later stage that will go into the ideas behind souls and emotions in more detail for anyone who is interested. 'Bad' souls are not self-sustaining and are limited in what they can do and achieve. In loose terms this is effectively Heaven and Hell, but from a different perspective. Throughout life we are able to ignore our conscience or convince ourselves that we are doing something good when in fact it's not as good as we hoped or sometimes just outright bad. In the afterlife your conscience is you, you don't have a biological body or the strains of the living world. You ultimately have to face up to what you've done within your conscience over your life, and the resulting energies from those decisions, determines what sort of afterlife you can lead. There is no God-like figure who judges you, you ultimately judge yourself.
Back to Nowtime, there is an important idea that is really at the heart of Nowtime, it is the idea that there is energy in time and energy is absorbed by time. If you could stop human time, press the pause button on human time and yet could carry on, then time itself would absorb that energy. The easiest way to describe this is to say, if we have an apple and cut it into a hundred pieces which were then scattered all over the country. If you stopped time and then went all around the country to collect the apple pieces and put the apple back together again. That journey could take you a full year of human time and you would use a lot of energy in your quest to find the apple pieces. If you used 2000 calories per day, you would have used 730,000 calories in that quest. When you start the 'play' button on time again (and eat your apple) then those 730,000 calories would be absorbed instantly by time. This is effectively how Nowtime works.
There is a colossal amount of energy in time. Energy that is abundant in the ever expanding universe. It happens in the human time frame too but is indirect – exo-energy. For example, a natural disaster such as an earthquake or tornado. Firstly you have the measurable energy (the energy involved in the event itself) but after that there is the combined energy that is absorbed over time in two stages. One, the clean-up operation, search and rescue, clearing away debris, rebuilding the broken homes, fixing infrastructure, etc. Masses of man-power, fuel and construction energy. Two, the psychological energy; trauma, grief, frustration, displacement, worry, etc (this can last decades after the event). This energy, which indirectly still obeys the laws of thermal dynamics, is absorbed and expelled through time – the energy to do the 'work' and the 'work done'.
For a deceased 'Good' soul to 'imagine' and effectively 'will' a world into existence around them, it is possible with the energy absorbed in Nowtime. When we use our imagination now and picture ourselves on the other side of the world, there are no limits on our imagination, we are only limited by our physical bodies and our own individual creativity, and we can imagine instantly. In the afterlife, time does not relate to distance, so particles can be 'willed' together, so wherever they are in the universe, they can be elsewhere. The idea that energy can be absorbed in time sounds absurd because we think of human time, because human time is always in motion, but with Nowtime this does not happen. We know that the observable universe expands over human time entropically. With Nowtime there's nowhere for all that information to go, so that energy is stored within time itself and metaphorically speaking, why the vortex shape is also seen to expand. This is effectively dark energy, and the energy that enables the universe to expand.
As an example, if you were to eat a 200kcal chocolate bar, the energy involved is human time related. In a theoretical situation, the nearer the time gets to 0 the more energy is required to burn off the consumed calories. Eventually there's equilibrium where you burn off calories as fast as you eat them. Obviously in reality this is physically impossible for a person, but if we get near to and stupidly close to 0, you'd be approaching the speed of light. Therefore, all your particles would be ripped apart by that energy, so much so, they would start behaving like waves. Eventually you would reach planck time because nothing can go faster than the speed of light. However, there is all this energy, Nowtime is always now – it's instant, this energy is dark energy.
The laws of thermal dynamics still apply and every moment of plank time has to be this absolute moment plus all the possibilities of information that is about to happen in the next moment of planck time. That's why there is energy in time, it is an extension of special relativity in many ways. Time at this infinitesimally small moment behaves like light.
Nowtime moves in pulses, like frames of a video, in Planck-time along the arrow of human time. Nowtime holds all cosmological information, and by default conscious thought. All events contained in the Nowtime are connected through the creative field. Current mathematical models build on the space time reference in special relativity, citing causal zones at any event where the points of the cones meet (the middle of the hourglass shape). The idea works with the two timelines in Anomaly, but the visualisation is wrong thus the maths is also wrong. I think it is much easier to visualise a new time dimension with a vortex.
If Nowtime did exist, the reality would be much more like this. The shaded areas would be the causal zone, which is effectively the creative field for any reference point in human time, if you were to slide the two cones up the human timeline.
The two cones or hourglass shape is just a mathematical visualisation; the vortex/spiral is the actual visualisation of what is happening. In other words, the cones/hourglass explains what is happening at any point, all the events lead to that moment in time, but it is not as simple as that, the cones/hourglasses happen to every particle, not just one (every individual and every speck of dust). Therefore, for one major event, you would have an infinite number of cones/hourglasses all overlapping one another at that one point; every event has its own cause an effect. Also, the cones/hourglass shape is only relevant after the Big Bang, you can't go before the Big Bang with these shapes.
The concept of adding a second dimension of time would mathematically require an extra dimension of space. Events on the Nowtime collapse as human time passes as there are no possibilities beyond that point (from the past) to the present. Time is always now, but all events of the past are held together like a gravitational consequence of each event. This includes consciousness too of all such species, potentially including aliens – any creature that can use a memory or an idea in the future to effectively change the future. For example, an idea you have today you might revisit in 10 years' time, which could create a chain of events to change the future. It might lead to a new discovery or an ability to travel the universe and colonise other planets. Theoretically, in order for the maths to work the standard model would need changing.
There is no easy way of measuring any of this, as much as we see the effects around us everyday: Home advantage, placebos – even our own intuition. Ideally we would need to capture a moment in time to measure it, which is not possible – neither is the other indisputable proof, death. So we need to consider scientific ways of measuring the effects of time.
One way would be to use mental energy to summon matter. This would need a tremendous amount of energy – and also faith. So there would need to be a bit of trickery. Imagine 10,000 eyes in an arena staring at a box. Inside this box is a vacuum and atomic scales. If everybody could focus into that box and imagine seeing something that does not exist such as a blue banana, though it would perhaps need something heavier. Over time the atomic scale would start detecting mass (it would be ever so slight but would be permanent). The problem with this experiment is that it sounds absurd and it's hard to repeat enough to get enough data to recognise it scientifically.
Potentially data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could also be used if energy is gained or lost within the process of collisions. This would go towards upholding some of the expected processes of existing string theories. There would need to be some modification of these existing theories though. The nature of the creative/imaginary field and quantum mechanics means you can't allow for the effects of quantum tunnelling on time. There will always be some random event that completely changes the course of predictability and when you apply that to infinite time the slightest fluctuation – even a 1 in 1040 chance event will change the course of everything.
I guess there is always the possibility that the ideas within Anomaly could be more fact than fiction at some point in the future. If that were to be the case, then I would imagine a number of circumstances and events would have to happen first. A level of particles that as of yet remain undiscovered would be discovered and would have quantum properties. At first scientists might think that this discovery will be something that might prove the existence of multiverses. They may reach this conclusion because the laws of thermal dynamics may appear to have been breached, so they will conclude that the energy must have gone to a multiverse. However, if the Nowtime theory, mathematically speaking could be completed (if Nowtime is considered as a variable and included into the equations), then over time I believe this loss of energy would lend more to the Nowtime theory. That is not to say that the multiverse theory is wrong, there would be no way of proving that, but it is possible that more particles are yet to be discovered which will behave differently because they are effectively used by Nowtime. They would have properties in the same way as mesons and gluons to help these forces and connections in the creative/imaginary field.
If you've stuck this out to the end, then thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy blog. I have gone into more detail here about my ideas and thought process than I have within my book Anomaly, but I do plan to expand on these ideas in my next couple of books which will be part of The Soul Prophecies series. If you have any questions or wish to discuss these ideas further, then please feel free to leave a comment at my wordpress blog https://thebookigloo.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/my-thoughts-ideas-behind-anomaly/


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No time to read all tweets, scoops, blogs? Here is a summary of the Top Ten LT stories of the month, selected by our LangTechNews editor Andrew Joscelyne. Enjoy – and if you have a newsworthy story, contact us.
LT-Innovate is the Language Technology Industry Association - Terms & Conditions - Leipzig photo (c) Paul Kapischka on Unsplash


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Ben and Zal
February 4, 2012
Few things are as obnoxious as an obit think-piece, a lazy essay that tries to force connections between two people who happened to die around the same time. But Ben Gazzara and Zalman King died on the same date – yesterday, February 3, both from cancer – and, dammit, they did have something important in common. Both of them, at least during the brief periods of their respective careers in which they were television series headliners, were passive actors who cultivated a stillness at the center of activity. They suppressed their egos in a way that only a few television stars have had the courage to try: William Peterson, in C.S.I.; David Duchovny (who had, crucially, been directed by King on Red Shoe Diaries), in the early seasons of The X-Files; and of course David Janssen, in everything he ever did.
The job of a television star is not to recede; it's to reach out and grab the viewer, to be the entry point into a new world and then the object of familiarity that encourages a weekly return. Gazzara, in Arrest and Trial (1963-1964) and Run For Your Life (1965-1968), and King, in The Young Lawyers (1970-1971), went against the grain. Their instinct was always to underplay, to count on their magnetism to draw you in toward the subtle detail work they were doing.
A cops-and-lawyers procedural with an unwieldly premise, Arrest and Trial stands out, in retrospect, as a science experiment in clashing acting styles. It pitted Gazzara, an acclaimed young Broadway actor associated with Strasberg, Kazan, and Tennessee Williams, against ex-baseball player Chuck Connors, an impossibly jut-jawed TV western star who never did an acting exercise in his life. In Arrest and Trial, Connors was likably stolid – the Rifleman in a suit – but Gazzara was mesmerizing. He was perhaps the first American television star with the courage to use each episode as his own sandbox to play in, exploring the stories and the inner life of his character with a Brando-esque curiosity, rather than aiming to mold a consistent, familiar genre archetype (in this case, the brilliant detective who always gets his man). This was the short-lived New Frontier moment of the liberal TV cop, and Gazzara played Detective Anderson's police interrogation scenes not as an inquisitor but like a psychiatrist or an oral historian. Most television stars step out into the lights with a story to tell; Gazzara said to the guest stars, tell me your story. And to the audience: project yourselves onto me.
Roy Huggins's Run For Your Life cast Gazzara as Paul Bryan, a lawyer dying of an unspecified and symptomless illness, who decides to chuck his grey flannel suit and a live a boho life for his remaining days. Immediately the show ran away from that premise as fast as it could, plunking Gazzara's character down into a glut of recycled action and espionage stories. But there were moments, especially in the early episodes, where Paul Bryan strayed into some off-the-path locale or exotic subculture, and Gazzara just nailed the proto-New Agey bliss of exploration and transformation that Run For Your Life was fumbling toward. The pilot was about deep sea diving and it was called "Rapture at 240," and how many other sixties television actors could and would play rapture? Gazzara derided both series in his autobiography, with some justification; he felt that this flirtation with mainstream stardom delayed his more important work for the independent filmmakers like John Cassavetes and Peter Bogdanovich. In their films, Gazzara moved into a more operatic mode, essaying epically flawed or doomed characters, especially in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Saint Jack. But even when a script required him to yell and scream and smash things, Gazzara never seemed to be overacting. "There was a quiet, understated nobility about him, earned the hard way, from the ground up," is how Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas put it on Facebook yesterday.
Zalman King made his Hollywood debut as a teenaged thug in 1964's "Memo From Purgatory," a late episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour that Harlan Ellison also counts as his television debut (although that isn't quite accurate). A blonde, strapping James Caan played the Ellison figure in the autobiographical "Memo," but in my head I've always transmogrified King – diminutive, quick, Jewish, transparently intelligent – into Ellison's television avatar. The writer and the actor became lifelong friends; when we spoke about King years ago, Ellison referred to him affectionately as "Zally."
A year later, on The Munsters, King played a bearded beatnik (sample dialogue: "Man, that cat is deep"). At twenty-three, he was already typed (happily, I suspect) as an outsider, a kook. It was an inspired choice when King was cast as the most prominent of The Young Lawyers, a trio of eager law students who represented the poor and disenfranchised under the supervision of a grizzled Legal Aid lawyer. Top-billed Lee J. Cobb played the old lawyer, never overdoing it but still fulsomely dyspeptic and a formidable font of wisdom. King stole the show from him. He was one of the most open actors of his generation. As Gazzara had, King projected an empathy that worked beautifully within the context of this do-gooder show. King's character was written as a young hothead, a generation-gap foil for Cobb; but King brought to the role a plausible and only semi-scripted gravitas, a provocative rebuke to the assumption of unidirectional communication between young and old. Sixties TV was full of fake hippies – beaded sellouts like The Mod Squad – but King slipped one in under the radar, creating an intellectual, atypical anti-establishment figure. His Aaron Silverman was not some flaky peace-sign thrower; he was a fast-thinking, urban, Jewish liberal (really a radical, if you read between the lines), movingly and sincerely committed to change by challenging the system over and over again. Quick: Name another television character from the early seventies who fits that description.
The scripts on The Young Lawyers were pretty good (Ellison contributed the best one, the searing anti-drug love story "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs"); but the ideas I'm describing came out more through King's extraordinarily expressive acting, the play of complex thinking and sincere compassion across his face. Just a glimmer there; then The Young Lawyers went away and it was back to Barnaby Jones, geriatric crime-solver, and Steve McGarrett, authoritarian prick, and Richard Nixon, not a crook.
King was a minor movie star throughout the seventies, accruing credits that are impressively consistent in their status as either arty cult films (Some Call It Loving) or exploitation (Trip With the Teacher) or a fusion of both (Blue Sunshine). Then he began directing and producing; I haven't seen much of that work, but the Showtime series Red Shoe Diaries was a big enough hit to make King a rather disreputable household name, a middle-aged soft-core pornographer at whom one was encouraged to laugh up one's sleeve. The Young Lawyers should be easier to see, and King should be remembered as one of the most unusual and exciting actors around during the seventies.
15 Responses to "Ben and Zal"
February 4, 2012 at 3:46 pm
I hadn't seen the similar style between the two, but you are right. Now I am trying to think of a woman with the same acting method.
February 7, 2012 at 7:21 am
Although it's true that too often Run For Your Life dove into espionage and detective/police/lawyer stories, the series did have a lot of great episodes that explored existential themes with a profundity seldom seen on TV. And Gazzara was such a great actor that he made even the lamest stories work: it was a one man Route 66 which shared the overall pessimistic outlook of that other great series… although without the great on location shooting.
February 8, 2012 at 5:37 pm
Ben Gazzara was indeed a very accomplished actor but his performance in the tv series "Run For Your Life" was old school method acting at its most obvious. His highly mannered performance was annoying and any comparison to The Fugitive" is laughable. I said this in my book "TV Noir:The 20th Century", the first to apply film noir concepts to tv series dramas. (Amazon Books).
February 8, 2012 at 9:18 pm
I remember absolutely nothing about "Run for Your Life" (except for the opening titles, for some reason), but I would love the opportunity to watch the episodes. Sigh – another case where classic TV is given short shrift by the DVD/Blu-Ray companies.
February 9, 2012 at 8:46 am
I commented on Ben Gazzara yesterday and you list 4 comments total which would include mine but it only shows 2 or 3-I assmume you were adding my comment along with the others.
February 9, 2012 at 12:16 pm
I will always remember Zalman King doing a guest shot in the pilot episode of the quickly-cancelled, quickly-forgotten 1978 NBC series W.E.B. He portrayed an arrogant, overrated and under talented "artistic producer de jour", who was producing a major, multi-night miniseries for the fictitious TAB network's fall season premiere…and delivered an unusable piece of junk too close to the air date for the network to plan substitute programming.
February 9, 2012 at 12:23 pm
There's a great web site for Run For Your Life (http://www.run4.us/index.htm) that has that has a full episode guide and a few minutes of video for most episodes (that can also be seen on Youtube).
February 9, 2012 at 2:37 pm
I am a huge fan of both actors, although I have a particular fascination with Zalman King's performance in Blue Sunshine. In precisely the same way as you have identified, he underplayed the role in intriguing ways. His quietly intense and driven performance I think are what make this cult film so admired.
April 1, 2012 at 2:07 pm
They both died around the same time…for Gazzara, there were a myriad number of mainstream clips that I could grab from YouTube and share on Facebook (which I usually do when an actor I admire passes away). I shared a scene from Run For Your Life and also scenes from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (which impressed some of the hipper FB friends of mine) and Roadhouse. On the other hand, I couldn't think of anything King did which would have been suitable for Facebook sharing (I REALLY would've gotten slagged by a host of people if I put clips of Two-Moon Junction or Red Shoe Diaries up)…I later posted the clip of the Standells on The Munsters on the 45RPM music group on FB and pointed out that Zal was the beatnik in the scene and that he had just passed away.
The point of all this is…I'm glad you found a way to tie these two guys together. I could NEVER have thought of some connection between the two, and it's great that you could!


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It should come as no surprise that holidays are a big deal at a greeting card company. From individual associates decorating their cubes to entire departments turning on holiday tunes and decking the halls together, Christmas and the holiday season in general is a festive affair at American Greetings.
One of the most lovely centerpieces to the season is the official holiday trees throughout the building. However, this year something caught our eyes on the largest tree in our Town Square area that we wanted to share with you.
See those scrolls throughout the tree? They're simple scrolls of wrapping paper! We thought they gave a festive, on-trend dash of style to the tree. It's a look you can certainly recreate at home, even if you're not super crafty. Here's a close-up:
They also carried this look over to the wreaths on the doors of our store…
What do you think? Is this something that might work on your tree? Share with us your favorite holiday decor ideas!


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I Want to thank Mark Lawrence for being such a great guy and having all the book giveaways that he does, like the Red Sister contest that just ended. I also would like to thank all of my readers that commented on my post about Mark's latest contest. Because of you guys I won a signed copy of Red Sister! But to celebrate my winning I am going to give you guys something. During the time Mark's contest was going on I received an unsigned hardcover copy of Red Sister from Alexis at Penguin Random House that I no longer need since I have the signed one coming. So I am going to give it away to one of you guys. Everyone that commented on the post that helped me win will be automatically entered. But the rest of you can comment and share this post to be entered also. I will select one name randomly on March 31st around noon MST. Thanks again to Mark and all my readers and good luck!
To Pre- Order Red Sister click below
Fine Print
I will notify the winner and they will have 48 hours to contact me with an address. They can email me at email@example.com or IM me at https://www.facebook.com/hob.noblin If after that time has elapsed and they have not contacted me I will pick a new name.


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~Chardon Living Memorial Park~
It's time… to remember that tragedy nurtures the good in all of us.
The Chardon Living Memorial Park was conceived by a community of supporters that suffered a tragedy and wanted to give something back to the survivors and the community.
On February 27, 2012, a school shooting occurred which resulted in children that lost their lives, families that lost loved ones, friends that lost schoolmates. A tragedy that redefined what was normal for a small community.
Concerned citizens have bonded together to provide a historic record, honor the innocent victims and deliver a message of hope for generations to come. This park is designed to provide a place for reflection and create spiritual awareness. The effort is to upgrade a walking trail, create an outdoor fitness area and a children's playground complete with commemoration plaques and a welcoming statue.
~Please help us fund this honorable project.~