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Espen Oeino, the Norwegian designer of such iconic yachts as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's $200 million Octopus, was on a sleek 240-foot craft he had also designed, sailing from St. Tropez to Nice, in the fall of 2008. With him were three European billionaires and their wives, relaxed and happy at the end of yet another summer in a world that seemingly had no limits on luxury or cost. Suddenly the television was blaring with the news that the U.S. credit crisis had put the global economy at serious risk. "Soon they were all stuck to the TV, watching news unfold about how bad things were," says Oeino, adding, "There were some very nervous people on board." When they reached Nice, the billionaires rushed off the boat and onto their jets in order to fly home and tend to their businesses. "That is when I realized, Hey, something is really ugly here," says Oeino.
He shows me renderings in his Monte Carlo office of one of "the victims," as he calls the super-yachts that were commissioned but never got built. He knew what had happened to the yachting world the last time the economy tanked, in 1929: the boats got small. "It took 50 years for yachts to return to comparable sizes," he says, noting that the stalemate didn't break until 1980, when the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi launched the 282-foot, silver-hulled Nabila, named for his daughter. "It took a long time to come back to what it was pre-Depression. I was worried it was going to happen again."
Equally alarmed was veteran yacht broker Nicholas Edmiston, whose clientele includes a number of American, European, and Russian billionaires. When I met Edmiston, in the summer of 2004, while I was writing another yacht article for this magazine, he regaled me with stories of wild extravagance and got me on several of the biggest, most sumptuous boats sailing the Mediterranean. "That was the height of the boom," he tells me now in his red-leather office in Monte Carlo. Back then, yachts were routinely selling for premium prices, frequently double the asking price. "The yacht business more or less hit reinforced concrete in late fall of 2008," says Edmiston. Gone were the days when a super-yacht that had cost the owner $35 million was sold "to somebody from a former Soviet Union country" for $75 million.
"Then what happened?," I ask.
"Nothing. That was the trouble. Things got bad, really bad. People did not want to sell boats at deep discounts; people did not want to buy boats." He had little choice but to wait for the storm to pass. "People were saying, 'What are we going to do?' " he recalls. There was only one answer for brokers: reduce prices. "They would say, 'I just want to get it sold.' I said, 'You've got to be realistic. We can sell it, but we can only sell it for what it's worth. Don't say to me you want 20, when I've just told you it's worth 12.' " Edmiston says he recently sold a yacht for $65 million, $39 million less than the owner had turned down in the summer of 2008.
As the economic world crumbled around them, many yacht owners retreated, quietly mooring their boats in places where they wouldn't be seen. "They were parking in Greece, Croatia, and La Ciotat [the shipyard town in Provence], and not taking them to St. Barth's for Christmas," says Oeino. Edmiston adds, "There was an attitude against people being extravagant and spending money!"
Many new launches were said to be the result of owners who had commissioned yachts before the crisis and were in too deep to stop. A number of innovative concepts were put on hold, however, most notably a collaboration between Wally, the state-of-the-art designer of powerboats and sailboats, and Pierre-Alexis Dumas, of the French luxury brand Hermès, for a vast, triangular, ecologically sustainable, $130 million "floating island" called WHY (Wally-Hermès Yachts). Before the crisis, Hermès had planned to finance the project on spec. "Now we have to wait for a client before proceeding," says Wally owner Luca Bassani Antivari as we speed away from the Monaco coastline on his newest powerboat, the 73 Wallypower.
Fractional-ownership pitchmen promptly entered the arena of super-yachting. I met one of them in Cannes, on a boat designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster. For $2.3 million, not including running costs, he told me, I could become a one-eighth owner of a futuristic craft called Ocean Emerald and sail on it for 30 days a year. "Yachting is a wonderful pastime, but it's financial suicide," says John Hare, chairman of YachtPlus. I boarded another "affordable" alternative in Cannes: the Aquariva, one of a limited edition of 22 speedboats created by the designer Marc Newson as an homage to the great Riva brand and available this fall through the international art dealer Larry Gagosian for a mere $1.5 million each.
Flaunt It!
I had become curious about the current market for big boats after spending an afternoon on one called Predator this past summer. At 238 feet, Predator is a marvel of engineering and naval architecture that seems to fly in the face of the recession. To underscore its name, it is decorated with sculptures and depictions of sharks and other predatory creatures. The owner had ripped out most of the standard staterooms to enlarge the master suite, which is now one of the largest in the world. The boat features a massive dive room, equipped with the latest scuba gear, so the owner and his guests can literally swim with the sharks.
The aggressive look is equally prevalent on the most audacious yacht afloat: the 390-foot A, created by the French architect and designer Philippe Starck for a Russian client he calls "a genius of mathematics." Starck tells me A is a monolith, an artifact from the future, a line in the sand that makes every boat that came before it obsolete. His intention was to design a yacht that was "organic, in harmony with the sea," as opposed to most super-yachts, which he feels treat the ocean with arrogance. "The fabulous gold shit," he calls them. "Just showing the money, the power of the money, the vulgarity of the money."
He was in bed, he says, where he gets most of his inspirations, when the vision for A came to him whole. He had the boat down on paper in an hour and a half, and A was launched in the summer of 2008. Is it a futuristic battleship? An ultra-modern submarine? It looks like an enormous white stiletto with what The Times of London called "a razor-sharp bow [that] will cut through Arctic ice." Its white, porthole-dotted hull rises up sleek and shiny, its sharp angles impervious to piracy and price (it cost more than $300 million to build and requires $20 million a year to maintain). According to The Wall Street Journal, there are 23,600 square feet of living space, encased in bombproof glass, with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and hidden doors that lead to sanctums such as the one referred to as "the Nookie Room." The 2,583-square-foot master suite, with its rotating bed, is accessible to a select few via a fingerprint security system. There are three pools (one whose glass bottom is visible from the disco below it), 44 security cameras, and a 35-member crew in custom-designed harem-style uniforms. With its high-speed twin 24,000-horsepower diesel engines, A is able to out-run almost anything on the high seas.
The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, the undisputed king of the super-yacht set, has four enormous boats. His newest, launched last summer, is Eclipse, the biggest yacht in the world. Though Abramovich's representatives will not reveal details, Eclipse is believed to be between 533 and 600 feet, making it at least 18 inches longer than the previous recordholder, Dubai, owned by the Sheikh of Dubai. While Abramovich reportedly lost half of his estimated $23.5 billion fortune in the 2009 collapse of the Russian steel industry, Eclipse is a stunning statement of power. Built at a cost of somewhere between $400 and $800 million, it has eight decks (two for helicopters), a 70-member crew, 11 guest cabins, a disco, a mini-submarine, and reportedly special shields that emit flashes that prevent paparazzi from getting pictures. The boat is so overwhelming that even other oligarchs marvel. "A million euros [$1.3 million] a month in maintenance," one says in praise of it.
"If you come with your own little palace, you are more welcome," explains German industrialist and shipyard owner Guido Krass, who hosts royalty and heads of state aboard his 240-foot floating mansion, Silver Zwei (he sold the first Silver to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi), on which he has traveled this year to Kuwait, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Maldives.
This new, flamboyant level of oceangoing opulence is not restricted to a couple of billionaires, I am told by a bon vivant in one of the world's most expensive luxury-goods emporiums. A banty rooster of Eastern European descent, he is wearing a blue linen suit from which protrudes a little potbelly, which he blames on weeks of lavish living at sea. He shows me on the screen of his iPhone pictures of the colossal Alfa Nero, which a multi-billionaire buddy of his had chartered at the standard rate of $1.1 million per week, not counting such running costs as the $650,000 it takes to fill up the gas tank. "I gained so much weight," he says. "It was sick!" He keeps his iPhone in my face to display scenes of life on Alfa Nero—the elegant staterooms, the large crew, the extravagant wine and food available at any time. "It was sick!" he repeats. He points out the swimming pool on the boat's stern, which can be transformed into a helicopter landing pad with the flip of a switch. Then he shows the lavish French villa his host had acquired at an astronomical price just so that he could entertain his guests between cruises.
Clearly, one league of super-yacht owners were gone. But another had swiftly taken their place, snapping up their boats (and their lifestyles) at deep discounts. The economic crisis had hit the big-boat world extremely hard, but from the tumult there had emerged a fresh species of vessel: bigger, more cutting-edge—the new new. For the new owners, it seemed that the recession had never happened. Hoping to meet a few of the proud possessors of the most expensive toys on earth, I went to Monaco and managed to go on board eight boats in eight days.
On the Good Ship Lollipop
I start in Monte Carlo, at La Belle Epoque, the 17,500-square-foot, 30-room, two-level phantasmagoria that was formerly the home of the late international banker Edmond Safra. On the morning of December 3, 1999, this extraordinary penthouse was destroyed by a fire started by his male nurse. Safra died of asphyxiation in a locked bathroom.
The Candy brothers, Nick, 37, and Christian, 36, the swinging, London-based developers and interior designers, snapped up the expansive residence and transformed it into a fancy showplace for their Candy & Candy company designs. (Two months after my visit, they would sell the penthouse to an unnamed Middle Eastern investor for $304 million.)
I find Nick Candy and his gorgeous Australian girlfriend, Holly, in the office in the penthouse, where—as in all of the Candys' residences and their London headquarters—the brothers work side by side at matching desks.
"So you were impressed by the apartment?" asks Nick, the more outspoken brother, who has wavy reddish hair and is clad in cargo shorts and a pink linen shirt.
"I am frankly speechless," I reply. "Did you get a good deal?"
"An amazing deal," he says. "I think most people were scared to touch this."
Were he and his brother spooked by the deadly fire that had raged through the place?
"No," says Nick. "We had it blessed by every religion you can have it blessed by: Roman Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, rabbi—the whole lot."
He leads me outside to the port, where in one prime slip Candyscape II, the brothers' 203-foot extravaganza in white, stands waiting with its 14-member crew and every conceivable amenity.
In the main saloon, beneath a metal installation of the planets, Nick Candy attempts to describe the whale of a boat, employing a phrase that comes up frequently in conversations with the brothers: "not only." According to a writer in Candy, the brothers' magazine, the boat is "not only a home, but a floating showcase." There's not only an elevator but a circular shaft designed to take guests on a "Jules Verne—ish thrill ride" through the ship's four levels. Not only is there a 12-person Jacuzzi, but it turns into a circular bed that rotates with the sun. Should the sun's rays become too intense, the bed automatically sprays guests with a fine mist. In the guest cabins, not only are there full-length mirrors to satisfy the greatest narcissist, but the mirrors are equipped with invisible, computerized cameras that guests can program to see what they wore the night before—and the night before that—in order to avoid embarrassing wardrobe repeats. On the sundeck, according to Candy magazine, not only is there a massive alfresco dining table that can become a daybed, "but if, say, Lily Allen or Lady Gaga suddenly feels like performing … the table can also rise up to provide a small stage, complete with the necessary sound system."
Most of all, Candyscape II is not only a yacht but a marketing tool, a model, like the Monte Carlo residence, to show off the Candy brothers' expertise in designing homes, apartments, yachts, jets, helicopters, and cars. "We are in 30 countries today, designing for clients," says Nick. "So whether it be a Kylie Minogue or Gwyneth Paltrow or any one of our billionaire clients, we are designing for their specific tastes." To show potential new clients the unlimited scope of their designs, the Candys have to create their own domains. They have to live as well as, or better than, their clients. Hence, the multiple residences, the yacht, the private jet, the soon-to-be-completed helicopter, and the fleet of Rolls-Royces and Range Rovers. The brothers have an estimated worth of $1.5 billion.
Nick pauses, as if by telepathy. "Christian's arrived," he says, and his brother, tall, thin, angular, and intense, strides into the saloon, dressed exactly like Nick. The brothers are so close they complete each other's sentences. Sons of Tony Candy, a small-ad-agency executive from Surrey, they began with a $9,000 loan from their grandmother to ride the London housing boom, developing and designing homes for the Über-rich. Then came the crash, seemingly shaking Candyland to its core. Banks went bust. Projects imploded. Their expansion into America—an eight-acre project in Beverly Hills—was imperiled when their partner, an Icelandic-owned bank, couldn't pay its share of a loan and the venture went into default. However, they cannot afford to show weakness or retreat. In the Candy universe, to retreat is to die. Candyscape II is a strong signal that they not only have survived the economic crisis but are going full steam ahead.
"We weren't really planning to buy a boat," says Christian of their first yacht, the original Candyscape, which they acquired for their company in September 2003. "We came to a yacht show together and fell in love with it." It was a 150-foot Benetti, on which they did a massive refit, including adding a mini-casino and a bathroom lined with antique Louis Vuitton suitcase leather. They felt they had to come up with the perfect name, and Nick rattles off a few they rejected: "Candy & Candy, Eye Candy, Nose Candy, Yes We Candy.… Then Alasdhair Willis, who is Stella McCartney's husband and one of our consultants, along with some of our marketing team, came up with Candyscape."
The boat was a blast, the brothers say, recalling the parties they threw on it—with performances by Bon Jovi during the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix, and guests that included Prince Albert, Uma Thurman, and Ryan Seacrest. It proved to be a magnet for business. "Big deals were signed on board," says Nick. "We bought NoHo Square [their multi-billion-dollar London apartment and commercial complex] on the back of that boat during the Monaco Grand Prix. We did that with Kaupthing Bank, which, you know, is now in administration [has been taken over by the government]." In short, the yacht worked its magic. But one yacht is never enough. "We wanted bigger and better," says Nick.
They were in the middle of construction of their new boat, a collaboration between Espen Oeino and the Candy & Candy design team, when the crisis hit. Candyscape II stood half built in an Italian shipyard. "In the construction industry, if you have something half built, it is worth nothing," says Nick. They decided to forge ahead.
Christian picks up the thread. "Every six weeks I was heading down there to keep an eye on it, to look at the detail. With a project of this size, you have to be on top of it."
Once the boat was launched, the economic crisis took an even more painful turn. "Everybody thought you could put a deposit on a boat and flip it and six weeks later make money," says Nick. "But the value of yachts has fallen off a cliff."
He looks around, taking in Candyscape II. "In the boom, you would probably get 80-million-plus euros [$104 million] for this," says Nick. "Today, you would probably get—"
"—sixty," says Christian.
Their latest deal could easily make up the shortfall. One Hyde Park, 86 luxury apartments adjacent to Harrods in London's Knightsbridge, which the Candys opened this fall in partnership with the prime minister of Qatar, is said to be the most expensive real-estate development in the history of Great Britain. The brothers told Bloomberg News that they expect to earn £550 million [$860 million] if the remaining apartments at One Hyde Park sell for their asking price. They charter Candyscape II throughout the year, for $585,000 a week. Still, Nick says, "you don't break even or make money on boats." The boat sucks up cash insatiably. "To operate a yacht like this is 2.5 million euros [$3.2 million] a year," Nick continues. "That is just straight operating costs for the crew and maintaining it, and we are not even in the super-league of the 90-to-100-meter [295-to-330-foot] yachts."
"It is very different to go on a yacht and then go back to hotel life," says Christian. "The service standards, the space for freedom, waking up on different mornings with different backdrops—you just cannot get that in a hotel."
Plus, Candyscape II is a showcase not only for the Candy & Candy brand but also for the Candy brothers themselves, offering instant access to fellow super-yacht owners, who tend to stick to their own kind. "Like-minded people go in for boats," explains Nick. "We'll be in St. Tropez, and we will go on [billionaire British retailer] Philip Green's boat, [British Thoroughbred-racing king] Michael Tabor's boat. Most of our friends have boats, so you just go from boat to boat. Obviously business comes up.
"This time of year, everybody is coming here," he continues when we are on the stern of Candyscape II, surveying the giant boats crowding Monte Carlo's harbor. "From Middle Eastern royal families to Russian oligarchs, entrepreneurs from all around the world." They are here because the South of France is a jumping-off point to the sun spots of the world. "We're one and a half hours from London, and you have Ibiza, Capri, Sardinia, Corsica, Monaco, Cannes, St. Tropez. All my friends from L.A. are here now. Sam Nazarian is on a boat. He owns all the top restaurants, bars, and clubs in Los Angeles. It is his 35th birthday on Friday night. Harvey Weinstein is here. The prime minister and the Emir of Qatar are both here. All the royal families of the Middle East are here. For these two months, this has become the center of the world, where the super-rich want to play."
Nick races off the yacht, and he and his girlfriend climb into Catch Me if You Candy, the brothers' speedboat. The next night they're going to a party at the home of David and Simon Reuben, the Bombay-born, London-based brothers who made their billions in aluminum mining in Russia. "They own a number of boats, including Siren, a very nice boat that I think my friend Simon Cowell's going to be chartering in the next couple of weeks," says Nick. "They're having a big party. I'll see whether I can get you an invite."
He does. That night, in the Reuben villa, high on a hill above St. Tropez, yacht owners (including Denise Rich, the former wife of the American tax exile Marc Rich, who is staying on her boat, Lady Joy) mix with British man-about-town Nicky Haslam, actors George Hamilton and Joan Collins, and more than 100 others. No one seems to be dwelling on the recession.
On the Bounding Main
I'm at the port of La Spezia, Italy, where a caravan of vehicles, led by a silver Maybach, speeds onto the dock. Behind the Maybach is a black Mercedes cargo truck, out of which four men in matching navy-blue Armani shirts and slacks rush and begin unloading luggage: black Armani suitcases, silver Armani shopping bags, white Armani duffel bags.
From the Maybach steps Giorgio Armani himself, having been driven two hours straight from his July ready-to-wear show in Milan. Dressed also in navy, he hurries onto the gangplank of his new, 213-foot yacht, Main, with an exterior as deep green as the sea. He greets his crew, 14 young men in white Armani shirts and shorts, then disappears into his bedroom, emerging moments later in identical white shorts and shirt.
"Andiamo, andiamo!" he says to hurry an assistant and associates waiting for him with a few last bits of business to attend to before he can sail away, with a group of longtime friends, on a two-month vacation. He signs papers and poses for a photograph. Then he strips to his waist and walks around the boat, through its stunning split-level, colorful main saloon (a departure from the regulation Armani Casa hues of black and mauve) and its sleek areas with wraparound louvered windows. Armani quickly settles into a world that moves on his whim. Up on the bridge deck, his captain awaits his orders. "Maybe Mr. Armani changes the plan," he says. They might sail for Naples, Monaco, Cannes, St. Tropez, Ibiza, or the Aeolian Islands of Sicily. It's all up to Armani.
Then the engines roar and the air fills with smoke. The crew members have changed into their sailing uniforms: shirts and shorts the color of the boat. One of them shouts out something in Italian, the dock lines are thrown off, and the big boat backs away from the dock. "Bella, bella!," Armani exclaims, sitting at a teak table on the fourth and topmost deck with his friends, laughing, dipping cookies into cappuccino, the stress falling rapidly away as Main sets sail.
Meanwhile, I am about to go super-yachting in Greece, whose colossal financial crisis could bring down the whole of Europe if it defaults on its $400 billion in loans. After a night in Athens, I fly to Corfu, which some German lawmakers have suggested be sold to help satisfy the national debt. Here, in the blue Ionian Sea, lies the ideal vessel for escaping any economic crisis, a yacht whose exterior is painted in a camouflage pattern, like the World War I battleships designed to confuse and elude enemy gunships. A 115-foot riot of design in blinding Popsicle colors, the yacht is called Guilty.
Guilty as Charged
Dakis Joannou, the Cyprus-born construction magnate who is among the world's leading collectors of contemporary art, takes me on a tour of his estate. Then we sit outside at a table in the garden, looking out at Guilty, which blazes with almost neon intensity in the morning sun. Soon the Milan-based designer Ivana Porfiri is at the table with her iPad, helping Joannou tell how they created what he has called "a totally magical object."
Once again, Guilty is the last in a yacht-lover's progression to ever bigger and better boats. "The first was a very fast 55-miles-per-hour Italian boat called Mickey Mouse," says Joannou. "The next one was called Donald Duck. We had a family conference for the name of the new boat. Everybody wanted to call it Goofy." Instead, he took the name of a work by the artist Jenny Holzer: Protect Me from What I Want. His fourth boat, a 90-footer, served Joannou's purposes: sailing around Greece's archipelago islands every weekend from March until October. But then Joannou needed "an upgrade," and he enlisted Porfiri to help him create a new boat.
What Porfiri conjured up—a swirling Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole whose interiors explode with infinity mirrors, ultra-modern furniture, and windows that change shade as the sun moves—would surely have been inventive enough. In the summer of 2007, however, the Michelangelo in Joannou's collection of contemporary artists arrived on Corfu for a visit.
"Jeff," he says, meaning Jeff Koons.
A balding, 70-year-old grandfather, Joannou is subdued to the point of being shy. He might have remained simply the rich chairman of a group of privately held building and civil-engineering companies, but in 1985 his life took an unexpected turn: he met Jeff Koons at an exhibition of his "Equilibrium" series and fell so deeply in love with the artist's work that he became a serious collector and a major patron of Koons, who is now the top-selling living artist at auction.
"He was sitting on this actual table, and I told him the plans for the boat," says Joannou. "I said, 'Do you have any ideas about the outside? Because we don't know about the color.' "
"Razzle-dazzle," Koons said almost immediately.
"What?" asked Joannou. "Razzle-dazzle" was the term used for camouflaging World War I battleships. Once Koons showed Joannou photographs of those battleships with geometrically patterned exteriors, Porfiri opened her notebook to show that she had had the identical idea, causing Joannou to exclaim, "It has to be done."
Koons went to work, applying the design and adding an image of music star Iggy Pop on the top deck. Koons suggested calling the boat Iggy, but after Joannou saw and later acquired a Sarah Morris painting that featured one word in red on a white field—GUILTY—he knew he had found the perfect name.
What emerged was a boat so extreme that it had to be wrapped in paper to guard against paparazzi as it was trucked from the Cantieri Navali Rizzardi shipyard in Sabaudia, Italy. All along the way, trees and power lines had to be cut, and bridges strengthened, to accommodate the load. Joannou and his wife, Lietta, and Porfiri took the boat on its maiden voyage, and it caused a dizzy stir in the little port of Hydra.
"Wow! What is that?," Joannou recalls people asking. "Is it a disco boat?"
In June 2008, Guilty was officially launched in Athens to the acclaim of a hundred art aficionados, including Larry Gagosian and the Italian photographer Jean Pigozzi, whose own Ettore Sottsass—designed trawler had pushed previous design limits. "And I thought my boat was crazy," Pigozzi told Joannou.
Would the same boat be built today? Guilty was a product of the height of the boom, and even Porfiri admits things are different now. "Everything was climbing up and up and—" She slams her hand on the table. "Then everything came crashing down. Today, you don't want to show anything."
"A, people don't have it," says Joannou, meaning money. "People just stopped buying yachts. And, B, even people who go on yachts don't really use them anymore, because of the cost of fuel."
The owner of arguably the most ostentatious vessel on the sea, however, has no intention of giving it up. "I am what I am," he says. "You can't really change your life completely, and I don't think people should." He pauses, then adds, "Let's stick to pleasant things."
As we sail around Corfu, it occurs to me that Guilty might be an ingenious hedge against the recession, as a piece of contemporary art whose skin—the biggest and most expensive Jeff Koons work in existence—might be worth more in the art market than in today's beleaguered yacht market. A Koons Balloon Flower sculpture sold in 2008 for $25.8 million at auction. Ivana Porfiri insists it's a boat, not a floating piece of art. But when I bring the subject up with Joannou, the magnate emerges. "Hmm, maybe yes," he admits.
Terific, with One R
The next day, a Eurocopter EC120 is sent to fly me to the tiny island of Patmos, where a beautiful shipping heiress is waiting on a boat that was inspired by Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them.
The sails of Angela Ismailos's stunning 164-foot Perini Navi sailing yacht, Baracuda, are indeed purple. Ismailos is waiting seductively on the stern, barefoot, in a flowing sundress and a gold necklace, as members of her crew of eight deliver me in her dinghy.
By noon, we are sipping champagne in her handsomely furnished saloon. My hostess lights a big cigar, turns up the volume of her favorite opera, Tosca, and, as Maria Callas's voice fills the air, tells me about her boat. The daughter of a Greek shipping executive and the wife of shipping magnate George Economou (No. 707 on the 2008 Forbes list of international billionaires), Ismailos is a fireball. She has degrees in law and political science from Athens University, and she has studied at New York University, the New York Film Academy, the Juilliard School, the Lee Strasberg Studio, and Columbia University, in New York, where she lives part-time in a Park Avenue apartment surrounded by the works of her friends Julian Schnabel, John Currin, and Francesco Clemente. Her first film, Great Directors—in which she interviews 10 filmmakers, from Bernardo Bertolucci to John Sayles—was shown last year at the Venice Film Festival. When it opened in Cannes, she had a party for 150 friends on her boat.
Angela says that when she was young she would sit in her father's office and look out at the port of Piraeus. "I used to sit there and look at all the fishing boats, cruise boats, sailing boats, and I always imagined torture, battles, and the Persians coming to attack the Parthenon and take over Athens," she says. She also had a recurring dream: "A huge sailing boat with purple sails coming to save me and my family."
When she began conceptualizing her dream boat, she and her husband came across Rupert Murdoch's 184-foot sailboat, Rosehearty, with its Christian Liaigre interiors. While they admired it, Ismailos had something quite different in mind: "a continuity of the floors and ceiling," she says, referring to the bleached teak that you see throughout the boat. She envisioned a minimalist, contemporary vessel, its walls of white parchment and lacquer, its hull covered with reflective silver. It would be one of the world's most technically superior and aesthetically stylish sailboats, as smooth as the predator whose name she would give it: Baracuda, with one r, "because I don't like two *r'*s," she says. One night in New York, at a party hosted by Calvin Klein, she met the man who would help her achieve her vision, the master of minimalism who had designed Klein's Madison Avenue flagship, the London-based architect John Pawson. She gets Pawson on the phone during my visit to extol the virtues of the boat, which, she says, definitely wasn't built with the meager proceeds from her films. "It would take James Cameron or a Jurassic Park blockbuster returns to afford to buy a sailboat like this," she says.
"When I met my husband, I told him, 'I love art, I love opera,' and he told me, 'I love shipping,' " she says. "I told him, 'I hope we don't end up like Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis.' His ambition and her talent killed their lives. But since then everything has been good. He gives me a lot of freedom."
A late lunch is served on the expansive sundeck, with its Hermès deck chairs, where Ismailos talks about her next film, a feature entitled The City of a Dead Woman, the story of a woman who re-discovers her desire to live through a complex relationship with a priest on a remote Greek island; about the time she visited the tortured Christina Onassis on Skorpios; about a party she is giving the following night on Baracuda, with guests including Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's chairman of worldwide contemporary art, VANITY FAIR contributing editor Reinaldo Herrera and his wife, the designer Carolina Herrera, and several Greek royals. She asks me to stay.
She and her boat have a hypnotic hold on me, but I have to excuse myself and fly to the South of France, where an unlikely sailor is expecting me on a dock in St. Tropez.
The Aristocraft
Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramophone Getty is the name his parents gave him, but everyone now knows him simply as Tara Getty. We are on a 1971 Riva Aquarama, and he is taking me to his boat, a storied vessel launched in 1938. The last private yacht of Sir Malcolm Campbell, the British racing hero known as "the fastest man on earth" for breaking speed records in cars and boats he named Blue Bird, it has been immaculately restored with its original fittings as well as the newest technology. "I like classic boats personally," Getty says when we are in *Blue Bird'*s main saloon, which is as elegant as a suite at Claridge's. "I always liked older things. I quite like restoring things versus building from scratch."
His circuitous route to Blue Bird is indicated by a photograph placed prominently on a table in the saloon: a 1969 Patrick Lichfield portrait of Getty's parents on the roof of the 19th-century palazzo they purchased during their honeymoon in Marrakech. The picture shows John Paul Getty II, son of the American oil baron who was once the world's richest man, in a djellaba, and Talitha Pol, the Javanese beauty who became a 1960s fashion icon, kneeling in harem pants and a flowing robe. They were introduced by Getty Sr.'s onetime assistant Claus von Bülow, who seated them next to each other at a dinner party he was hosting in London after Rudolf Nureyev, who was said to be entranced by Talitha, had canceled. Married a year later in Rome, the couple blazed a trail of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll to become emblems of the 1960s along with their friends Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. "It's a beautiful picture, and it sort of represents the wild 60s," says Getty. Yves Saint Laurent, who paid homage to Talitha in some of his designs, once described the couple as "beautiful and damned."
Tara, their only child, was born in Rome in May of 1968. When he was three, his mother died of a heroin overdose. Tara was sent to live with his father's first wife and four half-siblings in Rome. When he was five, his half-brother John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Mafia, and his right ear was delivered to an Italian newspaper with a ransom note. "Everyone left Italy, and the rest of my family went to America," Tara tells me. "I went to live with my maternal grandparents, who were living down here.
"I consider myself very lucky that I came here," he says of St. Tropez, where he and his family still live part of the year, in the house of his late maternal grandparents, the artists Willem and Poppet Pol. "They were great. They became my parents, really. I went to school for four years in Ramatuelle [a village in the hills above St. Tropez]. It's an amazing place to be brought up."
In St. Tropez, the world of boats opened up to him. His father had been born at sea, "off the coast of Italy on a cruise ship," he says. In 1988, John Paul Getty II bought film producer Robert Stigwood's antique yacht, Jezebel, and after a restoration re-christened her Talitha G, for his late wife. He and Tara had discussed crossing the Atlantic together in Talitha G, but he died in 2003.
The son John Paul and Talitha Getty left behind is an unpretentious, gentle man, tanned and bearded. He spends half his time in South Africa, where he and his wife, Jessica, run a game reserve in Zululand. But it is here, on the sea, that he feels most alive. His résumé is rife with private schools in England and time spent in the family businesses, but through it all runs a series of boats, gradually growing in size and range, that led him to Blue Bird. "He's a serial boat buyer," says his broker, Nick Edmiston, who helped Tara locate Blue Bird, which was in a sorry state in a Rotterdam shipyard.
As Getty proudly gives me a tour of the boat, he talks about its restoration and both the freedom of being on the sea and the danger. Once, when he was sailing with a friend in the Gulf Stream off the Florida coast, the waters were so rough that the ship actually broke up around them, and the Coast Guard had to rescue them. No chance of that happening on Blue Bird, which was stripped down to its studs and rebuilt piece by piece by G. L. Watson, of Liverpool. The interiors were done by the pre-eminent firm of Bannenberg and Rowell Design, run by Dickie Bannenberg and Simon Rowell, in London.
It is tempting to view Getty and Blue Bird as part of the new strain of super-yachts, beyond the reach of the global recession. But, for him, a yacht is not something to show; it's a way of life, stretching back to the glory days of his parents. "So many come into yachting because they made a fortune; Tara came into it because he was a kid who grew up on the beach," says Edmiston.
The other end of the spectrum plays out on the dock in Monte Carlo. I'm standing with my luggage in front of the Port Palace hotel, which overlooks the marina, at the end of my eight-day adventure. On the decks of a moored yacht there is a commotion, made by white-clad crew members as they line up in formation to bid a charter guest farewell. A short Eastern European, trailed by his family, emerges to the cooing of the crew. The scene attracts a gaggle of onlookers, who quickly approach the boat with their cameras. The man ambles down the gangplank in blue velvet house slippers and heads for a white Rolls-Royce Phantom standing nearby. He and his family climb inside, but the rowdy horde of young men and women surround the sedan, and one girl places her grimy hands on the hood and leans against the car to pose for a picture. "How rude!" screams a crew member as the Rolls speeds away. Then the crew scurries back to the boat to get it ready for the next guests, due to arrive within hours—the number of yacht charters rose sharply last summer, after recovering from a drop the year before.
Speaking of the future of yachts, Guido Krass, the German industrialist, tells me, "The Americans have been quiet, but the Asians are going for these 100-meter [328-foot] monsters. You have people from India and mainland China now talking about yachts. Russia is coming back, and the Middle East is booming. Despite the economic crisis, the average size of big boats has outgrown all expectations." This fall's new arrivals include Orca, New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov's futuristic 315-foot vision; Serene, a 439-foot Espen Oeino marvel, complete with a Snow Room (where guests can cool off in a simulated blizzard) and an outdoor cinema (two drive-in-style screens rise up from the deck); and Pacific, a 278-foot giant with, according to the designer Dickie Bannenberg, "elements of Nepal, Japan, Polynesia, South America, and the movie Minority Report thrown in."
In spite of the global economic meltdown, the world of the super-yachts sails on.


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San Francisco's Golden Gate Park has long featured a herd of bison in their own fenced-in paddock.
Apparently Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Yammer CEO David Sacks are fans. They and their spouses have donated to support the animals, Bloomberg's Mark Milian reports.
In September, Financial Times reporter Tim Bradshaw noticed a sign recognizing the financial support of Mayer and her husband, tech investor Zack Bogue.
Bradshaw tells us he later saw the sign a bit worse for wear, having "taken a beating."
Weird. Who dislikes bison?
The San Francisco Parks Alliance, a nonprofit which helps support the city's parks, recognized Mayer and Bogue as a "First Family" and David and Jacqueline Sacks as "Park Heroes."
The "First Family" level requires a donation of at least $20,000, while $2,500 or more gets "Park Hero" status.
We also noticed that Yahoo executive Adam Cahan, who was recently promoted to be Yahoo's senior vice president of mobile and emerging products as a key member of Mayer's team, attended a Party for the Parks event in September.

subset: commoncrawl


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I read your editorial every Christmas Eve with great pleasure and many memories of Virginia O'Hanlon and my childhood in New York City.
I knew her as a teacher and then principal of my elementary school in Manhattan during the Depression years.
One of my classmates told me all about her. She was a kind, likable person and a wonderful teacher. I was indeed fortunate to have known her.


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Ten years later, the imprint of Virginia Tech's landmark football season remains — from the luxury suites at Lane Stadium, to the admissions office at Burruss Hall, to the headquarters of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
But let's start at a Blacksburg grocery store.
Seem like an odd place to reflect upon the 1999 Hokies' charge to the national-championship game? Associate head coach Billy Hite certainly thinks so.
Earlier this summer, Hite wandered into the Kroger on Main Street for what he imagined would be a quick trip through the express line. More than 30 minutes later, he emerged amused and amazed.
The cause of Hite's delay was fans intent on discussing Tech's prospects — the Hokies are No. 7 in the preseason Associated Press poll — for making this season's title contest, in Pasadena, Calif.
Hite traces the current chatter back to '99, when Frank Beamer's program barged its way into college football's elite.
"It's raised the expectations so high," Hite said. "I can remember my wife telling Coach Beamer, 'You screwed up by going undefeated because now they're going to expect it every year.'
"And damn if they don't. … All people are talking about is Pasadena. I'm thinking, 'Let me get a vacation in here first before you start talking about it.' "
Ten years ago, the buzz was New Orleans.
Led by the electric Michael Vick at quarterback and relentless Corey Moore at defensive end, the '99 Hokies authored Tech's first unblemished regular season since 1918. Dominant in all phases, they are the only team of the last 15 years to lead the nation in scoring offense and scoring defense.
But Florida State, then a full-fledged dynasty, defeated Virginia Tech 46-29 in the title game at the Louisiana Superdome.
The Hokies have not returned to the championship contest — they were close in 2000 and 2007 — but with exponentially more television revenue, an upgraded stadium and 16 consecutive bowl seasons, they are positioned to contend in 2009, and beyond.
"With the success Virginia Tech's had, plus the facilities they've built, now they're getting a really different level of talent," said former Miami coach Larry Coker, now heading Texas-San Antonio's start-up program. "I think sometimes earlier in Frank's career they were doing it somewhat with smoke and mirrors."
The Hokies advertise their ambitions in their Hall of Legends.
"This area is reserved for the national championship trophy," reads the large maroon sign inside an otherwise vacant glass case.
"I don't think there's any question that Virginia Tech can return to the game," athletic director Jim Weaver said. "I don't think there's any question that Virginia Tech can win a national championship. We've tried to do everything we can to continue to prepare us for that opportunity, to continue to stay abreast of our competition. …
"There is no doubt in my mind that at some point Virginia Tech will win a national championship. I don't know if I'll be here or not. I don't know if Frank Beamer will be the coach, but the tradition in my opinion has been established."
Weaver, Beamer, assistant coaches and many Hokies faithful recite the numbers from memory.
Only Florida and Florida State have longer bowl streaks. Only Ohio State and Florida have won more games since 1995. Only Virginia Tech, Texas and Southern California have won at least 10 games each of the last five seasons.
Flattering company, no doubt, with one glaring difference. Each of the other five has won multiple national titles.
"You're up there and you knock on the door, you can knock it down one of these days," said Beamer, entering his 23rd season as the Hokies' coach.
Virginia Tech first knocked, albeit timidly, in 1995 and '96, when Big East championship seasons concluded, respectively, with a Sugar Bowl victory over Texas and an Orange Bowl loss to Nebraska. But in both years, the Hokies lost in September and never cracked the top five.
Everything changed in 1999. Or, was it Dec. 30, 1998?
On that frigid evening in Nashville, Tenn., Tech concluded a 9-3 season with a 38-7 thumping of Alabama at the Music City Bowl. Following the game, then-Crimson Tide coach Mike DuBose said his program was striving to reach the Hokies' level.
Alabama, the program of Bear Bryant, Joe Namath and Ken Stabler, looking up to Virginia Tech? It did not compute.
"I took it the same way," Beamer said. "When I grew up, Alabama, that was as good as it gets. They were a step down (in '98), but I thought that was a fantastic compliment to our program."
The Hokies began 1999 ranked 13th by the AP. Opening victories over James Madison and Alabama Birmingham impressed few, though one pollster, Jack Ebling of the Lansing State Journal in Michigan, created a stir by voting Tech No. 1 in mid-September.
Ebling's lone-wolf notion gained credence as the season progressed. The Hokies smothered Clemson in prime-time, dusted Virginia and Rutgers on the road and vaulted to No. 4, the highest ranking in school history.
Next up: No. 16 Syracuse.
Blacksburg crackled. ESPN's College GameDay crew parachuted in, and seven hours before kickoff, more than 10,000 fans mobbed the set.
Tech was flawless. The Hokies forced five turnovers, committed none and scored two defensive touchdowns.
The stunning final was 62-0, the most-lopsided shutout ever administered to a ranked team.
"I'm sold," Tech receiver Ricky Hall said afterward. "I'm pretty sure we can go out there and play with anybody."
Three weeks later, at West Virginia, the Hokies trailed for the first time all season.
Rallying from a 12-point, fourth-quarter deficit, the Mountaineers grabbed a 20-19 lead with 1:15 remaining.
"All of a sudden," Weaver said, "we're fighting for our life."
But with no timeouts, Vick engineered a 58-yard drive that ended with Shayne Graham's 44-yard field goal at the gun.
The Hokies were 8-0 for the first time since 1905.
"Boy, going undefeated, that was hard," said Rickey Bustle, then Tech's offensive coordinator and now Louisiana-Lafayette's head coach. "It was a great thing, and as you went through it and the snowball kept getting bigger and bigger, you realize that there's possibilities.
"You go through those years when you're 2-9 or 3-8, and those are tough years. But it was tough going 11-0 that year. The pressure kept mounting, for the kids and coaches, and after a while you start saying, 'Can we do this?' "
After West Virginia, the answer was an emphatic "yes," as Tech pounded Miami, Temple and Boston College by a combined 112 points. Then came New Orleans. Lots of New Orleans.
The second-ranked Hokies arrived Dec. 27 for the Jan. 4 Sugar Bowl. Primed to ring in Y2K and celebrate Tech's first championship appearance, fans weren't far behind.
And even for a city built on debauchery, the maroon-and-orange bunch was unique, as senior associate athletic director Sharon McCloskey warned management at Tech's hotel, the Hilton Riverside.
"I told her: 'Now this crowd, they'll drink some beer. Make sure you're stocked up,' " McCloskey said. "She said, 'This is New Orleans, we're used to this.' They ran out in three days."
The vibe surrounding Florida State was radically different. Unbeaten and No. 1, the Seminoles were playing in their second consecutive title game and were among the nation's top-four teams for the 13th straight year.
Facing a top-10 opponent for the first time all season, Tech disregarded pedigree. The Hokies led 29-28 after three quarters.
But Tech faded fast as Florida State won the fourth quarter 18-zip.
A few days after the defeat, Hite heard from an old college friend living in Iowa. He called to tell Hite of the four cars he'd just seen with Virginia Tech stickers.
"I thought to myself, this place really is something now," Hite said.
The national media coverage — "you couldn't get enough money together to pay for it," McCloskey said — rippled across the campus.
Applications for admission increased, in quantity and quality. Donations to athletics and academics soared.
"The impact of a successful football program wasn't just that one year and the national-championship game," said then-university president Paul Torgersen. "It was a cumulative sort of thing. … It impacted parents and high school youngsters knowing about Virginia Tech, and I'm sure it (affected) our admissions. … Now I'd like to think the reputation of the university is significant, too.
"We've seen a gradual rise in college-board scores and high school grades of applicants, and that goes back at least maybe two decades. Each year seems to be just a little better than the year before. It's hard to reach into the mix and attribute to specific elements such as architecture, engineering or athletics, but we'll take it any way we can."
During the 1999 football season, Virginia Tech was concluding a campus-wide capital campaign. The goal was $250 million.
"We raised $330 million," Torgersen said.
Meanwhile, Hokie Club donations increased from $6.4 million in fiscal 1998 to $10.02 million in fiscal 2000, said Lu Merritt, the athletic department's director of development.
Virginia Tech has since transformed 45-year-old Lane Stadium from a cookie-cutter slab into a contemporary arena. The enhancements, including 43 suites, added more than 11,000 seats and goosed capacity to 66,233.
The stadium projects cost about $79 million, and a $17 million support complex (locker room, weight room, offices, meeting areas) is under construction.
But football's most enduring legacy is ACC membership. Absent the national splashes of 1995, '96 and '99, the Hokies' inclusion in the conference's football-driven expansion of 2003 would have been laughable.
Whether 1999 specifically was a tipping point is impossible to determine, but as Torgersen said, "It sure didn't hurt."
Bolting the Big East for the ACC eased travel demands for all sports and more than quadrupled annual television revenue from about $2.5 million to more than $12 million.
In fiscal 2003-04, its final year in the Big East, Virginia Tech reported $38.9 million in athletics revenue to the U.S. Department of Education. In 2007-08, the school reported $56 million.
"There's a wonderful cascading effect of a successful football team, at least at Virginia Tech," said Torgersen, who retired in 2000.
Beamer's program has taken full advantage of ACC membership, winning three conference championships in five years, including the last two. But many will view anything less in 2009 as unacceptable, the season-ending knee injury to incumbent tailback Darren Evans notwithstanding.
Such expectations were in full bloom last season, when the Hokies lost four regular-season games before closing strong and defeating Cincinnati in the Orange Bowl.
"You talk about going through a tough year," Hite said. "You're winning 10 games and winning a championship again and the crap that we took as coaches and players? Something's not right with that picture. …
"I think it's the new group that's become Hokies. I think the people who have been through the good times and the lean times, I don't think it's those people."
Beamer recalls the lean times all too well. Losing 17 of his first 22 games as coach. Getting skunked by 35 points at Syracuse and 38 at Virginia. Wondering about his job.
"I understand it," Beamer said, "but every loss now is such a critical loss. And it's a compliment I think to your program because people have such high expectations, and you want it that way.
"But I can remember when I first started here, and you lost, 'Well, we just weren't good enough to beat them.' Now you feel like your talent level is good enough to beat most people, so when you lose, it's so critical. … When you lose one you shouldn't have lost, it just wears you out."
Veteran assistant coach Bryan Stinespring recalls 1993, when he and Hokies faithful were thrilled to beat Indiana in the Independence Bowl. Those wide-eyed days are gone, evidenced by the Dec. 6, 1999, edition of Sports Illustrated in Stinespring's office.
"They Belong!" screams the main headline, superimposed over a photograph of receiver Andre Davis.
"Why Virginia Tech Deserves a Shot at The National Title," echoes the subhead.
The memories still make Stinespring's voice catch. Graham's kick. Vick's runs. The regular-season finale against Boston College.
Stinespring rocked his chair back and clasped his hands behind his head.
"When you've played on that stage, when you've had a taste, when you've played for the national championship, it's a part of you," he said. "It stays with you forever."


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Discussion in 'Server Operation' started by botnet, Jun 18, 2012.
Please give a tutorial to install latest mysql and php in centos 6.2 32bit i686. Thanks.
small bump...
yum install mysql mysql-server httpd php
yum install mysql mysql-server httpd php
That will only install the present old package. But I need the newest one. Thanks.
replace install with update
yum update mysql mysql-server
yum update mysql mysql-server
Thanks, Will try...
Separate names with a comma.


text:
Separating Fact from Fiction: Remaining Vigilant in the War against Misinformation
Presenter: Laura Sheets, Volunteer State Community College
Interview Tips and Tricks from Both Sides of the Desk
Martha Earl, Preston Medical Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Meredith Goins, Oak Ridge Associated Universities
Susan Earl, John P. Holt Brentwood Library
Worried what your interviewer is going to spring on you? Perplexed as how to weed the wheat from the chaff among your applicants? Wondering how you can employ technology to strengthen your chances of getting the job you want or the librarian with the skills to take your team to the next level? Need some insight and discussion on taking your search to the next level?
Free Educator Tech Tools
slides audio
Play it Again Sam
Many of us are looking for ways to put life into our instruction sessions. This presentation will give us great ways to engage our students and keep our presentations from being the "same old, same old."
Eureka Handout
SU Venture Catalyst, the startup unit of Arizona State University, along with the Scottsdale Public Library system, have started a new initiative for helping inventors, problem-solvers, social enterprises, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. The new Alexandria Network is designed to provide support for the innovation economy within designated public libraries. The Eureka Loft opened in mid-May in the Scottsdale Public Library and offers co-working spaces, mentorship, advice, and access to some "pracademic" classes both online and in the library. Speakers Jim Cook from ASU and Michael Beck from the Scottsdale Public Library will share information on the program start up and community feedback.
Everyone is a Leader
Presented by Ruth Kinnersley and Dolores Greenwald.
The Latest and Greatest in TEL
Wendy Cornelisen gives a tour of new and improved features of the Tennessee Electronic Library. Particularly featured databases are PowerSpeak (a languages database) and Learning Express Library (a testing and skills database).
Circulating Ideas: Creating a Personal Learning Network for Librarians
The field of librarianship is evolving at a rapidly-increasing pace, making it more important than ever to keep up with new ideas and trends. A Personal Learning Network (PLN) is one of the best ways to stay on top of new developments. Join Steve Thomas, assistant branch manager at Gwinnett County Public Library, as he talks about what a PLN is and explores ways you can create and curate your own PLN to increase your professional knowledge base and connect with your peers.
Adopting New Technologies for Reference Services
PowerPoint Slides
Are you finding that your patrons are asking for assistance with digital devices, downloading ebooks, and posting pictures to Facebook? Let's take a look at how libraries are incorporating some of the new technologies into Reference Services and meeting the digital needs of their patrons.
Instructor Jeffie Nicholson is the Adult Services Manager at the Williamson County Public Library in Franklin Tennessee and one of the two Social Media Managers for the Tennessee Library Association.
Embrace The Dark Side: Using Wikipedia to Teach Information Literacy
PowerPoint Slides
E-Readers 101: A Buying Guide
Libraries and Economic Development
Future of Libraries with Sarah Houghton-Jan
Cataloging Demystified
Generation Now! Surviving and Thriving with Four Generations in the Workplace
51 and a Half Things to Do with Google
This video was interrupted and so it is offered in two parts. The video files are available in wmv format and must be downloaded to view. If you have never used GoToMeeting, you will have to download the GoToMeeting Codec to be able to view the video.To download the codec, go to: http://www.gotomeeting.com/codec.
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Information Overload
Conflict Resolution: Dealing with Difficult People
Everyday Early Literacy
Remember Me
6/14/2019TLA Advisory Council/Executive Board: Williamson County Public Library
9/13/2019TLA Advisory Council/Executive Board: Hermitage Branch Library
8/30/2017TLA Statement on Events in Tennessee and Virginia, August 2017
2/2/2017Visit the TLA Store
P.O. Box 241074 Memphis, TN 38124-1074 p. 901.485.6952 firstname.lastname@example.com


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Let's go Surfing! Have Beach Parties! and Meet Fun People! Everyone, of all levels, are welcome to join! This group supports and encourages surfers at all levels.
A headshot profile photo is required to join this group. The photo must show your face. No distant or obscured photos are allowed. This will help us to recognize you at our events and foster a safe and open feeling to the group. After your profile is completed, it will be approved. Members with no profile photo will be removed. Profiles must represent a real person, not an alias, organization or company.
All types of surfing are welcome! Longboard, Shortboard, Stand Up Paddle SUP, Kayak, Kiteboard, Wakeboard, Windsurf, etc.
Surfing is a potentially dangerous sport, with real risks of injury. By joining this group and events you hereby agree to assume all risks and liability related to or resulting from any group functions. You agree that neither you or any third party will hold the Organizer and Asst Organizers liable for any injury, loss, or damage to your own person or any members of your family, friends, children, pets, or property, arising directly or as a consequence from a group activity. You also agree that your participation of this event is based on an "at will" basis.
Have Fun, Be Safe! Know your own limitations.
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I started on May 9th, so a little tad bit over 2 weeks ago. I set my first mini goal at 10 pounds, you know, because it's a nice round number.
The last few days have been utter frustration because I've been bouncing around with that last 2.2lbs up a bit, down a bit, but never breaking through to my 10lb loss goal. Today I got up, weighed myself, and TADA! 171.5 lbs. I did it! 10lbs down from my start date!
I am following the Curves diet plan, which I know works wonders as I've done it before, and exercising with my Wii fit, and DDR. (So much fun!...Even though I stink at it! Hehe) 30 min a day almost every day.
So YAY for me! 10lbs down, still about 20 more to go though. Whew, that seems large, but I can do it if I just remember not to get frustrated and do something dumb like binge on bad foods.
Gary H is right when he says in his Curves book that you really start to notice the weight gain when you reach "critical mass" AKA 30lbs of weight gain. That is exactly when I got super uncomfortable and motivated to stop my destructive behavior.


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Oracle bone
|Oracle bone
A Shang dynasty oracle bone from the Shanghai Museum
|Literal meaning
|Shells and bones
Oracle bones (Chinese: 甲骨; pinyin: jiǎgǔ) are pieces of ox scapula or turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty. Scapulimancy is the correct term if ox scapulae were used for the divination; plastromancy if turtle plastrons were used.
Diviners would submit questions to deities regarding future weather, crop planting, the fortunes of members of the royal family, military endeavors, and other similar topics.[1] These questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion. The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks and write the prognostication upon the piece as well.[1] By the Zhou dynasty, cinnabar ink and brush had become the preferred writing method, resulting in fewer carved inscriptions and often blank oracle bones being unearthed.
The oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing[lower-alpha 1] and contain important historical information such as the complete royal genealogy of the Shang dynasty.[lower-alpha 2] When they were discovered and deciphered in the early twentieth century, these records confirmed the existence of the Shang, which some scholars had until then doubted.
The Shang-dynasty oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed periodically by local farmers[2] since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties and perhaps starting as early as the Han dynasty,[3] but local inhabitants did not realize what the bones were and generally reburied them.[4] During the 19th century, villagers in the area digging in the fields discovered a number of bones and used them as "dragon bones" (Chinese: 龍骨; pinyin: lóng gǔ), a reference to the traditional Chinese medicine practice of grinding up Pleistocene fossils into tonics or poultices.[4][5] The turtle shell fragments were prescribed for malaria,[lower-alpha 3] while the other animal bones were used in powdered form to treat knife wounds.[6]
In 1899, an antiques dealer from Shandong Province searching for Chinese bronzes in the area acquired a number of oracle bones from locals, several of which he sold to Wang Yirong, the chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing.[7] Wang was a knowledgeable collector of Chinese bronzes and is believed to be the first person in modern times to recognize the oracle bones' markings as ancient Chinese writing similar to that on Zhou dynasty bronzes.[7] A legendary tale relates that Wang was sick with malaria, and his scholar friend Liu E was visiting him and helped examine his medicine. They discovered, before it was ground into powder, that it bore strange glyphs, which they, having studied the ancient bronze inscriptions, recognized as ancient writing.[6] As Xǔ Yǎhuì states:
- "No one can know how many oracle bones, prior to 1899, were ground up by traditional Chinese pharmacies and disappeared into peoples' stomachs."[6]
It is not known how Wang and Liu actually came across these "dragon bones", but Wang is credited with being the first to recognize their significance.[6] Wang committed suicide in 1900 in connection with his involvement in the Boxer Rebellion, and his son later sold the bones to friend Liu E, who published the first book of rubbings of the oracle bone inscriptions in 1903.[7][8] News of the discovery of the oracle bones spread quickly throughout China and among foreign collectors and scholars, and the market for oracle bones exploded, though many collectors sought to keep the location of the bones' source a secret.[7] Although scholars tried to find their source, antique dealers falsely claimed that the bones came from Tangyin in Henan.[6] In 1908, scholar Luo Zhenyu discovered the source of the bones near Anyang and realized that the area was the site of the last Shang dynasty capital.[7] Decades of uncontrolled digs followed to fuel the antiques trade,[lower-alpha 4] and many of these pieces eventually entered collections in Europe, the US, Canada and Japan.[9] The first Western collector was the American Rev. Frank H. Chalfant,[lower-alpha 5] while Presbyterian minister James Mellon Menzies (明義士) (1885–1957) of Canada bought the largest amount.[10] The Chinese still acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Menzies as "the foremost western scholar of Yin-Shang culture and oracle bone inscriptions." His former residence in Anyang was declared a "Protected Treasure" in 2004, and the James Mellon Menzies Memorial Museum for Oracle Bone Studies was established.[11][12][13]
Official excavations
By the time of the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology headed by Fu Sinian at the Academia Sinica in 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiǎotún (小屯) village at Anyang in Henan Province. Official archaeological excavations in 1928–1937 led by Li Ji, the father of Chinese archaeology,[14] discovered 20,000 oracle bone pieces, which now form the bulk of the Academia Sinica's collection in Taiwan and constitute about 1/5 of the total discovered.[lower-alpha 6] The inscriptions on the oracle bones, once deciphered, turned out to be the records of the divinations performed for or by the royal household. These, together with royal-sized tombs,[lower-alpha 7] proved beyond a doubt for the first time the existence of the Shang dynasty, which had recently been doubted, and the location of its last capital, Yin. Today, Xiǎotún at Anyang is thus also known as the Ruins of Yin, or Yinxu.
The Jiǎgǔwén héjí (甲骨文合集) edited by Hu Houxuan, with its supplement edited by Peng Bangjiong, is the most comprehensive catalogue of oracle bone framents. The 20 volumes contain reproductions of over 55,000 fragments. A separate work contains transcriptions of the inscriptions into standard characters.[15]
The vast majority of the inscribed oracle bones were found at Yin (modern Anyang), and date to the reigns of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty (c. 1200–1045 BCE).[16] The diviners named on the bones have been assigned to five periods by Dong Zuobin:[17]
|Common diviners
|Wu Ding[lower-alpha 8]
|Què 㱿, Bīn 賓, Zhēng 爭, Xuān 宣
|Zu Geng, Zu Jia
|Dà 大, Lǚ 旅, Xíng 行, Jí 即, Yǐn 尹, Chū 出
|Lin Xin, Kang Ding
|Hé 何
|Wu Yi, Wen Wu Ding
|Di Yi, Di Xin
The kings were involved in divination in all periods, but in later periods most divinations were done personally by the king.[18] The extant inscriptions are not evenly distributed across these periods, with 55% coming from period I and 31% from periods III and IV.[19] A few oracle bones date to the beginning of the subsequent Zhou dynasty.
Shang divination
Since divination (-mancy) was by heat or fire (pyro-) and most often on plastrons or scapulae, the terms pyromancy, plastromancy[lower-alpha 9] and scapulimancy are often used for this process.
The oracle bones are mostly tortoise plastrons (ventral or belly shells, probably female[lower-alpha 10]) and ox scapulae (shoulder blades), although some are the carapace (dorsal or back shells) of tortoises, and a few are ox rib bones,[lower-alpha 11] scapulae of sheep, boars, horses and deer, and some other animal bones.[lower-alpha 12] The skulls of deer, oxen and humans have also been found with inscriptions on them,[lower-alpha 13] although these are very rare and appear to have been inscribed for record keeping or practice rather than for actual divination;[lower-alpha 14] in one case, inscribed deer antlers were reported, but Keightley (1978) reports that they are fake.[lower-alpha 15] Neolithic diviners in China had long been heating the bones of deer, sheep, pigs and cattle for similar purposes; evidence for this in Liaoning has been found dating to the late fourth millennium BCE.[20] However, over time, the use of ox bones increased, and use of tortoise shells does not appear until early Shang culture. The earliest tortoise shells found that had been prepared for divinatory use (i.e., with chiseled pits) date to the earliest Shang stratum at Erligang (Zhengzhou, Henan).[21] By the end of the Erligang, the plastrons were numerous,[22] and at Anyang, scapulae and plastrons were used in roughly equal numbers.[23] Due to the use of these shells in addition to bones, early references to the oracle bone script often used the term "shell and bone script", but since tortoise shells are actually a bony material, the more concise term "oracle bones" is applied to them as well.
The bones or shells were first sourced and then prepared for use. Their sourcing is significant because some of them (especially many of the shells) are believed to have been presented as tribute to the Shang, which is valuable information about diplomatic relations of the time. We know this because notations were often made on them recording their provenance (e.g., tribute of how many shells from where and on what date). For example, one notation records that "Què (雀) sent 250 (tortoise shells)", identifying this as, perhaps, a statelet within the Shang sphere of influence.[24] These notations were generally made on the back of the shell's bridge (called bridge notations), the lower carapace, or the xiphiplastron (tail edge). Some shells may have been from locally raised tortoises, however.[lower-alpha 16] Scapula notations were near the socket or a lower edge. Some of these notations were not carved after being written with a brush, proving (along with other evidence) the use of the writing brush in Shang times. Scapulae are assumed to have generally come from the Shang's own livestock, perhaps those used in ritual sacrifice, although there are records of cattle sent as tribute as well, including some recorded via marginal notations.[25]
The bones or shells were cleaned of meat and then prepared by sawing, scraping, smoothing and even polishing to create convenient, flat surfaces.[lower-alpha 17][lower-alpha 18] The predominance of scapulae and later of plastrons is also thought to be related to their convenience as large, flat surfaces needing minimal preparation. There is also speculation that only female tortoise shells were used, as these are significantly less concave.[26] Pits or hollows were then drilled or chiseled partway through the bone or shell in orderly series. At least one such drill has been unearthed at Erligang, exactly matching the pits in size and shape.[27] The shape of these pits evolved over time and is an important indicator for dating the oracle bones within various sub-periods in the Shang dynasty. The shape and depth also helped determine the nature of the crack that would appear. The number of pits per bone or shell varied widely.
Cracking and interpretation
Divinations were typically carried out for the Shang kings in the presence of a diviner. A very few oracle bones were used in divination by other members of the royal family or nobles close to the king. By the latest periods, the Shang kings took over the role of diviner personally.[28]
During a divination session, the shell or bone was anointed with blood,[29] and in an inscription section called the "preface", the date was recorded using the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, and the diviner name was noted. Next, the topic of divination (called the "charge") was posed,[lower-alpha 19] such as whether a particular ancestor was causing a king's toothache. The divination charges were often directed at ancestors, whom the ancient Chinese revered and worshiped, as well as natural powers and Dì (帝), the highest god in the Shang society. A wide variety of topics were asked, essentially anything of concern to the royal house of Shang, from illness, birth and death, to weather,[30] warfare, agriculture, tribute and so on. One of the most common topics was whether performing rituals in a certain manner would be satisfactory.[lower-alpha 20]
An intense heat source[lower-alpha 21] was then inserted in a pit until it cracked. Due to the shape of the pit, the front side of the bone cracked in a rough 卜 shape. The character 卜 (pinyin: bǔ or pǔ; Old Chinese: *puk; "to divine") may be a pictogram of such a crack; the reading of the character may also be an onomatopoeia for the cracking. A number of cracks were typically made in one session, sometimes on more than one bone, and these were typically numbered. The diviner in charge of the ceremony read the cracks to learn the answer to the divination. How exactly the cracks were interpreted is not known. The topic of divination was raised multiple times, and often in different ways, such as in the negative, or by changing the date being divined about. One oracle bone might be used for one session or for many,[lower-alpha 22] and one session could be recorded on a number of bones. The divined answer was sometimes then marked either "auspicious" or "inauspicious", and the king occasionally added a "prognostication", his reading on the nature of the omen.[31] On very rare occasions, the actual outcome was later added to the bone in what is known as a "verification".[31] A complete record of all the above elements is rare; most bones contain just the date, diviner and topic of divination,[31] and many remained uninscribed after the divination.[32]
The uninscribed divination is thought to have been brush-written with ink or cinnabar on the oracle bones or accompanying documents, as a few of the oracle bones found still bear their brush-written divinations without carving,[lower-alpha 23] while some have been found partially carved. After use, shells and bones used ritually were buried in separate pits (some for shells only; others for scapulae only),[lower-alpha 24] in groups of up to hundreds or even thousands (one pit unearthed in 1936 contained over 17,000 pieces along with a human skeleton).[33]
Oracle bones at other sites
A few inscribed oracle bones have been unearthed in the Zhōuyuán, the original political center of the Zhou in Shaanxi, in Zhengzhou, Henan, and in Daxinzhuang, Jinan, Shandong. Some bones from the Zhouyuan are believed to be contemporaneous with the reign of Di Xin, the last Shang king.[34]
Four inscribed bones have been found at Zhengzhou: three with numbers 310, 311 and 312 in the Hebu corpus, and one containing a single character. HB 310, which contained two brief divinations, has been lost, but is recorded in a rubbing and two photographs. HB 311 and 312 each contain a short sentence. HB 312 was found in an upper layer of the Erligang culture. The rest were found accidentally in river management earthworks, and so lack archaeological context. Pei Mingxiang argued that they predated the Anyang site. Takashima, referring to character forms and syntax, argues that they were contemporaneous with the reign of Wu Ding.[35]
Archaeological evidence of pre-Anyang pyromancy
While the use of bones in divination has been practiced almost globally, such divination involving fire or heat has generally been found in Asia and the Asian-derived North American cultures.[36] The use of heat to crack scapulae (pyro-scapulimancy) originated in ancient China, the earliest evidence of which extends back to the 4th millennium BCE, with archaeological finds from Liaoning, but these were not inscribed.[37] In Neolithic China at a variety of sites, the scapulae of cattle, sheep, pigs and deer used in pyromancy have been found,[38] and the practice appears to have become quite common by the end of the third millennium BCE. Scapulae were unearthed along with smaller numbers of pitless plastrons in the Nánguānwài (南關外) stage at Zhengzhou, Henan; scapulae as well as smaller numbers of plastrons with chiseled pits were also discovered in the Lower and Upper Erligang stages.[39]
Significant use of tortoise plastrons does not appear until the Shang culture sites.[40] Ox scapulae and plastrons, both prepared for divination, were found at the Shang culture sites of Táixīcūn (台西村) in Hebei and Qiūwān (丘灣) in Jiangsu.[41] One or more pitted scapulae were found at Lùsìcūn (鹿寺村) in Henan, while unpitted scapulae have been found at Erlitou in Henan, Cíxiàn (磁縣) in Hebei, Níngchéng (寧城) in Liaoning, and Qíjiā (齊家) in Gansu.[42] Plastrons do not become more numerous than scapulae until the Rénmín (人民) Park phase.[43]
As for pyromantic shells or bones with inscriptions, the earliest date back to the site of Erligang in Zhengzhou, Henan, where burned scapulae of oxen, sheep and pigs were found and one bone fragment from a pre-Shang layer was inscribed with a graph (ㄓ) corresponding to Shang oracle bone script. Another piece found at the site bears ten or more characters that are similar to the Shang script but different in their pattern of use, and it is not clear what layer the piece came from.[44]
Post-Shang oracle bones
After the founding of Zhou, the Shang practices of bronze casting, pyromancy and writing continued. Oracle bones found in the 1970s have been dated to the Zhou dynasty, with some dating to the Spring and Autumn period. However, very few of those were inscribed. It is thought that other methods of divination supplanted pyromancy, such as numerological divination using milfoil (yarrow) in connection with the hexagrams of the I Ching, leading to the decline in inscribed oracle bones. However, evidence for the continued use of plastromancy exists for the Eastern Zhou, Han, Tang[45] and Qing[46] dynasty periods, and Keightley (1978, p. 9) mentions use in Taiwan as late as 1972.[47]
- ↑ A tiny number of isolated mid to late Shang pottery, bone and bronze inscriptions may predate the oracle bones. However, the oracle bones are considered the earliest significant body of writing, due to the length of the inscriptions, the vast amount of vocabulary (very roughly 4000 graphs), and the sheer quantity of pieces found – at least 100,000 pieces (Qiu 2000, p. 61; Keightley 1978, p.xiii) bearing millions (Qiu 2000, p. 49) of characters, and around 5,000 different characters (Qiu 2000, p.49), forming a full working vocabulary (Qiu 2000, p. 50 cites various statistical studies before concluding that "the number of Chinese characters in general use is around five to six thousand"). It should be noted that there are also inscribed or brush-written Neolithic signs in China, but they do not generally occur in strings of signs resembling writing; rather, they generally occur singly and whether or not these constitute writing or are ancestral to the Shang writing system is currently a matter of great academic controversy. They are also insignificant in number compared to the massive amounts of oracle bones found so far. See Qiú 2000, Boltz 2003, and Woon 1987.
- ↑ Zhōu Hóngxiáng (周鴻翔) 1976 p. 12 cites two such scapulae, citing his own "商殷帝王本紀" Shāng–Yīn dìwáng bĕnjì, pp. 18–21.
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.4–5 cites The Compendium of Materia Medica and includes a photo of the relevant page and entry.
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.6 cites eight waves of illegal digs over three decades, with tens of thousands of pieces taken.
- ↑ Rev. Chalfant acquired 803 oracle bone pieces between 1903 and 1908, and hand-traced over 2500 pieces including these. Zhōu 1976, p.1–2.
- ↑ over 100,000 pieces have been found in all (Qiu 2000, p.61; Keightley 1978, p.xiii).
- ↑ Eleven royal-sized tombs were found --Xu Yahui p.10; note that this exactly matches the number of kings who should have been buried at Yin (the 12th king died in the Zhou conquest and would not have received a royal burial).
- ↑ Dong also included kings Pan Geng, Xiao Xin and Xiao Yi. However, few or perhaps no inscriptions can be reliably assigned to pre-Wu Ding reigns. Many scholars assume that earlier oracle bones from Anyang exist but have not yet been found. (Keightley 1978, p.139, 140 & 203).
- ↑ According to Keightley 1978, p.5, citing Yang Junshi 1963, the term plastromancy (from plastron + Greek μαντεία, "divination") was coined by Li Ji.
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.9 – the female shells are smoother, flatter and of more uniform thickness, facilitating pyromantic use.
- ↑ According to Zhōu 1976 p.7, only four rib bones have been found.
- ↑ such as ox humerus or astragalus (ankle bone); see Zhōu 1976, p.1.
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.34 shows a large, clear photograph of a piece of inscribed human skull in the collection of the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, presumably belonging to an enemy of the Shang.
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.7; note that there appears to be some confusion in published reports between inscribed bones in general, and bones that have actually been heated and cracked for use in divination.
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.7, note 21; Xu Yahui p.35 does show an inscribed deer skull, thought to have been killed by a Shang king during a hunt.
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.12 mentions reports of Xiǎotún villagers finding hundreds of shells of all sizes, implying live tending or breeding of the turtles onsite.
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.24; Zhou 1976 p.12 notes that evidence of sawing is present on some oracle bones, and that the saws were likely of bronze, although none have ever been found.
- ↑ For details of the preparations, see Keightley 1978, pp. 13–14.
- ↑ There is scholarly debate about whether the topic was posed as a question or not; Keightley prefers the term "charge", since grammatical questions were often not involved.
- ↑ For a fuller overview of the topics of divination and what can be gleaned from them about the Shang and their environment, see Keightley 2000.
- ↑ The nature of this heat source is still a matter of debate.
- ↑ Most full (non-fragmentary) oracle bones bear multiple inscriptions; the longest of which are around 90 characters long: Qiu 2000, p.62.
- ↑ Qiu 2000, p.60 mentions that some were written with a brush and either ink or cinnabar, but not carved.
- ↑ Those that were for practice or records, where buried in common rubbish pits (Xu Yahui p.32).
- 1 2 Victor H. Mair, "The Case of the Wayward Oracle Bone", Expedition 43/2 (2001), 42.
- ↑ Qiu 2000, p.60
- ↑ Zhōu Hóngxiáng (周鴻翔) 1976 p.1, citing Wei Juxian 1939, "Qín-Hàn shi fāxiàn jiǎgǔwén shuō", in Shuōwén Yuè Kān, vol. 1, no.4; and He Tianxing 1940, "Jiǎgǔwén yi xianyu gǔdài shuō", in Xueshu (Shànghǎi), no. 1
- 1 2 Wilkinson (2000): 390.
- ↑ Fairbank, 2006, p. 33.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Xu Yahui p.4
- 1 2 3 4 5 Wilkinson (2000): 391.
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.16
- ↑ Zhou 1976, p.1
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.6
- ↑ Wang Haiping (2006). "Menzies and Yin-Shang Culture Scholarship – An Unbreakable Bond." Anyang Ribao (Anyang Daily), August 12, 2006, p.1
- ↑ See Linfu Dong (2005). Cross Culture and Faith: the Life and Work of James Mellon Menzies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ISBN 978-0-8020-3869-2.
- ↑ Geoff York (2008). "The unsung Canadian some knew as 'Old Bones' James Mellon Menzies, a man of God whose faith inspired him to unearth clues about the Middle Kingdom." Globe and Mail, January 18, 2008, p. F4-5
- ↑ Xu Yahui, p.9
- ↑ Wilkinson 2000, pp. 400–401
- ↑ Keightley 1978, pp. xiii, 139
- ↑ Keightley 1978, pp. 31, 92–93, 203
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p. 31
- ↑ Keightley 1978, pp. 139–140
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.3
- ↑ Keightley 1978 p.8
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.8
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.10
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.9; Xu Yahui p.22. Some cattle scapulae were also tribute (Xu Yahui p.24.)
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.11
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.9
- ↑ Keightley 1978 p.18
- ↑ Qiu 2000, p.61.
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.28, citing the Rites of Zhou
- ↑ 四方风 or Winds of the Four Directions World Digital Library. National Library of China. Retrieved December 3, 2010.
- 1 2 3 Xu Yahui p.30
- ↑ Qiu 2000, p.62
- ↑ Xu Yahui p.32
- ↑ Takashima 2012, p. 141.
- ↑ Takashima 2012, pp. 143–160.
- ↑ Keightley 1978 p.3, p.4, and p.4 n.11 & 12.
- ↑ Keightley 1978 p.3
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.3; p.6, n.16
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.8, note 25, citing KKHP 1973.1, pp. 70, 79, 88, 91, plates 3.1, 4.2, 13.8
- ↑ Keightley p.8
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.8, note 25 cites KK 1973.2 p.74
- ↑ Keightley 1978 p.6, n.16
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.8, note 25 cites Zhèngzhoū Èrlĭgāng, p.38
- ↑ Qiu Xigui 2000 p. 41 cites Kexue Press 1959:38, also Fig. 30
- ↑ Keightley 1978 p.4 n.4
- ↑ Keightley 1978, p.9, n.30, citing Hu Xu 1782–1787, ch. 4, p.3b on use in Jiangsu
- ↑ Keightley cites Zhāng Guangyuan 1972
Works cited
- Boltz, William G. (2003). The origin and early development of the Chinese writing system (Pbk. ed. with minor corr. and a new preface. ed.). New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Soc. ISBN 0-940490-18-8.
- Fairbank, John King; Goldman, Merle (2005). China : a new history (2nd enl. ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01828-1.
- Keightley, David N. (1978). Sources of Shang history : the oracle-bone inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02969-0.; Paperback 2nd edition (1985) ISBN 0-520-05455-5.
- Keightley, David N. (2000). The ancestral landscape: time, space, and community in late Shang China, ca. 1200-1045 B.C (2nd print. ed.). Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-070-9.
- Qiu Xigui. Transl. by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (2000). Chinese writing (Wenzixue gaiyao). Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China [u.a.] ISBN 1-55729-071-7.
- Takashima, Ken-ichi (2012). "Literacy to the South and the East of Anyang in Shang China: Zhengzhou and Daxinzhuang". In Li, Feng; Branner, David Prager. Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar. University of Washington Press. pp. 141–172. ISBN 978-0-295-80450-7.
- Wilkinson, Endymion (2000). Chinese History: A Manual (2nd ed.). Harvard University Asia Center. ISBN 978-0-674-00249-4.
- Woon, Wee Lee 雲惟利 (1987). Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution (in English; Chinese title漢字的原始和演變). Originally published by the Univ. of East Asia, Macau; now by Joint Publishing, Hong Kong.
- Xǔ Yǎhuì (許雅惠 Hsu Ya-huei) (2002). Ancient Chinese Writing, Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the Ruins of Yin. Illustrated guide to the Special Exhibition of Oracle Bone Inscriptions from the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. English translation by Mark Caltonhill and Jeff Moser. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Govt. Publ. No. 1009100250.
- Zhōu Hóngxiáng (周鴻翔, wg Chou Hung-hsiang) (1976). Oracle Bone Collections in the United States. University of California Press, Berkeley – Los Angeles – London. ISBN 0-520-09534-0.
External links
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Oracle bones.
- Oracle bones, United College Library, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Includes 45 inscribed fragments.
- Oracle Bone Collection, Institute of History and Philology, Taipei City.
- High-resolution digital images of oracle bones, Cambridge Digital Library


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MONSANTO recently received a jury's confirmation that it was the first to invent the Bt insect-resistant corn technology. The decision was in response to the latest lawsuit between Monsanto and Bayer CropScience. In this lawsuit, Bayer claimed that Monsanto had infringed on a patent awarded to Bayer. The jury found in Monsanto's favor and found the patent invalid.
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University of Illinois President Michael Hogan's embattled former chief of staff is to be paid $109,000 a year as a tenured psychology faculty member, though campus officials might challenge her employment.
Lisa Troyer resigned as chief of staff last month amid an investigation into whether she sent two anonymous emails posing as a member of an influential faculty group in order to influence its decision on a contentious issue.
The university hired two firms to investigate the source of the emails, and their report concluded they were sent from Troyer's laptop while it was in her possession. Troyer has denied sending them.
On Monday, Troyer signed a letter agreeing to the new salary and job responsibilities for the nine-month appointment, weeks later than she had been asked to return it. As chief of staff, she was paid $200,850 a year and was one of the president's chief advisers and confidantes.
Troyer was given a tenured faculty position when she was hired as chief of staff in 2010. The letter she signed Monday clarified the terms of her employment, which will include research and teaching duties.
The offer letter, however, states there may be "additional reviews of (her) activities" related to the anonymous emails.
"You will of course be apprised and engaged as any such reviews are undertaken, and your continued cooperation will be expected and appreciated," said the letter, signed by interim Provost Richard Wheeler, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the interim head of the psychology department.
Troyer maintained in an email to the Tribune on Tuesday that she "did not write or send" the emails. "Information about this issue continues to develop, and I believe that over time, as the full information comes to light, it will reveal the truth behind this matter," she wrote. "Meanwhile, I'll do my best to serve the university as a teacher and researcher."
U. of I. spokeswoman Robin Kaler said campus administrators and faculty leaders likely will meet to discuss the next steps. "It would be determining if there is something to investigate and, if so, what the process would be because this is a very uncommon process, thankfully," she said.
Possible sanctions could include dismissal, according to university statutes.
U. of I. board Chairman Christopher Kennedy questioned last month why Troyer would go through a possible faculty investigation.
"I myself would not go through it," Kennedy said.
Troyer's salary was determined by figuring out the median earned by psychology faculty members who got their doctoral degrees and achieved full professor credentials around the same time she did, according to the offer letter. Because it's too late to begin teaching this semester, she is to work on developing future research and teaching agendas.
Prior to going to the U. of I., Troyer worked with Hogan at the University of Connecticut and the University of Iowa. Hogan has been under fire by university faculty since the email scandal for a "failure of leadership." The investigation found no evidence he was involved, and he has apologized for the embarrassment it has caused.
The emails were sent in mid-December to the University Senates Conference, a group of faculty members from the three campuses. The group was on the verge of issuing a report critical of some proposals to centralize enrollment functions among the university's three campuses — a key issue for Hogan — and the anonymous emails tried to sway the decision.
One of the members, a computer science professor, discovered the emails appeared to be written on a computer used by Troyer, and the university launched an investigation, expected to cost about $200,000. The 29-page investigative report went to great lengths to illustrate that there was no evidence — and that the possibility is extremely remote — that anyone hacked into the university's computer network or Troyer's laptop.


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Computer Support and Network Administrator
Program Details
- College/University: Minneapolis Community and Technical College
- Award: Diploma
- Credits: 54
- Delivery: Face-to-face where some online courses may be available or required.
- Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Certified
About this Program
MCTC's Computer Support and Network Administration Diploma is part of the college's Computer Support and Network Administration program. Computer Support and Network Administration provides a comprehensive, industry-focused training on network support and Internet technologies. You will learn how to install, configure, and maintain computer hardware, protocols, operating systems, software and Internet working devices, with special emphasis on developing troubleshooting skills. Instructors with real world experience lead classes and cover key topics such as network administration, client/server installation and support, Web server management, database implementation, and network security. In addition, you will have the chance to work in groups with other class members to learn valuable teamwork and communication skills that reflect the real-world soft-skill requirements. You'll also have the opportunity to participate in various student club activities, technology competitions and industry events. As a student, you will also have the opportunity to participate in valuable learning activities such as internships, student learning experiences and the Information Technology Club. Upon completion of the program, you will have gained strong problem-solving, interpersonal and communication skills that will be useful as you enter the workforce. MCTC has an articulation agreement with Metropolitan State University, Minnesota State University Moorhead, St. Mary's University, and St. Scholastica for students who wish to pursue a four-year degree. Where You Could Work Help desk centers Technical support Information technology departments in government and industry Network administration Internet service providers IT consulting firms Training centers Technology vendors Software consulting firms Application software developers Web developers
Classroom Location(s)
- Minneapolis Community and Technical College 55403


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Detroit SCCA I96 Spectacular Rallycross
SCCA - Detroit Region
Registration closed July 13, 2017 1:00 AM on July 13, 2017 1:00 AM EDT Registration ends July 13, 2017 1:00 AM on July 13, 2017 1:00 AM EDT Registration opens June 11, 2017 8:00 PM on June 11, 2017 8:00 PM EDT Registration runs from June 11, 2017 8:00 PM to July 13, 2017 1:00 AM
2017 Detroit Region SCCA
I96 Spectacular RallyCross
July 15 2017
presented by Thayer Automotive
Event Chair: Dan Hutchison
Safety Stewards: TBD
$50 entry fee. 60 entrant entry limit. Membership required but weekend memberships can be purchased for $15 (applicable to your full membership if you join)
All vehicles must pass tech inspection. All drivers and passengers must wear approved helmets and seatbelts. Loaner helmets will be available but please return them when not in use.
All drivers, passenger, crew and spectators must sign a waiver.
Schedule of Events:
Sunday June 11th
8:00 am - Online registration opens
Thursday, July13th
1:00 am - Close of online registration
for registration after this time, email the registrar. There will be a $10 late entry fee.
Saturday, July 15th
8:00 am - Begin course setup
9:00 am - Onsite registration opens
9:15 am - Tech opens
9:45am - Novice meeting - required for all first time rallycrossers
9:45am - Course open for walking, registration closes
10:15 am - Tech closes
10:30 am - Driver's meeting
Runs start after the conclusion of the driver's meeting. There will be a morning and an afternoon session with a lunch break in between. There will be 4 runs per entrant in each session, time permitting, with all runs counting. Run order and work assignments will be announced at the end of the driver's meeting. When you are not running, you are required to be at your worker station.
There will a trophy presentation after course clean up has concluded (so, the faster the cones get back into the trailer, the sooner we can all go home!).
Please remember to dress appropriately for the weather. You will be outside for the entire day.