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The açaí berry – the new superfood berry native to South America, is being touted as the latest supplement for a wide range of health ailments. It's said to promote weight loss, anti-ageing, clearer skin, increased energy and better sleep, all due to its impressive nutrient profile.
Many people are seeing great results when combing a pure açaí berry product with a colon cleanse detox product, but do they really work?
A friend and I (both mid 40s and around the 16-18 UK size mark) were keen to try out the açaí berry detox for ourselves for one month to try and shed a few pounds without adjusting our diet or exercising. We both work pretty hectic schedules and eating properly and being motivated to exercise is very hard to squeeze in.
We tried out the most popular açaí berry and colon cleanser products to see if they really live up to the claims. With no side effects in a totally natural weight-loss and detox package, what could I lose?
We started looking for açaí berry products online, it seems to be the best resource for tracking down the best quality açaí berry products which are simply not available in stores. Through various recommendations by health professionals and journalists, we discovered that in order to get the most benefit from the açaí berry capsules you'll need one that's 100% pure fruit, not an extract or capsule with filler or bulking agents inside. This way, you'll get the actual fruit pulp which is freeze dried (to capture the entire fruit and all of the nutrients) for the maximum benefits. We found out that the açaí berry must be freeze-dried immediately after harvest due to its short shelf life.
The açaí berry contains a good amount of healthy fats such as omega 3, 6 and 9, which means it doesn't stay fresh for very long, therefore must be frozen immediately by freeze-drying. We figured that's why we couldn't find the açaí berry fruit in supermarkets or health stores, and ventured online to get the best product available.
Whilst doing a quick search for the term 'açaí' we came across the 'Slimming & Wellbeing Superstore' from Evolution Slimming. Their açaí berry appeared 100% pure, and they showed photographs of the open capsules for side-by-side comparisons of their açaí berry fruit.
The powder looked very dark in colour; a deep rich purple, which proves the quality of the powder. We also noticed the açaí berry was reviewed by a national newspaper, the Sunday Express, which gave us confidence that the product was worth the money. Just to make sure, we contacted the company for a copy of their açaí berry certification which they quickly provided us via email. We had great confidence in Evolution Slimming's açaí berry quality, so with this in mind, went ahead and ordered a bottle of their pure açaí berry (£29) and a bottle of their colon cleanser (£19) as a special offer bundle which was £43.50 on special offer. We went for the free delivery option which arrived at our address two days later, which was great. Each bottle was for one month's supply, so I was hoping to complete the entire 4 week program. We bought one each.
I started the course the very next day. Taking 2 DetoxPlus in the morning with one Açaí berry, and then again before bed with a glass of water. I took my first dose with breakfast as recommended and waited to see if I felt any immediate difference. The manufacturers claimed that I should start to see results within the first few days, so after not feeling any immediate benefits I persevered and continued the tablets for a further 2 days.
On the third day, I noticed I definitely had more energy, presumably from the açaí berry antioxidants. I was also visiting the toilet a little more, but this was an expected effect of the detox product, which is called a 'colon cleanser' for a reason as I felt 'cleansed' after each visit. It was a strange feeling to get used to; I felt somewhat lighter and fresher, with my stomach feeling less bloated and a little flatter. I hadn't lost any weight yet, but it was still early days.
After the second week, I hopped on the scales to see if I had lost any weight. I wasn't expecting miracles, but my size 16 office trousers were much looser around the waistband. To my delight, I was down 6lbs. That's an average of 3lbs per week, which was great! My friend had lost slightly less at 4lbs, but still a result she was pleased with. We had half a bottle left of each product with two weeks to go and were excited at the possible results after the full course.
The fourth and final week rolled around. I can't believe how great I feel and how little effort it took. I'm now able to jump right out of bed as soon as my alarm screams, without having to whack the snooze button six times before I eventually crawl out of bed. I've bags more energy meaning I'm taking the stairs at work rather than the lift, which is making me feel more motivated to take a 30 minute walk three nights a week. I'm weighing myself every three days, and seem to be losing a pound each time, which is absolutely fantastic. In total, I've lost almost a stone (13.5lbs) and am feeling like a new woman. I'm so pleased with the results that I'm going to continue for another month.
Positive points: I lost a satisfying amount of weight in a relatively short time, and gained a huge load of energy without feeling 'buzzy' or getting the shakes (as I have found previously with other diet pills). I'd definitely recommend it to people in similar situations that are struggling to lose weight through dieting or exercise.
Negative points: Going to the toilet more was a little inconvenient, but only when at work. This inconvenience was balanced out with knowing I'm cleansing toxins from the body gently, which was most definitely assisting my weight loss.


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Events, Music & Entertainment in NYC. Short and Sweet.
The Gaslight Anthem Handwritten (Mercury/Island Def Jam) Handwritten is Jersey rockers The Gaslight Anthem's first album on Mercury Records, but it's certainly […]
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text:
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's payments watchdog will review banks who process card transactions on behalf of merchants such as retailers following concerns that customers may not be getting the best deal.
The Payments Systems Regulator (PSR) published draft terms of its review into card-acquiring services provided by high street banks who accept and process card payments on behalf of a merchant for a fee.
"The costs merchants incur for such services may ultimately be reflected in the prices they charge and services they offer to their customers," the PSR said in a statement.
UK Finance, which represents the sector, said acquirer fees are negotiated directly with the retailer and will depend on factors like volume of transactions and type of business.
"Card payments play a vital role in our economy, with card spending equivalent to about a third of the UK's GDP," UK Finance said.
"It is understandable, therefore, that the PSR would want to review this important market. We will be responding in due course."
The watchdog has powers to alter the sector's structure if it finds harm to customers.
The use of cards to buy goods and services became the most frequently used payment method in 2017.
"The PSR is proposing to carry out this market review having taken into account the concerns that have been brought to its attention," the watchdog said.
"The regulator wants to ensure that the supply of card-acquiring services is competitive and works in the interests of merchants, and ultimately consumers."
A public consultation on the terms of the review is open until September.
Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Keith Weir


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Chiqui*Kat (Almost)Daily.
Rain or shine Here you'll find A piece of my heart A slice of my mind
Monday, July 8, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Day 30 | My Writing Buddyship
Posted by Unknown at 9:14 PM 2 comments : Links to this post
Labels: charina , giron , thirty days , writing buddy , wruddy
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Day 29 | the one where i say "holy canon camera!"
|©KatShotsPhotography, 2008
they're more makulit* now that they're older. it's a challenge to keep them in one place. they're hardly stand still. when they were babies you could just plop them down in a corner and presto...photoshoot in session! now it's more an aerobic activity photographing them: kneel down, chase them around, holler for them to "please, guys, just stand on that spot on the big rock for one more minute...just one more photo...one more.......".
of course it's never just one more. and they don't ever stand on that rock for an entire minute either.
i think it's worth the effort. the grow so fast i can hardly keep up with the way their hands (and nails!) look. one day i was wiping the remnants of timbits off of the little guy when it suddenly hit me: those hands! when did your hands get so much bigger?!
and i'm thinking to my self: whose hands are these and where did all the baby fat and pudgy fingers go?
snap-snap-snap-snap ::
Fast-forward: 2013
Brampton, ON. May, 2013: I am so darn grateful for following that pull. For obeying Joseph Campbell's words to "Follow your bliss". Yes, even when you can hardly keep your eyes open and your legs are cramping from chasing them around too much.
I may not be able to bring back this time but, holy canon camera, thank you! Thank you for being there to help me capture these moments. They give me so much joy and a gentle yet powerful reminder that "It's all good, Mom. It's all good."
This I say to you, dearest new mommy (or daddy) reading this post: It's all good. There'll be days when it feels like you just won the heavenly lotto max and then sometimes it feels like it's all sh*t and stones. It's okay. Just remember to grab that camera and keep snapping. Yes, even the ordinary everyday moments.
Like Jojie said, "Chiqui's biggest accomplishment as a photographer is creating unforgettable pieces infused with love and spontaneity, which she refers to as Everyday Magic. Her hope is that her images will carry over through the years and invoke the same feeling when you first looked at them 20-30 years down the road."
It isn't 20 down the road yet, thankfully. But the feelings I have looking at these photos right now make the burden of this day lighter. It gives me faith in knowing that no matter what happens today, I'll have these precious memories and will continue to make them for as long as I can.
*makulit = rowdy
Posted by Unknown at 10:33 PM 1 comment : Links to this post
Labels: a kid's life , everyday , katshots , magic
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Day 28 | That Everyday Magic, A Guest Post
|©KatShots Photography
"what should have been chocolate brownies"
That Everyday Magic
(Note: this is going to be on a more personal level since the subject happens to be this writer's classmate since Kindergarten)
KatShots Photography is a product of Chiqui Pineda. Familiar name, you say. This person was born in Davao City, made her way to Manila as a college student and became a professional singer, joined a noontime TV show, launched the immortal song "How Did You Know?" still being sung in videoke bars, and performed brilliantly in the lauded musical Rama at Sita. It is the same person who chose to slip away from the limelight to settle quietly in Toronto, Canada with her family. Being the artist that she is, she opted to explore another passion close to the heart.
Posted by Unknown at 10:10 PM No comments : Links to this post
Monday, May 27, 2013
Day 27 | Tickled Picture-Perfectly Pink!
It's a very exciting day at KatShots Photography today...and I have a feeling for the rest of the month!
All because of this feature in the Manila Bulletin's Picture Perfect for today, May 28, 2013. An excerpt ~
All because of this feature in the Manila Bulletin's Picture Perfect for today, May 28, 2013. An excerpt ~
When Chiqui Pineda, the voice behind the famous song "How Did You Know," decided to slip away from the limelight to settle quietly in Toronto, Canada, she opted to explore another passion close to her heart – photography.
In the same way she tackled her singing career and as a theater performer (Rama at Sita), photography for this native of Davao City was self-taught as she was the family's official photographer at a young age during special occasions. Chiqui has attended various workshops in Toronto and back in Manila, shadowed and observed photographer friends in action, read tons of materials, and browsed through websites. Eventually she put up KatShots Photography based in Canada.
For the rest of the article, please click HERE.
Ms. Jojie Alcantara, an excellent artist*, freelance writer and award-winning photographer for almost all the major publications in the Philippines and around the globe and most importantly, my classmate since Kindergarten gave me a most delicious compliment and mega-validation as a photographer! She asked to feature me as Photographer of the Week for her column! My YES couldn't have been more resounding. Echo jud siya hangtod Davao City...abot saTagum pa! :D
Thank you kayo, dai! Like I said, it's a birthday-mother's day-christmas all rolled into one kind of day!!!
Grateful and ticked perfectly pink.
For more Defining Moment shots, come visit my photo blog :
Posted by Unknown at 10:46 PM No comments : Links to this post
Labels: alcantara , bulletin , chiquipinedaphotos , jojie , katshots , manila , perfect , photography , picture
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Here's what you can find in our store:
Back issues are the heart and soul of any real comic book store. You need to know that you are going to find that super rare artifact that only you can love and you get that piece of mind from Wonderland Comics.
You will find up to ten thousand back issues in the store at any time. Which, by the way, isn't a whole lot. But wait, we have more – a whole lot more.
Just email us if there is something in particular that you are trying to find. We will look for it, pull it out and let you know it's here – saving you hours upon hours of looking. You see, we really have over 800,000 comic books (give or take) but we just don't have the space for them all – so we keep them elsewhere to storage and shift them around all the time to keep things fresh and interesting. By the way – we're always buying good comic collections – just click here to get the details on how you can sell us your list.
We have brought in over 5,000 back issues into the store, including some rare X-Men, more than 100 DC horror comics from the 70's, More than 40 DC 100 page comics from the 70's, and literally thousands of comics from the 70's and older.
Some of the Independents you will find here: Avatar, IDW, Moonstare, Abstract, Kunami, America's Best, Ablaze, Vertigo, Image, Antarie Press and more!
Make sure you don't miss a thing – get on our email subscriber list today and we'll let you know when new(old) stuff comes in!


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TEFL Paper DialectHow is a culture defined? What defines cultural differences and country borders? One of the most important aspects of culture is language. One must learn the language of another people to truly be immersed and understand their culture. Within one language however, different cultures can exist and are manifested through regional slang or regional dialects. As an American, I feel most comfortable discussing regional dialects from my country, but by not mentioning British, australian, and other Anglophone countries I am not ignoring the cultural depth of these dialects, but am merely discussing what I know best. Dialect is defined as "a regional variety of a language" (Dictionary.com) and "a provincial, rural, or socially distinct variety of a language that differs from the standard language, especially when considered substandard" (Dictionary.com). Slang, on the other hand, is defined as "very informal usage in vocabulary and idiom that is characteristically more metaphorical, playful, elliptical, vivid, and ephemeral than ordinary language" (Dictionary.com). As an enthusiast for languages, I find both of these phenomenons particularly fascinating, in large part because of the cultural
and social implications and indicators of a dialect. Slang and dialect are related, however. Dialect includes slang words and phrases and in this article I am going to focus primarily on slang relating to regions. At what point does a student of english as a Foreign Language need to know slang words and a particular dialect? I would say there are a few situations that call for specific teachings of "non-standard english". First of all, if students are studying in an english host country, like the united states of America, I would find it pertinent to discuss the American word for pants (trousers) and words like "drive-thru" or "all you can eat buffets" which are places more or less unique to American culture. Knowing that pants in America is distinct from pants in Britain is important. Also knowing words that Americans associate with various things helps ease a foreigner into American culture by understanding basic communication skills. In cases of teaching students in their country, it would be important to point out regional dialects and compare them between the countries. Between American and British english some phrases and words are vastly different, and it would be important to distinguish between
the two dialects. Some students watch American films and television, they thus learn slang on their own, and often can recite phrases learned from Hollywood films. WHile some of these phrases are correct, it will be important to point out that some might not be acceptable speech depending on the context. Saying "may the force be with you" is probably not appropriate for any professional setting, as an example. I think its important for teachers teaching foreign students in America to allow students to use American specific phrases, and even go into internet lingo. The word "lol" is used frequently on the internet, and students should know that it means "laughing out loud." There are other words used as slang in America like "ridiculous" and "awesome" which, when defined literally, carry different meanings. Although its easy to get into dialect and explaining the cultural roots of which, it is also important to stick to standard english. For instance, part of a dialect is the usage of particular slang. Usage of slang is acceptable, but needs to be stressed that certain slang terms are considered inappropriate in various situations and people should be wary of using too colloquial of language. Language, the way we communicate with each other and how we express our thoughts
and beliefs, is a window into each of our own cultures. Making reference to the various differences found in the english language, based on dialect, explains the vast diversity of the Anglophone world. Allowing students to pursue the cultural background of slang terms and dialect differences might satiate some of their interest in the english speaking world. I believe that discussing and teaching slang, but also particular jargon and differences found in various dialects is important for an english teacher. If one only knows standard english and no phrases to use when speaking to native english speakers, whats the point in learning english in the first place?
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text: An end-of-the-rainy-season downpour had just ended as I pulled into the Publix parking lot. A magnolia tree was in front of my parking spot. The cluster of aging leaves in a field of shiny green magnolia leaves said "shoot me," so I grabbed my ever-ready camera from the back seat, did a final couple of swipes of the windshield wipers and took the shot.


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The quick and dirty:
12.4 km
100th place Stage / 99th place GC (don't ask me how or why)
The night before the Time Trial, Bart Bowen issued all of us Nature Valley Pro Chase riders our bib numbers and did up our team's start order. I would be one of the later riders to start, 4th out of six. What a whirlwind experience this morning was. I haven't been that anxious for a bicycle event in....I can't quite remember. The realization of the magnitude of the Nature Valley Pro Chase experience was completely sunken in and FULLY etched on my mind. I was thinking about how lucky I was, how cool it felt to be 'one of the pros', and how many people back home I was representing, that I never really fully focused on my ride, which is probably a good thing.
I was on a good day. The week of no-riding before I flew up here to Minnesota put me right where I need to be for a 5 day stage race. Coming off the start ramp, I was flushed with adrenaline (which has been absent in my body for some time), and within minutes I was seeing heart rate numbers pinned in the 190's.
With my mind [on my money and my money on my mind] on what lay ahead through the next five races, my in-race thoughts consisted of 'ease back. ease back. ease back.'
Not much interesting to report. I rode well, stayed within my limits, and finished well. My placing was towards the rear, but in the middle of the amateurs, but in all honesty, I'm in over my head. Making time cuts and being ready for the next ride is what is important!


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When I first moved to Davis to attend UC Davis I lived in the Primero dormitories located along Russell Boulevard. As I walked by the Student Health Center on my way to class, I noticed a powerfully fragrant shrub blooming in spring and fall. The flowers were nondescript and the foliage was a drab green-olive color, so one hardly noticed the plant itself. The fragrance resembled peaches and apricots, with sharp sweet notes, like a fine liqueur. Osmanthus fragrans: commonly called sweet olive. There was also a plant located near the Memorial Union building before it was remodeled. The former had white flowers; the latter had orange ones and bloomed more heavily in the fall.
Alas, Primero dorms are gone, though not lamented: they had no A/C and had antiquated heaters; gone also are both of those shrubs. In my mind's eye I can still see each one, more than 35 years later. As a nascent student of horticulture, anything with an aroma like that would distract me as I crossed campus. My bike got totaled, and then stolen, within a month of my arrival here, so I gave up on bicycles. I was a pedestrian on campus for all of my student years, which enabled me to see the plants close up that 99% of the students whizzed past.
Recently the orange variety came through my store for the first time I can remember. Osmanthus fragrans 'Aurantiacus'is the official name. "Fragrans" is self-explanatory, and "Aurantiacus" is Latin for orange. This Osmanthus species is native to Asia; flowers are used in tea, jam, and liquor and various Asian dishes.
The flowers of 'Aurantiacus' are pumpkin-orange, appear mostly in autumn, and each flower is only about one-quarter inch. Not spectacular, but it would be difficult to overstate the powerful fragrance of these tiny flowers. Everyone who walked by the evergreen shrub raved about the scent. As with many fragrant flowers, the volatile oils evaporate and drift several feet from the plant.
Common O. fragrans is readily available, but 'Aurantiacus' is hard to propagate and very rare in the trade. I don't know how this grower produced it, and as soon as they released their small crop it was gone. Both grow with an open habit, at a moderate pace of 2 to 3 feet a year, ultimately becoming ten to fifteen feet tall with about half that spread. They tolerate sun, but look best with protection from the hottest sun of the afternoon, and will also grow and bloom in bright shade.
Osmanthus is just one of many easy landscape shrubs providing rich fragrance without special attention. In fact, along with certain perennials and annuals, it is possible to plant a garden of easy plants for fragrance year-around. Here are some choices, sorted by season of bloom.
1. Brugmansia
Common name: Angel's trumpet.
A big shrub with bold leaves, growing to 10 feet +. Hardy subtropical. Tops are damaged in winter, sometimes killed to the ground, but it always resprouts. Appearance is best if it is sheltered from hot sun and wind, and frost protection prolongs the late fall bloom. Blossoms are intoxicatingly fragrant, but only at night. All parts are poisonous.
2. Osmanthus fragrans 'Aurantiacus'
Common name: Orange tea olive.
Hardy evergreen shrub best in partial sun or shade. Full morning sun is ok. Drought tolerant.
3. Sarcococca ruscifolia
Common name: Victorian box.
Slow growing evergreen shrub to 3 to 4' tall and wide, easily clipped as a hedge. Little white flowers in January smell like gardenias! Very shade tolerant, burns in any direct sun. Drought tolerant.
4. Wisteria species: W. sinensis, floribunda, and venusta.
Common name: Wisteria.
Very vigorous deciduous vine with purple or white flowers in late winter.
Blooms best in full sun and under dry conditions.
5. Citrus
Evergreens grown as shrubs or trees. April blossoms are intensely fragrant. Meyer lemon flowers and fruits year around. Kumquats bloom in summer. Hardiness varies: mandarins are hardiest; limes are tender.
6. Jasminum polyanthum
Common name: Winter jasmine.
Very vigorous evergreen vine that can take over part of your yard. Pink buds open to pungent white blossoms in Feb. - April, depending on weather.
7. Lathyrus odorata
Common name: Sweet pea.
Annual vine that we plant from seed in fall for winter and spring bloom.
8. Philadelphus
Common name: Mock orange.
Deciduous shrub grows pretty fast to 8 feet tall, 5 to 6 feet wide. There are dwarf varieties. Open, somewhat rangy habit. Lemon-scented blossoms in May. This is what east-coasters call Mock orange.
9. Pittosporum tobira
Common name: Mock orange.
Common evergreen grows 2 to 3 feet a year to 10 feet or more; readily pruned to any height. Lemon-scented blossoms in April and early May. This is what Californians call Mock orange.
10. Rosa banksia
Common name: Lady banks rose.
Gigantic evergreen, thornless climbing rose. Very tough. Blooms for a couple of weeks in early spring before the other roses begin. The yellow and single white forms smell like cotton candy. Best in full sun. Very drought tolerant.
11. Syringa vulgaris
Common name: Lilac
The familiar hardy deciduous shrub from colder climates grows fine here and blooms freely in full sun or light shade. Very drought tolerant.
12. Osmanthus fragrans
Common name: Sweet olive.
The white form blooms most in the spring.
Spring and Summer blooming
13. Dianthus
Common name: Pinks, carnations.
Hardy perennials that can last for years. The grey-leaved forms are tougher garden plants than the green-leaved ones (which are usually sold as annuals, though they will live two to three years). Many Dianthus have strongly spice-scented blooms.
14. Phlomis fruticosa
Common name: Jerusalem sage.
Tough shrub with fuzzy grey-green leaves, grows to 4 to 5 feet tall and 6 feet or more across. Blooms in waves in spring and summer. The strange-shaped whorls of bright yellow flowers smell just like carnations! Tolerate extreme sun, heat, and drought.
Spring, summer, and fall blooming
15. Rosa hybrids
Common name: Rose
Obviously roses belong on any list of fragrant shrubs. Look for varieties noted for their scent, as many hybrids have light or no fragrance. Roses like full sun and lot of water.
Summer blooming
16. Fortunella margarita
Common name: Kumquat.
This evergreen citrus, which grows as a large shrub or small tree, is the hardiest of all. The summer flowers are smaller than other types, but very fragrant. The fruit is a nice ornamental and edible bonus, hanging on the tree year around.
17. Jasminum officinale
Common name: Poet's jasmine.
Hardy evergreen vine that blooms in the summer. Much less invasive than the spring-blooming jasmine, the bloom is less abundant but lasts longer.
18. Trachelospermum jasminoides
Common name: Star jasmine.
This evergreen vine hardly needs introduction. The fragrance is too powerful for some people Very drought tolerant and grows in anything from full sun to full shade (though bloom is limited in shade). Very drought tolerant.
Fragrant foliage
19. Aloysia triphylla
Common name: Lemon verbena.
Open, airy shrub with yellow-green foliage that is packed with citronella aromatics. It gets 6 feet or more tall and broad. Either prune it to enhance the open form, or cut it back hard every couple of springs. A hardy subtropical, it often loses leaves and might even die back during freezing weather, but always resprouts.
Blooms year-around
20. Lobularia maritima
Common name: Sweet alyssum.
Easy-to-grow annual flower that reseeds all over your yard. The honey-scented blooms can be present all year around once you have an established population. Pink and purple forms will reseed lighter, eventually white. Best in full sun or very light shade. Very drought tolerant.
Also-rans ("why didn't you mention....?"):
Ceanothus species and hybrids: Mountain lilac.
Fast-growing shrubs and ground covers are very drought tolerant but also easy to kill by watering too often. Blue, purple, or white blossoms in spring smell like honey.
Cestrum nocturnum: Night-blooming Jessamine.
Dies back to the ground most years, but usually resprouts. Powerful fragrance at night only. Poisonous.
Daphne odora: Winter Daphne.
Spicy lemon-scented blooms in winter. So, so, so easy to kill. Poisonous.
Elaeagnus species.
Cousins of Russian olive, several species of Elaeagnus have sweet-scented clusters of flowers. Very tough, informal shrubs for rural areas or large hedges; in small yards they'll need a lot of pruning. E. ebbingei 'Gilt Edge' has strongly variegated leaves and a manageable upright habit. The fruit are edible (I'm told) and popular with songbirds. Very drought tolerant.
Gardenia jasminoides.
Not happy about our alkaline water, so it gets anemic without special fertilizer. Blooms best where it gets morning sun, afternoon shade.
Jasminum sambac: Arabian jasmine.
The wonderful Pikake of Hawai'i. Tender even to a light frost, it must be indoors in winter here.
Lonicera species: honeysuckles.
I hesitate to recommend the most fragrant (and most common) species, L. japonica, because it is very invasive.
Here is a substitute, although it is rare:
Lonicera hildebrandtiana
Common name: Giant Burmese honeysuckle.
Fast-growing evergreen subtropical vine with large, shiny leaves, it is just hardy here, showing damage after severe frost but usually recovering. Giant blooms have exceptional fragrance. Difficult to propagate, it is usually grafted onto L. japonica, so watch carefully for any root suckers and remove them immediately.
Passiflora species and hybrids
Passion flowers and passionfruit. Many hybrids have spicy-scented flowers. Variable hardiness, and some are rampant. Choose accordingly.
Scented geraniums (Pelargonium species).
Easy to grow, somewhat frost tender. Expect to replace them every year or so.


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Sharna Florence
As a health & wellness fanatic, fitness specialist, speaker & author + mom to 4 adult children - Sharna has always been active!
For the last 38 years, Sharna has been an advocate for fitness. After experiencing many injuries, mostly self-inflicted from over-use & improper form in her fitness classes, she dedicated her life to become a specialist in corrective & preventative exercise techniques………….in other words — her theories reduce neck & back pain dead in their tracks!
She has the solution TIPS that make everyday's movements more strengthening for the body.
Posture & Core awareness & activation tips - simple, basic concept for injury prevention.
Her life's mission is to help millions with easy HABITS - that once demonstrated and explained in a fun method can truly change lives.


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Hey there, fellow English teacher! If you've stumbled upon this blog post, chances are you are looking for ideas, inspiration, lesson plans, and guidance for the beginning of the school year. To help teachers everywhere, I'm writing a new blog series that explains how I plan and sequence my school year starting in the beginning of a brand new school year. This curriculum outline is ideal for grades 7-10.
The first week of school is crucial for building trust and establishing your classroom culture. That is why I like to spend a little bit of time getting to know my students, assessing their knowledge, and teaching some crucial information.
To begin with, I usually like to spend about three days getting to know my students and fostering a positive classroom culture. To do so, I use the resources in my Back to School Activities for Secondary Students and Growth Mindset Activities resources. Usually by the third day I like to begin assessing my students' abilities, and this typically takes the form of a short narrative essay. I spend the last two days of the first week teaching students how to properly annotate text with my Annotating Text Made Easy lesson. I like to use this lesson in the beginning of the school year so that I can refer back to the close reading skills they gain during this lesson throughout the entire year.
For my first unit of the school year, I like to begin with short stories. Starting the year with short stories exposes students to literary devices and elements. For the first week of the short story unit, I typically begin with the shortest short story because there is some pre-loading that goes into this unit. Before we even read a short story in class, I teach students about short stories and literary devices using a PowerPoint lesson found in my Short Stories Unit. What I like about this unit is that it introduces students to the content, and it works with any short story. There are many organizers and creative assignments included in this resource as well.
When I teach short stories, I usually tend to focus on one or two literary elements and devices per story. Before we read, I give students vocabulary words, review important story context, and teach the focus literary element or device. Then we read the story, and I have them look for examples and quotes that show that particular device. After each short story, I have them write a paragraph that analyzes the short story, the author's use of the device, and how the device contributes to the audience's understanding of the story. I typically do not quiz my students on each short story, rather I assess their knowledge and understanding through these paragraphs.
One of my favorite short stories to teach is "The Most Dangerous Game." This Close Reading Lesson and Writing Activity follows the format that I teach. It focuses on a particular literary device and includes a writing response. Since I teach short stories in the beginning of the year, I provide my students with sentence frames to help with the writing.
I wrap-up my short story unit with a fictional narrative. Throughout the first few weeks my students read and analyzed narratives, so I like to conclude this unit with a narrative of their own. We spend a couple days brainstorming their protagonist, antagonist, setting, conflict, and plot structure. The students sketch out their narrative essay and write their first draft. After a day of revision circles (peer editing done in small groups), students then publish their final draft using the feedback from their peers. I use the information in my Narrative Writing Unit to help with this final assessment.
On the last day of the unit, I typically assess my students with an end-of-unit test that includes all of the literary devices we covered and information from each of the stories. I also use this time in class while students are testing to begin grading their final drafts. Doing this helps reduce the time I spend on the weekends grading student papers.
After teaching short stories for the first unit, my students are ready to move on to a longer text!
What do your first six weeks of the school year look like?


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Sales Rep Fucks Doctor to Get Order
I had no patients in the waiting room and no appointments booked, so I was about to go for lunch when in walked a beautiful blonde. She introduced herself and said she was a saleswoman for a company who supply clinics and hospitals with all the medical gear that they may need. I explained that I had a contract with another supplier who gave me big discounts, but she insisted we could work something out. She was very flirtatious and I began to understand how she managed a 100 percent success rate in getting orders out of doctors. I decided to play along and said if I recommended her company to be our main supplier, it would cost her something. She had a glint in her eye when she said she thought it might and it made my cock stiffen in my trousers. I approached her and we began kissing before I brought her round to my side of the desk and she stuffed my cock into her mouth. This girl could suck better then she could sell and I was dying to get deep inside her. She did a little striptease for me then I got her to lie on her back on the desk as I began to lick her pussy. I couldn't wait any longer and I began to fuck her on my desk, watching her beautiful tits bounce as her moans of pleasure filled the air. I flipped her over and fucked her doggystyle, her ass was a vision to behold from behind. This woman really loves her commission because she was putting everything into milking my cock. She even mounted me on the office floor in cowgirl before I got her back up on the desk and fucked her to orgasm again. I was fast losing control of my ability to not cum, this woman was so hot and was such a good fuck. With a final few strokes I pulled out and shot my medical waste all over her pussy. Fair play, that's one woman whose way to seal a deal will get her my equipment orders every time.January 23, 2015


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Indonesian thesp Iko Uwais ("The Raid") has joined the cast of Keanu Reeves' action drama directorial debut "Man of Tai Chi" for Village Roadshow Pictures Asia, China Film Group and Wanda Media Group says Variety.
Set in modern Beijing, Tiger Chen plays a young martial artist on a spiritual quest whose skills present him with both exciting opportunities and painful choices.
Uwais will fight Chen in one of the last scenes of the film, which is being shot in Beijing, Hong Kong and Macau. Reeves also co-stars.
Michael G. Cooney penned the script while Lemore Syvan will produce.


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Free reusable bag from Scotch-Brite!
Simply submit your receipt and two UPC symbols along with this printable rebate form.
Your purchases must be made by 6/30/10. And your rebate form should be postmarked by 6/30/10 and received by 7/31/10.
Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery of your new bag!
2 comments:
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SHEFFIELD, England (AP) Former Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill announced her retirement from track and field on Thursday, ending the career of one of Britain's most successful sportswomen.
The 30-year-old Ennis-Hill won the heptathlon gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics, won a second world championship gold a year after giving birth to her first child, and won silver at the this year's Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
''I've always said I want to leave my sport on a high and have no regrets,'' she said in a post on Twitter and Instagram , ''and I can truly say that.''
The poster girl for the London Games, Ennis-Hill is among the most popular sportspeople in Britain and widely regarded as a role model to upcoming athletes.
''Her record as an athlete is phenomenal and that's without considering the challenges of returning from pregnancy to win world gold and Olympic silver,'' said Neil Black, performance director at British Athletics. ''I'd like to thank her not only for her contribution to the GB team over the years, but additionally for being a great person to work with, know and support.''
Ennis-Hill took time out of the sport to give birth to son Reggie - forcing her to miss the 2014 Commonwealth Games - and hinted about ending her 11-year professional career immediately after winning the silver medal in Rio, behind Nafissatou Thiam of Belgium.
''From my first world title in Berlin 2009 to Rio 2016, I'm so fortunate to have had such an amazing career within the sport I love and this has been one of the toughest decisions I've had to make,'' she said. ''But I know that retiring now is right.''
An excellent sprint hurdler and long jumper, Ennis-Hill broke through in 2006 by winning bronze in the heptathlon at her only Commonwealth Games.
Other career highlights included winning heptathlon gold at the 2010 European Championships and winning the world indoor pentathlon title the same year. She dominated the heptathlon between 2009-12, a period that culminated in Ennis-Hill handling home pressure to win Olympic gold.


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ENGEOCOM has completed reconstruction of the highway interchange at the intersection of Ring Road and Ryazan Ave. In December Moscow's mayor Sergei Sobyanin was on hand to open the transport tunnel to traffic for the first time since construction began. Also at the opening was the Deputy Mayor for urban planning, and the building of Marat Khusnullin, head of the construction department for the city of Moscow Alexey Bochkarev. Also the First Deputy head of the city's construction department Pyotr Aksenov, as well as the president of the company ENGEOCOM, Dimitri Evseev.
Dimitri and Sergey were on hand to talk about the project. The entire reconstruction of the freeway interchange took 11 months. "In September we opened one overpass here, and in November, the second." With the completion of the tunnel they will complete the work on all basic functions of the interchange, said Dimitri Evseev, president of ENGEOCOM. The brand new tunnel runs the length of 603 metres and will provide Congress with the counterclockwise roundabout of Lermontov Avenue on the inner side of the Moscow Ring Road. Reconstruction of the entire project, comprises a large set of measures: the construction of the overpass Moscow-Ryazan has a projected length of 178 meters, the overpass Ring – Lermontov avenue has a 168 meter long road tunnel, and 608 meters long pedestrian bridge over the Ryazan prospectus; expansion of Moscow, Ryazan and Lermontov Prospekt; and includes reconstruction of existing conventions with Moscow and relaying the underlying utilities. After the reconstruction of the facility traffic capacity will increase by 25%, which will cut down on traffic and make areas much easier to access.
The aim is to replace one of the "petals" of the traffic "clover" with a decoupling of one of the interchanges. The mayor then noted that the updated interchange will greatly improve the accessibility of the Zhulebino, Nekrasovka, and suburban Lyubertsy areas. This is the 12th upgrade in a series of upgrades at the interchange at Ring Road. It is a complex subject, which, despite all attempts to make it as easy on motorists, has cause a large inconvenience to drivers on the road.
ENGEOCOM has had workers going at maximum speed to try to make the road construction be less obtrusive to the daily lives of motorists as soon as possible. "In recent years, the builders have been working around the clock and have finished the extremely complex construction as soon as possible," said the mayor. Clearly the intent here is to finish as soon as possible, and the government feels the push to finish this large undertaking as soon as possible.
The mayor thanked the construction workers of all of their good work and gave the command to open up the tunnel in order to let the first traffic through the new interchange.


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River Voice Community Choir
RiverVoice is a very friendly and welcoming group of people who love singing together and engaging with their audiences. Set up in 2013 following a short programme of workshops for participants with visual impairment, Rivervoice reach across the disabled and non-disabled communities to ensure that music making is accessible to all. Our approach is that there is no requirement for members to read a musical score (though these are available) and rehearsal sessions are led by professional musicians, allowing for the development of a broad repertoire, improving musical skills and raising confidence.
Alongside a programme of regular concert performances, RiverVoice also aspires to undertake flagship projects to continue building our creative profile and also welcomes invitations to perform within the local community. We are based in Medway but our members are from a wider area.
Post code


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Taapsee Pannu missing Delhi fun !
Bollywood actress Taapsee Pannu has said that she grew up in New Delhi and always miss the walled city .She regularly visits Delhi she do not forget to visit the Khan Market.
"I really Love Khan Market and next time when I come to Delhi I will take my parents to this market," says Tapsee Panu.
Besides the Khan Market, Tapsee's favourite is North Campus.
"I have spent so much time in North Campus and I have no so many fun memories of that place," says Tapsee Panu.


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Many years ago, students at universities found it difficult to share information with their peers. It was cumbersome to work on a project and you had no way for the other person seeing what you have just done. So too did the military see the need to protect their computer mainframes with the knowledge that their networks will be safe in case of an attack. The history of the internet is one of intrigue and genius, bringing the world together on a small screen.
So it was in tandem that the military and universities worked to remedy their problems. Network protocols were slowly developed and gave a chance for individuals to exchange information between two linked up computers.
These early day crude networks were only available between computer oriented people and of course scientists. The man in the street had to wait a few years still before they could reap the advantage of file sharing as was the initial idea in the beginning.
What you see today, is leap years away from what it was in the past. Uploading a file can now be done using a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program, which will have your information on a server within seconds. Anybody who has access to the server will then be able to read your data. Or like on the internet people are able to read information which was uploaded through this protocol.
It was not the case years ago and many thousands of hours were spent during the eighties and nineties trying to come up with a solution for menu systems. The reason behind this was that it would allow anyone access to this menu and obtain their required stored files, by only selecting it.
Along came the Swiss scientist at CERN (where they study particles, who needed a program which gave them easy access to many files on one screen. The hypertext protocol was developed there and was launch in 1991. This gave the world wide web it's real catalyst and after that there was no stopping. Sharing information became easy and fun.
Companies like Microsoft and Netscape took the lead in developing browsers to access the internet. Mosaic was actually one of the very first browsers to be used by consumers and this started an frenzy as internet businesses mushroomed overnight. With booms, there are usually bangs, so many people made a living off the net those days and maybe under estimated the clever consumer a bit.
Email program developers became prolific as well, as this tool started catching on everywhere in the world. Communication was made easy and brought the world closer. The history of the internet will never be a closed book, as it is an ongoing entity which has taken on a life of it's own. Happy surfing!
You can begin growing your business fast and easy when you use search engine optimisation services today! Using online business marketing, you will be able to expand your market and begin growing your customer base quickly!


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University of Kentucky's oral history program 'potentially revolutionary'
The University of Kentucky is making strides to preserve oral history with a system that allows interviews to be heard online before they are transcribed.
The Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, developed at UK in 2008, is the only one in the country, said Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at UK's Special Collections.
"It's potentially revolutionary," he said.
In 2011, the Institute of Museum and Library Services gave the Nunn Center a $195,853 National Leadership Grant to continue developing the synchronizer, Boyd said.
The Nunn Center, which is part of UK Libraries, has been gathering oral histories for four years and has about 9,000 interviews, Boyd said, adding that one of the center's goals is to make the interviews more accessible to the public. Before the synchronizer, the only way to listen to the interviews was to go to the center.
"It's making these interviews no longer something that's going to sit on the shelf for 25 years," Boyd said.
The synchronizer allows interviews to be tagged with keywords that take listeners to those portions of the interview. A written synopsis or transcription of the interview also is provided beneath the audio or video footage.
The Nunn Center is preparing the system for free open-source distribution, meaning it will be available for other archivists to put their interviews online. Boyd hopes to see that happen in a year or so.
Cliff Kuhn, executive director of the Oral History Association, said Boyd is known nationally for his work in oral history, and the program at the center also is well-known in that community.
"It's very much pioneering," Kuhn said.
Kuhn also said oral history is well-respected in Kentucky, and has had a long tradition at UK.
The system is "spreading the word that there are very rich interviews out there," he said.
Among the Nunn Center's collections is one about the desegregation of Major League Baseball, which includes about 70 interviews.
Thirty of Boyd's graduate students tagged and transcribed 60 interviews in a two-week period for a class, and others who work at the center finished the rest.
"I was so proud of the students, but I was also so incredibly proud of the system," he said.
Boyd hopes to have that collection on the site by the end of July.
Sheli Walker, one of Boyd's former graduate students, helped with the baseball collection. She liked the system because it's simple and doesn't take long to learn.
"It isn't going to require any specialized training," Walker said.
The center has interviews that involve Kentucky legislation and veterans, and local, state and regional topics.
There are interviews about local college students who are veterans called From Combat to Kentucky, black farmers and World War II, just to name a few.
The student veteran project is ongoing, but some of the tagged video interviews are available on the site. Another ongoing project involves interviews about black history in Lexington.
"It really runs the gamut in terms of topics covered in our archives," Boyd said.
Ian Jennings Abney, a student at UK, was interviewed for the veteran collection. He served in the Marine Corps and is an Iraq veteran.
Abney's interview gives a personal touch to the war in Iraq, particularly when he talks about playing with his GI Joe as a child, when his mother told him that GI Joe was a Marine.
"And I didn't ever think about it being a Marine or anything else, but that's probably the first time I can think back to really being motivated toward going into the military," Abney said in the interview. "And it was from then for as long as I can remember, I've never wanted to do anything else."
What Boyd likes about oral history and preserving it is that everybody has a story.
"I love the idea of capturing ... those stories," he said.
Boyd said recording and archiving the interviews were important because people all over the world have access to them.
Deirdre Scaggs, associate dean of Special Collections, said the program was important for her department because it's part of the overall mission to preserve the commonwealth's cultural and historical memory.
"Without preserving sounds and stories ... people don't have the ability to learn about the past in the same way," she said.
Listen online
To listen to oral histories collected by the University of Kentucky's Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, go to the Kentucky Digital Library at Kdl.kyvl.org or ExploreUK at Exploreuk.uky.edu.


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Anyway, on to the topic of the books I read in July and August. July was a marvelous month for reading as I went on a mini holiday down south (a yearly tradition in my family). With little to no access to wifi and therefore no unnecessary distraction, I always love these jaunts because they help me to relax and get a lot of reading done in the process. In fact, the first three books listed below were read over the period of three to four days. I got so involved with the stories that returning home and to 'reality' was odd, to say the least. August was a bit light on as I only managed to read one book, but hey, it's something.
So without further ado, here are the books I read in July and August.
Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock - Matthew Quick
"Not letting the world destroy you. That's a daily battle."
On the day of his birthday, Leonard Peacock hides a P-38 pistol in his school backpack which he intends to kill both his former best friend and then himself with. Before doing so, he must say good-bye to the only people in his life that he feels matter to him: his Humphrey Bogart-obsessed next-door neighbor, Walt; his classmate, Baback, a violin virtuoso; Lauren, the Christian home schooler he has a crush on; and Herr Silverman, who teaches the high school's class on the Holocaust. Throughout the course of the day, Leonard's troubled character is slowly revealed and readers witness a sensitive soul crying out for help in the only way he knows how.
This novel is quite touching but also extremely disturbing. Leonard is a very lonely, confused and 'weird' boy. He has a traumatic past, and too many people let him down in life. I both wanted to comfort him but also despised him, loathed him for his disturbing intentions that I don't feel could ever be excusable. Nevertheless, I feel it reveals a lot of problems that need to be more openly discussed in society; about sexual abuse, mental health, suicide and, specific to America, gun control. I wouldn't recommend reading this if you're after something lighthearted, but it is certainly a worthwhile read.
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwoord
"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down."
Taking place in the dystopian Republic of Gilead, Offred serves one purpose and one purpose only: to be a Handmaid. She is one of the few fertile women left in an age of declining births and is kept in the home of the 'Commander' and his wife in order to bear 'their' children. Restricted from leaving the house aside from one day a week, Gilead lives a monotonous routine. She remembers the 'years before' spent with her husband and daughter, when she had a job, money of her own, freedom and access to knowledge. Everything that was cruelly stripped away from her...
I want to begin by voicing my disbelief that I had never read any of Atwood's works before this one. I always intended on doing so, but after reading The Handmaid's Tale I wish I made it more of a priority. Atwood's prose is stunning. While the subject matter of this novel is quite frightening, Atwood's writing style had my eyes glued to the page. It's overall a fascinating read with prominent themes, such as religious fundamentalism and women's rights, made easily applicable to problems and scenarios taking place in the world today.
Left Bank - Kate MuirSet in modern day Paris, Olivier and Madison Malin are high profile Parisians who live on the Left Bank and have a seemingly dream life in the exclusive neighbourhood. This is until a new English nanny appears on the scene and threatens to endanger the lives of the Malin family.
I picked up this book in a second hand bookshop while on holiday. Having just finished the two very bleak titles above, I was craving some chick lit and this promised to fit the bill. It was an easy read...but honestly, it was a whole lot of nonsense and every single character, par Sabine, the daughter of Oliver and Madison, is unlikable, incredibly self centered and self righteous (or just absolutely insane). The vast majority of reviews on goodreads tend to agree, unfortunately. The only saving grace that I can think of were Muir's descriptions of French gastronomy, but they weren't enough to fully satisfy.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping - Richard Flanagan
"So Maria Buloh continued walking down the empty street, a young woman clad in an old coat carrying a small cardboard suitcase, the tracks left by her shoes momentarily bisecting that grim, sour, snow-swept camp, her image already losing its earthly outlines in the falling snow"
Fleeing the terrors of war and seeking a new life in the promising land of Tasmania in 1954, this novel tells the story of migrant Bojan Buloh and his family. Working in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote highlands, life is far from easy. One night, Bojan's wife, Maria, walks out into a blizzard and is never to be seen again, leaving Bojan to care for their three year old daughter, Sonja, on his own. Traumatized by Maria's disappearance and the ghosts of war, Bojan turns to drink and his actions towards Sonja lead to a strained and painful relationship. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania where she eventually learns to love again and create a promising new 'lifetime'.
This book is beautiful. I found it was an excellent experience reading Tasmanian literature, as I'm not all that familiar with the Tasmanian oeuvre. Flanagan's prose is haunting, and I felt so strongly that it serves as an accurate depiction of the unique region. I visited over five years ago and was struck by the distinctive landscape, 'an island of high latitudes, of mountains, lakes, mists, clouds and rain; of wastes of awesome scenery' which evoke a certain sense of isolation (Jim Davidson, Tasmanian Gothic). Indeed, the feeling of isolation lingers throughout this novel, not just in the landscape, but in Tasmania's migrant history. An outsider to the 'Australians' yet living in a melting pot of cultures, Bojan struggles to communicate and struggles to fit in where ever he goes. A constant source of pain for him is his inability to express what he feels and to come to terms with the horrors he witnessed during the war. Unfortunately, it's Sonja who suffers at the hands of his torment, and she also struggles to come to terms with the mystery of her mother's disappearance, a family she never knew and a home that never felt like home. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is full of moving moments and is flawlessly put together. It has been one of my favourite reads so far this year.


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More than 3,000 primary schoolchildren in Warwickshire and Leicestershire will be running a marathon in a challenge set by Leamington charity Kids Run Free.
The organisation, which hosts free running events for children across the Midlands, has been awarded £8,000 by Heart Research UK and SUBWAY® stores to run a year-long project involving pupils from ten schools in the region.
The Young Hearts Run Free project, launched following Heart Research UK figures that showed that 19.1 per cent of children in year 6 are obese and 14.4 per cent are overweight, will see the participating pupils run the distance of a marathon across two school terms by running laps during their lunch break.
Martine Verweij, chief executive of Kids Run Free, said: "We are so grateful for Heart Research UK's and SUBWAY® support, as it will help to get the children healthier, happier and more confident and learn how to take care of their hearts.
"The aim is to get children confident in achieving their goal in bite-sized pieces, whilst being conscious of the positive impact it has on their health."
All children taking part will learn how to take their own pulse and breathing rate, which they will hopefully see improve. They will receive a certificate at the end of the project and medals will be awarded to those who complete their marathon.
Schools wishing to take part should contact Sam Young on 07711 372795 or email firstname.lastname@example.com


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Wedding Pro Annual Gala "Down the Rabbit Hole: We're All Mad Here"
"You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret, all the best people are." -The Mad Hatter
This is the Wedding Industry event of the year! It's a Gala, a Recognition Dinner, Awards Dinner and a night on the town, all rolled into one evening.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Tsakopoulos Library Galleria in Sacramento.


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The William Hill Darts League presentation evening produced a packed house at Skegness WMC as world number one Glen Durrant turned on the style.
With bull finishes and exhibition doubles, Durrant showed why he is the world's top-ranked player, hitting five 180s, and a fantastic 11-dart leg on the way.
Mark Gray and Martin Bell played him at best of three at the end of a very entertaining evening. Bell hit a 180 and Durrant had to pull out all of the stops to beat him 2-1. Rick Garner was the only player to beat him on the night.
Organisers wish to thank markers Lee Yates, and Jamie Cooper, and Tony Warry, Ian Chamberlain, Liam Simms and Chris Butler for the raffle.
Thanks also to Skegness Liberal and Social Club and SeaviewPub Skegness, for their raffle prizes and Skegness WMC for their support in putting the on evening which was held together by compere John Fowler,
League award winners – Sid Dennis and Sons Ltd Division One: Arctic Shrew Monkies, runners-up Seaview Oak. Sid Dennis and Sons Ltd Division Two: Finnegans, runners-up: WMC Aces. Cup: Arctic Shrew Monkies, runners-up: Ex Service Cobras. Trebles: Brad Martin, Mark Gray, Pete Evans. Doubles: Brad Martin and Mark Gray. Singles: Martin Bell, Runner-up: Brad Martin.
* The Summer League starts on Friday with the Ex Service Pro Am Qualifier number four, starting at 8pm. Entry £2.
* The second part of a busy weekend brought the Fun Bus with four pubs in one afternoon.
The fun started at the SeaviewPub Skegness with a fantastic crowd as Kevin Painter played more than 12 games here.
They moved on to Woolpack, Wainfleet, where Painter again played more than a dozen games before heading to the Red Lion, Burgh. The final destination was Highwayman.


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I get lots of questions about charitable donations in memory of loved ones. Here are two:
Q: Our much-loved boss died of cancer. His widow told me he had wished for support of the Cancer Society, so I took up a collection at the office. I dutifully sent the money and got a thank-you note, which I passed around, indicating the total donation of over $2,000. To my surprise, at tax time, I received an official receipt for a charitable donation made out to myself. This would have resulted in a tax credit of $800. I was on the horns of a dilemma, and now understood why some people make it their "duty" to collect for charitable organizations; it can pay handsomely.
A: Yes, but only if a person is willing to cheat.
Your mistake, made honestly, was not being clear with the charity that this was a group donation, not a personal one. The gift should have been forwarded in the name of "The Staff at Walter's Widgets," rather than your own. But there's no dilemma; just throw the receipt in the garbage.
A better way of handling such situations is to ask the charity to provide donation cards, which can then be handed to every employee. Each person fills out his own card and includes a cheque. They can be mailed individually, or someone can collect them (peer pressure never hurts) and send them off together. This way each employee gets her own receipt; they're entitled to a tax deduction, so why not claim it?
Incidentally, the charity likely gets more this way, too; if folks get a tax receipt, they might give more than the 10 bucks they throw into a corporate pot.
Q: Recently, a member of our local art gallery died; I got an email from the gallery telling about her death and asking if I'd like to make a donation in her memory. I later saw the obit; her wishes were that friends give donations to two other charities. The gallery wasn't mentioned. Isn't their suggestion to give to the gallery a bit tacky, and maybe even ethically wrong?
A: With all due respect, the privileges that accompany death don't include dictating to the living how to use their money.
It's perfectly appropriate for a dying person, or their family, to suggest charities where they'd appreciate donations in their honour.
But sometimes those suggestions, made in the heat of the moment, aren't well thought out. When I worked for the church, I hated when a lifelong member would die after two weeks in hospital, and the family would request donations to the hospital — without mentioning the church. We weren't pitting worthy causes against each other — but we anaesthetized him every Sunday for 80 years, while the hospital had only two weeks!
As long as your gallery doesn't pretend to be acting at the behest of the deceased, there's nothing wrong with inviting members to donate in honour of another member. That doesn't preclude other donations folks might make; they can also give to the "suggested" charity if they wish.
Where I give money is my decision — not my friend's. Even when he's dead.


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text:
Dear Mark,
While you've kept working on the stats, I've been mulling a couple of our "to do" items.
Item one: Katherine Hayles's recent book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Item two: the midcentury founding of Mass Communications, which caught my eye doing that earlier post on I.A. Richards. I decided to write about these two items together because each presents the project of ordering a motley array of scholarly experiments as an invitation to consider the relationship between academic research and administration.
For early Mass Communication, the managerial stakes were pretty explicit. Mass media were a crucial part of the war effort and academics were charged with understanding what propaganda could do. In Hayles's account, the managerial challenges facing the Digital Humanities are dominated by a singular academic concern: how and whether digital humanists should mollify textual analysts in literature programs.
In the opening section of her book, Hayles presents the Digital Humanities as a reckoning with technogenesis. Mass media have changed in the last twenty years and humanists have a stake in understanding what those changes mean. The web in particular appears to have altered our relationship to media, causing us to pay attention in different ways than we used to. For some commentators, like Mark Bauerlein, such alteration amounts to a crisis for the humanities and for the populace. Kids today can only pay attention fleetingly. They cannot read deeply. As a result, the value of closely reading literature is largely lost on them.
Many digital humanists seek to sooth their alarmed colleagues. Hayles describes a posture of "assimilation," which "extends existing scholarship into the digital realm" and "adopts an attitude of reassurance rather than confrontation" (45). Assimilationists include the journal Postmodern Culture, Willard McCarthy's Humanities Computing and the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London, as well as various efforts to build electronic editions of print texts. Assimilation means reconsidering "what reading is and how it works" and treating that as the chief puzzle posed by "the rich mixtures of words and images, sounds and animations, graphics and letters that constitute the environments of twenty-first century literacies" (78). If it is true that new technologies have brought about "cognitive and morphological changes in the brain," that does not mean that deep engagement with literature is no longer desirable, Hayles assures her readers (11). "The NEA argues (and I of course agree) that literary reading is a good in itself," she writes (55). But it is no good pretending that English professors and others will be able to persuade students to deeply engage with literature if they "are focused exclusively on print close reading," she cautions (60). Instead, Hayles proposes "Comparative Media Studies," defined as a set of "courses and curricula" devoted to assembling "reading modalities—close, hyper-, and machine—" and to preparing "students to understand the limitations and affordances of each" (11). In this program, literary scholars will be able to reflect on new media while reproducing their devotion to reading.
Not all digital humanists care as deeply about reading and literature as the assimilationists, Hayles notes. Its name notwithstanding, the School of Literature, Culture and Communication at Georgia Tech privileges cooperation with engineering and computer science departments, features digital media in its curriculum, and announces its interest in "the theoretical and practical foundation for careers as digital media researchers in academia and industry." The LCC is more interested in "distinction" than "assimilation," Hayles explains, and is less concerned with reading practices than with "new methodologies, new kinds of research questions, and the emergence of entirely new fields" (45).
Hayles's account of assimilation and distinction requires her to ignore pre-digital humanities research that is not defined by textual analysis and close reading. Hayles portrays humanities scholars as capable of understanding visual media only as new and alien, as a disruptive surprise or excitingly dangerous supplement. It is only recently, she explains, that digital humanists turned "from a primary focus on text encoding, analysis, and searching to multimedia practices that explore the fusion of text-based humanities with film, sound, animation, graphics, and other multimodal practices across real, mixed, and virtual reality" (24). Hayles largely reproduces, in short, the reduction of the humanities to literary study that we've seen in a whole parade of "crisis of the humanities" arguments as well as in the midcentury education plan called the Harvard Redbook. Only by defining the "Traditional Humanities" as the literary and philosophical analysis of print is it possible to imagine that images come as a surprise to humanists or that the technical study undertaken at Georgia Tech's LCC has a "less clear, more problematic, and generally undertheorized" relationship to humanities research (52). Certainly film and media professors have long been involved in thinking about technical processes and engineering problems–including but not limited to matters concerned with the chemical properties of film–even if they have not been making friends with computer scientists. The same could be said for any number of other kinds of humanists, especially perhaps those working with medieval and classical materials.
Since we first started discussing our project, Mark, you've been annoyed at the reduction of the humanities to literary study. Hayles is clearly annoyed by it too, which is why she wishes that literary scholars would join her in Comparative Media Studies. But to the extent that she portrays media comparison as "reading" ("reading modalities—close, hyper-, and machine—," as she puts it), I wonder how much of an advance this represents.
It should be said that managing the concerns of literary scholars "after the age of print" is not the only administrative concern in How We Think, even if it does dominate. Sandwiched in the middle of her book, Hayles pauses to describe an archival project focused on special collections of telegraph code books. She explains how the practices of sending and receiving code generated "a zone of indeterminacy…in which bodies seemed to take on some of the attributes of dematerialized information, and information seemed to take on the physicality of bodies" (147). This argument is science studies-esque, entirely reminiscent of Schivelbush and early Latour, and has almost nothing to do with literature.
Where other chapters in her book seek to manage technogenesis so as not to scare Bauerlein and co., Hayles's chapter on telegraphy describes hyper-attention as "a positive adaptation that makes young people better suited to live in the information-intensive environments that are becoming ever more pervasive" (99). In this chapter, Hayles appears freed to move from the small to the large, from the "small percentage" of telegraphers and clerks who were "neurologically affected" by practices of sending and receiving code to the "wider effects…transmitted via the technological unconscious as business practices, military strategies, personal finances, and a host of other everyday concerns were transformed with the expectation of fast communication and the virtualization of commodities and money into information" (157). At no point were the stakes involved in the administration of these effects higher than in World War II, by which point "'wireless telegraphy,' or radio, had become the favored mode of communication" (155). Surveying the regulations and rules for coding during the war brings Hayles to her observation of just how far telegraphy had gone in facilitating an "historical shift," one that anticipates our era "in which all kinds of communications are mediated by intelligent machines" (156-57).
You and I have been working for some time to figure out how and when literary study started playing the part that it plays in Hayles's book. We used to argue that in the mid-twentieth century English solidified its hold on a core curriculum by opposing reading to viewing, the intellectual reflection of literary consumption to the contrastingly numbing reception of film, etc. My previous post on I.A. Richards suggests a more complicated dynamic, however. Richards helped position English at the center of the Harvard Redbook's educational program and marginalized media study in the process, but at the same time he was also experimenting with film and TV as tools for mass education outside the academy. He received support from the Rockefeller Foundation as well as early public television.
My (admittedly superficial) research into the early days of Mass Communication in the 1930s and 40s suggests that such paradoxical allegiances were not unusual. Some of the most influential figures in that emerging field were English professors perfecting willing to stop behaving as if literature and reading were the center of their intellectual lives when they joined up with various interdisciplinary teams.
Rockefeller Foundation office John Marshall, who dreamed of a "genuinely democratic propaganda" and in 1936 first suggested that the foundation fund communications-related activities, was trained as a medievalist and taught in the Harvard English Department.
Wilbur Schramm, who organized the first Mass Communications PhD program at Iowa in 1943, had a PhD in English, a postdoc from the ACLS (in psychology), and from 1935 to 1942 directed the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
For his part, Richards was ever so briefly part of the Rockefeller Foundation Communications Group organized by Marshall. According to Brett Gary, Richards departed after his fellow group members largely ignored two of his papers on semantics. His departure, Gary argues, happened at a moment when quantitative research was beginning to dominate the group's activities.
The opposition between qualitative and quantitative analysis crops up in much of what I read on the early years of Mass Communications. Disciplinary historians believe it pinched English types like Richards and also University of Chicago sociologists, who were actively considering communications problems but whose qualitative methods meant they were largely left behind when Mass Communications on their campus started to emphasize the tabulation of surveys.
This split between quantitative and qualitative may have been real but to privilege it occludes the truly messy collaboration in communications research and policy that was going on both before and during the second World War. The Rockefeller Foundation appears to have led the way in bringing together disparate squads, "younger men with talent for these mediums," as Marshall called them, "men interested primarily in education, literature, criticism, or in disseminating the findings of the social or natural sciences," who wanted to engage in "relatively free experimentation."
Jefferson Pooley and Elihu Katz see similarly motley group activity at Chicago, where sociology served as "heir to the rich but scattered reflections on communications and the media that characterized European thought. At Chicago, as in Europe, interests were broad: media professionals and media organizations, media as agents of social integration and deviance, media as contributors to a public sphere of participatory democracy, and media as implicated in social change and in the diffusion of ideas, opinions, and practices."
Karin Wahl-Jorgenson describes the activities of short-lived inter-disciplinary committees at Chicago that were "meant to explore, conquer, and die," "to tag onto particular research problems, linked to individuals' interests or urgent questions of social import."
Especially during the war, there were policy questions that ran through all of these experimental efforts.
Gary sums up: "Anxieties about the relation between democracy and new mass communication technologies linked the emergence of mass communication research as a scholarly field with the growth of the surveillance apparatus of the modern national security state. The contradictory imperatives of modern liberalism–its simultaneous commitment to and fear of the expansion of the modern state, with its information and opinion control apparatus–pervaded the debates of the first generation of communication researchers…." Rockefeller researchers worked with and against governmental officers prosecuting the war. Schramm was involved in Roosevelt's radio addresses, including the fireside chats. And so forth. As the war went on, Gary recounts, Rockefeller communications group members "regularly returned to the question of whether their focus should be primarily scientific (reliably measuring effects) or administrative (servicing the state's probable interests in public opinion control)."
Wahl-Jorgenssen titles her 2004 article on the early days of Mass Communication "How Not to Found a Field," which seems just about right. The pods that were moving in and out of government, conducting research and shaping policy would have fit awkwardly in any department, and where Mass Communication codified itself around quantitative analysis the price paid for methodological coherence appears to have been the exclusion of a whole array of earlier contributors. If Marshall and Schramm seemed more or less ok leaving their English backgrounds behind, Richards clearly was not and the continentally-oriented sociologists at Chicago were not willing to forget their past expertise either. When Richards left, of course, he was no more homeless than the Chicago sociologists who went back to their usual corridors. There's a familiar model here, albeit more familiar outside the humanities than inside them, of the research group or lab that does its business for a while and then disbands.
The various Digital Humanities institutes and centers that Hayles describes in the first section of her book share something of this ad hoc feel as well as a recognizable desire to work with all sorts of strange bedfellows. "The Humanities Lab at Stanford University, formerly directed by Jeffrey Schnapp, modeled itself on 'Big Science,'" Hayles recalls (34). Alan Liu at UC Santa Barbara asks students "to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields of study" (75). There is a "willingness" among many digital humanists, Hayles argues, to shed any "hermeneutic of suspicion…toward capitalism and corporations" and "reach out to funders (sometimes including commercial interests)" (41). Instead of departments, Hayles's digital humanists want "flexible laboratory spaces in which teams can work collaboratively, as well as studio spaces with high-end technologies for production and implementation" (5).
In truth, the least interesting thing about the Digital Humanities in Hayles's account is the need to manage its relationship to literature departments. Although I grasp why it is important for humanities professors and graduate students immersed in interdisciplinary collaboration to have home departments–just as it is important for scientists who join up on specific grants–it is frustrating, to say the least, that the narrow lens of literary study should so define how one values experimental humanities research.
Dipping into the history of Mass Communication teaches me that as recently as the 1940s the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation felt it entirely reasonable to empower a literary medievalist to organize media research that not only crossed disciplines but also got embroiled in governmental policy. Hayles's book teaches me that conditions have changed notably since the 1940s. There is plenty of experiment in the humanities today, but to the extent that it must be obsessed with the purview of literary study, it seems hobbled, incapable of embracing the managerial challenges that mass media call forth.


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Hi all,
I found this post on the google groups from nov. of 07, when searching for a way to import a group of materials into sketchup. I installed the ruby and it shows up under my plugins drop down. Problem is I cant get it to work. Does anyone have any experience with this particular plugin??? The genesis of my problem is the need for a bunch of sketchy type materials for a black and white presentation i'm preparing in Layout. I was only able to find a set of jpg's hence my need to convert them to .skm files.
Is there a way to automate a bulk add of a JPG library to the
SKM library? I've got several hundred material texture images and it
would be tedious to convert them by hand one by one.
Use the ruby script Mass Material Importer
http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDep ... mporter.rb.
to place an entire folder of images into your In-Model library, which
you can then save with Save As Library. You'll probably have to tweak
the scales on the images."
Thanks for any help!!
mass material importer
14 posts • Page 1 of 1
Re: mass material importer
Since I tweaked this so it worked originally, here goes...
You pick 'Import Materials' off the Plugins menu.
You'll get a dialog open up.
Navigate to the folder that contains all of your image files (jpg etc).
Select one of the files and click OK - the instructions on the dialog's top-bar tell you to do this...
Because there is no 'get directory' method in SketchUp Ruby the work around is that you select one file and the script works out that file's directory... Then it takes all of the images in that directory and these are added as materials in the Model - open the 'model-tab' in the Materials browser to see them...
You might need to scale the materials individually...
You can then 'save_as' pop-out to export these as separate .skm files outside of the one model if you have multiple models needing some of these materials.
Still works for me...
Last edited by TIG on Fri Mar 27, 2009 11:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: mass material importer
You'll find also a workaround here
Re: mass material importer
What do you do about the scale of the imported images? You still have to manually scale every imported image to make it usable, i.e. brick textures (or any patterned texture that is meant to have a certain size in relation to SketchUp model space).
There are a few SketchUp material libraries floating around the www, that are basically just images with unrealistic scale, and not true material libraries..
Re: mass material importer
Is there a way that you can set the default texture size? I see that when you import them, they all come in at 10" x 10".....
Other then that, sweet plugin!
Sketchup Kitchen Design Plugin
Custom Models
Re: mass material importer
You can read the image size and set the materials texture to suit...
*** Unfortunately there seems to be no direct relationship between the original image size in pixels and imported image or the texture size it produces. We could find
then use Ruby to find its size - as its file-size might come into the equation with it w/h pixel size ?
Not sure how though ??? my_factor would then be calculated based on the file_size and image_height in pixels, to return it as inches ?
To show this weirdness manually you can import two images of different pixel sizes and double-click to place them with no scaling - and an image of 225x225px might become a SUp image of 75x75" when exploded, whilst one 512x512px might become 69x69" - the height:width ratio is kept but the image-size varies - probably depending on the image's complexity, I find that low-res monochrome images import as very large in w/h inches ?
It's an enhancement I've yet to implement - if you want to add it then it's not so hard - except for working out what the size should be ??? ...
Re: mass material importer
Also there is no direct relationship between an image size in pixels and how many virtualinches/sms it should cover in SU (just think of brick sizes -how would the plugin know how many bricks are in the image and how big they are supposed to be each?).
It seems that some manual tweaking and rescaling the images cannot be spared in SU.
Re: mass material importer
BTW - WOW ... this is an EXCELLENT Plugin.
I wish I had known about this a long time ago but better late than never.
This plugin will save me (and others) a HUGE amount of time.
I have hundreds of hi-res repeating photo textures that would take hours or even days to import and save one-by-one.
With this Plugin/Ruby, I was able to save many in just a few clicks.
It's going to get lots of use over the next day or two ... any for hereinafter.
Re: mass material importer
I agree, I have a large collection, which I'm willing to share, is it possible to
setup a sharing of Materials Repository for .skm files at this Forum?
Re: mass material importer
Tomot... I don't know but let me know. I'd love to see what you have.
I still use the importer and it works somewhat well. I do have issues with it after using it 3 times in a row or using it on folders with over 50 textures it imports them in a black hue or a light gray hue. So I try to keep the folders small.
then of course the standard 10" I would at least like it to be 1'x 1'.
By: Kristoff Rand
Home Designer
Unique House Plans
Re: mass material importer
I don't want to be accused of stealing this thread, ....sorry!
Come to think of it this might not be feasible in this forum.
Therefore I would suggest Google Drive as an alternative. It offers 5GB free and its easy to email download links to friends that are interested in cross sharing.
My current customized material files are not small?
Re: mass material importer
I know what you mean...
the smaller folder being my .skm's the larger all the originals and stuff I might not have used or converted yet.
I would really love and would pay (hint hint) to be able to convert all the files to skms... and keep the folder structure in tact.
By: Kristoff Rand
Home Designer
Unique House Plans
Re: mass material importer
It does not take long to make the conversion, all it takes is time Hint: I keep my textures in separate prefixed folders, while keeping the original texture file folder names unchanged. This way I can always copy my texture folders to any new install of SU. Using this procedure your new prefixed folders can be added to my folders under the common Materials folder, or vice versa.
Re: mass material importer
Thanks a lot guys for the tips ! the script work fine.
But really no one have any idea how to batch-adjust the tiling of the material ? Other ways it will take me days to manually adjust each one of them (I have like 500 skm tu adjust)
14 posts • Page 1 of 1