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BEST WESTERN Moffat House Hotel.
A charming country mansion in South Scotland.The BEST WESTERN Moffat House Hotel is set just off the High Street in this delightful Victorian Spa town. A stunning country mansion, built for The Earl of Hopetoun in the 1750's, our hotel is set in 1.5 acres of grounds. So, although the amenities and shops of Moffat are on your doorstep, they'll seem a world away thanks to our peaceful courtyard and gardens - which feature a 260 year old oak tree! Hospitality is at the heart of this hotel, and our staff are renowned for their first-class customer service. A warm welcome awaits in this tranquil, yet convenient setting, so be our guest and enjoy it for yourself.Maintaining high brand standards and excellence in quality is second nature to the BEST WESTERN Moffat House Hotel in Moffatt. We have proven that going that extra mile during our annual BEST WESTERN quality assurance assessments really does pay off. Our hard work and dedication to cleanliness and quality of both guest rooms and public areas has gained us the BEST WESTERN International Quality Award. A global recognition of excellence given to only a few selected hotels throughout the world, this award shows that we take pride in offering high levels of excellence in quality and brand standards our guests expect.
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Davie Ferries
We serve up traditional classics with a modern twist and of course, a smile. The focus is on local cuisine and Scottish hospitality!
Sit back, relax and enjoy a drink or two in traditional surroundings. Pleasant decor and comfortable seating create a warm, cosy atmosphere, which our open log fire only adds to in those winter months!
The Moffat Golf Club
Course information
Course Type: 18
Location: Off Site
Holes: 18
Par: 10
Distance: 1000 Yards
No handicap required
1 miles away in Moffat
Driving range
Practice ground golf facilities
Putting green golf facilites
Pro shop golf facilities
The grooms suit won't be the only thing thats tailor-made on your big day. After all, we offer bespoke packages to suit different budgets and tastes! We're always open to new ideas, and keen to make your dreams a reality.
Wedding service and reception venue
Whether you want to dance the night away with a Ceilidh, live band, cabaret or DJ, we'll make sure the stage is set for a perfect evening reception.
From banquets that serve up to 100 people or marquees catering for up to 200, our set menus, carveries and buffets will go down a treat with everyone on your guest list!
Honeymoon Suite
Our four poster rooms are the perfect place to relax and unwind after the days non-stop celebrations. You'll love our chaise longue, large bath and the private access from our courtyard!
Registry office:
Dumfries & Galloway
15 Ednam Street, Annan, Dumfries & Galloway DG12 5
01461 204914
Get in touch with Paul or Michal on 01683 22 00 39
For any enquiries please call Paul Lawson / Ian Wilson on 01683 220039
Getting there.
Sat nav users: type DG10 9HL
Send to Tom Tom
Nearest motorway: A74(M), J15, 1.00 miles
Nearest train station:
Lockerbie, 14.00 miles
Nearest airport: Glasgow, 50.00 miles
Free parking on site (35 spaces)
On site disabled parking (2 spaces)
High Street
What's nearby?
Murrayfield, Edinburgh (55 miles)
Hampden Park, Glasgow (50 miles)
Grey Mairs Tail - Waterfall (4 miles)
Gretna Green and Outlet Village (30 miles)
Glasgow (50 miles)
Edinburgh (55 miles)
Moffat Woolen Mill (0.5 miles)
Moffat High Street (0.1 miles)
Gretna Green outlet village (27 miles)
As well as the perfect setting for meetings and conferences, we can also provide lunch, dinner and evening entertainment to make sure your event is as relaxing as it is productive. Overnight packages are available, because a day at this splendid hotel might not be enough!
Available room set ups
BanquetBoardroomClassroomTheatreU shape
01/01/0001 ,
We usually eat at the Star Hotel, but it was a lovely day and they have no garden. The garden is lovely, but..
1. a large sign outside advertised real ales - "it off sir, but back on on Monday"
2. No one was clearing the tables in the garden - heaped with dity plates and glasses
3. Smallest fish I have ever been served and it was overdone.
The chips were alright less
BW Moffat House is a nice enough hotel in a typical Scottish market town. There wasn't anything bad to say about it but I didn't want to give it a 4 star ''very good'' review either. It's a solid 3 star hotel that is perhaps showing it's age a bit but staff were friendly and polite. Dinner in the bar and breakfast in the restaurant was good. Free parking and shops/pubs/local transport right on your doorstep. less
Great kerb appeal.
We had 3 rooms over 1 night stay.
1 of the twins rooms main overhead light did not work and there were no towels in the rooms on arrival.
The towels were quickly fixed with a visit to the front desk though.
Staff were very polite and helpful; a credit to the hotel.
Breakfast was slightly slow but all delicious. less
This was a lovely hotel, we were a group of 30 walkers all tired after walking the Southern upland way and we were all very well looked after and enjoyed our stay, there was brilliant service , lovely food, with very accommodating staff. The staff were able to arrange a special menu and group seating. less
Very, very comfortable. Clean rooms, excellent service. It was raining, but we enjoyed our stay. We had our evening meal in the lounge bar which was comfortable and ambient. The breakfast was good and up to the standard we would expect. Prices were on par with other similar establishments. less


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83-12062 - Windows 7 Professional 32 Bit OEM
Windows 7 was designed to simplify the things you do every day, work the way you want, and make some exciting new things possible. Windows 7 was designed to work with today's multi-core processors. All 32-bit versions of Windows 7 can support up to 32 processor c...
Mfr Name: Microsoft
Mfr Number: FQC-08279
See all items in Software
83-16034 - Easy Website In A Box
Easy Website in a Box
The world's first website builder for non-technical people that provides you with an easy, responsive and secure website.
Mfr Name: Distributed By MCM
Mfr Number: EWIABSE
83-16035 - Easy Website In A Box Deluxe
Easy Website in a Box Deluxe
The world's first website builder for non-technical people that provides you with an easy, responsive and secure website.
Mfr Number: EWIABDE
83-16028 - 2015 Panda Pro Antivirus Software
Panda Internet Security 2014
Want you and your family to be safe on the internet?
Panda Internet Security 2014 offers the most advanced protection against the dangers of the Web. It lets you use the Internet for everything privately and securely, from buying to ...
Mfr Name: Panda Security
Mfr Number: B12IS14DVD1
83-16027 - 2014 Panda Pro Antivirus Software
Panda Antivirus Pro 2014
The new Panda Antivirus Pro 2014 offers the easiest-to-use and most intuitive protection for your computer. Just install it and forget about viruses, spyware, rootkits, hackers and online fraud. Chat, share photos and videos, bank and buy...
Mfr Number: B12AP14DVD1
83-12063 - Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit OEM
Mfr Number: FQC-08289
831-3319 - AC750 Wireless Adapter
Connect and upgrade your devices to the newest, most powerful wireless-AC technology.
Mfr Name: Linksys
Mfr Number: AE6000
See all items in Adapters
831-3320 - AC1200 Wireless Adapter
Mfr Number: WUSB6300
83-16036 - Software Data Recovery
SD Card Recovery Pro
SD Cards store a wealth of data, and are found in a range of devices including cameras, tablets and Android phones. These memories are often irreplaceable, such as photos from a holiday, or family videos. Likewise, USB flash drives are used ...
Mfr Number: ER-241
83-16029 - 2014 Global Protection Software
Panda Global Protection 2014
MAXIMUM SECURITY FOR ALL YOUR DEVICES - How do you connect to the Internet? PC? Mac? Tablet? Smartphone? Do not worry, Panda Global Protection 2014 protects all your data regardless of the device or operating systems used.Protection a...
Mfr Number: B12GP14B1
83-15151 - Maple STM32 Arduino Compatible Development Board
Leaf Labs - Maple
The Maple is a improved version of the Arduino Uno. The Maple maintains the same pin and mounting hole positions as the Arduino Uno.
Mfr Name: Leaf
Mfr Number: MAPLE_D25
See all items in Boards
831-3322 - N600 Wi-Fi Range Extender
The Linksys RE2000 works seamlessly with all b/g/n Wi-Fi devices so you can connect all of the computers and devices around your home. For best performance, pair with any Wireless-N router.
Mfr Number: RE2000
See all items in Access Points
831-3321 - N300 Wi-Fi Range Extender
The Linksys RE1000 works seamlessly with all b/g/n Wi-Fi devices so you can connect all of the computers and devices around your home. For best performance, pair with any Wireless-N router.
Mfr Number: RE1000-NP
28-13500 - Cookie - Arduino Compatible Arm32 Development Board
Cookie is an open-source Arduino™ compatible ARM prototyping platform based on 32-bit ARM Cortex M0/3/4 MCUs plus hardware and software building blocks. Cookie expands the concepts of Arduino™ into 32-bit ARM Cortex MCUs.
Mfr Name: Embest
Mfr Number: COOKIE NUMICRO EVB
83-13517 - USB 3.0 HDMI Adapter
The USB 3.0 Display Adapter is a device which enables connection to second display device to a computer using USB 3.0 port.
Mfr Number: AN3810
See all items in Video Cards & Accessories
MCM Electronics provided very good service and even went beyond to help me with an order. I always have good service and would recommend them to anyone.

subset: commoncrawl


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Whether you're an athlete in training or you want to maintain good health practices, Vermont Technical College's SHAPE (Student Health and Physical Education) Facility offers state-of-the-art equipment and fitness facilities for the Vermont Tech and surrounding community. As the home of our Athletic and Intramural Departments, SHAPE is the campus hub for physical activities. We are open long hours to accomodate both students and community members.
Originally built in 1990, the existing SHAPE complex now includes one gymnasium; a spacious and well equipped weight room complete with free weights and BodyMaster equipment, an aerobic fitness area with stair climbers, Concept II rowing machines, elliptical trainers, treadmills, spinning bikes, stair steppers; a 26-foot climbing wall; two racquetball courts, one squash court; and a six-lane, 25-yard swimming pool.
In addition to serving the college's student and staff needs, the Vermont Technical College SHAPE Facility continues to open its doors to the surrounding community, offering a variety of community memberships and fitness classes as well as working in partnership with many of the area's schools, community recreation groups and health organizations.
Vermont Technical College reserves the right to close the facility and/or adjust hours for maintenance, holidays and college events as deemed necessary during the year. Every effort will be made to notify the general public of these changes in advance.
Questions about SHAPE should be directed to our front desk staff at 802-728-1384.
Sign up for SHAPE news! You'll receive our monthly newsletter and notices about upcoming classes, events and cancellations.
Press Enter when fields are complete.
|SHAPE will be closed for Vermont Tech Commencement on May 16th, 2015.


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Cooper Cottages
Self Catering Accommodation in Scotland
Balquhidder - Callander - Comrie - Doune - Killin - Lochearnhead
Cooper Cottages offer a variety of self catering holiday cottages throughout Perthshire and Argyll. Be at the heart of Scotland in 2015. Each holiday cottage has its own individual Scottish charm. If you enjoy holidays in Scotland; staying in a village, tranquil rural cottage or in a picturesque Lochside location overlooking a castle, we have what you are looking for. For larger groups or wedding parties, we have a complex of cottages and lodges in a beautiful location.
If you want self catering accommodation because you are walking or cycling in Scotland, then you might be interested in a vacation property close to the Route 7 Sutrans cycle network which begins on the doorstep of the Balquhidder and Lochearnhead cottages. For enthusiastic climbers of Munros and Corbetts, Ben Vorlich, Stuc a Chroin, Ben Lawers and Ben More are within easy travelling distance.
You might enjoy bird watching; there are many species of birds including the Osprey or Golden Eagle that can be seen locally. Wild deer can also be easily spotted in the early months of the year.
If you are visiting the area for the local Lochearnhead Highland Games, Lochearnhead Shears, and need accommodation in the Lochearnhead area please contact us.
Quick Search
Fishing, permits can be obtained locally for Loch and river fishing.
If you enjoy skiing, Glencoe Ski resort is within easy travelling distance. Golf is available at St Fillans, Killin, Callander and Crieff.
Our holiday cottages are in an ideal central location for visiting other tourist attractions and historical sites. For the artist the surrounding scenery is outstandingly beautiful and many wild flowers can be found in the summer months including the wild orchid.
There are numerous and varied events throughout Scotland to celebrate Scotland's Year of Food and Drink 2015. Many events and activities are easily accessible from our cottages.
If you are looking to holiday or attend a forthcoming event in Scotland during 2015, or enjoy a relaxing break with family or friends we might have just what you are looking for. Click here for a full list of our cottages.
If you are looking to holiday or attend a forthcoming event in Scotland during 2015, or enjoy a relaxing break with family or friends we might have just what you are looking for. Click here for a full list of our cottages.


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Aquino praises NGOs
After over two years in power, President Benigno Aquino has been struck by this realization: when you're with the opposition, it's easy to nitpick, but very hard to propose solutions.
Addressing the Caucus of Development NGO Network (Code NGO), the President on Thursday praised nongovernment organizations (NGOs) for keeping the spirit of Edsa People Power I, and serving as a "pillar for good governance" in the administration.
"You're our eyes against anomalies; ears for our country's problems, and the voice of our marginalized sectors. In fact, some government officials came from your sector," he said at the national congress of Code NGO in SM City, Quezon City. The speech was aired over government-run radio.
Mr. Aquino then acknowledged Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman, and Secretary Teresita Deles, presidential adviser on the peace process, and cited their significant contributions to the government.
Years ago, the Code NGO was embroiled in a controversy over the sale of P1.8 billion in Poverty Eradication and Alleviation Certificate (PEACe) Bonds. Its officials said the transaction was legal and transparent.
"I have just one wish: when you engage in dialogue let's make sure we're contributing sensible points, instead of making brownie points like other people. We can't keep on criticizing, yet keep our mouth shut when it comes to solving problems," he said.
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Famous quotes by Thomas Davidson:Sort:PopularA - Z
|Associate with the noblest people you can find read the best books live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone. Rely upon your own energies, and so do not wait for, or depend on other people.
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Slow Food Story
10 Jun 13
"They say we are what we eat, but the way we eat is destroying the planet. Fortunately, some people are fighting back," says Azio Citi, introducing Carlo Petrini in the new documentary Slow Food Story. "But who is Carlo Petrini? He's my best friend."
Slow Food Story offers a personal account of how the Slow Food movement was born 25 years ago, and its journey that has seen it spread to 150 countries. Starting with its founder still current president Carlo Petrini, director Stefano Sardo weaves a story that portrays how a group of friends from a small Italian province pursued a dream of a better world. Sardo, himself from the city of Bra in the Piedmont region, introduces us to characters like Azio, who have been at the association's side since the beginning and offer a unique insight.
It is a story of pleasure and politics, joy and sorrow, local and global friendships. From Piedmont's peasant tradition of "cantare le uova" – walking amongst the Langhe's vineyards to visit farms, drink red wine and sing until dawn – that Petrini and friends still carry on today, to the global Terra Madre gathering that unites Slow Food's food communities, members and supporters from 160 countries.
Footage that takes us from Italy to Kenya to the USA reflects the movement's proactive approach to change based on seeking out the good in life – for taste, the environment, cultures and humans – and promoting it. "We are an association that wants to change the world, and that wants to change through pleasure," says Petrini.
With this approach, Slow Food wants to revolutionize the food system, changing the direction of a planet that is driving at top gear, fueled by fast food, industrial agriculture and globalized commodities. As Prince Charles says in the film, "Joining the international Slow Food movement might prove to be the answer."
Slow Food Story is now screening in Italy.
Watch the trailer or for more information visit the website: www.slowfoodstory.com
Search the Slow Stories archive
Tackling Food Waste? France is Streets Ahead
03/06/2015 | A victory in the fight against waste as France introduces measures to stop supermarkets throwing away food...
France at the Forefront of Saving Bee Colonies
02/06/2015 | We take a look a new strategies in place to protect declining bee populations...
Slow Food in the Caribbean
27/05/2015 | The 2015 meeting of the Slow Food Caribbean network takes place in the Dominican Republic…
A New Chapter in Morocco
Morocco | 25/05/2015 | Slow Food in Morocco welcomes a new President...
Help Bring Young Farmers to Milan: Give Expo a Soul!
21/05/2015 | The crowdfunding platform created by Saatchi & Saatchi to enable young farmers to attend a unique and...
@ 2015 Slow Food - All rights reserved - C.F. 91008360041 - Powered by Blulab


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- Forum Posts: 1520
- Wiki Points: 19
- Followed by: 58
- Reviews: -1 Lists: 4
Hoodie and Blazer is the easiest one. I remember someone posting that if he made a comeback at E3, Brad would shite himself. In that instant, i knew who it was.
Most important man one though, I finally got it! but damn! that was an ordeal!
Just look at the front page and click on anyone with a goatee.
Thought it was Ryan for a minute.
- Forum Posts: 429
- Wiki Points: 15
- Followed by: 12
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 2
I was hoping it was something sarcastic so I looked up Bobby Kotick. I'm stumped.
HAHA! I finally figured out who the blazer guy is. The effed up thing? I knew it all along and couldn't put the name ot the face. I even started seraching youtube for the Xbox 360 launch and E3 press confrenses and stuff. I had that image of him trying to squat like a cool guy with Elijah wood hosting the party.
- Forum Posts: 1270
- Wiki Points: 133
- Followed by: 27
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 5
Wow I found it. Man, thats dumb. GB should really change it to someone legitimate and recognizable, like Miyamoto or Ralph Baer. Or at least an in-joke I would be in on, like Matt Rorie or something. If people are still looking, I can confirm that YES, it is on the Mass Effect 2 credits page.
Any answers that aren't Miyamoto or Sakaguchi are wrong.
- Forum Posts: 139
- Wiki Points: 1
- Followed by: 25
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 2
I had no idea who this guy was. Glad to have found him though!
- Forum Posts: 8553
- Wiki Points: -1
- Followed by: 199
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 2
Finally got it, I don't think he's even remotely the most important man in the video game industry. Thanks for the hints though, otherwise I wouldn't have figured it out in a billion years.
- Forum Posts: 5877
- Wiki Points: 755
- Followed by: 118
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 2
I just need the MMO one, anyone wanna help me out?
- Forum Posts: 1526
- Wiki Points: 3075
- Followed by: 58
- Reviews: 4 Lists: 4
Glad someone else tried the pong and tetris creators.
- Forum Posts: 1378
- Wiki Points: 6587
- Followed by: 57
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 9
Got it. Got it. The hints did their job. Don't think I'd have got it otherwise.
- Forum Posts: 1081
- Wiki Points: 77
- Followed by: 41
- Reviews: 6 Lists: 8
- Forum Posts: 84
- Wiki Points: 1
- Followed by: 3
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 5
Is it a voice actor?
- Forum Posts: 119
- Wiki Points: 448
- Followed by: 8
- Reviews: 3 Lists: 2
where can i get the ME2 credits page?
- Forum Posts: 168
- Wiki Points: 1797
- Followed by: 11
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 2
" I need this one as well as the person related with the MMORPG. no clue on that one. "The title 'British Royalty' is a big hint with this one.
- Forum Posts: 3995
- Wiki Points: 0
- Followed by: 51
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 2
All those who need the secret one just brute force the Mass Effect 2 page that what i did his name kinda rymes aas well
I'm totally stumped, and I looked at both Amped 3 and ME2's pages. Found nothing. Anyone PM me the answer or at least another hint, initials maybe?
- Forum Posts: 6039
- Wiki Points: -1
- Followed by: 82
- Reviews: 4 Lists: 5
it's someone that I bet you 100000000000000000000000 dollars you've never heard of
lol thanks, I just got it
- Forum Posts: 841
- Wiki Points: 33
- Followed by: 12
- Reviews: 0 Lists: 0
I got it, but I still have no clue who he is.
" Yes he is in the ME2 credits page, just look for the person who's name rhymes per a clue somebody gave earlier in this thread. Anybody have any other hints for the MMORPG guy? He's the only one I have left. EDIT: NVM Found it. If anybody else is having issues this clue that was given earlier is all you need for the MMO guy: "he is a British lord" "Without this clue, there is NO way I would have ever gotten the most important man quest. Thanks.


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Black father: the subversive achievement of Joel Chandler Harris.
A century ago Joel Chandler Harris was famous. His first and best known book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, sold more than 7,000 copies in its first month in 1880. It's been in print ever since. Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, the stars of his stories, took their place in the nation's cultural lexicon, and Harris himself was much celebrated. Teddy Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House and Mark Twain tried to interest him in a joint lecture tour. Children clamored for Uncle Remus and were shocked to find that Harris was white. Harris was much too shy to lecture--he couldn't even bring himself to read for children--but he was a prolific writer, churning out seven additional Uncle Remus collections, a fictionalized memoir called On the Plantation, and various shorter and longer fictional works. But Joel Chandler Harris claimed his fame as the creator of gentle Uncle Remus, the teller of Brer Rabbit's triumphant underdog tale. They were the ones who made him, in Twain's admiring phrase, the "oracle of the nation's nurseries."
But then, no surprise, the long honeymoon ended. Harris's stock began to fall. Critics took his world apart, separated storyteller Uncle Remus from story hero Brer Rabbit to the disadvantage of the former. Brer Rabbit was in fact elevated in this revision, recognized as "a revolutionary black figure" from African American traditional lore, the black core of an otherwise white work (Songs and Sayings 29). He is, and this is one of the deep roots of his power, a Signifying Rabbit, in the fullest sense of that term as carefully described by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and situated in African American literature by Henry Louis Gates. His situation is understood as echoing that of his anonymous black creators, and his antics are not at their root comic at all, but deadly serious maneuvers allowing his survival and even triumph in a world ruled by enemies bent upon his destruction. When Brer Rabbit outwits and eventually destroys Brer Wolf, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox, his victories are interpreted as supplying at least vicarious pleasure and at most pragmatic advice to black audiences whose position in the world is appreciated as deeply analogous.
Uncle Remus, however, the teller of Brer Rabbit's subversive tale, went down with his author. He was a cartoon, an offensive stereotype, an Uncle Tom, the literary creation of a white author with an obvious regional agenda. "Uncle Remus, the creation of Joel Chandler Harris, is one of many masks employed by the Plantation School to justify the restoration of white supremacy," according to Robert Bone's 1975 analysis (Bickley, Critical 139). The old man, it was noticed, was so much a creature of his author's nostalgias that he was presented in the first collection's introduction as possessing, preposterously, "nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery" (Songs and Sayings 47).
Meanwhile Harris himself fell from grace even more precipitously, and much more completely, than Remus. Harris's editorials, and more especially his popular magazine articles, were bursting at the seams with paternalist nonsense and irritating defenses of Southern racial mores. Darwin Turner, in a lengthy, meticulous, scrupulously fair, and influential 1968 study, was especially dismayed by the attitudes put forward in Harris's three-part "Observations From New England," published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1883. If slavery is muted to a benign "discipline" in the introduction of Remus, Harris in his own voice describes slavery as "an institution which, under Providence, grew into a university in which millions of savages served an apprenticeship to religion and civilization" (Editor and Essayist 166). Turner's response to this outrageous misuse of both logic and language is rightly contemptuous: "It is ironic to use the term 'university' to describe the practices of a system which legally prohibited the formal education of slaves. It is presumptuous to praise slavery for giving religion to the Africans, who observed a religious faith long before they became American slaves" (Bickley, Critical 126). It's impossible to withhold assent from Turner's critique, and tempting to add that the inclusion of Providence sneaks in the appalling idea that the human institution of slavery enjoyed divine support, that apprenticeship is by definition a temporally limited contract, and that the savage in any slavemaster relationship is surely the master. Shoddy logic, tendentious prose--this is indeed sorry stuff.
The famous Uncle Remus tales, then, combining such disparate elements, were necessarily, said the new critique, formal hashes, the black traditional tales at their center obscured by the crude racial stereotypes on their surface. Harris's work was at best a ridiculous idealization of a slave-based plantation society and at worst a bald exploitation of African American culture. By 1981 fellow Georgian (and fellow Eatontonian) Alice Walker was working him over for cultural theft: "As far as I'm concerned, he stole a good part of my heritage" (32).
The attack was thus two-pronged at its heart: Harris the man was judged politically incorrect at a deep level, a paternalist and genteel racist; and Harris the author was clumsy and amateurish, yoking servile Uncle Remus to unbowed Brer Rabbit in awkward union. Biography was enlisted in explanation: In 1862, Harris, an illegitimate child who never knew his father, went to work as a boy of fifteen in the printshop of Joseph Addison Turner's Turnwold plantation, near his home town of Eatonton in Putnam County, Georgia. While there he heard from slave storytellers the Brer Rabbit tales that would make him famous. Years later, in the 1870s, working as a prominent newspaperman and editorialist for the Atlanta Constitution, he developed the character of Uncle Remus for "humorous" newspaper sketches aimed at white Southern readers. Finally, in 1880, he made his name by tying the traditional black folktales to the local color "character," adding an adoring little white boy as listener. The result, despite huge popular success, was judged a failure a century later because the constituent elements were recognized as incompatible. Harris, wrote Robert Hemenway in 1982, was "an author retreating from an adult, public world of difficult decisions," attempting to project his paternalist nostalgia for a lost world "through a medium that he could mimic but never fully comprehend" (30-31). A white man, in short, was peddling a black culture he didn't understand, and he was turning it to purposes it could not serve.
Recent scholarship has swung back somewhat from this nadir. Defenders of Harris the man, insisting upon appreciation of the pressures of his position as a Southern journalist, have insisted upon his persistent liberalism, within these constraints, on racial matters. His stinging rebuke of Jefferson Davis in an 1882 Constitution editorial is cited, as are his fulsome praises of Abraham Lincoln (in the novel Gabriel Tolliver) and Booker T. Washington (in a 1904 piece for the Saturday Evening Post). Wayne Mixon describes Harris's piece on Davis as "perhaps the most withering attack of his journalistic career" (460) and notes that it "took courage for a white southerner to praise Washington publicly after 1901, as Harris did, for when news of the black leader's dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt and his family reached the South 'the cry from Dixie resembled the howl of a mob'" (479).
Scholars have also insisted on the intimacy of Harris's personal acquaintance with the Brer Rabbit stories. Bruce Bickley's 1978 Twayne study suggests that Uncle George Terrell and Old Harbert, the slave men at Turnwold who were Harris's models for Uncle Remus, "helped fill the place of the absent father in Harris's life" (24). In 1981, Joseph Griska called Remus "one of the most intriguing father-figures in American letters" (Bickley, Critical 212). Mixon, in 1990, pushed such observations to what may be a surprising conclusion: "As a man, his nostalgia was more for a black world than a white one" (459).
Defenses of Harris the author have been even more interesting, stressing Uncle Remus's control of the storytelling context and his persistent, if oblique, critique of plantation values. Sometimes even the most innocuous-looking alterations bear a greater weight than is immediately apparent. The opening story of Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, for example, was called "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox" when it was first published in the Atlanta Constitution, but retitled "Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy" for the book-length collection. Initiates--it may seem a small change, but it looms larger in light of Remus's systematic undermining of Mars John's world view and the substitution of his own in its place. As Raymond Hedin noted in a 1982 study, Harris's relocation of the story (in the Constitution version the boy listened in his home, not in Remus's) is no less significant: In his own cabin "Remus becomes a shaman, and the tales become instruments of initiation into a world the boy can learn from only to the extent that he leaves his own world behind" (Hedin 85).
An equally unobtrusive phrasal device subverts racial stereotypes by their immediate extension. In Gabriel Tolliver it is deployed to describe the old clergyman Jeremiah Tomlin: "In common with the great majority of his race--in common, perhaps with the men of all races--he was eaten up with a desire to become prominent" (162-63). In The Bishop and the Boogerman, Randall Holden, another clergyman, is described by the same device as "a pattern, a model for the men of his race, and indeed, for the men of any race" (139). Finally, in his 1904 Saturday Evening Post article "The Negro of Today," Harris's praise of Booker T. Washington exploits it as a rhetorical query: "But is it not true that a man like Booker Washington is an exception in any race?" (Editor and Essayist 143). His race, any race, all races--by such phrasings racial distinctions are themselves consistently undermined. Taken together these syntactic ploys, too recurrent to be inadvertent, reveal themselves as quite obviously deliberate, and unveil a Harris quietly but insistently pursuing an anti-racist agenda.
Remus, it thus turns out, contrary to a century of earlier readings, is a remarkably complex character, and his author was less clumsy than has been realized in his integration of Brer Rabbit's traditional tales and their literary frames. His smiling surfaces and apparent orthodoxy may have misled nineteenth-century readers, leading to their complacency, just as the author intended. The same smiles then misled twentieth-century readers, leading to their displeasure, though Harris of course could not have anticipated this.
All these recent close examinations of Harris's work as a fiction writer and as an editorialist were long overdue. Generations of crudely racist illustrations, culminating in a staggeringly obnoxious movie, Disney's 1946 Song of the South, perpetuated and popularized approaches that understood Harris's stories as simple-minded tales aimed at entertaining children. (Mixon, for one, notes that Harris "was poorly served" [469] by most of his illustrators, and a closer look at Alice Walker's critique of Harris reveals that Harris himself is never cited--the real targets of censure are Song of the South and the remarkably saccharine Julia Collier Harris, Harris's daughter-in-law, who edited the 1918 Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris.) In sum, critics of the 1960s/1970s and defenders of the 1980s/1990s shared a determination to bring a sharper analytic attention to Harris's writing, and their conclusions are right on the money.
But they don't go far enough. Time after time, careful readers tiptoe up to the idea that Harris after all knew exactly what he was doing, only to step quickly back, insist again that "irony seems lost on Harris" (McDonald xxiv) or that "Harris probably did not understand this part of the story" (Hemenway 28). It's high time, then, to at least consider the possibility that Harris constructed his tales and their framing narratives with consummate skill and deliberate cunning, that multiple ironies were not only not lost upon him but were in fact something of his stock-in-trade, and that he was, in short, something of a Brer Rabbit among authors. Uncle Remus, by such an approach, is revealed as a secret hero of Harris's work, a figure wholly worthy of comparison with Brer Rabbit himself. In creating him, Harris put forward, covertly, by extraordinarily oblique means, a vision that would have shocked and horrified the great majority of his readers, had they understood him.
Harris was careful to see that contemporary readers didn't understand him, disguising the core of his vision with a rich battery of rhetorical misdirections and false leads. Fundamentally, Harris's strategy as a writer is of a piece with that of Remus the storyteller and Brer Rabbit the character. Each presents himself as a benign figure in full compliance with expected mannerisms and behaviors. I am what you think I am, they say to readers--gentle plantation romancer, "venerable old darkey" (Songs and Sayings 90), mischievous rabbit. Meanwhile, behind the smiles, the same threesome busies itself, each on his own level, with the exposure and demolition of such stereotypes.
A few examples will suffice to illustrate the strategy. In "Why Mr. Possum Has No Hair On His Tail," Remus rebukes the little boy for excessive familiarity with the "no 'count" Favers children. Such behavior, he says, would "'fetch Ole Miss right up out'n dat berryin'-groun' fum down dar in Putmon County, en w'at yo' gran'ma wouldn't er stood me and yo' ma ain't gwineter stan' nudder'" (Songs and Sayings 130). This whole passage has attracted comment for the comedy of Remus's class consciousness, the retainer's vicarious pride in his employers' superior station. But under the condescending laughs it may not be noticed that "yo' pa" is unmentioned and that Remus himself ("me and yo' ma") occupies his place in parental authority.
The similarly titled "Why Brother Bear Has No Tail," offers a more extended passage. Here the little boy appears at Remus's cabin at dinnertime, apparently sent away without supper for "a-cuttin' up" at the table. No sooner does he arrive than the voice of his father summons his return. The boy rises to go, but Remus intervenes. "'Des set right whar you is, honey,'" he says. He then goes to the door and addresses the father in a voice "that could be heard half over the plantation": "'Mars John, I wish you en Miss Sally be so good ez ter let dat chile 'lone.'" Here Remus allies himself not with Miss Sally but with Ole Miss, who is cited again in support of correct practice. "'I ain't been use ter no sich gwines on in Ole Miss time, en I ain't gwine git use ter it now'" (Nights With Uncle Remus 113-14). Once more, and a bit more openly in this instance, Remus asserts his control, his assumption of the paternal role.
Finally, there is "A Story of the War," which brings Yankee soldiers to the Abercrombie plantation, where they are greeted in the "settin'-room" by a strikingly constituted "family" of unwilling hosts. Ole Miss is there, and Miss Sally, and Uncle Remus, sharpened axe in hand. Daughter, mother, and ...? In all the story, there is no mention, however oblique, of a husband for Ole Miss, a father for Miss Sally and Mars Jeems. The erasure of the father, so inconspicuous in "Why Mr. Possum Has No Hair On His Tail," and only a shade more insistent in "Why Brother Bear Has No Tail," is here more glaring. There is plenty, however, of the language of paternity. When Mars Jeems, a Confederate soldier, asks Remus to take care of his mother and sister in his absence, he calls him "Daddy." He does this three times, not including Remus's own explanation that"'all Old Miss's chilluns call me daddy'" (Songs and Sayings 181-82).
Exactly this same omission of the father also occurs in the deeply autobiographical On the Plantation, published in 1892. When young Joe Maxwell leaves home for his new job as a printer's apprentice, he "kisse[s] his mother and his grandmother good-by," and during his journey remembers "his mother, whom he ha[s] last seen standing at the little gate smiling at him through her tears" (On the Plantation, 14, 16). But here too, as in "A Story of the War," there is no mention of a father. This, too, as with the syntactical ploy discussed earlier, is too recurrent for coincidence. It is obviously deliberate, a clear matter of authorial purpose, despite its careful masking.
A secret center thus stands revealed. Again and again Harris, the child whose father omitted himself, revenges himself by undermining and omitting the fathers--Mars John, the unnamed husband of Ole Miss, the father of Joe Maxwell. And with the dismissal, the patriarch's authority and hierarchy are likewise undone. Again and again Remus (or Harbert, in On the Plantation) acts not as a marginal servant, but as a central parent. Even on the rare occasions when Mars John is present, as in "Why Brother Bear Has No Tail," his authority is systematically undermined. When the boy interrupts a story about a Putnam County witch to report that "'Papa says there ain't any witches,'" Remus dismisses "Papa" with contempt: "'Mars John ain't live long ez I is'" (Songs and Sayings 144). These deprecations of paternal opinion reach their peak in the 1892 Uncle Remus and His Friends, perhaps most assertively in "Why Brother Bull Growls and Grumbles." Hearing the bellow of a passing bull, Remus opens the story by first assuring the boy that "'he got a mighty good reason fer gwine on that way,'" and then immediately asking who is available to tell him what that reason is: "'You may spit on yo' thumb en turn over de leaves in Marse John's liberry, yit you won't fin' out in um. You may ax Marse John, you may ax Miss Sally, you may ax a preacher, yit; but none un um'll ever tell you. '"Where then can he turn?"' Den who kin tell you? Me!'" (Uncle Remus and His Friends 81)
Most instances are much less confrontational, but Remus's contrast of his own wisdom to that of the boy's father is recurrent, and invariably works to the father's disadvantage. Again and again, his stories are loaded with asides and anecdotes critical of "Marse John's" actions and vision of the world. When his unorthodox account of a great flood provokes a query as to the whereabouts of Noah's ark, Remus brushes it aside with a marvelously succinct mix of agnosticism and cultural relativism: "'Dey mout er bin two deloojes, en den agin dey moutent'" (Songs and Sayings 66). In "Why the Negro Is Black" he blithely asserts both an original black creation-" 'time wuz we'n we 'uz all niggers tergedder'"--and the great numerical predominance of "merlatters" while ostensibly addressing the child's notice of his own white palms. Mixed race people, he reports, "'wuz sech a crowd ... dat dey mighty nigh use de water up'" (Songs and Sayings 151).
Two things should be noted here. First, what Remus says is strikingly at odds with regional (and national) norms (and laws). Second, what he says is disguised by how he says it. He is, in short, and here we reach the heart of this essay's purposes, Signifying, (1) in the sense that his discourse includes an "implicit content ... which is potentially obscured by the surface content" (Mitchell-Kernan 314). Remus, it emerges, is much more than an "Uncle," and he has more than mere stories to present. He's a father, and he takes his paternal responsibilities seriously. He knows a larger world than Mars John's, and has a deeper wisdom to pass on. At one point, reacting to an account of Brer Rabbit's success in obtaining chickens from Brer Fox, the little boy plugs in lessons clearly learned from Mars John: "When Brother Rabbit got the chickens from Brother Fox, he was really stealing them." Remus immediately affirms that theft is the accurate description, but his subsequent dismissal of the Big House bromide (and Christian commandment) is a sweeping one: "'Dey ain't no two ways 'bout dat. But what wuz Brer Fox doin' when he got um? ... No, honey! Dey's a heap er idees dat you got ter shake off.'" Remus goes on to conclude that "'dey's a heap er folks lots wuss dan Brer Rabbit when it comes ter takin' what ain't der'n'" (Uncle Remus Returns 105-06). In other instances where Remus encourages the boy to "snatch up" (Songs and Sayings 131) and bring to him everything from tea-cakes (71) to candles (130), it is clear that such ideas have indeed been shaken off. Remus here serves his own ends, of course, but he also perseveres in his reeducation of the boy.
The little boy needs it, too. He'll soon enough be grown, soon be out on perilous ground beyond Remus's protection. That dangerous world is inadequately understood by Mars John, who has been sheltered by birth and upbringing from too many harsh realities. Nobody told him Brer Rabbit tales, and he's much the stupider for it. He is, in fact, a Brer Bear figure transposed to the human sphere, overly confident in his own power and position, and insufficiently alert to the world's hazards. His complacent opinions about witches, like his self-serving bromides about stealing, are childishly shallow. He's living a lullaby, and he's finally a dangerously inadequate father--go out armed only with his lessons and you'll soon be lunch. All this, and no less, is carried by Harris's use of the word initiates in the opening story. Throughout the animal tales, the perspective of Brer Rabbit is privileged, and that of Brer Wolf, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox is undermined, just as in the human frame Remus's perspective continually wins out over that of Mars John. Eventually, just as in "A Story of the War" and On the Plantation, a complete erasure/replacement is accomplished in the Brer Rabbit cycle as well. Near the end of Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, after Brer Wolf, Brer Bear, and finally Brer Fox have been done in, Remus allows that "'some say dat Brer Rabbit's ole 'oman died fum eatin' some pizen-weed, en dat Brer Rabbit married ole Miss Fox'" (155).
"Me an yo' ma"? White children call a black man Daddy? Brer Rabbit marries Miss Fox after he kills her husband? In earliest, Edenic times, "we 'uz all niggers tergedder"? Put such instances together (and there are countless others) and they surely emerge as beyond coincidence, as deliberate, though covert, subversion of the "Plantation School" values Harris's work ostensibly supported. The familiar plantation romance is turned upside down, its foundational ethnic hierarchy undone. The Old Plantation's traditional patriarch, the Mr. Man who in the animal stories is even more feared than Mr. Lion, is not just away at war or on business, with his loyal vassals confirming his power by acting as his agents even in his absence. He's entirely absent, completely unmentioned. Massa's in the cold cold ground, dead or disappeared. Uncle Remus is Daddy. The slave is the master.
How did Harris ever get away with this? It is a shame that no evidence exists to suggest that the Uncle Remus tales came to the attention of Herman Melville, then living in obscurity in New York, or that Harris himself appreciated Melville's dark tales, because a Melvillian subtlety and subversiveness may offer a useful key to a fuller understanding of Harris's achievement. It was Melville, after all, who noted that even Solomon "a little managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism" (Letters 130), and who found it characteristic of genius to "delight in hoodwinking the world" (Complete Shorter Fiction 246), to communicate "the little lower layer" (Moby Dick, 164) by means of "cunning glimpses ... covertly, and by snatches" (Complete Shorter Fiction 239). It was Melville, too, who noted that Shakespeare employed "the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago" to articulate indirectly "the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them" (Complete Shorter Fiction 239).
Working in exactly this way, proceeding by "cunning glimpses" and covert insinuations, Harris not only violates the ultimate taboo of Old South racial codes, but presents the violation in positive terms, as a tranquil domestic scene. The ostensibly separate races are mixed at every level, from the allegory of Brer Rabbit marrying Miz Fox, to the figurative language of Mars Jeems and his sister calling Remus "Daddy," to the vast crowd of "merlatters" who generalize this state of affairs in "Why the Negro Is Black," to the mythic origin story where all humanity are "niggers tergedder." Meanwhile, speaking in his own voice, Harris is blithely reassuring Northern and Southern readers that to worry about "The Bugaboo of Social Equality" is "to make a problem out of something that never had an existence" (Editor and Essayist 155-56).
Harris's writings, then, display a persistent and conscious manipulation of his culture's social and literary conventions, a deliberate tension between a surface in comfortable accord with the dominant sentimental pieties (and related ideological projects) of the day and a subversive subtext profoundly critical of those same pieties. Recent criticism has not been much interested in authorial control, especially since the much celebrated "death of the author" announced most famously by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. But despite such influential obituaries and the no less obvious constraints upon writers exercised by everything from linguistic history and convention to various "authorities of delimitation," authors clearly attempt to direct the responses of readers by the deliberate cultivation of their expectations. They also, in at least some instances, manage a purposeful misleading of at least some audiences. Any "discursive formation" or system of meaning, even the most totalizing, despite its aspiration to spatial and/or temporal universality, is riddled with holes and fissures, lacunae which are at one and the same time weaknesses and opportunities (Foucault, Archaeology 42, 74). Terrae incognitae honeycomb all maps. Despite (and because of) its formidable network of interlocking institutionalized powers, the ruling episteme (Foucault's term, from The Order of Things) is a slow-moving beast. Its claims to "panoptic" range notwithstanding, it has its blind spots. It can be fooled; it is vulnerable to Signifying. And authors, experts in verbal mischief, are just the folks for the job. If Melville's terminology offers a detailed formal description of these strategies as Harris employs them, the African American aesthetic of Signifying reveals its deeper cultural sources, points to the skilled black storytellers who taught him the tricks of his trade.
Perhaps such subterfuges are clearest in situations where subversive narratives must pass the scrutiny of a vigilant and obviously hostile censoring authority. In November, 1941, in a Norway occupied by German troops since the spring of 1940, a children's book by Frithjof Saelen entitled Snorri sel (Snorri the Seal) appeared in stores. Billed as "a fable in color for children and adults," the book was not only approved for publication by Nazi censors but praised by the German-controlled press. Its narrative was a simple one: Snorri is a little seal, vain about his coat, who escapes his enemies (a polar bear named Brummelab and a killer whale named Glefs) primarily through the aid of a walrus named Bart. Norwegian readers noted instantly what Nazi censors missed, a covert allegorical subtext in which Snorri represented Norway, Brummelab the Soviet Union, Glefs Germany, and Uncle Bart England. The book was loaded with giveaway details for those who were looking--an ice floe shaped like Norway, Bart's British mustache. It was less than a month before the occupation authorities caught on, but by then the whole press run (12,500 copies) had been snapped up by skilled Norwegian readers (Stokker 89-93).
Harris, of course, was writing in much less perilous circumstances. But a censorship no less thoroughgoing for all its unofficial character than that which faced Saelen was in place in his own society, and he knew perfectly well that a straightforward expression of skepticism toward prevailing segregationist orthodoxy or open acknowledgment of substantial mixed-race populations in an era of anti-miscegenation legislation would be greeted with hostility (if published at all), just as Saelen knew he would be promptly arrested (and not published at all) had he attempted a straightforward political essay. Both men thus made their initial feints generic ones, disguising their subversive messages in ostensibly harmless tales intended for children, and both men succeeded in their purposes not as "autonomous" authors (that's a straw house built for the author as First Little Pig, easily demolished by Big Bad Critic's first huff and puff) but very much as devious ones, accomplishing their public and private ends via the simultaneous exploitation and undermining of reigning discursive rules and audience expectations.
As early as 1879, in "As to Southern Literature," Harris made clear his understanding of the need for indirection. Describing Thackeray as a writer who "satirized the society in which he moved and held up to ridicule the hollow hypocrisy of his neighbors," he immediately noted the hostility such works would encounter in Harris's homeland: "The Southern Thackeray of the future will doubtless be surprised to learn that if he had put in an appearance half a century earlier he would probably have been escorted beyond the limits of our Southern clime astraddle of a rail." What Thackeray did in England, Harris emphasizes, could not be done in the late-nineteenth-century American South: "He took liberties with the people of his own blood and time that would have led him hurriedly in the direction of bodily discomfort if he had lived in the South" (Editor and Essayist 44). Harris, then, absorbing these lessons, would do it differently. He would, like Melville and Shakespeare, employ "dark characters" to communicate his "little lower layer" indirectly, "covertly, and by snatches."
As it happened, of course, Harris had no need for Melville (or Shakespeare), since he had immediately at hand, in Brer Rabbit's Signifying tales, a no less sophisticated model of encoded discourse. George Terrell and Harbert, telling Brer Rabbit's wonderful tales to the listening boy, taught him not only the covert critique of their matter, but also the even more subversive lessons of their Signifying method.
On their surface, then, the Brer Rabbit tales, "A Story of the War," and On the Plantation serve the healing, future-oriented ends Harris shared with Atlanta Constitution editor and prominent New South advocate Henry W. Grady. Uncle Remus is entirely benevolent, a saccharine figure comforting to descendants of the folks who owned him; "A Story of the War" marries the Yankee soldier to the Southern belle in a sentimental romance of intersectional harmony; On the Plantation is dedicated to "philanthropist" plantation owner Joseph Addison Turner. This is the level of Harris the editorialist, whose voice predominates (but never wholly submerges its subversive other) in "Observations From New England" and the other pieces that have dismayed contemporary readers. And there can be no question that this is the voice heard, even in his better known work, by the overwhelming majority of Harris's early readers. The "cultural work" of the famous Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit collections, then, like that of Harris's newspaper editorials and essays, is accurately described as ideological in this sense. In the name of a future-oriented vision of regional reconciliation they offered a wholly sanitized historical fantasy in place of the brutal realities of the slave-based plantation economy of the antebellum South. The sins of the past were occluded in the service of a hoped-for harmonious future.
But under these surfaces, such anodyne lullabies are persistently undermined, revealed as illusory, childlike evasions of an immeasurably larger, darker, more complex, and finally more lively world. Turner, as the powerful and articulate spokesman for antebellum Southern ideology who gave Harris his start as a writer, is an obvious surrogate father figure. It seems inevitable that he gets the dedication, a page of his own at the volume's front. But George Terrell and Harbert, the slave men who told him of Brer Rabbit's triumphs, emerge as the boy's true mentors, the teachers of his deepest lessons. They get the book itself, its center and heart.
Such obliquities were of course absolutely necessary. Harris lived in Georgia and earned his pay as a Southern newspaperman. He was, like Remus, like Brer Rabbit, operating within constraints. But, like them again, he was far from helpless. With his artful words he put forward his world, as he knew it and as he wished it, right under the noses of a society he knew it would appall. The boy who listened to Brer Rabbit tales on pro-slavery zealot Joseph Addison Turner's plantation had learned their lessons well. Harris went to the world as the trickster Brer Rabbit, and in the trickster Uncle Remus he projected both his sharpest critique of things as they were and the deepest image of his heart's desire. He was, like Remus with his alternative "deloojes" and crowds of "merlatters," Signifying. Harris's dedication of On the Plantation to Turner serves, along with a host of other subsequent misdirections, to distract readers from his repudiation of the world Turner held dear. In that less well known but equally subversive work, the "Georgia boy" who is a thinly disguised portrait of Harris aids and abets runaway slaves and Confederate army deserters.
Back down in Putnam County, in "A Story of the War," the Yankee soldier confronted by the interracial domestic tableau on the Abercrombie plantation fails, of course, prefiguring generations of readers both Northern and Southern, to understand the scene before his eyes. He stresses Remus's age, calling him "ole man," dismisses his own vision of blood on Remus's axe with a laugh, and soon leaves after failing to locate the livestock and food Remus has carefully hidden. Remus, once again, is triumphant, this time as master of the plantation. The Yankee soldier, Remus says, "'wouldn't never laft dat day ef he'd know'd de wukkins er Remus's mine'" (Songs and Sayings 183). Indeed he wouldn't. And thousands of readers wouldn't have laughed either, had they recognized the no less subtle workings of Harris's mind. He was every bit as skilled at disguising his meanings as Brer Rabbit was at duping wolves and foxes, as Remus was at hiding corn and hogs, and the "wukkins" of his mind and pen have long remained unplumbed.
The closing paragraph of "A Story of the War," for its part, contains Uncle Remus's oblique but unmistakable claim that it was he, after all, who arranged the alliance of Miss Sally with her Yankee suitor. He is, again, despite the superficial obsequies that misled and comforted generations of readers, the master of the house, here busying himself with managing the happy marriage of a "daughter" who seems to have no other father but he. Chastized by this husband's sister--"'But you cost him an arm'"--for the wartime shot that saved Mars Jeems and wounded her brother, Remus answers that if he took one arm he gave four in return: "'I gin 'im dem,'" says Uncle Remus, pointing to Mrs. Huntingdon, "'en I gin 'im deze'"--holding up his own brawny arms (Songs and Sayings 185).
But who except Harris himself could appreciate such subtleties, would read through the bland surfaces of Remus's "half-confident, half-apologetic" manner (Songs and Sayings 178) to the wily, undermining messages of his matter? Who would be for him what captive Norwegians were for Saelen? The record is admittedly thin, since most reviewers, those who praised Harris together with those who damned him, took the surface for the whole and understood him as a nostalgic plantation romancer. But countering voices are not wholly absent. The young North Carolina journalist Walter Hines Page, for example, noted in an 1881 letter that Harris "hardly conceals his scorn for the old aristocracy," adding that "you can find here and there in 'Uncle Remus's' sayings a sly thrust at the pompous life of the Old South" (qtd. in Hendrick 152).
There is also the even more interesting 1904 letter to Harris from Mrs. Mary C. Turner of New Orleans. Writing for an African American women's group, the Phillis Wheatley Woman's Club, she offers "heart felt thanks" to Harris for his "encouraging words," informs him that his name has been added to the group's "book of friendship," and adds that the club members have resolved to pass on his stories to their children (Mixon 478). Here the central image of Harris's collections, a revered elder speaking intimately to a loved child, is carried by print across time and space to other elders and other children. Thanks to Harris's labors of remembering and recreating, thanks that is to his Signifying mastery of the oral register he heard and his skill with the textual medium he worked in, the wit and wisdom he heard at the knee of George Terrell and Harbert are passed on to a new generation by mothers reading to their children. What more could a writer ask?
In an often-quoted 1898 letter to his daughters, Harris, who was famously self-deprecating in his public assessments of his accomplishment, calling himself a mere "cornfield journalist" (Life and Letters 345), permitted himself a somewhat more complex analysis. His "editorials for the paper" were all his own, he allowed, but this proper self was not in fact "a real, sure enough author" because the famous stories were the work of an internal "other fellow" who "takes charge" whenever "I take my pen in my hand." This "other fellow," most significantly, holds highly critical views of the editorials and magazine articles of the "cornfield journalist": "He regards them with scorn and contempt" (Life and Letters 384-85). In fact, and by now it should come as no surprise, the "other fellow" views the "cornfield journalist" with an attitude remarkably similar to that of Uncle Remus toward the opinions of Mars John, or that of Brer Rabbit for the attitudes of Brer Fox or Brer Bear. Darwin Turner's criticisms of Harris's magazine articles were on the mark, but at least a part of Harris's own consciousness had arrived at the same conclusions seventy years earlier, and had penned his own critique.
It is difficult to articulate precisely, but the central point is not that Harris consciously urges a subversive political message (though he surely does this). There is every reason to suppose that the gradualist and paternalist views put forward in his prefaces, magazine articles, and Constitution editorials had Harris's honest if highly qualified support. There is, similarly, no reason to suppose that the dedication of On The Plantation to Turner is a deliberate mockery, even though the book itself demolishes the basic tenets of Turner's world view. The surface of Snorri sel, by contrast, seems entirely diversionary--although one might imagine (as Nazi censors necessarily did imagine) reading it to a child as a cautionary tale centered not on opposition to German occupation but on the pitfalls of vanity and the importance of good friends.
With Harris, however, things are more complex. Both levels of the story reflect some aspect of his purpose. First, the surface narrative produced by Harris the prominent editorialist was pleasing to a great many contemporary readers, who rewarded him with a comfortable living and a respected niche in the world. Only later, when a new politics and poetics came to power, did this narrative fall from grace and its author come in for opprobrium. His second voice, however, his hidden narrative, had anticipated such critiques by half a century. It found few sympathetic readers at first, and was produced in response to deeply personal and private needs by "the other fellow," the Harris who held the pieties of his surface narrative in contempt. The fundamental point is psychological and formal at its core. If Harris could not entirely escape the dominant views espoused by the most influential men of his place and time, his mind and heart were nevertheless held, and even more deeply, to a very different order. And he had the skill to manage the articulation of both. He made it by the censors (in part because a part of him subscribed to the censorship's values) and he got his heart's truth told. Careful attention to his famous collections shows heart and head working together to produce analogously tensioned Brer Rabbit tales and Uncle Remus frames that manage at one and the same time to satisfy (even as they also criticize) Southern readers, reassure (even as they sometimes rebuke) Northern ones, and celebrate the deeply personal sense of interracial "family" that is Harris's own best purchase on childhood's prelapsarian security.
This sort of divided self is not so very unusual, after all, as any number of recent and not so recent studies demonstrate. Consider for instance the story of Amanda America Dickson, as told in Kent Anderson Leslie's Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege. Her father is David Dickson, an ambitious, innovative, and wealthy Georgia farmer, who in 1848 rapes her mother, a twelve-year-old slave girl named Julia. When he dies thirty-seven years later, in 1885, his carefully written will leaves the great bulk of his estate (some $400,000) to Amanda America, his only child, making her perhaps the richest woman in Georgia. Unsurprisingly, vigorous legal challenges were mounted by a host of (white) claimants, with the Georgia Supreme Court eventually upholding the will. (The Atlanta Constitution of course gave these legal proceedings extensive coverage, and it's even possible Joel Chandler Harris may have written one or another of the generally positive reports and editorial comments on Amanda America Dickson's legal triumphs.)
In the years before his death Dickson had cherished his two grandsons from Amanda America's marriage to a white Civil War veteran, shocking more than one visitor by his practice of dining with his daughter and her boys, who reportedly clambered into his lap and called him "Pappy" (Leslie 65). David Dickson, then, begins as a rapist and ends as the doting grandfather of his "merlatter" descendants, living most of his adult life with his sense of family ties completely at odds with the mores of a society in which he occupied a prominent and public place. Family won out; blood was thicker than ideology.
A nearly identical situation occurs in Pauli Murray's classic memoir Proud Shoes, first published in 1956. Murray's paternal grandmother, Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, a child born of the rape of a North Carolina slave woman by her master's son, is raised (along with three other daughters of another son by the same mother) by her Aunt Mary Ruffin Smith. This rapist father, like David Dickson, also dotes upon his daughter, and this daughter's granddaughter, writing a century later, notes her own two-mindedness: "I couldn't hate Sidney Smith when Grandmother talked about him" (Murray 52). Murray, narrating her own family's tangled history, subtitles her book The Story of an American Family and reaches the same conclusions as David Dickson: "As Grandmother said, blood was thicker than water" (Murray 46).
For Joel Chandler Harris, it wasn't a matter of blood. For him, it was the ignominious experience of illegitimacy, the sorrow of the fatherless child. In each of these instances children are born into conditions of outrage--Joel Chandler Harris into abandonment, Amanda America Dickson and Cornelia Smith out of the greater horror of rape--and grow into an encompassing sense of family at least in part self-created. Pressured by racist, sexist, and classist ideologies that, whatever their differences, share their abstract urge to binary, determined, black-and-white simplifications, people resist being pigeonholed, insist on working out their own richly textured, finely cross-grained destinies. Personal identities reveal themselves as maddeningly complex matters, tangled mixes of the inherited, the enacted, and the imagined. Pauli Murray's grandmother, after all, grew up to marry a black Union Civil War veteran, but she also insisted fiercely upon her own heritage: "'My daddy was a Rebel, and I'm a Rebel, too,'" she said. When her schoolteacher daughter complained of disrespectful treatment by white supervisors she called "dirty Rebs," her mother brought her up short: "'There's not one of those white folks in the school system that's any whiter or haughtier than you. You look and act just like a Rebbish Smith, and you can't help yourself. You're one of them'" (Murray 157).
If Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, then, insisted that her daughter was at least in part a white woman passing for black, Joel Chandler Harris, as a man whose "nostalgia was more for a black world than for a white one," was in some sense only passing for white when he billed himself as a "cornfield journalist" and spouted nonsense about the hand of God guiding the "discipline" of slavery. The "other fellow" knew better; he held such views in "scorn and contempt." The best name for this "other fellow" should by now be clear. It is Remus, after all, who tells the tale, just as it is the "other fellow" who takes over when "I take my pen in my hand." It was as black Uncle Remus (or, more precisely, as Remus's "son") that white Joel Chandler Harris found at once his freedom and his voice. (2)
Harris was still in his teens when he sat at the feet of the black men who became his models for Uncle Remus. He went on to sign letters as Remus. He had a grandson named Remus. His evenings listening to George Terrell and Harbert were absolutely critical formative experiences; such scenes were what he knew of childhood. These wise men were in the deepest sense (emotionally, spiritually, culturally) his fathers, men who taught him a way to live adroitly (and more especially to speak adroitly; that is, covertly) in a dangerous world. Can we doubt, given what he made of them, his profound apprehension of the tales he was told? Can his sure mastery of their Signifying method remain in question? Joel Chandler Harris didn't "steal" Alice Walker's inheritance. It was given to him. And it was given to him as it was given to her, orally, by older people with lessons to teach speaking to younger people with lessons to learn. It was the closest thing he had to an inheritance of his own, and in his work he accomplished, in addition to the skillful textualization of a rich African American oral tradition which made him famous, the intimate personal testimony that Nietzsche found at the heart of all great achievements of mind--"a kind of involuntary and unnoticed memoir" (13).
In the setting of the Uncle Remus stories, as in the abandoned cabin of On the Plantation, where a boy, two runaway slaves, and two Confederate deserters shelter together and tell stories to one another, as in the account in Nights With Uncle Remus of a wonderful night in 1882 when Harris, normally so reticent, swapped stories with a group of black laborers at a train station in Norcross, Georgia--in all of these Harris recreates his most treasured moments in idealized form. Harris, it turns out, was both nourished as a child and trained as an artist by black storytellers who were in turn both mentors and fathers to a boy whose acquisition of their gifts to him was more profound than even the man he became could appreciate fully.
Joel Chandler Harris was a painfully shy, deeply private man. In a famous letter written on his twenty-second birthday, December 9, 1870, he offered his friend and confidant Mrs. Georgia Starke a bleak summary of his life: "My history is a peculiarly sad and unfortunate one" (qtd. in Cousins 83). His indirections and obliquities no doubt served psychological as well as pragmatic ends. But with all his wiles and evasions he leaves no doubt as to the shape of his ideal order, his sense of life's best gifts. Harris's dream, it turns out, was not so very different from another famous Georgian's. Though he lacked Dr. King's courageous martyr's heart, he possessed in full measure a very similar appreciation of the powers of the word. Harris's carefully disguised critique reaches to the very center of his region's society, but he issues it from wholly utopian marginal havens. This Georgia, its racist hierarchies momentarily undone in moments of unconstrained egalitarian communication, with boys and old men and runaways of every stripe taking shelter and comfort together, with black workers and a white traveler passing a night exchanging stories at a railroad depot, was for Harris the desired country; these humble gatherings were for him the beloved community. At its heart is his cherished family, insistently if covertly affirmed. The little boy's mother is a young white woman who loves him. His chosen father, strong and knowing and generous with his wisdom, is an old black man.
(1.) In capitalizing "Signifying," I follow Mitchell-Kernan and Gates, who use both italics and capitalization (among other devices) to indicate meanings specific to African American speech.
(2.) My thinking on the whole matter of Harris'ss "passing" as Remus and/or a "son" of black slaves owes much to conversations with Susan Marten and Janet Wondra.
Works Cited
Bickley, Bruce, ed. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Hall, 1981.
--. Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Cousins, Paul M. Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1968.
Davis, Merrell R., and William H. Gilman. The Letters of Herman Melville. New Haven: Yale UP, 1960.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper, 1976.
--. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon, 1970.
Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988,
Harris, Joel Chandler. The Bishop and the Boogerman. New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1909.
--. The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.
--. Gabriel Tolliver. New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1902.
--. Nights With Uncle Remus. 1881. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911.
--. On the Plantation. 1892, Fredericksburg, VA: Sergeant Kirkland's, 1997.
--. Uncle Remus and His Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892.
--. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. 1880. New York: Penguin, 1982.
--. Uncle Remus Returns. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Harris, Julia Collier, ed. Joel Chandler Harris: Editor and Essayist, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1931.
--. The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Hedin, Raymond, "Uncle Remus: Puttin' On Ole Massa's Son." Southern Literary Journal 15 (1982): 83-90.
Hemenway, Robert. "Introduction." Harris, Songs and Sayings 7-31.
Hendrick, Burton J., ed. The Training of An American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, 1855-1913. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.
Leslie, Kent Anderson. Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995.
McDonald, William C. "Introduction." Harris, On the Plantation vii-xxxv.
Melville, Herman. Complete Shorter Fiction. New York: Knopf, 1997.
--. Moby Dick. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.
Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. "Signifying." Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel." Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973. 310-28.
Mixon, Wayne, "The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race: Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus In Their Time." Journal of Southern History 56 (1990): 457-80.
Murray, Pauli. Proud Shoes: The Story of An American Family. New York: Harper, 1978.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.
Stokker, Kathleen. Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940-1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997.
Walker, Alice. Living By the Word. San Diego: Harcourt, 1988.
Robert Cochran is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas. His recent books include two music studies, Our Own Sweet Sounds (1996) and Singing in Zion (1999), and a study of photographer Geleve Grice, A Photographer of Note (2003). Cochran notes that, in preparing this essay, he read nearly everything written about Harris and his work. Most helpful were the studies by Darwin Turner and Wayne Mixon, which helped him credit his own observations.
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2 votes
Do you remember Ron Paul Radio?Submitted by MikeonFire on Thu, 10/06/2011 - 15:52
Way back in 2007, my brother Jake and I decided to do a radio show on Ron Paul Radio. If you've seen the movie "For Liberty" you may have seen a little bit of Ron Paul Radio. Well, our show was called "The Fire Team for Freedom: The Mike and Jake Show". It was a learning experience that introduced Jake and I to quite a few new things and new people. We ended up in Washington DC, Minneapolis and even a Presidential Debate.... And we even got to meet Ron Paul on several occasions. It was a great time!


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Petteri Nokelainen won't return tonight
|02.10.09 at 8:31 pm ET
Petteri Nokelainen was hit with a high stick in the final seconds of the first period, and B's media relations just announced that "he won't be returning" to tonight's game due to the injury. Chuck Kobasew took Nokelainen's place alongside Krejci and Wheeler at the beginning of the period, but coach Claude Julien has been mixing and matching lines during the period.
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I've been playing with a new 65%/30%/5% Cotton, Wool, nylon yarn for socks, and have been having a heck of a time with it. This is my first attempt to knit with cotton, and i've got a feeling I'm going to have to adjust something, somewhere. Any advice for working with cotton?
I work with dpns for socks, but hope to learn to use circs soon, even two at a time on circs!
OK, I thought that this was going to be easy. My friend Jimmie started to make the Nano cover by Debbie Bliss for his daughter & had problems. I thought, 'Oh plesase, somethning so small can't be that hard.' Wrong.
What is it about bobbles? Why are they so hard? Or what am i/we missing?
Any tips will be very welcome. I've googled & got a few sites but they don't seem to match Debbies instructions.
This was knitted in the round on #4 DPNs using Millefili Fine, the first "pricey" yarn I've ever bought, a souvenir of my June excursion to New York and my first visit to Knit New York, a great knit café with an awesome staff.
...is also a hot seat, at least in this kind of weather. Into the 90s again today, with high humidity and little breeze. Today was the day I promised to judge knit and crochet pieces for the county fair, so off to the fairgrounds at 9 am. Mary, the supervisor, was waiting for me and knew who I was even though we'd never met in person before. Easy, I was the only male judge in her division, Home Economics.
We started with the crochet work, and the only hard judgement call I had was to rank six crocheted afghans. Managed that and wrote suggestions to all the creators. Plowed ahead through several smaller categories, then had to pick best in show for crochet. It went to the best afghan, which was really a nice piece of work.
Hey everyone, I am thrilled to announce that I just finished my very first sacrf! ...I think it turned out pretty well for having basically taught myself.
Needles to say, I have begun yet another scarf (I'll do one more before branching out into something more complicated, any suggestions?). I found that I didn't know what to do with my hands for the three days between projects. I am truly obssesed!
A word of thanks to everyone for thier kind advice, I am finding this site to be a priceless resource!
...Which brings me to my next question....
Good evening, men. I've been knitting for some time, but have just recently discovered the joys of knitting socks!
Of course, I expect to be motivated to push myself into other areas of knitting once I hear and see what you all are doing!
When's the next chat, by the way?
Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to the poll about a scheduled chat session. 55 people voted . . double what I had expected . . and 51% indicated that they either want a scheduled chat or often check the chatroom when they log on to MWK.
So, the first scheduled GENERAL CHAT will be scheduled for this Thursday, August 3rd, 10PM EASTERN- until whenever. This way, hopefully, you will know that if you log into the chatroom then, someone should be here to chat with you. Chat about whatever you like. It will just be a way for everyone to meet, especially the new members.
Hi guys!
I know I have been pretty quiet for the last few days, got my reasons, but going to do the clog chat tonight at 10pm eastern, which means 7pm pacific and who's on first???..... Lars will let me know.
And welcome to all the new guys out there!!! You'll love it here. Write me... I can tell you who to avoid! hmm
Hello everyone! Just a little bit more about myself: I am completely new to knitting - I just started teaching myself today, haha. I have been crocheting since I was about 8 years old, but as I grew older I began to form an interest in knitting as well. So I began researching it and here I am. I guess I'm off to a decent start. I guess having some history in crocheting helped out a little.
I am exicted to be a part of this new community! I was happy to have stumbled across this website. I look forward to getting to know many of you.
hey guys, i stumbled across this webpage while i was surfing around tonite. i have no idea who created this art, or what the parent site is for, but i thought the knitted items were great from an artistic standpoint. please be aware that the subject matter may not be suitable for children....


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Do you think wearing on-body cameras on duty should be mandatory?
Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, the only man taken into U.S. custody in connection with the 2010 slaying of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was sentenced today to 30 years in federal prison. Read Full Story Here.
A judge has enacted a policy barring police officers from wearing their uniforms or other insignia while watching the trial of accused deputy shooter Brandon Bradley. Read Full Story Here.
Two Bellwood, Ill., men in their 20s have been charged with gunning down a Cook County sheriff's investigator as he tried to stop them from robbing his daughter and her boyfriend outside a holiday party at a VFW hall. Read Full Story Here.


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-- WWE and the Pearson Foundation have announced via press release that they are teaming to expand the WWE's WrestleMania Reading Challenge program. The new digital side of the reading program will kick off on February 4th and will give students between the ages of 4 and 11 the chance to sign up for the WrestleMania Reading Challenge at WWEReadingSuperstar.com where they can read children's books online, virtually connect with WWE Superstar Reading Buddies and enter to win a trip to WrestleMania 29 or a school visit from a WWE Superstar.
WWE is also making a contribution on behalf of We Give Books to provide book grants to schools. WWE CMO Michelle Wilson commented, saying, "WWE is proud to expand its commitment to literacy initiatives through this new partnership with the Pearson Foundation and We Give Books. Given that today's youth are digitally connected at such an early age, the WrestleMania Reading Challenge will now reach more children than ever before."


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The .exe extension on a filename indicates an executable file. Executable files may, in some cases, harm your computer. Therefore, please read below to decide for yourself whether the UpdateTask.exe on your computer is a Trojan that you should remove, or whether it is a file belonging to the Windows operating system or to a trusted application.
The process known as Ask Toolbar belongs to software unknown by DealPly Technologies (www.dealply.com) or Ask.com (www.ask.com).
Description: UpdateTask.exe is not essential for the Windows OS and causes relatively few problems. The UpdateTask.exe file is located in a subfolder of "C:\Documents and Settings".
Known file sizes on Windows 8/7/XP are 95,232 bytes (33% of all occurrences), 94,208 bytes and 7 more variants.
UpdateTask.exe is a file with no information about its developer. The file is not a Windows core file. The program has no visible window. Therefore the technical security rating is 55% dangerous.
It is possible to ask for help from Support or uninstall DealPly Technologies Ltd software via Windows Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs (Windows XP) or Programs and Features (Windows 8/7/Vista).
Recommended: Identify UpdateTask.exe related errors
If UpdateTask.exe is located in a subfolder of "C:\Program Files", the security rating is 18% dangerous. The file size is 134,824 bytes.
The software can be removed using the Control Panel's Add\Remove programs applet. There is no information about the author of the file. The program has no visible window. It is a Verisign signed file. The file has a digital signature. The file is not a Windows core file.
UpdateTask.exe is able to monitor applications.
It is possible to ask for help from Support or uninstall Ask Toolbar software via Windows Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs (Windows XP) or Programs and Features (Windows 8/7/Vista).
Important: Some malware camouflages itself as UpdateTask.exe, particularly when located in the C:\Windows or C:\Windows\System32 folder, for example Win32:Agent-ASOG [Trj] (detected by Avast), and RDN/Generic PUP.x!br3 (detected by McAfee). Therefore, you should check the UpdateTask.exe process on your PC to see if it is a threat. We recommend Security Task Manager for verifying your computer's security. This was one of the Top Download Picks of The Washington Post and PC World.
A clean and tidy computer is the key requirement for avoiding problems with UpdateTask. This means running a scan for malware, cleaning your hard drive using cleanmgr and sfc /scannow, uninstalling programs that you no longer need, checking for Autostart programs (using msconfig) and enabling Windows' Automatic Update. Always remember to perform periodic backups, or at least to set restore points.
Should you experience an actual problem, try to recall the last thing you did, or the last thing you installed before the problem appeared for the first time. Use the resmon command to identify the processes that are causing your problem. Even for serious problems, rather than reinstalling Windows, you are better off doing a repair of your installation, or in the case of Windows 8, executing the DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth command. This allows you to repair the operating system without losing data.
To help you analyze the UpdateTask.exe process on your computer, the following programs have proven to be helpful: Security Task Manager displays all running Windows tasks, including embedded hidden processes, such as keyboard and browser monitoring or Autostart entries. A unique security risk rating indicates the likelihood of the process being potential spyware, malware or a Trojan. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware detects and removes sleeping spyware, adware, Trojans, keyloggers, malware and trackers from your hard drive.
ccmsghk.dll pavsrk.sys viapfd.sys UpdateTask.exe ybrowser.exe gaim.exe batterymiser.exe pgaccount.exe wfxmod32.exe quickparshlext.dll chkfont.exe [all]


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Post Content
Assistant Press Secretary, Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA)
On Saturday, May 4, head over to the Freetown State Forest and strap on your hiking boots and experience the vastness of the unbroken forest on a walk that spans the full length of the 13,600-acre bioreserve. From old mill ponds to abandoned farm sites to vernal pools to cedar swamps – you won't believe the wilderness right in our own backyard. The full hike is 12 miles, but pick-ups will be available every few miles along the way and transportation will provided back your car.
This program is co-sponsored with The Trustees of Reservations, MassWildlife, and the city of Fall River. This hike is suitable for adults. Program is free and open to the public. Rain or shine. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request. Meet at the pavilion located near the main parking lot at Freetown State Forest. The Bioreserve Big Walk takes place 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. For more information call (508) 636-4693 x103. For directions, go to http://www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/southeast/free.htm
Also happening this weekend is a number of fishing derbies and festivals across the state! Cast a line; learn about fish in our waters, safety, ethics, and fishing equipment. If you have fishing equipment, bring it along. A limited quantity of fishing equipment and bait will be available at each event.
- On Saturday, May 4, the Needham Recreation Family Fishing Derby is taking place at the Needham Reservoir from 9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. MassWildlife is participating in this festival in cooperation with the Needham Recreation Commission. Contact: Karen Peirce (781) 455-7521.
- The Westborough Spring Fishing Challenge is also happening on Saturday on Sandra Pond at the Minuteman Park in Westborough from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Contact MassWildlife's Jim Lagacy at (508) 389-6309 or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
- For those in the Charlton area, the Snows Pond Family Fishing Festival is happening on the shores of Snows Pond, located at Fay Mountain Farm off Cemetary Rod from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. MassWildlife is participating in this festival in cooperation with the Charlton Conservation Commission. Contact: Charlton Conservation Commission, Todd P. Girard (508) 248-2247 or email: firstname.lastname@example.com.
- On Sunday, May 5, the Brookline Reservoir Family Fishing Festival is taking place in Brookline! From 9:00 a.m. – noon, MassWildlife is participating in this festival in cooperation with the Brookline Recreation Department. Contact Stephanie Springer by email firstname.lastname@example.com for more information.
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The theme at the CFI convention last year was "The Good Life." The program was designed to help everyone have a more successful business so they could enjoy life. There are so many things in life that we cannot plan on—the one thing we do need to plan on is change.
Working solo is not the way to have the most successful company. You need to have a partner in business, such as spouse, a business partner, a business consultant, or a friend that you can turn to. Being a member of an association will give you a tremendous partner of support that your business needs.
Now is the time for you to consider the way you run your business. Are you charging enough for your services? Consider raising your prices for the services you provide. Take a hard look at the way you operate your business, and change something. Even if it's wrong, a change in your attitude towards business will change the way you run your business. Remember, you're condemned to repeat past performances if you don't change the way you run your future. Are you really happy with the success of your business so far? This new millennium is going to offer many challenges to your business. Are you ready? You might want to get out your business plan and review it right now, and make the changes needed to secure a bright future for your company.
Promise yourself that you will make at least seven changes to the way you run your business. Take a chance on something. After all, that's why you got into business for yourself in the first place. Here are a few ideas that have worked for other companies.
- Raise your prices by 10%
- Send a letter to all your current customers and thank them for their business in the past
- Attend at least four association chapter meetings this year
- Take two days off in the middle of the week (your business will still be there when you get back)
- Attend a certification class that you've never taken, but you think you are an expert in
- Attend a certification class that you've never taken in a topic you know nothing about
- Every time you make a deposit into your bank account, sweep 10% into your savings account.
Are you a member of, or have you wanted to be a member of the World Floor Covering Association (WFCA)? The CFI has a goal of working with others in our industry and we have an alliance with the WFCA. Once a member of the CFI, you can become a member of the WFCA at a 50% discount. The WFCA offers scholarships that will pay for you and your employees to attend educational classes. Last year, there were many CFI members that attended IICRC classes at no cost. Others attended the CFI convention and trade show and the WFCA picked up the registration cost.
The CFI today is working for you, but you must take advantage of what is offered. When you buy tapes, attend classes or purchase programs to help you get your business off the ground and not put them to use, then you have wasted your time and money.
CFI membership is one of the best investments you will ever make for your company, but you need to use the resources available to get the benefits. If you've been a member in the past, now is the time to move your business forward and see what the CFI has to offer you today. If you have never been a member, now is the time to find out what benefits are available to you by being a member of the largest local trade association in the west.
So what are you going to do this year? Do the same thing over and over again, or are you going to take charge of your business life and try something different? When you compete on price alone, you're competing with companies that compete on price and not service. These types of companies, who don't have a handle on business practices and compete on price alone, will go out of business.
Montgomery Wards has been in business for more than 128 years. They tried to compete on price, but didn't manage the business side of the company. They're now out of business. They found out that price was not the way to prevent bankruptcy liquidation.
Companies that have success know where their profit margin is and work hard to provide the best service to their customers. Don't you think it's time you got paid what you're worth and provided service to your customers the way you would want someone to take care of your needs?
Change is good!
Events-At-A-GlanceWhat: CFI Convention and Tradeshow—the West Coast's largest conference and trade show for professional cleaners.
Where: The Holiday Inn on the Bay, San Diego, CA.
When: Aug. 30-Sept. 1, 2001.


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Time to get recertified in CPR/AED and/or First Aid?
In order to qualify for an American Red Cross recertification/review/refresher class, you must have successfully completed (and have proof of that fact):
- the same American Red Cross class;
- a higher level American Red Cross class;
- the equivalent American Heart Association class; or
- a higher level American Heart Association class.
Furthermore, that qualifying class must have been completed within the past two years. Except for a 30-day grace period, there are no exceptions to this rule.
To help you understand what qualifies and what does not, here are the general American Heart Association and American Red Cross class equivalents:
AHA: "Basic Life Support (BLS) for Healthcare Providers"
ARC: "CPR/AED for Professional Rescuers and Health Care Providers"
ARC: "CPR/AED for Lifeguards" (class no longer offered)
AHA: "Heartsaver CPR AED"
AHA: "Family & Friends CPR" (non-certification class)
ARC: "CPR/AED-Adult," "CPR/AED-Pediatric" ("CPR/AED-Child" + "CPR-Infant"), or a combo
AHA: "Heartsaver First Aid"
ARC: "First Aid"


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My vet never told me about this!
posted 6 years ago
I have never heard about this product and my vet never informed of them, either. I was gving my dog ibuprofen and had to have tests doen on her in case there was damage to her kidneys and liver! Had I only known. I will definitely go to the store to get these this week. In this economy, saving money from large cost meds is worth it.
Pros: easy to give/great flavor/won't hurt the dog
Cons: I didn't know about this before
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Juliana Antique Textiles
Celadon velvet pillow has a French hand-embroidered gold metallic "x" appliqué from the early 20th-century bordered with antique French gold metallic galloon. Vintage French gold metallic soutache is applied by hand to the seams.
Juliana Antique Textiles seeks to provide customers with a tangible piece of history and a glimpse into the past, when incredible amounts of time and energy were devoted to the creation of the most beautiful textiles.