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Flying T Salers near Sprague River Oregon is one of the largest and longest established Salers breeders in the United States. We introduced this breed to the Flying T in 1982. The herd was closed in 1985, and has since been subjected to strong selection for calving ease, good disposition, maternal characteristics, and performance traits. Our cattle live under natural range conditions, feeding on meadow and range grasses from late April to mid November. During the five month winter hay feeding period, their diet consists of long hay. These cattle are not pampered, but are treated like commercial cattle. We have available a large selection of polled, black or red bulls, bred cows and heifers. We have semen on many of our foundation herd sires as well as embryos on our top donor cows.
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Comments on the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement(KBRA).
Our Experience page, written by Bruce explains how we came use Salers and our results with the breed. History of Salers explains the early history of the Salers breed from the Stone Age on.
Over the years we have introduced many people to the qualities of Salers beef. After many requests we have decided to make our Salers beef available to the public. To do this we have faced a lot of red tape and have aquired a state meatseller's license. Our meat is now slaughtered, cut and wrapped under the watchful eye of the U.S.D.A. We are now able to sell directly to the public in any size from a pound of ground beef to an entire half of beef.
The Flying T Ranch is offering an internship in beef cow management and calving from January until April of 2012. This opening is available to qualified animal science students of exemplary character who are currently enrolled in accredited colleges and universities. Call for further details. 541-533-2416
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Bilingual Bakken: Safety instructors at NIT begin offering courses in Spanish
May 1, 2014 at 11:53 pm in Uncategorized
Diego Sanchez came to the U.S. from Colombia 22 years ago, knowing no English.
He got by with jobs in construction, landscaping and painting.
Back then, âif you had a hammer and tools, you could get a job,â he said. âNow, everythingâs chang…continue reading on thedickinsonpress.com

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Hemingway's Private War
In the summer of 1924, Ernest Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to report on the progress he was making with a long short story in which he was "trying to do the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isn't writing a hard job though?" The story in question was "Big Two-Hearted River," which in addition to being swell about the fish and as visually powerful as a Cézanne landscape, turned out to be a nice little masterpiece of psychological indeterminacy.
As he walks into the Michigan woods, the solitary Nick Adams feels a sense of release. "He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him." Toward the end of the day, he pitches his tent and crawls inside, noting with pleasure how "homelike" the space seems. At last, he thinks, "he was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it."
From this point forward the story abounds in details of how splendid the fishing is and what a good time Nick is having. Yet some sort of problem is lurking on the margins of his mind. Thus while he is finishing his supper the first night, he suddenly becomes aware that his mind is "starting to work," but because he is tired he is able to "choke it." The next day his happiness is again interrupted. An arduous battle with the biggest trout Nick has ever seen ends with the trout's escape, and as the fisherman is reeling in his line he feels, vaguely, "a little sick." In the manipulative manner of a Watsonian behaviorist, he thereupon modifies his behavior so as to avoid the negative stimulus of a second defeat in one day. Instead of plunging into the armpit-deep water of a tree-filled swamp, wherein he might hook big trout in places impossible to land them, he decides to postpone the experience. "There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp," he says to himself, as the story ends.
What are the "other needs" Nick feels he has put behind him on entering the woods? Why does he call the tent his home? What is the thought that he manages to choke off? Why is he so upset by defeat? Hemingway does not explain any of these puzzles. The angler on the bank of the Big Two-Hearted River is clearly a man with a divided heart, but the unhappiness underlying his predominant happiness is never specified.
For a decade and a half after its appearance as the concluding episode of In Our Time (1925), "Big Two-Hearted River" was admired by literary critics for its ambiguities. Then in the late 1930's this situation changed, when Edmund Wilson took it upon himself to improve the story by making it more explicit. The experience that has given Nick Adams "a touch of panic," Wilson asserted in 1939, is "the wholesale shattering of human beings in which he has taken part." The statement had no basis in fact. For World War I is not mentioned in "Big Two-Hearted River," and there is no reference in the story to feelings of panic.
That Wilson nevertheless described Hemingway's hero as the psychological victim of a brutal war was a measure of the extent to which his literary sensibility was ruled by political nausea. In the early 30's, Wilson's nausea had led him to the Marxist faith, because Marxism called for the total rejection of the entire existing society. With visions of destruction dancing in his head, Wilson had dedicated himself to writing an ambitious book on European radical thought. To the Finland Station was completed in 1939, but by that time the author had come to the realization that the Marxist cure for social disease was no solution. The Bolsheviks, he admitted, had not erected a "classless society out of the old illiterate feudal Russia," but rather had "encouraged the rise and domination of a new controlling and privileged class, who were . . . exploiting the workers almost as callously as the Czarist industrialists had done."
The recognition of Stalin's reign of terror, however, did not reconcile Wilson to the imperfections of capitalism; it merely caused him to include the Soviet Union among the governments of the world that he despised. Turning away from the study of radical political thought, he reread Hemingway—and promptly found in "Big Two-Hearted River" the vision of a sensitive writer whose suffering has been caused not by mistakes he himself has made, but by the belligerency of great powers. The commentators have been wrong in accusing Hemingway of an indifference to society, Wilson proclaimed at the end of his essay, for in fact "his whole work is a criticism of society."
When, in 1940, Malcolm Cowley finally ceased apologizing for Stalinism, he, too, began to cast about for non-Marxist modes of continuing his assault on the moral credentials of capitalist society. America's entrance into the war against Hitler made this problem particularly difficult for him, but Wilson's overinterpretation of Hemingway seems to have showed him how to solve it. In addition to shoveling much more war-victim material into "Big Two-Hearted River" than Wilson had done, Cowley's introduction to the Viking Portable Hemingway (1944) went on to insist that a haunted, hypnagogic quality characterizes all of Hemingway's work. His stories are told against the background of the countries he has seen, Cowley said, but
these countries are presented in a strangely mortuary light. In no other writer of our time can you find such a profusion of corpses: dead women in the rain; dead soldiers bloated in their uniforms and surrounded by torn papers; sunken liners full of bodies that float past the closed portholes. In no other writer can you find so many suffering animals: mules with their forelegs broken drowning in shallow water off the quay at Smyrna; gored horses in the bull ring; wounded hyenas first snapping at their own entrails and then eating them with relish.
In a strangely mortuary light. To a critic who had argued all through the 1930's that the difference between the Soviet Union and other countries was the difference between life and death, it must have felt like vindication to write those words, and to append to them that long list of fearsome illustrations. For while history had revealed that the critic might have been a bit incautious in his praise of the Soviet Union, Hemingway's stories certainly seemed to confirm Cowley's judgment of the rest of the world.
Was it really accurate, though, to say that Hemingway had presented France, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and the other countries he knew as a series of hypnagogic visions? Convincing proof of this bold proposition would have required a great many demonstrations across the whole range of his work. The Viking Portable's editor, however, stuck to a strikingly limited number of stories; indeed, there was one story he kept coming back to again and again. In the end, all the credibility of his "nightmares at noonday" interpretation was invested in his comments on "Big Two-Hearted River."
Cowley's Nick Adams is in far worse psychological shape than Edmund Wilson's. The evidence of his condition is not to be found in the story, to be sure, but that was nothing to worry about because "Hemingway's stories are most of them continued," and in a somewhat later book than In Our Time there is a story called "Now I Lay Me" that "casts a retrospective light" on "Big Two-Hearted River." The later story is concerned with "an American volunteer in the Italian army who isn't named but who might easily be Nick Adams." (The critic is in error. The volunteer is named, and his name is Nick.) As a result of being wounded in action, the young man is afraid to go to sleep at night. "I had been living for a long time," he confesses, "with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body." This confession, we are assured, enables us to appreciate the psychological fragility of the man who is fishing the Big Two-Hearted River.
Among the things Cowley neglects to tell us about "Now I Lay Me" is that the frightened American soldier is lying in a room a scant seven kilometers behind the lines. Moreover, the soldier knows that, as surely as autumn follows summer, he will have to return to the fighting—and in fact at the end of the story we learn of his later participation in the "October offensive." The story, in short, is very much like another Hemingway story called "In Another Country," in which a recuperating American soldier lies in bed at night in Milan, "afraid to die and wondering how I would be when I went back to the front again."
In "Big Two-Hearted River," we are in a very different world. Nick is a civilian, safely back in the United States. Now that he no longer has any worries about coming under fire again, has his psyche healed as rapidly as his body has, or is he still afraid to close his eyes at night, lest his soul take flight? Hemingway's answer is clear. "Nick lay down . . . under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep." So much for the retrospective light cast by "Now I Lay Me."
Cowley's essay on Hemingway is not a work that can bear careful scrutiny; it does not even give the correct year of Hemingway's birth. Yet no sooner was the essay published than it began to influence critics everywhere. A young man named Philip Young, for instance, "ported a Portable Hemingway . . . half way across Europe during World War II," and after the war he wrote a book that carried Cowley's critical extravagances to further heights of absurdity. The wound Hemingway suffered in World War I, Young contended, had so deeply traumatized him that he spent his entire life as a writer composing variations on the story of the psychically crippled "sick man" who fishes the Big Two-Hearted River. Alas, Young never thought to ask himself whether reading the Viking Portable Hemingway against the dramatic backdrop of World War II had not made it all too easy for him to believe in the obsessive importance to Hemingway of World War I. Nor did Young ever suspect that Cowley's conversion of a sun-drenched, Cézannesque picture of a predominantly happy fishing trip into a tale as spooky as any of Poe's or Hawthorne's was governed by an ideological purpose, which was to bathe American life in a strangely mortuary light.
Intellectual naiveté, however, was not the only reason Cowley's introduction slew the minds of so many critics. In the wake of the triumph of American power in World War II, the anti-American prejudice of intellectuals who automatically identified themselves with powerlessness became more virulent than ever before, and anti-American interpretations of American literature sprang up like poisonous weeds. In Huckleberry Finn, for instance, Huck's decision at the end of the book to cross over into the Oklahoma Territory for a few weeks of howling adventures with Tom Sawyer and Nigger Jim before returning to his home town in Missouri was transformed by post-World War II critics into a decision to secede forever from American society, because American society sickened the boy.
It was the critics, however, who were sickened by American society, not Huck Finn, and their endorsement of a war-wound interpretation of the life and work of Hemingway was a further reflection of their bias. Thus the late Mark Schorer, in an essay published in 1962, projected upon the author of "Big Two-Hearted River" his own sense of social victimization. On July 8, 1918, while on service with the Red Cross on the Italian front, Schorer wrote, Hemingway "was severely wounded by the explosion of a mortar shell and the next three months he spent in a hospital in Milan. Nothing more important than this wounding was ever to happen to him. A wound was to become the central symbol of nearly everything he was to write, and the consequences of a wound his persistent thematic preoccupation."
Carlos Baker had a golden opportunity to overturn the prevailing clichés when he undertook to write his massive Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). But the weight of thirty years of accumulated critical authority was too much for Baker, and the opportunity was lost. Two events in recent months have now presented another opportunity. The first event was President Reagan's reminder to the nation in March that, despite the awful pain, human beings are sometimes able to respond to the experience of being wounded with an amazing gaiety. The second was the appearance in April of a totally unstructured, badly under-annotated, unhelpfully indexed, but marvelously rich trove of Hemingway letters,1 which among other things reveals that the young man who was struck down on July 8, 1918 reacted to the event with humorous equivalents of his fellow Illinoisan's "Honey, I forgot to duck."
The youth's first letter to his family, written from the hospital in Milan on his nineteenth birthday, not quite two weeks after he was hit, was adorned with a reassuringly funny cartoon he had drawn of himself lying on his back, a heavily bandaged leg thrust straight out. The balloon coming out of this comic figure's mouth reads, "gimme a drink!" The text of the letter is equally high-spirited. "This is a peach of a hospital," he began. "Everything is fine," he continued, "and I'm very comfortable and one of the best surgeons in Milan is looking after my wounds." The wounds in his left leg were "healing finely"; the bullet in his right knee would be removed "by the time you get this letter."
A month later, he recounted to his family the whole story of how he had been "struck by a trench mortar and a machine gun while advancing toward the rear, as the Irish say." In spite of his wounds, he had carried an injured Italian soldier to a dugout, where "I kind of collapsed." When the ambulance finally came for Hemingway, he "ordered it down to the road to get the soldiers that had been wounded first." Back at the dressing station at last, the officers "gave me a shot of morphine and an anti-tetanus injection and shaved my legs and took out about Twenty 8 shell fragments. . . . They did a fine job of bandaging and all shook hands with me and would have kissed me but I kidded them along."
In mid-September, he announced to his father that "my legs are coming on wonderfully and will both eventually be O.K. absolutely," and on October 18 he finished off another health report to his family by declaring that "it does give you an awfully satisfactory feeling to be wounded."
Mixed in, though, with the enormous pleasure it gave him to know that he had behaved heroically and was healing splendidly were some chillier thoughts he was not talking about. A quarter of a century would pass before he would admit in a letter that in World War I he not only had been "really scared" when he was hit, but that in the ensuing months his continuing fear of death had prompted him to become "very devout." For like the wounded American soldiers in "Now I Lay Me" and "In Another Country," Hemingway knew that once he had recuperated he was slated to return to the front. On the eve of being discharged from the hospital, he sought to quiet his family's anxieties by saying that "it has been fairly conclusively proved that I can't be bumped off," but as he nervously chattered on about what a "very simple thing" it was to die, and about how preferable it was "to die in . . . the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old," it became clear that, like Tom Sawyer, he was whistling to keep up his courage as he walked past the graveyard at midnight.
A day or so after rejoining his unit, Hemingway was felled by an attack of jaundice, and by the time he was healthy again the armistice had been signed. The knowledge that he was no longer in danger of being killed was immediately reflected in the tone and content of his letters. Self-deprecatory humor gave way to bragging, and an inadvertent revelation of deadly fear was replaced by an inadvertent revelation of how little he knew about liquor and women. "Lately I've been hitting it up," he boasted to his old friend Bill Smith in December, shortly before leaving Italy, "about 18 martinis a day." The letter to Smith also asserted that, in spite of the writer's "brutal" personality, a nurse he had met in the hospital had fallen madly in love with him and they were planning to get married and "have a wonderful time being poor together." This estimate of things was no more accurate than the report on his martini intake. Not long after his return to the States, the nurse sent him a "Dear Ernest" letter. Hemingway was so overcome with anger that he ran a fever and was obliged to take to his bed.
Between the time he arrived at his parents' home in Oak Park, Illinois, in January 1919, and his reembarkation for Europe in the late fall of 1921, the returned war veteran wrote many letters to many people. In none of them is there either an explicit or implicit indication of the sort of psychic malaise that literary criticism would subsequently assign to the autobiographical hero who fishes the Big Two-Hearted River. An emotion of startling intensity does surge to the surface of the correspondence in the middle of these postwar years, but the name of that emotion is not panic, or hypnagogic horror, or anything like. It is anger, an all-consuming anger, of the sort he manifested when he was jilted by the nurse. And what would trigger it would be a contest of wills with his mother.
Grace Hall Hemingway was an ardent Congregationalist, a frustrated opera singer, and the dominant personality in the Hemingway household. While her doctor husband resented his wife's bossiness, he fully shared her moral values, and as a parent was a considerably stricter disciplinarian. Where Grace occasionally used a hair brush on an erring child, Ed Hemingway was quick to employ a razor strop. Conflict between the parents and Ernest, their headstrong second child (but first son), thus became inevitable, even though the boy worshipped his father for his knowledge of nature and his extraordinary prowess as a hunter and fisherman. According to Carlos Baker's biography, young Ernest sometimes became so angered by the punishments meted out to him by his father that he would sit in the open door of a shed behind their house drawing beads on his father's head with a shotgun, as Dr. Hemingway worked among his tomato vines.
But the struggle with his mother was finally much more bitter. In the opening pages of the new edition of the letters, we pick up the struggle at the point at which she was attempting to maintain control of her son's life even though he had left home and taken a job with the Kansas City Star. It was an attempt which in some ways the eighteen-year-old Hemingway welcomed. Thus he was very grateful for the food she regularly prepared and sent to him. "The box came tonight and we just opened it at the Press room," he informed her on March 2, 1918. With the help of some friends he had polished off the cake right there in the office. "Mother Hemingstein," he said, using one of his two favorite nicknames for her (the other was, more simply, "Mrs. Stein"), you are "some cook."
Yet if he was glad to reap the rewards of his continuing dependency, he refused to be bound by its obligations. As he would with all the women he would marry, the young Hemingway wanted to eat his cake and have it too. When his mother remonstrated with him for not attending church, he replied with a patently hypocritical excuse. "The reason I don't go to church on Sunday is because always I have to work till 1 a.m. getting out the Sunday Star . . . and I never open my eyes Sunday morning until 12:30 noon." Modulating into outright lying, he added, "so you see it isn't because I don't want to. You know I don't rave about religion but am as sincere a Christian as I can be."
The war hero who came back to Oak Park in January 1919 felt it necessary to conceal from his parents not only that he had learned to smoke and drink, but that he had no intention of remaining for long in the United States. To one of his army buddies he revealed that he was keeping a bottle of booze in a "camouflaged bookcase in my room"; to another he grumbled that "My Family . . . are wolfing at me to go to college. They want me to settle down for a while and the place that they are pulling for is Wisconsin." Toward the end of the summer of 1919, he briefly escaped the constraints on his freedom by going on a fishing trip with two friends to the Big Fox and Little Fox Rivers in the northern peninsula of Michigan. Below an old dam, Hemingway hooked the "biggest trout I've ever seen," only to lose it after a long effort. Nevertheless, the fishing had been "priceless."
On his return home, the fisherman and his mother inexorably moved toward a confrontation, and in the summer of 1920, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, it occurred. One moonlit night at the Hemingways' summer place in Michigan, Ernest and some other young people in the neighborhood sneaked out after midnight and held a party on a sandbar that went on until 3 A.M. When the deception was discovered, the mother of one of girls blamed Ernest, because he was older, and thereafter refused to speak to him. Mrs. Hemingway punished her son by coldly ordering him out of the house. In reprisal, Hemingway refused to communicate with either of his parents and left their letters to him unopened. "Am so darn disgusted," he wrote to his fifteen-year-old friend Grace Quinlan, "I don't care to have anything more to do with them for a year at least." In the first of a series of cruelly unfair allegations, Hemingway also told Grace Quinlan that his mother had been "glad of an excuse to oust me," because she had "more or less hated me" ever since he had told her—or so he claimed—that she was spending money on herself that should have been reserved for the younger Hemingway children in college.
By the fall of 1920, he was once again in touch with his father, but not with his mother. In an effort to comfort his wife, Dr. Hemingway wrote her a letter—the text is in Carlos Baker's biography—which left no doubt where his sympathies lay. "Ernest's last letter to me," he told her, "was written in anger and filled with expressions that were untrue to a gentleman and a son who has had everything done for him. . . . He must get busy and make his own way, and suffering alone will be the means of softening his Iron Heart of selfishness."
Eventually, a reconciliation took place. The senior Hemingways were present at Ernest's marriage to Hadley Richardson in September 1921, and they did not protest the decision of the bride and groom to make their home in Paris. Yet for all the polite gestures back and forth, Hemingway was never able to come to terms with his mother. As reviews of it have suggested, the new edition of his letters outrivals in vehemence even the collected eruptions of Mark Twain. Hemingway in the course of his life was angry at politicians, churchmen, fellow writers, literary critics, and assorted sports figures. But above all, he was angry at his mother. Not until his suicide—that act of supreme anger—would his epistolary abuse of her cease.
Upon learning from her in 1926 that she considered The Sun Also Rises to be a filthy book, he was so furious that for a time he could not reply. "I did not answer when you wrote about the Sun etc. book," he finally explained to her on February 5, 1927, "as I could not help being angry and it is very foolish to write angry letters; and more than foolish to do so to one's mother. It is quite natural for you not to like the book and I regret your reading any book that causes you pain or disgust." Of course the book is unpleasant, he conceded with seeming good temper, as he prepared to counterattack, "but it is not all unpleasant and I am sure is no more unpleasant than the real inner lives of some of our best Oak Park families. You must remember that in such a book all the worst of the people's lives is displayed while at home there is a very lovely side for the public and the sort of thing of which I have had some experience in observing behind closed doors."
At times, his astonishing vulnerability to his mother's moral judgments caused him to respond not with insults, but with flights of self-justification and prevarication, as in his adolescent letters from Kansas City. On the day, for instance, when he sought to explain to his parents why he had divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer, he began by apologizing to them for having caused them "so much shame and suffering," and then went on to declare, in a flagrant departure from the truth, that although he had been in love with both women for over a year, he had been "absolutely faithful to Hadley." Moreover, he claimed, he had been leading a very clean life in other respects. "I remember Mother saying once that she would rather see me in my grave than something—I forget what—smoking cigarettes perhaps. If it's of any interest I don't smoke. Haven't for almost 3 years altho you probably will hear stories that I smoke like a furnace." As for the nature of his fiction, he admitted that while he was "upset about Mother accusing me of pandering to the lowest tastes," his conscience was clear. "I know that I am not disgracing you in my writing but rather doing something that some day you will be proud of." You cannot know, he cried out, his voice rising in anguish, "how it makes me feel for Mother to be ashamed of what I know as sure as you know that there is a God in heaven is not to be ashamed of."
A year after receiving that letter, Dr. Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Angina pectoris, diabetes, and the inability to sleep because of pain were the reasons behind the tragedy, according to the letter that Hemingway dispatched to his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Physiological explanations, however, did not satisfy the letter writer for long. Whether because there simply was no limit to his desire to degrade his mother, or because he was trying to cover up his own guilty sense of having caused his father a great deal of unhappiness, Hemingway soon persuaded himself that a hen-pecking wife had "forced my father to suicide." Thenceforward he was wont to refer to her in his correspondence as "my bitch of a mother." He refused to invite her to visit him at his home in Cuba, and he would not go to Oak Park, because "I can't stand to see her." Even after her death in 1951, he continued to rail at her as a husband killer.
Right from the start of his career as a creative writer, Hemingway also sought to pursue his war with his mother by fictional means. From the vantage point of Paris's Left Bank in 1924, he looked back upon Oak Park in anger, as he worked upon the stories that became the book called In Our Time. "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," the second of the stories in the book, presents a sanctimonious wife, her hen-pecked husband, and their little boy. Instead of obeying his mother's request that he come up to the bedroom where she is lying with the blinds drawn and a Bible beside her, the boy goes off for a walk in the woods with his father. In "Soldier's Home," the seventh story, we meet a mother who willingly cooks breakfast for her war-veteran son, but who doesn't allow him to "muss up" the morning newspaper—it is the Kansas City Star, we learn—which he wants to read while eating. She then completes the young man's annoyance by asking him if he loves her, to which he replies, "I don't love anybody," and by urging him to kneel and pray with her, to which he replies, "I can't." In both of these stories, the need to comply with a mother's demands is defied by a rebellious son. The final story in In Our Time, as we have seen, centers on a fisherman who feels, as he enters the woods, that he has left everything behind, "the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs." Whether the "other needs" he has escaped include the need to please his mother is never made clear.
Yet if the fisherman's dark thoughts in "Big Two-Hearted River" are choked off before they reach the level of consciousness, Grace Hall Hemingway was surely on the storyteller's mind. The satisfaction Nick takes in referring to his tent as his home, for instance, derives from the author's inability either to forget or to forgive his mother's banishment of him four years before from their home in Michigan. As Nick sets up the tent, he is defiantly establishing a counter-domicile—and as he proceeds to hang his pack from a nail that he has "gently" driven into a pine tree, to prepare a delicious meal of beans and spaghetti, to brew his coffee by a carefully described method, and to clean up after himself with scrupulous thoroughness, he is defining a counter-domesticity. Hemingway may have rebelled against the values of his mother and father, but he was also marked by them; in the woods, Nick Adams apes the cooking skills and the careful housekeeping habits that Hemingway had observed in his father on fishing and hunting trips and in his mother at home.
Happiness for the hero of "Big Two-Hearted River" is an inordinate concern with small details. On the one hand, his obsessiveness keeps dark thoughts at bay; on the other hand, it demonstrates how responsible he is. Before reaching down into the stream to touch a trout resting on the bottom, Nick conscientiously wets his hand, "so that he would not disturb the delicate mucus that covered him. If a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot." The author who would cry out to his mother that his work was nothing to be ashamed of, and that the day would come when she would be proud of him, could not have continued writing if he had not believed himself to be, in his own way, a moralist. He had incorporated into himself too much of her personality to have embraced the nihilism with which his interpreters have been so eager to associate him.
The question of why the author elected not to specify the nature of the malaise that underlies Nick's happiness in "Big Two-Hearted River" can never be answered with certainty. But the most plausible answer is that, unlike "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" and "Soldier's Home," in which sons are clearly unhappy in the homes of their mothers, "Big Two-Hearted River" takes place in the woods. If Nick Adams had been revealed as a man so angry at his mother that he could not even forget her when he was off on a fishing trip, readers might simply have concluded that Nick was an emotional adolescent. The only way to avoid such a judgment would have been to show Nick using his time in the woods to sort out his feelings about his mother and come to an understanding of the tension between them. Writing that kind of story, however, would have required of Hemingway a degree of self-understanding that he would never achieve.
"I had a wonderful novel to write about Oak Park," he told the literary critic Charles Fenton in 1952, but "would never do it because I did not want to hurt liveing [sic ] people." The excuse rings false. Neither as a man nor as a writer had Hemingway ever hesitated to hurt living people, and furthermore both of his parents were dead when he wrote to Fenton. If pangs of conscience had previously stayed his hand, why did he not write the Oak Park novel at some point during the ten years of life that remained to him after his mother's death in 1951? Clearly, it was not a concern for protecting his parents that forever prevented him from writing the book, but rather his own failure to master its materials. A novel-length exploration of the experience of growing up in Oak Park would have led Hemingway into a swamp filled with deep water and overgrown with trees, in which big trout might be hooked but not landed.
Having failed to work out his relationship with his mother, Hemingway went on to marriages that mostly did not work, and to fictional commentaries upon them that are either as brutally direct as "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" and "Soldier's Home" are about his mother, or as brilliantly evasive as "Big Two-Hearted River." Three of his four marriages were important to him personally, the first, the second, and the fourth, but in terms of their fictional consequences, the first was by far the most significant.
Hadley Richardson was eight years older than Hemingway. She was raised in a roomy, comfortable house in the suburban West End of St. Louis, where the oak trees and fine lawns recalled Oak Park's. Her mother's overriding interest was in varieties of religious experience, from theosophy to mental science to psychic phenomena. "A woman of strong personality and convictions," says Hadley's biographer, Alice Hunt Sokoloff, "she was the dominant influence in the Richardson family." Mr. Richardson ran a pharmaceutical business and was a heavy drinker, a habit of which his wife severely disapproved, and when Hadley was twelve years old, he committed suicide. The similarities in their backgrounds helped to make Ernest and Hadley feel that they belonged together, and so did their dreams of escape. When Hadley wrote to Ernest during their engagement that "The world's a jail and we're going to break it together," she knew she spoke for him as well as for herself.
"She's a wonderful tennis player, best pianist I ever heard and a sort of terribly fine article," Hemingway wrote to Grace Quinlan in the summer of 1921, a month and a half before he and Hadley were married. Under his tutelage, Hadley also learned to fish as well as he could, and in the first two years of their marriage she kept right up with him as he walked over the St. Bernard pass into Italy, played tennis at Rapallo, hiked through the Black Forest, spent three months skiing in Switzerland, handicapped the horses at San Siro and Auteuil, went to all the bullfights at Pamplona, and dined out every night in Milan at the Cova or Campari's. Despite the considerable difference in their ages—which for unstated psychological reasons must have played its part, too, in his attraction to her—Hadley was wonderfully youthful, a gutsy companion, a perfect pal.
In August 1923, the endless honeymoon abruptly came to an end, as the Hemingways left Paris for Toronto. Hadley was pregnant, and they both wanted the baby to be born in a hospital on North American soil. (In Europe, it was still not the general practice to give anesthetics to women in labor.) On September 10, Hemingway reported for work at the Toronto Daily Star. He expected to be kept on local assignments, but was told he might be sent out of town as well. A month later, he was in New York, covering the arrival of the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, when the news reached him that Hadley had gone into the hospital. The long train ride back to Toronto gave him ample time to worry about all sorts of things. Upon reaching the hospital the next morning, he looked broken down "from fatigue and strain," as Hadley subsequently described him to Isabel Simmons, an old friend of Ernest's from Oak Park.
By the end of January 1924, the Hemingways were back in Paris, where because of Bumby, their baby boy, they now settled in a somewhat larger apartment than they had previously occupied. Soon, Hemingway's letters to his friends were bubbling with descriptions of where he and Hadley had just been and of where they were planning to go next. "We have more fun together all the time," he wrote to Howell Jenkins. "She is the best guy on a trip you ever saw. She is keeping her piano up and runs the house and the baby damned smooth and is always ready to go out and eat oysters at the cafe and drink a bottle of Pouilly before supper." The endless honeymoon had seemingly resumed—except that it hadn't. "It is just about morning," Hemingway wrote to the publisher Robert McAlmon in the pre-dawn darkness of November 15, 1924, "Bumby had a night when he didn't sleep and Hadley and I've been up with him alternatively and together." Baby-sitter problems forced them to come home in the evening before Hemingway was ready to do so, and when they left Bumby with a sitter and went to the six-day bike races at the Velodrome d'Hiver, Hadley's energies would give out in the hours after midnight, forcing her to curl up on the bench and nap, as her indefatigable husband went on cheering the riders.
In his immaturity, Hemingway was no more ready to accept the restrictions on his freedom that fatherhood had imposed than he had been to live by the rules of conduct laid down by his mother. The letters he sent to friends during 1924 had only praise for lovely, gallant Hadley, but in several of the stories he wrote for In Our Time, he revealed how deeply conflicted his feelings about her had become.
Of the six stories in the collection that reflect one facet or another of the author's angry, guilty, depressed state of mind, the most blatantly autobiographical is "Cross Country Snow." Nick Adams and his friend George are having such fun skiing by themselves in Switzerland that they both wish they could go on sampling the slopes indefinitely and "not give a damn" about anything else. Nick, though, is married to Helen, and Helen is going to have a baby. "Will you go back to the States?" George inquires. "I guess so," Nick replies. "Do you want to?" George asks. "No," says Nick.
In "Cat in the Rain" and "Out of Season," the author extended his examination of the problems of young American couples in postwar Europe. But in the other three stories about Hadley and himself, Hemingway projected his sense of foreboding backward in time, into stories of boyhood in Michigan before the war. He wrote "The Three-Day Blow," he later recalled in his memoir of the 20's, A Moveable Feast, while sitting in a café on the Place St.-Michel on "a wild, cold, blowing day," and so he made it "that sort of day in the story." A marital weather as well got into the story, and into "Indian Camp" and "The End of Something."
Carlos Baker's biography tells us that Hemingway once knew a girl from Petoskey, Michigan, named Marjorie Bump, and that he "romanticized their friendship" in "The End of Something." Nick's girlfriend in the story is, to be sure, named Marjorie, but the fact that she fishes as well as he can, is very much of a pal to Nick, and yet is deeply in love with him, strongly suggests she is Hadley. Furthermore, the story does not "romanticize" Nick's friendship with Marjorie, it portrays the swift and ruthless destruction of their relationship. For Hemingway was testing out, through the composition of "The End of Something," the idea of divorce. In the mid-1930's he would do the same thing in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by presenting his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, transparently disguised as the rich-bitch spouse of a dying writer, even though at the time of writing the story Hemingway was assuring such correspondents as Maxwell Perkins that "Pauline is fine," just as he had written only sweet words about Hadley in his correspondence of 1924.
As Hemingway conjured up Nick and Marjorie building a fire on a sandy point and watching it get dark, he was rehearsing a scene he would shortly play in his own life. "There's going to be a moon tonight," Nick says. "I know it," Marjorie replies happily. Without warning, Nick turns on her. "You know everything," he says sarcastically. "I've taught you everything," he goes on angrily, "and now it isn't fun any more." Stunned, Marjorie asks, "Isn't love any fun?" "No," says Nick, his head in his hands. The feeling of emptiness that one can sense in Nick's laconic answers to George in "Cross Country Snow" is again evident in the wake of his anger at the end of "The End of Something."
The mood of depression in the follow-up story, in which Nick and his friend Bill get drunk on a cold and blowy afternoon and talk about Marjorie, is considerably deeper. If you hadn't broken off with Marge, Bill says, "you'd be back home working trying to get enough money to get married." Nick says nothing, so Bill resumes his effort to comfort him. "Once a man's married he's absolutely bitched. . . . He hasn't got anything more. Nothing. Not a damn thing. He's done for." Once again, Nick says nothing. Depression has reduced him from laconicisms to silence.
And sometimes silence is the prelude to suicide, as "Indian Camp" demonstrates. Through the wide eyes of a very young Nick Adams, we watch his doctor father enter an Indian shanty one night and perform a Caesarean section on a young woman, using a jackknife to make the incision and a tapered gut leader from a fishing kit to sew it up. Only after the operation has been successfully concluded does Dr. Adams discover that the woman's seemingly stoic husband, unable to bear his wife's screams, has slit his throat while lying in the upper bunk.
For years, incautious critics claimed that "Indian Camp" was based on the author's memory of an incident he had witnessed as a little boy. Thanks to Carlos Baker, the claim no longer has any credibility. Yet Baker's own belief that the "melodramatic circumstances" of the story were entirely an "invention" is equally misleading. Behind the grisly tale lay the circumstance of Hemingway's anxiety-ridden train trip back to Toronto on the night Hadley went into labor. Did Hemingway, on that long night, out of a fear of being entrapped once again in family life, consider deserting his wife? Out of a sense of guilt at being absent from Hadley's side to help her through an ordeal which he himself had caused, did the train rider contemplate suicide? All we know is that he arrived at the hospital looking broken down with strain and fatigue. Yet eventually he did desert his wife and, as the new edition of his letters shows, by the time that "Indian Camp" and the rest of the In Our Time stories were published in October 1925, the author was openly talking of killing himself. "Indian Camp" is even more eerily predictive than "The End of Something."
Like Hemingway on the train, who in his imagination could see his wife in the hospital even though he was hundreds of miles away from her, the Indian husband is there in the room, listening to the screams, yet is so unconnected to what is going on that it is as if he were somewhere else. He does not speak to his wife, he does nothing to assist the doctor, he displays no interest in watching the birth of his son. Instead, he lies silently on his bunk, smoking a pipe, and then rolls toward the wall. Why his will to live has been overmastered remains mysterious. Throughout the story he has said not a word, and Nick Adams is so young that his father has to reply to the boy's question about the tragedy on a very simple level. "Why did he kill himself, Daddy?" "I don't know, Nick. He couldn't stand things, I guess." Reading that exchange, one feels that the author has brilliantly finessed a situation which virtually demanded perceptive comment because he was at a loss to explain his own vulnerability to thoughts of self-destruction. If Nick had been sixteen or seventeen years old, he and his father conceivably could have had a probing discussion of why a man might be moved to kill himself on the night he became a father; by making Nick a young boy, the author precluded the possibility.
"Perfectly calmly and not bluffingly," so he later reminded Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway announced in the fall of 1925 that if his emotional split between Pauline and Hadley "wasn't cleared up by christmas I would kill myself." His flight from family life had led him into a love affair that had become more serious than he had bargained on.
If the recollections of the dying writer in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" may be trusted as autobiographical confession, Hemingway was already consorting with other women as early as the fall of 1922, barely more than a year after his wedding to Hadley. "To me," he confessed to F. Scott Fitzgerald on July 1, 1925, "heaven would be . . . two lovely houses in town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors." Not too many weeks after writing that letter, Hemingway sent Hadley and Pauline off to the Loire Valley together so that he could finish the first draft of The Sun Also Rises at full throttle. "I did not want to lose my speed making love," he explained a quarter of a century later to the art historian Bernard Berenson. But after the manuscript was completed, he told Berenson, he felt "hollow and lonely and needed a girl very badly. So I was in bed with a no good girl when my wife came home and had to get the girl out onto the roof . . . and change the sheets and come down to open the door." Having fornicated into a "state of absolute clear-headed-ness," he then went off with Hadley and Bumby to Schruns in the Vorarlberg, where they had "a wonderful, healthy, happy life," and he twice rewrote his novel. Pauline joined them at Christmas.
All very jolly, except that the hollow feeling he referred to in the letter to Berenson was depression. In the fall, he had threatened to kill himself if his love life were not cleared up by Christmas, but by then it was more agonizing than ever. A Christmas eve note to Scott Fitzgerald spoke of nights of sleeplessness and of all the "sons of bitching things I've done," and in yet another letter to Fitzgerald he admitted that he had been "in hell" since Christmas, "with plenty of insomnia to light the way around so I could study the terrain." Ever since he had met Hadley, he had regarded her as "the best and truest and loveliest person that I have ever known." He could not have written In Our Time, The Torrents of Spring, and The Sun Also Rises if he had not had her "loyal and self-sacrificing and always stimulating and loving . . . support," as well as the financial backing of her small inheritance. Bumby, he exclaimed, was so lucky to have her as a mother. Yet he was sexually enchanted and intellectually beguiled by Pauline. Besides being four years younger than Hadley, she was handsomer, wealthier, better dressed, and far more willing to cater to Hemingway's dependency on female flattery. Most people, including Hadley, were embarrassed by Hemingway's vicious parody of Sherwood Anderson in The Torrents of Spring, but Pauline predictably adored it. The writer who put his new novel through two more drafts at Schruns was a man torn in half between wife and mistress.
Jake Barnes, the hero of The Sun Also Rises, has always been the prize exhibit of the war-victim interpretation of Hemingway. For Jake is sexually impotent as a result of a wound received in World War I, and he has trouble sleeping at night. But Jake's wound is not only the thematic preoccupation of the novelist, as Mark Schorer would have it; it is also a cover-up for artistic failure, a simplistic and sensationalistic means of accounting for the hero's depressed condition. Jake's insomnia, the new edition of Hemingway's letters makes clear, was inspired by the sleeplessness of a married man at Schruns, and Jake's inability to make love to the woman he is in love with was inspired by Hemingway's inability to find sexual contentment in the arms of the "best and truest and loveliest person" he had ever known. In The Sun Also Rises, the author let a war wound stand for a more subtle and complicated disability which he was afraid to deal with directly.
But if Hemingway is the impotent Jake, who is the nymphomaniacal Lady Brett Ashley? This compulsive creature, who claims to be deeply in love with Jake, has generally been identified by the critics as the fictional counterpart of Lady Duff Twysden, whom Hemingway had sometimes encountered in the bars of Montparnasse (and may, just possibly, have bedded). Yet while Lady Brett's boyish hairdo and clipped-speech mannerisms were in all likelihood modeled on Lady Duff's, the real-life lady's sexual liberation fell considerably short of the fictional lady's insatiability.
In her raging need to fornicate, Lady Brett is Hemingway himself, as the novelist came close to acknowledging in a letter to the poet Archibald MacLeish in 1943. Each of his novels, he told MacLeish, contained one new thing he had personally learned in the course of his life, and the realization that The Sun Also Rises had been based on was, "Promiscuity no solution." To the considerable distress of the poet Allen Tate, who reviewed The Sun Abo Rises in the Nation in 1926, the novel not only makes its wayward heroine an attractive person, it condones her incontinent behavior. The letter to MacLeish explains why. Hemingway never thought of not condoning Lady Brett's sexual self-indulgence because he never thought of not condoning his own. Hemingway's only objection to promiscuity was that it had led him into hell, not heaven. Instead of solving his emotional problems, it had multiplied them.
Hemingway has not rounded out his people, Allen Tate further complained in his review, he has created caricatures based on one or two traits; his vision of character is "singularly oblique." Singularly oblique indeed. The novelist had based both the principal female character and the principal male character on aspects of himself and had then depicted these representatives of his divided self as being desperately in love with one another. In the back seats of taxicabs, they hold hands and kiss and exchange endearments. Kinkiness, though, was utterly foreign to the spirit of Hemingway, in Hemingway's opinion. Never in my life have I "felt a 'malajust'," he boasted to a friend in 1932. Kinkiness was a disease that afflicted only other writers, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was eternally worried, Hemingway jeered, about the size of his penis, or Gertrude Stein, who was a queer. Stein in particular became an object of his derision and contempt, for in addition to being a lesbian, she was a Jew. But Stein's worst sin of all in the eyes of the author of The Sun Also Rises was that although he had thought of her as a mother he could count on, she had failed to give him her unstinting approval.
"Mrs. Stein" was one of his nicknames for his real mother. No sooner had he fled from her authority to Paris than he placed himself under the wing of Miss Stein, at 27 rue de Fleurus. At first, it was marvelous. She gave him the "run of the house." She encouraged him in his writing. And when he eventually asked her to become Bumby's godmother, she agreed. Yet if he basked in her love and understanding, this enormously gifted, deeply damaged man was no more able to tolerate her authoritarianism than he had been his mother's. An exasperated remark she made about the irresponsibility of the generation to which Hemingway belonged may very well have marked the moment at which his increasing irritation with her began to fester into an uglier feeling. For in front of the text of The Sun Also Rises he placed her remark about his generation being lost in juxtaposition with a quotation from Ecclesiastes to the effect that one generation passeth and another cometh, but the earth abideth forever—and the juxtaposition was no more intended as a compliment to his surrogate mother than the ensuing novel was intended as a bow to the literary taste of his real mother.
To Maxwell Perkins in 1926, he confessed that while he himself did not think "a hell of a lot" of his generation, he had resented Gertrude Stein's "bombast." "Nobody knows about the generation that follows them and certainly has no right to judge." In 1932, he told another friend that the purpose of the two quotations had been "to show the superiority of the earlier Hebrew writers over the later." In 1934, his accumulating anger finally exploded into hatred. Gertrude Stein "was a damned pleasant woman," he wrote to Arnold Gingrich of Esquire,
before she had the menopause and it goes against my digestion to take shots at anyone who's ever been a friend no matter how lousey [sic] they get to be finally. Besides, I've got the gun and it's loaded and I know where the vital spots are and friendship aside there's a certain damned fine feeling of superiority in knowing you can finish anybody off whenever you want to and still not doing it.
The words seethe with the primitive rage of the child who drew beads on his father's head with a shotgun.
After she and Ernest had come to a parting of the ways, Hadley insisted that he and Pauline also part; if, after a considerable number of months had passed, they still found that they loved one another, Hadley would agree to a divorce. Hemingway's letters to Pauline during the period of their separation are filled with allusions to "horrors at night" and to "black depression." When two people love one another terribly much and then go away from each other, he told her, "it works almost as bad as abortion." All you can do is lie awake at night and "pray and pray and pray you won't go crazy."
Yet within a few weeks of his marriage to Pauline on May 10, 1927, the presumably happy bridegroom wrote "Hills Like White Elephants," an emotionally urgent story in which a man like Hemingway pleads with a woman like Hadley that if only she will consent to an abortion, "We can have everything. . . . We can have the whole world." And three months later, the bridegroom wrote to his father and admitted that "After we were divorced if Hadley would have wanted me I would have gone back to her." Another era, in short, had begun in Hemingway's life and work, in which fantasies of what-might-have-been would loom very large.
Across the entire length of his adult life, Hemingway kept a double record of his feelings by writing stories and by writing letters. In contrast to the appalling frankness of the letters, the stories suppress information, conflate memories, play tricks with time-frames, speak in symbols. But with the help of the letters, they can be decoded and, at long last, properly understood. In the light of this understanding, the interpretation of Hemingway's fiction that originated forty years ago in Edmund Wilson's misreading of "Big Two-Hearted River," and that was then magnified by Malcolm Cowley into a misreading of the entire oeuvre, can also be recognized for what it really is: the exploitation of an author's work for ideological purposes.
Taken together, the letters and the stories show that what happened to Hemingway on July 8, 1918, did not give him nightmares for the rest of his life. If World War I played hob with his future, it was not because of a wound but because it suddenly propelled a rebellious youth who was barely out of high school into a very much bigger and more exciting world than the one he was slowly getting to know as a newspaperman in Kansas City.
Perhaps his separation from his mother and the values she stood for could never have been accomplished in the spirit of mutual understanding and love that Sherwood Anderson describes so delicately in his account of the relationship between young George Willard and his mother in Winesburg, Ohio. Perhaps, like figures in an O'Neill tragedy, Hemingway and his mother were doomed to claw and slash at one another, no matter what. The high-gear acceleration in his development that resulted from the war, however, certainly did not enhance the chances of establishing peace on the home front. Hemingway came back to Oak Park in 1919 spoiling for a fight, and his mother was waiting for him.
1 Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker, Scribner's, 948 pp., $27.50.


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Treating Multiple Myeloma with Immunotherapy
Is there any research about treating myeloma with immunotherapy? In this video from our ""Living Well With Multiple Myeloma"" event held at SCCA in November 2011, Dr. William Bensinger of SCCA discusses the eradication of chronic lymphocytic leukemia with adoptive T cell therapy. The effects of this treatment against multiple myeloma are currently being studied. Dr. Noopur Raje describes how adoptive t-cell therapy increases T cells and NK (natural killer) cells over time, which fight tumor cells. It ""wakes up"" your immune system and teaches it to fight against myeloma.


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A FERAL fox has left a mum and her six-year-old son "prisoners in their home", MPs tight-lipped over their proposed pay rise, £10,000 raised for dying mum Debbie Johnson, 300 lifesavers are created in Bracknell and much, much more - including a FREE lifesaver poster.
All in this week's Bracknell News, out today (Thursday) for just 60p.
- A feral fox has terrified a mum and her six-year-old son
- MPs refuse to say if they would accept a controversial 10% pay increase
- £10,000 raised for dying mum Debbie Johnson
- Two-page education special
- 300 lifesavers are created in Bracknell
- FREE lifesaver poster
- Lots of pictures from the Moss End Farm Show and Warfield Driving Show
- 10 pages of top local sport
- Binfield FC sign their fourth ex- Wokingham player this summer
- Thames Valley Cricket including Bracknell, Eversley, Wokingham and Finchampstead
- Property, family announcements, motors, jobs and classifed
And much, much more!


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The Bob Devaney Sports Center isn't just getting a facelift. It's getting something close to an extreme makeover with the addition of the new Hendricks Training Complex that promises to be a boon for recruiting for Nebraska men's and women's basketball and Husker wrestling.
Continue reading "Osborne Describes Timeline and Scope of Devaney Center Addition"


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Flow, Pair Programming and Emotional Intelligence
July 22, 2008 § 6 Comments
I was involved in an interesting chat with some colleagues about the apparent incompatibilities between pair programming and being in the 'zone'; a Zen like state where everything just clicks and one is able to perform seamlessly to their optimum ability given the present moment. From a developer viewpoint our egos become almost on autopilot as our hands reach out and tap away at the keyboard, the mind harmoniously serving up a variety of designs and strategies that may help us solve the problem at hand. We effortlessly approach excellence.
Psychologists refer to zone as 'flow'. Daniel Coleman – author of Emotional Intelligence – describes flow as being "emotional intelligence at its best… the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning". Emotions generate a plethora of thoughts for us, including distracting worries and concerns. Therefore having our emotions working for us enables us to be more focussed and to think more clearly and objectively about a specific problem.
Pair programming is a not stress free activity. Though it has been proven to raise productivity it does require more focus on the part of the developer – asking much more of them than were they coding solo. Being in a "pair" you are constantly required to explain your intricate thought processes to another person. You are challenged, and you have a responsibility to ensure that the person you are pairing with gets up to speed with the material at hand and that you are providing them with a progressive learning experience.
We need to appreciate that developers are humans, and sadly are not perfect coding punching-out machines. Pair-programming introduces an emotional burden on the developer. Thoughts such as how the other person in the pair is coping and performing are one of many, along with speculation as to what the other person is thinking… Are they frustrated that I can't keep up? Are they worried I'm going too fast? Or worse still do they feel guilty for slowing me down? – a common concern as developers strive to be productive. In order to deal with these worries a whole new – totally justifiable – plateau of thinking opens up. The brain switches over from analysing the current software problem to instead work on strategies for making the pair more effective: 'they have a need to see this area of the code-base as it will help them to contextualise the problem better… I want to get some "quick wins" to build our momentum as a pair, therefore it makes sense to pick off this little bit of low hanging fruit…'
I believe that whilst pair-programming has the capacity to inhibit flow, the emotional intelligence within us is the tool to help minimize the impact distractions have allowing us to closer reach a level of excellence on an individual level. EQ is essentially about being aware of our emotions and the impact they have on us – to realise when we're worried, or when our frustrations are mounting. A higher EQ will not only help us to better meet our own needs, but it will give us more empathy and understanding to better meet the needs of the person we're working with – to help us create a more effective "pair". EQ is essentially about being aware, and the best thing about it is that unlike IQ it can be learned.
Lastly, I want to refer to the premise that "stress makes you stupid". We underperform when our emotions run unchecked. I've seen first hand developers resigning from jobs they sought hard for because pair programming has been too much of a difficult experience. If we can improve our awareness of the distractions and difficulties pairing introduces – and in doing so our EQ – then we'll likely make it easier for ourselves and the person we're pairing with.
§ 6 Responses to Flow, Pair Programming and Emotional Intelligence
Interesting O_o
My experience of pairing is that is is extremely difficult to do well, and requires a very particular kind of person for it to be successful. Most developers are passive aggressive sociopaths and this makes 'pairing' with them painful at best.
You usually end up with a few situations…
A senior dev pairing with a junior dev. This can work ok, as long as the senior dev gets a break every few days to pair with someone who needs less coaching etc. Progress is not usually fast though. If you need to bring someone up to speed on a team this is an awesome way to do it.
2 junior devs pairing together – oh no. Hope you have a good source control system.
2 senior devs pairing together – best results in terms of productivity, however if the work is straightforward then the navigator is usually bored. Ping pong helps… but not much. If the work is not straightforward then it is difficult to get in 'the zone' having to constantly explain what you are thinking. You also get people pulling in opposite directions a lot on complex problems.
Having paired with quite a lot of people in my time as a developer, I can honestly say I have enjoyed pairing with less than 5 people. The common characteristics of the people I enjoyed working with were: laid back, honest, sense of humour, humility, high technical ability. I posses none of those attributes. HAHA.
Just because someone is in the 'zone' does not necessarily mean the code they are writing is any good.
From a business perspective it probably means the code is built on a whole lot of assumptions that really should be challenged ( a pair is useful for this)
From a technical perspective it probably means the code is very obvious and understandable to the person writing it, but probably not so obvious to any one else. Being regularly challenged by a pair would have probably sorted this out.
To me, any process that stops people this kind of crap code is a good thing.
As a Project Manager I've always found pairing interesting. I don't mean that it shouldn't happen but that there do appear to be some issues that arise. Yes it reduces the risk of 'crap' code and it is therefore a good thing. But shouldn't we be concerned if there is (anecdotal at least) evidence to suggest that it has the potential to make people unhappy. From what I understand of John's post he is seeking ways to reduce the risk of unhappiness not reduce the prevalence of pairing.
In my 1-2-1s with team members I've had people talking about punching other people, hating other people and general grumpiness about those people that developers are pairing with (and this doesn't usually centre around their level of aptitude more their personality – though when it comes to aptitude the grumbling can be, it seems equally vicious). When the challenges to a pair are so agressive it is no surprise that people are unhappy. I've struggled to find a solution to this – I can't pass on 2nd-hand information so I try to help people to give feedback in a reasonably healthy way.
I've been doing a lot of research recently on enabling people to fulfil their potential for happiness (particularly at work) and I read a lot about the benefits of effective feedback. One way to help this might be training, but that seems to be something that people forget quite quickly.
How is it possible to maintain the kind of open discussions during the life of a project that would help people to discover their inner EQ and to have more effective conversations about how they are feeling during pairing?
I have previously advised people to tell others when their feelings have been hurt – this has certainly helped me to move relationships to a higher level but this can't be all that there is to it…
Beware the next team that I work with because I am hoping to instigate meditation sessions – which have been studied and seem to help people to be more effective in their relationships. Furthermore they do something similar at Google – so it must be a good idea!
Any other ideas to free the flow would be gratefully received!
One other thing that you haven't considered is that pair programming helps people to avoid wasting time checking email, feed readers, slashdot etc. I believe that this factor alone makes it more productive than isolated programming.
I like what Mark said. I know we all want to be in the zone, but I would like to see some evidence that the zone is more than just desirable, but is actually effective. Unless someone else can tell me that my zone time produced something impressive I am hesitant to give a unilateral judgement that it was a superproductive coding fest.
But I may be a bit of a freak. I have actually enjoyed the vast majority of my pairing experiences. There have certainly been some frictional experiences, but they were a minority. That doesn't mean there aren't alot of ex-pairs of mine who were put off the idea because I was a lousy pair
Nice Post. Genuinely it will support good deal of individuals.


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There is a major omission from the map that accompanied the article on potential contamination risks from sunken nuclear submarines (This Week, 12 March): the wreck of a Soviet nuclear hunter-killer lying 70 miles southwest of Land's End.
The vessel, a unit of the first class of Soviet atomic subs, code named November by NATO, sank on 13 April 1970, apparently breaking up - a pattern characteristic of hull failures in Russian submarines - and its wreck has lain on the seabed ever since.
For some years, the Red Navy maintained a Don-class submarine support ship on station over the location of the sinking. Whether this was to monitor contamination, deter NATO salvage efforts, or carry out salvage work of their own, is not entirely clear.
In addition to its reactor, the boat would have probably carried torpedoes with nuclear warheads, totalling about 20 per cent of its complement of ...
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Worldwide Remittance Flows To Developing CountriesEconomic conditions and policy Migrant workers Remittances from expatriate and migrant workers Trackbacks (0)
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has issued a new report on remittances, money sent by migrant workers back to their home countries. According to Sending Money Home: Worldwide Remittance Flows to Developing Countries (pdf, 18.1 MB), an estimated 150 million migrants worldwide sent more than US$300 billion to their families in developing countries during 2006, typically US$100, US$200 or US$300 at a time, through more than 1.5 billion separate financial transactions. You may learn more from the IFAD press release, UN news story, or from the information related to the 2007 International Forum on Remittances.
Permanent Link: Sending money home UN Pulse


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Illustration: Spectacular new book by French illustrator Marion Fayolle
It hardly comes as a surprise that we're posting about this book; after all it's Marion Fayolle, one of our favourite French illustrators, and her new title has been lovingly published by NoBrow. What's not to like? Anyway, this truly is something special – most spreads are made up of one-page, two-part panel-less stories of couples dancing, swinging, hunting, being in love and sculpting. A lot of the time the stories end in a sweet sadness that you can totally relate to, but can't quite tell why.
Funny, sexy, touching and in parts rather philosophical, this sweet tome is rounded off nicely with a foreword by Comica director Paul Gravett, and is an absolute joy to get lost in.


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This profile for Robert Didonato MD is located in Fort Myers, FL. Robert Didonato MD industry is listed as Medical Doctor's Office.
Robert Didonato serves as the Medical Doctor and has interests in other corporate entities including Advanced Medicine, Inc. located in Fort Myers, FL
Key roles for Robert Didonato MD
Robert A. Didonato
Medical Doctor, Principal
Comprehensive Insight Plus Report
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|The D&B Comprehensive Insight Plus Report for Robert Didonato MD combines D&B's proprietary statistical scoring with business, payment and financial information all in one report.
US Company Profile Report
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|The D&B U.S. Company Profile contains basic information such as address and telephone number, executive names and titles, line of business and SIC codes, D-U-N-S Numbers, organization status, and year and location of incorporation for Robert Didonato MD.


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If you are in danger call 911.
Or reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline
at 1-800-799-7233 or TTY 1-800-787-3224.
review these safety tips.
Only 88 days before the start of DVAM 2015...
Join us in Sugar Land Town Center during the Giving Spirits Concert Series featuring the award-winning Zip Dagger Band. We will have resource tables, awareness materials and displays available. A candlelight vigil will be held at the closing of the concert. Help us spread awareness concerning domestic violence and dating abuse. Let's raise our voices and end the silence on violence!
The Bark Against Violence is sponsored by the Alice Paul House, Indiana County's Victim Service Center, and the Indiana County Humane Society. The Bark Against Violence will open with a presentation from Indiana County's District Attorney who works diligently to put and end to domestic violence. A survivor of domestic violence will also discuss her own experiences and how difficult it was to leave her dog to escape abuse.
In recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Casa de Esperanza is sponsoring a Zumbathon Event for community members to come together, join the party, and take a stand against domestic violence. This event will include 90 minutes of Zumba offered by certified instructors, as well as a 30-minute presentation on domestic violence awareness and healthy communities. It is a free event, but optional donations of household and/or personal items for families staying at the shelter are accepted.
Join Community Voices For Peace & Power, an evening of survivor testimony, performance and art against domestic violence, on October 17 from 6:30pm-9:00pm. This free event will include speakers, dance, poetry, and song by survivors, youth, and community members, "Clothesline Project" T-shirt display, "Time of Remembrance" for victims lost in 2014, as well as resources and refreshments.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Domestic violence doesn't discriminate. It can happen to you, to your parent or child, sibling or friend. Temple Beth David Sisterhood invites you to examine this important issue with guest speaker, Stephanie Domurat from Human Options, an Orange County, CA-based agency that provides safe haven and life changing programs to help abused women, their children and families rebuild their lives – and works with the community to break the cycle of domestic violence.
Local survivor of domestic violence, Rebecca Leo, will be talking about how she survived extreme abuse and reading passages from her recently published memoir-based novel, The Flaws That Bind. The book takes place largely in Jamaica, West Indies. She will then answer questions and monitor a discussion about combatting and preventing these insidious crimes. Signed copies of her book will be available for purchase. A portion of proceeds are donated to local women's resource centers.
Don't miss this unique awareness event at our new location (Joliet Area Historical Museum, Rooftop) to kickoff Domestic Violence Awareness Month! The event is free and open to the public and will include vigil gathering, guest speaker, survivor stories, and more.
Join us to honor the memories of loved ones lost to domestic violence and to raise awareness of efforts to end violence and assist victims and survivors on St. Croix. Wear purple or a t-shirt with artwork dedicated to your loved one. We will walk the streets of Frederiksted in silence to rally together at the waterfront. Call the Women's Coalition of St. Croix at (340)773-9272 for more information.
This event will take place at the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in Lansing. Partners include: MSU Safe Place, Capital Area Response Effort, Lansing Police Department, EVE, and the Women's Center of Greater Lansing.
The Metropolitan Dallas Alumnae Chaper of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. and The Theta Alpha Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc. presents "Get Out" Impact Day 2014 Conference focused on domestic violence. The event will have 4 adult classes, one men's only class, and one youth focused class for teens 13-17.
The topics to be discussed will be:
© 2012 National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. | SITEMAP
The Domestic Violence Awareness Project is coordinated by the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence - 3605 Vartan Way, Suite 101 Harrisburg, PA 17110; 1-800-537-2238. This Web site is funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Family and Youth Services Bureau. Neither the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse this Web site (including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided).


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Caulfield Guineas Day News
Chivalry Set for 2014 Caulfield Guineas
A notable performer in two-year-old events over the 2014 Sydney Autumn Carnival, trainer Mark Kavanagh has revealed Chivalry will be geared towards the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas (1600m) on October 11th.
Unlucky to finish second to I …
Moroney Eyeing 2014 Caulfield Guineas for Merion
Trainer Mike Moroney is confident rising three-year-old Merion will figure as a legitimate 2014 Group 1 Caulfield Guineas (1600m) contender come October 11th after impressing over his two debut race starts so far.
While yet to line up against the majority of likely opponents for the 2014 Caulfield Guineas, Moroney said he believes Merion has displayed the ideal form-line …
Meursault to Target 2014 Caulfield Guineas
Racing Manager for Darley Australia, Jason Walsh has revealed exciting two-year-old Meursault will target the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas (1600m) during the 2014 Spring Racing Carnival.
Contesting four barrier trials prior to his only appearance on course to date; a resounding …
2013 Caulfield Guineas Results – Long John Digs Deep To Hold-Off Divine Calling
Exciting gelding Long John held-off Gai Waterhouse-trained Divine Calling and the unlucky Shamus Award to win the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas (1600m) at Caulfield this afternoon.
Long John was ridden just off the pace by Kerrin McEvoy and got off the fence with 350 metres left …
2013 Caulfield Guineas Day Results
With three Group 1 events on the 10 race card, 2013 Caulfield Guineas Day features high-quality racing and is the first day of the annual three day Caulfield Spring Carnival.
Notable winners today included Atlantic Jewel in the Group 1 Caulfield Stakes, Solzhenitsyn claiming …
Caulfield Guineas 2013 Betting Tips
Today, Saturday October 12, will see a bumper three-Group 1 race program run at Caulfield Racecourse, the namesake race of the meeting being the three-year-olds' 2013 Caulfield Guineas.
Running as the last on a bumper 10-race program, this year's $1 million Group 1 …
Vasil Confident Prince Harada Can Claim 2013 Caulfield Guineas
Trainer Tony Vasil is confident that Prince Harada is more than capable of winning the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas at Caulfield Racecourse tomorrow October 12, 2013.
"This colt has loads of potential," said Vasil.
Prince Harada has won two of his four race …
2013 Caulfield Guineas Odds – Long John Leads Betting
Betting odds have been announced for the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas, which is scheduled to run at Caulfield Racecourse this Saturday October 12, 2013.
Current favourite to win the 2013 Caulfield Guineas is Long John, who is paying odds of $8 at Ladbrokes.com.au thanks to their Double The Odds promotion.
Long John has won four of his six …
Final Field & Barrier Draw – 2013 Caulfield Guineas
The final field and barrier draw has been released for the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas, which will take place at Caulfield Racecourse this Saturday October 8, 2013.
A total of 14 three-year-olds have accepted for the 2013 Caulfield Guineas, including Prince Harada.
46 Second Acceptances Received For 2013 Caulfield Guineas
Second acceptances have been taken for the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas, which will run at Caulfield Racecourse on Saturday October 12, 2013.
A total of 46 horses remain in the running for a 2013 Caulfield Guineas start, including Zoustar.
Zoustar …


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Find a Doctor - Provider Profile
Brock S. Cummings, MD
|Specialty: Surgery, Orthopedic
Enloe Total Joint Replacement Program
251 Cohasset Road, Suite 130A
Chico, CA 95926
Phone: (530) 332-6045
Fax: (530) 893-6980
View Map | Driving Directions
Gender: M
Board Certification
|Certifying Board: American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery
|Certification: Orthopaedic Surgery
Education and Training
|Loma Linda University, School of Medicine (CA)
|Loma Linda University Medical Center (CA)
Language Spoken
The information provided here is regularly updated. However, some information may have changed. Please call the doctor's office to determine availability or that your insurance is accepted. To ensure coverage, remember to follow your health plan's policies and procedures. Doctors on our Medical Staff are independent licensed practitioners not employed by the medical center.
Learn more about the expansion project at Enloe Medical Center.
Medical Care
Enloe Medical Center works together with doctors on the Enloe Medical Staff to bring the most comprehensive health care to our area.
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Call our doctor referral line at 1-877-ENLOE-MD for a referral from one of our customer service advisors.
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If you are a doctor on Enloe's Medical Staff and need to update your information or want to be added to this online directory, please contact Enloe's Medical Staff Office for assistance.


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jury in a sentence
Example sentences for jury
The heavily nuanced legal flap surrounded instructions a federal judge had given to the jury.
Serving on a criminal jury exposes one to unpleasant realities about the legal system and human nature.
Jury selection in the trial is expected to continue all week.
Most of those notions proved false or impractical, and the jury is still out on the rest.
In an effort to avoid prison, defendants have increasingly demanded jury trials.
The jury may be out on whether you can teach old dogs new tricks.
When you review some of these wrongful conviction cases, it's clear that the jury did not do its job.
The jury will consider each entry on its own merits and is empowered to grant as many awards as the submissions justify.
Criminal defendants rarely face jury trials, because they have.
Jury trials over accounting matters are unpredictable, given their technical nature and jurors' limited expertise.
Humanity, and the verdict rendered by the jury of intellectuals.
The jury is out on the balance of benefit and harm from testing for dementia that results from an incurable disease.
However, until there is more concrete scientific research, the jury is still out.
Attorney's office says it can not comment on an open grand jury investigation.
But it proved impossible to distract the jury from what was said in those calls.
In short, the jury is still out on the question of whether organic foods are more nutritious.
Even some winners would be on the hook, if the jury award is much less than they had previously been offered in a settlement.
It can strengthen a jury decision or question the reliability of a contrasting jury decision.
He is determined to abolish the right of some defendants to opt for a trial by jury.
In science, the jury is never finished deliberating but a consensus, nonetheless can be reached.
These remarks alone would probably have sufficed to prejudice a jury against the defendants.
The jury is still out on whether these marine mammals also endure hot flashes.
He might also have celebrated the jury deadlocking on two charges of attempted extortion.
He added that jury instructions were confusing altogether.
In the other, the shooter was prosecuted, but the jury found him not guilty.
In the case of physics the jury is still out as there isn't enough evidence for physics to form a consensus yet.
The jury did not believe him, but was in doubt as to his real target and how many were involved.
There is no jury system, and judicial precedent is generally considered to be binding.
The investigation had lasted only a few weeks and was never put before a grand jury-or reported in the newspapers.
Seven were convicted by an all-white jury, eight were acquitted and three were released after jurors deadlocked.
The appellate court held that a jury might find otherwise.
The grand jury indictment is graphic and troubling in its scope and detail.
He puts the needful facts before the jury, and then rests his case.
The proper jury to render the verdict would be one of poets.
Other folklore about jury selection soon came my way.
Past that, he told the jury, he did not give a fig about the facts in this case.
In many borderline cases involving financial fraud, the crime ultimately lies in the eye of a beholding jury or judge.
The jury found the two arson defendants guilty, but the judge handed down lenient sentences.
Many felt that if he had admitted the affair, the jury might have believed the rest of his story.
The jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty.
He was indicted on federal charges not long after the killings, but he benefitted at trial from a deadlocked jury.
His example was how the average joe rises to the occasion of jury duty.
But the cost of defense is high, and when doctors lose, the average jury verdict is half a million dollars.
The scene is informed by the do-it-yourself ethic of punk rock and hacker culture, and many artists rely on jury-rigged gadgets.
The jury's always out on the commercial viability of any new technology, before its developers' claims can be accepted.
Except the jury-with a clever marketing strategy-has been rigged.
Earlier, to a grand jury, he reportedly said that upon seeing the incident he left the building and called his father.
One of the conspirators, called before a grand jury, informed others that he would have to tell the truth.
No criminal charges have been filed, but the district is scrambling to respond to two sweeping grand jury subpoenas.
But the jury-rigged look restores some of the glamour lost through familiarity.
Jury duty is bad enough, but imagine not being able to check your phone or e-mail to help relieve the boredom.
As evolutionary theory evolved, however, the system had to be jury-rigged.
The jury's decision reflects a profound shift in the way our culture views people who are excessively overweight.
And he thinks that natural selection could well have jury-rigged those preexisting structures to perform some new functions.
The jury is still out on the fate of the blue whale.
The jury is still out on this in our own solar system.
Other trial highlights were few and far between, and even certain jury members struggled to pay attention.
The jury was to focus on the intentions of the company, not on the tonnage-based theory of the plaintiff.
Sometimes, possibly quite often, they acted as judge and jury in the quarters.
Click on this link to get answers to frequently asked questions about jury service.
Famous quotes containing the word jury
Of all my prosecutors ... not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted... more
I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal ... more
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis ... more
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Synonyms for jury
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If everything goes according to plan, the Toronto Zoo's three aging African elephants – Toka, Thika, and Iringa – will board a massive cargo plane on or around August 3, an Antonov An-124, designed to carry a locomotive or a whale, destined for a Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) sanctuary in sunny California, and retirement. The journey will cost over $600,000, and legendary former game show host Bob Barker is footing the bill.
The fate of Toka, Thika, and Iringa has been the focus of much debate: at the Toronto Zoo, at Toronto City Hall, and in San Andreas, California, their potential new home. You're probably wondering, "How did we get here?" Lucky for you, Agenda producer Meredith Martin has got you covered. She wrote a four-part blog post series exploring why the three elephants are still at the Toronto Zoo, why Toronto City Council got involved, and why it's taken far too long to decide where the three elephants will eventually end up. Read on for excerpts from, and links to, each post.
Update: Previously, we'd written that Toronto's three elephants were headed for retirement in Galt, California. PAWS is headquartered in Galt, California, and the elephants are headed to PAWS' San Andreas, California location. We've made the correction.
Part I: Why are the Elephants Still at the Toronto Zoo?
The casino that may or may not be coming to Toronto is going to be the focus of much debate at City Hall over the next few months. As it should; it's a big decision that will affect the city's budget and landscape for years to come.
The state of Toronto's finances was a major concern for the better part of last year, and then suddenly, at the end of April, we found out we were going to have a budget surplus in the hundreds of millions. Surprise!
However, when Toronto City Council voted to send the Toronto Zoo's three aging elephants to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in Galt, California, way back in October, it was still recovering from 24-hour budget negotiations to slash spending; absolutely everything was on the block. So, when Councillor Michelle Berardinetti (Ward 35, Scarborough Southwest) presented Council, in a suprise motion, the option of getting the elephants off the books as soon as possible, it was a shrewd move. The annual maintenance cost of the elephants is $618,533, and the sooner they go, the sooner the Toronto Zoo, and the city, stops paying for them. The motion passed easily (31-4). And, yet, it's now June, some eight months after the motion passed, and the three elephants – Toka, Thika, and Iringa – still call Toronto home. This blog post attempts to answer my favourite questions of all time: Why?
Before we get there, though, there are some things you should know about elephants, so you can truly understand the conflict. (And I think it's safe to say that what has happened at the zoo over the moving of the elephants to the PAWS sanctuary is a conflict.) ...
Read the rest of part one.
Part II: Elephants as Political Football
As we all know, winters in Toronto are nothing like they are in Africa (this past winter excluded), and while the outdoor space for Toronto's three aging African elephants is adequate, the indoor space leaves much to be desired. After going through the infrastructure review, and examining the costs of updating the elephant exhibit, it was decided that the Toronto Zoo could no longer adequately house the elephants without sinking many millions of dollars into a new facility -- money the zoo just doesn't have.
In May 2011, the zoo administration consulted Toronto's Zoo Board of Management, and it was announced the exhibit would be closed as soon as a new and appropriate home for the elephants could be found.
Although the zoo has decommissioned exhibits before, it has never closed one this size. The next task was for the zoo administration to come up with a list of possible sites that would be appropriate for the three "ladies," as they are oft referred, to be sent to. But they never got that far. On October 24, 2011, Toronto City Councillor Michelle Berardinetti put forward a surprise motion, seconded by Councillor Raymond Cho (Ward 42, Scarborough-Rouge River), proposing that city council vote that the elephants be sent to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), in Galt, California. And when council handily passed the motion, it did something it had never done before: It took a decision out of the hands of the trained professionals at the Toronto Zoo and the Toronto Zoo's Board of Management, and made it a political one. And this is why the decommissioning of the elephant exhibit and the relocation of the "three ladies" has become so contentious.
This is also where things get pretty complicated. ...
Read the rest of part two.
Part III: Elephant Philosophy
The Association of Zoos and Aquariums, or the AZA as it's otherwise known, is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to "the advancement of zoos and aquariums in the areas of conservation, education, science, and recreation." In order to become accredited with the AZA, a zoo or aquarium must go through a lengthy and vigorous screening process. Fewer than 10 per cent of the approximately 2,400 animal exhibitors licensed by the United States Department of Agriculture are AZA accredited. The AZA is aiming to be the gold standard by which one can judge a zoo. Two examples of AZA accredited exhibits include the San Diego Zoo, one of the most famous zoos in the world, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. However, the Toronto Zoo is not accredited by the AZA. That's because it lost its accreditation earlier this year, over concerns about its governance. When Toronto City Council determined what should happen to the zoo's elephants, instead of the professionals at the zoo who are hired for their expertise to make these decisions, the AZA lost confidence in the Toronto Zoo to run its affairs in keeping with the AZA's best practices.
But it's not just a question of how the decision was made: AZA also sees animal welfare differently than the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), the California sanctuary where Toronto City Council has voted to send the elephants.
PAWS began advocating to move the Toronto Zoo elephants to its facility through Zoocheck Canada, an animal welfare advocacy group, back in 2009. Former American television show host Bob Barker, apparently a big supporter of PAWS, who also has a long history ofadvocating for the spaying and neutering of household pets, even offered to foot the bill for transporting the elephants to the sanctuary at considerable personal expense.
PAWS wildlife sanctuaries are defined on their website as: ...
Read the rest of part three.
Part IV: Elephants in Limbo
Under normal circumstances, board members of the Toronto Zoo, advised by the zoo's management, and not Toronto City Council, would decide the fate of Toka, Thika, and Iringa.
So why did Councillor Michelle Berardinetti put forward a last-minute motion to send the elephants to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) sanctuary in California?
I spoke to Councillor Berardinetti at some length, and what I took from the conversation is that she felt that the staff at Toronto Zoo were dragging their feet in finding a place for the elephants to go. I also spoke to Councillor Raymond Cho, who sits on the zoo's board, and who is a councillor in Scarborough, where the zoo is located, and he corroborated that story. The zoo was simply taking too long to come come up with a potential list of viable locations to transfer the elephants to, so council stepped in.
So, in some respects, this is an argument about due process, and what is and what isn't a reasonable amount of time for a decision to be made. In May 2011, it was announced that the elephants needed a new home, and in October of the same year, Councillor Berardinetti felt that enough time had passed and it was her job to take action. Does five months to find an appropriate home for three, aging African elephants seem like an onerously long time to you?
And, here we are, it's June 2012, and the elephants are still very much living at the Toronto Zoo. Why? ...
Read the rest of part four.
Image credits: Concerned Elephant Keepers, and the National Post.


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Vintage Treasures Vignette
Create a focal point, such as the rustic mirror in this fireplace mantel display, to pull a group of objects together.
"The worn patina of the mirror brings an element of history to this grouping," Richards explains. "If you don't have space for large items, creating a still life or vignette of finds can bring a stylish reclaimed element to even the most conservative space."
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