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Below is the poem entitled Hounds Tooth which was written by poet
Hudson. Please feel free to comment on this poem. However, please remember, PoetrySoup is a place of encouragement and growth.
Read Poems by
Sandra Hudson
Out of her hounds tooth, slanderous slobber
Utilizing her foot paws, she toenails the ice
Transcending into the deep, would surely silence her
Save her chattering mouth tick, accompanied by cracks
Imagining each step twice, she cautions
Daring looks backward for telling traces of breakage
Evil had yet seen what lurks beneath
Reels she, with pitch and rotation falls full
Slipping into the creature's fang, she rolls
Unnerved, she hears the crunch of her rule, changing hands
Matching her closed mouth to the pain
Morph-inflicted through another,
Oscillating she disappears immeasurably
Near death returns to the belly
If consequences denounced, are affirmed
Naked will, is gliding through the torrential waves
Grub-Broken spirit, is no longer her concern
Terse, having but one breath to gasp
Once tender morsels are regurgitated
Reminders of a coward's prayer
Trip, fall silent amidst the internal hate
Usurped they press forward, amongst forgotten names
Rusty pieces dance between the guiles of myth
Repositioning, once again
Swallowed up by impregnated blame
Twice In shadows, neath a flowing stream
Obtuse this float, the entrails, tail and claw
Gather near the bend of endless screams
Evening tide the beast is but the devils dream
There is not, in truth, just here, as all there is
Heartfelt vile sup-positioning in formal fashion
Encased in hollow howls of woe and misery
Re-envisions untold atrocities here on planet passion
Total Fiction
Submitted for consideration in Deborah Guzzi's
"Something wicked this way comes" Contest


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subset: commoncrawl


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Good rail-trails mean big business. How big?
Business owners and local officials in Pennsylvania and Maryland discuss exactly what the local rail-trail means to their bottom line.
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Friday, May 9, 2014
In keeping with May being National Bike Month, the Aiken County Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee is sponsoring two education sessions addressing the rights, rules and responsibilities of bicyclists, pedestrians and motor vehicle operators.
The objective is to teach all roadway users how to safely share our South Carolina roads. The first session will be in Aiken at Odell Weeks on Saturday, May 10. Participants can drop in any time between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
Another session will be held in North Augusta on May 18 at the North Augusta Activity Center. Participants can drop in any time between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
Weather permitting these sessions will be held outdoors and moved to inside facilities as necessary.
Odell Weeks celebrates National Bike Month
The North Augusta Star is pleased to offer readers the enhanced ability to comment on stories. We expect our readers to engage in lively, yet civil discourse. We do not edit user submitted statements and we cannot promise that readers will not occasionally find offensive or inaccurate comments posted in the comments area. Responsibility for the statements posted lies with the person submitting the comment, not The North Augusta Star.
If you find a comment that is objectionable, please click "report abuse" and we will review it for possible removal. Please be reminded, however, that in accordance with our Terms of Use and federal law, we are under no obligation to remove any third party comments posted on our website. Read our full terms and conditions.
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Top-notch talent is critical for any business. For a growing company, universities are the perfect place to hunt for the most ambitious and passionate entry-level employees.
For my company, developing a relationship with the University of Missouri made perfect sense. It has one of the best journalism schools in the country and makes an effort to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in its students. Professors are looking for real-world opportunities for their students, and offering that experience through our internship program gives us access to top journalism students. All it took was contacting a few professors, speaking in classes, and finding ways we could provide value to the university.
Teaming up with students helps them shape their futures and gives your business a fresh outlook. Here are a few reasons forming a relationship with a local university makes sense:


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Time For Reflection
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Dana Holgorsen will be the first to admit that his internal compass is always pointing north, West Virginia's new head football coach rarely pausing for reflection. But Holgorsen managed to do just that one serene afternoon last week during a rare fishing trip with some buddies.
"It was very calm; there were no houses, there was no traffic, no motorboats," Holgorsen said last Friday afternoon. "There was just a lot of peaceful time to the point where I could reflect on what's going on and understand the situation that changed last Friday."
What changed for Holgorsen is that the mood of the entire state now rests in his hands each Saturday afternoon this fall. If his football team performs well and scores a lot of points then everybody will be happy – something Holgorsen fully understands.
"I've been preparing for this for some time," he said. "I've worked with some good people – Mike Leach and Kevin Sumlin – who are very, very dear friends of mine that you take specific things from.
"Seven months ago when I sat here I knew what was ahead of me and I felt very good about it due to the fact that I have a tremendous amount of trust in Oliver (Luck) and have a tremendous amount of trust in Dr. Clements," Holgorsen said. "We just expedited the process, and I gathered my thoughts and hit the ground running a couple of days ago."
Holgorsen held his first team meeting last Tuesday morning, and then after jumping out of an airplane (landing safely if not a little roughly) later that afternoon, he presided over his first staff meeting on Friday morning.
"We had a good meeting," he said.
If Holgorsen's master plan for WVU football seemed a little vague a week ago before he was named the school's 33rd head football coach, he says that was by design. His job was to run the offense and score points, not undermine the guy in charge. Now circumstances have obviously changed. Holgorsen says one of his biggest objectives right now is getting to know the defensive coaches that he inherited much, much better.
"(Getting to know them) wasn't my job prior to a week ago," he said. "My job (was to run the offense). The other day we had all of the offensive guys and all of the defensive guys and I knew all of (the offensive guys)," Holgorsen said. "I knew them by name. I met with them. I got their cell number. I know who they are; where they're from and all that, and my job now is to do the same thing with this group (defensive players)."
Holgorsen understands that he has to have a staff full of people pulling their oars in the same direction. All three engines (offense, defense and special teams) have to be running at the same speed.
"I interacted with some of (the defensive coaches) and I've got a good relationship with some, but I've got to get to know them all," he said. "I've got to know who they are, what makes them tick, where they're from and do a better job with that. That doesn't change a thing from a schematic point. That's Coach (Jeff) Casteel's job. How Kirlav (assistant coach Bill Kirelawich) interacts with his guys in the (team meeting room), that's not going to change. That's his job. But as head coach you've got to get to know your guys and make sure you know what makes them tick."
Tactically and schematically Holgorsen believes the staff he has in place, from the guys he brought in to the guys that were already here, is second to none.
"I think every player on this team has a good position coach," he said. "We have a good scheme on offense. We have a good scheme on defense. Our special teams have got specific people in charge of it that are implementing their thoughts and views on it.
"All of those schemes and all of those coaches are fine. Our strength staff does a good job. That's not going to change," Holgorsen said. "Coach (Mike) Joseph and the guys working under him do a good job and they're on track. Coach (Dave) Kerns and the athletic trainers - that's not going to change."
Holgorsen said his staff will work hard to get things done, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will be in the office 24 hours a day.
"I work a lot but that doesn't mean I'm at the office a lot," he said. "The job follows you home. If you go on vacation that cell phone is still going to ring. I wouldn't be doing the football program justice and I wouldn't be doing the University justice, or the state justice, if I wasn't answering my phone calls even if I was taking a long weekend or a five-day vacation."
Holgorsen believes there comes a point when a staff can get worn down if their head coach is constantly grinding them.
"Some people get away with it (working excessive hours). I could do that if I wanted but I've got 20 other people that work for me and I'd be wearing them out as well," he explained. "You don't want those guys worn out. You want them fired up and ready to roll."
Holgorsen said all of the coaches he worked for had a similar philosophy.
"I've worked for guys starting with Hal Mumme who you work and when you're done you go home," he said. "Bob Stoops is like that and Mike Leach worked for him and then came to Tech. Kevin Sumlin worked for him and then went to Houston. Mike Gundy is a family guy and likes to go home. Everybody that I've worked for are guys that do it like that.
"If you know what you're doing and you've got confidence in what you're doing and you go in and you work 8-10-12 hours then you can get it done. If it takes 14-16-18 hours then you better stay."
And then when the work gets done, if you want to stick your fishing pole into the water or even cast your line into the trees every now and again so be it, says Holgorsen.
"I'm not a good fisherman, now," he laughed. "This is supposed to be the best small-mouth bass fishing in possibly the United States and I caught like three, and I was out there for like eight hours."
That's OK, coach. Just keep us happy on Saturdays this fall.
Follow John Antonik on Twitter: @JohnAntonik
Dana Holgorsen, West Virginia University, Mountaineer football
Big 12 Media Days: Dave Wannstedt
Big 12 Media Days: Karl Joseph
Men's Basketball: Bahamas Preview
Womens Soccer: Kadeisha Buchanan Press Conference
Big 12 Media Days: Dana Holgorsen
Women's Soccer: Amanda Hill and Mocha


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See all Villa de Leiva hostels
Hostal Campestre El Pozzo
Hostel | carrera 12 con calle 4 esquina, Via a Santa Sofia, Villa de Leiva, Colombia n/a
- Car Parking
- Internet / Wi-Fi
- Pool table(s)
- Restaurant
- Tours/Travel Desk
- Late check-out
- Wake-up calls
- BBQ area
- Café
- Common area / room
- Communal kitchen
- Internet access in public areas
- Outside area
- Television room
What's Included
- Luggage Room
- Breakfast
- Linen
- Towel
Cancellation Policy
Customers can cancel their reservation free of charge up to 2 days before arrival (local time). Payments made to HostelBookers are non-refundable.
Check-In/Out Details
Earliest check-in: 15:00
Latest Check-out: 14:00
Group booking?
Group of 15 or more traveling to Villa de Leiva?Contact us directly
We are a country hostel located 10 minutes from the historic area of ??Villa de Leyva, we have 11 rooms, large green areas, games room with pool table and ping pong, volleyball court, soccer minicancha, lake and gardens Read more
Enter dates to check prices
|Private Rooms A private room is a room that is not shared with other people from the property – in other words, you book and pay for all the beds in the room. If you are traveling alone, for example, but want to book a double room, you must pay for two people in order to book the whole room.
Double Garden View (Private bathroom)American breakfast included
About Hostal Campestre El Pozzo
Hostel setting with personal attention, ensuring that our guests have a pleasant stay. We are in the rural area which facilitates relaxation and tranquility, but not far from the historical or tourist interest sites for our visitors
Accommodation Information
We have 11 rooms: 6 doubles, 3 triples, 1 quad and 1 quintuple, we can accommodate 30 people maximum
Location Information
We are located 10 minutes walk from the historical center of Villa de Leyva, via Santa Sofia.
See all Villa de Leiva hostels
Other languages
- Deutsch: Hostal Campestre El Pozzo
- Español: Hostal Campestre El Pozzo
- Français: Hostal Campestre El Pozzo
- Italiano: Hostal Campestre El Pozzo
- Português: Hostal Campestre El Pozzo


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Good evening, NXT fans! This week's episode is a fun one, so let's cut the crap and get right to it! If you haven't seen the show yet, check out the video below and join the rest of us for the semi-witty commentary afterwards.
See? That was one jam-packed episode, chock full of momentum. To recap, everything revolved around the beat-the-clock challenge to determine Bo Dallas's next opponent, which resulted in a series of quick matches featuring Big Cazz, Alexander Rusev, Tyler Breeze, Kassius Ohno, Adrian Neville, Aiden English, Sami Zane and Leo Kruger. In addition to that, Hunico and Camacho returned to NXT, squashed some jobbers and set themselves up to be the next challengers for the NXT tag titles. We also got some good promos and the debuts of some new interviewer-type people. There's a lot to talk about, starting with….
Your main event returning with some stank on it:
I think the NXT creative people are addressing that issue I talked about a few weeks back, where they've got too many talented wrestlers and not enough slots to use them in, by just…not heavily featuring certain people every taping. It's sort of brilliant, really. Well, I might be giving them too much credit, and maybe they're just reacting to a recent set of injuries, but I'll be damned if keeping Bo Dallas and Sami Zayn away from each other for an entire month hasn't kept their feud just as hot as it's ever been.
Tonight's opening bit was another of Bo's goober showcases, wherein he finds a lot of humor in just how much of a lame-O cheeseball he can be. I don't mind when wrestling (or other forms of entertainment) find comedy in villainy, so I was pretty damn entertained. The addition of Sami and JBL to that mix resulted in another "authority figure sets up the direction of the show", which gets done to death because it can work very well, like it did here tonight.
Also, the fact that Dallas screwed up his slideshow was hilariously appropriate.
Get better soon, you spastic, meathead prince, you:
Did anyone else notice how quickly the Full Sail crowd went from wild excitement to "meh" when Big Cazz came out and they realized Enzo Amore wasn't there with him? Yeah…it's kind of a sad story. It was mentioned tonight on commentary that Enzo is injured and that is indeed the case. I found out about it a couple weeks back but haven't really found the right place to mention it. Dude broke his leg or something. And it just plain sucks.
Luckily, if this picture is indicative of anything, Enzo hasn't let a little thing like a broken leg slow down his rampaging charisma.
Get well soon you buffoon of buffoons. We'll keep the light on for ya.
You wanna know why I really dislike when the WWE introduces new heel characters whose sole character trait is "foreign?" Well too bad, I'm gonna tell you anyway. It's because those characters bring out the xenophobic worst in people. This new Russian lady, Lana, is another in a long line of WWE creations that walk out and get booed because they speak a language other than English. It's a pretty shallow reason to make someone a villain, isn't it? That they have a different primary language?
Where this silliness is magnified is when the WWE's good guys then make fun of the foreign villain for being foreign and our inner nastiness gets put on display for us to see and hear. Kassius Ohno, in his now futile attempts to play by the WWE system, is the culprit tonight, mocking a Russian lady for having a Russian accent. A wag of my finger for this being the basis of his short feud with Alexander Rusev. A tip of my hat for there even being a feud in the first place.
Speaking of Kassius Ohno….
Holy crap, did Ohno actually beat Tyler Breeze!?:
I read the spoilers and I still can't believe Kassius beat Breeze tonight! I could have sworn the WWE had Ohno losing multiple times this taping in order to get the most out of him before his untimely exit. Shows what I know. Though that lingering shot of Tyler Breeze's upset face as he left the ring does make me wonder if the vain one will be coming back for some quick revenge. Man, between beating Breeze and ruining Rusev's title aspirations, Kassius Ohno sure is creating a lot of enemies lately.
…oh man….that's so meta. I see what you did there WWE.
A gold star for Bayley, a gold star for Adrian Neville, a participation award for new interviewers:
Tonight featured a thankful return to the traditional backstage interview, the one Renee Young excelled at before she graduated to the greater WWE. Two new backstage interviewers were introduced, one male, one female. You really can't judge them on one week of work, but let's just say that they weren't an instant success. Bayley, on the other hand, turned in an excellent interview, combining the aspects of her personality that make her who she is with enough confrontational elements to further her new feud with Charlotte and the other mean girls.
Adrian Neville also pulled off his best promo to date. If I had to point out one thing he did that really helped him out this time, it would be the slight edge of confidence he had when talking himself up. Dude's an amazing athlete, he's allowed to be a little cocky.
Also, while we're handing out praise and pointing out new people holding microphones, the girl acting a ring announcer tonight is called Alexa Bliss and she had a cameo as the random chick Tyler Breeze talked to that one time. More importantly she was Scott Dawson's partner in a funny promo video that got leaked to the internet. When Dawson comes back from injury, I wouldn't be surprised if slash I hope Alexa suddenly morphs into her "My Name is Earl" inspired character.
Oh yeah, wrestling:
Before I go any more about characters and such, I should probably mention that the wrestling on tonight's show was urgent, exciting and well-done. I know not everyone is a fan of the beat-the-clock concept, but I think it really helped NXT achieve a level of excitement that it sometimes lacks. The meaningful but quick matches worked way more than they didn't and amidst all the lovely chaos Aiden English had his first proper match, something that needed to happen.
Now, Sami Zayn pinning Leo Kruger at exactly the right moment to tie Adrian Neville's time was not what I was expecting to happen, but I like the idea of the two of them having to go one-on-one to earn their #1 contendership. Those little kinks in the storyline are what make things interesting.
Will Sami get another chance to become NXT champion? Will the Authority let him? We'll have to tune in and find out.
What did you guys think of the show? Are you glad the Ascension finally have a real tag team to fight or is this combination of pseudo Mexican's and pseudo Vampires weird and boring? Let us know.
P.S. This was taken during tonight's NXT tapings:
And this video explains how Enzo Amore got a spot on NXT.


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Questions about a utility in Adobe InDesign that can be used to apply a style or template to a subsequent set of pages.
635 views
Indesign running-header character style doesnt work if characters are the number in a list
I have a list [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and in the paragraph style is set that the number [1, 2, 3, 4...] is of character style A. Now I set a variable for the character style A and it doesn't show up the ...
38 views
Inserting page causes master to center\resize
When I insert a page or pagination changes within my book, the headers\footers set in my masters center on the spread. The error does not occur when I insert a page that does not have a text box for ...
26 views
Changing canvas size in fireworks while having a master page set for multiple pages
I am using Adobe Fireworks for a website mockup and set a master page so that each page will have the same header,nav and footer. The problem is that each page is not going to be the same in size ...
604 views
How do I change InDesign CC Automatic Page Number Prefix/Suffix
I started working on a book in InDesign CC 2014 (10.0.0). The designer's original file makes no use of Master pages at all. He somehow placed page numbers in the footer manually. After a few days I ...


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Fits Waistlines Measuring 40-60"
When voids are made into the Abena Abri Form L4 Premium Adult Diapers, standing leakage barriers contain them inside the diaper, while a top dry layer quickly absorbs and wicks fluids triple the distance from the wearer, remaining dry to the touch to prevent overexposure to moisture. To prevent clumping, fluids are distributed evenly throughout the diaper via lengthwise cellulose fibers in the double-absorption core, where they are locked away permanently by Super Absorbent Polymer (SAP) and other highly absorbent materials. Odors are also kept under control by an advanced odor control system, aided by the lack of evaporation from the trapped liquids.
Abena Abri Form L4 Premium Adult Diapers are fully breathable incontinence products designed to let air flow through via a cloth-like material. The skin is cooled to prevent moisture accumulation on the skin, preventing severe drying and the formation of ulcers and other skin maladies. Abena Premium products are essential for proper skin care for persons using incontinence products, especially for their comfort and overall health.


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13 Signs You Might Be a Foochebag
Categories: List Mania!
|Foochebags in the wild.
Foochebag is a portmanteau (which we think means it was smuggled into the English language inside someone's luggage) of the words foodie and douchebag and accurately summarizes the behavior on at least one occasion of everyone who doesn't eat to live, but lives to eat.
Not sure whether you're a foochebag? Follow us after the jump as we (with no apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, whom we hated even before the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and Are You Smarter than an Igneous Rock?) explore some signs that you might be a foochebag.
13. If you use the phrase "I don't eat to live, I live to eat," you might be a foochebag.
|Image from Tiny Bites
11. If the lens of your camera is bigger than the food that you're photographing, you're definitely a foochebag.
10. If you preface your Yelp review with, "Now, I don't normally like...", you might be a foochebag.
- from occasional Gut Check contributor Andrew Veety, via Twitter
9. If you correct others when they pronounce pho with an o at the end rather than "fuh," you might be a foochebag.
8. If you extol the virtues of authentic Oaxacan cuisine but pronounce it "oh-AXE-ah-can," you might be a foochebag, and you're definitely an idiot.
1 | 2 | Next Page >>
Sponsor Content


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Football Betting Sites and Guide
Football is the number one sport for sports betting action in the United States and it's not even close. Last year's Super Bowl generated nearly $120 million worth of handle in Nevada alone. We can't even begin to guess what online bookmakers saw, but you can be sure there's were equally impressive numbers on the internet. And that's just for one game.
Whatever the numbers may be, football betting is big business. Visit any US-facing sports betting site during the NFL or NCAA season and you'll be bombarded with special offers and promotions designed to take advantage of the biggest betting season of the year. If you like to bet on football, you'll never suffer from a lack of options.
Speaking of options, we'd like to make a few recommendations right up front. Below is a list of safe, US-friendly betting sites that go all out on the NFL every year.
The reason we recommend these sites in particular is because they have the best reputations among the many options out there. We could recommend dozens of alternatives, but these have served our readers the best year after year. There's no need to constantly switch it up when our mainstays have been so reliable for so long.
The Newbie's Guide to Football Betting
Once you have a betting site to call home, it's time to get to the fun stuff. If you're already familiar with sports betting, feel free to skip this section. If you're new to the game, definitely take a look at our getting started guide here.
Football is one of the most straightforward sports when it comes to betting. Unlike some of the other sports out there, football doesn't have unique or odd types of wagers. Bookmakers almost always stick with the basic types of wagers.
However, some books do offer more advanced wagers such as teasers and pleasures. These aren't as common, but they are nice to play around with if you ever feel like switching it up from your normal routine. Here are a few other types of bets that you might see:
Achieving a basic level of familiarity with the most common types of football bets is only the beginning. It's time now to develop the skills you need to do better than the average sports bettor. We have four in-depth strategy articles that we'd like to recommend as a starting point:
- Football betting systems
- Handicapping the market
- Advanced football betting strategy
- Poisson distributions for prop betting
The majority of the advice in this guide applies equally to NFL and NCAA football. The biggest difference between pro and college football is that there's significantly more parity in the NFL. In other words, the skill differences between NFL teams are usually less pronounced than in college games.
The lack of parity in college football makes it easier to spot winners and losers, but bookmakers do take skill differences into account when setting the lines. College football requires a broad depth of knowledge, because there are so many teams, competing coaching philosophies, and so many more factors to consider.
It's generally agreed that NFL handicapping is more difficult, because there are fewer teams, fewer games to track, and more people betting on those games. Oddsmakers follow the NFL closely and know it inside out. Therefore, their lines tend to be pretty spot-on.
In any case, it wouldn't hurt to do your homework before you bet on any particular game. The odds are there are a hundred other people considering betting on the same game. If you can out-study the competition and practice smart bankroll management, you'll be well on your way to outperforming all the other casual bettors out there.
One Simple Trick to Boost Your Earnings
If you have done much research into football betting, you've probably already seen this trick a hundred times. But on the off-chance that you happen to be brand-spanking-new, we have one simple method to boost your win rate:
Open an account at two or three betting sites.
What good does this do? Well, it allows you to go line shopping before placing each bet. Line shopping is the simple practice of getting the best odds possible for any bet you're considering. Let's say, for example, that you want to bet on the Raiders in this weekend's Packers-Raiders game.
So, you head over to BetOnline and see that the Raiders are +180 underdogs. This means that a $100 bet on the Raiders would get you $180 in profits if the Raiders pull off the upset. Instead of stopping there, you decide to see what TopBet and Bovada have for the same game.
TopBet is also showing +180 so there's nothing special there. But then, you get to Bovada and you see that the Raiders are listed at +190. Now there's a nice deal. You could place that same $100 bet with Bovada and get a $190 payout instead of the $180 offered everywhere else. You've just increased your potential by $10 with very little work.
This may not be a huge pay raise percentage-wise, but it's a darn good improvement considering that it only took a minute to check three different betting sites. We're sure you can imagine how that kind of line shopping could make an impact over the course of a full football season.
Unfortunately, that's the only simple trick we know of for improving your results. The other 99% of improvement comes from hard work. Reading strategy articles, studying games, researching statistics, and crunching numbers are all integral to becoming a better bettor.
Getting Paid
You know what's even better than placing a bet on football? Getting paid. As fun as it is to place a bet on a big game and watch it play out on live TV, it's even better to log in to your online banking account and see a nice, juicy deposit to your checking account.
Most online sportsbooks pay their winners via one of three methods:
- Paper check in the mail
- Electronic funds transfer
- Cash transfer
The paper check is the most common payment method for customers based out of the United States. All you have to do is log in to your account, request a check, and wait for it to show up at your front door. We've never had a problem getting a check in the mail, so we wouldn't recommend you worry too much about it getting lost in the mail or anything. The worst case scenario is you tell your sportsbook to cancel your last check and issue a new one.
Electronic funds transfers are super-easy, because the book sends the money straight to your bank account. The only reason this method isn't more popular is because banking laws in the United States make it difficult for online sportsbooks to send money to US customers. However, if this option is available, we recommend you take it. It doesn't get any easier than having money delivered straight to your account.
Cash transfers are especially popular for customers withdrawing less than a thousand dollars. If you don't want to wait for a paper check in the mail, you can have your site send cash to your local cash transfer station. All you have to do is bring your photo ID to the nearest Wal-Mart, head over to the customer service area, and use the WU or MG terminal to claim your cash.
We've used all three methods in the past to get my money and they all worked out well. Paper checks take the longest to process, but they are almost always free and can be sent for fairly large amounts of money. Cash transfers were quite a bit faster and it was kind of cool to walk out with a big wad of cash in our hand.
Our favorite method of them all is (and probably always will be) the electronic funds transfer. These have almost always taken less than a week and were always free. We've received fairly substantial amounts of money via this method and it has always been a simple, efficient process.
As long as you do business with reputable sportsbooks, any of these methods will work fine for you. Legitimate sportsbooks want your business in the future and they do everything they can to make it just as easy to withdraw as it is to deposit. The only thing you need to worry about is making the right betting picks.


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Jewish Art and the Fear of the Image:
The Escape from an Age-Old Inhibition
In addition to scholarship and enthusiasm, Herbert Howarth brings to the study of the long-obscured problem of the relation of the Jewish spirit to pictorial art the perhaps useful personal detachment of a non-Jew.
When interpreted by Gentiles, the commandment "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. . . ." is usually attributed to the Israelites' hatred of the idolatry of neighboring nations, and is construed as "make unto thee no graven image for purposes of worship." But it has been understood by the Jewish people themselves as a prohibition against representation irrespective of its purpose—a kind of general exclusion of delight in art. As a result, in the field of the visual arts Jewish genius suffered a thwarting that was self-imposed, and hence all the more damaging.
In Judaism, no less than in Islam, which imposes a corresponding veto on the image, the strictness of its imposition has varied in various ages. It has depended, to quote Sir Thomas Arnold, "on the influence of the theologians upon the habits and tastes of society at any one particular time." It has equally depended on the surge and ebb of conservative and liberal opinion among theologians. Thus, for example, Rostovtzeff, describing the trend that eventually led to the murals in the synagogues at Dura-Europos in the third century CE, notes: "Some time in the course of the first century AD a group of rabbis tried to substitute a more liberal interpretation of the passage [in the Decalogue], which would permit the adorning of synagogues with pictures illustrating the sacred books of Judaism."
But all in all, the essence of the prohibition was observed in most Jewish communities at most times; and where and when individuals freed themselves of it, they lost touch with their people, worked for aliens, and were left with a rootless art of no real importance. Professor Cecil Roth's delightful Jewish Contributions to Civilization names Jewish artists who accepted commissions from other faiths and worked in the fashions of other people, and their number and achievement are not inconsiderable. Yet, when everything has been said, they remain little known and of little significance either for their own people or for the others. For by and large only artists significant for their own people become so for others.
What is the explanation of the Jewish fear of the image, this fear that was strong enough to inhibit Jewish artists for centuries?
Among the modern rationalizations of the commandment and its power, one or two characteristic examples may be quoted. Adolph Lods in Israel, from its Beginnings to the Middle of the 8th Century (London, 1932), argues that the early Jewish refusal to make images was due to inherent conservatism. Priests and public chose to remain loyal to the habits of a period when sculpture was unknown. At a later stage in Palestinian history, Lods remarks, images became permissible, provided they were not costly ones. The foreign innovation of images in precious metals was resisted, but simple figures in wood and stone were acceptable.
The fundamental argument here turns on conservatism. It may well be that the conservatism that has been so strong a feature of Jewish life for a long period of history was due to exile and dispersion. Conservatism in habits grew out of the need to preserve identity in widely different places. To ding to old ways became a sign of the national longing and a guarantee of its ultimate fulfillment.
Delitzsch, Benzinger,1 and others argued—in the period when climatic and physiological conditions were conceived as the dominant factors in forming national character—that a "defective sense of color" on the part of the Jews accounted for their abstinence from painting and for the commandment against images. This point of view appealed to the great Jewish theorist, Martin Buber. In his Jüdische Künstler, which is a relatively early work, published in Berlin in 1903, he argues, with perhaps too much enthusiasm and German abstraction: "The Jew of antiquity was more of an aural than a visual man and felt more in terms of time than of space. . . . The most vivid descriptions in ancient Jewish writing are acoustic in nature."
Dr. Buber did not assume that this alleged deficiency of visual sense was innate, but supposed it to have been induced by geographical and social conditions. First, nomad life was hostile to visual images because visual art is set in static things, and because the nomad's feelings were too bold and his way led too far—"sein Gefühl war zu wild und der Weg zu weit." Second, even in the more settled life led in ancient Palestine, says Buber, the anti-chromatic effects of the strong Syriac sun opposed itself to the impulses of visual art. Harsh light, doubled by reflection from sand and stone, he suggests, deprives objects of their color and reduces them to drab remote outlines: ". . . the few colors appear in glaring, abrupt isolation. All this is under the power of a sun that makes things seem remote, devours roundness, and permits no harmonious modulation of colors. This sun gives one visions, but not sight."
Buber was young when he wrote this, and had not yet lived in Palestine. He reasoned from what he thought to be the character of the Palestine landscape. The refutation of his hypothesis lies in modern Palestinian painting with its striking colors—striking, even though a thousand years of poor agricultural methods, bad administration, and goats have stripped the land of the trees and verdure that may have clothed part of it in Biblical days; striking, even though many Palestinian artists think their canvases not yet bold enough to do justice to the land's profounder colors. So a surrealist painter, Wolf Hildesheimer, pleaded movingly in an article written in 1945, in which he spoke of the unrecorded purples of the mountains and craters between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.
And in any case, if the Jewish vision was as decidedly non-figurative as Dr. Buber assumed, why was it necessary to bind it with a stringent rule? You do not need to proscribe that to which your subject is not tempted. It is significant that another theorist and one who, if non-Jewish, was nevertheless fascinated by the Jewish mind, theorized to precisely the opposite conclusion from Dr. Buber's. In his Origin of Language (1848) Renan states that there are no psychological terms in Hebrew and that consequently the language takes recourse to physical suggestions when mental states must be presented; and he goes on to label the Semitic peoples voyants (seers): ". . . idioms depicting all objects by their sensuous qualities . . . were to be eminently suitable to the violent declamations of the Seers. . . . For the Semites, eloquence is chiefly an animated succession of turns of speech and daring images."
Nevertheless, Dr. Buber's argument continues formidable. We find another German Jewish thinker accepting it and reaffirming it. Thus Hans Kohn in his Prophets and Peoples (New York, 1946) writes: "The Jew lives within time. He does not see as clearly as he hears. His senses are less aware of the contours than the inner flowing of the world. . . . Thus to this folk did God become a voice. Again and again sounds the command 'Hear!' When Elijah becomes aware of God he hears only a still small voice. Therefore the Jew never made himself an image of his God. It is the word, the logos, which to the Jew is the mediator between the infinite and the individual, and the word carries more of infinity within itself than the sharp form of the frozen image."
One difficulty in considering the nature of the Jewish interdict against images is the absence of material other than that presented by Scripture itself. Some light may be shed on the problem if, with the help of Sir Thomas Arnold's standard summary, Painting in Islam (Oxford, 1928), we glance at the analogous ban in Moslem theory and practice.
Among the Arabs the ban led to the blocking of image-painting until the last decades, but also to the development of calligraphic art and the arabesque. The relevant verse in the fifth sura of the Koran (one of the legislating suras) orders believers to avoid images as "an abomination of Satan's work." And the traditions of the Prophet add vivid and memorable elaborations. Bukhari tells how the Prophet said that painters are those who will be most severely punished by God on the Day of Judgment. They will be bidden to breathe life into the forms they have fashioned yet they will be unable to do so and it will become apparent that they have vainly presumed to usurp the function of the Creator and "to assimilate themselves to God." Abu Hurayrah heard Mohammed say: "Who is more wicked than a man who sets to work to imitate the creative activity of God? Let them try to create a grain of wheat or create an ant." It is also written that angels will not enter a house in which there is a picture or a dog.
During the first generations of Islam, rulers and theologians—for some time one and the same thing—were tolerant. But by the second century of Islam the traditions began to crystallize, and the compilations of laws were final and authoritative by the third century. Then "no further doubt was possible for the faithful as to the illegality of painting and sculpture, and the same condemnation was embodied in the accepted textbooks of Muslim law." Though, just as liberal interpretations intersperse the history of the Jewish ban, so in the case of Islam a legislator like Nawawi could suggest that only living things were protected by the ordinance against image-making, but not inanimate objects such as, he specified, a camel-saddle, of which the artist could paint a picture without imitating God's activity as a creator.
Our major concern is with the origin of the attitude. One theory Sir Thomas Arnold considers particularly plausible is that Jewish converts to Islam encouraged the canonization of the Prophet's remarks against pictorial art. A second possible reason adduced by Arnold is "a reaction against the naturalism and verisimilitude of Hellenic art, which had been manifesting itself in the Nearer East for some time before the rise of Islam." A third, the hatred of idolatry, common to Islam and Judaism, which saw a danger in images because they put their makers in the sacrilegious position of a partner of God.
If the Jewish and Moslem approaches are examined together, the dislike of idolatry stands out as the principal common feature. The philosophical achievement of Judaism had been the removal of God from the visible to the invisible world; the Jews had not quite spiritualized their God into a complex of moral requirements, but at least they had unified him and represented him in a system of similes and metaphors that were attached to earthly things but were not materially palpable. Islam, a force making for the economic unification of the Arabs, was to conquer by a view of God that was equally abstract.
Abstractness—or sheerness—was the feature of the Semitic mind that most impressed T. E. Lawrence, it will be remembered: "Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly." ". . . no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. God was to them not anthropomorphic, not tangible, not moral nor ethical, not concerned with the world or with him, not natural: but the being achromatos, achrematistos, anaphes, thus qualified not by divestiture but by investiture, a comprehending Being, the egg of all activity, with nature and matter just a glass reflecting Him." ". . . petty incarnate Semites who attained height and depths beyond our reach, though not beyond our sight. They realized our absolute in their unrestrained capacity for good and evil."
There is, however, another important feature common to the Middle Eastern peoples among whom Judaism and Islam first flourished. Sir Thomas Arnold thinks of it as facilitating the acceptance of, rather than motivating, the ban on images. In his own words: "This theological prohibition found a ready acceptance in minds obsessed by the superstition common in the East, that an image is not something apart from the person represented, but is a kind of double." So very old—and more universal than Sir Thomas thinks—is this anxious identification of an image with its original that one wonders whether it was not the original reason for the religious prohibition on images, anterior even to the horror of idolatry which, based by its very nature on intangibles, presupposes a philosophical sophistication that could have come only at a relatively late date.
Whether we put the horror of idolatry or the superstitious motive of image-fear first, both together operated to keep the Orthodox Jew and Moslem hostile to figurative art. The idols, portraits, or statues of other faiths seemed to be inextricably linked with the forbidden pleasures enjoyed by the peoples who practiced these faiths. These pleasures were sometimes attractive to the faithful and threatened to draw them away from righteousness; old Palestine knew the magnetism of the hedonist Gadarenes, the Astarte-lovers, the Greeks. Jewish puritanism was a defense-mechanism against infiltration by these heathen cultures. From the one extreme of ascetic obedience the Semitic mind could, it was felt, too easily rebound to the other extreme of carnality; a little sin, a golden mean of pleasure did not exist for it. On this point too, T. E. Lawrence gives evidence from 20-century experience: "Had the circumstances of their [the Arabs'] lives given them opportunity they would have been sheer sensualists. . . . If forced into civilized life they would have succumbed like any savage race to its diseases . . . and like savages, they would have suffered them exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation."
If the Jews do not altogether resemble the Semites of the Arabian desert in this point, it is because mere opportunity has not been enough to win them over to a life of pleasure. Fearing the extreme of carnality and the sensual vehemence that awaited them there, they had, with the help of the Law, proved themselves capable of resisting opportunity. Only once in a while did a Solomon come along—and afterwards become the subject of infinite apologies to prove that his sensual self-indulgence was unworldly, the mystic's ravished intuition of God. And once the disruption of the Jewish nation scattered it over the world, the consequent stiffening of Jewish conservative impulses, the need to insist on identity, aided the Law; and so did the social conditions that rendered every Jew an object of suspicion and envy to the Gentile majorities around him, so that no Jew dared relax in pleasure, least of all in visible pleasure, lest he attract violence on himself and all his community.
One more parallel of the many that might be adduced between Judaism and Islam: The prophet Mohammed, we are told, hated the bath, the public bath, where one person might be excited by the presence of another, as a plague spot of evil. His hyperaesthesia operated in the field of every sensation, including the sexual, and he recoiled. There was a comparable rabbinical suspicion of the bath in old Palestine, especially in those periods when the influence of the voluptuous Gentiles was the strongest. Although in some aspects the Jewish attitude to sex was sane—it was free, for example, from the monastic emphasis on mortification of the flesh—the Jewish fear of displayed nakedness was considerable. The ultimate effects of this fear on Jewish painting have been curious, but not illogical.
However, even the Moslems have had intermittences of pictorial art—see the staff of Moses, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and the raven of Noah as pictured in fresco in the Great Mosque of Cordova in Spain. But the synagogue at Dura-Europos is a more significant exception for Judaism. Jewish historians of the 20th century have again and again pointed to the wall paintings in this synagogue as proof that the Jewish consciousness had liberated itself from the law against the image at least as early as seventeen hundred years ago.
While it is clear from the excavation s at Dura that there were murals in the Jewish chapel, it is by no means certain that their presence represents a great victory over the prohibition against images. Rostovtzeff himself writes: "What happened in the synagogues was exactly what happened in the temples of Dura, except that the character of the pictures in the former naturally accorded with the general character of the Jewish religion." He means that there was no distinctive new temper or manner visible in the synagogue work; the only difference from earlier and contemporary Gentile art in that region was the fact that the subject matter was taken from the Old Testament. The images were Jewish in name rather than in form and thought.
With all due deference, and subject to correction, I would suggest that the murals at Dura are to be classed with other visual art done by Jews in forms alien to them: with the illuminations of the medieval Darmstadt Haggadah, which used the methods of the Christian illuminated manuscripts; with the Farhi Manuscripts and their Islamic decoration; with the Gothic dome of the Prague synagogue. The Jewish artists who executed this work had become masters of a craft; but in carrying out that craft they renounced their Jewishness. They adopted the sensibility and temperament of the peoples among whom they worked. It was the beginning of assimilation.
"Show me a Jewish painting," someone may say to you today. You can show him Chagall, expressive of Eastern European Jewry, or a canvas by a modern Palestinian. The picture will reveal a Jewish personality, a Jewish distinctiveness with all that may be odd, reprehensible, beautiful, and sad about it.
But before 1900 you would have found nothing of the sort. True, you can take certain works by Jews or half-Jews of the 19th century and point out signs or reminiscences of Jewish character; you can find paintings of Jews by Rembrandt and pictures of Jewish things by religious painters that sometimes reveal a splendid or profound observation of Jews. But in all these examples the Jewish element will be passive. A Jewish art that can be called active, positive, and of international interest because of national vitality, is the result only of the last half-century.
The 19th century was nevertheless a time of preparation. The emancipation movement that began in Europe with the French Revolution caused the Gentile world to relax some of the measures of exclusion it practiced against Jews. A few decades later Jews began to appear among the leaders of European intellectual movements, and among the celebrities of the arts as well.
The first Jews to arrive in West European art were those who explicitly rejected their Jewishness. Most of them were the children of fathers who had had them baptized, and they lived in Germany, where Jewry was embarking on its most complete, and therefore most conspicuously unsuccessful, experiment in assimilation and self-oblivion. The names are familiar: Felix Mendelssohn in music, Karl Marx in philosophy and economics, and many others. In England at the same date there is Francis Palgrave (originally Cohen), who produced the most popular of all anthologies of English poetry in the Golden Treasury; and we also have the Disraelis, the elder a littérateur and the younger a novelist who later turned politician.
If, as is undoubtedly often the case, the mixing of strains produces valuable effects, then it might be argued that a mixture of Jewish with non-Jewish culture should be exceptionally fertile. But in the arts the achievements of assimilating Jews in the 19th century were untypical, unstable, and less fruitful than those that might have been had Jews been emancipated into an independence of their own instead of into dépaysement. The achievements of assimilated Jews involved excesses: excess of propriety in Palgrave or of patriotism in Disraeli and James Elroy Flecker; excess of religious fervor and damnation-melancholy in Mahler; excess of German rectitude in the great painter Liebermann.
Liebermann is perhaps the foremost instance of the assimilated 19th-century painter. The poet Richard Dehmel could write satirically of a perfect Junker:
Er ist mir doch zu gottvoll zum Hasse:
Ein so urdeutscher Menschheitstyrann,
Dass nur der Vollblutjüde Liebermann
Ihn malen könnte: so schön voll Rasse.
(He is too godly for me to hate
Such an old-German tyrant of humanity
That only a thoroughbred Jew like Lieber-
Could paint him; so beautiful in his blue-
The Germany of the Hohenzollerns came to recognize Liebermann, as his long life proceeded, as her most characteristic contemporary painter. On the recent occasion of his centenary Leo Koenig wrote of him in New Life: "He belonged to that generation of German Jews who believed in emancipation and assimilation while not denying their origin . . . and Liebermann, the pantheist in art as in religion, had no special interest in Jewish cultural problems."
Liebermann is scarcely less a miracle of assimilation in German painting than is Mendelssohn, who rediscovered the St. Matthew Passim and thus led to the revival of Bach, in German music.
In a similar way in Russia, Professor Roth tells us, Isaac Levitan was praised by the Novoye Vremya, because "this full-blooded Jew knew, as no other man, how to make us realize and love our plain and homely country scenes." Of course, this is praise, as Professor Roth esteems it. But it involves a loss, too. It points a loss of Jewish in the gain of Russian consciousness. The Jewish soul would have gone undisplayed and less understood than ever if all Jewish painters had followed Liebermann or Levitan.
More widely known today than Liebermann is his contemporary in France, Camille Pissarro. Here again the environment produced almost all, Jewish origin and culture but little. But Pissarro's letters reveal that at certain moments this most bucolic of all French painters saw his own canvases with bewilderment, with an obscure atavistic apprehension of an occult presence in them. "I who made them," he writes to his son, Lucien, "often find them horrible. I understand them only at rare moments, when I have forgotten all about them." He found a "savage" melancholy in his work, and he resented it. To try to fix its character, he said: "Remember that I have the temperament of a peasant." His passion for nature was the recoil of a soul that had been divorced from it. Pissarro did not think much about Jewish things; like Liebermann, he had made himself a pantheist and rationalist.
One element, however, of the Jewish make-up was rarely lost by the most completely assimilated of the people. That was the Messianic element. The belief that amid conflict and the stalking terror of Og, Gog, and Magog, the Messiah shall come to lead the poor and the oppressed into their proper bliss was the greatest support of the popular imagination during many centuries of persecution. It is fundamental to the Marxist social solution, and helps to explain the attraction of Marxism for many Jews who have rejected their religion. This remark is not made derisively. In its social, as apart from its religious intention, the Messianic myth only dramatizes humanity's need and hope.2 The hope in which Camille Pissarro lived and brought up his artist sons was likewise revolutionary. His letters are sprinkled with warnings against the "sentimental," the "Christian," even the "Greek." Ideas stamped in such moulds, he says, are the antithesis of those "which belong to you, anarchist and lover of nature, to the Lucien who reserves the great ideal for a better time, when man, having achieved another mode of life, will understand the beautiful differently." (July 8, 1891.)
A problem of the Jewish artist who ceased to be Jewish was, I have suggested, a tendency to exaggerate certain traits of the Gentile environment. One instance of this is the way in which certain of these assimilated Jewish artists canalized the residual Messianic impulses into caricature. Caricature is by its nature an art of exclusion on the one hand and excess on the other. It eliminates most of those heterogeneous emotions that are associated in the greater forms of art, and focusses intensely on the one or two it retains. It makes its selected statements with piercing exaggeration. It delights and revolts by a logical but grotesque magnification of some one feature that the ordinary eye sees as small amid many compensating or cancelling features.
Since 1900, and especially since 1918, a number of artists of Jewish origin have applied their gifts to caricature with superlative effect. Their Messianic impulses are brought to bear in so far as the aim of caricature is almost always subversive. They begin to destroy, as if still sure that when the world tumbles into ruins mild and irresistible peace will come with the giants.
In an article in COMMENTARY ('The World of Saul Steinberg," October 1947), the poet Heinz Politzer, himself one of the ultimate products of the Central European assimilationist experiment, and one who in mourning the end of his era has also profoundly analyzed it, examined the work of one such artist, the cartoonist and draftsman Saul Steinberg. He does not speak of destruction in it, he sees it this way:
"Steinberg renders the isolation of modern man, his boredom, spleen, and inanity. As comedy followed tragedy on the Attic stage, so Steinberg comes after the great documents of modern isolation: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka have given birth to this ludicrous postlude. By becoming comedy it becomes palatable to the masses." And he adds, "Like Kafka, Steinberg has no need to insist on his Jewishness as something special. He has identified himself with the temper of the age, just as the progressive elements of our age—those able to smile at their own foibles—have identified themselves with his vision." It should also be remembered, that Pascin—a half-Jewish artist born of a Sephardic father and a Serb-Italian mother, and educated in Bulgaria—was introduced to the world of art through his caricatures in the famous Simplicissimus, "torchbearer of liberal thought in Germany."
Lack of inspiration is not the problem of assimilant Jewish painting. Nor lack of vitality. But excessive exaggeration is—that excess which, even when it takes astringent forms, is always liable to degenerate into sentimentalism—that very sentimentalism Pissarro shunned, but which is present even in him in his total surrender to nature; for the nature he looked on as objective reality was seen through longing eyes. Excess can be lovely; excess can be art; but can it be the best of art?
Before turning from assimilationist to independent Jewish painting, I would like to consider the problem of excess in one more set of instances, linked with the ancient fear of the excitement of the bath, the temptations of the nude. The ban on the representation of nakedness even up to this very moment, when the struggle for the image has been practically won, is sustained in many Jewish communities. At the Bezalel School in Jerusalem modeling of the nude is forbidden; nor is it easy to get nude models in some Jewish areas. Yet from a number of modern Jewish painters nudes have received the most sensuous treatment since Rubens.
Pascin is a case in point. "Pascin could paint flesh!" say his biographers. "His nudes are plastic, and they exhale a sensuousness from amid opalescent tints, tones of mother-of-pearl, faded rainbows, the sheen of lilies and the subleties of faded roses." Yet at the same time there is something spectral about his evocation of the young girls that were his favorite models. They are young in order that they may not be quite real. They are not quite real because the severe self-denial of the artist's paternal lineage forbids them. All the more does he long for the flesh, all the more does it become appetizing and apocalyptic to him; but all the more it is unmerited, unobtainable; and when he most possesses it, even wallows in it, Pascin is least sure that he has it. The extremes of luxury and deprivation are present together.
Then again, Modigliani, an Italian Jew who died early from a life of debauchery, and of certain of whose surviving canvases Picasso can say in hushed admiration, "I own a genuine Modigliani"—Modigliani is marked by a provocative sensuality. A sensuality at the opposite end of the scale to the ban on the nude. His art is a statement of protest against centuries of discretion, an individual essay on the theme of the sheerness of the first fall into hedonism. Nostalgia for the flesh was his dominant mood. He extracted it from all things. When he came home drunk to his Montparnasse attic one night and made a lot of noise, his landlady got out of bed and went upstairs to stop him. With drunken good humor he laid her across his knees to spank her—but when he lifted her nightdress his hand stopped in mid-air, and he burst out in spontaneous admiration: "Que les fesses sont épatantes!—What marvelous buttocks!" And so he found a new model. To live by the orgiastic cult of flesh and die in its practice—that is one possible destiny for those who lose all of Jewish heritage but its starved passion.
That the Gentile world has in the end relaxed its restrictions on the activities of Jews means that there is now an invitation, and a temptation, to Jews to paint. But it does not explain why Jews themselves broke down their long-standing internal prohibition of the pictorial.
Many of the assimilated mentioned above had in their leap away from Judaism gone from one extreme to another—thus some of the Mendelssohns, or, a century later. Max Jacob in France, became ardent Roman Catholics. But their leap at least took them, from the very start, out of the whole sphere of Jewish Law—whose very function was in part separatist.
The more interesting question, though the answer is not completely different, is how it happened that Jews whose families did not renounce their faith came to participate in image-making. If Martin Buber is not wholly helpful on the origins of the law against images, he is intensely helpful on this point. As the exponent to the Western world of the values of Hasidism, he indicates in his Jüdische Künstler how the "birth of the new Jewishness" brought "the perception of a unity with God." Pantheistic in trend, Hasidism suggested that the virtues of God, which could be manifested in the perfect saint, could through the latter's influence and the contagion of his presence spread into all persons and all matter. If all things participated in the divine, it could be piety to show as well as see them. That an image possessed some of the character of the object it imaged now became a reason for encouraging its portrayal, to catch its virtues and contribute towards their diffusion.
If a private note may be interposed: when first thinking about the Jewish ban on the image, I was puzzled to remember the portraits of revered rabbis I had seen in very Orthodox houses; but Dr. Buber's explanation of the modifications in the Jewish consciousness produced by Hasidism, and the thought that these modifications would operate the "double" superstition in reverse, made it logical. Everything that belongs to a wonder-rabbi is holy. Vilem Haas, who knew a wonder-rabbi in Eastern Poland in the First World War, told me how disciples and visitors waited in front of his table while he ate, and from time to time he tossed morsels to them, and whoever caught these ate with the conviction that a spark of the miracle was passing into him.
In his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Professor Scholem says that the innovating features of Hasidism were "the primitive enthusiasm with which it was expounded and the truly pantheistic exhilaration evoked by the belief that God 'surrounds everything and pervades everything.'" In this new sense of the good as endowing the world with loveliness lay the new sanction within the stream of Jewish life for the active making of pictorial art.
And perhaps there was also a contributory factor in heretical Sabbatianism, which Professor Scholem believes to have persisted more strongly than either Orthodox or rationalist Jewish historians previously allowed; it may have led to the acceptance of reforms that filled in the emptiness left by the breakdown of Messianic hopes; and, by its embrace of the belief that evil must be traversed on the way towards ultimate good, it may have affected its adherents' attitude to matter, worldly rule, and sin.
Thus an inner alteration of horizon, working rather less quickly than apostasy but working more potently, succeeded, towards the last quarter of the 19th century, in enabling growing Jewish children to think of becoming Jewish artists.
There are two Jews whom any art lover in the world would immediately cite, if asked to name prototypes of this process. One is Epstein, the other is Chagall. They are the examples, the earliest in time and most outstanding in quality, of how Jewish artists give their best by being explicitly and predominantly Jewish. The power and dynamic of certain of Epstein's images are conceived, albeit unconsciously, in terms of old Jewish history. Brought up in a wholly "Hebrew" atmosphere, he becomes creative when the memories of childhood, and the collective memories of which they were a continuation, are touched. So it recently happened, for example, that he heard the old Hebrew folksongs of the Yemenite singer Bracha Zefira; and they so stirred these profound reactions that he resolved to model her; and she agreed and has been sitting for him.
Chagall's painting is a Jewish, or more strictly a Yiddish, epic that has caught and recorded the ghetto epos of Eastern Europe just before its destruction.
The European provinces of Russia: Poland, and those Baltic countries which together with some Russian territory contained the so-called "Lithuanian" Jewry, nourished a third of the world's Jewish population, the third whose character was uneven with all the richness of ghetto unevenness. The profuse mingling of beauty and poverty, spiritual imprisonment and spiritual soaring, oppressed helplessness and domestic intensity—this is Chagall's subject matter, which is objectivized in material images and communicated in marvels of color and vital diversity of form. He remembers—in sophisticated Paris he still remembers—how the child's eye saw his father and family and neighbors in the Russian village. People and houses jig in fantastic disorder. The perversion of the proper harmony of society, implicit in Jewish subjugation, is represented in the distorted objects that dazzle the child's vision.
Several Jewish artists have begun to work in Chagall's vein. Even in Palestine today there are one or two of them, like Castel, whose images are formulated in the dizzy Yiddish tradition; just as Palestine, despite its preference for Hebrew, still has one or two great Yiddish poets like Papiernikov. But it is doubtful whether there can now be any long sustaining of this subject and its manner. For the civilization that begot it has been obliterated, and there is hardly any possibility of a re-emergence of the Yiddish community. With its melancholy, its malformations, its incredible touches of beauty, its tenacious achievement, it has perished. Those whom it bred, the painter Chagall and poets like Malkah Locker, will complete their work in its name, but probably the story wall end with them. Meanwhile a new chapter is being written in Palestine.
1 F. Delitzsch, Iris, Farbenstudien und Blumenstücke (Leipzig, 1888) and Immanuel Benzinger, Hebräische Archäologie (Freiburg and Leipzig).
2 Junius Frey, who died on the guillotine with Danton, was a disciple of the pseudo-Messiah, Jacob Frank.


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Seemingly not a day goes past when stem cells do not feature somewhere in our media, heralded as the Golden Bullet or Magic Cure that will rid us of all ails. While such aims are the goal of the field of regenerative medicine, the barrage of headlines obscures the truly amazing impact that the discovery of embryonic stem (ES) cells has had on the way we as researchers can begin to understand the complexities of the human body, to determine what goes wrong in disease and ultimately to develop strategies to repair it.
In 1981, Martin Evans together with his colleague, Kaufman, described the isolation of ES cells from early stage mouse embryos that could be grown in culture. By genetically modifying these cells and implanting them into adult female mice Evans was able to create genetically modified offspring, which led to the creation of transgenic mice.
Now, almost every aspect of mammalian physiology can be studied by such gene targeting. We can switch genes on or off at specific time points, allowing us to dissect the role of these genes both during development and in the adult organism. We can change expression throughout the whole organism or just within certain cells in a given organ or tissue. We can introduce mutations known to cause disease in humans allowing us to study the disease process and to develop strategies to prevent disease or repair any damage done. We can even introduce reporters, such as green fluorescent protein, under the control of a given gene or its promoter, allowing us to label all the cells within the organism that express that gene. Suddenly, we are able to sort specific populations of live cells from one another, to track the expression of a given gene in development and even to follow cells transplanted from one organism to another.
My own work examines the potential for repairing the diseased retina by transplanting healthy photoreceptors and transgenic animals are crucial to my research. By using mice engineered to carry mutations known to cause disease in humans, we are able to accurately model human retinal disease. We use donor cells from transgenic animals that have been modified to carry reporter constructs, which allow us to track the transplanted cells within the diseased recipient and now we are beginning to take stem cells to the next level; to use them as a renewable source of cells to generate donor photoreceptors.
Evans' work not only gave rise to the discovery of stem cells but a wealth of tools and the beginnings of regenerative medicine itself.
Dr Rachael Pearson is a University Research Fellow at the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology. Her work has helped develop a novel therapeutic approach to restoring vision, by replacing the cells lost through degeneration with functioning, light-sensitive cells.
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Visual Arts Department Faculty
Bob Pennebaker (2003) Associate Professor of Art & Chair of the Visual Arts Department
BA, MA, Mississippi College
Curriculum vitae
Bob Pennebaker, associate professor of art and chair of the visual arts department, teaches drawing and painting. He holds master's and bachelor's degrees in art from Mississippi College and also studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Previously, Mr. Pennebaker served as chair of fine arts at Gordon College in Barnesville, GA, and has many years of experience as a self-employed artist, private art instructor, and gallery owner. He is also a professional caricature artist and judges numerous art competitions throughout the region, as well as leading art tours to Europe. His work is found in many private and corporate art collections. Recent exhibitions of Mr. Pennebaker's work include Confluence, a joint show with photographer Gretchen Haien at the Meridian Museum of Art in Meridian, Mississippi.
Gretchen Haien (2007) Associate Professor of Art
BA, Belhaven University
MFA, Louisiana Tech University
Curriculum vitae
Gretchen Haien, associate professor of art, teaches photography. She received her BA in art from Belhaven University and her MFA in photography from Louisiana Tech University. For more than twenty years she owned and operated Studio 4 in Jackson, a professional studio offering creative commercial and fine art photographic services to national and international clients. After over a decade of part-time teaching, she joined the full-time faculty of Belhaven University in 2007. She has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in venues including the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, the Meridian Museum of Art, and the Beverly Street Gallery in Staunton, Virginia, and her work is found in both corporate and museum permanent collections. Ms. Haien's awards include the 2005 Mississippi Arts and Letters Award in Photography and the 2007 Photography's Emerging Artist to Watch Award of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Dr. Melissa Thorson Hause (2001) ) Associate Professor of Art History and Dean of the Honors College
BA, Belhaven University
MA,PhD, Emory University
Curriculum vitae
Dr. Melissa Thorson Hause, associate professor of art history and dean of the Honors College, teaches art history, aesthetics, art theory, and Honors Colloquium. After receiving a BA in studio art from Belhaven University, she pursued graduate study at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, where she received her MA in art history and her PhD from Emory's interdisciplinary Institute of the Liberal Arts. From 1991 to 2000, Dr. Hause lived in Germany, where she studied art history at the Philipps-Universit-t in Marburg and worked as an art and architectural translator and editor. Her published translations include Picasso: The Sculptures by Werner Spies and The Prints of Barnett Newman by Gabriele Schor as well as contributions to major exhibition catalogues such as C-zanne: Finished / Unfinished and Bill Traylor 1854-1949: Deep Blues.
Nate Theisen (2002) Professor of Art
BFA, University of South Dakota
MFA, Wichita State University
Curriculum vitae
Nate Theisen, professor of art, teaches sculpture, two- and three-dimensional design, and painting. He received his BFA with an emphasis in painting from the University of South Dakota and an MFA with a major in painting and a minor in sculpture from Wichita State University. He also apprenticed in Germany under sculptor Anatol Herzfeld, a student of Joseph Beuys. Previously, Mr. Theisen taught at Butler County Community College in Kansas and at Wichita State University. Attending and teaching at secular institutions has caused him to realize that faith has been truncated from the whole of human experience, leaving a void that the world cannot fill. "It is my hope that students who are called to be in the arts see this need and the validity that expression and imagination inherently contain."
Mr. J. David West (2010) Assistant Professor of Art
BA, Mississippi College
MFA, Louisiana State University
Curriculum vitae
David West, assistant professor of art, teaches beginning and upper-level drawing and printmaking. He holds a BA from Mississippi College with an emphasis in painting and an MFA from Louisiana State University in printmaking. His previous teaching experience includes a stint as a high school art teacher as well as positions at Baton Rouge Community College and Louisiana State University. He is co-founder of ArtSpace86, a pop-up gallery in the Jackson, MS, metro area. His most recent body of work includes graphite drawings and mixed media prints.
Mr. Jon Tyson (2008) Specialty Instructor of Art
BS and MED, Mississippi College
Curriculum vitae


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Solar - Bridging the gap
December 09, 2009 — Titanium dioxide, the same inexpensive white pigment that protects us from sunburns, can be converted into a material that absorbs sunlight and could greatly increase the efficiency of solar energy cells. Until now, however, researchers had not been able to overcome the inherent wide band gap associated with the different energy levels, or bands, of the electrons.
Nuclear Energy- Record fuel burn
December 09, 2009 — Coated particle fuel fabricated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in cooperation with Idaho National Laboratory, General Atomics, and the Babcock & Wilcox Company, has set a world record for advanced high temperature gas-cooled reactor fuel.
Physics - Exploiting strain fields
December 09, 2009 — Electronic devices of the future may benefit from a fundamental discovery that allows researchers to customize the electronic properties of complex materials such as single-crystal thin-film structures.
Transportation - Gone hybrid
November 05, 2009 — Fuel economy ratings for the new 2010 model year automobiles are now posted at the http://www.fueleconomy.gov web site, which Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed and maintains for the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Materials - Ferroelectric fury
November 05, 2009 — By discovering a technique to guide the ferroelectric switching process in bismuth ferrite, a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Nina Balke has moved one step closer to developing more rugged memory and logic devices. One key to the success is that the material has both electrical and magnetic properties at the same time, which is unusual.
Manufacturing - Holey truck frames
November 05, 2009 — Heavy trucks are a little less heavy but just as safe and rugged because of steel rail frames provided by Metalsa Roanoke, which enlisted the help of Cam Hubbard and the High Temperature Materials Laboratory User Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Nanoscience - Using neural networks
November 05, 2009 — A new approach to crunching massive volumes of data uses neural networks, an architecture of multiple elements that is figuratively taught to pool imbedded information into results, like an artificial brain.
Materials - Graphene cleanup
October 13, 2009 — Graphene, a single-layer sheet of graphite, has potential as a remarkable material, particularly for electronics and composite applications. However, working with the material leaves molecular-scale rough edges, which spoil its properties.
Transportation - IntelligentFreight hits highway
October 13, 2009 — Information sharing technologies at the heart of Web 2.0 are being integrated into an Oak Ridge National Laboratory freight tracking system that could revolutionize the industry.
Neutron Sciences - TOPAZ beam line
October 13, 2009 — Construction and installation has been completed recently on the newest instrument at the Department of Energy's Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Single-Crystal Diffractometer, also known as TOPAZ, will greatly expand the range of materials explored in chemistry, earth sciences, materials science and engineering, solid-state physics and biology.
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A qualified medicaid school provider participating in the medicaid school component of the medicaid program may submit a claim to the department of medicaid for federal financial participation for providing, in schools, services covered by the medicaid school component to medicaid recipients who are eligible for the services. No qualified medicaid school provider may submit such a claim before the provider incurs the cost of providing the service.
The claim shall include certification of the qualified medicaid school provider's expenditures for the service. The certification shall show that the money the qualified medicaid school provider used for the expenditures was nonfederal money the provider may legally use for providing the service and that the amount of the expenditures was sufficient to pay the full cost of the service.
Except as otherwise provided in sections 5162.36 to 5162.364 of the Revised Code and rules authorized by sections 5162.363 and 5162.364 of the Revised Code, a qualified medicaid school provider is subject to all conditions of participation in the medicaid program that generally apply to providers of goods and services under the medicaid program, including conditions regarding audits and recovery of overpayments.
Renumbered from § 5111.711 by 130th General Assembly File No. 25, HB 59, §101.01, eff. 9/29/2013.
Effective Date: 2008 HB562 06-24-2008


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Why an ebook piracy awareness drive is a waste of time and money
March 11, 2011 | 10:31 am
By Jason Davis
The UK's Guardian site is running a story with the title "Authors demand drive to raise readers' awareness of book piracy's cost". It's basically a lot of authors and publishers whining about ebook piracy. They are demanding "someone" do "something" about it and let readers know that it's bad – maybe via a publicity drive. From the story:
Crime writer David Hewson, author of the Italy-set Nic Costa novels, said a campaign along the lines of "People Who Love Books Don't Steal Books" was urgently required – because readers who consider themselves his fans are downloading pirated copies of his ebooks and audiobooks.
Novelist Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand and Little Bee, agreed. "I don't blame anyone. They don't do it [download books illegally] because they are evil but because they don't understand," he said. "In the music industry, when the price of music went down to zero – as it arguably now is because of filesharing – artists didn't mind that much.
Whatthefu…? Let's leave the minor details of the current health of the music industry, who would pay for the ebook campaign, and with what money, not to mention who would pay the slightest heed to it.
Some people clearly are not getting it, so I'm going to spell it out in terms that even those from the "old school" of publishing can understand.
1. Generally speaking, people will do what is easiest.
Sure there are exceptions to this rule, there are people who will pirate no matter what, and people who will go to the ends of the earth to pay – but generally the more roadblocks to legitimate purchase, the more piracy. Ask Apple. People are busy, and lazy, and they want stuff to be easy. We are talking about the vast, "general public" here, not the fringes.
2. Price is the biggest ebook roadblock
Again, with the same caveats as above, the higher the price of ebooks and more DRM, the more piracy. If it's hard, they're not interested. If they have to convert a format, they will rarely bother. Many people just aren't going to bother to pirate a $0.99 ebook. If you want an ebook, a "One-Click" purchase of $0.99 is just less painful than the hassle of going to find a reliable torrent of it and downloading.
3. People buy more ebooks if the price is lower
This has been proved time and again. Yes, yes, there may be exceptions – and you may or may not want to go all the way down to a Konrath-esq $0.99, but there's a big difference between $1-3 and the good old "agency" $7.99, $9.99 or worse. And that big difference is sales.
4. The "Agency Model" is promoting piracy, hurting sales
See all of the above. Oh settle down, all those who are squealing about how I can't prove that statement. You're right, no-one can. But I can use my consumer eyes ("agency" is almost always more expensive), logic, experience in the ebook market and personal observation.
Publishers, you can talk around it, "make your case" for agency, hand-wring about "giving back to authors" (honestly – don't make me laugh) or just get over yourselves and grow your businesses.
Or, as I've said before, you can make it easier for the rest of us.
Via Jason Davis' Book Bee site
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There's a slight distraction in your argument. The problem isn't really with an agency pricing model in itself, where the publisher sets the sale price and the retailer (the agent) gets a fixed-percentage cut of the sale price. The problem is the prices the publishers are choosing to set. I don't care what pricing model is used, only that the prices are reasonable.
Orielwen – I disagree fundamentally. It is the use of this "Agency Pricing" that is the cause of the problem. When Price-Fixing Cartels happens, it inevitably results in high prices. The same has been the case in many other industries over the decades such as Oil, Airlines, Food, Electronics.
The high pricing we see on Amazon and elsewhere by the Agency Pricing Publishers is the direct fall out of this cartel.
Some people will suggest that individual authors who set their prices are operating Agency Pricing. This is not the case.
I think the problem is that all these dialogues treat 'pirates' as this great, amorphous group when in reality, not all 'pirates' are the same. Some are digital hoarders who just like downloading torrents and are never going to buy (or even read!) most of this stuff anyway. You may as well write those people off right now as the cost of doing business, the same way retailers budget a margin for losses due to shoplifting, or offices understand that they'll lose some money to people taking staplers home with them. Fwiw my own boss estimates she loses about $400 a month to stuff like people using the expensive colour printers for things they should be using the copier for, or laminating things that should not be laminated. Every business has this percentage of losses which occurs.
The issue is that the people obsessed with 'pirates' focus on this group of people to no gain and as a result fail to focus on the convertible pirate, i.e. the one who downloads because a specific reason (geo-restrictions, price higher than paper, book unavailable, book locked with DRM etc). If you shift your piracy efforts into focusing on THIS group by resolving whatever issue it was that had them downloading to begin with, you'll actually see gains in profit and reduction in downloading. But lumping these customers in with the 'pirates are BAD!' paranoia is a mistake because unlike the pirate who was never going to buy, these people actually might have. And if you fail to address the reason why they didn't, you'll never get them back as your customer.
Joanna, you've written what is probably the single best summation of the piracy issue that I've seen. Wish all of the Agency 6 publishers would read and heed.
Joanna, I agree that you've done a good job eloquently describing the different types of piraters. But that doesn't mean that you're right about the mix of piraters and the reality of why and how much they pirate. Brian O'Leary has done a fine job beginning to research this, but the results are hardly conclusive. Lost sales are incredibly hard to measure in reality, but just because you (and many others on this site) think it's "not a problem worth worrying about" doesn't make it so. I find it hard to believe that those who think so would be saying the same things if their content was being pirated.
Is it possible that the reason most people pirate things is because it's free and it's hard to be caught? Or do you really dismiss that possibility and feel that most pirates would pay for it if it was a "reasonable price" (only allowed to be defined by them)? By the way, using iTunes as a positive example of the digital music market "working" is not a good reply as lots and lots and lots of music is still pirated.
Along those same lines, (in my opinion) the way the music studios "screwed" over their customers (having to buy full albums instead of singles, so about a 10x increase in amount needed to spend to get what they want) is wholly different than the way publishers have "screwed" their customers ("high" prices for the full content ($1-5 dollars more than most seem to be willing to pay) and windowing of content (expensive hardbacks before paperbacks or ebooks).
And yes, dealing with piracy is a reality that publishers have to face. But it's funny to read all the people who think they "get it" denying the likelihood that the easy availability of pirated products is a real problem worth talking about. This doesn't mean publishers should be incorporating strict DRM, but hearing people calling publishers "whiners" when they themselves are complaining about the difference between $9.99 and $12.99, or even $4.99 and $9.99 considering the amount of time spent with a book, is more than ironic.
Let me ask you this rhetorical question about piracy: if the chance of being caught was 1 in 10 instead of 1 in 1 million+, do you think the levels of piracy would change? Exactly.
There certainly are issues with who would pay for a 'don't pirate' program. There are hundreds of authors, few of them rich. While many would benefit from such a program, they'd benefit even more if someone else would pay for it. Which is one reason we haven't seen much of a program (although Epic has done some work along these lines) despite what authors would like.
Yes, people will pirate more when prices are high. What people seem to forget, though, is that the goal is not to eliminate piracy. As many commentors have pointed out, eliminating piracy is impossible. Publishers make pricing decisions based on what they assess as the elasticity of demand, which in turn is impacted by piracy. But informing people that piracy is a bad thing would benefit publishers and authors regardless of the price (persuading those people who were wavering).
I don't think we're going to see any huge anti-piracy movement, but anything we as authors and publishers can do to remind people that taking a book hurts not just huge conglomerates but tiny companies like mine, and authors who aren't super-rich like J. K. Rowling, but who hope to make a few dollars for the enjoyment they provide readers.
Rob Preece
Anon, I think it is a question of priorities. Publishers right now are lumping everyone together and so failing to deal with convertible pirates by meeting their needs. Solve THAT aspect of piracy first, because it is easy to do and you can actually achieve gains in your profit and customer base, and THEN I am prepared to look more closely at the rest of it. But as long as they continue to turn away people who do want to pay, I am afraid they have no credibility to cry "piracy!" to me.
I don't think the goal of iTunes it to prove that piracy can be eliminated. As I said, I don't think it can be any more than shoplifting or any other industries loss margin can be. But I think it does prove that people will pay for digital product when you make it easy and affordable to them. I don't think the "why would people pay when they can get it for free" argument is true. ITunes HAS proven that people will pay even if getting it for free is possible. My experience with tormented books has been that most I have seen were riddled with errors anyway. I'd rather pay for the proper one.
I don't pirate books – I don't know how, or how to find the web sites for it, so it's not all that easy.
What I do do is not buy books at all if the price is what I consider unreasonable. And unreasonable to me is anything over $5 or $6 for a back list title.
If, for example, Patricia Veryan's titles were available, and at a price I could afford, I'd gladly buy one (or two, or three) titles each payday until I had her entire list. There's several hundred dollars there being lost, because the files aren't available. Would I pirate them if I could find them? I don't know.
If Baen can afford to sell their front list titles at $5 and $6, I don't understand why the Big Publishers can't do so.
I think there may be some benefit to educating users, but the arguments have to be more reasonable than "It's bad, M'kay?"
For example, for a casual reader, what's the difference between:
– going to the library and getting a book, reading it and returning it,
– borrowing a book from a friend, reading it and returning it (or passing it on),
– downloading a book, reading it and deleting it?
I don't think most people will see a difference. In all the cases, there was no payment to read the content. The author received no additional revenue. The publisher received no additional revenue.
It's a difficult and abstract distinction – if a distinction even exists logically, and until that can be clarified to a broad audience the 'war on pirates' is just a losing battle.
As long as the publishers insist on trying to implement draconian and exploitative copyright policies that the public can transparently see for what they are, no amount of 'education' will make a whit of difference.
The public are not stupid, despite the apparent belief by some in the publishing industry that they are. The Publishers and some misguided writers think they can hoodwink them with the blanket and indiscriminate use of the language of 'theft'. It is a silly and insulting waste of the public's time and of their money, and more over it just enhances a sense of contempt for the industry.
As long as the industry tries to sell the public a pup, by replacing 'selling' with 'licensing'; by supplying nobbled eBooks files; by preventing cross platform and cross platform reading; by locking legitimately sold files and by preventing fair lending and sales. And as long as they then trying to convince the public that anyone daring to act in defiance of these new restrictions is lumped into the vast 'Theft, Illegal pirates, 'we'll get you through the courts" kind of obnoxious language … the public across all spectrums of society will continue to treat them with disdain and refuse to listen to ANY message they have, legitimate or not.
I must point out that in a number of countries authors do receive payment for books borrowed from libraries, not a great deal but income is income.
Why does point number 2 have the same title as point number three, but the same content as point number 1? What is the "Agency Model"? Why does a website about reading have such awful writing?