text:
Listen to the Sound of My Voice
I first realized there was a problem with my voice on the first day of tenth grade English class. The teacher, Mrs. C, had a formidable reputation of strictness and high standards. She had us sit in alphabetical order row after row, and then insisted on calling roll aloud while she sat at her desk. Each name emerged as both a command and a threat in her firm voice.
"Kelly Barfield?"
"Here," I mumbled quietly. I was a Honor Roll student with consistent good grades, all A's and one B on each report card, yet I was shy and softspoken in classes. This was an excellent way to make teachers amiable but largely go unnoticed. The softness of my voice made me less visible and less recognizable.
Mrs. C repeated my name. Caught off guard, I repeated "here" a little more loudly. She rose to her feet to get a better look at me. I knew what she saw: a petite girl with long ash blonde hair, big brown eyes, and overalls embroidered with white daisies on the bib. When her gaze finally met mine, Mrs. C frowned at me and cleared her throat loudly. I curled into my desk, hoping to disappear.
"Miss Barfield, did you hear me call your name twice? In this class, when I call roll, you respond." I gave a quick nod, but Mrs. C wasn't finished: "We use our strong voices in here, not our girly, breathy ones." My cheeks flushed red while Mrs. C droned on about confidence and classroom expectations.
"Do you understand me?"
I stammered a "yes." Mrs. C turned her attention back to the roll call. Her harsh words rang in my ears. I sank low in my chair, humiliated and angry. I couldn't help that I sounded girly: I was, in fact, a girl. This was the way my voice sounded. It was not an attempt to sound like the dumb blonde she appeared to think I was.
That day I decided that I would never speak up in her class. Forget the Honor Roll. If the sound of my voice was such a problem, then my mouth would remain firmly shut in this class and all of my others. I would never speak up again.
My vow to stop speaking lived a short life. I enjoyed Mrs. C's serious fixation on diagramming sentences and her attempts to show sophomores that literature offered ideas and worlds we didn't quite know. At first, I spoke up with hesitation and fear of the inevitable dismissal, but I continued to speak. Becoming louder became my method to seem confident, even when I felt anything but.
Throughout high school, my voice emerged again and again as a problem. Despite the increased volume, my voice still sounded tremulous, squeaky, hesitant, and shrill to my own ears. Other girls had these steady, warm voices that encouraged others to listen to them. Some had higher voices that were melodic and lovely. I craved a lower, more resonant voice, but I was stuck with what I had. In drama club, our director scolded me with increasing frustration about my tendency to end my lines in the form of a question. My nerves materialized as upspeak. The more he yelled at me, the more pronounced the habit became. He eventually gave up, disgusted by my inability to control my vocal patterns.It wasn't just the theater director who commented on my voice; fellow students expressed shock and occasionally dismay that the soft-spoken blonde had smart things to say if you stopped to listen to her. Teenage girls were supposed to sound confident (but not too confident), loud enough to be audible (but not too loud), warm (never cold), and smart (but not smarter than the boys), all while cultural norms suggested that voices of teenage girls were also annoying. Teenage girls were supposed to be seen, but when they spoke they had to master the right combination in order to be heard. I could never master it.
Meanwhile, at a big state university in my native Florida, I learned quickly that a Southern accent marks you as a dumb redneck from some rural town that no one had heard of. Students in my classes asked me to say particular words and then giggled at my pronunciations. "You sound like a Southern belle," one student noted. This was not really a compliment. According to my peers, Southern belles didn't have a place in the classroom. Southern belles didn't easily match up with "college student. As a working-class girl from a trailer park, I learned that I surely didn't sound like a college student should. I worked desperately to rid myself of any hint of twang. I dropped y'all and reckon.
I listened carefully to how other students talked. I mimicked their speech patterns by being more abrupt and deadpan, slowly killing my drawl. When I finally removed all traces of my hometown from my voice, my friends both from home and from college explained that now I sounded like an extra from Clueless. My voice was all Valley girl. I was smarter, they noted with humor, than I sounded and looked. My voice now alternated between high-pitched and fried. Occasionally, it would squeak or crack. I thought I sounded too feminine and too much like an airhead, even when I avidly tried not to. I began to hate the sound of my voice.
My voice betrayed me because it refused to sound like I thought I needed it to. It refused to sound like anyone but me.
When I started teaching and receiving student evaluations, my voice became the target for students to express their displeasure with the course and me. According to students, my voice was too high and grating. Screechy, even: one student said my voice was at a frequency that only bats could hear. In every set of evaluations, a handful of students declared that I sounded annoying. This experience, however, was not something I alone faced. Women professors and lecturers routinely face gender bias in teaching evaluations. According to the interactive chart, Gender Language in Teaching Evaluations, female professors are more likely to be called "annoying" than their male counterparts in all 25 disciplines evaluated. The sound of my voice was only part of the problem, but I couldn't help but wonder if how I sounded was an obstacle to what I was teaching them.
Once again, I tried to fix my problematic voice. I lowered it. I listened to NPR hosts in my search for a smooth, accentless, and educated sound, and I attempted to create a sound more like them. I practiced pronouncing words like they did. I modulated my volume. I paid careful attention to the length of my vowels. I avoided my natural drawl. None of my attempts seemed to last. Some days, I dreaded lecturing in my courses. I had to speak, but I didn't want to. I wondered if my students listened, but I wondered more about what they heard.
The sound of your voice is a distinct trait of each human being, created by your lungs, the length of your vocal cords, and your larnyx. Your lungs provide the air pressure to vibrate your vocal cords. The muscles of your larnyx adjust both the length and the tension of the cords to provide pitch and tone. Your voice is how you sound beyond the resonances that you hear when you speak. It is dependent on both the length and thickness of the vocal cords. Biology determines your pitch and tone. Your pitch is a result of the rate at which your vocal cords vibrate. The faster the rate, the higher your voice. Women tend to have shorter cords than men, which makes our voices higher.
Emotion also alters pitch. Fright, excitement, and nervousness all make your voice sound higher. Nerves would make a teenage girl have an even higher voice than she normally would. Her anxious adult self would too. Her voice would seem tinny because her larnyx clenched her vocal cords tight. Perhaps this is the only sound she can make. Perhaps she is trying to communicate with bats because they at least would attempt to listen.
Biology, the body, gives us the voices we have. Biology doesn't care if we like the ways in which we sound. Biology might not care, but culture is the real asshole. Culture marks a voice as weak, grating, shrill, or hard to listen to.
My attempts to change my voice were always destined to fail. I fought against my body and lost. I couldn't have won even if I tried harder. My vocal cords are determined that my voice would be high, so it is. The culture around me, however, taught me to hate myself for it. Voice and body seem to cast aspersions on intelligence or credentials. It's the routineness of it all that wears on me. I expect the reactions now.
I wonder if I'm drawn to the quietness of writing because I don't have to hear myself speak. I crave the silence while simultaneously bristling at it. Why is my voice a problem that I must resolve to placate others? How can I get others to hear me and not the stereotypes that have chased me for years?
My silence has become fruitful. The words I don't say appear on the page of an essay, a post, or an article. I type them up. I read aloud what I first refused to say. I wince as I hear my voice reciting my words. I listen carefully to the cadence and tone. This separation of words and voice is why writing appeals to me. I can say what I want to say without the sound of my voice causing things to go awry.
People can read what I write, yet they can't dismiss my voice by its sound. Instead, they read what I have to say. They imagine my voice; my actual sound can't bother them. But, they aren't really hearing me. They just have my words on the page. They don't know how I wrap the sound around them. They don't hear me.
Rebecca Solnit, in "Men Explain Things to Me," writes "Credibility is a basic survival tool." Solnit continues that to be credible is to be audible. We must be heard to for our credibility to be realized. This right to speak is crucial to Solnit. Too many women have been silenced. Too many men refuse to listen. To speak is essential "to survival, to dignity, and to liberty."
I agree with her. I underline her words. I say them aloud. The more I engage with her argument, the more I worry. What about our right to be heard? When women speak, do people listen? Women can speak and speak and speak and never be heard. Our words dismissed because of gender and sound. Being able to speak is not enough, we need to be heard.
We get caught up in the power of speaking, but we forget that there's power in listening too. Listening is political. It is act of compassion and empathy. When we listen, we make space for other people, their stories, their voices. We grant them room to be. We let them inhabit our world, and for a moment, we inhabit theirs. Yes, we need to be able to speak, but the world also needs to be ready to listen us.
We need to be listened to. Will you hear me? Will you hear us? Will you grant us room to be?
When I think of times I've been silenced and of the times I haven't been heard, I feel the sharp pain of exclusion, of realizing that my personhood didn't matter because of how I sounded. I remember the burning anger because no one would listen. I think of the way that silence and the policing of how I sound made me feel small, unimportant, or disposable. As a teenager, a college student, and a grown woman, I wanted to be heard, but couldn't figure out exactly how to make that happen. I blamed my voice for a problem that wasn't its fault. My voice wasn't the problem at all; the problem was the failure of others to listen.
While writing this essay on my voice, I almost lost mine, not once but twice. I caught a cold and then the flu. My throat ached, and I found it difficult to swallow. A stuffy nose gave my voice a muted quality, but then, it sounded lower and huskier. I could hear the congestion disrupting the timber of my words. My voice blipped in and out as I were radio finding and losing signal. It hurt to speak, so I was quiet.
"You sound awful," my husband said in passing. He was right. My voice sounded unfamiliar and monstrous. I tested out this version of my voice. It was rougher and almost masculine. I can't decide if this is the stronger, more authoritative voice I wanted all along or some crude mockery of what I can never really have. I couldn't sing along with my favorite songs because my voice breaks at the higher register. I wheezed out words. I croaked my way through conversations. "Are you sick?" my daughter asked, "You don't sound like you."
Her passing comment stuck with me. You don't sound like you. Suddenly, I missed the sound of my voice. I disliked this alien version of it. I craved that problematic voice that I've tried to change over the years. I wanted my voice to return.
After twenty years, I decided to acknowledge the sound of me, even if others don't. I want to be heard, and I'm done trying to make anyone listen.
Featured image: "Speak" by Flickr user Ash Zing, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Kelly Baker is a freelance writer with a religious studies PhD who covers religion, higher education, gender, labor, motherhood, and popular culture. She's also an essayist, historian, and reporter. You can find her writing at the Chronicle for Higher Education's Vitae project, Women in Higher Education, Killing the Buddha, and Sacred Matters. She's also written for The Atlantic, Bearings, The Rumpus, The Manifest-Station, Religion Dispatches, Christian Century's Then & Now, Washington Post, and Brain, Child. She's on Twitter at @kelly_j_baker and at her website.
REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies — Christine Ehrick
On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice– Yvon Bonefant
As Loud As I Want To Be: Gender, Loudness, and Respectability Politics — Liana Silva
Hearing Eugenics
Editor's Note: Today we start off a series, a propos for World Listening Day 2016 on digital humanities and listening. As I mentioned in my Call for Abstracts in March, this forum considers the role of "listening" in the digital humanities (DH, for short). We at Sounding Out! are stoked to hear about (and listen to) all the new projects out there that archive sound, but we wonder whether the digital humanities engage enough with the the notion of listening. After all, what's a sound without someone to listen to it? The posts this month consider: how have particular digital studies, projects, apps, and online archives addressed, challenged, expanded, played with, sharpened, questioned, and/or shifted "listening"? What happens to digital humanities when we use "listening" as a keyword rather than (or alongside) "sound"?
We will be hosting the work of DH scholars who are doing exactly that: prompting readers to consider what it means to listen in the context of DH projects. Fabiola Hanna will be reflecting upon what DH means when it talks about participatory practices. Emmanuelle Sonntag, who has written for SO! before, will be addressing listening from the starting point of the documentary Chosen (Custody of the Eyes). Today, however, we start things off with a collaborative piece from the Vibrant Lives team on the ethics of listening to 20th century sterilization victims' records.
Don't just stand there. Take a seat and listen.-Liana M. Silva, Managing Editor
In the 1920s a young woman was admitted by her mother to a mental institution in California. The local doctor recommended her for sterilization with the following notes:
has been reported to have interest in sexual encounters
Mother is pregnant and cannot care for her (thinks she may be able to post-sterilization).
This brief note is representative of the stories of the roughly 20,000 people who were sterilized in California institutions of mental health. The soundscape of these institutions is largely lost to the past. We cannot recover the sounds of treatment spaces, family visits, recreation, and everyday life of those in the care of the state of California who were considered feeble, insane, or otherwise out of control.
Like the conversations about illness and reproduction presumably had in those halls, the sounds of salpingectomies (removal of fallopian tubes), vasectomies (severing the vas deferens), and, later, tubal ligations are lost to us. In the absence of human rights violations, this is perhaps as it should be; we cannot collect the minutiae of everyday life. But in situations where reproductive and disability rights have been limited, where we can see race and gendered bias, we may well have need of telling such stories.
Reparative justice best practices dictate that survivors should be able to tell their own stories on their own terms. How can we listen to such stories when the majority of our survivors have died and we have little to nothing in their own words?
While conversations between patients, parents, and doctors might be lost to us in terms of playback, they have embodied traces in the nearly 20,000 people sterilized in California between 1919 and the 1950s under eugenic sterilization laws. The 19,995 sterilization recommendations and notes, brought together under the project Eugenic Rubicon: California's Sterilization Stories, cannot currently be made publicly available due to U.S. patient privacy laws. Important documentary films like No Más Bebés, which tells the story of Mexican-American women sterilized without consent at Los Angeles County – USC Medical Center in the 1960s and 1970s, have made it possible for us to hear accounts of such reproductive injustice first hand. But for the thousands of people sterilized between 1909 and the repeal of eugenics laws in 1979, we must find other ways to listen and to hear.
Given the privacy restrictions on working with this dataset and our concerns to care for the people who are represented therein, we (the Vibrant Lives team) felt it was important to find alternative methods that did more than de-identified and quantified graphs could do. We know all too well that we can't recover the past "as it was." Nevertheless, we are working to bring the emotional and intellectual power of sound and critical listening to a largely unheard history of sterilization of Latinx people. Specifically, our project prompts listeners to consider how listening fits into reparative justice for the victims of sterilization.
Listening Toward under the Law
That eugenics laws and their surgical enactments played out in racialized and gendered ways is not surprising but bears repeating. For example, according to work by Alexandra Minna Stern, Nicole Novak, Natalie Lira, and Kate O'Connor, patients with Spanish or Hispanic surnames were three times as likely to be sterilized as their non-Hispanic counterparts. Those lost sounds have traces in California's Latinx communities, both in terms of the community structures themselves, but also in terms of soundscapes that never were because of sterilization. This acoustic ecosystem in which the politics of race, gender, nation, and mental health converged in dramatic fashion is recorded only in the bodies and medical records of the patients and the 21st century communities shaped by the children, born and unborn, of these patients.
Not only are we limited to working with the textual, institutionally generated remnants of the past, we are also constrained by 21st century health and personal data privacy laws. Our archive is a set of medical records and as such this collection contains sensitive patient data that must be de-identified and used in accordance with contemporary HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act) regulations and IRB protocols.
This means that we cannot reveal names, dates, and other identifying information regarding those who were sterilized in the first half of the 20th century. We are unable to tell individual stories of sterilization lest the individual be identified. Traditionally, historians have used fictional composites to tell such stories and our collaborator Alexandra Minna Stern used this method in her 2015 second edition of Eugenic Nation.
The HIPAA guidelines and their impact on how we tell the history of medicine raises important legal questions about how we might balance a public right to know about practices (we'd call them abuses) within state-run facilities with the need to protect patients' rights to privacy regarding their own reproductive and mental health. In some cases, it seems as though the privacy guidelines protect the state more than they protect any individual patient. In fact, we have seen a remarkable lack of concern for these records in their discovery and transmission. The records themselves were largely abandoned when Stern discovered the microfilm reels in the 2000s. They were lost again after she returned them to the state after having made a copy. The originals are lost as far as we know.
Listening Toward the Past
Vibrant Lives is working not with sounds found, but with archival records found and then sonified (transformed into sound) as a way of listening toward those rooms, conversations, and procedures. In brief, this sonification entails the following steps
- Selecting a subset of the large data set (we can't currently process the whole)
- Selecting between two and four axes of information, such as gender, race, age at sterilization recommendation, consent, or nationality
- Mapping the informational values into numerical space – sonification requires the creation of a dataset whose limits are 1 and -1 (based on how the speakers work)
This work has been done to date using two tools: Sonification Sandbox, an open source tool developed at the University of Georgia, and GarageBand, a proprietary music making tool that comes with Macintosh computers. We use Sonification Sandbox to create the score first and then turn to GarageBand because it has a greater range of instrumentation available. The sonification process is still very experimental and exploratory. Team member Jacqueline Wernimont does all of our sonifications for us and she is trained as a historian of literature and technology. While she has extensive experience within digital humanities methodologies, sonification is a new effort for us.
We have begun producing short sample tracks that allow us to enact the kind of listening toward that we're advocating for. In the track below, we have data from the age, gender, and consent axes for the period 1940-1949. Additionally, this sample draws only from what we've described as "Spanish surname" patients, the vast majority of whom were American-born of Mexican descent, although they also include some other Latinx national communities.
Latinx Eugenics Sample Track
As you listen, each note represents one Spanish-surnamed person recommended for sterilization. The children, both boys and girls under 18, who were sterilized without consent are the highest notes, and the adult men who were sterilized with consent are the lowest.
Listening Toward as Ethical and Communal
Listening is always about an ethical relationship and it is particularly fraught when the effort to listen and to encourage others to listen entails hearing about a person's most intimate health information and experiences. This is particularly true when those experiences may include trauma from unwanted surgery or other experiences.
While we might think of patient privacy as a form of care, in this instance we find ourselves wondering who these regulations actually serve. According to the updated 2013 HIPAA guidelines, personal health records are no longer considered sensitive information 50 years after death (it was previously 100 years). Preliminary estimates by our team indicate that as many as 1,000 survivors might be alive in 2016. However, while the vast majority of the people discussed in the records are no longer alive, family and friends may well be.
We respect the need for family members and friends to privacy when it comes to the health records of their loved ones. At the same time, an essential component of most restorative justice programs, like those undertaken for North Carolina eugenic sterilizations, is an articulation of the violations, which HIPAA blocks in many ways (North Carolina's cases were revealed by investigative journalists who are not subject to HIPAA and the IRB regulations that we must adhere to as academics). As a consequence, those who might most benefit from reparations – sterilized individuals and their immediate families, including children – are likely to die before the privacy laws enable us to draw attention to the individual impacted by the racialized and gendered discrimination evident in the records.
The sonification of these records and the companion participatory performances that we facilitate allow us to intervene and share these important stories before all of the survivors and family members have passed away. We have the opportunity to drive justice-oriented processes forward while there is still time.
Consent/Non-consent Sample Track (entire population)
Vibrant Lives focuses not just on the stories but also on the people who listen to the audio. We spend time watching how our audiences participate in listening toward the history of eugenic sterilization in California. Below are images of recent presentations of this work in which we've incorporated both haptic (touch-based) and sonic performance.
Part of what we see here is the attentive posture of our participants – leaning in to feel a history of sterilization. The haptics are being shared with a thin, red metal wire that the participants have to touch lightly in order to not dampen the signal for others. For us, this is an effort to bring care for the experiences of others into the performance. The history of eugenics has impacted communities and we are creating communal aural and tactile experiences as a way to disrupt the notion that academic work and knowledge is a solitary endeavor.
The performance captured above is also an exercise in patience and as such expresses a willingness on the part of the participants to sit with a disturbing history. The sample people are listening to and feeling here is 100 seconds long with each note/vibration corresponding to one person who was sterilized. In most performances the participants stay for the duration of the piece, but there have been instances where people have touched a haptic piece and then walked quickly away. We can't know why some have chosen to walk away.
Some of those who have stayed have shared with us that they felt responsible to feel and hear each person. It's an abstraction, to be sure, but we are intrigued by the power of listening and feeling to encourage people to not simply look and walk away. As one participant at a Michigan performance noted, the "tingling (from the haptics) lingers, it's spooky." Another participant at the same performance indicated that she felt "more implicated" having engaged with a multi-media experience than with a visual like a graph or chart. When asked why, she responded "I've felt it and will continue to remember that, but still will likely do nothing in response."
In creating performances where participants have to care for one another and care enough about the people represented in the data to stay through a durational piece, we are working to redress the extraordinary lack of care that the records represent, both in terms of testifying to the violence done to men's and women's bodies and in terms of the State of California's lack of regard for this history.
Sounds Felt, Sounds Touched
Our work is an ongoing experiment. We've moved from haptics along a wire, to haptic spheres that vibrate with the sonification. The image above is from one of these events this spring. We've retained the communal effect while transforming the embodied structure of the event. Participants now gather around, encircling the object as they listen toward a history of reproductive injustices. People still tend to lean in – to have heads lowered in a posture of intense focus. The sphere itself demands that someone cradle it and it also requires that people touch lightly once again so as to not dampen the experience for others.
We plan to expand our durational events in our next iteration known as "Safe Harbor" in which we hope to explore how to best care for those people sterilized by the state by caring for their data. In this instance we are thinking of sounds (and more) that we'll make together with impacted communities. For this work we are particularly interested in engaging audience members in the hosting and care of the eugenics data and, by extension, the survivors.
As a way of enacting a site-specific response to both historical and contemporary human and reproductive rights violations that have occurred in the state, we plan to stage this durational event in California. We'll begin by inviting audiences to help build and shape an empty warehouse space with us, transforming the empty space into a place of care where we can listen toward these histories. The audience will be invited to converse about the research and reflect upon conversations through making, creating, and ultimately building up our safe harbor.
We plan to listen to and co-create with impacted communities through collective making of the space. As a result, Safe Harbor will enact a cooperative improvisational process shaping socially responsive dialogue – performing, hearing, listening, documenting, and rebuilding notions of care in real time. What we hope to discover here are shared sounds of resistance, repair, and healing. Sounds that might let us listen toward the past, while also creating more just futures.
Featured image: "Water under 12.5 Hz vibration" by Jordi Torrents, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Vibrant Lives is a collaborative team that makes, stages, and performs as part of interactive multimedia installations. Jessica Rajko and Eileen Standley are both professors in the Dance area of the School of Film, Theater, and Dance at Arizona State University (ASU). Jacqueline Wernimont's home department at ASU is English and she's a digital humanities and digital archives specialist. Wernimont and Rajko are also multimedia artists/faculty working in Arts, Media, and Engineering.
The data derives from a larger project, known as Eugenic Rubicon: California's Sterilization Stories, a multidisciplinary collaboration among Arizona State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Michigan. This larger collaboration includes historical demography and epidemiology, public health, history of medicine, digital storytelling, data visualization, and the construction of interactive digital platforms. This team is quite large, with our center of gravity residing at the University of Michigan where historian of science Alexandra Minna Stern directs the Eugenic Rubicon lab. Stern discovered the microfilms of more than 20,000 eugenic sterilization patient records in 2013. Stern and her team have created a dataset with this unique set of patient records that includes 212 discrete variables culled from over 30,000 individual documents. This resource is the first of its kind, encompassing almost one-third of the total sterilizations performed in 32 states in the U.S. in the 20th century.
REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Sound Off! // Comment Klatsch #4: Sound and The Digital Humanities, or #dhsound
EPISODE LI: Creating New Words from Old Sounds–Marcella Ernest, Candace Gala, Leslie Harper, and Daryn McKenny
Radio Preservation Task Force Conference: Sound History and the Logistics of Social Recognition-Josh Sheppard
Of Resilience and Men: How Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo Play with Gender in "Where Are Ü Now"
Justin Bieber caught me off guard last year. There I was, minding my own business, listening to a pop station, and this breathy little thing, this delicate vocal wrapped in a halo of shimmering effects starts piping through my car. I didn't even realize it was him at first; it had been so long since I'd heard a new Bieber song. And I had no clue the production was from Skrillex and Diplo (from their 2015 Skrillex and Diplo Present Jack Ü), which is why I was probably also not ready for the drop, that moment when the song's tension releases and I'm suddenly gliding across a syncopated bass synth while Bieber's vocals are pinched into a dolphin call. Somehow, two of the most notoriously unsubtle producers and the posterboy for "too much, too soon" had snuck up on me with "Where Are Ü Now" (WAÜN).
WAÜN's drop from nowhere isn't brand new. Subtle soars and understated drops are officially A Thing. More importantly, they do work beyond the sonic aesthetic. In this case, I want to listen to WAÜN in the context of Bieber's performance of gender, specifically with an ear toward the way Skrillex and Diplo mix elements from dancepop's 2015 toolkit to produce a track that plays on feminine tropes, which articulate a kind of masculinity. Listening to WAÜN alongside Robin James's Resilience & Melancholy (2015) amplifies the male privilege at play in WAÜN. James calls attention to the way drops can sonify feminine resilience, and WAÜN's surprise drop toys with that resilience in a thoroughly heteromasculine way. I'll first set up how drops usually work, then read James in the context of Bieber's gender performance as heard in WAÜN.
Drops, at their most basic, are climactic moments when a song's full instrumental measure hits (hence "drop"), often after some key elements of the instrumental have been removed so that the climax can sound more intense. At that broad level, any genre can employ a drop of some sort. EDM and dancepop drops—the kind that most directly inform the music of Skrillex, Diplo, and Bieber—are bass-heavy and typically follow a soar that intensifies volume, texture, rhythm, and/or pitch: you soar to a sonic plateau or a cliff, and with a "YEEEEEES!!!!!" coast on some wobbly goodness to the next verse.
The pre-chorus soar in the Messengers/Sir Nolan/Kuk Harrell-produced "All Around the World" from Bieber's 2012 Believe is a solid example. In the video below, the soar starts at 0:45, the chorus enters at 1:00, and the drop lands at 1:15. It's textbook: the instrumental is stripped back and filtered, and in the opening moments, we hear a descending bass glide. A filter does what its name suggests–it filters out a prescribed set of frequencies so that we only hear a certain range, and in this case it's the low end that comes through. The effect makes the synths sound like they're pulsating through water, and the higher frequency overtones take on a shimmery quality. Over the course of the 8-measure soar, the higher frequency range is brought into earshot, and then, on the second half of the eighth measure…nothing. This nothingness is integral to James's central argument in Resilience & Melancholy: nothingness intensifies what follows. In these eight measures, we've glided down to the low end only to soar up up up until all that's left is Bieber's voice, confident, nasally, with just a touch of autotune as he sings the titular line that will take us to the chorus. That chorus bangs harder because of the soar to oblivion before it.
WAÜN's drop lands at 1:09. For full context, start from the beginning and listen for the soar. (If you also need to stare dreamily into Bieber's eyes, then by all means.)
There's not really a soar there. No intensifying volume, texture, rhythm, pitch. The not-soar (starting at 0:48) is even a weird length, clocking in at 12 measures after an 8-measure intro and 16-measure verse have established a multiples-of-8 structural rhythm; even if we were expecting a drop, it comes four measures early. The clearest sign we get that a drop is imminent is that moment where the instrumental reduces to a quiet hiss for two measures as Bieber sings "Where are you now?" That hiss is the structural equivalent of the nothingness we hear just before "All Around the World"'s chorus, and with no traditional soar before it, we have just enough time to think "Oh shit, are they gonna….?" before we're off, clutching tight to Justin Bieber as we ride a dolphin through the more tender parts of Skrillex's and Diplo's musical oceans.
Until that nothingness, this could just as easily be one of those heartfelt Bieber tunes where he reaches to the high end of his range for a chorus full of feels. That Bieber? He's incredibly self-assured, bearing his soul because he's certain you'll love him. The bait-and-switch of WAÜN's soarless drop highlights Bieber's insecurity in this song—he's just dolphin calls and "Where are you now"s—by creating expectations for a different persona.
So what we have here is an atypical drop, a drop that calls attention to itself by behaving differently than we expect it to, a drop that's a study in understatement–all courtesy of three of dancepop's resident maximalists.
Atypical soars and drops aren't new, as producers will always toy with musical conventions as a way to disrupt expectations. Skrillex's own "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (2010) includes a pre-drop that doesn't soar at all. In 2015, two big acts in the dance scene, Disclosure and The Chemical Brothers, released singles that don't soar right, either. Disclosure, whose big 2013 hit "Latch" soared rather traditionally into Sam Smith's chorus, is coyer on "Bang That" and "Jaded." "Bang That" includes three separate 8-measure phrases (at 0:30, 0:45, and 1:01, respectively, in the linked video) that never take off, finally settling into a descending bass line (starting at 1:09) that just repeats a rhythmic motif, running out the clock on the final four measures before the chorus. "Jaded," at the other end of the spectrum, includes only a 4-measure pre-chorus (1:18-1:27) that seems to be sweeping upward like a traditional soar, then roller coasters down and back up over the final two measures. The instability of this soar/not-soar is punctuated with an additional eighth note tacked onto the end of the fourth measure, throwing the chorus off-kilter. The Chemical Brothers employ a similar roller coaster sweep in "Sometimes I Feel So Deserted" that marks out an even eight measures (0:58-1:13) without either intensifying rhythmically or pushing to a pitch ceiling at the drop.
These soars and drops stand out precisely because, like WAÜN's, they aren't the norm. To help theorize WAÜN's not-soar, I want to think with Robin James, whose Resilience & Melancholy hears soars and drops in the context of contemporary race and gender politics. James situates soars and drops as the sonic equivalent of resilience–a performance of feminine overcoming that ultimately only strengthens the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that inflicts the damage that is being surmounted. In other words, women can only attempt to overcome through the damage that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy inflicts upon them. Sonically, the soar is an accrual of damage that is spectacularly (and profitably) overcome in the drop, the music that resiliently endures on the other side of nothingness. Melancholy, on the other hand, is failed resilience, a handling of damage that does not directly profit white supremacist patriarchy and that could sound any number of ways, including like a non-traditional soar. While admittedly these soars and drops aren't always about gender politics, R&M opens space for us to think about gender and soars/drops together.
I don't think WAÜN's non-soar/drop is resilient or melancholic, but I do think it's helpful to think of it as being about resilience and melancholy. This is where Bieber's performance of masculinity comes into play. From his earliest poofy-headed, babyfaced performances, Biebs has done a modified bro thing: his heart's on his sleeve, but mostly as a strategy for sexual conquest. "All Around the World," again, is exemplary. In the lyrics, Bieber uses his worldly experiences to woo a potential lover, who he also negs, keeping himself in a position of power as someone who knows more, has seen more, and is willing to accept this woman despite her obvious flaws.
In WAÜN, though, I hear his performance of masculinity complicated further, as he tries out a number of more feminized tropes all at once. Lyrically, Bieber is the scorned lover who claims to have done all the care work in his relationship. Visually, he's the pop icon whose body is ogled, scrutinized, and marked. Vocally, he receives the pitch-shift treatment that has most recently been associated with DJ Snake's production of diva vocals (think "You Know You Like It" and "Lean On"). He also sings in a breathy style that James has elsewhere noted mimics Ellie Goulding's vocals. Musically, Skrillex and Diplo give him the soar/drop construction to undergird his pain, a musical technique that most often signifies feminine resilience.
What bubbles up is a heteromasculine play on resilience and melancholy. Skrillex and Diplo liquidate the soar until all that's left is a nothing-hiss before the drop. In the context of the other feminized tropes Bieber is messing with in WAÜN, this failed soar could feel melancholic, a refusal to spectacularly overcome. Overcome what, though? Bieber gets to sound resilient or melancholic without ever experiencing damage. That's his male privilege. James points out that one of the most violent outcomes of resilience discourse is the re-enforcement of damage. If resilience is the way women become legible and profitable, then the damage inflicted by ablist white cisheteropatriarchy becomes a necessity, something that must be endured to gain access to power and resources. This is the lynchpin of James's critique: resilience is a harmful discourse because it ultimately benefits the system it purports to overcome. Melancholy turns resilience logic on its head by refusing to treat damage as something an individual is responsible for overcoming. WAÜN, though, erases damage altogether in its initial drop. WAÜN's feminized tropes ultimately highlight instead of unsettle Bieber's performance of hetero-masculinity: what's more man-ly than accessing power and resources without the threat of institutional violence?
Importantly, these feminized tropes don't undermine Bieber's heteromasculine performance; rather, they only seem to add nuance to the slightly bro-ier [that's a word] Bieber performance we've become accustomed to. That's what I mean when I say WAÜN is about resilience and melancholy; Skrillex and Diplo use the markers of queer or feminine overcoming and failed overcoming to re-construct Bieber's masculinity, to toss some more ingredients into his manly mix, and the not-soar is a big component of that. Skrillex and Diplo tap into this soar experimentation, then drop it into the middle of a slightly more gender-fluid Bieber.
WAÜN's high water mark is a few months behind us at this point, but Bieber remains hotter than ever, with "What Do You Mean?," "Sorry" (another Skrillex production credit), and "Love Yourself" still dominating US and UK charts. Several more singles from Purpose (including two more Skrillex collaborations) are poised to do the same in 2016. Each of these singles extends some of the same tropes Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo explore in WAÜN—breathy vocals, misunderstood and mistreated pop icon, resilience and contrition and care in the face of a failed relationship—and I hear WAÜN's initial drop as the sonic moment that preps Bieber's return to the pop charts. He wades back into the mainstream with a more complex performance of heteromasculinity and reaps the profits that come with it.
Justin D Burton is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, and a regular writer at Sounding Out!. His research revolves around critical race and gender theory in hip hop and pop, and his current book project is called Posthuman Pop. He is co-editor with Ali Colleen Neff of the Journal of Popular Music Studies 27:4, "Sounding Global Southernness," and with Jason Lee Oakes of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies (2017). You can catch him at justindburton.com and on Twitter @justindburton. His favorite rapper is Right Said Fred.
REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies — Christine Ehrick
They Do Not All Sound Alike: Sampling Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis — Tara Betts
Tomahawk Chopped and Screwed: The Indeterminacy of Listening–Justin Burton
The Hell, the High Water, and the Funk of It All: Sounding Power in Scandal
Editor's Note: Here's installment #3 of Sounding Out!'s blog forum on gender and voice! Last week I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, "loud." The week before that we hosted Christine Ehrick's selections from her forthcoming book; she introduced us to the idea of the gendered soundscape, which she uses in her analysis on women's radio speech from the 1930s to the 1950s. In the next few weeks we'll have A.O. Roberts with synthesized voices and gender, Art Blake with his reflections on how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage, and lastly Robin James with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy.
This week regular writer Regina Bradley puts the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with the agency of the show's protagonist, a black woman in manages crises for a living. So, lean in and close your eyes, but keep your ears open for any spies creeping in. –Liana M. Silva, Managing Editor
9:00 pm (Eastern). The quick shutter of an invisible camera calls the attention of the viewers to Scandal. The clicking re-emphasizes the show's title, bringing to mind paparazzi and their capturing of scandalous behavior. The shuttering also signifies the literal and sonic fast paced timing of Shonda Rhimes' most popular ABC prime time show: quickened plots, fast talks, and blink-and-you'll-miss-something-important visual details. Scandal's central character, Washington D.C. crisis manager Olivia Pope (portrayed by Kerry Washington), is known mostly for her sharp professional outfits and no-nonsense approach to work. In Olivia, Rhimes has created a black female character that is perfectly flawed, a symbol of both the potential power and victimization of black women. Olivia Pope is neither just the savior nor is she solely a victim.
Scandal evokes intense debate about race and power because of its visual politics, but rarely is Scandal's scoring prominent in those discussions. The soundtrack acts as an indicator of contemporary black women's agency in popular culture. As both Rhimes and Scandal music director Alexandra Patsavas reveal, Scandal's 'vintage' soundtrack is an opportunity to buoy the plot and add a unique alternative perspective to the action taking place on the show. The soundtrack's nods to yesteryear artists – including Stevie Wonder, The Ohio Players, The O'Jays, Sam Cooke, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Nina Simone sonically narrate additional layers of agency and identity on the show. Are these tracks giving Olivia a voice? What does Scandal's scoring suggest about race, place, and power scripts for black women in contemporary popular culture?
Scandal takes place in Washington D.C., a location full of physical and sonic significance in national lore and the black popular imagination. In a national narrative D.C. is the epicenter of political agency, power, and the visibility of whiteness as a form of power. It is America's city. Yet D.C. in the black imagination is the Chocolate City, a space that serves as a living archive of black folks' attempts to intervene into a national narrative that would rather overlook the contributions of black bodies and culture. Washington, D.C. is the home of the Moorland-Springarn Research Center and multiple black cultural archives, Howard University and its place as the black mecca of Black Greek Letter Organizations, GoGo Music, and (embattled) social-political policies and endeavors for black people. It is a site of black identity that goes much farther than the place where everyone saw how a certain somebody had an American Dream. On the other hand, the increasing gentrification of the city raises questions of whether or not the nickname "Chocolate City" is applicable.Thus, Washington, D.C. exists at the crux of the romanticization of Americanness as a form of worldly power and the reality that (white) Americanness does not include all Americans.
Yet Washington D.C. as a site of complex and rich black experiences does not alone buoy Scandal's use of Washington, D.C. as a site where a black woman "handles" the hustle and bustle of American power and its upheaval. This type of work takes place in the scoring, particularly because the show is not culturally recognizable as a "black show." Its inherent blackness is sonic, using black music to revisit tropes of power and racial politics.
One possible and albeit slightly heavy handed approach for thinking through Scandal's leaning on funk and soul music is to point out how the show uses black cultural forms to invoke power. For example, soul songs like Otis Redding's "Mr. Pitiful," Edwin Starr's "War," and Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People" are not only used to accentuate the action in a scene but the possibility of Olivia as a power figure. The use of black men's voices as they yell, scream, and moan sonically allude to power as a masculine concept. Yet Olivia's connection to these songs signifies her potential to wield power in unorthodox ways not associated with black women. For example, the crescendo of music before Olivia delivers a demand to her team sets up her agency as a political figure. Her blackness is amplified and earmarked by the music. This pairing amplifies the question of race and power in a useful way. The dominantly black musical script offers the critique and engagement with Olivia Pope's blackness that many viewers and critics complain are lacking. (See the brilliant synopsis presented by Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson about Shonda Rhimes' portrayal of black women and popular culture that took place at Duke University last month.)
Scandal serves vintage musical scoring as a double entendre: the sound of black music from previous eras evokes 'vintage' scripts of race, gender, and power from that era that seep into this present moment. Scandal's use of soul, funk, and disco sonically allude to larger questions lingering from the Civil Rights Movement: integration as an equalizer of power and privilege, the hypermasculinity of the Civil Rights Era, its cultural producers, and the immediate aftermath of these scripts on (black) American society in the late 1960s and 1970s. We frequently annotate black agency through the men creating (singing?) the music. This is equally true for the black cultural productions of the era, as they aesthetically supplemented the understanding that black folks mattering connected to the uplift and healthy presence of black men. Even with soul and funk music, which stand as antithetical responses to the problematic expectations of classist respectability politics, black women's agency was associated with the sexual, emotional, or physical agency of black men.
The blackness and "maleness" of the funk and soul used in Scandal's score subverts the power that Olivia Pope exerts in her dealings with her clients, her lovers, and team. For example, in season two Olivia and President Fitz's sex tape is threatened to be leaked to the public. It is important to note that the tape is an audio tape, suggestively alluding the absence of physical and visual rhetoric to address the interracial relationship. As Olivia gives the word to leak the sex tape, The Ohio Players' track "Love Rollercoaster" begins to play. It sonically stabilizes Olivia's decision to "leak" her sexuality as a power move while also leaving room to question the deeper implications of how the viewer navigates her blackness and womanhood using physical, aural, and cultural markers of sexuality. Using male funk and soul artists allows Pope to 'codeswitch' between cultural scripts of power as masculine and womanhood as opposite power. It amplifies her authority and agency while signifying that her physical appearance and voice may not have the ability to confer her worth to the audience.
This tug-and-pull of power and agency is most amplified in Olivia Pope's dealings with her father Rowan Pope, played by Joe Morton (who plays the HELL out of this role, by the way). Rowan Pope is a literal and figurative double agent: He is Elijah Pope, a curator of antiquities at the Smithsonian, and Rowan Pope, head of the top secret and lethal U.S. organization called B613. His fragmented life speaks to the constant negotiation of "safe" black masculinity. He also embodies the anxieties about black men as violent and bloodthirsty. Rowan/Elijah encapsulates all of the swagger and vitriol associated with conceptualizations of black power and black men from the Black Liberation Era. He is cold and calculating, and he complicates the rhetoric of racial uplift and expected from the Civil Rights/Black Power movements. He speaks in hardened, hushed tones with conviction, while snarling his words with spite for white authority. Not to mention, his is the character that brings up race overtly in the show.
This balance between hushed tones and snarled words comes through in Rowan's early interaction with Olivia during Scandal's season three premiere. Olivia, on the run because her name is leaked as the President's mistress, is recovered by her father and told to flee the country. Rowan is not a doting and concerned father in this scene. Rather, he is disappointed by her lack of prowess and failure to aspire to higher forms of power and authority than "first lady." Rowan recognizes there is no power in being the wife of the President, especially as a black woman, and he criticizes her for not following the first rule of black folks' survival: "You need to be twice as good to get half of what they have." "They" is a collective noun for white folks, often spoken behind closed doors as a means to inspire young black folks to do better. Rowan demands she state out loud what they need to be twice of. Olivia's voice cracks and is breathless as she whispers "twice as good to get half of what they have." Rowan exaggerates a "yes" and dismisses Olivia as "mediocre." It is a painful and powerful scene where multiple dichotomies take place: a father scolding his daughter, a black man undermining black women's agency, and the fear/anxiety about black women's sexuality as a sign of weakness and lacking privilege. The wavering volume of Olivia's voice signifies her quickly plummeting ability to voice her power. Olivia's loss of words amplifies Rowans' own authority, embodied in his voice when he adamantly declares "I am the hell and the high water!" No soundtrack can save her here.
However, Rowan does have human moments, reaching out to his estranged daughter Olivia with wine and music, specifically Stevie Wonder. Her record collection is filled with Stevie Wonder. It is important that she has a record collection instead of a collection of CDs or playlist. Not only does this detail speak to the trope of "vintage" that runs through the show but also gives credence to how Olivia establishes her power. Her major moments are annotated by Stevie Wonder: when her name is leaked "Higher Ground" plays in the background. When she is kidnapped at the end of the episode for past December's Winter finale "Don't You Worry Bout a Thing" takes center stage. Again, the sounds of a man, her father in this instance, are the soundtrack to her work. The choice of music subverts the gender balance of power. Through male artists, the show gives Olivia her authority.
The most prominent sonic signifier is the instrumental accompaniment from the artist The Album Leaf titled "The Light." Also known as Olivia and President Fitz's "song," the track plays each time the two characters interact and share intimacy (physical and otherwise).
Notes from what sounds like an electric piano playing a scale are short and sweet to the ear. The track lends its innocence and vulnerability to Olivia and Fitz's affair and offers a possibility that their love for each other can be read as star-crossed instead of in bad taste.
Scott Poulson-Bryant offered an intriguing read on his Facebook page on "The Light" as an allusion to the Civil Rights' theme song "We Shall Overcome." This reading of "The Light" as the context to Olivia and Fitz's relationship makes room to complicate how Olivia's agency as a black woman is historically and politically bound to women before–she alludes to her similarity to Sally Hemmings in one episode. Olivia's Sally Hemmings reference uses Hemmings as the genesis point for understanding the complexity of Olivia's sexual encounters as well as how to navigate black women's sexual agency – and pleasure – in popular spaces. Sally Hemmings' relationship to President Thomas Jefferson lends historical credence to Olivia and Fitz's Scandal but also signifies the gray area of historical memory, cultural expectations, and consent as a form of power for African American women. "The Light" instrumental is not only a sonic accompaniment of Olivia as she relates to Fitz but her own struggles to recognize and balance her public and personal agency.
The soundtrack of Scandal gives a voice to not just Olivia's authority in a place where race and power are intertwined but also a voice on national television to how whiteness and political power operate. Scandal's controversial protagonist/anti-hero Olivia Pope is often central to recent discussions of race, gender, and popular culture. But the soundtrack to the show asks viewers to not just watch closely but also listen closely. Tune out and you might miss something.
Regina Bradley recently completed her PhD at Florida State University in African American Literature. Her dissertation is titled "Race to Post: White Hegemonic Capitalism and Black Empowerment in 21st Century Black Popular Culture and Literature." She is a regular writer for Sounding Out!
REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
SO! Reads: Shana Redmond's Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora—Ashon Crawley
Freedom Back: Sounding Black Feminist History, Courtesy the Artists–Tavia Nyong'o
They Do Not All Sound Alike: Sampling Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis—Tara Betts


text:
Chubby Redhead Babe Masturbates
Description: this chubby adorable redhead babe striped her white panties and took a big vibrator.she started vibrating her horny wet pussy and clit making sweet sexy noises.than she took a small purple dildo and began pounding her wet shaved pussy until she cum like a bad girl sould.for the end she took a big dildo and presented her spectacular blowjob skills.
Duration: 10:00
Categories:boysfood chubby redhead masturbation babe masturbate babe+fucked+hard masturbating chubby+teen caught+masturbating amateur+babe+fucking babe+gets+cum hot+babe
Comments (0)
Please Login or Register to leave a comment!
registered users:
- no captcha
- unique username!
- video "add to favorites" option

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Angel HazeView in iTunes
To preview a song, mouse over the title and click Play. Open iTunes to buy and download music.
Possessed of a kind of self-awareness and assuredness usually known to those much older, Angel Haze is a poetry-turned-rap act based out of New York. With a raw style that feels distinctly East Coast, the artist uses deep knowledge of self to channel various personality aspects, being vulnerable and emotional one minute and suddenly brash and aggressive the next. Haze eventually brought this considerable lyrical talent to the rap world with a 2012 album, Reservation. ~ Gregory Heaney
Top Albums
Top Songs
Birth Name:
Raykeea Angel Wilson
July, 1991 in Detroit, MI
Years Active:


text:
|Mountain Bike Jersey
|quick-dry polyester with antimicrobial technology
|Manufacturer Warranty:
|2 Year
The new Thrillium bike Jersey goes beyond the monotone color jersey offerings with standout fully-sublimated graphic prints. This downhill jersey is constructed of lightweight, quick drying polyester with raglan sleeves delivering the full range of motion, and a not-too-baggy, not-too-snug fit. Offered in either long sleeve or short sleeve, the Thrillium is designed for all day downhills, park laps and drinks afterward (bonus points for not stinking up the place thanks to Polygiene odor control tech in the fabric).
Discover 60,000 ways to explore the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Whether you play in it, explore in it or relax in it, we always have the best gear on-hand and in-season.
Weekly Deals to fuel a lifetime of adventure. Save up to 70% on products for every season and passion! Save big. Explore more.
Maybe outsold but never undersold. We offer the best price match guarantee on every product. We match prices so you don't have to.
A simple way to share the love. The House gift card personalizes your gift beyond the plastic. Give the gift that never needs a receipt.


text:
Higher education in Nunavut
Higher education in Nunavut allows residents of this Canadian Arctic territory access to specialized training provided at post-secondary institutions. There are some unique challenges faced by students wishing to pursue advanced training in Nunavut, a vast territory stretching across Arctic Canada from Hudsons Bay to the north pole. The territory was split from the Northwest Territories in 1999, following a successful plebiscite which affirmed Inuit desires to establish an independent political jurisdiction. Covering one-fifth of Canada's area and over 60% of its coastlines, the territory had a population of 31,153 in 2010.
There are no universities in Nunavut. Nunavut Arctic College is the only institution of higher education. It offers a small number of degrees in conjunction with Dalhousie University - Nunavut Nursing Program, University of Regina - Nunavut Teacher Education, University of Prince Edward Island - Master of Education in Leadership and Learning program, and the former Akitsiraq Law Program, recently and unexpectedly disabled by the territorial government, given its widely acknowledged successes and accolades.[1][2] Northerners can also receive training in both very basic academic and vocational studies. Due to the distance and lack of connecting roads between communities, the college attempts to operate on the basis that adult education must be delivered in all communities and that the training be tailored to address individual and community needs.[2]
Nunavut and the Canadian North have begun to think about and address the issues of language and quality of education in K to 12 through the creative and demanding Education Act (Nunavut 2008) which strongly supports Inuit languages and culture in the school system. The implementation of this fundamental legislation is propelling an intensive effort to strengthen and improve the quality of primary and secondary education, but also has compelled a closer look at Teacher Education in the College, and the quality and ability of graduates to teach effectively at all levels. The first two terms of the Nunavut government invested very strongly in new schools in Nunavut Communities leading (among other factors) to a steadily increasing number of high school graduates, bringing additional pressures to the College through additional adult learners. The College has struggled to effectively meet this expanding demand for higher quality, diversity, and expanded delivery.
The external dialogue has also accelerated recently with former Governor General Michaëlle Jean speaking in favour of an Arctic University GG advocates for Arctic learning, -Attempts to build an the "Arctic University", an alliance of 30 institutions with circumpolar components, located mostly in existing institutions with Arctic research mandates, and - ~ The declaration of the three territorial Premiers (Yukon - Fentie, NWT - Roland, Nunavut - Aariak) who, in a September 2009 Conference Communique "committed to examine options for the development of a northern university" in common.
The Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation has taken up the issue of post-secondary education in the Canadian North, both through its Arctic Voices Fellowship program and through its commitment to sponsor a 2010 conference among territorial interest groups to address a common institutional design which would enhance post-secondary learning across Canada's northern territories.
Although the territory of Nunavut was created in 1999, Nunavut Arctic College (NAC) was created in 1995 through legislation implemented January 1, 1995, when the former Arctic College was split into Aurora College in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Arctic College in the eastern arctic.[2] Today this early split is seen as an attempt by the dominant western college to retain resources and funding after division and has been seen at the heart of the multi-year struggle of the College to fulfill its mandate, address public perception, despite a number of successful and effective graduates, that instruction and student quality are low and that many students drop out or become perpetual enrollees in an atmosphere where instructors take advantage of weak management and collective bargaining status as "teachers" with school year type holidays and no obligations for research and long term scholarship.
The major campuses of Nunavut Arctic College are Nunatta Campus in Iqaluit on Baffin Island, Kivalliq Campus at Rankin Inlet, and Kitikmeot Campus at Cambridge Bay. The three campuses have very distinct atmospheres and approaches, some being vital and active with committed leadership and others being regrettably perfunctory in performing their obligations. The College has also established Learning Centres in twenty-four of the twenty-six communities on the territory.[1][2] The efficiency and quality of these Centres varies with the enthusiasm and basic abilities of the single supervising instructor, and the College struggles to maintain these feeder institutions with minimal financial support and varying program success. Prior to 1999 most campus infrastructure had been built in the western territory, and Nunavut Arctic College is still running to catch up with the need for classrooms and residences to serve an exploding youth population in Nunavut.
Higher education in Nunavut is the responsibility of the territorial government, consistent with jurisdictions across Canada. Three main pieces of legislation govern post-secondary education in Nunavut:[1]
- The Education Act, known as Bill 21, governs the education in Nunavut from Kindergarten through to adult learner.[3]
- The Nunavut Act is the federal act that essentially created Nunavut. It has jurisdiction over all public institutes including colleges.[4]
- Public Colleges Act was created through an amendment to the previous Arctic College Act as a result of the creation of Aurora College and Nunavut Arctic College.[5]
For admissions into Nunavut Arctic college, students are required to meet the specific requirements for their chosen program. Programs are not offered at all campuses of Nunavut Arctic College, so interested students are required to submit an application directly to the campus or community centre with the course offering.[6] International and Out of Province Canadians are required to submit applications before April first of each year, and only a limited number of seats are available to these students.[6]
Training partnerships[edit]
Nunavut Arctic College has entered into training partnerships programs for variety community and funding agencies. These programs have aided northern residents in gaining skills needed for enhancing their positions within small business, government and non-governmental organizations. Customized certificates are created specifically for the needs of the community and the organization with the help of public and private sectors. Some examples include: a Community Health Representative Program for the Government of Nunavut's Health and Social Service sector, a Community Lands Administration Certificate for the Nunavut Housing Corporation, and an Inuit Resource Management Certificate for the Nunavut Implementation Training Committee. The Director of Customized Training is a special unit based at the Kivalliq Campus located at Rankin Inlet.[7]
Transfer agreements[edit]
Nunavut Arctic College is a member of the Alberta Council on Admissions and Transfer (ACAT); therefore, the college has formed formal transfer arrangements with Aurora College in the Northwest Territories and many Alberta institutions.[8] Students are advised to refer to the Transfer Guide for information on course eligibility. The college has arranged bulk credit transfer for other Canadian universities including McGill University in Quebec, Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, and the University of Manitoba in Manitoba.[8]
Financial assistance is available to qualified students in Nunavut though: Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC), the Financial Assistance for Nunavut Students (FANS), and the various regional Inuit Organizations. A student is responsible to initiate the funding request.[9]
Tuition fees are established by the Minister of Education. In the current (2005–2007) calendar, the tuition fees were set at $1000 per term for full-time students, $200 per course for part-time students and free for senior citizens (defined as a student over the age of sixty).[9]
Future direction[edit]
Higher education in Nunavut is in the infancy stage. The Government of Nunavut recognized that higher education is critical for economic and intellectual development; therefore, a strategy was developed to address unique challenges and opportunities found in Canada's north.[10] The Nunavut Adult Learning Strategy completed in March 2006, recommended a five-year strategy to address the needs of the adult learner in Nunavut. This includes career training, literacy, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (traditional knowledge), and professional education. The report recommended the restructuring the Department of Education, changing how vocational and apprentice training is delivered, improve career guidance and development, and the creation of a mature student graduation certificate. Adult literacy is identified a key barrier for employment for Arctic inhabitants, as Nunavut is a region with jobs in skilled sectors like mining, fishing, tourism and government.
The strategy identified that advances in post secondary training are required in Nunavut; however, the recommendation was made that Nunavut Arctic College continue to work with major Canadian universities to deliver specialized training. The small population and geographic expanse did not allow for a free standing university, particularly in a conventional form, until more residents complete their K-12 education.[10] This position appears to be changing, there have been attempts to re-define the nature of a university which could service this population base, and there is the potential for exciting change in the coming years.
See also[edit]
- List of universities in Canada
- List of colleges in Canada
- List of business schools in Canada
- List of law schools in Canada
- List of Canadian universities by endowment
- Higher education in Canada
External links[edit]
- Alberta Council on Admissions and Transfer (ACAT)
- Post secondary Education in Nunavut (Canadian information Centre for International Credentials)
- ^ a b c "Canada (Nunavut) - Education system" (RTF). IAU, World Higher Education Database (WHED). Retrieved 2008-07-25.
- ^ a b c d "A Brief Overview of Nunavut Arctic College (pg. 6)" (PDF). Nunavut Arctic College: Calendar of Courses. Nunavut Arctic College. Retrieved 2008-07-25.
- ^ Government of Nunavut. "Fourth Session, Second Legislative Assembly, Government Bill, Bill 21, Education Act" retrieved July 23, 2008
- ^ Fortier, M. and Jones, F. (?) "Engineering Public Service Excellence for Nunavut: The Nunavut Unified Human Resources Development Strategy" (page 191 - 195) Retrieved July 23, 2008
- ^ Hilyer, G. (1997) "Higher Education in the Northwest Territories" In Higher Education in Canada: Different Systems, Different Perspectives (pages 301 - 323) Retrieved July 23, 2008
- ^ a b "Policies, Procedures and Services (pg. 10)" (PDF). Nunavut Arctic College: Calendar of Courses. Nunavut Arctic College. Retrieved 2008-07-25.
- ^ "Training Partnerships and Customized Training (pg. 8)" (PDF). Nunavut Arctic College: Calendar of Courses. Nunavut Arctic College. Retrieved 2008-07-25.
- ^ a b "Transfer Credits (pg. 9)" (PDF). Nunavut Arctic College: Calendar of Courses. Nunavut Arctic College. Retrieved 2008-07-25.
- ^ a b "Financial Assistance (pg. 11)" (PDF). Nunavut Arctic College: Calendar of Courses. Nunavut Arctic College. Retrieved 2008-07-25.
- ^ a b Government of Nunavut. (2007) Retrieved July 21, 2008, Nunavut Adult Learning Strategy (page 21) ISBN 1-55325-105-9


text:
Randy Couture On Gina Carano Strikeforce Post-Fight watch video >>
Affliction's Tom Atencio and Randy Couture predict the winner of the Strikeforce Grand Prix match: Alistair Overeem vs Fabricio Werdum bout. watch video >>
Affliction's Tom Atencio and Randy Couture predict the winner of the Strikeforce Grand Prix match: Josh Barnett vs Brett Rogers bout. watch video >>
MMAinterviews.tv reporter Spencer Lazara caught up with Randy "the Natural" Couture at Strikeforce after Dan Henderson KO'd Feijao to win the Lightheavyweight Belt. Randy breaks down that fight, his watch video >>
http://www.MMAWeekly.com/ -- UFC Hall of Famer Ryan Couture may done with his fight career, but his son, Ryan, is just getting started. Ryan has been molding his career under the Strikeforce banner, watch video >>
Ryan Couture está escalado para lutar no Strikeforce em janeiro de 2013, contra a pedreira KJ Noons, e a TATAME acompanhou seu treino na X-Treme Couture. Confira a preparação da fera, que tem cinco v watch video >>
Kim Couture Strikeforce Interview watch video >>
Strikeforce: Carano vs. Cyborg Weigh-in Video watch video >>
Gegard Mousasi takes on Renato Sobral for the Strikeforce Light Heavyweight Championship title at San Jose, CA. watch video >>
Watch Carano vs Cyborg Fight Video Gina Carano faces Cristiane Santos for the first ever Strikeforce Women's 145-pound title at San Jose, CA. watch video >>


text:
Hotel Caldas
No prices found through our partners. Please contact the business directly or check some of our recommended alternatives.
Travelers also looked at:
TripAdvisor Reviews Hotel Caldas Caldes De Boi
Travel Blogs from Caldes De Boi
Breathtaking Snow Country Without the Snow
... a U-turn and headed back. Truly it is hard to describe the scenery in this part of the world, no amount of photos do it justice. And simply having a car and driving anywhere in this area was such a fabulous experience.
Well the walk was mountainous (not surprisingly) and even a twisted ankle didn't dampen memories of crystal clear, dark blue lakes set in a backdrop of rugged mountains.
"This place can't be all good" I hear you ...
Lazy days in Biert
A lazy start as James is crook. Mod got up slowly are brekky and did some more prep for our Paris break through Aurbnb, who wanted a passport identification. Once completed - which was not as easy as it seems as it used Facebook and my birthday is incorrect on that site. Once complete it was time to have a nap as everyone was either away or in bed. Walked downhill to the car with rubbish and a little walk upstream from the car showed an awesome little stream took some slow mo video. ...
Biert ...a warm welcome and relaxing place to rest
... be given some jobs and the first day (after several extremely nice coffees...of course) we started in trench digging for the electricity which was about to be connected. A full on day followed by dinner on the terrace as the sun set behind the silhouette of the mountains - what more could a man want. Well I could tell you straight away to share the experience with Liz my better half, that is all that would make the day more ...
Day 5
... hair-pin bends. This is the section which saw the tragic death of young Italian rider Fabio Casartelli, who in 1995 crashed while descending on a stage of the Tour. Our descent was steep to start with, but then became a lovely rolling downhill through villages and green pastures, all the way down to the small town of Saint-Girons. 82km (51 ...
Day 4
Day 4: Argelès-Gazost – Col du Tourmalet – Col d'Aspin – Col de Peyresourde – Bagnères-de-Luchon Today is the most demanding of them all – three infamous tour climbs all in quick succession. We are feeling the effects of yesterday's efforts. Our day started with a lovely flat scenic ride from Argelès, surrounded by granite peaks with picturesque castles and churches perched on the green slopes above us. ...


text:
So it starts out as a typical night. I get a text from my friend Jonathan Daniel Brown to come out drinking with him & some buddies. But there's always this moment when I come out to hang that he always wants to showcase my blog to everyone. Casually in conversation he finds the perfect way to drop the bomb, 'This is my friend Alex, & she actually writes a sex blog.'
I don't mind being on a pedestal for entertainment, seeing as I have some pretty great stories to tell. And before I let my ego get the best of me, I do like to consider myself a 'Sexpert.' And the only reason I would give myself a title like that is I have a pretty open sex life where I am interested in trying almost anything, but I am also knowledgeable in different areas of sexuality, & I pursue a higher education for personal benefit when it comes to things I do not know as of yet.
So I show up & meet some pretty interesting people that night. One of those individuals was Comedy Central Comedian, Bo Burnham.. Who I was far too interested in spilling the details of my kinky sex life to like a giggly boy-crazed Japanese school girl. I've never really listened to his stand up before, but let me just tell you his sense of humor was quite on par with mine, not to mention his nerdy charm, that I could have gotten on the table & ripped my pants off & done the sexy dance for him.. dead sober. But I digress..
When it comes to conversing about 'my sex blog,' it somehow always turns into, 'What are some of the kinkiest things you have done sexually.' I'm not one to kiss & tell normally, let alone get freaky & dish, but when I do I love having something to say that makes people walk away with their jaws on the floor. One of my first 'real' relationships was when I was 17, & I dated a 27 year old. So before we hop on the weird, red-flag of awkward age gaps.. let's just get to the good part. Shortly after dating I found out that he was a virgin, which didn't bother me in the least. It's great in a way being able to train someone just the way you like it. We met through work & it became one of those awkward situations because everyone at work had this assumption because I was a bit of a party girl, that I was also a sexual deviant. They weren't too far off on that one.
So to feed the reputation, I would start suggesting interesting things to do in the bedroom. Living in Koreatown at the time, we didn't have air conditioning.. so summers could be quite painful at times. One day we were both in the mood but frankly it was too hot to attempt anything. But we had these Popsicles in the freezer that were juuuuuuuust right. So we grabbed a couple from the freezer & while he was playing around with me down there he got the bold idea to DP me with them.
As a fan of cold things, this drove me absolutely nuts. It is one of the hottest things, ironically of course, to have a guy go down on you & make use of a couple ice cubes during playtime. So having something that is generally dildo shaped, & is ice cold to cool you down while things heat up was a fantastic & spontaneous thing I could only dream of.
Now normally when I tell people about the Popsicles, they are under the impression that I had two unwrapped Big Sticks shoved inside me. That isn't the case at all & I would highly advise against doing that unless you want a nice yeast infection, & probably a painful one too. What I like to refer to as, 'Ghetto Pops,' since you can buy them in bulk at the 99 cent store, are more commonly known as, 'Ice Pops.' People also ask if the wrapper would hurt, which it becomes difficult to explain that the wrapper is curved on one end, & rounded very much so like the tip of a penis, so it makes it easy to insert & protects you from the sugary death awaiting inside. To give some better imagery of what they look like, I found a couple online that are more of the popular Asian brands.
As you can see from the images below, the Popsicles not only are fully rounded on one tip, but they also snap in half in the middle. So afterwards if you want to bump up the freak level in your story, it is more than easy enough to pull one out & break it off for a nice after sex snack.


text:
#include <ldap.h> int ldap_delete_s(ld, dn) LDAP *ld; char *dn; int ldap_delete(ld, dn) LDAP *ld; char *dn;
The ldap_delete() routine is used to perform an LDAP delete operation asynchronously. It takes the same parameters as ldap_delete_s(), but returns the message id of the request it initiated. The result of the delete can be obtained by a subsequent call to ldap_result(3).


text:
Hello, I'm a student currently working on a piece about some uncommon conditions that children face such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorders etc.
I would like to highlight and raise awareness to the public about this issue, thus if anyone has any personal experience with such issues, it would be of utmost help to me.
Your sharing will not only be able to help educate the public, but also be able to give encouragement and tips to those who are currently in the same situation.
Your identity will of course, be kept confidential and all information gained will be dealt with the strictest of confidence.
If you have any stories to share or wish to understand more before you share, kindly leave your contact/e-mail here, or PM me, and I will get back to you within 24 hours. Or you can contact me directly at my school personal account: email@example.com
A letter of proof regarding my assignment can also given if necessary.
Please share your experiences with children mental illnesses
A healthy body is most important for any child or adult. Discuss all issues related to health in this forum.


text:
Description Usage Format Source See Also Examples
One issue concerning the validity of the clutch volume and parental care study
ex1031 is the selection of the bird species in the
set of currently living animals. Was the selection just as good as a random
sample of species from each of the groups? One way to study this for birds, at
least, is to compare the numbers of species from each of the 29 orders of birds
in the study with the known total number of species in each of the orders. If
the selection of birds had been at random, the expected proportion of species
in the study from one particular order, n, is the proportion of all species in
that order (N=9,866) times the total number of species in the sample (414).
That is, the expected number in each sample, if random sampling were used, is
(N/9,866)x 414. Calculate the expected numbers and compare the observed numbers
with them using Pearson's chi-square statistic.
A data frame with 29 observations on the following 3 variables.
a character variable with the name of the order
the known number of species in the order
the number of sampled species from the order
Ramsey, F.L. and Schafer, D.W. (2013). The Statistical Sleuth: A Course in Methods of Data Analysis (3rd ed), Cengage Learning.
Questions? Problems? Suggestions? Tweet to @rdrrHQ or email at email@example.com.
Please suggest features or report bugs in the GitHub issue tracker.
All documentation is copyright its authors; we didn't write any of that.
Add the following code to your website.
For more information on customizing the embed code, read Embedding Snippets.


text:
Heidi Bichette Light Buzzyear added on Nov 01, 2016
pics in full gallery
(8 shown here)
pics in full gallery
(8 shown here)
Subscribers enjoy high-resolution pics (1920px)
Zishy.com subscribers enjoy the full 62 photos in this gallery. Zishy is a unique destination that features incredible girls in beautiful photos. The best part is that something is left to your imagination. You will be surprised how exciting non-explicit imagery can be.
Is it just me or does she look an awful lot like Paris Geller from Gilmore Girls? Still hot af tho...Senghas - 7 months ago
Oh so very Zishy, Heidi. Thank you! May I have another...princefan79 - 7 months ago
Wish to be the lucky bear of photos from 21 to 33....Maserlu - 7 months ago
Need a part 2!moopieb72 - 7 months ago
yum, sexy and cute.bowfinger - 7 months ago
Excellent!waydownsouth - 7 months ago
One word totally amazing! Ok that's two words haha! ❤❤Spitfire - 7 months ago
If all your models did Non-full nudity like Heidi, I'd be all for it. WOW. Also, I'm sure the everyday life of a stuffed animal on a bed would be boring as hell. But............axiom49 - 7 months ago
great set with a gorgeous modelbillzish - 7 months ago
Watch it..... that bear has a hard on.rockhopper29 - 7 months ago
Absolute perfection. Please tell me there's a part 2!sargie - 7 months ago
I love her back dimples. She's a beautyBreathless Oblivion - 7 months ago
Nice buttJohnny Tees - 7 months ago
Damn!! I'm happy to see this lovely young lady on here again.biged72 - 7 months ago
Lucky BearIson13 - 7 months ago
Please sign in or register before posting a comment.


text:
Landrum Ranks High on 2015 Florida Trend Top Private Companies List
Landrum Human Resources Companies Inc., an industry leader in staffing and human resources, ranked 90th on the 2015 Florida Trend Top 225 Private Companies list.
This is Landrum's 15th consecutive year to be recognized, and is the only Pensacola-based company to earn a spot on the 2015 list.
Profiles of Landrum and other businesses listed are featured in the July 2015 issue of Florida Trend Magazine.


text:
Country Lodge Motel
No prices found through our partners. Please contact the business directly or check some of our recommended alternatives.
TripAdvisor Reviews Country Lodge Motel Homestead
Travel Blogs from Homestead
Arrived at our Next Stop: Homestead
Today was the day we left Everglades City for Homestead. Strictly speaking, the last couple of days we mainly visited the Big Cypress swamp national park which was adjacent to the Everglades Swamp National Park but to the north. Ira said there really was not too much difference between the two. In the next day, we will visit the Everglades swamp.
We got up at 7, finished packing, and got on the road after 9am after having ...
Tour Through the Sunshine State
... Mangrove islands. We could walk through various eco-systems via a raised boardwalk that permitted us to get up close and very personal with a large variety of wildlife: numerous species of birds and, of course, the ever present alligator. Speaking of alligator, we did dine at a local eatery that served alligator "bites" as an appetizer. It sort of tastes like chicken, but is chewier than chicken; it was quite delicious. One very elusive ...
The West Coast and on to the Everglades
Our journey continues south along the West Coast of Florida. Most of the way we travelled along US Highway 41. Jayne remembers her first visit to Florida to attend a cousin's wedding. She was about 10 years old then. Jayne and her parents drove from Illinois to Florida along the same highway. Interstates hadn't been built then.
In Madeira Beach we chose a KOA campground with a view of a canal. We spent two ...
Ship Inspection Oceania's "Riviera"
... size, elegant ships catering to just 684 or 1,250 guests
� Finest cuisine at sea, served in a variety of distinctive open-seating restaurants, at no additional charge
� Gourmet culinary program created by world-renowned Master Chef Jacques P�pin
� Port-intensive itineraries featuring more overnight visits and extended evening port stays
� Country club-casual ambiance; tuxedos and gowns are never required
� Bon ...
Everglades National Park
... not bother us.
We did drive over a high mountain pass down here. The photo marking the pass is included here, but you can see that it was all the way up to 3 feet above sea level. We almost needed supplemental oxygen at that high altitude. Glad we are now down to a more comfortable 2 feet above sea level here at the campground.
A few rain showers did not dampen our spirits today, and we even enjoyed seeing a ...


text: Just going through some old paperwork, and I came across a leftover, unused coupon book for the Disney Dining Club circa 1995. The price was $16.50 for a child, and included: 1 - Breakfast or lunch 1 - Lunch or Dinner 1 - One hour rental of canopy boat or sprite at Disney Marketplace (now downtown Disney) 1 - use of all transportation at WDW Meals included appetizer/salad, entree, beverage, dessert, tax, and tip. Included all the table service restaurants I can remember, plus the Luau. It did specify you couldn't get lobster at Coral Reef Too bad it has expired!


text:
I slept fitfully until about 9 o'clock, I don't really know what time I went to sleep last night. I attempt to sit up but my head is pounding and I feel slightly sick, I reach across the bed but it is empty. Rory is elsewhere, I grope around for my phone and manage to dial his number.
"Hello," I manage to croak out, "Where are you?" I say, hoping he is close to hand.
"I'm in the kitchen. Why?"
"Because my head is killing and I need a paracetamol but I can hardly sit up let alone walk downstairs to find one"
"So you thought you'd rind me to ask me to find these things for you?"
"Yes. Sad, but I can't move"
"Right then, give me a few minutes and I will have those items at your side"
"Thank You" I say, hanging up and flopping back onto the pillow.
Within minutes Rory has entered the room with a glass, brandishing it in my face encouraging me to drink. Within minutes of drinking the water, I feel slightly more human, only just though. Rory must be feeling my pain, something is wrong with him today, he looks slightly nervous.
"Hey babe, whats wrong? You look knotted up"
"Oh, do I? I just think last night is coming back to haunt me. Plus I was up for a while with you as well"
"Me?" I say, a bit shocked if I'm honest, "Why were you up with me?"
"Because love, after you went to sleep you woke up mumbling something about being sick, so I jumped out of bed and carried you to the bathroom and held your hair back whilst you were sick. Then carried you back to bed and watched you sleep for a while to make sure that you weren't going to be sick again."
"Oh, God," I mutter, I can feel my cheeks blushing, "I'm sorry you had to see me like that"
"It's fine. I don't mind, I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to choke on your own sick. But even when you had your head over the toilet, you were still cute and adorable in your own little way. Anyway, you drink up and make yourself human again. If you want to have a little sleep, do so, I'll be waiting because I've got something to show you"
I drift off into an alcohol fuelled slumber, thankful for the paracetamol I have consumed. I must sleep for along than intended as when I wake Rory is next to me, just watching to make sure I'm not on the verge of puking.
"How long have I been asleep?" I ask blearily, "Hope I haven't disrupted that thing you wanted to show me?"
"You've slept for a long time. And no, you haven't but get in the shower and get dressed because it wont wait forever," he says with a serious look on his face. I stumble out of bed and into the shower, the feeling of nausea has gone but in its place, a stinking headache. I spend a long time in the shower, making myself more human, with every minute that passes I feel ten per cent better. I ponder what Rory has in order but my brain cannot really cope with this amount of thought, so I leave the shower and get changed. Rory must have gone back downstairs to perfect whatever he has in store for me. I look at the clock, its nearly midday, so maybe he has some food organised for me. I walk downstairs and into my small kitchen, Rory is sat at my small table, I look around, filled with food and decorations and Rory has a massive grin on his face. I try and rack my brain to make sure I have not forgotten any anniversary, I haven't, I smile back at Rory and take my place opposite him.
"What's this all about?" I question Rory; I notice he has still got this massive grin on his face.
"You'll just have to wait and see!" he said offering me a glass of orange juice. I accept and take a sip, my face changes rapidly, orange juice always tastes vile after brushing your teeth, "That better?" I nod, unsure on what is going to happen next.
"Right, Jen, this is something I've wanted to do for a long time." I nod, willing him to carry on, "I love you more than life itself and never want to leave you. It kills me when I leave to go home which is one of the reasons I asked you to move in with me." I take hold of his hand because it is shaking violently. Bless him, he is very nervous, "Because you are moving in with me I thought it would be only right if we took the next step." He gets off his chair and kneels on the floor, my eyes are filling with tears. I physically cannot believe he is doing this.
"Jen. I love you. Will you do me the great honour of marrying me?" he says as he opens the little box which he has a death grip on. the ring is beautiful, a silver band with one large diamond and a medley of smaller diamonds as well as amethysts. He looks at me with his big blue eyes, eager for my answer.
"Yes!" I manage to stutter out as I am overcome with emotion. I launch myself towards Rory and we both shed tears whilst holding each other.


text:
Kristen Stewart Did Not Dine with "Mystery Man" in Los Angeles
HollywoodLife has gone from taking cheap shots at Kristen Stewart whenever possible to botching movie "news" about her to bungling her travel schedule to taunting her about Robert Pattinson's co-stars to creating fake professional rivalries to stirring controversy over her sex scenes to inventing romantic evenings out to… well, you get the idea.
The site's track record with Stewart is abysmal (and that's putting it charitably). So when outlet reports that the actress had dinner with a "mystery man," red flags pop up immediately. "Eyewitnesses saw Kristen Stewart having a fun night out with a guy friend in Los Angeles Friday night May 20, while Robert Pattinson was stuck filming Cosmopolis in Toronto," declares the blog, detailing Stewart's supposed dinner at Sunset Tower Hotel's restaurant with a "pretty short, brown haired man."
"Now fans, don't get upset. This wasn't a date!" explains the webloid. "The pair looked like they were definitely just friends." Phew. For a second there, we thought the headline, "K-Stew, Mystery Man Have Dinner in Los Angeles Without R-Patz!" might be an attempt to create controversy!
"They seemed like old friends, I mean they were laughing and talking but there wasn't that romantic spark if you know what I mean," reports a "witness" for HollywoodLife. There's one problem. Actually, a rep for the actress confirms to Gossip Cop she was not at Sunset Tower Hotel's restaurant on Friday. She wasn't there with a short, brown-haired man. She wasn't there with a tall, blonde woman. She wasn't there with Bigfoot or Elvis or the Loch Ness Monster. She wasn't there, period.
But we are definitely happy for whatever random, friendly couple HollywoodLife's "eyewitnesses" did see on Friday. Maybe a website with half a clue can even identify them properly! Importantly, to create it's manufactured and inaccurate controversy, the webloid used a photo of Stewart, with insets of the Sunset Tower Hotel's restaurant and Pattinson, to convey the actress ate there without him. But no matter how many pictures (above) that the site piled on top of each other, the site's reporting just doesn't stack up.
Share the Facts ID:7c5aeecc-973d-4fa3-8756-2128bcc2711b


text:
School, like most of everyday life, is at times boring and occasionally a waste of time. We can place blame for that squarely upon the education system and teachers, or share it with parents if we'd like to keep diplomacy in the PTA. But although it's true that the adults who shape and deliver education as we know it are largely responsible for what we learn and how well we learn it while we are children, we have nobody but ourselves to blame for allowing ignorance to persist after we grow up.
This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact firstname.lastname@example.com to report an issue.
[Head over to GeekMom to read the rest of Kay Holt's post on teaching yourself with YouTube!]Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.


text:
Mono one-arm stands pro
- Description
Paddock stand for motorcycles with one support arm.
Ball bearings for even easier and more precise control.
It may be used on the width of the front of the motorcycle. Jacking up the and motorcycle saves space.
The lever can be removed for even easier space saving.
Suitable mounting pin needs to be chosen and ordered separately ( https://www.polo-motorrad.de/de/catalogsearch/result/?q=Aufnahmedorn&searchfor=shop ).
With a set of wheels (article 60150201520), the motorcycle may be maneuvered in every direction - e.g. by the garage wall.
- Shipping & delivery
We always give our best to handle your order as fast as possible. Orders which are placed before 2 pm on a work day are usually handed over to our logistics partner (DHL) on the same day if in stock.
Shipping cost
4.95 Euro within Germany, Poland
5.95 Euro in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands
9.95 Euro Spain, Finland, United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden
14.95 Euro Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal
19.95 Euro Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria
All delivery costs are charged per order.
In our online shop, you can choose from various payment options. You can pay by invoice, direct debit, cash on delivery, credit card or finance.
- Reviews
- Product Questions (0)
Here you can ask public questions which can be answered not only by us, but also by other customers. If you have a private question, please use our contact form.
Fragen zum Produkt