text:
The first thing you notice when you walk into the Electronic Entertainment Expo—E3 to those in the know—is the volume. It's an eardrum-rattling, goose-bump-inducing, I-hate-my-neighbors sort of noise. It's the noise comes from a thousand video games played all at once and at full volume: soldiers spraying clip after M16 clip, kung fu masters battling to the death, genetically altered monsters marauding through post-apocalyptic cities. There are less grating, almost pleasant sounds, too—a touchdown cheer in a football game, for instance—but you really have to listen for them.
Video games, especially those big-budget commercial releases for the Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox, are famously (some would say notoriously) violent. But, of course, the on-screen fighting is all make believe. It's in the boardrooms and cubicles of the $60 billion video-game industry where you find the real carnage.
Case in point: Titanfall, a sci-fi shoot-'em-up,that was shown off for the first time yesterday morning at a Microsoft press conference. The release is among the year's most hotly anticipated, and it represents an end to a bloody corporate battle that pitted the brash C.E.O. of the world's largest video-game publisher, Activision Blizzard's Robert Kotick, against two of the industry's most successful game developers, Call of Duty creators Vincent Zampella and Jason West. The fight, which would ultimately involve allegations of corporate espionage, intimidation, and fraud, was all the more strange because Kotick's collaboration with West and Zampella, who founded Respawn in 2010 after leaving Activision, had been one of the most lucrative in the game industry's 40-year history.
West and Zampella's last title for Activision, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2—a military simulation that takes players through Russian gulags, Brazilian favelas, and a besieged Washington, D.C.—went on sale at midnight on November 10, 2009, and within 24 hours had sold nearly five million copies. Its first-day gross, $310 million, easily topped that of any movie, book, album, or other video game that went on sale that year. In a triumphant press release, Kotick, their boss at the time, called it "the largest entertainment launch in history." By January, Modern Warfare 2 had surpassed $1 billion in gross sales.
But in March, just months after their resounding success, West and Zampella say they were summoned to Activision's headquarters in Santa Monica, California, where they were escorted, separately, by a detail of thick-necked security guards wearing communications earpieces into a conference room, where they were met by a lawyer and Activision's head of human resources. According to West and Zampella, they were told they could not return to their offices, could not talk to their former colleagues, and—oh yes—would not be receiving the $36 million in bonuses and royalties they'd been expecting. (Activision declined to coment.)
"I was speechless," West told me when I interviewed him two years ago at E3. "In my head, this was the moment when everyone was supposed to go home in a limousine. Instead, we were eating the seed corn and they were taking all the money." West drove home, broke the bad news to his wife, and got drunk. Zampella spent the evening having a talk with his son to prepare him for what he might hear about the incident in school.
Then the two men went to war.
That same week, they sued Activision for wrongful termination, seeking to recover bonuses and control of their billion-dollar franchise. The following month, they announced that they had founded Respawn—video-game jargon for what happens when a character dies and digitally reincarnates—and would be hiring. They rented a cheap office in the San Fernando Valley, set up a bare-bones Web site, and began to lure dozens of developers from Activision, financing all of this with a large advance from Electronic Arts, Activision's main rival.
Signing the two hottest guys in video games was a major coup for EA, but for Activision it was treasonous. In a countersuit in April 2010, Activision alleged that West and Zampella were not the naïve artists they claimed to be; they were co-conspirators, "small-minded executives," motivated by "envy and personal greed." The suit claimed that West and Zampella had colluded with EA to get themselves fired and set up a rival studio. "The things they did," Kotick, the Activision C.E.O., said in an interview with a gaming magazine, "I would go to jail if I did them."
Disputes like this one have become surprisingly common in the video-game industry. "It's the timeless struggle between the suits and the ponytails," says Trip Hawkins, a longtime game executive who founded Electronic Arts in 1982. "It's an ideological conflict," Hawkins says. "The suits are driven by money and power. The ponytails don't hate money, but what they really care about are ideas and artistic expression." There's truth in this story, but it also leaves out an important point: it's not always easy to tell suits from ponytails.
In the past 20 years, video-game design has professionalized, with dozens of colleges offering master's and bachelor's degrees in the craft. The University of Southern California has the top program in the country, according to the Princeton Review's annual rankings, and there is an entire university dedicated to producing video-game developers, the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington, which boasts an enrollment of nearly 1,000 undergraduates.
But in the early 1990s, when West and Zampella were breaking into the business, making video games was still a fringe pursuit, undertaken largely by Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts who'd failed at most everything else. West, 40, has a quick wit, but he looks a bit like the comic-book geek on The Simpsons, with a gut, a goatee, and a thin, long ponytail of black hair. He learned to write computer programs at age nine and spent much of his early childhood playing text-based role-playing games on a primitive P.C. He struggled through two years at the University of Texas before dropping out and moving back home to Dallas. He finished college at the University of North Texas, where his dad taught physics and where, more importantly to him, a group of computer-science majors had started a video-game club.
Zampella, 43, is the business mind. He has close-cropped blond hair and generally cleans up a bit better than West, but he's awkward in conversation, speaking in a soft voice with a slight lisp. He got into the game business after a brief, unsuccessful stint at Broward Community College in Florida, followed by work as a handyman. With the help of a friend who worked at a computer store, Zampella talked his way into an entry-level job at a local game company, answering phones and testing new releases.
The pair first met in 1997, when Zampella, who had become a producer at SegaSoft, hired the Dallas video-game company where West worked to build a role-playing game called Skies. The working relationship became a friendship, and two years later, when West took a job as the lead developer at an obscure Tulsa, Oklahoma, game start-up called 2015, he convinced Zampella to join him as lead producer. Their first game, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, was commissioned by EA in 2000 as a P.C. version of Medal of Honor—a big-budget Playstation game produced by DreamWorks Interactive, published by EA, and created by Steven Spielberg*.*
Because games made for consoles like the Playstation and Xbox outsell P.C. games by a wide margin, EA seems to have viewed Allied Assault as an inexpensive side project, awarding the contract to 2015 despite the fact that the two-year-old studio had never produced a full-length game. Tom Kudirka, 2015's founder and C.E.O., landed the deal thanks to a recommendation from a friend at a well-established studio, staffing the company with amateur developers he'd found on Web forums.
Two years later, this inexperienced group delivered a game to EA that was at least as promising as the original Medal of Honor. Up to that point, game designers had instructed players on what to do using blinking arrows or on-screen text, which was an inelegant but effective way to keep players from walking into walls or getting lost in spaceships. But in their rendition of the Allied invasion of Normandy, West's team introduced a storytelling innovation: they put the game's instructions in the mouths of commanding officers, making Allied Assault feel more like a movie than a game. "I was blown away," says Danny Bilson, a professor of game writing at U.S.C. and an executive vice president at the game company THQ. At the time, Bilson oversaw the entire Medal of Honor series as a producer for EA. "It was one of the most immersive things I'd ever seen," he says. Released in January 2002, Allied Assault would sell over a million copies in its first 10 months, a huge take that made it one of the most successful P.C. games in history. Ten years later, it still has a devoted following.
The success of Allied Assault was less a coup for 2015 than it was for Zampella, who, according to a lawsuit filed against him by 2015's Kudirka and two other former 2015 executives, immediately began plotting a way to strike out on his own. The lawsuit, which contains startlingly similar allegations to those that would be made by Activision a decade later, claims that Zampella began negotiating with EA through an intermediary and organized secret weekly meetings at a local Tex-Mex joint, during which he conceived a plan to leave 2015 and start a competing studio, known as Infinity Ward. Salaries and job titles were planned, the renting of office space was discussed, and a time line was drawn up.
Zampella and West say there was no conspiracy, but no one disputes what happened next. In the days before *Allied Assault'*s release, Kudirka's team rose up against him. Each day, Kudirka would come to the office and find a handful of resignation letters slipped under his door. By the end of January, 20 of Kudirka's 27 developers had turned in letters. "People don't have any idea that Jason and Vince did the exact same thing to me that they're doing to Activision," says Kudirka. "I was a tough boss. But those guys screwed me over pretty good."
These allegations have never been reported in the press, and West and Zampella clammed up the first time I asked them what happened. Zampella laughed awkwardly. "Things happened," was all West would offer. (Later, Robert Schwartz, Respawn's lawyer, denied that West and Zampella had organized a walk-out at 2015.) Then he changed the subject and telling me about the idyllic conditions at Infinity Ward following the group's departure from 2015. Decisions were made communally, with employees sitting on the floor in a circle. "We just wanted to make kick-ass games," West says. "That's what it was about."
When an advance to develop a new game for EA failed to materialize, West and Zampella offered their services to EA's chief competitor, which jumped at the chance to do business with them. Activision paid $1.5 million for a 30 percent stake in Infinity Ward. The lawsuit was quietly settled. As part of the deal, Activision received the right to buy the remaining 70 percent of the studio at the same valuation and acquired Infinity Ward outright for an additional $3.5 million the following year.
Bobby Kotick was just 27 years old—about the same age as Jason West at the time of Infinity Ward's founding—when he bought Activision out of bankruptcy in 1990. Kotick, who had already started two software companies, was wildly ambitious and well connected. He wasn't much of a gamer, but he'd become convinced that the game business represented a huge investment opportunity. With help from his mentor (casino mogul Steve Wynn) and two other partners, Kotick paid $440,000 to acquire a 30 percent stake in Activision and became its C.E.O..
It was an odd marriage. Activision had been founded as an artist's redoubt in 1979 by four fed-up developers from Atari who felt they weren't getting the credit or the money they deserved. (In an interview with Fortune, Atari's C.E.O. had maligned his developers' contribution, calling them "high-strung prima donnas.") "We asked for a little recognition, similar to that afforded a book author," Activision co-founder David Crane told me in an e-mail. "When we were told we were no more important to the success of a game than the assembly-line worker who built it, we left the company." Activision paid designers bonuses tied to profits and included Hollywood-style credits with each game. Developers wore T-shirts with the words "Just Another High-Strung Prima Donna" printed across the chest.
The company flourished in its early years, but its success inspired competitors with similar business models, and even similar ideologies. Electronic Arts was founded by Hawkins, a former marketing executive at Apple Computer, in 1982 as a haven for game developers—or, as Hawkins called them in the company's early days, "software artists." EA's name was a reference to United Artists, the production company that Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford founded in 1919, and whose founding struck the first blow against the studio system.
But in the mid-1980s, growth in the video-game industry slowed dramatically, and the idealistic ambitions of both companies gave way to more pressing concerns. Hawkins left EA in 1991 and was replaced as C.E.O. by Larry Probst, a former Clorox executive, whose pioneering strategy, which would be adopted by Kotick as well, was to pump out sequels to a handful of successful franchises, including John Madden Football and Sim City.
Activision, on the other hand, struggled mightily just to stay solvent. Facing declining sales, a $3.5 million patent-infringement judgment, and a dearth of new games in the pipeline, the company renamed itself Mediagenic and focused on developing business software. By 1990, it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the next decade, Kotick presided over a remarkable turnaround. He brought back the Activision name, laid off almost everybody, and moved the company from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, where it would not have to compete with EA for talent. He hired managers from the consumer-products industry and asked developers to take responsibility not just for their games' quality but also for their profitability. His goal, he later joked, had been to "take the fun out of video games."
This approach played well on Wall Street, and Activision's stock soared past that of EA. A Forbes cover story outlining Kotick's accomplishments called him "Activision's Unlikely Hero." But to gamers, Kotick was pure evil. Comments on Internet forums compare him to the Superman villain Lex Luthor, Dr. Seuss's Grinch, and inevitably, Adolf Hitler. Developers speak of a corporate culture that values profit above all else: "He definitely has that kind of widget-maker attitude," Tim Schafer, a game developer and longtime Kotick critic, once told Eurogamer. "His obligation is to his shareholders. Well, he doesn't have to be as much of a dick about it."
Even so, West and Zampella initially thrived under Kotick's regime. They released Call of Duty games for Activision in 2003 and 2005, the second of which was chosen as a launch title for Microsoft's Xbox 360 game system and moved more than a million copies in its first year. Still, West says, Activision's focus on developing wildly profitable franchises and then milking them for all they were worth quickly grew stifling. He longed to let his imagination run beyond the narrow bounds imposed by historical fiction. He imagined a war game that would use contemporary weapons and tactics, while addressing anxieties about terrorism and violence. World War II had a clear hero and a clear villain; war in the modern era is full of ambiguity.
At a steak house not far from Respawn's headquarters—and supervised by a publicist and a lawyer—I asked West if there were times when Infinity Ward had clashed creatively with its bosses. He paused for a minute. "Well, Activision wanted us to make another World War II game," said West, his words clipped, his voice rising. "So that'd be an example of when we pushed for something creatively. And now they have billions of dollars they didn't have before."
Zampella finished his thought. "We're such jerks," he said.
West and Zampella have been using this line since at least 2009, when West told PlayStation magazine, "We had to fight for everything." It's also an oddly ungenerous position, given that Kotick agreed to finance the risky new war game and spent lavishly to market it. Released in 2007 as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (most gamers simply call it Modern Warfare), the title sold more than 10 million units in its first nine months, received glowing reviews, and took top honors at the Interactive Achievement Awards, the industry's equivalent of the Oscars.
For West and Zampella, this sudden success was fortuitous, coming just months before their contract with Activision was due to expire. Activision wanted a second Modern Warfare, and seemed to want it badly. Kotick was negotiating his company's merger with Vivendi Games, and his only other major title, Guitar Hero, was facing stiff competition from a similar game, Rock Band. Dealt a winning hand, West and Zampella went all in: they agreed to Kotick's demand that they deliver Modern Warfare 2 for the 2009 holiday season—giving Activision a likely blockbuster for that year—in exchange for a bonus plan that had the potential to make them among the highest-paid video-game developers in the industry. They also got the thing they'd wanted all along: creative control.
Kotick gave West and Zampella the equivalent of final cut on the entire Modern Warfare franchise, including the power to block any subsequent sequels. This was unprecedented at Activision and rare in the industry. As part of the agreement, West and Zampella were allowed to operate almost completely autonomously. Whereas other studios had to submit their finished games to their bosses for quality testing several months before the release dates, Infinity Ward was allowed to handle this task internally. The upshot was that no one among Activision's top brass would play Modern Warfare 2 until the general public did. ("We were giving up some control," concedes Steven Marenberg, a lawyer who initially served as Activision's lead council. "It gave them comfort and we wanted them to feel comfortable and motivated.")
Kotick did build a loophole into the deal: if West and Zampella were fired, rights to the games would revert to Activision. West and Zampella, who negotiated the arrangement without an agent, say they didn't initially appreciate the ramifications of this last clause. "It's not like Hollywood, where you can just read Variety and see what deal somebody got," West says. "I had Vince to represent me, and Vince had me to represent him. That's how we got by."
During an hour-long interview in the summer of 2011, Kotick, sporting a sweater vest over a white T-shirt, waxed nostalgic about his past and emphasized that he'd negotiated in good faith. But he refused to respond to West and Zampella's most explosive allegation: that Activision began trying to fire them only months after the 2008 contract had been signed. Court filings reveal that in an e-mail exchange between two executives charged with overseeing West and Zampella in January 2009, one warned that the risks of firing the pair would be great. "Is everyone ready for the big, negative PR story this is going to turn into if we kick them out?" he asked. "Freaking me out a little."
The apparent effort to find a pretext to replace West and Zampella became known within Activision's top ranks as "Project Icebreaker"—the code name seemingly straight out of a video-game villain's playbook. It was undertaken in part by a former I.T. director, Thomas Fenady, who in a deposition claimed he was ordered by Activision's former chief legal officer, George Rose, to "dig up dirt on Jason and Vince."
Fenady testified that Rose instructed him to hack into West and Zampella's computers, cell phones, and e-mail accounts. "We're sick of dealing with these guys, their egos. They're difficult to work with," Rose allegedly told him. "We just want to get rid of them." (Rose denied having asked Fenady to "dig up dirt" on the two but admitted to asking Fenady to monitor e-mails.) Fenady said he asked about the repercussions of a secret investigation and remembers being told, "This comes from Bobby directly. . . . Don't worry about repercussions." Accoding to Fenady, there were discussions about creating a ruse—possibilities included a fake fire drill or a building fumigation—to give Activision investigators time to sneak into the Infinity Ward offices and copy their e-mails. They eventually tried to hire a private security firm to hack the e-mails. (The security firm refused, citing legal concerns.)
In the meantime, Kotick's deputies busied themselves with trying to find their replacements. PowerPoint slides from late 2009 compare the pay packages of West and Zampella—who each made $16.3 million in 2008 alone—with the meager salaries of their eventual replacements, Steve Pearce and Steve Ackrich. Around the same time, Activision awarded stock grants to Infinity Ward's key employees, apparently to entice them to stay at the company.
For their part, West and Zampella tried unsuccessfully to block the stock grants, and rebelled against Activision in ways large and small. According to a deposition from a senior Activision executive, they blew off meetings, insulted managers, and generally acted like, well, high-strung prima donnas. West frequently explained his resistance to various directives with the mantra, "I'm not getting back to my happy place." During one particularly heated exchange, according to the deposition, West and Zampella threatened to not participate in the E3 demo for Modern Warfare 2, hanging up on Activision vice-chairman Mike Griffith during a conference call. Kotick, when told of the rebellion, suggested in an email that Griffith "change their locks and lock them out of their building."
In the months leading up to the release—and wild success—of Modern Warfare 2, West and Zampella began trying to renegotiate their contract. They felt that Activision had been meddling with their studio and asked to spin out Infinity Ward as an independent company with Activision as its publisher. They would not be Bobby Kotick's employees, and Infinity Ward, not Activision, would own the games they made. They hired an agent, Seamus Blackley of CAA, and threatened to use their creative-control provision to block the development of any future Modern Warfare games if their demands were not met. West told me he had no intention of leaving Activision, but that he and Zampella had no choice but to weigh their options. "We weren't trying to plan a future outside of Activision," West insisted. "We were just planning a future."
But Kotick refused to negotiate, or even meet with Blackley. "West and Zampella are talented guys," Kotick says. "This dispute wasn't about that. It was about their conduct. It would have sent a bad message and badly affected the culture of our company if we had tolerated what they were doing." In August, Blackley arranged for a private jet to take West and Zampella to Silicon Valley for a secret meeting at the home of EA C.E.O. John Riccitiello.
In February 2010, Activision hired a law firm to launch an official investigation into possible misconduct, which included interviews, conducted under oath, with West, Zampella, and their employees. According to a separate complaint filed by former Infinity Ward developers who joined West and Zampella's suit, employees were told not to discuss the investigation with anyone and were forbidden from hiring lawyers. Security guards became a regular fixture at Infinity Ward's offices. The atmosphere, according to the lawsuit, was that of a "police state."
In an early level of Modern Warfare 2, you assume the role of a young special-forces recruit assigned to go undercover with a Russian terrorist cell. "Yesterday you were a soldier on the front lines," intones Lieutenant General Shepherd, your gruff and almost comically amoral commander, voiced by the actor Lance Henriksen. "But today, the front lines are history." He warns that your mission will involve significant collateral damage, and "will cost nothing compared to everything you'll save."
Moments later, you find yourself in a crowded international airport as your Russian compatriots begin indiscriminately mowing down travelers. There's an automatic weapon in your hand, and as you watch the terrorists slay innocent people, you begin to wonder what will happen if you join in by tapping the "X" button.
It is possible to complete the level, "No Russian," without shooting any civilians; you can simply hang back as the terrorists kill people. But most players follow General Shepherd's instructions and start firing, killing dozens of screaming travelers. Whatever you do, the scene ends with a dramatic plot twist. Just as you try to hop into the back of a getaway van, your comrades throw you to the ground and shoot you in the head. As you expire, you learn that the terrorists knew you were an American the whole time; you've been set up.
It's fitting that the level, which was controversial even within the video-game industry, became West and Zampella's artistic calling card. The story of double agents and deep-cover espionage almost perfectly encapsulates their own penetration of the corporate entertainment world. As Kotick put it, "These guys are sophisticated businessmen and entrepreneurs"—in short, a lot like him. "They negotiate deals with the biggest companies and hire the best lawyers."
In the months leading up to the trial, West and Zampella's demands for damages increased from $36 million to more than $1 billion to account, in part, for possible future earnings, and Activision started to act defensively. In an S.E.C. filing on May 9, 2012, the company disclosed that it had begun setting aside cash in case a verdict in the lawsuit went against it. The following day, Activision announced that it had hired D.C. power lawyer Beth Wilkinson, a former army captain who led the government's successful prosecution of Timothy McVeigh to lead the trial. Wilkinson immediately asked for a delay to get up to speed on the case, but her request was denied.
A few days later, Activision, which had steadfastly refused to pay bonuses to former Infinity Ward developers who had defected to Respawn and joined West and Zampella's suit, announced a reversal: it would immediately pay them a total of $42 million. The company also announced that it had reached a settlement with EA over the alleged poaching of West and Zampella. With the trial only days away, it offered West and Zampella a settlement thought to be in the tens of millions of dollars. They accepted.
In a statement, EA called the settlement, "a vindication of Vince and Jason, and the right of creative artists to collect the rewards due for their hard work." As he walked out of the courthouse in early June following the judge's dismissal of the case, West flashed reporters an ear-to-ear smile, pleased that his narrative of starving artists taking on an evil corporation had found some success. After the signing agreement, Activision stopped responding to questions about its battle with Respawn. A person close to Activision cited the terms of the settlement as a reason for its refusal to comment.
But the story wasn't over. A person close to the company says that revelations about West's erratic behavior at Activision, which came out during the depositions, upset Zampella. "Vince felt that Jason was sabotaging the company," says the source. As the Respawn team scrambled to finish Titanfall, West was barely coming to the office. In March, he officially parted ways with his longtime partner, moving his family to North Carolina and leaving Zampella in control of Respawn. In an interview in April, Zampella refused to elaborate on what had separated them—except to say, "It's hard to work with one person for 15 years."
In the end, the battle over Call of Duty cost Kotick almost nothing. The three subsequent sequels to the Call of Duty franchise, produced without West and Zampella, have each grossed more than $1 billion. Activision's stock is up 30 percent since their firing, and its chief executive made $64.9 million last year—second only to Larry Ellison among U.S. C.E.O.'s. Bobby Kotick lost the battle, but he won the war.
I last spoke with West in August. He seemed distant, and his words came haltingly. "It does sort of sour you on the industry" he told me. "It's tough. If we can't get treated well, what possible chance does a newcomer have? How do they prevent themselves from being strong-armed by the guys with the money? I wish I had the answer to that question, but I don't."
Follow to get the latest news and analysis about the players in your inbox.See All Players


text:
This website may not function correctly under these settings. We recommend enabling Javascript to ensure images, menu options, links and buttons function correctly.
Non-Optimal Settings Detected: It appears you have Blocked Cookies or Enabled Private Browsing. We recommend switching them off for a better user experience and to ensure you are able to shortlist properties, submit inquiries, search and change language/currency preferences correctly.
This website may not function correctly under these settings and we recommend switching them off for a better user experience and to ensure you are able to shortlist properties, search, submit inquiries and change language/currency preferences correctly.
A property agent will be in touch shortly based on the details you have entered and/or properties you have selected.
While we strive to offer same day responses, please note that enquiries sent outside office hours may be responded to on the following business day.
No favorited properties. To favorite a property click on the icon anywhere you see it.
Share with a Friend
97 Belcher's Street, Western District, Hong Kong Island
Layout & Features:
High rise apartment of 834 sq.ft.(net), with 3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, 1 maid's room with bath, 2 total balconies, 2 open balcony and sea view.
Brand new 3 bedroom apartment in Kennedy Town with stunning views of the harbor.
You will enjoy an amazing sea view from the living room and all 3 bedrooms. The kitchen comes fully equipped with top-notch appliances, the bathrooms are beautifully designed and there is storage throughout the whole apartment. Kennedy On Belcher's is a brand new residence in the trendy Kennedy Town and comes with great facilities, such as gym, barbecue area on the rooftop.
Last Updated:
368027May 15 2019
The Kennedy On Belcher's
97 Belcher's Street, Western District, Hong Kong Island
1 Years
High Rise
1 block(s)
464 to 1040
The area lying between Sheung Wan and Kennedy Town is often referred to as Western. With Sheung Wan just one stop away from Central on the MTR, Western is conveniently located for commuters. Characterised as a dense combination of residential and office buildings, the area has seen significant development in recent years with the growth of hip restaurants, galleries, and new residential and commercial towers.
*The above figures are based on OKAY.com's database
Note: By clicking on the above, you confirm your intent to receive communications from us. Your details will remain confidential and you may opt-out at any time.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Sign Up To Sell Avon In Oregon Become An Avon Representative Online! It's Easy, and a great opportunity for you to Start an Avon Business of your Own, Grow and Prosper in Oregon! Think about it, The population in Oregon as of 2016 was over 4 Million people! That's a lot of possible customers !
Some estimates have the number of active Avon Representatives in the USA at about 330,000 A low point today, but on a rebound! Some economic conditions turned many away from classic Commission Based Direct Selling over the last few years. That leaves a very large untapped market for a NEW Avon Representative in Oregon!
Divide that 330,000 by the 50 states, and assuming an even distribution across all states, for simplicity, and that gives Oregon roughly 6,600 Avon Reps. Divide the Oregon population of 4 Million by 6,600 Avon representatives and you get a estimated over 600 Customers per Avon Representative in Oregon! That is a great potential! Keep in mind that estimate of 4 Million residents includes those who may not be in the market for cosmetics. But still, think of the possibilities! ~ Your Avon Business can really take off !
Sign up to sell Avon In Oregon Online Today!
Sign Up To Sell Avon In Oregon Become An Avon Representative Online and still be on my Sales Team! You will still be able to communicate with me, and have access to my help just as if you lived right next door. I have Avon Representatives on my sales team in many States. My goal is to be able to help people in every State start and run a successful Avon Business. Once you sign up and complete the process Avon will email me and let me know you have signed up to sell Avon on my Sales Team, at this point I will contact you as soon as I get your email. We can start working on a plan for you to grow your business, with a sales plan, and begin working on growing a sales team of your own!
I do NOT sell my Help! No DVD's Online Paid Classes, NO! Join my Sales Team and you have direct access to my help for FREE! – As it should be….
Become An Avon Representative Online – Sell Avon
Click here to Sign up to Sell Avon or Click the picture to go to the form. Fill out the first page and click submit, on the next screen You will see a choice of Start-Up kit configurations. You may choose from 3 kits, starting at $25. for a Basic, $50. for a Medium kit, and finally, a the Premium $100. kit is available. The Premium kit contains over $400. worth of supplies and samples. By far the Premium Avon Star Up Kit is the greatest value as it contains more product samples, and supplies. Each kit contains more brochures, and is all around better stocked than in previous years. While you may start your business, and do well no matter which kit you choose, if you have the money, the larger kit will allow you to reach more customers with a brochure, and to offer a product sample for a potential customer who may be interested in trying something before making a purchase.When asked please enter Reference Code CARTRIP in the box.
When asked please enter Reference Code CARTRIP in the box.
My reference code ensures AVON adds you to me sales team!
Avon will collect some information at this time, please be sure you have a secure location for deliveries! Think about this carefully. If necessary, add directions to place the deliveries around back. Be sure your address, and ID address is up to date, and correct. Be sure your bank has your most recent and correct address. Avon will verify these items, and if they find them satisfactory you may end up with a credit for placing your orders. Otherwise, most New Avon Representatives are required to pay for their order when they place it with Avon, so make sure your credentials are correct, and up to date first! If you are not sure, call me first! I want to do everything to get you started on the right track from day 1. Once you complete the Online Sign Up, an Avon Starter Kit will be mailed to you. You should receive it in less than 7 business days. It will contain some paper work, business guidelines, procedures, and how to get your business going. Your welcome email will instruct you to go online and register to activate your web based Avon e-store. You should hit the ground running and get this done as soon as possible! Ready to get started ! – Keep reading !
Start Your Avon Business Today Online
Sign Up To Sell Avon In Oregon Become An Avon Representative Online – It's your time for Success! The best way to ensure Success is to take control, and Sign Up To Sell AVON ! Yes I know I'm biased, but all Avon Business Owners, and they are Successful, Confident, and Earning a comfortable living selling Avon Products. Join them, push the Join Now button and get Started ! If you have additional questions look at this website, or call me, I'll be happy to talk with you before you sign up!
Thank you for choosing to Sign Up To Sell Avon On My Team !


text:
The WOW factor – A TEXTILLERY throw on a hotel bed makes the guest say WOW! We get calls every day from a guest that has fallen in love with the throw in their room – they want their own TEXTILLERY throw. We've had designers start with the throw; they design and build the rest of the room around it. Whether adding an unexpected splash of color or a luxurious neutral, TEXTILLERY throws truly finish the room!
Variety and versatility are the key – Our reversible throws can be woven in widths from 36" to 54" by whatever length you need. No project is too small – TEXTILLERY can custom design/custom color for as few as 10 throws. TEXTILLERY speaks green – our bamboo throws have a wonderful hand, dye beautifully, and are ecofriendly. TEXTILLERY is the exclusive licensee for Sunbrella® throws – offering a collection of high performance throws made from Sunbrella® yarns – ideal for indoor and outdoor uses.
We welcome new hospitality clients. Our opening order is typically 10 units of a style. We will do swatches or single model room throws. Contact Judith at Textillery directly.
The Hospitality Portfolio will give you an overview of some of the projects we have completed. Hotels around the world have used our throws – including Four Seasons, Fairmont, Ritz Carlton, Marriott, and Hilton. If you are searching for a particular hotel or hotel chain, use our search feature in the upper right hand corner to type in the name of the property.


text:
• NBA: The crowd down at Cheers are still celebrating this one ... except for Norm, who's in the crapper. Celtics 97, Cavaliers 92.
• NHL: Bow before our flightless, herring-breathed overlords. Penguins 6, Flyers 0.
• Auto racing: I misunderstood ... I thought "Bump Day" was something else entirely. Foyt makes Indy 500 field.


text:
Let's take our Bibles this morning and look, for our Scripture lesson, to the 8th chapter of Matthew, the gospel of Matthew and the 8th chapter. We're having an ongoing study of this marvelous gospel, the record of the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, as seen by Matthew under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I've entitled the message this morning from verses 16 to 22, "What Keeps Men from Christ." It could be titled, "What Makes Christ Refuse Would-Be Followers?" In some ways it is utterly incredible, absolutely inexplicable that people continually reject and refuse to acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ. In some ways it is beyond understanding that people would reject Jesus Christ as the Savior; the incomparable, matchless, lovely, gracious Son of God. The Savior of the world who died for men is still despised by men today as He was when He first came. And as you study the gospel of Matthew it becomes very apparent to you that the unbelief and the rejection of people flies in the face of all that Christ has done, for His credentials are obvious. The proof of His personhood as God in human flesh is beyond any contradiction. His words, His works, His death, His resurrection; all of these things speak loudly, they speak clearly, they speak unmistakably of the reality that He is the Christ of God, the Savior of the world. And though it says in John 1, "He came unto His own and His own received Him not," and though He said in John 5, "You will not come unto me that you might have life," and though they cried out at His crucifixion, "We will not have this man to reign over us," all of those statements about rejection and refusal to acknowledge Christ really go right against the very affirmations that people made when they were confronted with Him. In other words rejection flies in the face of massive evidence.
The world is like a judge in a court who has heard an open-and- shut, airtight case and made the exact opposite verdict from the facts. For example, the authority of Jesus was apparent. In Matthew 7 it says, "The people were astonished at His teaching, for He taught them as one having authority." The words of Jesus were absolutely unique. In John 7:46 they said, "Never a man spake like this man."
The works of Jesus were undeniably divine. The blind man said to his inquisitors in John 9, "Why, here is a marvelous thing, that you know not from where He is, and yet He has opened my eyes. If this man were not from God He could not do this."
The wisdom of Jesus was super human. In Matthew 22, they confronted Him with a coin and they said, "Should we pay tax to Caesar?" He said, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." And the Scripture says, "When they heard these words they marveled."
His purity was undeniable. He confronted them in John 8 and he said, "Which of you convicteth me of sin?" and there was dead silence. His truthfulness was beyond question. In John 8:46, He said, "If I say the truth, why then do you believe Me not?"
His power fascinated them. In Luke 8:25, they said, "What manner of man is this, for He commandeth even the wind and the waves and they obey Him?"
His provision fed them. He fed them on the side of the mountain and in John 6 they showed up again and he said, "You seek Me because you did eat of the loaves and were filled."
His healing removed their sicknesses, "And when the multitude saw Him heal the paralytic, they marveled and glorified God, who had given such power unto men," says Matthew 9:8.
His love, it literally overawed them. They stood at the grave of Lazarus and they saw Jesus as He began to weep and they said, "Behold how He loved him."
His dominance over demons shocked them. When He cast the demon out in Matthew 9:33, it says, "The multitudes marveled saying, 'It was never so seen in Israel.'" His judgment was awesome. When He came to the fig tree, it died. Matthew 21:20 says, "They marveled."
His composure was beyond the human. He was silent before Pilate, who had the power over His life. He showed no fear. He gave no defense and Matthew 27:14, says, "He answered him never a word, so that the governor marveled greatly."
His teaching, His teaching was so far beyond any teacher they had ever known, that it says in John 7:15, "The Jews marveled saying, 'How knoweth this man letters, never having learned?'" And as a boy of twelve the doctors in the temple were astonished at His questions. His independence from their legal system made them shudder. The Pharisees marveled that He did not first wash before dinner. He defied their ceremonies.
His tender condescension shocked them. The woman who had five husbands, who was living with one who wasn't her husband, a harlot, an adulteress, and He talked with her, and He loved her, and He cleansed her, and it says in John 4:27, "They marveled that He talked with that woman."
You see, everything about Him was astounding. Everything about Him was astonishing. Everything about Him was humanly inexplicable. Everything about Him was marvelous, superhuman, supernatural, divine. And they saw it all. Is it any wonder then that in Mark 6:6 it says, "Jesus marveled at their unbelief?" Why? I mean, why? How can you be exposed to such an infinite number of convincing credentials and walk away? How can it be? Well for some, for some, there's an overt willful love of sin. And in John 3 it says, "Men love [What?] darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil and they don't want to come to the light because the light proves their deeds." And some people just love sin and they defy the evidence and they cling to their evil. Those people really never bother to show up. They run the other way. But then there's another category of people and they're the kind that see the attractiveness of Jesus, the charisma, the power, and they're attracted to that. They're the thrill seekers. They want to get in on the action and so they show up and they linger and they hang around and the church has them today, too. And they may claim to be born again. And they may say, "We follow Jesus," and they're attracted by the wonder of His person, but they're just as lost as the ones who turn and run from the light. And we're going to meet three of them in this passage.
But to begin with, let's begin at the beginning, verse 16. Matthew has just recorded three miracles, three miracles that may well have happened on the same day. Jesus concluded the marvelous masterful Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5 through 7. People were astounded at His authority. The very teaching itself attracted a crowd. He had already performed thousands, no doubt, of healings and so the crowd was massive by now, following him around Galilee. It may well be that these three miracles were performed on the Sabbath day, and now the Sabbath day is over and we pick it up in verse 16. "When the evening was come, [and by the way, the evening, the setting of the sun, marked the end of the Sabbath, and until that time the Jews would not do anything to break Sabbath law, but once the evening had come] they began to bring them, those who were possessed with demons; and He cast out the spirits with His word and healed all that was sick." As soon as the Sabbath had come to a close they began to come with all the sick and all the demon-possessed and they began to press against Him with all of these people who needed Him, and He healed all. He healed all. It was always that way. You don't have to look and scrape and scratch to find a miracle; thousands of them. He healed everybody. If their disease and disorder was spiritual, related to the possession of demons, He healed that. If it was physical sickness, He healed that. And He healed all of them. It wasn't a question of their faith. It wasn't a question of their circumstances. He healed them all. He was giving evidence of His messiahship and His deity that is beyond question.
In Matthew 12:15, "And when Jesus knew it, He withdrew himself from there [that is, from the council of the Pharisees] and great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them all." Matthew 14:14, "He saw a great multitude. He was moved with compassion toward them and He healed their sick." Unqualified, unlimited healing! Luke 5:17, "It came to pass on a certain day, as He was teaching, there were Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting by who were come out of every town of Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem, and the power of the Lord was present for Him to heal them." In Chapter 9 of Luke also, I think it's in verse 6, you have a similar statement, "And they departed and went through the towns preaching the gospel and healing everywhere." As I told you last week, for all intents and purposes Jesus banished disease from Palestine. Incredible, immense, voluminous were His miracles.
Now beloved, when someone is marching through the countryside doing this, he tends to attract a crowd, and that is exactly what happened. Even phony healers today can draw crowds, and even the people who go away as sick as they were when they showed up insist on trying to find another healer, so often. Jesus healed everybody and naturally the crowd got larger and larger and that's what we find in verse 16, this massive crowd.
Now why did He heal them all? Well we could say it was because of His compassion and we would be right. He had compassion on people. He despised disease because He knew disease was a result of what? Sin. That doesn't mean that every time you're sick is because you committed a certain sin. What I mean by that is because there is sin in the world, there is disease in the world. Because there is sin in the world, there is death in the world. So He despised sin and death and disease. And so in compassion toward people He healed them. But there is more than that. He healed them, I think, another reason, He healed them because He was giving them a preview of His kingdom. You want to know what will happen when Christ sets up His eternal kingdom? There will be no more death. There will be no more sorrow. There will be no more pain. There will be no more sickness. And here He comes banishing disease from Palestine, raising the dead. These are all previews of His eternal kingdom. Just as on the Mount of Transfiguration when He pulled back His flesh and revealed His glory, so does He give them visions of the coming glorious kingdom when disease is banished forever.
But there's yet a third reason why He healed and it is given in verse 17, and this is that to which the Spirit speaks. He did this in order that—it's a purpose clause—for the purpose of fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah. Now the Old Testament had predicted that the Messiah would come and the prophets had said many, many things about the Messiah, about the Christ of God, about the Savior of the world, about the Lamb of God who would take away sin. The Scripture said many things, and Jesus, when He came, was the fulfillment of all of those things. And among all of the sayings of the prophets was the statement of Isaiah 53:4, "that He would take our infirmities..." You see it in verse 17: "And bear our sicknesses." One of the things the Messiah would do would be to deal with disease and sickness. Jesus was going to do that. In fact, listen how wonderfully Jesus was going to set up a kingdom in which He would totally eliminate all sickness, all death, all disease, and all sin. And here He is giving them a taste of that.
Now when it says in Matthew 8, "He himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses," that is from Isaiah 53. Now that's an important chapter in the Bible because it's the prediction of the death of Christ. Let me just read you several verses to help you get the context. "Surely he hath born our griefs and carried our sorrows." Now that's the statement that Matthew quotes. "He's born our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." Now notice He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Jesus died for our sins—get that—our transgressions, our iniquities, our sins, and when it says, "With His stripes we are healed," it is not referring there specifically of physical healing, but of the healing of the disease of sin. But listen: Indirectly, when you heal sin you heal sickness, because sickness is a result of sin.
People say, "Is there physical healing in the atonement?" The answer is yes. There is physical healing in the atonement. But watch this: It isn't for now; it's for later. I'll put it this way: When Jesus died on the cross did he take away our sin? Yes. Do you, as a Christian, have any trouble with sin? Yes. He dealt with sin, but the fulfillment of that is yet future in its fullness, right? When He died on the cross did He remove and destroy the enemy death? Yes. Do Christians die? Yes. The full fulfillment is yet future. When He died on the cross did He deal with disease? Yes. Do we still get sick? Yes. That's still future, too. Yes, there's healing in the atonement just as there's deliverance from death in the atonement, just as the fullness of restoration to the glorious position of the believer before God in eternity is in the atonement; but still we wait till that day. And people who want to come along and say, "Well Christians should never be sick because there's healing in the atonement; you shouldn't have a cold, you shouldn't have cancer, you shouldn't have paralysis, you shouldn't have anything if you're a Christian because there's healing in the atonement," then logically have to say neither should a Christian ever sin, neither should a Christian ever die. That is not a proper teaching to say that Christians should not be sick any more than that Christians should never sin, or they should never die. Even the people who teach that die, which must be a little hard on them.
Beloved, Christ died for our sins, not our sicknesses. The gospel is good news about forgiveness, not health. Christ was made sin, not disease. Christ took away our sin, not our sickness. He died on the cross for our sin. And we would never interpret Isaiah 53 any differently. We'd just say Isaiah 53 means He's healed us from sin if it weren't this use here in Matthew; because in Peter's, I Peter 2:24, when Peter says, "By His stripes we are healed," he says that, having said, "who bore in His own body our sins." Peter's talking about the spiritual healing from sin. But Matthew opens up to us the fact that the statement, "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases," extends from the sin problem to the sickness problem. Yes, there's healing in the atonement. Yes, there's wholeness there, but only in so far as it comes to us in the fullness of salvation, the redemption of our bodies when we're glorified in His eternal kingdom. And so we see here that what you have really is just a taste of the kingdom, just a preview of the kingdom. Yes, someday He will bear our sicknesses away. Someday He will carry our infirmities all away and this is a taste of that, which was said by the prophet Isaiah. You see? The great Word!
Now there's a lot of other ways you can look at this. How did He bear our sicknesses? I think in a sense He bore our sicknesses because He felt sympathetically the pain. See, Christ was omniscient. The Bible says He knew what was in the heart of man. He could read the mind. Nicodemus, you remember, came to Him and asked Him a question and He didn't answer that. He asked a question Nicodemus had in his head, but never asked. He did that a lot, because He knew what was in a man. And if He's omniscient, then He knows everything you've ever felt and thought, and if He is fully omniscient He knows it to its extremity. Therefore, He can understand every pain you ever feel. That's why the Bible says He is a sympathetic high priest who is touched with the feelings of our (What?) infirmities; same word. I believe He's born our sicknesses in the sense that He sympathetically feels the pain that we feel. You know He saw the crowd, didn't he, in Luke, as I read to you, and He was moved with—What?—compassion. That word means to suffer with. He felt their pain, you see, and He's a sympathetic high priest. He didn't get our diseases, but He fully felt our pain.
So there's a sense in which He took our infirmities and took our diseases by feeling with us the pain that they bring. Secondly, I think there's a sense in which He took our infirmities and took our sicknesses in that He felt the root of them. I think when He saw disease He felt the power of sin. For example, He stood at the grave of Lazarus, beloved Lazarus. He'd been in their home many times, the brother of Mary and Martha. Lazarus had been dead now many days and so Jesus stood by the grave. The Bible says He caused himself to groan in His spirit. He literally was writhing in agony in His heart and the next verse says He wept. Why? What was He groaning about? What was He weeping about? You say, "Because Lazarus was dead." No. No, because He was about to change that. He was about to call him out of the grave. He wasn't weeping for that. He wasn't groaning for that. For what, then? Because whenever He saw sickness He experienced the bitter vicarious reality of Calvary. He knew what caused all this pain, and all this heartache, and all this sorrow, and mourning, and sadness was the evil of sin. And He lived His life in the shadow of the cross and he never saw sickness without feeling the pain of sin. He hurt because He knew that it was sin that did it. That's why in Matthew 9, there's a very important verse, verse 5: He said, "Which is easier to say, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee; or rise and walk?'" The answer is neither is easier. They're both the same. If you have eliminated sickness you have eliminated its cause, sin. If you've eliminated sin you've eliminated its results, sickness. Which is easier? Neither is easier. Listen, anybody who can deal with sickness can deal with sin, because sickness and sin are inextricably tied with a curse.
So Jesus came and dealt with the root and the fruit. But I think, most supremely of all, "He took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses" means that when Messiah comes and goes to the cross He will deal with sin in such a devastating way that ultimately all sickness and all disease will be carried away and these healings that you see are simply a preview of that marvelous day. The king was there and He was offering His kingdom and He was previewing its elements. He was on display, and so very clear was the evidence that a wayfaring man, though he be a fool, need not err.
Now there were many Pharisees who hated, turned, and walked away. They loved their sin. They loved darkness rather than light. But then there were others who were attracted to Him, the magnetism of His personality; the thrill seekers. And they came, but in each case something kept them from genuine conversion. Let's see what it was. Three classic, classic cases: Number one: personal comfort, personal comfort. Verse 18: "Now when Jesus saw great multitudes about Him, he gave commandment to depart to the other shore." They were on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The crowd was becoming so massive the Lord was weary in His physical body. In fact, on the boat ride across, He fell asleep down in the hole of the boat on the wood planks. He needed time for prayer and refreshment. He needed time for respite, for meditation, and the crowd could put pressures on Him that were not necessarily in the plan of God. So He said, "I think we'd better leave, go to a new place," commanded them to depart to the other side. Now when He did that, immediately it pressed the issue of commitment with certain people, because by then He had a lot of people following Him. In fact, Mark tells us that when He went on His little boat a bunch of other little boats went behind Him like a little flotilla following along. So some people were at the very crux of decision: Do I get in the boat or do I stay? What do I do? And we meet these three people in our lesson this morning.
The first man was so interested, but he never came to true salvation because he wanted personal comfort more than he wanted Christ. Verse 19: "And a certain scribe came and said unto him, 'Master, I will follow Thee wherever Thou goest.'" Oh man, that sounds good, doesn't it? You could sing that song: "Follow, I will follow Thee every passing day." Wonderful. Hey, we've got a live one, Lord, and guess what, he is a scribe! You know what? The scribes, the scribes were the authorities in the law. The scribes were the ones who had the official sanction in the Pharisees. The scribes were qualified by Jewish authority to teach. The scribes were highly educated. The scribes were loyal to the system. They were the teachers, they weren't the followers of teachers, and the scribes were generally hostile, weren't they, to Christ. They generally joined the Pharisees in their antagonism and opposition, so when you get a scribe you've got a live one. A scribe! And he says, "Master," didaskalos, teacher, rabbi, master. What an affirmation! I will unconditionally, continuously follow you wherever you go. You got me for good. What a tremendous statement of dedication, permanent commitment. I'm sure the scribe thought Jesus was the greatest teacher he'd ever heard. They all marveled at that. I'm sure that when he saw these miracles he said, "This is of God. This is something else. This is unbelievable. This is attractive. I want to get close to this guy. Man, wherever this guy is going I want to go. He's irresistible." Now if this guy showed up today we'd say, "Hey, great, we take you in." We're real eager to do that, but Jesus wasn't so eager. Listen to what He said to him. What a strange statement. I don't know. Was it just out of the blue, at first appearance? "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." Huh? What's that? Try that one again! The foxes, how did they get into this? The birds. You know what? This is a proverbial saying. It simply means the basic comforts of life that even wild animals have I don't have.
John 7: It says, "Every man went to his own house and Jesus went to the Mount of Olives." He didn't have a house and He spent the night lying on the ground in prayer with the Father. In Luke, chapter 8, it lists for us the dear ladies who were hospitable to Him. How often it tells us that He stayed in the little house in Bethany. See He didn't have any personal comforts. He didn't have any worldly possessions. He didn't have anything to offer this guy. Well, you say, "Why did He bring that up?" Because He could read his mind and He knew what the guy's hang-up was. The guy was saying, "Man, my life is full and rich and I got all I want and my lifestyle satisfies me and I just want to add you to my lifestyle. I just want to take my whole gig and drag it along and follow you." Jesus refuses to cash in on a moment's popularity.
You remember back in John, chapter 2, He had done these same miracles in Jerusalem? And it says, "Many believed in His name." And then it says, "And He committed Himself to none of them because He need not have anybody tell Him what was in man; He knew what was in man." You know what that means? It means that He had no faith in their faith. He knew it was shallow, superficial, thrill seeking. In fact, He classified these people in the parable of the seed. He said, "There's some seed, you throw it and it gathers a little root and it springs up and as soon as the sun comes out it burns and dies." There are those people, you know, who want to jump on the bandwagon and they look like they're alive for Christ, and as soon as the persecution starts, as soon as it's not comfortable anymore, as soon as you don't have a nest or a hole, as soon as you don't have the basic commodities of life, then you want out. Sun scorches it and it dies.
This scribe saw Jesus, and he was magnetized. But Jesus knew human nature. He knew it was fickle. He knew it was unstable. He knew it was self-centered. He knew that human nature hungered for sensations. The crowd, the miracles, the excitement; the scribe was fascinated. As Lenski said, "He sees the soldiers on parade. He sees the fine uniforms. He sees the glittering arms and he's eager to join; and he forgets the exhausting marches, the bloody battles, the graves, perhaps unmarked. You see, for Jesus, he's too ready, he's too eager, he's too complete in his offer. He's like a seed on stony ground; it grows quickly, it lacks root and it dies under the blazing sun of the price that has to be paid. You see this man never und erstood the basic principle of discipleship; and that is self-denial; that is sacrifice; that is suffering. So Jesus hit him with it. He said, "I just want you to know one thing: you're not going to get any comfort out of this." You know what the next verse says? It doesn't say anything about him. You know why? He isn't around. He left in the white space between verses 20 and 21. The Lord nailed him right where he was. He's gone. Isn't Jesus unlike us? We sugarcoat the message. We want to make it so everybody can get in as easy as possible. He makes it so hard—to keep them out—unless they have a genuine commitment.
I love the statement: "The Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." The Son of Man first appears in Daniel 7:13. Daniel prophesied that the Messiah would be Son of Man, and Jesus came and said, "I'm Son of Man." Do you know how many times that's used in the gospels? Eighty times! Jesus affirmed He was the Son of man. What is it? It's a term of humiliation. Son of God speaks of deity; Son of Man of His humiliation. He's saying, "In my humiliation I don't even have what foxes have, and the foxes were very common in those parts of the world in those times, and they would burrow little holes in the ground. And birds were everywhere and they had their nests, and He said, "I don't even have that." In my humiliation I don't have the basic comforts of life and if you're going to follow me you're going to have to be willing to give that up.
In Matthew 10:16, He said, "Now I'm going to send you forth." Later on He tells His apostles, "I'm going to send you forth. I'm going to send you like sheep in the midst of wolves." Now that's not a very inviting thing, is it? You're going to send us out like sheep in the midst of wolves? "And just remember, beware of men. They're going to deliver you up in councils, and scourge you in synagogues, you'll be brought before governors and kings, and they'll deliver you. Don't worry I'll give you what to say." Verse 22: "You'll be hated of all men for my name's sake." Verse 23: "You'll be persecuted." Verse 24: "And don't think you're going to be above your teacher. I've been getting it and you're going to get it." In John 15, He said, "Don't be surprised when men hate you. They hate me." "Don't be surprised when they kill you and think they're doing God's service." Persecution: "In this world you shall have tribulation." He said it to them: "All that will live godly..." II Timothy 3:12: "All that will live godly in this present age will suffer persecution." Matthew 5: "Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake." Hebrews 11: They just suffered and suffered, all those heroes of the faith, and at the end it says, "of whom the world was not worthy."
There's a price to pay to be a Christian. This guy wasn't willing to pay the price. He just wanted to add excitement to his life. He was a potential Judas, and nobody needs more than one of those. So, Jesus drove him away. It's like a young man who comes and expresses a desire for scholarship and we have to say to him, "Good, but are you prepared to scorn the delights of the world and study diligently to attain your goal?" Or an explorer who wants to gather a team to explore some uncharted portion of the earth and everybody wants to line up until he gives a little speech about the snow and the ice, the searing heat, the swamps, the wild animals; and all of a sudden the troops start disappearing. But the young person who wants to be a great athlete and the trainer says to him, "Yes, but are you willing to make the sacrifice that it takes to be great?" You see, we do Jesus a grave disservice if we lead people to believe that the Christian way is an easy way. It is not an easy way. I agree there is no thrill like the way of Christ. There's no glory like the end of that way, but Jesus never said it would be easy. He always said that you had to take up your—what?—cross.
You see people who want personal comfort. They want to do their thing, they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They just want to add Jesus to their already established life pattern. He refuses them. That's right, He refuses them.
There's a second person in this chapter. The first one didn't get entrance into the kingdom because he wanted personal comfort. The second one wanted personal riches. Verse 21. Now watch this: "And another of His disciples." Now the word disciple is not an official word with a capital D. It simply means learner, follower; and at this particular point He's got a lot of people following Him of all different levels. And another one of these followers said to Him, "Lord, permit me to go first and bury my father." Now you say, "Well, I mean that sounds like a reasonable request, right? Can't leave the old guy just lying around dead, got to get him in the ground, certainly proper." The Jews didn't embalm, so when somebody died you really had to get him in there fast. And on the other hand, the Jews used to teach you needed to mourn for your father and mother thirty days when they died, so maybe he's talking about, "Just need a month to get my act together." And by the way, in Genesis it tells us that the last responsibility of a son in his final act of devotion to his parents was to make sure that he cared for their burial. It's a very lovely thing to do. And so it sounds like a very reasonable request. I mean the man knows the Lord is on the move. He's going to get in a boat and leave and he says, "I just can't come, but I'll try to catch you later after I bury my father."
But there's a lot more here than meets the eye, because the phrase, "I must first go and bury my father" is a colloquial phrase that appears in the Middle East even in contemporary times. Recently a doctor Waldmeyer was conversing with a Turk— Waldmeyer is a missionary in the Middle East—and he was talking with a rich, young Turk and he advised this Turk to go on a certain trip to Europe, and along with him, the missionary. And he thought he could disciple him and accomplish certain things with him, and after he finished his education, to go along, to which the Turk replied, "I must first of all bury my father." And the missionary Waldmeyer said, "Oh, young man, I had no idea he'd died. I just am so sorry. I hope I wasn't insensitive." He said, "Oh no." He said, "He isn't dead. He's not dead. That's just a phrase we use. My father is very much alive. I just have to stick around and fulfill my responsibility till he passes on. And then, of course, I will receive my inheritance." Oh, I see. "I must first go and bury my father who isn't even dead" means, "I've been waiting a long time for my inheritance. Can I just hang around? The guy is tottering at this point and when I get it all, think of how I can be used in the movement." See? The guy had the money on his mind. He was playing with trivia and it took the courage and commitment out of his discipleship. His father wasn't even dead.
Jesus said to him, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead." Now again, that's a sharp statement. At first it seems nonsensical. How can dead people bury dead people? Obviously dead people can't bury dead people unless the first kind are spiritually dead; and that's what he's saying. It's a proverb. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the spiritually dead bury their physical dead, and then Luke adds in the parallel passage, "Go thou and preach the kingdom of God." What he's saying is ... Look, this is a proverb again just like the one about the foxes and birds. The first one meant, "Look I don't have any personal comforts." This one means, "Let spiritually dead people bury their dead. Let the secular world take care of its own issues. You have been called to the kingdom of God." See the difference? What he's saying is, "You are functioning on the wrong level." In other words let the system take care of itself.
He's not saying Christians are forbidden to go to funerals. He's not saying if you're a Christian you're not supposed to make sure your father or mother gets buried. It's a proverb, and what he means is the world's passing affairs, the coming and going of people, the passing of fortunes from one to another is all part of a dead system. You are called to a living kingdom; go and preach the kingdom. You see the man's priorities are fouled up. Secular matters belong to the people who are secular. The human system takes care of itself. But this man, what does it say he did? It's not there either. He left somewhere between verse 22 and 23. He disappeared. Why? Personal possessions were the big thing to him. He had waited a long time for his piece of the action. He wasn't bailing out now. Hey, he liked the thrill and the charisma and the wonder and the miracles, and this was fabulous stuff and he wanted to get on the bandwagon, but there was no commitment there. He wanted his money.
It reminds me of another man in the 19th chapter of Matthew who came to Jesus and said, "Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?" You say, "Oh, isn't that wonderful?" "Oh," he says, "what will I have to do attain eternal life?" And the Lord says to him, verse 21: "If you would be perfect, go and sell what you have and give to the poor, that you should have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me." He said go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Is that how you get saved? You get saved by selling everything and giving all the money to the poor? No. But, if your money stands in the way and the money is the god, you're going to have to get rid of the money in order to get saved. That was the issue. You don't get saved by unloading your money; you just get the obstacle out of the way so you can get in the kingdom. Your money is in your way. Here comes this young man and he says, "Oh I've kept all the law. I want eternal life." And Jesus says to him, knows exactly what's going on in his life. He's omniscient, knows every detail. He says, "All right, take everything you have and give it to the poor." And He hit him right at the weak spot. The next verse says, "The young man heard that; he went away sorrowful because he had great possessions." He was sorry, sorry he couldn't get in the kingdom because he wanted to hold onto his money. What a fool. But a lot of people are like that. How sad it is. Personal comfort, personal riches, keep Christ from accepting people who come to Him. They're attracted, they're astounded, they're overwhelmed, and they walk away forever because the price is too high.
There was a third guy who came that day, only Matthew doesn't tell us about him; Luke does. Luke 9, very quickly, Luke 9, this is fascinating. Third guy, and Luke gives us basically the same story but he adds this third one, in the 61st verse of the 9th chapter; it's a long chapter. "And another also said, [Here's the third one.] 'Lord I will follow Thee, but let me first go bid them farewell who are at home at my house.'" Well, you say, "Why, go on and say goodbye. Kiss your mother and shake hands with your dad, and sure."
"Jesus said to him," and he gives him a proverb that went clear back to 800 B.C. It was originated with a man named Hesed. It was a very common proverb in the day. "No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God." What he basically says is it's very difficult to plow a straight furrow when you're looking backwards. I would guess that's fairly true, wouldn't you? I'm not accustomed to plowing furrows, but I can imagine that if you're trying to plow a furrow looking this way you would tend to get a little bit off. That's what He's saying. Now what did Jesus know about this young man? Oh He knew a lot more than is on the surface: "I'll follow you, let me first go and bid them farewell who are at home at my house." It's not his wife and kids; it's his mommy and daddy. Does that give you a little hint? Apron strings? You've heard about those? He was under the pressure, power, influence, domination of his parents, and Jesus knew that if he went back there, the malingering apron strings, the intimidation of the family, the pressure of being ostracized, the emotional pleas to stay, and he would never come back. There are a lot of people like that. They'd come to Christ but they're afraid of what their family might say, what their family might do, what their father might say. They're afraid to be alienated and so they stay in a false religious system, or they keep back from Christ out of fear. Maybe they just show up now and then at church, just kind of peek in, and they're trying to plow a furrow looking backwards.
Listen, it comes down to this people. Matthew 10:34: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set, [listen to this] set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; he that loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me." You get it? If that holds you back from full commitment, you are not fit to enter the kingdom of God. This is not talking about Christian service, people; this is talking about salvation. You can't get saved with those kinds of strings. You're not fit to enter My kingdom. Half a heart is no heart. The issue is not service; it is salvation. Because he could not commit all, Jesus offered him nothing, nothing, no halfway discipleship, no halfway anything, nothing. Personal relations, personal riches, personal comfort all stand in the way. Sad! You say, "Well, doesn't it say in John 6:37, 'Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise [What?] cast out?" Yes. But you say, "These people came and He cast him out." Yeah, but you see if you keep reading in John 6 you find out more. "Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out." And then you read later in the chapter, "Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no part with Me." What did He mean by that? You either take all or you get nothing. And it says from that time many of His disciples walked no more with Him. They weren't willing to make the full commitment, and He turned them down. "Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out. If he comes on My terms, full surrender, with a beatitude attitude, a beggar in his spirit, mourning over his sin, meek before God, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, crying for mercy, and willing to be persecuted, hated, and reviled for My sake."
The master came to the slave one day and He said, "You have a joy and a happiness that I wish I had." He said, "What is it?" He said, "It's Jesus Christ." He said, "I want the Christ that you have." The slave said, "Then go put your white suit on and come down and work in the mud and you'll meet Him." He said, "I wouldn't do that. It's beneath my dignity." A year later he came back to the slave and he was in deeper problems and he said, "I want what you have." He said, "What I have is Jesus Christ." He said, "Well how can I know Christ like you do?" He said, "You put your white suit on, you come down and work with us in the mud and you'll meet Him." He said, "I won't do that."
In desperation some time later he came back a third time and he said, "I have to have what you have." And he said, "Well you know how, you get your white suit on and you come down and you work with us in the mud and you'll meet Him." And the master said, "I'll do it." The slave said, "You don't have to." "What do you mean you don't have to?" "You just have to be willing, that's all."
You see the Lord may not want to take away your personal comforts. He may not want to take away your personal possessions. He may not want to take away your personal relationships. But you have to be willing to let him if He wanted to, you see? That's the affirmation of His Lordship in your life. If you come, saying, "I'll come, but I'm hanging on to this, I'm hanging on to this, I'm hanging on to this," and you give Him half a heart, you get nothing. If you offer Him everything, He may allow you to keep the portion. He may give you more than you have. It's the willingness that is the issue.
These three walked away and William MacDonald puts it so aptly, "They left Christ to make a comfortable place for themselves in the world and to spend the rest of their lives hugging the subordinate." What a statement. Are you a true disciple? Have you looked at the evidence? People through the centuries have marveled at Jesus' authority, His words, His works, His wisdom, His purity, His truthfulness, His power, His provision, His healing, His love, His dominance, His judgment, His composure, His teaching, His independence, His condescension. They've marveled, they've been overwhelmed, they've been astounded, but they've walked away lost because they never came on His terms. Listen to this in closing: Bishop Ryle said, "The saddest road to hell is the one that runs under the pulpit, past the Bible, and through the middle of warnings and invitations." I hope you hear what the Spirit of God is saying.
Father, thank you for our time this morning in Your Word and in worship. Thank you for the music. The beauty of it still lingers in our hearts. We do pray, Lord, that You would bring to bear upon our lives this, Your truth. Make us people that know how to cut the cord with the system and let the secular world have its own. Help us to live for the eternal. Help us to go and preach the kingdom. Help us to know the priorities. Give us the willingness to give up everything we have, knowing full well You may give back to us more than we ever dreamed of having, knowing that it's not what we have, but it's the attitude we have toward what we have.
Oh God, may there be no disciples here who walk away from Christ because of personal comfort, personal possessions, personal relations. Father, we pray that we might be contemplating how Your Spirit applies this to our own lives first before we think of others. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.
This article is also available and sold as a booklet.
This sermon series includes the following messages:
Please contact the publisher to obtain copies of this resource.Publisher Information


text:
When you stash your belongings in an accent cabinet, you stow them away in style. At Rooms To Go, we offer an assortment of accent cabinets that perfectly fuse fashion and functionality. Our selections feature classic and contemporary designs in a variety of colors and constructions allowing you to add stylish storage space to any room in your home. Whether you prefer accent storage in the form of a bookcase, cabinet, chest, or table, we have the perfect piece.
Our accent storage cabinets boast an array of unique styles that prove versatile enough to integrate into any home setting. Use an accent cabinet in the bathroom to organize medical supplies or add an accent chest to your bedroom for extra storage space. Keep your valuables concealed in an accent console or display them with a curio cabinet. In addition to offering practical storage space, our accent cabinets feature a wide range of colors and finishes. From traditional tones like black and ivory to such bolder shades as purple and yellow, you'll find the cabinet that perfectly accents your current decor.
At Rooms To Go, we offer accent cabinets to suit a variety of preferences and styles. Many of our contemporary accent cabinets feature clean, straight lines and bolder color combinations. Eye-catching designs and textured patterns contribute to the modern allure of several contemporary cabinets. Our traditional accent chests and cabinets generally feature wood constructions finished in classic shades, such as maple or walnut. Many of our traditional pieces also boast understated floral designs and ornate wood detailing. Conveniently serviceable as storage and wonderfully stylish as furniture, our accent cabinets at Rooms To Go truly embody the best of both worlds.


text:
Browse by Medical Category
Research at Mass General
The Unit provides a link between the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. One of its functions is to provide consultation and training for psychiatric residents and others who wish to include public health in their backgrounds. The main function, however, is research with a focus on the longest ongoing study of psychiatric epidemiology in a general population.
Jane M. Murphy, Ph.D.Unit DirectorProfessor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical SchoolProfessor of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health Publications by Dr. MurphyJack D. Burke Jr., M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge Hospital Nan M. Laird, Ph.D., Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health Alexander H. Leighton, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Community Health and Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Richard R. Monson, M.D., D.Sc, Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health Nicholas J. Horton, Sc.D., Assistant Processor, Department of Mathematics, Smith College Arthur M. Sobol, M.A., Applications Computer Programmer Barbara J. Burns, B.A., Staff Assistant
Reports based on the full 40-year perspective indicate that the current prevalence of depression remained stable but in the last quarter of the 20th century a re-distribution occurred based on a two-fold increase among women under 45 years of age with small decreases in the other gender/age groups. Throughout the period of study, depression was almost always accompanied by generalized anxiety. The only change in the relationship between depression and anxiety was that depression began to resemble anxiety as mainly a disorder of women. While it has usually been thought that epidemiologic estimates are unrealistically high, a validity study toward the end of the investigation indicated that clinicians administering the Structured Clinical Interview for Diagnosis suggested that epidemiologic rates may underestimate prevalence. Over the 40 years, the prevalence of cigarette smoking rose and then declined. In the most recent survey, but not earlier, there was a strong relationship between smoking and depression. The prevalence of obesity increased but was not associated with depression although among those with lifetime depression, the obese subjects were much more likely to gain weight during an episode of depression than the non-obese. Other topics for which reports are currently being prepared include mortality risk, the relationship between smoking and alcohol abuse vis-a-vis depression, and trends in the relationship between socioeconomic status and the prevalence and incidence of psychiatric disorders.
Back to Top


text:
Asian Antiques
Here at Online Galleries, our Asian Antiques catalogue is refreshed on a daily basis, bringing our users the very latest range of Chinese antiques and Japanese antiques that are on sale via our trade association-controlled dealer membership. Browsing our online galleries is simple – for a less broad view of Japanese and Chinese antiques for sale just use our keyword tool to refine your search and compare items of interest.Making further enquiries about a specific item, such as an antique netsuke piece or decorative okimono piece, couldn't be easier – alongside each item displayed within Online Galleries, for your convenience we've also included all pertinent contact details for the associated dealer. In addition, Online Galleries also provides an email alert notification service, keeping you updated with the latest antiques news relevant to your Chinese antiques and Japanese antiques searches.And if you'd rather to see your preferred item in person before you commit to a purchase, then you'll be pleased to note that we also allow users to search for both antique pieces and antique dealers by location.With over 35,000 antiques and works of art for sale on any given day, Online Galleries is one of the safest and most secure antiques communities online. Strictly controlled by over 30 international trade associations and representing over 21 countries around the world, Online Galleries provides one of the most user-friendly ways to find Oriental antiques on the web.


text:
Dear visitor, welcome to SPRINKLER TALK FORUM - You Got Questions, We've Got Answers. If this is your first visit here, please read the Help. It explains how this page works. You must be registered before you can use all the page's features. Please use the registration form, to register here or read more information about the registration process. If you are already registered, please login here.
Thursday, January 11th 2007, 12:44am
Supreme Member
Location: Metro NYC
Thursday, January 11th 2007, 3:45am
Saturday, January 13th 2007, 7:41pm
Supreme Member
Tuesday, January 16th 2007, 2:30am
Tuesday, January 16th 2007, 7:27am
Supreme Member
Wednesday, January 17th 2007, 11:29am
Wednesday, January 17th 2007, 11:57am
Supreme Member
Location: Metro NYC
Thursday, January 18th 2007, 3:11pm
Friday, January 19th 2007, 1:34am
Saturday, January 20th 2007, 5:27am


text:
Handsome Dan XI
Answered to Oliver and was owned by Dean and Mrs. Horace Taft. Oliver, of royal descent, was born September 19, 1966; was a brindle with white markings, and registered with the Kennel Club. Oliver was bought for John Hersey, then master of Pierson College, by a group of students. When Mr. Hersey left his post, Oliver summered at Martha's Vineyard. Upon his return, he resided with the Tafts where he is was a member of the household. Handsome Dan started his assignment as Yale's mascot in November, 1969. He loved football and could be seen at the games escorted by Ho-Ho Taft, son of Mr. and Mrs. Taft. He suffered from arthritis and was accused of sleeping in the sun at football games. He was retired of old age at the end of the 1974 football season.


text:
The White House was kind enough to invite Business Insider and me to a private briefing on the economy yesterday.
The briefing featured the President's whole gang--Alan Krueger (Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors), Gene Sperling (head of the National Economic Council), et al. Basically, we got a preview of how the White House will likely frame the economy during the election.
And that was cool. I'm always happy to chat with the President's economic team.
But I've never met the President before--this one or any other.
So, even though the President's name wasn't on the agenda, I was hoping he might pop in.
And he did!
At about 3:30 in the afternoon, the White House's Director of Communications, Dan Pfeiffer, was at the head of the table, chattering away, and the 20-odd journalists in attendance were appearing to take notes attentively but probably actually catching up on email...
And then, boom, there he was, standing by a door in the corner, President Obama.
"Hello, everyone."
To get a sense of the effect this had on the room, imagine a bunch of kids in a lazily supervised study hall suddenly snapping to attention when the principal unexpectedly walks in with a rock star in tow. Everyone sat up suddenly in their chairs, grabbed papers and pencils (and cell-phone cameras), and began frantically paying attention.
Obama glided to the vacated head of the table (mission accomplished, Dan Pfeiffer had vanished in thin air). He said he would say a few things and take a few questions and then shake everyone's hand.
And then there we were, sitting at a table with the President of the United States.
A few observations:
- Thanks to the magic of television, I have spent hundreds of hours in seemingly close proximity to President Obama over the last several years--more time than I've spent with anyone else other than my colleagues and family. So, sitting at a table with him felt, at first, extraordinary, and then, almost immediately, routine.
- I have never seen someone make less of an effort to charm a room and yet so instantly establish a connection (at least with me). Yes, it helps that Obama's the most powerful man in the world. You don't need to be particularly funny or engaging when you have that attribute. But Obama just started speaking in the soft "just among friends here" intimate tone that he usually speaks in, pausing, as he always does, to carefully choose every word. And it quickly felt like this was, in fact, just a conversation among friends.
- Equally remarkably, I discovered that it's possible to zone out while in a small meeting with the President of the United States. I've listened to Obama talk about the economy so many times that when he started talking about the economy, I started doing what I often do when he starts talking about the economy--stopped taking notes and started IMing with a colleague at the office. Then I remembered that I was actually in the room with Obama and stopped.
He took some questions and handled them with the same "just among friends" casual but careful intimacy. Then came around the table and shook everyone's hand.
He's bigger than he looks on TV. He has a firm handshake. When shaking your hand, he strikes the perfect balance between appearing to actually be focused on you without going overboard and pretending that you're more important than anyone else in the room.
I told him it was great to meet him, which it was.
He said "thank you."
And then he was gone.
SEE ALSO: Obama Says His First Car Cost $900 And Had A Huge Rust Hole In The Floor


text:
However, this was a view from our window today, after the rainbow, and I swear, I just saw Noah and his ark float by... and we are 300 metres above sea level! Normally we can see as far as the island of Elba 100 miles from here. Now we barely see the neighbours roof!
This weather is ridiculous! I have never experienced a colder or wetter May anywhere, let alone in Italy. Last year at this time we had 35+ degrees, now it's 14! I apologise for the excessive use of exclamation marks, but there are just no words for it. There's so much to do on the land, but I'm just sitting indoors, twiddling thumbs.
Anyway, enough of that. On one of the few brief breaks in the rain, Sunday afternoon, we went for a wee walk along the coast.
And of course there's no such thing for me as just a walk if there's wild food to gather. I've first heard of the many uses for mallow from my buddy Mr.H. I've since discovered there's loads of it growing around here, I just didn't know what it looked like.
Richard Mabey's invaluable pocket guide Food for Free has an interesting recipe, which I modified slightly to test this new food (new to me that is, because alledgedly Horace ate nothing but olive oil, mallow and chicory).
The variety growing wild here is Common Mallow (it's common alright):
It has numereous health benefits and all parts of the plant are edible. It's high in mucus and as a tea relieves coughs. The root of a different species, marsh mallow, used to be used to make the famous confection, which I believe is now made exclusively from sugar. It is also rich in vitamins A, B1, B2 and C as well as various mineral salts. It can be used externally to treat skin diseases acne, burns and insect bites.
The seeds can be eaten raw as a snack, young leaves and flowers can be added to salads. The recipe I tried is a variant of the Egyptian soup Melokhia:
This is how I did it:
- 500g mallow leaves
- 1 litre chicken or vegetable stock
- 2 tsp coriander seeds
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1 dried chilli of your preferred strength
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- Cook the mallow leaves in the stock for some 10 minutes
- In the meantime mash the spices and oil to a paste in a pestle and mortar, then fry gently in a separate pan for a couple of minutes.
- Add the paste to the soup and leave to simmer for anothe 2 or 3 minutes.
- Serve with bread


text:
"I live in Hollywood, California and am tired of members of my community being described as amoral and trying to undermine the fabric of the American family."
A couple of weeks ago I was coming home from work, and I saw right next to the Frederick's of Hollywood building I saw this billboard from an organization called Citizens United.
Citizens United - Thank Hollywood for George W. Bush's Re-election!
If this type of statement was made to any other city it would be considered out of line, but because of some moral high ground it's always open season on my town. Okay I forgot Las Vegas. Usually these people say, "The just have to pay for the sinners". Even though I can't find that quote in the bible. BibleGateway.com Quick search: the just have to pay for the sinners
Anyone with half a brain can read my column and see where I stand on things. Speaking of people with half a brain, I wrote the following letter to the people of Citizens United.
Dear Citizens United,
My name is Tony Figueroa and I am a resident of Hollywood CA. I am happily married and a productive member of society. I believe in free speech, free expression and free enterprise. I am tired of members of my community being described as amoral, trying to undermine the fabric of the American family or whatever other narrow minded generalization you come up with. So you can understand that I was very offended when walking home from work on Hollywood Blvd. I saw one of your billboards.
You are certainly not being gracious winners. I felt like you were giving me, and my neighbors, the middle finger with that message. So where is the morality that you profess to have? By your admission you did this to see us squirm, so where is that compassion that you claim to have. On your own web site you say,
"Citizens United's goal is to restore the founding father's vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens."
One must question whether your billboard campaign is even covered under the protected free speech that the founding fathers had in mind since again you did this to see us squirm.
Tony Figueroa
PS: I fail to see that "honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens" that you profess to have either.
I saw the Oscar broadcast and nobody squirmed.
To quote Bill Maher (Host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"), "Hollywood isn't your cesspool, America, it's your mirror".
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa