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Separate names with a comma.
Discussion in 'rFactor 2' started by Bram Hengeveld, Aug 13, 2010.
At least that is what Gjon tweeted 4 hours ago:
No clue what this means. What do you think?
I have no clue as well but it sounds cool...
The tyres we are used to with rfactor, gtl, gtr2 and race07 are based on the Pacejka curves so i guess some new maths geek has worked out a new formula
If this is really the first time its been "installed" it seems very late in the day.
There is a general trend to move from a theoretical Pacejka tyre model to a physical or brush tyre model. I think LFS was the first to use this kind of tyre model, but Shift and Forza 3 use it too. I think NetKar Pro moved to this model for v1.1 and Dave Kaemmer is working on this kind of tyre model for iRacing.
It means this right?
That is absolutely brilliant
This is going to make it critical for our physics gurus to start getting it right. The suspension models will need to be a lot more accurate then they are now that's for sure.
I think you can have a physical tyre model in the physics without using it in the graphics, but the trend seems to do both - Forza 3 and Dirt 2 for example.
X-Motor Racing ads already a bunch of visual and physical data in their game when it comes to tires. Really cool
I would know who I would hire if I were ISI
Interesting comment The phrase "Installing a new state-of-the-art physical and thermodynamic tire model" does hint that it was developed separately and perhaps outside ISI.
So in plain language the tires will have flatspots and accumulated dirt like in netcar pro ?
My understanding is that the first release of NetKar Pro, which featured flatspots and dirt, used an empirical Pacejka-type tyre model, albeit a sophisticated one. rF2 will ditch the empirical tyre model and move to a physical model.
Is a physical model better than the netkar's Pacejka-type model ? In my mind netkar has the most advanced tire simulation and has the best "feel".Its the only sim that going outside of the tarmac over grass and dirt feels as it should feel and when you go back on track the car feels as it should feel with accumulated dirt over the tires for a while untile the tires "clean themselves" .A simiral tire model would make Rfactor 2 the end of all sims...
Lets look at the trend in tyre models.
LFS has used a physical model for some time.
Forza 3 has a physical model
NFS Shift has a physical model
iRacing have anounced they are working on a physical model to replace their empirical model
ISI have anounced they are replacing rFactor's empirical model with a physical model
I suspect Codies have a physical model - the tyres sertainly visually deform during cornering like LFS.
I think NetKar Pro moved to a physical model with v1.1
So the trend is very firmly away from empirical models to physical models. That doesn't mean physical models are perfect. LFS has had one improvement to its physical tyre model and another major overhaul is being worked on.
As most sims (and games which some might not consider hardcore sims like Forza 3 and NFS Shift) are moving or have moved to a physical model then the answer would appear to be it is better. However, such models can still be flawed. The early LFS tyres (which use a physical model) seemed wierd to me and were improved in a patch, but even these are still being worked on as they didn't prove realistic when used with the forthcoming VW Sirocco.
You can simulate dirt on a tyre without needing a physical model.
The weakness with rFactor2 as a sim will be its reliance on mods (though the supplied content does look like it will be much better than rF1). It doesn't matter how good the physics engine is, if the modder doesn't understand the physics engine and doesn't have accurate data to use in the physics engine then the results will be flawed.
I understand !
By the way wouldn't a solution for poor mods could be the ability to choose from multiple tire properties ?
For example while creating a car to be able to choose ready tire sets like a slick tire ,a treaded tire and a offroad tire ?
I drive over dirt in real life and it doesn't effect my cars grip what so ever... The dirt comes of the wheel in roughly 2 seconds. Whats the big deal?
Your tyres are not slicks running soft sticky rubber with a tread temperature of 100 degrees C


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Archive for the 'misc' Category
There are times in my life that I didn't fully appreciate while I was living those times, and only years later look back in amazement and gratitude for the opportunities and the experiences. One such time was when Steve Jobs came to Princeton to speak about this new computer, the NeXT. The auditorium was packed, and Jobs did not disappoint. He revealed to us the wonders of the NeXT with such enthusiasm, confidence, and joy that many of us became believers in the greatness of the NeXT. We wanted to get our hands on these machines and play around with them.
This was years before Jobs returned to Apple. Years before the ipod, years before the iphone and ipad… but already the aura and the mystique were there. Now, if only I had had my ipad with me back then and could have captured it on video!

subset: commoncrawl


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Hot Box Photo MeetUp, Mare Island, Vallejo, CA, March 20th — UPDATE CANCELLED
UPDATE: Due to the heavy rain scheduled for tonight we are cancelling this photowalk. We'll reschedule Mare Island soon.
A group of us from the Hot Box Uncensored group on Flickr are going to be getting together on Sunday March 20th for an evening of shooting out on Mare Island in Vallejo. Sunset is approx 7:21pm that night, so we'll plan on meeting at 6:30pm and then shoot the last hour or so of day light into the sunset and into the night. We'll have a full moon that night so it should make for some fun night shooting. After we're all done, for those who would like, we can go hit up a local bar in Vallejo somewhere there and catch up.
All are welcome from beginners to experts, bring your tripod if you have one. 🙂
You can follow this thread on Flickr to get more of the details as the meetup progresses.
A few photos of mine from previous outings to Mare Island below.


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Think it's Healthy To Find it Weird
Isaacs has a kind of energy that you don't see every day. He's certainly
enthusiastic – he likes his work, which is acting on stage and in movies, and
he likes the traveling that goes with it, which he's doing presently to promote The
Patriot, in which he co-stars with Mel Gibson. And he's certainly earnest
when he talks about it all, seeming actually to consider your question before he
answers it. But Isaacs has an unusual playfulness, generosity, and
attentiveness, too, a keen sense of humor and perceptiveness that don't surface
often in your everyday movie star.
just finished breakfast, the thirty-seven-year-old Liverpool native wants to
talk in his hotel room, which is, frankly, a mess. There are suitcases
half-unpacked, and sneakers strewn about, his laptop ready-to-go on the desk.
He's embarrassed by the disorder, but not too. He's clearly at ease with
Fuchs: How did you get involved in The Patriot?
Isaacs: I get to read lots and lots of scripts, and almost all of them
are crap. Not that the people writing them aren't talented or the people
developing them aren't talented, but something doesn't quite work. If you ever
start reading one and you're still reading it by the end, when you should have
actually gone somewhere else, and you've been reading it on the steering wheel
of your car, and park in a parking lot to finish it or read it in the tub until
your skin goes wrinkly, you know it's something good. And this script had me
sobbing. Those sentimental moments, when they work, it's difficult to
orchestrate them well. I think that's one of the great things about Roland [Emmerich]
and Dean [Devlin]. They can take those moments, and even intentionally telegraph
them, and do them well enough that they can always hit a chord.
Well, there's Godzilla.
Actually, Godzilla is the second most successful film the studio
had ever made. But for Roland and Dean, they made a sub par film, which is one
reason why they wanted to make a film of this [The Patriot's] kind of
grandeur and ambition, and they were careful to test it, and very deliberately,
they made sure it was underhyped, so they didn't buy the first weekend. The
Perfect Storm, as it happens, took in a bit more money this weekend, but it
was always part of the plan not to make the cinemas were crammed, and do lots of
promotions, and to let the film speak for itself.
You seem to know a lot about how the business works...
The thing is, amazingly, for the people who've made some of the biggest
popcorn movies in history, they were the most gracious and inclusive people I've
ever worked with. I know about the business because they included me in, at
every stage. It was very collaborative. They invited input on the script and
such from early on. But you wanted to ask what?
Is it important for you to know all this stuff about the money end of
Hollywood filmmaking, aside from your acting?
No. I'm one of those people who, if the door is slightly open just a
crack, I will charge through. So if somebody says, "What do you think of
the script, do you have any ideas?" I'll show up with a sheath of notes and
never stop. And that's made me some very good friends and some people who never
want to work with me again. But I think I'm sensible enough to know that
sometimes you just don't, sometimes you're just a hired hand. And I expected on
something of this scale to be something of a hired hand, and far from it. They
were as collaborative as we used to be when we'd devise plays and take them to
festivals in England, as students. You don't need to know stuff about the
business; what's been useful for me is to stick with your instincts, and it's
been my instinct is to get involved in telling the story as best I could, and
never be swayed or overawed by the history of the people involved, or the wealth
or power of the people involved. I think my ideas are as valuable as anybody
else's. And it turns out that that's what I've been hired for over the years: I
don't just read the script, I tell people what I think.
I found Tavington fascinating, in part because he had to carry a lot of
the class shifts and anxieties in Britain, partly through the story about his
father. How did you come to that characterization?
That wasn't originally in the script, and I did a lot of research on the
person he was loosely based on, Tarleton. And his father died and left huge
gambling debts, which a lot of people had during that era. And he himself had
been a law student, like I was, and a third son, like I was. And he dropped out
of law school because he had a gambling and whoring problem, and I went to drama
school, so the parallels continue. When his father died, suddenly he wasn't
wealthy anymore, and his mother packed him off to the colonies and bought him a
commission in the army. And it was imperative to him -- which I brought to
Roland and Dean and they stuck it in the script -- that he succeed in the new
world; he had nothing to go back to. He was one of the swaggering young British
officers who expected to inherit the new world. He'd ride around with a map in
his pocket, and after each victory, carve out a bigger piece for himself, and he
also carried around a book on polygamy, because there were going to be new rules
in this new world. And he'd already picked out several wives for himself. When
real life doesn't help the drama, you junk it, because in the end you're telling
a story. But this was a gift. I had a complete psychological landscape for this
guy: he was bitter. I was constantly looking for approval from my father figure,
General Cornwallis. And I don't get it: I get humiliated, which fuels my rage.
And reports of Tarleton were that he was a spectacular warrior. He used to ride
headfirst into battle, without any sort of strategy. And he won lots of things,
outnumbered; it was a pretty low-tech war, you're just riding in with a sword.
He had a kind of self-destructive death wish, and that lends itself well to
being a villain.
That self-destructive thing also moves Gibson's character, the
There are great parallels between our characters. Our way of fighting is
all or nothing, and we're completely fearless. We both see through this
extraordinary formality of war. I can't imagine how they used to do that: lining
up, forty yards from each other. They'd fire once, everyone around them just
dying, cannonballs plowing through them. Then they'd reload, fire again, then
they'd go, "Oh, two's enough," and then they'd charge. Why two?
In the theater, viewers were just gasping at those battle scenes.
Yes, war is kept from us nowadays. We see these video-game versions of
what's going on in Kosovo or Iraq, when actually there are huge trenches full of
human bodies. It's just as low tech today:
people just don't see it.
I have to ask you, briefly, about the hubbub concerning the portrayal of
the British villains.
I think it's very entertaining. Lots of journalists whose writing I
respect and read in England have decided to fill columns and columns about it.
And I hope it sells newspapers and gets them higher salaries. On the other hand,
I think it's faintly ludicrous that the British have a glorious history of
Empire with their colonies abroad. There are a few things to say about it. One
is that the British are not portrayed in a terrible way, I am. Cornwallis wants
to conduct the war in a civil way: my men don't want to carry out my orders. I
am the one who is seemingly amoral. But look closely at any of our current war
heroes, or go to the places they've earned their spurs: speak to the Iraqis and
see how they feel about Colin Powell. The guy I'm based on is known as The
Butcher. I don't quite understand why they're doing this. I understand the fuss
about some of the other big American movies that are crediting Americans with
things that the British actually achieved. But in general, the British have a
very inglorious past in terms of our colonies. We didn't leave India with gift
Were you at all daunted by the hugeness of this project?
No, it's a tribute to Roland and Dean: they were careful to make sure
there was an atmosphere of play. When I had my big finale fight with Mel, which
we did repeatedly, and I was meant to chop to his knee and suddenly you smash
into a superstar's kneecap with a big sword, and you say, "Whoa, can we
stop for a second?' And Roland would say, "Sure, no problem. Can we just
rest those 500 horses and put that village back up and plat another 50 bombs and
send those 2000 people over the hill?' And you say, "Oh my god!" but
they never ever made us feel responsible or tension for any of that; I didn't
hear a raised voice in six months. I've worked on much smaller things, when the
tension is much greater, and you don't get a sense of free play, which is what
acting is all about. It's not a very serious business in the end.
That sounds like a healthy perspective.
It's a great catharsis. It's very cheap therapy, a wonderful outlet for
all these things that I'm never going to live, rage and sadism, to cry and laugh
and kill: it's a fabulous relief.
What possessed you to take up acting, when you were in law school?
I auditioned for a play because it was one of the many things you were
supposed to do in school, and when I was rehearsing for the first time, I felt
completely at home, truly comfortable and able to express myself. Not
necessarily to do with the acting, but the ready-made family unit, like I
belonged. It was free of a sense of class, and history, and ethnicity, and
gender, almost, as well. Though it was an easy way to meet girls, share dressing
rooms. I became obsessed, every summer, every role I could take. When it came
time to leave law school, many of my contemporaries were applying to drama
school, which seemed to me insane, to think you work professionally at it. I was
never going to do it, I was going to get a letter, if I was lucky, and keep it
on my wall, to show to my grandchildren. And then this woman called me to
Central, and invited me to attend. And I went, "Oh, thanks very much."
I remember vividly, thinking, as I was walking down the road, leaving, that my
English good manners had made a life decision for me.
You were thinking stage only, at that point?
I never thought of even being on telly. The biggest difference between
actors on the West coast and European and East coast actors, is that I started
because I loved the experience. I loved doing plays: I loved rehearsing. It was
the rehearsing really: you're in a room, working with people, exploring the
human condition. People on the West coast, or Los Angeles, they go because they
have the best teeth or the best tits, and somebody's said to them, you could
make money out of those, and they go, "Oh, I could, you know." More
power to them. There are people who want to be famous and people who become
famous. For me, there isn't really any difference, being in giant movies, little
movies, being in TV, or on stage. Things get in the way sometimes, stars with
baggage or an entourage, or the fact that they don't want to be there to work
with you. But when you're doing scenes with good actors whose egos don't get in
the way, it's always the same.
You have a clear sense of what celebrity means, for yourself.
I've never been out of work. The success of things I do is almost
irrelevant to me, except that it provides more opportunity. I got this job when
I was, in American terms, completely unknown, and I'm sure I'll get others, so
it doesn't really matter to me. And I've never been very famous, but I've seen
friends get very famous, seen them lose themselves in a big swirling sea of
their own hubris. I've been doing this for a long time, and so I know who my
friends are. Then there are people like Mel, who's as famous as Jesus:
everywhere he goes, people behave in an unconscionable fashion, and he is about
as healthy an example as you could ever wish to find. He still asks questions
and listens to the answers and still has raw nerve endings, and is humble. But
it's not a nice life. I can see why he works all the time, because work is a
normal environment. I don't really aspire to that. I think it's healthy to find
it weird, not to be at ease with it. I know my place in the food chain at the
Don't you imagine that people who have fallen into the awful crevice of
celebrity think that about themselves at some point, as grounded and together?
Oh yes, they say, I don't care about the size of the trailer, and you
have to treat people well who do the small jobs. And it's clearly not true for
them. So yes, everybody thinks of themselves as grounded, so I have no idea how
much I am.
Click here to read KJ Doughton's review.


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Dickinson County Nature Center naturalist intern Jessica Tramp has been exploring the Iowa Great Lakes area to see what birds she can spot.
The wetland areas have been alive as breeding season reaches its peak, and she has documented northern shovelers, pied-billed grebes, coot, and a variety of other species.
She's excited that part of her job at the nature center in Okoboji will entail some birding, as the annual Birding on the Green series kicks off for the 2016 season at 7 a.m. Monday, May 2. Participants meet at the Brooks National Golf Club in Okoboji and take golf carts through the course each month to document species.
An average of 40-60 avian species are identified at each event, which is led by experienced area birders Ed Thelen and Lee Schoenewe, who can help both beginners and experienced birders alike identify species not only by sight but also by sound. Interesting species spotted in the past have included kingbirds, bluebirds, wood ducks and migrating warblers.
Tramp is also hoping to check some more birds off her list.
"I would like to see what woodpeckers might be there, maybe some flickers," she said, adding she has dreams of spotting a scarlet tanager too. "They are supposed to be here now. I would love to see one."
Birding on the Green is held each month May-September: May 2, June 6, July 11, Aug. 1 and Sept. 12.
The May and September events often have the most winged creatures identified because a variety of species migrate through the area at that time. Plus, Tramp has spotted a variety of water birds throughout the area that have been active during breeding season, and the May Birding on the Green might afford participants a chance to see species such as northern shovelers and pied-billed grebes.
Brooks National Golf Club is the perfect place to check items off of your bird checklist, because it is an Audubon-certified golf course that draws a variety of species of songbirds, raptors, and waterfowl. Birding on the Green has been a successful partnership for the conservation board and golf course, because the course can keep its Audubon certification by having this active bird inventory, and it's a wonderful outdoor experience for the conservation board to offer.
If you don't get your fill of birds during Birding on the Green, stop inside the Dickinson County Nature Center to see exhibits on bird nests and the Okoboji osprey or visit the nature center website to watch the osprey's daily life on our live nest cam.
For more information on Birding on the Green or other events, call 712-336-6352 or keep up with the latest happenings at the nature center on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.


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I love this tree trunk patterned paper from Websters Beautiful Chic collection, I started the page off with some spritz of gold mist, they give a really nice glimmer, then I used some green and brown ink with a sequin waste style stencil....then went onto layering up the papers which are again from the Beautiful Chic collection. I had a really good delve through my stash and used a Crate Paper chipboard frame that I backed with a vellum doily from Websters, there is a Prima Bark heart, a Simple Stories banner and alphabet and some American Crafts wooden chevrons and Teresa Collins stickers...almost something from every manufacturer!
The photo is from our holiday in France last year and a little cave in a gorge, that you just have to go and explore! My album with pocket pages is nearly finished from that holiday - it is a mix of papers, but I try to keep the pockets with the same ranges.


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As everyone knows, we were supposed to spend a Carl Sagan amount of money on the F-35 Lightning II, a plane that has the demerits of sucking and costing too much, but on the plus side comes armed with unintentionally hilarious music videos. So I wake up to find that the Conservative government is considering a new agency for military purchases at arm's length from National Defence. This has the right kind of image: a Responsible Government, well meaning but duped by clever pencil pushers in a broken administration that our heroes are now fixing.
It is hard to know what to make of this. You don't do this sort of thing without signalling that somebody really screwed up. Even the most somnolent bureaucracy can bolt to its hind legs with the sudden manic, slavering energy of a coke-addled Rottweiler to defend its territory. Especially when the hound is a defense department, and the particular patch of turf in question is the one where it can dig up its tastiest chew toys.
But we still may be buying the damn things. Maybe. Ah, who knows?
As for this new agency plan. The implication that it's all the bureaucrats' fault tempts me to language that would get me into serious trouble if I worked for a respectable publication. The government misled Canadians about the true cost of the fighter, and then ordered the RCMP to investigate the leaks on "national security" grounds that the Mounties could not bring themselves to buy. The Defence Minister claimed that it was standard practice not to include life-cycle costs, when in fact it was. Mr. MacKay told us, rather wonderfully,
If you went out and bought a new minivan and it was going to cost you $20,000, you wouldn't calculate the gas, the washer fluid, the oil and give yourself a salary to drive it for the next 20 years.If nothing else, MacKay did buy himself a lot of attention from disreputable used-car salesmen.
Anyway, MacKay didn't improve his case by arbitrarily knocking 50 per cent off the cost of the Libya mission. Chump change compared to the Lightning-II, so why bother? I can only attribute that last bit of old Peter's bull to sheer force of habit.


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The design and publishing tools provided within QuarkXPress and Quark App Studio will take your design projects to the next level at a fraction of the cost. Take advantage of the great academic discounts on Quark products from Studica today!


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The husband and I had a date night, in. My father in law watched our son for us as we whipped up another recipe from our cook book we bought recently (remember the first recipe?). We listened to some Frank Sinatra and put our own spin on the ingredients since we didn't have "ziti" pasta, enough arugula and apparently the wrong ricotta cheese was purchased for this dish. As much fun as we had cooking this dinner, I'd love to say that this recipe turned out super delicious but because of our inaccuracy of ingredients, it definitely could have been better (we know for next time).
Nothing beats the time we spent together that night and I'd do it all over again...ingredient mishaps and all.
Mornings in the sunshine with my love bug have been a part of my favorite moments.
I have had the opportunity to have my work featured in my first print magazine. Per request, I shipped a whimsical floral crown from my shop to Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine. "The #1 monthly mag for chic moms-to-be and hot new mamas." I can't wait to see the April issue! Floral crowns are PERFECT for maternity shoots!
I have also had the absolutely amazing opportunity to work with Casey Wiegand. I have been following her blog for quite some time now. She has been such a great inspiration and beautiful role model as a mother and Godly woman. She is just beautiful inside and out!
I sent out a few floral crowns from the new line to her and her precious daughters and she blew me away with her kind words when she first opened her package, "I just had to say THANK YOU!!!!! Oh my heavens, I literally GASPED when I opened your gorgeous box today- AHH! WOW! Seriously WOW! We will get pics asap!...THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart!! **squeals**"
Such sweet moments of motherhood!
After my friend Tara and I attended Creative Tea Time a few weeks ago, we did something spontaneous on our way home. As we drove on the freeway, we looked to our left and saw a beautifully lit Ferris Wheel and without much hesitation, we got off the next exit (totally unaware of our location) and drove until we saw our destination. We got to see the city lights that night at the top of a giant wheel and it is a memory that will not soon be forgotten.
I was sent a couple handmade bow ties from As Darling Does and I fell in LOVE!! I am so excited to finally have some little boy accessories because they seem hard to come across. Our little man looks so handsome in his spiffy new pieces! I will be featuring this adorable shop with a giveaway so check back VERY soon.
I received some photos from another amazing and happy customer. I love seeing photos of special moments captured with handmade pieces from my craft studio. Thank you so much Hoi! I wish you the very best and a lifetime of happiness in your marriage. <3
Get the lace blusher veil in the shop here.
We went on a late night family trip to one of my favorite burger places-Tommy's! The nearest drive thru is now about 20 minutes away and with a sudden urge for a chili slathered cheeseburger, the husband didn't mind driving. It was a craving worth giving into and on the way back, we belched some good tunes as love bug danced his little heart out in the back seat.
The husband and I snuck out for a little double date night to go bowling with the in laws. I won half of a game and I will take that! ;)
A couple nights ago, I hosted a Valentine-themed girl's night with yummy food, singing in the kitchen (a game of love songs), mimosas, intimate topics and lots of chuckles.
Thank you Dee Dee Motique for the darling wooden topper!!
The other morning, we woke up as a family and headed to the park for some fresh air. I didn't take any photos because I had put my phone away in attempt to be more "present." I feel like social media and the phone in general can be such a huge distraction throughout your day in this beautiful life given to us. I find myself turning off my phone ringer a lot more now and actually hiding it at times to diminish those unwanted disturbances. I want to make this more of a habit. It can be really hard for me because this is a huge part of work-responding to emails, updating and renewing sold listings, keeping up on social media, etc. but I want to enjoy even the smallest of moments throughout my day. I am making a conscious effort and that's where it starts.
What do you think about the craze of social media and keeping up on notifications and emails?
What have you been doing recently my friends?


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Because the technology to get to the moon existed in 1969, but the technology to fake a moon landing in a studio did not.
The takeaway –
Why does any of this matter? Well my concern is with the ultimate fate of knowing, of seeing the difference between what you can know and what you wish for…The urge to believe drives people to trade in part of their soul in exchange for the comfort of being a rebel.


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If you're an avid reader who is always on the hunt for more good books to read or if you're just looking for a few reading suggestions tailored to your interests, the Pasadena Public Library has the perfect new service for you. We're proud to offer NextReads - an exciting e-newsletter service that connects our readers with new gems, best-sellers, related titles and maybe even an awesome older title that they might have missed before!
In order to get your customized selections, simply put a check mark next to the type of books or media you enjoy on the list below - choose as many as you like! – then enter your e-mail and account information, and we'll start delivering reading lists right to your inbox. You'll also be able to find out immediately if the items are in our catalog and, if not, we'll do our best to connect you with the titles or maybe even add it to our collection!
If you'd like to preview a newsletter before signing up, simply click on the name of the newsletter and a recent issue will open in a new window. If you're signing up while in the library, please feel free to ask one of our friendly staff members if you need assistance. If you're signing up from home and need help, call us at 713-477-0276 during our regular business hours and we will be happy to help. We're open Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m and Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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Interpersonal companionship is proven to enhance health and happiness in seniors, therefore improving the quality of life. Often seniors suffer from symptoms of depression due to lack of interaction and the inability to be active in a social community. Advantage Homecare Caregivers can assist with providing clients critical companionship services which improve quality of life, decrease loneliness and depression and allow seniors to stay in their homes longer.
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Meal preparation
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- Answer the door or telephone
- Monitor a calendar for appointments and other important events
- Monitor TV usage
- Organize mail
- Arrange appointments
- Monitor diet and eating
- Buy magazines, books, newspapers
- Record family history
- Clothing selection assistance
- Conversation and fellowship
- Help with letter writing and correspondence
- Rent and watch movies
To find our more about how Advantage Homecare's companionship services might improve the quality of life for your loved one, contact us today by calling 1.855.The.VNAs.


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4 Post-Its in Search of an Intro
1. Certain delicate features of literature are easily shattered by translation, while other hardier features will stand up under even casual handling. (Rough analogy? In a drawing class, certain extreme faces – hawk-nosed, great-eyed, bald or lushly-maned – will assert themselves faithfully through all manner of renderings.)
2. When I told Dan Wells I wasn't sure I couldwrite on translation since my foreign language skills, once modestly athletic, had atrophied with the years; plus, though some of my favourite authors are foreign, I wasn't sure if that mattered to my reading of them in English, he said, "Try."
3. Le mot juste. Is the belief in it more a necessary artistic credo than an aesthetic fact? A carver has to believe in the perfect stroke if he is to have any chance of finding the many excellent strokes he will need. Joyce said somewhere that he could defend every word in Ulysses. His requirement to do so – for how could he complete it otherwise? – need not convince the reader that numerous substitutions and excisions might not improve the novel. Usually it does convince, though, even a reader who quits the book in boredom. Why?
4. Quality is an existential bully; it radiates enough authority that the alternatives that might have replaced it fade to faint apparitions. If they disappear entirely we are apt to call the work a masterpiece.
. . . circa 1970, several pimply philosophers
Cool ideas were what we were after. Science fiction was the river we hunted in. Swarming at least one novel, or its equivalent in stories, per night, we behaved as reading piranhas, ravening little squirts with razor buck teeth, able to quickly strip a living carcass of words, however gaunt or obese, healthy or diseased, down to a gleaming white string of disarticulated notions. Cool idea! Unlike piranhas, our interest lay in what-was-left, the glittering inventions, and also in the sharing of them. We traded them like the marbles of two years previous, and the drug-and-sex tips of two years hence. You gotta hear this . . . then there's this other . . . cool idea.
This was not at all unliterary. It was merely a hypertrophied taste for one of the important elements of literature: ideas. Strong, stimulating thought-fare. Not necessarily true ideas, obviously, but baseline plausible (that is, capable of fulfilling wishes without insulting them). And not necessarily unsubtle, though subtlety will always present transmission problems – author to reader, reader to reader – just as the delicately shaded drawing botches in the copying worse than the bold silhouette. And nor, twerpish though we mostly were, did we have completely tin ears. If someone could think up really cool stuff and convey it in really cool ways – well, such a two-fer would soon be shredded with lending . . . but that's always been the tallest order, hasn't it? And if we judged the idea-master with the mealy prose no more harshly than we would a chef who floated delectable morsels in a workaday sauce – is that leniency any more perverse than the modern high-literary preference for rumps of average sentiment, thinly sliced and soothed with a team-stirred reduction garnished with sprigs of local/historical colour?
Though we were boys when we believed in it implicitly, I don't think the notion of all literature as translation, absurdly epic attempts to cross interpsychic space, was at all boyish – or childlike in any but the best sense of the word.
Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a reader better primed for first-time immersion in Céline. I'd just come out of a mental ward after an eighteen-month stay. As I roamed the streets of
I walked, drank coffee, and read. I'd found several places within a radius of a few miles that had a never-empty cup and waitresses who would let me ride that for three or four hours. I had a library card. When I hit a phrase or passage that was just too good, I copied it into the thick journal I'd bought. My own brilliant scheme, quieter than Shock 2's (whose given name I've never been able to recall, I'm sorry), was to collect this essence of the best, distilling my own portable mini-library between hospitalizations, then reviewing, savouring, memorizing – consolidating – its pages during the times inside.
But I had strict standards. The project demanded them. A line had, like Shock 2, to plant itself in front of me and bellow, barring my way until I recorded it. If I detected the slightest "give" in the verbal presence, I moved on. Bons mots, of every kind, I enjoyed like any reader; holy writ I transcribed.
Céline and his Journey just about undid me. My already febrile and flayed – in other words, prepared – sensibilities were shocked, staggered and stupefied, they were KO'd, sent reeling and belted sideways through the ropes by the torrential brilliance of the medico-literary maelstrom that called itself Céline. I couldn't get through a page without scribbling something down. Sometimes a single page forced me to flip open the journal three, four, five times. Often one fantastic image cascaded into the next, then the next, and then . . . it might be two thirds of the page before I could legally lift my pen. When it wasn't tumultuously exhilarating, it was dismaying, tiring, annoying. Aggravating. Who wants to stop reading every three sentences? You don't know whether to kiss or kick the author.
There was something so familiar, so intimate and almost-cosy, in those first post-ward days, about this Jouney to the End of the Night, everybody's dark-enraptured ride to the end of the line encoded in its incomparable title, but elaborated and transposed, transported, unforgettably. Infinitely, I would even say. ("Infinite" and "eternity," in various permutations, are words Céline used constantly, naturally; something, one of many things, that perplexes his rancid guttermouth Jew-baiter persona. He loved dancers, married one finally, and his language, even, or especially, when moling through the blackest of composts, is prone to "leap," "pirouette," "spin," going aerial to perform dogfights, ethereal glides, sunrise banks, flame-outs and death spirals.) "It is not reality which Céline paints but the hallucinations which reality provokes," said André Gide on the novel's reception, adding, "I find here the accents of a remarkable sensibility." It is the sensibility of a translator, I would venture, an author who never for a moment loses the sense of putting his shoulder to the door of a room which will never open more than a crack but whose contents he is determined, however meagrely, with a hopelessly hopeful faith, to display. Such ardors of transcription lead to doggedness, resourcefulness, and strangenesses of the kind that might be called dislocations to suggest an unpinpointable location (because it is everywhere and nowhere?).3
For I never lost the sense, even in the most hectic moments, that angels of translation – clamorous, flappy ones in this boisterous heaven – were the particular spirits attending this sacred copywork in the eye-dimming coffee houses. From Céline's vast ecology of fantasy, I was stocking an ark with specimens for replanting and breeding attempts on the other side. And the already considerable journey this Journey had made, from a French vernacular slang reputedly a tough stretch even for modern French speakers, was as nothing to the distance Céline had had to cross to incarnate the creatures of his hothouse phantasmagoria in any language whatsoever.
No doubt about it. Céline was Shock 1. The rest of us, echoes, later emanations, laudable in just the proportion with which we honoured the source, limping mimics of that inimitable rap, would have to fit ourselves inside some fractional nomenclature:
1/8, 2/8 . . . 1/16 . . . 1/32 . . . .
A beloved book reread without profit.
Guiltily and fearfully, too. Was I such a dull jerk now that genius bounced off me like nerf balls? Had I become, inside a decade, Catullus's "fit dolt for the treadmill"?
Or – just as bad, or worse – Could my earlier exultation have been deluded? Adoration of Céline . . . a symptom?
Obviously, both lines of thought were too discouraging to pursue and I must have let them down a drain of some kind.
Twenty years passed.
Dan Wells asked me to consider works in translation, and I took – with due trepidation – Marks-Céline and Manheim-Céline from their dust on my bookshelves.
A thousand compared pages later, the two texts read in tandem, warped and porcupined from several hundred yellow Post-It notes (Céline as exhaustive and exhausting as ever), two general conclusions were obvious to me. The two translations are so different, line by line, word by word, that it is obviously extremely difficult, requiring much ingenuity, judgement and (presumably) compromise, to render Céline's language into English. More interestingly, though, the distinctive lineaments of Céline's creation emerge so unmistakably from both translations that, though made of words, they seem impervious to words. The ideas are too cool not to make it across. (Within limits, obviously; they are immune to the fluctuations of skilled translators doing their level best by the work.) This, and not premature senility or recollected mania, was why I'd felt such ennui reading Manheim's new translation: I was expecting a revelation, but I'd already had it. Manheim's new version was more smoothly readable while more sharply particular, grittier, earthier, an improvement in most (not all) ways over Marks's fifty-year-old, and now a little fusty and clunky by comparison, original. But –
– what might be an appropriate analogy? You're walking through a gallery of rather staid and accomplished artworks, more or less pleasing, more or less equivalent. You round a corner and – WHAM! you're struck by, slammed by a work of radiant gusto, a giant fresco seething with form and colour, so wholesome and rich in its depraved audacity . . . naturally your tour is over. You ogle until they kick you out. Decades later you hear they've made improvements, removal of films and dust, some censored bits, that were occluding it. You go back. The renovations are as claimed. But appreciation is a poor relation, an eighth or ninth line cousin, of awe.
First, though, to the improvements. (Which would, I enviously acknowledge, give the virgin reader now an even purer hit of what floored me.)
Marks, in 1934, was sometimes a bit prudish, where Manheim runs right at things:
Upstairs the woman's ass was still bleeding. (259)
This casual profanity sounds like Céline, meaning it hangs together better with the rest of the sensibility encountered, whereas Marks's genteel decorum sometimes makes it seem that a Mormon has walked into the bar:
The woman on the third floor was still bleeding profusely. (300)
And yet, even this seemingly undeniable improvement is not crystal clear. Nothing ever is with Céline. He's like a big dark sun you're trying to wrap your arms around. Marks's reticence may capture a drawing-back from certain matters, a delicacy, even a prudery, that is authentically Céline. Céline said somewhere that a novelist should have a sense of shame, and a repeated motif involves the prose drawing the curtains over a scene that won't stand any more scrutiny. After parading the grisly horrors of trench warfare near the start of the novel, Céline's narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu, backs away with a discretion that underlines the carnage terribly, assuring us it's only a peek:
Each of us returned to his own war. And things happened, a whole host of things went on happening, which it isn't easy to talk about now, because nowadays people wouldn't understand them any more. (Marks 43) [Manheim's version is very similar]
The novel concludes with Bardamu's obliterating vision, sparked by a tugboat's hooting call, of the whole world being summoned to disappear. Marks conveys it like this:
It was calling to itself every boat on the river, every one, the whole town, and the sky and the country and us, all of it being called away, and the
The abruptness of this, the yanking shut of theater curtains on an intolerable scene, jibes with Bardamu's frequent assertions that, though a journey to the end of the night really has no end, there are repeated limits to a voyager's ability to take (or tell) what he finds. Manheim ends the summons to dissolution with: " – and that would be the end of us." (435) It is noteworthy that the two translators would have recourse to such different formulations for words in such an exposed position, the very last in the novel. Each uses the dash and a phrase of abrupt dismissal, but in Manheim the dismissal is of existence itself – a reiteration of nullity that at the end of the voyage is too familiar and too blandly assured – while in Marks the dismissal is of the telling, which has been shocked into (what will prove, with the publication of Mort á credit four years later, temporary) silence.
For the Célinian narrator is, above all, exposed. His nerve endings assault him with jagged illuminations; he sheathes them in dark broodings and digressive ruminations. Which doesn't mean the tough talk is unreal; it is as real as any hard, clenched muscle. As one reads the novel, one gets used to this rhythm of astonished contact – usually signalled by a startling metaphor – followed by cynical flight. It is the dominant rhythm of the narrator's contacts with others, especially his contacts with women. As frank and explicit as he is about the body and most of its functions, Céline is more reserved about sex. He seems to have mystical notions about sex, which he acknowledges sometimes, but which he perhaps intuited would vitiate his novel, or just embarrass him, if he voiced them too often or too fully:
[Musyne] has a gift for locating her fantasies in a dramatic faraway setting that gave everything a lasting glow. . . . Her medium was eternity . . . that unfathomable realm (Manheim 66-67) . . . those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love. (Marks 77) [I'll combine Marks and Manheim in this way if their different registers blend in a Célinian harmony.]
But I can feel myself straying here from translation; Céline is sucking me into his world-blender, seducing me as he always did. If I want to convey those essences of Céline that Marks and Manheim transmit so faithfully, while wording them so differently, I've got to be brutally programmatic. First, though, a remark in passing to correct an impression I may have given. One doesn't have to believe, as I obviously do, that some of the most translatable literary elements also represent some of the highest literary values. One only has to concede that they are durably transmissible. Some works travel better than others. Why? It's no counsel of carelessness to admit that some imaginative ecosystems are bigger than others, so richly teeming that they can lose numerous organisms without threatening their major life forms. It's the marginal systems that keep you counting ticks and fleas. But that image can be taken to imply a simplified equation, Great = Translatable, which is not true (especially not in reverse). It depends on the qualities, not the quality, of the original. Average bottles of artificial vanilla extract give a pretty fair flavour of natural vanilla. With lemon, on the other hand, even the more expensive brands go wide of the real lemon mark. But not because vanilla is a better flavour than lemon. Something, some chemical constituents in lemon, must be more elusive or fragile.
What, then, are the extracts of Céline's Journey that come across so unmistakably from the very different laboratories of Marks and Manheim?
Strong characters, for one. The world-wandering Bardamu is an unforgettable mixture of Chaplin's Little Tramp, sneering philosopher, lust-crazed low-life, rhapsodic visionary and persevering slum doctor . . . to name just a few of his shifting attributes. He is a protean derelict, musing from the heights, bitching from the swamps. Robinson, the degenerate (and unregenerate) coward he keeps running into – in "the muddy fricasee of heroism" (Manheim 41) of Flanders, in Africa, in
But I don't want to be loved anymore . . . It disgusts me! . . . I think it's like making love in the crapper! [Marks says "lavatory"] (Manheim 424-425) . . . You don't mind eating rotten meat? Helping it down with that Love sauce of yours? That's good enough, is it? Not for me, it isn't. (Marks 498)
And she shoots him in the belly three times. There's no mistaking characters this raw and startling. And they take prime place in a drama filled with dozens of minor characters just as originally conceived and minutely particularized. This particularization is one of the features of his writing that bedevils Céline's characterization as a hopeless misanthrope. (No less misguided, as an oversimplification, is the counter-assertion of his heroic compassion in chronicling naked human misery. His imagination was capacious, and his literary judgement astute: paradoxes ramble and collide in his great first novel, but always within the parameters of a finely tuned tone and trajectory.) The true literary misanthrope is more likely to pen a good book club selection, a socio-historical Theme Park in which embodied attitudes jostle toward a conclusion of dogged hopefulness unencumbered by a living person. The casually judging author, whether sunny or sour, trades in broad-brush types; when the Célinian narrator flees to jeering derision, as he does constantly, it is at least partly for respite from the constant threat of his engulfment by obsessively particularized others:
. . . he had the most beautiful eyes you ever saw, supernatural velvet . . . (Manheim 71)
Nature, too, is always trapping the narrator's eye with minatory revelations:
. . . those ungainly, caparisoned caterpillars which, quivering and foaming at the mouth, kept assailing our forest cabin. . . . God help you if you are clumsy enough to crush one. You'll be punished with an entire week of intense stench, which rises slowly from that unforgettable mash. (Manheim 144)
Both translators, though Manheim better than Marks, capture the novel's endlessly inventive and addicting rhythms: joltingly pell-mell, spiky and panicked, then suddenly relaxed, chatting and blackly joking, the forward propulsion harried with sudden reverses and digressions, but always compulsively readable. Harrowing and, just as often, hilarious. (Baradmu, who has become by default the director of a mental asylum, tells how "At Easter time our patients became rather agitated, women in light-colored dresses had taken to strolling back and forth outside the garden. Harbingers of spring. I gave them bromides.") (Manheim 396) It is miraculous that a novel so rich in internal reflection should also be so rich in external event, the audaciously extravagant escapades that entrammel Bardamu – and which he usually just escapes by fleeing – in World War I, the Congo, New York, the Ford factory in Detroit, Toulouse and Paris. One rich episode among many has Robinson paid by the Henrouilles to kill the wife's detested mother by wiring her rabbit hutches with explosives. But the bomb explodes in Robinson's face instead, blinding him. As Bardamu, the doctor, nurses him back to partial sight, Robinson confides that a new scheme is afoot: he and the old lady, his former intended victim, are going to
A translator can't miss with material like that. Or with Bardamu getting out of Africa only when, raving with tropical fever, he is sold by a priest to a slave galley bound for
To house numerous extended episodes like this, with all their attendant richnesses of description and reflection, should need two thousand pages instead of five hundred. That it doesn't – that it can be compressed without feeling constricted – is due, I think, to the novel's sly and brilliant construction. Journey, which can be taken as a grab bag of wild riffs and ravings, is in fact a tightly disciplined delirium, an exploration so focused as to be forensic that only poses as a haphazard picaresque. For all its exuberant sideshows, it proceeds like a dissection, deeper and deeper into the tissues under its glaring lights. But what is the body – the crime one might say – laid out on the table? It is both self and world, inner and outer; the journey proceeds in both directions simultaneously, the seeming paradox made possible by the myriad evocations of the named subject, "night." Night ramifies, accretes, alludes, and dodges; we learn a new quirk or aspect of it on nearly every page (and almost every page of my old journal), the sum of these revelations, which, curiously like the Cappadocian refusal to fix God's essence finally, approach without confining, shoving us into intimate proximity with something we can never quite see, confirming Night as both the central character and the presiding genius of the novel. The journey which binds the narrator to this undiscoverable, beckoning night is evoked with equal fluidity (the whole novel, not just its final scene, is riverine): it is a compulsion to "record the worst" (Manheim 18) . . . "to get at the essential truth" (Marks 29) . . . "more a sickness than a voyage" (Manheim 98) . . . "groping among the shadows" (Manheim 145) . . . "a key with which to try locked doors of many years and months, and finally days" (Marks 168) . . . "my vice, my mania for running away in search of God knows what" (Manheim 197) . . . "the strength to go further . . . even deeper and lower" (Manheim 230) . . . "calmly walking round by oneself to the other side of Time"(Marks 287) . . . "meticulous observation . . . a hobby of mine" (Manheim 291) . . . "to go further and still further with Robinson." (Manheim 329) And Robinson, the always-questionable guide to deeper night, is first encountered as a figment of night, a part of it that detaches with difficulty: "That change in the layout of the darkness had taken place a few steps away." (Manheim 33) "A few feet away the shadows had shifted . . . There must be somebody there." (Marks 37) As the search leads the searcher everywhere, everything is to his purpose. Everything seeming to fly apart actually hangs together. The result is one of those world-devouring, world-disgorging novels that, while you are reading it, actually becomes the world. Nothing comes to you that is not Céline-mediated.
One of the great joys of this conceit of the inner/outer journey is that it allows for a complete elasticity of time and perception. When fact and perception of fact mingle across a perpetually permeable membrane, there is no discrepancy in, for example, the narrator's first visit to a New York cinema taking longer, and seeming more significant, than his training to be a doctor. Metaphor ceases to be an adornment and becomes a law, a life force. Céline's superabundant metaphorizing seems like precisely the consummation his narrator wishes for so devoutly: "One day when the inner rhythm rejoins the outside one and all your ideas spill out and run away at last to play with the stars." (Marks 310) That ecstatic, universal communion is what I found, and still find, so shatteringly joyful and permitting a force in Céline. Imagination reels in a playground that is populous and deserted, centrifugal and centripetal; shocked remarks spin away from, and draw attention to, the gleeful panic at the centre.
One can be as innocent of Horror as one is of sex. (Marks 9)
Céline did not stay working consistently at these heights. Who could? In the later, more fitfully brilliant novels, his snarl often dilutes to a whine, his disgust too often lacks its vitalizing obverse of astonishment, and his by-then-signature three dots (used sparingly in his first novel) are too often a lazy stand-in for the jarring juxtapositions that produced the original effect of catching perception on the run. But in Journey to the End of the Night he accomplishes something truly extraordinary. There he functions as that prized anomaly: the fertile hybrid. His pages don't alternate between plodding rationality and insipid whimsy, each faculty enfeebled by the retreat of the other. He is always fully conscious and fully dreaming, and that is what gives his work its peculiar aura of lucid hallucination. He articulates a world that is perpetually dissolving in the act of reaching us. He crosses our own orbit as both messenger and mirage.
Macbeth: A Picture of Health
A Chinese student of mine, poor in English and disinclined to improve, recently read Macbeth in a translation that was at least thirdhand: Chinese prose (which she also found too hard) rendered into basic English and retrieved in chunks from someone's website. The results were notably threadbare: "It is a story told by a fool. Full of noise and anger, yet without meaning." Along with shock at how much was missing (and relief that Faulkner got his title at the source), surprise crept in, a little after, at how much still remained. Shakespeare's distinctive language may be gone, but the image of bottomless nullity endures. The image is so strong it can survive extensive hacking.
Su wei (I will call her) proceeded to give me a rather remarkable précis of Macbeth consisting almost entirely of vivid pictures. Remarkable because this string of vivid tableaux laid bare the play's strong skeleton of imagery and event, and, even more remarkably, suggested (to Su wei and to me) many of the subtleties of its flesh, quite without the flesh of Shakespeare's language.
Macbeth's battle prowess, his résumé of violence . . . his temptation by witches, whom he more than meets halfway . . . a skeptical friend, a scheming wife . . . "unsex me" invocations (these never fail to impress, perhaps largely due to the word "sex") . . . a beckoning, floating dagger . . . murder in the dark castle, the frightened perpetrators, blood . . . "Sleep no more" . . . And so on, a necklace of brilliantly macabre moments, until "Out, damned spot!" and the clasp closes with a new traitor's dripping head displayed.
(None of my students, by the way, fail to see the play as a love tragedy, the childless protagonists driven to separate corners of hell by the very means they had supposed would unite them fruitfully. They arrive at this understanding mathematically, noting Lady Macbeth's diminishing number of lines and then her absence from many scenes until her pre-suicide ravings. Movie-schooled to calibrate screentime, which in a halfway honest screenplay will predict plot turns (none of my students was surprised, a decade ago, by Gwyneth Paltrow's head in the box in Seven; her coffee shop conversation with Morgan Freeman had prepared them; otherwise, "baby talk in that restaurant . . . waste of time," as one boy, now a dentist, informed me), they count the solitary scenes that spell the end of a marriage. Not uninterestingly, they see Macbeth as a middle-aged, and thus appropriately perverse, sequel to Romeo and Juliet. Su wei even recognizes the gender divide implicit in the different deaths available to husband and wife: "He can fight other men . . . she just kill herself.")
Now, if it would be absurd to claim Su wei had any real knowledge of Shakespeare's language, would it not be equally absurd to deny that she had some significant acquaintance with his imagination? And can that mean, really, no knowledge of language? Can we amputate so neatly the world-staining hands she knows from the "multitudinous seas incarnadine" she cannot, saying one is image and the other words?
The other day, I was reading a translation of Chateaubriand's Memoires d'outre tombe (a title even Céline might have envied), when I came across the memoirist's evocation of a bygone era (more fanciful than historical, I assume), "an imperfect state of civilization [in which] superstitious beliefs and semi-barberous customs of foreign origin mingled romance with everything: characters were strongly deWned, imagination powerful, existence strange and mysterious." Chateaubriand being Chateaubriand, I couldn't be sure if his tone was more nostalgic or contemptuous, but it struck me that his listed attributes are equivalent to several of the most robust literary features, those most likely to come through translation intact: strong character, powerful imagination, strange and mysterious existence (or sense of existence).
"Exuberance is Beauty," said Blake. (Who, not incidentally, was constantly aware of translation as the core activity of writing. His poems were "dictated" to him by the visionary world, and he testified in active verbs to the number of realms and faculties they had to cross to reach him: I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock: with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, and read by them on earth." [emphases mine]) And exuberance is precisely what is least easily swaddled by decorum or change of costume. Every author is a translator first. So is every reader. Words cross monstrous gulfs to reach us. But admitting all crossings are perilous is a long way from saying all are doomed or even equally costly. If all authors defy you to get them right, some, and the best among them, dare you no less ardently to get them wrong.
1From "a conversation between two persons diagnosed as schizophrenic," recorded in R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (Penguin, 1967), p. 84.
2John H. P. Marks. Journey to the End of the Night.
3"Everywhere and nowhere," like "hopelessly hopeful faith," point to an experience – eerie and brain-arresting, though not really puzzling – I have had from time to time; that is, finding a phrase or passage that might illuminate Céline's aesthetics – and this is the only time I find such phrases – in a religious work, particularly of the mystical variety. The parallel popped up most recently – as it will pop up again in this essay, if I can slip it in over Our Author's intensified cacklings in Eternity – in a volume of Simone Weil, in statements such as these from "Decreation": "It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day. To uproot oneself socially and vegetatively. To exile oneself from every earthly country. . . . But by uprooting oneself one seeks greater reality."
4Ralph Manheim. Journey to the End of the Night.


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Football Taco Bowl Bites are hearty appetizers and are always a hit for game-day parties. They are like a seven layer taco dip….in your hand! Easy Football Taco Bowl Bites The Super Bowl is this weekend, and creating a robust menu of appetizers is ALWAYS front and center on my mind! Being a food blogger, the pressure is ON to bring "that" dish everyone devours. Couple that with the fact …continue reading
Instant Pot Chili Recipe – This beefy chili is easy to make and super flavorful. Full of warm chili spices and excellent flavor! Chili con Carne is easy to make in your pressure cooker! Follow my tips easy steps to make this delicious recipe, and grab my Instant Pot cheat sheet. To make this recipe, you will need: chuck roast, onion, jalapeños, beef broth, canned tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, beer, spice mix, chili powder, dry mustard, cumin, smoked paprika, cocoa powder, cornmeal, and salt. Instant Pot Chili …continue reading
Yogurt fruit dip is a fun and healthy recipe that will give fruit an extra creamy and sweet twist. Made with just 3 ingredients, this easy fruit dip recipe is perfect for after school snacks or parties. Follow my tips below to make our favorite yogurt fruit dip. Ingredients you will need to make this yogurt fruit dip: yogurt, heavy whipping cream, honey or maple syrup. Yogurt Fruit Dip …continue reading
Carrot Orange smoothie is packed with vitamins A and C but it's really the perfect drink whether you're sick or not. Kids love how sweet it is and you'll love it's packed with immunity-boosting nutrients. Whether you're looking to help kiddos kick a cold or just want something cool and sweet to sip as an easy snack, this is it. Blend together carrot puree with pineapple and orange juice to make …continue reading
Decadent triple chocolate cherry dump cake is a rich chocolate dessert perfect for Valentine's Day. Layers of cherries, chocolate with cream, and cake with a subtle almond flavor take an ordinary, easy dump cake up a notch and make it extraordinary. If you have a few simple ingredients and 10 minutes to prep, you can make this delicious dessert. Follow my tips below to make this delicious chocolate dump cake. …continue reading
Ham and cheese pinwheels are a super simple and easy appetizer that everyone will love. All you need is 4 ingredients and a few minutes to make these pinwheel appetizers. Use deli ham and your favorite sliced cheese; turkey would also work and be absolutely delicious. Follow my helpful tips below when making these ham and cheese pinwheels. For this recipe you will need: crescent roll dough, deli ham, cheese …continue reading
As soon as the cold weather hits my mind immediately goes to cleaning hacks. I'm not overly ocd about my house (we leave that to my husband), but the cold weather brings me back to a time when I had the flu so bad that I couldn't even open the cough syrup bottle because I was too weak. So now I do everything I can to keep our house clean …continue reading
This soft sugar cookie recipe is a must-bake for the holidays! The cookies are light and fluffy, making them perfect for homemade buttercream frosting! Follow my tips below to make the best sugar soft sugar cookies with frosting. Ingredients you will need: unsalted butter, four, sugar, one egg, vanilla extract, almond extract, baking soda, and milk. Hello again and happy holidays! It's me, Kristine from Kristine in between and I'm …continue reading


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The Free Things Box (FTB) is a freebie box that's placed in front of the house as a friendly means for recycling small, still useful objects. Many people have a lot of stuff that's still in good order and don't want to throw it away. The FTB allows residents to find new homes for these items, locally with their neighbors. The design of the FTB is simple with the front side featuring a window for a quick look, an opening on top, and a sloping lid that can be closed at night time to keep out unwanted guests. There are just three rules that need to be followed when using the FTB: 1. It is only kept open during daytime; 2. You can only take things you can use; and 3. Only one thing can be taken at a time. Watch the video above to learn how to build one of your own or download the building plan here. The Free Things Box can be made for about 50 dollars.
Via Berto's Blog
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Woke up at the hotel bright and early..OK, maybe not THAT early, and went to the hotel courtyard for a "continental breakfast" of cereal, fresh pastries & coffee. I tried to get down a "bug juice" of sorts that was simply awful. Another cup of coffee (and I normally don't drink coffee) and I was on my way.
I stayed in a northern part of Napa known as Calistoga and made my way North West to Sonoma county. I ended up in Healdsburg in the Russian River and started at a winery called Sausal winery. I tried a Sangiovese, an Italian varietal that is not that common in NorCal and was the only one I tasted on this trip. Sangiovese is often a lighter red with greater acidity. This was one such Sangiovese, wherein I detected some cherry & earth and a nice acidity. Zinfandel is a very common varietal in Sonoma county and I tried 2 Zins at Sausal; the 2004 Family Zinfandel & the 2005 Private reserve Zin. The alcohol was under 15% on both, a relatively low # for Zin. The family Zin is priced very reasonably at under $20 and is a nice, sweet jammy zin. The private reserve Zin is also priced pretty well and I think by far the better of the two. At a suggested retail price of $23 this Zinfandel aged for 19 months in 100% french oak showed fresh red & blue fruit that turned to riper black fruit, was not overly jammy and had some nice layers to it. Well integrated tannins with a medium-long finish this is a very nice Zin for $23.
The prior day in Napa was a lot of fun but I have friends and other contacts there whom I really wanted to see so my day was very much set. I know nobody in Sonoma so I figured the day would take me where it took me. The gentleman at Sausal recommended a winery up the road (in Geyserville) called Stryker Sonoma, so I gave it a shot. Sadly the gentleman in the tasting room at SS was not the friendliest guy around. Maybe he simply lacked personality. Not sure, but it made the visit much less pleasant than it could have been. Suddenly I was missing having friends at all the wineries. It was also the ONLY winery on my trip that charged me for a tasting. Granted it was only $5 and I did try 7 wines, but still – all the other places extended a very friendly courtesy to the Wine Tasting Guy and this guy did not. That said the wines were nice. I started with a white blend of 50% Semillon & 50% chardonnay that I really enjoyed. And I think I detected a wine adjective I had not previously understood – "oily". "Oily" is used to describe the texture or body of a wine and is commonly associated with Semillon – which may be why I used that descriptor (another benefit to blind tasting). The wine had a nice citrus nose & a creamy citrus palate with nice acidity and a medium+ finish. There was also a Merlot, Cab, and then 4 zinfandels. Amazingly enough of the 4 I liked the one that I htink was the cheapest (I did not get the price for one of them). I'm not sure if I was bitter given the lack of warmth, but 3 of the wines seemed a little bitter and overly acidic to me – wines that were simply out of balance. It was actually the 2004 "old vine" Estate Alexander Valley Zin that I liked most. Made from 98 year old vines and retailing for $26 this wine did not have the out of balance acidity and was not overly jammy. I found it to be lightly jammy with nice fruit a soft & nice mouth feel and a medium to long finish. Oh yeah, did I mention how beautiful the tasting room was. And with huge glass windows that had a marvelous view of the mountains and vineyards.
From Stryker I headed West on Alexander Valley Road and stopped at a winery I have heard of, Jordan Winery. Set on a beautiful estate my first impression was how pretentious this place was. I did not make a reservation and was told one needs to schedule an appointment to taste there. Preparing to leave the girl at the reception area invited us to go in and look around. A different woman informed us that she had time for us and that we could in fact taste the wine. I was with a friend and she asked if we wanted one tasting or two. At $20 I asked her if we could share one and we were informed that they do not do that. Serious pretension. I was ready to write a nasty review of this place. But sure enough while brousing the goods in the tasting room we were waved over by the woman who sort of whispered "come on, its OK". Turns out she was a pretty sweet lady and I was thrilled to have stayed because the wines were quite good.
There were only 2 wines, a Chardonnay and a bordeaux blend. The 2006 Chardonnay spends 3 months "Sue Lie" (on its lees or mixture of yeast cells, grape pulp, etc), gets filtered, and then goes back into the French oak barrels for another 7-8 months. The wine had a nice subtle toastiness and melon aromas. On the palate it showed some lemon zest, subtle oak and was crisp with a silky mouth feel and a nice long finish.
Their 2004 cabernet which is actually a Bordeaux blend of 76% Cabernet, 18% merlot, 4% Petit Verdot & 2% cab franc. Interestingly enough this wine spends 3 months in large 1000 liter oak tanks while going through it malolactic (secondary) fermentation before being blended and then moved to a mixture of French & American oak barrels for one year. The wine is then kept in the winery cellar for 18 months before being released. This is a very important step (that most wineries can not afford to do) allowing the wine to show its best upon release. The wine had a clear ruby color, with a somewhat typical Napa/Sonoma bouquet of blue/black berry. What made this wine great were its very soft & well integrated tannins and it velvety mouth feel. There was no spitoon here but I was OK with that as this wine deserved to be swallowed. Upon swallowing this wine showed a nice long finish. At $50 for the Cab & $30 for the Chard it is actually not ridiculously priced either. Great stuff!
Heading further West & a little North we ended up at the Ridge (Lytton Springs) winery. Ridge is a well known Zinfandel producer & upon arrival we were WARMLY greeted by a very nice woman. Although Ridge is known for their Zins they do make other very fine wines and we were started off with a Chardonnay and finished with a Cab/Merlot blend and finally a Petit Syrah. But I was there for the Zins, and we tasted 3 of them. The Ponzo vineyard, Oltrani & famous Geyserville Zinfandel. Although the Geyserville sells for $35 while the others go for $28 it was the Ponzo that I enjoyed most. It had the lowest Alcohol (at 14.4% ABV as opposed to 14.6 for the Geyserville & 15.1 for oltrani) and was the least "jammy" of the 3. Now Zins are often jammy and there is nothing wrong with that if you like it, but I felt like I had lots of one dimensional jammy zins. By no means were the other zins one dimensional. The Geyserville showed nice tabacco, cigar box & mocha coffee while the Oltrtani had ripe fruit & a great mouth feel. But the 2006 Ponzo vineyard Zin showed ripe cherry on the nose and fresh cherry & berry flavors on the palate. It was lush, fruity, had well integrated tannins & a nice long finish. Ahhhh…..
From Ridge we drove just up Lytton Springs Rd to Mazzocco Sonoma where we met a fun & edgy guy who called himself Demitrus (although we later found out he was kidding and his real name is something else – he asked not to be mentioned by name). We tried a chardonnay, 3 zins & 2 cabs at Mazzocco. Their 2005 "Home" Zinfandel, blended with 3% Petit Sirah, had a very pleasant minty menthol thing going on that went very nicely with the ripe fruit. It had a great mouth feel and a medium + finish. The 2003 Dry Creek Valley Cabernet reserve was also a favorite with its unusual nose and nice body. I felt the nose showed more blue or purple fruit than black fruit & was not yet another Norcal cab. Nice showing all around.
From Mazzocco we headed north on Dry Creek Road and decided to stop at Dutcher Crossing, a winery I had visited a year earlier. One of the reasons I went back was because of a very warm and gracious tasting room person the first time I was there. This time I had to wait a while before anyone paid attention to me and even longer before they finished with the other people and decided to get started with us. YES PEOPLE, CUSTOMER SERVICE MATTERS. The woman ended up being nice enough, but I really got started on the wrong foot. We tried a nice Sauvignon Blanc and two Chardonnays that another gentleman in the tasting room really seemed to like. I found them both to be a bit tart for my liking but I suppose different strokes for different folks. We tried a Mapple Vineyard Zin which we were told came from the "twisted Oak block" which is a dry farmed section. It was nice, as was the Proprietors Cab which was blended with 24% Syrah. But our favorite of the tasting was a very interestingly blended Port made of 59% Petit Sirah, 36% Zin & 5% Syrah. It had an alcohol level of 19% (not that much higher than some zins) and apparently spent 24 months in French oak. It was full of sweet, nutty, fruity aromas and flavors and was thoroughly enjoyed…and swallowed!
It was getting late and I really wanted to get to one more winery so we ran next door to Ferrari-Carano, a very large, fancy & beautiful estate. The scenery from the multi-level tasting room was quite spectacular. Sadly we were told that the only human to actually walk the ground is the groundskeeper – strict look but do not walk policy. Seemed kind of sad – almost like fine China that stays in a cabinet and never gets used. back the wines though, they were all very nice. They have a fancy "limited release" room downstairs which closes 30 minutes prior to the "classic wines" tasting room so we started there. We tried a very nice Chardonnay (the 2006 Emelia's Cuvee) that I struggled with a little as I could not grasp the nose from the traditional Burgundy glass. On the palate however it was full, soft, luscious, slightly creamy, crisp & had some zestiness, all brought together by a nice long finish. Their 2006 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir had that artificial candy fruit nose that I do not care for but on the palate it was quite complex showing some smoked meat, full fruit, cherry, red berry, red licorice…the only thing missing was some good earthiness. Not my favorite, but nice. We then tried the 2004 Sonoma county "tre'sor", a bordeaux blend containing all 5 varietals, 63% Cab, 16% Malbec, 11% Petit Verdot, 6% Cab Franc & 4% Merlot. This wine had big black fruit, subtle oak, some black pepper & what I thought was a hint of charcoal. It was a full bodied wine with a smooth mouth feel (and a touch of heat) that had well integrated tannins and a medium to long finish. The last wine was the "Prevail – West Face" which is a blend of 70% Cab & 30% Syrah. I really enjoyed the nose on this one as it had a lot going on. I thought I detected a bit of brett but it was mild and somewhat masked by black fruit, spice, smokiness, and some earthy foresty aromas. This wine was big & had huge tannins that would go fabulously with a juicy steak. Yum, I'm hungry!
Finding ourselves all the way up North it is a good thing I spit most of the day as we had a nice long drive down to the Southern most part of Sonoma County, downtown Sonoma. There we had dinner at The Girl & the Fig. I'm admittedly no food critic, but I had a pan roasted arctic Char, a fish a lot like salmon that I was not previously familiar with. Sadly I felt my own pan seared salmon comes out better but my friend had a really delicious vegetarian dish called the chickpea panisse cake. We had a very nice server, drank a lot of wine, and it was a great ending to a fabulous trip.
Not sure when I next get back to Sonoma so if you're going any time soon please say hi for me.
Happy Sonoma wine tasting!
Tags: , Healdsburg, Sonoma county, wine tasting


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50mm, bokeh, Cameron village, d7000, floral, flowers, gardens, nikon, shopping center, spring, tulips
13 Monday Apr 2015
Posted life, lifestyle, photographyin
13 Friday Mar 2015
Posted food, life, lifestyle, travelin
50mm, amsterdam, brew, dof, fbf, happy friday, jordaan, nikon, nikond7000, tea, unlimited delicious
09 Monday Mar 2015
Posted lifestyle, photographyin
50mm, clouds, d90, dof, images, lake, landscape, nature, night, nikon, photography, reflection, reflections, silhouettes, sunset, water
PS. In regard to copyright – all images belong to figandthewasp unless otherwise stated. Be kind and give credit where credit is due.
'nuff said
06 Friday Mar 2015
Posted food, photography, travelin
50mm, candid, candids, close up, comfort food, desserts, donuts, doughnut plant, doughnuts, food, food porn, happy friday, new york city, nikon, nyc, people watching, portrait, portraiture, travel, vacation
Happy Friday from Doughnut Plant, NYC!
PS. With regard to copyright – all images belong to figandthewasp.wordpress.com unless otherwise stated. Be kind and give credit where credit is due.
'nuff said
25 Wednesday Feb 2015
Posted food, life, lifestyle, photography, Uncategorizedin
50mm, 85mm, beasley's, burgers, chuck's, comfort, d7000, desserts, dof, downtown raleigh, food, food porn, frites, ice, inches, laduree, lucette grace, macarons, macaroons, nc, nikon, nikon d600, not again, photography, pot pie, raleigh, snow, snowday, snowedin, snowmageddon, tarts, triangle, unlimited delicious, winter storm, winter weather
Here again is the chance for winter weather. I myself am tired of snow and hearing the word, "snowmageddon". Are you? Thought so.
The only plus side (or down side if you're thinking of the aftermath) of a winter storm for me is the opportunity to indulge in comfort foods. Rich decadent desserts top the list along with hearty main courses. Feast your eyes on some of my favorites!
Above, Lucette Grace, Raleigh.
Unlimited Delicious, Jordaan, Amsterdam.
Beasley's Chicken + Honey, Raleigh.
PS. In regard to copyright – all images belong to little ol' me unless otherwise stated. Be kind and give credit where credit is due.
'nuff said


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The champion of champions has been made in seed form. The OG Kush was formally a clone only cannabis strain. Although the plant stretches in the first periods of growth, it soon fills out during the flowering stage. She has smaller nugs so that you can get a good yield.
Type: Mostly Indica Yield: 400-500 g/m2 Flowering Period: 8 - 9 Weeks Ambience: Indoor and Outdoor
Super Thai Skunk | Kerala Cheese | Buddha's Sister | Kandy Kush | OG Kush | Sleestack


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It's made Chuck Lorre rich, but The Big Bang Theory is a niggling weed in the cracks of modern comedy.
I was a kid who grew up on some of the world's most popular comedies; Friends, Frasier, The Office – sitcoms that contained real gems of television comedy that the western world still holds dear today. Now, as a 16-year-old, sitcoms are still my daily bread. I watch them with semi-insane regularity, literally being able to reel off entire Friends scenes by memory after watching them repeatedly. This is why I hold a particularly strong opinion of any new-found sitcom claiming to have 'taken the world by storm', 'reinvented the comedy genre' itself, or some other washed-up phrase that's plastered all over the billboards for the new and improved comedy that we will all love and watch because, well, we'll have no choice – it'll be everywhere.
According to Chuck Lorre, the losers, aka the ones we're meant to laugh at, are the geeks, the socially awkward, and women
So, let's address an issue with recent sitcoms in this 'Golden Age of Television'. It all comes down to The Big Bang Theory, and Chuck Lorre's colourful, canned laughter bandwagon of a predecessor, Two and a Half Men. I have regularly and regretfully had the opportunity to tune into both of these shows several times; enough times to get a clear picture of what they are. Apparently, there are clear winners and losers in Chuck Lorre's idea of life. The losers, aka the ones we're meant to laugh at and not with, are the geeks, the socially awkward, and the women.
The winners are the ones who are blessed with cable-worthy good looks, or the ones whose alcohol addiction and sexism are shrugged off as funny banter for the whole family to enjoy. These two groups occupy both 'comedies', and the characters that adopt these written traits are loved and adored by the public. Simply put, Lorre's shows are designed for us to laugh at the expense of people who don't realise they're a joke, neatly wrapped into a 20-minute package that is convenient for us all to watch every Thursday at 9pm. But how can these shows be so incredibly popular, when the majority of people who watch them don't regularly spout off offensive one-liners like a character in The Big Bang Theory?
The harsh reality is that this comedy is genuinely loved and appreciated by the general TV-watching public. The real question is: why is this allowed? Why is the current highest-rating sitcom, drawing in tens of millions of viewers in repeats alone, so atrocious? Why do I see T-shirts baring the phrase 'Bazinga' every god-damn place I go?
While Dads was promptly cancelled, a new strain of insulting sitcom appears every TV season like a weed that simply won't die
The worst part of sitcoms like Big Bang Theory is the hope they inspire in wannabe show creators who believe that, yes, they too can have the massive, looming success of that Godzilla of a comedy by being just as offensive as the people who created it. Enter shows like Dads, also known as the show that became renowned for its racist and sexist storylines. If only the creators had masked it as cleverly as Chuck Lorre masks the brash offensiveness of The Big Bang Theory's scripts, they could have had just what Lorre is currently rolling in. While this particular comedy was promptly and appropriately cancelled, a new strain of insulting sitcom appears every new TV season like a weed that simply won't die.
And while I'm not a fan of award propaganda like the Oscars or the Emmys, the unfortunate false belief is that a film or a TV show isn't actually worthy until it's won a load of meaningless mini statues. While many of us can cling to the idea that good shows that win next to no awards (cough, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Parks and Recreation, cough) are still beloved and deserve cult status, the cold reality is that the shows that reach even the most off-the-grid TV viewer via extensive marketing are the ones that funding is pumped into like a bloated pig: the shiny award winners.
Sure, sometimes, if the advertising, acting and 'rave' critic reviews all align perfectly, genuinely clever and funny comedies can make it through the dark tunnel and into the promised land of decent viewer ratings. Newer shows like The Mindy Project are living proof that, sometimes, this can just work. These kinds of comedies skim on the surface, safe enough for a few more seasons, but not reeling in the big money like our family-fan-favourite, The Big Bang Theory.
We, as a television watching community, need Chuck Lorre and people angling for his success to just quit while they're ahead. Make room for the sitcoms that are, you know, actually intelligent, original, and – most importantly here when talking about comedies – funny. So, as an eternally hopeful sitcom-lover, I will continue to watch new comedy pilots that appear every September from the USA in an attempt to find my new Friends or Frasier, while all the time resisting the shows inebriated with bright colours, offensive one-liners and cheap jokes, and I encourage others to do the same.
Read more: Do popular sitcoms exacerbate prejudiced attitudes in our society?
All images: CBS


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Here is a quote from the movie to put you in the mood for black capes, twilight, and Hugh Jackman, or at least mega magnetism and electricity:
"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret… but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"." – Michael Caine, The Prestige
When I rang the doorbell to the "vintage" b&b that houses the museum, I felt like I was an accessory to the pledge of a magic trick. It struck me as an eerie piece of dramatic flair. The museum entrance was the turn.
The inn-keeper gave us a tour of the b-and-b. The rooms include prime balcony views of Pike's Peak, romantic sunsets from the hot-tubs, and authentic steam showers. These produce hot water like other modern appliances, but are powered by steam – just like a calliope, which is also powered by steam. Factoid compliment of the host.
After awkwardly pausing at door-ways and exploring the honey-moon get-a-way rooms, we trooped downstairs to the basement. And what awaited? Downstairs, the lights were off. The room was unheated. The table was covered in books and light-bulbish things, and fronted by a row of chairs. The room definitely upped the ante that the door-bell had slapped down. The museum master was the prestige.
He was a man who looked like a Monty Python Hitler in rumply black jeans, a tightish zippered black polo, and black Nikes with a white logo, just like a badly-dressed high school science teacher with a great grey greasy mop of pepper-and-salt hair. He was so awfully glad to see us he didn't know where to start, and so excited to continue that he didn't know where to stop.
By the end of the tangled web of conspiracies I actually was overpowered by a burning desire to know about Tesla. After a while I couldn't resist. My hand shot up again and again. I was the prize student, the one that everyone really hates. I knew – or at least I should have known – all that St. Tesla wasn't, because the Tesla Ex had made that very clear. Right now I am pretty sure that he was from Mars. But what was the name of the cat?
That was when the Tesla Ex turned on a movie and left me to it. I'm going to have to read one of those 500 page biographies, I guess. But I was his favorite. He asked ME to lick the light-bulb. It was a fuzzy taste, with a furry zap – like licking the swing-set in a playground. Like really, really dirty iron that has a nice zing.
When we left the Tesla Ex asked us all to return to be a part of Tesla: The Movie: a production to be filmed this summer. But since the movie won't have a heroine so I can't be her, and besides all of that sexy Hollywood jazz is a b.s. conspiracy, I've instructed my agent to decline.
Tesla: The Sequel
Here is a quote from the movie to put you in the mood for black capes, twilight, and Hugh Jackman, or at least mega magnetism and electricity:
Filed under Uncategorized
2 responses to "Tesla: The Sequel"
Every time I imagine doing something like this on my own, all I want to do crawl under a rock. LOL.
Thanks, I have been searching for facts about this topic for ages and yours is the best I've discovered so far.