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Charles R. Foster is professor and associate dean of faculty development at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.
his article appeared in The Christian Century, December 9, 1998, pp. 1185-1187. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This article prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
Fashion, entertainment and possessions are identity markers for the youth of our times. Churches need critical perspective on the influence of contemporary media and values of consumer capitalism. The authors of these three works document the pervasiveness of this consumer capitalism and media in defining young peoples’ experiences.
BOOK REVIEWS: >Youth Leadership: A Guide to Understanding Leadership Development in Adolescents, by Josephine A. Long and Carl I. Fertman. Jossey Bass, 243 pp, $25.00
Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, by William Finnegan. Random House, 481 pp., $26.00.
Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, By Tom Beaudoin. Jossey Bass, 210 pp., $22.00.
Three provocative books challenge our concept of youth ministry and question our capacity to transmit the faith across generations. In Youth Leadership Josephine Long and Carl I. Fertman take up a topic that many churches, schools and other youth-serving organizations have ignored since the late 1960s. Long, director of the Leadership Development Network at the University of Pittsburgh, and Fertman, executive director of the Maximizing Adolescent Potentials Program at the University of Pittsburgh, explore patterns of leadership in teenagers and examine how leadership is nurtured.
The authors frame the discussion with two theoretical perspectives. The first is that of developmental psychology, an approach that dominates the literature on youth ministry. Drawing on the insights of Erik Erikson, Carol Gilligan and others, Long and Fertman note that while young people begin to engage in leadership at a very young age, their involvement intensifies rapidly as they move into the teenage years. They are busy acquiring in- formation about leadership and forming attitudes toward leadership in these years. They learn to communicate, make decisions and manage leadership roles. The authors identify three distinctive stages in this effort: awareness, in which youth self-consciously begin to identify ways to function as leaders in various social contexts; interaction, in which they explore and test their growing knowledge and skills of leadership; and mastery, when they begin to develop a vision of themselves as leaders and take responsibility for preparing to be leaders.
Long and Fertman's second theoretical perspective is drawn from the research of E. P Hollander, J. M. Burns and J. V. Downton, which emphasizes leadership as "transactions or exchanges" that take place between the leader and the one who is led, as well as the transformation of "self-interests for the good of the group, organization or society." The transactions are the skills and tasks associated with leadership, while the transformation of self-interests describes the act of leadership itself. From these two perspectives, the authors locate the impetus to leadership in the developing capacities of teenagers, who respond to the situations in which they find themselves and practice leadership.
The task of developing youth leaders is a matter of creating environments that will nurture capacities for leadership. This changes the role of adult leaders. Instead of teaching people to be leaders, they are to nurture their potential for leadership. Parents become partners to youth leadership efforts, while teachers and other adults "support," "empower" and "facilitate" their developing capacities.
The authors suggest ways to create these conditions and give examples of leadership-nurturing environments. They challenge the value of youth ministries that don't meet these conditions, including those that isolate teenagers from children and adults in the congregation, those that emphasize entertainment, and those that prefer charismatic adults who direct youth over adults who nurture youth capacities.
The youth in Youth Leadership are familiar to most church people. They are active in school and community, live at home with at least one parent and accept the basic values and perspectives of society's dominant social institutions.
We are not familiar, however, with the young people we encounter in Cold New World. William Finnegan introduces us to disenfranchised young people whose families seem overwhelmed. Schools do not hold these young people's attention. Their skills do not translate into success in the job market. With the exception of some rural African-American youth, these youths find the institutional church irrelevant. Yet many of the deepest issues of their lives are inherently religious, especially when they are trying to make some sense out of the violence and hostility they experience.
Finnegan presents the lives of African-American young people in a New Haven neighborhood through the eyes of a teenage drug dealer. He presents Mexican-American youth in Washington State who struggle with the experience of immigration, and white supremacist Anglo-American youth in the Los Angeles suburbs. All of these youth are experiencing the downward economic movement of their families; all of them have had repeated encounters with direct, overt and systemic violence.
Finnegan researched this book by living with these young people. He ate with them, attended their gatherings, interviewed family members and community, business and school leaders who touched their lives. He re- turned to visit the youths over the course of his research, and on several occasions intervened in their lives.
Despite the grimness and violence of their stories, the youth reveal their resilience and their capacity for tenderness and compassion. I found myself hoping that these young people would find a way to improve their situation, give some socially acceptable response or find enough institutional or personal support to escape the downward spiral of their lives. It does not happen. Their environments do not contain the resources to alter this tragic course. And most of our congregations are unaware of or inattentive to their quests for meaning and place.
The young people in Virtual Faith represent another group that has had little contact with the church--GenXers, or those middle-class, educationally successful young people born between 1961 and 1981. This book is a generational autobiography of their quest for religious meaning. According to Tom Beaudoin, a GenXer and theology student, the distinguishing feature of the GenX experience is the influence of the images and values of television and popular music.
Wade Clark Roof observes that Beaudoin "takes us on a romping, eye-opening voyage through GenX culture--its music, its fashion, its imagery, its spiritual quests." Many readers will consider that culture to be not only irreverent, but sacrilegious. It turns the authority of tradition upside down, relativizes religious imagery and symbols, and celebrates theological ambiguity. Beaudoin contends that unlike previous generations of students and young adults, who contested secular culture with critiques found in religious tradition (Beaudoin's mentor Harvey Cox would be one good example), he and his peers embrace pop culture as the primary source of and catalyst to faith. They then turn to religious traditions to confirm, support and energize symbols and myths.
Beaudoin models the "ministry imagination" he espouses by leaping back and forth between the religious themes of an MTV clip and the exegesis of a biblical passage. This, he says, is the GenXer's way of nurturing "virtual faith." By this term he means that "Xers live religiously in real ways (involving real faith, real practice and a real spiritual journey)," while simultaneously imitating "real faith and real practice, simulating what they expect institutional religion and real religiousness to be." They want both the "real thing" and an "imitation" of the real thing--the "genuine and the posture, the authentic and the artificial."
The GenXer is suspicious of institutions, especially religious institutions. He focuses on personal experience in the spiritual quest, and on a sense of suffering expressed in a psychological and spiritual crisis of meaning. The GenXer also accepts the ambiguity that may be found in the fusion of sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual, orthodox and blasphemous in popular culture. He does not reject or dismiss faith tradition or religious institutions, but they are not the only sources of spirituality. The implications are clear: If traditional Christianity is to engage the spiritual quest of the GenXer, it must attend to the ways in which these young adults draw on the church and popular culture.
Read together, the three books suggest that the range and diversity of youth and young adult experience in the U.S. is much broader and more diverse than is evident in most congregational ministries. The labels we use-- "youth culture," the "silent generation" of my own college years, or "GenXer"--do not describe the experience of many youth and young adults. The teenagers in Youth Leadership and the GenXers in Virtual Faith have possibilities that are distant to the young people in Cold New World. While the racism and classism that weigh heavily on Finnegan's youth may represent intellectual or political issues for some of Beaudoin's GenXers, it hardly catches the attention of the youth that Long and Fertman describe. The teenagers they describe do not share the suspicion or disregard of institutions--including the church--that is found among GenXers and the disenfranchised young people in Cold New World. The traditional values, symbols and practices that provide the context for nurturing youth leadership for Long and Fertman function only as backdrop for the imaginative reconstructions of pop culture undertaken by Beaudoin's peers, and they may generate negative self-images for Finnegan's youth.
Our lack of attention to the range and diversity of the experience of youth and young adults inevitably limits our capacity to speak truthfully and faithfully to these people. Consequently, many simply do not find a welcoming place in the congregation.
We have left the task of defining what it means to be a youth to the youth themselves. As a result, they are picking and choosing images, symbols and values from media, religious and other social institutions, as they try to produce meaning for and give shape to their lives. In this process, the church becomes another boutique in the shopping mall of options for personal and group identity.
We have also abandoned the notion of the interdependence of the generations in congregational life. Few adults see themselves engaged in a communal effort to sponsor, nurture and mentor young people. Indeed, few pastors identify this as a central role in their ministry.
A 1984 study found that few teenagers in an affluent suburban high school had an adult--other than their parents--with whom they could discuss important matters. Another study found that 70 percent of high school students are "generally ignored and poorly served"--i.e., "unspecial" in the system. Adults are certainly present in the lives of young people. But the well-intentioned parents, grandparents, teachers and social workers in Cold New World are unable to create environments that nurture socially acceptable norms and practices; meanwhile, many of the parents de- scribed by Finnegan and Beaudoin acquiesce to the dominant role of television and media in their children's lives.
Mentoring in youth ministry tends to be individualistic rather than communal or strategic. Youth ministry literature has not yet challenged the practice of letting youth ministries be directed by adults. Long and Fertman need to emphasize the reciprocity of youth and adults--of possibility and experience, imaginative exploration and wise reflection--in the leadership development of the group or community. Youth need to be viewed as full members, and challenged accordingly
The churches need critical perspective on the influence of contemporary media and the values of consumer capitalism. The authors of these three works document the pervasiveness of consumer capitalism and media in defining the young people's experience. These forces may take diverse forms: the market economy of the "drug culture" and the appeal of the violence in the "media culture" in Finnegan's study, the MTV "pop culture" for Beaudoin's GenXer, or the middle-class values implicit in the patterns of leadership promoted by Long and Fertman. Common in each book are themes of individualism, competition, ambition and success, and consumption.
Fashion, entertainment and possessions are identity markers for the youth in all these books--although the object of consumption varies. The youth of Cold New World may have little vision of their participation in a democratic society, but they certainly do see themselves as full participants in a consumer culture. The "irreverent spirituality" of Beaudoin's GenXers more easily aligns itself with Newt Gingrich's anti-institutional vision of economic well-being than with the ecological visions of justice and stewardship of the earth.


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An Exhibition by Alison Bechdel
Jan 22 - Feb 25, 2015
The Institute for the Humanities is pleased to present the first comprehensive, curated exhibition of the work of Alison Bechdel, cartoonist, graphic memoirist, and 2014 McArthur "Genius." Bechdel's work explores the overlap of the personal and the political, "using the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives." The musical adaptation of her acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which originated at the Public Theater, opened on Broadway in April 2015.
"Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For has become a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians all over the planet. And her more recent, darkly humorous graphic memoirs about her family have forged an unlikely intimacy with an even wider range of readers.
Bechdel self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For for twenty-five years, from 1983 to 2008. The award-winning generational chronicle has been called “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” (Ms. magazine)
In 2006 she published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Time magazine named it the Best Book of 2006, describing the tightly architected investigation into her closeted bisexual father’s suicide “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” Fun Home was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been adapted into a musical by the playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori. It opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in September 2013 and ran through several extensions. It opens on Broadway in April 2015.
In her work, Bechdel is preoccupied with the overlap of the political and the personal spheres, the relationship of the self to the world outside. Her 2012 memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama delved into not just her relationship with her own mother, but the theories of the 20th-century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. In the New York Times Book Review, Katie Roiphe wrote, “There’s a lucidity to Bechdel’s work that in certain ways … bears more resemblance to poetry than to the dense, wordy introspection of most prose memoirs. The book delivers lightning bolts of revelation, maps of insight and visual snapshots of family entanglements in a singularly beautiful style.”
Alison’s comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. She received a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Alison lives in Vermont, where she is a Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont."

domain: artistic


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The electrification of the Calder Valley has been recommended as a priority by a cross-party taskforce to Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin.
The group has said that 12 lines across the north of England including six lines in Yorkshire should be pushed to the top of the list for the next round of electrification upgrades which will take place from 2019 to 2024.
Campaigners from Halifax and District Rail Action Group who have been fighting for electrification of the trans-Pennine route for months said they were delighted.
And it’s victory for the Courier’s campaign, backed by businesses across the district, as electrifying the line will mean faster, cleaner, greener, more energy efficient trains, punctual services and massive benefits for Calderdale passengers.
Stephen Waring, chair of HADRAG, said: “Nearly 15 months ago everyone locally and across the region was astonished when the DfT omitted the Calder Valley line from the task force’s list.
“In our Christmas 2013 letter to Patrick McLoughlin we put common sense arguments for Calder Valley line electrification and the government and its Transport Department were forced to concede our line must be considered,” he said.
This would be a welcome boost, but there also needs to be faster trains, more carriages and more services
“A lot of work has been put into this for well over a year by Calderdale Council and West Yorkshire Combined Authority as well as the wider Rail North consortium.
“We are also extremely grateful to Mid-Yorkshire Commerce for keeping up the campaign.
“Now, thanks also to the professional work done by the northern electrification taskforce, there is a strong business case for electrification of our line backing HADRAG’s common-sense arguments.”
Mr McLoughlin said: “I want to see a rolling plan for further electrification and this study will have a vital part to play in setting the agenda for 2019 and beyond.
“Network Rail will take the taskforce’s findings into account as it develops its nationwide plan to improve the nation’s railways.”
The news has also been welcomed by politicians from across the political divide.
Linda Riordan, Labour MP for Halifax , said: “This would be a welcome boost, but there also needs to be faster trains, more carriages and more services.
“This Government has failed on all three. I have long campaigned for electrification and a future Labour Government would give the green light for more investment and better trains.”
Philip Allott, Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Halifax, said: “It’s great news - it shows that when we pull together in Calderdale we get what we want.
“There’s been a lot of effort not just by me, but by a lot of people on the council across the political spectrum.
“It bodes well for the vision I have for Halifax which is having high speed trains, upgraded trains and signals and third platform at the station.”
Paul Rogan, UKIP Parliamentary candidate for Calder Valley, said: “This is good news for the environment and for travellers. Electric trains cause less pollution, are lighter, cheaper to run and are more modern rolling stock - it’s a win-win.”
Alisdair Calder McGregor, Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate for Calder Valley, said: “As I advised Liberal Democrat Transport Minister, Baroness Susan Kramer when we met at Liberal Democrat Conference, electrification of Calderdale is essential for the good running of trains between Manchester and Leeds, as if only one of the two pennine crossing routes is electrified, operational resilience is halved.”
The report by the rail taskforce was presented to Mr McLoughlin at Sheffield Station yesterday.
Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones, who chaired the group, said: “The need for rail electrification is significant. It is part of the improvements in infrastructure that we need in the north. We know how much there is to do and to do it we are looking at a task of generational scale. Indeed, this report is intended to look years ahead.”
It recommends that the case for electrifying 12 lines, including the six through Yorkshire, is developed further ready for the next investment plan by Network Rail which will cover the five years from 2019. The five other lines recommended for electrification are the Harrogate line, the Selby to Hull line, Dearne Valley line, the route connection Sheffield to Leeds via Barnsley and the stretch from Northallerton to Middlesbrough.

domain: politics


From June's Chemical Processing:
We have a plug-flow reactor that is cooled by water circulated through a surrounding jacket. The temperature of the exothermic reaction is measured at several places within the reactor, and the highest measurement is used for control. The cooling water flow is co-current to the flow through the reactor. The cooling water inlet temperature is cascaded to the reactor temperature controller. The water inlet temperature is adjusted by an equal percentage valve that allows fresh coolant into the system. Both are proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers.
Until recently, we had no trouble controlling the reactor temperature, but the temperature has started to cycle and seems to be getting worse. We have tried tuning both controllers without any improvement. The temperature can't even be controlled manually. Only cutting our production rate seems to reduce the amplitude of the cycle, but this is too costly. We are not operating near the cooling limit because the temperature starts to nose-dive when the control valve is only half open, and we didn't have this cycling in the summer when the valve operated more fully open. Should we invest in model predictive control? Is there another solution to this problem?
Check cooling water quality
In addition to your controllers, you may want to check for simple "physical" things, such as scaling on your heat transfer surfaces and valves. What is the quality of the cooling water? Hard? High organics or bio-count?
Hans G. Schroeder, Ph.D.
International Consultants Association, Encinitas, Calif.
Too much heat extracted
Although model predictive control is all the rage, this problem should not be used to justify it. All the symptoms described are consistent with too much heat being extracted.
A temperature sensor may be reading high or otherwise is not operating properly. This would cause the coolant control valve to overreact and dump too much cooling water to the jacket, resulting in the temperature nose-diving. As the temperature drops, the valve closes and the cycle repeats. In addition, a lower production rate would lower the amplitude of the cycle. Check the calibration and operation of the sensor.
Another issue is that the half-open valve causes overcooling of the process, whereas in the summer the valve was more fully open and performed well. This suggests that more heat now is being removed from the process at a lower coolant flow rate. If the reactor or jacket were cleaned, it would increase the overall heat-transfer coefficient, making the heat removal more efficient. To be sure this is the case, you need to know the age of the system and when it was last cleaned. If the reactor were brought up to the original specifications, restoring the original tuning parameters might solve the problem.
Keith Dackson, engineering scientist
Henkel Technologies, Olean, N.Y.
Use different control scheme
Send fresh cooling water directly to the jacket to control the exotherm. There is no need to control the coolant inlet temperature. I would suggest two independent controls.
First, control the coolant flow based on the highest reactor temperature. The goal is to maintain maximum coolant flow (the control valve should be wide open at all times). To achieve this, control the reactant feed rate based on the reactor temperature. Use separate temperature measurement for both controls and ensure they are installed at the same location in the reactor. The temperature set point for the second controller should be slightly higher than the first one (2 Degrees F-4 Degrees F). This control philosophy maximizes the cooling capacity and optimizes the reactant feed rate for seasonal variation of reactant temperature. For added safety, use interrupt temperature (4 Degrees F-6 Degrees F higher than reaction temperature) to stop the feed if cooling fails.
Vinay Deshmane, senior process engineer
Akzo Nobel Polymer Chemicals LLC, Pasadena, Texas
Unstable reaction rate
The cooling system may not be at fault , reaction rates may be unstable. Make sure the reactor feed composition and flow rate are consistent. Good reactant mixing with a static mixer could help. As a final option, consider recycling product or adding an inert. The non-reactive mass will have a dampening effect on the temperature fluctuations.
Stephen D. Marcum, principal process engineer
Aker Kvaerner, Houston
Predictive control caveat
If your process normally would benefit from model predictive control, then you should purchase it. Do not purchase it only to fix your current problem. It seems you have a process/chemistry issue occurring. The predictive controller only will mask the problem until the model can no longer solve it.
Invest a large amount of resources investigating the basic process and chemistry of the reaction system. It would appear that something in the process has changed. If you were able to control the system a year ago, you should be able to do the same now.
You may want to use Six Sigma methodologies to attack your problem instead of placing a Band-Aid on your system.
Jerome Rister, technical and materials manager
Ashland Chemical, Calumet City, Ill.
Buildup of scale on sensors
The symptoms described may be explained by a buildup of thermally insulating contaminants on the temperature-sensing elements. Normally, these sensors (e.g. thermocouples or PRTs) are in intimate thermal contact with the process stream and have a response time constant. These constants may be ignored when compared with the response time constants of the control elements, in this case the equal percentage valves. However, when an insulating layer of contamination is allowed to build up on the temperature sensors, their time constants can become significant and prevent tuning the PID to stability.
A similar drift toward instability could be caused by a buildup of contaminants on the reactor wall or water jacket. However, this increased thermal impedance could be compensated for by tuning to limit the amount of time the controller spends in saturation.
Barry K. Norling, Ph.D., Division of Biomaterials
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, Texas
Recirculate cooling water
I have a similar problem with an old pickup truck that has no thermostat. I control the engine temperature with a cardboard air blocker in front of the radiator. In the winter, the engine temperature is much more difficult to control than in the summer since the high delta T makes the system very sensitive to small changes in flow, outside temperature, etc.
Using the lesson from the truck, I would approach the plug flow reactor by trying to recreate the summertime conditions. A recirculation loop in the coolant line could return warm coolant to the inlet, making the whole system slower and less sensitive to swings.
William M. Hall, reliability engineer
BP, Naperville, Ill.
Install an orifice
It sounds like the cooling water inlet valve is either fully open or fully closed. The PID controller adjustments may be inadequate. It also is possible that the cooling water inlet valve is inadequately sized, allowing in too much water or shutting it off completely with no graduation between open and close.
You may want to install a flow orifice in the cooling water inlet to adjust the flow. Alternatively, you can change the valve type to restrict cooling water inlet flow.
Michael K. Ryan, validation specialist
Merck & Co., Barceloneta, Puerto Rico


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May 2, 2016
The made-for-television movie wasn’t invented, in its modern form, until the mid-sixties – See How They Run (1964) is usually cited as the first one – and it didn’t become a big deal until NBC and ABC dedicated weekly prime-time blocks to them around the end of the decade. Prior to that, though, there were many one-off dramatic specials, in prime time and also tucked into daytime slots and the FCC-dictated Sunday afternoon “cultural ghetto.” In the fifties these were often star-driven adaptations of plays or musicals – Laurence Olivier in The Moon and Sixpence (1959), for instance. During the early sixties, as stark dramas like The Defenders flourished briefly and many in the industry mourned the demise of the live anthology, some smaller-scaled, more austere playlets in the kitchen drama vein cropped up. They’re all completely forgotten today.
Here’s one example, chosen essentially at random. (I stumbled across a file on it at work.) The 91st Day, broadcast on public television stations during the month of JFK’s assassination, was a case study of mental illness and an indictment of the inadequate public health remedies for it. The protagonist, Loren Benson, was a high school music teacher who suffers a breakdown; his wife Maggie, the other main character, becomes an advocate for his care as the system fails him. The title refers to the state-mandated discontinuation of Benson’s institutionalization: at the end of ninety days, the mental patient is kicked to the curb, cured or not.
The 91st Day commands interest first and foremost for its stars: Patrick O’Neal, a sardonic, hard-drinking Florida-born Irishman who seemed custom-built to understudy Jason Robards in the complete works of Eugene O’Neill; and Madeleine Sherwood, an Actors Studio doyenne who could come off as both matronly and high-strung. Sherwood died last month (that’s what prompted me to finish this half-drafted, half-forgotten piece); despite having appeared in the original Broadway production of The Crucible and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and films for Elia Kazan (Baby Doll) and Otto Preminger (Hurry Sundown), Sherwood was best known for her most ridiculous credit, the role of The Flying Nun’s Mother Superior. The supporting cast, drawn from the crowd of New York-based theater and television actors – The 91st Day was filmed in studios on West End Avenue, in June 1963, with a location trip to a hospital outside Reading, Pennsylvania – included Staats Cotsworth, Royal Beal, and Robert Gerringer (a stolid Frank Lovejoy type who served as one of The Defenders’ rotating prosecutors).
At almost ninety minutes, The 91st Day was a feature-length work, and yet it was created by outsiders to the world of scripted film and television. Lee R. Bobker, its director, was an independent filmmaker, an Oscar-nominated documentarian, and an NYU instructor. (Bobker’s company, Vision Associates, had produced Frank Perry’s independent film David and Lisa the year before, and both projects had the same film editor, Irving Oshman; The 91st Day was probably an offshoot of David and Lisa, which also dealt with mental illness.) The writers, Emily and David Alman, were novelist-playwrights better known as neighbors of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who sought publicly to clear their names after the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage in 1953. The Almans employed a pseudonym, “Emily David,” possibly to deflect attention from their leftist associations – although publicity materials identified them, and their involvement was mentioned in The New York Times’s coverage of the show. The Ford Foundation-funded NET, the precursor to PBS, produced and aired The 91st Day, and the budgetary limitations of public television meant that it was likely made for a quarter, or less, of what a comparable network program cost. (The single sponsor was the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French, a corporate forerunner of GlaxoSmithKline.) Most mainstream talent probably discovered that they had prior commitments that month.
Was it any good? The reviews were mixed. TV Guide wrote that it “grinds no axes, calls no names, but forcibly reveals a few of life’s truths.” John Horn, in The New York Herald Tribune, thought it “badly needed substance, point and human engagement.” Without much else from Bobker’s or the Almans’ resumes to compare it to, it’s hard to judge whether The 91st Day would seem earnest and amateurish today, like an afterschool special, or sensitive and urgent, like a lost two-parter from Ben Casey or The Nurses.
The 91st Day doesn’t turn up in the catalogs of either the UCLA Film and Television Archive or the Paley Center For Media – and Worldcat doesn’t locate it in any libraries, which is surprising, given that it was likely made with the idea that it could have a long afterlife in educational and institutional settings. (Perhaps its length kept it out of the repository of 16mm films your school library stocked for those days when your teacher was hungover.) It’s likely that prints of it exist, though, if not in the archives of PBS or The 91st Day’s corporate sponsors, then in the basement of one of its makers. The show doesn’t come up in the Library of Congress’s database, but the NET archives are housed there, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they have an uncataloged copy. If not, though, you’re crazy if you think you have a chance of seeing The 91st Day.
November 6, 2014
There is a lost episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, the acclaimed filmed anthology that ran on NBC for four years in the mid-sixties. Filmed sometime in 1966, during the first half of the show’s final season, this episode was rejected by the sponsor and never shown publicly. It’s likely that a copy still exists, but if so, it hasn’t seen the outside of Universal’s vaults in nearly fifty years.
Entitled “Barbed Wire,” the unaired segment starred Leslie Nielsen, Michael Parks, Sean Garrison, and the character actor Don Pedro Colley, in what would have been his television debut. It was produced by Ron Roth, a former associate producer on the series who by 1966 was one of several Chrysler producers (the others included Gordon Hessler, Stanley Chase, and Jack Laird). The names of the writer (or writers) were never reported in the press, but the director of “Barbed Wire” was Don Taylor. (Taylor directed at least one other Roth-produced Chrysler Theater that season, the Western “Massacre at Fort Phil Kearny.”)
“Barbed Wire” was a World War II story set in a stateside stockade for soldiers who had gone AWOL or committed other offenses. In the sole Variety report on the incident, Leslie Nielsen provided a somewhat garbled synopsis:
Actor said that he plays a very hard commandant of the camp, a strict disciplinarian. In a key scene, a drunken GI tells him as far as he is concerned about the war, the more who get killed over there, the better the chances for him to get a job when it’s all over. Nielsen said that after this remark a fight ensues, in which the GI is accidentally killed.
Contacted last week, Colley offered this description of the plot:
It was about a crazy commander of this stockade, and he had flipped out and was commanding his stockade like it was a [concentration] camp. He would make people stand in a circle, and if they moved out of the circle, the guards were ordered to shoot them.
Colley also remembered the events leading up to his casting:
I drove down from San Francisco to L.A. after I made up my mind that I needed to go make some money in Hollyweird. Driving into town at night, the first thing you see is this huge monolith on a hillside that says Universal City. Back in the day, that was about the only thing that the Ventura Freeway had on it – this monolith that stuck out. It just froze me to my heart, like seeing an alien from outer space. At night, just after sundown, it was the only thing that was lit up. One night, I was at Shelly’s Manne-Hole, on Cahuenga Boulevard. It was a jazz club. Shelly Manne was a jazz drummer, the best in the business. And this fella came up to me and said, “Don Pedro, man, how you doing? I remember you from San Francisco, when you were hanging out in the jazz clubs and being beatniks and carrying on.” I said, “Yeah, I remember, Duke. What’s happening?” He says, “Listen, I’m a publicist out at Universal Studios, in the Tower building. Come on out and I’ll introduce you around.” I said, “You got it, man.” So we went out there and he did introduce me around to people in the Tower building, and one of those people was Ron Roth, whom he had become friends with. Universal had a bunch of young producers that they were grooming. So they said, “Yeah, well, you got this one little bit. You’re one of the people in the stockade.”
I got there in January ’66, and Duke Williams had been there about six or eight months, in the publicity department. When I got over there, he had access to a car, and he was making deliveries to the various companies on the lot. I got to ride along with him. We went all the way to the top of the hill, which is now the Universal Walk, that was called the Shiloh Ranch [from The Virginian]. They had actual cattle and horses and farm things up there. We’d look out over the Valley and I was fantasizing, like, “Wow. The world is mine! Mine!” Sitting on a rock and laughing to myself. People were saying, “That boy’s crazy. What’s wrong with him?”
On the set of his first television episode, Colley found a way to put his own stamp on his small “Barbed Wire” role:
I’m kind of a goofball. The only thing that came to my mind was Laurel-and-Hardy kind of goofball, where Hardy gets into a dilemma and all he can do is waggle the end of his tie. They remember you better if you’re funny, versus just being a bad guy. I decided to play it that way. They were there for a reason, and my one scene dealt with that reason. And that was a little added – my little deal, that I was allowing myself to give this character that much depth.
Don Pedro Colley in 1968 (Here Come the Brides, “The Stand Off”)
So why was “Barbed Wire” shelved? According to Variety, Chrysler viewed the episode as “anti-military” (Colley quote?) It’s tempting to speculate that “Barbed Wire” carried an unwelcome anti-war theme at a time when the Vietnam War was raging, but the actual issue may have been more prosaic; a 1968 Los Angeles Times profile of Colley wrote that it was “judged too violent.”
Incidentally, Jennings Lang, Universal’s head of television at the time, denied the controversy, claiming (lamely) that “Barbed Wire” was shelved because of possible plans to develop it as a feature film. But it’s clear that the Variety reporter put more stock in what he or she called “insider reports” (most likely a leak from Roth) of the more controversial explanation.
About eighty of the one hundred or so Chrysler Theater episodes were syndicated, in two separate packages, albeit never widely. (The exact episode count for Chrysler is debatable, depending upon whether or not one includes the comedy specials starring Hope that aired in the Chrysler timeslot about every fourth week.) But many of the unsold pilots and two-parters, as well as scattered other episodes, were withheld from syndication. In most cases, those were either expanded or re-edited as features for overseas release and resurfaced in the U.S., if at all, in TV-movie packages. Others disappeared because of rights issues. (For instance, the writer S. Lee Pogostin told me that his Emmy-winning episode “The Game” got locked away after Hope acquired the rights for a theatrical remake, which was never made.) Unsurprisingly, “Barbed Wire” appears to be one of those unsyndicated episodes.
I stumbled across this story while researching Then Came Bronson and Michael Parks, who in 1966 was in the midst of a terrible run of luck both personally and professionally. In 1964 his wife of only five weeks, the actress Jan Moriarty, died of an overdose of pills, and in 1968 the actor’s brother, James, drowned in a skin-diving accident. In 1966, Parks refused a role in a remake of Beau Geste, and his studio contract at Universal fizzled out in acrimony and litigation. He didn’t act for nearly three years, apart from four made-for-TV movies. The comeback promised by Bronson had the opposite effect, as Parks’s disputes with the series’ producers and directors were widely reported and landed him on what Bronson casting director Joseph D’Agosta described as Hollywood’s “life’s too short” list. (As in: Life’s too short to work with that guy.) Once again, after Bronson was canceled in 1970, Parks was absent from the screen for three years – wholly absent, this time – until he accepted a leading role in Between Friends, a Canadian film by the acclaimed director Donald Shebib, which gradually resuscitated his career. (Coincidentally, his leading lady in Between Friends was his leading lady from the Bronson pilot, Bonnie Bedelia.) During that exile, in 1971, Parks’s nine year-old stepdaughter, Stephanie, was hit and killed by a motorist in Ojai.
Although minuscule in comparison to those other setbacks, the disappearance of “Barbed Wire” couldn’t have come as good news – especially since one of those three late-sixties telefilms, 1968’s An Act of Piracy (directed by William A. Graham, who directed the Bronson pilot), was also shelved. A 1970 Variety article implied that Piracy was rejected for a World Premiere slot due to “violence,” but it’s also possible it was just terrible, judging from Parks’s description of the character he played: “I was forced to play a fat, bald, gold-toothed Mexican revolutionary. They say I came across like a cross between Fernando Lamas and Marlon Brando; I think it’s more like Alfonso Bedoya and Dame May Whitty.” At least An Act of Piracy, which also starred William Shatner, was finally broadcast – but not until 1976, and under an even more generic title, Perilous Voyage.
For Colley, “Barbed Wire” had a more positive outcome. The final version of the episode cut Colley’s one big scene for length, but the supportive Roth arranged for the young stage actor to get a copy of the minute-long sequence for his reel. Ironically, that one minute would be all of “Barbed Wire” that anyone outside of Universal would ever see – and it helped Colley to get him the breakout role as the Canadian trapper Gideon during the penultimate season of Daniel Boone.
Needless to say, it would be most welcome if Universal were to liberate “Barbed Wire” and some of the other elusive Chrysler Theater segments – if not for a commercial release, at least for deposit at UCLA or another archive.
August 23, 2012
Welcome to Nukeland.
Here in these United States it’s been a long time since we’ve had a good, scary dose of nuclear fear. Remember walking around feeling like some unseen enemy (or just the power plant upstate) could suddenly vaporize you or leave you glowing green while your guts slowly leak out of every orifice?
I’m just old enough to have experienced the last one, in the early eighties, when Reagan desperately pumped more life into the flagging Cold War. Movies like The Day After and Testament played on television downstairs while I huddled in bed, peering out my window and waiting for the inevitable mushroom cloud to bloom in the night sky.
Nuclear paranoia is one of my favorite little subgenres of television drama (and even comedy: think Sledge Hammer!). It reached full bloom in the eighties but you can trace it all the way back to the early days of Uh-murr-kuh’s throwdown with the Russkies. There’s a Medic episode that has Los Angeles glowing green, a truly disturbing Way Out in which the devil infiltrates an Air Force bunker to launch some nukes, a Nevada nuclear test that irradiated some key characters on Crime Story (made in the eighties, of course, but set in the fifties), a fistful of post-apocalyptic Twilight Zones, and even a Dr. Kildare about H-bomb survivors that’s a sort of Nagasaki, Mon Amour.
I’ve seen all of those and they’re great, but there’s one that’s driving me crazy, that I’ve looked for for years and can’t get my hands on: “Alas, Babylon,” Playhouse 90’s 1960 adaptation of the Pat Frank novel about survival in a post-Holocaust world.
Frank’s novel is straightforward, quietly terrifying account of a one-day war and the year that follows, in which a young loafer, Randy Bragg, gradually toughens and matures and becomes the leader of a motley community of survivors. Frank, a hard-drinking ex-reporter, was an adoptive Floridian and he nails the atmosphere of that sweaty, sun-drenched, slow-moving place better than any Florida writer I’ve read, except maybe John D. MacDonald.
Alas, Babylon was published in 1959, the same year that Stanley Kramer made On the Beach, that movie stars-on-a-submarine white elephant that is the blandest of all movies about the end of human civilization (an impossibility, one would think, but no). More closely than either the Kramer film or the Nevil Shute novel upon which it is based, Frank’s book resembles Lynne Littman’s astonishing Testament (1983), perhaps the best (or at least the most depressing) American film of the eighties, which chronicles the slow, quiet, inexorable death of a small town as it succumbs to fallout, starvation, and infrastructure collapse.
By 1959, Playhouse 90 was falling apart. Three years earlier it had begun life as the showpiece of the live anthologies. Now it was something of an albatross, a loss leader that CBS could point to as evidence that quality television was still alive and well (even if it wasn’t). After two seasons in the hands of the capable Martin Manulis, Playhouse 90 had been split between three big-name live dramatic producers: Fred Coe, Herbert Brodkin, and John Houseman. If anything, the year under their tenure – which included “The Days of Wine and Roses,” “Child of Our Time,” “The Velvet Alley,” and “Judgment at Nuremberg” – was even better than the first two.
For the fourth season, the multi-producer arrangement continued, with Coe and Houseman handling six each of a planned twenty-three segments, according to a Variety story dated July 15, 1959. The remaining eleven were to be divided between Brodkin and Peter Kortner, who had been a story editor and associate producer on Playhouse 90 since the show’s debut. A journeyman among giants, Kortner was nevertheless given the first two airdates in the 1959-1960 season, and prepared two ambitious shows for them: Rod Serling’s original “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” for October 1 and “Alas, Babylon” for October 8.
But things did not go as planned.
By midseason, CBS had cut the episode order down to seventeen and dislodged Playhouse 90 from its Thursday night timeslot. The fourth season had been a last-minute reprieve in the first place, and fully half of the series’ commercial spots remained unbought, leaving CBS about $4 million in the red. The final episodes drifted around the schedule, airing as special events.
Somehow, Serling’s “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” went from the first to the last. The writer’s only contribution to Playhouse 90’s last season, Serling’s Warsaw ghetto story (with Charles Laughton as a rabbi) wasn’t broadcast until May 18, 1960, when it became the series’ final episode.
As for “Alas, Babylon,” it was swapped with the Serling piece and announced, on July 27, as the fourth season premiere. The symmetry was irresistible. The very first episode of Playhouse 90, “Forbidden Area,” had also been an adaptation of a Pat Frank novel; now another one would open what was certain to be the final season of the show. (The two Frank-derived segments bookended a trilogy of nuclear 90s, with another story of post-atomic survival, Dorothy and Howard Baker’s “The Ninth Day,” in the middle.) But on August 20, the network announced that “Alas, Babylon” would be pushed back to an unspecified date, to accommodate the availability of Charlton Heston, who had agreed to star in it. In its place to kick off the season was “Target For Three,” a well-reviewed fictionalization of the recent revolution in Cuba.
The status of “Alas, Babylon” remained unclear until, finally, CBS announced on February 4 that it would be shown on April 3, 1960 (making it, ironically, the penultimate original Playhouse 90). The cast now comprised Don Murray as Randy Bragg and Dana Andrews as his Air Force officer brother, along with Rita Moreno, Barbara Rush, Everett Sloane, Kim Hunter, Don Gordon, and a very young Burt Reynolds. No mention was made of Heston (and it’s uncertain which of the brothers he would have played; it’s hard to imagine him as the easygoing wastrel Randy, but Mark Bragg was probably too secondary a role for Heston).
In the interim, the film version of On the Beach – a December 1959 release – had opened to generally good reviews and, in effect, “scooped” “Alas, Babylon,” which had blown its chance to debut ahead of the similar and much more high-profile Kramer project.
New York Times television columnist Val Adams sniffed a conspiracy, writing an October 4 piece subtitled “Alas, Babylon – Alas, CBS, where is it?” in which he hinted that the Heston excuse was a fiction. Adams speculated that the network had become gun-shy as a result of an old controversy over the third season premiere, “The Plot to Kill Stalin,” which had so annoyed the Soviet Union that it kicked CBS’s correspondent out of Moscow. Could “Alas, Babylon” cause another international incident?
In fact, though, the Heston story was plausible. His atypical commitment to live television even after establishing himself as a movie star (“Actor Charlton Heston likes doing live TV,” was the headline for a June 14, 1959 Hartford Courant interview) had of necessity ended with the extended location filming of Ben-Hur in 1958. But Heston noted in his autobiography that he spent an idle “few months” mostly playing with his young son in Los Angeles in between the lensing of The Wreck of the Mary Deare during the summer of 1959 and publicity duties prior to the premiere of Ben-Hur in December. “Alas, Babylon” was probably taped during that window and it could indeed have been rescheduled following a tentative commitment from Heston.
And had “The Plot to Kill Stalin” really been the problem, wouldn’t CBS have killed “Alas, Babylon” long before it went in front of the camera? Still, the unusual duration of “Alas, Babylon”’s limbo – it was benched for six months, nearly the entirety of the television season – does suggest a deficit of enthusiasm on the network’s part.
Speaking only in terms of prestige, “Alas, Babylon” was a product of Playhouse 90’s “B team.” David Shaw, who wrote the teleplay, was the humblest of the major television playwrights, content to adapt others’ work and more chameleonesque in his style than Chayefsky, Serling, or Reginald Rose. But some of his originals, especially for The Defenders, are urgent and precise; he may have been a better match than the verbose Serling for Frank’s matter-of-fact prose.
The director of “Alas, Babylon” was Robert Stevens, who had also done “Target For Three.” The most famously temperamental of live television directors – Jeff Kisseloff’s industry survey The Box contains a section of “Robert Stevens stories” – Stevens was also an underrated talent with a penchant for chiaroscuro lighting and fluid, sweeping camera movements. Equally versatile on film, he became the only director to win an Emmy for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Hitchcock himself never did) with the scary episode “The Glass Eye.”
The well-publicized delay in getting “Alas, Babylon” on the air, coupled with Playhouse 90’s clear lame-duck status, was blood in the water for the critics, who were not kind to the show. Lawrence Laurent of the Washington Post, Times Herald had liked Frank’s novel but sniffed that its “sweep of grandeur . . . was reduced, on television, to an unhappy love story.” Fred Danzig of UPI was more specific, complaining that Shaw’s “pompous, obvious dialogue . . . served to magnify the artificiality of the characters” and that his adaptation “managed to grab all the stereotyped, sharp-edged blocks of action and emotion in the book and reject all the subtleties.”
John Crosby, one of the nation’s most respected television critics, wrote:
The narrative moved like lightning from uneasy peace to total disaster with a sure-footed mounting excitement that left me breathless. The transitions . . . were particularly dramatic. In one of them, for example, the action shifted suddenly, explosively from a character quoting the Alas, Babylon passage from the Bible to jet bombers streaming through the sky; in another from the drunken hero at a supermarket to the quiet orderliness of the underground “push button” headquarters.
But Crosby, somewhat unfairly, used the occasion to proclaim an overall fatigue for apocalyptic fiction. Had “Alas, Babylon” been shown half a year earlier, the headline over Crosby’s Hartford Courant review might not have been “End of World Fiction Is Getting Boring.”
In The New York Times, John P. Shanley just seemed shell-shocked. Shanley praised the show’s dramatic effectiveness but wondered
what good purpose could be served by many of the vivid moments of terror and hysteria depicted during the program. A small child runs back into her home after a nuclear explosion, screaming “I’m blind, I’m blind.” A physician is brutally beaten by a group of addicts after the blasts have cut off their regular source of supply.
But, you know what? All that stuff that freaked out the critics back in 1960 sounds pretty fucking awesome now.
The show opens with a dead man’s narration (a device that Laurent correctly noted was cribbed from Sunset Boulevard): “My name is Mark Bragg. I’m dead. Ninety-two percent of the world’s population is dead. I was one of the first. I was lucky.” If the remaining eighty-nine minutes are as stark as that one, then I’m in. Was “Alas, Babylon” a dud? Or could it have been ahead of its time, miles ahead if its time, too hard to take except maybe now, at a remove, when the nukes are still out there but the sweaty thumbs aren’t twitching quite so hard over the buttons?
The UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Paley Center for Media both possess large caches of Playhouse 90 episodes – between them, more than half of the 134 episodes are available for study – but neither has a copy of “Alas, Babylon.” It’s also not among the cataloged holdings of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Broadcasting in Chicago, or the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research.
It is likely that CBS has the original 2” master tape, or at least a kinescope, of “Alas, Babylon” in its vaults. Playhouse 90 was a prestige product from the outset, less likely than just about any other show to have had its elements tossed or reused. I’ve even heard that CBS’s Playhouse 90 tapes were preserved and transferred to a more stable video format at some point.
Of course, that’s of little use to anyone who would actually like to see the show, and judging from the internet comments of some fellow nuclear paranoiaphiles (see here and here), I’m not the only one in that camp. It’s only enough to whet the appetite, but Getty Images does have a small selection of production and publicity stills from “Alas, Babylon” on its website. For now, that will have to suffice.
In what will be an occasional column on this blog, I’m going to start writing about some television shows that I haven’t seen – and that you haven’t, either, unless you were born during the baby boom or earlier.
I’m talking about live, or videotaped, or even occasional filmed shows that are verifiably lost, or that, if they do exist, reside only in a corporate vault, inaccessible to the public.
My idea here is to pick out a few specific episodes or specials that I, personally, would really love to see, and create a little virtual shrine for them. And, who knows, perhaps a little attention paid will help coax a last copy out of the closet or the vault . . . .

domain: entertainment


The Deputy Premier, Foreign Minister, Abdulmalik al-Mikhlafi discussed with US Acting Assistant Secretary of State David Statterfield the latest developments in Yemen.
The Foreign Minister reconfirmed that Yemeni government supports efforts made by the UN Secretary General Special envoy to Yemen Ould Al-Sheikh Ahmed in order to move peace process ahead. He blames the putschists for the lingering warfare Yemen has been plagued by. Their intransigence has led to a gridlock, they rejected all suggestions and possible solutions proposed earlier to make peace, he noted.
Al-Mikhlafi said:" The putschists adopted Iranian manner, betting on time and pushing toward edge. Peace isn't their choice".
"Peace is the government's main option, war is imposed upon us, it must produce peace, we have to do more to make peace", he added.
Al-Mikhlafi stressed that Iranian interference in the region has proved destabilizing and promoting turmoil. Iran seeks to substitute the State with sects, official armies with militias".
The American official voiced his country's support to the legitimate government in Yemen represented by President Hadi.
Mr Satterfield expressed his government's support to the efforts made by the UN envoy to Yemen Ould al-Sheikh Ahmed to make peace. " We think the status quo is beset with intimidations and challenges, many players including Iran and Al-Qaeda" , he said.
Kuwait reaffirms continuous humanitarian support to Yemen
Al-Sa'adi discusses with UN advisor humanitarian situations in Yemen
Ambassador Yaseen discusses with French official latest developments in Yemen
Military source: 10 soldiers killed in two terror attacks by Al-Qaeda
Eryani: Increasing parricides in Houthi-controlled areas a result of radicalisation
Solicitor-General discusses with ICRC improving forensic medicine
Saudi Arabia, Jordan affirm support for Presidential Council & peace in Yemen
Yemeni-Kenyan relations discussed
Bin Mubarak appreciates Norwegian efforts to push peace in Yemen
Saudi Arabia, Egypt confirm support to efforts of political solution in Yemen


It does pressurises clutch plates and may burn down the clutch chamber in a very longer duration of time. These wheelies may also prove to be bad for the front shocks as landing is as important as taking off and power deficient bikes usually redlines mid-air and then land with a sudden front-end smash.
Do clutch wheelies ruin your clutch?
Obviously you can always damage the clutch, but some motorcycles have oil reserves that won’t feed the oil pump at wheelie angles. Extended time spent in wheelies can then starve the engine, clutch (often lubricated with engine oil) and gearbox of oil. This is not a good thing.
Are wheelies bad for your bike?
As a rule, wheelies aren’t bad for your bike, but bad wheelies are. … Bad wheelies like that are torturing your clutch and causing excess wear on the friction plates and clutch basket, shock-loading your chain and sprockets, and hammering your fork.
Why do bikers do wheelies?
Shows knowledge and understanding of your motorcycle. If you can pull a controllable wheelie it shows other riders how skilled and comfortable you are with your bike. People who don’t ride just see a dangerous act on a motorcycle, riders see a skilled rider who likes to show out and show off.
What is a clutch up wheelie?
Popping a wheelie starts by disengaging the clutch, opening the throttle abruptly and then quickly popping the clutch. This delivers a sudden boost of power to the rear wheel. Clutch wheelies can also be performed by smoothly but somewhat quickly opening the clutch instead of popping it.
Are wheelies dangerous?
Although many Maryland motorcycle riders are responsible, some get a little carried away and perform wheelies. Wheelies are against the law, and for good reason – they are quite dangerous.
Do wheelies damage your mountain bike?
Yes, it is possible to damage wheels doing wheelies and taking falls; however, it is less likely on a bike truly designed to take the abuse of off-road riding (such as your new stumpy).
Is it easier to wheelie a 2 stroke or 4 stroke?
Two strokes have more snap, and make wheelies easy. Four strokes have less snap, but more torque and more controllable powerbands, making riding a wheelie at or near the balance point easier.
Are wheelies easy?
Wheelies and handling anything on two wheels require fine motor skills and a acute sense of balance. … Some people have it easy because they have the motor skills, sense of balance and muscle to go with it. Some can be built over a period of time with practice but the others – not so much.
What dirt bike is best for wheelies?
Best Dirt Bike to Learn Wheelies
- KTM 300 EXC.
- Honda CRF150F.
- Yamaha YZ450F.
- Husqvarna CR125.
- KTM 250 XC-F.
- Kawasaki KX100.
- Kawasaki KX500.
- Suzuki RM250.
How do you stop wheelies?
Just staying relaxed, gently rolling off the throttle and gripping the tank with your knees will restore control without destabilising the bike. if you get a chance to ride a modest off road bike, it will give you a chance to practice wheelies and how to react to them in relative safety.
Who invented wheelies?
As the Tribune reports, Canary tried out the bike at Niagara Falls and “performed the feat, then regarded as impossible, of riding on the rear wheel, with the front wheel elevated. Mr. Canary believes he was the first rider to perform the feat.” That’s right—Dan Canary invented the wheelie.
What type of bike is easiest to wheelie?
Easily the easiest bike to wheelie, there’s a lot to like about the Schwinn High Timber Bicycle. If you plan on popping wheelies in the mountainside, then this is the bicycle for you. It comes with 7-speed twist shifters and a quality back detailer as would be expected from any Schwinn bike.
What gear is best for wheelies?
Start off in a low-to-medium gear, at a little faster than a walking pace. If you start in too high or too low a gear, it will be difficult to pedal with enough force to lift the front wheel. Adjust the gears higher or lower as you find the right speed for your ability and the terrain.


text:
FedEx is now using five zero-emission vehicles for pickups and deliveries in Belgium.
The all-electric Nissan e-NV200 vans have been introduced to FedEx’s fleet to be used in the cities of Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp.
Erik Uljee, vice president for Ground operations Benelux at FedEx Express, said: “As the world’s largest express distribution company with unmatched infrastructre and the latest technology, FedEx aims to make a real difference in shaping the future.
“Our first priority is to reduce overall mileage by optimising routes. As major cities with important last-mile deliveries, Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels offer the perfect opportunity for the Nissan e-NV200 vans.”
Patrick Roedolf, senior manager for Operations, Clearance and Brokerage Benelux, at FedEx Express, said: “The Nissan e-NV200 vans not only help reduce CO2 emissions, they are also quieter, which is generally a big issue in urban areas.”

domain: geography


text:
Curtiss P-36 to P-42
The most successful pursuit effort of 1935 was the Curtiss design by Donovan R. Berlin (1898-1982) that became the P-36. Berlin had been hired as Chief Engineer by the Buffalo, New York firm, because of his experience at Northrop with all-metal construction. His P-36 would be the first American-built fighter to shoot down German planes, the first to pass a 1,000-plane production total, and was developed into the P-40, the principle U.S. production fighter of the war’s early years.
Work began on the prototype, known as Curtiss Model 75, on November 1, 1934. Seeing that engines are the pacing element in aircraft design and development, he planned from the beginning an aircraft large enough in size and wing area for growth in power plants. Berlin wanted to “provide the ultimate in performance, stability, maneuverability, controllability and maintenance, and ... a structure which would lend itself to quantity production.”
When the design was first offered to the Army on May 24, 1935, three different power plants were proposed, and the prototype actually experienced four engine changes within a year’s testing. For the generous 236-square-foot area wing, a new NACA 2300-series airfoil was chosen, with less drag than the Clark CHY profile used by Seversky. Using a unique retractable landing gear whose wheels rotated as they folded back flat within the wings, the Model 75 had a 700-hp Wright XR-1510-C5 when test pilot H. Lloyd Child made the first flight on May 13, 1935.
Top speed was estimated as a modest 253-mph at 10,000 feet, but this experimental radial engine was replaced in July by a 775-hp Wright XR-1670-5, which promised 263 mph. Neither of these power plants was accepted for Air Corps production, so another air-cooled radial, the 750-hp Pratt & Whitney R-1535 adopted by
the Army for attack and observation planes, powered the Curtiss Model 75 when it appeared on August 7 for the Army competition.
The larger Wright R-1820 on Seversky’s entry gave it an advantage in speed. When Curtiss complained, the Secretary of War set back the contract competition to April 15, 1936. Don Berlin’s Hawk was flown again as Model 75B on April 4, 1936, powered by an 850-hp single-row Wright XR-1820-G5 Cyclone, and with indentations behind the cockpit to help visibility. Curtiss estimated the top speed of their Hawk as 294 mph with the Cyclone, or 297 mph if provided with a Twin Wasp, but only 285 mph was actually obtained during the tests.
Although Seversky won the Fiscal 1936 contract, Curtiss did get an order on August 7, 1936, for three Y1P-36s. The first Y1P-36, was delivered to Wright Field with a twin-row Pratt & Whitney R-1830-13 and Hamilton propeller on March 4, 1937, and was soon followed by its two service test companions. The gear-driven supercharger built into the back of the R-1830-13 yielded 1,050-hp for takeoff and 900-hp at 12,000 feet with 92-octane fuel, giving the Y1P-36 a top speed of 295 mph.
Fiscal 1938 funds would allow purchase of about 220 new pursuits, so both companies tried again with bids opened April 2, 1937. Specification 98-605 called for 300-mph and deleted the old bomb rack requirement; the Air Corps then didn’t want its fighters diverted to ground-
Seversky offered its AP-1 at $15,900 each, while Curtiss wanted $18,720 for its P-36. This time the lowest bidder lost. Curtiss won the largest fighter contract since 1918: for 210 P-36s on July 30, 1937.
The first production P-36A was flown April 20, 1938, using the same Twin Wasp as the Y1P-36, but with a Curtiss propeller, and a new cowl with cooling flaps and blast tubes for the usual two nose guns. When the fourth P-36A, 38-4, was delivered on September 12, it had a new R-1830-17 with a carburetor for 100-octane fuel. These engines were standardized, beginning with the 15th P-36A. They delivered 1,050 hp at altitude, improving performance, so the
P-36A did 313 mph at 8,500 feet. (P-36A 38-4 was flown back on October 26 to Buffalo, where it would be converted to the XP-42.)
The 20th Hawk was accepted on November 4 and designated P-36B with an R-1830-25 giving 1,100-hp at takeoff and 950-hp at 14,300 feet. Top speed was 327-mph at 17,000 feet. After a decision not to produce more of this engine model, the plane reverted to the standard P-36A power plant.
Two guns in the nose had armed American single-seat fighters in 1918, and still did twenty years later. Curtiss
P-36A Hawks of 1938 had a .30-caliber Browning on the left side of the engine cowl with 500 rpg and another on the right side that could be replaced by a .50-caliber gun with 200 rpg. No bomb racks were used on any Army P-36s.
Not until September 12, 1938, was the Curtiss proposal to add two .30-caliber guns in the wings accepted, and the 85th aircraft was delivered as a P-36C on December 2. These wing guns were also authorized on December 9 for the last 30 contract aircraft. Retainer boxes were added under the P-36C wing guns to prevent used cartridges from damaging other aircraft. These P-36Cs were delivered
to the 27th Pursuit Squadron at Selfridge from April 4 to May 5, 1939.
The Curtiss fighter was a “much better flying plane than the P-35” wrote Colonel Charles Lindbergh in 1939, and other pilots usually agreed. Air Corps pursuit strength then consisted of the 1st Group (with one squadron each of P-35, P-36A, and P-36C fighters and a large reserve of the former), and the 8th and 20th Groups with P-36As.
At last Air Corps pilots had a plus 300-mph fighter, but this speed was surpassed abroad. In June 1936, the same month the Army ordered 77 P-35s, the Royal Air Force had ordered 600 Hurricane and 310 Spitfire fighters with eight guns. Hurricanes entered service in December 1937 with a 320-mph speed and the 362-mph Spitfire joined a squadron in August 1938. Their streamlined nose enclosing Rolls-Royce inline engines contrasted with the built-in drag of the Wasp radials.
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domain: design


text:
Trading psychology is essentially the emotional and mental factors that influence an individual’s trading decisions in the market. And as something that influences one’s decisions, you better believe it plays a crucial role in determining a trader’s success or failure. Some key aspects of trading psychology include:
- Emotions: Emotions like fear, greed, hope, and regret can affect trading decisions. For example, fear of loss might lead a trader to exit a position prematurely, missing out on potential profits, while greed might prompt a trader to take excessive risks.
- Discipline: Discipline in sticking to a trading plan, risk management rules, and strategies is essential. Emotionally driven decisions often result from a lack of discipline.
- Risk Management: Effective risk management is crucial for a trader’s long-term success. Emotions can lead to disregarding risk management rules, which can result in significant losses.
- Overtrading: The desire to trade frequently can be driven by impatience and a need for excitement. Overtrading can lead to losses due to excessive transaction costs and impulsive decisions.
- Confirmation Bias: Traders often seek information that confirms their existing beliefs or positions, ignoring contradictory data. This can lead to poor decision-making.
- Regret Aversion: Traders may avoid taking necessary risks to prevent potential regret, which can hinder profitability.
- Patience: Successful trading often requires patience, waiting for the right opportunities, and not succumbing to impulsive actions.
- Adaptability: Traders should be adaptable to changing market conditions. Rigid thinking can lead to losses when the market behaves differently from expectations.
- Mental Resilience: Trading can be stressful and challenging. Mental resilience is essential to handle losses and maintain a clear, focused mind.
- Self-Reflection: Regularly evaluating one’s trading decisions and performance can help identify areas for improvement and emotional biases.
You guessed it, this post’s feature is Emotions in trading. We will talk on how understanding the human psyche can significantly impact your trading outcomes. Getting your emotions in check are a huge deal in life, and in trading. Emotions often take centre stage when we’re trading. Our minds can be both our greatest allies and most formidable adversaries.
The Emotional Whirlwind of Trading
Trading often becomes a battleground for our emotions. When the markets surge, your confidence is way up there with it. But when they plummet, panic sets in. I mean, panic is the first stage, you know its really bad when people get quiet on the matter. But anyway, emotions can sway us, leading to impulsive decisions and financial turmoil.
To master this emotional whirlwind, self-awareness is key. Acknowledge that, as people, emotions are an integral part of our decision-making. The first step is recognising when your decisions are rooted in a well-thought-out strategy versus being a reaction to fear or greed.
The Fear and Greed Game
Fear and greed are two potent emotions that can dictate our trading choices. The fear of loss and the allure of quick, significant gains often take the wheel for a lot of people. Which is how some people get roped into pyramid schemes and get-rich-quick schemes. They are driven by how much they would be getting out of it and fail to see what could be the threat in it. Striking a balance between these two extremes (fear and greed) is critical. Successful traders tend to be more prudent and less impulsive.
The Overconfidence Bias
Overconfidence is a common psychological pitfall. It’s the belief that we’re infallible and that we can’t be wrong. This often results in taking on more risk than is sensible.
To combat overconfidence, it’s essential to regularly review and critique your trades. Analyse your decision-making process and use your trading history as a learning tool. Even the most successful traders started as noobs, learning from their mistakes, losses and failures.
Revenge Trading and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
Revenge trading, an attempt to recover losses with larger, riskier trades, often stems from the sunk cost fallacy. Haha, now we’re getting technical. For those of us unaware, sunk costs are expenses that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Take for instance, you’ve purchased non-refundable, non-transferable tickets to a concert. And as it so happens, you fall gravely ill and your doctor advises you to rest and avoid crowded places. The ticket is a sunk cost. We’re compelled to persist because of the resources we’ve invested, even when it’s evident we’re on the wrong path.
Recognising and resisting these tendencies are crucial to your trading journey. Learning to step away when it’s apparent the odds are against you is essential. Remember, every trade is independent, and past investments should not dictate future actions.
Trading psychology is an indispensable aspect of trading, potentially differentiating between success and failure. Mastering your emotions is the foundation of a sustainable and profitable trading journey.
In trading, the battle isn’t against the market; it’s a quest for self-mastery. We all possess the potential to succeed, but realising it requires overcoming emotional barriers. So, are you prepared to undertake the journey of mastering your emotions and becoming a successful trader? The world of trading awaits, and with LearnTradeEvolve, you have a trusted guide. Let’s navigate the path to growth together.
Our trading academy is dedicated to providing the necessary knowledge and strategies for managing your trading psychology. We understand the significance of emotions in trading and offer guidance on how to remain rational, irrespective of market conditions.
Moreover, our trading bot is an invaluable tool. It operates without the emotional influence that affects traders. The bot adheres to the plan, follows the data, and issues prompts for your consideration. It allows you to distance yourself from the emotional rollercoaster, providing a clear, rational approach to trading.

domain: finance


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What we see right now doesn't mean that Bitcoin will die. If you think Bitcoin - when we speak about making money (not using it!) - is a bursting bubble I can say it looks so. You may be right. However, that doesn't mean Bitcoin dies. Do you folks remember the Dot-com boom? That bursting bubble?
What happened can be read on Wikipedia
, but what is more important is that it didn't kill the IT industry. It just corrected thing and stabilized their values and the market got rid of bad companies. This is just what Bitcoin needs.

domain: economics


CATS Park & Rides
Charlotte, NC, USA
As a sub-consultant to Atkins, Neighboring Concepts designed comfort stations and custom bus shelters for four Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) Park and Ride Facilities that serve communities surrounding the Charlotte area. Each facility design was guided by valuable input from the users and in collaboration with the project artist to reflect the character of the community. The facilities were designed to accommodate passenger waiting, a driver rest area, and secure bicycle storage for transit riders utilizing the park and ride facilities.


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The Office and A Quiet Place actor John Krasinski is currently nailing it as the eponymous Jack Ryan, former Marine-turned CIA analyst, in the new series from Amazon.
The first season launched on August 31, with a second - featuring a whole new story for Jack and the team - already commissioned months before.
Based on the hugely-successful book series from author Tom Clancy (who passed away in 2013), Jack Ryan has also enjoyed a healthy big-screen franchise for the past three decades.
Here's how all these movies fit into the Ryan-verse.
1. The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Clancy's Jack Ryan debut hit book stores in 1984 and, after a ringing endorsement from then-President Ronald Reagan, went on to sell over nearly 5 million copies.
Just six years later, the movie adaptation came along with the slightly surprising choice of Alec Baldwin in the lead role (though he was nowhere to be seen on the film's poster). At this point, the actor had been known for roles in lighter films like Beetlejuice, Working Girl and a regular role in Dallas spin-off show Knots Landing.
The cast was bolstered by ex-Bond Sean Connery, the legendary James Earl Jones, and future Jurassic Park star, Sam Neill.
The 'Red October' of the title was a Soviet nuclear submarine captained by Marko Ramiu, a Russian played by obvious first choice Connery (though, we will add, he did pick up a BAFTA nomination for his performance).
With innovative stealth tech, the sub was practically invisible and headed towards the Eastern seaboard of the US alerting a certain former Marine-turned-analyst to its presence.After some sub-on-sub action, it turned out Ramiu was defecting and Ryan worked with the captain on getting him to the "new world", America.
Critics and audiences loved the film, with universally positive reviews and a box office take of over $200 million.
2. Patriot Games (1992)
Clancy's second Ryan adventure, published in 1987, was actually set before the events of The Hunt for Red October though the film version is, in fact, set after.
Not only that, Ryan had undergone a face-swap and was now played by Harrison Ford. (Baldwin was unable to commit to the series, so the part was recast with the imminently bankable Star Wars actor).
Playing the film's antagonist Sean Miller, a member of an IRA splinter cell, was Sean Bean, while James Earl Jones is the sole representative from Red October, reprising his role as Ryan's mentor James Greer.
Retired Jack is on vacation in London with his family when he witnesses a terrorist attack on the Queen Mother – in the book, it was the Prince and Princess of Wales. Intervening, Ryan has Miller sent to prison and kills his younger brother Patrick.
Enraged, Sean decides to seek vengeance on the CIA man.
One person who was not a fan of the film was the man behind the book series, Tom Clancy.
At the time, he disowned the film, labelling it "unrealistic" and flat-out calling it "bad". He even wrote to the LA Times to express his umbrage, citing that only one scene in the entirety of the big-screen version resembled any from his own novel.
As a result, his name was removed from any promotional materials and buried within the film's credits. Ouch.
However, critics and audiences were on board and the film took in a worldwide gross of $180 million.
3. Clear and Present Danger (1994)
Hot on the heels of Patriot Games came this adaptation of the fourth Jack Ryan instalment, published in 1989.
Returning to their roles were Harrison Ford, Anne Archer as Dr. Caroline Ryan and James Earl Jones, joined by Willem Dafoe as CIA officer John Clark, a character who first appeared in Clancy's Jack Ryan novel The Cardinal of the Kremlin in 1987 (itself a direct sequel to The Hunt for Red October).
After becoming acting deputy director of the CIA, Ryan uncovers links between a murdered friend of the President and drug dealers. Agent Clark is sent to Colombia to do the dirty work while Ryan seeks to expose the forces behind the conspiracy – at the cost of his own career.
Despite becoming the series biggest film to date, taking in $215 million, the franchise would go on hiatus after Clear and Present Danger, returning rebooted 6 years later with a new lead.
4. The Sum of All Fears (2002)
Before Spider-Man made rebooting your franchise every few years fashionable, the Jack Ryan universe got in there first.
This fifth instalment in the Tom Clancy novel series was the first to be published after the film series had begun. And, given the change in political climate since the book was published and the fact that the movie was a reboot, numerous elements were also changed for the Noughties.
Namely, Ryan was now a low-level CIA analyst and neo-Nazis took the place of the novel's Palestinian terrorists. Replacing Ford as Ryan was Ben Affleck, while Liev Schreiber stepped in for Defoe as the aforementioned John Clark.
The Sum of All Fears wasn't as positively received as its predecessors, pulling in mediocre reviews - with some citing Affleck's portrayal as an issue - and a worldwide box office of around $190 million.
The damage had been done and Jack Ryan wouldn't re-emerge from this particular attack for another decade.
5. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)
Another decade, another reboot.
Departing completely from the film and the book series, Shadow Recruit is – like Amazon's new series – an original script and not based on any previous Tom Clancy material.
The 2014 thriller was directed by Kenneth Branagh (who also starred in it) and boasted another impressive cast, including: Kevin Costner, Keira Knightley and Star Trek's Chris Pine in the hot seat as Ryan.
The film started from scratch (again) to tell the story of a young Jack, who leads a double life crunching numbers for the CIA and keeping his work secret from his fiancée (Knightley). He soon uncovers a plot to crash the US economy, utilising his world-class analysis skills to put a stop to it.
With a poor box office show (a global $135 million) and less-than-favourable reviews (55% on Rotten Tomatoes), this new reboot was a franchise low. Even star Pine lamented, "we didn't totally get that right," adding that a sequel was unlikely.
Thankfully, for Jack Ryan fans, John Krasinski and Amazon came along with a reboot that really did boot the franchise up the backside and get it back on track. We cannot wait for season two.
Jack Ryan season one is available on Amazon Prime Video now.


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Newly developed evidence-based recommendations for the diagnosis, treatment, and long-term monitoring and follow-up care of patients with this extremely aggressive form of thyroid cancer are published in Thyroid, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The Guidelines, prepared by the American Thyroid Association Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer Guidelines Taskforce, are available free online on the Thyroid website.
Robert C. Smallridge, MD, Chair of the ATA Task Force, from the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, and coauthors of the “American Thyroid Association Guidelines for Management of Patients With Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer ” emphasize the importance of rapid diagnosis and evaluation of this aggressive tumor, establishing treatment goals, and employing a multidisciplinary team approach for optimal patient management. The comprehensive Guidelines cover recommended approaches to treatment including surgery, radiotherapy, systemic therapy, and supportive care. They also offer guidance on managing patients with advanced/metastatic disease, surveillance and long-term monitoring, palliative care options, and ethical issues including end-of-life care.
“The American Thyroid Association Guidelines for Management of Patients with Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer is a remarkable and comprehensive document that distills the literature and task force expertise into a useful guide for providers of patients with this aggressive cancer. The focused therapeutic approaches, as well as the inclusion of palliative care and ethical issues into this document, is a real advance for our field,” says Bryan R. Haugen, MD, President of the ATA and Professor of Medicine and Pathology, Head, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism & Diabetes, Mary Rossick Kern and Jerome H. Kern Chair in Endocrine Neoplasms Research, University of Colorado School of Medicine.
“The Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer Guidelines are a unique contribution to the endocrine literature,” says Charles H. Emerson, MD, Editor-in-Chief of Thyroid and Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine. “The Guidelines demand to be read now, not learned during the emergency that is anaplastic thyroid cancer.”
About the Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative medical and biomedical peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Women’s Health, Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics, and Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry’s most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm’s 70 journals, newsmagazines, and books is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

domain: health


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A Kennewick woman was cited for second-degree negligent driving after trying to pass in a no-passing zone and then rolling her SUV about a mile west of Connell, the Washington State Patrol said.
Shanna D. Hatchett, 41, was driving a 1999 Dodge Durango east on Highway 260 about 8 a.m. Thursday when she tried to pass, the state patrol said. She slowed for oncoming traffic, lost control, left the roadway and rolled.
She was injured and taken to Othello Community Hospital with unknown injuries.
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For the most comprehensive local coverage, subscribe today.

domain: news


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In celebration of the Nigeria's 62nd independence anniversary, chieftain of the African Democratic Congress, Hon Ezekiel Fayoyin has urged Nigerians to vote capable personalities in the forthcoming general election.
Fayoyin in a statement he personally signed and made available to newsmen on Saturday said the future of the country is in the hands of electorate, stressing that 2023 election will determine who run the country for another eight years.
The Ogun State governorship aspirant in the statement urged the residents of the state to do the right thing by upholding democracy on the right path.
The statement reads in part: "I want to congratulate every citizen of Nigeria especially Ogun State Indigenes as regards celebration of the 62nd Independence Anniversary of our dear Nation.
"I think this time we should be remembered of what our commitments are to our Nation because we are the ones responsible for the ups and downs of our Nation. And i want to call the attention of Nigerians globally that the destiny of Nigeria is in our hands collectively. Now that we are preparing and bracing ourselves for the polls coming up next year.
"I want to urge every Ogun State citizen to endeavor to do the right thing to uphold democracy on the right path. Let us vote our conscience and not allow ourselves to be bought by any politician. The future of our Nation is in our hands, so therefore we must ensure we do right thing and be mindful of the coming Generations.
"I want to wish everyone again Happy Independence and may we have the course to celebrate this independence in a better society where we will happy and bold to call our Country our own because of the great developments that would have happened in the nearest future".

domain: sociology


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Where to Store
How Long to Store
Unwrap your cauliflower right away and transfer to a breathable bag with a paper towel to absorb moisture.
Not using all your cauliflower at once? If you can’t eat the remaining florets in the next day or so, blanch the cauliflower for 3 minutes and then freeze for later use.
Cauliflower greens deserve love too! Remove the woody sections of the leaves and roast the rest of the greens with olive oil and seasoning for 15 minutes at 400 degrees.

domain: food


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'Iris': A Love Story In Glorious Full Bloom
Friday, February 15, 2002
For Descartes, to think was to be. For Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, to think and to know was to love. Murdoch, the brilliant British philosopher and novelist who died in 1999, and Bayley, a distinguished literary critic, formed an incandescent, eccentric and passionate couple, for whom intimacy took on the form of an endless dialogue, an inquiry into each other's most mysterious places, a passionate and endless interrogation of body, spirit and psyche.
These were people for whom precision of language and thought were enormously important in living a moral life: How can we love the good, Murdoch asked, indeed how can we be good, unless we have the means to imagine the good? In the film "Iris," we see with shattering clarity what happens to such a logocentric existence when Logos itself fails. And we are reassured just as clearly that, at least in the case of Murdoch and Bayley, love survives.
Based on Bayley's memoirs, "Elegy for Iris" and "Iris and Her Friends," "Iris" traces the remarkable 40-year relationship of Bayley and Murdoch, who met as students at Oxford. When they met, Murdoch was already something of a legend on campus, held in awe for her incisive mind, her ready wit and her catholic love life. Bayley approaches her with stammering admiration, and his besottedness would not falter even after they were married: Throughout "Iris" it's made clear that he never felt quite in her league, either intellectually or sexually.
What he does give her, though, is the constant reminder that the life of the mind must be ballasted with the senses: Reality isn't just what we construct out of ideas and words but what we can see, smell, feel. It's just that world of pure sensation to which Iris will increasingly retreat when she begins to suffer, at age 78, from Alzheimer's disease.
Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent, who portray Murdoch and Bayley in their later years, both received Oscar nominations this week for their performances; so did Kate Winslet, for playing Iris as a young college student exhilarated by love, lust and really big ideas. The kudos are richly deserved: All three actors deliver fearless performances and bring enormous warmth, vitality and messy humanity to people who, as Murdoch says in the film, largely "live in our minds." Dench and Broadbent tactfully evoke the abstracted nature of Iris and John's relationship the almost secret language of compulsive punning, the subtle power dynamic at play between Murdoch's ruthlessly penetrating mind and Bayley's more childlike demeanor, the clutter of a house inhabited by scholars preoccupied by greater things. And they just as compassionately, often painfully, portray the slippage of oncoming disease, when everyday absent-mindednessis symptomatic of something more serious.
But as breathtaking as these performances are Dench especially bears an uncanny resemblance to the real Iris Murdoch Hugh Bonneville, who plays the young John with such modest ardor, should not be overlooked. Nor, indeed, should the ensemble achievement of the entire film not just of the cast, but of director Richard Eyre, who with Charles Wood wrote the screenplay, and editor Martin Walsh. Along with the actors, these filmmakers have created something extraordinary in "Iris," not just a fitting document of a life brilliantly lived but a vibrant, almost palpitating piece of cinema that does justice to its subject by reaching just a little bit further than most movies. Gracefully edited between the recent past and Murdoch and Bayley's courtship 50 years ago, "Iris" folds era upon era, then moment upon moment, until the film doesn't so much tell a story as reflect the workings of consciousness itself. Eyre has executed a precise, graceful and intellectually rewarding work worthy of Murdoch herself.
Advocates for Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers have hailed "Iris" as the most realistic depiction to date of the progression of the ailment, as well as its toll on its witnesses. There is an especially excruciating passage in which Bayley gives full vent to his helplessness and rage even vestigial jealousy at the "secret world" to which Iris seems to have permanently retreated.
But as welcome as such a realistic portrayal of Alzheimer's is, "Iris" is much more than the chronicle of an illness. Rather it is one of the great love stories, an epic romance of two empyrean minds whose exacting literary and philosophical standards, as well as their firm commitment to the tactile pleasures of life, informed every strand of their relationship. During their courtship, John Bayley responded to a typically high-minded Murdoch discourse on freedom and morality by complimenting her snub nose. It's a yin and yang that animated the whole of their life together and, in the end, served them exceedingly well.

domain: literature


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Princess Random Matching Wedding
Disney land will have a party called random matching wedding. Elsa, Anna and Rapunzel are very excited to hear the news and decided to join the party. It's a wedding party. The princesses need your help to dress up. They can not wait to see their bridegrooms. Come on playing the game and have a good time!
Tap on screen on mobile phone and mouse click on PC.
Add to your favorites


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Desire: it drives you, pushes you forward in life, and only by satisfying this yearning will happiness be possible. Blindness: some choose to ignore reality and bring this upon themselves, while others are simply unable to see life in its true light. When examined closely, the main characters in A Streetcar Named Desire each have individual desires, and each exhibits a type of blindness. The theme of A Streetcar Named Desire is the search for fulfillment, but these searches are misguided, because the characters are unable to grasp reality. Blindness to reality and desire for fulfillment play a crucial role when analyzing A Streetcar Named Desire. These two elements are especially vital to understand the main protagonist, Blanche Dubois.
Analyzing Blanche Dubois is fascinating, yet difficult, because of the complexity of her character. First seen clothed in a manner fit for a high-society afternoon tea, her dress starkly contrasts with the part of town in which she arrives. Tennessee Williams describes her appearance as "incongruous- to the setting of the play (Scene 5). She is dressed completely in white, a symbol of innocence and purity. Yet the drama occurs at Elysian Fields, a low-class section of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Blanche is portrayed as delicate, sensitive, and refined, while her surroundings are dirty, run-down, and anything but sophisticated. The contrast between the settings of the play .
and manner in which Blanche dresses provides the reader with his first glimpse of a major conflict in the drama: the true reality of life versus created illusion. Tennessee Williams is famous for dressing his most degenerate characters ironically in all white, so this provides readers with another clue about Blanche. We learn that Blanche refuses to see life realistically, and prefers fantasy, or as she calls it, "magic."" She says in scene nine, "I don't want realism! I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!" (Williams, Scene 9).