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Evander Glazing & Lock has signed a major new fleet outsourcing contract with ALD Automotive to supply new company cars and to manage out the legacy fleet.
The locksmith company consolidated the supply and management of its fleet through one supplier following a management buy-out from Homeserve last year.
ALD Automotive won a competitive tender to deliver a comprehensive outsourced service, including fleet management, fleet maintenance, accident management and short-term car hire.
Evander Glazing & Locks employees will benefit from access to ALD Automotive’s affinity scheme, AutoChoice Benefits Direct, which offers new, nearly new and used cars at discounted rates.
Richard Tuck, fleet manager, Evander Glazing & Locks, said: “We wanted to simplify our fleet supplier structure and move to a sole supply arrangement.
“In ALD Automotive we have selected a company that can meet all our requirements going forward to exacting standards, while managing out our existing vehicles.”
Read more on fleet management

domain: news


[WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Game of Thrones.]
With the season 4 premiere of Game of Thrones less than two weeks away, HBO has the series' loyal viewers whipped into a frenzy thanks to a constant stream of trailers, sneak peeks, and featurettes - all teasing what direction the series will take in the aftermath of "The Red Wedding."Following along with that strategy, HBO has released two more trailers, though neither contain any new or extended footage. The first trailer (above) features quick shots of characters giving furtive glances intercut with sword-swinging, fire-breathing action. The flurry of images are all connected by this season's ominous tagline: All Men Must Die. It's unclear whether or not that phrase is meant as a warning or prophecy, but either way, it most certainly does not mean things will get any easier for those seeking the Iron Throne - or for those running from it.
The second trailer (below) has narration from Kit Harrington's Jon Snow, a character whose journey took a drastic turn last season after appearing to switch sides and traveling with the wildlings north of The Wall.
Now Jon is back with his brothers at Castle Black, preparing to defend the realm from the invading wildlings and whatever other threats come at them from the north. With the Starks for the most part out of the picture, the Lannisters prepare to celebrate with the wedding of Joffrey (Jack Gleason) to Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer). New faces come to King's Landing, and new threats as well, and siblings Cersei (Lena Headey), Jamie (Nikolaj Coster-Waldeau), and Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) must face them all.
Of the surviving Starks, Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) continues his spiritual journey beyond the wall, Arya (Maisie Williams) wanders the Riverlands with the Hound (Rory McCann), and Sansa (Sophie Turner) continues to be the Lannisters' prisoner. While out east, Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) learns the hardships that come with ruling and faces difficulties with her ever-growing dragons.
Expect the drama and intrigue of season 4 to be even more intense, and the death toll only higher. From an adaptation standpoint, there will be more changes made from the source material than in previous seasons, keeping even fans caught up with the books guessing at where the show will go next. And while showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss envision the series wrapping in about seven or eight seasons, the momentum surrounding Game of Thrones doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
How excited are you for Game of Thrones' return, Screen Rant readers? Which character are you most excited to see again and why? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Game of Thrones season 4 premieres on Sunday, April 6th @9pm on HBO.


By some estimates, 30% of the electricity used in the United States alone is just from lighting and for retailers that number climbs to 45%. But this next story shows those numbers could drop dramatically simply by letting the sun come in.
Duncan Earl looks like he’s recreating a scene from Starwars but he’s really demonstrating an elegant new lighting system. It could save millions in energy costs, it could improve worker productivity. It’s called Hybrid Solar Lighting and some buildings are already seeing the light.
We’re here on the rooftop of the American Museum of
Science and Energy in Oakridge Tennessee where we are seeing a solar collector that’s part of Sunlight Direct’s HSL3000 system.
The Hybrid Solar Lighting Components
This system consists of a 48-inch diameter primary mirror that concentrates the light towards the secondary mirror. This secondary mirror strips off UV and Infrared wavelengths.
Taking out the Infrared UV light reduces heat in the fiber optics and, why not, you can’t see that light anyway?
The visible light is focused towards the fiber optic receiver. The fiber optic receiver contains optical fibers that then passed into the building interior for building lighting.
Just like electrical wire sent to lighting fixtures, the fibers are easily installed and replaced. Unlike fluorescent lights that require energy, the hybrid solar system only needs one 9-volt battery to power the solar tracking system for a week.
“The solar tracker mechanism consists of two motors that are controlled by GPS microprocessor. The GPS microprocessor can calculate the exact location of the sun to within point 1 degree.” and that makes the lights shine bright.
How Much Light Power It Gives?
“To give you an idea of how much light is emitted by these optical fibers, just 2 of these fibers produce enough light to be equivalent to a 60-watt light bulb and there’s a hundred twenty seven of those optical fibers in our bundle. “
Scratches on this rod help distribute the light but what if it’s cloudy or rainy outside? That’s where the hybrid comes in.
“The lighting fixtures blend the sunlight with the artificial lamps from fluorescent or incandescent lamps that’s to create a hybrid luminary. Photo sensors in the room monitors the intensity and and makes sure the artificial lamps are ramped up or decreased proportionally to keep a constant room illumination.”


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“If somebody said would you rather have HAVlife or my son — hands down I wish I had my son back.” says Mike Vondran, founder of the HAVlife Foundation.
The father reflects on the creation of the organization and how it honors his son.
“Knowing in his name we’re able to do some good things and help others live a better life and have opportunity, that’s pretty cool — that’s a win — so I guess out of tragedy sometimes comes greatness too,” he adds. “We really wanted to do something in memorial that might live on for many many years.”
Hunter Vondran’s birthday — September 19 — prompting the state-wide proclamation, declaring the month of September “Preventing Lost Potential” month.
The month is dedicated to helping protect the community’s young people. HAVlife works to provide young individuals with resources to succeed — emphasizing how education, art, athletics — finding a passion — can help children discover their true potential, while keeping them out of trouble and excited about their futures.
Bettendorf’s mayor Bob Gallagher signed-on to the proclamation — agreeing to help raise awareness about the cause.
For more information on HAVlife and their mission to help “prevent lost potential”, visit https://havlife.org/


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Pennsylvania High School Soccer - Milton Central MountainSeptember 20, 2022: Milton, PA 17847
Milton Black Panthers (Milton, PA) fans were thrilled Tuesday as they observed their soccer team knock off the visiting Central Mountain Wildcats (Mill Hall, PA), 2-0 in a league challenge.
Next, the Black Panthers confront the Williamsport Millionaires (Williamsport, PA) in a Heartland I challenge, on Thursday, September 22. Milton will attempt to better on its 5-3 season record. The Millionaires enter the challenge with a 6-1 record after their 5-1 non-league win over Shikellamy (Sunbury, PA).
The Wildcats now have a 1-5 record. They take the field next when they host Danville for a Heartland I challenge on Thursday, September 22. Central Mountain will confront a Ironmen team coming off a 3-1 league loss to Selinsgrove (Selinsgrove, PA). The Ironmen record now stands at 8-2.


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GEORGE'S SUGAR RUSH
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Can you guess how this parrot toy got its name? George's Sugar Rush is a beautiful parrot toy in the Picasso parrot toy line. Each candy wrapper holds a chewable wood "candy", with soft foam circles stacked between each candy piece. This parrot toy is set on a steel kebab, making this parrot toy a delight for DIY projects to be used again and again!
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domain: hobby


What was she thinking? Katherine Jenkins stuns at the Brit Awards in a shapeless paint-swirl dress
With her ballgowns and fitted shift dresses, Katherine Jenkins is normally queen of the red carpet.
However, the classical singer put a rare foot wrong in the style stakes at Wednesday's Brit Awards.
The 32-year-old stood out for all the wrong reasons in a shapeless Stella McCartney dress with blue, green and yellow paint-swirl patterns.
Scroll down for video and a list of winners
Not a good look: Katherine Jenkins wears a Stella McCartney dress and Charlotte Olympian heels to the Brit Awards 2013
Covering her curves: The material billowed out around her bottom
Known for her amazing curves, the Welsh star's figure was swamped by the material which billowed out behind her.
She teamed the dress with a pair of aquamarine Charlotte Olympia heels and swept her back into an unusual backcombed style.
After realising her dress hadn't gone down well, she tweeted: 'Clearly Stella, me & a very gusty red carpet do not go hand in hand! #Doh.'
Swirly girlie: Katherine usually gets it right on the red carpet
Baby got back! Rita Ora wore a too long, creased orange Ulyana Sergeenko dress
Rita Ora failed to impress in an orange satin Ulyana Sergeenko number with a bustle.
The celebrity who seemed to make the least effort was American singer Lana Del Rey.
Despite wowing last year in a plunging red Vivienne Westwood number, this year it looked like she was more dressed for a day in the park than an awards bash in her Chanel shirt dress.
The Born To Die star arrived with her rumoured fiance Barrie James O'Neill.
Could have made more effort! Lana Del Rey looked more suited for a daytime event than the red carpet in her Chanel shirt dress
Eclectic: Little Mix (L-R) Perrie Edwards, Jesy Nelson, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jade Thirlwall
Corinne Bailey Rae wore an uninspired creased shapeless cream dress, while soul singer Laura Mvula stood out in a shapeless jacket-style dress.
Ex-EastEnders actress Preeya Kalidas showed off plenty of cleavage in a leather, pleated skater dress.
Girl group Little Mix went for very different looks as they arrived on the red carpet.
Standing out: Corinne Bailey Rae's (left) dress was a shapeless, crinkled number, while soul singer Laura Mvula wore a white jacket style dress
Interesting: Actress Jaime Winstone (left) and TV presenter Zoe Hardman wore colourful dresses
Perrie Edwards showed off a lot of leg in her pink Natalia Kaut dress, which she teamed with a Kurt Geiger heels and floral Lara Jensen headband.
Jesy Nelson showed off her curves in a super-tight Celeb Boutique dress and Kurt Geiger platform heels.
Leigh-Anne Pinnock went for a sexy look in a plunging, white Aqua dress, while Jade Thirlwall wore a multi-coloured holographic Mary Benson dress and Steve Madden shoe boots.
Lady in black: Preeya Kalidas wore a low-cut leather skater dress
Dividing critics: Gemma Arteron's Jonathan Saunders dress was met by a mixed response
Brit Awards 2013 Winners
Best Female Solo Artist - Emeli Sandé
British Breakthrough Act - Ben Howard
British Male - Ben Howard
International Female Solo Artist - Lana Del Rey
British Live Act - Coldplay
British Single - Adele - Skyfall
British Group - Mumford & Sons
International Group - The Black Keys
International Male Solo Artist - Frank Ocean
Special Recognition - Warchild
British Album - Emeli Sandé - Our Version of Events
Global Success - One Direction
VIDEO Brits 2013. Red carpet highlights
VIDEO Brits 2013. MailOnline's pick of the best bits
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Paparazzi Accessories Earrings:
Tinted in a refreshing blue and orange finish, a colorful flower dots the top of an airy blue lure in a whimsical fashion. A border of silver studs adorns the frame, adding a textured finish to the colorful lure. Earring attaches to a standard fishhook fitting.
Sold as one pair of earrings.
Paparazzi jewelry meets applicable consumer safety laws and regulations in the United States, including California's Proposition 65.
Want to get to know Lisa Abercrombie? Visit me on Facebook to see my LIVE shows where I not only sell jewelry but also teach business tips and tricks!

domain: artistic


This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion
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A federal judge — who happens to be the sister of failed 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams — has ordered two Georgia counties to stop purging ineligible voters from their rolls.
This ruling comes just days before the crucial Senate run-off elections on Jan. 5, which will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner ruled that two counties cannot remove thousands of voters who have filed a change of address with the U.S. Postal Service on Monday night, with liberal Democrat groups arguing that the registrations should be preserved even after their former holders have officially changed their addresses to locations outside of Georgia.
The judge ordered two counties to reverse a decision removing more than 4,000 voters from the rolls.
The Muscogee County Board of Elections had specifically requested that Abrams Gardner recuse herself from the case, citing her sister’s well-publicized claims of election misconduct and voter suppression after her loss in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial election.
Gardner rejected requests for her recusal and ruled to halt the ongoing election integrity measures in an eleven-page ruling on Monday, arguing the purges were being enacted too closely to Georgia’s upcoming federal election and that the out-of-state voters being removed weren’t given proper notice.
Judge blocks voter purge in 2 Georgia counties.
Don’t believe these things are rigged?
THE JUDGE IS STACY ABRAMS’ SISTER!!! WTF. https://t.co/zVnjkXyjsB
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 29, 2020
The judge, Leslie Abrams Gardner — the sister of former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a prominent ally of President-elect Joe Biden who has led voter registration efforts across the state — concluded that the counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address data to invalidate registrations in the two counties.
The bulk of the registrations that the counties sought to rescind, more than 4,000, were in Muscogee County, which Biden won handily in November. An additional 150 were from Ben Hill County, which Trump won by a wide margin.
The suit, brought by Majority Forward, represented by National Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, followed an effort to challenge the lengthy roster of voters simply because their registrations appeared to match U.S. Postal Service change-of-address records. Voting officials in the two counties agreed to remove the voters, despite warnings from Democrats that such postal data is not a reliable or conclusive indicator that a voter has given up their local residence.
The motion requesting Gardner’s recusal noted that a voter registration group affiliated with Abrams, Fair Fight, filed a suit in another federal court in Georgia last week complaining that a national organization dedicated to targeting voter fraud, True the Vote, is making unjustified challenges to Georgia voters in the lead-up to the Jan. 5 runoffs.
“Abrams’ involvement in the Fair Fight Litigation … is sufficient to satisfy the standard for mandatory judicial recusal,” the board’s attorneys wrote. “Abrams has a clear interest in the outcome of this proceeding and other similarly situated litigation in Georgia due to her voting advocacy through projects such as Fair Fight and the New Georgia Project.”


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Charlotte, North Carolina! Home to one of my favorite airports and also home to Alright. If Alright were ice cream, they would be Rocky Road: sugary-sweet indie pop with some crunch, namely in the buzzing guitar sound that brings Dinosaur Jr. and Hüsker Dü to mind. The three tracks presented here are all fine examples of what Alright brings to the party. Did I mention ice cream?
–Garrett Barnwell (Negative Fun, negativefun.com)


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Working in comic books for just over a decade in the 1940s and '50s, Bernard Krigstein applied all the craft, intelligence, and ambition of a burgeoning "serious" artist, achieving results that remain stunning to this day. While his legend rests mostly on his landmark narratives created for EC Comics, dozens of stories for lesser publishers equally showcase his singular draftsmanship and radical reinterpretation of the comics page.
Harvey and Eisner Award-winning Krigstein biographer Greg Sadowski has assembled the very best of the artist’s work, starting with his earliest creative rumblings, through his glory days at EC, to his final daring experiments for Stan Lee’s Atlas Comics — running through nearly every genre popular at the time, be it horror, science fiction, war, western, or romance.
This edition reprints the out-of-print 2004 hardcover B. Krigstein Comics, with a number of stories re-tooled and improved in terms of reproduction, and several new stories added. Legendary EC colorist Marie Severin, in her last major assignment before her retirement, recolored 20 stories for this edition. The remainder has been taken from printed comics, digitally restored with subtlety and restraint. Original art pages, photostats from Krigstein's personal archives, and an extensive set of historical and editorial notes by Sadowski round out this compelling volume.
• Review:Publishers Weekly gives a starred review to 7 Miles a Second by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook. "The author’s prose is poetic, arriving with a light touch while delivering a heavy, dark, and understandably angry message. Part of what makes the book unusual is that it does not go out of its way to be uplifting… Romberger and Van Cook’s art is hyperactive, with splattery color that suggests the out-of-body acid-trip world of contradictory values and constantly shifting danger that Wojnarowicz lived in."
• Preview:Publishers Weekly also posted a preview of the comic 7 Miles a Secondby David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, compiled by Ada Price for your prereading pleasure.
• Review: Beta Testing the Apocalypse by Tom Kaczynski gets reviewed on Publishers Weekly. "Kaczynski’s range is wide, and in these chronologically arranged stories, we can trace an artistic development that begins as self-satisfied…and becomes more searching and curious…although his worldview won’t connect with everyone, there is plenty of smart humor and honest perspective."
• Interview:The Writing Disorder interviews Steven Weissman on his Barack Hussein Obama graphic novel, process and original art he owns. Weissman says, "I never had a scientist’s desire for the truth. I’ve always been comfortable not knowing things."
• Interview:Shelf Life of EW.com interviews Jaime Hernandez on the 30th Anniversary ofLove and Rockets. Solvej Schou asks, "So how do you and your brothers get along, being involved in the same project?" Jaime admits, "Our secret is why we can still do it is we don't collaborate."Read more!
• Plug:Noah Van Sciver's The Hypo receives an excellent rating on the Lone Star Book Review. "… an interesting look at young Abe Lincoln and his melancholic. This is a side of Lincoln that is often overlooked…"
• Review:Four Color Fear edited by Greg Sadowski continues to generate reviews after two sold out printings. Kitty Sneezes' Rev. Syung Myung Me writes "Greg Sadowski put together a wonderful collection complete with in-depth notes in the back of some of the best from comics that tend to be thought of dismissively as also-rans…if you’re a type who has the complete EC horror libraries along with a subscription to Creepy, this will slot in real well in your collection. And, well, even if you’re not that type, it’s still a great collection of some unjustly overlooked comics from the 1950s."
Coming in late February/early March, Messages in a Bottle collects the best work by Bernard Krigstein, a singular draftsman and one of the most graphically sophisticated comics illustrators of all time, whose too-brief career in the 1940s and '50s included work for EC and Atlas Comics. For those who have been awaiting a new edition of our long-out-of-print B. Krigstein: Comics, this book contains every story from that volume plus several more. It is our great privilege to have had a number of these stories specially recolored by the great Marie Severin; the remainder have been painstakingly restored from the original comic books by acclaimed editor Greg Sadowski. Read a free 22-page excerpt with 3 complete stories, and pre-order a copy, right here.
The most symmetrical cake slice of Online Commentaries & Diversions:
• Review:Publishers Weekly occasionally lets smart and famous people recommend books. Jeopardy Master Ken Jennings "skipped the obvious Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel entries in favor of this lesser-known three-volume masterpiece, about Tyler’s complicated relationship with her distant dad, a World War II vet. With her playful, fluid brush line and busy patchwork of watercolor woodgrain, Tyler’s art looks like the past feels." Carol Tyler's complete series You'll Never Know is available.
• Review:Booklist Online cooks up a review from some Pogo (The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Vol. 2: "Bona Fide Balderdash"). Ian Chipman writes, "[Walt Kelly's] hallmarks of deft wordplay, daft swamp critters, and poisonously sharp sociopolitical satire are in full blossom here. The highlight is the 1952 election season that saw Pogo’s first and entirely reluctant presidential run and the birth of the “I Go Pogo” slogan. Mimicking “I Like Ike. . . A must for all collections of comic-strip history."
• Plug:Forces of Geek throws out some good gift recommendations for kidslike Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge "Only a Poor Old Man"by Carl Barks. "Comic books have always been an excellent gateway into reading, and when it comes to smart, imaginative and engaging, you don't have to go much further than Carl Barks. . . What better way to introduce your own Huey, Dewey or Louie to comics?"
• Review:Paste Magazines's 10 Best Collections of 2012 include two Fantagraphics titles. Hillary Brown loved Young Romance, by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby edited by Michel Gagné who "painstakingly restored them (without making them look exactly new, thus giving the book the feel of a vintage compilation that just happens to be in amazing shape). . . Simon and Kirby tried to bring as much excitement to primarily psychological and interpersonal goings-on as to punching and flying." And this might be the last year anything by Carl Barks is on the list, "We’ll just grant it permanent honorary status as the best of the best, like when John Larroquette removed himself from Emmy consideration after winning four straight for Night Court. . . [Walt Disney's Donald Duck "A Christmas for Shacktown] once again proves Barks to be one of the finest draftsmen and storytellers we’ve ever had." Well put, Garrett Martin.
• Plug:The Scotsman lists some of the Best of 2012 as told by the best scotsman. Withered Hand's singer/songwriter Dan Willson has eyes only for Ron Rege, Jr. and states, "[The] Cartoon Utopia , his magnum opus, is quite a head-trip. Thousands of very dense little drawings and words resemble a psychedelic illuminated manuscript peppered with themes of spiritual redemption and good versus evil. It’s a very unusual and beautiful work."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. On Ron Rege Jr.'s The Cartoon Utopia , "The first esoteric text of the new century. The harbinger of the New Aeon. This book will be a staple of Esoteric Lore for millennia to come."
• Plug:Boing Boing makes my job easy by providing the Best Damn Comics of 2012. Compiled by Brian Heater, a lot of creative people offered up their favorite books of the year. Nick Abadzis thinks Kolor Klimax (edited by Matthias Wivel), "feels startling and vital to me and features a wide variety of styles, each as absorbing as all the others contained within these pages. I don't think I've enjoyed an anthology as much as this one in years."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Box Brown on Barack Hussein Obama, "Steven Weissman does stuff with actual analog comic materials that most dudes can't even do with photoshop." Jeffrey Brown chimes in on BHO, "Strange, funny and beautiful. Weissman reinvents his comics with the kind of book I wish I would make." Will Dinksi agrees, "Barack Hussein Obama is pretty much my favorite book of the year. . . I get a better appreciation for Weissman's craft in the printed collection where it can feel like you're actually looking at the finished artwork." Mari Naomi says,"I just love what this book is. If I didn't know better, I wouldn't even recognize this as Weissman. And I like that."
• Review:Paris Review checks out The Last Vispo, edited by Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill. Nicole Rudick states,"it makes sense that in visual form poetry would elicit a kind of motion, an unfolding over the space of a page, and that even its sound would be voiced as a series of discoveries. Movement disrupts the continuity of a sentence, a phrase, a word. And language, unsettled, is unbound."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Box Brown continues to wax poetic on Josh Simmons' The Furry Trap, "Funny, even as it makes your hair stand on end and your skin start to crawl... Horror comics that gash their way below the surface."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Shaenon K. Garrity says that The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio "is a book I've been awaiting for over ten years, and it exceeds my expectations."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Nate Powell on Interiorae by Gabriella Giandelli, is "just what I look for in a narrative: patient, dreamy, full of seemingly endless layers of shadow, slowly revealing the sweetness inside the rotten, all within the confines of a single high-rise apartment building, surrounded by snow and static."
• Review:Slate finds themselves choosing Heads or Tails, going for broke. Dan Kois says, "Lilli Carré’s short stories are dreamy, unlikely, and unsettling. What transforms the stories from nightmares to fables is Carré’s artwork, which varies with each story. . ."
• Review:Page 45 looks at Heads or Tails by Lilli Carré. "The art reminds me a little of Lynda Barry and the flow of the pages reminded me a little of Walt Holcombe. . .I recently recommended this book to a customer who named their favourite film as Amelie (good choice!) precisely because it has that feeling of whimsy about it."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Jeremy Tinder on Heads or Tails by Lilli Carré, "A nice encapsulation of many of the ways Lilli has been pushing herself both narratively and stylistically over the last few years. If only there was a way to squeeze her animation in there too." Will Dinksi comments on Heads or Tails by Lilli Carré, "Beautiful artwork. Thoughtfully paced. "Of The Essence" is one of the best comic book short stories I've ever read."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Robert Kirby on No Straight Lines edited by Justin Hall, "Long overdue, this beautifully-produced, sharply edited retrospective may usher in a new era of respect and recognition for a long-neglected realm of the alt-comics world."
• Review:Nate's Broadcast enjoyed The Hypo by Noah Van Sciver in addition to the recent film, Lincoln, and book America Aflame. "Van Sciver’s contribution to the Lincoln mythology is perfect for those who like their heroes a little troubled and messy, but good at their core- not a bad way to interpret the American ideal."
• Plug: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Will Dinski continues with The Hypo. "[Noah] Van Sciver is pretty prolific, but this is his best work to date. The line art just drips with anguish." Brian Heater thinks it "puts the cartoonist's brimming angst to a different use entirely, in a book that does precisely what a good piece of historical non-fiction should: finding a fascinating way to tell a story we were convinced we already knew."
• Review: Blacklung by Chris Wright is whittled on by Tucker Stone at TCJ. It's called "the big, trippy brother to Drew Weing’s Segar influenced Set To Sea. . . . [and] Gore saturates this comic. . . Brutality for its own sake is the point of some entertaining movies, no reason it can’t be the point of some entertaining comics as well."
• Review: On Filth and Fabulations, Jeppe Mulich states that Chris Wright's "[Blacklung is] not a work of splatter punk or mindless gore, but rather an engaging, breathless, and humorous tale of the dregs of the sea, including a colorful assortment of pirates and madmen, quite clearly drawing inspiration from both Melville, Stevenson and Peckinpah."
• Review: Paste Magazine reviews Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking by Charles M. Schulz. "Seeing this work isolated and expanded only reinforces the sheer timelessness and brilliance inherent; Schulz was a master of mood and line in equal measure. . . it’s some of the finest nostalgia porn you can put under the tree," quips Sean Edgar.
•Review:Pheonix New Times unwraps their present early and Jason P. Woodbury interviews Nat Gertler on Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking by Charles M Schulz. "[Schulz] had done a Christmas book, Christmas is Together-Time, using red and green," Gertler says, explaining the minimal color palette. "We wanted to keep that simplicity and Christmas-sense in there." The stable of Schulz characters transcend fads and time because as Gertler points out "It's not the way kids talk, but they way they feel is the way that kids feel."
• Plug:Drawn blog tops off another the Best of 2012 list with some Ernie Bushmiller. John Martz points out, "Nancy seems to be a love-it-or-leave-it strip, and I am firmly in the Love It camp. . . Often surreal, and always impeccably drawn, there is nothing quite like it. . . these books are a virtual masterclass in cartooning."
• Review: From Boing Boing's list of the Best Damn Comics of 2012, compiled by Brian Heater. Tom Kaczynski on Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy is Happy, "The minimalism of the art, the quirky humor, the amazing consistency, it all started with these strips."
• Review: Getting ready for the hardback release of Delphine by Richard Sala, Carrie Cuinn of SF Portal reviews the tale complete with "dark duotone inking style, little dialogue, and gothic, shadowy, art. . . Overall I think that Sala’s retelling of that well-known love story is affectingly tragic. . . It is, in a word, creepy."
• Review: If MTV Geek knows about The End of the Fucking World then the secret is out: Charles Forsman is amazing! "[It] pulls you in like no other comic this year. Stunning in its simplicity and brave in its subject matter. Charles Forsman is a future force. . . [it] is like stumbling onto the ultimate secret in comic books, but based on how great TEOTFW is, it won't be much a secret longer."
• Review: Ashley over at Bibliophibien looks at Wandering Son series by Shimura Takako, "While the story is focused on transgender topics, I think that this is a wonderfully moving coming-of-age story and captures the complexities of sexual identity, friendships, and family that teens face."
• Review: Rick Klaw at SF Site enjoys the glossy glory of Action! Mystery! Thrills!, edited by Greg Sadowski. "As in his previous volumes. . . Sadowski supplies copious end notes and annotations. Though this time, the information additionally reads as an entertaining history of early comics. . . Sadowski once again delivers an essential book for anyone with an interest in comics history."
• Plug: John McMurtrie of SF Gate (San Francisco Gate) lists Listen, Whitey! by Pat Thomas as one of the Music Books to Buy of 2012.
The first rain-free (HA!) day of Online Commentaries & Diversions:
• Review:The Comics Journal looks at Ron Rege Jr.'s The Cartoon Utopia. Katie Haegel writes, "Almost impossible to categorize, the work in Cartoon Utopia is both fully realized in a formal sense and wonderfully idiosyncratic. Like, it’s really out there. . . to me the work is much stronger when it depicts magic in action, which Regé accomplishes by telling us stories about historical figures and their relationship to the natural world."
• Review:Robot 6 reviews The Cartoon Utopia by Ron Rege Jr. Chris Mautner writes "with Rege drawing science, new age spiritualism, the occult, astrology and Jungian archetypes to come up with a personal grand unification theory. There are no plots or characters in the book to speak of, instead Rege merely muses and illustrates his theories, which mainly have to on the interconnectedness of all living matter."
• Plugs: Best covers of the week by Andy Khouri on Comics Alliance. Ron Regé Jr'sThe Cartoon Utopia: "This cover really makes me smile, and maybe gives me a sense of four-color spiritual well-being. But cartoon utopia looks more outdoorsy than I expected."
• Review:Page 45 enjoys the gentle pages of The Cartoon Utopia. Stephen L. Holland states, "Regé is back with a spiritual manifesto and ode to creativity: a singular, secular vision delivered with all the fervour of a religious sermon. It’s a call not to arms but to peace and perception unshackled from the conditioning of ages, exhorting all to see new possibilities, infinite possibilities, so enabling one’s full potential to be realised in both senses of the word."
• Review:Barack Hussein Obamaby Steven Weissman is reviewed on Bookslut. Martyn Pedler says, "His Obama begins as a kind of smug, stoner everyman: telling 'your momma' jokes, discussing old movies with visiting dignitaries . . . Weissman’s pages -- drawn in ballpoint into a moleskin notebook -- use a four-panel gag structure that makes the book immediately addictive."
• Review:Publishers Weekly takes on Barack Hussein Obama by Steven Weissman.". . . readers will likely have to be content with being one part giddy and three parts puzzled. . . Perhaps that’s Weissman’s point: that the farce of contemporary politics has the capacity to make one simultaneously giddy, confused, and disenchanted."
• Interview (audio): Speaking of Steven Weissman, Obama and the elections, he is interviewed on KPFK 90.7 FM's show Beneath the Surface.
• Review: Cartoonist Lilli Carré finds herself Boing-Boing-ed. Brian Heater describes Heads or Tails collection, "These strips, which originally in the pages of places like The Believer and Mome, find the artist dipping her toes into new pools, the sort of freedom afforded by the low commitments of the short story form, often to truly wonderful effect."
• Interview: Eddie Wright of MTV Geek interviews Johnny Ryan about Prison Pit 4 and why us humans love it so much. "Well, I think it connects to comic fans because it's the stripped down essence of what popular superhero comics are, which is men beating the living shit out of each other. People love it."
• Review:Reglar Wiglar spit takes while reading Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit 4. Chris Auman says, "This is Ryan’s depraved ID unleashed in its purest form: blood, guts, genitalia and fecal matter abound—actually they don’t abound so much as they’re sprayed all over absolutely everything in a fantastical sci-fi orgy of digustedness."
• Plugs: Best covers of the week by Andy Khouri on Comics Alliance. continues with Wallace Wood's Came the Dawn: "And while we're talking smart use of interior art, here's another superb example. This collection is all about the mastery of Wally Wood, so the cover presents a taste of his work in an uncluttered and respectful way, while also establishing a trade dress for Fantagraphics' new EC artists line." Chris Wright's Blacklung: "I see a lot of Joann Sfar in this densely demonic and stylishly constructed cover, and that's enough to convince me to investigate the work of newcomer Chris Wright." Spacehawk mini-comic by Basil Wolverton: "Basil Wolverton may be best known for his grotesque caricatures in MAD Magazine, but he worked in a lot of genres. Spacehawk was evidently one of his early works, and if this gorgeously lurid cover is anything to go by it was a delightfully daffy sci-fi pulp."
• Review:Booklist Online carves out a place in their hearts for Wallace Wood's Came the Dawn. Ray Olson writes, "This volume presenting all his horror and crime stories chronologically shows him refining what is at first a crude though powerful sense of mise-en-scène into one that is assured, highly detailed, and lightly caricatural."
• Review:AV Club reviewed all our new books Came the Dawn by Wallace Wood and Corpse on the Imjin by Harvey Kurtzman. Noel Murray writes, "in writer/artist-driven volumes, printed in black and white, with additional essays and archival material . . . [and] both immediately reveal the value in the artist-driven approach. . . Feldstein’s stories were like the comic-book equivalent to some of the seediest B-movies, and Wood’s art fit Feldstein’s text, with lots of deep shadows and wrinkles reflecting a complicated world." On Basil WolvertonSpacehawk, "As with Kurtzman’s war comics, it’s remarkable to see art so twisted applied to such vivid pulp tales—almost as though Wolverton was trying his hardest to be Alex Raymond, but couldn’t help turning out images to rival Salvador Dalí." Gary Panter's "Dal Tokyo would evolve, strip-by-strip, into a distinctly Panter-esque swirl of science fiction and pure abstraction, in keeping with the artist’s one-of-a-kind sense of design, and his pursuit of comics that resemble music and poetry."
•Plug:Web Cast Beacon reviews all free Halloween Comics Fest freebies. They enjoy Tales from the Crypt and Spacehawk. YES, mail in those ad coupons, people.
• Interview:Jim Woodring is interviewed by Peter Bebergal on hippies, hallucinations and all the good stuff that goes into his latest work, Problematic, a skechbook. "I frequently saw things at night — silently jabbering heads at the foot of my bed, distorted animals and objects hanging in the air over me. Often I saw a huge staring eye that made me vomit with fear."
• Plug: On Boing-Boing, Mark Frauenfelder tips his digi-hat to Floyd Gottfredson: "Gottfredson's Mickey is a plucky, goodhearted imp, bursting with energy and impulsively eager for adventure. . . [Carl] Barks will always have a special place in my heart, but I've added Gottfredson to my short list of great American cartoonists."
• Review: Page 45 looks at The Lost Art of Ah Pookand Stephen L. Holland ponders "Malcom Mc Neill has taken the time to put this eye-frazzling book of art – some of it sequential – into context, for the work itself is very much lost. . . There are vast scenes of ancient ritual, carnal lust and very modern warfare transcending time just as they were always intended."
• Review:Booklist Online likes Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Old Manby Carl Barks. Ian Chipman states, "from the bitter cold of the Klondike to the bottom of the Caribbean. . . Barks’ comics are an absolute treasure that have aged remarkably well, and are finally getting wide-scale publication to introduce them to a new generation of readers."
• Review: Gene Ambaum of Unshelved happily views covers from Action! Mystery! Thrills!, edited by Greg Sadowski. "Beautiful full-color reproductions of unblemished comic book covers show the amazing art and the breadth of genres on the newsstands before Fredric Wertham screwed everything up in the 1950s. . . The colors are bright, and the art is just plain fun."
• Review: Is That All There Is? by Joost Swarte gets reviewed on Bookgasm. JT Lindroos states, ". . . it’s impossible not to enjoy this ultimately all-too-brief volume for every single panel it presents. Swarte is consistently projecting an incisive and curious mind at work, perfectly tuned to his showstopping skills as an artist nonpareil."
• Review: Rod Lott of Bookgasm spends a long, loooong time checking out Sexytime. "[Editor Jacque Boyreau] has a knack for picking images; much like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and hardcore porn, Boyreau knows it when he sees it. And luckily, he shares it, this time from the visual-presentation experts of Fantagraphics Books — a match made in poster-art heaven."
• Plug: Matt Bielby writes about The Complete Crumb Volume 1 by R. Crumb in Comic Heroes Magazine: "It's incredible stuff, much of it obviously for completists only, but even the most obscure volumes track a fascinating, and developing, world view."
• Interview: Charles Burns is interviewed on Cult Montreal by Emily Raine about The Hive, his creepy artwork and the Black Hole movie. "It’s not my intention to be creepy per se, or that’s not the reason I’m writing stories. I think they end up being whatever they are. Maybe I’m just a creepy guy, I don’t know."
• Interview (audio): One of our favorite creators, Ellen Forney, speaks to KUOW/NPR on bi-polar disorder, comics and her new work, Marbles.
• Plug:Jaime Hernandez will be at the Copenhagen Comics Fest in Copenhagen, Denmark in June of 2013. Mark them calendars!
The saltiest sounds of the ocean's Online Commentaries & Diversions:
• Interview: Dubbing them "The Four Horseman of AltComix" Sean T. Collins interviews Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes all in one go onRolling Stone. What a beautiful meetup of minds. Ware says, "Well, there are better cartoonists now than there ever have been. I firmly believe that. There's some amazing work being done." While Gilbert laments the change in alt comics, "That's what was missing from alternative comics after us: The art got less and less good."
• Interview (video): George O'Connor with co-host Natalie Kim recap SPX on InkedTV, including an interview with Gilbert Hernandez, and George shows off his Love and Rockets shirt.
• Plug:Dan Clowes is interviewed on what inspires him by the NY Times : "I didn’t really listen to the Kinks growing up at all — I was just vaguely aware of them, like everybody else — so when I was in my mid-20s I bought a couple of their records, just on a whim, and got sort of obsessed with them."
• Review:Comics Alliance reviews Lorenzo Mattotti's newest collaboration The Crackle of the Frostwith Jorge Zentner. Sarah Horrocks points out,". . . what you're looking at in The Crackle of the Frost is a largely amazing new Mattotti release for North American audiences, with fantastic art that has to be seen to be believed. It is a work that is better than most of what you can get on the stands on any given Wednesday. But it's also a book that is hurt by how achingly close it gets to its own perfection."
• Review:InkedTV reviews Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest Volumes 1-3 on their new video reviews featuring Natalie Kim and George O'Connor. "You will never find a book or a series of books that is so genetalia-obssessed as this book." Take a gander at our back catalog and you might find more.
• Plug:The Comics Journal lets Philip Nel tell a bit of the tale before the legend of Crockett Johnson, from his biography on the man called Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss. Fans have their eyes on the horizon for Johnson's Barnaby, edited by Nel and Eric Reynolds. Nel writes, "But before Barnaby, there was Crockett Johnson. And before Crockett Johnson, there was David Johnson Leisk."
• Review:Broken Frontier covers King of the Flies by Mezzo and Pirus. "King Of The Flies by Mezzo & Pirus is one hell of a hardcore comic. It is noir on acid, dark and unrelenting. It is one of the most thorough examinations of the cimmerian darkness the human species can dwell on and it will hit you square in the chest." But what about Book 2? "King Of The Flies 2 : Origin Of The World is maybe even better than its original and though it bears the number 2 it can just as well be read on its own."
• Profile: Esteemed underground comix historian Patrick Rosenkranz at The Comics Journal: "Spain Rodriguez acknowledges that age hasn’t necessarily brought wisdom, but it does help him appreciate his youthful adventures more, especially the unique experience of growing up in Buffalo, New York in the 1950s, which he portrays in his latest book,Cruisin' with the Hound.... This new volume from Fantagraphics Books tells more about his childhood, the guys and girls in his neighborhood, early encounters with sex, religion, and science fiction, and the birth of rock and roll." Sample quote from Spain: "Each moment is unique. That’s the thing about comics. If affords you the potential to be able to capture that moment, probably more than anything else. It has certain objective and subjective potentiality. It’s something that nobody else can do. Each person is unique, each person sees things in their individual way and comics give you that opportunity."
• Review: "A book with 400 pages of Alex Toth comics is a dream come true. Toth is one of the early greats of comics. Many of the golden age and early silver age comic artists made drawings that were charmingly crude, but there were a few supergeniuses among them. Alex Toth's art is obviously a cut above a lot of his peers. His understanding of how to use areas of black is unequaled. Cartoonists like Frank Miller and Charles Burns, who really like to use as much black as possible, owe a lot to Toth as a guy who really broke new ground in blacking it up. If you want to learn something about shading and composition you go get this book [Setting the Standard] and just black out." – Nick Gazin, VICE
• Review: "I still like looking at Ditko's stuff and think his work is valid. He's not a great drawer but he is clearly full of intense feelings and a lot of rage. Although his actual rendering skills aren't as strong as someone like Toth his ideas, feelings, and visual concepts are strong. This book [Mysterious Traveler] collects various sci-fi and horror comics he drew that are all pretty fun to look at and have neat visual ideas littered throughout." – Nick Gazin, VICE
• Review: "[Glitz-2-Go] deals with feeling unattractive and dressing kinda like a drag queen and being dissatisfied with relationships. The Didi Glitz comics were produced at a time when doing art about the hidden perversions of the 50s was big. Pee Wee Herman, Blue Velvet, John Waters, a lot of stuff Devo did — it all fits in with this book." – Nick Gazin, VICE
• Interview: At PSFK, an excerpt of Rob Walker talking about Significant Objects in Need to Know Magazine: "People value and are attracted to stories, and this often plays out in the world of objects. What we tried to do is take that observation in a different direction. Instead of a traditional story ‘about an object’ (where it was made, why it’s so great, how it will make your life better), we wanted creative writers to invent stories inspired by objects, which can lead to all kinds of unpredictable results. And in this case, the results turned out to be strong enough that the stories stood on their own."
• Commentary: A Fletcher Hanks creation tops Pip Ury's list of "6 Great Old-Timey Comics for (Traumatizing) Kids" at Cracked: "Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle is often credited as the first comic book superheroine, debuting in early 1940 and predating Wonder Woman by almost two years. Whoever decided she counted as one, however, has an extremely loose definition of what superheroing entails -- for starters, as far as we know superheroes aren't meant to be mind-numbingly terrifying."
What happens when you have to miss a couple of days of the comics internet is that it takes you almost the whole rest of the week to get fully caught up on Online Commentary & Diversions:
• List:Library Journal's Martha Cornog gives a nice shout-out to Carl Barks and recommends Oil and Water by Steve Duin & Shannon Wheeler as one of "30 Graphic Novels for Earth Day 2012": "Wheeler’s atmospheric, ink-washed greys capture eccentric residents from crabbers to a pelican-rescue team, and Duin’s script catches the ironic resiliency of people exploited by the very industry that feeds them.... Valuable for high schoolers and adults as a glimpse into the crisis, and for general sensitization to environmental issues."
• Review: "When I brought Pogo home from the bookstore on a Sunday afternoon, I called my daughters over, and we lay on the floor in the living room and read it together. I read it aloud, because half of the fun of Pogo is hearing the fantastic dialogue penned by Kelly, and my daughters loved it. I’m sure there were things that went over their heads — jokes that rely on experiences they haven’t had, references to past events, wordplay that’s a little too sophisticated. But the beauty of the strip is that does work on so many levels. There’s slapstick humor, cute little talking animals, and keen observations on the human condition — the last made easier to swallow perhaps because the characters aren’t people, as human as they may be." – Jonathan Liu, Wired – GeekDad
• Review: "[Jason] populates his tales with brightly clad cats and dogs and ducks, but their misbehavior is unmistakably human.... [Athos in America] is... consummately worth reading for its three gems: the lovely title story, the self-portrait 'A Cat From Heaven' and the wonderful 'Tom Waits on the Moon,' in which Jason carefully maps the crossed paths of four lonely people." – Sam Thielman, Newsday
• Review: "Despair threatens to overwhelm the creator’s usual tales of longing [in Athos in America]. In 'A Cat From Heaven,' his characteristic unrequited love story gives way to a somewhat depressing look at a self-absorbed cartoonist named Jason’s bitter relationship. Mercifully, the rest of the collection is a little more playful, from a couple noir parodies to the highlight, 'Tom Waits on the Moon,' in which four solipsistic stories converge in a tragic act." – Mike Sebastian, Campus Circle
• Review: "The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s MAD-Inspired Satirical Comics is a wonderful book collecting the best stories of the beginnings of a favorite comic book genre — and I can’t emphasize this enough — it’s put together by people who know what they’re doing. Plus, it’s designed to fit on your bookshelf right next to your MAD Archives volumes. I can’t believe that you haven’t already picked this up! Are you unsane?!?" – K.C. Carlson, Comics Worth Reading
• Review: "If [Wandering Son] Vol. 1 was a masterclass in people not wanting to accept the status quo within their own minds, Vol. 2 shows the uncertainty of the waiting world. The way that Nitori and Takatsuki fumble forward with no plan is painful and endearing. They know the two of them are better together but there’s the problem of dealing with classmates, family and teachers. It’s not easy and well done to Takako for not short-circuiting the process. It’s not easy writing characters in distress but it’s wonderful to read it. If you can recognise the character’s pain and sympathise despite your differences, it proves you’re human and so is the author.... So much of what we read is a kind of literary false economy. We put in so much and get so little out of it. Wandering Son asks so little of you and you get so much out of it.... It is a wonderful, sweet, heartbreaking window into being different, young, unsure, afraid and human." – Eeeper's Choice
• Review: "[The Man Who Grew His Beard]’s a big batch of critic-friendly comic strips, comics which resemble curios excavated from some none-too-defined European past and more often than not have all the daring shallow-space visual syntax of a Garfield strip. They’re less stories than contraptions that wear their artifice and structure on their sleeve, like those medieval homunculi which transparently show their cogs and mechanisms while making their programmed movements." – Rich Baez, It's Like When a Cowboy Becomes a Butterfly
• Review: "Action! Mystery! Thrills!... beautifully resurrects all the Golden Age favorites, from superheroes to killer robots to cowboys and occult Nazis. This time capsule collection of cover art spans from 1933-45... An index in the back gives the fascinating stories behind the covers, while the full-page, color reproductions reveal them for what they are: works of art." – Mike Sebastian, Campus Circle
• Review: "Primarily known for his ghoulish comic strips in Playboy and The New Yorker, Gahan Wilson showed his tender side (kind of) with Nuts. Originally a series of one-page vignettes running in National Lampoon, Nuts is presented here in its entirety as a classic warts-and-all reminiscence of childhood, from sick days to family gatherings, the joys of candy to the terrors of the dark basement." – Mike Sebastian, Campus Circle
• Review: "R. Crumb hit it big in the ‘60s alternative Comix scene with his creation of Fritz the Cat (originally conceived as an adolescent). The feline protagonist remained Crumb’s avatar for lambasting American culture until a lackluster film adaptation prompted some divine retribution from his creator. The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat collects all of Fritz’s essential stories." – Mike Sebastian, Campus Circle
• Awards:GalleyCat reports that Author Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, contributor to Significant Objects, has won the $1,000 Sidney Prize, which rewards "the author of the best new American story," and has a link to an excerpt from the winning story
• Opinions:Robert Crumb's got 'em! In the third installment of the "Crumb On Others" series, he lets you know exactly what he thinks of a bunch of prominent personalities, from Hitler to Ghandi (in whose homeland Crumb can be seen above) and from Kurtzman to Van Gogh
• Interview: When The Comics Journal posted the Q&A with Bill Griffith conducted by Gary Panter, I called it the must-read of the day, and it still stands as your must-read of the week: "I’ve only taken LSD twice in my life. Once on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard in 1967, which was pleasant, but not ego-shattering or anything. And once in New York after I’d started doing comics. All I remember about the second time was, I got hemorrhoids."
• Interview: Who better to talk to Matthias Wivel, editor of our Scandinavian comics anthology Kolor Klimax, than Steffen Maarup, editor of our Danish comics anthology From Wonderland with Love? A taste: "Putting together a good anthology is similar to making a good mixtape. Whatever the individual merits of a piece, it won’t do to include it if it doesn’t somehow work for the anthology as a whole. There has to be a consistent idea or tone to the book, which doesn’t mean that there can’t be dissonance — there’s some of that in Kolor Klimax, and I think for the better — but the individual parts still have to generate something greater than their sum. It’s incredibly difficult to achieve, but also a lot of fun." Read more at The Metabunker
Editor Greg Sadowski just provided us with this update on one of our most-anticipated books of the year:
Basil Wolverton opus Creeping Death from Neptune is taking a few extra months due to the inclusion of material not originally planned — nearly a hundred pages, including unpublished 1936-38 sci-fi strips and Wolverton's complete non-humorous Marvel comics. Here's a panel from "Eye of Doom" (1952).
Very excited to be putting this one together. I'll be amazed if it doesn't sell out quickly. Do yourself a favor and pre-order a copy today — if you love comics it doesn't get better than this.
Agreed! And Greg's right: demand for this one is through the roof! Thanks Greg!
• Review: "Besides a particularly gleeful dark humour, this collection of short stories by Norweigan artist Jason [Athos in America] is tied together by a certain obsession with Hollywood genres: science-fiction and crime are the main targets, and Jason infuses them with both a slightly tweaked pathos and a taste for melancholy macabre. His drawing style is sparse and uncluttered, but that works something like keeping an even tone during a dry remark: his punchlines and gut-punches are that much sharper for having played it cool. All of these stories have an underlying sadness — something that seems to stem from the bleak futility of all our existence — but the best has to be 'Tom Waits on the Moon,' four seemingly unconnected vignettes that ruminate on various relationship troubles before tying up in [a] surprising and funny end. That’s not to discount any of these, though: this is just fantastic stuff for sad bastards and the people who love them." – David Berry, National Post
• Review: "I’m going to go out on a limb and assume anyone reading a review of comics is aware enough of Walt Kelly’s landmark Pogo series that they don’t need much in the way of description, but suffice to say that any strip artist worth their salt has taken serious cues from Kelly’s rich dialogue, playful illustration and at-times fierce politics. This first edition, which features for the first time full-colour Sunday strips, definitely leans towards the sweeter side, but there’s simply no denying Kelly’s mastery: he evokes full characters with nothing but a few choice words, and the sprightliness of his visual style is all fun here, laying the groundwork for what would become profoundly subversive later. The included essays, as is usually the case for Fantagraphics reissues, absolutely nail the context and import of the strip, too. I just don’t think you can say you love comics and not have this around." – David Berry, National Post
• Review: "[Action! Mystery! Thrills! Comic Book Covers of the Golden Age] is a fucking mind blower for me since it's just full-size reproductions of cover art of the most important comic book issues you never saw, printed on glossy paper with information about what makes them so special on the back.... The brain of the casual art looker or person who thinks comics are a genre and not a medium will look at this stuff and try to make it ironic or perverse. To appreciate the work in this book you have to turn off those parts of your cynicism and open whatever part of yourself receives beauty. America's golden-age comic books are some of the greatest art our country has produced." – Nick Gazin, VICE

domain: library


text:
In Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett , the Supreme Court overturned a Arizona state programs that mitigated the cash advantage of wealthy individuals, who spent millions their own dollars on their own political campaign, by providing the matching funds to their opponent. Basically - with the program in place - there became no point of spending millions of your own dollars on your own campaign. Rich individuals would need to raise money from other people just like everybody else. It evened the playing field, somewhat. This ended when Supreme Court ruled that the program, along with any other additional restrictions under Davis v. Federal Election Commission, creates a "chilling effect" on free speech.
Money in politics has been a problem for a long, long time. Though corporate money is a relatively new phenomenon that has led to problems that the founding fathers could not even fathom. The scale of this achievement would be asking the founding fathers to include constitutional rules on airplanes and biotechnology, when they couldn't even imagine the existence of political parties.
Modern problems of campaign finance really began in the 1976 Supreme Court case, Buckley v. Valeo, where the court decided that money spent on politics was free speech; therefore limiting someone's ability to spend money on politics was limiting someone's first amendment constitutional rights thereof. Ever since then, the US has slowly descended to where we are today. McCain-Feingold tried to address the issue, but it was gutted by the Supreme Court using the same "money is free speech" logic; same logic for Citizens United as well.
Now here is my question. If not being able to spend millions of dollars is a "chilling of speech", why is the inability to do so not also a "chilling of speech" as well? If my voice gets drowned out by somebody else's money, then has my freedom of speech not been chilled? If it is proven that people do not run for office because they are not inherently wealthy, then is that a chilling of constitutional rights as well?
I may not be a constitutional scholar, but it seems like there is something awfully fishy with this logic.
Fun fact: The founding fathers never even thought DC would become a large population center. It was just an empty swamp that was conveniently located at the time. The lack of voting rights for this non-state district was a simple oversight that became constitutionally enshrined. Ooops.

domain: sociology


| Oct 25, 2013
| 3:15 PM
Health officials have confirmed Los Angeles County's first death of the 2013-2014 influenza season.
The victim, a woman who lived in the San Fernando Valley, was infected with an influenza B strain, the Department of Public Health reported Friday. The...
| Oct 28, 2013
| 4:43 PM
Even healthy children can come down with a case of the flu severe enough to cause death in a matter of days, according to a new report from researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In fact, children who were in good health...
| Nov 17, 2013
In the first half of the 20th century, about 10,000 American infants — and as many as 200,000 worldwide — died each year from a lethal immune reaction, called Rh disease, produced by their mother's body during childbirth. Perhaps twice that...
| Sep 9, 2013
| 4:13 PM
A hard-hitting, $54-million public health campaign designed to scare smokers into quitting appears to have prompted 100,000 people to give up cigarettes, according to a new report. That works out to a cost of $540 per quitter.
The Centers for Disease...
| Jul 20, 2013
| 9:22 PM
Two visitors from Europe are suspected of falling ill with measles in Ventura County, prompting public health officials to remind the public to get vaccinated.
Health authorities said one of the visitors was confirmed to have measles, and the other is...
| Aug 20, 2013
| 10:25 AM
What if ticks were an endangered species? Would we preserve critical habitat for them? Fund a captive-tick breeding program? It would be hard for me, as a hiker and dog owner, to summon any sympathy for these disgusting little pests. If they were gone,...
| Sep 3, 2013
| 2:07 PM
At least 200,000 deaths due to heart disease and stroke can be prevented each year by quitting smoking, controlling blood pressure and cholesterol, and taking aspirin when recommended by a physician, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and...
| Aug 10, 2013
Across the country, preschools and elementary schools are declaring themselves nut free or peanut free, asking families not to pack lunch foods that could pose life-threatening dangers to highly allergic children. And the prohibitions are expanding beyond...
| Aug 27, 2013
| 3:03 PM
A man travels to Indonesia and contracts the measles. He then visits a church in Texas, sickening 21 people -- at least so far. Who should feel responsible? The unvaccinated man who contracted the disease or the ministers at the church who’ve...
| Apr 25, 2013
| 8:15 PM
In another major setback for efforts to develop a vaccine to boost immunity to the human immunodeficiency virus, known as HIV, a key clinical trial was ordered shut down this week after an independent panel of safety experts found that participants...
| Aug 19, 2013
| 2:01 PM
Indoor tanning is a great way to get skin cancer – especially if you start young. People who use tanning beds, sunlamps or tanning booths before age 35 are up to 75% more likely to develop melanoma, and those who begin before 25 may double their...


Mar 10, 2014, 10:41 PM EDT
George A. King III of the New York Post heard last month that the Yankees might look to deal a catcher before they head back north for Opening Day.
That catcher could be Francisco Cervelli.
According to Chris Cotillo of MLB Daily Dish, the 28-year-old Cervelli is drawing “lots of trade interest” from front offices around the league. Cotillo says the White Sox are “among many teams” that have been monitoring Cervelli this spring in Yankees camp.
Cervelli is out of minor league options and the Bombers seem comfortable going with 25-year-old former Top 100 prospect Austin Romine as the backup to new starting catcher Brian McCann. So they might as well deal from a surplus and attempt to address an area of need (key word: attempt).
Cervelli is a .271/.343/.367 career hitter in 623 major league plate appearances.
He probably won’t fetch a high-impact return.
- Jonathan Papelbon makes it clear, again: He wants out of Philadelphia 46
- Looking at the All-Star team snubs and surprises 60
- And That Happened: Monday’s scores and highlights 51
- “Final Vote” balloting opens for 2015 MLB All-Star Game 49
- Pitchers and reserves for 2015 MLB All-Star Game announced 64
- And That Happened: Sunday’s scores and highlights 51
- AL and NL Starters for the 2015 All-Star Game announced 106
- That time Manny Ramirez nearly became a Met 10
- AL and NL Starters for the 2015 All-Star Game announced (106)
- Mike Scioscia says Josh Hamilton should apologize to Angels owner Arte Moreno (90)
- What Yasiel Puig being a pain in the butt means. And what it doesn’t mean. (78)
- Report: Jerry Dipoto “definitely out” as Angels GM (77)
- Brian Dozier is the best second baseman in baseball (72)


text:
Agriculture Secretary William Dar has downgraded his year-end growth target for the Philippines’ farm sector, from 2.5 percent to 2 percent, amid the prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the continuous spread of African Swine Fever (ASF).
“We always would like to be optimistic but our big challenges are still there – the lockdown and ASF,” Dar told reporters, following his State of Philippine Agriculture address on Wednesday.
Dar then said that though he doesn’t want to give up on the 2.5-percent growth target that he initially gave, he will be happy to “achieve a comfortable growth in sync with population growth [and] 2 percent would be a good target”.
“There is no indication that COVID-19 is going away and we are still dealing with ASF,” Dar further said.
Just the other day, Glenn B. Gregorio, director of international think tank Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), said there’s a high chance that the agriculture sector will not be able to surpass the production growth level of 2 percent by the end of the year.
This, he said, is for the same reasons that Dar has cited, as well as the “systemic challenges” hounding the sector for a long time, including the lack of science-based and forward-looking institutional and policy reforms in the agriculture sector.
“The long years of concern on the need to increase the Gross Value Added (GVA) of the agriculture sector and the country’s overall development remains. While we celebrate the success of the Philippine government in implementing programs and projects to help boost the agriculture sector of the country, what we need is a more science-based and forward-looking structure, institutional, and operational reforms in the agriculture sector that must be sustained across different administrations,” Gregorio said.
Gregorio further said that given the significant impact of typhoons and floods on the crop sector as experienced in 2020 or even in the years prior, agricultural farming systems must be resilient. This requires an increased percentage of Filipino farmers having internalized a decision-support system that would make them more agile and effective in responding to natural hazards and other potential external disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic.
These efforts must also include giving farmers improved access to climatic and weather data, stress-tolerant crop varieties, good agricultural practices, crop insurance system, extension system and modern technological support, and innovative financial capital.
In 2020, the country’s total agricultural production fell by 1.2 percent, from a mere growth of 0.7 percent in 2019, after crops, livestock, poultry, and fisheries all had lower output. The downtrend continued during the first three months of the year when the sector went down further by 3.3 percent from the decline of only 1.7 percent during the same period last year.
Nevertheless, Dar said the new growth forecast of 2 percent will be achieved through the efforts of the government and the positive trend in the production of rice, which is the country’s main staple.
For this year, and despite the recent heavy rains, the DA expects the country’s rice production to be around 20.4 million metric tons (MT), which should eclipse the Philippines’ highest rice output of 19.4 million MT recorded in 2019.

domain: agronomy


text:
When I arrived in Montreal a couple of months ago, someone suggested I cycle Le P’tit Train du Nord trail. At the time it was still closed, then it was raining, then I had other things to do, but over the weekend I finally managed to cycle it.
The trail runs on a former railroad track that transverses the Laurentians region of Québec. It starts in Saint-Jérôme and ends in Mont-Laurier. I, however, went in opposite direction: I took a bus to Mont-Laurier and cycled back to Saint-Jérôme.
Surprisingly, despite it being a long weekend, the trail wasn’t busy at all; I enjoyed a practically empty road, free of motorized traffic, in a fairly good condition that weaved through the woods, skirting various lakes.
I somehow was able to avoid the forecasted thunderstorms and arrived at Mont-Tremblant, roughly the halfway point, unscathed. I stopped at a youth hostel; I like to think of myself as young, but only in spirit. Furthermore, you can’t beat a $25 CND price tag. This price comes with ramifications: people coming and going in and out of the room for the first half of the night and snoring for the second half.
The second day’s ride should’ve been shorter but once I arrived in Saint-Jérôme, I thought: “Hmm, can I cycle another 60km, all the way back home?” And so I did.
I haven’t cycled long distances at a robust pace for a while and my legs were shaking by the time I arrived. The worst tough was the fact that I forgot to bring my anti-chaffing cream and my butt is thoroughly sore.
Julie was back in Brooklyn so she couldn’t join me. Although, I suspect she left just to avoid cycling long distances with me.
This weekend in numbers:
265 km – distance cycled
200 km – length of the Le P’tit Train du Nord Trail
22 000 sq km – size of the Laurentians region

domain: geography


text:
Compared with other separation machines, centrifuges can not only obtain solid phase with low moisture content and high-purity liquid phase, but also have the advantages of small size, good sealing, continuous operation, automatic remote control, etc., so they are widely used in chemical industry, Petrochemical, petroleum refining, light industry, medicine, food, textile, metallurgy, coal, mineral processing, shipbuilding, environmental protection, military and other departments, such as the recovery of pulverized coal for wet coal mining; the purification and reuse of drilling mud for oil mining; uranium Concentration of isotopes; sludge concentration and dehydration of sewage treatment; refining of petrochemical products; extraction of antibiotics and pesticides; manufacture of milk, yeast, beer, fruit juice, sugar, orange oil, animal and vegetable oil, rice bran oil, starch and other foods; The dehydration of fabric fibers; the purification of lubricating oil and fuel oil need to use centrifuges. It can be seen that the centrifuge has become widely used separation equipment in various sectors of the national economy.
The application functions of the centrifuge mainly include: dehydration, clarification, concentration, classification, separation and so on. Different centrifuge models must be selected according to different material characteristics and separation requirements, which leads to the problem of centrifuge selection. In the actual production process, due to the selection of suitable separation equipment for some projects, the process is simple, the energy consumption is reduced, the product quality is improved, and good economic benefits are obtained; but there is also improper selection of centrifuges, which makes the production process unable to proceed normally. , resulting in greater economic losses. Therefore, in the engineering design and technical transformation, the problem of how to correctly select the centrifuge has been recognized and valued by the majority of engineering and technical personnel.
Welcome to contact GN Sales Manager.
Best & Regards,
GN Separation & Conveying
Hebei GN Separation & Conveying Equipment Co.,Ltd
Mob (WhatsApp/Wechat): +86-15810901775
GN China: www.gnseparation.com (Langfang/Beijing)
GN USA: www.gnsolidsamerica.com (Houston, Texas)
GN Russia: www.gnseparation.ru (Moscow City)

domain: chemistry


text:
800 Baht per person
Khao Sok Community Standard Price
(no national park entrance fees needed)
One of the best ways to explore Khao Sok and a great opportunity to spot some of the national park’s wildlife is a canoeing trip on the Sok River.
The experienced guides will do all the work for you and paddle you down the river safely.
Their skilled eyes rarely miss any of the numerous wildlife and other points of interest along the river. Monkeys, snakes, frogs and several bird species are regularly seen and make the trip a favorite for wildlife enthusiasts.
If you get lucky, you might see pythons, and kingfishers among other interesting creatures…
The tour is around 2 hours long and can be booked spontaneously during the day, starting from 8am until the last possible tour at around 4:30.
What to bring
- water proof bag
- drinking water
In order to guarantee the safety of all travellers and to provide jobs for the local community, you are not allowed to paddle the canoe by yourself.

domain: travel


text:
Old-Fashioned Rice Custard
Total TimePrep: 50 min. Bake: 50 min.
- 1/2 cup uncooked long-grain rice
- 4 cups 2% milk, divided
- 1/4 cup butter, cubed
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 3 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- In a large saucepan, bring rice and 2 cups milk to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 15-18 minutes or until liquid is absorbed and rice is tender. Stir in butter. Cool slightly
- In a large bowl, beat the sugar, eggs, vanilla, salt and remaining milk; stir into the rice mixture.
- Pour into a lightly greased 2-qt. baking dish; sprinkle with nutmeg. Bake at 350° for 50 minutes or until knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
Nutrition Facts1 cup: 256 calories, 10g fat (6g saturated fat), 95mg cholesterol, 209mg sodium, 34g carbohydrate (25g sugars, 0 fiber), 7g protein.
Apr 7, 2020
Replaced 2% milk with unsweetened coconut milk. Just a hit of coconut in the taste. Easy recipe, delicious results!
May 26, 2019
Added cinnamon. A very creamy recipe loved it.
May 20, 2018
Nov 3, 2012
I made this tonight and it turned out wonderfully. I used jasmine rice and added a half teaspoon of cinnamon, beaten in with the milk and eggs, and used half as much nutmeg.I love this recipe and will definitely make it again.
May 8, 2012
I loved the nutmeg in this dessert. I wasn't completely happy with the texture, but it might have been an issue with the type of rice I used or the stone bakeware. I'm definitely going to try it again. My recipe analyzer (using 2% milk) was 337 calories, 6 servings. I used Goya Jasmine Rice.
Feb 2, 2012
Absolutely fantastic! Easy, creamy, and oh so yummy! I have a LARGE family so I doubled the recipe but the cooking time was not affected. I also added a dash of nutmeg and cinnamon to the rice while cooking on stove top and added maple flavoring to the final mix before putting in the oven. If you love custard, you are going to love this dish!
Jun 28, 2011
This custard was great! Reminded me of my Grandmothers. I think next time I will use cinnamon. I wasn't too crazy about the nutmeg.
Jun 14, 2010
It is delicious, even being made with fat free milk. I was surprised at the number of calories that are listed in the nutrition info. I did some figuring by adding up all ingredients and came up with 250 per serving , using 6 servings for the math. This was with fat -free milk.
Sep 1, 2009
Nutrition Facts* One serving:* (1 cup)* Calories:* 998* Fat:* 99 gIs this correct? O.O
Aug 28, 2009
Recheck the amount of rice. I will make a pudding that serves 8 with 1/2c rice every day.

domain: food


text:
Describe how the following are illustrated in the picture of Dorian Gray youth, mortality, good vs evil and art and culture
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, youth is illustrated as a delicate state which leaves us at any moment, and its loss is a symbol of disgrace. This is why Dorian became adamant that he would not want to age, and wished that the picture would. It is also illustrated as an omen of disaster. It is disturbing in the story how characters who had aged in more than 20 years suddenly find Dorian walking around and not having aged. That is an element of terror, and what makes the story scary.
Mortality is illustrated in the death of Basil and his posterior cremation by Dorian's indebted friend. It is disregarded as a romantic process. When Sybil Vane killed herself, Harry said he was glad to live in a time and place where things so intense are able to happen. Dorian dismissed it as a rebirth for himself, and used it as a symbol of sacrifice (which he would never do).
Good vs. Evil is illustrated in Basil and Harry. Basil shows a true and honest love for Dorian, and he protects and cares for him. Harry has the evil side which tempts and lures Dorian into sin.
Art is seen as a revealer of the artist, but then as a concealer of the artist. When Basil laid "all of himself" onto the picture, he feared that he had said "too much" about his admiration for Dorian. Yet, as the suppressed paragraph of Dorian Gray that was read at the Old Bailey during Wilde's trials, he ended up admitting that "form and color is just form and color" and that art helps the artist actually protect himself from the world outside.
Culture is entirely left to the upper classes. The theatre is for the rich, but acting is for the poor. The so-called "Idle Classes" are the epitome of a life through contemplation, and not laziness. Philanthropy is seen as an unnecessary waste of intellect. All these are cultural factors inherent to the rich, and are all represented by Harry himself


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Touch A Truck is in 3 weeks! You are going to need some stuff to load, excavate, transport, dig, and sort. Obviously, you can go outside now and do this in the dirt. But if you need to be inside, make your own sensory bins with rice, beans, lentils, cornstarch or pasta!
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text:
It’s one of the key questions the care quality commission (CQC) asks during inspection – is your GP practice providing safe care? To provide safe healthcare for patients is the end goal of every practice – but how can you ensure you’re hitting the safety mark? We explore
According to the BMA’s 2017 report, General practice in the UK, there was an estimated 15% increase in the number of GP appointments undertaken every year in England between 2011 and 2014 – the most recent number standing at 340 million.
Every day, practice staff – GPs, nurses, practice managers, healthcare assistants, reception staff – provide outstanding healthcare to their patients. However, according to the RCGP, best estimates suggest that between two and three per cent of consultations result in a patient safety incident which is defined as, ‘Any unintended or unexpected incident which could have, or did, lead to harm for one or more patients receiving NHS-funded healthcare’.
Further, a study published in the BMJ – How safe is primary care? A systematic review – says that one in 25 patient-safety incidents will result in severe harm – for example, shorter life-expectancy, permanent injury, major loss of function or death.
What does this mean? According to guidance published by the RCGP, a GP working six sessions per/week, with an estimated 25 interactions per session, could be involved in seven to eight severe incidents a year.
What happens in the case of such an incident? How can you lower risk?
What is a patient safety incident?
There is a diverse range of incidents that fall under the definition of ‘patient safety incident’. Some common ones might include:
- miscommunication with patients;
- difficulty accessing clinical services;
- unavailable records;
- inaccurate medical records;
- delayed referrals;
- poor information transfer between healthcare providers;
- missed or delayed diagnosis or assessment of care;
- prescription errors;
- malfunctioning or unavailable medical equipment
The National Reporting and Learning Service (NRLS)
The NRLS works with health organisations and royal colleges to improve reporting of patient safety incidents. All incident reports are submitted to a national database which was designed by the National Patient Safety Agency based on international experience and best practice. Collating this information provides an opportunity to ensure that learning from patient safety incidents is shared across the country and is intended to protect patients by raising awareness.
All patient safety incidents – whether they result in harm or not – should be reported through the NRLS. This can be done via NHS England’s general practice specific eform which are used to spot emerging incident-trends, or anything that might be of particular concern.
What happens after a patient safety incident report is made?
Once submitted to the NRLS, and entered into the national database, each patient safety incident report is analysed by national patient safety experts to spot trends, specific incidents of concern or emerging risks to patient safety.
If a trigger incident, or group of incidents of particular concern, is identified action will be taken to help address the identified issues/risks through the provision of advice and guidance. This will be disseminated across the NHS – as a patient safety alert, for example – so as to ensure that lessons learned in one part of the country are shared elsewhere.
‘Although you may not receive any formal feedback on an individual incident you report, you can be assured that, by feeding into a national system, you are making a difference to the bigger picture of patient safety,’ the NHS says.
Why report a patient safety incident?
Your patient safety report should describe clearly and concisely what happened – including the conditions and steps that led to the situation. The importance of this at practice level is that, for example, reflection on patient safety incidents can flag strengths and weaknesses in your practice and drive enhanced professional development and positive changes, as well as providing an opportunity for significant event analyses (SEA) – also known as a significant event review or audit – which can be used to improve practice and processes.
If an incident occurs, or nearly occurs, it is up to the practice to understand the mitigating factors that could have contributed to a patient safety incident – this will inform the design of interventions or the restructuring of processes to avoid future issues. Your patient safety report can provide a sound basis on which to build an improvement plan.
Assessing patient safety
There are plenty of valuable resources available online to support practices in their quest for optimum patient safety. The RCGP’s patient safety tool kit provides a structured approach to assessing the different aspects of patient safety and how you can ensure that you are meeting them – covering safe systems, safety culture, communication, patient reported problems, diagnostic safety and prescribing safety, for example.
Seven steps to safety
The NHS provides a useful, seven-step best practice guide for general practices to implement to safeguard their patients, as set out in Seven steps to patient safety in primary care. The steps have been developed to ensure that, if followed, should something go wrong, the right action is taken and that clinical governance standards, accreditation processes and contractual requirements are met.
The seven steps are as follows:
Step 1: build a safety culture
Step 2: lead and support your practice team
Step 3: integrate your risk management activity
Step 4: promote reporting
Step 5: involve and communicate with patients and the public
Step 6: learn and share safety lessons
Step 7: implement solutions to prevent harm
So, where does patient safety stand in your practice?

domain: health


by Danielle Fong
The clock stuck twelve. It’s October 30th. In a heartbeat I emerged an adult in the eyes of American law. In an alternate universe, I danced the night into a hazy sunrise. But I left celebration to Haight St. patrons, their addled revelry spilling muffled through the crack in my window. Tonight, we work.
Dawn, a night and two weeks later. It was ready; the design for the both the engine and the drivetrain, encoded in a scattered handful of drawings and documents, one wiki, two heads, and a thousand lines of physical simulation code. The first test: powering a scooter through a staccato ride amid frenzied Manhattan traffic, calculating, by the hundredth second, the will of the engine, and the vehicle’s reply. We’d follow a path devised to track emissions from humming, throbbing combustion engines, byproducts of fuel burnt in tiny explosions sparked every second by the thousands.
But nothing save cool air would our machine exhale. Compressed air, ‘a thermomechanical battery’ of sorts, is cheap, long lasting, and quick to recharge (one need only open a valve, and if impatient, run a pump, the tank will fill in seconds.) What’s more, it’s efficient. A batteries charge begins life in mechanical form, in a spinning turbine if charged off the grid, or in the inertia of a vehicle, during regenerative braking. This is then converted into AC electrical current, which is converted into DC current, which, finally, is converted into mechanical energy, losing power at each step. To power the engine this whole process runs in reverse! But compressing or expanding air keeps mechanical energy mechanical (so long as temperature is kept reasonably constant.) In powering vehicles it is superior to the most advanced battery systems known. That is, in every parameter but one.
Historically, the low energy density of compressed air had crippled any attempt to venture further than a couple dozen miles; physics, it seemed, demanded tanks of excessive proportions to travel longer. At 300 bar (‘scuba pressure’), compressed air could release only half a percent as much energy as the same volume of gasoline burnt. We understood, however; it was an efficiency war. We knew that conventional vehicles were incredibly wasteful. There were many battles left to fight.
The Laws of Thermodynamics1
“You can’t win.”
“You can’t break even.”
“You can’t give up.”
We hunted losses relentlessly. We were repaid with a series of compounding improvements, each building upon another, reversing the conventional patterns of efficiency losses endured by vehicles for more than a century. Finally, in a brilliant and unusually compact layout by Steve Crane, we found room to replace the paltry 1.3 gallon gas tank with one ten times its size. Nights yielded to our toil, and, slowly but surely our enemy routed.
“We’ve cracked the code,” we exclaimed. “The city is ours to conquer.” On the highway, whatever benefit earned by our scooter’s light weight, low rolling resistance and ultra-efficient regenerative braking would be dominated by air resistance.2 But air resistance falls quickly with speed, and in the stop-start motion of the city our combined inventions would give our scooter an efficiency historically unmatched.
I keyed in the last few drivecycle parameters, drew a shallow breath, cocked my head, and pressed the enter key. The simulation lasted only a moment, but in that time, my little scooter ran more than one hundred and twenty miles, the equivalent of dozen rides between Wall Street and the Bronx on a single tank. “We’re in business,” I said. With that, and for all of a New York Minute, the questions, worries and restlessness retreated from our hearts. We huffed. “What’s next?”
: To paraphrase C. P. Snow. Hat tip to Jonathan Smith.
: Scooters are not particularly aerodynamic vehicles. Ordinary scooters have a drag coefficient of nearly 0.9, and a frontal area of 0.6 meters squared. We hope to achieve a drag coefficient of 0.6, similar to faired motorcycles ridden upright, but due to the rider’s position this will be difficult: some have described the aerodynamics of a scooter as like a “brick attached to a parachute.”
Congratulations! And happy birthday.
I read the LightSail Designs Technologies page a few days ago. Impressive stuff. Right off the bat you have the double-acting piston. You’re not only working on the basic problem of efficiency but adding amenities, such as the pneumatic suspension and HUD.
This is a great age to be working on real work, when many people our age have no idea what they want to do, and older people have already given up on making anything useful. Onward ho!
Happy belated b-day. Great blog, and very interesting work! You might be interested in an expansion of the implications of thermodynamics that I posted about a while back: (http://quietlightfalling.blogspot.com/2008/08/entropy.html)
Congrats! Sounds cool. Do you mechanically repressurize the tank from your regenerative braking, or does that go to an electric pump?
Ah. NOW I’m somewhat excited.
Let me drop one intriguing tip to consider. If it entices you, you know where to contact me. ^_^
Use a graphite piston perfectly fitted into a smooth fused quartz cylinder. (They have virtually the same thermal expansion coefficients in operational temperature ranges.) No seals. No static friction.
(Chill the piston in dry ice or liquid nitrogen to get it to shrink so you can get it into the cylinder.)
So, I did some calculations of my own out of curiosity, and now I’m not so optimistic about compressed air. As a storage medium, compressed air is not lossless. There are several major losses incurred during the compression of the air: inefficiencies in the compressor, and thermodynamic losses from the heat dissipating from the compressed air, and according to the calculations I did, the thermodynamic losses are huge.
Here’s the premise.
When you compress a gas, it experiences adiabatic heating. For a given reduction in volume, the most work you can do would be adiabatic compression, where none of the heat can dissipate. The least work you can do for the same compression is isothermal compression, where all of the heat due to compression is dissipated as the gas is compressed. If your compressed air tank holds air at scuba-tank pressure (200-300 bar) at room temperature, the compressor would have to dissipate a huge quantity of heat from the compression of the gas; that molar quantity of gas, if compressed adiabatically, would be over thousand degrees. (In fact, at compression above 250 bar, the ideal gas law no longer works as an approximation of the behavior of air.)
All of the heat dissipated during compression is energy lost. The storage tank will be hot after being filled with compressed air, and it will dissipate energy as it cools down until it matches ambient temperatures. However, there are even more losses during decompression: gases experience adiabatic cooling when decompressed, especially when decompressed too quickly to absorb significant quantities of heat from the surrounding, such as when driving pistons in a compressed air engine. Your compressed air storage tank will get extremely cold as you let air out. As you know from thermodynamics, adiabatic expansion is the *least* work a volume of gas can do, yet the entire operation of a compressed air engine is in the realm of adiabatic expansion (if you’re not going to use fuel to heat the compressed air).
If you put heat absorption fins on your compressed air tank to absorb as much ambient heat as possible as it decompresses and somehow manage to achieve near isothermal expansion, at best you lose all the energy dissipated as heat during compression. If your tank is insulated, or doesn’t have a high surface area to volume ratio, at worse you lose all the energy between the adiabatic expansion curve (on a PV diagram, starting at ambient temperature and the compressed volume of a full tank) and the adiabatic compression curve (starting at the intersection of ambient temperature, the original volume of all the air that went into the tank). This is a huge quantity of energy lost. A casual inspection of a graph of these curves shows that much more energy is lost than is stored and recoverable even in the best case scenario.
(If you have a Mac, I can send you the Grapher file with my calculations.)
Have you taken the losses due to dissipation of heat into account?
(Let me correct something I said; the molar quantity of gas in a scuba tank might not heat up to a thousand degrees under adiabatic compression, but it would be several hundred degrees at least.)
The problems with adiabatic compression and expansion were obvious from the outset. We’ve taken these and many other losses into account.
The heat of compression can be stored as well. However, heat is available over a range of temperatures and needs to be stored that way. There are some new patents out there.


text:
Lakshmi, a homemaker from Periyapatna, who delivered her first child at government-run Chaluvamba Hospital here years ago, chose the same hospital for her second delivery, the lack of privacy notwithstanding.The 27-year-old Lakshmi was one of 200 new mothers crammed into the wards of the century-old hospital, which sees, on an average, 40 new babies coming into the world daily. The rate at which deliveries happen at the hospital makes it Karnataka's busiest maternity ward.
Source: The Times of India
News on maternal health
This is a collection of news clippings from differnt newspapers on maternal health