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Why Is Art So Expensive

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I recently went to a gallery and saw pieces of broken glass selling for $1,000 per shard. Why?

Money is a medium of exchange. We exchange it for something we either need or want. We have to give it up in amounts based on "values" that are set by a multitude of factors. Although there are those who assert that art may have "intrinsic value," I'm not certain there is anything in this world today that is priced at its "intrinsic value." What would that be? Construction materials plus some preset labor cost plus an agreed upon "fair" profit margin? I don't believe even our food is priced like that these days. If Chile can raise the price on cherries in the winter, you'd better believe they will.

Everything I can think of is priced based on supply and demand. And that is also true of art. With art that was created by dead guys (not so many dead gals), scarcity is a real factor. There aren't too many Vermeers running around, so this dramatically affects pricing. He won't be making any more.

When it comes to living replica hermes handbags artists, other factors become involved. Presumably, the demand is not limited, although some artists only create (or say they only create, or their dealers say they only create) a limited number of works. However, any specific artwork is unique. And artists and dealers do other things in an effort to create value the perception that the art has present, or future potential, value. They facilitate getting the artist's work written up copy hermes bags by magazines, put into museums, or placed into well known collections. This gives the artist's work third party blessings kind of like having your significant other approved by the family before he proposes, or the vintage car signed off by five mechanics before you write the check. It doesn't really mean the significant other won't leave you or the car won't break down two blocks later, but you feel reassured.

And art is like other items. Paintings are priced and valued in relationship to each other, within an extremely large and niched marketplace. It's like food or cars. Oranges aren't affected by the pricing of steaks, nor are Fords affected by the pricing of Mercedes, except in very large scale. Same thing with art. Those questionable thousand dollar glass shards that prompted your question are priced relative to other similarly silly kinds of contemporary "artworks" (and the marketplace between dealers and collectors of those kinds of works), but are completely unaffected by the pricing of a Van Gogh masterpiece or a contemporary landscape. Each are bought, sold, and priced within individual marketplaces.
Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
vote Yes for your kids' future

Taking the bus to work in the early morning I see them, in the long necklace of headlights backed up before the tunnel. It is the rare car among them that carries more than one person.

To watch them is to be struck by how over built and inefficient cars are for the job. These are mostly office workers going from Point A to Point B, and every one of them requires copy hermes bags several tons of steel and glass to do so.

Cars create the hell that is commuting, but and this is their self perpetuating irony what better way to escape that hell than to wrap oneself in a quiet cocoon of steel and glass while listening to the radio and sipping your morning coffee. What self indulgence. What unthinking ease. Outside it's hell, but brother, inside it's heaven.

Call a commuter on that self indulgence and you'll hear all the excuses: I need my car during the day, public transit is too slow or nonexistent, I need to get home to pick up the kids from school.

For some, that may be true. For the majority, it's just blather. It's the blithe self justification for the fact that, at heart, they just don't care to get out of their car.

None of this has entered the conversation in the debate over the coming transit plebiscite. According to the No side, the fault lies, not with human nature, but with the operation of our public transit system. To hear them, Metro Vancouver's transit is on par with Baghdad's, and so badly run that instituting a small tax to fund future projects would be throwing money down the drain.

This is, again, blather. Those rare times, for example, when the Expo line has malfunctioned have been blown way out of proportion, as if it were proof the whole system has to be abandoned and remade. It doesn't. A transit line malfunction is not a disaster. It's a glitch.

But human nature? That's way harder to fix. Motion studies show that, on average, people won't walk to a bus stop if it's more than 400 metres away. That's a five minute walk. Any longer than that and the numbers drop precipitously.

That, in our modern world, is the limit of our tolerance. That's assuming people are willing to take the bus in the first place.

Catering to such expectations is very hard to do.

Yet so far, the debate over the transit plebiscite has been all about money and the cost to taxpayers.

What you do not hear about is the cost of the havoc that cars wreak. Aside from the enormous government subsidies motorists enjoy, aside from the space they take, their societal cost is primarily environmental. It is that enormous and imminently catastrophic cost the No side ignores. But a 0.5 per cent rise in the sales tax? Horror.

Projections have a million more people coming to Metro in the next 25 years. In the absence of the proposed transit plan, projections also call for 600,000 additional cars.

With the transit plan fully realized, Metro's engineers estimate that in that time frame, the increased transit system will be able to effect an annual reduction of about 550,000 tonnes in greenhouse gases, or enough to keep it to present levels. Even with the transit plan, we'll just be treading water.

All those car commuters strung along the highway? They might cocoon themselves from their daily hell but not the unnerving thought that, incrementally, with every mile, they're hurtling themselves and their loved ones toward some greater disaster. I bet they wonder, as I do, if their car addiction isn't jeopardizing the future of their children and grandchildren.

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Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
What's the appeal of a caliphate

In June the leader of Islamic State declared the creation of a caliphate stretching across parts of Syria and Iraq Abu Bakr al Baghdadi named himself the caliph or leader. Edward Stourton examines the historical parallels and asks what is a caliphate, and what is its appeal?

When Islamic State (IS) declared itself a caliphate in June this year, and its leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi claimed the title of caliph, it seemed confirmation of the group's reputation for megalomania and atavistic fantasy. Al Baghdadi insisted that pledging allegiance to this caliphate was a religious obligation on all Muslims an appeal which was immediately greeted brown hermes belt replica by a chorus of condemnation across the Middle East.

But is it dangerous to underestimate the appeal of IS? Al Baghdadi's brutal regime does not, of course, remotely conform to the classical Muslim understanding of what a caliphate should be, but it does evoke an aspiration with a powerful and increasingly urgent resonance in the wider Muslim world.

The last caliphate that of the Ottomans was officially abolished 90 years ago this spring. Yet in a 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims living in Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan, two thirds of respondents said they supported the goal of "unifying all Islamic countries" into a new caliphate.

Why do so many Muslims subscribe to this apparently unrealisable dream? The answer lies in the caliphate's history.

The Arabic khalifa means a representative or successor, and in the Koran it is linked to the idea of just government Adam, and then David and Solomon, are each said to be God's khalifa on earth. And when the Prophet Mohammed died in 632 the title was bestowed on his successor as the leader of the Muslim community, the first of the Rashidun, the four so called "Rightly Guided Caliphs" who ruled for the first three decades of the new Islamic era. He argues that their era established an ideal of a caliph as "the choice of the people appointed in order to be responsible to them, apply Islamic law and ensure it's executed". He adds that the true caliph "is not above the law".

Find out more

Listen to The Idea of the Caliphate, broadcast on Analysis on BBC Radio 4 or download the podcast

Shia Muslims challenge this version of history they believe that the first two caliphs effectively staged a coup to frustrate the leadership claims of the Prophet's cousin Ali and this dispute about the hermes black belt knockoff early caliphate is the source of Islam's most enduring schism. But to today's Sunni Muslims, many of them living under autocratic regimes, the ideal of a caliphate built on the principle of government by consent is likely to have a powerful appeal.

Another significant source of the caliphate's appeal today is the memory it stirs of Muslim greatness. The era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs was followed by the imperial caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids.

"Seventy years after the Prophet's death, this Muslim world stretched from Spain and Morocco right the way to Central Asia and to the southern bits of Pakistan, so a huge empire that was all under the control of a single Muslim leader," says historian Prof Hugh Kennedy. "And it's this Muslim unity, the extent of Muslim sovereignty, that people above all look back to."

This Islamic Golden Age was also marked by great intellectual and cultural creativity the Abbasid court in Baghdad valued literature and music, and fostered world changing advances in medicine, science and mathematics.

Yet these dynasties extended their rule so far, and so fast, that it became increasingly difficult for any one lineage to control all Muslim lands. As power fragmented, it was not just a political dilemma for any particular dynasty, but also a theological challenge to the very idea of the caliphate. The power of unity was closely linked to the idea of a caliph yet it only took just over a century of the Muslim faith for the world to see parallel and even competing caliphates emerge.

The Sunni theologian Sheikh Ruzwan Mohammed argues: "While you do have two caliphs on earth proclaiming that they're the representatives of the Muslim community at this point, and more deeply that they are the shadow of God on earth, Muslims at that point were very pragmatic, and they acknowledged the fact that there could be more than one caliph representing the benefits and the concerns of the Muslim community and that was also understood and accepted by Muslim theologians."

The Abbasid caliphate lasted for half a millennium before coming to a brutal end in 1258. When Baghdad fell to the Mongols, the last of the city's caliphs was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death under the hooves of Mongol horses this was, bizarrely, a mark of respect, as the Mongols believed that people of rank should be killed without their blood being shed.

The institution of the caliphate, however, survived. Members of the Abbasid family were installed as titular caliphs in Cairo by the Mamluks, the main Sunni Islamic power of the day. They were more ornaments to the Mamluk court than anything else, but merely by existing they preserved the ideal of a single leader behind whom all Muslims could unite. So the title was still there for the taking when a new Islamic empire arose. Early in the 16th Century it passed in slightly murky circumstances to the Ottoman sultans, who ruled a new Islamic world power for a further 400 years.

The caliphate was finally extinguished by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, in 1924. He believed the abolition of the institution was essential to his campaign to turn what was left of the empire into a 20th Century secular nation state. The last Ottoman caliph was expelled from Istanbul to live out a life of cultured exile in Paris and on the Cote d'Azur.

But the institution he represented had by then existed for nearly 1300 years, and the impact of its abolition on Muslim intellectual life was profound. In the same way, he says, Muslim thinkers in the 1920s suddenly found they had to ask fundamental questions they had never confronted before: "Do Muslims need to live in an Islamic State? What should that state be like?"

By the mid 20th Century leaders like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser had come up with an answer to those questions the ideology known as pan Arabism offered a kind of secular caliphate, and during the 1950s Nasser even established something called the United Arab Republic, which joined Egypt and Syria.

But everything changed in the Middle East with the foundation of the State of Israel, and Pankhurst argues that Pan Arabism was wrecked on the rock of Israeli military might. "Pan Arabism drew its legitimacy from the fact that it was going to return the Arabs to their position of glory and liberate Palestine," he says. "When we had the abject defeat of 1967 (the Six hermes belt price replica Day War) it exposed a hollowness to the ideology."

Pankhurst belongs to Hizb ut Tahrir, an organisation founded in the 1950s to campaign for the restoration of the caliphate, and he argues that the revival of the idea has been driven by a general disenchantment with the political systems under which most Muslims have been living. "When people talk about a caliphate they are talking about a leader who's accountable, about justice and accountability according to Islamic law," he says. "That stands in stark contrast to the motley crew of dictators, kings, and oppressive state security type regimes you have, which have no popular legitimacy at all."

The regimes that dominated the Middle East during the late 20th Century did not like Hizb ut Tahrir unsurprisingly, in view of its ideology. Pankhurst spent nearly four years in an Egyptian jail.

In the early days of the Arab Spring, the revolutions in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were interpreted in Western capitals as evidence that the Muslim future lay with democracy. Then in Egypt came the overthrow of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the army under General Abdel Fatah al Sisi and then came the horrors of Islamic State amid the bloody chaos of civil strife in Syria and Iraq.

"Many people will say that IS begins with al Sisi's coup," says Salman Sayyid Hermes belt replica france of Leeds University. "We right now have a growing gap of legitimacy in most governments that rule the Muslim peoples and that gap isn't closing One way of thinking about the caliphate is really a quest for Muslims to have autonomy. The idea that you should have capacity to write your own history becomes very strong and for Muslims I think the caliphate is the instrument for trying to write their own history."

Many classical Sunni scholars challenge the very notion that the caliphate is a political project. Sheikh Ruzwan Mohammed, for example, argues that the key to the caliphate is really spiritual. "I think the Islamic State should come from within," he says. "It should be an Islamic State first and foremost of mind and soul." And the overwhelming majority, even of those who do believe that a new caliphate is a realistic political objective, completely reject the violence espoused by the self styled Islamic State.

But IS has skilfully exploited the elements in the caliphate's history which best serve its purposes. The historian Hugh Kennedy has pointed out, for example, that their black uniforms and flags deliberately echo the black robes the Abbasids adopted as their court dress in the 8th Century, thus recalling Islam's Golden Age. And their original title the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant harks back to the days when there was no national border between the two countries, because both territories were part of the great Islamic caliphate.

The success of IS does, in a grim way, reflect what a powerful and urgent aspiration the Caliphate has become. The IS project is certainly megalomaniac and atavistic, but it is building on an idea that is much more than a fantasy.
Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
Western Bulldogs' Hong Kong Trip

At one point, Grant, wearing a pair of pink flashing bunny ears, stops a silver van and hermes men belt replica opens the passenger side door. Cooney slides open the rear door and the men appear to have a conversation with the car's occupants before a third man shepherds the pair away from the car.

Speaking today, Garlick said the club, which learned of the video last week, was ''extremely disappointed'' in the behaviour and it could have serious consequences for the players involved.

''We need the players to be understanding of what comes with this level of scrutiny with this sort of role and if they're not comfortable in that then it's perhaps not the line of work for them,'' he told SEN radio.

Garlick said the pair had let down the club and the incident was being used as a warning to Hermes replica belt paris other players.

''We've moved from a club in the past which hasn't had the best perception to a highly credible, extremely professional place both on and off the field, so to have this come up is really disappointing.''

Most worryingly for the club was the potential for injury, with Grant shown jumping onto the bonnet of a stopped taxi and landing on his shoulder before rolling off the side. Meanwhile, Adam Cooney takes a run up before leaping onto a plastic lid and sliding away down the road. Cooney then reappears to put his foot under the tyre of a passing taxi.

Throughout the five minute video, Cooney gyrates to music blaring from the surrounding nightclubs while Grant acts like a traffic policeman, standing in the middle of the road and replica Hermes belt france gesturing to the many taxis trying to get through the celebrating crowd.

There is no suggestion of violence or other misbehaviour in the footage and no intervention by local police.

The video comes at the end hermes mens belt replica of a relatively quiet summer for the Bulldogs.

Fellow finals aspirants St Kilda, on the other hand, have been forced to deal with an embarrassing nude photo scandal and the suspension of four players after reports of alcohol and prescription drug abuse on a team trip to New Zealand.
Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
Wegmans Is Opening 10 New Stores

The cult of Wegmans fanatics is about to get a bit bigger.

The Rochester, New York based grocery store chain will open 10 new stores over the next three years, Jo Natale, Wegmans' director of media relations, told The Huffington Post Tuesday morning. The new stores will be in Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hermes belt replica france Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Unfortunately, Wegmans isn't expanding into any states where it doesn't already have a store. The regional chain already has 84 stores hermes belt price replica in six states the five where it will open its new locations, along fake hermes belts whosale with New York.

Wegmans was recently named the best supermarket chain in America by Consumer Reports. It's well known for its fresh food selection and its treatment of workers. The store is so Hermes belt replica paris popular it has even inspired a high school musical.

This post has been updated with a statement from a Wegmans representative, that the chain is opening 10 new stores over the next three years, rather than two, as previously reported.
Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
Wanganui Chronicle News

Wanganui Presbyterians can celebrate the return of a prodigal son now that the Reverend Stephan Van Os has returned to his birthplace.

He held his first service at St Andrew's Church at 42 Glasgow St last Sunday morning.

After spending the past 30 years as a padre for the British hermes belt price replica Army, Mr Van Os says the move back to Wanganui gives him a feeling of life coming full circle.

"I have a wonderful sense of being back in the place where I started from."

Mr Van Os remembers living in the house his father built on Bastia Hill and going to St Anne's School, when it was in Kawakawa St.

"I was taught to swim by Ingleby Morrison, who later became known as the swimming grandmother," he recalls.

The family moved to Tokoroa when Mr Van Os was 8 and he grew up there.

After leaving fake hermes belt price school, he studied at Otago University.

"I discovered my calling there and transferred to Knox College to study for the ministry."

Otago was where Mr Van Os met his wife to be Margaret and after he was ordained in 1980 they decided to head overseas. "The big OE became a long term life journey that lasted for 30 years," he said.

They went to Northern Ireland, where Mr Van Os became parish minister in Newtonhamilton, which had been the scene of fatalities during the Troubles in the 1970s.

"The work in Bosnia was hearts and minds stuff, fake hermes mens belt helping people rebuild their lives after some of them had lost everything.

"I have been to Iraq twice and I went to Afghanistan with the Royal Irish Regiment.

"It is a young man's job. I was the oldest person on the last trip and I really felt the physical demands of being bounced around in trucks."

The minister's most recent assignment was in Worthy Down, Winchester, where he worked with Hermes belt replica paris defence personnel training as chefs, clerks and in specialised trades.

"I now look forward to working in the Wanganui community and getting to know everyone," he said.

The Wanganui landscape is still familiar to Mr Van Os and he can still remember the streets and intersections of the city.

Settling into the manse and getting used to cooler temperatures is just part of the re assimilation.

"One thing I notice, being back in New Zealand, are the multiple layers of loyalty. I have Dutch heritage, so I supported Holland in the football World Cup. My wife has Scottish heritage and she is a Southlander, so she supports the Otago Highlanders at rugby while I support the Waikato Chiefs."

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Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
What I learned from getting shot

I haven said or written much publicly about the shooting that nearly killed me in 2008. But a recent confluence of events Trayvon Martin death, the Zimmerman trial and the public pronouncements of mostly privileged, mostly white people in the aftermath of the verdict has left me feeling like I have something to share. (Penn published abrief explanationlate last week, and apparently reconsidered his view over the weekend.)

Racial profiling for thee but not for me. That how it looks, at least. It probably more complicated than that. I don know. I asked Penn on Twitter to discuss the evolution of his views with me, but didn get a reply. Maybe he didn see the request. Either way, the offer still stands.

My story is more than five years old now. I was out late on a Tuesday with a friend whom I call Matt, since that his name. We been drinking probably too much for a weeknight, but not too much for a 25 year old journalist.

A half hour after last call, on our walk home up 16th Street northbound toward Mount Pleasant where we lived at the time, we impulsively decided to grab a late night snack at a 24 hour diner we used to frequent in Adams Morgan and hung a left up Euclid Street a dimly lit one way street with a violent history.

I been up and down Euclid hundreds of times over the years midday and late at night; alone and with friends; drunk and sober; and just about every fashion cheap hermes handbags permutation thereof. Always without incident.

This time was different. About half a block up Euclid, Matt and I encountered two young men both black, both wearing hoodies, charactersculled from Richard Cohen sweatiest nightmares. They wanted our phones, which we were cleverly holding in front of our faces as we walked.

We declined, gently under the circumstances. I worried we might end up in a fight. Maybe one of them had a knife, or a larger group of friends around the corner. I know I would surrendered my phone eventually, but not before suggesting they go hassle someone else. Maybe they figure we weren worth the trouble.

They didn oblige. The kid opposite Matt drew a small, shiny object from wherever he been concealing it and passed it to his accomplice, who was standing opposite me. A second or two lapsed long enough for me to recognize they weren joking, but not long enough for me to beg before it dischargedclap clap clap; my body torqued into the air horizontally, like I been blindsided by a linebacker, and I fell to the ground.

The kids fled east in a hurry, the same direction we come from down Euclid street. I stood up right away. Strangely I felt fine. Something had knocked the wind out of me, and my shoulder hurt a little bit, but ridiculously in hindsight we concluded it was an extremely effective prank. Rubber bullets. Something. If it been a real gun, I wouldn be standing.

Shake it off, I told myself, then onward to the diner.

Half a block later I didn feel so good anymore. I removed my T shirt (a red one, inconveniently) and realized it had masked a badly bleeding shoulder wound. My adrenaline fueled defiance gave way to the gory injury staring me in the face, and some important things dawned on me: I been imitiaton hermes bag shot. We were within firing distance of at least two armed men willing to commit murder. They hadn taken any of the things they claimed to want. And, oh yeah, I been shot.

Fortunately Matt was fine. Call 9 1 1, I told him as we started running. Ask for police and an ambulance. We were headed west on Euclid, as fast as we could, to put quick distance between ourselves and the thugs with the gun.

The 911 operator wanted us to stay put. will we know where to send the ambulance? they have a gun! They shot my friend! just keep updating me with your location. turned north onto 17th Street and made it another 30 feet before I couldn run anymore. Couldn breathe very well either. That was the moment I realized I suffered more than just a flesh wound on my shoulder. I slumped down against a fence on the east side of the street, in pain, but mainly just winded and growing sleepy. No good. I noticed intricate metalwork on a fence across the street and forced myself to focus on it. Stay awake, I told myself. Matt, per 911 instructions, was putting pressure on my shoulder wound, using my shirt as a rag, as if that was the cause of my sudden immobility.

The ambulance drove past us. I motioned frantically. Flag it down! He did, just in time. It stopped short of the intersection and the EMTs got to work. They found an exit wound in my back. They ran fluid into a vein in my left arm to revive my sinking blood pressure, but it worked too well. I no longer felt like I was on the verge of unconsciousness, but for the first time I could feel the full extent of the pain wracking my upper body. I strongly advise against getting shot. It hurts very badly.

The bad news, one EMT told me, was that I suffered a punctured lung. The good news, he added, was that they caught it quickly, and it should heal just fine. They loaded me into the back of the ambulance, snipped off my clothes, and did their level best to ignore my impolite demands for pain medicine.

your Social Security number? I gave it to them. I have some drugs? your dad cellphone number? I give it to you will you give me some drugs? knew it was a lie, and I was angry. But I was also relieved I wasn too far gone to recall that information. Or so I was later told.

During the transition I got one last bit of good news from the departing ambulance driver Brian. violence. Then came the bad news from an attending physician in the emergency room. we have to take you into surgery. We have to remove your spleen to save your life. remember thinking that a splenectomy was probably as unobtrusive as an appendectomy. I knew people who had their appendixes removed, and they all recovered pretty quickly. Either way, I wasn about to argue. don care, I just need those drugs. wheeled me into the operating room, and administered anesthesia. The last thing I remember before I finally lost consciousness was a nurse or doctor saying, surgeon not ready for him. My sister was there. My editor. Matt was somewhere. I was groggy, and wearing an oxygen mask, but I knew where I was and why. I wiggled my shoulder. fine, I thought to myself, surprised. I even wondered for a minute if I be released in time to catch a flight to Seattle, where I planned to spend the Fourth of July. That all changed when fake hermes bag I scratched my chest and nearly ripped out a staple. Odd. Below it there was another. I traced a line of them from my sternum down to below my belly button.

It turns out that even if a bullet only causes minor internal damage, doctors have to cut you wide open to perform a procedure called an exploratory laparotomy to make sure they not missing anything dangerous or fatal. In my case there were three bullets, including the one in my shoulder, and the injuries were pretty severe. Punctured lung, punctured diaphragm, punctured stomach, ruptured spleen, broken ribs, a hematoma on my kidney. One bullet tunneled harmlessly around the bones and muscles in my shoulder and remains lodged in a back rib on the upper left side of my body. Doctors removed another with my spleen. The third missed both my aorta and my spine by an inch or less, exited my back and landed on Euclid Street. A little this way and I be paralyzed. A little that way and I have bled out before the ambulance arrived.

I lost plenty of blood anyhow, probably over six units. The doctors put a tube in my chest to drain my lung, and two in my abdomen to drain my peritoneal cavity.

I spent a week and a half in the hospital, but never without company. My dad, who as luck would have it happens to be the best clinician I know, arrived within hours and took de facto charge of my care.

When the hospital released me I was still in bad shape, mentally and physically. After a couple months I lost my job. I moved out of the group house I lived in for two and a half years and in with a girlfriend, who lived in New York at the time. I worried I run out of money, have to move back to California, start all over.

I didn want that. But a part of me wondered if it might be for the best. People don get shot in Redlands very often. I knew my internal consigliere would eventually whisper that to me, and sure enough it did.

But the moment I woke up in the hospital I promised myself I wouldn let what happened change the way I approached life. I wouldn flee the city. I wouldn start looking over my shoulder. I wouldn let it affect my views on race or crime or guns, both because I liked the way my life had been taking shape, but also because at a fundamental level I knew I just been profoundly unlucky. most people going about their business on any given day or year or decade don get shot. Mugged, maybe, not shot.

Which isn to say my only scars were physical. It took my body about three months to heal, then another three before I sloughed off enough self pity to start working off the 40 pounds of booze and Hostess snacks I added to my waistline in a sedentary state of self pity. During that time I harbored revenge fantasies relished them, even. For my suffering, I told myself, I be justified returning Hermes birkin bags fake to the scene of the crime, armed and eager to mow down the first punk who tried to roll me.

That all passed. But to this day, I flinch when I look over a balcony, or when my airplane hits a patch of unexpected turbulence. That never happened to me before. The vivid image of a van or bus flattening me in a crosswalk flashes through my mind if I realize a few steps into the intersection that I haven looked both ways. These are minor inconveniences, and I become pretty good at controlling them or shaking them off quickly by reminding myself why they happening. Mind over matter.
Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
Warren Beatty eyeing

More than a quarter century after he brought Dick Tracy to the Hermes birkin bags fake screen, Warren Beatty is considering making a sequel.

The news was revealed by Arnon Milchan on Wednesday at CinemaCon, as the producer accepted the Legends of Cinema Award from Beatty.

Asked after the lunch ceremony about the project, Beatty confirmed, "I'm serious about it, but I am slow about these things." He was whisked away by a crowd of admirers before he could make any additional comments. But Milchan also confirmed that a project is being discussed and could be completed within two years.

Beatty is already at work on a film in which he plays the aged billionaire Howard Hughes. That movie is also for Milchan's New Regency Productions, the powerhouse production company that won best picture awards for 12 Years a Slaveand Birdman. They expect a fall or winter release for Beatty's long gestating passion project, the yet to be titled Hughes film.

Beatty produced, fashion cheap hermes handbags directed and starred in the highly stylized 1990 version of Dick Tracy. The film featured an all star cast including Al Pacino, Madonna, Dustin Hoffman and Dick Van Dyke. It received critical praise for bringing a bright, comic imitiaton hermes bag book sensibility into live action, but criticism for weak character development and plot. Still, it made nearly $163 million on a $47 million production budget.

A sequel has been contemplated for years, but was held up in a fight over rights to the story between Beatty andTribune Media Services. With resolution of the lawsuit in 2013, a path was cleared for production. Milchan's comments at the luncheon in his honour were the first indication that Beatty plans on moving ahead. Asked after the event how serious Beatty was about the project, Milchan responded: "Very serious."

Milchan told the audience that Tracy was just one project being mulled by Beatty, who agreed after presenting the award to Milchan that another film on the comic book detective is a real possibility.

Beatty, the acclaimed star of films like Bonnie and Clyde, Bugsy,Reds,Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, has not starred in a major film since 1998's political satire Bulworth. As to the possible re emergence of the 79 year old star after years out of the limelight, Milchan said: "The rules don't apply to him."

The star has been trying to get the Hughes film to the screen replica hermes handbags outlet for years and now looks like he is about to realise that dream, in partnership with New Regency and Fox. He will play the billionaire industrialist and filmmaker in his later years. Milchan said the story centres around the elderly Hughes' relationship with a young actress who wants to become a star. The New Regency owner said that the film will be test screened three or four times before a release date is set.
Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
West Ham vs Manchester United

Louis van Gaal has admitted he is worried about the threat Andy Carroll will pose when Manchester United take on West Ham at Upton Park on Tuesday evening.

United have the chance to go above rivals Manchester City into fourth place tonight if they can beat West Ham in the Hammers' final match at the Boleyn Ground.

Such a result imitation hermes belt sale would mean that victory over Bournemouth on the last day of the season will see the Red Devils pip Manuel Pellegrini's side to a Champions League spot.

However, West Ham will be desperate to avoid losing a second consecutive Premier League match in front of their fans after Slaven Bilic's side were thrashed 4 1 by Swansea at home on Saturday, while a win would help keep the club on track for Europa League qualification.

1993: Hundreds of football fans, many hermes belts Knockoff in tears, gathered outside West Ham's ground to pay tribute to Bobby Moore. Praise for the former England and West Ham captain poured in from international players all over the world, down at Upton Park it was the turn of the ordinary fan to pay his respects to the football legend who died after a two year battle against cancer. of all ages, many hermes men belt replica draped in West Ham's claret and blue colours, crowded around the club's main gates now almost hidden under a sea of scarves, banners and bouquets

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Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
What interpreting Abraham replica Hermes belts france Lincoln

In 1889, Joseph Pulitzer's New York Evening World held a contest to determine America's "Champion Dreamer." The winner was a Maryland junior college instructor named Buckey who dreamed he'd shot a man who wore a thick black mustache. As Buckey walked to work the next morning, the vividly seen face of his victim was suddenly before his eyes a second time. The two men jumped back, equally startled. "For God's sake, don't shoot me!" cried the stranger. Buckey and he recognized each other, because they had dreamed the same dream.

In the midst of the Civil War, newspapers North and South featured stories about soldiers whose dreams predicted war's end. On April 25, 1863, Boston's Saturday Evening Gazette demonstrated the credence it had given to a local artilleryman's dream by printing a retraction, regretting that the man's six week old vision of April 23 as "the date of Peace" had not been met. The wife of a Union general, meanwhile, could not banish from her fragmented sleep narratives gruesome premonitions about her sons: "One night I dream that Paul is drowned, another that Benny is dead."

What did dreams mean for Americans who lived in the century before Sigmund Freud undressed their repressed desires and ushered in the "Self Help Century"? A pretty basic question, yet somehow no historian had really delved into it before. We know much about the physical contours of our forebears' world, far less about the emotional contours. As I began to dig up old dreams for my new book, Dreamt He Died, the more I paged through preserved diaries and letters, the more committed I became to answering the question cultural historians can't help but ask: Were they like us? It would be a history of America from the inside out, the "American Dream" in a most literal way. pleasant dreams (it's the same for theirs as it is with modern dreams: about three fourths are anxious). I can report, at least, that the famous people whose dreams I track are surprisingly forthcoming, considering that we imagine early Americans to have been a less self revealing people than us moderns.

Were they like us? Not exactly. Lots of 18th century people heard voices while unconscious and responded to the musical soundtrack of their sleep narratives a phenomenon less common in modern dream reports. To take one example, Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, speculated that "no impression ever made on the mind is ever wholly lost," as he related a dream in which he was attending a lecture. The speaker's "peculiar" tones resembled musical notes loud sounds that remained in Priestley's head for a short time after he woke, though the image of the speaker and audience had by then dissipated.

"I see dead people" dreams were extremely common. Benjamin Rush, born in 1745, was a physician, University of Pennsylvania professor, and signer of the Declaration of Independence. He had faith in his medical colleagues' standard prognosis: that dreams indicated physiological impairment. Ordinarily that meant indigestion, but in extreme cases a hysteria that could lead to madness. At the same time, Dr. Rush considered his own dreams delightful and instructive. In one of his death defying dreams, the good doctor was inside the gates of a graveyard, watching the comings and goings of ghosts, some of whom he had known in life. The risen dead dressed in their burial shrouds did not spook him, but the "noise in the air which I supposed to be the last trumpet" was hard to forget. His dream was filled with sound: "I heard a woman vociferating to a man I supposed to be her husband." She demanded, and her mate "meekly" complied. Nearby, a different marital scene unfolded: "It was a man kicking his wife and dragging her by the hair and then leaving her by saying, 'There, take that, you bitch.'" Who knew America's founders were so caught up in gender politics when they weren't philosophizing about government?

The next generation evidenced similar concerns, ratcheting up the bizarre. Popular essayist, lecturer and Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson fretted all his life about the dissolving properties of memory, and he repeatedly tried to nail down the most absorbing of his dreams. One he had in the late 1830s that he called "droll" was particularly vivid. He found himself attending a conference on marriage, when one of the speakers suddenly "turned on the audience the spout of an engine which was copiously supplied from within the wall with water." This man shook the hose in all directions and "drove all the company out of the house." The dreaming Emerson relished the scene: "I stood watching astonished amused at the malice vigor of the orator, I saw the spout lengthened by a supply of hose behind, the man suddenly brought it round a corner drenched me as I gazed. I woke up relieved to find myself quite dry." His recorded postscript illuminates Emerson's lighter side: "the Institution of marriage was safe for tonight." He says nothing, however, about any sexual allusion in the Hermes belt replica france man shaking his engorged hose Freud had not been born yet. While visiting Lake Geneva in 1870, she sent home to her sister what she, too, termed "a droll dream," which involved their ne'er do well educator father. In the dream, she is back in their old neighborhood but it looks different her house is gone, replaced by a castle and she asks a neighbor, while he is wallpapering a room, to direct her. This is how she learns that she died 10 years earlier and left her father a plot of land on which he built his long wished for school. She sees her reflection, and discovers herself to be "a fat old lady, with gray hair and specs." When she finds her father, he, on the other hand, is years younger, "with brown hair and a big white neck cloth, as in the old times." She laughs at the absurdity of it all.

Until the middle of the 19th century, many more Americans saw dire warnings than Hermes belt replica odd humor in dreams. In a good number of them, angels took the dreamer on a tour of the afterlife. People away from home wrote urgently to find out whether the coffin they saw during sleep indicated that someone in the family had died. In the American Revolution as well as the Civil War, separated sweethearts wrote ecstatically, conveying literal dreams of happy reunions; but some men in army camps dreamed of being coldly met by their wives on their return home. Abandonment dreams were common. Prisoners of war, not surprisingly, dreamed of sumptuous meals, and woke to dirt and despair.

As for the book's title, Abraham Lincoln was one of countless Americans coming of age in what we term the Romantic era, who believed that dreams could prophesy. Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" note that his company is called DreamWorks opens with a dream sequence. There is basis in fact for this directorial decision.

Lincoln memorized the haunting poetry of Lord Byron, reveling in the "wide realm of wild reality" that comprised the Romantics' dream world. After reelection, he confided to his close friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon that he dreamed of seeing his own body lying in state. "Who is dead in the White House?" the dreaming Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard. "The President," he was told. "He was killed by an assassin." Though Lamon was generally reliable, we cannot be absolutely certain that he didn't dress up his memoir here.

Mark Twain was another who swore by the supernatural character of certain sleep narratives. He dreamed of his younger brother's death in a riverboat explosion, not long before it took place. "Dreamed of a whaling cruise in a drop of water," began another of his many documented dreams. Whereas Thomas Jefferson simply referred to dreams as "our nightly incoherencies," Twain called them "psychic phenomena."

Times were changing for dreamers. It is more than a little curious that the mass of ordinary, as well as extraordinary, Americans came to reject standard medical thinking, going along instead with the language of opiated poets and gothic novelists that so fascinated them. Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" commanded their attention, and so did Mary Shelley's the late 1850s, Caroline Clay Dillard, a young North Carolina woman, peppered her diary with Irving's pathos driven graveside laments, Byron's dream laden poetry and a smattering of her own dreams. In one she saw her deceased toddler nephew and "heard strains of music and looking ahead saw a bright dazzling glorious City." Dream life and real life were easily interchangeable in an age when frequent early death darkened the sunlit days of every family. Desperately in love with her former teacher, who subtly hinted at his feelings for her, Miss Dillard wrote to herself: "O! I'm dreaming."

Her preoccupation was the norm. The 19th century's classic literature of sleep borne journeys, time travel and mystifying reanimations only intensified with the years. Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and H. G. Wells' Time Machine are but two examples. Americans' engagement with dreams was such that when Freud crossed the Atlantic, great numbers were immediately intrigued and before long ready to submit to psychoanalysis.

We know what we mean when we use the term "American Dream": It speaks to collective hope, national pride and the personal security we see as a possibility for those who believe in its magic. Studying literal dreams is another form of magical belief, another delineator of culture, another marker of hopes and fears. The 1889 New York Evening World's "champion dream" came with a certificate of authenticity. (Who doesn't wonder how something that melts away in seconds can be authenticated?)

Yet I think the dreams I have collected indicate more than signs of individual strength or weakness: They are historical treasures. Since classical times, dreams have suggested to the multiplying millions who preceded us that physical death does not necessarily mark the end of sentience. Even those not known in their communities as conventionally religious found themselves drawn in. Rush that she dreamed of her husband's dying in the Caribbean on the very night she later learned he had perished. Death stalked the early American dreamer.

I have found in my research that while Americans claimed, even then, to be a practical minded people, they were actually mired in superstition, haunted by their dreams, and no less delighted by the invention of the Ouija board than by the cotton gin. It is their unsupported claims to wisdom that adheres most to our ancestors, and renders them intensely interesting as historical subjects. hermes black belt knockoff After the American Revolution, dreamers did not immediately regard dream life as a form of autobiography. It took decades before they knew their dreams as we know our dreams as a facet of longing for which the imagination serves as a delivery vehicle.

Today's dream scientists speculate that the function of dreams may be to restore body and mind, helping the brain to manage threats and disturbances. They say that our remembering dreams may in fact be nothing more than an evolutionary fluke. For the cultural historian, however, studying the extant dreams of past societies holds out the promise of unearthing new clues to the collective identity of entire generations.

I feel comfortable in concluding that you cannot fully appreciate the 20th century's fascination with psychoanalysis until you first appreciate the 19th century's fascination with dreams. The road that brought them to Freud is paved with colorful imagery and soundscapes, hauntings, illusions and echoes of love. Their footprints may be gone from our world, but in these most personal of texts they still speak to us.
Sep 21 '17 · 0 comments
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