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The Fall of the House of Dixie
Southern farms and plantations yielded handsome profits to their owners, who were some of the wealthiest people in the country, and the southern elite had also controlled all three branches of the federal government during most of its existence. At the root of this all this economic and political power lay the institution of slavery an institution which, as the former slave Frederick Douglass would later recall, then "seemed impregnable." Few could then have imagined, he noted, "that in less than ten years from that time, no master would wield a lash and no slave would clank a chain in the United States."
But what almost no one foresaw in 1860 is exactly what came to pass. In Mark Twain's words, the Civil War and its aftermath "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country." The most important and dramatic of these transformations was the radical destruction of slavery. One out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description. For the South's ruling families, meanwhile, the war turned the world upside down. It stripped them of their privileged status and their most valuable property. It deprived them of the totalitarian power they had previously wielded over the men, women, and children who produced most of the South's great wealth. "The events of the last five years," a Memphis newspaper editor summarized in 1865, "have produced an entire revolution in the entire Southern country. The old arrangement of things is broken up." The ex Confederate general Richard Taylor lodged the same complaint that year. "Society has been completely changed by the war," he wrote. Even the stormy French revolution of the previous century "did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Regime' than has this in our social life."[i] Abraham Lincoln applauded this "total revolution of labor" as "a new birth of freedom."[ii] Black South Carolinians cheered this "mighty revolution which must affect the future destiny of the world."
Even as it upended society in the South, the Civil War era transformed the shape of national politics in the United States as a whole. Beginning with Lincoln's election in 1860, it finally broke the southern elite's once iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, finance, and commerce and thereby speed the country's transformation into the economic colossus familiar to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the hands of these same men, meanwhile, the post Civil War federal government assumed key roles previously assigned to the states, including the power and the responsibility to safeguard the freedom and rights of the nation's citizens citizens whose ranks now expanded to include millions of former slaves. Constitutional amendments adopted in the war's aftermath laid the legal basis for and pointed the way towards transforming the United States into a multi racial republic.
Relatively few people today are aware of just how all this happened. Although "the military movements connected with the Civil War are well known," a witness to those events commented decades afterward, "the great mass of American people know but little, and so think less" about the destruction of slavery and all that it entailed. That observation holds true after the passage of another century and more.
The Fall of the House of Dixie was written to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory. It traces the origins and development of America's "second revolution," explaining why it occurred and how it unfolded especially how this great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite. In recent years many scholarly books and articles have analyzed the Civil War's momentous consequences. But bookstore shelves allotted to the Civil War are to this day filled principally with detailed accounts of armies, officers, and the battles they fought, great and small. Nearly every major study of the Civil War as a whole especially those aimed at a wide audience continues to take the military story as its organizing principle and narrative spine.
The Fall of the House of Dixie by no means ignores that subject. The slave based society of the American South required powerful external blows to break it along its lines of internal stress. Union armies delivered those blows blows that therefore make up a crucial part of the story told in this book. But the chapters that follow focus especially upon the transformation of that war from a conventional military conflict into a revolutionary struggle. And they emphasize the ways in which very different groups of people slave owners, slaves, the great mass of slaveless southern whites, and soldiers both Union and Confederate, black as well as white experienced and helped to bring about what one newspaper at the time called "the greatest social and political revolution of the age."
From The Fall of The House of Dixie by Bruce Levine. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc.
THE HOUSE OF DIXIE
The House of Dixie was an imposing thing indeed. Senate to emphasize the slave states wealth, power, and solidity to northern colleagues who were then challenging some of their prerogatives.
One of the things that Hammond boasted of that day was the South sheer physical size, which had grown greatly since the nation founding. The number of southern slave states more than doubled over those years with the creation of Kentucky (in 1792), Tennessee (in 1796), Louisiana (in 1812), Mississippi (in 1817), Alabama (in 1819), Missouri (in 1821), Arkansas (in 1836), Florida (in 1845), and Texas (in 1845). we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, Hammond summarized, at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain combined. Here, surely, Hammond trumpeted, was enough to make an empire that might the world. But the American South was more opulent and formidable than even its great size suggested. Of the more than twelve million souls who resided there, almost one out of every three was enslaved outright by others. As commodities that could be (and were) freely bought and sold, slaves themselves were immensely valuable. At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.
Still more important to southern wealth than even the enormous potential sale price of these human beings was the work that they could be made to perform. The efforts of slaves yielded more than half of all the South tobacco; almost all of its sugar, rice, and hemp; and of its cotton.
The last item on this list, cotton, was in aggregate the single most valuable commodity produced in the United States. It was a key raw material for the international Industrial Revolution and therefore of commerce. By 1860, in fact, the American South was producing of all the commercially grown cotton in the world and about of the cotton that Great Britain mammoth textile industry consumed every year. The cotton trade was just as important to the national economy of the United States. The ubiquitous bales that were hauled down to coastal wharves and there packed into the holds of big ships destined for European markets accounted for about half the value of all the United States exports, as they had since the 1830s.
Small wonder, then, that most of the country richest men lived in the slave states and that the nation dozen wealthiest counties, per capita, were all located in the South.
Slaves were by far the most valuable properties one could own in the southern states. But only a minority of white southerners (about one fake van cleef Perlee bracelet price owned human beings in 1860, and among those who did, the size of their property holding varied dramatically.
The typical master owned between four and six slaves. That much human property made him or her many times as prosperous as the average southern farmer but considerably less wealthy than those masters who owned at least twenty slaves, for whom the federal census bureau reserved the title of Only one out of eight southern masters belonged to this thousand in total. But as a group, they controlled more than half of all the South slaves and an even larger share of its total agricultural wealth.
Some planters were far richer than others. The true planter aristocracy embraced ten thousand families that owned van cleef ahambra bracelet gold replica fifty or more slaves apiece.10 These were the people who, as the former North Carolina slave William Yancey later recalled, shape to the government and tone to the society. They had the right of way in business and in politics. Among these people were Patrick M. Edmondston and his wife, Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, who owned two plantations in northeastern North Carolina. Jefferson Thomas and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas owned Belmont, a plantation in Georgia that by 1861 boasted ninety slaves. In Virginia, Edmund Ruffin, a agricultural innovator and a tireless exponent of slavery merits, also claimed a place in this charmed circle. So did Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee. Both came from old Virginia planter families. father, George Washington Parke Custis, was one of the state largest planters. He left the Lees one of his three plantations (Arlington) and sixty slaves to work it.
About one in fifteen planter families enjoyed wealth that dwarfed the holdings of even the Ruffins, Lees, Edmondstons, and Thomases. Each of these three thousand or so families owned at least 100 slaves in 1860. The family of Louisiana Katherine Stone was one of these. to thirty miles south of the Stones Brokenburn plantation lay Davis Bend, a peninsula formed by the twists and turns of the Mississippi River. It contained Jefferson Davis cotton plantation, named Brierfield, and the 113 slaves who lived and labored on it. Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, who spearheaded the campaign to bring a proslavery form of Christianity to southern bondspeople, owned 129 slaves on three plantations in coastal Georgia Liberty County. Robert Toombs, who became the Confederacy first secretary of state, held 176 slaves and 2,200 acres of land in three counties.
And even richer than these moneyed masters were about three hundred planters who each owned at least 250 people. House of Representatives, and secretary of the Treasury, and went on to become the Speaker of the Confederacy provisional Congress. A third was James Henry Hammond. The son of a teacher and minor businessman who had married into the planter class, by 1860 he owned 338 people. Another South Carolinian, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., published the Charleston Mercury; Rhett owned at least two rice plantations and more than 400 slaves. Other Palmetto State planters of comparable wealth included Colonel James Chesnut, Sr., master of the grand Mulberry plantation in Kershaw County. Congress and later became a Confederate brigadier general and aide to Jefferson Davis.
At the very apex of the South social pyramid stood about fifty southern planters, each of whom owned at least five hundred slaves. Some owned considerably more than that. The richest planter in North Carolina was Thomas P. Devereux, the father of Catherine Dev Edmondston, referred to earlier. He owned more than one thousand people. Georgia James Hamilton Couper owned fifteen hundred.
In the words of North Carolina plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas, members of the planter elite enjoyed the of luxury and ease. Many lived in homes that were palatial by the standards of their day. In eastern Virginia, John Armistead Selden presided over the venerable Westover plantation. Its mansion boasted a great hall, a dining room that regularly hosted more than fifty, a grand stairway, multiple fireplaces, a lush garden, and a lawn that carpeted the 150 feet between the mansion and the James River. In Virginia Chesapeake region, Richard Baylor neoclassical mansion, Kinloch, boasted rooms, eighteen fireplaces, four great halls, an imposing front portico, and an observation deck that overlooked the valley of the Rappahannock River. James Hamilton Couper modeled his Hopeton plantation in Georgia on an Italian villa. Its main house was three stories tall and had rooms, elegant gardens, and a grand staircase descending from the entranceway. Here, if anywhere, were the mansions celebrated in Hollywood version of Gone with the Wind.
In some of the richest but more recently settled states, elite society was still too new and its members too preoccupied with assembling their slave workforces in 1860 to devote much time or money to elegance and ostentation. In northeastern Louisiana, for example, the Stone family was living in what its members considered a temporary dwelling on their Brokenburn plantation. It, too, was big, with long galleries and two great halls. But it was nothing compared with the structure they looked forward to building soon.
Such houses (as they were generally called) were not only grand; they were also furnished and filled everything that a hundred years or more of unlimited wealth could accumulate, much of it purchased in the North and in Europe. So noted the assiduous diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was born into a prominent Mississippi planter family and who married James Chesnut, Jr. In addition to their rural residences, many of the larger planters also owned stately town houses in cities such as Charleston, Augusta, Savannah, Natchez, Mobile, and New Orleans. Those urban abodes commonly featured impressive gardens fronted by high walls and large iron gates, all of which spared owners the proximity to and shielded them from the gaze of less privileged passersby.
In their free time, families like the Stones of Louisiana always had going on (as Katherine put it). They entertained themselves with hunting, boating regattas, and horse races (using slave oarsmen and slave jockeys), lavish dinner parties, and balls. replica van cleef clover bracelets They summered at northern spas in Saratoga Springs, Cape May, Niagara Falls, Newport, and Montreal and at southern resorts such as Biloxi, Pass Christian, and the springs of western Virginia.
The southern states of the Union contained the nation least developed school system. But the planters children wanted for few educational advantages. Private tutors provided individual instruction. Daughters attended elite female academies. Sons went off to colleges in the South, in the North, and in Europe. A leisurely and luxurious tour of Europe often followed college, allowing future leaders of the southern elite to bathe in the high culture of the Old World.
At least as impressive as their sheer wealth and personal comfort was the slave masters political might. Robert E. Lee wartime Colonel Charles Marshall, later recalled controlling influence that owners of slaves enjoyed the management of affairs in the Southern States. In the capitals of nearly every state that would go on to join the Confederacy, slave masters occupied at least half the legislative seats in 1860. In Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina, more than a third of those seats belonged to planters. In South Carolina, planters claimed not a third but more than half of those positions.
But the masters writ ran far beyond the confines of their own states. They also exercised tremendous power over the United States as a whole, and they had done so for generations. James Henry Hammond put it bluntly in his Senate speech of 1858. the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, led it to independence, and have since then continued her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence. Since the Revolution, in fact, nearly all the occupants of the White House had been either slave masters (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor) or the allies and advocates of masters (Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan). Congress and the Supreme Court. The South four million slaves formed the core of its laboring population. are the source in large measure of our living, and comprise our wealth, the Georgia planter and Presbyterian minister Charles Colcock Jones reminded his fellow churchmen in 1861. Slaves and the profits that their labor yielded paid for education, our food, and clothing, and our dwellings, and a thousand comforts of life that crowd our happy homes. They also performed many other vital kinds of labor: From the slave quarters came boatmen the waters; our mechanics and artisans to build our houses, to work in many trades; prepare our food, and wait about our tables and our persons, and keep the house. As Jones noted, slaves toiled in all sectors of the southern society and economy. Some worked in the region relatively small urban economy, in workshops, factories, and a variety of commercial establishments. Others labored as household servants in the masters homes in town or country or as artisans of various kinds on their farms and plantations. But the great majority, perhaps worked the land. As Jones put it, they were agriculturalists to subdue our forests, to sow, and cultivate, and reap our land; without whom no team is started, no plough is run, no spade, nor hoe, nor axe is The 1860 census estimated that one in every ten slaves cultivated tobacco (centered in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri), another one in ten raised sugar, rice, or hemp (in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina). And more than half worked in the cotton fields (especially in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana).
Katherine Stone noted some of the characteristics of slave labor that made it most attractive to landowners anxious to turn a profit. Slaves could be made to perform especially heavy, intensive, and continuous work in return for just bare necessities of life. James Henry Hammond accounted for slavery importance in just those terms in a open letter to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Only slaves, Hammond held, could be made to work as hard while costing the landowner so little. People who enjoyed the right to protest, resist, or simply refuse such terms would never tolerate such conditions.
The South slaves worked very hard indeed. It was uncommon thing, Katherine Stone remembered, for the more productive slaves in her family cotton fields to pick or six hundred pounds each day for maybe a week at a time. That was almost three times as much cotton as agricultural workers would pick after slavery was abolished.
Southern farms and plantations yielded handsome profits to their owners, who were some of the wealthiest people in the country, and the southern elite had also controlled all three branches of the federal government during most of its existence. At the root of this all this economic and political power lay the institution of slavery an institution which, as the former slave Frederick Douglass would later recall, then "seemed impregnable." Few could then have imagined, he noted, "that in less than ten years from that time, no master would wield a lash and no slave would clank a chain in the United States."
But what almost no one foresaw in 1860 is exactly what came to pass. In Mark Twain's words, the Civil War and its aftermath "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country." The most important and dramatic of these transformations was the radical destruction of slavery. One out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description. For the South's ruling families, meanwhile, the war turned the world upside down. It stripped them of their privileged status and their most valuable property. It deprived them of the totalitarian power they had previously wielded over the men, women, and children who produced most of the South's great wealth. "The events of the last five years," a Memphis newspaper editor summarized in 1865, "have produced an entire revolution in the entire Southern country. The old arrangement of things is broken up." The ex Confederate general Richard Taylor lodged the same complaint that year. "Society has been completely changed by the war," he wrote. Even the stormy French revolution of the previous century "did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Regime' than has this in our social life."[i] Abraham Lincoln applauded this "total revolution of labor" as "a new birth of freedom."[ii] Black South Carolinians cheered this "mighty revolution which must affect the future destiny of the world."
Even as it upended society in the South, the Civil War era transformed the shape of national politics in the United States as a whole. Beginning with Lincoln's election in 1860, it finally broke the southern elite's once iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, finance, and commerce and thereby speed the country's transformation into the economic colossus familiar to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the hands of these same men, meanwhile, the post Civil War federal government assumed key roles previously assigned to the states, including the power and the responsibility to safeguard the freedom and rights of the nation's citizens citizens whose ranks now expanded to include millions of former slaves. Constitutional amendments adopted in the war's aftermath laid the legal basis for and pointed the way towards transforming the United States into a multi racial republic.
Relatively few people today are aware of just how all this happened. Although "the military movements connected with the Civil War are well known," a witness to those events commented decades afterward, "the great mass of American people know but little, and so think less" about the destruction of slavery and all that it entailed. That observation holds true after the passage of another century and more.
The Fall of the House of Dixie was written to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory. It traces the origins and development of America's "second revolution," explaining why it occurred and how it unfolded especially how this great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite. In recent years many scholarly books and articles have analyzed the Civil War's momentous consequences. But bookstore shelves allotted to the Civil War are to this day filled principally with detailed accounts of armies, officers, and the battles they fought, great and small. Nearly every major study of the Civil War as a whole especially those aimed at a wide audience continues to take the military story as its organizing principle and narrative spine.
The Fall of the House of Dixie by no means ignores that subject. The slave based society of the American South required powerful external blows to break it along its lines of internal stress. Union armies delivered those blows blows that therefore make up a crucial part of the story told in this book. But the chapters that follow focus especially upon the transformation of that war from a conventional military conflict into a revolutionary struggle. And they emphasize the ways in which very different groups of people slave owners, slaves, the great mass of slaveless southern whites, and soldiers both Union and Confederate, black as well as white experienced and helped to bring about what one newspaper at the time called "the greatest social and political revolution of the age."
From The Fall of The House of Dixie by Bruce Levine. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc.
THE HOUSE OF DIXIE
The House of Dixie was an imposing thing indeed. Senate to emphasize the slave states wealth, power, and solidity to northern colleagues who were then challenging some of their prerogatives.
One of the things that Hammond boasted of that day was the South sheer physical size, which had grown greatly since the nation founding. The number of southern slave states more than doubled over those years with the creation of Kentucky (in 1792), Tennessee (in 1796), Louisiana (in 1812), Mississippi (in 1817), Alabama (in 1819), Missouri (in 1821), Arkansas (in 1836), Florida (in 1845), and Texas (in 1845). we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, Hammond summarized, at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain combined. Here, surely, Hammond trumpeted, was enough to make an empire that might the world. But the American South was more opulent and formidable than even its great size suggested. Of the more than twelve million souls who resided there, almost one out of every three was enslaved outright by others. As commodities that could be (and were) freely bought and sold, slaves themselves were immensely valuable. At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.
Still more important to southern wealth than even the enormous potential sale price of these human beings was the work that they could be made to perform. The efforts of slaves yielded more than half of all the South tobacco; almost all of its sugar, rice, and hemp; and of its cotton.
The last item on this list, cotton, was in aggregate the single most valuable commodity produced in the United States. It was a key raw material for the international Industrial Revolution and therefore of commerce. By 1860, in fact, the American South was producing of all the commercially grown cotton in the world and about of the cotton that Great Britain mammoth textile industry consumed every year. The cotton trade was just as important to the national economy of the United States. The ubiquitous bales that were hauled down to coastal wharves and there packed into the holds of big ships destined for European markets accounted for about half the value of all the United States exports, as they had since the 1830s.
Small wonder, then, that most of the country richest men lived in the slave states and that the nation dozen wealthiest counties, per capita, were all located in the South.
Slaves were by far the most valuable properties one could own in the southern states. But only a minority of white southerners (about one fake van cleef Perlee bracelet price owned human beings in 1860, and among those who did, the size of their property holding varied dramatically.
The typical master owned between four and six slaves. That much human property made him or her many times as prosperous as the average southern farmer but considerably less wealthy than those masters who owned at least twenty slaves, for whom the federal census bureau reserved the title of Only one out of eight southern masters belonged to this thousand in total. But as a group, they controlled more than half of all the South slaves and an even larger share of its total agricultural wealth.
Some planters were far richer than others. The true planter aristocracy embraced ten thousand families that owned van cleef ahambra bracelet gold replica fifty or more slaves apiece.10 These were the people who, as the former North Carolina slave William Yancey later recalled, shape to the government and tone to the society. They had the right of way in business and in politics. Among these people were Patrick M. Edmondston and his wife, Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, who owned two plantations in northeastern North Carolina. Jefferson Thomas and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas owned Belmont, a plantation in Georgia that by 1861 boasted ninety slaves. In Virginia, Edmund Ruffin, a agricultural innovator and a tireless exponent of slavery merits, also claimed a place in this charmed circle. So did Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee. Both came from old Virginia planter families. father, George Washington Parke Custis, was one of the state largest planters. He left the Lees one of his three plantations (Arlington) and sixty slaves to work it.
About one in fifteen planter families enjoyed wealth that dwarfed the holdings of even the Ruffins, Lees, Edmondstons, and Thomases. Each of these three thousand or so families owned at least 100 slaves in 1860. The family of Louisiana Katherine Stone was one of these. to thirty miles south of the Stones Brokenburn plantation lay Davis Bend, a peninsula formed by the twists and turns of the Mississippi River. It contained Jefferson Davis cotton plantation, named Brierfield, and the 113 slaves who lived and labored on it. Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, who spearheaded the campaign to bring a proslavery form of Christianity to southern bondspeople, owned 129 slaves on three plantations in coastal Georgia Liberty County. Robert Toombs, who became the Confederacy first secretary of state, held 176 slaves and 2,200 acres of land in three counties.
And even richer than these moneyed masters were about three hundred planters who each owned at least 250 people. House of Representatives, and secretary of the Treasury, and went on to become the Speaker of the Confederacy provisional Congress. A third was James Henry Hammond. The son of a teacher and minor businessman who had married into the planter class, by 1860 he owned 338 people. Another South Carolinian, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., published the Charleston Mercury; Rhett owned at least two rice plantations and more than 400 slaves. Other Palmetto State planters of comparable wealth included Colonel James Chesnut, Sr., master of the grand Mulberry plantation in Kershaw County. Congress and later became a Confederate brigadier general and aide to Jefferson Davis.
At the very apex of the South social pyramid stood about fifty southern planters, each of whom owned at least five hundred slaves. Some owned considerably more than that. The richest planter in North Carolina was Thomas P. Devereux, the father of Catherine Dev Edmondston, referred to earlier. He owned more than one thousand people. Georgia James Hamilton Couper owned fifteen hundred.
In the words of North Carolina plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas, members of the planter elite enjoyed the of luxury and ease. Many lived in homes that were palatial by the standards of their day. In eastern Virginia, John Armistead Selden presided over the venerable Westover plantation. Its mansion boasted a great hall, a dining room that regularly hosted more than fifty, a grand stairway, multiple fireplaces, a lush garden, and a lawn that carpeted the 150 feet between the mansion and the James River. In Virginia Chesapeake region, Richard Baylor neoclassical mansion, Kinloch, boasted rooms, eighteen fireplaces, four great halls, an imposing front portico, and an observation deck that overlooked the valley of the Rappahannock River. James Hamilton Couper modeled his Hopeton plantation in Georgia on an Italian villa. Its main house was three stories tall and had rooms, elegant gardens, and a grand staircase descending from the entranceway. Here, if anywhere, were the mansions celebrated in Hollywood version of Gone with the Wind.
In some of the richest but more recently settled states, elite society was still too new and its members too preoccupied with assembling their slave workforces in 1860 to devote much time or money to elegance and ostentation. In northeastern Louisiana, for example, the Stone family was living in what its members considered a temporary dwelling on their Brokenburn plantation. It, too, was big, with long galleries and two great halls. But it was nothing compared with the structure they looked forward to building soon.
Such houses (as they were generally called) were not only grand; they were also furnished and filled everything that a hundred years or more of unlimited wealth could accumulate, much of it purchased in the North and in Europe. So noted the assiduous diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was born into a prominent Mississippi planter family and who married James Chesnut, Jr. In addition to their rural residences, many of the larger planters also owned stately town houses in cities such as Charleston, Augusta, Savannah, Natchez, Mobile, and New Orleans. Those urban abodes commonly featured impressive gardens fronted by high walls and large iron gates, all of which spared owners the proximity to and shielded them from the gaze of less privileged passersby.
In their free time, families like the Stones of Louisiana always had going on (as Katherine put it). They entertained themselves with hunting, boating regattas, and horse races (using slave oarsmen and slave jockeys), lavish dinner parties, and balls. replica van cleef clover bracelets They summered at northern spas in Saratoga Springs, Cape May, Niagara Falls, Newport, and Montreal and at southern resorts such as Biloxi, Pass Christian, and the springs of western Virginia.
The southern states of the Union contained the nation least developed school system. But the planters children wanted for few educational advantages. Private tutors provided individual instruction. Daughters attended elite female academies. Sons went off to colleges in the South, in the North, and in Europe. A leisurely and luxurious tour of Europe often followed college, allowing future leaders of the southern elite to bathe in the high culture of the Old World.
At least as impressive as their sheer wealth and personal comfort was the slave masters political might. Robert E. Lee wartime Colonel Charles Marshall, later recalled controlling influence that owners of slaves enjoyed the management of affairs in the Southern States. In the capitals of nearly every state that would go on to join the Confederacy, slave masters occupied at least half the legislative seats in 1860. In Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina, more than a third of those seats belonged to planters. In South Carolina, planters claimed not a third but more than half of those positions.
But the masters writ ran far beyond the confines of their own states. They also exercised tremendous power over the United States as a whole, and they had done so for generations. James Henry Hammond put it bluntly in his Senate speech of 1858. the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, led it to independence, and have since then continued her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence. Since the Revolution, in fact, nearly all the occupants of the White House had been either slave masters (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor) or the allies and advocates of masters (Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan). Congress and the Supreme Court. The South four million slaves formed the core of its laboring population. are the source in large measure of our living, and comprise our wealth, the Georgia planter and Presbyterian minister Charles Colcock Jones reminded his fellow churchmen in 1861. Slaves and the profits that their labor yielded paid for education, our food, and clothing, and our dwellings, and a thousand comforts of life that crowd our happy homes. They also performed many other vital kinds of labor: From the slave quarters came boatmen the waters; our mechanics and artisans to build our houses, to work in many trades; prepare our food, and wait about our tables and our persons, and keep the house. As Jones noted, slaves toiled in all sectors of the southern society and economy. Some worked in the region relatively small urban economy, in workshops, factories, and a variety of commercial establishments. Others labored as household servants in the masters homes in town or country or as artisans of various kinds on their farms and plantations. But the great majority, perhaps worked the land. As Jones put it, they were agriculturalists to subdue our forests, to sow, and cultivate, and reap our land; without whom no team is started, no plough is run, no spade, nor hoe, nor axe is The 1860 census estimated that one in every ten slaves cultivated tobacco (centered in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri), another one in ten raised sugar, rice, or hemp (in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina). And more than half worked in the cotton fields (especially in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana).
Katherine Stone noted some of the characteristics of slave labor that made it most attractive to landowners anxious to turn a profit. Slaves could be made to perform especially heavy, intensive, and continuous work in return for just bare necessities of life. James Henry Hammond accounted for slavery importance in just those terms in a open letter to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Only slaves, Hammond held, could be made to work as hard while costing the landowner so little. People who enjoyed the right to protest, resist, or simply refuse such terms would never tolerate such conditions.
The South slaves worked very hard indeed. It was uncommon thing, Katherine Stone remembered, for the more productive slaves in her family cotton fields to pick or six hundred pounds each day for maybe a week at a time. That was almost three times as much cotton as agricultural workers would pick after slavery was abolished.
The End of the Affair
The epigraph to Graham Greene's 'The Lawless Roads' is a magnificent quote from Cardinal Newman: "If there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity." Just as mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry, it was the frictions of faith that brought Greene's novels to life. 'The End of the Affair' is his masterpiece: an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn't live without but struggled to live with.
Drawing on his long affair with his goddaughter Lady Catherine Walston (who refused to leave her husband because of her faith), 'The End of the Affair' is Greene at his most pared down and intimate: he had never written in the first person before. Gone are the tropical locations, the revolutions and gangsters. The narrative scaffolding of Greene land has been dismantled, leaving us with a novel that gains extraordinary intensity from the narrowness of its focus.
It seems scarcely credible now, but the first time I read the book it seemed much more of a love story than a tale of the ravages of religion. I was 19, living in Paris, perpetually reeling from failed romances. The story of the flawed and floundering Maurice Bendrix and his love for the saintly Sarah was very familiar her faith stood for all of the confused impediments to love that had prevented me from skipping down the Boulevard St Germain with my current mademoiselle of choice.
The novel inserted fissures of doubt in my adolescent atheism. I remember going to the American Church on the replica van cleef clover bracelets Quai d'Orsay on finishing the book and sitting at the buy imitation van cleef bracelet silver back of the room, waiting for some sort of epiphany. The End of the Affair provides a blueprint for finding a way into belief. Bendrix's sardonic, burly resistance to Sarah's God finally breaks when the weight of evidence becomes too much. But this is not a happy conversion; in his final, bitter prayer "O God, you've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever" Bendrix shows that there is no comfort in his new found relationship with God.
I read 'The End of the Affair' again just before beginning my latest novel, 'The Revelations'. I wanted to write about religion in a way that didn't seem patronising or proselytising. It is hard fake van cleef Perlee bracelet price to write a novel in a Christian setting in such a secular age; 'The End of the Affair' manages to make even the punctilios of Catholic doctrine feel profoundly relevant. Bendrix's hesitant edging towards faith at the end of the novel would give even Richard Dawkins pause for thought.
Alex Preston's 'The Revelations' is published by Faber Faber
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On Adblock click "Don't run on pages on this domain".
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The epigraph to Graham Greene's 'The Lawless Roads' is a magnificent quote from Cardinal Newman: "If there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity." Just as mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry, it was the frictions of faith that brought Greene's novels to life. 'The End of the Affair' is his masterpiece: an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn't live without but struggled to live with.
Drawing on his long affair with his goddaughter Lady Catherine Walston (who refused to leave her husband because of her faith), 'The End of the Affair' is Greene at his most pared down and intimate: he had never written in the first person before. Gone are the tropical locations, the revolutions and gangsters. The narrative scaffolding of Greene land has been dismantled, leaving us with a novel that gains extraordinary intensity from the narrowness of its focus.
It seems scarcely credible now, but the first time I read the book it seemed much more of a love story than a tale of the ravages of religion. I was 19, living in Paris, perpetually reeling from failed romances. The story of the flawed and floundering Maurice Bendrix and his love for the saintly Sarah was very familiar her faith stood for all of the confused impediments to love that had prevented me from skipping down the Boulevard St Germain with my current mademoiselle of choice.
The novel inserted fissures of doubt in my adolescent atheism. I remember going to the American Church on the replica van cleef clover bracelets Quai d'Orsay on finishing the book and sitting at the buy imitation van cleef bracelet silver back of the room, waiting for some sort of epiphany. The End of the Affair provides a blueprint for finding a way into belief. Bendrix's sardonic, burly resistance to Sarah's God finally breaks when the weight of evidence becomes too much. But this is not a happy conversion; in his final, bitter prayer "O God, you've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever" Bendrix shows that there is no comfort in his new found relationship with God.
I read 'The End of the Affair' again just before beginning my latest novel, 'The Revelations'. I wanted to write about religion in a way that didn't seem patronising or proselytising. It is hard fake van cleef Perlee bracelet price to write a novel in a Christian setting in such a secular age; 'The End of the Affair' manages to make even the punctilios of Catholic doctrine feel profoundly relevant. Bendrix's hesitant edging towards faith at the end of the novel would give even Richard Dawkins pause for thought.
Alex Preston's 'The Revelations' is published by Faber Faber
Click the Adblock/Adblock Plus icon, which is to the right of your address bar.
On Adblock click "Don't run on pages on this domain".
If you are Private Browsing in Firefox, "Tracking Protection" may cause the adblock notice to show. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar.
says Madden as battle looms
JUSTIN Madden is going to watch Carlton play Essendon with his kids on Saturday for the trophy mockingly dubbed the "Bryce Gibbs Cup", but he will resist the temptation to take along a nice wooden spoon to hand over to his brother, Simon. The Victorian Minister for Sport and former Carlton and Essendon ruckman has a mischievous streak, but he'll leave that behind for the day as the Blues and the Bombers, historical superpowers of Australian football, decide who will win the mythical spoon as the AFL's bottom placed team.
In the minister's eyes, they are playing for the Madden Cup tomorrow, a trophy instituted in 1997 for games between the clubs, struck in honour of Simon and Justin. "It's tragic to think the Madden Cup's sort of boiled down to the wooden spoon," said Madden, tongue firmly implanted in cheek. "The downside is you get the Madden Cup; the upside is you get the wooden spoon and the first draft pick. Is that right?" Justin Madden played most of his 332 games for Carlton but retains a soft spot for Essendon. "It's sad, really," he said of the Bombers' demise. "I suppose there would be more joy if it was Collingwood down there. But replica van cleef & arpels Clover necklace then it wouldn't be the Madden Cup." The honourable member for Doutta Galla is not planning on getting to the MCG too early. "I don't think it'll be hard to get a seat."
Bombed out coach FOR what it's worth, here's Sporting Life's Five Crazy Things Sheeds Might Say or Do Under The Influence of Van Cleef & Arpels alhambra necklace fake Drugs 1 Volunteer to play this week, picking up Dean Solomon, the man whose hit at training injured his shoulder in the first place. After all, it is the AFL's Retro round!
2 Tell the runner to get bloody Paul van der Haar on the ground and back to centre half forward.
3 Organise to have Kevin Walsh brought back on to the list, for there is a shortage of key defenders. And while you're at it, what's Dean Wallis up to?
4 Make sure (acting) coach Gary O'Donnell plays everyone in position.
5 Give a coherent description of the game with no excuses or spin whatsoever, all the while keeping a nice, low profile away from the prying media.
A goal drought
WE'RE tipping there will be some sort of celebration if Carlton full back Bret Thornton kicks a goal during the game this weekend, for Thornton is creating quite a record as what you might call the anti spearhead. Last weekend against the Bulldogs, Thornton registered his 900th career disposal in his 84th game for the Blues. With those 900 touches, he has kicked only one goal (it was in his 20th game, against Fremantle in 2003). Statistical guru Footy Works, which has been logging these things since 1993, reckon Thornton's 909 disposals a goal ratio is the highest of that era, nudging out Gary Pert (600 a goal), Chris Langford (569) and Danny Frawley (554). Hiddink is listening to Russian soccer federation boss Vitaly Mutko as they watch a match between CSKA Moscow and Zenit St Petersburg in the Russia Cup at the Petrovsky stadium in St Petersburg. And listen he might well do, since his contract, extending to Euro 2008, is said to be worth the equivalent of $3.2 million a year plus bonuses. It also carries an option to extend to the next World Cup in 2010. Our spy suggests that former Saint Michael Roberts, MC for the night, was a hit in his PVC pants, complaining that he was "a little warm and sweaty" down under. One time Lion Richard Champion did his almost famous rendition of Cold Chisel's Flame Trees, and of course, Demon Russell Robertson replica Van Cleef & Arpels red necklace was front and square with the band formed for the occasion, "No. 1 Draft Picks", which did a couple of songs. Daly, the "Wild Thing" of golf, whipped out the guitar for a few of his homespun songs at the Cavern Club, the famous, old haunt of the Beatles in the 1960s (pictured above).
Reeling off some of his favourites they include All My Exes Wear Rolexes, and I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me Than a Frontal Lobotomy Daly was at the club to promote his tell all book, My Life In and Out of the Rough.
It's an extraordinary piece of literature, too, detailing how he got through four marriages, alcoholism and a gambling addiction that cost him $US60 million ($A80 million) as well as winning a couple of major championships. In the book, he explains why he ran 17 consecutive red lights one day in South Africa. "I ran this one red light and pretty soon it was like: 'F it, and I just keep going'."
There's only one John Daly.
Then again golf needs characters and Ian Poulter is up to his old tricks as well, bringing out another set of lairy trousers for the Open week (pictured).
Poulter's 2006 version is relatively understated by comparison with the infamous Union Jack dacks or the ones with the Auld Mug depicted down the leg. As for the question mark, maybe it's a query about the last time an Englishman won the Open, for it has been 14 years. The answer is 1992 and Nick Faldo at Muirfield.
Sheeds' folly OF ALL people, Justin Madden knows that Kevin Sheedy is capable of some wacky behaviour, even without the influence of painkilling drugs. "Anything's possible," said Madden yesterday, when asked what the master coach might get up to at the MCG. "Even when he's lucid." Sheedy, incidentally, has been discharged from hospital after having shoulder surgery this week, but remains unlikely to coach the Bombers as they try to stave off a 15th consecutive defeat.
JUSTIN Madden is going to watch Carlton play Essendon with his kids on Saturday for the trophy mockingly dubbed the "Bryce Gibbs Cup", but he will resist the temptation to take along a nice wooden spoon to hand over to his brother, Simon. The Victorian Minister for Sport and former Carlton and Essendon ruckman has a mischievous streak, but he'll leave that behind for the day as the Blues and the Bombers, historical superpowers of Australian football, decide who will win the mythical spoon as the AFL's bottom placed team.
In the minister's eyes, they are playing for the Madden Cup tomorrow, a trophy instituted in 1997 for games between the clubs, struck in honour of Simon and Justin. "It's tragic to think the Madden Cup's sort of boiled down to the wooden spoon," said Madden, tongue firmly implanted in cheek. "The downside is you get the Madden Cup; the upside is you get the wooden spoon and the first draft pick. Is that right?" Justin Madden played most of his 332 games for Carlton but retains a soft spot for Essendon. "It's sad, really," he said of the Bombers' demise. "I suppose there would be more joy if it was Collingwood down there. But replica van cleef & arpels Clover necklace then it wouldn't be the Madden Cup." The honourable member for Doutta Galla is not planning on getting to the MCG too early. "I don't think it'll be hard to get a seat."
Bombed out coach FOR what it's worth, here's Sporting Life's Five Crazy Things Sheeds Might Say or Do Under The Influence of Van Cleef & Arpels alhambra necklace fake Drugs 1 Volunteer to play this week, picking up Dean Solomon, the man whose hit at training injured his shoulder in the first place. After all, it is the AFL's Retro round!
2 Tell the runner to get bloody Paul van der Haar on the ground and back to centre half forward.
3 Organise to have Kevin Walsh brought back on to the list, for there is a shortage of key defenders. And while you're at it, what's Dean Wallis up to?
4 Make sure (acting) coach Gary O'Donnell plays everyone in position.
5 Give a coherent description of the game with no excuses or spin whatsoever, all the while keeping a nice, low profile away from the prying media.
A goal drought
WE'RE tipping there will be some sort of celebration if Carlton full back Bret Thornton kicks a goal during the game this weekend, for Thornton is creating quite a record as what you might call the anti spearhead. Last weekend against the Bulldogs, Thornton registered his 900th career disposal in his 84th game for the Blues. With those 900 touches, he has kicked only one goal (it was in his 20th game, against Fremantle in 2003). Statistical guru Footy Works, which has been logging these things since 1993, reckon Thornton's 909 disposals a goal ratio is the highest of that era, nudging out Gary Pert (600 a goal), Chris Langford (569) and Danny Frawley (554). Hiddink is listening to Russian soccer federation boss Vitaly Mutko as they watch a match between CSKA Moscow and Zenit St Petersburg in the Russia Cup at the Petrovsky stadium in St Petersburg. And listen he might well do, since his contract, extending to Euro 2008, is said to be worth the equivalent of $3.2 million a year plus bonuses. It also carries an option to extend to the next World Cup in 2010. Our spy suggests that former Saint Michael Roberts, MC for the night, was a hit in his PVC pants, complaining that he was "a little warm and sweaty" down under. One time Lion Richard Champion did his almost famous rendition of Cold Chisel's Flame Trees, and of course, Demon Russell Robertson replica Van Cleef & Arpels red necklace was front and square with the band formed for the occasion, "No. 1 Draft Picks", which did a couple of songs. Daly, the "Wild Thing" of golf, whipped out the guitar for a few of his homespun songs at the Cavern Club, the famous, old haunt of the Beatles in the 1960s (pictured above).
Reeling off some of his favourites they include All My Exes Wear Rolexes, and I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me Than a Frontal Lobotomy Daly was at the club to promote his tell all book, My Life In and Out of the Rough.
It's an extraordinary piece of literature, too, detailing how he got through four marriages, alcoholism and a gambling addiction that cost him $US60 million ($A80 million) as well as winning a couple of major championships. In the book, he explains why he ran 17 consecutive red lights one day in South Africa. "I ran this one red light and pretty soon it was like: 'F it, and I just keep going'."
There's only one John Daly.
Then again golf needs characters and Ian Poulter is up to his old tricks as well, bringing out another set of lairy trousers for the Open week (pictured).
Poulter's 2006 version is relatively understated by comparison with the infamous Union Jack dacks or the ones with the Auld Mug depicted down the leg. As for the question mark, maybe it's a query about the last time an Englishman won the Open, for it has been 14 years. The answer is 1992 and Nick Faldo at Muirfield.
Sheeds' folly OF ALL people, Justin Madden knows that Kevin Sheedy is capable of some wacky behaviour, even without the influence of painkilling drugs. "Anything's possible," said Madden yesterday, when asked what the master coach might get up to at the MCG. "Even when he's lucid." Sheedy, incidentally, has been discharged from hospital after having shoulder surgery this week, but remains unlikely to coach the Bombers as they try to stave off a 15th consecutive defeat.
The Certain Cost Of Yue Yues Life
It is difficult to believe that as we saw Gaddafi treated like a slaughtered piece of meat we would soon see a child lying in the street like a discarded piece of meat; run over by two vans. The CCTV images from China, and indeed the Libyan images, demonstrate that the potential for any human being to be treated as a carcass exists. It also demonstrates yet again that financial, cost benefit analysis still extends to human life and suffering.
It was reported that the father of the child was contacted by the driver of the first van to offer him money, but not surrender to the police. He allegedly also noted that it's better to pay compensation for a dead child than a surviving, injured one. I don't know if this is true. Facts are not always contained in the reports we hear and even if they are the interpretation can be wildly off beam. But I will presume the broadcasts were ethically secure and move on.
I will say first, that having witnessed the death van cleef 18k necklace replica of family members and seen, intimately, the effects of losing a child upon a parent, I pray in whatever way I can that the family of the child and the child herself find peace in time.
There is this issue though of the dark capitalistic practice of putting a price on a human being; dead or alive. Animal rights campaigners have covered this area in their discussions about the value of animals, but out of respect for the child I will stick with humanity just now.
I have had experience of this dark capitalistic practice yet cannot fathom the foundation from which those who monetise the living and the copy Van Cleef & Arpels necklace yellow dead do so. There Van Cleef & Arpels alhambra necklace fake is evidence of assessing probable life expectancy, age at time of death, impact on family, care costs for those who survive etc. Yet there remains this core question. What is a life worth? How can we ever state with certainty that the.
It is difficult to believe that as we saw Gaddafi treated like a slaughtered piece of meat we would soon see a child lying in the street like a discarded piece of meat; run over by two vans. The CCTV images from China, and indeed the Libyan images, demonstrate that the potential for any human being to be treated as a carcass exists. It also demonstrates yet again that financial, cost benefit analysis still extends to human life and suffering.
It was reported that the father of the child was contacted by the driver of the first van to offer him money, but not surrender to the police. He allegedly also noted that it's better to pay compensation for a dead child than a surviving, injured one. I don't know if this is true. Facts are not always contained in the reports we hear and even if they are the interpretation can be wildly off beam. But I will presume the broadcasts were ethically secure and move on.
I will say first, that having witnessed the death van cleef 18k necklace replica of family members and seen, intimately, the effects of losing a child upon a parent, I pray in whatever way I can that the family of the child and the child herself find peace in time.
There is this issue though of the dark capitalistic practice of putting a price on a human being; dead or alive. Animal rights campaigners have covered this area in their discussions about the value of animals, but out of respect for the child I will stick with humanity just now.
I have had experience of this dark capitalistic practice yet cannot fathom the foundation from which those who monetise the living and the copy Van Cleef & Arpels necklace yellow dead do so. There Van Cleef & Arpels alhambra necklace fake is evidence of assessing probable life expectancy, age at time of death, impact on family, care costs for those who survive etc. Yet there remains this core question. What is a life worth? How can we ever state with certainty that the.
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reliant offshore wind steals skills
COPENHAGEN From a helicopter, it looks like just another North Sea oil rig, a grey cube supported by massive yellow pillars, 90 kilometers (56 miles) off western Denmark.
But the DanTysk facility is the world's first accommodation platform for offshore wind, which is borrowing techniques and labor from the crisis hit oil sector as it tries to cut costs and end an addiction to state subsidies.
The wind industry is moving further offshore and into the deeper waters tamed long ago by oil companies to increase scale and capture stronger and more constant winds.
"There's a lot of new generation technology in the offshore wind industry, but when I'm out there, I still know the nuts and bolts," said Anders Noer Christensen, a former superintendent engineer on oil platforms, who now works as a development manager for Vattenfall's wind projects in the North Sea.
The 100 million euro ($110 million) DanTysk opened in August as a way to slash operational and transport costs for the remote turbines. Many of its staff used to work in oil or gas until a plunge in crude prices caused a slump in exploration.
Drawing on a classic offshore oil work schedule, up to 50 staff work two weeks on and two weeks off the platform to keep the 80 wind turbines operational. When winds are blowing strong, DanTysk's maximum 280 megawatts can power up to 400,000 homes.
DONG Energy, the world's biggest offshore wind farm operator, says it has halved its wind energy production costs in four years.
The company has found a cheaper and simpler way to fix the turbines in place, which used to involve hammering a steel tube into the seabed. New turbines now have three legs that stand on top of giant suction buckets that anchor the foundation to the seabed. The method has been used in the oil and gas industry since the early 1980s.
Jeppe Lauridsen, a geologist who used to work for DONG Energy's oil and gas unit, is now responsible for finding the right parts of the seabed to site wind turbines.
"Seismic profiles of the underground are used in both (DONG's oil and offshore wind) divisions," he said. "In wind we look at the top 100 meters whereas in oil and gas you look at layers five kilometers deep," he said.
Danish consultancy Ramboll has installed more than half of the world's offshore turbine foundations, and relies a lot on its experience in oil and gas.
"It's no secret that the oil and gas industry has had a hard time, so thankfully we've been able to use oil and gas staff in offshore wind. There are lots of similarities," said its global market director Soren Petersen.
He said offshore copy van cleef clover bracelet oil equipment companies including Boskalis, Heerema, Seaway Heavy Lift and DEME were looking to shift into offshore wind. Van Oord is using several of its rock dumping and dredging vessels in both offshore oil and wind, either for laying cables or protecting turbine foundations by covering the surrounding seabed with rocks.
Oil workers are bringing other skills with them, from safety expertise to software design and techniques to extend the life replica van cleef and arpels jewelry of assets. Dolf Elsevier van Griethuysen of Van Oord's wind division said the oil sector downturn had made tenders to build offshore installations more competitive and lowered prices.
The UK oil and gas industry lost 110,000 jobs between 2013 and 2016, according to industry lobby Oil Gas UK. The offshore wind industry employs over 13,000 people in Britain and has the van cleef alhambra earrings fake potential to provide 44,000 jobs in the next 10 years, said RenewableUK, another industry body.
"When oil prices were still high, competition for talent was a big headache for the wind industry, because we simply couldn't pay the same salaries. But that has significantly changed," said Martin Neuberts, DONG Energy's chief strategy officer.
DONG Energy said in September it would build the UK's largest offshore wind maintenance hub in northeast England to service its offshore wind farms. On the Essex coast of eastern England, it repurposed Europe's biggest drilling rig to help lay power cables to connect offshore wind farms with the main grid.
As the onshore business' younger sibling, offshore accounts for only 8 percent of Europe's total installed 142 gigawatt wind capacity, which covers 11 percent of EU electricity demand.
Many European governments are keen for that percentage to rise after they led the way in developing offshore wind. But few of the continent's cash strapped governments have given firm plans for support beyond 2020.
Developers need to keep costs tumbling for it to have a future. The key to that is dependable government support and continued rapid expansion: 4 7 GW of new capacity is needed each year to bring costs below 80 euros per MWh from around 125 euros now, according to the industry.
Coal is still the cheapest energy source at between 50 and 90 euros per megawatt hour, according to industry group WindEurope. But advocates of offshore wind say it is already proving it can kick its addiction to state subsidies.
A little over a year after winning a 400 MW order for Horns Rev 3 in the Danish North Sea at a production price of 103.1 euros per megawatt hour, Vattenfall won a Danish near shore project in September by promising to produce power at 63.8 euros per megawatt hour. Just last week, Vattenfall won the 600 MW Kriegers Flak project by bidding to produce power at a record 49.9 euros per megawatt hour. The company aims to build subsidy free offshore wind by 2025.
Scale is the industry's biggest ally. Bigger turbines offer cheaper raw materials, installation and maintenance per unit of energy. Average turbine size in Europe in the first half of 2016 rose to 4.8 megawatt, 15 percent more than just a year earlier, according to WindEurope.
MHI Vestas' and Siemens' behemoth 8 megawatt wind turbines set new industry standards when the first was erected in September off Britain's west coast near Liverpool.
Rising almost 200 meters into the sky, their blades sweep an area larger than the London Eye.
(Additional reporting by Jacob Gronholt Pedersen and Karolin Schaps; editing by Alister Doyle and David Evans)
COPENHAGEN From a helicopter, it looks like just another North Sea oil rig, a grey cube supported by massive yellow pillars, 90 kilometers (56 miles) off western Denmark.
But the DanTysk facility is the world's first accommodation platform for offshore wind, which is borrowing techniques and labor from the crisis hit oil sector as it tries to cut costs and end an addiction to state subsidies.
The wind industry is moving further offshore and into the deeper waters tamed long ago by oil companies to increase scale and capture stronger and more constant winds.
"There's a lot of new generation technology in the offshore wind industry, but when I'm out there, I still know the nuts and bolts," said Anders Noer Christensen, a former superintendent engineer on oil platforms, who now works as a development manager for Vattenfall's wind projects in the North Sea.
The 100 million euro ($110 million) DanTysk opened in August as a way to slash operational and transport costs for the remote turbines. Many of its staff used to work in oil or gas until a plunge in crude prices caused a slump in exploration.
Drawing on a classic offshore oil work schedule, up to 50 staff work two weeks on and two weeks off the platform to keep the 80 wind turbines operational. When winds are blowing strong, DanTysk's maximum 280 megawatts can power up to 400,000 homes.
DONG Energy, the world's biggest offshore wind farm operator, says it has halved its wind energy production costs in four years.
The company has found a cheaper and simpler way to fix the turbines in place, which used to involve hammering a steel tube into the seabed. New turbines now have three legs that stand on top of giant suction buckets that anchor the foundation to the seabed. The method has been used in the oil and gas industry since the early 1980s.
Jeppe Lauridsen, a geologist who used to work for DONG Energy's oil and gas unit, is now responsible for finding the right parts of the seabed to site wind turbines.
"Seismic profiles of the underground are used in both (DONG's oil and offshore wind) divisions," he said. "In wind we look at the top 100 meters whereas in oil and gas you look at layers five kilometers deep," he said.
Danish consultancy Ramboll has installed more than half of the world's offshore turbine foundations, and relies a lot on its experience in oil and gas.
"It's no secret that the oil and gas industry has had a hard time, so thankfully we've been able to use oil and gas staff in offshore wind. There are lots of similarities," said its global market director Soren Petersen.
He said offshore copy van cleef clover bracelet oil equipment companies including Boskalis, Heerema, Seaway Heavy Lift and DEME were looking to shift into offshore wind. Van Oord is using several of its rock dumping and dredging vessels in both offshore oil and wind, either for laying cables or protecting turbine foundations by covering the surrounding seabed with rocks.
Oil workers are bringing other skills with them, from safety expertise to software design and techniques to extend the life replica van cleef and arpels jewelry of assets. Dolf Elsevier van Griethuysen of Van Oord's wind division said the oil sector downturn had made tenders to build offshore installations more competitive and lowered prices.
The UK oil and gas industry lost 110,000 jobs between 2013 and 2016, according to industry lobby Oil Gas UK. The offshore wind industry employs over 13,000 people in Britain and has the van cleef alhambra earrings fake potential to provide 44,000 jobs in the next 10 years, said RenewableUK, another industry body.
"When oil prices were still high, competition for talent was a big headache for the wind industry, because we simply couldn't pay the same salaries. But that has significantly changed," said Martin Neuberts, DONG Energy's chief strategy officer.
DONG Energy said in September it would build the UK's largest offshore wind maintenance hub in northeast England to service its offshore wind farms. On the Essex coast of eastern England, it repurposed Europe's biggest drilling rig to help lay power cables to connect offshore wind farms with the main grid.
As the onshore business' younger sibling, offshore accounts for only 8 percent of Europe's total installed 142 gigawatt wind capacity, which covers 11 percent of EU electricity demand.
Many European governments are keen for that percentage to rise after they led the way in developing offshore wind. But few of the continent's cash strapped governments have given firm plans for support beyond 2020.
Developers need to keep costs tumbling for it to have a future. The key to that is dependable government support and continued rapid expansion: 4 7 GW of new capacity is needed each year to bring costs below 80 euros per MWh from around 125 euros now, according to the industry.
Coal is still the cheapest energy source at between 50 and 90 euros per megawatt hour, according to industry group WindEurope. But advocates of offshore wind say it is already proving it can kick its addiction to state subsidies.
A little over a year after winning a 400 MW order for Horns Rev 3 in the Danish North Sea at a production price of 103.1 euros per megawatt hour, Vattenfall won a Danish near shore project in September by promising to produce power at 63.8 euros per megawatt hour. Just last week, Vattenfall won the 600 MW Kriegers Flak project by bidding to produce power at a record 49.9 euros per megawatt hour. The company aims to build subsidy free offshore wind by 2025.
Scale is the industry's biggest ally. Bigger turbines offer cheaper raw materials, installation and maintenance per unit of energy. Average turbine size in Europe in the first half of 2016 rose to 4.8 megawatt, 15 percent more than just a year earlier, according to WindEurope.
MHI Vestas' and Siemens' behemoth 8 megawatt wind turbines set new industry standards when the first was erected in September off Britain's west coast near Liverpool.
Rising almost 200 meters into the sky, their blades sweep an area larger than the London Eye.
(Additional reporting by Jacob Gronholt Pedersen and Karolin Schaps; editing by Alister Doyle and David Evans)
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The 8 Most WTF Ideas In the History of Transportation
The design of a tricycle seems to be pretty good at keeping toddlers from falling off, so one would assume that it's a fairly stable system. So why haven't we seen more three wheeled vehicles made for adults, who are capable of spending way more money on ridiculous things?
Well for starters, here is the world's top selling three wheeled vehicle, the Reliant Robin.
We're not engineers over here, but we're going to go out on a limb and say that taking a corner with just one wheel to balance all the weight on the front of your car ups the likelihood of tipping over and rolling down the street from "possible" to "guaranteed." And we're thinking the odds get worse the faster you go. Basically you can only drive the Robin slowly and in a straight line, so it's best not to purchase one unless all of your errands are directly in front of you and are never an emergency.
The Sinclair is best described copy van cleef clover earrings by the Sinclair C5: The Site for Sinclair C5 Enthusiasts Worldwide, which states, "The Sinclair C5 was a commercial disaster." This is the first line on the group's website after the name of the website itself. We can't imagine why.
Well, there's the fact that your body is exposed and that your head winds up right around the area where the grill of an SUV would be, so if you forget to check your blind spot and merge into a Chevy Suburban your skull might be torn from your shoulders. But other than that.
Though replica van cleef necklaces we can't mock it too hard, because apparently this open vehicle concept is the future. From top to bottom we give you the i unit, the i swing and the i REAL.
"The i unit: Looking like the future has never been this not worth it."
"The i Swing: You could probably pick up a very specific type of chick in this."
"The i REAL: You'll wish your back was broken."
The i REAL was slated for sale this year. As these products demonstrate, Toyota is gallantly ignoring all of the handicap ramps, chair lifts, curb lips and parking spaces in the world to operate under the assumption that motorized chairs are both practical and ideal.
Unfortunately for Toyota, the i REAL has virtually no selling points. It's, what, a more comfortable Segway? A slow motorcycle that won't impress women? One of the only vehicles ever made that offers zero frontal protection for the driver?
Even its own product page can't really state anything other than "it exists."
It does have an embedded social networking system, allowing you to communicate with other i REALs in the vicinity, but unless you're trying to coordinate a bank robbery with a group of lazy strangers we can't envision this ever being useful. And its maximum speed is only 20 mph, so really having a cellphone in your car provides pretty much the same exact experience as owning an i REAL, only the car is infinitely more useful.
It looks like the ejection seat from the car we actually want.
Really, the whole concept of odd numbered wheels just seems to turn people copy van cleef diamond earrings off. Of course, the most ridiculous expression of this idea is.
Here's the Audi Snook, a state of the art unicycle most likely invented by Dr. Wiley.
Oh yeah, that'll stand up to a mini van.
The military even decided to give legs a go and threw tons of money at it, coming up with the walking truck, with such features as being hideous and impossible to control:
The driver has to use his or her own legs to manipulate those of the walking truck. It's also as slow as ketchup in a glass bottle, the problem being that although legs are flexible as far as terrain, they aren't exactly efficient in turning pure force into speed. Add the fact that making good legs is extremely complex and potentially expensive, and you're left with a pretty terrible vehicle. So the military dropped the project entirely.
Hint: Transformers didn't turn into wheeled vehicles just because they thought it looked cool.
The most prominent nuclear powered car concept was the Ford Nucleon, which we have to admit looks pretty rad.
The design of a tricycle seems to be pretty good at keeping toddlers from falling off, so one would assume that it's a fairly stable system. So why haven't we seen more three wheeled vehicles made for adults, who are capable of spending way more money on ridiculous things?
Well for starters, here is the world's top selling three wheeled vehicle, the Reliant Robin.
We're not engineers over here, but we're going to go out on a limb and say that taking a corner with just one wheel to balance all the weight on the front of your car ups the likelihood of tipping over and rolling down the street from "possible" to "guaranteed." And we're thinking the odds get worse the faster you go. Basically you can only drive the Robin slowly and in a straight line, so it's best not to purchase one unless all of your errands are directly in front of you and are never an emergency.
The Sinclair is best described copy van cleef clover earrings by the Sinclair C5: The Site for Sinclair C5 Enthusiasts Worldwide, which states, "The Sinclair C5 was a commercial disaster." This is the first line on the group's website after the name of the website itself. We can't imagine why.
Well, there's the fact that your body is exposed and that your head winds up right around the area where the grill of an SUV would be, so if you forget to check your blind spot and merge into a Chevy Suburban your skull might be torn from your shoulders. But other than that.
Though replica van cleef necklaces we can't mock it too hard, because apparently this open vehicle concept is the future. From top to bottom we give you the i unit, the i swing and the i REAL.
"The i unit: Looking like the future has never been this not worth it."
"The i Swing: You could probably pick up a very specific type of chick in this."
"The i REAL: You'll wish your back was broken."
The i REAL was slated for sale this year. As these products demonstrate, Toyota is gallantly ignoring all of the handicap ramps, chair lifts, curb lips and parking spaces in the world to operate under the assumption that motorized chairs are both practical and ideal.
Unfortunately for Toyota, the i REAL has virtually no selling points. It's, what, a more comfortable Segway? A slow motorcycle that won't impress women? One of the only vehicles ever made that offers zero frontal protection for the driver?
Even its own product page can't really state anything other than "it exists."
It does have an embedded social networking system, allowing you to communicate with other i REALs in the vicinity, but unless you're trying to coordinate a bank robbery with a group of lazy strangers we can't envision this ever being useful. And its maximum speed is only 20 mph, so really having a cellphone in your car provides pretty much the same exact experience as owning an i REAL, only the car is infinitely more useful.
It looks like the ejection seat from the car we actually want.
Really, the whole concept of odd numbered wheels just seems to turn people copy van cleef diamond earrings off. Of course, the most ridiculous expression of this idea is.
Here's the Audi Snook, a state of the art unicycle most likely invented by Dr. Wiley.
Oh yeah, that'll stand up to a mini van.
The military even decided to give legs a go and threw tons of money at it, coming up with the walking truck, with such features as being hideous and impossible to control:
The driver has to use his or her own legs to manipulate those of the walking truck. It's also as slow as ketchup in a glass bottle, the problem being that although legs are flexible as far as terrain, they aren't exactly efficient in turning pure force into speed. Add the fact that making good legs is extremely complex and potentially expensive, and you're left with a pretty terrible vehicle. So the military dropped the project entirely.
Hint: Transformers didn't turn into wheeled vehicles just because they thought it looked cool.
The most prominent nuclear powered car concept was the Ford Nucleon, which we have to admit looks pretty rad.
The best TV shows of 2010
There an odd subculture of aficionados out there who adore any flavor of comedy that reminds them of their all time favorite things: Monty Python, Space, and anything with Bill Murray or Chevy Chase in it. This crowd loves deeply unambitious characters prone to self defeating or nihilistic asides, who nonetheless develop unexpectedly passionate responses to particular stimuli: Wars, puppy parades, cliques of mean girls, wheelchairs you control by blowing into them, etc. For those who feel ambivalent about the mainstream way of life and really, who doesn NBC is the holy grail of televised comedy. Here you have a handful of misfits, lumped together by fate, bravely facing two years in a mediocre, infantilizing institution of always trying to get higher learning. adeptly conjures all of the charms of its influences, from the clueless confusion and farcical antics of Chevy Chase Pierce to the idiot savant buddy routine of Abed and Troy. Like its predecessors, is less about actual jokes than it is about the giddy anything goes mentality that pervades the uneasy crossroads of idealism, skepticism and really good marijuana. After all, when you combine a healthy suspicion toward the straight world with lots of high quality pot, what do you get? a) A deadly zombie virus spreading across Greendale; b) the discovery of a spiritually uplifting trampoline on a secret corner of campus, c) extended emotional fallout from a thieving, pen hoarding monkey living in the school venting system; or d) all of the above? The answer is d and somehow, makes of the above work like never before.
You probably could bet that Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter tale of prohibition era Atlantic City would land in the year top 10 shows without watching a single episode, and to be sure, the HBO series stunning photography, gorgeous costumes, elaborate sets and fine cast haven disappointed. Even though this story of American ambition and corruption has taken some time to pick up steam, over the course of the first season it ripened into a dynamic, imaginative narrative about the complicated compromises of the American dream. However an unusual leading man Steve Buscemi may be, he has a way of reflecting every wave of resignation and regret in his big, watery eyes that makes us feel real empathy for Nucky Thompson. Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) has developed from ambivalent sidekick to a compassionate but at times vicious antihero whose good intentions can save him from his worst impulses. And best of all, Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) has transformed from abused wife to respected leader, struggling palpably with the ethical implications of her role while taking undeniable pride in her apparent talents. In its first season, the drama posed one central question: Can you sell a small piece of your soul to ensure your own survival, but preserve the rest and avoid spiraling downward into utter selfishness and depravity? The answer appears to be no, but we sure to learn more, in cinematically stunning form, as this provocative series matures. replica van cleef and arpels bracelet Considering the dearth of smart dramas on the small screen this year, Empire could be half as good and we still watch it. Luckily, though, HBO has backed a historical tale with loads of style, suspense and dark wit, and with scenes so cinematically rich, it can make a night out at the movies feel downright obsolete.
While most comedies these days cater to the misfits and losers of the modern landscape, Rock demonstrates how easily the vainglorious narcissist, the deluded misanthrope and the self defeating neurotic alike can transform their so called personality flaws into gainful employment. Maybe part of Rock buoyant, upbeat tone lies in this central notion, that even confused human beings whom you assume might become shut ins or convicted felons find their ways to small victories each and every day, whether these victories involve securing the perfect pair of jeans, crafting an elaborate scam to rip off Carvel Ice Cream, or undermining the political campaign of an enemy of their television network. And who knew that when Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) forged a fragile friendship on the set of TGS four years ago, it would transform into one of the most odd partnerships to grace the half hour comedy world? Just as Lemon continues to enthrall us with her utter patheticness as a human being, Jack wows us with his executive level survival instinct, from his pitches for new reality shows ( put a bunch of people on a plane, fly them over the Atlantic, then Tom Bergeron comes out and reveals that the pilot is a 6 year old boy! We call it Hell Flight to his competitive streak ( have to talk to Rachel Maddow. Only one of us can have this haircut to his occasional admissions of fallibility ( performance issues? That does happen to men. I faced it myself, with Greta Van Susteren, before her head transplant Although shows as smart and funny as this usually don stay smart and funny for all that long, Rock has beaten the odds, rather spectacularly, for the fifth season in a row.
While that title may sound, to actual men of a certain age, about as appealing as Prostate and You or Time!, TNT understated drama about middle aged men manages to explore the indignities of aging through the comforting lens of old friendships. Like the title itself, these stories are both fearlessly ordinary and daringly depressing, from Joe struggles with gambling in the wake of his divorce to Terry nonexistent acting career and halfhearted flings to Owen failed attempts to gain some respect from his father (who also his boss at the car dealership). Luckily, show creators Ray Romano and Mike Royce lean into the pathos and the humor in every story, buoying each scene with the sorts of heartbreaking, absurd details that make us sigh and chuckle at ourselves in real life. Slowly, we discover the dark ironies of these men choices: Terry hates planning anything in advance, but lives in a state of perpetual uncertainty as a result; Joe son blames himself for everything, when Joe figures all that stuff is his fault instead; Owen volleys between shame and pride, mirroring his father warmth and withdrawal. These are the sorts of smart contradictions that transform quirky characters into fully imagined, familiar, larger than life figures that stay with us when an episode is over. Of course, the great acting helps; Andre Braugher, Scott Bakula and Romano reveal the weight of each scene without detracting from the drama diligent realism. More than anything, though, of a Certain Age demonstrates just how moving and entertaining an ordinary show about ordinary life can be.
That said, not every grumpy, divorced middle aged man with kids spends his time having heartfelt talks and come to Jesus moments. Some of them just whine about how old and fat and disgusting they become while eating potato chips on the couch. Some of them complain about how annoying and inconvenient their children are, mostly hoping that such talk with get them laid by the single mom whose children are also annoying and inconvenient. Whether all of this sounds funny or repugnant is a matter of taste, but at the very least the grumpy, the lazy and the heavily inconvenienced among us appreciate Louis CK unvarnished, squealing pig approach to the midlife crisis. Considering the self congratulatory nature of most self titled shows, you have to applaud a man who invites Ricky Gervais onto his show, just to play a sadistic doctor friend who a) tortures Louie by diagnosing him with life threatening afflictions, b) demands to examine Louie, then calls his worst penis I ever seen in my life, and c) refers to Louie as collection of broken organs mashed into a big, sweaty ginger skin sack. This show turns negativity and self effacement into an extreme sport but really, so does middle age itself. Kudos to Louis CK for bravely throwing himself onto the altar of aging, decline and despair, so that we all might go forth feeling a little less mediocre and disgusting.
Who could guessed that a half hour comedy around small town government officials could be this brilliant? Aside from a steady stream of great moments from Amy Poehler as deputy parks director Leslie Knope, NBC and Recreation really hit its stride in its second season, from the best ever fake van cleef and arpels bracelet episode about a visit by corrupt officials (including Fred Armisen) from Pawnee sister city in Venezuela to another where Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) offers a barrage of ideas on slashing the city budget ( the zoo animals. whom? labs. Weird restaurants. I just spitballin here And you never want to miss any episode that features a public meeting. When Leslie announces that the city parks will be closed until further notice, one woman stands up and says, is out in two weeks. What am I going to do with my kids all day? Keep them in my house? Where I live? Unexpected laugh out loud moments like that are what makes and Recreation one of the most underrated sitcoms on TV.
Men will rank among the best TV shows of the next decade, not just the best of this year, because it a drama that dares to offer us all of the intelligence and symbolic layers of a great novel. If Matthew Weiner has an unsavory habit of talking about Men like it Shakespeare, so be it a cursory glance at the rest of the skin deep cops and lawyers puppet shows that infect our TV screens, and we ready to allow Weiner a little grandiosity around his fine creation. While the show lost some momentum in its second season, its third more than made up for it with its extended deconstruction of the joys and perils of selling your soul to the company store. The end of each episode this season felt like putting down another chapter in a great book; we left full of questions, sure, but once we start looking for answers, a whole shadow world of meaning opens up to us. Against a backdrop of TV characters who say exactly what they mean at all times, Don Draper communicates mostly through what he doesn or won say. In short, Men is simply five times smarter, funnier, more moving and more stylish than the top dramas on TV right now, but best of all, it demands a little work and thought from its audience. The pleasure of becoming so deeply engaged in Weiner rich, witty, dark creation is what keeps audiences coming back, week after week. Still, not even loyal fans of to Death could predicted how dazzlingly odd and affecting the show could become in its second season, from Jonathan (Schwartzman) disastrous investigation into an S/M parlor to George (Danson) unexpected romance with the doctor treating him for prostate cancer. While Ray (Galifianakis) downward spiral into toddler level antics are always delightful to behold ( are you always picking on me? I don procrastinate. I just like to do things later! it the philosophical conversations between Jonathan and George that are the sweet heart of this goofy gem. By capturing the self doubts and laziness of these underachieving elites, Ames has created a comedy that anything but boring.
A six part dystopic zombie series really shouldn be any better than the wide assortment of classic zombie films available for public consumption, but somehow comic book and series creator Robert Kirkman has succeeded in serving up an enthralling and highly addictive undead spectacle van cleef alhambra bracelet fake for our viewing pleasure (and by of course, I mean the kind of pleasure that comes from watching our hero hack a dead body to bloody bits in order to mask himself with the scent of the undead). Lead actor Andrew Lincoln, who plays former cop and zombie apocalypse survivor Rick Grimes, has all of the gravitas and grit that you need for a man delivering lines like I am is a man who looking for his wife and son. Anybody gets in the way of that gonna lose. The instant soapy elements illicit affairs, endangered sisters, enraged racists are kept in check by smart, spare dialogue and concise editing, plus some of the most intelligently written post apocalyptic scenarios to date. Even if you dislike horror and gore, you shouldn let the stumbling corpses fool you: Dead is one of the smartest, most original series to air this year.
In its second season, Family continues to prove that, after a full decade of spiraling downward, the family sitcom need not be a stale and horrid thing. In fact, show creators Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan have transformed it into a thing of great beauty, milking each absurd but eminently relatable scenario for all it worth. Whether Cameron is reinterpreting baby books into a sordid tales of cocaine fueled club hopping to save himself from dying of boredom or Manny is dreaming up unnervingly sophisticated schemes to woo his latest elementary school crush, each story on this show is packed with enough amusing back story and heated banter that it feels at once inspired and unpredictable. Best of all, the characters here are complex enough to surprise us each week with their funny but still realistic quirks, from Phil Dunphy sentimentality to Gloria brutal streak. Most of all, Family unearths the harsh realities of being tethered to an unruly gaggle of emotionally deranged people you not allowed to ignore. Or, in the words of Claire to her husband, Phil, take this the wrong way, but I have almost no faith in you. We get it. We wish we didn but we do.
There an odd subculture of aficionados out there who adore any flavor of comedy that reminds them of their all time favorite things: Monty Python, Space, and anything with Bill Murray or Chevy Chase in it. This crowd loves deeply unambitious characters prone to self defeating or nihilistic asides, who nonetheless develop unexpectedly passionate responses to particular stimuli: Wars, puppy parades, cliques of mean girls, wheelchairs you control by blowing into them, etc. For those who feel ambivalent about the mainstream way of life and really, who doesn NBC is the holy grail of televised comedy. Here you have a handful of misfits, lumped together by fate, bravely facing two years in a mediocre, infantilizing institution of always trying to get higher learning. adeptly conjures all of the charms of its influences, from the clueless confusion and farcical antics of Chevy Chase Pierce to the idiot savant buddy routine of Abed and Troy. Like its predecessors, is less about actual jokes than it is about the giddy anything goes mentality that pervades the uneasy crossroads of idealism, skepticism and really good marijuana. After all, when you combine a healthy suspicion toward the straight world with lots of high quality pot, what do you get? a) A deadly zombie virus spreading across Greendale; b) the discovery of a spiritually uplifting trampoline on a secret corner of campus, c) extended emotional fallout from a thieving, pen hoarding monkey living in the school venting system; or d) all of the above? The answer is d and somehow, makes of the above work like never before.
You probably could bet that Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter tale of prohibition era Atlantic City would land in the year top 10 shows without watching a single episode, and to be sure, the HBO series stunning photography, gorgeous costumes, elaborate sets and fine cast haven disappointed. Even though this story of American ambition and corruption has taken some time to pick up steam, over the course of the first season it ripened into a dynamic, imaginative narrative about the complicated compromises of the American dream. However an unusual leading man Steve Buscemi may be, he has a way of reflecting every wave of resignation and regret in his big, watery eyes that makes us feel real empathy for Nucky Thompson. Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) has developed from ambivalent sidekick to a compassionate but at times vicious antihero whose good intentions can save him from his worst impulses. And best of all, Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) has transformed from abused wife to respected leader, struggling palpably with the ethical implications of her role while taking undeniable pride in her apparent talents. In its first season, the drama posed one central question: Can you sell a small piece of your soul to ensure your own survival, but preserve the rest and avoid spiraling downward into utter selfishness and depravity? The answer appears to be no, but we sure to learn more, in cinematically stunning form, as this provocative series matures. replica van cleef and arpels bracelet Considering the dearth of smart dramas on the small screen this year, Empire could be half as good and we still watch it. Luckily, though, HBO has backed a historical tale with loads of style, suspense and dark wit, and with scenes so cinematically rich, it can make a night out at the movies feel downright obsolete.
While most comedies these days cater to the misfits and losers of the modern landscape, Rock demonstrates how easily the vainglorious narcissist, the deluded misanthrope and the self defeating neurotic alike can transform their so called personality flaws into gainful employment. Maybe part of Rock buoyant, upbeat tone lies in this central notion, that even confused human beings whom you assume might become shut ins or convicted felons find their ways to small victories each and every day, whether these victories involve securing the perfect pair of jeans, crafting an elaborate scam to rip off Carvel Ice Cream, or undermining the political campaign of an enemy of their television network. And who knew that when Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) forged a fragile friendship on the set of TGS four years ago, it would transform into one of the most odd partnerships to grace the half hour comedy world? Just as Lemon continues to enthrall us with her utter patheticness as a human being, Jack wows us with his executive level survival instinct, from his pitches for new reality shows ( put a bunch of people on a plane, fly them over the Atlantic, then Tom Bergeron comes out and reveals that the pilot is a 6 year old boy! We call it Hell Flight to his competitive streak ( have to talk to Rachel Maddow. Only one of us can have this haircut to his occasional admissions of fallibility ( performance issues? That does happen to men. I faced it myself, with Greta Van Susteren, before her head transplant Although shows as smart and funny as this usually don stay smart and funny for all that long, Rock has beaten the odds, rather spectacularly, for the fifth season in a row.
While that title may sound, to actual men of a certain age, about as appealing as Prostate and You or Time!, TNT understated drama about middle aged men manages to explore the indignities of aging through the comforting lens of old friendships. Like the title itself, these stories are both fearlessly ordinary and daringly depressing, from Joe struggles with gambling in the wake of his divorce to Terry nonexistent acting career and halfhearted flings to Owen failed attempts to gain some respect from his father (who also his boss at the car dealership). Luckily, show creators Ray Romano and Mike Royce lean into the pathos and the humor in every story, buoying each scene with the sorts of heartbreaking, absurd details that make us sigh and chuckle at ourselves in real life. Slowly, we discover the dark ironies of these men choices: Terry hates planning anything in advance, but lives in a state of perpetual uncertainty as a result; Joe son blames himself for everything, when Joe figures all that stuff is his fault instead; Owen volleys between shame and pride, mirroring his father warmth and withdrawal. These are the sorts of smart contradictions that transform quirky characters into fully imagined, familiar, larger than life figures that stay with us when an episode is over. Of course, the great acting helps; Andre Braugher, Scott Bakula and Romano reveal the weight of each scene without detracting from the drama diligent realism. More than anything, though, of a Certain Age demonstrates just how moving and entertaining an ordinary show about ordinary life can be.
That said, not every grumpy, divorced middle aged man with kids spends his time having heartfelt talks and come to Jesus moments. Some of them just whine about how old and fat and disgusting they become while eating potato chips on the couch. Some of them complain about how annoying and inconvenient their children are, mostly hoping that such talk with get them laid by the single mom whose children are also annoying and inconvenient. Whether all of this sounds funny or repugnant is a matter of taste, but at the very least the grumpy, the lazy and the heavily inconvenienced among us appreciate Louis CK unvarnished, squealing pig approach to the midlife crisis. Considering the self congratulatory nature of most self titled shows, you have to applaud a man who invites Ricky Gervais onto his show, just to play a sadistic doctor friend who a) tortures Louie by diagnosing him with life threatening afflictions, b) demands to examine Louie, then calls his worst penis I ever seen in my life, and c) refers to Louie as collection of broken organs mashed into a big, sweaty ginger skin sack. This show turns negativity and self effacement into an extreme sport but really, so does middle age itself. Kudos to Louis CK for bravely throwing himself onto the altar of aging, decline and despair, so that we all might go forth feeling a little less mediocre and disgusting.
Who could guessed that a half hour comedy around small town government officials could be this brilliant? Aside from a steady stream of great moments from Amy Poehler as deputy parks director Leslie Knope, NBC and Recreation really hit its stride in its second season, from the best ever fake van cleef and arpels bracelet episode about a visit by corrupt officials (including Fred Armisen) from Pawnee sister city in Venezuela to another where Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) offers a barrage of ideas on slashing the city budget ( the zoo animals. whom? labs. Weird restaurants. I just spitballin here And you never want to miss any episode that features a public meeting. When Leslie announces that the city parks will be closed until further notice, one woman stands up and says, is out in two weeks. What am I going to do with my kids all day? Keep them in my house? Where I live? Unexpected laugh out loud moments like that are what makes and Recreation one of the most underrated sitcoms on TV.
Men will rank among the best TV shows of the next decade, not just the best of this year, because it a drama that dares to offer us all of the intelligence and symbolic layers of a great novel. If Matthew Weiner has an unsavory habit of talking about Men like it Shakespeare, so be it a cursory glance at the rest of the skin deep cops and lawyers puppet shows that infect our TV screens, and we ready to allow Weiner a little grandiosity around his fine creation. While the show lost some momentum in its second season, its third more than made up for it with its extended deconstruction of the joys and perils of selling your soul to the company store. The end of each episode this season felt like putting down another chapter in a great book; we left full of questions, sure, but once we start looking for answers, a whole shadow world of meaning opens up to us. Against a backdrop of TV characters who say exactly what they mean at all times, Don Draper communicates mostly through what he doesn or won say. In short, Men is simply five times smarter, funnier, more moving and more stylish than the top dramas on TV right now, but best of all, it demands a little work and thought from its audience. The pleasure of becoming so deeply engaged in Weiner rich, witty, dark creation is what keeps audiences coming back, week after week. Still, not even loyal fans of to Death could predicted how dazzlingly odd and affecting the show could become in its second season, from Jonathan (Schwartzman) disastrous investigation into an S/M parlor to George (Danson) unexpected romance with the doctor treating him for prostate cancer. While Ray (Galifianakis) downward spiral into toddler level antics are always delightful to behold ( are you always picking on me? I don procrastinate. I just like to do things later! it the philosophical conversations between Jonathan and George that are the sweet heart of this goofy gem. By capturing the self doubts and laziness of these underachieving elites, Ames has created a comedy that anything but boring.
A six part dystopic zombie series really shouldn be any better than the wide assortment of classic zombie films available for public consumption, but somehow comic book and series creator Robert Kirkman has succeeded in serving up an enthralling and highly addictive undead spectacle van cleef alhambra bracelet fake for our viewing pleasure (and by of course, I mean the kind of pleasure that comes from watching our hero hack a dead body to bloody bits in order to mask himself with the scent of the undead). Lead actor Andrew Lincoln, who plays former cop and zombie apocalypse survivor Rick Grimes, has all of the gravitas and grit that you need for a man delivering lines like I am is a man who looking for his wife and son. Anybody gets in the way of that gonna lose. The instant soapy elements illicit affairs, endangered sisters, enraged racists are kept in check by smart, spare dialogue and concise editing, plus some of the most intelligently written post apocalyptic scenarios to date. Even if you dislike horror and gore, you shouldn let the stumbling corpses fool you: Dead is one of the smartest, most original series to air this year.
In its second season, Family continues to prove that, after a full decade of spiraling downward, the family sitcom need not be a stale and horrid thing. In fact, show creators Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan have transformed it into a thing of great beauty, milking each absurd but eminently relatable scenario for all it worth. Whether Cameron is reinterpreting baby books into a sordid tales of cocaine fueled club hopping to save himself from dying of boredom or Manny is dreaming up unnervingly sophisticated schemes to woo his latest elementary school crush, each story on this show is packed with enough amusing back story and heated banter that it feels at once inspired and unpredictable. Best of all, the characters here are complex enough to surprise us each week with their funny but still realistic quirks, from Phil Dunphy sentimentality to Gloria brutal streak. Most of all, Family unearths the harsh realities of being tethered to an unruly gaggle of emotionally deranged people you not allowed to ignore. Or, in the words of Claire to her husband, Phil, take this the wrong way, but I have almost no faith in you. We get it. We wish we didn but we do.
Southampton will refuse to sell Virgil van Dijk in January
Southampton intend to rebuff any January bids for centre back Virgil van Dijk, but could sell captain Jose Fonte if a sizeable offer comes in.
Van Dijk is attracting interest from the two Manchester clubs following his commanding performances since joining Southampton from Celtic last year but, in line with their successful transfer knock off van cleef and arpels bracelets strategy of recent seasons, Saints plan only to consider major offers in the summer if they have identified a replacement.
After signing a new six year contract in May, Van Dijk is settled in Hampshire and there is copy van cleef and arpels bracelet little prospect of him pushing for a January move. He was bought for only 13 million but his valuation has since soared to around 40 million.
Fonte, who refused to sign an improved contract offer earlier in the year, was rested from Sunday's 3 1 win against Bournemouth. Manager Claude Puel replica bracelet van cleef alhambra said that it was simply down to his need to rotate players, but Fonte was already disappointed to play no part in the club's Europa League campaign following his pivotal role in Southampton's upward journey from League One in 2010.
Fonte, who will turn 33 later this week, received the offer of a pay rise after helping Portugal to win the European Championship but no extension to a contract that expires in 2018 amid interest from Manchester United and Everton.
Southampton offered to make him one of their top earners on around 70,000 a week but they are not prepared to extend the time on his contract. In line with many leading clubs for players into their thirties, they would simply expect to review the situation next season.
Manchester United andEverton were interested in Fonte but whether they would now be willing to pay a transfer fee, as well as offer a longer contract, must be doubtful. It is also unclear now whether Southampton's increased offer is even still on the table. Fonte is expected to return for Southampton against Tottenham on December 28.
Southampton intend to rebuff any January bids for centre back Virgil van Dijk, but could sell captain Jose Fonte if a sizeable offer comes in.
Van Dijk is attracting interest from the two Manchester clubs following his commanding performances since joining Southampton from Celtic last year but, in line with their successful transfer knock off van cleef and arpels bracelets strategy of recent seasons, Saints plan only to consider major offers in the summer if they have identified a replacement.
After signing a new six year contract in May, Van Dijk is settled in Hampshire and there is copy van cleef and arpels bracelet little prospect of him pushing for a January move. He was bought for only 13 million but his valuation has since soared to around 40 million.
Fonte, who refused to sign an improved contract offer earlier in the year, was rested from Sunday's 3 1 win against Bournemouth. Manager Claude Puel replica bracelet van cleef alhambra said that it was simply down to his need to rotate players, but Fonte was already disappointed to play no part in the club's Europa League campaign following his pivotal role in Southampton's upward journey from League One in 2010.
Fonte, who will turn 33 later this week, received the offer of a pay rise after helping Portugal to win the European Championship but no extension to a contract that expires in 2018 amid interest from Manchester United and Everton.
Southampton offered to make him one of their top earners on around 70,000 a week but they are not prepared to extend the time on his contract. In line with many leading clubs for players into their thirties, they would simply expect to review the situation next season.
Manchester United andEverton were interested in Fonte but whether they would now be willing to pay a transfer fee, as well as offer a longer contract, must be doubtful. It is also unclear now whether Southampton's increased offer is even still on the table. Fonte is expected to return for Southampton against Tottenham on December 28.
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The Body After Death
A few imitation Van Cleef&arpels clover ring days after death, these bacteria and enzymes start the process of breaking down their host. The pancreas is full of so many bacteria that it essentially digests itself [source: Macnair]. As these organisms work their way to other organs, the body becomes discolored, first turning green, then purple, then black. If you can't see the change, you'll smell it soon enough, because the bacteria create an awful smelling gas. In addition to smelling up the room, that gas will cause the body to bloat, the eyes to bulge out of their sockets and the tongue fake van cleef clover ring to swell and protrude. (In rare instances, this gas has created enough pressure after a few weeks to cause decomposing pregnant women to expel the fetus in a process known as coffin birth.)
Now, most of us don't see that process because the law requires that we do something with the body. There are endless possibilities: We can choose a coffin for our body or an urn for our ashes. We can be embalmed, mummified or frozen. Some cultures were rumored to engage in cannibalistic rituals of consuming the dead, while others left their dead exposed to the elements for animals to cart away. You could donate your body to science or ask for burial at sea. But unless mummified or preserved, bodies eventually disintegrate in the process described above. However, burial in a coffin slows the process tremendously; even the type of soil in which you're buried can make a difference.
Disposal of a dead body is largely regulated imitation van cleef clover ring women by cultural and religious beliefs. Early cultures buried the dead with their favorite possessions (and sometimes their favorite people) for the afterlife. Sometimes, warriors or servants were buried standing up, eternally ready for action. Orthodox Jews shroud their dead and bury them on the same day as death, while Buddhists believe that consciousness stays in the body for three days [source: Mims]. Hindus are cremated, because it's believed that burning releases the soul from the body, while Roman Catholics frown on cremation out of respect for the body as a symbol of human life [sources: Mims; Cassell et al].
A few imitation Van Cleef&arpels clover ring days after death, these bacteria and enzymes start the process of breaking down their host. The pancreas is full of so many bacteria that it essentially digests itself [source: Macnair]. As these organisms work their way to other organs, the body becomes discolored, first turning green, then purple, then black. If you can't see the change, you'll smell it soon enough, because the bacteria create an awful smelling gas. In addition to smelling up the room, that gas will cause the body to bloat, the eyes to bulge out of their sockets and the tongue fake van cleef clover ring to swell and protrude. (In rare instances, this gas has created enough pressure after a few weeks to cause decomposing pregnant women to expel the fetus in a process known as coffin birth.)
Now, most of us don't see that process because the law requires that we do something with the body. There are endless possibilities: We can choose a coffin for our body or an urn for our ashes. We can be embalmed, mummified or frozen. Some cultures were rumored to engage in cannibalistic rituals of consuming the dead, while others left their dead exposed to the elements for animals to cart away. You could donate your body to science or ask for burial at sea. But unless mummified or preserved, bodies eventually disintegrate in the process described above. However, burial in a coffin slows the process tremendously; even the type of soil in which you're buried can make a difference.
Disposal of a dead body is largely regulated imitation van cleef clover ring women by cultural and religious beliefs. Early cultures buried the dead with their favorite possessions (and sometimes their favorite people) for the afterlife. Sometimes, warriors or servants were buried standing up, eternally ready for action. Orthodox Jews shroud their dead and bury them on the same day as death, while Buddhists believe that consciousness stays in the body for three days [source: Mims]. Hindus are cremated, because it's believed that burning releases the soul from the body, while Roman Catholics frown on cremation out of respect for the body as a symbol of human life [sources: Mims; Cassell et al].
Swiftsure yacht race wraps up with near
Swift winds and currents made for an exceptional 72nd Swiftsure International Yacht Race except for one sailor who was tossed overboard.
By Sunday evening all of the boats had finished the race and organizers were celebrating a memorable weekend that began with the blast of a starting gun Saturday morning.
The exception was one sailor aboard Beats Per Minute out of Seattle in the Cape Flattery monohull race. She was tossed overboard near the rounding mark at Neah Bay, Burkhardt said.
The sailor how much is the copy van cleef & arpels ring was in a life jacket and tethered to the boat. Upon being quickly retrieved she was put below deck and warmed, organizers said.
"It wasn't declared an emergency because the onboard skipper said she was fine," Burkhardt said. "She was not hypothermic, just very cold."
The rest of the races went off without a hitch with many fast races, Burkhardt said.
Almost 200 boats crewed by nearly 1,800 sailors from van cleef jewelry replica yacht clubs from all over the Puget Sound, Vancouver, Oregon and Vancouver Island competed.
Dragonfly, Richard Ackrill's lightning fast Formula 40 catamaran out of the Royal Victoria Yacht Club, was racing up to 22 knots at one point, Burkhardt said. but in a repeat from last year was beat out in corrected time by Bad Kitty out of Vancouver.
The fleet is split into classes and each class is grouped into divisions. Times are adjusted to account for different types of boats, meaning the first over the finish line may not be the winner.
Some boats finished up to 12 hours faster than in previous race years, Burkhardt said.
In years when winds have been low to nonexistent, the race has been mockingly referred to as "Driftsure."
Not this year. Sailors returned with smiles on their faces and reports of dream conditions, Burkhardt said. "They had long runs and were able to build up a lot of speed."
Sometimes high winds can make for rough seas but that hasn't been the case this weekend. "Even though they had strong winds that built up the seas stayed calm," he said.
The Swiftsure International Yacht Race is hosted by the Royal Victoria Yacht Club.
The event featured five races held concurrently. There were four long course events Swiftsure Lightship Classic (138.2 nautical miles), Hein Bank Race (118.1 nautical miles), Cape Flattery Race (101.9 nautical miles) and Juan de Fuca Race (78.7 nautical miles).
There was also the shorter Swiftsure Inshore Classic designed to finish in Cadboro Bay before dinner on Saturday. "For people who don't want to sail overnight," van cleef Alhambra ring yellow copy Burkhardt said.
Swift winds and currents made for an exceptional 72nd Swiftsure International Yacht Race except for one sailor who was tossed overboard.
By Sunday evening all of the boats had finished the race and organizers were celebrating a memorable weekend that began with the blast of a starting gun Saturday morning.
The exception was one sailor aboard Beats Per Minute out of Seattle in the Cape Flattery monohull race. She was tossed overboard near the rounding mark at Neah Bay, Burkhardt said.
The sailor how much is the copy van cleef & arpels ring was in a life jacket and tethered to the boat. Upon being quickly retrieved she was put below deck and warmed, organizers said.
"It wasn't declared an emergency because the onboard skipper said she was fine," Burkhardt said. "She was not hypothermic, just very cold."
The rest of the races went off without a hitch with many fast races, Burkhardt said.
Almost 200 boats crewed by nearly 1,800 sailors from van cleef jewelry replica yacht clubs from all over the Puget Sound, Vancouver, Oregon and Vancouver Island competed.
Dragonfly, Richard Ackrill's lightning fast Formula 40 catamaran out of the Royal Victoria Yacht Club, was racing up to 22 knots at one point, Burkhardt said. but in a repeat from last year was beat out in corrected time by Bad Kitty out of Vancouver.
The fleet is split into classes and each class is grouped into divisions. Times are adjusted to account for different types of boats, meaning the first over the finish line may not be the winner.
Some boats finished up to 12 hours faster than in previous race years, Burkhardt said.
In years when winds have been low to nonexistent, the race has been mockingly referred to as "Driftsure."
Not this year. Sailors returned with smiles on their faces and reports of dream conditions, Burkhardt said. "They had long runs and were able to build up a lot of speed."
Sometimes high winds can make for rough seas but that hasn't been the case this weekend. "Even though they had strong winds that built up the seas stayed calm," he said.
The Swiftsure International Yacht Race is hosted by the Royal Victoria Yacht Club.
The event featured five races held concurrently. There were four long course events Swiftsure Lightship Classic (138.2 nautical miles), Hein Bank Race (118.1 nautical miles), Cape Flattery Race (101.9 nautical miles) and Juan de Fuca Race (78.7 nautical miles).
There was also the shorter Swiftsure Inshore Classic designed to finish in Cadboro Bay before dinner on Saturday. "For people who don't want to sail overnight," van cleef Alhambra ring yellow copy Burkhardt said.