#he's never sounder more british

[csnews]

Harbor porpoise bycatch near Point Barrow contributes to larger study on Bering Sea population

Jenna Kunze - September 3, 2020

When James Judkins began pulling up his fishing nets out near Point Barrow this month, the weight of the catch pulled back at him.

“Man, this is a really big fish,” Judkins thought. Then, he glimpsed the dorsal fin. Then another. “Dolphins?” he wondered. Close. Harbor porpoises, a marine mammal resembling dolphins, but in the same family as whales, have made several appearances in Utqiaġvik recently. In recent weeks, local fishermen have caught at least four porpoises in subsistence fishing nets near Point Barrow. Judkins recovered two, along with a seal, on Aug. 12 in Elson Lagoon. The other two were bycatches in Christian Stein and Charlie Sikvaguyak’s separate nets set in the same area. For some fishermen, it was their first time seeing the mammal.

“I went to Sea World when I was real little and I saw stuff in aquariums, but never in real life,” said Judkins, 33.

Dorcas Stein and her husband have been setting nets in the same area for more than 25 years, and had never heard of anyone getting a porpoise until they caught one themselves. They called North Slope Borough Wildlife Department, who came out to sample the animal. Stein said she gifted the meat to family. Judkins and his partner Jaime Patkotak, after gifting some meat to community members, are smoking their remaining porpoise, which is rumored to taste similar to beluga whale.

In Alaska, harbor porpoises are divided into three stocks: Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska and Southeast Alaska. The estimated population size of the Bering Sea stock is 66,076 animals, with about 41,854 in the Gulf of Alaska and 17,076 animals in the Southeast, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Raphaela Stimmelmayr, North Slope Borough wildlife veterinarian and research biologist, collected tissue samples from three of the recovered porpoises (plus another found dead on shore) to submit to the University of Alaska Museum of the North. The samples will contribute to research on the Bering Sea stock.

Stimmelmayr says there isn’t a lot of information on the species in Alaska because of their small size and shy nature, making them easy to miss in aerial surveys. “We don’t know much about them,” she said. “They are better described in more populated coastal areas (such as) Washington coast, British Columbia (and) California.”

She also noted a distinction between bycatch in Utqiaġvik, versus other regions and states where subsistence marine mammal consumption is less common. All of the recovered animals were consumed by community members. Stimmelmayr, who last saw a porpoise in 2013, said that the two adult females and one adult male porpoises she sampled all looked relatively healthy, based on her initial assessment. They measured between 125 and 130 centimeters (about 50 inches), according to her records.

“I haven’t seen a harbor porpoise for a couple of years,” Stimmelmayr said. “Though it could’ve happened that some were caught in years passed, but people just didn’t contact us.”

Community Elder Johnny Adams, 75, echoes Stimmelmayr’s suspicion that it’s not that the harbor porpoises aren’t there, it’s that they haven’t been caught or reported. Adams remembers his grandfather getting porpoises in the lagoon, and another time his granduncle got one in the ocean.

“It’s not really uncommon for them to be up here nowadays,” Adams said. “My guess is that they’re following up on the food chain (and the) other smaller fish that we have ... like candle fish.”

Both Judkins and Stein saw a large run of small fish just before the porpoises showed up.

“The capelin (paŋmaksraqs) and the rainbow smelts (ilhuaġniqs) were running, and a lot of pink salmon,” Stein wrote to The Sounder.

Some of the limited information about harbor porpoises, especially the Bering Sea stock, has come from Utqiaġvik’s local whale biologist, Craig George. George co-published a paper on harbor porpoise sightings near Point Barrow in 1993, along with author Robert Suydam. George and Suydam looked at records of harbor porpoises found near Point Barrow between 1985 and 1991. The records included live sightings, animals found dead on the beach and animals entangled in fishing nets.

In 1991, six harbor porpoises were caught in subsistence fishing gear in Elson Lagoon, the most at any one time within the period of study.

“Subsistence fishermen in Barrow state this it is not uncommon for one or two porpoises to be caught each summer,” the paper says, noting that 1991 was an anomaly. Some speculative reasons for why high numbers are caught certain years include changes in sea ice and prey movement.

In 1991, the pack ice that is typically about 16 miles north of Point Barrow was against the coast for most of July and August, the paper said, which could have forced more porpoises into the lagoon that year. This summer, the pack is much further out and currently over 100 miles north of Point Barrow, George said.

George also speculated that the abundance of fish in the coastal arctic lagoons may have attracted harbor porpoises north. According to George’s research, harbor porpoises regularly visit the North Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea and occasionally the Chukchi Sea during ice-free months. Point Barrow is the northernmost limit where the animal is typically found. Elsewhere in the state and country, researchers are working to understand more about harbor porpoises, including the Bering Sea stock.

Kim Parsons, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research geneticist at Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, surveyed harbor porpoises in Southeast Alaska in 2016 and 2019. She said she’s working on analyzing the current samples, along with archived tissue samples collected from bycatch over the past 30 years.

“There’s certainly lots of questions about the biology and physiology of harbor porpoise that are still unanswered,” Parsons said. “The pieces that we know little about are pieces like: how far individuals are moving, how many calves they’re having each year and things like that you’d get from doing long-term study.”

That data will help paint a clear picture of global long-term patterns of change, Parsons said.

“If environmental changes affect the distribution and abundance of prey, then marine mammals will follow that prey,” she said.

[easyhairstylesbest]

Cicely Tyson on the ‘Power’ of Her 1973 Oscar Nom: ‘That Was My Dream’

The day I learned I’d been nominated for an Oscar, I was filming a small role for a new Black director. Just as I was delivering an important line, I heard laughter on the sidelines of the set. “Don’t they know we’re shooting in here?” I snapped. “What’s the matter with them?” A moment later, a producer walked in. “We’ve just gotten some good news,” he said. I held up my hand. “I don’t want to hear anything,” I told him. “Whatever it is can wait.” When I am working, I show up to do exactly that. All else is a distraction, a disruption to an unfolding moment. The gentleman smiled, shook his head, and left.

The director, who must’ve heard the news that awaited, gave me a strange look before we resumed. We completed the scene, and even on my way out, I wouldn’t let anyone tell me anything. It was upon arriving home, at my agent Haber’s place, that he gave me the exhilarating announcement: I’d been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. “Really?” I said, the living room suddenly swirling out of focus. “Yes!” he yelped. As tears flooded my face, all I could think about were my friend Arthur Mitchell’s words to me: “You’re going to be nominated for an Oscar.” My friend’s what-if had come true.

I don’t care what any actor says, that golden statue matters. It is what we’re all vying for—the ultimate validation from our peers. You empty yourself into a character, you labor hour upon hour to get every single gesture and sentence precise, and you mean to tell me that such an affirmation means nothing to you? It holds tremendous power. When I was just getting into the business, I’d looked on in awe as Sidney Poitier earned that affirmation for his marvelous work in Lilies of the Field, becoming the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. That evening, as I watched the ceremony on my old black-and-white RCA set, I said to myself, I’m going to sit in the front at the Oscars one day. That was my dream. But as my career carried me mostly toward stage and television, that hope seemed unlikely. That is why, long before I did Sounder, I’d quietly accepted that the Academy Awards would probably not be part of my path. And yet, lo and behold, here I was, on the verge of taking a seat in that front row I’d envisioned for myself.

Cicely Tyson as Rebecca in Sounder.

Stanley Bielecki Movie CollectionGetty Images

My good news was just the beginning. Sounder received a slew of nominations, for Best Picture, Best Writing (Lonne Elder), and Best Actor (I was as delighted for Paul Winfield as I was for myself). The film’s message also reverberated beyond our shores, earning a BAFTA nomination for its score, created by Taj Mahal, who also earned a Grammy for his work. Kevin Hooks, who played my son (and who, in real life, is the son of director and actor Robert Hooks), received a Golden Globe nomination. That awards season also became a landmark recognition of Black talent: Diana Ross was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Lady Sings the Blues, as was screenplay writer Suzanne de Passe. The 1973 nominations for Diana Ross and myself were the first time Black women had been nominated in the Best Actress category since trailblazer Dorothy Dandridge received the honor in 1954 for her role in Carmen Jones.

The morning after the official nomination announcement in Los Angeles, I called my mother in New York. On television, she’d seen how all those white folks had stood and applauded me. “Well?” I said to her. “Well, what?” she said chuckling. “You’d better tell me something,” I said. The line went silent. “I am so proud of you, Sister,” she finally said. I could feel tears brimming and I let them fall, unable to speak because I was so overcome by what I’d longed to hear. If I had not heard those words from my mother, none of this would have made any difference. If she had not been able to participate in the acclaim I was receiving, all of it would’ve felt empty to me.

I, of course, already knew she and my father recognized my work. “Why do you do such sad movies?” my dad once joked after he’d seen me in Brown Girl, Brownstones. Likewise, Mom would often tell me what her friends were always asking her: “Why is she always wearing rags in her movies? Doesn’t she ever dress up?” Though their teasing was an indirect acknowledgment of their pride, I needed my mother, in particular, to voice her validation. She’d been my greatest source of energy, the reason I’d devoted myself so wholly to my work. She had believed I’d go out and become a slut of some kind, had no idea this Hollywood journey could lead me to play a character as honorable as Rebecca. My nomination did more than just prove my mother wrong. After a childhood during which my mother’s opinions drowned out all others, it gave me the last say.

“If I had not heard those words from my mother, none of this would have made any difference.”

I flew my mother to Los Angeles to attend the screening of Sounder. We were seated in the mezzanine, and she was one row behind me. In the dark, just as the curtains parted, she tapped me on the shoulder. “Ed Sullivan is sitting behind me,” she said, pronouncing his last name Sulli-wan, because for whatever reason, West Indians can’t say v’s. For years, she’d never missed The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights. I turned around and whispered to her, “And I am sitting here.” We both snickered, her loudly enough to prompt Ed Sulli-wan to smile in my mother’s direction.

To celebrate Sounder’s cascade of nominations, the studio hosted a splashy New York premiere. I called upon acclaimed fashion designer Bill Whitten to design my dress (years later, Bill would design Michael Jackson’s rhinestone glove to cover the singer’s early signs of vitiligo). “I want to create the kind of gown that Rebecca might have worn if she’d had money,” I told Bill. That sent him in search of the prints and cottons poor colored women would’ve worn in 1933. Using the fabric remnants he found, he pieced together a treasure. The dress, antebellum in style, came with a fancy apron that served as a flower sack. He filled it with cotton balls he’d sent for from down South. It was the most glorious creation. The same woman who braided my hair for the movie created a crown of beautiful cornrows to complement my look. When I strode into the theater that evening, chin lifted, pride on my brow, I showed up in the name of the ancestors whose sweat and sorrow had carried me there.

In the months leading up to the ceremony, the devil got to work doing what he does best: attempting to pit Black women against each other. In the lead-up to the Oscars, one of Diana Ross’s designers tried to keep my dress from being finished by hiring my designer to make suits for the Jackson Five. I don’t know whether Diana knew anything about it, but I heard the whispers. The media, for months, had been playing up the narrative that there was some big competition between the two of us. I refused to feed into that storyline, which was false. I have never been in competition with anybody but myself, and I wanted no part in such unpleasantness. Just Breathing While Black is trouble enough.

A month before the ceremony, the studio sent me overseas on a promotional tour in Europe, my first time in Paris and London. Months before I left town, I’d rubbed elbows with British royalty. Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, First Earl of Snowdon, was then husband to Princess Margaret and an avid photographer and filmmaker. Lord Snowdon had taken quite an interest in Arthur’s work at Dance Theatre of Harlem. The two began a partnership, with Lord Snowdon investing in the school. Arthur connected me with him, and during one of Lord Snowdon’s trips to New York, he and I met for appetizers and a brief conversation. As we awaited our order, he kept glancing over his left shoulder. How strange, I thought. I wonder if he’s expecting someone. As it turned out, he was on the lookout for the paparazzi, who of course had followed him to the restaurant. Later, on another one of his trips to New York, Lord Snowdon photographed me wearing that Bill Whitten masterpiece of a dress. What a memory.

Cicely Tyson at England’s Heathrow Airport in February 1973, a month before the Oscars.

George StroudGetty Images

In London, the marveling began with my ride from Heathrow in an enormous black taxi, a Hackney carriage so gargantuan that I could stand up inside of it! In a penthouse suite in the Dorchester Hotel, I spent a half-hour just wandering around the space, gawking at the grandeur of the accommodations, thinking back on those days when my siblings, Emily and Melrose, and I had all been squished together on a rollaway bed in our parents’ living room.

And to think that I now had this sprawling space to myself, in a world where my name was plastered on billboards all over America and Europe. It was nothing short of spectacular. The same was true of my time in the City of Light, where, from my balcony, I gazed in awe at the Eiffel Tower, head held high and preening in the distance.

“When I strode into the theater that evening, chin lifted, pride on my brow, I showed up in the name of the ancestors whose sweat and sorrow had carried me there.”

Back in New York before the ceremony, the surrealism continued. In another head nod to Rebecca, I wanted my hair done in a croquignole, the deep-wave style that would’ve been popular for well-to- do women during the 1930s. “Do you know how to do that style?” I asked my hairstylist Omar. “No,” she said, “but my mother can.” Can you believe that child’s mom came out of retirement just to create my waves? The words thank you fell short of expressing the gratitude I felt. Designer Bill Whitten turned up the luxury by creating a white silk-wool fitted dress, with a touch of grey in it, complete with a heart cut-out, lace-trimmed detail across the décolletage. Gracing each sleeve was a glistening row of tiny gold buttons, with the same buttons stretching down the back. It was absolutely stunning.

When Arthur arrived, dashing in his tuxedo, he escorted me by the arm to the awaiting limo. The evening, for us, marked two celebrations: the Forty-Fifth Academy Awards, and my dear Arthur’s thirty-ninth birthday. The quintet of hosts—Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Charlton Heston, and Rock Hudson—took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. My dream was to be in the front row, and there I sat, delighted that my fantasy had come to pass.

But as for the possibility of garnering the gold statue, I had done my back-of-the-napkin math. I’m logical that way, a pragmatist who is always weighing the odds, and in Hollywood politics, those odds were decidedly not in my favor. That same year, Liza Minnelli had been nominated for her role in Cabaret. Her father, Vincente, was a big-time director, which gave her one advantage. Check. Her mother was Judy Garland. Double check. Neither of them had ever earned an Oscar. Triple check. And at the time, Liza was dating Desi Arnaz Jr., son of Desi and Lucille Ball, Hollywood royalty. Quadruple check. Common sense told me that I had no chance amid the schmoozing and vote-securing that goes on in back rooms.

So as I sat near the stage that evening, I relaxed into the joy of just being there, with Arthur to my left and with Rebecca’s spirit dancing on my shoulder. So certain was I that this was Liza’s year, when Gene Hackman said, “And the winner is…,” I turned to Arthur and said, “Liza Minnelli.” Liza made her way up to the stage, tearful and jubilant, and I sat there, palm over my heart, relishing my presence in the arena. This journey of mine, this path so unpredictable, had somehow carried me from 219 East 102nd Street in the slums to the front row of movie magic at Hollywood’s most grand affair. As Liza accepted her award, I’d already received the only prize I have ever truly wanted—the affirmation of the dear woman who gave me birth.

From the book Just as I Am: A Memoir by Cicely Tyson with Michelle Burford. Copyright © 2021 by Cicely Tyson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Cicely Tyson Cicely Tyson has been nominated for 40 television and film awards and has won 42, most notably an Oscar, a Tony Award, 3 Emmys, 8 NAACP Image Awards, the African American Film Critics Special Achievement Award, the BAFTA Film Award, the Black Film Critics Circle Award, 4 Black Reel Awards, the Elle Women in Hollywood Award, 3 Lifetime Achievement Awards, and many more.  Ms.

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Cicely Tyson on the ‘Power’ of Her 1973 Oscar Nom: ‘That Was My Dream’

[rickhorrow]

10 To Watch : Mayor’s Edition 111119

RICK HORROW’S TOP 10 SPORTS/BIZ/TECH/PHILANTHROPY ISSUES FOR THE WEEK OF NOVEMBER 11 : Mayor’s Edition

with Jacob Aere

Sports investor Bruin Sports Capital received $600 million more to spend. According to the New York Times, Bruin Sports Capital is a sports investment and management company that invests in the technologies of media, marketing, and data surrounding sports. After raising $600 million from two even larger investors – CVC Capital Partners and the Jordan Company – Bruin Sports will be able to expand its portfolio of investments, which already include data analytics, media and streaming companies, and a fledgling drone-racing league. Currently, Bruin, led by Sport Business Handbook contributor George Pyne, has nearly $1 billion invested, including significant stakes in six companies across the modern sports landscape, from sports media start-ups such as The Athletic to a live-event provider selling high-end trips to events like the Super Bowl and the NFL draft. Overall, Bruin Sports Capital’s guiding philosophy is that people under 40 watch and consume sports and media in radically different ways from their parents – and this is likely how the strategic company will invest its newly-acquired $600 million: toward attracting future generations of sports and tech fans.

As “Ford v Ferrari” prepares to open nationwide, with Oscar in its sights, the Raiders have announced Desert Ford Dealers Las Vegas as founding partner of their new Allegiant Stadium. The tie-up also sees Ford, which has five dealerships across Las Vegas, named as the official vehicle of the Raiders. The deal gives Ford a year-round presence throughout Allegiant Stadium including pre-game tailgate activations and naming rights on the north gate entry. Construction on the $1.8 billion stadium is due for completion July 21. Said Raiders president Marc Badain, “We are excited to add another world-wide brand to the Raider family and for the annual activation and tailgating experiences this partnership will provide to our fans.” Set to open this Friday, “Ford v Ferrari” focuses on the relationship between visionary car designer Carroll Shelby (played by Matt Damon) and British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) as they worked to develop the Ford GT-40 car that swept the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. In case you’re wondering, the original cars sold and licensed by Ford in the 1960s have great value. A 1965 GT-40 roadster prototype was sold in August at a Monterey, CA auction for $7.65 million.

While the majority of America's top high school basketball talent chose to spend the year in college where they will earn $0 in wages, LaMelo Ball and R.J. Hampton chose to spend the year in Australia's National Basketball League, where they will earn $68,400. Ball was unlikely to be NCAA eligible anyway after playing professionally in Lithuania, but Hampton had full eligibility at an American college. Instead, he chose the path he thought would best prepare him for the NBA. Hampton's decision embodies the modern challenge facing college basketball, but fears over this becoming the new normal are exaggerated. After all, thanks to a new collective bargaining agreement on the horizon, the "one-and-done" era will likely end soon. And when it does, these alternative paths will be moot. We've seen international prospects make noise before, but we've never seen two young Americans — both active on social media with big followings: Ball has five million Instagram followers while RJ has 430,000 – playing  overseas while their former classmates play on campuses. Should be a fun storyline to follow this college basketball season and into next year’s NBA Draft.

As MLS once again crowned the Seattle Sounders as their champion, the average value of an MLS franchise has climbed 30% from $240 million to $313 million, according to Forbes. The year-on-year growth outpaces the rising team values in the NBA, which were up 13%, as well as the 11% increase in the NFL, an 8% rise in MLB, and a 6% climb in the NHL. Atlanta United remains the most valuable MLS franchise for the second straight year at $500 million, up from $330 million in last year’s rankings. The club’s revenue soared from $47 million to $78 million, resulting in an operating income of $7 million. Atlanta United are closely followed by the L.A. Galaxy ($480 million), with LAFC ($475 million), MLS Cup Champion Seattle Sounders ($405 million), and Toronto FC ($395 million) rounding off the top five. Despite the increase in team values, Forbes estimates that just seven of the league’s 24 teams turned a profit last season, with Toronto FC recording the biggest loss of $19 million. However, that has not stemmed the demand from investors looking to own an MLS franchise, even though expansion fees have soared to $200 million

In similar sports engagement news, a new study from Telemundo Deportes was welcome news for brands looking to engage with Hispanic fans. Telemundo Deportes, in partnership with Turnkey Intelligence-MarketCast, reports that Hispanic fans show 15% higher propensity to support sponsors on television and elsewhere than non-Hispanics, “by trying, buying, or recommending a product or service,” according to the study. Additionally, 57% of Hispanic sports fans who consume Spanish-language media would try, buy, or recommend a product or service — a 22% increase over non-Hispanics. Among the report’s other highlights, more than three-quarters of Spanish-language media consumers consider the FIFA Men’s World Cup a “can’t miss event.” 81% of Hispanic sports fans watch sports on television, predominantly at home, and were somewhat less likely than non-Hispanic fans to follow sports on other media platforms such as streaming services, social media, and online news sites. It’s never too early to prepare for the World Cup. Even though the 2022 event in Qatar is later than normal in the calendar due to brutal summer heat in that country – it kicks off in almost three years to the day – brand marketers should take note of this timely study.

The New York Knicks and New Jersey Devils broadcasts will soon feature FanDuel betting. According to Bloomberg, FanDuel will become an official sports gaming partner for broadcasts of the NBA’s Knicks, as well as the exclusive sports gambling partner for broadcasts of the NHL’s Devils. Also, New York Rangers hockey telecasts will include FanDuel commercials, but not betting-related content. Devils telecasts will have updated betting odds in a scrolling sidebar during each intermission. The partnership also will include a mix of in-game and halftime spots, branded content, and commercials. Prior to the Knicks halftime show, the network recently began showing a five-minute segment called “Inside the Lines,” devoting that time to look at the NBA betting landscape. A similar one-minute NHL-focused show will air leading into every Devils pregame show. Sports betting companies increasingly are signing deals with pro sports teams and media entities in places where betting on games is legal, and more teams will sign deals with betting partners as state by state legislation continues to relax on sports betting.

Privacy-focused messaging app Signal is making waves in the NBA, NFL, and NCAA. Tampering issues loom over professional sports and a widespread federal investigation still lingers over the NCAA landscape, meaning that the desire for privacy, encryption, and even disappearing messages has increased. For public schools in college sports, the app has emerged as an outlet to avoid jeopardy under Freedom of Information Act requests and to circumvent NCAA amateurism rules. In pro sports, Signal is used to combat the uptick in tampering enforcement. According to Yahoo! Sports, all the messages, photos, and documents passed back and forth are heavily encrypted on Signal. In the NBA and NFL, Signal spans every level from players to executives. In the wake of an NBA free agency period in which news of deals was broken prior to the formal start of the free agency round, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced stricter enforcement of rules for tampering and salary-cap circumvention. While the Signal app was originally created for use in politics, the sports world has been using its security features to avoid legal repercussions for phone conversations or texts or, simply, an escape from stardom.

Total advertising on connected TV devices and platforms will grow 37.6% in 2019 to hit $6.94 billion, forecasts eMarketer – and surpass $10 billion by 2021. “When looking at ad revenues, YouTube, Hulu and Roku are the leaders in this market,” eMarketer lead analyst Eric Haggstrom shared with Cynopsis. “Users of these platforms are likely either cord-cutters or cord-shavers. That means some TV ad buyers are willing to pay a premium to reach users who are difficult to reach via traditional TV ads. These platforms are also bulking up their targeting, programmatic and attribution capabilities in order to attract buyers from the digital world.” While these numbers comprise all programming, including sports, major recent deals that pro sports leagues have done with the likes of Amazon and YouTube prove that they understand where the content consuming world is going and are already headed in that direction.

Boston Marathon Charity eclipses $100 million in donations for cancer over its 20 years. According to Tucson.com, Boston Marathon runners participating on behalf of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute since 1990 have surpassed the $100 million fundraising mark. The research center says more than $500,000 has already been raised by runners in next year's race, putting it over the threshold. Dana-Farber was one of the first charities allowed to use the Boston Marathon as a fundraiser. More than 500 runners are expected to take part in the 2020 race as part of the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge. They are hoping to raise $6.25 million. 100% of the money raised from the team's Boston Marathon runners supports promising cancer research in its earliest stages. The Boston Marathon is the pinnacle of marathon and media coverage and the race will make positive headlines as multiple charities will be highlighted on the day of the event next year, April 20, 2020.

Phillies coach Charlie Manuel will sleep on the street for charity. According to Crossing Broad, Manuel will be sleeping outside on a Philly street along with Larry Bowa and Phillies executives to raise money for the Covenant House “Sleep Out” program, which supports homeless youth. Charlie went on Twitter to explain that his family had 11 kids and that he “grew up poor,” so it’s a cause he can relate to. As of Friday, $1,415 of the $5,000 goal had already been raised. The sleep out will take place on November 21 and is not about pretending to be homeless. It’s an act of solidarity with the 4.2 million young people who experience homelessness each year. It’s a decision that we can’t stay indoors while so many kids remain outside. The funds raised will be donated to Covenant House, a shelter for kids experiencing homelessness and trafficking. Covenant House offers these young people respect and unconditional love, and their continuum of care provides essential services to help kids transition from homelessness to independence. Manuel is raising awareness of homelessness in Philadelphia and speaking from a place of respect, as he too suffered financial struggles in his childhood.

[alightinthelantern]

Naval architect William Francis Gibbs looks across the water at his creation: SS United States. Designed in the aftermath of WWII and the burgeoning Cold War, and the looming threat of a possible WWIII, the United States was designed as a passenger ship that could be converted over a series of days into a troopship---one that could, like the British liners RMS Queen Mary and RMS Queen Elizabeth had in the last conflict, carried multiple thousands of troops per voyage, a ship that America hadn’t had in WWII and had thus suffered for. The ship was built according to the U.S. Navy’s stringent standards, and in return the Government payed for $50 million of the $70 million bill, a subsidy the ship’s parent company United States Lines would never have been able to afford if on its own.

William Francis Gibbs, America’s foremost naval engineer and a man who, along with his brother Frederic and business partner Daniel Cox, had designed the lion’s share of American warships in WWII, and had converted the old German ocean liner Vaterland into the U.S. ship Leviathan after WWI, was the obvious choice for the job. In light of its role as a troop ship, the ship was over-designed: the ship had twice as many watertight compartments as the average liner and the bulkheads reached higher; it had separate engine rooms, each powering two of the ship’s four propellers, so that if one engine room were flooded the ship could still sail; the holds and tanks had enough capacity for the ship to travel 10,000 nautical miles (19,000 km) without refueling or taking on provisions; the only spaces taller than a single deck were the first-class main dining room and the ship’s theatre, lending to a greater than average structural integrity; and the majority of the ships’ doorways and openings, especially those leading out on deck, were located directly amidships, which is structurally sounder than doorways closer to the sides.

An incredibly brilliant and meticulous man, William Francis overlooked no detail, and as someone who’d watched many magnificent ships, most notably the French Normandie in 1942, burn to ruin over the years, he was adamant it would not happen to his ship. Nothing was flammable aboard the SS United States; fabrics were specially woven from flame-retardant fibers, paints used were non-flammable, and the only wood used aboard the ship at all were a handful of specially-fireproofed pianos and the kitchen butcher block. The ship was, for him, the culmination of a lifetime spent designing smaller ships while dreaming of building a superliner for America, and he poured his heart and soul into a project that for him had been ongoing most of his life.

The fastest ocean liner ever built, she had a top speed of over 40 knots and could steam in reverse in excess of 20 knots---faster than most ships of the day could, or even modern cruise ships can, travel forward. On her maiden voyage in 1952, leaving the Hudson River in New York City on July 3rd and arriving in Southampton, England on July the 7th, the United States crossed 3,000 miles between New York City and Southampton, England in 3 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes, at an average speed of 35.59 knots (65.84 km/h), shaving ten hours and two minutes off the 14 year old record of the venerable liner RMS Queen Mary, and snatching the Blue Riband, a title given to the fastest liner on the Atlantic, from her.

When interviewed in England, while the ship was docked in Southampton for two weeks for a series of fetes and galas, about his achievement, the United States’ Commander Commodore Harry Manning stated that he had actually only been cruising his ship throughout the record crossing. British journalists, still sore about the Queen Mary's lost title, called him a “Yankee braggart”, but Commodore Manning hadn’t been bragging. During her maiden voyage, the United States had only used two-thirds of her total power. The ship's engines were identical to those that powered U.S. aircraft carriers of the Forrestal class, as a result of the ship's duel-purpose design. Its eight massive boilers were each the size of a two-story brownstone house, and no more than six were ever in use on any voyage; in fact, the boilers were routinely rotated through service, allowing for maintenance on whichever two were not running while the ship was at sea. The United States was, and is to this day, the most over-engineered passenger ship in history. During the ship’s second set of sea trials (there were multiple trials and test runs spread out over six weeks before the ship started passenger service), the engines had been worked up to full capacity, and the ship had, for a time, achieved the astonishing speed of 43 knots (79.64 km/h). A crewman then aboard later reminisced that he’d seen the funnels belching thick black smoke, and that, as massive as they were (each funnel was as tall as a five-storey building, just as long, and half as wide), at such speed they were insufficiently ventilating the engines. Had the engines somehow been perfectly ventilated, he believed the ship might have attained even 50 knots, but at such speeds the engines would be inefficient and exorbitantly costly. The ship’s cruising speed on subsequent voyages throughout its 17-year service history averaged 31--32 knots, wherein the ship consumed about 400 barrels of oil per voyage, but at top speeds the amount shot up to roughly 1,000 barrels, an incredibly prohibitive figure.

Had she been going at full speed throughout the voyage though, the margin of victory against the Queen Mary's old record would undoubtedly been much greater.

[justforbooks]

On Not Knowing (Modern) Greek

By Johanna Hanink

Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Not Knowing Greek” was published in 1925, the same year as Mrs Dalloway. The title gestures not to Woolf’s (nor to anyone’s) ignorance of Ancient Greek syntax, morphology and vocabulary, but to the impossibility of knowing today “how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted.” The essay is nevertheless an encomium of ancient Greek thought and literature, and, ironically, a testament to Woolf’s own fine command of the ancient language.

I think of it sometimes when I reflect on two frustrations I have about “not knowing” Modern Greek: a version of Greek in which you can, in fact, hear words, laugh on cue, and watch actors act. The first is with myself, because I wish I knew the language better. The second is with the field of Classics, for not institutionally valuing—and for even dismissing—any aspiring classicist’s efforts to learn it. After all, the thinking goes, those hours would be better spent on Homer and Thucydides (or even “German for Reading”: leave it to us to kill off a living language).

Classicists like equally to brag and complain that they have to learn a lot of languages. Most American PhD programs require exams in Ancient Greek, Latin, German, and either French or Italian: if you know either French or Italian, the thinking goes, you can fake your way through the other.

These languages are the tools of the trade, but they are also metonyms for the philological traditions that we are expected to put on a convincing show of knowing—with, say, the occasional name-check of Wilamowitz. Once you decide to get serious about the field, you learn to take these traditions for granted as the most inherently valuable. The history of European classical scholarship is entangled with the esteem that Greek and Latin have enjoyed in countries where German, French, Italian, or English is spoken. Many scholars who identify with the European classical tradition assume that any scholarship worth reading, or at least citing, will be in one of those four languages.

On the one hand, the modern language requirements of Classics PhD programs should really start to reflect that interesting and important things have been said and are being said about Greco-Roman antiquity in countless languages other than English, German, French, and Italian (why not accept Turkish or Arabic or Chinese—isn’t, after all, scholarship really just a form of “reception”?). On the other, the absence of Modern Greek from the list of discipline-approved languages is itself curious, and stranger still if you consider how classicists love to spend time, and to talk about spending time, in Greece.

Like fourteen European countries and two other former British colonies (Canada and Australia), the United States has a home base for its archeologists and classicists in Athens, at the American School of Classical Studies. It should go without saying that plenty of scholarship has been and continues to be written in Greek; Greek universities often have enormous Classics departments. There is simply more information in Greek about Greek archeological sites, both at the sites and in print. And for better or for worse Greek antiquity is more urgently present in national conversations (and at bookstores and on social media) in Greece than anywhere else.

So why does Modern Greek still not have a seat at the classicists’ table? This is, bluntly put, largely because our discipline continues to take a colonialist view of, among other things, Greece, Greeks, and (Modern) Greek. Historians and anthropologists who work on Greece have been much more willing than classicists to acknowledge the country’s legacy of metaphorical colonization: not by the Ottomans, but by the early European antiquaries and travelers who planted their flags in the ruins of Greek antiquity.

At a time when European powers were scrambling to expand their empires, the travelers’ influential approach to the Ottoman-held “Classical Lands” was, as historian K.E. Fleming points out, “representative of a different form of colonialism, in which the history and ideology, rather than territory, of another country” is “claimed, invaded, and annexed.” Viewed through the lens of the present, the people who undertook this more “symbolic” colonization of Greece look a great deal like early versions of classicists.

Thanks to their proprietary attitude toward antiquity, they largely discounted local knowledge and described local people as apathetic to the ancient past whose ruins they seemed to live so blithely among (see here for evidence to the contrary). This kind of thinking was in turn used to justify, among other things, the removal of antiquities from Greece to countries where, supposedly, they would be better appreciated and cared for. All of this makes for a very long and complex story—one in which Greeks were hardly passive participants.

One of the story’s many legacies is that classicists trained in the “Western” classical tradition tend to disregard Modern Greek as a scholarly language, while Greeks who want to participate in the tradition—to have their voices and ideas heard abroad— earn degrees in other countries and publish their research in English, German, or French. Granting Modern Greek a more valued place in the professional conversation would be a positive step for a field that, on the point of colonialism, has a lot to answer for.

Beyond the political argument—and on the more personal, spiritual level that Woolf evokes in her own essay—the struggle to learn Modern Greek can bring a special kind of joy to those of us who first came to the language in its ancient form. That joy is the main reason I recommend that classicists spend at least a little time on Modern Greek, and ignore the gnawing voice that will say it’s a waste of time.

In a recent blog post (“What does the Latin actually say?”), Mary Beard makes an important point: for a lot of people it is hard for people to learn dead languages because we learn them passively. “It is both the plus and the minus of Latin,” she writes, “that we never have to ask for a pizza, or the way to the swimming pool, in it.”

My own learning style is certainly more “verbal” than “logical.” I like to talk, so I make much slower progress at learning dead languages passively than at learning living languages actively (my German is bad, but I could think of no greater waste of my own time than a “German for Reading” class). Modern Greek, of course, is not Ancient Greek: the linguistic politics here are particularly delicate and complex for historical reasons. The pronunciation can be a psychological barrier, and the language has changed since antiquity: classicists are often especially surprised to learn that infinitives have long since passed out of use. Greek also brims with borrowings from Turkish, Albanian, Italian, French, English…. But so what? Classicists’ own modern language requirements count Italian and French as substitutes for each other.

There’s no denying that having to decline Greek nouns when I order a pizza, or manipulate Greek verbs when I ask the way to the swimming pool, has brought even the ancient language to life for me. After years of studying Modern Greek, I have a far better recall for vocabulary, handle on verb forms, and instinctive sense for accentuation. The time I have dedicated to Modern Greek is some of the best I have spent as a classicist, since it has given me a sounder, more internalized sense of the ancient language (a better Sprachgefühl, as a more responsible classicist might say).

It’s fun, too, to learn how meanings of words have changed over time. For years ὁφόρος was, in my mind, the tribute paid to Athens by its Delian League allies. Now the word just means “tax” (inasmuch as tax ever “just” means tax). Being αγαθός nowadays is not usually such a good thing. A στήλη can be a “column” in a newspaper (or on Eidolon). In chapter 4 of thePoetics, Aristotle observes just how much pleasure people take in learning and inferring: in looking at an image of someone and recognizing, “Oh, that’s him” (οὗτοςἐκεῖνος, 1448b).

Making connections between two things—hearing a new word and realizing you already know it, just differently—sends a spark of joy through the brain. And anyway there is something to be said for a language that allows you to describe a tall, fit guy as a kouros in everyday conversation.

The twists and turns of Greek linguistic history also mean you can play specifically with avoiding Ancient Greek. Oftentimes there is a choice between describing something with a “high-register” word with ancient roots or a “low-register” vernacular or foreign word. Liver, for example, is συκώτι (derived, like Italian fegato and French foie, from a word for “fig”), but when the matter is a disease of the liver the more classicist-friendly ήπαρ is common. Speaking of liver, who would you buy it from: the κρεοπώλης or the χασάπης? The one features in beginning Ancient Greek textbooks; the other comes from Turkish. A Greek professor of Latin once told me that he revels in speaking English precisely because it offers similar opportunities to play with the nuance of register: between Anglo-Saxon, French and Latinate diction (to use a classic example, does Elizabeth II strike you as queenly, royal, or regal?).

The Facebook page Ancient Memes exploits the space between these levels by captioning “high-register” artworks with dialogue in very modern, “low-register” Greek. Reading things like Ancient Memes, or my few copies of “Aristophanes in Comics,” has introduced new playfulness into my approach to Ancient Greek. And play, of course, is one of ways we learn best.

So what is still keeping many classicists (again, leaving the more political argument aside) from seizing the real practical benefits that Modern Greek has to offer: the opportunity to spend time in Greece more comfortably, the chance to collaborate with Greek colleagues more substantively, the opportunity to bolster our grasp of the language and its extremely longue durée, and to procrastinate by laughing at Ancient Memes?

When I posed a version of the question to a professor in Thessaloniki, he had a good answer. Classicists, he suggested, are easily embarrassed and afraid to make mistakes. Making mistakes is crucial for language acquisition, and sometimes the mistakes will be horribly embarrassing ones (I have, in polite conversation, said τσιμπούκι when I meant τσιμπούρι). Once, after I paid for books at a bookstore in Greece, I overheard the woman who had just rung me out ask a colleague with genuine bewilderment: “What does she want with an Ancient Greek book if she can’t even speak Greek?” In a field that already demands so much posturing, so much pretense of knowing Greek and Latin, risking mistakes and “not knowing” means risking a lot of your ego.

But it’s worth it. Learning Modern Greek, at least to the extent that I have managed to learn it, has made both my life and my relationship with my work all the richer. I haven’t even mentioned the unique pleasure that modern Greek literature offers the classicist. That sheer enjoyment aside, few people have been more influential in shaping modern views of Greek antiquity than George Seferis, or have problematized the periodization of Greek poetry more than Constantine Cavafy (translated into English most recently by critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn). I first came to Modern Greek after reading Seferis’ essay “Delphi” (Greek here), but since then have actually come to prefer paddling around in Greek literature’s less classical waters.

Nevertheless, since I’m teaching ancient Greek mythology again this semester, the text I’m most excited about right now is Auguste Corteau’s Νεοελληνική Μυθολογία. It is a parodic re-imagining of ancient Greek myths: on one page, Erebus makes a move on his sister Nyx: “Hush you idiot,” she replies, “Mom’ll hear and call Social Services.” Later, Kronos appears on the beach and informs his father he’s come to play paddle ball. “But I don’t see any balls,” says Ouranos. “Nor will you ever again,” says Kronos.

Now, with the prospect of a long plane ride ahead of me, I’m looking forward to having a few quiet hours with the book—no matter how much of it I manage to understand, or how often I know when I ought to laugh.

Johanna Hanink is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University, US.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[hudsonespie]

German World War II Cruiser Discovered Off Norway

Karlsruhe 1934 in San Diego - U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph

The wreckage of one of Germany’s most famous World War II-era vessels, the light cruiser Karlsruhe, was recently found quite by accident in the waters off Norway. While the history of the vessel, which was the only large German ship lost during the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940 was well known, until now the wreckage of the ship had never been located.

According to reports from Norwegian energy company Statnett, during a routine inspection in April 2017 of a power cable running from Norway to Denmark along the seafloor, they noticed the image of a shipwreck. It was approximately 15 meters from the undersea cable and from the images on sonar it appeared to be a large vessel.

Image from the ROV of the vessel on the seafloor - all current images courtesy of Statnett

Three years later, in June 2020, an expedition got underway aboard the offshore vessel Olympic Taurus to explore the wreck which was lying approximately 13 nautical miles from Kristiansand in southern Norway. Statnett’s senior project engineer Ole Petter Hobberstad working with a team of experts got their first glimpses of the vessel using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with multi-beam echo sounders. 

“When the ROV results showed us a ship that was torpedoed, we realized it was from the war,” Hobberstad says. “As the cannons became visible on the screen, we understood it was a huge warship. We were very excited and surprised that the wreck was so big.”

Analysis of the images confirmed that they had located the final resting place of the German light cruiser Karlsruhe approximately 490 meters below the surface resting upright on the seafloor. “You can find Karlsruhe's fate in history books, but no one has known exactly where the ship sunk,” explains Frode Kvalø, archaeologist and researcher at the Norwegian Maritime Museum. “After all these years we finally know where the graveyard to this important warship is.”

Construction of the Karlsruhe had begun in 1926 with the hull being launched the following year. With Germany’s navy severely restricted by the World War I armistice, the vessel along with two sister ships was among the largest and finest ships of the German navy during that era. She was commissioned in 1929. Measuring 571 feet in length and powered by steam turbines she could achieve speeds of 32 knots. She was manned by 21 officers and 493 sailors. Her primary armaments were nine 150mm/60 guns C/25 in three turrets. The ships had an unusual placement of two aft turrets each offset to one side of the hull. 

During the 1930s the Karlsruhe was used primarily as a training vessel for the German navy making a range of cruises including around the world voyages. She was also deployed off Spain during the revolution. In 1938, the ship was sent to a shipyard for a major reconditioning which prepared her for World War II.

The Karlsruhe saw action in the Baltic and she ordered to carry troops for the invasion of Norway. Sailing from Bremerhaven on April 8, 1940 heading to Kristiansand, she lay off the city waiting for a heavy fog to lift. As she entered the fjord the following day she came under heavy bombardment with the cruiser and the Norwegian guns engaged in the artillery barrage for nearly two hours before the fog again covered the port. The Norwegian surrenders and the Karlsruhe disembarked the troops.

The Karlsruhe was outbound from the fjord when she was attacked by a British submarine. She was hit by two torpedoes, one forward and one midship. Flooding it was determined that the cruiser was mortally wounded and could not make the voyage back to Germany. Her crew abandoned the ship and a German torpedo boat fired two more shots sending the Karlsruhe to the bottom.

Barrels from the ship's famous guns on three turrets - all current images courtesy of Statnett

The images of the vessel on the seafloor are unique according to Kvalø in that the Karlsruhe is sitting upright with her turrets intact. He says that most warships, with a high center of gravity, typically roll over when they were sunk. 

Statnett’s Hobberstad says that he is glad that they finally got the opportunity to investigate the mysterious wreck so close to their cable and could share the news of their discovery with the world.

All current images courtesy of Statnett

from Storage Containers https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/german-world-war-ii-cruiser-discovered-off-norway via http://www.rssmix.com/

[palmoilmillmachine-blog]

Will palm oil-free certification save forests?

One year since the launch of the world’s first certification programme for palm oil-free products, 705 products globally have been declared free from the controversial edible oil. But what has going palm oil-free achieved?

The global movement to avoid palm oil is growing.

In the one year since the International Palm Oil Free Certification Accreditation Programme (POFCAP) was launched in Australia, it has declared 705 products from 18 countries free of the controversial vegetable oil, and is helping shoppers make informed choices as they browse supermarket shelves.

Certified palm oil-free products include skincare products, pet food, and the POFCAP orangutan logo can even be found on the food and drinks menu of a restaurant in the United Kingdom. The certifying body intends to have certified a total of 1,000 products by its second anniversary.

POFCAP  is the world’s first palm oil-free certification standard for products, companies and manufacturing processes. Co-founder Bev Luff tells Eco-Business in an email interview that the idea arose out of many years of fundraising and public awareness efforts, and research about palm oil and deforestation among the team’s co-founders.

“We wanted to help consumers find products that are genuinely palm oil and palm oil derivative-free and independently tested, and at the same time create a new funding stream to help organisations around the world that are working to protect rainforests,” she says.

Growing public awareness of deforestation and worker exploitation in manufacturing supply chains is driving a ground-up movement to avoid palm oil, and environmentally conscious companies such as British soapmaker Lush are working to purge palm oil from their products.

In the year since POFCAP launched, it has been approved for use in 13 countries including Austria, Spain, Sweden and the UK, and is waiting for clearance from five more.

Not all of these countries are in Europe, heartland of the anti-palm oil movement. Also pending approval is Singapore, headquarters for palm oil companies Wilmar International, Musim Mas and Golden Agri-Resources. POFCAP applied for approval in November 2016.

The organisation is also helping companies gain more visibility into their supply chains. “Through our research over the years we learned very quickly that many companies had no idea that they were using palm oil derivatives, and so the palm oil-free claims on their products were false. We believe it was ignorance rather than intentional,” says Luff. Part of the difficulty is that palm oil and its derivatives have hundreds of names, many of which are not obviously linked the crop.

It has even received inquiries from companies in Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producers, but had to turn them down because POFCAP is not yet approved there, says Luff.

Currently, 50 per cent of certified palm oil-free products are from the Asia Pacific region, mostly due to strong support from Australia.

The latest additions to the list are eight edible oils and a canola meal product for feeding livestock, from Australian company MSM Milling.

Communications and brand manager Genya Miller tells Eco-Business: “No two consumers are the same in their buying habits. If we can give them a choice when they’re standing in the supermarket and it’s a toss-up between a generic vegetable oil with them having no idea what it contains, and one that’s a certified palm oil-free vegetable oil, it makes the choice easier.”

Miller adds that the firm, which has never used palm oil, intends to pursue certification for more of its products so it can display the POFCAP orangutan logo on its website, packaging and marketing collateral.

POFCAP charges two sets of fees for each product to be certified: an application fee and a second fee for successful application, as well as a licence fee to be renewed every three years. The cost is determined by the company’s annual revenue. The idea is for profits to go towards partner NGOs, such as the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, once POFCAP is on sounder financial footing.

Luff says that while consumers and companies appear to regard being palm oil-free as the “next ethical and environmental step towards true sustainability”, POFCAP is apolitical and not part of the palm oil free movement.

“There will always be consumers who wish to avoid palm oil for allergy, dietary or ethical reasons,” she remarks, and says POFCAP is a tool to aid decision-making. Furthermore, protecting the world’s rainforests requires a “multi-pronged approach and we support any organisation or campaign helping to reduce deforestation and consumption”.

“We too desire for 100 per cent of all palm oil produced to be identity preserved, certified sustainable palm oil, however it [makes up] only a small percentage now and that has taken 15 years,” she says, referring to the 21 per cent of the world’s palm oil supply that has been certified sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a palm oil industry certification body.

“Ensuring that all palm oil produced is sustainable is a mammoth undertaking that will take time, and we do not even know if it is achievable,” says Luff.

Good intentions

POFCAP says it is not part of the global movement away from palm oil—which has drawn criticism. Some say the European Union’s planned ban on palm oil for biofuels is undermining efforts to shift the industry towards more sustainable practices and ignores the fact that palm oil provides upwards of 3.5 million jobs in Malaysia and Indonesia alone.

Others like research organisation World Resources Institute Indonesia’s sustainable commodities and business manager, Andika Putraditama, say that while switching to other vegetable crops “sounds compelling”, it may have the inadvertent effect of driving more deforestation because other oil crops are less efficient and more land is needed to grow them.

Citing a recent International Union for Conservation of Nature report that said the best course of action is to reform the palm oil industry and avoid further deforestation, he says: “We should start looking at the root of the problem, and not the crop itself.”

“Without [addressing the root of unsustainable land use], no matter what the crops are, the problems we face today with palm oil will persist,” he warns.

[mikemortgage]

‘He changed the world’ – Reaction to Paul Allen’s death

SEATTLE — Reaction to the death of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died Monday:

Paul Allen’s contributions to our company, our industry and to our community are indispensable. As co-founder of Microsoft, in his own quiet and persistent way, he created magical products, experiences and institutions, and in doing so, he changed the world. I have learned so much from him — his inquisitiveness, curiosity and push for high standards is something that will continue to inspire me and all of us at Microsoft. Our hearts are with Paul’s family and loved ones. Rest in peace. — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in a statement.

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I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Paul Allen. From our early days together at Lakeside School, through our partnership in the creation of Microsoft, to some of our joint philanthropic projects over the years, Paul was a true partner and dear friend. Personal computing would not have existed without him. But Paul wasn’t content with starting one company. He channeled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people’s lives and strengthening communities in Seattle and around the world. He was fond of saying, “If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it.” That’s the kind of person he was. Paul loved life and those around him, and we all cherished him in return. He deserved much more time, but his contributions to the world of technology and philanthropy will live on for generations to come. I will miss him tremendously. — Bill Gates, in a statement.

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While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much-loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend. –sister Jody Allen, in a statement.

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Paul Allen stands as a giant in Washington history for the genius vision that was so important to creating Microsoft with Bill Gates. That he went on to do so much more for our state, nation and the world puts him in rarefied company. — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, in a statement.

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Paul Allen was the driving force behind keeping the NFL in the Pacific Northwest. His vision led to the construction of CenturyLink Field and the building of a team that played in three Super Bowls, winning the championship in Super Bowl XLVIII. The raising of the “12th Man” flag at the start of every Seahawks home game was Paul’s tribute to the extraordinary fan base in the Seattle community. His passion for the game, combined with his quiet determination, led to a model organization on and off the field. He worked tirelessly alongside our medical advisers to identify new ways to make the game safer and protect our players from unnecessary risk. I personally valued Paul’s advice on subjects ranging from collective bargaining to bringing technology to our game. Our league is better for Paul Allen having been a part of it and the entire NFL sends its deepest condolences to Paul’s family and to the Seahawks organization. ??– NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, in a statement.

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RIP to my dear friend (& killer guitar player) Paul Allen. Your genius & generosity has & will forever be felt by mankind. — music mogul Quincy Jones, via Twitter.

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Paul was a remarkable pioneer, a generous philanthropist and a special partner for us. SKG wouldn’t have been possible for us without him. Our hearts and prayers are with him and his family. — Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, in a statement.

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Paul was a true son of Seattle who made his beloved city – and our world – a better, more vibrant place. For generations to come, Seattleites and people across our planet will benefit from his vision, innovation, and generosity. He quite literally helped invent the future. — Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, in a statement.

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Rest in Peace, Paul Allen. — National Football League, via Twitter.

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Deeply saddened by the passing of Paul Allen. I’ll miss him greatly. His gracious leadership and tremendous inspiration will never be forgotten. The world is a better place because of Paul’s passion, commitment, and selflessness. His legacy will live on forever. — Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll, in a statement.

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We miss you. We thank you. We love you. — Portland Trail Blazers, via Twitter.

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Big dog rest easy as you go home Paul Allen prayers for your family. — Oakland Raiders running back and former Seattle Seahawk Marshawn Lynch, via Twitter.

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I will be always thankful for Paul Allen’s generosity and his kind heart. He was a genius, and genuine person, who cared about humanity all over the world and it was an honour to be able to learn from and be around such a great leader. — Philadelphia Eagles defensive end and former Seattle Seahawk Michael Bennett, via Twitter.

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Thank you for being you, Paul Allen. Grateful I had the chance to know you. — Seahawks wide receiver Doug Baldwin Jr., via Twitter.

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Paul Allen was the ultimate trail blazer — in business, philanthropy and in sports. As one of the longest-tenured owners in the NBA, Paul brought a sense of discovery and vision to every league matter large and small. He was generous with his time on committee work, and his expertise helped lay the foundation for the league’s growth internationally and our embrace of new technologies. He was a valued voice who challenged who challenged assumptions and conventional wisdom and one we will deeply miss as we start a new season without him. Our condolences go to his family, friends and the entire Trail Blazers organization. — NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, in a statement.

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I am so sorry to hear this!!! Thank you Paul for your generosity towards myself and Darbury. Thank you for the wonderful monument of (Museum of Pop Culture) for Seattle Music. You built Seattle into a great city. Rest in Peace. — Former Nirvana star Krist Novoselic, via Twitter.

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Our industry has lost a pioneer and our world has lost a force for good. We send our deepest condolences to Paul’s friends, the Allen family and everyone at Microsoft. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, via Twitter.

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Seattle Sounders FC offers its deepest condolences to the Allen family during this difficult time. We stand united with our community in mourning the loss of one of our regions’ great icons. Paul Allen was a profound public leader, leaving an indelible mark on many aspects of civic life here in Settle, including the growth and success of professional soccer. He will be greatly missed. — Seattle Sounders Football Club, via Twitter.

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Today we mourn the loss of Paul G. Allen, a man of extraordinary vision, leadership and generosity whose impact on our world is profound. Paul was a true innovator — co-founding Microsoft and launching the revolution that put a computer on every desktop — and what many would call a Renaissance man. The breadth of his curiosity was a hallmark of his life, whether it was delving into the mysteries of the brain, exploring the promise of artificial intelligence, working to protect endangered species, rocking out on the electric guitar or cheering on his beloved Seahawks. — University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce, in a statement.

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Very sad to hear of Paul Allen’s passing. His passion for invention and pushing forward inspired so many. He was relentless to the end. My heart goes out to Paul’s family and friends. — Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos

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Our founder let us fly with super heroes. He showed us that we could create beautiful music of our own. He inspired us to look to the stars. Today we mourn the passing of Paul Allen. — The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, via Twitter.

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Sad to hear of the passing of Paul Allen, who was a strong advocate for environmental protection. He and the team at Vulcan played a pivotal role in developing the Shark Conservation Fund alongside (The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation). His legacy lives on via his incredible work as a philanthropist and investor. — Leonardo DiCaprio, via Twitter.

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The world has lost a great technologist and philanthropist. Seattle has lost a true leader in our community. The legacy of Paul Allen will live on in the organizations he has built and the lives he has uplifted. — Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, via Twitter.

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We have lost a friend and a giant. Mr. Allen, thank you for your extraordinary vision, your abundant generosity and for believing in all of us. By your example, you made us all better, kinder. May you Rest In Peace. Go Hawks! — Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, via Twitter.

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RIP Paul Allen. Thank you for your immeasurable contributions to the community and beyond … Rock on. — Pearl Jam, via Twitter.

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Saddened by the passing of Paul Allen a great leader in tech and a man of all seasons who fully enjoyed his life and wealth yet also gave back to the world at scale. I was especially impressed with how he took care of the Oceans. May the one who brings peace bring peace to all. — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, via Twitter.

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So sad to hear about the passing of Paul Allen. Among many other things he was a pioneer of commercial space travel. We shared a belief that by exploring space in new ways we can improve life on Earth. All our thoughts are with his loved ones. — British billionaire Richard Branson, via Twitter.

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We will hear so much about the tremendous impact that Paul has had on our state, our country, and the world–but the impact he has had on the people he worked with and those who knew him best cannot be overstated. He leaves a legacy of compassion, innovation, and heart that none of us will soon forget, and all of us will honour. It was joy to know Paul and to see his incredible drive and incredible heart, and he will be missed by me and so many others. –U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, via Twitter.

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[vitalmindandbody]

The center of darkness that still vanquishes within our 24 -hour cities

With technology man has subjugated the night. Yet walk wall street alone at 3am, and still the sorcery and whodunit ooze through

On some nighttimes, in the insomniac interims between roaring goods trains, and beneath the voice of ambulance alarms, I can hear owls announcing mournfully to one another from the trees that screen the rail lines flowing past the back of the house in which I live in inner London. On most nights, alongside the outcries of parties engaging or having sexuality, I hear the bag of cats and foxes screaming sporadically, as if they are being tortured. On some mornings, when a thin illumination firstly leaks through my dazzles, I can discover a cockerel croaking from a plot in which chickens are remained a couple of streets away. Rarely, when the mornings are resonantly still, the insistent tap of a woodpecker chiselling at a tree trunk wakes me.

The city at night is far eerier, far more feral than it is in the day. It is far harder to anthropomorphise, far more difficult to domesticate. In detail, the city doesnt necessarily sound and feel like a metropolis, a center of advanced civilisation, when most of its population is fast asleep. It can resound and experience a little bit closer to sort than culture. As Virginia Woolf once point out here that with a noticeable appreciation of frisson, we are no longer fairly ourselves after dark. She enjoyed the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight give. Our cities, like ourselves, can seem alien and unfamiliar at night. And if you listen to them attentively, as though through an echo sounder, they are able to sounds the including darkness give from its profundities the interferences and pulsates of the capitals pre-modern past.

The dins I sometimes hear from my bedroom, for example, are identifiably offsprings of those that the author and printer William Baldwin enumerated in his eccentric irony Beware the Cat ( 1553 ), one of “the worlds largest” suggestive evidences we have of London in the 16 th century. At one point, Baldwins protagonist, Gregory Streamer, ingests a narcotic drugs and lies in his assembly at Aldersgate listening with preternatural discovering to the commixed rackets of the nocturnal metropolitan. These include the barking of hounds, grunting of swine, shrieking of felines, thundering of rats; the ringing of bells, counting of coins, organizing of groins, moaning of suitors; also the scratching of owl, fluttering of poultry, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves. He might have added the tap of cobblers and the shovelling and scratching of nightmen, popularly known as Tom-Turd-Men, who were employed to clean the citys streets and privies after dark.

The night-time brooks our cities pasts. It channels their historical persistences and discontinuities with a clarity and vitality that our everyday lives, who the hell is influenced by an almost uninterrupted purposefulness, invariably obscure. It wishes to point out that we once shared these cities with innumerable swine, some of them tame, some of them not; and that to some extent we still do. It reminds us that, although we think about the 24 -hour city as a comparatively recent phenomenon if in the UK it is a phenomenon at all cities have always been hives of labour and leisure after nightfall. Baldwin, in his remarkable onomatopoeic prose poem, refers to the audible nocturnal activities of , among other things, grouting and rotating, baking and brewing. It reminds us, more, that we were once awful of the nighttime, and of the ones who colonize it, whether these expect the form of potential felons or the police; and that, to a astonishing level, especially if we come from socially marginalised radicals, we still are.

However efficiently artificial brightnes decimates the difference between night and day, the poet and critic Al Alvarez wrote, it never wholly omits the primitive suspicion that night beings are up to no good. Over the last four or five centuries, a series of social and technological changes have reshaped the city at night, progressively colonising it. The preamble of oil daylight, gaslight and electric light has, for example, successively reshaped it according to the needs of a diurnal territory. And the increase of working hours has reshaped it according to the needs of a daytime economy. But these changes havent entirely dispelled its pre-modern past. Cities encourage a centre of darkness that even the processes of industrialisation and electrification, the purpose of applying all-night plants and stores, all-night buses and instructs, have failed fully to conquer.

Gaslight earmarks high-jinks, circa 1820. Illustration: SSPL via Getty Images

In 1788, at the high levels of the Enlightenment, the Daily Universal Register triumphantly reported that not a single building in all London is perhaps now to be heard of which tolerates the repute of being an haunted house. Scientific rationalism, it was optimistically presupposed, had cleansed the citys darker, more strange targets with the coldnes, bright light-footed of reason, just as it had driven supernatural back to the dark ages. But, in the 21 st century as in previous ones, London abides, like all cities, a storehouse of archaic, if not primal, panics and anxieties at night. Anyone who has stepped through its empty streets alone at 3am, sensitive to the slightest flicker of motion in the darkness, knows this( not, of course, that these anxieties and nervousness are necessarily irrational, particularly if you happen to be a woman ).

Intellectual enlightenment and the practical illumination of wall street, both initiatives that sought to eradicate remnants of the medieval past, were closely complicit developments in the cities of early modern Europe. Arranged public street lighting had set in place in center regions of the British capital for a century by the time the newspaper report Ive repeated complacently declared that its constructs were finally free of ghosts. Paris, operating under the initiative of Louis XIVs council for the the process of reforming the policing of the city, spearheaded the policy in 1667. Other European metropolis, is cognizant of it was necessary to pre-empt petty crimes and forestall political schemes, are still in speedy succession: Amsterdam in 1669, Turin in 1675, Berlin in 1682, and London in 1684.

Replacing the lantern candles that private householders had formerly been required to erect outside their front doorways, most European civic authorities distributed petroleum torches, remain at public expenditure, to light-headed wall street on moonless darkness. The impression, is in accordance with contemporaries, was virtually overwhelming. The first report on the New Lights of the British metropolis, are presented in 1690 , noted in rapturous colours that they produced such a reciprocal thinking, that they all seem to be but one great Solar-Light.

Public illuminating had a decisive impact on Europes main routes, transforming them into places where, at the least when the condition was clement, beings could promenade and patronize after dark. The German novelist Sophie von La Roche, enraptured by Londons culture of intake, exploited a note of 1786 to describe the double sequences of brightly reflecting lamps that allowed pedestrians and people in tutors to gaze at Oxford Streets gorgeously lit shop fronts.

In some quite literal sense, the city at night in the late 17 th and 18 th centuries was flamboyant. As the rise of Londons coffee houses and pleasure garden-varieties expressed, nightlife became a distinct social phenomenon from this time. It was increasingly fashionable to stay up dancing, drinking, gambling and soliciting prostitutes all night and then be retained in berthed in all areas of the next day. This was in part because it dramatised an aristocratic repudiation of the protestant ethic and the minds of the capitalism. In populous, upwardly mobile societies like those pioneered in London and Paris, where separations of rank could all too easily be obliterated in the press of torsoes on the streets, the human rights of stray freely at night was a advantage. And at first light, when revellers careen home elapsed labourers marching to cultivate, it was once again unambiguously clear to which social class these people belonged.

A soul stops to talk to a polouse in the rain on the Thames embankment, 1929. Photograph: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But if street lighting gentrified and glamorised the commercial and political centres of Europes municipalities in this period, it relegated other regions to no-go neighbourhoods. The French dramatist Louis-Sbastien Mercier conveyed comfort in 1780 that millions of lubricant reflectors had recently changed torches in the French capital. But, as well as demonstrating that this excellent innovation had been marred by misdirected economy, he pointedly have also pointed out that, outside the shallow puddles of astonishing lighter that the oil lamps radiated, wall street had been immersed into a mist that seemed deeper and more impenetrable than ever. Surely, in the poorer areas of Europes metropolis, the new technology moved little gap to folks everyday lives. At night, the serpentine streets, suffocating courts and labyrinthine slums of the city were quite as overshadow and poisonous as they had been in the middle ages.

The introduction of gaslight in the early 19 th century had much the same effects, transforming the areas frequented by the upper and middle classes but leaving those inhabited by the poor pretty much untouched. Even so, alongside the professionalisation of Europes police forces, it revolutionised metropolitans at night. In 1807, as part of an energetic campaign to acquire London the first metropolis to be chiefly ignited at night by gas, the expat German entrepreneur Frederick Winsor attached an exhibition of its benefits in Pall Mall. The Monthly Magazine praised the success of this experiment and the beautifully white-hot and brilliant flare it made. By 1823 more than 200 miles of streets in London were ignited by virtually 40,000 lamps. Light had been industrialised.

Not everyone was happy about this development. Like other Romantics, John Keats deplored that the insinuate different forms of illumination links with candles and oil lamps, which lighted small areas with an uneven, gently flickering kindle, and which consequently generated a kind of contemplative aura, were being delivered to the past. An impersonal artificial flare, especially in the regions where the retail marketers let loose the gas, was progressively repulsing all the powers of darkness. Keats deplored the facts of the case that the citys authorities and commercial-grade pastimes were exiling nighttimes magic, its mystery and its splendor, from the city. And his famed Ode to a Nightingale( 1819 ), which celebrates the embalmed darkness, was a carefully staged attempt to summon it back.

The decorating the consequences of gaslight were far more uniform than those of oil, but electric lighting, which emerged in the 1880 s, inundated rather than plainly pooled the streets in which it was installed with an intense, apparently grey brightnes. Caricatures and depicts from the period proudly depict parties countenancing about on sidewalks speaking newspapers beneath etiolated electrical lamps. Electric street lighting became the ultimate button of metropolitan modernity, and European municipalities rivalled with one another to be the pre-eminent City of Light. In the end, New York engulf all of them, including Paris. Meanwhile, metropolis that retained their medieval terrain, and that were slow to introduce the new technology, were relegated to the past. In an clause titled Against Past-Loving Venice( 1910 ), the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti thundered: Give the reign of pious Electric Light eventually come, to liberate Venice from its venal moonshine

Harrods in London, flooded with light in 1935. Photo: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But, in spite of the unvarying glare of electrical street lights at the commercial-grade, industrial and residential centres, even the 20 th centurys most futuristic metropolis were shaped by socially peripheral, mainly working-class areas that remained plunged in darkness at night. The German astronomer Bruno H Brgel, echoing in 1930 the pride with which “his fathers”, who came from the days of lighting by oil-lamp, extended him through Berlins wealth of light-footed, drily find: A step into the side streets, and you seemed put over by centuries. It was not merely the is a lack of lighting, but the presence of the poor at night, and above all the homeless, that attained these regions seem like remainders of the pre-Enlightenment, pre-capitalist past. The houseless, as they used to be called, had been an endemic attendance in Europes municipalities after dark since the middle ages, when males and denizens of the street were criminalised as common nightwalkers.

The 20 th-century metropoli nonetheless staged the progressive colonisation of the night by the day, darkness by light-footed. Tables, cinema, golf-clubs, music halls, theatres and amusement parks catered ever more energetically to people appetite for recreation after hours. Indeed, the term after hours seemed more and more nonsensical, as mills, infirmaries, parts and supermarkets thrummed throughout the night. Even in what had for centuries been called the dead nighttime, roughly between 2am and 4am, the center of major metropolitan metropolitans situates like Piccadilly Circus and Times Square pulsated with beings. Electric light, Thomas Edison had insisted, necessitates darknes life, and darknes life represents progress.

In the early 1940 s, when the British uppercase was regularly immersed into darkness during the offensive, Edisons formula seemed all the more irrefutable. For at that time, conversely, the is a lack of electric light plunged London, and other European cities, into a government of cruelty. It was perhaps in part because of this traumatic know-how that the postwar generation redoubled its commitment to respect for obtaining the value of both labour and leisure from the darknes. The statement clubbing was first are applied to necessitate going to nightclubs in the mid-1 960 s, when the family of the individuals who been adults through the second world war set about overcoming this inheritance and regaining the night.

Since then, as the artistry historian Jonathan Crary lately wrote in his fine polemical 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep , the capitalist system has fostered the rise of national societies in which a position of permanent lighting is indispensable to the non-stop procedure of world-wide exchange and lighting. In the late 1990 s, to afford a magnificent sample, a Russian-European cavity consortium developed proposes to use satellites with paraboloid reflector to crystallize remote regions of Earth with sunlight and so enable work to be performed all over the clock. Promising dawn all darknes long, it also was suggested that entire metropolitan areas are likely to be crystallized after dark along these lines, rendering electric light itself anachronistic. Dreams of the elimination of the night can no longer be dismissed as science fiction.

In the 21 st century, electric lighting in advanced financier countries if not in innumerable developing nations is a uniform and universal facet of cities at night. So is travelling, browse, working and other activities that for much of the past seemed unimaginable taking place after dark. But in practice, as has been the case for millennia, some people have freer and fuller access to the city at night than others. Lone wives may experience excluded from it, for example, if simply because at certain times and in certain places they are made to feel unacceptably vulnerable. Black and Asian souls, for their segment, are far more likely to be criminalised in west metropolis than white-hot humankinds at night.

The 24-hour tube, “its probably” safe to prophesy, will not basically reform the facts of the case that for numerous people, if not for the citys person of cats and feral foxes, London stands, like other British metropolitans, at least partly off limits at night. We have a night-time economy; we need a night-time politics.

Matthew Beaumont is the author of Nightwalking: a Nocturnal History of London, 9.99, Verso. Click here to buy it for 8.19

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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[perkinsfamilyblog]

Lucius H. Perkins

LUCIUS H. PERKINS who resided at Lawrence from 1877 until his accidental death on June 1, 1907, contributed much more to the life of Kansas than the achievements of an able lawyer, great as those were and much as they distinguished him in professional circles. By his varied attainments and accomplishments, by his interest in literature and the broader humanities, he singularly enriched the thought and public opinions of his times. In a generation when the thoughts and energies of the people of Kansas were necessarily concentrated upon the fundamental problems of existence and constructive business, be exemplified that better balance between the practical business man and the thoughtful idealist and scholar. He proved that the successful lawyer could also have time for pure literature. He gained financial independence if not wealth by a large legal practice, and at the same time was one of the leaders of the literary life and affairs of the state.

The ordinary facts of biography can be briefly told. He was born on a farm in Racine County, Wisconsin, March 5, 1855. His parents were both natives of Onondaga County, New York and were among the pioneers of Southeastern Wisconsin. His father, Otis G. Perkins, was a farmer, was rated as successful and well to do, and in addition possessed the virtues of sterling integrity, thrift and energy. The later Mr. Perkins was also possessed of a long and honorable lineage. The Perkinses appeared in English history as early as the tenth century and were at that time an old and powerful and rich family. They possessed large estates surrounding Ufton Court, the ancestral stronghold in Berkshire. Some of the descendants still own that estate. The first American of the name was John W. Perkins, who come to America in the ship Lion in 1631, and became a member of the Masachusetts Bay Colony at Ipswich. The family later removed to Norwich, Connecticut, and the Perkins had their family seat there for nearly 200 years. From Connecticut they moved to Northern New York and from there this branch came to Southern Wisconsin. In the long line of American and English ancestry there were soldiers, sailors, lawyers, judges and statesmen.

Lucius H. Perkins had a farm training, was taught the virtues of industry and energy, and at the same time was given a liberal education. In 1877 he graduated in the classical course from Beloit College of Wisconsin. Then aspiring to a place in the world befitting his talents he came from Wisconsin to Lawrence, Kansas. He soon articled as a student of law in the office of Judge Solon O. Thacher. After two years of diligent study he was admitted to the bar in 1879, and in the following year was graduated with the first class of the law school of the state university. He was president of the State Bar Association for a period. Perhaps he attained his lasting fame by reason of his connection with the state university. He was one of the first to be appointed on the State Board of Law Examiners connected with the university and was retained in that position until his death.

With all the burdens and demands imposed upon him as a successful attorney he was throughout his life a scholar and a student. He devoted a great amount of time and energy to general literature, philosophy, and the science of government and constitutional and international law. He never put off the role of a student. In 1897 he entered upon a course of post-graduate study and after three years was awarded the degree Doctor of Civil Laws by the University of Chicago. Mr. Perkins was entrusted with a volume of important litigation, not only in Kansas but in other states. His practice afforded him a liberal income, and he used it wisely in forwarding the many movements with which he was identified at different times.

What has been called his greatest service to his profession was the work he did to bring about a uniform system of examination for admission to the bar throughout the United States. As chairman of the national committee, composed of representative lawyers from different states, he did more than any one else to reduce the system of bar examinations to a science. Again and again he was quoted as the highest authority on the subject by the leading universities and by eminent lawyers.

From his youth up he was a devout Christian and long a member of the First Congregational Church of Lawrence. For over twenty years he was one of the active workers in the republican party. His logical mind, his gift as a debater and speaker, and his insight into economic questions enabled him to perform a notable service for hi; party and for the country when the free silver craze was at its height in 1896. He not only saw the fallacies in the financial arguments that were so common at the time, but had the better ability to explain and expound these fallacies and show the better side of a sounder monetary system. Under the direction and at the request of the county central committee he prepared and delivered four subjects on financial topics and was a speaker in much demand during that presidential campaign

While he was a member of several fraternal orders he was especially zealous in the Masonic Order. From 1883, when he was made a Master Mason, until the day of his death he devoted his time, his talents, and his money to the up-building of the order, which to him stood for all that is purest and noblest in the life of man. His genial manners, his kindly smile, his keen intellect and warm heart endeared him to all who came under their spell. He meant much to Masonry in Kansas. He was at his best in the Scottish Rite, and his zeal and marked ability in its work brought him the highest honor within the gift of the Rite, that of Sovereign Grand Inspector, with the honorary thirty-third degree.

On May 15, 1882, Mr. Perkins married Miss Clara L. Morris, daughter of Dr. Richard Morris, a physician who located in Lawrence shortly after the close of the Civil war. Mrs. Perkins was a graduate of the University of Kansas and at the time of her marriage a member of the university faculty. She possessed the culture that made her a companion in study and aims as well as the helpmate of a home. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins had four children: Bertram Allan, born April 14, 1883, and died when four years old; Clement Dudley, born August 2, 1885, and now a resident of San Bernardino, California; Rollin Morris, born March 15, 1889, is at present an assistant professor in the law department of the Iowa State University, and Lucius Junius, born March 11, 1897, is now a student at Kansas University.

Mr. Perkins was fond of travel, gave his family many advantages in that direction and at one time he and his wife and children spent three years abroad. Much of that time he spent in the British Museum pursuing special study along his favorite lines. Devotedly attached to his home, loving the companionship of his fellow men, it naturally followed that his geniality at home was at its best. He could be and was dignified, but at times he acted as a boy again. He played ball with his own boys, and the home was a rendezvous for all the neighboring boys.

Considering the breadth of his culture and attainments, it is not strange that he was often thought of in connection with some of the larger honors of the profession. At one time his name was prominently suggested for appointment to the Kansas Supreme Court, and his elevation to such a position would have been as creditable to the state as a personal honor to himself.

To those who did not know Mr. Perkins personally, and to future Kansans who may wish to understand more of his life and purpose the preceding statements are inadequate as a complete picture. One of his old friends was Hon. Charles Scott, president of the Kansas Historical Society and editor of the Iola Daily Register. Mr. Scott in an editorial appearing in the Register after the death of Mr. Perkins expressed a tribute sympathetic but just, and supplying much that has been left unsaid above. This editorial in part is quoted as follows:

"Lucius H. Perkins had good fortune, the best of all good fortunes, to be well born. For 200 years or more the family from which he sprang has been important people in the communities in which they happened to live. Not rich, but thrifty. Not geniuses, but strong in character and common sense. From this sterling sturdy stock Lucius Perkins came into the world endowed with a robust and athletic body, with a keen and vigorous mind, and with a character that instinctively rejected and despised the things that were mean and base and degrading. Born to neither poverty nor riches, he reached in a large measure the advantages of both those conditions. Poverty was not so far away but that the boy was bred to work and to learn by earning it the value of a dollar. And riches were not so far far away but that books and music and a college education were within reach. And so the young man when he came of age fronted the world well armed for the battle.

"And the victories came. Not easily always, for the world does not surrender even to the boldest and most fortunate without a blow, without many blows given and taken. There were many long years when it was hard to tell which way the balance would turn, years of tireless toil and unremitting vigilance and relentless persistence. The sturdy body was tested to the utmost and the keen-edged intellect must parry and thrust in ceaseless fencing with adroit opponents and adverse conditions. But in the end the victories came. Victories which brought an assured and honorable professional position, the opportunity, gladly embraced, for notable and important public work, and wealth enough to assure the spacious home for which his hospitable soul thirsted and the comfort and maintenance of the family which was his soul's delight.

"And as the struggle had not embittered him, the victories did not destroy the sweet and simple kindliness and modesty that made men love him. In the tiny cottage that for so many years was his home he received his friends with the same warmth of hospitality which in later years he greeted them in the stately mansion which he had builded with such loving care and in which he had looked forward to keeping 'open house' through the golden years of the slowly declining afternoon of life; and he welcomed his friends by the hundred in the new home with its rich and luxurious appointments with the same modesty and lack of affectation which marked his manner in the small beginning days.

"And the reason he could do this was because by his nature his mind was large and broad, while by training and culture his soul had attained to the full stature of unselfish and noble manhood. All of his life he was a student, not of his law books only, but of the world's best literature, not forgetting the old classics with which, in their original tongues, he was as familiar on the day of his death as he was at the end of his college course. He was not only a student of books all his life, but he was a lover of nature and a lover of men. He loved the growing things, and on his home lawn were innumerable trees, shrubs and vines that he had set out or planted with his own hands and had tended as lovingly as if they were living souls. He enjoyed far beyond the capacity of most men the society of his friends, and he was lavish in his entertainment of them. During the past winter alone, the first winter in the new home, a thousand or more of his friends had at one time or another been welcomed under his roof with a hospitality which had no limit except that of time and opportunity. And this lavish hospitality had in it no hint or suggestion of mere vanity or self exploitation. It sprang from a kindly, sympathetic, loving nature to which the society of family and friends was as natural and as necessary as sunlight."

A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, written & compiled by William E. Connelley, Secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, copyright 1918; transcribed November 11, 1998.

Francis M. Perkins

FRANCIS M. PERKINS, President of the Perkins Trust Company of Lawrence has been a prominent factor in financial and business affairs of that city and of the state at large for more than forty years.

He was the first of his family to come to Kansas. Mr. Perkins was born in Racine County, Wisconsin, on a farm June 21, 1846. His parents were Otis' Goodspeed and Julia Ann (Bender) Perkins. His father was a descendant of John W. Perkins of Ipswich, Massachusetts, who came to Massachusetts Colony in 1631 and was originally from Ufton Court, the large family estate of Berkshire, England. A large part of this old English estate is still owned by a member of the family. For fully 200 years the Perkins family lived in Connecticut and from that point they spread westward to New York and thence to Wisconsin. Mr. Perkins' parents were among the pioneers of Southern Wisconsin, locating there when Wisconsin was still a territory. Francis M. Perkins is a brother of the late Lucius H. Perkins, the distinguished lawyer of Lawrence whose career is sketched on other pages.

Francis M. Perkins grew up on a Wisconsin farm, and his people being well to do he was given a liberal education. He spent two years in Beloit College, was a teacher for some time, and finally became identified with merchandising in Milwaukee.

In 1875 he came to Kansas, and having friends at Lawrence located there and embarked in the mortgage investment business. Two years later his brother Lucius H. came to Lawrence fresh from Beloit College, and after graduating from the law department of Kansas University in 1880 became associated with Francis in business. Francis M. Perkins conducted his enterprise under the firm name of Perkins & Company. Like other institutions that grow and flourish its beginning was humble. It was scarcely known outside of Douglas County for some years, but in time has become one of the leading institutions of Kansas, the scope of its operations is at least state wide, and the integrity and scrupulous business policy which have marked its course have proved individual benefits to thousands of the patrons.

In 1910 the Perkins Trust Company was organized with a capital of $100,000. In 1912 the company built its present home at the corner of Sixth and Massachusetts streets. Mr. F. M. Perkins has been president of this company from its organization. He and his brother in their business associations have done much for Lawrence. In connection with the Trust Company they bought the Citizens State Bank in 1914, and this bank is operated in connection with the Trust Company.

Francis M. Perkins is a republican in politics, is a third degree Mason, and throughout the more than forty years he has lived in Lawrence his name has come to be recognized as synonymous with ideal citizenship.

A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, written & compiled by William E. Connelley, 1918, transcribed by students from Baxter Springs Middle School, Baxter Springs, Kansas, February 28, 2000.

[hudsonespie]

German World War II Cruiser Discovered Off Norway

Karlsruhe 1934 in San Diego - U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph

The wreckage of one of Germany’s most famous World War II-era vessels, the light cruiser Karlsruhe, was recently found quite by accident in the waters off Norway. While the history of the vessel, which was the only large German ship lost during the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940 was well known, until now the wreckage of the ship had never been located.

According to reports from Norwegian energy company Statnett, during a routine inspection in April 2017 of a power cable running from Norway to Denmark along the seafloor, they noticed the image of a shipwreck. It was approximately 15 meters from the undersea cable and from the images on sonar it appeared to be a large vessel.

Image from the ROV of the vessel on the seafloor - all current images courtesy of Statnett

Three years later, in June 2020, an expedition got underway aboard the offshore vessel Olympic Taurus to explore the wreck which was lying approximately 13 nautical miles from Kristiansand in southern Norway. Statnett’s senior project engineer Ole Petter Hobberstad working with a team of experts got their first glimpses of the vessel using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with multi-beam echo sounders. 

“When the ROV results showed us a ship that was torpedoed, we realized it was from the war,” Hobberstad says. “As the cannons became visible on the screen, we understood it was a huge warship. We were very excited and surprised that the wreck was so big.”

Analysis of the images confirmed that they had located the final resting place of the German light cruiser Karlsruhe approximately 490 meters below the surface resting upright on the seafloor. “You can find Karlsruhe's fate in history books, but no one has known exactly where the ship sunk,” explains Frode Kvalø, archaeologist and researcher at the Norwegian Maritime Museum. “After all these years we finally know where the graveyard to this important warship is.”

Construction of the Karlsruhe had begun in 1926 with the hull being launched the following year. With Germany’s navy severely restricted by the World War I armistice, the vessel along with two sister ships was among the largest and finest ships of the German navy during that era. She was commissioned in 1929. Measuring 571 feet in length and powered by steam turbines she could achieve speeds of 32 knots. She was manned by 21 officers and 493 sailors. Her primary armaments were nine 150mm/60 guns C/25 in three turrets. The ships had an unusual placement of two aft turrets each offset to one side of the hull. 

During the 1930s the Karlsruhe was used primarily as a training vessel for the German navy making a range of cruises including around the world voyages. She was also deployed off Spain during the revolution. In 1938, the ship was sent to a shipyard for a major reconditioning which prepared her for World War II.

The Karlsruhe saw action in the Baltic and she ordered to carry troops for the invasion of Norway. Sailing from Bremerhaven on April 8, 1940 heading to Kristiansand, she lay off the city waiting for a heavy fog to lift. As she entered the fjord the following day she came under heavy bombardment with the cruiser and the Norwegian guns engaged in the artillery barrage for nearly two hours before the fog again covered the port. The Norwegian surrenders and the Karlsruhe disembarked the troops.

The Karlsruhe was outbound from the fjord when she was attacked by a British submarine. She was hit by two torpedoes, one forward and one midship. Flooding it was determined that the cruiser was mortally wounded and could not make the voyage back to Germany. Her crew abandoned the ship and a German torpedo boat fired two more shots sending the Karlsruhe to the bottom.

Barrels from the ship's famous guns on three turrets - all current images courtesy of Statnett

The images of the vessel on the seafloor are unique according to Kvalø in that the Karlsruhe is sitting upright with her turrets intact. He says that most warships, with a high center of gravity, typically roll over when they were sunk. 

Statnett’s Hobberstad says that he is glad that they finally got the opportunity to investigate the mysterious wreck so close to their cable and could share the news of their discovery with the world.

All current images courtesy of Statnett

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[rickhorrow]

15+5+5 To Watch 111119

15 TO WATCH/5 SPORTS TECH/POWER OF SPORTS 5: RICK HORROW’S TOP SPORTS/BIZ/TECH/PHILANTHROPY ISSUES FOR THE WEEK OF NOVEMBER 11

with Jacob Aere

Monday is Veteran’s Day, and sports entities are lining up their tributes. For starters, San Antonio-based insurer USAA is supporting ESPN’s annual veterans initiative which this year commemorates the 100th anniversary of the holiday. The insurance company’s activation will be highlighted by athletes, coaches, and celebrities issuing “shout-outs” to members of the military during SportsCenter and tributes on other ESPN platforms. Running November 7-11, ESPN’s America’s Heroes: A Salute to Our Veterans fare began with an hour-long SportsCenter special from Fort Campbell Military Base in Kentucky on November 7 on ESPN2. First Take aired live from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona the following day. In addition, the annual Armed Forces Classic was played from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska that night. And anyone watching football, basketball, and hockey over the weekend couldn’t help but notice the platoons of paratroopers, scoreboard salutes, and abundance of camouflage on all sidelines. Putting aside anything that divides us in sport and elsewhere, on Monday, all Americans should pause and say “thank you for your service” at some point during the day.

Sports investor Bruin Sports Capital received $600 million more to spend. According to the New York Times, Bruin Sports Capital is a sports investment and management company that invests in the technologies of media, marketing, and data surrounding sports. After raising $600 million from two even larger investors – CVC Capital Partners and the Jordan Company – Bruin Sports will be able to expand its portfolio of investments, which already include data analytics, media and streaming companies, and a fledgling drone-racing league. Currently, Bruin, led by Sport Business Handbook contributor George Pyne, has nearly $1 billion invested, including significant stakes in six companies across the modern sports landscape, from sports media start-ups such as The Athletic to a live-event provider selling high-end trips to events like the Super Bowl and the NFL draft. Overall, Bruin Sports Capital’s guiding philosophy is that people under 40 watch and consume sports and media in radically different ways from their parents – and this is likely how the strategic company will invest its newly-acquired $600 million: toward attracting future generations of sports and tech fans.

College basketball is underway, and we may soon see an end to the sport’s infamous “one and done” scenario. The "one-and-done" era began in 2006 when the NBA implemented a controversial age eligibility rule. And all signs point to that rule being changed back prior to the 2022 draft, restoring the legal right of 18-year-olds to declare out of high school. As Axios noted, “in other words, the sport you've come to know over the past decade-plus — the landscape you've grown so familiar with — might soon collapse into oblivion. Enjoy it while it lasts.” Axios also noted that it's been 23 years since a national basketball champion emerged west of Lawrence, Kansas, and that “the Eastern Time Zone has produced 21 of the past 22 national titles! Will the drought continue?” New college hoops coaches to watch this season include former NBA coaches Juwan Howard (Michigan), Jerry Stackhouse (Vanderbilt), and Fred Hoiberg (Nebraska); while Mick Cronin (Cincinnati to UCLA), Eric Musselman (Nevada to Arkansas), Buzz Williams (Virginia Tech to Texas A&M), and made lateral moves.

While the majority of America's top high school basketball talent chose to spend the year in college where they will earn $0 in wages, LaMelo Ball and R.J. Hampton chose to spend the year in Australia's National Basketball League, where they will earn $68,400. Ball was unlikely to be NCAA eligible anyway after playing professionally in Lithuania, but Hampton had full eligibility at an American college. Instead, he chose the path he thought would best prepare him for the NBA. Hampton's decision embodies the modern challenge facing college basketball, but fears over this becoming the new normal are exaggerated. After all, thanks to a new collective bargaining agreement on the horizon, the "one-and-done" era will likely end soon. And when it does, these alternative paths will be moot. We've seen international prospects make noise before, but we've never seen two young Americans — both active on social media with big followings: Ball has five million Instagram followers while RJ has 430,000 – playing  overseas while their former classmates play on campuses. Should be a fun storyline to follow this college basketball season and into next year’s NBA Draft.

IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway have a new owner. History was made last week for IndyCar, as the Board of Directors of Hulman & Company entered into an agreement to be acquired by Penske Corporation, selling principal operating assets, including the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), the NTT IndyCar Series, and IMS Productions to the corporation. This ended a legacy with the Hulman family and the racing series, as IMS was purchased by Tony Hulman and Hulman & Company in 1945, although the family will have an opportunity from Penske to remain involved with both the series and the speedway, according to ESPN. Said Tony George, Chairman of Hulman & Company, “The Indianapolis Motor Speedway has been the centerpiece and the cathedral of motorsports since 1909 and the Hulman-George family has proudly served as the steward of this great institution for more than 70 years. Now, we are honored to pass the torch to Roger Penske and Penske Corporation.” Penske is well respected within motorsports, and the deal will no doubt benefit all IndyCar stakeholders, from IMS itself to sponsors like Group1001, which backs young IndyCar driver Zach Veach. 

As “Ford v Ferrari” prepares to open nationwide, with Oscar in its sights, the Raiders have announced Desert Ford Dealers Las Vegas as founding partner of their new Allegiant Stadium. The tie-up also sees Ford, which has five dealerships across Las Vegas, named as the official vehicle of the Raiders. The deal gives Ford a year-round presence throughout Allegiant Stadium including pre-game tailgate activations and naming rights on the north gate entry. Construction on the $1.8 billion stadium is due for completion July 21. Said Raiders president Marc Badain, “We are excited to add another world-wide brand to the Raider family and for the annual activation and tailgating experiences this partnership will provide to our fans.” Set to open this Friday, “Ford v Ferrari” focuses on the relationship between visionary car designer Carroll Shelby (played by Matt Damon) and British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) as they worked to develop the Ford GT-40 car that swept the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. In case you’re wondering, the original cars sold and licensed by Ford in the 1960s have great value. A 1965 GT-40 roadster prototype was sold in August at a Monterey, CA auction for $7.65 million.

The ATP tested wearable technology for the first time during its just-completed Next Gen ATP Finals in Milan. The Association of Tennis Professionals says the technology will allow players and coaches at the annual 21-and-under men’s tennis tournament to quantify the demands of the competition, practice load management, and make performance decisions based on objective data. The wearable devices will have a GPS receiver and sensors that measure velocity and direction, acceleration and force, rotation, and body orientation. The technology will also measure a player’s heart rate. The data generated from the device will only be available to each player and those that they choose to give access to. It will be displayed in the form of maps showing player movements and actions, while players and coaches will also get post-match and post-practice reports. They will also be able to synchronize the data with match footage.  Wearable technology is the latest innovation to be rolled out at the Next Gen Finals, which also feature shorter sets to four, electronic line calling through Hawk-Eye Live, a 25-second shot clock, in-match player coaching via headsets, and video review. Next up for the ATP: the season finale at London’s O2.

As MLS once again crowned the Seattle Sounders as their champion, the average value of an MLS franchise has climbed 30% from $240 million to $313 million, according to Forbes. The year-on-year growth outpaces the rising team values in the NBA, which were up 13%, as well as the 11% increase in the NFL, an 8% rise in MLB, and a 6% climb in the NHL. Atlanta United remains the most valuable MLS franchise for the second straight year at $500 million, up from $330 million in last year’s rankings. The club’s revenue soared from $47 million to $78 million, resulting in an operating income of $7 million. Atlanta United are closely followed by the L.A. Galaxy ($480 million), with LAFC ($475 million), MLS Cup Champion Seattle Sounders ($405 million), and Toronto FC ($395 million) rounding off the top five. Despite the increase in team values, Forbes estimates that just seven of the league’s 24 teams turned a profit last season, with Toronto FC recording the biggest loss of $19 million. However, that has not stemmed the demand from investors looking to own an MLS franchise, even though expansion fees have soared to $200 million.

We’re past the halfway point of the 2019-2020 NFL season, and FOX expects Super Bowl LIV ad pricing to set record. FOX said it expects to get the highest prices ever for its commercials for this season's Super Bowl, set to take place in Miami on February 2, 2020. Speaking on FOX’s earnings conference call with analysts last Wednesday, FOX CEO Lachlan Murdoch said that “we’re confident pricing will certainly be the highest cost per 30 second spot of any Super Bowl.” Prices for Super Bowl spots have been well in excess of $5 million in recent years. Categories that are already spending money with FOX for the big game include the companies engaged in streaming wars (think Netflix, Amazon, Hulu), tech companies, pharmaceutical marketers, and financial services companies led by insurance companies such as GEICO, Progressive, and State Farm. Back in May, FOX announced that they were cutting one commercial break from each Super Bowl quarter in an attempt to combat criticism about the volume of breaks in the game. Of course, this also makes Super Bowl ad inventory scarcer – and more expensive.

New research from video platform Imagen suggests a generational shift is happening among sports fans across the major U.S. pro leagues. Millennial and Gen Z fans are showing a desire to interact with sports content beyond live games, and a strong preference for more personalized engagement with content. Four times as many millennial and Gen Z fans watch more than three hours of non-game sports content each week compared to Baby Boomers, 78% of fans enhance their live experience with non-game content by dual screening while watching a live game, and 39% of millennials are willing to pay for exclusive online sports content. What’s the takeaway for the TV industry? “The study we conducted surfaced a number of interesting insights for content owners and rights-holders across the sports media landscape,” Ryan Rolf, Imagen CRO, told Cynopsis. “Game broadcasters should do more to embrace second screening through official companion apps and social streams or otherwise risk fans consuming content in-game via competing platforms.” The biggest takeaway? Influencers should be embraced for their authenticity and implemented into programming that breaks down the traditional wall between teams and their fans, rather than teams holding them at bay.

In similar sports engagement news, a new study from Telemundo Deportes was welcome news for brands looking to engage with Hispanic fans. Telemundo Deportes, in partnership with Turnkey Intelligence-MarketCast, reports that Hispanic fans show 15% higher propensity to support sponsors on television and elsewhere than non-Hispanics, “by trying, buying, or recommending a product or service,” according to the study. Additionally, 57% of Hispanic sports fans who consume Spanish-language media would try, buy, or recommend a product or service — a 22% increase over non-Hispanics. Among the report’s other highlights, more than three-quarters of Spanish-language media consumers consider the FIFA Men’s World Cup a “can’t miss event.” 81% of Hispanic sports fans watch sports on television, predominantly at home, and were somewhat less likely than non-Hispanic fans to follow sports on other media platforms such as streaming services, social media, and online news sites. It’s never too early to prepare for the World Cup. Even though the 2022 event in Qatar is later than normal in the calendar due to brutal summer heat in that country – it kicks off in almost three years to the day – brand marketers should take note of this timely study.

As a handful of golf’s global stars prepare for the big 5-0, PGA Tour Champions announced the 2020 tournament schedule, featuring 27 events and culminating with the fifth annual Charles Schwab Cup Playoffs. In 2020, the Tour will hold tournaments in four foreign countries and 18 states, with total prize money of nearly $59 million. The 2020 season will mark the first year of PGA Tour Champions eligibility for a number of the game’s biggest names. World Golf Hall of Fame member Ernie Els celebrated his 50th birthday on October 17, while 17-time PGA Tour winner and 2010 FedEx Cup Champion Jim Furyk, 2003 Masters champion Mike Weir, 2011 Players Champion K.J. Choi, and World Golf Hall of Fame member Phil Mickelson will all turn 50 in the next 12 months. Mickelson, perhaps in a nod to his newly svelte frame – he claims he has lost more than 15 pounds – is certainly not slowing down in his role as a pitchman. Last week, he signed a reported equity deal with Heineken to promote its Amstel Light brand. 

Sinclair Broadcast Group has recorded a 47% increase in total yearly revenues to $1.125 billion, for which the majority of growth is attributed to its sports portfolio since acquiring 22 RSNs from Disney. Chris Ripley, Sinclair’s CEO, has revealed to investors that 75% of the company’s income is created through its sports and news programming, and is now “weighed heavily toward sports.” Compared to financial statements at the end of September 2018, Sinclair’s overall revenue has grown from $766 million. Although advertising and distribution revenues generated by Sinclair’s news content ($651 million) still account for the majority of the company’s income, Sinclair’s sports segment accounted for more than 98% ($352 million) of its revenue growth in the 12 months since. Ripley has also confirmed that the group is planning to increase its ownership of the 24/7 multi-platform Stadium sports network. Stadium was formed in May 2017 in a joint venture with Sinclair’s former American Sports Network (ASN) division and two U.S. TV streaming services, Campus Insiders and 120 Sports. Sinclair paid more than $14 billion to secure all 22 former FOX networks from Disney. 

The NBA altered its bylaws prior to the start of the 2019-2020 season to allow teams to sell sponsorship packages outside of the U.S. and Canada for the first time. League rules previously prevented teams from participating in any ad campaign or sponsorship event outside of their home market. However, NBA chief innovation officer Amy Brooks told JohnWallStreet that the companies currently participating in the league’s jersey patch program – two-thirds of which have an international presence – indicated that the time was right “to grow [the NBA] brand and our partners’ brands globally.” Loosening bylaws surrounding international marketing rights should help the league grow revenues and connect with fans in other regions. The Washington Wizards were the first NBA franchise to take advantage of the rule change, signing an agreement with Japanese tech conglomerate NEC. The Wizards made Rui Hachimura the first Japanese player ever selected in the first round of the NBA Draft in 2019.

Airbnb is set to announce a global sponsorship with the International Olympic Committee running through the Los Angeles 2028 Games, according to SportsBusiness Journal. The deal would represent a significant shift in the home-sharing platform's sports marketing strategy as Airbnb prepares for its IPO in 2020. According to SBJ, the deal would focus on Airbnb’s “experiences” strand, which allows hosts to offer access to their hobbies, skills, or expertise as part of offering out their homes for rent. The arrangement is not intended to infringe on the hotel and hospitality business that Olympic organizers require to stage the Olympics. Recent partners joining the IOC’s global TOP program have made significant investments, with a joint Mengniu Dairy and Coca-Cola deal back in June being valued at $3 billion over 11 years. Currently, 13 companies comprise the TOP program, getting category-exclusive rights to every Games, the IOC, and national Olympic committees.

Top Five Tech

The New York Knicks and New Jersey Devils broadcasts will soon feature FanDuel betting. According to Bloomberg, FanDuel will become an official sports gaming partner for broadcasts of the NBA’s Knicks, as well as the exclusive sports gambling partner for broadcasts of the NHL’s Devils. Also, New York Rangers hockey telecasts will include FanDuel commercials, but not betting-related content. Devils telecasts will have updated betting odds in a scrolling sidebar during each intermission. The partnership also will include a mix of in-game and halftime spots, branded content, and commercials. Prior to the Knicks halftime show, the network recently began showing a five-minute segment called “Inside the Lines,” devoting that time to look at the NBA betting landscape. A similar one-minute NHL-focused show will air leading into every Devils pregame show. Sports betting companies increasingly are signing deals with pro sports teams and media entities in places where betting on games is legal, and more teams will sign deals with betting partners as state by state legislation continues to relax on sports betting.

Privacy-focused messaging app Signal is making waves in the NBA, NFL, and NCAA. Tampering issues loom over professional sports and a widespread federal investigation still lingers over the NCAA landscape, meaning that the desire for privacy, encryption, and even disappearing messages has increased. For public schools in college sports, the app has emerged as an outlet to avoid jeopardy under Freedom of Information Act requests and to circumvent NCAA amateurism rules. In pro sports, Signal is used to combat the uptick in tampering enforcement. According to Yahoo! Sports, all the messages, photos, and documents passed back and forth are heavily encrypted on Signal. In the NBA and NFL, Signal spans every level from players to executives. In the wake of an NBA free agency period in which news of deals was broken prior to the formal start of the free agency round, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced stricter enforcement of rules for tampering and salary-cap circumvention. While the Signal app was originally created for use in politics, the sports world has been using its security features to avoid legal repercussions for phone conversations or texts or, simply, an escape from stardom.

Spalding hosts holiday shopping event on social media. According to Mobile Marketer, basketball maker Spalding will host a two-hour shopping event on social media to give fans a chance to buy limited-edition gear. The "Spalding.com Holiday Slam" will be headlined by NBA players Damian Lillard and DeMar DeRozan on November 24. Spalding will sell 30 items, including new basketballs and hoops, in a collaboration that also will include former L.A. Lakers star Kobe Bryant, the NBA, and global travel brand Sprayground. The shopping event will be hosted at a special microsite and on Spalding's @spaldingball account on Instagram and @Spalding handle on Twitter. Some of the proceeds from the shopping event will be donated to the NBPA Foundation and LA84 Foundation's joint Court Refurbishment Program that provides places for kids to play basketball in Southern California. By following a model of well-known exclusivity similar to an online sneaker drop, it’s likely that the Spalding merchandise will sell out quickly and may influence future marketing tactics in other sports.

NBA TV linear network goes direct to consumer on digital platform. According to SportsPro, the channel includes more than 100 exclusive live NBA games per season and has been added to the NBA’s official website and app, alongside on-demand video content, and will enable viewers to access NBATV content using mobile and connected devices. The offer is available for $6.99 per month or $59.99 annually, and will also continue to authenticate fans who get NBA TV via a pay-TV operator. The move comes after NBA Digital recently debuted a new NBA TV franchise called Center Court, which features a series of 20 live 2019-2020 NBA games with enhanced viewing options. They include new camera angles with footage captured exclusively on smartphones, live on-screen group chats with celebrity influencers, in-depth analytics and statistical graphics, and social media integration. The NBA has also announced an expansion of its existing media partnerships in the Philippines to distribute NBA League Pass, amidst turbulence in China that has put that country and the league at an impasse.

Total advertising on connected TV devices and platforms will grow 37.6% in 2019 to hit $6.94 billion, forecasts eMarketer – and surpass $10 billion by 2021. “When looking at ad revenues, YouTube, Hulu and Roku are the leaders in this market,” eMarketer lead analyst Eric Haggstrom shared with Cynopsis. “Users of these platforms are likely either cord-cutters or cord-shavers. That means some TV ad buyers are willing to pay a premium to reach users who are difficult to reach via traditional TV ads. These platforms are also bulking up their targeting, programmatic and attribution capabilities in order to attract buyers from the digital world.” While these numbers comprise all programming, including sports, major recent deals that pro sports leagues have done with the likes of Amazon and YouTube prove that they understand where the content consuming world is going and are already headed in that direction. 

Power of Sports Five

Fútbol Más Foundation and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) look to integrate Venezuelan migrants to Peru. According to sportanddev, Fútbol Más Foundation started a project in partnership with the IOM, which seeks to promote the well-being and integration of youth between 6 and 18 years old through socio-sportive activities. 150 boys, girls, and teens are part of the project “El Balón No Tiene Banderas” (The Ball Has No Flags). Families from both nationalities and members of the management team participated to kick-start the socio-sportive workshops and meetings, leader courses, and the intercultural festival that will benefit the communities through the commitment to a protected and inclusive childhood all through the power of soccer as a unifier. Fútbol Más, a non-profit organization, emerged in Chile in 2007 and is currently working in Chile, Ecuador, France, Haiti, Kenya, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru. While Venezuela continues to see famine throughout the devastated country, El Balon No Tiene Banderas looks to help relocate youth and families in need to the much safer location of Lima, Peru.

Boston Marathon Charity eclipses $100 million in donations for cancer over its 20 years. According to Tucson.com, Boston Marathon runners participating on behalf of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute since 1990 have surpassed the $100 million fundraising mark. The research center says more than $500,000 has already been raised by runners in next year's race, putting it over the threshold. Dana-Farber was one of the first charities allowed to use the Boston Marathon as a fundraiser. More than 500 runners are expected to take part in the 2020 race as part of the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge. They are hoping to raise $6.25 million. 100% of the money raised from the team's Boston Marathon runners supports promising cancer research in its earliest stages. The Boston Marathon is the pinnacle of marathon and media coverage and the race will make positive headlines as multiple charities will be highlighted on the day of the event next year, April 20, 2020.

Baltimore Orioles’ Chris Davis donates $3 million to the University of Maryland Children's Hospital. According to MLB, Chris and Jill Davis donated $3 million to the UMD Children’s Hospital at the University of Maryland Medical Center, which made their donation the largest ever received by the hospital from a Baltimore sports figure. Hospital officials said the funds would be allocated for the expansion of a state-of-the-art pediatric hybrid catheterization and operation room used to fight congenital heart disease. The Davises have long been active with the hospital, where their second daughter, Evie, was diagnosed with a ventricular septal defect in January, 2018 and spent nearly a year under doctors’ watchful eyes before being medically cleared near her first birthday. Davis is a three-time nominee for MLB’s prestigious Roberto Clemente Award, and his family hosted a charity home run derby called “Crush’s Homers for Hearts” at Oriole Park at Camden Yards during each of the last three summers. To date, the event has raised more than $250,000 for UMCH Children’s Heart Program. While Davis’ on-field struggles have now totaled four straight seasons of subpar batting averages and strikeout numbers, his off-field contributions continue to make him a welcome athlete in Baltimore.

The Pittsburgh Penguins will honor the military with a Veterans Day Celebration. According to the NHL, the Pittsburgh Penguins honored military veterans at this past Saturday's game against Chicago at PPG Paints Arena by wearing special black-and-green camouflage jerseys in the pre-game warmup. The jerseys will then be autographed and auctioned online, with proceeds benefiting Veterans Leadership Program of Western Pennsylvania. Additionally, ten veterans from the Veterans Leadership Program and their guests watched Saturday's game from a party suite, courtesy of the Penguins and the Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation, while stars Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin donated their charity suites to veterans from the Veterans Leadership Program and their families. With Veterans Day taking place on Monday, November 11, the Penguins are making sure to honor those who allow for the freedoms of others to enjoy hockey on a regular basis.

Phillies coach Charlie Manuel will sleep on the street for charity. According to Crossing Broad, Manuel will be sleeping outside on a Philly street along with Larry Bowa and Phillies executives to raise money for the Covenant House “Sleep Out” program, which supports homeless youth. Charlie went on Twitter to explain that his family had 11 kids and that he “grew up poor,” so it’s a cause he can relate to. As of Friday, $1,415 of the $5,000 goal had already been raised. The sleep out will take place on November 21 and is not about pretending to be homeless. It’s an act of solidarity with the 4.2 million young people who experience homelessness each year. It’s a decision that we can’t stay indoors while so many kids remain outside. The funds raised will be donated to Covenant House, a shelter for kids experiencing homelessness and trafficking. Covenant House offers these young people respect and unconditional love, and their continuum of care provides essential services to help kids transition from homelessness to independence. Manuel is raising awareness of homelessness in Philadelphia and speaking from a place of respect, as he too suffered financial struggles in his childhood.

[vitalmindandbody]

The mettle of darkness that still drums within our 24 -hour cities

With technology man has inhibited the night. Yet walk wall street alone at 3am, and still the occult and whodunit ooze through

On some nighttimes, in the insomniac intervals between reverberating goods trains, and beneath the audio of ambulance alarms, I can sounds owls calling mournfully to one another from the trees that screen the rail lines extending past the back of the house in which I live in inner London. On most darkness, alongside the wails of parties crusading or having fornication, I sounds the bag of cats and foxes screaming intermittently, as if they are being tortured. On some mornings, when a thin sun first reveals through my dazzles, I can hear a cockerel squawking from a plot in which chickens are prevented got a couple of streets away. Rarely, when the mornings are resonantly still, the insistent tap of a woodpecker chiselling at a tree trunk wakes me.

The city at night is far eerier, far more feral than it is in the day. It is far harder to anthropomorphise, far more difficult to domesticate. In reality, the city doesnt necessarily sound and feel like a metropolis, a centre of advanced civilisation, when most of its population is fast asleep. It can resound and find closer to nature than culture. As Virginia Woolf once pointed out with a noticeable sense of frisson, we are no longer quite ourselves after dark. She basked the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. Our cities, like ourselves, can seem immigrant and unfamiliar at night. And if you listen to them attentively, as though through an echo sounder, you can hear the embracing darkness transmit from its depths the rackets and pulsates of the capital city pre-modern past.

The seems I sometimes hear from my bedroom, for example, are identifiably descendants of those that the author and printer William Baldwin enumerated in his eccentric satire Beware the Cat ( 1553 ), one of the most evocative accounts we have of London in the 16 th century. At one point, Baldwins protagonist, Gregory Streamer, absorbs a narcotic and lies in his chamber at Aldersgate listening with preternatural listening to the commixed rackets of the nocturnal municipality. These include the barking of puppies, grunting of swine, weeping of felines, thundering of rats; the ringing of buzzers, counting of coppers, organizing of groins, moaning of buffs; also the scratching of owl, flit of fowls, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves. He might have added the tapping of cobblers and the shovelling and scraping of nightmen, popularly known as Tom-Turd-Men, who were employed to clean the citys streets and johns after dark.

The night-time brooks our metropolitans pasts. It channels their historic persistences and discontinuities with a clarity and vitality that our everyday lives, who the hell is influenced by an nearly uninterrupted purposefulness, constantly obscure. It wishes to point out that we once shared these cities with innumerable swine, some of them tamed, some of them not; and that to some extent we still do. It reminds us that, although we think of the 24 -hour city as a comparatively recent phenomenon if in the UK it is a phenomenon at all cities have always been hives of labour and leisure after nightfall. Baldwin, in his remarkable onomatopoeic prose song, refers to the audible nocturnal acts of , among other things, grouting and rotating, broiling and brewing. It reminds us, very, that we were once terrible of the nighttime, and of the people who occupy it, whether these assume the form of potential felons or the police; and that, to a astonishing level, especially if we come from socially marginalised groups, we still are.

However efficiently artificial sunlight overpowers the difference between night and day, the poet and critic Al Alvarez wrote, it never wholly eliminates the primitive suspicion that night parties are up to no good. Over the last four or five centuries, a series of social and technological changes have reshaped the city at night, progressively colonising it. The preamble of petroleum lighting, gaslight and electric light has, for example, successively reshaped it according to the needs of a diurnal country. And the postponement of working hours has reshaped it according to the needs of a daytime economy. But these changes havent totally dispelled its pre-modern past. Metropolis nurture a nerve of darkness that even the processes of industrialisation and electrification, the purpose of applying all-night mills and shops, all-night buses and teaches, have flunked fully to conquer.

Gaslight earmarks high-jinks, circa 1820. Illustration: SSPL via Getty Images

In 1788, at the high levels of the Enlightenment, the Daily Universal Register triumphantly reported that not a single building in all London is perhaps now to be heard of which makes the repute of being an haunted room. Scientific rationalism, it was optimistically accepted, had cleaned the citys darker, more strange lieu with the coldnes, shining illuminate of reason, just as it had driven supernatural back to the dark ages. But, in the 21 st century as in previous ones, London remains, like all cities, a repository of archaic, if not primal, anxieties and nervousness at night. Anyone who has ambled through its empty streets alone at 3am, sensitive to the slightest glint of push in the darkness, knows this( not, of course, that these panics and nervousness are necessarily irrational, specially if you happen to be a woman ).

Intellectual enlightenment and the practical illumination of the streets, both organizations that sought to eradicate remnants of the medieval past, were closely complicit developments in the cities of early modern Europe. Coordinated public street lighting had set in place in center regions of the British uppercase for a century by the time the newspaper report Ive paraphrased complacently declared that its constructs were finally free of specters. Paris, operating under the initiative of Louis XIVs council for the the process of reforming the policing of the city, spearheaded the policy in 1667. Other European municipalities, is cognizant of the need to pre-empt inessential felonies and foreclose political conspiracies, are still in speedy succession: Amsterdam in 1669, Turin in 1675, Berlin in 1682, and London in 1684.

Replacing the lantern candles that private householders had formerly been required to erect outside their front doors, most European civic powers distributed petroleum torches, remain at public expenditure, to light-colored the street on moonless nights. The impression, is in accordance with peers, was virtually overwhelming. The first report on the New Lights of the British metropolis, published in 1690 , was reported in rapturous colours that they grew such a mutual thoughtfulnes, that they all seem to be but one enormous Solar-Light.

Public igniting had a decisive impact on Europes central avenues, transforming them into the locations where, at least when the condition was clement, beings could promenade and shop after dark. The German novelist Sophie von La Roche, enraptured by Londons culture of consumption, use a note of 1786 to describe the double rows of brightly glowing lamps that enabled pedestrians and people in coach-and-fours to gaze at Oxford Streets excellently lit shop fronts.

In some quite literal feel, the city at night in the late 17 th and 18 th centuries was ostentatious. As the rise of Londons coffee houses and pleasure gardens expressed, nightlife became a distinct social phenomenon from this time. It was increasingly fashionable to stay up dancing, booze, gambling and soliciting prostitutes all night and then be retained in bed throughout the next day. This was in part because it dramatised an noble repudiation of the protestant ethic and the minds of the capitalism. In populous, upwardly mobile societies like those pioneered in London and Paris, where differences of grade could all too easily be obscured in the press of torsoes on the streets, the human rights of wander freely at night was a advantage. And at first light, when revellers careen residence delivered labourers ambling to task, it was once again unambiguously clear to which social class these people belonged.

A gentleman stops to talk to a polouse in the rain on the Thames embankment, 1929. Photograph: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But if street lighting gentrified and glamorised the commercial and political centres of Europes metropolis in this period, it relegated other regions to no-go orbits. The French dramatist Louis-Sbastien Mercier conveyed relief in 1780 that thousands of lubricant reflectors has only replaced lamps in the French capital. But, as well as protesting that this excellent innovation had been impaired by misdirected economy, he pointedly noted that, outside the shallow consortia of fascinating daylight that the oil lamps ejected, wall street had been thrown into a despair that seemed deeper and more impenetrable than ever. Certainly, in the poorer areas of Europes metropolitans, the new technology became little change to publics everyday lives. At nighttime, the serpentine streets, suffocating the tribunals and labyrinthine slums of the city were quite as obliterate and harmful as they had been in the middle ages.

The introduction of gaslight in the early 19 th century had much the same effect, transforming the areas frequented by the upper and middle class but leaving those inhabited by the poor pretty much untouched. Even so, alongside the professionalisation of Europes police forces, it revolutionised municipalities at night. In 1807, as part of an energetic expedition to stimulate London the first metropolis to be chiefly lit at night by gas, the expat German entrepreneur Frederick Winsor mounted an exhibition of its benefits in Pall Mall. The Monthly Magazine praised the success of this experiment and the beautifully lily-white and brilliant dawn it induced. By 1823 more than 200 miles of streets in London were lit by nearly 40,000 lamps. Light had been industrialised.

Not everyone was happy about this development. Like other Romantics, John Keats deplored that the insinuate forms of brightnes links with candles and oil lamps, which ignited small areas with an uneven, gently flickering flare, and which consequently generated a kind of contemplative halo, were being consigned to the past. An impersonal artificial flare, especially in the regions where the retail merchants let loose the gas, was progressively fighting all the powers of darkness. Keats mourned the facts of the case that the citys authorities and commercial-grade interests were exiling nighttimes magic, its mystery and its magnificence, from the city. And his famed Ode to a Nightingale( 1819 ), which celebrates the embalmed darkness, was a carefully staged is making an effort to summon it back.

The illuminating the consequences of gaslight were far more uniform than those of oil, but electric lighting, which emerged in the 1880 s, flooded rather than plainly pooled wall street in which it was installed with an intense, apparently grey light. Caricatures and covers from the period proudly depict parties digesting about on sidewalks reading newspapers beneath etiolated electrical lamps. Electric street lighting grew the eventual button of metropolitan modernity, and European metropolis rivalled with each other to be the pre-eminent City of Light. In the end, New York overtook all of them, including Paris. Meanwhile, cities that retained their medieval topography, and that were slow to establish the new technology, were delivered to the past. In an section named Against Past-Loving Venice( 1910 ), the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti pealed: Make the predominate of pious Electric Light ultimately come, to liberate Venice from its venal moonshine

Harrods in London, inundated with sun in 1935. Photograph: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But, in spite of the unvarying glare of electrical street lights at the commercial, industrial and residential cores, even the 20 th centurys most futuristic metropolitans were determined by socially peripheral, primarily working-class areas that remained plunged in darkness at night. The German astronomer Bruno H Brgel, echoing in 1930 the dignity with which “his fathers”, who came from the working day of igniting by oil-lamp, produced him through Berlins wealth of lighter, drily find: A step into the side streets, and you felt put back by centuries. It was not merely the absence of sun, but the presence of the poor at night, and above all the homeless, that made these regions seem like remnants of the pre-Enlightenment, pre-capitalist past. The houseless, as they used to be called, had been an endemic proximity in Europes metropolitans after dark since the middle ages, when males and denizens of the streets were criminalised as common nightwalkers.

The 20 th-century city nonetheless staged the progressive colonisation of the darknes by the day, darkness by light. Tables, cinema, golf-clubs, music halls, theaters and amusement parks gratified ever more forcefully to people appetite for leisure after hours. Surely, the word after hours seemed more and more futile, as factories, hospitals, places and supermarkets thrummed throughout the darknes. Even in what had for centuries been called the dead night, roughly between 2am and 4am, the center of major metropolitan cities regions like Piccadilly Circus and Times Square pulsated with people. Electric light, Thomas Edison had contended, makes darknes life, and night life entails progress.

In the early 1940 s, when the British uppercase was regularly jumped into darkness during the course of its offensive, Edisons formula seemed all the more irrefutable. For at that time, conversely, the absence of electric light plunged London, and other European municipalities, into a commonwealth of cruelty. It was perhaps in part because of this distressing experience that the postwar generation redoubled its commitment to obtaining the value of both labour and leisure from the night. The word clubbing was first are applied to aim going to nightclubs in the mid-1 960 s, when the family of those who been adults through the second largest world war start out overcoming this inheritance and regaining the night.

Since then, as the artwork historian Jonathan Crary recently wrote in his fine polemic 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep , the capitalist system has fostered the rise of a society in which a position of permanent radiance is indispensable to the non-stop functioning of world exchange and lighting. In the late 1990 s, to present a spectacular speciman, a Russian-European opening consortium developed programs to use satellites with parabolic reflectors to illuminate remote regions of Earth with sunlight and so enable work to be performed all over the clock. Promising daylight all nighttime long, it also proposed that entire metropolitan areas are likely to be illuminated after dark along these lines, making electric light itself anachronistic. Dreams of the elimination of the night can no longer be dismissed as science fiction.

In the 21 st century, electric lighting in advanced capitalist countries if not in innumerable developing nations is a uniform and universal feature of cities at night. So is commuting, store, making and other activities that for much of the past seemed unimaginable taking place after dark. But in practice, as has been the case for millennia, some people have freer and fuller access to the city at night than others. Lone girls may appear be exempted from it, for example, if exclusively because at certain times and in certain places they are made to feel unacceptably vulnerable. Black and Asian souls, for their component, are far more likely to be criminalised in west cities than lily-white humankinds at night.

The 24-hour tubing, “its probably” safe to predict, will not essentially vary the facts of the case that for numerous beings, if not for the citys person of cats and feral foxes, London abides, like other British metropolis, at the least partially off limits at night. We have a night-time economy; the work requires a night-time politics.

Matthew Beaumont is the author of Nightwalking: a Nocturnal Biography of London, 9.99, Verso. Click here to buy it for 8.19

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post The mettle of darkness that still drums within our 24 -hour cities appeared first on vitalmindandbody.com.

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The centre of darkness that still beats within our 24 -hour cities

With technology man has subdued the night. Yet walk wall street alone at 3am, and still the occult and whodunit seep through

On some nighttimes, in the insomniac times between roaring goods trains, and beneath the reverberate of ambulance sirens, I can listen owls announcing mournfully to one another from the trees that screen the rail trails leading past the back of the house in which I live in inner London. On most nighttimes, alongside the screams of people contending or having sex, I listen cats and foxes bellowing sporadically, as if they are being tortured. On some mornings, when a thin sun firstly reveals through my blinds, I can listen a cockerel squawking from a plot in which chickens are remained got a couple of streets away. Sometimes, when the mornings are resonantly still, the insistent tap of a woodpecker chiselling at a tree trunk wakes me.

The city at night is far eerier, far more feral than it is in the day. It is far harder to anthropomorphise, much more difficult to domesticate. In detail, the city doesnt necessarily sound and feel like a metropolis, a center of advanced civilisation, when most of its population is rapidly asleep. It can voice and detect a little bit closer to sort than culture. As Virginia Woolf formerly pointed out with a noticeable feel of frisson, we are no longer fairly ourselves after dark. She enjoyed the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight grant. Our municipalities, like ourselves, can seem immigrant and unfamiliar at night. And if you listen to them attentively, as though through an echo sounder, they are able to discover the embracing darkness give from its penetrations the interferences and pulsates of the capital city pre-modern past.

The reverberates I sometimes hear from my bedroom, for example, are identifiably offsprings of those that the author and printer William Baldwin enumerated in his eccentric parody Beware the Cat ( 1553 ), one of “the worlds largest” resonant evidences we have of London in the 16 th century. At one point, Baldwins protagonist, Gregory Streamer, absorbs a narcotic and lies in his enclosure at Aldersgate listening with preternatural listening to the commixed noises of the nocturnal city. These include the barking of puppies, grunting of pigs, roaring of cats, reverberating of rats; the ringing of buzzers, counting of coins, mounting of groins, mumbling of lovers; too the scratching of owl, flit of fowl, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves. He might have added the tap of cobblers and the shovelling and scratching of nightmen, universally known as Tom-Turd-Men, who were employed to clean the citys streets and privies after dark.

The night-time torrents our cities pasts. It channels their historic persistences and discontinuities with a clarity and vitality that our everyday lives, who the hell is determined by an nearly uninterrupted purposefulness, perpetually obscure. It wishes to point out that we once shared these cities with innumerable swine, some of them tame, some of them not; and that to a certain extent we are continuing do. It reminds us that, though we think about the 24 -hour city as a comparatively recent phenomenon if in the UK it is a phenomenon at all cities have always been hives of labour and leisure after nightfall. Baldwin, in his remarkable onomatopoeic prose song, refers to the audible nocturnal acts of , among other things, grouting and inventing, cooking and brewing. It reminds us, extremely, that we were once grim of the nighttime, and of the ones who inhabit it, whether these expect the form of potential felons or the police; and that, to a astonishing magnitude, specially if we come from socially marginalised groups, we still are.

However efficiently artificial brightnes obliterates discrepancies between night and day, the poet and critic Al Alvarez wrote, it never wholly extinguishes the primitive suspicion that night beings are up to no good. Over the past four or five centuries, a series of social and technological changes have reshaped the city at night, progressively colonising it. The preface of oil light-headed, gaslight and electric light has, for example, successively reshaped it according to the needs of a diurnal commonwealth. And the postponement of working hours has reshaped it according to the needs of a daytime economy. But these changes havent wholly allayed its pre-modern past. Metropolis foster a middle of darkness that even the processes of industrialisation and electrification, the purpose of applying all-night mills and patronizes, all-night buses and instructs, have flunked fully to conquer.

Gaslight tolerates high-jinks, circa 1820. Illustration: SSPL via Getty Images

In 1788, at the height of the Enlightenment, the Daily Universal Register triumphantly reported that not a single building in all London is perhaps now to be heard of which suffers the repute of being an recurred house. Scientific rationalism, it was optimistically expected, had cleansed the citys darker, more strange lieu with the cold, shining light-colored of reasonablenes, just as it had driven magic back to the dark ages. But, in the 21 st century as in previous ones, London stands, like all cities, a repository of outmoded, if not primal, panics and anxieties at night. Anyone who has went through its empty streets alone at 3am, sensitive to the slightest glint of flow in the darkness, knows this( not, of course, that these frights and feelings are inevitably insane, specially if you happen to be a woman ).

Intellectual enlightenment and the practical radiance of the streets, both initiatives that sought to eradicate residues of the medieval past, is very closely complicit developments in the cities of early modern Europe. Arranged public street lighting had been in place in central regions of the British capital for a century by the time the newspaper report Ive repeated complacently declared that its structures were finally free of ghosts. Paris, operating under the initiative of Louis XIVs council for the reform of the policing of the city, led the policy in 1667. Other European metropolis, is cognizant of it was necessary to pre-empt inessential felonies and forestall political conspiracies, are still in rapid succession: Amsterdam in 1669, Turin in 1675, Berlin in 1682, and London in 1684.

Replacing the lantern candles that private householders had formerly been required to erect outside their front openings, most European civic experts distributed oil torches, remain at public overhead, to light-headed wall street on moonless nights. The impact, according to peers, was almost overwhelming. The first report on the New Lights of the British metropolis, published in 1690 , was reported in euphoric atmospheres that they raised such a reciprocal thinking, that they all seem to be but one enormous Solar-Light.

Public igniting had a decisive impact on Europes central thoroughfares, transforming them into places where, at the least when the condition was clement, parties could promenade and patronize after dark. The German novelist Sophie von La Roche, enraptured by Londons culture of uptake, used a word of 1786 to describe the double rows of brightly glinting lamps that allowed pedestrians and beings in managers to gaze at Oxford Streets splendidly lighted shop fronts.

In some fairly literal gumption, the city at night in the late 17 th and 18 th centuries was flamboyant. As the rise of Londons coffee houses and pleasure garden-varieties marked, nightlife became a distinct social phenomenon from this time. It was increasingly fashionable to stay up dancing, boozing, gambling and soliciting prostitutes all nighttime and then remain in berthed in all areas of the next day. This was in part because it dramatised an noble accept of the protestant ethic and the minds of the capitalism. In populous, upwardly mobile civilizations like those pioneered in London and Paris, where marks of grade could all too easily be obliterated in the press of forms on the streets, the human rights of wander freely at night was a advantage. And at first light, when revellers overwhelm dwelling delivered labourers going to study, it was once again unambiguously clear to which social class these individuals belonged.

A being stops to talk to a policeman in the rain on the Thames embankment, 1929. Image: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But if street lighting gentrified and glamorised the commercial and political centres of Europes municipalities in this period, it demoted other regions to no-go neighborhoods. The French dramatist Louis-Sbastien Mercier conveyed relief in 1780 that millions of petroleum reflectors has only supplanted torches in the French uppercase. But, as well as protesting that this excellent innovation had been disfigured by misdirected economy, he pointedly have also pointed out that, outside the shallow pools of dazzling sun that the oil lamps radiated, the streets had been plunged into a desolation that seemed deeper and more impassable than ever. Surely, in the poorer areas of Europes metropolitans, the new technology obligated little gap to publics everyday lives. At night, the serpentine streets, suffocating courts and labyrinthine slums of the city were quite as obliterate and poisonous as they had been in the middle ages.

The introduction of gaslight in the early 19 th century had much the same effect, transforming the areas frequented by the upper and middle classes but leaving those inhabited by the poor pretty much untouched. Even so, alongside the professionalisation of Europes police forces, it revolutionised cities at night. In 1807, as part of an energetic safarus to manufacture London the first metropolis to be predominantly lit at night by gas, the expat German entrepreneur Frederick Winsor mounted an exhibition of its benefits in Pall Mall. The Monthly Magazine praised the success of this experiment and the beautifully white and bright daylight it caused. By 1823 more than 200 miles of streets in London were lighted by virtually 40,000 lamps. Light had been industrialised.

Not everyone was happy about this development. Like other Romantic, John Keats deplored that the insinuate different forms of brightnes links with candles and oil lamps, which lighted small areas with an uneven, gently flickering flare, and which therefore made a kind of introspective halo, were being consigned to the past. An impersonal artificial flare, especially in the regions where the retail dealers let loose the gas, was progressively repulsing all the powers of darkness. Keats deplored the facts of the case that the citys authorities and commercial pastimes were exiling nights magic, its mystery and its magnificence, from the city. And his far-famed Ode to a Nightingale( 1819 ), which celebrates the embalmed darkness, was a carefully staged attempt to summon it back.

The decorating the consequences of gaslight were much more uniform than those of lubricant, but electric lighting, which emerged in the 1880 s, filled rather than simply pooled the street in which it was installed with an intense, apparently grey light-headed. Cartoons and depicts from the period proudly depict beings accepting about on pavements speaking newspapers beneath etiolated electric lamps. Electric street lighting grew the ultimate button of metropolitan modernity, and European metropolis vied with each other to be the pre-eminent City of Light. In the end, New York engulf all of them, including Paris. Meanwhile, metropolitans that retained their medieval topography, and that were slow to initiate the new technology, were relegated to the past. In an article designation Against Past-Loving Venice( 1910 ), the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti thundered: Tell the reign of pious Electric Light eventually come, to liberate Venice from its venal moonshine

Harrods in London, inundated with sun in 1935. Photo: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But, in spite of the unvarying glare of electrical street lights at the commercial-grade, industrial and residential cores, even the 20 th centurys most futuristic metropolis were determined by socially peripheral, primarily working-class areas that remained plunged in darkness at night. The German astronomer Bruno H Brgel, echoing in 1930 the dignity with which his father, who came from the working day of igniting by oil-lamp, preceded him through Berlins wealth of ignite, drily detected: A step into the side streets, and you seemed put back by centuries. It was not merely the absence of lighting, but the presence of the poor at night, and above all the homeless, that realized these neighborhoods seem like remainders of the pre-Enlightenment, pre-capitalist past. The houseless, as they used to be called, had been an endemic proximity in Europes metropolis after dark since the middle ages, when male and female denizens of wall street were criminalised as common nightwalkers.

The 20 th-century municipality nonetheless staged the progressive colonisation of the darknes by the day, darkness by light. Barrooms, cinema, golf-clubs, music halls, theaters and amusement parks catered ever more energetically to people appetite for vacation after hours. Indeed, the motto after hours seemed more and more futile, as plants, hospitals, offices and supermarkets thrummed throughout the nighttime. Even in what had for centuries been called the dead darknes, approximately between 2am and 4am, the centres of major metropolitan municipalities regions like Piccadilly Circus and Times Square pulsed with beings. Electric light, Thomas Edison had insisted, makes nighttime life, and night life necessitates progress.

In the early 1940 s, when the British uppercase was regularly jumped into darkness during the course of its blitz, Edisons formula seemed all the more irrefutable. For at that time, conversely, the absence of electric light plunged London, and other European metropolis, into a country of barbarism. It was perhaps in part because of this distressing ordeal that the postwar generation redoubled its commitment to obtaining the value of both labour and leisure from the night. The text clubbing was first used to mean going to nightclubs in the mid-1 960 s, when the family of the individuals who been adults through the second largest world war start out overcoming this inheritance and regaining the night.

Since then, as the prowes historian Jonathan Crary lately wrote in his fine polemic 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep , the capitalist system has promoted the rise of a society in which a regime of permanent lighting is inseparable from the non-stop activity of world exchange and lighting. In the late 1990 s, to hand a fantastic pattern, a Russian-European opening consortium developed schedules to use satellites with parabolic reflectors to decorate remote regions of Earth with sunlight and so enable work to be performed all over the clock. Promising sunlight all nighttime long, it also proposed that entire metropolitan areas are likely to be crystallized after dark along these lines, interpreting electric light itself anachronistic. Dreams of the elimination of the darknes can no longer be dismissed as science fiction.

In the 21 st century, electric lighting in advanced financier countries if not in innumerable developing nations is a uniform and universal boast of metropolitans at night. So is travelling, shopping, wielding and another activity that for much of the past seemed unimaginable taking place after dark. But in practice, as has been the case for millennia, some people have freer and fuller access to the city at night than others. Lone wives may seem excluded from it, for example, if simply because at certain times and in certain places they are made to feel unacceptably vulnerable. Black and Asian guys, for their percentage, are far more likely to be criminalised in western metropolis than white-hot people at night.

The 24-hour tube, it is probably safe to predict, will not essentially adapt the fact that for many beings, if not for the citys population of cats and feral foxes, London continues, like other British municipalities, at the least partially off limits at night. We have a night-time economy; the work requires a night-time politics.

Matthew Beaumont is the author of Nightwalking: a Nocturnal History of London, 9.99, Verso. Click here to buy it for 8.19

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post The centre of darkness that still beats within our 24 -hour cities appeared first on vitalmindandbody.com.

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[vitalmindandbody]

The center of darkness that still hits within our 24 -hour cities

With technology man has inhibited the night. Yet walk the street alone at 3am, and still the supernatural and whodunit seep through

On some darkness, in the insomniac intervals between roaring goods trains, and beneath the music of ambulance sirens, I can discover owls calling mournfully to one another from the trees that screen the railway lines loping past the back of the house in which I live in inner London. On most darkness, alongside the screams of people crusading or having fornication, I discover the bag of cats and foxes screaming sporadically, as if they are being tortured. On some mornings, when a thin lighting firstly divulges through my blinds, I can hear a cockerel squawking from a plot in which chickens are retained got a couple of streets away. Rarely, when the mornings are resonantly still, the insistent tapping of a woodpecker chiselling at a tree trunk wakes me.

The city at night is far eerier, much more feral than it is in the day. It is far harder to anthropomorphise, much more difficult to domesticate. In detail, the city doesnt necessarily sound and feel like a metropolis, a center of advanced civilisation, when most of its population is rapidly asleep. It can sound and appear closer to quality than culture. As Virginia Woolf once pointed out with a noticeable feel of frisson, we are no longer quite ourselves after dark. She basked the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight give. Our cities, like ourselves, can seem alien and unfamiliar at night. And if you listen to them attentively, as though through an echo sounder, they are able to hear the including darkness give from its degrees the noises and pulses of the capital city pre-modern past.

The bangs I sometimes hear from my bedroom, for example, are identifiably descendants of those that the author and printer William Baldwin enumerated in his eccentric satire Beware the Cat ( 1553 ), one of the most evocative records we have of London in the 16 th century. At one point, Baldwins protagonist, Gregory Streamer, assimilates a narcotic drugs and lies in his assembly at Aldersgate listening with preternatural listening to the commixed noises of the nocturnal municipality. These include the barking of hounds, grunting of swine, screeching of “cat-o-nine-tails”, growling of rats; the ringing of buzzers, weigh of coppers, attaching of groins, muttering of lovers; also the scratching of owl, flit of fowls, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves. He might have added the tap of cobblers and the shovelling and scraping of nightmen, popularly known as Tom-Turd-Men, who were employed to clean the citys streets and outhouses after dark.

The night-time creeks our metropolis pasts. It channels their historic persistences and discontinuities with a clarity and vitality that our everyday lives, which are determined by an virtually uninterrupted purposefulness, constantly obscure. It wishes to point out that we once shared these cities with innumerable swine, some of them tame, some of them not; and that to a certain extent we are continuing do. It reminds us that, although we think up the 24 -hour city as a comparatively recent phenomenon if in the UK it is a phenomenon at all cities have always been hives of labour and leisure after nightfall. Baldwin, in his remarkable onomatopoeic prose lyric, refers to the audible nocturnal acts of , among other things, grouting and revolving, cooking and brewing. It reminds us, very, that we were once hideou of the darknes, and of the people who occupy it, whether these usurp the form of potential felons or the police; and that, to a stunning extension, specially if we come from socially marginalised radicals, we still are.

However efficiently artificial light kills discrepancies between night and day, the poet and critic Al Alvarez wrote, it never utterly extinguishes the primitive suspicion that night parties are up to no good. Over the last four or five centuries, a series of social and technological changes have reshaped the city at night, progressively colonising it. The opening of petroleum light-footed, gaslight and electric light has, for example, successively reshaped it according to the needs of a diurnal district. And the extension of working hours has reshaped it according to the needs of a daytime economy. But these changes havent totally allayed its pre-modern past. Metropolitans foster a nerve of darkness that even the processes of industrialisation and electrification, the introduction of all-night mills and stores, all-night buses and learns, have flunked amply to conquer.

Gaslight stands high-jinks, circa 1820. Illustration: SSPL via Getty Images

In 1788, at the high levels of the Enlightenment, the Daily Universal Register triumphantly reported that not a single building in all London is perhaps now to be heard of which suffers the reputation of being an haunted mansion. Scientific rationalism, it was optimistically expected, had cleansed the citys darker, more mysterious lieu with the cold, luminous illuminate of conclude, just as it had driven supernatural back to the dark ages. But, in the 21 st century as in previous ones, London abides, like all cities, a storehouse of archaic, if not primal, frights and nervousness at night. Anyone who has stepped through its empty streets alone at 3am, sensitive to the slightest glint of crusade in the darkness, knows this( not, of course, that these anxieties and anxieties are necessarily irrational, specially if you happen to be a woman ).

Intellectual enlightenment and the practical lighting of wall street, both projects that sought to eradicate remnants of the medieval past, were closely complicit developments in the cities of early modern Europe. Arranged public street lighting had set in place in central parts of the British capital for a century by the time the newspaper report Ive repeated complacently declared that its structures were finally free of ghosts. Paris, operating under the initiative of Louis XIVs council for the reform of the policing of the city, spearheaded the policy in 1667. Other European municipalities, conscious of the need to pre-empt inessential crimes and thwart political schemes, followed in speedy succession: Amsterdam in 1669, Turin in 1675, Berlin in 1682, and London in 1684.

Replacing the lantern candles that private householders had formerly been required to erect outside their front doors, most European civic permissions deployed petroleum lights, remain at public overhead, to light-headed the streets on moonless nighttimes. The effect, is in accordance with peers, was nearly overwhelming. The first report on the New Lights of the British metropolis, published in 1690 , noted in euphoric feelings that they induced such a mutual thoughtfulnes, that they all seem to be but one enormous Solar-Light.

Public lighting had a decisive impact on Europes central roadways, transforming them into places where, at the least when the weather was clement, parties could promenade and shop after dark. The German novelist Sophie von La Roche, enraptured by Londons culture of consumption, used a character of 1786 to describe the double rows of brightly glistening lamps that allowed pedestrians and parties in managers to gaze at Oxford Streets excellently ignited store fronts.

In some quite literal feel, the city at night in the late 17 th and 18 th centuries was ostentatious. As the rise of Londons coffee houses and pleasure gardens indicated, nightlife became a distinct social phenomenon from this time. It was increasingly fashionable to stay up dancing, booze, gambling and soliciting prostitutes all darknes and then be retained in bed throughout the next day. This was in part because it dramatised an upper-class repudiation of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. In populous, upwardly mobile cultures like those pioneered in London and Paris, where distinctions of grade could all too easily be obliterated in the press of people on the street, the right to roam freely at night was a privilege. And at first light, when revellers staggering home extended labourers marching to undertaking, it was once again unambiguously clear to which social class these men belonged.

A gentleman stops to talk to a policeman in the rain on the Thames embankment, 1929. Picture: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But if street lighting gentrified and glamorised the commercial and political regional centres for Europes metropolis in this period, it relegated other regions to no-go orbits. The French dramatist Louis-Sbastien Mercier expressed aid in 1780 that millions of lubricant reflectors has only changed lanterns in the French uppercase. But, as well as demonstrating that this excellent innovation had been marred by misdirected economy, he pointedly have also pointed out that, outside the shallow kitties of stupefying illumination that the oil lamps radiated, the street had been jumped into a mist that seemed deeper and more impenetrable than ever. Certainly, in the poorer the matter of Europes metropolitans, the new technology obliged little change to folks daily life. At darknes, the serpentine streets, suffocating the tribunals and labyrinthine shanties of the city were quite as overshadow and harmful as they had been in the middle ages.

The introduction of gaslight in the early 19 th century had much the same effects, transforming the areas frequented by the upper and middle classes but leaving those inhabited by the poor pretty much untouched. Even so, alongside the professionalisation of Europes police forces, it revolutionised municipalities at night. In 1807, as part of an energetic expedition to shape London the first metropolis to be predominantly ignited at night by gas, the expat German entrepreneur Frederick Winsor mounted an exhibition of its benefits in Pall Mall. The Monthly Magazine praised the success of this experimentation and the beautifully grey and bright light-colored it raised. By 1823 more than 200 miles of streets in London were illuminated by nearly 40,000 lamps. Light had been industrialised.

Not everyone was happy about those improvements. Like other Romantic, John Keats grumbled that the insinuate forms of lighting links with candles and oil lamps, which ignited small areas with an uneven, gently flickering flame, and which hence rendered a kind of introspective halo, were being confided to the past. An impersonal artificial flare, especially in the regions where the retail pushers let loose the gas, was progressively rebuffing all the powers of darkness. Keats lamented the facts of the case that the citys authorities and commercial-grade sakes were exiling nighttimes magic, its whodunit and its splendor, from the city. And his famed Ode to a Nightingale( 1819 ), which celebrates the embalmed darkness, was a carefully staged is making an effort to summon it back.

The decorating the consequences of gaslight were far more uniform than those of lubricant, but electric lighting, which emerged in the 1880 s, flooded rather than simply pooled the street in which it was installed with an intense, apparently grey illumination. Caricatures and decorates from the period proudly depict beings holding about on pavements speaking newspapers beneath etiolated electric lamps. Electric street lighting grew the ultimate button of metropolitan modernity, and European municipalities rivalled with each other to be the pre-eminent City of Light. In the end, New York overtake all of them, including Paris. Meanwhile, cities that retained their medieval terrain, and that were slow to innovate the new technology, were consigned to the past. In an section named Against Past-Loving Venice( 1910 ), the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti pealed: Tell the reign of sacred Electric Light finally come, to liberate Venice from its venal moonshine

Harrods in London, spate with lighter in 1935. Photograph: Fox Photos/ Getty Images

But, in spite of the unvarying glare of electric street lights at the commercial, industrial and residential centres, even the 20 th centurys most futuristic metropolitans were influenced by socially peripheral, predominantly working-class areas that remained plunged in darkness at night. The German astronomer Bruno H Brgel, recalling in 1930 the dignity with which his father, who came from the days of lighting by oil-lamp, resulted him through Berlins wealth of flare, drily celebrated: A step into the side streets, and you felt set back by centuries. It was not merely the absence of sunlight, but the fact that there is the poor at night, and above all the homeless, that prepared these localities seem like remnants of the pre-Enlightenment, pre-capitalist past. The houseless, as they used to be called, had been an endemic proximity in Europes cities after dark since the middle ages, when males and denizens of the street were criminalised as common nightwalkers.

The 20 th-century city nonetheless staged the progressive colonisation of the darknes by the day, darkness by light. Prohibits, cinema, associations, music halls, theaters and amusement parks catered ever more forcefully to families appetite for vacation after hours. Surely, the motto after hours seemed more and more nonsensical, as factories, infirmaries, roles and supermarkets thrummed throughout the nighttime. Even in what had for centuries been called the dead night, approximately between 2am and 4am, the centres of major metropolitan metropolitans neighbourhoods like Piccadilly Circus and Times Square pulsed with parties. Electric light, Thomas Edison had insisted, means darknes life, and night life intends progress.

In the early 1940 s, when the British capital was routinely submerge into darkness during the course of its offensive, Edisons formula seemed all the more irrefutable. For at that time, conversely, the absence of electric light plunged London, and other European metropolis, into a district of wickednes. It was perhaps in part because of this harrowing know-how that the postwar generation redoubled its commitment to obtaining the value of both labour and leisure from the night. The term clubbing was first used to symbolize going to nightclubs in the mid-1 960 s, when the family of those who been adults through the second largest world war start out overcoming this inheritance and reclaiming the night.

Since then, as the artistry historian Jonathan Crary lately wrote in his fine polemical 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep , the capitalist system has promoted the rise of a society in which a territory of permanent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop action of world exchange and radiance. In the late 1990 s, to hold a dazzling precedent, a Russian-European infinite consortium developed proposals to use satellites with parabolic reflector to illuminate remote regions of Earth with sunlight and so enable work to be performed around the clock. Promising sunlight all darknes long, it also proposed that entire metropolitan areas might be decorated after dark along these lines, yielding electric light itself anachronistic. Dreams of the elimination of the darknes can no longer be dismissed as science fiction.

In the 21 st century, electric lighting in advanced capitalist countries if not in innumerable developing nations is a uniform and universal facet of cities at night. So is travelling, browse, wreaking and another activity that for much of the past seemed unimaginable taking place after dark. But in practice, as has been the case for millennia, some people have freer and fuller access to the city at night than others. Lone women may detect be exempted from it, for example, if exclusively because at certain times and in certain places they are made to feel unacceptably susceptible. Black and Asian beings, for their side, are far more likely to be criminalised in west municipalities than white humen at night.

The 24-hour tubing, “its probably” safe to predict, will not essentially adapt the facts of the case that for numerous parties, if not for the citys person of cats and feral foxes, London abides, like other British municipalities, at the least partially off limits at night. We have a night-time economy; the work requires a night-time politics.

Matthew Beaumont is the author of Nightwalking: a Nocturnal Biography of London, 9.99, Verso. Click here to buy it for 8.19

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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