#it 1990 is. as always. the superior adaptation <3

[chiseler]

Utopia and Apocalypse: Pynchon’s Populist/Fatalist Cinema

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.

--from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors—two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein)—but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. My motives were both pluralistic and populist: a desire both to respect fiction and non-fiction as equal creative partners and to insist that the book was about more than just myself and my own life. Because my book was largely about the creative roles played by the fictions of cinema on the non-fictions of personal lives, the anti-elitist nature of cinema played a crucial part in these transactions.`

In the case of Pynchon’s 1964 story—which twenty years later, in his collection Slow Learner, he would admit was the only early story of his that he still liked—the cinematic relevance to Moving Places could be found in a single fleeting but resonant detail: the momentary bonding of a little white boy named Tim Santora with a black, homeless, alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee in a hotel room when they discover that they’ve both seen Blood Alley (1955), an anticommunist action-adventure with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, directed by William Wellman. Pynchon mentions only the film’s title, but the complex synergy of this passing moment of mutual recognition between two of its dissimilar viewers represented for me an epiphany, in part because of the irony of such casual camaraderie occurring in relation to a routine example of Manichean Cold War mythology. Moreover, as a right-wing cinematic touchstone, Blood Alley is dialectically complemented in the same story by Tim and his friends categorizing their rebellious schoolboy pranks as Operation Spartacus, inspired by the left-wing Spartacus (1960) of Kirk Douglas, Dalton Trumbo, and Stanley Kubrick.

For better and for worse, all of Pynchon’s fiction partakes of this populism by customarily defining cinema as the cultural air that everyone breathes, or at least the river in which everyone swims and bathes. This is equally apparent in the only Pynchon novel that qualifies as hackwork, Inherent Vice (2009), and the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it is also his worst film to date—a hippie remake of Chinatown in the same way that the novel is a hippie remake of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—seems logical insofar as it seems to have been written with an eye towards selling the screen rights. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed (while defending this indefensible book and film) in the New York Review of Books (January 3, 2015), “Perhaps the novel really was crying out for such a cinematic transformation, for in its pages people watch movies, remember them, compare events in the ‘real world’ to their plots, re-experience their soundtracks as auditory hallucinations, even work their technical components (the lighting style of cinematographer James Wong Howe, for instance) into aspects of complex conspiratorial schemes.” (Despite a few glancing virtues, such as  Josh Brolin’s Nixonesque performance as "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Anderson’s film seems just as cynical as its source and infused with the same sort of misplaced would-be nostalgia for the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, pitched to a generation that didn’t experience it, as Bertolucci’s Innocents: The Dreamers.)

From The Crying of Lot 49’s evocation of an orgasm in cinematic terms (“She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera’s already moving”) to the magical-surreal guest star appearance of Mickey Rooney in wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, cinema is invariably a form of lingua franca in Pynchon’s fiction, an expedient form of shorthand, calling up common experiences that seem light years away from the sectarianism of the politique des auteurs. This explains why his novels set in mid-20th century, such as the two just cited, when cinema was still a common currency cutting across classes, age groups, and diverse levels of education, tend to have the greatest number of movie references. In Gravity’s Rainbow—set mostly in war-torn Europe, with a few flashbacks to the east coast U.S. and flash-forwards to the contemporary west coast—this even includes such anachronistic pop ephemera as the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men and the 1955 Western The Return of Jack Slade (which a character named Waxwing Blodgett is said to have seen at U.S. Army bases during World War 2 no less than twenty-seven times), along with various comic books.

Significantly, “The Secret Integration”, a title evoking both conspiracy and countercultural utopia, is set in the same cozy suburban neighborhood in the Berkshires from which Tyrone Slothrop, the wartime hero or antihero of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), aka “Rocketman,” springs, with his kid brother and father among the story’s characters. It’s also the same region where Pynchon himself grew up. And Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus and richest work, is by all measures the most film-drenched of his novels in its design as well as its details—so much so that even its blocks of text are separated typographically by what resemble sprocket holes. Unlike, say, Vineland (1990), where cinema figures mostly in terms of imaginary TV reruns (e.g., Woody Allen in Young Kissinger) and diverse cultural appropriations (e.g., a Noir Center shopping mall), or the post-cinematic adventures in cyberspace found in the noirish (and far superior) east-coast companion volume to Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge (2013), cinema in Gravity’s Rainbow is basically a theatrical event with a social impact, where Fritz Lang’s invention of the rocket countdown as a suspense device (in the 1929 Frau im mond) and the separate “frames” of a rocket’s trajectory are equally relevant and operative factors. There are also passing references to Lang’s Der müde Tod, Die Nibelungen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Metropolis—not to mention De Mille’s Cleopatra, Dumbo, Freaks, Son of Frankenstein, White Zombie, at least two Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, Pabst, and Lubitsch—and the epigraphs introducing the novel’s second and third sections (“You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray” and “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…. –Dorothy, arriving in Oz”) are equally steeped in familiar movie mythology.

These are all populist allusions, yet the bane of populism as a rightwing curse is another near-constant in Pynchon’s work. The same ambivalence can be felt in the novel’s last two words, “Now everybody—“, at once frightening and comforting in its immediacy and universality. With the possible exception of Mason & Dixon (1997), every Pynchon novel over the past three decades—Vineland, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge—has an attractive, prominent, and sympathetic female character betraying or at least acting against her leftist roots and/or principles by being first drawn erotically towards and then being seduced by a fascistic male. In Bleeding Edge, this even happens to the novel’s earthy protagonist, the middle-aged detective Maxine Tarnow. Given the teasing amount of autobiographical concealment and revelation Pynchon carries on with his public while rigorously avoiding the press, it is tempting to see this recurring theme as a personal obsession grounded in some private psychic wound, and one that points to sadder-but-wiser challenges brought by Pynchon to his own populism, eventually reflecting a certain cynicism about human behavior. It also calls to mind some of the reflections of Luc Moullet (in “Sainte Janet,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 86, août 1958) aroused by Howard Hughes’ and Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot and (more incidentally) by Ayn Rand’s and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead whereby “erotic verve” is tied to a contempt for collectivity—implicitly suggesting that rightwing art may be sexier than leftwing art, especially if the sexual delirium in question has some of the adolescent energy found in, for example, Hughes, Sternberg, Rand, Vidor, Kubrick, Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and, yes, Pynchon.

One of the most impressive things about Pynchon’s fiction is the way in which it often represents the narrative shapes of individual novels in explicit visual terms. V, his first novel, has two heroes and narrative lines that converge at the bottom point of a V; Gravity’s Rainbow, his second—a V2 in more ways than one—unfolds across an epic skyscape like a rocket’s (linear) ascent and its (scattered) descent; Vineland offers a narrative tangle of lives to rhyme with its crisscrossing vines, and the curving ampersand in the middle of Mason & Dixon suggests another form of digressive tangle between its two male leads; Against the Day, which opens with a balloon flight, seems to follow the curving shape and rotation of the planet.

This compulsive patterning suggests that the sprocket-hole design in Gravity’s Rainbow’s section breaks is more than just a decorative detail. The recurrence of sprockets and film frames carries metaphorical resonance in the novel’s action, so that Franz Pökler, a German rocket engineer allowed by his superiors to see his long-lost daughter (whom he calls his “movie child” because she was conceived the night he and her mother saw a porn film) only once a year, at a children’s village called Zwölfkinder, and can’t even be sure if it’s the same girl each time:

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child—what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you can speed or slow at will…)?

***

Cinema, in short, is both delightful and sinister—a utopian dream and an apocalyptic nightmare, a stark juxtaposition reflected in the abrupt shift in the earlier Pynchon passage quoted at the beginning of this essay from present tense to past tense, and from third person to first person. Much the same could be said about the various displacements experienced while moving from the positive to the negative consequences of  populism.

Pynchon’s allegiance to the irreverent vulgarity of kazoos sounding like farts and concomitant Spike Jones parodies seems wholly in keeping with his disdain for David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s popular song “Laura” and what he perceives as the snobbish elitism  of the Preminger film it derives from, as expressed in his passionate liner notes to the CD compilation “Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones” a half-century later:

The song had been featured in the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke the hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors,witty repartee—a world of pseudos as inviting to…class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better.

Consequently, neither art cinema nor auteur cinema figures much in Pynchon’s otherwise hefty lexicon of film culture, aside from a jokey mention of a Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casares Film Festival (actors playing Death in The Seventh Seal and Orphée) held in Los Angeles—and significantly, even the “underground”, 16-millimeter radical political filmmaking in northern California charted in Vineland becomes emblematic of the perceived failure of the 60s counterculture as a whole. This also helps to account for why the paranoia and solipsism found in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient and Out 1, perhaps the closest equivalents to Pynchon’s own notions of mass conspiracy juxtaposed with solitary despair, are never mentioned in his writing, and the films that are referenced belong almost exclusively to the commercial mainstream, unlike the examples of painting, music, and literature, such as the surrealist painting of Remedios Varo described in detail at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49,  the importance of Ornette Coleman in V and Anton Webern in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the visible impact of both Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs on the latter novel. (1) And much of the novel’s supply of movie folklore—e.g., the fatal ambushing of John Dillinger while leaving Chicago’s Biograph theater--is mainstream as well.

Nevertheless, one can find a fairly precise philosophical and metaphysical description of these aforementioned Rivette films in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” And the white, empty movie screen that appears apocalyptically on the novel’s final page—as white and as blank as the fusion of all the colors in a rainbow—also appears in Rivette’s first feature when a 16-millimeter print of Lang’s Metropolis breaks during the projection of the Tower of Babel sequence.

Is such a physically and metaphysically similar affective climax of a halted film projection foretelling an apocalypse a mere coincidence? It’s impossible to know whether Pynchon might have seen Paris nous appartient during its brief New York run in the early 60s. But even if he hadn’t (or still hasn’t), a bitter sense of betrayed utopian possibilities in that film, in Out 1, and in most of his fiction is hard to overlook. Old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) don’t like to be woken from their dreams.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Footnote

For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical about accepting the hypothesis of the otherwise reliable Pynchon critic Richard Poirier that Gravity’s Rainbow’s enigmatic references to “the Kenosha Kid” might allude to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Steven C. Weisenburger, in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), reports more plausibly that “the Kenosha Kid” was a pulp magazine character created by Forbes Parkhill in Western stories published from the 1920s through the 1940s. Once again, Pynchon’s populism trumps—i.e. exceeds—his cinephilia.

[marcmyworks]

Quentin Tarantino is one of the best directors of both the 20th and 21st Century, which started with his first wide release film in 1992. He has just recently released his 9th (or 10th depending on your point of view) film, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood to rave reviews. As one of my favourite directors, I have decided to list rank each of his films. I want to first state that I love everything this man puts out, just some more than others. Lets begin.

*Spoilers below*

10. The Hateful Eight (2015)

The Hateful Eight is the least successful in Tarantino’s repertoire and I don’t mean financially. This film just seems to have little to no likeability, and before you say it, I do understand that each character is ‘hateful’ but at times it seems quite forced. 

Though well written and acted, it feels that the shocking moments are put in there simply to shock rather than provide any interest. We have the story of eight characters trapped in a cabin during a snowstorm, the film is Western themed, there is a revenge plot as well a bounty hunter. I really do not think this is a bad film in any regard, and it even feels like the sister film to Reservoir Dogs, but in terms of style and content it feels like a mishmash of things the audience has seen before from the Director, like his greatest hits, rather than a new and original story.

9. Death Proof (2007)

A lot of critics, and even Tarantino himself, have put this as the lowest ranking of his films on their list, I disagree. This may not be the most fleshed out story, but it is one of the most fun. I am ranking the unrated version of the film, as the theatrical version was cut down from its 113 minutes to 87 minutes to be incorporated as the Grindhouse double feature (with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror). The shorter version is the one critics saw and I don’t believe it does the full film justice. 

Death Proof is inspired by Grindhouse revenge films such as I Spit on Your Grave and include a multitude of young starlets and even re-launched the career of actor Kurt Russell. Overall the film is quite good though there are instances where it is quite obvious that a man wrote the female dialogue, which in the Me-Too age isn’t as acceptable. An example of this can be read here, where this character speaks about her father:

“Look, he’s totally harmless and cute as a bug's ear! But you know, when he's got a bunch of half-naked poontang walking the floor of his lake house, he just likes to pay us a visit and make sure we got everything we need.”

8. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Tarantino’s first full length film is the smallest scale of his career as most of it takes place in one room. Though the scale is small, the dialogue and action are immense, the characters fleshed out and, in most ways, stands the test of time. The film was well received by audiences and made more than twice its meager budget, but at times it is quite obvious this was shot by a new director still formulating his style. Tim Roth (as Mr. Orange) is excellent as the newest member of the gang and his relationship with Harvey Keitel (Mr. White) is one of the strongest bromances in cinema history.

7. Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019)

Though advertised as an accurate biographical account of the Manson Murders in 1960s Hollywood, this film is actually more fictional, less about these murders and more a love letter to the actors of that time. The story is centred around director Roman Polanski and wife Sharon Tate’s fictional neighbour, actor Rick Dalton and his stunt man Cliff Booth (based screen legends Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds and the latter’s stunt-double Hal Needham). The film explores how the two are struggling to adapt to the ever-changing Hollywood, paralleling with the growth of the Manson family who are interested with the Tate/Polanski household. Though a long film, it does quite well at showcasing the struggles of actors in Hollywood, the indulgence of the rich and the rise of a fanatic cult.

6. Jackie Brown (1997)

In the 1990s Tarantino was one of the biggest Directors around, he had won an Oscar for his writing and audiences were anxiously awaiting his third film. After acquiring the film rights to Elmore Leonard’s novel ‘Rum Punch’, Tarantino started writing Jackie Brown with the intent on giving the script to another director; however, Leonard loved the script so much Tarantino decided to direct himself.

Jackie Brown takes inspiration from Blaxploitation films like Coffy and Foxy Brown, though with a slower pace and using much less action. Pam Grier, star of both the aforementioned films, was Tarantino’s only choice for the lead role and to this day he is amazed that she was not nominated for an Oscar. The film is a slow burn compared to Tarantino’s previous two movies and does have its issues with pacing and story consistency but does contain more humour.

5. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)

The Kill Bill films are two of the coolest of Tarantino’s career; from the opening Klingon proverb, to the Pussy Wagon to the schlocky gore, this film was every film geek’s dream. Tarantino promised Uma Thurman that her birthday present would be the lead in his next film and a year after promising her this he delivered her the script. Originally conceived as one long epic film, it was split into two by production as it was felt the first half of the film had a different tone to the second. Producers also wanted to ensure it was a box office success and a four-hour film in the modern age was too much of a gamble. The first Kill Bill provides the groundwork for what is rarely seen in Hollywood, an even better sequel.

4. Django Unchained (2012)

Django is similar to the original film from 1966 in name only, as this version focuses on pre-American Civil War racism, slavery and the liberation a slave named Django. The film feels more like an homage to one of the biggest budget exploitation film of all time, Mandingo. It's a very simple story of a man who is trying to save his wife and along the way befriends a bounty hunter who aids him in his quest, but it is effective as it is a criticism of racism that still continues in the United States. Jamie Foxx does an excellent job portraying the titular character with Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson wonderfully playing the supporting roles.

3. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)

I will say there is a large debate in the fan community whether the Kill Bill films should be ranked together as one film (as Tarantino states they should be), or whether they are two separate entities of a franchise as well which one is the better of the two. Upon first watching the films I was a bit disappointed Volume 2 did not have the same amount of camp violence as the first, as this film feels to be more a Spaghetti Western revenge film rather than a Samurai thriller. However, upon the re-watching the film multiple times it is quite obvious through the dialogue, storytelling and excellent cinematography that this is the superior film and is a contender for the top spot of Tarantino’s filmography.

2. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Inglorious Basterds is one of the films that not only has incredible star power but also has amazing gravitas. The film made Irish actor Michael Fassbender and German actor Christoph Waltz popular with American audiences with the latter’s excellent performance winning him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. The Basterds, a team of Jewish mercenary’s who capture, interrogate and kill Nazis and are played by a group of talents including Brad Pitt, Eli Roth and B.J. Novak. They are up against the evil Hans Landa (Waltz) also known as “The Jew Hunter”, a Nazi Colonel who is employed to ensure security for a film event being attended by Adolf Hitler. The film itself is a tribute to American war propaganda films from the 1940s, and though one of his most brutal, is truly one of Tarantino’s best writing efforts.

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)

I know this is the obvious choice, but with good reason. Pulp Fiction is the first film anyone thinks of when they think Tarantino. Made up of seemingly random story vignettes and inspired by pulp magazines, Tarantino devised to make a film made up of simple short stories that only later the viewer could see were actually intertwined. Tarantino proved he could make interesting films on a smaller scale with his critically acclaimed film Reservoir Dogs and was able to bring in major stars such as Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman, John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, the latter of whom would star in or have roles in most of his pictures. The film was a box-office success and won several awards including the Academy Award for best writing. Though Tarantino has had many excellent films in his career, Pulp Fiction will always be the most iconic and original.

[fletchermarple]

Five Real Crime Stories that Inspired Fiction – Part III

(Part I and Part II)

1.Roseann Quinn - “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”:

In the commercially succesful 1977 film, Diane Keaton plays Theresa Dunn, a woman who after leaving behind her repressive background starts exploring her sexuality by having one night stands and getting tangled with a dangerous man. The movie is based on a novel, which in turn tells the true story of Roseann Quinn, a 29 year old school teacher who was stabbed to death on January 2, 1973, by John Wayne Wilson. The couple had just met at a bar and gone back to her apartment, but after he was unable to get an erection he claims she insulted him and made him snap. Wilson hanged himself on May 5, 1973, while he was in jail waiting for the legal proceedings.

2. David Cox - “A Few Good Men”: Arguably one of the best legal dramas in film, “A Few Good Men” tells the story of two U.S. Marines who are under court-martialed for accidentally killing a fellow soldier in Guantanamo, while giving the young man a punishment ordered by their superiors. Tom Cruise and Demi Moore play the lawyers defending them, and Jack Nicholson, as the base commander, delivers one of the most quotable lines in movie history: “You can’t handle the truth!”. The movie was originally a play, and its writer Aaron Sorkin got the idea because his sister, a lawyer in the Navy, had to defend a group of Marines who almost killed another one while following orders. One of those accused Marines was David Cox, who ended up suing the studio for using his story without asking or paying him. But Cox never got to see the end of that court case: he disappeared on June 5, 1994, and his body was found three months later. He had been shot four times, execution style. The murder has never been solved, but many believed that David was targeted because he started talking too much about that the U.S. military was doing in Guantanamo while giving interviews about the movie.

3. Dennis DePue - “Jeepers Creepers”: What can a horror movie about an ancient creature that feeds on human body parts have to do with reality? Turns out that the whole opening sequence of this 2001 movie, in which two siblings are driving around when they see a strange figure disposing of bloody sheets, is almost an exact copy of a segment featured in Unsolved Mysteries in 1991. That episode started with a couple who were driving in Michigan in April 1990, when a speeding van passed them. They later saw the van parked in an abandoned schoolhouse, and the man that had been driving it was taking out some bloody sheets and burying them in the ground. The man was Dennis DePue, and he’d just murdered his ex wife Marilynn, pictured with him above. The whole thing was pretty horrible: Dennis had first beaten Marilynn in front of his kids, and then had left the house with her, claiming he was taking her to the hospital. But instead, he shot her in the head, sent a bunch of deranged letters to his relatives and disappeared. When the case came up in Unsolved Mysteries, Dennis was living in Texas under the name of Hank Queen. He was recognized and when police confronted him, he ended up shooting himself. “Jeepers Creepers” writer and director Victor Salva never admitted he had pretty much ripped off the start of his movie from the show, but you can judge for yourself the similarities here. But the real crime in this story is the fact that Salva, a convicted child molester, was allowed to continue working with kids and doing movies.

4. Dr. Sam Sheppard - “The Fugitive”: One of the most infamous unsolved cases in american history is the 1954 murder of Marilyn Sheppard, who was bludgeoned to death in her bed in Cleveland. Her husband Sam, a neurosurgeon, said that an intruder had killed Marilyn and knocked him unconscious. However, he ended up being arrested and tried for the murder and found guilty. He spent 10 years in prison, after which he was retried and acquitted. (If you want to know more, you can check here for the arguments in favor of guilt and innocence, and also these findings in 1998). Sheppard’s guilt has been hotly debated for decades, and it allegedly inspired a popular TV show in the 60s called “The Fugitive”, which in 1993 was adapted into a very successful movie starring Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, who gets wrongfully accused of killing his wife and must escape from custody to prove his innocence. The creators of the original TV show always denied that they had based their story on the Sheppard case, but it’s hard to believe them when you compare the two plots. And after all, F. Lee Bailey, Sheppard’s famous lawyer who got him out of jail, said that the producer himself had confessed to him that it was based on Sheppard.

5. Sarah Winchester - “Winchester” and “Rose Red”: Technically it’s not a crime, but a creepy story. Sarah became the heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company after the death of her husband and used most of her fortune to obsessively build a never ending mansion in California during 38 years. It’s said that she did so because she was convinced she had been cursed by all the people who had been killed with Winchester guns, and a medium had told her that she needed to keep working on the house to appease the spirits, or else she would die. The bizarre house ended up having over 160 rooms and is today a tourist attraction (in case you’re wondering, after an earthquake in 1906, Sarah left the house and didn’t die until 1922). The famous legend inspired Stephen King to write the miniseries “Rose Red”, which follows a group of psychics exploring a house with a similar background, and is behind a movie that was released in 2018, starring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester.

[avanneman]

The Code of the Woosters

The 23 episodes of “Jeeves and Wooster”, a British TV series starring Stephen Fry as Jeeves and a young Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster that ran from 1990 to 1993, are now available via YouTube. If you don’t know who Jeeves and Bertie are, you probably won’t enjoy the series. If you do know, you’re almost sure to have quibbles.

Jeeves, indispensable personal manservant, and his employer, mentally negligible man about town Bertie Wooster, were the supreme creations of P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced “Woodhouse”), the most gifted (to my mind) author of light fiction who ever lived. George Orwell, who wrote an intelligent though ultimately too generous discussion of Wodehouse, explained to ignorant Americans that Bertie was a pre-World War I Edwardian “knut”, a languid, yet somehow charming fellow whose general incompetence somehow makes it appropriate that he should have more money than he can spend.

The fact that a lot of Bertie Woosters got slaughtered in the trenches of World War I somehow did not decrease the market for Wodehouse’s fiction. Wodehouse, who always looked rather determinedly on the bright side of life, at least in public, shrewdly guessed that a lot of people would prefer to pretend that the Great War never happened, and so made the world of the knut even more extravagantly self-indulgent and unreal than it had been in the balmy days when King Edward was still alive,1 creating a world of young men in spats, white flannels and cucumber sandwiches, smart flats and country homes, heiresses and French maids, all of them pure as the driven snow—for Wodehouse’s world is as innocent as the real one is wicked.

What makes Wodehouse worth reading is the wonderful dexterity of both his language and his plots—“musical comedy without the music,” he liked to call it, although few musicals could match the twists and turns of his absurdist plots where everything is first turned upside down—very often due to Bertie’s blundering—and then flipped rightside up again thanks to Jeeves’ brilliance.2 Wodehouse drew heavily on the tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan for both his plots and language, translating them onto the written page. He had a wonderful ability to mix the clichés of formal and colloquial English—ponderous “Establishment English” and English “public school”3 slang, in particular—turning them inside out or leaving them rightside in while placing them in incongruous surroundings, shifting constantly from outrageous overstatement to similarly outrageous understatement within a single sentence.4

When I first saw the Jeeves and Wooster episodes I was disappointed that every line of Wodehouse’s superb verbal stunting wasn’t faithfully replicated on the screen—absurd, no doubt, but, as Bertie would say, there it is. After almost thirty years to collect my thoughts, I find that, so far, my original judgment was a bit harsh. Stephen Fry makes an excellent Jeeves, though there’s often an ironic tone to his supposedly respectful responses to Bertie’s inanities—as though Fry feels the need to let us know that Jeeves knows how stupid Bertie is—which strikes me as lazy and self-indulgent. The real Jeeves, one feels, would be above the need to signal his superiority.

Laurie’s Bertie Wooster is more of a mixed bag. In the first scenes of the first episode, Laurie engages in some horrible mugging, intended to let us know that Bertie’s suffering from a hangover, but if the plot didn’t make that clear, we’d never have guessed. Eventually. Laurie improves, and physically he makes an excellent Wooster, his tall, spindly, eccentric frame making even the most elegant outfit look somewhat ridiculous, and thus serving to ridicule rather than distinguish its wearer.

The trappings of twenties and thirties elegance are very well done, but the Brits, of course, never tire of this. British studios must have roundhouses of puffing locomotives, garages bursting with antique sports cars, taxis, and limos, not to mention immaculately maintained country homes and smart flats. The theme music, a sort of palm court jazz, if that isn’t too rude a term, is quite catchy as well.

The attempts to “open up” Wodehouse’s world are another matter, and an area where devotees are likely to quibble. The series takes us inside Bertie’s “Drones Club,” but the members are depicted as emotionally stunted six-year-olds, while I always envisioned them as emotionally stunted thirteen-year-olds. I ended up bailing on the series back in the nineties for its lack of “respect” for Wodehouse, but if I persevere through the whole thing this time around I may be more forgiving.

Afterwords In the “real” twenties, knuts were better known as upper-class twits or “Bright Young Things.” The current British series The Windsors does a better job taking down the modern-day upper-class twit, because The Windsors deals with shagging and snorting as well as cigarettes and liquor, which are the only sins permitted in Jeeves and Wooster, though The Windsors still keeps it light. For a grimmer touch, you can find a TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, in which all the Bright Young Things are damned to Hell—or at least would be if Evelyn had his way. Variations on these themes can also be found on the once legendary Upstairs Downstairs series, which you can get on Amazon, if not elsewhere, as well as the execrable Downton Abbey—execrable if not indeed damnable—which I ridiculed both here and here.

Back in his heyday, between the two big wars, Wodehouse was the beloved pet of virtually every English writer, from Orwell on the left to T. S. Eliot (officially an American, of course,5) on the right, first because he was so funny and second because he offered no competition to them, despite writing of a world that they all knew never existed.6 The Wodehouse cult endured a great crisis in the early days of World War II when Wodehouse and his wife, enjoying an extended vacation in France, managed to get themselves captured by the German army. They were interned as enemy civilians, and Wodehouse agreed to make a few radio broadcasts for the Germans, in which he explained that his hosts, once you got to know them, proved to be rather jolly chaps in the whole. This naturally enraged the British population, who regarded Wodehouse as nothing less than a traitor.

The intelligentsia can always love an outcast—some more than others, of course—and Wodehouse admirers like Orwell rallied round in an excessive manner, rushing to “explain” that Wodehouse was a political naïf who knew not what he did. I think one can wonder about that. Wodehouse was quite a wealthy man—rarely the mark of a naïf in the first place—and many wealthy people on the eve of World War II feared that a “long war” would inevitably lead to crushing taxation and endless governmental regulation of every aspect of society no matter who “won”. Better to have the whole thing settled and done with, so that, hopefully, we could somehow find our way back to “normality”. Far more illustrious men than Wodehouse—Picasso, Matisse, and Andrè Gide, for example—were willing to make their peace with the Nazis. One must learn to accept that which one cannot change, after all.

Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 until 1911, was the figurehead monarch of a society that was moving rapidly towards civil war (over the question of “Home Rule” for Ireland) when an even greater external crisis intervened. Great Britain, as it then was generally called, was spared a civil war at the expense of about 600,000 dead and an equal number of wounded. On the one hand, there was almost nothing that Edward could do to prevent the smashup. On the other, there was almost nothing he did do to prevent the smashup. ↩︎

Eighteenth century literature featured many plots where, as Orwell (again) put it, the elements fit together like the teeth of a zipper, but the real classic that prefigures Wodehouse is Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, far better known in the U.S. via Mozart’s opera. Wodehouse no doubt got the idea from Gilbert and Sullivan rather than the “original”. ↩︎

English “public schools” are what we would call private schools. Wodehouse was immensely happy at his school—confusingly known as “Dulwich College”. It isn’t hard to guess from his work that he found the idea of an all-male society revolving largely around sports and adolescent hijinks immensely appealing. ↩︎

Wodehouse came from a seriously “colonial” family, and according to Wikipedia was raised for the first two years of his life by a Chinese nurse. I’ve read (somewhere) that the historian Edward Gibbon was cared for in his first years by a French nurse, and William F. Buckley was initially raised by a Spanish one. Not being exposed to your “native language” from birth can perhaps lead certain spirits to experience language as “naturally” artificial. ↩︎

Wherever he went, Eliot liked thinking of himself as a “metic” (Greek for “resident alien”)—St. Augustine’s notion of the proper role of a Christian while here on earth. I once read an interesting biography of Eliot that collected the opening remarks of addresses he gave, largely in the U.S. and the U.K., in which he would politely but firmly explain to his audience that he was not one of them. ↩︎

Not every writer adored Wodehouse. It’s typical of writers, regardless of background, to think of themselves as aristocrats and identify with the aristocracy, but some British writers, raised in the “Dissenting” tradition, hate everything about the whole country house fantasy. The fact that Wodehouse created a sort of “Disney version” made it no more palatable. ↩︎

[theantisocialcritic]

Archive Project - December 11, 2013 - Frozen Review

Frozen, 2013 Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee 108 Minutes Watch the Trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbQm5doF_Uc —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— I've been a rather vocal detractor from Disney for a long time. Most of the time I consider them an evil corporation that monopolizes bedtime stories and panders endlessly to little girls. Just read some of the stories about the behind the scenes stuff that happens at Disney World. Rather terrifying stuff… I grew up as a Pixar fanatic, with films like The Incredibles, Monsters Inc and Toy Story which I considered to be far superior than the endless line of princess movies. However since the release of Toy Story 3, it would appear that the two companies have magically switched bodies. Pixar having now given way to a series of princess movies and horrible sequelizing in favor of creativity (Brave and Cars 2 respectively), while Disney seems to have picked up in quality and started flexing their creative muscles with great movies like Tangled and Wreck it Ralph (the latter being my favorite animated movie of 2012). For this reason I got pretty excited the first time I saw a poster for Frozen. Then the advertising campaign came in a sucked out most of my enthusiasm. The two trailers I saw advertised essentially a different movie that what came out; portraying some sort of snowman movie, alternatively contrasted by what appeared to be Tangled at the North Pole. I still wanted to see it but my interested fell back in favor of other major blockbusters like Thor: The Dark World and Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug. Given that i'm a detractor from Disney, and that the marketing campaign was really bad, understand how insane it is for me to say that Frozen is probably the best Disney movie to come out since Beauty and the Beast and Lion King came out in the 1990s. Its not only a totally amazing animated film, but probably one that will break my top ten films of the year list. What makes it work so well? The story, the characters, the themes and technical aspects of the film are all insanely top notch. The story works as a liberally interpreted adaption of the Snow Queen, apparently. I've never actually read that story or heard about it outside of the context of this movie. However its clear that the story isn't trying to work as a strict adaption and just wants to do it's own thing. It focuses on two young girls, Elsa and Anna. The story starts out with them as young kids playing together in the snow and shows how close they are. What becomes immediately apparent is that sister Elsa has the magical ability to create ice and snow which they abuse to turn a room in their parents castle into a playground. When an accident leaves Anna with a near fatal injury, Elsa becomes reclusive from Anna and retreats to her room for the remainder of her childhood and vainly attempts to get a grip on her abilities which grow more powerful as she gets older. The story skips to the day of Elsa's coronation ceremony in which she is supposed to be declared the new Queen of her parent's kingdom (probably should mention that her parents were royalty). During the coronation however, Anna accidentally pushes Elsa out of her comfort zone, causing her to lose control of her powers in from of the kingdom. She retreats to the mountains were she begins openly taking advantage of her powers away from the judgmental eyes of her kingdom which has the unintentional effect of blanketing the entire kingdom with snow in the middle of summer. Anna pursues Elsa up into the mountains with the hope of trying to bring her back to the Kingdom and having her use her abilities to end the imposed winter. Those aren't really spoilers, they are in the trailer and only really encompass the first act. What makes Elsa and Anna so interesting are the way that their personalities clash and what they symbolize. Anna is awkward but incredibly outgoing and kind, while Elsa is introverted, and wants to avoid people. What is nice is that Elsa isn't played as a straight up bad guy. Frozen isn't a story about good and evil. The focus is always on Elsa and Anna's relationship and whether Elsa can overcome her abilities and fears. Their supporting cast is an amazing lineup of personalities. Kristoff, a mountain man and his life partner/reindeer Sven accompany Anna on their journey up the mountain. Olaf, a talking snowman previous mentioned in the ad campaign, works very well as endearing comedic relief. Hans plays the role as the stereotypical handsome prince. Not to mention a variety of minor background characters with definite personalities. The story takes advantage of the cast and consistently interweaves drama and comedy together perfectly in only that way that animated movies can that makes both them awesome and endearing. Although the clique, love is the answer to life, the universe, everything and all purpose plot insolation/motif did kinda make me role my eyes hard a few times, it was used effectively at times and didn't have me scratching my head with bizarre logic very much.   Recently i've kinda taken somewhat of a stance against the concept of musicals as a means of effective storytelling. Not because I think they are inheritantly bad, but because I find musical numbers to be a pace breaker. If you will, Imagine a movie in which characters would sporadically take 5 minute breaks to stare directly at the audience and tell them how their day is going. The pacing in this movie would probably suck because the movie keeps stopping and starting the plot. For this reason, a good musical is one that uses the music numbers as part of the plot. For that, Frozen does a pretty good job. A few songs do break the pace somewhat, but a lot of them do just the opposite by speeding it up and incorporating it into the plot. The song Do you want to build a Snowman serves as a very well done transition between Anna and Elsa's childhood and young adulthood. What is really striking about the movie though is how much the movie serves at a critique of it's own genre of films. It takes a lot of huge swings at the cliques of the princess film genre such as "Love at First sight", "True Love", "The Prince Charming" and so on. The films very ending is very surprising and breaks a commonly used plot moment in most princess films in favor of a creatively conceived moment that plays into the relationships of the characters. I can't really explain further without spoiling major details so I won't, but when you see it pay attention for this detail. If I haven't made it clear from this review, know that Frozen is an amazing film that deserves to seen. Consider this, I usually only buy a few films I see in theaters each year on DVD, and usually its only films like Star Trek or The Avengers that I end up buying. I almost never go out of my way to buy animated films, even ones I really like like Toy Story 3 or Wreck it Ralph. I can say with confidence that I will more than likely pick up Frozen on DVD, possibly even on Blu-ray. If thats not enough of a recommendation that I don't know what is……. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Frozen is now playing in theaters. Special Thanks to Melissa and Meag for actually reading this review! Thanks for reading! Live long and prosper!

[choosewoodentrain]

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CHOOSING YOUR WOODEN TRAIN

Nowadays, children spend more time on their shelves than playing outside. Classic toys tend to decline over time. But thanks to Vintage, good old toys come back to the taste of the day. The wooden train is one of those toys that are timeless. They allow unlimited creativity, they are suitable for all ages.

 In fact, even adults can spend hours riding a wooden train. In this guide, we will describe the main models of the wooden train. And we will see the models adapted to your children.

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 A LITTLE STORY OF THE WOODEN TRAIN

The wooden train is a toy that has been around for a very long time. In the United States, the fascination for wooden trains began with Thomas the little train. It was a character in an animated series called Thomas and his boyfriends that came out in 1984 and continues until today.

 The series is based on a series of books that have been published in books. But the train toys date back to 1931 with the couple Marshal Hart Larrabee II and his wife Elizabeth.

 Graduated from the Wharton School in 1931, Larrabee caught tuberculosis which forced him to a long recovery. To take care, he began to work wood. He created small furniture and different items. One day, he asks his wife what else he could do. She told him to create a train that could be held in his hand.

 An answer that creates the entire wooden train industry. Marshal went to work and started creating small cars that could be assembled together. He also created rails. The beauty of his creation is that the trains were perfectly modular. You could take a locomotive from a first model and connect it to another model.

 What is remarkable is that modern builders have kept this habit. Thus, many models, from different manufacturers, are compatible with each other.

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 THE WOODEN TRAIN STIMULATES CHILDREN'S CREATIVITY

Marshal patented the model of his train and launched his company, Skaneateles Handicrafters, in 1940. From 1945, America had to rebuild after the war.

 And the education sector considered that the wooden train was enormously creative. It also allowed children to solve engineering problems. From the 1950s, major manufacturers have landed in the sector and we can mention BRIO or Keystone.

 Over time, the wooden train has undergone several innovations. Standardization of components, identical track spacing and more and more accessories.

 Important innovations include magnetic tracks and train connectors. This allows you to create pathways as you want, multiplying children's imagination.

 But the golden age of the wooden train began in the 1980s. The arrival of the cartoon Thomas and his friends increased sales tenfold. Everyone wanted Thomas the little train. But the demanding children also wanted other people. Trains named Percy or Gordon were constantly in conversations in the playgrounds.

And from there, we spoke more about operators of a wooden train, but a collector. The 1990s also saw the arrival of China in the sector. Competition is raging until today and that's why you can have hundreds of wooden train models available on the market.

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 THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF WOODEN TRAIN

Now that we have done historically, we must understand that the market has diversified enormously over the years. In wooden trains, we have the models intended for the game and those for modelling. The difference is the quality of materials and the accuracy of the scale.

 THE WOODEN TRAIN FOR THE GAME

Also known as the playful wooden train, it does not benefit from a particular precision. It consists of a locomotive and several wagons. It is clearly in Marshal's mentality where the train allows the child to freely express his creativity. He can assemble different models and create the wooden train circuit that suits him.

 The wooden train is suitable for children under 8 years old, but you have to pay attention to the complexity of the models. At age 5, it is better to buy a simpler model, for example, a locomotive and 3 cars. And then we can move to a more efficient model. 

THE WOODEN TRAIN IN MODELING

The wooden train for modelling benefits from a sector in its own right. They must be very precise and each component must be identical to the model of the train in reality. These wooden trains are available on several scales:

 The G scale: The G scale comes from the Grob word which means big. A G wooden train usually has a scale of 1: 22.5. This is the largest of the train models.

Scale 1 or Gauge 1: This scale offers 1:32. Very popular in the 20th century, it lost notoriety with the embargoes of the world wars. Very appreciated collectors.

Scale 0 : We have a scale of 1:48, 1:64 or 1: 43.5. Note that the 1:64 scale is quite old. The scale name 0 comes from the fact that the components are smaller than the scale 1. This is a popular scale in England.

The S scale : One of the oldest models of wooden train. It has a value of 1:64. Note that the wooden train for the game also has a size S. In the latter case, the scale does not matter because it indicates a large toy model.

The H0 scale : The most popular scale for trains. The name comes from the fact that it is 50% larger than the 0 scale. Its value is 1: 87.1. It is also known as the OO scale in Europe.

The TT scale : The acronym stands for Table Top. Very popular in Germany, it's an ideal scale for war games with trains. In modeling, we have very complex models that can cover an entire table.

N scale : The smallest scale available. With a value of 1: 148 or 1: 160. It is half the scale H0.

DO YOU HAVE TO BUY A WOODEN TRAIN FOR MODELING?

Many parents are wrong when they buy a wooden train. They are taking the train for modelling and then they understand that the child is often lost. This is normal because they are trains that must be assembled piece and piece and it will achieve a precision millimeter.

 Similarly, trains for modelling are often made of metal. One can be confusing because their aesthetic is superior to the classic wooden train. And these are much cheaper.

 If you choose a 100% wooden train, then chances are it's a toy. It is a good way to not go wrong during the purchase. Then, if your kids love modelling, then model trains are also a good choice. But be sure to choose easier models and the most robust components.

 In addition, trains for modelling require a certain age to use them. Do not forget to check it in the product sheet.

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 THE CRITERIA FOR CHOOSING A WOODEN TRAIN

You have decided to choose a wooden train for your children. But you will have to consider the different variants. We talked about tables and there are wooden trains with an integrated table or standalone.

 You can also choose the 2 separately. For example, a table with a Wild West landscape with a modern wooden train model. But check the compatibility between the manufacturers.

 If your child has never played trains, then it is better to go through the model with the built-in table. The train and the table will come from the same manufacturer and you will have perfect compatibility.

 So, we mentioned Thomas the little train and it's a good model to start. We benefit from many designs and children will quickly become familiar with this type of model.

 Among the purchasing criteria, we have the materials, the storage space and the compatibility between the manufacturers. The wood must be thick enough and treated with varnish and other protective substances. Storage space is crucial. It will be in the form of a drawer on the table.

 Check that you can store all components to avoid damaging the train. Finally, the compatibility between the train and the table must be optimal. But since builders use the same dimensions, we will rarely have problems in this area.

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 TRAINS MADE ENTIRELY OF WOOD OR HYBRIDS?

You can find trains made entirely of wood. But manufacturers also offer hybrids. Thus, we will have a combination of plastic and wood. These are interesting models.

 On the one hand, they are more affordable and stronger. Plastic also allows for more flexibility in design. You also have metal models. But clearly, they are intended for modelling. In addition, they are much more expensive and can be dangerous for young children.

 WHICH TRAIN DEPENDS ON THE AGE OF THE CHILD?

Regarding age, if your child is under 3, then it is better to opt for a single-block train. The dexterity of the child will not be optimal for trains with multiple components. From the age of 5, you can buy a locomotive made up of several wagons and a wooden train track. We also have the technique of buying a large, very complex model.

 But we give only a few pieces to the child. In this way, he can grow up with his wooden train. Moreover, it is almost certain that he will lose coins. If you do not give it all, then you reduce the risk of having to buy a new model every year.

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 DO NOT RUSH ON THE CHEAPEST!

Many collectors and model enthusiasts remember their first train. This is not a coincidence, as manufacturers offer the best models for the first purchase. It is a toy that must accompany the child for years. And you might be tempted to choose the cheapest one.

But you would regret it. The child may get bored with too expensive and inexpensive models will be expensive in the long run. It is also not worth spending a fortune and always keep a good compromise between the quality/price ratio. The choice of the manufacturer of the wooden train is also important.

 THE BEST BRANDS OF WOODEN TRAIN

BRIO and KidKraft are considered the best wooden train manufacturers.

 BRIO

The BRIO brand started in 1884 in a village in Sweden where a certain Ivar Bengtsson began selling woven baskets. It was from 1902 that BRIO started making toys, mainly wooden horses.

 The company BRIO is officially created in 1908 and the name comes from the acronyms of the two brothers of Ivar. And it was not until 1957 that the brand offered its first wooden train.

 Today, his trains are among the most famous models. And the brand is also interested in the development of the child. He created the concept of Brio Word which allows the child to grow up with his trains. From a single locomotive, he can create a world that pleases him with components that guarantee his safety while being powerful and playful at will.

 KIDKRAFT

Established in 1968, KidKraft is a relatively new company compared to the venerable sector. But very quickly, the brand has become world famous.

 She specializes in a wooden train with accessories and trains with integrated tables. She makes a point of honour to choose the best materials.

Thus, it offers models that are wooden from a to z. His models are suitable for all ages and as Brio, child development is at the heart of their design process. Having fun is good, but learning while having fun is a plus in today's world.

PRICES OF THE WOODEN TRAIN

The price of the wooden train varies greatly depending on the model. If you buy a train in one block, then you can find it for 15 euros.

If you are looking for a model to assemble, then it will take about 50 to 60 euros. The average price we have seen is around 40 euros.

 But if you are looking for the model with an integrated table, then the price can exceed 200 euros to reach 400 euros. The price will depend on the number of pieces available. A model of 100 pieces can reach 150 euros. Given the diversity of models, our guide will be very useful.

 If your child is young, then put a good forty euros to choose a monobloc wooden train. But if you have the budget, you can opt for models over $ 250. In this way, you make a single investment and your child can have fun with his train for years.

For more about prices & product, visit wagon world

[theodorefox]

On Empire by Eric Hobsbawm (2008)

A short collection of four essays on sometimes overlapping topics, which I mostly enjoyed, especially the second and fourth. Notes on each follow.

1. The End of Empires

The memories of old empires feed into the narrative of nation states who were formerly the centers of empires, whereas the national identities of completely new nation states base themselves in struggle or liberation. Contemporary citizens have a different relationship to an empire’s subjects, which changes how a modern state can function, and limits the ability of empire to return in the 21st Century.

2. War and Peace in the Twentieth Century

An exploration of how war has changed between the three periods in the 20th century: the era of world wars, the era of confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union, and the era since the end of the “classic international power system.” What are the differences  between wars which happen between states and those which are internal?

“The contrast between the First World War and the Second is dramatic: only 5 percent of those who died in World War I were civilians; in World War II the figure increased to 66 percent. It is generally supposed that 80 to 90 percent of those affected by war today are civilians.

A clear delineation between the start and finish of a war rarely now exists, and the term war is often applied to matters of policing, which “confuses the actions of the two types of armed force.”

The dissolution of the great powers system of international relations has removed a major restraint on interstate warfare and the armed intervention of states in the affairs of other states. The UN is not sufficiently empowered to control this and to prosecute crimes of war, while the USA is not nor ever will be powerful enough to control the globe by unilateral force.

3. War, Peace, and Hegemony at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

The pace of urbanization in the developing world is so rapid as to bring the largest change in the last 10,000 years of human history: the vast majority of humans will no longer be predominantly concerned with making food.

Globalization is subverting what had been the basic unit of human organization through the twentieth century, the nation state, by transferring some of the nation’s powers to private companies.

A rise in the willingness and prevalence of states surveilling their citizens has made citizens feel less loyal to the state while not increasing state power and law. This lack of loyalty of citizens to power removes the ability of states to behave like the old empires towards their own citizens or to the citizens of occupied places.

The foreign policy of America after 9/11 has destroyed the political and ideological foundation of the country’s former influence in the world. Rather than being foreign policy directives at producing outward influence, it was directed at reinforcing a political express of american superiority and manifest destiny to a voter base in middle America, resentful of and uncomprehending of the prosperous globalized “other America” on the coasts.

4. Why America’s Hegemony Differs from Britain’s Empire

Interest in a revival of systems of empire stem from four developments:

i. The changes in economics, technology, and culture, brought by globalization have brought an explosive rise in global inequality under free market capitalism, and national politics have not adapted to address this issue.

ii. The collapse of the international balance of power since the end of World War II, and especially after the collapse of the USSR. How does an international system based on relationships between superpowers function when only one remains?

iii. The crisis of the ability of nation states to control what is happening in their territory; separatism and civil war are so constant as to be a feature of contemporary nation-states.

iv. The return of mass human catastrophe including mass expulsion and genocide of peoples, along with a general fear of conflict, terrorism, and disease. The nations of the world have proven inadequate at addressing these global catastrophes, especially those which have been so endemic to the Africa from the 1990s onward.

The international bodies designed to deal with these forces are not powerful enough to act without the support of strong nation-states, who are unwilling to participate in those matters which oppose their own interest, but are otherwise of internet top the whole world, or even to their own citizenry.

A persistent myth is that: “the best case for empire is always the case for order.” The peace enjoyed by empires was usually either through luck, or through constant warfare on its frontiers, outside of the view of its subjects.

“Winning big wars proved as fatal to empires as losing them.”

“International peace is not what they created but what gave them a chance to survive.”

Both the British and American empires derived their power from dominating the industrial world economy, possessing global military supremacy (naval for the British, air for the Americans). They exercised huge cultural impact on the world, which further increased their prestige. Note that cultural dominance is not powerful by itself, see the case of Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Their expansionist spirits derived differently: Britain had fixed and constraining borders, so much of its colonial energy came from the mass of emigration by its people; America, on the other hand, derived its expansionism from the legacy of the frontier and its familiarity with seeing itself as superior to the Native American population it displaced and genocided.

Because America is younger and founded on colonial revolution-notably against the British-it is missing the pride of heritage as well as the neighbouring geographical enemy which an older nation can define itself again-in the British case, against the French. Therefore, America has had to define itself ideologically, which changes the way it perceives enemies.

The British economy was global and it relied upon its colonies for industrial and trade development. America derived its influence based on its sheer size and originality in exporting technology and business organization. Now that the rest of the world is using those exports to catch up, the unusually low trade dependency of America’s economy threatens to leave it behind in global competition.

Because the British empire’s economic position relied more on trade than imperial power, it adjusted relatively easily to the loss of its colonies and political power in the 20th century. America’s reliance on military and political power for advancing its economy and global position may mean it copes more poorly with its loss of status as superpower when that eventually comes.

[recentanimenews]

Manga the Week of 2/26/20

SEAN: It’s the end of February at last, and we celebrate with a huge pile of stuff. Are you ready?

ASH: Always!

SEAN: Cross Infinite World has a 2nd volume of light novel The Eccentric Master and the Fake Lover.

Dark Horse has a 4th deluxe hardcover for Berserk.

ASH: The hardcover edition really is impressive — I’m slowly replacing my paperback copies.

SEAN: A couple of Volume 2s from Ghost Ship: Destiny Lovers 2 and World’s End Harem: Fantasia 2.

J-Novel Club has another shoujo light novel out next week: Tearmoon Empire (Tearmoon Teikoku Monogatari). This is from TO Books, and stars a selfish princess who is about to be guillotined by an angry populace when suddenly she wakes up in the past! It’s time to change the future so she doesn’t die! But… that’s so much hard work… can’t she just get others to do it for her? This seems like fun.

ASH: I appreciate this foray into shoujo fantasy works.

SEAN: There’s also a 9th Lazy Dungeon Master and a 3rd Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf!.

Kodansha has three debuts, two print and one digital. The print is Sweat and Soap (Ase to Sekken), a seinen title from Weekly Morning. A woman who works in a toiletry company is ashamed of the way she smells, and very grateful for her company’s products. Then she meets the company’s lead brand developer, who is fascinated by her natural scent. Romance ensues. Despite sounding like it does for sweat what Mysterious Girlfriend X did for drool, I’ll give this a try.

ASH: I’m cautious, but intrigued?

MELINDA: This could either be amazing… or really not.

SEAN: The other debut is a license rescue, coming out in deluxe omnibuses: Saiyuki! And yes, this is the original 1990s Saiyuki, not any of the modern remixes and spinoffs. A GFantasy title, it originally came out via Tokyopop. Now Kodansha is re-releasing it. Hope you like journeys to the west.

MICHELLE: I read a little of this ten years ago but never continued, so I’m looking forward to having another chance.

ANNA: I love journeys to the west! I have the old volumes but I’m seriously considering double dipping and I almost never double dip.

ASH: Nice to see this series back in print!

MELINDA: I’m so happy to see this again! It won’t get me over my eternal longing for Wild Adapter, but I’ll take it.

SEAN: Kodansha also has, in print, In/Spectre 11, Land of the Lustrous 10, and Magus of the Library 3.

ASH: I’ve fallen behind and need to catch up with In/Spectre, but I’m definitely ready for more of Land of the Lustrous and Magus of the Library!

SEAN: Digitally the debut is I Fell in Love After School (Houkago, Koishita), another Dessert title. A shy girl who lacks presence and a volleyball club she’s managing. This looks very fluffy.

ANNA: Aww, this sounds cute if only I were capable of keeping up on all these digital releases.

SEAN: Also out digitally next week: Altair: A Record of Battles 15, Drowning Love 17, Guilty 5, Hotaru’s Way 12, Kounodori: Dr. Stork 13, and Watari’s ******* Is About to Collapse 3.

KUMA has a one-volume title called Can an Otaku Like Me really Be an Idol? (Doruota no Bokudesuga Shinken ni Aidoru Mezashimasu!?). It’s a BL title about cross-dressing idols, and ran in Takeshobo’s Qpa. It was also on the Renta! site.

MICHELLE: My friend assures me it is very cute.

ASH: I’ve likewise heard good things.

SEAN: One Peace has a 7th Hinamatsuri.

Seven Seas has a pile, as is becoming traditional for the last week of the month. There’s another ‘early digital’ novel release, again by the author of I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. This is I Had That Same Dream Again (Mata, Onaji Yume wo Miteita), and is another coming-of-age story.

We also get The Ancient Magus’ Bride 12, The Brave-Tuber 2, Classroom of the Elite’s 4th light novel (in print), How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? 2, Mushoku Tensei’s 10th manga volume, Reincarnated As a Sword’s 4th light novel in print, Skeleton Knight in Another World 4 (print) and 5 (digital), and Ultra Kaiju Humanization Project 4.

MICHELLE: Hooray for more of The Ancient Magus’ Bride!

ASH: Yes, indeed!

SEAN: Square Enix has the debut of Hi-Score Girl, a Big Gangan series with a quirky art style and a love of retro gaming. Two otherwise dissimilar kids share a bond over games.

ASH: I like quirky.

MELINDA: I’m up for whatever Square Enix throws at us, so count me in.

SEAN: Udon has the 3rd and final Stravaganza omnibus, as well as a 6th Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu.

Vertical debuts Blood on the Tracks (Chi no Wadachi), another psychological drama from Shuzo Oshimi. This ran in Big Comic Superior, and is about a boy who realizes that his doting, over-affectionate mother may NOT be as normal as he’d though. If you’ve read Oshimi you know what to expect.

MICHELLE: Hm, potentially interesting.

ANNA: I’m gonna wait for a review, but I am also intrigued.

MELINDA: I’m with Anna on this.

SEAN: Yen On technically has a debut, but really it’s just more KH, as we get Kingdom Hearts III: The Novel 1.

They’ve also got Is It Wrong to try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Sword Oratoria 11, KonoSuba EXPLOSION! 2, My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong As I Expected 9, Re: ZERO 12, Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online 6, and World’s Strongest Rearguard 2. Lots of heavy hitters in that lineup.

From the manga end, Yen debuts RaW Hero, which is from the creator of Prison School, and also appears to be for fans of Prison School. It runs in Kodansha’s Evening Magazine, and is about heroes, villains, and fetishes, not in that order.

ASH: That’s… the general impression that I’ve gotten, too.

SEAN: We also get Combatants Will Be Dispatched! 2 (manga), The Devil Is a Part-Timer! 15 (manga), Goblin Slayer: Brand New Day 2 (manga), Happy Sugar Life 4 (also a manga, but not a light novel as well like those others), Kemono Friends a la Carte 2, Phantom Tales of the Night 3, and Trinity Seven 19.

ASH: Oh, Phantom Tales of the Night! If nothing else, it’s very pretty (and creepy); I’m interested in how the series continues to develop.

SEAN: A lot of, shall we say, saucy manga out next week. Are you getting any?

By: Sean Gaffney

[memoryfoamdoctor]

Purple versus Tuft & Needle

Let’s face it, we humans come in all shapes and sizes and for that very reason the mattress we sleep on should never be of the one-size fits all variety. For those with a little, height, heft or both, a firmer mattress that doesn’t swallow you up each time you climb into bed or turn over in the night, is the way to go. And if you have already begun to explore the many benefits of memory foam and it’s ability to dissipate weight for pressure point relief on heavier joints that can result in improved circulation and a pain-free morning, the odds are you’re already on the right track when it comes to finding a mattress that suits your body type and sleep style.

Now there are literally dozens of brands and designs on the market that all claim to be better than the rest at delivering the cooler, curve-hugging comfort you want with a memory foam mattress but don’t feel daunted, Memory Foam Doctor is here to help. We’ve reviewed many of the top manufacturers, sorting their products by density, support, fabrication, comfort and special features to offer a comprehensive, consumer-friendly comparison that can help with this big decision.

For those on the heavier side, you’ll want a medium-firm to firm mattress and both Purple and Tuft & Needle memory foam mattresses deliver big-time. Better still, because both offer 100-night trial periods, you get the chance to test run your new mattress with the option to return or exchange for free. Ready to learn more?

Purple

Background

The Purple brand is the brainchild of the Pearce brothers whose expertise in the area of producing advanced cushioning products led them to develop a number of patented products back in the 1990s, including their Hyper-Elastic Polymer. This latter technology was then used to produce a memory foam that has the ability to stretch to 15 times it’s resting size and once molded into the brand’s patented Smart Comfort Grid, it delivers not only exceptional back support but has the ability to relax under pressure points – so no push back. Today, Purple is one of the more recent additions to the on-line mattress industry and is quickly becoming one of the most popular options due to this unique, grid design.

Why is Purple a Great Mattress for Heavier People?

Purple’s 9.5-inch thick mattress with medium-firm construction delivers exceptional bounce-back due to the hyper-elastic polymer construction. This means that it has a little extra spring and is easier to get in and out of bed as well as turn over in the night. This aptly colored mattress is firm enough that regardless of your weight, you won’t sink in the way you can with some memory foam mattresses. That said, it offers enough cushioning comfort that if you’re a stomach sleeper who carries a little extra weight around the mid-section, its soft enough to contour to your tummy and chest area.  The hyper-elastic polymer technology makes this mattress super durable so it won’t break-down regardless of body weight and that special grid pattern delivers the cooler, curve-hugging support you expect with memory foam.

Construction

Cover

Purple uses a visco-polyester-poly/lycra blend for a super breathable cover that works with the top layer of the mattress to deliver exceptional air flow and a cooler, more comfortable sleep. Because it’s designed to be extra stretchy, it quickly conforms to the mattress shape every time you move in the night, so you never lose the contouring comfort of the foam.

Top Layer

Using a 2-inch thick layer of their patented hyper-elastic polymer foam in a deep grid (think super thick waffle) pattern on their mattress top ensures not only superior air movement for a cooler sleep but it also instantly adapts to your curves to ensure your back and spine continually revert to a neutral position regardless of how often you move in the night.

Second Layer

Acting as a buffer or transition between the plush, upper comfort layer and the firmer base layer is a 3.5-inch thick layer of polyurethane foam. It’s this critical layer that delivers deep compression support and makes it ideal for heavier sleepers because of its ability to dissipate body weight across the entire sleep surface, alleviating pressure on key joints such as shoulders, hips and knees. The result is a more comfortable sleep and pain-free morning.

Base Layer

The Purple memory foam mattress uses a 4-inch thick base layer comprised of ultra firm polyurethane. This base layer not only delivers uniform support across the entire mattress surface, but it also buffers shock and movement for a more durable and longer lasting mattress.

Additional Benefits

Allergen Free

Purple’s hyper-elastic polymer is made with food- and food-contact grade materials so you won’t experience any off-gassing with this mattress. Additionally, their foam is CertiPUR-US Certified which makes it an ideal option for those who suffer from allergies.

Motion Isolation

For those with partners, kids or pets that wake them continually in the night as they climb in, climb out, flip or flop, sleep deprivation can seriously impact your health and productivity. Purple’s unique design helps to isolate motion and prevent it from transferring to your sleep space.

Trial Period / Warranty

Purple offers a 100-night trial period with free shipping and returns, free in-home set-up and the removal of your old mattress as well as a 10-year warranty that covers manufacturing defects.

Tuft & Needle

Background

As a relatively recent addition to the bed-in-a-box industry, Tuft & Needle first began to manufacture quality memory foam mattresses in 2012 as an independent (though they are now owned by Simmons). The brand was committed to producing a premium product without the premium price so the founders – both software engineers out of Silicon Valley in California – decided to build a better bed… or memory foam mattress to be exact. The result is a simple yet superior quality, two-layer mattress that is designed and manufactured in the United States, using only American made products. All at an affordable price.

Why is Tuft & Needle a Great Mattress for Heavier People?

Tuft & Needle offers a premium quality, 10-inch thick mattress that comes in just one level of firmness – medium-firm, which happens to be ideal for heavier individuals. The brand achieves superior support and curve-hugging comfort by using just two layers of top-quality materials including a thick, 3-inch comfort layer of poly foam and a sturdy 7-inch layer of high-density support foam for a consistent level of support across the entire sleep surface. And as over-heating can often be a key concern for heavier individuals, it’s proprietary T&N Adaptive foam ensures a cooler, more comfortable sleep.

Construction

Cover

The super lightweight cover of the Tuft & Needle memory foam mattress is made from a micro polyamide and polyester blend for a softer feel that’s not only highly durable but is known to dry 6 to 8 times faster than pure cotton. For you, this means your sleep surface will always remain cool and dry regardless of how warm you sleep.

Top Layer

Tuft & Needle’s top layer includes a 3-inch thick slab of the brand’s patented T&N Adaptive foam for an ideal level of medium-firm support that can accommodate the heaviest of sleepers. But in spite of being a little extra firm, you’ll never have to sacrifice the cozy, curve-hugging comfort you want and expect from a memory foam mattress. Their Adaptive foam in this top layer instantly contours to your body’s shape to draw heat away and dissipate it throughout the lower layer. So, you have continual air movement and an always cooler sleep.

Base Layer

The base layer of this mattress is constructed from 7-inches of 1.8 PCF Adaptive foam for superior, uniform support across the entire mattress surface. Its role is critical to the effectiveness of the upper comfort layer because it not only buffers the softer memory foam from shock and movement for added durability, but it helps with spinal alignment regardless of your sleep style.

Additional Benefits

Suitable for Most Sleep Styles

Because Tuft & Needle delivers both soft comfort and firm support, it’s an ideal middle-of-the-road choice for those who like to sleep on their stomach, side and/or back. It offers sufficient “give” to accommodate heavier tummies and chests and adapts quickly to maintain optimal spinal alignment.

Cooler Sleep Surface

For heavier individuals, having a cool sleep surface can be the difference between waking rested or feeling like you need to hit “snooze” a few more times. The Tuft & Needle memory foam mattress draws heat away from your body while the lightweight, breathable cover allows warmer air to continually escape for an always cooler, more comfortable sleep.

Trial Period / Warranty

Similar to Purple, Tuft & Needle provides purchasers with a 100-night trial period and a 10-year warranty (with free shipping and 100% money back guarantee if you are not happy with your purchase within the prescribed timeline).

  The post Purple versus Tuft & Needle appeared first on Memory Foam Doctor.

Source: https://www.memoryfoamdoctor.com/purple-versus-tuft-needle/

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Jeff York on The Establishing Shot: “CATS”, QUITE SIMPLY, IS A DOG

If you saw the trailer, you had a good idea of just how badly conceived the filmed adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical CATS was going to be. But after seeing the 110-minute, $95 million mess, bad is too small of a word. This film is a dog.

Seldom has an adaptation been as blundered at every level as this one. One could readily list a hundred mistakes in it, and I’m sure the makers of those “Everything Wrong With” videos on YouTube will go to town in exactly that way. Me? I’ll list nine, an appropriate number given the number of lives felines are supposed to have. This CATS, however, and all of its screw-ups, arrives in the cineplex DOA.

1.) The source material has aged badly

When he wrote the musical in 1981, Webber kept faithfully true to the T.S. Eliot source material – the book of poems entitled “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” Eliot’s musings about felines were equally nonsensical and whimsical. He coined the term “Jellicle cat” to signify scruffy, black and white cats, which he had a fondness for. By the time you’ve heard the cast sing that gibberish word for the hundredth time, you’ll wish he had just used a term like “domesticated cat�� or “pet.” The lyrics sound creaky, dated, and not particularly charming or funny, like a lot of Eliot’s misguided take on cats. (Cats aren’t supposed to drink milk or dream, for example. Need I go on?) The odd poetry really doesn’t play in 2019, especially when the one song that is crystal clear in meaning and intent is a new song written by Taylor Swift for this adaptation. There’s quaint, and then there’s irritating and worn, and too much of the jellicleness falls into the latter category here.

2.) The look of the cat/human hybrids is ugly and inconsistent

The form-fitting fur costumes for the big screen accentuate human anatomy more than suggest our four-legged friends. The film is supposed to be family-friendly, but the look of the characters is far too sexualized, too Dr. Moreau. Rebel Wilson’s Jennyanydots portrayal is the most egregious, as she rubs her loins and holds her tail between her legs as if it’s an erection. Why they simply didn’t ape the stage costumes is a puzzler as John Napier’s award-winning designs mixed dancewear with tasteful fur trimming and some human clothing, but nothing about it conjured the feel of a “furry” fetishist.

Also, the attempts to look like real cats are inconsistent. Sure, the ears move, as do the whiskers, but what good is any of that when all the cats have human hands and feet, and often left flesh-colored at that. Couldn’t such appendages have been painted or covered with gloves or socks? And why aren’t any of the cats’ noses painted here? Cats’ noses are pink, brown, and almost always a different color than the yap surrounding them. To a cat lover, it’s inexplicable.

3.) The special effects aren’t very special

The cat dancers here do a lot of wonderfully slinky moves, just like they did on stage, but the movie wants them to be able to leap about too and that requires wirework. Granted, the wires were removed in post-production, but when the dancers jump high in the sky here, it looks like crappy stuntwork. The movements are slow and rickety.

The effect of removing the human ears in post-production looks wrong too. Not enough hair fills out the edges of the face, giving some cast members the look of a burn victim or plastic surgery gone amuck. Placing human faces on the mice and cockroach characters is ugly and cheap-looking as well, but then so is the whole grotesque concept of Busby Berkeley dancing vermin.

4.) The acting soars…over-the-top

On Broadway, you can be as big as you want because you’re playing to the balcony. Movies are a whole other matter. Close-ups on film don’t require the same large efforts. Director Tom Hooper failed to learn from his mistakes in the movie version of LES MISERABLES that he directed. He shoved the camera right up into the actors’ faces to prove that they weren’t lip-syncing. Unfortunately, it showed off too much spittle and spray too. The same happens here. Jennifer Hudson’s Grizabella is so screechy, melodramatic, and moist, it makes a sympathetic character into a shrill one.

As for most of the rest of the cast, they either mug shamelessly or overdo the cat clichés. James Corden is slyly funny until he starts hacking up hairballs. Ian McKellen creates some pathos as Gus the Theater Cat, but then he vamps through his solo number and the heart-tugging moment almost becomes laughable. At least Judi Dench attempts to underplay throughout, but she’s not helped by a costume that makes her look more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion than a dignified Old Deuteronomy.

5.) If you’re going to write dialogue, resist hoary cat puns

Webber’s original stage production was a sung-thru musical. Adding dialogue now, with cheap puns like, “Cat got your tongue?” and “Cat’s out of the bag” should’ve given the filmmakers pause. (Not paws.)  There are too many cat behavioral clichés on display too, with the cast leaning hard on traits like hissing, preening, and lip-licking. They’re like students in a freshman improv class – “Okay, everyone, now you’re all cats!”

6.) Taylor Swift is wasted in a nothing role

She looks quite good in her “Josie and the Pussycats” kind of way, but her role as Bombalurina is virtually a throwaway. For starters, she doesn’t appear onscreen until the last 30 minutes, and then all she does basically is sing about what a badass Macavity is. We already know that as Idris Alba’s character is clearly the villain of this piece as evidenced by his every insidious action and all the snide lines he utters. Where’s Bombalurina been the whole time?

7.) The scale is all wrong

The cats here are too small in the context of many of the film’s settings, particularly its human homes. The scale isn’t properly proportioned as almost everything is too oversized, reminiscent of the fantasy sequences in ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. Such satirical scale worked there because it was a spoof of childhood. Here, it just looks wrong.

8.) Are we in a human world or a cat world?

The opening scene has a high-heeled woman step out of a car and throw her bagged pet away in a dirty alley. Additionally, Gus sings about appearing on stage with Shakespearean actors. But then the city marquees, billboards, and hotel names all are ‘cat-ified.’ So, are we in the human world or a modified cat one? Such inconsistencies should have been taken care of in the first pass through Final Draft.

9.) Tom Hooper is not a natural for such material

The Oscar-winning director for THE KING’S SPEECH tends to do well with character-driven pieces, like JOHN ADAMS on HBO and PRIME SUSPECT on Granada Television for the UK. Musicals are different though, requiring a sophisticated blend of the extroverted and the intimate. Too much of LES MIZ felt histrionic and broad, and the same goes here. He’s also not a natural at moving the camera and relies far too much on actors moving in and out of frame to give his film action.

Casting principal dancer Francesca Hayward of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden as the lead cat Victoria here was his one inspired choice. She’s got expressive eyes and entrancing moves, and she makes her audience conduit character the calm in all the storm around her.

Alternately, Hooper badly botches the presentation of magical Mr. Mistoffelees, letting actor Laurie Edwards play him as far too irritating. The “Skimbleshanks” number not only feels extraneous here, but the character comes off as completely lackluster in the way Steven McRae performs the part. And the estimable Ray Winstone is given little to do but growl as Captain Growltiger, another throwaway role. So much for Hooper being such “an actor’s director.”

Perhaps the simple, stage-bound show should have remained so. Doing an adaptation of it almost 40 years after the fact is crazy late too, not helped by the fact that playwright John Guare satirized the notion of a CATS movie musical in his award-winning play SIX DEGREES OF SEPERATION way back in 1990. CATS is not a great musical onstage, anyway, but it’s been an enormous success for decades and should have garnered a better adaptation.  And cats, as a superior species, certainly deserve a lot better than this effort too.

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[thefinishedarticle]

The World Cup in review

Russia 2018: better than they said it was going to be, but not as good as they will say it was. There has been much talk about this being the best World Cup in memory, but that memory must be a short one: in mine it doesn’t even surpass its predecessor, Brazil 2014. It’s definitely been unusual, and unique in many respects, but weird doesn’t always equal wonderful.

Don’t get me wrong: it has been a perfectly decent World Cup. The scare-mongering before the tournament proved unfounded, as it always does, and we’ve had many good games to enjoy against a backdrop of well-organised peace. For those who love knock-out competitions for giant-killings, it has offered up treat after treat.

After four-time champions Italy failed to qualify, four-time and current champions Germany finished bottom of their group, whilst Spain, Argentina and Portugal were equally limp and soon joined them at home. The games and groups were as close as they’ve ever been, and there was a sense that any team could progress. Even England made it to the semi final.

Free for all?

But the champions going out in the group stage shouldn’t surprise us any more. It was surprising in 2002, when previous winners France finished bottom of their group with just the single point. It was surprising in 2010, when both Italy and France were bottom of their groups after reaching the final last time out. It was surprising in 2014, when the 2010 champions Spain... also went out in the group stage. 

With Germany this year, that’s four of the last five champions falling at the first hurdle in the defence of their title. We should be used to it by now. It’s a little odd, but perhaps not quite as surprising as it seems at first glance. National sides seem to run on a cycle: they build a team, see them grow together, and then the stars retire and the team has to be built again. The team’s ability increases as they age, and they tend to win something at their peak before a sharp decline or international retirement.

The same thing happens in clubs, we just tend to see more gradual change because they compete annually, whereas the World Cup is only every 4 years: in that time, the core of players at their prime will likely have moved on, leaving the side in what club managers would call a ‘transitional period’. Why do we assume they will still be just as good with largely different personnel?

Then there are other factors. Look at the Premier League: none of the champions of the last 10 seasons have yet managed to defend their title the following year, despite many of them winning by good margins. Man United followed their triumph in 2013, the end of the Sir Alex Ferguson era, with a 7th place finish the next year, whilst the last three seasons have seen reigning champions finish 10th (Chelsea), 12th (Leicester), and 5th (Chelsea).

Great managers can retire after a triumph along with their star players, leaving the squad in transition, but others can stay on and grow complacent. Contrast Ferguson with Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal. Managers can remain too loyal to the players who have helped them win before, reluctant to show the ingratitude of dropping them, even when they are no longer fit for purpose: a mistake made by Joachim Low for Germany this year. The same happens with tactics, not wanting to change a winning formula even as it ceases to win, as the game moves on and opponents adapt, a flaw now shown by Spain.

Success can bring complacency, loyalty, a loss of judgement, a lack of hunger, stagnation. None of that goes against what we know and regularly observe to be the case in club football and in tournaments gone by, so it’s hardly that exciting here. As for the other major scalps, remember that South Africa 2010 (Italy and France in their groups, Brazil and Argentina in the next round) and Brazil 2014 (Spain, Portugal, Italy, England in their groups, Uruguay in the next round) can claim at least as many.

The one thing that makes Russa 2018 stand out is that most of the big sides were assigned to one side of the knockout draw, giving a chance for some fresh faces to progress... but saying there were no past winners in 3 of the first round games and one quarter final is hardly incredible. The exact same could be said for 2014, and in 2010 we had no past winners in 4 first round games, one quarter final... and the final itself.

Besides, whilst everyone loves the romance of an underdog it’s also good to see the big names fight it out. One of the most entertaining group games was Spain’s draw with Portugal, not Iran’s narrow win over Morocco the same day. The best game in the first knockout round was France against Argentina, not Sweden against Switzerland. It’s fun to see creative talents letting loose, not compact, careful units grinding out results through doggedness. The latter are heartening to see, but they don’t make for brilliant entertainment.

On a similar note, it would have been nice to see some teams from outside Europe make it to the later stages: it’s supposed to be the World Cup, a colourful mixture of all sorts of teams, not a repeat of the European Championship. Some people have complained that this is because UEFA get a disproportionate share of the qualifying places (14 of 32), but that’s nonsense: 12 of the 18 qualifying non-European sides went out in the group stage, so lowering the bar further would just introduce even more sub-par teams, not a semi-finalist. It would just have been nice if one of the 18 had made it.

Free flowing?

The football has been more unusual than the cast. The number of goals has been cited, but whilst it leaves boring 2010 in the dust it’s still behind Brazil 2014. It’s also true that not all goals are equal, and this tournament has set records for the most own goals and the most penalties, helped by the controversial introduction of VAR which overshadowed much of the group stages.

This World Cup has trailed the previous five in shots on goal, but had more inside the box, more own goals, more goals from penalties, more goals from set pieces, more goals after 90 minutes (dramatic, but following one and a half hours of nothingness). That means that whilst we’ve seen a decent number of goals, we’ve seen a lower number of decent goals. It’s had the lowest proportion of intentional goals scored in open play during normal time, and still fewer than 2014 overall.

That tournament set the tone with Netherlands 5-1 Spain, a dramatic reversal of the previous final in a first round of matches which also saw Germany 4-0 Portugal, and culminated in Germany 7-1 Brazil. In the 2014 group stages we saw seven teams put 4 goals past an opponent; this year it only happened three times. Russia 2018′s tone wasn’t set by the hosts’ opening trouncing of Saudi Arabia, the worst team in the tournament, but by the next two games: 1-0 victories won in the 89th and 95th minute, the latter with an own goal.

Another of this tournament’s boasts was that it had the longest run of games before the first 0-0, but that was only because so many equally tight, closed defensive matches were settled by a late tap-in or penalty instead. We saw four fewer goalless draws than 2014, but five more games with just a single goal, and fewer goals overall. It’s effectively a choice between a 4-0 and a 0-0 or two scrappy 1-0s.

The games have been the tightest I remember, which is a good thing in its own way, but entertaining football over 90 minutes has been rare in matches between mostly cautious, defensive teams. One good stat is that this is the first ever World Cup where every team has scored at least two goals across their games, but fewer teams than before have scored two, three, four goals in a game. More egalitarian, but less fun.

Coming home?

Moving on from the objective quality of the tournament itself, we come to the subjective success of the England national team, one reason many fans here will have enjoyed Russia 2018 more than the early exits of tournaments past. England massively surpassed expectations in reaching the semi finals, and narrowly losing it in extra time after taking an early lead. It’s hard to be disappointed with that: they haven’t always played that well, and getting to the final would have been even more of an overachievement. 

But have they really done that well? On the one hand, they've gone further than anyone expected, further than they have in ages, but on the other, they've only beaten Tunisia, Panama, Colombia, and Sweden, all ranked lower than them, and lost to the two good sides they've faced (Croatia once and Belgium twice). Should we be proud of that?

In a way, going out to Croatia in the semi finals is more embarrassing than losing to Italy and Uruguay in the group of death last time, or being thrashed by a much superior German side in 2010. It happened later on in the tournament, but still to a side who England fans would only ever see as an equal, if even that, whereas previously they have gone out with honour against big teams who were always the favourite. This time they were favourites and still lost.

Since 1970, England have been knocked out of major tournaments as follows: 

1970 - Germany  1986 - Argentina 1990 - Germany (penalties) 1996 - Germany (penalties) 1998 - Argentina (penalties)  2002 - Brazil 2004 - Portugal (penalties) 2006 - Portugal (penalties) 2010 - Germany 2012 - Italy (penalties) 2016 - Iceland 2018 - Croatia

Is this semi final defeat not more similar to the defeat against Iceland, where England again went ahead in the first five minutes and were pegged back 2-1, than to the narrow, plucky penalty defeats against the best sides in the world that they used to be known for? All that’s changed is that it’s a couple of games later on: they’ve won two doable games, and then lost one. Is that better than winning one doable game and then losing a hard one? Is it even better than just losing a hard game straight away?

Those are the questions most pessimists and haters of the England team are asking. Is beating the likes of Tunisia and Panama an achievement? Is progress in a uniquely ‘easy’ half of the draw really something to be proud of? In short: yes. World Cups don’t have any ‘easy’ games. World Cups are hard. As mentioned above, just ask four out of the five last champions.

This year Germany, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, and Argentina all went out after failing to win the 'easy' games against South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Iran, Morocco, Russia, and Iceland in their groups and the first knockout round. England got the job done. Past England teams have always failed to win the 'easy' games. This side got the job done. They’ve only won the games they were expected to, but that in itself was unexpected. They’ve been exceptional, not in performing beyond their normal abilities, but in simply showing the abilities we all knew should be there.

Much was made of a first knockout win in years, even without the added rarity of a successful penalty shootout, but the real change started in the group stage. Whilst it’s true that England have usually fallen short in the early knockout stages, often that’s because they’ve limped out of their group and drawn a much better, more experienced side. The list above makes that clear enough: England have usually been dispatched by a better team, their comparative lack of progress to this year more to do with the luck of the draw than their relative performances. 

It’s similar to the derision around Arsenal going out of the Champions League in the first round every year: it’s a shortcoming, but it’s also usually a result of being drawn against Bayern Munich or Barcelona, teams who they would never be expected to beat, whilst their rivals progress against much lesser sides. They aren’t awful at knockout games: they just tend to play teams who are incredible at them. There’s no shame in losing to them, whether you meet them then or in the semi final.

The shame usually came earlier, when Arsenal lost to teams like Olympiacos in the group (bizarrely, it was actually Olympiacos for four years in short succession) and scraped through in second place with no momentum to be drawn against the team who’d topped the next group on. The shame was in losing to the minnows to draw a giant, not in losing to the giant, so the idea that they had a problem with the knockout stages themselves was ill-founded. 

The same has tended to be true with England. Before this World Cup, their last seven group games featured defeats to Italy and Uruguay, draws with Sweden, USA, Algeria and Costa Rica, and a solitary victory against Slovenia. Losing to Iceland in 2016 was an embarrassment, but so was failing to beat Russia or Slovakia in the group and finishing second to Wales. The idea that England had some specific issue with knockout games is nonsense. They struggled in the group first.

That’s why this World Cup was a success for England, not only when they beat Colombia, but from the moment they held on against that rough Tunisia team. In any other year they would have faltered to a draw, and then carried that nervousness on into the next game, rather than thrashing Panama as they did. The opposition wasn’t great, but it wasn’t any worse than it usually is, and it wasn’t worse than in the other groups where big teams struggled.

I don’t accept the idea that they played particularly well: they lacked creativity throughout, and relied on set pieces for most of their goals. They looked very open on the counter, and were mostly fortunate for their opponents’ poor finishing (and some goalkeeping heroics from Jordan Pickford) to not concede more. They had a tendency to try to see out games, making negative substitutions and passing backwards, which only gave the other team a way back into them. 

Some players impressed, and others grew into the tournament, but as a team they weren’t as good as some of the hype would suggest. Even Harry Kane, returning with the Golden Boot and a hat-trick match ball from the Panama game (meaning that at least one football’s coming home), went missing shortly after then. Perhaps he realised it was almost August.

His telling stat was that he’d scored his 6 goals from almost as many shots, which was stated as if it was something impressive when in reality it’s anything but. Three of those shots were penalties which, although he took them perfectly, were given to him to score. His hat-trick goal after two of them was a deflection he knew nothing about. That means he otherwise didn’t manage more than one shot per game. In open play, England as a whole had the fewest shots on target of any team but Iran.

Special mention has to go to Kieran Trippier, who created the most chances of any player in the tournament, but that just highlights that the attacking players failed to put them away. He, with fellow defenders John Stones and Harry Maguire, who grew into the tournament impressively after a shaky start, managed two more goals than Raheem Sterling, Dele Alli, Jesse Lingard, Jamie Vardy, Marcus Rashford, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Danny Welbeck combined.

Coming of age?

The final statistic about England, heard often in the build up and even more now they’ve gone out, is that they had the youngest, least internationally experienced squad in the tournament. In this latter context, it is said to show how much fans have to look forward to: if they could get to the semi finals at this age, how well will they do when they’ve reached their prime, with England’s successful youth teams grown to join them? 

I’ve written before about the common fallacy that players peak later in their careers, when in reality they often fade after their ‘potential’ has been hyped up because they actually peaked whilst young. I’ve also written about the equally flawed hope that success at youth level spells success at senior level later down the line: it’s true that England’s young sides have been doing exceptionally well (in 2017 they won the U20 World Cup, U17 World Cup, U21 Toulon Tournament and the U19 Euros, came second in the U17 Euros and third in the U21 Euros), but previous youth stars have failed to develop as adults or not been given the opportunities to do so.

But it is my write up of England’s opening match of Brazil 2014, a defeat to Italy, that I quote from now. Although they lost, I spoke of the promising signs shown by one of the youngest, least internationally experienced teams in the tournament. “Whilst we’re in a transitional stage now, England show a lot of attacking promise for the future,” I wrote, a fool. With young talents Sterling and Ross Barkley impressing, and “Sturridge, Henderson, Welbeck, Walcott, Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Wilshere all also under 25 but matching the world’s best, we should be in great shape for Russia 2018.”

Also giving hope were Luke Shaw (18), Chris Smalling (24), Phil Jones (22), and Adam Lallana (26). Where is that roll-call now? Of those 12 players, only four actually made the squad for Russia 2016, when they would supposedly be hitting their prime, and only two as more than squad players. Sturridge is no longer “continuing to transfer his excellent club form to the global stage”, having lost fitness and form soon afterwards and now barely getting a club game, just like the exciting Barkley, Welbeck, Wilshere, and Shaw.

When I hear fans echoing me now, “this year [wasn’t] our year, but the next two competitions just might be”, I can’t help but think of whether I will be saying the same in 2022, when this squad of players with an average age of 26 have an average age of 30. No doubt those north of that will be jettisoned, including those who have impressed the most: Trippier, Henderson, and all of the left backs, amongst others. Will the team be stronger then?

I suspect many of the young prospects will be forgotten, stagnated like those who came before: will we still remember who Trent Alexander-Arnold was, brought along to give him some experience for the future, just like I wrote would be a good thing for Luke Shaw? Will a 28-year-old John Stones still sit on City’s bench, forgotten? Will Marcus Rashford still be failing to force his way into United’s starting team, the Danny Welbeck of his generation?

Worst of all, they might just be replaced by even younger models, the latest bright prospects to emerge and show flashes of promise. Why bring these 27-year-olds who never really made it when you can give experience to a 23-year-old who might? Then in four years time, when they don’t live up to the hype you’ve given them, you just do the exact same thing again. 

You don’t follow the cycle I described above, where teams are left to grow together. Instead you remain permanently in the ‘transitional’ phase, always replacing actual with potential, never winning anything but always leaving hope for Next Time, when these players are older and experienced... but actually replacing them with the next batch of empty promises, and getting praised for it, praised for building with an eye an imaginary future. Just like you were praised for it four years ago.

We’ll see.

Finally...

England conceded both the latest winning goal in terms of playing time (109 minutes against Croatia) and the latest goal in terms of a player’s life (Panama’s only scorer was 37 years old). 

They scored the most goals in a single game, but also faced the joint-most clean sheets and suffered the joint-most defeats (although the third place play-off is to blame for that). 

They were the only side to select players only from their domestic league, but then the English league system provided the most players overall. 

A positive is their discipline: they had the sixth fewest yellow or red cards per match, despite the game against Colombia seeing the joint most. They also kept their cool against a rough Croatia, who saw the most cards of any team. Of that, at least, we can be proud.

[thomasross90]

5 Things To Consider When Adopting A Hybrid Cloud Structure

Everyone is talking about the hybrid cloud, but what is it? Is it right for your business? And if so, what should you consider when shifting to a hybrid cloud infrastructure?

First, let’s consider recent trends in cloud computing more generally. Cloud computing has its roots in the 1950s, with the invention of mainframe computing, but it only really took off in the 1990s, when telecommunications companies were able to start offering virtualised private network connections.

This opened up the possibility of public clouds, where a third party such as Amazon or Google – or, commonly, a combination of such third parties – owns the physical hardware supporting data storage and applications, and this infrastructure is shared by multiple clients. Cloud-based server hosting, webmail, and online office applications like Office 365 are some of the most common forms of public cloud service today.

Private clouds, where hosted services are provided through a proprietary computing architecture owned and managed by the individual client, soon followed.

There are different benefits on offer with both models. Public clouds give organisations the scalability and flexibility of depending on hardware managed by a third-party provider, while private clouds offer the superior control – and, potentially, security – that comes from being the sole owner and manager of a cloud environment.

Hybrid clouds then grew out of a desire to marry the different benefits on offer with both public and private clouds. Hybrid clouds combine dedicated, localised servers and infrastructure with cloud servers and storage, both public and private, on the same network. By mixing and matching various combinations of these different network approaches, from localised datacentres to cloud services hosted by third parties, and even managed private clouds, organisations can build highly flexible environments to meet their IT infrastructure requirements.

For example, it might be important to host highly sensitive, business-critical applications and data, such as customer financial data and processes, on premise, while less critical services, such as office programs, are hosted by a public cloud provider. As such, hybrid clouds are the most flexible and adaptable types of cloud infrastructure – which is why they are increasingly popular.

In fact, according to Gartner, by 2020, 90% of organisations will adopt ‘hybrid infrastructure management’ – meaning a combination of cloud, hosting and traditional infrastructure services.  Whether organisations are primarily focused on reducing costs, increasing scalability, shoring up security and compliance, adding new services or enhancing existing ones, creating a hybrid cloud infrastructure is, in many cases, the best fit answer.

However, all this can seem a little overwhelming if your business is still at the beginning of its hybrid cloud journey. Given all of these different considerations, how can you ensure that you create a hybrid environment that is a good fit for your needs?

There are five main areas that I think you need to consider:

1. Cost & Efficiency

Datacentres have hefty running costs in terms of power, cooling and maintenance – which means, in turn, that storing data locally can be expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. Paying for a cloud-based ‘as-a-service’ model whereby you only pay for the storage or compute power you require can be an obvious cost-saving alternative.

However, it’s not always that simple. Depending on the infrastructure you currently have in place and the outlay that will be involved in creating a range of virtualisation and infrastructure set-ups, a new cloud environment can be prohibitive in itself. This is why it’s important to have a value-based approach to analysing the cost and efficiency benefits of public and private cloud in different parts of your proposed infrastructure.

Don’t forget that datacentres date and require significant upkeep and upgrading at periodic intervals, so your cost and efficiency analysis should be long-term in outlook, considering what additional one-off costs may come into play in one, two, five years and so on.

2. Security & Compliance

It’s important to remember that the reality of cloud storage provided by a third party is that an external organisation is ultimately responsible for the integrity of your data. In other words, you are extending your cybersecurity chain to involve that third party.

Key areas to consider include data redundancy, what your provider’s uptime record is, how they respond to outages and the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that you have in place. If you are working with multiple different cloud providers –something which can happen in many hybrid cloud models – this becomes even more complex.

When it comes to integrating security controls such as authentication and authorisation across a hybrid cloud environment, you have two broad options. You can either replicate controls across the different clouds that make up your hybrid infrastructure, synchronising the data across them, or you can deploy an identity management service that delivers a single security service across the whole environment. There are cost and simplicity of management benefits to weigh up between the two options.

3. Regulatory Compliance

Depending on the nature of the data generated and processed by your organisation, there will be strict laws and regulatory requirements in place governing where it can be stored and how it can be treated – and the chains of responsibility for these demands will necessarily extend to the cloud providers you work with. For example, any medical data must be stored in its country of origin, and this will govern which public cloud providers you can work with – you need to check where their datacentres are based. If you are subject to PCI DSS, then your providers need to meet those restrictions too.

4. Infrastructure

Whatever the final design of your hybrid environment, it is vital to maintain seamless access to both cloud-stored data and that which remains in localised datacentres. This is where managed network operations can be invaluable, ensuring that visibility, monitoring and incident response is carried out at the same high level across all areas of the infrastructure.

5. Forward Planning & Disaster Recovery

As referred to in terms of cost and efficiency, it is vital to have a medium to long-term approach to any hybrid cloud investment – which includes planning for worst-case scenarios such as damage to a specific datacentre. It is important to map what impact such a problem will have on services running either in the cloud or through localised datacentres, and spread critical services and applications accordingly.

Similarly, it is important to consider your organisation’s overall roadmap for IT infrastructure investment, and how the hybrid cloud could fit into this. For example, if your organisation is planning to upgrade to a localised datacentre in the near future, then adopting a hybrid cloud model might allow for phased migration of data and a specific path that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.

The Hybrid Future

Hybrid cloud environments are here to stay. By blending different elements of public and private, on premise and externally hosted services and data storage, organisations can likewise blend the benefits on offer from each approach. However, maximising the opportunities of the hybrid cloud depends on understanding the precise needs of your own organisation, and the pros and cons that need to be weighed up across a range of areas, from security and compliance to cost and efficiency.

Where data is particularly sensitive, or even governed by specific regulations as in the case of healthcare data for example, a hybrid cloud model that incorporate significant use of localised services is likely to be preferable. However, if you’re planning a significant revamp of existing IT infrastructure, the use of either public or private cloud services might be key to achieving the flexibility you need.

from http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/5-things-to-consider-when-adopting-a-hybrid-cloud-structure/

[5hit-i-l00k-at]

2019 ford fusion concept

New Post has been published on http://www.fordissue.net/2019-ford-fusion-concept/

2019 ford fusion concept

2019 ford fusion concept – Ford includes a world-wide impact by using production services in a great many areas worldwide, including Australia wherever it develops the in your area developed Falcon passenger car in addition to power variety, plus the Place SUV. That company includes a extensive variety of in your area produced along with imported passenger vehicles, SUVs and light-weight advertisements. The traveler car assortment incorporates the lightweight Fiesta hatch, the little Focus hatch, mid-sized Mondeo hatch and the full-size Falcon sedan. SUVs range from the Ecosport, Kuga, Everest and Territory. The lighting industrial range comprises the iconic Falcon utility, Ranger two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive utility as well as cab-chassis alternatives, and then European Transportation vans as well as cab-chassis.

With regard to more than 100 decades, Ford Motor Company has been selling mass-produced automobiles inside United States and around the planet. Referred to as one of the Massive Three American manufacturers, Ford provides attracted numerous faithful clients that has a wide range of cars offering sizeable cost. The automaker’s trucks plus SUVs are already particularly well-known. For decades, Ford’s F-Series truck have been all the best-selling vehicle in the usa.

These company began by Henry Ford inside 1903. Ford thought of creating a car to the masses, and that’s just what he did, most notably while using immortal Design T of 1908-’27. The second seemed to be purchased simply by 16.5 million Americans in the course of its 20-year lifespan and it was economical adequate for Ford’s very own factory workers to buy. Ford’s early on many years were also recognized by simply its release with the relocating set up line. It had become the first one to utilize this extra cost-effective way of production, and its invention was a pillar with the production system.

Ford enhanced into the luxury-car marketplace featuring its acquiring Lincoln Motor Company throughout 1925. In the next few years, these company broadened its focus even more by creating the Mercury division to generate mid-priced cars. By the late ’30s, Ford had presented the stylish Lincoln Zephyr, unveiled a low-priced V8 engine and constructed extra than 25 million cars.

These 1950s found the introduction of the famous Thunderbird. Providing sleek design and spirited performance married for you to available luxurious features similar to power windows and also a signal-seeking radio, all the car was obviously a huge strike. Another type of that will decade, these Edsel, satisfied using a relatively significantly less excited wedding party. Inside the wake up of abysmal sales, all of the Edsel seemed to be discontinued only a few months directly into its 3 rd type year.

Ford obtained its a foot-hold in early 1960s using the intro of the compact Falcon, one particular that’s warmly been given through the public. By the middle of the 10 years all the automaker acquired provided lovers one thing to be able to perk about with the launch of the sporty Mustang, a car of which continued for being one of the greatest dealers of their day. Customers loved all the Mustang’s reduced price, available potent V8 engines and additionally cool styling. These Mustang perhaps designed a brand-new vehicle category: the horse car.

By the 1970s, Ford, like other home-based automakers, seemed to be needs to suffer the effects of fixing customer tastes and additionally fresh govt regulations. A lot of its cars started to be eye shadows with their former selves. Nevertheless the seeds of rebirth have been planted in this particular 10 years. Inside 1979, all the company acquired a stake in Mazda; this kind of move might later aid Ford substantially with co-development tasks. These company additionally emerged with a new way of thinking of worldwide competitiveness.

By the mid-to-late ’80s, Ford seemed to be showing innovative strength having its popular Escort and additionally Taurus styles while additional expanding its empire with the purchase of all of the Aston Martin plus Jaguar companies. In the mean time, its full-size LTD sedan (later relabeled these Crown Victoria) always been a standard feature of taxi businesses and additionally police allows throughout The us.

Ford rode a wave of popularity in the 1990s, many thanks simply towards the large achievement of the company’s Explorer midsize SUV. The truck played a huge role in ushering in the era of the SUV. In 1999, Ford enhanced its family just as before by purchasing Volvo’s car department, and additionally, with 2000, it acquired Land Rover. For a little bit, there were speak of Ford perhaps getting General Motors’ place because No. 1 automaker in the world.

However the|However the} new millennium at first saw a downturn for Ford. Elevated competitors, a continuing operating reduction for Jaguar, legacy fees as well as a reliance on SUVs pertaining to profit needed their own toll. To pay, the company supplied Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and also Volvo and launched a wave of successful different products. Designs just like the F-150, Fusion, Fiesta, Focus, Flex and Mustang have allowed Ford to regain its nicely being as well as position like a extremely competitive manufacturer.

Ford Focus RS Assess

Complete Race Motorsports gives an in depth aerodynamic physique kit that consists of parts such as a top race splitter and side splitters that assist enhance the scorching hatch’s downforce. A rear diffuser is furthermore incorporated within the supplying, as can be a beauty livery design that’s highlighted inside Stealth Gray physique finish getting a black roof as well as a Fire Orange strips operating all through the physique from the Focus RS. A “Full Race” decal within the decrease edge from the windshield finishes these exterior upgrades in which Complete Race Motorsports is supplying. I’m guessing, also, that the color choices can differ depending on the customer’s wishes. The tuner commissions it from BASF, that is certainly known inside tuning communities as among probably the most useful within the company relating to automotive physique wraps.

Mountune may not possess the most renowned title within the aftermarket tuning circle, but honestly do not let the relative privacy distract you against what are the tuner will be totally efficient at. All of us at present saw what requires place when it gets its hands within the Ford Focus RS. It accomplished it final 12 months together with Ford Performance as well as managed to squeeze away 375 horse power and 376 pound-feet of torque. Nowadays it is back getting a higher and a lot superior upgrade towards the scorching hatch as calls for any 400-horsepower Ford Focus RS have got lastly already been clarified.

The capacity of Mountune’s brand new improvements towards the Focus RS covers a great deal of ground so far as mechanical changes are involved. There’s extremely compact within the procedure of aesthetic enhancements, so customers are advisable to find out these anywhere else, whether it is coming from Ford or an extra aftermarket company. Nevertheless, the actual program’s not enough adaptability shouldn’t be held against it, not with all of the promise of remarkable energy and performance.

[levaduraa]

2019 ford fusion concept

New Post has been published on http://www.fordissue.net/2019-ford-fusion-concept/

2019 ford fusion concept

2019 ford fusion concept – Ford includes a world-wide impact by using production services in a great many areas worldwide, including Australia wherever it develops the in your area developed Falcon passenger car in addition to power variety, plus the Place SUV. That company includes a extensive variety of in your area produced along with imported passenger vehicles, SUVs and light-weight advertisements. The traveler car assortment incorporates the lightweight Fiesta hatch, the little Focus hatch, mid-sized Mondeo hatch and the full-size Falcon sedan. SUVs range from the Ecosport, Kuga, Everest and Territory. The lighting industrial range comprises the iconic Falcon utility, Ranger two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive utility as well as cab-chassis alternatives, and then European Transportation vans as well as cab-chassis.

With regard to more than 100 decades, Ford Motor Company has been selling mass-produced automobiles inside United States and around the planet. Referred to as one of the Massive Three American manufacturers, Ford provides attracted numerous faithful clients that has a wide range of cars offering sizeable cost. The automaker’s trucks plus SUVs are already particularly well-known. For decades, Ford’s F-Series truck have been all the best-selling vehicle in the usa.

These company began by Henry Ford inside 1903. Ford thought of creating a car to the masses, and that’s just what he did, most notably while using immortal Design T of 1908-’27. The second seemed to be purchased simply by 16.5 million Americans in the course of its 20-year lifespan and it was economical adequate for Ford’s very own factory workers to buy. Ford’s early on many years were also recognized by simply its release with the relocating set up line. It had become the first one to utilize this extra cost-effective way of production, and its invention was a pillar with the production system.

Ford enhanced into the luxury-car marketplace featuring its acquiring Lincoln Motor Company throughout 1925. In the next few years, these company broadened its focus even more by creating the Mercury division to generate mid-priced cars. By the late ’30s, Ford had presented the stylish Lincoln Zephyr, unveiled a low-priced V8 engine and constructed extra than 25 million cars.

These 1950s found the introduction of the famous Thunderbird. Providing sleek design and spirited performance married for you to available luxurious features similar to power windows and also a signal-seeking radio, all the car was obviously a huge strike. Another type of that will decade, these Edsel, satisfied using a relatively significantly less excited wedding party. Inside the wake up of abysmal sales, all of the Edsel seemed to be discontinued only a few months directly into its 3 rd type year.

Ford obtained its a foot-hold in early 1960s using the intro of the compact Falcon, one particular that’s warmly been given through the public. By the middle of the 10 years all the automaker acquired provided lovers one thing to be able to perk about with the launch of the sporty Mustang, a car of which continued for being one of the greatest dealers of their day. Customers loved all the Mustang’s reduced price, available potent V8 engines and additionally cool styling. These Mustang perhaps designed a brand-new vehicle category: the horse car.

By the 1970s, Ford, like other home-based automakers, seemed to be needs to suffer the effects of fixing customer tastes and additionally fresh govt regulations. A lot of its cars started to be eye shadows with their former selves. Nevertheless the seeds of rebirth have been planted in this particular 10 years. Inside 1979, all the company acquired a stake in Mazda; this kind of move might later aid Ford substantially with co-development tasks. These company additionally emerged with a new way of thinking of worldwide competitiveness.

By the mid-to-late ’80s, Ford seemed to be showing innovative strength having its popular Escort and additionally Taurus styles while additional expanding its empire with the purchase of all of the Aston Martin plus Jaguar companies. In the mean time, its full-size LTD sedan (later relabeled these Crown Victoria) always been a standard feature of taxi businesses and additionally police allows throughout The us.

Ford rode a wave of popularity in the 1990s, many thanks simply towards the large achievement of the company’s Explorer midsize SUV. The truck played a huge role in ushering in the era of the SUV. In 1999, Ford enhanced its family just as before by purchasing Volvo’s car department, and additionally, with 2000, it acquired Land Rover. For a little bit, there were speak of Ford perhaps getting General Motors’ place because No. 1 automaker in the world.

However the|However the} new millennium at first saw a downturn for Ford. Elevated competitors, a continuing operating reduction for Jaguar, legacy fees as well as a reliance on SUVs pertaining to profit needed their own toll. To pay, the company supplied Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and also Volvo and launched a wave of successful different products. Designs just like the F-150, Fusion, Fiesta, Focus, Flex and Mustang have allowed Ford to regain its nicely being as well as position like a extremely competitive manufacturer.

Ford Focus RS Assess

Complete Race Motorsports gives an in depth aerodynamic physique kit that consists of parts such as a top race splitter and side splitters that assist enhance the scorching hatch’s downforce. A rear diffuser is furthermore incorporated within the supplying, as can be a beauty livery design that’s highlighted inside Stealth Gray physique finish getting a black roof as well as a Fire Orange strips operating all through the physique from the Focus RS. A “Full Race” decal within the decrease edge from the windshield finishes these exterior upgrades in which Complete Race Motorsports is supplying. I’m guessing, also, that the color choices can differ depending on the customer’s wishes. The tuner commissions it from BASF, that is certainly known inside tuning communities as among probably the most useful within the company relating to automotive physique wraps.

Mountune may not possess the most renowned title within the aftermarket tuning circle, but honestly do not let the relative privacy distract you against what are the tuner will be totally efficient at. All of us at present saw what requires place when it gets its hands within the Ford Focus RS. It accomplished it final 12 months together with Ford Performance as well as managed to squeeze away 375 horse power and 376 pound-feet of torque. Nowadays it is back getting a higher and a lot superior upgrade towards the scorching hatch as calls for any 400-horsepower Ford Focus RS have got lastly already been clarified.

The capacity of Mountune’s brand new improvements towards the Focus RS covers a great deal of ground so far as mechanical changes are involved. There’s extremely compact within the procedure of aesthetic enhancements, so customers are advisable to find out these anywhere else, whether it is coming from Ford or an extra aftermarket company. Nevertheless, the actual program’s not enough adaptability shouldn’t be held against it, not with all of the promise of remarkable energy and performance.

[mariokolaric]

2019 ford fusion concept

New Post has been published on http://www.fordissue.net/2019-ford-fusion-concept/

2019 ford fusion concept

2019 ford fusion concept – Ford includes a world-wide impact by using production services in a great many areas worldwide, including Australia wherever it develops the in your area developed Falcon passenger car in addition to power variety, plus the Place SUV. That company includes a extensive variety of in your area produced along with imported passenger vehicles, SUVs and light-weight advertisements. The traveler car assortment incorporates the lightweight Fiesta hatch, the little Focus hatch, mid-sized Mondeo hatch and the full-size Falcon sedan. SUVs range from the Ecosport, Kuga, Everest and Territory. The lighting industrial range comprises the iconic Falcon utility, Ranger two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive utility as well as cab-chassis alternatives, and then European Transportation vans as well as cab-chassis.

With regard to more than 100 decades, Ford Motor Company has been selling mass-produced automobiles inside United States and around the planet. Referred to as one of the Massive Three American manufacturers, Ford provides attracted numerous faithful clients that has a wide range of cars offering sizeable cost. The automaker’s trucks plus SUVs are already particularly well-known. For decades, Ford’s F-Series truck have been all the best-selling vehicle in the usa.

These company began by Henry Ford inside 1903. Ford thought of creating a car to the masses, and that’s just what he did, most notably while using immortal Design T of 1908-’27. The second seemed to be purchased simply by 16.5 million Americans in the course of its 20-year lifespan and it was economical adequate for Ford’s very own factory workers to buy. Ford’s early on many years were also recognized by simply its release with the relocating set up line. It had become the first one to utilize this extra cost-effective way of production, and its invention was a pillar with the production system.

Ford enhanced into the luxury-car marketplace featuring its acquiring Lincoln Motor Company throughout 1925. In the next few years, these company broadened its focus even more by creating the Mercury division to generate mid-priced cars. By the late ’30s, Ford had presented the stylish Lincoln Zephyr, unveiled a low-priced V8 engine and constructed extra than 25 million cars.

These 1950s found the introduction of the famous Thunderbird. Providing sleek design and spirited performance married for you to available luxurious features similar to power windows and also a signal-seeking radio, all the car was obviously a huge strike. Another type of that will decade, these Edsel, satisfied using a relatively significantly less excited wedding party. Inside the wake up of abysmal sales, all of the Edsel seemed to be discontinued only a few months directly into its 3 rd type year.

Ford obtained its a foot-hold in early 1960s using the intro of the compact Falcon, one particular that’s warmly been given through the public. By the middle of the 10 years all the automaker acquired provided lovers one thing to be able to perk about with the launch of the sporty Mustang, a car of which continued for being one of the greatest dealers of their day. Customers loved all the Mustang’s reduced price, available potent V8 engines and additionally cool styling. These Mustang perhaps designed a brand-new vehicle category: the horse car.

By the 1970s, Ford, like other home-based automakers, seemed to be needs to suffer the effects of fixing customer tastes and additionally fresh govt regulations. A lot of its cars started to be eye shadows with their former selves. Nevertheless the seeds of rebirth have been planted in this particular 10 years. Inside 1979, all the company acquired a stake in Mazda; this kind of move might later aid Ford substantially with co-development tasks. These company additionally emerged with a new way of thinking of worldwide competitiveness.

By the mid-to-late ’80s, Ford seemed to be showing innovative strength having its popular Escort and additionally Taurus styles while additional expanding its empire with the purchase of all of the Aston Martin plus Jaguar companies. In the mean time, its full-size LTD sedan (later relabeled these Crown Victoria) always been a standard feature of taxi businesses and additionally police allows throughout The us.

Ford rode a wave of popularity in the 1990s, many thanks simply towards the large achievement of the company’s Explorer midsize SUV. The truck played a huge role in ushering in the era of the SUV. In 1999, Ford enhanced its family just as before by purchasing Volvo’s car department, and additionally, with 2000, it acquired Land Rover. For a little bit, there were speak of Ford perhaps getting General Motors’ place because No. 1 automaker in the world.

However the|However the} new millennium at first saw a downturn for Ford. Elevated competitors, a continuing operating reduction for Jaguar, legacy fees as well as a reliance on SUVs pertaining to profit needed their own toll. To pay, the company supplied Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and also Volvo and launched a wave of successful different products. Designs just like the F-150, Fusion, Fiesta, Focus, Flex and Mustang have allowed Ford to regain its nicely being as well as position like a extremely competitive manufacturer.

Ford Focus RS Assess

Complete Race Motorsports gives an in depth aerodynamic physique kit that consists of parts such as a top race splitter and side splitters that assist enhance the scorching hatch’s downforce. A rear diffuser is furthermore incorporated within the supplying, as can be a beauty livery design that’s highlighted inside Stealth Gray physique finish getting a black roof as well as a Fire Orange strips operating all through the physique from the Focus RS. A “Full Race” decal within the decrease edge from the windshield finishes these exterior upgrades in which Complete Race Motorsports is supplying. I’m guessing, also, that the color choices can differ depending on the customer’s wishes. The tuner commissions it from BASF, that is certainly known inside tuning communities as among probably the most useful within the company relating to automotive physique wraps.

Mountune may not possess the most renowned title within the aftermarket tuning circle, but honestly do not let the relative privacy distract you against what are the tuner will be totally efficient at. All of us at present saw what requires place when it gets its hands within the Ford Focus RS. It accomplished it final 12 months together with Ford Performance as well as managed to squeeze away 375 horse power and 376 pound-feet of torque. Nowadays it is back getting a higher and a lot superior upgrade towards the scorching hatch as calls for any 400-horsepower Ford Focus RS have got lastly already been clarified.

The capacity of Mountune’s brand new improvements towards the Focus RS covers a great deal of ground so far as mechanical changes are involved. There’s extremely compact within the procedure of aesthetic enhancements, so customers are advisable to find out these anywhere else, whether it is coming from Ford or an extra aftermarket company. Nevertheless, the actual program’s not enough adaptability shouldn’t be held against it, not with all of the promise of remarkable energy and performance.

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2019 ford fusion concept

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2019 ford fusion concept

2019 ford fusion concept – Ford includes a world-wide impact by using production services in a great many areas worldwide, including Australia wherever it develops the in your area developed Falcon passenger car in addition to power variety, plus the Place SUV. That company includes a extensive variety of in your area produced along with imported passenger vehicles, SUVs and light-weight advertisements. The traveler car assortment incorporates the lightweight Fiesta hatch, the little Focus hatch, mid-sized Mondeo hatch and the full-size Falcon sedan. SUVs range from the Ecosport, Kuga, Everest and Territory. The lighting industrial range comprises the iconic Falcon utility, Ranger two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive utility as well as cab-chassis alternatives, and then European Transportation vans as well as cab-chassis.

With regard to more than 100 decades, Ford Motor Company has been selling mass-produced automobiles inside United States and around the planet. Referred to as one of the Massive Three American manufacturers, Ford provides attracted numerous faithful clients that has a wide range of cars offering sizeable cost. The automaker’s trucks plus SUVs are already particularly well-known. For decades, Ford’s F-Series truck have been all the best-selling vehicle in the usa.

These company began by Henry Ford inside 1903. Ford thought of creating a car to the masses, and that’s just what he did, most notably while using immortal Design T of 1908-’27. The second seemed to be purchased simply by 16.5 million Americans in the course of its 20-year lifespan and it was economical adequate for Ford’s very own factory workers to buy. Ford’s early on many years were also recognized by simply its release with the relocating set up line. It had become the first one to utilize this extra cost-effective way of production, and its invention was a pillar with the production system.

Ford enhanced into the luxury-car marketplace featuring its acquiring Lincoln Motor Company throughout 1925. In the next few years, these company broadened its focus even more by creating the Mercury division to generate mid-priced cars. By the late ’30s, Ford had presented the stylish Lincoln Zephyr, unveiled a low-priced V8 engine and constructed extra than 25 million cars.

These 1950s found the introduction of the famous Thunderbird. Providing sleek design and spirited performance married for you to available luxurious features similar to power windows and also a signal-seeking radio, all the car was obviously a huge strike. Another type of that will decade, these Edsel, satisfied using a relatively significantly less excited wedding party. Inside the wake up of abysmal sales, all of the Edsel seemed to be discontinued only a few months directly into its 3 rd type year.

Ford obtained its a foot-hold in early 1960s using the intro of the compact Falcon, one particular that’s warmly been given through the public. By the middle of the 10 years all the automaker acquired provided lovers one thing to be able to perk about with the launch of the sporty Mustang, a car of which continued for being one of the greatest dealers of their day. Customers loved all the Mustang’s reduced price, available potent V8 engines and additionally cool styling. These Mustang perhaps designed a brand-new vehicle category: the horse car.

By the 1970s, Ford, like other home-based automakers, seemed to be needs to suffer the effects of fixing customer tastes and additionally fresh govt regulations. A lot of its cars started to be eye shadows with their former selves. Nevertheless the seeds of rebirth have been planted in this particular 10 years. Inside 1979, all the company acquired a stake in Mazda; this kind of move might later aid Ford substantially with co-development tasks. These company additionally emerged with a new way of thinking of worldwide competitiveness.

By the mid-to-late ’80s, Ford seemed to be showing innovative strength having its popular Escort and additionally Taurus styles while additional expanding its empire with the purchase of all of the Aston Martin plus Jaguar companies. In the mean time, its full-size LTD sedan (later relabeled these Crown Victoria) always been a standard feature of taxi businesses and additionally police allows throughout The us.

Ford rode a wave of popularity in the 1990s, many thanks simply towards the large achievement of the company’s Explorer midsize SUV. The truck played a huge role in ushering in the era of the SUV. In 1999, Ford enhanced its family just as before by purchasing Volvo’s car department, and additionally, with 2000, it acquired Land Rover. For a little bit, there were speak of Ford perhaps getting General Motors’ place because No. 1 automaker in the world.

However the|However the} new millennium at first saw a downturn for Ford. Elevated competitors, a continuing operating reduction for Jaguar, legacy fees as well as a reliance on SUVs pertaining to profit needed their own toll. To pay, the company supplied Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and also Volvo and launched a wave of successful different products. Designs just like the F-150, Fusion, Fiesta, Focus, Flex and Mustang have allowed Ford to regain its nicely being as well as position like a extremely competitive manufacturer.

Ford Focus RS Assess

Complete Race Motorsports gives an in depth aerodynamic physique kit that consists of parts such as a top race splitter and side splitters that assist enhance the scorching hatch’s downforce. A rear diffuser is furthermore incorporated within the supplying, as can be a beauty livery design that’s highlighted inside Stealth Gray physique finish getting a black roof as well as a Fire Orange strips operating all through the physique from the Focus RS. A “Full Race” decal within the decrease edge from the windshield finishes these exterior upgrades in which Complete Race Motorsports is supplying. I’m guessing, also, that the color choices can differ depending on the customer’s wishes. The tuner commissions it from BASF, that is certainly known inside tuning communities as among probably the most useful within the company relating to automotive physique wraps.

Mountune may not possess the most renowned title within the aftermarket tuning circle, but honestly do not let the relative privacy distract you against what are the tuner will be totally efficient at. All of us at present saw what requires place when it gets its hands within the Ford Focus RS. It accomplished it final 12 months together with Ford Performance as well as managed to squeeze away 375 horse power and 376 pound-feet of torque. Nowadays it is back getting a higher and a lot superior upgrade towards the scorching hatch as calls for any 400-horsepower Ford Focus RS have got lastly already been clarified.

The capacity of Mountune’s brand new improvements towards the Focus RS covers a great deal of ground so far as mechanical changes are involved. There’s extremely compact within the procedure of aesthetic enhancements, so customers are advisable to find out these anywhere else, whether it is coming from Ford or an extra aftermarket company. Nevertheless, the actual program’s not enough adaptability shouldn’t be held against it, not with all of the promise of remarkable energy and performance.