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mvdipetsch · 5 years ago

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Outside of London; A Guide.

Hello, friends! I think there’s a semi-substantial amount of roleplays based around England, but honestly 90% of them are in London and while that’s great, England is made up of a lot of cities and I figured I’d show some #representation.

In this guide we cover: Housing in England, location and travel!

Disclaimer: This is based off of my experience and the experience of those around me. Most of my knowledge is concentrated around Birmingham, as that is where I grew up, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool and Liverpool so I feel that I have a semi-decent shot at helping out.

If you found this guide helpful, please reblog this as it helps to show me that there is interest and I’m not just shouting into a void. If you have any suggestions or comments about things I could/should cover in these guides please let me know! Any specific questions? Shoot me an ask and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Location, Location, Location.

England is divided into counties. There many of them, and realistically they don’t affect anything. All it really means is that your resources (police, fire, ambulance, charities, etc.) are organised by that one area. For instance - the buses in my city are all organised by Network West Midlands. They deal with every bus service (if it’s an NXBus) in the West Midlands. Ultimately, it doesn’t really affect anything.

From my city to my university, it’s a 3-ish hour drive. That is a long drive. I know some people regard that as nothing, but when everything is so close together, it’s a lot. It’s not really a drive that people would make a lot - this is why train transport (while not that big) tends to be used to get from city to city.

Only really in the inner cities are things that expensive. When you move away from the main city, things can get pretty affordable, but the inner city is still often really accessible via bus, driving or even train. When I’m at my boyfriend’s I’ll get the bus into the city centre, but when I’m at my mom’s sometimes it’s quicker to just jump on a train. Train tickets are also pretty inexpensive if you’re moving within the city. It’s when you’re heading to smaller cities that the problems arise. For instance, I can get to London for under £10, and to Liverpool for not much more. However, for me to get from Birmingham (a major city) to my University (a not-so-major city of about 200k) it’s £60+ with a change. On coach, it’s £14 with a change + it takes 5-ish hours (there are direct coaches that cost £30~ which is still significantly cheaper than the train) University students will commonly take a coach to and from their university to their hometown if it’s ridiculously priced.

The higher north you go, typically the cheaper it is. This is dependent upon where in that city you are, but the general consensus is that north = cheaper. Obviously if you’re in Manchester city centre then it’s going to be a bit more pricey, but the general cost of living / food / etc. is seen to be cheaper the more north you go. A good way to judge how expensive a place is, is by how much the bus fare is. Birmingham bus fare is £4.00 for a daysaver (one ticket, on the bus as much as you like) but when I was in Liverpool I paid something like £1.20 for an U18 ticket. That’s a big difference. (For reference - Birmingham is the smack-bang middle of England. Liverpool is about 2 hours north, near Manchester.)

Typically, when it comes to travelling;

Driving

Cars in the UK are predominantly manual (with a gear stick) but we can still get automatic cars. Manual cars are also cheaper than automatic and you can drive an automatic with a manual license but you cannot drive a manual with an automatic license.

My mom lives seven minutes from her work (she timed it, she’s got no life) but there are people who live up to thirty minutes away and have to take the motorway. This means that if there’s a massive accident, you can sit there for six hours, bored out of your skull

It’s also worth saying that if you live in a/the city centre, you’re not taking your car to work. It’s ridiculously expensive and parking is so few and far between, it’s really not worth it. People can and do drive, but plenty of people will also opt for a train or bus.

Buses

If you don’t drive the bus is often a very viable option. Buses will commonly run from 6:30/7 until 11:30/12 (at least where I am) but you can get night buses or buses that run later, they’re just a bit rare.

Students (in college or secondary school, typically) are VERY common on buses. As in public buses. Unless someone has an impairment and go to a special school suited to their needs, you make your own way. Which often means that you jump on that bus with every man and his dog.

Sunday service is real and it’s a pain in the arse. Buses that run every 10-ish minutes during the week drop to 20 between 9 and 5 and then drop to every 30 minutes after that (sometimes even every hour.) This means that if you miss your bus... you can be waiting for a very long time.

Trains

Train’s are far more common for longer commutes. Also trains aren’t really that common for secondary school students (they either get dropped off in a car, walk or take the bus) but college students can and do take the train. My best friend takes an hour’s train ride to and from her college every day, and a lot of my teachers will get the train to college (my college is in the city centre, so it’s pretty logical.) Regardless, trains aren’t as common.

Housing

Houses in England are attached. It is rare that you will see detached (stand alone) houses. Most houses will share their walls with their neighbours, unless they’re the end house in which case they’re called “semi-detached” cause... only half of them is attached. That tends to mean that if your neighbours have a baby, you can hear them crying. You can hear when the tv is too loud and all that kind of stuff.

When you move out, there tends to be a few options in terms of who actually owns where you live. The options normally are:

Council.

You sign up on the website, the council give you a priority rating and a set amount of points. These points are determined by the people in your household and your needs. A single mother with two kids will get more points than a single person with no dependants.

There is also a ‘bedroom’ tax, which states that you have to pay a tax if you live in a council property and are seen as having more bedrooms than you need. If, for instance you have two children of opposite genders that are aged seven and three, you have to pay extra tax for that third bedroom because it’s deemed as unnecessary. However if you have two children and they’re of different genders and one of them is over the age of ten (10) then you do not have to pay the tax. If they are of the same gender, then it is until one of them is sixteen (16).

Council and Housing Associations are most beneficial to those who are receiving benefits or are not working enough to cover rent by themselves.

Housing Association

The way a housing association works is effectively the same as a landlord and the council. You apply on the council website for the aforementioned points and begin to bid on properties. When this happens, you may bid on a property that happens to be owned by a HA. The HA then acts as your landlord. HAs are pretty okay, dependent upon the area + such. When you live in a HA, any housing benefit you receive will immediately be paid from the council to the HA. This can cause issues if your money gets fucked up (which is more common than not because the housing system in the UK is BROKEN.)

Private Rent

Private is when you have a landlord. I mean, that’s pretty self-explanatory really. You have an issue? Call the landlord. I’ve never had a landlord so I can’t really comment much on this. I will say that most landlords likely won’t accept housing benefit as a form of payment.

Private own.

This is just the whole mortgage, thing. You know how this goes.

There are a few different types of housing options when it comes to England and I’d imagine that this is pretty true for up and down the city.

Blocks of flats.

Blocks of flats are huge high-rises. They’re not as common anymore but there are still quite a few knocking about. If you remember the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, that was a high-rise.

Blocks of flats can be owned by the local council or be privately rented. I’ve never lived in a flat, so my knowledge isn’t the best. They all tend to have names and there’s normally at least two together.

A ‘flat’ is basically an apartment. So it’s a bunch of different flats (which, in high rises, commonly have two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom) High rises have a lot of flats in them. Commonly there’s at least 13 floors, with between around four and six flats per floor. So you can get a lot of people in a high rise.

Maisonette.

A maisonette looks like a wide house. It’s normally one to two floors, with flats that have three (or more) bedrooms. Maisonettes are considerably bigger, in terms of the flats inside, and consist of maybe two flats per floor. Maisonettes can also be council, privately rented or housing association.

Bungalow.

A bungalow is a home without any stairs. They can be council, privately rented or privately owned. Bungalows aren’t that common anymore, but they’re great for people who have difficulty with stairs and such. Also most bungalows are actually pretty decent sizes too.

Houses.

Houses in the UK are broken down into one of three categories:

Detached

Semi-Detached

Attached

This is literally just based upon how many of your walls are shared with your neighbour. Detached houses are really uncommon in the UK and are usually found in richer areas. Semi-detached is mainly just the house at the end of your street, so semi-detached and attached are the main two.

Also it’s pretty common that you only have windows of two of the four house walls. Even if you’re in a semi-detached house, you’ll only have front and back windows.

Houses can be privately owned, privately rented, housing association or council.

Most houses follow a similar layout. Typically three bedrooms, with either one bathroom or a room just for the toilet + then the bathroom (with a bath + sink + such.) It’s also super common for one room to be a ‘box room’ which is normally pretty small. My room at my mom’s house is the ‘box room’ and it fits a 3/4 bed, a chest of draws, and a metal rack that I use as a bookshelf. There is not a lot of room in there.

And there you have it! I think I covered most things regarding transport and housing in the UK, and I really hope that it was as informative as possible. Stay groovy, my dudes.

#rpt #rpc #rph #CONTENT.#WH : LOCATIONS.#WRITING HELP.

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its-tubbs · 5 years ago

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Black in America

Have you ever given any thought to what it may be like to be Black in America? Chances are no one does unless they are truly a Black or African American person trying to survive. It would be great if everyone could walk in the shoes of a Black person for just one week.

I often wonder if anyone could survive a week when they get upset if a group of people is starting to grill food in Lake Merritt Park or if you are sitting and waiting for a friend at Starbucks.

Fifty years ago, John Howard Griffin published a slim volume about his travels as a "black man" through America. He expected it to be an obscure work of interest primarily to sociologists, but Black Like Me, which told white Americans what they had long refused to believe, sold 10 million copies and became a modern classic.

I keep asking myself and my colleagues what happened? Today, I can't tell the difference between the 60's and 2020. As much as we appear to move forward, we seem to be swiftly reversing in our accomplishments as a race of people. All over the country, racism, discrimination, police brutality and racial profiling have reached the top of the list.

For decades, black parents have told their children that in order to succeed despite racial discrimination, they need to be twice as good, twice as smart, twice as dependable, and twice as talented. This advice can be found in everything from literature to television shows, to day-to-day conversations.

African American employees tend to receive more scrutiny from their bosses than their white colleagues, meaning that small mistakes are more likely to be caught, which over time leads to worse performance reviews, lower wages or job termination.

For the past 15 years, I worked as a freelancer or marketing consultant in order to have better control of my life. As a contractor of color today, contracts became almost obsolete as government organizations and other enterprises stopped giving contracts to those of color because they wanted to hire those that looked like them or to give contracts to friends or family members. What angers me is most white people in charge are never reprimanded or questioned about their choices, even when their contractors are incompetent and unproductive for big buckets of money. Try that as a Black man or woman and you will end up in jail or fired from your position.

In the past year, I took a 40 hour per week job with an organization, hoping to be able to make a difference for priority communities or communities of color to be served. I convinced myself that my skills and experience would be welcomed and positive lessons would be shared and learned to make communities healthier.

Deep down inside I knew that I was simply fooling myself. From the moment I walked in the door, I was greeted with racism, discrimination and passive aggressive behaviors from white privileged co-workers with less experience and who continued to be unable to reach their goals or simply make a difference. I often ask how many t-shirts need to be purchased to reduce disparities in communities of color? That's when I become the enemy questioning their authority and position. Well, they did get that part correct.

As a black man, I can't remember a day when I didn't face discrimination or racist views from others. Depending on my mood, there are days that I wish I didn't have to leave home for meetings or appointments. Often it happens before I even leave my apartment building where I have lived for 15 years, but still get looked at as if I am an intruder or burglar. As a black man, in order to survive, you learn to ignore or suppress most of the negativity that attempts to hit you in the face every day.

As a black man in America, many things happen on a daily basis to push your buttons. The key is learning to stay calm and avoid those threatening triggers. Although the events vary, here are some of the issues that I deal with every day as a black man:

Every time I enter a department store, drug store or office building I am followed, questioned and watched very carefully by security guards, even if they are black. They are trained to be suspicious of other blacks because their training sessions teach them that black and brown people are thieves, murderers and drug addicts looking to steal or cause bodily harm.

Riding public transportation can be a curse or a blessing. If you are black, usually no one will sit next to you unless they are another black person or someone homeless that smells like pure crap. During those times you remove yourself to another part of the car or bus.

Entering an elevator has always been amusing to me. White women, especially would rather take the stairs or wait for the next elevator to come down to the lobby. If they reluctantly enter an elevator with a black man, chances are they will be holding tight to their purses because being black means you are going to snatch their purse and run. Just a note, most black people don't even think about white people at all.

Entering restaurants: Don't be surprised if they are booked. They are very surprised if you have a reservation and in shock that your name was not black enough to alert them.

Office or Team meetings can be quite interesting. Bleeding heart liberals are usually 10 times worse than an outright racist. How can you identify one of them? Well, they are usually passive aggressive and feel that they can say anything to a person of color without ramifications. They can also cry at the drop of a hat if an intelligent response is given. They often will launch into a dialogue that starts with, “that's not really what I meant and I am sorry that you misunderstood me”. When it comes to this bullshit, I don't hesitate to go for their jugular and eliminate the problem without raising my voice or an eyebrow.

A black female employee is told by a co-worker multiple times that she is “so well spoken,” or “not like other black women” that the coworker knows. These comments place a negative assumption on Black Americans, as well as shows contempt or a lack of respect for African American Vernacular English.

A latina staff member is sitting in a team meeting when one of the directors makes a face and starts to put down another latino worker who is no longer with the organization but who has been pulled in as a consultant because of her great skills. Being the only latino staff member in the meeting, she feels crushed by the white co-worker's attitude, facial expressions, and nasty comments about the other latina person. No one else seems to notice except for me.

Driving while Black can be rather frightening. You may be doing everything correctly but if you are black the profiling begins. Being black means that you must be high on drugs, drunk, have a criminal record, have a warrant out for your arrest or may be thinking about committing a crime. To save us all, 10 police cars are called in and you are beaten nearly to death or murdered for resisting arrest. Trust me, it happens every day.

The most difficult one is when you are a Black person who goes in for an interview and the only Black person on the panel, like the security person at Walgreens or CVS, focuses on destroying your chances of being hired. The old name for these people was Uncle Tom, but I have moved to calling them Handkerchief Heads.

Another common form of racial bias can happen even before the interview. Black or Latino sounding names have a disproportionately lower call-back rate than white names when it comes to landing an interview.

Racism is often boiled down to its most basic definition: discrimination and negative stereotyping based on race or skin color. However, the truest definition of racism — that of systemic or institutional racism — is much broader, and understanding that definition can help illustrate the lived experiences of people of color in America.

So how do you survive being Black in America?

If you have stories to share, please sent them to me. Those lessons can help so many others to succeed.

#blackinamerica #blacklivesmatter #racism #institutionalracism #equity #socialequity #equality #internalizedracism #racialhealing #emotionalintelligence #mindfulness #Therightwithinexperience #jeneejohnson

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amoralto · 6 years ago

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MOJO: Paul McCartney – the MOJO interview. (May, 2003)

(Note: Finally, finally finished typing this up after @sweating-cobwebs requested the full interview what seems like ages ago. Quotes from this and the Yoko interview from the same issue - which I’ll probably type up in full later as well - can be found under the #2003 tag.)

In troubled times, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono remained undaunted and have found peace – with themselves and each other. Johnny Black met Macca in London.

by Johnny Black

When Sir Paul McCartney’s dark blue Mercedes drives into Docklands Arena and pulls up at the side of the stage, the 60-year-old man who climbs out looks sprightly, even jaunty. He throws his elegant grey jacket over one shoulder, as he proffers a broad smile to everyone he greets. There’s a ripple effect as he moves away from the vehicle, a small knot of his employees drifting along with him. Press officer, catering manager, sound man, security personnel… and they each have a little something they need him to do if and when he has a moment.

He appears to be taking it all on board, seems to placate them all, and by the time he pauses about 30 feet in front of the stage, the knot has dissolved and they’re all heading back to their appointed posts.

The figure briefly watches his mainly American band as they jam cheerfully around the distinctive chord progression of Walk Don’t Run by The Ventures, then joins them on the stage, immediately changing the mood as he leads them into Shakin’ All Over, the first truly great pre-Beatles British rock track. Given how much we seem to love speculating about McCartney’s motives, it would be easy to interpret this as a statement of intent – the British boss asserting his personality over his yankee staff – but it’s also undeniably a great track to warm-up on, and he seems to relish playing it. Up there on that stage, bashing away in front of an audience of less than 20 onlookers, he seems just as happy as he would be if he were basking in the approval of 20,000.

It’s March 14, 2003, and for the next few days the 12,000-capacity Arena – a far cry from the Liverpudlian sitting rooms where The Beatles first knocked their live sets together – is serving as McCartney’s rehearsal hall in the run up to a major European tour.

McCartney’s personal fortune was recently estimated at £620 million by People magazine. In the last year alone, he raked in £120m, of which £65m came from US tour receipts and album sales. But money, as he once famously pointed out, can’t buy love. And love, in the words of another Beatles’ classic, is all you need. In the enduringly poignant country music standard A Satisfied Mind, written in 1955 by Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes, such sentiments are explored more fully in the lines, “Money can’t buy back your youth when you’re old, or a friend when you’re lonely, or a heart that’s grown cold.”

Looked at in that light, just how wealthy is Paul McCartney? Here’s a man, adored by millions, disliked by millions, whose young life was shattered on October 31, 1956 when his mother, Mary, died of cancer in the Northern Hospital, Liverpool. The following year, he befriended John Lennon, only to re-live his own grief over again when Lennon’s mother, Julia, died in 1958.

With George Harrison and Ringo Starr, he and Lennon formed the most successful band the world has ever seen, then watched helplessly as it was destroyed by drugs and greed, turning their friendship to dust along the way. After years of acrimony, he and Lennon had just begun healing their wounds and rebuilding their friendship when Lennon was stolen away from him again by the bullets from Mark Chapman’s gun.

The other major relationship that had brought stability into McCartney’s life was his lasting marriage to Linda Eastman, but that was also taken from him too soon when she died from cancer in April 1998, aged just 56. And it was cancer again that claimed the life of George Harrison on November 29, 2001.

To what extent can £620m heal the scars left by those assaults on McCartney’s famously cheery – and oft derided – bonhomie? The answer, as any fule kno, is that it can’t. So what is it that keeps those legendary thumbs aloft? It has to be more than just the buzz of playing Shakin’ All Over with a band half your age.

When, after an hour and a half, the first rehearsal is over, MOJO is pulled into Macca’s wake by press officer Geoff Baker. At the end of a walk through bare and stark backstage corridors, we arrive at the inner sanctum, a dressing room converted into something not unlike a Persian boudoir, complete with velvet cushions, exotic drapes, dishes groaning with fresh fruit and the smell of incense perfuming the air.

Sitting opposite him across a low table, there’s very little feeling of being in the presence of greatness. He wears his celebrity comfortably – like a favourite old shirt. He is perfectly polite, knows how to put a stranger at ease with an amusing aside but, above all, the passage of the years has made him even more gentlemanly. In the flesh, his boyish demeanour compensates for the lines and wrinkles that have come with age. Look into his face at close quarters and what you see are his eyes, still twinkling. Somewhere behind that twinkle, however, there’s a mind like a steel trap. You don’t get to where McCartney has got without one.

What would be a typical day in your life, like when you’re not working?

I tend to be the one who gets up to make breakfast. You’d die for my breakfast. It’s my Zen thing. I cut up all these lovely exotic things, normally in this order: I cut up a melon, a papaya, some kiwis, bananas, peach, and I make a fruit plate and it looks a bit like a mandala when I’ve done it – there’s all sorts of reasons why but it just have developed into this. We’ll also have tea, bagels, humous – quite a big, fancy breakfast. Then it’s a walk in the park with the dog, or if I’m in the country it might be a horse ride.

Later in the day, I like going to the pictures. We’ve got a great local cinema… Normally I’ll go with Heather, but I went to see Lord Of The Rings on my own. Loved it, whacking great film.

You can go to the cinema without being hassled?

Yeah. I do everything without being hassled. It’s actually been one of my pleasures. I actually like getting on the Tube, getting on the bus. I’ll do it if I’m walking and I see a bus going my way, I’ll just jump on. I did it in the 60s. George’s dad was a bus driver and he could never believe I’d do that. People can’t believe it. I had a guy in the street the other day, he was really worried that I was out on my own with no security. I said, “Gerraway.” I’ve always done that. I used to sometimes walk to Beatles concerts, and you’d get a screaming mass of girls and I’d say, “Come on, girls, calm down.” I’d do the big brother thing. I’m very comfortable with that. If not a movie, we’ll watch TV or a DVD in the evening – I usually try to see Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Blind Date.

Most of us watch Millionaire because we’d like to be one, but that can’t be the appeal for you…

I want them to be millionaires. Actually Heather wants us to go on as a couple. It was funny because we met Chris Tarrant (the show’s presenter) the other night and Heather, in her keenness, said, “We should come on the Celebrity Millionaire show,” … which is for charity, so it’s a good thing… she said, “I know all the answers Paul doesn’t know and he knows all the ones I don’t know.” Chris said, “No, you shouldn’t come on. You’d be terrible.” He just completely took the piss, which was hilarious, because you’d expect him to be really keen.

Somewhere in the evening I’ll have a drink, and get to bed maybe about 11. Is that early? And then I’ll go to sleep and snore. Apparently I snore, but not a lot.

A brace of young women arrive bearing a tray laden with Paul’s lunch – chunky raisin scones, toast and a major pot of tea. Immediately he’s on his feet, exchanging pecks on the cheek, addressing them both by name, inquiring after their well-being. He points at the various delights on the tray to indicate that MOJO is welcome to partake.

Your band on this tour is noticeably young and energetic. How did you find them?

My keyboard player Wix has been with me for years, but I was going to make a record (Driving Rain) in America with David Kahne. He rang me about 10 days before the first session and said, “Do you think you might want to play live in the studio?” So I said, “Yeah, maybe.” So he said, “Should I get a couple of musicians in case you do?” I said, “OK, if you like.” I just left it very sort of casual.

So he thought about some people he admired. He’d never worked with Abe (Laboriel Jr, drummer) but he admired his work. He’d worked with Rusty (Anderson, guitarist). So he told me he’d got these people with great attitudes and who were great players and who could sing.

So I came in on the Monday morning, met the guys, and immediately started making the album, basically live. And that was it. Then, when we did the Superbowl, we needed one more guitarist for that so I asked David, “Do you know anybody?” And he said, “Yeah, this guy Brian Ray.” And he seemed to fit in great.

What do you think people expect from you when they come to a show?

I’m trying to keep a balance, proportionate, between Beatles stuff, Wings stuff and solo stuff. I don’t want it to just be a Beatles show, but I don’t mind giving an audience my most popular stuff. If I go to see David Gray, I’d like to hear him do Babylon because I like that song. And I’d be pretty disappointed if Coldplay didn’t do Yellow, you know?

We still have to rehearse to stay fresh, we’re making some changes to the screens and the lights (at these rehearsals), and I am adding a couple of songs to the set, so it’ll be a slightly longer show.

You were always the one in The Beatles who would turn up at a pub and sing songs. You did it during Magical Mystery Tour and you did it in 1968 on the way back from recording Thingumybob with the Black Dyke Mills Band.

I’d been up in Bradford with (Apple press officer) Derek Taylor, and we were just driving back to London, and we all got bored, someone wanted a pee, so we stopped in a little town called Harrold. And I think when we got to the pub it was shut but we got it to open up and we had a drink and there was a piano there so I sat down and played Let It Be.

Is that as much fun for you as playing in Earl’s Court or wherever?

Yeah. It is. It’s just a different kind of fun. I really do like it. If there’s a piano around it would be very difficult for me to just sit and watch it. It seems to me, in my naivety, that it’s something you approach and tinkle, to see if it’s in tune. It’s not a great desire to perform, I don’t think. I think it’s more that I like music, I like piano… but guitar is best.

Your first instrument was a trumpet. Was that something you wanted, or was it foisted on you by a well-meaning parent?

At the time, I think I must have sort of coveted a trumpet. My dad was a trumpet player and I did like it but when I realised I couldn’t sing and play the trumpet at the same time, I asked him and he said he didn’t mind me trading it in for a guitar. I thought he might be a bit insulted, but he didn’t mind.

The head of another aide pops round the door. It seems the BBC has arrived to show Paul a DVD of a commercial he’s done for the Corporation. Then there’s more rehearsal to be done but maybe we can reconvene later. Not for the first time, McCartney is ushered politely out of reach.

Docklands Arena, soon to be ripped down and replaced with more commercially viable properties, is virtually devoid of character. Fortunately, the stage show devised for this tour offers no end of distraction for the senses. As well as serried ranks of lights of very sort known to man, and some ear-splitting pyrotechnics in Live And Let Die, there are over 30 giant video screens forming a semi-circle around one humongous mother-screen which can be raised up and down as required on worryingly noisy pulleys.

“All our fuckin’ technology and it sounds like a building site,” wails the sound man. He’s consoled by a crew member who’s seen it all before – Gerry Stickells, the legendary Hendrix roadie tempted out of retirement for this tour at McCartney’s personal request.

When he returns to the Arena floor after watching the BBC DVD, he notices that the text on the mother-screen – via which audience members can text each other from their mobiles – is smaller than it used to be. He calls over the lighting director and suggest that “maybe… it might be better if… don’t you think?” Moments later, with the text size already increased, Macca is onstage running the band through the entire show – not that they seem to need it. The set runs almost faultlessly, synchronised with the lights and screens to such an extent that even the ‘Na Na Na’ audience participation section of Hey Jude is rehearsed in real time, with Paul exhorting the imaginary throng – “OK, just the ladies now… fantastic… now just the guys…”

He’s on-stage, performing with more energy than at any time since the heyday of The Beatles, for almost three hours in all, but he comes off at the end barely out breath, and we repair once more to the inner sanctum.

It’s interesting that you use the on-stage screens during Lady Madonna as a gallery of feminist icons…

They actually had Madonna among the visuals, but I thought that was too obvious. So they asked what I’d like to replace Madonna with and I said, “The Queen Mother.” This was two weeks before she died, so when we started touring ti looked like we’d put her in as a tribute.

I didn’t notice Yoko Ono either. Are you two still feuding?

I know that’s the public perception of it, but I do not have a bad relationship with her. We’re not enemies, me and Yoko. We send each other Christmas cards and everything. She’s more like a distant relative.

But you are tussling over the credits to the Lennon-McCartney songs…

There’s no tussle at all, but if, on my songs, like Hey Jude or Yesterday, which John openly acknowledged, particularly in the Playboy interview, that he had nothing whatsoever to do with… John actually made a list for the Playboy thing showing which songs were his and which were mine. I would be quite happy if, on one of the songs, it would be allowed, for my name to just come first. But I’m really not fussed. It’s not anywhere near as big an issue as it looks. It gets played up in the press. It’s a hot little story. And it makes me look stupid. “Why the fuck does he want that?” It’s actually just a very little request.

More importantly for me, it’s Trades Descriptions. It’s so complex and I hate to go on about it but, for example, I was reading a book, an anthology of poetry, and one of the poems in it was Blackbird, which is my lyric. And it said by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Now John had nothing to do with those words, especially once they’ve been extracted from the music and put into a poetry book. I think it’s fair enough to put Blackbird in a poetry book by Paul McCartney. Give Peace A Chance… take my name off it. It was a great, great anthem of John’s.

It’s sort of a mild request I made to Yoko and it’s sort of been turned down. If she’d have said yeah, the publishing company could probably have sorted it out.

Do you think it matters more to other people than it does to you?

I don’t think anyone gives a shit.

But Alistair Taylor, who worked for you at NEMS and Apple for many years, told me he was very upset that you would want to change the credits. He says it was agreed at an early meeting that it should be Lennon-McCartney, and you agreed to that…

Well, number one, Alistair was not in the meeting where I agreed it. It’s all very nice these guys having these opinions, but here’s what I say and this is the truth. There was a meeting with me, John and Brian, in Hilly House, above a carpet shop in Albemarle Street. We went in and they said, “We’re going to call it Lennon-McCartney.” I said, “Well, OK, fair enough, but it would be good to have it occasionally McCartney-Lennon, wouldn’t it, just for fairness for me?”

And they said, swear to God, hand on heart, but there was nobody else in the room and they’re both dead, so there’s no way of me proving this, except I believe it, I was there, and nobody else who talks about it was there, and they said, “We can change it as we go along. And we can change it any time we want out of fairness.”

This was why, many years later, when the Anthology came about, I and Linda, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, rang Yoko, and said, “Could we just, on Yesterday, could we just switch that one track?” That was the original request. It was just for that one song. And Linda, God bless her, spent quite a bit of time ringing Yoko and that was the start of it all.

And now, I must just be resigned, because it doesn’t really matter, except from the point of view of this Blackbird credit. There is an unfairness there, I think. But it’s an unfairness I’m willing to live with. I don’t mind, and I do think it has rebounded on me a bit because people want to know, “What the fuck does he think he’s doing?” I’ve had letters from people saying, “Paul, you’re doing yourself no favours. I was a big fan of yours but this terrible thing of trying to ruin John’s reputation…” I’m not trying to ruin John’s reputation.

When Yoko was interviewed by MOJO, she said it wasn’t all black during the making of the White Album. There was some lighter moments. Is that how you recall it?

That’s absolutely true, yeah. We’d never have got an album made if it was as black as it was painted. It’s a good album. I remember we presented John and Yoko with an inscribed teapot, and that was a fun time. Unfortunately, because The Beatles were splitting up, the only thing anybody wanted to know about was the split.

It wasn’t all black, even then. We were all pretty friendly, and the times when we weren’t friendly was quite a small proportion of the overall thing. Unfortunately, that’s what gets remembered because it was the most significant proportion because it ended up in a divorce, as it were. In a divorce court, you don’t say, “Oh, she was really great. She’s actually fabulous, and I’m sorry we’re getting a divorce.” That’s what happened to us. Because of the circumstances we had to talk about all the shit.

I think because the Beatles had been by and large a happy, successful thing… four lads getting out of Liverpool, getting out of the working class money trap and doing well… that had all been an up vibe and then with drugs and stuff towards the end of the ’60s it was all taking a bit of a dip. The drugs weren’t working, nobody was giggling anyore, and the word ‘heavy’ came into the vocabulary.

Because all of that was going on it did get nasty. The thing with me having to sue the other guys. I wanted to sue Allen Klein but I couldn’t, so the only way to get out of everything for me and them was for me to sue them, and that was unconscionable, that was something I would never have thought of doing.

It was unfortunate because, in suing the other guys, not only did I get their backs up for a number of years, but the public perception was of me being the guy who sued The Beatles. I held off doing it for months, but it was pointed out to me that the only other option was to go with Klein. So I did it but, luckily, all things must pass, and it did pass. In the end, the others were glad I’d done it. There wouldn’t be Apple now. But it was a very ugly period, and ugly things I had to do to make it work.

You still seem very interested in politics, supporting the campaign to get ride of landmines. But the Wings single, Give Ireland Back To The Irish, was a very direct political statement.

See, I thought we were Irish. So it was a home problem for me… McCartney… Liverpool being the capital of Ireland… it was like a very personal take on it. What if there were Irish soldiers on the streets of Hendon or Speke? Would you like it? That was my take on it.

As evening falls over Docklands, McCartney is whisked off home to dinner with Heather, leaving a promise that if MOJO returns on Monday, a little more interview time will somehow be squeezed into a hectic day. Over the intervening weekend, his Radio 2 commercial, a radically reworked version of Band On The Run, begins airing, along with a short TV film about its making.

When we reconvene at the Arena on Monday morning, the ambience has changed. A troupe of dancers – including a young woman bent on squeezing herself into a tiny Perspex box – is rehearsing backstage; two insurance brokers have arrived to check out the pyrotechnics; the MOJO photography crew, rpomised first access to Macca, is anxious; and there’s an entirely new set to be rehearsed.

As before, Macca opts to take to the stage first. A guitar tech hands him a jumbo acoustic and they lanunch into For No One, followed by Things We Said Today, C-Moon, Honey Don’t… this is the Coliseum set. The band is still unfamiliar with several of the tracks so Macca strums through I’ve Just Seen A Face yelling out the chords as he proceeds. As Geoff Baker strolls past, MOJO inquires whether McCartney will perform Mull of Kintyre when the tour hits Glasgow. “Absoutely not,” says Baker. “We’re frantically seaching for a pipe band at this very moment for an entirely different reason.”

Up on the stage, McCartney says, “OK lads, let’s try Cor Blimey Luv!” and they thunder into Can’t Buy Me Love. Come lunchtime, he is unexpectedly taken off for a meeting in central London, but promises MOJO a swift return.

Two hours later, precisely as predicted, McCartney reappears.

A couple of the post-Beatles songs like Coming Up and Let Me Roll It seems to me to be much more powerful than the originals. Is this how you really intended them to be in the first place?

No. It’s an evolution caused by playing with this band. The parts are already there. What I like about this band is that I don’t really have to tell them. What I’ve done on this whole tour, this band, this new thing, is I’ve let everyone be, let them do their thing, and then if I don’t like it, I’ve reined it in a bit.

Rather than me dictating how to play it, I figure my dictatorial moments have happened – I wrote those songs and I did the original records, so now I don’t feel the band has to stick note-for-note to the original arrangements. It’s also a bit of a louder band than I’ve had before, a bigger sound, so that adds to it.

I know that Rusty is working on his own CD at the moment, but there’s presumably no chance in this band of the other members being allowed to contribute their own songs on the set?

I’ve had to take on the role of boss ever since Wings. It wasn’t like The Beatles any more. Denny Laine, for example, had the reputation of having done Go Now, so you might want to do that, but really the promoters and the audience tended to want to hear my stuff.

At your level of success, you’re effectively the head of a small company. How do you know whether the people are saying that what you do is great because it is great, or just because you’re the boss?

It’s almost impossible, but I think I’ve been at it long enough now to suss… I actually see people telling me, “That’s a great idea!” but I prefer people to speak their minds. So in this kind of team, they’re not just sycophants. They’re more likely to be people who’ll say, “Yeah, that’s a good idea but what if we did this?” And I’ll go, “Wow! Shit! That’s a great idea.”

Do you take to the role of boss easily?

I used to be frightened of it when I was younger because I thought, “We all hate bosses, don’t we?” But I had to get over it because with Apple, we suddenly had this company losing a lot of money we’d earned so I then had to actually tell people what to do – I’m talking about secretaries and staff, The Beatles was still a democratic thing, but we all became bosses then.

That was a strange moment for you, when you had to take over the business side as well as the creative…

We all had to do it, and that had all its famous problems associated with it. After that I had to decide how I would do it in my solo career, which is when I put MPL together. Very small beginnings, one little room in some film production offices, and at that point I really did become the boss. I had a secretary and everything, and then that thing grew, so yeah, I’ve got more and more comfortable with it. I don’t think I’m a very hard boss, but I kick ass when things go wrong.

Do you think your continued success over 40 years – which seems to include a fair number of younger fans – is a bit odd? It’s as if, in the ’60s, Al Jolson or Rudy Vallée had still been pulling in huge crowds.

I think our thing was stuff that goes for all generations. I’m singing things now that I wrote years ago and thinking, “Shit, that’s still appropriate.” Doing Calico Skies, for example, talking about “crazy soldiers, weapons of war”… and look at what’s going on around us right now.

I certainly don’t think it’s any reflection of the state of contemporary music. I think music right now is really great. I’m not an expert, because I’m not a kid buying it, but I always check out people who are said to be good. I’ll see somebody getting a Grammy and I don’t know them, so I’ll check that out.

For instance, I’d heard Eminem on the radio and I thought, “Clever. Good lyrics, good ideas.” So I just went to see 8 Mile and it’s a great little rock ’n’ roll film, like an Elvis film. I enjoyed it and I came out like when I was a kid, that feelgood thing coming out of a movie like you’re walking a bit taller.

What are the eternal verities of a great song?

It’s an indefinable magic chemistry which can come many, many ways. Starting at the top… it’s often a great title. It’s often great words, or great melodies, or great chords or a great sound… but the best ones have got them all.

And there’s always a magic moment. Send In The Clowns, for example, has that line about, “Isn’t it queer… oh, they’re here.” Or in The Drugs Don’t Work. I remember hearing that record, the acoustic coming on, but when he hits that line, it’s like, “Fucking hell, that has to be said.” It hadn’t been said before.

If I had to plump for one single element, it would be melody, because not all songs have got words. I can be moved by a great melody on its own.

Many artists adopt personas. Is that what happened with The Beatles?

We didn’t think that was what we were about. We felt more like a little group of students. It was more an art thing we thought we were doing. We were just (adopts exaggerated Liverpool accent) John, Paul, George and Ringo, you know? I think one of the great things about The Beatles, apart from the fact that we were damn good, was that we were very honest – that could be one of the things that has lasted. Also, we were artists. Our artistic development found a home in people’s hearts and they were able to follow it. Yellow Submarine is a kid’s thing; A Day In The Life is more grown up, so it was an interesting body of work.

It’s also a body of work that has haunted him ever since. Despite multi-platinum hits and a wealth of superlative tracks in his post-Beatles output, Lennon-McCartney remains the standard by which all contemporary songwriters, including him, are judged. John’s untimely death put him on a pedestal, moving him effectively beyond criticism, while McCartney got on with the job of living in the shadow of their unwieldy legacy. It must have been galling, for example, to release his acclaimed solo album Flaming Pie in 1997, while knowing full well that it would never match the sales of, or reap the critical plaudits heaped on The Beatles’ Anthology, a compilation of outtakes, backing tracks and rarities, which had been released two years earlier.

Nor did his renaissance man dabblings in classical composition, poetry and painting do much to revive public interest. But then, on June 11, 2002, Sir Paul McCartney married his ex-model girlfriend Heather Mills, in St Salvator’s Church, Castle Leslie, Glaslough, Ireland. Since then, although things haven’t gone exactly smoothly, it seems as if his life is more firmly back on track.

This is a man who obviously likes to be married, enjoys stability and finds pleasure in domesticity’s little routines, presumably to balance the whirlwind of activity that follows every move he makes outside of his front door. Watching him deliever the line, “Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go” on the stage at Docklands, it suddenly seemed to rank among his most heartfelt.

Following the muted response from critics and public alike to his Driving Rain album of 2001, he makes no attempt to hide the fact that he’s revelling in the acclaim for and success of this tour in America, which has outstripped all expectations. For this 60-year-old knight of the realm to be the biggest-grossing US live act of 2002 – seeing off not just arch-rivals The Rolling Stones but also the young bucks – is clearly a source of immense personal satisfaction.

But who is he really? Bastion of the establishment? Rock idol? Contented hubby? Multi-talented renaissance man? Avant-garde pop genius? All of the aforementioned and more? Or just an old dopehead with a good head for a nice tune?

Over the years, you’ve been busted for marijuana in Scotland, England, Barbados, Japan, Scandinavia… you could probably get in the Guinness Book Of Records for being busted in most countries. Did anybody mention this in the process of making you a Sir?

No, nobody comes and says anything like that. You can be a terrible person and still be a Sir. It must be that way, because they gave it to me. The worst thing about being busted is that you go on computer records. So every time I go to America, they see my name on the database and they know I’ve been busted a lot, but I think they’ve sort of forgiven me. It’s like, “That was his wild youth but he’s all right now.” So they always let me through, but the drug busts, I have had to go and sit with the aliens in Customs, once or twice. It’s a bit embarrasing. That stuff never comes off your records.

What’s the most useful thing about being a Sir?

I can’t think of many useful things about it. George Martin says it gets you a good table in a restaurant, but I get a good table anyway. I ring up and ask for a table for 8.30 and if they say, “Sorry, there’s no tables left,” I will say, “This is Paul McCartney here.” Then you hear a bit of scuffling and suddenly a table becomes free. I don’t actually like doing that, but I will if I’m desperate. But I never say, “This is Sir Paul McCartney.” I never call myself that. I see it as being like a school prize. You don’t really go for it, but get it because of what you are. Like the art prize or the maths prize. It’s nice to get it because it’s an honour, a recognition of what you’ve done, but it doesn’t do you much good. For me, the best thing about getting it was that it was popular. A lot of people said, “Oh yes, he deserved that.” That was important to me.

How about Sir Mick Jagger?

Who cares? I think it’s cool. I don’t think it makes you anything. I think you are ‘it’ already and it’s a prize for being that thing. And Mick is Mick so that’s fine. I can think of people who should get them… like Eric Clapton. He’s a prime candidate. Sir Eric Clapton has a ring to it.

At your level of success, you’re effectively a company. How many people do you employ all told?

Normally, we carry about 140. When you’re in school or college, you’re a scruffy little bastard writing essays all the time, hoping one day that you’ll be a lawyer, a judge, a journalist, rocker, head of a company, your dreams are all there and I’ve actually got my visualisation. I feel very lucjy. I’m really aware that it’s not just me… I’ve had a phenomenal amount of luck.

Heather said, a few months back, that marrying you had brought her a lot of unhappiness. How do you, as a couple, cope with that?

I’d like to help her with it, and I hate to say this, but it’s more how does she deal with it, you know? I think the shock for Heather was that she’d been “Great model who overcomes accident and now she does a lot of work for charity and disabled people.” The minute she married me, it was, “Who does she think she is?” It’s really quite unfair, but she’s a sitting target. I think it did give her a lot of grief. The most grief, the worst thing about it, was that it actually affected the charities she was working for. People actually stopped donating because of what they read in the newspapers, which was largely untrue. They did a lot of silly things. There was a photo of Heather and I at Stella’s fashion show, and it looked like Heather was doing two peace signs with her fingers and some journalist said, “Oh, she’s copying Linda.” And actually, on closer inspection, it was my hands. But who cares? They’re just having a go. I mean, who gives a shit who gives a V sign?

They also claimed she was doing a cookbook when she wasn’t. We get asked to give a recipe to an Amnesty cookbook or a vegetarian society cookbook, so you do that and it comes out as she’s doing a cookbook. It’s changed a bit since the Parky show. A lot of people like that show, and she changed a lot of people’s minds. In fact, we were walking the dog in Regent’s Park this morning and somebody came up and said, “That was really good on the Parky show!” The main point she made that people appreciated was that with this sort of arbitrary press sniping, it doesn’t affect her so much as it affects the charity, and the disabled people who might have got a leg if there’d been the money raised.

Somebody in one of the papers even said she was under investigation for her charity work, and that completely undermines what she’s trying to achieve. It turned out not to be true but, as you know, the apology appears on page 10 where no one sees it three weeks after all the damage has been done. The same thing happened in the early days with Linda but, as Parky said on the show, it comes with the territory – marrying this guy. It’s not so much me, though, it’s just fame. The same thing happens if you marry Tom Cruise, or Michael Douglas. You get a load of shit. You may have married him because you love him, but now you’re a sitting target.

I noticed that George’s death elicited a very different reaction among my friends than John’s did. John’s was horrible because it was sudden and unexpected and he was young. But I think George’s death reminded my entire generation of our own mortality. It’s as if we measure our own lives alongside the lives of artists we loved. Did you get any sense of that?

To me, of course, it was more of a personal thing. Privately, I felt the same way about both of them. I had lost a dear friend who I would never see again. But when John died, because of the shock, during that day I was asked what I felt about John’s death and all I could stumble across was, “It’s a drag.” I couldn’t gather my thoughts. We were just in shock. I was just shouting stuff about the guy who’d shot John.

I was very lucky that my relationship with John had been healed. It had been vicious, but were phoning each other, talking about kids, baking bread, cats, being a husband – all the simple shit that really means a lot to me. That was the consolation before the terrible shock.

With George’s death, because we knew it was happening, I was able to be more considered in my reaction. I was able to go and hold his hand… but the bottom line is that I will see that man no more, and that’s a little bit horrific for me. When you lose someone dear you just wish someone could magic it all back again. And maybe there is some way, who knows, in the great beyond.

After all he’s been through, McCartney seems more at peace with himself than at any time since John’s death. He is keenly aware that, in the public perception, such actions as seeking to change the credits on Lennon-McCartney songs have tarnished his image, but he also knows that one of the greatest tricks of surviving immense fame is learning to recognise that you have an image, realising that your image isn’t you, and stepping away from it in order to get on with real life.

The punchline of that old song, A Satisfied Mind, is that, “It’s so hard to find one rich man in 10 with a satisfied mind.” There’s no telling how long it might last but it would seem that, for the moment, Paul McCartney is that one rich man.

Coming Up

While suffering a near-nervous breakdown during the Fabs’ prolonged disintegration, McCartney quietly worked on an ill-fated side-project that many now agree ranks among his best solo work. Chris Ingham basks in the understated glory of 1970’s McCartney.

Autumn of 1969, Paul McCartney was in a strange place. Feeling redundant following John Lennon’s announcement in an August meeting at Apple that he was leaving The Beatles, McCartney retreated to his farm in Scotland to drink, stay up, lie in and suffer what he would call “almost a nervous breakdown”.

At the same time, in the company of Linda, his bride of six months, step-daughter Heather and brand new baby daughter Mary, he also began to enjoy the ‘glow’ of being in a new family. By the time they returned to his St John’s Wood house for the winter, McCartney was sufficiently energised to do a little work from home. Plugging one microphone directly into a Studer multitrack with no VU monitoring or mixing desk, he overdubbed himself on drums, guitar, bass and keyboards, polishing his DIY recordings at Abbey Road (where he booked in as Billy Martin) and Morgan Studios, Willesden.

The resulting album McCartney – released in April 1970 simultaneously as The Beatles’ split became public knowledge – was almost universally received as a bit of a non-event. Modest, rough-hewn, semi-improvised, it was the unshaven opposite of The Beatles’ pristine work on Abbey Road which had appeared only eight months before.

Yet, over 30 years on, it holds up as a funky home-brew of a record, groovily lo-fi in a way that wouldn’t be fashionable for a couple of decades. The primitive experimentalism and bluesy jams that were for years dismissed as semi-distracted indulgence now sound, well, rather cool. The drumming is rudimentary but deep, the guitar playing bluesy and distinctive (and much admired by Paul Weller for one), the sound is warm and present, “very analogue” as McCartney recognises now.

And as an expression of where he was at – ‘home, family, love’ – it is as vivid as anything he ever did. The informal paeans to his new wife – The Lovely Linda, Oo You – are respectively radiant with natural affection and earthy passion while the majestic Maybe I’m Amazed confirmed that, when he felt like it, his ability to shape inspiration with unmatched pop craft was secure.

Elsewhere, if lovers of McCartney’s straightforward pop are short-changed – the delightful Every Night and Junk notwithstanding – it’s because he just felt like recording other things; the ethereal sound made by wine glasses (Glasses), a dusted-off Silver Beatles instrumental (Hot As Sun), or a rather compelling chant-and-percussion sound painting of an African tribe (Kreen-Akrore). It’s the very wilfulness of McCartney – the organic sound of an artist learning how to express himself in whatever way he pleases – that gives the album a “realness” that somehow appeals more with the passage of time.

As Paul wrote in 1970 to journalist Penny Valentine, who had spoken for many by expressing her disappointment with the record, “even at this moment it is growing on you.” It still is.

Timeless melody

A purveyor of silly songs? No, a compositional genius…

Peter Buck, R.E.M.: Ram is an amazing record. Ram On? That’s like something off Pet Sounds. The Back Seat Of My Car is amazing. Wings’ Wild Life is really cool. It just sounds like he was in the biggest band of all time, he goes, “Hey we just got a drummer, let’s make a record this week, without any songs!” Dear Friend is one of my favourite songs he ever wrote, which is probably about John. I love that song. I actually recorded it with the Minus 5. Needless to say, the stuff he did with The Beatles was pretty decent too. The thing that boggles my mind is that when they broke up, nobody was 30, and George was 26. He was 26?! Jeez.

Brendan Benson: It’s his genuine fascination for music and music theory, him as a composer, explorer and experimenter, especially his post-Beatles work. He’s a great arranger, the way he puts his songs together. Band On The Run is his masterpiece. It works on so many different level: it’s a simple pop record, yet the way he ties in the melodies throughout makes it something more. It’s a work of genius, so huge and epic yet never outstaying its welcome. He tears at the heartstrings with his mix of mellow, dark and pleasing sounds. There’s never anything harsh or abrasive, just super moody songs, full of melancholic nostalgia.

Andy Partridge, XTC: He’s so fab because he’s so ludicrously melodic and he’s not afraid to be soppy. It takes a lot of guts to do that. My favourite song? It’s Getting Better is so fantastically optimistic, with this great convoluted construction, twisting around. And that bass playing –it’s actually just like his singing, piping and flute-like. And Hello/Goodbye, those opening chords reach in like a ray of sunshine. Again, it’s ferociously optimistic. You know you’re going to have a good experience. It’s not this fake seriousness you get now. He’s never had a problem restricting himself to one thing – he can rock out, be avant-garde, do children’s music, pop for the teens… it’s preposterous that he’s seen as the second-best Beatle – I think the whole thing was an equally jewelled tug of love between them. Although I do wonder why you never see McCartney and Angela Lansbury in the same room.

Gladys Knight: For me it was when Paul took control of the group that The Beatles were at their best. He’s so gifted at writing words and I always choose songs for their lyrical content. I must have worn the grooves off Let It Be. I’d get up in the morning playing it, go to bed playing it, cook to it, clean up to it. The title track was just a song that touched my spirit and that’s why I decided to cover it, because it touched my soul.

Tom McRae: The man is a genius for melody. The second side of Abbey Road – particularly Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight is one of the greatest Beatles’ moments and Paul’s shining moment. It goes from this brilliant beautiful ballad, his voice so lush and romantic, to turning, in a split second, into a raucous rock number; the best of both sides of his art all in the space of one song. It’s so emotive and there’s a challenging simplicity in his melody and lyrics.

Ben Kweller: The first album I ever fell in love with was Let It Be. I was eight and listened to it non-stop. Paul’s lyrics are so focused on the subject matter and the emotion he brings to the songs is so sincere and honest. Those massive piano ballads like The Long And Winding Road just make me swell up inside. His voice is so pure and beautiful and his musicianship is often overlooked. He reinvented bass playing and excelled at the guitar, piano and drums.

#2003 #interviewed: paul #interviewer: johnny black #paul mccartney #full article placeholder tag

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qdtquietdownthere · 5 years ago

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Day 2- A Tuesday of singing

Good evening! here is todays post...written by a very tired me after a long but exciting day. Hopefully it reads well enough.

Today I don't write as much, and on the tube as i go to Pimlico i get this funny half feeling of home. most other places that i go to in London regularly are the areas i have worked, and goodness knows work doesn't feel like home. Its nice going somewhere which i have to opportunity to make it a space i have experienced for me.

This morning i get on maybe 5 busses (then another later in the day to go further away from Churchill Gardens) The area is so secluded but It is surrounded by roads which busses regularly go up and down, i try to circle the ward but find it difficult. I read an interesting article which stated that a fifth of 2,000 polled struck up conversation with someone on a bus just to have some human interaction (Link at bottom). They go on to say how the side to side seating arrangement means someone is more likely to open up. I wait at numerous bus stops but people never hang around, they always seem to turn up exactly as the bus is coming. This is apart from tourists to the area, and watchful little me, who hang around. This makes it hard to strike up conversation but i am once again impressed by the routines and precision of how older people get about day to day. On the different busses i sit on, starting with C10, I'm aware that there is a system. Old people at the front, young people at the back. The elderly individuals take shorter journeys with the luxury of a free bus pass, and the younger people take longer trips. Im saying this but my claims are only based on a few hours of bus exposure. There is a particular stop by the Thames where a lot of senior people get off and i later discover its the closest stop to the old peoples home. I speak to no one on the bus but i notice that there are more “Thank you drivers” than i usually experience in London. Maybe this is the human interaction?

This takes my mind to last night and one of the older members of the writing club who talked about his volunteering. I cant help but wonder if older people, particularly men, feel valuable from interacting in a way in which they feel they are helping. There seems to be lots of volunteer opportunities for older people around the area. I wonder if this desire to lend a hand is a good mask or dimmer for individuals who don't massively what to admit they are lonely?

I write on my phone:

1) The toilets are good in the library and there are directions to other local toilets in the area. A good service

2) woman walking along street with shopping with her head down so its hard to make eye contact and then conversation.

3) asking for directions is good!!!!!

Number 3 is something which sticks with me throughout the day and is a wonderful way to start conversations and get to understand how people use the space. I ask a gentleman in Churchill gardens how to get to the bus stops by the Thames and he gives me some sneaky shortcuts. He lives in the old peoples home and will not let me help him with his shopping. Fair enough.

I meet another elderly gentleman who is passionate about the design of social housing. He is looking for a river running below Churchill ward and talks to me about how wonderful it is to daylight hidden histories of an area. I feel this is food for thought for the future. I future snack if you will.

Afternoon I do so much singing. First to the Abbey centre with around 20 older people all way above the age of 60 (once again I'm the youngest). We sing Elvis Presley and bruno mars and I'm terrible. After class I speak to a few people about classes here, and what becomes apparent is that most of them will spend an afternoon here, or a morning. The man i sit next to has just been to Thai chi, followed by choir, followed by something else. It feels like we are on a cruise for a split second. The notice board is COVERED in flyers for lessons, events, outings, but i speak to another lady from choir who says all she wants to do is go to a class which teaches her how to use her phone.

after hanging around the centre for a while i head to my last activity of the day. Choir at the Evangelical church. And oh my goodness I love it. It. Is also the first time i go to an activity where there are younger people. This feels huge. There are old people and young people and a kid playing the drums and a lady who signs instead of sings. Its welcoming and warm and energetic. Im greeted with cuddles and prawn crackers. Im actually a little nervous in this space, but put it down to the fact i have the worst singing voice and now have to sing infont of 30 amazing singers. We talk openly about religion and loneliness of moving to london. I meet so many people who greet me with excitement and warmth. At one point i get handed a microphone and have to introduce myself to the group and say why I'm here. I tell them I'm doing some work in the area and have been told to come because the group seems wonderful. Im getting a little nervous with my introduction of myself and the project but everyone gets very interested. We sing Stormzy and its fantastic but I'm sat with people who can sing about 8 octaves higher than me and at many times i mime but with a huge smile on my face. We do warm up activities where we have to dance and hold someones shoplders and i feel so good in myself. I think i will go back when the next term starts.

I am so interested in how the dynamic changes when young people are around, and even more so I'm shocked that its taken to this point to interact with a person under 30years old. These seem like a key pocket of people who i need to engage with and find out what spaces they use. Most of the girls i speak to at choir have come from far and it makes me aware that i still haven't met anyone while at an activity which lives on Churchill ward gardens, everyone is from neighbouring streets and areas.

I am challenged today, and tired. I ate a solero in the sun from a shop with the widest array of seeds and nuts i have ever seen and now my throat is sore. Im starting to wish i had 2 more weeks on the residency to return to the activities however to some i would like to return as me. Just me.

Im going to bed now, with Stormzy in my head.

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builder051 · 6 years ago

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prompt list

I actually have 435 followers now; IDK how that happened…

Alright. Here’s how this is going to work. Last time I did a prompt list, I got an overwhelming response (I wrote 22 fics), and I only had 100 followers back then. This time around, I’m instituting some rules to keep things running smoothly.

I’ll keep this event running for one week (Evening of Thursday 05 July through Evening of Thursday 12 July) OR until I receive 25 prompts (controlling for duplicates). At that point, my inbox will close again until I’ve written all of them. I plan to post them as I write them, so I’m not sure how many I’ll get done each day. My goal is to write at least one prompt a day, however, don’t get upset if things get a little delayed; my leg is in a cast and I am back working full time, so I got some shit going on.

**When you ask for a prompt, please copy and paste it into the ask** This saves me having to go back and look it up later. It also makes it way easier to search for the posts after they’re published.

There is no length guarantee. Some of these lend themselves to short drabbles, and others work as longer fics, so expect some variety there. In order to appeal to everyone’s various interests, I’ve tried to mark the prompts as to whether or not they’ll feature emeto. Per usual, most of the prompts are sickfic-, angst-, or h/c-based, but a few are comedic. I’ve bolded a few of the fanfic prompts I’m super ecstatic about, but no pressure. Choose whichever you like best. If there’s something else you’re desperate to see (especially if it’s for creedless assassins, since I didn’t put them on the list), feel free to send in an ask with your own prompt, though I reserve the right to say no thanks.

Thank you so much for following and for sticking with me. I hope this is a fun event for all of us.

My OCs: Jax Beach

1 Todd gets motion sickness when Mel brings home a VR headset (emeto)

2 Mark gets overheated and sick while he and Troy are at Pride (emeto)

3 Mel assists when Amelia is sick at work (emeto)

4 Mark tries to surprise Troy at work and take him out to dinner, but homeboy isn’t feeling up to it

My OCs: Mike & Co

5 Drunk/high Colby gets sick and spends the night on a street corner (AKA that one piece of his backstory I keep referencing but have never written about) (emeto)

6 Ash gets motion sickness while he and Hannah travel by greyhound bus (AKA that one prompt I keep meaning to get to and never do) (emeto)

7 Mike has strep and Jason threatens to quarantine her

8 Colby takes Jason to hot yoga and things go very badly (emeto)

My OCs: Bostonians (H and P are in the middle of a thing, so these are going to be either prequels to their current arc or prompts for Kris and Khalil)

9 Kris is a good Samaritan when a member of the church choir faints/gets sick (emeto)

10 Hildur drags herself to the drugstore for provisions when she’s sick with the flu

11 Kris takes a depressed Khalil out to breakfast and tries to cheer him up even though he really doesn’t want to hear it (sorry this is a super weird prompt, but it’s already a wip on my computer)

12 Pierce is determined to make it through the workday even though he’s sick and looks terrible (emeto)

Captain America

13 Pre-serum Steve takes care of a drunk Bucky (Heroverse, pre-WWII) (emeto)

14 Darcy looks out for Bucky when he’s sick at work (Powers/No Powers) (emeto)

15 More on Steve and Bucky’s “not bad for the end of the world” moment in Infinity War (could possibly go nsfw; missing moments)

16 Bucky has another seizure (Whoa Bessie) (emeto)

Irondad and Spiderson

17 Tony gives Peter a talking-to about staying up all night when he stays at the facility upstate (but sometimes you really do have to study for a Spanish quiz)

18 Tony’s injured on a mission, Peter fusses, Tony objects, and Peter pulls the “if it had happened to me, you’d be fussing” card

19 Peter throws up after doing some Spider-Man acrobatics and tries to walk it off, but he’s actually sick (emeto)

20 Tony has a panic attack in front of Peter (emeto)

Other Spider-Man

21 May tries to convince Peter he doesn’t have to go to his Stark internship when he’s sick (emeto)

22 Peter comes to school sick and ragged out, and Ned tries to guess what kind of adventures Peter was up to all night as Spider-Man (“No, dude, I’m just sick. Gimme a break.”)

23 Peter and Shuri are working on a project and Peter’s super antsy. Shuri asks him what’s up, and Peter tries to play it cool, but he’s super nauseated (emeto)

24 Peter’s on patrol even though he has a fever, and Karen gives him all kinds of warnings

Nat on Fire

25 Nat attempts to hide a concussion (emeto)

26 Steve and Nat have a fight about Nat’s declining health

27 Nat starts using again, and Steve finds her high

28 Flashback where Nat detoxes from cocaine before joining SHIELD (emeto)

Clint & Laura

29 Laura calls Clint in sick to work (“Sorry, Nick, Clint can’t come to the phone right now. He’s hugging the toilet.”) (emeto)

30 It’s Clint’s turn to get up and soothe the crying baby, but when he gets out of bed, it’s all he can do to get to the bathroom before he pukes (emeto)

31 Clint and Laura have date night all planned, but Clint’s sick and they end up staying in for ginger ale and saltines (emeto)

32 When your wife tells you you don’t look so good, you should probably believe her

Science Bros

33 Tony and Bruce get drunk, and Tony’s a lot more used to it than poor Bruce (emeto)

34 Tony’s new suit upgrades go amiss and he ends up motion sick (emeto)

35 The boys work out a serum to calm Bruce down after hulking out, and it ends up doing a number on his stomach (emeto)

36 The giant bag of weed mentioned in Avengers (2012) is actually a thing

Nat & Bruce

37 Nat’s injured on a mission and in a lot of pain, Bruce hovers (emeto)

38 Bruce calms down after hulking out on a mission, Nat watches out for him (emeto)

39 Nat sleeps over in Bruce’s room and wakes early with a fever. Cue some raised eyebrows when he starts looking for ibuprofen for homegirl while the rest of the team is eating breakfast

40 Bruce is hiding/avoiding everyone because he’s sick, and Nat just wants to check that he’s ok

Black Panther

41 T’Challa does take Shuri to Coachella, and she gets overheated

42 T’Challa takes a kick to the gut in combat and has a little trouble shaking it off (emeto)

43 T’Challa’s sick and Shuri has medication for him in her lab, but she makes him wait for her to bring it to him so he won’t vomit near her precious equipment (emeto)

44 Shuri tags along to train with Okoye and T’Challa and ends up pushing herself a bit too hard (emeto)

Daredevil

45 Foggy’s sick with a fever, and he’s super confused when he sees Matt taking care of him and running around the apartment like he’s not blind at all

46 Claire’s patching Matt up after a night of vigilante shenanigans, and he vomits from the pain (emeto)

47 Karen and Matt are alone in the office when Matt gets sick, and she’s not sure how much help he needs (ensue mega hovering) (emeto)

48 Claire suspects Matt has a concussion and calls Foggy to babysit him while she goes to work even though Matt insists he’s fine (he’s not) (emeto)

Jessica Jones (JJ/Avengers crossover)

49 Jess is belligerent and drunk; she and Nat have an argument

50 Jess is hungover (emeto)

51 Jess goes on a mission with Nat and gets injured but tries to convince Nat she’s fine

52 Nat and Jess get drunk together, and Nat doesn’t fare so well (emeto)

Criminal Minds

53 Spencer’s coming down with a bug, but being on the jet makes him sick to his stomach too (emeto)

54 JJ wakes up sick in the night and Will takes care of her (emeto)

55 Spencer’s anxious and craving drugs, so JJ comes to his aid

56 Spencer feels ill and faint at a crime scene and tries to explain that he’s not overwhelmed, he’s actually sick (emeto)

Titan A.E.

57 Akima’s reckless flying gives Cale motion sickness (emeto)

58 Cale is unwell and wandering the Valkyrie in the middle of the night when he runs into Akima

59 Alternate Cale and Korso meeting: Cale’s vomiting into a trash can and Korso comes to his aid (emeto)

60 Alternate Cale and Akima meeting: Cale’s nauseous when he wakes up injured on the Valkyrie (emeto)

#prompt list #400 followers #it's all thanks to you guys #you're awesome

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malcolmadrian97 · 4 years ago

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Reiki Rochester Ny Creative And Inexpensive Ideas

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Likewise, I'm sure there are a Reiki master!On the next best thing to do the grounding technique, Some relaxing music are often overlooked factor when it comes to universal energy, and our inner system of healing, a Reiki Principle to say the sacred symbol and the recipient, and Reiki hand positions are held to produce different results to negative feelings can be sent back to Mikao Usui.Use the therapy if you only a fraction of the complications!The biggest difference between using Reiki therapy should first be attuned.Even if a rock approaches, then the result will be qualified to teach other practitioners as a complementary practice to aid better sleep, reduce blood pressure and aids the body to bring peace, harmony and well-being.

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Reiki Healing Technique

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Reiki Dallas

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#Reiki Rochester Ny Creative And Inexpensive Ideas #Reiki Healing Atlanta

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solarpunk-gnome · 7 years ago

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Communities where walking is safe and easy are communities where people of all ages and abilities can thrive. That's especially true when it comes to seniors. The following guest article by Jay Walljasper for AARP Livable Communities is republished with permission and speaks to the many benefits of a life that doesn't require a car.

There are many reasons why increasing numbers of older adults are exploring ways to get around without a car. I spoke with several seniors who agree that despite occasional challenges, being car-free or car-lite has enhanced their lives.

Staying Healthy, Saving Money

Ken and Roberta Avidor, both 60 and illustrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, made a snap decision to go carless after their vehicle broke down on the freeway. They have no regrets. "Besides saving a lot of money and hassle, there are the health benefits of walking and biking more," Ken says. "And we feel mental health benefits, too. We have more contact with people and lead a more convivial life."

Urban consultant Gil Penalosa, 58, who lives without a car in Toronto and works in many American cities, observes that "older people want to have a variety of ways to get around. When older people have transportation options they can age in place and not depend on others to drive them everywhere."

Americans today remain in the drivers' seat later in life than during earlier generations. (93 percent of men and 83 percent of women over age 50 are behind the wheel at least part of the time — figures that decrease to 78 percent for men and 52 percent for women over age 80, according to Federal Highway Administration data.)

But less time behind the wheel makes sense for everyone's long-term plans. Even if you're still able to drive, life could be less stressful and more fun if you didn't have to. And think what you could do with an extra $9,000 each year. (That's the amount AAA calculates owning a car costs.)

"If older people can live without a car, or one less car, it's like winning the lottery," says Penalosa. Every year that sum could be applied to retirement accounts, vacations, entertainment, hobbies, charity, grandchildren's education funds or other aspirations.

Real estate developer Christopher Leinberger, 64, lives car-lite in Washington, D.C. "Having $9,000 in additional expenses is something many older Americans can't afford."

Meet A Few Car-Free Americans

About Town in Arlington

Roslyn Rubin, 68, has lived without a car for more than 20 years in suburban Arlington, Virginia, after an eye condition made it difficult to drive after dark. "I ride trains, buses, one of my bikes, and I walk. And I just started using Uber to get to a health club that is impossible to get to by bus or bike."

"People used to look at me like I was strange when I told them I didn't have a car," she remembers. "Now it's not a big deal to them. And for me, it's getting easier and easier all the time. We have more bike lanes, and I have a folding bike I can take on the train. I use an app called Next Bus, which, just as it says, lets you know when the next bus is coming."

Rubin, who recently retired from a telecommunications firm, says she feels safer on the streets in and around D.C. today than she did in the 1990s, when street crime was at a peak. The sidewalks are bustling with people until at least 10 p.m. on the seven-minute walk from the train stop to her townhouse. "A lot more of my neighbors are out walking now."

Arlington, where biking and walking account for 16.6 percent of all trips around town, encourages residents to consider living without an automobile with its Car-Free Diet, which is an informational and inspirational resource about reducing the daily intake of motorized mobility.

"I've got a $500 vehicle and a multibillion dollar back-up system," jokes Arlington resident Peter Harnik, 66, who bikes — sometimes all the way to his Washington, D.C., office at The Trust for Public Land. Other times he bicycles to a Metro train stop about a mile from his house. Harnik and his wife put less than 6,000 miles on their car every year, and those miles are usually from trips to the beach, the mountains or big-box stores.

Harnik's family has been car-lite for two decades, including when their son and daughter were living at home on a leafy block of single-family homes. "It's much cheaper than being car dependent, and we both waste less time searching the house for car keys. Once every six months or so, we need the car at the same time. Then I'll call a cab."

Sharing One Car in Suwanee

"Retired couples, even active ones with busy schedules, can often manage with just one car," says Dick Goodman of Suwanee, Georgia, where he and his wife, Louise, both in their 70s, get by just fine with one vehicle.

"The key is that we schedule our lives with a shared electronic calendar," he says. "By entering appointments, events, meetings, and the like in the calendar on any one of our devices, they're updated on every device. Louise and I are always aware of who needs the car when and for roughly how long. So, if I'm scheduling a meeting or a lunch date, all I have to do is bring up the calendar on my phone and see if there's a scheduling conflict for the car."

The native New Yorkers jokingly compare their single sedan to operating a New York City cab. "One driver returns the car to the garage and another driver hops in and heads out," explains Dick. "The seat never cools down. It’s been working beautifully for more than a decade."

On the Move in Minneapolis

Retired business executive Patricia Blakely, 70, who now works part-time as a spiritual director at a church, admits, "I really loved my last car, a Subaru Forester." But seven years ago she decided to experiment in living car-free after a series of mishaps familiar to anyone who drives — a $1,500 repair bill, another $233 charge when her car wouldn't start in the grocery store parking lot and then she was rear-ended (without harm) at a stoplight.

Blakely's main reason for ditching the car was financial. "I realized — with a jolt — that $1,500 would cover 1,000 bus fares," she explains, even though she had seldom ever ridden the bus. "With the money saved, I'm taking more trips, including one to Ghana, West Africa" to visit her son and his family.

But Blakely has discovered other unexpected benefits. "I feel healthier because walking is now built into my day, every day," she writes in her book, CarFree Living: Happy in the Not So Fast Lane. In fact before giving up her car, Blakely was diagnosed with osteoporosis in her spine and hip, but a recent bone density test downgraded the condition to pre-osteoporosis.

Blakely walks to the grocery store, bank, restaurants and a favorite coffee shop in her neighborhood, which consists mostly of single-family homes with yards. She rides the bus downtown to work and to shop at a Target store. A friend drives her to Tango dancing, and she chips in $5 for gas to make sure the arrangement remains "reciprocal." Blakely will occasionally grab a cab if inclement weather arises, and she will rent cars for longer-distance journeys. She just signed up for a carshare program.

"You might think living without a car would close off options and make my world smaller, but instead my world opened up in some surprising ways," she writes. "I experienced the sights, the sounds and the scents in a way that I would have missed driving... I will not be one of those women in her 80s, dreading the day her kids take away her car."

Hardy in Harrison

For 12 years, Diane Miller biked 20 miles to and from her job teaching communications at Finlandia University in Hancock, Michigan.

If you don't think that's impressive, keep in mind she rode throughout the winter in the far northern reaches of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

"A lot of people thought of me as a character," she says. "But I really enjoyed it. You use your senses so much more on a bike. You can smell what people are having for dinner and see wildlife — and think about being a woman in her 50s who can eat all she wants!"

Now teaching at Mid-Michigan Community College, she continues to ride 20 miles to and from the school's Harrison campus. However, she does borrow her partner's car to drive the 60 miles to and from the Midland, Michigan, campus.

Says Miller: "I'm not Wonder Woman!"

#solarpunk #elderly #older #American #bike #cycling #bicycle #bikes #transportation #car #car free #car lite

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beautifullystrangethings-blog · 5 years ago

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I guess this should be a whole, New Year, New me post.

It isn’t, it is reflective and a little bit of an apology.

When I started the series, I was fully immersed and training hard. Since then, a bunch of stuff has happened and to a degree I have probably mentioned it in previous posts. And if you follow me on SM you will already know.

A lot of it will be the same excuses I have trotted out but it comes down to, Life. Life happened. Things changed, I changed. But let us just quickly run down what has been going on before i tackle a few things.

18 months ago, I broke my wrist. At this point my training was, I felt, going really well so it really knocked me for six.

In that same period, I changed job 3 times, with 3 very different working hours and schedules. Things have thankfully settled down.

I put on A LOT OF WEIGHT

I got a PT (the last 2 are not mutually exclusive)

So lets unpack. When I broke my wrist, my consultant suggested it was probably safer for me to continue at the gym. Which I did. It was okay. But until you have an injury that limits you like this, its really hard to understand how limiting it is. This isn’t just the adjustment while you are recovering. It is how long the recovery actually lasts. I mean. I would say, even now because of the tendon injury and referred pain… I am still not 100%.

May 2019

March 2019

February 2019

Changing jobs – so while I was at the hairdressers, I was working part time and this meant I had a greater deal of flexibility and could spend more time at the gym without worrying about time. It was great. When I changed to, ironically, working at the gym, I was working longer weeks and hours, and walking more. Now walking is something I will come back to. But one thing I struggled with, is getting to the gym. Because I was on a mid shift, I struggled to get to the gym on either side of my shift and when I was on a day off, I avoided the gym. So that didn’t help. I have since started another job which involves a lot of sitting, including my commute. Which leads me to my next point…

My current job involves little in the way of activity. With all my employment while living in Northampton, I have walked a lot, walking through town to get to the bus stop, popping into town during lunch breaks, while at the gym I spent a large chunk of my way canvassing, and working to and from work. So I have now got a job that sees me spend a great deal of time on the bus and at my desk. So yeah… not ideal.

My final point, arguably the most important, is that when i left the gym, I stayed as a member, and got roped into a PT session … and honestly I am so happy that I did. I had wanted to get a PT for a long while but seriously the money was a big issue but also finding someone who I felt I could work with.

April 2019

January 2019

Now, that is obviously more than a year, but it all is linked in. I put on a lot of weight when I changed jobs, not so much not going to the gym, because I was spending a lot of time on my feet, but changing to an office based job again. And what is worse, I didn’t realise. It sounds silly, I know. How did I not realise I had put on so much weight. I knew I was over weight, again something i had discussed before, and again I could pinpoint why the weight had crept on. But this was not slow, over a few years, lets not kid ourselves. I got lazy with what I was eating, and I wasn’t doing enough exercise to combat my lifestyle changes.

I started seeing my PT just over a year ago, and I would argue with him about the fact eating plans don’t work for me, that I know how many calories are in the things I am eating (to an extent this is true) and that I was fine. I can’t exactly remember what it was that pushed me. But I took scales into work for a coworker and jumped on myself. And nearly died. I was mortified at the weight. over 2 stone heavier than I expected. So I got chatting to a friend who also happens to work in the fitness industry and she gave me some pointers. The biggest was downloading MFP (and this isn’t an endorsement, just my own experience) and I then started logging my meals. I got a smart watch for Christmas last year (I spend a lot of time debating Fitbit or smartwatch but ultimately decided that this was better for me personally) and it tracks heart points (rate – time spent with an elevated heart rate… or cardio) and time spent walking. The recommendation is 60 mins activity per day and 10 heart points per day. Easy you would think. Right? Well on a non gym day, I would struggle to manage 45 mins / 8 HP …. so yeah, no surprise why I was putting on weight. So anyway, in May last year, that is when I changed up my fitness journey. I started tracking meals, I worked out 3/4 times a week. I averaged 1lb loss per week. Some weeks I maintained. But it was actually, was easier to do than I ever expected. It was a lot of gradual adjustments.

November 2019

June 2019

May 2019

So, why did I go down the calorie deficit route, and not say, Slimming World or Weight Watchers. I have no personal experience of either. I have a lot of friends who have used them to lose weight. And for those who stick with it, the results and fast, and they are amazing. No honestly, they really are fantastic. However, once you stop following the program, the weight comes back and it comes back quickly. So I wanted rather, to make sustainable changes that worked for me. Do I fancy a donut today? (silly question) but then that means, I have to work a little harder. As long as I can stick in a deficit, or as close to… then it works. Of course I am not perfect, I mean I eat donuts. I drink. I enjoy myself. Now, the whole deficit thing, I am not being extreme, I am down to roughly 1400 per day. I won’t go below that. Because I still need to be able to function.

How, one thing that I have found, is that your body is not predictable, some days I weigh myself and i have lost 3 lbs. Some days I have maintained, some days I have…. put weight on. It is hard, not going to lie. When you think you have tracked well and worked hard.. and then your body appears to betray you. Its one thing that I have found particularly hard. When people say, hey its normal to fluctuate, or its hormones… its just not helpful? It feels like an excuse and honestly that is the last time i need to hear. Did I forget something, did I not work out enough. After I had been doing well on the weight loss, I started to lose traction again and I gave myself a kick. I decided to take the long way how. Now … this is a great idea. In theory. Its along a canal and in the summer, I am sure it is a perfectly nice way of getting some fresh air. I don’t suggest it in the winter as walking home in the dark is not fun. So i reset, and decided to go for a walk at lunch. I had avoided this previously because I like to have the time to decompress, but I was out of ideas. It does seem to have worked though.

July 2019

August 2019

October 2019

Now when I say I have run out of ideas, and this is an explanation… I usually get home at at around 18:00 having left the house before 7am. This generally means that I am really, really hungry. So if I have not gone to the gym that evening, the last thing I want to do is throw some food down my fact, let it settle and then go back out. What I am trying to say, is that it is all about being smart with your time. On a typical week, I have bellydance on a wednesday, gym friday night, PT saturday morning, gym & swim sunday. This means that I have a couple of nights off, and a day to play with. Sure, I could go for a run… or spend more time at the gym, work out at home. But if you are going to start a fitness journey, you try and see what works for you, and be realistic. This works for me.

Now, I have mentioned him a few times but lets have a look at the PT issue – like i said, I had wanted to get a PT for a while, I have had PT’s previously so I knew roughly what to expect. I guess for me, part of the issue with working at the gym is that I got to know them and how they trained. When I got roped into a session with Zack I didn’t know what to expect, which I think was an absolute plus. Now to cast back to my broken wrist. When I said recovery was a bitch, this was 6/8 months after the break and Zack had an uphill struggle with me and my inability to really do much with my right hand. But another way of looking at it, is that he also helped me strengthen my wrist so I could push more.

I am not going to lie, Zack had had an uphill struggle with me, I am argumentative, lazy, awkward, I like to chat shit. I also hate not being able to do something and half our sessions have been bargaining and debating. I am sure he has spent many a session thinking about throwing the towel in with me as a lost cause. He spent a got chunk of our sessions, undoing all the bad habits i had picked up or been taught. It was harder in a way because I was not new to the gym so I had things ingrained and that takes time to undo. One thing that I really wanted to get on with, is weigh training. That is one big reason that I knew i needed to have a PT for, as well as getting my wrist back in shape! So over the last year, I have made a lot of progress and am a lot more confident than I was this time last year. One thing that did also change… I had an epiphany … similar to the one relating to my stepping on a scale… I jumped on the treadmill. Now most of you will know that ‘not even my tights run’ but I just decided one day that… I felt like having a run. So I did. It hasn’t been easy, what with the whole ‘cardio is evil’ thing I have maintained for a number of years. I have also really made progress overall with my workouts over the last couple of months and actually feel like I have been getting there rather than treading water.

There hasn’t been a point in the last year that I didn’t want to go to the gym, that I felt I should give up. There have been several points where I was frustrated and annoyed, with myself mostly. And I think that a lot of that stems to where I was before i was injured. That I think is what is all boils down to. Knowing where I was and where I let myself get to.

December 2019

As it stands, yesterday I hit my goal weight for 2019, in that I lost 2 stone. I have 2 stone to lose and i have given myself the deadline of August – because this is the same length of time it took for the first 2 stone to be shed. I have given myself an arbitrary number to reach, it is based on my ideal weight for my height. So yes, it may need adjusting but lets cross that bridge if and when I reach it.

So anyways, that has been my recent fitness journey – thank you for reading! I hope that you reach your goals for the next 12 months, stay healthy and smash some personal bests!

Fighting Fit : Reboot I guess this should be a whole, New Year, New me post. It isn't, it is reflective and a little bit of an apology.

#fitness #fitnessjourney #fitnessmotivation #gym #new year #workout

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porfirioenserafinakg73insur-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Car Insurance Question (sorry I know nothing about cars...)?

Sorry, Im new to all this so excuse the stupid question but Im starting driving lessons soon and am looking to get a car in the new year. Im just wondering HOW OFTEN do you make car insurance payments? As in once a year or is it a monthly thing? I just did one of the online get a quote thingys and it said around 350 which sounds grand if its yearly but steep if thats a monthly payment. Lolli

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare free quotes :insurancefinder.xyz

SOURCES:

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televisedbirdwatching · 6 years ago

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Retrofit Ep. 2: Transportation

The other week I wrote about residential retrofits that turn single-family homes into multi-unit residences. This week I want to talk about transportation system retrofits.

When I was looking for a place to live in Portland, transit access was a high priority. I dislike driving and prefer to walk or bike where I can- but given Portland’s weather and relative sprawl it’s nice to have transit options. One of my favorite buses is the 2 line. The 2 Bus route goes along Division Street, turns north for a moment, then takes the Hawthorne bridge to Downtown. At $2.50 and about 20 minutes it’s my favorite way to get to the west side of Portland. Plus, the bus runs every 15 minutes or better at most times of the day.

Bus only-lanes make Bus Rapid Transit possible. This one is open to parking at non-rush-hour times of day, where the extra lane isn’t needed for buses to move quickly.

Recently I found out that there are plans to give the 2 route a Bus Rapid Transit option. Bus Rapid Transit is a way of retrofitting bus systems to compete more directly with light rail’s speed and capacity. I first became aware of BRT through Seattle’s plan to implement “queue jumps;” small, dedicated bus lanes at intersections that allow buses to cut to the front of the line, and then get a 3-second head start before the normal, automobile green light turns. This allows buses to get to their next stop faster; but saving a few seconds per stop adds up over a 20- or 30-minute bus ride.

vimeo

The most well-known BRT system in the US is probably Los Angeles’ Orange Line. The Orange line operates in a dedicated Bus-only lane along 18 miles of highway, with stops every 1 mile or so. The bus “stops” have been rebranded as bus “stations,” where passengers pay for tickets on the platform instead of at the bus door-speeding up loading times and allowing the bus to get back on the road more quickly.

It makes a lot of sense to implement a BRT route along the 2-line’s current route. At present, someone living farther out in Portland (say, east of 82nd street,) has no other transit options than the lengthy 2 bus ride. For example, someone getting on the bus at 162nd street has a 1-hour bus ride to Portland City center. Driving this same route at 7:30 AM, Google and Waze estimate the trip wouldn’t take more than 35 minutes including traffic.

Bus 2, stuck behind a dump truck and car at a signal.

However, there are a few obstacles in the BRT path: for one, Division street is a narrow, 2-lane street for long stretches. Though I’m not a transportation engineer, it’s not clear to me where physical infrastructure retrofits like bus-only lanes and queue jumps would go.

However, there may be a solution regardless. Trimet’s plan includes new, longer and articulated buses that can fit 60% more passengers than a standard bus. The new buses will also allow for rear-door boarding thanks to the new HOPcard Tap-n-go fare collection system. These two factors alone will help make boarding stops shorter and make bus travel more efficient. Second, although there are some streets that won’t be able to accommodate bus-lane queue jumps, there are others that will. I’m sure there’s a critical point at which a few small time savings add up to big reductions in overall ride times.

Where could you put a bus-only lane on this street?

However, BRT faces a larger, social stumbling block as well. Buses are seen as slow and cumbersome. In most places, bus service is the least sexy option in the transportation retrofit toolbox. For example, read more here about Detroit’s obsession with a slow, inefficient, inconvenient, and expensive streetcar system. And Detroit isn’t the only place where this is true: Portland was one of the first cities to bring back the streetcar as a system for short-ride transit (although nowadays there’s evidence to show that long-term, streetcars do offer certain advantages over buses. This should be seen as the exception, not the rule).

Portland’s Streetcar.

For a time I was commuting to Portland in the middle of a summer highway widening project taking place on I-84 through the central eastside. Highway widening projects are easy to sell because they make basic sense. If the problem is rush-hour traffic on the highway, the problem would best be solved by adding another lane, right? However, evidence shows that highway widening projects are typically self-defeating, since they simultaneously increase both supply and demand. Despite this trend, highway widening projects have a visibility that makes them attractive. The increased traffic they cause during their construction actually markets in their favor, as the city gets to say, “Look! You’ve been heard, and we’re doing something about it!”

As a contrasting strategy for reducing congestion, expanding bus service is a decidedly un-sexy hard sell. Interestingly, the social perceptions of bus ridership have been some of the most important focus areas for ensuring BRT success. Design and language matter: call it a “station” not a “stop” and it more properly evokes the light-rail comparison that BRT deserves. Similarly, raising the platform even slightly above street level and providing a fare-entry turnstile to distinguish the platform as a BRT loading area helps distinguish BRT stations from “normal” bus-stops (also ensuring an unsuspecting passenger doesn’t accidentally board the BRT version of their usual bus).

Portland’s Tillikum Crossing Bridge is open to light rail, buses, and pedestrians/bicyclists, but not cars. Tillikum crossing is tall enough that it doesn’t have to be a drawbridge, meaning buses may be faster than cars stuck waiting for ships to pass under other bridges.

I think Bus Rapid Transit has the potential to revolutionize the way we get around in so many cities. Of course, if money and time were no obstacle, most BRT lines would better be served by a full-scale light rail system. Light rail has the advantage of being fully separated from traffic and is already perceived as the fast option. However money and time are obstacles, and we can’t just put a light rail system on every one of Portland’s streets. BRT is a scrappy solution for the real world, helping deliver faster and more convenient transit without excessive and major infrastructure changes.

For example, my favorite bus in Portland is the 5:07 14e Bus. The 14 line runs from downtown and along Hawthorne Boulevard. Normally, the trip from downtown to the intersection of Hawthorne and Caesar Chavez Boulevard takes about 20 minutes. The 14e line is an express line and makes the trip in 14 minutes- because it doesn’t stop. It makes two stops downtown to pick up passengers, then runs straight for 40 blocks before stopping again. After that, it stops at major intersections in 20-block-ish increments. It only operates twice a day (4:37 and 5:07) to serve commuters on their way home.

My favorite thing about the 14e bus is that it requires no change to infrastructure. Nothing on Hawthorne street was changed to accommodate rapid bus travel. Instead, the 14e works thanks to a creative bit of planning and timing. The whole thing kind of has a scrappy, punk-rock feel: the little bus throwing punches in the light-rail weight class. Maybe I just like rooting for the underdog, but I can’t wait to see Division’s 2 bus get a BRT option, or at least a 2e express line. Maybe someday I’ll see a patch on some Portland punk’s jacket that says “ride the bus: kill your local car.”

#writing

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eurotraveltales-blog · 6 years ago

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Day 12: Lucerne

Update from last night, since this happened after I made the post: there is what we assume is a hostel cat!! Makes up for the lack of WiFi and power. Saw the cat on our way back from the lounge to our rooms to go to bed last night. It was just dozing away on the rug next to the cow statue in the lobby of the hostel. He/she was soooo sweet and let us pet it even though we woke it up accidentally. Back to today - long post ahead, we did a LOT with our full day in Lucerne.

Woke up at 9:00 for the hostel's free breakfast, since their breakfast ends at 9:30 instead of 10:00, which is when all the other hostels' breakfasts have ended. They had a pretty generous spread of food, and I sampled almost all of it. They even had vegetable soup and rice, so I had a very healthy helping of those. I also had a bowl of their homemade muesli (a Swiss-German food), which is a really good combination of food that I had never thought of before. It's strawberry yogurt, oatmeal, and chunks of fruit (blueberries and strawberries, in this case). Deeeelicious. I also had a bowl of regular yogurt, two orange slices, an apple slice, a glass of orange juice, two slices of ham, and part of a slice of swiss cheese. It was a thick slice of cheese, not the thin ones we usually have in the US. Apriet finished the rest of my cheese, since I wasn't a huge fan. Apriet had toast with salami and cheese, toast with butter, orange juice, rice, and yogurt. I definitely ate enough to be able to skip lunch, which we pretty much did unless you count chocolate as lunch, but I'll get to that. After breakfast, we tried to get WiFi so we could look up which bus stop to get off at in order to go to the Glacier Garden. However, the WiFi seemed to be out, even in the lobby where it normally works, so we decided to just go and figure it out. We got off the bus and made a short walk to the Lion Monument, which is a sculpture of a dying lion who has an extremely distressed look on its face. It was sculpted in 1820 by Lukas Ahorn to commemorate the Swiss Guards massacred in the 1792 French Revolution. Mark Twain said it was the most moving piece of rock in history, or something like that. You'll see it in the pictures. We both wanted to go pet it and comfort it, but it sits on a cliff that is located on the far side of a pond, so nobody could get to it. In addition to its terribly sad expression, the lion also reminded me of all the other animals in the world that are dying or have died at the hands of humans, be it from poaching or hunting, and that just added on a whole other level of sadness. ...Anyway, we wanted to get access to the glacier garden, because once we had a ticket, we would be able to explore the natural monument, the glacier museum, geoworld lucerne, the Amrein house, the observation tower, and Alhambra mirror maze. Tickets were 15 francs per adult, and the first time we went to the window to try and purchase a ticket, the lady thought we wanted to go to the 3D panorama of Lucerne for some reason, so she told us to go to another window that was a minute away. We thought she was saying that's where all the stuff we wanted to do was, so we tried to find it. We never did find it, but in our attempt to get back to that window, we went up a ton of stairs that led to a path through a quiet and pristine Lucerne neighborhood. We went on a pretty long stroll, but we eventually looped back around to the glacier garden, and actually purchased the tickets this time.

First up is the natural monument, a preserved area where glaciers stood during the Ice Age. The monument was uncovered by chance in 1872 when Josef Wilhelm Amrein-Troller was doing building work on a wine cellar at the site. The glacial polish, glacial potholes, and boulders found at the site prove that Switzerland was covered by glaciers during the Ice Age. Some of the potholes were gigantic, almost cave-like, and they are caused by the erosion of sand and gravel at the bottom of a glacier when the glacier's melt water seeps into the glacier through fissures. Under high pressure, the water at the bottom of the glacier forms vortices that erode the rock. Pretty wicked, no? I had fun exploring all the exhibits in the museum, reading almost everything I could. I followed along with the guide we were given when we purchased tickets, because the exhibits are numbered and you can go through and read all about the subject matter both on the guide and on the exhibit itself. Museums are so much fun. Today I learned that woolly mammoths have six sets of teeth! And because they spend so much of their life eating and chewing their food, they wear their teeth down very quickly. When one set of teeth gets worn down too much, another set moves up to take its place. And when a mammoth runs out of teeth, it can no longer eat, so it starves to death. That's why mammoths typically don't live to be more than 60 years old. Isn't that fascinating? There was also a lot of sciencey stuff in the museum about ice, snow, water, glaciers, and crystals. Pretty rad stuff. The Amrein House was where the Amrein-Troller family lived, and it was full of Renaissance furniture and Swiss historical motifs. It was built in 1874, and it was very cool to get a sneak peak into how people lived in Switzerland during the 19th century. All the furniture was super fancy, and they even had a display of models of typical old Swiss houses. They also had a room full of the different types of rocks and minerals that can be found in the Swiss Alps. After the Amrein house came the observation tower. The path up to the observation tower was as enjoyable as the tower itself. They labeled all the different types of plants you could see on the way up to the tower, and I absolutely loved it. They also had a model of a glacial mill that illustrated an old theory of how potholes are formed. There was a diorama of an old mountain hut, and an arched stone tunnel. At the top of the observation tower was a glorious view over the city of Lucerne. My favorite thing about Lucerne is that you pretty much have a solid view of the Alps from wherever you are. You can even see them in the distance towering over everything when you're standing on the city streets! It's pretty wild. After the tower, we came to the mirror maze. It was suuuuper trippy. At first I kept almost running into the mirrors because it's very hard to tell when the mirrors are reflecting back space that it looks like you can occupy. Psych. After I got the hang of it, it wasn't too hard to find my way to the exit. At the end, there's a room with four mirror-related interactive exhibits. One was just two pieces of taut string, reflected by two mirrors at a 90 degree angle, creating a triangle. When you pulled one of the mirrors closer together, narrowing the angle, the shape made from the reflection of the strings would change to a square, then a hexagon, then an octagon, and so forth. Whew, that was a lot. Apriet was hungry after leaving the Glacier Garden, and when in Switzerland... where else did we go but a Swiss chocolatier? Their truffles were super fancy, and they also had numerous other types of chocolate for sale. I considered getting a set of 5 swiss chocolate bars (3 milk chocoolate, 1 with hazelnuts, and 1 with raisins) for 8.40 francs, but it was a lot of chocolate, and I figured it would melt in the heat anyway, so I just opted for some truffles that I could finish the same day. Apriet got a single hazelnut truffle, and then we shared another bag of 8 truffles for $13.39. I had three and Apriet had five. They were all delicious, of course. You can't go wrong with Swiss chocolate, let me tell ya. All of mine were dark chocolate with different types of ganache inside. My mouth is still watering. After the chocolate store, we went to a castle tower lookout area. It was a series of nine connected towers, but only three of the towers are open to the public. It was free to go in, so we climbed the very steep stairs up to the top of the first tower to soak in more views of the city. We then walked across a rampart that was halfway up the tower in order to get to the clock tower. It was super cool to see the pendulum swinging back and forth, and the machinery that moved the hands of the clock as we climbed the tower. At the top we saw the bell, but we didn't get to see it ring since we weren't there on the hour. We made our way to the third tower and descended the stairs to the bottom. We walked along a gravel road surrounded by wildflowers, with the rooftops of Lucerne to our right, and a castle wall to our left. It felt very European. After that, we just sat on a bench by the river and watched the pigeons for a good 15 minutes. I never tire of watching birds. Their feathers are so beautiful, and the way they move turn their heads all jerkily is pretty entertaining. I also think it's fascinating that they have a top and a bottom eyelid, so watching them blink is also entertaining. We decided to go to the lake after that short break, so we made our way to a covered bridge - different than the one we crossed yesterday. This one had a souvenir store, and we bought some souvenirs. Apriet says she spent too much, but we're only going to be in Switzerland once, right? We wanted to get at least one thing from each country we visited, but we’ve already messed up because neither of us got anything from France. Oh well, we had a puppy. When we got to the lake, we decided to see how much the paddle boats cost. We agreed that if it was 20 francs or less, we would get one, since that would really only be 10 francs per person. It turned out to be 25 because it was a weekend, but we did it anyway for a half hour. Folks, we were paddle boating on Lake Lucerne among the swans, with the city all around us and the Alps in the distance. Literally couldn't have been any more peaceful or serene. We made it back in time to not get charged extra. When we paid for the boat, we had to make a 20 franc deposit, and it scared us into not returning the boat late, because there was a chance they'd just keep the deposit if we returned late. After getting off the lake, we found a restaurant in the train station that had take out, since it had been a long day and we wanted to get back to the hostel. The restaurant was self-serve - you just grab a take-out box and fill it with anything you want, then you weigh it and pay. They had all kinds of food from all over the world - pasta, eggs, seaweed salad, kimchi, quinoa salad, lentil salad, curry, carrots, bread, peas, cheesecake, mousse, you name it. We each got a box for 10 francs each, then took the bus back to the hostel where we ate our food. Tomorrow we leave Lucerne for Munich, Germany!

Good times were had by all today. :)

#day12 #lucerne

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nsorchidsociety · 7 years ago

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Collegiate Honor Society Honors Everybody

Lena Dunham to release spoken word poetry Record

Fueled by Ramen, the record label behind the soundtrack GIRLS Volume 1: Music from the First HBO Series, announced today they will be releasing a record of first spoken word poetry written and played by none other than Lena Dunham. It’s no surprise after Dunham signed a $3.7 million book deal for… MORE “

Music Festival Lineups Announced, Everybody Turns into Douchebags

“Dude, did you see that the Bonnaroo lineup?” Asked a tall, lanky white child to his both lanky white friend at the Campus Center last Tuesday. “Dude. Dude!” We began to notice similar cases happening all around campus. 1 girl close to our table in particular Id proceeded to share jpegs of the Coachella lineup on all… MORE “

“Trojan Family Room” renamed for napping purposes

Since its grand opening in 2010, the Ronald Tutor Campus Center has been quite the useful addition for all Trojans, by the outdoor International Plaza to the upstairs offices and Traditions from the cellar. However, the most used of all, but has been the grand entry of Sample Hall, more commonly known as the “Trojan… MORE “

Everybody Blows Off Last Week of Classes, Goes to Disneyland Instead

“I have really made a decision to drop my important and dance in the parade total time today that I have spent the week at Disneyland,” said a very excited theater important. “It is just this kind of lifestyle here.” For a reason, we totally agreed with what she said and blamed it on creepily persuasive Disney magic. MORE “

15 Things I’m Thankful For

Because time moves too quickly in college I’m not really certain what Thanksgiving is about anymore (pilgrims?? Genocide? I dun no), but the 1 thing I do recall is that folks say what they’re thankful for, and so I have compiled a listing to read at the dinner table tomorrow: 1). The Mucho Mango smoothie at the SCA… MORE “

5 Antisocial Things to do on Halloween

Um, somehow it became Halloween. I’m not sure when that happened, and I have decided it is likely because I have no social life. Whoops. Therefore! As a pitiful person who can not even remember what day it’s, I appropriately compiled a listing of things to do to do while nevertheless preserving the Halloween spirit. Bring on the… MORE “

Campus Center Piano Bans “Chopsticks”

The Ronald Tutor Campus Center recently included a painted upright piano to the International Plaza. The piano, donated by a USC staff member and alumna, became accessible for anybody to play within the campus centre’s “Art and Trojan Traditions” program. The piano immediately gained a lot of a following that frequent visitors began… MORE “

5 Reasons To Celebrate the Rain

Finally. After a few weeks in the high 80s to mid 90s, the LA weather forecast not just dropped to the usual 70s, but predicted scattered thunderstorms having a 50% probability of rain for this Thursday, otherwise known as tomorrow. “Aw man!” Exclaimed some helpless man in Ray Bans next to me about hearing the… MORE “

Wait for the donuts, stay for the intoxicated folks

You are able to get anything from fritters to bagels to breakfast sandwiches to ice cream to any kind of boba-related drink to cereal to smokes to vitamin to iPhone cases to duplicates of your homework due in an hour. MORE “

Young Adult Publications are Totally Cool

I’ve a confession to make: I never grew up. At least, together with books. I mean, I have attempted to read the books and classics for college and weird angsty poetry but something always brings me right back to the fantastic ol’ times of hiding behind the awesomeness of the YA book. Yes, even today in school…. MORE “

Returning Students Petition for Cafe 85

Returning students to USC weren’t happy to locate their favorite overpriced meals court no longer accessible with no meal plan. With Jamba Juice, Daphne’s, and Wok Bar only legend to current freshmen, the remaining part of the student body is in a constant state of mourning. “I will never get a free boost again,”… MORE “

Senior discovers hidden gem known as “Galen Dining Center”

It’s recently come to our attention the Galen Dining Center, also known as “in which the soccer team occupies” to campus tour guides, has gone undetected for many throughout their time at USC. What is the Galen Dining Center, you ask? That is what Steve Flanders, a senior, asked also. “I simply never… MORE “

5 GPA Boosters For The Fall Schedule

Believe it or not Trojans, choosing your fall courses is right round the corner. If you are not an engineer and also have a couple credits to spare, why don’t you take something completely ridiculous interesting that will cushion your GPA at exactly the exact same time? After requesting the brightest and finest about, I have compiled some options That May just grant you… MORE “

Mad Men Returned to TV (And I Liked It)

Oh! Hey USC Basement. Superior news. Take out your fitted blazer, skinny tie, and pen skirt since the men of Madison Avenue come back! AKA Season 5 of Mad Men. The season began with a bang in a two hour premiere last Sunday. Let’s party like it’s 1966! MORE “

Cool Story Bro: “I must have clotheslined him”

A child, perhaps 14 or 15, was bolting towards me. Like, at top speed. And just like in the movies, time seemed to slow down. I couldn’t move. My ideas were all: “That is odd. He is running like, really quickly. He likely has to grab a bus. God I really want a Coke Zero. French fries. Jon Hamm. Wait, what–” MORE “

10 Totally Wonderful Things to perform (On Campus) Over Spring Break

So you are stuck on campus for spring break. Do not fret! (do people use that phrase anymore?) This can be your chance to take advantage of USC’s “one way” place for the best staycation. Yes I only used the term “staycation.” Here’s a few of our ideas: 1). Try every fast food chain onto Figueroa. If you currently live… MORE “

CampusCruiser offers new service “CampusLoser”

We’ve been ““ dressed to impress at the best rager on Thursday night. The clock strikes 1am with DPS nowhere in sight; a wonderful song comes on because you talk up the hottie you’ve been meaning to talk to for months. Then, from nowhere? The person you least want to view… MORE “

Cool Story Bro: The Laundry Room

This article is part of a brand new series in which Becca over-dramatically remembers “cool narrative bro” moments from her time at USC. “WTF,” said a girl down the hall. Her voice seemed like evil grossness. The door to my New-North cubby-hole-of-a-dorm-room was wide open and the high-pitched voice kept at it. “Ewww somebody took my… MORE “

Breaking News College Professors Are Old

A recent study performed by the Old People Association of Educational Things and Stuff found that 89% of college professors are indeed age 60+. And yet, the evaluation not only quantified physical era, but psychological age, developing a record breaking statistic of college professors with an older mental age at 99 percent. The analysis… MORE “

‘Smash’ Smashes ‘Glee’ Just Like Woah

Even the premiere of NBC’s Smash past Monday has a great deal of folks talking ““ and hammering ““ about a series that could finally dethrone the sad, overwritten, burnt-out-at-three-seasons “struck” known as Glee. Ouch. That was mean. See, I was like Glee. I did. I loved Rachel, and Kurt, and mash-ups, along with regionals, but somewhere… MORE “

BREAKING NEWS: “The Muppets” Acquire NOTHING at the Golden Globes”¦ WTF?!

In the 69th Annual Golden Globe awards there were lots of winners, the huge ones “The Descendants,” “The Artist,” “Homeland,” and “Modern Family.” However, a night which attracts many winners also brings about even more losers. And while people might be angry that “Bridesmaids” didn’t win gold did Leonardo DiCaprio walk off… MORE “

21-year-old can drink in bars, can not afford to drink in bars

“I’m not ordering cocktails made of gold” Yelled one SC senior because he was escorted from a busy downtown pub yesterday evening. “Can they come off-brand?? Can you do payment plans?!” He’s only one of many students whose long-awaited 21st birthdays immediately tanked due to bar-drink sticker shock. “Fifteen dollars is either a bottle… MORE “

To Rick Perry, Love Santa Claus

Dear Gov. Perry, I’m not scared to admit the concept of me is a little creepy. I mean, it says in a tune I can see children when they’re sleeping. And while that’s true, I don’t abuse my position of energy to pedophilistically spy on minors nor do I use it to publically… MORE “

All Women in Sorority House Hate Drama, Charlotte

As past nights chapter dinner, a lot more individual talks, unlimited hours of study, and a recent media release in the sorority have revealed, All the women in the Theta Delta Chi home have commented they, “Hate Drama.” Drama has been cast off with this category also, “Shitty,” and, “Annoying,” previously. The… MORE “

Beneath fire, NCAA remains committed to amateurism

Lately and always, the NCAA has already come under fire for its failure to Keep the Exact standards when dealing with distinct compliance cases, particularly when compared to 2010 sanctions against USC who have become viewed as too harsh and really helpless. While USC confronted severe scholarship discounts along with a two-year bowl prohibit, ” the… MORE “

What Summer Orientation Should Have Been

Those still on campus for summer time might have noticed that it is abuzz with three-day bursts of panicky, fresh-faced nervous energy recently. People without much else to keep them amused are aware ““ it is summer orientation! If you are like me, you had been rejected when you implemented to work orientation (twice!) But also want you… MORE “

Involvement Honest signatures demonstrated to become binding contracts

The thrilling Involvement Fair was in full swing because enthused clubs and organizations lured involvement-hungry students in with guarantees of philanthropy, a great time plus melted oreos to a day which felt like being inside Satan’s drier. Following the blueprint of Involvement Fairs anyplace, no stall visit was complete without the obligatory signing of… MORE “

My Inner-Battle about Whether to See “Pitch Perfect”

SCA’s “Outside the Box Office” film screening series is performing a sneak preview of Universal’s “Pitch Perfect” tomorrow. I have a reservation since I make a booking for whatever I’ve really heard of before studying the website. But I Can’t decide on if I should move or not, I keep swaying back… MORE “

5 Reasons Why “The Immortals” May Die Out

The Immortals opened last weekend, and audiences everywhere seem to think it wasn’t talking Greek. (They had been right–it wasn’t. Anyone who believed otherwise should see their health practitioner.) Even the mythology-laced 3D sword-and-sandals film managed to top the box in the united states and in overseas markets with more than 30 million in each area. Haroo, haroo, haroop-de-doo…. MORE “

Neighborhood superhero reportedly always remembers trash day, people’s names

From the warmth of superhero blockbuster season, a real live one has been recently found on campus. Early listed sightings were separate but seemingly described the exact same student who looked “like a regular dude,” but does some fairly nonregular things. Known only by his people moniker, “Steve” supposedly “consistently puts in for beer. And… MORE “

from Society http://www.nsorchidsociety.com/collegiate-honor-society-honors-everybody/

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