Passion will keep you going when the going gets tough. Eric Church Highway To Home Heartland Falls Brown 5 Pc Queen Panel Bedroom Included in this room Like your favorite music, your home should reflect what makes you feel good. With that in mind, the Heartland Falls bedroom, inspired by the music and lifestyle of Eric Church, is a nostalgic mix of Arts and Crafts design with a dash of western style. This rustic collection is designed to fit the way you live centered around family and the warmth of home. Each piece is quality crafted using wood solids along with quartered oak and cherry veneers in a rich whiskey brown finish. The panel bed features a plank style arched headboard and an upholstered bench footboard with all the appeal of leather. Metal accent strapping, custom designed antique brass finished cup pulls and ice box style latches add authentic touches and a time-aged heirloom quality. Mattress and foundation (if required) sold separately. Set of 2 Artwork
5 Pc Full/Queen Coverlet Set Other Heartland Falls room packages Eric Church Highway To Home Heartland Falls Brown 7 Pc Queen Panel Bedroom 3 Pc Queen Bed Email to a Friend Pin It For LaterYou've probably heard about Amazon's radical plan to deliver parcels to your door using unmanned drones. The company first touted the Amazon Prime Air service in 2013 , promising to deliver goods weighing up to 2.3kg within half an hour of customers placing an order. So how come our skies aren't already swarming with thousands of robotic couriers? Apart from the obvious logistical problems, one of the main reasons is that drones require a lot of power to fly - especially if they're carrying a heavy load. Most of the batteries currently available for drones are only capable of keeping them airborne for a few minutes, which isn't enough for them to deliver a parcel and then return back to base. So Amazon has been exploring ways for its delivery drones to recharge their batteries en route.
Now the company has won a patent for the use of aerial structures such as street lights and church steeples as "docking stations". According to the patent, drones will be able to check in at these stations to recharge their batteries and shelter in bad weather, before continuing their journeys. The docks will come equipped with solar panels to power themselves, as well as their own Wi-Fi hotspots and security cameras. They could even serve as pick-up and drop-off points for packages, according to the patent, which was filed on 18 December 2014 and approved on 12 July 2016. The patent alone does not count as proof that Amazon is planning to set up such a system. However, it could help the retail company overcome one of its biggest hurdles. "The range provided by current UAV technology makes deliveries over a wide area - e.g. throughout a city, or even a portion of a city - difficult," the patent states. "The docking stations may incorporate a number of features to enable UAVs to fly longer routes, to fly routes more accurately, and to provide shelter during adverse conditions."
Would you like your parcels to be delivered by drone? Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, located at 38th and Chestnut Streets in West Philadelphia, is the cathedral church of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. Formerly known as the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Saviour, it was built in 1855, renovated in 1898, and rebuilt after an April 16, 1902 fire. In 1992 it became the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. A highly-controversial renovation of the interior was undertaken, 2000-2002, under then-cathedral dean Richard Giles, author of Re-Pitching the Tent: Re-Ordering the Church Building for Worship and Mission.[3] The pews, altar, and other church furniture were removed and sold. Chairs and modern lighting fixtures replaced the traditional fixtures. The stone walls were stuccoed over and whitewashed. The baptismal font was joined by an immersion pool for adults. These actions divided the congregation and were severely criticized in the press.
In 2012, facing a $3.5 million bill to renovate its bell tower, current cathedral dean Judith Sullivan petitioned the Philadelphia Historical Commission for permission to demolish its parish house and rectory, both NRHP-certified buildings. They would be replaced with a 25-story apartment building wedged between the cathedral and Chestnut Street. The demolition was approved. ^ Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral - History ^ The cover photograph shows the cathedral's renovated interior. ^ Stephan Salisbury, "Work on historic church decried. One critic calls it 'cultural vandalism'," The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 2001. ^ Stephan Salisbury, "Episcopal Cathedral gets OK to raze historic buildings, erect apartment high-rise," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10, 2012.Fence WoodRustic FenceWedding GoalsWedding 2018Wedding TimeMy WeddingWedding StuffDream Wedding IdeasTopp WeddingForwardDecorate your aisles! - It doesn't have to cost a bunch, but when you decorate your wedding aisles, it looks oh, so nice!
THE LITTLE RED CHAIRSBy Edna O’Brien299 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.Edna O’Brien’s boldly imagined and harrowing new novel, “The Little Red Chairs” — her 23rd work of fiction since “The Country Girls” (1960) — is both an exploration of those themes of Irish provincial life from the perspective of girls and women for which she has become acclaimed and a radical departure, a work of alternate history in which the devastation of a war-torn Central European country intrudes upon the “primal innocence, lost to most places in the world,” of rural Ireland. Here, in addition to O’Brien’s celebrated gifts of lyricism and mimetic precision, is a new, unsettling fabulist vision that suggests Kafka more than Joyce, as her portrait of the psychopath “warrior poet” Vladimir Dragan suggests Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode. Should we not recognize immediately the sinister “Dr. Vladimir Dragan of Montenegro,” the author has placed this poignant passage as an epigraph:“On the 6th of April 2012, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces, 11,541 red chairs were laid out in rows along the 800 meters of the Sarajevo high street.
One empty chair for every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425 days of siege. Six hundred and forty-three small chairs represented the children killed by snipers and the heavy artillery fired from the surrounding mountains.”Like a figure in a malevolent Irish fairy tale, a mysterious stranger appears one day seemingly out of nowhere on a bank of a tumultuous river in western Ireland, in a “freezing backwater that passes for a town and is called Cloonoila.” The stranger is himself “mesmerized” by the “manic glee” of the deafening water.Soon, the curious, credulous inhabitants of Cloonoila fall one by one under the spell of Dragan, “Vuk,” or “Dr. Vlad,” a professed poet, exile, visionary, “healer and sex therapist.” To one, he resembles a “holy man with a white beard and white hair, in a long black coat”; so priestly, one might “genuflect.” To another, he is a figure of hope: “Maybe he’ll bring a bit of romance into our lives.” Schoolchildren think he looks “a bit funny in a long black smock, with his white beard,” but consider him harmless.
The village schoolteacher is suspicious, suggesting that the stranger may be a kind of Rasputin, another notorious “visionary and a healer,” but no one chooses to listen. The young Catholic priest Father Damien is initially wary of Dr. Vlad only because the outsider represents a threat to church authority and because he has advertised himself as a sex therapist: “This is a Catholic country, and chastity is our No. 1 commandment.” O’Brien’s portraits of Irish priests are rarely flattering, and Father Damien is a font of clichés and empty rhetoric. “You see,” he says of the local residents, “many feel a vacuum in their lives . . . marriages losing their mojo . . . Internet dating . . . nudity . . . hedonism . . . the things I have heard in confession.” The presumed spiritual leader of the community is as readily taken in by Dr. Vlad as the others, confiding in him that “repentance and sorrow for sin is woven into our DNA.”In these briskly satirical exchanges O’Brien can be as wittily lethal as Muriel Spark eviscerating the foolish, but O’Brien’s sympathy is more fully engaged by those women — lonely, childless, naïve — who fall more deeply under the spell of Dr. Vlad.
There’s Sister Bonaventure, a nun who pays for a massage from the practitioner of “holistic healing in Eastern and Western disciplines”: “She felt a flash of blinding light and was transported to the ethereal.” More crucially, there is the “town beauty” Fidelma, married to a man much older than her and desperate to have a child, who contrives to be impregnated by the charlatan therapist, but with disastrous results both for her marriage and for herself. Their union, after Fidelma tells him the legend of a playboy who promises to kiss girls “unto their necklaces,” verges on the surreal, it is so self-consciously mythic: “ ‘Unto your necklace,’ he said and kissed her and they lay down, his body next to hers, seeking her with his hands, with his mouth, with his whole being, as if in the name of love, or what she believed to be love, he could not get enough of her. Her breath came in little gasps, their limbs entwined, the healer and she, the stranger and she, like lovers now, as in a story or in a myth.”
Later, Fidelma will feel that the union with Dr. Vlad has brought a “terrible curse” on her village — like a union with the Devil. For her audacity, which (the reader knows) is a consequence of naïveté, not lust, Fidelma will be viciously punished, as in a fairy tale in which consequences are wildly disproportionate to causes. (The scene of Fidelma’s punishment by betrayed allies of Dr. Vlad is not for the fainthearted; O’Brien does not gloss over details.) Yet, somehow, perhaps not altogether plausibly, Fidelma regains not only her health and strength but acquires a confidence she had lacked; by the novel’s end she is determined to expiate the curse of a union with the Devil by dedicating herself to the aid of desperate, displaced persons at a shelter for the homeless in London: “I could not go home until I could come home to myself.”The most boldly imagined element of “The Little Red Chairs” is, of course, the positing of an alternate universe in which a Balkan War criminal, the object of an international search for years, turns up in a remote Irish village in the hope of establishing a new, much-diminished life as a healer-therapist.
In a more conventional work of fiction, and certainly in a work of genre mystery, the exact identity of Dr. Vlad would constitute the plot, and his outing would be the consequence of detection on the part of a canny protagonist among the villagers. One can well imagine a sly Nabokovian hide-and-seek with the reader in which the man’s exact identity is never quite established and we are confronted with the possibility that Dr. Vlad, like the mad narrator of “Pale Fire,” may be imagining his own lurid history. Instead, in an audacious move in which every creative-writing admonition is tossed blithely aside, the author simply presents seven pages of densely iterated exposition in the (again, audaciously awkward) form of a dream of Dr. Vlad’s in which he is chastised by an old, now-dead “blood brother” and comrade in the genocidal Serbian onslaught against Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croatian communities in the early 1990s: “You had been christened Young Torless because of the two terribly contrasting aspects of your character, the sane, the reasonable and the other so dark, so vengeful.”
Later, the “Beast of Bosnia” will argue in his own defense at his trial in The Hague: “If I am crazy, then patriotism itself is crazy.” (“Dragan David Dabic” was a false identity for the leader of the Serb Republic in Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic, apprehended in Serbia in 2008 after 13 years in hiding; known as the Butcher of Bosnia, Karadzic was tried in The Hague by the United Nations war crimes tribunal for war crimes including genocide. While he was in hiding, Karadzic practiced “alternative healing.”) Book Review Newsletter Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. But O’Brien is not interested in sensationalizing her material, and “The Little Red Chairs” is not a novel of suspense, still less a mystery or a thriller; it is something more challenging, a work of meditation and penance. How does one come to terms with one’s own complicity in evil, even if that complicity is “innocent”?
Should we trust the stranger who arrives out of nowhere in our community? Should we mistrust the stranger? When is innocence self-destructive? Given the nature of the world, when is skepticism, even cynicism, justified? Much is made of innocence in fiction, as in life, but in O’Brien’s unsentimental imagination the innocent suffer greatly because they are not distrustful enough; and usually these innocents are girls and young women, as in O’Brien’s compelling novel “Down by the River” (1997), in which a young rural Irish girl is impregnated by her father and further humiliated by being forced to endure the public politicization of her pregnancy by people on both sides of the abortion debate. As one of O’Brien’s female characters has said of her native Ireland: “Ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women.” “The Little Red Chairs,” much farther reaching in its historic scope, much more terrifying in its portraiture of the unrepentant war criminal, yet shares with other works of O’Brien the pervading sense of guilt that is “woven into our DNA” and a determination to be free of this guilt.
Initially one of Dr. Vlad’s dupes, Fidelma evolves into O’Brien’s most resourceful heroine as she throws off her very identity to live amid the homeless in London and to remake herself by painful degrees (chambermaid, dog kennel worker) into a woman strong enough to help others. In her new awareness she hears stories told by refugees in a homeless shelter: displaced persons, victims of unspeakable horrors. “It is essential to remember,” one says, “nothing must be forgotten.” She finds her community in a place that promises “We Help Victims Become Heroines.”In her wonderful memoir, “Country Girl,” O’Brien describes her convent-girl background and her infatuation with one of her nun-teachers; it is not difficult to see how this early idealization of a life of service has enriched her fiction. The religious vocation, in the service of others, is essentially what her courageous heroine Fidelma undertakes, in the midst of much struggle, choosing “not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky.”
