text:
Article

Brendan Flannery, Sue B. Reynolds, Lenee Blanton, Tammy A. Santibanez, Alissa O’Halloran, Peng-Jun Lu, Jufu Chen, Ivo M. Foppa, Paul Gargiullo, Joseph Bresee, James A. Singleton and Alicia M. Fry

Pediatrics April 2017, e20164244; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-4244

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Surveillance for laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated pediatric deaths since 2004 has shown that most deaths occur in unvaccinated children. We assessed whether influenza vaccination reduced the risk of influenza-associated death in children and adolescents.

METHODS: We conducted a case–cohort analysis comparing vaccination uptake among laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated pediatric deaths with estimated vaccination coverage among pediatric cohorts in the United States. Case vaccination and high-risk status were determined by case investigation. Influenza vaccination coverage estimates were obtained from national survey data or a national insurance claims database. We estimated odds ratios from logistic regression comparing odds of vaccination among cases with odds of vaccination in comparison cohorts. We used Bayesian methods to compute 95% credible intervals (CIs) for vaccine effectiveness (VE), calculated as (1 − odds ratio) × 100.

RESULTS: From July 2010 through June 2014, 358 laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated pediatric deaths were reported among children aged 6 months through 17 years. Vaccination status was determined for 291 deaths; 75 (26%) received vaccine before illness onset. Average vaccination coverage in survey cohorts was 48%. Overall VE against death was 65% (95% CI, 54% to 74%). Among 153 deaths in children with underlying high-risk medical conditions, 47 (31%) were vaccinated. VE among children with high-risk conditions was 51% (95% CI, 31% to 67%), compared with 65% (95% CI, 47% to 78%) among children without high-risk conditions.

CONCLUSIONS: Influenza vaccination was associated with reduced risk of laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated pediatric death. Increasing influenza vaccination could prevent influenza-associated deaths among children and adolescents.

Abbreviations:

ACIP —
    Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

CI —
    credible interval

NHIS —
    National Health Interview Survey

NIS-Flu —
    National Immunization Survey–Flu

OR —
    odds ratio

VE —
    vaccine effectiveness

What’s Known on This Subject:

Annual influenza vaccination beginning at 6 months of age is recommended to prevent influenza and its complications. Most influenza-associated pediatric deaths occur in unvaccinated children. Evidence for the effectiveness of vaccination in preventing influenza-associated deaths is needed.

What This Study Adds:

Estimated influenza vaccine effectiveness was 65% (95% credible interval, 54% to 74%) against laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated deaths among children. Vaccine effectiveness was lower for children with underlying medical conditions, but protection remained significant. Sensitivity analyses supported the findings.

In the United States, annual influenza vaccination of children is recommended to reduce adverse health impacts of influenza and prevent severe complications.¹ Though uncommon, influenza-associated deaths among children occur annually, with varying incidence depending on the severity of the influenza season.²,³ From 1976 to 2007, influenza was estimated to account for >100 deaths annually among children and adolescents.⁴,⁵ Since 2004, when influenza-associated deaths among children aged <18 years became nationally notifiable,⁶ reported numbers of deaths have ranged from 37 in the 2011–2012 season to 358 during the 2009 pandemic.² Surveillance for pediatric deaths has contributed to identification of groups at high risk of influenza-related mortality, such as children with neurologic conditions,⁷ and documented fatal illness among children with and without underlying high-risk medical conditions.³ Previous reports have indicated low rates of influenza vaccination among pediatric deaths despite a high prevalence of underlying medical conditions that increase risk for influenza complications.³,⁸ In this analysis, we used a case–cohort approach comparing influenza vaccination rates among influenza-associated pediatric deaths with vaccination coverage estimates for cohorts of US children to estimate the effectiveness of influenza vaccination against laboratory-confirmed influenza-associated death.

Methods

Influenza-Associated Pediatric Deaths

To estimate influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) against death, we used a case–cohort design (or screening method).⁹,¹⁰ Cases were deaths in US residents aged <18 years with laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infection that were reported to the Influenza-Associated Pediatric Mortality Surveillance System.³ Data obtained from standardized case report forms included demographic characteristics, state of residence, results of laboratory testing, underlying high-risk medical conditions, and influenza vaccination status. Confirmation of influenza virus infection consisted of clinical diagnostic testing during illness or postmortem examination including antigen detection, viral culture, or nucleic acid amplification. We included children ≥6 months old on November 1 of the influenza season during which death occurred who were eligible to receive ≥1 dose of seasonal influenza vaccine and had complete medical history; 10 deaths among children who turned 6 months old after November 1 were excluded. For cases without illness onset date, we estimated onset as 4 days before death, based on the mean duration of illness among cases with known onset date. We excluded 7 children who received their first dose of current season vaccine <14 days before illness onset because vaccine-induced protection may be incomplete.¹¹

Health department personnel determined vaccination status based on a review of available information from the child’s medical records, health care provider, state or county immunization information systems, parental report, or coroner’s report. Children were considered vaccinated (either fully or partially) if records indicated receipt of ≥1 doses of current season influenza vaccine ≥14 days before onset of illness. Partial vaccination was defined as receipt of 1 dose when health department personnel determined that 2 doses were indicated. Vaccination status was listed as unknown if surveillance personnel could not determine from available records whether the child had received influenza vaccine. If immunization records indicated vaccination for previous seasons but no current season vaccination, children were assumed to be unvaccinated. A sensitivity analysis explored the effects of assuming that children with unknown vaccination status were unvaccinated. Presence of underlying medical conditions was recorded on case report forms according to high-risk conditions for influenza-related complications identified by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)¹²: asthma, chronic lung disease, neurologic or neurodevelopmental disorders, heart disease (including congenital heart disease), blood disorders, endocrine disorders, metabolic disorders, kidney disorders, liver disorders, immunosuppression, and pregnancy. For consistency with vaccination coverage estimates, age groups were defined based on child’s age on November 1 for influenza season of fatal illness.

Influenza Vaccination Coverage in Cohorts

We used 3 sources of influenza vaccination coverage among comparison cohorts of US children and adolescents: National Immunization Survey–Flu (NIS-Flu),¹³ National Health Interview Survey (NHIS),¹⁴ and the MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters database (Truven Health Analytics, Ann Arbor, MI). NIS-Flu is a national telephone survey of households with children aged 6 months through 17 years that produces national and state-level estimates (and for some cities, including Chicago and New York City) of influenza vaccine coverage for children. NHIS is an in-person household survey that provides nationally representative estimates of influenza vaccination for children aged 6 months through 17 years with and without specified high-risk medical conditions (cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, diabetes, congenital heart disease or other heart condition, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, or seizures, or an asthma episode in the past 12 months).¹⁵ In NIS-Flu and NHIS, seasonal influenza vaccination coverage is estimated from parental report of child’s receipt of ≥1 dose of seasonal influenza vaccine. Data from NIS-Flu and NHIS are weighted by age, sex, race or ethnicity, and geographic area to represent the US population. Monthly coverage estimates and SEs for vaccination received during July or August (depending on survey and season) through May were calculated by Kaplan–Meier survival analysis of data from interviews conducted from August, September, or October through June.¹⁶ Age group was based on the child’s age on November 1 of each influenza season.

In the MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters database, coverage estimates were based on commercial insurance claims for influenza vaccination; children with no vaccination claim were assumed unvaccinated. We analyzed data from July 2010 through June 2014 among children continuously enrolled in a health plan from January preceding each influenza season. We determined underlying high-risk medical conditions based on International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision codes associated with hospitalizations and outpatient visits during a 12-month period.¹⁷ We calculated cumulative vaccination coverage from August through May each season among children aged <18 years with and without underlying high-risk medical conditions. Age categories were based on child’s age at vaccination or at the beginning of each calendar year; children in the youngest age category (0–4 years) were ≥10 months old on November 1. For MarketScan comparison cohorts, state-level coverage estimates were used for children without high-risk conditions, and national coverage estimates were used for children in high-risk groups because of their smaller sample sizes.

Analysis

The case–cohort method⁹,¹⁰ produces an odds ratio (OR), which estimates the relative risk for influenza-associated death among vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Influenza VE was estimated as (1 − OR). ORs were obtained from logistic regression models where vaccination status of the case was the dependent variable and the log odds of vaccination (proportion vaccinated/1 − proportion vaccinated) in the comparison cohort from NIS-Flu, NHIS, or MarketScan data were entered as an offset. With this offset in the model, the intercept provides an estimate of the log(OR). Cases and corresponding coverage estimates were stratified by influenza season, age, and state of residence (for NIS-Flu and MarketScan) or high-risk condition (for NHIS and MarketScan) for the month ending ≥2 weeks before case illness onset. For average coverage estimates by age group, season, or influenza virus type, we derived confidence limits by averaging the variance of independent, normally distributed coverage estimates. To incorporate uncertainty in coverage estimates from survey data, 10 000 estimates were sampled from normally distributed vaccination coverage estimates for NIS-Flu and NHIS comparison cohorts to calculate 95% credible intervals (CIs) for VE estimates. Because MarketScan estimates were derived from all observations without sampling, confidence limits for VE estimates based on MarketScan data were estimated from logistic regression assuming fixed coverage estimates. We assumed that cases did not contribute uncertainty to VE estimates. Sensitivity analyses were conducted under the assumption that cases with unknown vaccination status were unvaccinated and that coverage estimates based on parental report underestimated coverage by 10% or overestimated coverage by 10% or 20%.¹⁸,¹⁹ χ² tests were used to evaluate proportions, and 2-sided _P_ values <.05 were considered significant. Analyses were conducted in SAS version 9.4 (SAS Institute, Inc, Cary, NC) and R (version 3.1.1; R Core Team, Vienna, Austria).

Results

This analysis included 358 influenza-associated pediatric deaths that occurred during 4 influenza seasons from July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2014 among children aged 6 months through 17 years. Deaths were reported from 43 states, New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Vaccination status was unknown for 67 (19%) children who died. Of 291 deaths in children with known vaccination status, 75 (26%) children had received seasonal influenza vaccination ≥14 days before illness onset and were considered vaccinated. Vaccine type was recorded for 62 cases; 12 (19%) received live-attenuated influenza vaccine and 50 (81%) received inactivated influenza vaccines. Vaccinated proportions were similar for boys and girls and did not differ significantly by age category (Table 1). Black non-Hispanic children who died had significantly lower vaccination rates compared with white non-Hispanic children who died (_P_ < .05). Among 31 deaths in vaccinated children aged 6 months through 4 years, 16 (52%) were partially vaccinated.

TABLE 1

Characteristics of Influenza-Associated Pediatric Deaths With Known Vaccination Status, United States, 2010–2011 to 2013–2014 Influenza Seasons (_N_ = 291)

A total of 153 (53%) of 291 pediatric deaths with known vaccination status occurred among children with ≥1 ACIP underlying high-risk medical conditions. The prevalence of high-risk conditions among pediatric deaths increased from 41% among those aged 6 months to 4 years to 57% and 62% among 5- to 12-year-olds and 13- to 17-year-olds, respectively. Although the proportion of cases vaccinated increased from 20% among those without high-risk conditions to 31% among those with ≥1 high-risk condition and 37% among those with ≥2 high-risk conditions, <50% of cases in all individual high-risk categories were vaccinated (Table 1).

Average influenza vaccination coverage among comparison cohorts in the month preceding case illness onset was higher than vaccinated proportions among pediatric deaths for most months (Fig 1). Among deaths in children with known vaccination status, children who died had lower vaccination uptake for all age categories, seasons, and infecting influenza virus types than the NIS-Flu cohort (Table 2). Overall, average vaccination coverage was 48% among NIS-Flu comparison cohorts. Estimated VE against pediatric death was 65% (95% CI, 54% to 74%). Estimated VE ranged from 40% among 13- to 17-year-olds to 76% among 5- to 12-year-olds. By season, VE ranged from 54% in the 2010 to 2011 season to 80% (with overlapping credible intervals) in the mild 2011 to 2012 season, with the lowest number of pediatric deaths. By virus type, VE point estimates were similar against death associated with influenza A virus (66%) and influenza B virus (62%).

[FIGURE 1]

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FIGURE 1

Comparison of vaccination coverage among influenza-associated pediatric deaths and comparison cohorts during 4 influenza seasons, according to month of death. Note: Number of deaths shown in parentheses. Coverage estimates for comparison cohorts correspond to month preceding case illness onset.

TABLE 2

Percentage Vaccinated Among Influenza-Associated Pediatric Deaths Compared With NIS-Flu Cohorts, With VE Estimates by Season and Age Group

Vaccination uptake among pediatric deaths was also lower than average coverage in the NHIS comparison cohorts with or without high-risk conditions (Table 3). Estimated VE was 51% (95% CI, 31% to 67%) among children with high-risk medical conditions and 65% (95% CI, 47% to 78%) among those without high-risk conditions, similar to VE estimated via NIS-Flu. VE point estimates were lower among children with high-risk conditions compared with those without high-risk conditions in most analyses, but CIs widely overlapped. Among children with high-risk conditions, VE estimates were statistically significant (95% CIs not overlapping 0) only for children aged 5 to 12 years. Estimated VE was statistically significant for 3 of 4 seasons among both children with and without high-risk conditions, for influenza A virus infections among both groups of children, and for influenza B virus infections among children without high-risk conditions.

TABLE 3

Percentage Vaccinated Among Influenza-Associated Pediatric Deaths Compared With NHIS Sample According to High-Risk Status, With VE Estimates by Season and Age Group

Table 4 compares the prevalence of high-risk conditions and uptake of influenza vaccination among influenza-associated pediatric deaths and children in the MarketScan database (including an average of >6 million children aged <18 years during the 4 influenza seasons). Vaccination coverage in MarketScan among children aged <18 years by high-risk group ranged from 27% among those with no high-risk condition to 45% among children with ≥2 high-risk conditions (Table 4). Prevalence of high-risk conditions was higher among pediatric deaths compared with the MarketScan cohort, and vaccination rates were lower among pediatric deaths for most high-risk groups.

TABLE 4

Prevalence of High-Risk Conditions and Influenza Vaccination Among Children With Influenza-Associated Death and Children in MarketScan Commercial Claims Database, 2010–2014

In sensitivity analysis treating deaths with unknown vaccination status as unvaccinated, overall VE increased to 74% for the NIS-Flu cohort, 73% for the NHIS cohort without high-risk conditions, and 50% for the MarketScan cohort without high-risk conditions (Table 5). Alternatively, assuming 10% overestimation of vaccination by parental report in the survey data led to estimates of 56% with NIS-Flu and 58% with the NHIS no high-risk cohort. MarketScan estimates treating deaths with unknown vaccination status as unvaccinated were similar to NHIS estimates assuming 20% overestimation of coverage by parental report. VE estimates among children with high-risk conditions were lower than among those without high-risk conditions for the MarketScan and NHIS cohorts. Estimated VE among children with high-risk conditions remained statistically significant; NHIS coverage estimates were decreased by 10%, whereas that among children without high-risk conditions remained significant when NHIS estimates were decreased by 20%.

TABLE 5

Sensitivity Analysis for VE Estimates With Adjustments to Case and Comparison Cohort Vaccination Status

Discussion

We used national surveillance data on laboratory-confirmed influenza deaths and 3 comparison cohorts over 4 influenza seasons to estimate the effectiveness of influenza vaccination to prevent influenza-associated pediatric deaths. Best estimates based on NHIS survey data suggested that vaccination reduced the risk of influenza-associated death by half among children with high-risk conditions and by nearly two-thirds among children without high-risk conditions. Despite high prevalence (53%) of underlying conditions that increase risk of severe influenza-related complications, only 1 in 4 children who died with laboratory-confirmed influenza had been vaccinated. These results reinforce the need to increase influenza vaccination coverage, especially among children at increased risk of influenza-related complications and death.

To our knowledge, this is the first study to use laboratory-confirmed outcomes to investigate influenza VE against influenza-associated deaths. Observational studies that have used nonspecific outcomes, such as all-cause mortality, have often overestimated effects of influenza vaccination on mortality in older adults.²⁰–²² Estimates of VE against death from this analysis were similar to VE against medically attended influenza among pediatric patients for the same seasons. For 2011—2012 through 2013—2014 seasons, estimated VE against medically attended influenza ranged from 45% to 57% among young children (ages 6 months–8 years) and from 39% to 58% among older children (ages 9–17 years).²³–²⁶ In addition, estimated VE against severe life-threatening influenza among children admitted to PICUs during the 2010—2011 and 2011—2012 seasons was 74%.²⁷ VE against medically attended influenza has been used in models to estimate deaths averted by influenza vaccination.²⁸ Results of this analysis support the use of VE against medically attended influenza to estimate deaths averted by influenza vaccination.

Case–cohort analyses have previously been used to estimate influenza VE against laboratory-confirmed influenza,²⁹ effectiveness of seasonal influenza vaccine against influenza A(H1N1)pdm09–associated illness,³⁰ and risk factors for hospitalization and death due to influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 infection.³¹ In the main analyses, VE estimates were based on comparisons with NHIS and NIS-Flu, the 2 surveys used to measure influenza vaccine coverage among US children. NHIS includes coverage estimates among children with high-risk conditions, and NIS-Flu, with its larger sample size, provides state-level vaccination coverage. NHIS has been considered the most representative source for influenza vaccination coverage estimates among children¹⁵ and is used as the data source to track progress toward Healthy People 2020 goals.³² VE estimates based on NIS-Flu were similar to those based on the NHIS cohort without high-risk conditions.

This study highlights the importance of annual influenza vaccination for children, especially those with underlying high-risk medical conditions. Previous reports have highlighted the high prevalence of underlying high-risk conditions among children who die of influenza-related complications, including neurologic disorders and conditions associated with underlying chromosomal abnormalities and genetic syndromes.³,⁷,³³ Although children with high-risk conditions in both the NHIS and MarketScan data were more likely than children without high-risk conditions to be vaccinated, vaccination coverage among children at high risk remained below the Healthy People 2020 target of 70% during these seasons.³² Because of the higher risk of severe complications and influenza-associated death among children with underlying conditions, vaccination is especially important for these children. Previous reports have also highlighted the occurrence of influenza-associated death in previously healthy children with no reported high-risk conditions.³,³⁴ The current study indicates that although VE estimates tended to be higher among children without underlying high-risk conditions, significant protection was demonstrated for both groups of children for most seasons.

This analysis is subject to several limitations. Coverage estimates from NIS-Flu and NHIS rely on the accuracy of parental report of influenza vaccination, which has been found to overestimate provider report of coverage.¹⁸ Overreporting may be more common for adolescents and children with high-risk conditions.¹⁹ The MarketScan database included only privately insured children, and vaccination rates based on insurance claims of influenza vaccination were lower than those based on reported vaccination for the NHIS cohort. However, MarketScan estimates were also lower than observed vaccination rates (53%–56% among children aged 6 months–8 years and 37%– 43% among those aged 9–17 years) among influenza-negative children enrolled in the outpatient Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness network from 2011—2012 through 2013—2014.²³–²⁵ Sensitivity analysis suggested that vaccination still provided protection against death, assuming 10% to 20% overreporting in NHIS, which resulted in similar estimates to comparisons with MarketScan cohorts. An alternative source of comparison coverage would be immunization information systems, but reporting of influenza vaccination for children is not mandatory in all states.³⁵ The majority of pediatric deaths with unknown vaccination status had no documentation of influenza vaccination in immunization information systems and were probably unvaccinated; sensitivity analyses treating these deaths as unvaccinated resulted in higher VE estimates. Vaccination coverage in the comparison cohorts was probably intermediate between estimates based on parental report and those based on insurance claims.¹⁸ Finally, our analysis excluded deaths among infants who became eligible for vaccination after November 1 of each season and included partially vaccinated children; partial vaccination provided no protection against severe influenza in a study conducted among children with influenza admitted to PICUs.²⁷

Results of this study suggest that vaccination reduced the risk of influenza-associated death among children and adolescents and add to the evidence of benefits of influenza vaccination for children. Annual vaccination is an important strategy to prevent influenza and influenza-associated complications and deaths. These results support current recommendations for annual influenza vaccination for all children ≥6 months of age.

Acknowledgments

We thank the influenza surveillance coordinators for their contributions to this study and all the clinicians, medical examiners, and local, state, and territorial health department colleagues who contributed to the surveillance of pediatric influenza-associated deaths.

Footnotes

-   Accepted February 7, 2017.

Address correspondence to Brendan Flannery, PhD, Influenza Division, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Rd NE, MS A-32, Atlanta, GA 30329. E-mail: bif4{at}cdc.gov
FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: The authors have indicated they have no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.

FUNDING: No external funding. The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have indicated they have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

-

    Copyright © 2017 by the American Academy of Pediatrics

question: What format is this text?

answer: An academic report of a scientific study.

question: What is the subject of the study?

answer: The role of the flu vaccine in reducing the risk of flu-related death in children and adolescents.

question: How many authors are listed?

answer: Twelve.

question: What are the conclusions of the study?

answer: The use of an influenza vaccine shows reduced risk of flu-related deaths in children and adolescents.

question: Are there any conflicts of interest involved?

answer: No.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: The scientific report assesses the role of the influenza vaccine in reducing the risk of flu-related death in children and adolescents in the United States. By conducting a case-cohort analysis, the authors use Bayesian methods to determine that the statistics show the use of a vaccine reduces risk of (and can potentially prevent) flu-related deaths in children and adolescents.


split: train

text:
The most comprehensive archive of the artist Vaginal Creme Davis is on YouTube, where fans have uploaded hundreds of clips of her videos and performances. “That Fertile Feeling,” a video from 1986, follows Davis and her close friend, Fertile LaToya Jackson, after Fertile’s water breaks while the two women are watching television. At the hospital, Fertile is turned away because she doesn’t have state health insurance. Eventually, at the apartment of Fertile’s boyfriend (who is always naked), Davis coaches Fertile through giving birth to eleven-tuplets. After a successful delivery, Fertile rides away on a skateboard down a Los Angeles street, Davis calling after her.

“I was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays. I am a societal threat,” the artist Vaginal Davis, seen here in 2002, said.Photograph by John Vlautin

“Fertile!” Davis yells, “You’re so fertile! You’re the first woman in the world to give birth to eleven-tuplets!”

Fertile’s delivery is an ambiguous miracle: both because of the large quantity of babies, and how Davis and Fertile perform an uncertain womanhood. Are they mocking the fact that they have bodies that may not be able to give birth, and that are turned away at hospitals? Or are they mocking a cultural fixation on pregnancy as the marker of womanhood? Either way, the two artists parody an entire epoch of divine births. Maybe Mary was a virgin; just as possible, perhaps, is that she was trans.

Davis’s new exhibition at Invisible-Exports, “Come On Daughter Save Me,” includes sixteen blood-red wall sculptures. Like her performance and video work, Davis’s sculptures do not ascribe to distinctions between artist and hobbyist, sacred and amateur. She made these objects in Berlin, where she has lived for almost a decade, out of quick-drying clay and whatever else was lying around: red nail polish, hydrogen peroxide, perfume, witch hazel. Some are melted faces; others look like genitals that you’ve never seen before. All could be the work of an ancient-maker or an obsessive child. She doesn’t consider herself “a sculptress like Louise Nevelson” but has always made objects to keep herself amused.

The show’s title, “Come On Daughter Save Me,” is taken from a phrase the artist’s mother said to her often when she was a child. According to Davis, her black Creole mother—then forty-five years old—met her twenty-year-old Mexican-American father only once: under the table at a Ray Charles concert at the Hollywood Palladium, sometime in the early nineteen-sixties. The artist was born from this encounter.

Davis was born intersex, at a time when doctors assigned children with her anatomy a gender of “male” or “female” through surgical intervention. (These procedures persist today, though at lower rates.) Her mother refused to let doctors operate. So Davis grew up with the word “male” on her birth certificate but with her mother and four older sisters referring to her by female pronouns. Their household in South Central Los Angeles, Davis said, was a “Druid Wiccan witches’ coven” where her identity as a daughter was not questioned but affirmed.

Davis got her start in L.A.’s predominately white punk scene as the front woman of an art-punk band called the Afro Sisters, where she referenced and drew inspiration from iconic black radicals like Angela Davis, after whom she named herself. Throughout the eighties, Vaginal Davis developed multiple personas and performed incongruous identities. She was a black revolutionary drag queen, a teen-age Chicana pop star, a white-supremacist militiaman. These characters often referred to one another: against her better judgment, Vaginal Davis pined for Clarence, a rabid white supremacist; Clarence, too, harbored secret affections. Their dynamic caricatured that illicit desire that exists despite—or, perhaps, because of—racism. This kind of political critique, simultaneously absurd and hyper-real, made Davis a muse to a generation of queer writers and critics, like the late José Esteban Muñoz, who died in 2013.

Muñoz was the first person to use the term “terrorist drag” to describe the work of Davis—in particular, the way she interrogated rather than obscured her cultural otherness. Referring to herself as a drag queen, a hermaphrodite, and a “sexual repulsive,” Davis used her performances to critique the many contexts in which she was undesirable. “I don’t fit into mainstream society, but I also don’t really fit into ‘alternative culture,’ either,” she told me recently. “I was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays. I am a societal threat.”

“Terrorist drag,” as performed by Davis and theorized by Muñoz, feels especially relevant in a security age when people continue to be surveilled due to their gender identities. In 2003, amid post-9/11 overhauls, the Department of Homeland Security warned the Transportation Security Administration that “male bombers may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny.” In airports, trans people continue to be pulled aside at far higher rates than cis people: body parts like a trans woman’s penis or a trans man’s chest-binder register on body scanners as “anomalies.” Just last week, the Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz incorrectly suggested in a press conference that the attacker behind a recent mass shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood was “a transgendered leftist activist.”

Concurrent with this rhetoric and policy, a generation of gay Americans appears to be benefitting from rights and protections that were an impossibility for previous generations. The laws that didn’t save the elders, it seems, are going to save some of the children. The title of Davis’s show, “Come On Daughter Save Me,” is a bittersweet plea, and a cautionary warning. As she told me last week, “You can’t change institutions from the inside, as they always wind up changing you.” This is why she is content with her place as an outsider of the institutional art world, and of culture at large. She does what she wants, makes what she wants, and mocks who she wants; she rejects inclusion, and its limiting factors.

Davis continues to be prolific: in addition to the sixteen wall sculptures, “Come On Daughter Save Me” included a radical re-staging of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at N.Y.U.’s 80WSE Gallery, in collaboration with the director Susanne Sachsse. “The Magic Flute” was the first opera Davis saw, at the age of seven, at the famed Shrine Auditorium, in South Central Los Angeles. Around this time, she was an active youth member at the Theocratic Ministry School, a division of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There, she learned what she liked (the historical significance of the Bible, the principles of rhetoric) and rejected what she didn’t: namely, any doctrine that did not make room for her entire existence. Davis is not religious, but her work is a sacred mythology for the outsider.

question: Summarize a very important message found in this article.

answer: A very important message found in this article is how a generation of gay Americans appear to be benefitting from rights and protections that were an impossibility for previous generations. The article describes the rhetoric and policy of how gay Americans are treated now. There are laws now that can save elders. The article emphasizes how you can't change institutions from the inside, because they end up changing you.

question: Summarize how Davis's work was perceived.

answer: Davis's work was seen as "terrorist drag." Munoz was the first person to describe Davis's work that way. This term encompasses how people continued to be surveilled due to their gender identities.  Davis said she used her performances to critique the many contexts in which she was found undesirable.

question: If Davis was to have children, how would she encourage her children to accept their gender identities?


text:
The 2009 IIHF WORLD U18 CHAMPIONSHIP DIVISION I was an international under-18 ice hockey competition organised by the International Ice Hockey Federation. Both Division I tournaments made up the second level of the 2009 IIHF World U18 Championships. The Group A tournament was played in Minsk, Belarus, and the Group B tournament was played in Asiago, Italy. Belarus and Latvia won the Group A and B tournaments respectively and gained promotion to the Top Division of the 2010 IIHF World U18 Championships.

Group A

The Group A tournament was played in Minsk, Belarus at the Ice Palace from 6 to 12 April 2009.

Final Standings

  Team   GP   W   OTW   OTL   L   GF   GA   GD    PTS
  ------ ---- --- ----- ----- --- ---- ---- ----- -----
         5    4   1     0     0   23   6    17    14
         5    2   2     0     1   25   15   10    10
         5    3   0     1     1   19   18   1     10
         5    2   0     1     2   16   21   −5    7
         5    1   0     1     3   13   16   −3    4
         5    0   0     0     5   7    29   −22   0

_ is promoted to Top Division for the 2010 IIHF World U18 Championships_
_ is relegated to Division II for the 2010 IIHF World U18 Championships_

Results

All times local

Group B

The Group B tournament was played in Asiago, Italy at PalaOdegar from 29 March to 4 April 2009.

Final Standings

  Team   GP   W   OTW   OTL   L   GF   GA   GD    PTS
  ------ ---- --- ----- ----- --- ---- ---- ----- -----
         5    4   0     0     1   18   10   8     12
         5    3   0     1     1   15   7    8     10
         5    2   2     0     1   21   20   1     10
         5    1   1     1     2   15   17   −2    6
         5    0   2     1     2   13   16   −3    5
         5    0   0     2     3   8    20   −12   2

_ is promoted to Top Division for the 2010 IIHF World U18 Championships_
_ is relegated to Division II for the 2010 IIHF World U18 Championships_

Results

All times local

Leading scorers

  Player                Country   GP   G   A   Pts   +/-   PIM
  --------------------- --------- ---- --- --- ----- ----- -----
  Bartlomiej Neupauer             5    5   6   11    +8    6
  Kacper Guzik                    5    6   4   10    +7    35
  Benjamin Nemes                  5    5   4   9     +1    0
  Damian Kapica                   5    3   6   9     +8    2
  Kevin Puschnik                  5    4   4   8     +0    4
  Richard Hardi                   5    2   6   8     +0    4
  Janos Hari                      5    3   4   7     +3    6
  Dovydas Streckis                5    2   5   7     +0    10
  Victor Barbero                  5    5   1   6     −1    6
  Nikolai Suslo                   5    3   3   6     +5    6

Top goaltenders

  Player                     Country   GP   Min      GAA    SV%    SO
  -------------------------- --------- ---- -------- ------ ------ ----
  Lasse Jensen                         4    230:48   0.50   .980   2
  Andrei Novikov                       3    150:19   0.80   .956   2
  Bartlomiej Niesluchowski             3    181:28   1.98   .934   1
  Jānis Kalniņš                        3    144:43   1.66   .933   1
  Ren Yamaguchi                        4    253:45   2.60   .929   0

title: 2009 IIHF World U18 Championship Division I

question: What does "IIHF" stand for?

answer: "IIHF" stands for International Ice Hockey Federation.

question: Where was the group A tournament played?

answer: The group A tournament was played in Minsk, Belarus.

question: When was the group B tournament played?

answer: The group B tournament was played from March 29 to April 4, 2009.

question: Who won group A?

answer: Belarus won group A.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: The 2009 IIHF World U18 Championship Division I was an international under-18 ice hockey competition. It was organized into two groups, group A and B. Belarus won group A and Latvia won group B.


text:
_NOVOSPHINGOBIUM ENDOPHYTICUM_ is a Gram-negative, rod-shaped and aerobic bacterium from the genus of Novosphingobium which has been isolated from the roots of the plant Glycyrrhiza uralensis from Yuli County in China.[1][2]

[1]

[2]

title: Novosphingobium endophyticum

question: Where is this bacterium from?

answer: It is from Yuli County in China.

question: What does gram-negative mean?

answer: It can be inferred that this bacterium tests negative on the gram test.

question: What does rod-shaped mean?

answer: It means that this bacterium is in the shape of a rod.

question: What is the significance of this bacterium?

answer: Novosphingobium endophyticum is a bacterium that has been isolated from the roots of the plant Glycyrrhiza uralensis from Yuli County in China.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: Novosphingobium endophyticum has been isolated from the roots of the Glycyrrhiza uralensis from Yuli County in China.


text:
I wake up to blood rushing down a cut in my hand. It feels hot. How can that be? I taste it. Metal. Just how blood tastes, I've tasted it a few times.

I stand up, and survey the room. I see a few corpses, and choke back some vomit. They were cut open in different places. Skull, stomach, chest. Chunks of brains on the floor, kidneys, intestines, and livers decorating the room. Hearts and lungs kept in a clear plastic container. I struggle to find an exit. I find a light switch, but I won't turn it on. Who knows what else I'll see, other than the already brutal images that are burned in my memory?

I see the door, past some brain chunks, and walk towards it. I open it. Finally. Sunlight. I look down and see bloodstains on the sidewalk. It spells our "You're next" on the floor, upside down. I infer the person who did this failed in gutting me, since I was clearly alive. I forgot about my cut. It had stopped bleeding, but my hand was now pale, cold, and numb. I look down, and see my shoes covered in blood. I also see my shirt and pants covered in blood.

I take a look back in the room, and see the floor was covered in blood. I close the door again, and now, people start to pass by. One person noticed me and asked what happened. I told him I woke up in the room behind me. "What room?" he asked. I black out. I wake up in the same room, with the person I had just talked to. he was beside me, dissected like the others. I was shaken up by this. I go out, and check my pockets for a phone. Ah, there it is.

I looked through it, and see morbid messages, talking about gutting people from an unknown sender. It also included eating their veins, arteries, and capillaries. I wiped my mouth. The blood on my hand increased. I had blood on my mouth... I was the one who ate their parts.... I was the monster.

(If you could give some feedback, I would appreaciate it a lot. I want to improve this story a whole lot.)

title: The Rooms -Part 1-

question: How did the protagonist's hand get injured?

answer: That information can't be found.

question: How does the story end?

answer: The protagonist discovers that they are the one who killed and ate all those people.

question: Who is the protagonist?

answer: The protagonist is unnamed--little is known about them.

question: What does the protagonist find when they survey the room?

answer: They see a few corpses, cut open in different places. The floor is covered in chunks of brains, kidneys, intestines, and livers.

question: Where does the story take place?

answer: The story takes place in some sort of room, but it's not clear where that room is located.

question: Write a ~4 sentence summary.

answer: The protagonist wakes up in a room littered with corpses and strewn with body parts. They exit the room and try to tell a man about what they find, only to black out and wind up back in the room. The man is there with them and has also been murdered. The protagonist then finds blood on their mouth and realizes they were the one who killed and ate all those people.


text:
	Harry woke up last Tuesday morning. This wasn't a particularly unusual event, as he had woken up every morning in a similar manner for thirty-five years. He had developed the habit of turning the alarm off several times before crawling out of bed, and Tuesday was no different. He stumbled to the bathroom, scratched his stubble and emptied his bladder. All typical morning activities. He made his coffee, smoked a cigarette, and thumbed through the paper. Nothing atypical.
	He took a shower and pondered his existence. While this may have been an ordinary action at other times, Harry had come to a new conclusion: his life was no longer worth living.
	Harry was a thinker, and knew to take each thought with care. He kept this thought and studied it. There was validity to the thought. Harry's life was never really worth living; but, it wasn't really worth dieing for, either. He was typically caught in a penumbra of apathy.
	He finished his shower, and returned to his newspaper. Another school shooting. At a preschool, this time. The culprit was a war veteran. He unloaded his fully automatic assault rifle into the kids while they napped. The teachers were unharmed; they were fucking a few blocks away in a rented car.
	The shooter then walked down the street to a retirement home where he murdered three elderly women who were sitting on their porch. On Mondays, they liked to drink tea and knit. They found it quaint. The veteran found killing innocent people quaint. It takes all kinds.
	In his final act, the armed man walked into the main office and pulled the pin on a grenade. Twenty-five people died that day. Twelve children, ten adults, and three old ladies. But who's keeping a tally?
	Harry didn't finish the article. There had been another shooting a week ago. And another not too far beyond that. Harry had become numb to the slaughter. He grabbed his coat and drove to work, at a minor chemical manufacturer. He was a bench-chemist. He mostly cleaned glassware for people who stayed in school longer than him. But it was a job, thankless and hopeless.
	As Harry swirled a dilute sulfuric acid and potassium dichromate solution in an erlenmeyer flask, his earlier idea bubbled back into his brain. His life really wasn't worth living. The other people in the lab weren't particularly friendly. They all had families and friends and things to do. Harry often wished he had things to do.
	He wasn't an unattractive individual, but he wasn't attractive either. This enabled to go through life practically invisible. Most people never knew he was ever around. Even as a child, his family barely acknowledged his existence. He'd often have to walk home from practice or work or school simply because his parents had forgotten they had had three children.
	Once, Santa forgot about him on Christmas. He never forgave Santa. Another time, his family celebrated his birthday three weeks early. No one could remember when he was born.
	While he was studying chemistry, his parents divorced and remarried. His cousin had over-dosed on benzos. Three friends committed group suicide. His mother suffered a mental collapse and was beaten to death by her abusive meth-addicted second husband. His older brother got married, had children, and got a divorce. Harry didn't learn any of this until five years ago. It took his extended family over ten years to realize they hadn't told him.
	Harry didn't care much about his family. He was disowned by his father when he was sixteen because he smoked pot.
	Harry knew he had a gun at home. He'd stick the barrel to the side of his head and throw in the towel.
	As Harry finished his work and walked to his car, a stranger followed him into the parking lot. When Harry unlocked his car, the individual stuck the barrel of his gun to his ribcage and demanded all of Harry's possessions. Clothes, car and all.
	Harry laughed. "I'm going home to kill myself. Shoot me if you have to. You'll only hasten the process and preserve a shred of my dignity." The man shot him in the abdomen and fled. A woman heard the blast and came over to investigate.
	She saw Harry slumped on the ground, next to his car. She called an ambulance. She walked  next to Harry as he groaned. He was bleeding, as one could expect. She sat down and held his head. She stroked his hair. She said everything was going to be okay. She told him her name was Maggie. Well, Margaret, actually, but that's the name her mother used to call her when she was in trouble. Maggie didn't like that name.
	The ambulance arrived and Maggie rode with him. She lied and said she was his wife. Harry had never even been in a relationship longer than a week. Easy come, easy go.
	Maggie waited with Harry until someone close to him showed up. She was sure he had someone who would care if he got shot. Doesn't everybody?
	Nobody came asking for Harry.
	She stayed overnight, and read out loud from the book she had on her. She loved reading books out loud. Still no one arrived looking for Harry.
	Luckily, the bullet had missed the vital parts of Harry, and he was in no mortal danger. He was wounded and sore, certainly, but a far cry from dead. He woke disoriented and vaguely coherent.
	Harry wasn't a religious man, but he thought he had reached the equivalent of an after-life. He saw Maggie. An angel, certainly. The rising sun silhouetted her frizzed hair giving the illusion of a halo. Harry was glad to have seen her. Harry liked seeing beautiful things.
	"Where am I?" He asked towards Maggie.
	"The hospital."
	"Oh."
	Harry relaxed into his bedding and closed his eyes.
	"Is there anyone I should contact for you? I'm sure someone's worried sick about you."
	"Nope. What you see is what you get."
	Maggie moved next to Harry and held his hand. "I'm Maggie. It's going to be okay."
	Harry smiled. Maybe things were finally turning for the better. "I've got to go to work. I'll be back this evening." She left, and passed a medical school student on her way in.
	The medical school intern stared at a chart, then looked at the name on Harry's chart.
        "Harry is like Barry. It must just be a typo." The intern thought to herself. She attached the I.V. line into Harry's arm.
	Harry died later that afternoon. He had a major allergic reaction to the penicillin that the intern had pumped into his arm. Easy come, easy go.

title: Last Tuesday

question: Who are the major characters in the story?

answer: Harry, the robber, Maggie

question: What does Harry read about in the newspaper?

answer: A school shooting at a preschool, perpetrated by a war veteran, who then went on to murder three elderly women at a retirement home before detonating a grenade in the main office.

question: What happens to Harry at the end of the story?

answer: He dies from an allergic reaction to the penicillin the medical school intern accidentally injects him with.

question: Describe Harry's feelings toward Santa Claus.

answer: He has never forgiven Santa for the one Christmas where Santa forgot about him.

question: What does Harry do for a living?

answer: Harry is a bench-chemist for a minor chemical manufacturer.

question: Why does Harry get shot?

answer: Someone tries to rob him at gunpoint on the way home from work, and he encourages the robber to shoot him.

question: Write a ~5 sentence summary.

answer: Harry wakes up and reads about a school shooting in the paper. He reflects on various family tragedies and how everyone always seems to forget about him. On his way home from work, a robber shoots him in the abdomen. A woman named Maggie finds him and accompanies him to the hospital, and he wonders if his luck is finally changing. A medical school intern then confuses him for another patient and administers penicillin to him, which he has an allergic reaction to and dies.


text:
*Hello, I wrote this quickly at work this morning after I dreamt about it. Please let me know what you think and any comments or critiques you may have are welcomed.*

**Not Quite Paradise**

It was hot in the garage; the dryer had only just stopped running so the heat hadn’t left yet not that it would matter. Actually come to think of it, it was hot everywhere. Even stepping outside and taking a deep breath feels like a drag on a cigarette without the nicotine. Sweat dripped down my face and back. I should have been used to it by now after having been here for almost a year, but it hasn’t gotten any better.

I pull the clothes from the machine with both arms being careful not to touch the scalding metal sides. I go to close the dryer door when my eyes spot a lone black sock at the back of the dryer. I reach for it. A pulling sensation, like that of two magnets held close together begins to tug at my fingers, then my hands, then my arms, and eventually the rest of my body. The world turns bright white. A loud rushing sound fills my ears.

“Oh god…Not now, I’m not dressed for th---“

*Ooopppfff!* The air escapes from my lungs as I tumble face down onto the black and white tiles of a familiar kitchen. The sudden coldness of the floor against my bare skin sends a chill down my back.
An even more familiar voice breaks the silence, “Good, you’re here. I’m trying to get this jar of pickled radish open, but the lid is stuck. I even ran it under hot water for two minutes.”

“You’re twenty-three years old and you still force me to come here to open a jar for you?” I say while still lying on the ground. Looking up, my eyes passed by pink fluffy puppy slippers, long slender legs, a short light blue apron, and finally the face of a beautiful young woman with long brown hair who was clearly not in the mood for games judging by her scowl.

“Yisssshhhh!” she hissed stamping her puppy slippers on the ground. “If you aren’t going to make yourself useful then you can just go back and stay there.”

“Gimme that jar,” I tell her, picking myself up off the ground. Her kitchen is nice and cool; a stark contrast to my hot and humid garage.

Standing up I am almost a head taller than she is, but the gaze from her large brown eyes makes me feel small and insignificant. She hands me the jar, our fingers brush and I can feel a cool pleasant tingling where our skin touch. I make my way over to one of the drawers, fish out a spoon, and begin using it to tap the edges of the lid, loosening its grip on the jar. It finally pops open and I hand her the pickled radish.

“What are you making anyway?” I ask.

“Gimbap (Korean sushi) you want some?”

My stomach rumbles. It has been a long time since I’ve eaten anything substantial. “Sure! I mean…is it alright? It is allowed?”

“Just sit there,” she says pointing to a stool at the counter.

For the next few minutes I watch her while she prepares the food. She hums, wiggles her hips, and bobs her head as she cooks. I cannot help but stare. Gradually my eyes force their way off of her and towards the window. It is so clear there I checked twice to be sure there was anything there to begin with. Outside the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and tall palm trees sway back and forth against a peaceful ocean in the background. It was beautfiul and I get to be a tiny part of it today.

“Done!” she exclaims. Spinning around she reveals a plate of delicious looking Gimbap with a little mayo dressing on the side for dipping. A small pile of kimchi sat on one side of the plate.

“Say ahhh” she says picking up a piece with a pair of chopsticks and maneuvering it towards my face.

“Ahhh” I open my mouth. As the roll touches my tongue I can feel my body jerk violently backwards as I fall off the stool. The magnetic feeling fills my body once again, while darkness fills my vision. A high-pitched siren is all I can hear.

I wake up with my head in the dryer. It is hot. Beads of sweat have already formed on my forehead. I chew the Gimbap that has somehow made its way into my mouth.

“Delicious.” I whisper while swallowing slowly, savoring every morsel. Sighing, I grab the lone sock, put it in the basket, and head out the door back into an equally hot and humid house. Out the window the sky is filled with dark ominous looking clouds. The trees forever smoldering with fiery ash caked on the ground.

This is how my days are spent. Today I was her jar opener, yesterday a deckhand her boat, and tomorrow I might be her maid. I am her personal assistant making her life whatever heaven she chooses, while I serve out my eternity in hell.

title: Not Quite Paradise

question: Summarize the positive events in the story.

answer: The narrator's experiences in the woman's world are positive, especially in comparison to the hell of the narrator's own world of residence. These experiences include: the cooler temperature, the attractive company of the young woman, the view of a clear sky and beach, and the taste of Gimbap that makes it back to the narrator's world when they are forced to return.

question: Summarize the relationship between the characters.

answer: The narrator is subservient to the woman, obliged to attend to the woman in whichever role is required. These roles include deckhand, handyman, etc. The narrator is resigned to this as their eternity and the woman seems satisfied with the arrangement.

question: What does the story say about sashimi?

question: What does the story say about hell?

answer: The narrator claims to have spent the past year in hell, which is described as extremely hot and humid. From here, the narrator is magically pulled to serve a woman in heaven at her whim. It is not clear if this is a literal version of heaven and hell, but that is the most likely interpretation.

question: What does the story say about snow?


text:
I know I had come across true love once, and I know it because the feeling still burns in my bones. I met him at the age of 4, his name was Elijah. Never in a million years would I have thought that I would see him fade into colorless dust, brushing away to coat the earth and never be found, leaving his family like a shipwreck in a never-ending tide. Elijah, oh how much I could have done for you, how much I could have done to save you. But in my seven year old shoes, I stood paralyzed as menacing arms gripped mine, with a scolding voice that replayed over and over in my head. One day, we were going to stare deep into each-others eyes, telling ourselves it was where we wanted to be for the rest of our lives. We were going to run in our adult shoes, playing tag, until our legs didn't work anymore. That was our true fate, not this. Nothing would have burnt us to the ground. But now I live with a demon always sitting on my shoulder. He likes to laugh at me for what I've done, reminding me of the horrors over again, just as soon as I try to move on. He binds me with chains of silence, he binds me with a closed mind. He draws the man who burnt my clothes, the man who burnt your life. Elijah, I could have saved you.
 Elijah... One day, I hope you will forgive me.

But do you remember our last day together, Elijah? The one where we walked home from school through fields of gold, spinning the earth beneath our feet? Do you remember the sun and how it melted the clouds beneath it, revealing the freckles on our faces? Our hands intertwined unconsciously, as our tiny hearts beat like racing drums. We ran until our laughter knocked us down, and stayed until the sky was coated with marmalade. If only we could have frozen the moment and never moved on. If only we could have both stayed in our seven year old bodies. If only I had never been given the opportunity to grow up alone.

 I wish our hands stayed intertwined the whole way through. I wish we closed our eyes, and imagined the sun was melting us into the fields of gold. I wish my little legs didn't learn to escape. I wish it was me instead of you, so that you could have run home to your family, letting them know everything was okay.
 And in this moment, I wish the fires that covered you could dry my tears.

I searched for you in the eyes of the sun, in the dancing wheat that feathered my eyes, in the butterfly wings that flapped my hair gently behind my ears. I searched for you in the cotton tails of the milk weeds, parting from their buds, to say hello as soon as they said goodbye, soon brushing through familiar cornstalks, to reveal your marble face. Oh Elijah, how I wait for the day your smile will bring the field back to life, but all I see are charcoal dusted, broken stalks, with a demon dancing on top of a mountain of ember lit ashes, acting as if nothing were wrong, as if this place were a sanctuary of good dreams, where kids like us could play all day and all night long and never be taken away.  Elijah, I can't look at those milk weeds anymore, because they always say hello, and I never got to say good-bye.

The heat of Summer always reminded me of the comfort of my mother, but now, it greets me like the trees of Winter. Somehow I still stay horrendously captivated in Summer's reign, climbing through Peter as you once did, with trembling soles that found it hard to grip his bark, hoping to keep balance long enough to pick a peach that matched the colors of the run down sky. Remember when you would take a big bite, back cradled against Peter's torso, trying to caress the crescent moon into the empty space? I guess the real question is, how could you ever forget it? You were my summer, Elijah, and now it's nothing but a bittersweet memory with an ending that left me with a dark, hollow core that can't be sealed with even the purest words of sympathy or remorse. … It's a nightmare that makes it hard to live. A nightmare that I can't seem to forget.

title: [Elijah]...Continued. Criticism welcomed.

question: What happened to Elijah that the narrator mourns?

answer: When they were seven years old, Elijah died in an accident. It seems he died in a fire. The narrator managed to escape but Elijah did not. The narrator harbors guilt because they survived while their childhood friend died.

question: How did the narrator feel about Elijah?

answer: The narrator met Elijah at the age of 4. They call Elijah their true love. They mourn the loss of Elijah, saying never in a million years "would I have thought that I would see him fade into colorless dust."


text:
While opening up a fuel dock at the Maryland Yacht Club in Pasadena a maintenance worker discovered a 5-year-old bald eagle fighting for its life.

Ernie Jenkins told local media he saw the exhausted bird flapping around in the water near the club, where Maryland's Rock Creek empties into the Chesapeake Bay. Using a net, Jenkins was able to lift the bird out of the water to safety.

"I didn't want to watch him drown," Jenkins told local paper The Capital Gazette. "If I didn't get him out, he would have died and that was it."

Tests showed the eagle was suffering from a respiratory illness and lead poisoning, which can lead to brain damage. A rescue team has the bird under surveillance while it is being treated.

“He might of [sic] got a rabbit that had pellets in him, or a fishing weight off of someone’s fishing line,” Jenkins told CBS Baltimore of the possible cause of the lead poisoning.

"[The eagle's] condition at this point is poor and our prognosis is that we're hopeful, but also trying to be realistic in that we don't know if he's going to make it," Lisa Smith, executive director of the rescue center helping the eagle recover, told the Gazette.

Previously on the threatened and endangered species list, the bald eagle is now a common sight throughout Maryland, especially near the Chesapeake Bay. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources estimates that more than 500 pairs of bald eagles nest in the state each year.

Jenkins is optimistic that the injured bird could soon rejoin the state's wild eagle population.

“If he turns for the worst at least I tried. I gotta try you know, but I would love to see him back. I would love to see him back,” Jenkins told CBS Baltimore.

Calling all HuffPost superfans!

Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter

question: What does the rescue center really think about the chances of the bad eagle surviving?

answer: They are hopeful but not sure about the bird surviving its ordeal.


text:
BAYBULDA is a village in Sverdlovsk region located 30 km South-South-West from urban settlement Artie. It is a part of Malokarsinsk village council. Malokarsinsk rural council is located in the South-West of the Sverdlovsk region and Artinsk district. It borders with Bashkortostan, the length of borders is 33 kilometers, from the West – with the Sverdlovsk rural council, from the North – with Zlatoust rural administration. The distance to the district center Artie is 40 km.

History

Some time age the territory belonged to Bashkiria and then to Okinsk and Novozlatoustovsk districts. In 1869 the population of the village was 172 people. Baybulda was the oldest village of Artinsk region. It was named after the first settler – Paygelde (Paybolde) – Baybulda. The village was founded in 1740 by the people of Mari. Up to 1820, the aboriginal inhabitants were Bashkirians and people of Mari. The construction of a plant for the production of agricultural equipment in Artinsk begins in the 1780s.

Population and social structure

On 01.01.2016, the village's population is 153 people. The number of yards is 69. Categories of population are:

1.  Working-age population 83 people;
2.  Retired 41 people;
3.  Pupils 14 people.
4.  Children of preschool age 15 people.

The male working population is engaged in private part-time farming, or rotation-based work Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous districts and in Yekaterinburg. The female working population is engaged into private part-time farming, or works in social institutions, which are located in the neighboring villages. School-age children have studies at Asigulovo secondary schools. Transportation of children to school is by bus daily. There is 1 shop in the village. Mobile aid station visits the village every day.

Attractions

There are nine natural monuments on the territory of Artinsk urban; each of them has its unique importance and its unique beauty.

1.  Mountain Kashkabash (Romanov Uval) — a geological monument of nature of Federal significance, located two kilometers away from the village Kurki, on the right Bank of the river Ufa.
2.  Sabarsk landscape nature reserve — a reserved area of dark hardwood broad-leafed forests.
3.  Stone mould — a geomorphological nature monument, located on the right Bank of the river Ufa. It has an original deposition of rock conglomerates and sandstones.
4.  Berezovskaya dubrava — a botanical nature monument located near Berezovka village. It is an end point of the oak growth in Russia.
5.  Potashkinskaya dubrava — a botanical nature monument located near Potashka village. It is an end point of the oak growth in Russia.
6.  The area of growingstock — a botanical nature monument, located near Azhigulova village , in the floodplain of Ufa.
7.  Mountain feather-grass heath — a botanical nature monument located near Upper and Lower Bardym village.
8.  The area of mountain feather grass heaths — a botanical nature monument, located near Novyy Zlatoust village.
9.  The area of ginseng cultural planting – a botanical monument of nature, located in Komarovo village.

Notes and references

title: Baybulda

question: Where is Baybulda?

answer: Baybulda is in Sverdlovsk region.

question: What is the population of the village?

answer: As of 1 January 2016, the population of the village was 153.

question: When was the village founded?

answer: 1740

question: How big is the village?

answer: The village is 69 yards.

question: Write a ~6 sentence summary.

answer:
Baybulda is a village located in the Sverdlovsk region. It borders with Bachkortostan. The village was founded in 1740 by the people of Mari.

As of 2016, the population of the village is 153 people. The male working population is engaged in private part-time farming or rotation-based work, while the female population is engaged in either farming or in social institutions in the nearby villages.

The village has about nine natural monuments around it.


text:
August 26th, 2018 - 12:00 PM

[Death Cab for Cutie – Thank You For Today]

CLEAN AS A WHISTLE

Alt-rock mainstays Death Cab for Cutie have achieved something remarkable with their latest studio album, _Thank You For Today_, that they could perfectly sum up their record through its title and album art. Depicting a sky image within a larger border with some tricky shapes tossed in from clipart for flair, it is bland, poppy, upbeat and defeatedly functional. _Thank You For Today_ as a title sounds like a message on a greeting card. The album-title-over-sky effect looks like a trumped-up ripoff of the already boring album cover for LCD Soundsystem’s _American Dream_, which is a comparison _Thank You For Today_ would slobber at the mouth for. This new record, the ninth full-length studio effort by the five-piece, leans definitively into a contemporary pop sound, incorporating electronic elements into their sound, just like pretty much every other indie band over the past few years. Why beat against the current when you can swim right into it? Someday, someone is going to have to classify this ever-expanding field of indietronica, but this Death Cab for Cutie record is not that day.

To the credit of frontman Ben Gibbard and company, _Thank You For Today_ has a palpable current of energy running through its tight 38-minute running time. There’s hardly a wasted second across these ten tracks, but it must be said that some of the material filling in that space is questionable. The album opens with two energetic tracks, “I Dreamt We Spoke Again” and “Summer Years.” The latter is an album highlight with an unstoppable rhythm section, which offers a good introduction into the record’s sound. However, the record fails to pick up on its most interesting elements and immediately dives head first back into modern pop with the autotuned “Gold Rush,” which actually has some entertaining backing instrumentals at parts but is otherwise overwhelmed by grating vocals. Grating vocals are a running theme on _Thank You For Today_, along with lyrics that fail to break out of the community college poetry class mold, especially on the following track, “Your Hurricane,” which carries some real groaners like, “Heaven is just a hole in the sky,” and “…When your wreckage washes up on my shore…”

To the record’s credit all of the tracks are well-produced and contain a number of interesting ideas, but they more often than not feel overproduced, jumbling too many ideas together without fully developing any of them. And overlayed over all of that is auto-tuned singing that is not poorly used but quickly overstays its welcome, even as it takes up the majority of the record. This overproduction leaves _Thank You For Today_ feeling dryer than a bone. It is a shame because the tracks on this record are not boring, in fact, songs like “Northern Lights” and “Near/Far” are exciting, with simple drum beats and bass lines that work well together to create a tight, pop framework that just feels wasted being paired with lame-duck vocals and lyrics. The result is a track listing of songs that come across without personality or even a heart, which is disappointing from one of the pre-eminent emo-pop acts of the 2000s. The only thread tying anything together is Gibbard singing about the sky, or what the sky looks like, or what the sky represents–seriously there are at least three songs built around the image of the sky, which is just irritating by the end of the record as opposed to tying anything together. Even the most emo track on the record, “You Moved Away,” depicting a breakup of a relationship, is just not compelling relying on its emotional content.

Overall, it’s kind of like a boring Arctic Monkeys record without any British wit to bolster it. The feeling is just that, nine records in, the boys driving the Death Cab just were not inspired enough on this new record, preferring a product sharp, clean and poppy to the point of breaking.

question: Summarize the critic's sentiments about the album "Thank You for Today".

answer: The critic thinks that this album has a contemporary pop sound while testing limits-they both sound and do not sound like many of their contemporaries in the same genre.  The album is very current in that its sounds resemble the results of the sonic techniques favored by many similar bands. The critic says the album has a high production quality and have a stronger beat then they do lyrics. The gist is that the album is perfectly serviceable, but just that.

question: Summarize the author's general musical tastes, based on this review.

answer: One could ascertain that the

question: Explain what the reviewer finds remarkable about this album.

answer: The answer has a bit of irony in it. The author seems perplexed as to how Death Cab for Cutie-a band the author has liked quite a bit-managed to eek out an album that is so mediocre. The author likens the album to a greeting card-perfunctory; sans depth-which is remarkable because they achieved this mediocrity so seamlessly.


text:
Hybrid is the dominant cloud model, and it requires new management tools from a new crop of vendors, Forrester says

[hybrid cloud thinkstock]
 Thinkstock

As organizations increase their use of cloud services, Forrester principal analyst Dave Bartoletti says they're coming to this realization: No one platform can provide everything developers and IT operations professionals need.

According to a poll of global technology users, nearly two-thirds said they’re using more than one public and/or private cloud at the same time. As has been predicted for years, hybrid cloud has become a dominant deployment methodology. Organizations are combining public cloud resources with private cloud infrastructure, or multiple public clouds, or multiple private clouds. When they do so, an overlay management software for controlling all those assets can be very helpful, Bartoletti says.

For the first time Forrester has produced a Wave report examining the leading vendors in this hybrid cloud management market, and the crop of providers leading the pack could come as a surprise.

Bartoletti breaks the market down into two major categories. There’s a relatively new collection of vendors selling agnostic management platforms. Tools from RightScale, CliQr, Dell and Scalr do not have affinity to any one cloud vendor, so they can manage many different clouds. The second category includes pre-existing software from classic management vendors like VMware, Red Hat and IBM. These vendors have extended their virtualization management software to now include cloud management.

Perhaps most surprising about this list is that vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (Azure) and Google (Cloud Platform) – who dominate the IaaS public cloud market, aren’t atop this list of cloud management tool providers. After all, why would they want to sell customers management software for competitors’ clouds?

Bartoletti says he sees two major use cases for these hybrid cloud software packages. The first is a multi-public cloud environment. It’s not uncommon to see an organization using Amazon Web Services in certain departments or developer teams. Perhaps the marketing department has a new mobile or Java app that needs to be able to scale quickly. AWS is a great fit. There may be other developers who are more used to working in a Windows environment and prefer to use Azure. A single cloud management platform can provision virtual machines and storage to both these clouds and give IT central control and visibility into how the clouds are being used.

There’s another use case for hybrid cloud software in which teams within an organization are all using the same public cloud, for example AWS. These hybrid cloud products can act as a central portal for users to access AWS resources and for IT to monitor the use.

These tools are “still in the maturing phase” though, Bartoletti says. The “nirvana” is to get to a point where users have a “single pane of glass” to manage multiple clouds and dynamically move workloads across clouds. We’re not quite there yet. Typically, the most functionality for dynamic usage across clouds comes within a homogenous environment: Users can do some cool stuff with vMotion in an all-VMware environment that combines vSphere with vCloudAir, for example. Managing applications across AWS and Azure is still a cumbersome process though, so expect more innovation in this market.

Despite their shortfalls, these can be incredibly helpful tools for users. “At their core, hybrid cloud management solutions are automation and orchestration platforms. They automate manual or scripted tasks to request, change, or deploy standardized cloud services, and they orchestrate the execution of these tasks across a range of cloud platforms, often leveraging other automation tools like configuration management or provisioning,” Bartoletti wrote in the report.

Rounding out the list of vendors who made the cut were Hewlett Packard Enterprise, BMC, Microsoft and Citrix.

This story, "It’s a hybrid cloud world, and we’re all just living in it" was originally published by Network World.

Senior Editor Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups.

Copyright © 2016 IDG Communications, Inc.

question: Summarize the historical context around using cloud technology to store files.

question: Summarize how and why technology users utilize cloud storage.

answer: It seems, based on self-reporting,that the majority of users likely use cloud storage for both public and private storage. One could speculate reasonably that the former is tied to job. Private sharing could also include family, which means there are likely photo albums and possibly books. There is also the need for some developers to use storage that operates better with their preferred working environment, such as Windows.

question: Describe how, then, hybrid technology could be favorable.

answer: Since many users have indicated they are using cloud storage in the private and public spheres, some marketing companies think it's a good idea to sell storage as package deals to accommodate both sets of needs and functions. These vendors are relatively new and the platforms sell agnostic management platforms, which are not beholden to any cloud in particular so the user can switch between clouds. Other vendors-larger companies on a list that includes IBM-sell management software that includes cloud management. The hybrid cloud products coming out can assure users can still use their preferred computer systems, but also that companies can view and sort of oversee the items in the cloud.

question: Summarize what hybrid management is and provide an example.

answer: Hybrid management is a method of at once automating scripted or manual tasks to deal with standardized cloud services while allowing for the execution of such functions across cloud platforms. For example, a company might utilize Amazon Web Services for their development department because their app needs to be able to scale quickly, but some developers may have a particular environment with which they are used to working such as Windows with their own storage platform.


text:
SYMPHONY NO. 22 in E major, Hoboken I/22, is a symphony written by Joseph Haydn in 1764, under the auspices of the benign Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. Its nickname is “The Philosopher” (German _“Der Philosoph”_).

[The Haydnsaal in Eisenstadt. Click to enlarge.]

Composition and premiere

The composition date of 1764 appears on the autograph manuscript, which survives. Haydn composed the work during his tenure as Vice-Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy. As Vice-Kapellmeister Haydn was in charge of all but religious music in the Esterházy household; in particular he was the leader of the orchestra and was expected to compose symphonies for it to perform. This ensemble numbered about fifteen players.[1] The intended audience (except on special occasions such as the Prince's name day) consisted only of the Prince and his guests; thus “very often Haydn's orchestra would have outnumbered the listeners.” (Jones 1990:18).

Jones suggests that the first performance venue may have been what is today called the “Haydnsaal”, a large hall at the family palace in Eisenstadt “having a very resonant acoustic”. Other candidates were somewhat smaller halls in the other primary Esterházy palaces, at Vienna and Kittsee.

The nickname “The Philosopher”

The name (“the Philosopher”) is not on the original manuscript and is unlikely to have come from Haydn himself. “Le Philosoph” appears on a manuscript copy of the symphony found in Modena dated 1790; thus the nickname dates from the composer's own lifetime. The title is thought to derive from the melody and counterpoint of the first movement (between the horns and cor anglais), which musically allude to a question followed by an answer and paralleling the disputatio system of debate. The piece's use of a muted tick-tock effect also evokes the image of a philosopher deep in thought while time passes by. As Jones notes, the nickname “becomes less appropriate as the symphony proceeds and earnestness gives way to high spirits.”[2]

[A historical cor anglais. Image from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica]

Scoring

The work is scored for two cors anglais (English horns), two horns, and strings.[3] The use of the cor anglais in place of the (related, but higher-pitched) oboe is more than unusual; indeed McVeigh (2009:386) suggests that it is “the only symphony in the entire history of the genre to use this scoring”. The horns play a prominent role in all but the second movement, and Haydn's choice of E major may have been dictated by the fact that the valveless horns of the time sounded best when played as E instruments (that is, with E crooks inserted).

Form

The symphony is in four movements:

1.  Adagio,
2.  Presto,
3.  Menuet e Trio,
4.  Finale: Presto,

This slow-fast-slow-fast sequence of tempos corresponds to the sonata da chiesa of the Baroque era, although the musical language of the piece is classical. As with other early Haydn symphonies that use this tempo scheme, all of the movements are in the same key. The first, second, and fourth movements are in sonata form and the third is the customary minuet and trio in ternary form.

The first movement is the highlight of the symphony and features horns answered by cors anglais over a walking bass line. The violins play with mutes. H. C. Robbins Landon calls it “surely one of the _settecento_'s supremely original concepts”.[4] Played with all the indicated repeats, it lasts about 10 minutes, almost half the duration of the symphony as a whole.

The second movement is extroverted, in very fast tempo, and features virtuosic playing from the string section. As commentators have pointed out, this movement would be too fast and light to begin a classical symphony on its own, but fits well after a slow opening movement. Later in Haydn's symphonic career, the same effect would be achieved by placing a light opening theme after a slow introduction.

As McVeigh notes, the opening theme of the third movement echoes that of the first, resembling an extended rendition of it in minuet tempo.[5] The trio section features writing in the high register for the two horns.

The last movement is one of the earliest examples of a “hunting finale” that would later be used in symphonies such as No. 65 and No. 73 “La Chasse”.[6]

Second version

Another version of the piece, well known in Haydn's time, was published by the Venier firm in Paris.[7] This version has three movements with the second movement of the original version coming first, followed by a different movement that is marked _andante grazioso_ in and concluding with the same finale as in the original version. The second movement (catalogued as H. I:22bis) is thought to be spurious, and arrangement as a whole not Haydn's own. H. C. Robbins Landon suggests that this arrangement was likely made to the original composition due to the “strangely original” adagio and the existence of cors anglais, which were not available in many areas. It is precisely these elements that make this symphony so popular, so this version is seldom performed in modern times.[8]

[1] Jones (1990:18)

[2] Jones (1990:20)

[3] Jones (2009:445)

[4] HC Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, 5 vols, (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1976-) v. 1, Haydn: the Early Years, 1732-1765

[5] McVeigh (2009:386)

[6]

[7] Jones (2009:425).

[8]

title: Symphony No. 22 (Haydn)

question: How does "The Philosopher" compare to other works of its day?

answer: The piece is atypical of classical arrangements of its day. First, it's scored with two English horns in place of the oboe, which is unusual. It's slow-fast-slow-fast sequence of tempos corresponds to the Baroque era, but it's decidedly a classical piece. It's movement would be too fast and light to begin a classical symphony on its own, but fits well with the overall piece.


text:
[Future Tense]
[]

Trot out your exoskeleton for Cybathlon 2016.
Photo from Cybathlon.

The summer 2016 Olympics may be in Brazil, but I’m getting much more excited for a competition taking place that year in Switzerland.

Cybathlon 2016 is a championship for robot-assisted parathletes, and it sounds  awesome. If some part of your body is assisted or moved by external power—for example, a robotic prosthetic or an exoskeleton—you can compete. Unlike in the Olympics and the Paralympics, robotic devices and other futuristic mechanisms are basically required at Cybathlon, even—especially!—if they lend superhuman powers. See? Awesome.

Cybathlon was announced this week and will feature six competitions for athletes (who are known as “pilots”): a brain-computer interface race, a functional electrical stimulation bike race, a leg prosthetics race, a powered exoskeleton race, a powered wheelchair race, and a arm prosthetics race that tests dexterity for manual manipulation. It’s quite the lineup. At the games, pilots will be eligible for medals in their events, of course, but device manufacturers will also be awarded for their contributions to development and research, as exemplified by the way the pilots perform with the devices.

Like with any sport, the events are designed to be challenging and exciting. The powered wheelchair race, for example, will happen on an obstacle course that takes competitors over different types of terrain and around different objects. The powered leg prosthetics race and powered exoskeleton race (for people with spinal cord injuries) will be on an obstacle course that will test how competitors handle slopes, uphills, straightaways, curves, and other scenarios. If certain pilots’ devices operate more slowly in certain conditions, but allow them to catch up at other points, the competition could be fierce. Additionally, exoskeletons haven’t had very wide public exposure, so it will be interesting to see the different ways the competitors can move. (My colleague Will Oremus wrote about the state of exoskeletons in 2013.)

The powered arm prosthetics competition will test the pilot’s dexterity. In the functional electrical stimulation bike race, devices will electrically stimulate people with spinal cord injuries to pedal bikes.

The most futuristic event will probably be the brain-computer interface race. In this competition, pilots who are totally paralyzed from the neck down will control a computer avatar that will either race on a horse or in a car against the other pilots. Honestly, if that isn’t the future, what is?

The first Cybathlon will be in Zurich, Switzerland on Oct. 8, 2016. When you start to think about the potential for drama, human stories, and intense competition, the Cybathlon is totally compelling. It’s not that human athletes aren’t incredible—it’s just that these pilots are actually _superhuman_.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

question: Describe the competition being discussed.

answer: Cybathlon 2016 is a championship for robot-assisted parathletes. Robotic devices and other futuristic mechanisms are required.

question: Where is the competition taking place?

answer: Zurich, Switzerland

question: When is the competition taking place?

answer: October 8, 2016

question: Who will participate in the competition?

answer: Robot-assisted parathletes (anyone who has some part of their body assisted or moved by external power)

question: Describe the brain-computer interface race.

answer: Pilots paralyzed from the neck down control a computer avatar racing on either a horse or in a car.

question: List the different events at the competition.

answer: A brain-computer interface race, a functional electrical stimulation bike race, a leg prosthetics race, a powered exoskeleton race, a powered wheelchair race, and a arm prosthetics race.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: This article concerns the first ever Cybathlon, held in Zurich, Switzerland on October 8, 2016. Robot-assisted parathletes compete in a series of six different events aided by devices such as robotic prosthetics. Both pilots and device manufacturers are eligible for medals.


text:
ALLERGY TESTING
Will test for food and chemical or environment allergies.  Buy now $75
You will need to bring in a hair and saliva sample from your pet.

[]

LASER ULTRASOUND
Well tolerated for pain. Can be done for any pet. Buy Now $35

[]

Laser Therapy, or “photobiomodulation”, is the use of specific wavelengths of light (red and near-infrared) to create therapeutic effects. These effects include improved healing time, pain reduction, increased circulation and decreased swelling.

[]

BACH AND BODY ESSENCES
For any emotional issue – these easy remedies can be done at home.
We will muscle test using the owner as a surrogate. Remedies are
very inexpensive (approx. $17) Can be used for travel sickness,
separation anxiety, loneliness, grief, fear of thunder storms etc.

Buy Now

[]

ACUPRESSURE[]
Used mostly on dogs, horses and large animals.
Emotional and physical issues can be treated.
House calls can be made for this.
Treatments at our business $45. to $75
Out calls will have an extra charge for travelling.

REFLEXOLOGY
Animal reflexology is very similar to working on humans.
Results can be immediate for physical or emotional complaints. ($45 per session)

[]

REIKI
Animals tend to react to Reiki treatments very quickly and
positively. Can be done at your home or by long distance appointments.
($45 per session)

[]

AURICULAR THERAPY
Done mostly on dogs with bad ears. We would come to your home and do this treatment when necessary.  $55 + travel time

[]

HOMEOPATHY
The same type of surrogate testing can be done to determine the best homeopathy
remedy to use for many different pathologies. This type of treatment can be very successful in a quick response in animals. (typical cost per vial is  $11.99)

[]

QXCI OR INDIGO TESTING
Often done to find the root cause of a problem. We would need hair and saliva samples of any type of pet that you want tested.  $75 per session

[]

Please register or inquire by EMAILor phone 519.433.3434

THERMOTEXFAR INFRARED HEATING PET BED –
Small to Large size bed

Designed to comfort pets and safely relieve pain and inflammation with far infrared heat therapy.

_Delivering gentle, deep-penetrating infrared heat to help soothe PAIN SAFELY, EFFECTIVELY AND EXPERTLY while helping your pet to relax.                            []_

After just 20 minutes, the heat penetrates to depths of 2.36 inches promoting increased blood flow into the targeted area delivering nutrients, oxygen and proteins to keep tissues healthy while eliminating toxin build up and reducing inflammation.

OUR PET PRODUCTS ARE MANUFACTURED USING THE SAME TECHNOLOGY AS OUR THERAPEUTIC PERSONAL PRODUCTS WHICH ARE REGISTERED AS MEDICAL DEVICES WITH HEALTH CANADA AND THE FDA.

PROVIDES RELIEF FROM:

-   Muscle pain and stiffness
-   Joint pain associated with arthritis
-   Inflammation

OTHER BENEFITS:

-   Increased tissue extensibility
-   Easy to operate
-   Convenient to use
-   Costs less than 3 cents per day to operate on the low setting for 24 hours.

THERAPEUTIC BENEFITS OF FAR INFRARED HEAT:

-   Vasodilatation of the blood vessels result in increased localized blood flow to accelerate healing
-   Pain relief
-   Increased metabolic activity within the cells to help repair and recover
-   Provides deep heat for animals that cannot maintain body temperature
-   Removal of harmful and painful pro-inflammatory mediators (toxins).

“THIS MAY JUST BE THE THING FOR YOUR PET SUFFERING FROM STIFFNESS AND SIGNS OF AGING”

_For pets up to 24 lbs._

NOTE: For hygienic and health reasons, used pet products are not returnable.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

question: What kinds of items are in this glossary?

answer: It appears that this article is a list of products and remedies for improving one's health. Not only are these medical treatments, they also seem to be alternative-medicine therapies. For instance, one item on the list involves the music of Bach. Yet, it is also clear that these alternative medicine products are not for humans. They are for animals, presumably the humans' pets.


text:
[International Women's Day]

_8th March 2019_

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY!

Happy International Women’s Day! We proudly have a heap of strong female founders as wonderful clients. Therefore, this blog is dedicated to you – keep representing women in power and keep achieving above and beyond.

The 8th March marks International Women’s Day which is a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Furthermore, it also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. This year’s theme is #BalanceForBetter – Better the balance, better the world. You can read more on the website here.

FIELD DAY/FIELD APOTHECARY

Firstly, a strong female founder we are celebrating is Alix Mulholland of Field Day/Field Apothecary. Alix created Field Day with the vision of bringing a little bit of luxury to homes with natural, long-lasting Irish inspired scents. For instance, Alix’s hand poured candles (Sea, Tea, Field to name a few) offer a unique and distinctive lingering aroma that make you feel right at home. Perfect as a gift for friends or family, or as a treat for yourself you can enjoy time and time again. View her beautiful products here.

We spoke to Alix about the importance of packaging within her industry.

“As a giftware company our packaging quality is extremely important – Priory Press understand this and always produce printing of a high standard. They have gone to great lengths to ensure I get consistency in my print colours. I have worked with many printers over the years and find Priory Press very helpful and courteous.”

[Alix Mulholland]

_Alix Mulholland_

Chocolatey Clare

Secondly, Clare’s a Vegan, but she also _loves_ chocolate. As a result, she was on the hunt in the supermarket for vegan, dairy-free chocolate that somehow still tasted chocolatey. In conclusion, Clare embarked on creating her own bar of chocolate. So, with six flavours later and stocked at Supervalu, Avoca Ireland and more, it’s safe to say she’s mastered the art!

Here is her recent post thanking us for the artwork we’ve created for her. Our highly skilled in-house design team can help clients just like Clare, who was open to guidance and inspiration from us into crafting a perfect design!

“I WAS DELIGHTED TO WORK WITH PRIORY PRESS PACKAGING AS I HAD BEEN LOOKING FOR A PRINTING COMPANY WITH AN ECO-FRIENDLY ETHOS THAT WOULD MATCH MY BRAND – EVERY ASPECT WAS EXPERTLY COVERED, FROM VEGETABLE-BASED INK TO WIND-POWERED PRINTING MACHINES.

WHAT MORE COULD I WANT! EXCELLENT COMMUNICATION FROM THE TEAM AND TOP-NOTCH PACKAGING THAT I’M PROUD TO USE FOR MY CHOCOLATE. THANK YOU, PRIORY PRESS!”

[Chocolately Clare]

_Chocolatey Clare_

Remedy Roots

Cousin duo Lisa and Stuart founded Remedy Roots in early 2018, with combined experience in Graphic Design and Marketing, and a love for all things natural – they created their unique herbal tea blends that all the family can enjoy. Launching their completely compostable packaging with a little help from us at their Food Academy trial in Supervalu, they have gone from strength to strength. We can’t wait to see what else they come up with!

“The guys at Priory Press helped us develop our products to the standard we had hoped for; with them, we achieved our goal of completely compostable packaging. The new packs have boosted our shelf sales, drummed up new retailer interest and given us something to be proud of when talking to our customers. Overnight, they’ve become a key partner and advisor in our supply chain.”

[Remedy Roots]

_Remedy Roots_

The Busy Botanist

Best friends and strong female founders, Clair and Jo, are passionate about healthy options through easy choices. They found most on-shelf herbal teas disappointing as they contained additives, colourings and preservatives – not as healthy as they appear! Clair and Jo buddied up to produce splendid (and healthy) tea to support their active lifestyle. They currently have an impressive range of 14 quirky products which include ‘Will Power,’ ‘Women’s Problem’s,’ ‘Sneezy Wheezy’ and PPP’s favourite, ‘Pick Me Up.’ We loved creating such vibrant packaging for Clair and Jo as they complement the vibrant flavours.

The Little Herb Farm

Finally, this strong female founder, Lindsey, luckily has her family on board to help with all things herby! She even has the help of her young children and their Granny and Papa. A strong female founder and family woman all in one! This business boomed in a flash and now the products can be found all over the UK. Their vinegar bottles involve home-grown ingredients including herbs and locally sourced fruit. Also, check out these Gluten-Free, Fat-Free wonders! Furthermore, Priory Press Packaging created sleeves for their new sauces and dips which complement these delicious delicacies!

[The Little Herb Farm]

_The Little Herb Farm_

How will you celebrate women’s achievements today?

In conclusion, we are THRILLED to have such influential women as customers. We _love_ to watch their companies grow with success and we are chuffed to have been a big part of their process. Start your story with us today and we can help your business grow _too_!

question: Who is being celebrated at for Field Apothecary?

answer: Field Apothecary was created by a strong female founder, named Alix Mulholland. She created Field Day with the vision of bringing long-lasting Irish inspired scents. Alix's hand poured candles offer a unique and distinctive lingering aroma that everyone can enjoy. Alix also emphasizes the importance of packaging within her industry.

question: Describe Chocolatey Clare.

answer: Chocolatey Clare loves chocolate. She was on the hunt for a vegan, dairy-free chocolate that still tasted chocolatey and decided to create her own bar of chocolate. She was able to do this with six flavors and stocked at Supervalu, Avoca Ireland. She hired others to do artwork for her chocolate bar and was very appreciative of it.

question: Describe the Busy Botanist.

answer: The Busy Botanist was created by best friends, Clair and Jo. Clair and Jo are passionate about finding healthy options and making this an easy choice. They were disappointed with many on-shelf herbal teas so they produced some splendid tea to support their active lifestyle. They have a range of 14 quirky products.

question: Describe all the strong female founders this article chose to highlight.

answer: This article chose to highlight many strong female founders to celebrate women's achievements on International Women's Day. Some of these female founders owned candle shops, tea shops, chocolate bars, and even new sauces and dips. Each women owned business was created with lots of passion and hard work and should be acknowledged.

question: Would Clair and Jo enjoy going to Japan to learn about teas?