Vox Humana Ted Morrissey

Her brother Harry hadn’t written from Korea for more than a year, or at least none of his letters got through. Then out of the blue he called, said he was in South Carolina, he was taking a train, then a bus and he’d be in Crawford at the Trailways terminal in three days: Could Annette or Tim pick him up? Tim and the car had been gone for three weeks and two days at that point. It was too complicated to explain over the phone, especially long distance, so Annette said she would see her brother in Crawford. It required her taking a day off from school and borrowing Carl Reynolds’s Ford, but she managed it. She arrived at the bus terminal a few minutes late but suspected the bus would be even later. However, she’d only stepped from the car when she spotted Harry on a bench in front of the station, which also sat vacant and lonely. Harry was lost in his own thoughts and didn’t notice her right away, which gave Annette a few moments to look at her brother and truly see him, almost the way a stranger might take him in. He was thin, perhaps even wiry beneath clothes that looked like hand-me-downs from an older and somewhat larger brother, nonexistent. His hair was brown with—was it possible?—the beginning streaks of white at his temples. It’d been cut short but that was weeks ago and the neat haircut had been growing of its own accord. Trousers of summer-weight wool, soon to be unquestionably out of season; a cotton shirt with a button-down collar, unbuttoned, and zippered jacket, unzipped, also soon to be too light for the time of year. His shoes may have been new but definitely in need of an energetic polishing. Harry was smoking, something he must’ve picked up in the service. More accurately, he was watching the lit cigarette between his fingers, as if a complicated thing which warranted careful study. Annette was reluctant to interrupt his seemingly peaceful contemplation, but Harry must’ve sensed her presence, or someone’s, and he looked up. Sis, he said, not so much in greeting as in practicing. He hadn’t seen his sister in nearly five years, and perhaps with all that had transpired in the intervening years he needed a sort of rehearsal to reprise his role as kid brother. Look at you, said Annette kissing him on the cheek, rough with stubble. You’re so skinny. The scent of his cigarette elicited a recollection of Tim, who would smoke after dinner, and the memory was unpleasant and unwelcome. The Army isn’t known for its haute cuisine. Quite the opposite. He exhaled a final breath of smoke and stepped on the butt with the toe of his shoe. The car’s just over here. He slung an army-green duffel over his shoulder and picked up a medium-size suitcase, old-fashioned, with leather straps—his only possessions it would seem. On the drive back Annette tried to make small talk, which in itself felt strange, to speak to her brother as she would a virtual stranger, but Harry’s responses were perfunctory at best. Annette wondered if he was upset to be in the passenger seat. Maybe he’d become one of those men who felt it was a fact of biology that the male of the species should always take the wheel. Tim believed it. After a while, Annette decided her brother’s taciturnity was more a matter of his preferring quiet. So she left him to his own thoughts, and he seemed content to watch the old familiar countryside, rushing past in its early orange hues, the fields dotted here and there with farm animals. You can smoke if you like—probably best to roll down the window. Harry took out his pack of Chesterfields. ㅑ

Annette had only begun to use the spare bedroom as a what-not room—she’d set up her ironing-board, for example—so it was easy enough to prepare for Harry’s arrival when he called. He hadn’t asked to stay but she assumed, and apparently correctly. He didn’t inquire about Tim, either, or about anything for that matter. Annette imagined Tim’s absence from her life was abundantly clear. Harry put away his few things almost as soon as they got back, and easy as that they were roommates. Annette wondered if she should have a welcome-home party for Harry, but growing up he’d had few close friends, and fewer still remained in the village. Zane Robbins’s bone spurs kept him out of the service, as did Herbert Green’s vertigo. Zane worked the family farm. Herb lived at home, taking correspondence courses. There was Beth Ann Ferguson, too, the school librarian. Harry and Beth Ann had gone to a dance or two together, nothing serious. As far as Annette knew, Beth Ann wasn’t seeing anyone—nor had she ever indicated that she wanted to be. Harry had been a quiet, bookish boy, yet he didn’t find school especially interesting. He would have preferred to stay home, reading and studying whatever he pleased. It wasn’t surprising when the Army attached him to a unit specializing in linguistics, not as a translator but as a transcriber. Harry lugged his portable typewriter and folding table and chair from one encampment to another, usually near the front line. His typewriter’s steel case saved him from injury twice, once deflecting a wildly off-target bullet, another time a piece of shrapnel as long as his thumb. The case bore the scars of those close calls, along with the innumerable hard knocks from time in-country, each leaving its mark on the Army-issue Olympia that he returned to the quartermaster before his discharge. The carriage-return arm was bent, the carriage itself tended to slip when underlining, and the ribbon had been worn so thin it was opaque in spots, well past being re-inked. Harry had managed his final transcript and submitted it along with its carbons to the lieutenant who was his immediate superior. For months it seemed that his only words were those that belonged to the North and South Koreans who had been interrogated or interviewed, respectively. Their stories, whether mostly true or mostly false, had been his stories, their lives his life. He felt as if he only existed when he was transcribing, and the brief interval between scripts was a time of silent incompleteness and waiting to be reanimated by the story of the next bearer of words. Meanwhile, the horrors of the conflict multiplied around him like an earthquake’s suffocating rubble. The only relief was immersing himself in the transcribed lives of others. The night-colored letters on the paper, hammered there by the Olympia’s solid strokes, formed a fortress against the bodies torn asunder, friend and foe alike, combatant and collateral kill, men and women, children. Even the images of slain animals haunted him, family pets, and livestock slaughtered in fields and left to rot. By the time Annette met him at the bus station in Crawford Harry hadn’t completed a transcript in nearly two months, weeks exposed to the world without periodic relief inside the sanctuary of others’ words. Their stories, no matter how horrific the images they related, were like invocations that protected his fragile sanity. Harry could slip behind the walls of words and breathe more easily for a few blessed minutes. ㅓ

Annette had left Harry alone to go to school. She probably thought he was sleeping in on his first morning back home, but in fact he’d been awake for hours listening to the cricket chirp of night transform to the birdsong of morning. Then Annette was up rushing through her routine. He loved his sister and appreciated her giving him a place to stay, truly, but the idea of speaking to her—to anyone—was overwhelming. Conversation was exhausting. Sometimes the exhaustion came from trying to think of something to say, and sometimes it came from holding back the torrent of words wanting to break forth. For months Harry had found himself at one extreme or the other. When he was transcribing, the words of others were enough and he didn’t feel the crippling pressure to unearth or embank his own. At last Annette left for school, and the house was quiet. Harry dressed then went to the kitchen. He checked the icebox and breadbox. He might eat something eventually but he needed coffee and a smoke. He prepared the coffeepot and lit the burner with a kitchen match. While he waited for the water to boil, he went to the bookcase in his sister’s small dining room and perused the selection of hardcovers and paperbacks. Several of the latter were Armed Services Editions, leftovers from the previous war still circulating a decade later. Harry ran his finger along the spines, listening for the coffeepot’s boil. One title in particular arrested his attention: Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. He took the well-worn paperback from the shelf and in a few minutes was seated on the back porch with the Sandburg, his coffee, and cigarettes. It was a cool morning; leaves from an elm lay on the steps, a scarlet harbinger of winter’s slow approach. The book of poetry was divided into sections, and the one titled ‘War Poems (1914-1915)’ stood out. Obviously they were inspired by the Great War, but he suspected the Great War was as terrible as his own, or any other. He lit a cigarette and began reading. Later, one image especially would stay with him--Red drips from my chin where I have been eating. Not all the blood, nowhere near all, is wiped off my mouth. He sat on the porch for a long while with the poems and the thoughts they conjured. Mrs. Holcomb next door had come out and spent some time cleaning fallen leaves from her flowerbeds and primping the mums and asters. She pretended not to see Harry, not wanting to disturb his privacy perhaps; or maybe she truly didn’t see him, half hidden by the porch itself. ㅕ

On her way home from school, Annette stopped at the grocery for a piece of sirloin and some new potatoes. Normally her main meal was the hot one prepared by the school cooks; then at night she would nibble on cold cuts and crackers or some fruit. When Tim left she wondered if it was because of her inadequate dinners, at least in part. But, no, he seemed generally unhappy with everything and everyone, inside and outside their home. It wasn’t as simple as poorly prepared meals. Still, it sometimes nagged her. Maybe because so many of the wives took such pride in their ability to cook, and several were associated with a particularly popular dish: Mrs. Reynolds’s rabbit stew, Mrs. Abernathy’s quail in white gravy, Mrs. Johnston’s minted lamb-chops, Mrs. Phillips’s fried chicken and cornbread, Mrs. Whittle’s chicken and dumplings, Mrs. Smythe’s morel soufflé, Mrs. Moreland’s honey-glazed pork roast. . . . On one level Annette knew Tim’s happiness was beyond her influence—no effort great or small seemed capable of achieving it for long—yet his discontent picked at her peace of mind. She would think of the eagle that tortured bound Prometheus, little by little without interruption. Tim’s leaving triggered a tide of complex emotions, some sharp, some subtle, but the most immediate and most profound was simple relief: The harpy had suddenly ceased plucking at her liver, and it was, in a word, glorious.These thoughts and feelings returned to her as she was preparing the meal for Harry and her, and she examined them like exhibits in a museum, or, better, like specimens in a zoo—for they were safely sealed off but still very much alive, and their quickness lent them an element of danger, should one or two of the more predatory types get loose.Annette scraped cubed potatoes from the cutting-board into the pan of salted boiling water. Harry was in the living room. The evening news was on, the picture more snowy than usual. It didn’t seem to matter: He sipped at his can of Falstaff and stared at the fuzzy newsman, the Zenith’s sound all but off. She considered attempting a conversation—about something, anything—but her brother appeared content so she elected to let him be and focus on making their dinner. While she stirred the roiling potatoes she thought of all the times she wanted to talk with Tim—always in an attempt to make things better, it seemed in retrospect, either via a conversation that dealt with a problem or one that deflected from it—eventually, however, the futility of talk, of any kind, became clear, and it was simpler to keep within her own thoughts. Even though this felt different, Annette resolved that she wouldn’t let avoiding conversations with her brother become a pattern. They ate at the dining-room table. Harry turned off the television, and he poured his beer into a glass. Drinking from the can at the table must’ve seemed poor etiquette. Everything smells great, Netta. It was the first time he’d used her nickname since coming home, but rather than a sign of normality it felt a forced attempt to mimic it. Thank you, she said. I’m afraid I’m out of practice in the kitchen. She thought that Harry must be wondering about Tim’s absence, but he hadn’t said a word. Did he wonder, did he assume, or did he not even notice? Some of Tim’s things remained. Old clothes in the closet of the spare room (now, Harry’s room), odds and ends of tools in the shed, along with various shovels and spades and the mower, an item or two in the back of this drawer or that. To Annette these stray remainders were reminders of Tim’s absence, but perhaps to others, to Harry, they were as unworthy of note as a burned out bulb, or the unraked leaves in the corner of the yard. She wondered at times if there was something wrong with her. Shouldn’t she be devastated Tim had left and their marriage of six years was through? Shouldn’t she become weepy at the thought of it? Shouldn’t she be lonely, and desperate to fill some vacuous void? Everything told her she should be all of these things and more. In truth, though, she felt only serenity and the strange stirrings of contentment. Now her life could have meaning which she herself ascribed to it. She was just beginning to understand Tim’s abandonment and what it may mean for her when Harry called about his discharge and his needing a ride. As they sat across the table from one another, eating the sirloin and mashed potatoes, Annette found herself wondering how long her brother would be staying with her. It was an uncharitable line of thought and she tried to dismiss it altogether. The click and scrape of Harry’s fork as he scooped up tinefuls of potato punctuated her selfish speculations. You’re almost out. Would you like another Falstaff? Harry looked at the finger of yellow liquid in his glass. Sure, sis, thanks. Annette pushed herself away from the table and her unkind thoughts. She retrieved a can from the icebox, punctured its top twice, big and small; then returned to the table and poured some of the beer into her brother’s glass. Her water glass was empty so she poured the rest of the beer for herself. Annette took her seat: I was thinking, we should have a welcome-home party for you, give everyone a chance to say hello all at once. I’m sure we could use the basement of the church. I’ll speak with Pastor Phillips. She didn’t say: Letting everyone know you’re back may prompt someone to offer you a job. She tried to imagine what Harry would’ve done if he hadn’t gone off to Korea. It was difficult to imagine. He’d always been a bookish, quiet sort of child, though not much interested in school unless it was a subject he especially liked. Mythology, for example, and the Trojan War. Homer’s Iliad was a favorite and of course Odysseus’ great wanderings. She recalled his making a cyclops out of papier-mâché. It was nearly three feet tall and required most of their immediate neighbors’ old newspapers, torn into strips. ㅗ

Plans were made for a potluck in the church’s basement. Pastor Phillips insisted that the Methodist Ladies Auxiliary would supply the main course and cake. Guests could bring salads and sides. The pastor imagined that the whole village would turn out to welcome Harry home. The returns of World War Two boys, less than a decade earlier, were still fresh in most folks’ minds. Those were some bona fide parties, said Pastor Phillips, grinning a bit mischievously beneath his thick glasses. He would have Mrs. Holcomb put a notice about Harry’s party in the bulletin. Between that and word-of-mouth, the whole village will be in the know in no time. The pastor enjoyed his turn of phrase.Annette thanked him before hurrying from his office to get to school on time. ㅛ

Harry had spent the morning reading, thinking, smoking, drinking coffee. The sky was gray and mildly threatening as he considered it from his sister’s back porch. They were nearly out of coffee, and he was down to his last two cigarettes. They were low on bread also, and cornflakes. All the time sitting, relaxing, had given way to a goading restlessness, so he decided to walk to the grocery to restock essentials. He was already feeling a trifle guilty about staying with Annette and not pulling his own weight, especially since Tim seemed to be out of the picture. He felt that he should say something about his absent brother-in-law but he didn’t want to pry—that was one excuse he allowed himself. Really, though, it had more to do with his belief that if he broached the subject, it may lead to his sister confessing a cascade of heavy, complicated emotions, and it would be more than he could bear. There was so much heaviness and complication inside of him already, he sensed that another straw more may be his undoing. He may collapse beneath it all. Besides, he never cared much for Tim Wilson, and it was a pleasant surprise not having him around. Annette kept a sturdy wicker basket with long handles on a hook next to the backdoor for the express purpose of carrying items home from the grocery store. Harry knew, in part, because she’d had the same basket for years. He removed it from its hook and began walking to Wilson’s Grocery (the owner was a cousin, once or twice removed, of Annette’s husband). It was a short walk along Willow Street to Main, made shorter by Harry’s hurrying: the skies looked more threatening than they had from the porch. Large, icy drops were beginning to pelt him as he reached the store. He regretted his timing as he didn’t know how long he’d be pinned down by the rain. There was a young woman working the counter whom he didn’t recognize. How could that be? It was a place where everyone knew everyone. He was Wilson’s only customer at the moment. Harry nodded hello to the blond-haired girl; she was working a crossword puzzle. He began perusing the small store’s slim inventory. Outside, the rain intensified. Harry could hear it monsooning against the roof, raindrops mixed with pellets of hail. It was warm inside the store. He could feel sweat on his neck. The girl seemed unconcerned about the weather as she filled in letters of her puzzle with a yellow pencil. Light glinted off canisters of soup. Harry blinked at the shards of white. He heard the first grumble of thunder. The girl looked up too. She smiled briefly—perhaps reassuringly—then returned to her crossword. Harry’s mouth was dry. He wanted a long drink of beer. A flash of lightning broke across the gray, instantly followed by the thunder’s crash. Harry dropped the basket and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt: He was suffocating. His t-shirt was soaked under his arms and along his ribs and spine. He was near a bin of vegetables. He fought an instinct to squat behind it, shielding himself from the flashing windows. Another bolt then bellow of thunder. He put his hand on the wooden bin for support. A head of purple cabbage shifted and fell to the floor. As he watched it topple, the bin’s wet scent of boggy earth rose around him like a closing bag. Another head fell. He may have kicked it as he lurched forward, or it may have been that his legs felt as stiff as crutches—but he lost his balance and groped for a handhold. He found a rack of sealed jars. One or two fell and glass shrapneled across the floor as the briny smell of pickles rippled over him. He couldn’t breathe. Harry fumbled his way out of the store, which felt as claustrophobic as a coffin. More items may have fallen and burst in his wake. Down the streets rain running in streams, calling his name, someone. Red umbrella, porch, Annette’s, blanket on his shoulders, Annette’s. Smoking. ㅜ Donald and Rita Gale (née Hopkins) were both only-children of parents who had them later in life. Thus Annette Elizabeth and Harrison Scott Gale grew up with no extended family to speak of. Their father had a distant cousin, a nun, whom they met once at the funeral of a still more distant cousin, a salesman of some sort, door-to-door. Don Gale passed (coronary) when Annette and Harry were in their early teens; Rita five years later (cancer). They’d been dutiful parents but not doting. Annette, who was a voracious reader starting in childhood with the works of Lewis Carroll, soon advancing to Jane Austen then the Brontës and beyond, came to think of her parents, especially her father, as affectionate in a British sort of way—though he was as Midwestern American as a boy and then a man could be. Her mother wasn’t quite as aloof as her father, but she seemed to prefer her husband’s company to her children’s, and she was devastated nearly to the point of petrification at his sudden passing. In Annette’s recollection her mother had died shortly after her father. She would have to remind herself there was a five-year interval, during which her mother seemed morbidly intent on joining her spouse in death. Rita showed the preoccupation of a commuter who’d missed her train but was determined to catch the next.ㅠ

 Sometimes Harry saw the Koreans who were the subjects of the translations he typed into transcripts, in triplicate. Seeing them was more likely if they were South Koreans. But it usually took several days or even weeks for the translated interviews to reach him for transcription. So he rarely had any idea whose words he was reading. Over time, his mind began selecting one of a small collection of Korean faces as the subject. While working on a transcript, Harry would automatically assign a face to the voice he heard in the words. He thought of them almost as masks stored in a theatrical cabinet, except of course real, living faces. The mask—thickset or thin, bright-eyed or beady, saintly or sinister—spoke the words he read on the pages, the Koreans’ comments and confessions, rendered into English by the translators, most of whom broadcast an air of superiority. They delivered the words Mosaically, as if Jehovah’s own, not to be doubted, leave be amended. One could almost smell the acrid scent of a burned bush upon the pages. After a time the Korean faces began appearing in his dreams, whispering to him in English with their distinct accents. They floated in an ethereal sea, a space all their own, a sort of in-between but with no sense of what lay before or beyond. In the beginning, they whispered snippets of the transcripts he’d typed on the portable Olympia. One night, though, they started murmuring of other things, barely audible in the rush of ether, only partly formed, mostly pieces of images, a helter-skelter of tiles from incomplete mosaics. Harry woke in the dark tent knowing something was different—knowing he was different.More and more the faces spoke to him when he was awake, in the background of his consciousness, like distant voices in a crowded theater before the opening curtain. He’d catch a word or phrase, not enough to constitute a whole thought, just enough to remain frustratingly at the edge of intelligibility. He thought of the cast who occupied the fringes of his psyche as his own Greek chorus, a joke meant to lessen his fears about their worrisome presence, but it had little effect. _

Annette had informed her teaching colleagues about the welcome-home party while they were in the faculty dining-room. She communicated the details over the noise of scraping forks and slicing knives. Two teachers immediately gave their regrets. The remaining dozen or so implied they would attend by not saying they couldn’t. Annette wanted to be sure about Beth Ann Ferguson’s attendance. When the end-of-the-day bell had rung and the students had rushed away as if the school was sinking, Annette went to the room which served as the library. Bookcases, tall and short, cut the space into narrow aisles. Beth Ann’s desk, constructed of some ancient wood, dark and dense, stood sentinel near one wall. Beth Ann was so diminutive, when she sat at her mammoth desk, she could at first look like one of the children. She was not at her desk, however, and Annette believed for a moment that she’d already left; then she heard a sound among the tall stacks, and she found the little librarian in the 800s. Annette startled her. Sorry, Beth Ann—I thought you probably heard me come in. It’s o.k. She peered up, above her half reading glasses, which she wore on a cord around her neck. For a second Annette doubted what she knew to be true, that Beth Ann and Harry were the same age. With her hair pinned back, and her reading glasses, and her blue dress with the lace collar, Miss Ferguson projected the image of an older woman. Earrings of pearl, like grandmotherly types in the village wore for special occasions, looked almost too weighty for Beth Ann’s delicate ears. Annette wondered if she, too, presented a similarly dowdy persona. She hoped not. I couldn’t recall if you were at lunch when I mentioned Harry’s party, Annette fibbed. Yes, it sounds like a nice thing for Harry. She replaced a book to its spot on the shelf. Euripides. Annette knew the collection, and sometimes shared an excerpt from The Trojan Women with her class as further context for Homer. The stacks were pleasantly heavy with the musty scent of old books; there was also a floral trace of Beth Ann’s powder—subtle but it stood out because of its strangeness among the rows and rows of rarely read books. Do you think you can make it? To Harry’s party? I’m not sure . . . I may have plans. The lie lingered in the air between them. Beth Ann added, I may have a friend coming in from out of town. The lie maintained its buoyancy in spite of the added weight. Your friend would be welcome, of course. I’m sure it would mean the world to Harry to have you there. I’ll see. I’ll try to make it. She pulled a book from the shelf. Aeschylus. Thank you. . . . Thank you. Annette manufactured a smile of warmth. As she was leaving the library she thought of The Libation Bearers.

ㅣ

During the thirty-six-hour cross-country trip Harry discovered that reading helped to calm the chorus—not quiet their voices completely, nor drown them out, but at least the author’s voice could distract his attention from the chorus’ multilayered murmuring. On the bus Harry was reading a collection of New England ghost stories, and he found that some authorial voices were better at distracting from the Korean chorus than others. The more complex the sentence structure, the more obscure the vocabulary—the further the narrative distanced the incoherent choir. The ghost stories were sweet relief. At Annette’s home, Harry doubted that the collection of Sandburg poems would have much effect, but the poet’s voice could more than distract Harry; in fact, some of the poems seemed to get the choral voices to stop altogether, for a few minutes at least. It was something about their rhythm, perhaps interwoven with particularly vivid images, that provoked the chorus’ silence, ceased their steady whispering, like a wind that is harbinger to storm.

I cannot tell you now; When the wind’s drive and whirl Blow me along no longer

The poem was titled ‘The Great Hunt,’ but it seemed to be more about seeking than hunting, thought Harry, because he associated hunting with killing, and the poem was about seeking someone with a great soul, or searching for that great soul beyond death. In any event, the words froze him in the realization of his solitariness, in understanding the lonely state of his own soul. He wondered if his soul was great, or could be great. Harry savored the moment’s utter silence as if rays of golden light temporarily tore through a stubborn gray cover.ㄱ

Most of the translations Harry typed were the quintessence of banality—subjects’ mundane descriptions of daily routines, uninspired details of local topographical features not included on the Army Corps’ survey maps, and rambling acknowledgments of connections between family members and friends. One day, however, a translation landed in Harry’s assignment box that was out of the ordinary: A South Korean, from Taejon, identified only as Im, was interviewed and claimed his profession as master storyteller. As substantiation Im told a tale that was so ancient no one knew its attribution, he said. Its title was translated as ‘The Tale of the Old Man with No Legs.’ It turned out to be a frame narrative (Harry recalled when he first learned the term in English class--Arabian Nights, Chaucer’sTales, The Ancient Mariner). The unnamed narrator meets an old man with no legs on the wharf and inquires as to how he lost them. The old man recounts, In my youth I was a sailor, one among a crew of twenty whose ship was battered by a terrible storm and driven many leagues from our course. We came to an island unknown to us. A strange-looking keep stood on the headland overlooking the sea. We were hungry and thirsty and exhausted from our ordeal in the storm. We had no choice but to ask for assistance. We climbed to the keep and called at the tall, queerly arched door. No one responded so we pushed the door ajar and entered the barely illumined interior. The smell of animals was strong and at a distance we heard the bleating of sheep and other pasture creatures. We were relieved, for surely the master of the keep had plenty of food and could spare some for lost, woebegone travelers in need. Our relief was fleeting, however. Just then a giant, terrible to behold, came into dim view from the dark edges of the vast room. We made our plea to the giant, who loomed above us as a very large man does tiny children. He made no reply, but went to the door and secured it with a ponderous timber. We were trapped. He disappeared into the dark only to return momentarily with a pile of wood and start a blazing bonfire. Still without a word he snatched one of our number and proceeded to roast him alive; then eat him to every last morsel. Meanwhile all that we could do was watch in horror. When the giant finished his meal, he drank greedily from an earthen vessel, which must have held strong spirits for soon the giant lay on his back snoring, a sound like felled trees tumbling together. We rushed to the door and tried to budge the timber which held it fast but it was too massive. One of our number had a small knife used mainly for carving figures. We resolved to blind the giant and slash his throat. We managed the first order of business, but the terrible injury woke him to sudden rage and frantically he grasped for us. We scrambled to the far side of the room, where we found the giant’s sheep and pigs. He followed us but every time he reached down he clutched an animal instead of a man. We each picked up a sheep and carried it on our back. The giant went to the door and opened it so that his stock could go to pasture, which allowed us to escape the keep. We ran for our lives to the beach and our waiting ship. The giant heard our clamoring down the rocks and called to his brethren for assistance. We boarded our ship but before we could reach open water the giants held us fast. We beat their hands with oars and clubs and stabbed them with fishing lances until they released us, and the tide carried us away. Weary from our escape, however, we soon ran upon treacherous shoals, which tore the ship asunder. All of my mates drowned. I clung to a piece of the timber, a rib of the splintered ship, and was the sole survivor. As I floated in the sea, a frightful fish bit off my legs. I washed upon a lonely island, where I remained marooned for many years—surviving against all odds. Harry recognized the Korean tale from Odysseus’s great wanderings as well as from Sinbad’s voyages—all the ancient authors drawing from some still more ancient source, a common human head water. ㄴ

As the day of his welcome-home party approached, Harry felt more and more uneasy. Perhaps it was the very idea of it: The village no longer felt like home. No place did. It seemed, then, that the idea was to welcome him to a strange place, one that offered no hope of becoming familiar.The village had donned a disquieting mask The line came to him—alone in the house, brewing coffee—as if spoken (whispered) by someone else. It took him a moment to attribute it to the chorus, which was whispering other words: a flood of images. As soon as the coffee was done he took a cup to the back porch, along with a notepad he found in a drawer and a pen. It was a chilly morning but Harry was warm enough in a heavy sweater, with a scarf knotted around his neck—in addition to the words burning inside of him. He scribbled the line about the disquieting mask, then the next: as dramatic a change as from Drama to Comedy, from Dionysus to Apollo, from Discord to Calm He sat for a long while writing the words, working them, before he accepted that he was making a poem. He wrought images into lines and lines into stanzas. Harry discovered that the chaos of his chorus had become a more tamable torrent, one that could be checked with dikes and causeways and dams, by controlling diction, syntax and punctuation—even blank spaces provided some buffer for the rising tide of words. In the corner of the spare room there was a small desk on which sat an Underwood typewriter. Harry took the pages of handwritten poetry—with their crossouts and insertions, arrows and asterisks—and sat in front of the machine. Even his juxtaposition to the typewriter calmed his mind further. He found clean sheets of paper in one of the desk drawers and rolled a sheet into the carriage. He worked to bring meaning to the disordered ideas and images. After a time he had a draft with which he felt some level of satisfaction. He unrolled it from the carriage, folded the newborn poem in thirds, and placed it inside Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. He’d titled it ‘The Human Voice.’ ㄷ

The Ladies Auxiliary prepared most of the food, including their signature ham loaf, and decorated the church basement. Annette’s students made a banner out of an old sheet and purple fabric paint: Welcome Home, Harry!! There was some debate as to whether ‘Harry’ should be ‘Mr. Gale’ or ‘Cpl. Gale,’ but Annette decided the simplest approach best. The banner hung on the basement wall above the refreshments table. Mrs. Holcomb had made a cake, white icing with purple script repeating the message, and color scheme, of the banner. Pastor Phillips had placed a notice about the welcome-home in the bulletin, prominently anchoring the front page; and he made special mention of it during both services. Other notices were posted here and there: the windows of Owens’ Café and Reynolds’ Barber Shop, on the bulletin-board in the library, and on the wall at the Farm Service office. ㄹ

Harry: (To the Audience) I hold no animosity for my neighbors—but neither do they hold a special place in my heart. They strike me as ghosts, a part of my past that has returned to me unwanted and unbidden, even though it is I who has returned to them. They dully occupy a space which should be my future, as yet unformed. Are there seeds beneath the soil that shall claw their way to the surface and the enlivening light? Or have they lain dormant too long and forgotten their purpose, and will merely rot in the damp earth? Food for another’s dream.Annette: Are you ready? The guest of honor shouldn’t be late, not even fashionably so.Harry: I cannot of course count my sister a ghost. That would be unkind, for one, and she has always been kind to me; even when we were children. Also, there is life and living in her more so than most of her (our) neighbors. She is a seed whose brave shoot may yet break into the light—perhaps only to whither in the inhospitable climate. She may be brave enough to try, but am I brave enough to let her?Chorus: Harry has not broached the subject but Annette has obviously been abandoned by her husband. Tim loaded the car with what he wanted—leaving enough behind to tell the tale of his departure—and he drove toward some other future. Though this place is rife with spirits, a new Asphodel, how could Harry abandon his sister too? It could be the last bit that breaks her.Annette: Look. They’ve made you a banner: Welcome Home, Harry!!Pastor Phillips: Here’s our war hero. Let us shake your hand.Jim Goodpath: Welcome home!Carl Reynolds: It’s good to see you!Harry: Thank you, Pastor, for lending us use of the basement, and for arranging the food.Pastor: You’re welcome. The ladies were delighted to have a project. It’s been a slow year in the wedding and funeral departments, sadly and gladly, respectively.Chorus: A funeral, that’s what this feels like to Harry: The village turning out to pay their respects, then have a free meal and eat a piece of white cake. He manufactures a smile for new arrivals and shakes hands and responds to the same few questions again and again. When did he get back? What’s he going to do? Implied: Will he be staying? A couple of weeks ago . . . ? . . . ? The too-sweet smell of the ham loaf reminds him of his parents’ funerals.Pastor Phillips: (Confidentially.) Your arrival home was quite fortuitous—the timing we mean.Harry: Timing?Jim Goodpath: Just when she needed a man.Chorus: It’s a well-established fact that a woman needs a man. The several women in the village and in its history who appear to have successfully ignored the fact are mere exceptions: Outliers, often nearly as literal of a term as figurative. Harry looks across the basement at his sister, whom he would describe as thoughtful, but notunhappy. It makes sense: There is much to consider, given her change of circumstance.Pastor: I have been saying an extra little prayer for Annette—and here you are . . . and for your safe return to us, too, of course.Carl Reynolds: Let’s get your picture.Pastor: I see you have a new toy.Carl: Picked up the new flash in Crawford yesterday. Been chomping at the bit to try it out.Chorus: Harry has brought the ragged copy of Chicago Poems with him, in his side pocket— the weight of the book against his hip, slight as it is, gives him a sense of security. He takes the Sandburg from his pocket to pose for Carl Reynolds, amateur but avid photographer.Carl: That’s great. Chin up a bit, smile, on three . . .Chorus: The exploding bulb dazzles Harry for a second. As his vision clears he sees Beth Ann Ferguson standing next to Carl, as if she has materialized with the burst of light. At first, before his vision returns completely, he thinks she is a child at Mr. Reynolds’s side. When he recognizes Beth Ann, he recalls that her childhood nickname was Polly, something to do with a story about a parrot in one of their primers. Harry must be imagining it, but a faint residue of the blinding light seems to linger in the space around Beth Ann, like an aura.Harry: Hi. I didn’t notice you come in.Chorus: His extended hand holds the book of poetry still, as if an offering. Beth Ann takes the accidental gift and looks at the spine before returning it.Beth Ann: Sandburg.Chorus: Eruption of laughter, if you please. . . . Thank you. It is because Mr. Abernathy has gotten into the basement storage-room where the church’s theatrical properties are kept and emerged wearing a goat mask. Mayor Whittle and Doc Higgins join in, and they are a cow and a pig. The trio begin to make the appropriate noises, much to the group’s general delight.Pastor Phillips: What do you think, Harry? Bet you didn’t know this would be a masquerade.High noon inside the playhouse large cool fishes glisten singing of life in the sun: Chorus.Harry: I need a smoke.Beth Ann: I could use some air.A grinning skull waves of sound beat the sidewalk a new way: Chorus.Harry: The night is clear. The stars are like comets. They should all have tails of stardust.Beth Ann: You always noticed the oddest things, Harry Gale.Harry: Did I? I’d nearly forgotten.Cars whir by when high waves come closer into the hoofs on a winter night: Chorus.Beth Ann: Is something wrong?Harry: No. . . .Soft echoes on a bronze pony in the cold and lonely snow and into dawn: Chorus.Harry: Do you have a car?Beth Ann: I can use my dad’s Mercury.Harry: Would you drive me to Crawford? To the bus terminal?Beth Ann: What? Now?—Do you want to let Annette know?Harry: I can call. She can send me my things.Alone with a picture after the dead beat their hands outside of what poets leave their skulls in the sun for: Chorus.

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Decolonising research methodology must include undoing its dirty history

Author

Director of Scholarship at Change Management Unit at the Vice Chancellors' office; Professor and Head of Archie Mafeje Research Institute, University of South Africa

Disclosure statement

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Hyphenating “research” into “re-search” is very useful because it reveals what is involved, what it really means, and goes beyond the naive view of “research” as an innocent pursuit of knowledge.

It underscores the fact that “re-searching” involves the activity of undressing other people so as to see them naked. It is also a process of reducing some people to the level of micro-organism: putting them under a magnifying glass to peep into their private lives, secrets, taboos, thinking, and their sacred worlds.

Building on Smith’s work, my concern here is the context in which re-search methodology is designed and deployed. In particular, it concerns the relationship between methodology with power, the imperial/colonial project as well as the implications for those who happened to be the re-searched.

Broadly speaking, what is at issue is re-search as a terrain of pitting the interests of the “re-searcher” against those of the “re-searched.” The core concern is about how re-search is still steeped in the Euro-North America-centric worldview. Re-searching continues to give the “re-searcher” the power to define. The “re-searched” appear as “specimens” rather than people.

I define re-search methodology as a process of seeking to know the “Other” who becomes the object, rather than subject of re-search and what is means to be known by others.

That is why methodology needs to be decolonised. The process of its decolonisation is an ethical, ontological and political exercise rather than simply one of approach and ways of producing knowledge.

Whose methodology is it anyway?

When Europeans shifted from a God-centred society to secular thinking during the Enlightenment period, they inaugurated the science of “knowability”. God was no longer the only one who could understand the world. The rational human could too.

This idea is best captured in Rene Descartes’ famous dictum

Cogito Ergo Sum (I Think, Therefore, I am).

This marks the emergence of the Cartesian philosophy of being and the Cartesian knowing subject: a human defined by her rationality.

Since then, the decolonial theorists have unmasked the person behind the “I” as not just any human being, but the European “Man”. Here was born the idea that “Man” stands for “Human” as well – the beginning of the shift towards the world being seen through a patriarchal lens.

It was during the “Voyages of discovery” that gave rise to colonialism, that European men began to encounter the “Other” and then assume the position of a “knower” and a “re-searcher” who was thirsty to know the “Other”, who emerged as the native Indian, as Shakespeare’s Caliban, as the African, the Aborigines and the other natives.

The Other had to be re-searched to establish whether they were actually human or not. Here was born the methodology as a handmaiden of colonialism and imperialism.

From ‘ethnographic’ to ‘biometric’ state

In his book Define and Rule, Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani argued that every colonial conqueror was preoccupied with the “native question”. This was about how a minority of white colonial conquerors were to rule over a majority of conquered black people.

To resolve the “native question” the conquered black “native” had to be known in minute detail by the white coloniser. Thus re-search became a critical part of the imperial-colonial project. The European anthropologist became an important re-searcher, producing ethnographic data and knowledge that was desperately needed by colonialism to deal with the nagging “native question”.

As a result of this desire to know the “native” for colonial administrative purposes the colonial state emerged as an “ethnographic state”, interested and involved in ‘re-searching’ the native so as to “define” and “rule” over the “native”.

It was under the “ethnographic state” that colonial ideologues such as Thomas Babington Macaulay in India, Lord Frederick Lugard in West and East Africa, Cecil John Rhodes in Southern Africa used this data to malevolent ends, both to invent the idea of the native and to control her. They assumed the status of experts on the colonised natives and produced treatise such as The Dual Mandate in Africa which assumed the status of modules on how to rule over “natives”.

Today, with the rise of “global terrorism,” drug-trafficking and the problem of migration, new forms of surveillance, and state control have emerged. Keith Breckenridge in his award winning book reflected on concepts of “biometric state” and “documentary state”. These use machines to extract, capture, and store information about all people, but particularly “Muslims” and “blacks”, whose ways of worship, living and actions do not fit into the European template.

What is the role of re-search in this and what methodologies are used in trying to know the “Other”, that is, the unwanted migrant and the feared Muslim.

Unmasking, rebelling, re-positioning and recasting

Decolonising methodology must begin with unmasking the modern world system and the global order as the broader context from which re-search and methodology are cascading and are influenced. It also means acknowledging and recognising its dirtiness.

Our present crisis is that we continued to use re-search methods that are not fundamentally different from before. The critique of methodology is interpreted as being anti-re-search itself. Fearing this label, we (modern scholars and intellectuals) have been responsible for forcing students to adhere religiously to existing ways of knowing and understanding the world.

No research proposal can pass without agreement on methodology. No thesis can pass without recognisable methodology. There is a mandatory demand: how did you go about getting to know what you have put together as your thesis?

Consequently, methodology has become the straitjacket that every new researcher has to wear if they are to discover knowledge. This blocks all attempts to know differently. It has become a disciplinary tool that makes it difficult for new knowledge to be discovered and generated.

In the knowledge domain those who try to exercise what the leading Argentinian semiotician and decolonial theorist Whater D. Mignolo termed “epistemic disobedience” are disciplined into an existing methodology, in the process draining it of its profundity.

Decolonising methodology, therefore, entails unmasking its role and purpose in re-search. It also about rebelling against it; shifting the identity of its object so as to re-position those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators. And, finally, it means recasting research into what Europe has done to humanity and nature rather than following Europe as a teacher to the rest of the world.

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Q:

SyntaxError: missing ) after argument list in fire bug

I am getting the syntax error:

SyntaxError: missing ) after argument list

From this jQuery code:
$("#createEnquiry").text(${noEnqMsg});

What kinds of mistakes produce this Javascript Syntax error?

A:

I think you meant to use string quotes:
$("#createEnquiry").text("${noEnqMsg}");

Or maybe you though you were using template strings:
$("#createEnquiry").text(`${noEnqMsg}`);


Acacia incognita

Acacia incognita is a shrub belonging to the genus Acacia and the subgenus Juliflorae. It is native to an area in the Mid West region of Western Australia.

See also
List of Acacia species

References

incognita
Category:Flora of Western Australia


# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from common import *

class Items:

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            except:
                pass

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What are good methods of explaining to my four-year-old son why "color" is not how he should spell "colour", even though it is spelt that way in many of the books he's reading? (Also "realize", "favorite", etc).

Similarly, although less importantly, that he should pronounce "z" as "zed" ("dance", "tomato", etc), but the characters on TV that say "zee" are right too.

He understands that there are multiple words for the same thing in other languages (e.g. counting in Māori or Spanish), but US English is so close to English that it's confusing that there are these minor differences.

I'm not saying that US English is "wrong", but at school he will be expected to spell in NZ English, and there using US spelling will be "wrong" in that it will be corrected. When he is older, he'll be able to learn why regional variants of languages exist, but for someone just learning to read/spell, that's a bit complicated.

In maths, we first learn that the square root of 4 is 2, and that is the "correct" answer in school - once we understand more we learn that it's ±2. For now, what matters is knowing that if he is asked to spell "colour" that the answer that is expected has a "u"; learning how to write in US English can be done when he's older.

I'd like suggestions as to know how I can explain what's expected, while acknowledging that the variants are (for the author) correct, without overwhelming his four-year-old brain.

@torbengb Not as far as I can tell. It isn't really an English question (I know why there are differences and what there are), it's a parenting question (how to explain this to a pre-schooler). I'd like advice from parents, not language experts (for this particular question).
–
Tony MeyerMay 23 '11 at 12:58

2

+1 to this. We live in The Philippines, the stuff on the shelves might have come from any given country. AGH!
–
Tim Post♦May 23 '11 at 18:14

I dunno, I've always considered "Mom" and "Mum" to be different words - they're not alternate spellings, but different things you can call your mother, just like "Ma" or "Mama".
–
MarthaMay 28 '11 at 0:06

For the mom example, mom and mum are different words with different pronunciations, although with the same meaning and IIRC a parallel or closely branched etymology. You could have both in a sentence and they would both be spelled correctly. Color and colour are better examples, and ironically enough the latter 'ou' spelling is taken from Old French, while the previous matches both a more modern Anglicization and the original latin.
–
Peter DeWeeseJul 1 '11 at 19:00

9 Answers
9

You can use it as an introduction to World Cultures, English while spoken in places like America, Britain, Australia and in Canada all have different spellings and pronunciations. Even in a individual countries you get regional dialects that make words sound different, that might even be a starting point.

Wrong and right may not be the best way to phrase it, but maybe expectations are. In the book your son is reading, because its from a different place, has spellings that are different but your son will still be expected to spell the words in the way he is taught.

Language is a wonderful and changing thing, although lots of these complexities might be too much for a 4 year old but it doesn't hurt to lay the groundwork for the future.

Thanks. His understanding of geography is significantly behind his reading, so that doesn't really help. Using this as a reason to try and improve that is a good suggestion.
–
Tony MeyerMay 23 '11 at 12:59

3

I like the point about wrong and right vs. expectations. It reminds me of some excellent (if humorous) advice I once heard: "There are two answers to every question in school. The right answer, and the answer your teacher wants to hear. I expect you to know them both."
–
Bill ClarkMay 24 '11 at 15:53

Before you read a book, put a pin on a world map for where the author is from and/or the setting of the story. Then explain to your child that different people from different places speak and write differently. Without distracting their reading too much, mention phrases/idioms, animals, spelling, architecture, etc. that is unique to that author or story setting. You may have to scan the book beforehand to be prepared.

A nice suggestion, although a lot of work :) We read four books each night, so that would add quite a lot of prep and execution time, although most books are from NZ/UK/US, so there would be a lot of overlap I guess.
–
Tony MeyerMay 24 '11 at 0:34

You don't have to do it with every book..
–
Javid JamaeMay 24 '11 at 1:22

2

+1 for the idea of having a world map. I grew up with a huge world map on the wall, and I'm providing the same to my son. I believe it's important to understand that you're just a small part of something much much bigger.
–
Torben Gundtofte-BruunMay 24 '11 at 6:15

I agree torben; we have a huge map in the eldests bedroom and she pins it in each country we've visited with green pins and red pins for any country she wants to go to. We also have a lot of maps as jigsaws. I come from a mixed background, and want the kids to know they too shouldn't limit themselves by geographical bounds; maps are great.
–
HairyMay 24 '11 at 6:44

At my grammar school you were allowed to spell either way: US English or British English - you just had to choose one and stick with it.

You need to explain that there exists different written dialects of English much like there are different accents. A Scotsman speaking English sounds much different from a Cockney speaking English (if they actually do speak English, that is. I'm still not convinced.) But neither of them are pronouncing anything 'wrong' per se, just in their own dialect.

If he uses the US spelling, gently correct him with the comment, "Remember, we spell 'X' differently than they do. Their spelling isn't WRONG, it's just not how WE spell it here."

If he gets familiar with both forms of spelling, it's just a bonus IMO. That way there isn't any agonising over colors or neighbourhoods or how to check your cheque.

Cockney uses rhyming slang, which is a bastardisation of english, so isn't really the same at all. In Scotland, like in the US, they actually use different words, for the same things, so the same rules can be applied. I'd also say, for us, it is wrong, so I will always teach my children there is a wrong and right way to spell things. We call the english Americans speak American English and approach it as a different language, as such.
–
HairyMay 23 '11 at 13:19

1

1: I'd just like to add I'm female. 2: Even American English has different dialects. Bostonian vs. Georgia Peach vs. Wisconsinite. What's a Tonic to me, is a Coke the other and a Pop to the third, even if it's a Pepsi we're all drinking. Does it make it wrong? No. Both a Scotsman and a Cockney (or a Welshman) can speak English to each other and be understood (most of the time, accent joking aside). The same way a Dane from Copenhagen can understand a Dane from Sønderjylland. Different dialects, with some different regional expressions and spellings, but both 'right' in their own sense.
–
DarwyMay 23 '11 at 15:17

@Darwy Apologies on the gender! I'd edit if I could....
–
BeofettMay 23 '11 at 15:20

...and finally, the discussion was about spelling. In England, if you spell Colour as color, you will be marked as incorrect, at ALL academic institutions; teaching a child it isn't wrong, will not only confuse them, especially at an early age, it will be misleading them, for it is wrong.
–
HairyMay 23 '11 at 15:59

As an Englishman living in the US, this is a never ending topic of interest, intrigue and amusement for my 2 young daughters.

Conceptually, there are quite a few different angles that one can take this from (probably depending on age) that can make pretty interesting explanations & discussions.

Historical - it's pretty fun to explain how over the last several hundred years people have moved around the world, and in this case how the expansion (and subsequent contraction) of the British Empire has led to dispersement of the language.

Evolutionary - Given the dispersement, explain how things can diverge over time (spelling, pronunciation and so forth). This is a nice way to explain the beauty of language and how it can be different and yet but the same. Also a nice lead in to other evolutionary concepts.

Differences - How any differences across cultures, geographies, countries etc. present these interesting and fun situations.

Spelling was very unstandardized at one point and phonetic encodings differed considerably. English seemed to hit the perfect storm for un-standardization as compared to most other european languages. Very interesting cultural study.
–
Peter DeWeeseJul 1 '11 at 18:52

Children at the age of four are not and should not be generally expected to sit still or spell complicated words correctly and certainly not understand why spelling it "color" is wrong when Kermit spells it like that.

So it's a mistake to use the terms "right" and "wrong" in this case. In fact, it's a mistake in any case as one spelling isn't right or wrong. English spelling is just a mostly arbitrary selection between options, there aren't any spelling rules per se, just tradition, and tradition differs in different countries.

Hence, instead of explaining that "color" is wrong, you should explain that "color" is alright, but in NZ we usually have a u before the r, making it "colour". This will be an excellent opportunity for your kid to learn both that there may not always be a right and wrong answer. If "here in New Zealand" is too complicated, just say "color" is correct, but "colour" is even better. Personally I'd wait with that until he starts school, though.

With regards to the claims that NZ and UK schools do claim that there is a right and wrong spelling, this is hardly done with 4-years olds, and if it is, a word with the teacher to tone down the "you are doing it wrong!" with 4-year olds is probably appropriate. It's obviously different once they are a bit older, but telling a 4-year old they are doing it wrong when he/she is writing "I have a calico colored cat" is perhaps less pedagogical than could be desired.

Perhaps you should start by changing your stance that one way is "right" and the other "wrong". Even if the schools operate by this expectation, it is difficult to explain to a 4-year-old (as you no doubt have witnessed, else you wouldn't be asking the question).

Instead, simply explain that the US spellings and pronunciations are considered "unusual" in your area, and that "people who live far away" sometimes do things a little different.

There's nothing wrong with an American who spells "color" as "colour". At worst, it might seem a trifle eccentric. It certainly isn't "wrong". Any teacher who would mark such a thing "wrong" is more concerned with teaching a lesson about following instructions rather than proper spelling, and you may or may not agree with teaching children that doing what is expected of them is more important than understanding why it is expected of them.

If you're having trouble explaining these concepts to a 4 year old, then you might simply have to wait until he's a bit older. In the meantime, you can just make an effort to expose him to more examples of the English variations, so that the US versions appear to be more of a minority. When he is actually in school, all of the examples presented will be the English variations, which should make it easier for him to decide which to use. If there is still any confusion, you can simply guide him to spell or pronounce it the way the teachers do.

I am still not clear from the conflicting comments if children in NZ are expected to be writing words like "colour" by the time they are 4, but it seems that they probably are not. You do have time for your son to develop a bit more, and in as little as a year it may be much easier for him to grasp the concept.

@everybody, I've said this before, so I'll be a bit less polite today: Please do not use comments for long back-and-forth sessions; this is a Q&A site, not a chat. If you don't have access to the parenting chat from work, then chat from home. If you feel the need to declare your perspective in detail, do so in your own answer. I have saved the comments. If anyone is interested, ask me in the chat!
–
Torben Gundtofte-BruunMay 23 '11 at 15:49

1

@everybody, I will continue to delete comments as long as you're just using them to bicker. Please everyone, contribute your thoughts in separate answers. Demonstrate your good parenting skills by showing tolerance and respect toward each other. Remember the FAQ says be nice.
–
Torben Gundtofte-BruunMay 23 '11 at 19:16

I would have thought simplest would be to say it is wrong in NZ English or British English. Treat it as a different language that has most words the same as proper English (by proper I mean for your region) - as I would certainly hope the school would mark answers as incorrect if they use spelling from a different language.

The issue is that he has trouble understanding how they are different languages when 90%+ is exactly the same (unlike, e.g. Spanish or Māori).
–
Tony MeyerMay 24 '11 at 0:36

There are other groups of languages that are also similar-yet-different. The German group of German/Austrian/Swiss German; the Scandinavian group of Danish/Swedish/Norwegian. Or even (less helpful to a U.S. 4yo) Japanese that uses many Chinese kanji characters that sometimes have different meaning but same reading (pronunciation), and sometimes different reading but same meaning. I think US/UK/AU/NZ English is closer than all of these though, so it's no wonder that it's difficult to learn, and probably also hard to teach!
–
Torben Gundtofte-BruunMay 24 '11 at 6:41

1

Which is probably why it is a very good idea to make it very clear to a child, who is learning a language, that there is a right and wrong way to spell, speak it. Any variance can be introduced at a later date when they are ready, intellectually, for it.
–
HairyMay 24 '11 at 7:19

When I was a child, I read books from the UK, and my mom just made a little arch over the "u" in "Mum" to make it "Mom." Sometimes little corrections like that may be necessary.

By the time I was 12, I read books my dad brought back from his trips to the UK, and loved learning a different way of spelling. To this day, however, I spell some things "wrong" for the US, and don't realize it until spellcheck corrects me.

At the same time, the internet has no borders and many jobs nowadays require knowledge of, and sensitivity to, other countries' means of spelling. It's a fine line to walk, and 4 years old is definitely an age to "keep it simple, stupid." I'd try to avoid conflicting English for now (even if you have to edit your child's books), and whenever you can't avoid it, try to turn it into a very short, very simple geography or history lesson. Bear in mind that sometimes adults overly complicate things; a simple "people spell things differently in other countries, but we should get used to the way we do it here first" might suffice.

You can always expand this into teaching more about the grey (or gray) areas of life later.


Q:

'System.ArgumentException' when trying to use SetPixel (x, y, Color)

I am trying to create a white picture (greyscale format).
So here is the code I use:
Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(1, 1,
System.Drawing.Imaging.PixelFormat.Format16bppGrayScale);
bmp.SetPixel(0, 0, Color.FromArgb(255, 255, 255));
bmp = new Bitmap(bmp, i.Width, i.Height);

"I" is an existing Bitmap image. I am playing with its channels.
The principle is to create a 1 pixel image in greyscale, give this pixel the white color and then enlarge it to the good size.
But I have this as a result:

"An unhandled exception of type 'System.ArgumentException' occurred in
  System.Drawing.dll"

I tried Color.White but it isn't allowed for greyscale or indexed formats.
What are my other options to fix this?

A:

Why not to do it without converting to greyscale?
Bitmap A = new Bitmap(i.Width, i.Height);
for (int x = 0; x < i.Width; x++)
    for (int y = 0; y < i.Height; y++)
    {
        Color C = i.GetPixel(x, y);
        Color WD = Color.FromArgb(C.R, 255, C.G, 0);
        A.SetPixel(x, y, WD);
    }

Simply done by placing colour channels in the desired order


307 F.3d 1127
DEWITT CONSTRUCTION INC., Plaintiff-Appellant,v.CHARTER OAK FIRE INSURANCE COMPANY; Travelers Property Casualty Corporation; Travelers Indemnity Company of America, Defendants-Appellees,v.Opus Northwest LLC, Third-party-plaintiff.DeWitt Construction Inc., Plaintiff-Appellee,v.Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company; Travelers Property Casualty Corporation; Travelers Indemnity Company of America, Defendants-Appellants,v.Opus Northwest LLC, Third-party-plaintiff.
No. 01-36013.
No. 01-36014.
United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.
Argued and Submitted September 9, 2002.
Filed October 9, 2002.
As Amended on Denial of Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc December 4, 2002.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED Todd C. Hayes, Stanislaw Ashbaugh, LLP, Seattle, WA, for plaintiff-appellant-appellee.
Russell C. Love, Thorsrud Cane & Paulich, Seattle, WA, for defendants-appellees-appellants.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington; Barbara J. Rothstein, Chief Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-00-01150-BJR.
Before HILL*, GOULD, and BERZON, Circuit Judges.
Opinion by Judge GOULD; Concurrence by Judge HILL.
OPINION
GOULD, Circuit Judge.

1
This appeal, in a case with jurisdiction based on diversity, follows the district court's grant of summary judgment in an insurance contract dispute about two commercial liability insurance policies purchased by DeWitt Construction, Inc. ("DeWitt") from Travelers Property Casualty Co.1 ("Travelers"). DeWitt, a sub-contractor on a major development project, negligently installed cement piles, and thereafter had to install new piles that were satisfactory. The initial substandard performance by DeWitt gave rise to damages claims by the general contractor.2 The scope of the insurance policies' coverage, Travelers' duty to defend DeWitt against the asserted liability on DeWitt's subcontract, and bad faith and Consumer Protection Act claims resulting after Travelers declined the tender of defense are the subject of this dispute.

2
The district court granted DeWitt's partial summary judgment motion on duty to defend, granted Travelers' partial summary judgment motion on coverage, and thereafter dismissed DeWitt's claims for bad faith insurance claims handling and for violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act. The district court awarded DeWitt $17,043 in defense costs and $43,043.40 in attorneys' fees to be paid by Travelers because it had breached its duty to defend. DeWitt appeals, and Travelers cross-appeals. We have jurisdiction, and we affirm in part and reverse in part.

Factual Background

3
DeWitt was a subcontractor on a large-scale commercial construction project in Issaquah, Washington. DeWitt subcontracted with the general contractor, Opus Northwest LLC ("Opus"), to drill and place concrete piles into the ground to serve as a primary component of a building's foundation. At the heart of DeWitt's subcontract was DeWitt's promise to achieve a minimum strength in the concrete piles that were to support the building. Before commencing operations, DeWitt purchased a commercial general liability policy and a commercial excess liability policy (collectively "policies") from Travelers.

4
In performing the work, DeWitt at first failed to construct the concrete piles so that they achieved the required strength. The cement in the piles did not harden properly. As a result, the original holes and pile assembles were unusable. DeWitt had to install about 300 more piles to the site in other locations. This also resulted in delays in the overall project pace, abandonment of defective piles, re-engineering of the site's foundation, and the removal and reinstallation of other subcontractors' work. In addition, when DeWitt was moving heavy equipment to install remedial piles, DeWitt damaged buried mechanical and site work completed by other subcontractors. DeWitt's unsatisfactory work required Opus to accelerate the work of other subcontractors to meet its original construction deadline.

5
On January 6, 2000, Opus informed DeWitt that it was asserting a $3.5 million claim against DeWitt for damages arising from DeWitt's alleged negligence in the design and installation of the defective piles. DeWitt tendered Opus's claim to Travelers. Opus filed an arbitration demand against DeWitt on March 24, 2000. DeWitt also tendered the arbitration demand to Travelers. Between April and May, 2000, Travelers and Opus exchanged correspondence in which Opus provided Travelers additional itemization and detail regarding its claimed loss. Travelers made no decision on indemnification and did not provide counsel for DeWitt's defense during its investigation. After DeWitt filed suit in this case for a declaratory judgment, Travelers informed DeWitt that it was denying both defense and indemnification benefits under the policies.

Discussion

6
On appeal we address: whether the district court erred (1) in finding there is no coverage, (2) in finding that Travelers breached its duty to defend DeWitt, (3) in calculating the damages awarded to DeWitt, and (4) in dismissing DeWitt's bad faith and Consumer Protection Act claims. We review these issues de novo. Delta Sav. Bank v. United States, 265 F.3d 1017, 1021 (9th Cir.2001); Neptune Orient Lines, Ltd. v. Burlington N. and Santa Fe Ry. Co., 213 F.3d 1118, 1119 (9th Cir.2000).

I. Coverage

7
To determine whether any of DeWitt's claims are covered under the policies, we must consider three questions of contract interpretation: (1) whether there was an "occurrence" giving rise to the alleged damages; (2) whether any of the alleged damages are "property damage"; and (3) whether the property damages are nevertheless barred from coverage by a specific exclusion under the policies.

A. Occurrence

8
To be covered under the policies, any alleged property damage must be caused by an "occurrence," which is defined in part as "an accident." DeWitt argues that the defective manufacture of the concrete piles, such that they failed to meet the proper break-strength requirements, constituted an "occurrence" within the meaning of the policies. We agree. As the Washington Supreme Court decided in Yakima Cement Products Co. v. Great American Ins. Co., 93 Wash.2d 210, 608 P.2d 254, 257 (1980), a subcontractor's unintentional mismanufacture of a product constitutes an "occurrence." See also Baugh Constr. Co. v. Mission Ins. Co., 836 F.2d 1164, 1169 (9th Cir.1988) (finding that "negligent construction and negligent design claims fall within the definition of a fortuitous event").

9
In addition, the inadvertent act of driving over the buried mechanical and site work fits squarely within the policies' definition of "occurrence," as there is no indication in the record that the damage was caused intentionally.

B. Property Damage

10
The policies at issue in this case provide DeWitt with coverage for "those sums that the insured becomes legally obligated to pay as damages because of `bodily injury' or `property damage' to which this insurance applies." "Property damage" means: (a) "physical injury to tangible property, including all resulting loss of use of that property" or (b) "loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured."3

11
DeWitt alleges three types of property damage in this case: (1) damage to the construction site by impaling it with unremovable obstacles, (2) damage to the work of other subcontractors that had to be removed and reconstructed due to DeWitt's negligence, and (3) damage to buried mechanical piping and site work while moving equipment to replace the under-strength piles.

12
We conclude that the alleged damage to the construction site caused by DeWitt impaling it with unremovable piles is not "property damage" under the policies. For faulty workmanship to give rise to property damage, there must be property damage separate from the defective product itself. Yakima Cement, 608 P.2d at 258-59 (no property damage occurred due to the incorporation of defective concrete panels where record was devoid of evidence that the building value was diminished).4 See also Marley Orchard Corp. v. Travelers Indem. Co., 50 Wash.App. 801, 750 P.2d 1294, 1297 (1988) (stress to trees was property damage caused by the installation of a defective sprinkler system, unlike Yakima Cement where there was no damage separate from the defect).

13
DeWitt argues that the site was impaled with useless concrete piles and had to be redesigned to accommodate the remedial piles. DeWitt does not argue, however, that the remedial design was qualitatively worse than the original. Because DeWitt does not allege physical injury apart from the defective piles themselves, there is no issue of material fact in dispute. We affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on coverage for the alleged property damage to the construction site by the "impaling."

14
We turn next to whether the alleged damage to the work of other subcontractors, which had to be removed and destroyed as a result of DeWitt's installation of defective piles, is property damage within the scope of the policies. We find that it is. In Baugh, we applied Washington law and found property damage to tenant improvements when those improvements had to be removed as a result of the installation of defective concrete panels in a building. 836 F.2d at 1170. Similarly, Opus had to hire a demolition subcontractor to tear out pile-caps that had been installed over the defective piles because they were no longer useful. Baugh controls our conclusion that there was property damage to the extent subcontractors' work had to be removed and destroyed.

15
We also find that the alleged damage to the buried mechanical and site work caused by DeWitt's movement of heavy equipment was "physical injury to tangible property" and thus constituted property damage within the scope of the policies.

C. Applicability of Exclusions

16
Because we have found that DeWitt has proven property damages within the scope of the policies to the other subcontractors' work that was torn out or otherwise destroyed and to the other subcontractors' work that was damaged by operation of DeWitt's equipment, we next analyze whether any exclusion under the policies nevertheless bars coverage. Travelers bears the burden of proving that property damages that fall within the scope of the policy are excluded from coverage under the two policies purchased by DeWitt. See, e.g., Am. Star Ins. Co. v. Grice, 121 Wash.2d 869, 854 P.2d 622, 625-26 (1993) (insurer bears the burden of proving that a loss is not covered because of an exclusionary provision). Exclusions are strictly construed against the insurer because they are contrary to the protective purpose of insurance. See Diamaco, Inc. v. Aetna Cas. & Sur. Co., 97 Wash.App. 335, 983 P.2d 707, 711 (1999).

1. Damage to Other Subcontractors' Work Performed on Defective Piles

17
The "impaired property" exclusion does not bar coverage for property damage to the destroyed work that other subcontractors had performed on the defective piles. The impaired property exclusion, as stated in the policies, only applies "if [the impaired property] can be restored to use by: a) the repair, replacement, adjustment or removal of `[the insured's] product' or `[the insured's] work'; or b) [the insured] fulfilling the terms of the contract or agreement." DeWitt's installation of additional piles did not "restore to use" the work of other subcontractors. The other subcontractors' work (e.g., the pile caps) was removed from the defective piles, destroyed in the removal process, and remained destroyed notwithstanding the subsequent remedial work by DeWitt. The destroyed work of other subcontractors was not merely impaired, nor was it restored to use.

18
The "course of operations" exclusion in the general liability policy bars coverage for damage to "that particular part of any property" on which DeWitt is "performing operations, if the `property damage' arises out of those operations." In addition, the exclusion bars coverage for damage to "that particular part of any property" that must be repaired or replaced because DeWitt's work "was incorrectly performed on it."

19
The sequence of the work performed by other subcontractors in relation to DeWitt's work precludes the applicability of the course of operations exclusion. DeWitt installed piles by drilling holes, filling them with concrete, and then inserting rebar cages into the concrete. After DeWitt completed these operations, DeWitt began work in another area. Only then did the other subcontractors perform work on the defective piles. Neither component of the course of operations exclusion bars coverage: DeWitt was not performing operations on the work of other subcontractors when the damage occurred, nor did DeWitt incorrectly perform operations on the work of other subcontractors because that work (e.g., the pile caps) did not even exist when DeWitt performed its operations.

20
The "care, custody, and control" exclusion in the umbrella policy bars coverage for property damage to "property in [DeWitt's] care, custody, or control." This exclusion does not bar coverage for damage to the work of other subcontractors that performed work on the defective piles. DeWitt was in control of the areas in which piles were being installed only while operations were being performed in those areas. Once DeWitt finished installing a pile, DeWitt did not retain control over those site areas.5 To find otherwise would incorrectly impute control for a particular piece of property for the duration of the construction project as soon as a subcontractor performs any operation on that area, even if only for a limited time. Such a broad reading of the care, custody, and control exclusion would be inconsistent with the controlling principle of Washington law that exclusions should be narrowly construed and read in favor of the insured. See Diamaco, Inc., 983 P.2d at 711.

21
Because there is no policy exclusion that specifically bars coverage for the property damage to the work that other subcontractors performed on the defective piles, we reverse the district court's grant of summary judgment to Travelers on coverage of this claim.6

2. Damage to Buried Mechanical and Site Work

22
The impaired property exclusion does not bar coverage for the damage to buried mechanical and site work that was crushed by the movement of heavy equipment. That work was not restored to use through remedial steps taken by DeWitt; on the contrary, this property damage occurred when DeWitt was attempting to redress the initial mistake.

23
Whether the course of operations exclusion applies to damage to buried mechanical and site work cannot be decided on summary judgment at this time because there is a factual dispute as to whether the damaged work was on "that particular part" of the property on which DeWitt was performing operations. DeWitt argues that the damage occurred while driving heavy equipment en route to the particular part of the site where the remedial piles were being installed. Travelers, however, argues that the damage occurred when DeWitt moved heavy equipment in the particular area on which DeWitt was performing operations. The record is not instructive. Because there is a genuine issue of material fact, and because on summary judgment we view the facts in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party, we conclude that the course of operations exclusion does not bar coverage for the damage to buried site and mechanical work as a matter of law based on the current record. We therefore reverse in part the district court's grant of summary judgment on coverage and remand to the district court for further factual determinations and proceedings on the applicability of the course of operations exclusion to the damage to buried site and mechanical work.

24
As with the course of operations exclusion, there is also a factual dispute involving the applicability of the care, custody, and control exclusion. DeWitt contends that it only had control over the specific locations where it was actively installing piles. There is a question of fact regarding the proximity of the areas where the buried mechanical and site work was damaged to the areas where DeWitt was actively installing additional piles. Because there remains a genuine issue of material fact as to the applicability of the care, custody, and control exclusion, we reverse the district court's grant of summary judgment on coverage of this claim and remand for further factual determination.

D. Consequential Damages

25
The insurance policies at issue here provide for indemnification of the insured for "those sums that the insured becomes legally obligated to pay as damages because of ... `property damage' to which the insurance applies." In construing similar language, the Washington Court of Appeals in Marley Orchard determined that the policy allowed for consequential damages. 750 P.2d at 1297. The plaintiff in Marley was allowed to recover for expenditures reasonably made in an effort to avoid or minimize damages. Id. See also Gen. Ins. Co. of Am. v. Gauger, 13 Wash.App. 928, 538 P.2d 563, 566 (1975) (finding that once the definition of property damage is satisfied, "any and all damages flowing therefrom and not expressly excluded from the policy are covered").

26
Because the policies cover consequential damages, the district court correctly noted that even though intangible economic injury does not constitute property damage under the policy, "intangible economic injuries may result from physical injury to tangible property." We remand to the district court to determine the consequential damages (e.g., delay costs), if any, that flowed from property damage to the work of other subcontractors. Also, if the factfinder concludes that the property damage to buried mechanical and site work is not barred by any of the exclusions, then DeWitt is entitled to recover for delay costs that flowed directly from those damages. We express no view on these issues, which are properly within the domain of the district court in its further proceedings.

II. Duty to Defend

27
Under Washington law, the duty to defend and the duty to indemnify are separate obligations, and the duty to defend is broader than the duty to indemnify. Baugh, 836 F.2d at 1168. "The duty to defend arises whenever a lawsuit is filed against the insured alleging facts and circumstances arguably covered by the policy. The duty to defend is one of the main benefits of the insurance contract." Kirk v. Mt. Airy Ins. Co., 134 Wash.2d 558, 951 P.2d 1124, 1126 (1998). To determine whether a duty to defend exists, we examine whether the allegations for coverage are conceivably within the terms of the policy. Hayden v. Mut. of Enumclaw Ins. Co., 141 Wash.2d 55, 1 P.3d 1167, 1172 (2000). Then we determine whether an exclusion clearly and unambiguously bars coverage. Id.

28
Because we have concluded that at least some of the claims tendered to Travelers by DeWitt involve property damage within the scope of the policies that is not clearly excluded from coverage, Travelers did have a duty to defend. As explained below, that duty was triggered by the filing of the arbitration demand. We affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on the duty to defend.7

29
When, as here, an insurer breaches its duty to defend, recoverable damages for the insured include: "(1) the amount of expenses, including reasonable attorney fees the insured incurred defending the underlying action, and (2) the amount of the judgment entered against the insured." Kirk, 951 P.2d at 1126. See also Waite v. Aetna Cas. and Sur. Co., 77 Wash.2d 850, 467 P.2d 847, 851 (1970) (an insurer who wrongfully refuses to defend "will be required to pay the judgment or settlement to the extent of its policy limits" and reimburse the defense costs) (emphasis added).

30
Because we have determined that the policies do cover property damage to the subcontractors' work on the defective piles, and because the factfinder may conclude that the buried mechanical and site work is also covered by the policies, on remand the district court should consider (1) the portion of a reasonable settlement, if any, that can fairly be said to be related to the covered property damage; and (2) whether any such portion is recoverable as damages for breach of duty to defend.8

31
The district court erred by calculating attorneys' fees and costs from the date that DeWitt tendered Opus's claim to Travelers, February 16, 2000. The duty to defend is triggered by a "suit." See, e.g., Griffin v. Allstate Ins. Co., 108 Wash.App. 133, 29 P.3d 777, 781 (2001) (noting that in Washington the duty to defend arises upon the filing of a complaint). Because the policies include arbitration proceedings within the definition of "suit," the duty to defend was triggered on the date the arbitration demand was filed, March 24, 2000. Therefore, the award of attorneys' fees and costs should be calculated from March 24, 2000. We reverse and remand to the district court to properly determine the attorneys' fees and costs.

III. Extra-contractual Claims

32
To establish the tort of bad faith in the insurance context, the insured must show that the insurer's actions were "unreasonable, frivolous, or unfounded." Kirk, 951 P.2d at 1126. "Bad faith will not be found where a denial of coverage or failure to provide a defense is based upon a reasonable interpretation of the insurance policy." Id. Here, Travelers's duty to defend was not unambiguous. The arbitration demand was vague as to the nature of the damages giving rise to the claims, referencing "additional material damages" instead of noting specific property damage. The policy coverage was unclear in light of legitimate factual and legal issues pertinent to contract interpretation and application. We affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment dismissing DeWitt's bad faith claim.

33
DeWitt also appeals the district court's grant of summary judgment of its claim under the Washington Consumer Protection Act (CPA), RCW 19.86.010 et seq. Under the CPA, DeWitt must demonstrate (1) an unfair or deceptive act or practice (2) occurring in trade or commerce (3) that impacts the public interest (4) causing an injury to the plaintiff's business or property with (5) a causal link between the unfair or deceptive act and the injury suffered. Indus. Indem. Co. of the Northwest, Inc. v. Kallevig, 114 Wash.2d 907, 792 P.2d 520, 528 (1990). The first part of this analysis is closely related to the bad faith standard that we have already held was not satisfied by DeWitt. For essentially the same reasons that we conclude the district court appropriately dismissed the claim for bad faith, the district court appropriately dismissed the CPA claims against the insurer. We affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment for the CPA claims.

Conclusion

34
We affirm in part and reverse in part the district court's grant of summary judgment on coverage. Specifically, and as explained above, we affirm denial of coverage on the alleged damage to site from defective piles; we reverse denial of coverage on the subcontractors' work that was destroyed because of the defective piles (and direct the district court to enter a partial summary judgment to DeWitt on this issue); and we remand for further proceedings and factual determinations pertinent to application of the course of operations and of the care, custody, and control exclusions, as they may relate to the damage to buried subcontractors' work caused by DeWitt's movement of equipment to install new piles. We affirm the grant of summary judgment to the insured and against the insurer for breach of the duty to defend. On that issue, we remand for a recalculation of attorneys fees and costs subsequent to the arbitration demand, and for consideration whether there are other recoverable damages for breach of the duty to defend as to any portion of the settlement between DeWitt and Opus that reflects covered property damage. We finally affirm the grant of summary judgment to the insurer rejecting the bad faith and CPA claims because the insurer's position was not unreasonable, frivolous or unfounded. Both parties shall bear their own costs for appeal.

35
AFFIRMED IN PART AND REVERSED IN PART, AND REMANDED for further proceedings consistent with this disposition.

Notes:

*
 The Honorable James C. Hill, Senior United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting by designation

1
 Because Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company and Travelers Indemnity Company of America are subsidiaries of Travelers Property Casualty Company, the defendants are hereby collectively referred to as "Travelers"

2
 DeWitt has entered into a settlement agreement with the general contractor, Opus Northwest LLC ("Opus"). Opus has agreed not to file a judgment implementing the settlement pending the final outcome of this litigation between DeWitt and Travelers

3
 DeWitt did not argue that any of Opus's claims fall within the "loss of use" definition of property damage, and we do not address that issue on appeal

4
 In this case, even a showing of diminished value of the site would be insufficient to show property damage. Property damage under this policy requires "physical injury," whereas the policy inYakima Cement only required "injury."

5
 There is no indication in the record that DeWitt had supervisory control over the subcontractors who performed work on the piles after DeWitt had concluded its own operations

6
 Because there are no fact issues pertinent to coverage for the destroyed work of other subcontractors that attached to the defective piles, we direct the district court on remand to give partial summary judgment to DeWitt on this issueCf. Bird v. Glacier Elec. Coop., Inc., 255 F.3d 1136, 1152 (9th Cir.2001) (courts may sua sponte grant summary judgment to a nonmovant when there has been a summary judgment motion by one party and no cross-motion).

7
 Because we have determined that the arbitration demand alleged claims covered by the policies, we do not need to reach, and therefore do not decide, the issue of whether, under any theory including that relied upon by the district court, Travelers would have had a duty to defend even if coverage ultimately had been barred on summary judgment. More specifically, we need not decide and therefore express no view whether the district court's finding of a duty to defend absent a coverage determination for an interim period, before the coverage decision was made by the insurer, was correct

8
 We reject DeWitt's argument that Washington law permits no allocation of settlement if the insurer breaches the duty to defend. First, the Washington Supreme Court, inKirk v. Mt. Airy Ins. Co., 951 P.2d 1124, 1128 (Wash.1998), held that when an insurer breaches the duty to defend in bad faith, the insurer is estopped from asserting that alleged claims are outside the scope of coverage. Absent bad faith, the insurer is "liable for the judgment entered provided that the act creating liability is a covered event and provided the amount of the judgment is within the limits of the policy." Id. at 1126 (emphasis added). Because there was no bad faith here, see infra Section III, allocation is appropriate. To conclude otherwise would be to afford the same remedy in cases where the insurer has breached the duty to defend in good faith as in cases where such breach was in bad faith. Second, DeWitt's partial reliance on Nautilus v. Transamerica Title Ins. Co., 534 P.2d 1388, 1393 (Wash.App.1975), is misplaced because there the court rejected allocation where there was one claim and there were several legal theories of recovery. Here we have several claims; coverage of one claim does not automatically bring the others into the scope of the policy absent bad faith.

HILL, Circuit Judge, concurring:

36
Were we writing on the proverbial clean slate, I should be in serious doubt that the failure of the insured, DeWitt, to have performed its contracted work properly constituted an occurrence under the commercial liability policies. It seems to me that this goes far towards substituting general liability coverage for a performance guarantee underwritten by an insurance company.

37
However, evaluation of such doubt is not necessary in this case. We are dealing with a state law case, and the Yakima Cement Products Co. case, cited in the opinion, is a clear statement by the highest court of the state that, in Washington, such a failure is an occurrence. I, therefore, concur.


Hotels and Resorts HODELPA all-inclusive

Hodelpa chain has four hotels in the Dominican Republic, one is located in the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo, the other three are located in Santiago de los Caballeros. These are city hotels for business travelers, businessmen ... but also to tourists visiting the Dominican Republic.

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Enzymatic mechanism of an RNA ligase from wheat germ.
We have characterized the mechanism of action of a wheat germ RNA ligase which has been partially purified on the basis of its ability to participate in in vitro splicing of yeast tRNA precursors (Gegenheimer, P., Gabius, H-J., Peebles, C.L., and Abelson, J. (1983) J. Biol. Chem. 258, 8365-8373). The preparation catalyzes the ligation of oligoribonucleotide substrates forming a 2'-phosphomonoester, 3',5'-phosphodiester linkage. The 5' terminus of an RNA substrate can have either a 5'-hydroxyl or a 5'-phosphate. The 5'-phosphate, which for a 5'-hydroxyl substrate can be introduced by a polynucleotide kinase activity in the preparation, is incorporated into the ligated junction. The 3' terminus can have either a 2',3'-cyclic phosphate or a 2'-phosphate. 2',3'-Cyclic phosphates can be converted into 2'-phosphates by a 2',3'-cyclic phosphate, 3'-phosphodiesterase activity in the preparation. The 2'-phosphate of the ligated product is derived from the phosphate at the 3' terminus of the substrate. Ligation proceeds with the adenylylation of the 5'-phosphorylated terminus to form an intermediate with a 5',5'-phosphoanhydride bond.


A tariff on guitars bundled with the video game Rocksmith is striking the wrong chord with Ubisoft Canada Inc.

The software developer, which has studios in Montreal, Toronto, and other cities worldwide, is appealing a decision by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to classify guitars bundled with copies of its instructional video game Rocksmith as musical instruments.

Still following?

While the guitars — Les Paul Junior models, manufactured by Epiphone — are indeed real musical instruments, Ubisoft’s argument is that because the guitars are bundled and sold with video game software, they are eligible for alternate classification under “tariff item No. 9948.”

The said tarriff allows “articles for use in video games used with a television receiver, and other electronic games” to be sold duty free. Imported musical instruments and accessories, however, are typically subject to a 6% fee under tariff rules.


Ellen DeGeneres' reaction to the country star's "tiny snake" is priceless. Enjoy Blake Shelton keeping the audience entertained while on 'Ellen' here!

Blake Shelton is now a children’s book author. The country star and The Voice coach debuted his book titled “Blake and His Tiny, Little Snake” while visiting The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

“Chapter one. There once was a man named Blake. Blake was a very tall and handsome man. But Blake had a very tiny little snake,” Shelton read aloud to the audience.

Watch Ellen’s priceless reaction to Blake’s new project and below.

Okay, thankfully the book is a total fake— but the gifts Ellen and Blake gave out to the excited audience are totally real! Later in the episode Blake and Ellen invited two sisters to play a new game called “Wet Head”

Watch the hilarity ensue…

As can be expected, when Blake and Ellen get together— laughter is abundant.

Share these silly segments with other Blake Shelton fans!