Street 3D art

Renaissance Review

Below is a review of THE MASTER OF VERONA by Michael Lohr, of Renaissance Magazine. It will appear in their upcoming issue. At their request, I have happily reproduced it here, but please do visit them for their many other reviews and articles. “Montibus in claris semper vivida fides” - “Faith is always vigorous in the clear mountains." The Master Of Verona, the debut novel by Chicago-based Shakespearean actor and director David Blixt, is a historical and cultural immersion into fourteenth-century Italian life. We find ourselves standing on the cusp of the birth of the Renaissance, immersed in the Golden Age of Dante and the watching the cause and effect that would launch forth events that would inspire one of Shakespeare’s greatest works. The Master Of Verona focuses on the events that initiated the famous feud in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Blixt asked this question: what happened between the Montagues and the Capulets that eventually caused the tragic dual suicide? The Master Of Verona is the answer to that question.With a large ensemble of characters, we are exposed to a veritable cornucopia of swashbuckling eccentricities and temperaments. From such questionable persons as Giovanna da Svevia, the illegitimate descendant of Emperor Frederick II to more prominent folks such as Pietro Alaghieri, the eldest son of poet Dante, who like his father was exiled from Florence in 1312 to the callous Marsilio da Carrara, a knight from the family Padua, the novel is brimming with personality.In the same historical fiction tradition as Michael Chabon and his brilliant novels The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road, as well as just about any novel by Bernard Cornwell, The Master Of Verona is a beautifully realized historical novel. It is flowing with intricate plot movements, taut narrative, head spinning revelations and vibrantly painted scenes. At times the novel gets bogged down in fourteenth-century Italian minutiae; with all those Italian names swirling about, at times I felt like I was reading one of those Biblical “Jeddadiah begat Ezekiel who beget Ishmael” scriptures. But this complication is a mechanism of historical fiction and not the fault of Blixt. For historical accuracy you must use that which history gives you. Overall, The Master Of Verona is a rich, resonant novel, voluminous with the verve of life and a downright pleasure to read. This book is nirvana for any lover of quality historical fiction or books that focus upon Italian/European history. But it will also speak passionately to all connoisseurs of great fiction, regardless of their literati bent of interest.

Blobfish

Online gaming in China: Intangible value

Changyou is making a fortune selling items in a virtual worldPERHAPS it should not be a surprise. In the midst of a global capital shortage, the first company to list this year on New Yorks NASDAQ exchange not only needs no money; its source of profit is receiving cash for items that do not exist.Changyou is a three-year-old online-gaming business being spun out of Sohu, Chinas second-largest internet portal. The deal was due to be priced on April 2nd, as The Economist went to press, in a nostalgic reminder of what the stockmarket used to look like. At the top of the expected price range Changyou will be valued at about $820m, after a special distribution of $100m to its parent. The opening price may be higher still, given strong demand. ...

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Aye- Aye

The power of plant

libgdata

It’s about time to announce something I’ve been working on for about three months now: libgdata. It’s a GLib-, libsoup- and libxml2-based library for accessing GData APIs, as used by most Google services. There already exist several such libraries in a variety of languages, but as far as I’m aware this is the first one written in C — and thus the first which is widely accessible to the GNOME stack. So far it has decent support for YouTube video queries, and the beginnings of Google Calendar support. Having ported the Totem YouTube plugin to use libgdata, my next plan is to port the evolution-data-server Google Calendar backend as well. With that done, libgdata will hopefully be stable and fully-featured enough for people to get to work on starting to fulfil Rob Bradford’s dream of tighter desktop integration with web services.