Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Alone... alone... alone..."
¤ Usage: Repeat the word repeatedly as soon as you are left alone in a room, even if someone else can be found less than ten feet away.
¤ Origin: We've got Dusty to thank for this one, since it's his habit. Whenever he's restless, or whenever both Malaya and me change rooms, leaving him alone in the living room or bedroom, he wakes up, looks around and begins sounding in a sonar-like fashion, as he repeatedly meows, each yowl at exactly the same pitch and tone.
¤ Notes: He's not actually saying "alone" of course, at least not that we know, but since he only does it when he's suddenly alone, either due to his wandering or our movement, it seems a reasonably translation, based on the context. Since I made up the "alone" joke, whenever Dusty wanders off and begins yowling pathetically in the otherwise-empty bathroom or bedroom or living room, Malaya and me amuse each other by saying, "Alone, alone, alone..." over and over again, in the same pitch that Dusty uses.

Hey, it beats, "Shut up!" which is what we used to yell, which had about as much effect on the cat as you might expect. -- August 16, 2004

Blavod Black Vodka gets its unique color from Black Catechu -- the resin of the heartwood of the Acacia catechu, a tree indigenous to India and Burma.

Yes, those traditional vodka-producing hotspots... India and Burma. That on top of the fact that Burma tried to change its name to Myanmar about five years ago, with little international success.

Anyway, it occurs to me that if this trend continues, they may find ways to make other alcoholic beverages in other colors. Orange wine is catching on now, for instance. And then how long will it be before someone whips up some black champagne, and comes to me?  I like my URL, but if I'm also poor, and if some multinational beverage conglomerate comes calling with about $25k and an urgent desire to own my domain name... well you all could change your bookmarks, right?

Especially since it would be sell to them, or die a slow death as their lawyers bleed me with nuisance filings and try to arbitrate my URL out from under me. I'd take their money on the condition that they wrangle ericbruce.com for me. That and ericbruce.net have been owned by the same guy for as long as I've been looking to buy them, the site had nothing but some bad photos with a painful tartan background back when I first looked, and it hasn't even been online for upwards of two years.

Once I'm rich my lawyers will eat him, which would make me exactly as bad as the hypothetical black champagne-selling beverage company I alluded to two paragraphs ago. (You know how most everyone becomes a tax-dodging, self-justified prudish, soulless, back-stabbing bastard Republican once they're rich? Exactly. At least I can admit it, though.)

 

 

¤ Continuing to talk about random things in random order, how about that there Yeti Sports game? I posted about the new surfing one last week, after playing it for just an hour or so. I don't have a lot to add since then, other than that I still play it for 10 or 15 minutes a day, I don't care about score -- just about big air, and that I'm pretty bored with it.

I have found some new strategies though. Strategies for big air, of course. If you want to get an actual high score -- good luck. I've managed 30k a couple of times, but that's not even enough to crack the top 1000. The overall high scores are in the low 40k range, and I can't even imagine that, though I don't really try for them.  What I like to do is go high and pull 540ºs, and I've gotten pretty good at that.

This is a shot from the game, with the screen cropped a bit and the top lowered so you can see the stats. Not that I'm having a great game or anything here (I was mostly screwing around trying to get something good in a screenshot), but this is a technique that's essential for big air, as well as for high scores. When you ride sideways along the wave, at any height, you maintain your speed and actually accelerate a bit. This is useful for penguin hunting since you can skim along, make a right turn to jump and nail one, do your 180º and land, and repeat endlessly.  The goal of a high score is to get as many pingus as possible, which means (I think, as I said, I have zero high scores.) spending as little time jumping high and not hitting pingus as possible.  The new pingus seem to shoot out and hover at about the altitude you were at when they came out of the water, so if you don't go high they won't go high and require big/time-consuming leaps to get them. You'll lose points by not doing high airs, but I think the greater speed of pingu harvesting will make up for it.

When it comes to big airs though, something I am expert at, I can say that going sideways is very useful. Why? You have to wind it up with carving to get big. You can't get more than 550 or so just going air to air, but if you carve some you can easily get over 700. My record to date is a 1058 air, and I've had dozens over 1000, and imagine 1200 or so would be possible, since my biggest ones never seem to be on really perfect angles or after perfect carves.

The basic technique is to do circles; you gain speed by going down or up the wave in a straight line (and I mean straight, not 1 degree off; you slow down then), while turning slows you down. You gain more by going up and down than you lose by turning though, so if you keep doing circles you'll gradually accelerate, until your circles get bigger and bigger and you shoot off the side of the screen, or off the top of the wave. Once you get air you lose speed, so you want to not get air until you're going super fast.  You can maintain your speed to some degree, especially if you come down perfectly vertical to the wave and make your turn at the very bottom of the screen; I've even gained a few times at high speed; following an 822 air with an 860, for instance. The problem is that human reflex speed and human error dictate mistakes will be made, especially if you're like me and you have a compunction to crank a 540º turn every time you to bigger than about 750 and know you can comfortably make the turns and land cleanly. So while you could, in theory, achieve and them maintain infinite consecutive airs of 800+, doing a 540º every time, you never will. I've done 5 or 6 good 540s in a row several times, and scored on up to 3 straight ones, but I always start to land slightly off, turn poorly, go up slightly off, etc, and all of those drain my speed until I'm down below 700, when doing a clean 540 is almost impossible.

As for how to do it, you really need to just play the game and get a feel for it, but you want to carve as close to the top of the wave as possible, turn as close to the bottom of the screen as possible, and go sideways to reposition yourself. It's really hard to do any S turns when you're going super fast. You pretty much have to stick to circles, so I'll often land after about a 650 and make a 270º turn, so I'm in basically the position in the screenshot above. I then go sideways along the wave to the edge of the screen, turn down to the bottom again and do a 360º so I'm going sideways again, thus gaining a great deal of speed while still going sideways. With a few good turns and skims and carves you can pretty easily get 800+ airs. Over 900 is harder and requires tremendous speed and very clean angles. Over 1000 is just more of the same, but even cleaner and closer to going out of bounds on your bottom turn or leaping over the top of the wave on the top turn. If you leap it's okay, just land straight and keep going, you don't lose that much speed.

This is all much easier when the wave is still high, of course, since you've got more room to turn and power up your speed. I've done 900 airs even when the clock is down under 1/4 time left and the wave is lower, simply because the jump points are measured from the top of the wave to the apex of the jump, so if the wave is lower, you don't have to go as high to get the same score.

The real key to big airs (and probably big scores as well) is to cheat. You want a slower computer, or you want to play it with a bunch of other windows open. This slows down the game play and makes much more precise cornering possible. I'm currently playing the downloaded version of Big Wave, and I have my usual 4 or 5 browser windows open, email open, frontpage open, etc, and then I open up the downloaded version of Yeti Game 5 (pingu golf) and and Game 5 (Big Wave) at the same time. This cuts my big wave speed substantially, and while still being fast enough that I have to actually play it and I'm not bored waiting for things to happen, the high speed doesn't send me out of bounds every time I'm on the verge of a really big air.

As for the ongoing challenge of pulling a 720º air, I think it's possible, but would require a gigantic leap and perfect timing on the spin. I've tried for it on several 1000+ airs and never turned more than about 650º, where I go well past a clean 540º and land awkwardly, sideways on the wave. I'd say that height of maybe 1150 or 1200 would make it possible, if you got your turn going the instant you cleared the top of the wave, but since the game instructions don't even list a bonus for 720s, and they do for 180, 360, and 540, it's entirely possible that it's not included in the programming, and that you wouldn't get a gratifying "720" in glowing green letters even if you actually did one.

Feel free to try, though. I inevitably do on my biggest airs.

 

 

¤ Marilyn Manson's long-awaited cover and video of the old Depeche Mode song Personal Jesus is now online.  I'd like directly to it, but Launch.com doesn't allow that sort of thing, nor do they allow you to just watch it over and over again without commercial interruption. So click that link to go to the "personal jesus" search page and then click the link for the Marilyn Manson version.

It's not that good a song or video, unfortunately. The song suffers from Harry Potter movie 1 and 2 syndrome, where it's almost exactly like the source material, and feels too familiar. I never much liked Depeche Mode at the time (Too wimpy for my teen age thrash metal tastes.) but I did enjoy this song, and thought the video was probably the funniest (unintentionally) video I'd ever seen.  With that in mind, my eyes lit up at the link to the Depeche Mode video for Personal Jesus, since the only online version of it, as linked to from my band names discussion of DM, is a 30 second sample. Unfortunately, it's just an overly-bombastic live version of the song, which seems to be played about about 75% speed, as though they're too old to keep up now and had to slow down the drum and synth machines to keep up.

The Marilyn Manson version is much faster, and adds slightly harder guitars, but there's far too little that's original and unique about it, and far too much that's an exact copy of the original.  I love the MM version of Tainted Love, another cheesy 80s synth pop hit, since he makes it deeper, harder, and adds an evil, creepy layer to the original pop poof version. I'd hoped he would do that with Personal Jesus, and riff some on the guitars, but this cover version seems like v1.0, where v2.24 or so would be getting interesting and original enough to really stand out.

As for the new MM video, it's visually-interesting, even if it looks like every Antichrist Superstar era video in the art direction and costuming, and the parts near the end where he's holding the baby are sorta cool. But other than that there's nothing to make it stand out. If it were me, I would have revisited the original gay camp masterpiece that the Depeche Mode video was and had MM and band stumbling around an Old West ghost town, but a creepy one, maybe at night with blood-stained beds in the whorehouse, fleetingly-seen monsters, etc. Not an out and out horror movie though, throw in some silly stuff and perhaps even end it with Marilyn cracking a whip in the "oh so pride of the YMCA" way the lead singer of DM did in the original video.  But yes, leather cowboy hats and those (essential gay accessory) leather chaps should have been mandatory.

Ahh, for lost opportunities.

 

 

¤ And for the last bit of random this and that, have you seen Devil Finder yet? It's a search engine, but not one I can recommend, after my search for "black champagne" didn't turn up this site until about the 25th option.  What I do recommend is their image finder, since it's awesome. I first heard of it when I saw hit records from them in my site stats, and upon backtracking found their technology very useful. What you do is go to the image search page, type in the name of what you want, and hit it. The spider picks the first 12 (or more, you can set the number of returns up to 72) image returns, and loads them, full size, right there on the screen. This is very quick and easy and useful if you want to find a celebrity photo, but its comical and porn uses are enormous as well.

The comical part is how weirdly-mixed the results you get are. In my initial "how does this work?" playing around I tried "madonna" one time. The first 30 or 40 images were of the famous singer, quite often nude, but then as I kept scrolling down I started to get religious images, random photos of houses and landscapes that happened to have "madonna" in the image URL, etc. That's half the fun of the search; just put in virtually anything non-specific, "pretty picture" for instance, and you'll get a page of completely unrelated images, at least some of which will be interesting, for one reason or another.

I wouldn't use this site at work or with mom looking on though, since I don't think I've ever done a search yet, no matter how innocuous my terms, that didn't return at least half a dozen photos with nudity in them, if not outright pornography. Of course if that's your goal, then devil finder is for you. Search on the name of any model, actress, porn star, body part, etc, and bingo... more pics than you can shake a stick at. Just don't go shaking the wrong kind of stick, if you know what I mean, and when you do, there's no need to tell me about it.

I don't have any idea how they sort them, rank them, or pick which ones to show, but for virtually every celebrity I've searched on, there have been at least half a dozen fake nude porn shots, usually right on top of the listing. I just checked for the formerly-hot Britney Spears, and yep, there are several fake porn nudes of her, though I thought this fake was by far the most amusing shot on the page. It's non-nude, but that doesn't mean you necessarily want to click it. It made me laugh, at least.

iction stuff.

¤ As you may have noticed from my "books lying open" list, I've been slowly digging through Jeffrey Eugenides' masterpiece, Middlesex, for a week or so. I'd seen reviews saying what a great novel it was, and eventually, in my frequent idle time in the bookstore while Malaya prowls through the religion section, I started picking it up and reading a dozen pages. It never failed to impress me, so I eventually put my name on the wait list at the library, and after maybe 4 months, my turn came up.

Despite the desire to read and the wait I endured, I never seem to have make the time to sit/lie down and just read it for a while, so I'm doing it 15 or 20 pages at a time, mostly in the bathroom. For a 522 page book with a complicated structure, that's not exactly the best way to go about it. So it's been a week and I've got 2 more weeks before it's due back and I'm only on page 107. Bleh.

As for the book, the first 20 pages, which I read in Borders, were the best first 20 pages of any book I'd ever read. Perhaps not the most suspenseful or intriguing, but the best-written. And I'm a fifth of the way through the book, and nothing has changed. It's still written amazingly well, especially in ways that I, as an (aspiring) author, can appreciate. Several times, a chapter begins with a quick flashback, or a flash forward, or a piece of legend, and then segues into the ongoing narration, and every time the transition is seamless. Actually, that's not entirely true. It's got a seam, but the seam is so beautifully sewn that it's better than it would have been if there'd been no visible seam at all.  If that makes any sense. Remember this when I talk about my own ongoing story below.  You'll see why.

Middlesex isn't exactly a page turner, or I'd have been compelled to read the whole thing by now. It's a much slower, more intellectual and beautiful novel, and probably one that benefits by slower reading. It's not the sort of rousing adventure of limited quality that you want to plow through in a few hours, just to find out how it turns out. In Middlesex, you already know how it turns out, since it's in first person, and in the very beginning the narrator, named Cal, discusses his/her life (he/she is a hermaphrodite of sorts) briefly, before launching into a long flashback to how his/her grandparents came to America from their tiny Greek village when it was destroyed at the end of World War I.  There are plenty of twists and turns, but basically you know who the narrator is, how old he/she is at the time of the narration, and that she was raised a girl until puberty, when the penis and testicles begin to make an appearance, and has lived as a man since his 20s.

That's all rather beside the point, even though it's not beside the point. This novel, like most great writing, isn't really about what it's about. It's got larger themes and meanings, and much of the joy in reading it is in just appreciating the beauty of the words and images. I strongly recommend that you read it, and not even the whole thing. Just go to your local bookstore, head to the Literature section (yes, I know, it's hard to find, rather than being right in front with fantasy and horror and sports where you and I both spend most of our browsing time), pick up a copy, and read the first 15 or 20 pages. If you don't think it's astonishingly well-written and want to read more of it, then put it down and that's that.

Anyway, here's a quick paragraph from page 82, that had me cursing in my "Goddamn that's well written." way:

Obsessively, in the way a person worries a rip deep in a pocket, she now reached up under the floppy hat to feel her denuded scalp for the thirtieth or fortieth time. "That's the last haircut," she said again." (She was true to this vow. From that day on, Desmonda grew her hair out like Lady Godiva, keeping it under a net in an enormous mass and washing it every Friday; and only after Lefty died did she ever cut it, giving it to Sophie Sassoon, who sold it for two hundred and fifty dollars to a wigmaker who made five separate wigs out of it, one of which, she claimed was later bought by Betty Ford, post White House and rehab, so that we got to see it on television once, during Richard Nixon's funeral, my grandmother's hair, sitting on the ex-President's wife's head.)

And no, it doesn't add a bit to the story to know that she never cut her hair again, and we certainly don't need to know that it ended up as five wigs, and that one ended up on the head of the ex-first lady. But it's so neatly dropped in there and so cunningly-presented and such an interesting little tidbit that it's just irresistible. This sort of thing can't be done in many types of writing; and it would break the flow and be ridiculous in the fantasy novel I'm writing. But in this book, in this sort of literary novel, it's brilliant.

¤ With that dangerous precedent set, I'm now going to talk about my ongoing writing for a bit, and even include a very unpolished excerpt.  Talk about presenting myself in a poor light, eh?

The thing I wanted to talk about was my own rather less happy experience with opening a chapter in a flashback and then transitioning out of it. For about five days a couple of weeks ago, my only novel work was writing and rewriting the opening of a mini-chapter in the late-middle of chapter two. It wasn't a complicated segment, in theory, but it was something I wrote after I realized how long Chapter 2 was going, and that I needed to hurry it along. So rather than continuing to relate most of the events of their travel across the long forest, I started skipping ahead, and ending mini-chapters with sleep or darkness or whatever, and beginning the next with things like:

An exhausting night and day later, Vena sat beside Quinoss in a dense clump of bushes, stretching her aching legs while gnawing on a rabbit bone.

That's the actual quote from the current, reworked version. Nothing special, but it seems like a very simple sentence. I just needed to open and set the time frame, set the current scene, and then quickly flashback/recap the events that transpired since we last saw our heroes. Easy, right?

It certainly seemed that way, but when I read what I'd written initially it was just a mess. I kept writing it, starting out each night at that point, rewriting the whole thing, varying the length from 10 to 20 paragraphs, then going on to less-problematic material. But as I was doing other stuff I knew, in the back of my mind, that the first part still didn't work. And then the next night when I'd read over it I'd wince again, see that it didn't work again, and rewrite it again. The problem was that I wasn't doing it with enough consciousness to evaluate the whole thing, see what the structure of it was, and therefore I couldn't see why it didn't work.

Finally, after about four days of this, four days of completely rewriting the same chapter opening scene, I found myself thinking about it when I wasn't working on it, and it took shape in my head. I realized, at last, why it wasn't working and what I had to do to fix it. The problem was that I had two flashbacks, and they blurred over each other. I started out present, with Vena thinking back about the past day and a half, then cut to about an hour ago as they were walking towards the bushes and catching the rabbits, and in that mini-flashback I tried to flashback again to recap the last day's events.  And it just didn't work, since every time I reread it I realized that at some point the flashback merged into the present time narrative, either with erroneous verb tenses, or time flow issues, or no clear transitions between the flashback and the present time narrative. It doesn't sound like such a complicated thing to write, but it just didn't work, and only after I had realized why did I wish I'd saved every version of it. I could have posted them all in sequence, critiqued them, and left it as a cautionary tale to others.

In the end I decided that I had to simplify it. I couldn't have a flashback in a flashback, since it just got too complicated for the reader to tell where they were as they read it. I wanted to keep the "night and day later" part though, so I started with that, and Vena eating the rabbit, but then, rather than immediately flashing back to how they got the rabbits, I set the current stage for about two paragraphs without a word about the last 24 hours, or the rabbit capture, and described their current setting. Previously, all of the setting description had been in the flashback, and part of it had been a flashback itself, where Vena remembered (for the benefit of the reader) what Quinoss had told her about how the road they were watching came into being. That road info portion is now related a couple of pages later, when they're actually walking down to the road. 

This isn't likely to make a great deal of sense without the story to read, so I'll wrap this up before delving deeper into minutia.

Basically I had to see the whole section with some distance, like looking at a blue print rather than fumbling through the rooms in the dark. That way I could analyze it rather than just trying to fix it by feel, I.E. as I rewrote it again, and once I saw that it wasn't too hard to figure what I could move around. The net result is what was once 3 or 4 pages long is now 3 paragraphs, with nothing of any importance lost. There was a semi-detailed description of how they got into the bushes, and more about how they caught the rabbits (if you remember Vena's rabbit-gathering experience at the end of chapter one you'll probably appreciate somewhat her feelings at reliving that scenario a month later, with far more experience and far fewer pounds under her belt), and more about how much they walked during the past 24 hours, but in retrospect, none of that was needed.

I suspect that in a future rewrite I'll be doing more of this sort of editing all through Chapter Two, since while the current revision is making a ton of changes and improvements, it's not really making it much shorter in words. I'm taking out lots of incidental details that aren't needed, removing redundancies, and streamlining things, but at the same time I keep adding in longer descriptions of important scenes, so the length isn't changing much.

I am cutting some stuff though, and that leads me into today's brief excerpt. This chunk is from late in chapter two, while Vena and Quinoss are running through a long tunnel. In the rewrite I decided that Vena had too many terror/freak out moments, I also changed how the tunnel they run through is set up and especially changed the tactics of their pursuers, and Quinoss' counter tactics. So as a result this chunk was removed entirely, and since nothing like this remains in the book, I figured I might as well post part of it here, for your "tide-me-over" edification.  There's nothing spoilery in it, so don't worry about this ruining the book for you, assuming you could even remember this 2 or 3 years from now when the book might actually exist in purchasable form.

To briefly set the scene, Vena lagged behind while Quinoss was running ahead, they're being chased by lots of very fast bad guys, and she's terrified that the dark tunnel they're running through might collapse on her head and terrified that Quinoss (the Necromancer) might just leave her behind, alone, in the dark.

Half a minute later she saw a faint white light, far, far ahead. Quinoss?  She kept running, reassured that the tunnel continued in a straight line, but terrified that he was casting some sort of spell.

"Don't leave me in here!" Vena screamed, breaking into a sprint. The tunnel was still smooth, and now slanting gently downwards. She flew along, both hands pumping at her sides, the light from Quinoss still very, very faint.  Her gasping breaths and footsteps echoed off the walls of the tunnel, and as she ran Vena became very aware of just how much stone was pressing down on all sides of her. Still she ran, nearly blind with panic, a cramp biting into her side.  The light was closer, and when it flashed brighter for one instant she could see the outline of the long stone hallway she was running down. The roof was arched, to her surprise. She also saw Quinoss standing in the tunnel, and the rock erupting out of one wall, falling into and filling the tunnel.

"No!" Vena screamed, pressing herself to run even faster, though she was still at least one hundred yards from Quinoss, and had no chance to close the distance before his landslide completely filled the tunnel. As the light faded, partially obscured by stone, Vena screamed again and felt hot tears filling her eyes, mixing with the sweat beading on her face.

Fifteen seconds later, she slowed, the sound of crushing rock just ahead of her. Quinoss' light was gone, but the sound went on and on. How much rock could be falling to fill the tunnel? Did she dare try to climb over it while it was rumbling down? What other choice did she have? And with that thought, it was easy to keep moving. After all, if she didn't get past the rocks she'd be taken by the Furies, once they managed to cut their way through the rocks at the end of the tunnel. Vena was half surprised that they hadn't already, since as she'd been running she'd fully expected daylight to appear behind her at any moment. Knowing how easily Furies could carve through solid stone, she didn't see why they hadn't pushed the Templars aside and cut through the three or four feet of rock that came between them and the tunnel entrance.

Prophetically enough, Vena turned to look back just as a pinpoint of light appeared far, far behind her. She stumbled, and stopped, watching in horror as the light grew stronger. She couldn't hear anything from that distance, not with the continual crashing of stone just a dozen yards ahead, but she was sure there would have been the silence of enchanted blades slicing through stone, rather than the loud bashing as Templar maces crushed the rock.

Turning around, Vena hurried towards the sounds of breaking rock in front of her. Perhaps she'd get lucky and a stone would fall and crush her skull.

 

It was hard to judge distance in the tunnel, with the constant echo of falling rock, so Vena shuffled forwards, kicking stray rocks and stepping over larger ones, expecting at every minute that she'd run into a mound of stone that she would try to climb, only to find that it reached all the way to the ceiling.

She found a pile of rock and she stumbled up it, climbing awkwardly in the darkness. The grinding sounds were louder now, coming from just a few feet away, and she winced as fist-sized stones bounced down the pile and off of her legs. She winced again when something hard hit her shoulder, then gasped in surprise when the something gripped her and yanked her forwards.

Vena crashed head first into a rough stone object, and shut her eyes as stars blossomed in front of them. Bouncing off of whatever it was, the cut on her forehead already seeping blood down into her eyebrow, Vena flailed her hands, trying to stop her forward motion. She gripped stone, scraped along the wall, but the force that pulled her was too powerful to resist.

"Run straight on, Little Thief."

Vena gaped in astonishment at Quinoss' voice in her head, then shrieked in terror as she was thrown forwards, and sent bouncing down a pile of very unforgiving stone. Staggering to her feet, her dented head spinning, she found the left side of the tunnel and stumbled forwards, kicking rocks out of the way as the grinding sounds behind her grew much, much louder.

She still couldn't see anything, but Quinoss had told her to hurry, so she did the best she could. As she ran, gasping and holding her bleeding head with her right hand, trailing her left along the wall to keep on track, her mind settled and she realized what had just happened. Quinoss must have summoned a giant golem, and set it to work tearing down the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, creating a rockslide to block the Templars and Furies who were following them. But the Furies would be into the tunnel soon, and Vena know how fast they could run. She remembered how easily the last golem had carved handfuls out of the stone wall below the metal slot at the end of the tunnel. But could this one pull down enough stone to block the Furies and Templars?

Remember, this is rough draft material that's not going to be in the book anyway, so don't pour over it with too critical an eye.  Comments are welcome, if you are so motivated, even though there's not really so much here to comment about. I always like getting emails.

(Even ones castigating me for writing an articles page that is grossly frivolous and makes entirely inappropriate jokes about the scourge that is child pornography. You'll be seeing that mail in a blog sometime soon, unless I just save it for the eventual September 2004 mailbag.)

<-- Previous  --  Next -->
Archives Index Page