Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

No stranger to affordable technology for the home, Wyze has recently expanded its offerings beyond cameras, locks, and bulbs, now dipping its toes into fitness items. Today were taking a look at one of those the Wyze Scale. Priced at an astonishingly low $19.99, the Scale does more than just report your weight. It can also track a ton of other metrics like muscle weight and metabolic rate. Head down to the video below to check it out.

Wyze has also released a fitness tracker, the Wyze Band, but that review will come a little later. Weve also checked out some Wyzes other products like the Cam Panand Wyze Lock and are always amazed at the affordable price points for their features.

Getting the Wyze Scale out of the box, we have the quick start guide, the Scale itself, and four AA batteries.

Setting up the Scale is very straight forward. Put the batteries in and open the Wyze app. Select add a product and choose the Wyze Scale. Youll be asked to enter some of your metrics like birthday and height so that the app can calculate figures such as BMI and metabolic age. Then step on the scale, install any updates, and youre good to go.

With an attractive dark blue and black color scheme, the Wyze Scale sports a modern design. Its hard to believe this is only $19.99. One thing to keep in mind here is that unlike the Withings Body+ scale, there arent any feet included that can be installed to use the Scale on carpet. The Scale must be used on a hard floor to get an accurate measurement.

On the screen, the Scale will show weight and body fat percentage after a short time scanning. You can also get the scale to measure and track your heart rate, but that must be prompted from within the Wyze app.

Also within the Wyze app are a ton of other metrics. Everything from muscle weight, metabolic rate, and bone mass to metabolic age. If youre like me and dont know what a lot of these really mean, Wyze tries to quickly explain them in the app to give an idea of what those metrics can tell you.

Both with the Wyze Scale and the Withings Body+ Ive had for a while, Im not sure how accurate these readings are. I havent compared them to any official tests. I do think theyre great for tracking trends, though. You can see if your BMI is going up or down along with your weight, etc.

While weight and BMI were very similar between the Wyze Scale and the Withings, the other metrics did differ a bit. For example, the Withings Body+ scale had me at 16.2% body fat while the Wyze Scale had 19.7%.

To make it even more useful, the Wyze Scale can also connect to third party applications. Currently, it can connect to Apple Health and Google Fit with support coming soon for other programs like Fitbit and Samsung health.

Its still hard to believe that the Wyze Scale is only $19.99. With its modern design, ease of use, and variety of metrics tracked, it has a lot to offer for that price. Like I stated earlier, Im not sure of how accurate those measurements are, but they are great for tracking trends.

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Wyze Scale Review: Classy looks and Apple Health support for $20 [Video] - 9to5Toys

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All

an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York, March 4closing date to be announced; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, August 15, 2020January 18, 2021

an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, February 28April 25, 2020

(The gallery is temporarily closed.)

In 2002 Gerhard Richter was included in a conversation about the restoration of the great gothic cathedral of Cologne. The building had survived the thousand-bomber raids that flattened the city in 1942, but the stained glass of the enormous tracery window in the south transept had been lost, and the cathedral chapter now wanted to replace the plain-glass postwar repairs with something that lived up to the buildings spectacular presence and spiritual purposeideally, a work by a major artist, commemorating victims of Nazism.

Richter was, in one sense, an obvious choiceone of Germanys most prominent artists, he had lived in Cologne for years. In other ways, the decision was curious. Richter is not religious, and while his work had made glancing references to the Third Reich, his position on the often reflexive commemoration of war crimes was not uncomplicated. For the cathedral, he considered, then rejected, the possibility of transmuting Nazi execution photographs into stained glass. Instead he turned to a 1974 painting of randomly arranged color squares, part of a series that had included paintings, prints, and a design for commercial carpeting. Colognes archbishop, who had wanted something demonstrablyeven exclusivelyChristian, did not attend the unveiling.1 But while Richters window is, in theory, a repriseits approximately 11,500 color squares were arranged by algorithm and tweaked by the artist to remove any suggestion of symbols or ciphersthe experience it provides is utterly distinct. The squares are made of glass using medieval recipes, they rise collectively some seventy-five feet, and are part of a gothic cathedral. When the sun shines through and paints floors, walls, and people with moving color, the effect is aleatoric, agnostic, and otherworldly. It should mean nothing, and feels like it could mean everything.

Decades earlier, fresh from two rounds of art schoolone in East Germany, one in WestRichter had made a note to himself: Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A good picture takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Richter is contemporary arts great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the worlds most influential living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.

In Germany he is treated as a kind of painterly public intellectualpersonally diffident and professionally serious, a thoughtful oracle especially as regards the prickly territory of German history. He was among the first postwar German artists to deal with pictorial records of Nazism, and his approach to the past might be summarized as poignant pragmatism, rejecting both despair and amnesia. One measure of his status is that visitors today enter the Reichstag flanked by two soaring Richters: on one side a sixty-seven-foot glass stele in the colors of the German flag; on the other, facsimiles of Birkenau (2014), the paintings through which he finally succeeded in responding to the Holocaust, abandoning earlier attempts across five decades.

The Birkenau paintings, which had never been seen on this side of the Atlantic, were among the eagerly anticipated inclusions in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, the last exhibition to be held at the Met Breuer before the building is ceded to the Frick Collection in July. A streamlined, eloquent summa of Richters career, curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, the show opened on March 4, nine days before being shuttered by Covid-19 (along with a concurrent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery). Im one of thousands who missed that brief window. It is not yet known whether the show will reopen in New York before it travels to Los Angeles in August. In the meantime, we are left with an expansive website (the museum has posted images of all works in the show, installation shots, and some film clips), a weighty catalog, and memories of works seen in person. This is, of course, not ideal: many of the things shown depend on properties of scale and reflectivity that cannot be experienced in reproduction. But this is a retrospective about retrospection, and the situation is not without a certain resonance.

The opening wall is a preview of the elliptical path taken through Richters career. Table (1962), the first painting Richter put into his catalogue raisonn, is a mix of Pop-ish consumer culture (the titular subject was clipped from an Italian design magazine) and ersatz expressionism (it devolves at the center into circular sweeps of paint thinner). Eleven Panes (2004), forty-two years younger, is a leaning stack of eleven-foot-tall sheets of glass, individually transparent but collectively reflective, windows ganged up to make a stammering mirror. The small photo-painting September (2005) bears a discreet echo of Tables inchoate mess in the desolate cloud leaking from the South Tower on September 11; the brash colors of the source photograph have been drawn down, the orange of the explosion scraped away, time hovers like a bee, neither frozen nor moving forward. Even in reproduction, the arrangement of these works is affecting: three visions of the world being unmade and made again. In real life, this idea would be further extended by the ephemeral animation of passersby reflected in the glass. The installation photographs, however, were cleverly constructed to conceal the photographer in the mirroran uncanny absence that evokes the emptiness of public space in Covid-time.

American audiences came late to Richter. In the 1960s and 1970s the hegemony of American Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism tended to crowd out curiosity about what was going on elsewhere. Richters first solo show in New York in 1973 did not ignite great excitement, and for many years he was understood here primarily as a graphic artist; his first interview in the American press appeared in The Print Collectors Newsletter in 1985.2 By then, a series of influential exhibitions (as well as favorable exchange rates for American dealers and collectors) had stoked new interest in European art, but Richters reputation lagged behind those of Germans such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer who made raw work that spoke of war and atonement in no uncertain terms.

Richters oeuvre, by contrast, was measured and indirect and took a confusing variety of forms. His foggy photo-paintings suggested an oxymoronic lugubrious Pop, the random color squares an ebullient Conceptualism, and his soft-focus landscapes and portraits channeled both the Sturm und Drang of German Romanticism and the cool distance of contemporary photography. Uncertain terms were Richters mtier, and critics simply did not know what to do with it. Many concluded he was a cynic bent on invalidating art itself: Richter wars on poetries, declared a 1989 review in The Washington Post. When he depicts a cloudy sky, or a log fence and a red-roofed barn in the quiet countryside, he somehow makes you queasy. Even admiring critics like Peter Schjeldahl acknowledged Richters reputation for severity, hermeticism, and all-around, intimidating difficulty.

It was not until the 2002 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, organized by Robert Storr, that American audiences really warmed to Richter. He was then seventy years old, and the emotional hypervigilance of his early work had softened. American viewers had also matured: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of that hopeful experiment in peace and prosperity, the European Union, bathed Germany in a more benign light than it had enjoyed in the anglophone world for a century. The photo-paintings now looked plangent rather than snide; the multivalent shifting of styles was recognized not as sarcasm but as a defense against dogma; the portrait of his daughter turning from the camera (Betty, 1988), hushed and luminous, made no one queasy. His peculiar breadth was evidence of a patient regard for the world. Richter, it turned out, was a mensch.

Painting After All recapitulates this history (indeed, it features many of the same paintings), while extending the timeline both later and earlier. The shows interest in memory is visible through groupings and inter-gallery vistas that illuminate continuities and repetitions across time. The catalog takes a more didactic approach, and how you feel about it probably depends on how you feel about Buchloh, Richters long-time interlocutor (though the two have famously disagreed about some of Buchlohs conclusions) and an art historian deeply entrenched in Frankfurt School social theory and philosophical postulates. Perhaps because of the wealth of Richter literature already in the world, the text bypasses the usual career overview; each of its seven authors (all but one quotes from Buchloh) targets a specific subset of works. This has the advantage of illuminating some less-visited corners of Richters oeuvre (Hal Fosters discussion of the glass works and Peter Geimers pocket history of German abstract photography are particularly useful), though readers new to Richter may feel like theyve accidentally enrolled in the second term of a class in which every other student has taken the intro.3

Richters biography mattersnot because he has made it the subject of his work (he has not), but because the historical systems and events he has lived through have directly informed the way he thinks about art and about history. Born in Dresden in 1932, he grew up in smaller towns along the Polish border during World War II. In postwar East Germany he received a rigorous technical training at the venerable Dresden art academy, but had only limited exposure to modern art: We werent able to borrow books that dealt with the period beyond the onset of Impressionism because that was when bourgeois decadence set in. (Only one work from this period, a remarkably prescient series of monotypes, is included in Richters official catalog; it was on view in facsimile form at both the Met Breuer and Marian Goodman.) After some early success as a painter of affirming Socialist Realist murals, he was permitted to travel to West Germany in 1959 to visit the second Documenta exhibition in Kassel, where he encountered paintings by Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock that upended everything he knew about pictures. Two years later he defected to the West, writing to his favorite professor in Dresden, mine was not a careless decision based on a desire for nicer cars.

Dsseldorf, where he reenrolled in art school, was a world apart from the monoculture of official East German art: Beuys had recently arrived with his mystical cult of personality, the Zero group was developing its language of impersonal geometries, and Informel (Europes attenuated answer to New York School abstraction) was championed as the subjective antidote to totalitarianism and its instrumentalizing of soppy figuration. Even in the West, artistic style was a badge of political allegianceabstract/universalist vs. figurative/populist. And both Germanies, focused on building their respective new societies, chose not to ruminate on the unprecedented destruction perpetrated byand inflicted ontheir people. It would not be until the cusp of the millennium that W.G. Sebalds On the Natural History of Destruction anatomized the silence around the German civilian experience of the war: When we turn to take a retrospective view, Sebald wrote, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.4

Among the group of young, irreverent artists Richter met in Dsseldorf was Sigmar Polke, who for several years provided a crucial, puckish complement to Richters circumspection. Discarding the various high-minded models around them, Polke and Richter began painting from newspaper clippings and magazines, toying with the ways mechanical reproduction remakes its subjectsthe flattening and fragmentation of cheap printing and the unseemly croppings and juxtapositions of the commercial printed page. The stupidity of copying was part of the irreverenceserious modern art is supposed to despise the copy. But copying, done attentively, is a way into something. Academic art training depended on it as a means of internalizing the canon, but even as children we copy something when we cant get it out of our heads. Richter began keeping photographs, clippings, and sketches of potential source material that would become Atlas, his now career-long half-archive, half-artwork of things somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away.

Most of Richters subjects appeared affably Popfamilies by the seaside, tabloid perp walks, household goodsbut where Pop Art tended to ratchet up the volume with brighter colors and sharper edges, Richter turned the dial in the other direction, painting everything in plaintive grays with a subaqueous wobble. And the subjects were not all as banal as they seemed. Scattered amid the race cars and drying racks were bombers dropping their payloads and family members destroyed by the Third Reich: Uncle Rudi (1965), smiling jauntily in his enormous Wehrmacht overcoat, later killed in combat; Aunt Marianne (1965), shown as a teenager with the infant Richter, years before she was institutionalized as a schizophrenic and starved to death by the Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia of the unfit. Richters paintings of Rudi and Marianne are no more or less anguished than his ones of kitchen chairs. But for German viewers in the 1960s they must have invoked numberless pictures of relativesvictims, villains, heroesremoved from display as markers of a world best not mentioned.

By the 1970s Richter had also become intrigued with the possibilities of pictures that originated not in a preselected image, but in an a priori set of rules. The random color squares that later dappled worshipers in Cologne Cathedral were one result; a body of heavily impastoed canvases made by moving paint around in semi-predetermined ways was another. This edging toward Conceptualism did not mark an abandonment of representation, however. He continued making paintings from photographs, now usually his own, including color landscapes so refulgent they might, in thumbnail, be mistaken for Turners. Some of these were tricks, painted from photomontages that unravel as you look. Others, like his lit candles and misty skulls, balanced reality and Romanticism on a knifes edge.

Gradually Richters art-historical allegiances were laid bare: Caspar David Friedrich, Vermeer, Velzquezpainters with a gift for inviting us through the illusory window while showing us how the trick was played (the oversized sequins of light that Vermeer scatters on metalwork and bread rolls call attention to the materiality of paint as surely as any Pollock drip). In the portraits of his friends and family especially one senses the double desire to capture the emotional load of a moment and to reveal the means by which image turns into feeling. When things slip too far toward tender, he adjusts the surface with lateral swipes of paint or abrasions, pushing and pulling until that magical space between looking and knowing is reached.

Academic writers often view Richter as a master strategist plotting from on high, but his own statements suggest something less mandarin: It is my wish, he told Storr, to create a well-built, beautiful, constructive painting. And there are many moments when I plan to do just that, and then I realize that it looks terrible. Then I start to destroy it, piece by piece, and I arrive at something that I didnt want but that looks pretty good. In 1980 he began using squeegees to drag paint in broad, uneven swaths that partly obscure whatever lies belowphotographs, printed matter, prior paintings. Its the look of mechanical failuremachine parts wearing badly, jammed printers, skid marks, abraded film. When repeated over and over, it generates complex color fields full of fissures and pockets exposing older strata. Geological metaphors feel aptthe surfaces resemble landscapes shaped by the scouring and dumping of glaciers. Richter has limited control over what happens in any one layer, so composition becomes the joint product of accumulation and knowing when to stop.

Sometimes I think I should not call myself a painter, but a picture-maker, Richter remarked in 2013. I am more interested in pictures than in painting. Painting has something slightly dusty about it. I suspect it is not paintings long history that bothers him, but a more specific quality. Dust accumulates on things that are settled, immobile. And painting, in our culture, has the unassailable fixity of a monument. Its a property Richter has repeatedly undermined, cutting up paintings and distributing the pieces as editions, rereleasing finished paintings as photographic editions and digital facsimiles under Plexiglas. (The Aunt Marianne in Painting After All is not, in fact, a painting.) Like Jasper Johns, his near contemporary, he is fascinated by doubling, mirroring, and illusionthe same-not-same quandary of image and object. His many prints, facsimiles, and artists books are not so much spin-offs of his paintings (though that is how they are often regarded) but partners with painting in a bantering, ongoing conversation. Even the persistent doubling back and restructuring of earlier work can be seen as a corrective to the presumed finality of painting.

One squeegee painting from 1990, Abstract Painting (#724-4 in his catalogue raisonn), has been repeatedly reformulated: resized and defocused in photographic editions, digitally refracted as kaleidoscopic tapestries and stained glass windows for a sixth-century monastery in rural Saarland, and slivered in a Photoshop version of Xenos paradox for the series called Strip. (The image was digitally bisected and mirrored; those halves were each bisected and mirrored, then those quarters, and so on, to produce 4096 (212) segments, each less than 100 microns wide, that fuse together in the eye to produce a pattern of stripes. These patterns were then cut up, arranged in different orders, and printed at different sizes.) The Strip in Painting After All runs an optically dazzling thirty-three feet across.

The monumental painting sextet Cage (2006)also in the US now for the first timestarted out as photo-paintings of scientific images of atoms (resembling fuzzy photographs, these are records of particle behavior translated into light and dark to accommodate human sensibilities). Having committed the pictures to canvas, Richter found himself bored by the result and began adding color, painting in and scratching out. At the end of four months, the atom arrays were present only as an inherited rhythm within the complex accretion of paint. In its grandeur of agitation and resolution, Cage may be as close to the sublime as contemporary painting can get. Perhaps it was to knock the dust off that sublimity that Richter followed up with two facsimile editions, breaking Cage 6 into sixteen parts that can be carried in a flight case and hung in any configuration that suits the owner.

Everything, Richter demonstrates, is a derivative, everything is contingent, nothing is immutable. This has implications for how one thinks about history. Even about catastrophes.

The Birkenau paintings are also abstract responses to failed photo-paintings, but the underlying images are of a different moral order: four photographs taken clandestinely in late summer 1944 by Sonderkommando prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The ethics of using, exhibiting, or even viewing Holocaust photographs has always been complicated. Moving east with American troops in 1945, Robert Capa declined to use his camera: From the Rhine to the Oder I took no pictures. The concentration camps were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. As early as the spring of 1945, Peter Geimer explains in the catalog, the Allies began circulating camp photographs in Germany, but the anticipated ethical shock never materialized, and the pictures disappeared. Richter remembers being shown them for the first time by a fellow student in Dresden in the mid-1950s: It was like irrefutable proof of something we had always half known.

Shoah director Claude Lanzmann objected not just to the numbing effects of profusion, but to visual representation itselfthe illusion of a presence when the reality was one of appalling absence. The opposing view, voiced by Jean-Luc Godard and others, was that documents are our strongest defense against amnesia, and that images can be powerful agents of imaginative reconstruction. (Whether or not imagination should have a role here is the heart of the conflict.)

As the only pictures taken by victims of the killing system they document, the Sonderkommando photographs occupy a special place in this debate. In 2001 the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman wrote an essay for an exhibition in which they were shown and was roundly attacked in the pages of Lanzmanns journal, Les temps modernes. Didi-Huberman responded with a carefully considered book, Images malgr tout, which Richter read in Geimers German translation, Bilder trotz allem. In English the title is Images in Spite of All, but the German can also be translated as Painting After All.

The Sonderkommando photographs are unique not only because of who took them and what they show, but because of their appearance. They had to be shot secretly from a distance and are hard to read. Two of them look out through an angled trapezoid of doorway onto a landscape where people are working by a bonfire, smoke rising against silhouetted trees. It takes a moment to register the barbed wire and to understand that the things piled on the ground are not logs but bodies. The other two photos show tree trunks at a sharp angle. One is a misfirejust black trees and white sky. But one includes a wedge of land over which small figuresnaked womenare walking or running. Reconstructions show that they are headed to the gas chambers and that the bonfire pictures were shot from within one of the gas chamber buildings.

The human element is overwhelming once recognized, but it occupies only a small area and reveals itself slowly. The pictures initial impression is one of visual dynamism, modernist angles slamming into tropes of Friedrich-era Romanticism: soaring trees, billowing vapor, nature seen through a doorway. Perhaps because of the paradoxical way form and content cut across each other here, Richter felt it might be possible to make them into paintings. He flipped them left-right, projected them, and transcribed them onto canvas.

Their failure as photo-paintings has, I think, nothing to do with visual quality and everything to do with history. Richters photo-paintings work because, no matter how intimate the subjects, they function as types. Individuals and events are elided, commonalities revealed, through a concentration on form. Even his elegiac paintings of dead Baader-Meinhof members are as much about the dislocating formats of news as they are about the wasted lives in question. Given the Sonderkommando photographs singular status as historical documents, however, they cannot be stand-ins for anything elsenot for the look of clandestine photography, not for mans inhumanity to man, not for German accountability. They do not work as pictures in Richters sense of precluding the emergence of any single meaning or depriv[ing] a thing of its meaning and its name. Here, meaning and name are untouchable.

Richter did not abandon the images but, as with Cage, began working into and over them, pulling paint horizontally and vertically, layer upon layer. The Met website shows the progression from source photo to drawing, to photo-painting, to successive states of overpainting. The final canvases have the tenor of a forest after a firetwitchy, ashy crusts over an underworld of dun, crimson, and kelly green. They are complex, scarified, and alsoheres the rubbeautiful. In places the juddering repetition of fragmented color recalls, of all things, late Monet water lilies.

Max Glickman, the Holocaust-obsessed cartoonist in Howard Jacobsons novel Kalooki Nights, captures the moral vertigo induced by the collision of aesthetics and the Holocaust: A mass grave at Belsenthe bodies almost beautiful in their abstraction, thats if you dare let your eye abstract in such a place.5 Perhaps to brace us against that fall, Richter has gone to some lengths to structure how we experience the paintings. They do not stand alone. The original photographs are hung on an adjacent wall, in prints small enough to be understood as documents, and large enough to be legible. There are sources and there are commentaries, Richter tells us, events and reverberations of those events. More eccentrically, he has doubled the paintings themselves. The four canvases hang opposite four full-scale not-quite doppelgngers, each divided into quarters. Source, commentary, and gloss.

The events of 1944 are beyond our reach. The subject of these paintings is not that world, but our ownthe place where we actively choose to know or not know, see or not see. At the Met Breuer, the whole confab of paintings, facsimiles, and historical photographs is further multiplied by a thirty-foot-long stretch of gray mirrors at the backSebalds looking and looking away at the same time made inescapable.

The writer William Maxwell, who, like Richter, was a habitual spinner of fictions that were barely fictions, once had a (barely fictional) character observe:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memorymeaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivionis really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.6

Richters oeuvre is, at some level, a six-decade-long disquisition on this lieits inevitability, its emotional utility, its shape-changing instability. His stylistic ticsthe hazy edges, overlaying, chopping into pieces, and reconfiguring of partsare visual reminders that you are not seeing everything, that availability to the eye is no guarantee of clarity. The story always changes with the telling. Uncertainty is truth.

Fair enough. But what is perhaps most remarkable about Richters art is its affirmation that this is not a bad thing. The story of the color-square painting that became a carpet that became a cathedral window (and now, undoubtedly, somebodys cell phone wallpaper) is not a tragedy, its an assertion of endless possibility.

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Gerhard Richter: The Master of Unknowing | by Susan Tallman - The New York Review of Books

You may think that just because your windows aren't drafty that there's no obvious reason to replace them. But that isn't the only tell-tale sign that it's time for your windows to get a much-needed upgrade.

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3) You hear a lot of noise through closed windows.If you have been working from home for the past few weeks, you may have noticed that you can clearly hear every dog bark, lawnmower, passing car, and even the mail carrier opening your mailbox. If the noise level made you second guess whether or not you had an open window somewhere, it may be time to update them. Old single-pane windows allow noise to pass through the glass, around the pane, and through the window sash. On top of that, your noise can also be coming from insufficient window calking and foam insulation from a poor window installation job.

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If you've noticed any of the above things about the windows in your home, now is the time to update them. For a quote on your replacement window, door or screen project, call Michelle at 508-992-8847 to schedule a consultation withBayStateWindow & Door, Inc. of New Bedford, MA.BayStateWindow & Door proudly carries Diamond Windows & Doors, KasKel, Harvey, Alside, Therma-Tru, and CustomBuilt widow and door brands.

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Not-So-Obvious Signs that It's Time to Replace Your Windows - wbsm.com

A judge has set an April 30 deadline for the city of New Orleans and the developer of the Hard Rock Hotel to take action on a proposal to remove two bodies that remain in the partially collapsed building and bring down its upper floors by July.

Attorneys for the developer, 1031 Canal Street Developer LLC, filed a motion the week of April 20 for the city to approve the plan. The plan involves using cranes with wrecking balls, shears and other tools to pick apart and dismantle the structure from the top down. It would also require the removal of two adjacent historic buildings.

The city and the developer have been at odds for months over how to demolish what is left of the hotel, which collapsed while under construction on Oct. 12, killing three workers on the site. The developer favors a traditional, piece-by-piece demolition, whereas the city believes implosion is a safer option.

In their court filing, attorneys for the developer call the plan for a conventional demolition the safest, fastest and most effective way to demolish the site without further impacting neighboring properties and to attempt to recover the remains of the workers inside the building. They say implosion will provide little, if any recovery of remains and would destroy evidence.

The developer indicated earlier this month it had worked out a deal with Kolb Grading to dismantle the building and applied for city permits on March 27 to move forward with its plans for a conventional demolition. On Friday, the developer submitted engineering drawings to meet the citys requests for additional information. The city went back to the engineer with additional technical questions.

At a court hearing April 23, Civil District Court Judge Kern Reese ordered the developer provide the city with answers to these questions by April 27, at noon. The judge set a deadline for the city to respond by April 30 at noon as to whether the city will issue a permit for the demolition plans. Based on the citys actions, the judge will make additional rulings at a 2 p.m. hearing that day.

A city spokesperson said in a statement prepared for ENR that the city is reviewing the plans, and has no further comment.

The developers attorney, Kerry Miller of Fishman Haygood LLP, said 1031 Canal Development, LLC was pleased to be able to present its demolition plan for the Hard Rock building this morning in court, including details how the conventional demolition being advanced will not damage neighboring properties. 1031 Canal remains committed to a safe demolition process and is hopeful that work will begin soon.

The new demolition plan involves removing the remnants of twotower cranes that were brought down in a controlled demolition a week after the collapse. One of the cranes remains draped over the top of the building, and the developers attorney indicated in court documents that the crane presents the biggest risk to the demolition crew.

Removing the crane would make it possible to clear out enough debris to access the two bodies trapped inside the rubble. Workers have been unable to safely recover the bodies because officials say the structure is unstable.

According to court documents, the last stages of the demolition involve tearing down floors nine through 18 the collapsed, unstable hotel structure and then floors one through eight, which consist of a concrete parking garage that is believed to bestable.

The demolition proposal comes after months of setbacks. The original plan was for demolition contractor Dem/Tech, an affiliate of Kolb Grading, to perform a controlled demolition of the hotel using explosives. That plan was replaced by a more conventional demolition, in which the building would be stabilized using temporary supports and shoring while workers take it down piece-by-piece. This change of plan pushed the schedule back to at least December 2020.

In January, the city of New Orleans announced plans for the hotel to come down in late March in a controlled demolition by D.H. Griffin Cos., the same firm that oversaw the implosion that brought down the two tower cranes. But that deal fell apart after the State of Louisiana refused to provide indemnity to D.H. Griffin and its subcontractors, and the company was unable to secure the $50 million in liability insurance it needed to move forward with the demolition.

The developers new demolition team is led by Kolb Grading and subcontractor Marschel Wrecking. If the new demolition plan for the hotel is approved, the upper floors of the building would be taken down by July 24, before the start of the 2020 hurricane season.

Continued here:
Judge orders New Orleans, Hard Rock developer to take decide on demolition | 2020-04-23 - Engineering News-Record

Illinois environmental enforcement officials and the state attorney general have entered the fray in the controversial demolition of an old coal plant that blanketed much of the Little Village neighborhood under piles of dust earlier this month.

Gov. JB Pritzkers Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has accused the developer behind the demolition with breaking air and water pollution laws, while Attorney General Kwame Raouls office on Wednesday said it was reviewing the incident.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE:

April 17, 2020

The double-barreled move from the state against developer Hilco Redevelopment Partners comes a week after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoots administration said it was fining Hilco $68,000 for its role in the demolition of a smokestack at the plant.

Hilco could face tens of thousands of dollars in additional fines as a result of the state EPA violations, according to the state law. While Chicago has limited authority to enforce its local ordinances related to construction dust and air quality, Raoul has broad powers to enforce the Illinois Environmental Protection Act.

Photographs and videos taken during and following the implosion show a large cloud of dust and airborne material, Illinois EPA officials said in a statement Wednesday. While some dust suppression controls were utilized, a substantial plume of dust exited the site from the implosion.

The state EPA referred the case to Raouls office following the April 11 incident at the former Crawford coal power plant. The botched demolition, which happened with little notice and during a respiratory pandemic,blanketed the community with dust, which was widely recorded on video and in photographs.

We received the referral from the Illinois EPA and it is under review, said Annie Thompson, a spokeswoman for the attorney generals office.

Specifically, the EPA said in its violation notice, Hilco violated the state Environmental Protection Act by failing to comply with its stormwater protection permit that required the control of dust during demolition and construction. The company also failed to adhere to a stormwater pollution prevention plan and did not establish and follow procedures to prevent or mitigate air pollution, the state EPA said in the notice.

In all three areas, the EPA told Hilco that compliance is expected immediately.

Hilco and its demolition contractor used explosives to implode the tall smokestack at the old Crawford site.

The demolition of an on-site smokestack resulted in a large dust cloud that adversely affected residents in the surrounding area, the EPA violation notice sent to Hilco on April 16 stated. Due to the nature and seriousness of the alleged violations, please be advised that resolution of the violations may also require the involvement of a prosecutorial authority.

Hilco received its stormwater permit in 2019, the state EPA said in its statement. According to the statement, Hilco itself reported to the state EPA on April 15 that it violated its permit.

The citys $68,000 in fines are being assessed, the mayor announced, based on violations of four city ordinances that relate to construction and demolition dust as well as air pollution.

Lightfoot has said the citys health department will be working hand in glove with the Illinois EPA to determine additional enforcement measures that may be taken.

Lightfoot issued a stop-work order at the site, but is allowing the developer and its new contractor Heneghan Wrecking to clean up debris from the implosion.

This isnt the first time Hilco faced environmental violations.

In Maryland, Hilco and its partners were fined for environmental violations related to the demolition of retired steel mill buildings, according to a settlement. Contractor MCM Management Corp., which worked on the Crawford site, also was part of the Maryland project.

In a 2015 agreement with the Maryland Department of the Environment, the developers and its contractor settled, and were forced to complete $3.375 million in environmental projects. The companies also were fined $375,000.

Last week, the Chicago Inspector General Joseph Ferguson confirmed he has opened an investigation into the implosion.

Representatives from Hilco did not immediately return calls for comment.

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Developer in Little Village Demolition Gone Wrong Cited By State EPA With Violating Pollution Laws - Better Government Association (BGA)

On Monday, the Webster County Fair Board voted to cancel most aspects of this summer's Webster County Fair in Marshfield.

The fairs signature events including the rodeo, livestock shows, showcase exhibits are canceled, according to Bill Roberts, manager of the Webster County Fair.

"It's a yearlong process to organize a fair," said Robert. "We have so many uncertainties right now with all that's going on. By not knowing, there are things like our catalog, ad sales and sponsor sales that we just can't get done in that period of time."

With the present economy and restrictions on large gatherings, Roberts said that contributes to other concerns, as far as participation in fair events or if they're even allowed to even host them.

"This year, the demolition derby was scheduled for Saturday, July 4, but I just don't know what people are saying about making derby cars," said Roberts. "When we look around, livestock shows are being canceled. Those are cattle that would show and continue onto our fair."

Because of school closures, Roberts said agriculture mechanics projects wouldn't be completed in time by FFA students. He noted other counties they know around the area have canceled their rodeos, along with their tractor pulls.

"We learned that one of the Mason groups that helps with our truck and tractor pull are canceling their event, so I don't know about contestants," said Roberts. "Then you have the concerns about ordering food ahead of time and I don't know what the response of people is going to be once we open. In our present climate, we don't know if they will respond or will they stay home."

The fair board is currently planning a truck and tractor pull on Saturday night (July 4), to coordinate with the Marshfield Chamber of Commerce's fireworks display, which they do during the Fourth of July celebration.

"We still want to leave options open for a community event since we know so many people enjoy attending the fair," said Roberts. "Kevin Cantrell, our fair board president, is talking to the Marshfield Chamber of Commerce more about that."

Kyle Whittaker organizes the livestock shows in the Webster County Fair. While he wasn't able to attend the Monday meeting, he said he was disappointed by the news.

"It is a longstanding tradition for the community," said Whittaker. "Hopefully, other Fourth of July celebrations will be able to move forward as normal (parade). This situation has definitely changed a lot of aspects of everyday life. It would appear the fair has fallen victim to COVID-19, as well."

There was some confusion about the cancelation when it was announced in a brief announcement by The Mail after Roberts and Whittaker both confirmed the news. Kevin Cantrell reached out to The Mail to say that the board is hoping to salvage some part of the fair.

We dont know what the big group regulations are going to be, Cantrell said. We had to cancel it because of the fair book.

The fair book is where the board announces its competitive categories, including livestock, home arts and more.

We are going to meet June 1 and maybe we can pull out a Saturday or Sunday night fair, Cantrell said. I dont want to answer a bunch of questions about it now.

If some aspects of a fair are offered, they would be presented on July 3 and 4.

We dont know. Our hands are tied. We dont know what we can do right now, Cantrell said. I didnt know Bill was going to release it yet.

Cantrell clarified at animal exhibits, the rodeo and the demolition derby are all off.

Read this article:
Fair events called off: No livestock shows, showcase exhibits, demolition derby. Board still trying to put something together for the public. -...

Collin Creek Mall is undergoing a $1 billion redevelopment project that is expected to transform the property into a mixed-use destination. (Liesbeth Powers/Community Impact Newspaper)

Here are five notable stories from the past few days of DFW coverage, on coronavirus relief, school districts and more.

Frisco parks department helping people play at home and in public

Play Frisco, the citys parks and recreation department, is working to keep people engaged amid the pandemic both at city parks, which remain open with social distancing guidelines in place, and in their own homes with online programs and content.

MAP: Richardson ISD to reduce frequency of grab-and-go meal service starting April 20

Richardson ISD is rolling back its meal service program for students to three days a week instead of five beginning April 20.

McKinney ISD's music education program earns national recognition

McKinney ISD has been named to the 2020 Best Communities for Music Education list by the National Association of Music Merchants.

United Way of Denton County disburses $118,425 of COVID-19 Relief Fund to help struggling residents

United Way of Denton County has disbursed $118,425 from its COVID-19 Relief Fund to help Denton County residents who are struggling financially due to the pandemic.

'We're on schedule': Demolition continues at Collin Creek Mall amid coronavirus shutdowns

Demolition continues at Collin Creek Mall despite the economic impact of coronavirus restrictions, according to the developers.

Anna Herod, Daniel Houston, Makenzie Plusnick, Miranda Jaimes and William C. Wadsack contributed to this report.

Read the rest here:
Collin Creek Mall demolition continues, and four other DFW-area stories - Community Impact Newspaper

The better question is do we really need a Demolition Man sequel, but thats kind of a silly question in an era where reboots and sequels have become the norm and the answer would be of course from anyone that remembers the original movie. Ive seen the original movie, as have a lot of people, but the consensus on whether or not it deserves a sequel is still unknown since teh first movie was fine for its time and had a lot of action that was enjoyable, but it was also kind of a goofy movie in some ways too. One big thing that Cody Hamman of Joblo is getting after though is that it would appear the movie has a bit of predictive power much like a few other movies and TV shows have throughout the years. People love to pick up on these cues since it is a little eerie how some things that are predicted in movies tend to happen in real life. This time around however there are notable differences since Arnold Schwarzenegger didnt become president in real life, though he did become the governor of California. Also, there was no massive earthquake that devastated California to such a degree that cities had to merge in order to create a new society, thankfully. The whole no-contact thing thats so prevalent in the movie however is an unfortunate side effect that some have witnessed and been living with thanks to the coronavirus, so the predictive nature of the movie is coming into play as some might want to think. Within the next decade however its hard to think that well be doing air high-fives and having VR sex for fear of contracting any unwanted diseases. Plus, growing babies in a lab just doesnt sound like something that a lot of people would get on board with.

Movies set in the future are typically a lot of fun since they tend to predict certain outcomes based on habitual behavior and trends of the day and how they could possibly expand in the years to come, but rarely are they ever really worth using as predictors when it comes to stating how life will be at some point in the future. After all, according to a lot of futuristic movies we were supposed to have flying cars, suspended highways, time travel, and various other wondrous inventions by now that havent been seen since movie magic is fanciful and fun but its not realistic and likely as not it would be extremely costly. Think of what a flying car would cost right now and what it might take to actually earn the permission to operate one. The Demolition Man was a nice jump into a future where cryogenics are seen as the pacifistic and kind way to store the worst of the worst instead of locking them away for life and possibly executing them for their crimes. Those that are against the death penalty usually have their reasons, and sometimes theyre right, but stacking people like ice cubes and later on learning that theyre still awake while in hibernation sounds even more inhumane than sticking a needle in their arm. Some prisoners might even prefer the needle if they were to realize that theyd be spending their time in prison literally in the ice.

One reason Id say that a Demolition Man sequel isnt needed is that the movie did end on a pretty good note with Spartan and Huxley appearing as though they might be an item, Edgar Friendly and his people were topside once again and about to integrate with everyone, and things were about to go back to the way they were pre-Cocteau, as in back to the normal that we know today. The one thing with a utopia is that as a reality its not bound to work and as an ideal its like a shifting tide, its different for everyone and very few people are ever going to fully agree on one ideal for everyone. Trying to create such a place is next to impossible since it would mean creating a world thats bound to encapsulate everyones likes and none of their dislikes, which isnt possible since the likes of some are the dislikes of others. See how that works? Michael Shermer of The Week has a more in-depth explanation of this idea. As far as a sequel goes for Demolition Man though one would have to think about who the main bad guy would be, since there would need to be one, and why in the world theyd start causing trouble. Obviously Spartan would still be around to do his thing, but as weve seen in the latest Rambo movie, Stallone is getting kind of old to do all the same action sequences he used to do so readily. A sequel would also need to cover a lot of bases between the last movie and now, and of course, the three seashells thing would need to be explained. You thought I would leave that out, didnt you?

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Are We Going to See a Demolition Man Sequel? - TVOvermind

Photo by Jason Hope

While much of the world is on hold right now due to the coronavirus pandemic, demolition has begun on an iconic part of the University of Kentucky campus. The Kirwan-Blanding dormitory complex is finally being dismantled after sitting vacant for over four years.

Some pictures from Jason Hope on Facebook:

Photo by Jason Hope

Photo by Jason Hope

Photo by Jason Hope

UK friends- just when you thought the world couldnt be more upside down, they started to demolish South Campus.

Posted by Jason Hope onThursday, April 16, 2020

The two 23-story towers and eight surrounding low-rise buildings were built in the 1960s and sit on 14 acres.Demolition is expected to cost $15 million ($10 million from an internal loan, $5 million from private funding), which pales in comparison to the $126 million estimate to renovate the buildings to modern standards.

A map of the area, per the Herald-Leader:

Once the complex is demolished which could take 12-15 months UK will use the area for a new 500-bed dormitory and large green space. If approved, the goal is to have the dormitory ready for the 2022-23 school year.

Feel free to share your favorite Kirwan-Blanding memories below.

Here is the original post:
LOOK: Demolition of the Kirwan-Blanding complex has begun - kentuckysportsradio.com

Saying those seeking to raze a derelict greenhouse followed the process outlined in a local ordinance, New Canaans town building official last week told members of an appointed municipal body that he wouldnt enforce their request to re-notice the structure.

The disused and damaged greenhouse at the New Canaan Nature Center is to be demolished. Credit: Michael Dinan

According to some members of the Historical Review Committee, the sign affixed to a ca.-1900 greenhouse at the New Canaan Nature Center failed to meet a requirement that it be posted in a conspicuous location of the property on which the structure is situated and that its visible from the nearest public street or other accessway adjoining the property.

Committee member Ed Vollmer said during the appointed bodys April 16 meeting that there are people who are unhappy with what is going on and the destruction of the greenhouse because it is considered a historic building.

Under local ordinance, if a letter objecting to a planned demolition is received within 15 days of publication of the notice in a newspaper, then the Committee may decide to impose a delay period of up to 90 days. In this case, however, the Nature Centers notice was published Feb. 6, meaning the objection period expired Feb. 21four days before a New Canaan woman filed her letter, which was therefore rejected by Town Building Official Brian Platz.

Vollmer said the Committees review and opportunity to impose a delay should have been triggered.

Our job is basically to recognize this and to agree or not agree with the individual but not to have a chance to do this is very upsetting, he said at the meeting, held via videoconference. It is upsetting because that is what our purview is. So the fact that it was signed property is fine, but we did not have an opportunity to weigh in on it. And this is getting slipped into the cracks and is there no way to redeem or review this? Is there any way we can go back and what authority can we go to, to deal with it? We would like to see an opportunity for people in town to make a choice.

Platz noted that he is the enforcement agent for the Committee as well as the demolition delay ordinance, saying, It is my position that unless you can demonstrate to me a clear violation of the provisions of the ordinance, then you do not get a second bite at the apple.

Even so, the Committee voted 5-0 in favor of a motion made by Secretary Rose Rothbart that the signage at the Nature Center was not in compliance with the ordinance and requesting that additional signage be posted on Oenoke Ridge.

Platz said, I will not enforce that, and the following exchange ensued:

Rothbart: You wont enforce what the ordinance says?

Platz: I will enforce what the ordinance says. The ordinance doesnt say two signs. You can change the ordinance moving forward but you cant do that retroactively for this application.

Rothbart: But can we request that for the town?

Platz: You can request whatever you want, but I am not enforcing it.

In addition to Rothbart and Vollmer, those voting in favor of the motion included Chair Mark Markiewicz, Andrew Melillo and Marty Skrelunas.

Platz noted that even if the applicantin this case, the town itself, as the Nature Center is situated on town propertydid re-post demolition notices on Oenoke Ridge, that wouldnt trigger the opportunity for any delay period, because the objection period lapsed.

Committee members said they would recommend changes to the ordinance to the Town Council Bylaws & Ordinances Committee. Specifically, the Committee said it would seek to flesh out the definition of conspicuous in the ordinance and consider a requirement for on-street signs where the structures to be demolished are on interior lots.

The physical sign itself is one of three ways that residents are notified of an intention to demolish a structure, under local law. Notice must be published in a print newspaper, and those seeking formal notice of any such application may sign up to be notified by certified mail from the town.

Yet the Committee also said theres a problem with that form of notice. Specifically, Rothbart said that she didnt receive a notice by certified mail even though shes on the list.

Platz noted that what the local ordinance and State Demolition Code specifically require is confirmation that such notices are mailed, not proof of return receipt, as Rothbart described.

Certified mail is just a confirmation from the Post Office, he said. You do not have to sign for certified mail, that is return receipt.

Though the Committee voted unanimously in favor of the motion regarding a second sign, not every member agreed that the applicant in the case of the greenhouse had run afoul of the ordinance.

For example, when Rothbart said the sign on the greenhouse was the absolute opposite definition of conspicuous, Melillo noted that the language is meant to preempt an attempt to hide such a sign behind a tree or under vines (which this one wasnt), and that the ordinance says it must be visible from a public road or other accessway.

The sign was right in front of the building, he said, adding, Its not being purposely hidden.

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'I Will Not Enforce That': Committee, Building Official at Odds Over Demolition Notice - New Canaanite