Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Carnival Never Got Started by S. Guy Lovelace Maryland 20-Year-Old Dies Never Having Aged. Brooke Greenberg is only one of a dozen children with syndrome X. 20-Year-Old Dies Never Having Aged. Oct. 29, 2013— -- Brooke Greenberg, who baffled scientists because she never aged, has died at the age of 20, never having developed beyond the physical size of an infant or the mental capacity of a 2-year-old. The daughter of Howard and Melanie Greenberg from Reisterstown, Md., Brooke is one of about a dozen children in the world who have what some call syndrome X -- a kind of Benjamin Button disorder that prevents them from aging. Her funeral was Sunday at a synagogue outside Baltimore, family friends confirmed. "The family is doing as well as can be expected," Chris Cole, a colleague of Brooke's father, told ABCNews.com today. "They are going through their traditions this week -- the shiva." Brooke has been pushed around in a stroller all her life. In 2009, when her family was interviewed on ABC's "20/20," Brook weighed 16 pounds and was 30 inches tall. She didn't speak, but she laughed when she was happy, and clearly recognized her three sisters: Emily, now 26; Caitlin, now 23; and Carly, now 17. But only her hair and fingernails grew. In her first six years, Brooke went through a series of medical emergencies from which she recovered, often without explanation. She survived surgery for seven perforated stomach ulcers. She had a brain seizure followed by what was diagnosed as a stroke that, weeks later, had left no apparent damage. At 4, she fell into a lethargy that caused her to sleep for 14 days. Then, doctors diagnosed a brain tumor, and the Greenbergs bought a casket for Brooke. "We were preparing for our child to die," Howard Greenberg told ABC in 2009. "We were saying goodbye. And, then, we got a call that there was some change -- that Brooke had opened her eyes and she was fine. There was no tumor. She overcomes every obstacle that is thrown her way." Richard F. Walker, a retired medical researcher from the University of Florida Medical School who now does his research at All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, has followed Brooke's case since she was about 2 years old, comparing her genetic code with that of other children with the same condition. "In some people, something happens to them and the development process is retarded," he told ABCNews.com earlier this year. "The rate of change in the body slows and is negligible." Walker wants to learn not only what is wrong with these children but also if others in the family could pass on genes for this rare and baffling disorder. Their bodies do not develop as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync, according to Walker. No known genetic syndromes or chromosomal abnormalities can explain why. Brooke still had baby teeth at age 16, and her bone age was estimated to be more like 10. "There've been very minimal changes in Brooke's brain," he said. "Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected." Walker also studies Gabby Williams, an 8-year-old from Billings, Mont., who weighs only 11 pounds and a 29-year-old Florida man who has the body of a 10-year-old. Like Brooke, they never seem to age. "My whole career has been focused on the aging process," he said. "My fixation has been not on the consequences but the cause of it." Not only do the people he's studying have a growth rate of one-fifth the speed of others, but they live with a variety of other medical problems, including deafness, the inability to walk, eat or even speak. Walker explains that physiological change, or what he calls "developmental inertia," is essential for human growth. Maturation occurs after reproduction. "Without that process we never develop," he said. "When we develop, all the pieces of our body come together and change and are coordinated. Otherwise, there would be chaos." But, said Walker, the body does not have a "stop switch" for this development. "What happens is we become mature at age 20 and continue to change." The first subtle internal body changes of aging are seen in the 30s and become more visible in the 40s. "There is a progressive erosion of internal order as a result of developmental inertia," he said. In one of the girls Walker has studied, he found damage to one of the genes that causes developmental inertia, a finding that he called significant. He also suspects the mutations are on the regulatory genes on the second female X chromosome. "If we could identify the gene and then at young adulthood we could silence the expression of developmental inertia, find an off-switch, when you do that, there is perfect homeostasis and you are biologically immortal." Now Walker doesn't mean that people will never die. Human life will still end. "But you wouldn't have the later years -- you'd remain physically and functionally able," he said. As for Brooke, even though she never grew up, her rabbi remembered her two-decade life with dignity and reverence in a eulogy this week. "While the outside world may have noticed Brooke's physical stature and been puzzled by her unique development state, she brought joy and love to her family," Rabbi Andrew Busch told the New York Daily News. "Her parents, three sisters and extended family showered her with love and respected her dignity throughout her entire life." In the Studio with Che Lovelace, the Painter Putting Trinidad on the Art-World Map. At a certain point in their careers, most artists born in places far from the traditional art world capitals have to confront a question: Should they stay in their home countries, or move to Europe or the United States in hopes of landing on the art-world map? Che Lovelace has witnessed plenty of artists opt for the latter in his decades as a staple of the Port of Spain, Trinidad, art scene. He gets it. “A decade or two ago, Trinidad would have felt isolated,” he tells me over Zoom. “Being somewhere far from the centers of art has always been part of the challenge of living here, which I feel is my place and where I want to work from.” For artists like Lovelace, there’s a rare upside to the pandemic: The rise of Zoom and Instagram and the decline of travel have helped level the playing field. “This increasingly digital era has made it possible to interact with the world and be part of a larger conversation—to contribute from this vantage point,” he says. Case in point: the exhibition of brightly colored, vibrant paintings he just opened at the pace-setting Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires, which marks his second-ever solo showing in the U.S. In any other year, Lovelace wouldn't have been available the afternoon of our virtual studio visit. He would've been deep in the food, music, and dance of Trinidad's traditional week of Carnival. Maybe more than any other part of pre-Covid Trinidadian life, it's Carnival that Lovelace misses the most. At this point, Mas, as locals call the celebration, has influenced him so profoundly that it's become essential to his work. There’s a core cast of characters to be found at Mas, portrayed by participants known as masqueraders. Lovelace is a committed masquerader— and more and more, in his studio, he’s found himself inhabiting Carnival favorites like the Blue Devil. “I feel that if I act out a character—perform that character, so to speak—I’m able to get closer to it to paint it in a more intimate way,” he says. “To pretend to be something is kind of to learn it and be it.” For the past five years, Lovelace has worked out of a former U.S. Army base 20 minutes outside of Port of Spain, situated in a tropical sea of green. He initially felt, guiltily, that it was “too pretty,” and that painting in a space which had been headquarters to American soldiers during World War II might be the opposite of creatively stimulating. “I could almost feel the weight of that history,” Lovelace says. But it soon became liberating. Lovelace grew up in the rural village of Matura, but as an adult has lived only in urban or industrial centers. To be so fully surrounded by nature, Lovelace says, looking through a massive open-air window, “felt like a homecoming of sorts.” From left: Man descending Stairs Carrying Wings (to Become a Blue Devil) , 2020; Interior with Cutlass , 2019. Featured in the exhibition “From the Edge of the Rock,” on view at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles through April 17, 2021. It also coincided with a burst of color in his palette. Early on, Lovelace “resisted” working with bright colors. He worried they’d come across as “too easily Caribbean,” just like painting, say, a coconut or coconut tree. Since learning to transform those tropes, his work has become defined by them. Figures are central in many of his paintings, but Lovelace doesn’t see them as representational. The Blue Devils he depicts aren’t of the Mas or himself. “I’m always playing around with the different ways I can represent the reality of what I’m thinking about or looking at,” Lovelace explains. And the moment something transforms from figurative to something more abstract is one he’d like to “relive over and over.” In a way, he does: “I’m able to discover the figure anew every single time I paint it.” Over Zoom, I was initially alarmed by how casually Lovelace maneuvered a selection of paintings he’d laid out for me to see on the floor. The rich surfaces of his paintings belie the unassuming way they’re put together: four boards repurposed from a local stationery distributor, taped together and then framed. The freedom of movement in his methods translates to a unique ability to capture movement on a still two-dimensional surface. “Poised on the border between Cubism and realism,” the New Yorker wrote of his first U.S. exhibition, at New York’s Half Gallery in 2017. “Lovelace doesn’t really belong to any school.” But Lovelace has always been part of a community. Post-World War II, the Port of Spain art scene has thrived, and includes a growing legion of talented painters. Most of them are homegrown, but the island’s way of life and lush setting has also attracted the likes of Chris Ofili and Peter Doig, two internationally renowned artists who came from London in the early Aughts and never really left. Ofili leans on the island for his creative process—the Blue Devil has found his way into his paintings, too—and Doig is also active in the community. In 2003, he and Lovelace founded Studiofilmclub, which, for years, screened independent films free of charge. While no one is going to the movies these days, the pandemic has allowed Lovelace time to finally finish works he started years earlier—it usually takes him a year and a half to complete one painting—and the show at Various Small Fires is an unusually thorough account of what Lovelace has been up to in his studio. When he finally sees it in-person—pandemic-related travel restrictions permitting—it’ll be just his third time visiting L.A. (He went twice as a young surfer.) But the artist is by no means a stranger to the U.S. Lovelace has visited New York at least once a year for decades now—long enough to have witnessed galleries make the shift from Soho to Chelsea. He shacks up at the most covetable of pieds-à-terre: the home of the art dealer Bill Powers and the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley. It’s not that Lovelace hasn’t had the opportunity to show Stateside—let alone closer to home—over the span of his career. He simply isn’t too concerned with displaying his work, nor suffering the financial consequences. “Even with this space, I’ve been months and months behind on rent, and almost thrown out,” he says. He always finds a solution, whether it’s teaching surfing lessons or, currently, lecturing at the University of the West Indies. “I think you create a presence, you create something that has value,” Lovelace says. “I may not be getting cold, hard cash, but I'm getting a currency.” ISBN 13: 9780533150106. Ever dream of escaping your day job and running away to the paradise of the Caribbean? Now imagine that Caribbean paradise is your day job. In THE CARNIVAL NEVER GOT STARTED, S. Guy Lovelace recount just that in his fascinating memoir of life as a resort architect, then resort owner and operator, on a Caribbean island. For all those who sit by a bleak window on a dreary winter day and dream dreams of running a small inn on a sunbathed island, THE CARNIVAL NEVER GOT STARTED provides new perspectives, laughably educational and unbelievable but true incidents, and a bit of reality for those who believe that the grass is always greener where the weather is always warm. Laugh along with the constantly befuddling problems and enjoy vicariously the beauty of the islands and the adventurous spirit of an intrepid couple bent on living their dream of living in paradise. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. S. GUY LOVELACE has enjoyed a life-long career as an architect, land developer, interior designer, and resort owner. Having lived and worked on several Caribbean islands as well as in Costa Rica and Haiti, Mr. Lovelace and his wife now reside in Florida, where he is president of the Longmead Bay Company. Plantation Press. For those of you who once were guests at the Windmills Plantation, or received the old Plantation Press, or read The Carnival Never Got Started or Caribbean Cooking Made Simple and were saddened by the tragic fate of our lovely little hotel: JUSTICE HAS BEEN DONE. Our friend and many time guest "Henry" Higgins, sent the following article: Mario Hoffman. CORRUPTION -accused developer Mario Hoffmann has surrendered his Belongership and handed back 1,506 acres of Salt Cay land to the government. In an out of court settlement Mr Hoffmann and the Salt Cay Development Companies also agreed to contribute to TCIG’s costs. However the Slovak businessman refuses to admit any wrongdoing and continues to maintain his innocence. In 2009 the Commission of Inquiry revealed that the government sold Crown land to Mr Hoffmann for a suspiciously low price. Commissioner Sir Robin Auld claimed that there was “information of possibly corrupt and/or otherwise seriously dishonest involvement including misfeasance in public office” relating to the former Premier’s dealings with the developer. Mr Hoffmann battled for a number of years to have the allegations retracted but lost his case. In a press release this week he said that he was happy to put the matter behind him. “We have at all times maintained our innocence with respect to all allegations of misconduct and corruption made against us and determined that it was most convenient and expedient to enter into the settlement rather than continue on with the disputes in relation to Salt Cay,” he said. “We are pleased to put these disputes behind us. “We have maintained our innocence at all times and continue to think that our project for Salt Cay was a good one for the people of Salt Cay and the. Turks and Caicos Islands. “After litigating these issues for several years, in light of all mutual claims we felt it best to settle these disputes now and move forward with our other businesses. “We thank the people of Salt Cay for their trust and confidence in us." The terms of the settlement are confidential, but the parties have agreed to make public all significant terms. Firstly, Mr Hoffmann and the Development Companies have transferred all the lands on Salt Cay which they own or lease to TCIG, totalling some 1,506 acres. They have also made a contribution to TCIG's costs and Mr Hoffmann has surrendered his Belongership. Neither Mr Hoffmann nor the Development Companies admitted any wrongdoing or civil or criminal liability when entering into the settlement. Attorney General, Huw Shepheard said: “We are pleased that these disputes have now been settled, and in consequence that the position of Salt Cay is now secured with the transfer of all the respective lands on Salt Cay to the government. “The government will be undertaking a broad consultation as to the future of Salt Cay.” OR: www.amazon.com/author/sguylovelace Underneath the the main picture are some little bitty pictures. Click on them to meke them bigger. ANOTHER OR: For further information on books by Pat and Guy Lovelace, visit our website at: Historical Landmarks On South Caicos. South Caicos is one of the most interesting and historic islands to visit in Turks and Caicos. The island’s capital town of Cockburn Harbour was once the most active commercial community in the British Overseas Territory. Its buildings provide an interesting glimpse into the island’s past. South Caicos St. Thomas Anglican Church. Providenciales has now succeeded South Caicos in terms of business growth, but for those visitors interested in learning about the history of Turks and Caicos, the historical landmarks on South Caicos provide a delightful introduction. Queen Elizabeth Parade Grounds. The leading historical landmark on South Caicos is the 18th century Commissioner’s House. Currently unoccupied, it stands atop Tucker’s Hill southeast of the village and is easily recognized by its green roof. It was originally the District Commissioner, Mr. Hutchinson’s house, and then later became Miss Mae’s B&B. Miss Mae operated the business until she became too old to care for it, and then turned it over to her son. The property was later purchased by famous French free-diver Jacques Mayol, who frequented South Caicos in the early eighties. The house is now unoccupied. Of note, this property provided accommodations to Queen Elizabeth II when Her Highness visited the islands in 1966. South Caicos District Commissioner’s House. There are also remnants of other old buildings, walls, sluice gates, windmill pumps, and old salt warehouses to explore in Cockburn Town. They give evidence to the once bustling salt trade that occurred on the Big South, as the island is fondly called. The extensive manmade salinas dot the landscape and are easy to discover on a leisurely stroll about the community. They now serve as homes for a variety of bird species, including pink flamingos. The historical landmarks on South Caicos can easily be explored on foot. Some visitors also like to travel on bicycles, which are readily available on a complimentary basis to guests staying at East Bay Resort. Guided tours are another great way to learn about the history of the island, and can be arranged through a guest services agent.