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I love the story of Icarus...I might have been stretching the boundaries a bit with that title...but she sure could fly my lovely Kat!
Doing its best to evade the morning's rain showers, Kansas City to St. Paul-Pigs Eye tonnage on northbound Canadian Pacific mixed merchandise train 475 slowly trundles upgrade out of the Iowa River Valley between Fredonia and Letts atop rails of the lightly used Ottumwa Subdivision. A patch of Butterweed flowers look on at the long and heavy 123 car freight that will soon take a diverging route into the siding at Letts to clear a path for southbound counterpart 474 before the crew can finish up the remainder of their trip into Nahant Yard in Davenport. SD70ACu #7037, recent graduate of Progress Rail's CP SD9043MAC rebuild program in Mayfield, KY, gets front seat privileges on today's train and looks quite spiffy dressed in the company's Candy Apple Red and Golden Beaver livery. CP currently possess 60 of these sharp rebuilt EMD locomotives which throw in a little variety to their General Electric favored roster.
The Electro-Motive Diesel SD9043MAC, considered to be one of the more unsuccessful locomotives ever produced by the company, found 60 of their kind sent to Canadian Pacific, Union Pacific being the only other buyer of this particular model, in the late 1990s. Despite seeing mainline service for a handful of years following their arrival to the CP system, the entire fleet eventually found themselves laid up in long-term storage due to numerous computer and operational issues and one wondered if they would ever turn another wheel for the railroad again. This must've soured Canadian Pacific's view on EMD products and they probably used their failed fleet of SD90s as an excuse to not buy anything except General Electric for the years to come. However, in 2018, it was announced that the railroad came to an agreement with Progress Rail to rebuild their long dormant SD9043MAC fleet into what are now classified as an SD70ACu. These rebirthed locomotives feature new crew comforts and safety enhancements including a Progress Rail "Q" cab, AAR control stand, emergency access door, inward/outward facing cameras, electrically assisted handbrakes, new control electronics, improved air brake systems, Positive Train Control and of course, a fresh paint job. Union Pacific has sold off a majority of its SD90 fleet to Norfolk Southern for the same cause and what hasn't been sold, sit in storage as UP currently has none in active service on its system.
pictionid66048537 - title waves - catalog45-127-h - filename waves - - titlearray - filename78.140.acropped.jpg- titlearray - filename78.140.acropped.jpg-Image from the SDASM Curatorial Collection.Note: This material may be protected by Copyright Law (Title 17 U.S.C.)--Repository: San Diego Air and Space Museum
Born to lose, I've lived my life in vain
Every dream has only brought me pain
All my life I've always been so blue
Born to lose and now I'm losing you.
Born to lose, it seems so hard to bear
When I wake, and find that you're not there
You've grown tired and now you say we're through
Born to lose and now I'm losing you.
Born in captivity the Woburn Safari Park Land Rovers are free to roam their limited habitat.
The perimeter fence discourages them from roaming too far and becoming a nuisance or threat to the general public.
Despite daily human interaction they still remain a potential hazard to the keepers.
Many injuries per year are linked to people tending to distressed Land Rovers.
Muito interessante esse pedacinho nascendo, achei lindo demais!
Planta da minha mãe :D
----------------
Very interesting piece that was born, I found beautiful too!
Plant of my mother :D
"To a wild, eternal longing we were born by pallid mothers,
from the labour pains of troubles rose our first and anguished cry.
We were thrown on plains and mountains then, to play with all our brothers,
and we played there elk and lion, beggar, god and butterfly."
- A phrase from "Omkring tiggarn från Luossa" by Swedish poet Dan Andersson. Translation by Ola Wiklander.
| The Gallery |
Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2010.
You'll never seen a nation so resilient.
You'll never see a nation so passionate about freedom.
..And you'll never feel the value of freedom as intense as we feel.
Because you never paid a price as hefty as we did.
Today, 16 December, is the Victory day of Bangladesh. 40 years ago, in 1971 on this very day Bangladesh achieved victory against the Pakistani aggressor army after 9 months of blood bath. 3 millions of civilians and freedom fighters sacrificed their lives and 0.2 million women got raped to pay for this victory.
Ladies, Leaders, Lives Lived, Lives Led - IMRAN™
By Imran Anwar
The last day of March closes out Women's History Month. It is a perfect time to honor and salute at least some of the incredible women who have had an impact on my life since I was born. I know you will love the stories, and will join me in honoring these ladies.
>>Family & Early Life<<
March 31 is also the birthday of my precious and incredible younger sister, Dr. Ambereen. A gold-medalist student since childhood, accomplished doctor, great professor, head of department at the top medical school in Pakistan, devoted wife, incredible mother to a daughter (who just became a doctor) and a son getting a business and tech degree.... On top of that she is the author of a brand new medical textbook. Not to mention that she manages to beat the combined 10,000 and 10,000 walking steps goals of our brother and me every day, often exceeding 20,000 steps daily! Yet, in all that she does, she insists, that she has not been able to do as much as our late mother was able to accomplish, whom we lost aged 50, thirty years ago.
Our mother, Nargis Anwar, whom people who even only knew her briefly still talk to us about decades after she was gone, gave up her master’s in economics in the final year when she got married and devoted her life to our amazing father, and our upbringing. My father outlived her by nearly two decades, but he never remarried, never even dated. He spent his remaining life talking about her and bringing fresh rose petals to her grave every weekend for the next 17 years.
He did that even during the last 7 years of his life when he was totally paralyzed by a massive stroke and had to be physically carried to her grave! That is how much we all considered her the soul of our family.
I was also triply blessed that I grew up with my late maternal grandmother, Shakila Khatoon. I moved to Karachi just past age 6. I was given the choice to leave home and stay with her for a better education than I would get in the remote locations my father was posted every three years early in his civil engineering career. People still can’t believe my parents let me make that life choice that early.
It was hardest for my mother to accept that decision, as I was her first born. But that choice forged my life and gave me the confidence to embark on any journey or take on life’s toughest challenges on my own.
My grandmother was a young orphan, and later a young widow. She could only read Urdu newspapers and the Holy Quran in Arabic. Despite that, she insisted on, and managed to have, all five of her daughters get master’s degrees -- from Economics to Chemistry to Education -- which was not very common in the 1950s in many parts of the world, and impossible even today in some countries.
She gave them the support to build careers in Pakistan in the 1960s on. One of my aunts, Parveen Akhtar, still flies around the world as a consultant and speaker to NGOs and governmental organizations on promoting entrepreneurship and women's businesses. Another of my aunts, now-deceased, Ishrat Shirwany, launched a private school system in Pakistan, and then a line of fashion clothing.... for kids... in Pakistan... in the 1960s! Talk about multi-industry entrepreneurship. I was fortunate enough to see them all achieve these things even in a conservative Muslim country while I grew up with my grandmother.
If we Muslims had an equivalent system of sainthood, as was often mentioned in the catholic schools that I was lucky to be educated at in Karachi, my grandmother would have been declared a saint. She was one because of all the ways she continued to serve others, through her life, by example, and by guidance, attention, love, and even prayer, never asking anything in return, or once complaining for having lost her parents, her young husband, then losing a young son, a relatively young daughter, and many more losses.
These are people whom one will never read about in traditional history books, but to me they are the history of anything I ever achieve in life, or any good that I am able to do in my time on earth.
There are obviously many times in my personal life that I have been blessed to be loved with and have had the female partners on the journey of life. These incredible, beautiful, smart, talented, and loving souls are part of my personal history as well, so this is a nod to them, but those are stories for another day, another book.
>>Education & Lifelong Learning<<
Going back to subject of Education. That was something that my grandmother and my parents insisted were essential for me, and all of us, to excel in. It was another area where I shall always honor and cherish several lady-teachers who had the most incredible impact on my life.
The late Sister Mary Frances, who taught Cambridge University School Certificate English Grammar to dozens of us students at St. Paul's English High School, in Karachi, had a lot to do with the fact that I love to write so much.
I was eleven, growing up in a developing nation, with English (still) my third language. She could have ignored "'Chinku & Minku Get The Bananas’ by Imran Anwar" -- a short one-act play of imaginary dialog between two kid-monkeys at a zoo. The monkeys discussed how to fool a visitor boy to give them his bananas.
Sister Mary quietly took the paper I handed to her in addition to my actual homework. But more importantly, a few days later she brought it back. She called me over after class. Then she went over it with me…. line by line.... on how to make the dialog tighter, the story more engaging.
She told me, before I was even a teen, that I had a gift for writing. What more could a kid ask for! She did see me get published in the Pakistan Times at age 17, but later she passed away, and was buried in her native Ireland, but draped in a Pakistani flag! She did not get to read things like my Op-Ed pieces published by the Wall Street Journal and other global publications. But I salute her, and other great teachers like her, with every word I write even today.
Columbia And America
There is obviously not enough time to mention all the great lady-teachers, much less all the teachers, whom I am grateful to. But my lifelong journey of constant learning, even after starting a career, and becoming established in Pakistan, continued.
With the four-concentrations full-scholarship MBA from Columbia Business School, Journalism School, as well as Engineering School, to some I may have proven that academic standards have fallen worldwide. But, kidding aside, even at that stage in life, in 1989-1990, when I began the American part of my life's journey, having great ladies as among the greatest teachers remained a great factor.
One of the toughest and most popular professors at Columbia Business School, Professor Dr. Kathryn Harrigan, taught two courses when I was there. Her courses were always oversubscribed. The final rosters of students were picked by lottery. Wanting to be in at least one of her two courses, regardless of how difficult the workload she was famous for, and how tough she was in intellectually challenging her students, I applied for both.
Being a Gemini, I often joke about wanting two of everything. Well, wouldn't you believe it, my name was picked in both lotteries. I would say that I was in two-minds, but for a Gemini that is a base-state of mind!
Living up to one of my two lifelong mottos, "If Anyone Can, 'I' Can!" yours truly decided to attend both courses... in the same semester. To this day I recall attending the first class of her first subject. You know me, I always have something to say, and something to ask. So, I did. And what an intellectually gratifying discussion it led to from the very first session. When she assigned work and an immense reading workload, I knew I was in for a tough but awesome course.
Later that same afternoon, in another filled classroom, I sat in the first session of Professor Harrigan's second subject. Not missing a beat, she noticed me in that room, and was surprised that I had gotten into both classes by lottery.
Then she literally asked if I was a glutton for punishment. Was I sure I wanted to put myself through the grinding workload of two of her courses in the same semester, because this course was even tougher than the one earlier that day?
I believe achieving Anything is possible. The Impossible just takes a little more effort. So, I said, "Yes, Professor. I can't wait!" She grinned and went on to teach a class full of successful professionals continuing our learning in awe of her sharp mind. She lived up to her expectation as one of the most incredible professors of anything anywhere, in both the courses we learned from her in.
Literally two decades later, as I was walking to my parked car outside a grocery store on the South shore of eastern Long Island, I saw Professor Harrigan walking out of the store next door. She said, “Aren’t you Imran? You were one of the most interesting students I had in my courses twenty years ago!” Talk about an incredible teacher and an incredibly sharp mind!
>>Today, Tomorrow, And Beyond<<
To this day the learnings from Professor Harrigan’s two courses at Columbia University, covering Corporate Strategy (strategic management, alliances, M&A, diversification) and Competitive Strategy (applicable to every aspect of life and business), and our classroom discussions, inspire me in my work. Those are surely at play in my never-ending proposals to leaders at client global giants, as well as to the topmost leaders at Microsoft.
As I write these lines, as midnight approaches the international dateline at the end of Women’s History Month, I must also acknowledge the incredible ladies and leaders within Microsoft. linkedin.com/in/imran has their names, but the clock is about to strike so I am posting this shorter item. proposals.
They have helped me continue to learn and grow, to aspire to lead higher, and to contribute at the highest levels of my experience and capabilities. They lead and inspire my colleagues and me to serve our clients, and people around the world, to drive Customer Success, for our greatest impact in helping every person and every organization on the planet achieve all they are capable of.
Thank you, ladies!
© 2021 IMRAN™
SEASON'S GREETINGS - ΚΑΛΕΣ ΓΙΟΡΤΕΣ
Taken on December 15, 2017.
Thanassis Fournarakos - Θανάσης Φουρναράκος
Professional Photographer, Athens, Greece
(retired in 2011, born in 1946).
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
None of my images may be downloaded, copied, reproduced, manipulated or used on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit written permission. THANK YOU!
Hans Haacke - Gift Horse
Proposed Materials: bronze, electroluminescent film
Instead of the statue of William IV astride a horse, as originally planned for the empty plinth, Hans Haacke proposes a skeleton of a riderless, strutting horse. Tied to the horse’s front leg is an electronic ribbon which displays live the ticker of the London Stock Exchange, completing the link between power, money and history. The horse is derived from an etching by George Stubbs, whose studies of equine anatomy were published the year after the birth of the reputedly decadent king, whose statue was abandoned due to a lack of funds. Haacke’s proposal makes visible a number of ordinarily hidden substructures, tied up with a bow as if a gift to all.
Haacke’s early work employed physical and organic processes, such as condensation, in what he called ‘systems’, until his focus shifted to the socio-political field of equally interdependent dynamics. For the last four decades Haacke has been examining relationships between art, power and money, and has addressed issues of free expression and civic responsibilities in democratic societies. Haacke’s practice is difficult to categorise, moving from object to image to text, from painting to photography, at times of a provocative nature.
Hans Haacke was born 1936 in Cologne, Germany. He lives and works in New York.
If Lola were an athlete in the NFL she would be a tight end rather than a wide receiver. She can block, guard, tackle, and catch but with 81 lbs of lean muscle she does not change direction with the facility of a Jack Russel or a Border Collie. She powers through obstacles. She is fearless. In barn hunt competition she is known to move hay bales to get to the prize. In agility competition she will leap over any barrier with ease and negotiate the the seesaw with aplomb.
Just received a new pair of Born Julianne flats in dark brown. These were a little tighter than my black ones, but once they stretch will probably still be the most comfortable shoes in my closet.
Porto.
Frente Marítima.
Recuperada pelo arquitecto, Manuel de Solà-Morales.
____________________________________
POMPE INUTILI
for Silvina Rodrigues Lopes
Nobody’s born; it would make no sense
to call the placental remains
enveloping a bunch of organs
whose action is all but predetermined
somebody.
Only the dead truly
exist. They wrote or didn’t
write books, love letters,
diaries. No matter: they crossed
our paths, sometimes sat
at the same table, and even believed
in the sweet torture of love.
They had real hands when they touched
the pubescent face they were saying farewell to.
A kiss, though it kissed only wrinkles,
was able to make the mornings less cold.
The dead aren’t very good at farewells,
even if they’re precise and sincere
as never before in the moment they descend
into the earth and won’t let us
partake with them a cigarette,
one last drink, a species of destiny.
The dead are frightfully real.
A whole life is insufficient
for us to kill them all, one
by one, as the most basic metaphysical
hygiene would surely recommend.
And yet they give us the necessary strength
to die more and more, to endure
our rented days, these homes not quite fit
to live in. Because the truth is that other
people are merely the imperfect dead.
They, like us, are a bit too alive.
But perhaps they’ll one day write
a poem like this (and it might not even be
a poem, let alone like this) which denotes,
besides the obvious influences, what we might
call a penchant for horror.
For that’s what it all comes down to.
The dead know.
Knowledge is useless.
Poetry too.
*
POMPE INUTILI
Para a Silvina Rodrigues Lopes
Ninguém nasce; seria descabido
chamar alguém aos resíduos
de placenta que envolvem
um conjunto de órgãos
a tudo ou quase tudo predispostos.
Só os mortos, verdadeiramente,
existem. Escreveram ou não
escreveram livros, cartas de amor,
diários. Não importa: cruzaram-se
connosco, sentaram-se por vezes
à mesma mesa, acreditaram até
no terno suplício do amor.
E tinham mãos reais, ao tocarem
o rosto imberbe de que se despediam.
Um beijo, sobre rugas apenas,
conseguia tornar menos frias as manhãs.
Despedem-se muito mal, os mortos.
Embora, por uma vez, sejam
exactos e sinceros – no momento
em que descem à terra e nos impedem
de partilhar com eles um cigarro,
o último copo, uma espécie de destino.
São terrivelmente reais, os mortos.
A vida inteira não chega
para que possamos matá-los a todos,
um a um, como decerto aconselharia
a mais elementar higiene metafísica.
Dão-nos, contudo, a força necessária
para morrer cada vez mais, tolerando
dias de aluguer, casas ligeiramente
inabitáveis. Porque os outros, na
verdade, não passam de mortos imperfeitos.
Estão, como nós, um pouco demasiado vivos.
Talvez um dia, porém, venham a
assinar um poema assim (e pode até não ser
um poema, muito menos assim), em que se note,
além das influências óbvias, uma certa
– digamos – especialização no horror.
Pois é disso apenas que se trata.
Os mortos sabem-no.
A sabedoria é inútil.
A poesia também.
© 2005, Manuel de Freitas
From: A Flor dos Terramotos
Publisher: Averno, Lisboa, 2005
© Translation: 2007, Richard Zenith