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Oslo, Norway: The suspect in Norway's twin attacks that killed at least 92 people says he acted alone, police said Sunday, after some witness accounts said a second gunman had taken part in a mass shooting.
But police are still trying to establish whether there was "one or several" shooters at Friday's attack on a Labour Party youth meeting on Utoeya island, northwest of Oslo, police commissioner Sveinung Sponheim told journalists.
Norway suspect 'deemed killings necessary'
A suspected right-wing fanatic accused of killing at least 92 people deemed his acts "atrocious" yet "necessary" as Norway mourned victims of the nation's worst attacks since World War Two.
Police were hunting on Sunday to see if a possible second gunman took part in the shooting massacre and bomb attack on Friday that traumatised a normally peaceful Nordic country.
Anders Behring Breivik comments
In his first comment via a lawyer since he was arrested, 32-year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik expressed willingness to explain himself in court at a hearing likely to be held on Monday about extending protective custody.
"He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary," lawyer Geir Lippestad told independent TV2 news.
Police said Breivik gave himself up after admitting to a massacre in which at least 85 people died, mostly young people attending a summer camp of the youth wing of Norway's ruling Labour Party on an idyllic island.
Breivik was also arrested for the bombing of Oslo's government district that killed seven people hours earlier. Norway's toughest sentence is 21 years in jail. Survivors, relatives of those killed and supporters planned a procession to mourn the dead at Sundvollen on Sunday, near the island where the massacre took place.
Police defend delays
The comments from Breivik came as reports said police arrived at the island massacre about an hour and a half after he first opened fire, slowed because they didn't have quick access to a helicopter and then couldn't find a boat to make their way to the scene just several hundred yards offshore.
Survivors of the shooting spree have described hiding and fleeing into the water to escape the gunman, but a police briefing Saturday detailed for the first time how long the terror lasted - and how long victims waited for help.
Manifesto and video against multiculturalism
King Harald would attend a service in Oslo cathedral, a few hundred metres (yards) from where a bomb devastated government buildings including the offices of Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
Breivik hated "cultural marxists", wanted a "crusade" against the spread of Islam and liked guns and weightlifting, web postings, acquaintances and officials said.
A video posted to the YouTube website showed several pictures of Breivik, including one of him in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon. "Before we can start our crusade we must do our duty by decimating cultural marxism," said a caption under the video called "Knights Templar 2083" on the YouTube website, which took down the video on Saturday.
A Norwegian website provided a link to a 1,500 page electronic manifesto which says Breivik was the author. It was not possible to verify who posted the video or wrote the book.
"Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike," the book said.
Norway has traditionally been open to immigration, which has been criticised by the Progress Party, of which Breivik was for a short time a member. The Labour Party, whose youth camp Breivik attacked, has long been in favour of immigration.
About 100 people stood solemnly early on Sunday at a makeshift vigil near Oslo's main church, laying flowers and lighting candles. Soldiers with guns and wearing bullet-proof vests blocked streets leading to the government district.
"We are all in sorrow, everybody is scared," said Imran Shah, a Norwegian taxi driver of Pakistani heritage, as a light summer drizzle fell on unusually empty Oslo streets.
Some terrified survivors of the shooting rampage said bullets came from at least two sides. "We are not at all certain" about whether he acted alone, police chief Sveinung Sponheim said. "That is one of the things that the investigation will concentrate on."
Witnesses
Witnesses said the gunman, wearing a police uniform, was able to shoot unchallenged for a prolonged period. He picked off his victims on Utoeya island northwest of Oslo forcing youngsters to scatter in panic or to jump into the lake to swim for the mainland.
"I heard screams. I heard people begging for their lives and I heard shots. He just blew them away," Labour Party youth member Erik Kursetgjerde, 18, told Reuters.
"I was certain I was going to die," he said. "People ran everywhere. They panicked and climbed into trees. People got trampled."
Home-grown militant
The suspect, tall and blond, owned an organic farming company called Breivik Geofarm, which a supply firm said he had used to buy fertiliser -- possibly to make the Oslo bomb.
Home-grown anti-government militants have struck elsewhere in the past, notably in the United States, where Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people with a truck bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995.
The district attacked is the heart of power in Norway. But security is not tight in a country unused to such violence and better known for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize and mediating in conflicts, including the Middle East and Sri Lanka.
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NK 1505 A4 1964
In the first part of the book, Mr. Alexander discusses the process by which a form is adapted to the context of human needs and demands that has called it into being. He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some backgorund:
The Corps d'Aviation d'Haïti was formed in 1943 with some aircraft from the United States. Its main task was transport and communication. Headquarters were at Bowen Field, Port-au-Prince, a former U.S. Marine Corps airfield, which was the main air base of the Haïtian Air Force until 1994. During the 1940s Haiti received small quantities of training aircraft. The first combat aircraft, six F-51D Mustang and four F-47D-40, arrived in country in 1950 - just in time when things turned rough.
Haiti elected a legislature in May 1946, and after two rounds of voting, Dumarsais Estimé, a black cabinet minister, was elected president. He operated under a new constitution which expanded schools, established rural farming cooperatives, and raised salaries of civil servants. These early successes, however, were undermined by his personal ambition, and his alienation of the military and elite led to a coup in 1950, which reinstalled the military junta.
This was just the moment when the ex USAF aircraft arrived. The Mustangs were reserved for the fighter role, ground attack being just a secondary option. The Thunderbolts were primarily intended against ground and sea targets, and they were equipped to carry HVARs under the wings.
The Republic F-47 Thunderbolt (P-47 until 1948) was one of the largest and heaviest fighter aircraft in history to be powered by a single piston engine. It was heavily armed with eight .50-caliber machine guns, four per wing. When fully loaded, the P-47 weighed up to eight tons, and in the fighter-bomber ground-attack roles could carry up to ten five-inch rockets or a significant bomb load, for a total of up to 2.500 pounds of external ordnance.
After WWII the USAAF Strategic Air Command had P-47 Thunderbolts in service from 1946 through 1947, as escort fighter for heavy bombers, but they were quickly retired until 1953. The four Haïtian aircraft were taken from this overstock, and unlike the Mustangs, which had to be modernized and made airworthy by Cavalier in the USA, the F-47s could be put into service immediately.
When Haiti announced that its first direct elections (all men twenty-one or over were allowed to vote) would be held on October 8, 1950, Paul Magloire resigned from the junta and declared himself a candidate for president. In contrast to the chaotic political climate of 1946, the campaign of 1950 proceeded under the implicit understanding that only a strong candidate backed by both the army and the elite would be able to take power. During that uncertain phase, all the Haïtian Air Force aircraft were kept in store and were disarmed, for fear that they’d be abused in another coup d’état.
Facing only token opposition, Magloire won the election and assumed office on December 6th 1950. Magloire restored the elite to prominence, and the Haïtian Air Force resumed its duties. The business community and the government benefited from favorable economic conditions until Hurricane Hazel hit the island in 1954. Hazel devastated the nation's freshly renovated infrastructure and economy. Hurricane relief was inadequately distributed and misspent, and Magloire jailed opponents and shut down newspapers.
After refusing to step down after his term ended, a general strike shut down Port-au-Prince's economy, and Magloire fled, leaving the government in a state of chaos. When elections were finally organized, François Duvalier, a rural doctor, was elected, on a platform of activism on behalf of Haiti's poor.
Both Mustang and Thunderbolts were superseded in October 1973 with T-28D Trojan from France, which were replace by O-2A Skymaster in 1975. It was also in 1973 that Haiti got its first helicopters from the United States.
Eventually, the Haitian Air Force was disbanded in 1994, after United Nation sponsored forces came to Haiti to reinstall president Aristide.
General characteristics:
Crew: 1
Length: 36 ft 1 in (11.00 m)
Wingspan: 40 ft 9 in (12.42 m)
Height: 14 ft 8 in (4.47 m)
Wing area: 300 ft² (27.87 m²)
Empty weight: 10,000 lb (4,535 kg)
Loaded weight: 13,300 lb (6,032 kg)
Max. takeoff weight: 17,500 lb (7,938 kg)
Powerplant:
1× Pratt & Whitney R-2800-59 twin-row radial engine, 2,535 hp (1,890 kW)
Performance
Maximum speed: 433 mph at 30,000 ft (697 km/h at 9,145 m)
Range: 800 mi combat, 1,800 mi ferry (1,290 km / 2,900 km)
Service ceiling: 43,000 ft (13,100 m)
Rate of climb: 3,120 ft/min (15.9 m/s)
Wing loading: 44.33 lb/ft² ()
Power/mass: 0.19 hp/lb (238 W/kg)
Armament:
8× 0.50 in (12.7 mm) M2 Browning machine guns (w. 3.400 rounds total)
Up to 2,500 lb (1,134 kg) of bombs or10× 5 in (127 mm) unguided rockets/HVARs
The kit and its assembly:
An exotic topic, since I suppose that hardly anyone could imagine what a Haïtian Air Force aircraft (much like a Nepalese one) is or would look like? I found a profile of a Haïtian F-51 in a book and was… inspired. Building a model of the real aircraft could have been an option, but doing a whiffy alternative appeared more entertaining.
My choice finally fell on the P-47 Thunderbolt. The kit is the Hobby Boss P-47D (bubble canopy version), but the ordnance was replaced – instead of WWII drop tanks or iron bombs I settled for a rather anachronistic load of two LAU-68 launchers for 2.75” FFARs on the wing hardpoints.
Otherwise the kit was only marginally modified: I added a dashboard and a respective cover with a gun sight inside of the cockpit, the canopy was cut in two parts so that it could be presented in an open position, and I added a scratched antenna fairing on the P-47's back – similar to an installment that Haïtian F-51s carried in their late career.
Painting an markings:
The Haïtian P-51s were originally delivered in bare metal finish, but during their modifications at Cavalier painted all-gray, with some red trim on spinner, fin and wing tips. Except for the roundels only a three digit tactical code on the fin was carried – all very basic, but with potential.
I just transplanted this concept on the P-47. The red spinner became a red ring around the engine opening, and in order to make the aircraft not look too uniform I layered the paint, with an aluminum basis coat (Revell Acrylics) over which a thin and cloudy coat of light gray (IJN Gray from Modelmaster) was brushed. This was, after a light black ink wash, wet sanded in order to achieve an uneven, worn and even bleached look, esp. on the upper surfaces.
The anti glare panel in front of the cockpit was painted with matt olive drab (Humbrol 66 & 155), also inspired by the real Haïtian P-51s, and some small panels and trim tabs were painted in shades of gray.
The roundels were completely scratched with separate white circles and bars, plus RAF Type B roundels – the circles are actually blank start numbers for slot cars and the RAF roundels belong to a British F-4 Phantom! The tactical code actually belongs to an IAI Kfir in Israeli service.
After having dried, the roundels also received a light sanding treatment, as well as some dry painting to blend them into the overall look of the aircraft.
There actually is an aftermarket decal sheet for Haïtian P-51s in 1:72, but its sports the later roundel which shows a circle in a red and a blue half – but I wanted the earlier variant.
Some more wear was done with dry-brushed Polished Aluminum and silver, as well as grinded graphite for soot and exhaust stains. The aircraft was supposed to look used and worn.
Finally, everything was sealed under coat of matt varnish.
A rather simple project, concerning both the build and the livery (expect for the special weathering effects, maybe), but the result looks convincing and has a certain exotic charm. Nothing you'll often come across.
..wood form I made from some scape soft-wood to confirm a concept for creation of a camera grip that never passed presentation and ideas because there was newer ideas that did not require optical pin-registrations and vertical/horizontal referencing etcetera
Over-complication is a human fallacy. So when I photograph anything, I try to maintain focus and make sure that every form in the frame matters and contributes something to the capture. If it does not belong then I make sure that they are not included.
For photographs which there is no time to think (live action), I just shoot and then crop after the fact. But for things which stay put I take my time to compose before clicking the shutter.
In digital photography, cropping means lose of resolution and detail, so it is best to do it right at the moment of capture then trying to fix things in Photoshop after the fact. Photoshop is not magic, you know. The best Photoshop jobs do not look like it was ever Photoshopped. And I am not a one of those wizards who can wield magic. So I try to do it right where I can.
# SML Data
+ Date: 2013-02-19 13:39:11 GMT+0800
+ Dimensions: 3429 x 5144
+ Exposure: 1/1000 sec at f/5.6
+ Focal Length: 280 mm
+ ISO: 100
+ Flash: Did not fire
+ Camera: Canon EOS 7D
+ Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM + Canon EF 1.4x Extender III
+ GPS: 22°25'0" N 114°13'41" E
+ Location: 中國香港馬鞍山恆安商場 中国香港马鞍山恒安商场 Heng On Shopping Centre, Ma On Shan, Hong Kong, China
+ Serial: SML.20130219.7D.23216.P1.L1
+ Workflow: Photoshop CS6, Lightroom 4
+ Series: 商場 Shopping Malls, 形 Forms
“三角形交響樂 Symphonic Triangles No. 3” / 商場建築之形 Shopping Malls Architecture Forms / SML.20130219.7D.23216.P1.L1
/ #商場 #ShoppingMalls #形 #Forms #SMLForms #CCBY #SMLPhotography SMLUniverse #SMLProjects
/ #三角形 #Triangles #中國 #中国 #China #香港 #HongKong #馬鞍山 #MaOnShan #建築 #建筑 #Architecture #城市 #Urban #攝影 #摄影 #photography
Early juveniles in August when all or most adults dead. Similar form to adults, but periostracum thinner and paler, and spire protrudes less.
Maximum dimension 4.1 mm and 3.3 mm, Portlethen, north-east Scotland, August 1970.
Full SPECIES DESCRIPTION BELOW
Revised PDF available at www.researchgate.net/publication/372768813_Lacuna_pallidu....
Sets of OTHER SPECIES at: www.flickr.com/photos/56388191@N08/collections/
Lacuna pallidula (da Costa, 1778)
Synonyms: Cochlea pallidula da Costa, 1778; Lacuna neritoidea Gould, 1840; Lacuna patula Thorpe, 1844; Lacuna retusa Brown.
Current taxonomy: WoRMS www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=140168
Vernacular: Pallid chink shell; Pale lacuna; Gwichiad agennog gwelw (Welsh); Lacuna pâle (French); Lavspiret grubesnegl (Danish); Bleke scheefhoren (Dutch); Blek lagunsnäcka (Swedish).
Shell description
The largest dimension of female shells is up to about 12 mm fig. 01 flic.kr/p/2kNQ7pc and males grow to 6 mm. The species has an annual life cycle; all or most adults are dead by June. Their small juvenile offspring occur in summer fig. 02 flic.kr/p/2kGH2G9 , growing to full size in winter. The body whorl forms the great majority of the shell, and the very small spire is sunk below the upper margin in most views. Juveniles are similar in form with a slightly lower spire. Sutures between the whorls are distinct. The smooth surface has no sculpture apart from numerous, growth lines.
One face of the hollow columella is missing, exposing a long wide columellar groove (lacuna, chink or canal), leading to a large funnel-like umbilicus fig. 03 flic.kr/p/2kNL1YB . On some specimens the columellar groove is indistinct and the umbilicus reduced fig. 04 flic.kr/p/2kNPCc9 and fig. 05 flic.kr/p/2oQ83ra .
The very large ‘D’ shape aperture is as high as the whole shell, and it occupies about 75% of the area in apertural-view images fig. 01 flic.kr/p/2kNQ7pc . The palatal lip is semi-circular, and it continues along the abapertural side of the columellar groove. The wide, white columellar lip forms the adapertural edge of the groove fig. 03 flic.kr/p/2kNL1YB .
The ‘D’ shape operculum is a rapidly expanding oligogyrous spiral with its off-centre nucleus close to the base of the columellar lip. It is transparent, tinted yellow fig. 04 flic.kr/p/2kNPCc9 & fig. 06 flic.kr/p/2kNL1Ut or nearly colourless fig. 05 flic.kr/p/2oQ83ra . The substantial periostracum is olive-brown with distinct growth lines on large specimens fig. 07 flic.kr/p/2kNQ773, and it usually extends beyond the lip of the aperture fig. 04 flic.kr/p/2kNPCc9 . Under the periostracum, the calcareous shell is white or yellowish white fig. 01 flic.kr/p/2kNQ7pc . Live adults with a thick opaque periostracum are olive-green/brown in water fig. 08 flic.kr/p/2kNPC3g becoming dull brown when dead and dried fig. 01 flic.kr/p/2kNQ7pc . There are no coloured bands or variegation at any stage.
Body description
The flesh is translucent white with varying amounts of yellow or pink tinting fig. 07 flic.kr/p/2kNQ773 and fig. 05 flic.kr/p/2oQ83ra . The snout is ventrally slit fig.06 flic.kr/p/2kNL1Ut and usually rolled into a cylinder fig. 09 flic.kr/p/2oQ92WM . The extended cephalic tentacles are long, smooth, translucent whitish and taper to a blunt tip. When contracted they wrinkle and any yellow tint is intensified fig. 08 flic.kr/p/2kNPC3g . There is a black eye on a slight bulge at the base of each tentacle fig. 07 flic.kr/p/2kNQ773 . The roof of the mantle cavity is whitish translucent showing the colour of the shell except for the mantle edge which is thick and sometimes yellowish fig. 09 flic.kr/p/2oQ92WM . The foot is white with varying amounts of yellow or pink fig. 07 flic.kr/p/2kNQ773 , especially on the opercular disc which supports, and is visible under and through, the transparent operculum fig. 05 flic.kr/p/2oQ83ra and fig. 09 flic.kr/p/2oQ92WM . The two small, flat metapodial tentacles protrude beyond the posterior of the operculum fig. 09 flic.kr/p/2oQ92WM .
Key identification features
Lacuna pallidula
1) Columellar groove (lacuna or chink) leads to umbilicus fig. 01 flic.kr/p/2kNQ7pc but is sometimes sealed over fig. 04 flic.kr/p/2kNPCc9 .
2) Largest dimensions up to 12 mm (female) and 6 mm (male). Hardly any of the spire protrudes beyond the body whorl fig. 01 flic.kr/p/2kNQ7pc
3) Very large ‘D’ shape aperture equals shell height and occupies about 75% of area in apertural view fig. 01 flic.kr/p/2kNQ7pc.
4) Shell olive-brown with no spiral bands fig. 08 flic.kr/p/2kNPC3g .
5) Body white fig. 07 flic.kr/p/2kNQ773 , sometimes yellowish or pinkish; no grey stipple.
6) Found mainly on Fucus serratus and sometimes on Laminaria.
Similar species
Lacuna parva (da Costa, 1778) fig. 10 flic.kr/p/2kNL1A2 .
1) Columellar groove (“lacuna” or “chink) leads to umbilicus. 2) Usual maximum height 4 mm; sometimes 6 mm. Spire 30% to 40% of shell height.
3) Aperture occupies about 50% of area in apertural-view images.
4) Body whorl has three brown spiral bands; basal band 1 easily overlooked if base of shell not examined. Some shells are uniform white or brown with no bands.
5) Body translucent white, usually stippled grey.
6) Found mainly, especially when young, on small red weeds. Sometimes on fucoids.
Littorina fabalis (W. Turton, 1825) and
L. obtusata (Linnaeus, 1758) fig. 11 flic.kr/p/2kNPBJk .
1) No columellar groove or umbilicus.
2) Maximum dimension up to 17 mm. Very large body whorl and small spire.
3) Aperture occupies about 50% of area in apertural-view images.
4) Shell of L. obtusata is sometimes greenish olive.
5) Body varied shades of yellow, brown or black.
6) Found on Fucus serratus (L. fabalis) or Ascophyllum (L. obtusata) and on Fucus vesiculosus (both).
Lacuna vincta (Montagu, 1803) fig. 12 flic.kr/p/2kNQ6PK .
1) Columellar groove (“lacuna” or “chink”) leads to umbilicus. 2) Maximum height about 10 mm. Well developed spire about 50% of adult shell height, and about 30% on juveniles less than 3 mm high.
3) Aperture occupies about 30% of area in apertural-view images of full grown adults.
4) Body whorl has four brown spiral bands.
5) Body whitish with grey, yellow, orange and/or aquamarine parts.
6) Found on Laminaria and, especially juveniles, on small red weeds. Also on Zostera and sometimes on fucoids.
Lacuna crassior (Montagu, 1803) fig. 13 flic.kr/p/2kGH26u
1) Wide white columellar shelf. Usually no groove or umbilicus but sometimes small ones present.
2) Distinct spire about 50% of mature shell height, about 45% when younger.
3) Aperture occupies about 30% of area in apertural view.
4) Shell when live, has translucent, yellowish-brown spire and brownish-white body whorl. Thick periostracum has distinct, raised, transverse (costal) ridges. Dead dry shells are dull yellowish-brown if periostracum retained, yellowish white with faint spiral lines if periostracum worn off.
5) Body translucent whitish.
6) A rare species which often associates with the bryozoan Alcyonidium diaphanum.
Habits and ecology
L. pallidula feeds on the surface of Fucus serratus (Smith, 1973) and Laminaria (Lebour, 1937) near low water on rocky shores and to 70 metres depth. It is usually absent where turbidity or soft substrate prevents growth of F. serratus. It cannot survive desiccation. Some populations live in the Baltic in salinity down to 12‰.
It moves with a bipedal stepping motion, lifting alternately the right and left sides of the foot. It breeds in late winter and spring, sometimes extending into summer and autumn, with a maximum in February to May in Britain, but precise dates vary regionally. The spawn mass is a low gelatinous dome with an almost circular, oval base (not kidney-shape), diameter 3.9 mm to 5.3 mm (Lebour, 1937), laid on fronds of F. serratus or Laminaria. There are up to about 200 ova per spawn mass fig. 14 flic.kr/p/2kNQ71M . In the low salinity Øresund, Denmark, the masses are smaller with as few as 13 ova (Thorson, 1946 in Fretter & Graham, 1962).
Fretter and Graham (1962) reported confusion with the spawn of “Littorina littoralis” (the name mistakenly used formerly by British authors for an aggregate of Littorina obtusata and L. fabalis). The limited material examined for this account suggests the confusion is with L. fabalis which lives on F. serratus at the same shore level and lays similar, almost circular oval spawn masses, while L. obtusata lives higher up the shore, favouring Ascophyllum, and often lays kidney-shaped spawn masses up to 7 mm long. The difference between the spawn masses of L. fabalis and Lacuna pallidula may be that the latter has a distinctly bevelled peripheral rim while the surface of the former slopes to the substrate without a break in slope fig. 14 flic.kr/p/2kNQ71M . But more investigation is required to test these suggestions; the difference might be due to age of spawn mass. Lacuna parva also has similar spawn but it is found on red algae and is smaller, about 2.5 mm diameter with about 50 ova in Britain fig. 14 flic.kr/p/2kNQ71M ; 2.2 mm to 2.5 mm with 6 to16 ova in the brackish Øresund (Ockelmann & Nielsen, 1981 in Wigham & Graham, 2017).
The individual egg capsules of L. pallidula become angular as they swell and become crowded and compressed. There is no planktonic veliger stage; young emerge as tiny crawling snails. Through a microscope, just before hatching, two tentacular extensions of the opercular disc protruding beyond the operculum may be detected on the embryos within the clear capsules (Fretter & Graham, 1962). Males die after mating, and the females about a month later, so all or most adults breeding in the main period are dead by June or July, and few specimens over 5 mm high can be found in August fig. 02 flic.kr/p/2kGH2G9 . Both sexes grow rapidly until October. From October to February males grow slowly, but females at three times their rate so that by breeding time they are over twice as high as males (Thorson, 1946 in Fretter & Graham, 1962). When mating, the small male rides on the female’s shell near the aperture with his penis inserted into her mantle cavity 15Lp flic.kr/p/2rSk89j.
Distribution and status
L. pallidula occurs from northern Norway and Iceland to Atlantic Spain and New England (USA). GBIF map www.gbif.org/species/2301181
It is found all around Britain and Ireland, but is scarce or absent in the north-eastern Irish Sea and southern North Sea where lack of hard substrate and/or turbidity hinder the growth of Fucus serratus and Laminaria. UK distribution map NBN species.nbnatlas.org/species/NBNSYS0000175975#tab_mapView
Acknowledgements
For use of images, I thank Sarah Charles and Rob Durrant.
References and links
Forbes, E. & Hanley S. 1849-53. A history of the British mollusca and their shells. vol. 3 (1853), London, van Voorst. archive.org/details/historyofbritish03forbe/page/56/mode/2up
Also plate LXX11 at end of vol.4, fig. 1 & 2, also fig. 3 & 4 labelled “L. patula” archive.org/details/historyofbritish04forbe/page/n459/mod...
Fretter, V. and Graham, A. 1962. British prosobranch molluscs. London, Ray Society.
Graham, A. 1988. Molluscs: prosobranch and pyramidellid gastropods. Synopses of the British Fauna (New Series) no.2 (Second edition). Leiden, E.J.Brill/Dr. W. Backhuys. 662 pp.
Jeffreys, J.G. 1862-69. British conchology. vol. 3 (1865). London, van Voorst.
archive.org/details/britishconcholog03jeffr/page/350/mode...
Lebour, M.V. 1937. The eggs and larvae of the British prosobranchs with special reference to those living in the plankton. J. mar. biol. Ass. U.K., 22: 105 – 166. plymsea.ac.uk/953/
Ockelmann, K. W. and Nielsen, C. 1981. On the biology of the prosobranch Lacuna parva in the Øresund. Ophelia 20: 1-16.
Abstract at www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00785236.1981.10426559
Smith, D. A. S. 1973. The population biology of Lacuna pallidula (da Costa) and Lacuna vincta (Montagu) in north-east England. J. mar. biol. Ass. U.K., 53: 493-520.
Thorson, G. 1946. Reproduction and larval development of the Danish marine bottom invertebrates. Meddelelser fra Kommissionen for Danmarks Fiskeri- og Havundersøgelser, Serie Plankton 4: 1-523.
Wigham, G.D. & Graham, A. 2017. Marine gastropods 2: Littorinimorpha and other, unassigned, Caenogastropoda. Synopses of the British Fauna (New Series) no.61. (344 pages). Field Studies Council, Telford, England.
Glossary
‰ = (salinity) parts salt per thousand parts water (brackish <30‰).
abapertural = away from the aperture.
abapical = away from the apex of the shell.
adapertural = towards the aperture
adapical = towards the apex of the shell.
aperture = mouth of gastropod shell; outlet for head and foot.
apical = at or near the apex.
chink = (see columellar groove).
columella = solid or hollow axis around which gastropod shell spirals; concealed except next to aperture where hollow ones may end in an umbilicus, slit or siphonal canal.
columellar = (adj.) of or near central axis of spiral gastropod,
columellar groove = Groove where one face of hollow columella missing, terminates in umbilicus. Also called “lacuna” or “chink.
columellar lip = lower (abapical) part of inner lip of aperture.
cephalic = (adj.) of the head.
costa = (pl. costae) rib crossing a whorl of a gastropod shell at about 90° to direction of coiling and any spiral ribs or lines.
costal = (adj.) of, or arranged like, costae.
ctenidium = comb-like molluscan gill; usually an axis with a row of filaments either side.
height = (of gastropod shells) distance from apex of spire to base of aperture.
lacuna = (see columellar groove).
mantle = sheet of tissue that secretes the shell and forms a cavity for the gill.
oligogyrous = (of a spiral) having few turns.
operculum = plate of horny conchiolin used to close shell aperture.
palatal lip = outer lip of gastropod aperture.
parietal lip = upper (adapical) part of inner lip of gastropod aperture that lies, often as a glaze, on surface of whorl.
periostracum = thin horny layer of conchiolin often coating shells.
plankton = animals and plants that drift in pelagic zone (main body of water).
protoconch = apical whorls produced during embryonic and larval stages of gastropod; often different in form from other whorls.
suture = groove or line where whorls adjoin.
umbilicus = cavity up axis of some gastropods, open as a hole or chink on base of shell, sometimes sealed over.
umbilical groove = narrow slit opening of umbilicus on some gastropods.
veliger = shelled larva of marine gastropod or bivalve mollusc which swims by beating cilia of a velum (bilobed flap).
Human form of Princess Luna, My Little Pony.
Supanova Expo, Sydney Olympic Park, Sydney, Australia (Saturday 17 June 2017)
Webb has pinpointed three galaxies actively forming when our 13.8 billion-years-old universe was in its infancy. The galaxies are surrounded by gas suspected to be almost purely hydrogen and helium, the earliest elements to exist in the cosmos.
These galaxies belong to the Era of Reionization, only several hundred million years after the big bang. During this period, gas between stars and galaxies was largely opaque. Stars contributed to heating and ionizing gas, eventually turning the gas transparent one billion years after the big bang.
By matching Webb’s data to models of star formation, researchers found that these galaxies are a unique window into future star formation. They primarily have populations of young stars, and the gas around them suggests they haven’t formed most of their stars yet.
More on this breakthrough: science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/galaxies-actively-forming-...
Galaxy artist concept credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
Image Description: This illustration is awash in bright blues, with only areas of the black background of space peeking out near the edges. Just above center is a large white spiral galaxy that is forming within a large cloud of blue gas. Its spiral arms twirl clockwise. Immediately around the galaxy’s edges are larger light blue dots. The gas appears thicker and brighter blue below the galaxy and toward the bottom left in what looks like a loose, extended column. Other wispy blue gas appears all around the galaxy, extending to every edge of the illustration. There are two additional spiral galaxies, though they are about half the size of the one at the center. They appear toward the top left and bottom right, and both are connected to regions of blue gas. Several bright knots dot the brightest blue areas near the center, and toward the top right. The background is clearer and more obviously black along a wider area at the left edge, a sliver along the top right, and in triangles toward the bottom right corner. In the bottom left is “Artist Concept” in white text.
This image: This artist concept shows a galaxy forming only a few hundred million years after the big bang, when gas was a mix of transparent and opaque during the Era of Reionization. Data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show that there is a lot of cold, neutral gas in the neighborhood of these early galaxies – and that the gas may be more dense than anticipated.
Webb observed these galaxies as part of its Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey a few months after it began taking observations in 2022. CEERS includes both images and data known as spectra from the microshutters aboard its NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). Data from CEERS were released immediately to support discoveries like this as part of Webb’s Early Release Science (ERS) program.
Pottery Vase
Pottery vase in the form of a woman carrying a vessel in each hand, inspired by increased trade in the Mediterranean during the Second Intermediate Period onwards
Tomb W1, Abydos
18th Dynasty
E.2431
***
From www.ashmolean.org/documents/ANTSacklerHandbook.pdf
Case 51 Pottery and the Decorative Arts in the New Kingdom
New Kingdom
18th Dynasty
about 1540–1292 BC
The growing prosperity of Egypt in the 18th Dynasty is reflected in a new fashion for fine pottery, especially miniature forms. Contemporary graves have preserved a range of objects which were probably treasured possessions in life, as well as necessities for the well-stocked tomb. Beautifully crafted vessels were made for personal use, probably as containers for scented oil or cosmetics. Figure-vases were made by shaping the clay in a mould, and covering it with a slip which was polished before firing. Additional details could be added in brown or black paint.
Both wild and domesticated animals were popular subjects for pottery and the decorative arts in general. A cosmetic dish in the shape of a duck, or a kohl-pot adorned with a monkey, made playful references to the natural world, but also related these objects to the imagery of rebirth and sexual attraction.
Craftsmen were inspired by foreign imports as well as traditional Egyptian themes. Ceramic shapes from Greece and Cyprus were copied in pottery or stone. Vases made exclusively for the tomb were sometimes decorated after firing with colourful painted designs recalling the floral garlands placed on wine jars for festive occasions. Another, but less successful, innovation was to coat pottery and stone vessels with a glossy resin similar to that used on painted coffins and walls.
This is my finished model of the TARDIS in its original form. Although the ship doesn't have a base in 'The Name Of The Doctor' I felt that it looked unfinished without it. So I added a base and fitted a thicker, more sturdy door
BARTHOLT HYPERION (GIANT FORM), COLOSSUS OF THE RIFTEIL RAIDERS.
As I near the milestone of my 300th post on Instagram, I wanted to look back on another of my older builds. This is one of the first builds I ever shared online, years ago on a different account, long before Builds & Guilds was ever a thing. It's a giant form of one of the original characters in my D&D campaign, which he was able to shift into for a limited amount of time, after embarking on a solo quest to prove himself to his stone giant ancestors. Though the character is now a retired trainer in the thieves' guild and one of his hands is now a mechanical prosthetic, his impact lives on in the tales of his exploits during his time on Steal Team Six.
This build was one of the first things I ever made that made me realize I wanted to share my creations online, so it is a bit special to me. You can see in the last photo that I designed it based on the minifig, with the sort of "mech" ability to place the minifig into the giant suit for use in combat when the character transformed. What do you think: does it match the aesthetic of the minifig?
Chrissie Hammond, Russell Hitchcock, and Graham Russell met in May 1975 while performing in the Australian production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical, Jesus Christ Superstar.With Hammond and Hitchcock on vocals and Russell on guitar, they formed a harmony vocal group in Melbourne, while the show was still playing. Hammond left the vocal group to form Cheetah and was replaced by Jeremy Paul (ex-Soffrok and later Divinyls) on bass guitar and vocals in 1976. Together, Hitchcock, Russell and Paul formed Air Supply. The group's first single, "Love and Other Bruises", was released in November, 1976 and peaked at No. 6 on the Australian Kent Music Report Singles Chart in January 1977. It was followed by Air Supply, their debut album, in December, which reached No. 17 on the Kent Music Report Albums Chart and achieved gold in Australia The album was produced by Peter Dawkins (Spectrum, Ross Ryan) with Air Supply line-up as Hitchcock, Paul, Russell and drummer Jeff Browne, guitarist Mark McEntee and keyboardist, arranger Adrian Scott. Other singles were "If You Knew Me", "Empty Pages" and "Feel the Breeze" but none reached the Top 40. A national tour followed with Hitchcock, Paul, Russell and Scott joined by Nigel Macara (ex-Tamam Shud, Ariel) on drums and Brenton White (Skintight)on guitar.Brenton White rehearsed but did not perform with Air Supply
Their second album, The Whole Thing's Started, also produced by Dawkins,[3] was released in July 1977 with White replaced on lead guitar by Alan Kendall.[1] The album spawned the singles "Do What You Do" (June), "That's How the Whole Thing Started" (October) and "Do It Again" (February 1978) but neither album nor singles charted into the Top 40.[4] From late 1977, the group supported Rod Stewart during his tour of Australia—he invited them to continue to the United States and Canada. Their third album, Love & Other Bruises, included re-recordings of some earlier tracks, was made mid-tour in Los Angeles in July–August and released later that year in the US on Columbia Records with Jimmy Horowitz producing.[3] During the tour, Paul left the band with a new line-up of Hitchcock, Macara, and Russell, plus Rex Goh on guitar, Joey Carbone on keyboards, Robin LeMesurier on lead guitar and Howard Sukimoto on bass guitar.[2] Paul, in 1980, recruited fellow former Air Supply bandmate McEntee in the lineup of Divinyls, fronted by Chrissie Amphlett. Air Supply performed in London supporting Chicago and Boz Scaggs.[1]
Although their music had some commercial success, Russell claimed, on a 1995 DVD, that he and Hitchcock were so poor that they checked the backs of hotel sofas for change so that they could buy bread to make toast. By early 1978, the line-up was Hitchcock, Russell, and Macara with George Terry and Joey Murcia on guitar, George Bitzer on keyboards and Harold Cowart on bass guitar.[1][2] However, by mid-1978, only Hitchcock and Russell remained in the line-up, backed by Ralph Cooper (Windchase) on drums and former Sailor members Brian Hamilton on bass guitar and vocals and David Moyse on guitar.[1][2]
In April 1979, the band released Life Support, a concept album which included a picture disc on its first printing. The album was recorded at Trafalgar Studios in Sydney, Australia. The album had a five-and-a-half minute version of "Lost in Love", written by Graham Russell in 15 minutes; it was released as a single and peaked at No. 13 in Australia and No. 13 in New Zealand.[4][5] The track caught the attention of Arista Records boss Clive Davis, who remixed the song and released it as a single in the US early the next year. In late November 1979 Russell was embroiled in a bitter court case with Samuel Nay over accusations of assault at a backstage meet and greet in Oklahoma. Nay would later pass away during the court case and all charges were dropped. The lineup for the album kept Hitchcock, Russell, Cooper, and Moyse, and added Criston Barker (bass) and Frank Esler-Smith (keyboards/orchestra arrangements) with help from other session musicians. Esler-Smith had previously known Hitchcock and Russell from working with them in Jesus Christ Superstar.
A re-recorded and remixed version of "Lost in Love" was released internationally as a single in January 1980 on Arista Records. The associated album, Lost in Love, appeared in March and contained three US Top 5 singles, including the title track which peaked at No. 3 on Billboard Hot 100 and No. 11 in the United Kingdom Singles Chart.[6][7] The other US Top 5 singles were "Every Woman in the World" (No. 5) and "All Out of Love" (No. 2).[6] Both singles were Top 10 in Australia with "All Out of Love" reaching No. 17 in the Netherlands.[4][8] The album kept the same lineup as before, with Hitchcock, Russell, Cooper, Moyse, Barker and Esler-Smith. The album sold three million copies in the US and peaked at No. 22 on Billboard 200.[9]
1981–1990
In 1981, Air Supply released The One That You Love, produced by Russell, David Foster and Harry Maslin with the title track issued as a single which went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.[6] It also featured two other Top 5 hits, "Here I Am (Just When I Thought I Was Over You)" and "Sweet Dreams". A fourth single, "I'll Never Get Enough" was released in Japan and achieved Top 10 status. By the recording for this album, Barker left and was replaced by David Green. Also, previous Air Supply guitarist Rex Goh returned for the album, co-writing "I'll Never Get Enough" with Russell.
Russell and Hitchcock also from time to time were relief hosts on the music program Solid Gold. It is believed that they initially filled in when Andy Gibb was a no show for an episode that they performed on. However, Gibb's "no shows" soon became more frequent, which resulted in his termination. Even though this was not their usual job, the duo made an impression on producers and the audience who enjoyed their accents, and they were asked to host every so often until the show was cancelled.
Their next album Now and Forever, released in 1982 with the same seven-piece lineup (Hitchcock, Russell, Moyse, Goh, Esler-Smith, Green and Cooper), continued the group's popularity with the Top 5 hit "Even the Nights Are Better" and two Top 40 singles, "Young Love" and "Two Less Lonely People in the World".
In 1983, they released their Greatest Hits album with a new single, "Making Love Out of Nothing at All", written by Jim Steinman. The song was one of their biggest hits ever spending three weeks at No. 2, and the album eventually sold 7 million copies.
That same year, Air Supply also released their first live video, Air Supply Live in Hawaii. In 1984, their song "I Can Wait Forever" was featured in a scene of the blockbuster movie Ghostbusters, and was included in the soundtrack album.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the model, the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
The Royal Ceylon Air Force (RCyAF) was formed on 2 March 1951 with RAF officers and other personnel seconded to the RCyAF. Ceylonese were recruited to the new RCyAF and several Ceylonese who had served with the RAF during WWII were absorbed in the force. Initial objective was to train local pilots and ground crew, early administration and training was carried out by exclusively by RAF officers and other personnel on secondment. The first aircraft of the RCyAF were de Havilland Canada DHC-1 Chipmunks used as basic trainers to train the first batches of pilots locally while several cadets were sent to Royal Air Force College Cranwell. These were followed by Boulton Paul Balliol T.Mk.2s and Airspeed Oxford Mk.1s for advanced training of pilots and aircrew along with de Havilland Doves and de Havilland Herons for transport use, all provided by the British. By 1955 the RCyAF was operating two flying squadrons based at RAF Negombo. The first helicopter type to be added to the service was the Westland Dragonfly.
Following Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike's negotiated the closure of British air and naval bases in Ceylon in 1956, the RCyAF took over the former RAF stations; Katunayake and China Bay, becoming RCyAF operational stations while ancillary functions were carried out at Diyatalawa and Ekala. The RAF headquarters, Air HQ Ceylon, was disbanded on 1 November 1957. However, RAF officers remained with the RCyAF till 1962.
In 1959 de Havilland Vampire jet aircraft were acquired, five fighter bombers and five trainers. The Vampire was developed and manufactured by the de Havilland Aircraft Company and its development as an experimental aircraft began in 1941 during the Second World War, to exploit the revolutionary innovation of jet propulsion. From the company's design studies, it was decided to use a single-engine, twin-boom aircraft, powered by the Halford H.1 turbojet (later produced as the Goblin). Aside from its propulsion system and twin-boom configuration, it was a relatively conventional aircraft. In May 1944 it was decided to produce the aircraft as an interceptor for the Royal Air Force (RAF), but it came too late for operati9onal use in the war. It was eventually the second jet fighter to be operated by the RAF, after the Gloster Meteor, and the first to be powered by a single jet engine. In 1946 the Vampire entered operational service with the RAF, only months after the war had ended.
The Vampire quickly proved to be effective and was adopted as a replacement of wartime piston-engined fighter aircraft. During its early service it accomplished several aviation firsts and achieved various records, such as being the first jet aircraft to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Vampire remained in front-line RAF service until 1953 when its transfer began to secondary roles such as ground attack and pilot training, for which specialist variants were produced. Many of these aircraft were sold to foreign air forces. The RAF retired the Vampire in 1966 when its final role of advanced trainer was filled by the Folland Gnat. The Royal Navy had also adapted the type as the Sea Vampire, a navalised variant suitable for operations from aircraft carriers. It was the service's first jet fighter.
The Vampire was exported to many nations and was operated worldwide in numerous theatres and climates. Several countries used the type in combat including the Suez Crisis, the Malayan Emergency and the Rhodesian Bush War. By the end of production, almost 3,300 Vampires had been manufactured, a quarter of these having been manufactured under licence abroad.
The Ceylonese Vampires received the official export designation FB.56, but they were in fact refurbished Fairey-built ex-RAF FB.9 fighter bombers, the last single seater fighter bomber variant to be produced. As such, they were tropicalised Goblin-3 powered F.5 fighter-bombers with air conditioning and retrofitted with ejection seats. They had the ability to carry bombs of up to 1.000 lb (454 kg) caliber under each wing, drop tanks or up to eight unguided 3-inch "60 lb" rockets againts ground targets. The trainers were newly-built T.55 export machines with ejection seats.
Following a RCyAF superstition, the machines were allocated tactical codes that the single numerals did not sum up to "13" or a multiple of it, a "tradition" that has been kept up until today. Even more weird: codes that openly sported a "13" were and are used - as long as the whole code number conforms to the cross total rule!
This small fleet formed the 'Jet Squadron' was soon supplemented with five Hunting Jet Provosts obtained from the British, and ten more Vampire FB.56 fighter bombers in 1959. In the 1960s, various other aircraft were procured, most notably American Bell JetRanger helicopters and a Hindustan HUL-26 Pushpak given by India. The force had grown gradually during its early years, reaching a little over 1,000 officers and recruits in the 1960s.
The Vampires' service did not last long, though. The trainers were replaced by the more modern and economic Jet Provosts and mothballed by 1963. In 1968, the Royal Ceylon Air Force started to look out for a more capable multi-role aircraft to replace the Vampire FB.56s and evaluated foreign types like the F-86 Sabre, the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, the Hawker Hunter and AMD's Mystère IV as well as the SMB.2. The decision fell on the supersonic Super Mystère, which was offered as a bargain from French surplus stock since the fighter was at that time in the process of being gradually replaced by the 3rd generation Mirage III. A total of eight revamped SMB.2s were procured, which conformed to the Armée de l’Air’s standard. The machines arrived in early 1971 and were allocated to the newly established No. 3 Squadron, even though it took some months to make them fully operational, and the Vampires (eleven FB.56s were still operational at that time) soldiered on as a stopgap measure, due to innerpolitical tensions.
These got more and more tense and the Ceylonese Vampires were eventually deployed in a hot conflict in 1971. Together with the Jet Provosts, which had been mothballed since 1970 and quickly revamped, they were used in COIN missions during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection, since the new SMB.2s were not ready yet and deemed too valuable and unsuited to be deployed in guerilla warfare. The JVP insurrection was the first of two unsuccessful armed revolts conducted by the communist JVP against the socialist United Front Government of Ceylon under Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. The revolt began on 5 April 1971, and lasted until June of that year. The insurgents held towns and rural areas for several weeks, until the regions were recaptured by the armed forces, following strong support from friendly nations that sent men and material. Vampires and Jet Provosts flew from RCyAF Chinabay to RCyAF Katunayake, attacking rebel locations en route, and on the 12 April following a bombing run on a target in Polonnaruwa, one Jet Provost lost power and crashed on its approach to RCyAF Chinabay killing its pilot. Several weeks later, the Jet Provosts were joined by the Bell 47-G2 in ground attacks. After three weeks of fighting, the government regained control of all but a few remote areas. In most cases, the government regained control of townships; insurgent groups melted away into the jungle and continued to operate, with some groups operating into early 1972.
With Ceylon becoming a republic in 1972, the Royal Ceylon Air Force changed its name to the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF), along with all insignia, and the last RCyAF Vampire was retired in summer 1972.
General characteristics:
Crew: 1
Length: 30 ft 9 in (9.37 m)
Wingspan: 38 ft (12 m)
Height: 8 ft 10 in (2.69 m)
Wing area: 262 sq ft (24.3 m²)
Airfoil: root: EC1240/0640 (14%); tip: EC1240/0640 (9%)
Empty weight: 7,283 lb (3,304 kg)
Max takeoff weight: 12,390 lb (5,620 kg)
Powerplant:
1× de Havilland Goblin 3 centrifugal-flow turbojet engine, 3,350 lbf (14.9 kN) thrust
Performance:
Maximum speed: 548 mph (882 km/h, 476 kn)
Range: 1,220 mi (1,960 km, 1,060 nmi)
Service ceiling: 42,800 ft (13,000 m)
Rate of climb: 4,800 ft/min (24 m/s)
Wing loading: 39.4 lb/sq ft (192 kg/m²)
Armament:
4× 20 mm (0.79 in) Hispano Mk.V cannon with 600 rounds total (150 rounds per gun)
8× 3-inch "60 lb" rockets or 2× 1.000 lb (454 kg) bombs or two drop-tanks
The kit and its assembly:
A subtle what-if model, and despite the xotic markings the CeyloneseVampire is closer to reality than one might think. In fact, Ceylon actually received Vampire fighter bombers and trainer from the RAF when the country became independent and the RCyAF was founded, but they were never put into service. So, this whif depicts what might have been, and the type's use until the early Seventies is purely fictional.
The kit is the venerable Heller Vampire FB.5, which has been released under various brand labels (including Airfix and Revell) through the years. While it is a very simple model kit, the level of detail is not bad. You get a decent cockpit with a nice dashboard, separated canopy sections and even the landing gear wells feature details. You can hardly ask for more, even though the fit is rather mediocre - but this might be blamed on the molds' age. PSR was necessary on almost any major seam, and the fit of the tail booms to their adapters on the wings was really poor - the kit's engineers could have copme up with a better and more stable solution for the tail assembly. Another issue is the cockpit: while it's detailed, everything is much too small and tight - it turned out to be impossible to insert a pilot figure for the flight scenes, even just a torso!
Since I wanted to build a standard export Vampire fighter bomber, the kit was built OOB. I just added a gunsight behind the windscreen, replaced the rather massive pitot on the left fin and added some ordnance for the machine's COIN missions using the JVP insurrection. These comsist of a pair of vintage 500 lb iron bombs (from a Monogram F8F Bearcat) on pylons which probably come from an Academy P-47 Thunderbolt, plus four unguided 60 lb rockets and their launch rails from a Pioneer/Airfix Hawker Sea Fury.
Painting and markings:
Conservative. A real RCyAF Vampire would during the late Sixties probably have been painted overall silver, but I found this rather boring and thought that the role as s strike aircraft would justify camouflage. With its origins in the RAF I gave the Vampire consequently the British standard paint scheme in Dark Green/Dark Sea Grey from above, using Humbrol 163 and 156 (Dark Camouflage Grey BS381C/629, the latter on purpose as a lighter alternative to 164, for more contrast). For a slightly odd look I painted the undersides in RAF Azure Blue (Humbrol 157), what also makes a good contrast to the colorful RCyAF roundels.
The cockpit interior was painted in very dark grey (Anthracite, Revell 09) while the landing gear and the respective wells were painted in Humbrol 56 (Aluminum Dope), a metallic grey.
The kit received a lioght black ink washing and some panel shading, especuially from above to simulate sun-bleached paint - after all, the model depicts an aircraft that would soon be retired.
The roundels come from an Xtradecal aftermarket sheet for Jet Provosts, the fictional serial number was created with 3 and 10mm letters in black from TL Modellbau. A personal addition are the RAF-style white individual aircraft code letters on the fin and the front wheel cover. Due to their size, the fuselage roundels had to be placed under the cockpit, but that does not look bad or out of place at all - early Swedish Vampires used a similar solution. Unfortunately, the kit came without decal sheet, so that other details had to be procured elsewhere - but the decal heap provided ample material. The few stencils and the "No step" warnings were taken from a Model decal Vampire sheet; the ejection seat markings came from an Xtradecal Vampire trainer sheet.
After some light traces with dry-brushed silver on the wings' leading edges the model was eventually sealed with matt acrylic varnish.
Simple but exotic, and like the whiffy Sri Lankan SM2.B I built some time ago a very plausible result. I really like the fact that the model is, despite the camouflage and the subdued colors, quite colorful. outcome a lot. The paint scheme already looks unusual, even though it has been patterned after a real world benchmark. But together with the colorful SLAF markings and some serious weathering, the whole package looks pretty weird but also believable. A classic what-if model! 😉
Narasimha (Sanskrit: नरसिंह IAST: Narasiṁha, lit. man-lion), Narasingh, Narsingh and Narasingha in derivative languages is an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu and one of Hinduism's most popular deities, as evidenced in early epics, iconography, and temple and festival worship for over a millennium.
Narasiṁha is often visualised as having a human-like torso and lower body, with a lion-like face and claws. This image is widely worshipped in deity form by a significant number of Vaiṣṇava groups. Vishnu assumed this form on top of Himvat mountain (Harivamsa). He is known primarily as the 'Great Protector' who specifically defends and protects his devotees in times of need. Vishnu is believed to have taken the avatar to destroy the demon king Hiranyakashipu.
ETYMOLOGY
The word Narasimha means 'lion-man' which usually means 'half man and half lion'. His other names are:
- Agnilochana (अग्निलोचन) - the one who has fiery eyes
- Bhairavadambara (भैरवडम्बर) - the one who causes terror by roaring
- Karala (कराल) - the one who has a wide mouth and projecting teeth
- Hiranyakashipudvamsa (हिरण्यकशिपुध्वंस) - the one who killed Hiranyakashipu
- Nakhastra (नखास्त्र) - the one for whom nails are his weapons
- Sinhavadana (सिंहवदन) - the whose face is of lion
- Mrigendra (मृगेन्द्र) - king of animals or lion
SCRIPTURAL SOURCES
There are references to Narasiṁha in a variety of Purāṇas, with 17 different versions of the main narrative. The Bhagavata Purāṇa (Canto 7), Agni Purāṇa (4.2-3), Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa(2.5.3-29), Vayu Purāṇa (67.61-66), Harivaṁśa (41 & 3.41-47), Brahma-Purāṇa (213.44-79), Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa(1.54), Kūrma Purāṇa (1.15.18-72), Matsya Purāṇa(161-163), Padma Purāṇa(Uttara-khaṇḍa 5.42), Śiva Purāṇa (2.5.43 & 3.10-12), Liṅga Purāṇa (1.95-96), Skanda Purāṇa 7 (2.18.60-130) and Viṣṇu Purāṇa (1.16-20) all contain depictions of the Narasiṁha Avatāra. There is also a short reference in the Mahābhārata (3.272.56-60) and a Gopāla Tapani Upaniṣad (Narasiṁha tapani Upaniṣad), earliest of Vaiṣṇava Upaniṣads named in reference to him.
REFERENCES FROM VEDAS
The Ṛg Veda contains an epithet that has been attributed to Narasiṁha. The half-man, half-lion avatāra is described as:
- like some wild beast, dread, prowling, mountain-roaming.
Source: (RV.I 154.2a).
There is an allusion to a Namuci story in RV.VIII 14.13:
- With waters' foam you tore off, Indra, the head of Namuci, subduing all contending hosts.
This short reference is believed to have culminated in the full puranic story of Narasiṁha.
LORD NARASIMHA AND PRAHLADA
Bhagavata Purāṇa describes that in his previous avatar as Varāha, Viṣṇu killed the asura Hiraṇayakṣa. The younger brother of Hirṇayakṣa, Hiraṇyakaśipu wanted revenge on Viṣṇu and his followers. He undertook many years of austere penance to take revenge on Viṣṇu: Brahma thus offers the demon a boon and Hiraṇyakaśipu asks for immortality. Brahma tells him this is not possible, but that he could bind the death of Hiraṇyakaśipu with conditions. Hiraṇyakaśipu agreed:
- O my lord, O best of the givers of benediction, if you will kindly grant me the benediction I desire, please let me not meet death from any of the living entities created by you.
- Grant me that I not die within any residence or outside any residence, during the daytime or at night, nor on the ground or in the sky. Grant me that my death not be brought about by any weapon, nor by any human being or animal.
- Grant me that I not meet death from any entity, living or nonliving created by you. Grant me, further, that I not be killed by any demigod or demon or by any great snake from the lower planets. Since no one can kill you in the battlefield, you have no competitor. Therefore, grant me the benediction that I too may have no rival. Give me sole lordship over all the living entities and presiding deities, and give me all the glories obtained by that position. Furthermore, give me all the mystic powers attained by long austerities and the practice of yoga, for these cannot be lost at any time.
Brahma said,
Tathāstu (so be it) and vanished. Hiraṇyakaśipu was happy thinking that he had won over death.
One day while Hiraṇyakaśipu performed austerities at Mandarācala Mountain, his home was attacked by Indra and the other devatās. At this point the Devarṣi (divine sage) Nārada intervenes to protect Kayādu, whom he describes as sinless. Following this event, Nārada takes Kayādu into his care and while under the guidance of Nārada, her unborn child (Hiraṇyakaśipu's son) Prahālada, becomes affected by the transcendental instructions of the sage even at such a young stage of development. Thus, Prahlāda later begins to show symptoms of this earlier training by Nārada, gradually becoming recognised as a devoted follower of Viṣṇu, much to his father's disappointment.
Hiraṇyakaśipu furious at the devotion of his son to Viṣṇu, as the god had killed his brother. Finally, he decides to commit filicide. but each time he attempts to kill the boy, Prahlāda is protected by Viṣṇu's mystical power. When asked, Prahlāda refuses to acknowledge his father as the supreme lord of the universe and claims that Viṣṇu is all-pervading and omnipresent.
Hiraṇyakaśipu points to a nearby pillar and asks if 'his Viṣṇu' is in it and says to his son Prahlāda:
O most unfortunate Prahlāda, you have always described a supreme being other than me, a supreme being who is above everything, who is the controller of everyone, and who is all-pervading. But where is He? If He is everywhere, then why is He not present before me in this pillar?
Prahlāda then answers,
He was, He is and He will be.
In an alternate version of the story, Prahlāda answers,
He is in pillars, and he is in the smallest twig.
Hiraṇyakaśipu, unable to control his anger, smashes the pillar with his mace, and following a tumultuous sound, Viṣṇu in the form of Narasiṁha appears from it and moves to attack Hiraṇyakaśipu. in defence of Prahlāda. In order to kill Hiraṇyakaśipu and not upset the boon given by Brahma, the form of Narasiṁha is chosen. Hiraṇyakaśipu can not be killed by human, deva or animal. Narasiṁha is neither one of these as he is a form of Viṣṇu incarnate as a part-human, part-animal. He comes upon Hiraṇyakaśipu at twilight (when it is neither day nor night) on the threshold of a courtyard (neither indoors nor out), and puts the demon on his thighs (neither earth nor space). Using his sharp fingernails (neither animate nor inanimate) as weapons, he disembowels and kills the demon.
Kūrma Purāṇa describes the preceding battle between the Puruṣa and demonic forces in which he escapes a powerful weapon called Paśupāta and it describes how Prahlāda's brothers headed by Anuhrāda and thousands of other demons were led to the valley of death (yamalayam) by the lion produced from the body of man-lion avatar. The same episode occurs in the Matsya Purāṇa 179, several chapters after its version of the Narasiṁha advent.
It is said that even after killing Hiraṇyakaśipu, none of the present demigods are able to calm Narasiṁha's wrath.So the demigods requested Prahlada to calm down the Lord,and Narasimha,who had assumed the all-powerful form of Gandaberunda returned to more benevolent form after that. In other stories,all the gods and goddesses call his consort, Lakṣmī, who assumes the form of Pratyangira and pacifies the Lord. According to a few scriptures, at the request of Brahma, Shiva took the form of Sharabha and successfully pacified him. Before parting, Narasiṁha rewards the wise Prahlāda by crowning him as the king.
NARASIMHA AND ADI SANKARA
Narasiṁha is also a protector of his devotees in times of danger. Near Śrī Śailaṁ, there is a forest called Hatakeśvanam, that no man enters. Śaṅkarācārya entered this place and did penance for many days. During this time, a Kāpālika, by name Kirakashan appeared before him.
He told Śrī Śaṅkara that he should give his body as a human-sacrifice to Kālī. Śaṅkara happily agreed. His disciples were shocked to hear this and pleaded with Śaṅkara to change his mind, but he refused to do so saying that it was an honor to give up his body as a sacrifice for Kālī and one must not lament such things. The Kāpālika arranged a fire for the sacrifice and Śaṅkara sat beside it. Just as he lifted his axe to severe the head of Śaṅkara, Viṣṇu as Narasiṁha entered the body of the disciple of Śaṅkarācārya and Narasiṁha devotee, Padmapada. He then fought the Kāpālika, slayed him and freed the forest of Kapalikas. Ādi Śaṅkara composed the powerful Lakṣmī-Narasiṁha Karāvalambaṁ Stotram at the very spot in front of Lord Narasiṁha.
MODE OF WORSHIP
Due to the nature of Narasiṁha's form (divine anger), it is essential that worship be given with a very high level of attention compared to other deities. In many temples only lifelong celibates (Brahmācārya) will be able to have the chance to serve as priests to perform the daily puja. Forms where Narasiṁha appears sitting in a yogic posture, or with the goddess Lakṣmī are the exception to this rule, as Narasiṁha is taken as being more relaxed in both of these instances compared to his form when first emerging from the pillar to protect Prahlāda.
PRAYERS
A number of prayers have been written in dedication to Narasiṁha avatāra. These include:
- The Narasiṁha Mahā-Mantra
- Narasiṁha Praṇāma Prayer
- Daśāvatāra Stotra by Jayadeva
- Kāmaśikha Aṣṭakam by Vedānta Deśika
- Divya Prabandham 2954
- Sri Lakshmi Narasimha Karavalamba Stotram by Sri Adi Sankara
THE NARASIMHA MAHA-MANTRA
- oṁ hrīṁ kṣauṁ
- ugraṁ viraṁ mahāviṣṇuṁ
- jvalantaṁ sarvatomukham ।
- nṛsiṁhaṁ bhīṣaṇaṁ bhadraṁ
- mṛtyormṛtyuṁ namāmyaham ॥
O' Angry and brave Mahā-Viṣṇu, your heat and fire permeate everywhere. O Lord Narasiṁha, you are everywhere. You are the death of death and I surrender to You.
NARASIMHA PRANAMA PRAYER
namaste narasiṁhāya,
prahlādahlāda-dāyine,
hiraṇyakaśipor vakṣaḥ,
śilā-ṭaṅka nakhālaye
I offer my obeisances to Lord Narasiṁha, who gives joy to Prahlāda Mahārāja and whose nails are like chisels on the stone like chest of the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu.
ito nṛsiṁhaḥ parato nṛsiṁho,
yato yato yāmi tato nṛsiṁhaḥ,
bahir nṛsiṁho hṛdaye nṛsiṁho,
nṛsiṁhaṁ ādiṁ śaraṇaṁ prapadye
Lord Nṛsiṁha is here and also there. Wherever I go Lord Narasiṁha is there. He is in the heart and is outside as well. I surrender to Lord Narasiṁha, the origin of all things and the supreme refuge.
DASAVATARA STOTRA BY JAYADEVA
tava kara-kamala-vare nakham adbhuta-śrṅgaṁ,
dalita-hiraṇyakaśipu-tanu-bhṛṅgam,
keśava dhṛta-narahari-rūpa jaya jagadiśa hare
O Keśava! O Lord of the universe. O Hari, who have assumed the form of half-man, half-lion! All glories to You! Just as one can easily crush a wasp between one's fingernails, so in the same way the body of the wasp-like demon Hiraṇyakaśipu has been ripped apart by the wonderful pointed nails on your beautiful lotus hands. (from the Daśāvatāra-stotra composed by Jayadeva)
KAMASIKHA ASTAKAM BY VEDANTA DESIKA
tvayi rakṣati rakṣakaiḥ kimanyaiḥ,
tvayi cārakṣāti rakṣākaiḥ kimanyaiḥ ।
iti niścita dhīḥ śrayāmi nityaṁ,
nṛhare vegavatī taṭāśrayaṁ tvam ॥8॥
O Kāmaśikhā Narasiṁha! you are sarva śakthan. When you are resolved to protect some one, where is the need to seek the protection of anyone else? When you are resolved not to protect some one, which other person is capable of protecting us?. There is no one. Knowing this fundamental truth, I have resolved to offer my śaraṇāgatī at your lotus feet alone that rest at the banks of Vegavatī river.
DIVYA PRABANDHAM 2954
āḍi āḍi agam karaindhu isai
pāḍip pāḍik kaṇṇīr malgi engum
nāḍi nāḍi narasingā endru,
vāḍi vāḍum ivvāl nuthale!
I will dance and melt for you, within my heart, to see you, I will sing in praise of you with tears in joy, I will search for Narasiṁha and I am a householder who still searches to reach you (to attain Salvation).
SYMBOLISM
Narasiṁha indicates God's omnipresence and the lesson is that God is everywhere. For more information, see Vaishnav Theology.
Narasiṁha demonstrates God's willingness and ability to come to the aid of His devotees, no matter how difficult or impossible the circumstances may appear to be.
Prahlāda's devotion indicates that pure devotion is not one of birthright but of character. Prahlāda, although born an asura, demonstrated the greatest bhakti to God, and endured much, without losing faith.
Narasiṁha is known by the epithet Mṛga-Śarīra in Sanskrit which translates to Animal-Man. From a philosophical perspective. Narasiṁha is the very icon of Vaiṣṇavism, where jñāna (knowledge) and Bhakti are important as opposed to Advaita, which has no room for Bhakti, as the object to be worshipped and the worshipper do not exist. As according to Advaita or Māyāvāda, the jīva is Paramātma.
SIGNIFICANCE
In South Indian art – sculptures, bronzes and paintings – Viṣṇu's incarnation as Narasiṁha is one of the most chosen themes and amongst [[Avatar] |Avatāra]]s perhaps next only to Rāma and Kṛṣṇa in popularity.
Lord Narasiṁha also appears as one of Hanuman's 5 faces, who is a significant character in the Rāmāyaṇa as Lord (Rāma's) devotee.
FORMS OF NARASIMHA
There are several forms of Narasiṁha, but 9 main ones collectively known as Nava-narasiṁha:
Ugra-narasiṁha
Kroddha-narasiṁha
Vīra-narasiṁha
Vilamba-narasiṁha
Kopa-narasiṁha
Yoga-narasiṁha
Aghora-narasiṁha
Sudarśana-narasiṁha
Lakṣmī-narasiṁha
In Ahobilam, Andhra Pradesh, the nine forms are as follows:
Chātra-vata-narasiṁha (seated under a banyan tree)
Yogānanda-narasiṁha (who blessed Lord Brahma)
Karañja-narasiṁha
Uha-narasiṁha
Ugra-narasiṁha
Krodha-narasiṁha
Malola-narasiṁha (With Lakṣmī on His lap)
Jvālā-narasiṁha (an eight armed form rushing out of the pillar)
Pavana-narasiṁha (who blessed the sage Bharadvaja)
Forms from Prahlad story:
Stambha-narasiṁha (coming out of the pillar)
Svayam-narasiṁha (manifesting on His own)
Grahaṇa-narasiṁha (catching hold of the demon)
Vidāraṇa-narasiṁha (ripping open of the belly of the demon)
Saṁhāra-narasiṁha (killing the demon)
The following three refer to His ferocious aspect:
Ghora-narasiṁha
Ugra-narasiṁha
Candā-narasiṁha
OTHERS
Pañcamukha-Hanumān-narasiṁha, (appears as one of Śrī Hanuman's five faces.)
Pṛthvī-narasiṁha, Vayu-narasiṁha, Ākāśa-narasiṁha, Jvalana-narasiṁha, and
Amṛta-narasiṁha, (representing the five elements)
Jvālā-narasiṁha (with a flame-like mane)
Lakṣmī-narasiṁha (where Lakṣmī pacifies Him)
Prasāda/Prahlāda-varadā-narasiṁha (His benign aspect of protecting Prahlad)
Chatrā-narasiṁha (seated under a parasol of a five-hooded serpent)
Yoga-narasiṁha or Yogeśvara-narasiṁha (in meditation)
Āveśa-narasiṁha (a frenzied form)
Aṭṭahasa-narasiṁha (a form that roars horribly and majestically strides across to destroy evil)
Cakra-narasiṁha, (with only a discus in hand)
Viṣṇu-narasiṁha, Brahma-narasiṁha and Rudra-narasiṁha
Puṣṭi narasiṁha, (worshipped for overcoming evil influences)
EARLY IMAGES
In Andhra Pradesh, a panel dating to third-fourth century AD shows a full theriomorphic squatting lion with two extra human arms behind his shoulders holding Vaiṣṇava emblems. This lion, flanked by five heroes (vīra), often has been identified as an early depiction of Narasiṁha. Standing cult images of Narasiṁha from the early Gupta period, survive from temples at Tigowa and Eran. These sculptures are two-armed, long maned, frontal, wearing only a lower garment, and with no demon-figure of Hiraṇyakaśipu. Images representing the narrative of Narasiṁha slaying the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu survive from slightly later Gupta-period temples: one at Madhia and one from a temple-doorway now set into the Kūrma-maṭha at Nachna, both dated to the late fifth or early sixth century A.D.
An image of Narasiṁha supposedly dating to second-third century AD sculpted at Mathura was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1987. It was described by Stella Kramrisch, the former Philadelphia Museum of Art's Indian curator, as "perhaps the earliest image of Narasiṁha as yet known". This figure depicts a furled brow, fangs, and lolling tongue similar to later images of Narasiṁha, but the idol's robe, simplicity, and stance set it apart. On Narasiṁha's chest under his upper garment appears the suggestion of an amulet, which Stella Kramrisch associated with Visnu's cognizance, the Kauṣtubha jewel. This upper garment flows over both shoulders; but below Hiranyakasipu, the demon-figure placed horizontally across Narasiṁha's body, a twisted waist-band suggests a separate garment covering the legs. The demon's hair streams behind him, cushioning his head against the man-lion's right knee. He wears a simple single strand of beads. His body seems relaxed, even pliant. His face is calm, with a slight suggestion of a smile. His eyes stare adoringly up at the face of Viṣṇu. There is little tension in this figure's legs or feet, even as Narasiṁha gently disembowels him. His innards spill along his right side. As the Matsya purana describes it, Narasiṁha ripped "apart the mighty Daitya chief as a plaiter of straw mats shreds his reeds". Based on the Gandhara-style of robe worn by the idol, Michael Meiste altered the date of the image to fourth century AD.
Deborah Soifer, a scholar who worked on texts in relation to Narasiṁha, believes that "the traits basic to Viṣṇu in the Veda remain central to Viṣṇu in his avataras" and points out, however, that:
we have virtually no precursors in the Vedic material for the figure of a man-lion, and only one phrase that simply does not rule out the possibility of a violent side to the benign Viṣṇu.
Soifer speaks of the enigma of Viṣṇu's Narasiṁha avatāra and comments that how the myth arrived at its rudimentary form [first recorded in the Mahābhārata], and where the figure of the man-lion came from remain unsolved mysteries.
An image of Narasiṁha, dating to the 9th century, was found on the northern slope of Mount Ijo, at Prambanan, Indonesia. Images of Trivikrama and Varāha avatāras were also found at Prambanan, Indonesia. Viṣṇu and His avatāra images follow iconographic peculiarities characteristic of the art of central Java. This includes physiognomy of central Java, an exaggerated volume of garment, and some elaboration of the jewelry. This decorative scheme once formulated became, with very little modification, an accepted norm for sculptures throughout the Central Javanese period (circa 730–930 A.D.). Despite the iconographic peculiarities, the stylistic antecedents of the Java sculptures can be traced back to Indian carvings as the Chalukya and Pallava images of the 6th–7th centuries AD.
CULTURAL TRADITION OF PROCESSION (SRI NRSIMHA YATRA)
In Rājopadhyāya Brahmins of Nepal, there is a tradition of celebrating the procession ceremony of the deity Narasiṁha avatar, in Lalitpur district of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. The Lunar fifth day of the waning phase of the moon, in the holy Soli-lunar Śrāvaṇa month i.e. on Śrāvaṇa Kṛṣṇa Pañcamī of the Hindu Lunar Calendar is marked as auspicious day for the religious procession, Nṛsiṁha Yātrā. This tradition of the holy procession has been held for more than a hundred years. This is one of the typical traditions of the Rājopadhyāya Bramhins, the Hindu Bramhans of the locality.
In this Nṛsiṁha Yātrā, each year one male member of the Rājopadhyāya community gets the chance to be the organizer each year in that particular day. He gets his turn according to the sequence in their record, where the names of Rājopadhyāya bramhins are registered when a brahmāṇa lad is eligible to be called as a Bramhan.
WIKIPEDIA
II
El estigma de puta no está a disposición de ser derogado o eliminado porque forma parte del imaginario social y este a su vez deviene una de los principales pilares del sistema patriarcal. El estigma de puta se asocia a aquellas mujeres que faltan a la castidad, es decir a las mujeres que mantienen comportamientos incastos. De esta manera, y retomando la definición de incasta (Todas somos putas I) veremos las diferentes vertientes del significado de la falta de castidad que propician la estigmatización de las mujeres como putas.
Falta de castidad = Sexo ilícito
La mujer puede resultar objeto del estigma de puta en el momento de participar en una relación sexual considerada ilícita legal o moralmente. Existen una serie de conductas encuadradas tradicionalmente dentro del dominio de la sexualidad prohibida para las mujeres: sexo antes o fuera del matrimonio, sexo en caso de ser divorciada o viuda, sexo con más de una pareja, sexo diferente del coito heterosexual (anal, oral o sadomasoquista), sexo con otra mujer, sexo que cruce las barreras del color. Es más la iniciativa sexual, el conocimiento, y la destreza sexual en mujeres son signos de conducta incasta.
Falta de castidad = Mancilla
La falta de castidad como mancilla hace referencia a la experiencia sexual. La virginidad femenina se ha considerado tradicionalmente lo opuesto a la mancilla. La mancilla hace referencia a la contaminación física o violación. Se puede estigmatizar a las mujeres jóvenes como putas una vez se han encontrado expuestas al sexo, ya sea a la fuerza o por propia elección. Dado que este estigma tiene consecuencias tan devastadoras para el futuro de la mujer joven, los padres/madres son socializados para proteger la reputación de sus hijas, incluso a costa del libre desarrollo de éstas. De manera implícita se hace responsable a la chica de incitar el asalto sexual masculino.
Falta de castidad = Indecencia y Libertinaje
Indecente se define como “indecoroso, impúdico, obsceno”; libertinaje se dice de la conducta de alguien que “no cuida las formas, que carece de autocontrol, inmoderado, exagerado”. Las putas o mujeres estigmatizadas como tal son mujeres que enseñan demasiado, dicen demasiado, ríen demasiado, comen demasiado, llevan demasiado maquillaje o joyas o perfume. Demasiado de lo que sea resulta incasto para las mujeres, se considera obsceno. Así pues, se establece una doble dicotomía: exceso = puta/ discreción = mujer virtuosa.
Falta de castidad = Mujeres Autónomas, Inteligentes, Conspicuas
La última definición de la falta de castidad es la de carente de sencillez. Una mujer casta debe ser una mujer simple. “Simple” se define como “no desarrollada, carente de adorno, inocente alocada, no experimentada, insignificante”. De esta definición surgen tres categorías: (1) el estigma asociado a la autonomía de las mujeres, es decir, al desarrollo, la experiencia; (2) el estigma asociado a la inteligencia y la sofisticación, es decir, lo opuesto al carácter alocado o inocente; y (3) el estigma asociado a una apariencia conspicua, es decir, el adorno, la afirmación, la visibilidad.
Es incasto e incorrecto ser demasiado inteligente y demostrarlo públicamente. A la mujer inteligente se la degrada como aberración del género femenino y a la mujer banal se la degrada por ser la típica mujer.
De la exigencia a las mujeres de simplicidad se deduce que se espera de las mujeres que “encajen” mostrándose agradables, apropiadas, discretas. Por ejemplo se supone que las mujeres gordas, discapacitadas o culturalmente distintas deben o bien permanecer fuera de la vista o hacerse a si mismas inconspicuas quedándose sentadas o escondiendo su cuerpo dentro de ropa negra, suelta, sin ajustar.
Mujeres negras o de otras étnias distinta a la blanca, mujeres de clase trabajadora, mujeres divorciadas, mujeres gordas, mujeres maltratadas, mujeres violadas o agredidas son más vulnerables al estigma de puta que las mujeres blancas, de clase media, delgadas y otras supuestamente no echadas a perder. Independientemente de su actividad o historia sexual, a tales mujeres marcadas se les supone mayor grado de experiencia sexual y una disponibilidad sexual mayor.
La amenaza del estigma de puta actúa como el látigo que mantiene a la humanidad femenina en un estado de subordinación pura. De esta manera no debemos avergonzarnos del estigma que nos impone un sistema de poderes que rechazamos, que luchamos por destruir y que ni tan siquiera reconocemos; porque en definitiva, TODAS SOMOS PUTAS.
Durga
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In Hinduism, Durga one who can redeem in situations of utmost distress; is a form of Devi, the supremely radiant goddess, depicted as having ten arms, riding a lion or a tiger, carrying weapons and a lotus flower, maintaining a meditative smile, and practising mudras, or symbolic hand gestures.
An embodiment of creative feminine force (Shakti), Durga exists in a state of tantrya (independence from the universe and anything/anybody else, i.e., self-sufficiency) and fierce compassion. Kali is considered by Hindus to be an aspect of Durga. Durga is also the mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya. She is thus considered the fiercer, demon-fighting form of Shiva's wife, goddess Parvati. Durga manifests fearlessness and patience, and never loses her sense of humor, even during spiritual battles of epic proportion.
The word Shakti means divine feminine energy/force/power, and Durga is the warrior aspect of the Divine Mother. Other incarnations include Annapurna and Karunamayi. Durga's darker aspect Kali is represented as the consort of the god Shiva, on whose body she is often seen standing.
Durga Slays Mahishasura, Mahabalipuram sculpture.
As a goddess, Durga's feminine power contains the energies of the gods. Each of her weapons was given to her by various gods: Rudra's trident, Vishnu's discus, Indra's thunderbolt, Brahma's kamandalu, Kuber's Ratnahar, etc.
According to a narrative in the Devi Mahatmya story of the Markandeya Purana text, Durga was created as a warrior goddess to fight an asura (an inhuman force/demon) named Mahishasura. He had unleashed a reign of terror on earth, heaven and the nether worlds, and he could not be defeated by any man or god, anywhere. The gods went to Brahma, who had given Mahishasura the power not to be defeated by a man. Brahma could do nothing. They made Brahma their leader and went to Vaikuntha — the place where Vishnu lay on Ananta Naag. They found both Vishnu and Shiva, and Brahma eloquently related the reign of terror Mahishasur had unleashed on the three worlds. Hearing this Vishnu, Shiva and all of the gods became very angry and beams of fierce light emerged from their bodies. The blinding sea of light met at the Ashram of a priest named Katyan. The goddess Durga took the name Katyaayani from the priest and emerged from the sea of light. She introduced herself in the language of the Rig-Veda, saying she was the form of the supreme Brahman who had created all the gods. Now she had come to fight the demon to save the gods. They did not create her; it was her lila that she emerged from their combined energy. The gods were blessed with her compassion.
It is said that upon initially encountering Durga, Mahishasura underestimated her, thinking: "How can a woman kill me, Mahishasur — the one who has defeated the trinity of gods?" However, Durga roared with laughter, which caused an earthquake which made Mahishasur aware of her powers.
And the terrible Mahishasur rampaged against her, changing forms many times. First he was a buffalo demon, and she defeated him with her sword. Then he changed forms and became an elephant that tied up the goddess's lion and began to pull it towards him. The goddess cut off his trunk with her sword. The demon Mahishasur continued his terrorizing, taking the form of a lion, and then the form of a man, but both of them were gracefully slain by Durga.
Then Mahishasur began attacking once more, starting to take the form of a buffalo again. The patient goddess became very angry, and as she sipped divine wine from a cup she smiled and proclaimed to Mahishasur in a colorful tone — "Roar with delight while you still can, O illiterate demon, because when I will kill you after drinking this, the gods themselves will roar with delight".[cite this quote] When Mahashaur had half emerged into his buffalo form, he was paralyzed by the extreme light emitting from the goddess's body. The goddess then resounded with laughter before cutting Mahishasur's head down with her sword.
Thus Durga slew Mahishasur, thus is the power of the fierce compassion of Durga. Hence, Mata Durga is also known as Mahishasurmardhini — the slayer of Mahishasur. According to one legend, the goddess Durga created an army to fight against the forces of the demon-king Mahishasur, who was terrorizing Heaven and Earth. After ten days of fighting, Durga and her army defeated Mahishasur and killed him. As a reward for their service, Durga bestowed upon her army the knowledge of jewelry-making. Ever since, the Sonara community has been involved in the jewelry profession [3].
The goddess as Mahisasuramardhini appears quite early in Indian art. The Archaeological Museum in Matura has several statues on display including a 6-armed Kushana period Mahisasuramardhini that depicts her pressing down the buffalo with her lower hands [4]. A Nagar plaque from the first century BC - first century AD depicts a 4-armed Mahisamardhini accompanied by a lion. But it is in the Gupta period that we see the finest representations of Mahisasuramardhini (2-, 4-, 6-, and at Udayagiri, 12-armed). The spear and trident are her most common weapons. a Mamallapuram relief shows the goddess with 8 arms riding her lion subduing a bufalo-faced demon (as contrasted with a buffalo demon); a variation also seen at Ellora. In later sculptures (post-seventh Century), sculptures show the goddess having decapitated the buffalo demon
Durga Puja
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Durga puja is an annual Hindu festival in South Asia that celebrates worship of the Hindu goddess Durga. It refers to all the six days observed as Mahalaya, Shashthi , Maha Saptami, Maha Ashtami, Maha Navami and Bijoya Dashami. The dates of Durga Puja celebrations are set according to the traditional Hindu calendar and the fortnight corresponding to the festival is called Devi Paksha and is ended on Kojagori Lokkhi Puja
Durga Puja is widely celebrated in the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam, Jharkhand, Orissa and Tripura where it is a five-day annual holiday.In West Bengal and Tripura which has majority of Bengali Hindus it is the Biggest festival of the year. Not only is it the biggest Hindu festival celebrated throughout the State, but it is also the most significant socio-cultural event in Bengali society. Apart from eastern India, Durga Puja is also celebrated in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Kashmir, Karnataka and Kerala. Durga Puja is also celebrated as a major festival in Nepal and in Bangladesh where 10% population are Hindu. Nowadays, many diaspora Bengali cultural organizations arrange for Durgotsab in countries such as the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Singapore and Kuwait, among others. In 2006, a grand Durga Puja ceremony was held in the Great Court of the British Museum.
The prominence of Durga Puja increased gradually during the British Raj in Bengal. After the Hindu reformists identified Durga with India, she became an icon for the Indian independence movement. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the tradition of Baroyari or Community Puja was popularised due to this. After independence, Durga Puja became one of the largest celebrated festivals in the whole world.
Durga Puja also includes the worship of Shiva, Lakshmi, Ganesha, Saraswati and Kartikeya. Modern traditions have come to include the display of decorated pandals and artistically depicted idols (murti) of Durga, exchange of Bijoya Greetings and publication of Puja Annuals.
This doll was a gift for my boyfriend.
It is the cat form of a druid, from world of Warcraft (a game). It was made in incredible 14 days! I don't know how many hours it took.
About the doll: this is a handmade one of a kind ball jointed doll, entirely made from scratch of cold porcelain. The doll is made of purple clay and has some airbrushing and painted details. The eyes and the stones of the collar are handpainted glass cabochons and both glow in the dark. The rest of the collar and the bracelets are made from craft foam, and the bracelets has golden details made with 3d paint. And it also has some faux fur. The mark on it's back is made of clay but painted with a transparent ink that glows under UV light. Felt was used on some joints to protect the painting from scratch.
Character reference: www.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/druidcat(1).jpg
It is hard to find pictures of this character!
The story: I was suffering to find a gift for my boyfriend to celebrate our dating anniversary. I had no ideas... After some long time thinking, I decided to make a doll for him. I never made him one before XD The idea was to have something to distract the mind when he wasn't being able to solve a problem while working, something to relax, to play. Then, there was a problem: which doll to make? Which character or whatever? More days thinking. I remember seeing he plays WoW, and that there was a druid that could transform itself in other critters, being a panther like the one I saw more frequently. That was called the cat form, even it looking like a big wild feline. More and more days passed thinking on which kind of doll to make. Chibi? Standard? Deluxe?! Chibi was not very poseable, so next. Deluxe was too hard and there wasn't enough time to finish. Standard was the chosen one. I was going to follow a cute style as well. But I wasn't being able to imagine how the doll would look, I couldn't draw it.... the time was passing.... How to make the open mouth? The accessories? Wow, and if I make the eyes and the collar, and that mark on the back glows like in the game? But how?? Well, Happens that there was only 14 days left to the dating anniversary and I started to freak out! So I just had to start even not knowing that the hell I was going to do and how! Sculpting like crazy XD The eyes needed 4 or five attempts, and paints and adhesives to find something that work fine to glow in the dark. I found a nail polish that glows under UV lamp for the marking at the back. But my boyfriend didn't have a UV light. So I discovered a tiny laser pen like thing that was originally made to check if money is real or not. The thing had a UV led. Bought it. In the middle of the craziness my boyfriend asked me if I was going to give him a coffee maker (espresso one). And I was like "crap! I forgot he want one of those!! XD" but I said it was indeed what I was going to give him, just to surprise in the end. Back to work, I wake up very early and laid down very late all days working on the doll. Go out to buy all the supplies, and still have to hide everything when he came to my place! He stays at my place like Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So, many days I couldn't work of the very few I already had when started! T___T Finished the sculpting process like crazy, still remade 4 pieces. Then I decided to airbrush the doll, you know, because weren't enough stress already. And when airbrushing, I had to cover every claw and the nose, and the pawpads, because those were in the correct color already................. I bought a latex mask (not sure if it is the word) for watercolor and it thank goddess worked!! But oh, soooo much work to cover all those tiny tiny things... And then after airbrushing and removing the mask, there was a gap around all the claws (the latex ran a bit..) and I needed to mask everything again, airbrush again..... Then paint all the little details. Seal everything, make all the accessories, glue all the faux fur.... Also, had to glue something on the joints to avoid scratching the paint. I found a felt - no kidding - that was exactly the same color as the light purple on the doll! Couldn't be better. I think you can barely see it on the pictures. Well, I still have to find a package for it. I wanted a treasure chest, but couldn't find one that suits. So I bought a plastic box similar to the ones I use, but with a funny shape. I designed the labels, with pictures from the game an all. Made the little drawstring bag, that I find on the stuffs I have since many years a blue stone that looks very "WoW" to use on the strings. I was literally finishing it in the day I had to give it to my boyfriend XD But not enough, I decided to fake it was the coffee maker. So I've found a box that had a good size, made fake labels (made very funny drawings, with "memes" and such, by hand with a black pen over craft paper), covered the box, put some rice bags inside to make it weight like a coffee maker, put the doll inside, and wrapped everything with gift wrapping paper. All packaged, it was a coffee maker! So I give it for him. And when he started to open and seeing the fake labels, his face was just like "WTF??!!" and while he was opening, removing lots of bubble wrapping, paper, and... rice bags, he was getting more and more confused, and I couldn't stop laughing! Until he finally found the little box (that was also wrapped in gift paper), opened and discovered the little doll inside, with a letter on which I told all the story you are also reading, but more detailed, and some cute things (by the way I had to write that letter, that has 2 or three pages too in this amount of time!). He got very touched I pass through all that to make a doll for him, and totally surprised because he never guessed what I was up to. In the end, beautiful doll, happy boyfriend, mission accomplished! XD Of course it isn't allll perfect as my dolls usually are. There are very small flaws that maybe just I and few people (my boyfriend isn't one of them) can see. But he is very different, and very detailed, and I am very very proud of this little guy!
Well, I hope you like my "little" adventure! I am glad I survived all of this! I doubt many people would read it anyway, but I decided to share n.n
All of this happened on 2014, months ago, but just now I took the pictures of the doll to show you.
The original much older control tower probably dating back to the very early days of the base. RAF Swinderby closed on the 1st April 1993.
A visit to the National Trust property that is Penrhyn Castle
Penrhyn Castle is a country house in Llandygai, Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales, in the form of a Norman castle. It was originally a medieval fortified manor house, founded by Ednyfed Fychan. In 1438, Ioan ap Gruffudd was granted a licence to crenellate and he founded the stone castle and added a tower house. Samuel Wyatt reconstructed the property in the 1780s.
The present building was created between about 1822 and 1837 to designs by Thomas Hopper, who expanded and transformed the building beyond recognition. However a spiral staircase from the original property can still be seen, and a vaulted basement and other masonry were incorporated into the new structure. Hopper's client was George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, who had inherited the Penrhyn estate on the death of his second cousin, Richard Pennant, who had made his fortune from slavery in Jamaica and local slate quarries. The eldest of George's two daughters, Juliana, married Grenadier Guard, Edward Gordon Douglas, who, on inheriting the estate on George's death in 1845, adopted the hyphenated surname of Douglas-Pennant. The cost of the construction of this vast 'castle' is disputed, and very difficult to work out accurately, as much of the timber came from the family's own forestry, and much of the labour was acquired from within their own workforce at the slate quarry. It cost the Pennant family an estimated £150,000. This is the current equivalent to about £49,500,000.
Penrhyn is one of the most admired of the numerous mock castles built in the United Kingdom in the 19th century; Christopher Hussey called it, "the outstanding instance of Norman revival." The castle is a picturesque composition that stretches over 600 feet from a tall donjon containing family rooms, through the main block built around the earlier house, to the service wing and the stables.
It is built in a sombre style which allows it to possess something of the medieval fortress air despite the ground-level drawing room windows. Hopper designed all the principal interiors in a rich but restrained Norman style, with much fine plasterwork and wood and stone carving. The castle also has some specially designed Norman-style furniture, including a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria when she visited in 1859.
Hugh Napier Douglas-Pennant, 4th Lord Penrhyn, died in 1949, and the castle and estate passed to his niece, Lady Janet Pelham, who, on inheritance, adopted the surname of Douglas-Pennant. In 1951, the castle and 40,000 acres (160 km²) of land were accepted by the treasury in lieu of death duties from Lady Janet. It now belongs to the National Trust and is open to the public. The site received 109,395 visitors in 2017.
Grade I Listed Building
History
The present house, built in the form of a vast Norman castle, was constructed to the design of Thomas Hopper for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant between 1820 and 1837. It has been very little altered since.
The original house on the site was a medieval manor house of C14 origin, for which a licence to crenellate was given at an unknown date between 1410 and 1431. This house survived until c1782 when it was remodelled in castellated Gothick style, replete with yellow mathematical tiles, by Samuel Wyatt for Richard Pennant. This house, the great hall of which is incorporated in the present drawing room, was remodelled in c1800, but the vast profits from the Penrhyn slate quarries enabled all the rest to be completely swept away by Hopper's vast neo-Norman fantasy, sited and built so that it could be seen not only from the quarries, but most parts of the surrounding estate, thereby emphasizing the local dominance of the Dawkins-Pennant family. The total cost is unknown but it cannot have been less than the £123,000 claimed by Catherine Sinclair in 1839.
Since 1951 the house has belonged to the National Trust, together with over 40,000 acres of the family estates around Ysbyty Ifan and the Ogwen valley.
Exterior
Country house built in the style of a vast Norman castle with other later medieval influences, so huge (its 70 roofs cover an area of over an acre (0.4ha)) that it almost defies meaningful description. The main components of the house, which is built on a north-south axis with the main elevations to east and west, are the 124ft (37.8m) high keep, based on Castle Hedingham (Essex) containing the family quarters on the south, the central range, protected by a 'barbican' terrace on the east, housing the state apartments, and the rectangular-shaped staff/service buildings and stables to the north. The whole is constructed of local rubblestone with internal brick lining, but all elevations are faced in tooled Anglesey limestone ashlar of the finest quality jointing; flat lead roofs concealed by castellated parapets. Close to, the extreme length of the building (it is about 200 yards (182.88m) long) and the fact that the ground slopes away on all sides mean that almost no complete elevation can be seen. That the most frequent views of the exterior are oblique also offered Hopper the opportunity to deploy his towers for picturesque effect, the relationship between the keep and the other towers and turrets frequently obscuring the distances between them. Another significant external feature of the castle is that it actually looks defensible making it secure at least from Pugin's famous slur of 1841 on contemporary "castles" - "Who would hammer against nailed portals, when he could kick his way through the greenhouse?" Certainly, this could never be achieved at Penrhyn and it looks every inch the impregnable fortress both architect and patron intended it to be.
East elevation: to the left is the loosely attached 4-storey keep on battered plinth with 4 tiers of deeply splayed Norman windows, 2 to each face, with chevron decoration and nook-shafts, topped by 4 square corner turrets. The dining room (distinguished by the intersecting tracery above the windows) and breakfast room to the right of the entrance gallery are protected by the long sweep of the machicolated 'barbican' terrace (carriage forecourt), curved in front of the 2 rooms and then running northwards before returning at right-angles to the west to include the gatehouse, which formed the original main entrance to the castle, and ending in a tall rectangular tower with machicolated parapet. To the right of the gatehouse are the recessed buildings of the kitchen court and to the right again the long, largely unbroken outer wall of the stable court, terminated by the square footmen's tower to the left and the rather more exuberant projecting circular dung tower with its spectacularly cantilevered bartizan on the right. From here the wall runs at right-angles to the west incorporating the impressive gatehouse to the stable court.
West elevation: beginning at the left is the hexagonal smithy tower, followed by the long run of the stable court, well provided with windows on this side as the stables lie directly behind. At the end of this the wall turns at right-angles to the west, incorporating the narrow circular-turreted gatehouse to the outer court and terminating in the machicolated circular ice tower. From here the wall runs again at a lower height enclosing the remainder of the outer court. It is, of course, the state apartments which make up the chief architectural display on the central part of this elevation, beginning with a strongly articulated but essentially rectangular tower to the left, while both the drawing room and the library have Norman windows leading directly onto the lawns, the latter terminating in a slender machicolated circular corner tower. To the right is the keep, considerably set back on this side.
Interior
Only those parts of the castle generally accessible to visitors are recorded in this description. Although not described here much of the furniture and many of the paintings (including family portraits) are also original to the house. Similarly, it should be noted that in the interests of brevity and clarity, not all significant architectural features are itemised in the following description.
Entrance gallery: one of the last parts of the castle to be built, this narrow cloister-like passage was added to the main block to heighten the sensation of entering the vast Grand Hall, which is made only partly visible by the deliberate offsetting of the intervening doorways; bronze lamp standards with wolf-heads on stone bases. Grand Hall: entering the columned aisle of this huge space, the visitor stands at a cross-roads between the 3 principal areas of the castle's plan; to the left the passage leads up to the family's private apartments on the 4 floors of the keep, to the right the door at the end leads to the extensive service quarters while ahead lies the sequence of state rooms used for entertaining guests and displayed to the public ever since the castle was built. The hall itself resembles in form, style and scale the transept of a great Norman cathedral, the great clustered columns extending upwards to a "triforium" formed on 2 sides of extraordinary compound arches; stained glass with signs of the zodiac and months of the year as in a book of hours by Thomas Willement (completed 1835). Library: has very much the atmosphere of a gentlemen’s London club with walls, columned arches and ceilings covered in the most lavish ornamentation; superb architectural bookcases and panelled walls are of oak but the arches are plaster grained to match; ornamental bosses and other devices to the rich plaster ceiling refer to the ancestry of the Dawkins and Pennant families, as do the stained glass lunettes above the windows, possibly by David Evans of Shrewsbury; 4 chimneypieces of polished Anglesey "marble", one with a frieze of fantastical carved mummers in the capitals. Drawing room (great hall of the late C18 house and its medieval predecessor): again in a neo-Norman style but the decoration is lighter and the columns more slender, the spirit of the room reflected in the 2000 delicate Maltese gilt crosses to the vaulted ceiling. Ebony room: so called on account of its furniture and "ebonised" chimneypiece and plasterwork, has at its entrance a spiral staircase from the medieval house. Grand Staircase hall: in many ways the greatest architectural achievement at Penrhyn, taking 10 years to complete, the carving in 2 contrasting stones of the highest quality; repeating abstract decorative motifs contrast with the infinitely inventive figurative carving in the newels and capitals; to the top the intricate plaster panels of the domed lantern are formed in exceptionally high relief and display both Norse and Celtic influences. Next to the grand stair is the secondary stair, itself a magnificent structure in grey sandstone with lantern, built immediately next to the grand stair so that family or guests should not meet staff on the same staircase. Reached from the columned aisle of the grand hall are the 2 remaining principal ground-floor rooms, the dining room and the breakfast room, among the last parts of the castle to be completed and clearly intended to be picture galleries as much as dining areas, the stencilled treatment of the walls in the dining room allowing both the provision of an appropriately elaborate "Norman" scheme and a large flat surface for the hanging of paintings; black marble fireplace carved by Richard Westmacott and extremely ornate ceiling with leaf bosses encircled by bands of figurative mouldings derived from the Romanesque church of Kilpeck, Herefordshire. Breakfast room has cambered beam ceiling with oak-grained finish.
Grand hall gallery: at the top of the grand staircase is vaulted and continues around the grand hall below to link with the passage to the keep, which at this level (as on the other floors) contains a suite of rooms comprising a sitting room, dressing room, bedroom and small ante-chamber, the room containing the famous slate bed also with a red Mona marble chimneypiece, one of the most spectacular in the castle. Returning to the grand hall gallery and continuing straight on rather than returning to the grand staircase the Lower India room is reached to the right: this contains an Anglesey limestone chimneypiece painted to match the ground colour of the room's Chinese wallpaper. Coming out of this room, the chapel corridor leads to the chapel gallery (used by the family) and the chapel proper below (used by staff), the latter with encaustic tiles probably reused from the old medieval chapel; stained and painted glass by David Evans (c1833).
The domestic quarters of the castle are reached along the passage from the breakfast room, which turns at right-angles to the right at the foot of the secondary staircase, the most important areas being the butler's pantry, steward's office, servants' hall, housekeeper's room, still room, housekeeper's store and housemaids' tower, while the kitchen (with its cast-iron range flanked by large and hygienic vertical slabs of Penrhyn slate) is housed on the lower ground floor. From this kitchen court, which also includes a coal store, oil vaults, brushing room, lamp room, pastry room, larder, scullery and laundry are reached the outer court with its soup kitchen, brewhouse and 2-storey ice tower and the much larger stables court which, along with the stables themselves containing their extensive slate-partitioned stalls and loose boxes, incorporates the coach house, covered ride, smithy tower, dung tower with gardeners' messroom above and footmen's tower.
Reasons for Listing
Included at Grade I as one of the most important large country houses in Wales; a superb example of the relatively short-lived Norman Revival of the early C19 and generally regarded as the masterpiece of its architect, Thomas Hopper.
A look around the inside of the castle / house.
The Grand Hall
Piano
i went outside to have a ciggy and saw this amazing cloud being formed .
i did not transform this image in any way apart from the contrast and sharpness .
El Teide
es un volcán situado en la isla de Tenerife ( Islas Canarias, España ), forma parte del Parque Nacional del Teide, declarado también Patrimonio de la Humanidad. El Teide, con una altura de 3.718 metros sobre el nivel del mar y más de 7.000 metros sobre el lecho oceánico, es el pico más alto de España, el de cualquier tierra emergida del Océano Atlántico y el tercer mayor volcán insular de la tierra, después del Mauna Loa ( 4.170 m / 5.000 m sobre el lecho oceánico ) y Mauna Kea ( 4.205 m / 10.205 m sobre el lecho oceánico ), ambos en la Isla de Hawaii.
Es además un espacio natural protegido en la categoría de Monumento Natural que encierra el complejo volcánico Teide-Pico Viejo, un gran estratovolcán de tipo vesubiano que aún se mantiene activo a tenor de las erupciones históricas ocurridas no hace demasiado tiempo ( la última, Narices del Teide, en 1798 ) y las fumarolas que emite regularmente desde su cráter.
En la actualidad el Teide es considerado el monumento natural más emblemático de las Islas Canarias. También es un gran atractivo turístico que cada año atrae a millones de personas de diferentes lugares del mundo, de hecho el Parque Nacional del Teide es el Parque Nacional más visitado de España con 3.142.148 visitantes en 2007. Además es el parque nacional más visitado de Europa y el segundo parque nacional más visitado del mundo.
Localización
Está situado dentro del Parque Nacional del Teide en el centro geográfico de la isla de Tenerife y conforma un elemento muy emblemático, destacando sus características geomorfológicas específicas que definen su paisaje y lo convierten en el símbolo natural más emblemático de la isla de Tenerife y del Archipiélago Canario.
Con una extensión 3.606,7 hectáreas se halla dentro de los límites municipales
de La Orotava, Santiago del Teide, Guía de Isora e Icod de los Vinos.
Formación
Se tiene constancia de erupciones antiguas ( hace unos 150.000 años ) que marcaron el relieve actual de toda la isla. Por entonces se alzaba un volcán todavía mayor que el Teide. Se barajan dos hipótesis para la desaparición de este pico. La primera, que este pico se fraccionó y se deslizó hasta el mar por el norte de Tenerife. La otra hipótesis se explica mediante un colapso gravitatorio de todo el edificio vulcanológico que provocó su hundimiento. En ambos casos, se formaron las llamadas Cañadas del Teide. Una caldera enorme de 17 km de diámetro. Gracias a nuevas erupciones se elevó el volcán que ha llegado a la actualidad.
El desarrollo de la isla de Tenerife es análogo a formación de otras islas oceánicas. Los inicios de la formación de la isla de Tenerife, se produjeron a través de tres directrices estructurales ( noreste-suroeste, noroeste-sureste y norte-sur ) en el basamento oceánico.
A través de estas fracturas comenzó las primeras erupciones submarinas hace 10 millones de años. Estas erupciones submarinas produjeron una acumulación de coladas de tipo de lava almohadillada que elevaron el conjunto desde el fondo oceánico hasta el nivel del mar.
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Pico del Teide
Der Pico del Teide ist mit 3.718 Metern ( 7.000 m über dem Meeresboden ) die höchste Erhebung auf der Kanarischen Insel Teneriffa und ebenfalls höchster Berg auf spanischem Staatsgebiet. Der Teide ist der dritthöchste Inselvulkan der Erde, nach dem Mauna Loa ( 4.170 m / 5.000 m über dem Meeresboden ) und Mauna Kea ( 4.205 m / 10.205 m über dem Meeresboden ) auf Hawaii.
Der Berg gehört zum Gemeindegebiet von La Orotava. 18.990 Hektar der Bergregion sind als Nationalpark ausgewiesen. Von 1996 bis 2009 schwankte die Besucherzahl zwischen 2,8 und 3,8 Millionen jährlich. 2007 wurde das Gebiet des Parks von der UNESCO in die Liste Weltnaturerbe aufgenommen. Der Teide Nationalpark ist der am meisten besuchte in Spanien.
Name
Sein Name „El Teide“ ist die hispanisierte Form des Guanchen-Begriffes „Echeyde“. Er bezeichnet die Wohnung des Dämonen Guayota, welcher der Legende nach den Sonnengott Magec eingefangen hatte und im Echeyde gefangen hielt. Die Dunkelheit erschreckte die Guanchen zutiefst, und sie baten ihren obersten Gott Achamán um Hilfe. Dieser verjagte Guayota, befreite den Sonnengott Magec und verschloss die obere Öffnung des Echeyde mit einem Stopfen, dem sogenannten Pan de Azúcar
( Zuckerbrot ) oder Pitón ( Zuckerhut ).
Geologie
Der Teide ist ein </bSchichtvulkan. Seine Hänge sind kaum bewachsen. Er erhebt sich aus einer riesigen Caldera mit 17 Kilometer Durchmesser namens Las Cañadas. Nach älteren Vorstellungen entstand sie vor 170.000 Jahren aus einem älteren Vulkan, dessen damals tief im Massiv gelegene Magmakammer sich entleerte und anschließend in sich zusammenbrach. Heute nimmt man an, dass die "Caldera" bzw. deren südlicher Rand das "Amphitheater" eine Trümmerlawine war, die nach Norden ins Meer rutschte. Die Geologen vermuten, dass das unterseeische Plateau im Norden Teneriffas das abgerutschte Material dieses gigantischen Abrutsches darstellt.
Den Teide selbst kann man nicht als Vulkan ansehen, der aus einem Guss entstanden ist. Der Komplex Teide-Pico Viejo ist ein Schichtvulkan, der sich durch die Anhäufung von Material aufeinander folgender Eruptionen bildete. Der 200 Meter hohe Teidegipfel "El Pitón" wuchs ebenfalls aus einem älteren Krater heraus.
Der letzte Ausbruch am Teide-Massiv fand am 18. November 1909 am Chinyero, einem Schlackekegel 10 km nordwestlich des Gipfels statt. Innerhalb der Caldera ereignete sich der letzte Ausbruch im Jahre 1798 an den Narices del Teide, die an der Flanke des westlichen Nachbarvulkans Pico Viejo ( 3.134 m ) liegen.
The Curtiss JN-4 was one of the most popular aircraft in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Designed by Englishman Benjamin Thomas, formerly with the Sopwith Aviation Company, it was manufactured by the Curtiss Aeroplane Co. of Hammondsport, New York. The JN built upon the previous Curtiss Model J and Model N series of trainers that had developed before the First World War. The name “Jenny” came from the JN designation and is associated with the American (Curtiss Aeroplane Co.) variants of this aircraft. It was originally developed as a training aircraft in response to a U.S. Army competition seeking a two-seater biplane (student in front, instructor behind) with dual controls. The JN-4 model first appeared in 1916 and sported a 90 hp Curtiss OX-5 water cooled V8 engine. By 1918 a larger 150 hp Hispano-Suiza engine was installed to provide more power. LINK - albertaaviationmuseum.com/in-formation-curtiss-jn-4-jenni...
The Curtiss Model 41 Lark was a commercial biplane manufactured by Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company that was used by pioneering airmail, airline and bush pilots in the 1920s. Patrica Airways operated a Lark for early bushplane operations. The aircraft flew with floats in warm weather, and skis in the winter. The aircraft was pressed into service as an early hearse once, with the cargo needing to be seated upside down in the open seat and secured with haywire.
(The Gazette newspaper - Montreal, Quebec, Canada •
Friday, March 12, 1926) - AIR SERVICE FOR RED LAKE DISTRICT - Company is Formed and Flying Boat and Cruiser Purchased - Red Lake, which was brought within one and half hours of the outer world on March 3, 1926 when the first airplane flight was made in from Hudson, as compared with from ten to twelve days previously, made with dogs, is to have an even better service with the formation yesterday of the Elliot Fairchild Air Service and the purchase of one aeromarine, seven passenger, all metal flying boat, together with a large deluxe cruiser passenger boat. Jack V. Elliot who inaugurated the original service with two machines, spent yesterday in Montreal making arrangements with the Fairchild Aerial Surveys Company of Canada Limited, with the result that a company has been formed and a charter applied for. To date there has been a daily service into Red Lake from Hudson, three planes being in operation and carrying two passengers and 500 pounds of baggage each. They cover the 140 miles separating Hudson and Red Lake in one hour and a half. Air mail is carried from Hudson, the post office address for Red Lake being via Rolling Portage, Ontario. Stamps for the air-mail service may be purchased from the post offices at Hudson (Hudson being the rail road station and Rolling Portage the post office address). Toronto. Winnipeg, Montreal, Ottawa. North Bay, Sudbury, Cobalt, Haileybury and Timiskaming. When navigation opens about May 1, a boat service is to be provided from Hudson to Pineridge, two-thirds the distance from Hudson to Red Lake, and the large flying boats will take passengers, mail and express freight the balance of the distance into Red Lake. Heavier packages and canoes are to be taken in by Indians, who will be brought back by airplane. The passenger cruiser, which has been purchased for the boat service, will have three staterooms with sleeping accommodation for 16 and day accommodation for 50, the journey by water taking seven or eight hours. It has been planned to erect a broadcasting station at Red Lake, Hudson and on the boat so that communications may be kept up between these three and the outer world at all times. President of the new company is Elwood Wilson, M E.I.C., and Jack V. Elliot is vice-president and general manager. LINK - www.newspapers.com/article/the-gazette-air-service-for-re...
(The Daily Sun-Times newspaper - Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada • Monday, March 22, 1926) - NEW AIRPLANE FOR HUDSON TO RED LAKE ROUTE IS ON THE WAY "The Lark" Leaving Buffalo for Toronto and There Will Take on Sleeping Bags, Etc. (Canadian Press Despatch) BUFFALO, N. Y., Mar. 22, 1926 -The new airplane, "'The Lark", to be used in the Lake service, by the Patricia Airway and Exploration company, arrived here shortly after noon, yesterday, from New York, with "Casey" Jones, test pilot for the Curtis Airplanes Corporation, in charge, and two passengers. Frederick Griffin, press writer, and Captain W. R. Maxwell, Director of the Ontario Provincial air service. The Lark expected to continue its northward flight, to-day, by way of Toronto, Sault Ste. Marie, Orient Bay, Sioux Lookout and Hudson. Roy Mitchell will replace Mr. Jones in the pilot's seat from this point. At Toronto the ship will take on snowshoes, sleeping bags, and food, preparation for an overland tramp, in the event of ship coming down unscheduled, in northern territory. LINK - www.newspapers.com/article/the-daily-sun-times-new-airpla...
(The Toronto Star newspaper - Toronto, Ontario, Canada •
Tuesday, June 29, 1926) - RED LAKE MAIL SERVICE - F. E. Davidson of the Patricia Air Service into Red Lake, made an announcement this morning that starting today all mail will be carried into Red Lake via Sioux Lookout instead of via Hudson. All letters should bear the mark "Via Sioux Lookout." The Elliot Fairchild service has been carrying mail since March 20th. From now on the Patricia Air Service will be permitted to issue their own postage stamps. The government intends to redeem the old Elliot-Fairchild stamps but in the meantime old stamps are good for carriage over the Patricia Air Service. The new Patricia stamps can now be purchased at post offices for 25 cents apiece. The Patricia Air Service makes the trip from Sioux Lookout to Red Lake in about 60 minutes. It also makes trips to Woman Lake, Pine Ridge and to Bull Dog Lake, Manitoba. The Elliot Fairchild boat service still continues. LINK - www.newspapers.com/article/the-toronto-star-red-lake-mail...
(The Toronto Star newspaper - Toronto, Ontario, Canada •
Wednesday, June 30, 1926) - Patricia Airways • Exploration- Above is reproduced a facsimile of one of new postal stickers of the Patricia Air Service, operating airplanes into Red Lake. The postmaster has granted the company permission to issue these stickers in future, and they can be procured at any post office for 25 cents apiece. The old Elliot-Fairchild stamps are being redeemed, but can still be used for letters. In future letters to Red Lake should be marked "Via Sioux Lookout." LINK - www.newspapers.com/article/the-toronto-star-patricia-airw...
Sherman Mills Fairchild (April 7, 1896 – March 28, 1971) was an American businessman and investor who founded over 70 companies, including Fairchild Aviation, Fairchild Industries, and Fairchild Camera and Instrument. LINK - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Fairchild
John "Jack" Vernon Elliot (1893 - 1964), was a pilot in the western Ontario area providing passenger service and flights for thrill seekers in the early 1920's. By 1925, he had his own flying school and by purchasing partially completed aircraft, managed to complete his own aircraft. LINK - www.semiofficials.ca/elliot_1.html
Images on the box may be slightly misleading. Read my review here: Clay for the Kiddos: Fun Forms Piggy Bank Review
Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).
Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions
"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".
The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.
The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.
Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.
Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:
Wet with cool dew drops
fragrant with perfume from the flowers
came the gentle breeze
jasmine and water lily
dance in the spring sunshine
side-long glances
of the golden-hued ladies
stab into my thoughts
heaven itself cannot take my mind
as it has been captivated by one lass
among the five hundred I have seen here.
Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.
Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.
There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.
Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.
The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.
In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:
During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".
Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.
While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’
Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.
An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.
Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983
Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture
Main article: Commercial graffiti
With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.
In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".
Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.
Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.
Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.
Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.
There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.
The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.
Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.
Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis
Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.
Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.
Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"
Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal
In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.
Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.
Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.
Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.
With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.
Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.
Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.
Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.
Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.
Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.
Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.
Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.
The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.
I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.
The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.
Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.
Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.
In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".
There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.
Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.
A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.
By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.
Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.
In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.
A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.
From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.
Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.
Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.
In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.
Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.
In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.
In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."
In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.
In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.
In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.
In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.
In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.
The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.
To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."
In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.
In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.
Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".
Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)
In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.
Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.
Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.
In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.
Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.
Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.
To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.
When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.
This young woman poses in Henry Moore's Large Two Forms, outside of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Large Two Forms. 1969.
Henry Moore.
Outside of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
View "Third Form" on black or on white.
Copyright © 2011, Jeff Stewart.
All rights reserved.
Ikat, or ikkat, is a dyeing technique used to pattern textiles that employs resist dyeing on the yarns prior to dyeing and weaving the fabric.
In ikat the resist is formed by binding individual yarns or bundles of yarns with a tight wrapping applied in the desired pattern. The yarns are then dyed. The bindings may then be altered to create a new pattern and the yarns dyed again with another colour. This process may be repeated multiple times to produce elaborate, multicolored patterns. When the dyeing is finished all the bindings are removed and the yarns are woven into cloth. In other resist-dyeing techniques such as tie-dye and batik the resist is applied to the woven cloth, whereas in ikat the resist is applied to the yarns before they are woven into cloth. Because the surface design is created in the yarns rather than on the finished cloth, in ikat both fabric faces are patterned.
A characteristic of ikat textiles is an apparent "blurriness" to the design. The blurriness is a result of the extreme difficulty the weaver has lining up the dyed yarns so that the pattern comes out perfectly in the finished cloth. The blurriness can be reduced by using finer yarns or by the skill of the craftsperson. Ikats with little blurriness, multiple colours and complicated patterns are more difficult to create and therefore often more expensive. However, the blurriness that is so characteristic of ikat is often prized by textile collectors.
Ikat is produced in many traditional textile centres around the world, from India to Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan (where it is called "kasuri"), Africa and Latin America. Double ikats - in which both the warp and weft yarns are tied and dyed before being woven into a single textile - are relatively rare because of the intensive skilled labour required to produce them. They are produced in Okinawa islands of Japan, the village of Tenganan in Indonesia, and the villages of Puttapaka and Bhoodan Pochampally in Telangana and Gujarat in India.
TYPES
In warp ikat it is only the warp yarns that are dyed using the ikat technique. The weft yarns are dyed a solid colour. The ikat pattern is clearly visible in the warp yarns wound onto the loom even before the weft is woven in. Warp ikat is, amongst others, produced in Indonesia; more specifically in Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Sumatra by respectively the Dayaks, Torajans and Bataks.
In weft ikat it is the weaving or weft yarn that carries the dyed patterns. Therefore, the pattern only appears as the weaving proceeds. Weft ikats are much slower to weave than warp ikat because the weft yarns must be carefully adjusted after each passing of the shuttle to maintain the clarity of the design.
Double Ikat is a technique in which both warp and the weft are resist-dyed prior to weaving. Obviously it is the most difficult to make and the most expensive. ouble ikat is only produced in three countries: India, Japan and Indonesia. The double ikat made in Patan, Gujarat in India is the most complicated. Called "patola," it is made using fine silk yarns and many colours. It may be patterned with a small motif that is repeated many times across the length of a six-meter sari. Sometimes the Patan double ikat is pictorial with no repeats across its length. That is, each small design element in each colour was individually tied in the warp and weft yarns. It's an extraordinary achievement in the textile arts. These much sought after textiles were traded by the Dutch East Indies company for exclusive spice trading rights with the sultanates of Indonesia. The double ikat woven in the small Bali Aga village, Tenganan in east Bali in Indonesia reflects the influence of these prized textiles. Some of the Tenganan double ikat motifs are taken directly from the patola tradition. In India double ikat is also woven in Puttapaka, Nalgonda District and is called Puttapaka Saree. In Japan, double ikat is woven in the Okinawa islands where it is called tate-yoko gasuri.
ETYMOLOGY
Ikat is an Indonesian language word, which depending on context, can be the nouns: cord, thread, knot and the finished ikat fabric as well as the verbs "to tie" or "to bind". It has a direct etymological relation to Javanese language of the same word. Thus, the name of the finished ikat woven fabric originates from the tali (threads, ropes) being ikat (tied, bound, knotted) before they are being put in celupan (dyed by way of dipping), then berjalin (woven, intertwined) resulting in a berjalin ikat- reduced to ikat.
The introduction of the term ikat into European language is attributed to Rouffaer. Ikat is now a generic English loanword used to describe the process and the cloth itself regardless of where the fabric was produced or how it is patterned.
In Indonesian the plural of ikat remains ikat. However, in English a suffix plural 's' is commonly added, as in ikats. This is true in other some other languages. All are correct.
DISTRIBUTION
Ikat is a weaving style common to many world cultures. It is probably one of the oldest forms of textile decoration. However, it is most prevalent in Indonesia, India and Japan. In Central and South America, ikat is still common in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico.
In the 19th century, the Silk Road desert oases of Bukhara, Samarkand, Hotan and Kashgar (in what is now Uzbekistan and Xinjiang in Central Asia) were famous for their fine silk Uzbek/Uyghur ikat.
India, Japan, Indonesia and many other Southeast Asian nations including Cambodia, Myanmar, Philippines and Thailand have weaving cultures with long histories of ikat production.
Double ikat weaving is still found in India, Japan and Indonesia. In Indonesia, it is still woven in Bali, Java, Kalimantan or Borneo and Sumatra.
HISTORY
As textiles do not last well through history, scholars have so far been unable to determine where the technique of ikat originated. Nevertheless, some parts of Asia demonstrates strong ikat traditions which suggest its possible origin; they are Maritime Southeast Asia, Indian subcontinent and Central Asia. However, it probably developed in several different locations independently, since ikat was known to be produced in several pre-Columbian Central and South American cultures.
The term "ikat" has Indonesian origin, and it was introduced into European textile vocabulary back in early 20th century, when the Dutch scholars begin to study the rich textile traditions of East Indies archipelago (today Indonesia).
Uyghurs call it atlas (in IPA [ɛtlɛs]) and use it only for woman's clothing. The historical record indicates that there were 27 types of atlas during Qing occupation. Now there are only four types of Uyghur atlas remaining: Qara-atlas (Darayi, black ikat used for older women's clothing), Khoja'e-atlas (yellow, blue, purple ikat used for married women), Qizil-atlas (red ikat used for girls) and Yarkant-atlas (Khan-atlas). Yarkant-atlas has more diverse styles; during Yarkant Khanate (16th century), there ten different styles of Yarkant-atlas.
PRODUCTION
WARP IKAT
Ikat created by dyeing the warp are simpler to make than either weft ikat or double ikat. First the yarns - cotton, silk, wool or other fibres - are wound onto a frame. Then they are tied into bundles. The bundles may be covered with wax, as in batik. (However, in making batik, the craftsperson applies the resist to the finished cloth rather than to the yarns to be woven.) The warp yarns are then wrapped tightly with thread or some other dye-resistant material to prevent unwanted dye permeation. The procedure is repeated, depending on the number of colours required to complete the design. Multiple coloration is common, requiring multiple rounds of tying and dyeing. The newly dyed and thoroughly washed bundles are wound onto the loom to produce the warp (longitudinal yarns). Warp threads are adjusted for the desired alignment for precise motifs.
Some ikat traditions, such as Central Asia's, embrace a blurred aesthetic in the design. Other traditions favour a more precise and more difficult to achieve refinement in the placement of the ikat yarns. South American and Indonesian ikat are known for a high degree of warp alignment. Weavers must adjust the warp repeatedly to maintain pattern alignment.
Patterns result from a combination of the warp dye and the weft thread colour. Some warp ikat traditions are designed with vertical-axis symmetry or have a "mirror-image" running along their long centre line. That is, whatever pattern or design is woven on the right is duplicated on the left in reverse order about a central warp thread group. Patterns can be created in the vertical, horizontal or diagonal.
WEFT IKAT
Weft ikat uses resist-dyeing for the weft yarns. The movement of the weft yarns in the weaving process means precisely delineated patterns are more difficult to weave. The weft yarn must be adjusted after each passing of the shuttle to preserve the pattern.
Nevertheless, highly skilled artisans can produce precise weft ikat. Japanese weavers produce very accurate indigo and white weft ikat with small scale motifs in cotton. Weavers in Odisha, India have replicated fine Urdu script in weft ikat. In Thailand, weavers make very fine silk sarongs depicting birds and complex geometrical designs in seven colour weft ikat.
In some precise weft ikat traditions (Gujarat, India), two artisans weave the cloth: one passes the shuttle and the other adjusts the way the yarn lies in the shed.
As the weft is commonly a continuous strand, aberrations or variation in coloration are cumulative. Some weft ikat traditions incorporate this affect into their aesthetic. Patterns become transformed by the weaving process into irregular and erratic designs. Guatemalan ikat is well-noted for its beautiful "blurs."
DOUBLE IKAT
Double Ikat is created by resist-dyeing both the warp and weft prior to weaving.This form of weaving requires the most skill for precise patterns to be woven and is considered the premiere form of ikat. The amount of labour and skill required also make it the most expensive, and many poor quality cloths flood the tourist markets. Indian and Indonesian examples typify highly precise double ikat. Especially prized are the double ikats woven in silk known in India as patola (singular: patolu). These are from Gujarat (Cambay). During the colonial era, Dutch merchants used patola as prestigious trade cloths during the peak of the spice trade.
In Indonesia double ikat is only woven in the Bali Aga village of Tenganan. These cloths have high spiritual significance. In Tenganan they are still worn for specific ceremonies. Outside Tenganan, geringsing are treasured as they are purported to have magical powers.
The double ikat of Japan is woven in the Okinawa islands and is called tate-yoko gasuri.
Pochampally Sari, a variety from a small village in Nalgonda district, Andhra Pradesh, India is known for silk saris woven in the double Ikat.
The Puttapaka Saree is made in Puttapaka village, Samsthan Narayanpuram mandal in Nalgonda district, India. It is known for its unique style of silk saris. The symmetric design is over 200 years old. The Ikat is warp-based. The Puttapaka Saree is a double ikat.
Before the weaving is done, a manual winding of yarn, called Asu, needs to be performed. This process takes up to 5 hours per sari and is usually done by the womenfolk, who suffer physical strain through constantly moving their hands back and forth over 9000 times for each sari. In 1999, a young weaver C Mallesham developed a machine which automated Asu, thus developing a technological solution for a decades-old unsolved problem.
OSHIMA
Oshima ikat is a uniquely Japanese ikat. In Oshima, the warp and weft threads are both used as warp to weave stiff fabric, upon which the thread for the ikat weaving is spot-dyed. Then the mats are unravelled and the dyed thread is woven into oshima cloth.
The Oshima process is duplicated in Java and Bali, and is reserved for ruling royalty, notably Klungkung and Ubud: most especially the dodot cloth semi-cummerbund of Javanese court attire.
OTHER COUNTRIES
CAMBODIA
The Cambodian ikat is a weft ikat woven of silk on a multi-shaft loom with an uneven twill weave, which results in the weft threads showing more prominently on the front of the fabric than the back.
By the 19th century, Cambodian ikat was considered among the finest textiles of the world. When the King of Thailand came to the US in 1856, he brought as a gift for President Franklin Pierce fine Cambodian ikat cloth. The most intricately patterned of the Cambodian fabrics are the sampot hol - skirts worn by the women - and the pidans - wall hangings used to decorate the pagoda or the home for special ceremonies.
Unfortunately, Cambodian culture suffered massive disruption and destruction during the mid-20th century Indochina wars but most especially during the Khmer Rouge regime. Most weavers were killed and the whole art of Cambodian ikat was in danger of disappearing.
Kikuo Morimoto is a prominent pioneer in re-introducing ikat to Cambodia. In 1995, he moved from Japan and located one or two old lady weavers and Khmer Rouge survivors who knew the art and have taught it to a new generation.
THAILAND
In Thailand, the local weft ikat type of woven cloth is known as Matmi (also spelled 'Mudmee' or 'Mudmi'). Traditional Mudmi cloth was woven for daily use among the nobility. Other uses included ceremonial costumes. Warp ikat in cotton is also produced by the Karen and Lawa tribal peoples in northern Thailand.
This type of cloth is the favourite silk item woven by ethnic Khmer people living in southern Isaan, mainly in Surin, Sisaket and Buriram.
LATIN AMERICA
Ikat patterns are common among the Andes peoples, and native people of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. The Mapuche shawl or poncho of the Huaso cowboys of Chile is perhaps the item best known in the West. Wool and cabuya fibre are the most commonly used.
The Mexican rebozos can be made from silk, wool or cotton and are frequently ikat dyed. These shawls are seen as a part of the Mexican national identity and most women own at least one.
Latin American ikat (Jaspe, as it is known to Maya weavers) textiles are commonly woven on a back-strap loom. Pre-dyed warp threads are a common item in traditional markets- saving the weaver much mess, expense, time and labour. A Latin American innovation which may also be employed elsewhere is to employ a round stick around which warp threads are wrapped in groups, thus allowing more precise control of the desired design. The "corte" is the typical wrap skirt used worn by Guatemalan women.
ACCREDITATION
As of 2010, the government of the Republic of Indonesia announced it would pursue UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage accreditation for its ikat weaving, along with songket, and gamelan having successfully attained this UNESCO recognition for its wayang, batik and the kris.
WIKIPEDIA
Wheels: Satin Bronze SM-10s
Front & Rear: 17x9 ET42, Profile 1
Tires: Falken RT615K+
Front & Rear: 255/40-17
Additional notes:
Bilstein B8 W/ VW Racing Springs
A visit to the National Trust property that is Penrhyn Castle
Penrhyn Castle is a country house in Llandygai, Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales, in the form of a Norman castle. It was originally a medieval fortified manor house, founded by Ednyfed Fychan. In 1438, Ioan ap Gruffudd was granted a licence to crenellate and he founded the stone castle and added a tower house. Samuel Wyatt reconstructed the property in the 1780s.
The present building was created between about 1822 and 1837 to designs by Thomas Hopper, who expanded and transformed the building beyond recognition. However a spiral staircase from the original property can still be seen, and a vaulted basement and other masonry were incorporated into the new structure. Hopper's client was George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, who had inherited the Penrhyn estate on the death of his second cousin, Richard Pennant, who had made his fortune from slavery in Jamaica and local slate quarries. The eldest of George's two daughters, Juliana, married Grenadier Guard, Edward Gordon Douglas, who, on inheriting the estate on George's death in 1845, adopted the hyphenated surname of Douglas-Pennant. The cost of the construction of this vast 'castle' is disputed, and very difficult to work out accurately, as much of the timber came from the family's own forestry, and much of the labour was acquired from within their own workforce at the slate quarry. It cost the Pennant family an estimated £150,000. This is the current equivalent to about £49,500,000.
Penrhyn is one of the most admired of the numerous mock castles built in the United Kingdom in the 19th century; Christopher Hussey called it, "the outstanding instance of Norman revival." The castle is a picturesque composition that stretches over 600 feet from a tall donjon containing family rooms, through the main block built around the earlier house, to the service wing and the stables.
It is built in a sombre style which allows it to possess something of the medieval fortress air despite the ground-level drawing room windows. Hopper designed all the principal interiors in a rich but restrained Norman style, with much fine plasterwork and wood and stone carving. The castle also has some specially designed Norman-style furniture, including a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria when she visited in 1859.
Hugh Napier Douglas-Pennant, 4th Lord Penrhyn, died in 1949, and the castle and estate passed to his niece, Lady Janet Pelham, who, on inheritance, adopted the surname of Douglas-Pennant. In 1951, the castle and 40,000 acres (160 km²) of land were accepted by the treasury in lieu of death duties from Lady Janet. It now belongs to the National Trust and is open to the public. The site received 109,395 visitors in 2017.
Grade I Listed Building
History
The present house, built in the form of a vast Norman castle, was constructed to the design of Thomas Hopper for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant between 1820 and 1837. It has been very little altered since.
The original house on the site was a medieval manor house of C14 origin, for which a licence to crenellate was given at an unknown date between 1410 and 1431. This house survived until c1782 when it was remodelled in castellated Gothick style, replete with yellow mathematical tiles, by Samuel Wyatt for Richard Pennant. This house, the great hall of which is incorporated in the present drawing room, was remodelled in c1800, but the vast profits from the Penrhyn slate quarries enabled all the rest to be completely swept away by Hopper's vast neo-Norman fantasy, sited and built so that it could be seen not only from the quarries, but most parts of the surrounding estate, thereby emphasizing the local dominance of the Dawkins-Pennant family. The total cost is unknown but it cannot have been less than the £123,000 claimed by Catherine Sinclair in 1839.
Since 1951 the house has belonged to the National Trust, together with over 40,000 acres of the family estates around Ysbyty Ifan and the Ogwen valley.
Exterior
Country house built in the style of a vast Norman castle with other later medieval influences, so huge (its 70 roofs cover an area of over an acre (0.4ha)) that it almost defies meaningful description. The main components of the house, which is built on a north-south axis with the main elevations to east and west, are the 124ft (37.8m) high keep, based on Castle Hedingham (Essex) containing the family quarters on the south, the central range, protected by a 'barbican' terrace on the east, housing the state apartments, and the rectangular-shaped staff/service buildings and stables to the north. The whole is constructed of local rubblestone with internal brick lining, but all elevations are faced in tooled Anglesey limestone ashlar of the finest quality jointing; flat lead roofs concealed by castellated parapets. Close to, the extreme length of the building (it is about 200 yards (182.88m) long) and the fact that the ground slopes away on all sides mean that almost no complete elevation can be seen. That the most frequent views of the exterior are oblique also offered Hopper the opportunity to deploy his towers for picturesque effect, the relationship between the keep and the other towers and turrets frequently obscuring the distances between them. Another significant external feature of the castle is that it actually looks defensible making it secure at least from Pugin's famous slur of 1841 on contemporary "castles" - "Who would hammer against nailed portals, when he could kick his way through the greenhouse?" Certainly, this could never be achieved at Penrhyn and it looks every inch the impregnable fortress both architect and patron intended it to be.
East elevation: to the left is the loosely attached 4-storey keep on battered plinth with 4 tiers of deeply splayed Norman windows, 2 to each face, with chevron decoration and nook-shafts, topped by 4 square corner turrets. The dining room (distinguished by the intersecting tracery above the windows) and breakfast room to the right of the entrance gallery are protected by the long sweep of the machicolated 'barbican' terrace (carriage forecourt), curved in front of the 2 rooms and then running northwards before returning at right-angles to the west to include the gatehouse, which formed the original main entrance to the castle, and ending in a tall rectangular tower with machicolated parapet. To the right of the gatehouse are the recessed buildings of the kitchen court and to the right again the long, largely unbroken outer wall of the stable court, terminated by the square footmen's tower to the left and the rather more exuberant projecting circular dung tower with its spectacularly cantilevered bartizan on the right. From here the wall runs at right-angles to the west incorporating the impressive gatehouse to the stable court.
West elevation: beginning at the left is the hexagonal smithy tower, followed by the long run of the stable court, well provided with windows on this side as the stables lie directly behind. At the end of this the wall turns at right-angles to the west, incorporating the narrow circular-turreted gatehouse to the outer court and terminating in the machicolated circular ice tower. From here the wall runs again at a lower height enclosing the remainder of the outer court. It is, of course, the state apartments which make up the chief architectural display on the central part of this elevation, beginning with a strongly articulated but essentially rectangular tower to the left, while both the drawing room and the library have Norman windows leading directly onto the lawns, the latter terminating in a slender machicolated circular corner tower. To the right is the keep, considerably set back on this side.
Interior
Only those parts of the castle generally accessible to visitors are recorded in this description. Although not described here much of the furniture and many of the paintings (including family portraits) are also original to the house. Similarly, it should be noted that in the interests of brevity and clarity, not all significant architectural features are itemised in the following description.
Entrance gallery: one of the last parts of the castle to be built, this narrow cloister-like passage was added to the main block to heighten the sensation of entering the vast Grand Hall, which is made only partly visible by the deliberate offsetting of the intervening doorways; bronze lamp standards with wolf-heads on stone bases. Grand Hall: entering the columned aisle of this huge space, the visitor stands at a cross-roads between the 3 principal areas of the castle's plan; to the left the passage leads up to the family's private apartments on the 4 floors of the keep, to the right the door at the end leads to the extensive service quarters while ahead lies the sequence of state rooms used for entertaining guests and displayed to the public ever since the castle was built. The hall itself resembles in form, style and scale the transept of a great Norman cathedral, the great clustered columns extending upwards to a "triforium" formed on 2 sides of extraordinary compound arches; stained glass with signs of the zodiac and months of the year as in a book of hours by Thomas Willement (completed 1835). Library: has very much the atmosphere of a gentlemen’s London club with walls, columned arches and ceilings covered in the most lavish ornamentation; superb architectural bookcases and panelled walls are of oak but the arches are plaster grained to match; ornamental bosses and other devices to the rich plaster ceiling refer to the ancestry of the Dawkins and Pennant families, as do the stained glass lunettes above the windows, possibly by David Evans of Shrewsbury; 4 chimneypieces of polished Anglesey "marble", one with a frieze of fantastical carved mummers in the capitals. Drawing room (great hall of the late C18 house and its medieval predecessor): again in a neo-Norman style but the decoration is lighter and the columns more slender, the spirit of the room reflected in the 2000 delicate Maltese gilt crosses to the vaulted ceiling. Ebony room: so called on account of its furniture and "ebonised" chimneypiece and plasterwork, has at its entrance a spiral staircase from the medieval house. Grand Staircase hall: in many ways the greatest architectural achievement at Penrhyn, taking 10 years to complete, the carving in 2 contrasting stones of the highest quality; repeating abstract decorative motifs contrast with the infinitely inventive figurative carving in the newels and capitals; to the top the intricate plaster panels of the domed lantern are formed in exceptionally high relief and display both Norse and Celtic influences. Next to the grand stair is the secondary stair, itself a magnificent structure in grey sandstone with lantern, built immediately next to the grand stair so that family or guests should not meet staff on the same staircase. Reached from the columned aisle of the grand hall are the 2 remaining principal ground-floor rooms, the dining room and the breakfast room, among the last parts of the castle to be completed and clearly intended to be picture galleries as much as dining areas, the stencilled treatment of the walls in the dining room allowing both the provision of an appropriately elaborate "Norman" scheme and a large flat surface for the hanging of paintings; black marble fireplace carved by Richard Westmacott and extremely ornate ceiling with leaf bosses encircled by bands of figurative mouldings derived from the Romanesque church of Kilpeck, Herefordshire. Breakfast room has cambered beam ceiling with oak-grained finish.
Grand hall gallery: at the top of the grand staircase is vaulted and continues around the grand hall below to link with the passage to the keep, which at this level (as on the other floors) contains a suite of rooms comprising a sitting room, dressing room, bedroom and small ante-chamber, the room containing the famous slate bed also with a red Mona marble chimneypiece, one of the most spectacular in the castle. Returning to the grand hall gallery and continuing straight on rather than returning to the grand staircase the Lower India room is reached to the right: this contains an Anglesey limestone chimneypiece painted to match the ground colour of the room's Chinese wallpaper. Coming out of this room, the chapel corridor leads to the chapel gallery (used by the family) and the chapel proper below (used by staff), the latter with encaustic tiles probably reused from the old medieval chapel; stained and painted glass by David Evans (c1833).
The domestic quarters of the castle are reached along the passage from the breakfast room, which turns at right-angles to the right at the foot of the secondary staircase, the most important areas being the butler's pantry, steward's office, servants' hall, housekeeper's room, still room, housekeeper's store and housemaids' tower, while the kitchen (with its cast-iron range flanked by large and hygienic vertical slabs of Penrhyn slate) is housed on the lower ground floor. From this kitchen court, which also includes a coal store, oil vaults, brushing room, lamp room, pastry room, larder, scullery and laundry are reached the outer court with its soup kitchen, brewhouse and 2-storey ice tower and the much larger stables court which, along with the stables themselves containing their extensive slate-partitioned stalls and loose boxes, incorporates the coach house, covered ride, smithy tower, dung tower with gardeners' messroom above and footmen's tower.
Reasons for Listing
Included at Grade I as one of the most important large country houses in Wales; a superb example of the relatively short-lived Norman Revival of the early C19 and generally regarded as the masterpiece of its architect, Thomas Hopper.
Merryweather and Sons Fire Engine.
The Merryweather fire pump.
The Merryweather Greenwich Gem, horse drawn fire pump was purchased in 1898 to safe guard Lord Penrhyn's vast house and gardens. Made of mainly brass, with a copper and wrought iron boiler, the fire pump supported a brave crew of 7 people and a pair of horses.
This was in a room not far from the Ice Tower (opposite that) and not far from the Victorian Kitchens entrance.
sign - Merryweather and Sons Fire Engine Makers
The exploitation rights for this text are the property of the Vienna Tourist Board. This text may be reprinted free of charge until further notice, even partially and in edited form. Forward sample copy to: Vienna Tourist Board, Media Management, Invalidenstraße 6, 1030 Vienna; media.rel@wien.info. All information in this text without guarantee.
Author: Andreas Nierhaus, Curator of Architecture/Wien Museum
Last updated January 2014
Architecture in Vienna
Vienna's 2,000-year history is present in a unique density in the cityscape. The layout of the center dates back to the Roman city and medieval road network. Romanesque and Gothic churches characterize the streets and squares as well as palaces and mansions of the baroque city of residence. The ring road is an expression of the modern city of the 19th century, in the 20th century extensive housing developments set accents in the outer districts. Currently, large-scale urban development measures are implemented; distinctive buildings of international star architects complement the silhouette of the city.
Due to its function as residence of the emperor and European power center, Vienna for centuries stood in the focus of international attention, but it was well aware of that too. As a result, developed an outstanding building culture, and still today on a worldwide scale only a few cities can come up with a comparable density of high-quality architecture. For several years now, Vienna has increased its efforts to connect with its historical highlights and is drawing attention to itself with some spectacular new buildings. The fastest growing city in the German-speaking world today most of all in residential construction is setting standards. Constants of the Viennese architecture are respect for existing structures, the palpability of historical layers and the dialogue between old and new.
Culmination of medieval architecture: the Stephansdom
The oldest architectural landmark of the city is St. Stephen's Cathedral. Under the rule of the Habsburgs, defining the face of the city from the late 13th century until 1918 in a decisive way, the cathedral was upgraded into the sacral monument of the political ambitions of the ruling house. The 1433 completed, 137 meters high southern tower, by the Viennese people affectionately named "Steffl", is a masterpiece of late Gothic architecture in Europe. For decades he was the tallest stone structure in Europe, until today he is the undisputed center of the city.
The baroque residence
Vienna's ascension into the ranks of the great European capitals began in Baroque. Among the most important architects are Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt. Outside the city walls arose a chain of summer palaces, including the garden Palais Schwarzenberg (1697-1704) as well as the Upper and Lower Belvedere of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1714-22). Among the most important city palaces are the Winter Palace of Prince Eugene (1695-1724, now a branch of the Belvedere) and the Palais Daun-Kinsky (auction house in Kinsky 1713-19). The emperor himself the Hofburg had complemented by buildings such as the Imperial Library (1722-26) and the Winter Riding School (1729-34). More important, however, for the Habsburgs was the foundation of churches and monasteries. Thus arose before the city walls Fischer von Erlach's Karlskirche (1714-39), which with its formal and thematic complex show façade belongs to the major works of European Baroque. In colored interior rooms like that of St. Peter's Church (1701-22), the contemporary efforts for the synthesis of architecture, painting and sculpture becomes visible.
Upgrading into metropolis: the ring road time (Ringstraßenzeit)
Since the Baroque, reflections on extension of the hopelessly overcrowed city were made, but only Emperor Franz Joseph ordered in 1857 the demolition of the fortifications and the connection of the inner city with the suburbs. 1865, the Ring Road was opened. It is as the most important boulevard of Europe an architectural and in terms of urban development achievement of the highest rank. The original building structure is almost completely preserved and thus conveys the authentic image of a metropolis of the 19th century. The public representational buildings speak, reflecting accurately the historicism, by their style: The Greek Antique forms of Theophil Hansen's Parliament (1871-83) stood for democracy, the Renaissance of the by Heinrich Ferstel built University (1873-84) for the flourishing of humanism, the Gothic of the Town Hall (1872-83) by Friedrich Schmidt for the medieval civic pride.
Dominating remained the buildings of the imperial family: Eduard van der Nüll's and August Sicardsburg's Opera House (1863-69), Gottfried Semper's and Carl Hasenauer's Burgtheater (1874-88), their Museum of Art History and Museum of Natural History (1871-91) and the Neue (New) Hofburg (1881-1918 ). At the same time the ring road was the preferred residential area of mostly Jewish haute bourgeoisie. With luxurious palaces the families Ephrussi, Epstein or Todesco made it clear that they had taken over the cultural leadership role in Viennese society. In the framework of the World Exhibition of 1873, the new Vienna presented itself an international audience. At the ring road many hotels were opened, among them the Hotel Imperial and today's Palais Hansen Kempinski.
Laboratory of modernity: Vienna around 1900
Otto Wagner's Postal Savings Bank (1903-06) was one of the last buildings in the Ring road area Otto Wagner's Postal Savings Bank (1903-06), which with it façade, liberated of ornament, and only decorated with "functional" aluminum buttons and the glass banking hall now is one of the icons of modern architecture. Like no other stood Otto Wagner for the dawn into the 20th century: His Metropolitan Railway buildings made the public transport of the city a topic of architecture, the church of the Psychiatric hospital at Steinhofgründe (1904-07) is considered the first modern church.
With his consistent focus on the function of a building ("Something impractical can not be beautiful"), Wagner marked a whole generation of architects and made Vienna the laboratory of modernity: in addition to Joseph Maria Olbrich, the builder of the Secession (1897-98) and Josef Hoffmann, the architect of the at the western outskirts located Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1904) and founder of the Vienna Workshop (Wiener Werkstätte, 1903) is mainly to mention Adolf Loos, with the Loos House at the square Michaelerplatz (1909-11) making architectural history. The extravagant marble cladding of the business zone stands in maximal contrast, derived from the building function, to the unadorned facade above, whereby its "nudity" became even more obvious - a provocation, as well as his culture-critical texts ("Ornament and Crime"), with which he had greatest impact on the architecture of the 20th century. Public contracts Loos remained denied. His major works therefore include villas, apartment facilities and premises as the still in original state preserved Tailor salon Knize at Graben (1910-13) and the restored Loos Bar (1908-09) near the Kärntner Straße (passageway Kärntner Durchgang).
Between the Wars: International Modern Age and social housing
After the collapse of the monarchy in 1918, Vienna became capital of the newly formed small country of Austria. In the heart of the city, the architects Theiss & Jaksch built 1931-32 the first skyscraper in Vienna as an exclusive residential address (Herrengasse - alley 6-8). To combat the housing shortage for the general population, the social democratic city government in a globally unique building program within a few years 60,000 apartments in hundreds of apartment buildings throughout the city area had built, including the famous Karl Marx-Hof by Karl Ehn (1925-30). An alternative to the multi-storey buildings with the 1932 opened International Werkbundsiedlung was presented, which was attended by 31 architects from Austria, Germany, France, Holland and the USA and showed models for affordable housing in greenfield areas. With buildings of Adolf Loos, André Lurçat, Richard Neutra, Gerrit Rietveld, the Werkbundsiedlung, which currently is being restored at great expense, is one of the most important documents of modern architecture in Austria.
Modernism was also expressed in significant Villa buildings: The House Beer (1929-31) by Josef Frank exemplifies the refined Wiener living culture of the interwar period, while the house Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1926-28, today Bulgarian Cultural Institute), built by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein together with the architect Paul Engelmann for his sister Margarete, by its aesthetic radicalism and mathematical rigor represents a special case within contemporary architecture.
Expulsion, war and reconstruction
After the "Anschluss (Annexation)" to the German Reich in 1938, numerous Jewish builders, architects (female and male ones), who had been largely responsible for the high level of Viennese architecture, have been expelled from Austria. During the Nazi era, Vienna remained largely unaffected by structural transformations, apart from the six flak towers built for air defense of Friedrich Tamms (1942-45), made of solid reinforced concrete which today are present as memorials in the cityscape.
The years after the end of World War II were characterized by the reconstruction of the by bombs heavily damaged city. The architecture of those times was marked by aesthetic pragmatism, but also by the attempt to connect with the period before 1938 and pick up on current international trends. Among the most important buildings of the 1950s are Roland Rainer's City Hall (1952-58), the by Oswald Haerdtl erected Wien Museum at Karlsplatz (1954-59) and the 21er Haus of Karl Schwanzer (1958-62).
The youngsters come
Since the 1960s, a young generation was looking for alternatives to the moderate modernism of the reconstruction years. With visionary designs, conceptual, experimental and above all temporary architectures, interventions and installations, Raimund Abraham, Günther Domenig, Eilfried Huth, Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler and the groups Coop Himmelb(l)au, Haus-Rucker-Co and Missing Link rapidly got international attention. Although for the time being it was more designed than built, was the influence on the postmodern and deconstructivist trends of the 1970s and 1980s also outside Austria great. Hollein's futuristic "Retti" candle shop at Charcoal Market/Kohlmarkt (1964-65) and Domenig's biomorphic building of the Central Savings Bank in Favoriten (10th district of Vienna - 1975-79) are among the earliest examples, later Hollein's Haas-Haus (1985-90), the loft conversion Falkestraße (1987/88) by Coop Himmelb(l)au or Domenig's T Center (2002-04) were added. Especially Domenig, Hollein, Coop Himmelb(l)au and the architects Ortner & Ortner (ancient members of Haus-Rucker-Co) by orders from abroad the new Austrian and Viennese architecture made a fixed international concept.
MuseumQuarter and Gasometer
Since the 1980s, the focus of building in Vienna lies on the compaction of the historic urban fabric that now as urban habitat of high quality no longer is put in question. Among the internationally best known projects is the by Ortner & Ortner planned MuseumsQuartier in the former imperial stables (competition 1987, 1998-2001), which with institutions such as the MUMOK - Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig, the Leopold Museum, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Architecture Center Vienna and the Zoom Children's Museum on a wordwide scale is under the largest cultural complexes. After controversies in the planning phase, here an architectural compromise between old and new has been achieved at the end, whose success as an urban stage with four million visitors (2012) is overwhelming.
The dialogue between old and new, which has to stand on the agenda of building culture of a city that is so strongly influenced by history, also features the reconstruction of the Gasometer in Simmering by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Wilhelm Holzbauer, Jean Nouvel and Manfred Wehdorn (1999-2001). Here was not only created new housing, but also a historical industrial monument reinterpreted into a signal in the urban development area.
New Neighborhood
In recent years, the major railway stations and their surroundings moved into the focus of planning. Here not only necessary infrastructural measures were taken, but at the same time opened up spacious inner-city residential areas and business districts. Among the prestigious projects are included the construction of the new Vienna Central Station, started in 2010 with the surrounding office towers of the Quartier Belvedere and the residential and school buildings of the Midsummer quarter (Sonnwendviertel). Europe's largest wooden tower invites here for a spectacular view to the construction site and the entire city. On the site of the former North Station are currently being built 10,000 homes and 20,000 jobs, on that of the Aspangbahn station is being built at Europe's greatest Passive House settlement "Euro Gate", the area of the North Western Railway Station is expected to be developed from 2020 for living and working. The largest currently under construction residential project but can be found in the north-eastern outskirts, where in Seaside Town Aspern till 2028 living and working space for 40,000 people will be created.
In one of the "green lungs" of Vienna, the Prater, 2013, the WU campus was opened for the largest University of Economics of Europe. Around the central square spectacular buildings of an international architect team from Great Britain, Japan, Spain and Austria are gathered that seem to lead a sometimes very loud conversation about the status quo of contemporary architecture (Hitoshi Abe, BUSarchitektur, Peter Cook, Zaha Hadid, NO MAD Arquitectos, Carme Pinós).
Flying high
International is also the number of architects who have inscribed themselves in the last few years with high-rise buildings in the skyline of Vienna and make St. Stephen's a not always unproblematic competition. Visible from afar is Massimiliano Fuksas' 138 and 127 meters high elegant Twin Tower at Wienerberg (1999-2001). The monolithic, 75-meter-high tower of the Hotel Sofitel at the Danube Canal by Jean Nouvel (2007-10), on the other hand, reacts to the particular urban situation and stages in its top floor new perspectives to the historical center on the other side.
Also at the water stands Dominique Perrault's DC Tower (2010-13) in the Danube City - those high-rise city, in which since the start of construction in 1996, the expansion of the city north of the Danube is condensed symbolically. Even in this environment, the slim and at the same time striking vertically folded tower of Perrault is beyond all known dimensions; from its Sky Bar, from spring 2014 on you are able to enjoy the highest view of Vienna. With 250 meters, the tower is the tallest building of Austria and almost twice as high as the St. Stephen's Cathedral. Vienna, thus, has acquired a new architectural landmark which cannot be overlooked - whether it also has the potential to become a landmark of the new Vienna, only time will tell. The architectural history of Vienna, where European history is presence and new buildings enter into an exciting and not always conflict-free dialogue with a great and outstanding architectural heritage, in any case has yet to offer exciting chapters.
Info: The folder "Architecture: From Art Nouveau to the Presence" is available at the Vienna Tourist Board and can be downloaded on www.wien.info/media/files/guide-architecture-in-wien.pdf.
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A visit to the National Trust property that is Penrhyn Castle
Penrhyn Castle is a country house in Llandygai, Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales, in the form of a Norman castle. It was originally a medieval fortified manor house, founded by Ednyfed Fychan. In 1438, Ioan ap Gruffudd was granted a licence to crenellate and he founded the stone castle and added a tower house. Samuel Wyatt reconstructed the property in the 1780s.
The present building was created between about 1822 and 1837 to designs by Thomas Hopper, who expanded and transformed the building beyond recognition. However a spiral staircase from the original property can still be seen, and a vaulted basement and other masonry were incorporated into the new structure. Hopper's client was George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, who had inherited the Penrhyn estate on the death of his second cousin, Richard Pennant, who had made his fortune from slavery in Jamaica and local slate quarries. The eldest of George's two daughters, Juliana, married Grenadier Guard, Edward Gordon Douglas, who, on inheriting the estate on George's death in 1845, adopted the hyphenated surname of Douglas-Pennant. The cost of the construction of this vast 'castle' is disputed, and very difficult to work out accurately, as much of the timber came from the family's own forestry, and much of the labour was acquired from within their own workforce at the slate quarry. It cost the Pennant family an estimated £150,000. This is the current equivalent to about £49,500,000.
Penrhyn is one of the most admired of the numerous mock castles built in the United Kingdom in the 19th century; Christopher Hussey called it, "the outstanding instance of Norman revival." The castle is a picturesque composition that stretches over 600 feet from a tall donjon containing family rooms, through the main block built around the earlier house, to the service wing and the stables.
It is built in a sombre style which allows it to possess something of the medieval fortress air despite the ground-level drawing room windows. Hopper designed all the principal interiors in a rich but restrained Norman style, with much fine plasterwork and wood and stone carving. The castle also has some specially designed Norman-style furniture, including a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria when she visited in 1859.
Hugh Napier Douglas-Pennant, 4th Lord Penrhyn, died in 1949, and the castle and estate passed to his niece, Lady Janet Pelham, who, on inheritance, adopted the surname of Douglas-Pennant. In 1951, the castle and 40,000 acres (160 km²) of land were accepted by the treasury in lieu of death duties from Lady Janet. It now belongs to the National Trust and is open to the public. The site received 109,395 visitors in 2017.
Grade I Listed Building
History
The present house, built in the form of a vast Norman castle, was constructed to the design of Thomas Hopper for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant between 1820 and 1837. It has been very little altered since.
The original house on the site was a medieval manor house of C14 origin, for which a licence to crenellate was given at an unknown date between 1410 and 1431. This house survived until c1782 when it was remodelled in castellated Gothick style, replete with yellow mathematical tiles, by Samuel Wyatt for Richard Pennant. This house, the great hall of which is incorporated in the present drawing room, was remodelled in c1800, but the vast profits from the Penrhyn slate quarries enabled all the rest to be completely swept away by Hopper's vast neo-Norman fantasy, sited and built so that it could be seen not only from the quarries, but most parts of the surrounding estate, thereby emphasizing the local dominance of the Dawkins-Pennant family. The total cost is unknown but it cannot have been less than the £123,000 claimed by Catherine Sinclair in 1839.
Since 1951 the house has belonged to the National Trust, together with over 40,000 acres of the family estates around Ysbyty Ifan and the Ogwen valley.
Exterior
Country house built in the style of a vast Norman castle with other later medieval influences, so huge (its 70 roofs cover an area of over an acre (0.4ha)) that it almost defies meaningful description. The main components of the house, which is built on a north-south axis with the main elevations to east and west, are the 124ft (37.8m) high keep, based on Castle Hedingham (Essex) containing the family quarters on the south, the central range, protected by a 'barbican' terrace on the east, housing the state apartments, and the rectangular-shaped staff/service buildings and stables to the north. The whole is constructed of local rubblestone with internal brick lining, but all elevations are faced in tooled Anglesey limestone ashlar of the finest quality jointing; flat lead roofs concealed by castellated parapets. Close to, the extreme length of the building (it is about 200 yards (182.88m) long) and the fact that the ground slopes away on all sides mean that almost no complete elevation can be seen. That the most frequent views of the exterior are oblique also offered Hopper the opportunity to deploy his towers for picturesque effect, the relationship between the keep and the other towers and turrets frequently obscuring the distances between them. Another significant external feature of the castle is that it actually looks defensible making it secure at least from Pugin's famous slur of 1841 on contemporary "castles" - "Who would hammer against nailed portals, when he could kick his way through the greenhouse?" Certainly, this could never be achieved at Penrhyn and it looks every inch the impregnable fortress both architect and patron intended it to be.
East elevation: to the left is the loosely attached 4-storey keep on battered plinth with 4 tiers of deeply splayed Norman windows, 2 to each face, with chevron decoration and nook-shafts, topped by 4 square corner turrets. The dining room (distinguished by the intersecting tracery above the windows) and breakfast room to the right of the entrance gallery are protected by the long sweep of the machicolated 'barbican' terrace (carriage forecourt), curved in front of the 2 rooms and then running northwards before returning at right-angles to the west to include the gatehouse, which formed the original main entrance to the castle, and ending in a tall rectangular tower with machicolated parapet. To the right of the gatehouse are the recessed buildings of the kitchen court and to the right again the long, largely unbroken outer wall of the stable court, terminated by the square footmen's tower to the left and the rather more exuberant projecting circular dung tower with its spectacularly cantilevered bartizan on the right. From here the wall runs at right-angles to the west incorporating the impressive gatehouse to the stable court.
West elevation: beginning at the left is the hexagonal smithy tower, followed by the long run of the stable court, well provided with windows on this side as the stables lie directly behind. At the end of this the wall turns at right-angles to the west, incorporating the narrow circular-turreted gatehouse to the outer court and terminating in the machicolated circular ice tower. From here the wall runs again at a lower height enclosing the remainder of the outer court. It is, of course, the state apartments which make up the chief architectural display on the central part of this elevation, beginning with a strongly articulated but essentially rectangular tower to the left, while both the drawing room and the library have Norman windows leading directly onto the lawns, the latter terminating in a slender machicolated circular corner tower. To the right is the keep, considerably set back on this side.
Interior
Only those parts of the castle generally accessible to visitors are recorded in this description. Although not described here much of the furniture and many of the paintings (including family portraits) are also original to the house. Similarly, it should be noted that in the interests of brevity and clarity, not all significant architectural features are itemised in the following description.
Entrance gallery: one of the last parts of the castle to be built, this narrow cloister-like passage was added to the main block to heighten the sensation of entering the vast Grand Hall, which is made only partly visible by the deliberate offsetting of the intervening doorways; bronze lamp standards with wolf-heads on stone bases. Grand Hall: entering the columned aisle of this huge space, the visitor stands at a cross-roads between the 3 principal areas of the castle's plan; to the left the passage leads up to the family's private apartments on the 4 floors of the keep, to the right the door at the end leads to the extensive service quarters while ahead lies the sequence of state rooms used for entertaining guests and displayed to the public ever since the castle was built. The hall itself resembles in form, style and scale the transept of a great Norman cathedral, the great clustered columns extending upwards to a "triforium" formed on 2 sides of extraordinary compound arches; stained glass with signs of the zodiac and months of the year as in a book of hours by Thomas Willement (completed 1835). Library: has very much the atmosphere of a gentlemen’s London club with walls, columned arches and ceilings covered in the most lavish ornamentation; superb architectural bookcases and panelled walls are of oak but the arches are plaster grained to match; ornamental bosses and other devices to the rich plaster ceiling refer to the ancestry of the Dawkins and Pennant families, as do the stained glass lunettes above the windows, possibly by David Evans of Shrewsbury; 4 chimneypieces of polished Anglesey "marble", one with a frieze of fantastical carved mummers in the capitals. Drawing room (great hall of the late C18 house and its medieval predecessor): again in a neo-Norman style but the decoration is lighter and the columns more slender, the spirit of the room reflected in the 2000 delicate Maltese gilt crosses to the vaulted ceiling. Ebony room: so called on account of its furniture and "ebonised" chimneypiece and plasterwork, has at its entrance a spiral staircase from the medieval house. Grand Staircase hall: in many ways the greatest architectural achievement at Penrhyn, taking 10 years to complete, the carving in 2 contrasting stones of the highest quality; repeating abstract decorative motifs contrast with the infinitely inventive figurative carving in the newels and capitals; to the top the intricate plaster panels of the domed lantern are formed in exceptionally high relief and display both Norse and Celtic influences. Next to the grand stair is the secondary stair, itself a magnificent structure in grey sandstone with lantern, built immediately next to the grand stair so that family or guests should not meet staff on the same staircase. Reached from the columned aisle of the grand hall are the 2 remaining principal ground-floor rooms, the dining room and the breakfast room, among the last parts of the castle to be completed and clearly intended to be picture galleries as much as dining areas, the stencilled treatment of the walls in the dining room allowing both the provision of an appropriately elaborate "Norman" scheme and a large flat surface for the hanging of paintings; black marble fireplace carved by Richard Westmacott and extremely ornate ceiling with leaf bosses encircled by bands of figurative mouldings derived from the Romanesque church of Kilpeck, Herefordshire. Breakfast room has cambered beam ceiling with oak-grained finish.
Grand hall gallery: at the top of the grand staircase is vaulted and continues around the grand hall below to link with the passage to the keep, which at this level (as on the other floors) contains a suite of rooms comprising a sitting room, dressing room, bedroom and small ante-chamber, the room containing the famous slate bed also with a red Mona marble chimneypiece, one of the most spectacular in the castle. Returning to the grand hall gallery and continuing straight on rather than returning to the grand staircase the Lower India room is reached to the right: this contains an Anglesey limestone chimneypiece painted to match the ground colour of the room's Chinese wallpaper. Coming out of this room, the chapel corridor leads to the chapel gallery (used by the family) and the chapel proper below (used by staff), the latter with encaustic tiles probably reused from the old medieval chapel; stained and painted glass by David Evans (c1833).
The domestic quarters of the castle are reached along the passage from the breakfast room, which turns at right-angles to the right at the foot of the secondary staircase, the most important areas being the butler's pantry, steward's office, servants' hall, housekeeper's room, still room, housekeeper's store and housemaids' tower, while the kitchen (with its cast-iron range flanked by large and hygienic vertical slabs of Penrhyn slate) is housed on the lower ground floor. From this kitchen court, which also includes a coal store, oil vaults, brushing room, lamp room, pastry room, larder, scullery and laundry are reached the outer court with its soup kitchen, brewhouse and 2-storey ice tower and the much larger stables court which, along with the stables themselves containing their extensive slate-partitioned stalls and loose boxes, incorporates the coach house, covered ride, smithy tower, dung tower with gardeners' messroom above and footmen's tower.
Reasons for Listing
Included at Grade I as one of the most important large country houses in Wales; a superb example of the relatively short-lived Norman Revival of the early C19 and generally regarded as the masterpiece of its architect, Thomas Hopper.
Victorian Kitchens
Pastry Room
© All Rights Reserved - No Usage Allowed in Any Form Without My Written Consent.
Linford 1992.
Pastel portrait (photographed & digitally reframed) from my 'paint/chalk period', before I discovered the challenges of digital art ;-)
"Linford Christie, OBE (born April 2, 1960) is a former athlete, and the only English man to win Olympic, World, Commonwealth and European 100 m gold medals. He still holds the UK record. Christie's track career was ended when he received a two-year ban for taking a performance-enhancing substance, although he has continually denied any wrongdoing.
In the 1992 Olympic Games Linford won the 100m gold medal. In 1993, he became the first man in history to hold the Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth titles in the 100 m as he was victorious at the Stuttgart World Championships."
(from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linford_Christie - accessed 9th Sept 2007).
My inspiration: Words of Peace.
Love this pic, even if it's not 100% sharp, not a lot of emotion or super lighting...
But because I got this guy so far too let him smoke in the VRT-Buildings hehehe, where you are not allowed to smoke. I also like you can see the moment of the hand...
So it's more a personal fav cause it got a story behind it.