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They were invented by the Reverend Jonathan Scobie, an American Baptist minister living in Yokohama, Japan. The first model was built in 1869 in order to transport his handicapped wife. Today it remains as one of the most important modes of transportation in Pakistan used for traveling short distances within cities.
One of the major brands of auto rickshaws is Vespa (an Italian Company). Environment Canada is implementing pilot projects in Lahore, Karachi and Quetta with engine technology developed in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada that uses compressed natural gas (CNG) instead of gasoline in the two-stroke engines, in an effort to combat environmental pollution.
In many cities in Pakistan, there are also motorcycle rickshaws, usually called chand gari (moon car) or qingqi (after the Chinese company who first introduced these to the market).
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Auto rickshaws are locally known as "Tuk Tuk".
It is a cute little ride.It is so small and compact that when ur sitting in it ur knees are actually touching your chin. And u will be amazed to see the number of ppl which can fit in this small thing. They got their name from the sound they make which is “tuk..tuk..tuk tuk….”
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Visit the following link if you're interested to know more about it; this guy has done a good research on them:
pakistaniat.com/2007/08/22/guest-post-pictures-of-the-day...
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8/60...Thank you every1 for your nicest comments and fave!! ..Always come back.:))
During the ‘naughties’ I paid a few visits to Crosshaven on the west side of Cork Harbour as it offered a good location for ship photography.
Located above Crosshaven is the impressive bastion of Camden Fort Meagher.
Today it is a museum and tourist attraction which I must visit when I get to return to Cork. However, back then it was an abandoned site which was firmly locked up with two substantial gates one each side of a bridge over a very deep, dry moat.
However, when I visited on July 29, 2006 both the outer and inner pedestrian gates were open!
There was no sign of life.
I couldn't resist the temptation to take a quick look inside!
However, being aware that should the gates be closed and locked I would have no means of escape and having left my mobile phone in my car I would have had no means of summoning help.
Hence, I only spent about 10 minutes inside and didn’t wander far beyond the view of the entrance.
In the early 2000s this historic site faced and uncertain future but by the 2013 when I sailed past on the MV BOUDICCA restoration was clearly underway. I was pleased to see it featured in a recent episode of UKTV Play’s Underground Worlds.
A Short History of Fort Meagher
Fort Meagher was originally constructed by the British Military along with other coastal defences in the Cork Harbour area during the Napoleonic Wars. During the British rule the fort bore the name Fort Camden - after the second Early of Camden, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1795. It occupies a 60 acre site 200 feet above sea level.
Fort Meagher is situated on the west side of the entrance to Cork Harbour. On the opposite side of the entrance lies Fort Davis (Fort Carlisle) which is still used by the Irish Army.
Between 1850 and 1865 the fort served as a convict prison. It was returned to military use being extended and extended present size during the period 1875 to 1880 using both contract and convict labour from the nearby Spike Island convict prison.
During this extension 30 additional guns were installed
A narrow gauge railway was installed to handle torpedoes in the 1890s, remains of the tracks are visible down on the quay.
There is a tunnel engineered to house a torpedo system invented by Louis Philip Brennan on the site as well as other extensive underground tunnels and a large underground magazine
Along with other military bases in the Cork Harbour area the British garrison remained 1938. However with war clouds looming in Europe and the presence of the British military threatening Irish neutrality the British withdrew on July 11, 1938 from Cork Harbour, along with the other "Treaty Ports", and they were handed over to the then Irish Free State Army.
The Irish Army renamed the fort after Thomas Francis Meagher. Meagher was born in the City of Waterford, Ireland, in 1823. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, in Lancashire, England and played a key part in the Young Ireland Rebellion in 1848.
After the rebellion he was sentenced to transportation to a penal colony in Tasmania from where he escaped to the United States of America.
He fought on the Union side in the American Civil War rising to the rank of Brigadier General, following the war he became Governor of Montana and died in a drowning "accident" in 1867.
Fort Meagher was occupied by the army during "The Emergency" as WWII is often referred to in Ireland. Following the war it was used by the Irish Naval Service.
In 1989 the fort was sold to Cork County Council. It is now a museum and open April to October each year.
More photographs of Camden Fort Meagher can be found here: www.jhluxton.com/Ireland/County-Cork/Camden-Fort-Meagher/
Kaysersberg (Haut-Rhin) - Église de l'Invention-de-la-Sainte-Croix - Nef
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/%C3%89glise_Ste_Croix_(Kaysersberg)?uselang=fr
“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”
- Mary Lou Cook
It’s my 10th rezday in SL now...wow I am getting old! lol I always said that I would leave and not come back once I reached 10 years. Now that its here I don’t think I can do it. lol I love my family & friends too much to leave, even those I don’t talk to as much or not at all anymore. You all have made my sl what it is today & I thank you for that, even the bad times which taught me to grow more. The ones who are always there no matter what & never giving up on me, the very few who I can trust with anything, and the ones that push me to be a better me...I couldn’t do this without you. (You know who you are) So here is to another 10 years in sl with you guys! ❤ ❤ ❤
The Conversion.
Ruin: so, tell me about the day you got the 'news'. Did you go there alone? I went with Adrian, but we got the news separately.
Rack: I will, but zero energy today and this will require some gusto. I was alone, half expecting it. I’ve never fully described it to myself or anyone else. Going to think on it. If it goes in our book, it will have to be largely fictionalized as I remember very little. Not surprisingly. Send me yours and I’ll send you mine. xo
Ruin: Mine is similar, remember very little, though I did write around it, both to you and to one or two others. I was working in the Civil Service at the time. I had just finished my Doctorate. I will re-build it around those messages, will find it out, write about not remembering it, even. I can't even remember if I was sitting opposite a male or female doctor. I do remember the shock though, and coming out to discover that Adrian was in with another doctor. I had gone in first, so I had to wait for him. My head was racing, but then, when is it not?
Amanda Knox writes quite well, relative to that link you sent me, about her ‘Red Letter Day’.
There’s a similar feeling in it, that prison sentence, the air being drawn out of the room.
Yes, I will write it, we can also find it in our exchange, and yes, it can include fiction, of course. But then what is fiction? Perhaps it’s the story we tell ourselves convincing ourselves that it’s true, those self-justifications we invent to make moving forward possible, that greasing of those wheels.
I also have the writing about when we first got our t-cell count back, and mine being higher than his, and there being some guilt. It's near the end of those emails I sent you, but I will contrive to pull it all together.
Rack: God yes, the T-cell counts. Mine were not terrible. Peter tested after me and his were terrible. That’s how he found out. I feel like I might have to resort to science fiction, a genre I’m not fond of. Not that I know anything about it. Anyway, will stop writing about writing about it and will write it.
Ruin:
Sent : Sun Apr 22, 2001, 9:17 am.
Cries and Whimpers. (On discovering new HIV status Sent : Sun Apr 22, 2001, 9:17 am.
“I feel like I have dropped out of the world. You know the feeling, that in it but not of it, sort of thing. This acknowledgement of a new but inevitable state of being waxes and wanes, sometimes seeming unbearable and sometimes seeming very ordinary. That we both want or need to deal with it in totally different ways causes problems intermittently as we knock off each other (relative to Adrian). Meanwhile the world seems even more inaccessible than ever, the art world in particular. As usual I cringe at youth and beauty, but now in a more bitter and twisted way. When I see what is acceptable and celebrated in the Art world it becomes immediately clear why I would not be. Who needs the ravings of an aberrational cock and cum obsessed dysfunctional unit? The world is about going forth and multiplying, about buying and selling. It’s all about possessions and looking good. Having got to the ripe old age of 47, I haven't even managed to develop the acquisitional gene and imagine that will be a lack until the final shuffling off of this tired old coil.”
That's the day I found out, after a little search, but I will make it into a story. But no, on re-reading, I see it isn’t the day I found out, it’s 12 days later. I have no idea what happened in those intervening days.
I sort of discovered that in the act of writing, you start to remember even, to recapture memories. It's an interesting process.
Rack: Yes, I hope that happens. I am thinking I might make the perspective that of the doctor’s, to some degree, not entirely. I do remember him. Better than I remember myself that day. Telling.
Ruin: I remember reactions over that time, telling people, and getting that "well you were bloody looking for it" reaction.
I think before that day I thought that I might have been immune.
There was a rumour that some people were, and I had been such a slattern to that point, and always stayed negative, so I sort of allowed myself delude myself.
But I think that I might have wanted it too.
Rack: I mostly knew. I had fevers, swollen lymph nodes and one night a pain in the left side of my neck like a piece of rebar had been jammed up from my clavicle.
Yes, regarding wanting it, me too. It was connected to my loss of Conor. Complicated. It was a way for me to have an identity.
Ruin: But it was so much not your demographic, that must have been bewildering somewhat.
I think I was a semi-conscious bug-chaser, but also blindingly honest. As soon as I converted I told everyone.
Rack: Oh, it did. It was my calling card. The 25-year-old Irish woman with AIDS (no distinctions were made back then really).
Ruin: It was how I sorted out that wheat from the chaff, frighten the fuckers away.
Rack: It was a fantastic litmus test. That’s certain.
Ruin: I told you before, that demographically in London, the Irish and those from the Caribbean have the greatest percentage of HIV positive amongst their cohorts. They both have a disproportionate number for the size of their populations. It's the old ‘Cuckoo’, ‘Wild Goose’ thing. There was a survey done, and it was reported. I wish I had kept it.
Rack: Not surprising. The disenfranchised. Same could be said of Covid deaths.
Ruin: Lost, wandering, souls, untethered.
Rack: Yup. Less to lose.
Ruin: It's interesting now here to be in that demographic again relative to Covid, the disposables, the old.
Rack: But there was also the sense that it could get anyone. Liberace. Rock Hudson. Magic Johnson.
Ruin: Straight from one to the other, straight from seeing our parents out to preparing to see ourselves out. But that is universally the way of the world too.
Rack: I’d like to see myself in first.
Ruin: Yes, absolutely, but the untethered are more vulnerable, more likely to head for it, almost daringly.
Rack: I’m beginning to understand the reason for my writerly reticence. It ain’t pretty.
Ruin: Great, meaning ‘yes’ to the seeing of yourself in, but also describe it, it works at perhaps even bringing that about, of disenfranchising it.
Rack: I will. Not now though. I need to clarify it to myself. It’s terrifying.
Ruin: That self-loathing, it's great, and liberating, when you at last begin to call it out.
I am listening to Sapolsky again today about childhood abuse and PTSD. Take your time.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcBgsmJFHDY&t=3s
Baboons in the wild, that's us, his subject, extrapolated to us.
Rack: Waving our purple arses. xoxooxoxox
Ruin: Kiss it, bitch!!!! XXX
It's bedtime here. I have been thinking about this, I will write it tomorrow, or start, it will include this, grow out of this. This will be the immediate aspect. The rest will happen, from notes made around the time and retrieved memories. It might take the rest of the week to pull it out, but I will.
When I think of it, it must have been a female doctor. At the same time, it might not have even been a doctor, perhaps a social worker, or a nurse, or one of the gay men manning the ‘Tavistock Clinic’. It was all nicely normalised for us sexual renegades, so that we could talk about anything, just as if we too were actually ‘normal’. My memory of the clinic in Dublin was not like that. There, we were well and truly outsiders, beyond that pale, next to the shackled prisoners from the local jail (I kid you not). This was indicative of the shame we might have dragged with us unknowingly, that friendly self-targeting fire. There is an aspect of that there in Nuala O’ Faolain’s autobiography, around abortion and birth control, and lesbianism. In fact, it’s more or less there in the writings of all our compatriots from Joyce wandering off to forge the conscience of his race, to the Magdalene Laundry atrocities in Claire Keegan. It is our wandering lot. I guess it’s that I seethe against in everything I make or do. That stranglehold of religion, for generations, casting sex as shameful. But there’s no real blame there either, or if there is, it is directable somewhere else. It perhaps could be laid squarely at the feet of the colonisation, and devastatingly cruel treatment, of our forebears, driving them into the maws of religion, that all-devouring solace.
I am not surprised we went crazy, you and me. I guess it’s also why I hold onto the discussion around Joyce relative to syphilis. There is much Irish objection to the theory amongst literature scholars, that ‘not our Saint James’ sort of thing, not now that we have taken him back into our collective, all enveloping, chaste bosoms. But we know he is one of us, shameless, you just have to read his letters, and look at the treatments he was receiving (That mercury and Neo-Salvarsan). We are shameless, and this is good. This needs both embracing and celebrating, wantonly, lusciously, and hilariously.
So back to the ‘Tavistock Clinic’, nestled there just off the Tottenham Court Road, succour for sinners, offered now by our nation’s tormentors. Going there to confess repeated improprieties, which inevitably did, at last, trip one up, was always a bit of a laugh, until it wasn’t.
The thing I think I remember most is hard to describe. It wasn’t a sharp intake of breath, not exactly that. It was more like a rush of cold air into the lungs, like it feels just before a panic attack. But this was years before those panic attacks, but I still remember that ‘cold air’ second. It was like, suddenly from nowhere, air from a deep freeze had entered your lungs. Just the once, it wasn’t ongoing, but it took quite a few more breaths to warm it back up. The heart felt it, and responded, speeding up. Again, Sapolsky describes this wonderfully, that flight or fight response to danger, that speeding up when there was nowhere to run to. He links it to abuse and neglect in childhood. Like a baboon sitting directly opposite a man-eating tiger. The thing is that we are so used to running away from our own personal ‘bête noire’, mine being my mother selling me for sex to her brother when I was a child. That she did this ‘innocently’ is no succour, no release at all. Running had to happen. Running until you dropped, and you, apparently, had just dropped in front of this ferocious caregiver. Luckily the tiger opposite you was just there to make a follow up appointment to have your bloodwork done, to see the extent of the damage already coalesced. I didn’t realise at the time that there would be still a lot of time to conjure a seemingly infinite amount of even more damage. I was always very good at generating self-damage, a past master, even. But then this was inherited, something passed on from abused parents to their litter (or their farrow, as Mr. Joyce termed it). I still love this stuff we carry forward, until we work out that reproduction is probably not a good idea at all; so we stop.
We were very clever in that regard, or at least our DNA was.
Rack, I think that this is how it is done, or a lot of it anyway. This immediacy of these SMS messages between us, this explaining it to each other. You pointed out that this was your favourite part of the 50 pages I sent you, that 'nowness'. Yes, I agree with you there, it is the 'bones', like an extended diary really, a day by day thing, grabbing what ever understanding happens as you wake up. That's when it’s best for me anyway. It also means you don't actually have to sit down and write, in that traditional way of putting hours aside for the 'muse'. Anyway, you both muse and amuse me, enough to make me respond.
I am searching in the stuff I have here from around that time. There is not a lot, I think I sort of temporarily shut down. There are some breadcrumbs scattered. The next part seems to be about results, t-cell counts and the like. I can certainly fill in the gaps somewhat. I remember distinctly telling a few people, and their inappropriate reactions, which made me angry. Some fed me some 'choices' shit, as in "you made bad choices" sort of way. I knew that I had been true. I also knew already that there was no such thing as ‘freedom of choice’, no such chimera as ‘free Will’. Those ghosts were the terrors of childhood, they were over, as dead as ‘God’.
I thought their reactions were shaming, and I was having none of that.
Anyway there is solace. I love the tenderness between us as we work this out.
Ruin: Anyway, dear Rack, here's a start. Good morning!
I was surprised to hear that you knew before Peter, and then he went and got tested. I always presumed that it was the other way around. I remember those people in New York, those gay men that didn't want to know. I had myself tested more or less every three months, more so after I had resumed barebacking. That happened quite late for me, it was really after I had left New York, that point where I had become so tired of all that self-preservation of someone I loathed, myself. You see, I had come from a long line of barebackers. My parents were, it was mandated by their religion (as you know condoms were not available), and my grandfather and grandmother, with their 17 children, were definitely barebackers too, and so on through countless generations. What can I say? It was ingrained in my DNA.
In fact, almost every heterosexual I ever met was a barebacker. They were forever falling pregnant, or going on the pill, or looking to get an abortion, or whatever. It was from that bastion of privilege that most of the shaming was coming from, as it would happen, and this always managed to irritate the bejaysus out of me. This might have been at the root of the art I was beginning to make, that adoption of those indicators of their divinity, that gold and silver they chose to honour their beatified, that idealised self they had inherited. Fuck them all Rack, I would give that to us.
Rack: Great stuff Billy. I love the idea of barebacking, for whatever reason being hereditary. Brilliant. And yes, the immediacy and the “I’m not really writing” are the genius of the back and forth.
It seems I need this. Or an assignment like this. Working on mine. I’ve got to the office, but no further.
ONWARD
08:20, 15/03/2023
Ruin: Yes, I do and don’t see it as writing. It’s really just a correspondence between friends, and we both write as we write. That, of course, comes with a sense of immediacy, that not writing really towards an end, the picking apart (that knot) being the ongoing driver. This is what we have been doing for years, though I did start by saying that I wanted to keep a record of us dealing with what was happening, and that I had this ‘Laclos’ fantasy. Yes, it has developed, but it is also still the same. I never set out to be a writer, you know that; I am, and was, an image maker, it was and is how I explain the world to myself. I still don’t want to be what is called a writer, that career involving whatever it involves. It’s still writing until I feel this is sorted out, whether that be completed in those fabled 4 years I say I hope for, or whether it goes on until Max Van Sydow arrives with his scythe. The writing is primarily the unravelling of what I have wrought, that Gordian knot thingy, my very own one, in tandem, and parallel with your picking apart of your very own variant of the same. I sense similarities there in both our fumblings. Though it isn’t all fumbling, sometimes we seem to have breakthroughs, seem even to be getting somewhere. This might be delusional on my part. I often look back as things I make, places where I thought I was being ‘true’, some of those ‘eureka’ moments and wonder what I thought I was up to.
Maybe my trying to fashion it into a type of ‘book’ is too much pressure, maybe it is even dishonest, though I see there is ‘worth’ there. I think we can communicate something valuable about the human condition, or at least our own ‘perverted’ version of the same (which is equal to all other versions) especially relative to sex, shame, and abuse. The struggle with whatever, in the moment it was happening, is what the messages back and forth between each other manifests. It wasn’t some narrative contrivance we manufactured to create something called a story or plot. It was the ‘there and then’ of the continuous ‘now’. We are lucky to have that record, and I don’t really care if it is ‘literature’ or even ‘good writing’. I have no problem with correcting it where necessary, grammar or spelling-wise, but that’s only to make it clearer for myself initially. After myself, I want to make it clearer for you. I have no idea what follows after that, or if anything needs to.
I am saying this to take the pressure off of you, the head of steam you seem to build up, fit to burst. I see it can cause a type of panic for you. I am talking about your fear of writing. Don’t write then, just respond if you want to. That’s enough. It builds of its own volition.
Strangely, I could hardly read the O’Faolain book. I got to about 150 pages in and had to stop. I kept waiting for it to start, and kept getting irritated when it didn’t, and had to stop. Anyway, I am not going to attack it, the writing I mean, I am hardly an expert, but it didn’t win me over at all. I don’t know why, maybe it was that generational thing, that Dublin one just before me, before I found myself on Kildare Street, with your mother, and had somewhat of a sampling of what Dublin had to offer (for the first time), before deciding that I had to escape from that too. Then there was that usual doo-doo. That “you had books growing up, you were lucky”, all that crazy comparative abuse stuff, that “mine was worse than yours” stuff. Then she went to Oxford. I would have killed all Jude the obscure’s children to have been aware then that Oxford even existed as a possibility. It’s all very much about what you were born into, and the sort of privilege that is taken for granted, even if her father was a complete negligent asshole.
So, there you have it, another good book ruined through seething jealousy.
Well, at least I now know it, and knowledge being power, and all that palaver, let’s see where that takes us. Anyway, jealousy often comes up around memoirs I read, primarily that Monty Pythonesque “You were lucky, you had books”. I must have always really wanted them, those ‘unobtainables’. This suggests that I might have wanted to write. I remember loving writing in school, and always getting top marks for the same. I think it had something to do with not being able to speak, that damned stutter, so that the writing was the only way I could manage to say what I was thinking. The progenitors worked according to the rule that “children should be seen and not heard”, a relentlessly repeated maxim. So, most of the time was spent making cheap jigsaws. I got one every Christmas, each one more complicated than the last in the hopes of keeping the stammering child quiet. But there was drawing too. I preferred that.
Then I pulled Rack, sorry Kim, through that scratchy hedge hole, your doggy alter-ego, and the world changed. That all sounds a bit like what happened in the Moondance Diner, on that day we first met and simultaneously told me that you had just found out you were HIV-positive.
Ruin: Next step for me is first bloodwork, as you know my veins and arteries are sewers so that should make for fun reading. Can you remember your first? Each seems like a tentative step at the beginnings of a journey. First sex after conversion, first time stoned, pissed, first bloodwork, first confession of new status, first time you snapped at someone who complained about something trivial when you were carrying life and death, and mostly the latter, on your shoulders, first film you managed to sit through. There have been no first tears yet. You know all of this......wanna be my Beatrice?
Edge-dwelling, one of our favourite subjects.
It does seem strange not to have your madness here at the moment. It probably wouldn't help but it might. I may need to visit NYC at some stage for a fix and a change of perspective and just to prove that I can and that all is not over. This is a stupid infuriating stage, and it can be over as soon as it wants. Sorry if I remind you of a past self. Going to the Irish Club in Eaton Square for lunch for some posh comfort food. The sort of food which was eaten on the Hill of Howth but never made it to Clondalkin. With Wine (for some reason my spellcheck wants to change this to Whine).
Rack: You know what is really odd. I get bad news and my whole being reacts as if it's good news. This is a strange thing. I get all fired up, determined, focused, confident, strong and ballsy. It's the perversion of our predicament. Of course, the bloodwork sucked the big hairy moosedick. This I think I knew without having to charge my health insurance company 2,000 dollars. I'll deal with it, as I always do. I'll go back in. I'll play more drug-chess, I'll grow to love compromise as much as a miracle and I'll be around for a little longer.
This is not easy.
I think I am going back on the interferon. This is hard for me, but it's a gamble. Maybe I can keep my liver in working order for another two years and by then the drugs in the pipeline now will be available to me. It's always been thus, and I have to say that I have
had great fortune in being on the right side of time.
Ruin, Ruin, Ruin. You know I'd say a prayer if I could. There must be real comfort in that stuff. However, we persist...
I'm happy to have you as my dear friend.
Ruin: I should have written earlier to you to let you know of the results of our bloodwork. I was somewhat shocked and dismayed to discover that mine are actually much better than him indoors. Mine are 800 with a low viral load of 9,000. His are around 500 with a viral load of 60,000. I know these are all just figures and can change over a short period; I remember that film ‘Silverlake Life’. This comparison thing is odious and the main overpowering feeling I had was one of guilt at being overly endowed in the T-cell department, as opposed to the trouser department which is my usual problem! We are both being treated at the moment for an amoebic infection in the gut and hopefully this will up his numbers (and mine to superhuman levels), as he has been quite sick and squitty.
They are probably a leftover from my time in New York as I had bad stomach bug problems there (Giardia etc.) from my propensity for eating nether regions. When I went to have them checked here, I was told I had nervous stomach and sent home by my GP, and it is only now that I have the lurgy that the National Health bothers to check and finds the little buggers. At last, we will get comprehensive healthcare, but it had to get to this point (where they check out every little problem). Can you imagine how the rest of the clean population (henceforth to be known as the cleanies) gets treated? Cancer patients getting sent home with ‘Imodium’. It happens.
We are now, of course, utterly disposable. All the rules of survival of the fittest would support this. How do we turn this around? This has been your struggle for years. I don't mean it in a bad way but is it somewhat of a support to have me there with you in the same boat? It is a support for me that you are such an old hand and inspiration in your ability to move on with this. I am telling my friends but the present climate dictates that they absorb the news, express concern and then disappear (my NY friends excluded), almost like an ‘Oh well, too bad, now get over it’ sort of shrug. So that is what I am doing. I am not averse to milking it, but the udder of human kindness seems to have deserted the pap. Anyway, I am more likely to laugh than cry and my inclination is to shout 'fuck you and your sympathy.' At the same time, I don't want to hide it. I don't want to become some HIV activist, but I do want to talk about being mortal. I still want TOO MUCH, but now I want it immediately. NOTE TO SELF: Self, you must get some credit cards or at least a credit rating.
So, I am sure you will be glad to see that my unhealthy Ego is still very much intact and beginning to re-emerge from the wettest winter on record. I am torn as to how to approach bodies for art funding. Should I do the “I am profoundly mortal and in touch with the moment of extinction” spiel, hoping they will think, “oops better fund him because he won't be around for much longer” or avoid all that in case they think, “oops another AIDS artist who has nothing to say to us cleanies?” It's all in the work anyway......but which is the best way to exploit the situation, given that Brit Art is dominated by Laddism and that even the girls are beer drinking heterosexual womanisers (who can spit great distances).
Brit art has had no response to this Fin De Siecle malaise, there is no Gober, or Gonzales Torres or Wojnarowicz, or even a Goldin......I don't think they should get away with this. Similarly, Brits don't know how to respond when you tell them of your lurgyness, as they know no one else with this condition, or at least act as if they don’t. I miss my mates in New York, who have absorbed the whole shebang and know how to respond. Let's hear it for the ‘Healing Circle’ and ‘Act-Up’ meetings.
They were good, if slightly hysterical, times. I hate normalisation, it really does you in.
I am not what might be considered 'normal', I worship at the back passage and no amount of interior design flair will change that. I love being an aberration.
I still have the bitter and twisted fantasy I would like to write as a story. Set in the future it would involve a new virus that would kill you within a month. The idea would be that anyone who was already HIV positive would be immune to the virus. So, reverse everything. Those who were Poz would no longer be Pariahs. Cleanies would be begging for positive loads, it would be on sale on the net. The most efficient way to contact it would be anal sex (as if) so that every straight jock in Christendom would be begging for it and we would be very busy and multi-squillionaires in no time. So I am a sicko....but you always knew that.
Anyway now you have the latest earth-shattering facts and fantasies of my so-called life. Civil servitude continues and the days drag on. I have some feelers out for vague connections to generate art and space and support. We now have a power shower and the new cooker and washing machine and tumble dryer are paid for and awaiting delivery. We will never go short of a clean diaper when the time comes. Debts mount for same.
Attached please find pic for cover of aforementioned book,
Infected kisses,
Billzebum
Rack: Will reply. I don’t see the cover attachment. Xo
Ruin: Nope, that's an old email, that last part. It was just as far as I got this morning.
This is exactly what I am talking about, this immediacy, this interweaving. It is an exchange between two people, in that moment of that exchange, that perpetual now. Perpetual, another catholic word, that idea of perpetual succour, and that giving and receiving of same to each other.
I sent you more, as email, which I think is a better place to communicate. Except there is also that added immediacy of this organ (WhatsApp) here....that complete 'in the moment'. Let's not lose this either.
"I suspect you saw that 'cleanies' reference I put up. I know it seems offensive. It came from a time when I would go out to bars, or wherever, and someone would try to pick me up. We would chat away, the usual inanities, until the person flirting with me would ask was I clean. I would play along and say I washed regularly, or whatever, but they would insist. So, I would get them to ask me if I was positive or not. I was asked was I clean so many times. They would get angry too, when I said I was positive, as in why I had wasted their time. I was told a few times that I shouldn't be in a bar, because I was spoiling it for 'clean' people."
I am looking at stigma and shame, though the email I sent you is not about that. It's a continuation on the last one.
Rack: I had this boyfriend who said to me after I tested positive (as I was soliciting him for sex), “I didn’t think you could have sex now.” As if my vagina had grown a metal hymen. I think of him sometimes, now 35 years later, and wonder if he wonders what happened to me.
Ruin: I remember a friend in NYC used to cover his glass with his hand when he was drinking with me, just in case. I wasn't even positive then, but I was a wooftah. That was enough.
That was the same guy I went to work with in Palm Beach around 9/11. That story is, of course, here too.
It appears I have forsworn even trying to be a sympathetic character. It's just as well that I am fictional, or rather that we are.
I did not invent this. This is the original work of Sean and Steph Mayo. You can see the original creation here: www.flickr.com/photos/legocy/5803377246/in/photolist-qMUe...
I just really liked this idea, and I think it is a great way to make a minifigure-scale compound bow that actually fires. Congratulations to them for their excellent work!
I did modify their design slightly by using the official white rubber band instead of the iffy black ones.
The creators of this have said that you can copy their idea, so I guess you can use this however you want, just be sure to give them proper credit for it.
Orden:Anseriformes
Familia:Anatidae
Subfamilia:Tadorninae
Género:Tadorna
Nombres comunes:Oca común, Tarro Blanco macho
Nombre cientifico:Tardorna tadorna
Nombre Ingles: Common Shelduck Male
Lugar de captura: Las Tablas de Daimiel, Ciudad Real, Castilla la Mancha, España
Por: Cimarron mayor Panta
Ask around what are the two most iconic symbols of Gothic architecture and art, and the answer will likely be: stained glass windows and rib vaulting.
In both cases, that answer will be wrong: those wonders, on which Gothic cathedrals built their worldwide reputation, are... Romanesque! And they were not just invented and barely tested at the time of Romanesque, they were actually implemented again and again, and perfected along the way over at least one century before Gothic happened. Much more than the definitive breaking point it is often purported to be, the advent of the Gothic was much more a smooth and slow transition, largely calling upon concepts, methods and techniques created and improved during Romanesque times.
As regards stained glass, the oldest still in place is the Ascension Window in the Le Mans Cathedral, which could be as old as Year 1100, possibly 1120–40. The windows in the Augsburg Cathedral in Germany also have a strong claim to the title of oldest Romanesque stained glass window. I hope to be able to photograph all of them some day.
Now, and coming back to our main subject, the rib vaulting (in French: voûte sur croisée d’ogives, or more simply voûte d’ogives), experts agree that, even before the cathedral of Durham in England, it was first experimented in the abbey church of Lessay in Normandy, which stands in the Cotentin peninsula, today the département of Manche. This new, revolutionary vaulting system could be as old as 1090, at least for the apse, choir and transept. Let us remember that this was also the time when other Benedictine monks, in Burgundy, were experimenting the “broken”, or “pointy” Romanesque arch in the Cluny II abbey church, on which construction began in 1088.
The beginning of the nave is also very old, as will be explained below. Its western part may have been built a few decades later, around 1130–40 —but even so, at that time we are still fully within the Romanesque Age, which did not come to an end until 1200 at the earliest —and of course such a clean cutoff date is only symbolic and does not correspond to any actual reality.
The abbey church of Lessay was miraculously saved in the 1950s by Yves-Marie Froidevaux, Chief Architect of Historic Landmarks, after it was severely damaged by the mines detonated by the Nazi army before it retreated after the D-Day landing of June 1944. The restoration Froidevaux carried out, re-using most of the old stones wherever it was possible, today remains an example of a successful and respectful restoration.
Dedicated to the Holy Trinity, this church may look less impressive from the outside than the one in Cerisy, of which I uploaded photos a few days ago. Its apparel is mostly of local shale stones. The cut stones are limestone from Yvetot-Bocage near Valognes, a stone of a lesser quality compared to the famous pierre de Caen, which is also used here, but quite sparsely. Prima facie, this vast church offers more similarities with the humble parochial ones to be found locally in the Cotentin, than with “the great monastic architecture”, as Lucien Musset calls it in the Normandie romane book published by Zodiaque.
As you step inside, however, the architectural and religious message resonates with all its majesty and might. Contrary to Cerisy, this nave retains all of its rows; its perfect proportions are ample, elegant and powerful. They fascinate the first-time visitor.
In the oldest rows of the nave, toward the transept, the ribs fall on “nothing”, for lack of a base or an engaged column to receive them. Such an approximation denotes an incomplete concept, enthusiastically adopted but not yet fully developed.
However remarkable and iconic it may be, owing to the very first use of rib vaulting in human history, the abbey church of Lessay fails to satisfy the lovers of Romanesque sculpture, which is almost absent. This does not come as a surprise in a Norman Romanesque church. Some capitals are sculpted, but they are often the most distant, way up high at triforium level, and the other are only prepared for sculpting, rarely decorated with hooks or gadroons.
This photo shows how luminous the nave is. Almost as much as Vézelay!
May 2nd, 2014
Acushnet, MA
This is a focus stacked macro shot of one our kid's little league baseballs. When you look at them really close, they take a beating.
Some facts about baseball's ball:
"Although legend has it that a student in Cooperstown, New York invented baseball in 1839, in all likelihood it evolved from the game of cricket. The sport was less than organized in its early days, and the ball went through many transformations in the 19th century on its way to becoming the baseball used by Major League Baseball in the millennium.
First Baseballs
The first baseballs had anything from a walnut to a rock in the center. Yarn or string was wrapped around any solid substance. The string was then encased in leather. Players made their own or had them made for them to their own specifications. Since the custom was for the first teams of the 1850s to supply the balls for a game, games were dramatically swayed by the choice of a ball with properties that suited a team’s style of play.
Official Construction
As baseball became more organized in the 1850s, meetings periodically took place between teams and governing bodies to decide on the best weight, dimension and construction of the baseball. Rules were changed, then changed again. In 1854, three New York teams decided they would use balls that weighed 5½ to 6 ounces. The weight changed to between 6 and 6¼ ounces three years later. In 1858, it was decided that the center be made of India rubber. In 1860, everything changed again. The official weight of a baseball was reduced back to 5¾ ounces, then to 5 ½ ounces in 1861, and to 5¼ ounces in 1867. In 1871, it was decided that the weight of the rubber inside should be no more than 1 ounce. This seemed to satisfy everyone, because the baseball did not change again throughout the remainder of the 19th century. As of 2011, MLB rules specify that the center can be made of any rubber or cork and the ball must weigh between 5 and 5¼ ounces.
Modern Era
The last notable change to baseballs came about in 1974 when MLB changed the outside covering to cowhide from horsehide, as horsehide became hard to come by. Major League Baseball now puts its baseballs through stringent testing before play. They are shot from an air cannon at a speed of 85 feet per second at a wall of northern white ash and must rebound at no more than 0.578 percent of their original speed.
Fun Facts
When pitchers began complaining in 1921 that they could not get a good grip on new balls, umpires began the practice of rubbing them before a game. Lena Blackburne’s Rubbing Mud is currently used, and its exact recipe is a deep secret. Rawlings also now makes baseballs with microchips inside that record a ball's speed."
SOURCE: www.livestrong.com/article/359789-history-of-the-baseball...
How did a burly, middle-aged soldier become an enduring, homo-erotic icon? Was he playing Ignatius Loyola? Francis of Assisi? Paul of Tarsus? Not quite. The only saint who really cuts it as a cover-boy is St Sebastian, that curly-haired Roman youth shot with arrows on the orders of the emperor Diocletian. Sebastian's appeal to gay men seems obvious. He was young, male, apparently unmarried and martyred by the establishment. Unlike, say, St Augustine of Hippo, he also looks good in a loincloth and tied to a tree. And never was Sebastian more winsome than in the seven versions of him sculpted inside the choir of Saint-Maurice Church in Orschwiller..
What's going on? Well, Sebastian is living proof of the fact that if saints didn't exist, we would have to invent them. Thanks to the arrows, he's the one martyr in art everyone can spot. (Iconography is so unfair. Who now recognises St Stephen's stones or St Lawrence's griddle?) A twinky torso also helps. Yet, according to his hagiographer, Ambrose of Milan, Sebastian was a red-blooded captain in the Praetorian Guard, a centurion of middling years: he is the patron saint of soldiers and athletes, not hairdressers. Far from riling Diocletian by proselytising for same-sex love, he was killed for converting Romans to Christianity. And we all know where that led.
But there is worse. Not only was St Sebastian middle-aged and butch, he wasn't killed with arrows. Punctured, yes, but not killed. The perforated martyr was rescued from the stake and nursed back to health by St Irene of Rome – a woman, boys – before unwisely haranguing Diocletian for his paganism as he passed by on a litter. Unmoved by his tenacity, the emperor had Sebastian clubbed to death; his body was then dumped in Rome's sewers. Had history been less kind, he might have ended up as patron saint of poo.
How this would have affected his career as a gay coverboy we will never know. I can only recall one representation in art of St Sebastian thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, and that – by Reni's contemporary and fellow Bolognese, Lodovico Carracci – is safely tucked away in The Getty Center in Los Angeles. By contrast, there are more pictures of the arrow-filled Sebastian than there are of any other martyr I can think of, painted by everyone from Aleotti to Zick by way of Rubens, Botticelli, Titian and John Singer Sargent. The National Gallery alone has a dozen, including ones by Crivelli, Gerrit Honthorst and Luca Signorelli. And they're all of the same Sebastian, the one who ends up, eventually, on the cover of reFRESH: a paragon of male beauty, his toned body, prettily stuck with arrows, exposed to our gaze; the martyr described by Oscar Wilde – who, in French exile, took the alias "Sebastian Melmoth" – as "a lovely brown boy with crisp, clustering hair and red lips".
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/arr...
Arrows of desire: How did St Sebastian become an enduring, homo-erotic icon? It’s a way? But other wise you could have a nice understanding about arrows:
The five arrows are the five pillars to design the light inside your body and the pathways to immortal soul. Passed times, actually, future are realistic two other are united in the astral and are properties of auspicious answering from ancestors and reborn of consciousness.
The Promise Revealed .The arrow association with timeline is long and varied and much must wait for a more in depth recounting, but for now let us say he opened many doors for me and was a light on the inner and outer path towards knowledge and truth, love and the secrets of the universe.
My entire life has been filled with a calling and a longing. These longings and search for love and truth have been a blessing and a curse.I have always wanted to know who am I? Where did we come from?What is our purpose here? Why is there so much suffering and discord and anxiety on our planet? Why is the world so distorted and fractured,and so caught up in wars pollution ignorance superstition and fear?
Even as a small child I could see the answers to many of the worlds problems that were simple and easy fixes – if mankind would but realize the folly of his ways! It seems every question that was answered opened up 10 more. It seems I was never satisfied.
In my youth, I could really not understand why this planet was such a bloody mess. Once when I was pondering such questions as an 8-year-old, I asked my mother, Mom what is out there in outer space? Where does it go? When does it end? She replied: It never ends.
I nervously laughed, as if to deny the responsibility of accepting an infinite ever-expanding consciousness, and replied: It has to end somewhere. She laughed and saidWhere then? At a wall?
What is on other side?”
This really got me thinking, and I shook my head as I walked down the stairs to my own room, which was in the basement.
I got into bed and laid back. I fell into a melancholy reverie of infinite space. Into this otherwise dark room,I watched with interest as a small star maneuvered into the center of myone window. This Light, which I obviously now know to be my space family, had noticed my interest in deeper truths and proceeded to talk to me!
I had a short or long, I cannot remember to be honest, informational exchange on some deep and not so deep subjects. When I finally got to the question?
Well what is going to happen to planet earth? It surely cannot go on like this or we will most definitely destroy ourselves with they way things are going now, I was given an unexpected answer.
I was shown how eventually everything would come to a head and then at some point every one, or maybe not everyone, would be lifted off the planet and find themselves in giant space ships. Then they would be taken to other beautiful new and pristine planets to try and make a fresh start. For some reason, I felt I might be left behind.
Now how accurate my remembrances are, or exactly what this means, is open for debate. I only know that later in life while coming to grips with the fact that we are not alone in the universe and that I was being contacted by intelligent life from beyond our solar system, I remembered this telepathic exchange, and as far as I can recollect, this was my first contact.
My life was pretty normal for the most part and my deep hunger for truth and search for expanded awareness led me to Carlos Castanedas teachings and writings from Don Juan. These series of books were for me the key to growth and realizing myself as an infinite being of light.
I was enthralled and could not get enough of these books. I was more interested in the actual knowledge and the seemingly magical understandings of how we perceive and what really makes our reality as opposed to the Power plants that Don Juan gave to Carlos to help him to stop the world and to perceive a separate reality. The concepts Don Juan was expounding on were the basis of quantum Physics.
I was instinctively drawn to these understandings and somehow knew we make our own reality by our beliefs and where we place our attention. I was practicing the various secrets of gaining personal power and had some profound beyond belief type of happenings. Growing up in Laguna Beach where Timothy Leary lived, it wasnt long before I was having my own experiences with Power Plants, mushrooms and eventually LSD.
LAGUNA BEACH 100 Yards FROM MY CHILDHOOD OCEAN FRONT HOME
WHAT MY OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES FELT LIKE TRYING TO COMMUNICATE WITH SEMJASES SHIP
The details of these awakenings will be shared later, but for now suffice to say that I Saw my death, my will and realized myself as a Luminous being.
I realized that we are in essence, a luminous, nameless cluster of feelings that is held together by the binding force of life. I flew on the wings of my perception and learned how to shrink my tonal and even was visited by The Moth of Knowledge.
For some, these descriptions are metaphors, but for me these are real and accurate descriptions of the steps to becoming a man of knowledge and the path with heart. Seeing my auric egg was part and parcel of my spiritual awakening and my expanded perceptions of reality helped me to understand who we are and how we interact with the immensity of the infinite reality.
It was around this time at age 16 or so I was very interested in Psychic phenomenon and the developing of Siddhis or the powers of the mind. I developed a sort of obsession with pyramids in high school and was talking to a girl at school who upon hearing of my interest, proclaimed, I know the PYRAMID MAN.
 Pyramid Power in action!
13 - fred healing machine
Fred’s Front page of The National Examiner Article
He is holding his scale model of the X-1 healing machine and the design of a time machine / spaceship utilizing the interstellar conversion process
The pyramid man, really? I had to meet him and my first meeting was days later when I knocked on the door of Fred Bell. He was literally carrying in his very first run of 50 gold pyramids, which we would later share with the entire world.
I spent many hours and days and years of my life in close association with Fred Bell, who was my friend, teacher and benefactor and spiritual guide. We developed many healing technologies utilizing pyramids, crystals and lasers. The history of our association is long and varied and much must wait for a more in depth recounting, but for now let me say he opened many doors for me and was a light on the inner and outer path towards knowledge and truth, love and the secrets of the universe.
Our esoteric experiences and metaphysical alchemical journeys culminated in not only out-of-body experiences, which reached not only into the heart of the galaxy, but even unto the heart of creation itself.
These ineffable experiences transcend all logic and defy the intellect and spill out onto the floor of belief where only visionary mystics, impeccable warriors, saints and angels dare to tread. I must most likely be a visionary or a mystic because god knows I am no angel or saint. My flirtations with impeccability, if I dare to describe them as such, have been limited to very brief short bursts of accumulated personal power, which have enabled brief flights on the wings of my perception. I have touched infinity and knelt before the infinite light and worshiped the glory of God.
I am but a small speck of nothingness in the vastness of forever and God has made me whole and showed me the glory and the beauty of creation. I know from whence I came and I long to return to this divine source. I am ever on the path home gathering light and life immersed in the folly of men, ever seeking the truth far above and within my own self. This love and experience is so all powerful and consuming that my entire life is devoted to serving this ever living presence of love, life and light.
This eternal presence of perfection and ever expanding love, this primal relationship, this way of the eternal is right here before us and within us every step of the way. It is our souls right to follow the path of love home. On and on we must go with our inner and outer, our most innate self and awareness and consciousness as it is striving incessantly to realize this truth – this I AM .
Though many are blind to this reality for many reasons, the infinite light, the infinite love of creation waits within and without you hiding in plain sight throughout all of creation. There is no force, no power, no amount of hate, no tidal wave of fear, and no mountain of ignorance that can ever hold back this infinite being within you from realizing your self.
This is one aspect of the The Promise that I can Reveal as I try to share with you, to encourage you to make your way home. I can make a promise to you now. I know, I swear to you that one day, if you have not already realized it, that you too will share in this communion of love and the return of the spirit of truth in the very heart of your soul and you will one day share this through your life well lived, to every being throughout creation itself. We will stop all of the hate and all of the killing will stop. We will end the suffering and ignorance on this beautiful blue jewel floating in the immensity of God’s infinite light. We do have the power within us to bring Peace to this world.
The second part of The Promise is coming true before my eyes and is my lifelong calling. Today my hours of study, my intense searching for truth, my deep reflections and endless meditations are now allowing me to be of service to our beautiful planet. I have prepared and after many hard fought battles with my lower personality vehicle and accumulated scars, I now try to fly on scarred wings. Under Fred Bell’s watchful eye, after many years of leaving my body and going through various initiations of light body awareness, I was rewarded with several live contacts with my space family.
The first live contact was the culmination of a magical time with a member of the earths Resistance Movement. This was a military Special Forces brother who refused to work for the dark side and was rewarded with help from our space family. His name was Jim and I owe him a great debt of gratitude. He was sent to act as my teacher at Gabriel Greens house. The Ascended Master Hilarion, who is the Cohan of the 5th Ray of Concrete Science and Knowledge, sent Jim, who I consider my brother and teacher of light, to me.
He was instructed to teach me many things. In the course of my association, I was gifted with my first real open visit from Semjase. I was with Jim, Gabriel Green and Michael El Legion. I had a very emotional telepathic contact, which ended in me never having to see another space ship to know that they are real and there are very physical beings who ride in space ships made of matter and living light.
My second encounter with Semjase that I am allowed to remember is when I was with Fred in the living room of his house atop the Vortex in Laguna Beach. I was lying on the floor and the next moment I was standing inside a space ship. Many wonderful things and many amazing revelations were shared with me. And in the morning, I was returned to adifferent location in his living room with Fred by my side. You are the master now, he exclaimed. I could only watch in frustration as right before my eyes most of my experiences were erased from my mind. I had all the memories before me and I watched helpless to stop the eraser that slowly step-by-step removed almost all of my experience. I managed to keep one major memory and this is what I have held onto for all of my life. All that remains of the most amazing day of my entire life is my remembrance of The Promise.
THE MINI ALL SPARK IN ACTION
I made a promise to Semjase before I left the ship on the teleportation beam and I am fulfilling part of that promise by sharing with you here on this site my most intimate and personal struggles and victories of the light in my life and as I have witnessed them on the surface of the planet and in my personal life.
I promised to her that one day I would create a show, a party of love to honor the Galactic Federation of Light. This event would share the wonderful healing technologies of light color and sound that were part of my own individual awakening process. I promised to her that I would do my best to help people overcome the darkness on this planet by unifying them into a purpose and a mission to heal themselves and the planet herself. I would teach others that by invoking love and light into their beings they could realize that by entering into the silence they too can realize the living presence of God within themselves.
This picture below is of one of our Major Portal Vortexes we created in Fred’s living room! We utilized the laser light crystal sound color technology in conjunction with Pyramids. We amplified and accelerated these fields with the violet flame-tesla coils to achieve our own artificial time warp zones! These vortexes were actually accelerated Scalar field ;Event horizons that we used in the alchemical transfiguration of ourselves in activations designed to heal the timelines ourselves and the planet herself through interaction with the grid lines or vortex portals, which were accessed through the mineral kingdom and the vortexes of our own Christ Consciousness or I AM Presence.
Some of The Main Components of A Promise Pyramid System
I also promised that I would gather people in a large group or groups in a concerted effort to send this light into the heart of the mother herself. I was shown how this could change the world. I do not know if this is in an instant or if this is even a possibility. I do know that I have faith that this is true. I have prayed with all my heart and being and have thought of nothing else and never wanted anything more than to serve the light by fulfilling this promise and for me this is what I must do. I bare my soul to you, the world, and reveal this Promise.
The Promise being fulfilled at the funerary Temple in Egypt
From the source of all that is good, beautiful and true, I pray that I am successful and that my effort will bear fruit and hasten the day of the return of love and light to the world of men and upon our world. I know whether I am successful or not, that love is already here inside my heart and yours, and one day very soon this love will spread like a fire and envelope the entire world and be evident in the very nature of our reality, and we will once again be home. Living in harmony with nature and each other is not so hard to do.It is for this dream, this promise I am here to serve.
May the kingdom come quickly
Rob Potter
Inventei uma nail art com ombré invertido pra ficar mais bonitinho o laranja. Não ando no clima de cremosão, então... :P
O bom desse desafio é que pelo menos na cor não fico com dúvida! :D
Aí tem 2 camadas de Chris da Lorena;
1 camada de Cobertura Encantada da Risqué;
Ombré com glitter ching-ling fedorento;
Só espero que amanhã meu chefe não me chame pra nenhuma reunião. :P
Beijos meninas e boa noite! ;*
Self.
Trying out new places. I'm in Italy for some time now. This is a nice scenery different from my usual ones.
Water skiing was invented in 1922 when Ralph Samuelson used a pair of boards as skis and a clothesline as a tow rope on Lake Pepin in Lake City, Minnesota. The sport remained a little-known activity for several years. Then, Samuelson performed shows from Michigan to Florida. In 1966, the American Water Ski Association formally acknowledged Samuelson as the first water skiier on record. Samuelson was also the first ski racer, first to go over a jump ramp, first to slalom ski, and the first to put on a water ski show.[1] He experimented with different positions on the skis for several days until July 2, 1922. Finally, Ralph discovered that leaning backwards in the water with ski tips up and poking out of the water at the tip was optimal. His brother Ben towed him and they reached a speed of 20 miles per hour. Samuelson also achieved the first ski jump on July 8, 1925 using a greased 4 feet (1.2 m) by 16 feet (4.9 m) ramp, making him the first water ski jumper.
Ridley Memorial
Erected by public subscription
John Ridley, National Benefactor 1806 –1887
The reaping machine invented by John Ridley in 1843 so reduced the cost of harvesting as to make available immense areas of land for agriculture. Thus increasing the industry, commerce and wealth of Australia. In declining to patent his invention Ridley manifested great unselfishness and noble patriotism.
Opening Ceremony
The Gates of this Memorial were formally opened on 1st September 1933 by His Excellency the Governor of South Australia Sir Alexander Hore-Ruthven VC KCMG GB DSC. Ref: Gate Plaque - transcription.
What John Ridley did for South Australia
By Stephen Parsons
Memorial Gate to be erected
This dignified and ornate structure is to be known as the Ridley memorial entrance. Messrs Lawson & Cheeseman, of Adelaide, are the architects, and a tender has been accepted for the work, which will be completed before the date of the next September Show. This will serve to perpetuate the memory of Ridley and his work to succeeding generations.
By a happy coincidence, the Showgrounds at Wayville is directly opposite the scene of the first public trial of the reaping machine, made in December, 1843. Ref: Chronicle (Adelaide) 4-5-1933.
John Ridley brought from England one of Watt’s beam steam engines. It was installed at Hindmarsh and there the first flour was ground from South Australian wheat. His connection with farmers resulted in his wondering whether it would not be possible to invent a machine which would materially simplify harvesting. Other people talked, but he concentrated on the problem and eventually, to the astonishment of everybody, solved it.
When the first trial took place we can in imagination see the harvest field and hear the farmers discussing Mr Ridley and his wonderful machine. But we have more than imagination to go on. Mr F S Dutton, in his book on the early days of this State, gives a most interesting account of what he saw “One afternoon during the summer of 1843-4," he says, "some friends met me in Adelaide and asked me to join them in their ride to a neighbouring farm, where Mr Ridley's reaping machine, which they said both reaped and threshed the corn at the same time, was successfully at work. It was not generally known at that time what the machine was, and, although we were all incredulous, we started to see with our own eyes how far the reports we had heard were correct. By the time we reached the farm a large field had mustered to witness the proceedings: and there, sure enough, was the machine at work, by the agency of two horses and two men, one to guide the horses, the other the machine. There was no mistake about it—the heads of the corn were threshed off perfectly clean: and a winnowing machine being at hand, the corn was transferred out of the reaper into the latter machine, and carts were ready to convey the cleaned wheat to the mill two miles off where the wheat, which an hour before was waving in the fields in all the lustre of gold tints, was by Mr Ridley's steam engine ground into flour."
Governor's Tribute
A little later the first show of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society was held, when a special prize of 10 guineas was offered for a reaping machine and was, of course, won by Mr Ridley. In presenting the prize, the Governor, Sir George Grey, said—"l am peculiarly gratified in having this opportunity of expressing my opinion of the value of Mr Ridley's machine, which I have very carefully inspected. I am firmly convinced that it will be of the utmost importance to the agriculturists of this country, as it will enable them successfully to compete in corn with any part of the world."
The members of the Society did not content themselves with the presentation of a prize to Mr Ridley, but when the machine had been in successful operation for ten years they carried the following resolution, which is certainly a splendid tribute and one most richly deserved: —"Resolved that, in the opinion of this Society, the introduction of the reaping machine invented by John Ridley, of Hindmarsh, has been of the utmost importance to the practical development of the agricultural capabilities of South Australia, and this meeting believes that it expresses the unanimous sense of the colonists of the great and lasting benefits which Mr Ridley has thereby conferred upon the community. The gracious manner in which Mr Ridley contributed to the public his admirable machine by refusing to secure for himself either a monopoly of or a money profit by its manufacture, deserves to be recorded by this society. It presents for his acceptance its hearty and grateful thanks, with every good wish, for his further prosperous career."
I cannot refrain from quoting from a letter by Governor Grey to Miss Ridley. Here are his words:—"It was then that your father showed himself the greatest benefactor of the country by inventing the first reaping machine which was peculiarly adapted to the climate and soil of South Australia. He often conversed with me while he was constructing his machine, for I ever regarded him as a friend, and as one of those eminent men whom South Australia was so fortunate in numbering among its first settlers. He gave his invention to all his fellow citizens, to be a free blessing to the entire colony. May his name ever be held in reverence for this noble act." Ref: Advertiser (Adelaide) 2-9-1933.
"Tente. Sei lá, tem sempre um pôr-do-sol esperando para ser visto, uma árvore, um pássaro, um rio, uma nuvem. Pelo menos sorria, procure sentir amor. Imagine. Invente. Sonhe. Voe. Se a realidade te alimenta com merda, meu irmão, a mente pode te alimentar com flores. Eu não estou fazendo nada de errado. Só estou tentando deixar as coisas um pouco mais bonitas."
- Caio Fernando Abreu
R.I.P. Steve, The Man who invented the future
133rd Day
Very bad news tonight.. Rest In Peace dear Steve, you were and will be an inspiration for generations and a very good person. Thanks for all you made.
Cya mate.
The Man who invented the FUTURE
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Post Production with Lightroom 3.3 & Photoshop CS5
©2011, Stefano Minella Photo
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Para quem quer se soltar invento o cais
Invento mais que a solidão me dá
Invento lua nova a clarear
Invento o amor e sei a dor de me lançar
Eu queria ser feliz
Invento o mar
Invento em mim o sonhador
Para quem quer me seguir eu quero mais
Tenho o caminho do que sempre quis
E um saveiro pronto pra partir
Invento o cais
E sei a vez de me lançar.
( Cais - Composição: Milton Nascimento/Ronaldo Bastos)
FACEBOOK: Buzios Summer Park
Orkut: perfil Buzios Summer Park
twitter:@bzsummerpark _ siga-nos
Desejo que todos encontrem seu caminho e se lancem na certeza de serem felizes.
Muita paz e muita luz em todos os seus dias.
“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.” ~ Henry Ford
Amazing Stories / Magazin-Reihe
- Jacque Morgan / Mr. Fosdick invents the "Seidlitzmobile"
art: Frank R. Paul
Editor: Hugo Gernsback
Experimenter Publishing Co. / USA 1926
Reprint: Comic-Club NK 2010
ex libris MTP
I invented a berry frame around our new Christmas sign by shooting through what's left of the crab apple tree.
"A single cup of coffee can create a friendship that lasts for 40 years"
Turkish Coffee is the name given to a type of coffee whose preparation and brewing techniques were invented by the Turks. It has a unique taste, froth, aroma, brewing technique and presentation… in other words it has its own identity and tradition.
The first coffee was made in the Arabian Peninsula by boiling coffee cherries. The new method invented by the Turks revealed coffee's true flavour and peerless aroma. The Turks introduced coffee to Europe where for many years it was prepared and consumed as Turkish Coffee.
Turkish Coffee is made from high quality arabica coffee beans from Central America and Brazil that are blended and carefully roasted, then very finely ground. The coffee is mixed with water and the desired amount of sugar and cooked in a "cevze", or Turkish coffeepot. The coffee is served in small cups. The coffee must be left to stand for a short time after serving to allow the grounds to settle at the bottom of the cup.
HISTORY
Istanbul was introduced to coffee in 1517 by Özdemir Pasha, the Ottoman Governor of Yemen, who had grown to love the drink while stationed in that country.
Prepared in a cezve or "güğüm" (copper vessel) using the technique invented by the Turks, the drink became known as Turkish Coffee.
The Turkish public became acquainted with coffee through the establishment of coffeehouses; the first coffeehouse opened in the district of Tahtakale and others rapidly cropped up all over the city. Coffeehouses and coffee culture soon became an integral part of Istanbul social culture; people came here throughout the day to read books and beautiful texts, play chess and backgammon and discuss poetry and literature.
As coffee became a staple in palace cuisine as well as in private homes, its consumption increased dramatically. The raw beans were roasted in pans and then ground in mortars. The coffee was then brewed in cezves and served with great care to esteemed friends.
Thanks to the efforts of merchants and travellers who passed through Istanbul, and even Ottoman ambassadors, Turkish Coffee's renown soon spread to Europe and ultimately to the whole world.
CHARACTERISTICS
Turkish Coffee… Is the world's oldest coffee brewing method.
Consists of foam, coffee and grounds.
Remains on the palate longer than all other types of coffee thanks to its soft and velvety foam.
Remains hot for a long time thanks to its delicious foam, which keeps its form for several minutes after the coffee is poured.
Cools much more slowly than other varieties of coffee as it is served in thin cups, thus prolonging the drinking pleasure.
Has an unforgettable flavour thanks to its thick, syrupy consistency that stimulates the taste buds.
Is thicker, softer and more aromatic than other types of coffee.
Is easily discernible from other types of coffee due to its unique aroma and foam.
Is the only coffee that can be boiled.
Is the only coffee that can be used to predict the future. Cafedomancy: The use of coffee grounds to cast fortunes.
Is unique in that its grounds are left in the cup: the coffee is not filtered or strained because the grounds settle at the bottom of the cup.
Does not have to be sweetened after it has been poured as the sugar is added during preparation.
THE TURKS AND
TURKISH COFFEE
Drinking coffee is a unique pleasure for Turks.
A cup of Turkish coffee is endowed with a variety of important connotations for Turks: friendship, affection and sharing. This is best illustrated in the old saying: "A single cup of coffee can create a friendship that lasts for 40 years". Turkish coffee is such an intrinsic part of Turkish culture that it has given its name to the word for breakfast, "kahvaltı", which translates as "before coffee", and is derived from the words "kahve" (coffee) and "altı" (before).
Serving a cup of Turkish Coffee is also a way of sealing a friendship. The preparation and care taken by a host in serving Turkish Coffee to his guests is an important aspect of hospitality. In Turkey, it is traditional for a prospective bride to serve coffee to her suitor and his family when they come to ask for her hand in marriage. Accepting a cup of coffee is a source of pride to the person who offers it. This is illustrated in the Turkish expressions "his coffee can be drunk" and "I would drink a cup of your coffee".
Nothing compares to long, friendly conversation over a cup of frothy Turkish Coffee, followed by having your fortune told.
Shot with the Cokin Blue/Yellow Varicolor Polarizer.
There's a video for this image where the water changes colour from yellow to blue. For the Flickr On Location group.
I wanted to write a review about the blue/yellow polarizer, as there's limited information about this filter circulating on the web or in books. When I thought about writing a review, I couldn't help but think about regular polarizers and their origin. Who invented this amazing photographic tool? I use them all the time, take them for granted, and can't imagine where landscape photography would be without them. Perish the thought.
Although some of the details are sketchy, I found out that a Harvard dropout named Edwin Land invented a polarizer in 1929 when he was 19 years old. Interestingly, he also founded the Polaroid Corporation. And, car manufacturers were interested in polarizing technology to reduce the glare from car headlights. I was very amused when I heard about that. But enough about Ed. Let's move on to Jean Coquin.
Jean Coquin is the French photographer who founded Cokin, the filter company that created the blue/yellow varicolor polarizer. I can find nothing about the origin of this filter. If you have any information on this, please let me know. I'd be interested.
Okay, the history lesson is over. Let's get on with the review.
I'd first heard about the blue/yellow polarizer in a landscape photography book. The author explained nothing about how it worked, just that it was used for a couple shots. I was curious and wanted to know more. Months later, I decided to buy one. At $40 and some change, I figured it was worth the money to test it out.
The day the package arrived, I saw glass encased in a plastic square. I thought, "Okay... how do you get the circle filter out of this plastic case?" Then I realized, the whole thing IS the filter. I let out a very loud, "FUUUUUUUUCK!!! Who the hell designed this thing?! What were they thinking?!" If you haven't figured out why I was upset, you probably don't own a Cokin filter holder. What this meant was that I couldn't rotate the polarizer independently of the holder itself. So, if I wanted to use a neutral density graduated filter in tandem with the polarizer, I'd have to stick it to the polarizer with adhesive putty. It's a bit of a pain, let me tell you. A sprocket mount would have been preferred immensely.
After my anger subsided, I took another look at the filter. I even pried it open just to make sure I wasn't crazy. I wasn't, and I discovered that there were two pieces of glass in there. I took the filter out on my deck and held it up to my eye. I live right next to I-5. I was looking around, rotating the filter, and changing the reflections on peoples' windshields from yellow to blue and back again. I was starting to have fun and smiled a little. To my left, I changed the sky from sunset pink to purple. To my right, I turned the sky a subtle peach. Hmmm...
I soon came to realize that this filter was like being able to play with Kelvins and a polarizer at the same time. You could warm things up or cool them down. Sometimes both at the same time. A bit of a mind twister. And where a regular polarizer reduces or removes reflections, this filter added colour to the reflections. And you could control the degree of colour, to an extent. In some ways, it was like having a continuously variable warm up filter that went from 81A to 81D with a twist of the hand. Kind of like Singh-Ray's variable neutral density filter that goes from 2 stops to 8. This also made me wonder why someone hadn't invented a variable warm-up filter, or cooling filter for that matter.
This filter can be VERY over the top. Overall, I prefer its subtle uses and like it most in low light conditions. It was pretty subtle on the waterfall picture I took with it. You can see the blue on the rocks, but it's not objectionable, in my opinion. I think it's quite pretty actually. However, that picture was colour corrected for a purple cast in post-processing.
That brings up another point. The purple cast. In some cases, it works for the picture. Other times, it's an eyesore. In many photo software programs, you can pick an area of a picture that should be white, click on it, and voila, purple be gone. But doing so can also undo part of the magic of the filter. It's hard to describe, but it's different. The picture you're now looking at was not colour corrected, yet doesn't have much of a purple cast at all. I honestly don't know why.
That brings up another interesting point. The filter is kind of unpredictable. Oh, you'll get the hang of it, but every situation is a little different. I turned leaves in a forest from green to yellow and saw how this created a greater contrast between the leaves and their tree trunks that wasn't there a moment ago. There's still much to discover. It makes you think about light a lot and just how much polarization is going on all around you everyday. It draws attention to it by colouring it for you.
A little over $40 buys you a whole lot of fun. And a couple hassles. But it's worth it to me. FYI, Singh-Ray makes their own version called the Gold-N-Blue polarizer that sells for around $190, they offer it in sprocket mount, and it's probably optically sharper than Cokin's. Well, that's my review. You'll see more pictures I've taken with this filter in the future.
- No echo, in the remote forests of this world ....
The world never ... ever world ......
The painted world ....., ..... invented world...
That ...., in that other world .......
www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5tWYmIOWGk
- No hay eco,en los lejanos bosques del otro mundo....
Del mundo de nunca..., del mundo de siempre......
Del mundo pintado....., del mundo inventado......
De ese...., de ese otro mundo.....
Aggie Ring loves a good "selfie!"
I could tell that Aggie Ring was impressed. After several moments of silence he spoke out and said, “If my Eyes of Texas aren’t deceiving me, that’s the biggest damn lightbulb I’ve ever seen! I guess it’s true… Everything IS bigger in Jersey!”
The Aggie Ring woke me up early this morning. In fact it was even before 11:30 a.m. so I knew he wanted to do something. I asked the Aggie Ring, “What do you want to do Aggie Ring?” The Aggie Ring replied, “I want to go see the lightbulb!” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about so I said, “What lightbulb?” The Aggie Ring said with emphasis, “Let there be LIGHT!” Then it hit me. Aggie Ring wanted to drive him up the Parkway to the site of Thomas A. Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory so he could see the Art Deco Edison Memorial Tower and “Big Ass Lightbulb!”
Other than the time he told me that he thought Elvis took our change in a tollbooth on the New Jersey State Turnpike, Aggie Ring has great ideas. It’s only about a 20 to 25 minute drive up the Parkway from our house so Aggie Ring and I set off to see the Edison Memorial Tower. The last time we’d been there it had been in horrible shape and they were beginning work on restoring it. That was a bit over a year ago so I assumed that Aggie Ring figured out that they would be finished with the conservation work on the historical site.
When we drove down the little side street where the tower is located the Aggie Ring was overwhelmed with awe at the restored site. Aggie Ring was truly “speechless!” It’s just as beautiful as the day it was built. They did an incredible job on the restoration. After a few moments sitting in the car just looking out the window Aggie Ring broke his silence and asked me, “Did you bring a cigar? Edison loved his cigars and I think he’d have wanted you to smoke a cigar while you’re looking the place over.” Unfortunately I had left my cigars at home so the Edison “smoke out” will have to happen on a future date.
The laboratory building is no longer at this site but it’s still impressive to think of not only the electric lightbulb, but all of the other great inventions that Mr. Edison invented here. Aggie Ring said, “Imagine. He did all this stuff without the help of an Aggie Ring!”
The Aggie Ring and I walked around the tower and took some photos of the “Big Ass Lightbulb” and the historical plaques at its base. The Aggie Ring and I are planning on going back some evening when the lightbulb is illuminated. Aggie Ring said, “It would be cool if you could get a photo during a thunderstorm when there’s lightning behind the tower.” I told Aggie Ring, “You’re crazy! I’m not standing out in a field during a lightning storm with an Aggie Ring on my finger! Maybe if we can get a VMI grad to come with us. Their rings are so damn big a lightning bolt would hit one of them before us!”
Aggie Ring said, “It’s a good thing Edison invented the lightbulb or there’d be a lot of Waggies drinking their tequila shots by candlelight!” I told the Aggie Ring, “True… Those Waggies love their tequila the invention of the lightbulb makes it a lot easier for them to pour the tequila and do body shots!”
Aggie Ring asked me to provide some info on the Edison “Big Ass Lightbulb” Memorial Tower for your educational enlightenment (“Get it?” Aggie Ring said):
Thomas Alva Edison Memorial Tower and Menlo Park Museum, New Jersey
"Let there be light." Thomas Alva Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory and Memorial Tower. Those of us on the Jersey Shore call it the "Big Ass Lightbulb!”
The Edison Tower, located on the site of the original laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, to which Thomas Alva Edison moved in 1876, was erected in 1937 as a monument to the great inventor. The Tower is the gift of William Slocum Barstow to the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Incorporated in behalf of the Edison Pioneers. It was dedicated on February 11, 1838, the ninety-first anniversary of the inventor's birth.
Rising 131 ft. 4 in. above the ground, the tower looms as the highest discernible object for many miles. Surmounting the 117 ft. 8 in. concrete-slab structure is a 13 ft. 8 in. replica of the original incandescent lamp which, when illuminated, can be seen for a distance of several miles. It once served as an airplane beacon. The Tower is designed for pressure of wind at a velocity of 120 miles per hour. In its construction, which consumed slightly less than eight months, approximately 1200 barrels of Edison Portland cement and 50 tons of reinforced steel were used.
The large bulb on top of the Tower was cast by the Corning Glass Works. The replica bulb contains 153 separate pieces of amber tinted Pyrex glass, 2 in. thick, set upon a steel frame. The bulb is 5 ft. in diameter at the neck and 9 ft. 2 in. in diameter at the greatest width and weighs, without the steel frame on which it is placed, in excess of three tons. Before the restoration, inside this Pyrex glass bulb were four 1000 watt bulbs, four 200 watt bulbs, and four 100 watt bulbs. A duplicate of each was arranged as automatically to cut in should its companion bulb fail.
The Edison Tower has been completely restored and when complete, the bulb is now illuminated with modern Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology. Mr. Edison would be pleased with this, I’m sure.
While we don’t have any records of exactly what was said when Mr. Edison perfected his invention, I suspect one of his workers shouted out something like this: “Holy Mother of Baby Jesus on a Donkey!” “Mr. Edison, You’ve done it!!! You’ve perfected the Electric Light!!! You truly are King of Kings!!!!”
The tower is located on a mysterious plot of land and exactly at midnight on the night of a full moon, it would be a perfect site for the ritual sacrifice of virgins. Too bad we don’t have any of those in New Jersey! :-)
*********************
Aggie Ring says, “The Road Goes On Forever, and the Party Never Ends!”
Franciscan Way, Ipswich
A view from the old churchyard of St Nicholas's church. That's St Francis Tower behind, by Vine & Vine, 1966. Part of the Greyfriars complex, it had a bad reputation for drugs by the 1980s, and was sold off by the Borough Council, emptied, stripped, reclad and refitted, and is now rebadged as Ipswich One, sought after privately owned apartments.
St Nicholas's church was declared redundant in 1975. It was vested in the care of the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust, and went through a long period of neglect before being controversially bought back by the diocese for a pound for use as a resource and conference centre. There's a nice little restaurant attached, open to all.
I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms
In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.
Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score
Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when
You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greed
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.
Philip Larkin, Going, Going, 1972
mémoire2cité - Sols absorbants, formes arrondies et couleurs vives, les aires de jeux standardisées font désormais partie du paysage urbain. Toujours les mêmes toboggans sécurisés, châteaux forts en bois et animaux à ressort. Ces non-lieux qu’on finit par ne plus voir ont une histoire, parallèle à celle des différentes visions portées sur l’enfant et l’éducation. En retournant jouer au xixe siècle, sur les premiers playgrounds des États-Unis, on assiste à la construction d’une nation – et à des jeux de société qui changent notre vision sur les balançoires du capitalisme. Ce texte est paru dans le numéro 4 de la revue Jef Klak « Ch’val de Course », printemps-été 2017. La version ici publiée en ligne est une version légèrement remaniée à l’occasion de sa republication dans le magazine Palais no 27 1, paru en juin 2018. la video içi www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwj1wh5k5PY The concept for adventure playgrounds originated in postwar Europe, after a playground designer found that children had more fun with the trash and rubble left behind by bombings -inventing their own toys and playing with them- than on the conventional equipment of swings and slides. Narrator John Snagge was a well-known voice talent in the UK, working as a newsreader for BBC Radio - jefklak.org/le-gouvernement-des-playgrounds/ - www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/chasing-the-vanishing-p... or children, playgrounds are where magic happens. And if you count yourself among Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, you probably have fond memories of high steel jungle gyms and even higher metal slides that squeaked and groaned as you slid down them. The cheerful variety of animals and vehicles on springs gave you plenty of rides to choose from, while a spiral slide, often made of striped panels, was a repeated thrill. When you dismounted from a teeter-totter, you had to be careful not to send your partner crashing to the ground or get hit in the head by your own seat. The tougher, faster kids always pushed the brightly colored merry-go-round, trying to make riders as dizzy as possible. In the same way, you’d dare your sibling or best friend to push you even higher on the swing so your toes could touch the sky. The most exciting playgrounds would take the form of a pirate ship, a giant robot, or a space rocket.
“My husband would look at these big metal things and go, ‘Oh my God, those are the Slides of Death!'” - insh.world/history/playground-equipment-of-yesterday-that...
Today, these objects of happy summers past have nearly disappeared, replaced by newer equipment that’s lower to the ground and made of plastic, painted metal, and sometimes rot-resistant woods like cedar or redwood. The transformation began in 1973, when the U.S. Congress established the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which began tracking playground injuries at hospital emergency rooms. The study led to the publication of the first Handbook for Public Playground Safety in 1981, which signaled the beginning of the end for much of the playground equipment in use. (See the latest PPS handbook here.) Then, the American Society for Testing and Materials created a subcommittee of designers and playground-equipment manufacturers to set safety standards for the whole industry. When they published their guidelines in 1993, they suggested most existing playground surfaces, which were usually asphalt, dirt, or grass, needed to be replaced with pits of wood or rubber mulch or sand, prompting many schools and parks to rip their old playgrounds out entirely.
Top: A Space Age rocket-themed playground set by Miracle Playground Equipment, introduced circa 1968, photographed in Burlington, Colorado, in 2009. Above: Two seesaws and a snail-shaped climber, circa 1970s, photographed in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, in 2007. (Photos by Brenda Biondo)
Top: A Space Age rocket-themed playground set by Miracle Playground Equipment, introduced circa 1968, photographed in Burlington, Colorado, in 2009. Above: Two seesaws and a snail-shaped climber, circa 1970s, photographed in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, in 2007. (Photos by Brenda Biondo)
That said, removing and replacing playground equipment takes money, so a certain amount of vintage playground equipment survived into the next millennium—but it’s vanishing fast. Fortunately, Brenda Biondo, a freelance journalist turned photographer, felt inspired to document these playscapes before they’ve all been melted down. Her photographs capture the sculptural beauty and creativity of the vintage apparatuses, as well as that feeling of nostalgia you get when you see a piece of your childhood. After a decade of hunting down old playgrounds, Biondo published a coffee-table book, 2014’s Once Upon a Playground: A Celebration of Classic American Playgrounds, 1920-1975, which includes both her photographs of vintage equipment and pages of old playground catalogs that sold it.
Starting this November, Biondo’s playground photos will hit the road as part of a four-year ExhibitsUSA traveling show, which will also include vintage playground postcards and catalog pages from Biondo’s collection. The show will make stops in smaller museums and history centers around the United States, passing through Temple, Texas; Lincoln, Nebraska; Kansas City, Missouri; and Greenville, South Carolina. Biondo talked to us on the phone from her home in small-town Colorado, where she lives with her husband and children.
This 1975 Miracle catalog page reads, "This famous Lifetime Whirl has delighted three generations of children and still is a safe, playground favorite. Although it has gone through many improvements many of the original models are still spinning on playgrounds from coast to coast." (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)This 1975 Miracle catalog page reads, “This famous Lifetime Whirl has delighted three generations of children and still is a safe, playground favorite. Although it has gone through many improvements many of the original models are still spinning on playgrounds from coast to coast.” (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)Collectors Weekly: What inspired you to photograph playgrounds?Biondo: In 2004, I happened to be at my local park with my 1-year-old daughter, who was playing in the sandbox. I had just switched careers, from freelance journalism to photography, and I was looking for a starter project. I looked around the playground and thought, “Where is all the equipment that I remember growing up on?” They had new plastic contraptions, but nothing like the big metal slides I grew up with. After that, I started driving around to other playgrounds to see if any of this old equipment still existed. I found very little of it and realized it was disappearing quickly. That got to me.I felt like somebody should be documenting this equipment, because it was such a big part—and a very good part—of so many people’s childhoods. I couldn’t find anybody else who was documenting it, and I didn’t see any evidence that the Smithsonian was collecting it. As far as I could tell, it was just getting ripped up and sent to the scrap heap. At first, I started traveling around Colorado where I live, visiting playgrounds. Eventually, I took longer trips around the Southwest, and then I started looking for playgrounds whenever I was in any other parts of the country, like around California and the East Coast. It was a long-term project—shot over the course of a decade. And every year that I was shooting, it got harder and harder to find those pieces of old equipment.
This merry-go-round, photographed in Cañon City, Colorado, in 2006, is very similar to the Lifetime Whirl above. In the background are a rideable jalopy and animals, including four attached to a teeter-totter. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
This merry-go-round, photographed in Cañon City, Colorado, in 2006, is very similar to the Lifetime Whirl above. In the background are a rideable jalopy and animals, including four attached to a teeter-totter. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
Collectors Weekly: How did you find them?
Biondo: I would just drive around. I started hunting down local elementary schools and main-street playgrounds as well as neighborhood playgrounds. If I had a weekend, I would say, “OK, I’m going to drive from my home three hours east to the Kansas border, stay overnight and drive back.” Along the way, I would stop at every little town that I’d pass. They usually had one tiny main-street playground and one elementary school. I never knew what I was going to find. In a poorer area, a town often doesn’t have much money to replace playground equipment, whereas more affluent areas usually have updated their playgrounds by now. It was a bit of a crap shoot. Sometimes, I’d drive for hours and not really find anything—or I’d find one old playground after the other, because I happened to be in an area where equipment hadn’t been replaced.
I couldn’t get to every state, so I had to shoot where I was. I think there certainly are still old playgrounds out there, especially in small towns. But there’s fewer and fewer of them every year. My book has something like 170 photographs. I would guess that half the equipment pictured is already gone. Sometimes, I’d go back to a playground with a nice piece of equipment a year later to reshoot it, maybe in different lighting or a different season, and so often it had been removed. That pressured me to get out as often as I could because if I waited a few weeks, that piece might not be there anymore.
A 1911 postcard shows girls playing on an outdoor gymnasium at Mayo Park in Rochester, Minnesota.
a 1911 postcard shows girls playing on an outdoor gymnasium at Mayo Park in Rochester, Minnesota.
Collectors Weekly: What did you learn about playground history?
Biondo: I didn’t know American playgrounds started as part of the social reform or progressive movement of the early 1900s. Reformers hoped to keep poor inner-city immigrant kids safe and out of trouble. Back then, city children were playing in the streets with nothing to do, and when cars became more popular, kids started to get hit by motorists. Child activists started building playgrounds in big cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York as a way to help and protect these kids. These reformers felt they could build model citizens by teaching cooperation and manners through playgrounds. These early main-street parks would also have playground leaders who orchestrated activities such as games and songs.
“I started driving to playgrounds to see if any old equipment still existed. I found very little of it and realized it was disappearing quickly.”
In the late 1800s, Germans developed what they called “sand gardens,” which are just piles of sand where kids can come dig and build things. There were few of those in the United States as well. But by the early 1900s, the emphasis of playgrounds was on the apparatuses, things kids could climb on or swing on.
Soon after I started researching playground history, I happened to stumble on an eBay auction for a 1926 catalog that the playground manufacturers used to send to schools. At that point, I wasn’t thinking of doing a book, but I thought I could do something with it. I won the catalog; I paid, like, $12 for it. And it was so interesting because I could see this vintage equipment when it was brand new and considered modern and advanced. The manufacturers boasted about how safe it was and how it was good for building both muscles and imaginations.
After that, I would always search on eBay for playground catalogs, and I ended up with about three dozen catalogs from different manufacturers. My oldest is 1916, and my newest is from 1975. So I would take a photograph of some type of merry-go-round, and then I might find that same merry-go-round in a 1930 catalog. Often in the book, I pair my picture with the page from the catalog showing when it was first manufactured. I discovered a couple dozen manufacturers, which tended to be located in the bigger industrial areas with steel manufacturing, like Trenton, New Jersey, and Kokomo and Litchfield, Indiana. Pueblo, Colorado, even had a playground manufacturer. Burke and GameTime were big 20th century companies, and actually are among few still in existence.
The cover of a 1926 catalog for EverWear Manufacturing Company. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
The cover of a 1926 catalog for EverWear Manufacturing Company. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
Collectors Weekly: I recently came across an old metal slide whose steps had the name of the manufacturer, American, forged in openwork letters.
Biondo: I love those. One of the last pages in the book shows treads from six different slides, and they each had the name of their manufacturer in them, including Porter, American, and Burke. One time when I was traveling, I did a quick side trip to a small town with an elementary school. In the parking lot was this old metal slide with the American step treads, lying on its side. You could tell it had just been ripped off out of the concrete, which was still attached to the bottom, and was waiting for the steel recyclers to come and take it away.
I thought, “Oh my gosh, just put it on eBay! Somebody is going to want that. Don’t melt it down.” But nobody thinks about this stuff getting thrown away when it should be preserved. If you go on eBay, you can find a lot of those small animals on springs that little kids ride, because they’re small enough to be shipped. Once I saw someone selling one of those huge rocket ships, which had been dismantled, on eBay, but I don’t know if anybody ever bid on it. It’s rare to see the big stuff, because it is so expensive to ship. It’s like, “What kind of truck do you need to haul this thing away?” I don’t know of anyone who’s collecting those pieces, but I hope somebody is.
A metal slide in Victor, Colorado, had step treads with the name "American" in them. Photographed in 2008. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
A metal slide in Victor, Colorado, had step treads with the name “American” in them. Photographed in 2008. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
Collectors Weekly: It seems like an opportunity for both starting a collection or repurposing the material.
Biondo: I photographed many of the apparatuses as if they were sculptures because they have really cool designs and colors. Even when they’re worn down, the exposed layers of paint can be beautiful. Hardly anybody stops to look at it that way. People drive by and think, “Oh, there’s an old, rusty, rundown playground.” But if you take the time to look closely at this stuff, it’s really interesting. Just by looking at these pieces, you can picture all the kids who played on them.
Collectors Weekly: Aren’t people nostalgic for their childhood playgrounds?
Biondo: While I was taking the pictures, I visited Boulder, Colorado, which is a very affluent community. I was sure there would be no old playground equipment there. When I was driving around, all of a sudden, I looked over and saw this huge rocket ship. It turns out that one of the original NASA astronauts, Scott Carpenter, grew up in Boulder, and this playground was built in the ’60s to honor their hometown boy. Because of that, the citizens of Boulder never wanted to take down the rocket ship. One of the first exhibitions of this photography project happened in Boulder, and at the opening, I sold four prints of that rocket ship. People would come up to me at the exhibition, and they’d go, “Oh my gosh, I grew up playing on this when I was a little kid! Now, my kids are playing on it, and I’m so excited that I can get a picture of it and hang it in their bedroom.” So people have a strong nostalgic attachment to this equipment. It’s sad that most of it’s not going to be around for much longer.
A 1968 Miracle Playground Equipment catalog features the huge rocket-ship play set seen at the top of this story. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
A 1968 Miracle Playground Equipment catalog features the huge rocket-ship playset seen at the top of this story. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
Collectors Weekly: Besides slides and animals on springs, what were some other pieces that were common in older playgrounds?
Biondo: I didn’t come across as many old swings as I expected. I thought they would be all over the place, but I guess they’re gone now because they were so easy to replace. I tended to find merry-go-rounds more frequently—you know, the one where you’d run around pushing them and then jump on. When my kids were younger, they’d go out playground hunting with me, and the merry-go-rounds were their favorite things. They’re just so fun. The other thing you don’t find often is the seesaw or teeter-totter, and that was my favorite.The Karymor Stationary Jingle Ring Outfit appeared in the 1931 playground catalog put out by Pueblo, Colorado's R.F. Lamar and Co. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
The Karymor Stationary Jingle Ring Outfit appeared in the 1931 playground catalog put out by Pueblo, Colorado’s R.F. Lamar and Co. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
Before I started this project, I didn’t know there was such a variety of equipment. I figured I’d see seesaws, swings, slides, and merry-go-rounds. But I had no idea there were such things as revolving swings, which would be attached to a spinning pole via outstretched metal arms. Many mid-century pieces had themes from pop culture like “The Wizard of Oz,” “Cinderella,” “Denis the Menace,” cowboys and Indians, and Saturday-morning cartoons. During the Space Age, you started to see pieces of equipment shaped like rocket ships and satellites, because in the ’60s, Americans were so excited about space exploration. What was going on in the broader culture often got reflected in playground equipment.
Pursuing the catalogs was eye-opening. I live about an hour and a half south of Denver, so I often looked for playgrounds around the city. There, I’d find these contraptions where were shaped like umbrella skeletons, but then they had these rings hanging off the spindles. I’ve never seen them outside of Colorado. Then I bought a 1930s catalog from the manufacturer in Pueblo, Colorado, which is only 45 minutes from me, and it featured this apparatus. Later, I met people in Denver who’d say, “Oh, yeah, I remember that thing as a kid. It’s kind of like monkey bars where you had to try and get from ring to ring swinging and hanging by your arms.” There was so much variety, and even so many variations on the basics.I have a cool catalog from 1926 from the manufacturer Mitchell, which doesn’t exist anymore. I looked at one of the contraptions they advertised and I was like, “Oh my God, this looks like a torture device!” It was their own proprietary apparatus and maybe it didn’t prove to be very popular. I had never seen something like that on a playground. There probably weren’t very many of them installed.
This strange Climbing Swing from the 1926 Mitchell Manufacturing Company catalog looks a bit like a torture device. Brenda Biondo says she's never found one in the wild. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
This Climbing Swing from the 1926 Mitchell Manufacturing Company catalog looks a bit like a torture device. Biondo’s never found one in the wild. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
Collectors Weekly: After a while, were you able to date pieces just by looking at them?
Biondo: From looking at the catalogs, I certainly got a better idea of when things were built. But there were a handful things I couldn’t find in the catalogs. You can guess the age by knowing the design, as well as by looking at the amount of wear and the height of the piece. Usually, the taller it was, the older it was. One of the oldest slides I photographed was probably from the ’30s. I climbed to the top to shoot it as if the viewer were going to go down the slide. Up there, the place where you’d sit before sliding had been used for so many years by so many kids that I could see an outline of all the butts worn into the metal. You can imagine all the children who must have gone down that slide to wear the metal down like that.
This 1930s-era slide, found in Sargents, Colorado, in 2007, developed a butt-shaped imprint. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
This 1930s-era slide, found in Sargents, Colorado, in 2007, developed a butt-shaped imprint. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
Collectors Weekly: How did Modernism influence playground design?
Biondo: In 1953, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a competition for playground design. Modern Art was just getting popular, and the idea of incorporating the theories of Modernist design into utilitarian objects was in the air, and was translated into playgrounds for several years. I have a 1967 catalog that features very abstract playground equipment made from sinuous blobs of poured concrete. And you’ve probably seen some of it, but there’s not too much of that around. That’s another example of how broader cultural trends were reflected in playgrounds.
When most people think of playgrounds, they say, “Oh, that’s a kiddie subject. There’s not much to it.” But when you start looking into them, you realize playgrounds are a fascinating piece of American culture—they go back a hundred years and played a part in most Americans’ lives. These playground pieces are icons of our childhood.
Collectors Weekly:What was the impact of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which launched in 1973?
Biondo: Things started to change after that, which is why I limited to book to apparatuses made before 1975. New playgrounds were starting to be build out of plastic and fiberglass. I looked up the statistics, and according to the little research I’ve done—contrary to what you’d expect—there’s not much difference in the number of injuries on older equipment versus injuries on equipment today. A “New York Times” article from 2011 called “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” explains that studies show when playground equipment was really high and just had asphalt underneath it and not seven layers of mulch, thekids knew they had to be careful because they didn’t want to fall. Nowadays, when everything is lower and there’s so much mulch, kids are just used to jumping down and falling and catching themselves. So kids learned to assess risk by playing on the older equipment. They also learned to challenge themselves because it is a little scary to go up to the top of the thing.
This old postcard of Shawnee Park in Kansas City, Kansas, circa 1912, shows how tall slides could get.
This old postcard of Shawnee Park in Kansas City, Kansas, circa 1912, shows how tall slides could get.
At my local park where you have new equipment, the monkey bars aren’t that high and there’s mulch below it, but a child fell and broke their arm last year. When I was talking to the principal at the school where they had just torn out that old American slide, I asked her, “Why did you replace the equipment?” She said, “We felt the parents in the community were expecting to have a little bit newer and nicer equipment. And this stuff had been here for so long.” And I said, “Have you seen a difference in injury rates since you put up your newer equipment?” She replied, “I’ve been a principal here several years, and we never had a serious broken-bone injury on the playground until four months ago on the new equipment.”
There were some nasty accidents in the ‘60s and ’70s, where kids got their arms or their heads caught in the contraptions. Those issues definitely needed to be assessed. What’s interesting is the Consumer Product Safety Commission never issued requirements, just suggested guidelines. But manufacturers felt that if their equipment didn’t meet those guidelines, they’d be vulnerable to liability. Everybody went to the extreme, making everything super safe so they wouldn’t risk getting sued.A 1970s-era climbing-bar apparatus, photographed in Rocky Ford, Colorado, in 2006. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
A 1970s-era climbing-bar apparatus, photographed in Rocky Ford, Colorado, in 2006. (Photo by Brenda Biondo)
In the last decade, people have been looking at playground-equipment design and trying to make it more challenging and more encouraging of imaginative play, but without making it more likely someone’s going to get injured. And adults, I think, are realizing kids are spending more time indoors on devices so they want to do everything they can to encourage kids to still get outside, run around, and climb on things.
Collectors Weekly: You don’t need a playground to hurt yourself. When I was a kid, I fell off a farm post and broke my arm.Biondo: Oh, yeah, kids have been falling out trees forever—they always want to climb stuff. Playground politics are always evolving. Even in the 1920s, the catalogs talked about how safe their equipment was, and they were selling these 30-foot slides. Sometimes, I’d be out with my family on a vacation, and we’d make a little side tour to look for an old playground to shoot. My husband would look at these big metal things and go, “Oh my God, those are the Slides of Death!” because they were so huge and rickety. But back then, these were very safe pieces of equipment compared to what kids had been playing on before.
A page from the 1971 GameTime catalog offering rideable Saddle Mates. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
A page from the 1971 GameTime catalog offering rideable Saddle Mates. (Courtesy of Brenda Biondo)
Collectors Weekly: Growing up in the 1980s, I always hated the new fiberglass slides because I’d end up with all these tiny glass shards in my butt.
Biondo: Yeah, I remember that, too. It’s always something. It is fun to talk to people about playgrounds because it reminds them of all the fun stuff they did as kids. When people see pictures of these metal slides, they tell me, “Oh my gosh, I remember getting such a bad burn from a metal slide one summer!” The metal would get so hot in the sun, and kids would take pieces of wax paper with them to sit on so they’d go flying down the slide. I have some old postcards that show playgrounds from the early ’20s. The wood seesaws not only were huge, but they had no handles so you had hold on to the sides of the board where you sat. I’m looking at that like, “Oh my God!” It’s all relative.
playground_postcard_milwaukee
Kids ride the rocking-boat seesaw at a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, park in this postcard postmarked 1910.
(To see more of Brenda Biondo’s playground photos and vintage catalog pages, pick up a copy of her book, “Once Upon a Playground: A Celebration of Classic American Playground, 1920-1975.” To find an exhibition of Biondo’s playground project, or to bring it to your town, visit the ExhibitsUSA page. To learn more about creative mid-century playgrounds around the globe, also pick up, “The Playground Project” by Xavier Salle and Vincent Romagny.) insh.world/history/playground-equipment-of-yesterday-that...
Invent, experiment --- Jazz / that doesn't swing but dances tight (Omer Avital, poem by John Keene)
see the original photograph on www.hobokollektiv.net
© Yonathan Avishai, Wolfsburg, 2015, Florian Fritsch
The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae, is a concept in medieval and ancient philosophy referring to the capricious nature of Fate. The wheel belongs to the goddess Fortuna, who spins it at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel - some suffer great misfortune, others gain windfalls. Fortune appears on all paintings as a woman, sometimes blindfolded, "puppeteering" a wheel.Origins[edit]
The origin of the word is from the "wheel of fortune" - the zodiac, referring to the Celestial spheres of which the 8th holds the stars, and the 9th is where the signs of the zodiac are placed. The concept was first invented in Babylon and later developed by the ancient Greeks. The concept somewhat resembles the Bhavacakra, or Wheel of Becoming, depicted throughout Ancient Indian art and literature, except that the earliest conceptions in the Roman and Greek world involve not a two-dimensional wheel but a three-dimensional sphere, a metaphor for the world. It was widely used in the Ptolemaic perception of the universe as the zodiac being a wheel with its "signs" constantly turning throughout the year and having effect on the world's fate (or fortune). Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn with epicycle, eccentric deferent and equant point. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474.
Vettius Valens, a second century BC astronomer and astrologer, wrote. There are many wheels, most moving from west to east, but some move from east to west.
Seven wheels, each hold one heavenly object, the first holds the moon... Then the eighth wheel holds all the stars that we see... And the ninth wheel, the wheel of fortunes, moves from east to west, and includes each of the twelve signs of fortune, the twelve signs of the zodiac. Each wheel is inside the other, like an onion's peel sits inside another peel, and there is no empty space between them.[this quote needs a citation] In the same century, the Roman tragedian Pacuvius wrote: Fortunam insanam esse et caecam et brutam perhibent philosophical, Saxoque instare in globoso praedicant volubili: Id quo saxum inpulerit fors, eo cadere Fortunam autumant. Caecam ob eam rem esse iterant, quia nihil cernat, quo sese adplicet; Insanam autem esse aiunt, quia atrox, incerta instabilisque sit; Brutam, quia dignum atque indignum nequeat internoscere. Philosophers say that Fortune is insane and blind and stupid, and they teach that she stands on a rolling, spherical rock: they affirm that, wherever chance pushes that rock, Fortuna falls in that direction. They repeat that she is blind for this reason: that she does not see where she's heading; they say she's insane, because she is cruel, flaky and unstable; stupid, because she can't distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.
—Pacuvius, Scaenicae Romanorum Poesis Fragmenta. Vol. 1, ed. O. Ribbeck, 1897
The idea of the rolling ball of fortune became a literary topos and was used frequently in declamation. In fact, the Rota Fortunae became a prime example of a trite topos or meme for Tacitus, who mentions its rhetorical overuse in the Dialogus de oratoribus. Fortuna eventually became Christianized: the Roman philosopher Boethius (d. 524) was a major source for the medieval view of the Wheel, writing about it in his Consolatio Philosophiae - "I know how Fortune is ever most friendly and alluring to those whom she strives to deceive, until she overwhelms them with grief beyond bearing, by deserting them when least expected. … Are you trying to stay the force of her turning wheel? Ah! dull-witted mortal, if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune."
The Wheel was widely used as an allegory in medieval literature and art to aid religious instruction. Though classically Fortune's Wheel could be favourable and disadvantageous, medieval writers preferred to concentrate on the tragic aspect, dwelling on downfall of the mighty - serving to remind people of the temporality of earthly things. In the morality play Everyman (c. 1495), for instance, Death comes unexpectedly to claim the protagonist. Fortune's Wheel has spun Everyman low, and Good Deeds, which he previously neglected, are needed to secure his passage to heaven. Geoffrey Chaucer used the concept of the tragic Wheel of Fortune a great deal. It forms the basis for the Monk's Tale, which recounts stories of the great brought low throughout history, including Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Hercules, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Nero, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and, in the following passage, Peter I of Cyprus. O noble Peter, Cyprus' lord and king,
Which Alexander won by mastery, To many a heathen ruin did'st thou bring; For this thy lords had so much jealousy,
That, for no crime save thy high chivalry, All in thy bed they slew thee on a morrow. And thus does Fortune's wheel turn treacherously And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.
~ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Monk's Fortune's Wheel often turns up in medieval art, from manuscripts to the great Rose windows in many medieval cathedrals, which are based on the Wheel. Characteristically, it has four shelves, or stages of life, with four human figures, usually labeled on the left regnabo (I shall reign), on the top regno (I reign) and is usually crowned, descending on the right regnavi (I have reigned) and the lowly figure on the bottom is marked sum sine regno (I am without a kingdom). Dante employed the Wheel in the Inferno and a "Wheel of Fortune" trump-card appeared in the Tarot deck (circa 1440, Italy). The wheel of fortune from the Burana Codex; The figures are labelled "Regno, Regnavi, Sum sine regno, Regnabo": I reign, I reigned, My reign is finished, I shall reign
In the medieval and renaissance period, a popular genre of writing was "Mirrors for Princes", which set out advice for the ruling classes on how to wield power (the most famous being The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli). Such political treatises could use the concept of the Wheel of Fortune as an instructive guide to their readers. John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, written for his patron Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester is a noteworthy example. Many Arthurian romances of the era also use the concept of the Wheel in this manner, often placing the Nine Worthies on it at various points....fortune is so variant, and the wheel so moveable, there nis none constant abiding, and that may be proved by many old chronicles, of noble Hector, and Troilus, and Alisander, the mighty conqueror, and many mo other; when they were most in their royalty, they alighted lowest. ~ Lancelot in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Chapter XVII.[3] Like the Mirrors for Princes, this could be used to convey advice to readers. For instance, in most romances, Arthur's greatest military achievement - the conquest of the Roman Empire - is placed late on in the overall story. However in Malory's work the Roman conquest and high point of King Arthur's reign is established very early on. Thus, everything that follows is something of a decline. Arthur, Lancelot and the other Knights of the Round Table are meant to be the paragons of chivalry, yet in Malory's telling of the story they are doomed to failure. In medieval thinking, only God was perfect, and even a great figure like King Arthur had to be brought low. For the noble reader of the tale in the Middle Ages, this moral could serve as a warning, but also as something to aspire to. Malory could be using the concept of Fortune's Wheel to imply that if even the greatest of chivalric knights made mistakes, then a normal fifteenth-century noble didn't have to be a paragon of virtue in order to be a good knight. The Wheel of Fortune motif appears significantly in the Carmina Burana (or Burana Codex), albeit with a postclassical phonetic spelling of the genitive form Fortunae. Excerpts from two of the collection's better known poems, "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (Fortune, Empress of the World)" and "Fortune Plango Vulnera (I Bemoan the Wounds of Fortune)," read: Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis, status malus,
vana salus semper dissolubilis, obumbrata et velata michi quoque niteris; nunc per ludum dorsum nudum fero tui sceleris. Fortune rota volvitur; descendo minoratus; alter in altum tollitur; nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice caveat ruinam! nam sub axe legimus Hecubam reginam.Fate - monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, status is bad,
well-being is vain always may melt away, shadowy
and veiled you plague me too; now through the game
bare backed I bear your villainy. The wheel of Fortune turns;
I go down, demeaned; another is carried to the height;
far too high up sits the king at the summit - let him beware ruin! for under the axis we read: Queen Hecuba. Later usage:
Fortune and her Wheel have remained an enduring image throughout history. Fortune's wheel can also be found in Thomas More's Utopia. Wheel of fortune in Sebastian Brant`s Narrenschiff, woodcut by A. Dürer William Shakespeare in Hamlet wrote of the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and, of fortune personified, to "break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel." And in Henry V, Act 3 Scene VI[4] are the lines: Bardolph, a soldier who is loyal and stout-hearted and full of valour, has, by a cruel trick of fate and a turn of silly Fortune's wildly spinning wheel, that blind goddess who stands upon an ever-rolling stone—
Fluellen: Now, now, Ensign Pistol. Fortune is depicted as blind, with a scarf over her eyes, to signify that she is blind. And she is depicted with a wheel to signify—this is the point—that she is turning and inconstant, and all about change and variation. And her foot, see, is planted on a spherical stone that rolls and rolls and rolls. Shakespeare also references this Wheel in King Lear.[5] The Earl of Kent, who was once held dear by the King, has been banished, only to return in disguise. This disguised character is placed in the stocks for an overnight and laments this turn of events at the end of Act II, Scene 2:Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel! In Act IV, scene vii, King Lear also contrasts his misery on the "wheel of fire" to Cordelia's "soul in bliss". Shakespeare also made reference to this in "Macbeth" throughout the whole play. Macbeth starts off halfway up the wheel when a Thane, but moves higher and higher until he becomes king, but falls right down again towards the end as his wife dies, and he in turn dies.
In Anthony Trollope's novel The Way We Live Now, the character Lady Carbury writes a novel entitled "The Wheel of Fortune" about a heroine who suffers great financial hardships.
Selections from the Carmina Burana, including the two poems quoted above, were set to new music by twentieth-century classical composer Carl Orff, whose well-known "O Fortuna" is based on the poem Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.
Jerry Garcia recorded a song entitled "The Wheel" (co-written with Robert Hunter and Bill Kreutzmann) for his 1972 solo album Garcia, and performed the song regularly with the Grateful Dead from 1976 onward. The song "Wheel in the Sky" by Journey from their 1978 release Infinity also touches on the concept through the lyrics "Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin' / I don't know where I'll be tomorrow". The song "Throw Your Hatred Down" by Neil Young on his 1995 album Mirror Ball, recorded with Pearl Jam, has the verse "The wheel of fortune / Keeps on rollin' down". The term has found its way into modern popular culture through the Wheel of Fortune game show, where contestants win or lose money determined by the random spin of a wheel. Also, the video game series character Kain (Legacy of Kain) used the wheel of fate. Fortuna does occasionally turn up in modern literature, although these days she has become more or less synonymous with Lady Luck. Her Wheel is less widely used as a symbol, and has been replaced largely by a reputation for fickleness. She is often associated with gamblers, and dice could also be said to have replaced the Wheel as the primary metaphor for uncertain fortune. The Hudsucker Proxy, a film by the Coen Brothers, also uses the Rota Fortunae concept and in the TV series Firefly (2002) the main character, Malcolm Reynolds, says "The Wheel never stops turning, Badger" to which Badger replies "That only matters to the people on the rim". Likewise, a physical version of the Wheel of Fortune is used in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, a film by George Miller and George Ogilvie. In the movie, the title character reneges on a contract and is told "bust a deal, face the wheel." In the science fiction TV series Farscape, the fourth episode of the fourth season has main character Crichton mention that his grandmother told him that fate was like a wheel, alternately bringing fortunes up and down, and the episode's title also references this. Unlike many other instances of the wheel of fortune analogy, which focus on tragic falls from good fortune, Crichton's version is notably more positive, and meant as a message of endurance: those suffering from bad fortune must remain strong and "wait for the wheel" of fortune to turn back to eventually turn back to good fortune again. Ignatius J. Reilly, the central character from John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces, states that he believes the Rota Fortunae to be the source of all man's fate. In the Fable video game series, the wheel of fortune appears twice, somehow perverted. The Wheel of Unholy Misfortune is a torture device in Fable II. It is found in the Temple of Shadows in Rookridge. The Hero can use the wheel to sacrifice followers to the shadows. In Fable III, Reaver's Wheel of Misfortune is a device that, once activated, sends to The Hero a round of random monsters. The Wheel of Fortune is featured in a Magic: the Gathering card by that name that forces all players to discard their hands and draw new ones.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_Fortunae
Wheel of Fortune is R.O.T.A or TARO and TORA all 3 are born in same meaning :the workings of a social engine ROTARY'S WHEEL EMBLEM
A wheel has been the symbol of Rotary since our earliest days. The first design was made by Chicago Rotarian Montague Bear, an engraver who drew a simple wagon wheel, with a few lines to show dust and motion. The wheel was said to illustrate "Civilization and Movement." Most of the early clubs had some form of wagon wheel on their publications and letterheads. Finally, in 1922, it was decided that all Rotary clubs should adopt a single design as the exclusive emblem of Rotarians. Thus, in 1923, the present gear wheel, with 24 cogs and six spokes was adopted by the "Rotary International Association." A group of engineers advised that the geared wheel was mechanically unsound and would not work without a "keyway" in the center of the gear to attach it to a power shaft. So, in 1923 the keyway was added and the design which we now know was formally adopted as the official Rotary International emblem. www.icufr.org/abc/abc01.htm
www.rotaryfirst100.org/history/history/wheel/
The most popular symbol is the All seeing eye, and most popular hand signs are the Horn and the 666. Any study of Music and ... Circle (Rotary symbol)
[These are the symbols used by the Reptilian proxy group, the Reptoids (Illuminati, & Freemasons), collectively are known as Satanists or Luciferians. The signs of Evil. The most popular symbol is the All seeing eye, and most popular hand signs are the Horn and the 666. Any study of Music and Movies will find all the usual suspects (proving Satanic control), along with some symbols for mind control. If you want a symbol to use stick with the heart, the exact opposite of Evil. They like to cut them out and offer them to Lucifer, see Blood sacrifice. All the worshiped 'Gods' are a few Anunnaki/Reptilians going under various names down the years such as: Nimrod/Anubis/Horus/Osiris/Baal/Shamash/Janus/Quetzalcoatl/Baphomet/Lucifer/Moloch etc, hence all the snake and horn symbols. The symbols are their secret language, and you can see the connections down the years by the use of the same symbols, e.g. Freemasonry, the US Government, and Communism with the Hidden hand, the hidden hand of history.]
Winter Haven, FL. April 2019.
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