View allAll Photos Tagged Lifetime
by Cerys Alonso. Honouring the fact that in a bee's lifetime it makes only a 12th a teaspoonful of honey.
Leica M4-P
TTArtisan M50mm f1.4 ASPH.
Hitchcock Double-X 5222
Kodak HC-110 + ars-imago #9 45min @20° in Jobo1520
Digitaliza on Essential Film Holder
DSLR Scan
Negative Lab Pro
THANKS EXPLORE! Explored on July 15th, 2008
this was honestly the most beautiful sunset that i have had the chance to witness in my 37 years! Every second grew increasingly more breathtaking over about 45 minutes. The only PP i did on this image was to play with the black by a couple of stops in my RAW processor. it truly looked just like this! THis was the point at which the upper clouds looked like a celestial nebula! I am thankful to have witnessed this beauty. the picture was taken from my west facing balcony.
A bird's eye view of the enormous size & expanse of the Himalayas. Shot through the broken wall in Hanle Monastery, Ladakh.
More about the "Ride of a lifetime!" - colorodyssey.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/ladakh-ride-of-a-li...
A view of the August 2017 solar eclipse during totality with a Live Oak tree branch thrown in for scale. Hello from planet Earth. A once in a lifetime event. Shot along the Cypress lined shore of Lake Marion in the Santee NWR.
You may find yourself in the other part of the world...
Once in a lifetime water flowing underground.
Man and Woman Installation by Michael Benisty
Burning Man Festival 2018 in Nevada. The theme was "I, Robot"
To see more images from 2018 and other years of Burning Man festival go to: www.dusttoashes.com
I hope you enjoyed the images and thank you for visiting.
I guess the time was right for us to say
We'd take our time and live our lives together day by day
Firehouse
...have a great weekend friends!
Director of the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Planetary Science Division, Dr. Lori Glaze, left, accepts the Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of the agency from director of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, Jim Walther, during the Nuclear Science Week event, Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2021, at The Observatory at America’s Square in Washington. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
A lifetime later it is still running in Leeds but now with Hunters coaches, Leeds. When these B7s came off a couple of local companies bought half a dozen between them, most have slipped away but Hunters have recently given this one some care and attention. They had hard lives in Leeds but wanted for nothing at Bramley, and became the backbone of the fleet for many years. If ever there was a decent current preservation prospect for Leeds it must be this bus, still has many of its original seats.
"A lifetime"
Eglise Notre-Dame
51290 Châtillon-sur-Broué - Route des églises à pans de bois (Région des grands lacs de Champagne)
Website : www.fluidr.com/photos/pat21
picssr.com/photos/pat21?ref=user
"Copyright © – Patrick Bouchenard
The reproduction, publication, modification, transmission or exploitation of any work contained here in for any use, personal or commercial, without my prior written permission is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved."
Written by my sister:
As a very popular old song says, “If you can’t have the one you want, love the one you’re with.” We’ve all, as doll collectors, at one point in our life had those “grail dolls.” The fantasies. I’m sure many of you will relate when I say that, as kids, Shelly and I spent a lot of time thinking out loud about what we’d do when we got our hands on certain dolls. We figured that our doll games would be so much more exciting after Shelly got a Tarzan Jade doll. We spent months leading up to Christmas plotting what we’d do in our scenarios when Shelly got her hands on the Winning London dolls. For my sister in particular, “the next thing” was an all consuming obsession. I remember a lot of time we could have spent playing dolls but, instead, spent brooding about the one she wanted at the time.
As doll collectors, we’ve all experienced getting one doll when our first choice was unobtainable. You go to many stores and, when the doll you’ve wanted isn’t there, you take the next best thing. After a while, you “love the one you’re with” and forget who you were seeking in the first place. I can think of this scenario playing over many times in my life as a doll collector--having to get Fashion Party Nikki instead of Totally Yo Yo Nikki for Christmas 2002, Shelly wanting the original Deuce but, him being unavailable at the time, deciding to settle on Scaris then deciding to buy a Swim Class Lagoona after hours of searching for a Scaris Deuce, and Shelly getting both the Bratz Wild Wild West and Rock lines when our quest to find 10/10/10 Party Cloe didn’t succeed after hours of searching. Until around March 2016, when rewriting “fun facts” for line photos, I’d actually forgotten that my original choice for the perfect Nikki doll was the Totally Yo Yo doll but that she wasn’t in stores anymore so Dad bought me the Fashion Party doll. To me “Nikki” will always be Fashion Party Nikki. Many times, we’ll forget that the doll we are having so much fun with was just a placeholder...or a replacement. Other times, the novelty of a doll being a replacement makes her that much more special. For instance, Katie and Heidi: My favorite Kid Kore Katie doll lost an arm. I dragged Dad to a billion Walmarts to replace her. The second Katie wound up meaning WAY more to me--even though I got the first a few months before Mom passed away and I have a lot of good memories of Katie that involve Mom. The same is true of Heidi. The first Heidi was a Travel in Style Barbie that Shelly randomly bought, using mostly quarters, at a KB toy store one weekend with Dad. However, Shelly made the poor choice of giving her a haircut. When Dad had to resort to the internet to replace Heidi, Shelly became even more attached to the newer doll. In these instances, being a replacement/placeholder made the doll more dear.
Sometimes we end up eventually getting the doll we initially were pursuing sometime down the road--but the doll we took in their stead ends up becoming such an important part of our lives that the “grail doll” doesn’t hold a candle to her! I could probably give at least ten examples, but the most memorable example, to me at least, is the story of a sad little doll I named Margie Valentine. In what I recall to be spring 2002, Shelly and I were with our parents at the same flea market we still go to to this day. She bought a Pretty Surprise Barbie and we decided to buy a blue dining room table (that we still use all the time to this day). The seller had dolls sitting at the table. She moved them over to pack up the chairs. I noticed a sweet, blue-eyed blonde Skipper that intrigued me because the only doll we had on that body at the time was Daphne, our Teen Time Courtney we’d had since Shelly was two! I secretly wanted her but didn’t say anything. However, seeing her really sparked my interest in all things Skipper (a passion I still have to this day). I started playing with Daphne after that, I believe, and wanted to come across more Skippers. It was a regret I had every time I looked at our blue table.
Fast forward six months--my life had changed so much. Mom had passed away over the summer so it felt like a different world. In the fall, I started collecting Skipper officially--buying Robin (Pet Pals) boxed and several in stores. I was buying as many Skipper outfits as I could get my hands on. One chilly weekend in early 2003, we came to the GROSSEST indoor flea market I’d ever seen (at the time). The guy wanted way too much for his disgusting dolls--he had three “old” Skippers that he wanted five dollars a piece for. I wanted them so much that I bought them (now I’d walk away laughing at the ridiculous price) and hadn’t seen any like them. I found Cool Crimp Courtney, 1990 Babysitter Skipper, and Hawaiian Fun Skipper. Of course, I didn’t know who they were at the time--I’ll admit it added to their mystique. Hawaiian Fun Skipper, who I named Margie, reminded me a bit of the doll I’d seen and deeply regretted not buying, the doll that kick started my Skipper obsession. By then, Robin was the queen bee, my favorite. I chose Margie for her best friend and Beach Party Cloe’s sister. Ironically, Beach Party Cloe was also a placeholder, not the “perfect Cloe” and Cloe, just like Margie, wormed her way into our hearts and our story line.
Over the next six months, Margie ended up being a huge part of our doll games and our lives. She went pretty much everywhere we did--to the beach, to visit relatives, to go to the flea market and the toy stores to buy more friends...Sometime during summer 2003, a doll collector’s miracle occurred, one I NEVER honestly thought possible: my dream doll reappeared at the flea market! Of course, I didn’t pass her up a second time--she’s a lovely Wet ‘n Wild Skipper I call Sonya. Never for a moment have I looked at her and not felt super grateful that we were reunited. However, as precious as that once-in-a-lifetime experience as a doll collector is to me, she doesn’t come close to being as special as Margie! That is because, while Margie started as a placeholder in my heart--a doll standing in for the one I thought I’d never have a chance to buy again--she wound up becoming an irreplaceable friend and playmate.
In fact, when I look back at our doll “cast” from the two year span when dolls were the most important to us they’d ever been, 2002 and 2003, about half of our main “cast” consisted of dolls that started as replacements or placeholders--Margie, Cloe, Heidi, Nikki, Katie, and Jasmine. Shelly’s all-time favorite fashion doll, and “leading lady” of the day, Sparkling Jasmine was never in the original plan either. For years, Shelly wanted a new Jasmine doll. The Classics we’d grown up with were well out of stores. When the King of Thieves movie came out, Mom told her she could either get the wedding doll or the VHS. Like the day I didn’t buy Sonya at the flea market back in 2002, Shelly made the mistake of passing up Jasmine as a beautiful bride. She pined for her for a long time, then became enamored by the Holiday doll. When the Holiday Princess too disappeared from stores, she settled on the only Jasmine in stores at the time--Sparkling Jasmine.
I think dolls like Margie--the dolls you never planned to love--are one of the biggest reasons why I love being a collector. I also think that dolls like Margie are a big part of the reason why I collect the way I do. Most of the time, the dolls we buy are the ones we come across by chance, like Margie. We buy them in bulk and get a lot of duplicates--and each one has a different...personality. We find dolls like Lindsey and Maya (MAG #41) that we NEVER planned to get and end up falling very much in love with them because of the memories--like that day we bought Lindsey, the “Ken Suitcase Lot,” and stopped at Dunkin Donuts. We also buy a lot of our dolls opportunistically--on a sale. For example, I don’t think either of us “wanted” the Freak du Chic dolls--but we’ve really had a great time with them since they turned up so cheap at Walmart. I’m not saying we don’t buy special dolls for special occasions or that I wouldn’t be overjoyed if Totally Yo Yo Nikki found her way to my flea market. The dolls we make a point of tracking down are special in their own way too. What I mean is that those dolls like Margie that just find their way into your life also find a way into your heart that can be just as special as the doll you pined for for months or years! Dolls like Margie and Swim Class Lagoona have shaped our collection, our memories, and who we are as doll collectors. I wouldn’t take back the memories we made with Margie, Cloe, Heidi, Nikki, Katie, and Jasmine. The mishaps and adventures that led to them being in our lives are part of our most special doll memories. That’s why… “When you can’t have the one you want, love the one you’re with."
© István Pénzes.
Please NOTE and RESPECT the copyright.
16th September 2017, @ home
Canon EOS M3
Canon EF-M 22mm 1:2
Samson and Delilah is a painting long attributed to the Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) in the National Gallery, London. It dates from about 1609 to 1610.
Two preliminary copies of the painting exist today: an ink-and-wash drawing on paper, and an oil sketch on wood panel. The oil sketch is in the Cincinnati Art Museum, while the ink sketch is held by a private collection in Amsterdam.
Rubens depicts the moment when, Samson having fallen asleep on Delilah's lap, a young man cuts Samson's hair. Samson and Delilah are in a dark room, which is lit mostly by a candle held by an old woman to Delilah's left. Delilah is shown fully dressed, but with her breasts exposed. Her left hand is on top of Samson's right shoulder, as his left arm is draped over her legs. The man snipping Samson's hair is crossing his hands, which is a sign of betrayal. Philistine soldiers can be seen in the right-hand background of the painting. The niche behind Delilah contains a statue of Venus, the goddess of love, and her son, Cupid. Notably, Cupid's mouth is bound, rather than his eyes. This statue can be taken to represent the cause of Samson's fate and the tool of Delilah's actions.
The painting depicts an episode from the Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah (Judges 16). Samson was a Hebrew hero known for fighting the Philistines. Having fallen in love with Delilah, who has been bribed by the Philistines, Samson tells her the secret of his great strength: his uncut hair. Without his strength, Samson is captured by the Philistines. The old woman standing behind Delilah, providing further light for the scene, does not appear in the biblical narrative of Samson and Delilah. She is believed to be a procuress, and the adjacent profiles of her and Delilah may symbolise the old woman's past, and Delilah's future.
The painting was originally commissioned by Nicolaas II Rockox, lord mayor of Antwerp, for Rockox House in that city. In addition to being a patron, Rockox was a close personal friend of Rubens. The painting was specifically intended to be placed above a 7-foot mantelshelf, where the painting would have been seen from below. The painting was publicly sold for charity when Rockox died in 1640, but the purchaser's identity is unknown. In 1700, a panel titled Samson and Delilah was bought by Hans-Adam I, Prince of Liechtenstein. This is likely to have been Rubens's painting. However, when the panel was part of the Liechtenstein Collection in Vienna in the eighteenth century, the painter was identified as Jan van den Hoecke, who was a principal assistant of Rubens in the 1630s. The painting was then sold in 1880 in Paris, where it was later discovered by Ludwig Burchard in 1929. Eventually, it was sold at auction in 1980 at Christie's, purchased by the National Gallery for $5 million.
The painting was earlier attributed to the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst, a painter who, like Rubens, worked in Rome in the shadow of Caravaggio at the start of the 17th century.
There has been some doubt cast over the attribution of the painting to Rubens, led by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, an artist and scholar of the Fayum mummy portraits. She argues that the National Gallery's painting varies in details from copies of the original made during Rubens's lifetime, that it does not employ the layering technique of glazing common in oil painting at the time and mastered by Rubens, and that its provenance cannot be documented with certainty between 1641 and 1929. A dendrochronological examination of the painting however, confirms that the painting dates to the correct period, and the attribution has been accepted by a majority of the art-historical scholarly community.
In September 2021 however, an artificial intelligence analysis conducted by Dr Carina Popovici and Art Recognition, a Swiss company based near Zurich, seemed to confirm doubters' beliefs when it was announced there is a 91% probability that the painting was not the work of Rubens.
The painting was cleaned and investigated in the National Gallery in 1983. It is noteworthy for the masterful and elaborate painting of the draperies and for the absence of blue pigments. Rubens employed carmine (kermes) lake, lead-tin-yellow, vermilion and ochres in addition to lead white and charcoal black. Chemical pigment analysis however, was still in its early stages at that time, and not enough samples for other works by Rubens were available compared to what is available today.
Jacob Matham, a Haarlem printmaker, used the Cincinnati oil sketch of Samson and Delilah as a modello for an engraving he made c. 1613. The engraving is a reverse image of Samson and Delilah.
The painting of Samson and Delilah can be seen in Frans Francken the Younger's painting Banquet at the House of Burgomaster Rockox, where the painting is hanging above the mantelpiece. Notably, this 17th-century depiction of the original Rubens painting shows Samson's foot included wholly within the frame of the composition. Compared to it the National Gallery's version is cropped on both left and right sides. Also, there are five soldiers in the doorway compared to three in Francken's picture and in early engravings.
Holland, Sommer 2012
Berlin, November 2012
please view on black
© Sally Lazic, 2012, www.fotosally.de
His scientific works include a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He is a vigorous supporter of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Hawking is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the US. In 2002, Hawking was ranked number 25 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009 and has achieved commercial success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; his book A Brief History of Time appeared on the British Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
Hawking has a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that has gradually paralysed him over the decades. He now communicates using a single cheek muscle attached to a speech-generating device.
PRIMARY and SECONDARY SCHOOL YEARS
Hawking began his schooling at the Byron House School in Highgate, London. He later blamed its "progressive methods" for his failure to learn to read while at the school.In St Albans, the eight-year-old Hawking attended St Albans High School for Girls for a few months. At that time, younger boys could attend one of the houses.
Hawking attended Radlett School, an independent school in the village of Radlett in Hertfordshire, for a year, and from September 1952, St Albans School, an independent school in the city of St Albans in Hertfordshire. The family placed a high value on education. Hawking's father wanted his son to attend the well-regarded Westminster School, but the 13-year-old Hawking was ill on the day of the scholarship examination. His family could not afford the school fees without the financial aid of a scholarship, so Hawking remained at St Albans. A positive consequence was that Hawking remained with a close group of friends with whom he enjoyed board games, the manufacture of fireworks, model aeroplanes and boats, and long discussions about Christianity and extrasensory perception. From 1958 on, with the help of the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, they built a computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other recycled components.
Although known at school as "Einstein", Hawking was not initially successful academically. With time, he began to show considerable aptitude for scientific subjects and, inspired by Tahta, decided to read mathematics at university. Hawking's father advised him to study medicine, concerned that there were few jobs for mathematics graduates. He also wanted his son to attend University College, Oxford, his own alma mater. As it was not possible to read mathematics there at the time, Hawking decided to study physics and chemistry. Despite his headmaster's advice to wait until the next year, Hawking was awarded a scholarship after taking the examinations in March 1959.
UNDERGRADUATE YEARS
Hawking began his university education at University College, Oxford in October 1959 at the age of 17. For the first 18 months, he was bored and lonely – he was younger than many of the other students, and found the academic work "ridiculously easy". His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said, "It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it." A change occurred during his second and third year when, according to Berman, Hawking made more of an effort "to be one of the boys". He developed into a popular, lively and witty college member, interested in classical music and science fiction. Part of the transformation resulted from his decision to join the college boat club, the University College Boat Club, where he coxed a rowing team. The rowing trainer at the time noted that Hawking cultivated a daredevil image, steering his crew on risky courses that led to damaged boats.
Hawking has estimated that he studied about a thousand hours during his three years at Oxford. These unimpressive study habits made sitting his finals a challenge, and he decided to answer only theoretical physics questions rather than those requiring factual knowledge. A first-class honours degree was a condition of acceptance for his planned graduate study in cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Anxious, he slept poorly the night before the examinations, and the final result was on the borderline between first- and second-class honours, making a viva (oral examination) necessary. Hawking was concerned that he was viewed as a lazy and difficult student. So, when asked at the oral to describe his future plans, he said, "If you award me a First, I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a First." He was held in higher regard than he believed; as Berman commented, the examiners "were intelligent enough to realise they were talking to someone far cleverer than most of themselves". After receiving a first-class BA (Hons.) degree in natural science and completing a trip to Iran with a friend, he began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in October 1962.
GRADUATE YEARS
Hawking's first year as a doctoral student was difficult. He was initially disappointed to find that he had been assigned Dennis William Sciama, one of the founders of modern cosmology, as a supervisor rather than noted astronomer Fred Hoyle, and he found his training in mathematics inadequate for work in general relativity and cosmology. After being diagnosed with motor neurone disease, Hawking fell into a depression – though his doctors advised that he continue with his studies, he felt there was little point. However, his disease progressed more slowly than doctors had predicted. Although Hawking had difficulty walking unsupported, and his speech was almost unintelligible, an initial diagnosis that he had only two years to live proved unfounded. With Sciama's encouragement, he returned to his work. Hawking started developing a reputation for brilliance and brashness when he publicly challenged the work of Fred Hoyle and his student Jayant Narlikar at a lecture in June 1964.
When Hawking began his graduate studies, there was much debate in the physics community about the prevailing theories of the creation of the universe: the Big Bang and Steady State theories. Inspired by Roger Penrose's theorem of a spacetime singularity in the centre of black holes, Hawking applied the same thinking to the entire universe; and, during 1965, he wrote his thesis on this topic. There were other positive developments: Hawking received a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College; he obtained his PhD degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, specialising in general relativity and cosmology, in March 1966; and his essay entitled "Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time" shared top honours with one by Penrose to win that year's prestigious Adams Prize.
CAREER
1966–1975
In his work, and in collaboration with Penrose, Hawking extended the singularity theorem concepts first explored in his doctoral thesis. This included not only the existence of singularities but also the theory that the universe might have started as a singularity. Their joint essay was the runner-up in the 1968 Gravity Research Foundation competition. In 1970 they published a proof that if the universe obeys the general theory of relativity and fits any of the models of physical cosmology developed by Alexander Friedmann, then it must have begun as a singularity. In 1969, Hawking accepted a specially created Fellowship for Distinction in Science to remain at Caius.
In 1970, Hawking postulated what became known as the second law of black hole dynamics, that the event horizon of a black hole can never get smaller.[83] With James M. Bardeen and Brandon Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. To Hawking's irritation, Jacob Bekenstein, a graduate student of John Wheeler, went further—and ultimately correctly—to apply thermodynamic concepts literally.[85][86] In the early 1970s, Hawking's work with Carter, Werner Israel and David C. Robinson strongly supported Wheeler's no-hair theorem that no matter what the original material from which a black hole is created, it can be completely described by the properties of mass, electrical charge and rotation.[87][88] His essay titled "Black Holes" won the Gravity Research Foundation Award in January 1971.[89] Hawking's first book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, written with George Ellis, was published in 1973.
Beginning in 1973, Hawking moved into the study of quantum gravity and quantum mechanics. His work in this area was spurred by a visit to Moscow and discussions with Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Alexei Starobinsky, whose work showed that according to the uncertainty principle, rotating black holes emit particles. To Hawking's annoyance, his much-checked calculations produced findings that contradicted his second law, which claimed black holes could never get smaller,and supported Bekenstein's reasoning about their entropy.His results, which Hawking presented from 1974, showed that black holes emit radiation, known today as Hawking radiation, which may continue until they exhaust their energy and evaporate. Initially, Hawking radiation was controversial. However, by the late 1970s and following the publication of further research, the discovery was widely accepted as a significant breakthrough in theoretical physics. Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974, a few weeks after the announcement of Hawking radiation. At the time, he was one of the youngest scientists to become a Fellow.
Hawking was appointed to the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1970. He worked with a friend on the faculty, Kip Thorne, and engaged him in a scientific wager about whether the dark star Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. The wager was an "insurance policy" against the proposition that black holes did not exist. Hawking acknowledged that he had lost the bet in 1990, which was the first of several that he was to make with Thorne and others.Hawking has maintained ties to Caltech, spending a month there almost every year since this first visit.
1975–1990
Hawking returned to Cambridge in 1975 to a more academically senior post, as reader in gravitational physics. The mid to late 1970s were a period of growing public interest in black holes and of the physicists who were studying them. Hawking was regularly interviewed for print and television. He also received increasing academic recognition of his work. In 1975, he was awarded both the Eddington Medal and the Pius XI Gold Medal, and in 1976 the Dannie Heineman Prize, the Maxwell Prize and the Hughes Medal. He was appointed a professor with a chair in gravitational physics in 1977. The following year he received the Albert Einstein Medal and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
In the late 1970s, Hawking was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.His inaugural lecture as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was titled: "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics" and proposed N=8 Supergravity as the leading theory to solve many of the outstanding problems physicists were studying. His promotion coincided with a health crisis which led to his accepting, albeit reluctantly, some nursing services at home. At the same time, he was also making a transition in his approach to physics, becoming more intuitive and speculative rather than insisting on mathematical proofs. "I would rather be right than rigorous", he told Kip Thorne. In 1981, he proposed that information in a black hole is irretrievably lost when a black hole evaporates. This information paradox violates the fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics, and led to years of debate, including "the Black Hole War" with Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft.
Cosmological inflation – a theory proposing that following the Big Bang, the universe initially expanded incredibly rapidly before settling down to a slower expansion – was proposed by Alan Guth and also developed by Andrei Linde. Following a conference in Moscow in October 1981, Hawking and Gary Gibbons organized a three-week Nuffield Workshop in the summer of 1982 on "The Very Early Universe" at Cambridge University, which focused mainly on inflation theory. Hawking also began a new line of quantum theory research into the origin of the universe. In 1981 at a Vatican conference, he presented work suggesting that there might be no boundary – or beginning or ending – to the universe. He subsequently developed the research in collaboration with Jim Hartle, and in 1983 they published a model, known as the Hartle–Hawking state. It proposed that prior to the Planck epoch, the universe had no boundary in space-time; before the Big Bang, time did not exist and the concept of the beginning of the universe is meaningless. The initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models was replaced with a region akin to the North Pole. One cannot travel north of the North Pole, but there is no boundary there – it is simply the point where all north-running lines meet and end. Initially, the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed universe, which had implications about the existence of God. As Hawking explained, "If the universe has no boundaries but is self-contained... then God would not have had any freedom to choose how the universe began."
Hawking did not rule out the existence of a Creator, asking in A Brief History of Time "Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?" In his early work, Hawking spoke of God in a metaphorical sense. In A Brief History of Time he wrote: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God." In the same book he suggested that the existence of God was not necessary to explain the origin of the universe. Later discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the existence of God was also compatible with an open universe.
Further work by Hawking in the area of arrows of time led to the 1985 publication of a paper theorising that if the no-boundary proposition were correct, then when the universe stopped expanding and eventually collapsed, time would run backwards. A paper by Don Page and independent calculations by Raymond Laflamme led Hawking to withdraw this concept. Honours continued to be awarded: in 1981 he was awarded the American Franklin Medal, and in 1982 made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Awards do not pay the bills, however, and motivated by the need to finance the children's education and home expenses, in 1982 Hawking determined to write a popular book about the universe that would be accessible to the general public. Instead of publishing with an academic press, he signed a contract with Bantam Books, a mass market publisher, and received a large advance for his book. A first draft of the book, called A Brief History of Time, was completed in 1984.
One of the first messages Hawking produced with his speech-generating device was a request for his assistant to help him finish writing A Brief History of Time. Peter Guzzardi, his editor at Bantam, pushed him to explain his ideas clearly in non-technical language, a process that required many revisions from an increasingly irritated Hawking. The book was published in April 1988 in the US and in June in the UK, and it proved to be an extraordinary success, rising quickly to the top of bestseller lists in both countries and remaining there for months. The book was translated into many languages, and ultimately sold an estimated 9 million copies. Media attention was intense, and a Newsweek magazine cover and a television special both described him as "Master of the Universe". Success led to significant financial rewards, but also the challenges of celebrity status. Hawking travelled extensively to promote his work, and enjoyed partying and dancing into the small hours. He had difficulty refusing the invitations and visitors, which left limited time for work and his students. Some colleagues were resentful of the attention Hawking received, feeling it was due to his disability. He received further academic recognition, including five more honorary degrees,[149] the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985), the Paul Dirac Medal (1987) and, jointly with Penrose, the prestigious Wolf Prize (1988). In 1989, he was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH). He reportedly declined a knighthood.
1990–2000
Hawking pursued his work in physics: in 1993 he co-edited a book on Euclidean quantum gravity with Gary Gibbons and published a collected edition of his own articles on black holes and the Big Bang. In 1994, at Cambridge's Newton Institute, Hawking and Penrose delivered a series of six lectures that were published in 1996 as "The Nature of Space and Time". In 1997, he conceded a 1991 public scientific wager made with Kip Thorne and John Preskill of Caltech. Hawking had bet that Penrose's proposal of a "cosmic censorship conjecture" – that there could be no "naked singularities" unclothed within a horizon – was correct. After discovering his concession might have been premature, a new, more refined, wager was made. This one specified that such singularities would occur without extra conditions. The same year, Thorne, Hawking and Preskill made another bet, this time concerning the black hole information paradox. Thorne and Hawking argued that since general relativity made it impossible for black holes to radiate and lose information, the mass-energy and information carried by Hawking radiation must be "new", and not from inside the black hole event horizon. Since this contradicted the quantum mechanics of microcausality, quantum mechanics theory would need to be rewritten. Preskill argued the opposite, that since quantum mechanics suggests that the information emitted by a black hole relates to information that fell in at an earlier time, the concept of black holes given by general relativity must be modified in some way.
Hawking also maintained his public profile, including bringing science to a wider audience. A film version of A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris and produced by Steven Spielberg, premiered in 1992. Hawking had wanted the film to be scientific rather than biographical, but he was persuaded otherwise. The film, while a critical success, was, however, not widely released. A popular-level collection of essays, interviews, and talks titled Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays was published in 1993, and a six-part television series Stephen Hawking's Universe and a companion book appeared in 1997. As Hawking insisted, this time the focus was entirely on science.
2000–present
Hawking continued his writings for a popular audience, publishing The Universe in a Nutshell in 2001, and A Briefer History of Time, which he wrote in 2005 with Leonard Mlodinow to update his earlier works with the aim of making them accessible to a wider audience, and God Created the Integers, which appeared in 2006. Along with Thomas Hertog at CERN and Jim Hartle, from 2006 on Hawking developed a theory of "top-down cosmology", which says that the universe had not one unique initial state but many different ones, and therefore that it is inappropriate to formulate a theory that predicts the universe's current configuration from one particular initial state. Top-down cosmology posits that the present "selects" the past from a superposition of many possible histories. In doing so, the theory suggests a possible resolution of the fine-tuning question.
Hawking continued to travel widely, including trips to Chile, Easter Island, South Africa, Spain (to receive the Fonseca Prize in 2008),] Canada, and numerous trips to the United States. For practical reasons related to his disability, Hawking increasingly travelled by private jet, and by 2011 that had become his only mode of international travel. By 2003, consensus among physicists was growing that Hawking was wrong about the loss of information in a black hole. In a 2004 lecture in Dublin, he conceded his 1997 bet with Preskill, but described his own, somewhat controversial solution to the information paradox problem, involving the possibility that black holes have more than one topology. In the 2005 paper he published on the subject, he argued that the information paradox was explained by examining all the alternative histories of universes, with the information loss in those with black holes being cancelled out by those without such loss. In January 2014 he called the alleged loss of information in black holes his "biggest blunder".
As part of another longstanding scientific dispute, Hawking had emphatically argued, and bet, that the Higgs boson would never be found.[182] The particle was proposed to exist as part of the Higgs field theory by Peter Higgs in 1964. Hawking and Higgs engaged in a heated and public debate over the matter in 2002 and again in 2008, with Higgs criticising Hawking's work and complaining that Hawking's "celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have." The particle was discovered in July 2012 at CERN following construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Hawking quickly conceded that he had lost his bet and said that Higgs should win the Nobel Prize for Physics, which he did in 2013.
In 2007, Hawking and his daughter Lucy published George's Secret Key to the Universe, a children's book designed to explain theoretical physics in an accessible fashion and featuring characters similar to those in the Hawking family.[188] The book was followed by sequels in 2009, 2011 and 2014.
In 2002, following a UK-wide vote, the BBC included Hawking in their list of the 100 Greatest Britons.[190] He was awarded the Copley Medal from the Royal Society (2006), the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is America's highest civilian honour (2009), and the Russian Special Fundamental Physics Prize (2013).
Several buildings have been named after him, including the Stephen W. Hawking Science Museum in San Salvador, El Salvador, the Stephen Hawking Building in Cambridge, and the Stephen Hawking Centre at the Perimeter Institute in Canada.Appropriately, given Hawking's association with time, he unveiled the mechanical "Chronophage" (or time-eating) Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College Cambridge in September 2008.
During his career, Hawking has supervised 39 successful PhD students. As required by Cambridge University regulations, Hawking retired as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 2009. Despite suggestions that he might leave the United Kingdom as a protest against public funding cuts to basic scientific research, Hawking has continued to work as director of research at the Cambridge University Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and indicated in 2012 that he had no plans to retire.
On 28 June 2009, as a tongue-in-cheek test of his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible, Hawking held a party open to all, complete with hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne, but only publicized the party after it was over so that only time-travellers would know to attend; as expected, nobody showed up to the party.
On 20 July 2015, Hawking helped launch Breakthrough Initiatives, an effort to search for extraterrestrial life. In 2015, Richard Branson offered Stephen Hawking a seat on the Virgin Galactic spaceship for free. While no hard date has been set for launch, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is slated to launch at the end of 2017. At 75, Hawking will not be the oldest person ever to go to space (John Glenn returned to space at age 77), but he will be the first person to go to space with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). While this will be Hawking's first time in space, it will not be the first time he will have experienced weightlessness: in 2007, he had flown into zero gravity aboard a specially-modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft. Hawking created Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth, a documentary on space colonization, as a summer 2017 episode of Tomorrow's World.
In August 2015, Hawking said that not all information is lost when something enters a black hole and there might be a possibility to retrieve information from a black hole according to his theory.
The MtSac v Cerritos dual was held on 23 October 2019 at Mt. San Antonio College.
In his 13 years as the Cerritos College wrestling head coach, Donny Garriott has won a lot of matches. But one place he has had difficulty winning in conference play has been at Mt. San Antonio College, where he had lost his last five matches. But on Wednesday, the #2-ranked Falcons (10-0, 2-0) posted a 25-16 Southwest Conference win over the Mounties. It was the first conference win for Garriott and the Falcons at Mt. SAC since 2010, who now has a lifetime 13-8 record against the Mounties.
125 Pounds - Jonathan Prata (CERR) def. Connor Diamond (MSAC), 11-4
133 Pounds - Andres Gonzales (CERR) pinned Nicholas Weissinger (MSAC), 3:24
141 Pounds - Oscar Chirino (MSAC) pinned Stefano McKinney (CERR), 3:36
149 Pounds - V'ante Moore (CERR) def. Jimmy Adams (MSAC), 9-0
157 Pounds - Larry Rodriguez (CERR) win by forfeit
165 Pounds - Wetzel Hill (MSAC) def. Drake De La Cruz (CERR), 17-3
174 Pounds - Ian Vasquez (MSAC) def. Cobe Hatcher (CERR), 3-2
184 Pounds - Kevin Hope (MSAC) def. Jarrod Nunez (CERR), 10-6
197 Pounds - Hamzah Al-Saudi (CERR) def. Mellad Ayyoub (MSAC), 2-0
285 Pounds - Randy Arriaga (CERR) def. Jackson Clark (MSAC), 5-0
From a previous lifetime, the only new Cadillac I ever bought. I lost it and the house to Wife 1.0 and I was beyond "Get off my lawn" angry for the next decade, not at what I'd lost but that I had been played for such a fool.
Renn at Ocean Shores. My brother is suffering from ALS. My son and I took a trip to ocean shores so Renn could get his feet wet...one more time.
My new photo: "Lifetime Work on the Floating Market" I captured it in Damnoen Saduak near Bangkok, Thailand. Watch my video about it (in French): youtu.be/8BXl9CLj5BE
Large size prints available on demand
Sony Alpha 7RIII, 50mm Zeiss 1.4 (+ 2h or editing) (Original file: 9000 x 6000 pixels, 300 dpi)
info@benheine.com /// www.benheine.com
#benheinephotography #photoediting #photoretouching #retouchephoto #floatingmarket #marcheflottant #worker #woman #market #thailand #thailande #bangkok #photographie #asia #asie #china #river #work #damnoensaduak
Get the satisfaction of knowing Kodak offers a lifetime guarantee, but is it for your lifetime or Kodaks lifetime?
I was sorting some old prints on the rainy weekend, and came across some of these memories from the film days.
Truncated Wikipedia text is :-
Kodak was founded by George Eastman in 1889 and in 1976 had a 90% market share of photographic film sales in the United States.
The letter "K" was a favorite of Eastman's; he is quoted as saying, "it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter."
He and his mother devised the name Kodak with an Anagrams set. Eastman said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name:
it should be short
one cannot mispronounce it
and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak
In 2011 Kodak rapidly used up its cash reserves, stoking fears of bankruptcy.
On January 19, 2012 Kodak filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection.
The photographers of the world have a lot to thank Kodak for.
The Letter P (Pictures) theme
Ouray Colorado
The Little Switzerland of America
A place you visit and don't want to leave.
I help aspiring and established photographers get noticed so they can earn an income from photography or increase sales. My blog, Photographer’s Business Notebook is a wealth of information as is my Mark Paulda’s YouTube Channel. I also offer a variety of books, mentor services and online classes at Mark Paulda Photography Mentor
All images are available as Museum Quality Photographic Prints and Commercial Licensing. Feel free to contact me with any and all inquiries.
Follow My Once In A Lifetime Travel Experiences at Mark Paulda’s Travel Journal
The joys of selling gear on ebay ...
This is the Nikon MH-30 quick charger unit. It can charge up to two MN-30 battery packs for the Nikon F5 SLR.
I sold the unit you see here via ebay to a customer in England and a week or so after sending it to him, I received an irate e-mail claiming that the charger I had sold him did not work.
The customer had miraculously obtained an unused (and therefore never re-charged) MN-30 battery pack from another source, tried to charge it with the MH-30 quick charger he had purchased from me, and failed. He was suspecting that I had duped him and sold him a non-functional charger.
Here is the (slightly abridged) reply I sent him:
First a few words on that brand new and unused MN-30 battery pack for your F5. The manufacturing of the MN-30 battery pack for the F5 was discontinued in the year 2007. The MN-30 battery pack uses NiMH (nickel metal hydride) cells. Even when used and charged properly and frequently, the lifetime of NiMH cells is 3-5 years at most.
If the cells are not recharged, they will go into deep discharge and suffer irreversible damage after much less than 3 years. This appears to have happened to the cells in the battery pack you bought. At any rate, your battery pack must be at least 13 years old (please check what is written on the battery pack). It is impossible for NiMH cells to still remain functional after such a long time. There just is no chance at all.
There are two ways to make your F5 work.
1.) Either you take your battery pack, open the case and exchange the NiMH cells for fresh ones. There are instructions on how to do this on the web.
2.) Or you purchase an MS-30 battery case that holds 8 normal AA cells. 8 AA batteries last for around 25 rolls of film, perhaps more, if you use good batteries. This is perhaps the easiest way to make your F5 functional.
I hope you will find this information useful. If you have any doubt, I advise you to consult an expert, but rest assured that an expert will tell you the same things that I told you.
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
. . .
"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like -"
"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."...
Anyway, I keep picturing these little kids playing some game in this big field or rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean, except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
—excerpts from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye
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"Somewhere along the line - in one damn incarnation or another, if you like - you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to - be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to - there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around."
—excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
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John Keats
John Keats
John
Please put your scarf on.
Do I go on about my brother's poetry too much? Am I being garrulous? Yes. Yes. I go on about my brother's poetry too much. I'm being garrulous. And I care. But my reasons against leaving off multiply like rabbits as I go along. Furthermore, though I am, as I've already conspicuously posted, a happy writer, I'll take my oath I'm not now and never have been a merry one; I've mercifully been allowed the usual professional quota of unmerry thoughts. For example, it hasn't just this moment struck me that once I get around to recounting what I know of Seymour himself, I can't expect to leave myself either the space or the required pulse rate or, in a broad but true sense, the inclination to mention his poetry again. At this very instant, alarmingly, while I clutch my own wrist and lecture myself on garrulousness, I may be losing the chance of a lifetime - my last chance, I think, really - to make one final, hoarse, objectionable, sweeping public pronouncement on my brother's rank as an American poet. I mustn't let it slip. Here it is: When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly more original poets we've had in America, as well as the numerous talented eccentric poets and - in modern times, especially - the many gifted style deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have had only three or four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few. Not overnight, verständlich. Zut, what would would you? It's my guess, my perhaps flagrantly over-considered guess, that the first few waves of reviewers will obliquely condemn his verses by calling them Interesting or Very Interesting, with a tacit or just plain badly articulated declaration, still more damning, that they are rather small, sub-acoustical things that have failed to arrive on the contemporary Western scene with their own built-in transatlantic podium, complete with lectern, drinking glass, and pitcher of iced sea water. Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.) And I'm reminded, too, that once when we were boys, Seymour waked me from a sound sleep, much excited, yellow pajamas flashing in the dark. He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and he wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. (It was a problem that had been baffling him all week, because it sounded to him like a piece of advice, I believe, more typical of Emily Post than of someone busily about his Father's Business.) Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes - fools, no. It seemed to him well worth waking me up for, but if I admit that it was (and I do, without reservations), I'll have to concede that if you give even poetry critics enough time, they'll prove themselves unfoolish. To be truthful, it's a thought that comes hard to me, and I'm grateful to be able to push on to something else. I've reached, at long last, the real head of this compulsive and, I'm afraid, occasionally somewhat pustulous disquisition on my brother's poetry. I've seen it coming from the very beginning. I would to God the reader had something terrible to tell me first. (Oh, you out there - with your enviable golden silence.)
I have a recurrent, and, in 1959, almost chronic, premonition that when Seymour's poems have been widely and rather officially acknowledged as First Class (stacked up in college bookstores, assigned in Contemporary Poetry courses), matriculating young men and women will strike out, in singlets and twosomes, notebooks at the ready, for my somewhat creaking front door. (It's regrettable that this matter has to come up at all, but it's surely too late to pretend to an ingenuousness, to say nothing of a grace, I don't have, and I must reveal that my reputedly heartshaped prose has knighted me one of the best-loved sciolists in print since Ferris L. Monahan, and a good many young English Department people already know where I live, hole up; I have their tire tracks in my rose beds to prove it.) By and large, I'd say without a shred of hesitation, there are three kinds of students who have both the desire and the temerity to look as squarely as possible into any sort of literary horse's mouth. The first kind is the young man or woman who loves and respects to distraction any fairly responsible sort of literature and who, if he or she can't see Shelley plain, will make do with seeking out manufacturers of inferior but estimable products. I know these boys and girls well, or think I do. They're naive, they're alive, they're enthusiastic, they're usually less than right, and they're the hope always, I think, of blase or vested-interested literary society the world over. (By some good fortune I can't believe I've deserved, I've had one of these ebullient, cocksure, irritating, instructive, often charming girls or boys in every second or third class I've taught in the past twelve years.) The second kind of young person who actually rings doorbells in the pursuit of literary data suffers, somewhat proudly, from a case of academicitis, contracted from any one of half a dozen Modern English professors or graduate instructors to whom he's been exposed since his freshman year. Not seldom, if he himself is already teaching or is about to start teaching, the disease is so far along that one doubts whether it could be arrested, even if someone were fully equipped to try. Only last year, for example, a young man stopped by to see me about a piece I'd written, several years back, that had a good deal to do with Sherwood Anderson. He came at a time when I was cutting part of my winter's supply of firewood with a gasoline-operated chain saw - an instrument that after eight years of repeated use I'm still terrified of. It was the height of the spring thaw, a beautiful sunny day, and I was feeling, frankly, just a trifle Thoreauish (a real treat for me, because after thirteen years of country living I'm still a man who gauges bucolic distances by New York City blocks). In short, it looked like a promising, if literary, afternoon, and I recall that I had high hopes of getting the young man, a la Tom Sawyer and his bucket of whitewash, to have a go at my chain saw. He appeared healthy, not to say strapping. His deceiving looks, however, very nearly cost me my left foot, for between spurts and buzzes of my saw, just as I finished delivering a short and to me rather enjoyable eulogy on Sherwood Anderson's gentle and effective style, the young man asked me - after a thoughtful, a cruelly promising pause - if I thought there was an endemic American Zeitgeist. (Poor young man. Even if he takes exceptionally good care of himself, he can't at the outside have more than fifty years of successful campus activity ahead of him.) The third kind of person who will be a fairly constant visitor around here, I believe, once Seymour's poems have been quite thoroughly unpacked and tagged, requires a paragraph to himself or herself.
It would be absurd to say that most young people's attraction to poetry is far exceeded by their attraction to those few or many details of a poet's life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid. It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday. I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses - most of them seniors, all of them English majors - to quote a line, any line from "Ozymandias," or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I'd bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote "Frankenstein" and another who drowned herself.* I'm neither shocked nor outraged at the idea, please mind. I don't think I'm even complaining. For if nobody's a fool, then neither am I, and I'm entitled to a non-fool's Sunday awareness that, whoever we are, no matter how like a blast furnace the heat from the candles on our latest birthday cake, and however presumably lofty the intellectual, moral, and spiritual heights we've all reached, our gusto for the lurid or partly lurid (which, of course, includes both low and superior gossip) is probably the last of our fleshy appetites to be sated or effectively curbed. (But, my God, why do I rant on? Why am I not going straight to the poet for an illustration? One of Seymour's hundred and eighty-four poems - a shocker on the first impact only; on the second, as heartening a paean to the living as I've read - is about a distinguished old ascetic on his deathbed, surrounded by chanting priests and disciples, who lies straining to hear what the washerwoman in the courtyard is saying about his neighbor's laundry. The old gentleman, Seymour makes it clear, is faintly wishing the priests would keep their voices down a bit.) I can see, though, that I'm having a little of the usual trouble entailed in trying to make a very convenient generalization stay still and docile long enough to support a wild specific premise. I don't relish being sensible about it, but I suppose I must. It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.
(How can I record what I've just recorded and still be happy? But I am. Unjolly, unmerry, to the marrow, but my afflatus seems to be punctureproof. Recollective of only one other person I've known in my life.)
—poem and excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Seymour An Introduction
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I was staring, as I remember, directly in front of me, at the back of the driver's neck, which was a relief map of boil scars, when suddenly my jump-seat mate addressed me: "I didn't get a chance to ask you inside. How's that darling mother of yours? Aren't you Dickie Briganza?"
My tongue, at the time of the question, was curled back exploratively as far as the soft palate. I disentangled it, swallowed, and turned to her. She was fifty, or thereabouts, fashionably and tastefully dressed. She was wearing a very heavy pancake makeup. I answered no - that I wasn't.
She narrowed her eyes a trifle at me and said I looked exactly like Celia Briganza's boy. Around the mouth. I tried to show by my expression that it was a mistake anybody could make. Then I went on staring at the back of the driver's neck. The car was silent. I glanced out of the window, for a change of scene.
"How do you like the Army?" Mrs. Silsburn asked. Abruptly, conversationally.
I had a brief coughing spell at that particular instant. When it was over, I turned to her with all available alacrity and said I'd made a lot of buddies. It was a little difficult for me to swivel in her direction, what with the encasement of adhesive tape around my diaphragm.
She nodded. "I think you're all just wonderful," she said, somewhat ambiguously. "Are you a friend of the bride's or the groom's?" she then asked, delicately getting down to brass tacks.
"Well, actually, I'm not exactly a friend of--"
"You'd better not say you're a friend of the groom," the Matron of Honor interrupted me, from the back of the car. "I'd like to get my hands on him for about two minutes. Just two minutes, that's all."
Mrs. Silsburn turned briefly - but completely - around to smile at the speaker. Then she faced front again. We made the round trip, in fact, almost in unison. Considering that Mrs. Silsburn had turned around for only an instant, the smile she had bestowed on the Matron of Honor was a kind of jump-seat masterpiece. It was vivid enough to express unlimited partisanship with all young people, all over the world, but most particularly with this spirited, outspoken local representative, to whom, perhaps, she had been little more than perfunctorily introduced, if at all.
"Bloodthirsty wench," said a chuckling male voice. And Mrs. Silsburn and I turned around again. It was the Matron of Honor's husband who had spoken up. He was seated directly behind me, at his wife's left. He was seated directly behind me, at his wife's left. He and I briefly exchanged that blank,uncomradely look which, possibly, in the crapulous year of 1942, only an officer and a private could exchange. A first lieutenant in the Signal Corps, he was wearing a very interesting Air Corps pilot's cap - a visored hat with the metal frame removed from inside the crown, which usually conferred on the wearer a certain, presumably desired, intrepid look. In his case, however, the cap didn't begin to fill the bill. It seemed to serve no other purpose than to make my own outsize, regulation headpiece feel rather like a clown's hat that someone had nervously picked out of the incinerator. His face was sallow and, essentially, daunted-looking. He was perspiring with an almost incredible profusion - on his forehead, on his upper lip, and even at the end of his nose - to the point where a salt tablet might have been in order. "I'm married to the bloodthirstiest wench in six counties," he said, addressing Mrs. Silsburn and giving another soft, public chuckle. In automatic deference to his rank, I very nearly chuckled right along with him - a short, inane, stranger's and draftee's chuckle that would clearly signify that I was with him and everyone else in the car, against no one.
"I mean it," the Matron of Honor said. "Just two minutes - that's all, brother. Oh, if I could just get my two little hands -"
"All right, now, take it easy, take it easy," her husband said, still with apparently inexhaustible resources of connubial good humor. "Just take it easy. You'll last longer."
Mrs. Silsburn faced around toward the back of the car again, and favored the Matron of Honor with an all but canonized smile. "Did anyone see any of his people at the wedding?" she inquired softly, with just a little emphasis - no more than perfectly genteel - on the personal pronoun.
The Matron of Honor's answer came with toxic volume: "No. They're all out on the West Coast or someplace. I just wish I had."
Her husband's chuckle sounded again. "What wouldja done if you had, honey?" he asked - and winked indiscriminately at me.
"Well, I don't know, but I'd've done something," said the Matron of Honor. The chuckle at her left expanded in volume. "Well, I would have!" she insisted. "I'd've said something to them. I mean. My gosh." She spoke with increasing aplomb, as though perceiving that, cued by her husband, the rest of us within earshot were finding something attractively forthright - spunky - about her sense of justice, however youthful or impractical it might be. "I don't know what I'd have said to them. I probably would have just blabbered something idiotic. But my gosh. Honestly! I just can't stand to see somebody get away with absolute murder. It makes my blood boil." She suspended animation just long enough to be bolstered by a look of simulated empathy from Mrs. Silsburn. Mrs. Silsburn and I were now turned completely, supersociably, around in our jump seats. "I mean it," the Matron of Honor said. "You can't just barge through life hurting people's feelings whenever you feel like it."
"I'm afraid I know very little about the young man," Mrs. Silsburn said, softly. "As a matter of fact, I haven't even met him. The first I'd heard that Muriel was even engaged -"
"Nobody's met him," the Matron of Honor said, rather explosively. "I haven't even met him. We had two rehearsals, and both times Muriel's poor father had to take his place, just because his crazy plane couldn't take off. he was supposed to get a hop here last Tuesday night in some crazy Army plane, but it was snowing or something crazy in Colorado, or Arizona, or one of those crazy places, and he didn't get in till one o'clock in the morning, last night. Then - at that insane hour - he calls Muriel on the phone from way out in Long Island or someplace and asks her to meet him in the lobby of some horrible hotel so they can talk." The Matron of Honor shuddered eloquently. "And you know Muriel. She's just darling enought o let anybody and his brother push her around. That's what gripes me. It's always those kind of people that get hurt in the end ... Anyway, so she gets dressed and gets in a cab and sits in some horrible lobby talking with him till quarter to five in the morning." The Matron of Honor released her grip on her gardenia bouquet long enough to raise two clenched fists above her lap. "Ooo, it makes me so mad!" she said.
"What hotel?" I asked the Matron of Honor. "Do you know?" I tried to make my voice sound casual, as though, possibly, my father might be in the hotel business and I took a certain understandable filial interest in where people stopped in New York. In reality, my question meant almost nothing. I was just thinking aloud, more or less. I'd been interested in the fact that my brother had asked his fiancee to meet him in a hotel lobby, rather than at his empty, available apartment. The morality of the invitation was by no means out of character, but it interested me, mildly, nonetheless.
"I don't know which hotel," the Matron of Honor said irritably. "Just some hotel." She stared at me. "Why?" she demanded. "Are you a friend of his?"
There was something distinctly intimidating about her stare. It seemed to come from a one-woman mob, separated only by time and chance from her knitting bag and a splendid view of the guillotine. I've been terrified of mobs, of any kind, all my life. "We were boys together," I answered, all but unintelligibly.
"Well, lucky you!"
"Now, now," said her husband.
"Well, I'm sorry," the Matron of Honor said to him, but addressing all of us. "But you haven't been in a room watching that poor kid cry her eyes out for a solid hour. It's not funny - and don't you forget it. I've heard about grooms getting cold feet, and all that. But you don't do it at the last minute. I mean you don't do it so that you'll embarrass a lot of perfectly nice people half to death and almost break a kid's spirit and everything! If he'd changed his mind, why didn't he write to her and at least break it off like a gentleman, for goodness' sake? Before all the damage was done."
"All right, take it easy, just take it easy," her husband said. His chuckle was still there, but it was sounding a trifle strained.
"Well, I mean it! Why couldn't he write to her and just tell her, like a man, and prevent all this tragedy and everything?" She looked at me, abruptly. "Do you have any idea where he is, by any chance?" she demanded, with metal in her voice. "If you have boyhood friends, you should have some -"
"I just got into New York about two hours ago," I said nervously. Not only the Matron of Honor but her husband and Mrs. Silsburn as well were now staring at me. "So far, I haven't even had a chance to get to a phone." At that point, as I remember, I had a coughing spell. It was genuine enough, but I must say I did very little to suppress it or shorten its duration.
"You had that cough looked at, soldier?" the Lieutenant asked me when I'd come out of it.
At that instant, I had another coughing spell - a perfectly genuine one, oddly enough. I was still turned a sort of half or quarter right in my jump seat, with my body averted just enough toward the front of the car to be able to cough with all due hygienic propriety.
—excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
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A lifetime first for me to finally see a Crane - well nine of them as you can see.
Cranes are a rare sight in the UK - there is only a tiny breeding population (9-14 pairs).
A small number of Cranes also overwinter in the UK or pass through on migration. The Winter population (individuals present between October and March) is reported as 52 birds, with c40 Cranes also passing through on their Winter Migration.
(All figures from the RSPB)
This is my dear Uncle Don. He is not a blood relative, but he is "uncle" to the hundreds of kids he taught in his lifetime. As our high school music teacher, Uncle Don taught us to question authority, to think for ourselves, and to stand up for what we believed in. And he taught us by example to be true to ourselves.
I visited him last week with my friend Sandra. She is a new friend, and a trip to meet Uncle Don is absolutely necessary for all the people I am close to. The experience touched her deeply. In fact, you cannot visit him and escape being affected.
Walking into Uncle Don's, you are transported to another world. Two full-sized antique pipe organs share the living room with his nine-foot concert grand, a second grand beside it, a custom-built 20-foot double-ended harpsichord, a clavichord, a Mozart grand, antique Victorian settees and chairs, framed manuscripts, stained glass, hanging tapestries, an antique grandfather clock and a night-blooming cereus that puts out flowers that dazzle his friends and neighbors.
Sandra, a pianist herself, had the pleasure of playing dual piano with him, and of trying out the harpsichord, clavichord and organ. Then we were led into the dining room, where we enjoyed a light lunch served on antique Spode china. We speared morsels with a few pieces of his collection of antique mother-of-pearl-handled silverware (more than 600 pieces in all), and drank from heavy Waterford crystal goblets.
Then, while I cleared and washed the dishes, Uncle Don showed Sandra the downstairs, which houses the rest of the keyboard collection -- a total of more than 40 keyboards.
The adopted son of a humble Montana miner and his wife, Uncle Don has never forgotten his roots. He works his land, even at the ripe age of 81 (or is it 82 now?), and thinks nothing of driving around in a 20-year-old car that runs perfectly fine, thank you. And although adopted, he cared for both his parents in their golden years. He loved them fiercely, and frequently speaks of their leap of faith when they answered an ad in the local paper and took him -- an abandoned baby -- into their home and hearts. He remains profoundly grateful for that, and for their many sacrifices they made for him. They both died in his home.
He believes that he is the custodian of all these beautiful things, and that he must share. And share he does. Complete strangers who hear about him drop in and are treated to the tour and some tea. He regularly plays at seniors' homes without charge, simply to give back and bring joy. And every Monday morning without fail, he calls the registrar (now long retired, at 100 years of age) of the university he attended, and he plays the organ for her.
I could go on and on and on about Uncle Don. Actually, I guess I already have!! But there are many more stories -- so many fond memories in the 42 years I've known him.
When I took this photo, I had hoped that the musical notes on the framed manuscripts would show, but they are a blur. That's the lid of his nine-foot grand in the background. I thought the light was so nice on his face while he was talking to Sandra, I told him not to move, to go on talking, and to ignore my clicking. He did, and that's why this looks so natural -- or at least I think it does!