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Picture: Nineteenth century image of a Carrion Crow from Morris's English Birds, digitally adapted.
An old illustration from my collection called The Morrigan's Dark Ministers, here:
www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/sets/72157610356313494/
The ORACLE
The curse of the oracle I bear:
Baring uncomfortable truths
To those with too much power.
My heart, a small receptacle
For a kingly soul, beating old blood
About a body battered and maligned.
I spoke truths of children
Serpent tailed; Athene dropped her stone
In wrath, making Lycabettus,
And banished me from the Acropolis,
Turning black my bone-white
Feathers, beak and claw.
*
I shall draw the keeper’s wrath
Away from jays and slit-eyed foxes.
Of lead-shot cruelty I caw,
And hang dead, wired up like lightning
Zigzag, or a hooked and hanging
Question mark, zeroing to ground.
Cut me down gently, bury me,
Let my black fluid flow back
To Earth, who made me.
The curse of the oracle I bear:
Baring uncomfortable truths
To those with too much power.
Source material: In Greek mythology, the crow, personified as Cronus, was an oracular bird, and was said to house the soul of a sacred king after his sacrifice. The crow was cursed and banished by Athene after he reported to her that Herse, Pandrosos and Agraulos had plunged in terror from the Acropolis after uncovering a child with a serpent’s tail. She did this after dropping the stone which she had been carrying towards the Acropolis, thus forming the nearby Lycabettus Hill. See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 6, 7, 25, 50. The second half of the poem describes the plight of a particular crow, known to the author, who happened to fly within range of the gun of a bloodthirsty gamekeeper.
The Oracle, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. More at www.stevefranklinphoto.com
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Oldest known form of Chinese writing, from the Shang dynasty - up to 4,800 years ago. (Wow.)
The card reads:
"The day on which royal consorts would give birth, and whether the baby will be a son or daughter, were both matters of great interest to the Shang King.
Of the four sets of inscriptions on this turtle plastron, parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 inquire as to the month of birth."
More information about the writing: click
Here is a list of oracle bones - this one is at the very bottom.
Taken in the National Palace Museum in Taipei [ against the rules, shhhhhh! ;) hooray for sneaky digicam snaps! ]
I like to snap pics to fill out folders in my offline workbook. The folders are set as archive, and the files - or clusters of files - are used as reference locations - information resources.
I'm behind schedule in regard to my agenda for 2009, which is about all I can say for the moment about my intended market output. Flickr at least provides me with a useful distraction, a place to go to get away from work.
My tie-in with Oracle came via a web and sometime conference connection with software company BEA. I was attracted by the BEA approach, and attended conferences from when only a handful of people turned up through to when there was standing room only. That is, up til Oracle bought the BEA suite for integration in their range of database systems. Unfortunately, I missed the most recent Oracle web conference but the company was kind enough to send me briefs from the event.
In Auckland, there are many software brands in competition with Oracle, but the main competitor for market share is SAP (System Analysis and Program Development). Both companies tend to work in with local and imported soft solutions and adaptations and much of the work involves migration from and operation on top of legacy systems - brought forward to the current market situation. The Oracle and SAP stand-off appears to be common to many of the world markets, granted there remains ample room for smaller players to market their own distinctive brands of software and solution.
Taking pics of the 'brick and mortar' representations of the IT industry players enables some physical grasp of the complex infrastructure chains that underpin the marketing programs of these business groups. Often the local presence is minimal - with Microsoft almost nil, although that might be changing - with most business conducted electronically or through outsource and / or procure and 'settle in' services provided by various affiliates or agencies.
Oracle was built at the Cammell Laird Birkenhead yard and launched in 1961 and was an Oberon class submarine. This class were improvements over the earlier Porpoise class being made of higher grade steel, having a fibre glass conning tower and having a better equipment fit. The class was intended for anti-submarine operations but also carred out may special forces missions..
She was decommissioned in 1993 and broken up at Pounds Yard, Portsmouth between 1997 and 2003
Scott Ferguson (BSE NAME '85), Design Coordinator and Manager of Wing Design for ORACLE TEAM USA, talks with other members of the team before the day's afternoon testing event.
ORACLE TEAM USA is preparing to compete in the 2017 America's Cup. The race will take place in Bermuda, so the team has setup shop on the small island nation off the eastern coast of the United States in order to perform iterative design testing and practice racing its hydrofoiling catamaran yacht.
Photo: Evan Dougherty, Michigan Engineering Communications & Marketing
Purple? Maybe?
It is annoying how it is utterly impossible to capture real colors of light on a photography. While the dark, deep blue with white blobs is very neat, perhaps even more than in reality, what one sees with their own eyes is a pale shade of violet with a weird, almost grey light inside.
Behind the 2 racing boats, one of Oracle's racers (in the far distance) sails outside of the race course, closely monitoring its competitors. In the foreground, a tourist sailing catamaran.