Legend relates that Pir Ghaib and his sister, the venerable Bibi Nani, arrived here to convert the local heathens in the early days of Islam. But the fire Worshippers sent an army after the pious pair. In the gorge of the Bolan the siblings split; Bibi Nani went down the gorge(her purported tomb is under a bridge about 15km/ 8 miles downstream) while her brother fled into this arid landscape with the army in hot pursiut. At the head of the gorge, seeing that he was blocked by the rock wall, the saint prayed to the Almighty to be rescued. As is the wont of the Lord of all saints, He cleaved the rock to receive the holy man. And so he was known as Pir Ghaib - The Invisible Saint.

 

Local Hindus worship Pir Ghaib as Mahadeve. But, long before the Bolan gorge had rung the vedic hymns or invocations of Pir Ghaib, travellers and traders from the Indus Valley would have stopped at this spring sacred to their own gods on the first leg of their long journey to esopotamian marts. As the Vedic god Shive derives from an earlier Indus Valley deity, and as the 5,000-year-old goddess Nania evolves into Bibi Nani or Durga, so too did Pir Ghaib develop from an early Indus Valley god. But until the Indis script is understood we will not know which from this pantheon was celebrated for waling into rock walls.

 

Source: Insigth Guides : Pakistan

Pictures Relating to the Gallipoli Operations: April-December, 1915.

 

The series of photographs on this and following pages will serve as an introduction to a special collection of absorbingly interesting pictures to be published in the "Mail" Anzac Number on April 25. The Anzac Number will not be a re-publication of illustrations familiar to the public - the pictures will be new, and will in thrilling manner fill up all gaps in the pictorial record of the magnificent but ill-fated Gallipoli expedition.

 

Many wonderful scenes were enacted in the beautiful harbour of Mudros, Lemnos Island, in connection with the Gallipoli campaign. It was from here that our gallant troops sailed to storm the heights and win imperishable renown. It was to this spot that thousands were brought back wounded and ill. It was here that many of our soldiers rested awhile from the trenches. And it was here that the troops again landed after the evacuation of the Peninsula and prior to returning to Egypt. No. 3 Australian General Hospital was stationed at Mudros, and the doctors and nurses, particularly in the early part of the campaign, did work no less magnificent than that of the soldiers at the front.

 

Caption for two photos at top of pictorial spread:

 

PANORAMIC VIEW OF MUDROS HARBOUR, LEMNOS.

The structure in the centre of this section of the picture is a huge condenser, which supplied pure water. The troops at first sank wells, but the water obtained in this way was not good; indeed, it was said to be responsible for a good deal of the sickness from which many of the men suffered so severely.

 

Photos by A.W. Savage. From The Sydney Mail, 5 April 1916.

by fuckjerry ift.tt/1V6KuvR

The subject matter of images relating to the military come in many forms, and here the photographer recorded the packaging and bottles for 'Normal Human Plasma' in the USN Hospital at Creevagh.

 

The use of Blood Plasma during WW2 was a relatively new innovation. Blood plasma was an essential component of treating wounded soldiers. When a soldier is critically wounded, blood loss is extremely dangerous. Rather than the loss of oxygen carrying red blood cells, the greatest concern is the loss of fluids which results in low blood pressure. By transfusing casualties with plasma, blood volume is maintained and blood pressure remains at a normal level, preventing shock. Because the red blood cells are removed from plasma, the need to match the blood type of the donor to the recipient is unnecessary. Dried (desiccated) plasma was developed which could be stored for long periods of time without refrigeration or transportation difficulties. A package was designed for bottles of either the 250 or 500 ml equivalent of dried plasma to be reconstituted with companion bottles of distilled water. Both were supplied in boxes containing all that was necessary to infuse in the field.

 

In January 1941, U.S. military authorities asked the American Red Cross to organize a Blood Donor Service to meet the anticipated needs of the American armed forces should the United States enter the war and by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Red Cross operated ten blood donor centers in the Eastern United States. Eventually, that number grew to 35 centers located across the country, supplemented by an additional 63 mobile units. At its peak, the program involved a paid staff of 2,285 doctors, nurses, and technicians, plus an estimated 25,000 volunteers. The Red Cross expended nearly $16 million in the Service which ended on 15 September 1945 after collecting 13.4 million pints of blood from 6.6 million donors. Near the end of the war, when the necessary collection, refrigeration, and air transport links had been established, whole blood was shipped to the battlefront and found to be superior.

 

The image shows the standard Army & Navy package containing one bottle of plasma and one bottle of distilled water, and the respective bottles.

  

Sources:

 

www.nationalww2museum.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/blo...

 

www.redcross.org/content/dam/redcross/National/history-ww...

 

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1537-2995.2012....

#lol #Friday #funny #relatable #posts #me #repost #quote #quotes #follow #nofilter #like #instadaily #life #like

 

20 Likes on Instagram

  

Always a helper somewhere. I'm trying to photograph this bouquet and mini arms are reaching in the shot.

Gobierno de Chile

Lord Henry Cockburn (Law Lord).

Brass casting likeness on his grave at the Lords Terrace, Old Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.

 

I enjoy finding these old brass likenesses with their oxidation and lichenous patina, which gives them an unintended artistic presentation.

 

Henry Thomas Cockburn of Bonaly, Lord Cockburn, 26 Oct 1779 - 26 April 1854 was a Scottish lawyer, judge and literary figure. He served as Solicitor General for Scotland between 1830 and 1834. He presided over the Burke and Hare Trial in which evidence relating to the murder location was given by Fire Officer James Braidwood - already mentioned in the album.

 

He lived at Bonaly Tower, just north of Edinburgh Bypass, was photographed there by Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill ( already mentioned in the album) with a town house at 14 Charlotte Square.

 

He was a very close lifelong friend of my ancestor Æneas MacBean WS, who lived at 11 Charlotte Square. Aeneas held many positions one of which was on the City Council with a responsibility for the Fire Service, and it is likely he was part of the committee that discussed and appointed Braidwood.

 

His mother Janet Rannie was as sister-in-law of the influential Lord Melville, through her sister Elizabeth, and his father, Archibald Cockburn, was Sheriff of Midlothian and Baron of the Court of Exchequer. He was educated at the Royal High School and the University of Edinburgh.

 

His brother, John Cockburn FRSE (died 1862), was a wine merchant and founder of Cockburn's of Leith.

 

Cockburn contributed regularly to the Edinburgh Review. In this popular magazine of its day he is described as: "rather below the middle height, firm, wiry and muscular, inured to active exercise of all kinds, a good swimmer, an accomplished skater, an intense lover of the fresh breezes of heaven. He was the model of a high-bred Scotch gentleman. He spoke with a Doric breadth of accent. Cockburn was one of the most popular men north of the Tweed."

 

He was a member of the famous Speculative Society, to which Sir Walter Scott, Lord Henry Brougham, Lord Francis Jeffrey belonged and Æneas MacBean WS. Æneas nephew William MacBean was the Speculative Society’s librarian until his very premature death.

 

The extent of Cockburn's literary ability only became known after he had passed his 70th year, on the publication of his biography of lifelong friend Lord Jeffrey in 1852, and from his chief literary work, the Memorials of his Time, which appeared posthumously in 1856. His published work continued with his Journal, published in 1874. These constitute an autobiography of the writer interspersed with notices of manners, public events, and sketches of his contemporaries, of great interest and value.

 

Cockburn entered the Faculty of Advocates in 1800, and attached himself, not to the party of his relatives, who could have afforded him most valuable patronage, but to the Whig party, and that at a time when it held out few inducements to men ambitious of success in life. He became a distinguished advocate, and ultimately a judge. He was one of the leaders of the Whig party in Scotland in its days of darkness prior to the Reform Act of 1832, and was a close friend of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder. He was the defence lawyer for Helen McDougal, Burke's wife, in the trial for the Burke and Hare murders, and won her acquittal.

 

On the accession of Earl Grey's ministry in 1830 he became Solicitor General for Scotland. During his time here he drafted the First Scottish Reform Bill. In 1834 he was raised to the bench, and on taking his seat as a Judge in the Court of Session he adopted the title of Lord Cockburn as a Scottish Lord of Session.

 

Cockburn died on 26 April 1854, at his mansion of Bonaly, near Edinburgh and is buried in the city's Dean Cemetery. A statue of him by local sculptor William Brodie stands in the north-east corner inside Parliament Hall.

 

Cockburn Street, built in the 1850s to connect the High Street with the North British Railway's Waverley station, is also named after him. The building at the foot of the street, formerly the "Cockburn Hotel", bears his image in profile in a stone above the entrance.

 

Cockburn had an interest in architectural conservation, particularly in Edinburgh, where several important historic buildings such as John Knox's House and Tailors' Hall in the Cowgate owe their continued existence to the change in attitude towards conservation which he helped bring about. The Cockburn Association (Edinburgh Civic Trust), founded in 1875, was named in his honour. It still plays a very important role in Edinburgh.

 

Cockburn was played by Russell Hunter in Cocky, a one-man play which was effectively a dramatisation of his memoirs, broadcast on BBC Scotland. It ended with his closing speech to the jury in the Burke and Hare trial.

  

Ganesha, also spelled Ganesh, and also known as Ganapati and Vinayaka, is a widely worshipped deity in the Hindu pantheon. His image is found throughout India and Nepal. Hindu sects worship him regardless of affiliations. Devotion to Ganesha is widely diffused and extends to Jains, Buddhists, and beyond India.

 

Although he is known by many attributes, Ganesha's elephant head makes him easy to identify. Ganesha is widely revered as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom. As the god of beginnings, he is honoured at the start of rituals and ceremonies. Ganesha is also invoked as patron of letters and learning during writing sessions. Several texts relate mythological anecdotes associated with his birth and exploits and explain his distinct iconography.

 

Ganesha emerged as a distinct deity in the 4th and 5th centuries CE, during the Gupta Period, although he inherited traits from Vedic and pre-Vedic precursors. He was formally included among the five primary deities of Smartism (a Hindu denomination) in the 9th century. A sect of devotees called the Ganapatya arose, who identified Ganesha as the supreme deity. The principal scriptures dedicated to Ganesha are the Ganesha Purana, the Mudgala Purana, and the Ganapati Atharvashirsa.

 

ETYMOLOGY AND OTHER NAMES

Ganesha has been ascribed many other titles and epithets, including Ganapati and Vighneshvara. The Hindu title of respect Shri is often added before his name. One popular way Ganesha is worshipped is by chanting a Ganesha Sahasranama, a litany of "a thousand names of Ganesha". Each name in the sahasranama conveys a different meaning and symbolises a different aspect of Ganesha. At least two different versions of the Ganesha Sahasranama exist; one version is drawn from the Ganesha Purana, a Hindu scripture venerating Ganesha.

 

The name Ganesha is a Sanskrit compound, joining the words gana, meaning a group, multitude, or categorical system and isha, meaning lord or master. The word gaņa when associated with Ganesha is often taken to refer to the gaņas, a troop of semi-divine beings that form part of the retinue of Shiva. The term more generally means a category, class, community, association, or corporation. Some commentators interpret the name "Lord of the Gaņas" to mean "Lord of Hosts" or "Lord of created categories", such as the elements. Ganapati, a synonym for Ganesha, is a compound composed of gaṇa, meaning "group", and pati, meaning "ruler" or "lord". The Amarakosha, an early Sanskrit lexicon, lists eight synonyms of Ganesha : Vinayaka, Vighnarāja (equivalent to Vighnesha), Dvaimātura (one who has two mothers), Gaṇādhipa (equivalent to Ganapati and Ganesha), Ekadanta (one who has one tusk), Heramba, Lambodara (one who has a pot belly, or, literally, one who has a hanging belly), and Gajanana; having the face of an elephant).

 

Vinayaka is a common name for Ganesha that appears in the Purāṇas and in Buddhist Tantras. This name is reflected in the naming of the eight famous Ganesha temples in Maharashtra known as the Ashtavinayak (aṣṭavināyaka). The names Vighnesha and Vighneshvara (Lord of Obstacles) refers to his primary function in Hindu theology as the master and remover of obstacles (vighna).

 

A prominent name for Ganesha in the Tamil language is Pillai. A. K. Narain differentiates these terms by saying that pillai means a "child" while pillaiyar means a "noble child". He adds that the words pallu, pella, and pell in the Dravidian family of languages signify "tooth or tusk", also "elephant tooth or tusk". Anita Raina Thapan notes that the root word pille in the name Pillaiyar might have originally meant "the young of the elephant", because the Pali word pillaka means "a young elephant".

 

In the Burmese language, Ganesha is known as Maha Peinne, derived from Pali Mahā Wināyaka. The widespread name of Ganesha in Thailand is Phra Phikhanet or Phra Phikhanesuan, both of which are derived from Vara Vighnesha and Vara Vighneshvara respectively, whereas the name Khanet (from Ganesha) is rather rare.

 

In Sri Lanka, in the North-Central and North Western areas with predominantly Buddhist population, Ganesha is known as Aiyanayaka Deviyo, while in other Singhala Buddhist areas he is known as Gana deviyo.

 

ICONOGRAPHY

Ganesha is a popular figure in Indian art. Unlike those of some deities, representations of Ganesha show wide variations and distinct patterns changing over time. He may be portrayed standing, dancing, heroically taking action against demons, playing with his family as a boy, sitting down or on an elevated seat, or engaging in a range of contemporary situations.

 

Ganesha images were prevalent in many parts of India by the 6th century. The 13th century statue pictured is typical of Ganesha statuary from 900–1200, after Ganesha had been well-established as an independent deity with his own sect. This example features some of Ganesha's common iconographic elements. A virtually identical statue has been dated between 973–1200 by Paul Martin-Dubost, and another similar statue is dated c. 12th century by Pratapaditya Pal. Ganesha has the head of an elephant and a big belly. This statue has four arms, which is common in depictions of Ganesha. He holds his own broken tusk in his lower-right hand and holds a delicacy, which he samples with his trunk, in his lower-left hand. The motif of Ganesha turning his trunk sharply to his left to taste a sweet in his lower-left hand is a particularly archaic feature. A more primitive statue in one of the Ellora Caves with this general form has been dated to the 7th century. Details of the other hands are difficult to make out on the statue shown. In the standard configuration, Ganesha typically holds an axe or a goad in one upper arm and a pasha (noose) in the other upper arm.

 

The influence of this old constellation of iconographic elements can still be seen in contemporary representations of Ganesha. In one modern form, the only variation from these old elements is that the lower-right hand does not hold the broken tusk but is turned towards the viewer in a gesture of protection or fearlessness (abhaya mudra). The same combination of four arms and attributes occurs in statues of Ganesha dancing, which is a very popular theme.

 

COMMON ATTRIBUTES

Ganesha has been represented with the head of an elephant since the early stages of his appearance in Indian art. Puranic myths provide many explanations for how he got his elephant head. One of his popular forms, Heramba-Ganapati, has five elephant heads, and other less-common variations in the number of heads are known. While some texts say that Ganesha was born with an elephant head, he acquires the head later in most stories. The most recurrent motif in these stories is that Ganesha was created by Parvati using clay to protect her and Shiva beheaded him when Ganesha came between Shiva and Parvati. Shiva then replaced Ganesha's original head with that of an elephant. Details of the battle and where the replacement head came from vary from source to source. Another story says that Ganesha was created directly by Shiva's laughter. Because Shiva considered Ganesha too alluring, he gave him the head of an elephant and a protruding belly.

 

Ganesha's earliest name was Ekadanta (One Tusked), referring to his single whole tusk, the other being broken. Some of the earliest images of Ganesha show him holding his broken tusk. The importance of this distinctive feature is reflected in the Mudgala Purana, which states that the name of Ganesha's second incarnation is Ekadanta. Ganesha's protruding belly appears as a distinctive attribute in his earliest statuary, which dates to the Gupta period (4th to 6th centuries). This feature is so important that, according to the Mudgala Purana, two different incarnations of Ganesha use names based on it: Lambodara (Pot Belly, or, literally, Hanging Belly) and Mahodara (Great Belly). Both names are Sanskrit compounds describing his belly. The Brahmanda Purana says that Ganesha has the name Lambodara because all the universes (i.e., cosmic eggs) of the past, present, and future are present in him. The number of Ganesha's arms varies; his best-known forms have between two and sixteen arms. Many depictions of Ganesha feature four arms, which is mentioned in Puranic sources and codified as a standard form in some iconographic texts. His earliest images had two arms. Forms with 14 and 20 arms appeared in Central India during the 9th and the 10th centuries. The serpent is a common feature in Ganesha iconography and appears in many forms. According to the Ganesha Purana, Ganesha wrapped the serpent Vasuki around his neck. Other depictions of snakes include use as a sacred thread wrapped around the stomach as a belt, held in a hand, coiled at the ankles, or as a throne. Upon Ganesha's forehead may be a third eye or the Shaivite sectarian mark , which consists of three horizontal lines. The Ganesha Purana prescribes a tilaka mark as well as a crescent moon on the forehead. A distinct form of Ganesha called Bhalachandra includes that iconographic element. Ganesha is often described as red in color. Specific colors are associated with certain forms. Many examples of color associations with specific meditation forms are prescribed in the Sritattvanidhi, a treatise on Hindu iconography. For example, white is associated with his representations as Heramba-Ganapati and Rina-Mochana-Ganapati (Ganapati Who Releases from Bondage). Ekadanta-Ganapati is visualized as blue during meditation in that form.

 

VAHANAS

The earliest Ganesha images are without a vahana (mount/vehicle). Of the eight incarnations of Ganesha described in the Mudgala Purana, Ganesha uses a mouse (shrew) in five of them, a lion in his incarnation as Vakratunda, a peacock in his incarnation as Vikata, and Shesha, the divine serpent, in his incarnation as Vighnaraja. Mohotkata uses a lion, Mayūreśvara uses a peacock, Dhumraketu uses a horse, and Gajanana uses a mouse, in the four incarnations of Ganesha listed in the Ganesha Purana. Jain depictions of Ganesha show his vahana variously as a mouse, elephant, tortoise, ram, or peacock.

 

Ganesha is often shown riding on or attended by a mouse, shrew or rat. Martin-Dubost says that the rat began to appear as the principal vehicle in sculptures of Ganesha in central and western India during the 7th century; the rat was always placed close to his feet. The mouse as a mount first appears in written sources in the Matsya Purana and later in the Brahmananda Purana and Ganesha Purana, where Ganesha uses it as his vehicle in his last incarnation. The Ganapati Atharvashirsa includes a meditation verse on Ganesha that describes the mouse appearing on his flag. The names Mūṣakavāhana (mouse-mount) and Ākhuketana (rat-banner) appear in the Ganesha Sahasranama.

 

The mouse is interpreted in several ways. According to Grimes, "Many, if not most of those who interpret Gaṇapati's mouse, do so negatively; it symbolizes tamoguṇa as well as desire". Along these lines, Michael Wilcockson says it symbolizes those who wish to overcome desires and be less selfish. Krishan notes that the rat is destructive and a menace to crops. The Sanskrit word mūṣaka (mouse) is derived from the root mūṣ (stealing, robbing). It was essential to subdue the rat as a destructive pest, a type of vighna (impediment) that needed to be overcome. According to this theory, showing Ganesha as master of the rat demonstrates his function as Vigneshvara (Lord of Obstacles) and gives evidence of his possible role as a folk grāma-devatā (village deity) who later rose to greater prominence. Martin-Dubost notes a view that the rat is a symbol suggesting that Ganesha, like the rat, penetrates even the most secret places.

 

ASSOCIATIONS

 

OBSTACLES

Ganesha is Vighneshvara or Vighnaraja or Vighnaharta (Marathi), the Lord of Obstacles, both of a material and spiritual order. He is popularly worshipped as a remover of obstacles, though traditionally he also places obstacles in the path of those who need to be checked. Paul Courtright says that "his task in the divine scheme of things, his dharma, is to place and remove obstacles. It is his particular territory, the reason for his creation."

 

Krishan notes that some of Ganesha's names reflect shadings of multiple roles that have evolved over time. Dhavalikar ascribes the quick ascension of Ganesha in the Hindu pantheon, and the emergence of the Ganapatyas, to this shift in emphasis from vighnakartā (obstacle-creator) to vighnahartā (obstacle-averter). However, both functions continue to be vital to his character.

 

BUDDHI (KNOWLEDGE)

Ganesha is considered to be the Lord of letters and learning. In Sanskrit, the word buddhi is a feminine noun that is variously translated as intelligence, wisdom, or intellect. The concept of buddhi is closely associated with the personality of Ganesha, especially in the Puranic period, when many stories stress his cleverness and love of intelligence. One of Ganesha's names in the Ganesha Purana and the Ganesha Sahasranama is Buddhipriya. This name also appears in a list of 21 names at the end of the Ganesha Sahasranama that Ganesha says are especially important. The word priya can mean "fond of", and in a marital context it can mean "lover" or "husband", so the name may mean either "Fond of Intelligence" or "Buddhi's Husband".

 

AUM

Ganesha is identified with the Hindu mantra Aum, also spelled Om. The term oṃkārasvarūpa (Aum is his form), when identified with Ganesha, refers to the notion that he personifies the primal sound. The Ganapati Atharvashirsa attests to this association. Chinmayananda translates the relevant passage as follows:

 

(O Lord Ganapati!) You are (the Trinity) Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa. You are Indra. You are fire [Agni] and air [Vāyu]. You are the sun [Sūrya] and the moon [Chandrama]. You are Brahman. You are (the three worlds) Bhuloka [earth], Antariksha-loka [space], and Swargaloka [heaven]. You are Om. (That is to say, You are all this).

 

Some devotees see similarities between the shape of Ganesha's body in iconography and the shape of Aum in the Devanāgarī and Tamil scripts.

 

FIRST CHAKRA

According to Kundalini yoga, Ganesha resides in the first chakra, called Muladhara (mūlādhāra). Mula means "original, main"; adhara means "base, foundation". The muladhara chakra is the principle on which the manifestation or outward expansion of primordial Divine Force rests. This association is also attested to in the Ganapati Atharvashirsa. Courtright translates this passage as follows: "[O Ganesha,] You continually dwell in the sacral plexus at the base of the spine [mūlādhāra cakra]." Thus, Ganesha has a permanent abode in every being at the Muladhara. Ganesha holds, supports and guides all other chakras, thereby "governing the forces that propel the wheel of life".

 

FAMILY AND CONSORTS

Though Ganesha is popularly held to be the son of Shiva and Parvati, the Puranic myths give different versions about his birth. In some he was created by Parvati, in another he was created by Shiva and Parvati, in another he appeared mysteriously and was discovered by Shiva and Parvati or he was born from the elephant headed goddess Malini after she drank Parvati's bath water that had been thrown in the river.

 

The family includes his brother the war god Kartikeya, who is also called Subramanya, Skanda, Murugan and other names. Regional differences dictate the order of their births. In northern India, Skanda is generally said to be the elder, while in the south, Ganesha is considered the first born. In northern India, Skanda was an important martial deity from about 500 BCE to about 600 CE, when worship of him declined significantly in northern India. As Skanda fell, Ganesha rose. Several stories tell of sibling rivalry between the brothers and may reflect sectarian tensions.

 

Ganesha's marital status, the subject of considerable scholarly review, varies widely in mythological stories. One pattern of myths identifies Ganesha as an unmarried brahmacari. This view is common in southern India and parts of northern India. Another pattern associates him with the concepts of Buddhi (intellect), Siddhi (spiritual power), and Riddhi (prosperity); these qualities are sometimes personified as goddesses, said to be Ganesha's wives. He also may be shown with a single consort or a nameless servant (Sanskrit: daşi). Another pattern connects Ganesha with the goddess of culture and the arts, Sarasvati or Śarda (particularly in Maharashtra). He is also associated with the goddess of luck and prosperity, Lakshmi. Another pattern, mainly prevalent in the Bengal region, links Ganesha with the banana tree, Kala Bo.

 

The Shiva Purana says that Ganesha had begotten two sons: Kşema (prosperity) and Lābha (profit). In northern Indian variants of this story, the sons are often said to be Śubha (auspiciouness) and Lābha. The 1975 Hindi film Jai Santoshi Maa shows Ganesha married to Riddhi and Siddhi and having a daughter named Santoshi Ma, the goddess of satisfaction. This story has no Puranic basis, but Anita Raina Thapan and Lawrence Cohen cite Santoshi Ma's cult as evidence of Ganesha's continuing evolution as a popular deity.

 

WOSHIP AND FESTIVALS

Ganesha is worshipped on many religious and secular occasions; especially at the beginning of ventures such as buying a vehicle or starting a business. K.N. Somayaji says, "there can hardly be a [Hindu] home [in India] which does not house an idol of Ganapati. [..] Ganapati, being the most popular deity in India, is worshipped by almost all castes and in all parts of the country". Devotees believe that if Ganesha is propitiated, he grants success, prosperity and protection against adversity.

 

Ganesha is a non-sectarian deity, and Hindus of all denominations invoke him at the beginning of prayers, important undertakings, and religious ceremonies. Dancers and musicians, particularly in southern India, begin performances of arts such as the Bharatnatyam dance with a prayer to Ganesha. Mantras such as Om Shri Gaṇeshāya Namah (Om, salutation to the Illustrious Ganesha) are often used. One of the most famous mantras associated with Ganesha is Om Gaṃ Ganapataye Namah (Om, Gaṃ, Salutation to the Lord of Hosts).

 

Devotees offer Ganesha sweets such as modaka and small sweet balls (laddus). He is often shown carrying a bowl of sweets, called a modakapātra. Because of his identification with the color red, he is often worshipped with red sandalwood paste (raktacandana) or red flowers. Dūrvā grass (Cynodon dactylon) and other materials are also used in his worship.

 

Festivals associated with Ganesh are Ganesh Chaturthi or Vināyaka chaturthī in the śuklapakṣa (the fourth day of the waxing moon) in the month of bhādrapada (August/September) and the Gaṇeśa jayanti (Gaṇeśa's birthday) celebrated on the cathurthī of the śuklapakṣa (fourth day of the waxing moon) in the month of māgha (January/February)."

 

GANESH CHATURTI

An annual festival honours Ganesha for ten days, starting on Ganesha Chaturthi, which typically falls in late August or early September. The festival begins with people bringing in clay idols of Ganesha, symbolising Ganesha's visit. The festival culminates on the day of Ananta Chaturdashi, when idols (murtis) of Ganesha are immersed in the most convenient body of water. Some families have a tradition of immersion on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, or 7th day. In 1893, Lokmanya Tilak transformed this annual Ganesha festival from private family celebrations into a grand public event. He did so "to bridge the gap between the Brahmins and the non-Brahmins and find an appropriate context in which to build a new grassroots unity between them" in his nationalistic strivings against the British in Maharashtra. Because of Ganesha's wide appeal as "the god for Everyman", Tilak chose him as a rallying point for Indian protest against British rule. Tilak was the first to install large public images of Ganesha in pavilions, and he established the practice of submerging all the public images on the tenth day. Today, Hindus across India celebrate the Ganapati festival with great fervour, though it is most popular in the state of Maharashtra. The festival also assumes huge proportions in Mumbai, Pune, and in the surrounding belt of Ashtavinayaka temples.

 

TEMPLES

In Hindu temples, Ganesha is depicted in various ways: as an acolyte or subordinate deity (pãrśva-devatã); as a deity related to the principal deity (parivāra-devatã); or as the principal deity of the temple (pradhāna), treated similarly as the highest gods of the Hindu pantheon. As the god of transitions, he is placed at the doorway of many Hindu temples to keep out the unworthy, which is analogous to his role as Parvati’s doorkeeper. In addition, several shrines are dedicated to Ganesha himself, of which the Ashtavinayak (lit. "eight Ganesha (shrines)") in Maharashtra are particularly well known. Located within a 100-kilometer radius of the city of Pune, each of these eight shrines celebrates a particular form of Ganapati, complete with its own lore and legend. The eight shrines are: Morgaon, Siddhatek, Pali, Mahad, Theur, Lenyadri, Ozar and Ranjangaon.

 

There are many other important Ganesha temples at the following locations: Wai in Maharashtra; Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh; Jodhpur, Nagaur and Raipur (Pali) in Rajasthan; Baidyanath in Bihar; Baroda, Dholaka, and Valsad in Gujarat and Dhundiraj Temple in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Prominent Ganesha temples in southern India include the following: Kanipakam in Chittoor; the Jambukeśvara Temple at Tiruchirapalli; at Rameshvaram and Suchindram in Tamil Nadu; at Malliyur, Kottarakara, Pazhavangadi, Kasargod in Kerala, Hampi, and Idagunji in Karnataka; and Bhadrachalam in Andhra Pradesh.

 

T. A. Gopinatha notes, "Every village however small has its own image of Vighneśvara (Vigneshvara) with or without a temple to house it in. At entrances of villages and forts, below pīpaḹa (Sacred fig) trees [...], in a niche [...] in temples of Viṣṇu (Vishnu) as well as Śiva (Shiva) and also in separate shrines specially constructed in Śiva temples [...]; the figure of Vighneśvara is invariably seen." Ganesha temples have also been built outside of India, including southeast Asia, Nepal (including the four Vinayaka shrines in the Kathmandu valley), and in several western countries.

 

RISE TO PROMINENCE

 

FIRST APEARANCE

Ganesha appeared in his classic form as a clearly recognizable deity with well-defined iconographic attributes in the early 4th to 5th centuries. Shanti Lal Nagar says that the earliest known iconic image of Ganesha is in the niche of the Shiva temple at Bhumra, which has been dated to the Gupta period. His independent cult appeared by about the 10th century. Narain summarizes the controversy between devotees and academics regarding the development of Ganesha as follows:

 

What is inscrutable is the somewhat dramatic appearance of Gaņeśa on the historical scene. His antecedents are not clear. His wide acceptance and popularity, which transcend sectarian and territorial limits, are indeed amazing. On the one hand there is the pious belief of the orthodox devotees in Gaņeśa's Vedic origins and in the Purāṇic explanations contained in the confusing, but nonetheless interesting, mythology. On the other hand there are doubts about the existence of the idea and the icon of this deity" before the fourth to fifth century A.D. ... [I]n my opinion, indeed there is no convincing evidence of the existence of this divinity prior to the fifth century.

 

POSSIBLE INFLUENCES

Courtright reviews various speculative theories about the early history of Ganesha, including supposed tribal traditions and animal cults, and dismisses all of them in this way:

 

In the post 600 BC period there is evidence of people and places named after the animal. The motif appears on coins and sculptures.

 

Thapan's book on the development of Ganesha devotes a chapter to speculations about the role elephants had in early India but concludes that, "although by the second century CE the elephant-headed yakṣa form exists it cannot be presumed to represent Gaṇapati-Vināyaka. There is no evidence of a deity by this name having an elephant or elephant-headed form at this early stage. Gaṇapati-Vināyaka had yet to make his debut."

 

One theory of the origin of Ganesha is that he gradually came to prominence in connection with the four Vinayakas (Vināyakas). In Hindu mythology, the Vināyakas were a group of four troublesome demons who created obstacles and difficulties but who were easily propitiated. The name Vināyaka is a common name for Ganesha both in the Purāṇas and in Buddhist Tantras. Krishan is one of the academics who accepts this view, stating flatly of Ganesha, "He is a non-vedic god. His origin is to be traced to the four Vināyakas, evil spirits, of the Mānavagŗhyasūtra (7th–4th century BCE) who cause various types of evil and suffering". Depictions of elephant-headed human figures, which some identify with Ganesha, appear in Indian art and coinage as early as the 2nd century. According to Ellawala, the elephant-headed Ganesha as lord of the Ganas was known to the people of Sri Lanka in the early pre-Christian era.

 

A metal plate depiction of Ganesha had been discovered in 1993, in Iran, it dated back to 1,200 BCE. Another one was discovered much before, in Lorestan Province of Iran.

 

First Ganesha's terracotta images are from 1st century CE found in Ter, Pal, Verrapuram and Chandraketugarh. These figures are small, with elephant head, two arms, and chubby physique. The earliest Ganesha icons in stone were carved in Mathura during Kushan times (2nd-3rd centuries CE).

 

VEDIC AND EPIC LITERATURE

The title "Leader of the group" (Sanskrit: gaṇapati) occurs twice in the Rig Veda, but in neither case does it refer to the modern Ganesha. The term appears in RV 2.23.1 as a title for Brahmanaspati, according to commentators. While this verse doubtless refers to Brahmanaspati, it was later adopted for worship of Ganesha and is still used today. In rejecting any claim that this passage is evidence of Ganesha in the Rig Veda, Ludo Rocher says that it "clearly refers to Bṛhaspati—who is the deity of the hymn—and Bṛhaspati only". Equally clearly, the second passage (RV 10.112.9) refers to Indra, who is given the epithet 'gaṇapati', translated "Lord of the companies (of the Maruts)." However, Rocher notes that the more recent Ganapatya literature often quotes the Rigvedic verses to give Vedic respectability to Ganesha .

 

Two verses in texts belonging to Black Yajurveda, Maitrāyaṇīya Saṃhitā (2.9.1) and Taittirīya Āraṇyaka (10.1), appeal to a deity as "the tusked one" (Dantiḥ), "elephant-faced" (Hastimukha), and "with a curved trunk" (Vakratuņḍa). These names are suggestive of Ganesha, and the 14th century commentator Sayana explicitly establishes this identification. The description of Dantin, possessing a twisted trunk (vakratuṇḍa) and holding a corn-sheaf, a sugar cane, and a club, is so characteristic of the Puranic Ganapati that Heras says "we cannot resist to accept his full identification with this Vedic Dantin". However, Krishan considers these hymns to be post-Vedic additions. Thapan reports that these passages are "generally considered to have been interpolated". Dhavalikar says, "the references to the elephant-headed deity in the Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā have been proven to be very late interpolations, and thus are not very helpful for determining the early formation of the deity".

 

Ganesha does not appear in Indian epic literature that is dated to the Vedic period. A late interpolation to the epic poem Mahabharata says that the sage Vyasa (Vyāsa) asked Ganesha to serve as his scribe to transcribe the poem as he dictated it to him. Ganesha agreed but only on condition that Vyasa recite the poem uninterrupted, that is, without pausing. The sage agreed, but found that to get any rest he needed to recite very complex passages so Ganesha would have to ask for clarifications. The story is not accepted as part of the original text by the editors of the critical edition of the Mahabharata, in which the twenty-line story is relegated to a footnote in an appendix. The story of Ganesha acting as the scribe occurs in 37 of the 59 manuscripts consulted during preparation of the critical edition.[174] Ganesha's association with mental agility and learning is one reason he is shown as scribe for Vyāsa's dictation of the Mahabharata in this interpolation. Richard L. Brown dates the story to the 8th century, and Moriz Winternitz concludes that it was known as early as c. 900, but it was not added to the Mahabharata some 150 years later. Winternitz also notes that a distinctive feature in South Indian manuscripts of the Mahabharata is their omission of this Ganesha legend. The term vināyaka is found in some recensions of the Śāntiparva and Anuśāsanaparva that are regarded as interpolations. A reference to Vighnakartṛīṇām ("Creator of Obstacles") in Vanaparva is also believed to be an interpolation and does not appear in the critical edition.

 

PURANIC PERIOD

Stories about Ganesha often occur in the Puranic corpus. Brown notes while the Puranas "defy precise chronological ordering", the more detailed narratives of Ganesha's life are in the late texts, c. 600–1300. Yuvraj Krishan says that the Puranic myths about the birth of Ganesha and how he acquired an elephant's head are in the later Puranas, which were composed from c. 600 onwards. He elaborates on the matter to say that references to Ganesha in the earlier Puranas, such as the Vayu and Brahmanda Puranas, are later interpolations made during the 7th to 10th centuries.

 

In his survey of Ganesha's rise to prominence in Sanskrit literature, Ludo Rocher notes that:

 

Above all, one cannot help being struck by the fact that the numerous stories surrounding Gaṇeśa concentrate on an unexpectedly limited number of incidents. These incidents are mainly three: his birth and parenthood, his elephant head, and his single tusk. Other incidents are touched on in the texts, but to a far lesser extent.

 

Ganesha's rise to prominence was codified in the 9th century, when he was formally included as one of the five primary deities of Smartism. The 9th-century philosopher Adi Shankara popularized the "worship of the five forms" (Panchayatana puja) system among orthodox Brahmins of the Smarta tradition. This worship practice invokes the five deities Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, and Surya. Adi Shankara instituted the tradition primarily to unite the principal deities of these five major sects on an equal status. This formalized the role of Ganesha as a complementary deity.

 

SCRIPTURES

Once Ganesha was accepted as one of the five principal deities of Brahmanism, some Brahmins (brāhmaṇas) chose to worship Ganesha as their principal deity. They developed the Ganapatya tradition, as seen in the Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana.

 

The date of composition for the Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana - and their dating relative to one another - has sparked academic debate. Both works were developed over time and contain age-layered strata. Anita Thapan reviews comments about dating and provides her own judgement. "It seems likely that the core of the Ganesha Purana appeared around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries", she says, "but was later interpolated." Lawrence W. Preston considers the most reasonable date for the Ganesha Purana to be between 1100 and 1400, which coincides with the apparent age of the sacred sites mentioned by the text.

 

R.C. Hazra suggests that the Mudgala Purana is older than the Ganesha Purana, which he dates between 1100 and 1400. However, Phyllis Granoff finds problems with this relative dating and concludes that the Mudgala Purana was the last of the philosophical texts concerned with Ganesha. She bases her reasoning on the fact that, among other internal evidence, the Mudgala Purana specifically mentions the Ganesha Purana as one of the four Puranas (the Brahma, the Brahmanda, the Ganesha, and the Mudgala Puranas) which deal at length with Ganesha. While the kernel of the text must be old, it was interpolated until the 17th and 18th centuries as the worship of Ganapati became more important in certain regions. Another highly regarded scripture, the Ganapati Atharvashirsa, was probably composed during the 16th or 17th centuries.

 

BEYOND INDIA AND HINDUISM

Commercial and cultural contacts extended India's influence in western and southeast Asia. Ganesha is one of a number of Hindu deities who reached foreign lands as a result.

 

Ganesha was particularly worshipped by traders and merchants, who went out of India for commercial ventures. From approximately the 10th century onwards, new networks of exchange developed including the formation of trade guilds and a resurgence of money circulation. During this time, Ganesha became the principal deity associated with traders. The earliest inscription invoking Ganesha before any other deity is associated with the merchant community.

 

Hindus migrated to Maritime Southeast Asia and took their culture, including Ganesha, with them. Statues of Ganesha are found throughout the region, often beside Shiva sanctuaries. The forms of Ganesha found in Hindu art of Java, Bali, and Borneo show specific regional influences. The spread of Hindu culture to southeast Asia established Ganesha in modified forms in Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand. In Indochina, Hinduism and Buddhism were practiced side by side, and mutual influences can be seen in the iconography of Ganesha in the region. In Thailand, Cambodia, and among the Hindu classes of the Chams in Vietnam, Ganesha was mainly thought of as a remover of obstacles. Today in Buddhist Thailand, Ganesha is regarded as a remover of obstacles, the god of success.

 

Before the arrival of Islam, Afghanistan had close cultural ties with India, and the adoration of both Hindu and Buddhist deities was practiced. Examples of sculptures from the 5th to the 7th centuries have survived, suggesting that the worship of Ganesha was then in vogue in the region.

 

Ganesha appears in Mahayana Buddhism, not only in the form of the Buddhist god Vināyaka, but also as a Hindu demon form with the same name. His image appears in Buddhist sculptures during the late Gupta period. As the Buddhist god Vināyaka, he is often shown dancing. This form, called Nṛtta Ganapati, was popular in northern India, later adopted in Nepal, and then in Tibet. In Nepal, the Hindu form of Ganesha, known as Heramba, is popular; he has five heads and rides a lion. Tibetan representations of Ganesha show ambivalent views of him. A Tibetan rendering of Ganapati is tshogs bdag. In one Tibetan form, he is shown being trodden under foot by Mahākāla, (Shiva) a popular Tibetan deity. Other depictions show him as the Destroyer of Obstacles, and sometimes dancing. Ganesha appears in China and Japan in forms that show distinct regional character. In northern China, the earliest known stone statue of Ganesha carries an inscription dated to 531. In Japan, where Ganesha is known as Kangiten, the Ganesha cult was first mentioned in 806.

 

The canonical literature of Jainism does not mention the worship of Ganesha. However, Ganesha is worshipped by most Jains, for whom he appears to have taken over certain functions of Kubera. Jain connections with the trading community support the idea that Jainism took up Ganesha worship as a result of commercial connections. The earliest known Jain Ganesha statue dates to about the 9th century. A 15th-century Jain text lists procedures for the installation of Ganapati images. Images of Ganesha appear in the Jain temples of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

 

WIKIPEDIA

 

during Queens Park Cricket Club 125th Anniversary Gala Dinner at the Hilton Trinidad & Conference Centre, Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Photo by WICB Media/Randy Brooks of Brooks Latouche Photography

Activity relating to the carrying of the more than 100 portable shrines (mikoshi) around the Asakusa neighbourhood to bless the businesses and residents with prosperity in the coming year.

 

Sanja Matsuri (Festival) at the Sensoji Temple, Asakusa,

Tokyo, Japan, 2016

 

Only the street shots - thestreetzine.blogspot.com/

Sarah Dallon, aged about 65 Taken at Blackpool GB124.DPA/645/4 No Date, circa 1925

 

See also www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/7214624268/in...

Myth and Psyche

The Evolution of Consciousness

This introduction to Jungian psychology was written by Donald Kalsched and Alan Jones as a companion to a photographic exhibition at The Hofstra Museum, in New York City, November 15 – December 19, 1986. The exhibit was presented by The Hofstra Museum with The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). The exhibit was curated by Karin Barnaby and Annmari Ronnberg.

 

Introduction

Mythology is the most archaic and profound record we have of mankind's essential spirit and nature. As far back as we are able to trace the origins of our species, we find myth and myth-making as the fundamental language through which man relates to life's mystery and fashions meaning from his experiences. The world of myth has its own laws and its own reality. Instead of concepts and facts that make logical sense, we find patterns of irrational imagery whose meaning must be discerned or experienced by the participant-observer. Discovering these patterns of meaning is what Jung meant by the symbolic approach to religion, myth, and dream.

The mythic image is not to be taken literally and concretely as it would be in the belief-system of a particular religion, nor is it to be dismissed as 'mere illusion,' as often happens in scientific circles. Instead, we must approach myth symbolically as revealed eternal 'truths' about mankind's psychic existence — about the reality of the psyche. 'Once upon a time' does not mean 'once' in history but refers to events that occur in eternal time, always and everywhere. Any myth is very much alive today. Every night in sleep we sink back into that source of all mythological imagery, the unconscious psyche — the origin of dreams. Many of our games have their roots in mythology and much of contemporary art, literature, and film is shot through with mythological themes.

The comparative method is the basic key to a symbolic understanding of mythology. Through it we discover certain patterns which recur in widely varying cultures separated by an immensity of both distance and time. Jung called these underlying patterns 'archetypes' from 'arche' meaning primordial, and 'typos' meaning typical. Archetypal images embody the most essential elements of the human experience and drama. They manifest both as powerful images, and as dynamic behavioral patterns. They are a repertoire of instinctive human functioning, analogous in our species to the instinctive impulse that impels, say, the Baltimore Oriole to build a beautiful teardrop nest, or Salmon to return to the streams of their birth. The generality of these images result from recurrent reactions of human beings to situations and stimuli of the same general order, repeated over thousands of years.

The archetypal images represent several basic stages of the life drama symbolized by the Hero myth. They lead from an initial stage of unconsciousness before the ego has awakened, through various stages of heroic struggle, to a final state of 'wholeness' or integration when life has reached its full potential and a relationship between the human and divine has been reestablished. Jung called this process 'individuation,' the process of becoming the true individual that one really is. This 'true self' Jung felt to be the dynamic factor in the unconscious of each individual. It represents the central archetype of order and wholeness among the other archetypes. Jung called it the Self.

The Original Embryonic State

In the beginning of many creation myths is an image of an original state of perfection, wholeness, and beatific containment. This is often represented as a containing circle, cave, pool, or sphere. The predominant archetypal symbol is that of the primordial Earth Goddess — the Great Mother with her nourishing and protective womb. Many other symbols express this archetype. Anything large and embracing or containing, such as a vessel, that enwraps, shelters, and preserves something small and fragile partakes of this 'primordial mother' One very common symbol is the uroborus, the snake with its tail in its mouth. These symbols express a paradisal state prior to any degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy. The Garden of Eden, and the Golden Age when mankind lived in union with the gods, partaking of divine fullness and totality, are other common motifs of this psychological condition. In the biological life of the individual this symbolism corresponds not only to the pre-natal gestation of the embryo in the mother's uterus, but to the state of the newborn's total dependence upon the mother. Psychologically, these symbols express the stage when the ego is only a potential, or when the ego is dominated by the universal instinctual patterns of human response to the world, or a condition when little or nothing of a uniquely personal value is expressed by the individual.

Separation, Creation, and the Birth Of Consciousness

Comparative mythology teaches us that there is always a creative tension or urgency in the original embryonic state which leads to trouble. The great uroboric round breaks open and light is born into the world. A typical personification of this impulse is the snake that tempts Eve to violate her passive containment in the Garden, or the shadowy figure or animal in Fairy Tales that tempt the hero or heroine to break the status quo and do something 'evil,' i.e., individual. Such acts result in expulsion from paradisal condition. The protection of childhood, as well as the contentment with the past or with what has been achieved, are types of a paradise that are lost when life calls for a new adaptation.

This process begins with a cataclysmic separation. In myth it is often imaged as the separation of the world Parents. Father Sky and Mother Earth hold each other in an embrace and the world is left in darkness. The children born between them must thrust them apart, despite their parents' protesting cries and groans. Only then does light enter the world. This light symbolizes consciousness. Only in the light of consciousness can man know. Yet the acquisition of consciousness is a Promethean act subjecting the hero to the danger of inflation and retribution. For stealing fire from the Gods Prometheus was chained to a rock where an eagle ate his liver every night; when Icarus flew too high on his man-made wings, their wax melted and he plunged to his death in the sea. As a bearer of light, the hero is willing to face these dangers, despite the awareness of his aloneness, individuality, and mortality, in order to carry development further.

However, once the apple is eaten the world falls into opposites, and 'good' and 'evil' are assigned their place in the world. The Great Good Mother shows her dark aspect, the hateful or Terrible Mother, while the creative Father now sits opposite the Destructive Father, and brothers kill each other in the name of love, and the world is alternately either an enchanted or persecutory place.

The Hero Myth: Birth, Call, Journey

The hero myth symbolizes that personality formation occurs only through struggle, suffering, and sacrifice. The hero's triumphs and defeats are the paradigms of the individual's confrontation with the challenges of his or her own individual life — no matter how mundane or exalted. The birth of the hero usually occurs in humble surroundings such as a manger or cave, but it is always extraordinary in some way. Often there is a special light around the child, or the child is perceived to be a threat to the King. Frequently, the hero has two fathers — his personal father and a 'higher' father. Often the mother is a virgin, and the hero's conception is of divine origin. The hero thereby inherits a dual nature. He is a human being like everyone else, yet at the same time he feels himself to be an outsider, a stranger to the community. He does not fit in, and discovers within himself something that sets him apart, such as his prophetic powers, healing abilities, or creative powers. These lead him to extraordinary deeds.

The heroic adventure often begins with some message or 'call' from a miraculous source. A frog talks to the princess, or Moses confronts a burning bush, or an empty rice bowl floats upstream (Buddha), or there is an annunciation in a dream. The call often comes at an important moment. Old life values have often been outgrown and a certain sterility has set in. Parsifal's quest for the Holy Grail was set in motion by the Fisher King's realm having become a wasteland. Whatever its form, the call awakens the hero to his or her special destiny.

The Hero Myth: The Dragon Fight and Redemption of the Feminine

In the fight with the dragon the hero battles the regressive forces of the unconscious which threaten to swallow the individuating ego. The forces, personified in figures like Circe, Kali, medusa, sea serpents, Minotaur, or Gorgon, represent the Terrible side of the Great Mother. The Hero may voluntarily submit to being swallowed by the monster, or to a conscious descent into Hades so as to vanquish the forces of darkness. This mortifying descent into the abyss, the sea, the dark cave, or the underworld in order to be reborn to a new identity expresses the symbolism of the night-sea journey through the uterine belly of the monster. It is a fundamental theme in mythology the world over — that of death and rebirth. All initiatory rituals involve this basic archetypal pattern through which the old order and early infantile attachments must die and a more mature and productive life be born in their place.

The mythological goal of the dragon fight is almost always the virgin, the captive, or more generally, the 'treasure hard to attain.' This image of the vulnerable, beautiful, and enchanting woman, guarded by and captive of a menacing monster gives us a picture of the inner core of the personality and its surrounding defenses. The hero's task is to rescue the maiden from the grasp of the monster and, ultimately, to marry her and establish his kingdom with her. This dragon fight and liberation of the captive is the archetypal pattern that can guide us through those major transitional passages in our personal development where a rebirth or reorientation of consciousness is indicated. The captive represents the 'new' element whose liberation makes all further development possible.

In response to the call the hero undertakes a journey, usually a dangerous journey to an unknown region full of both promise and danger. Often the journey is a descent. Sometimes, as with Jonah, Aeneas, Christ, and Psyche, it is a descent into the depths — the sea, the underworld, or Hades itself. Always there is a perilous crossing. Sometimes the faintheartedness of the hero is balanced by the appearance of guardians or helpful animals that enable the hero to perform the superhuman task that cannot be accomplished unaided. These helpful forces are representatives of the psychic totality that supports the ego in its struggle. They bear witness to the fact that the essential function of the hero myth is the development of the individual's true personality.

The Goal of Individuation and Its Symbols

The successful completion of the hero drama forges a relationship between the psychic opposites which split apart at the birth of consciousness. The major symbols for this synthesis are various forms of the Coniunctio Oppositorium or Mandala in which the original wholeness is now re-established but on a higher, more differentiated level. In the images of King and Queen united in marriage, or male and female united in the form of the androgyne, or geometrical opposites paradoxically united in the 'squared circle' or life and death come together in the mysterious image of the immortal God suffering a mortal wound, the integration of the opposites within the personality are symbolized. Additional symbols of wholeness are the elixir of immortality, the pearl of great price, and the divine child, representing a life-transcending potential for future growth.

The hero myth tells us that the ego's courage to suffer the burdens of fear, guilt, and the conflicts within the personality — the willingness to be crucified on the cross of one's own doubleness and to hold this inwardly — is the only way God and man can be reconciled and drawn closer together. The original unity of God and man, as in the Garden, is broken when the ego aspires to consciousness. The ego is then banished to a world full of opposites which war with each other within the personality, as brother falls upon brother in war and devastation. But into the chaos is born the child of light, the hero, whose struggle can forge an everlasting relationship between male and female, light and darkness, life and death, God and man. This is the promise, the Ring, the Covenant, the Flaming Rainbow Bridge which can unite the human and divine in the inward depths of the human psyche.

 

www.cgjungny.org/d/d_mythpsyche.html

 

The biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis Chapters 2-3) is foundational to our Western culture and has influenced the upbringing and psychology of all of us, whether we realize it or not.Mythologists as well as many biblical scholars recognize the story as being in the genre of myth, which makes it appropriate to analyze it from the perspective of depth psychology, among other approaches. Indeed, as Joseph Campbell concluded, “This story yields its meaning only to a psychological interpretation” (2001, p. 50). Further, Carl Jung (CW 9.2, para. 230) had already written that “cosmogonic myths are, at bottom, symbols for the coming of consciousness.” But the literature about the Eden story taking such a psychological approach is scant, largely due to traditional and problematic gaps and tensions between academic disciplines. My recent book, The Mythology of Eden, is in part an interdisciplinary effort to take on this fascinating and important task and advance our knowledge on the subject. Below I distill some of my findings from this approach to the Eden myth, and I hope they break some new ground: The Story as Told.In the story, Yahweh warns Adam (before Eve is created) not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or he will die that very day. In many mythologies and religions, including traditional Canaanite-Israelite religion, sacred trees have been thought of as conduits for connecting with and directly experiencing the divine, whereas the Eden story’s author insisted upon a covenant (contract) relationship between the divine (Yahweh) on the one hand and the human (earthly, profane, non-divine) sphere on the other. In the ancient biblical world, one way to experience the divine was to partake of the fruit or other produce of the sacred tree or plant, thus imbibing the essence of the divinity represented by or immanent within the tree, but this practice was condemned in the Bible.When Eve was tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit, she decided to eat it for various reasons, but mainly because she desired wisdom (Gen. 3:6). This purpose was realized when, immediately after Eve and then Adam ate the fruit, “the eyes of both were opened” (Gen. 3:7), and Yahweh remarked (to other divine beings), “See, the man has become like one of us [deities], knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). The questions become: What kind of knowledge/wisdom did Adam and Eve acquire, and what kind of transformation did these archetypal humans undergo? Both relate to the psyche.

 

The Creation of the Cosmos from ChaosIn ancient Near Eastern creation myths, there was no such thing as creation from nothing. Before the creation, there was always a formless watery substance characterized as “chaos” (see, e.g., Gen. 1:1) because at that stage no time, space, or other order existed. The same is true before the beginning of creation in the Eden story (a separate creation story from that in Genesis 1, by a different, earlier author), only a different metaphor for chaos was used, that of a desert wasteland (Gen. 2:4-5). The ordered cosmos is created like a bubble within the surrounding chaos and is bordered by the solid firmament above and the ground below, as shown in Diagram 1 below. The cosmos (including humans) is made of the same substance as chaos; the only difference is that it is ordered, has multiplicity, and the things created have names given by the creator decreeing their function and destiny.This motif of creation from chaos was universal in the ancient Near East and common around the world. Why? Marie-Louise von Franz (1995, pp. 2-4) explained that this is a natural result of our psyche experiencing its own ego-consciousness coming into being as “world-becoming.” As far as our psyche is concerned, our becoming aware of the world and the world coming into existence are one and the same. This process occurred not only when humans first developed ego-consciousness but also occurs in any young child’s development (as shown by developmental psychology) and in the life of adults, such as when we wake up in the morning from an unconscious state and order falls into place. Our unconscious has no sense of space or time and little sense of order; it is indeed chaotic and is experienced as such. Thus, the dawn of consciousness and our image of the creation of the world are parallel and related processes which throw up corresponding, related symbols. The notion of primordial chaos is a natural projection of an archetypal image that helps make the unknown comprehensible.Chaos as Evil and Sin.After the creation, chaos is not eliminated but continues outside the cosmos, always trying to encroach upon and undo the created cosmos. Particular things are “created” only to the extent that chaos is absent in them. But in fact nothing is perfect (except the initial Garden of Eden); each thing contains some element of chaos. In nature, chaos is manifested in natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and violent storms. Since humans are made of the same substance as the rest of the cosmos (recall Adam being formed from the ground and water), chaos can and will inevitably erupt in humans too. In modern psychological terms, this is the unconscious at work. In the biblical world, chaos was typically symbolized by a serpent, so when in the Eden story the serpent appears before Eve, the story’s ancient audience knew that chaos had entered the Garden and Eve’s mind. Her dialogue with the serpent represents this manifestation of chaos within herself and inner turmoil.In normative terms, chaos is viewed as bad (evil), while creation is good. After all, God had created the ordered cosmos from chaos, so that’s what He wanted. The cosmos in this respect has a teleological nature, which should be respected, maintained, and furthered. Chaos manifested in humans is what results in human evil (which the biblical authors said includes pagan religion). This is what Yahweh warns Cain about: “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen. 4:7, by the same author as the Eden story). The same biblical author later described this chaotic trait within human nature as wild imaginings of the human heart (in the ancient world thought to be the repository of thought) (Gen. 6:5; 8:21), much like Eve’s imaginings during her temptation (Gen. 3:6). Later rabbinical writings characterized this trait as the yezer hara (“impulse to evil”), which became the standard rabbinical explanation for the origin of evil. The ancients did not understand the nature of the unconscious as such, but they did reach the insight that much of human behavior, especially evil behavior, stems from urges deep within and barely susceptible to our rational, conscious control.The Antidote: The Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Law

Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden showed what happens if unrestricted human nature takes its natural course. The author had to provide a remedy. His antidote was twofold: the knowledge of good and evil, combined with the Law (here in its incipient form).First, the immediate result of eating the forbidden fruit was to acquire the godlike knowledge of good and evil. What this knowledge consists of has been the subject of much debate, but actually the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls go fairly far in explaining it. In several passages they describe this knowledge as being acquired (or perfected) as one passes from minority to adulthood, at the age of 20 (e.g., Isa. 7:14-16). Thus, when the Hebrews rebelled against Yahweh in the wilderness of Sinai, those 20 or older (except for the virtuous Joshua and Caleb) were implicated in this sin and so were not allowed to enter the Promised Land (hence the long stay in the wilderness), while minors under 20 had no knowledge of good and evil and so were considered incapable of sin, and therefore would eventually enter the Promised Land (Num. 14:29-30; Deut. 1:39). The Hebrew Bible goes on to portray Israel’s best kings, David and Solomon, has having an extra dose of the knowledge of good and evil, which is described as wisdom and a power of discernment (2 Sam. 14:17, 20; 1 Kings 3:9-12, 28; 4:29-31).The above understanding means that Adam and Eve’s transgression did not rise to the level of sin, since they had not yet acquired the knowledge of good and evil. They were like minors without legal capacity. In fact, their transgression was the result of human nature already at creation having the aforementioned inclination toward evil, not the cause of our sinfulness, as claimed in the doctrine of original sin.Given that evil is a form of chaos and good is a manifestation of the divinely created order of creation, the knowledge of good and evil is nothing less than the godlike knowledge of how the universe works in terms of the dynamic between chaos and order, both at the cosmic level and at the human moral level of good and evil. This understanding was likewise an insight into how the human psyche works. According to the biblical writers, in principle the knowledge of good and evil is what can (if applied) enable humans to avoid sin and further good.As shown by the snowballing of human evil leading up to Noah’s flood, however, in practice merely having this knowledge was not enough for good to prevail. Humans needed divine guidance and assistance. It was for this reason that Yahweh bestowed on the Hebrews the Law, a set of ordering principles which, if followed, would result in good prevailing, as well as the greatness of the Israelite nation. Having the knowledge of good and evil would enable humans to understand and follow the Law. This scheme is shown in Diagram 2 below, presenting the knowledge of good and evil as a type of merism, encompassing these opposites at the cosmic and human level.The Psychic Nature of the Transgression.Having the knowledge of good and evil enables humans to discern and understand both external and internal (psychic) reality, in particular pairs of opposites, symbolized by the opposites of good and evil but including others in the story such as male and female, and God and humans. Therefore, Adam and Eve’s acquisition of this knowledge constituted an enlightenment and transformation into a higher psychic level, that of full ego-consciousness. Before that, they were mired in a lower psychic state dominated by the unconscious that Erich Neumann (1954) famously called the “uroboros,” where all is one and there are no pairs of opposites (pp. 5-38). Yahweh’s warning that Adam would “die” upon eating the fruit, may well render this moment a kind of initiation scenario, with the old human dying and entering a new state of being. This transformation is what made humans responsible and accountable for their actions (especially before God), truly capable of sin or of good, and ready to act in the real world. That is when Adam and Eve exited the Garden. In psychological terms, they were not driven from the Garden but grew up and walked out on their own. As Joseph Campbell explained, “The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds” (2001, p. 50).Although no act of “original sin” occurred, the Eden story remains principally a story explaining human nature, in particular our psyche. Especially important is the story’s recognition of the role of chaos in the psyche, which today means the unconscious and especially the Shadow. As Jung recognized, “it is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow-side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism” (CW 7, para. 35). This chaos eventually came to be represented by the Devil. The author of the Eden story honestly brought out this psychic fact, and he did his best to fashion a way to deal with it. His remedy was the application of our knowledge of good and evil (an aspect of ego-consciousness) plus the Law.

What Does the Eden Story Mean for Us?In considering the relevance of the Eden story in today’s world, we must reevaluate the biblical author’s remedy and determine what our conclusions mean for us individually (spirituality, psychology), as well as socio-politically in terms of criminology, social policy, ethics and morality, education, religious doctrine (or abandonment thereof), and law. This complicated endeavor would take us far beyond the scope of this article, so I will end with just two points in this regard.

First, to the extent the biblical remedy involves conscious application of the knowledge of good and evil, this seems inevitably to involve, at least in part, ego-consciousness repressing and suppressing contents of our unconscious, which modern psychology has shown to cause still more problems.Second, historically, the biblical authors’ reliance on prophylactic laws to control human behavior has had mixed results. Further, such approach assumes that the human psyche is incapable of further change, even though it had transformed once before in the Garden. As a result, the prophylactic approach treats symptoms rather than the underlying problems, including evolved traits that once had survival value but which in many cases are now dysfunctional.

An alternative approach is to endeavor to transform the human psyche to a higher level, in which case the need for prophylactic measures and suppression and repression of the unconscious would lessen. Such is the approach, for example, being explored by Allan Combs (2009), the integral psychology movement championed by Ken Wilber (1996; 2000), and other progressive thinkers and initiatives. One means toward this end may well be spiritual practices giving a direct experience of divinity (however conceived), the type of approach condemned in the Bible but which resulted in the elevation of Adam and Eve’s consciousness.

www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/jung...

This lantern slide relates to a photograph taken by Clement Lindley Wragge (b.1852, d.1922), date unknown.

 

The slide is a red/purple tinted image of lunar landscape depicting two mountains and a valley. In the distance, a yellow depiction of saturn and its rings is placed against a dark sky full of stars.

 

Inscription Details: Handwritten in black ink at top of plate, 'Saturn from satellite -ideal. Handwritten in black ink in lower left corner of plate, 'Aux:U'. VERSO, handwritten in black ink at top of plate, 'Tinted CLW Karangahaki 17/11/14'.

 

Credit: Shared by Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tāmaki Paenga Hira, as part of the Clement Lindley Wragge collection.

 

Rights: No known copyright restrictions.

 

Reference: 236016|PH-1984-1-LS78-4-9

 

For more details, please visit: www.aucklandmuseum.com/discover/collections/record/1033200

at first glance, boleh relate ke oren dengan caption gambar? muehehehe ( ok, tonight nk ckp serious issue sebenarnye)

 

since I have been part of the da'wah and tarbiyah for almost few months, I've been come across some individuals yang (boleh tahan) taasub dengan certain jemaah yang mereka yakini..

 

it doesn't matter which jemaah you are from, yang penting, tarbiyah yang kita inginkan bersifat ketuhanan, which brings us back to Him, membawa mad'u yang kita kasihkan kerana Allah kembali kepada Dia, bukan kepada jemaah kita, bukan kpd diri kita, but solely to Him only, *nangeslajulaju*

 

"tidak mungkin bagi seseorang yang telah diberi kitab oleh Allah, serta hikmah dan kenabian, kemudian dia berkata kepada manusia, 'Jadilah kamu penyembahku, bukan penyembah Allah,' tetapi dia berkata, 'Jadilah kamu pengabdi-pengabdi Allah, kerana kamu mengajarkan Kitab dan kerana kamu mempelajarinya!'" ( 3:79)

*ce bgtau alasan ape tak nangis baca ayat ni? sobs*

 

hasil tangkapan di sebuah blog, in which I believe it is relevant..

 

“Suasana dakwah di luar negara ni ibarat kita sedang berenang di sebatang sungai yang sempit. Di dalamnya ada ramai dai’e yang sedang berenang dan sungai yang sempit itulah gambaran bilangan mad’u yang ada. Masing-masing berenang dengan cara tersendiri untuk menuju ke destinasi yang sama. Sudah menjadi lumrah apabila ramai orang yang berenang pada sebatang sungai yang sempit, pasti sesekali ada yang akan tersakiti oleh yang lain. Mungkin ada yang tersiku, tertarik, tertampar dan sebagainya kerana sungai yang ada itu begitu sempit dan ruang untuk bergerak juga tidak banyak…”

    

“…Kemudian, bila masa terus berlalu mereka yang berenang di sungai itu tadi akan tiba jua ke muara dan masuklah ke medan baru iaitu laut yang luas tidak bertepi. Sesudah beberapa tahun kita menuntut di luar negara akhirnya kita akan pulang juga ke tanah air untuk menyumbang bakti. Pada masa itu, kita tidak lagi berenang pada sebatang sungai yang sempit tapi kita akan berenang dalam sebuah lautan yang sangat luas dan gelombangnya juga sangat ganas. Terlalu ramai mad’u yang ada dan tenaga dai’e yang ada sangatlah tidak mencukupi. Pada masa ini, kita tidak lagi tersiku atau bertepuk tampar dengan orang lain kerana lautan yang kita renangi itu sangat luas. Bahkan pada masa ini mungkin kita sendiri akan memanggil semula orang-orang yang kita marahkan dahulunya kerana tersiku kita sewaktu berenang di sungai, kerana dalam lautan yang ganas itu nanti, kita hampir-hampir sahaja lemas dan tidak mampu untuk terus berenang bersendirian…”

    

“…Situasi di tanah air kita ibarat lautan yang luas tersebut. Terlalu ramai orang yang perlu kita ajak kepada dakwah ini sehinggakan kita sendiri-sendiri pasti tidak mampu untuk melaksanakan tanggungjawab ini. Bukan itu sahaja, di Malaysia kini wujudnya pelbagai lagi ancaman seperti gerakan liberal, syiah, hedonisme dan sebagainya yang menjadikan kita seorang sahaja pasti tidak mampu melawannya. Justeru, sementara berenang di sungai yang sempit ini cubalah untuk berlapang dada dan saling bermafaan antara kita. Peliharalah sebaiknya hubungan sesama pendakwah walaupun berbeza jemaah dan fahaman kerana kita sememangnya saling memerlukan dalam perjuangan di tanah air nanti.”

 

after all, we are one, seperti buah oren2 yg bergelimpangan tu, hehe, oren2 tu dtg dari pokok yang sama,dan kita masih saudara seakidah, cuma pohon tu menghasilkan buah2 yang banyak dan berbeza setiap satunye, yg pengakhirannya insyaAllah, ingin memberi faedah(nikmat) kpd mcm2 jenis manusia,

however, it depends on tahapan iman kita, utk 'menangkap' mad'u kembali kepada Dia..

 

zasss, reminder khas especially utk hamba Allah yang marhaen yg tgh menulis ni sbnrnye, huu

 

p/s first time bercurhat (read: pillow talk) dgn murabbi pertama yg memperkenalkan kwujudan Dia sejak lahir, curhat bukan perkara main2 lagi, pasal da'wah kot, tengok cermin, cubit pipi, tak pecaye, ohoii >.<

 

pp/s after effect kene fire dgn atuk sebelum ke uskab, uhuk3, hamek kau, terkedu roh dan jasad tiga empat hari....

Brasília 28/03/2017 Relator da reforma política na câmara, Vicente Cândido, durante entrevista para agência PT.

Foto: Lula Marques/Agência PT

Because of recent news relating to the development [re-development] of Cherrywood in the South of County Dublin I decided to see if I had any relevant photograph but the earliest usable photographs were taken in July 2013. I do know that I did photograph the area in 2010 and possibly in 2009 but I cannot locate the original photographs.

 

This photograph was taken in 2013 but nothing really changed between 2010 and 2013,

 

Back in 2010 I made the following comment online:

 

“The New Luas Extension Has Been Criticised By Commuters Who Cannot Park.”

 

“When it comes to transport in Dublin there have been two success stories in recent years. The DublinBike scheme is one and the other is the Luas tram system. Last Monday was a beautiful sunny day and after photographing the Dublin Marathon I decided that it would be a good idea to get the Luas to Cherrywood to see if I could take a few photographs. It was explained to me, by a gentleman that I met on the tram, that the land is now tied up in NAMA and as a result it cannot be developed as a park and ride facility. Commuters were turned away from the new Cherrywood terminus on opening day as there were no parking facilities available.”

 

“Cherrywood is one of Dublin's newest suburbs and as can be seen from my photographs it is partly developed and there are some very large empty spaces and believe it or not there is a shortage of parking spaces. Some time ago a decision was made to extend the Sandyford (Green) Luas line to Cherrywood and construction started in February 2007 and the line became operational this month (October 2010) There are now two Luas stops in Cherrywood: Cherrywood and the terminus, Brides Glen.”

 

I would suggest that the tram stop at Laughanstown could be described as being in the area.

 

FRIDAY 10 FEB 2016:

 

Hines Ireland has officially started work on the first key phase of construction at Cherrywood in South County Dublin. If all goes well up to 30,000 people will live at Cherrywood by early in the next decade meaning that it will be as large as Bray and even larger than a town such as Athlone.

  

Brian Moran said, “The upfront delivery of the roads, cycle and pedestrian network and three wonderful parks is a pivotal moment for the Cherrywood project. These will be the green lungs for this modern new town and this not only strikes the right environmental note for Cherrywood to come but it also underpins our commitment to expedite the delivery of the 4,000 modern new homes within the Hines land holding."

 

"We are acutely aware of the enormous public demand for new housing stock and the submission of planning for the new €875 million Cherrywood Town Centre in the coming months will include 1300 new smart design apartments as part of this highly ambitious plan.”

 

In 2014, Hines acquired Cherrywood in South Dublin. The two components of this investment include an existing 52,000-square-meter office park and a 390-acre master-planned development site. The Cherrywood site has been acquired with approval for the construction of a new, retail-led mixed-use town center; up to 3,800 apartments and houses; and zoning capacity to expand the second largest office park in Dublin to three times its current size.

 

Mr. Moran is the Senior Managing Director responsible for developing Hines’ Ireland projects. He established the Hines platform in Ireland which currently has more than €1.2 billion of retail, office and residential assets under management, in addition to a major development pipeline which includes an additional €500 million of retail development and over 4,000 residential units. He rejoined the firm in 2011 having previously worked with Hines in Russia in the 1990's.

This photo shows cartilage cell infiltration into a fibrous metallic scaffold. The cell nuclei are stained orange with Hoechest and the metal fibres are in monochrome. The project relates to the introduction of a relatively thick metallic layer, strongly attached to a conventional hip prosthesis. This metal layer is highly porous, being composed of a network of stainless steel fibres bonded together. Provided the pore size of the scaffold is suitable (~100-400 microns), tissue in-growth can readily occur forming a strong bond between the prosthesis and the surrounding tissue. The photo is a combined reflectance and fluorescence confocal microscope image, taken 260 micrometres below the scaffold surface.

  

Someone once said that if you can relate to Edgar Allen Poe then you must be mentally ill. That person was also a simpleton and devoid of any real awareness of the dark corners of the human character. There is no doubt Poe was tortured man, an eccentric man and just maybe towards the end of his life mentally ill due to disease. No one knows for sure. His works are an expedition into love and loss, grief and insanity. They smite our emotions so hard because the human spirit is largely enveloped in feelings of sadness, rage, longing and feeling out of place. We may not perceive these things every second of everyday but they are there occasionally and they are very real for us. You cannot gaze upon the line “And all I loved, I loved alone” and not feel your heart fracture just a little, not because of the simple cluster of words but because we know all too well what he means! We feel it so deeply! That’s a truly great poet! A great poet deserves great homage, a series bridging many artistic journeys through some of the most adored compositions in Poe’s collection, a chance to create our own visions and build so much more on what he gave us.

 

"The Masque of the Red Death “is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, host a masquerade ball within seven rooms, each decorated with a different color. Prospero and 1,000 other nobles have taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague with gruesome symptoms that has swept over the land. Victims are overcome by "sharp pains", "sudden dizziness", and die within half an hour. Prospero and his court are indifferent to the sufferings of the population at large; they intend to await the end of the plague in luxury and safety behind the walls of their secure refuge, having welded the doors shut. At the chiming of midnight, the revelers and Prospero notice a figure in a dark, blood-splattered robe resembling a funeral shroud. The figure's mask resembles the rigid face of a corpse and exhibits the traits of the Red Death. When the figure turns to face him, the Prince lets out a sharp cry and falls dead... Only then do we realize the figure is the Red Death itself, and all of the guests contract and succumb to the disease. The final line of the story sums it up, "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all".

 

In this project I have been exploring the feeling of alienation. In order to understand this topic more fully I researched philosophers and psychologists. In doing this, I learnt more in depth about current schools of thought relating to the concept of alienation. This was important because it informed the meaning and intentions behind all my physical work completed in this project. It allowed me to collect my thoughts and ideas and link them to pre existing philosophies. Albert Camus is an existentialist philosopher who wrote about the absurd, human mortality and suicide. In his book, The Outsider, the protagonist, Meursault, becomes so alienated from reality that he does not mourn his mother's death, does not care about getting married and eventually does not care about killing a man or being executed for this. Camus believed that humans had no purpose or meaning and that we must create these for ourselves. It can be hard to do this and failure to do this can lead to alienation in all forms. This school of thought came into popularity after World War 2 due to a questioning of religion, something that gives people purpose. This questioning resulted from the atrocities that were committed in the war. The ‘existential attitude’ is a feeling of dread or disorientation felt when faced with a meaningless and absurd world. This feeling also affected the art world, with movements like abstract expressionism emerging. Inspired by surrealist ideas, abstract expressionism is a movement which emphasises the self, anxiety and grief being expressed through vigourous, active brush strokes and expressive mark making.

 

Another existentialist philosopher I researched was Sartre. One of his key ideas was bad faith. This is when a person submits to societal forces and does not utilise their personal freedom. Sartre’s common example was a waiter who is too ‘waiter-esque’, too eager to please, too absorbed in his waiter identity that he has forgotten he is a free entity. He is acting inauthentically and therefore is suppressing his freedom. In this modern interconnected world I believe people are acting in bad faith more and more as there is not often a time when one is truly alone. We are always communicating via social media. We act as our perceived ‘best’ form of ourselves where we are not actually being free. We are merely pretending to be ‘cooler’ than we actually are, pretending that we fit into societies boxes, when, more often than not, we don’t. This is possibly a reason for increased mental health issues in today’s society (although I do not believe this is the only or even the main reason).

 

A psychologist I researched was Carl Jung. He was a psychodynamic psychologist who worked with Freud and the Vienna Society. He wrote about the shadow self. This is an unconscious part of the self which one does not identify with oneself. Contrary to Freud’s definition of the shadow, Jung believed it not only contains very negative parts of oneself but also can contain positive parts; it is comprised of anything hidden from our consciousness. Positive parts of the self are more commonly held in the shadow in people suffering from mental health disorders like low self esteem and anxiety. Jung wrote that the shadow is the animalistic and instinctive part of the self which the ego suppresses when you develop out of childhood. It is linked with the Id, the part of the self which operates on the pleasure principle. Jung also wrote that the shadow is prone to psychological projection, a phenomenon where a persons insecurities and perceived deficiencies are projected onto another person. For example, someone who is very intolerant may call someone else intolerant when they are called out on their intolerance. They do not want to believe they are intolerant and have not accepted that part of themselves so they use projection as a defence mechanism. Furthermore, Jung wrote that the shadow self is a window to creativity and expressing one’s true self, “in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness, or perhaps because of this, the shadow is the seat of creativity”. I feel that all of these philosophical and psychological ideas will be very interesting to express through visual art.

 

After this research I went on to research artists whose ideas linked to existentialist philosophy and psychodynamic psychology. One artist I researched was Francis Bacon. He was a painter from the 1900s who painted grotesque, raw and bold images. Usually portraits, his paintings are distorted and mangled into emotional expressions of the artists own troubles. He had a troubled life, one example being kicked out of his home at 15 because of his homosexuality. A lot of these troubles shine through in his paintings. His paintings often have an element of aggressive expressionism, using obvious brush strokes and mark-making to accentuate the raw emotion he is expressing in his paintings. The distortion of the face could link to Sartre’s idea of bad faith, the figures changing and distorting themselves to fit into societies prescribed boxes, creating ugly versions of oneself. Also, it could link to the shadow self as it is an ugly representation of the figure which seems surreal or disconnected to reality.

 

Another artist who links to these ideas is Giacometti. Although his most famous works are his sculptures, I think his paintings are also very interesting. They often depict a figure sitting, staring straight at the viewer. The colours he uses are very muted, creating a negative, depressing mood. His brush strokes are again expressive, attacking the canvas with colour. This creates a sense of anxiety and conflict. This may be felt by the subject, the artist and the viewer. The proportions of the subject are often distorted, stretched to make them more slender, almost ghost-like.

 

A third artist I researched who greatly influenced my work was Emilio Villalba. His paintings are a mismatch of facial features. He greatly distorts the face of his subjects, creating a strange, eerie mood. The dark background contrasts the often over saturated face, creating interesting depth in his works. He often combines elements of realism with very expressive areas, adding to the surreal, psychological mood. From these artists I created responses, meaning I learnt more fully about the techniques they use. They also informed my first photoshoot which I presented in my source book. This photoshoot contained simple portraits that I intended to distort and change through my drawings and paintings. They helped to link my ideas into ideas for my own pieces. For example, throughout my project I experimented with lighting to create a dark almost ghostlike atmosphere.

 

After completing my source book, I started to work on the main book. I completed in depth research on two artists, Kwang Ho Shin and Frank Auerbach. From Kwang Ho Shin I learnt about impasto, a technique used by both of these artists to create an interesting, distorted image. Another idea I learnt from Kwang Ho Shin was to use bold, unnatural colours. This creates the unnatural mood. It could be related to the modern, technological world where we are becoming more and more detached from nature, also linking to my idea of modern bad faith. Also, I learnt about contrast. In his paintings, Kwang Ho Shin uses a large amount of contrast with the often plain white canvas backgrounds and the textural, bold figure. He also accentuates this with the black areas of the figure. This leads to the creation of an interesting image and could symbolise our detachment from society. From Auerbach I learnt about choosing subject matter. He said, “I find myself simply more engaged when I know the people. They get older and change; there is something touching about that, about recording something that’s getting on.” I believe that using yourself and subjects you know well in real life can lead to the creation of more intimate and honest pieces because you aren’t creating the emotions, you are expressing existing emotions which you have insight into. This lead to me predominantly using myself and my girlfriend in my pieces as I felt that we are the people I know best, meaning I know more of what's going on inside our heads. Another technique I learnt from Auerbach and Kwang Ho Shin was the use of randomness. Although it is generally informed randomness, it often can lead to a very honest piece as you are allowing your subconscious to take over. This links to a surrealist idea of automatism (used by artists like André Masson and Joan Miro) and Jean Arp’s use of randomness in pieces like ‘Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance’. I also learnt about colour from Auerbach with his use of distorted colours. Unlike Kwang Ho Shin, Auerbach doesn’t use such vibrant colours, creating a more moody atmosphere.

 

Using ideas from this in depth research and previous research, I took the first large photoshoot. I placed objects over the lens, used long exposure techniques and used coloured LEDs to distort the image. I tried to capture an atmosphere of uneasiness and anxiety. These ideas come from existentialist ideas like bad faith. The images distortions could signify the distortions we make to ourselves in order to fit into society. The bright colours take the images further away from reality. This lead to the creation of a series of work from these photos. I took ideas of mixed media from Kwang Ho Shin. I used chalk, charcoal and pastel to create surreal, sometimes angry self portraits using ideas from Kwang Ho Shin and Auerbach. I also drew a skull, using the macabre idea from artists like Ensor and Bacon. I also created many continuous line drawings, using a range of different techniques. In some of the pieces I tied multiple pens of different colours together, using ideas of unnatural colour from Auerbach and Kwang Ho Shin. I also used extended arm techniques where I tied a pen to a 30cm ruler and drew with that. Some other continuous line drawings used a dark background with a white pen, again taking ideas of contrast and dark backgrounds from artist research. All of these continuous line drawings have an element of randomness, an idea from Auerbach and Kwang Ho Shin. They also strongly link to surrealist automatism.

 

A second photoshoot was then carried out. This photoshoot was just 2 photos which I then made many photoshopped versions of. This photoshoot was heavily influenced by Emilio Villalba and his tapestries of facial features. I tried to distort the images to create a mood of estrangement and alienation. Similarly to the first photo shoot, this one was influenced by bad faith, just expressed in a different way. The duplicated facial features and the disfigurement expresses the way one warps oneself into the boxes society forces us into. This lead to the creation of many more pieces using ideas of distortion and uneasiness. I tried to capture this through the use of pencil, pen, paint, pastel and more. In some of my pieces, I added colours to further emphasize the existentialist ideas from the first photoshoot. In others, I used impasto, a technique learned from Auerbach and Shin. The impasto further accentuates the ideas of bad faith and alienation. Another technique I used was expressive line. This was learnt from the line drawings of Giacometti and Auerbach. This allows me to express emotion through the gestures I make while drawing the piece. If I am angry, the lines will be more erratic and rough. For example, the black and red self portrait with felt tip pen was drawn when I was in a very angry mood. Another example was the mixed media self portrait where it started off as a pencil drawing. As I was carefully drawing it, the outcome was not what I wanted, making me quite angry. I then expressed this anger through the gestural paint and pen. The anger could link to the idea of bad faith and the shadow self through it being an expression of frustration of our true self (or our unconscious self) when we are forced to confine it to society's norms. This unconscious frustration and alienation from ourselves can often be the cause of irrational anger that seems to come from nowhere.

 

I then decided to work towards creating a final piece. I was aiming to experiment with different techniques and compositions which I felt would sum up my ideas the most fully. I experimented with cropping out most of the face and making the focal point the eye. I feel that the eyes are the most expressive part of the face and can reveal the most about a person's feelings. Another aspect I experimented with was colour. Using ideas from my first photoshoot I quickly chose to use unnatural colours. I didn’t wish to use colours as vibrant as Kwang Ho Shin because I felt that more muted colours create a darker mood. I wanted the colours to be similar to real life but still far enough away to create the surreal mood. This was the same in the proportions I distorted. This links to the idea of the ‘Uncanny valley’ which suggests that ‘humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers’. In terms of composition, I created many quick drawings experimenting with composition. I decided to use a black background as it contrasts nicely with the colours and almost signifies that the figures are subconscious representations as they are not placed into reality. This was inspired by Emilio Villalba and some of Bacon’s work. I created two oil pastel pieces heavily inspired by Francis Bacon’s distorted portraits. I was aiming to capture the way we warp our self by warping the physical self. This led to more research into Francis Bacon’s process and I learned that he used unprimed canvas. This meant that in my development I experimented with different fabrics and found that I liked the unprimed canvas the most. It creates an interesting texture and I prefer the way it feels to paint on as it is rough and lends itself to a rough and expressive style of painting. He also painted a lot of triptychs. I decided on painting a triptych because they allow for time to be included in the piece. I decided to create a piece that gets more and more disoriented and warped, showing how over time we get more and more alienated from our true selves as we get more indoctrinated into societies norms. The composition of the triptych will have the least distorted piece in the center as it will be the most eye catching of the three and provide context for the more distorted ones.

ca. 1917

 

Image H2010.127/5

 

Scenes relating to Mont Park Hospital: interior views of hospital with staff, group portraits, views of buildings and grounds.

 

Visit our catalogue to download a hi-res copy or find out more about this image: handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/96294

 

Want to find more pictures from the State Library of Victoria's collections? guides.slv.vic.gov.au/pictures

Someone once said that if you can relate to Edgar Allen Poe then you must be mentally ill. That person was also a simpleton and devoid of any real awareness of the dark corners of the human character. There is no doubt Poe was tortured man, an eccentric man and just maybe towards the end of his life mentally ill due to disease. No one knows for sure. His works are an expedition into love and loss, grief and insanity. They smite our emotions so hard because the human spirit is largely enveloped in feelings of sadness, rage, longing and feeling out of place. We may not perceive these things every second of everyday but they are there occasionally and they are very real for us. You cannot gaze upon the line “And all I loved, I loved alone” and not feel your heart fracture just a little, not because of the simple cluster of words but because we know all too well what he means! We feel it so deeply! That’s a truly great poet! A great poet deserves great homage, a series bridging many artistic journeys through some of the most adored compositions in Poe’s collection, a chance to create our own visions and build so much more on what he gave us.

 

"The Masque of the Red Death “is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, host a masquerade ball within seven rooms, each decorated with a different color. Prospero and 1,000 other nobles have taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague with gruesome symptoms that has swept over the land. Victims are overcome by "sharp pains", "sudden dizziness", and die within half an hour. Prospero and his court are indifferent to the sufferings of the population at large; they intend to await the end of the plague in luxury and safety behind the walls of their secure refuge, having welded the doors shut. At the chiming of midnight, the revelers and Prospero notice a figure in a dark, blood-splattered robe resembling a funeral shroud. The figure's mask resembles the rigid face of a corpse and exhibits the traits of the Red Death. When the figure turns to face him, the Prince lets out a sharp cry and falls dead... Only then do we realize the figure is the Red Death itself, and all of the guests contract and succumb to the disease. The final line of the story sums it up, "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all".

 

Gov. Neil Abercrombie today signed House Bill 656, establishing the Health Care Transformation Program within the Governor’s office to advance the transformation.

 

“Improving health and the quality of care while bending the cost curve are among my administration’s top priorities,” Gov. Abercrombie said. “Addressing these concerns requires a new systematic approach that affects health care statewide.”

 

HB656 (Relating to Health Care Administrative Uniformity) also sets specific responsibilities for creating a strategy and timeline for statewide healthcare transformation that includes developing standards to measure quality and costs, reducing administrative burdens for providers and insurers, and improving and expanding the use of information technology to support transformation.

 

The measure explicitly gives the Governor the authority to obtain information by consulting with any stakeholders, individually or in groups, as part of the foundation for transformation. This is crucial since the healthcare sector cannot make systematic, coordinated changes of its own volition because:

 

- antitrust issues preclude many kinds of concerted group action that are not mandated and/or supervised by government authority;

- while insurers, hospitals, and provider groups can all make sweeping changes within the scope of their own organizations, these changes may have little effect on the rest of the system; and

- private sector health organizations agree on improving health, quality and cost, but implementing strategies without regulation or at least industry coordination is difficult because such organizations may have mixed motivations in a competitive environment.

 

“The cost of health care affects every resident and business in Hawaii,” said Beth Giesting, the state’s Healthcare Transformation Coordinator. “While health insurance premiums in Hawaii are relatively modest and offer good coverage, the inflationary trend – on average about 6 percent per year – results in wage stagnation and limited opportunities for business expansion.”

 

More than any other entity in Hawaii, the state is directly impacted by the effectiveness of the healthcare system as it purchases coverage for nearly 40 percent of the population, and that percentage will grow when new eligibility provisions and requirements under the federal Affordable Care Act result in Medicaid expansion. Med-QUEST programs now cover more than 20 percent of the state’s population with a budget of nearly $2 billion. The Hawaii Employer-Union Health Benefits Trust Fund covers nearly 15 percent of the population (Its annual budget is $523 million and it carries an unfunded liability of $14.4 billion). The state budget also supports the Hawaii Health Systems Corporation, emergency and trauma services at other facilities, behavioral health care, federally qualified health centers, and more.

 

Also today, Gov. Abercrombie signed the following measures in separate bill signing ceremonies:

 

Kupuna Bills

Individuals 65 years or older account for 14.7 percent of Hawaii’s population, which makes Hawaii the eighth in the nation in terms of the greatest percentage of older Americans. The following bills provide protections and resources needed for Hawaii’s growing kupuna population.

 

- HB529 (Relating to Care Homes)

- HB120 (Relating to Health)

- SB106 (Relating to Aging)

- HB398 (Relating to Human Services)

- SB102 (Relating to the Elderly)

 

SB102 specifically requires that financial institutions report instances of suspected financial abuse of an elder directly to the appropriate county police department (via 911) and the state Department of Human Services via Adult Protective Services:

 

Oahu – 832-5115

Kauai – 241-3337

Maui – 243-5151

East Hawaii – 933-8820

West Hawaii – 327-6280

Other Health-Related Bills

These bills protect consumers, ensure qualified professionals provide medical treatment, and help families who have loved ones suffering from a severe mental illness obtain treatment.

 

- HB847 (Relating to Enforcement Tools to Improve Patient Safety)

- SB1074 (Relating to Physical Therapy)

- SB310 (Relating to Mental Health Treatment)

 

Housing Bills

The following bills address housing needs and recognize that one size does not fit all when finding a solution to end homelessness.

 

- SB515 (Relating to Housing)

- HB536 (Relating to Public Housing)

The phrase Bristol fashion relates to the skill in mooring many large boats in the small harbour area of Bristol. It could be said to be similar at the crowded First depot in Lawrence Hill with a half dozen similar Volvo B9/Wright Gemini deckers.

Assorted photos from 2022

Activity relating to the carrying of the more than 100 portable shrines (mikoshi) around the Asakusa neighbourhood to bless the businesses and residents with prosperity in the coming year.

 

Sanja Matsuri (Festival) at the Sensoji Temple, Asakusa,

Tokyo, Japan, 2016

 

Only the street shots - thestreetzine.blogspot.com/

Kagura, a shamanic ritual of ancient Japan was performed here recently. Team Viva attended

 

Shinto, the ancient Japanese religion has many rites and rituals relating to sacred worship. Among them is the Kagura, a theatrical dance, performed wearing heavy, colourful costumes of animals, with demon masks and featuring graceful body movements.

 

It was delivered by the Iwami Kagura troupe. The whole extravaganza was divided in three parts.

 

The last was particularly riveting. It involved a huge bamboo and paper serpent, about 40cm in diameter and 16mts long.

 

Tomoharu Katsuta, director of The Japan-India Association explained, “This is a sacred dance offered to Gods and Goddess at local shrines during the autumn harvest festival. It is based on old scriptures and was begun during 1100AD, by Shinto priests. Ordinary folk began performing it from the start of the Meiji Era, from 1869-1912, using Taiko drums, hand claps and flutes.”

 

It originally lasted for 12 hours, beginning from 7pm. It ended by 7am. The Delhi show was organised by ICCR and supported by the Embassy of Japan.

 

The evening began with a section called the Jin-rin, named after a demon, represented with a big mask. It was followed by Ebisu, the of fishing and Orochi, the name of a giant serpent. “According to myth, Jin-rinwas a winged demon king who flew all over Japan and killed people.” Later, King Chuai, second son of Emperor Yamato Takeru decided to kill the Jin-rin. The second piece featured Ebisu and Daikoku, God of wealth and prosperity. This is usually performed at weddings and auspicious ceremonies.

 

Orochi’s story involves an old couple and their daughter. The serpent would take the girls away and kill them. The couple was saved by the hero, Susano no Mikoto, who was exiled from the Heaven called Takamagahara. He asked the couples to make eight barrels of strong sake (rice wine), because the Orochi serpent had eight heads and eight tails. And its length swept over eight mountains and eight valleys.

 

“Mikoto succeeded in killing the monster while it was drunk and sleeping. Since then, sake is used to be drink in the weddings,” explained Tomoharu Katsuta.

 

He added, “This traditional dance form is used as a tool for Japans’ cultural exchange activities. It includes the Orochi (giant evil Serpent) episode, which received acclaim for its scale and dynamic movement. And the Iwami Kagura is a source of pride for locals. However, the big masks used, with their small eyes, create problem for performers vision. And the heavy costumes weigh over 20kgs, with gold and silver threads, plus glass beads.” Carrying the heavy serpent is also a tough job.

 

[Credit to Pioneer article]

Today in Ireland and in the US new regulations relating to drones has been introduced [effective from the 21st of December 2015]. There are many similarities in the regulations but there is one major differences in that here in Ireland they have not mention the penalties for failure to register but in the US the cost of failure to register appears to be rather extreme … “civil penalties up to $27,500, or criminal penalties up to 3 years in prison and $250,000.” According to the minister the aim here in Ireland is to encourage drone users to be responsible citizens.

  

I have included the press releases from both administrations, have a read and see what you think.

  

Thursday, 17th December 2015: The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) today announced a new drone regulation which includes the mandatory registration of all drones weighing 1kg or more from Monday, 21st December 2015.

 

The use of drones worldwide is expanding rapidly and there are estimated to be between 4,000 – 5,000 drones already in use in Ireland. Ireland has taken a proactive role in this fast emerging area and is currently one of only a handful of EU Member states that has legislation governing the use of drones.

 

The new legislation is intended to further enhance safety within Ireland and specifically addresses the safety challenges posed by drones.

 

From 21st December 2015, all drones weighing 1kg or more must be registered with the IAA via www.iaa.ie/drones. Drone registration is a simple two-step process. To register a drone, the registrant must be 16 years of age or older (Drones operated by those under 16 years of age must be registered by a parent or legal guardian). A nominal fee will apply from February 2016 but this has been initially waived by the IAA in order to encourage early registration.

  

Mr Ralph James, IAA Director of Safety Regulation, said

 

“Ireland is already recognised worldwide as a centre of excellence for civil aviation and the drone sector presents another major opportunity for Ireland. We’re closely working with industry to facilitate its successful development here. At the same time, safety is our top priority and we must ensure that drones are used in a safe way and that they do not interfere with all other forms of aviation.

 

Mr James explained that drone registration has been made a mandatory requirement as this will help the IAA to monitor the sector in the years ahead. The IAA encourages all drone operators to take part in training courses which are available through a number of approved drone training organisations.

 

“We would strongly encourage drone operators to register with us as quickly as possible, to complete a training course and to become aware of their responsibilities. People operating drones must do so in safe and responsible manner and in full compliance with the new regulations”, he said.

 

Welcoming the introduction of drone regulation, Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Paschal Donohoe TD highlighted the importance of the new legislation and commended the IAA for the efficient manner to have the new registration system in place so quickly.

 

“The core safety message promoted today advocates the safe use of drones in civilian airspace. The development of drone technology brings opportunities as well as challenges for businesses and services in Ireland. I expect hundreds if not thousands of drones to be bought as presents this Christmas so getting the message to ensure that new owners and operators are aware of their responsibilities and the requirement to register all drones over 1 kg from 21st December 2015 is key. Tremendous potential exists for this sector and Ireland is at the forefront of its development. The speedy response by the IAA to this fast developing aviation area will make sure that drones are properly regulated and registered for use. As a result, Ireland is well placed to exploit the drone sector and to ensure industry growth in this area,” he said.

  

The new legislation prohibits users from operating their drones in an unsafe manner. This includes never operating a drone:

 

• if it will be a hazard to another aircraft in flight

• over an assembly of people

• farther than 300m from the operator

• within 120m of any person, vessel or structure not under the operator’s control

• closer than 5km from an aerodrome

• in a negligent or reckless manner so as to endanger life or property of others

• over 400ft (120m) above ground level

• over urban areas

• in civil of military controlled airspace

• in restricted areas (e.g. military installations, prisons, etc.)

• unless the operator has permission from the landowner for takeoff and landing.

  

For further information please visit www.iaa.ie/drones and see the IAA’s detailed Q&A sheet.

  

The Federal Aviation Administration has officially launched the drone registration program first reported in October. Drone operators are required to register their UAVs with the Unmanned Aircraft System registry starting December 21. Failure to register could result in criminal and civil penalties.

 

Under the new system, all aircraft must be registered with the FAA including those 'operated by modelers and hobbyists.' Once registered, drone operators must carry the registration certificate during operation. This new system only applies to drones weighing more than 0.55lbs/250g and less than 55lbs/25kg. The only exception to the registration requirement is indoor drone flights.

 

Required registration information includes a mailing address and physical address, email address, and full names; however, no information on the drone's make, model, or serial number is required from recreational users. Non-recreational users will need to provide drone information, including serial number, when that particular registration system goes live.

 

Failure to register could result in civil penalties up to $27,500, or criminal penalties up to 3 years in prison and $250,000. A $5 registration charge is applied, but will be refunded to those who register before January 20. The registration certificate is sent in an email to be printed at home.

Mary's maternal grandmother nee Sarah Dallon. Born 1860 and died in 1926. Her nephew is Cannon of Chester Hill and his name: Morris Hill Ridgeway. She lived at Washway Road, Sale. 645/3 No Date

View on Instagram instagr.am/p/CafUHm8pcV5/

Three photos in the album relate to Claude Grahame White's Hendon Aerodrome which was established in the years these photos were taken in 1911.

 

The inscription in the album suggests that a Mr Patterson is in the shots and the plane is said to be a Baby Biplane .

 

According to Hargrave the Pioneers website

www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/grahame-white.html

 

"Grahame White was one of the first Britons to exploit aviation commercially after achieving heroic status for narrowly losing the £10,000 prize the Daily Mail offered for the first London to Manchester flight to a Frenchman!

 

He set up London's first aerodrome at Hendon he was later to sell this to the air ministry and this is now the site of the RAF Museum .For 3 years up to the outbreak of WW1 the weekend flying displays at Hendon were the greatest attraction in London seum

Kagura, a shamanic ritual of ancient Japan was performed here recently. Team Viva attended

 

Shinto, the ancient Japanese religion has many rites and rituals relating to sacred worship. Among them is the Kagura, a theatrical dance, performed wearing heavy, colourful costumes of animals, with demon masks and featuring graceful body movements.

 

It was delivered by the Iwami Kagura troupe. The whole extravaganza was divided in three parts.

 

The last was particularly riveting. It involved a huge bamboo and paper serpent, about 40cm in diameter and 16mts long.

 

Tomoharu Katsuta, director of The Japan-India Association explained, “This is a sacred dance offered to Gods and Goddess at local shrines during the autumn harvest festival. It is based on old scriptures and was begun during 1100AD, by Shinto priests. Ordinary folk began performing it from the start of the Meiji Era, from 1869-1912, using Taiko drums, hand claps and flutes.”

 

It originally lasted for 12 hours, beginning from 7pm. It ended by 7am. The Delhi show was organised by ICCR and supported by the Embassy of Japan.

 

The evening began with a section called the Jin-rin, named after a demon, represented with a big mask. It was followed by Ebisu, the of fishing and Orochi, the name of a giant serpent. “According to myth, Jin-rinwas a winged demon king who flew all over Japan and killed people.” Later, King Chuai, second son of Emperor Yamato Takeru decided to kill the Jin-rin. The second piece featured Ebisu and Daikoku, God of wealth and prosperity. This is usually performed at weddings and auspicious ceremonies.

 

Orochi’s story involves an old couple and their daughter. The serpent would take the girls away and kill them. The couple was saved by the hero, Susano no Mikoto, who was exiled from the Heaven called Takamagahara. He asked the couples to make eight barrels of strong sake (rice wine), because the Orochi serpent had eight heads and eight tails. And its length swept over eight mountains and eight valleys.

 

“Mikoto succeeded in killing the monster while it was drunk and sleeping. Since then, sake is used to be drink in the weddings,” explained Tomoharu Katsuta.

 

He added, “This traditional dance form is used as a tool for Japans’ cultural exchange activities. It includes the Orochi (giant evil Serpent) episode, which received acclaim for its scale and dynamic movement. And the Iwami Kagura is a source of pride for locals. However, the big masks used, with their small eyes, create problem for performers vision. And the heavy costumes weigh over 20kgs, with gold and silver threads, plus glass beads.” Carrying the heavy serpent is also a tough job.

 

[Credit to Pioneer article]

Letter from Germany – Scrisoare din Germania: the Tragedy of Romania

 

Dear Mircea,

I promised to relate my Romanian experience, yet I would not know where to start: on one hand it was pleasant, yet on the other it was quite sad. In spite of all the effort aimed at reaching the projected goal, the country has not attained the intended standard. True enough, one can find everything one desires, the shops are bursting with goods and it looks as if the standard of living is comparable to that in the West, but this is as far as it goes – the people have not changed an iota, in fact they have stagnated, taking advantage of a civilization somehow offered on a silver plate, out of the blue, as if it was normal. It is not unlike a bunch of lazy monkeys, perched on trees, in the jungle, spending the whole day eating all bananas within their reach. Describing the manner in which these people live is beyond belief, as their sole (existentialist) concern boils down to eating well, drinking well and above all not exerting themselves with too much work.

I have never ever seen so much misery in a place where, given the resources at hand, there ought to be good order. Wherever you look there are luxury goods mixed with paraphernalia of poor taste, miserable goods. I have seen bare-feet, unwashed peasant farmers, in their horse-drawn wooden carts, busy talking on their cell phone; I have seen rural folk, who were exhibiting to all and sundry their newly- acquired luxury car, displayed on the back of a rusty lorry, which they were conveying, just to show off to the rest of the world to marvel at… I have seen hundreds of stray dogs curled up, asleep in the middle of the highway… In downtown Bucharest, I had seen hovels whose windows were covered with hanging tee shirts, or pyjamas, for lack of curtains… I have seen top-notch luxury malls with their ubiquitous uniformed security guards, only to discover, round the corner, people begging in the street.

In the countryside, I walked the main streets of villages covered in thick dust and boulders… I have seen sanitary installations, which were at least seventy-years old… I sat at dining tables laden with foodstuff, yet covered in shoals of flies, which cut my appetite… I cried my eyes out seeing the destitute elderly villagers, seated in the doorways of their rural homes, looking forlorn as the world went bye… I would have liked so much to fathom out what thoughts were visiting their vacuous faces… as the darkness enveloped their cottage, I would have liked to find out what they were doing in the evening, what were they thinking of, the next morning, as immediate prospects were fading fast, biting the dust of their farmyard… I tried to help as much as I could, I bought washing machines, clothes for the children and sundry goods needed in every household, but, as I said, it felt like a bottomless pit.

By contrast, the grandomania of the nouveau-rich, of those who made it overnight, was quite unbelievable. There are so many Romanians who work abroad only to return home playing a game of one-upmanship. In the outskirts of Bucharest they build for themselves some horrible, if pompous villas, which are completely out of kilter with the traditional rural abodes of their neighbours, living in cottages built of clay mixed with horse manure and straw, with whitewashed walls under a tilted roof, not unlike some old people seated on a bench, for a natter. The once bucolic rural atmosphere is completely ruined, yet to cap it all, in some of these farmyards, where such villas look out of place, one could discover, by looking through the iron fence, a wooden cart next to a malnourished cow, trying to graze next to a pile of broken bricks.

The overall impression I got is one of a journey into the past, yet one intermingled with the future, an odd mixture of social scales, a motley palette of a nation, which, in my opinion, will never have a chance of getting very far, at all, just because the discrepancies are too great to smooth over. How could one convert some innocent old woman to the benefits of a new century, when she crosses herself to chase away the evil eye, each time you take her picture and show it to her on the screen of your cell phone?

Yet it is for this very reason that I understand and feel compassionate for those who live in a world of their own, a hundred years ago, as opposed to the present-day wheeler-dealers, replete with underhand, dirty tricks, trying to put this country on the rack. Unfortunately one feels hopeless attempting to do anything to forestall this contrast, a failure which gives overall a painful sensation.

As you can see, after returning home to Germany, I am still haunted by the Romanian realities left behind. Yet, as I wake up, in the middle of the night, thinking that I was still there, I feel absolutely hopeless, unable to find a solution…

I trust I have not bored you stiff with my story, as, on the whole, my re-immersion in the Romanian reality, as it is, was worthwhile and perhaps long-overdue, after all these years.

Love,

Magda

 

www.romanianstudies.org/content/2012/09/letter-from-germa...

Today in Ireland and in the US new regulations relating to drones has been introduced [effective from the 21st of December 2015]. There are many similarities in the regulations but there is one major differences in that here in Ireland they have not mention the penalties for failure to register but in the US the cost of failure to register appears to be rather extreme … “civil penalties up to $27,500, or criminal penalties up to 3 years in prison and $250,000.” According to the minister the aim here in Ireland is to encourage drone users to be responsible citizens.

  

I have included the press releases from both administrations, have a read and see what you think.

  

Thursday, 17th December 2015: The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) today announced a new drone regulation which includes the mandatory registration of all drones weighing 1kg or more from Monday, 21st December 2015.

 

The use of drones worldwide is expanding rapidly and there are estimated to be between 4,000 – 5,000 drones already in use in Ireland. Ireland has taken a proactive role in this fast emerging area and is currently one of only a handful of EU Member states that has legislation governing the use of drones.

 

The new legislation is intended to further enhance safety within Ireland and specifically addresses the safety challenges posed by drones.

 

From 21st December 2015, all drones weighing 1kg or more must be registered with the IAA via www.iaa.ie/drones. Drone registration is a simple two-step process. To register a drone, the registrant must be 16 years of age or older (Drones operated by those under 16 years of age must be registered by a parent or legal guardian). A nominal fee will apply from February 2016 but this has been initially waived by the IAA in order to encourage early registration.

  

Mr Ralph James, IAA Director of Safety Regulation, said

 

“Ireland is already recognised worldwide as a centre of excellence for civil aviation and the drone sector presents another major opportunity for Ireland. We’re closely working with industry to facilitate its successful development here. At the same time, safety is our top priority and we must ensure that drones are used in a safe way and that they do not interfere with all other forms of aviation.

 

Mr James explained that drone registration has been made a mandatory requirement as this will help the IAA to monitor the sector in the years ahead. The IAA encourages all drone operators to take part in training courses which are available through a number of approved drone training organisations.

 

“We would strongly encourage drone operators to register with us as quickly as possible, to complete a training course and to become aware of their responsibilities. People operating drones must do so in safe and responsible manner and in full compliance with the new regulations”, he said.

 

Welcoming the introduction of drone regulation, Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Paschal Donohoe TD highlighted the importance of the new legislation and commended the IAA for the efficient manner to have the new registration system in place so quickly.

 

“The core safety message promoted today advocates the safe use of drones in civilian airspace. The development of drone technology brings opportunities as well as challenges for businesses and services in Ireland. I expect hundreds if not thousands of drones to be bought as presents this Christmas so getting the message to ensure that new owners and operators are aware of their responsibilities and the requirement to register all drones over 1 kg from 21st December 2015 is key. Tremendous potential exists for this sector and Ireland is at the forefront of its development. The speedy response by the IAA to this fast developing aviation area will make sure that drones are properly regulated and registered for use. As a result, Ireland is well placed to exploit the drone sector and to ensure industry growth in this area,” he said.

  

The new legislation prohibits users from operating their drones in an unsafe manner. This includes never operating a drone:

 

• if it will be a hazard to another aircraft in flight

• over an assembly of people

• farther than 300m from the operator

• within 120m of any person, vessel or structure not under the operator’s control

• closer than 5km from an aerodrome

• in a negligent or reckless manner so as to endanger life or property of others

• over 400ft (120m) above ground level

• over urban areas

• in civil of military controlled airspace

• in restricted areas (e.g. military installations, prisons, etc.)

• unless the operator has permission from the landowner for takeoff and landing.

  

For further information please visit www.iaa.ie/drones and see the IAA’s detailed Q&A sheet.

  

The Federal Aviation Administration has officially launched the drone registration program first reported in October. Drone operators are required to register their UAVs with the Unmanned Aircraft System registry starting December 21. Failure to register could result in criminal and civil penalties.

 

Under the new system, all aircraft must be registered with the FAA including those 'operated by modelers and hobbyists.' Once registered, drone operators must carry the registration certificate during operation. This new system only applies to drones weighing more than 0.55lbs/250g and less than 55lbs/25kg. The only exception to the registration requirement is indoor drone flights.

 

Required registration information includes a mailing address and physical address, email address, and full names; however, no information on the drone's make, model, or serial number is required from recreational users. Non-recreational users will need to provide drone information, including serial number, when that particular registration system goes live.

 

Failure to register could result in civil penalties up to $27,500, or criminal penalties up to 3 years in prison and $250,000. A $5 registration charge is applied, but will be refunded to those who register before January 20. The registration certificate is sent in an email to be printed at home.

This lantern slide relates to a photograph taken by Clement Lindley Wragge (b.1852, d.1922), likely dating between 1890-1922.

 

The slide shows 8 images of moon in different stages of eclipse in a 2x4 grid. Handwritten in pencil on right side of plate, 'Phases of the Moon.'.

 

Inscription Details: Handwritten in pencil on right side of plate, 'Phases of the Moon.'. RECTO: Handwritten in black ink on white paper in top left corner of plate, 'S W E N'. Handwritten in pencil on right side of plate, 'Phases of the Moon.'.

 

Credit: Shared by Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tāmaki Paenga Hira, as part of the Clement Lindley Wragge collection.

 

Rights: No known copyright restrictions.

 

Reference: 235695|PH-1984-1-LS78-2-21

 

For more details, please visit: www.aucklandmuseum.com/discover/collections/record/1033517

Legend relates that in January 1297 François Grimaldi, disguised as a monk, sought shelter at the castle. On obtaining entry he murdered the guard, whereupon his men appeared and captured the castle. Thus the fortress became the stronghold of the Grimaldi. This event is commemorated by a statue of François Grimaldi in the precincts of the palace and in the arms of the House of Grimaldi where François is depicted wielding a sword while in the garb of a monk

The Death of the Virgin, c 1472–80. 147.8cm x 122.5cm. Groeningemuseum, Bruges.

The Death of the Virgin is an oil on oak panel by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes. Completed c 1472–80, it shows the Virgin Mary on her deathbed surrounded by the Twelve Apostles. The scene is borrowed from Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century "Legenda aurea"[1] which relates how the apostles were brought, at Mary's request, on clouds by angels to a house near Mount Zion to be with her in her final three days.[2] On the third day Jesus appeared above her bed in a halo of light surrounded by angels to accept her soul at the point when his name was finally mentioned.[3] Three days later he reappeared to accept her body.

 

Death of the Virgin was almost certainly painted on commission and along with his Monforte and Portinari altarpieces is one of van der Goes most important works. It is likely one of his last paintings finished before he died. According to art historian Till-Holger Borchert, the panel "belongs to the most impressive and artistically mature achievements of Early Netherlandish painting". According to Lorne Campbell, the painting is van der Goes' "most idiosyncratic masterpiece".

 

Mary is shown lying in a blue robe with a white headdress on a timber bed with her head resting on a white pillow against a headboard. Her skin is thin and pallid, her hands clasped in prayer. She is surrounded by the twelve apostles who crowd around her bed. Peter is dressed in the white robes of a priest and holds a candle which in the then contemporary ritual will be handed to the dying woman. Above her Christ appears in a halo of light, holding his arms open to receive Mary's soul, while his palms are open to display the wounds sustained at Calvary. With this gesture, Christ identifies himself as both redeemer and conqueror of death.

 

The Death marks a break in van der Goes style; line has become more important, setting is eliminated and the image lacks depth and is tightly contracted with only the bed, door and the body of the Virgin giving spatial indicators. It is renowned for not showing the apostles either in the traditional idealised manner nor as conventional figure types, but instead representing each as a unique individual, displaying their grief through a range of expressions and gestures, from sorrow and despair, to empathy and compassion. Because the artist has not used traditional representation it is difficult to identify each apostle.

The work is the best known and famous of one of a number of paintings after the death of Mary attributed to van der Goes or followers. Some art historians, including Friedrich Winkler (1964), believe he painted at least three versions, although it is generally accepted that preparatory sketches made for the Bruges work were later copied reproduced as paintings by late 15th century followers. Two similar paintings in the Berlin State Museums, the National Gallery, London, are attributed as "after van der Goes". They are usually thought to be later versions of a pen on paper drawing in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, probably a copy of an original preparatory sketch by van der Goes. These works are similar to the Bruges paintings, but show the image in reverse. Infra-red photography shows that the composition was planned a highly detailed manner before the underdrawing was applied. Art historian Lorne Campbell writes, "it is possible that the Brunswick drawing reflects one of his earliest ideas for the Bruges painting and that the Berlin, Prague and London pictures echo, however distantly, a later stage in his development of the Bruges composition.[

The painting has been the subject of intense debate as to its date and meaning. Van der Goes spent the final years of his life submerged in depression. A number of art historians, including Max Friedländer, view the work as painted c. 1480 when the artist first began to display signs of mental suffering and thus view it as an expression of his illness. The artist's late life—he died in either 1482 or 1483—susceptibility to depression and insanity was discovered in 1863 in a chronicle by his contemporary Gaspar Ofhuys, who recorded a night in 1480 when van der Goes began to excitedly talk about how he was a doomed, lost soul and attempted to commit suicide and had to be forcibly held down.

 

This account greatly added to the painting's value in the eyes of late-19th-century painters. Vincent van Gogh mentions van der Goes three times in his letters, first in 1873 to his brother Theo, and on two more occasions when he wrote that he identified with the portrait of van der Goes in Emile Wauters's emotionally rendered 1872 painting Hugo van der Goes Undergoing Treatment at the Red Cloister. Art historian Erwin Panofsky described van der Goes as "the first artist to live up to a concept unknown to the Middle Ages but cherished by the European mind ever after, the concept of a genius both blessed and cursed with his diversity from ordinary human beings." Panofsky goes on to describe how the work's flatness represents an "irrationality of space, light, colour, [the] expression of the artist's mental illness".

 

Other art historians, including Dirk de Vos and Susan Koslow, reject this thesis and argue that a wholly individualised conception of the scene would not have been acceptable to the painting's commissioners. In their view the pared down and contracted manner of the work is due to a desire to "stress the solemnity of the event and its miraculous nature, van der Goes may have decided that material richness would be distracting and indecorous."

 

Van der Goes was a highly progressive and original artist, but at the same time heavily influenced by both contemporary and predecessor artists. Inspiration for this work can be detected in Petrus Christus' c 1457–67 Death of the Virgin and by works attributed to the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. The painting bears striking similarity to Martin Schongauer's c 1470–75 engraving of the same name, especially in its overall tone and mood, the depiction of Mary and the representation of the apostles seated to Mary's left. Yet there are significant differences; the bed in Schongauer's engraving is canopied and the distribution of the apostles is very different in the two works. The Schongauer is dated to at latest 1475, and it is a matter of significant and at times harsh and divisive critical debate as to which work came first

Contrast the Problem of Relating Politics and Administration Today with Those in President Woodrow Wilson’s Essay: The Study of Administration

 

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem (Reagan, 1981).” This, now famous, expression appeared in President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address. The Calvinist antistatism sentiment found in this maxim reveals the passion surrounding the role of American government in our lives today, just as it did at the birth of our Constitution (Stillman, 2010, p. 17). Given these public attitudes, America’s geographic attributes and the propensity of the Constitution to define a “night watchman” (Stillman, 2010, p. 17) style of government: how does the administration of government (Stillman, 2010, p. 6) relate to the politics of government today contrast with those in President Woodrow Wilson’s essay, The Study of Administration?

President Wilson stated in this famous essay that government administration is a field of business divorced from the “hurry and strife of politics (Stillman, 2010, p. 10).” He thought that administration should be treated as a science and that it should “lie outside the proper sphere of politics (Stillman, 2010, p. 10).”

There were only five cabinet level departments established prior to Wilson’s 1887 essay and these essential bodies were still compatible with a minimal state promulgated by the founding fathers and their constituents (Garrett & Rhine, On the Size and Growth of Government, 2006). Today there are twenty entities with cabinet level rank (United States Government, 2011). The simple infrastructure required to run these additional bureaucracies would demand a faster pace and additional strife associated with the demands of networking. This growth in government is reflected in the cost of government.

A quantitative look at the expenses of government from 1792 through the year 2000 reveals a very inexpensive undertaking before 1913. Each resident of the United States paid an average of $85 a year (in year 2000 dollars) during this period to support his government (Garrett & Rhine, On the Size and Growth of Government - DATA, 2006). A linear plot of these per capita expenses in Figure 1 reveals a linear increase in government expenditure after 1913, the year in which the sixteenth amendment was passed removing obstacles to federal income taxation. The dawn of public administration may have started with the publication of Wilson’s essay but the funding for it appeared with the sixteenth amendment.

 

Successful executive directed bureaucracies are those that have either intrinsically visible outputs and outcomes or leadership that is committed to the politics and power of favorable visibility (Gormley & Balla, 2008, pp. 203-217). Shaping its public image is overlooked at the peril of the agency that ignores this political necessity.

A recent example of a government agency that lost control of its public relations and political image was the United States Coast Guard during the Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Although the Federal On-Site Coordinator, in the form of U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry, was responsible for disseminating cleanup information to the public, the preponderance of information came from British Petroleum and Transocean Ltd (Region 6 US EPA, 2004). These two parties had a financial interest in “cooking” the information in a self promotional manner. The result was a series of false statements that had a tone of official government endorsement. The question: who is in charge, was then asked by my friends and many “lazy” pundants. U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen replaced the Rear Admiral within two weeks of the disaster and began a very compelling interaction with news media and a visibly demanding attitude toward the companies responsible for financing the clean-up. Politically motivated communication was essential in this case and is desirable in most other circumstances including the case study of Los Angeles Street Services Bureau head, William Robertson (Stillman, 2010, pp. 87-94).

President Wilson states that the greater a man’s [administrative] power the less likely he is to abuse it and the less significant a man’s power the more likely he is to abuse it (Stillman, 2010, p. 12). This is contrary to the Calvinist assumption that all men in power are corruptible and that one of the greatest precautions against this abuse is a balance of power and oversight in the form of rules, regulations and “sunshine.” The Government in the Sunshine Act is a more recent attempt to make commission dealings more visible and less corruptible by opening meetings to interested parties from outside the government (Gormley & Balla, 2008, p. 13).

Although President Wilson has covered many issues in his essay that have proven to be true over time, two of his assertions on administration appear to be incongruent with current bureaucratic government operations. The first, that public administration and politics are and should be separated is shown to be a bad organizational strategy in today’s culture. Finally, the presumption that powerful administrators are less prone to corruption than their less empowered colleagues may be true, but is certainly not believed to be true in today’s culture.

  

References

Garrett, T. A., & Rhine, R. M. (2006, January/February). On the Size and Growth of Government - DATA. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review: research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/06/01/0601tgd...

Garrett, T. A., & Rhine, R. M. (2006, January/February). On the Size and Growth of Government. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review: research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/06/01/GarrettRhine.pdf

Gormley, W. T., & Balla, S. J. (2008). Bureaucracy and Democracy Accountability and Performance. Washington, DC: CQ Press.

Reagan, R. (1981, January 20). Presidential Inaugurations: Ronald Reagan, First Inauguration, January 20, 1981. Retrieved Febrary 8, 2011, from American Memory from the Library of Congress: www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speeches/1981/12081a.htm

Region 6 US EPA. (2004, June). Oil Spill Response Roles. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: www.epa.gov/Region06/6sf/pdffiles/document_oil_spill_resp...

Stillman, R. J. (2010). Public Administration Concepts and Cases. Boston: Wadsworth.

United States Government. ( 2011, February 9). The Cabinet | The White House. Retrieved February 9, 2011, from The White House: www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet/

 

There have been very few posters relating to this proposed amendment.

 

The proposed 30th amendment provides for the setting-up of inquiries by the Oireachtas when it is decided to be in the public interest and for the balance between the rights of individuals appearing before them and the public interest in having the inquiry expeditiously to be decided by the Oireachtas.

 

Eight former attorney generals have written to the national newspapers giving reasons for their stated opposition to the Oireachtas powers referendum. They state that the proposals will seriously weaken the rights of individuals to their good name and provide insufficient protection for the independence of the judiciary. The signatories are Patrick Connolly, Peter Sutherland, John Rogers, Harold Whelehan, Dermot Gleeson, David Byrne, Michael McDowell and Paul Gallagher.

 

“The proposal in relation to Oireachtas enquiries seriously weakens the rights of individual citizens, firstly to protect their good names, and secondly to have disputes between themselves and the Oireachtas concerning their constitutional rights (especially their rights to fair procedures) decided by an independent judiciary. The proposal to allow proportionate reductions in judicial remuneration (which we support in principle) provides insufficient protection for the independence of the judiciary.”

 

Gov. Neil Abercrombie today signed House Bill 656, establishing the Health Care Transformation Program within the Governor’s office to advance the transformation.

 

“Improving health and the quality of care while bending the cost curve are among my administration’s top priorities,” Gov. Abercrombie said. “Addressing these concerns requires a new systematic approach that affects health care statewide.”

 

HB656 (Relating to Health Care Administrative Uniformity) also sets specific responsibilities for creating a strategy and timeline for statewide healthcare transformation that includes developing standards to measure quality and costs, reducing administrative burdens for providers and insurers, and improving and expanding the use of information technology to support transformation.

 

The measure explicitly gives the Governor the authority to obtain information by consulting with any stakeholders, individually or in groups, as part of the foundation for transformation. This is crucial since the healthcare sector cannot make systematic, coordinated changes of its own volition because:

 

- antitrust issues preclude many kinds of concerted group action that are not mandated and/or supervised by government authority;

- while insurers, hospitals, and provider groups can all make sweeping changes within the scope of their own organizations, these changes may have little effect on the rest of the system; and

- private sector health organizations agree on improving health, quality and cost, but implementing strategies without regulation or at least industry coordination is difficult because such organizations may have mixed motivations in a competitive environment.

 

“The cost of health care affects every resident and business in Hawaii,” said Beth Giesting, the state’s Healthcare Transformation Coordinator. “While health insurance premiums in Hawaii are relatively modest and offer good coverage, the inflationary trend – on average about 6 percent per year – results in wage stagnation and limited opportunities for business expansion.”

 

More than any other entity in Hawaii, the state is directly impacted by the effectiveness of the healthcare system as it purchases coverage for nearly 40 percent of the population, and that percentage will grow when new eligibility provisions and requirements under the federal Affordable Care Act result in Medicaid expansion. Med-QUEST programs now cover more than 20 percent of the state’s population with a budget of nearly $2 billion. The Hawaii Employer-Union Health Benefits Trust Fund covers nearly 15 percent of the population (Its annual budget is $523 million and it carries an unfunded liability of $14.4 billion). The state budget also supports the Hawaii Health Systems Corporation, emergency and trauma services at other facilities, behavioral health care, federally qualified health centers, and more.

 

Also today, Gov. Abercrombie signed the following measures in separate bill signing ceremonies:

 

Kupuna Bills

Individuals 65 years or older account for 14.7 percent of Hawaii’s population, which makes Hawaii the eighth in the nation in terms of the greatest percentage of older Americans. The following bills provide protections and resources needed for Hawaii’s growing kupuna population.

 

- HB529 (Relating to Care Homes)

- HB120 (Relating to Health)

- SB106 (Relating to Aging)

- HB398 (Relating to Human Services)

- SB102 (Relating to the Elderly)

 

SB102 specifically requires that financial institutions report instances of suspected financial abuse of an elder directly to the appropriate county police department (via 911) and the state Department of Human Services via Adult Protective Services:

 

Oahu – 832-5115

Kauai – 241-3337

Maui – 243-5151

East Hawaii – 933-8820

West Hawaii – 327-6280

Other Health-Related Bills

These bills protect consumers, ensure qualified professionals provide medical treatment, and help families who have loved ones suffering from a severe mental illness obtain treatment.

 

- HB847 (Relating to Enforcement Tools to Improve Patient Safety)

- SB1074 (Relating to Physical Therapy)

- SB310 (Relating to Mental Health Treatment)

 

Housing Bills

The following bills address housing needs and recognize that one size does not fit all when finding a solution to end homelessness.

 

- SB515 (Relating to Housing)

- HB536 (Relating to Public Housing)

Relates to Leeds TOTW: Stairs (John Fotohouse - Jan 2009)

Today in Ireland and in the US new regulations relating to drones has been introduced [effective from the 21st of December 2015]. There are many similarities in the regulations but there is one major differences in that here in Ireland they have not mention the penalties for failure to register but in the US the cost of failure to register appears to be rather extreme … “civil penalties up to $27,500, or criminal penalties up to 3 years in prison and $250,000.” According to the minister the aim here in Ireland is to encourage drone users to be responsible citizens.

  

I have included the press releases from both administrations, have a read and see what you think.

  

Thursday, 17th December 2015: The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) today announced a new drone regulation which includes the mandatory registration of all drones weighing 1kg or more from Monday, 21st December 2015.

 

The use of drones worldwide is expanding rapidly and there are estimated to be between 4,000 – 5,000 drones already in use in Ireland. Ireland has taken a proactive role in this fast emerging area and is currently one of only a handful of EU Member states that has legislation governing the use of drones.

 

The new legislation is intended to further enhance safety within Ireland and specifically addresses the safety challenges posed by drones.

 

From 21st December 2015, all drones weighing 1kg or more must be registered with the IAA via www.iaa.ie/drones. Drone registration is a simple two-step process. To register a drone, the registrant must be 16 years of age or older (Drones operated by those under 16 years of age must be registered by a parent or legal guardian). A nominal fee will apply from February 2016 but this has been initially waived by the IAA in order to encourage early registration.

  

Mr Ralph James, IAA Director of Safety Regulation, said

 

“Ireland is already recognised worldwide as a centre of excellence for civil aviation and the drone sector presents another major opportunity for Ireland. We’re closely working with industry to facilitate its successful development here. At the same time, safety is our top priority and we must ensure that drones are used in a safe way and that they do not interfere with all other forms of aviation.

 

Mr James explained that drone registration has been made a mandatory requirement as this will help the IAA to monitor the sector in the years ahead. The IAA encourages all drone operators to take part in training courses which are available through a number of approved drone training organisations.

 

“We would strongly encourage drone operators to register with us as quickly as possible, to complete a training course and to become aware of their responsibilities. People operating drones must do so in safe and responsible manner and in full compliance with the new regulations”, he said.

 

Welcoming the introduction of drone regulation, Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Paschal Donohoe TD highlighted the importance of the new legislation and commended the IAA for the efficient manner to have the new registration system in place so quickly.

 

“The core safety message promoted today advocates the safe use of drones in civilian airspace. The development of drone technology brings opportunities as well as challenges for businesses and services in Ireland. I expect hundreds if not thousands of drones to be bought as presents this Christmas so getting the message to ensure that new owners and operators are aware of their responsibilities and the requirement to register all drones over 1 kg from 21st December 2015 is key. Tremendous potential exists for this sector and Ireland is at the forefront of its development. The speedy response by the IAA to this fast developing aviation area will make sure that drones are properly regulated and registered for use. As a result, Ireland is well placed to exploit the drone sector and to ensure industry growth in this area,” he said.

  

The new legislation prohibits users from operating their drones in an unsafe manner. This includes never operating a drone:

 

• if it will be a hazard to another aircraft in flight

• over an assembly of people

• farther than 300m from the operator

• within 120m of any person, vessel or structure not under the operator’s control

• closer than 5km from an aerodrome

• in a negligent or reckless manner so as to endanger life or property of others

• over 400ft (120m) above ground level

• over urban areas

• in civil of military controlled airspace

• in restricted areas (e.g. military installations, prisons, etc.)

• unless the operator has permission from the landowner for takeoff and landing.

  

For further information please visit www.iaa.ie/drones and see the IAA’s detailed Q&A sheet.

  

The Federal Aviation Administration has officially launched the drone registration program first reported in October. Drone operators are required to register their UAVs with the Unmanned Aircraft System registry starting December 21. Failure to register could result in criminal and civil penalties.

 

Under the new system, all aircraft must be registered with the FAA including those 'operated by modelers and hobbyists.' Once registered, drone operators must carry the registration certificate during operation. This new system only applies to drones weighing more than 0.55lbs/250g and less than 55lbs/25kg. The only exception to the registration requirement is indoor drone flights.

 

Required registration information includes a mailing address and physical address, email address, and full names; however, no information on the drone's make, model, or serial number is required from recreational users. Non-recreational users will need to provide drone information, including serial number, when that particular registration system goes live.

 

Failure to register could result in civil penalties up to $27,500, or criminal penalties up to 3 years in prison and $250,000. A $5 registration charge is applied, but will be refunded to those who register before January 20. The registration certificate is sent in an email to be printed at home.

This is how I want to run after salmon ngiri in sushi restaurants. I relate, Mama bear.

Someone once said that if you can relate to Edgar Allen Poe then you must be mentally ill. That person was also a simpleton and devoid of any real awareness of the dark corners of the human character. There is no doubt Poe was tortured man, an eccentric man and just maybe towards the end of his life mentally ill due to disease. No one knows for sure. His works are an expedition into love and loss, grief and insanity. They smite our emotions so hard because the human spirit is largely enveloped in feelings of sadness, rage, longing and feeling out of place. We may not perceive these things every second of everyday but they are there occasionally and they are very real for us. You cannot gaze upon the line “And all I loved, I loved alone” and not feel your heart fracture just a little, not because of the simple cluster of words but because we know all too well what he means! We feel it so deeply! That’s a truly great poet! A great poet deserves great homage, a series bridging many artistic journeys through some of the most adored compositions in Poe’s collection, a chance to create our own visions and build so much more on what he gave us.

 

"The Masque of the Red Death “is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death. He, along with many other wealthy nobles, host a masquerade ball within seven rooms, each decorated with a different color. Prospero and 1,000 other nobles have taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague with gruesome symptoms that has swept over the land. Victims are overcome by "sharp pains", "sudden dizziness", and die within half an hour. Prospero and his court are indifferent to the sufferings of the population at large; they intend to await the end of the plague in luxury and safety behind the walls of their secure refuge, having welded the doors shut. At the chiming of midnight, the revelers and Prospero notice a figure in a dark, blood-splattered robe resembling a funeral shroud. The figure's mask resembles the rigid face of a corpse and exhibits the traits of the Red Death. When the figure turns to face him, the Prince lets out a sharp cry and falls dead... Only then do we realize the figure is the Red Death itself, and all of the guests contract and succumb to the disease. The final line of the story sums it up, "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all".

 

(please view large!)

 

If you have an uncommon name, I'm sure you can relate. I'm thinking about writing "Sarah" or "Emily" on my name tag at work because I get so many questions about my name.

 

This is how it usually goes when I'm introduced to someone...

This is my friend Brynn.

Britt?

Brynn.

Brent?

Brynn.

Brett, that's cool.

Yeah, but it's Brynn.

 

Substitutes growing up were the worst. Seriously, you're a teacher. Sound. It. Out. It doesn't make sense to pronounce it any other way.

 

FAQ:

Wow, that's interesting. Is that Irish?

I guess so. (I've heard it is, but I'm not Irish and my mom thought she made it up when I was born)

 

Isn't that a boy's name?

Well, I'm a girl.

 

That's really pretty, would you mind if I used that for my daughters middle name?

Knock yourself out.

 

Have ever met another Brynn?

yeah, actually. A camp counselor once, but he was a boy and spelled it with one N instead of two. And once I saw it on a girl's name tag at Costco but it turned out that her real name was Brenna and she was just trying to be extra trendy. I don't know if I was disappointed or relived.

 

Do you ever get jokes about Bryn Maur or Brynn Thayer?

The thing is, I never do. People always ask me if I do though, which is weird. (Bryn Maur is a collge somewhere and Brynn Thayer is a soap opera star, I believe, and no I'm not named after either).

 

Common misspellings include: Bryn, Brin, Brinn, Brenn or even Brynne. Honestly, how does that make sense to tag an E at the end?

 

I've gotten tons of nicknames from it. The most common ones are probably Bee, Rynn, B-Rynn, Brynnie or Brynnaboo, but I've gotten Brynnifer, Brynnathan, Bryllo Pad, Brynnius Maximus, Brynnaphone, Brynnacious, Grinnin' Brynn, Skinny Brynnie, Brynnzie, Brynnley, Brynn Tin Tin... none of them were catchy enough to stick, obviously. My dad used to call me Brynnius Calinious growing up because I used to read the comic BC at breakfast and he told me that's what BC stood for.

 

And with a last name like Breakey? Gimme a Breakey! Achey Breakey Heart, Heart Breaker... un-humorous jokes and nicknames have never ended.

 

My brothers are named Beau, Bryson, Bentley. The Breakey bunch. I know you were thinking it, too bad it's been said a thousand times already. Sorry, that was kind of mean. You were just trying to be creative.

 

What does it mean?

Its means Hope. And if you know me I think you'd agree that it fits me and my optimism pretty well. I'm pretty hard to upset and don't often give up, even when I probably should.

 

I hated my name for a long time, but now I'm kind of thankful for it. It's not one that's easy to forget and it's a little quirky, two things I hope to live up to.

Activity relating to the carrying of the more than 100 portable shrines (mikoshi) around the Asakusa neighbourhood to bless the businesses and residents with prosperity in the coming year.

 

Sanja Matsuri (Festival) at the Sensoji Temple, Asakusa,

Tokyo, Japan, 2016

 

Only the street shots - thestreetzine.blogspot.com/

Periodic Report from Headquarters 1st Battalion 2nd Infantry Regiment, 5th Infantry Division, relating to a Combat Team Field Exercise named 'BLACKJACK' that was held on 17, 18, and 24 January 1944. With this handwritten report covering activity from the last day.

 

The account is as follows:

 

Troops-1st Battalion with all troops of Division/actual or simulated.

 

Bn Attack order issued by C.O at 09:15 hours. Company B is on left. 400yds frontage. Company A on right moves and assists Company B who is the base Company. Dispositions (overlay.)

 

Enemy located generally on forward slopes of Craignamona and hill 977 (overlay)

 

report of casualties from companies. First aid station reports casualties heavy. Co A 15 casualties 4 dead.

 

Weather- Raining

Visibility-Poor

Progress of situation. Satisfactory

 

S-3 1st Bn

  

The exercise was intended to provide instruction in the application of 2nd Infantry Regiments, Standard Operating Procedures, troop leading for command personnel, techniques in issuing orders, communications and message centre procedures, and coordination of Regimental and Battalion Staffs in the field.

 

The word (overlay) refers to a tracing paper detail that was attached to the normal maps being used. Troops involved in the exercise included: the 2nd Infantry Regiment; the 50th Field Artillery Battalion; Company 'A' 5th Medical Battalion; 1st Platoon Company 'A' 7th Engineer Battalion; and a detachment from the 5th Signal Company.

 

The enemy was represented by one Rifle Company from the 1st Battalion, one Machine Gun Platoon from Company 'D' attached, and one squad from AP Platoon 1st Battalion. The enemy force was identified by wearing fatigue caps and vehicles having a red cross painted on their windshields.

 

Simulated casualties were tagged by a number of umpires and either evacuated if required, or if marked as killed, returned to regimental collection points. The Umpires wore a white identification band on their right sleeve and were selected from non-participating units.

 

Although Craignamona is the only local name referred to on the report, division records indicate the exercise as being held in the vicinity of Hilltown. The exercise also included air support by the RAF who provided simulated strafing and bombing. The weather for each day was recorded as 17 Jan, Cloudy with rain. Light south winds. 18 Jan, Cloudy with light rain throughout the day. And, 24 January, Cloudy with rain and warmer.

   

Relating to a different tram project, this is a new line being constructed across a couple of islands.

 

I've seen this technique used before on some motorway work near the airport. Basically, skilled joiners produce this massive former into which concrete is poured and we get a new bridge.