Is this starting to look like a memory game?

specially con amor for kids

no censorship

all included

wait until Zappa joins the game honeybees

//birdview, ink, watercolor, proceso

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Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!

- Yuri Gagarin, first human in space (9 Mar 1934-1968)

I do not own this image. It is provided for media use by the Lego Group (www.lego.com/en-us/AboutUs/), and I am using it in an article for BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com).

I do not own this image. It is provided for media use by the Invictus Games Foundation (www.invictusgamesfoundation.org/), and I have permission to include it in an article for BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com).

Today we celebrate a playwright, Rodolfo Usigli. Some people call him the father of modern Mexican drama. Others just call him trouble. Rodolfo Usigli, the playwright who could hear the heartbeat of a whole country and wasn’t afraid to say it sounded a little off-tempo.

Rodolfo Usigli came into the world in 1905, born to a family of European immigrants (mother from Poland, father from Italy) in Mexico City. He grew up with big ears. He listened. To the revolution rumbling outside. To the talk in cafés. To the gossip of politicians who thought no one was paying attention. And he listened to the theater most of all. He believed a stage wasn’t just a place for make-believe, it was a place where nations could see themselves warts. He believed that Mexico deserved its own dramatic identity, not just borrowed tragedies or hand-me-down comedies. He wanted a soul for Mexican theater, but souls are complicated things. They resist polite company.

Usigli had this uncanny ability to slip behind the mask of a nation and shine a flashlight on all the cracks. He wrote a play back in the 1940s—El gesticulador, The Impostor, The Gesturer, call it what you will. A story about mexican post revolution politics, identity, corruption… you know, all the things that never go out of style.

Now here’s where the story takes a turn worthy of a B-side. See, there was a brand-new Theater Department at the Dirección de Bellas Artes in Mexico City: fresh paint on the walls, big dreams in the air. And heading it up was an actor named Alfredo Gómez de la Vega. Sitting in the second chair right beside him, holding the title of subdirector of the theater and the spirit of a true believer, was Ignacio Ibarra Mazari, my grandfather. Yes, my grandfather.

For almost 10 years, El gesticulador was passed around like contraband. People whispered about it. Professors taught it in back rooms. Students copied it by hand. It didn’t see a major stage until 1947, when my grandfather Ignacio Ibarra Mazari, along with his colleague Alfredo Gómez de la Vega, decided that the time for whispering was over. Together they decided to stage premiere El gesticulador. And that, my friends, is like deciding to juggle lit dynamite because the moon looked bored.

Alfredo himself took the lead role, César Rubio, the man with too many faces and maybe none at all. And my grandfather, working behind the scenes, helped bring that firecracker of a play to life. But the thing about truth is it doesn’t always stay onstage.

Word got out. People started whispering. Politicians started sweating. The curtain rose, the curtain fell, and then, like thunder after lightning, the scandal broke. The Mexican government didn’t care for that mirror Usigli was holding up. Didn’t like what they saw. And just like that, Alfredo Gómez de la Vega and Ignacio Ibarra Mazari were shown the door. Out of their posts before the applause had even died.

It’s the kind of gesture only power knows how to make. But let me tell you something about artists: they stick together like bandmates in a smoky van rolling into the next town. One of the biggest names of them Diego Rivera, the muralist with hands full of color and a heart full of rebellion, he penned an open letter. And not just any letter. A blazing, thundering, truth-toting defense of my grandfather, demanding he be put right back where he belonged. Rivera didn’t mince words, and he didn’t need to. Sometimes a single artist telling the truth can be louder than a whole government trying to silence it. Now, whether it was a gesture, a protest, or just the echo of justice in a hollow hallway, that letter lives on and so does the story.

So here’s to Rodolfo Usigli, shaking the walls with theater. Sometimes the bravest gesture is just telling the truth on a stage, under the hot lights, while the world tries to look away.

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You know, when you talk about visions, you can’t get too far down that foggy London road before you bump into a the one big one we celebrate today. William Blake.

Yes, Blake. Poet, painter, engraver, mystic, troublemaker, the kind of guy who saw angels in trees and revolution in the streets, sometimes on the same day.

William Blake was born in 1757, back when London was a little grimier, a little smokier, and a whole lot louder with horse carts and street criers. Young Blake wasn’t much for school. Spent his time staring out the window, sketching the world the way he saw it, which was usually about three layers deeper than everyone else. You know the type.

Blake wasn’t just writing poems; he was etching them into copper plates, painting around them, coloring them in with watercolors. Multimedia before anyone had a name for that. A one-man art factory, run by visions and stubbornness. Some called him eccentric. Others called him crazy. But, hey, some people say that about the ones who do not want to dance the same waltz. You see, Blake had ideas, big, loud ideas. Angels and tigers and prophetic books about vast cosmic wars. He saw God in a sunbeam and the devil in a factory chimney, and he figured the world would be better if people used a little more imagination and a little less oppression. Visionary stuff. Got him in trouble more than once.

You might know the poem The Tyger. “Tyger Tyger, burning bright…” You hear that and you can practically feel the sparks flying off the words. Blake said he wrote by taking dictation from eternity. Most of us just look at a blank page and hope something shows up… but Blake had the whole cosmos whispering in his ear. And the funny thing is, the world didn’t care much for him when he was around. Sold a few books, not many. Gave some art lessons. Lived modestly. Dreamed extravagantly. But time, time’s got a habit of catching up with prophets. Now he’s the patron saint of anyone who ever tried to make something bold and strange and beautiful, even when nobody was buying.

So here’s to William Blake, the man who saw heaven in a wildflower and the apocalypse in a print shop. A poet who painted, a painter who prophesied and a visionary who never stopped looking past the veil.

—-

Auguries of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all Heaven in a rage.

A dove house fill'd with doves and pigeons

Shudders Hell thro' all its regions.

A dog starv'd at his master's gate

Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misus'd upon the road

Calls to Heaven for human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted hare

A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,

A Cherubim does cease to sing.

The game cock clipp'd and arm'd for fight

Does the rising Sun affright.

Every wolf's and lion's howl

Raises from Hell a human soul.

...

He who respects the infant's faith

Triumphs over Hell and Death.

The child's toys and the old man's reasons

Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,

Shall never know how to reply.

He who replies to words of doubt

Doth put the light of Knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known

Came from Caesar's laurel crown,

Nought can deform the human race

Like to the armour's iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow

To peaceful arts shall Envy bow.

A riddle or the cricket's cry

Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet's inch and eagle's mile

Make lame Philosophy to smile.

He who doubts from what he sees

Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

If the Sun and Moon should doubt,

They'd immediately go out.

To be in a passion you good may do,

But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state

Licens'd, build that nation's fate.

The harlot's cry from street to street,

Shall weave Old England's winding sheet.

The winner's shout, the loser's curse,

Dance before dead England's hearse.

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

When we see not thro' the eye

Which was born in a night to perish in a night,

When the Soul slept in beams of light.

God appears and God is light

To those poor souls who dwell in night,

But does a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day.

//Auguries of Innocence, W.Blake 1863

watercolor, ink on paper

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Today we celebrate a poet, yeah, a poet, a loner named Jim Morrison.

Most people out there know Jim Morrison as that wild-eyed singer of The Doors, the guy who howled like a wolf trying to read philosophy to the moon. But underneath the snakeskin swagger and the Lizard King crown, there was a fella sitting at a notebook, scratching out lines like he was trying to trap lightning before it ran off.

They say some poets whisper their poems. Jim’s poems didn’t whisper, they stalked. All jagged edges and candlelight shadows. Filled with deserts, highways, dreamwomen, and little bits of America he picked up like souvenirs from a road trip he never finished.

People liked, and like, to call him a rock star because that’s easier than saying he was a man who wanted to peel the skin off reality and see what was quivering underneath. But listen close, late at night, when the traffic’s gone and the static’s the only friend you’ve got, and Morrison starts sounding less like a singer and more like a shaman with a library card. He read Rimbaud, Blake, Huxley, Nietzsche… all the folks you don’t read unless you’re either very brave or very young. And he carried their ghosts into Hollywood motels, Paris cafés, cheap notebooks bought at gas stations.

Some of his poems were rough, some were tangled, some were beautiful in that way abandoned buildings are beautiful, full of echoes and possibility.

Funny thing is that for all his fame, his poetry never quite got the handshake it deserved. Maybe the sunglasses were too dark, maybe the music was too loud. Hard to hear the man’s words when the myth is wearing them like an overcoat.

You see Jim Morrison, undervalued poet, wrote like someone who knew the world was burning but figured out that if you stared into the flames long enough you might see something holy. At the age of 19 he was saying things like “Women are better than men. They have good ideas. They seem more apt to accept life and live it more simply. Men have to create life. Women don’t. They are life”.

So here’s to Jim. Not the icon, not the legend, I mean the poet. The guy with 149 IQ who scribbled at 4 AM while the city slept trying to wring meaning out of madness before dawn came knocking.

—-

The movie

The movie will begin in five moments

The mindless voice announced

All those unseated will await the next show.

We filed slowly, languidly into the hall

The auditorium was vast and silent

As we seated and were darkened, the voice continued.

The program for this evening is not new

You’ve seen this entertainment through and through

You’ve seen your birth your life and death

you might recall all of the rest

Did you have a good world when you died?

Enough to base a movie on?

-I’m getting out of here

-Where are you going?

-To the other side of morning

-Please don’t chase the clouds, pagodas.

Her cunt gripped him like a warm, friendly hand.

-It’s alright, all your friends are here.

-When can I meet them?

-After you’ve eaten.

-I’m not hungry.

-Uh, we meant beaten

Silver stream, silvery scream

Oooooh, impossible concentration.

//The Movie, 1970. J.M.

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Today we celebrate a little special, a little strange, a little surreal… we are celebrating the greatest and magical Remedios Varo, a painter from Spain who found herself in the heart of Mexico. Her work, it’s like you walked into a dream, or maybe a waking feverish nightmare, depending on how you look at it.

Remedios Varo was a surrealist, but she wasn’t just painting pictures, she was painting portals. I’m talking about portals to different worlds, strange little creatures, and all kinds of fantastical machines, machines that seemed to be a part of the fabric of life itself. Varo wasn’t just sitting in her studio, paintbrush in hand, humming a tune, she was mixing things up with some of the wildest minds Mexico had to offer. When Varo moved to Mexico in the late '40s, she wasn’t just escaping the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. She was entering a new world. And Mexico in the mid-20th century, oh yeeh, it was a place of contradictions, of light and shadow. You had revolutionary ideas, indigenous cultures, and old colonial ghosts all swirling together in the air. But it was also a place where the modern world was knocking on the door, and Varo, well, she answered. She threw herself into that mix, and the result was some of the most mind-bending work you can imagine.

Her paintings? Oh, they were all about transformation, about breaking through the mundane, about seeing the world as it could be, not as it should be. You ever look at one of her paintings and wonder, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Varo’s art isn’t trying to give you the answers, it’s trying to get you to ask the right questions. It was about living and working in Mexico, which itself was a kind of strange dance between life and death. The dead were always there, hovering just below the surface. Mexico’s rich history of indigenous spirituality and Catholicism had the dead walking side by side with the living. You couldn’t escape it. You still can’t. But Mexico also gave Varo something else, a big thing, yeah, I’m talking about freedom. She found a place where she could create without the constraints of European tradition, where she could make her mark in a community that embraced her. She was no outsider in Mexico. Her work was a reflection of the time and place she was living in, she wasn’t just painting for art’s sake; she was painting a new kind of world. The rituals of life, the mysteries of death, and the endless question of what happens next?

Now, here’s something you don’t always hear when people talk about artists. Everybody likes to imagine big studios, high ceilings, sunlight pouring in through factory windows, paint splattered on the floor like a crime scene. But Remedios Varo didn’t have any of that. No grand atelier, no ivory tower. She painted wherever she could, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in small, borrowed rooms, places where the coffee was still warm and the walls were closing in. And maybe that tells you something. Maybe that’s why her worlds feel so tight, so precise, so inward. Her paintings aren’t shouting at you. They’re whispering. Lean in too fast and you might miss them. Varo worked small because her life was small in scale but huge in imagination. Exile’ll do that to you. Spain, Paris, then finally Mexico, always moving, always adapting. In Mexico City, she lived in modest apartments, often painting at a table meant for eating, not dreaming. But she turned those domestic spaces into laboratories. The kitchen became an alchemist’s chamber. The hallway became a portal. Her thin, meticulous brushwork wasn’t just a stylistic choice, it was a necessity. Limited space, limited materials, limited time. She painted slowly, deliberately, layering fine lines like someone stitching together a spell. No broad gestures, no macho slashes of paint. This wasn’t action painting. This was quiet work, almost monastic. You get the feeling she was listening more than she was speaking. And that intimacy, the small rooms, the fine lines, ties her even closer to Mexico. Because Mexico understands the poetry of making something sacred out of the ordinary. Death altars built on kitchen tables. Magic hidden in daily ritual. Life and mystery sharing the same cramped quarters.

Remedios Varo died young, only 54, in 1963. She was working on a series of paintings that were darker, more introspective, maybe a little obsessed with the unknown. And just like that, she was gone, gone before she could finish what she started, before she could unveil all the worlds she had inside her head. In the end, she wasn’t just part of Mexico’s history. She became a part of the fabric of that place. Her work is still alive, folks. It’s still out there.

So, as we wind this one down, let’s remember Remedios Varo not just for the artist she was, but for the way she lived, the way she worked, and the way she died. She brought the surreal to the real, the impossible to the possible. And Mexico, with all its magic, chaos, and contradiction, gave her the stage to make that dream, or nightmare, come true. Alright, sit back, take it easy, and think about that as you move along.

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Today we celebrate a story of fire. Of rhythm. A woman who danced like the earth itself was trying to keep up with her. Her name was Carmen Amaya.

Born in the shanties of Somorrostro, down by the sea in Barcelona. People say she came into this world already tapping her feet, kicking up sparks on the floorboards. She was La Capitana, the Captain. Flamenco’s wild child. When she danced, it wasn’t pretty, it was powerful. A volcano. A storm in a skirt. They say her heels could strike lightning. Her hands could make thunder. She said she learned dancing by imitating the movement of the waves in the sea.

Now, flamenco used to be a man’s world. Men danced, men played, men strutted around in their tight pants and fancy vests. But Carmen, Carmen just laughed. She danced in pants, smoked cigarettes, and didn’t give a damn who was watching. She wasn’t playing by their rules. She was rewriting them.

They called her the greatest flamenco dancer who ever lived. Charlie Chaplin thought she was something out of this world. She danced for Roosevelt at the White House, and I bet even the Secret Service couldn’t keep their feet still.

She didn’t just dance, she attacked the floor.

Every stomp was a heartbeat. Every turn, a fight for freedom. You watch her, and you realize that rhythm, that pulse; the sound of survival.

Amaya burned fast and bright. Died young, at the age of 45, but the sparks she left behind you can still see them glowing if you close your eyes and listen close.

So here’s to Carmen Amaya. The barefoot queen of fire. The woman who made the world tap its foot, whether it wanted to or not.

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Somewhere between a silver screen and a cigarette curling in a Paris café. Today we celebrate a man who didn’t just break the rules of cinema… He tore them up, folded them into paper airplanes, and flew them straight into the future. The French-Swiss film director, film critic and screenwriter Jean-Luc Godard.

Yeah, Godard, the guy with glasses so thick you could see the whole New Wave reflecting in them. He was the kind of guy who’d point a camera at a street corner, and suddenly that street corner was speaking French poetry. Even if all that was happening was somebody buying a newspaper.

He came up with that wild bunch of dreamers in the late ’50s —Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol… Kids who loved Hollywood but didn’t wanted to behave like Hollywood. It’s like they admired the parade, but they wanted to march sideways. You watch Bande à Part and you wish you had the guts to do everything they do.

Godard made films like Breathless, where the camera moves like a restless teenager with something on his mind. Cuts jumping around like they’re trying to escape the frame. Actors talking like philosophers who just woke up late for class. A whole generation saw that picture and said, “Wait… movies can do that?” And he kept changing too. Political, personal, beautiful, confusing, sometimes all in the same ten minutes.

The man treated cinema like clay. Or dynamite. Depends on the day. People would ask him why he did things the way he did, and he’d shrug, like he was saying, “Why does the river run the way it runs” You don’t argue with a river, friend. You just watch it go by, and hope it carries something interesting.

So here’s to Jean-Luc Godard, a director who didn’t want you to forget you were watching a movie, but somehow made you see the world clearer anyway.

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Today we celebrate a fella named Lucian Freud.

Now Lucian wasn’t your average Sunday painter. Hell no. He painted people like he was digging through the Earth looking for fossils. All that flesh, all those folds, the man could make a sleeping dog look like it was confessing its sins.

They say a portrait’s supposed to flatter. Not Lucian. His portraits didn’t flatter; they revealed. Like a hotel mirror at two in the morning, after the party’s over and you finally get a good look at yourself.

He came from a long line of thinkers. His grandfather was Sigmund Freud. The doctor of dreams! Guess that makes Lucian the painter of waking nightmares, or maybe just honest mornings.

He’d get his models in a room; friends, lovers, boxers, even the Queen of England once, and he’d stare at them for months. Not in a creepy way. More like he was trying to read the whole story written on their skin.

Some people read fortunes in tea leaves, Lucian read them in elbows, hips, and unmade beds. He said he wanted the paint to have “the feel of the body.” Most folks paint with brushes; Lucian painted with insistence. Thick strokes, like he was building the person from scratch, one stubborn dollop at a time. You look at one of his portraits and you don’t just see the person, they kinda walk into the room with you. Sit down. Breathe a little. Make you wonder what secrets they’re keeping.

Lucian Freud lived like he painted; slow, intense, always in search of something true. Stayed up late, gambled a little, slept less than he should, and kept on painting right to the end. Not bad for a guy who once said he wasn’t interested in “likeness,” only in life.

So here’s to Lucian Freud, the painter who didn’t airbrush the world, but wrestled with it. Wrestled it till it gave up something real.

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Happy birthday to the "Baby Boeing" - the Boeing 737. Pictured: Boeing 737-100 (N73700) on its maiden flight, 9 April 1967. 50 years old today!

.

#history #aviationhistory #flight #crewlife #boeing737 #boeing #babyboeing #onthisday #todayinhistory #thisdayinhistory #flightsafety #marty #airbus #airlines #airline #qantas #virginaustralia fat.ly/26nem

Karin Boye was born back in 1900. That was the same year as Aaron Copland, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the first Zeppelin flight. She grew up with her head in the clouds and her feet in the snow and she wrote like someone who could see both the beginning and the end of the world at once.

Now, Boye wasn’t just another writer sitting by the fireplace dreaming up rhymes. She was a thinker. A believer in change. A fighter, in her quiet way.

You might know her from that book Kallocain, a futuristic tale about truth, fear, and control. It came out in 1940, but you read it today and it still feels like she’s talking about now. Funny how the future never gets old.

She was from Gothenburg, or Göteborg, if you want to say it right. That’s on the west coast of Sweden. It’s a beautiful place. The kind of city that smells like salt and steel, where the gulls cry above the harbor and the rain never really leaves you alone. They build ships there, and dreams. And somewhere between the gray skies and the glimmer on the water, Karin Boye learned how to see the light hiding inside the dark.

She once wrote, ‘Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking.’ Now, that’s a line that’s been tattooed on more hearts than arms, I tell you. You can feel the ache in it, you know, that strange kind of pain that comes when something beautiful is trying to grow. Guess that’s what living’s all about, huh? Hurts like hell sometimes, but it’s the only way spring ever shows up.

So here’s to Karin Boye, the poet from Gothenburg who could turn sorrow into song, fear into fire, and cold nights into something worth remembering. If you’re ever wandering down by the Göta River and the wind’s got a story to tell, lean in close. You just might hear her voice in it. I for sure have.

-Jag är född I en stad-

Jag är född i en stad. Kring min första dröm

har gatornas höga hus stått vakt,

och gatornas sorlande människoström

har sin förtrollning i blodet mig lagt.

Jag är född i en stad, och jag vet, att än

en gång skall jag trampa dess gråa sten,

jag skall höra dess forsande buller igen

och vandra om kvällen i lyktors sken.

När skymningen faller djup och blå,

då skall jag se, huru tusen ljus

likt skälvande eldstalaktiter stå

i vattnet, där ångarnas lyktor gå,

medan fönsterna tändas i strandens hus.

Och jag vet, att här andas en livscentral,

förtätat liv är dess atmosfär;

här samlas all världens lust och kval,

och arbetet, arbetet härskar här.

I morgonens gråkalla våta dis

skall jag gå till min möda min dagliga gång

och höra den stora mödans sång,

som sjungit i sekler på samma vis.

Här känner jag världens pulsar slå,

här brusa tankarnas strömmar fritt;

just här, just här vill jag stridande stå

i den stora heliga kampens mitt!

Just här är min plats, jag vet att så är,

om jag vill eller ej. Men jag vill, jag vill!

Jag är född i en stad. Jag hör staden till.

Det bud, som jag söker, bidar där.

Det håller alltjämt min längtan varm,

fast ännu till hälften det döljer sig...

Men djupt ur gatornas mullrande larm

dess kallande, bjudande stämma jag hör -

den gärning, den gärning, som väntar mig,

det verk, det verk, som jag lever för!

//1915, Karin Boye

—-

-I Am Born in a City-

I am born in a city. Around my first dream

the tall houses of the streets have stood guard,

and the murmuring stream of people in the streets

has cast its enchantment into my blood.

I am born in a city, and I know that once more

I shall tread its gray stones again,

I shall hear its roaring tumult once more

and wander at evening in the glow of the lamps.

When twilight falls, deep and blue,

then shall I see how a thousand lights,

like trembling stalactites of fire, stand

in the water where the steamers’ lanterns go,

while windows are kindled in the houses along the shore.

And I know that here breathes a center of life,

condensed life is its atmosphere;

here gathers all the world’s joy and pain,

and labor — labor rules here.

In the gray, chill, mist of morning

I shall go to my toil, my daily path,

and hear the great song of labor

that through centuries has sung in the same way.

Here I feel the world’s pulses beat,

here the streams of thought surge free;

just here, just here I would stand and fight,

in the midst of the great and sacred struggle!

Just here is my place — I know it is so,

whether I will or not. But I will, I will!

I am born in a city. I belong to the city.

The calling I seek awaits me there.

It keeps my longing ever warm,

though still it hides itself halfway...

But deep in the city’s rumbling din

its summoning, commanding voice I hear —

the deed, the deed that is waiting for me,

the work, the work that I live for!

//1915, Karin Boye

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Words and Whiskey. Today we celebrate a fella who knew both like old friends: Dylan Thomas.

Names are slippery things. But there’s no denying the man had rhythm, not in a backbeat or a twelve-bar, but in the bones of the language itself.

Dylan Thomas was born 1914 in Swansea, Wales, a place that sounds like a harmonica note bent too far and still coming back for more. He started writing poems before most people learn to hold their liquor, and he never really stopped. He wrote like a man trying to wrestle God and the devil at the same time and somehow making them both sing harmony.

“Do not go gentle into that good night.”

That’s not just poetry, that’s advice. That’s a blues line.

Now here’s a funny thing about Dylan Thomas, the man didn’t make his money selling books. Nah, those poems of his didn’t exactly fly off the shelves like hotcakes at a truck stop. What really kept the lights on came from something different... records. You see, in America, folks didn’t just read his poems, they listened to them. Thomas had one of those voices that could make a grocery list sound like scripture. So when the BBC needed someone to fill the airwaves, they called him up. He did radio shows, wrote a few scripts, and turned that voice into a living. He was kind of like a one-man jukebox of the soul.

By the 1950s, he crossed the ocean to the States, thirty-five years old, a poet with a pint in one hand and a suitcase full of words in the other. Those American tours changed everything. He turned poetry readings into a kind of performance, not a classroom lecture, but a happening. You could say he plugged the old muse right into the microphone. That spark lit up something in a few kids listening. Artists such as Bob Dylan started thinking -hey, maybe poetry could sound like folk music... and maybe folk music could sound like poetry. Before long, the lines got blurry, and out of that blur came a whole lot of songs. Years later, when The Beatles made Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, John Lennon asked for Dylan Thomas to be on the cover. You can see him there, right between the movie stars and the mystics standing in that garden of fame, looking like he just wandered in from a pub in Swansea. Yeah, Dylan Thomas never had a hit single but he sure made a lot of noise.

Thomas had a voice like thunder trapped in a bottle, the kind of sound that could shake the dust off a pub wall and make the bartender cry. He drank too much, he lived too fast, and he left a trail of words that still burn like cigarette ash on your heart. They say he died in New York, at the Chelsea Hotel.

So today we raise a glass to the man who showed us that poetry can be as wild as a jazz solo, and as tender as a lullaby. Dylan Thomas the other Dylan, the first Dylan, maybe the only one who could make words sound like a song before songs even knew what they were missing.

-And Death Should Have No Dominion-

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion

//1943, D.T.

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Today we’re taking a little trip to Amherst, Massachusetts. Quiet place. Trees that whisper, houses that creak, and a young woman celebrating her birthday staring out the window like she’s looking straight into the machinery of the universe. Name’s Emily Dickinson. Wore white dresses, but don’t let that fool you, she saw things in colors most folks never imagined.

Emily Dickinson didn’t travel much, didn’t play no shows, didn’t go on no lecture tours. She stayed home, wrote poems the way some folks breathe. Slipped them into drawers, boxes, envelopes like she was leaving messages for a future that didn’t arrive until long after she checked out.

People like to call her a recluse, but you know, sometimes you got to step away from the world to hear the world. She listened to bees, funerals in the brain, the loaded gun of her own imagination. She tuned herself to thunderstorms and eternity

Dickinson wrote about death like it was an old acquaintance stopping by for tea and about hope, that little bird with feathers, tapping on the windowsill. She made the small things big and the big things small, the way good poets and bad weather always do.

And here’s the funny part: she sent a few poems out, they cleaned them up, combed their hair, made them behave. But the poems she hid away? Those wild ones, with the dashes going every which way, they’re the ones that ended up changing American poetry. Sometimes the things you keep to yourself are the ones that echo the loudest.

So here’s to Emily Dickinson, quiet as snowfall, fierce as lightning. A woman who turned her own room into a universe and still left enough space for the rest of us to wander in.

—

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum -

Kept beating - beating - till I thought

My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

// around 1861, E.Dickinson

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Today in history, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Some people said a shot came from where I'm standing in this photo. The infamous grassy knoll.

After visiting in person, I don't buy it.

Some people think the troubadour disappeared with chain mail and castles, but they’ve just been hiding, tuning their guitars under streetlamps, slipping metaphors under locked doors, singing the truth in a world that don’t always want to hear it. And with that said, today we celebrate a man from Cuba. Silvio Rodríguez.

If troubadours were constellations, he'd be one of those stars you don’t notice at first, until your eyes adjust to the dark.

Silvio Rodríguez came out of the Nueva Trova movement, which is kinda like folk music with a revolutionary passport, songs that know the price of bread and the weight of history. He became one of the founding stars of the movement that tried to put ideals into melodies and turn poetry into something you could actually hum. He sang with the softest voice, but it carried like a rumor you can’t silence. You listen to him and you think he’s whispering into your conscience. Some thought he was the government’s songbird. Others thought he was its sharpest critic. The truth is always more tangled… like an old fishing net that’s been sitting out too long. He believed in the hope of the revolution, the promise that the world could tilt toward the poor, the forgotten. But he wasn’t blind to its cracks. And he wrote about those cracks the way a painter uses shadow, to make the light stand out.

“I defend the revolution, but I also want it to defend itself from its own mistakes.”

There’s a tune of his, that I as a little girl used to listen on repeat; “Ojalá.” Sounds like a love song, but it’s got teeth. That thing can cut through steel if you let it. One of the best versions is the one he sang on the record “Mano a Mano”. Yeah, that moment when he let the audience sing carries an indescribably beautiful energi.

And then there’s “Playa Girón,” named after a fishing boat, but just like any good story, there's a lot more swimming under the waterline.

Silvio’s the kind of songwriter who writes like he’s walking a tightrope between dream and duty. He’ll give you a melody that floats like a feather, and a lyric that hits like a sledgehammer wrapped in velvet. He reminds me that sometimes the quietest people start the loudest revolutions.

So here’s to Silvio Rodríguez, a man who turned a guitar into a navigational instrument, steered a whole generation through storms without ever raising his voice above a murmur.

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Today we celebrate beauty, pain, and a little bit of divine light, all wrapped up in oil paint. The name on the easel is Guido Reni. Born way back in 1575 in Bologna, that’s Italy, not the sandwich. Guido was one of those Baroque painters, you know? Big drama, big gestures, and even bigger halos.

Reni had this thing about purity, he wanted his saints to glow, float, shimmer like they just stepped outta heaven’s backstage door. But there’s one painting that outshines the rest, a little number called Saint Sebastian.

Now Sebastian, he’s that Roman soldier who got himself tied to a post and turned into a pincushion for believing in something bigger than himself. Guido painted him smooth as marble, eyes rolled to heaven, body pierced with arrows but somehow looking like he’s just been kissed by the spirit. He’s not suffering, he’s shining.

Centuries later, that painting caught the eye of my one big time favorite, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. So Mishima, he was a man of contradictions - wrote beautiful words, lived a disciplined life, and had a fascination with death and perfection. When he saw Reni’s Sebastian, he didn’t just see a martyr. He saw beauty in pain, desire in devotion. It stirred something inside him, the kind of thing you can’t talk about in polite company. He said that picture awakened him… and in a way, maybe it created him.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Guido Reni painted a saint, trying to capture holiness. And a few hundred years later, that same painting lit a fire in the heart of a man on the other side of the world, a fire that burned with art, sex, and death. Makes you think, once a monumental painting leaves the brush, it’s free. It belongs to whoever needs it. Sometimes great work of art gets stolen, gets buried deep down in the ground for ages (case of Cellini) and sometimes it can be used to satisfy your deepest and unconscious sex desires. Ain’t that something?

So here’s to Guido Reni, the man who made marble melt, and saints bleed beautiful. And here’s to Mishima, the man who saw that beauty and said, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ You never know where one man’s vision will end up, maybe on a museum wall, maybe in the heart of a stranger halfway around the world. That’s the power of art, honeybees. It shoots straight as an arrow.

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Today we’re heading down to Brazil. Land of jaguars, jacaranda trees, and a kind of heat that makes even your shadow sweat. Down there, in the middle of all that tropical thunder, lived a woman named Clarice Lispector, let’s celebrate her, a writer who didn’t just put words on a page, she drilled right through the page and into the electric wires humming underneath.

Clarice Lispector had a look in her eye like she was seeing the secret life of everything. Chairs, eggs, insects, the silence before dawn, nothing was too small for her to take apart with a spiritual crowbar. She wrote like she was whispering to the universe, asking it what it meant, then arguing with it when it wouldn’t answer.

Lispector came from Ukraine originally, fled trouble, landed in Brazil as a kid. You could say she was born in one storm and grew up in another. Maybe that’s why her books feel like weather: sudden, strange, unforgettable. One minute it’s clear skies, the next you’re in a metaphysical hurricane and you don’t know how you got there. Lispector could take something ordinary like cracking an egg, combing your hair, walking down a hallway, and turn it into a spiritual showdown. She didn’t write plot; she wrote epiphanies. The kind that sneak up behind you, tap you on the shoulder, then rearrange your furniture while you’re not looking. It’s an indeed nice feeling if you ask me.

Critics tried to put her in a box. Existentialist… mystic… surrealist… But Clarice was her own category, like a record you can’t file under blues, gospel, or rock ‘n’ roll because it’s a little of each and also none at all. She said she wrote “from the inside out,” which is a pretty good way to live, if you can stand the intensity. She once did an interview on TV… and folks said she looked like she was staring right through the camera, maybe seeing the folks watching at home, maybe seeing something else entirely.

So today we salute her, a woman who took existence apart like a watch just to listen to the gears. Turned the everyday into the impossible.

—-

“When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.”

//Near to the Wild Heart, 1943. C.Lispector

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Prevent Deadly Diseases with simple health checkups here

plus100years.com/thyrocare-packages

#plus100years #thyrocarepackages #yoga #healthcheckups #india #hyderabad #nagpur #telangana #tamilnadu #kolkata #karnataka #Gujarat #delhi #pune #mumbai #kurnool #TodayInHistory #viazg #Thursday

Life without a swimming pool - the city now has seven pools - summer fun for the kids (of all ages,lol)

Today in history...

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Okay...I was there...Oswald acted alone. No WAY could anyone shoot from the grassy knoll and get away with it. NO WAY. Done. (heehee..Oh, I am so gonna get it)

Duane and I visited Dallas, Texas on April 3rd and 4th of 2008. We had a fabulous time in Big D! We experienced Dealey Plaza and the site of the John F. Kennedy’s assassination by “alleged” gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. We had never been there before but it feels familiar. The site is so iconoclastic…it just boggles your mind. We visited the 6th Floor Museum in the School Book Depository and viewed the Oswald’s sniper nest and experienced a full historical review of that day in Dallas. No photos were allowed, so that was a bit of a bummer. If you love history you owe it to yourself to visit this area. We also ate guacamole, drank expensive margaritas and had a FABULOUS time. I am also now a member of the Bubba Army.

Here are my photos from Dallas if you'd like to see more.

www.flickr.com/photos/starycat/sets/72157604378344991/wit...

Today we celebrate a lady named Georgia O'Keeffe. She was born in the windswept plains of Wisconsin, 1887, you know, way out where the say the sky ain't never quite the same, and the land stretches out like a dream you can't quite wake up from. Also the home of one marvelous show, yes, I’m talking about “That 70’s show”, but that’s another story.

Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t always painting flowers and desert bones. No, not at first. She went to the big city, New York, and that’s where she crossed paths with a fellow named Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer who saw something in her, a spark, like a match you hold just long enough before it burns your fingers.

O’Keeffe was a woman of contradictions. She painted in the silence of the desert, but the way she laid out those colors -deep reds, bold yellows, and blues that stretched the edges of what we thought was real, well, it was like she was shouting at you without making a sound and it took a while for people to understand her. Those flowers she painted they weren’t just flowers. No ma’m, they were landscapes of the heart, too, a love song in every petal, a prayer in every curve.

The desert called to her. And that’s where she found herself, sitting with the wind and the dust. You ever been out there, in the big, empty spaces? The kind of place where it seems like the world is holding its breath? O’Keeffe saw something in it, something quiet, something fierce. She painted the bones of the land, those bleached skulls, them jagged cliffs, the far-off mountains that look like they could collapse under the weight of the sun.

Her art was all about the way you look at things, the way you breathe in the space between the lines. She'd make you think about a flower like it was the center of the universe, or a mountain like it was your own heart beating in your chest. It’s like she pulled back the curtain on the world, showed you how to see it without all the noise, all the distractions. And you know, she didn’t care for what people thought. She was free like the wind that blows across that desert. She didn’t need to explain herself. She painted what she saw, what she felt and that was enough. Some people got it, some didn’t, but O’Keeffe, she was just doing her thing, her way.

So if you ever find yourself sitting by a big old window, watching the sun sink low, maybe think of Georgia O'Keeffe for a moment. And let the desert stretch out before you. See the bones. See the flowers. Let the silence sing.

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On This Day in 1959 (July 2nd), the first Qantas Airways jet airliner - the Boeing 707-138 VH-EBB - arrives at Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport having completed its trans-Pacific delivery flight. During this flight it created history for being the very first jet airliner to land at Honolulu. Huge crowds turned out to welcome the aircraft at both locations.

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#history #aviationhistory #qantas #boeing #crewlife #sydney #sydneyairport #onthisday #thisdayinhistory #todayinhistory #vhebb #viralnetics

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Via AussieAirliners. fat.ly/1rs51

Inspiration.

Some folks find it in a bottle. Some find it in a dream. And some find it in the person sitting right across from them at the breakfast table, that’s the case of today’s celebration.

Today we celebrate a woman who didn’t just sit at the table, she set it, she designed the chairs, she embroidered the cushions, and she probably picked the flowers too. Her name was Karin Larsson.

She was born Karin Bergöö, yeah, with two umlauts, like a couple old little birds sitting on a telephone wire. She came from Örebro, Sweden... which is just fun to say. Go on, try it. Örebro.

Anyway, Bergöö was no ordinary housewife. Nah. She studied art in Stockholm, then Paris. The big leagues. That's like learning to play the blues in Chicago and then taking a train down to the Delta.

She met this guy, Carl Larsson. He was an artist too. They fell in love, like moonlight and shadow, and moved into this little house in Sundborn. Now Carl Larsson painted, and yes, how he paint. But the real secret sauce? Karin. While Carl was making pretty pictures, Karin was making life pretty. She designed clothes, furniture, textiles. She had this wild idea, that a home could be both beautiful and lived-in.

That a kid could run through the parlor and it wouldn’t be the end of the world. That color could sing. She took Swedish folk tradition and shook it up like a snow globe.

Ever see one of Carl Larsson’s famous paintings? Those cozy rooms with the white walls and red accents, the light pouring in like honey? That’s her. That’s all Karin. She wasn’t behind the scenes, she was the scene. She didn’t care about fame, didn’t sign her name on much. But every cushion she stitched, every wall she painted, whispered her name just the same. You don’t need neon lights when your soul’s sewn into the fabric.

So here’s to Karin Larsson: artist, designer, craftswoman, companion, mother, lover. The quiet kind of genius. The kind that makes a house into a home, and a home into a masterpiece.

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Today we celebrate the one and only, one sitting high on the podium inside my head, a man who didn’t just play the guitar, he interrogated it. Put it under a bright light. Asked it questions it didn’t want to answer. Frank Zappa.

Frank Zappa didn’t look like a preacher, but he sure preached about freedom, about nonsense, about the way the U.S. sells you a dream and hands you the receipt later. He was a composer who dressed like a rock musician, or maybe a rock musician who hid a symphony in his back pocket. Hard to tell with Zappa. He liked it that way. Zappa believed intelligence should be loud. Not polite. Not tidy. And definitely not marketed. He wrote music that laughed at you while teaching you something and then laughed again when you thought you got the joke. Songs about consumer culture, political hypocrisy, and the great American pastime of not paying attention.

Frank Zappa’s music didn’t sit still. It paced. It argued with itself. Sometimes it tripped over the furniture on purpose. You couldn’t tap your foot to it unless your foot had read the instruction manual first. Zappa treated rock ’n’ roll like raw material, not a finished product. He mixed it with jazz, modern classical, doo-wop, rhythm and blues, and sounds that didn’t even have a name yet. I call it Zappaism. If it made people uncomfortable, that was usually a good sign. He wrote songs that changed time signatures the way most people change their mind. One minute you’re cruising, next minute the road disappears and you’re flying. And he demanded things from his musicians.

Precision. Attention. The kind of focus usually reserved for surgeons or chess players. Zappa didn’t believe chaos happened by accident. If it sounded wild, it was because someone practiced it that way. Every odd turn, every sudden stop, every note that made you say “wait — what?” was there because he put it there. His guitar playing wasn’t about speed for the sake of speed. It was conversational. Long solos that felt like a man thinking out loud, sometimes contradicting himself mid-sentence, sometimes landing on a truth he didn’t know he was chasing. And then there were the melodies, often sweet, sometimes ugly, frequently hilarious, and just as often beautiful when you weren’t expecting it. Zappa didn’t separate “serious” music from “funny” music. To him, humor was a form of intelligence. If you couldn’t laugh at the world, you probably weren’t listening closely enough. He wrote orchestral pieces that belonged in concert halls and garage-band anthems that sounded like they’d been recorded in the parking lot, sometimes on the same album, sometimes in the same song. Zappa’s music didn’t ask for your agreement. It asked for your attention. And if you gave it that, if you followed the twists, embraced the nonsense, and trusted that the man at the wheel knew where he was going you realized something: Frank Zappa wasn’t trying to fit into music history. He was writing footnotes, cross-references, and entire chapters that nobody else had thought to open yet.

Now here’s something that surprised a lot of people: Frank Zappa didn’t drink. Didn’t take drugs. Didn’t romanticize any of it. At a time when excess was being sold as enlightenment, Zappa looked at the whole parade and said, “No thanks. I’ve got work to do.” He thought drugs dulled the mind. Said they interfered with discipline. And discipline, to Zappa, was freedom, the freedom to finish what you start and hear what you actually meant to say. He saw addiction as a business model, not a rebellion. A way to keep artists foggy and audiences easier to sell to. If you wanted to play with Zappa, well, you had to keep away from drugs and alcohol to keep your jobb. But tobacco, that was a different story…

“Well, to me, a cigarette is food. Now that may be a baffling concept for people in San Francisco who have this theory that they WILL live forever if they stamp out tobacco smoke”

Zappa smoked. Didn’t pretend it was healthy. Didn’t dress it up as a philosophy either. He treated it like a tool, or maybe a vice he understood too well to mythologize. He once suggested cigarettes didn’t make you creative, they just gave you something to do with your hands while the ideas showed up on their own schedule. No halos. No slogans. Just honesty.

And that was Frank Zappa’s real protest: clarity. In a culture high on slogans, he stayed stubbornly sober, mentally, at least. Questioning everything. Refusing to play the role they wrote for him. Zappa didn’t want you to escape reality. He wanted you to look straight at it and notice how strange it already was. And that’s the kind of music that doesn’t fade out, it just keeps asking questions long after the needle lifts.

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Today we celebrate a place where fairy tales climb trees and the moon keeps watch like a curious neighbor.

There’s a name stitched onto that sky, that’s Astrid Lindgren. A woman who could turn a handful of words into a whole neighborhood of wonder. She gave us Pippi, that girl with braids like rebellious question marks, strong enough to lift a horse and soft enough to pick up a lonely heart.

Astrid Lindgren wrote like she was opening windows. Every sentence swung wide, letting in a breeze full of ideas that smelled like pine needles and adventure. Kids reading her books didn’t just sit on couches, oh no, they took off running with Pippi, with Emil, with Ronja, through forests where trouble was just another kind of friend.

The thing about Lindgren is that she didn’t try to make the world prettier. She made it truer. She showed the bruises, the long shadows, the lonely corners where a kid’s heart might hide. But she also always left a lantern burning, always, always so anyone lost could find their way back.

Some writers write about freedom; she wrote it into the bones of her characters. Big freedom, small freedom, the kind that fits in your pocket and the kind you need two hands to hold.

So here is to Astrid, still out there, somewhere,

walking her paper roads, leaving footprints in ink for every kid who needs a place to run, a place to dream, a place to be gloriously, impossibly alive.

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