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Going through some old files, and I found this shot of the "extended version" of the waterbomb tessellation from my book.

This was before I wetted it and pressed it underneath books to make it flat - prior to that it was curling up into a cylinder like this, completely uncontrollably... problematic!

Sharing the photo because I haven't folded anything in a long while.

by Michael Thompson

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This video will shed some light in the plight of the migrants moving north on the Beast, one thing is certain is that the desperation cause by the growing problems of poverty, corruption, and violence will only make the situation worse, add climate change to the ingredient and the future is a bleak one. No wall or fence will stop this, that is a a fact. The only solution is to focus the resources and energies directly at the problems in those countries where the mass of the people are coming. What the U.S. is facing now is certainly "Blow Back," and in particularly with regard to this migrant crisis. The USA and it agency the CIA spent billions in the 70s and 80s cultivating military dictatorships in Latin America. This led to decades of wars and uncontrollable violence that destroys these countries, the current crisis is a direct result of that failed foreign policy. Now we see the politicians offering costly brandade fixes and initiatives like building massive walls. History has proven that walls are failures. Humanity on the move cannot be stopped. It is impossible to stop the flow of water without first fixing the leak at the source. youtu.be/GzEUHF1KPY8

Foxton museum exhibit by Wayne Duncan

A reboot of the sheriffs car that was used in the 2001 movie, When Strangers Appear, shot entirely in and around Foxton during April-June 2000 on a $3 million budget and which was acquired by Ian Little after filming was finished and used as a static display for a few years at the Main St. entranceway to the Foxton trolleybus museum depot.

In a movie goof, the sheriffs squad car and a Jeep suburban utility vehicle (SUV) that was also used in the movie had the same license plate, supposedly Oregon VLP-077, the Jeep SUV featuring in a scene at the roadside diner which was constructed in Kere Kere Rd., just off the Foxton-Shannon road..

WHEN STRANGERS APPEAR MOVIE REVIEW

By Robert Cettl

(Robert Cettl’s review published on Letterboxd):

The rural film noir has become something of a minor sub-genre in American film. Directors such as John Dahl and J.S. Cardone have spun intriguing thrillers based on the desolate roadside fixtures of isolated areas, often populated by seemingly nomadic psychopaths and disillusioned heroes at the point of personal despair. These films are bleak, with people driven by an un-stated but desperate need for connection. They are placed near roads and tackle the notion of a stalled journey, where the road becomes the site of conflict. Often, these people cannot even make it to the open road and remain trapped, unsure of where to turn or how to escape. When they make the road, it is often full of lurking menace. It is this legacy of films that the New Zealand based When Strangers Appear seeks in part to evoke. New Zealand director Scott Reynolds has shown a proclivity for the notion of youth psychosis in his cult serial killer film, The Ugly, and in his latest thriller attempts to blend his interest in youthful psychopaths with the angst-driven despair of the 20-something so-called Generation X. Although the effort is there, the result is more a curiosity.

When Strangers Appear is set mostly around a roadside diner, not too far down from a motel. A young woman (Radha Mitchell) walks to work and opens up the diner. A dirty car pulls up and the driver watches. As she readies the diner, he enters, a dishevelled, unshaven youth (Barry Watson) who seems unbearably intense and pressured. She chats to him, but when another car pulls up, Watson hides. Three men, led by a rugged surfer (Josh Lucas) enter, eat and leave. Watson tells Mitchell that they are after him. At first she disbelieves but when he collapses, revealing a stab wound, she takes it on herself to care for him and takes him to a motel, where the three men are also staying. She takes him to a doctor for treatment, but later gets a call from the doctor that he believes the wound may be self-inflicted. She turns to Lucas, a man who may have more involvement than he lets on and who urges her not to go the police. Nevertheless, not knowing who to trust, she turns to a local cop (Kevin Anderson) with whom she has a troubled past. The doctor is now missing and it seems that someone may be a murderer.

The film starts out as the portrait of a young 20-something woman who seems bored and dissatisfied with her routine and is full of attitude. Her interest in strangers as a means of disrupting the boredom ultimately leads her into trouble as she realizes that she cannot trust anybody and that appearances are deceiving. Although this is certainly conventional and familiar material, the film does manage an irony which is at times effectively disconcerting, although until briefly at the end it never achieves the idea of absurdity and futility that it circles around. In structure, the film seeks to achieve the gathering momentum usually referred to as the snowball effect and as day becomes night seeks to immerse its characters in a world of shadowy uncertainty. It achieves this based on the audience’s expectation of schizophrenic behaviour. Thus, once it is revealed that one of the characters is apparently taking anti-psychotic medication, the film flirts with the idea of a drifting psychopath. The uncertainty over what to expect from a potentially psychotic killer is intended to destabilize the viewer and drive the momentum of the film through its expected series of twists. Although some of the twists are novel, the plot seems a hastily assembled addition meant to give some form to this idea of uncertainty.

In the moral order of films of this kind, curiosity and even compassionate involvement with strangers is a punishable sin and so the film sets out to give Mitchell a lesson for her initial know-it-all attitude. She must learn her place, the film asserts, and so takes her on a journey through mounting despair towards a supposed humility. The layers of uncertainty along this journey struggle for invention however, and by the time the mystery surrounding the strangers is revealed, it has become tired and pointlessly ridiculous as if the filmmakers are at a loss to fully explain it all and so reached out for the flimsiest of plot irrelevances. Thus, the film is more adept at creating uncertainty than it is at resolving it, although it seems needlessly to want to neatly do both. However, the circularity to the film’s final stages is momentarily a fine demonstration of the notion of an absurd universe and of people trapped forever in a repetitive cycle. Sadly, the film also dissipates this idea and the resolution fails to ring true to much of the preceding drama. Nevertheless, for much of the film, this is an involving if minor thriller that constantly promises how much better and tighter it could have been. What is unhurriedly and tautly developed at the outset is dissipated: just as the film is supposed to become more involving and suspenseful it feels merely rushed.

The visual transfer, although preserving a widescreen ratio, is something of a merely serviceable job. The film itself is too well (if flatly) lit to ever achieve any film noirish subtleties although it seems that it is deliberately bright at first in order to heighten the danger felt as day turns into night, a transition it only partly accomplishes (and must resort to flashbacks to structure properly). The picture is clear throughout but rarely achieves more than a downcast sense of atmosphere, although colours seem to be more pronounced as it proceeds as if perception has been heightened, particularly at night. This suggestion is also dissipated over time however to give an impression of flat technical competence. Even the cold weather fails to add much of a palpable presence. The landscapes however are suitably inhospitable although their otherworldly possibility is never utilized beyond a backdrop.

The sound transfer is again a matter of rote technical competence. It does however effectively use quiet and the sense of increasingly desperate voices. Aside from the score (especially the songs over both sets of credits), much of the film seems centred, even mono at times, although voices are crisp enough. The abruptness of certain sounds effectively disrupts the quiet and helps to build a modicum of tension to an otherwise lethargically paced film. Subtly shifting tones of voice carry the evolving uncertainty well but most of the film seems concerned with injecting sound into an initially quiet, boring and peaceful world, gathering aural momentum until a climactic explosion. At capturing this apparent intention, the transfer works well enough. It hopes to create a sense of uncontrollable propulsion, pausing only to reinforce the notion of danger as if retreating only to find calm and quiet increasingly impossible to maintain.

“WHEN STRANGERS APPEAR” MOVIE GOOFS

Errors in geography

- Even though the film is set in Oregon, USA, the Firestone ad on the side of the gas station refers to "tyres" not "tires". Beth also refers to the "car park", a term which is not used in the USA.

- The sign on the doctor's office says "Surgery". This is a term used in the UK, as well as New Zealand, for a doctor's office.

- The sheriff mispronounces the name of the state he lives in (Oregon).

Factual errors

- The motorway diner has not open,yet when the owner goes to check the till it is full of money.

- When the gas station attendant looks up at the wall from behind the register, the clock has no hands on its face.

- The cop's squad car and wife's SUV had the same license plate, supposedly Oregon VLP-077.

WHEN STRANGERS APPEAR (2001) YouTube trailer.....

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHa5XZ1ixs

GP01KO5 by Greenpeace Australia Pacific

A portrait of a coal worker, Ashiky, 22, in Jharia coal mine. Jharia is one of the most important coal mines in India and one of the largest in Asia. Once a treasure trove of high-quality coking coal, uncontrollable fires have turned the mine and the surroundings into a slow-burning inferno. Before coal was unearthed in this area, Jharia was a belt of dense forests inhabited by tribes.

The Eel: No More Tears (A DCU One-Shot) by King Clown

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-^- Argus Offshore Facility, 2007 -^-

The crackling sound of electricity filled the small office room, followed shortly after by an agonizing scream.

A man in black military garb fell to the floor, his skin bubbling and smoking. The other in the room, dressed in a navy suit and sat behind the desk, rolled backwards until he hit the wall.

"P-p-please!" he begged, holding his hands up. "I-I-I have a f-family!"

Standing across the room was Marco Coolidge, the Eel. His body was still, the only movement coming from the erratic crackling of lightning in his hand. The noise paired with the unnerving sizzling of the floored corpse caused the suited man to cry.

"Wh-what is it you w-want?" he asked, moving his hands to point to the safe in the corner of the room. "I-i-if you need money, p-pr-priceless jewels are in th-there."

Marco said nothing, only stepping forward. As his foot landed on the head of the corpse, it was crushed like an egg. Marco tilted his head, his single eye narrowing as he stared at the man.

"Extortion? I-is that it?" he cried, his hands digging through his desk. "I-I-I don't have h-high level clearance, b-but…"

The man held out his lanyard, a low level A.R.G.U.S ID card. Marco took slow steps forward, the man cowering slightly as he did. His hand reached out, snagging the card.

"I'm gl-glad we could come to a-"

A small spark lit at the bottom of the card, burning it instantaneously. Marco tossed the lanyard to the floor, stepping closer once again.

"Where is Charles Coolidge being held?" he asked, placing both hands on the desk, leaning close to the man.

"C-C-Coolidge?" he asked, turning his head to look at the computer. "W-well, he's on f-floor b12."

"Turn off the meta dampeners for that floor," Marco ordered, earning a nod.

"D-done," he sighed, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead.

Marco stood from his position, turning towards the door. His foot once again stepped on the corpse's now crushed skull. Upon reaching the door, he paused.

"Send Waller my regards," he said, holding his hand out behind him.

"W-w-wait you said-"

The blast of electricity was followed by a bloodcurdling scream before silence.

Marco stepped into the hallway, maneuvering over charred corpses and body parts strung along the hallway.

-^- Bar Harbor, Maine, 1986 -^-

"Again."

Marco rose to his feet, a piercing pain lingering in his abdomen. It was the 15th drill in a row, each time barring the same results. Nothing.

"Dad…" the voice of his brother Morty said, words laced with annoyance. "There isn't any type of progress, let Marco have a break."

"You aren't old enough to understand," his father said, brushing off his brother's comment. "His power is too important."

"I know it is, dad," his brother pleaded, "but you're working him to the bone. He's only ten, he needs a break."

His father got up and walked to Morty. "So, you're just the parent all of a sudden, eh?" he asked, looking down at the boy.

His hand quickly raised to strike the boy across the cheek. As he made contact, his arm recoiled, a slew of curses escaping his lips.

Morty continued to stare at his father, his skin now a dark, shining copper. "He needs a break."

"You damn…"

"It's okay, Morty," Marco said, getting between his brother and father. "I'm fine to keep going! I promise!"

Morty shook his head, pointing to the house. "Inside, now," he ordered, Marco's mouth flattening. "I'm gonna make you some lunch and you're gonna take a break."

Marco, though hesitant, nodded, sauntering over to the house's backdoor. He looked back to his brother, who waved him off. "I'll be there in a moment, I need to talk to dad."

Sliding the door shut, Marco walked over to the kitchen table, sitting down with a sigh. He didn't want to say anything, but his body hurt. His father would go on and on about his power, how important it was to their lifestyle. He never would say he was never important though.

The power was called a metagene, something that activates in random people throughout the world. The powers are random, ranging from awesome strength to insane speeds. He however, wasn't so lucky.

Lightning; the ability to generate electricity from his body. It sounds like something one would call a gift, an amazing power… but it wasn't. The power was uncontrollable, electricity discharging at random times and at random voltage amounts. It also changed his brain, insomnia plaguing him any time he'd close his eyes.

He wished he could give this power up. Wished for the chance to throw it away so he could have a normal life, but it was a part of him. It always would be.

"Sorry about that," the voice of his brother spoke, causing him to look towards the door. "I'm gonna make you a sandwich, then you're gonna watch some TV for the rest of today. Sounds alright?"

Marco's eyes lit up, smiling and nodding profusely.

He scarfed down the turkey sandwich in minutes. Morty asked him to slow down, but the request went in one ear and out the other. The two spent the rest of the day watching the television in the living room, Morty getting snacks every few hours until dinner time.

"The spaghetti will be done in a few minutes, get in the kitchen!" Morty called, Marco regrettably turning the television off and sitting down at the dining table.

His brother always would cook their meals, ever since their mother left, that is. Their father always would disappear around 5:00pm, leaving his brother to hold the house down. He never minded it, his brother was all he needed to have a family.

-^- Argus Offshore Facility, 2007 -^-

The cellblock's doors slid open, multiple inmates flooding into the hallway. Marco stood at the intersection, watching the mob funnel out of their confinements.

One of the inmates' heads turned, noticing Marco. "Aye, I know him!" he shouted, pointing at him. "He works for that fat bitch!"

Marco tilted his head, eyes narrowing as the various men and women. He could name a few of them from his time working under Waller, but most were new faces. The tallest stepped forward, his arms raising and stretching out towards Marco. Raising his right arm, electricity sparked to life. With a single swipe, both the man's limbs fell to the floor.

"What the…"

"Out of my way, or you all die," he announced, raising his arm again.

"He can't take us all out!" one shouted, fire swords forming in his hands. The others followed suit, activating whatever meta abilities they had.

Marco sighed, his raised fist lighting up. A blast of lightning shot forward, directly aimed at the fire swordsman.

"I've got this!" a woman shouted, jumping in front of the man. In front of her formed a large yellow block of what seemed to be gelatine. "Try getting through my block!"

Marco never moved, the only motion being the opening of his fist.

The group of inmates' eyes widened, some gasping at the sight in front of them. The blast of lightning split upon Marco opening his fist; now tens of thin, wire-like lines of lightning arched around the blockade, heading straight at the group.

"What the!?"

"Look o-aghhhhagh!"

"Oh no!"

As the lightning stopped, Marco rolled his shoulder, letting his arm fall as the bodies split apart before his eyes.

"Come out, old man," he ordered, shouting down the hallway.

Stepping out of the furthest cell in the block was an older man, hair greying and skin beginning to wrinkle. His lips upturned to a grin as he saw Marco.

"About damn time, son," he remarked, pulling the gauze wrapped over his left eye off his face. "You got my eyeglass?"

Marco didn't speak, only tossing the small device to his father. His body turned, heading back down the way he came. "Let's go," he ordered. "The crew is waiting."

"Hold your horses," Charlie said, stopping Marco. "We need to get the score from the warden's office! It's too good to pass up."

"We don't have time for th-"

"I wasn't asking," his father snapped back. "We're getting that safe, let's go."

Marco opened his mouth, but closed it before he spoke, following his father back to the Warden's office.

-^- Bar Harbor, Maine, 1988 -^-

"Block those damned bullets!" Charles shouted, holding a bag of jewels in his right hand, a pistol in his left.

"My metal is reforming! It'll be a minute, dad!" Morty responded, letting off a few potshots with his own pistol.

Marco was terrified. His father told him his first heist would be small scale; robbing Bar Harbor's museum of all it's jewels. They were never even supposed to run into anyone, let alone the military, or at least that's who he thought they were.

"This is getting out of hand!" his father shouted, throwing his empty pistol at one of the soldiers. "Marco, go and fry them!"

"B-b-b-b-but dad!" Marco pleaded, tears rolling down his face. "I don't want to get hurt!"

"We're all getting hurt if you don't go out there, now!" Charles fired back.

"Dad, stop!" Morty shouted, staring into his father's eyes. "He's twelve! You're asking him to kill someone!?"

"Either he goes out there and zaps them, or you go!" His father responded.

"My copper isn't ready yet!"

Marco's lip quivered. He didn't want his brother to get hurt. He didn't want to watch his brother get shot just because he was too scared to do something.His body began to spark as he stood up, looking in the direction of the soldiers.

"Marco?" his brother asked, shocked at the sight. "Marco no, you don't have to…"

Marco ran. He ran fast and hard towards the soldiers. Lightning was sparking off his body, ricocheting off the walls back onto him.

"Is that a kid?"

The first soldier went down hard, their body twitching and smoking from the blast of electricity that hit their chest. The next was hit by a shoulder charge, sending him into the nearby wall.

The third pulled a second firearm from his pocket, the weapon yellow in color. Rather than firing a bullet, it shot our two cables, both attaching themselves to Marco.

As soon as they connected, Marco felt pain. More pain than he had through his years of relentless training. More pain than when his father would beat him. It was mind breaking pain.

Electricity shot off of him like a fountain, a continuous stream of lightning pouring from his body. The power burst through the walls and ceiling of the museum, rubble falling all around him.

"Aghgahahhhah!" he cried, holding his head, trying to keep his brain from splitting in two.

The heavy footsteps behind him, followed by cold arms being wrapped around him immediately began soothing the monumental pain.

"It's o… okay… you're okay!" the person screamed, Marco recognizing the voice of his older brother. "J-j-just… just calm down!"

"I can't!" Marco cried, more electricity spouting out of him. "I can't stop it!"

"I… I know…" his brother responded, his voice growing more hoarse. "That's why… that's why your big b-b-brother is here… to protect you."

Marco could feel the electricity slowly being pulled from his body, the pain in his head diminishing. It was coming to a stop, his brother had saved him, time and time again.

As the chaos stopped, the lightning no longer shooting out of him, he turned, ready to thank his brother. His heart plummeted as his eyes caught the person behind him.

Swaying slightly was his brother, his skin glowing green, no longer it's shining copper. His mouth, nose, and ears were all leaking blood, his eyes crying the crimson liquid.

"M... Morty?"

"It's… okay," he mumbled, his lips quirked into a smile. "You're… safe… that's all that matters."

"No Morty!" Marco screamed, rushing to hug his brother. As his hand made contact, he immediately pulled away, the metal burning hot. Tears fell from Marco's eyes as he watched his brother stumble to a knee. "Morty…"

"Please… don't… don't cry," he requested, his eyes closing. "I don't… I don't want you to cry… anymore… promise me?"

Marco's eyes shut as Morty fell to the floor, dropping to his knees. "I… I promise," Marco yelled, wiping away the tears in his eyes. "I promise I won't cry anymore!"

"That's… good. That… that's all… all I need…"

He could hear the walls and ceiling finally settling after the destruction, the soldiers entering the building, his father screaming for him to take them all out… but none of it registered. It all was merely a blur of noise.

The only noise he could hear properly… was the searing of copper.

-^- Argus Offshore Facility, 2007 -^-

"Pick up the slack!"

The wind blew hard as Marco trudged along the deck of the facility. The safe was being dragged behind him, his electricity pulling it along. The Manta was waiting at the edge of the deck, ready to pick both he and his father up.

"Damn electricity," his father mumbled, spitting onto the floor. "If your brother wasn't so stupid, he could be carrying that and we'd be gone already. Running into a damned lightning storm like he's in a movie."

Marco's teeth clenched, using more electricity to lift the safe into the air. His pace picked up significantly with the weight gone.

"That's my boy!" Charles commented, picking up his own pace. "That safe's about as conductive as your brother, eh Marco?"

As the two stopped at the edge of the dock, Marco dropped the safe, looking downwards into the ocean.

"Sorry sorry, too far huh?" Charles laughed, bending down to unlock the safe. "You really are a great asset, son." he said standing up with a bag of gemstones in his hand. "I'm glad you… glad… you…"

The crackling of electricity caused Charles to peer downwards, his eyes widening at the sight. A glowing blue hand was shoved through his chest, his still beating heart impaled by the fingers.

His head turned, blood leaking from the corners of his mouth. "Mar...co?"

Marco's right hand was brought to his helmet, ripping the gear off. "Look me in the eyes," he said, tears leaking from his eyes. "Look me in the eyes while you die. The same way my brother had to."

-^- A.R.G.U.S Facility, 1990 -^-

"With your father sentenced to 25 years and no other known relatives, the state is legally responsible for you," the short woman spoke, her hands behind her back.

Marco sat with his head down, his left hand sparking on and off. "I don't care what you do with me," he said, repeating the action, "but I'm not going to be your weapon."

"What if I said your father could… have his sentence reduced?" the woman suggested.

Marco's head tilted up, the lighting in his hand stopping. "What are you talking about?"

"If you do as I say, become an operative for me, then your father's 50 year sentence will be reduced," she explained, crossing her arms. "Then you and him can have your nice little family reunion."

Marco's hand once again lit up, this time a condensed ball of lightning encompassing his fist. His eyes darkened, as he looked the woman in her eyes. "What do I do first?"

-^- Argus Offshore Facility, 2007 -^-

"Wh...why?"

"The training… the years of abuse!" Marco shouted, his lightning exploding the heart from inside. "If it weren't for your damn lifestyle, I'd have had a normal life… my brother would still be here!

"He's not, though," Marco said, his teeth gritting hard. "He had his life ripped away at 16! I only wish I could've ended yours sooner."

Charles's eyes slowly lost their light, eyelids shutting as Marco pulled his hand from his father's chest. He watched as the body fell forward, plunging into the ocean below. His eyes never left the body as it sank, a small pool of red quickly being encompassed by the clear water.

"I'm sorry, Morty," Marco said, looking up into the sky. He wiped away his tears as the clouds began to rain. "I couldn't… keep my promise to you after all."

Bipolar disorder...Self-disorder....ipseity disturbance...schizophrenia spectrum disorders...phenomenon of dialipsis "constantly challenged, unstable, and oscillating" by Hughes Songe

Bipolar disorder, previously known as manic depression, is a mood disorder characterized by periods of depression and periods of abnormally-elevated mood that last from days to weeks each. A self-disorder, also called ipseity disturbance, is a psychological phenomenon of disruption or diminishing of a person's sense of minimal (or basic) self-awareness. The precise mechanisms that cause bipolar disorder are not well understood. Bipolar disorder is thought to be associated with abnormalities in the structure and function of certain brain areas responsible for cognitive tasks and the processing of emotions. A neurologic model for bipolar disorder proposes that the emotional circuitry of the brain can be divided into two main parts. The ventral system (regulates emotional perception) includes brain structures such as the amygdala, insula, ventral striatum, ventral anterior cingulate cortex, and the prefrontal cortex. The dorsal system (responsible for emotional regulation) includes the hippocampus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and other parts of the prefrontal cortex.The model hypothesizes that bipolar disorder may occur when the ventral system is overactivated and the dorsal system is underactivated.Other models suggest the ability to regulate emotions is disrupted in people with bipolar disorder and that dysfunction of the ventricular prefrontal cortex (vPFC) is crucial to this disruption.

If the elevated mood is severe or associated with psychosis, it is called mania; if it is less severe, it is called hypomania. During mania, an individual behaves or feels abnormally energetic, happy or irritable, and they often make impulsive decisions with little regard for the consequences.[5] There is usually also a reduced need for sleep during manic phases.[5] During periods of depression, the individual may experience crying and have a negative outlook on life and poor eye contact with others.[ The risk of suicide is high; over a period of 20 years, 6% of those with bipolar disorder died by suicide, while 30–40% engaged in self-harm. Other mental health issues, such as anxiety disorders and substance use disorders, are commonly associated with bipolar disorder. The sense of minimal self refers to the very basic sense of having experiences that are one's own; it has no properties, unlike the more extended sense of self, the narrative self, which is characterized by the person's reflections on themselves as a person, things they like, their identity, and other aspects that are the result of reflection on one's self. Disturbances in the sense of minimal self, as measured by the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE), aggregate in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders, to include schizotypal personality disorder, and distinguish them from other conditions such as psychotic bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. The minimal self has been likened to a "flame that enlightens its surroundings and thereby itself." Unlike the extended self, which is composed of properties such as the person's identity, the person's narrative, and other aspects that can be gleaned from reflection, the minimal self has no properties, but refers to the "mine-ness" "given-ness" of experience, that the experiences are that of the person having them in that person's stream of consciousness. These experiences that are part of the minimal self are normally "tacit" and implied, requiring no reflection on the part of the person experiencing to know that the experience is theirs. The minimal self cannot be further elaborated and normally one cannot grasp it upon reflection. The minimal self goes hand-in-hand with immersion in the shared social world, such that "[t]he world is always pregiven, ie, tacitly grasped as a self-evident background of all experiencing and meaning." This is the self-world structure. De Warren gives an example of the minimal self combined with immersion in the shared social world: "When looking at this tree in my backyard, my consciousness is directed toward the tree and not toward my own act of perception. I am, however, aware of myself as perceiving this tree, yet this self-awareness (or self-consciousness) is not itself thematic."[5] The focus is normally on the tree itself, not on the person's own act of seeing the tree: to know that one is seeing the tree does not require an act of reflection. In the schizophrenia spectrum disorders, the minimal self and the self-world structure are "constantly challenged, unstable, and oscillating," causing anomalous self-experiences known as self-disorders. These involve the person feeling as if they lack an identity, as if they are not really existing, that the sense of their experiences being their own (the "mine-ness" of their experiential world) is failing or diminishing, as if their inner experiences are no longer private, and that they don't really understand the world. These experiences lead to the person engaging in hyper-reflectivity, or abnormally prolonged and intense self-reflection, to attempt to gain a grasp on these experiences, but such intense reflection may further exacerbate the self-disorders. Self-disorders tend to be chronic, becoming incorporated into the person's way of being and affecting "how" they experience the world and not necessarily "what" they experience. This instability of the minimal self may provoke the onset of psychosis. Similar phenomena can occur in other conditions, such as bipolar disorder and depersonalization disorder, but Sass's (2014) review of the literature comparing accounts of self-experience in various mental disorders shows that serious self-other confusion and "severe erosion of minimal self-experience" only occur in schizophrenia; as an example of the latter, Sass cites the autobiographical account of Elyn Saks, who has schizophrenia, of her experience of "disorganization" in which she felt that thoughts, perceptions, sensations, and even the passage of time became incoherent, and that she had no longer "the solid center from which one experiences reality", which occurred when she was 7 or 8 years old. This disturbance tends to fluctuate over time based on emotions and motivation, accounting for the phenomenon of dialipsis in schizophrenia, where neurocognitive performance tends to be inconsistent over time. The disturbance of the minimal self may manifest in people in various ways, including as a tendency to inspect one's thoughts in order to know what they are thinking, like a person seeing an image, reading a message, or listening closely to someone talking (audible thoughts; or in German: Gedankenlautwerden). In normal thought, the "signifier" (the images or inner speech representing the thought) and the "meaning" are combined into the "expression", so that the person "inhabits" their thinking, or that both the signifier and the meaning implicitly come to mind together; the person does not need to reflect on their thoughts to understand what they are thinking. In people with self-disorder, however, it is frequently the case that many thoughts are experienced as more like external objects that are not implicitly comprehended. The person must turn their focus toward the thoughts to understand their thoughts because of that lack of implicit comprehension, a split of the signifier and the meaning from each other, where the signifier emerges automatically in the field of awareness but the meaning does not. This is an example of the failing "mine-ness" of the experiential field as the minimal self recedes from its own thoughts, which are consigned to an outer space. This is present chronically, both during and outside of psychosis, and may represent a middle point between normal inner speech and auditory hallucinations, as well as normal experience and first-rank symptoms. They may also experience uncontrolled multiple trains of thought with different themes simultaneously coursing through one's head interfering with concentration (thought pressure) or often feel they must attend to things with their full attention in order to get done what most people can do without giving it much thought (hyper-reflectivity), which can lead to fatigue.In a 2014 review, Postmes, et al., suggested that self-disorders and psychosis may arise from attempts to compensate for perceptual incoherence and proposed a hypothesis for how the interaction among these phenomena and the person's attempts to resolve the incoherence give rise to schizophrenia. The problems with the integration of sensory information create problems for the person in keeping a grip on the world, and since the self-world interaction is fundamentally linked to the basic sense of self, the latter is also disrupted as a result. Sass and Borda have studied the correlates of the dimensions of self-disorders, namely disturbed grip (perplexity, difficulty "getting" stuff most people can get), hyperreflexivity (where thoughts, feelings, sensations, and objects pop up uncontrollably in the field of awareness, as well dysfunctional reflecting on matters and the self), and diminished self-affection (where the person has difficulty being "affected" by aspects of the self, experiencing those aspects as if they existed in an outer space), and have proposed how both primary and secondary factors may arise from dysfunctions in perceptual organization and multisensory integration. In a 2013 review, Mishara, et al., criticized the concept of the minimal self as an explanation for self-disorder, saying that it is unfalsifiable, and that self-disorder arises primarily from difficulty integrating different aspects of the self as well as having difficulty distinguishing self and other, as proposed by Lysaker and Lysaker: Ichstörung or ego disorder, as they say, in schizophrenia arises from disturbed relationships not from the "solipsistic" concept of the self as proposed by Sass, Parnas, and others. In his review, Sass agrees that the focus of research into self-disorder has focused too much on the self, and mentions attempts to look at disturbances in the person's relationship with other people and the world, with work being done to create an Examination of Anomalous World Experience, which will look at the person's anomalous experiences regarding time, space, persons, language, and atmosphere; he suggests there are problems with both the self and the world in people with self-disorder, and that it may be better conceptualized as a "presence-disturbance".Parnas acknowledges the Lysaker model, but says that it is not incompatible with the concept of the minimal self, as they deal with different levels of self-hood.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-disorder

Late adolescence and early adulthood are peak years for the onset of bipolar disorder.The condition is characterized by intermittent episodes of mania and/or depression, with an absence of symptoms in between. During these episodes, people with bipolar disorder exhibit disruptions in normal mood, psychomotor activity (the level of physical activity that is influenced by mood)—e.g. constant fidgeting during mania or slowed movements during depression—circadian rhythm and cognition. Mania can present with varying levels of mood disturbance, ranging from euphoria, which is associated with "classic mania", to dysphoria and irritability. Psychotic symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations may occur in both manic and depressive episodes; their content and nature are consistent with the person's prevailing mood. According to the DSM-5 criteria, mania is distinguished from hypomania by length: hypomania is present if elevated mood symptoms persist for at least four consecutive days, while mania is present if such symptoms persist for more than a week. Unlike mania, hypomania is not always associated with impaired functioning. The biological mechanisms responsible for switching from a manic or hypomanic episode to a depressive episode, or vice versa, remain poorly understood.The causes of bipolar disorder are not clearly understood, both genetic and environmental factors are thought to play a role. Many genes, each with small effects, may contribute to the development of the disorder. Genetic factors account for about 70–90% of the risk of developing bipolar disorder. Environmental risk factors include a history of childhood abuse and long-term stress. The condition is classified as bipolar I disorder if there has been at least one manic episode, with or without depressive episodes, and as bipolar II disorder if there has been at least one hypomanic episode (but no full manic episodes) and one major depressive episode. If these symptoms are due to drugs or medical problems, they are not diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Other conditions that have overlapping symptoms with bipolar disorder include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, personality disorders, schizophrenia, and substance use disorder as well as many other medical conditions. Medical testing is not required for a diagnosis, though blood tests or medical imaging can rule out other problems. Mood stabilizers—lithium and certain anticonvulsants such as valproate and carbamazepine—are the mainstay of long-term relapse prevention. Antipsychotics are given during acute manic episodes as well as in cases where mood stabilizers are poorly tolerated or ineffective or where compliance is poor. There is some evidence that psychotherapy improves the course of this disorder. The use of antidepressants in depressive episodes is controversial: they can be effective but have been implicated in triggering manic episodes. The treatment of depressive episodes, therefore, is often difficult. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is effective in acute manic and depressive episodes, especially with psychosis or catatonia. Admission to a psychiatric hospital may be required if a person is a risk to themselves or others; involuntary treatment is sometimes necessary if the affected person refuses treatment. Bipolar disorder occurs in approximately 1% of the global population. In the United States, about 3% are estimated to be affected at some point in their life; rates appear to be similar in females and males. Symptoms most commonly begin between the ages of 20 and 25 years old; an earlier onset in life is associated with a worse prognosis. Interest in functioning in the assessment of patients with bipolar disorder is growing, with an emphasis on specific domains such as work, education, social life, family, and cognition. Around one-quarter to one-third of people with bipolar disorder have financial, social or work-related problems due to the illness. Bipolar disorder is among the top 20 causes of disability worldwide and leads to substantial costs for society. Due to lifestyle choices and the side effects of medications, the risk of death from natural causes such as coronary heart disease in people with bipolar disorder is twice that of the general population. Also known as a manic episode, mania is a distinct period of at least one week of elevated or irritable mood, which can range from euphoria to delirium. The core symptom of mania involves an increase in energy of psychomotor activity. Mania can also present with increased self-esteem or grandiosity, racing thoughts, pressured speech that is difficult to interrupt, decreased need for sleep, disinhibited social behavior, increased goal-oriented activities and impaired judgement, which can lead to exhibition of behaviors characterized as impulsive or high-risk, such as hypersexuality or excessive spending.To fit the definition of a manic episode, these behaviors must impair the individual's ability to socialize or work.[ If untreated, a manic episode usually lasts three to six months.

In severe manic episodes, a person can experience psychotic symptoms, where thought content is affected along with mood. They may feel unstoppable, or as if they have a special relationship with God, a great mission to accomplish, or other grandiose or delusional ideas. This may lead to violent behavior and, sometimes, hospitalization in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. The severity of manic symptoms can be measured by rating scales such as the Young Mania Rating Scale, though questions remain about the reliability of these scales. The onset of a manic or depressive episode is often foreshadowed by sleep disturbance. Mood changes, psychomotor and appetite changes, and an increase in anxiety can also occur up to three weeks before a manic episode develops.[medical citation needed] Manic individuals often have a history of substance abuse developed over years as a form of "self-medication". Hypomania is the milder form of mania, defined as at least four days of the same criteria as mania, but which does not cause a significant decrease in the individual's ability to socialize or work, lacks psychotic features such as delusions or hallucinations, and does not require psychiatric hospitalization. Overall functioning may actually increase during episodes of hypomania and is thought to serve as a defense mechanism against depression by some. Hypomanic episodes rarely progress to full-blown manic episodes. Some people who experience hypomania show increased creativity, while others are irritable or demonstrate poor judgment. Hypomania may feel good to some individuals who experience it, though most people who experience hypomania state that the stress of the experience is very painful. People with bipolar disorder who experience hypomania tend to forget the effects of their actions on those around them. Even when family and friends recognize mood swings, the individual will often deny that anything is wrong. If not accompanied by depressive episodes, hypomanic episodes are often not deemed problematic unless the mood changes are uncontrollable or volatile.Most commonly, symptoms continue for time periods from a few weeks to a few months. People with bipolar disorder who are in a euthymic mood state show decreased activity in the lingual gyrus compared to people without bipolar disorder. In contrast, they demonstrate decreased activity in the inferior frontal cortex during manic episodes compared to people without the disorder. Similar studies examining the differences in brain activity between people with bipolar disorder and those without did not find a consistent area in the brain that was more or less active when comparing these two groups. People with bipolar have increased activation of left hemisphere ventral limbic areas—which mediate emotional experiences and generation of emotional responses—and decreased activation of right hemisphere cortical structures related to cognition—structures associated with the regulation of emotions. Neuroscientists have proposed additional models to try to explain the cause of bipolar disorder. One proposed model for bipolar disorder suggests that hypersensitivity of reward circuits consisting of frontostriatal circuits causes mania, and decreased sensitivity of these circuits causes depression. According to the "kindling" hypothesis, when people who are genetically predisposed toward bipolar disorder experience stressful events, the stress threshold at which mood changes occur becomes progressively lower, until the episodes eventually start (and recur) spontaneously. There is evidence supporting an association between early-life stress and dysfunction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis leading to its overactivation, which may play a role in the pathogenesis of bipolar disorder. Other brain components that have been proposed to play a role in bipolar disorder are the mitochondria and a sodium ATPase pump. Circadian rhythms and regulation of the hormone melatonin also seem to be altered. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for mood cycling, has increased transmission during the manic phase. The dopamine hypothesis states that the increase in dopamine results in secondary homeostatic downregulation of key system elements and receptors such as lower sensitivity of dopaminergic receptors. This results in decreased dopamine transmission characteristic of the depressive phase. The depressive phase ends with homeostatic upregulation potentially restarting the cycle over again. Glutamate is significantly increased within the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the manic phase of bipolar disorder, and returns to normal levels once the phase is over. Medications used to treat bipolar may exert their effect by modulating intracellular signaling, such as through depleting myo-inositol levels, inhibition of cAMP signaling, and through altering subunits of the dopamine-associated G-protein.[81] Consistent with this, elevated levels of Gαi, Gαs, and Gαq/11 have been reported in brain and blood samples, along with increased protein kinase A (PKA) expression and sensitivity;[82] typically, PKA activates as part of the intracellular signalling cascade downstream from the detachment of Gαs subunit from the G protein complex. Decreased levels of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, a byproduct of serotonin, are present in the cerebrospinal fluid of persons with bipolar disorder during both the depressed and manic phases. Increased dopaminergic activity has been hypothesized in manic states due to the ability of dopamine agonists to stimulate mania in people with bipolar disorder. Decreased sensitivity of regulatory α2 adrenergic receptors as well as increased cell counts in the locus coeruleus indicated increased noradrenergic activity in manic people. Low plasma GABA levels on both sides of the mood spectrum have been found.[83] One review found no difference in monoamine levels, but found abnormal norepinephrine turnover in people with bipolar disorder. Tyrosine depletion was found to reduce the effects of methamphetamine in people with bipolar disorder as well as symptoms of mania, implicating dopamine in mania. VMAT2 binding was found to be increased in one study of people with bipolar mania.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder

USS Akron, Airship, Blimp, USS New Hampshire Battleship by photolibrarian

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Manufacturer Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation, Akron, Ohio

Manufactured 31 October 1929 (commenced)

8 August 1931 (launched)

Serial ZRS-4

First flight 23 September 1931

Owners and operators United States Navy

In service 27 October 1931 (commissioned)

Last flight 4 April 1933

Flights 73

Total hours 1695.8

Aircraft carried 5 x Curtiss F9C 'Sparrowhawk',[1] Consolidated N2Y-1, Waco XJW-1

Fate Crashed off coast of New Jersey, 4 April 1933

USS Akron (ZRS-4) was a helium-filled rigid airship of the U.S. Navy, the lead ship of her class, which operated between September 1931 and April 1933. It was the world's first purpose-built flying aircraft carrier, carrying F9C Sparrowhawk fighter planes, which could be launched and recovered while it was in flight. With an overall length of 785 ft (239 m), Akron and her sister ship Macon were among the largest flying objects ever built. Although LZ 129 Hindenburg and LZ 130 Graf Zeppelin II were some 18 ft (5.5 m) longer and slightly more voluminous, the two German airships were filled with hydrogen, and so the two US Navy craft still hold the world record for the largest helium-filled airships.[2]

Akron was destroyed in a thunderstorm off the coast of New Jersey on the morning of 4 April 1933, killing 73 of the 76 crewmen and passengers. The accident involved the greatest loss of life in any airship crash.

Technical description

The airship's skeleton was built of the new lightweight alloy duralumin 17-SRT.[3] The frame introduced several novel features compared with traditional Zeppelin designs. Rather than being single-girder diamond trusses with radial wire bracing, the main rings of Akron were self-supporting deep frames: triangular Warren trusses 'curled' round to form a ring. Though much heavier than conventional rings, the deep rings promised to be much stronger, a significant attraction to the navy after the in-flight break up of the earlier conventional airships R38/ZR-2 and ZR-1 Shenandoah.[4] The inherent strength of these frames allowed the chief designer, Karl Arnstein, to dispense with the internal cruciform structure used by Zeppelin to support the fins of their ships. Instead, the fins of Akron were cantilevered: mounted entirely externally to the main structure.[5] Graf Zeppelin, Graf Zeppelin II, and Hindenburg used a supplementary axial keel along the hull centerline. However, the Akron used three keels, one running along the top of the hull and one each side, 45 degrees up from the lower centreline. Each keel provided a walkway running almost the entire length of the ship. The electric and telephone wiring, control cables, 110 fuel tanks, 44 water ballast bags, 8 engine rooms, engines, transmissions, and water-recovery devices were placed along the lower keels. The inert gas helium was used instead of flammable hydrogen, which improved streamlining by allowing the engines to be safely placed inside the hull. A generator room, with 2 Westinghouse d.c. generators powered by a 30-h.p. internal combustion engine, was forward of the No. 7 engine room.[6]: 36, 187–197

The main rings were spaced at 22.5 m (74 ft) and between each pair were three intermediate rings of lighter construction. In keeping with conventional practice, 'station numbers' on the airship were measured in meters from zero at the rudder post, positive forward and negative aft. Thus the tip of the tail was at station −23.75 and the nose mooring spindle was at station 210.75. Each ring frame formed a polygon with 36 corners and these (and their associated longitudinal girders) were numbered from 1 (at the bottom centre) to 18 (at the top centre) port and starboard.[7] Thus a position on the hull could be referred to, for example, as "6 port at station 102.5" (the number 1 engine room).

While Germany, France and Britain used goldbeater's skin to gas-proof their gasbags, Akron used Goodyear Tire and Rubber's rubberised cotton, heavier but much cheaper and more durable. Half the gas cells used an experimental cotton-based fabric impregnated with a gelatin-latex compound. This was more expensive than the rubberised cotton but lighter than goldbeater's skin. It was so successful that all the gasbags of Macon were made from it.[8] There were 12 gas cells, numbered 0 to XI, using Roman numerals and starting from the tail.[9] While the 'air volume' of the hull was 7,401,260 cu ft (209,580 m3), the total volume of the gas cells at 100 percent fill was 6,850,000 cu ft (194,000 m3). At a normal 95 percent fill with helium of standard purity, the 6,500,000 cu ft (180,000 m3) of gas would yield a gross lift of 403,000 lb (183,000 kg). Given a structure deadweight of 242,356 lb (109,931 kg),[10] this gives a useful lift of 160,644 lb (72,867 kg) available for fuel, lubricants, ballast, crew, supplies and military load (including the skyhook airplanes)

Eight Maybach VL II 560 hp (420 kW) gasoline engines were mounted inside the hull.[11] Each engine turned a two-bladed, 16 ft 4 in (4.98 m) diameter, fixed pitch, wooden propeller via a driveshaft and bevel gearing which allowed the propeller to swivel from the vertical plane to the horizontal.[12] With the engines' ability to reverse, this allowed thrust to be applied forward, aft, up or down.[13] It appears from photographs that the four propellers on each side were contra-rotating, each one turning the opposite way to the one ahead of it. Thus it would appear that the designers were aware that running the propellers in the air disturbed by the one ahead was not ideal. While the external engine pods of other airships allowed the thrust lines to be staggered, placing all four engine rooms on each side of the ship along the lower keel resulted in Akron's propellers all being in line. This proved problematic in service, as it induced considerable vibration which was especially noticeable in the emergency control position in the lower fin. By 1933, Akron had two of her propellers replaced by more advanced, ground-adjustable, three-bladed, metal propellers.[14] These promised a performance increase and were adopted as standard for Macon.

The outer cover was of cotton cloth, treated with four coats of clear and two coats of aluminum pigmented cellulose dope. The total area of the skin was 330,000 sq ft (31,000 m2) and it weighed, after doping, 113,000 lb (51,000 kg).[15]

The prominent dark vertical bands on the hull were condensers of the system designed to recover water from the engines' exhaust for buoyancy compensation. In-flight fuel consumption continuously reduces an airship's weight and changes in the temperature of the lifting gas can do the same. Normally, expensive helium has to be released to compensate and any way of avoiding this is desirable. In theory, a water recovery system such as this can produce 1 lb of ballast water for every lb of fuel burned, though this is unlikely to be achieved in practice.[13]

Akron could carry up to 20,700 US gal (78,000 L) of gasoline (126,000 lb (57,000 kg)) in 110 separate tanks which were distributed along the lower keels to preserve the ship's trim, giving her a normal range of 5,940 nmi (6,840 mi; 11,000 km) at cruising speed.[16] Theoretical maximum ballast water capacity was 223,000 lb (101,000 kg) in 44 bags, again distributed along her length, though normal ballast load at unmasting was 20,000 lb (9,100 kg).[15] Maximum ballast was never an option, because a full fuel and ballast load would have left only 4,600 lb (2,100 kg) lifting capacity for aircraft, crew, and supplies, and each fully loaded F9C fighter alone weighed 2,800 lb (1,300 kg).

The heart of the ship, and her sole reason for existing, was the airplane hangar and trapeze system. Aft of the control car, in bay VII, between frames 125 and 141.25, was a compartment large enough to accommodate up to five F9C Sparrowhawk airplanes. However, two structural girders partially obstructed Akron's aftmost hangar bays, limiting its capacity to three airplanes (one in each forward corner of the hangar and one on the trapeze). A modification to remove this design flaw was pending at the time of the ship's loss.[17]

The F9C was not the ideal choice, being designed as a 'conventional' carrier-borne fighter. It was heavily built to withstand carrier landings, downward visibility was not very good and it initially lacked an effective radio. But the primary role of Akron's airplanes was long-range naval scouting. What was actually needed was a stable, fast, lightweight scouting airplane with a long range,[18] but none existed capable of fitting between the structural members and into the airship's hangar, as the F9C could.

The trapeze was lowered through the T-shaped door in the bottom of the ship and into the slipstream, with an airplane attached to the crossbar by the 'skyhook' above its top wing, its pilot on board and its engine running. The pilot tripped the hook and the airplane fell away from the ship. On his return, he positioned himself beneath the trapeze and climbed up until he could fly his skyhook onto the crossbar, at which point it automatically latched shut. Now, with the engine idling, the trapeze and airplane were raised into the hangar, the pilot cutting his engine as he passed through the door. Once inside, the airplane was transferred from the trapeze to a trolley, running on an overhead 'monorail' system by which it could be shunted into one of the four corners of the hangar to be refueled and re-armed. Having a single trapeze raised two problems: it limited the rate at which airplanes could be launched and recovered and any fault in the trapeze would leave any airborne scouts with nowhere to land. The solution was a second, fixed trapeze permanently rigged further aft along the bottom of the ship at station 102.5 and known as the 'perch'. By 1933 a perch was fitted and in use. Three more perches were planned (at stations 57.5, 80 and 147.5) but these were never fitted.[17]

Akron revived an idea used, and eventually rejected, by the German Navy zeppelins during World War I: the spähkorb or 'spy basket'.[19] The "angel basket" or "sub-cloud observation car", allowed the airship to remain hidden in a cloud layer, while still observing the enemy below. The small car, rather like an airplane fuselage without wings, could be lowered on a 1000 foot long cable. The observer on board communicated with the ship by telephone. In practice, the device was unstable, almost looping over the airship during its only test flight.[6]

During the design stage, in 1929, the navy requested an alteration to the fins. It was considered desirable for the bottom of the lower fin to be visible from the control car. Charles E. Rosendahl had witnessed, from the control room, Graf Zeppelin almost snagging her fin on high-tension power lines during her heavy take off into an unsuspected but very marked temperature inversion from Mines Field, Los Angeles at the start of the last leg of her round-the-world flight earlier that year.[20] The design change would also allow direct vision between the main control car and the emergency control position in the lower fin. The control car was moved 8 ft (2.4 m) aft and all the fins were shortened and deepened. The leading edge root of the fins no longer coincided with a main (deep) ring and instead the foremost attachment was now to an intermediate ring at frame 28.75. This achieved the required visibility, improved low-speed controllability, due to the increased span of the control surfaces, and simplified stress calculations, by reducing the number of fin attachment points. The designers and the navy's inspectors, led by the very experienced Charles P Burgess, were entirely satisfied with the revised stress calculations. However, this alteration has been the subject of much criticism as an "inherent defect" in the design and is often alleged to have been a major factor in the loss of Akron's sister ship Macon.[21] Construction for both ships amounted to $8,800,000 (in 1931 dollars) with the Akron accounting $5,538,400 of the total.[22]

Construction and commissioning

Construction of ZRS-4 was begun on 31 October 1929 at the Goodyear Airdock in Akron, Ohio by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation.[23] Because it was larger than any airship previously built in the US, a special hangar was constructed.[24] Chief Designer Karl Arnstein and a team of experienced German airship engineers instructed and supported design and construction of both U.S. Navy airships USS Akron and USS Macon.[25]

On 7 November 1929, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, the Chief of the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, drove the "golden rivet" into the main ring of "ZRS4". Erection of the hull sections began in March 1930. Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams chose the name Akron (for the city near where it was being built), and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ernest Lee Jahncke announced it in May 1930.[6]: 33

Sample of the duralumin from which the frame of USS Akron was built

On 8 August 1931, Akron was launched (floated free of the hangar floor) and christened by First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, the wife of the President of the United States, Herbert Clark Hoover. The maiden flight of Akron took place around Cleveland on the afternoon of 23 September with Secretary of the Navy Adams and Rear Admiral Moffett on board. The airship made ten trial flights, including a 2000-mile journey, over 48 hours, to St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee. On 21 October Akron left the Goodyear Zeppelin Air Dock for the Lakehurst Naval Air Station (NAS), with Lieutenant Commander Charles E. Rosendahl in command, arriving the next day. On Navy Day, 27 October 1931, the Akron was commissioned as a Navy vessel.[6]: 37–43

History of service

Maiden voyage

On 2 November 1931, Akron departed on her first cruise down the eastern seaboard to Washington, D.C. On 3 November the Akron took to the air with 207 persons on board. This demonstration was to prove that in an emergency airships could provide limited but high speed airlift of troops to outlying possessions. Over the weeks that followed, some 300 hours aloft were logged in a series of flights, including a 46-hour endurance flight to Mobile, Alabama, and back. The return leg of the trip was made via the valleys of the Mississippi River and the Ohio River.[6]: 47–49

Participation in a search exercise (January 1932)

On the morning of 9 January 1932, Akron departed from Lakehurst to work with the Scouting Fleet on a search exercise. Proceeding to the coast of North Carolina, Akron headed out over the Atlantic where it was assigned to find a group of destroyers bound for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Once these were located, the airship was to shadow them and report their movements. Leaving the coast of North Carolina at about 7:21 on the morning of 10 January, the airship proceeded south, but bad weather prevented sighting the destroyers (contact with them was missed at 12:40 EST, although their crews had sighted Akron) and eventually shaped a course toward the Bahamas by late afternoon. Heading northwesterly into the night, Akron then changed course shortly before midnight and proceeded to the southeast. Ultimately, at 9:08 am on 11 January, the airship succeeded in spotting the light cruiser USS Raleigh and 12 destroyers, positively identifying them on the eastern horizon two minutes later. Sighting a second group of destroyers shortly thereafter, Akron was released from the evaluation about 10:00 a.m., having achieved a "qualified success" in the initial test with the Scouting Fleet, but the performance could have been better with radio detection finding equipment, and scout planes.[6]: 49–51

As the historian Richard K Smith wrote in his definitive study, The Airships Akron and Macon, "...consideration given to the weather, duration of flight, a track of more than 3,000 mi (4,800 km) flown, her material deficiencies, and the rudimentary character of aerial navigation at that date, the Akron's performance was remarkable. There was not a military airplane in the world in 1932 which could have given the same performance, operating from the same base."[26]

First accident (February 1932)

Akron was to have taken part in Fleet Problem XIII, but an accident at Lakehurst on 22 February 1932 prevented her participation. While the airship was being taken from her hangar, the tail came loose from her moorings, was caught by the wind, and struck the ground.[27] The heaviest damage was confined to the lower fin area, which required repair. Also, ground handling fittings had been torn from the main frame, necessitating further repairs. Akron was not certified as airworthy again until later in the spring. Her next operation took place on 28 April, when it made a nine-hour flight with Rear Admiral Moffett and Secretary of the Navy Adams aboard.[6]: 53–55

As a result of this accident, a turntable with a walking beam on tracks powered by electric mine locomotives was developed to secure the tail and turn the ship even in high winds so that it could be pulled into the massive hangar at Lakehurst.[28]

Testing of the "spy basket"

Soon after returning to Lakehurst to disembark her distinguished passengers, Akron took off again to conduct a test of the "spy basket"—something like a small airplane fuselage suspended beneath the airship that would enable an observer to serve as the ship's "eyes" below the clouds while the ship herself remained out of sight above them. The first time the basket was tried (with sandbags aboard instead of a man), it oscillated so violently that it put the whole ship in danger. The basket proved "frighteningly unstable", swooping from one side of the airship to the other before the startled gaze of Akron's officers and men and reaching as high as the ship's equator.[19] Though it was later improved by adding a ventral stabilizing fin, the spybasket was never used again.[29]

Akron and Macon (which was still under construction) were regarded as potential "flying aircraft carriers", carrying parasite fighters for reconnaissance. On 3 May 1932, Akron cruised over the coast of New Jersey with Rear Admiral George C. Day, and the Board of Inspection and Survey, on board, and for the first time tested the "trapeze" installation for in-flight handling of aircraft. The aviators who carried out those historic "landings"—first with a Consolidated N2Y trainer and then with the prototype Curtiss XF9C-1 Sparrowhawk—were Lieutenant D. Ward Harrigan and Lieutenant Howard L. Young. The following day, Akron carried out another demonstration flight, this time with members of the House Committee on Naval Affairs on board; this time, Lieutenants Harrigan and Young gave the lawmakers a demonstration of Akron's aircraft hook-on ability.[6]: 55–56

Following the conclusion of those trial flights, Akron departed from Lakehurst, New Jersey on 8 May 1932, for the American west coast. The airship proceeded down the eastern seaboard to Georgia and then across the southern gulf states, continuing over Texas and Arizona. En route to Sunnyvale, California, Akron reached Camp Kearny in San Diego on the morning of 11 May and attempted to moor. Since neither trained ground handlers nor specialized mooring equipment were present, the landing at Camp Kearny was fraught with danger. By the time the crew started the evaluation, the helium gas had been warmed by sunlight, increasing lift. Lightened by 40 short tons (36 t), the amount of fuel spent during the transcontinental trip, Akron was now uncontrollably light.[6]: 56–57

The mooring cable was cut to avert a catastrophic nose-stand by the errant airship which floated upwards. Most of the mooring crew—predominantly "boot" seamen from the Naval Training Station San Diego—released their lines although four did not. One let go at about 15 ft (4.6 m) and suffered a broken arm while the three others were carried further aloft. Of these, Aviation Carpenter's Mate 3rd Class Robert H. Edsall and Apprentice Seaman Nigel M. Henton soon plunged to their deaths while Apprentice Seaman C. M. "Bud" Cowart held on to his line and then secured himself to it[30] before being hoisted on board the airship an hour later.[31] Akron moored at Camp Kearny later that day before proceeding to Sunnyvale, California. Footage from the accident appears in the film Encounters with Disaster, released in 1979 and produced by Sun Classic Pictures.

West Coast flights

Over the weeks that followed, Akron "showed the flag" on the West Coast of the United States, ranging as far north as the Canada–US border before returning south in time to exercise once more with the Scouting Fleet. Serving as part of the "Green Force", the Akron attempted to locate the "White Force". Although opposed by Vought O2U Corsair floatplanes from "enemy" warships, the airship located the opposing forces in just 22 hours, a fact not lost upon some of the participants in the exercise in subsequent critiques.[6]: 58–59

In need of repairs, Akron departed from Sunnyvale on 11 June 1932 bound for Lakehurst, New Jersey, on a return trip that was sprinkled with difficulties, mostly because of unfavorable weather, and having to fly at pressure height while crossing the mountains. Akron arrived on 15 June after a "long and sometimes harrowing" aerial voyage.[6]: 61–62

Akron next underwent a period of voyage repairs before taking part in July in a search for Curlew, a yacht which had failed to reach port at the end of a race to the island of Bermuda. The yacht was later discovered safe off Nantucket.[32] It then resumed operations capturing aircraft on the "trapeze" equipment. Admiral Moffett again boarded Akron on 20 July, but the next day left the airship in one of her N2Y-1s which took him back to Lakehurst after a severe storm had delayed the airship's own return to base.[6]: 65–66

Further tests as "flying aircraft carrier"

Akron entered a new phase of her career that summer of 1932, engaging in intense experimentation with the revolutionary "trapeze" and a full complement of F9C-2s. A key element of the entrance into that new phase was a new commanding officer, Commander Alger Dresel.[6]: 63–65

Third accident (August 1932)

Another accident hampered training on 22 August when Akron's tail fin became fouled by a beam in Lakehurst's massive Hangar No 1 after a premature order to commence towing the ship out of the mooring circle. Nevertheless, rapid repairs enabled eight more flights over the Atlantic during the last three months of 1932. These operations involved intensive work with the trapeze and the F9C-2s, as well as the drilling of lookouts and gun crews.[6]: 66–67

Among the tasks undertaken were the maintenance of two aircraft patrolling and scouting on Akron's flanks. During a seven-hour period on 18 November 1932, the airship and a trio of planes searched a sector 100 mi wide.[6]: 67

Return to the fleet

After local operations out of Lakehurst for the remainder of 1932, Akron was ready to resume operations with the fleet. On the afternoon of 3 January 1933, Commander Frank C. McCord relieved Commander Dresel as commanding officer, the latter becoming the first commanding officer of Akron's sister ship Macon, whose construction was almost complete. Within hours, Akron headed south down the eastern seaboard toward Florida where, after refueling at the Naval Reserve Aviation Base, Opa-locka, Florida, near Miami, the next day proceeded to Guantánamo Bay for an inspection of base sites. At this time the N2Y-1s were used to provide aerial "taxi" service to ferry members of the inspection party back and forth.[6]: 73

Soon thereafter, Akron returned to Lakehurst for local operations which were interrupted by a two-week overhaul and poor weather. In March, it carried out intensive training with an aviation unit of F9C-2s, honing hook-on skills. During the course of these operations, an overfly of Washington DC was made 4 March 1933, the day Franklin D. Roosevelt first took the oath of office as President of the United States.[6]: 74

On 11 March, Akron departed Lakehurst bound for Panama stopping briefly en route at Opa-locka before proceeding on to Balboa where an inspection party looked over a potential air base site. While returning northward, the airship paused at Opa-locka again for local operations exercising gun crews, with the N2Y-1s serving as targets, before getting underway for Lakehurst on 22 March.[6]: 74–75

Loss

Location of crash

On the evening of 3 April 1933, Akron cast off from the mooring mast to operate along the coast of New England, assisting in the calibration of radio direction finder stations. Rear Admiral Moffett was again on board along with his aide, Commander Henry Barton Cecil, Commander Fred T. Berry, the commanding officer of NAS Lakehurst, and Lieutenant Colonel Alfred F. Masury, U.S. Army Reserve, a guest of the admiral, the vice-president of Mack Trucks, and a strong proponent of the potential civilian uses of rigid airships.[6]: 77–78

After casting off at 19:28, Akron soon encountered fog and then severe weather, which did not improve when the airship passed over Barnegat Light, New Jersey,[33] at 22:00. According to Richard Smith, "Unknown to the men on board the Akron, they were flying ahead of one of the most violent stormfronts to sweep the North Atlantic States in ten years. It would soon envelop them." Enveloped in fog, increased lightning and heavy rain, it became extremely turbulent at 00:15. The Akron began a rapid nose-down descent, reaching 1100 feet while still falling. Ballast was dumped, which stabilized the ship at 700 feet, and climbed back to 1600 feet cruising altitude. Then a second violent descent sent the Akron downwards at 14 feet per second. "Landing stations" alerted the crew, as the ship descended tail-down. The lower fin struck the sea, water entered the fin, and the stern was dragged under. The engines pulled the ship into a nose-high attitude, then the Akron stalled, and crashed into the sea.[6]: 78–80

Akron broke up rapidly and sank in the stormy Atlantic. The crew of the nearby German merchant ship Phoebus saw lights descending toward the ocean at about 00:23 and altered course to starboard to investigate, with her captain believing that he was witnessing an airplane crash. At 00:55, executive officer Lieutenant Commander Herbert V. Wiley was pulled from the water while the ship's boat picked up three more men: Chief Radioman Robert W. Copeland, Boatswain's Mate Second Class Richard E. Deal, and Aviation Metalsmith Second Class Moody E. Erwin. Despite artificial respiration, Copeland never regained consciousness, and he died aboard Phoebus.[6]: 80 Although the German sailors spotted four or five other men in the water, they did not know their ship had chanced upon the crash of Akron until Lt. Commander Wiley regained consciousness half an hour after being rescued. The crew of Phoebus combed the ocean in boats for over five hours in a fruitless search for more survivors. The Navy blimp J-3—sent out to join the search—also crashed, with the loss of two men.[34]

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tucker—the first American vessel on the scene—arrived at 06:00, taking the airship's survivors and the body of Copeland on board. Among the other ships combing the area for survivors were the heavy cruiser Portland, the destroyer Cole, the Coast Guard cutter Mojave, and the Coast Guard destroyers McDougal and Hunt, as well as two Coast Guard aircraft. The fishing vessel Grace F from Gloucester, Massachusetts, also assisted in the search, using her seining gear in an effort to recover bodies.[35] Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft. The accident left 73 dead, and only three survivors. Wiley, standing next to the two other survivors, gave a brief account on 6 April.[36]

Aftermath of loss

More from their visit on the blog

(1995) Raggedy Ann Paper Dolls by A Thousand Splendid Dolls

While this set may be humble paper dolls, it is one of my most prized possessions and greatest treasures of all time. For our family vacation, during the summer of 2001, my grandmother bought my sister and I each a set of these Raggedy Ann Paper Dolls. Even though this set is dated 1995, my memeré must have been able to purchase these at a store somewhere in 2001. Growing up, Colleen and I always had a particular fancy for paper dolls. They were far more portable than their fashion doll counterparts. That meant we could take our entire paper doll collection (which by the way was shamefully huge) where ever we wanted at the drop of a hat. I still remember those days we'd haul our huge freezer bags and envelopes stuffed with our paper dolls to Mom's office cleaning jobs on weekends, or on our outings on Dad's beloved boat.

We took our new Raggedy Ann and Andy paper dolls with us on vacation that summer. Colleen and I opted to keep one set preserved in it's original condition, and to only cut out one set. We decided to split the set--I chose Andy, and Colleen chose Ann. Both of us found Marcella to be nauseatingly bratty looking, so we in turn dubbed her the villain of our new paper doll game. In fact, Marcella inspired what became one of our most infamous paper doll games of all time. Raggedy Ann and Andy lived with Marcella, and were greatly mistreated and abused by her. So one night, they fled from their home, packing up all their things on a sleigh pulled by imaginary huskies (the original "sleigh" was actually this envelope thing pictured here). On their exodus, they found a new home, in an attic of a mansion. Little did they know, they were living above a mayor, who would soon discover their secret retreat. The mayor took them in, and treated Ann and Andy as if they were family....although sometimes I think he regretted it. Let's just say Ann and Andy were dysfunctional. Plus, they had a massive family who were often invited over...and were NOT housebroken. I still remember the hours Colleen and I spent on our living room floor, talking in our high pitched Ann and Andy voices, laughing uncontrollably at everything we made them do and say.

What we grew to love most of all about Ann and Andy was the world we created for them. Their universe had no limits--if we could imagine it, we could create it. We designed them probably a hundred different outfits. We had all sorts of coordinating accessories too. We also spent hours creating different sets and furniture for them to use. We even brought their crazy family to life, using the illustrations that came with this set as an inspiration. What started out as a fun game in the backseat of Mom's car, became one of our most memorable and beloved hobbies. From their meager beginnings, which included clothes and accessories made from humble notepads in our camping trailer, they grew to have a huge empire, which required two fat envelopes just to store everything in.

The dolls you see here are actually our second set. While the first set still survives, we played with them so much, that we eventually had to swap them out for the untouched one....after Andy's head kept falling off. The original Marcella disappeared over the years...I think she got thrown out during the mass paper doll throw out of the mid 2000s. But at least we have this girl to remind us of our childhood games. Colleen and I even have many of the original clothes, furniture, accessories, and family members that we created back in the day (pictured separately). Granted, we did have to do some thinning out when we were younger. Ann and Andy actually had too many clothes! I don't think my grandmother ever anticipated just how much Colleen and I would grow to love and cherish this set. But I am forever grateful that she was thoughtful enough to get us two sets (we really needed that second one too). I think it's a shame that paper dolls are a dying breed. Today, it seems like most kids would rather sit and play video games or use some other electronic device. It's really disheartening to think that children don't have the same opportunities to let their imaginations run wild, like my sister and I did when we were younger. Paper dolls, regular dolls, toys in general, and make believe games had no limits. We could create our own world without any limitations as long as we were imaginative enough to dream it. We loved creating sets and props for our toys, and we developed a complex "society" which our childhood lives revolved around. Even though paper dolls like Ann and Andy cost a fraction of the price of today's modern entertainment, like cell phones and iPads, they never had to be charged, they never grew out of date, and you could never run out of things to do with them!

Ambushed_5 by Joey G

Chapter 1 - Episode 9

Location: Urban Sector - Slums, World of Ruin

Shadow began his climb down to the crumbling streets below. He lost track of time, looking out over the Slums from the broken access road high above the city streets. His mind was troubled. His thoughts like a winding road. Beneath this sprawling section of upper access roadways, was a well-preserved mansion of sorts. The architecture was masterful, holding fast against the flow of time, and the destruction of the Calamity that fell from the sky. Throughout his decent, Shadow thought about the inhabitants who once lived here. He wondered if they ever had a chance to escape. Did this family live on, to see the end of their world? No. It didn't matter. This place had long been forgotten; empty, still, remnants of a bygone era.

When he finally reached street level, standing before the unbroken mansion, Shadow took a moment to gaze upwards. It was a true marvel, what the civilization that came before had accomplished. Taking a deep breath, Shadow gathered his thoughts; he knew it was time to move onward. The old world motor bike was still waiting for him, parked just outside the mansion's front gates, rusted yet beautifully crafted. Just as Shadow began to walk, something flew past his face with tremendous velocity, just narrowly missing him before blowing a hole in the masonry behind him. The sound of gunfire quickly followed. He had been ambushed. Three large Ogres came into view as Shadow rushed behind the motor bike for cover. He quickly surveyed his attackers. All were heavily armored, and the Ogre at the rear was carrying an old world rocket launcher.

...

Xerith found herself walking along a quiet city street, lined with several large homes and mansions. She admired the craftsmanship, amazed that this forgotten community had suffered little damage in the wake of the Catastrophe. Perhaps the extensive network of upper roadways had provided some protection against the destruction that rained from the sky, on that fateful day. She had spent much time here, rummaging through the larger structures for possible salvage to collect and bring back to her homeland. She had in her possession an old world storage device that could shrink objects through some sort of molecular reduction. She didn't understand how the device worked. That knowledge had been lost to time. All that mattered was her clan. Their survival depended upon her success, here, in this forgotten city.

Xerith walked along, when the sound of distant thunder caused her to pause. She looked up, the sky was gray, but that was nothing unusual for life in the Urban Sector. The thunder became more rapid, and came with it a pattern that was very distinctive. It was so quiet between bursts that she could hear what sounded like stonework breaking apart. She crept forward, listening, occasionally jolting, when she finally realized that it was gunfire, just up ahead. Xerith engaged her cloaking device, more old world technology she didn't understand, and scaled the rooftops until she came to a large mansion. In the streets below she caught sight of the lone wanderer she had followed before, holding off three green-skinned ones behind the motor bike he had claimed in the alleyway. She couldn't believe her eyes, was it really him? Had fate brought them together once more? Xerith didn't have time to dwell on such thoughts, she had to act now. Xerith didn't know what provoked the attack, but also knew that she couldn't stand idly by and do nothing. Xerith wouldn't let him fight this battle alone. Not today.

...

Shadow knew the situation was dire. He had never known Ogres to be this organized before. He couldn't help but think, was all this really necessary over an old world motor bike? Still, something about their behavior troubled him greatly. Never mind. Shadow regained his composure, cocking his long rifle in the process. He could do this. He would have to remain steady and true. A shielded Ogre was protecting the one with the rocket launcher, straying ahead only slightly. Shadow felt that removing the shielded Ogre first might prompt the one with the rocket launcher to react uncontrollably. Keep the status quo, Shadow thought to himself. One other beast remained; this one would have to be removed first. Nothing particularly stood out with this Ogre.

Peering over the motor bike, Shadow was poised to fire, when suddenly, out of nowhere; another wanderer appeared on the second floor balcony of the mansion, calling out to him. Cloaked in sand green and wielding twin pistols, the wanderer drew the attention of all three Ogres, even just for a moment, it was enough. Shadow reacted. With two quick precision shots from his long rifle, Shadow incapacitated his intended target as well as the shielded Ogre, both now lying still on the pavement. The shielded Ogre attempted to retract backwards to protect the rear one, but to no avail. Just as Shadow suspected, the remaining Ogre became berserked. Before he could take the shot, the Ogre fired a single rocket upward toward the wanderer on the balcony. The sound of the rocket pierced the air. The wanderer attempted to dodge, but the rocket slammed into the balcony, causing a massive explosion of dust and masonry. The wanderer fell onto the pavement below, lying motionless on the ground. Now unarmed, the Ogre rushed toward Shadow in a frenzy. Shadow's first shot blew the Ogre's helmet apart, leaving the beast's head exposed. One final head shot was enough to take the Ogre down for good.

Shadow rushed over to aid the wanderer who had helped him defeat the Ogres. The wanderer was female, and badly wounded. Still breathing but drifting in and out of consciousness. This was beyond his skill to heal. She needed proper medical attention, and quickly. Shadow feared that she might not make it through the night. He would have to take her to the capital city of Hope, in the center of the Urban Sector, a place he avoided. Shadow had always stayed away from large settlements, preferring to wander alone. None of that mattered now; this wanderer's life depended upon it. Shadow carried her to the motor bike, and drove off into the sunset.

THANK YOU FOR 100 FOLLOWERS!

Aftermarket parts are from Brick Forge, Brick Arms, Brick Warriors, Cape Madness, Amazing/United Armory, Tiny Tactical, Finders Keepers, Battle Brick, and Minifig.Cat.

Special thanks to Family Bricks/Brick Mercenaries for the custom Ogre minifigures:

www.flickr.com/photos/49756387@N02/5234392291/in/dateposted/

Faves, comments, and feedback are appreciated, thank you!

To be continued....

15Feb10_007 by Cajsa Lilliehook

13 2

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Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky Statue, Voronezh, Russian Federation. by HISTOGRAPHY by DM & DBM.

Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (Russian: Владимир Семёнович Высоцкий, IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr sʲɪˈmʲɵnəvʲɪtɕ vɨˈsotskʲɪj]; 25 January 1938 – 25 July 1980), was a Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, and actor who had an immense and enduring effect on Soviet culture. He became widely known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which featured social and political commentary in often humorous street-jargon. He was also a prominent stage- and screen-actor. Though the official Soviet cultural establishment largely ignored his work, he was remarkably popular during his lifetime, and to this day exerts significant influence on many of Russia's musicians and actors.

Vysotsky was born in Moscow at the 3rd Meshchanskaya St. (61/2) maternity hospital. His father, Semyon Volfovich (Vladimirovich) (1915–1997), was a colonel in the Soviet army, originally from Kiev. Vladimir's mother, Nina Maksimovna, (née Seryogina, 1912–2003) was Russian, and worked as a German language translator.[3] Vysotsky's family lived in a Moscow communal flat in harsh conditions, and had serious financial difficulties. When Vladimir was 10 months old, Nina had to return to her office in the Transcript bureau of the Soviet Ministry of Geodesy and Cartography (engaged in making German maps available for the Soviet military) so as to help her husband earn their family's living.

Vladimir's theatrical inclinations became obvious at an early age, and were supported by his paternal grandmother Dora Bronshteyn, a theater fan. The boy used to recite poems, standing on a chair and "flinging hair backwards, like a real poet," often using in his public speeches expressions he could hardly have heard at home. Once, at the age of two, when he had tired of the family's guests' poetry requests, he, according to his mother, sat himself under the New-year tree with a frustrated air about him and sighed: "You silly tossers! Give a child some respite!" His sense of humor was extraordinary, but often baffling for people around him. A three-year-old could jeer his father in a bathroom with unexpected poetic improvisation ("Now look what's here before us / Our goat's to shave himself!") or appall unwanted guests with some street folk song, promptly steering them away. Vysotsky remembered those first three years of his life in the autobiographical Ballad of Childhood (Баллада о детстве, 1975), one of his best-known songs.

As World War II broke out, Semyon Vysotsky, a military reserve officer, joined the Soviet army and went to fight the Nazis. Nina and Vladimir were evacuated to the village of Vorontsovka, in Orenburg Oblast where the boy had to spend six days a week in a kindergarten and his mother worked for twelve hours a day in a chemical factory. In 1943, both returned to their Moscow apartment at 1st Meschanskaya St., 126. In September 1945, Vladimir joined the 1st class of the 273rd Moscow Rostokino region School.

In December 1946, Vysotsky's parents divorced. From 1947 to 1949, Vladimir lived with Semyon Vladimirovich (then an army Major) and his Armenian wife, Yevgenya Stepanovna Liholatova, whom the boy called "aunt Zhenya", at a military base in Eberswalde in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany (later East Germany). "We decided that our son would stay with me. Vladimir came to stay with me in January 1947, and my second wife, Yevgenia, became Vladimir's second mother for many years to come. They had much in common and liked each other, which made me really happy," Semyon Vysotsky later remembered. Here living conditions, compared to those of Nina's communal Moscow flat, were infinitely better; the family occupied the whole floor of a two-storeyed house, and the boy had a room to himself for the first time in his life. In 1949 along with his stepmother Vladimir returned to Moscow. There he joined the 5th class of the Moscow 128th School and settled at Bolshoy Karetny [ru], 15 (where they had to themselves two rooms of a four-roomed flat), with "auntie Zhenya" (who was just 28 at the time), a woman of great kindness and warmth whom he later remembered as his second mother. In 1953 Vysotsky, now much interested in theater and cinema, joined the Drama courses led by Vladimir Bogomolov.[7] "No one in my family has had anything to do with arts, no actors or directors were there among them. But my mother admired theater and from the earliest age... each and every Saturday I've been taken up with her to watch one play or the other. And all of this, it probably stayed with me," he later reminisced. The same year he received his first ever guitar, a birthday present from Nina Maksimovna; a close friend, bard and a future well-known Soviet pop lyricist Igor Kokhanovsky taught him basic chords. In 1955 Vladimir re-settled into his mother's new home at 1st Meshchanskaya, 76. In June of the same year he graduated from school with five A's.

In 1955, Vladimir enrolled into the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering, but dropped out after just one semester to pursue an acting career. In June 1956 he joined Boris Vershilov's class at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio-Institute. It was there that he met the 3rd course student Iza Zhukova who four years later became his wife; soon the two lovers settled at the 1st Meschanskaya flat, in a common room, shielded off by a folding screen. It was also in the Studio that Vysotsky met Bulat Okudzhava for the first time, an already popular underground bard. He was even more impressed by his Russian literature teacher Andrey Sinyavsky who along with his wife often invited students to his home to stage improvised disputes and concerts. In 1958 Vysotsky's got his first Moscow Art Theatre role: that of Porfiry Petrovich in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In 1959 he was cast in his first cinema role, that of student Petya in Vasily Ordynsky's The Yearlings (Сверстницы). On 20 June 1960, Vysotsky graduated from the MAT theater institute and joined the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre (led by Boris Ravenskikh at the time) where he spent (with intervals) almost three troubled years. These were marred by numerous administrative sanctions, due to "lack of discipline" and occasional drunken sprees which were a reaction, mainly, to the lack of serious roles and his inability to realise his artistic potential. A short stint in 1962 at the Moscow Theater of Miniatures (administered at the time by Vladimir Polyakov) ended with him being fired, officially "for a total lack of sense of humour."

Vysotsky's second and third films, Dima Gorin's Career and 713 Requests Permission to Land, were interesting only for the fact that in both he had to be beaten up (in the first case by Aleksandr Demyanenko). "That was the way cinema greeted me," he later jokingly remarked. In 1961, Vysotsky wrote his first ever proper song, called "Tattoo" (Татуировка), which started a long and colourful cycle of artfully stylized criminal underworld romantic stories, full of undercurrents and witty social comments. In June 1963, while shooting Penalty Kick (directed by Veniamin Dorman and starring Mikhail Pugovkin), Vysotsky used the Gorky Film Studio to record an hour-long reel-to-reel cassette of his own songs; copies of it quickly spread and the author's name became known in Moscow and elsewhere (although many of these songs were often being referred to as either "traditional" or "anonymous"). Just several months later Riga-based chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal was heard praising the author of "Bolshoy Karetny" (Большой Каретный) and Anna Akhmatova (in a conversation with Joseph Brodsky) was quoting Vysotsky's number "I was the soul of a bad company..." taking it apparently for some brilliant piece of anonymous street folklore. In October 1964 Vysotsky recorded in chronological order 48 of his own songs, his first self-made Complete works of... compilation, which boosted his popularity as a new Moscow folk underground star.

In 1964, director Yuri Lyubimov invited Vysotsky to join the newly created Taganka Theatre. "'I've written some songs of my own. Won't you listen?' – he asked. I agreed to listen to just one of them, expecting our meeting to last for no more than five minutes. Instead I ended up listening to him for an entire 1.5 hours," Lyubimov remembered years later of this first audition. On 19 September 1964, Vysotsky debuted in Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan as the Second God (not to count two minor roles). A month later he came on stage as a dragoon captain (Bela's father) in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. It was in Taganka that Vysotsky started to sing on stage; the War theme becoming prominent in his musical repertoire. In 1965 Vysotsky appeared in the experimental Poet and Theater (Поэт и Театр, February) show, based on Andrey Voznesensky's work and then Ten Days that Shook the World (after John Reed's book, April) and was commissioned by Lyubimov to write songs exclusively for Taganka's new World War II play. The Fallen and the Living (Павшие и Живые), premiered in October 1965, featured Vysotsky's "Stars" (Звёзды), "The Soldiers of Heeresgruppe Mitte" (Солдаты группы "Центр") and "Penal Battalions" (Штрафные батальоны), the striking examples of a completely new kind of a war song, never heard in his country before. As veteran screenwriter Nikolay Erdman put it (in conversation with Lyubimov), "Professionally, I can well understand how Mayakovsky or Seryozha Yesenin were doing it. How Volodya Vysotsky does it is totally beyond me." With his songs – in effect, miniature theatrical dramatizations (usually with a protagonist and full of dialogues), Vysotsky instantly achieved such level of credibility that real life former prisoners, war veterans, boxers, footballers refused to believe that the author himself had never served his time in prisons and labor camps, or fought in the War, or been a boxing/football professional. After the second of the two concerts at the Leningrad Molecular Physics institute (that was his actual debut as a solo musical performer) Vysotsky left a note for his fans in a journal which ended with words: "Now that you've heard all these songs, please, don't you make a mistake of mixing me with my characters, I am not like them at all. With love, Vysotsky, 20 April 1965, XX c." Excuses of this kind he had to make throughout his performing career. At least one of Vysotsky's song themes – that of alcoholic abuse – was worryingly autobiographical, though. By the time his breakthrough came in 1967, he'd suffered several physical breakdowns and once was sent (by Taganka's boss) to a rehabilitation clinic, a visit he on several occasions repeated since.

Brecht's Life of Galileo (premiered on 17 May 1966), transformed by Lyubimov into a powerful allegory of Soviet intelligentsia's set of moral and intellectual dilemmas, brought Vysotsky his first leading theater role (along with some fitness lessons: he had to perform numerous acrobatic tricks on stage). Press reaction was mixed, some reviewers disliked the actor's overt emotionalism, but it was for the first time ever that Vysotsky's name appeared in Soviet papers. Film directors now were treating him with respect. Viktor Turov's war film I Come from the Childhood where Vysotsky got his first ever "serious" (neither comical, nor villainous) role in cinema, featured two of his songs: a spontaneous piece called "When It's Cold" (Холода) and a dark, Unknown soldier theme-inspired classic "Common Graves" (На братских могилах), sung behind the screen by the legendary Mark Bernes.

Stanislav Govorukhin and Boris Durov's The Vertical (1967), a mountain climbing drama, starring Vysotsky (as Volodya the radioman), brought him all-round recognition and fame. Four of the numbers used in the film (including "Song of a Friend [fi]" (Песня о друге), released in 1968 by the Soviet recording industry monopolist Melodiya disc to become an unofficial hit) were written literally on the spot, nearby Elbrus, inspired by professional climbers' tales and one curious hotel bar conversation with a German guest who 25 years ago happened to climb these very mountains in a capacity of an Edelweiss division fighter. Another 1967 film, Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters featured Vysotsky as the geologist Maxim (paste-bearded again) with a now trademark off-the-cuff musical piece, a melancholy improvisation called "Things to Do" (Дела). All the while Vysotsky continued working hard at Taganka, with another important role under his belt (that of Mayakovsky or, rather one of the latter character's five different versions) in the experimental piece called Listen! (Послушайте!), and now regularly gave semi-official concerts where audiences greeted him as a cult hero.

In the end of 1967 Vysotsky got another pivotal theater role, that of Khlopusha [ru] in Pugachov (a play based on a poem by Sergei Yesenin), often described as one of Taganka's finest. "He put into his performance all the things that he excelled at and, on the other hand, it was Pugachyov that made him discover his own potential," – Soviet critic Natalya Krymova wrote years later. Several weeks after the premiere, infuriated by the actor's increasing unreliability triggered by worsening drinking problems, Lyubimov fired him – only to let him back again several months later (and thus begin the humiliating sacked-then-pardoned routine which continued for years). In June 1968 a Vysotsky-slagging campaign was launched in the Soviet press. First Sovetskaya Rossiya commented on the "epidemic spread of immoral, smutty songs," allegedly promoting "criminal world values, alcoholism, vice and immorality" and condemned their author for "sowing seeds of evil." Then Komsomolskaya Pravda linked Vysotsky with black market dealers selling his tapes somewhere in Siberia. Composer Dmitry Kabalevsky speaking from the Union of Soviet Composers' Committee tribune criticised the Soviet radio for giving an ideologically dubious, "low-life product" like "Song of a Friend" (Песня о друге) an unwarranted airplay. Playwright Alexander Stein who in his Last Parade play used several of Vysotsky's songs, was chastised by a Ministry of Culture official for "providing a tribune for this anti-Soviet scum." The phraseology prompted commentators in the West to make parallels between Vysotsky and Mikhail Zoschenko, another Soviet author who'd been officially labeled "scum" some 20 years ago.

Two of Vysotsky's 1968 films, Gennady Poloka's Intervention (premiered in May 1987) where he was cast as Brodsky, a dodgy even if highly artistic character, and Yevgeny Karelov's Two Comrades Were Serving (a gun-toting White Army officer Brusentsov who in the course of the film shoots his friend, his horse, Oleg Yankovsky's good guy character and, finally himself) – were severely censored, first of them shelved for twenty years. At least four of Vysotsky's 1968 songs, "Save Our Souls" (Спасите наши души), "The Wolfhunt" (Охота на волков), "Gypsy Variations" (Моя цыганская) and "The Steam-bath in White" (Банька по-белому), were hailed later as masterpieces. It was at this point that 'proper' love songs started to appear in Vysotsky's repertoire, documenting the beginning of his passionate love affair with French actress Marina Vlady.

In 1969 Vysotsky starred in two films: The Master of Taiga where he played a villainous Siberian timber-floating brigadier, and more entertaining Dangerous Tour. The latter was criticized in the Soviet press for taking a farcical approach to the subject of the Bolshevik underground activities but for a wider Soviet audience this was an important opportunity to enjoy the charismatic actor's presence on big screen. In 1970, after visiting the dislodged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at his dacha and having a lengthy conversation with him, Vysotsky embarked on a massive and by Soviet standards dangerously commercial concert tour in Soviet Central Asia and then brought Marina Vlady to director Viktor Turov's place so as to investigate her Belarusian roots. The pair finally wed on 1 December 1970 (causing furore among the Moscow cultural and political elite) and spent a honeymoon in Georgia. This was the highly productive period for Vysotsky, resulting in numerous new songs, including the anthemic "I Hate" (Я не люблю), sentimental "Lyricale" (Лирическая) and dramatic war epics "He Didn't Return from the Battle" (Он не вернулся из боя) and "The Earth Song" (Песня о Земле) among many others.

In 1971 a drinking spree-related nervous breakdown brought Vysotsky to the Moscow Kashchenko clinic [ru]. By this time he has been suffering from alcoholism. Many of his songs from this period deal, either directly or metaphorically, with alcoholism and insanity. Partially recovered (due to the encouraging presence of Marina Vladi), Vysotsky embarked on a successful Ukrainian concert tour and wrote a cluster of new songs. On 29 November 1971 Taganka's Hamlet premiered, a groundbreaking Lyubimov's production with Vysotsky in the leading role, that of a lone intellectual rebel, rising to fight the cruel state machine.

Also in 1971 Vysotsky was invited to play the lead in The Sannikov Land, the screen adaptation of Vladimir Obruchev's science fiction,[47] which he wrote several songs for, but was suddenly dropped for the reason of his face "being too scandalously recognisable" as a state official put it. One of the songs written for the film, a doom-laden epic allegory "Capricious Horses" (Кони привередливые), became one of the singer's signature tunes. Two of Vysotsky's 1972 film roles were somewhat meditative: an anonymous American journalist in The Fourth One and the "righteous guy" von Koren in The Bad Good Man (based on Anton Chekov's Duel). The latter brought Vysotsky the Best Male Role prize at the V Taormina Film Fest. This philosophical slant rubbed off onto some of his new works of the time: "A Singer at the Microphone" (Певец у микрофона), "The Tightrope Walker" (Канатоходец), two new war songs ("We Spin the Earth", "Black Pea-Coats") and "The Grief" (Беда), a folkish girl's lament, later recorded by Marina Vladi and subsequently covered by several female performers. Popular proved to be his 1972 humorous songs: "Mishka Shifman" (Мишка Шифман), satirizing the leaving-for-Israel routine, "Victim of the Television" which ridiculed the concept of "political consciousness," and "The Honour of the Chess Crown" (Честь шахматной короны) about an ever-fearless "simple Soviet man" challenging the much feared American champion Bobby Fischer to a match.

In 1972 he stepped up in Soviet Estonian TV where he presented his songs and gave an interview. The name of the show was "Young Man from Taganka" (Noormees Tagankalt).

In April 1973 Vysotsky visited Poland and France. Predictable problems concerning the official permission were sorted after the French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais made a personal phone call to Leonid Brezhnev who, according to Marina Vlady's memoirs, rather sympathized with the stellar couple. Having found on return a potentially dangerous lawsuit brought against him (concerning some unsanctioned concerts in Siberia the year before), Vysotsky wrote a defiant letter to the Minister of Culture Pyotr Demichev. As a result, he was granted the status of a philharmonic artist, 11.5 roubles per concert now guaranteed. Still the 900 rubles fine had to be paid according to the court verdict, which was a substantial sum, considering his monthly salary at the theater was 110 rubles. That year Vysotsky wrote some thirty songs for "Alice in Wonderland," an audioplay where he himself has been given several minor roles. His best known songs of 1973 included "The Others' Track" (Чужая колея), "The Flight Interrupted" (Прерванный полёт) and "The Monument", all pondering on his achievements and legacy.

In 1974 Melodiya released the 7" EP, featuring four of Vysotsky's war songs ("He Never Returned From the Battle", "The New Times Song", "Common Graves", and "The Earth Song") which represented a tiny portion of his creative work, owned by millions on tape. In September of that year Vysotsky received his first state award, the Honorary Diploma of the Uzbek SSR following a tour with fellow actors from the Taganka Theatre in Uzbekistan. A year later he was granted the USSR Union of Cinematographers' membership. This meant he was not an "anti-Soviet scum" now, rather an unlikely link between the official Soviet cinema elite and the "progressive-thinking artists of the West." More films followed, among them The Only Road (a Soviet-Yugoslav joint venture, premiered on 10 January 1975 in Belgrade) and a science fiction movie The Flight of Mr. McKinley (1975). Out of nine ballads that he wrote for the latter only two have made it into the soundtrack. This was the height of his popularity, when, as described in Vlady's book about her husband, walking down the street on a summer night, one could hear Vysotsky's recognizable voice coming literally from every open window. Among the songs written at the time, were humorous "The Instruction before the Trip Abroad", lyrical "Of the Dead Pilot" and philosophical "The Strange House". In 1975 Vysotsky made his third trip to France where he rather riskily visited his former tutor (and now a celebrated dissident emigre) Andrey Sinyavsky. Artist Mikhail Shemyakin, his new Paris friend (or a "bottle-sharer", in Vladi's terms), recorded Vysotsky in his home studio. After a brief stay in England Vysotsky crossed the ocean and made his first Mexican concerts in April. Back in Moscow, there were changes at Taganka: Lyubimov went to Milan's La Scala on a contract and Anatoly Efros has been brought in, a director of radically different approach. His project, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, caused a sensation. Critics praised Alla Demidova (as Ranevskaya) and Vysotsky (as Lopakhin) powerful interplay, some describing it as one of the most dazzling in the history of the Soviet theater. Lyubimov, who disliked the piece, accused Efros of giving his actors "the stardom malaise." The 1976 Taganka's visit to Bulgaria resulted in Vysotskys's interview there being filmed and 15 songs recorded by Balkanton record label. On return Lyubimov made a move which many thought outrageous: declaring himself "unable to work with this Mr. Vysotsky anymore" he gave the role of Hamlet to Valery Zolotukhin, the latter's best friend. That was the time, reportedly, when stressed out Vysotsky started taking amphetamines.

Another Belorussian voyage completed, Marina and Vladimir went for France and from there (without any official permission given, or asked for) flew to the North America. In New York Vysotsky met, among other people, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Joseph Brodsky. In a televised one-hour interview with Dan Rather he stressed he was "not a dissident, just an artist, who's never had any intentions to leave his country where people loved him and his songs." At home this unauthorized venture into the Western world bore no repercussions: by this time Soviet authorities were divided as regards the "Vysotsky controversy" up to the highest level; while Mikhail Suslov detested the bard, Brezhnev loved him to such an extent that once, while in hospital, asked him to perform live in his daughter Galina's home, listening to this concert on the telephone. In 1976 appeared "The Domes", "The Rope" and the "Medieval" cycle, including "The Ballad of Love".

In September Vysotsky with Taganka made a trip to Yugoslavia where Hamlet won the annual BITEF festival's first prize, and then to Hungary for a two-week concert tour. Back in Moscow Lyubimov's production of The Master & Margarita featured Vysotsky as Ivan Bezdomny; a modest role, somewhat recompensed by an important Svidrigailov slot in Yury Karyakin's take on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Vysotsky's new songs of this period include "The History of Illness" cycle concerning his health problems, humorous "Why Did the Savages Eat Captain Cook", the metaphorical "Ballad of the Truth and the Lie", as well as "Two Fates", the chilling story of a self-absorbed alcoholic hunted by two malevolent witches, his two-faced destiny. In 1977 Vysotsky's health deteriorated (heart, kidneys, liver failures, jaw infection and nervous breakdown) to such an extent that in April he found himself in Moscow clinic's reanimation center in the state of physical and mental collapse.

In 1977 Vysotsky made an unlikely appearance in New York City on the American television show 60 Minutes, which falsely stated that Vysotsky had spent time in the Soviet prison system, the Gulag. That year saw the release of three Vysotsky's LPs in France (including the one that had been recorded by RCA in Canada the previous year); arranged and accompanied by guitarist Kostya Kazansky, the singer for the first time ever enjoyed the relatively sophisticated musical background. In August he performed in Hollywood before members of New York City film cast and (according to Vladi) was greeted warmly by the likes of Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro. Some more concerts in Los Angeles were followed by the appearance at the French Communist paper L’Humanité annual event. In December Taganka left for France, its Hamlet (Vysotsky back in the lead) gaining fine reviews.

1978 started with the March–April series of concerts in Moscow and Ukraine. In May Vysotsky embarked upon a new major film project: The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Место встречи изменить нельзя) about two detectives fighting crime in late 1940s Russia, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin. The film (premiered on 11 November 1978 on the Soviet Central TV) presented Vysotsky as Zheglov, a ruthless and charismatic cop teaching his milder partner Sharapov (actor Vladimir Konkin) his art of crime-solving. Vysotsky also became engaged in Taganka's Genre-seeking show (performing some of his own songs) and played Aleksander Blok in Anatoly Efros' The Lady Stranger (Незнакомка) radio play (premiered on air on 10 July 1979 and later released as a double LP).

In November 1978 Vysotsky took part in the underground censorship-defying literary project Metropolis, inspired and organized by Vasily Aksenov. In January 1979 Vysotsky again visited America with highly successful series of concerts. That was the point (according to biographer Vladimir Novikov) when a glimpse of new, clean life of a respectable international actor and performer all but made Vysotsky seriously reconsider his priorities. What followed though, was a return to the self-destructive theater and concert tours schedule, personal doctor Anatoly Fedotov now not only his companion, but part of Taganka's crew. "Who was this Anatoly? Just a man who in every possible situation would try to provide drugs. And he did provide. In such moments Volodya trusted him totally," Oksana Afanasyeva, Vysotsky's Moscow girlfriend (who was near him for most of the last year of his life and, on occasion, herself served as a drug courier) remembered. In July 1979, after a series of Central Asia concerts, Vysotsky collapsed, experienced clinical death and was resuscitated by Fedotov (who injected caffeine into the heart directly), colleague and close friend Vsevolod Abdulov helping with heart massage. In January 1980 Vysotsky asked Lyubimov for a year's leave. "Up to you, but on condition that Hamlet is yours," was the answer. The songwriting showed signs of slowing down, as Vysotsky began switching from songs to more conventional poetry. Still, of nearly 800 poems by Vysotsky only one has been published in the Soviet Union while he was alive. Not a single performance or interview was broadcast by the Soviet television in his lifetime.

In May 1979, being in a practice studio of the MSU Faculty of Journalism, Vysotsky recorded a video letter to American actor and film producer Warren Beatty, looking for both a personal meeting with Beatty and an opportunity to get a role in Reds film, to be produced and directed by the latter. While recording, Vysotsky made a few attempts to speak English, trying to overcome the language barrier. This video letter never reached Beatty. It was broadcast for the first time more than three decades later, on the night of 24 January 2013 (local time) by Rossiya 1 channel, along with records of TV channels of Italy, Mexico, Poland, USA and from private collections, in Vladimir Vysotsky. A letter to Warren Beatty film by Alexander Kovanovsky and Igor Rakhmanov. While recording this video, Vysotsky had a rare opportunity to perform for a camera, being still unable to do it with Soviet television.

On 22 January 1980, Vysotsky entered the Moscow Ostankino TV Center to record his one and only studio concert for the Soviet television. What proved to be an exhausting affair (his concentration lacking, he had to plod through several takes for each song) was premiered on the Soviet TV eight years later. The last six months of his life saw Vysotsky appearing on stage sporadically, fueled by heavy dosages of drugs and alcohol. His performances were often erratic. Occasionally Vysotsky paid visits to Sklifosofsky [ru] institute's ER unit, but would not hear of Marina Vlady's suggestions for him to take long-term rehabilitation course in a Western clinic. Yet he kept writing, mostly poetry and even prose, but songs as well. The last song he performed was the agonizing "My Sorrow, My Anguish" and his final poem, written one week prior to his death was "A Letter to Marina": "I'm less than fifty, but the time is short / By you and God protected, life and limb / I have a song or two to sing before the Lord / I have a way to make my peace with him."

Although several theories of the ultimate cause of the singer's death persist to this day, given what is now known about cardiovascular disease, it seems likely that by the time of his death Vysotsky had an advanced coronary condition brought about by years of tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as his grueling work schedule and the stress of the constant harassment by the government. Towards the end, most of Vysotsky's closest friends had become aware of the ominous signs and were convinced that his demise was only a matter of time. Clear evidence of this can be seen in a video ostensibly shot by the Japanese NHK channel only months before Vysotsky's death, where he appears visibly unwell, breathing heavily and slurring his speech. Accounts by Vysotsky's close friends and colleagues concerning his last hours were compiled in the book by V. Perevozchikov.

Vysotsky suffered from alcoholism for most of his life. Sometime around 1977, he started using amphetamines and other prescription narcotics in an attempt to counteract the debilitating hangovers and eventually to rid himself of alcohol addiction. While these attempts were partially successful, he ended up trading alcoholism for a severe drug dependency that was fast spiralling out of control. He was reduced to begging some of his close friends in the medical profession for supplies of drugs, often using his acting skills to collapse in a medical office and imitate a seizure or some other condition requiring a painkiller injection. On 25 July 1979 (a year to the day before his death) he suffered a cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for several minutes during a concert tour of Soviet Uzbekistan, after injecting himself with a wrong kind of painkiller he had previously obtained from a dentist's office.

Fully aware of the dangers of his condition, Vysotsky made several attempts to cure himself of his addiction. He underwent an experimental (and ultimately discredited) blood purification procedure offered by a leading drug rehabilitation specialist in Moscow. He also went to an isolated retreat in France with his wife Marina in the spring of 1980 as a way of forcefully depriving himself of any access to drugs. After these attempts failed, Vysotsky returned to Moscow to find his life in an increasingly stressful state of disarray. He had been a defendant in two criminal trials, one for a car wreck he had caused some months earlier, and one for an alleged conspiracy to sell unauthorized concert tickets (he eventually received a suspended sentence and a probation in the first case, and the charges in the second were dismissed, although several of his co-defendants were found guilty). He also unsuccessfully fought the film studio authorities for the rights to direct a movie called The Green Phaeton. Relations with his wife Marina were deteriorating, and he was torn between his loyalty to her and his love for his mistress Oksana Afanasyeva. He had also developed severe inflammation in one of his legs, making his concert performances extremely challenging.

In a final desperate attempt to overcome his drug addiction, partially prompted by his inability to obtain drugs through his usual channels (the authorities had imposed a strict monitoring of the medical institutions to prevent illicit drug distribution during the 1980 Olympics), he relapsed into alcohol and went on a prolonged drinking binge (apparently consuming copious amounts of champagne due to a prevalent misconception at the time that it was better than vodka at countering the effects of drug withdrawal).

On 3 July 1980, Vysotsky gave a performance at a suburban Moscow concert hall. One of the stage managers recalls that he looked visibly unhealthy ("gray-faced", as she puts it) and complained of not feeling too good, while another says she was surprised by his request for champagne before the start of the show, as he had always been known for completely abstaining from drink before his concerts. On 16 July Vysotsky gave his last public concert in Kaliningrad. On 18 July, Vysotsky played Hamlet for the last time at the Taganka Theatre. From around 21 July, several of his close friends were on a round-the-clock watch at his apartment, carefully monitoring his alcohol intake and hoping against all odds that his drug dependency would soon be overcome and they would then be able to bring him back from the brink. The effects of drug withdrawal were clearly getting the better of him, as he got increasingly restless, moaned and screamed in pain, and at times fell into memory lapses, failing to recognize at first some of his visitors, including his son Arkadiy. At one point, Vysotsky's personal physician A. Fedotov (the same doctor who had brought him back from clinical death a year earlier in Uzbekistan) attempted to sedate him, inadvertently causing asphyxiation from which he was barely saved. On 24 July, Vysotsky told his mother that he thought he was going to die that day, and then made similar remarks to a few of the friends present at the apartment, who begged him to stop such talk and keep his spirits up. But soon thereafter, Oksana Afanasyeva saw him clench his chest several times, which led her to suspect that he was genuinely suffering from a cardiovascular condition. She informed Fedotov of this but was told not to worry, as he was going to monitor Vysotsky's condition all night. In the evening, after drinking relatively small amounts of alcohol, the moaning and groaning Vysotsky was sedated by Fedotov, who then sat down on the couch next to him but fell asleep. Fedotov awoke in the early hours of 25 July to an unusual silence and found Vysotsky dead in his bed with his eyes wide open, apparently of a myocardial infarction, as he later certified. This was contradicted by Fedotov's colleagues, Sklifosovsky Emergency Medical Institute physicians L. Sul'povar and S. Scherbakov (who had demanded the actor's immediate hospitalization on 23 July but were allegedly rebuffed by Fedotov), who insisted that Fedotov's incompetent sedation combined with alcohol was what killed Vysotsky. An autopsy was prevented by Vysotsky's parents (who were eager to have their son's drug addiction remain secret), so the true cause of death remains unknown.

No official announcement of the actor's death was made, only a brief obituary appeared in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, and a note informing of Vysotsky's death and cancellation of the Hamlet performance was put out at the entrance to the Taganka Theatre (the story goes that not a single ticket holder took advantage of the refund offer). Despite this, by the end of the day, millions had learned of Vysotsky's death. On 28 July, he lay in state at the Taganka Theatre. After a mourning ceremony involving an unauthorized mass gathering of unprecedented scale, Vysotsky was buried at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. The attendance at the Olympic events dropped noticeably on that day, as scores of spectators left to attend the funeral. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of his coffin.

According to author Valery Perevozchikov part of the blame for his death lay with the group of associates who surrounded him in the last years of his life. This inner circle were all people under the influence of his strong character, combined with a material interest in the large sums of money his concerts earned. This list included Valerii Yankelovich, manager of the Taganka Theatre and prime organiser of his non-sanctioned concerts; Anatoly Fedotov, his personal doctor; Vadim Tumanov, gold prospector (and personal friend) from Siberia; Oksana Afanasyeva (later Yarmolnik), his mistress the last three years of his life; Ivan Bortnik, a fellow actor; and Leonid Sul'povar, a department head at the Sklifosovski hospital who was responsible for much of the supply of drugs.

Vysotsky's associates had all put in efforts to supply his drug habit, which kept him going in the last years of his life. Under their influence, he was able to continue to perform all over the country, up to a week before his death. Due to illegal (i.e. non-state-sanctioned) sales of tickets and other underground methods, these concerts pulled in sums of money unimaginable in Soviet times, when almost everyone received nearly the same small salary. The payouts and gathering of money were a constant source of danger, and Yankelovich and others were needed to organise them.

Some money went to Vysotsky, the rest was distributed amongst this circle. At first this was a reasonable return on their efforts; however, as his addiction progressed and his body developed resistance, the frequency and amount of drugs needed to keep Vysotsky going became unmanageable. This culminated at the time of the Moscow Olympics which coincided with the last days of his life, when supplies of drugs were monitored more strictly than usual, and some of the doctors involved in supplying Vysotsky were already behind bars (normally the doctors had to account for every ampule, thus drugs were transferred to an empty container, while the patients received a substitute or placebo instead). In the last few days Vysotsky became uncontrollable, his shouting could be heard all over the apartment building on Malaya Gruzinskaya St. where he lived amongst VIP's. Several days before his death, in a state of stupor he went on a high speed drive around Moscow in an attempt to obtain drugs and alcohol – when many high-ranking people saw him. This increased the likelihood of him being forcibly admitted to the hospital, and the consequent danger to the circle supplying his habit. As his state of health declined, and it became obvious that he might die, his associates gathered to decide what to do with him. They came up with no firm decision. They did not want him admitted officially, as his drug addiction would become public and they would fall under suspicion, although some of them admitted that any ordinary person in his condition would have been admitted immediately.

On Vysotsky's death his associates and relatives put in much effort to prevent a post-mortem being carried out. This despite the fairly unusual circumstances: he died aged 42 under heavy sedation with an improvised cocktail of sedatives and stimulants, including the toxic chloral hydrate, provided by his personal doctor who had been supplying him with narcotics the previous three years. This doctor, being the only one present at his side when death occurred, had a few days earlier been seen to display elementary negligence in treating the sedated Vysotsky. On the night of his death, Arkadii Vysotsky (his son), who tried to visit his father in his apartment, was rudely refused entry by Yankelovich, even though there was a lack of people able to care for him. Subsequently, the Soviet police commenced a manslaughter investigation which was dropped due to the absence of evidence taken at the time of death.

Vysotsky's first wife was Iza Zhukova. They met in 1956, being both MAT theater institute students, lived for some time at Vysotsky's mother's flat in Moscow, after her graduation (Iza was 2 years older) spent months in different cities (her – in Kiev, then Rostov) and finally married on 25 April 1960.

He met his second wife Lyudmila Abramova in 1961, while shooting the film 713 Requests Permission to Land. They married in 1965 and had two sons, Arkady (born 1962) and Nikita (born 1964).

While still married to Lyudmila Abramova, Vysotsky began a romantic relationship with Tatyana Ivanenko, a Taganka actress, then, in 1967 fell in love with Marina Vlady, a French actress of Russian descent, who was working at Mosfilm on a joint Soviet-French production at that time. Marina had been married before and had three children, while Vladimir had two. They were married in 1969. For 10 years the two maintained a long-distance relationship as Marina compromised her career in France to spend more time in Moscow, and Vladimir's friends pulled strings for him to be allowed to travel abroad to stay with his wife. Marina eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the Soviet Union, and provided Vladimir with some immunity against prosecution by the government, which was becoming weary of his covertly anti-Soviet lyrics and his odds-defying popularity with the masses. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs.

In the autumn of 1981 Vysotsky's first collection of poetry was officially published in the USSR, called The Nerve (Нерв). Its first edition (25,000 copies) was sold out instantly. In 1982 the second one followed (100,000), then the 3rd (1988, 200,000), followed in the 1990s by several more. The material for it was compiled by Robert Rozhdestvensky, an officially laurelled Soviet poet. Also in 1981 Yuri Lyubimov staged at Taganka a new music and poetry production called Vladimir Vysotsky which was promptly banned and officially premiered on 25 January 1989.

In 1982 the motion picture The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe was produced in the Soviet Union and in 1983 the movie was released to the public. Four songs by Vysotsky were featured in the film.

In 1986 the official Vysotsky poetic heritage committee was formed (with Robert Rozhdestvensky at the helm, theater critic Natalya Krymova being both the instigator and the organizer). Despite some opposition from the conservatives (Yegor Ligachev was the latter's political leader, Stanislav Kunyaev of Nash Sovremennik represented its literary flank) Vysotsky was rewarded posthumously with the USSR State Prize. The official formula – "for creating the character of Zheglov and artistic achievements as a singer-songwriter" was much derided from both the left and the right. In 1988 the Selected Works of... (edited by N. Krymova) compilation was published, preceded by I Will Surely Return... (Я, конечно, вернусь...) book of fellow actors' memoirs and Vysotsky's verses, some published for the first time. In 1990 two volumes of extensive The Works of... were published, financed by the late poet's father Semyon Vysotsky. Even more ambitious publication series, self-proclaimed "the first ever academical edition" (the latter assertion being dismissed by sceptics) compiled and edited by Sergey Zhiltsov, were published in Tula (1994–1998, 5 volumes), Germany (1994, 7 volumes) and Moscow (1997, 4 volumes).

In 1989 the official Vysotsky Museum opened in Moscow, with the magazine of its own called Vagant (edited by Sergey Zaitsev) devoted entirely to Vysotsky's legacy. In 1996 it became an independent publication and was closed in 2002.

In the years to come, Vysotsky's grave became a site of pilgrimage for several generations of his fans, the youngest of whom were born after his death. His tombstone also became the subject of controversy, as his widow had wished for a simple abstract slab, while his parents insisted on a realistic gilded statue. Although probably too solemn to have inspired Vysotsky himself, the statue is believed by some to be full of metaphors and symbols reminiscent of the singer's life.

In 1995 in Moscow the Vysotsky monument was officially opened at Strastnoy Boulevard, by the Petrovsky Gates. Among those present were the bard's parents, two of his sons, first wife Iza, renown poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. "Vysotsky had always been telling the truth. Only once he was wrong when he sang in one of his songs: 'They will never erect me a monument in a square like that by Petrovskye Vorota'", Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov said in his speech.[95] A further monument to Vysotsky was erected in 2014 at Rostov-on-Don.

In October 2004, a monument to Vysotsky was erected in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, near the Millennium Bridge. His son, Nikita Vysotsky, attended the unveiling. The statue was designed by Russian sculptor Alexander Taratinov, who also designed a monument to Alexander Pushkin in Podgorica. The bronze statue shows Vysotsky standing on a pedestal, with his one hand raised and the other holding a guitar. Next to the figure lies a bronze skull – a reference to Vysotsky's monumental lead performances in Shakespeare's Hamlet. On the pedestal the last lines from a poem of Vysotsky's, dedicated to Montenegro, are carved.

The Vysotsky business center & semi-skyscraper was officially opened in Yekaterinburg, in 2011. It is the tallest building in Russia outside of Moscow, has 54 floors, total height: 188.3 m (618 ft). On the third floor of the business center is the Vysotsky Museum. Behind the building is a bronze sculpture of Vladimir Vysotsky and his third wife, a French actress Marina Vlady.

In 2011 a controversial movie Vysotsky. Thank You For Being Alive was released, script written by his son, Nikita Vysotsky. The actor Sergey Bezrukov portrayed Vysotsky, using a combination of a mask and CGI effects. The film tells about Vysotsky's illegal underground performances, problems with KGB and drugs, and subsequent clinical death in 1979.

Shortly after Vysotsky's death, many Russian bards started writing songs and poems about his life and death. The best known are Yuri Vizbor's "Letter to Vysotsky" (1982) and Bulat Okudzhava's "About Volodya Vysotsky" (1980). In Poland, Jacek Kaczmarski based some of his songs on those of Vysotsky, such as his first song (1977) was based on "The Wolfhunt", and dedicated to his memory the song "Epitafium dla Włodzimierza Wysockiego" ("Epitaph for Vladimir Vysotsky").

Every year on Vysotsky's birthday festivals are held throughout Russia and in many communities throughout the world, especially in Europe. Vysotsky's impact in Russia is often compared to that of Wolf Biermann in Germany, Bob Dylan in America, or Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel in France.

The asteroid 2374 Vladvysotskij, discovered by Lyudmila Zhuravleva, was named after Vysotsky.

During the Annual Q&A Event Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, Alexey Venediktov asked Putin to name a street in Moscow after the singer Vladimir Vysotsky, who, though considered one of the greatest Russian artists, has no street named after him in Moscow almost 30 years after his death. Venediktov stated a Russian law that allowed the President to do so and promote a law suggestion to name a street by decree. Putin answered that he would talk to Mayor of Moscow and would solve this problem. In July 2015 former Upper and Lower Tagansky Dead-ends (Верхний и Нижний Таганские тупики) in Moscow were reorganized into Vladimir Vysotsky Street.

The Sata Kieli Cultural Association, [Finland], organizes the annual International Vladimir Vysotsky Festival (Vysotski Fest), where Vysotsky's singers from different countries perform in Helsinki and other Finnish cities. They sing Vysotsky in different languages and in different arrangements.

Two brothers and singers from Finland, Mika and Turkka Mali, over the course of their more than 30-year musical career, have translated into Finnish, recorded and on numerous occasions publicly performed songs of Vladimir Vysotsky.

Throughout his lengthy musical career, Jaromír Nohavica, a famed Czech singer, translated and performed numerous songs of Vladimir Vysotsky, most notably Песня о друге (Píseň o příteli – Song about a friend).

The Museum of Vladimir Vysotsky in Koszalin dedicated to Vladimir Vysotsky was founded by Marlena Zimna (1969–2016) in May 1994, in her apartment, in the city of Koszalin, in Poland. Since then the museum has collected over 19,500 exhibits from different countries and currently holds Vladimir Vysotsky' personal items, autographs, drawings, letters, photographs and a large library containing unique film footage, vinyl records, CDs and DVDs. A special place in the collection holds a Vladimir Vysotsky's guitar, on which he played at a concert in Casablanca in April 1976. Vladimir Vysotsky presented this guitar to Moroccan journalist Hassan El-Sayed together with an autograph (an extract from Vladimir Vysotsky's song "What Happened in Africa"), written in Russian right on the guitar.

In January 2023, a monument to the outstanding actor, singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky was unveiled in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, in the square near the Rodina House of Culture. Author Vladimir Chebotarev.

After her husband's death, urged by her friend Simone Signoret, Marina Vlady wrote a book called The Aborted Flight about her years together with Vysotsky. The book paid tribute to Vladimir's talent and rich persona, yet was uncompromising in its depiction of his addictions and the problems that they caused in their marriage. Written in French (and published in France in 1987), it was translated into Russian in tandem by Vlady and a professional translator and came out in 1989 in the USSR. Totally credible from the specialists' point of view, the book caused controversy, among other things, by shocking revelations about the difficult father-and-son relationship (or rather, the lack of any), implying that Vysotsky-senior (while his son was alive) was deeply ashamed of him and his songs which he deemed "anti-Soviet" and reported his own son to the KGB. Also in 1989 another important book of memoirs was published in the USSR, providing a bulk of priceless material for the host of future biographers, Alla Demidova's Vladimir Vysotsky, the One I Know and Love. Among other publications of note were Valery Zolotukhin's Vysotsky's Secret (2000), a series of Valery Perevozchikov's books (His Dying Hour, The Unknown Vysotsky and others) containing detailed accounts and interviews dealing with the bard's life's major controversies (the mystery surrounding his death, the truth behind Vysotsky Sr.'s alleged KGB reports, the true nature of Vladimir Vysotsky's relations with his mother Nina's second husband Georgy Bartosh etc.), Iza Zhukova's Short Happiness for a Lifetime and the late bard's sister-in-law Irena Vysotskaya's My Brother Vysotsky. The Beginnings (both 2005).

A group of enthusiasts has created a non-profit project – the mobile application "Vysotsky"

The multifaceted talent of Vysotsky is often described by the term "bard" (бард) that Vysotsky has never been enthusiastic about. He thought of himself mainly as an actor and poet rather than a singer, and once remarked, "I do not belong to what people call bards or minstrels or whatever." With the advent of portable tape-recorders in the Soviet Union, Vysotsky's music became available to the masses in the form of home-made reel-to-reel audio tape recordings (later on cassette tapes).

Vysotsky accompanied himself on a Russian seven-string guitar, with a raspy voice singing ballads of love, peace, war, everyday Soviet life and of the human condition. He was largely perceived as the voice of honesty, at times sarcastically jabbing at the Soviet government, which made him a target for surveillance and threats. In France, he has been compared with Georges Brassens; in Russia, however, he was more frequently compared with Joe Dassin, partly because they were the same age and died in the same year, although their ideologies, biographies, and musical styles are very different. Vysotsky's lyrics and style greatly influenced Jacek Kaczmarski, a Polish songwriter and singer who touched on similar themes.

The songs – over 600 of them – were written about almost any imaginable theme. The earliest were blatnaya pesnya ("outlaw songs"). These songs were based either on the life of the common people in Moscow or on life in the crime people, sometimes in Gulag. Vysotsky slowly grew out of this phase and started singing more serious, though often satirical, songs. Many of these songs were about war. These war songs were not written to glorify war, but rather to expose the listener to the emotions of those in extreme, life-threatening situations. Most Soviet veterans would say that Vysotsky's war songs described the truth of war far more accurately than more official "patriotic" songs.

Nearly all of Vysotsky's songs are in the first person, although he is almost never the narrator. When singing his criminal songs, he would adopt the accent and intonation of a Moscow thief, and when singing war songs, he would sing from the point of view of a soldier. In many of his philosophical songs, he adopted the role of inanimate objects. This created some confusion about Vysotsky's background, especially during the early years when information could not be passed around very easily. Using his acting talent, the poet played his role so well that until told otherwise, many of his fans believed that he was, indeed, a criminal or war veteran. Vysotsky's father said that "War veterans thought the author of the songs to be one of them, as if he had participated in the war together with them." The same could be said about mountain climbers; on multiple occasions, Vysotsky was sent pictures of mountain climbers' graves with quotes from his lyrics etched on the tombstones.

Not being officially recognized as a poet and singer, Vysotsky performed wherever and whenever he could – in the theater (where he worked), at universities, in private apartments, village clubs, and in the open air. It was not unusual for him to give several concerts in one day. He used to sleep little, using the night hours to write. With few exceptions, he wasn't allowed to publish his recordings with "Melodiya", which held a monopoly on the Soviet music industry. His songs were passed on through amateur, fairly low quality recordings on vinyl discs and magnetic tape, resulting in his immense popularity. Cosmonauts even took his music on cassette into orbit.

Musically, virtually all of Vysotsky's songs were written in a minor key, and tended to employ from three to seven chords. Vysotsky composed his songs and played them exclusively on the Russian seven string guitar, often tuned a tone or a tone-and-a-half below the traditional Russian "Open G major" tuning. This guitar, with its specific Russian tuning, makes a slight yet notable difference in chord voicings than the standard tuned six string Spanish (classical) guitar, and it became a staple of his sound. Because Vysotsky tuned down a tone and a half, his strings had less tension, which also colored the sound.

His earliest songs were usually written in C minor (with the guitar tuned a tone down from DGBDGBD to CFACFAC)

Songs written in this key include "Stars" (Zvyozdy), "My friend left for Magadan" (Moy drug uyekhal v Magadan), and most of his "outlaw songs".

At around 1970, Vysotsky began writing and playing exclusively in A minor (guitar tuned to CFACFAC), which he continued doing until his death.

Vysotsky used his fingers instead of a pick to pluck and strum, as was the tradition with Russian guitar playing. He used a variety of finger picking and strumming techniques. One of his favorite was to play an alternating bass with his thumb as he plucked or strummed with his other fingers.

Often, Vysotsky would neglect to check the tuning of his guitar, which is particularly noticeable on earlier recordings. According to some accounts, Vysotsky would get upset when friends would attempt to tune his guitar, leading some to believe that he preferred to play slightly out of tune as a stylistic choice. Much of this is also attributable to the fact that a guitar that is tuned down more than 1 whole step (Vysotsky would sometimes tune as much as 2 and a half steps down) is prone to intonation problems.

Vysotsky had a unique singing style. He had an unusual habit of elongating consonants instead of vowels in his songs. So when a syllable is sung for a prolonged period of time, he would elongate the consonant instead of the vowel in that syllable.

Doppelganger - A Star Trek Adventure (11) by Marilyn Bardot

"Hello Crea," Marilyn tentatively whispered, deeply embarassed and ashamed of her behaviour in this latest adventure.

"Its OK, Marilyn," cooed Crea. "I know that Cammy used the tears of Elaan to beguile you, so you weren't in control."

With that revelation, and the lovingly gentle way it was conveyed to her, the events of the last 24 hours hit home, and our heroine thought about how close she had come to losing everything, including this precious and beautiful woman, so finally the bubble burst. As such, Marilyn promptly collapsed into tears, sobbing and blubbering uncontrollably!!!

See the whole story... www.flickr.com/photos/145133269@N04/albums/72157709121110966

by Thomas Oscar Miles

Love

Has a way of wilting

Or blossoming

At the strangest,

Most unpredictable hour.

This is how love is,

An uncontrollable beast

In the form of a flower.

The sun does not always shine on it.

Nor does the rain always pour on it

Nor should it always get beaten by a storm.

Love does not always emit the sweetest scents,

And sometimes it can sting with its thorns.

Water it.

Give it plenty of sunlight.

Nurture it,

And the flower of love will

Outlive you.

Neglect it or keep dissecting it,

And its petals will quickly curl up and die.

This is how love is,

Perfection is a delusional vision.

So love the person who loves you

Unconditionally,

And abandon the one

Who only loves you

Under favorable

Conditions.”

― Suzy Kassem

My first photo from shooting with Emilia (CinnamonGaze) and Tabitha Boydell up in Manchester! After a kind man recommended we go find this blossom tree, I fell in love and had to shoot there in true classic @tomandtheflowers style (my instagram handle!)

6/52 Images 2011 - Love by Lucy Shires

16 73

Love, I really found this theme tough!

I wrote down everything love means to me, tried to get inspired, failed, cut all the words out and ended up with this!

I know it's very cliched, but so is love!

Love is . . . . . . . . . . all of the above!

Dannee's wild dream by Nataly Larina

13 6

Dannee dreamed almost every night, there was a time when there were only nightmares but… in time, with new friends and companions care, the feelings that were awaken in her heart again, and with the new found sense of peace her nightmares began to cease… but her rigid control did not extend to sleep, she cannot completely filter out the uncontrollable, no matter how much she might wish otherwise. Wishes, hopes, memories and horrors swirl together in a maelstrom of images and sound, most of it too chaotic to remember in waking hours but tonight it wasn’t just a nightmare, on the contrary it was a dream she knew she has, it was girlish, completely impossible given her friend Sam way of life and his view of family but she couldn’t get it out of her mind anyway, for a dream is dream, what harm in that?

Quarantine by Tyler Sky

A terrible plague known as "The Doll Effect" is quickly spreading throughout the indigenous population. Symptoms include loss of articulation, lengthening of limbs, and an uncontrollable attraction to pretty colors.

Keep your distance and do NOT accept any Friendly requests!

All species are affected, people and animals alike! Infected lifeforms are being gathered and placed into Quarantine until such time as a cure can be developed.

Sunny day..uncontrollable hem 😅 by Melanie Taylor

21 4

All New Robin Volume 1 #9 by The Filmgmr

24 4

Tim dodged the Middleman’s bullet, which nearly hit Jason before lodging itself in the door behind them. The swing of his staff combined with the dodge of the bullet carried him around the projectile’s trajectory, allowing him to knock the gun from the elderly woman’s hand. Standing back for a moment, Tim composed himself and said,

“Look, I don’t want to hurt you. Just answer our-” The Middleman responded by grabbing a small knife from her belt and throwing it at Tim. He deflected it before the elderly woman began running for the back of the store. Turning to Jason, Tim exclaimed, “C’mon! Do something!” Before running towards the escaping woman. Jason, even under his mask, was visibly conflicted before drawing one of the taser guns Tim had given him from his belt. Reaching the door just before the Middleman, Tim vaulted onto the wall in order to launch off it onto the woman. However, she quickly dodged this, instead being hit by a blast from Jason’s taser gun. Shaking uncontrollably from the electric shock, she attempted to compose herself while blocking a swing from Tim’s staff. Judging by the strength and her ability to dodge, Tim deduced that there was more to her than they had initially seen. Scanning her with his mask’s capabilities he was able to see a strange sort of green liquid pulsating within her blood stream, something not seen in the average nervous system. As he thought this however, Tim was hit by a punch that certainly bruised a decent chunk of his left cheek. Stumbling back, he was nearly hit again before Jason let out a cry of anger and launched himself at the Middleman. He was able to knock her into one of the assembly lines the vacuums were created on before lifting her into the air and slamming her onto it. Stumbling back, he breathed heavily, and Tim approached him cautiously. It only took Jason a moment to compose himself however, before he once again raised his taser gun to the woman, saying,

“Alright…I’ve got killer Bea Arthur…you check the place out…” Tim nodded, rubbing his cheek for a moment, causing Jason to ask, “You ok?” Tim nodded again before disappearing into the back room. Upon entering, Tim found several dozen computers, each either monitoring a different room in the shop, a room in someone’s house, or revealing conversations between the Middleman and clients. One such conversation was with a person with the email address ‘JackKubrick237’, and was comprised of them asking the Middleman for the virtual reality headgear. According to the order, they had ordered three of them, and with the e-mail seemingly still active, Tim activated his comm to say,

“Al, we got passed the black market guy…er…girl…lady. I have an e-mail conversation between Film Freak and them, we might be able to find him this way. Sending the address now.” After a moment, Alfred responded,

“Very good, sir, it seems with this address the Batcomputer was able to find the location where Mr. Weston sent the e-mail. Sending it to you now.” As Tim received the address, he said,

“Thanks Al, I’ll be in touch.” Before hanging up and looking at another conversation, one between the Middleman and someone going by ‘JG24601’. The Middleman had sent this person several photographs and paragraphs of detail on what seemed to be Jason Todd and a woman accompanying him. Hearing a shock outside and a thud, Tim turned to see Jason walking in, saying,

“I was checking out a green pouch she had on her back, it was pumping some weird liquid into her bloodstream. Looked kinda familiar. Anyways she got up and tried to attack me again so I kinda shocked her pretty bad. Like, might not, I mean hopefully won’t, remember anything. Ever. Ah well, whatever it takes to clean up the streets…what is it?” Tim pointed to the conversation on the screen. Jason took a moment to read it before saying, “Can I please kill again? Just her?” Tim actually smirked at this, before Jason picked up a flashdrive the Middleman had lying around and began to download all that she had on the mysterious ‘JG24601’, pausing only to say, “This surprisingly has everything to do with what we’re doing right now. This guy’s got what we need. And now…we know everything about him as well.” He said just as the files finished downloading. Sighing for a moment, Jason said, “Ok, how about you take Middleman here to the cops, I’ll go back home and start downloading this to add to what we already have, and then you can stop by for a bit.”

“Where do you live now?” Tim asked.

“Blaze Comics. Not too far away. You won’t miss it. So…deal?” Jason asked with his hand stuck out. Tim shook it before the two exited the building, but not before picking up the Middleman and taking her with them.

Storms by Ivalina

19 50

Storms. All kind of storms.

Natural, emotional, strong, quick, expected, unexpected, electrified, unbearable, needed, uncontrollable, inspiring, beautiful.

Too many adjectives.

Storms outside the window. Storms on the inside. Storms in cups.

All kind of storms knocking on my door.

No time to lock, no time to escape.

I'm standing in the face of them all, red-lipped, and I feel I'm being blown away...

Hindmarsh Lagoon, Victor Harbor by jonathan Burbury

6 103

Melaleuca quinquenervia, the common name 'paperbark'

East coast of Australia, New South Wales and Queensland usually along watercourses and swamps. Also occurs in New Guinea and New Caledonia.

Caution should be exercised in planting the species in tropical wetland areas overseas. The plant has caused serious environmental damage in the Florida Everglades, USA, where it has spread uncontrollably.

96/365 by Lizzy Gadd

20 30

+++++

Random story of the day: I may look all calm and peaceful here... But earlier, I decided to eat some ice cubes. I like to eat ice cubes. So I got a gigantic ice cube, one of the biggest I've ever eaten, and I put it in my mouth and it froze on my tongue... Actually froze, it was like someone glued it to my tongue! And I couldn't get it off so I had to wait 'till it melted in my mouth before it fell off my tongue. And during that time, my sister was asking what was wrong with me, because I was trying to talk but it's really hard to talk with a freezing giant ice cube in your mouth. Somehow I thought it was funny, and so I started laughing, and when I laughed the melted ice water in my mouth spewed over the kitchen floor. And my sister freaked, and then I couldn't stop laughing, so I was laughing and choking on a giant ice cube stuck to my tongue and spewing ice water out of my mouth uncontrollably all over the kitchen floor and table, and my sides started to hurt, but it was just one of those times where I couldn't stop laughing at the worst time, ya know? It was an interesting experience. I had a lot of drool to clean up after.

Moving Swiftly on by SelmerOrSelnec

I must admit that I'm sadly completely unengaged regarding anything to do with the insanely popular Taylor Swift. Despite the frenzied hyperbole about her, buzzing uncontrollably around nearly all aspects of daily life, I find myself resolutely unimpressed.

Mind you, I am a 57-year old man who takes photographs of buses, so that may go some way towards explaining that.

Anyway, here's Go North West/Bee Network 3062 (BG66 WKD), doing a morning stint on the V4. Ms Swift clings on to the side with grim determination.

Manchester, John Dalton Street, 15/04/2024. Posted 23/04/2024.

(LCC)The End... (Part 2) by Mark of Falworth

30 4

When we last left Mark of Falworth he was facing off against a horde of loathsome Outlaws!

The first warriors who came within reach of Mark's sword were speedily cut down. Mark charged furiously into the great mass of men!
Mark slashed and chopped and parried and stabbed in an uncontrollable surge of adrenaline and rage!
After a dozen had fallen before his sword, the Outlaws paused in sheer disbelief. Fighting 12 opponents at a time, he still drove them back and held his own!
The respite was momentary, as the Outlaws were burning for vengeance against years of disastrous crusades (Some instigated by Mark). More and more fell, and Mark was thought to have fallen dead more then once, but then he would erupt from a pile of struggling bandits and rain down his deadly blows faster then ever!
For 7 long hours the carnage raged, and nigh a hundred Outlaws had died trying to bring down the knight of the everlasting smile and perfect hair (which still remained perfect despite the intense action).

But even the bravest cannot fight beyond his own strength, and each wave of opponents was getting harder and harder for Mark to drive back...
The Outlaws gathered together shoulder to shoulder for a final rush towards their target. Their war-cries grew stronger as Mark's strength faded.

But just before they could deliver the death blows, a tremendous, eardrum-bursting roar shook the entire battlefield!

Every warrior stopped and looked to the heavens from whence the rumble came.

Lo and behold, a colossal black creature descended on the mass of men. Fangs glistening, enormous wings spreading forth in terrible glory. It was none other then the fearsome dragon Cyricus the Mighty!

The great host of Outlaws fled like mice before a lion.

The Dragon landed with immense impact, feet away from the exhausted Mark.

He had no energy left to run, or even to raise his weapon. His voice had long since dissipated.

He looked straight into the jaws of death, and smiled. At last his time had come.

The massive claws and teeth shrieked towards him as he fell senseless to the ground...

To be Continued...

NEXT YEAR!! :D

_____________________

{Hollow's End} PHOTO CONTEST 2017 - 5000L$++ give away!! by Hollow's End Roleplay

This is our first Photo Contest with 3 Categories opens for everyone! We sincerely hope to have your support and participations! (╯✧∇✧)╯♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Each contestant has chance to win all 3 big prizes (1000L$/prize) + many add-on achievement prizes!!

You will just need to submit your picture taken in Hollow's End RP SIM while following this guideline:

► ► ► hollowsend.enjin.com/forum/m/40448026/viewthread/31048563...

► ► ► TP to Hollow's End:

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Crystal%20Shores/19/137/810

The 3 Categories are:

◣ Landscape: Hollow's End landscape.

◣ My Character: Your character in Hollow's End

◣ My Story: A scene photo, natural or arranged, giving the feel of movie or a rp scene.

↓↓↓ Brief about Hollow's End ↓↓↓

✣✤✥✦✧✩✫✬✭✮✯✰✣✤✥✦✧✩✫✬✭✮✯✰

"Entering of Hollow's End, it's almost a dream; slipping into the comforting arms of a warm bath, or a sensation of Deja vu that beckons from the dark places to draw you in. The exceptions being those found intoxicated with terror or baleful remorse who entered Hollow's End through some form of traumatic experience. As random as the cards, as insightful as Karma, the sewn roots of uncountable dimensions have been knotted to this realm called Hollow's End: A limbo oubliette that could be Shangri-La or Sheol to each person who finds themselves ensnared in the morose city or surrounding countryside.

Finding the way back home is another story...

Time itself winds and loops of its own accord in Hollow's End.

Hollow's End rather defies general logic of other realms, unless of course one is bonkers.

What will become of you?"

✣✤✥✦✧✩✫✬✭✮✯✰✣✤✥✦✧✩✫✬✭✮✯✰

Hollow's End is a multiverse RP sim with a dark-themed beautiful city where the uncontrollable flows of magic lead and connect to 7 other inworld built realms of various theme and time settings. We are proud about our detailed build, as well as the welcoming, growing community of rpers we are having. This Photo contest serves the purpose of an entertaining, fun activities for rpers and photographers alike, for anyone who would like to discover our sim or would like to save a memory of this strange City.

Please join us with have a great, artistic and fun time with this Photo Contest!! o(〃＾▽＾〃)o

✣✤✥✦✧✩✫✬✭✮✯✰

Basanta Utsav..... Celebration of Spring by pallab seth

10 1

Basanta Utsav literally means the 'celebration of spring'. ...

Annually celebrated in March, the festival is an occassion to invite the colourful spring season with utmost warmth. What is appreciated is the grace and diginified manner in which Vasant Utsav is celebrated in Bengal as compared to uncontrollable Holi witnessed in most parts of India.

The beautiful tradition of celebrating spring festival in Bengal was first started by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.

FORBIDDEN FRUIT IN THE MIDST OF THE GARDEN by Hughes Songe

In Part 2, I discussed how the Serpent was used as a symbol for not only initiation into the mysteries and immortality but also a symbol for sexuality, generation, death and rebirth due to the creature’s ability to shed its skin of the old to reveal a shiny new skin underneath. The mythologized Serpent, of course, does appear in almost every culture around the world over. Genesis 3 relays how the Serpent offers knowledge in the form of a fruit grown from the Tree of Knowledge (the “Good ” and “Evil” part may have have been added later as a gloss.) Like the Serpent, the Tree of Knowledge is sometimes considered to be a phallic symbol. This Fruit along with the Tree also were used to signify the result or effect of some cause, having both a positive and a negative effect and origin.

The Two Trees.

The Tree of Knowledge and digesting the forbidden fruit in Genesis according to Jewish tradition represented the primeval mixture or intermingling of good and evil, light and darkness in an almost Manichean fashion. Eating the fruit forbidden set off a chain reaction where humanity developed a “yeitzer hara” or “evil inclination.” Unlike the earlier Hebrews, who blamed themselves for their woes, the Jewish Rabbis believed God had implanted in the ‘heart’, the Hebrew place of the unconscious of each individual, at his birth or conception. The yezer was not hereditary. It was intrinsically good and the source of creative energy, but had a strong potential for evil through appetite or greed. Only strict observance of the Law could keep the strong, irrational passions it engendered under control. To the commentators in the ﬁve centuries before Christ, Adam’s death was due to his own “sinful actions”, and not to the Augustine-authored “original sin nature” or “ancestral sin” inherent in the DNA in the race of man because of the disobedience of the primal parents. The Zohar claims that Adam and Eve lost their immortality by ingesting the fruit which is ironically enough compared to the occult:

Hear what saith scripture when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree by which death entered into their souls or lower nature, ‘And when they heard the voice of the Lord of the Alhim walking in the garden’ (Gen. iii-8), or, as it ought to be rendered, had walked (mithhalech). Note further that whilst Adam had not fallen, he was a recipient of divine wisdom (hochma) and heavenly light and derived his continuous existence from the Tree of Life to which he had free access, but as soon as he allowed himself to be seduced and deluded with the desire of occult knowledge, he lost everything, heavenly light and life through the disjunction of his higher and lower self, and, the loss of that harmony that should always exist between them, in short, he then first knew what evil was and what it entailed, and, therefore, it is written, ‘Thou art not a God that approveth wickedness, neither shall evil dwell with thee’ (Is. v-5); or, in other words, he who implicitly and blindly follows the dictates of his lower nature or self shall not come near the Tree of Life.

According to the Babylonian Talmud, Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden for just twelve hours before being unceremoniously thrown out. This is half a day in Paradise. That snake sure was a fast worker! Yahweh gave Adam and Eve the tour round Eden, told them what they could or couldn’t do and had no sooner turned his back than they were disobeying him and he had to expel them and sentence them, and the whole human race to come, to hell-fire for all eternity. Is that not the biggest (pardon this author’s french) fuck up of all time? It takes a spectacular degree of incompetence to screw things up that badly, so quickly. And yet the source who engineered this monumental disaster is supposed to be the Creator of the Universe, all-knowing and all-powerful, incapable of error! It is any wonder why the Gnostics called the creator god of Genesis as a dark and brutal god who was also given names such as: Samael (Blind One) and Saklas (idiot-retard)?

The Catholic Church Father Irenaeus mentions in Adv. Hear. 1, 29, 3, that the Barbelognostics revered the classic Qabalistic symbol of the “Tree, which itself they call Knowledge (gnosis).” This Tree is generated by two more primordial entities or “Aeons” called “Man” and “Knowledge.” It is hard to know just what his source for this passage may have been, for the kabbalistic symbol of the Tree does not figure in any of the surviving versions of the Apocryphon of John. There is, however, a passage in the Church Father Origen’s description in Contra Celsum of the diagrams of the cosmos envisaged by the Ophites:

And everywhere there, the Tree of Life, and the resurrection of flesh from the Tree …

This passage suggests that the form of the Tree had been imposed on the whole diagram. The Church Father Origen also gives a number of “ten circles”, the traditional number of the emanations or “sefiroth” associated with the cosmic spheres in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life – though roughly only seven of them can have planetary names. This image of the spiritual powers circling in the heavenly spheres, which the Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem has suggested entered Jewish esoteric teaching from Hellenistic-Egyptian traditions in the centuries before Christianity (or at least Christian gnosticism) arose bears also upon the enigma of the seven-headed form of Iao in the fourth sphere (as discussed in the Apocryphon of John), that of the Sun.

This idea of the Archons situated upon the astral “aerial toll houses” of Eastern Orthodoxy (and of course Gnosticism, especially in the First Apocalypse of James) does indeed seem to originate in ancient Egypt where the the Book of the Dead lists protective spells learned by initiates to guard against the dangerous “judges” during the post-mortem journey of the soul. Speculation in Christian and in Gnostic circles concerning the order of the celestial hierarchy hinged upon a few passages in the Pauline literature, which seem to imply, however, different sequences as Colassians 1:16 states:

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

The names of the authorities are as follows, featured and listed in the Ophite doctrine, refuted by Celsus in Contra Celsum:

Michael – lion, Souriel – bull, Raphael – serpent, Gabriel – eagle, Thauthabaoth – bear, Erathaoth – dog, Taphabaoth/Onoel – ass.

The sequence was composed using the figures of four biblical Cherubim, to whom three new personages were added. The animal forms are derived from the biblical story of the famous vision of Ezekiel as is the iconography of the four evangelists. Ezekiel had seen four monstrous beings in the shape of winged men with four faces: of a man, a lion, a bull and an eagle, on each of the four sides. Jerome connects this tetramorph with the Four Evangelists, being Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

05200

In the Trimorphic Protennoia, the Archons claim that they also were derived from a tree:

For as for our tree from which we grew, a fruit of ignorance is what it has; and also its leaves, it is death that dwells in them, and darkness dwells under the shadow of its boughs. And it was in deceit and lust that we harvested it, this (tree) through which ignorant Chaos became for us a dwelling place.

As mentioned in Part 1, the Gospel of John 15, 1-2 equates Christ with the vines and fruit of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, which also sounds vaguely Dionysian. Dionysus was also called the surname Dendritês, the god of the tree, which has the same import as Dasyllius, the giver of foliage.

The Gospel of Truth also equates the cross to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden:

He was nailed to a tree (and) he became fruit of the knowledge of the Father. It did not, however, cause destruction because it was eaten, but to those who ate it, it (cause) to become glad in the discovery, and he discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves.

The Gospel of Philip also makes the connection between the Tree of Life, the resurrection via the chrism (anointing) and Jesus Christ, explicit:

Philip the apostle said, “Joseph the carpenter planted a garden because he needed wood for his trade. It was he who made the cross from the trees which he planted. His own offspring hung on that which he planted. His offspring was Jesus, and the planting was the cross.” But the Tree of Life is in the middle of the Garden. However, it is from the olive tree that we got the chrism, and from the chrism, the resurrection.

Elsewhere in the Gospel of Philip, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is identified with the flesh and the Law (the lower natures as opposed to the pnuematic one). Using a riff from the Epistle to the Romans 7:7-11, the author says:

“It has the power to give knowledge of good and evil. It neither removed him from evil, nor did it set him in the good. Instead it created death for those who ate of it. For when it said, ‘Eat this. Do not eat that.’ it became the beginning of death.”

The pseudepigraphic Jewish-apocalypse Book of Enoch 31:4, describes this tree of knowledge in the midst of the “Garden of Righteousness”:

It was like a species of the Tamarind tree, bearing fruit which resembled grapes extremely fine; and its fragrance extended to a considerable distance. I exclaimed, How beautiful is this tree, and how delightful is its appearance!

Irenaeus’ pupil, Hippolytus would write in Against All Heresies (VI, 27) on how the Valentinians compared the Logos to the fruit of the Tree of Life:

This (one) is styled among them Joint Fruit of the Pleroma. These (matters), then, took place within the Pleroma in this way. And the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma was projected, (that is,) Jesus,— for this is his name—the great High Priest. Sophia, however, who was outside the Pleroma in search of Christ, who had given her form, and of the Holy Spirit, became involved in great terror that she would perish, if he should separate from her, who had given her form and consistency.

He also writes that the Father projected a warrior Aeon as a defense mechanism to protect the Aeonic realm of the Pleroma from the shapeless void created by the fallen Sophia, who is often shaped in a Cross:

Now this (Aeon) is styled Horos, because he separates from the Pleroma the Hysterema that is outside. And (he is called) Metocheus, because he shares also in the Hysterema. And (he is denominated) Staurus, because he is fixed inflexibly and inexorably, so that nothing of the Hysterema can come near the Aeons who are within the Pleroma.

This description also matches with Irenaeus’ account (Against Heresies 1.3.5) on how the Valentinian Christians viewed the hidden, metaphysical meaning and nature of the Cross:

“They show, further, that that Horos of theirs, whom they call by a variety of names, has two faculties,-the one of supporting, and the other of separating; and in so far as he supports and sustains, he is Stauros, while in so far as he divides and separates, he is Horos. They then represent the Saviour as having indicated this twofold faculty: first, the sustaining power, when He said, “Whosoever doth not bear his cross (Stauros), and follow after me, cannot be my disciple; ” and again, “Taking up the cross follow me; ” but the separating power when He said, “I came not to send peace, but a word.” They also maintain that John indicated the same thing when he said, “The fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge the floor, and will gather the wheat into His garner; but the chaff He will burn with fire unquenchable.” By this declaration He set forth the faculty of Horos. For that fan they explain to be the cross (Stauros), which consumes, no doubt, all material objects, as fire does chaff, but it purifies all them that are saved, as a fan does wheat. Moreover, they affirm that the Apostle Paul himself made mention of this cross in the following words: “The doctrine of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but to us who are saved it is the power of God.” And again: “God forbid that I should glory in anything save in the cross of Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I unto the world.”

In the above paragraph, Horos or Stauros (the cross of John) is the limit (X) of Plato’s Timaeus. Simon Magus taught this same exact thing as we will see below. The cross symbolizes the separation of powers and realms. It represents the apokatastasis, the Stoic conflagration, the baptism by fire. Paul the Apostle speaks of this fire that purifies and tries men’s works in 1 Corinthians 3:10-15. To be crucified to the world is to bear the symbol of the cross which is a flat-out denial of YHWH and the Elohim archons’ creation. It is to spit in the face of the Greek gods of fate like Socrates. It is hemlock to the flesh and to the spirit it is immortality.

It is the Cross of Christ, which in the Gnostic interpretation separates God from the manifest world, the uncreated, transcendent World of Forms from the Creator and the created realm, constituting a Separate and Hidden God. This limit in essence separates the “wheat from the tares”. At the same time, it also serves as a bridge between the saved sparks of light into the realm above. The extremely esoteric Sethian text, Allogenes, mentions a power or aeon by the name of “Kalyptos”, which can mean either “hidden” or “that which covers,” which may derive from the conception of the veil parting the higher from the lower realm. This power derives from the Aeon of Barbelo, which is also a state of being in which a spiritual power descends into matter. The position of Kalyptos comes very close to that of the Valentinian Horos, Stauros or Limit that separates the highest deity Bythos (Depth or Abyss) from the other Aeons that derive from him. This limit also functions though a second barrier between the “hysterema” of the material cosmos and the realm of the Aeons. Sophia also functions as a veil in On the Origin of the World.

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All of these concepts are also reflected in Origen’s Contra Celsum (6, 33) in which he states that that on the diameter of one of the circles a sword of fire was depicted, the same one that had driven Adam and Eve from the earthly Paradise. This flaming sword guarded the Tree of knowledge (gnosis) and of life (zoe). If the sword was above the black line of Tartarus, then the tree of knowledge and of life has to be the series of circles starting from Gnosis and Sophia and leading through the circle of Life to the Father. This could be similar to the Kabbalistic number of 777 being the sum the paths that the Lightening Path of Creation travels down through the Tree of Life. It is through this channel that the Luciferian motif of bringing the light of heaven to the World of Action becomes apparent.

In Contra Celsum, Origen reports Celsus’ comments on the Christians (the Ophite-Sethian Gnostics in reality), who called their baptismal rite “seal” (recalling the Five Seals of the Sethians); the person who placed the seal was called “father”; the one who received it was called “son” and “young man”, answering: “I am anointed with the white chrism of the tree of life”. Celsus further down describes the Christian belief of “tree of life” being both synonymous with Christ and the resurrection in 6:34:

And in all their writings (is mention made) of the ‘tree of life’ (τό της ζωης ξύλον), and a resurrection of the flesh by means of the ‘tree’ (από ξύλου), because, I imagine, their teacher was nailed to a cross (σταυρω ένηλώθη), and was a carpenter by craft (τέκτων τήν τεχνην)…

Celsus connects a so-called “tree of life,” and a resurrection by means of the “tree,” to Jesus’ execution: that he was nailed to an execution pole and his trade being carpenter, joiner. The relevant point Celsus is making here is that Jesus was suspended on some kind of pole, and secured to it with nails. Clearly, the parallels between the Ophite diagram and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with the circles shown to have numerical values, are there.

The Trimorphic Protennoia and the hermetic Discourse on Eighth and Ninth in the Nag Hammadi library pre-suppose numerical values for the manifestations of God, as does the system of Valentinus as described by his enemy, Irenaeus, which envisioned the theoretical attainment of 10 divine Aeons. He also develops a system consisting of about thirty Aeons, which would suggest that he had taken the simpler Ophite system and expanded it until it was almost uncontrollable. Even more interesting is in the Sethian text, Melchizedek, it portrays Adam and Eve defeating the guardians of the Tree of Life with their own weapon!

For when they ate of the tree of knowledge, they trampled the Cherubim and the Seraphim with the flaming sword.

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The Sephirothic Tree by Robert Fludd

The Qabalah or Kabbalah itself has many similarities with Gnosticism in their closely related teachings of the hidden God and hypostatization of God’s attributes. The Sephirot (or Enumerations, which also means “book” in Hebrew) are the ten emanations of God (or infinite light: Ein Sof Aur) into the universe. These emanations manifest not only in the physical part of the universe, but also in the metaphysical one. Kabbalah distinguish four different worlds or planes: Atziluth, or World of Emanations, where the Divine Archetypes live; Beri’ah or World of Creations, where Highest Ranking Angels are; Yetzirah or World of Formations is the astral world; and Asiyah or World of Actions, is the physical plane and “low astral” plane. Each of these worlds are progressively grosser and denser (one can see the strong Kabbalistic influence on Neo-Platonic thought here as well), but the ten Sephiroth manifest in all of them.

The Kabbalah is rooted in the Merkavah and Assyrian traditions, and the Kabbalah defines Sefirot is also based on the great visions described by Ezekiel. The Sephiroth constitutes the “Tree of Life”, and is aligned in three columns, each headed by a Supernal. The names of the Sephirot are: Kether (Crown), Chochman (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Chesed (Mercy), Gevurah (Severity), Tiphareth (Redeemer), Netzach (Victory), Hod (Majesty), Yesod (Foundation), Malkhuth (Kingdom). Some clear Christian and Gnostic associations on the Tree of Life is down the middle path, with Keter relating to the Father, which emanates into Tipharet relating to the Holy Ghost, and Christ as the Solar Logos and Savior, which emanates to Yesod, relating to the Son. This being the path by which God emanates into Malkut, the physical world

The Manichean Psalm CCXX illustrates the theme of matter receiving the spiritual Light rather well by using Tree imagery:

They rose, that they belong to Matter, the children of Error, desiring to uproot thy unshakable tree and plant it in their land. Matter and her sons divided me up amongst them, they burnt me in their fire, they gave me a bitter likeness.” … “I am the sweet water that is beneath the sons of Matter.

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Alchemical image of the Divine Sophia as a Tree of Learning and source of the Elixir of Life.

In Jewish Wisdom literature, it was Khokhmah who personified the female Divine. She is understood as an emanation of God, yet she resonates with the Hebrew Goddess who is otherwise assailed in the Old Testament, by Jehovah especially Asherah, the Queen of Heaven. Proverbs 3:18 calls up an image of Khokhmah that originates in the oldest core of Jewish culture: “She is a Tree of Life to all who lay hold of her.” In the same book, Khokhmah sings, “The one who finds me, finds life.” A similar aretalogy can be found in the Sethian text, Thunder-Perfect Mind. The creation story of the 2nd, Century Gnostic, Valentinus of Alexandria, the greatest of Sophia’s devotees, describes the origin and essence of the matter composing this world as emotionally and psychically consubstantial with Sophia as indicated by Irenaeus in Against Heresies, 5, 4:

This mother they also call Ogdoad, Sophia, Terra (Gaia), Jerusalem (cf. Gal. 4:26), Holy Spirit, and, with a masculine reference, Lord. Their mother dwells in that place which is above the heavens, that is, in the intermediate abode; the Demiurge in the heavenly place, that is, in the hebdomad; but the Cosmocrator in this our world. The corporeal elements of the world, again, sprang, as we before remarked, from bewilderment and perplexity, as from a more ignoble source. Thus the earth arose from her state of stupor; water from the agitation caused by her fear; air from the consolidation of her grief; while fire, producing death and corruption, was inherent in all these elements, even as they teach that ignorance also lay concealed in these three passions.

Furthermore, she knows:

the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the nature of animals and the tempers of wild animals, the powers of spirits and the thoughts of human beings, the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots… (Wisdom 7:15-22)

The imagery of the tree is also included in Simon Magus’s cosmology, as reported by Hippolytus of Rome, is a powerful model that describing some rare concepts that Simononians in the early third century work described in the Philosophumena, as the “Great Declaration” or “Great Announcement”. Simon very much describes a tree of fire that consumes itself. This is a third century Simonian document, positing that the root of all existence is infinite, and abides in man, who serves as its dwelling-house. The Logos or the Word is projected down by the luciferian Lightening Flash through the Aeons and into the manifest world and man. From the original root, the hidden principle, spring three pairs of manifestations of: Mind and Thought, Voice and Name, Reasoning and Reflection.

The Father is, moreover, “He that hath stood” in relation to premundane existence; “He that standeth” in relation to present being; and “He that shall stand” in relation to the final consummation. Man is simply the realization of “boundless power,” the ultimate end of the cosmic process in which the godhead attains self-consciousness. This infinite power works in all of the aeons as a compound name: He who stands, has stood, and will stand; a term alluded to in the Clementine Homilies and Recognition’s which say, that Simon Magus considered himself as the “Standing One” along with the “that power of God which is called Great”.

The Simonian author employs very Stoic language in describing what is hidden and revealed in the divine Fire, the original Boundless Power that is the stuff that the original Ineffable God is made of—the equivalent of the Qabalistic Ein Sof or Kether—the Crown. In this above entry (linked above) by Hippolytus, he refers to Simon’s theology of the “fruit from the Tree” as being the quintessential product of the human incarnation. The tripartite division of spirit, psyche and matter are simply manifest expressions of the original Stoic-like Divine Fire. This concealed fruit or “Hidden Power” which is another term that he used, requires a key in the conscious process of imagining or beholding a power to form mental images.

The Simonian author interestingly uses the term “imagining” as a reference of becoming divinized or be initiated into the mysteries. But this can only be manifested “if its imagining has been perfected and it takes the shape of itself.” Later, the text mentions a “storehouse” which is a room, located adjacent to a royal chamber within a palace where the gold, jewels and other wealth are stored. Here, the Simonian author is referring to the treasure-house and the storehouse, both concepts that are found within the Pistis Sophia that refer to a location within the “House of Many Mansions” of John 14:2.

Simon Magus also appealed to Matthew 12:33, as Hippolytus writes in Refutations of All Heresies VI, 11:

If, however, a tree continues alone, not producing fruit fully formed, it is utterly destroyed. For somewhere near, he says, is the axe (which is laid) at the roots of the tree. Every tree, he says, which does not produce good fruit, is hewn down and cast into fire.

This, of course, was also Marcion’s (and much later in Mani’s theological two principle system) main scriptural justification for his radical dualism in Christ’s maxim that a good tree does not bear evil fruit, nor does an evil tree bear bad fruit. So if we also interpret that in terms of origins, then the evil god could not possibly have originated from the good god, because good things do not produce evil things, and vice versa. The Gospel of Thomas says something very similar:

(45) Jesus said, “Grapes are not harvested from thorns, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they do not produce fruit. A good man brings forth good from his storehouse; an evil man brings forth evil things from his evil storehouse, which is in his heart, and says evil things. For out of the abundance of the heart he brings forth evil things.”

The fact is Simon had a similar doctrine that condemned false religion and predicted a final dissolution of the cosmos, presumably dissolved in fire, so that Simon’s elect can be redeemed, viz. the Great Announcement; Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, 6:14; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23.3.

These words from Simon and John resonate with a key saying of Jesus in Matthew 7:17-20,

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

This was a key saying used by the Gnostics and Marcionites. Could it be that this metaphor originated from John the Baptist, from whom Simon also learned this same metaphor?

Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judaea, and all the region round about Jordan, And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: And think not to say within yourselves, that you have Abraham for your father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” (Cf. John 8:39, 44; 1:17-18)

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In the text On the Origin of the World, it states that the tree of life and the tree of gnosis are situated “to the north of Paradise” and is identified as Epinoia. The Greek name Epinoia carries the meaning of “understanding” or “thought” or “purpose”. She is sent to dwell within Adam, her role being to give him consciousness of his divine origins and the way to return to the Pleroma. The author of On the Origin of the World makes a positive evaluation of the Garden of Eden:

And the tree of eternal life is as it appeared by God’s will, to the north of Paradise, so that it might make eternal the souls of the pure, who shall come forth from the modelled forms of poverty at the consummation of the age. Now the color of the tree of life is like the sun. And its branches are beautiful. Its leaves are like those of the cypress. Its fruit is like a bunch of grapes when it is white. Its height goes as far as heaven. And next to it (is) the tree of knowledge (gnosis), having the strength of God. Its glory is like the moon when fully radiant. And its branches are beautiful. Its leaves are like fig leaves. Its fruit is like a good appetizing date. And this tree is to the north of Paradise, so that it might arouse the souls from the torpor of the demons, in order that they might approach the tree of life and eat of its fruit, and so condemn the authorities and their angels.

This depiction is in stark contrast with how the the Apocryphon of John depicts Eden as more of a zoo-like prison of the authorities:

And the archons took him and placed him in paradise. And they said to him, ‘Eat, that is at leisure,’ for their luxury is bitter and their beauty is depraved. And their luxury is deception and their trees are godlessness and their fruit is deadly poison and their promise is death. And the tree of their life they had placed in the midst of paradise.

The Apocalypse of Moses is primarily an account about Adam’s death, its cause and cure. Seth is procured along with Adam’s many other children which leads Adam to recount briefly the story of the temptation, the fall, and the the first parents’ punishment in chapters 7-8. Adam’s narrative explains the reason for his present plight. Adam then subsequently sends his wife Eve and son Seth to paradise in search of the oil of mercy that will bring him relief. (9:3) On the way to the garden, Seth is attacked by a beast (in chapters 10-12) which seems to be evidence that God’s curse in Genesis 3:15 is in effect. Adam’s request to be saved is subsequently denied.

(The oil of Mercy) will not be yours now, but at the ends of the times. Then will arise all flesh from Adam to the great day …. , and then all the joy of paradise will be given to them. … (13:2-4)

Adam knows he is going to die and later on in Chapters 22-29, God appears in paradise on his chariot while accompanied by his angels. His throne is fixed, and he indicts and sentences his creatures from the consequences of the fall being spelled out in detail in chapters 24-26. Adam seeks the oil of mercy but God commands the angels to get on with the expulsion (27:4-28:1). Again Adam pleads, this time for access to the Tree of Life (28:2). God’s response to Adam’s plea is met with a reproof:

You shall not take from it now … if you keep yourself from all evil, as one about to die, when again the resurrection comes to pass, I shall raise you up. And then there shall be given to you from the tree of life. (28:3-4)

Another time, Adam pleads with God for herbs from Eden to offer incense and seeds to grow food. God is kind enough to grant this request before Adam and Eve are kicked out from the garden in Chapter 29. The text concludes on a solemn yet promising note which expands on Genesis 3:19:

I told you that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Again I promise you the resurrection. I shall raise you up to the last day, in the resurrection, with every man who is of your seed. (41:2-3)

In the concluding portion of the book, it describes Eve’s death and her burial by Seth, who is commanded to bury in this fashion everyone who dies until the day of the resurrection. These ideas are also reflected in the apocryphal the Book of the Cave of Treasures, where the dying Adam assembles his sons, including Seth for a request to embalm him with myrrh, cassia and balsam and to leave his body in the Cave of Treasures, situated at a side of a high mountain but below paradise.

Seth himself was also considered to be the archetypal father and savior of the Gnostics, resulting from the Jewish exegesis and combination of various biblical themes: (1) that of “the sons of God” in Gen 6:4 (LXX), (2) that of Seth as “another seed” appointed by God in place of the slain Abel in Gen 4:25, who (3) was fathered by Adam as a son in his own likeness and image according to Gen 5:3.

These themes, in combination with Gen 1:26, concerning the god “Man” created in the image and likeness of God, implied the divine nature of Seth, the “planter” of the heavenly seed (Gen 4:25). Seth would recover from “the great aeons” the glory that had left Adam and Eve at their Fall, caused by the Ialdabaoth. Seth would preserve his seed against the repeated attempts of Ialdabaoth to steal it by keeping it separate from the lustful seed of Cain which came from the Archons. At the end of time, Seth (or Sophia in On the Origin of the World) would destroy Ialdabaoth and his followers in a Revelations-styled apocalypse and reinstate his seed, the part of mankind untainted by lust, into its original glory. The strongest instant that we see Seth as a Gnostic Savior is in the Apocalypse of Adam, where Adam tells his son Seth:

And the glory in our hearts left us, me and your mother Eve, along with the first knowledge that breathed within us.

Later, Adam called his son “by the name of that man who is the seed of the great generation as a planter of the righteous seed”, recalling 1 Corinthians 15: 35-49 by Paul the Apostle, who compared the resurrection to a seed. Paul states that when a plant sprouts forth from the seed, and the remnants of the seed whither away. The plant came from the seed, but the plant isn’t the seed, and the seed isn’t the plant. They’re two distinct things, and the plant doesn’t come to life until the seed dies. So what Paul is saying is that spirit is deposited as a seed in the body, and it remains a seed until the body dies and decomposes. Then the spirit sprouts forth from the body, and the body is transmuted into a spiritual body, which also recalls the Parable of the Sower in Matthew, Mark and Thomas. It isn’t reanimation of a corpse at all as Catholic Church Fathers such as Irenaeus and especially Tertullian, have maintained (Against Heresies, 5.12.1, De Resurrectione Carnis). Paul’s theology concerning the spiritual resurrection isn’t so far removed from the ideas expressed in the Great Announcement:

…the manifested side corresponds to the trunk, limbs, leaves, and encasing bark. All these members of the tree are set ablaze from the all-consuming flame of the fire and destroyed. But as for the fruit of the tree, if it’s for is perfect and it assumes the true shape, it is gathered into the storehouse, not thrown into the fire.

Here, the vegetation and tree motifs are evident. Returning to the Gnostics—is it from Seth’s descendants who would possess the Gnosis. The Apocryphon of John suggests that Sophia prepared a place for the souls in heaven, where Jesus, the incarnation of the aeon Christ would disclose the true knowledge of how to return to their true home in with the Spirit (in Pleroma), where they would ascend past the rulers (archons) and their astral spheres and be healed of all deficiency and become holy and faultless. To gain these higher realms, one must ascend above the Seven Heavens of Chaos into the Aeons as stated in the Gospel of the Egyptians:

Then there came forth from the great aeons four hundred ethereal angels, accompanied by the great Aerosiel and the great Selmechel, to guard the great, incorruptible race, its fruit, and the great men of the great Seth, from the time and the moment of Truth and Justice, until the consummation of the aeon and its archons, those whom the great judges have condemned to death.

The Apocryphon of John spells it out in a more concise manner:

And he placed seven kings – each corresponding to the firmaments of heaven – over the seven heavens, and five over the depth of the abyss, that they may reign. And he shared his fire with them, but he did not send forth from the power of the light which he had taken from his mother, for he is ignorant darkness.

Origen, despite being one of the Church Fathers (and theological enemies of the Gnostics), he actually had a doctrine very much influenced by Platonism (but stood firmly against groups like the Valentinians and Marcionites). Origen also did not accept the historicity of the Bible nor did he interpret it literally. One example of this can be taken from De Prinicipiis, 4.1.16, where he discusses the Genesis creation myth more as an allegory:

No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it.” And “those who are not altogether blind can collect countless instances of a similar kind recorded as having occurred, but which did not literally take place? Nay, the Gospels themselves are filled with the same kind of narratives; for example, the devil leading Jesus up into a high mountain, in order to show him from thence the kingdoms of the whole world, and the glory of them.

Likewise, the Valentinians viewed scripture as allegorical on three different levels that corresponded to the three natures. The earlier Gnostics viewed the Old Testament as a symbolic record of the struggle between Yaldabaoth-Jehovah and Sophia as testified in Irenaeus’ account in Against Heresies, VII, 3:

They maintain, moreover, that those souls which possess the seed of Achamoth are superior to the rest, and are more dearly loved by the Demiurge than others, while he knows not the true cause thereof, but imagines that they are what they are through his favour towards them. Wherefore, also, they say he distributed them to prophets, priests, and kings; and they declare that many things were spoken (7) by this seed through the prophets, inasmuch as it was endowed with a transcendently lofty nature. Themother also, they say, spake much about things above, and that both through him and through the souls which were formed by him. Then, again, they divide the prophecies [into different classes], maintaining that one portion was uttered by the mother, a second by her seed, and a third by the Demiurge. In like manner, they hold that Jesus uttered some things under the influence of the Saviour, others under that of the mother, and others still under that of the Demiurge, as we shall show further on in our work.

As we can see, the Tree was an important universal symbol for not only the Gnostics, Simonians, Valentinians, etc, but to groups like the Jewish-Kabbalists, alchemists and many occult groups throughout the ages. The Tree is highly associative with the idea of the descent and crucifixion (and eventual ascent and resurrection) of spirit into and from matter as seen in Sophia-Achamoth’s fall from the celestial world and into the prima materia which parallels the Genesis account of the fall of Eve, the “mother of the living”. In Plato’s Timaeus, do we find the account of the Fall of Atlantis, (as strange as it might sound) which could be read as symbolic of the Divine tragedy and catastrophe so predominant in Gnostic cosmology and theology.

In Part 4, we will investigate a possible Gnostic exegesis of the Atlantis myth and other Greek tales, the Gnostic science of human physiology and the mind relating to Genesis, where and how exactly Orthodox theology developed from and ultimately became victorious as a common religious Christian doctrine, along with some concluding final thoughts on this series.

theaeoneye.com/2013/05/14/forbidden-fruit-in-the-midst-of...

While blazing clouds grew intense by ScorpioOnSUP

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Once the sun began sinking behind the horizon, the sky started burning. Flames spread like uncontrollable wildfire. The ocean was completely engulfed by a mixture of orange and purple glow. The glistening surface was simply hypnotizing. While the blazing clouds grew intense by the minute, the crevices were overflowing with gushing water. Completely dazed by what was unfolding before my eyes, I almost forgot to press the remote shutter button.

Picnic in the neighoring woods - summer 1955 by Ed Yourdon

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I'm pretty sure these were the same woods where I subsequently got shot in the face with an arrow. Details in the notes below ..

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Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website

www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html

and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:

www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html

Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.

So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.

For now, here is a random list of things I remember:

1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.

2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.

3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.

4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.

5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.

6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).

7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.

8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.

9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.

10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted.

11. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.

Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.

Ship-timber Beetle (Atractocerus crassicornis), Singapore by Jun (still here with you 🌱)

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The Ultimate Drilling Machine -

I don’t look like a straight face antlion. I don’t resemble a scorpion fly with curved sting. What am I? To address your curiosity, let’s take a look at a remaining enigma. You remember the Titanic? Scientists put the blame on an iceberg or uncontrollable fire that caused unsinkable Titanic to dip. Accurately there was a part that entomologists don’t dare to footnote. A weird-bird, a teeny insect is the one that stirred the biggest crime in historic mysteries. What? Don’t be shock at what I’m about to snitch. Titanic, the 25,000 ton ship was constructed from stainless steel alright, but the metal pins (3 million in total) that held the vessel together were made of... wood! Who would have known? It all started when the skipper brought me in his cabin to feed his pet toad but I escaped from the fallible hands of the second mate. He had absolutely no idea how much I love timber, dead or alive. Once I hit the soft spot of a hardwood, my lips contort into a rotary tool at escalating speed. O what a stimulation working like a dentist in boring frenzy. Ha! The repulsed wood must have felt giddy because she vomited out her refuse everywhere on the floor. Some of the guests complained, thus the room steward swept diligently behind each and every door. Nobody understands why the baffling carpet of sawdust returns night after night with no culprits in sight. Four days was all it took to split the massive haul into two steamboats. I jumped ship at the last moment to avoid the ocean’s icy folds. Thankfully my wasted wings though extremely short are competent enough to steer my unnecessarily long body to new shore. So here I am from Southampton to Singapore. Bosch will bore as long as you pay your electricity bill. By contrast, I am driven by innate passion to gyrate. You decide which is better. Call me anytime if your home needs to drill a hole.

Wistera is no more by jennifer

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Sadly I had to cut down my wistera from my porch. It was a gift from my daughter (Melissa_Dawn). It just grows uncontrollably, and it got to be to much to take care of. I will miss it. boo-hoo

"Forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that made you smile." by elisa aka stjernesol

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~ unknown ~

Britannia Shipyard Infrared 6996e by Harris Hui

40 118

We had a sunny afternoon on Sunday. Bright sunny day is good infrared day to me. So I went to Britannia Shipyard and had a few IR shots.

How can we have fresh views on the familiar scenes? We shoot them in different light.

- shoot them on sunrise

- shoot them at sunset

- shoot day time long exposure

- shoot them at night

- shoot them in back light

- shoot them in blue hours

To achieve more drastic redefinition of tones, we strip off the colors and we take B&W shots.

To do even more aggressive re-distribution of tones, we take infrared shots. Infrared is the typical example of “what you see is not what get” in photography.

We cannot accurately project how the scene will look like in infrared since things have different reflectivity with infrared.

It is more and more becoming a guess work to me when I do infrared. But this is the part with most fun. There has to be something not totally under your control and that is where the fun comes from. It is very different from something you try to do with editing software.

Happy Monday and happy week to all of you!

Twirling Blanket by Tracy Adams

6 3

I spotted this young woman walking haphazardly down the sidewalk dragging a blanket. Her head would bob up and down and she would seem to twirl about uncontrollably. Seeing her hair piece and blanket flutter about was like watching a leaf caught in a gust of wind that won't let go. Beautiful and sad to watch.

Secondary Bakery and Deli Signs by Retail Retell

11 5

WEEK 42 – Hdo WM, Post-Remodel, Set V

This is strange… normally I wake up at 10AM for my TTh classes, and I’m pretty tired by the time the evening rolls around and I get to sit down and write my descriptions for Saturday. Today, I was rudely awoken in the 7AM hour (it’s a long story, but to try and summarize it, it’s thanks to an uncontrollable fire alarm in my apartment complex that goes off all. the. time. and is impossible to sleep through once it does start sounding), and, in anger, said frig it (but with a more choice word) and decided to go on a two-mile walk around campus. In the cold (for Mississippi) morning temperatures. Two things I never do: go on two-mile walks, or go outside in the cold without a jacket. The point I’m trying to get to here is, somehow, I’ve actually felt more awake today despite having gotten less sleep and being more aggravated than normal in the morning than I do on a regular Thursday. Like I said… it’s strange.

Anyhow, it’s a good thing I’m feeling good today, because that means I’m in a good position to take us all through the home stretch of this semester’s Hernando Walmart post-remodel photos! We’re kicking off set 5 of 5 today with this look behind the bakery counter, which shows a close-up of the original BD1.0 tile I told y’all about last time, as well as several new auxiliary signs for the deli and bakery which were added several months after the remodel wrapped up. I had tried for a few days to get a photo like this, only for an employee behind the counter to inevitably appear every single time (!), but thankfully I was finally able to get this one to turn out nicely back on December 15th, 2016 :) I like the signs – do you?

These places are public so these photos are too, but just as I tell where they came from, I'd appreciate if you'd say who :)

[SW The Dark Mercenary] Chapter 10 - Tremor of Darkness by Director KW

(Coruscant, Jedi Temple, one week after the Battle of Taris)

Coruscant. The core world of the inner galactic systems of the Galactic Republic and home of the Jedi Order. For nearly a thousand years has gone by since a battle had taken place on the planet by the Sith. From that, Coruscant has been war free of any major conflict, giving the citizens of the Republic a haven of pure peace and safety.

But not everything is what it seems. There always seems to be a hidden darkness somewhere, looming around the entire planet. Even the light itself cannot penetrate the source of its darkness.

Inside the Jedi Temple, Master Gulio stares across the room in deep thought with an expression of sadness upon his face. By the large window, Master Yoda himself gazes through the city of Coruscant, watching each passing vehicles passing by every second near the Jedi Temple. But it seemed that Master Yoda was also deep in thought, with much focus and disturbance on his face.

Both Jedi Masters have been silent for nearly thirty minutes every since Gualo entered Master Yoda's main chambers. Whatever they were pondering so much on was no question that whatever it is, was a very serious matter. However, the long silence was broken when another older Master, Coneros Witress, entered the chambers as his eyes met with the two other Jedi Masters across the room.

Coneros- "You summoned me, Masters?"

Gulio- "Yes we have, Coneros. We wish to speak you about some...previous events."

Coneros- "Uh...very well?"

As the confused Jedi Master takes his seat, Master Yoda walks away from the window as he slowly goes to take his own seat in the middle. The atmosphere around them all was intense and heavy.

Coneros- "So what is this about Masters? Is it about the Separatist? Dooku, perhaps?"

Gulio- "Not just the Separatist...but about our Republic forces and fellow Jedi in the Order."

Master Yoda- "Received reports from Taris, Republic Intelligience have. A battle taken place recently it has, between the two armies."

This somewhat surprised Coneros at the least. He was unaware of any battles that had recently taken place, besides the recent assault of Christophis.

Coneros- "I was under the oppression that Taris was heavily fortified under Separatist control?"

Gulio- "At first it was, but the situation had changed..."

Master Yoda- "Leading the Separatist defenses, Sith Acolyte Gualo Rotinth was. Killed in action, he was, by a few of our Jedi brethren."

Coneros- "Our own? Who were they?"

Gulio- "Master Turin Dehais was one of them. We had recently sent him undercover in order to get some insight on some of our Republic forces from within. Apparently, some of them were having doubts about us and the Jedi Order.

Coneros- "But why would the Clones be having doubts about us? Aren't they programmed to not have those kind of feelings or thoughts?"

Gulio- "It would seemed that the Clones have been allowed to have their own personalities and free will of thoughts, which is said that it had lead them to doubt our abilities. But to the point...Turin was leading the assault under his command. He was going by the name of Lieutenant Higer, a Republic officer that was highly recommended for the past few years before the war started. But sadly, Master Dehais was killed in action by the Dark Acolyte, Gualo."

Coneros- "I...haven't heard the news."

Master Yoda- "Close, were you?"

Coneros- "Of course. He was one of the Masters that helped train my apprentice for quite some time. Turin loved and adored him like his own son."

Gulio- "Yes...about your apprentice, Master Coneros.

Coneros- "What about him?"

Master Yoda- "On the planet, he apparently was. Kedone Witress, he was known by the others. Helped Turin in the fight, but to only see him pass unexpectedly."

Coneros grew wide eyed. His apprentice was on Taris? That couldn't be right, Kydan was suppose to be somewhere else!

Coneros- "That can't be right! Kydan told me that he was assigned for a medical relief on Ryloth!"

Master Yoda- "Assigned to him, that mission was not."

Coneros- "So why then? What was he doing there?"

Both Masters Gulio and Yoda glanced at each other silently, sorrow and guilt implanted on their faces. Master Yoda spoke up first to hault the silence.

Master Yoda- "Tell him, we must."

Coneros- "Tell me what?"

Gulio- *Sighs* "...Your not gonna like it, I guarantee you that."

Coneros- "It can't be any worse than I could imagine it to be."

Gulio- "...Very well......Master Turin, Kydan, and one of our promising padwans that we sent with Turin, Padawan Calena Irune, attacked the planet Taris with only two heavily armed Acclamator-Class Cruisers, carrying only a batallion of Clone Troopers and a whole platoon of Bounty Hunters, Smugglers and Mercenaries. It seemed that it only took them eight hours to recapture the planet, killing General Gualo Rotinth in the process. Though, almost the entire batallion was killed and the platoon was completely wiped out. Then, Master Turin was killed in the very end."

Coneros- "Alright, but your still not telling me what happened to my nephew."

Gulio gave him a worried look. He was at the point of not able to tell him about his apprentice's decision that he chose afterwards. He knew the boy very well, even sparred with him over the years. He and Kydan were like brothers. Yet, telling Coneros about something awful about him would seem to be over the line.

However, Gulio was about to speak when Master Yoda spoke up for him.

Master "Yoda- Your apprentice...gone he is. A Jedi, he is no longer not. A mercenary, he has become."

Coneros' expression turn to a complete state of shock. He was totally speechless. His apprentice...left the Jedi Order? A mercenary? No, that couldn't be right!

Coneros- "I...I don't...understand. Why would he...?"

Gulio- "In Padawan Calena's reports, it seemed that he was trying to protect the entire Jedi Order from the Clone's standard point of views. He thought that in order to protect the Jedi, he would lie and tell everyone that he was this...Dark Mercenary, neither a Jedi nor a Sith... but rather, something else."

Coneros was now completely confused. The story didn't really add up to him.

Coneros- "He did it...so he could protect us?"

Gulio- "Apparently so..."

Master Yoda- "Clouded, his future is. Confused and in pain, he suffers through."

Coneros- "...I don't...know what to say. My apprentice? Leaving the Jedi Order behind? I hardly ever saw this coming..."

Gulio- "Coneros, I know you and Kydan share a close bond with each other-

Coneros- "He is like a son to me. I have raised him ever since his father died when he was still a small boy. I had promised my brother and his wife that I would protect the boy no matter what. But this? I can't even..."

Sitting up, Coneros makes his way towards the window and looks above the high buildings and traffic. He pondered for a bit, thinking about what to do next.

Coneros- ...I have to find him.

Master Yoda- His path, alone he must take.

Coneros- But Master--

Master Yoda- Allies he has, many more he will soon gain. Worried, you should not.

Closing his eyes slowly, Master Yoda hums in deep meditation. His mind trying to be one with the Force, his thoughts racing through his older mind.

Master Yoda- "Hmm...unexpected allies, he too will travel. Shadowed is his future."

Gulio- "Like who, Master Yoda?"

Master Yoda- "...Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future."

He reopens his eyes and stares at Gulio and Coneros.

Master Yoda- "His future, clouded by the dark side, it is. Kydan's fate, his actions it will all depend."

Coneros- "So what? Do we just sit here and let him do what he wants, Master? We and the Council knows what he's capable of. He is a major threat to everyone out there, even to the Republic!"

Gulio- "And so is he to the Separatist. Coneros, I'm sure he'll make the right decisions. You have trained him well enough to do that, have you not?"

Coneros stared at Gulio with sadness and disappointment. He didn't want this. He didn't want his apprentice to fall to the dark side like this. He already went through one family member falling, he didn't need his one and only nephew to fall either. But like Gulio and Yoda said, he had trained him enough to know his rights and wrongs, to make his own decisions wisely. He knew that they were both right.

Coneros- *Sighs* "...Yes."

Gulio- "Then you know that he'll survive on his own, whether he's still a Jedi in the inside or not. In a way, he might surprise all of us."

Standing up from his seat and stretching his muscles, he looks towards the other two Masters.

Gulio- "Well I'm off, I must prepare for my upcoming assignment for tomorrow. We are to head to the front lines immediately."

Master Yoda- "May the Force be with you then, Master Gulio."

Gulio- "And with you Master Yoda...and Coneros?"

Coneros looked over to Gulio who was giving him a comforting smile.

Gulio- "Have patience, my old friend. He will return when he thinks he ready to."

Coneros nodded in agreement silently. He still felt the utter sadness in him, even if what Gulio said was true. Bowing one last time, Gulio walks towards the door and out of the chambers, leaving Masters Yoda and Coneros alone. After what seemed like an eternity, Master Yoda finally spoke up.

Master Yoda- "Concerned for your Padawan, hmm?

Coneros- "Yes Master. I know the code forbids a Master and an apprentice to share such a close bond. But all my years of training him, he's been like my own...

Master Yoda- A son to you, has he become?"

Coneros- "...Yes, Master Yoda."

Master Yoda- "Hmm...dangerous this is Coneros. A fear of lost is a path to the dark side."

Coneros- "I know, Master. But it's something I cannot control myself.

Master Yoda- If anything, rejoice for your times together. Mourn him do not, shed him do not. Self-attachments is a part of possession. A part of greed, that is."

Coneros- "So what I am to do, Master?"

Master Yoda- "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose. Kydan's attachment to you, close this bond for now you must, until another time is decided."

Coneros hesitated to reply. Closing off the bond with his Padawan? It was bad enough to hear that he left the Order, but to separate their bond just like that? Even though he knew this would be hard, he believed that Master Yoda was right. He needed to let his Padawan go and do things his way.

Coneros- *Sighs and nods sadly* "Yes, Master Yoda...I understand."

Master Yoda- "Very good. Now, back to teachings, I must go. Younglings, patiently awaiting me, they are."

Master Coneros- "I best be getting back to mine as well."

Bowing to the old Jedi Master, Master Yoda slowly starts to exit the room.

Coneros- "Um...Master?"

Master Yoda- "Hm, yes?"

Coneros- "...Thank you for telling me personally. I don't know how I would react if I have found out on my own."

Master Yoda- "A great Master you have become, Coneros. Seen you rise in the ranks of the Jedi Order, I have. Become a great Jedi Master in the Council, soon you will."

Coneros- "Thank you Master. I wish I could have helped my Padawan do the same."

Pondering for a moment, Master Yoda thinks of some wisdom for Coneros. That's when he smiled.

Master Yoda- "Perhaps one day, you can. His future, still undetermined it is. In the end, close allies and friends he will still have. A great teacher like you, he will one day become."

With that, Master Yoda exits the room, hoping that his somewhat wisdom had helped ease Coneros' concern for the boy. As Master Yoda leaves the room, Coneros walks back towards the window, thinking about what Yoda had just said. He really hope that Kydan will be what he said. But he still couldn't shake off the worry and concern for his nephew.

Coneros- "I hope your right, Master Yoda. I really hope your right..."

_________________________

(A few hours later after the brief discussion in Master Yoda's chambers)

Gulio- "Do you think he is really ready, Master Fisto?"

Kit Fisto- "He has come a long way in the ranks of the Jedi. The Council and I agree that he is to be the next General for the Grand Army of the Republic, as well as his Padawan going through the trials of becoming a Jedi Knight."

Gulio- "I don't disagree with the Council's decisions on those two, nor am I trying to sound disapproving. But him being in high command of the Grand Army? Surely I would think probably of perhaps Master Kenobi, or Master Plo."

It wasn't that Gulio didn't trust his fellow Jedi, it was the other way around. The other Jedi reminded him of another young Jedi in the Order that was stubborn, living for the adventure and never looking towards the present. It just seemed to soon for the Jedi to be Generals of war just yet. In fact, to fight a war at all.

Kit Fisto- "I know your judgement of him is different, but the decision has been made. We must honor the Council's wishes."

Gulio- "I have no doubts. But I just hope were not making a wrong decision, Master Fisto."

Kit Fisto- "I guess we'll have to wait and see Master Gulio. Now come on, we are to tell them both in person."

Gulio- "Of course."

_________________________

(Half an hour later...)

Kit Fisto- ...By the rights of the Council and the Republic, we have come to the decision that you would be the next General of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Gulio- Congratulations, Master Hecilt.

Hecilt- Thank you Masters. This is truly an honor. I will not fail the Republic nor the Order, no matter the cost.

Kit Fisto- We all know that you will do your best Hecilt. It hasn't been long, but it seems you've improved extremely well. We are sure that you will do what you can as General.

Gulio- Now, as for you young Padawan...

The seventeen year old padawan woman comes forth to the Masters. She wore a black Jedi robe and has long brown color hair that stops to the tip of her waist, her eyes colored in an emerald green. She seemed quite nervous in front of the Masters.

Gulio- "Padawan Calena? After much of your training training, patients, trials and your excellent skills with your speed and fighting techniques, we are happy and please to announce that you are welcomed to join the ranks of the Jedi Knights."

That news caught her off guard. She didn't seem to see that one coming at all.

Calena- "Th-that's...Th-thank you Gulio--I-I mean, thank you Masters. I promise to do my best."

The Masters silently laughed within themselves, a genuine smile formed on their faces. Her enthusiasm reminded them so much of what they went through when they were just Padawans themselves. It overjoyed them, to say, and they really couldn't be happier for her. Hecilt approaches his apprentice, putting his hand upon her shoulder as he gently squeezed.

Hecilt- "Now my apprentice, remember everything that I taught you, and you will do just fine."

Calena- "I will Master. I promise, I won't let you down."

Hecilt- *Smirks* "I know you won't. I have taught you everything I know. Now...it's time for you to move up to Knighthood, my old apprentice."

Kit Fisto- "So? Shall we begin with the trials then, padawan?"

Calena- *Smiles* "Yes, of course, Master Fisto."

Smiling, Master Fisto and Calena leave the chambers to prepare for her trials as Masters Gulio and Hecilt follow closely behind.

Hecilt- "She has come a long way Gulio."

Gulio- "Yes she has. We thought it was crazy when we brought her here when she was at a mere age of eight...and yet, we seemed to underestimate her. Her skills, speed and abilities of the Force have grown tremendously. She shows much promise as a member of the Irune Clan."

Hecilt- "Who knows, maybe she'll be a Jedi Master sooner than we think."

Gulio couldn't help but laugh at Hecilt's comment. Even though she was still young, anything could be possible.

Gulio- "Perhaps one day, my friend. Perhaps one day indeed."

_________________________

(Separatist Space, one month after the Battle of Taris)

In unknown Separatist space, aboard the Providence-class Carrier/Destroyer flagship, the Gyroosa, Lord Nedoura had just begun to report the news to his masters and allies. The situation, however, would soon get ugly for him as he stared upon the three holograms before him.

???- "What news from the fronts, General?"

Grevious- "The Republic is slowly moving upwards, my lord. Ever since the takeover of Taris and Christophis as of recent, the Republic have found multiple ways of countering our fleets in nearby borders of Republic systems."

Dooku- "We only have little concern of that, General Grevious. However, I am not able to coup with the loss of Taris. With the reports that we had received earlier...is somewhat disturbing."

Grevious- *Snarls* "The boy..."

Grevious and Dooku both had the looks of much anger and infuriation in their eyes. Ever since they learned about the downfall of their forces on Taris, they had to take their plans a step back because of some mere boy and his soldiers earning a victory against them. However, Nedoura didn't seem deterred by the situation whatsoever.

Nedoura- "He seems to have grown stronger since the start of the Clone Wars..."

Grevious- "You should have taken him while you had the chance! We could have saved one of our nearby planets if it wasn't for him!"

Nedoura- "It was not the time yet--"

Grevious- "Do not give us excuses, Nedoura! If you had just--"

???- "ENOUGH!"

Their master's voice crackled loud through the holograms, as well as giving a small tremor in the Force itself. It seemed that their Emperor had enough of their small debate over the boy.

???- "The boy is nothing but a immature mercenary. His act on Taris was but an example of what he could really do."

Dooku- But would he not be a threat to us, master?

???- "Perhaps...but also to the Jedi. They had tried to tame him under secrecy, and yet, they couldn't hold him down with a leash long enough. We will be cautious and watch the boy for now."

Grevious- "And then what? What if he becomes a major threat?"

The Dark Lord looked over to his apprentice and acolytes with a devious and evil smile. That look alone could have scared the daylights out of any alien or human.

???- "He will either join us...or die. But until then, we need to move forward with my plans."

Dooku- "Yes, my master. We had just sent a few fleets to some nearby trade routes in Republic territory. It shouldn't be long until we have control of the trading routes."

???- "Good, good. General, have your fleets ready to move on with capturing the home planet of Kamino. We will need to delay their armies a bit longer in order to fully move on."

Grevious- "At once, my lord."

With Grevious' hologram disappearing, the Emperor turned to his Grand Acolyte

???- "Grand Acolyte, is our fleets ready for control?"

Nedoura- "Yes, Emperor. Aeton II, Corellia and a few other planets are just days away of being conquered. It shall not be much longer."

???- "Excellent. You have both done well. Make sure my plans do not deter any further. And continue to monitor the whereabouts of the boy and the Jedi.

Nedoura- At once, my lord."

Dooku- "Understood, my master."

With that, both the Emperor and Count Dooku's holograms disappeared, revealing nothing but the view of Nedoura's massive fleet in space. It didn't take too long before a chime sound was heard from the room.

Nedoura- "Appear."

The doors silently slid open, revealing two figures wearing Sith robes and armor. One wore a torned cape with a black bandanas covering half his face. The other looked cybernetic, wearing an armored chest plate and shoulder pads, along with a breather mask. They both walked up to the Grand Inquisitor and they kneel before him.

???- "Our lord..."

Nedoura- "Report, my acolytes. Are we ready to advance with our operations?"

???- Yes, Lord Nedoura. The fleets are already mobilized and ready for departure. We shall have news from them very soon.

Nedoura- "Excellent. Any news from the boy?"

???- "Yes, Nedoura. We recently received reports that he was in the Carida system aiding Republic forces into capturing the planet. It also mentioned that his powerd and skills have proven quite a lot since then."

That little information gave him a wicked grin to grow on his face. He was correct after all; the boy was getting stronger by the days, and he would soon be able to hone his special abilities sooner than he would expect.

Nedoura- "Excellent. Then it will not be long before he is ready then..".

???- "My lord, I have to ask...do you really think keeping our plans from Lord Sidious a secret is a good idea? Would he not sense betrayal and deception from us?"

Nedoura- "Do not concern yourselves over that nonsense, my acolytes. Sidious will know soon enough. Our plans is what will help create his future Empire, after all."

???- "And what of the Witronian boy, master?"

Nedoura- "Simple..."

Nedoura turned back to the hologram, now revealing an image of a under construction structure that was not yet completed. Nedoura's expression became a smile and his eyes started to glow yellow.

Nedoura- "Once my nephew is ready...we shall have him by joining us, or take him by force. And once that happens, we will finally be ready. My acolytes...this war is just the beginning..."

At that very moment, he started to chuckle menacingly, turning into an insane and uncontrollable laughter that spread throughout the entire ship as they all stared at the hologram.

He was right. This was just the beginning...

_________________________

I really liked writing this chapter. Even though there wasn't any battles involved in this, it was still pretty good. We wanted to show from each side and some of the main characters on what was going on and what might happen later on.

On another note, because we been getting amazing support from you guys, we would like to give a shout-out to the following people that have been with us from the start:

Once again, thank you all for your wonderful and countless support on our series, and please, continue to give me feedback on how the story is going and what we could still do to approve on. Again, thank you all and, as always, have a fan-tucking-tastic day/night! See ya' in the next one.

- Director K.W.

Batman Year Three: Part 6 "The King" by Olliver Simmones

13 6

Kite Man: Can I make a request?

Robin: Um...sure?

Kite Man: Well actually it's two...See Lenny is still kinda in ice…

Batgirl: Oh yeah we never finished saving him.

Eraser: Yeah I’m still here!

Kite Man: Calm down Lenny!

Eraser: Calm down? My dick has been frozen solid for 20 minutes!

Kite Man: God, we’re coming!

[The trio get Eraser out of the ice]

Eraser: Agh… Sorry for being a douche…

Robin: Eh don’t mention it… have to imagine that being frozen in ice sucks.

Kite Man: Well now that that’s done… We need to go to the Armory.

Batgirl: You think we’re just gonna take you to the armory. I mean we put you in jail.

Kite Man: Look just because you put us in jail, doesn’t mean we’re pricks. Right Lenny?

Eraser: Yeah.

Kite Man: We’ll help you after you help us get our gear. Sound good?

Robin: Why would we need your help?

Kite Man: To stop the Joker duh. That guy’s a total prick. Didn’t even invite us!

Robin: Invite you to what?

Kite Man: I...I don’t know actually. The inmates have been murmuring something about a chapel.

Robin: There’s a chapel at Arkham?

Kite Man: Well...no not really. Though I have a few ideas where we may find him.

Robin: ...I don’t like it, but you’re our best bet to find the joker.

[The group walks towards the armory]

Kite Man: This is it.

[He tries to open the door but it’s locked]

Kite Man: How do we-

[Robin kicks the door off its hinges and Condiment King, Crazy Quilt, and King Tut turn around]

Crazy Quilt: Charles?

Kite Man: Dekker?

Eraser: Tut?

Condiment King: Daddy!

[Everyone looks at Condiment King]

Eraser: Is that mayo on your costume?

Robin: I don’t think that’s mayo.

Batgirl: *vomits*

KIng Tut: That’s besides...Wait really Buddy?...

Condiment King: You know how hard it is to get girls when you’re the fucking Condiment King?

King Tut: Fair point… Anyway, what do you four want?

Kite Man: We’re gonna get our gear back and go kick Joker’s ass.

King Tut: Ooo, now see. That’s where we have our problem. We’re going to join him, so people actually take us seriously.

Crazy Quilt: I thought you were the mighty King Tut.

King Tut: Nah...I stopped believin’ that shit like 10 years ago.

Crazy Quilt: Oh…

King Tut: Anyway…

[Tut turns around and picks up his staff]

King Tut: You’re in our way.

Batgirl: But we never said we were going to fight you.

King Tut: I...shut up…

[King Tut shoots them back through the doorway with sand]

King Tut: Now we’ll be on our leave

[They walk off, but are stopped when Condiment King starts shaking uncontrollably and falls to the ground]

Crazy Quilt: Buddy!

[They turn around to see Robin pointing his ecrisma stick at Tut]

Robin: You’re not leaving.

[Robin gets in a few blows on Tut’s staff, but is thrown against the wall by more sand]

King Tut: I said, we were leaving.

Batgirl: No, you’re not.

[Batgirl drops Quilt with two hits, but is pushed into the ceiling]

King Tut: God why was I even working with them.

Kite Man: Hey Nerd!

[Kite Man crashes into King Tut]

King Tut: Kite Man?!

Kite Man: Hell Yeah.

[A Blast of sand comes through the wall, but Kite Man easily flies over it and gets a few hits on King Tut]

Kite Man: Whoevers gear this is had style.

King Tut: Shut it!

[Several blasts of sand try to shoot Kite Man down but all fail]

Kite Man: Face it Tut! You can’t catch me!

King Tut: Actually you’re right where I want you.

[A small coil of sand grabs Kite Man by the leg, crawls up his body, and starts to choke him]

Kite Man: Gah! tUT we w- ehhh…

[A Batarang flies into his staff and explodes]

King Tut: No!

[Robin, Batgirl, and Kite Man drop to the floor]

King Tut: What happened?

Batman: NO one messes with my family...and Kite Man.

[Batman drops King Tut and Robin stands up]

Robin: B-Bruce?

Batman: Robin...I said...wait there.

Robin: Yeah, yeah.

[Robin shakes Batgirl’s shoulder and brings her to her feet]

Robin: You okay Babs?

Batgirl: Yeah...I’m good.

Kite Man: I’m here too yknow.

Batman: Why are you here?

Kite Man: I’m working with you sidekicks here.

Robin: Actually it’s partners.

Batman: Excuse me?

Robin: Yeah we’re partners. And TOGETHER we’re going to stop the Joker and Kite Man is gonna take us there.

Kite Man: I am?

Robin: You said you were.

Kite Man: Oh right...Let’s go!

[Robin glares at Batman as he follows Kite Man]

Uncontrollable by the sancho

16 2

Strobist: One 430exii to camera left

Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair (1844-1923) (The Pride of Merchants) by Muharraq Forever

19 1

Mugbil Al-Thukair was likely photographed in his bedchamber at his house in Manama, sitting on a prayer rug with a pious wistful countenance in a dapper embroidered silk Jubbah (open coat) and an ornate Cashmere Ghutra Shawl (headdress) fastened with the obsolete thick Najdi Agal (headband) these were some of the distinctive formal attire worn by wealthy Arab merchants and tribal chieftains in Central Arabia and the northern Arabian Gulf in the early twentieth century as Al-Thukair supposedly was facing a Victorian colonial Anglo-Indian Raj four-poster teakwood bed surrounded by all the trappings of wealth typifying the lifestyle of a Gulf-rich pearl merchant and his household at the time, such as the open Indian teakwood wardrobe cabinet with an inside mirrored door on the left where a visible Cashmere Ghutra Shawl hangs from an open wardrobe drawer, a Victorian glass-shaded gas lamp in the right corner next to a pendulum clock in the back of a reclining wooden cane chair with its vertically striped cushion and several sitting chairs stacked high with books together with a variety of Persian rugs and carpets strewn across the floor during Jacques Cartier's second extended visit to Bahrain (from the 14th to the 26th of March 1912) the focal point of his Arabian Gulf pearl purchasing trip on Thursday, the 16th of March, 1912.

(Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair was born in 1844 in the rural town of Unaizah in the Al-Qassim region in northern Najd, Central Arabia as Al-Qassim has always been considered the agricultural heartland of the Arabian Peninsula known since pre-Islamic times as the "Alimental Basket" or granary of Arabia for its abundant agricultural assets into a prestigious erudite family of merchants widespread across Arabia and the Fertile Crescent with a trading history that could be traced back to the early eighteenth century from a young age Al-Thukair was endowed with natural business acumen combined with deep intellectual and literary interests following in the footsteps of generations of his family's enterprising male offspring which drove him first in 1867 at the tender age of 23 to the prosperous port town of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast of Arabia with its bustling market and cosmopolitan outlook the obvious first choice for any ambitious young man from the hinterlands of Arabia mainly Najd in those days where he started to establish himself as a budding young merchant at the same time exploring any available business opportunities in the port cities and towns of the Near East (Middle East) and those in the neighbouring Indian subcontinent principally in the newly British-founded port city of Bombay (Mumbai), the quickly burgeoning commercial hub on the Arabian Sea, the main western gateway to India and the key gathering place for Arab merchants and their families from Arabia in the subcontinent forming a dynamic expatriate Arab community that would continue to exist from the mid-nineteenth century until India's independence from Britain in 1947 Bombay also provided a good head start for scores of young Arabian Peninsula merchants at the time some of whom went on to become well-known household business names across the region most notably Alireza of Jeddah, Alghanim, Al-Kharafi and Alshaya of Kuwait among others, spurring young Al-Thukair to learn Hindi, the pre-oil seafaring age's business lingua franca in the Arabian Peninsula since the majority of Arabia's trade passed through Indian entrepôts and in due course he became proficient in the essential business language, the port city of Basra in southern Iraq was yet another desirable alternative business opportunity for Al-Thukair, a familiar business destination for his family for many decades and a second adopted domicile for several family members as Iraq's gateway to the rest of the world, frequently visited by him in the early to mid-1870s while en route to Iraq's only port on the Arabian Gulf his ship would stop at Bahrain one of the three major ports of the Arabian Peninsula in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries (the other two were Aden and Jeddah) allowing him during the few hours interval between passengers and cargo disembarkation and embarkation to wander around the town of Manama the cosmopolitan commercial hub on the main island of the Bahraini archipelago examining closely along the way Manama's ethnically diverse purveyors of bountiful goods from all over the world meanwhile assessing the business possibilities of the Bahraini market especially its booming pearl trade prompting him to dabble in the lucrative commodity with great success as part of his general trading business interests and after spending ten years in the coastal town of Jeddah now as a seasoned well-established general merchant Bahrain beckoned as the centre of the pearl trade in the Arabian Gulf and beyond a pioneering position consolidated by possessing in its northern waters the richest pearl oyster beds in the Gulf renowned worldwide for producing the finest quality pearls for their iridescent lustre, size and variety of colours making it the place of choice for anyone wishing to try his luck in the pearl business back then which was the mainstay of the Arabian Gulf economy prior to the discovery of oil similarly sundry of his Central Arabian Najdi merchant counterparts from the austere Arabian inland such as Algosaibi, Al-Ajaji, Al-Qadi and Al-Bassam were lured to Bahrain by the country's newfound political stability following the accession of the young, astute and literarily inclined Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (1848-1932) to the throne in 1869 ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity after decades of turmoil and instability as reflected in the renewed confidence and heightened profitability prospects of the Bahraini pearl market driven by increasing international demand particularly in the West for high-quality natural pearls from the Arabian Gulf as rapidly soaring demand propelled pearl prices to unprecedented heights against such a heady backdrop Al-Thukair decided in 1877 at the age of 33 to relocate to Bahrain with his immediate family consisting of his wife and two young sons Abdullatif and Abdulmuhsin, a decision that would change his life forever Bahrain with its lush date palm groves and freshwater springs proved to be more suitable to his agrarian temperament than arid Jeddah though comparable to its vibrant multicultural and multi-ethnic society as it was the closest thing to a second home for the mature aspiring assiduous merchant after his beloved birthplace of Unaizah within a matter of years after arriving in the small island country he managed to become a leading pearl merchant and a highly esteemed public figure well-known for his philanthropic disposition, honest dealings, impeccable integrity and intellectual prowess so much so that he was dubbed "The Pride of Merchants" by the Bahraini business community he also took on the role of honorary chairman of the Manama business community and titular head of the Najdi diaspora community in Bahrain as a natural progression of his tremendous entrepreneurial successes and admirable character traits due to this exalted social status and the extensive network of highly influential personages he cultivated throughout the region Al-Thukair became increasingly sought-after as an arbiter of disputes including those of a political nature in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region but among the many scattered instances of his arbitration cases in the declassified annual Gulf reports from the British Archives, the following case from the latter stage of his life in Bahrain is one of the most striking examples of his high-level arbitrations where a family of illustrious clerics and judges resorted to his conscientious arbitration when asked by Ibrahim one of the two younger brothers of Bahrain's highest religious Muslim authority for nearly half a century the eminent cleric and unofficial supreme judge Sheikh Qasim Al Mehza (1847-1941) dubbed the "chief judge" unanimously by adherents of both Sunni and Shiite cross-sectarian Muslim denominations of Bahraini society for his scholarly knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence to intercede between the two younger siblings one of whom Ahmed was a highly respected cleric in his own right the first Bahraini graduate of the Al-Azhar of Cairo in 1887 and ironically their elder brother the highly learned cleric and judge Sheikh Qasim, here is the next slightly edited citation from the British Gulf residency report of 1912 concerning local Bahraini affairs from 1st to 30th September, exact date unspecified (A difference over the ownership of a plot of land and a shop recently arose between Sheikh Qasim Bin Mehza and his two brothers Ahmed and Ibrahim and the two parties were not on speaking terms. At the request of Ibrahim, Sheikh Mugbil and Yusuf Kanoo intervened and succeeded in arranging a comprise) correspondingly he was acting as an unpaid adviser, interlocutor and mediator to some of the Arabian Peninsula's rulers as attested by one of the earliest documented references to Al-Thukair in the British Archives in late 1888 and early 1889 where he was linked to a series of accounts dealing with the recurring violent hostilities between the neighbouring Sheikhdoms of Qatar and Abu Dhabi in which he acted as a go-between on behalf of Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) the first British-recognised Qatari ruler independent of Bahraini suzerainty and founder of the Al-Thani ruling dynasty to help broker a peaceful settlement between the two parties and other key players in the conflict including the Al Rasheed the then rulers of Arabia's northern region of Ha'il and their Ottoman backers both of whom intervened on behalf of the Qatari side, from early on as a middle-aged man Al-Thukair had established himself as an ethical impartial figure and a reliable confidant to the majority of the rulers in the Arabian Gulf as demonstrated in numerous instances in this mini-biography of the man, the following two edited extracts are part of a comprehensive report on the latter stage of the long-drawn fitful hostilities between Qatar and Abu Dhabi covering the period from March 1888 to June 1890 by the British Gulf residency in Bushehr Persia (Iran) on the bloody conflict which involved lengthy correspondence between the British political agent in Bahrain and his superior the political resident in Bushehr where Al-Thukair is frequently mentioned, a conflict that began as a random mid-sea raid by Qatari corsairs on an Abu Dhabi-owned pearl fishing vessel in Qatari waters killing all of its crew presumably around the year 1880 escalating into a prolonged fierce enmity between Sheikh Zayed Bin Khalifa Al Nahyan (r. 1855-1909) ruler of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) ruler of Qatar spiralling into uncontrollable atrocious carnage and depredation reprisals manifested in the thrice sacking of the Qatari capital Doha during the third of which Qatar ruler's son Ali was killed and the multiple sackings of the sedentary communities of Abu Dhabi's western region of Al Dhafra and other towns between 1880 and 1892 the first extract is a full-text letter while the second consists of the last two paragraphs of a longer letter the first of which is as follows (No. 10, dated the 20th January 1889. From-The Residency Agent, Bahrain. To-The Political Resident, Arabian Gulf. After compliments. I beg to send herewith a copy of a letter sent by Qasim Bin Thani (ruler of Qatar) to the Chief (ruler) of Bahrain with a special messenger who has also brought a number of other letters giving welcome tidings to Muhammad Bin Abdulwahab (Al-Faihani), Mugbil (Al-Thukair) and (Abdulrahman) Bin Aidan; and mentioning the number of people who were slain out of the inhabitants of Liwa (the Al Dhafra region is centred on the large Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi's westernmost domain); viz., 520 persons; and that they took from them large booty and numerous camels and that Sheikh Qasim returned safely with his army. I hear from reports that Sheikh Qasim lost 8 men killed. Others say 48, others again 110. But as yet there is no correct report as since the arrival of this messenger no one has come from Qatar owing to heavy "shemall" (northern gusty) winds. It is stated that Sheikh Qasim has not yet reached Al-Bidda (Doha). I hear that Isa Bin Ziyab a cousin of Sheikh Zayed Bin Khalifa (Al Nahyan) has arrived in Bahrain from Abu Dhabi and interviewed the Chief (ruler of Bahrain). According to what he says there are not so many people at Liwa and that Sheikh Zayed had not received any report of Sheikh Qasim's proceedings from Qatar to Liwa or any other place. I shall make further reports when I receive any fresh news) the second extract is as follows (No. 52, dated the 28th of March 1889. From-The Residency Agent, Bahrain. To-The Political Resident, Arabian Gulf. I have seen a letter from Qasim (ruler of Qatar) to Mugbil (Al-Thukair) in which the writer says that he is prepared to meet Zayed (ruler of Abu Dhabi) and that he is not afraid of his advance; on the contrary that he will himself march out to attack Zayed in case the latter should not advance against him. In that letter he also wishes Mugbil to believe that Ibn Rasheed (ruler of Ha'il in northern Arabia) will not fail to fulfil his promise. The date of this letter is 17th March. It is apparent that Qasim wrote that letter before the arrival of Nafi (Ibn Rasheed messenger) My own opinion is that if the news about Zayed's advance be true and also that if Qasim be supported by the Turkish soldiers, Zayed's forces will have hard work before them; for Qasim is regardless of expense and the Turkish soldiers are greedy as is known. Their number at Al-Bidda (Doha) is 250) the previous references were among several in this special report to Al-Thukair's top-level intermediation in this particular bloody conflict a small sample of his early political intermediation in regional affairs that would last until he unwillingly left his second adopted homeland Bahrain in mid-1917 but in connection with his frequent interactions with the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula the most significant of those were Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (r. 1869-1932) of Bahrain, Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) of Qatar and Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (r. 1902-1953) ruler of Najd and its dependencies who was styled as such from the 13th of January 1902 onwards after the subtle young industrious scion of the House of Saud succeeded in recapturing the ancestral seat of power of his forefathers, the then small town of Riyadh from the bellicose Ottoman-backed Al Rasheed ruling clan of the northern Arabian region of Ha'il in an audacious dawn attack, the future king of what would become the sprawling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia perceptibly in the course of time Al-Thukair became such a revered sage that the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa asked him to be one of the signatories of a solemn pledge of allegiance deed to his eldest surviving son the 24-year-old newly appointed heir apparent to the throne and future ruler Sheikh Hamad (r. 1932-1942) on 8th October 1896 following the untimely death of his eldest son and heir apparent Salman near Riyadh in Najd Central Arabia three years earlier on his exhausting perilous long land journey home from the Hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca during the formal investiture ceremony for the crown prince an honour reserved for only a select few high-ranking merchants from the highest echelons of the Bahraini business community who were recognised as pillars of society outside the ranks of senior members of the ruling family, tribal chieftains and clergy leaders amongst whom were Hussain Bin Salman Matar (1817-1911) and Ahmed Bin Muhammed Kanoo (1835-1905) as for Al-Thukair's aforementioned special relationship with Ibn Saud the marriage of his niece Lulwa the daughter of his brother Yahya to Ibn Saud solidified that relationship enabling him to negotiate on behalf of Ibn Saud a favourable agreement with the Ottomans on the withdrawal of their garrison from the Al-Hasa Oasis and its environs in eastern Arabia which would become part of the future eastern province of Saudi Arabia as Ibn Saud was poised to take control of the oasis in mid-1914 soon before the outbreak of World War One by the year 1890 Al-Thukair began to pursue in earnest his profound and ardent passion for spreading knowledge and learning which would become an indelible lifelong characteristic of his initially by starting a literary salon at his house in Manama similar to that of his friend and first cousin of the ruler of Bahrain classical poet and intellectual Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Muhammad Al Khalifa's literary salon in Muharraq and those of several educated and well-travelled merchants and ruling family members in both Manama and Muharraq Bahrain's former political capital from 1810 to 1923 however the literary salon of Al-Thukair was rather different from its local counterparts in that it was more educationally oriented than the others by allocating a well-furnished spacious room in his house as a permanent location for the salon equipped with a relatively sizable varied library whose contents were kept in its wall alcoves as it was the antecedent of his most ambitious cultural and educational project ever the "Bahrain Literary Society" twenty-three years later it must be acknowledged that those literary salons (clubs) collectively played a discernible educational role as they were haunts for the knowledge-hungry local literate young men prior to the establishment of formal education following the end of the First World War furthermore Sheikh Ibrahim requested Al-Thukair to be the principal supplier of Arabic periodicals in Bahrain by making use of his network of regional business agents to acquire popular newspapers and magazines from the Levant and Egypt, therefore he took it upon himself to supply all of the needs for published materials of other literary salons as a courtesy moving in the same direction he also vigorously sponsored the publication of seminal literary and theological works from the Arab Islamic mediaeval heritage as well as non-formal charity schooling and public libraries well-stocked with a wide range of books and respected periodicals largely from the Levant and Egypt (such as Al-Muqtataf, Al-Mu'ayyad, Al-Hilal, Al-Manar and so on) in both Bahrain and his birthplace Unaizah in addition to his educational and cultural dissemination efforts he was acutely sensitive to the daily hardships of ordinary impoverished and marginalised people as evidenced by the next edited excerpt from the 1910 British Gulf residency report (Almas, Negro the Confidential Adviser of Sheikh Isa (ruler of Bahrain) died on 11th January and was replaced by Ali Bin Abdullah (Al-Obaidli) on the advice of Ali Bin Abdullah, Sheikh Isa called upon house owners to produce the sanads (Arabic singular title deed: سند, Romanised English plural: sanads) in virtue of which they held their property on their failing to do so they were evicted and no consideration was paid to the period of possession, Sheikh Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair protested to Sheikh Isa against this measure as it pressed hardly on the poor the protest had the desired effect and the Sheikh (ruler) promised to refrain from such actions in the future) the rescinding of the ruler's decree in the past incident is the definitive indication of the unflinching deference accorded to Al-Thukair by everyone who came into contact with him from those in power to the ordinary man in the street he was also involved in a wide range of philanthropic activities that were not confined to the conventional charity act of almsgiving since he was a practical man who took a number of practical steps to assuage human suffering in any way he could defying common human prejudices among his various practical philanthropic contributions in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf was the commissioning of a water well next to his house in Manama around the year 1900 akin to the undertakings of prominent fellow local pearl merchants Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944) and Muhammad Bin Rashid Bin Hindi (1850-1934) of Muharraq who attempted to alleviate some of the freshwater supply predicament that plagued Bahrain's urban dwellers predominantly those of Manama and Muharraq the two main densely populated towns in the small island nation at the turn of the twentieth century where the majority of the population had difficulty securing their daily domestic supply of freshwater owing to the lack of potable drinking water infrastructure in Bahrain and much of the Near East as in many other parts of the globe including some of the underdeveloped regions of the Western world in the early part of the twentieth century despite the fact that Bahrain had abundant freshwater resources unlike some of its Arab Gulf neighbours a small example of the central socioeconomic roles that rich mercantile elites played throughout Arab polities in the Arabian Gulf before the discovery of oil and the subsequent establishment of the modern welfare state Al-Thukair also tended to the spiritual needs of the inhabitants of his neighbourhood in Manama at roughly the same time he commissioned the water well he financed the renovation of an old dilapidated bijou Mosque within the vicinity of his house dating back to the late seventeen hundreds placing a nearby shop he owned as a charitable endowment for the Mosque which the locals of the area after him affectionately called Mugbil Mosque even though he was not its original builder he was also instrumental in locally funding the construction of Bahrain's second hospital after the opening of the "American Mission Hospital" in Manama on 26th January 1903 at the request of the British to fulfil their envisaged "Victoria Memorial Hospital" between 1902 and its formal opening on 9th November 1906 to commemorate the late Queen Victoria (defunct since 1948) situated in the Ras Rumman area in Manama south of the British political agency (present-day British Embassy) by rallying other leading merchants to contribute to this vital medical project as Bahrain was in desperate need of a quarantine medical facility to combat the rampant spread of recurring deadly epidemics specifically plague, cholera and typhus as reported in the British Gulf residency report of 1902 this is a slightly edited excerpt from the detailed report dated 23rd August 1902 by J. C. Gaskin, Esq, Assistant Political Agent, Bahrain where Gaskin was delegated by his superiors in the British Indian government the task of securing funds for the proposed hospital locally by taking the pulse of the local mercantile elite through cosying up to rich local merchants chief among them Al-Thukair to enlist their financial assistance in building the hospital, stated as follows (I would venture to report that since the receipt of your communication I have spoken on the subject to some of the leading native merchants and from their replies to me I got the impression that they would give liberal donations towards the hospital: and subsequently Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair the leading Bahraini merchant called on me and offered to subscribe R1,000. (One thousand rupees) Haji Mugbil's handsome offer will influence the native merchants who usually follow his lead) in recognition of his role in securing local funding for the hospital British colonial authorities invited Al-Thukair along with other donors to the hospital opening ceremony, the following edited excerpt from the British Gulf residency report for the year 1906-1907 formulated by the British political agent in Bahrain Captain F. B. Prideaux sheds light on the event (on the 9th November 1906 advantage was taken of the presence of the Political Resident (Major P. Z. Cox) in the Arabian Gulf to hold a public meeting for the opening of the Victoria Memorial Charitable Hospital nearly all the contributors to the Rs. 21,000 which the construction had cost were present on the occasion as were also the Chief (ruler) of Bahrain and his sons after the Resident had delivered a short extempore speech, the leading Arab merchant Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair read a reply expressing gratitude to the British Government for their interest in and protection of Bahrain and wishing long life to the Ruler Sheikh Isa Bin Ali) for some the antagonistic stance of Al-Thukair towards the British as expounded in detail further in the text seemed contradictory as he gladly collaborated with them in their efforts to secure funding for the construction of the said hospital in tandem with their other measures to improve public sanitation and hygiene to help curb the spread of virulent diseases in Bahrain's two major towns Manama and Muharraq as he saw his sporadic cooperation with the advanced British in a different light as he would endorse any attempt to better the lives of ordinary Bahrainis even if it meant occasionally cooperating with a foreign colonial power he vehemently opposed in that sense he was a modern practical man, it could not be denied that the least tangible of his philanthropic efforts but perhaps the most life-changing for those affected by it was the hidden assistance he rendered in paying off the debts of struggling insolvent merchants in Bahrain and across the Arabian Gulf with a special priority given to his own debtors who either had their debts temporarily reprieved or cancelled altogether as in this revealing slightly edited citation from the 1913 British Gulf residency report asserting the regional scope of his business interests dated 5th of May 1913 stating as follows (Sheikh Qasim Bin Thani (ruler) of Qatar has asked Yusuf Kanoo to use his influence with Sheikh Mugbil Al-Thukair in bringing about an amiable settlement between the latter and his Qatar debtors who are unable to pay their debts on account of the dullness of the pearl market) surpassed only by Bahrain's preeminent pearl merchant of all time dubbed by the Bahraini people "Father of orphans and protector of widows" for his unequalled altruism and magnanimity Salman Bin Hussain Matar, yet his most important legacy was the founding in mid-1913 of the first officially recognised Literary Society in Bahrain as touched upon earlier located in close proximity to the American Mission Bible Bookshop in Manama on what is now Sheikh Isa Al Kabeer (Isa the Great) Avenue in its own special-purpose premises inaugurated under his patronage and with the full endorsement of the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa and the moral support of a number of local literary figures and dignitaries led by Bahrain's foremost literary figure in the early twentieth century the acclaimed classical poet Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Muhammad Al Khalifa (1850-1933) in conjunction with Al-Thukair's younger and trusted energetic friend, the influential comprador merchant and shrewd entrepreneur founder and sole owner of Bahrain's first Western-style Bank in 1890 a true man of the world the maverick Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo (1861-1945) this society was not merely an ordinary Literary Society but a modern educational institution in the true sense of the word a wellspring of radiance for the Bahraini people at the time comprising a comprehensive library, a school for teaching Arabic, English, mathematics and Islamic theology and a lecture hall ably managed by the gifted 33-year-old Al-Azhar graduate educator Muhammad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Mana (1882-1965) who would become the first chairman of the Directorate of Knowledge (Ministry of Education) in the newly established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the future judge and Grand Mufti (jurisconsult) of Qatar handpicked by Al-Thukair to undertake the onerous task of transforming this institution into a beacon of enlightenment and forward-thinking in a short period of time one of the many cultural contributions of the educated and enlightened Bahraini business elite who were at the vanguard of modernity and progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their previously mentioned literary salons and also through their lesser-known but no less important financing of numerous free of charge non-formal local schooling initiatives as those were among the earliest semi-modern organised educational institutions to tackle the prevalent illiteracy in Bahrain other than the existing traditional Quranic schools strikingly among the several non-formal schools of the time one stood out as the first female-founded charity school in Bahrain and most likely the entire Gulf established on the island of Muharraq the former capital of Bahrain in 1887 by the noblewoman and philanthropist heiress Sheikha Saida Bint Bishr (1834-1892) who defied all expectations of traditional domestic roles for women in the highly patriarchal society of late-nineteenth-century Bahrain by allocating the revenue of a date palm orchard she owned in Manama as an endowment for the school eponymously named after her nevertheless some of the independent charity schools date back to the early part of the nineteenth century since the earliest recorded charity school in Bahrain was that of Sheikh Isa Bin Rashid in Muharraq in 1829 an eminent cleric of the Island of Muharraq predating the reign of Sheikh Isa by forty years however this proliferation of educational initiatives noticeably in the last third of the nineteenth century was the fruit of the long-lasting stability of Sheikh Isa's reign the role of the Bahraini business elite was not limited to just paving the way for the establishment of modern education but also was directly involved in the development of Western-influenced formal education leading to the opening of the first elementary school for boys in Muharraq in 1919 followed by another for girls in 1928 also in Muharraq with a nine-year gap where some of the senior members of the said elite (such as Matar, Algosaibi, Al-Zayani and Fakhro) served on the first governmental educational regulatory body in the modern history of the country the education supervisory committee (the forerunner of the Ministry of Education) which oversaw the development of the nascent government's educational system chaired by Sheikh Abdullah (1883-1966) the youngest son of the ruler of Bahrain in the honorary position of minister of education, the first and only local state official to hold such a position under British colonial rule in Bahrain this exception was made due to the high status of its occupant considering he was the son of the ruler since the office of a minister was a symbol of sovereignty in an independent sovereign state which was not the case with Bahrain an office he would continue to occupy until his death in 1966 the education committee continued as the main financial backer of education in Bahrain by financing the construction of schools across the country since its formation in 1919 until the mid-1930s when the Bahraini government became financially self-sufficient as a result of stable oil export revenues lastly allowing the government to replenish its empty coffers permanently resolving the protracted financial problems that had beset the Bahraini government for many decades rendering it a thing of the past simultaneously with the establishment of formal education in 1919 another milestone was the creation of the first partially elected municipal councils in both Manama and Muharraq which were dominated by elected and appointed senior members of the Bahraini business elite who played a crucial role in sponsoring a number of infrastructure projects in the country including the Manama port project in 1919 as happened in the pre-oil era throughout the Gulf as the 1920s and 1930s saw the gradual emergence of the modern Bahraini bureaucratic centralised state and good governance replacing the existing centuries-old obsolete mediaeval fiefdom system an inexorable obstacle to human development in its entirety anywhere in the world of the early twentieth-century industrial age, it would be misleading not to mention the facilitating quintessential role of Britain in bringing those reforms to fruition as represented by the four most influential British colonial administrators and officers in the British colonial history of Bahrain whose contributions to the establishment of modern Bahrain could not be ignored or underestimated under any circumstances serving consecutively one after the other starting with the delicate and focal preliminary task of the wily Arabist and orientalist military commander and intelligence officer Captain N. N. E. Bray (1885-1962) as a political agent in Bahrain from November 1918 to June 1919 with clear directives to "seek the amelioration of the internal government by indirect and pacific means and by gaining the confidence and trust of the Sheikh" ruler," followed by Major H. R. P. Dickson (1881-1959) with a brief yet extremely productive tenure from 1919 to 1920 he would also serve as a political agent in Kuwait from 1929 to 1936 then his disgraced successor, demoted from Colonel to Major for his recklessly violent behaviour in post-World War One Iraq, inadvertently responsible for single-handedly igniting the first spark of what would become "The Iraqi revolt against the British" also known as the 1920 Iraqi Revolt or the Great Iraqi Revolution, the Anglo-Irish Clive Kirkpatrick Daly (1888-1966) with his divisive and controversial tenure from 1921 to 1926 and finally Charles D. Belgrave (1894-1969) who served as an administrator and financial adviser to the ruler of Bahrain in the newly created office of the "Adviser" to purposefully overshadow the increasingly unpopular post of the political agent for its association with Daly's heavy-handed colonial rule, Belgrave's long tenure from 1926 to 1957 is seen by historians as a consolidation of the modernising reforms of his predecessors particularly Daly, whom Belgrave held in high esteem where the reforms gained more momentum following the steady flow of oil revenues after the discovery of the essential commodity in 1932 as all four carefully selected highly competent Arabist hardy tricenarian officers were assigned by the British Government with specific instructions to introduce all required administrative reforms based on their own discretion in line with the broader British regional strategy of placating the growing social discontent among the disenfranchised lower classes by redressing the pressing multigenerational injustices in Bahraini society specifically in the semi-feudal systems of pearl fishing indentured workers and agricultural farmers coordinating their reforms with the financial and moral support of the cooperative Bahraini business elite under such circumstances the first batch of reforms in education, municipal and fiscal sectors was implemented almost immediately after Bray's assisting initiative by Dickson, whereas customs, judiciary, police and land reform fell to the authoritarian Daly while Belgrave is credited with creating several new government departments including the "Directorate of Religious Endowments" in 1927 his first significant reform after assuming office as a financial adviser to stem the chronic unfettered corruption of some of the local clergy whom the government entrusted to administer religious endowments (waqf) without any supervision or legal accountability followed by the slow process of his decades-long vital initiative to develop modern public utility infrastructure for electricity, water and telephone service which commenced effectively in early 1928 he was also instrumental in securing the oil concession that led to the discovery of oil in 1932 but his everlasting achievement was the founding of the "Minors Funds Directorate" in 1932 to protect the inheritance rights of orphans and widows, a life-changing cross-sectarian institution in the service of the Bahraini people operating without interruption since its inception the first governmental institution of its kind in Bahrain and Belgrave's most enduring legacy however Belgrave faced fierce and persistent opposition from deeply conservative reactionary and corrupt elements within the Sunni and Shiite cross-sectarian main religious composition of Bahrain who sought to obfuscate and obstruct the introduction of such a governmental institution as those elements had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, deeming such a move as tantamount to heresy but Belgrave's dedication and perseverance prevailed in the end, sadly for many Bahrainis this remarkable feat of his remains a little-known historical fact the upcoming excerpt is one of numerous recurring instances in Belgrave's diary on this motion from 20th February 1931 until it was ratified on 15th January 1932 by the deputy ruler Sheikh Hamad less than a year before his accession to the throne on 9th December after being put forward for public debate by the government involving the wonted religious and mercantile elites of Bahraini society as alluded to earlier illustrating the great lengths Belgrave went to for the creation of this totally new governmental regulatory body with no precedent at least in Bahrain (Sunday 17th Jan 1932 Called on Yusuf Kanoo in the morning and discussed with him the question of the Proclamation which we are issuing ordering all wills to be registered with the Government and no persons to administer estates without getting permission from Government. It will to a certain extent safeguard the rights of widows and orphans who at present are being robbed wholesale) but the timing of the urgency in implementing the reforms cannot be overlooked as it coincided with the execution on the ground of the 1916 secret Sykes-Picot agreement on dividing the legacy of the vanquished Ottoman Empire between the two main World War One victorious powers, Britain and France giving birth to the ubiquitous British coined term "Middle East" recognising the fact that the Hejaz western region of the Arabian Peninsula where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located was under direct Ottoman rule and the Peninsula as a whole was and still is an extension of Iraq and the Levant in addition to achieving sustainable political stability in the Gulf as the advanced western Arabian frontier of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent the jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the final analysis, the seemingly avowed altruistic goals of the reforms in Bahrain were part of the colonial "grafting process" reform assimilation policy of Britain through tactfully transplanting British hegemonic ideas into the newly formed Middle East as in other parts of the British Empire in contrast to its fellow draconian and pompous French to ensure the long-term strategic interests of Britain in the aftermath of World War One, thus everything the British undertook was to this end, Al-Thukair was concerned not only with the spread of modern learning and science but also with the introduction of modern technology in the region as he was either the first or second local to own a motor car in Bahrain in 1908 ten years before the supposed official arrival of the first motor vehicle in the country as depicted in the travel diary of international jeweller Jacques Cartier of the iconic Parisian Cartier jewellery house during his second visit to Bahrain in March 1912 moreover it is worth mentioning that among his numerous noble deeds was the utilisation of his high social status as a business doyen, arbiter of disputes and man of letters both locally and regionally in mustering financial and moral support for the Libyan resistance in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya in October of 1911 and Mussolini's subsequent genocidal fascist regime settler colonialism of this vast sparsely populated semidesert North African Arab nation where Al-Thukair successfully raised twenty thousand rupees in relief aid donations in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf with the effective collaboration of the motivated cleric and merchant Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani (1863-1925) who travelled to Lengeh (an Arab coastal town in modern-day Iran) and Dubai as part of a Gulf-wide fundraising campaign for the embattled Libyans of Tripoli to be forwarded after the end of the subscription on the steamship SS. "Patiala" on 8th July 1912 to the Ottoman Red Crescent Society in the Iraqi city of Basra to be sent from there via Egypt to Tripoli, Libya as stated in the following are slightly edited excerpts from the 1912 British Gulf residency report concerning the Turco-Italian war and local and regional reactions to it from February and July respectively the first describes Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani's tireless zeal for collecting donations for the Libyan cause while the second describes Al-Thukair's delivery of those donations, it was clearly a collaborative effort rather than a single individual endeavour however this is not meant to diminish the efforts of Al-Thukair as he was either the driving force behind all of those initiatives or an integral member of the majority of them the first excerpt is as follows (The Arabs of Muharraq incited by an influential Mullah Sheikh Abdulwahab (Al-Zayani) have opened a subscription list for The Red Crescent Society in order to help it in bringing succour to the wounded in Tripoli. So far about Rs. 5,000 have been collected. This sum will be largely increased if the Arabs of Manama, Budaiya and Hidd join in as they have promised to do. The same Mullah is stated to have paid visits to Lengeh and Dubai about a month ago. At Lengeh he succeeded in collecting some 5,000 rupees but met with no success at Dubai where the people were sceptical as to the probability of the money ever reaching its ostensible destination) while the second as with the first shows the British meticulous documentation of the conclusion of the initiative (Sheikh Mugbil Al-Thukair forwarded on the 8th of July per SS. "Patiala" the sum of Rs. 20,000 being the total amount of subscription raised in Bahrain for the Red Crescent Society to Basra for transmission to Tripoli via Egypt) leading to the incensing of the British colonial authorities in Bahrain against him he also played a significant role in the Bahraini relief campaign to provide financial aid to the displaced Muslim refugees of the Balkan war precipitated by the raging Turco-Italian War over Ottoman Libya the "Balkan League" was formed in 1912 under the auspices of the Russians with the aim of putting an end to the Ottoman presence in the Balkans once and for all resulting in the ethnic genocide of nearly one and a half million Balkan Muslims with more than four hundred thousand refugees fleeing to Anatolia as news of the harrowing atrocities reached Bahrain cleric and pearl merchant Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani referred to earlier one of Bahrain's most revered national figures in the early twentieth century the leader of the first Bahraini independence movement from Britain at the turn of the twentieth century set up a fundraising refugee relief committee with the full backing of the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa who launched the donation fundraiser with the generous sum of ten thousand rupees appointing Al-Thukair as secretary-treasurer of the committee who rose to the occasion by exerting immense efforts to garner financial aid for the displaced Muslim refugees by exhorting the Bahraini populace to donate to their stranded Muslim brethren through his eloquent oratorical motivational skills, thus by the end of the fundraising the accumulated amount had risen to well over a hundred and four thousand rupees a sizable sum for a tiny country the size of Bahrain in the early twentieth century Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani and Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo were entrusted by the committee with the task of faithfully delivering the donations to the representative of the Ottoman Governor of Iraq in the Iraqi port city of Basra on 28th December 1912 according to the 1912 report of the British political agency in Bushehr compiled by a number of political agents in the region including Captain D. L. R. Lorimer and Major A. P. Trevor both of whom served in Bahrain the following edited excerpt is part of Major Trevor's section of this thorough report who succeeded Lorimar from the 1st of November 1912 as political agent in Bahrain (The subscription raised by the Arabs of Bahrain for the Turkish Red Crescent Society having reached the handsome figure of Rs. 1,04,100 the amount was taken to Basra by SS. "Bahrain" (of the Arab Steamers, Limited) on 28th December by Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani and Yusuf Kanoo for despatch to the Sultan. Yusuf Kanoo stated that it was their intention to land at Bushehr and send a telegram to the Sultan stating the amount of the sum raised for the Red Crescent Fund and mentioning that it had been subscribed by the Sheikhs and people of Bahrain for the sick and wounded. The object of this telegram of course was to prevent hanky-panky on the part of the Wali (Ottoman Governor) of Basra) it should be pointed out that Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani was exiled to the Indian port city of Bombay by the British colonial authorities in Bahrain in 1923 along with several of his comrades in the Bahraini independence movement where he died and was buried in less than two years in 1925 on a similar note an oblique account related to a letter dated 11th April of the same year sent by an anonymous Indian Muslim leader requesting Al-Thukair to organise an unspecified cause relief aid campaign for the Muslims of an unnamed Indian province was included in the 1913 report of the British political agency in Bahrain demonstrating the widely acclaimed reputation he achieved through the efficacy of his fundraising campaigns however by the middle of the Great War Al-Thukair had suffered considerable losses in his pearl business wrought in part by the dire effects of war particularly on the luxury goods market but mainly attributed to British interventions aimed at undermining his business interests primarily in Bahrain as some Bahraini historical researchers concluded as a consequence of his active role in supporting the Libyan resistance movement against Italian colonialism as previously stated, needless to say from the British point of view the uncompromising character of Al-Thukair and his unequivocal stance against Western colonialism in all of its forms constituted a threat to British colonial economic hegemony in the region that needed to be addressed decisively by thwarting any attempt to achieve any form of economic independence no matter how insignificant or trivial it might seem as in Al-Thukair's participation as a founding major shareholder with a five percent stake with a number of other wealthy pearl merchants from Bahrain and Kuwait together with the rulers of the said countries and those of Qatar and Oman led and chaired by the regionally famous Kuwaiti pearl merchant Jassim Bin Muhammad Al-Ibrahim (1869-1956) and his fellow leading Bahraini pearl merchant Muhammad Bin Abdulwahab Al-Mishari (1864-1922) in the position of general manager in establishing the first truly regional Arab shareholding firm and the first fully Arab-owned ocean liner shipping company in the Arabian Gulf on 30th April 1911 "The Arab Steamers, Limited" made up for the first time in the modern history of the Gulf of a medium-sized fleet of Western-built passenger steamships the moderately edited following extract from the 1912 report of the British Gulf residency in the Persian (Iranian) coastal city of Bushehr gives an inkling of the size of the company's fleet (The Arab Steamers, Limited-This company started a service to the Arabian Gulf in July 1911 and during the past year, 18 of their steamers have called at Lengeh outwards from Bombay while 10 steamers called on the return journey from Basra) it should be noted that the fleet included the passenger and cargo ship "Tynesider" renamed "Faris" in early 1912 on which the Parisian jeweller Jacques Cartier (1884-1941) travelled to India and the Arabian Gulf the same year as the company's board named the previously mentioned respected Bahraini banker and merchant Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo as its agent in Bahrain since he was friends with most of the board members incidentally it was Yusuf Kanoo's first shipping agency in 1911, thus launching his shipping agency business which would become the posthumous cornerstone of the eponymous regional multinational Y.B.A. Kanoo conglomerate in the post-World War Two Arabian Gulf oil economy, the following excerpt from the 1912 report of the British Gulf residency describes the sense of jubilation and pride of the Bahraini people at the arrival of the first passenger steamship of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" to bear the name Bahrain on its maiden voyage (SS. Bahrain a new acquisition of the Arab company, arrived at Bahrain on 1st March, fully dressed with flags. It was explained that the decoration was in honour of the first visit of the ship to its name-place. The name is a source of great delight to the local Arabs) apart from the legitimate premise of economic independence the real reason for the establishment of this firm was a response to the monopolistic exploitative practises and racially discriminatory colonial policies of the "British India Steam Navigation Company" (B.I.) against non-European passengers in general and Arabs in particular as attested by the exorbitant ticket prices of Arab travellers not to mention the additional cargo charges exacted on Arab-owned goods exacerbating the whole situation by barring affluent Arab first-class passengers from eating in the dining rooms and halls of its ships rightfully regarded as a disparaging and demeaning hierarchical colonial policy that posed an egregious affront to human dignity irrespective of race, colour, ethnicity or creed commonly practised by Western colonial powers of divesting non-white peoples of their humanity in order to legitimise their subjugation on the other hand unfortunately the fate of this pioneering highly successful company was tragically sealed unceremoniously in 1915 when it was sold to the "Bombay & Persia Steam Navigation Company" (The Mogul Line) as a direct result of insurmountable British pressure after less than five years of operation a pressure that began by dissuading Gulf Arab rulers from investing in such a venture while the company was still in formation under the usual infantilising colonial mendacious pretenses of catastrophic financial losses and no practical feasibility for themselves and their peoples whether in the near or distant future but their spurious discouraging attempts were in vain with the British-owned (B.I.) resorting to an all-out price war immediately after the start of the company's operations all these flagrantly malicious actions by the British helped stoke the flames of Arab patriotic sentiments to the fullest against them in the Gulf by causing Gulf Arabs including Iraqis to travel almost exclusively on the ships of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" still the company managed to command the substantial sum of three-quarters of a million British Indian silver rupees as a sale price exactly threefold the paid-in capital just over four years earlier given the geopolitical situation of the Great War adverse international economic conditions, sending the pearl-based mono-cultural economies of the Gulf into a tailspin along with wartime restrictions on sea travel, to compound matters further, the British Admiralty requisitioned one of the company's vessels, the passenger and cargo ship SS. "Budrie" originally named SS. "Golconda" for the war effort where it ended up being scuttled as a blockship at Scapa Flow in northern Scotland on 3rd October 1915 a clear testament to the enormous success that this ill-fated company enjoyed in its short-lived existence, the following excerpt is from a thoroughly detailed report on the trade movement of Oman by Major S. G. Knox the British consul in Muscat, Oman and its de facto ruler dated 13th April 1912 on sea trade and shipping movement in and out of the country, refers to the effect of the launching of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" on freight shipping rates (The British India Company who have got the contract for the carriage of mails from and to India provide one weekly fast mail service up and down and 1 fortnightly coasting slow mail service both ways. The vessels of the Arab Steamers, Limited have also maintained a weekly service. In consequence of the weekly service maintained by the Arab Steamers, the freights to India, etc., were greatly reduced during the year and those for United States of America enhanced) the doomed fate of this company became a cautionary tale for anyone attempting to challenge British colonial economic hegemony in the region for many decades to come until the defining watershed historical moment of Britain's future role as a global power in the outcome of the new harsh bipolar world order realities of the 1956 Suez crisis (known as the "tripartite aggression" in the Arab world) marking the beginning of the end of the British imperial presence in the Middle East incrementally superseded by American influence in all aspects nevertheless on the positive side racial discrimination, unwarranted prices and mistreatment of Arabs and non-Europeans on British passenger ships came to an end as the British realised though belatedly that such discriminatory practises could impinge on their long-term economic interests in the region epitomising British pragmatism at its finest one of the most contributing factors to the British Imperial enterprise's resounding successes over the centuries in comparison to its other European counterparts and finally culminating in the straw that broke the camel's back Al-Thukair's staunch allegiance to the sworn enemy of Great Britain in the region the Ottoman Turks on the eve of World War One demonstrably embodied itself in his spearheading of a very large Gulf-wide fundraising campaign comparable to, if not larger than his previous ones to raise financial aid for the Ottomans with a special emphasis on enlisting the financial assistance of Arabian Gulf heads of state, leading merchants and clerics where it attained a resounding success under the watchful eye of the British colonial authorities in the region confirmed by a concise reference in the British Archives to the recently deceased ruler of Qatar Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani who died on 17th July 1913 in relation to the worrying antagonistic fundraising activities of Al-Thukair the British in anticipation of the looming global conflagration of World War One (as it would be known in the West as the Great War or perhaps more idealistically as "the war to end war" the paradoxical catchphrase created by prolific English author H. G. Wells) as an inevitable conclusion in light of the fraught international situation of the escalating crisis in Europe among the newly allied powers of Britain, France and Russia since the turn of the twentieth century in the face of rising militaristic and economic power of Germany as leader of the central powers mainly the Austro-Hungarians and the beleaguered Ottomans in the same previously referred to 1913 report of the British Gulf residency stated as follows (Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani has sent 25 thousand rupees to Sheikh Mugbil and Yusuf Kanoo here with instructions to send the amount to Basra. It is the subscription of the Qatar people for the Turkish relief) a war of the kind that the ailing Ottoman Empire dubbed "The Sick Man of Europe" in the West would be playing its definitive role in deciding the future of the Middle East after four centuries of imperial dominance just as war-weary Britain would be playing itself forty years later in the face of the growing new American influence in the region in the aftermath of the Second World War though in a peaceful conciliatory mode as should be the norm between close strategic partners ultimately Al-Thukair's relentless and far-reaching fervour on all fronts caught up with him forcing the venerable septuagenarian merchant to reluctantly relinquish his most rewarding and cherished achievement the "Bahrain Literary Society" resulting in its permanent closure in 1917 due to the unfortunate fact that he was the sole benefactor of this progressive institution where he spared no expense on his beloved creation during its fruitful albeit brief existence followed soon thereafter by the selling of almost all of his assets in Bahrain starting with the sale of virtually all his Manama properties including his commercial buildings and four houses in early 1917 to his friend and equal in character and exalted social stature prominent pearl merchant Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944) and ending with his most prized possession his huge date palm orchard named "Tinar" on the outskirts of Manama near the historic Al-Khamis Mosque which he sold to his fellow countryman and successor in heading the Najdi community of Bahrain and Ibn Saud's representative notable pearl merchant Abdulaziz Bin Hassan Algosaibi (1876-1953) shortly before his final departure to his birthplace Unaizah where he would die less than six years later in 1923 at the age of 79 this is undoubtedly the clearest manifestation of his unwavering loyalty to his Central Arabian Najdi roots in spite of making Bahrain his home in every sense for forty years however some of his descendants chose to remain in Bahrain namely his Bahraini-born youngest son Abdulrahman who spent the best part of his life moving back and forth between Bahrain and the birthplace of his ancestors Unaizah and whose descendants still live in Bahrain remarkably those last few years of his life were not spent idly on the contrary notwithstanding his financial woes Al-Thukair rose above it all by erecting a charity school complex with free lodging for teachers in his beloved hometown of Unaizah he also funded the publication of two classical Islamic theological works to be distributed gratuitously among its literate residents as a last token of gratitude to the place that played a pivotal role in shaping his formative years the ultimate proof of his noble unfaltering magnanimous nature in the face of overwhelming vicissitudes of fortune in other words for Al-Thukair moral agency and altruism took precedence over expediency, personal gain and selfish interest this idealised narrative might be viewed by some with incredulity however the veracity of the preceding portrait of Al-Thukair was corroborated by an independent foreign source free of any cultural affiliation to the region represented in the travel diary of the young French jeweller Jacques Cartier who painted a more poignant portrait of him than even some of his local and regional contemporaries devoid of duplicity and guile (such values and principles as some commentators suggested were detrimental to Al-Thukair's business activities of course from a pragmatic unscrupulous perspective) as expected at the death announcement of Al-Thukair at dawn on the 13th of May 1923 in his then small sleepy rural hometown of Unaizah thousands of mourners of all genders and walks of life thronged to join the sombre funeral procession of one of Unaizah's most illustrious natives while paying their respects to the family of this noble pious benevolent man the least honour they could afford for someone who gave so much to his people as word of his passing spread beyond Unaizah, cables and letters of condolence started to pour in from regional potentates, political leaders, notables and leading merchants from around the Arabian Peninsula he was also mourned and deservedly eulogised in Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian journals and periodicals by clerics, writers and intellectuals from the Gulf to Iraq and all the way to Egypt some of whom were personal friends such as the loyal Muhammad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Mana (1882-1965) the published author, judge and future Grand Mufti of Qatar and at one time the semi-adopted son and business assistant of Al-Thukair who wrote a heart-wrenching eloquently effusive obituary for Al-Thukair titled "The death of a great man and a famous philanthropist" in the respected Egyptian Magazine Al-Manar on 9th June 1923 less than a month after his death the unique closeness of Al-Mana to Al-Thukair in all respects including their shared birthplace allowed him to serve as a key link between Al-Thukair and all of his regional friends another personal friend was Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Khonji (1880-1967) the esteemed Bahraini multi-talented cleric, poet, writer, intellectual, historian, administrator and educator the second Bahraini to graduate from the reputable Al-Azhar Islamic University of Cairo, Egypt in 1902 a worthy member of the 1919 prestigious education supervisory committee and a regular patron of the "Bahrain Literary Society" the brainchild of Al-Thukair before and after its official inauguration in 1913 a prolific correspondent with Sheikh Muhammad Rasheed Rida the owner of Al-Manar Magazine in Cairo who also happened to be an epistolary friend of Al-Thukair as noted further down in the text curiously enough Khonji's upcoming literal translated description of Al-Thukair was the least ornate of his contemporaries written in a plain stoic unrhetorical spare style displaying the typical ascetic attributes of his writings (Mugbil was a well-educated big merchant who had correspondence through his many agents in India, East Africa, Arab countries and Europe may God Almighty rest his soul) Al-Thukair also formed abiding epistolary friendships throughout his adult life which began as a means to quench his lifelong thirst for intellectual knowledge by forming long-standing literary correspondents that evolved into genuine epistolary friendships as in the case of Mahmud Shukri Al-Alusi (1856-1924) the revered multidiscipline Iraqi Islamic thinker, linguist, historian and reformer editor-in-chief of the first Iraqi periodical the renowned weekly newspaper Al-Zawra'a and once professor and mentor to Al-Mana during his student days in Baghdad however there is strong evidence that the friendship of Al-Alusi and Al-Thukair was not solely epistolary as it was perfectly possible for both gentlemen to meet several times during Al-Thukair's numerous business trips to Iraq particularly in the 1890s there was also occasional specific correspondence between the two concerning the latter's generous and varied assistance to Al-Alusi including the forwarding of several batches of books each containing hundreds of copies of a newly printed first edition of an Islamic theological work by Al-Alusi printed and shipped to Iraq from India one batch at a time at Al-Thukair's expense in addition to financial assistance this was the main topic of a series of letters between the two parties dating back to the year 1893 but for the sake of historical accuracy some of the batches in question were consigned by the ruler of Qatar Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani to be delivered to Al-Alusi by Al-Thukair a trusted friend of the ruler as was the case with other Arabian Gulf rulers mentioned earlier the other distinguished epistolary friend of his was Sheikh Muhammad Rasheed Rida (1865-1935) the eminent Levantine-Egyptian Islamic theologian reformer, Quranic exegete, author and journalist founder and owner of Al-Manar Magazine in Cairo, Egypt to whom he regularly wrote seeking his scholarly counsel on Islamic jurisprudence issues who was alerted to the demise of Al-Thukair by their mutual friend Al-Mana, eliciting a brief yet meaningful obituary by Rida in his own Al-Manar Magazine; the following text is a literal translation of the obituary (we beseech thee Almighty God to bless the life of our mourning brother the just judge of Qatar and to bestow his mercy and blessings upon our departed brother and to unite us with him {In an Assembly of Truth, in the Presence of a Sovereign Omnipotent} (The Moon Surah (chapter) "verse 55" Quran) and to mitigate the grief of his family and offspring and to guide them in following his righteous path) the first impression of this final example of his lasting correspondence is that it was arguably the only one of his consequential epistolary friendships that remained exclusively epistolary since there is no record of any meeting between Al-Thukair and Rida that had ever occurred since their first correspondence at the end of the nineteenth century until the death of Al-Thukair a premise reinforced by an excessive degree of formality and reserved mutual respect a constant feature mirrored in their writings for each other over the years these are the most noteworthy examples to name a few of the monumental veneration that Al-Thukair received upon his death, an explicit attestation of the high standing that he enjoyed at all levels)

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