Thessaloniki (Greek: Θεσσαλονίκη, often referred to internationally as Thessalonica or Salonica, is the second-largest city in Greece and the capital of the Greek region of Macedonia, the administrative region of Central Macedonia and the Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace.[3][4] Its honorific title is Συμπρωτεύουσα (Symprotévousa), literally "co-capital",[5] and stands as a reference to its historical status as the Συμβασιλεύουσα (Symvasilévousa) or "co-reigning" city of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, alongside Constantinople.[6]

 

According to the preliminary results of the 2011 census, the municipality of Thessaloniki today has a population of 322,240,[1] while the Thessaloniki Urban Area (the contiguous built up area forming the "City of Thessaloniki") has a population of 790,824.[1] Furthermore, the Thessaloniki Metropolitan Area extends over an area of 1,455.62 km2 (562.02 sq mi) and its population in 2011 reached a total of 1,104,460 inhabitants.[1]

 

Thessaloniki is Greece's second major economic, industrial, commercial and political centre, and a major transportation hub for the rest of southeastern Europe;[7] its commercial port is also of great importance for Greece and the southeastern European hinterland.[7] The city is renowned for its festivals, events and vibrant cultural life in general,[8] and is considered to be Greece's cultural capital.[8] Events such as the Thessaloniki International Trade Fair and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival are held annually, while the city also hosts the largest bi-annual meeting of the Greek diaspora.[9] Thessaloniki is the 2014 European Youth Capital.[10]

 

Founded in 315 BC by Cassander of Macedon, Thessaloniki's history spans some 2,300 years. An important metropolis by the Roman period, Thessaloniki was the second largest and wealthiest city of the Byzantine Empire. Thessaloniki is home to numerous notable Byzantine monuments, including the Paleochristian and Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as several Roman, Ottoman and Sephardic Jewish structures. The city's main university, Aristotle University, is the largest in Greece and the Balkans.[11]

 

Thessaloniki is a popular tourist destination in Greece. In 2010, Lonely Planet ranked Thessaloniki as the world's fifth-best party city worldwide, comparable to other cities such as Dubai and Montreal.[12] For 2013 National Geographic Magazine included Thessaloniki in its top tourist destinations worldwide,[13] while in 2014 Financial Times FDI magazine (Foreign Direct Investments) declared Thessaloniki as the best mid-sized European city of the future for human capital and lifestyle.

  

Etymology

  

All variations of the city's name derive from the original (and current) appellation in Greek: Θεσσαλονίκη (from Θεσσαλός, Thessalos, and Νίκη, Nike), literally translating to "Thessalian Victory". The name of the city came from the name of a princess, Thessalonike of Macedon, half sister of Alexander the Great, so named because of her birth on the day of the Macedonian victory at the Battle of Crocus Field (353/352 BCE).[16]

 

The alternative name Salonica (or Salonika) derives from the variant form Σαλονίκη (Saloníki) in popular Greek speech, and has given rise to the form of the city's name in several languages. Names in other languages prominent in the city's history include Солѹнь (Solun) in Old Church Slavonic, סלוניקה (Salonika) in Ladino, Selanik (also Selânik) in Turkish (سلانیك in Ottoman Turkish), Solun (also written as Солун) in the local and neighboring South Slavic languages, Салоники (Saloníki) in Russian, and Sãrunã in Aromanian. In local speech, the city's name is typically pronounced with a dark and deep L characteristic of Macedonian Greek accent.[17][18]

 

The name often appears in writing in the abbreviated form Θεσ/νίκη

  

History

  

From antiquity to the Roman Empire

  

The city was founded around 315 BC by the King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and 26 other local villages.[20] He named it after his wife Thessalonike,[21] a half-sister of Alexander the Great and princess of Macedon as daughter of Philip II. Under the kingdom of Macedon the city retained its own autonomy and parliament[22] and evolved to become the most important city in Macedon.[21]

 

After the fall of the kingdom of Macedon in 168 BC, Thessalonica became a free city of the Roman Republic under Mark Antony in 41 BC.[21][23] It grew to be an important trade-hub located on the Via Egnatia,[24] the road connecting Dyrrhachium with Byzantium,[25] which facilitated trade between Thessaloniki and great centers of commerce such as Rome and Byzantium.[26] Thessaloniki also lay at the southern end of the main north-south route through the Balkans along the valleys of the Morava and Axios river valleys, thereby linking the Balkans with the rest of Greece.[27] The city later became the capital of one of the four Roman districts of Macedonia.[24] Later it became the capital of all the Greek provinces of the Roman Empire due to the city's importance in the Balkan peninsula. When the Roman Empire was divided into the tetrarchy, Thessaloniki became the administrative capital of one of the four portions of the Empire under Galerius Maximianus Caesar,[28][29] where Galerius commissioned an imperial palace, a new hippodrome, a triumphal arch and a mausoleum among others.[29][30][31]

 

In 379 when the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum was divided between the East and West Roman Empires, Thessaloniki became the capital of the new Prefecture of Illyricum.[24] In 390 Gothic troops under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, led a massacre against the inhabitants of Thessalonica, who had risen in revolt against the Germanic soldiers. With the Fall of Rome in 476, Thessaloniki became the second-largest city of the Eastern Roman Empire.[26] Around the time of the Roman Empire Thessaloniki was also an important center for the spread of Christianity; some scholars hold that the First Epistle to the Thessalonians written by Paul the Apostle is the first written book of the New Testament.

  

Byzantine era and Middle Ages

  

From the first years of the Byzantine Empire, Thessaloniki was considered the second city in the Empire after Constantinople,[33][34][35] both in terms of wealth and size.[33] with an population of 150,000 in the mid 1100s.[36] The city held this status until it was transferred to Venice in 1423. In the 14th century the city's population exceeded 100,000 to 150,000,[37][38][39] making it larger than London at the time.[40]

 

During the 6th and 7th centuries the area around Thessaloniki was invaded by Avars and Slavs, who unsuccessfully laid siege to the city several times.[41] Traditional historiography stipulates that many Slavs settled in the hinterland of Thessaloniki,[42] however, this migration was allegedly on a much smaller scale than previously thought.[42][42][43] In the 9th century, the Byzantine Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius, both natives of the city, created the first literary language of the Slavs, the Glagolic alphabet, most likely based on the Slavic dialect used in the hinterland of their hometown.[44][45][46][47][48]

 

An Arab naval attack in 904 resulted in the sack of the city.[49] The economic expansion of the city continued through the 12th century as the rule of the Komnenoi emperors expanded Byzantine control to the north. Thessaloniki passed out of Byzantine hands in 1204,[50] when Constantinople was captured by the forces of the Fourth Crusade and incorporated the city and its surrounding territories in the Kingdom of Thessalonica[51] — which then became the largest vassal of the Latin Empire. In 1224, the Kingdom of Thessalonica was overrun by the Despotate of Epirus, a remnant of the former Byzantine Empire, under Theodore Komnenos Doukas who crowned himself Emperor,[52] and the city became the Despotat's capital.[52][53] This era of the Despotate of Epirus is also known as the Empire of Thessalonica.[52][54][55] Following his defeat at Klokotnitsa however in 1230,[52][54] the Empire of Thessalonica became a vassal state of the Second Bulgarian Empire until it was recovered again in 1246, this time by the Nicaean Empire.[52] In 1342,[56] the city saw the rise of the Commune of the Zealots, an anti-aristocratic party formed of sailors and the poor,[57] which is nowadays described as social-revolutionary.[56] The city was practically independent of the rest of the Empire,[56][57][58] as it had its own government, a form of republic.[56] The zealot movement was overthrown in 1350 and the city was reunited with the rest of the Empire.[56]

 

In 1423, Despot Andronicus, who was in charge of the city, ceded it to the Republic of Venice with the hope that it could be protected from the Ottomans who were besieging the city (there is no evidence to support the oft-repeated story that he sold the city to them). The Venetians held Thessaloniki until it was captured by the Ottoman Sultan Murad II on 29 March 1430.

  

Ottoman period

  

When Sultan Murad II captured Thessaloniki and sacked it in 1430, contemporary reports estimated that about one-fifth of the city's population was enslaved.[60] Upon the conquest of Thessaloniki, some of its inhabitants escaped,[61] including intellectuals such as Theodorus Gaza "Thessalonicensis" and Andronicus Callistus.[62] However, the change of sovereignty from the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman one did not affect the city's prestige as a major imperial city and trading hub.[63][64] Thessaloniki and Smyrna, although smaller in size than Constantinople, were the Ottoman Empire's most important trading hubs.[63] Thessaloniki's importance was mostly in the field of shipping,[63] but also in manufacturing,[64] while most of the city's trade was controlled by ethnic Greeks.[63]

 

During the Ottoman period, the city's population of mainly Greek Jews and Ottoman Muslims (including those of Turkish and Albanian, as well as Bulgarian Muslim and Greek Muslim convert origin) grew substantially. By 1478 Selânik (سلانیك), as the city came to be known in Ottoman Turkish, had a population of 4,320 Muslims, 6,094 Greek Orthodox and some Catholics, but no Jews. Soon after the turn of the 15th to 16th century, nearly 20,000 Sephardic Jews had immigrated to Greece from Spain following their expulsion by the 1492 Alhambra Decree.[65] By c. 1500, the numbers had grown to 7,986 Greeks, 8,575 Muslims, and 3,770 Jews. By 1519, Sephardic Jews numbered 15,715, 54% of the city's population. Some historians consider the Ottoman regime's invitation to Jewish settlement was a strategy to prevent the ethnic Greek population (Eastern Orthodox Christians) from dominating the city.[38]

 

Thessaloniki was the capital of the Sanjak of Selanik within the wider Rumeli Eyalet (Balkans)[66] until 1826, and subsequently the capital of Selanik Eyalet (after 1867, the Selanik Vilayet).[67][68] This consisted of the sanjaks of Selanik, Serres and Drama between 1826 and 1912.[69] Thessaloniki was also a Janissary stronghold where novice Janissaries were trained. In June 1826, regular Ottoman soldiers attacked and destroyed the Janissary base in Thessaloniki while also killing over 10,000 Janissaries, an event known as The Auspicious Incident in Ottoman history.[70] From 1870, driven by economic growth, the city's population expanded by 70%, reaching 135,000 in 1917.[71]

 

The last few decades of Ottoman control over the city were an era of revival, particularly in terms of the city's infrastructure. It was at that time that the Ottoman administration of the city acquired an "official" face with the creation of the Command Post[72] while a number of new public buildings were built in the eclectic style in order to project the European face both of Thessaloniki and the Ottoman Empire.[72][73] The city walls were torn down between 1869 and 1889,[74] efforts for a planned expansion of the city are evident as early as 1879,[75] the first tram service started in 1888[76] and the city streets were illuminated with electric lamp posts in 1908.[77] In 1888 Thessaloniki was connected to Central Europe via rail through Belgrade, Monastir in 1893 and Constantinople in 1896.

  

Since the 20th century

  

In the early 20th century, Thessaloniki was in the center of radical activities by various groups; the Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, founded in 1897,[78] and the Greek Macedonian Committee, founded in 1903.[79] In 1903 an anarchist group known as the Boatmen of Thessaloniki planted bombs in several buildings in Thessaloniki, including the Ottoman Bank, with some assistance from the IMRO. The Greek consulate in Ottoman Thessaloniki (now the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle) served as the center of operations for the Greek guerillas. In 1908 the Young Turks movement broke out in the city, sparking the Young Turk Revolution.[80]

The Ottoman Feth-i Bülend being sunk in Thessaloniki in 1912 by a Greek ship during the First Balkan War.

Constantine I of Greece with George I of Greece and the Greek army enter the city.

 

As the First Balkan War broke out, Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire and expanded its borders. When Eleftherios Venizelos, Prime Minister at the time, was asked if the Greek army should move towards Thessaloniki or Monastir (now Bitola, Republic of Macedonia), Venizelos replied "Salonique à tout prix!" (Thessaloniki, at all costs!).[81] As both Greece and Bulgaria wanted Thessaloniki, the Ottoman garrison of the city entered negotiations with both armies.[82] On 8 November 1912 (26 October Old Style), the feast day of the city's patron saint, Saint Demetrius, the Greek Army accepted the surrender of the Ottoman garrison at Thessaloniki.[83] The Bulgarian army arrived one day after the surrender of the city to Greece and Tahsin Pasha, ruler of the city, told the Bulgarian officials that "I have only one Thessaloniki, which I have surrendered".[82] After the Second Balkan War, Thessaloniki and the rest of the Greek portion of Macedonia were officially annexed to Greece by the Treaty of Bucharest in 1913.[84] On 18 March 1913 George I of Greece was assassinated in the city by Alexandros Schinas.[85]

 

In 1915, during World War I, a large Allied expeditionary force established a base at Thessaloniki for operations against pro-German Bulgaria.[86] This culminated in the establishment of the Macedonian Front, also known as the Salonika Front.[87][88] In 1916, pro-Venizelist Greek army officers and civilians, with the support of the Allies, launched an uprising,[89] creating a pro-Allied[90] temporary government by the name of the "Provisional Government of National Defence"[89][91] that controlled the "New Lands" (lands that were gained by Greece in the Balkan Wars, most of Northern Greece including Greek Macedonia, the North Aegean as well as the island of Crete);[89][91] the official government of the King in Athens, the "State of Athens",[89] controlled "Old Greece"[89][91] which were traditionally monarchist. The State of Thessaloniki was disestablished with the unification of the two opposing Greek governments under Venizelos, following the abdication of King Constantine in 1917.[86][91]

The 1st Battalion of the National Defence army marches on its way to the front.

Aerial picture of the Great Fire of 1917.

 

Most of the old center of the city was destroyed by the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917, which started accidentally by an unattended kitchen fire on 18 August 1917.[92] The fire swept through the centre of the city, leaving 72,000 people homeless; according to the Pallis Report, most of them were Jewish (50,000). Many businesses were destroyed, as a result, 70% of the population were unemployed.[92] Also a number of religious structures of the three major faiths were lost. Nearly one-quarter of the total population of approximately 271,157 became homeless.[92] Following the fire the government prohibited quick rebuilding, so it could implement the new redesign of the city according to the European-style urban plan[6] prepared by a group of architects, including the Briton Thomas Mawson, and headed by French architect Ernest Hébrard.[92] Property values fell from 6.5 million Greek drachmas to 750,000.[93]

 

After the defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War and during the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, a population exchange took place between Greece and Turkey.[90] Over 160,000 ethnic Greeks deported from the former Ottoman Empire were resettled in the city,[90] changing its demographics. Additionally many of the city's Muslims were deported to Turkey, ranging at about 20,000 people.[94]

 

During World War II Thessaloniki was heavily bombarded by Fascist Italy (with 232 people dead, 871 wounded and over 800 buildings damaged or destroyed in November 1940 alone),[95] and, the Italians having failed to succeed in their invasion of Greece, it fell to the forces of Nazi Germany on 8 April 1941[96] and remained under German occupation until 30 October 1944 when it was liberated by the Greek People's Liberation Army.[97] The Nazis soon forced the Jewish residents into a ghetto near the railroads and on 15 March 1943 began the deportation process of the city's 56,000 Jews to its concentration camps.[98][99] They deported over 43,000 of the city's Jews in concentration camps,[98] where most were killed in the gas chambers. The Germans also deported 11,000 Jews to forced labor camps, where most perished.[100] Only 1,200 Jews live in the city today.

Part of Eleftherias Square during the Axis occupation.

 

The importance of Thessaloniki to Nazi Germany can be demonstrated by the fact that, initially, Hitler had planned to incorporate it directly in the Third Reich[101] (that is, make it part of Germany) and not have it controlled by a puppet state such as the Hellenic State or an ally of Germany (Thessaloniki had been promised to Yugoslavia as a reward for joining the Axis on 25 March 1941).[102] Having been the first major city in Greece to fall to the occupying forces just two days after the German invasion, it was in Thessaloniki that the first Greek resistance group was formed (under the name «Ελευθερία», Eleftheria, "Freedom")[103] as well as the first anti-Nazi newspaper in an occupied territory anywhere in Europe,[104] also by the name Eleftheria. Thessaloniki was also home to a military camp-converted-concentration camp, known in German as "Konzentrationslager Pavlo Mela" (Pavlos Melas Concentration Camp),[105] where members of the resistance and other non-favourable people towards the German occupation from all over Greece[105] were held either to be killed or sent to concentration camps elsewhere in Europe.[105] In the 1946 monarchy referendum, the majority of the locals voted in favour of a republic, contrary to the rest of Greece.[106]

 

After the war, Thessaloniki was rebuilt with large-scale development of new infrastructure and industry throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Many of its architectural treasures still remain, adding value to the city as a tourist destination, while several early Christian and Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1988.[107] In 1997, Thessaloniki was celebrated as the European Capital of Culture,[108] sponsoring events across the city and the region. Agency established to oversee the cultural activities of that year 1997 was still in existence by 2010.[109] In 2004 the city hosted a number of the football events as part of the 2004 Summer Olympics.[110]

 

Today Thessaloniki has become one of the most important trade and business hubs in Southeastern Europe, with its port, the Port of Thessaloniki being one of the largest in the Aegean and facilitating trade throughout the Balkan hinterland.[7] On 26 October 2012 the city celebrated its centennial since its incorporation into Greece.[111] The city also forms one of the largest student centres in Southeastern Europe, is host to the largest student population in Greece and will be the European Youth Capital in 2014

  

Geography

  

Geology

  

Thessaloniki lies on the northern fringe of the Thermaic Gulf on its eastern coast and is bound by Mount Chortiatis on its southeast. Its proximity to imposing mountain ranges, hills and fault lines, especially towards its southeast have historically made the city prone to geological changes.

 

Since medieval times, Thessaloniki was hit by strong earthquakes, notably in 1759, 1902, 1978 and 1995.[113] On 19–20 June 1978, the city suffered a series of powerful earthquakes, registering 5.5 and 6.5 on the Richter scale.[114][115] The tremors caused considerable damage to a number of buildings and ancient monuments,[114] but the city withstood the catastrophe without any major problems.[115] One apartment building in central Thessaloniki collapsed during the second earthquake, killing many, raising the final death toll to 51.[114][115]

Climate

  

Thessaloniki's climate is directly affected by the sea it is situated on.[116] The city lies in a transitional climatic zone, so its climate displays characteristics of several climates. According to the Köppen climate classification, it is a humid subtropical climate (Cfa) that borders on a semi-arid climate (BSk), with annual average precipitation of 450 millimetres (18 in) due to the Pindus rain shadow drying the westerly winds. However, the city has a summer precipitation between 20 to 30 millimetres (0.79 to 1.18 in), which borders it close to a hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Csa).

 

Winters are relatively dry, with common morning frost. Snowfalls are sporadic, but οccur more or less every winter, but the snow cover does not last for more than a few days. Fog is common, with an average of 193 foggy days in a year.[117] During the coldest winters, temperatures can drop to −10 °C (14 °F).[117] The record minimum temperature in Thessaloniki was −14 °C (7 °F).[118] On average, Thessaloniki experiences frost (sub-zero temperature) 32 days a year.[117] The coldest month of the year in the city is January, with an average 24-hour temperature of 6 °C (43 °F).[119] Wind is also usual in the winter months, with December and January having an average wind speed of 26 km/h (16 mph).[117]

 

Thessaloniki's summers are hot with rather humid nights.[117] Maximum temperatures usually rise above 30 °C (86 °F),[117] but rarely go over 40 °C (104 °F);[117] the average number of days the temperature is above 32 °C (90 °F) is 32.[117] The maximum recorded temperature in the city was 42 °C (108 °F).[117][118] Rain seldom falls in summer, mainly during thunderstorms. In the summer months Thessaloniki also experiences strong heat waves.[120] The hottest month of the year in the city is July, with an average 24-hour temperature of 26 °C (79 °F).[119] The average wind speed for June and July in Thessaloniki is 20 kilometres per hour (12 mph)

  

Government

  

According to the Kallikratis reform, as of 1 January 2011 the Thessaloniki Urban Area (Greek: Πολεοδομικό Συγκρότημα Θεσσαλονίκης) which makes up the "City of Thessaloniki", is made up of six self-governing municipalities (Greek: Δήμοι) and one municipal unit (Greek: Δημοτική ενότητα). The municipalities that are included in the Thessaloniki Urban Area are those of Thessaloniki (the city center and largest in population size), Kalamaria, Neapoli-Sykies, Pavlos Melas, Kordelio-Evosmos, Ampelokipoi-Menemeni, and the municipal unit of Pylaia, part of the municipality of Pylaia-Chortiatis. Prior to the Kallikratis reform, the Thessaloniki Urban Area was made up of twice as many municipalities, considerably smaller in size, which created bureaucratic problems.[123]

  

Thessaloniki Municipality

  

The municipality of Thessaloniki (Greek: Δήμος Θεσαλονίκης) is the second most populous in Greece, after Athens, with a population of 322,240[1] people (in 2011) and an area of 17.832 km2 (7 sq mi). The municipality forms the core of the Thessaloniki Urban Area, with its central district (the city center), referred to as the Kentro, meaning 'center' or 'downtown'.

 

The institution of mayor of Thessaloniki was inaugurated under the Ottoman Empire, in 1912. The first mayor of Thessaloniki was Osman Sait Bey, while the current mayor of the municipality of Thessaloniki is Yiannis Boutaris. In 2011, the municipality of Thessaloniki had a budget of €464.33 million[124] while the budget of 2012 stands at €409.00 million.[125]

 

According to an article in The New York Times, the way in which the present mayor of Thessaloniki is treating the city's debt and oversized administration problems could be used as an example by Greece's central government for a successful strategy in dealing with these problems.[126]

  

Other

  

Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece. It is an influential city for the northern parts of the country and is the capital of the region of Central Macedonia and the Thessaloniki regional unit. The Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace is also based in Thessaloniki, being that the city is the de facto capital of the Greek region of Macedonia.

 

It is customary every year for the Prime Minister of Greece to announce his administration's policies on a number of issues, such as the economy, at the opening night of the Thessaloniki International Trade Fair. In 2010, during the first months of the 2010 Greek debt crisis, the entire cabinet of Greece met in Thessaloniki to discuss the country's future.[127]

 

In the Hellenic Parliament, the Thessaloniki urban area constitutes a 16-seat constituency. As of the national elections of 17 June 2012 the largest party in Thessaloniki is New Democracy with 27.8%, followed by the Coalition of the Radical Left (27.0%) and the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (10.2%).[128] The table below summarizes the results of the latest elections.

  

Cityscape

  

Architecture

  

Architecture in Thessaloniki is the direct result of the city's position at the centre of all historical developments in the Balkans. Aside from its commercial importance, Thessaloniki was also for many centuries the military and administrative hub of the region, and beyond this the transportation link between Europe and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel / Palestine). Merchants, traders and refugees from all over Europe settled in the city. The need for commercial and public buildings in this new era of prosperity led to the construction of large edifices in the city center. During this time, the city saw the building of banks, large hotels, theatres, warehouses, and factories. Architects who designed some of the most notable buildings of the city, in the late 19th and early 20th century, include Vitaliano Poselli, Pietro Arrigoni, Xenophon Paionidis, Eli Modiano, Moshé Jacques, Jean Joseph Pleyber, Frederic Charnot, Ernst Ziller, Roubens Max, Levi Ernst, Angelos Siagas and others, using mainly the styles of Eclecticism and Art Nouveau.

 

The city layout changed after 1870, when the seaside fortifications gave way to extensive piers, and many of the oldest walls of the city were demolished, including those surrounding the White Tower, which today stands as the main landmark of the city. As parts of the early Byzantine walls were demolished, this allowed the city to expand east and west along the coast.[129]

 

The expansion of Eleftherias Square towards the sea completed the new commercial hub of the city and at the time was considered one of the most vibrant squares of the city. As the city grew, workers moved to the western districts, due to their proximity to factories and industrial activities; while the middle and upper classes gradually moved from the city-center to the eastern suburbs, leaving mainly businesses. In 1917, a devastating fire swept through the city and burned uncontrollably for 32 hours.[71] It destroyed the city's historic center and a large part of its architectural heritage, but paved the way for modern development and allowed Thessaloniki the development of a proper European city center, featuring wider diagonal avenues and monumental squares; which the city initially lacked – much of what was considered to be 'essential' in European architecture.

  

City Center

  

After the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917, a team of architects and urban planners including Thomas Mawson and Ernest Hebrard, a French architect, chose the Byzantine era as the basis of their (re)building designs for Thessaloniki's city center. The new city plan included axes, diagonal streets and monumental squares, with a street grid that would channel traffic smoothly. The plan of 1917 included provisions for future population expansions and a street and road network that would be, and still is sufficient today.[71] It contained sites for public buildings and provided for the restoration of Byzantine churches and Ottoman mosques.

The Metropolitan Church of Saint Gregory Palamas, designed by Ernst Ziller.

 

Today the city center of Thessaloniki includes the features designed as part of the plan and forms the point in the city where most of the public buildings, historical sites, entertainment venues and stores are located. The center is characterized by its many historical buildings, arcades, laneways and distinct architectural styles such as Art Nouveau and Art Deco, which can be seen on many of its buildings.

 

Also called the historic center, it is divided into several districts, of which include Ladadika (where many entertainment venues and tavernas are located), Kapani (were the city's central city market is located), Diagonios, Navarinou, Rotonta, Agia Sofia and Ippodromio (white tower), which are all located around Thessaloniki's most central point, Aristotelous Square.

 

The west point of the city center is home to Thessaloniki's law courts, its central international railway station and the port, while on its eastern side stands the city's two universities, the Thessaloniki International Exhibition Center, the city's main stadium, its archaeological and Byzantine museums, the new city hall and its central parklands and gardens, namely those of the ΧΑΝΘ/Palios Zoologikos Kipos and Pedio tou Areos. The central road arteries that pass through the city center, designed in the Ernest Hebrard plan, include those of Tsimiski, Egnatia, Nikis, Mitropoleos, Venizelou and St. Demetrius avenues.

  

Ano Poli

  

Ano Poli (also called Old Town and literally the Upper Town) is the heritage listed district north of Thessaloniki's city center that was not engulfed by the great fire of 1917 and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site by ministerial actions of Melina Merkouri, during the 1980s. It consists of Thessaloniki's most traditional part of the city, still featuring small stone paved streets, old squares and homes featuring old Greek and Ottoman architecture.

 

Ano Poli also, is the highest point in Thessaloniki and as such, is the location of the city's acropolis, its Byzantine fort, the Heptapyrgion, a large portion of the city's remaining walls, and with many of its additional Ottoman and Byzantine structures still standing. The area provides access to the Seich Sou Forest National Park[131] and features amphitheatric views of the whole city and the Thermaic Gulf. On clear days Mount Olympus, at about 100 km (62 mi) away across the gulf, can also be seen towering the horizon.

  

Southeastern Thessaloniki up until the 1920s was home to the city's most affluent residents and formed the outermost suburbs of the city at the time, with the area close to the Thermaic Gulf coast called Exoches, from the 19th century holiday villas which defined the area. Today southeastern Thessaloniki has in some way become a natural extension of the city center, with the avenues of Megalou Alexandrou, Georgiou Papandreou (Antheon), Vasilissis Olgas Avenue, Delfon, Konstantinou Karamanli (Nea Egnatia) and Papanastasiou passing through it, enclosing an area traditionally called Dépôt (Ντεπώ), from the name of the old tram station, owned by a French company. The area extends to Kalamaria and Pylaia, about 9 km (5.59 mi) from the White Tower in the city centre.

 

Some of the most notable mansions and villas of the old-era of the city remain along Vasilissis Olgas Avenue. Built for the most wealthy residents and designed by well known architects they are used today as museums, art galleries or remain as private properties. Some of them include Villa Bianca, Villa Ahmet Kapanci, Villa Modiano, Villa Mordoch, Villa Mehmet Kapanci, Hatzilazarou Mansion, Chateau Mon Bonheur (often called red tower) and others.

 

Most of southeastern Thessaloniki is characterized by its modern architecture and apartment buildings, home to the middle-class and more than half of the municipality of Thessaloniki population. Today this area of the city is also home to 3 of the city's main football stadiums, the Thessaloniki Concert Hall, the Posidonio aquatic and athletic complex, the Naval Command post of Northern Greece and the old royal palace (called Palataki), located on the most westerly point of Karabournaki cape. The municipality of Kalamaria is also located in southeastern Thessaloniki and has become this part of the city's most sought after areas, with many open spaces and home to high end bars, cafés and entertainment venues, most notably on Plastira street, along the coast

 

Northwestern Thessaloniki had always been associated with industry and the working class because as the city grew during the 1920s, many workers had moved there, due to its proximity near factories and industrial activities. Today many factories and industries have been moved further out west and the area is experiencing rapid growth as does the southeast. Many factories in this area have been converted to cultural centres, while past military grounds that are being surrounded by densely built neighborhoods are awaiting transformation into parklands.

 

Northwest Thessaloniki forms the main entry point into the city of Thessaloniki with the avenues of Monastiriou, Lagkada and 26is Octovriou passing through it, as well as the extension of the A1 motorway, feeding into Thessaloniki's city center. The area is home to the Macedonia InterCity Bus Terminal (KTEL), the Zeitenlik Allied memorial military cemetery and to large entertainment venues of the city, such as Milos, Fix, Vilka (which are housed in converted old factories). Northwestern Thessaloniki is also home to Moni Lazariston, located in Stavroupoli, which today forms one of the most important cultural centers for the city.

 

To read more please click :-

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thessaloniki

Photo of Luffenholtz Beach, looking toward Trinidad and Trinidad Head captured via Minolta MD Zoom Rokkor-X 75-200mm f/4.5 lens and Bracketing method of photography, and in the census-designated place of Westhaven-Moonstone via Scenic Drive, County Road 4M310, post-mile marker 1.23. Humboldt County. Late January 2014.

We thought this beach would be deserted, but a couple of teen boys showed up at the same time. God only knows what they thought of us looking like this and laughing uncontrollably.

 

More from their visit on the blog

 

but they got it made

 

this came out a little grainy, but not too bad! :) The water felt nice today, but it was rather chilly outside, so when i got out of the water, i ended up shaking uncontrollably for a while. Worth it? Definately.

 

**900 views!

 

+++ in comments!

Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace (MAE), Le Bourget.

 

This supersonic VTOL prototype was powered by a SNECMA-modified Pratt & Whitney JTF10 turbofan, redesignated TF-104B and providing cruise thrust, vertical thrust being provided by a battery of eight 1600kg Rolls-Royce RB162-1 engines mounted in pairs in the centre fuselage.

 

Wing root chord was increased by comparison with that of the non-VTOL Mirage, resulting in compound sweep. Following replacement of the 6300kg TF-104 by the TF-106A3 offering 7600kg, the IIIV effected its first transition to horizontal flight on 24 March 1966 and later attained speeds up to Mach 1.35.

 

The second prototype was flown on 22 June 1966. This was powered by an 8400kg TF-30 propulsion turbofan, and side-hinged doors rather than aft-hinged grilles covered the lift engines. On 12 September 1966, this second aircraft attained M=2.04 in level flight. But on 28 November 1966, the second prototype was lost in an accident. The aircraft became uncontrollable (in crabbing/sideslip flight tests), and the test pilot ejected and survived.but on 28 November, it was destroyed in a crash.

 

The production Mirage IIIV was intended to combine a 9000kg TF-306 propulsion engine (built by SNECMA) with eight 2200kg RB162-31 lift engines, and was to be optimised for the tactical strike role, with a low-level M=0.92 attack mode and a 467km combat radius with a 907kg nuclear payload. The development programme was suspended after the loss of the second aircraft and finally abandoned.

I found a stash of USGS copies I made some time ago so I am taking a retouching break for some USGS originals I found. This ranch house is that on a hill above the barn. The entire site still looks like a stage stop to me. I posted the original I found and then I suffered the retouching grief (3-4 hours evening out the tones) and this is my best as long as I am Trump coronation virus quarantining for now even if Trump convinces his hit squad to hand me the recycled virus when next I step out. I already spent more retouching time than I wanted. Although the Virginia Dale store (Stage Station) is closed now, it was always a stop on the route from northern Colorado especially to the transcontinental Union Pacific route through Laramie, Wyoming. (Supposedly) The Robber's Roost was within a mile of Virginia Dale when W.H. Jackson found and shot it.

 

A later rail link, trying to make a connection to southern Wyoming, was attempted and graded past Virginia Dale station at a later time. A tunnel was dug northwest of Virginia Dale. eDDie tracked the route and tunnel on Google maps as far as it was graded. The Union Pacific and the Denver Pacific joined to torpedo the new route. It's on our bucket list of future photos. I shot a couple of grave markers at the little church cemetery.

 

Virginia Dale, Colorado Stage Station Treasure

Overland Trail Team

 

"In 1863, a stagecoach along the Overland Trail carrying an army payroll of $60,000 (which would be about $1 million dollars today) in ten and twenty dollar gold coins was destined for Fort Sanders (at Laramie) in Wyoming Territory. The gold shipment represented several months of back pay for the soldiers at Fort Sanders; however, the unfortunate soldiers never saw the gold.

 

Only about a mile from the Virginia Dale Station, the stage was robbed by six masked outlaws at Long View Hill. The gang took the strongbox from the stage and headed west towards the wooded foothills, where they blew the lock off of the box, removed the gold coins, and buried the treasure.

 

However, before they could spend their ill-gained wealth, the bandits were pursued and killed by the U.S. Cavalry. The Cavalry later found the iron strong box in a nearby creek, the sides and bottom gone, riddled with bullet holes – and, obviously, empty.

 

The Overland Trail stage line was regularly terrorized by outlaws, where the surrounding area provided multiple opportunistic hideouts. One hideout, labeled the Robbers Roost atop Table Mountain, was so popular that the outlaws built a cabin there. Table Mountain, only about a mile northeast of the Virginia Dale Stage Station, was a perfect hideout, as it is difficult to climb with practically perpendicular cliffs and a rim of shale.

 

At the time, it was rumored that Joseph 'Jack' Slade, the former Station Master was the leader of the gang. Jack Slade, not as famous as many other outlaw characters, was nevertheless, as notorious as many of them. Slade was said to have had an uncontrollable temper, was a heavy drinker, and had murdered in the past.

 

The gold taken by the robbers at Virginia Dale has never been found."

 

Jan. 14 - Feb 5th, 2011 at Roq La Rue Gallery. www.roqlarue.com.

 

mandygreer.wordpress.com

 

Costume made in collaboration with Haruko Nishimura/Degenerate Art Ensemble for the Yokai ghost doll "Shiro" character in "Sonic Tales" from October 2009

 

model: Ella Wei

 

About “Honey and Lightening”

 

“Honey and Lightening” is a show of installation chambers, sculptures of talismanic birds and a series of staged photographs all revolving around examining the mercurial nature of human desire. The substances honey and lightening both have literary, mythical and archetypal references to the occurrence and evolution of desire and it’s fading. I see one as the slow ooze of pleasure and the other as the dangerous, uncontrollable and inexplicably instant occurrence of magnetism between two bodies.

 

Two installation chambers create full body experiences of these ephemeral phenomena and crystallize them in tangible form as a way to signify the human longing for a perfect stasis of experience – which is impossible as emotion begins to degrade, evolve, fold in upon itself after the initial strike.

 

The Honey Moon chamber is a 10 foot tall mirrored jewelry box spanning 12 feet, enclosing a giant engorged golden chandelier formation encrusted with tens of thousands of gold-colored trinkets – the cheapest of the trashiest materials but representing the purest element from the bowels of the earth that has induced lust to the point of violence since pre-history. This giant mass of gold, as well as the body of the viewer, is reflected infinitely in 35 mirrored panels that create a simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive encounter that memorializes a temporary event. The mythology of honey, a bodily fluid produced from flowers, has long been associated with the ooze of erotic perfection. An ambrosial month of drinking honey-wine has followed the wedding ceremony since the Pharaohs. But locked up in the folklore of this transitional period is that the delirium ends and the state of bliss is forever sought after.

 

The Cherry Tree Root chamber is, in a way, a reverence to my own experience with Colpo di fulmine — “love at first sight” in Italian, which literally translate to “lightning strike”, and a craving to re-experience a place and time that no longer exists. Recently digging a 16 foot deep foundation hole, my husband and I removed 72 tons of dirt from our property to build a studio, exposing deep and gnarled roots that seems like frozen solidified lightening, long forgotten, dug up by us to lay the foundation for the rooms we hope we’ll die in. The root chamber is like entering this underground world hidden from view of long- ago electric ephemeral desires that have now turned into strong and sturdy roots- not as flashy as lightening but quietly enduring and growing. The roots are battered beautiful twisting accumulations of crocheted scraps of fabric I’ve saved for years, old ropes and remnants of past installations, hand-spun hair, rabbit fur and old clothes, all coated in the dirt from below my family’s foundation.

 

Creating a chamber to recede into is an homage to Jeffry Michell’s 2001 installation “Hanabuki”, the site of our own lightening strike, a catalytic phenomenon that lasted a millisecond. Like life itself beginning with lightening striking the primordial soup, the mythology of celestial fire recognizes its ability to create fast irreversible transformation. Despite the impossibility of it, I made my chamber as a way to revisit and remember the secret place Jeffry made, the fur-lined hut that was a pleasure palace where I fell in love, presided over by little dancing gods spreading the joys of the pleasure in all bodies, a beginning of something that seemed temporary and ill-fated but really turned out to be deep-rooted like an ancient tree.

 

The installation also includes a gathering of talismanic birds made of leather and more than a thousand individually cut and sewn silk and satin feathers, representing my imminent needs but using imagery used by a variety of ancient peoples and cultures — a desire for protection, for a guide, and harbingers of happiness in the form of a raptors. In photographs, close friends and my husband play out roles that tie into the everyday events of their lives, but represented as re-interpreted gods and goddesses such as Hecate, Demeter and the Green Man. The photos speak to themes of cross-roads, the double pull of isolation vs. community, a power buried in the beginnings of motherhood and the visceral erotic pull of the earth, volatile but buried like a dormant volcano.

 

Sponsored in part by by the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs CityArtist Grant and 4Culture/King County Lodging Tax Revenue.

  

[Nakoma is over Pocahontas's crying her eyes out. A few days ago she found out the Kocoum is back to his old ways and has been seeing the Nerissa woman again! Nakoma has no clue what to do and needs some good advice. As the two talk Willow and Lake try and play with each other while in their mothers laps.]

 

N: [Sobbing uncontrollably] I just don't understand. What dose she have that I don't? We have a nice home, two beautiful little girls, great paying jobs. I don't get it. He goes after that women who can't even support herself! He even took a DNA test proving he isn't the father of her child, so what is so freaking important about her?!

 

P: How did you even find out?

 

N: That....woman had the nerve to call me. She sent me text messages between them, pictures, everything! They were talking about he didn't love me and that I was too old and all sorts of mean things. One screen shot of their messages even said that he might as well leave me and be with her and he agreed! He freaking agreed!! [Nakoma starts to cry even harder]

 

P: I'm so sorry Nakoma..

 

N: What am I suppose to tell River and Lake? Daddy went to live with another lady? Daddy doesn't love Mommy? I'm trying so hard to keep everything together, but it's hard. It's not fair either! How come he gets to walk away without any burdens.

 

P: He threw away years of love and commitment and a wonderful family. He'll understand that eventually and when he does it will hit him like a ton of bricks.

 

N: I just can't believe it. What is so special about her that he needs to hurt me...no..our family like this...AGAIN!?

 

P: I don't know, but what are you going to do?

 

N: I have no clue. So far I kicked him out. Thank God I didn't put him on the lease to the house. I guess the next step is a divorce.

 

P: Are you sure about that?

 

N: Absolutely. He'll just keep hurting me and the girls if I continue to forgive him. If he finds that Nerissa girl so special then they can be together. It's time to put the girls and I first. I just don't know how I'll manage being a single mother.

 

P: It will be hard, but you're strong. You'll turn this situation around and make it work out like you do for everything. If you need anything though please don't hesitate to ask. I'm here for you.

 

N: Thanks, P. I'll be holding you to that.

------

 

Aww. Poor Nakoma ='(

I like being nowhere better than at the edge of the ocean. It is the joining of two worlds and it always makes for spectacular photography. This appeared like many other drab, gray days at the beach but if one stood at just the right spot and looked hard enough it was anything but drab and gray. Photography is never inhibited by the weather, but photographers can be. I think if you look just right, there is something remarkable to always be found, no matter where or when you are.

 

Often I think I should start carrying a little point and shoot camera loaded with standard color film and take the "standard" snapshot of scenes at the same time I shoot them with my usual cameras, just to provide that comparison. For this photo, I knew the drab, gray, low contrast scene would look more interesting shot with high contrast film so I loaded up a roll of Ortho film in my Pentax 67, or maybe this was when I still had my 6x7... Normally the contrast of that film is uncontrollable but when shot in very flat light, it can produce some spectacular results. I ended up liking this shot and the warm tone that the print came out with. And yes I am pretty sure I got my feet wet taking it.

found this old Gothic church-like castle while browsing through my old pictures, a pity i tore it down...

 

Café Frequenters Episode 27

 

( 2006-07-31 Malmö. Sweden )

 

Hello all you people at te Unemployment office!

 

My Name is Johnny Browne and I will soon contact you in person...

But before I do that I want to write about my precent situation and my wishes and expectations on becoming a subscriber to your services!

 

Because my precent wellbeing and mental health is weak, not on a high!

...and my memory and power to process stress is low!

 

It is easier for me to at forehand write down important stuff that I need to say because the meeting with you in person will be very stressful and at that moment I won´t be able to express my self the way I wish due to my precent mental state!

 

For about three years ago "I started to get a hod of my life" which had been falling been towards hell in an abyss swallowing me while accelerating towards a crash at the bottom...

I had at the time been without what so ever sort of income for more than three months, rent debt and other bills were amounting unpayed and I was very frail and a nervous wreck.

 

...an important step towards my recovery and finding a job was the help and services of "Work and integration" and especially my support and ombudsman Rita Petterson, loads of credit to her, she did a wonderful piece of work and took me serious...

 

We Managed to get me an intern at Hotel Quantity here in Malmö, I had found my inner strength again and nothing could stop me, I was gonna get my life back together and get back on the right tracks...

 

Because of me working hard and proved med skilled in the profession I got a real employment...

 

But really, the work the work and the harsh work culture was stressful and started to grid me down... but I thought that if I have a work it would be easy to find a better job before I got too far down, I thought it would help me get a more sustainable work with the credibility being employed...

 

Then at 2005 bad luck struck with a big sledgehammer in my head, my boss and her two senior cleaners all got sick the very same summer and me and another cleaner was forced to step in to the world of managing hotel cleaning, we had to take turns in being the cleaning administrator (and still do our ordinary house keeping work), we had to learn a lot in an extremely short time, planning the cleaning, write shedules, the computer programme all the different things we wern´t trained for an at this very time our hotel had managed to get the room reservations for a big international sporting game in town, the hotel was fully booked all summer, the few of us that was still working, had to work longer, faster and more because of the lack of cleaners (3 where sick)

We worked 9-10 hours a day...

we started to clean six rooms an hour instead of four before to make ends meet, I had to give up my extra evening work doing phone interviews because of the Pressure of working more at the hotel...

 

...at first I thought what doesn´t kill me makes me stronger and that if it didn´t physically kill me my mind would endure...

 

But at the end of summer I was a wreck, my hands had started to shiver uncontrollably when ever I wasn´t working (at work my hands didn´t shake)

I could hardly even hold a cup of coffee without my shaking hands would spill coffee all over...

 

I felt embarrassed in front of people looking like someone with parkingsons, so my social life took a dip downwards, I stopped seeing friends and family, stopped going to cafés...

 

I still have these trembles, but the are very slowly fading away, but when I am exposed to any form of stress they usually return...

Like my last work pass 8 days in a row with my "Boss-phone" constantly ringing and people wanting, this or that, a schedule , finding lost property or wanting me to take different decisions... it makes me start to shake in the end...

 

Right now I am looking for a new job in Denmark across the sound, I hope I will find one, and any way I find people there easier to talk to and I get more replies on my applied works, like "we are sorry, but please return in a few months we might have room for you then.."

Instead of complete silence or people angry about applying for the job they advertised for???

I apologize for this letter turning rather long but I just want to explain my precent status and I want you to see that I am a living breathing person and not just a statistic in your computer files...

 

That I why I now ask you people at the office to really try to help me, I don´t want to meet another tired uncaring person who complain about my private dressing fashion or that I act to effeminate or that my movements doesn´t come across as non-serious because of my characteristic way of moving... (YES! this have happened in the past)

So Please I want the respect that i deserve as a human with specific needs, dream, ideas and personality, not a block that is gonna be trimmed to a square to fit in the wall of other Square blocks...

 

I am no Longer strong so I need someone to help me, someone who takes his/her job seriously as I did take my work... Not a Bully who pushes my head under the water line I have had to many of those...

 

I hope you all understand where I come from and hopefully you might help my towards new steps towards a brighter future...

 

Thanks for listening!

 

A hope full Johnny sends his greetings!

  

“She had six husbands, money – and one lover too many.”

 

From the back cover:

 

Philip Marlowe, private eye, knew that Terry’s wife, Sylvia Lennox, had millions and an uncontrollable passion for men.

 

“Did you ever find her with a man in that guest house?” he asked him.

 

Terry shook his head. “I never tried. It wouldn’t have been difficult. It never has been.”

 

“Lots of men, huh? But you went back and married her again.”

 

“Hell,” said Terry, “she’s been married five times, not including me. And one of them would go back at the crook of her finger. And not just for a million bucks.”

 

That was the night Sylvia was murdered, lying on the bed nude as a mermaid.

 

And, though he had only seen her once, the cops threw Philip Marlowe in jail on suspicion of murder.

 

Jan. 14 - Feb 4th, 2011 at Roq La Rue Gallery. www.roqlarue.com.

 

mandygreer.wordpress.com

 

About “Honey and Lightening”

 

“Honey and Lightening” is a show of installation chambers, sculptures of talismanic birds and a series of staged photographs all revolving around examining the mercurial nature of human desire. The substances honey and lightening both have literary, mythical and archetypal references to the occurrence and evolution of desire and it’s fading. I see one as the slow ooze of pleasure and the other as the dangerous, uncontrollable and inexplicably instant occurrence of magnetism between two bodies.

 

The installation also includes a gathering of talismanic birds made of leather and more than a thousand individually cut and sewn silk and satin feathers, representing my imminent needs but using imagery used by a variety of ancient peoples and cultures — a desire for protection, for a guide, and harbingers of happiness in the form of a raptors. In photographs, close friends and my husband play out roles that tie into the everyday events of their lives, but represented as re-interpreted gods and goddesses such as Hecate, Demeter and the Green Man. The photos speak to themes of cross-roads, the double pull of isolation vs. community, a power buried in the beginnings of motherhood and the visceral erotic pull of the earth, volatile but buried like a dormant volcano.

 

Sponsored in part by by the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs CityArtist Grant and 4Culture/King County Lodging Tax Revenue.

 

Model: Sara Kennedy (and unborn Max)

Photo/imaging: Mandy Greer

(sn 53-7786) (c/n 083-1001)-Location is Edwards AFB-Lockheed Chief Test Pilot Anthony "Tony" LeVier in the Lockheed XF-104-LO Starfighter prototype cocpit. Sent to me by "Tony" in the late 1950s. On July 11, 1957, Lockheed engineering test pilot William C. “Bill” Park, Jr. was flying the first XF-104 as chase for F-104A flight tests when the prototype developed uncontrollable tail flutter. Pilot Bill Park was forced to eject when the entire tail group was ripped from the airplane.

Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything. - Mark Twain

Two's company, three's a crowd. The emotion got to me. The blur in the foreground is due to me sobbing uncontrollably. Scene by the Nottingham canal.

Teaser for short film collaboration between Sarah Lee & Jeff Dotson, exploring the edge of the sea, where beauty unfolds between human interaction with the uncontrollable forces of nature.

 

vimeo.com/64489756

 

go to kainos.hisarahlee.com for more info and updates on release.

Vaudeville Games

A villainous study in 2 actes.

Acte 1

 

When I first saw the two of them, I knew that they were up to something no good.

  

It had been a pleasant afternoon spent amusing myself by mixing in during a black-tied occasion haunted by a group of the ultra-rich.

  

The place was an elegantly large, leased Ballroom, where a wedding reception with what seemed like a thousand gaily attired attendees had been in progress most of the afternoon. I had been amazed, dazzled may be a better word, when I had first walked in as the guests had already begun to gather. I had never seen a such a beautifully sparkling display of lovely jewels being worn by the ladies and lassies in attendance to a mere wedding reception before. I thought I was at some sort of convention for a Tiffanies or DeBeers, with models in long flowing gowns of satin, silk, and taffeta, all loaded to the gills with enticing jewels.

  

Later I learned, to my benefit, that a good number of them would be attending a local catholic charities ball held at the Cathedral’s large main hall later that evenin. Which explains the total overkillin with the fancy dress, and baubles.

  

Now, with the females in attendance wearing ample jewels expensive enough that any piece would have been profitable, there would be a temptation even the most unskilled of thieves could not resist. This is precisely one of the reasons why I was there. And I was determined to make the most out of the situation in all ways possible!

  

I soon found meself shadowing an unsuspecting, rather dipsy, female partier, whose steady drinking habit had first piqued my interest. She was wearing too many jewels than was good for her ( in my opinion), totally taking away notice from the rather fetching long taffeta gown she was poshly wearing over her delightfully young figure. I caught up to her just as she was making yet another quick swirling turn , letting her brush up against me. Almost on que ( and with the help of a foot on her dress’s hem) she lost her balance and I held her gloved arm to help steady her up. In the process I snagged one of her vulgarly large diamond bracelets from her satin clad wrist, secreting it to my vest pocket in the commotion.

  

I walked away, realizing yet once again, that the thrill I used to receive when lifting a piece of jewelry from a lady had noticeably been diminishing over the course of the last couple of years. Like any profession that has been worked at for a while, it had almost become too routinely easy anymore; my almost ghostlike hovering over receptions, ballroom dances and the ilk. Admiring the rich gowns and dresses, and savoring their sparkling jewels were becoming almost mundane. Even the snagging of a flashy bauble or two along the way was losing its appeal. Even though it was my primary source for putting the bread on the table , I felt sometimes that I needed a break. Sure, I held a second, loosely related, profession to seem respectable to the outside world, but it did not pay nearly as much. I sighed deeply to myself, wallowing in my rather dubious self-pity as I made my way through the thickly congregated crowd of guests at the reception. I also was finding meself pining for my place of birth, Merry old England( or wales to be specific) and a sweet ginger haired lass who I had once known, and still kept in touch with for the 7 long years since I had left my homeland.

  

With those thoughts whirling about in me head, I made my way to the bar, deciding to now settled back to have a few free drinks and try to enjoy the show. Soon I found myself cheered up, even lazily toying with the idea of making a second score later that evening. And then, well now, given what valuables were being displayed, it was not surprising that soon I spotted a second source of amusement. For it was at that point that I saw the two of them making their way in.

  

There appeared to be only two of them, together; An older woman, grandmotherly in appearance, with long silver hair, and a foxy expression. Along with the “Grandmother” was what appeared to be her 16 year old granddaughter. “Granddaughter” was a slender sprite with a long sheet of freely hanging long silky blonde hair and deep enchantingly blue eyes, and a rather charming smile, with was noticeably pasted upon her impish face as she took it in all the splendor.

  

The grandmother wore a blue silk skirt and white silky top, ¾ sleeved. The granddaughter was wearing a tea length black satin skirt and a gold satin long sleeved blouse with ruffles and frills, which was uncharacteristic when compared to the dresses and long gowns of the other girls around her age in attendance. The “Grandmother” was adorned with silver chains, and earrings. The “Granddaughter” wore ruby earrings and matching necklace, like the kind of imitation jewelry one receives as a promotion when buying overpriced perfume. Both newcomers out of place with some of the fancier costumes and gems on display, worn by the older rich ladies as well as quite a number of their younger female issue’s as well.

  

The granddaughter also wore gold plated rings and bracelets, so pick pocketing was probably not her game; she was probably the “ferret” or the lure. But the grandmother on the other hand, had clean fingers, nimble and long and with nothing around her bare wrists, and decidedly was dressed for quick movements; she was probably the dip, or lift. They also did not appear to be known personally by any of the other guests in attendance, but in a gathering that large, with so many snobs ignoring everything that was going on outside their immediate area, this was not surprising. After all, I was there not really knowing anyone either, except for the ones who had hired me.

  

The pair split off on their own separate courses. The granddaughter soon began mingling with girls in her own age bracket, whom, as was typical of the very rich, were totally unsupervised by any adult. I noticed she was mingling with only those who displayed the most expensive clothing, then zeroing in upon those wearing the largest quantity of expensive jewelry. The Grandmother soon fell into step with a group of older ladies, whose blazing jewels had attracted her notice.

  

The playing field was getting too crowded I thought, and so I made myself content by watching the (pair) work the room. I wasn’t shocked: Hunting grounds this fertile were bound to attract multiple predators. The appetite of my curiosity was wetted and I drifted to a corner table with my refilled drink ( an old fashion) , where I could watch over them without notice.

  

The grandmother was ever watchful, as she chatted up her new, satin gowned, acquaintances, but did not appear to be posed to strike. Her eyes were relentlessly on the move, I figured she was on the look for something special, and was ready to pounce when the situation arose.

  

Meanwhile the granddaughter seemed to have hooked one. A shy fifteen-year-old clad in a eye-catching sky blue long satin sheath gown, with a matching cape that hung from her shoulders to her elbows. The cut of her gown, and her heavy makeup, made the 15 year old look far too much like an adult. Her dangling earrings were at least a full caret, a long thin gold chain dangling from her gowns neckline held diamond studded heart with a sapphire center that swished expensively against her soft gown. A matching ring and bracelet to the pendent rounded out her jewels. But her cape also had a sapphire pin that swayed, shooting out flames of fiery brilliance, whenever the lights caught it.

  

I looked for the grandmother, she was now chatting to a young be speckled twenty something, diamonds glittered from the thin necklace that hung shimmering down the front of her satin turtleneck like blouse, an ideal setup. A long, midnight black, tiered skirt fell flowing to her feet, with a diamond brooch centered on the satin sash that encircled her waist. Rings glittered from the fingers that nervously twirled a locket of long , hanging hair as she talked to the “Grandmother”, who had her hand (seemingly nonchalantly) upon the girl’s silken covered shoulder as she made conversation.

  

I turned my attention back to the “Granddaughter” locating her by the stage, whispering conspiratorially into her newly made friends ear, the girl’s dangling earring shining ever so richly. I watched as the pair left and started to wander towards the dance floor, where they started to watch the dancing couples assembling for the bands next piece. As they stood there the “grandmother” walked up to the pair, and the “granddaughter” introduced her to her new found friend in the shiny blue sheath gown.

  

As they did so, I looked around for the be speckled 20 something the “grandmother” had been chatting up, she couldn’t have gotten far. I soon spotted her on the dance floor, in the arms of a young man in a monkey suite. I quickly noticed that her necklace was noticeably no longer adorning the neckline of her pretty blouse. I had a good idea where it was, but how had it been accomplished, removed from around her neck without notice, ahh, that was the rub. I was sorry I had missed the performance of the disappearing necklace trick!

  

My analysis of the pairs game had been spot on, and it was obvious that they were not armatures by any means. It appeared that the “Grandmother was the expert, The younger looking “Granddaughter “ probably her protégé. I quickly looked back at the small group of three hovering on the edge of the dance floor not wanting to miss a trick.

  

The three were chatted on, the “grandmother” admiring the young ladies gown flowing liquidly down over her perky figure. As she then admired blue gowns glimmering necklace, the “granddaughter” had moved and positioned herself behind the unwary young lady. As the necklace was raised I saw her look about and reach up, pulling up and back the chain, efficiently unhooking it. The grandmother held onto the pendant with one hand as she lifted the unsuspecting girls satin gloved hand with her other , all the while chatting her up. Then ever so slowly the “Grandmother” pulled the necklace down freeing it from around the unsuspecting lass’s neck, letting it drop to the carpeted floor at her feet. The “granddaughter” scrunched down behind their cute victim, ( totally unaware that she was being robbed), and reaching around, scarfed the necklace up, stood and moved off. The “grandmother gave the unwilling girl a hug, and when they broke off I noticed the sapphire pin had been lifted, adding unwary insult to undiscovered injury. I saw the girl in the blue sheath look around for her new friend, but the “Granddaughter” had disappeared, moving off to greener pastures.

  

I soon spotted the “granddaughter” as she resurfaced, obviously she was on the move again, which was surprising, I would have not risked any further attempts so soon if I had been in her dainty heels. I watched, trying to spot her next victim. She headed over towards a table that she had passed earlier, on one of the chairs was a mink jacket, and another was a feathery boa that I had seen her admiring, fingering on the then deserted table.

  

But the chair that the mink was hanging from now had an occupant. A girl of about 15, wearing a soft velvet dress with long sleeves, had picked up the boa and was sitting on the chair wearing it. She was happily playing with the long feather boa, not a concern in the world. I looked her over, on one side of her dress was a diamond sunburst pin, and on her chubby fingers, were two diamond rings, small but real, and from her ears dangled a pair of long pear shaped diamonds suspended from diamond solitaries clasped to her earlobes.... I was amazed that she would have been trusted to wear such valuable trinkets, but I was not surprised that she was in all probability about to lose them!

  

The “granddaughter” came upon the girl and asked if she could try on the boa. The unsuspecting girl helped her happily on with it , then the “granddaughter picked up one end, tickling the richly clad lass with the fluffy feathers, then allowed the girl to do the same, eyeing her victims shimmering rings in the process.

  

The grandmother soon approached to join in the fun. She put on the boa next and tickled both girls with its ends, getting them to giggle uncontrollably. The two devious ladies’s routine had been well honed, as their chosen victim became caught up in the middle of the pair’s rapid fire bantering, and teasing. But it was not all play for two of the three! The 15 year olds diamond starburst pin was the first item to disappear! As the giggling girl, her eyes closed, was doubled over trying to catch a breath, the “Grandmother” took rude advantage of the situation by smoothly reaching under and unsnapping the shimmering pin from the bent over girl’s shiny dress as it had fallen loosely away from her chest for a few seconds. Soon the purloined pin was followed by her sparkling rings, slipped off her fingers when it was her turn to have her hands held behind her by the “Grandmother” and be tickled with the boa by the “Granddaughter” during the course of their horsing around. I thought the pair were finished at that point, but no, they were going for the full Tribeca!

  

The “Grandmother” held the young ladies attention by kneeling in front of the 15 year old, and helping her on with the boa, wrapping it around the girls neck. As this was being done, the “granddaughter busied herself with coolly slipping off each of the girls old fashioned dangling clasp earrings ! I watched in wonder as the laughing girls expensive earrings were each effortlessly plucked away. The giggling 15 year old clad in the velvet dress had been stripped (tickled) of all her jewels with surgical precision, as the boa was being wily used to its full feathery advantage, and she had never noticed a thing!

  

The “Grandmother” then stood and moved off to one side, as the girls continued to giggle and play. Unnoticed, she gingerly lifting the mink from the chair behind the now less shimmering 15-year-old, as said child was still being entertained by the “granddaughter”, who I saw had now her hand inside a purse laying on the table behind their cheerful victim. The “grandmother”, carrying the expensive mink over her arm, slipped around and out of sight down the hidden entrance to a side corridor that I knew led down to the building’s work area. The show was probably ending. The pair had acted swiftly, and I knew they would be fished out soon. But I waited; the “granddaughter” was still there, apparently in no hurry to follow the “Grandmother” and disappear down the corridor with her. So probably there may possibly be another act to their scoundrel like play I surmised, although it was risking it in my professional opinion.

 

End Acte 1

  

**************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

 

I used 2 of Stephanie's layouts in her gallery for inspiration. Love all of her layouts and this came together pretty quickly for me...thanks to loads of inspiration today. Hope to start another lift sometime soon...there are so many I love. Look at my photostream to see the 2 layouts I lifted for today's layout. Some of you may remember me posting about when this happened during last October's LOAD...yes, I cried uncontrollably.

You know when I said I knew little about love? That wasn't true. I know a lot about love.

I've seen it, seen centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate... Made me want to turn away and never look down again. But to see the way that mankind loves... I mean, you could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So, yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and... What I'm trying to say, Tristan, is... I think I love you.

My heart... It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it doesn't belong to me any more. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I'd wish for nothing in exchange — no gifts, no goods, no demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me, too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine.

- "Stardust"

  

-----

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J. M William Turner

British, 1775-1851

Oil on canvas

Cleveland Museum of Art

 

On the night of October 16, 1834, fire consumed the housed of parliament in London. Londoners gathered along the banks of the river Thames to gaze in awe at the horrifying spectacle. Initially, a low tide made it difficult to pump water to firefighting equipment on land; likewise it hampered steamers towing equipment up the river. Although the tides eventually shifted, the effort was futile, as the fire burned uncontrollably for hours. Turner records this as the steamers in the lower-right corner head toward the flames.

5 PJL

  

——————————————————————————————————

  

Waking up hours later, Jason found the large computer monitor near his bed ablaze with static. Scarlet sat on the edge of the bed, cleaning her sniper rifle before noticing he had woken up and saying,

  

“Mornin’ sleeping beauty.” Jason sat up and immediately asked,

  

“What happened to the computer…and wait…where’s Roy?” Roy’s bag, quiver, and bow all sat on the ground in front of his bed, but there was no sign of him.

  

“We’re not sure…it turned on in the middle of the night and we thought we saw someone looking at us through it but…nah. And Roy’ll be back in a sec, just went to pick something up.” As if on queue, Roy opened the door upstairs and made his way through the shop above. Reaching the basement, Jason couldn’t help to smirk through his growing anxiety: Roy was wearing his old red and black spandex. Noticing Jason’s surprised expression, Roy quickly said,

  

“Scarlet and I got to talking last night and I realized I probably can’t and shouldn’t go out in anything else. I mean, I would prefer a new suit…this one’s a bit tight…but oh well,” Jason nodded while grabbing for the package to make sure it was still in his jacket. Sure enough it was, causing him to breath a short sigh of relief as Roy continued, “So…you were about to elaborate earlier?” Jason looked from Roy to Scarlet, who understood the meaning and explained to the former that,

  

“Roy wanted to know more about me. Ya know, before all of this. You could probably…I mean, you SHOULD probably be able to recite this by heart but I’ll say it for now I guess…” Scarlet set down her rifle and began to tell her story, “Basically I came to Gotham to start a new life with my dad…something like…five years ago? Wow, it’s been a while…anyway, we came to Gotham so he could get a better job with the help of my Uncle Lev. That a-hole. Lev worked for Professor Pyg, a serial killer who would do all sorts of nasty stuff to his ‘patients’. Good old Uncle Lev sold us out to Pyg to pay for his rent for the month. Pyg got my dad…he was unrecognizable by the time the freak was through with him. He put my dad and I in the same room overnight before Lev was coming for his payment…that was not a fun night. Dad was…he…um…”

  

“Pyg made him into a dollotron,” Jason said, “Felt no pain, but also felt no emotion. Couldn’t talk outside of grunts and moans…it was horrible.” Roy’s eyebrows were raised high during the whole story, prompting him to say,

  

“I’m sorry…that must’ve been terrible.”

  

“It got better,” Scarlet said with a solemn nod, uncharacteristic of her eternally happy persona, “‘Cause the next morning, as I was being wheeled out to the operating table, I heard something. Gunshots. All around me. Pyg was getting nervous, so he quickly began strapping me to the table as my Uncle Lev attempted to bar the doors. But it was no use…” Scarlet’s smile was slowly returning as she looked to Jason, who’d moved to the couch nearby, “…the Red Hood broke the door down and slammed my jackass uncle against the wall. Pyg tried to throw whatever knives he had around him at him but he dodged every one. In fact, he managed to dodge one perfectly so that it impaled Lev to the wall. Sure, for a second I felt bad…but I just kept remembering what he’d allowed my father to become. Red Hood took out Pyg in mere seconds. The fat bastard wouldn’tve been able to hold his own in any kind of fight, I was just glad I got a front row seat to his death. I remember the gunshot that killed him. Broke his stupid porcelain mask in half and went straight through his eye…taking everything on the inside out too. Then, the Red Hood saved me,” Again, Scarlet looked to Jason, who blushed slightly while nervously holding the package inside his jacket, “He told me about how my uncle had apparently done some dealings with some guy named the Joker…and he needed to be killed as part of some greater plan that would stop the madman forever. He told me about how Pyg was nothing compared to the Joker, and in that moment I realized that with no family left and men like Pyg still on the loose I needed to take action in some way. He was reluctant at first, but after I repeatedly told him about my time hunting with my dad and proficiency with a sniper rifle he let me join his crusade. We…um…had to take care of my dad first…” Jason finally stood up and walked over to her, putting an arm around her as she finished, “…but then things got really good for a while. We recruited some new guys, took down one of Gotham’s kingpins of crime, and somewhere along the way I fell for that chivalrous murderer who saved me from being a weird doll thing.” Roy nodded, sitting down on his bed as he said,

  

“That’s amazing. I’m jealous…mostly because your story involves you keeping both arms at the end, but anyway, wanna hear mine? Wanna hear the secrets of protecting Star City with the good old Emerald Archer?” Jason and Scarlet nodded, and Roy nearly began to speak before suddenly the monitor’s static stopped. All three heads turned to the screen to see a face looking back at them. Scarlet and Roy both looked confused, but Jason smiled and stepped forward, saying,

  

“Hello Alfred.” The aging butler smiled back, saying,

  

“It seems your roster has expanded Master Todd, very good, as we’re going to need as many helping hands as we can recruit.” Confused, Jason asked,

  

“Helping hands…what do you mean? Has something happened…?” Sighing, Alfred said,

  

“It would be best if…he explained. One moment sir.” He stepped away from the camera as Jason turned to Scarlet, seeing her smiling uncontrollably,

  

“Are we gonna meet Batman?” She asked, excitedly.

  

“I think you are…” Jason said as he noticed Roy had stood up and joined the two of them in front of the monitor. For a moment, the screen became a hybrid of the shot of the Batcave and static before finally the Batman stood at the camera. Jason nodded at him, saying, “Thank you. Thank you so much Br-”

  

“You can thank me later,” Batman said quickly. Jason noticed that he looked slightly more flustered than their last encounter, even when the two had believed Robin and Alfred to be dead, “Jason…we need to talk.”

Finished 3rd

 

For my video; youtu.be/CJC_4kup0fs

  

Gr.5 +2.0, 43, Germany Martini Racing Porsche System,

Drivers; Manfred Schurti, Germany Rolf Stommelen,

Porsche 935/78,

Porsche, 3.2L, Turbo, Flat-6

 

Rolf Johann Stommelen (11 July 1943 – 24 April 1983) was a racing driver from Siegen, Germany. He participated in 63 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix, achieving one podium, and scored a total of 14 championship points. He also participated in several non-Championship Formula One races.

 

One of the best endurance sports car racing drivers of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, Stommelen won the 24 Hours of Daytona four times; in 1968, 1978, 1980 and 1982 and the Targa Florio in 1967 in a Porsche 910.

 

Stommelen was killed in a crash during the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix 6 hour International Motor Sports Association GT Championship event at Riverside International Raceway on 24 April 1983. He was competing in a John Fitzpatrick entered Porsche 935 with co-driver Derek Bell. Stommelen had just taken over the car from Bell and was running in second place when the rear wing broke due to mechanical failure at 190 mph (310 km/h). The car became uncontrollable, slammed against a concrete wall, somersaulted and caught fire. Stommelen died of head injuries

 

Manfred Schurti (born 24 December 1941) is a former touring and prototype racing car driver from Liechtenstein mainly known for racing factory-entered Porsches.

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.

On Black

 

Alright well, I don't know if i like the text on this image... It makes it kind of cheesy, but it looked so bare without it ;0

SO feedback please!

 

And note to self, don't take photos after you over-slept because, they just don't turn out.

Damn, I had the most disturbing dream last night. What i remember, (I'm not going to bore you with the whole thing), but in the end, this lady was driving somewhere in a carriage, thing (this was in the 1800s, mind you) and her 2 kids, on the inside, asked her what they could eat because they were hungry. She told them there was a bag behind them full of food. I don't know WHY but the boy grabbed a water squirter... thing, that was full of some unknown substance and sprayed the substance in his mouth, then he did the same thing to his sister and after a while they started coughing uncontrollably. The mom didn't hear, and after about 10 minutes, the driver looked back and he goes 'Oh miss!' and she turns around and lets out the most disturbing scream, and that's when i wake up. kfdjgnfjlk It makes me shudder.

 

Getting to the point unknown thing about me #9:

My favorite colour is yellow. Mmn, yellow

 

Enjoy the photo

 

#267

“So Young . . . So Evil”

 

“Theona was so young to be so evil but only her sister Kit, who looked enough like her to be her twin, knew what rottenness lay below Theona’s luscious blonde beauty. Now at nineteen Theona had become involved in the ugliest scandal of her entire life and Kit felt duty bound to extricate her. ‘YELLOW HEAD’ is the staccato-paced story of Kit’s hopeless struggle to save her wanton, love-crazy sister from self-destruction at any cost – even at the cost of the man she loves.

 

“Unfolding against the tough, realistic background of a mushrooming West Coast town, itself threatened by powerful forces of vice and corruption, this novel breathes life and warmth into an unforgettable story of love, loyalty and murder – a story that could only have been written about – and for – our times.” [From the back cover]

 

“Scratch the Surface . . .”

 

“Two exquisitely lovely sisters, as alike as identical twins on the surface – so utterly different inside! Theona – wanton, cruel and provocative. And Kay “[sic]” – warm, reserved, desirable. Brill O’Hearn thought he knew which sister he wanted – until he discovered that, by falling in love with one, he had become doubly susceptible to both!

 

“Here is the raw, shocking story of two warm-blooded women whose desire for the same man stirs up that deepest rivalry of all, a rivalry between sisters, where blood ties are forgotten and all restraints removed as the age-old animal, struggle for a mate, erupts in uncontrollable viciousness and passion.” [From the Intro inside the front cover]

 

[Note: The pulps paved the way for mass-market erotica, normalizing stories that flirted with taboo. Both genres were often dismissed as "low brow" or "trash," yet they tapped into real emotional and psychological currents -- especially around gender, power, and desire.]

 

So Close Your Eyes.......Hear the sound of that howling wind continuing like its been raging unrelentlessly for years. Your body shakes uncontrollably as the coldness cuts through every section that doesn't have the protection layers required against its brutality. Your hamstrings are cramping with every effort you make trying to retrieve your leg out of what seems like bottomless canyons of snow. And then you pause, focusing your eyes in amazement, on the beauty and light that lays out in front of you. Wondering if a radical movement, like when approaching a butterfly, will make it all dissapear. For a split second, all thought and pain have dissapeared. Im glad I have captured that memory!!

 

Thanks for looking....Stay Safe

"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism."

Erma Bombeck

 

The series of American Flags around the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.

 

Here's to a better year in which people can band together and focus more on the similarities between each other rather than the differences. To me, the universal problems affecting all of us (in some way or another) will be a lot easier to see and seem a lot less uncontrollable once we take that first step.

 

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

 

(For some great thoughts by other Flickr members around the idea of independence day and the American flag evoking feeling from folks, I'd direct you to another American Flag shot)

On the way to support us with the uncontrollable wildfires around Älvdalen, Trängslet area.

.44 cal. Magnum single/double-action handgun.

 

A powerful handgun that superseded the FNX-45 as the US and Canadian Armed Forces' primary sidearm.

 

Using mighty .44 Magnum rounds in lieu of the more popular and traditional .45 ACP, this handgun may be a bit uncontrollable at times, but the stopping power it possesses is undeniable.

 

As the successor to the FNX-45, it shares the high modularity of the aforementioned pistol (as well as an extremely high magazine capacity), with replaceable iron sights, back strap, side plates, bottom rail, threaded barrel, 17 round magazine and even a slide stop piece. It is also completely ambidextrous.

  

Mirit Ben-Nun’s art exists within and beyond reality. She moves away from reality with aggressive and dense colorfulness which reveals an inner testimony of a threatened existence of women. The lines, points and shapes do not reproduce facts but emphasize the special charge of emotional coping.

 

Mirit Ben-Nun shows a rebellious spirit and tries to reach out to things not through wholeness but via searching for their expression and manifestation.

She explores personal identity and through it tries to define a complementary art, thereby illustrating the world and the nature of human culture. She focuses on the expressive dimension because of the exposure afforded by the uncontrollable moment that so much affects life in a rapidly changing global world.

The discourse between the inner world and the emerging reality is hyperactive and generates in Ben - Nun an endless sequence of works.

From the depths of feelings, dreams, anxieties and expressions arise rigid and exciting meanings of existence whose essence expresses restlessness and lack of adaptation.

 

Dora Woda

This was snapped, just before Hansel & Gretel teamed up with Tom & Huck, turned into river pirates and then robbed and drowned a mighty wizard, whom withdrew from civilisation into his floating mill house, to forge magical weapons against the evil orcs.

 

As clumsy Hansel leaned himself against a lever, controlling the paddle wheel speed, the wheel spun up, snapping the mill from its mooring. The mill skyrocketed (or, rather hydroplaned) downstream all the way to the sea, mashing bridges and dams to smithereens along its way and consequently unleashing unspeakable carnage upon the unsuspecting troll community, living underneath those very bridges.

 

Herds of billy goats, free of their natural predators, bred uncontrollably and grazed all surrounding forests and meadows (including the landmark giant beanstalk), down to bare ground, turning the land into a desert.

 

Hapless inhabitants of the Cloud Castle - its main beanstalk column severed - suddenly found themselves falling from the sky, air friction overheating their overweight bodies, turning upon impact into fat-bogs and quick-lards, strewn across the country.

 

While most of these posed a bit of a nuisance and potential malnutrition hazard for inhabitants, they were generally welcomed as a valuable natural resource. However, one particular piece of falling debris, had a rather severe side effect: the giants' chamberpot scored a direct ballistic hit at the high-energy magic research lab, belonging to the Porkpox School of Whichever Crafts and Wisearsery, cracking its thaumic damper hull and exposing its surroundings to raw magic radiation leakage, randomly turning pumpkins into Humvee-Yugo cross-breds and politicians into hot air balloons.

 

Meanwhile, Red Riding Hood Sorority, driven from their overgrazed forest playground, banded together with some (now homeless) wolf packs and launched a counter offensive against the goats - burning several villages, populated by the three little pigs' descendants in the process, roasting the tenants and using them as food rations for their campaign. However, they were soon overrun and eaten themselves by invading orcish hordes.

 

With the primary means of anti-orcish defence in form of wizards and whichever crafters out of commission, there was no one but Knights of the Orthogonal Desk left to be asked for help now.

 

Though them being not so much knights as a bunch of computer-club-dwelling geeks, their epic battles fought only in form of pen-and-paper RPGs, the Knights rejected any form of individual engagement even more than personal hygiene - but were nevertheless seduced by the promised life-long free beer & pizza supply. Thus, shunning any first-hand involvement, they cunningly succeed at luring an army of dwarves out of their mines, by planting misleading clues and false evidence, suggesting that the orcs' final goal is actually seizing the stockpiles of dwarfish gold.

 

Dwarf battle axes quickly turned the orcish horde into gravy, but the militant wing of the Committee for Equal Heights, realising it was all a ruse de guerre, set out to right the wrongs by shortening any and all remaining deceiving bastards, that call themselves the human race at knee height.

 

The racket awoke Cough, the magic weed-puffing dragon from his prolonged afternoon nap and as it dawned on him that a better part of a millennium passed since his last snack and puff already, things switched into higher gear and started to turn really interesting...

 

There. Now you know.

 

[This factual historic recount brought to you by Yours Truly. Some names have been changed to displease the guilty and blame the innocent.]

___

Two hand-held exposures [1/350, 1/235 sec]

Better large on black

PHOTOSHOP COMPOSITION: L'ESTASI DELL'ORO

 

This is my November choice. I wanted to evoke the deep and dark moodiness of this fantastic song. I will be doing this again as this is my first attempt in this CS area. I want to make this compostion even more moodier.

 

I have decided to give myself a monthly challemge with photography and CS5. The lesson is very simple, I have listed twelve of my favorite songs and each month I will take one of the song titles and compose a picture around it. My criteria is that the picture must be an original picture I have taken and that I use my CS5 skills to enhance the picture to meet the theme of the song title. Some will be direct some obscure. Listed below are the songs I will be using in the next twelve months. Here is my November compostion.

 

The Flesh Failures-Hair Original Cast Recording

The Uncontrollable Fire-U2

Wild Horses-Rolling Stones [June]*

Wonderwall-Ryan Adams [July]*

L'Estasi Dell'Oro-Ennio Morricone [November]*

Sorcerer-Tangerine Dream [September]*

Taxi to Heaven-Pray for Rain

White Room-Cream

Redemption Song-Bob Marley [August]*

Cruel Summer-Bananarama

The Celestials-Smashing Pumpkins

Every Step of the Way-Santana

 

Magical moments. Don't you just love it when after putting some thought and effort into something all the uncontrollable elements come together to create a magical moment. Having arrived early at St Monans and found the windmill (1st ever visit). Standing ready as the stillness and tranquillity of night becomes day, probably an event that very few people actually witness, luckily as a photographer I get more opportunities to witness this transformation.

Today's story and sketch "by me" you see Carl "Crop Circle" Gofish, You see him piloting

his Very Old Vintage Stearman 75 Bi Plane, that he was given when he retired from the

Postal Aircraft company as there first pilot. But I should start Carl's story at the beginning

and that would be when he was in Wichita Kansas one night flying his "ICC" Intergalactic Crop

Cutter, over a field of Rye, it was a beautiful geometric cutting, which he had sketched

on his "ICC" crop cutter program on his journey from Lippo the Blue Moon, to Earth

through worm hole 10, which was a grueling two day trip in those days. But his tragedy

started when the "ICC" was struck by a bolt of lightning, just when he was about to

finish the last cuts. The craft went into a "UW" Uncontrollable Wobbly, he was lucky and

was able to wobble into the barn you see in this sketch, which he has called home sense

that night.

The owners actually abandoned the barn style ranch house that same night, and moved away

to Portland, telling stories for many years of their close encounter with an Alien life form.

With his "ICC" broken beyond repair, he was grounded until one afternoon he was walking

down a goat path in front of the Stearman Aircraft Company down the way, Carl could read

English and he noticed a help wanted poster on the front gate, test pilot wanted.

Well at the time there were only a couple of pilots who lived in Kitty Hawk, and they

were happy building bicycles and doing some weekend sport flying. Desperate as they were

at Stearman for a pilot, they hired Carl, with a requirement he had to wear tinted goggles

to cover his very big black eyes, and a flying hat the company made for him. It was

a great job for many years, until he was hired away by the Post office and was the first

Air Mail Pilot, but that is a story for another time, until then taa ta the Rod Blog.

LC Verse Spider-Man #14 "Banshee..."

 

"Aaaaagh!" She screams in agony as the parasite fuses to her skin, it slowly parts her stomach and crawls its way inside her as Norman watches her unfazed. "Hmm intersting." He states observing the parasite tear her chest open slowly sprouting out a mouthful of teeth, the parasite seems to imitate her scream of agony. "Make it stop!" She cries loudly in pain and Norman wages his hand through the air in dismay, "Hush Donna, let it take over." He smirks as the past site stops to a still, her face is left revealed and she drops to her knees in a old sweat. A moment passes and Donna begins getting to her feet groaning whilst the parasite heals her back to health. "Banshee." Norman mutters as he looms her up and down pleased. "We will call you Banshee, a suitable name." He chuckles. Donna twitches her head hearing the parasite whisper in her ear, she closes her eyes and whimpers slightly. Her eyes then open however are a black void. The parasite has taken control Banshee is in charge.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

"Father." It whispers into my ear as Norman Osborn approaches us, I feel a slight sense of excitement however that's only the Parasites emotions passing through my mind. "Hello Parasite." He smirks at us and the parasite takes control forcing me to look at him, we notice a woman walk by his side. Her eyes are empty and we know she has been controlled by another..."This is your lets call her sister, Banshee," my eyes widen in terror from inside the parasite noticing a large mouth torn into her stomach. "Brother..." She says sinisterly looking into our eyes my mouth opens uncontrollably as I hiss the words "hello sister..." I shudder from inside hearing words that are not my own. "Parasite father has a little job for you. I want you to get me Spider-Man, I want him alive." He looks at us and a cruel smile spreads across his lips I try and ask him why but my mouth won't open, the parasite won't let me it forces my mouth shut. Until it opens speaking the words "Yes father..." Norman nods his head and waves us away with his hand, my body is forced to move walking away as we make our way to capture Spider-Man.

 

See in Larger.

 

Juca has an uncontrollable hunger eating all the slippers in its path...

Juca tem fome incontrolável de comer todos os chinelos que encontra...

 

Wishing you all a great weekend!

Ótimo final de semana a todos!

I've just done my first session of innocent morning yoga today.

It wasn't harsh at all, the exercises where quite easy compared to what they can be.

 

Even though. I found whole body shivering. It was like an earthquake inside of me. And out of no where tears began racing out my eyes.

 

For some reason I knew that all that uncomfortable and uncontrollable shivering had to be caused by my turbulent mind.

 

I didn't want my muscles to work out. It didn't want me to become strong. It wants me to continue being best friends with the couch, depression and of course adobe photoshop. It wants my muscles to ace, and it wants to get rid of all the motivation I have to grow stronger.

 

But the fact is that I need to grow stronger. I can't, simply CAN'T stop focusing about my body's strength and health. To make a long story short it's because I was born 4 months early 20 years ago in a very small town called Narvik. In Narvik they didn't have the equipment/knowledge to deal with that kind of a problems. So they simply told my mom there was no chance and that I would surely die. I was brought to another hospital in Bodø, Norway where despite everything and everyone - I survived. I want to be that little Natasha again, that little fighting Natasha that wanted to live even though she only weighted 600-grams. Less than a kilo. She never gave up. She always knew I had the power to become the best I can be. I can't give up on her. Not after 20 years. I want to have her motivation to live again.

 

Now it's not any doctors telling me there's not chance and that I'm going to die regardless of what I do, it's my mind. The doctors of 20 years ago have in some way made their way inside of me and I have to fight the battle yet again.

 

What always has made this harder are the physical problems regarding this.

I guess I just need to breathe.

 

There are many towns in the world that go by the handle “Highland Park.” New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida all contain Highland Parks. So do the countries of New Zealand and Canada. We will spend the next 36 hours in the Highland Park located in northeast Los Angeles, California - a low-key working-class neighborhood with an exciting variety of dining and cultural options.

 

Friday

 

6pm: We start our weekend with a drink at Johnny’s on York Boulevard (4). The place is full. The speakers are buzzing at a moderate volume with the bass line from Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge.” The foosball and pool tables make for great entertainment whether you're playing or just spectating. There's a nice not-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool vibe to the place.

 

8pm: You won't find any pizza in LA both better and cheaper than the Neapolitan-style pies at Folliero's (3). On most nights you're sure to catch a glimpse of Titina Folliero, whose father Tony started the restaurant in 1968. These days there are post-impressionist paintings of Los Angeles on the brick walls, which are earthquake-retrofitted with several massive I-beams. Dinners here are a solid tradition among local families. Some patrons say they have been coming since "before they were born"!

 

9:30pm: Across the street from Folliero’s is an old dive bar and bowling alley called Mr. T’s Bowl. Perhaps the best thing about this place is the sound man Arlo. Bands have been named after him. He seems to have no last name, even to his good friends. Arlo is renowned among the indie musicians of Los Angeles for A) giving a hoot, B) not being totally deaf, and C) being an extremely good egg. Between bands he spins Dave Brubeck and the Breeders.

 

Saturday

 

8am: Saturday morning breakfast is at Café de Leche, about two doors down from Johnny’s on York. Café de Leche is about as trendy as Highland Park gets. We would guess this is due to the proximity of Occidental College and the more affluent neighborhoods of Eagle Rock. The coffee is great, as are the pastries.

 

10am: Highland Park is a small neighborhood, quite navigable by bike. The Flying Pigeon both sells and rents bicycles (ask for Car - despite her name, she's an expert on bikes). With an elegant and reliable set of wheels we're ready to explore the rest of the day's activities under our own power.

 

12pm: On weekends, the house and gardens built by the renowned author, historian and bon vivant Charles Lummis are open to visitors. Lummis wrote many books about the American Southwest, worked for the LA Times, and founded the Southwest Museum, the first museum in Los Angeles. The walls of his house are constructed of big river rocks. The doors are carved from thick slabs of oak. Inside the Lummis house are objects and pictures related to his life and work. Outside, huge sycamore trees shade the gardens and walkways.

 

1:30pm: The Good Girl Dinette advertises "American diner meets Vietnamese comfort food", and the tightly edited menu offers such delights as rice noodle salads (6), curry pot pies, banh mi with spicy fries, and "Grandma's pho". Chef and owner Diep Tran is an enthusiastic member of the community and sources some of her ingredients from local urban farmers - she's even hoping to work out an arrangement with the community garden just two blocks away.

 

3pm: After lunch we visit Galco's (1), a strangely world-famous "mom and pop pop shop." It turns out that there are hundreds of varieties of carbonated drinks that few have heard of or tasted. These drinks have been shouldered off the grocery shelves by bigger brands that literally pay for retail space. One of the few places to try these hundreds of different soda pops from around the globe is Galco's. There's also time to look at some funky old shirts at a thrift store called Urchin, play a couple of used guitars at Future Music, and peruse the vinyl at Wombleton Records.

 

6pm: As the sun sets, we stop on the sidewalk to pick up a couple of excellent made-to-order tacos at a place with no name (5). These two guys don't need a name, apparently, because they know how to cook. Everything costs one dollar. Their advertising is strictly olfactory. There is always a throng of hungry people there.

 

7pm: We join the fleet of bikers touring the neighborhood art galleries, which all have openings on the second Saturday of every month. Along with the Future Studio, Clare Graham’s MorYork Gallery (7) is a crowd favorite. This place is huge and filled with astonishingly labor-intensive sculptures. You have never seen more buttons, wooden yardsticks, scrabble tiles, neck vertebrae, or pop tops. The MorYork is very art-creepy and not to be missed.

 

10pm: For a final drink and bite to eat just cross the street to The York. This being a Saturday night, a DJ is crankin' some old-school hip hop. The bartenders make a decent margarita (2), and the gastropub fare includes steak & fries, truffle mac & cheese, and shrimp bruschetta (they also do a weekend brunch).

 

Sunday

 

8am: Antigua Bread will set you up with coffee, but if you want more, we recommend the Antigua breakfast. It's a simple winning combo of eggs, frijoles and platanos con crema.

 

10am: What better way to spend your Sunday than with a round of miniature golf at the Arroyo Seco municipal golf course? Four bucks gets you nine holes with your own colored ball and club. Most of the holes initially appear pretty easy, but -- as they say -- hilarity ensues. The blades of the windmill seem to have a knack for interception. There is a hole where gravity exerts its force diagonally. The dollhouse architecture verges on the Escher-esque.

 

12pm: The Arroyo Seco Grill at the course is a relaxed and sunny place for a meal. From the outdoor seating, we can observe the progress of the next group of miniature golfers while we dine on classic all-American fare. You can't go wrong with a burger, a tuna salad sandwich, or an omelet (breakfast, of course, is served all day).

 

Lighting:

1) SB-800 with a diffusion dome high camera left, after careful soda-bottle curation

2) SB-900 with a 1/4 CTO gel in a Lumiquest LTp softbox camera left and a little behind the subject. Camera on a tripod partly blocking the path to the restroom, necessitating many pauses.

3) SB-900 with a 1/4 CTO gel through a semi-collapsed umbrella high camera right, and an SB-800 with a diffusion dome far camera left, wedged between a tower of pizza boxes and the wall, lighting the pizza-maker in the background.

4) SB-900 with a 3/4 CTO gel in a Lumiquest LTp softbox camera right, and a slow shutter speed to capture ambient light & motion. Bouncer asked what I was doing, and told me "some of our customers probably don't want to have their picture taken." I did not inquire as to the reason why.

5) bare SB-800 camera left for a cooler accent against the warm lights of the taco stand camera right.

6) window light behind the subject, and a white reflector camera right to bounce fill into the small bowl of charred pork.

7) ambient light from many, many sources (quite a few of them visible in the image!)

 

See an expanded set of images created in pursuit of this assignment here. I shot at almost every location in my itinerary, met so many local businessfolk, and had a fantastic time. It got me to visit places I'd only passed by before, and set me up with contacts for possible future work. I'd call it a rousing success!

 

Update: One of the photos I shot at the Good Girl Dinette and gave to the owner has been used in an LA Times interview with her!

 

website | twitter | google+

Note the ever-present family garden on the right side of the photo.

 

In the background is the empty lot where my friends and I played baseball. From the height of the grass and weeds, you can see why we lost so many baseballs...

 

**********************************

 

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.

Love doesn't always come dressed in the package we want. It doesn't arrive on

our schedule and it doesn't follow our guidelines and rules. It is love. It is

intangible, unpredictable, and certainly uncontrollable. This is what makes it

so wonderful. We need to remember to be grateful and honored by its presence

in our lives. Be careful to not let it pass you by just because it doesn't present

itself the way you think it should.

-- Kimberly Kirberger

 

thanks warda and funkyah :**

Halloween 2 BJL

  

————————————————————————————————

 

“Don’t run just yet Milo, the transformation’s just taking hold!” Scarecrow stood in front of one of several devices hooked up to a variety of Gothamites as he said this. Behind him, Professor Milo made several advances towards the exit as he replied,

  

“This isn’t fear Crane. We’re creating monsters!”

  

“Evolving monster,” Scarecrow corrected the professor, “Langstrom’s formula was only the beginning. Our Man-Bats will be infused with our special brand of fear toxin. It’s a win-win situation for us, don’t you see?” The man closest to them began to twitch and scream uncontrollably as Scarecrow continued, “They resemble the Bat, and with a little dose of fear toxin delivered to them as well as through them to the people of Gotham…it will destroy the Batman’s name and spread fear across the city in a way more beautiful than I have ever dreamed!”

  

“It’s too dangerous,” Milo replied, holding his head, “D-do you hear what you’re saying?!? Fear toxin on normal human beings causes them to go into a frenzy, we can’t give it to something like…” As Milo was about to finish, the first Man-Bat completed its transformation. It screeched at a pitch that caused the professor to cover his ears while Scarecrow simply stepped closer to it with a syringe. Plunging it into the creature’s neck, another louder screech proved that the effects were taking hold.

  

“We have nothing to fear.” Scarecrow said to Milo just as the Man-Bat began to break out of its bonds. Before either could react, the former was tackled by a figure dropping in from the ceiling. Cursing, Scarecrow attempted to push the figure off of him only to realize that it was Batman himself.

  

“Mad scientist experiments on Halloween? What’s next? The dead coming back to life?” Jason dropped in atop the first Man-Bat device as Batman stood to reply,

  

“Make sure the Man-Bat doesn’t escape. It’s too dangerous…”

  

“No, it’s not. It’ll be fine-” Batman reeled back and landed a punch that knocked Scarecrow out in the middle of the sentence. Professor Milo attempted to run, using the Man-Bat beginning to destroy his device as a distraction, but was quickly stopped by a batarang knocking him to the ground.

  

“Nice hit, boss.” Jason said as the Man-Bat began to take off. Batman was in the process of disabling the next device as he demanded,

  

“Robin! Make sure it doesn’t escape!” Thinking fast, Jason retrieved his grappling gun and fired it into the Man-Bat’s foot. He held on for dear life as the creature dragged him through the air around Scarecrow’s laboratory. Rolling his eyes as he managed to dismantle the last of the Man-Bat devices, Batman pressed a button on his utility belt causing several small syringes to drop out. Each label indicated a different drug to be administered in case of a variety of situations. The two he chose were labeled ‘MAN-BAT LANGSTROM 52’ and ‘SCARECROW CRANE 15’, and he placed them between the knuckles on his right hand just as the Man-Bat dove towards him with Robin in tow. Reeling back once more, Batman landed a punch that connected the needles with the Man-Bat’s chest. With the needles stuck in the beast, Batman slammed it to the ground, bringing Robin down with it. Jason rolled for a moment, the rope from his grappling gun wrapping around his body as he did. Upon standing up, he managed to wiggle them off in time to see the Man-Bat revert into a normal Gothamite.

  

“We do some pretty awesome work.” Jason said as he observed the scene of Scarecrow, Milo, and the Man-Bat all lying passed out on the ground. As the two began to alert the GCPD of their position and clean up the mess, Jason turned to Batman and said, “By the way, I just wanted to say from the bottom of my heart this really beats trick or treating.” Smirking slightly, Batman patted Jason on the back, saying,

  

“Happy Halloween, Robin.”

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Hey guys, Happy Halloween! A little explanation: I'm a little ahead in my main storyline Red Hood story (I have one more issue left in Volume 10 but it spoils some of Chris' Batman run and I don't wanna do that because he's building up to some BIG stuff). In the meantime I'll be releasing 3 Halloween inspired tales from Red Hood and the Outlaws' pasts to be festive and because in this case it was so much fun to write. Will release the second and third part tonight and possibly tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

“ Five minutes until detonation ”

  

“We get it! It was ten then nine then eight then seven then six…” Jason groaned angrily as he loaded the last of the mercenaries onto one of the trucks the Outlaws were commandeering. The plan was set: Ash had Tommy and most of the mercenaries in one vehicle while Scarlet drove the rest of the them in a smaller truck. Roy sat in the driver’s seat of the largest convoy truck, as he said,

  

“If I didn’t know any better I’d swear the Count…or Jim Henson…you know what, who did voice the Count?” Even beneath a mask, a look from Jason caused Roy to continue, “Ok, inappropriate time for that. But seriously, what is with Greene’s counting-security?” With that, Jason felt as if a weight had dropped through his throat and into his stomach. Greene was still lying trapped under his sword in the room the two of them had dueled. Looking to the stairs that led back up to Greene Manor, Jason turned to Roy and said,

  

“Go.”

  

“How about not without you?” Roy responded before the alarm spoke once again,

  

“ Four minutes until detonation ”

  

“I’ll meet you outside in three.” Jason said as he took off for the stairs leading back into Greene’s mansion.

  

“Jason, you crazy, stupid sonuvabi-” The mansion began to rumble before Roy could finish, so instead he turned the key of his truck and began to drive. Scarlet looked around for Jason, who had just disappeared up the stairs, and assumed he had gotten into the back of Roy’s convoy truck. As she and Ash started their respective vehicles, Jason found himself maneuvering around artifacts crashing to the ground. Somehow, the detonation procedure was causing what felt like a minor earthquake to hit Greene Manor. Reaching the door to the room where Green was, Jason was hit on the head by a large sculpture. The blow caused him to crash into the wall, sliding down it while attempting to regain his balance.

  

“ Three minutes until detonation ” Hearing this rekindled his strength, as he pulled himself back into a standing position before breaking down the door. Greene had moved slightly, as he now lie cape-less in front of a trail of blood, yet remained on his back. The old Red Hood was clearly weary as Jason bent down next to him and began to help him up. Confused, Greene asked,

  

“Why…? Why save me now?” Jason hoisted the man over his head, with his arms hanging over one side and legs over the other before saying,

  

“Because…honestly, Greene…I’m the better Red Hood, in every way. I prove that your way…how I used to be…it’s not the way, in everything that I do. It’s what defines me now…I’m giving you the chance to redefine yourself.” Silence from Greene proved more telling that Jason could have predicted, as he continued, “Now c’mon…we’re getting out of here-”

 

“ Two minutes until detonation ” As the security system said this, a panel opened in the fireplace nearby, revealing a massive amount of blue light. Small specks of white light floated out and began to rise to the ceiling along with a blue mist, both of which were enough to cause Jason to begin sprinting away. Running into the hallway, Jason asked,

  

“That’s what’s going to detonate?!?”

  

“It’s called the Starcatcher,” Greene said from his position behind Jason’s neck, “It’s meant to literally catch stars…the only problem is if it's not contained it can easily be set off by adding Earth’s levels of oxygen to it. By set off, of course, I mean…”

  

“Yeah, I get it. How big’s the explosion going to be?” Jason asked in a frenzy as he leapt over rubble to reach Tommy’s bedroom door.

  

“ One minute until detonation ” With those words, the entire manor began to shake uncontrollably with blue light shooting out of every door and window.

  

“Answer me Greene!!!” Jason demanded as he ran for the entrance hall.

  

“…I don’t know…” Reaching the main staircase, Jason bolted to the bottom before running into the main door. Kicking it as hard as he could was met with no reaction whatsoever, prompting him to yell,

  

“Greene, open the door, NOW!” Greene slipped off of Jason’s back and landed on his feet as he limped to a keypad nearby. Trembling, he punched in the code as fast as he could before a hum began to over take the mansion. Jason’s yells were drowned in the deafening hum, yet the two figures were still able to see the doors fly open. Both ran as fast as they could outside, and for a moment they could see Roy, Scarlet, Ash, and their trucks parked half a mile down the road before the world turned blue.

  

“…Detonation”

Lt. Col. Glenn Manning is accidentally exposed to the blast of a new weapon, a plutonium bomb. He is badly burned and isn’t expected to live. But he survives and he begins growing uncontrollably, until he reaches 50 feet tall. Reduced blood flow to his brain produces insanity and he proceeds to wreak havoc upon Las Vegas. Go Manning! A final showdown comes at Hoover Dam.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgpv7_4uonQ

 

Not to be outdone by the men, the women struck back with their own colossus a year later:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/57440551@N03/14513128493/in/album-7...

 

German postcard by Känguruhpress im Gebr. König Postkartenverlag, Köln, no. K. 2007. Photo: Julian Gotha.

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) was a German film director, screenwriter, film producer and actor. Fassbinder was part of the New German Cinema movement. Starting at age 21, Fassbinder made over forty films and TV dramas in fifteen years, along with directing numerous plays for the theatre. He also acted in nineteen of his own films as well as for other directors. Fassbinder died in 1982 at the age of 37 from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates.

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was born in Bavaria in the small town of Bad Wörishofen in 1945. The aftermath of World War II deeply marked his childhood and the lives of his bourgeois family. He was the only child of Liselotte Pempeit, a translator and Helmut Fassbinder, a doctor who worked out of the couple's apartment in Sendlinger Strasse, near Munich's red light district. In 1951, his parents divorced. Helmut moved to Cologne while Liselotte raised her son as a single parent in Munich. In order to support herself and her child, Pempeit took in boarders and found employment as a German to English translator. When she was working, she often sent her son to the cinema in order to concentrate. Later in life, Fassbinder claimed that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. As he was often left alone, he became independent and uncontrollable. He clashed with his mother's younger lover Siggi, who lived with them when Fassbinder was around eight or nine years old. He had a similar difficult relationship with the much older journalist Wolff Eder, who became his stepfather in 1959. Early in his adolescence, Fassbinder identified as homosexual. As a teen, Fassbinder was sent to boarding school. His time there was marred by his repeated escape attempts and he eventually left school before any final examinations. At the age of 15, he moved to Cologne and stayed with his father for a couple of years while attending night school. To earn money, he worked small jobs and helped his father who rented shabby apartments to immigrant workers. Around this time, Fassbinder began writing short plays and stories and poems. In 1963, aged eighteen, Fassbinder returned to Munich with plans to attend night school with the idea to eventually study theatrical science. Following his mother's advice, he took acting lessons and from 1964 to 1966 attended the Fridl-Leonhard Studio for actors in Munich. There, he met Hanna Schygulla, who would become one of his most important actors. During this time, he made his first 8mm films and took on small acting roles, assistant director, and sound man. During this period, he also wrote the tragic-comic play: Drops on Hot Stones. To gain entry to the Berlin Film School, Fassbinder submitted a film version of his play Parallels. He also entered several 8 mm films including This Night (now considered lost) but he was turned down for admission, as were the later film directors Werner Schroeter and Rosa von Praunheim. He returned to Munich where he continued with his writing. He also made two short films, Der Stadtstreicher,/The City Tramp (1965) and Das Kleine Chaos/The Little Chaos (1966). Shot in black and white, they were financed by Fassbinder's lover, Christoph Roser, an aspiring actor, in exchange for leading roles. Fassbinder acted in both of these films which also featured Irm Hermann. In the latter, his mother – under the name of Lilo Pempeit – played the first of many parts in her son's films.

 

In 1967 Rainer Werner Fassbinder joined the Munich Action-Theater, where he was active as an actor, director and script writer. After two months he became the company's leader. In April 1968 Fassbinder directed the premiere production of his play Katzelmacher, the story of a foreign worker from Greece who becomes the object of intense racial, sexual, and political hatred among a group of Bavarian slackers. A few weeks later, in May 1968, the Action-Theater was disbanded after its theatre was wrecked by one of its founders, jealous of Fassbinder's growing power within the group. It promptly reformed as the Anti-Theater under Fassbinder's direction. The troupe lived and performed together. This close-knit group of young actors included among them Fassbinder, Peer Raben, Harry Baer and Kurt Raab, who along with Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann became the most important members of his cinematic stock company. Working with the Anti-Theater, Fassbinder continued writing, directing and acting. In the space of eighteen months he directed twelve plays. Of these twelve plays, four were written by Fassbinder; he rewrote five others. The style of his stage directing closely resembled that of his early films, a mixture of choreographed movement and static poses, taking its cues not from the traditions of stage theatre, but from musicals, cabaret, films and the student protest movement. Fassbinder used his theatrical work as a springboard for making films. Shot in black and white with a shoestring budget in April 1969, Fassbinder's first feature-length film, Liebe ist kälter als der Tod/Love is Colder than Death (1969), was a deconstruction of the American gangster films of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Fassbinder plays the lead role of Franz, a small-time pimp who is torn between his mistress Joanna, a prostitute (Hanna Schygulla), and his friend Bruno, a gangster sent after Franz by the syndicate that he has refused to join. His second film, Katzelmacher (1969), was received more positively, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. From then on, Fassbinder centered his efforts in his career as film director, but he maintained an intermittent foothold in the theatre until his death. Fassbinder’s first ten films (1969–1971) were an extension of his work in the theatre, shot usually with a static camera and with deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue. Wikipedia: “He was strongly influenced by Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) and the French New Wave cinema, particularly the works of Jean-Luc Godard.” Fassbinder developed his rapid working methods early. Because he knew his actors and technicians so well, Fassbinder was able to complete as many as four or five films per year on extremely low budgets. This allowed him to compete successfully for the government grants needed to continue making films. Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, who started out making films, Fassbinder's stage background was evident throughout his work.

 

In 1971, Rainer Werner Fassbinder took an eight-month break from filmmaking. During this time, Fassbinder turned for a model to Hollywood melodrama, particularly the films German émigré Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood for Universal-International in the 1950s: All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life. Fassbinder was attracted to these films not only because of their entertainment value, but also for their depiction of various kinds of repression and exploitation. Fassbinder scored his first domestic commercial success with Händler der vier Jahreszeiten/The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971). Loneliness is a common theme in Fassbinder's work, together with the idea that power becomes a determining factor in all human relationships. His characters yearn for love, but seem condemned to exert an often violent control over those around them. A good example is Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant/The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) which was adapted by Fassbinder from his plays. Wildwechsel/Jailbait (1973 is a bleak story of teenage angst, set in industrial northern Germany during the 1950s. Like in many other of his films, Fassbinder analyses lower middle class life with characters who, unable to articulate their feelings, bury them in inane phrases and violent acts. Fassbinder first gained international success with Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (1974). which won the International Critics Prize at Cannes and was acclaimed by critics everywhere as one of 1974's best films. Fear Eats the Soul was loosely inspired by Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955). It details the vicious response of family and community to a lonely aging white cleaning lady (Brigitte Mira) who marries a muscular, much younger black Moroccan immigrant worker. In these films, Fassbinder explored how deep-rooted prejudices about race, sex, sexual orientation, politics and class are inherent in society, while also tackling his trademark subject of the everyday fascism of family life and friendship. He learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theatre management. This versatility surfaced in his films where he served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor.

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final films, from around 1977 until his death, were more varied, with international actors sometimes used and the stock company disbanded, although the casts of some films were still filled with Fassbinder regulars. Despair (1978) is based upon the 1936 novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov, adapted by Tom Stoppard and featuring Dirk Bogarde. It was made on a budget of 6,000,000 DEM, exceeding the total cost of Fassbinder's first fifteen films. In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden/In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) is Fassbinder most personal and bleakest work. The film follows the tragic life of Elvira, a transsexual formerly known as Erwin. In the last few days before her suicide, she decides to visit some of the important people and places in her life. Fassbinder became increasingly more idiosyncratic in terms of plot, form and subject matter in films like his greatest success Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Die Dritte Generation/The Third Generation (1979) and Querelle (1982). Returning to his explorations of German history, Fassbinder finally realized his dream of adapting Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). A television series running more than 13 hours, it was the culmination of the director's inter-related themes of love, life, and power. Fassbinder took on the Nazi period with Lili Marleen (1981), an international co production, shot in English and with a large budget. The script was vaguely based on the autobiography of World War II singer Lale Andersen, The Sky Has Many Colors. He articulated his themes in the bourgeois milieu with his trilogy about women in post-fascist Germany: Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981) and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss/Veronika Voss (1982), for which he won the Golden Bear at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival. Fassbinder did not live to see the premiere of his last film, Querelle (1982), based on Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest. The plot follows the title character, a handsome sailor (Brad Davis) who is a thief and hustler. Frustrated in a homoerotic relationship with his own brother, Querelle betrays those who love him and pays them even with murder.

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder had sexual relationships with both men and women. He rarely kept his professional and personal life separate and was known to cast family, friends and lovers in his films. Early in his career, he had a lasting, but fractured relationship with Irm Hermann, a former secretary whom he forced to become an actress. Fassbinder usually cast her in unglamorous roles, most notably as the unfaithful wife in The Merchant of Four Seasons and the silent abused assistant in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. In 1969, while portraying the lead role in the T.V film Baal under the direction of Volker Schlöndorff, Fassbinder met Günther Kaufmann, a black Bavarian actor who had a minor role in the film. Despite the fact that Kaufmann was married and had two children, Fassbinder fell madly in love with him. The two began a turbulent affair which ultimately affected the production of Baal. Fassbinder tried to buy Kaufmann's love by casting him in major roles in his films and buying him expensive gifts. The relationship came to an end when Kaufmann became romantically involved with composer Peer Raben. After the end of their relationship, Fassbinder continued to cast Kaufmann in his films, albeit in minor roles. Kaufmann appeared in fourteen of Fassbinder's films, with the lead role in Whity (1971). Although he claimed to be opposed to matrimony as an institution, in 1970 Fassbinder married Ingrid Caven, an actress who regularly appeared in his films. Their wedding reception was recycled in the film he was making at that time, The American Soldier. Their relationship of mutual admiration survived the complete failure of their two-year marriage. In 1971, Fassbinder began a relationship with El Hedi ben Salem, a Moroccan Berber who had left his wife and five children the previous year, after meeting him at a gay bathhouse in Paris. Over the next three years, Salem appeared in several Fassbinder productions. His best known role was Ali in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Their three-year relationship was punctuated with jealousy, violence and heavy drug and alcohol use. Fassbinder finally ended the relationship in 1974 due to Salem's chronic alcoholism and tendency to become violent when he drank. Shortly after the breakup, Salem went to France where he was arrested and imprisoned. He hanged himself while in custody in 1977. News of Salem's suicide was kept from Fassbinder for years. He eventually found out about his former lover's death shortly before his own death in 1982 and dedicated his last film, Querelle, to Salem. Fassbinder's next lover was Armin Meier. Meier was a near illiterate former butcher who had spent his early years in an orphanage. He also appeared in several Fassbinder films in this period. After Fassbinder ended the relationship in 1978, Meier deliberately consumed four bottles of sleeping pills and alcohol in the kitchen of the apartment he and Fassbinder had previously shared. His body was found a week later. In the last four years of his life, his companion was Juliane Lorenz), the editor of his films during the last years of his life. On the night of 10 June 1982, Fassbinder took an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. When he was found, an unfinished script for a film on Rosa Luxemburg was lying next to him. His death marked the end of New German Cinema.

 

Steve Cohn at IMDb: “Above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. Known for his trademark leather jacket and grungy appearance, Fassbinder cruised the bar scene by night, looking for sex and drugs, yet he maintained a flawless work ethic by day. Actors and actresses recount disturbing stories of his brutality toward them, yet his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence.”

 

Sources: Steve Cohn (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.