Praying for the dead bird

At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 37, the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, lifts off at 3:31 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 12, 2018. The spacecraft was built by Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. The mission will perform the closest-ever observations of a star when it travels through the Sun's atmosphere, called the corona. The probe will rely on measurements and imaging to revolutionize our understanding of the corona and the Sun-Earth connection. Photo credit: NASA/Tony Gray and Tim Powers

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+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the model, the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

Alexander Martin Lippisch (November 2, 1894 – February 11, 1976) was a German aeronautical engineer, a pioneer of aerodynamics who made important contributions to the understanding of flying wings, delta wings and the ground effect.

 

After working intially for the Zeppelin company, Reichsluftfahrtsministerium (RLM, Reich Aviation Ministry) transferred Lippisch and his team in 1939 to work at the Messerschmitt factory, in order to design a high-speed fighter aircraft around the rocket engines then under development by Hellmuth Walter. The team quickly adapted their most recent design, the DFS 194, to rocket power, the first example successfully flying in early 1940. This successfully demonstrated the technology for what would become the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, his most famous design.

 

In 1943, Lippisch transferred to Vienna’s Aeronautical Research Institute (Luftfahrtforschungsanstalt Wien, LFW), to concentrate on the problems of high-speed flight.That same year, he was awarded a doctoral degree in engineering by the University of Heidelberg. However, his research work did not stop Lippisch from designing further, mostly jet-powered and tailless fighter aircraft, e. g. for Henschel.

 

In early 1944, the RLM became aware of Allied jet developments and the high altitude B-29 in the Pacific TO, which was expected to appear soon over Europe, too. In response, the RLM instituted the Emergency Fighter Program, which took effect on July 3, 1944, ending production of most bomber and multi-role aircraft in favour of fighters, especially jet fighters. Additionally, they accelerated the development of experimental designs that would guarantee a performance edge over the Allied opponents, and designs that would replace the first generation of the German jet fighters, namely the Messerschmitt Me 262 and Heinkel He 162.

 

One of these advanced designs was the Ta 183 fighter, built by Focke Wulf and developed by Kurt Tank. The Ta 183 had a short fuselage with the air intake passing under the cockpit and proceeding to the rear where the single engine was located. The wings were swept back at 40° and were mounted in the mid-fuselage position. The pilot sat in a pressurized cockpit with a bubble canopy, which provided excellent vision. The primary armament of the aircraft consisted of four 30 mm (1.18 in) MK 108 cannons arranged around the air intake. The Ta 183 had a planned speed of about 1,000 km/h (620 mph) at 7,000 m (22,970 ft) and was powered by a 2nd generation jet engine, the Heinkel HeS 011 turbojet with 13 kN (2,700 lbf) of thrust. Several, steadily improved variants of the Ta 183 entered service from mid 1945 onwards, and the type was also the basis for more thorough derivatives - including a high altitude jet fighter proposed by Alexander Lippisch.

 

The resulting aircraft mated the structural basis of the proven Ta 183 with advanced aerodynamics, namely a tailless design with a much increased wing and fin area, and the machine was also powered by the new BMW 018 jet engine which delivered at this early stage 25kN (5.200 lb) of thrust and was expected to achieve more than 36 kN (7.500 lb) soon, without bigger dimensions than the widely used HeS 011 at the time.

 

The resulting machine, designated Li 383 in order to honor the developer, sacrificed some of the Ta 183' agility and speed for sheer altitude and climb performance, and the new wings were mostly built from non-strategic material, what increased weight considerably - the Li 383 was 1.5 times as heavy as the nimble Ta 183 fighter, but the new wing was more than twice as large.

 

Nevertheless, the modifications were effective and the RLM quickly accepted the radical re-design, since no better options were available on short notice. While the Ta 183 fighter was able to reach 14.000m (45,935 ft) in a zoom climb, the Li 383 could easily operate at 16.000m (52.500 ft) and even above that. However, Alexander Lippisch's original design, the Li 383A, had, despite positive wind tunnel tests, turned out to be unstable and prone to spinning. The reason was quickly found to be a lack of latitudal surfaces, and this was quickly fixed with a bigger tail fin and a characteristic gull wing that gave it the inofficial nickname for the serial Li 383B, "Sturmvogel".

 

When the Allied Forces eventually added the high-flying B-29 bombers to their air raids over Germany in late 1945, the Li 383 B-1 serial production variant was just ready for service. The new machines were quickly delivered to front line units, primarily fighter squadrons that defended vital centers like Berlin, Munich or the Ruhrgebiet. However, even though the Li 383 B-1's performance was sufficient, the type suffered from an inherent weakness against the well-armed Allied bombers: the range of the MK 108 cannon. While this weapon was relatively light and compact, and the four guns delivered an impressive weight of fire, a close attack against massive bomber formations was highly hazardous for the pilots. As a consequence, since bigger guns could not be mounted in the compact Ta 183 airframe, several weapon sets for filed modifications (so-called Rüstsätze) were offered that added a variety of weapons with a longer range and a bigger punch to the Li 383 B-1's arsenal, including unguided and guided air-to-air missiles.

 

Anyway, the Li 383's overall impact was not significant. Production numbers remained low, and all in all, only a total of 80-100 machines were completed and made operational when the hostilities ended.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: one

Length: 7.78 m (25 ft 5 1/2 in)

Wingspan: 12.67 m (41 ft 6 in)

Height: 3.86 m (12 ft 8 in)

Wing area: 46.8 m² (502.1 ft²)

Empty weight: 4,600 kg (10,141 lb)

Loaded weight: 6,912 kg (15,238 lb)

Max. takeoff weight: 8,100 kg (17,857 lb)

 

Powerplant:

1× BMW 018A turbojet, 25kN (5.200 lb)

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 977 km/h (estimated) (607 mph) at 12,000 meters (39,000 ft)

Service ceiling: 16,000 m (estimated) (52,000 ft)

Rate of climb: 22 m/s (estimated) (4,330 ft/min)

Wing loading: 147.7 kg/m² (20.2 lb/ft²)

Thrust/weight: 0.34

 

Armament:

4× 30 mm (1.18 in) MK 108 cannons around the air intake with 75 RPG

2x underwing hardpoints for two 300l drop tanks or 2x 250 kg (550 lb) bombs;

alternatively, various weapon sets (Rüstsätze) were available, including racks for 8× (R1) or 12× (R3)

R 65 “Föhn” or for 24x R4M unguided missiles (R2), or for 2× Ruhrstahl X-4 Wire Guided AAMs (R4)

 

The kit and its assembly:

This fictional Luft ’46 aircraft was inspired by the question what a further developed Ta 183 could have looked like, and it was also influenced by the many tailless Lippisch designs that never left the drawing board.

 

From the hardware perspective, the design is more or less the salvage of the most useable parts of the PM Model Horten IX/Go 229 kit – namely the outer wing sections. The PM Model Ta 183 is only marginally “better”, and I had one of these in the stash (Revell re-boxing), too. So, why not combine two dreadful kits into something …new?

 

Well, that was the plan, and building was rather straightforward. In the cockpit, I added simple side consoles, a dashboard, some oxygen flasks, a different seat and a pilot figure (seatbelts simulated with tape strips) – the kit would be finished with closed canopy.

 

An exhaust pipe was integrated and the air intake filled with a better compressor fan (from an Airfix D.H. Venom, IIRC, fits perfectly). The inner walls of the landing gear wells (well, they are not existent) were cut away and replaced with leftover jet engine parts, so that there was some structure and depth. The landing gear was taken OOB, though, I just used slightly bigger wheels, since the “new” aircraft would have considerably more mass than the Ta 183.

 

The highly swept, long Ta 183 tail was cut off and replaced by a surplus Me 262 fin and tail section (Matchbox). Despite the different shape and size, and the resulting side view profile reminds strangely of the Saab 29?

The original Ta 183 wings were not mounted and their attachment points on the fuselage cut/sanded away. Instead, I used the outer wing sections from the Go 229, with clipped wing tips for a different shape.

 

When I held the wings to the fuselage, the whole thing looked …boring. Something was missing, hard to pinpoint. After consulting some Luft ’46 literature I adapted a trick for better stability: a gull wing shape. This was achieved through simple cuts to the wings’ upper halves. Then the wings were bent down, the gap filled with a styrene strip, and finally PSRed away. Looks very dynamic, and also much better!

 

Another late addition was the underwing armament. I was about to start painting when I again found that something was missing… The new wings made the aircraft pretty large, so I considered some underwing ordnance. Anyway, I did not want to disrupt the relatively clean lines with ugly bombs or drop tanks, so I installed a pair of racks with six launch tubes for R 65 “Föhn” unguided AAMs into the lower wing surfaces, in a semi-recessed position and with a deflector plate for the rocket exhausts.

  

Painting and markings:

As a high altitude interceptor and late war design, this one was to receive a simple and relatively light livery, even though I stuck with classic RLM tones. The Li 383 was basically painted all-over RLM 76 (Humbrol 247), onto which RLM 75 (from Modelmaster) was added, in the form of highly thinned enamel paint for a cloudy and improvised effect, applied with a big and soft brush. On top of the wings, a typical two-tone scheme was created, while on the fuselage’s upper sides only some thin mottles were added.

 

In order to lighten the scheme up and add a unique twist, I added further mottles to the flanks and the fin, but this time with RLM 77. This is a very light grey – originally reserved for tactical markings, but also “abused” in the field for camouflage mods, e. g. on high-flying He 177 bombers. I used Humbrol 195 (RAL 7035), again applied with a brush and highly thinned for a rather cloudy finish.

 

The air intake section and the intake duct were painted in aluminum, while the engine exhaust section as well as the missile racks and the areas around the gun ports were painted with Revell 99 (Iron Metallic) and Steel Metallizer.

 

The cockpit interior became dark grey (RLM 66) while the landing gear, the wells and the visible engine parts inside became RLM 02.

 

The kit was lightly weathered with a thin black ink wash and some dry-brushing.

 

The markings were puzzled together; due to the light basic tones of the model, the upper crosses became black, with only a very small cross on the flanks due to the lack of space, and for the wings’ undersides I used “old school” full color markings in black and white. The red color for the tactical code was basically chosen because it would be a nice contrast to the bluish-grey overall livery.

 

Finally the kit was sealed with matt acrylic varnish and some gun soot stains added with grinded graphite, as well as some traces of flaked paint on the wings’ leading edges and around the cockpit.

  

Well, the attempt to bash two mediocre (at best) kits into something else and hopefully better worked out well – the Li 383 does not look totally out of place, even though it turned out to become a bigger aircraft than expected. However, the aircraft has this certain, futuristic Luft ’46 look – probably thanks to the gull wings, which really change the overall impression from a simple kitbash to a coherent design which-could-have-been. The livery also fits well and looks better than expected. Overall, a positive surprise.

Fish, any of approximately 34,000 species of vertebrate animals (phylum Chordata) found in the fresh and salt waters of the world. Living species range from the primitive jawless lampreys and hagfishes through the cartilaginous sharks, skates, and rays to the abundant and diverse bony fishes. Most fish species are cold-blooded; however, one species, the opah (Lampris guttatus), is warm-blooded.

 

The term fish is applied to a variety of vertebrates of several evolutionary lines. It describes a life-form rather than a taxonomic group. As members of the phylum Chordata, fish share certain features with other vertebrates. These features are gill slits at some point in the life cycle, a notochord, or skeletal supporting rod, a dorsal hollow nerve cord, and a tail. Living fishes represent some five classes, which are as distinct from one another as are the four classes of familiar air-breathing animals—amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. For example, the jawless fishes (Agnatha) have gills in pouches and lack limb girdles. Extant agnathans are the lampreys and the hagfishes. As the name implies, the skeletons of fishes of the class Chondrichthyes (from chondr, “cartilage,” and ichthyes, “fish”) are made entirely of cartilage. Modern fish of this class lack a swim bladder, and their scales and teeth are made up of the same placoid material. Sharks, skates, and rays are examples of cartilaginous fishes. The bony fishes are by far the largest class. Examples range from the tiny seahorse to the 450-kg (1,000-pound) blue marlin, from the flattened soles and flounders to the boxy puffers and ocean sunfishes. Unlike the scales of the cartilaginous fishes, those of bony fishes, when present, grow throughout life and are made up of thin overlapping plates of bone. Bony fishes also have an operculum that covers the gill slits.

 

The study of fishes, the science of ichthyology, is of broad importance. Fishes are of interest to humans for many reasons, the most important being their relationship with and dependence on the environment. A more obvious reason for interest in fishes is their role as a moderate but important part of the world’s food supply. This resource, once thought unlimited, is now realized to be finite and in delicate balance with the biological, chemical, and physical factors of the aquatic environment. Overfishing, pollution, and alteration of the environment are the chief enemies of proper fisheries management, both in fresh waters and in the ocean. (For a detailed discussion of the technology and economics of fisheries, see commercial fishing.) Another practical reason for studying fishes is their use in disease control. As predators on mosquito larvae, they help curb malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

 

Fishes are valuable laboratory animals in many aspects of medical and biological research. For example, the readiness of many fishes to acclimate to captivity has allowed biologists to study behaviour, physiology, and even ecology under relatively natural conditions. Fishes have been especially important in the study of animal behaviour, where research on fishes has provided a broad base for the understanding of the more flexible behaviour of the higher vertebrates. The zebra fish is used as a model in studies of gene expression.

 

There are aesthetic and recreational reasons for an interest in fishes. Millions of people keep live fishes in home aquariums for the simple pleasure of observing the beauty and behaviour of animals otherwise unfamiliar to them. Aquarium fishes provide a personal challenge to many aquarists, allowing them to test their ability to keep a small section of the natural environment in their homes. Sportfishing is another way of enjoying the natural environment, also indulged in by millions of people every year. Interest in aquarium fishes and sportfishing supports multimillion-dollar industries throughout the world.

 

Fishes have been in existence for more than 450 million years, during which time they have evolved repeatedly to fit into almost every conceivable type of aquatic habitat. In a sense, land vertebrates are simply highly modified fishes: when fishes colonized the land habitat, they became tetrapod (four-legged) land vertebrates. The popular conception of a fish as a slippery, streamlined aquatic animal that possesses fins and breathes by gills applies to many fishes, but far more fishes deviate from that conception than conform to it. For example, the body is elongate in many forms and greatly shortened in others; the body is flattened in some (principally in bottom-dwelling fishes) and laterally compressed in many others; the fins may be elaborately extended, forming intricate shapes, or they may be reduced or even lost; and the positions of the mouth, eyes, nostrils, and gill openings vary widely. Air breathers have appeared in several evolutionary lines.

 

Many fishes are cryptically coloured and shaped, closely matching their respective environments; others are among the most brilliantly coloured of all organisms, with a wide range of hues, often of striking intensity, on a single individual. The brilliance of pigments may be enhanced by the surface structure of the fish, so that it almost seems to glow. A number of unrelated fishes have actual light-producing organs. Many fishes are able to alter their coloration—some for the purpose of camouflage, others for the enhancement of behavioral signals.

 

Fishes range in adult length from less than 10 mm (0.4 inch) to more than 20 metres (60 feet) and in weight from about 1.5 grams (less than 0.06 ounce) to many thousands of kilograms. Some live in shallow thermal springs at temperatures slightly above 42 °C (100 °F), others in cold Arctic seas a few degrees below 0 °C (32 °F) or in cold deep waters more than 4,000 metres (13,100 feet) beneath the ocean surface. The structural and, especially, the physiological adaptations for life at such extremes are relatively poorly known and provide the scientifically curious with great incentive for study.

 

Almost all natural bodies of water bear fish life, the exceptions being very hot thermal ponds and extremely salt-alkaline lakes, such as the Dead Sea in Asia and the Great Salt Lake in North America. The present distribution of fishes is a result of the geological history and development of Earth as well as the ability of fishes to undergo evolutionary change and to adapt to the available habitats. Fishes may be seen to be distributed according to habitat and according to geographical area. Major habitat differences are marine and freshwater. For the most part, the fishes in a marine habitat differ from those in a freshwater habitat, even in adjacent areas, but some, such as the salmon, migrate from one to the other. The freshwater habitats may be seen to be of many kinds. Fishes found in mountain torrents, Arctic lakes, tropical lakes, temperate streams, and tropical rivers will all differ from each other, both in obvious gross structure and in physiological attributes. Even in closely adjacent habitats where, for example, a tropical mountain torrent enters a lowland stream, the fish fauna will differ. The marine habitats can be divided into deep ocean floors (benthic), mid-water oceanic (bathypelagic), surface oceanic (pelagic), rocky coast, sandy coast, muddy shores, bays, estuaries, and others. Also, for example, rocky coastal shores in tropical and temperate regions will have different fish faunas, even when such habitats occur along the same coastline.

 

Although much is known about the present geographical distribution of fishes, far less is known about how that distribution came about. Many parts of the fish fauna of the fresh waters of North America and Eurasia are related and undoubtedly have a common origin. The faunas of Africa and South America are related, extremely old, and probably an expression of the drifting apart of the two continents. The fauna of southern Asia is related to that of Central Asia, and some of it appears to have entered Africa. The extremely large shore-fish faunas of the Indian and tropical Pacific oceans comprise a related complex, but the tropical shore fauna of the Atlantic, although containing Indo-Pacific components, is relatively limited and probably younger. The Arctic and Antarctic marine faunas are quite different from each other. The shore fauna of the North Pacific is quite distinct, and that of the North Atlantic more limited and probably younger. Pelagic oceanic fishes, especially those in deep waters, are similar the world over, showing little geographical isolation in terms of family groups. The deep oceanic habitat is very much the same throughout the world, but species differences do exist, showing geographical areas determined by oceanic currents and water masses.

 

All aspects of the life of a fish are closely correlated with adaptation to the total environment, physical, chemical, and biological. In studies, all the interdependent aspects of fish, such as behaviour, locomotion, reproduction, and physical and physiological characteristics, must be taken into account.

 

Correlated with their adaptation to an extremely wide variety of habitats is the extremely wide variety of life cycles that fishes display. The great majority hatch from relatively small eggs a few days to several weeks or more after the eggs are scattered in the water. Newly hatched young are still partially undeveloped and are called larvae until body structures such as fins, skeleton, and some organs are fully formed. Larval life is often very short, usually less than a few weeks, but it can be very long, some lampreys continuing as larvae for at least five years. Young and larval fishes, before reaching sexual maturity, must grow considerably, and their small size and other factors often dictate that they live in a habitat different than that of the adults. For example, most tropical marine shore fishes have pelagic larvae. Larval food also is different, and larval fishes often live in shallow waters, where they may be less exposed to predators.

 

After a fish reaches adult size, the length of its life is subject to many factors, such as innate rates of aging, predation pressure, and the nature of the local climate. The longevity of a species in the protected environment of an aquarium may have nothing to do with how long members of that species live in the wild. Many small fishes live only one to three years at the most. In some species, however, individuals may live as long as 10 or 20 or even 100 years.

 

Fish behaviour is a complicated and varied subject. As in almost all animals with a central nervous system, the nature of a response of an individual fish to stimuli from its environment depends upon the inherited characteristics of its nervous system, on what it has learned from past experience, and on the nature of the stimuli. Compared with the variety of human responses, however, that of a fish is stereotyped, not subject to much modification by “thought” or learning, and investigators must guard against anthropomorphic interpretations of fish behaviour.

 

Fishes perceive the world around them by the usual senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste and by special lateral line water-current detectors. In the few fishes that generate electric fields, a process that might best be called electrolocation aids in perception. One or another of these senses often is emphasized at the expense of others, depending upon the fish’s other adaptations. In fishes with large eyes, the sense of smell may be reduced; others, with small eyes, hunt and feed primarily by smell (such as some eels).

 

Specialized behaviour is primarily concerned with the three most important activities in the fish’s life: feeding, reproduction, and escape from enemies. Schooling behaviour of sardines on the high seas, for instance, is largely a protective device to avoid enemies, but it is also associated with and modified by their breeding and feeding requirements. Predatory fishes are often solitary, lying in wait to dart suddenly after their prey, a kind of locomotion impossible for beaked parrot fishes, which feed on coral, swimming in small groups from one coral head to the next. In addition, some predatory fishes that inhabit pelagic environments, such as tunas, often school.

 

Sleep in fishes, all of which lack true eyelids, consists of a seemingly listless state in which the fish maintains its balance but moves slowly. If attacked or disturbed, most can dart away. A few kinds of fishes lie on the bottom to sleep. Most catfishes, some loaches, and some eels and electric fishes are strictly nocturnal, being active and hunting for food during the night and retiring during the day to holes, thick vegetation, or other protective parts of the environment.

 

Communication between members of a species or between members of two or more species often is extremely important, especially in breeding behaviour (see below Reproduction). The mode of communication may be visual, as between the small so-called cleaner fish and a large fish of a very different species. The larger fish often allows the cleaner to enter its mouth to remove gill parasites. The cleaner is recognized by its distinctive colour and actions and therefore is not eaten, even if the larger fish is normally a predator. Communication is often chemical, signals being sent by specific chemicals called pheromones.

 

Many fishes have a streamlined body and swim freely in open water. Fish locomotion is closely correlated with habitat and ecological niche (the general position of the animal to its environment).

 

Many fishes in both marine and fresh waters swim at the surface and have mouths adapted to feed best (and sometimes only) at the surface. Often such fishes are long and slender, able to dart at surface insects or at other surface fishes and in turn to dart away from predators; needlefishes, halfbeaks, and topminnows (such as killifish and mosquito fish) are good examples. Oceanic flying fishes escape their predators by gathering speed above the water surface, with the lower lobe of the tail providing thrust in the water. They then glide hundreds of yards on enlarged, winglike pectoral and pelvic fins. South American freshwater flying fishes escape their enemies by jumping and propelling their strongly keeled bodies out of the water.

 

So-called mid-water swimmers, the most common type of fish, are of many kinds and live in many habitats. The powerful fusiform tunas and the trouts, for example, are adapted for strong, fast swimming, the tunas to capture prey speedily in the open ocean and the trouts to cope with the swift currents of streams and rivers. The trout body form is well adapted to many habitats. Fishes that live in relatively quiet waters such as bays or lake shores or slow rivers usually are not strong, fast swimmers but are capable of short, quick bursts of speed to escape a predator. Many of these fishes have their sides flattened, examples being the sunfish and the freshwater angelfish of aquarists. Fish associated with the bottom or substrate usually are slow swimmers. Open-water plankton-feeding fishes almost always remain fusiform and are capable of rapid, strong movement (for example, sardines and herrings of the open ocean and also many small minnows of streams and lakes).

 

Bottom-living fishes are of many kinds and have undergone many types of modification of their body shape and swimming habits. Rays, which evolved from strong-swimming mid-water sharks, usually stay close to the bottom and move by undulating their large pectoral fins. Flounders live in a similar habitat and move over the bottom by undulating the entire body. Many bottom fishes dart from place to place, resting on the bottom between movements, a motion common in gobies. One goby relative, the mudskipper, has taken to living at the edge of pools along the shore of muddy mangrove swamps. It escapes its enemies by flipping rapidly over the mud, out of the water. Some catfishes, synbranchid eels, the so-called climbing perch, and a few other fishes venture out over damp ground to find more promising waters than those that they left. They move by wriggling their bodies, sometimes using strong pectoral fins; most have accessory air-breathing organs. Many bottom-dwelling fishes live in mud holes or rocky crevices. Marine eels and gobies commonly are found in such habitats and for the most part venture far beyond their cavelike homes. Some bottom dwellers, such as the clingfishes (Gobiesocidae), have developed powerful adhesive disks that enable them to remain in place on the substrate in areas such as rocky coasts, where the action of the waves is great.

 

The methods of reproduction in fishes are varied, but most fishes lay a large number of small eggs, fertilized and scattered outside of the body. The eggs of pelagic fishes usually remain suspended in the open water. Many shore and freshwater fishes lay eggs on the bottom or among plants. Some have adhesive eggs. The mortality of the young and especially of the eggs is very high, and often only a few individuals grow to maturity out of hundreds, thousands, and in some cases millions of eggs laid.

 

Males produce sperm, usually as a milky white substance called milt, in two (sometimes one) testes within the body cavity. In bony fishes a sperm duct leads from each testis to a urogenital opening behind the vent or anus. In sharks and rays and in cyclostomes the duct leads to a cloaca. Sometimes the pelvic fins are modified to help transmit the milt to the eggs at the female’s vent or on the substrate where the female has placed them. Sometimes accessory organs are used to fertilize females internally—for example, the claspers of many sharks and rays.

 

In the females the eggs are formed in two ovaries (sometimes only one) and pass through the ovaries to the urogenital opening and to the outside. In some fishes the eggs are fertilized internally but are shed before development takes place. Members of about a dozen families each of bony fishes (teleosts) and sharks bear live young. Many skates and rays also bear live young. In some bony fishes the eggs simply develop within the female, the young emerging when the eggs hatch (ovoviviparous). Others develop within the ovary and are nourished by ovarian tissues after hatching (viviparous). There are also other methods utilized by fishes to nourish young within the female. In all live-bearers the young are born at a relatively large size and are few in number. In one family of primarily marine fishes, the surfperches from the Pacific coast of North America, Japan, and Korea, the males of at least one species are born sexually mature, although they are not fully grown.

 

Some fishes are hermaphroditic—an individual producing both sperm and eggs, usually at different stages of its life. Self-fertilization, however, is probably rare.

 

Successful reproduction and, in many cases, defense of the eggs and the young are assured by rather stereotypical but often elaborate courtship and parental behaviour, either by the male or the female or both. Some fishes prepare nests by hollowing out depressions in the sand bottom (cichlids, for example), build nests with plant materials and sticky threads excreted by the kidneys (sticklebacks), or blow a cluster of mucus-covered bubbles at the water surface (gouramis). The eggs are laid in these structures. Some varieties of cichlids and catfishes incubate eggs in their mouths.

 

Some fishes, such as salmon, undergo long migrations from the ocean and up large rivers to spawn in the gravel beds where they themselves hatched (anadromous fishes). Some, such as the freshwater eels (family Anguillidae), live and grow to maturity in fresh water and migrate to the sea to spawn (catadromous fishes). Other fishes undertake shorter migrations from lakes into streams, within the ocean, or enter spawning habitats that they do not ordinarily occupy in other ways.

 

The basic structure and function of the fish body are similar to those of all other vertebrates. The usual four types of tissues are present: surface or epithelial, connective (bone, cartilage, and fibrous tissues, as well as their derivative, blood), nerve, and muscle tissues. In addition, the fish’s organs and organ systems parallel those of other vertebrates.

 

The typical fish body is streamlined and spindle-shaped, with an anterior head, a gill apparatus, and a heart, the latter lying in the midline just below the gill chamber. The body cavity, containing the vital organs, is situated behind the head in the lower anterior part of the body. The anus usually marks the posterior termination of the body cavity and most often occurs just in front of the base of the anal fin. The spinal cord and vertebral column continue from the posterior part of the head to the base of the tail fin, passing dorsal to the body cavity and through the caudal (tail) region behind the body cavity. Most of the body is of muscular tissue, a high proportion of which is necessitated by swimming. In the course of evolution this basic body plan has been modified repeatedly into the many varieties of fish shapes that exist today.

 

The skeleton forms an integral part of the fish’s locomotion system, as well as serving to protect vital parts. The internal skeleton consists of the skull bones (except for the roofing bones of the head, which are really part of the external skeleton), the vertebral column, and the fin supports (fin rays). The fin supports are derived from the external skeleton but will be treated here because of their close functional relationship to the internal skeleton. The internal skeleton of cyclostomes, sharks, and rays is of cartilage; that of many fossil groups and some primitive living fishes is mostly of cartilage but may include some bone. In place of the vertebral column, the earliest vertebrates had a fully developed notochord, a flexible stiff rod of viscous cells surrounded by a strong fibrous sheath. During the evolution of modern fishes the rod was replaced in part by cartilage and then by ossified cartilage. Sharks and rays retain a cartilaginous vertebral column; bony fishes have spool-shaped vertebrae that in the more primitive living forms only partially replace the notochord. The skull, including the gill arches and jaws of bony fishes, is fully, or at least partially, ossified. That of sharks and rays remains cartilaginous, at times partially replaced by calcium deposits but never by true bone.

 

The supportive elements of the fins (basal or radial bones or both) have changed greatly during fish evolution. Some of these changes are described in the section below (Evolution and paleontology). Most fishes possess a single dorsal fin on the midline of the back. Many have two and a few have three dorsal fins. The other fins are the single tail and anal fins and paired pelvic and pectoral fins. A small fin, the adipose fin, with hairlike fin rays, occurs in many of the relatively primitive teleosts (such as trout) on the back near the base of the caudal fin.

 

The skin of a fish must serve many functions. It aids in maintaining the osmotic balance, provides physical protection for the body, is the site of coloration, contains sensory receptors, and, in some fishes, functions in respiration. Mucous glands, which aid in maintaining the water balance and offer protection from bacteria, are extremely numerous in fish skin, especially in cyclostomes and teleosts. Since mucous glands are present in the modern lampreys, it is reasonable to assume that they were present in primitive fishes, such as the ancient Silurian and Devonian agnathans. Protection from abrasion and predation is another function of the fish skin, and dermal (skin) bone arose early in fish evolution in response to this need. It is thought that bone first evolved in skin and only later invaded the cartilaginous areas of the fish’s body, to provide additional support and protection. There is some argument as to which came first, cartilage or bone, and fossil evidence does not settle the question. In any event, dermal bone has played an important part in fish evolution and has different characteristics in different groups of fishes. Several groups are characterized at least in part by the kind of bony scales they possess.

 

Scales have played an important part in the evolution of fishes. Primitive fishes usually had thick bony plates or thick scales in several layers of bone, enamel, and related substances. Modern teleost fishes have scales of bone, which, while still protective, allow much more freedom of motion in the body. A few modern teleosts (some catfishes, sticklebacks, and others) have secondarily acquired bony plates in the skin. Modern and early sharks possessed placoid scales, a relatively primitive type of scale with a toothlike structure, consisting of an outside layer of enamel-like substance (vitrodentine), an inner layer of dentine, and a pulp cavity containing nerves and blood vessels. Primitive bony fishes had thick scales of either the ganoid or the cosmoid type. Cosmoid scales have a hard, enamel-like outer layer, an inner layer of cosmine (a form of dentine), and then a layer of vascular bone (isopedine). In ganoid scales the hard outer layer is different chemically and is called ganoin. Under this is a cosminelike layer and then a vascular bony layer. The thin, translucent bony scales of modern fishes, called cycloid and ctenoid (the latter distinguished by serrations at the edges), lack enameloid and dentine layers.

 

Skin has several other functions in fishes. It is well supplied with nerve endings and presumably receives tactile, thermal, and pain stimuli. Skin is also well supplied with blood vessels. Some fishes breathe in part through the skin, by the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the surrounding water and numerous small blood vessels near the skin surface.

 

Skin serves as protection through the control of coloration. Fishes exhibit an almost limitless range of colours. The colours often blend closely with the surroundings, effectively hiding the animal. Many fishes use bright colours for territorial advertisement or as recognition marks for other members of their own species, or sometimes for members of other species. Many fishes can change their colour to a greater or lesser degree, by movement of pigment within the pigment cells (chromatophores). Black pigment cells (melanophores), of almost universal occurrence in fishes, are often juxtaposed with other pigment cells. When placed beneath iridocytes or leucophores (bearing the silvery or white pigment guanine), melanophores produce structural colours of blue and green. These colours are often extremely intense, because they are formed by refraction of light through the needlelike crystals of guanine. The blue and green refracted colours are often relatively pure, lacking the red and yellow rays, which have been absorbed by the black pigment (melanin) of the melanophores. Yellow, orange, and red colours are produced by erythrophores, cells containing the appropriate carotenoid pigments. Other colours are produced by combinations of melanophores, erythrophores, and iridocytes.

 

The major portion of the body of most fishes consists of muscles. Most of the mass is trunk musculature, the fin muscles usually being relatively small. The caudal fin is usually the most powerful fin, being moved by the trunk musculature. The body musculature is usually arranged in rows of chevron-shaped segments on each side. Contractions of these segments, each attached to adjacent vertebrae and vertebral processes, bends the body on the vertebral joint, producing successive undulations of the body, passing from the head to the tail, and producing driving strokes of the tail. It is the latter that provides the strong forward movement for most fishes.

 

The digestive system, in a functional sense, starts at the mouth, with the teeth used to capture prey or collect plant foods. Mouth shape and tooth structure vary greatly in fishes, depending on the kind of food normally eaten. Most fishes are predacious, feeding on small invertebrates or other fishes and have simple conical teeth on the jaws, on at least some of the bones of the roof of the mouth, and on special gill arch structures just in front of the esophagus. The latter are throat teeth. Most predacious fishes swallow their prey whole, and the teeth are used for grasping and holding prey, for orienting prey to be swallowed (head first) and for working the prey toward the esophagus. There are a variety of tooth types in fishes. Some fishes, such as sharks and piranhas, have cutting teeth for biting chunks out of their victims. A shark’s tooth, although superficially like that of a piranha, appears in many respects to be a modified scale, while that of the piranha is like that of other bony fishes, consisting of dentine and enamel. Parrot fishes have beaklike mouths with short incisor-like teeth for breaking off coral and have heavy pavementlike throat teeth for crushing the coral. Some catfishes have small brushlike teeth, arranged in rows on the jaws, for scraping plant and animal growth from rocks. Many fishes (such as the Cyprinidae or minnows) have no jaw teeth at all but have very strong throat teeth.

 

Some fishes gather planktonic food by straining it from their gill cavities with numerous elongate stiff rods (gill rakers) anchored by one end to the gill bars. The food collected on these rods is passed to the throat, where it is swallowed. Most fishes have only short gill rakers that help keep food particles from escaping out the mouth cavity into the gill chamber.

 

Once reaching the throat, food enters a short, often greatly distensible esophagus, a simple tube with a muscular wall leading into a stomach. The stomach varies greatly in fishes, depending upon the diet. In most predacious fishes it is a simple straight or curved tube or pouch with a muscular wall and a glandular lining. Food is largely digested there and leaves the stomach in liquid form.

 

Between the stomach and the intestine, ducts enter the digestive tube from the liver and pancreas. The liver is a large, clearly defined organ. The pancreas may be embedded in it, diffused through it, or broken into small parts spread along some of the intestine. The junction between the stomach and the intestine is marked by a muscular valve. Pyloric ceca (blind sacs) occur in some fishes at this junction and have a digestive or absorptive function or both.

 

The intestine itself is quite variable in length, depending upon the fish’s diet. It is short in predacious forms, sometimes no longer than the body cavity, but long in herbivorous forms, being coiled and several times longer than the entire length of the fish in some species of South American catfishes. The intestine is primarily an organ for absorbing nutrients into the bloodstream. The larger its internal surface, the greater its absorptive efficiency, and a spiral valve is one method of increasing its absorption surface.

 

Sharks, rays, chimaeras, lungfishes, surviving chondrosteans, holosteans, and even a few of the more primitive teleosts have a spiral valve or at least traces of it in the intestine. Most modern teleosts have increased the area of the intestinal walls by having numerous folds and villi (fingerlike projections) somewhat like those in humans. Undigested substances are passed to the exterior through the anus in most teleost fishes. In lungfishes, sharks, and rays, it is first passed through the cloaca, a common cavity receiving the intestinal opening and the ducts from the urogenital system.

 

Oxygen and carbon dioxide dissolve in water, and most fishes exchange dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide in water by means of the gills. The gills lie behind and to the side of the mouth cavity and consist of fleshy filaments supported by the gill arches and filled with blood vessels, which give gills a bright red colour. Water taken in continuously through the mouth passes backward between the gill bars and over the gill filaments, where the exchange of gases takes place. The gills are protected by a gill cover in teleosts and many other fishes but by flaps of skin in sharks, rays, and some of the older fossil fish groups. The blood capillaries in the gill filaments are close to the gill surface to take up oxygen from the water and to give up excess carbon dioxide to the water.

 

Most modern fishes have a hydrostatic (ballast) organ, called the swim bladder, that lies in the body cavity just below the kidney and above the stomach and intestine. It originated as a diverticulum of the digestive canal. In advanced teleosts, especially the acanthopterygians, the bladder has lost its connection with the digestive tract, a condition called physoclistic. The connection has been retained (physostomous) by many relatively primitive teleosts. In several unrelated lines of fishes, the bladder has become specialized as a lung or, at least, as a highly vascularized accessory breathing organ. Some fishes with such accessory organs are obligate air breathers and will drown if denied access to the surface, even in well-oxygenated water. Fishes with a hydrostatic form of swim bladder can control their depth by regulating the amount of gas in the bladder. The gas, mostly oxygen, is secreted into the bladder by special glands, rendering the fish more buoyant; the gas is absorbed into the bloodstream by another special organ, reducing the overall buoyancy and allowing the fish to sink. Some deep-sea fishes may have oils, rather than gas, in the bladder. Other deep-sea and some bottom-living forms have much-reduced swim bladders or have lost the organ entirely.

 

The swim bladder of fishes follows the same developmental pattern as the lungs of land vertebrates. There is no doubt that the two structures have the same historical origin in primitive fishes. More or less intermediate forms still survive among the more primitive types of fishes, such as the lungfishes Lepidosiren and Protopterus.

 

The circulatory, or blood vascular, system consists of the heart, the arteries, the capillaries, and the veins. It is in the capillaries that the interchange of oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, and other substances such as hormones and waste products takes place. The capillaries lead to the veins, which return the venous blood with its waste products to the heart, kidneys, and gills. There are two kinds of capillary beds: those in the gills and those in the rest of the body. The heart, a folded continuous muscular tube with three or four saclike enlargements, undergoes rhythmic contractions and receives venous blood in a sinus venosus. It passes the blood to an auricle and then into a thick muscular pump, the ventricle. From the ventricle the blood goes to a bulbous structure at the base of a ventral aorta just below the gills. The blood passes to the afferent (receiving) arteries of the gill arches and then to the gill capillaries. There waste gases are given off to the environment, and oxygen is absorbed. The oxygenated blood enters efferent (exuant) arteries of the gill arches and then flows into the dorsal aorta. From there blood is distributed to the tissues and organs of the body. One-way valves prevent backflow. The circulation of fishes thus differs from that of the reptiles, birds, and mammals in that oxygenated blood is not returned to the heart prior to distribution to the other parts of the body.

 

The primary excretory organ in fishes, as in other vertebrates, is the kidney. In fishes some excretion also takes place in the digestive tract, skin, and especially the gills (where ammonia is given off). Compared with land vertebrates, fishes have a special problem in maintaining their internal environment at a constant concentration of water and dissolved substances, such as salts. Proper balance of the internal environment (homeostasis) of a fish is in a great part maintained by the excretory system, especially the kidney.

 

The kidney, gills, and skin play an important role in maintaining a fish’s internal environment and checking the effects of osmosis. Marine fishes live in an environment in which the water around them has a greater concentration of salts than they can have inside their body and still maintain life. Freshwater fishes, on the other hand, live in water with a much lower concentration of salts than they require inside their bodies. Osmosis tends to promote the loss of water from the body of a marine fish and absorption of water by that of a freshwater fish. Mucus in the skin tends to slow the process but is not a sufficient barrier to prevent the movement of fluids through the permeable skin. When solutions on two sides of a permeable membrane have different concentrations of dissolved substances, water will pass through the membrane into the more concentrated solution, while the dissolved chemicals move into the area of lower concentration (diffusion).

 

The kidney of freshwater fishes is often larger in relation to body weight than that of marine fishes. In both groups the kidney excretes wastes from the body, but the kidney of freshwater fishes also excretes large amounts of water, counteracting the water absorbed through the skin. Freshwater fishes tend to lose salt to the environment and must replace it. They get some salt from their food, but the gills and skin inside the mouth actively absorb salt from water passed through the mouth. This absorption is performed by special cells capable of moving salts against the diffusion gradient. Freshwater fishes drink very little water and take in little water with their food.

 

Marine fishes must conserve water, and therefore their kidneys excrete little water. To maintain their water balance, marine fishes drink large quantities of seawater, retaining most of the water and excreting the salt. Most nitrogenous waste in marine fishes appears to be secreted by the gills as ammonia. Marine fishes can excrete salt by clusters of special cells (chloride cells) in the gills.

 

There are several teleosts—for example, the salmon—that travel between fresh water and seawater and must adjust to the reversal of osmotic gradients. They adjust their physiological processes by spending time (often surprisingly little time) in the intermediate brackish environment.

 

Marine hagfishes, sharks, and rays have osmotic concentrations in their blood about equal to that of seawater and so do not have to drink water nor perform much physiological work to maintain their osmotic balance. In sharks and rays the osmotic concentration is kept high by retention of urea in the blood. Freshwater sharks have a lowered concentration of urea in the blood.

 

Endocrine glands secrete their products into the bloodstream and body tissues and, along with the central nervous system, control and regulate many kinds of body functions. Cyclostomes have a well-developed endocrine system, and presumably it was well developed in the early Agnatha, ancestral to modern fishes. Although the endocrine system in fishes is similar to that of higher vertebrates, there are numerous differences in detail. The pituitary, the thyroid, the suprarenals, the adrenals, the pancreatic islets, the sex glands (ovaries and testes), the inner wall of the intestine, and the bodies of the ultimobranchial gland make up the endocrine system in fishes. There are some others whose function is not well understood. These organs regulate sexual activity and reproduction, growth, osmotic pressure, general metabolic activities such as the storage of fat and the utilization of foodstuffs, blood pressure, and certain aspects of skin colour. Many of these activities are also controlled in part by the central nervous system, which works with the endocrine system in maintaining the life of a fish. Some parts of the endocrine system are developmentally, and undoubtedly evolutionarily, derived from the nervous system.

 

As in all vertebrates, the nervous system of fishes is the primary mechanism coordinating body activities, as well as integrating these activities in the appropriate manner with stimuli from the environment. The central nervous system, consisting of the brain and spinal cord, is the primary integrating mechanism. The peripheral nervous system, consisting of nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord to various body organs, carries sensory information from special receptor organs such as the eyes, internal ears, nares (sense of smell), taste glands, and others to the integrating centres of the brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system also carries information via different nerve cells from the integrating centres of the brain and spinal cord. This coded information is carried to the various organs and body systems, such as the skeletal muscular system, for appropriate action in response to the original external or internal stimulus. Another branch of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, helps to coordinate the activities of many glands and organs and is itself closely connected to the integrating centres of the brain.

 

The brain of the fish is divided into several anatomical and functional parts, all closely interconnected but each serving as the primary centre of integrating particular kinds of responses and activities. Several of these centres or parts are primarily associated with one type of sensory perception, such as sight, hearing, or smell (olfaction).

 

The sense of smell is important in almost all fishes. Certain eels with tiny eyes depend mostly on smell for location of food. The olfactory, or nasal, organ of fishes is located on the dorsal surface of the snout. The lining of the nasal organ has special sensory cells that perceive chemicals dissolved in the water, such as substances from food material, and send sensory information to the brain by way of the first cranial nerve. Odour also serves as an alarm system. Many fishes, especially various species of freshwater minnows, react with alarm to a chemical released from the skin of an injured member of their own species.

 

Many fishes have a well-developed sense of taste, and tiny pitlike taste buds or organs are located not only within their mouth cavities but also over their heads and parts of their body. Catfishes, which often have poor vision, have barbels (“whiskers”) that serve as supplementary taste organs, those around the mouth being actively used to search out food on the bottom. Some species of naturally blind cave fishes are especially well supplied with taste buds, which often cover most of their body surface.

 

Sight is extremely important in most fishes. The eye of a fish is basically like that of all other vertebrates, but the eyes of fishes are extremely varied in structure and adaptation. In general, fishes living in dark and dim water habitats have large eyes, unless they have specialized in some compensatory way so that another sense (such as smell) is dominant, in which case the eyes will often be reduced. Fishes living in brightly lighted shallow waters often will have relatively small but efficient eyes. Cyclostomes have somewhat less elaborate eyes than other fishes, with skin stretched over the eyeball perhaps making their vision somewhat less effective. Most fishes have a spherical lens and accommodate their vision to far or near subjects by moving the lens within the eyeball. A few sharks accommodate by changing the shape of the lens, as in land vertebrates. Those fishes that are heavily dependent upon the eyes have especially strong muscles for accommodation. Most fishes see well, despite the restrictions imposed by frequent turbidity of the water and by light refraction.

 

Fossil evidence suggests that colour vision evolved in fishes more than 300 million years ago, but not all living fishes have retained this ability. Experimental evidence indicates that many shallow-water fishes, if not all, have colour vision and see some colours especially well, but some bottom-dwelling shore fishes live in areas where the water is sufficiently deep to filter out most if not all colours, and these fishes apparently never see colours. When tested in shallow water, they apparently are unable to respond to colour differences.

 

Sound perception and balance are intimately associated senses in a fish. The organs of hearing are entirely internal, located within the skull, on each side of the brain and somewhat behind the eyes. Sound waves, especially those of low frequencies, travel readily through water and impinge directly upon the bones and fluids of the head and body, to be transmitted to the hearing organs. Fishes readily respond to sound; for example, a trout conditioned to escape by the approach of fishermen will take flight upon perceiving footsteps on a stream bank even if it cannot see a fisherman. Compared with humans, however, the range of sound frequencies heard by fishes is greatly restricted. Many fishes communicate with each other by producing sounds in their swim bladders, in their throats by rasping their teeth, and in other ways.

 

A fish or other vertebrate seldom has to rely on a single type of sensory information to determine the nature of the environment around it. A catfish uses taste and touch when examining a food object with its oral barbels. Like most other animals, fishes have many touch receptors over their body surface. Pain and temperature receptors also are present in fishes and presumably produce the same kind of information to a fish as to humans. Fishes react in a negative fashion to stimuli that would be painful to human beings, suggesting that they feel a sensation of pain.

 

An important sensory system in fishes that is absent in other vertebrates (except some amphibians) is the lateral line system. This consists of a series of heavily innervated small canals located in the skin and bone around the eyes, along the lower jaw, over the head, and down the mid-side of the body, where it is associated with the scales. Intermittently along these canals are located tiny sensory organs (pit organs) that apparently detect changes in pressure. The system allows a fish to sense changes in water currents and pressure, thereby helping the fish to orient itself to the various changes that occur in the physical environment.

  

U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Deputy Secretary Krysta Harden, left, signs a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with NASA's Deputy Administrator Dava Newman, right, that highlights and solidifies the commitment to inspiring young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and agriculture on Monday, October 5, 2015 at USDA's People's Garden in Washington, DC. The MOU is an annex to an agreement between USDA and NASA to better protect America's working lands, predict and prevent natural disasters, and encourage youth to pursue careers in the STEM and agricultural fields. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

www.leannestaples.com

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.

 

~ George Eastman

 

Leipziger Buchmesse 2015

2015-03-13 (Friday)

2015_005

2015#132

 

SakuK (___) 537673 as Anarchy Stocking from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt

Ann_in_the_Dark (Sophie) 778037 as Panty Anarchy from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt

 

Thank you for any group invites which I will gladly accept. However, if I can't check the content of such groups ("This group is not available to you") I'd rather not add any of my photos. Thanks for your understanding.

I want to thank everyone for the kind words and the vibes today.

 

I swear to gahd I felt them.

 

In the grand scheme of things I only hope that as much as you guys have helped me get through some tough shit...

 

that the images and words that I share with you are repayment in kind of some sort.

 

Because so many have done so much for me.

 

I feel like I owe the universe right now.

 

Things went better than I'd expected today and I'm feeling kinda good for having survived the day with my soul intact.

 

It didn't even get damaged actually.

 

Not a scratch or a dent.

 

I never got mad or felt angry once.

 

I kept reminding myself that the way to get through the toughest times in life is to let your heart be filled with love and light.

 

Here and there I would just visualize this 'love and light' filling the core of my being and it felt so good.

 

It was so warm and it was so bright.

 

It was the shit man.

 

I wish I could do that all of the time.

 

Not just when it's all blowing up around me.

 

I expected some real pain today and the pain never came.

 

There was frustration.

 

But when is there not?

 

To be honest I felt really freakin' good today.

 

I felt really good because I didn't feel 'bad.'

 

I don't know if anyone'll get that but I do.

 

I've got to get out from underneath the weight of these forces that are directing so much of my life so I can live the way that I want to.

 

I think I'll be there soon.

 

I don't like being told what I can or can't say by anyone.

 

The invasiveness of this situation's not cool at all.

 

It's felt like so much of my freedom's been taken away from me for so long.

 

I've been through hell.

 

A hell I couldn't describe to you accurately even if I was allowed to.

 

But slowly, surely...

 

that hell is fading into the past.

 

Every day it is of less and less significance.

 

I've chosen not to give it any more power over my life.

 

I'm gonna get where I gotta be and when I do you're gonna see an absolute explosion of love and light.

 

It feels like it's taken so long...

 

but the truth is coming out as surely as the sun rises each day.

 

And the truth has a power unlike anything in the universe.

 

The truth is the only thing that's real.

 

The things I have learned my friends.

 

The things I have learned.

 

It's my turn to send you some good vibes right now.

 

Kick Back and Listen

     

Caravaggio at the National Gallery, London

As a child I loved looking at the covers and the illustrations within my dad's old science magazines. I didn't actually read any, just looked at the pictures. It's still absolutely inspirational stuff.

 

Understanding slow shutter.

Asking For Forgiveness

View On Black

 

The Dome in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. It took a little maneuvering to get this shot, as the figures in blue (at the very top of the dome) can only be seen from certain angles.

 

From the LOC website:

On the ceiling of the lantern, which rises above the highest part of the dome, is a painting of a beautiful female figure representing Human Understanding, in the act of lifting the veil of ignorance and looking forward to intellectual progress. She is attended by two cherubs: one is holding the book of wisdom and knowledge and the other seems, by his gesture, to be encouraging viewers beneath to persist in their struggle toward perfection.

 

The decoration on the base or collar of the lantern consists of a ring of twelve seated figures, male and female, ranged against a wall of mosaic patterning. They represent the twelve countries, or epochs, which in 1897, when the building was constructed, were thought to have contributed the most to modern civilization.

 

• Egypt represents Written Records.

• Judea represents Religion.

• Greece represents Philosophy.

• Rome represents Administration.

• Islam represents Physics.

• The Middle Ages represent Modern Languages.

• Italy represents the Fine Arts.

• Germany represents the Art of Printing.

• Spain represents Discovery.

• England represents Literature.

• France represents Emancipation.

• America represents Science.

  

Thanks for looking!

 

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Comments and constructive criticism always appreciated.

Stream on Black

I read this concept related to stoicism, related to pain. You can apply it to eating overly sugared Christmas cookies as well. Bite into it. Resist your initial revulsion and let the sweetness wash through your system. Let it consume your taste buds until they almost feel like they will explode,...

 

manwithoutfather.com/2015/12/01/how-to-eat-christmas-cook...

When I’m not flying between countries, I have taken up the hobby of collecting my dream cameras of the past via Ebay. I picked up this mint Nikon F Photomic for only $50 (not including the lens). It looks like it was never used. This joins my Nikon F2 that I got a few months ago.

 

I find myself cycling invisible film through these cameras when I am relaxing with a glass of wine and looking for inspiration.

 

There is something obscene about the fact that a piece of technology like this can barely be used today, due to the virtual death of film. We can collect and drive a classic old Ferrari, because it still uses gasoline. But the “gasoline” of these old pieces of art is almost dead.

 

The person who bought this 1969 camera would have been a Pro. It was much too expensive for most people, except serious amateurs and pros. The user would have to understand how to set shutter speed and aperture to get the image that he/she was trying to attain. He/she would use his/her brain to focus, and understand how lighting would affect the final image, which would only be seen later after the film was developed. You had 20 or 36 shots to get the images right, and there was a cost involved that limited your use of film.

 

Today’s pro digital SLRs have settings for aperture and shutter speed, but most consumers don’t have a clue what the A, S, and M settings mean. Many set their expensive pro DSLR to AUTO and produce well-exposed and properly-focused boring pictures … that is what you generate when you leave your brain out of photography and let the camera do everything.

 

Your camera doesn’t know about the rule-of-thirds in framing an image, or that you want the background to be out of focus so you don’t have tree branches “growing” out of people’s heads in the image.

 

I love digital photography and would hate going back to film, but I am also glad that I grew up understanding how photography works, and I would never buy a digital camera that doesn’t allow manual settings. The best automation in today’s DSLR cameras can only approach the capability of a serious teenager photographer’s brain…. that’s all.

 

All the bulls**t about needing 90-point autofocus and 15 frames per second to take pictures at your son’s soccer game is just that – marketing bulls**t and bragging rights for dad at the soccer game.

 

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, also known as Mustafa Kemal Pasha until 1921, and Ghazi Mustafa Kemal from 1921 until the Surname Law of 1934 (c. 1881 – 10 November 1938), was a Turkish field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping progressive reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrializing nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and socio-political theories became known as Kemalism.

 

Atatürk came to prominence for his role in securing the Ottoman Turkish victory at the Battle of Gallipoli (1915) during World War I. During this time, the Ottoman Empire perpetrated genocides against its Greek, Armenian and Assyrian subjects; while not directly involved, Atatürk's role in their aftermath has been controversial. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, he led the Turkish National Movement, which resisted mainland Turkey's partition among the victorious Allied powers. Establishing a provisional government in the present-day Turkish capital Ankara (known in English at the time as Angora), he defeated the forces sent by the Allies, thus emerging victorious from what was later referred to as the Turkish War of Independence. He subsequently proceeded to abolish the sultanate in 1922 and proclaimed the foundation of the Turkish Republic in its place the following year.

 

As the president of the newly formed Turkish Republic, Atatürk initiated a rigorous program of political, economic, and cultural reforms with the ultimate aim of building a republican and secular nation-state. He made primary education free and compulsory, opening thousands of new schools all over the country. He also introduced the Latin-based Turkish alphabet, replacing the old Ottoman Turkish alphabet. Turkish women received equal civil and political rights during Atatürk's presidency. In particular, women were given voting rights in local elections by Act no. 1580 on 3 April 1930 and a few years later, in 1934, full universal suffrage. His government carried out a policy of Turkification, trying to create a homogeneous, unified and above all secular nation under the Turkish banner. Under Atatürk, the minorities in Turkey were ordered to speak Turkish in public, but were allowed to maintain their own languages in private and within their own communities; non-Turkish toponyms were replaced and non-Turkish families were ordered to adopt a Turkish surname. The Turkish Parliament granted him the surname Atatürk in 1934, which means "Father of the Turks", in recognition of the role he played in building the modern Turkish Republic. He died on 10 November 1938 at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, at the age of 57; he was succeeded as president by his long-time prime minister İsmet İnönü and was honored with a state funeral.

 

In 1981, the centennial of Atatürk's birth, his memory was honoured by the United Nations and UNESCO, which declared it The Atatürk Year in the World and adopted the Resolution on the Atatürk Centennial, describing him as "the leader of the first struggle given against colonialism and imperialism" and a "remarkable promoter of the sense of understanding between peoples and durable peace between the nations of the world and that he worked all his life for the development of harmony and cooperation between peoples without distinction". Atatürk was also credited for his peace-in-the-world oriented foreign policy and friendship with neighboring countries such as Iran, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Greece, as well as the creation of the Balkan Pact that resisted the expansionist aggressions of Fascist Italy and Tsarist Bulgaria.

 

The Turkish War of Independence (19 May 1919 – 24 July 1923) was a series of military campaigns and a revolution waged by the Turkish National Movement, after parts of the Ottoman Empire were occupied and partitioned following its defeat in World War I. The conflict was between the Turkish Nationalists against Allied and separatist forces over the application of Wilsonian principles, especially national self-determination, in post-World War I Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. The revolution concluded the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman monarchy and the Islamic caliphate were abolished, and the Republic of Turkey was declared in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. This resulted in a transfer of vested sovereignty from the sultan-caliph to the nation, setting the stage for Republican Turkey's period of nationalist revolutionary reform.

 

While World War I ended for the Ottoman Empire with the Armistice of Mudros, the Allied Powers continued occupying and securing land per the Sykes–Picot Agreement, as well as to facilitate the prosecution of former members of the Committee of Union and Progress and those involved in the Armenian genocide. Ottoman military commanders therefore refused orders from both the Allies and the Ottoman government to surrender and disband their forces. In an atmosphere of turmoil throughout the remainder of the empire, sultan Mehmed VI dispatched Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), a well-respected and high-ranking general, to Anatolia to restore order; however, Mustafa Kemal became an enabler and eventually leader of Turkish Nationalist resistance against the Ottoman government, Allied powers, and separatists.

 

In an attempt to establish control over the power vacuum in Anatolia, the Allies agreed to launch a Greek peacekeeping force into Anatolia and occupy Smyrna (İzmir), inflaming sectarian tensions and beginning the Turkish War of Independence. A nationalist counter government led by Mustafa Kemal was established in Ankara when it became clear the Ottoman government was appeasing the Allied powers. The Allies soon pressured the Ottoman government in Constantinople to suspend the Constitution, shutter Parliament, and sign the Treaty of Sèvres, a treaty unfavorable to Turkish interests that the "Ankara government" declared illegal.

 

In the ensuing war, Turkish and Syrian forces defeated the French in the south, and remobilized army units went on to partition Armenia with the Bolsheviks, resulting in the Treaty of Kars (October 1921). The Western Front of the independence war is known as the Greco-Turkish War, in which Greek forces at first encountered unorganized resistance. However, İsmet Pasha (İnönü)'s organization of militia into a regular army paid off when Ankara forces fought the Greeks in the First and Second Battle of İnönü. The Greek army emerged victorious in the Battle of Kütahya-Eskişehir and decided to drive on the Nationalist capital of Ankara, stretching their supply lines. The Turks checked their advance in the Battle of Sakarya and eventually counter-attacked in the Great Offensive, which expelled Greek forces from Anatolia in the span of three weeks. The war effectively ended with the recapture of İzmir and the Chanak Crisis, prompting the signing of another armistice in Mudanya.

 

The Grand National Assembly in Ankara was recognized as the legitimate Turkish government, which signed the Treaty of Lausanne (July 1923), a treaty more favorable to Turkey than the Sèvres Treaty. The Allies evacuated Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, the Ottoman government was overthrown and the monarchy abolished, and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (which remains Turkey's primary legislative body today) declared the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. With the war, a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, and the abolition of the sultanate, the Ottoman era came to an end, and with Atatürk's reforms, the Turks created the modern, secular nation-state of Turkey. On 3 March 1924, the Ottoman caliphate was also abolished.

 

The ethnic demographics of the modern Turkish Republic were significantly impacted by the earlier Armenian genocide and the deportations of Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian Rum people. The Turkish Nationalist Movement carried out massacres and deportations to eliminate native Christian populations—a continuation of the Armenian genocide and other ethnic cleansing operations during World War I. Following these campaigns of ethnic cleansing, the historic Christian presence in Anatolia was destroyed, in large part, and the Muslim demographic had increased from 80% to 98%.

 

Following the chaotic politics of the Second Constitutional Era, the Ottoman Empire came under the control of the Committee of Union and Progress in a coup in 1913, and then further consolidated its control after the assassination of Mahmud Shevket Pasha.[citation needed] Founded as a radical revolutionary group seeking to prevent a collapse of the Ottoman Empire, by the eve of World War I it decided that the solution was to implement nationalist and centralizing policies. The CUP reacted to the losses of land and the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkan Wars by turning even more nationalistic. Part of its effort to consolidate power was to proscribe and exile opposition politicians from the Freedom and Accord Party to remote Sinop.

 

The Unionists brought the Ottoman Empire into World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, during which a genocidal campaign was waged against Ottoman Christians, namely Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Assyrians. It was based on an alleged conspiracy that the three groups would rebel on the side of the Allies, so collective punishment was applied. A similar suspicion and suppression from the Turkish nationalist government was directed towards the Arab and Kurdish populations, leading to localized rebellions. The Entente powers reacted to these developments by charging the CUP leaders, commonly known as the Three Pashas, with "Crimes against humanity" and threatened accountability. They also had imperialist ambitions on Ottoman territory, with a major correspondence over a post-war settlement in the Ottoman Empire being leaked to the press as the Sykes–Picot Agreement. With Saint Petersburg's exit from World War I and descent into civil war, driven in part from the Ottomans' closure of the Turkish straits of goods bound to Russia, a new imperative was given to the Entente powers to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war to restart the Eastern Front.

 

World War I would be the nail in the coffin of Ottomanism, a monarchist and multicultural nationalism. Mistreatment of non-Turk groups after 1913, and the general context of great socio-political upheaval that occurred in the aftermath of World War I, meant many minorities now wished to divorce their future from imperialism to form futures of their own by separating into (often republican) nation-states.

 

In the summer months of 1918, the leaders of the Central Powers realized that the Great War was lost, including the Ottomans'. Almost simultaneously the Palestinian Front and then the Macedonian Front collapsed. The sudden decision by Bulgaria to sign an armistice cut communications from Constantinople (İstanbul) to Vienna and Berlin, and opened the undefended Ottoman capital to Entente attack. With the major fronts crumbling, Unionist Grand Vizier Talât Pasha intended to sign an armistice, and resigned on 8 October 1918 so that a new government would receive less harsh armistice terms. The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918, ending World War I for the Ottoman Empire. Three days later, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)—which governed the Ottoman Empire as a one-party state since 1913—held its last congress, where it was decided the party would be dissolved. Talât, Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, and five other high-ranking members of the CUP escaped the Ottoman Empire on a German torpedo boat later that night, plunging the country into a power vacuum.

 

The armistice was signed because the Ottoman Empire had been defeated in important fronts, but the military was intact and retreated in good order. Unlike other Central Powers, the Allies did not mandate an abdication of the imperial family as a condition for peace, nor did they request the Ottoman Army to dissolve its general staff. Though the army suffered from mass desertion throughout the war which led to banditry, there was no threat of mutiny or revolutions like in Germany, Austria-Hungary, or Russia. This is despite famine and economic collapse that was brought on by the extreme levels of mobilization, destruction from the war, disease, and mass murder since 1914.

 

Due to the Turkish nationalist policies pursued by the CUP against Ottoman Christians by 1918 the Ottoman Empire held control over a mostly homogeneous land of Muslims from Eastern Thrace to the Persian border. These included mostly Turks, as well as Kurds, Circassians, and Muhacir groups from Rumeli. Most Muslim Arabs were now outside of the Ottoman Empire and under Allied occupation, with some "imperialists" still loyal to the Ottoman Sultanate-Caliphate, and others wishing for independence or Allied protection under a League of Nations mandate. Sizable Greek and Armenian minorities remained within its borders, and most of these communities no longer wished to remain under the Empire.

 

On 30 October 1918, the Armistice of Mudros was signed between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies of World War I, bringing hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I to an end. The Ottoman Army was to demobilize, its navy and air force handed to the Allies, and occupied territory in the Caucasus and Persia to be evacuated. Critically, Article VII granted the Allies the right to occupy forts controlling the Turkish Straits and the vague right to occupy "in case of disorder" any territory if there were a threat to security. The clause relating to the occupation of the straits was meant to secure a Southern Russian intervention force, while the rest of the article was used to allow for Allied controlled peace-keeping forces. There was also a hope to follow through punishing local actors that carried out exterminatory orders from the CUP government against Armenian Ottomans. For now, the House of Osman escaped the fates of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, and Romanovs to continue ruling their empire, though at the cost of its remaining sovereignty.

 

On 13 November 1918, a French brigade entered Constantinople to begin a de facto occupation of the Ottoman capital and its immediate dependencies. This was followed by a fleet consisting of British, French, Italian and Greek ships deploying soldiers on the ground the next day, totaling 50,000 troops in Constantinople. The Allied Powers stated that the occupation was temporary and its purpose was to protect the monarchy, the caliphate and the minorities. Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe—the British signatory of the Mudros Armistice—stated the Triple Entente's public position that they had no intention to dismantle the Ottoman government or place it under military occupation by "occupying Constantinople". However, dismantling the government and partitioning the Ottoman Empire among the Allied nations had been an objective of the Entente since the start of WWI.

 

A wave of seizures took place in the rest of the country in the following months. Citing Article VII, British forces demanded that Turkish troops evacuate Mosul, claiming that Christian civilians in Mosul and Zakho were killed en masse. In the Caucasus, Britain established a presence in Menshevik Georgia and the Lori and Aras valleys as peace-keepers. On 14 November, joint Franco-Greek occupation was established in the town of Uzunköprü in Eastern Thrace as well as the railway axis until the train station of Hadımköy on the outskirts of Constantinople. On 1 December, British troops based in Syria occupied Kilis, Marash, Urfa and Birecik. Beginning in December, French troops began successive seizures of the province of Adana, including the towns of Antioch, Mersin, Tarsus, Ceyhan, Adana, Osmaniye, and İslâhiye, incorporating the area into the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration North while French forces embarked by gunboats and sent troops to the Black Sea ports of Zonguldak and Karadeniz Ereğli commanding Turkey's coal mining region. These continued seizures of land prompted Ottoman commanders to refuse demobilization and prepare for the resumption of war.

 

The British similarly asked Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) to turn over the port of Alexandretta (İskenderun), which he reluctantly did, following which he was recalled to Constantinople. He made sure to distribute weapons to the population to prevent them from falling into the hands of Allied forces. Some of these weapons were smuggled to the east by members of Karakol, a successor to the CUP's Special Organization, to be used in case resistance was necessary in Anatolia. Many Ottoman officials participated in efforts to conceal from the occupying authorities details of the burgeoning independence movement spreading throughout Anatolia.

 

Other commanders began refusing orders from the Ottoman government and the Allied powers. After Mustafa Kemal Pasha returned to Constantinople, Ali Fuat Pasha (Cebesoy) brought XX Corps under his command. He marched first to Konya and then to Ankara to organise resistance groups, such as the Circassian çetes he assembled with guerilla leader Çerkes Ethem. Meanwhile, Kazım Karabekir Pasha refused to surrender his intact and powerful XV Corps in Erzurum. Evacuation from the Caucusus, puppet republics and Muslim militia groups were established in the army's wake to hamper with the consolidation of the new Armenian state. Elsewhere in the country, regional nationalist resistance organizations known as Şuras –meaning "councils", not unlike soviets in revolutionary Russia– were founded, most pledging allegiance to the Defence of National Rights movement that protested continued Allied occupation and appeasement by the Sublime Porte.

 

Following the occupation of Constantinople, Mehmed VI Vahdettin dissolved the Chamber of Deputies which was dominated by Unionists elected back in 1914, promising elections for the next year. Vahdettin just ascended to the throne only months earlier with the death of Mehmed V Reşad. He was disgusted with the policies of the CUP, and wished to be a more assertive sovereign than his diseased half brother. Greek and Armenian Ottomans declared the termination of their relationship with the Ottoman Empire through their respective patriarchates, and refused to partake in any future election. With the collapse of the CUP and its censorship regime, an outpouring of condemnation against the party came from all parts of Ottoman media.

 

A general amnesty was soon issued, allowing the exiled and imprisoned dissidents persecuted by the CUP to return to Constantinople. Vahdettin invited the pro-Palace politician Damat Ferid Pasha, leader of the reconstituted Freedom and Accord Party, to form a government, whose members quickly set out to purge the Unionists from the Ottoman government. Ferid Pasha hoped that his Anglophilia and an attitude of appeasement would induce less harsh peace terms from the Allied powers. However, his appointment was problematic for nationalists, many being members of the liquidated committee that were surely to face trial. Years of corruption, unconstitutional acts, war profiteering, and enrichment from ethnic cleansing and genocide by the Unionists soon became basis of war crimes trials and courts martial trials held in Constantinople.[citation needed] While many leading Unionists were sentenced lengthy prison sentences, many made sure to escape the country before Allied occupation or to regions that the government now had minimal control over; thus most were sentenced in absentia. The Allies encouragement of the proceedings and the use of British Malta as their holding ground made the trials unpopular. The partisan nature of the trials was not lost on observers either. The hanging of the Kaymakam of Boğazlıyan district Mehmed Kemal resulted in a demonstration against the courts martials trials.

 

With all the chaotic politics in the capital and uncertainty of the severity of the incoming peace treaty, many Ottomans looked to Washington with the hope that the application of Wilsonian principles would mean Constantinople would stay Turkish, as Muslims outnumbered Christians 2:1. The United States never declared war on the Ottoman Empire, so many imperial elite believed Washington could be a neutral arbiter that could fix the empire's problems. Halide Edip (Adıvar) and her Wilsonian Principles Society led the movement that advocated for the empire to be governed by an American League of Nations Mandate (see United States during the Turkish War of Independence). American diplomats attempted to ascertain a role they could play in the area with the Harbord and King–Crane Commissions. However, with the collapse of Woodrow Wilson's health, the United States diplomatically withdrew from the Middle East to focus on Europe, leaving the Entente powers to construct a post-Ottoman order.

 

The Entente would have arrived at Constantinople to discover an administration attempting to deal with decades of accumulated refugee crisis. The new government issued a proclamation allowing for deportees to return to their homes, but many Greeks and Armenians found their old homes occupied by desperate Rumelian and Caucasian Muslim refugees which were settled in their properties during the First World War. Ethnic conflict restarted in Anatolia; government officials responsible for resettling Christian refugees often assisted Muslim refugees in these disputes, prompting European powers to continue bringing Ottoman territory under their control. Of the 800,000 Ottoman Christian refugees, approximately over half returned to their homes by 1920. Meanwhile 1.4 million refugees from the Russian Civil War would pass through the Turkish straits and Anatolia, with 150,000 White émigrés choosing to settle in Istanbul for short or long term (see Evacuation of the Crimea). Many provinces were simply depopulated from years of fighting, conscription, and ethnic cleansing (see Ottoman casualties of World War I). The province of Yozgat lost 50% of its Muslim population from conscription, while according to the governor of Van, almost 95% of its prewar residents were dead or internally displaced.

 

Administration in much of the Anatolian and Thracian countryside would soon all but collapse by 1919. Army deserters who turned to banditry essentially controlled fiefdoms with tacit approval from bureaucrats and local elites. An amnesty issued in late 1918 saw these bandits strengthen their positions and fight amongst each other instead of returning to civilian life. Albanian and Circassian muhacirs resettled by the government in northwestern Anatolia and Kurds in southeastern Anatolia were engaged in blood feuds that intensified during the war and were hesitant to pledge allegiance to the Defence of Rights movement, and only would if officials could facilitate truces. Various Muhacir groups were suspicious of the continued Ittihadist ideology in the Defence of Rights movement, and the potential for themselves to meet fates 'like the Armenians' especially as warlords hailing from those communities assisted the deportations of the Christians even though as many commanders in the Nationalist movement also had Caucasian and Balkan Muslim ancestry.

 

With Anatolia in practical anarchy and the Ottoman army being questionably loyal in reaction to Allied land seizures, Mehmed VI established the military inspectorate system to reestablish authority over the remaining empire. Encouraged by Karabekir and Edmund Allenby, he assigned Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) as the inspector of the Ninth Army Troops Inspectorate –based in Erzurum– to restore order to Ottoman military units and to improve internal security on 30 April 1919, with his first assignment to suppress a rebellion by Greek rebels around the city of Samsun.

 

Mustafa Kemal was a well known, well respected, and well connected army commander, with much prestige coming from his status as the "Hero of Anafartalar"—for his role in the Gallipoli Campaign—and his title of "Honorary Aide-de-camp to His Majesty Sultan" gained in the last months of WWI. This choice would seem curious, as he was a nationalist and a fierce critic of the government's accommodating policy to the Entente powers. He was also an early member of the CUP. However Kemal Pasha did not associate himself with the fanatical faction of the CUP, many knew that he frequently clashed with the radicals of the Central Committee like Enver. He was therefore sidelined to the periphery of power throughout the Great War; after the CUP's dissolution he vocally aligned himself with moderates that formed the Liberal People's Party instead of the rump radical faction which formed the Renewal Party (both parties would be banned in May 1919 for being successors of the CUP). All these reasons allowed him to be the most legitimate nationalist for the sultan to placate. In this new political climate, he sought to capitalize on his war exploits to attain a better job, indeed several times he unsuccessfully lobbied for his inclusion in cabinet as War Minister. His new assignment gave him effective plenipotentiary powers over all of Anatolia which was meant to accommodate him and other nationalists to keep them loyal to the government.

 

Mustafa Kemal had earlier declined to become the leader of the Sixth Army headquartered in Nusaybin. But according to Patrick Balfour, through manipulation and the help of friends and sympathizers, he became the inspector of virtually all of the Ottoman forces in Anatolia, tasked with overseeing the disbanding process of remaining Ottoman forces. Kemal had an abundance of connections and personal friends concentrated in the post-armistice War Ministry, a powerful tool that would help him accomplish his secret goal: to lead a nationalist movement to safeguard Turkish interests against the Allied powers and a collaborative Ottoman government.

 

The day before his departure to Samsun on the remote Black Sea coast, Kemal had one last audience with Sultan Vahdettin, where he affirmed his loyalty to the sultan-caliph. It was in this meeting that they were informed of the botched occupation ceremony of Smyrna (İzmir) by the Greeks. He and his carefully selected staff left Constantinople aboard the old steamer SS Bandırma on the evening of 16 May 1919.

 

On 19 January 1919, the Paris Peace Conference was first held, at which Allied nations set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers, including the Ottoman Empire. As a special body of the Paris Conference, "The Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey", was established to pursue the secret treaties they had signed between 1915 and 1917. Italy sought control over the southern part of Anatolia under the Agreement of St.-Jean-de-Maurienne. France expected to exercise control over Hatay, Lebanon, Syria, and a portion of southeastern Anatolia based on the Sykes–Picot Agreement.

 

Greece justified their territorial claims of Ottoman land through the Megali Idea as well as international sympathy from the suffering of Ottoman Greeks in 1914 and 1917–1918. Privately, Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos had British prime minister David Lloyd George's backing not least from Greece's entrance to WWI on the Allied side, but also from his charisma and charming personality. Greece's participation in the Allies' Southern Russian intervention also earned it favors in Paris. His demands included parts of Eastern Thrace, the islands of Imbros (Gökçeada), Tenedos (Bozcaada), and parts of Western Anatolia around the city of Smyrna (İzmir), all of which had large Greek populations. Venizelos also advocated a large Armenian state to check a post-war Ottoman Empire. Greece wanted to incorporate Constantinople, but Entente powers did not give permission. Damat Ferid Pasha went to Paris on behalf of the Ottoman Empire hoping to minimize territorial losses using Fourteen Points rhetoric, wishing for a return to status quo ante bellum, on the basis that every province of the Empire holds Muslim majorities. This plea was met with ridicule.

 

At the Paris Peace Conference, competing claims over Western Anatolia by Greek and Italian delegations led Greece to land the flagship of the Greek Navy at Smyrna, resulting in the Italian delegation walking out of the peace talks. On 30 April, Italy responded to the possible idea of Greek incorporation of Western Anatolia by sending a warship to Smyrna as a show of force against the Greek campaign. A large Italian force also landed in Antalya. Faced with Italian annexation of parts of Asia Minor with a significant ethnic Greek population, Venizelos secured Allied permission for Greek troops to land in Smyrna per Article VII, ostensibly as a peacekeeping force to keep stability in the region. Venizelos's rhetoric was more directed against the CUP regime than the Turks as a whole, an attitude not always shared in the Greek military: "Greece is not making war against Islam, but against the anachronistic [İttihadist] Government, and its corrupt, ignominious, and bloody administration, with a view to the expelling it from those territories where the majority of the population consists of Greeks." It was decided by the Triple Entente that Greece would control a zone around Smyrna and Ayvalık in western Asia Minor.

 

Most historians mark the Greek landing at Smyrna on 15 May 1919 as the start date of the Turkish War of Independence as well as the start of the "Kuva-yi Milliye Phase". The occupation ceremony from the outset was tense from nationalist fervor, with Ottoman Greeks greeting the soldiers with an ecstatic welcome, and Ottoman Muslims protesting the landing. A miscommunication in Greek high command led to an Evzone column marching by the municipal Turkish barracks. The nationalist journalist Hasan Tahsin fired the "first bullet"[note 4] at the Greek standard bearer at the head of the troops, turning the city into a warzone. Süleyman Fethi Bey was murdered by bayonet for refusing to shout "Zito Venizelos" (meaning "long live Venizelos"), and 300–400 unarmed Turkish soldiers and civilians and 100 Greek soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded.

 

Greek troops moved from Smyrna outwards to towns on the Karaburun peninsula; to Selçuk, situated a hundred kilometres south of the city at a key location that commands the fertile Küçük Menderes River valley; and to Menemen towards the north. Guerilla warfare commenced in the countryside, as Turks began to organize themselves into irregular guerilla groups known as Kuva-yi Milliye (national forces), which were soon joined by Ottoman soldiers, bandits, and disaffected farmers. Most Kuva-yi Milliye bands were led by rogue military commanders and members of the Special Organization. The Greek troops based in cosmopolitan Smyrna soon found themselves conducting counterinsurgency operations in a hostile, dominantly Muslim hinterland. Groups of Ottoman Greeks also formed contingents that cooperated with the Greek Army to combat Kuva-yi Milliye within the zone of control. A massacre of Turks at Menemen was followed up with a battle for the town of Aydın, which saw intense intercommunal violence and the razing of the city. What was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission of Western Anatolia instead inflamed ethnic tensions and became a counterinsurgency.

 

The reaction of Greek landing at Smyrna and continued Allied seizures of land served to destabilize Turkish civil society. Ottoman bureaucrats, military, and bourgeoisie trusted the Allies to bring peace, and thought the terms offered at Mudros were considerably more lenient than they actually were. Pushback was potent in the capital, with 23 May 1919 being largest of the Sultanahmet Square demonstrations organized by the Turkish Hearths against the Greek occupation of Smyrna, the largest act of civil disobedience in Turkish history at that point. The Ottoman government condemned the landing, but could do little about it. Ferid Pasha tried to resign, but was urged by the sultan to stay in his office.

 

Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his colleagues stepped ashore in Samsun on 19 May and set up their first quarters in the Mıntıka Palace Hotel. British troops were present in Samsun, and he initially maintained cordial contact. He had assured Damat Ferid about the army's loyalty towards the new government in Constantinople. However, behind the government's back, Kemal made the people of Samsun aware of the Greek and Italian landings, staged discreet mass meetings, made fast connections via telegraph with the army units in Anatolia, and began to form links with various Nationalist groups. He sent telegrams of protest to foreign embassies and the War Ministry about British reinforcements in the area and about British aid to Greek brigand gangs. After a week in Samsun, Kemal and his staff moved to Havza. It was there that he first showed the flag of the resistance.

 

Mustafa Kemal wrote in his memoir that he needed nationwide support to justify armed resistance against the Allied occupation. His credentials and the importance of his position were not enough to inspire everyone. While officially occupied with the disarming of the army, he met with various contacts in order to build his movement's momentum. He met with Rauf Pasha, Karabekir Pasha, Ali Fuat Pasha, and Refet Pasha and issued the Amasya Circular (22 June 1919). Ottoman provincial authorities were notified via telegraph that the unity and independence of the nation was at risk, and that the government in Constantinople was compromised. To remedy this, a congress was to take place in Erzurum between delegates of the Six Vilayets to decide on a response, and another congress would take place in Sivas where every Vilayet should send delegates. Sympathy and an lack of coordination from the capital gave Mustafa Kemal freedom of movement and telegraph use despite his implied anti-government tone.

 

On 23 June, High Commissioner Admiral Calthorpe, realising the significance of Mustafa Kemal's discreet activities in Anatolia, sent a report about the Pasha to the Foreign Office. His remarks were downplayed by George Kidson of the Eastern Department. Captain Hurst of the British occupation force in Samsun warned Admiral Calthorpe one more time, but Hurst's units were replaced with the Brigade of Gurkhas. When the British landed in Alexandretta, Admiral Calthorpe resigned on the basis that this was against the armistice that he had signed and was assigned to another position on 5 August 1919. The movement of British units alarmed the population of the region and convinced them that Mustafa Kemal was right.

 

By early July, Mustafa Kemal Pasha received telegrams from the sultan and Calthorpe, asking him and Refet to cease his activities in Anatolia and return to the capital. Kemal was in Erzincan and did not want to return to Constantinople, concerned that the foreign authorities might have designs for him beyond the sultan's plans. Before resigning from his position, he dispatched a circular to all nationalist organizations and military commanders to not disband or surrender unless for the latter if they could be replaced by cooperative nationalist commanders. Now only a civilian stripped of his command, Mustafa Kemal was at the mercy of the new inspector of Third Army (renamed from Ninth Army) Karabekir Pasha, indeed the War Ministry ordered him to arrest Kemal, an order which Karabekir refused. The Erzurum Congress was a meeting of delegates and governors from the six Eastern Vilayets. They drafted the National Pact (Misak-ı Millî), which envisioned new borders for the Ottoman Empire by applying principles of national self-determination per Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and the abolition of the capitulations. The Erzurum Congress concluded with a circular that was effectively a declaration of independence: All regions within Ottoman borders upon the signing of the Mudros Armistice were indivisible from the Ottoman state –Greek and Armenian claims on Thrace and Anatolia were moot– and assistance from any country not coveting Ottoman territory was welcome. If the government in Constantinople was not able to attain this after electing a new parliament, they insisted a provisional government should be promulgated to defend Turkish sovereignty. The Committee of Representation was established as a provisional executive body based in Anatolia, with Mustafa Kemal Pasha as its chairman.

 

Following the congress, the Committee of Representation relocated to Sivas. As announced in the Amasya Circular, a new congress was held there in September with delegates from all Anatolian and Thracian provinces. The Sivas Congress repeated the points of the National Pact agreed to in Erzurum, and united the various regional Defence of National Rights Associations organizations, into a united political organisation: Anatolia and Rumeli Defence of Rights Association (A-RMHC), with Mustafa Kemal as its chairman. In an effort show his movement was in fact a new and unifying movement, the delegates had to swear an oath to discontinue their relations with the CUP and to never revive the party (despite most present in Sivas being previous members).[120] It was also decided there that the Ottoman Empire should not be a League of Nations mandate under the United States, especially after the U.S Senate failed to ratify American membership in the League.

 

Momentum was now on the Nationalists' side. A plot by a loyalist Ottoman governor and a British intelligence officer to arrest Kemal before the Sivas Congress led to the cutting of all ties with the Ottoman government until a new election would be held in the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. In October 1919, the last Ottoman governor loyal to Constantinople fled his province. Fearing the outbreak of hostilities, all British troops stationed in the Black Sea coast and Kütahya were evacuated. Damat Ferid Pasha resigned, and the sultan replaced him with a general with nationalist credentials: Ali Rıza Pasha. On 16 October 1919, Ali Rıza and the Nationalists held negotiations in Amasya. They agreed in the Amasya Protocol that an election would be called for the Ottoman Parliament to establish national unity by upholding the resolutions made in the Sivas Congress, including the National Pact.

 

By October 1919, the Ottoman government only held de facto control over Constantinople; the rest of the Ottoman Empire was loyal to Kemal's movement to resist a partition of Anatolia and Thrace. Within a few months Mustafa Kemal went from General Inspector of the Ninth Army to a renegade military commander discharged for insubordination to leading a homegrown anti-Entente movement that overthrew a government and driven it into resistance.

 

In December 1919, an election was held for the Ottoman parliament, with polls only open in unoccupied Anatolia and Thrace. It was boycotted by Ottoman Greeks, Ottoman Armenians and the Freedom and Accord Party, resulting in groups associated with the Turkish Nationalist Movement winning, including the A-RMHC. The Nationalists' obvious links to the CUP made the election especially polarizing and voter intimidation and ballot box stuffing in favor of the Kemalists were regular occurrences in rural provinces. This controversy led to many of the nationalist MPs organizing the National Salvation Group separate from Kemal's movement, which risked the nationalist movement splitting in two.

 

Mustafa Kemal was elected an MP from Erzurum, but he expected the Allies neither to accept the Harbord report nor to respect his parliamentary immunity if he went to the Ottoman capital, hence he remained in Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal and the Committee of Representation moved from Sivas to Ankara so that he could keep in touch with as many deputies as possible as they traveled to Constantinople to attend the parliament.

 

Though Ali Rıza Pasha called the election as per the Amasya Protocol to keep unity between the "Istanbul government" and "Ankara government", he was wrong to think the election could bring him any legitimacy. The Ottoman parliament was under the de facto control of the British battalion stationed at Constantinople and any decisions by the parliament had to have the signatures of both Ali Rıza Pasha and the battalion's commanding officer. The only laws that passed were those acceptable to, or specifically ordered by the British.

 

On 12 January 1920, the last session of the Chamber of Deputies met in the capital. First the sultan's speech was presented, and then a telegram from Mustafa Kemal, manifesting the claim that the rightful government of Turkey was in Ankara in the name of the Committee of Representation. On 28 January the MPs from both sides of the isle secretly met to endorse the National Pact as a peace settlement. They added to the points passed in Sivas, calling for plebiscites to be held in West Thrace; Batum, Kars, and Ardahan, and Arab lands on whether to stay in the Empire or not. Proposals were also made to elect Kemal president of the Chamber;[clarification needed] however, this was deferred in the certain knowledge that the British would prorogue the Chamber. The Chamber of Deputies would be forcefully dissolved for passing the National Pact anyway. The National Pact solidified Nationalist interests, which were in conflict with the Allied plans.

 

From February to April, leaders of Britain, France, and Italy met in London to discuss the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and the crisis in Anatolia. The British began to sense that the elected Ottoman government was under Kemalist influence and if left unchecked, the Entente could once again find themselves at war with the Empire. The Ottoman government was not doing all that it could to suppress the Nationalists.

 

Mustafa Kemal manufactured a crisis to pressure the Istanbul government to pick a side by deploying Kuva-yi Milliye towards İzmit. The British, concerned about the security of the Bosporus Strait, demanded Ali Rıza Pasha to reassert control over the area, to which he responded with his resignation to the sultan.

 

As they were negotiating the partition of the Ottoman Empire, the Allies were growing increasingly concerned about the Turkish National Movement. To this end, the Allied occupational authorities in Istanbul began to plan a raid to arrest nationalist politicians and journalists along with occupying military and police installations and government buildings. On 16 March 1920, the coup was carried out; several Royal Navy warships were anchored in the Galata Bridge to support British forces, including the Indian Army, while they carried out the arrests and occupied several government buildings in the early hours of the morning.

 

An Indian Army operation, the Şehzadebaşı raid, resulted in 5 Ottoman soldiers from the 10th Infantry Division being killed when troops raided their barracks. Among those arrested were the senior leadership of the Turkish National Movement and former members of the CUP. 150 arrested Turkish politicians accused of war crimes were interned in Malta and became known as the Malta exiles.

 

Mustafa Kemal was ready for this move. He warned all the Nationalist organisations that there would be misleading declarations from the capital. He warned that the only way to counter Allied movements was to organise protests. He declared "Today the Turkish nation is called to defend its capacity for civilization, its right to life and independence – its entire future".

 

On 18 March, the Chamber of Deputies declared that it was unacceptable to arrest five of its members, and dissolved itself. Mehmed VI confirmed this and declared the end of Constitutional Monarchy and a return to absolutism. University students were forbidden from joining political associations inside and outside the classroom. With the lower elected Chamber of Deputies shuttered, the Constitution terminated, and the capital occupied; Sultan Vahdettin, his cabinet, and the appointed Senate were all that remained of the Ottoman government, and were basically a puppet regime of the Allied powers. Grand Vizier Salih Hulusi Pasha declared Mustafa Kemal's struggle legitimate, and resigned after less than a month in office. In his place, Damat Ferid Pasha returned to the premiership. The Sublime Porte's decapitation by the Entente allowed Mustafa Kemal to consolidate his position as the sole leader of Turkish resistance against the Allies, and to that end made him the legitimate representative of the Turkish people.

 

The strong measures taken against the Nationalists by the Allies in March 1920 began a distinct new phase of the conflict. Mustafa Kemal sent a note to the governors and force commanders, asking them to conduct elections to provide delegates for a new parliament to represent the Ottoman (Turkish) people, which would convene in Ankara. With the proclamation of the counter-government, Kemal would then ask the sultan to accept its authority. Mustafa Kemal appealed to the Islamic world, asking for help to make sure that everyone knew he was still fighting in the name of the sultan who was also the caliph. He stated he wanted to free the caliph from the Allies. He found an ally in the Khilafat movement of British India, where Indians protested Britain's planned dismemberment of Turkey. A committee was also started for sending funds to help the soon to be proclaimed Ankara government of Mustafa Kemal. A flood of supporters moved to Ankara just ahead of the Allied dragnets. Included among them were Halide Edip and Abdülhak Adnan (Adıvar), Mustafa İsmet Pasha (İnönü), Mustafa Fevzi Pasha (Çakmak), many of Kemal's allies in the Ministry of War, and Celalettin Arif, the president of the now shuttered Chamber of Deputies. Celaleddin Arif's desertion of the capital was of great significance, as he declared that the Ottoman Parliament had been dissolved illegally.

 

Some 100 members of the Chamber of Deputies were able to escape the Allied roundup and joined 190 deputies elected. In March 1920, Turkish revolutionaries announced the establishment of a new parliament in Ankara known as the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNA) that was dominated by the A-RMHC.[citation needed] The parliament included Turks, Circassians, Kurds, and one Jew. They met in a building that used to serve as the provincial headquarters of the local CUP chapter. The inclusion of "Turkey" in its name reflected a increasing trend of new ways Ottoman citizens thought of their country, and was the first time it was formally used as the name of the country. On 23 April, the assembly, assuming full governmental powers, gathered for the first time, electing Mustafa Kemal its first Speaker and Prime Minister.

 

Hoping to undermine the Nationalist Movement, Mehmed VI issued a fatwa to qualify the Turkish revolutionaries as infidels, calling for the death of its leaders. The fatwa stated that true believers should not go along with the Nationalist Movement as they committed apostasy. The mufti of Ankara Rifat Börekçi issued a simultaneous fatwa, declaring that the caliphate was under the control of the Entente and the Ferid Pasha government. In this text, the Nationalist Movement's goal was stated as freeing the sultanate and the caliphate from its enemies. In reaction to the desertion of several prominent figures to the Nationalist Movement, Ferid Pasha ordered Halide Edip, Ali Fuat and Mustafa Kemal to be sentenced to death in absentia for treason.

 

On 28 April the sultan raised 4,000 soldiers known as the Kuva-yi İnzibatiye (Caliphate Army) to combat the Nationalists. Then using money from the Allies, another force about 2,000 strong from non-Muslim inhabitants were initially deployed in İznik. The sultan's government sent the forces under the name of the Caliphate Army to the revolutionaries to arouse counterrevolutionary sympathy. The British, being skeptical of how formidable these insurgents were, decided to use irregular power to counteract the revolutionaries. The Nationalist forces were distributed all around Turkey, so many smaller units were dispatched to face them. In İzmit there were two battalions of the British army. These units were to be used to rout the partisans under the command of Ali Fuat and Refet Pasha.

 

Anatolia had many competing forces on its soil: British troops, Nationalist militia (Kuva-yi Milliye), the sultan's army (Kuva-yi İnzibatiye), and Anzavur's bands. On 13 April 1920, an uprising supported by Anzavur against the GNA occurred at Düzce as a direct consequence of the fatwa. Within days the rebellion spread to Bolu and Gerede. The movement engulfed northwestern Anatolia for about a month. On 14 June, Nationalist militia fought a pitched battle near İzmit against the Kuva-yi İnzibatiye, Anzavur's bands, and British units. Yet under heavy attack some of the Kuva-yi İnzibatiye deserted and joined the Nationalist militia. Anzavur was not so lucky, as the Nationalists tasked Ethem the Circassian with crushing Anzavur's revolt. This revealed the sultan did not have the unwavering support of his own men and allies. Meanwhile, the rest of these forces withdrew behind the British lines which held their position. For now, Istanbul was out of Ankara's grasp.

 

The clash outside İzmit brought serious consequences. British forces conducted combat operations on the Nationalists and the Royal Air Force carried out aerial bombardments against the positions, which forced Nationalist forces to temporarily retreat to more secure missions. The British commander in Turkey, General George Milne—, asked for reinforcements. This led to a study to determine what would be required to defeat the Turkish Nationalists. The report, signed by French Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, concluded that 27 divisions were necessary, but the British army did not have 27 divisions to spare. Also, a deployment of this size could have disastrous political consequences back home. World War I had just ended, and the British public would not support another lengthy and costly expedition.

 

The British accepted the fact that a nationalist movement could not be defeated without deployment of consistent and well-trained forces. On 25 June, the forces originating from Kuva-i İnzibatiye were dismantled under British supervision. The British realised that the best option to overcome these Turkish Nationalists was to use a force that was battle-tested and fierce enough to fight the Turks on their own soil. The British had to look no further than Turkey's neighbor already occupying its territory: Greece.

 

Eleftherios Venizelos, pessimistic of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Anatolia, requested to the Allies that a peace treaty be drawn up with the hope that fighting would stop. The subsequent treaty of Sèvres in August 1920 confirmed the Arab provinces of the empire would be reorganized into new nations given to Britain and France in the form of Mandates by the League of Nations, while the rest of the Empire would be partitioned between Greece, Italy, France (via Syrian mandate), Britain (via Iraqi mandate), Armenia (potentially under an American mandate), and Georgia. Smyrna would hold a plebiscite on whether to stay with Greece or Turkey, and the Kurdistan region would hold one on the question of independence. British, French, and Italian spheres of influence would also extend into Anatolia beyond the land concessions. The old capital of Constantinople as well as the Dardanelles would be under international League of Nations control.

 

However, the treaty could never come into effect. The treaty was extremely unpopular, with protests against the final document held even before its release in Sultanahmet square. Though Mehmed VI and Ferid Pasha loathed the treaty, they did not want Istanbul to join Ankara in nationalist struggle. The Ottoman government and Greece never ratified it. Though Ferid Pasha signed the treaty, the Ottoman Senate, the upper house with seats appointed by the sultan, refused to ratify the treaty. Greece disagreed on the borders drawn. The other allies began to fracture their support of the settlement immediately. Italy started openly supporting the Nationalists with arms by the end of 1920, and the French signed another separate peace treaty with Ankara only months later.

 

Kemal's GNA Government responded to the Treaty of Sèvres by promulgating a new constitution in January 1921. The resulting constitution consecrated the principle of popular sovereignty; authority not deriving from the unelected sultan, but from the Turkish people who elect governments representative of their interests. This document became the legal basis for the war of independence by the GNA, as the sultan's signature of the Treaty of Sèvres would be unconstitutional as his position was not elected. While the constitution did not specify a future role of the sultan, the document gave Kemal ever more legitimacy in the eyes of Turks for justified resistance against Istanbul.

 

In contrast to the Eastern and Western fronts, it was mostly unorganized Kuva-yi Milliye which were fighting in the Southern Front against France. They had help from the Syrians, who were fighting their own war with the French.

 

The British troops which occupied coastal Syria by the end of World War I were replaced by French troops over 1919, with the Syrian interior going to Faisal bin Al-Hussein's self-proclaimed Arab Kingdom of Syria. France which wanted to take control of all of Syria and Cilicia. There was also a desire facilitate the return of Armenian refugees in the region to their homes, and the occupation force consisted of the French Armenian Legion as well as various Armenian militia groups. 150,000 Armenians were repatriated to their homes within months of French occupation. On 21 January 1920, a Turkish Nationalist uprising and siege occurred against the French garrison in Marash. The French position untenable they retreated to Islahiye, resulting in a massacre of many Armenians by Turkish militia. A grueling siege followed in Antep which featured intense sectarian violence between Turks and Armenians. After a failed uprising by the Nationalists in Adana, by 1921, the French and Turks signed an armistice and eventually a treaty was brokered demarcating the border between the Ankara government and French controlled Syria. In the end, there was a mass exodus of Cilician Armenians to French controlled Syria, Previous Armenian survivors of deportation found themselves again as refugees and families which avoided the worst of the six years violence were forced from their homes, ending thousands of years of Christian presence in Southern Anatolia.[146] With France being the first Allied power to recognize and negotiate with the Ankara government only months after signing the Treaty of Sèvres, it was the first to break from the coordinated Allied approach to the Eastern question. In 1923 the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon under French authority would be proclaimed in former Ottoman territory.

 

Some efforts to coordinate between Turkish Nationalists and the Syrian rebels persisted from 1920 to 1921, with the Nationalists supporting the Faisal's kingdom through Ibrahim Hanunu and Alawite groups which were also fighting the French. While the French conquered Syria, Cilicia had to be abandoned.

 

Kuva-yi Milliye also engaged with British forces in the "Al-Jazira Front," primarily in Mosul. Ali İhsan Pasha (Sabis) and his forces defending Mosul would surrender to the British in October 1918, but the British ignored the armistice and seized the city, following which the pasha also ignored the armistice and distributed weapons to the locals. Even before Mustafa Kemal's movement was fully organized, rogue commanders found allies in Kurdish tribes. The Kurds detested the taxes and centralization the British demanded, including Shaykh Mahmud of the Barzani family. Having previously supported the British invasion of Mesopotamia to become the governor of South Kurdistan, Mahmud revolted but was apprehended by 1919. Without legitimacy to govern the region, he was released from captivity to Sulaymaniyah, where he again declared an uprising against the British as the King of Kurdistan. Though an alliance existed with the Turks, little material support came to him from Ankara, and by 1923 there was a desire to cease hostilities between the Turks and British at Barzanji's expense. Mahmud was overthrown in 1924, and after a 1926 plebiscite, Mosul was awarded to British-controlled Iraq.

 

Since 1917, the Caucasus was in a chaotic state. The border of newly independent Armenia and the Ottoman Empire was defined in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) after the Bolshevik revolution, and later by the Treaty of Batum (4 June 1918). To the east, Armenia was at war with the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic after the breakup of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, and received support from Anton Denikin's White Russian Army. It was obvious that after the Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918) the eastern border was not going to stay as it was drawn, which mandated the evacuation of the Ottoman army back to its 1914 borders. Right after the Armistice of Mudros was signed, pro-Ottoman provisional republics were proclaimed in Kars and Aras which were subsequently invaded by Armenia. Ottoman soldiers were convinced not to demobilize lest the area become a 'second Macedonia'.[149] Both sides of the new borders had massive refugee populations and famine, which were compounded by the renewed and more symmetric sectarian violence (See Massacres of Azerbaijanis in Armenia (1917–1921) and Muslim uprisings in Kars and Sharur–Nakhichevan). There were talks going on with the Armenian Diaspora and Allied Powers on reshaping the border. Woodrow Wilson agreed to transfer territories to Armenia based on the principles of national self-determination. The results of these talks were to be reflected on the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920).

 

Kâzım Karabekir Pasha, commander of the XV corps, encountered Muslim refugees fleeing from the Armenian army, but did not have the authority to cross the border. Karabekir's two reports (30 May and 4 June 1920) outlined the situation in the region. He recommended redrawing the eastern borders, especially around Erzurum. The Russian government was receptive to this and demanded that Van and Bitlis be transferred to Armenia. This was unacceptable to the Turkish revolutionaries. However, Soviet support was absolutely vital for the Turkish Nationalist movement, as Turkey was underdeveloped and had no domestic armaments industry. Bakir Sami (Kunduh) was assigned to negotiate with the Bolsheviks.

 

On 24 September 1920, Karabekir's XV corps and Kurdish militia advance on Kars, blowing through Armenian opposition, and then Alexandropol. With an advance on Yerevan imminent, on 28 November 1920, the 11th Red Army under the command of Anatoliy Gekker crossed over into Armenia from Soviet Azerbaijan, and the Armenian government surrendered to Bolshevik forces, ending the conflict.

 

The Treaty of Alexandropol (2—3 December 1920) was the first treaty (although illegitimate) signed by the Turkish revolutionaries. The 10th article in the Treaty of Alexandropol stated that Armenia renounced the Treaty of Sèvres and its allotted partition of Anatolia. The agreement was signed with representatives of the former government of Armenia, which by that time had no de jure or de facto power in Armenia, since Soviet rule was already established in the country. On 16 March 1921, the Bolsheviks and Turkey signed a more comprehensive agreement, the Treaty of Kars, which involved representatives of Soviet Armenia, Soviet Azerbaijan, and Soviet Georgia.

 

Throughout most of his life, Atatürk was a moderate-to-heavy drinker, often consuming half a litre of rakı a day; he also smoked tobacco, predominantly in the form of cigarettes. During 1937, indications that Atatürk's health was worsening started to appear. In early 1938, while on a trip to Yalova, he suffered from a serious illness. He went to Istanbul for treatment, where he was diagnosed with cirrhosis. During his stay in Istanbul, he made an effort to keep up with his regular lifestyle, but eventually succumbed to his illness. He died on 10 November 1938, at the age of 57, in the Dolmabahçe Palace.

 

Atatürk's funeral called forth both sorrow and pride in Turkey, and 17 countries sent special representatives, while nine contributed armed detachments to the cortège. Atatürk's remains were originally laid to rest in the Ethnography Museum of Ankara, but they were transferred on 10 November 1953 (15 years after his death) in a 42-ton sarcophagus to a mausoleum overlooking Ankara, Anıtkabir.

 

In his will, Atatürk donated all of his possessions to the Republican People's Party, provided that the yearly interest of his funds would be used to look after his sister Makbule and his adopted children, and fund the higher education of İsmet İnönü's children. The remainder was willed to the Turkish Language Association and the Turkish Historical Society.

The Bombings of 1940 forced a reappraisal of deep-shelter policy and at the end of October the Government decided to construct a system of deep shelters linked to existing tube stations. London Transport was consulted about the sites and required to build the tunnels at the public expense with the understanding that they were to have the option of taking them over for railway use after the war. With the latter point in mind, positions were chosen on routes of possible north-south and east-west express tube railways. It was decided that each shelter would comprise two parallel tubes 16 foot 6 inches internal diameter and 1,600 feet long and would be placed below existing station tunnels at Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Stockwell, Oval, Goodge Street, Camden Town, Belsize Park, Chancery Lane and St. Pauls...Each tube would have two decks, fully equipped with bunks, medical posts, kitchens and sanitation and each installation would accommodate 9,600 people...All the deep level shelters were sub-divided into sleeping areas. Each tunnel was divided into 4 sections with connecting doors between them. Each section was given a name. At Clapham South they were all naval commanders. The northern entrance sections (i.e. those accessed directly from the northern lift without crossing to the other side) were named: Freemantle, Beatty, Evans, Anson, Nelson, Jellicoe, Madden and Inglefield while those accessed from the southern entrance were: Grenville, Hardy, Drake, Oldham, Keppel, Parry and Ley. Each section had bunks fitted longitudinally along the outer wall, a single at the top, a double in the middle and a single at the bottom. Along the inner wall bunks were fitted across the passage forming bays. There were 7.952 bunks in total and each bunk was allocated to a named person. If they didn't turn up one night the bunk remained unused...Although work on them began in November 1940 there were difficulties in obtaining sufficient labour and materials so the first one was only ready in March 1942 and the other seven were finished later that year. Access to them was by ticket in order to help control numbers and prevent disruption to the underground network. There was considerable pressure to open the shelters to relieve the strain on London’s tube stations from people sheltering from the bombing, but the authorities were concerned about the cost of maintaining the shelters once opened and preferred to keep them in reserve in case the bombing intensified. Clapham South was used as weekend troop accommodation from 1943. The start of the attacks on London by V1 flying bombs (commonly known as ‘doodlebugs’) in June 1944, followed by the V2 rocket campaign in September that year, caused many of the deep shelters to be made fully available to the public; Clapham South opened on 19 July 1944. The south entrance, next door to what was the Odeon cinema, was in a small compound that housed administrative offices and ticket printing presses for all eight deep shelters. The shelters were used for their original purpose for less than a year. The north section closed on 21 October 1944 and the shelter was transferred from the Ministry of Home Security to the Ministry of Works on 1 October 1945. Clapham South closed completely on 7 May 1945 and from June 1945 it found a new use as a military leave hostel and for one month in June 1946 it acted as an armed-forces troop billet. At the end of the war, London had a severe labour shortage and the Colonial Office sought to recruit a labour force from Britain’s colonies. At that time there were no immigration restrictions for citizens from one part of the British Empire moving to another part. An advertisement appeared in Jamaica's Daily Gleaner on 13 April 1948 offering transport to the UK for a fare of £28.10s (£28.50) for anyone who wanted to work in the UK. As a result the ship MV Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury later in 1948 carrying 492 worker migrants from Jamaica. However, as there was no accommodation for the new arrivals the Colonial Office decided to house them in the deep-level shelter at Clapham South.

The nearest labour exchange to Clapham South was on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton so the men sought jobs there. As a result Brixton became a focus for West Indian settlers from that point onwards with successive arrivals making their way to the developing

community. The actual time the deep-level shelter was occupied by new arrivals was relatively short as the men all quickly found jobs and accommodation, and successfully integrated into many parts of south London.

[Subterranea Britannica]

The aicraft on the left pulling up hard on the cyclic stick while pushing the joystick forward is a The Westland Scout which was a light helicopter developed by Westland Helicopters. Developed from the Saro P.531, it served as a land-based general purpose military helicopter, sharing a common ancestor and numerous components with the naval-orientated Westland Wasp helicopter. The type's primary operator was the Army Air Corps of the British Army, who operated it in several conflict zones including Northern Ireland and the Falklands War. It was progressively replaced in British service by the Gazelle reconnaissance helicopter, and the larger Westland Lynx battlefield utility helicopter.

 

The The Aérospatiale Gazelle is the aircraft on the right and is a French five-seat helicopter, commonly used for light transport, scouting and light attack duties. It is powered by a single turbine engine and was the first helicopter to feature a fenestron tail instead of a conventional tail rotor. It was designed by Sud Aviation, later Aérospatiale, and manufactured in France and the United Kingdom through a joint production agreement with Westland Aircraft. Further manufacturing under license was performed by SOKO in Yugoslavia and the Arab British Helicopter Company (ABHCO) in Egypt.

 

Since being introduced to service in 1973, the Gazelle has been procured and operated by a number of export customers. It has also participated in numerous conflicts around the world, including by Syria during the 1982 Lebanon War, by Rwanda during the Rwandan Civil War in the 1990s, and by numerous participants on both sides of the 1991 Gulf War. In French service, the Gazelle has been supplemented as an attack helicopter by the larger Eurocopter Tiger, but remains in use primarily as a scout helicopter.

 

This aerial display took place at AAC Middle Wallop which is a British Army base near the Hampshire village of Middle Wallop. The base hosts 2 Regiment Army Air Corps and the Army Aviation Centre. The role of 2 Regiment is training and so AAC Middle Wallop is the base where most Army Air Corps pilots begin their careers. The base was previously under Royal Air Force control and it was then known as RAF Middle Wallop.

 

A close look at the backround reveals that there are several spectators us the nearby Danebury Hill as a vantage point. Danebury is an Iron Age hill fort about 19 kilometres (12 mi) north-west of Winchester. The site, covering 5 hectares (12 acres), was excavated by Barry Cunliffe in the 1970s. Danebury is considered a type-site for hill forts, and was important in developing the understanding of hill forts, as very few others have been so intensively excavated.

 

Built in the 6th century BC, the fort was in use for almost 500 years, during a period when the number of hill forts in Wessex greatly increased. Danebury was remodelled several times, making it more complex and resulting in it becoming a "developed" hill fort. It is now protected as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Local Nature Reserve. The spectators are about 1.5 miles (2.4km) distant.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westland_Scout

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%A9rospatiale_Gazelle

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAC_Middle_Wallop

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danebury

 

The information we get from satellites is essential for understanding how fast our seas are rising so that decision-makers are equipped to take appropriate mitigating action. Satellites carrying altimeter instruments systematically measure the height of the sea surface so that sea-level rise can be closely monitored. Altimetry measurements over the last 25 years show that, on average, sea-level is rising about 3 mm a year, and this rise is accelerating. However, this average number masks big differences as it is not rising at the same rate everywhere. In fact, while in some places it is rising as much as 10 mm a year, in other places it is falling by 10 mm a year. There are many reasons for this imbalance such as differences in local gravity, freshwater discharge from rivers and differences in seawater density.

 

Credits: ESA

Me and Kitten reading about photography while the laundry piles up.

 

Olympus Trip35

Fuji Superia 200

I have a tradition of reflecting upon another year of living with an (now) antiquated "blog" post that's part humor (in my mind), rememberance and heart-felt emotion. The older I get the easier it is to get lost in the could-haves, and memories — so that I don't forget who I am and who I still want to be.

 

I'm not sure I ever thought about what it would be like to be thirty nine years old when I was nine. It might have involved flying cars, or at the very least being driven around in some futuristic bubble car that made me money. I had no concept of adulthood. The burdens of owning things and paying for things and fixing things and wanting things and knowing things. The responsibility of earning money to pay for things, things that provide food and shelter for a wife and three kids. The trial of learning when to do with and do without, or saying yes and saying no, of admitting how completely lost you really are after thirty nine years. Nine doesn't seem so bad now.

 

Some people might fantasize about going back in time and telling their younger self's (with the voice of Morgan Freeman) to appreciate their time, enjoy every moment; but I know I would never listen, never grasp any of that at nine — nor should I. I scarcely know what it means to enjoy every moment now, "to take it all in".

 

And maybe that's what it means to get older. It means understanding that 82% of the problems in your life are caused (directly or indirectly) by you. Sure aging means medications and doctor's appointments, learning with every stretch, yawn and blink of your crumbling body, expanding stomachs and over-ripened skin. It means complaining being tired and fat and old and kids and drivers and politics and religion and entertainment and your neighbors and the impending gypsy/ killer bee/ Lyme disease/ SARS/ environmental disasters that will destroy this world. It means begrudgingly living with the image you've managed to cultivate for yourself, however true or untrue it is. It means never settling into who you think you, or who other's think you are. It means having perspective. That reflection and reminiscence aren't fanciful daydreams but history lessons. That wisdom isn't gained but earned. It means knowing the things you don't know far outweigh the things you do.

 

I'm thirty nine, and I'm still growing up.

When fear turns to

excepting your fear

it becomes understanding

of your fear

and then, there is no fear

there is just knowledge.

 

By AlyssaDawnw

 

Okay here is something I learned last night from my friend.

Its from the book of "Effortless Mastery" my friend was telling me about it.

 

So the book is talking about soloing and how people are timid to solo because they believe they will hit the wrong note.

 

think to yourself right before you play your solo "the first note I play will be the most beautiful note I, or anyone has ever heard". And by thinking and believing this, no matter what note you play, the beauty of that frequency will surface, and not only that, but will guide you to the next note.

 

Here is what I said, after he told me this.

 

Its like, going on, with the idea in mind, Im just going to do, what I do, be me, and even though when I take that plunge, it may seem totally off at first to me, it will be absolutely beautiful, because it is me. Okay now I am crying. Thanks

 

( sorry, this conversation was over FB )

It is absolutely beautiful! And the cool thing is that even if it seems kind of off, that's okay, because the more dissonant something is, the more beautiful the reslease or resolve is! I love it!

 

my off tune uniqueness, lol

I suppose

 

ha ha, exactly!

  

We talked about it for quite a while, thats just snippet.

 

An answered prayer, thats what you are..

  

she felt the duet of breeze and dreams and it was no longer about balance but her duet with...

 

reflections:

 

1 - A girl in Forest

2 - I'm Peter Pan by Heart ~ MJ

3 - Laawaris

 

...notes to self

Understanding color is complicated

Awakening from the dream of conceptual thinking follows a certain route and process. The Zen Circle of Enlightenment is a useful way of understanding this. This post does not cover the practices that help this evolve. It simply shows the route and process of what happens for freedom from the conceptual world to be directly experienced and lived. Click here to download this graphic: Zen Circle of Enlightenment

 

Zero Degrees – The Beginning

 

We begin in this map at zero degrees. We are completely attached to our thoughts. We see the world and ourself completely through thoughts, concepts and beliefs. We don’t yet realize that these are just abstractions of reality and not reality itself. We believe this conceptual world IS reality. We believe our thoughts ARE reality. In spiritual terms we might say we are living completely in a dream or illusion.

 

90 Degrees – The First Step Toward Freedom

 

When we begin a spiritual practice, we move to 90 degrees on this map. We start learning new concepts, spiritual concepts. We leave some of our old concepts and beliefs behind and pick up new ones. If we read and study The Heart Sutra, for instance, we might now say that Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form, where at zero degrees we were believing that Form is Form and Emptiness is Emptiness.

 

We can get very excited about our new discoveries. They feel very liberating. We find new friends who are also practicing these new ways of thinking and experiencing. We find new teachers who lead us deeper into these new ideas and beliefs. It’s a very exciting time. But it can also be a little frustrating. We’ve got all these new and exciting concepts and beliefs, but somehow we’re still not awake. Somehow we still experience suffering in our lives. We may even tell ourselves that we are free and awake because we’ve had some amazing experiences, but deep inside we know this is not true. Deep inside, we still experience an incompleteness.

 

That’s because, even though these are new and exciting thoughts and beliefs, they are still only thoughts and beliefs. Reality is completely beyond all thoughts and beliefs, even spiritual ones. Given the powerful conditioning we’ve all undergone, it may be hard to accept this. But eventually, through frustration and continued suffering if nothing else, we break through. We break through the barrier of thought.

 

180 Degrees – The First Glimpse of Freedom

 

In Zen koan practice, we call this The First Gate. The purpose of our koan practice is to introduce this impossible impasse, barrier or gate that the mind of thought cannot get through. No matter how hard we try, none of our usual mental strategies work. The only way through is without the mind. Finally, in that great breakthrough, body and mind drop away. Because this is beyond the mind, there is nothing we can say about it. None of our mental labels can describe what this is. In Zen, we call this Emptiness. It is completely beyond all words and thoughts. It is not nothing. It is not everything. It is not inside. It is not outside. It is not duality. It is not nonduality. It is not self. It is not other. It is not existing, nor is it not existing. There is absolutely nothing we can say about this.

 

Now we have come face to face with reality, but we don’t yet know what this is. All our words, concepts, beliefs, knowledge and previous experiences cannot touch this. All the spiritual knowledge and experiences we accumulated at 90 degrees cannot touch this at all. We are completely emptied out and all there is is reality itself.

 

Quite often people become a little unsettled and resistant to this complete freedom at first. They may quickly resort to thoughts in an attempt to exert at least a little imagined control. That’s unfortunate, but it’s the nature of the conditioned mind. The longer we stay in this freedom from thought, the more wonderful we realize it is. Here we are directly experiencing life, reality, without any thoughts getting in the way. The longer we stay here, the more we realize that this is the very source of the peace, love, contentment, freedom, creativity and wisdom we have been seeking. This is it. This is our True Self, even if there is not a thing we can say about it.

 

Because this freedom from thought is so liberating, we can also become attached to this stage and not move on and embody it in the world for the benefit of all beings. Eventually most of us do want to do this. We realize we are not separate from any being, unconditional love is our very nature, and so we move on.

 

270 Degrees – Embodying Freedom

 

At 270 Degrees, we’re free to use language, concepts, and thoughts without any attachment to them. They’re just language, concepts and thoughts. They have no reality or validity beyond that. When they’re useful, beneficial and appropriate, we use them. Otherwise we remain silent. Great creativity flows through some of us in this stage. But we’re not attached to it. It doesn’t even feel like we’re doing anything. It’s simply happening by itself. It’s simply life happening.

 

Some us find ourselves as spiritual teachers here. We feel called to help others discover this great freedom and liberation from suffering. Although people may become attached to our words, we never are. And we do our best to encourage them to see all our words as merely pointers to something beyond words and thoughts. It is never the words we are pointing towards. It is always the freedom beyond words and thoughts.

 

Although we’ve learned to use words and concepts again to communicate, the underlying emptiness and freedom remains. In the Zen tradition teachers often say things that sound like nonsense to the conditioned mind in an effort to help serious students break free of the prison of their conditioned thoughts. That’s the purpose of Zen koans. When we’re free of the conceptual dream world, what appeared as nonsense is completely understood as pointing directly at reality. It’s often a time of great hilarity, without any thoughts about why it’s so funny.

 

Here we’re free to use words, thoughts and actions in any way they are truly beneficial without having the slightest attachment to them. It’s like being a bucket without a bottom. Whatever pours in immediately leaves without a trace. In this way, we live in freedom. In the Christian bible, it’s called living in the world but not of it.

 

360 Degrees – Returning Home As Freedom

 

At 360 degrees on this circle, we have returned home. We live fully in the world, but without any attachment or resistance to any of it. We live in complete freedom. Now we can say that “mountains are mountains” without any attachment or belief in these words. The difference between saying “mountains are mountains” at zero degrees with attachment and belief and saying “mountains are mountains” at 360 degrees with complete freedom is profound. From the outside, it may appear that these are the same, but they are not at all. No longer imprisoned by our thoughts, no longer imprisoned by a sense of separation, we are free to be fully in the world and act in the highest benefit for all beings.

 

That doesn’t mean our journey has ended. In one sense it has just begun. But it’s no longer a personal self with needs and goals taking this journey. The journey is happening by itself. In every moment it is unfolding fresh, new and alive. Whatever arises in each moment is the journey. And each moment is fully complete in and of itself. There is no longer a desire to get something or get somewhere. The fullness of life is revealed in every moment. What more could be asked for? This is returning home.

 

n-lightenment.com/zen-circle-enlightenment/

More Details Here:

ilovelowcostbirdly.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/understanding....

🔴Leica-M6 TTL 0,72 Elmarit-M 1:2.8/21mm ASPH

Nikon super Coolscan 5000ed.

Ilford Delta 100asa. Kodak developer HC 110 1+31 (B) 6min 20º.

Heerlen City Centre (Murals) Graffiti.

 

🔴Leica my point of view.

Wetzlar, Deutschland.

 

Leica-CL 1974 Rangefinder,Serial Number 1395533

 

Leica-M 6 TTL 0.72 1998 Rangefinder Serial Number 2466527

 

Leica-M6 TTL 0.85 2001 Rangefinder Serial Number 2755204.

 

Found this doorway while on a walking tour with Sheikh Mohommed bin Rashid Center for Cultural Understanding in Dubai.

 

The area has been restored to earlier times, and for a small fee, you can take a 90 minute guided tour of "old Dubai". It was really a great experience.

 

More information:

www.cultures.ae/

SMCCU Facebook

  

Connect with me here, too!

Google | Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr

 

Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein

 

The Unisphere, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY

 

Built for the World's Fair in 1964

Stands 140ft (43m) tall and has a diameter of 120ft (36.5m).

 

Constructed to commemorate the beginning of the spaceage. The three orbit rings represent the tracks of Yuri Gagarin; the first man in space, John Glenn; the first American to orbit the Earth, and Telstar; the first active communications satellite.

 

More info on the sphere: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisphere

 

More info & images from me:

timvan.com/blog

 

87-0239

87-0247

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88-0410

88-0404

88-0405

 

© DM Parody 2020 (www.dotcom.gi/photos) These images are protected by copyright. You CANNOT copy or republish any of these photos without written consent of the photographer even if you retain the watermark (if present) and/or credit the photographer. You cannot use on any media including social media either. You CAN post a link to the page where the image appears without reference to the photographer only if not promoting a commercial product or service. Copyright infringements will be followed up, legally if necessary. Thank you for your understanding.

Trying to understand what you're saying... Wha?!

atmosphère breizh à la Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland

  

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understanding the memoir with a tenacious grip on relishing photography...

 

L

 

The morning air is awash with angels.

~ Richard Wilbur

Leipziger Buchmesse 2016 / Leipzig Book Fair 2016

2016-03-18 (Friday)

2016_017

2016#225

LelaLa (Felicia) 535336 as (own creation) from (own series)

 

Thank you for any group invites which I'd be glad to accept. However, if I can't check the content of such groups ("This group is not available to you") I'd rather not add any of my photos. Thanks for your understanding.

Understanding the Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology

-The first archaeological museum in northern Taiwan

The establishment of the Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology can be traced back to “rescue excavation” undertaken at the Shihsanhang Site in 1990. At that time the Taiwan Provincial Government’s Department of Housing and Development planned to build a sewage treatment plant on the top of the site. As a result, a group of noted archaeologists launched a campaign to rescue the Shihsanhang Site, which quickly received wide public support. This successfully resulted in the area being designated a Historical Site - Second class and part of the original site was ordered preserved. In 1992 the Executive Yuan ordered Taipei County government to establish a Shihsanhang Site Exhibition Room to display objects unearthed.It was renamed the Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology in 1998 and given the central objectives of preserving and displaying artifacts unearthed at the Shihsanhang Site, serving as an archaeological museum of northern Taiwan and an educational center, teaching people about the importance of the prehistoric culture. After its official opening in 2003, the Museum has also become an Ecomuseum of the Bali Left Bank.

 

-Building the Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology

The Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology cost NT$380 million to build, paid by both the central and Taipei County governments. Construction worked on the main buildings, the outdoor plaza and parking lot began in 2000,and the project was complet in 2003.

Love

It was two days after Christmas when my mother woke us up that fateful morning thirty something years ago. My sister and I had started sleeping in the same room again. There was no discussion about it - we just needed the comfort the nearness of another person can provide. I was twelve and my sister was eleven.

 

I remember the look on my mother’s face. Her eyes were swollen. Her lips pursed.

 

“I have good news and bad news. The good news is your father is no longer suffering. The bad news is he is gone."

 

The rest of the day felt like a dream. How could he be dead? We had just spent Christmas Eve with him and he was laughing and having fun. He didn't look like a man about to die.

 

My father had brain cancer. He was 36 years old when he died. His body withered quickly from the chemo and radiation. When the will was read, my sister and I were too young to understand the shock my mother faced. Later, we’d learn my father left my sister and I almost nothing, but chose instead, to leave most everything to my step-mother.

 

As I grew up and became a mother, I then understood the magnitude of that decision and became hurt about how little my father left us. How do you not take care of your children - especially when you know you are dying? It left me feeling confused and angry. I loved my children so much that I couldn’t imagine not being sure they were taken care of.

 

Bitterness became so real I could taste it. My father’s family had quit calling soon after the funeral and our step-mother had quickly remarried. We reached out several times but it felt awkward and forced. It was just easier to stay away and let the anger simmer.

 

Over the years and despite my disappointments, I’ve never quit missing my father. Several months ago, my father’s sister sent some pictures to me that she’d found. There were pictures of my parents together in a time before I had a memory. And there were pictures of that last Christmas. They took my breath away. In those pictures, my father looked swollen, pale, and sickly. Not at all like the picture in my memory.

 

For me, time has healed a lot of wounds and I think I understand why he didn’t leave us much in his will.

 

He didn’t plan on dying.

 

And for that I can forgive him.

 

~~

 

This is me.

Grounded in understanding.

And still missing my dad.

Now You Workshop

Summer 2012

This weeks focus: Roots and Wings

And telling the backstory

 

If you read all that, then I am truly impressed. It was cathartic to write.

 

I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out.

Apocrypha, Esdras 14:25

Corner of Lincoln Cathedral.

How many roads you’ve traveled

How many dreams you’ve chased

Across sand and sky and gravel

Looking for one safe place

 

Will you make a smoother landing

When you break your fall from grace

Into the arms of understanding

Looking for one safe place

 

Oh, life is trial by fire

And love’s the sweetest taste

And I pray it lifts us higher

To one safe place

 

How many roads we’ve traveled

How many dreams we’ve chased

Across sand and sky and gravel

Looking for one safe place

 

One safe place - Mark Cohn

Leipziger Buchmesse 2015

2015-03-13 (Friday)

2015_014

2015#140

 

MissVanilla (___) 155767 as Mew Zakuro Fujiwara from Tokyo Mew Mew

Atsusa (Anne) 018894 as Mew Purin from Tokyo Mew Mew

Chiyoko_Chi (___) 134576 as Mew Ichigo from Tokyo Mew Mew

 

Thank you for any group invites which I'd be glad to accept. However, if I can't check the content of such groups ("This group is not available to you") I'd rather not add any of my photos. Thanks for your understanding.