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Artists: Connie Huston & Howard Tharpe, 2001
This mural is a tribute to Cottage Grove's famous resident Opal Whiteley (1897-1992), revered by some as a mystic. Her controversial diary, the Journal of an Understanding Heart was a best seller in the US but her story was challenged as a fraud. The mystery is still unresolved.
20250614_100007
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“Sensitive people are the most genuine and honest people you will ever meet. There is nothing they won’t tell you about themselves if they trust your kindness. However, the moment you betray them, reject them or devalue them, they become the worse type of person. Unfortunately, they end up hurting themselves in the long run. They don’t want to hurt other people. It is against their very nature. They want to make amends and undo the wrong they did. Their life is a wave of highs and lows. They live with guilt and constant pain over unresolved situations and misunderstandings. They are tortured souls that are not able to live with hatred or being hated. This type of person needs the most love anyone can give them because their soul has been constantly bruised by others. However, despite the tragedy of what they have to go through in life, they remain the most compassionate people worth knowing, and the ones that often become activists for the broken hearted, forgotten and the misunderstood. They are angels with broken wings that only fly when loved.”
- Shannon L. Alder
Multi: “What’s the meaning of this?”
Powerhouse: “I’ll admit it, I’ve been keeping secrets from you, she only wanted you safe, Jon. It was Paola’s choice.”
Multi: “You mean both your choices. I can’t. I just can’t. How long have I been lied to for the last 2 years? How have I not been safe?”
Powerhouse: “I…I’ll let her do the talking when she comes.”
***
For four years in my life, I’ve never seen my apprentice. Alive in the flesh. Now I can’t bring myself to swallow the words—-I feel silent, as if there’s so much awkward, unresolved tension for the uneasiness.
Powerhouse: “Jon, this is Paola. She’ll tell you everything.”
Multi: “So you’re not dead. Since Springfield. 2016”
Paola: “..yes.”
Multi: “I don’t know. I just don’t where to start. You could have told me after Springfield when you saved me, but not like this and dropping everything.”
Paola: “I…I wanted to keep you safe. But that’s not the whole point, I’ll tell you everything later on—this was an emergency contact Ben intended because Doc was in critical danger.”
Multi: “Okay. Well, he is. But whatever it is, you still left me hanging. I thought about you—I had nightmares whether you were really dead.”
Paola: “I know Doc personally. I told him to check on you when you fainted that very night, while I escaped and took off into the night while we still managed to remain in contact somehow. And Ben offered me to join the FF as well, but it just wasn’t right for me.”
Multi: How long did you know?”
Powerhouse: “Since the start of 2018.”
Multi: “Damnit, how could you. You kept this all along?”
Powerhouse: “I cut her a deal, I made her do undercover missions while she was on the run. She had powers Jon, but I get it’s not understandable—“
Multi: “It’s definitely not. It won’t. I don’t wanna see you right now Ben, but you gotta get out of my sight while I try to take everything in.”
***
Multi: “This is him. He’s laying comatose right now. I don’t know what to do, Paola. So much is going on right now suddenly….you showing up after 4 years…”
Paola: “It’s ok…I…well, this was too sudden. I wasn’t ready to face you when I knew the day would come. But to check on him like that—he’s under the influence of drugs.”
Multi: “Why suppress the powers?”
Paola: “He needed to keep it in. I’ve know your powers through Doc. Energy dimensions right? It’s where the source is from. His..is not from there. Lemme try to take a close look. No, it’s not atom manipulation. You trained him a year ago, which might be good progress, but..just no.”
Multi: “So he’s gonna lay like this forever? Like a strawman?”
Paola: “For the time being, Jon. I think he’s gonna need some time. His family shouldn’t know yet.”
Multi: “So where do we go from here?”
Paola: “We track down the source of the drugs. The material that made it—even though he created it himself, but I know there’s always something when I’m called in for a big case like that.”
Multi: “Didn’t you hang up the cape like Ben said?”
Paola: “I did. But it’ll be a matter of time.”
***
Hours later, I’ve seemed to calm down in my own room. I allowed Paola to stay over for the night and use a backup bunk bed I’ve allocated in my place. She showers right away and puts on a simple tee and shorts.
I can see some of the scars on her arms and legs. Not a lot, but it’s likely she went through some deep stuff through the years, fighting for her way—for the missions. But what ponders me is the lack of connections, how am I supposed to let a former protege pop up in my life once more? How is this possible? Are all the other three still alive? What about my mentor who could even be a hero? Templer, Salient or Faceglass having anything to with it?
I don’t know. It’s too much to think. I hope Bailey and Rene don’t get to know it yet—but they have to because it’s Doc’s sister and niece after all. The powers inside her could be dangerous as well.
After some research, surveying and talking, I decide to finally fall asleep, letting my dreams slide once more.
Changeable Hawk-Eagle (Nisaetus cirrhatus)
The changeable hawk-eagle or crested hawk-eagle (Nisaetus cirrhatus) is a bird of prey species of the family Accipitridae. It was formerly placed in the genus Spizaetus, but studies pointed to the group being paraphyletic resulting in the Old World members being placed in Nisaetus (Hodgson, 1836) and separated from the New World species.
Changeable hawk-eagles breed in the Indian subcontinent, mainly in India and Sri Lanka, and from the southeast rim of the Himalaya across Southeast Asia to Indonesia and the Philippines. This is a bird occurring singly (outside mating season) in open woodland, although island forms prefer a higher tree density. It builds a stick nest in a tree and lays a single egg.
Description
The changeable hawk-eagle is a medium-large raptor at about 60–72 centimetres (24–28 in) in length with a 127–138 centimetres (50–54 in) wingspan, and a weight ranging from 1.2 to 1.9 kg.[3] It is a relatively slender forest eagle with some subspecies (especially N. c. limnaetus) being dimorphic giving the name "changeable". This and their complicated phylogeny further complicate precise identification.
Normally brown above, they have white below with barring on the undersides of the flight feathers and tail; black longitudinal streaks occur on the throat and chocolate streaks occur on the breast. Some subspecies have a crest of four feathers, but this is all but absent in others. The sexes are quite similar in their plumage, but males are about 15% smaller than females. The underparts and head of juveniles are whitish or buff with few dark streaks.
The wings are long and parallel-sided, and are held flat in flight, which helps to distinguish this species from the similar mountain hawk-eagle. In overhead flight, comparatively rounded wings (upturned at tip), longish tail, white body (spotted with brown) and grey underside of wings (streaked and spotted) are leading pointers.
Their call is a loud, high-pitched ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-kee, beginning short, rising in crescendo, and ending in a scream.
Ecology
Changeable hawk-eagles eat mammals, birds, and reptiles. They keep a sharp lookout perched bolt upright on a bough amongst the canopy foliage of some high tree standing near a forest clearing. There, they wait for junglefowl, pheasants, hares, and other small animals coming out into the open. The bird then swoops down forcefully, strikes, and bears the prey away in its talons.
Nesting
Season: December to April
Nest: a large stick platform lined with green leaves, high up in a forest tree
Eggs: a single one, greyish white, unmarked or with faint specks and blotches of light reddish at the broad end
Systematics
The Flores hawk-eagle has traditionally been treated as a subspecies of the changeable hawk-eagle, but it is now often treated as a separate species, N. floris.
Two distinct groups exist in the changeable hawk-eagle; one with crests and one without or with hardly visible crests. Dark morphs exist for some populations.
Changeable hawk-eagle
N. c. cirrhatus
- Gangetic plain southwards throughout India
- Crested, no dark morph
N. c. ceylanensis
- Sri Lanka (possibly also Travancore)
- Smaller than nominate, crest proportionally longer on average, apparently no dark morph
Crestless changeable hawk-eagle
N. c. limnaeetus
- Nepal, northeast India, via Burma and Malay Peninsula along Wallace Line to Philippines
- Much like nominate except crest, dimorphic, with the dark morph chocolate-brown all over, tail base might appear lighter in flight
N. c. andamanensis
- Andaman Islands
- Similar to N. c. limnaeetus, apparently no dark morph
N. c. vanheurni
- Simeulue Island
- Similar to N. c. limnaeetus, apparently no dark morph
Gamauf et al. (2005) analyzed mtDNA cytochrome b and control region sequence data of a considerable number of specimens of the crested hawk-eagle and some relatives. Despite the large sample, even the most conspicuous dichotomy - that between the crested and crestless groups - was not as well resolved as it might have been expected to be.
The three small-island taxa (N. c. andamanensis, N. c. vanheurni, and N. floris) also appear as monophyletic lineages. Their placement is even more unresolved, with N. floris being apparently a very ancient lineage. The other two seem quite certainly to derive from N. c. limnaeetus. The latter taxon has a confusing phylogeny. Different lineages exist that are apparently not stable in space and time, are best described as polytomy, from which the similar island taxa derive.
Obviously, N. c. limnaeetus does not represent a monophyletic lineage. Neither the biological nor the phylogenetic species concepts, nor phylogenetic systematics can be applied to satisfaction. The crested group apparently is close to becoming a distinct species. The island taxa derived from N. c. limnaeetus appear to have undergone founder effects, which has restricted their genetic diversity. In the continental population, genetic diversity is considerable, and the evolutionary pattern of the two studied genes did not agree, and neither did the origin of specimens show clear structures. N. c. limnaeetus thus is best considered a metapopulation.
Gamauf et al. (2005) therefore suggest the island taxa which are obviously at higher risk of extinction are, for conservation considered evolutionary significant units regardless of their systematic status. This case also demonstrates that a too-rigid interpretation of cladistics and the desire for monophyletic taxa, as well as universal application of single-species concept to all birds will undermine correct understanding of evolutionary relationships. It would even not be inconceivable to find mainland lineages to group closely with the western island taxa, if little genetic drift had occurred in the initial population. nonetheless, the divergence of this species' lineages seems to have taken place too recently to award them species status, as compared to the level of genetic divergence at which clades are usually considered distinct species.
N. c. limnaeetus appears for all that can be said with reasonable certainty basal pool of lineages in the crestless group that, despite not being monophyletic, should be considered a valid taxon as long as gene flow is possible through its range. In addition, as ancient DNA from museum specimens was used extensively, the possibility of ghost lineages must be considered. If it is assumed that all or most of the ancient lineages still exist today, considerable recombination must have taken place as the two genes' phylogenies do not agree much, indicating a healthy level of gene flow. Whether this still holds true today remains to be determined.
[Credit: en.wikipedia.org]
A hand raised—not in greeting, but in quiet resistance. Behind its weathered lines hides a soul half-revealed, wrapped in shadow and silence. The eye watches—not accusing, not afraid—but aware. This is the language of the unseen, the unspoken, the unresolved. A gesture that protects, deflects, and declares: enough. In every palm, a map. In every stare, a storm waiting to speak.
ON THE SHORES OF CABO SAN LUCAS, MEXICO
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
REFRESHMENT, ANYONE? By Jane Fryar
By some estimates, seven of every ten doctor visits are fatigue-related. That’s a lot of weariness! Sometimes fatigue is a symptom of disease. But fatigue has other sources, too. Long-term stress. Grief. Ongoing frustration. Clinical depression. The list of causes goes on and on. Always, though, fear and worry make weariness worse. Anyone who has laid awake at night stewing about an aging parent, a straying spouse, or a child with autism knows how quickly fear and worry can dig a pit—and how deep and dark that pit can be. Into our darkness the Lord shouts his promise to refresh us. Far more helpful than a splash of cold water on tired eyes, far more effective than two pots of stiff coffee, God’s promise touches our hearts, planting seeds of hope. “I will refresh the weary,” he says.
A tall lemonade on a hot day. That first dive into the pool after the cover comes off in spring. A care package from home during finals week at college. These things refresh us. How much more refreshing, though, to see a friendly face, to hear a loved one’s voice, to receive a hug from someone who cares deeply about us. The presence of those we love during life’s lonely, troubled times—now that’s refreshing! And how much more so when the one who comes to refresh our souls is the Savior, who loved us to death—his own death on the cross! At times we find ourselves as innocent bystanders in the troubles that engulf us. At other times, we have caused the train wreck of our circumstances. (Or, at least, contributed to it.) But always, Jesus comes to forgive and heal, to refresh and satisfy our hearts with his love for us. In the light of his promise, worries melt and fears shrink. Are you “fainting” today from weariness? Are you struggling with an unresolved illness? Are you carrying a burden of guilt or fear or worry? Whatever the cause of your fatigue, pause and invite your Savior to refresh your soul. Lord, you refresh me by your presence and in your promises. Teach me to rely more and more on You, especially. (written by Jane Fryar)
"I WILL refresh the weary and satisfy the faint." Jeremiah 31:25
Have a Great Week my very talented friends! And may you be refreshed wherever you find yourself today :)
In a world filled with mystery, sometimes you just need something to believe in. Get your hands on this four-figure pack of your favorite FBI agents and one humanoid parasitic sewer monster! Now you too can play out your own mysterious cryptozoology cases wrought with unresolved sexual tension and government conspiracy!
Socó (Butorides striatus)
A seguir, um texto, em português, da Wikipédia, a Enciclopédia livre:
O socozinho (Butorides striatus) é uma espécie de socó com ampla distribuição nas áreas alagadas das Américas e em grande parte do mundo. Tal espécie chega a medir até 36 cm de comprimento, possuindo capuz e topete nucal negros, pescoço acinzentado, peito com estrias ferrugem, dorso estriado de marrom, pernas amarelas e curtas. Também é conhecida pelos nomes de ana-velha, garça-socoí, maria-mole, socó-boi, socó-criminoso, socó-estudante, socoí, socó-mijão, socó-mirim e socó-tripa.
O Socozinho (Butorides striatus), é uma ave aquática muito comum em áreas alagadas, geralmente, nidifica solitário, podendo associar-se a outros indivíduos no período de reprodução, formando colônias de nidificação. Este estudo investigou a nidificação colonial de Butorides striatus, em uma área alagável no município de Porto Esperidião- MT. Foram observados os números de ninhos/ovos, distribuição espacial, período de incubação e biometria dos ovos. Foram realizadas visitas semanais à área de estudo nos meses de dezembro/2003 a março/2004. Os dados foram coletados através da observação visual e de mensurações métricas das dimensões e altura dos ninhos, bem como o status(confecção, postura, incubação e desativado). A atividade colonial reprodutiva da espécie em estudo teve início no mês de dezembro/2003, sendo período de maior atividade reprodutiva registrado no mês de março/2004, com total de 58 ninhos. Foram registrados um total de 119 ovos, sendo a média de 2,0 por ninho. Os ninhos localizaram-se a uma altura média de 2,6m(mín=0,9cm e máx=3,6m). A distância média entre os ninhos foi de 1,4m, sendo a distribuição espacial de cada ninho distinta, não ocorrendo uniformidade no extrato vegetal ocupado. Cada parental apresenta uma tolerância relativa à aproximação de outros indivíduos da espécie, que pode variar de 15 a 30 cm do ninho. O período de incubação durou em média 26,5 dias. Na colônia reprodutiva observam-se diferentes níveis de desenvolvimento, desde ninhos em estágio de confecção até indivíduos jovens prestes a voarem. Os indivíduos imaturos deixaram os ninhos por volta do vigésimo oitavo dia após o nascimento.
Following, a text in english, from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia:
The Striated Heron, Butorides striata, also known as Mangrove Heron, Little Heron or Green-backed Heron, is a small heron. Striated Herons are mostly non-migratory and noted for some interesting behavioral traits. Their breeding habitat is small wetlands in the Old World tropics from west Africa to Japan and Australia, and in South America. Vagrants have been recorded on oceanic islands, such as Chuuk and Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marianas and Palau; the bird recorded on Yap on February 25 1991, was from a continental Asian rather than from a Melanesian population, while the origin of the bird seen on Palau on May 3 2005 was not clear.
This bird was long considered to be conspecific with the closely related North American species, the Green Heron, which is now usually separted as B. virescens, as well as the Lava Heron of the Galápagos Islands (now B. sundevalli, but often included in B. striata, e.g. by BirdLife International); collectively they were called "green-backed herons". Like other herons, they are traditionally placed in the order Ciconiiformes together with storks, but all these birds form a close-knit group with pelicans, and it is unresolved whether herons are not actually closer to these than to storks.
Description and ecology:
Adults have a blue-grey back and wings, white underparts, a black cap and short yellow legs. Juveniles are browner above and streaked below.
These birds stand still at the water's edge and wait to ambush prey, but are easier to see than many small heron species. They mainly eat small fish, frogs and aquatic insects. They sometimes use bait, dropping a feather or leaf carefully on the water surface and picking fish that come to investigate.
They nest in a platform of sticks measuring between 20-40 cm long and 0.5-5 mm thick. The entire nest measures some 40-50 cm wide and 8-10 cm high outside, with an inner depression 20 cm wide and 4-5 cm deep. It is usually built in not too high off the ground in shrubs or trees but sometimes in sheltered locations on the ground, and often near water. The clutch is 2-5 eggs, which are pale blue and measure around 36 by 28 mm.[4]
An adult bird was once observed in a peculiar and mysterious behavior: while on the nest, it would grab a stick in its bill and make a rapid back-and-forth motion with the head, like a sewing machine's needle. The significance of this behavior is completely unknown: While such movements occur in many other nesting birds where they seem to compact the nest, move the eggs, or dislodge parasites, neither seems to have been the case in this particular Striated Heron.
Young birds will give a display when they feel threatened, by stretching out their necks and pointing the bill skywards. In how far this would deter predators is not known.
Widespread and generally common, the Striated Heron is classified as a Species of Least Concern by the IUCN; this holds true whether the Lava Heron is included in B. striata or not.
Master of the Pala Sforzesca (15th century) - Madonna Enthroned with Child, Doctors of the Church and the Family of Ludovico il Moro ("Pala Sforzesca") (1494-95) - Tempera and oil on panel 230 × 165 cm. - Brera Art Gallery, Milan
L’opera raffigura la famiglia di Ludovico il Moro inginocchiata davanti alla Vergine e ai santi Ambrogio, Gregorio Magno, Agostino e Gerolamo. Fu commissionata per la chiesa milanese di Sant’Ambrogio ad Nemus e, sulla base dei documenti d’archivio, fu eseguita nel corso del 1494. La rappresentazione qui allestita unisce all’espressione della devozione religiosa del committente la celebrazione del potere di quest’ultimo, giacché allude alla benevolenza divina nei suoi confronti e al futuro della sua dinastia, garantito dalla nascita di un erede. Quando commissionava la Pala Sforzesca, Ludovico il Moro tentava di ottenere dall’imperatore Massimiliano d’Asburgo la legalizzazione della propria signoria su Milano, esautorando alla morte di Gian Galeazzo (1494) il legittimo erede Francesco Maria Sforza. L’opera fu concepita, pertanto, come manifesto di propaganda politica, nel quale Ludovico si presentava immerso nello sfarzo del suo rango, protetto da sant’Ambrogio – che gli pone la mano sulla spalla – e accompagnato dalla moglie Beatrice e dagli eredi, uno dei quali, probabilmente, da identificare con un figlio nato fuori dal matrimonio. Per dare forma pittorica a questa fitta trama di messaggi Ludovico scelse un artista oggi ignoto e variamente identificato con uno dei seguaci lombardi di Leonardo, il quale allestì una sorta di compendio della cultura milanese del tempo, cronologicamente precoce ma stilisticamente irrisolto; nonostante il divario tra esito formale e significato dell’opera, questa affascina lo spettatore con lo straordinario impatto visivo dell’oro, delle perle e delle stoffe preziose.
The work depicts the family of Ludovico il Moro kneeling before the Virgin and Sts. Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Augustine and Jerome. It was commissioned for the Milanese church of Sant’Ambrogio ad Nemus and, on the basis of the documents in the archives, was executed over the course of 1494. The representation combines an expression of the client’s religious piety with a celebration of his power, as it alludes to an attitude of divine benevolence toward him and the future of his dynasty, guaranteed by the birth of an heir. At the time he commissioned the Sforza Altarpiece, Ludovico il Moro was trying to obtain a legitimization of his rule over Milan from Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, following his usurpation of the legitimate heir Francesco Maria Sforza on the death of Gian Galeazzo (1494). So the work was conceived as an operation of political propaganda, in which Ludovico was presented surrounded by the pomp of his rank, protected by St. Ambrose – who places his hand on his shoulder – and accompanied by his wife Beatrice and his heirs, one of whom is probably a child born out of wedlock. To give pictorial form to this complicated set of messages Ludovico chose an artist whose name is unknown today and has been variously identified with one of the Lombard followers of Leonardo. The result is a sort of compendium of the Milanese culture of the time, chronologically precocious but stylistically unresolved. Despite the discrepancy between the formal quality and the significance of the work, the extraordinary visual impact of the gold, the pearls and the precious fabrics is fascinating.
Herbig-Haro (HH) objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. This image of HH 211 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals an outflow from a Class 0 protostar, an infantile analog of our Sun when it was no more than a few tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 8% of the present-day Sun (it will eventually grow into a star like the Sun).
Infrared imaging is powerful in studying newborn stars and their outflows, because such stars are invariably still embedded within the gas from the molecular cloud in which they formed. The infrared emission of the star’s outflows penetrates the obscuring gas and dust, making a Herbig-Haro object like HH 211 ideal for observation with Webb’s sensitive infrared instruments. Molecules excited by the turbulent conditions, including molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and silicon monoxide, emit infrared light that Webb can collect to map out the structure of the outflows.
The image showcases a series of bow shocks to the southeast (lower-left) and northwest (upper-right) as well as the narrow bipolar jet that powers them. Webb reveals this scene in unprecedented detail — roughly 5 to 10 times higher spatial resolution than any previous images of HH 211. The inner jet is seen to “wiggle” with mirror symmetry on either side of the central protostar. This is in agreement with observations on smaller scales and suggests that the protostar may in fact be an unresolved binary star.
Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)
#NASA #STScI #jwst #jameswebbspacetelescope #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #star
peek & cloppenburg department store, köln, germany 1999-2005.
architects: renzo piano building workshop.
(a stitch from two photos, camera steadied against a lamppost)
walking back to central köln I passed this generous contribution to the city from renzo piano building workshop, its crisp detailing reminiscent of piano's brilliant early work.
glass is unusual in department stores, because windows add glare rather than light in what is typically a deep plan, and because views of the outside detract from the hypnotic (to some) atmosphere of shopping. as the furnishings here show, the problem remains unresolved.
interior here.
this photo was uploaded with a CC license and may be used free of charge and in any way you see fit.
if possible, please name photographer "SEIER+SEIER".
if not, don't.
This bank of old grain silos is the last vestige of the original docks infrastucture. They remain not as a reminder of what was here before but simply because of an unresolved ownership dispute.
Amongst all Scotland's mountain landscapes Assynt is the most unique. Its small, isolated peaks surrounded by uncountable lochs and lochans make it a haven for landscape photography and one of my favourite places.
This shot taken from the top of Stac Pollaidh, the areas most accessible peak, shows the full expanse of the area. From the left are Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor, Cul Beag and Ben Mor Coigach (which is actually in Coigach, not Assynt). Stac Pollaidh is perhaps the most characterful of all the peaks with fascinating rock formations all over the summit. At around 550m it is also one of the smallest peaks in Assynt yet it enjoys some of the best views over the region.
As this fabulous sunrise developed I was drawn into shooting a massive panorama of the area (as I have often done in the past). In my hurry to capture the scene I ended up with a composition that feels a little unresolved, but I simply didn’t have time to come up with an alternative. Although the structure of the image is a little lacking it does at least succeed in describing the scene in all its glory.
9.23.07
Becoming mature means learning to accept what you cannot change, facing unresolved sorrows and learning to love life as it really happens, not as you would have it happen.
-Barbara Sher
I'll admit it. I hate to feel vulnerable. Things out of my control make me very uncomfortable. So, I look all around and look like crazy and get confused and more confused and then all of a sudden it hits me - all I had to do was look up. When will I learn?
This one is also dedicated to sweet Tricia today. Some positive thoughts going into her 35th year.
Set of 5 - 1 of reserve & 4 about the machine. On the photo of the reserve the white dot on the horizon is the machine.
Please see photo with all the details about the Walking Dragline, the oldest surviving machine of its type in Europe.
St Aidan's is a 400-hectare (990-acre) Country Park between Leeds and Castleford in West Yorkshire, England. The land was formerly an opencast coal mining area.
The Country Park opened to the public in May 2013 under the care of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). The car park and visitor centre were subsequently closed in July 2013 due to unresolved land issues. With the successful transfer of St Aidan's to Leeds City Council, a 99-year lease was signed from the council to the RSPB in March 2017. The site is now open and functioning as an RSPB reserve.
It is a brilliant reserve with 4 waymarked loops of approx. 1.1, 1.7, 2.0 & 3 miles long so you can do as much or as little as you wish. Or merely sit outside the visitors centre & enjoy a coffee!
Master of the Pala Sforzesca (15th century) - Madonna Enthroned with Child, Doctors of the Church and the Family of Ludovico il Moro ("Pala Sforzesca") (1494-95) - Tempera and oil on panel 230 × 165 cm. - Brera Art Gallery, Milan
L’opera raffigura la famiglia di Ludovico il Moro inginocchiata davanti alla Vergine e ai santi Ambrogio, Gregorio Magno, Agostino e Gerolamo. Fu commissionata per la chiesa milanese di Sant’Ambrogio ad Nemus e, sulla base dei documenti d’archivio, fu eseguita nel corso del 1494. La rappresentazione qui allestita unisce all’espressione della devozione religiosa del committente la celebrazione del potere di quest’ultimo, giacché allude alla benevolenza divina nei suoi confronti e al futuro della sua dinastia, garantito dalla nascita di un erede. Quando commissionava la Pala Sforzesca, Ludovico il Moro tentava di ottenere dall’imperatore Massimiliano d’Asburgo la legalizzazione della propria signoria su Milano, esautorando alla morte di Gian Galeazzo (1494) il legittimo erede Francesco Maria Sforza. L’opera fu concepita, pertanto, come manifesto di propaganda politica, nel quale Ludovico si presentava immerso nello sfarzo del suo rango, protetto da sant’Ambrogio – che gli pone la mano sulla spalla – e accompagnato dalla moglie Beatrice e dagli eredi, uno dei quali, probabilmente, da identificare con un figlio nato fuori dal matrimonio. Per dare forma pittorica a questa fitta trama di messaggi Ludovico scelse un artista oggi ignoto e variamente identificato con uno dei seguaci lombardi di Leonardo, il quale allestì una sorta di compendio della cultura milanese del tempo, cronologicamente precoce ma stilisticamente irrisolto; nonostante il divario tra esito formale e significato dell’opera, questa affascina lo spettatore con lo straordinario impatto visivo dell’oro, delle perle e delle stoffe preziose.
The work depicts the family of Ludovico il Moro kneeling before the Virgin and Sts. Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Augustine and Jerome. It was commissioned for the Milanese church of Sant’Ambrogio ad Nemus and, on the basis of the documents in the archives, was executed over the course of 1494. The representation combines an expression of the client’s religious piety with a celebration of his power, as it alludes to an attitude of divine benevolence toward him and the future of his dynasty, guaranteed by the birth of an heir. At the time he commissioned the Sforza Altarpiece, Ludovico il Moro was trying to obtain a legitimization of his rule over Milan from Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, following his usurpation of the legitimate heir Francesco Maria Sforza on the death of Gian Galeazzo (1494). So the work was conceived as an operation of political propaganda, in which Ludovico was presented surrounded by the pomp of his rank, protected by St. Ambrose – who places his hand on his shoulder – and accompanied by his wife Beatrice and his heirs, one of whom is probably a child born out of wedlock. To give pictorial form to this complicated set of messages Ludovico chose an artist whose name is unknown today and has been variously identified with one of the Lombard followers of Leonardo. The result is a sort of compendium of the Milanese culture of the time, chronologically precocious but stylistically unresolved. Despite the discrepancy between the formal quality and the significance of the work, the extraordinary visual impact of the gold, the pearls and the precious fabrics is fascinating.
With news breaking this week that the famed Colorado Ski Train, which last ran in early 2009, is going to be resurrected for a one-time run with 400 passengers from Denver to Winter Park, CO on 14 Mar 15, I figured now would be a good time to take a look back at the last almost-Ski Train.
After 69 years in operation, Colorado's famous Ski Train made its last run on 29 Mar 09 leaving its fans and followers heartbroken. To be fair, the Ski Train had been operating at a financial loss to its owners for 21 years, but the economic collapse, rising liability coverage, and pending and uncertain upgrades at Denver's Union Station were enough to push the Ski Train into the history books.
But in stepped the San Luis & Rio Grande with a plan to continue the 69-year tradition of a passenger train running between Denver and Winter Park, CO. The SLRG had worked out a deal with Union Pacific (who owned the line) and Amtrak (who would run the trains) and the resurrected Ski Train was set to make its first run under new owners on 27 Dec 09! But in the days leading up to the first departure, pending issues remained unresolved. Verbal agreements and good will didn't stand up and things started to fall apart. On 28 Dec 09, the 2009-2010 Ski Train was cancelled. The main issue was that Amtrak could not reach a deal to run the trains citing unsafe equipment.
But none of that drama was in play when I "accidentally" happened out onto the passenger platform at Union Station a week before departure day to snap some shots of the recently leased and arrived SD90MACs which would provide power for the upcoming Ski Train. These things sparkled in the sunshine and I wondered what they would look like heading up the mountains and through the tunnels on their way to Winter Park.
After a brief discussion with a security guard, I was on my way with a rare sampling of the Ski Train that never was.
The 2015 version seems to be set in stone though. It appears there's going to be one Amtrak unit on each end of a 6-car Superliner train so they won't have to turn the train before coming back to Denver. Word is this train sold out in the neighborhood of 12 hours. I didn't plan on riding it, but I hope I'm able to head out and get a shot or two...
This woman was sitting at an outdoor table of a small restaurant/coffee-shop on the west side of Columbus Avenue at 73rd Street. It's the first time that I've seen anyone in this particular area (which is near a gym that I usually visit 2-3 times a week) with a laptop, and I was delighted to see that she had a Mac.... and not just any old Mac, but a Mac Powerbook. (But not a MacBook Air :) )
Note: this photo was published in a November 24, 2008 blog posting entitled "Mobile Tech Secrets for Getting Things Done On the Go." It was also published in a Dec 14, 2008 blog entitled "5 Fantastic Blogs To Improve Your Life." It was also published in a Jul 13, 2009 "Pimp Your Mac" blog titled "Pimp my Mail." And it was published in a Jul 24, 2009 blog titled "Step Away From the Computer." For some reason, it was also published as an illustration in an undated (Nov 2009) Mahalo blog titled "Macbook Air Battery" at www-dot-mahalo-dot-com-slash-macbook-air-battery. And it was published in a Nov 20, 2009 blog titled "Breng de klanten service naar de klant." It was also published in a Nov 23, 2009 blog titled "Customer Retention: How to Retain Existing Health Club Clients and Attract New Ones." And it was published in a Dec 4, 2009 blog titled "Every Mum Wrestles With Returning To Work."
More recently, it was published in a Jan 3, 2010 blog titled "Sunday Confessional: I Can't Stop Facebook Stalking My Ex." And it was published in a Jan 22, 2010 blog titled "Best Places with Free Wi-Fi in Metro Detroit." It was also published in a Feb 11, 2010 blog titled "How Healthcare Organizations Can Benefit From Video Campaigns." And it was published in a Feb 14, 2010 blog titled "The Most Useful Bloggers on the Web." It was also published in a Feb 16, 2010 blog titled "Unresolved Obstacles to the Credibility of Online Degrees," as well as a Feb 25, 2010 blog titled Running your "Fitness Business: Online Software vs Desktop Software." It was also published in an undated (Mar 2010) blog titled "8 Ways to Discover New Music." And it was published, sometime in Apr 2010, as an illustration in the "About Me" page of Sarita Li Johnson's blog. It was also published in an Apr 9, 2010 blog titled "Technology Vs. Human Eye: You Decide the Winner." And it was published in an Apr 17, 2010 blog titled "12 Hands-on tips to protect yourself online."
It was also published in an Apr 19, 2010 blog titled EMOBILEにUQ Flat、どれがいい？高速モバイルデータ通信サービスを比較 -- which I've been told means "Ed Yourdon is really an amazing photographer," but I'm not sure I believe it. And it was published in an Apr 22, 2010 blog titled "Gift ideas for working mums," as well as an Apr 22, 2010 blog titled "La intimidad en Internet: el pánico de los padres de la Generación M" (the English-language version of which is Internet privacy: Generation M parents panic." It was also published in an Apr 27, 2010 blog about Facebook's new privacy settings, titled "Facebook, cómo darse de baja," at www-dot-tuexperto-dot-com/2010/04/27/facebook-como-darse-de-baja/ . And on May 12, 2010 it showed up in a Web ad for the movie, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."
It was also published in an undated (May 2010) HeartsForU blog , with the same title as the caption that I used on this Flickr page. And it was published in a Jun 7, 2010 blog titled "5 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Small Business Blog," as well as a Jun 8, 2010 blog titled "Zmiana IP na 10 sposobów." It was also published in a Jun 21, 2010 blog titled Is "Blogging for Your Small Business Dead?" And it was published in a Jul 1, 2010 blog titled "2 Things All Content Creators Can Do." It was also published in a Jul 13, 2010 blog titled "Top 15 Countries Where Most Active Bloggers Are Located." And a cropped, horizontally flipped version of the photo was published in a Jul 27, 2010 blog titled "Welcome to the Gig Economy." It was also published in an Aug 12, 2010 blog titled "Women Spend More Time Online," and it was published in an undated (late August 2010) blog titled "Why you need to write in advance (and I do to!)." It was also published in a Sep 14, 2010 blog titled "Cool Top Blogging Subjects Images." And in one of the more bizarre publication examples I've seen on the Internet, the photo was published in a Sep 30, 2010 blog titled " Gillette Venus Original Razor, 1 Razor 2 Cartridges, 1-count Package Reviews." It was also published in an Oct 10, 2010 blog titled "17 laptop computers-17.3″ 17″ LAPTOP BAG NOTEBOOK CASE COMPUTER CARRYING." And it was published in a Nov 14, 2010 COMPARE LAPTOP PCS TABLETS & SMARTPHONES blog, with the same title as the caption that I used on this Flickr page. It was also published in two Nov 18, 2010 blogs, titled 3 Steps To Getting The Ultimate Article Marketing Guide" and "Investing On Internet Marketing Software." And it was published in a Nov 23, 2010 blog titled "The Online Business Opportunity for the New Entrepreneur," as well as a Nov 26, 2010 blog titled "Why Now Is The Right Time To Compare Online Trading." It was also published in a Nov 29, 2010 blog titled "The Truth About What Is Article Marketing." And it was published in a Dec 9, 2010 blog titled "Internet Schools- A Time for Choosing," as well as a Dec 18, 2010 Lifehacker blog titled "Step Away From Your Desk For A More Focused Environment." Also in late Dec 2010, I found that the photo had been published in the "about" page of a site called CafeWorkr.
Moving into 2011, the photo was published in a Jan 6, 2011 Desktopize blog/, with the same title and detailed notes that I had written on this Flickr page. It was also published in a Jan 8, 2011 blog titled "How to Build Your Own Profitable Small Internet Business." And it was published in a Jan 17, 2011 blog titled "How can i get my camera to take pictures like this?" It was also published in a Jan 25, 2011 blog titled "JUSTICE DEPT. WANTS PROVIDERS TO RETAIN INTERNET DATA." It was also published in a Jan 28, 2011 blog titled "7 Blogging Tips for Increased Traffic."
The photo was also published in a Feb 1, 2011 blog titled "Traveling With Your Laptop," as well as a Feb 17, 2011 blog titled "How You Can Make Changes To Your Business Website, Your Way." And it was published in a Feb 27, 2011 blog titled "Best Places with Free Wi-Fi in Metro Detroit." It was also published in a Mar 4, 2011 blog titled "Hi… What would be on your personal software wish list?? and what features wld you want in each? :)?" And it was published in a Mar 24, 2011 blog titled "11 Dos and Don’ts for Dating Online." It was also published in a May 13, 2011 blog titled "What Are Your Prospects Looking for Online?" And it was published in a May 24, 2011 blog titled "How To Achieve Success From Stone Cold Steve Austin." It was also published in an undated (late May 2011) Cafeworkr website "about" page titled "Purpose of Cafeworkr." And it was published in a Jun 1, 2011 blog titled "Blogging Tips: Top 6 WordPress Plugins." It was also published in a Jun 21, 2011 blog titled "Consumerization of IT Challenges Device-Centric ITAM." And it was published in an undated (late Jun 2011) blog titled "Internet privacy: Generation M parents panic." It was also published in a Jul 31, 2011 Compare-online blog, with the same caption and detailed notes that I had written on this Flickr page, as well as an Aug 3, 2011 bog titled "How To Search For A Repeatable & Scaleable Business Model." And it was published in an Aug 28, 2011 blog titled "Facebook vi rende più disinvolte negli approcci?"
Moving into the fall of 2011, the photo was published in a Sep 8, 2011 blog titled "Entidade da UE descontente com a auto-regulamentação de publicidade comportamental on-line." And it was published in a Sep 14, 2011 blog titled "New Rules for Business in the Social Media Age." It was also published in an Oct 5, 2011 Tolle Crazy Computer blog and a Nov 7, 2011 Active-Internet-dot-de blog, with the same caption and detailed notes that I had written here on this Flickr page.
Moving into 2012, the photo wa published in a Jan 12, 2012 Romanian blog titled "Mămici fără griji la service ." And it was published in a Jan 29, 2012 blog titled "Nice Online Dating Secrets of Success Photos." It was also published in an undated (early Feb 2012) blog titled "WIEDEN + KENNEDY TECH INCUBATOR PICKS ITS STARTUP CLASS OF 2011", as well as a Feb 17, 2012 blog titled "Internett og WiFi i Amsterdam." And it was published in a Mar 7, 2012 blog titled "Somebody's Tracking You," as well as a Mar 3, 2012 blog titled "5 Things You Should Never Share on Social Networking Sites." It was also published in a Mar 15, 2012 blog titled "Elo7 faz parceria com editora Globo e lança portal de conteúdo." And it was published in a Mar 21, 2012 blog titled "Internet to rank as 6th-largest economy by 2016." It was also published in an Apr 19, 2012 blog titled "Facebook for eCommerce: It’s About Customer Retention, Not Acquisition." And it was published in an Apr 30, 2012 blog titled "Ask LH: Do I Really Need To Be That Worried About Security When I’m Using Public Wi-Fi?", as well as a May 1, 2012 blog titled "Be in the Office Without Being in the Office." It was also published in a May 3, 2012 I Music News Radio blog, with the same caption and detailed notes that I had written on this Flickr page. It was also published in a May 4, 2012 blog titled "Kaspersky Lab ha elaborado un pasaporte 3.0 para mamás en el que presentan cómo utilizar herramientas de control parental." And it was published in a May 23, 2012 blog titled "Less professor time doesn’t hurt: study." It was also published in a Jun 18, 2012 blog titled "Nikon COOLPIX AW100 16 MP CMOS Waterproof Digital Camera."
Moving into the 2nd half of 2012, the photo was published in a Jul 6, 2012 blog titled "Jobs for Shy People: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," as well as a Jul 7, 2012 blog titled BUILD YOUR BUSINESS WITH QUALITY ARTICLE MARKETING." It was also published in a Jul 31, 2012 blog titled "22 Top Blogging Tools Loved by the Pros." And it was published in an Aug 28, 2012 blog titled El 51% de los argentinos utiliza Internet como su principal fuente de información." It was also published in a Sep 3, 2012 blog titled "Cool Best Ecommerce Websites images." And it was published in a Sep 21, 2012 blog titled "この先、生き残れるノウハウはこれだ," as well as a Sep 22, 2012 blog titled "Top 5 Blogs for Teachers, You Must Need To Know." It was also published in an Oct 1, 2012 blog titled "How to transfer computer files safely," as well as an undated (early Oct 2012) blog titled "11 Dos and Don’ts for Dating Online." And it was published in a Nov 2, 2012 blog titled "El fenómeno de las madres blogger y otras noticias en nuestro Flash Digital de octubre." And it was published in a Nov 9, 2012 blog titled "Sites de rencontres: La bonne rencontre en ligne, possible?" It was also published in a Nov 14, 2012 blog titled "The New Geography of Jobs." And it was published in a Nov 15, 2012 blog titled "MyGift 15 inch Fascinating Peacock Notebook Laptop Sleeve Bag Carrying Case for most of MacBook, Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba," with the same detailed notes and comments I had written on this Flickr page. It was also published in a Nov 20, 2012 blog titled "How to write a feature that connects." And it was published in a Dec 3, 2012 blog titled "Do I Really Need to Worry About Security When I’m Using Public Wi-Fi?" It was also published in a Dec 4, 2012 blog titled "Your Employees & Their Online Presence: How Will It Effect Your Brand in 2013?" And it was published in a Dec 14, 2012 blog titled "Nice Do It Yourself Calendar 2013 Photos," along with the same detailed notes I had written on this Flickr page.
Moving into 2013, the photo was published in a Jan 6, 2013 blog titled "Tips And Strategies On How To Be Successful In Article Promotion." And it was published in a Jan 9, 2013 blog titled "Take This Advice And Succeed With Article Advertising." It was also published in a Jan 15, 2013 blog titled "Capital Ideas Digest: 01.15.13." And it was published in a Jan 23, 2013 blog titled "Amazon Prime Is Worth the Price." It was also published in a Jan 28, 2013 blog titled "Nice Social Media Marketing Tips For Small Business photos," as well as a Feb 3, 2013 blog titled "Nice Online Trading Tips photos" and a Feb 3, 2013 blog titled "The Following Steps Can Help You To Market Any Article." And it was published in a Feb 20, 2013 blog titled "Guest Post via PostJoint: Write Drunk; Edit Sober." It was also published in a Feb 26, 2013 blog titled "퓨처워커에게 사업 멘토링 받는 방법#1." And it was published in a Mar 2, 2013 blog titled "Como manter um namoro online." It was also published in a Mar 6, 2013 blog titled "The Price of Nasty by Erica Brown," as well as a Mar 11, 2013 blog titled "Noise vs. Quiet: Which Is Better for Productivity?" I also found the photo in a Mar 11, 2013 blog titled "4 Steps to your Best Travel Insurance Purchase Every Time.," as well as a Mar 18, 2013 blog titled " Online College: Valuable Tool Or Waste Of Your time?", and a Mar 19, 2013 blog titled "Here’s Why Blogging is Not Your Cup of Tea, Wanna Leave? or Stick to it?" and a Mar 19, 2013 blog titled "Finally, Feds say cops’ access to your e-mail shouldn’t be time-dependent." It was also published in a Mar 23, 2013 blog titled "Dating Advice for PlentyOfFish-dot-com., as well as a Mar 27, 2013 blog titled "Online Dating: Yes or No?" And it was published in a Mar 31, 2013 Mashable blog titled "How Vizify Gives Recruiters Context for Your Digital Identity," as well as an Apr 4, 2013 blog titled "The most likely buyer of Nokia or BlackBerry now in talks to acquire NEC’s handset unit." And it was published in a May 1, 2013 blog titled "RESOURCES TO HELP FIND A TRAVEL COMPANION." It was also published in an undated (late May 2013) blog titled "Come trovare lavoro con i social network: cinque consigli utili per cambiare," as well as a May 21, 2013 blog titled "Consumers Can Now Upload Profile Photos for Unclaimed Place Pages." It was also published in a Jun 6, 2013 blog titled "El Consejo De Ministros Aprueba El Proyecto "Emprende En 3"," as well as an undated (mid-June 2013) blog titled "Sites de rencontres: La bonne rencontre en ligne, possible?" And it was published in a Jun 10, 2013 blog titled "10 Rules to Optimize Online Dating." It was also published in a Jun 19, 2013 blog titled "What Is ReMarketing?", as well as a Jul 1, 2013 blog titled "This is why you’re single. The top 3 reasons why your relationship fails." And it was published in a Jul 25, 2013 blog titled "The dangers of dating," as well as an Aug 1, 2013 blog titled "Higher Ed: 7 Things to Consider as You Prepare for the Year." It was also published in an undated (late Aug 2013) blog titled "Protecting Yourself From Identity Theft."
Moving into 2014, the photo was published in a Jan 13, 2014 blog titled "Be More Productive On Social Media With 10 Easy Tips." It was also published in a Feb 25, 2014 blog titled "Guía para el Periodista Freelance (I): Los primeros pasos legales, con Remo." And it was published in an undated (mid-September 2014) blog titled "12 MUST-HAVE BUSINESS APPS FOR THE MOBILE WORKER."
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This is part of an evolving photo-project, which will probably continue throughout the summer of 2008, and perhaps beyond: a random collection of "interesting" people in a broad stretch of the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- between 72nd Street and 104th Street, especially along Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.
I don't like to intrude on people's privacy, so I normally use a telephoto lens in order to photograph them while they're still 50-100 feet away from me; but that means I have to continue focusing my attention on the people and activities half a block away, rather than on what's right in front of me.
I've also learned that, in many cases, the opportunities for an interesting picture are very fleeting -- literally a matter of a couple of seconds, before the person(s) in question move on, turn away, or stop doing whatever was interesting. So I've learned to keep the camera switched on (which contradicts my traditional urge to conserve battery power), and not worry so much about zooming in for a perfectly-framed picture ... after all, once the digital image is uploaded to my computer, it's pretty trivial to crop out the parts unrelated to the main subject.
For the most part, I've deliberately avoided photographing bums, drunks, drunks, and crazy people. There are a few of them around, and they would certainly create some dramatic pictures; but they generally don't want to be photographed, and I don't want to feel like I'm taking advantage of them. I'm still looking for opportunities to take some "sympathetic" pictures of such people, which might inspire others to reach out and help them. We'll see how it goes ...
The only other thing I've noticed, thus far, is that while there are lots of interesting people to photograph, there are far, far, *far* more people who are *not* so interesting. They're probably fine people, and they might even be more interesting than the ones I've photographed ... but there was just nothing memorable about them. It was also published in a Jun 19, 2013 blog titled What Is Re-Marketing?", as well as a Jun 25, 2013 blog titled "言明してしまうことで自分を規定してしまうこと."
A mirror ‘lies’ on the lawn, reflecting the dappled pattern of clouds floating overhead in the evening sky. The electric blue of the reflection seems beautifully mesmerising.
Taken using f/22 aperture and a ISO 100 with a relatively fast shutter speed to produce this under-exposed image.
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“Start as you mean to go on.”
“If we understand the rule or karma then we may stop and think before we act selfishly for our own happiness.” The Gyalwang Drukpa
“A bad idea knows no bounds.” Ralph Steadman
“When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, ‘What was it that you wanted and why didn't you fight for it?’” Shannon L. Alder
“Sometimes to love someone you gotta be a stranger.” Rick Deckard
“One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.” Agatha Christie
“Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek.” R. D. Ronald
“Sensitive people are the most genuine and honest people you will ever meet. There is nothing they won’t tell you about themselves if they trust your kindness. However, the moment you betray them, reject them or devalue them, they become the worst type of person. Unfortunately, they end up hurting themselves in the long run. They don’t want to hurt other people. It is against their very nature. They want to make amends and undo the wrong they did. Their life is a wave of highs and lows. They live with guilt and constant pain over unresolved situations and misunderstandings. They are tortured souls that are not able to live with hatred or being hated. This type of person needs the most love anyone can give them because their soul has been constantly bruised by others. However, despite the tragedy of what they have to go through in life, they remain the most compassionate people worth knowing, and the ones that often become activists for the broken hearted, forgotten and the misunderstood. They are angels with broken wings that only fly when loved.” Shannon L. Alder
Villa Lora, Fermo (Italy) — one of the very first bodypaintings we photographed at our first event there.
A steampunk character carved from brass and shadows: part human, part machine, all attitude.
With gears on her corset and a skull of clockwork across her face, she leans into the villa’s worn elegance… and leaves the story unresolved.
Hero or villain? I’m not sure — and that’s the point.
Model: Natalie
Artist: Anna Wistrich
Location: Villa Lora
BTS on my free - SUBSTACK -
Leica M9-P
50mm f1.4 Zeiss Biotar (converted)
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Cougar ~ Paris Zoo ~ Paris ~ France ~ Thursday February 25th 2016.
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Cougar ~ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ~ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar ~ The cougar (Puma concolor), also commonly known as the mountain lion, puma, panther, or catamount, is a large felid of the subfamily Felinae native to the Americas. Its range, from the Canadian Yukon to the southern Andes of South America, is the greatest of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in most American habitat types. It is the second-heaviest cat in the New World, after the jaguar. Secretive and largely solitary by nature, the cougar is properly considered both nocturnal and crepuscular, although sightings during daylight hours do occur. The cougar is more closely related to smaller felines, including the domestic cat (subfamily Felinae), than to any species of subfamily Pantherinae, of which only the jaguar is native to the Americas.
The cougar is an ambush predator and pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources are ungulates, particularly deer, but also livestock. It also hunts species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and survives at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While large, it is not always the apex predator in its range, yielding to the jaguar, gray wolf, American black bear, and grizzly bear. It is reclusive and mostly avoids people. Fatal attacks on humans are rare, but in North America have been increasing in recent years as more people enter their territories.
Prolific hunting following European colonization of the Americas and the ongoing human development of cougar habitat has caused populations to drop in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America in the beginning of the 20th century, except for an isolated Florida panther subpopulation. Breeding populations have moved east into the far western parts of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Transient males have been verified in Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Illinois, where a cougar was shot in the city limits of Chicago and, in at least one instance, observed as far east as coastal Connecticut. Reports of eastern cougars (P. c. cougar) still surface, although it was declared extirpated in 2011.
Taxonomy and evolution ~ Cougars are the largest of the small cats. They are placed in the subfamily Felinae, although their bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia about 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial, and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and significant confidence intervals exist with suggested dates. In the latest genomic study of the Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas 8.0 to 8.5 million years ago (Mya). The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Mya as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
The cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. The cheetah lineage is suggested by some studies to have diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
A high level of genetic similarity has been found among North American cougar populations, suggesting they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. propose the original North American population of P. concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals, such as Smilodon, also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
A dragonfly is an insect belonging to the order Odonata, infraorder Anisoptera (from Greek ἄνισος anisos, "unequal" and πτερόν pteron, "wing", because the hindwing is broader than the forewing). Adult dragonflies are characterized by large, multifaceted eyes, two pairs of strong, transparent wings, sometimes with coloured patches, and an elongated body. Dragonflies can be mistaken for the related group, damselflies (Zygoptera), which are similar in structure, though usually lighter in build; however, the wings of most dragonflies are held flat and away from the body, while damselflies hold their wings folded at rest, along or above the abdomen. Dragonflies are agile fliers, while damselflies have a weaker, fluttery flight. Many dragonflies have brilliant iridescent or metallic colours produced by structural colouration, making them conspicuous in flight. An adult dragonfly's compound eyes have nearly 24,000 ommatidia each.
Fossils of very large dragonfly-like insects, sometimes called griffinflies, are found from 325 million years ago (Mya) in Upper Carboniferous rocks; these had wingspans up to about 750 mm (30 in), but were only distant ancestors, not true dragonflies. About 3,000 extant species of true dragonfly are known. Most are tropical, with fewer species in temperate regions. Loss of wetland habitat threatens dragonfly populations around the world.
Dragonflies are predators, both in their aquatic nymphs stage (also known as naiads) and as adults. In some species, the nymphal stage lasts for up to five years, and the adult stage may be as long as ten weeks, but most species have an adult lifespan in the order of five weeks or less, and some survive for only a few days. They are fast, agile fliers, sometimes migrating across oceans, and often live near water. They have a uniquely complex mode of reproduction involving indirect insemination, delayed fertilization, and sperm competition. During mating, the male grasps the female at the back of the head, and the female curls her abdomen under her body to pick up sperm from the male's secondary genitalia at the front of his abdomen, forming the "heart" or "wheel" posture.
Dragonflies are represented in human culture on artefacts such as pottery, rock paintings, statues and Art Nouveau jewellery. They are used in traditional medicine in Japan and China, and caught for food in Indonesia. They are symbols of courage, strength, and happiness in Japan, but seen as sinister in European folklore. Their bright colours and agile flight are admired in the poetry of Lord Tennyson and the prose of H. E. Bates.
Evolution
Dragonflies and their relatives are similar in structure to an ancient group, meganisoptera, from the 325 Mya Upper Carboniferous of Europe, a group that included the largest insect that ever lived, Meganeuropsis permiana from the Early Permian, with a wingspan around 750 mm (30 in);. Known informally as "griffinflies", their fossil record ends with the Permian–Triassic extinction event (about 247 Mya). The Protanisoptera, another ancestral group that lacks certain wing vein characters found in modern Odonata, lived from the Early to Late Permian age until the end Permian event, and are known from fossil wings from current-day United States, Russia, and Australia, suggesting they might have been cosmopolitan in distribution. While both of those groups are sometimes referred to as "giant dragonflies", in fact true dragonflies/odonata are more modern insects that had not evolved yet.
Modern dragonflies do retain some traits of their distant predecessors, and are in a group known as palaeoptera, ancient-winged. They, like the gigantic pre-dinosaur griffinflies, lack the ability to fold their wings up against their bodies in the way modern insects do, although some evolved their own different way to do so. The forerunners of modern Odonata are included in a clade called the Panodonata, which include the basal Zygoptera (damselflies) and the Anisoptera (true dragonflies). Today, some 3,000 species are extant around the world.
The relationships of anisopteran families are not fully resolved as of 2013, but all the families are monophyletic except the Corduliidae; the Gomphidae are a sister taxon to all other Anisoptera, the Austropetaliidae are sister to the Aeshnoidea, and the Chlorogomphidae are sister to a clade that includes the Synthemistidae and Libellulidae. On the cladogram, dashed lines indicate unresolved relationships; English names are given (in parentheses)
Distribution and diversity
About 3,012 species of dragonflies were known in 2010; these are classified into 348 genera in 11 families. The distribution of diversity within the biogeographical regions are summarized below (the world numbers are not ordinary totals, as overlaps in species occur).
Dragonflies live on every continent except Antarctica. In contrast to the damselflies (Zygoptera), which tend to have restricted distributions, some genera and species are spread across continents. For example, the blue-eyed darner Rhionaeschna multicolor lives all across North America, and in Central America; emperors Anax live throughout the Americas from as far north as Newfoundland to as far south as Bahia Blanca in Argentina, across Europe to central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The globe skimmer Pantala flavescens is probably the most widespread dragonfly species in the world; it is cosmopolitan, occurring on all continents in the warmer regions. Most Anisoptera species are tropical, with far fewer species in temperate regions.
Some dragonflies, including libellulids and aeshnids, live in desert pools, for example in the Mojave Desert, where they are active in shade temperatures between 18 and 45 °C (64.4 to 113 °F); these insects were able to survive body temperatures above the thermal death point of insects of the same species in cooler places.
Dragonflies live from sea level up to the mountains, decreasing in species diversity with altitude. Their altitudinal limit is about 3700 m, represented by a species of Aeshna in the Pamirs.
Dragonflies become scarce at higher latitudes. They are not native to Iceland, but individuals are occasionally swept in by strong winds, including a Hemianax ephippiger native to North Africa, and an unidentified darter species. In Kamchatka, only a few species of dragonfly including the treeline emerald Somatochlora arctica and some aeshnids such as Aeshna subarctica are found, possibly because of the low temperature of the lakes there. The treeline emerald also lives in northern Alaska, within the Arctic Circle, making it the most northerly of all dragonflies.
General description
Dragonflies (suborder Anisoptera) are heavy-bodied, strong-flying insects that hold their wings horizontally both in flight and at rest. By contrast, damselflies (suborder Zygoptera) have slender bodies and fly more weakly; most species fold their wings over the abdomen when stationary, and the eyes are well separated on the sides of the head.
An adult dragonfly has three distinct segments, the head, thorax, and abdomen, as in all insects. It has a chitinous exoskeleton of hard plates held together with flexible membranes. The head is large with very short antennae. It is dominated by the two compound eyes, which cover most of its surface. The compound eyes are made up of ommatidia, the numbers being greater in the larger species. Aeshna interrupta has 22650 ommatidia of two varying sizes, 4500 being large. The facets facing downward tend to be smaller. Petalura gigantea has 23890 ommatidia of just one size. These facets provide complete vision in the frontal hemisphere of the dragonfly. The compound eyes meet at the top of the head (except in the Petaluridae and Gomphidae, as also in the genus Epiophlebia). Also, they have three simple eyes or ocelli. The mouthparts are adapted for biting with a toothed jaw; the flap-like labrum, at the front of the mouth, can be shot rapidly forward to catch prey. The head has a system for locking it in place that consists of muscles and small hairs on the back of the head that grip structures on the front of the first thoracic segment. This arrester system is unique to the Odonata, and is activated when feeding and during tandem flight.
The thorax consists of three segments as in all insects. The prothorax is small and is flattened dorsally into a shield-like disc, which has two transverse ridges. The mesothorax and metathorax are fused into a rigid, box-like structure with internal bracing, and provide a robust attachment for the powerful wing muscles inside. The thorax bears two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs. The wings are long, veined, and membranous, narrower at the tip and wider at the base. The hindwings are broader than the forewings and the venation is different at the base. The veins carry haemolymph, which is analogous to blood in vertebrates, and carries out many similar functions, but which also serves a hydraulic function to expand the body between nymphal stages (instars) and to expand and stiffen the wings after the adult emerges from the final nymphal stage. The leading edge of each wing has a node where other veins join the marginal vein, and the wing is able to flex at this point. In most large species of dragonflies, the wings of females are shorter and broader than those of males. The legs are rarely used for walking, but are used to catch and hold prey, for perching, and for climbing on plants. Each has two short basal joints, two long joints, and a three-jointed foot, armed with a pair of claws. The long leg joints bear rows of spines, and in males, one row of spines on each front leg is modified to form an "eyebrush", for cleaning the surface of the compound eye.
The abdomen is long and slender and consists of 10 segments. Three terminal appendages are on segment 10; a pair of superiors (claspers) and an inferior. The second and third segments are enlarged, and in males, on the underside of the second segment has a cleft, forming the secondary genitalia consisting of the lamina, hamule, genital lobe, and penis. There are remarkable variations in the presence and the form of the penis and the related structures, the flagellum, cornua, and genital lobes. Sperm is produced at the 9th segment, and is transferred to the secondary genitalia prior to mating. The male holds the female behind the head using a pair of claspers on the terminal segment. In females, the genital opening is on the underside of the eighth segment, and is covered by a simple flap (vulvar lamina) or an ovipositor, depending on species and the method of egg-laying. Dragonflies having simple flaps shed the eggs in water, mostly in flight. Dragonflies having ovipositors use them to puncture soft tissues of plants and place the eggs singly in each puncture they make.
Dragonfly nymphs vary in form with species, and are loosely classed into claspers, sprawlers, hiders, and burrowers. The first instar is known as a prolarva, a relatively inactive stage from which it quickly moults into the more active nymphal form. The general body plan is similar to that of an adult, but the nymph lacks wings and reproductive organs. The lower jaw has a huge, extensible labium, armed with hooks and spines, which is used for catching prey. This labium is folded under the body at rest and struck out at great speed by hydraulic pressure created by the abdominal muscles. Whereas damselfly nymphs have three feathery external gills, dragonfly nymphs have internal gills, located around the fourth and fifth abdominal segments. Water is pumped in and out of the abdomen through an opening at the tip. The naiads of some clubtails (Gomphidae) that burrow into the sediment, have a snorkel-like tube at the end of the abdomen enabling them to draw in clean water while they are buried in mud. Naiads can forcefully expel a jet of water to propel themselves with great rapidity.
Colouration
Many adult dragonflies have brilliant iridescent or metallic colours produced by structural colouration, making them conspicuous in flight. Their overall colouration is often a combination of yellow, red, brown, and black pigments, with structural colours. Blues are typically created by microstructures in the cuticle that reflect blue light. Greens often combine a structural blue with a yellow pigment. Freshly emerged adults, known as tenerals, are often pale-coloured and obtain their typical colours after a few days, some have their bodies covered with a pale blue, waxy powderiness called pruinosity; it wears off when scraped during mating, leaving darker areas.
Some dragonflies, such as the green darner, Anax junius, have a noniridescent blue that is produced structurally by scatter from arrays of tiny spheres in the endoplasmic reticulum of epidermal cells underneath the cuticle.
The wings of dragonflies are generally clear, apart from the dark veins and pterostigmata. In the chasers (Libellulidae), however, many genera have areas of colour on the wings: for example, groundlings (Brachythemis) have brown bands on all four wings, while some scarlets (Crocothemis) and dropwings (Trithemis) have bright orange patches at the wing bases. Some aeshnids such as the brown hawker (Aeshna grandis) have translucent, pale yellow wings.
Dragonfly nymphs are usually a well-camouflaged blend of dull brown, green, and grey.
Biology
Ecology
Dragonflies and damselflies are predatory both in the aquatic nymphal and adult stages. Nymphs feed on a range of freshwater invertebrates and larger ones can prey on tadpoles and small fish. Adults capture insect prey in the air, making use of their acute vision and highly controlled flight. The mating system of dragonflies is complex, and they are among the few insect groups that have a system of indirect sperm transfer along with sperm storage, delayed fertilization, and sperm competition.
Adult males vigorously defend territories near water; these areas provide suitable habitat for the nymphs to develop, and for females to lay their eggs. Swarms of feeding adults aggregate to prey on swarming prey such as emerging flying ants or termites.
Dragonflies as a group occupy a considerable variety of habitats, but many species, and some families, have their own specific environmental requirements. Some species prefer flowing waters, while others prefer standing water. For example, the Gomphidae (clubtails) live in running water, and the Libellulidae (skimmers) live in still water. Some species live in temporary water pools and are capable of tolerating changes in water level, desiccation, and the resulting variations in temperature, but some genera such as Sympetrum (darters) have eggs and nymphs that can resist drought and are stimulated to grow rapidly in warm, shallow pools, also often benefiting from the absence of predators there. Vegetation and its characteristics including submerged, floating, emergent, or waterside are also important. Adults may require emergent or waterside plants to use as perches; others may need specific submerged or floating plants on which to lay eggs. Requirements may be highly specific, as in Aeshna viridis (green hawker), which lives in swamps with the water-soldier, Stratiotes aloides. The chemistry of the water, including its trophic status (degree of enrichment with nutrients) and pH can also affect its use by dragonflies. Most species need moderate conditions, not too eutrophic, not too acidic; a few species such as Sympetrum danae (black darter) and Libellula quadrimaculata (four-spotted chaser) prefer acidic waters such as peat bogs, while others such as Libellula fulva (scarce chaser) need slow-moving, eutrophic waters with reeds or similar waterside plants.
Behaviour
Many dragonflies, particularly males, are territorial. Some defend a territory against others of their own species, some against other species of dragonfly and a few against insects in unrelated groups. A particular perch may give a dragonfly a good view over an insect-rich feeding ground; males of many species such as the Pachydiplax longipennis (blue dasher) jostle other dragonflies to maintain the right to alight there. Defending a breeding territory is common among male dragonflies, especially in species that congregate around ponds. The territory contains desirable features such as a sunlit stretch of shallow water, a special plant species, or the preferred substrate for egg-laying. The territory may be small or large, depending on its quality, the time of day, and the number of competitors, and may be held for a few minutes or several hours. Dragonflies including Tramea lacerata (black saddlebags) may notice landmarks that assist in defining the boundaries of the territory. Landmarks may reduce the costs of territory establishment, or might serve as a spatial reference. Some dragonflies signal ownership with striking colours on the face, abdomen, legs, or wings. The Plathemis lydia (common whitetail) dashes towards an intruder holding its white abdomen aloft like a flag. Other dragonflies engage in aerial dogfights or high-speed chases. A female must mate with the territory holder before laying her eggs. There is also conflict between the males and females. Females may sometimes be harassed by males to the extent that it affects their normal activities including foraging and in some dimorphic species females have evolved multiple forms with some forms appearing deceptively like males. In some species females have evolved behavioural responses such as feigning death to escape the attention of males. Similarly, selection of habitat by adult dragonflies is not random, and terrestrial habitat patches may be held for up to 3 months. A species tightly linked to its birth site utilises a foraging area that is several orders of magnitude larger than the birth site.
Reproduction
Mating in dragonflies is a complex, precisely choreographed process. First, the male has to attract a female to his territory, continually driving off rival males. When he is ready to mate, he transfers a packet of sperm from his primary genital opening on segment 9, near the end of his abdomen, to his secondary genitalia on segments 2–3, near the base of his abdomen. The male then grasps the female by the head with the claspers at the end of his abdomen; the structure of the claspers varies between species, and may help to prevent interspecific mating. The pair flies in tandem with the male in front, typically perching on a twig or plant stem. The female then curls her abdomen downwards and forwards under her body to pick up the sperm from the male's secondary genitalia, while the male uses his "tail" claspers to grip the female behind the head: this distinctive posture is called the "heart" or "wheel"; the pair may also be described as being "in cop".
Egg-laying (ovipositing) involves not only the female darting over floating or waterside vegetation to deposit eggs on a suitable substrate, but also the male hovering above her or continuing to clasp her and flying in tandem. The male attempts to prevent rivals from removing his sperm and inserting their own, something made possible by delayed fertilisation and driven by sexual selection. If successful, a rival male uses his penis to compress or scrape out the sperm inserted previously; this activity takes up much of the time that a copulating pair remains in the heart posture. Flying in tandem has the advantage that less effort is needed by the female for flight and more can be expended on egg-laying, and when the female submerges to deposit eggs, the male may help to pull her out of the water.
Egg-laying takes two different forms depending on the species. The female in some families has a sharp-edged ovipositor with which she slits open a stem or leaf of a plant on or near the water, so she can push her eggs inside. In other families such as clubtails (Gomphidae), cruisers (Macromiidae), emeralds (Corduliidae), and skimmers (Libellulidae), the female lays eggs by tapping the surface of the water repeatedly with her abdomen, by shaking the eggs out of her abdomen as she flies along, or by placing the eggs on vegetation. In a few species, the eggs are laid on emergent plants above the water, and development is delayed until these have withered and become immersed.
Life cycle
Dragonflies are hemimetabolous insects; they do not have a pupal stage and undergo an incomplete metamorphosis with a series of nymphal stages from which the adult emerges. Eggs laid inside plant tissues are usually shaped like grains of rice, while other eggs are the size of a pinhead, ellipsoidal, or nearly spherical. A clutch may have as many as 1500 eggs, and they take about a week to hatch into aquatic nymphs or naiads which moult between six and 15 times (depending on species) as they grow. Most of a dragonfly's life is spent as a nymph, beneath the water's surface. The nymph extends its hinged labium (a toothed mouthpart similar to a lower mandible, which is sometimes termed as a "mask" as it is normally folded and held before the face) that can extend forward and retract rapidly to capture prey such as mosquito larvae, tadpoles, and small fish. They breathe through gills in their rectum, and can rapidly propel themselves by suddenly expelling water through the anus. Some naiads, such as the later stages of Antipodophlebia asthenes, hunt on land.
The nymph stage of dragonflies lasts up to five years in large species, and between two months and three years in smaller species. When the naiad is ready to metamorphose into an adult, it stops feeding and makes its way to the surface, generally at night. It remains stationary with its head out of the water, while its respiration system adapts to breathing air, then climbs up a reed or other emergent plant, and moults (ecdysis). Anchoring itself firmly in a vertical position with its claws, its skin begins to split at a weak spot behind the head. The adult dragonfly crawls out of its nymph skin, the exuvia, arching backwards when all but the tip of its abdomen is free, to allow its exoskeleton to harden. Curling back upwards, it completes its emergence, swallowing air, which plumps out its body, and pumping haemolymph into its wings, which causes them to expand to their full extent.
Dragonflies in temperate areas can be categorized into two groups, an early group and a later one. In any one area, individuals of a particular "spring species" emerge within a few days of each other. The springtime darner (Basiaeschna janata), for example, is suddenly very common in the spring, but disappears a few weeks later and is not seen again until the following year. By contrast, a "summer species" emerges over a period of weeks or months, later in the year. They may be seen on the wing for several months, but this may represent a whole series of individuals, with new adults hatching out as earlier ones complete their lifespans.
Sex ratios
The sex ratio of male to female dragonflies varies both temporally and spatially. Adult dragonflies have a high male-biased ratio at breeding habitats. The male-bias ratio has contributed partially to the females using different habitats to avoid male harassment. As seen in Hine's emerald dragonfly (Somatochlora hineana), male populations use wetland habitats, while females use dry meadows and marginal breeding habitats, only migrating to the wetlands to lay their eggs or to find mating partners. Unwanted mating is energetically costly for females because it affects the amount of time that they are able to spend foraging.
Flight
Dragonflies are powerful and agile fliers, capable of migrating across the sea, moving in any direction, and changing direction suddenly. In flight, the adult dragonfly can propel itself in six directions: upward, downward, forward, backward, to left and to right. They have four different styles of flight: A number of flying modes are used that include counter-stroking, with forewings beating 180° out of phase with the hindwings, is used for hovering and slow flight. This style is efficient and generates a large amount of lift; phased-stroking, with the hindwings beating 90° ahead of the forewings, is used for fast flight. This style creates more thrust, but less lift than counter-stroking; synchronised-stroking, with forewings and hindwings beating together, is used when changing direction rapidly, as it maximises thrust; and gliding, with the wings held out, is used in three situations: free gliding, for a few seconds in between bursts of powered flight; gliding in the updraft at the crest of a hill, effectively hovering by falling at the same speed as the updraft; and in certain dragonflies such as darters, when "in cop" with a male, the female sometimes simply glides while the male pulls the pair along by beating his wings.
The wings are powered directly, unlike most families of insects, with the flight muscles attached to the wing bases. Dragonflies have a high power/weight ratio, and have been documented accelerating at 4 G linearly and 9 G in sharp turns while pursuing prey.
Dragonflies generate lift in at least four ways at different times, including classical lift like an aircraft wing; supercritical lift with the wing above the critical angle, generating high lift and using very short strokes to avoid stalling; and creating and shedding vortices. Some families appear to use special mechanisms, as for example the Libellulidae which take off rapidly, their wings beginning pointed far forward and twisted almost vertically. Dragonfly wings behave highly dynamically during flight, flexing and twisting during each beat. Among the variables are wing curvature, length and speed of stroke, angle of attack, forward/back position of wing, and phase relative to the other wings.
Flight speed
Old and unreliable claims are made that dragonflies such as the southern giant darner can fly up to 97 km/h (60 mph). However, the greatest reliable flight speed records are for other types of insects. In general, large dragonflies like the hawkers have a maximum speed of 36–54 km/h (22–34 mph) with average cruising speed of about 16 km/h (9.9 mph). Dragonflies can travel at 100 body-lengths per second in forward flight, and three lengths per second backwards.
Motion camouflage
n high-speed territorial battles between male Australian emperors (Hemianax papuensis), the fighting dragonflies adjust their flight paths to appear stationary to their rivals, minimizing the chance of being detected as they approach.[a] To achieve the effect, the attacking dragonfly flies towards his rival, choosing his path to remain on a line between the rival and the start of his attack path. The attacker thus looms larger as he closes on the rival, but does not otherwise appear to move. Researchers found that six of 15 encounters involved motion camouflage.
Temperature control
The flight muscles need to be kept at a suitable temperature for the dragonfly to be able to fly. Being cold-blooded, they can raise their temperature by basking in the sun. Early in the morning, they may choose to perch in a vertical position with the wings outstretched, while in the middle of the day, a horizontal stance may be chosen. Another method of warming up used by some larger dragonflies is wing-whirring, a rapid vibration of the wings that causes heat to be generated in the flight muscles. The green darner (Anax junius) is known for its long-distance migrations, and often resorts to wing-whirring before dawn to enable it to make an early start.
Becoming too hot is another hazard, and a sunny or shady position for perching can be selected according to the ambient temperature. Some species have dark patches on the wings which can provide shade for the body, and a few use the obelisk posture to avoid overheating. This behaviour involves doing a "handstand", perching with the body raised and the abdomen pointing towards the sun, thus minimising the amount of solar radiation received. On a hot day, dragonflies sometimes adjust their body temperature by skimming over a water surface and briefly touching it, often three times in quick succession. This may also help to avoid desiccation.
Feeding
Adult dragonflies hunt on the wing using their exceptionally acute eyesight and strong, agile flight. They are almost exclusively carnivorous, eating a wide variety of insects ranging from small midges and mosquitoes to butterflies, moths, damselflies, and smaller dragonflies. A large prey item is subdued by being bitten on the head and is carried by the legs to a perch. Here, the wings are discarded and the prey usually ingested head first. A dragonfly may consume as much as a fifth of its body weight in prey per day. Dragonflies are also some of the insect world's most efficient hunters, catching up to 95% of the prey they pursue.
The nymphs are voracious predators, eating most living things that are smaller than they are. Their staple diet is mostly bloodworms and other insect larvae, but they also feed on tadpoles and small fish. A few species, especially those that live in temporary waters, are likely to leave the water to feed. Nymphs of Cordulegaster bidentata sometimes hunt small arthropods on the ground at night, while some species in the Anax genus have even been observed leaping out of the water to attack and kill full-grown tree frogs.
Eyesight
Dragonfly vision is thought to be like slow motion for humans. Dragonflies see faster than we do; they see around 200 images per second. A dragonfly can see in 360 degrees, and nearly 80 percent of the insect's brain is dedicated to its sight.
Predators
Although dragonflies are swift and agile fliers, some predators are fast enough to catch them. These include falcons such as the American kestrel, the merlin, and the hobby; nighthawks, swifts, flycatchers and swallows also take some adults; some species of wasps, too, prey on dragonflies, using them to provision their nests, laying an egg on each captured insect. In the water, various species of ducks and herons eat dragonfly nymphs and they are also preyed on by newts, frogs, fish, and water spiders. Amur falcons, which migrate over the Indian Ocean at a period that coincides with the migration of the globe skimmer dragonfly, Pantala flavescens, may actually be feeding on them while on the wing.
Parasites
Dragonflies are affected by three major groups of parasites: water mites, gregarine protozoa, and trematode flatworms (flukes). Water mites, Hydracarina, can kill smaller dragonfly nymphs, and may also be seen on adults. Gregarines infect the gut and may cause blockage and secondary infection. Trematodes are parasites of vertebrates such as frogs, with complex life cycles often involving a period as a stage called a cercaria in a secondary host, a snail. Dragonfly nymphs may swallow cercariae, or these may tunnel through a nymph's body wall; they then enter the gut and form a cyst or metacercaria, which remains in the nymph for the whole of its development. If the nymph is eaten by a frog, the amphibian becomes infected by the adult or fluke stage of the trematode.
Dragonflies and humans
Conservation
Most odonatologists live in temperate areas and the dragonflies of North America and Europe have been the subject of much research. However, the majority of species live in tropical areas and have been little studied. With the destruction of rainforest habitats, many of these species are in danger of becoming extinct before they have even been named. The greatest cause of decline is forest clearance with the consequent drying up of streams and pools which become clogged with silt. The damming of rivers for hydroelectric schemes and the drainage of low-lying land has reduced suitable habitat, as has pollution and the introduction of alien species.
In 1997, the International Union for Conservation of Nature set up a status survey and conservation action plan for dragonflies. This proposes the establishment of protected areas around the world and the management of these areas to provide suitable habitat for dragonflies. Outside these areas, encouragement should be given to modify forestry, agricultural, and industrial practices to enhance conservation. At the same time, more research into dragonflies needs to be done, consideration should be given to pollution control and the public should be educated about the importance of biodiversity.
Habitat degradation has reduced dragonfly populations across the world, for example in Japan. Over 60% of Japan's wetlands were lost in the 20th century, so its dragonflies now depend largely on rice fields, ponds, and creeks. Dragonflies feed on pest insects in rice, acting as a natural pest control. Dragonflies are steadily declining in Africa, and represent a conservation priority.
The dragonfly's long lifespan and low population density makes it vulnerable to disturbance, such as from collisions with vehicles on roads built near wetlands. Species that fly low and slow may be most at risk.
Dragonflies are attracted to shiny surfaces that produce polarization which they can mistake for water, and they have been known to aggregate close to polished gravestones, solar panels, automobiles, and other such structures on which they attempt to lay eggs. These can have a local impact on dragonfly populations; methods of reducing the attractiveness of structures such as solar panels are under experimentation.
In culture
A blue-glazed faience dragonfly amulet was found by Flinders Petrie at Lahun, from the Late Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt.
Many Native American tribes consider dragonflies to be medicine animals that had special powers. For example, the southwestern tribes, including the Pueblo, Hopi, and Zuni, associated dragonflies with transformation. They referred to dragonflies as "snake doctors" because they believed dragonflies followed snakes into the ground and healed them if they were injured. For the Navajo, dragonflies symbolize pure water. Often stylized in a double-barred cross design, dragonflies are a common motif in Zuni pottery, as well as Hopi rock art and Pueblo necklaces.: 20–26
As a seasonal symbol in Japan, the dragonflies are associated with season of autumn. In Japan, they are symbols of rebirth, courage, strength, and happiness. They are also depicted frequently in Japanese art and literature, especially haiku poetry. Japanese children catch large dragonflies as a game, using a hair with a small pebble tied to each end, which they throw into the air. The dragonfly mistakes the pebbles for prey, gets tangled in the hair, and is dragged to the ground by the weight.: 38
In Chinese culture, dragonflies symbolize both change and instability. They are also symbols in the Chinese practices of Feng Shui, where placements of dragonfly statues and artwork in parts of a home or office are believed to bring new insights and positive changes.
In both China and Japan, dragonflies have been used in traditional medicine. In Indonesia, adult dragonflies are caught on poles made sticky with birdlime, then fried in oil as a delicacy.
Images of dragonflies are common in Art Nouveau, especially in jewellery designs. They have also been used as a decorative motif on fabrics and home furnishings. Douglas, a British motorcycle manufacturer based in Bristol, named its innovatively designed postwar 350-cc flat-twin model the Dragonfly.
Among the classical names of Japan are Akitsukuni (秋津国), Akitsushima (秋津島), Toyo-akitsushima (豊秋津島). Akitsu is an old word for dragonfly, so one interpretation of Akitsushima is "Dragonfly Island". This is attributed to a legend in which Japan's mythical founder, Emperor Jimmu, was bitten by a mosquito, which was then eaten by a dragonfly.
In Europe, dragonflies have often been seen as sinister. Some English vernacular names, such as "horse-stinger", "devil's darning needle", and "ear cutter", link them with evil or injury. Swedish folklore holds that the devil uses dragonflies to weigh people's souls.: 25–27 The Norwegian name for dragonflies is Øyenstikker ("eye-poker"), and in Portugal, they are sometimes called tira-olhos ("eyes-snatcher"). They are often associated with snakes, as in the Welsh name gwas-y-neidr, "adder's servant". The Southern United States terms "snake doctor" and "snake feeder" refer to a folk belief that dragonflies catch insects for snakes or follow snakes around and stitch them back together if they are injured. Interestingly, the Hungarian name for dragonfly is szitakötő ("sieve-knitter").
The watercolourist Moses Harris (1731–1785), known for his The Aurelian or natural history of English insects (1766), published in 1780, the first scientific descriptions of several Odonata including the banded demoiselle, Calopteryx splendens. He was the first English artist to make illustrations of dragonflies accurate enough to be identified to species (Aeshna grandis at top left of plate illustrated), though his rough drawing of a nymph (at lower left) with the mask extended appears to be plagiarised.[b]
More recently, dragonfly watching has become popular in America as some birdwatchers seek new groups to observe.
In heraldry, like other winged insects, the dragonfly is typically depicted tergiant (with its back facing the viewer), with its head to chief.
In poetry and literature
Lafcadio Hearn wrote in his 1901 book A Japanese Miscellany that Japanese poets had created dragonfly haiku "almost as numerous as are the dragonflies themselves in the early autumn." The poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) wrote haiku such as "Crimson pepper pod / add two pairs of wings, and look / darting dragonfly", relating the autumn season to the dragonfly. Hori Bakusui (1718–1783) similarly wrote "Dyed he is with the / Colour of autumnal days, / O red dragonfly."
The poet Lord Tennyson, described a dragonfly splitting its old skin and emerging shining metallic blue like "sapphire mail" in his 1842 poem "The Two Voices", with the lines "An inner impulse rent the veil / Of his old husk: from head to tail / Came out clear plates of sapphire mail."
The novelist H. E. Bates described the rapid, agile flight of dragonflies in his 1937 nonfiction book Down the River:
I saw, once, an endless procession, just over an area of water-lilies, of small sapphire dragonflies, a continuous play of blue gauze over the snowy flowers above the sun-glassy water. It was all confined, in true dragonfly fashion, to one small space. It was a continuous turning and returning, an endless darting, poising, striking and hovering, so swift that it was often lost in sunlight.
In technology
A dragonfly has been genetically modified with light-sensitive "steering neurons" in its nerve cord to create a cyborg-like "DragonflEye". The neurons contain genes like those in the eye to make them sensitive to light. Miniature sensors, a computer chip and a solar panel were fitted in a "backpack" over the insect's thorax in front of its wings. Light is sent down flexible light-pipes named optrodes[c] from the backpack into the nerve cord to give steering commands to the insect. The result is a "micro-aerial vehicle that's smaller, lighter and stealthier than anything else that's manmade".
[Credit: en.wikipedia.org/]
La Rábida, Huelva (Spain).
ENGLISH
On the evening of August 3, 1492, Columbus departed from Palos with three ships; one larger carrack, Santa María, nicknamed Gallega (the Gallician), and two smaller caravels, Pinta (the Painted) and Santa Clara, nicknamed Niña (the Girl). (The ships were never officially named). They were property of Juan de la Cosa and the Pinzón brothers (Martin Alonzo and Vicente Yáñez), but the monarchs forced the Palos inhabitants to contribute to the expedition. Columbus first sailed to the Canary Islands, which was owned by Castile, where he restocked the provisions and made repairs, and on September 6, he started what turned out to be a five-week voyage across the ocean.
Land was sighted at 2 a.m. on October 12, 1492, by a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana (also known as Juan Rodríguez Bermejo) aboard Pinta. (Columbus would claim the prize.) Columbus called the island (in what is now The Bahamas) San Salvador, although the natives called it Guanahani. Exactly which island in the Bahamas this corresponds to is an unresolved topic; prime candidates are Samana Cay, Plana Cays, or San Salvador Island (named San Salvador in 1925 in the belief that it was Columbus's San Salvador). The indigenous people he encountered, the Lucayan, Taíno or Arawak, were peaceful and friendly. In his journal he wrote of them, "It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion." He also wrote of them, two days after landing, "I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased."
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#First_voyage
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CASTELLANO
Cristóbal Colón, en representación de los Reyes Católicos de España, realizó cuatro famosos viajes desde Europa a América en 1492, 1493, 1498 y 1502. En el primero de ellos llegó a América el 12 de octubre de 1492, a una isla de las Bahamas llamada Guanahani, cuya exacta localización aún se discute. En el tercer viaje llegó a territorio continental en la actual Venezuela.
El primer viaje de Colón se inició en Palos de la Frontera, el 3 de agosto de 1492. La escuadra colombina estaba formada por las carabelas Pinta, Niña y Santa María. Para el equipamiento de las naves fue decisiva la colaboración de los hermanos Pinzón, que participaron también en el viaje. Colón se dirigió hacia las Canarias y desde la isla de Gomera se lanzó a la travesía del Atlántico (6 de septiembre). El 12 de octubre llegó a la isla Guanahaní (Walting, en las Bahamas), a la que llamó San Salvador. Arribó después a la isla de Cuba, bautizada con el nombre de Juana, y posteriormente a La Española. El 25 de diciembre encalló la carabela Santa María y con sus restos construyó un fuerte llamado Navidad, en el que dejó una pequeña guarnición. Con las dos naves restantes, la Pinta y la Niña, emprendió el viaje de retorno (16 de enero de 1493). Durante la travesía las dos naves se separaron. Colón llegó a Palos el 15 de marzo y marchó a Barcelona para informar a los reyes de su descubrimiento.
Fuente: es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descubrimiento_de_Am%c3%a9rica
For Labor Day weekend, 1978, a college friend and I planned a three day trip to Buffalo, with the primary objective of seeing some of the remaining ex-Penn Central RSD5’s before they were retired. We arrived at the ex-NYC Frontier yard mid-afternoon and found all Conrail activity to be business as usual. Across town at Norfolk & Western’s Bison Yard, it was a different scene.
The Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks had been on strike against the N&W since July, and the other unions refused to cross the picket lines. This left management and non-union labor to run the N&W. The BRAC tried to strike neighboring lines, but each attempt was met with court injunctions. The dispute over the BRAC’s ability to picket other railroads ended up in the US Supreme Court, where on September 26 Chief Justice Warren Berger voided the injunctions, triggering a BRAC strike against 74 additional railroads. The next day, the Carter administration hosted a 24-hour negotiation. Still unresolved, President Carter ordered a 60-day cooling off period, and the strikers were ordered back to work on the N&W and the other 74 roads. During the cooling off period, the federal government mediated a permanent agreement, and the strike was over.
During the acrimonious strike, some vandalism was reported. Here an overturned boxcar is blocking two yard ladders, but I don’t know if the derailment was an act of vandalism, or if it occurred as a result of having inexperienced crews operating the railroad.
Master of the Pala Sforzesca (15th century) - Madonna Enthroned with Child, Doctors of the Church and the Family of Ludovico il Moro ("Pala Sforzesca") (1494-95) - Tempera and oil on panel 230 × 165 cm. - Brera Art Gallery, Milan
L’opera raffigura la famiglia di Ludovico il Moro inginocchiata davanti alla Vergine e ai santi Ambrogio, Gregorio Magno, Agostino e Gerolamo. Fu commissionata per la chiesa milanese di Sant’Ambrogio ad Nemus e, sulla base dei documenti d’archivio, fu eseguita nel corso del 1494. La rappresentazione qui allestita unisce all’espressione della devozione religiosa del committente la celebrazione del potere di quest’ultimo, giacché allude alla benevolenza divina nei suoi confronti e al futuro della sua dinastia, garantito dalla nascita di un erede. Quando commissionava la Pala Sforzesca, Ludovico il Moro tentava di ottenere dall’imperatore Massimiliano d’Asburgo la legalizzazione della propria signoria su Milano, esautorando alla morte di Gian Galeazzo (1494) il legittimo erede Francesco Maria Sforza. L’opera fu concepita, pertanto, come manifesto di propaganda politica, nel quale Ludovico si presentava immerso nello sfarzo del suo rango, protetto da sant’Ambrogio – che gli pone la mano sulla spalla – e accompagnato dalla moglie Beatrice e dagli eredi, uno dei quali, probabilmente, da identificare con un figlio nato fuori dal matrimonio. Per dare forma pittorica a questa fitta trama di messaggi Ludovico scelse un artista oggi ignoto e variamente identificato con uno dei seguaci lombardi di Leonardo, il quale allestì una sorta di compendio della cultura milanese del tempo, cronologicamente precoce ma stilisticamente irrisolto; nonostante il divario tra esito formale e significato dell’opera, questa affascina lo spettatore con lo straordinario impatto visivo dell’oro, delle perle e delle stoffe preziose.
The work depicts the family of Ludovico il Moro kneeling before the Virgin and Sts. Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Augustine and Jerome. It was commissioned for the Milanese church of Sant’Ambrogio ad Nemus and, on the basis of the documents in the archives, was executed over the course of 1494. The representation combines an expression of the client’s religious piety with a celebration of his power, as it alludes to an attitude of divine benevolence toward him and the future of his dynasty, guaranteed by the birth of an heir. At the time he commissioned the Sforza Altarpiece, Ludovico il Moro was trying to obtain a legitimization of his rule over Milan from Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, following his usurpation of the legitimate heir Francesco Maria Sforza on the death of Gian Galeazzo (1494). So the work was conceived as an operation of political propaganda, in which Ludovico was presented surrounded by the pomp of his rank, protected by St. Ambrose – who places his hand on his shoulder – and accompanied by his wife Beatrice and his heirs, one of whom is probably a child born out of wedlock. To give pictorial form to this complicated set of messages Ludovico chose an artist whose name is unknown today and has been variously identified with one of the Lombard followers of Leonardo. The result is a sort of compendium of the Milanese culture of the time, chronologically precocious but stylistically unresolved. Despite the discrepancy between the formal quality and the significance of the work, the extraordinary visual impact of the gold, the pearls and the precious fabrics is fascinating.
The future of the industry to which Burton owes it's very existence has never been more uncertain. A proposed takeover of Bass by Belgian firm Interbrew was blocked by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, and it's destiny remains unresolved at time of writing. The future of Marston's, now owned by Wolverhampton & Dudley, remains equally cloudy.
[IN ENGLISH, LOOK BELOW THE LINE]
Aquesta casa, la primera que ens trobem a Tor pujant des d'Alins, és Casa Sansa. Aquí fou mort en algun moment del juliol de 1995 en Josep Montané Baró, Sansa. A finals de mes trobaren el seu cadaver mort de feia dies. L'havien matat a cops i estrangulat amb un filferro. Tot i que un parell de sospitosos (Josep Mont i Marli Pinto) foren acusats un temps, despres s'arxivà el cas. Encara avui no està clar quí matà Sansa.
El poble de Tor, en el racó més perdut de tot el Pallars Sobirà, i de fet, de tot Catalunya, és un indret especial. Unic. Molts el coneixereu per la llegenda negra que té associada des de que el 1995 entrà per sorpresa a les noticies per l’assassinat, mai resolt, de Josep Montané, en Sansa. Tot plegat, per la propietat de la famosa Muntanya de Tor, un inmens i ferestec territori. Tant l’enigma del assassinat irresolt, com l’enfrontament entre dos personatges ja gairebé mítics, en Sansa i en Palanca (Jordi Riba), caps de les dues cases més riques de Tor, Casa Sansa i Casa Palanca, han donat diversos llibres i programes de TV. Notablement un 30 Minuts i el llibre que n’explica la realització, obres ambdós de Josep Porta. Us els recomano.
Però més enllà de tot això, Tor és un indret impresionantment bonic, encara verge i salvatge dins el Pirineu català (i segurament el poble a més alçada, quasi 1700 m.!). I encara afegeix força a aquest fet, el contrast amb Andorra, només a uns pocs quilometres però a tot un món de distancia. De fet, aquesta proximitat fronterera, el contrast urbanisme salvatge-natura verge, foren parts de l’explicació del gegantí merder d’interesos que es covà a Tor entre contrabandistes, neorurals, grups de poder, pirates inmobiliaris, advocats, etc. Penseu que al llibre de Porta, els protagonistes arriven a mencionar vincles amb ‘subjectes’ com Ruiz Mateos o bé Rodolfo Martín Villa!
Personalment, tinc el meu petit lligam personal amb Tor des que hi vaig passar l’agost del 1995, just 2 mesos després de l’assassinat d’en Sansa. De fet recordo com arribarem a parlar amb uns dels implicats en el cas, els ‘hippies’ d’en Sansa, que aleshores vivien a les barraques de Pleià, una mena d’assentament primitiu que aquell els havia permès. Nosaltres quatre arrivarem fent el turista des d’Andorra, amb un Land-Rover (benzina!!) vell que un amic mecanic havia restaurat i pintat de groc canari (a falta de groc “Camel”). Amb aquella Baluerna (el nom oficial que l’hi posarem) arrivarem a Pleià, on preguntarem pel camí cap a Tor, ja que la pluja s’havia emportat l’original, i acabarem baixant pel rec. En canvi, un cop a Tor mateix pararem entorn l’església i no hi varem veure ningú. En aquesta segona visita en solitari, vaig acabar esmorzant magníficament a Casa Sisqueta, l’unic establiment de Tor. I també em vaig topar amb un dels personatges que coneixereu llegint el llibre d’en Porta, en Lázaro Moreno.
ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28Alins%29
vallferreratourist.com/pobles-2/tor/
www.hotelbrases.com/blog/el-misterio-de-la-montana-de-tor...
No us perdeu el 30Minuts de TV3, “Tor, la Muntanya Maleïda”:
www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/programa/titol-video/video/1964...
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This is the first house of Tor, and the most famous. This is Casa Sansa. On the summer of 1995, here was murdered Josep Montané Baró, Sansa, just recently declared sole owner of all the mountain of Tor. His corpse was found days after the crime, with a wire arround the neck and the skull broken. Although there were several suspects (all of them could be labeled even "the usual suspects", you only have to watch the TV3 documentary that I link below) still today this crime is unresolved.
This is the most utterly lost village in Catalonia, Tor. The tiny village of Tor lays in a savage, narrow valley up in the Pallars mountains (Pyrenees). Yet, despite it’s remoteness, it’s located only kilometers away from extremely urban Andorra. This extreme contrast (Tor has only about 10 inhabitants IN SUMMER, and nobody in winter) it’s even more severe considering that in Tor there’s no electricity, no phone and even no mobile network coverage. That’s a real time-travel to early XX Century, and in Western Europe. Well, in the houses they have light and even satelite antennas, but thanks to generators. Anyway, Tor it’s a extremely beautiful and unspoilt place. Also it's one of the highest villages in the Pyrenees, at 1650 m, above sea level.
Yet it has a black legend, and at least 3 people have been murdered here in the last 40 years. All related to the ownership of the communal land of the mountain of Tor. The most famous victim was Josep Montané, known as Sansa, in june 1995. There are 2 powerful families in Tor, the Sansa and the Palanca houses. In the middle and late XX Century, the heads of these families were Josep Montané and Jordi Riba (Palanca). Montane in early 1995 achieved exclusive ownership of the valley, but was murdered months later. The murder has never been resolved. This generated several books and a TV documentary here in Catalonia, so tiny Tor achieved quite a fame. I visited Tor with some friends just 2 months later (mostly by chance), and I think we talked with some murder-related characters!
For more information about Tor:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor,_Pallars
vallferreratourist.com/en/pobles-2/tor/
An english site about the murders of Tor:
www.hotelbrases.com/blog/el-misterio-de-la-montana-de-tor...
There’s a splendid tv-documentary called “Tor, la muntanya maleïda” (Tor, the damned mountain). It’s in Catalan, but anyway you can take a look at the images and the people. Surely it has stuff for a movie:
www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/programa/titol-video/video/1964...
Successful single egg breeding - CHE offspring
Changeable Hawk-Eagle (Nisaetus cirrhatus)
The changeable hawk-eagle or crested hawk-eagle (Nisaetus cirrhatus) is a bird of prey species of the family Accipitridae. It was formerly placed in the genus Spizaetus, but studies pointed to the group being paraphyletic resulting in the Old World members being placed in Nisaetus (Hodgson, 1836) and separated from the New World species.
Changeable hawk-eagles breed in the Indian subcontinent, mainly in India and Sri Lanka, and from the southeast rim of the Himalaya across Southeast Asia to Indonesia and the Philippines. This is a bird occurring singly (outside mating season) in open woodland, although island forms prefer a higher tree density. It builds a stick nest in a tree and lays a single egg.
Description
The changeable hawk-eagle is a medium-large raptor at about 60–72 centimetres (24–28 in) in length with a 127–138 centimetres (50–54 in) wingspan, and a weight ranging from 1.2 to 1.9 kg.[3] It is a relatively slender forest eagle with some subspecies (especially N. c. limnaetus) being dimorphic giving the name "changeable". This and their complicated phylogeny further complicate precise identification.
Normally brown above, they have white below with barring on the undersides of the flight feathers and tail; black longitudinal streaks occur on the throat and chocolate streaks occur on the breast. Some subspecies have a crest of four feathers, but this is all but absent in others. The sexes are quite similar in their plumage, but males are about 15% smaller than females. The underparts and head of juveniles are whitish or buff with few dark streaks.
The wings are long and parallel-sided, and are held flat in flight, which helps to distinguish this species from the similar mountain hawk-eagle. In overhead flight, comparatively rounded wings (upturned at tip), longish tail, white body (spotted with brown) and grey underside of wings (streaked and spotted) are leading pointers.
Their call is a loud, high-pitched ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-kee, beginning short, rising in crescendo, and ending in a scream.
Ecology
Changeable hawk-eagles eat mammals, birds, and reptiles. They keep a sharp lookout perched bolt upright on a bough amongst the canopy foliage of some high tree standing near a forest clearing. There, they wait for junglefowl, pheasants, hares, and other small animals coming out into the open. The bird then swoops down forcefully, strikes, and bears the prey away in its talons.
Nesting
Season: December to April
Nest: a large stick platform lined with green leaves, high up in a forest tree
Eggs: a single one, greyish white, unmarked or with faint specks and blotches of light reddish at the broad end
Systematics
The Flores hawk-eagle has traditionally been treated as a subspecies of the changeable hawk-eagle, but it is now often treated as a separate species, N. floris.
Two distinct groups exist in the changeable hawk-eagle; one with crests and one without or with hardly visible crests. Dark morphs exist for some populations.
Changeable hawk-eagle
N. c. cirrhatus
- Gangetic plain southwards throughout India
- Crested, no dark morph
N. c. ceylanensis
- Sri Lanka (possibly also Travancore)
- Smaller than nominate, crest proportionally longer on average, apparently no dark morph
Crestless changeable hawk-eagle
N. c. limnaeetus
- Nepal, northeast India, via Burma and Malay Peninsula along Wallace Line to Philippines
- Much like nominate except crest, dimorphic, with the dark morph chocolate-brown all over, tail base might appear lighter in flight
N. c. andamanensis
- Andaman Islands
- Similar to N. c. limnaeetus, apparently no dark morph
N. c. vanheurni
- Simeulue Island
- Similar to N. c. limnaeetus, apparently no dark morph
Gamauf et al. (2005) analyzed mtDNA cytochrome b and control region sequence data of a considerable number of specimens of the crested hawk-eagle and some relatives. Despite the large sample, even the most conspicuous dichotomy - that between the crested and crestless groups - was not as well resolved as it might have been expected to be.
The three small-island taxa (N. c. andamanensis, N. c. vanheurni, and N. floris) also appear as monophyletic lineages. Their placement is even more unresolved, with N. floris being apparently a very ancient lineage. The other two seem quite certainly to derive from N. c. limnaeetus. The latter taxon has a confusing phylogeny. Different lineages exist that are apparently not stable in space and time, are best described as polytomy, from which the similar island taxa derive.
Obviously, N. c. limnaeetus does not represent a monophyletic lineage. Neither the biological nor the phylogenetic species concepts, nor phylogenetic systematics can be applied to satisfaction. The crested group apparently is close to becoming a distinct species. The island taxa derived from N. c. limnaeetus appear to have undergone founder effects, which has restricted their genetic diversity. In the continental population, genetic diversity is considerable, and the evolutionary pattern of the two studied genes did not agree, and neither did the origin of specimens show clear structures. N. c. limnaeetus thus is best considered a metapopulation.
Gamauf et al. (2005) therefore suggest the island taxa which are obviously at higher risk of extinction are, for conservation considered evolutionary significant units regardless of their systematic status. This case also demonstrates that a too-rigid interpretation of cladistics and the desire for monophyletic taxa, as well as universal application of single-species concept to all birds will undermine correct understanding of evolutionary relationships. It would even not be inconceivable to find mainland lineages to group closely with the western island taxa, if little genetic drift had occurred in the initial population. nonetheless, the divergence of this species' lineages seems to have taken place too recently to award them species status, as compared to the level of genetic divergence at which clades are usually considered distinct species.
N. c. limnaeetus appears for all that can be said with reasonable certainty basal pool of lineages in the crestless group that, despite not being monophyletic, should be considered a valid taxon as long as gene flow is possible through its range. In addition, as ancient DNA from museum specimens was used extensively, the possibility of ghost lineages must be considered. If it is assumed that all or most of the ancient lineages still exist today, considerable recombination must have taken place as the two genes' phylogenies do not agree much, indicating a healthy level of gene flow. Whether this still holds true today remains to be determined.
[Credit: en.wikipedia.org]
3rd in my series of phobias, This one was hard to do! The position i was in hurt almost as much as my legs down the toilet one on day 43. I had to clear out the cupboard look what was in there!!----> www.flickr.com/photos/ar_photography/3214680786/
also thank to KillxThexScenexStock for the background. I thought I got this idea out of my head but I remembered I'd seen something simular on love_Loren's photostream www.flickr.com/photos/loren_ashleigh/2781728483/#comment7...
Agoraphobia Signs And Symptoms:
Fear of being in a crowd, standing in line, riding in a car, bus, etc. Having imaginary "security area" where you feel safe. Anxiety increases, the further from that area you go. Feeling housebound.
Agoraphobia Causes:
Agoraphobia usually results from an unresolved panic disorder. Rather than deal with and manage the panic disorder, the agoraphobic just avoids the situations and locations where they had panic attacks.
Agoraphobia Treatment:
While there are medicines to reduce the anxiety symptoms, you should also try to discover and treat any underlying panic disorder. Make sure this treatment includes therapy to retrain your thought patterns and actions so, eventually, you won't need the drugs.
Agoraphobia Self Help:
Usually, by the time an anxiety disorder reaches the point of agoraphobia, self-help is difficult. You should seek qualified medical help for this condition.
Total Healing:
Health conditions can be frustrating and painful...sometimes even fatal. We both know there are no guaranteed cures or quick fixes, whether medicine, nutrition, herbs or anything else. Many illnesses are "incurable" from the medical standpoint.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Explore #422
I have taken many photos of the amazing new The Bow skyscraper in downtown Calgary, and posted a lot as well, but I have somehow never posted one from this side of it, the convex side where it bulges out rather than caves in!
This photo was taken last Friday on an overcast winter afternoon, although there was still plenty of magic hour light and the clouds made for cool reflections in the mirrored glass of the Bow!
I have included a photo in the comments section below of The Bow from its other side so you guys can get the whole view in one sitting.
Here is some info on this amazing structure:
From wikipedia - The Bow (skyscraper):
The Bow is a 158,000-square-metre (1.7 million sq ft) office building for the headquarters of EnCana Corporation and Cenovus Energy, which was spun off from Encana in late 2009. The skyscraper is being built in downtown Calgary, Alberta. The building is currently the tallest office tower in Canada outside Toronto, a title previously held by the Suncor Energy Centre's West tower, also in Calgary. The Bow is also considered the start of redevelopment in Calgary's Downtown East Village. It was completed in 2012.
The proposed highrise was announced in 2006 by Encana Corporation, North America's second largest natural gas producer. Early designs suggested that the project would consist of a complex of towers (perhaps two or more) over two blocks. The tallest of these towers could be 60-stories tall, which would make it taller than the current tallest tower in Western Canada, the Suncor Energy Centre (also in Calgary). Conflicting reports suggested that it would be one single tower around 70 stories tall and possibly over 1,000 feet (300 m), making it the tallest building in Canada. Other sources suggested a two tower complex spanning the entire surface of two blocks, with a second tower of 40 to 50 storeys connected at sixth storey level over 6th Avenue. Official statements declare that the tower will be 58 stories, or 247 metres (810 ft) tall.
The management company in charge of the project is Texas-based Matthews Southwest, with architectural services being furnished by UK-based Foster and Partners & Zeidler Partnership Architects of Calgary.
The Bow announced
The project filed for development permit application is called The Bow, for its crescent shape and the view of the Bow River. On October 12, 2006, Foster and Partners revealed the first designs for the new tower.
The project will eventually house two separate companies both equally occupying the space. Encana Natural Gas with over 3,000 Calgary-based employees and Cenovus Energy's more than 3,600 Calgary based staff. Both companies are presently located at multiple sites throughout the downtown core. With an estimated 158,000-square-metre total office space, the complex is expected to be the city's largest. The towers will be Canada's tallest-built since Toronto's Brookfield Place, completed as Canada Trust Tower in 1990. Construction costs are estimated to reach $1.4 billion. Construction started in June 2007, and is expected to be completed by 2012. The tower was lowered down to 236 m due to shadowing concerns. When the tower is completed it will become the 149th tallest building in the world.
On February 9, 2007, EnCana sold The Bow office project assets to H&R Real Estate Investment Trust for $70 million, while signing a 25-year tenant lease agreement that would start after the project's completion in 2011.
In late June 2007, the company announced that the Portrait Gallery of Canada would not be moving from Ottawa into the Bow.
Construction
Groundbreaking took place on June 13, 2007, with work starting on both sides of 6th Avenue S between Centre Street and 1st Street E. Sixth Avenue is being excavated, after closure of the block (August 21, 2007) and the six level underground parkade will be constructed on a two block area, on both north and south side of 6th Avenue.
A neighbouring historic building - The York Hotel, that was built from 1929 through 1930 using the Edwardian Commercial Architectural style was demolished to make room for the new building. Because of the historical significance of the York Hotel it was important to save as much as reasonable to incorporate into the new building "The Bow". Between 70 to 80 per cent of the bricks have been saved and will be used to reconstruct two of the hotel’s exterior walls. The brown brick originally supplied by Clayburn Brick in Abbotsford and the cast-in-concrete friezes have been removed, numbered and graphed to show the original location the brick and friezes will be put on the new building in the original locations. The remainder of the building was demolished ahead of schedule by Calgary based demolition and environmental contactor Hazco. A large crane was used to lift an excavator on to the roof of the York and it was used to demolish the building floor by floor.
The concrete foundation was continuously poured over 36 hours on May 11 and 12, 2008, being the largest of its kind in Canada, and third largest in the world after the Howard Hughes Center in Los Angeles and the Sama Tower (Al Durrah Tower) in Dubai. Some 14,000 cubic metres (18,000 cu yd) of concrete filled the 3,000-square-metre (30,000 sq ft) foundation.
Erection of the above ground steel superstructure began in October 2008 with the installation of the first of two Favelle Favco heavy lift tower cranes.
Construction was briefly halted in December 2008 due to a $400 million shortage of financing needed to finish the job. The project continues to move forward, despite the unresolved financing issues. In April 2009, a secondary tower in the project, the 200,000-square-foot (19,000 m2) building planned for a block south of the main tower, was put on hold for at least two years. The main tower, however, is set to continue, having secured the remaining $475 million required for completion of the structure.
On July 8, 2010, the Bow surpassed Suncor Energy Centre as Calgary's highest building. The 215 metres (705 ft) tall Suncor Energy Centre was the highest building in Calgary since 1984. The addition of a steel girder, part of floors 55 to 57, raised the Bow tower to 218 metres (715 ft).
Hope you all had a great weekend, my friends, and all the best in the upcoming week!
Pour les passionnés de Mars : on y découvre les projets de la NASA sur la planète rouge, et on peut tester ses compétences d’explorateur (petit quizz : Il faudrait plus de six Mars pour remplir le volume de la Terre, si vous pesiez 100 livres sur Terre, vous ne pèseriez que 38 livres sur Mars, une année sur Mars est presque deux fois plus longue qu'une année sur Terre). L'attraction, qui utilise des projections vidéo à grande échelle, des expositions dimensionnelles et des expériences interactives, est conçue pour plonger les visiteurs dans l'aventure et les défis non résolus de l'exploration spatiale future. L'exposition comprend des simulateurs de fixation orbitale et d'atterrissage lunaire, un modèle de développement complet pour un véhicule d'équipage, un modèle de véhicule d'exploration spatiale et des modèles de la famille de rover Mars: Curiosity , Spirit , Opportunity et Sojourner .
For fans of Mars: we discover the projects of NASA on the red planet, and we can test his skills as an explorer (small quiz: It would take more than six March to fill the volume of the Earth, if you weighed 100 books on Earth, you would only weigh 38 pounds on Mars, a year on Mars is almost twice as long as a year on Earth). The attraction, which uses large-scale video projections, dimensional displays and interactive experiences, is designed to immerse visitors in the adventure and unresolved challenges of future space exploration. The exhibition includes orbital and lunar landing simulators, a complete development model for a crew vehicle, a space exploration vehicle model and models from the Mars rover family: Curiosity, Spirit, Opportunity and Sojourner.
'Twas in another lifetime one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
And if I pass this way again you can rest assured
I'll always do my best for her on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
Not a word was spoke between us there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
I was burned out from exhaustion buried in the hail
Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail
Hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
Now there's a wall between us something there's been lost
I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed
Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker he blows a futile horn
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
I've heard newborn babies wailing like a mourning dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love
Do I understand your question man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
In a little hilltop village they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation and she gave me a lethal dose
I offered up my innocence, I got repaid with scorn
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
Well I'm living in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor's edge someday I'll make it mine
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
Shelter From The Storm - Bob Dylan
At the European Parliament’s Office in Greece Demanding Answers.
Despite nearly a decade of protest and continued communications with all the so-called concerned authorities whether in Greece or in Europe, my dire situation outside the UNHCR office where they have deliberately forced me into starvation since 2020, still continues to remain unresolved.
However, their Nazism and baseless hostility has neither entirely broken my spirit, nor has it stopped me from seeking answers to this ongoing hostage-taking and my complete deprivation in this vile place.
As such on March 02nd, 2023, I went to the office of the European Parliament’s Representation in Greece to demand answers there.
Three major questions that need to be answered and everybody should ask are why they held me Hostage in Greece and won’t let me go, what is their end game and agenda and what is the solution to this problem?
See the videos and read in-depth details about this here: 👇
Please sign the Petition now and Donate if you can.
Thank you in advance for your solidarity and support.🙏🆘💔
#HumanRights #Justice #Freedom #Immigration #Refugees #Politics #Democracy #Petition #Crowdfunding #Philanthropy #Humanity #Help #HelpingOthers #Europe #European #EuropeanParliament #Greece #Athens #UnitedNations #UNHCR #OHCHR #AnwarNillufary #Hostage #HostageOfEurope
"The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of their brazen bells: _et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam:_ the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs."
'Ulysses', Chapter 1: 'Telemachus', P.20 (1922 Text), James Joyce
Seven: I am much reenergised by these brief extracts. Realistically (when was I ever - doing this is proof enough) I will never get to return to Ulysses - the pile is too high. But it occurred to me that you and I were students when the ideas of Freud, Jung and Neitzsche were commonplace even if only by cultural osmosis, in a way that postmodernism was misused to render unnecessary - bigoted old white men, death of the author, et cetera. But despite what might be the neo-xenophobia of thought, where exploration is limited to the proscribed cell one occupies, policed with all the revisionist vigour of Maoism, youth will still out. I am confident that a young person could sense the depth of thought behind your work by its very visual qualities. I am confident that that your writing would further impel them towards the cave of imagined delights. (I am delighted also by the Duchampian spiral of that shirt button which reminds me of an unresolved image I must dig out...
Ruin: I am fond of the extracts from Joyce, in small bites they are wonderfully digestible. I keep finding more. I like weaving you into the story too, here as 'Seven'. The whole idea of moving over from Flickr is to do a sort of distillation, un-crowding them, focussing more.
This new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features Herbig-Haro 211 (HH 211), a bipolar jet travelling through interstellar space at supersonic speeds. At roughly 1,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus, the object is one of the youngest and nearest protostellar outflows, making it an ideal target for Webb.
Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, and are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shockwaves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. This spectacular image of HH 211 reveals an outflow from a Class 0 protostar, an infantile analogue of our Sun when it was no more than a few tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 8% of the present-day Sun (it will eventually grow into a star like the Sun).
Infrared imaging is powerful in studying newborn stars and their outflows, because such stars are invariably still embedded within the gas from the molecular cloud in which they formed. The infrared emission of the star’s outflows penetrates the obscuring gas and dust, making a Herbig-Haro object like HH 211 ideal for observation with Webb’s sensitive infrared instruments. Molecules excited by the turbulent conditions, including molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide, emit infrared light that Webb can collect to map out the structure of the outflows.
The image showcases a series of bow shocks to the southeast (lower-left) and northwest (upper-right) as well as the narrow bipolar jet that powers them. Webb reveals this scene in unprecedented detail — roughly 5 to 10 times higher spatial resolution than any previous images of HH 211. The inner jet is seen to “wiggle” with mirror symmetry on either side of the central protostar. This is in agreement with observations on smaller scales and suggests that the protostar may in fact be an unresolved binary star.
Earlier observations of HH 211 with ground-based telescopes revealed giant bow shocks moving away from us (northwest) and moving towards us (southeast) and cavity-like structures in shocked hydrogen and carbon monoxide respectively, as well as a knotty and wiggling bipolar jet in silicon monoxide. Researchers have used these new observations to determine that the object’s outflow is relatively slow in comparison to more evolved protostars with similar types of outflows.
The team measured the velocities of the innermost outflow structures to be roughly 80 to 100 kilometres per second. However, the difference in velocity between these sections of the outflow and the leading material that they’re colliding with — the velocity of the shockwave — is much smaller. The researchers concluded that outflows from the youngest stars, like that in the center of HH 211, are mostly made up of molecules, because the comparatively low shock wave velocities are not energetic enough to break the molecules apart into simpler atoms and ions.
[Image description: At the centre is a thin horizontal multi-coloured cloud tilted from bottom left to top right. At its centre is a dark brown cloud from which both outflows are spewing from. These outflows transition from colours of yellow/orange, to a light blue region, with prominent light pink features in the outer regions.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)
The old paddle that's hanging from the roof over the porch says "Seaview Play." It's hardly self explanatory. When I searched that term I came up empty handed. Since I can't approach the history of this charming house from that perspective, I'll provide a comprehensive history of the Long Beach Peninsula instead.
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Long Beach — Thumbnail History
By Jennifer Ott Posted 9/29/2010
HistoryLink.org Essay 9596
Long Beach, in Pacific County, one of Washington's oldest seaside resorts, has drawn visitors, first from Oregon and later from all over the Northwest, to its 28 miles of open beach, clam digging grounds, and town full of attractions, for more than a hundred years.
Hemmed in by hills and water, early visitors had to travel there via sternwheelers and stage coach, and later rail, until the 1920s when roads connected the town to Washington's interior.
Long Beach began as a resort community for wealthy Portlanders. Once Oregon's coastal resort towns began to develop, more visitors from Washington residents began to flock to its beaches.
After declines suffered in the 1980s following the near-failure of razor clam and salmon fisheries and the 1979 energy crisis, Long Beach has shifted its focus to the spectacular local environment and the community's unique history to attract visitors.
A Peninsula and its First People
Pacific County's Long Beach Peninsula extends like a finger between Willapa Bay and the Pacific Ocean, just north of the Columbia River, in the southwest corner of the state. Sediment brought to the ocean by the Columbia River formed the peninsula, which is also known as a bay mouth bar. It was most likely formed at the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago. Over time plants took root, bogs formed in the lower areas, and forest grew on drier ground.
Chinook Indians lived along the Columbia River and around Willapa Bay. They used the ocean side of the peninsula as a highway to travel between villages on the river and villages on the bay side of the peninsula. The hard sands on the beach provided a smooth, unimpeded path for the entire 28-mile length of the peninsula.
The Chinook had been trade intermediaries between tribes from the north and tribes farther inland on the Columbia. When European and American traders began visiting the North Pacific Coast's rivers in search of otter and beaver pelts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Chinooks' adeptness at trading stymied the traders' efforts to bargain prices down to a pittance.
Fur traders did not visit the Long Beach Peninsula because it had few of the pelt-bearing mammals they sought, but other traders would later come to the Chinook seeking to trade for wild cranberries, a delicious source of scarce vitamin C, beginning in 1847. After 1852 traders from San Francisco came annually to trade for the berries in the fall.
This sort of trade fit into the Chinooks' annual cycle of gathering and hunting. They already gathered berries to dry and store them for the winter. The Chinook moved around the Lower Columbia River and Willapa Bay with the seasons. Though they had permanent villages, they also went to temporary camps and villages according to when the different resources, such as salmon, camas bulbs, clams, oysters, or berries were available.
None of their settlements were located on the ocean side of the peninsula. This may have been because of its exposure to the rough weather coming off the open ocean. Willapa Bay and the Columbia River offered a plethora of natural resources in more sheltered environments.
William Clark (1770-1838), one of the captains of the Corps of Discovery, traversed the peninsula in 1805, walking up the beach to where Long Beach is today. In his journal he recorded carving his name and the date in a tree. Years later that tree was removed and today it is estimated that the tree was located between today's Chautauqua Lodge and The Breakers condominiums.
Besides the traders coming for pelts and cranberries, very few white Americans came to the Long Beach area until the 1860s when farmers began to claim homesteads.
The Chinook had agreed to cede their lands to the Americans in a treaty made with Superintendent of Indian Affairs Anson Dart (1797-1879) at Tansy Point (across Youngs Bay from today's Astoria) in 1851.
Unfortunately, Congress did not ratify the treaty, which left the Chinook without a treaty and without a reservation. Some members of the tribe moved onto the Quinault Reservation and others onto the Shoalwater Bay Tribes Reservation. Some remained on their lands on the river and the bay. Lacking a treaty, the Chinook have also had to petition the government for recognition. They received it briefly in 2000, but it was rescinded shortly afterward. The issue remains unresolved in 2010.
Stage Coach and Steamer
In 1870 Jonathan Stout (1820-1890) began stage service between Ilwaco and the Oysterville, then the county seat. At that time the beach was nearly a quarter of a mile closer to the future Long Beach townsite than it is today. The north jetty of the Columbia River has caused sand to build up on the peninsula, significantly widening it.
The stage followed a schedule determined by the tide. After driving a few miles on planks on the Indian trail that led through the woods just north of Ilwaco, the stage would cross the beach's dry sand and roll smoothly and swiftly along the wet sand until it was even with Oysterville, at which point it would leave the beach and travel overland to the bay.
Not long after, in 1872, Lewis Loomis (1831-1913) opened hotels where Seaview is today and at Nahcotta, south of Oysterville, on Willapa Bay. Nahcotta had become a landing place for steamers on the bay because extensive shallow water restricted boats' movements in the bay and the channel on the bay's western side approached the shore at its closest point just off Nahcotta.
In 1875 Loomis joined with Astoria ship captain J. H. D. Gray (b. 1839), Portland transportation company owner Jacob Kamm (ca. 1825-1912), and Oysterville farmer John R. Goulter (1840-1921) to form the Ilwaco Navigation Company. They had a steamship, the General Canby, built at South Bend and used it to ferry passengers and freight across the river between Astoria and Ilwaco. Travelers from Portland could take a steamship to Astoria and then travel across the river on the General Canby. In the 1880s the T.J. Potter and the Ocean Wave carried hundreds of Portlanders to Ilwaco on direct routes.
Portland residents came north to the Long Beach Peninsula because neither railroads nor roads had opened to the Oregon coast. For the same reason, very few Washington residents came to the peninsula. The Willapa Hills blocked most overland routes and the water route via the Chehalis River and Grays Harbor entailed considerable difficulty.
Loomis took over the stage route from Stout and also won the contract for carrying mail between Astoria and Olympia. Loomis loaded the mail onto the General Canby at Astoria, carried it on the stage between Ilwaco and Nahcotta, there it was loaded on another Ilwaco Navigation steamer to cross Willapa Bay. A second stage carried the mail overland to the Chehalis River where boats carried it up the Chehalis and then the Black River. A short portage took it to Olympia.
Seaside Tourists
Enough tourists from Portland sought overnight accommodations that hotels began to open on the peninsula. Stout opened Sea View House on property he had claimed under the Homestead Act and other property that he purchased outright. He platted the town of Seaview in 1881.
At about the same time, in 1880, Henry H. (1839-1924) and Nancy (1847-1902) Tinker moved with their three children to a tract of land just north of Seaview. Tinker platted the land and began to develop it as a tourist destination.
At that time, before the north jetty at the mouth of the Columbia was completed in 1916 and caused sand to build up on the peninsula's beaches, the high tide brought the surf up to where the grass-covered dunes lay now. The beach also had a natural formation called the Fishing Rocks that jutted into the water on the south side of town. The Fishing Rocks drew people for fishing and sightseeing. The rocks have since been covered in sand.
In 1883 the Tinkers built a hotel and some cottages on their land. They called the settlement Tinkertown and other hotels grew up around the Tinkers'. In the 1880s a Mr. Merritt from Portland began building the Driftwood Inn, entire hotel built entirely of driftwood gathered from the beach. Tom and Mary Lyniff bought the Driftwood Inn and finished building it. Others built cottages for their own use or to rent to tourists. By 1885, visitors, mostly from Portland, numbered about 5,000 annually.
Enter the Railroad
In the late 1880s and early 1890s, railroads began to enter the coastal areas of Washington and Oregon. The Northern Pacific Railway completed a line to Grays Harbor in 1892 and a line to South Bend in 1893. Likewise, in Oregon, the Astoria & South Coast Railroad was planned for the coast southward from Astoria. All these railroads threatened the Ilwaco Navigation Company's domination of the region's tourist market and its control of freight leaving Willapa Bay.
The Ilwaco Navigation Company decided to build a line from its dock at Ilwaco to the landing at Nahcotta. On July 1888, the first five miles of track reached Tinkertown. The railroad stopped at the Tinker Hotel, which lay so close to the tracks passengers could disembark on a plank laid between the train and the hotel's front door. In August the town's name changed to Long Beach, in reference to the peninsula-long stretch of sandy beach on which it fronted. In just a few months land values skyrocketed from $8 to $10 per acre to $200 per acre.
The railroad, run by the newly renamed Ilwaco Railroad and Steam Navigation Company, ran according to the tides, as the stage had, because the steamships at Ilwaco could only approach the docks at half-tide or higher. It also ran according to the day's distractions. As Lucile McDonald described it in her book, Coast Country: A History of Southwest Washington,
"The train stopped on the slightest excuse — to pick up a family carrying tired children, to shovel drifting sand from the curve at Oceanside, or to shoot a bear spied in a field. Once at Cranberry, passengers waited while the engine crew caught a runaway horse. Another time a woman dropped a ball of yarn out of a coach window; the conductor halted the train, got out, retrieved the wool, and rolled it" (100-101).
It gained nicknames, some friendly, some not, including the Clamshell Railroad and the Irregular Rambling and Never-Get-There Railroad.
In May 1889 the tracks reached Nahcotta. This new line benefited the tourists, the farmers, the oystermen, and the logging and milling companies because it carried both people and freight to the Columbia River. From there people could reach Portland and freight could continue on to various markets.
Becoming a Resort Town
By 1892 the Tinkers had renamed their hotel the Long Beach Hotel. A hundred cottages surrounded it. Just two years later 356 cottages filled Long Beach, along with a school, a Congregational Church, a grocery store, a butcher shop, a bakery, and vegetable wagons that delivered fresh produce.
The Long Beach Hotel burned in 1895 and the Tinkers built a new one in its place. Several other large resort hotels grew up in the area, making Long Beach the center of the summer resorts on the peninsula. The Portland Hotel, Newton's Inn, and the Shelbourne Inn all welcomed visitors. At the Long Beach Hotel in 1900, $9 to $12 per week included three meals per day. Bathrooms were shared.
Joseph M. Arthur, a Portland machinery dealer, built The Breakers Hotel in 1901. The 200-room hotel was built just north of Long Beach at what was then called Tioga, a stop on the Ilwaco railroad line. The hotel burned in 1904, was rebuilt in 1905, and served as one of the more elegant resorts on the peninsula. The original building was demolished in 1924, but other accommodations were built over the years, and The Breakers Resort remains a beach destination in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Between the 1880s and about 1910, Portland's wealthier residents filled the hotels and cottages at Long Beach. Often families would bring their household to the beach for the summer, with the working fathers commuting each weekend by boat and rail. The Saturday afternoon boat was known as the "husband's special" (Jessett, 15). For years The Oregonian ran a society page that regularly updated readers on the activities of Portlanders in Long Beach.
The peninsula offered a wide range of activities for visitors. First the Canaris Bathhouse, and after, 1912, the Crystal Waters Natatorium, featured indoor seawater pools for swimmers. Cool weather, even in the summer, and strong currents discouraged many from swimming in the surf.
Eleanor Barrows Bower recalled her fond memories of Crystal Waters in a 1967 reminiscence for the Sou'wester. Bower lived in Chinook as a child and remembered taking the Sunday excursion train to Long Beach. A whole host of exciting things awaited her there, but,
"Probably the most thrilling place of all, though, was the natatorium. That was a must as part of the festivities. The fact that the Pacific was a stone's throw away couldn't begin to compete with that swimming pool. We rented suits at twenty-five cents. Dingy gray dresses with baggy bloomers attached for the girls, and stretched-out jersey suits for the boys — they offered no allure to the pulchritude, but the fact we all looked the same gave 'Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's Lady' an equal chance. If you didn't swim in the pool, you could sit up in the balcony and call down caustic remarks to the swimmers below. You could always be sure of meeting everybody there some time before the day was over" (Bower, 29).
She always sent herself a postcard from Long Beach, even though she would beat it home, just for the happy memories it would bring.
Visitors could also rent skiffs on Willapa Bay, rent automobiles for $1 per hour, go to the movie theater, enjoy bonfires at the beach, or just sit on "Rubberneckers Row" and watch people go by. The rented cars could go on the beach once the Washington State Legislature designated the beach a public highway in 1901. The smooth, hard sand proved an enticing speedway, and, one can imagine, a thrill for anyone used to the bone-rattling rides on the region's many dirt roads.
Razor clams and salmon fishing drew thousands to Long Beach from the 1880s until the 1960s and 1970s, when both declined precipitously. Charter boats could be hired at Ilwaco and fishing derbies on the Columbia offered large prizes for the largest salmon caught. Whole families would go clam digging on the beach and then enjoy a clam bake.
After about 1915, Long Beach visitors' demographics began to change. Although many visitors still came from Portland, wealthier Portland families had begun to go to Oregon's ocean resorts, including Seaside and Gearhart. The Spokane, Portland & Seaside Railway carried passengers directly from Portland to Seaside, beginning in 1898. Also, increasing numbers of automobile owners drove to Astoria and took the train from there to Seaside. The fancier resort hotels in Long Beach closed down over the next few years, the Portland after a fire in 1914, and the Breakers in 1920.
During the 1910s and 1920s Long Beach residents began to develop new attractions. In 1920 a paper chase, a game also known as hare and hounds, was held. The game involved someone, the "hare," dropping a trail of paper pieces. The "hounds" would then try to catch the hare by following the paper trail through the woods and dunes and along the beach. In 1913 motorcycle races began on the beach, cheered on by many spectators.
Age of Auto and Motorcycle
Automobiles brought tremendous change to the peninsula. Early on they were just a novelty, but then they began to be a significant transportation mode for visitors coming to the peninsula and a source of entertainment once at the beach. In 1920 car drivers could cross the Columbia on the North Beach Auto Ferry, with a fare of $3 to $4, depending on the size of the car. In 1922 Washington visitors gained better access to Long Beach when a bridge spanning Bear Creek, at the southern end of Willapa Bay, opened. Cars could travel from the interior of the state via a highway over the Willapa Hills through Raymond and South Bend. The Union Pacific, the parent company of the Ilwaco railroad line after 1900, published advertisements touting the "World's Speedway" (Lloyd, Observing Our Peninsula's Past: The Age of Legends through 1931, 89).
Long Beach voted unanimously to incorporate in 1921. The local paper, The Chinook Observer, supported the move, arguing,
"In fact, if Long Beach is to take its rightful place as a leading summer resort it will have to widen its streets, and a municipal organization is necessary to force this to be done. In the height of the summer season the narrow main street there is as hard to navigate as the streets of Jerusalem" (Lloyd, Observing Our Peninsula's Past: The Age of Legends through 1931, 89).
The City of Long Beach's website describes the first mayor, Gilbert Tinker (1879-1959), son of Henry and Nancy, as a "really nice man and great steelhead fisherman" ("Long Beach Historical Facts"). The first council members were S. B. Hunt, C. E. Kinth, J. B. Mack, John B. Pape (ca. 1859-1935), and Joseph McKean (ca.1858-1925). Cars influenced other things about visits to the peninsula. Long Beach residents worked together in 1921 to develop a tract of oceanfront property into the Long Beach Auto Park. They cleared underbrush and small trees to provide places for car campers. In 1925 the city held its first organized auto race on the beach.
A pavilion built for dances proved to be a popular attraction for decades, from at least the 1920s until about the 1950s. The Annual Tourist Ball opened each summer season and the pavilion's manager worked with the Jantzen Beach Pavilion's manager to have the bands schedule for Jantzen Beach also play a night at Long Beach.
On September 10, 1930, the Ilwaco Railway and Navigation Company made its last run to Nahcotta. The Washington State Department of Transportation acquired the right-of-way and built a highway (now State Route 103) that followed the railroad's route. Several buildings had to be moved back from the street to make room for traffic. Many of the railroad's passenger cars were sold to area residents, some of whom converted them into cottages. The cars' plush red seats graced a number of residents' front porches.
In addition to cars and motorcycles, the beach also saw airplane traffic. During the summer of 1930 a pilot offered rides on his American Eagle biplane, using the beach as a landing strip. In late August a woman died while rescuing her niece from the airplane's propeller and the city banned airplanes from the beach. Since that left the peninsula without a landing strip, the incident spurred development of the Port of Ilwaco airfield, which was already under consideration.
Motorcycle races on the beach reached a new level of intensity when the Gypsy Tour arrived in Long Beach in 1938. This motorcycle rally featured races and skill competitions such as jumps and "plank rides," which required the rider to drive along a row of planks laid end to end on the beach. The 1940 rally had a top speed of 109 miles per hour. The Chinook Observer
estimated that two to three thousand motorcyclists came to the rally in 1949.
While the town certainly enjoyed the revenue generated by the annual rally, by the mid-1960s that did not outweigh the upheaval caused by what one resident called a "group of hoodlums" (Lloyd, Observing Our Peninsula's Past: The 1930s Through 1980, 119). The rallies ended in 1964.
The Dunes of Long Beach
All of the sands on the Long Beach Peninsula originated in the sediments brought downstream by the Columbia River. Over thousands of years currents carried the sediments north and south from the river's mouth and where they accumulated along the shore. After the Army Corps of Engineers built jetties at the mouth of the river between 1885 and 1916, the rates of accumulation increased and dunes built up more quickly along beaches to the north and south of the river mouth.
During the 1930s the dunes became a problem because they did not have enough vegetation to stabilize them, causing blowing sand to build up in streets and against buildings. Residents and officials of Clatsop County in the northwestern corner of Oregon developed a vegetation program with the Soil Conservation Service in 1935. One component of their project involved planting European dune grass to stabilize the dunes. This grass established quickly on the south side of the river and soon crossed to the north side. The grass ended the blowing sand problem in Long Beach, much to the relief of local residents.
Defense of the Estuary
During World War II, Long Beach's population doubled due to military activity at Fort Columbia, at the river's mouth and at Radar Ridge, near Naselle. Army and Air Force personnel manned the posts to defend the river and harbors from possible enemy attacks.
Today Fort Columbia is a state park and Radar Ridge is open to the public. Visitors make their way to the secluded hilltop for its spectacular views.
The Clams of Long Beach
Razor clam digging had long drawn visitors to Long Beach. In 1940 Long Beach organized the first of many Clam Festivals. Thousands of visitors dug clams, enjoyed clam chowder, and sampled the world's largest clam fritter made in the world's largest fry pan, borrowed from the city of Chehalis. Long Beach chef Wellington W. Marsh (1895-1977) made the world's largest clam fritter using 200 pounds of razor clams, 20 dozen eggs, 20 pounds each of flour, cracker meal, and corn meal, 10 gallons of milk, and 13 gallons of salad oil. A couple of girls helped grease the pan by "skating inside on large slabs of butter" ("Long Beach QR Code Smart Tour"). Cooks used garden hoes and two-foot-square shovels to maneuver the fritter in the pan.
The next year the Chamber of Commerce unveiled a new fry pan, manufacture by Northwest Copper and Sheet Metal Works of Portland. It was 14.6 feet long, including the handle. The pan has not been used for some time, but it still hangs in the middle of a park in Long Beach.
Just a few years later Washington state's Director of Fisheries warned that the coastal razor clam populations could not withstand the current level of harvest. In 1946, diggers had taken six million pounds of clams at Copalis, Grayland, and Long Beach.
Further concerns about clam populations led to a reduction in the limit from 36 to 24 per person per day. Fisheries officials worried particularly about the number of small clams taken from the sand and then thrown away. This waste significantly reduced the number of clams that remained for the next year's season.
The situation came to a head in the mid 1960s. At the urging of resort and business owners who feared the loss of an important tourist attraction if the decline was not stopped, the Department of Fisheries tried various measures to reduce the take of clams so the population could rebound. Over the next decade, they closed the season early, started it late, and limited digging hours. Digging razor clams remains a popular pastime on the Long Beach Peninsula, but the seasons have to be carefully managed and diggers' limits strictly enforced.
The Seashore Conservation Area
About this time a legal battle ensued over the accumulated, or accreted, lands on the ocean side of Long Beach. In 1966 the Washington Supreme Court ruled against a challenge by Ocean Park waterfront land owner Stella Hughes to Washington's shorelands ownership law. The court upheld the state's contention that landowners only held title to land east of the line of high tide as it existed at Washington's statehood in 1889, when the state gained title to the shorelands from the federal government. Hughes appealed the decision and in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that since landowners whose lands had been granted or sold by the federal government prior to statehood had been granted all the land east of the line of ordinary high tide, their property lines moved with that tide line as land accreted or eroded. On the Long Beach Peninsula this meant that landowners on beaches that had accreted, some significantly, owned the new land.
The State of Washington challenged the landowners' claims, many of who had filed quiet claims to establish their property lines following Hughes' filing of her case, on the basis of adverse possession. This meant that since the landowners had allowed public access for so many years, they had effectively given up their property rights. In June 1968 a large number of landowners, wanting to resolve the legal issue and ensure that the oceanfront remain free of development, granted the state deeds of dedication allowing for public access and use as long as it was limited to recreational use. These deeds encompass the lands about 100 feet east of the line of vegetation on the beach, an area that has been established as the Seashore Conservation Area. Every 10 years the line is resurveyed and adjusted to account for accretion or erosion.
Not all landowners filed deeds of dedication and other tracts along the beach belong to city and state governments. This has led to what some have called the "piano key" nature of landownership on the beach. Moving from north to south beach visitors cross a multitude of jurisdictions, complicating the State Parks' efforts to enforce beach rules and manage the landscape.
After a lull in development during the 1940s and 1950s, property values increased quickly in the 1960s and 1970s. A 1969 Oregonian article compared beachfront property values in the 1940s, about $17 per front foot, to those in 1969, about $250 per front foot. In 1978 the peninsula saw a 23.5 percent increase in real estate transactions. More areas of the peninsula saw development with time-share resorts, hotels, and homes.
Years of Difficulties
Although this development bolstered the peninsula's population and year-round economy to an extent, it did not shield the area from the effects of the gas crisis of 1979. The high energy prices that followed the Iranian Revolution in 1979 caused a 25 percent drop in tourism to Pacific County. Governor Dixy Lee Ray (1914-1994) declared the county and economic disaster area in 1980.
This difficulty compounded the drop in tourism experienced after the sharp decline in the salmon fishery in the mid-1970s. Salmon populations had dropped due to a variety of factors, including historic overharvest, upstream habitat loss, and climatic disruptions, such as El Nino.
Then, in 1974 federal judge George Boldt (1903-1984) issued his decision in the treaty rights case U.S. v. Washington. He ruled that Indian tribes that had signed treaties with the federal government retained rights to one-half of the harvestable fish available each year. Since the commercial and sports fishermen, including thousands who came to the peninsula for the fall and spring runs, were then taking more than half of the harvestable amount, fishing seasons were shortened to make more fish available to tribal fishermen.
New Attractions, New Possibilities
Faced with declining clam and salmon populations, and, thus, declining tourist activities, and the general troubles in the economy, Long Beach residents began to develop new attractions to attract tourism. In 1981 they held a kite festival, which has grown into the Washington State International Kite Festival held each August. The World Kite Museum sponsors events year-round, including the indoor Windless Kite Festival. Long Beach has since added the Blue Grass Festival and a sand castle competition to its annual calendar of events.
In 1990 the city built the Ocean Beach Boardwalk, a half-mile wooden walkway through the dunes. Kiosks and sculptures along its length explain local environment and history and commemorate Captain William Clark's visit to the beach in 1805.
The Boardwalk intersects with the Discovery Trail, an eight-mile walking trail connecting Long Beach with Ilwaco. It was developed beginning in 2002 in preparation for celebrations of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that were held in 2005.
In 1995 the City of Long Beach carried out a renovation of its downtown. They added vintage lighting, placed electrical lines underground, and re-landscaped public spaces. According to the city's website, this effort led to the development of design review standards that require an "early seashore architectural theme" ("Long Beach History").
A 2000 report produced by the City of Long Beach identified the peninsula's "open space, wild coastlines, untouched wildlife habitat," and its rich history as the key elements that set the region apart from other vacation destinations (City of Long Beach Dune Management Report, 3). The City's efforts to capitalize on its environmental and historical assets appear to be paying off. Between 1989 and 1995 the peninsula saw a 164 percent increase in tourism revenues. The rugged landscapes that discouraged tourists in the pre-automobile era are now the very things that will draw them to Long Beach.
When I was about ten I did see one of these in the Wild in Florida and it is a very wonderful memory of mine. I took this image of Wizard at the Busch Wildlife sanctuary in Jupiter Fl where he is recovering . These cats are very endangered
I am planning to make a series if their animals images to sell in their shop to raise money for the hospital.
The Florida panther is a highly threatened representative of cougar (Puma concolor) that lives in the low tides, palm forests and swamps of southern Florida in the United States. Its current taxonomic status (Puma concolor coryi or Puma concolor couguar) is unresolved. The Florida Panther is also known as the cougar, mountain lion, puma, and catamount.
Males weigh about 169 pounds and live within a range that includes the Big Cypress National Preserve, Everglades National Park, and the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.[4] This population, the only unequivocal cougar representative in the eastern United States, currently occupies only 5% of its historic range. The number of living Florida panthers is estimated to be between 80 and 100.[5]
In 1982, the Florida panther was chosen as the Florida state animal
Link to Busch
Scene of an unresolved crime, allegedly. 20 years ago, the landlady left the pub after her shift, took a taxi home, and was never seen again. They’ve dug up the pub, several gardens in Ely, but with no outcome.
Fall in New York is a time of contrasts, and surreal colors. Because of some currently unresolved issue in my camera, it is not recognizing lenses, defaulting to the slowest speeds. Trying to get it to behave I randomly changed many settings back and forth, and kept shooting.
The clouds were dark initially but brightened and filled with color as the sun slid down. You can make out the steamy fog starting to form on the Atlantic Ocean in the left of the photo, making the terrain in the distant hazier than straight ahead.
This accidental almost vintage toned shot just heightens the contrasts between the pinkish yellow sky from a sun bursting forth under clouds and the pale yellow green of reeds, drying grass and evergreens providing an interesting backdrop for the almost bleached looking boardwalk, like a path, a walkway to the Sun. Sun Way, Sunday.
Have a great week and rest of the year, my friends, as the nights get colder, and longer, as the clouds get darker, and lower, remember, the bright new sunshines, the brave new springs, like hope eternal, will be just around the calendar's corner.
© 2011 IMRAN
DSC_8329
Week 5 Landscapes (3) (1321 – 1325) 2/26 – 3/2/2023
ID 1323
Paul Cézanne French 1839-1906
Provençal Manor, about 1885
Oil on canvas.
This large house on a plain—its outbuildings and haystacks suggesting the prosperous farming operation of its owners—has a large chimney on one of the pavilions, perhaps from a bakery oven. The fields stretch out behind, rising on the sloping hills. Although the painting looks unfinished, it may have reached a point that satisfied Cézanne and beyond which he no longer wished to carry it. His definitions of “finished” and “Unfinished” were highly personal and specific to each of his works. To the eyes of the time, this was a disturbing lapse; to artists who came after, the areas of exposed canvas and unresolved spatial relationships were a revelation.
The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum
From the Placard: Princeton University Art Museum, NJ
During the last years of his life, Cézanne’s reputation had been steadily growing in Paris. He still kept his studio in the Villa des Arts and he was flattered that young painters had begun to admire his work, but he had no time for celebrity, preferring to return continually to Provence, where the motif that now most occupied him, the Mont Sainte Victoire, rose up before him, presenting a multitude of challenges. Cézanne remained humble in the face of his own work. As Rilke wrote, “it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one ‘judges’ it instead of saying it.” Here, he put his finger on the paradoxical quest for impersonality on which painters and poets of the early twentieth century, each in their different way, had begun. No serious painter who attended it was unaffected by the 1907 Cézanne exhibition; Picasso was no exception. Cézanne, he told the photographer Brassaï in later years, “was my one and only master! Don’t you think I’ve looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them. Cézanne! He was like the father of us all.”
Sue Roe: In Montmarte Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art, Penguin Press, 2016 pg. 206
Taken this afternoon while running some errands downtown, here is The Bow, Calgary's newest and tallest skyscraper. It is really quite an incredible building, especially when you are standing right beneath it!
Here is some info on this amazing structure:
From wikipedia - The Bow (skyscraper):
The Bow is a 158,000-square-metre (1.7 million sq ft) office building for the headquarters of EnCana Corporation and Cenovus Energy, which was spun off from Encana in late 2009. The skyscraper is being built in downtown Calgary, Alberta. The building is currently the tallest office tower in Canada outside Toronto, a title previously held by the Suncor Energy Centre's West tower, also in Calgary. The Bow is also considered the start of redevelopment in Calgary's Downtown East Village. It was completed in 2012.
The proposed highrise was announced in 2006 by Encana Corporation, North America's second largest natural gas producer. Early designs suggested that the project would consist of a complex of towers (perhaps two or more) over two blocks. The tallest of these towers could be 60-stories tall, which would make it taller than the current tallest tower in Western Canada, the Suncor Energy Centre (also in Calgary). Conflicting reports suggested that it would be one single tower around 70 stories tall and possibly over 1,000 feet (300 m), making it the tallest building in Canada. Other sources suggested a two tower complex spanning the entire surface of two blocks, with a second tower of 40 to 50 storeys connected at sixth storey level over 6th Avenue. Official statements declare that the tower will be 58 stories, or 247 metres (810 ft) tall.
The management company in charge of the project is Texas-based Matthews Southwest, with architectural services being furnished by UK-based Foster and Partners & Zeidler Partnership Architects of Calgary.
The Bow announced
The project filed for development permit application is called The Bow, for its crescent shape and the view of the Bow River. On October 12, 2006, Foster and Partners revealed the first designs for the new tower.
The project will eventually house two separate companies both equally occupying the space. Encana Natural Gas with over 3,000 Calgary-based employees and Cenovus Energy's more than 3,600 Calgary based staff. Both companies are presently located at multiple sites throughout the downtown core. With an estimated 158,000-square-metre total office space, the complex is expected to be the city's largest. The towers will be Canada's tallest-built since Toronto's Brookfield Place, completed as Canada Trust Tower in 1990. Construction costs are estimated to reach $1.4 billion. Construction started in June 2007, and is expected to be completed by 2012. The tower was lowered down to 236 m due to shadowing concerns. When the tower is completed it will become the 149th tallest building in the world.
On February 9, 2007, EnCana sold The Bow office project assets to H&R Real Estate Investment Trust for $70 million, while signing a 25-year tenant lease agreement that would start after the project's completion in 2011.
In late June 2007, the company announced that the Portrait Gallery of Canada would not be moving from Ottawa into the Bow.
Construction
Groundbreaking took place on June 13, 2007, with work starting on both sides of 6th Avenue S between Centre Street and 1st Street E. Sixth Avenue is being excavated, after closure of the block (August 21, 2007) and the six level underground parkade will be constructed on a two block area, on both north and south side of 6th Avenue.
A neighbouring historic building - The York Hotel, that was built from 1929 through 1930 using the Edwardian Commercial Architectural style was demolished to make room for the new building. Because of the historical significance of the York Hotel it was important to save as much as reasonable to incorporate into the new building "The Bow". Between 70 to 80 per cent of the bricks have been saved and will be used to reconstruct two of the hotel’s exterior walls. The brown brick originally supplied by Clayburn Brick in Abbotsford and the cast-in-concrete friezes have been removed, numbered and graphed to show the original location the brick and friezes will be put on the new building in the original locations. The remainder of the building was demolished ahead of schedule by Calgary based demolition and environmental contactor Hazco. A large crane was used to lift an excavator on to the roof of the York and it was used to demolish the building floor by floor.
The concrete foundation was continuously poured over 36 hours on May 11 and 12, 2008, being the largest of its kind in Canada, and third largest in the world after the Howard Hughes Center in Los Angeles and the Sama Tower (Al Durrah Tower) in Dubai. Some 14,000 cubic metres (18,000 cu yd) of concrete filled the 3,000-square-metre (30,000 sq ft) foundation.
Erection of the above ground steel superstructure began in October 2008 with the installation of the first of two Favelle Favco heavy lift tower cranes.
Construction was briefly halted in December 2008 due to a $400 million shortage of financing needed to finish the job. The project continues to move forward, despite the unresolved financing issues. In April 2009, a secondary tower in the project, the 200,000-square-foot (19,000 m2) building planned for a block south of the main tower, was put on hold for at least two years. The main tower, however, is set to continue, having secured the remaining $475 million required for completion of the structure.
On July 8, 2010, the Bow surpassed Suncor Energy Centre as Calgary's highest building. The 215 metres (705 ft) tall Suncor Energy Centre was the highest building in Calgary since 1984. The addition of a steel girder, part of floors 55 to 57, raised the Bow tower to 218 metres (715 ft).
Have an excellent evening, everyone!
L0076414 Symbolical alchemical drawing and text
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
Folio 74 from a Thesaurus of Alchemy, ca. 1725.
Latin title: 'THESAURUS thesaurorum et secretum secretissimum in quo omnia Mundi arcana latent, quodque Deus per ineffabilem suam misericordiam homini vili et abjecto peccatorique maximo revelavit. Lapidis Philosophorum verus processus'
Illustrated with numerous symbolic alchemical water-colour drawings, and figures of chemical and alchemical apparatus: a circular symbolic figure on p. 83 is by a different and later hand. The text and the legends to the illustrations are in Latin, but there are a few additions in verse in German. The title given above is that found on p. 7 at the beginning of the text. There is a title in an unresolved cypher on p. 1 of which the following only is en clair: 'S.N.D.B.L.E./..../Philoponus P...A...B...' Below the title to the second work (p. 93) is written 'Mei Magistri colendissimi piae memoriae'.
Ink and Watercolour
1725 Thesaurus thesaurorum.
Published: -
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Caroline Herschel, the sister to the famous astronomer Sir William Herschel, observed for the first time, on October 18, 1787, the large, rich open-cluster NGC 7789. Caroline was in her own-right a skilled observer and she “discovered” numerous deep-sky objects while she scanned the heavens. The most accepted English name for this cluster is Caroline’s Haystack. NGC 7789 ranks as one of her most impressive finds.
This dense open cluster contains over 580 stars ranging from magnitude 10 to 18 covering an area nearly as large as the full moon. In my 6-inch refractor the cluster is dotted with visible stars set against a background of unresolved stars. The stars on the edge of visibility fade in-and-out as I attempt to see details beyond the capability of my telescope. A virtual haystack of stars upon stars.
This is a cluster that shows best when the field-of-view is one-degree or more. This allows the thick star-cluster to be seen bordered by the interstellar space around it. Pleasing in binoculars and stunning through the telescope this is a fine object to visit when the Queen-of-Ethiopia (Cassiopeia) rides her throne high overhead.
To see additional astronomy drawings visit: www.orrastrodrawing.com
They were in a very privileged state. Of all the multitudes of spiritual beings in the universe, how many of them are able to have such a close and daily contact with the Creator God? Just very few — probably those associated with the throne itself such as the Cherubim and the twenty-four elders. But in the Garden were two human beings in the closest of association with God Himself. It must have been like a heaven on earth! And indeed, that’s just what it was, in a symbolic way. It was as if God’s celestial palace temporarily had come to earth. Even the Garden, the Cherubim of the Garden, the altar built by Cain and Abel, the land of Eden, and the land of Nod are all connected with the temple symbolism and are direct images of God’s heavenly abode. And for the brief period of time before the sin of Adam and Eve, "heaven” was really here on earth. In the Garden our first parents were able to talk face to face with God. But note an important point. They only had conversations with Him at certain times of the day. They did not see Him on all occasions. It was “in the cool of the day” that they came into “the presence of the Lord” (Genesis 3:8). The expressions “cool of the day” and “the presence of the Lord” were a part of temple language. 7 “The cool of the day” was the period when the Sun got lower in the sky and the cool sea breezes normally swept over the Palestinian region. This was the time of the evening sacrifice (1 Kings 18:36; Daniel 9:21) — about three in the afternoon. This was the time when the animals were being regularly sacrificed (and also in the morning about nine o’clock). At these times the people were then reckoned as being “in the presence of God” (2 Chronicles 20:19). As the Kingdom of Heaven is increasingly seen as a highly advanced extraterrestrial/alien civilization from a scientific perspective, so too will the collective ...... These so-called extraterrestrial "aliens" have been known to reveal that they originate from the Pleiades, Zeti Reticuli, Arcturus, Aldebaran and Sirius, among others.. Arian allegedly is the name of a planet that circles Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri), and that’s inhabited by a humanoid civilization. Arian would be the 4th planet circling Aldebaran. Older estimates situate it approx. 60 LY away, which is in line with the 59 LY Martin Wiesengrün mentions. Note that there are – thus far unconfirmed reports – of a possible brown dwarf companion, in which case Aldebaran would be a binary system. Allegedly the natives call their sun Raula. Arian’s orbit around it would take approx. 20.2 earth years to complete.Thus Jerusalem's holiest spot is a rock that the ancient Jews saw as the center of the Earth, the axis of the universe, the pivot that joined Heaven and Earth, and Earth with the ..... DOME: The dome over the Temple Mount, Old Jerusalem, and the entire city corresponds to Aldebaran, the alpha star and eye of the bull Taurus.
The term New Jerusalem occurs twice in the New Testament, in verses Rev 3:12 and Rev 21:2 of the Book of Revelation. A large portion of the final two chapters of Revelation deals with John of Patmos' vision of the New Jerusalem. He describes the New Jerusalem as "'the bride, the wife of the Lamb'", where the river of the Water of Life flows.After John witnesses the new heaven and a new earth "that no longer has any sea", an angel takes him "in the Spirit" to a vantage point on "a great and high mountain" to see the New Jerusalem's descent. The enormous city comes out of heaven down to the New Earth. John's elaborate description of the New Jerusalem retains many features of the Garden of Eden and the paradise garden, such as rivers, a square shape, a wall, and the Tree of Life.ccording to John, the New Jerusalem is "pure gold, like clear glass" and its "brilliance [is] like a very costly stone, as a stone of crystal-clear jasper." The street of the city is also made of "pure gold, like transparent glass". The base of the city is laid out in a square and surrounded by a wall made of jasper. It says in Revelation 21:16 that the height, length, and width are of equal dimensions - as it was with the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and First Temple - and they measure 12,000 furlongs which is approximately 1500.3 miles). John writes that the wall is 144 cubits, which is assumed to be the thickness since the length is mentioned previously. 144 cubits are about equal to 65 meters, or 72 yards. It is important to note that 12 is the square root of 144. The number 12 was very important to early Jews and Christians, representing the 12 tribes of Israel and 12 Apostles of Jesus Christ.Part of Jerusalem's significance and holiness to Muslims derives from its strong association with Abraham, David, Solomon, and Jesus. They are all regarded as Prophets of Islam and their stories are mentioned in the Qur'an. Jerusalem served as the first qibla (direction of prayer) for Muslims. Whilst Muslims were in Mecca, and also for 17–18 months in Medina, Muslims prayed towards Jerusalem. Early mosques in Medina were built to face Jerusalem. In 625, the qibla was changed to the Kaaba in Mecca.[21][Quran 2:142–151] After Muhammad, many of his Companions lived in Jerusalem, and upon their death they were buried there The four sides of the city represented the four cardinal directions (North, South, East, and West.) In this way, New Jerusalem was thought of as an inclusive place, with gates accepting all of the 12 tribes of Israel from all corners of the earth.There is no temple building in the New Jerusalem. God and the Lamb are the city's temple, since they are worshiped everywhere. Revelation 22 goes on to describe a river of the water of life that flows down the middle of the great street of the city from the Throne of God. The tree of life grows in the middle of this street and on either side, or in the middle of the street and on either side of the river. The tree bears twelve fruits, or kinds of fruits, and yields its fruit every month. According to John, "The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." This inclusion of the tree of life in the New Jerusalem harkens back to the Garden of Eden. The fruit the tree bears may be the fruit of life. John states that the New Jerusalem will be free of sin. The servants of God will have theosis, and "His name will be on their foreheads." Night will no longer fall, and the inhabitants of the city will "have need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light." John ends his account of the New Jerusalem by stressing its eternal nature: "And they shall reign forever and ever."There are twelve gates in the wall oriented to the compass with three each on the east, north, south, and west sides. There is an angel at each gate, or gatehouse. These gates are each made of a single pearl, giving them the name of the "pearly gates". The names of the twelve tribes of Israel are written on these gates. The (four) New Jerusalem (cardinal) gates may bear some relation to the gates mentioned in Enoch, Chapters 33 - 35, where the prophet reports (from four) "heavenly gates opening into heaven;" {(like) the extremities of the whole earth (reaching)}, "three (more gates) distinctly separated." [33, 3.] (All four of the gates) of the four major compass directions (are involved in the separating into 3 more gates, thus giving 12 gates total).[ref. Laurence translation, Book of Enoch.]The wall has twelve foundation stones, and on these are written the names of the Twelve Apostles. Revelation lacks a list of the names of the Twelve Apostles, and does not describe which name is inscribed on which foundation stone, or if all of the names are inscribed on all of the foundation stones, so that aspect of the arrangement is open to speculation. The layout of the precious stones is contested. All of the precious stones could adorn each foundation stone, either in layers or mixed together some other way, or just one unique type of stone could adorn each separate foundation stone. This latter possibility is favored by tradition, as each gate presumably stands on one foundation stone, and each of the twelve tribes has long been associated with a certain type of precious stone. These historical connections go back to the time of Temple worship, when the same kinds of stones were set in the golden Breastplate of the Ephod worn by the Kohen Gadol, and on the Ephod the names of each of the twelve tribes of Israel were inscribed on a particular type of stone.
It is interesting to note that the translated meanings of the various sorts of foundation stones have varied through the centuries: those in King James Version are differently named in later translations. "18: And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. 19: And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; 20: The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst." Rev 21:18-20 with the more modern, New Jerusalem Bible version, "18 The wall was built of diamond, and the city of pure gold, like clear glass. 19 The foundations of the city wall were faced with all kinds of precious stone: the first with diamond, the second lapis lazuli, the third turquoise, the fourth crystal, 20 the fifth agate, the sixth ruby, the seventh gold quartz, the eighth malachite, the ninth topaz, the tenth emerald, the eleventh sapphire and the twelfth amethyst." In 21:16, the angel measures the city with a golden rod or reed, and records it as 12,000 stadia by 12,000 stadia at the base, and 12,000 stadia high. A stadion is usually stated as 185 meters, or 607 feet, so the base has dimensions of about 2220 km by 2220 km, or 1380 miles by 1380 miles. In the ancient Greek system of measurement, the base of the New Jerusalem would have been equal to 144 million square stadia, 4.9 million square kilometers or 1.9 million square miles (roughly midway between the sizes of Australia and India). If rested on the Earth, its ceiling would be inside the upper boundary of the exosphere but outside the lower boundary.. By way of comparison, the International Space Station maintains an orbit with an altitude of about 386 km (240 mi) above the earth.The Book of Revelation was composed during the end of the 1st century AD, sometime during the later end of the reign of Emperor Nero Domitius (54 to 68 CE). The work is addressed to the “seven churches that are in Asia” (1:4). Revelation is normally broken into three sections: the prologue (1:1-3:22), the visions (4:1-22:5), and the epilogue (22:6-20). This study is principally concerned with chapter 21. The author of Revelation was both a Jew by birth and a believing Christian. For the author and the addressees of Revelation, they are searching for the Lord to vindicate them and judge the “inhabitants of the earth,” for their suffering (6:10). The fall of Jerusalem coupled with the Neronian persecutions form the tension within the subtext of Revelation. Throughout Revelation, several references to the Temple are made REV 3:12,7:15,11:19,14:15,16:1. This Temple appears to be of heavenly origin. When the eschaton arrives in REV 21:1, the reader expects the temple to come down from heaven with the New Jerusalem. Revelation 21 even contains typical New Jerusalem terminology that accompanies a restored Temple. Specific measurements are given for the new city (Ezekiel 40-48, 4Q554), and the city is built with gold, sapphires, and emeralds (Isaiah, Tobit). In addition, 21:21 references the “twelve gates.” Revelation maintains another typically aspect of New Jerusalem tradition – the reunification of the twelve tribes of Israel (Ezekiel 48:33-34, 4Q554).
Verse 22 marks a sudden and remarkable shift in New Jerusalem apocalyptic rhetoric: “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb.” Following with the tradition of 3 Baruch and 4 Sibylline Oracles, Revelation foresees an eschaton without the Temple. Why has the Revelation suddenly denied an eschatological Temple? Verse 23 sheds light on this disparity. Verse 23 proclaims, “And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is the light, and its lamp is the lamb.” For the author of Revelation, there is no need for a Temple because the Lord will be the New Jerusalem’s eternal light and Jesus (the lamb) will be its lamp. This re-interpretation utilizes Isaiah to make its case: “The LORD will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory. Your sun shall no more go down, or your moon withdraw itself; for the LORD will be your everlasting light, and your days of mourning shall be ended.” (Isaiah 60:19) The Temple is discarded in the eschaton because the Lord will provide illumination for the New Jerusalem, and Christ will be the glory for its residents. Henceforth, Christians believed that the New Jerusalem no longer required a Temple. For Christians, their Lord sufficiently replaced the Temple.The Babylonian threat to the Kingdom of Judah began as the Babylonian Empire conquered Assyria and rose to power from 612-609 BCE. Jerusalem surrendered without major bloodshed to Babylon in 597. An Israelite uprising brought the destruction of Nebuchadnezzar’s army upon Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The entire city, including the First Temple, was burned. Israelite aristocrats were taken captive to Babylon. The Book of Ezekiel contains the first record of the New Jerusalem. Within Ezekiel 40-48, there is an extended and detailed description of the measurements of the Temple, its chambers, porticos, and walls. Ezekiel 48:30-35 contains a list of twelve Temple gates named for Israel’s tribes. The Book of Zechariah expands upon Ezekiel’s New Jerusalem. After the Second Temple was built after the exile, Jerusalem’s population was only a few hundred. There were no defensive city walls until 445 BCE.[7] In the passage, the author writes about a city wall of fire to protect the enormous population. This text demonstrates the beginning of a progression of New Jerusalem thought. In Ezekiel, the focus is primarily on the human act of Temple construction. In Zechariah, the focus shifts to God’s intercession in the founding of New Jerusalem.
New Jerusalem is further extrapolated in Isaiah, where New Jerusalem is adorned with precious sapphires, jewels, and rubies. The city is described as a place free from terror and full of righteousness. Here, Isaiah provides an example of Jewish apocalypticism, where a hope for a perfected Jerusalem and freedom from oppression is revealed. As the original New Jerusalem composition, Ezekiel functioned as a source for later works such as 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, Qumran documents, and the Book of Revelation. These texts used similar measurement language and expanded on the limited eschatological perspective in Ezekiel.Judaism sees the Messiah as a human male descendant of King David who will be anointed as the king of Israel and sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem. He will gather in the lost tribes of Israel, clarify unresolved issues of halakha, and rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem according to the pattern shown to the prophet Ezekiel. During this time Jews believe an era of global peace and prosperity will be initiated, the nations will love Israel and will abandon their gods, turn toward Jerusalem, and come to the Holy Temple to worship the one God of Israel. Zechariah prophesied that any family among the nations who does not appear in the Temple in Jerusalem for the festival of Sukkoth will have no rain that year. Isaiah prophesied that the rebuilt Temple will be a house of prayer for all nations. The city of YHWH Shamma, the new Jerusalem, will be the gathering point of the world's nations, and will serve as the capital of the renewed Kingdom of Israel. Ezekiel prophesied that this city will have 12 gates, one gate for each of the tribes of Israel. The book of Isaiah closes with the prophecy "And it will come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, all flesh will come to worship before Me, says YHWH"
At the core, apocalypses are a form of theodicy. They respond to overwhelming suffering with the hope of divine intercession and a perfected World to Come. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 meant an end to Second Temple Judaism. Naturally, apocalyptic responses to the disaster followed. This section will first cover 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. Fourth Ezra and 2 Baruch are important for two reasons. First, they look for a Temple in Heaven, not the eschaton. Second, these texts exhibit the final new Temple texts in Judaism. Jewish texts like 3 Baruch began to reject a restored Temple completely. However, these texts were deemed to be apocryphal by the Rabbis who maintained the belief in a Third Temple as central to Rabbinic Judaism. The Jewish apocalypse of 4 Ezra is a text contained in the apocryphal book 2 Esdras. The genre of 4 Ezra is historical fiction, set thirteen years after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. Fourth Ezra is dated approximately in 83 CE, thirteen years after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. The story follows Ezra’s period of mourning following Jerusalem’s fall. Ezra is Job-like in his criticism of God’s allowance of Jerusalem’s downfall. In Ezra’s deep state of grief, he meets a woman lamenting over Jerusalem. Ezra consoles the woman, and tells her to, “shake off your great sadness, and lay aside your many sorrows… the Most High may give you rest.” (4 Ezra 10:24). Suddenly, the woman is transfigured in an array of bright lights. She transforms into the New Jerusalem being rebuilt. As a bereaved widow she convinced Ezra to apply solace to himself through the image of a New Jerusalem. Fourth Ezra has two clear messages. First, do not grieve excessively over Jerusalem. Second, Jerusalem will be restored as a heavenly kingdom. Fourth Ezra also uses the title “Most High,” throughout the apocalypse to emphasis that the Lord will once again reign and reside in Jerusalem. The apocalypse of 2 Baruch is a contemporary narrative of 4 Ezra. The text also follows the same basic structure 4 Ezra: Job-like grief, animosity towards the Lord, and the rectification of Jerusalem that leads to the comfort of the Job-figure. Second Baruch is historical fiction, written after the Roman destruction but set before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. Baruch is distressed when the Lord informs him of Jerusalem’s impending doom. Baruch responds with several theological questions for God. For this study, Baruch’s inquiry about the future of Israel and the honor of the Lord are most pertinent (2 Baruch 3:4-6). Baruch learns that the Lord will destroy the city, not the enemy. Baruch also learns of a pre-immanent heavenly Temple: “[The Temple] was already prepared from the moment I decided to create paradise.” And I showed it to Adam before he sinned.” (2 Baruch 4:3). This Temple was created before Adam, and shown to him before Adam’s fall.
Two important conclusions come from 2 Baruch. First, the author dismisses hopes for an earthly re-built Temple. The focus is entirely on the heavenly Temple that pre-dated the Garden of Eden. This may be a device to express the supremacy of the heavenly Temple as a sanctuary built before Eden (the traditional location of the earthly Temple). Second, Baruch believes that restoration for the people of Israel exists in heaven, not on earth. The apocalypse of 3 Baruch is the anomaly among post-revolt New Jerusalem texts. Unlike 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, the text exemplifies an alternative tradition that lacks a restored Temple. Like other apocalypses, 3 Baruch still mourns over the Temple, and re-focuses Jews to the heavens. Yet 3 Baruch finds that the Temple is ultimately unnecessary. This move could be polemical against works which afforded the Temple with excessive veneration. In the passage, an angel comes to Baruch and consoles him over Jerusalem: “Where is their God? And behold as I was weeping and saying such things, I saw an angel of the Lord coming and saying to me: Understand, O man, greatly beloved, and trouble not thyself so greatly concerning the salvation of Jerusalem.” (3 Baruch 1:3) Third Baruch certainly mourns over the Temple. Yet 3 Baruch is not ultimately concerned with the lack of a Temple. This text goes along with Jeremiah and Sibylline Oracles 4 to express a minority tradition within Jewish literature. In the first Christian apocalypse, the Book of Revelation coincides with this perspective on Jerusalem. The study will now move to early Christian perspectives on the Temple and the apocalyptic response in Revelation.Since Christianity originated from Judaism, the history of Jewish places of worship and the currents of thought in ancient Judaism described above served in part as the basis for the development of the Christian conception of the New Jerusalem. Christians have always placed religious significance on Jerusalem as the site of The Crucifixion and other events central to the Christian faith. In particular, the destruction of the Second Temple that took place in the year 70, a few decades after Christianity began its split from Judaism, was seminal to the nascent Christian apocalypticism of that time. In the Olivet discourse of the Gospels, Jesus predicts the destruction of Herod's Temple, and promises that it will precede the return of the Son of Man, commonly called the Second Coming. This prophecy of the renewal of Jerusalem by the messiah echoes those of the Jewish prophets. John of Patmos' vision of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation draws on the Olivet discourse and all the historical precursors mentioned above.
Based on the Book of Revelation, premillennialism holds that, following the end times and the second creation of heaven and earth (see The New Earth), the New Jerusalem will be the earthly location where all true believers will spend eternity with God. The New Jerusalem is not limited to eschatology, however. Many Christians view the New Jerusalem as a current reality, that the New Jerusalem is the consummation of the Body of Christ, the Church and that Christians already take part in membership of both the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Church in a kind of dual citizenship.In this way, the New Jerusalem represents to Christians the final and everlasting reconciliation of God and His chosen people, "the end of the Christian pilgrimage." As such, the New Jerusalem is a conception of Heaven, see also Heaven (Christianity).Christianity interprets the city as a physical and/or spiritual restoration or divine recreation of the city of Jerusalem. It is also interpreted by many Christian groups as referring to the Church to be the dwelling place of the saints.
John of Patmos describes the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible, and so the New Jerusalem holds an important place in Christian eschatology and Christian mysticism, and has also influenced Christian philosophy and Christian theology. Such a renewal of Jerusalem, if a reconstruction, is an important theme in Judaism, Christianity, and the Bahá'í Faith. Renewed Jerusalem bears as its motto the words Ad librum (Latin: "as by the book".) Many traditions based on biblical scripture and other writings in the Jewish and Christian religions, such as Protestantism, and Orthodox Judaism, expect the literal renewal of Jerusalem to some day take place at the Temple
The dome over the Temple Mount, Old Jerusalem, and the entire city corresponds to Aldebaran, the alpha star and eye of the bull Taurus. The Foundation Stone within the Dome of the Rock is the center of this dome. Aldebaran, the thirteenth brightest star in our galaxy, is a first magnitude star located sixty-eight light years from Earth, forty times larger than our Sun and 125 times more luminous. It's usually described as rosy or pale reddish-orange in color, a quality the Hindu astronomers noted in their name, Rohini, which means "the Red One" or "the Red Deer." In Hindu star myths, Rohini is the female antelope, the daughter of the male antelope, Prajapati, the Lord of Generation (the constellation Orion). Its name, from the Arabic Al Dabaran, means "the Follower," or "Bright One of the Follower," a reference to how its appearance in the sky follows just after the rising of the Pleiades or perhaps the Hyades, both in Taurus; it also sets immediately following the setting of these two star clusters. To the Mesopotamian astronomers, Aldebaran was one of the four royal stars, or "Watchers," along with Antares in Scorpio, Regulus in Leo, and Fomalhaut in Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish). The Babylonians knew it as Ikuu, "the Leading Star of Stars," the Akkadians as Gisda, "the Furrow of Heaven."
Appropriately, with respect to the attributions of the Flood, tehom, and the cosmic waters to the Foundation Stone, in various cultures Aldebaran was associated with the gods of the rain and the Earth's fertility. An interesting astronomical aspect of Aldebaran is that it is one of the few first-magnitude stars that are eclipsed regularly by our Moon, sometimes, as happened in 1978, every month for a year. It would be a useful study to correlate the schedule of occultations by the Moon of Aldebaran with political events in Jerusalem to see if the astronomical events coincide with earthly happenings. GRAIL CASTLE: To understand what is meant by the statement that the Even HaShetiyah was set over the tehom to keep the waters of chaos from inundating the land, you need to reverse the relationships. The physical stone, which is part of the rock outcropping of Mount Moriah, is not the issue or the important player in this activity; it marks the spot.
The Foundation Stone does not keep the subterranean waters below the Temple Mount from rising up and flooding Jerusalem; rather, the Stone, which is an astral device, is the "plug" on the cosmic bathtub upstairs in the higher worlds. It is the realm of the ether, the primordial "waters" of creation, in which water is an esoteric code word for ether and primeval creative substance or matrix, for a level of undifferentiated consciousness-surely chaos to us.
The Temple Mount on Mount Moriah is the equivalent of Mount Ararat, the legendary resting place for Noah's Ark after the Deluge. There are in fact 144 such resting points for the Ark, for the resting place, the "Mount Ararat," is the staging ground for the ascent into the Grail Castle which is the same as the Ark. There the Ark floats, high above us, in the exalted dimensions, floating safely on the top of the Flood waters released in the interregnums between vast periods of creation and destruction Days and Years of Brahma, in the Vedic time system. The Ark, or Grail Castle, is the repository of all the information from the previous epochs of cosmic existence; the extent of this knowledge is almost unfathomable, almost incomprehensible, almost unattainable-except it isn't. The attainment of this inestimable, mind-dilating knowledge is the goal of the Grail Quest; it is the riches in the Celestial City of Lord Kubera of the North; it is the diverse contents of Noah's Ark; it is the cosmic wisdom of the Fish that towed the boat of Matsya-avatara to the northern mountain as the Flood subsided. The real Foundation Stone is the regulator for the flow from above to below of the cosmic waters, which when they flow, inundate human consciousness with the living, consciousness energizing wetness of the spiritual worlds. You could say that this Stone regulates how much deep cosmic memory and awareness can enter the human continuum at a given time without driving people mad. Too much transcendental knowledge is like chaos; it can be a deadly poison. But when the land has gone dry with an intellectualism and atheistic materialism, when it has become the Wasteland, as periodically happens, then it's appropriate to let a little water moisten the land. One master of this water-world was King Solomon, who, with his wife, fashioned the Ship of Time, using wood from the original Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. Solomon placed King David's sword (the one he claimed from giant Goliath after he slew him) on the Ship of Time, which was an Ark, or repository, outside of space-time, to arrive, much later in planetary history, at the Celtic King Arthur's Camalate in England to be used by the Christed Knight, Sir Galahad."'
The connections will not be clear yet, but this is about the alpha and omega of the Temple of Jerusalem, the original Jerusalem temple in that holy city in the planet's early days, and the New Jerusalem to come at Glastonbury in England. King David's "sword" is the knowledge of how to activate and use the Jerusalem temple; this knowledge was obtained from the giant Goliath, who is a symbol for the Elohim, the angelic family whose members were the consummate masters of the geomantic temple and conservators of its mysteries. MYSTERIES OF THE EMERALD: As Jacob and Muhammad discovered, the Stone is also the launching pad for a remarkable Miraj into the higher spiritual worlds. The Stone itself-the real Even HaShetiyah-is the ladder into the higher worlds. It is the emerald, the true foundation and Foundation Stone of Jerusalem. It is the green stone brought by the angels from Heaven to Earth, the Stone by which the Phoenix is burned to ashes and restored to life, the stone that is "forever incorruptible" and whose "essence is most pure," known as the Grail, as Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote. The emerald is the Heart within the heart chakra, an esoteric dimension between the outer and inner aspects of this chakra. It is a six-sided double-terminated green stone standing vertically on one of its terminations; seen from the bottom up it is also a green cube. The entire Earth energy matrix is bounded by this emerald; it exists within every human; and it is one of the jewels from the crown of the Lord of Light. It is the essence of the Jerusalem temple as an archetype of the consummate heavenly city, the divine ideal.
In practical terms, the emerald as a subtle light form sits magnificently upon the physical Foundation Stone within the Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount. Its size is irrelevant and flexible; it is easier to interact with if you allow yourself to see it as perhaps the size of a skyscraper. That way it is easier to enter, which you may do through any of its six fluidic, permeable walls. There are other geomantic emeralds like this around the planet, but this one is special because its location is special. Only two places on Earth have the right combination of geomantic elements that allow this emerald (meaning, this emerald's special functions) to operate as intended. Only two places are designated for this seed to sprout: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Tor in Glastonbury England. These are the Old Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem, both based on what we might call the once and future archetype of Jerusalem. Here I mean not the physical Israeli city, nor the architectural details of the First and Second Temple of Jerusalem, but the celestial original for this temple, from the light pattern library from which our reality is created. The existence of the two physical Temples of Jerusalem for a time embodied and grounded this heavenly ideal, enabling it to function in the material world, and that was centrally important for the Earth. Here is one reason why. The planet's twelve Vibrating Stones all lead here, to the Jerusalem temple archetype grounded at Temple Mount. Each stone grounds one of the Oroboros Lines that encircle the planet; each stone is coordinated with the celestial Jerusalem as overlaid on the Earth at the Temple Mount. There is one stone per one-twelfth division of the planet's surface, each of which is a Pentagon. To each Pentagon was assigned one of the twelve tribes of Israel; this was not a diaspora, but rather a code, a metaphor, for energies and holders of those energies assigned to each of the Earth's pentagons. If you were standing by one of the stones-at Delphi in Greece or in Glastonbury-you could follow its energy connections and find yourself in the original Temple of Jerusalem. That temple, and its archetype, had twelve gates: the twelve Vibrating Stones are also twelve gates, and lead into the archetype of the Temple of Jerusalem, which for a time was coincident with the two physical Temples. In practical geomantic terms, this meant that the twelve Oroboros Lines and the twelve zodiacal energies they represented were grounded at the Foundation Stone. Insofar as the twelve lines comprise twelve out of the fifteen prime energy lines that are the armature of the Earth's energy matrix, this central grounding point was potentially pivotal for the health, welfare, and destiny of the planet. A paradise on Earth-or something less exalted and uplifting-could be created or sustained from here. The myths are true in saying the world was created from this Foundation Stone, with all things spreading out from this point. Energetically the Earth is inside the emerald, the original Foundation Stone. Every aspect of the planet's complex geomantic structure is subsumed in this single planet-sized emerald; everything that comprises the Earth's geomythic matrix comes out of the emerald, and returns to it. When the Temple of Jerusalem is physically grounded on the Earth, things are in the process of returning to their source within the emerald; everything that spread out from the Foundation Stone at the beginning of creation is now magnetically being recalled to its point of origin. Seen over vast stretches of Earth time, it is like a shape turning itself inside out, over and over, cycling in on itself like a torus, Jerusalem manifest, then unmanifest, then manifest again."'
THE ARK OF THE COVENANT. What about the Ineffable Name of God inscribed on the Foundation Stone and the Ark of the Covenant, which resided in the Holy of Holies (the Devir, a perfect cube of twenty cubits), said to be over the Stone? Jewish belief says that the location of the Ark "marks the exact center of the world, or God's footstool. The Ark is understood to have been a container, a portable rectangular box or wooden chest lined with gold with long parallel handles, measuring about four feet long, two feet high, and two feet wide. It held the tablets of the Ten Commandments, both the shattered first version and the intact second one, as well as Aaron's magical rod and a small quantity of manna (a miraculous angelic food). At the time he received the Commandments while on Mount Sinai, Moses received instructions from God to construct the Ark of the Covenant to house the tablets. In many respects, Solomon built the Temple of Jerusalem to house the Ark. The Ark was the holiest of objects, said to possess extraordinary magical powers capable of protecting the Jews from danger. Biblical references–the Old Testament has two hundred–indicate that the Ark blazed with fire and lightning, emitted sparks, produced tumors or severe burns, could stop rivers, blast armies, destroy cities, and level mountains. It issued a moaning sound and was capable of rising off the ground and rushing at the enemies of the Jews in battle. God was said to descend and sit in the miniature Mercy Seat atop the Ark. The Ark of the Covenant is one of the mysteries of the Earth, and it is presumptuous to speculate as to its true nature. However, it was a device that had to do with a combination of sound and energy, and there was only one Ark. We can try approaching the matter sideways, as it were, through metaphor. The Ark was the voice of magic, the Word, the Ineffable Name uttered, all the living letters of the Hebrew alphabet spoken correctly, at once, the electric current that turned the system on. The system was the Earth grid, its armature of Oroboros Lines, its multiple linked emeralds-the "modem." It could make twelve Oroboros Lines into a single twelve-stringed instrument, played from here at the Foundation Stone. It could make all the elements of the Earth's energy matrix cohere, turn inside out, and become part of the Temple of Jerusalem. It was perhaps like a recording of the Word that was in the beginning, all the sacred syllables and sounds in perfect pronunciation-a magic wand of sound. When this sound touched the Even HaShetiyah, it animated the Earth's spiritual body and remarkable things happened and were possible.;When it was "on," it made not just the Temple but the entire Earth the Morning and Evening Star, the Foundation of Venus-Heaven on Earth realized, the celestial Jerusalem Temple fully manifest in matter. The downside was misuse, as J. R. R. Tolkien said of another unique magical device in The Lord of the Rings, "One ring to rule them ... and in the darkness bind them." The Earth had witnessed such a misuse, a malfeasance remembered in Grail myth as the Dolorous Stroke by which the Fisher King had misused the Sword of David (the Elohim's celestial codes for operating the system), wounded himself, and precipitated the Wasteland, The plug was put back in securely to block the flow of the tehom into the human world. Access to the Grail Castle was curtailed, and its reality eventually disbelieved, forgotten. INIMICAL ENERGIES AT THE TEMPLE MOUNT- We should not be surprised to find a fair concentration of what we could label dark and negative energies marshaled at the Temple Mount to block or distort access. Two giant astral beings are locked in mortal battle atop the Mount, swords clashing, wounds gaping; they are primitive beings of a male valence, and all they do is fight, striving to kill each other. This energy permeates Jerusalem. Numerous alien ships high above the city quarantine the Mount in a ring of beams broadcast like laser shafts. These energies help maintain the energies and functions of several circles of reptilian beings and giant astral snakes that surround the Mount, facing outwards into Jerusalem, discouraging access, keeping the energies combative, fragmented, bent on isolation and conflict. Behind them and also facing away from the Mount is another circle of large demonic control beings; their function too is to dissuade the fainthearted, to inflame those on the edge, to confuse or scare the rest, to keep the Mount and Stone from being used again as intended. The dome directly over the Mount and encompassing all of Jerusalem is damaged. Part of its crown is severed, like a yarmulke riding the side of the head by the ears instead of the occiput. The two cords linking the dome to the master dome at Avebury are damaged; one of them is not "hooked up" at all. The damages mean that Jerusalem through its dome is not receiving the beneficial cosmic energies of both Sirius and Canopus through Avebury as they are meant to; this allows other inimical energies to exert the predominant influence. The dome can be repaired, but it requires human assistance in conjunction with the angelic realm, and such repair could only be undertaken if the spiritual worlds judged it appropriate or karmically possible. (For information about another damaged dome, see Clingman's Dome, Tennessee.)
LUCIFER BINDING SITE: Coincident with the decommissioning of the Jerusalem Temple was the binding of Lucifer, Lord of Light, under the Foundation Stone. The Foundation of Venus, the Jerusalem new, old, and archetypal, is his light realm.
Elsewhere in Christendom, the tendency was to bury Lucifer under the granite weight of a massive Gothic cathedral, such as at Lincoln in England. For Jerusalem as the city to be healed, Lucifer, its foundation, will have to be unbound, and for the New Jerusalem to manifest on the planet, the Lord of Light will have to be restored to his pre-Fall position as God's chief archangel. This is not meant to be a definitive listing of the geomantic features of Jerusalem, for it has many others. Notable among these is one of the Earth's twelve Crowns of the Ancient of Days at Golgotha, the Hill of Skulls, and an eighteen-mile wide Landscape Zodiac on the periphery of the Old City.
I knew a man who lived in fear
It was huge, it was angry
It was drawing near
Behind his house a secret place
Was the shadow of the demon
He could never face
He built a wall of steel and flame
And men with guns to keep it tame
Then standing back he made it plain
That the nightmare would never ever rise again
But the fear and the fire and the guns remain
[Chorus]
It doesn't matter now, it's over anyhow
He tells the world that it's sleeping
But as the night came 'round
I heard it slowly sound
It wasn't roaring, it was weeping
It wasn't roaring, it was weeping
And then one day the neighbours came
They were curious to know about the smoke and flame
They stood around outside the wall
But of course, there was nothing to be heard at all
"My friends," he said, "We've reached our goal
The threat is under firm control
As long as peace and order reign
I'll be damned if I can see a reason to explain
Why the fear and the fire and the guns remain."
[Chorus]
It doesn't matter now, it's over anyhow
He tells the world that it's sleeping
But as the night came 'round
I heard it slowly sound
It wasn't roaring, it was weeping
It wasn't roaring, it was weeping
It doesn't matter now it's over anyhow
It doesn't matter now it's over anyhow
- Song by Vusi Mahlasela, Weeping
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrDe2UWWkjQ&list=PLt0u3nV0-Jx...
Dan Heymann wrote this song about the atrocities of South Africa during Apartheid and I happen to play it this morning while having breakfast. Suddenly I was reminded of a conversation I had with some new friends last night about how hard it is to recognize Truth of a matter when your perspective is still dusted with unresolved pain of the past. It is still a sensitive wound, hidden ready to flare up but kept in secret. When the world seeks to shake up the minds of men, all of these walled "demons" we were never able to face become the very chains that can allow opression to continue. It is only when we break free of our own personal attachment to our wounds, go through a process of reclaiming our whole selves that a new and liberated world without violence and fear becomes even thinkable and then achievable. I call this artpiece "The Gateway" which while I was playing around with it was about the fall of the ego, the mask of self-protection.
I love Vusi's music because of how much love and vulnerability he sings with, I feel his heart reach into mine when I listen to him.
Stay brave my friends. These are hard and challengin times. Keep the dreams in your hearts alive and keep compassion alive. Sending love to you all!!!
This marks the next step, new beginning of a self-portrait series centering around anxiety and social interactions. A statement will follow the usual Flickr tech stuff.
Shot on Kodak Portra 160 in a Mamiya 7 with an 80mm lens. The f/stop was probably around 8. Shutter was around 1/60 and the room was pretty dark. DIY color development in a Jobo CPE-2 with an Arista C-41 kit. This was a DSLR film scan using a 4-shot panoramic stitch method.
Strobist: Fill light from a Lumopro LP180 at around 1/2 power in a Joe McNally Lastolite softbox, pushed to the ceiling and camera left. Key was a Nikon SB-80DX bare in the fridge, at about 1/8 power, too. Maybe I should have backed it up to reduce the light on the ceiling, but I wanted to make it appear as if it were night, and I feel like the fridge would cast light on the wall. So ... shutter and aperture info up there. I shot at at 160 ISO. Softball fill was triggered by Paul C. Buff Cybersync and the fridge camera was triggered by its built-in slave. Camera was on a tripod, and was triggered by self-timer. This was an athletic feat ... feet? heh.
My feet were most certainly not computer magic.
Statement: Our imaginations color our interactions with others and anxieties shape our perceptions. A handshake can mean more than a handshake; an innocent remark can signify romantic pursuit or a bitter insult. Assumptions cause us to build realities and cast them into doubt. Often, we are blind to the fact that what we perceive is not always what is true. Self-examination is necessary to discover reality. By incorporating other actors in addition to the artist, these images break self-portraiture from its insular norm and make it a collaborative effort of self-examination in order to confront anxieties. Concerns about co-existence with others, the fear of overlooking a good thing and unresolved self-defeating behaviors come to light in the form of magical realism that comes alive in the artist's head.
Taking cues from a tradition involving photographers such as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall, and filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Spike Jonze, everyday life is portrayed with a sense of theatricality.
This tree stands at the edge of a passage, far from everything and yet heavy with memory.
It remained still while something happened, without witnesses, without words.
In this place, years ago, a law enforcement officer involved in sensitive investigations was found dead.
The case was officially closed, yet the circumstances left unresolved questions, suspended like the silence that still inhabits this space.
The tree does not speak, it does not accuse.
It remains.
It preserves what was never clarified, what never found a voice.
In this photograph, the landscape becomes a mute witness:
not to the truth itself, but to its absence.
Questo albero sorge ai margini di un passaggio, lontano da tutto eppure carico di memoria.
È rimasto fermo mentre qualcosa accadeva, senza testimoni, senza parole.
In questo luogo, anni fa, un uomo delle forze dell’ordine impegnato in indagini delicate venne trovato morto.
Il caso fu archiviato, ma le circostanze lasciarono domande irrisolte, sospese come il silenzio che ancora abita questo spazio.
L’albero non racconta, non accusa.
Resta.
Custodisce ciò che non è stato chiarito, ciò che non ha trovato voce.
In questa fotografia il paesaggio diventa testimone muto:
non della verità, ma della sua assenza.
The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published in 1986 by Impact of Pittsburg, California 94565. The card, which was designed and distributed in the USA, was printed in Korea.
The photography was by Ken Raveill, and the card, which has a divided back, was made with recycled paper.
Hearst Castle
Hearst Castle, known formally as La Cuesta Encantada ("The Enchanted Hill"), is an estate in San Simeon, located on the Central Coast of California. Conceived by William Randolph Hearst, the publishing tycoon, and his architect Julia Morgan, the castle was built between 1919 and 1947.
George Bernard Shaw described Hearst Castle as:
"What God would have built
if he had had the money."
Today, Hearst Castle is a museum open to the public as a California State Park and registered as a National Historic Landmark and California Historical Landmark.
George Hearst, William Randolph Hearst's father, had purchased the original 40,000-acre (162 km2) estate in 1865 and Camp Hill, the site for the future Hearst Castle, was used for family camping vacations during Hearst's youth.
In 1919 William inherited $11,000,000 (equivalent to $172,000,000 in 2021) and estates, including the land at San Simeon. He used his fortune to further develop his media empire of newspapers, magazines and radio stations, the profits from which supported a lifetime of building and collecting.
Within a few months of Phoebe Hearst's death, he had commissioned Morgan to:
"Build something a little more
comfortable up on the hill."
This was the genesis of the present castle. Morgan was an architectural pioneer:
"America's first truly independent
female architect."
She was the first woman to study architecture at the School of Beaux-Arts in Paris, the first to have her own architectural practice in California, and the first female winner of the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal.
Julia worked in close collaboration with Hearst for over twenty years, and the castle at San Simeon is her best-known creation.
In the Roaring Twenties and into the 1930's, Hearst Castle reached its social peak. Originally intended as a family home for Hearst, his wife Millicent and their five sons, by 1925 he and Millicent had effectively separated and he held court at San Simeon with his mistress, the actress Marion Davies.
Their guest list comprised most of the Hollywood stars of the period; Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable all visited, some on multiple occasions.
Political luminaries encompassed Calvin Coolidge and Winston Churchill, while other notables included Charles Lindbergh, P. G. Wodehouse and George Bernard Shaw.
Visitors gathered each evening at Casa Grande for drinks in the Assembly Room, dined in the Refectory and watched the latest movie in the theater before retiring to the luxurious accommodation provided by the guest houses of Casa del Mar, Casa del Monte and Casa del Sol.
During the days, they admired the views, rode, played tennis, bowls or golf and swam in "the most sumptuous swimming pool on earth".
While Hearst entertained, Morgan built; the castle was under almost continual construction from 1920 until 1939, with work resuming after the end of World War II until Hearst's final departure in 1947.
Hearst, his castle and his lifestyle were satirized by Orson Welles in his 1941 film Citizen Kane. In the film, which Hearst sought to suppress, Charles Foster Kane's palace Xanadu is said to contain:
"Paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones
of many another palace – a collection of
everything so big it can never be cataloged
or appraised; enough for ten museums; the
loot of the world".
Welles's was referring to Hearst's mania for collecting; the dealer Joseph Duveen called him the "Great Accumulator".
With a passion for acquisition almost from childhood, he bought architectural elements, art, antiques, statuary, silverware and textiles on an epic scale. Shortly after starting San Simeon, he began to conceive of making the castle:
"A museum of the best
things that I can secure".
Foremost among his purchases were architectural elements from Western Europe, particularly Spain. Over thirty ceilings, doorcases, fireplaces and mantels, entire monasteries, paneling and a medieval tithe barn were purchased, shipped to Hearst's Brooklyn warehouses and transported on to California.
Much was then incorporated into the fabric of Hearst Castle. In addition, he built up collections of more conventional art and antiques of high quality; his assemblage of ancient Greek vases was one of the world's largest.
In May 1947, Hearst's health compelled him and Marion Davies to leave the castle for the last time. He died in Los Angeles in 1951, and Morgan died in 1957. The following year, the Hearst family gave the castle and much of its contents to the State of California, and the mansion was opened to the public on the 17th. May 17, 1958.
It has since operated as the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument, and attracts about 750,000 visitors annually.
The Hearst family retains ownership of the majority of the 82,000 acres (332 km2) wider estate and, under a land conservation agreement reached in 2005, has worked with the California State Parks Department and American Land Conservancy to preserve the undeveloped character of the area.
Early History to 1864
The coastal range of Southern California has been occupied since prehistoric times. The indigenous inhabitants were the Salinans and the Chumash. In the late 18th. century, Spanish missions were established in the area in order to convert the Native American population.
The Mission San Miguel Arcángel, one of the largest, opened in what is now San Luis Obispo county in 1797. By the 1840's, the mission had declined and the priests departed. In that decade, the governors of Mexican California distributed the mission lands in a series of grants.
Three of these were Rancho Piedra Blanca, Rancho Santa Rosa and Rancho San Simeon. The Mexican–American War of 1846–1848 saw the area pass into the control of the United States under the terms of the Mexican Cession. The California Gold Rush of the next decade brought an influx of American settlers, among whom was the 30-year old George Hearst.
Buying the land: 1865–1919
Born in Missouri in 1820, George Hearst made his fortune as a miner of gold and silver, notably at the Comstock Lode and the Homestake Mine. He then undertook a political career, becoming a senator in 1886, and bought The San Francisco Examiner.
Investing in land, he bought the Piedra Blanca property in 1865, and subsequently extended his holdings with the acquisition of most of the Santa Rosa estate, and much of the San Simeon lands.
In the 1870's George Hearst built a ranch house on his estate, which remains a private property maintained by the Hearst Corporation. The San Simeon area became a site for family camping expeditions, including his young son, William. A particularly favored spot was named Camp Hill, the site of the future Hearst Castle.
Years later Hearst recalled his early memories of the place:
"My father brought me to San Simeon
as a boy. I had to come up the slope
hanging on to the tail of a pony.
We lived in a cabin on this spot and I
could see forever. That's the West –
forever."
George Hearst developed the estate somewhat, introducing beef and dairy cattle, planting extensive fruit orchards, and expanding the wharf facilities at San Simeon Bay. He also bred racehorses.
While his father developed the ranch, Hearst and his mother traveled, including an eighteen-month tour of Europe in 1873, where Hearst's life-long obsession with art collecting began.
When George Hearst died in 1891, he left an estate of $18 million to his widow including the California ranch. Phoebe Hearst shared the cultural and artistic interests of her son, collecting art and patronizing architects.
She was also a considerable philanthropist, founding schools and libraries, supporting the fledgling University of California, Berkeley, including the funding of the Hearst Mining Building in memory of her husband, and making major donations to a range of women's organizations, including the YWCA.
During the late 1890's, Mrs Hearst encountered Julia Morgan, a young architecture student at Berkeley. On Phoebe Hearst's death in 1919, William Hearst inherited the ranch, which had grown to 250,000 acres and 14 miles (23 km) of coastline, as well as $11 million.
250,000 acres is a huge area for an estate - to accommodate that area in a square, it would need sides of over 19.8 miles (32 km).
Within days of his mother's death, William was at Morgan's San Francisco office.
Julia Morgan
Julia Morgan, who was born in 1872, was 47 when Hearst entered her office in 1919. Her biographer Mark A. Wilson has described her subsequent career as that of:
"America's first independent
full-time woman architect".
After studying at Berkeley, where she worked with Bernard Maybeck, and in 1898 she became the first woman to win entry to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Passing out from the École in 1902, Morgan returned to San Francisco and took up a post at the architectural practice of John Galen Howard.
Howard recognized Morgan's talents, but also exploited them:
"The best thing about this person
is, I pay her almost nothing, as it is
a woman."
In 1904, Julia passed the California architects' licensing examination, the first woman to do so, establishing her own office in 1906 at 456 Montgomery Street in San Francisco.
During her time with Howard, Morgan was commissioned by Phoebe Hearst to undertake work at her Hacienda del Pozo de Verona estate at Pleasanton. This led to work at Wyntoon and to a number of commissions from Hearst himself; an unexecuted design for a mansion at Sausalito, north of San Francisco, a cottage at the Grand Canyon, and the Los Angeles Examiner Building.
In 1919, when he turned up at Morgan's office, Hearst was fifty-six years old, and the owner of a publishing empire that included twenty-eight newspapers, thirteen magazines, eight radio stations, four film studios, extensive real-estate holdings and thirty-one thousand employees.
He was also a significant public figure: although his political endeavors had proved largely unsuccessful, the influence he exerted through his direct control of his media empire attracted fame and opprobrium in equal measure.
In 1917, one biographer described him as:
"The most hated man
in the country".
The actor Ralph Bellamy, a guest at San Simeon in the mid-1930's, recorded Hearst's working methods in a description of a party in the Assembly Room:
"The party was quite gay. And in the midst of it,
Mr Hearst came in. There was a teletype machine
just inside, and he stopped and he read it.
He went to a table and picked up a phone.
He asked for the editor of his San Francisco
newspaper and he said, 'Put this in a two-column
box of the front pages of all the newspapers
tomorrow morning.'
And without notes he dictated an editorial."
Morgan and Hearst's partnership at San Simeon lasted from 1919 until his final departure from the castle in 1947. Their correspondence, preserved in the Julia Morgan archive in the Robert E. Kennedy Library at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, runs to some 3,700 letters and telegrams.
Victoria Kastner, Hearst Castle's in-house custodian, has described the partnership as "a rare, true collaboration," and there are many contemporary accounts of the closeness of the relationship. Walter Steilberg, a draughtsman in Morgan's office, once observed them at dinner:
"The rest of us could have been a
hundred miles away; they didn't pay
any attention to anybody ... these
two very different people just clicked".
Thomas Aidala, in his 1984 history of the castle, made a similar observation:
"Seated opposite each other, they
would discuss and review work,
consider design changes, pass
drawings back and forth ... seemingly
oblivious of the rest of the guests."
Having a Ball: 1925–1938
Hearst and his family occupied Casa Grande for the first time at Christmas, 1925. Thereafter, Hearst's wife, Millicent, went back to New York, and from 1926 until they left for the last time in 1947, Hearst's mistress Marion Davies acted as his chatelaine at the castle.
The Hollywood and political elite often visited in the 1920's and 1930's. Among Hearst's guests were Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, and Clark Gable.
Churchill described his host, and Millicent Hearst and Davies, in a letter to his own wife:
"A grave simple child – with no doubt a
nasty temper – playing with the most
costly toys.
Two magnificent establishments, two
charming wives, complete indifference
to public opinion, oriental hospitalities."
Weekend guests were either brought by private train from Glendale Station north of Los Angeles, and then by car to the castle, or flew into Hearst's airstrip, generally arriving late on Friday evening or on Saturday. Cecil Beaton wrote of his impressions during his first visit for New Year's Eve in 1931:
"We caught sight of a vast, sparkling white
castle in Spain. It was out of a fairy story.
The sun poured down with theatrical
brilliance on tons of white marble and white
stone.
There seemed to be a thousand statues,
pedestals, urns. The flowers were unreal in
their ordered profusion.
Hearst stood smiling at the top of one of
the many flights of garden steps".
Guests were generally left to their own devices during the day. Horseback riding, shooting, swimming, golf, croquet and tennis were all available, while Hearst would lead mounted parties for picnics on the estate. The only absolute deadline was for cocktails in the assembly room at 7.30 on Saturday night.
Alcohol was rationed; guests were not permitted to have liquor in their rooms, and were limited to one cocktail each before dinner. This was due not to meanness on Hearst's part, but to his concerns over Davies's alcoholism, though the rule was frequently flouted.
The actor David Niven later reflected on his supplying illicit alcohol to Davies:
"It seemed fun at the time to stoke up
her fire of outrageous fun and I got a
kick out of feeling I had outwitted one
of the most powerful and best informed
men on earth, but what a disloyal and
crummy betrayal of him, and what a
nasty potential nail to put in her coffin."
Dinner was served at 9.00 in the refectory. Wine came from Hearst's 7,000-bottle cellar. Charlie Chaplin commented on the fare:
"Dinners were elaborate -- pheasant, wild
duck, partridge and venison -- but were
also informal: amidst the opulence, we
were served paper napkins, it was only
when Mrs Hearst was in residence that
the guests were given linen ones."
The informality extended to the ketchup bottles and condiments in jars which were remarked on by many guests.
Dinner was invariably followed by a movie; initially outside, and then in the theater. The actress Ilka Chase recorded a showing in the early 1930's:
"The theater was not yet complete – the plaster
was still wet – so an immense pile of fur coats
was heaped at the door, and each guest picked
one up and enveloped himself before entering...
Hearst and Marion, close together in the gloom
and bundled in their fur coats, looked for all the
world like the big and baby bears".
Movies were generally films from Hearst's own studio, Cosmopolitan Productions, and often featured Marion Davies. Sherman Eubanks, whose father worked as an electrician at the castle, recorded in an oral history:
"Mr Hearst would push a button and call up to
the projectionist and say 'Put on Marion's Peg
o' My Heart'.
So I've seen Peg o' My Heart about fifty times.
This is not being critical. I'm simply saying that's
the way it was. This repetition tended to put a
slight strain on the guests' gratitude."
In 1937, Patricia Van Cleeve married at the castle, the grandest social occasion there since the visit of President and Mrs Coolidge in February 1930. Ken Murray records these two events as the only occasions when formal attire was required of guests to the castle.
Van Cleeve, who married the actor Arthur Lake, was always introduced as Marion Davies' favorite niece. It was frequently rumored that she was in fact Davies and Hearst's daughter, something she herself acknowledged just before her death in 1993.
In February 1938, a plane crash at the San Simeon airstrip led to the deaths of Lord and Lady Plunket, who were traveling to the castle as Hearst's guests, and the pilot Tex Phillips. The only other passenger, the bobsledding champion, James Lawrence, survived.
The Specter at the Feast: Hearst, Welles and Xanadu
Hearst Castle was the inspiration for Xanadu, and Hearst himself the main model for Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane.
Having made his name with the Mercury Theatre production of The War of the Worlds in 1938, Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939 to make a film version of Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness for RKO Pictures.
The film was not made, and Welles began a collaboration with the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz on a screenplay originally entitled American. The film tells the stories of Kane, a media magnate and aspiring politician, and of his second wife Susan Alexander, a failed opera singer driven to drink, who inhabit a castle in Florida.
Filming began in June 1940, and the movie premiered on the 1st. June 1941. Although at the time Orson Welles and RKO denied that the film was based on Hearst, his long-time friend and collaborator, John Houseman was clear:
"The truth is simple: for the basic concept
of Charles Foster Kane and for the main
lines and significant events of his public life,
Mankiewicz used as his model the figure of
William Randolph Hearst".
Told of the film's content before its release – his friends, the gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons having attended early screenings – Hearst made strenuous efforts to stop the premiere. When these failed, he sought to damage the film's circulation by alternately forbidding all mention of it in his media outlets, or by using them to attack both the movie and Welles.
Hearst's assault damaged the film at the box office, and harmed Welles' subsequent career.
Since its inception in 1952 through to 2012, the Sight and Sound Critics' Poll voted Citizen Kane the greatest film of all time in every decade of polling. On the 9th. March 2012 the film was screened in the movie theater at Hearst Castle for the first time as part of the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival.
Depression, Death and After: 1939–Present
By the late 1930's, the Great Depression and Hearst's profligacy had brought him to the brink of financial ruin. Debts totaled $126 million, and he was compelled to cede financial control of the Hearst Corporation. Newspapers and radio stations were sold, and much of his art collection was dispersed in a series of sales, often for much less than he had paid.
Hearst railed against his losses, and the perceived incompetence of the sales agents, Parish-Watson & Co:
"They greatly cheapened them and us,
he advertises like a bargain basement
sale. I am heartbroken".
Construction at Hearst Castle virtually ceased. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the castle was closed up and Hearst and Davies moved to Wyntoon, which was perceived to be less vulnerable to enemy attack.
They returned in 1945, and construction on a limited scale recommenced, finally ending in 1947. In early May of that year, with his health declining, Hearst and Davies left the castle for the last time. The pair settled in at 1007 North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills.
William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, his death abruptly severing him from Davies, who was excluded from the funeral by Hearst's family:
"For thirty-two years I had him,
and they leave me with his
empty room".
In 1950 Julia Morgan closed her San Francisco office after a career of forty-two years. Ill health marred her retirement and she died, a virtual recluse, in early 1957.
In 1958 the Hearst Corporation donated Hearst Castle, its gardens, and many of its contents, to the state of California. A plaque at the castle reads:
"La Cuesta Encantada presented to
the State of California in 1958 by the
Hearst Corporation in memory of
William Randolph Hearst who created
this Enchanted Hill, and of his mother,
Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who
inspired it".
The castle was opened to the public for the first time in June 1958. Hearst Castle was added to the National Register of Historic Places on the 22nd. June.
Hearst was always keen to protect the mystique of his castle. In 1926, he wrote to Morgan to congratulate her after a successful party was held on the hill:
"Those wild movie people said it was
wonderful and that the most extravagant
dream of a movie picture fell far short of
this reality. They all wanted to make a
picture there but they are NOT going to
be allowed to do this."
Commercial filming at the castle is still rarely allowed. Since 1957 only two projects have been granted permission:
-- Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus used the castle to stand in as the villa of Marcus Licinius Crassus, played by Lawrence Olivier.
-- In 2014, Lady Gaga's music video for "G.U.Y." was filmed at the Neptune and Roman Pools.
On the 12th. February 1976, the Casa del Sol guesthouse was damaged by a bomb. The device was placed by allies of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), in retaliation for Patty Hearst, Hearst's granddaughter, testifying in court at her trial for armed robbery, following her kidnapping by the SLA in 1974.
On the 22nd. December 2003, an earthquake occurred with its epicenter some three miles north of the castle. With a magnitude of 6.5, it was the largest earthquake recorded at San Simeon. The very limited structural damage which resulted was a testament to the quality of the castle's construction.
Since its opening, the castle has become a major California tourist attraction, attracting over 850,000 visitors in 2018. Recent changes to the tour arrangements now allow visitors time to explore the grounds independently at the conclusion of the conducted tours.
The Hearst family maintains a connection with the castle, which was closed for a day in early August 2019 for the wedding of Amanda Hearst, Hearst's great-granddaughter.
The castle closed in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After 2 years of closure and repairs to the access road due to rainstorm damage, the castle reopened on the 11th. May 2022.
Architecture of Hearst Castle
Hearst's original idea was to build a bungalow, according to Walter Steilberg, one of Morgan's draftsmen who recalled Hearst's words from the initial meeting:
"I would like to build something up on
the hill at San Simeon. I get tired of
going up there and camping in tents.
I'm getting a little too old for that.
I'd like to get something that would
be a little more comfortable".
However within a month, Hearst's original ideas for a modest dwelling had greatly expanded. Discussion on the style began with consideration of "Jappo-Swisso" themes. Then the Spanish Colonial Revival style was favored. Morgan had used this style when she worked on Hearst's Los Angeles Herald Examiner headquarters in 1915.
Hearst appreciated the Spanish Revival but was dissatisfied with the crudeness of the colonial structures in California. Mexican colonial architecture had more sophistication, but he objected to its abundance of ornamentation.
Thomas Aidala, in his 1984 study of the castle, notes the Churrigueresque influence on the design of the main block:
"Flat and unembellished exterior surfaces;
decorative urges are particularized and
isolated, focused mainly on doorways,
windows and towers".
The Panama-California Exposition of 1915 in San Diego held the closest approximations in California to the approach Hearst desired. But William's European tours, and specifically the inspiration of the Iberian Peninsula, led him to Renaissance and Baroque examples in southern Spain that more exactly suited his tastes. He particularly admired a church in Ronda, Spain and asked Morgan to model the Casa Grande towers after it.
In a letter to Morgan dated 31st. December 1919, Hearst wrote:
"The San Diego Exposition is the best source
of Spanish in California. The alternative is to
build in the Renaissance style of southern Spain.
We picked out the towers of the church at Ronda...
a Renaissance decoration, particularly that of the
very southern part of Spain, could harmonize well
with them.
I would very much like to have your views on what
style of architecture we should select."
This blend of Southern Spanish Renaissance, Revival and Mediterranean examples became San Simeon's defining style:
"Something a little different than other
people are doing out in California".
The architectural writers Arrol Gellner and Douglas Keister describe Casa Grande as
"A palatial fusion of Classicism and Mediterranean
architecture that transcended the Mission Revival
era and instead belonged to the more archaeological
Period Revival styles that gained favor after the
Panama-California Exposition of 1915".
Hearst Castle has a total of 42 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 127 acres (half a square kilometer) of gardens, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, a movie theater, an airfield and, during Hearst's lifetime, the world's largest private zoo.
Hearst was an inveterate rethinker who would frequently order the redesign of previously agreed, and often built, structures: the Neptune Pool was rebuilt three times before he was satisfied.
He was aware of his propensity for changing his mind; in a letter dated the 18th. March 1920, he wrote to Morgan:
"All little houses stunning. Please complete
before I can think up any more changes".
As a consequence of Hearst's persistent design changes, and financial difficulties in the early and later 1930's, the complex was never finished.
By the late summer of 1919, Morgan had surveyed the site, analyzed its geology, and drawn initial plans for Casa Grande. Construction began in 1919 and continued through 1947 when Hearst left the estate for the last time.
During the early years of construction, until Hearst's stays at San Simeon became longer and more frequent, his approval for the ongoing design was obtained by Morgan sending him models of planned developments.
By the late 1920's the main model, designed by another female architect Julian C. Mesic, had become too large to ship, and Mesic and Morgan would photograph it, hand-color the images, and send these to Hearst.
Construction of Hearst Castle
The castle's location presented major challenges for construction. It was remote; when Morgan began coming to the estate for site visits in 1919, she would leave her San Francisco office on Friday afternoon and take an eight-hour, 200-mile train journey to San Luis Obispo, followed by a fifty-mile drive to San Simeon.
The relative isolation made recruiting and retaining a workforce a constant difficulty. In the early years, the estate lacked water, its limited supplies coming from three natural springs on Pine Mountain, a 3,500-foot-high (1,100 m) peak seven miles (11 km) east of Hearst Castle.
The issue was addressed by the construction of three reservoirs, and Morgan devised a gravity-based water delivery system that transported water from the nearby mountain springs to the reservoirs, including the main one on Rocky Butte, a 2,000-foot (610 m) knoll less than a mile southeast of Hearst Castle.
Water was of particular importance; as well as feeding the pools and fountains Hearst desired, it provided electricity, by way of a private hydroelectric plant, until the San Joaquin Light and Power Corporation began service to the castle in 1924.
The climate presented a further challenge. The proximity to the coast brought strong winds in from the Pacific Ocean, and the site's elevation meant that winter storms were frequent and severe.
After a period of severe storms in February 1927, Hearst wrote a letter:
"We are all leaving the hill. We are drowned,
blown and frozen out. Before we build anything
more, let's make what we have practical,
comfortable and beautiful.
If we can't do that we might just as well change
the names of the houses to Pneumonia House,
Diphtheria House and Influenza Bungalow.
The main house we can call the Clinic."
Water was also essential for the production of concrete, the main structural component of the houses and their ancillary buildings.
Morgan had substantial experience of building in steel-reinforced concrete and, together with the firm of consulting engineers Earl and Wright, experimented in finding suitable stone, eventually settling on that quarried from the mountain top on which the foundation platform for the castle was built.
Combining this with desalinated sand from San Simeon Bay produced concrete of exceptionally high quality. Later, white sand was brought in from Carmel. Material for construction was transported either by train and truck, or by sea into a wharf built in San Simeon Bay below the site. In time, a light railway was constructed from the wharf to the castle, and Morgan built a compound of warehouses for storage and accommodation for workers by the bay.
Brick and tile works were also developed on site, as brick was used extensively, and tiling was an important element of the decoration of the castle. Morgan used several tile companies to produce her designs, including Grueby Faience, Batchelder, California Faience and Solon & Schemmel.
Albert Solon and Frank Schemmel came to Hearst Castle to undertake tiling work, and Solon's brother, Camille, was responsible for the design of the mosaics of blue-and-gold Venetian glass tile used in the Roman pool and the murals in Hearst's Gothic library.
Morgan worked with a series of construction managers; Henry Washburn from 1919 to 1922, then Camille Rossi from 1922, until his firing by Hearst in 1932, and finally George Loorz until 1940. From 1920 to 1939, there were between 25 and 150 workmen employed in construction at the castle.
Costs of Hearst Castle
The exact cost of the entire San Simeon complex is unknown. Kastner makes an estimate of expenditure on construction and furnishing the complex between 1919 and 1947 as "under $10,000,000".
Thomas Aidala suggests a slightly more precise figure for the overall cost at between $7.2 and $8.2 million. Hearst's relaxed approach to using the funds of his companies, and sometimes the companies themselves, to make personal purchases made clear accounting for expenditure almost impossible.
In 1927 one of his lawyers wrote:
"The entire history of your corporation
shows an informal method of withdrawal
of funds".
In 1945, when the Hearst Corporation was closing the Hearst Castle account for the final time, Morgan gave a breakdown of construction costs, which did not include expenditure on antiques and furnishings.
Casa Grande's build cost is given as $2,987,000, and that for the guest houses, $500,000. Other works, including nearly half a million dollars on the Neptune pool, brought the total to $4,717,000.
Morgan's fees for twenty-odd years of almost continuous work came to $70,755. Her initial fee was a 6% commission on total costs. This was later increased to 8.5%. Many additional expenses, and challenges in getting prompt payment, led her to receive rather less than this.
Kastner suggests that Morgan made an overall profit of $100,000 on the entire, twenty-year, project. Her modest remuneration was unimportant to her. At the height of Hearst's financial travails in the late 1930's, when his debts stood at over $87 million, Morgan wrote to him,
"I wish you would use me in any way
that relieves your mind as to the care
of your belongings. There never has
been, nor will there be, any charge in
this connection, it is an honor and a
pleasure".
Casa del Mar
Casa del Mar, the largest of the three guest houses, provided accommodation for Hearst himself until Casa Grande was ready in 1925. He stayed in the house again in 1947, during his last visit to the estate.
Casa del Mar contains 5,350 square feet (546 square meters) of floor space. Although luxuriously designed and furnished, none of the guest houses had kitchen facilities, a lack that sometimes irritated Hearst's guests. Adela Rogers St. Johns recounted her first visit:
"I rang and asked the maid for coffee.
With a smile, she said I would have to
go up to the castle for that.
I asked Marion Davies about this. She
said W. R. Hearst did not approve of
breakfast in bed."
Adjacent to Casa del Mar is the wellhead from Phoebe Hearst's Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, which Hearst moved to San Simeon when he sold his mother's estate after her death in 1919.
Casa del Monte
Casa del Monte was the first of the guest houses, originally entitled simply Houses A (del Mar), B (del Monte) and C (del Sol). It was built by Morgan on the slopes below the site of Casa Grande during 1920–1924.
Hearst had initially wanted to commence work with the construction of the main house, but Morgan persuaded him to begin with the guest cottages because the smaller structures could be completed more quickly.
Each guest house faces the Esplanade, and appears as a single story at its front entrance. Additional stories descend rearward down the terraced mountain side. Casa del Monte has 2,550 sq ft (237 sq. meters) of living space.
Casa del Sol
The decorative style of the Casa del Sol is Moorish, accentuated by the use of antique Persian tiles. A bronze copy of Donatello's David stands atop a copy of an original Spanish fountain.
The inspiration for the fountain came from an illustration in a book, The Minor Ecclesiastical, Domestic and Garden Architecture of Southern Spain, written by Austin Whittlesey and published in 1919.
Hearst sent a copy to Morgan, while retaining another for himself, and it proved a fertile source of ideas. The size of the house is 3,620 square feet (242 sq. meters).
Morgan's staff were responsible for the cataloguing of those parts of Hearst's art collection which were shipped to California, and an oral record made in the 1980's indicates the methodology used for furnishing the buildings at San Simeon:
"We would set the object up, and then I would
stand with a yardstick to give it scale. Sam Crow
would take a picture. Then we would give it a
number and I would write a description.
These were made into albums.
When Mr Hearst would write and say 'I want a
Florentine mantel in Cottage C in Room B, and
four yards of tiles,' then we would look it up in
the books and find something that would fit."
Casa Grande
Construction of Casa Grande began in April 1922. Work continued almost until Hearst's final departure on the 2nd. May 1947, and even then the house was unfinished. The size of Casa Grande is 68,500 square feet (5,634 sq. meters).
The main western façade is four stories. The entrance front, inspired by a gateway in Seville, is flanked by twin bell towers modeled on the tower of the church of Santa Maria la Mayor.
The layout of the main house was originally to a T-plan, with the assembly room to the front, and the refectory at a right angle to its center. The subsequent extensions of the North and South wings modified the original design.
As elsewhere, the core construction material is concrete, though the façade is faced in stone. In October 1927 Morgan wrote to Arthur Byne:
"We finally took the bull by the horns
and are facing the entire main building
with a Manti stone from Utah."
Morgan assured Hearst that it would be "the making of the building".
A cast-stone balcony fronts the second floor, and another in cast-iron the third. Above this is a large wooden overhang or gable. This was constructed in Siamese teak, originally intended to outfit a ship, which Morgan located in San Francisco.
The carving was undertaken by her senior carver Jules Suppo. Sara Holmes Boutelle suggests Morgan may have been inspired by a somewhat similar example at the Mission San Xavier del Bac in Arizona. The façade terminates with the bell towers, comprising the Celestial suites, the carillon towers and two cupolas.
The curator Victoria Kastner notes a particular feature of Casa Grande, the absence of any grand staircases. Access to the upper floors is either by elevators or stairwells in the corner turrets of the building. Many of the stairwells are undecorated and the plain, poured concrete contrasts with the richness of the decoration elsewhere.
The terrace in front of the entrance, named Central Plaza, has a quatrefoil pond at its center, with a statue of Galatea on a Dolphin. The statue was inherited, having been bought by Phoebe Hearst when her son was temporarily short of money.
The doorway from the Central Plaza into Casa Grande illustrates Morgan and Hearst's relaxed approach to combining genuine antiques with modern reproductions to achieve the effects they both desired. A 16th.-century iron gate from Spain is topped by a fanlight grille, constructed in a matching style in the 1920's by Ed Trinkeller, the castle's main ironmonger.
The castle made use of the latest technology. Casa Grande was wired with an early sound system, allowing guests to make music selections which were played from a Capehart phonograph located in the basement, and piped into rooms in the house through a system of speakers. Alternatively, six radio stations were available.
The entire estate was also equipped with 80 telephones, operated through a PBX switchboard, which was staffed 24 hours a day, and ran under the exclusive exchange 'Hacienda'.
Fortune recorded an example of Hearst's delighting in the ubiquitous access the system provided:
"A guest) fell to wondering about the result
of a ball game while seated by a campfire
with Mr Hearst, a day's ride from the castle.
'I'll tell you' volunteers Mr Hearst and,
fumbling with the rock against which he was
leaning, pulls from there a telephone, asks
for New York, and relieves his guest's curiosity".
The Assembly Room
The assembly room is the main reception room of the castle, described in 1985 by Taylor Coffman as:
"One of San Simeon's most
magnificent interiors".
The fireplace, originally from a Burgundian chateau in Jours-lès-Baigneux, is named the Great Barney Mantel, after a previous owner, Charles T. Barney, from whose estate Hearst bought it after Barney's suicide.
The ceiling is from an Italian palazzo. A concealed door in the paneling next to the fireplace allowed Hearst to surprise his guests by entering unannounced. The door opened off an elevator which connected with his Gothic suite on the third floor.
The assembly room, completed in 1926, is nearly 2,500 square feet in extent, and was described by the writer and illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans as:
"Looking like half of Grand
Central Station".
The room held some of Hearst's best tapestries. These include four from a set celebrating the Roman general Scipio Africanus, designed by Giulio Romano, and two copied from drawings by Peter Paul Rubens depicting The Triumph of Religion.
The need to fit the tapestries above the paneling and below the roof required the installation of the unusually low windows.
The room has the only piece of Victorian decorative art in the castle, the Orchid Vase lamp, made by Tiffany for the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1889. It was bought by Phoebe Hearst, who had the original vase converted to a lamp. William placed it in the assembly room in tribute to his mother.
The Refectory
The refectory was the only dining room in the castle, and was built between 1926 and 1927. The choir stalls which line the walls are from the La Seu d'Urgell Cathedral in Catalonia, and the silk flags mounted on the walls are Palio banners from Siena.
Hearst originally intended a "vaulted Moorish ceiling" for the room but, finding nothing suitable, he and Morgan settled on the Italian Renaissance example, dating from around 1600, which Hearst purchased from a dealer in Rome in 1924.
Victoria Kastner considered that the flat roof, with life-size carvings of saints:
"Strikes a discordant note of
horizontality among the vertical
lines of the room".
The style of the whole is Gothic, in contrast to the Renaissance approach adopted in the preceding assembly room. The refectory is said to have been Morgan's favorite interior within the castle.
The design of both the refectory and the assembly room was greatly influenced by the monumental architectural elements, especially the fireplaces and the choir stalls used as wainscoting, and works of art, particularly the tapestries, which Hearst determined would be incorporated into the rooms.
The central table provided seating for 22 in its usual arrangement of two tables, which could be extended to three or four, on the occasion of larger gatherings. The tables were sourced from an Italian monastery, and were the setting for some of the best pieces from Hearst's collection of silverware. One of the finest is a wine cooler dating from the early 18th. century and weighing 14.2 kg by the Anglo-French silversmith David Willaume.
The Library
The library is on the second floor, directly above the assembly room. The ceiling is 16th. century Spanish, and a remnant is used in the library's lobby. It comprises three separate ceilings, from different rooms in the same Spanish house, which Morgan combined into one.
The fireplace is the largest Italian example in the castle. Carved from limestone, it is attributed to the medieval sculptor and architect Benedetto da Maiano.
The library contains a collection of over 5,000 books, with another 3,700 in Hearst's study above. The majority of the library collections, including Hearst's choicest pieces from his sets of, often signed, first editions by Charles Dickens, his favorite author, were sold at sales at Parke-Bernet at 1939 and Gimbels in 1941. The library is also the location for much of Hearst's important holding of antique Greek vases.
The Cloisters and the Doge's Suite
The Cloisters form a grouping of four bedrooms above the refectory and, along with the Doge's Suite above the breakfast room, were completed in 1926. The Doge's Suite was occupied by Millicent Hearst on her rare visits to the castle.
The room is lined with blue silk, and has a Dutch painted ceiling, in addition to two more of Spanish origin, which was once the property of architect Stanford White.
Morgan also incorporated an original Venetian loggia in the suite, refashioned as a balcony. The suite leads on to Morgan's inventive North and South Duplex apartments, with sitting areas and bathrooms at entry level and bedrooms on mezzanine floors above.
The Gothic Suite
The Gothic suite was Hearst's private apartment on the third floor. He moved there in 1927. It comprises the Gothic study or library and Hearst's own South Gothic bedroom and private sitting room.
The ceiling of the bedroom is one of the best Hearst bought; Spanish, of the 14th. century, it was discovered by his Iberian agent Arthur Byne who also located the original frieze panels which had been detached and sold some time before.
The whole was installed at the castle in 1924. The space originally allocated for the study was too low to create the impression desired by Morgan and Hearst, a difficulty Morgan surmounted by raising the roof and supporting the ceiling with concrete trusses.
These, and the walls, were painted with frescoes by Camille Solon. Light was provided by two ranges of clerestory windows. The necessity of raising the roof to incorporate the study occasioned one of the few instances where Hearst hesitated:
"I telegraphed you my fear of the cost...
I imagine it would be ghastly."
Nevertheless Morgan urged further changes and expense. The result vindicated Morgan. The study, completed in 1931, is dominated by a portrait of Hearst at age 31, painted by his life-long friend, Orrin Peck.
The Celestial Suites
The Celestial bedrooms, with a connecting, shared, sitting room, were created between 1924 and 1926. The bell towers were raised to improve the proportions of the building, and the suites constructed in the spaces created below.
The relatively cramped spaces allowed no room for storage, and en-suite bathrooms were "awkwardly squeezed" into lower landings. Ludwig Bemelmans, a guest in the 1930's, recalled:
"There was no place to hang your
clothes, so I hung mine on wire
coat hangers that a former tenant
had left hanging on the arms of
two six-armed gold candelabra,
the rest I put on the floor".
The sitting room contains one of the most important paintings in Hearst's collection, Bonaparte Before the Sphinx (1868) by Jean-Léon Gérôme. The suites are linked externally by a walkway, the Celestial Bridge, which is decorated with elaborate tiling.
The North and South Wings
The North, or Billiard, and the South, or Service, wings complete the castle, and were begun in 1929.
The North wing houses the billiard room on the first floor, which was converted from the original breakfast room. It has a Spanish antique ceiling and a French fireplace, and contains the oldest tapestry in the castle, a Millefleur hunting scene woven in Flanders in the 15th. century.
The spandrel over the doorcase is decorated with a frieze of 16th. century Persian tiles depicting a battle. The 34 tiles originate from Isfahan and were purchased by Hearst at the Kevorkian sale in New York in 1922.
The theater, which leads off the billiard room, was used both for amateur theatricals and the showing of movies from Hearst's Cosmopolitan Studios. The theater accommodated fifty guests and had an electric keyboard that enabled the bells in the carillon towers to be played. The walls are decorated in red damask, which originally hung in the Assembly room, and feature gilded caryatids.
The upper stories of the North Wing were the last to be worked upon, and were never completed. Activity recommenced in 1945 and Morgan delegated the work to her assistant, Warren McClure. Many of the rooms are unfinished, but Aidala considers that the bathrooms in the wing represent first-rate examples of streamline design.
The Service Wing contains the kitchen. The hotel-scale units and worktops are constructed in Monel Metal, an expensive form of nickel alloy invented in 1901. The wing contains further bedroom suites, a staff dining room, and gives entry to the 9,000 square foot basement which contained a wine cellar, pantries, the boiler plant which heated the main house, and a barber shop, for the use of Hearst's guests.
Planned but Uncompleted Elements
Hearst and Morgan intended a large ballroom or cloister to connect the North and South wings at the rear of Casa Grande and unify the whole composition, but it was never undertaken.
In 1932, Hearst contemplated incorporating the reja (grille) he had acquired from Valladolid Cathedral in 1929 into this room. He described his vision in a letter to Morgan dated that year:
"A great ballroom and banqueting hall,
that is the scheme! Isn't it a pippin."
The letter was signed "Sincerely, Your Assistant Architect".
Other structures that did not develop beyond drawings and plans included two more guest houses, in English and Chinese architectural styles.
Collections
After a visit to Ansiglioni's workshop in 1889, William wrote the following in a letter to his mother:
"Why didn't you buy Ansiglioni's Galatea. It is
superb...I have a great notion to buy it myself,
the one thing that prevents me is a scarcity of
funds.
The man wants eight thousand dollars for the
blooming thing. I have the art fever terribly.
Queer, isn't it?
I never miss a gallery and I go and nosey about
the pictures and statuary and wish they were mine."
Hearst was a voracious collector of art, with the stated intention of making the castle "a museum of the best things that I can secure."
The dealer Joseph Duveen, from whom Hearst bought despite their mutual dislike, called him the "Great Accumulator." His robust approach to buying, particularly the purchase and removal of entire historic structures, generated considerable ill-feeling, and sometimes outright opposition.
William's deconstruction and removal of the 14th. century Bradenstoke Priory in England led the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to organize a campaign which used language so violent that its posters had to be pasted over for fear of a libel suit.
Hearst sometimes encountered similar opposition elsewhere. In 1919 he was writing to Morgan about:
"The patio from Bergos (sic) which, by the
way, I own but cannot get out of Spain".
The dismantling of a monastery in Sacramenia, which Hearst bought in its entirety in the 1920's, saw his workmen attacked by enraged villagers.
Hearst's tardiness in paying his bills was another less attractive feature of his purchasing approach; in 1925 Morgan was obliged to write to Arthur Byne:
"Mr. Hearst accepts your
dictum – cash or nothing".
Some of the finest pieces from the collections of books and manuscripts, tapestries, paintings, antiquities and sculpture, amounting to about half of Hearst's total art holdings, were sold in sales in the late 1930's and early 1940's, when Hearst's publishing empire was facing financial collapse, but a great deal remains.
William's art buying had started when he was young and, in his tested fashion, he established a company, the International Studio Arts Corporation, as a vehicle for purchasing works and as a means of dealing with their export and import.
In 1975, the Hearst Corporation donated the archive of Hearst's Brooklyn warehouses, the gathering point for almost all of his European acquisitions before their dispersal to his many homes, to Long Island University.
As of 2015, the university has embarked on a digitization project which will ultimately see the 125 albums of records, and sundry other materials, made available online.
Antiquities
The ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities are the oldest works in Hearst's collection. The oldest of all are the stone figures of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet which stand on the South Esplanade below Casa Grande. They date from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, approximately 1550 to 1189 BC.
Morgan designed the pool setting for the pieces, with tiling inspired by ancient Egyptian motifs. In the courtyard of Casa del Monte is one of a total of nine Roman sarcophagi collected by Hearst, dated to 230 AD, and previously held at the Palazzo Barberini, which was acquired at the Charles T. Yerkes sale in 1910.
The most important element of the antiquities collection is the holding of Greek vases, on display in the second-floor library. Although 65 vases were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after Hearst's death, those which remain at the castle still form one of the world's largest private groups. Hearst began collecting vases in 1901, and his collection was moved from his New York homes to the castle in 1935.
At its peak, the collection numbered over 400 pieces. The vases were placed on the tops of the bookshelves in the library, each carefully wired in place to guard against vibrations from earthquakes. At the time of Hearst's collecting, many of the vases were believed to be of Etruscan manufacture, but later scholars ascribe all of them to Greece.
Sculptures
Hearst often bought multiple lots from sales of major collections; in 1930 he purchased five antique Roman statues from the Lansdowne sale in London. Four are now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and one in the Metropolitan.
William collected bronzes as well as marble figures; a cast of a stone original of Apollo and Daphne by Bernini, dating from around 1617, stands in the Doge's suite.
In addition to his classical sculptures, Hearst was content to acquire 19th. century versions, or contemporary copies of ancient works:
"If we cannot find the right thing
in a classic statue, we can find a
modern one".
He was a particular patron of Charles Cassou, and also favored the early 19th. century Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen whose Venus Victorious remains at the castle.
Both this, and the genuinely classical Athena from the collection of Thomas Hope, were displayed in the Assembly room, along with the Venus Italica by Antonio Canova. Other works by Thorvaldsen include the four large marble medallions in the Assembly room depicting society's virtues.
Two 19th. century marbles are in the anteroom to the Assembly room, Bacchante, by Frederick William MacMonnies, a copy of his bronze original, and Pygmalion and Galatea by Gérôme.
A monumental statue of Galatea, attributed to Leopoldo Ansiglioni and dating from around 1882, stands in the center of the pool on the Main terrace in front of Casa Grande.
Textiles
Tapestries include the Scipio set by Romano in the Assembly room, two from a set telling the Biblical story of Daniel in the Morning room, and the millefleur hunting scene in the Billiard room. The hunting scene is particularly rare, one of only "a handful from this period in the world".
Hearst also assembled and displayed an important collection of Navajo textiles at San Simeon, including blankets, rugs and serapes. Most were purchased from Herman Schweizer, who ran the Indian Department of the Fred Harvey Company.
Originally gathered at Hearst's hacienda at Jolon, they were moved to Wyntoon in 1940 before being brought to San Simeon. They were finally donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1942.
Hearst was always interested in pieces that had historical and cultural connections to the history of California and Central and Latin America. The North Wing contains two Peruvian armorial banners. Dating from the 1580's, they show the shields of Don Luis Jerónimo Fernández Cabrera y Bobadilla, Count of Chinchón and viceroy of Peru.
Nathaniel Burt, the composer and critic evaluated the collections at San Simeon thus:
"Far from being the mere kitsch that
most easterners have been led to
believe, San Simeon is full of real
beauties and treasures".
Paintings
The art collection includes works by Tintoretto, whose portrait of Alvisius Vendramin hangs in the Doge's suite, Franz Xaver Winterhalter who carried out the double portraits of Maximilian I of Mexico and his empress Carlota, located in Casa del Mar, and two portraits of Napoléon by Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Hearst's earliest painting, a Madonna and Child from the school of Duccio di Buoninsegna, dates from the early 14th. century. A gift from his friend, the editor Cissy Patterson, the painting hangs in Hearst's bedroom.
Portrait of a Woman, by Giulio Campi, hangs in a bedroom in the North Wing. In 1928 Hearst acquired the Madonna and Child with Two Angels, by Adriaen Isenbrandt.
The curator Taylor Coffman describes this work, which hangs in the Casa del Mar sitting room, as perhaps "San Simeon's finest painting". In 2018, a previously unattributed Annunciation in the Assembly room was identified as a work of 1690 by Bartolomé Pérez.
The Gardens and Grounds of Hearst Castle
The Esplanade, a curving, paved walkway, connects the main house with the guest cottages; Hearst described it as:
"Giving a finished touch to the big
house, to frame it in, as it were."
Morgan designed the pedestrianized pavement with great care, to create a coup de théâtre for guests, desiring:
"A strikingly noble and saississant effect
be impressed upon everyone on arrival."
Hearst concurred:
"Heartily approve. I certainly want that
saississant effect. I don't know what it
is, but I think we ought to have at least
one such on the premises".
A feature of the gardens are the lampposts topped with alabaster globes; modeled on "janiform hermae", the concept was Hearst's. The Swan lamps, remodeled with alabaster globe lights to match the hermae, were designed by Morgan's chief draftsman, Thaddeus Joy.
Others who influenced Hearst and Morgan in their landscaping include Charles Adams Platt, an artist and gardener who had made a particular study of the layout and planting of Italian villas. Also Nigel Keep, Hearst's orchardman, who worked at San Simeon from 1922 to 1947, and Albert Webb, Hearst's English head gardener who was at the hill from 1922 to 1948.
The Neptune Pool
The Neptune Pool, "the most sumptuous swimming pool on earth", is located near the edge of the hilltop. It is enclosed by a retaining wall and underpinned by a framework of concrete struts to allow for movement in the event of earthquakes.
The pool is often cited as an example of Hearst's changeability; it was reconstructed three times before he was finally satisfied. Originally begun as an ornamental pond, it was first expanded in 1924 as Millicent Hearst desired a swimming pool.
It was enlarged again during 1926–1928 to accommodate Cassou's statuary. Finally, in 1934, it was extended again to act as a setting for a Roman temple, in part original and in part comprising elements from other structures which Hearst transported from Europe and had reconstructed at the site.
The pool holds 345,000 gallons of water, and is equipped with seventeen shower and changing rooms. It was heated by oil-fired burners. In early 2014, the pool was drained due to drought conditions and leakage.
After a long-term restoration project to fix the leaking, the pool was refilled in August 2018. The restoration of the pool was recognized with a Preservation Design Award for Craftsmanship from the California Preservation Foundation in 2019.
The pool is well-supplied with sculpture, particularly works by Charles Cassou. His centerpiece, opposite the Roman temple, is The Birth of Venus. An even larger sculptural grouping, depicting Neptune in a chariot drawn by four horses, was commissioned to fill the empty basin above the Venus. Although carved, it was never installed.
Roman Pool
The Roman Pool, constructed under the tennis courts, provided an indoor alternative to the Neptune pool. Originally mooted by Hearst in 1927, construction did not begin until 1930, and the pool was not completed until 1935.
Hearst initially wanted the pool to be fed by salt-water, but the design challenges proved to be insuperable. A disastrous attempt to fulfill Hearst's desires by pouring 20 tons of washed rock salt into the pool saw the disintegration of the cast-iron heat exchanger and pump.
Inspiration for the mosaic decoration came from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. The tiles are of Murano glass, with gold-leaf, and were designed by Solon and manufactured in San Francisco.
Although a pool of "spectacular beauty", it was little used as it was located in a less-visited part of the complex.
The Pergola and Zoo
Two other major features of the grounds were the pergola and the zoo. The pergola, an ornamental bridleway, runs to the west of Casa Grande. Comprising concrete columns, covered in espaliered fruit trees, Morgan ensured that it was built to a height sufficient to allow Hearst, "a tall man with a tall hat on a tall horse", to ride unimpeded down its mile-long length.
Plans for a zoo, to house Hearst's large collection of wild animals, were drawn up by Morgan, and included an elephant house and separate enclosures for antelopes, camels, zebras and bears. The zoo was never constructed, but a range of shelters and pits were built, sited on Orchard Hill.
The Estate
At the height of Hearst's ownership, the estate totaled more than 250,000 acres. W. C. Fields commented on the extent of the estate while on a visit:
"Wonderful place to bring up children.
You can send them out to play. They
won't come back till they're grown."
23 miles to the north of the castle, Morgan constructed the Milpitas Hacienda, a ranch-house that acted as a trianon to the main estate, and as a focus for riding expeditions.
Appraisals of Hearst Castle
As with Hearst himself, Hearst Castle and its collections have been the subject of considerable criticism. From the 1940's the view of Hearst and Morgan's most important joint creation as the phantasmagorical Xanadu of Orson Welles's imagination has been commonplace.
Some literary depictions were gently mocking; P. G. Wodehouse's novel of 1953, The Return of Jeeves has a character describe her stay:
"I remember visiting San Simeon once,
and there was a whole French Abbey
lying on the grass."
John Steinbeck's unnamed description was certainly of Hearst:
"They's a fella, newspaper fella near the
coast, got a million acres. Fat, sof' fella
with little mean eyes an' a mouth like a
ass-hole".
The writer John Dos Passos went further, explicitly referencing Hearst in the third volume of his 1938 U.S.A trilogy:
"The emperor of newsprint retired to his
fief of San Simeon where he built an
Andalusian palace and there spends his
last years amid the relaxing adulations
of screen stars, admen, screenwriters,
publicity-men, columnists.
Until he dies, a spent Caesar grown old
with spending."
The English architectural writer Clive Aslet was little more complimentary about the castle. Disliking its "unsympathetic texture of poured concrete", he described it as "best seen from a distance".
The unfinished, and unresolved, rear façade of Casa Grande has been the subject of particular negative comment; Carleton Winslow and Nicola Frye, in their history from 1980, suggest:
"The flanking North and South wings
compete rather disastrously with the
central doge's suite block."
Others questioned the castle's very existence; the architect Witold Rybczynski asked:
"What is this Italian villa doing on the
Californian Coastal Range? A costly
piece of theatrical décor that ignores
its context and lacks meaning."
Hearst's collections were similarly disparaged. The art historian William George Constable echoed Joseph Duveen when he assessed Hearst as:
"Not a collector but a gigantic
and voracious magpie."
Later decades after Hearst's death have seen a more sympathetic and appreciative evaluation of his collections, and the estate he and Morgan created to house them.
The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving, although listing Hearst only at number 83 in his evaluation of America's top 101 art collectors, wrote:
"Hearst is being reevaluated. He may
have been much more of a collector
than was thought at the time of his
death."
The curator Mary Levkoff, in her 2008 study, Hearst the Collector, contends that he was indeed a collector, describing the four separate "staggeringly important" collections of antique vases, tapestries, armor and silver which Hearst had brought together.
She wrote of the challenge of bringing their artistic merit to light from under the shadow of his own reputation.
Of Morgan's building, its stock has risen with the re-evaluation of her standing and accomplishments, which saw her inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2008. She became the first woman to receive the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2014, and to have an obituary in The New York Times as recently as 2019.
The writer John Julius Norwich recorded his recantation after a visit to the castle:
"I went prepared to mock; I remained
to marvel. Hearst Castle is a palace in
every sense of the word."
Final Thoughts From William Randolph Hearst
"News is something somebody doesn't
want printed; all else is advertising.”
"Don't be afraid to make a mistake,
your readers might like it."
"Putting out a newspaper without
promotion is like winking at a girl
in the dark -- well-intentioned, but
ineffective."
"Truth is not only stranger than
fiction, it is more interesting."
"You must keep your mind on the
objective, not on the obstacle."