PISCES (Pontoon for In-situ Characterization of Environmental Systems), shown here at the National Great Rivers Field station, is a lightweight pontoon platform that supports water quality and meteorological sampling. The device will be deployed as part of the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center's long term river monitoring research program, GREON (Great Rivers Ecological Observation Network). The device will be the first water sampling platform to be used in a larger network of water quality platforms on the Mississippi River and large rivers around the world. Photo by S. Paige Allen, Lewis and Clark Community College photographer.

Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) landraces being characterized for drought tolerance, Obregon, Mexico (photo: CIMMYT)

British postcard by Art Photo, no. 101. Photo: London Films / Erich Pommer Production. Publicity still for Fire over England (William K. Howard, 1937).

 

Leslie Banks (1890–1952) was an English stage and screen actor, director, and producer. He is now best remembered for playing gruff, menacing characters in black-and-white films of the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Leslie James Banks, CBE was born in West Derby, Liverpool, Lancashire, in 1890. His parents were George and Emily (née Dalby) Banks. He attended school at Glenalmond College in Scotland and later studied at Keble College, Oxford with the intention of becoming a parson but decided against this. He joined Frank Benson's company and made his acting debut in 1911 at the town hall, Brechin, playing Old Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice. He then toured the United States and Canada with Henry V. Esmond and Eva Moore in 1912–1913. Returning to London, he appeared for the first time on the West End, as Lord Murdon in The Dangerous Age in 1914. During the First World War he served with the Essex Regiment. He suffered injuries that left his face partially scarred and paralysed. This later disqualified him from many leading roles that required handsome actors. In his acting career he would use this injury to good effect by showing the unblemished side of his face when playing comedy or romance and the scarred, paralysed side of his face when playing drama or tragedy. After the war, Banks joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He returned to London in 1921 and established himself as a leading dramatic actor and West End star known for his powerful yet restrained performances. Working in both London and New York City, he gained prominence on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was when he was in New York that Kenneth Macgowan persuaded him to go to Hollywood. Banks formidable bulk and intimidating face served him well in his first important film role in The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932). He played the sadistic Russian Count Zaroff, a diabolical hunter who arranges for a ship to be wrecked on an island where he can unleashe his vicious dogs and hunts the passengers in the jungle for sport. Ralph Michael Stein at IMDb: “Zaroff is, of course, evil but he's also oddly sympathetic. What's a count to do when he can buy anything and only the most extraordinary hunting will bring him happiness? In that light his trophy room becomes understandable, his bloody diversion almost sympathetic. Banks is very effective in this role where he swings between culture and carnage.” The film is based on a 1924 short story of the same name by Richard Connell and also features Joel McCrea and Fay Wray.

 

For the rest of his career, Leslie Banks divided his time between Britain and the United States and between film and theatre. One of his most successful films was the British thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934) with Edna Best and Peter Lorre. José Luis Rivera Mendoza at IMDb: “The performances by the actors are of an excellent quality, with Leslie Banks leading the cast with his charming presence and very British wit. His ability to mix drama with comedy makes his character a very real and likable person, that portrays remarkably the everyman placed in an uncommon situation.” Hitchcock remade the film with James Stewart in 1956, but the two films are very different in tone, in setting, and in many plot details. Brendon Hanley at AllMovie: “the original 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much is arguably a more historically significant and aesthetically interesting film. It was Hitchcock's first true international hit.” A box office smash was Farewell Again/Troopship (Tim Whelan Sr., 1937), a multi-plotted British comedy-drama about soldiers on leave and the people they've left. Other film with Banks include the historical drama Fire Over England (William K. Howard, 1937) notable for the first pairing of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Hitchcock’s last British film Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939) with Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara in her first major film role. Against 'type', Banks starred in British mystery film The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (Thorold Dickinson, 1939), as the eccentric Inspector Anthony Slade. Jim Cross at IMDb: “He plays a curious character who we meet rehearsing policemen in full uniform AND tutus for some sort of theatrical performance! Further, he has a large selection of different hats that he self-consciously picks from every time he has to go and perform some task; when he has to delegate an arrest to his sergeant, he even delegates the appropriate (fishing) hat to him also! Altogether, the character played is fascinating and odd: an English eccentric or a (coded- it is 1939!) gay characterization? Either way, it is Leslie Banks' playing that makes this film at all worth watching...”

 

Leslie Banks appeared as the Chorus in Henry V (1944), Laurence Olivier's brilliant Technicolor film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play of the same name. Bruce Eder at AllMovie: “Laurence Olivier's Henry V confounded almost every assumption about bringing Shakespeare's work to the screen. In contrast to previous Shakespeare adaptations, it was fresh and lively -- even challenging and daring -- in its presentation and structure; it had fun with its subject, while other versions had been reverent and respectful; and it delighted audiences, scholars, and critics alike, becoming the first screen adaptation of a Shakespeare play to receive mostly enthusiastic reviews and turn a profit.” Banks played a supporting part in the thriller The Small Back Room (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1949) about the bureaucratic and personal frustrations of a crippled munitions expert (David Farrar) during World War II. Banks’ final film was Madeleine (David Lean, 1950), based on a true story about Madeleine Smith (Ann Todd), a young Glasgow woman from a wealthy family who was tried in 1857 for the murder of her lover, Emile L'Angelier (Ivan Desny). The trial was much publicized in the newspapers of the day and labeled "the trial of the century". Banks played the authoritarian father, unaware of Madeleine's secret life. His theatre roles included Eliza Comes to Stay (his American debut in 1914), Captain Hook in Peter Pan (his New York debut in 1924), Petruchio in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1937) the kindly, doddering schoolmaster in the original 1938 staging of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1938), and James Jarvis in the Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars (1950). Leslie Banks married Gwendoline Haldane Unwin in 1915 and the couple had three daughters: Daphne, Virginia, and Evangeline, who became an actress. Banks was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to theatre in 1950, the year of his last appearances on stage and screen. He died in 1952, aged 61, from a stroke he suffered while walking.

 

Sources: Bruce Eder (AllMovie), Brendon Hanley (AllMovie), Ralph Michael Stein (IMDb), José Luis Rivera Mendoza (IMDb), Jim Cross (IMDb), AllMovie, Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

Project: UAS CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH WIND DAMAGE TO VEGETATION AND RURAL AREA ASSESSMENTS

 

With the help of the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office (USRTO), scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory in collaboration with the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies are working on developing an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based approach to better characterize high-wind damage to vegetation and in rural areas to improve disaster response and recovery.

 

Photo Credit: Tyler Bell/CIMMS/NSSL

Édouard Vuillard French

Madame Louis Kapferer , c. 1918-19

Glue-based distemper on canvas

This painting was commissioned by the sitter’s sons, Henri and Marcel. Madame Kapferer’s pose is regal, reminiscent of an El Greco cardinal, her expression austere. We feel we know what sort of person she is—her tastes, her cultural and economic class, her personality. From the curious angle of the viewpoint, the virtuoso treatment of her black dress, and the subtle disorder that reigns among the accumulated bibelots and photographs there emerges one of the artist’s masterpieces of setting and characterization.

Private Collection

From the placard: The Jewish Museum

 

MiniTile™ probes can be used on an industry-standard positioner arm for a variety of semiconductor tests.

Brigitte Bardot. Cacha capuccino Chat, RBL mold.

13 Flamerule 1369, Año del Guantelete según el Cómputo de los Valles

Project: UAS CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH WIND DAMAGE TO VEGETATION AND RURAL AREA ASSESSMENTS

 

With the help of the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office (USRTO), scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory in collaboration with the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies are working on developing an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based approach to better characterize high-wind damage to vegetation and in rural areas to improve disaster response and recovery.

 

Photo Credit: Tyler Bell/CIMMS/NSSL

Flint from the Pennsylvanian of Ohio, USA. (~4.1 centimeters across along the base)

 

Flint is the "official" state gemstone of Ohio (actually, there's no such thing as "official" anything). "Flint" is sometimes used as a lithologic term by modern geologists, but it is a synonym for chert. Flint and chert are the same - they are cryptocrystalline, quartzose sedimentary rocks. Rockhounds often assert that flint is high-quality while chert is low-quality. Some geologists assert that "flint" implies a biogenic origin and "chert" implies a chemical origin.

 

Many cherts do have a chemical origin - chert nodules are moderately common in some limestone units. The nodules form during diagenesis - pre-existing silica components in the carbonate sediments are dissolved, mobilized, and reprecipitated as chert masses. Some cherts do have a biogenic origin - for example, radiolarian cherts (rich in radiolarian microfossils) or spicular cherts (rich in siliceous sponge spicules).

 

The most famous flint deposit in Ohio is Flint Ridge, in Licking County. At this locality, the Middle Pennsylvanian-aged Vanport Flint is exposed in several places. The geologic literature on the Vanport Flint is relatively sparse, with inaccurate, incomplete descriptions and characterizations. For example, the literature describes the Vanport as a sheet of flint at Flint Ridge - it's actually a meganodule horizon. Other descriptions refer to the chert as the remains of siliceous sponges. In reality, siliceous sponge spicules are quite scarce in Vanport samples.

 

Two graduate student projects during the 2000s, conducted at two different universities, had very different conclusions & interpretations about the origin of the Vanport Flint. A 2003 study concluded that chert at Flint Ridge is biogenic in origin. A 2006 study concluded that the chert is chemical in origin.

 

Studies done by geologists at Ohio State University at Newark indicate that the Vanport Flint has a relatively complex history, the details of which are still being worked out.

 

Modern flint knappers value the Vanport Flint for being multicolored and high-quality (= very few impurities). With artificial heating, the flint is more easily knapped into arrowheads, spear points, and other objects. Prehistoric American Indians quarried the Vanport Flint at many specific sites on Flint Ridge. Old Indian flint pits can be examined along hiking trails in Flint Ridge State Park ("State Memorial"). Many authentic Indian artifacts found in Ohio (arrowheads & spearpoints - "projectile points") are composed of Vanport Flint.

 

Stratigraphy: Vanport Flint, Allegheny Group, upper Middle Pennsylvanian

 

Locality: Nethers Flint Quarries - flint pit in the woods on the southwestern side of Flint Ridge Road, eastern Flint Ridge, far-western Muskingum County, east-central Ohio, USA (vicinity of 40° 00.137’ North latitude, 82° 11.544’ West longitude)

 

tPix ASICs assembled on test carrier boards. ASICs are tested on boards compatible with the camera system they'll be used in to minimize characterization time.

 

Photo by Dawn Harmer/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

 

Learn more: www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2018-08-23-how-slacs-electron...

August 14, 2019 - NREL researchers and EHS Safety experts discuss testing parameters and procedure for a 10kW Power Take-Off (PTO) system designed for a wave energy converter on the 2.5 MW dynamometer at NREL's Flatirons Campus. A specially designed gearbox using the MMR (Mechancial Motion Rectifier) mechanism of is capable of rectifying the bi-direction input into uni-direction to drive the generator. Researchers are performing a system characterization test to determine the dynamic performance of the PTO and identify some unknown parameters. (Photo by Dennis Schroeder / NREL)

[59084]

The Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab is a Department of Energy User Facility charged with providing support to nanoscience researchers in academic, government and industrial laboratories around the world. The Foundry provides users with instruments, techniques and collaborators to enhance their studies of the synthesis, characterization and theory of nanoscale materials.

 

credit: Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab - Roy Kaltschmidt, photographer

 

XBD200805-00227.TIF

Project: UAS CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH WIND DAMAGE TO VEGETATION AND RURAL AREA ASSESSMENTS

 

With the help of the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office (USRTO), scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory in collaboration with the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies are working on developing an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based approach to better characterize high-wind damage to vegetation and in rural areas to improve disaster response and recovery.

 

Photo Credit: Tyler Bell/CIMMS/NSSL

The Malaria Program and the Institute for Biomedical Sciences in Suriname (MWI) are cooperating on conducting scientific studies of molecular screening with Real-Time PET PCR for malaria identification (even with very low parasitaemia). In addition the MWI explores the potential use of malaria serology in Suriname and introduce serological testing to allow the country to gradually declare areas of the territory free from malaria. In addition the emerging of Artemisinin resistance can be assessed through molecular characterizations and drug sensitivity studies.

The Malaria program receives technical support from individual infectious disease expert from the Academic Hospital.

Part 1 “ The Menagerie”

 

Star Trek- The Menagerie , “Return to Talos IV”

youtu.be/v5XBfgPy43A?t=2s The full feature.

 

The Menagerie Review: February 8, 2014 by neoethereal

As the only two-part episode in The Original Series, “The Menagerie” also cleverly serves as a re-telling of the very first Star Trek story ever filmed, “The Cage.” This week on The Uncommon Geek, I examine all of these episodes in full detail, highlighting their connections to other aspects of the Trek mythos. As well, I take a look at the ground broken by Gene Roddenberry concerning the nature of reality, decades before movies like “The Matrix” challenged the perception of our everyday world.

 

Equipped with little more than a shoestring budget and massive constraints on time with which to work, Gene Roddenberry and his Star Trek production team had to get extremely creative in order to make the show work. Nowhere, in my opinion, is that more evident than here in “The Menagerie,” an entry that served the purpose of buying the production team time to properly finish subsequent episodes, and as well, afforded Gene Roddenberry a unique opportunity to re-tell the story he had wanted to get on the air all along, “The Cage.”

 

This episode begins with the Enterprise having been called out of its way, to Starbase 11. Confusion arises when the starbase’s commanding officer, Commodore Mendez, reveals to Captain Kirk that the base never sent any message to the Enterprise. Spock claims to have received that message, which puts Kirk into the difficult position of whether to trust the starbase computers, or the word of his first officer and friend.

 

It turns out that Captain Christopher Pike, the former commander of the Enterprise, who was recently crippled and disfigured in a terrible accident, is on Starbase 11, and suspicion arises that perhaps he relayed a message to Spock. When Kirk finally gets to see Pike, however, he realizes that it would have been impossible for Spock’s former commanding officer to have done this, for Pike is now wheelchair bound, and his communication with others is limited to electronic beeps that fill in for “yes” and “no.

 

While Kirk and Mendez wrestle over the truth, Spock executes a daring and clever plan to hijack the Enterprise, taking Captain Pike with him. It goes to show just how dangerous an opponent someone as smart and calculating as Spock can be when he puts his mind to it. Spock sets the Enterprise on a locked course for Talos IV, a planet which the ship visited on a past mission under Christopher Pike, and a planet that invites the death penalty upon any Starfleet officer who goes there

 

The secret file on Talos IV, and the article of General Order 7

I personally find the idea of a death penalty being associated with Talos IV to be somewhat dubious; although there is a very good reason why Starfleet wants the existence of the Talosians kept secret, I find it hard to believe that if the Federation is capable of having a death penalty, that it only applies to one law. It may just be a grand bluff, and indeed, there is some evidence to that effect later in the episode. Regardless, breaking General Order 7 is a serious offense, and Spock is if nothing else, putting his career and livelihood on the line.

 

Kirk, of course, isn’t going to sit by while his ship is abducted. He and Mendez make a daring attempt to chase the Enterprise in the Shuttlecraft Picasso, knowing full well that while they would never catch up, they would appear on the Enterprise sensors. Kirk gambles his life on the fact that his friend Spock would not leave him to die in the void of space, as the shuttle runs out of fuel. Kirk’s illogical gambit causes Spock’s plan to unravel, and he surrenders himself to custody, pleading guilty to every charge leveled against him. However, Spock has locked the Enterprise into a course for Talos IV that cannot be broken, which will potentially extend the death sentence that is on himself, to Kirk as well.

 

The court martial that proceeds against Spock is highly unusual; as mentioned, Spock pleads guilty without defense, but through some legal technicality, manages to arrange for the court to hear out his evidence as to why he went through with his illegal actions. Given that Kirk is presiding over the hearing, and that the crew has little else to do but wait until they reach Talos IV, I get the lenience, but I am not sure what real court would remain in session to examine evidence for someone who just admitted their guilt. Or admittedly, maybe I just don’t know enough about legal proceedings.

 

Spock’s evidence, as it turns out, is a transmission from Talos IV, beamed directly to the Enterprise, which details the vessel’s first trip there under the command of Captain Pike. Of course, this transmission is the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” and from this point on, “The Menagerie” consists almost entirely of footage from that episode.

 

Aside from some really goofy tech dialogue, and incomplete characterizations, “The Cage” holds up surprisingly well. We get to see that Jeffrey Hunter’s Captain Pike is a darker, colder man than James Kirk; he is someone whose decisions and responsibilities as a commander are weighing on him heavily, and he is nearing the point of considering resignation. Pike’s first officer is only referred to as Number One (played by Majel Barrett), who is an amazing example of a strong female role for 1960’s television, but unfortunately her character had to be discarded by Roddenberry when the studio forced him to choose between keeping his strong, logical female, or his alien Spock. Roddenberry ended up giving Spock Number One’s cold, emotionless, logical persona, and thus the Spock we know and love was born.

 

It really is a shame that NBC put so much pressure on Roddenberry to alter his concept of women in the 23rd Century; aside from Number One, the other female crew members of the Cage-era Enterprise also seem to be on equal footing with the men, and there isn’t a mini-skirt in sight. Of course, this reviewer by no means, from an aesthetic point view, objects to how the women of the Enterprise look in said mini-skirts, but cheekiness and my own red-blooded male impulses aside, the female officers in Starfleet should have been offered the same, more professional uniform as the males. Unfortunately we would have to wait until The Motion Picture to see more fairness in the way men and women are presented in Star Trek.

 

When Enterprise finds evidence of human survivors on Talos IV, from a doomed expedition many years ago, Pike, Spock, and an away team beam down to investigate. What at first seems like a wonderful discovery of lost, homesick men, turns out to be just an elaborate, life like illusion created by the Talosians. Pike is abducted when he is lured in by the only true human survivor from the crash, Vina, whom he is extremely attracted to.

 

Pike is subjected to a variety of illusions crafted by the Talosians, in order to foster cooperation, as well as to strengthen his attraction toward Vina. Vina is presented to Pike in a variety of forms; as a damsel in distress on Rigel VII, as a wife in the countryside on Earth, and as a primal, animalistic Orion slave woman, all in an attempt to make him submit to his situation.

 

However, Pike is every bit as stubborn as Captain Kirk, and certainly has a darker, more furious edge to him. When he discovers that primitive, base human emotions such as hatred, and anger, block out the Talosian’s illusions and their telepathic abilities, he mines that weakness long enough to take one of them captive. Once the illusion is broken, the Enterprise crew find out that their attempts to break Pike out from his underground cage with phaser fire were actually working, but all along they weren’t able to see it.

 

The Talosians had, thousands of centuries ago, devastated their planet and their civilization with war. They retreated underground, where their telepathic abilities flourished, but their physical bodies and their technology atrophied. They had apparently been testing various species for many years, looking for a suitable slave race to use for rebuilding their world, but none had shown as much promise as humanity.

 

However, when the away team threatens to kill themselves with an overloaded phaser, and as well when the Talosians finish screening the Enterprise‘s records, they realize that humans would rather die than be enslaved, and would be too violent to keep in captivity. With of course, the sad exception of Vina, who in reality is too badly disfigured to live a normal life outside of Talos IV.

 

(I once heard a suggestion that Vina could be repaired using the transporter. I don’t think 23rd century transporters were sophisticated enough for that, plus, there wouldn’t be an original, unaltered version of her pattern to reference.)

 

The ending of “The Cage” leads us to the final moments of “The Menagerie,” where it is revealed that not only have the Talosians been transmitting a signal to the Enterprise, but even Commodore Mendez himself has been one of their illusions all along!

 

It is also revealed that Spock’s only intention was to take Captain Pike to Talos IV, so that the crippled starship commander could live out the rest of his life as a healthy, happy man with Vina. Even Kirk seems to relent that it is better to live with an illusion of health and happiness, than a reality of living as a useless vegetable. That Commodore Mendez was an illusion, and that Starfleet sends a signal to the Enterprise, apparently excusing their violation of Talos space, seems to let Spock off the hook. Perhaps too easily in fact; despite acting out of nothing but loyalty to his former Captain, and despite that the way he enacted his plan was done in such a manner as to put the blame only on himself, Spock seems to get out of his predicament with apparently no trouble at all. We can make a guess that perhaps this incident is why he doesn’t receive a promotion or command of his own until years later, but there is nothing spoken on-screen to that effect.

 

We are also left to ponder about how much of the incident was real at all. Since the Talosians can apparently project their powers through subspace, one wonders just how long they conspired with Spock, and also, how much we see of Mendez was real or an illusion. My guess is that the Mendez we see at the base was real, and what goes onto the shuttle with Kirk was the illusion, but unfortunately, again, there is little to back that up. What we do know for sure is that the Talosian’s powers are not to be trifled with, and it is truly for wise for Starfleet to give them a wide berth.

Despite some problems with logic and consistency, “The Menagerie” is an entertaining, fascinating episode that shows original series Trek at some of its most interestingly cerebral. Gene Roddenberry’s first pilot examines the nature of reality decades before The Matrix did, and asks the questions: What is real? How does one define their purpose, their reality? Is our reality just relative, defined only by experience? Is there a such thing as an absolute reality, or only what our senses perceive, or for that matter what they think they perceive? This is smart, ahead of its time writing for the 1960s.

 

Through the tragedies that befell both Vina and Pike, we must also question the quality of human life, and the value we place on it. Is it worth staying alive if you can’t function? If your brain is sound but your body is broken, can you still truly live? Speaking for myself, I certainly would despise the existence that Captain Pike is forced to endure in his wheelchair. I’d rather be dead than live that way. I’m not sure how I would react exactly to being forced to live in an illusion, but it is certainly preferable to a reality of uselessness and immobility. Besides, is our everyday life not just an elaborate series of deceptions spun before our very eyes; maybe not as powerful as a trick of telepathy played by an alien race, but an illusion nonetheless?

 

For even provoking these thoughts, and much more, “The Cage,” and by extension, “The Menagerie,” are what I consider among the best of Star Trek’s purely cerebral stories about human nature. It is imaginative, thoughtful, and quite engaging.

The Hellenistic age marks the unification of the Greek world, sharing a common culture based on that of 5th and 4th century BC Athens, along with a fusion of Near Eastern cultures. The Hellenistic style of sculpture, developed in the areas conquered by Alexander the Great, is chiefly characterized by delicate and highly finished modeling, dramatic movement of forms in space, representations of extreme emotion, highly individuated characterization, and a wide variety of subject matter.

Suspended Animation Classic #877 First published October 16, 2005 (#42) (Dates are approximate)

 

The King

By Michael Vance

 

The King has reentered the building.

 

Please. Not again.

 

Let’s be honest. What more can be done with the old canard that Elvis Presley isn’t dead? In fact, this idea has run so rampant that no Rock and Roll singer has ever died, and Elvis, Jim Morrison, Jimmie Hendrix and Buddy Holly are actually playing Pinochle with Janis Joplin and John Lennon somewhere in Oklahoma right now. Elvis is winning.

 

But can artist and writer Rich Koslowski bring something fresh in the way of characterization, plot, and dialog to his graphic novel The King?

 

Astonishingly, yes.

 

Is his visual storytelling strong enough to keep a reader turning pages to reach the denouement?

 

You bet.

 

His art is cartoonish but powerful, the staging in each panel flawless, the pacing from panel to panel enticing, and his visual characterizations are both appealing and consistent.

 

Well, then, can just a little bit of what The King is all about be shared?

 

Sure. It is about real and phony faith.

 

Put your fists down. It is also about a washed up National Enquirer journalist investigating an Elvis impersonator in a gold helmet who is so convincing that he has turned a dump in Las Vegas into a money-making machine and founded his own church. The impersonator picked this reporter to interview him.

 

It is about the cronies that surround this Elvis, and why they do so. And it is about 261 pages long.

 

And it is all done using profanity, nihilism, sexual and drug abuse, and nudity, all sure markers that it will get slammed by this reviewer.

 

The King is highly recommended for adults.

 

Wha … ? Huh?!?

 

It never glamorizes these vices.

 

And it’s about time you bought a copy.

 

Thank you very much. The reviewer has left the building.

 

The King/$19.95 from Top Shelf Productions/sold in comics and book stores.

 

President Obama’s Inaugural Address today may be one of the best of all time, and may be especially of interest to Israel. He has already had a lot to say about the “Holy Land,” and many wait with bated breath to see what he says today!

 

Today President Barack Obama will present what may be one of the greatest speeches of all time when he delivers his Inauguration Address. The precedent for such an event has already been established, as two of the best 35 speeches in history were, in fact, Inaugural Addresses. And, with our nation’s current state of affairs, it is entirely possible that profound words will, in fact, be uttered.

 

Make no doubt about, people are listening to what President Obama says, as the excerpt below from an article by Lanny Davis indicates. And, this is true not only of Americans, but of those around the world - - especially in Israel. As you listen to what the President says today about Israel, compare it to what he said in the two speeches mentioned in Mr. Davis’ article!

 

Lanny Davis Article

 

The New York Times' headline on Monday, concerning President Obama's speech on Israel the day before to the national pro-Israel organization, AIPAC, read:

 

"Obama Presses Israel to Make Hard Choices."

 

The story, written by Helene Cooper, began with an unusually non-factual, subjective characterization: "President Obama struck back at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel" in the Sunday American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) speech. The rest of the story reinforced the notion that Obama had not significantly changed his Sunday speech from the one he delivered the previous Thursday, May 19.

 

The Washington Post's headline on the same day reflected a 180 degree opposite interpretation:

 

"Obama reiterates 'ironclad' support for Israel."

 

There were several material differences between the Thursday and Sunday speeches, such as calling Hamas a "terrorist organization" on Sunday, saying Israel should not negotiate with a group that doesn't recognize the Jewish state's right to exist. But last week, Hamas was just an "organization that has and does resort to terrorism." But most noteworthy was the different context to the controversial reference to negotiations based on "1967 borders."

 

In the earlier speech, Obama stated: "We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states."

 

But on Sunday, May 22, Obama repeated the reference to 1967 lines and mutually agreed swaps, but added these words, which were inexplicably omitted from Cooper's story in the Times: "By definition, it means that the parties themselves -- Israelis and Palestinians -- will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last forty-four years, including the new demographic realities on the ground and the needs of both sides."

 

The key addition is the phrase, "new demographic realities on the ground."

 

These are nearly identical words to those used by President George W. Bush in his April 2004 letter to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- that the finally negotiated borders in an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation must reflect "new realities on the ground, including already existing major population centers" (widely understood to be a reference to those West Bank Israeli settlements needed for Israel's security.)

 

In other words, Obama had gone from a brand new formulation on Thursday that no American president had ever stated before publicly -- a fact that he explicitly acknowledged in his Sunday speech -- to one that had been explicitly stated by Bush.

 

What further differentiated Obama's remarks from those of every president since Lyndon Johnson was his omission of a clear statement, in the speech or at any point in his Presidency, that Israel cannot be expected to go back to the 1967/1949 armistice lines, and that as President Clinton endorsed in the "Clinton Parameters" and President Bush said on behalf of the United States in a letter to Israel's Prime Minister, that demographic changes and reality on the ground will affect the negotiated outcome that the United States supports.

 

What a man says is important, and he will be held accountable for it. As usual, the issue is addressed in the Word of God, as reflected in Numbers 30:1-2, “Moses spoke to the heads of the tribes of Israel, saying, “This is what the Lord has commanded. If a man vows a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he shall not break his word. He shall do so according to all that proceeds out of his mouth. It is important that we remember that this applies not only to President Obama but to each of us as well. As a result, when we promise to pray according to the dictates of Psalm 122:6 and pray for the peace of Jerusalem we must be diligent to keep that promise!

 

For more on this story, visit: Jerusalem Prayer Team Articles Page.

  

LIKE and SHARE this story to encourage others to pray for peace in Jerusalem, and leave your own PRAYERS and COMMENTS below.

 

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Blythe custom doll by erregiro®

The Radiochemical Processing Laboratory at PNNL is home to a new flagship JEOL GrandARM-300F scanning transmission electron microscope. This unique instrument will allow unprecedented atomic-scale characterization of nuclear materials, structural alloys, and functional systems in dynamic conditions.

 

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Project: UAS CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH WIND DAMAGE TO VEGETATION AND RURAL AREA ASSESSMENTS

 

With the help of the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office (USRTO), scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory in collaboration with the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies are working on developing an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based approach to better characterize high-wind damage to vegetation and in rural areas to improve disaster response and recovery.

 

Photo Credit: Tyler Bell/CIMMS/NSSL

This abridgement of Universal's 12-episode serial Buck Rogers stars Buster Crabbe as Dick Calkins' famed comic-strip space adventurer. Buck and Buddy (Jackie Moran) and are recruited to battle against modernistic gangster Killer Kane (Anthony Warde), by Wilma Deering (Constance Moore) and Dr. Huer (C. Montague Shaw). The duo travels to Saturn to get help in their mission, and after Buck and Buddy quell the internal struggles of the Saturnians, Buck triumphs over Killer Kane and his cosmic thugs.

Planet Outlaws Feature link: youtu.be/UD3xKy42KUY

 

Link to all 12 Serial Episodes:

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTtc-u3zFGk&feature=share&amp...

 

Starring Buster Crabbe, Constance Moore, Jackie Moran, Jack Mulhall, Anthony Warde, C. Montague Shaw, Guy Usher, William Gould, Philson Ahn. Directed by Ford Beebe, Saul A. Goodkind.

Buck Rogers and Buddy Wade are in the middle of a trans-polar dirigible flight when they are caught in a blizzard and crash. Buddy then releases a special gas to keep them in suspended animation until a rescue party can arrive. However, an avalanche covers the craft and the two are in suspended animation for 500 years. When they are found, they awake to find out that the world has been taken over by the outlaw army of Killer Kane. Along with Lieutenant Wilma Deering, Buck and Buddy join in the fight to overthrow Kane and with the help of Prince Tallen of Saturn and his forces, they eventually do and Earth is free of Kane's grip.

 

This is actually a pretty enjoyable serial, but it seems doomed to be forever overshadowed by the much superior Flash Gordon trilogy. Universal brought BUCK ROGERS out in 1939, in between their own chapterplays FLASH GORDON'S TRIP TO MARS and FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE; it also starred Buster Crabbe (but with his natural dark hair instead of Flash's golden curls) and although it is filled with space ships and weird gadgets, BUCK ROGERS lacks most of the elements that gave the Flash serials their intense emotional draw.

 

For one thing, there is none of the strong sexual charge that the Flash series had. Instead of nubile Dale Arden and sultry Princess Aura both competing for the hero's attention while the villain openly lusted for the heroine, Buck's epic featured Constance Moore as Col. Wilma Deering. Now, Moore is perfectly fine in her role, but she is after all a soldier in the resistance army and not a fair damsel in distress. She has a nice moment when she wrests a ray gun away from a guard and blasts her way out of her cell, but she and Buck seem to be merely chums on the same side.

 

Also, although BUCK ROGERS has plenty of futuristic gadgets (rayguns and buzzing spaceships which shoot sparks from their backs, teleportation tubes and invisibility rays), there are no grotesque monsters or nonhuman alien races on view. Prisoners have remarkably goofy metal helmets strapped on which turn them into docile zombies, and there are these homely goons called Zuggs moping around, but that's hardly as fascinating as Lion Men and Clay People and horned apes (that Orangapoid critter).

 

What's ironic about all this is that the comic strip BUCK ROGERS by Philip Nolan and Richard Calkins started in 1929, was immensely popular for many years and it success inspired the creation of Flash. Yet the Flash strip benefitted from the genius of Alex Raymond, one of the all-time great cartoon artists, and it produced stunning visual images (from the samples of Buck's strip I've seen, it was imaginative enough but pretty crude and drab). This contrast carried over to the serials.

 

Buck Rogers and his sidekick Buddy Wade (Jackie Moran) are pilots who crash in the Arctic in1938 and survive for 500 years because the 'Nirvano' gas they were carrying put them in a state of suspended animation. They both seem to adapt to waking up in the year 2424 pretty well, where I would think most people would be so traumatized it would take a while to adjust. In this dystopic future, the Earth is ruled by a mega-gangster called Killer Kane (another setback; Anthony Warde would be okay as a crimelord but he just doesn't have the imposing presence to convince me this guy can dominate an entire planet).

 

Luckily, Buck and Buddy have been found by the small resistance movement hopelessly trying to overthrow Kane from their hidden city. Here is Dr Huer (C. Montague Shaw, who I just saw in the UNDERSEA KINGDOM doing the same gig with his wild inventions) and Wilma Deering leading the good fight. For some reason I missed, everyone immediately puts all their trust in Buck and he pretty much takes over. (Maybe he's just one of those charismatic alpha males or something.) Most of the serial involves desperate trips back and forth to Saturn to enlist the aid of the isolationist Saturnians, and this means running the blockade of Kane's ships. The usual fistfights and explosions and captures and escapes normal for this sort of situation ensue. It's a lot of fun if you take it on its own terms, with a strong linear plot and likeable heroes, but it really never kicks into high gear and seems a bit drab.

 

It's interesting that some (but not all) of the Saturnians are played by Asian actors. Prince Tallen, who gets caught up in most of the fun, was portrayed by a very young Philson Ahn, and I thought for years this was the same guy who in 1972 impressed us as the head of the Shaolin Temple in TV's KUNG FU (he taught all the styles, really amazing if you think about it). Turns out that was Phiip Ahn, Philson's brother.

 

Dir: Ford Beebe and Saul A. Goodkind - 12 Chapters

 

BUCK ROGERS (1939): Director Ford Beebe, who also worked on Flash Gordon (1938), came straight from The Phantom Creeps (1939) and then went back to finish Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (1940). Buck Rogers stars Buster Crabbe or, as his family knew him, Lawrence. Now, Lawrence ‘Larry’ ‘Buster’ Crabbe had previously starred in two Flash Gordon serials, a couple of Tarzan movies and a long string of westerns, so it was only natural for Universal to decide he was perfect as the heroic Buck Rogers, aka that blonde guy who saves the universe but isn’t Flash Gordon. Actually, Buster Crabbe wasn’t the first actor to play Buck Rogers in-the-flesh, so to speak.

That honour goes to an unknown man who played Buck in a Virginia department store, instead of their regular Santa Claus. Santa was off conquering Martians at the time, I think it was an exchange program of sorts. It strikes me that Buck Rogers is not unlike a male fantasy come to life. Just think of it – Buck gets to take a nice five-hundred-year-long sleep-in. With my busy schedule, I’m ecstatic if I can get twenty minutes nap on the weekend. Then, when he wakes up, Buck is the smartest, most dynamic guy around. In reality he’d be treated like something that’s escaped from the zoo. And finally, everyone needs Buck to go on exciting missions, fight the bad guys, test exotic equipment and crash rocket ships – out of the half-dozen flights Buck makes, he only lands successfully once. It’s easy to see the bullet cars used in the movie are the same ones from Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (1938), and even the script is rather suspect.

Planet Outlaws

This film is actually a compilation of the Buck Rogers serials that ran originally in 1939. The cliffhanger endings and recap beginnings have been edited out to make it flow better -- with partial success. Some new footage was shot for the introduction and summary. At the opening, there are some newspaper headlines about jets chasing flying discs, and the obligatory checkered V2 launch, etc. to add a modern segue. After that, it's pure 1939.

Sci-fi movie technology had come a long way in the 14 years since Buck's debut. Audiences had grown accustomed to sleek and pointy rockets, flying saucers, strange aliens, etc. The Buck Rogers style world-of-the-future must have looked oddly quaint. (if not laughable) Just why Universal Pictures thought re-releasing Buck Rogers was a good idea is a bit of a mystery. Kids who were 8 or so back in 1939 would be young adults in '53. Perhaps Universal was banking on those young adults would buy tickets for a trip down memory lane.

Plot Synopsis

After a bit of modern ('53) footage about the wonders of modern progress and "flying disks," the old serial begins. Rogers and Buddy crashed in the arctic while on a transpolar flight. They were in suspended animation due to the cold and a vague gas. A patrol finds them in the year 2500 and revives them. In the world of 2500, a despot named Killer Kane is trying to take over the world. The forces of good are holed up in the "hidden city." Buck arranges a decoy maneuver to elude Kane's patrol ships. They fly to the planet Saturn in hopes of finding help. On Saturn, the Council sees Rogers and party as the rebels, and Kane as the rule of law. Rogers et al, escape Saturn, return to earth and seek to disrupt Kane's bamboozling of Prince Tallen, the Saturnian representative. Rogers sneaks into Kane's city, interrupts the treaty signing and convinces Tallen of Kane's evil by revealing Kane's "robot battalion" (slaves wearing mind-control helmets). Rogers and Tallen get to Saturn and the treaty is signed. Rogers escapes Kane's patrols via the Dissolvo Ray which rendered them invisible. Rogers and the war council plan for war. Rogers enlists the Saturnians to help. Meanwhile, Rogers sneaks into Kane's city and de-zombies Minister Krenco to lead an uprising of freed robot-slave-prisoners. Rogers storms Kane's palace and puts one of the robo-slave helmets on Kane. The End

The industrial vision of the future is delightful to watch. The heavily mechanical look of everything is so radically different from the sleek rockets and glowing acrylic audiences were growing accustomed to. The space ships look like they were built at locomotive factories or steamship yards. They spew roman-candle sparks and smoke and buzz as they fly. There are no computers, no radar or electronics. It's a fascinating snapshot of what pre-electronic-age people thought the future would be like.

When originally released in 1939, the Killer Kane character was a thinly disguised allusion to Hitler. In 1953, Kane was intended to represent a communist despot. It wasn't as tidy a fit. The narrator sums it up voicing a hope that scientists will develop the means for men to stand up to today's dictators and make the world safe for democracy. In the early 50s, there's little question of who they meant.

Simple Colors -- One endearing trait of Buck Rogers is the simplicity of the characterizations. The good guys do nothing but good. The bad guys are pure bad. The good guys are crack pilots and sharp shooters and tough as nails. The bad guys do nothing but bad, have trouble hitting a flying barn and are easily knocked out with one punch.

Industrial Baroque -- Somewhat like the baroque era's compulsion to decorate every square inch with swirls and filigree, Industrial Baroque sought to fill every space with heavy-duty hardware. The sets, and especially the rocket interiors are like flying boiler rooms. Valves, pipes, levers, dials, wheels, large flashing light bulbs. To look more "high tech" in the 30s meant cramming in more industrial hardware. Buck Rogers' ships show more affinity for Captain Nemo "steampunk" than the proto-space-age of the 50s.

Family Resemblance -- There is a noticeable similarity in the sets and costumes of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers. Even serials of the early 50s, like Captain Video and the various Rocketman serials, look more like Flash and Buck than George Pal. The industrial baroque look and costuming are distinctive, making them almost a sub-genre of their own. In that regard, Buck has a timelessness.

Another take on the story and additional background info.

A round-the-world dirigible flight commanded by US Air Force officer Buck Rogers (Buster Crabbe) encounters dangerously stormy weather above the Himalayas; said weather, along with disastrous panic on the part of Rogers’ crewmen, causes the aircraft to crash. The cowardly crewmen ditch the ship and meet quick ends, but Rogers and young Buddy Wade (Jackie Moran), son of the aircraft’s designer, survive the crash. The pair use a cylinder of “Nirvano” gas to place themselves into suspended animation until a rescue party can reach them, but an avalanche buries the ship and all searches prove fruitless; the dirigible and its two dormant inhabitants remain beneath rocks and snow for five hundred years.

Finally, in the year 2440, a spaceship unearths the wreck, and its pilots restore Buck and Buddy to consciousness. The holdovers from the 20th century soon learn that their rescuers are soldiers from the “Hidden City,” a pocket of resistance to the super-criminal who is ruling the 24th-century Earth–one “Killer” Kane (Anthony Warde). Rogers immediately pledges his support to Air Marshal Kragg (William Gould) and Scientist-General Dr. Huer (C. Montague Shaw), the leaders of the Hidden City exiles, and is soon en route to Saturn, hoping to convince that planet’s rulers to aid the Hidden City in freeing the Earth from Kane’s tyranny. To cement the Saturian alliance, Buck must battle Kane’s legions at every step of the way, with able assistance from Buddy and from Dr. Huer’s trusted aide Lieutenant Wilma Deering (Constance Moore).

 

Ever since its original release, Buck Rogers has stood in the shadow of Universal’s Flash Gordon serials; the studio encouraged such association by casting Flash Gordon star Buster Crabbe as a different sci-fi hero, obviously hoping that the chapterplay would capitalize on the goodwill generated by Flash Gordon and Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars. The serial did succeed in reminding audiences of the Flash outings–but it reminded them of how much they had liked those serials and forced inevitable comparisons that were not in Rogers’ favor. Universal’s plans for a second Buck Rogers serial were quickly scrapped when the first outing failed to please matinee audiences; the intended Buck sequel was then replaced on the studio’s production schedule by–what else?–a third Flash Gordon chapterplay. Even today, Buck is typically dismissed by fans as a pale echo of the great Gordon serials.

It’s easy to see why Buck Rogers came as a disappointment to audiences expecting an outing in the Flash Gordon tradition. Its production design, while futuristic, is less quirky and more uniform than that of the Gordons; there are no monsters and no weird semi-human races besides the rather uninteresting Zuggs; there are also no supporting characters as developed or as interesting as Dr. Zarkov, Ming, King Vultan, the Clay King, Princess Aura, Prince Barin, and other major figures in the Flash Gordon chapterplays. And yet, taken on its own terms, Buck Rogers is far from a failure; it does not approach the Flash Gordon trilogy in quality, but then few serials do.

Buck Rogers’ script, by former Mascot writers Norman Hall and Ray Trampe, is fast-moving and manages to avoid repetition for most of its length. The trip to Saturn, the attempts to convince Saturnian leader Prince Tallen (Philson Ahn) of the justice of the Hidden City’s cause, the subsequent rescue of Tallen from Kane’s city, the second journey to Saturn to cement the alliance, and the attempts of Kane’s henchman Laska (Henry Brandon) to sabotage it–all these incidents keep the narrative flowing very nicely for the serial’s first eight chapters. As in many of Trampe and Hall’s Mascot scripts, however, the writers seem to run out of plot before the serial’s end. While Chapters Nine and Ten remain interesting (with Buck being converted into a hypnotized robot, Buddy’s rescue of the hero, and an infiltration of the Hidden City by one of Kane’s men), the last two chapters have a definite wheel-spinning feel to them, throwing in a redundant third trip to Saturn and an unneeded flashback sequence.

The last-chapter climax is also something of a disappointment, with Kane being overthrown quickly and undramatically instead of being definitively crushed. Here, Trampe and Hall seem to have been leaving room for the sequel that never came and trying to avoid duplicating the dramatic but very final destruction of MIng which closed the first Flash Gordon serial (and which needed to be explained away in the second). The other weak spot of the scripting is Buck and Buddy’s rather calm reaction when they realize that their old world (and everyone in it) is dead–and their extraordinarily quick adjustment to their new one. One wouldn’t have wanted the writers to dwell on our heroes’ plight (which would be absolutely crushing in real life), but I do wish Trampe or Hall could have given Buck and Buddy a few emotional lines about their displacement before getting on to the main action; Hall in his scripts for other serials (Hawk of the Wilderness, Adventures of Red Ryder), showed himself capable of far more dramatic moments.

  

As already mentioned, the serial’s visuals are less varied than those of the Flash Gordon serials, but that’s not to say they aren’t impressive by serial standards. Pains seem to have been taken to avoid duplicating too much of Gordon’s “look;” the spaceship miniatures are completely different than the ships in the Gordon trilogy, while Kane’s stronghold–probably the best miniature in the serial–is not the quasi-Gothic palace of Ming but rather an ominous, futuristic-looking version of New York City, complete with towering skyscrapers. The Hidden City’s great rock gates are also nifty, and the massive Saturnian Forum (a life-size set, not a miniature) is very visually impressive. The barren Red Rock Canyon area works well as the Saturnian landscape, but I think it was a mistake to also use the Canyon as the area between the Hidden City and Kane’s capital; Saturn and Earth shouldn’t look so similar.

 

The only major prop or set reused from the Gordon serials are the “bullet cars” from Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars; they’re just as fun to watch in action here as in the earlier serial. Other incidental props and sets–Kane’s robot room, his mind-control helmets, the various televiewing devices, the anti-gravity belts, Dr. Huer’s invisibility ray, and the Star-Trek-like molecular transportation chamber–add further colorful touches to the serial., and are respectably represented by Universal’s always above-average array of sets and props. The Zuggs, the “primitive race” ruled by the Saturnians, are somewhat disappointing, however; while suitably grotesque-looking, they’re nowhere near as menacing or memorable–in appearance or demeanor–as their obvious inspiration, the Clay People in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars.

The serial’s action scenes are brisk and energetic, suffering not at all from a general lack of fistfights–thanks to the swift-moving direction of Ford Beebe (a Mascot veteran like writers Trampe and Hall) and his co-director Saul Goodkind (usually an editor). The few hand-to-hand tussles–most of them on the rocky hills of Saturn–are executed routinely but skillfully by Dave Sharpe, Tom Steele, Eddie Parker, and other stuntmen; the best of the bunch is the fight between Buck and a Kane man in the control room of the Hidden City, although this is more exciting for the suspenseful situation (Buck trying to close the gates that the henchman has opened to Kane’s oncoming armada) than for any particular flair in the staging.

Most of the action sequences consist of protracted chases and pursuits (both on foot and in rocketships), with occasional quick combats thrown in. Many of these lengthy chases are very exciting–particularly the long incursion into Kane’s city that occupies most of Chapters Three and Four, a great combination of action and suspense. Buddy’s later stealthy visit into Kane’s fortress to rescue Buck from the robot room, and the following escape, is also good, as are Buck’s skillful and repeated elusions of the rebellious Zuggs in Chapter Eight and the bullet car getaway in Chapter Six.

  

The cliffhanger endings are generally well-staged, with proper build-ups, but too many of them involve spaceship crashes that our heroes rather implausibly live through. The impressive collapsing forum at the end of Chapter Eleven and the bullet car crash at the end of Chapter Six provide nice variety amid the spaceship wrecks, but (alas) are also resolved by mere survival. Still, this is preferable to the blatantly cheating resolution of what is otherwise one the best chapter endings–Killer Kane’s pursuit of Buddy in a darkened council chamber and his apparently lethal zapping of the young hero. At least the resolution features a good stunt bit by Dave Sharpe.

The leading performances in Buck Rogers are all excellent (although most other critics would make a single exception; see below). Buster Crabbe, as always, makes a perfect serial hero–both genially cheerful and grimly serious, unassumingly polite and aggressively tough. As in the Flash Gordon trilogy, his down-to-earth attitude also helps to make the wild sci-fi happenings seem perfectly normal.

Jackie Moran (oddly “reduced” to serial acting only a year after playing Huck Finn in David O. Selznick’s big-budget classic Adventures of Tom Sawyer) does a fine job as Buddy Wade, handling his character’s frequent “golly, gee-whiz” lines in a low-key fashion that keeps Buddy from coming off as too naïve; his chipper but calm demeanor complements Crabbe’s well, and he has no problems carrying an entire chapter and part of another on his own.

Constance Moore, despite being saddled with perhaps the most unflattering costume ever worn by a serial leading lady (basically coveralls and a bathing cap), manages to come off as charming. Her Wilma Deering is self-possessed and capable-seeming but never too coldly efficient; she remains warmly likable even when piloting spaceships or explaining technology to Crabbe.

Henry Brandon is very good as Killer Kane’s chief henchman Captain Laska–suave and sly when acting as Kane’s ambassador to Saturn, haughtily arrogant when threatening people, and nervously jittery in the presence of his overbearing leader. Hard-bitten tough guys Wheeler Oakman and Reed Howes, along with the slicker Carleton Young , form Brandon’s backup squad.

As Killer Kane himself, perennial henchman actor Anthony Warde has been almost universally panned by critics as “miscast.” I have to dissent strongly, however; Warde does a fine job in the part and plays Kane with a memorable combination of viciousness and uncontrollable anger. The character is not a diabolical schemer like Ming, but rather a super-gangster who’s blasted and bullied his way to the top–and Warde’s bad-tempered, aggressive, and thuggish screen personality fits the part perfectly. He veers between intimidating ranting and harshly sinister sarcasm–as when he describes himself as a “kindly ruler” just after wrathfully sending a formerly trusted councilor to the robot room–but is quite menacing in both aspects.

Philson Ahn, brother of frequent serial and feature actor Phillip Ahn, does a good job as Prince Tallen of Saturn; he possesses his sibling’s deep and distinctive voice, which serves him well as a planetary dignitary. His manner also has a slightly tougher edge to it than his refined brother’s, which helps to keep the viewer in uncertainty in the earlier chapters as to whether Tallen will turn out to be friend or foe. Guy Usher plays Aldar, the head of Saturn’s ”Council of the Wise,” and does his best to seem suitably imposing and dignified, despite the almost comical way in which the “Wise” continually change their opinions–backing Kane, opposing him, giving into his demands, defying him, etc. Cyril Delevanti is enjoyable as a grumpy subordinate member of the Council.*

C. Montague Shaw has limited screen time, but is very good as Dr. Huer, balancing statesmanlike dignity with shrewdness and a touch of enjoyable scientific eccentricity (the last is particularly noticeable during his demonstration of his invisibility gas in Chapter Five). Energetic Jack Mulhall is typically affable and enthusiastic as Captain Rankin of the Hidden City, while Kenne Duncan has a rare good guy role as Mulhall’s fellow-officer Lieutenant Lacy. Perennial screen “underworld rat” John Harmon also plays against type as a Hidden City soldier, as does Stanley Price as a Hidden City pilot rescued from existence as a human robot. The dignified but stolid William Gould is good enough as Air Marshal Kragg, but I would have preferred a more dynamic actor in the role–Kragg is, after all, the top military leader of Kane’s enemies. Mulhall could have handled it well, as could Wade Boteler–who does an excellent job as the grim and concerned Professor Morgan in the first chapter, intensely instructing Buddy and Buck in the use of the Nirvano gas.

Lane Chandler also appears in the first chapter, as a military officer who demonstrates the Nirvano gas to a reporter played by another old pro, Kenneth Harlan. An unusually subdued Theodore Lorch is one of Kane’s councilors, while Karl Hackett has a good part as another councilor who gets into an argument with Kane that leads to Hackett’s being converted into a human robot (his terrified pleas as he’s dragged out of the council chamber are quite chilling). Al Bridge has some memorably sinister lines (“when this helmet is in place, you’ll never think or speak again”) in his periodic scenes as the slave-master of Kane’s human robots.

Unusually for Universal, several bit roles are filled by stuntmen; Eddie Parker and Tom Steele pop in as various soldiers and officers, but aren’t as noticeable as Dave Sharpe, who’s given multiple speaking roles as a Kane soldier, a Hidden City soldier, a Saturnian officer, and a Saturnian soldier. His ubiquity can get a little distracting at times, particularly since some of his appearances follow right on the previous one’s heels; he also seems to have a bit of trouble with the formal-sounding Saturnian dialogue, coming off as much more stiff and affected than in his co-starring turn in Daredevils of the Red Circle.

The serial’s music score, like most other Universals of the period, is an eclectic but usually effective array of stock music, some of it cues from the Flash Gordon serials but the majority of it culled from Universal’s horror features, including (most notably) Franz Waxman’s score for Bride of Frankenstein, which furnishes some memorable opening-titles music.

All in all, though Buck Rogers has its share of flaws, it also has more than enough virtues (the acting, the fast pace, the interesting sci-fi trappings) to make it a good chapterplay. Despite its similar themes, it shouldn’t be pitted against the Flash Gordon trilogy–a match it’s bound to lose–but rather judged against the field of competition in general. When judged in this fashion, it’s just as entertaining–and often more entertaining–than many serials with less shabby reputations.

 

*One has to wonder, though, why some Saturnians are Orientals like Ahn and others Occidentals like Usher and Delevanti; my own theory is that men from various countries emigrated from Earth to Saturn sometime before the bulk of the serial took place; this would explain the racial assortment and also explain why the Hidden City chooses Saturn in particular as an ally (as usual, I’m probably putting too much thought into this).

   

Advanced characterization methods Rare Earth Elements from Appalachian sources (coal byproducts and waste, underclay). Image depicts granular feedstock and cores and examples of microscopic REE phases as imaged by electron microscopy

Project: UAS CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH WIND DAMAGE TO VEGETATION AND RURAL AREA ASSESSMENTS

 

With the help of the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office (USRTO), scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory in collaboration with the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies are working on developing an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based approach to better characterize high-wind damage to vegetation and in rural areas to improve disaster response and recovery.

 

Photo Credit: NOAA

If someone could record the footprints of a number of human individuals or any other species during walking with the help of a sophisticated holter recording devices and could have incorporated such systematic collection of data in a data bank...that would have been used as an amazing source of information in bioinformatics. Critical analysis, characterization and standardization of such findings would have been reflected as unique identity for each individual, I'm sure. Every such individual style would have been a signature of a "Self" reflecting immense scientific importance in social sciences and medical sciences as well. Such huge data bank fed to AI could have been used as a tool in various applied fields.

 

Every natural art almost always intrigues some fundamental questions and invites deep-seated learning and subsequent wisdom, unique of its kind.

 

This photograph is a track created by a tiny aquatic snail on its way eating up the algae naturally grown on the aquarium glasses under artificial light. When I had a critical look out of my keen interest I found it amazing, fascinating and wonderful. I wonder how a little creature has made its own signature and identity on the face of nature, we frequently ignore and obscure. And such observations may flare up imaginations of a genuine scientific mind, who still believe in observational sciences having a great potential in unravelling truth and beauty of any natural fact and phenomenon. Nature leaves for us with such code languages in its endless showcases of varieties and beauties. Art and science has a critical and awe-inspiring interface and understanding this fact is always a great source of joy and fulfilment...😊🙏

 

Hope...you will enjoy this photograph.

British postcard by World Postcards Inc., no. X283, 1990, no. 9266, 1982. Buster Keaton in The General (Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, 1927).

 

Stone-faced Buster Keaton (1895-1966) was one of the three greatest comedians of Silent Hollywood.

 

Buster Keaton was born Joseph Frank Keaton in 1895 into a vaudeville family. His father was Joseph Hallie ‘Joe’ Keaton, who owned a travelling show with Harry Houdini called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company. Keaton was born in Piqua, Kansas, the small town where his mother, Myra Keaton (née Myra Edith Cutler), happened to go into labour. By the time he was 3, Keaton began performing with his parents in The Three Keatons. He was being thrown around the stage and into the orchestra pit, or even into the audience. His little suits even had a handle concealed at the waist, so Joe could sling him like luggage. "It was the roughest knockabout act that was ever in the history of the theatre," Keaton told the historian Kevin Brownlow. It led to accusations of child abuse, and occasionally, arrest. However, Buster Keaton was always able to show the authorities that he had no bruises or broken bones. Noticing that his laughing drew fewer laughs from the audience, Keaton adopted his famous deadpan expression whenever he was working. For the rest of his career, Keaton was "the great stone face," with an expression that ranged from impassive to slightly quizzical. By the time he was 21, his father's alcoholism threatened the reputation of the family act, so Keaton and his mother, Myra, left for New York, where Buster Keaton's career swiftly moved from vaudeville to film. In February 1917, Keaton met Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York City, where Arbuckle was under contract to Joseph M. Schenck. He was hired as a co-star and gagman, making his first appearance in the short The Butcher Boy (Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, 1917). He appeared in a total of 14 Arbuckle shorts, running into 1920. They were popular and, Keaton and Arbuckle became close friends. Keaton was one of few people to defend Arbuckle's character during accusations that he was responsible for the death of actress Virginia Rappe in 1921. In The Saphead (Herbert Blaché, Winchell Smith, 1920), Keaton had his first starring role in a full-length feature. It was a success and Schenck gave him his own production unit, Buster Keaton Comedies. He made a series of two-reel comedies, including One Week (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920), The Boat (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1921), Cops (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1922), and The Paleface (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1922). Keaton then moved to full-length features. His first feature, Three Ages (Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton, 1923), was produced similarly to his short films and was the dawning of a new era in comedic cinema, where it became apparent to Keaton that he had to put more focus on the storylines and characterization. His most enduring features include Our Hospitality (John G. Blystone, Buster Keaton, 1923), The Navigator (Donald Crisp, Buster Keaton, 1924), Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924), College (James W. Horne, Buster Keaton, 1927), and The General (Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, 1927). The General, set during the American Civil War, combined physical comedy with Keaton's love of trains, including an epic locomotive chase. Employing picturesque locations, the film's storyline re-enacted an actual wartime incident. Though it would come to be regarded as Keaton's greatest achievement, the film received mixed reviews at the time. It was too dramatic for some filmgoers expecting a lightweight comedy. It was an expensive misfire, and Keaton was never entrusted with total control over his films again. His distributor, United Artists, insisted on a production manager who monitored expenses and interfered with certain story elements.

 

Buster Keaton endured this treatment for two more feature films, including Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner, Buster Keaton, 1928), and then exchanged his independent setup for employment at Hollywood's biggest studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Keaton's loss of independence as a filmmaker coincided with the coming of sound films (although he was interested in making the transition) and mounting personal problems, In 1921, Keaton had married Natalie Talmadge, sister-in-law of his boss, Joseph Schenck, and sister of actresses Norma Talmadge and Constance Talmadge. She co-starred with Keaton in Our Hospitality. The couple had two sons, James (1922-2007) and Robert (1924–2009), but after the birth of Robert, the relationship began to suffer. Influenced by her family, Talmadge decided not to have any more children and this led to the couple staying in separate bedrooms. Her financial extravagance (she would spend up to a third of his salary on clothes) was another factor in the breakdown of the marriage. Keaton signed with MGM in 1928, a business decision that he would later call the worst of his life. He realized too late that MGM’s studio system would severely limit his creative input. For instance, the studio refused his request to make his early project, Spite Marriage (Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton, 1929), as a sound film and after the studio converted, he was obliged to adhere to dialogue-laden scripts. However, MGM did allow Keaton some creative participation on his last originally developed/written silent film The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton, 1928). which was his first project under contract with them. Keaton was forced to use a stunt double during some of the more dangerous scenes, something he had never done in his heyday, as MGM wanted badly to protect its investment. Some of his most financially successful films for the studio were during this period. MGM tried teaming the laconic Keaton with the rambunctious Jimmy Durante in a series of films, The Passionate Plumber (Edward Sedgwick, 1932), Speak Easily (Edward Sedgwick, 1932), and What! No Beer? (Edward Sedgwick, 1933). In the first Keaton pictures with sound, he and his fellow actors would shoot each scene three times: one in English, one in Spanish, and one in either French or German. The actors would phonetically memorize the foreign-language scripts a few lines at a time and shoot immediately after. In 1932, Nathalie Talmadge divorced Keaton, taking his entire fortune and refusing to allow any contact between Keaton and his sons, whose last name she had changed to Talmadge. Keaton was reunited with them about a decade later when his older son turned 18. With the failure of his marriage and the loss of his independence as a filmmaker, Keaton lapsed into a period of alcoholism.

 

Buster Keaton was so demoralized during the production of What! No Beer? (Edward Sedgwick, 1933) that MGM fired him after the filming was complete, despite the film being a resounding hit. In 1933, he married his nurse, Mae Scriven, during an alcoholic binge about which he afterwards claimed to remember nothing. Scriven herself would later claim that she didn't know Keaton's real first name until after the marriage. When they divorced in 1936, it was again at great financial cost to Keaton. In 1934, Keaton accepted an offer to make an independent film in Paris, Le Roi des Champs-Élysées/The King of the Champs Elysees (Max Nosseck, 1934) with Paulette Dubost. In England, he made another film, The Invader/An Old Spanish Custom (Adrian Brunel, 1936). Upon Keaton's return to Hollywood, he made a screen comeback in a series of 16 two-reel comedies for Educational Pictures. Most of these are simple visual comedies, with many of the gags supplied by Keaton himself, often recycling ideas from his family vaudeville act and his earlier films. The high point in the Educational series is Grand Slam Opera (Buster Keaton, Charles Lamont, 1936), featuring Buster in his own screenplay as a contestant in a radio amateur hour show hoping to win the first prize... by dancing and juggling. When the series lapsed in 1937, Keaton returned to MGM as a gag writer, including the Marx Brothers films At the Circus (Edward Buzzell, 1939) and Go West (Edward Buzzell, 1940), and providing material for Red Skelton. He also helped and advised Lucille Ball in her comedic work in films and television. In 1939, Columbia Pictures hired Keaton to star in ten two-reel comedies, running for two years. The director was usually Jules White, whose emphasis on slapstick and farce made most of these films resemble White's Three Stooges comedies. Keaton's personal favourite was the series' debut entry, Pest from the West (Del Lord, 1939), a shorter, tighter remake of The Invader (1936). Keaton's Columbia shorts rank as the worst comedies he made.

 

Buster Keaton's personal life stabilized with his 1940 marriage with Eleanor Norris, a 21-year-old dancer. She stopped his heavy drinking and helped to salvage his career. He abandoned Columbia for the less strenuous field of feature films. Throughout the 1940s, Keaton played character roles in features. He made his last starring feature El Moderno Barba Azul/Boom In The Moon (Jaime Salvador, 1946) in Mexico. Critics rediscovered Keaton in 1949. He had cameos in such films as In the Good Old Summertime (Robert Z. Leonard, 1949), Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), and Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956), and did innumerable TV appearances. Keaton also appeared in a comedy routine about two inept stage musicians in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952). In 1954, Keaton and his wife met film programmer Raymond Rohauer, with whom the couple would develop a business partnership to re-release Keaton's films. Around the same time, after buying the comedian's house, the actor James Mason found numerous cans of Keaton's films. Keaton had prints of the features Three Ages, Sherlock, Jr., Steamboat Bill, Jr., College (missing one reel) and the shorts The Boat and My Wife's Relations, which Keaton and Rohauer transferred to safety stock from deteriorating nitrate film stock. Unknown to them at the time, MGM also had saved some of Keaton's work: all his 1920-1926 features and his first eight two-reel shorts. In 1962 came a retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, and in 1965 a tribute at the Venice Film Festival. "I can't feel sorry for myself," he said in Venice. "It all goes to show that if you stay on the merry-go-round long enough you'll get another chance at the brass ring. Luckily, I stayed on." In 1960, Keaton returned to MGM for the final time, playing a lion tamer in an adaptation of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Michael Curtiz, 1960). Later Keaton played a cameo in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963) and starred in four films for American International Pictures: Pajama Party (Don Weis, 1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (William Asher, 1965), How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (William Asher, 1964) and Sergeant Deadhead (Norman Taurog, 1964). As he had done in the past, Keaton also provided gags for the four AIP films. In 1965, Keaton starred in the short film The Railrodder (Gerald Potterton, Buster Keaton, 1965) for the National Film Board of Canada. Wearing his traditional pork pie hat, he travelled from one end of Canada to the other on a railway motorcar, performing a few stunts similar to those in films he did 50 years earlier. The film was Keaton's last silent screen performance. He also played the central role in Samuel Beckett's Film (Alan Schneider, 1965) and travelled to Italy to play a role in Due Marines e un Generale/War Italian Style (Luigi Scattini, 1965), with Italian comedy duo Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. Keaton's final film was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Richard Lester, 1966) which was filmed in Spain in September-November 1965. He amazed the cast and crew by doing many of his own stunts. Shortly after completing the film, Keaton died of lung cancer in 1966 at his home in Woodland Hills, California. He was 70. In 1987, the documentary, Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, won two Emmy Awards.

 

Sources: Roger Ebert, Nicolette Olivier (IMDb), New York Times, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

The Wondrous Stag.

Book thesis on the characterization of female and male characters in western & eastern folktales.

The official launch of the state of farm animal genetic resources (AnGR) in Africa, the coffee table book of cattle breeds, the AnGR-Characterization, Inventory and Monitoring tool and the new Animal Resources Information System version in Nairobi on 12 June 2019 (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu).

NREL scientist works on a relithiation reactor, a chemical bath used to replenish used batteries, in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility, Materials Characterization Lab.

  

www.flickr.com/photos/departmentofenergy/collections/7215...

 

EnergyTechnologyVisualsCollectionETVC@hq.doe.gov

 

For more information or additional images, please contact 202-586-5251.

 

Directed by Roger Corman. Starring Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher, David Weston, Patrick Magee, Nigel Green and Skip Martin.

Brief Synopsis

In 12th-century Italy Prospero, a Satan-worshiping prince, jails two peasants, Gino and Ludovico, for defying his authority to tax citizens. Francesca, Ludovico's daughter and Gino's fiancée, pleads for their lives, and the intrigued Prospero agrees to spare whichever one she chooses. Later, the prince sees evidence of the Red Death plague in the village and orders all houses in the infected area burned. The disease obliges Prospero to retreat to his castle, and he forces Francesca to accompany him, intending to dress her in courtly attire and have her watch him indulge in sadistic pleasures as part of her instruction in diabolism. Juliana, the prince's mistress, is jealous of Francesca but aids her attempt to help Gino and Ludovico escape. The plot is foiled, however, and at one of the events preceding Prospero's annual masked ball, the prince orders the men to cut themselves with five knives, one of which is poisoned. Ludovico is impaled on Prospero's sword when he attempts to kill the prince with one of the weapons, and Gino is banished to the burning village, promising to return. Juliana, meanwhile, sacrifices herself to Satan while Prospero watches unperturbed. On his way back to town, Gino meets a strange figure in red, who takes him back to the castle and instructs him to wait outside for Francesca. As the mysterious intruder enters the ball, Prospero and his guests die of the Red Death, but Gino and Francesca are permitted to survive.

“The Masque of the Red Death” was apparently the story that inspired Roger Corman to start making movies based on the works of Poe. You might ask why, in that case, his first crack at the subgenre was The Fall of the House of Usher, and I honestly couldn’t give you an answer. But for whatever reason, Corman didn’t get around to filming The Masque of the Red Death until 1964, when it was obvious to everyone except possibly the director himself that he was getting sick of Poe adaptations, and the result was a disjointed, muddled, and nearly lifeless movie that just barely squeaks by on the basis of excellent visual composition and a splendid performance from star Vincent Price.

This would have been a difficult movie to make under the best of circumstances, though, because the original story is scarcely five pages long, and is written like a campfire tale. Characterization is literally at the level of “there’s this guy, see, and one day he...”, while months’ worth of action is passed over in single sentences, and every other element of the story is utterly subordinated to the final shock in the last paragraph. As temptingly cool as the underlying premise is, it would be a challenge to turn “The Masque of the Red Death” into a fifteen minute short, let alone a feature film. So inevitably, screenwriter Charles Beaumont was forced to invent scenes, characters, and motivations wholesale, and even then, he felt compelled to splice in a second Poe story, “Hop Frog,” as a subplot in order to bulk up his script to the required length.

The film begins with an old peasant woman encountering a strange man in a hooded red robe, sitting beneath a tree and dealing himself a Tarot hand. The man flags the old lady down, and gives her something to take with her to her village. She is to be his messenger, the hooded man explains, and sends her on her way.

Just hours after her arrival back home, her village finds itself playing host to its lord, Prince Prospero (Price). The prince has come to announce the date of the annual feast he holds for the nobility at his castle, the leftovers from which he has traditionally given back to the peasantry in what could arguably be seen as the feudal equivalent of an income tax refund. But this year, the peasants are not so placid in their acceptance of Prospero’s “generosity.” As a young man named Gino (Witchcraft’s David Weston) explains, one of their women met a holy man in the woods that evening, who told her that their day of deliverance was at hand. With news like that, Gino and his people feel little inclination to kiss Prince Prospero’s ass, whatever his rank. The prince is enraged, and he orders his soldiers to kill Gino, as well as an older man named Ludovico (Nigel Green, from The Skull and Jason and the Argonauts), who makes the mistake of sticking up for Gino. And when a lovely young girl named Francesca (Jane Asher, who had a tiny role in The Creeping Unknown/The Quatermass Xperiment) sticks up for both condemned men (she’s Ludovico’s daughter and Gino’s fiancee), Prospero plays the sort of nasty trick on her that Vincent Price characters are justly famous for, “magnanimously” agreeing to spare one of the men, and insisting that Francesca choose which it will be.

But Prospero’s fun is soon interrupted by prolonged and hideous screaming coming from one of the village huts. When he sends one of his men to investigate, that man finds the old lady from the first scene, keeled over dead on the floor, her skin covered in hundreds of tiny hemorrhages. The symptoms are unmistakable— the dreaded Red Death has come to Prospero’s domain. When the prince hears that, he orders his soldiers to pack up Gino, Ludovico, and Francesca, and burn the village to the ground while he and a handful of men escort the prisoners to the castle. Prospero may fear the Red Death, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to let it spoil his fun.

Then again, Prospero is almost certainly damned anyway. It isn’t just that he’s an evil bastard, although he certainly is that; more importantly, Prince Prospero and his wife, Juliana (Hazel Court, from The Curse of Frankenstein and Dr. Blood’s Coffin), are practicing Satanists. That would go some way toward explaining all the evil, wouldn’t it? In the prince’s case, Satanism looks a lot like a combination of sadism and hedonism. Whether he’s torturing prisoners, trying to force Gino and Ludovico to fight a duel against each other, or romancing the captive Francesca, all Prospero is really interested in is his own pleasure. And so it is scarcely surprising that he takes advantage of the need to quarantine his estate against the Red Death to convert his planned banquet into a weeks-long debauch. The assembled nobility will be plied with all the food and drink they can keep down, and presented with amusements ranging from dancing midgets to a lethal game of chance involving Gino, Ludovico, and five daggers, one with a poisoned blade (think of it as a renaissance version of Russian roulette). And as the climax to the celebration, an all-night masquerade will be held in the great hall of the castle. All Prospero’s nobles need to do to get in on the excitement is follow a few simple directions in traveling to his estate: stay the hell away from any peasant villages where the Red Death might have broken out. The fate of one lord who disregards the prince’s instructions is enough to ensure that everyone else does exactly as they are told.

Meanwhile, Prospero has been working on Francesca, and the girl proves surprisingly susceptible to persuasion. Though she professes a firm belief in Christianity, her simple peasant’s faith has no answer for the thorny philosophical questions with which the prince bombards her— how, for example, does one reconcile an all-powerful, benevolent deity with the undeniable domination of the world by cruel and evil men? When Prospero asserts that if ever the universe was ruled by a god of love and mercy, that god is now long gone, Francesca can offer no reply. The prince’s interest in converting the girl makes Juliana very nervous, however. She, after all, has no desire to see her place at Prospero’s side taken by some low-born wench who just happens to be a better-than-average piece of ass. Unfortunately for Juliana, though, her strategy for shoring up her position yields results rather different from those she sought, and the scheming lady ends up with a whole new appreciation of the capabilities of hunting falcons.

Juliana’s fate is only slightly less grisly than that of Prospero’s friend, Alfredo (Patrick Magee, from And Now the Screaming Starts and Dementia 13). Alfredo has, over the course of his stay with Prospero, developed quite a letch for Esmeralda (Verina Greenlaw, who was all but invisible in The Haunting the year before), the beautiful midget dancer who performs at Prospero’s court. But given that Alfredo is one of the prince’s closest friends, it goes without saying that his affection for the girl doesn’t lead him to treat her any better than he would any other commoner, and his sustained nastiness toward her brings upon him the vengeance of Hop Toad (Skip Martin, from Vampire Circus and Horror Hospital), the male dwarf who works as Esmeralda’s partner in her act. Hop Toad gets his revenge by suggesting a costume for Alfredo to wear to the masquerade. The dwarf knows that Prospero owns (for no very good reason) a gorilla suit that should fit Alfredo nicely. Hop Toad contends that if Alfredo wears this costume to the masque, and makes a big scene by molesting all the women and generally causing a ruckus, he’ll be the life of the party. Hop Toad can then come in and pretend to bring him under control for further laughs and hilarity. Alfredo agrees that Hop Toad’s idea sounds like a hoot and a holler, but what the dwarf neglected to mention was that he would “bring Alfredo under control” by chaining him to the chandelier, hoisting him to the ceiling, and setting him on fire. But Prospero gets the joke, and when it’s all over, he orders Hop Toad rewarded with five pieces of gold.

And now, at last, we have arrived at the point of the movie, and the only part of it that has much to do with the story from which it takes its title— the masquerade. Gino breaks out of Prospero’s castle, and on his wanderings through the surrounding woods, he meets up with the same red-robed man as the woman in the first scene. After a short talk, in which Gino explains who he is and where he has come from, the hooded stranger has Gino lead him to the castle, and before sneaking in, the man in red promises his companion that he will see to Francesca’s safety. Now obviously, there can be little question at this point who the hooded man really is, though Prospero himself doesn’t get it at first. The prince’s initial assumption is that his unannounced guess is his long-awaited master, Beelzebub, or at the very least his emissary. But when his guests start hemorrhaging to death all around him, Prospero puts the pieces together, and he is stunned to learn that his life-long devotion to Satan is no protection against the Red Death.

If you ask me, I think what Corman should have done was get Richard Matheson to write a “Masque of the Red Death” segment into the script for Tales of Terror back in 1962. Then the story’s greatest strengths— its brevity and directness— could have been deployed in service of the film adaptation, rather than standing as the basis for an unfavorable comparison. Poe’s story just doesn’t have enough meat to it to support a feature-length treatment, and all the extraneous material Beaumont was forced to add mainly serves to bog the movie down in directionless subplots. But there is one thing Beaumont added to the story that I really did enjoy. After all the plot threads are tied up, and everything seems to be fully over, the camera returns to the Red Death, sitting, as is his wont, beneath a tree, playing with his Tarot deck. Suddenly, he is joined by a similarly garbed figure, but wearing a black robe, rather than red. That’s right, the Red Death and the Black Death have gotten together to compare notes! And before long, a veritable rainbow of multicolored Deaths have arrived on the scene; I gave up guessing which diseases they were supposed to represent after Yellow Fever put in his appearance. It’s a fun scene, and it makes a great ending to a mostly forgettable movie.

  

The ramé-hart Model 295 Automated Goniometer / Tensiometer is identical to Model 290 except that the stage is upgraded to the Advanced 3-axis Stage. The Advanced Stage permits fine and coarse vertical adjustment and has a modular leveling stage with support for the optional Environmental Chamber (p/n 100-07) and Temperature Controller (p/n 100-50). Included with this system is the Automated Tilting Base and Automated Dispensing System.

 

The fiber optic illuminator provides adjustable backlighting and each system ships with a PC and LCD to make it a complete turn-key ready-to-use instrument.

 

Add the optional Oscillator to measure surface dilatational elasticity or the Environmental Fixture to measure interfacial tension. Other options include the film clamps, 4" diameter wafer support, custom fixtures and specimen support options.

 

With DROPimage Advanced software, results can be logged and reports can be generated using myriad options. Images can be saved and high speed measurements can be taken real time up to 100 frames per second.

 

If you need a robust automated system that is powerful yet user-friendly, the Model 295 is well-suited for a wide array of contact angle, surface energy, surface tension, interfacial tension, wetting, roughness, absorption, spreading, cleanliness, and surface heterogeneity and characterization applications. Add the optional Environmental Chamber for working at elevated temperatures.

 

Every study requires capacity and flexibility. This system is popular in research environments where a demanding system with a powerful suite of hardware and software tools permits the discovery of many quantitative surface characterizations with a high degree of automation and repeatability.

Hall and Masquerade costumes from Saturday at Norwescon 38. Judges' Choice, Best Video Game Characterization: Great Fairy (Photo by Michael Hanscom for Norwescon)

cobalt-nickel composites synthesized by Hydrothermal

 

Courtesy of yanzhu dai

 

Image Details

Instrument used: Quanta Family

Magnification: 5,000X

Voltage: 30kV

Detector: SE

 

Project: UAS CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH WIND DAMAGE TO VEGETATION AND RURAL AREA ASSESSMENTS

 

With the help of the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office (USRTO), scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory in collaboration with the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies are working on developing an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based approach to better characterize high-wind damage to vegetation and in rural areas to improve disaster response and recovery.

 

Photo Credit: NOAA

The Wondrous Stag.

Book thesis on the characterization of female and male characters in western & eastern folktales.

Hanuman is a Hindu god and an ardent devotee of Rama. He is a central character in the Indian epic Ramayana and its various versions. He also finds mentions in several other texts, including Mahabharata, the various Puranas and some Jain texts. A vanara, Hanuman participated in Rama's war against the demon king Ravana. Several texts also present him as an incarnation of Lord Shiva. He is the son of Kesari, and is also described as the son of Vayu, who according to several stories, played a role in his birth. Several sects including Arya Samaj believe that Hanuman was a human and not vanara.

 

ETYMOLOGY & OTHER NAMES

The Sanskrit texts mention several legends about how Sri Hanuman got his name. One legend is that Indra, the king of the deities, struck Sri Hanuman's jaw during his childhood (see below). The child received his name from the Sanskrit words Hanu ("jaw") and -man (or -mant, "prominent" or "disfigured"). The name thus means "one with prominent or disfigured jaw". Another theory says the name derives from the Sanskrit words Han ("killed" or "destroyed") and maana (pride); the name implies "one whose pride was destroyed". Some Jain texts mention that Sri Hanuman spent his childhood on an island called Hanuruha, which is the origin of his name.

 

According to one theory, the name "Hanuman" derives from the proto-Dravidian word for male monkey (ana-mandi), which was later Sanskritized to "Hanuman" (see historical development below). Linguistic variations of "Hanuman" include Hanumat, Anuman (Tamil), Anoman (Indonesian), Andoman (Malay) and Hunlaman (Lao).

 

Hanuman came to be regarded as an avatar (incarnation) of Shiva by the 10th century CE (this development possibly started as early as in the 8th century CE). Hanuman is mentioned as an avatar of Shiva or Rudra in the Sanskrit texts like Mahabhagvata Purana, Skanda Purana, Brhaddharma Purana and Mahanataka among others. This development might have been a result of the Shavite attempts to insert their ishta devata (cherished deity) in the Vaishnavite texts, which were gaining popularity. The 17th century Oriya work Rasavinoda by Divakrsnadasa goes on to mention that the three gods – Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva – combined take to the form of Hanuman.

 

Hanuman became more important in the medieval period, and came to be portrayed as the ideal devotee (bhakta) of Rama. His characterization as a lifelong brahmachari (celibate) was another important development during this period. The belief that Hanuman's celibacy is the source of his strength became popular among the wrestlers in India. The celibacy or brahmacharya aspect of Hanuman is not mentioned in the original Ramayana.

 

BIRTH & CHILDHOOD

Hanuman was born to the vanaras. His mother Anjana was an apsara who was born on earth due to a curse. She was redeemed from this curse on her giving birth to a son. The Valmiki Ramayana states that his father Kesari was the son of Brihaspati and that Kesari also fought on Rama's side in the war against Ravana. Anjana and Kesari performed intense prayers to Shiva to get a child. Pleased with their devotion, Shiva granted them the boon they sought. Hanuman, in another interpretation, is the incarnation or reflection of Shiva himself.

 

Hanuman is often called the son of the deity Vayu; several different traditions account for the Vayu's role in Hanuman's birth. One story mentioned in Eknath's Bhavartha Ramayana (16th century CE) states that when Anjana was worshiping Shiva, the King Dasharatha of Ayodhya was also performing the ritual of Putrakama yagna in order to have children. As a result, he received some sacred pudding (payasam) to be shared by his three wives, leading to the births of Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. By divine ordinance, a kite snatched a fragment of that pudding and dropped it while flying over the forest where Anjana was engaged in worship. Vayu, the Hindu deity of the wind, delivered the falling pudding to the outstretched hands of Anjana, who consumed it. Hanuman was born to her as a result. Another tradition says that Anjana and her husband Kesari prayed Shiva for a child. By Shiva's direction, Vayu transferred his male energy to Anjana's womb. Accordingly, Hanuman is identified as the son of the Vayu.

 

Another story of Hanuman's origins is derived from the Vishnu Purana and Naradeya Purana. Narada, infatuated with a princess, went to his lord Vishnu, to make him look like Vishnu, so that the princess would garland him at swayamvara (husband-choosing ceremony). He asked for hari mukh (Hari is another name of Vishnu, and mukh means face). Vishnu instead bestowed him with the face of a vanara. Unaware of this, Narada went to the princess, who burst into laughter at the sight of his ape-like face before all the king's court. Narada, unable to bear the humiliation, cursed Vishnu, that Vishnu would one day be dependent upon a vanara. Vishnu replied that what he had done was for Narada's own good, as he would have undermined his own powers if he were to enter matrimony. Vishnu also noted that Hari has the dual Sanskrit meaning of vanara. Upon hearing this, Narada repented for cursing his idol. But Vishnu told him not repent as the curse would act as a boon, for it would lead to the birth of Hanuman, an avatar of Shiva, without whose help Rama (Vishnu's avatar) could not kill Ravana.

 

BIRTH PLACE

Multiple places in India are claimed as the birthplace of Hanuman.

 

According to one theory, Hanuman was born on 'Anjaneya Hill', in Hampi, Karnataka. This is located near the Risyamukha mountain on the banks of the Pampa, where Sugreeva and Rama are said to have met in Valmiki Ramayana's Kishkinda Kanda. There is a temple that marks the spot. Kishkinda itself is identified with the modern Anegundi taluk (near Hampi) in Bellary district of Karnataka.

 

Anjan, a small village about 18 km away from Gumla, houses "Anjan Dham", which is said to be the birthplace of Hanuman. The name of the village is derived from the name of the goddess Anjani, the mother of Hanuman. Aanjani Gufa (cave), 4 km from the village, is believed to be the place where Anjani once lived. Many objects of archaeological importance obtained from this site are now held at the Patna Museum.

 

The Anjaneri (or Anjneri) mountain, located 7 km from Trimbakeshwar in the Nasik district, is also claimed as the birthplace of Hanuman.

 

According to Anjan Dham, Hanuman was born on Lakshka Hill near Sujangarh in Churu district, Rajasthan.

 

CHILDHOOD

As a child, believing the sun to be a ripe mango, Hanuman pursued it in order to eat it. Rahu, a Vedic planet corresponding to an eclipse, was at that time seeking out the sun as well, and he clashed with Hanuman. Hanuman thrashed Rahu and went to take sun in his mouth.[18] Rahu approached Indra, king of devas, and complained that a monkey child stopped him from taking on Sun, preventing the scheduled eclipse. This enraged Indra, who responded by throwing the Vajra (thunderbolt) at Hanuman, which struck his jaw. He fell back down to the earth and became unconscious. A permanent mark was left on his chin (हनुः hanuḥ "jaw" in Sanskrit), due to impact of Vajra, explaining his name. Upset over the attack, Hanuman's father figure Vayu deva (the deity of air) went into seclusion, withdrawing air along with him. As living beings began to asphyxiate, Indra withdrew the effect of his thunderbolt. The devas then revived Hanuman and blessed him with multiple boons to appease Vayu.

 

Brahma gave Hanuman a boon that would protect him from the irrevocable Brahma's curse. Brahma also said: "Nobody will be able to kill you with any weapon in war." From Brahma he obtained the power of inducing fear in enemies, of destroying fear in friends, to be able to change his form at will and to be able to easily travel wherever he wished. From Shiva he obtained the boons of longevity, scriptural wisdom and ability to cross the ocean. Shiva assured safety of Hanuman with a band that would protect him for life. Indra blessed him that the Vajra weapon will no longer be effective on him and his body would become stronger than Vajra. Varuna blessed baby Hanuman with a boon that he would always be protected from water. Agni blessed him with immunity to burning by fire. Surya gave him two siddhis of yoga namely "laghima" and "garima", to be able to attain the smallest or to attain the biggest form. Yama, the God of Death blessed him healthy life and free from his weapon danda, thus death would not come to him. Kubera showered his blessings declaring that Hanuman would always remain happy and contented. Vishwakarma blessed him that Hanuman would be protected from all his creations in the form of objects or weapons. Vayu also blessed him with more speed than he himself had. Kamadeva also blessed him that the sex will not be effective on him.So his name is also Bala Bramhachari.

 

On ascertaining Surya to be an all-knowing teacher, Hanuman raised his body into an orbit around the sun and requested to Surya to accept him as a student. Surya refused and explained claiming that he always had to be on the move in his chariot, it would be impossible for Hanuman to learn well. Undeterred, Hanuman enlarged his form, with one leg on the eastern ranges and the other on the western ranges, and facing Surya again pleaded. Pleased by his persistence, Surya agreed. Hanuman then learned all of the latter's knowledge. When Hanuman then requested Surya to quote his "guru-dakshina" (teacher's fee), the latter refused, saying that the pleasure of teaching one as dedicated as him was the fee in itself. Hanuman insisted, whereupon Surya asked him to help his (Surya's) spiritual son Sugriva. Hanuman's choice of Surya as his teacher is said to signify Surya as a Karma Saakshi, an eternal witness of all deeds. Hanuman later became Sugriva's minister.

 

Hanuman was mischievous in his childhood, and sometimes teased the meditating sages in the forests by snatching their personal belongings and by disturbing their well-arranged articles of worship. Finding his antics unbearable, but realizing that Hanuman was but a child, (albeit invincible), the sages placed a mild curse on him by which he became unable to remember his own ability unless reminded by another person. The curse is highlighted in Kishkindha Kanda and he was relieved from the curse by the end of Kishkindha Kanda when Jambavantha reminds Hanuman of his abilities and encourages him to go and find Sita and in Sundara Kanda he used his supernatural powers at his best.

 

ADVANTURES IN RAMAYANA

The Sundara Kanda, the fifth book in the Ramayana, focuses on the adventures of Hanuman.

 

MEETING WITH RAMA

Hanuman meets Rama during the Rama's 14-year exile. With his brother Lakshmana, Rama is searching for his wife Sita who had been abducted by Ravana. Their search brings them to the vicinity of the mountain Rishyamukha, where Sugriva, along with his followers and friends, are in hiding from his older brother Vali.

 

Having seen Rama and Lakshmana, Sugriva sends Hanuman to ascertain their identities. Hanuman approaches the two brothers in the guise of a brahmin. His first words to them are such that Rama says to Lakshmana that none could speak the way the brahmin did unless he or she had mastered the Vedas. He notes that there is no defect in the brahmin's countenance, eyes, forehead, brows, or any limb. He points out to Lakshmana that his accent is captivating, adding that even an enemy with sword drawn would be moved. He praises the disguised Hanuman further, saying that sure success awaited the king whose emissaries were as accomplished as he was.

 

When Rama introduces himself, the brahman identitifies himself as Hanuman and falls prostrate before Rama, who embraces him warmly. Thereafter, Hanuman's life becomes interwoven with that of Rama. Hanuman then brings about friendship and alliance between Rama and Sugriva; Rama helps Sugriva regain his honour and makes him king of Kishkindha. Sugriva and his vanaras, most notably Hanuman, help Rama defeat Raavana and reunite with Sita.

 

In their search for Sita, a group of Vanaras reaches the southern seashore. Upon encountering the vast ocean, every vanara begins to lament his inability to jump across the water. Hanuman too is saddened at the possible failure of his mission, until the other vanaras and the wise bear Jambavantha begin to extol his virtues. Hanuman then recollects his own powers, enlarges his body, and flies across the ocean. On his way, he encounters a mountain that rises from the sea, proclaims that it owed his father a debt, and asks him to rest a while before proceeding. Not wanting to waste any time, Hanuman thanks the mountain, touches it briefly, and presses on. He then encounters a sea-monster, Surasa, who challenges him to enter her mouth. When Hanuman outwits her, she admits that her challenge was merely a test of his courage. After killing Simhika, a rakshasi, he reaches Lanka.

 

FINDING SITA

Hanuman reaches Lanka through flight and marvels at its beauty. After he finds Sita in captivity in a garden, Hanuman reveals his identity to her, reassures her that Rama has been looking for her, and uplifts her spirits. He offers to carry her back to Rama, but she refuses his offer, saying it would be an insult to Rama as his honour is at stake. In order to give Sita faith, Hanuman gives her a ring that Rama wanted Hanuman to give her. After meeting Sita, Hanuman begins to wreak havoc, gradually destroying the palaces and properties of Lanka. He kills many rakshasas, including Jambumali and Aksha Kumar. To subdue him, Ravana's son Indrajit uses the Brahmastra. Though immune to the effects of this weapon Hanuman, out of respect to Brahma, allows himself be bound. Deciding to use the opportunity to meet Ravana, and to assess the strength of Ravana's hordes, Hanuman allows the rakshasa warriors to parade him through the streets. He conveys Rama's message of warning and demands the safe return of Sita. He also informs Ravana that Rama would be willing to forgive him if he returns Sita honourably.

 

Enraged, Ravana orders Hanuman's execution, whereupon Ravana's brother Vibhishana intervenes, pointing out that it is against the rules of engagement to kill a messenger. Ravana then orders Hanuman's tail be lit afire. As Ravana's forces attempted to wrap cloth around his tail, Hanuman begins to lengthen it. After frustrating them for a while, he allows it to burn, then escapes from his captors, and with his tail on fire he burns down large parts of Lanka. After extinguishing his flaming tail in the sea, he returns to Rama.

 

SHAPESHIFTING

In the Ramayana Hanuman changes shape several times. For example, while he searches for the kidnapped Sita in Ravana's palaces on Lanka, he contracts himself to the size of a cat, so that he will not be detected by the enemy. Later on, he takes on the size of a mountain, blazing with radiance, to show his true power to Sita.

 

Also he enlarges & immediately afterwards contracts his body to out-wit Surasa, the she-demon, who blocked his path while crossing the sea to reach Lanka. Again, he turns his body microscopically small to enter Lanka before killing Lankini, the she-demon guarding the gates of Lanka.

 

He achieved this shape-shifting by the powers of two siddhis; Anima and Garima bestowed upon him in his childhood by Sun-God, Surya.

 

MOUNTAIN LIFTING

When Lakshmana is severely wounded during the battle against Ravana, Hanuman is sent to fetch the Sanjivani, a powerful life-restoring herb, from Dronagiri mountain in the Himalayas, to revive him. Ravana realises that if Lakshmana dies, a distraught Rama would probably give up, and so he dispatches the sorcerer Kalanemi to intercept Hanuman. Kalanemi, in the guise of a sage, deceives Hanuman, but Hanuman uncovers his plot with the help of an apsara, whom he rescues from her accursed state as a crocodile.

 

Ravana, upon learning that Kalanemi has been slain by Hanuman, summons Surya to rise before its appointed time because the physician Sushena had said that Lakshmana would perish if untreated by daybreak. Hanuman realizes the danger, however, and, becoming many times his normal size, detains the Sun God to prevent the break of day. He then resumes his search for the precious herb, but, when he finds himself unable to identify which herb it is, he lifts the entire mountain and delivers it to the battlefield in Lanka. Sushena then identifies and administers the herb, and Lakshmana is saved. Rama embraces Hanuman, declaring him as dear to him as his own brother. Hanuman releases Surya from his grip, and asks forgiveness, as the Sun was also his Guru.

 

Hanuman was also called "langra veer"; langra in Hindi means limping and veer means "brave". The story behind Hanuman being called langra is as follows. He was injured when he was crossing the Ayodhya with the mountain in his hands. As he was crossing over Ayodhya, Bharat, Rama's young brother, saw him and assumed that some Rakshasa was taking this mountain to attack Ayodhya. Bharat then shot Hanuman with an arrow, which was engraved with Rama's name. Hanuman did not stop this arrow as it had Rama's name written on it, and it injured his leg. Hanuman landed and explained to Bharat that he was moving the mountain to save his own brother, Lakshmana. Bharat, very sorry, offered to fire an arrow to Lanka, which Hanuman could ride in order to reach his destination more easily. But Hanuman declined the offer, preferring to fly on his own, and he continued his journey with his injured leg.

 

PATALA INCIDENT

In another incident during the war, Rama and Lakshmana are captured by the rakshasa Mahiravana and Ahiravan), brother of Ravana, who held them captive in their palace in Patala (or Patalpuri) - the netherworld. Mahiravana keeps them as offerings to his deity. Searching for them, Hanuman reaches Patala, the gates of which are guarded by a young creature called Makardhwaja (known also as Makar-Dhwaja or Magar Dhwaja), who is part reptile and part Vanara.

 

The story of Makardhwaja's birth is said to be that when Hanuman extinguished his burning tail in the ocean, a drop of his sweat fell into the waters, eventually becoming Makardhwaja, who perceives Hanuman as his father. When Hanuman introduces himself to Makardhwaja, the latter asks his blessings. Hanuman enters Patala.

 

Upon entering Patala, Hanuman discovers that to kill Mahiravana, he must simultaneously extinguish five lamps burning in different directions. Hanuman assumes the Panchamukha or five-faced form of Sri Varaha facing north, Sri Narasimha facing south, Sri Garuda facing west, Sri Hayagriva facing the sky and his own facing the east, and blows out the lamps. Hanuman then rescues Rama and Lakshmana. Afterwards, Rama asks Hanuman to crown Makardhwaja king of Patala. Hanuman then instructs Makardhwaja to rule Patala with justice and wisdom.

 

To date Chandraloak Devpuri mandir is located at Dugana a small village 17 km from Laharpur,Sitapur district,Uttar Pradesh. A divine place where Chakleswar Mahadev situated.

 

HONOURS

Shortly after he is crowned Emperor upon his return to Ayodhya, Rama decides to ceremoniously reward all his well-wishers. At a grand ceremony in his court, all his friends and allies take turns being honoured at the throne. Hanuman approaches without desiring a reward. Seeing Hanuman come up to him, an emotionally overwhelmed Rama embraces him warmly, declaring that he could never adequately honour or repay Hanuman for the help and services he received from the noble Vanara. Sita, however, insists that Hanuman deserved honour more than anyone else, and Sita gives him a necklace of precious stones adorning her neck.

 

When he receives it, Hanuman immediately takes it apart, and peers into each stone. Taken aback, many of those present demand to know why he is destroying the precious gift. Hanuman answers that he was looking into the stones to make sure that Rama and Sita are in them, because if they are not, the necklace is of no value to him. At this, a few mock Hanuman, saying his reverence and love for Rama and Sita could not possibly be as deep as he implies. In response, Hanuman tears his chest open, and everyone is stunned to see Rama and Sita literally in his heart.

 

HANUMAN RAMAYANA

After the victory of Rama over Ravana, Hanuman went to the Himalayas to continue his worship of the Lord Rama. There he scripted a version of the Ramayana on the Himalayan mountains using his nails, recording every detail of Rama's deeds. When Maharishi Valmiki visited him to show him his own version of the Ramayana, he saw Hanuman's version and became very disappointed.

 

When Hanuman asked Valmiki the cause of his sorrow, the sage said that his version, which he had created very laboriously, was no match for the splendour of Hanuman's, and would therefore go ignored. At this, Hanuman discarded his own version, which is called the Hanumad Ramayana. Maharishi Valmiki was so taken aback that he said he would take another birth to sing the glory of Hanuman which he had understated in his version.

 

Later, one tablet is said to have floated ashore during the period of Mahakavi Kalidasa, and hung at a public place to be deciphered by scholars. Kalidasa is said to have deciphered it and recognised that it was from the Hanumad Ramayana recorded by Hanuman in an extinct script, and considered himself very fortunate to see at least one pada of the stanza.

 

AFTER RAMAYANA WAR

After the war, and after reigning for several years, the time arrived for Rama to depart to his supreme abode Vaikuntha. Many of Rama's entourage, including Sugriva, decided to depart with him. Hanuman, however, requested from Rama that he will remain on earth as long as Rama's name was venerated by people. Sita accorded Hanuman that desire, and granted that his image would be installed at various public places, so he could listen to people chanting Rama's name. He is one of the immortals (Chiranjivi) of Hinduism.

 

MAHABHARATA

Hanuman is also considered to be the brother of Bhima, on the basis of their having the same father, Vayu. During the Pandavas' exile, he appears disguised as a weak and aged monkey to Bhima in order to subdue his arrogance. Bhima enters a field where Hanuman is lying with his tail blocking the way. Bhima, unaware of his identity, tells him to move it out of the way. Hanuman, incognito, refuses. Bhima then tries to move the tail himself but he is unable, despite his great strength. Realising he is no ordinary monkey, he inquires as to Hanuman's identity, which is then revealed. At Bhima's request, Hanuman is also said to have enlarged himself to demonstrate the proportions he had assumed in his crossing of the sea as he journeyed to Lanka and also said that when the war came, he would be there to protect the Pandavas. This place is located at Sariska National Park in the Alwar District of the State of Rajasthan and named as Pandupole (Temple of Hanuman ji).Pandupole is very famous tourist spot of Alwar.

 

During the great battle of Kurukshetra, Arjuna entered the battlefield with a flag displaying Hanuman on his chariot. The incident that led to this was an earlier encounter between Hanuman and Arjuna, wherein Hanuman appeared as a small talking monkey before Arjuna at Rameshwaram, where Rama had built the great bridge to cross over to Lanka to rescue Sita. Upon Arjuna's wondering aloud at Rama's taking the help of monkeys rather than building a bridge of arrows, Hanuman challenged him to build a bridge capable of bearing him alone; Arjuna, unaware of the vanara's true identity, accepted. Hanuman then proceeded to repeatedly destroy the bridges made by Arjuna, who decided to take his own life. Krishna smiled and placed his divine discus beneath the bridge,and this time hanuman could no longer break it.Vishnu then appeared before them both after originally coming in the form of a tortoise, chiding Arjuna for his vanity and Hanuman for making Arjuna feel incompetent. As an act of penitence, Hanuman decided to help Arjuna by stabilizing and strengthening his chariot during the imminent great battle. After, the battle of Kurukshetra was over, Krishna asked Arjuna, that today you step down the chariot before me. After Arjuna got down, Krishna followed him and thanked Hanuman for staying with them during the whole fight in the form of a flag on the chariot. Hanuman came in his original form, bowed to Krishna and left the flag, flying away into the sky. As soon as he left the flag, the chariot began to burn and turned into ashes. Arjuna was shocked to see this, then Krishna told Arjuna, that the only reason his chariot was still standing was because of the presence of Himself and Hanuman, otherwise, it would have burnt many days ago due to effects of celestial weapons thrown at it in the war.

 

According to legend, Hanuman is one of the four people to have heard the Bhagwad Gita from Krishna and seen his Vishvarupa (universal) form, the other three being Arjuna, Sanjaya and Barbarika, son of Ghatotkacha.

 

OTHER TEXTS

Apart from Ramayana and Mahabharata, Hanuman is mentioned in several other texts. Some of these stories add to his adventures mentioned in the earlier epics, while others tell alternative stories of his life.

 

Paumacariya (also known as Pauma Chariu or Padmacharit), the Jain version of Ramayana written by Vimalasuri, mentions Hanuman as a Vidyadhara (a supernatural being), who is the son of Pavangati and Anjana Sundari. Anjana gives birth to Hanuman in a forest cave, after being banished by her in-laws. Her maternal uncle rescues her from the forest; while boarding his vimana, Anjana accidentally drops her baby on a rock. However, the baby remains uninjured while the rock is shattered. The baby is raised in Hanuruha, his great uncle's island kingdom, from which Hanuman gets his name. In this version, Hanuman is not celibate. He marries princess Anangakusuma, the daughter of Kharadushana and Ravana's sister Chandranakha. Ravana also presents Hanuman one of his nieces as a second wife. After becoming an ally of Sugriva, Hanuman acquires a hundred more wives. Hanuman is originally enraged at Rama for murdering his father-in-law Kharadushana. However, he becomes a supporter of Rama after meeting him and learning about Sita's kidnapping by Ravana. He goes to Lanka on Rama's behalf, but is unable to convince Ravana to surrender. Ultimately, he joins Rama in the war against Ravana and performs several heroic deeds. After the victory and subsequent celebrations, both Rama and Hanuman take Jaineshwari Diksha and become Jain Munis and achieve salvation. Later Jain texts such as Uttarapurana (9th century CE) by Gunabhadra and Anjana-Pavananjaya (12th century CE) tells the same story.

 

The Brahma Purana mentions that the vanaras built several Shiva lingams in Kishkindha. After his return to Ayodhya, Rama asks Hanuman to destroy these lingams, as they are no longer required. However, when Hanuman is unable to uproot these lingams, Rama orders them to worshipped permanently. The Skanda Purana mentions a variant of this story, which happens in Rameswaram. The Narada Purana describes Hanuman as a master of vocal music, and as an embodiment of the combined power of Shiva and Vishnu.

 

Apart from the Puranas, the Agama Saunaka Samhitha, and Agastya Sara Samhitha explains certain stories which are not mentioned in other Hindu texts along with the worship rituals of Hanuman. Recently a simple English Translation of some of stories are released as a book named Tales Of Hanuman: Tales from the eternal life of Hanuman

 

The 16th-century Indian poet Tulsidas wrote Hanuman Chalisa, a devotional song dedicated to Hanuman. He claimed to have visions where he met face to face with Hanuman. Based on these meetings, he wrote Ramcharitmanas, an Awadhi language version of Ramayana. The Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple (Varanasi) is said to be located on the spot where Tulsidas had these visions. The works of Tulsidas played an important role in increasing the popularity of Hanuman worship in North India.

 

Durga Chalisa mentions that Hanuman leads and welcomes the procession of the ferocious lion-riding Bhavani.

 

The non-Indian versions of Ramayana, such as the Thai Ramakien, mention that Hanuman had relationships with multiple women, including Svayamprabha, Benjakaya (Vibhisana's daughter), Suvannamaccha and even Ravana's wife Mandodari. According to these versions of the Ramayana, Macchanu is son of Hanuman borne by Suvannamaccha, daughter of Ravana. The Jain text Paumacariya also mentions that Hanuman married Lankasundari, the daughter of Lanka's chief defender Bajramukha. Another legend says that a demigod named Matsyaraja (also known as Makardhwaja or Matsyagarbha) claimed to be his son. Matsyaraja's birth is explained as follows: a fish (matsya) was impregnated by the drops of Hanuman's sweat, while he was bathing in the ocean.

 

PROPHECY & LEGACY

A number of religious leaders have claimed to have seen Hanuman over the course of the centuries, notably Madhvacharya (13th century CE), Tulsidas (16th century), Samarth Ramdas (17th century), Raghavendra Swami (17th century) and Swami Ramdas (20th century).

 

Swaminarayan, founder of the Hindu Swaminarayan sects, holds that other than worship of God through the Narayana Kavacha, Hanuman is the only deity who may be worshiped in the event of trouble by evil spirits.

 

Others have also asserted his presence wherever the Ramayana is read.

 

“Bow down to Hanumān, who is the slayer of demons, and who is present with head bowed and eyes full of flowing tears wherever the fame of Rāma is sung.”

 

This can be found in other texts such as the Vinaya Patrika by Tulsidas and the Mahabharta, and in other texts with only slight variation in language. During the readings of the Ramayana (Ramayanpath), a special puja and space (asan) are reserved for Hanuman.

 

TEMPLES

Hanuman is worshipped by villagers as a boundary guardian, by Shaiva ascetics as a Yogi, and by wrestlers for his strength. There are numerous temples for Hanuman, and his images are usually installed at all temples where images of avatars of Vishnu are installed. Hanuman temples are believed to keep the area and surroundings free of rakshasas (demons) and other evil beings. Hanuman idols are found on mountain roads because it is believed that he protects people from accidents.

 

Jakhu temple is a famous temple at Shimla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh. The word "Jakhu" is derived from "Yaku"/"Yaksha". The hill is the legendary abode of Yaksha, Kinners Nagas and Asuras. The temple was founded on a plain where, according to legend, Hanuman's sudden landing flattened a hill. A 33-metre statue of Hanuman has been erected at the top of the 2,591-metre tall Jakhu Hill, the highest point in Shimla.

 

According to the Ramayana, during the battle between Lord Rama and Ravana at Lanka, Lakshmana, brother of Lord Rama, was mortally wounded by an arrow. To save his life, Hanuman journeyed to the Himalayas to retrieve the Sanjeevani herb. En route, he encountered a meditating sage on Jakhu mountain; as he paused to inquire about the herb, Hanuman's landing on the mountain compressed the earth, changing the shape of the mountain to its present state. In his haste to depart, Hanuman is said to have left his friends behind, and they are said to continue to roam the area even today. A temple honoring Lord Hanuman was constructed by the Jakhu sage.

 

The oldest known independent Hanuman statue is the one at Khajuraho, which has an inscription dated Sam. 940 (AD 883) mentioning that it was erected by Gahil's son Gollak.

 

Sankat Mochan Shri Hanuman Mandir, located in the Punjab town of Phillaur is one of the popular temples of Hanuman. Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple, Varanasi, believed to be built by Tulsidas, is second most popular temple in the city.

 

Namakkal Anjaneyar temple is located in the town of Namakkal, Tamil Nadu. There is an 18-feet idol of Sri Hanuman in the temple facing east, worshipping Sri Lakshmi Narasimha Swami (one of the avatar of god Vishnu) in this temple. Anjenayar idol is Swayambu, believed to be growing in height; thus, temple has no roof enclosing.

 

Sholinghur Sri Yoga Narasimha swami temple and Sri Yoga Anjaneyar temple, located in Sholinghur, a town which is about 30 km from Arakkonam of Vellore District.Sri yoga Anjaneyar temple located over small hill containing 480 steps from ground. Lord Anjaneyar with Sathurpujam (sathur=four, pujam=arms) Sri Sangu and Sri Chakaram 2 hands and Jabba Malai and Jaba Shankaram in other two respectively facing Sri yoga Narasimha swami and Yoga Amurthavalli Thayar present over hill (periya malai= big hill) with 1305 steps from ground. Sholinghur shetram one among 108 divya desams also one of most famous temple of our Lord Anjaneya.

 

Ragigudda Anjaneya temple is a Hanuman temple located in JP Nagar Bangalore. The temple is located on a hillock.

 

The Hanuman temple at Nerul, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India is situated inside SIES complex. The Hanuman idol is 10 m tall and is installed on a pedestal of height 4 m, bringing the total height to 14 m. In the picture shown, Hanuman has silver coverings (Silver Kavasam). The 33 feet Hanuman idol is carved out of single granite stone. This is the tallest single granite stone Hanuman idol in India as per the temple.

 

Similarly, a 10 m idol of Sri Anjaneyar was entrenched in 1989 at Nanganallur in Chennai, India. The distinguishing factor of the idol is that it was molded out of a single rock.

 

An 26-m Karya Siddhi Hanuman statue was installed at Carapichaima in Trinidad and Tobago, by Avadhoota Dattapeetham's Pontiff Ganapathy Sachchidananda. It is the tallest in the Western hemisphere and second tallest in the world. One has also built a Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple in Frisco, Texas in the U.S.

 

The tallest Hanuman statue is the Veera Abhaya Anjaneya Hanuman Swami, standing 135 feet tall at Yerravaram, 46 km from Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh, installed in 2003.

 

The image of Hanuman is said to have come alive and moved when installed at the Shri Hanuman Mandir, Sarangpur. The temple is noted for getting rid of evil spirits.

 

Suchindram temple is a pious place lying about 14 km from Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu. The temple is famous for it 18 feet tall Hanuman idol. This idol is decorated fully with butter (Vennai kappu in Tamil) and Sandalwood paste (Chandana kappu in Tamil).

 

In Rajasthan,Hanuman Temples at Mehendipur Balaji in Dausa district (80 km from Jaipur) and Salasar dhaam in Churu district (160 km from Jaipur) attract a large number of devotees from all over India. [{Chandraloak Devpuri Balaji}] is located in Dugana 17 km from Laharpur district-sitapur,UttarPradesh

 

Bhaktha Anjaneyar is Temple is located in Vedasandur, Dindigul, Tamil Nadu.

 

Kaviyoor is a small village about 5–6 km from the town of Thiruvalla, Kerala The Kaviyoor Mahadevar Temple here is about 100 years old and the Hanuman temple inside the Shiva temple is considered as very auspicious by devotees. Hanuman idol consecrated here is made of Panchaloha and is depicting him telling the story of Ramayana to Sita in the Asoka Vana.

 

Yalagur, a small village about 30–35 km from the town of Bagalkot in Karnataka, also has a temple dedicated to Hanuman.

 

Sri Baktha Hanuman Temple, Ramboda.Sri Lanka. Ramboda is a place where Hanuman was searching for Sita Devi.

 

WORSHIP

Some of the prayers, songs, mantras, shlokas, devoted to Hanuman include Hanuman Chalisa, Bajranga Baan, Maruti Strotam, Anjaneya Dandakam, Vadvanal Strotam, Hanuman Sathhika, Hanuman Bahuk, Hanuman Dwadesha, Bhimrupi Strotam, Sundara Kanda, Maruti Gayatri Mantra, Hanumansahasranam stotra (Stotra of thousand names of Hanuman), Ek-mukhi Hanuman Raksha Kavacham, Pancha-mukhi Hanuman Raksha Kavacham and Sapta-mukhi Hanuman Raksha Kavacham.

 

"Ram Raksha Strotam", the Sanskrit Strota, a Shield of Rama has lines devoted to Hanuman, saying, whoever, reads this, will be protected by Hanuman.

 

PANCHAMUKHA SRI HANUMAN

Sri Hanuman assumed Panchamukha or five-faced form to kill Ahiravana, a powerful rakshasa black-magician and practitioner of the dark arts during the Ramayana war. Ahiravana, brother of Ravana, had taken Lord Rama and Lakshmana to netherworld as captive, and the only way to kill him was to extinguish five lamps burning in different directions, all at the same instant. Sri Hanuman assumed His Panchamukha form and accomplished the task, thus killing the rakshasa, and freeing Rama and Lakshmana.

 

This form of Sri Hanuman is very popular, and is also known as Panchamukha Anjaneya and Panchamukhi Anjaneya. (Anjaneya, which means "son of Anjana", is another name of Sri Hanuman). These faces show there is nothing in the world which does not come under any the influence of any of the five faces, symbolic of his all around security to all devotees. This also signifies vigilance and control over the five directions - north, south, east, west and the upward direction/zenith.

 

There are five ways of prayer, Naman, Smaran, Keerthanam, Yachanam and Arpanam. The five faces depict these five forms. Lord Sri Hanuman always used to Naman, Smaran and Keerthanam of Lord Sri Rama. He totally surrendered (Arpanam) to his Master Sri Rama. He also begged (yachanam) Sri Rama to bless him the undivided love.

 

The weapons are a parashu, a Khanda, a chakra, a dhaalam, a gada, a trishula, a kumbha, a Katar, a plate filled with blood and again a big Gada.

 

Chitrakoot in Central India is claimed to be the resting place of Sri Hanuman. The Hanuman Dhara Temple is situated on the peak of mountain where there is natural rock formation image of Shri Hanuman inside the cave and a natural stream of water falling on the tail. It is believed that after the coronation of Lord Rama, Sri Hanuman requested for a permanent place to settle in the Kingdom of Lord Rama, where his Injury of burns on his tails will be cured. Lord Rama, then with his arrow, spurred a stream of water on the tip of mountain and asked Sri Hanuman to rest there with water of the stream falling on his tail to cool down burning sensation in his tail. The access to the cave temple is through stairs starting from bottom of the mountain to its top. It takes roughly 30 to 40 minutes to reach the temple. Over time the temple has gained a new name, namely Hanuman Dhara.

 

Sri Panchamukha Anjaneya Swami was the main deity of Sri Raghavendra Swami. The place where he meditated on this five-faced form of Sri Hanuman is now known as Panchamukhi, wherein a temple for him has been built. There is also a shrine for Panchamukha Anjaneya Swami at Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, India. A 12 m tall monolithic green granite murti of Sri Panchamukha Hanuman has been installed in Thiruvallur, also in Tamil Nadu. This place was known as Rudravanam in olden times when many saints and seers had blessed this place with their presence. The Panchamukha Hanuman Ashram itself was established by a saint called Venkatesa Battar. A four foot image of Panchmukha Hanuman has been consecrated West of Lusaka, Zambia in Oye Kapi farm.

 

RELATION WITH SHANI

In Hinduism, Hanuman is one of the few deities not afflicted by Shani. Hanuman is the one of the deities in Hindu religion, over whom Shani could not cast his spell. Shani could not overcome Hanuman and as such people worship Hanuman to get rid of malefic effects of Shani.

 

In the Ramayana, Hanuman is said to have rescued Shani, from the clutches of Ravana.

 

In gratitude, Shani promised Hanuman that those who prayed him (Hanuman) would be rescued from the painful effects of Saturn, which in Hindu astrology, is said to produce malefic effects on one's life when one is afflicted "negatively" with Saturn.

 

Another version of the encounter between Lord Hanuman and Shani Bhagavan is that the latter once climbed on to Lord Hanuman's shoulder, implying that he (Hanuman) was coming under the effects of the influence of Shani. At this, Hanuman assumed a large size, and Shani was caught painfully between Hanuman's shoulders and the ceiling of the room they were in. As the pain was unbearable, Shani requested Hanuman to release him, promising that he (Shani) would moderate the malefic effects of his influence on a person praying to Hanuman. Hanuman released Shani thereafter.

 

In the verse with a thousand Names of Hanuman the Hanumansahasranam stotra, Shani is one of the Names of Hanuman. In some regions of India, Hanuman is also seen sporting an iron whip akin to Shani.

 

WIKIPEDIA

Project: UAS CHARACTERIZATION OF HIGH WIND DAMAGE TO VEGETATION AND RURAL AREA ASSESSMENTS

 

With the help of the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Uncrewed Systems Research Transition Office (USRTO), scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory in collaboration with the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies are working on developing an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based approach to better characterize high-wind damage to vegetation and in rural areas to improve disaster response and recovery.

 

Photo Credit: Tyler Bell/CIMMS/NSSL

Star Trek- The Menagerie , “Return to Talos IV”

youtu.be/v5XBfgPy43A?t=2s The full feature.

 

The Menagerie Review: February 8, 2014 by neoethereal

As the only two-part episode in The Original Series, “The Menagerie” also cleverly serves as a re-telling of the very first Star Trek story ever filmed, “The Cage.” This week on The Uncommon Geek, I examine all of these episodes in full detail, highlighting their connections to other aspects of the Trek mythos. As well, I take a look at the ground broken by Gene Roddenberry concerning the nature of reality, decades before movies like “The Matrix” challenged the perception of our everyday world.

 

Equipped with little more than a shoestring budget and massive constraints on time with which to work, Gene Roddenberry and his Star Trek production team had to get extremely creative in order to make the show work. Nowhere, in my opinion, is that more evident than here in “The Menagerie,” an entry that served the purpose of buying the production team time to properly finish subsequent episodes, and as well, afforded Gene Roddenberry a unique opportunity to re-tell the story he had wanted to get on the air all along, “The Cage.”

 

This episode begins with the Enterprise having been called out of its way, to Starbase 11. Confusion arises when the starbase’s commanding officer, Commodore Mendez, reveals to Captain Kirk that the base never sent any message to the Enterprise. Spock claims to have received that message, which puts Kirk into the difficult position of whether to trust the starbase computers, or the word of his first officer and friend.

 

It turns out that Captain Christopher Pike, the former commander of the Enterprise, who was recently crippled and disfigured in a terrible accident, is on Starbase 11, and suspicion arises that perhaps he relayed a message to Spock. When Kirk finally gets to see Pike, however, he realizes that it would have been impossible for Spock’s former commanding officer to have done this, for Pike is now wheelchair bound, and his communication with others is limited to electronic beeps that fill in for “yes” and “no.

 

While Kirk and Mendez wrestle over the truth, Spock executes a daring and clever plan to hijack the Enterprise, taking Captain Pike with him. It goes to show just how dangerous an opponent someone as smart and calculating as Spock can be when he puts his mind to it. Spock sets the Enterprise on a locked course for Talos IV, a planet which the ship visited on a past mission under Christopher Pike, and a planet that invites the death penalty upon any Starfleet officer who goes there

 

The secret file on Talos IV, and the article of General Order 7

I personally find the idea of a death penalty being associated with Talos IV to be somewhat dubious; although there is a very good reason why Starfleet wants the existence of the Talosians kept secret, I find it hard to believe that if the Federation is capable of having a death penalty, that it only applies to one law. It may just be a grand bluff, and indeed, there is some evidence to that effect later in the episode. Regardless, breaking General Order 7 is a serious offense, and Spock is if nothing else, putting his career and livelihood on the line.

 

Kirk, of course, isn’t going to sit by while his ship is abducted. He and Mendez make a daring attempt to chase the Enterprise in the Shuttlecraft Picasso, knowing full well that while they would never catch up, they would appear on the Enterprise sensors. Kirk gambles his life on the fact that his friend Spock would not leave him to die in the void of space, as the shuttle runs out of fuel. Kirk’s illogical gambit causes Spock’s plan to unravel, and he surrenders himself to custody, pleading guilty to every charge leveled against him. However, Spock has locked the Enterprise into a course for Talos IV that cannot be broken, which will potentially extend the death sentence that is on himself, to Kirk as well.

 

The court martial that proceeds against Spock is highly unusual; as mentioned, Spock pleads guilty without defense, but through some legal technicality, manages to arrange for the court to hear out his evidence as to why he went through with his illegal actions. Given that Kirk is presiding over the hearing, and that the crew has little else to do but wait until they reach Talos IV, I get the lenience, but I am not sure what real court would remain in session to examine evidence for someone who just admitted their guilt. Or admittedly, maybe I just don’t know enough about legal proceedings.

 

Spock’s evidence, as it turns out, is a transmission from Talos IV, beamed directly to the Enterprise, which details the vessel’s first trip there under the command of Captain Pike. Of course, this transmission is the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” and from this point on, “The Menagerie” consists almost entirely of footage from that episode.

 

Aside from some really goofy tech dialogue, and incomplete characterizations, “The Cage” holds up surprisingly well. We get to see that Jeffrey Hunter’s Captain Pike is a darker, colder man than James Kirk; he is someone whose decisions and responsibilities as a commander are weighing on him heavily, and he is nearing the point of considering resignation. Pike’s first officer is only referred to as Number One (played by Majel Barrett), who is an amazing example of a strong female role for 1960’s television, but unfortunately her character had to be discarded by Roddenberry when the studio forced him to choose between keeping his strong, logical female, or his alien Spock. Roddenberry ended up giving Spock Number One’s cold, emotionless, logical persona, and thus the Spock we know and love was born.

 

It really is a shame that NBC put so much pressure on Roddenberry to alter his concept of women in the 23rd Century; aside from Number One, the other female crew members of the Cage-era Enterprise also seem to be on equal footing with the men, and there isn’t a mini-skirt in sight. Of course, this reviewer by no means, from an aesthetic point view, objects to how the women of the Enterprise look in said mini-skirts, but cheekiness and my own red-blooded male impulses aside, the female officers in Starfleet should have been offered the same, more professional uniform as the males. Unfortunately we would have to wait until The Motion Picture to see more fairness in the way men and women are presented in Star Trek.

 

When Enterprise finds evidence of human survivors on Talos IV, from a doomed expedition many years ago, Pike, Spock, and an away team beam down to investigate. What at first seems like a wonderful discovery of lost, homesick men, turns out to be just an elaborate, life like illusion created by the Talosians. Pike is abducted when he is lured in by the only true human survivor from the crash, Vina, whom he is extremely attracted to.

 

Pike is subjected to a variety of illusions crafted by the Talosians, in order to foster cooperation, as well as to strengthen his attraction toward Vina. Vina is presented to Pike in a variety of forms; as a damsel in distress on Rigel VII, as a wife in the countryside on Earth, and as a primal, animalistic Orion slave woman, all in an attempt to make him submit to his situation.

 

However, Pike is every bit as stubborn as Captain Kirk, and certainly has a darker, more furious edge to him. When he discovers that primitive, base human emotions such as hatred, and anger, block out the Talosian’s illusions and their telepathic abilities, he mines that weakness long enough to take one of them captive. Once the illusion is broken, the Enterprise crew find out that their attempts to break Pike out from his underground cage with phaser fire were actually working, but all along they weren’t able to see it.

 

The Talosians had, thousands of centuries ago, devastated their planet and their civilization with war. They retreated underground, where their telepathic abilities flourished, but their physical bodies and their technology atrophied. They had apparently been testing various species for many years, looking for a suitable slave race to use for rebuilding their world, but none had shown as much promise as humanity.

 

However, when the away team threatens to kill themselves with an overloaded phaser, and as well when the Talosians finish screening the Enterprise‘s records, they realize that humans would rather die than be enslaved, and would be too violent to keep in captivity. With of course, the sad exception of Vina, who in reality is too badly disfigured to live a normal life outside of Talos IV.

 

(I once heard a suggestion that Vina could be repaired using the transporter. I don’t think 23rd century transporters were sophisticated enough for that, plus, there wouldn’t be an original, unaltered version of her pattern to reference.)

 

The ending of “The Cage” leads us to the final moments of “The Menagerie,” where it is revealed that not only have the Talosians been transmitting a signal to the Enterprise, but even Commodore Mendez himself has been one of their illusions all along!

 

It is also revealed that Spock’s only intention was to take Captain Pike to Talos IV, so that the crippled starship commander could live out the rest of his life as a healthy, happy man with Vina. Even Kirk seems to relent that it is better to live with an illusion of health and happiness, than a reality of living as a useless vegetable. That Commodore Mendez was an illusion, and that Starfleet sends a signal to the Enterprise, apparently excusing their violation of Talos space, seems to let Spock off the hook. Perhaps too easily in fact; despite acting out of nothing but loyalty to his former Captain, and despite that the way he enacted his plan was done in such a manner as to put the blame only on himself, Spock seems to get out of his predicament with apparently no trouble at all. We can make a guess that perhaps this incident is why he doesn’t receive a promotion or command of his own until years later, but there is nothing spoken on-screen to that effect.

 

We are also left to ponder about how much of the incident was real at all. Since the Talosians can apparently project their powers through subspace, one wonders just how long they conspired with Spock, and also, how much we see of Mendez was real or an illusion. My guess is that the Mendez we see at the base was real, and what goes onto the shuttle with Kirk was the illusion, but unfortunately, again, there is little to back that up. What we do know for sure is that the Talosian’s powers are not to be trifled with, and it is truly for wise for Starfleet to give them a wide berth.

Despite some problems with logic and consistency, “The Menagerie” is an entertaining, fascinating episode that shows original series Trek at some of its most interestingly cerebral. Gene Roddenberry’s first pilot examines the nature of reality decades before The Matrix did, and asks the questions: What is real? How does one define their purpose, their reality? Is our reality just relative, defined only by experience? Is there a such thing as an absolute reality, or only what our senses perceive, or for that matter what they think they perceive? This is smart, ahead of its time writing for the 1960s.

 

Through the tragedies that befell both Vina and Pike, we must also question the quality of human life, and the value we place on it. Is it worth staying alive if you can’t function? If your brain is sound but your body is broken, can you still truly live? Speaking for myself, I certainly would despise the existence that Captain Pike is forced to endure in his wheelchair. I’d rather be dead than live that way. I’m not sure how I would react exactly to being forced to live in an illusion, but it is certainly preferable to a reality of uselessness and immobility. Besides, is our everyday life not just an elaborate series of deceptions spun before our very eyes; maybe not as powerful as a trick of telepathy played by an alien race, but an illusion nonetheless?

 

For even provoking these thoughts, and much more, “The Cage,” and by extension, “The Menagerie,” are what I consider among the best of Star Trek’s purely cerebral stories about human nature. It is imaginative, thoughtful, and quite engaging.

The Wondrous Stag.

Book thesis on the characterization of female and male characters in western & eastern folktales.

The official launch of the state of farm animal genetic resources (AnGR) in Africa, the coffee table book of cattle breeds, the AnGR-Characterization, Inventory and Monitoring tool and the new Animal Resources Information System version in Nairobi on 12 June 2019 (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu).

The sample is zircon (ZrSiO4) doped with iron Fe at 0.05 wt%. This compound was prepared by control hydrolitic sol-gel route. The sample was heated at 1200oC during 3 h in air. This compound has application as a ceramic pigment.

   

Courtesy of Guillermo Herrera

 

Image Details

Instrument used: Quanta Family

Magnification: 3,500x

Horizontal Field Width: 7.00 μm

Vacuum: 1

Voltage: 20

Spot: 5.0

Working Distance: 6.0

Detector: SE

 

The Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

 

The Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCS) supported by basic energy sciences will be research facilities for the synthesis, processing, and fabrication of nanoscale materials. They will be collocated with existing user facilities to provide sophisticated characterization and analysis capabilities. In addition, NSRCS will provide specialized equipment and support staff not readily available to the research community. NRSCS will be operation as user facilities and be available to all researchers.

 

For more information or additional images, please contact 202-586-5251.

Jiseok Gim, materials science and engineering PhD candidate, demonstrates loading a sample into the JEOL 3100R05 electron microscope in the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization at the University of Michigan's North Campus Research Complex in Ann Arbor, MI on October 21, 2019.

 

Gim is part of a research team at U-M, led by Robert Hovden, associate professor of materials science and engineering, that used electron microscopy and mechanical deformation techniques to capture visual evidence of why nacre, a long-studied bio material found in mollusk shells, is so tough.

 

Photo: Evan Dougherty/University of Michigan Engineering

Silver micro streams on crystalline silicon substrate obtained after dry etching of a thin silver film.

 

Courtesy of Tomas Tamulevicius

 

Image Details

Instrument used: Quanta Family

Magnification: 5,000x

Horizontal Field Width: 51.2 um

Vacuum: High vacuum

Voltage: 30 kV

Spot: 3.5

Working Distance: 8.6mm

Detector: SE-ETD

 

Directed by Roger Corman. Starring Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher, David Weston, Patrick Magee, Nigel Green and Skip Martin.

Brief Synopsis

In 12th-century Italy Prospero, a Satan-worshiping prince, jails two peasants, Gino and Ludovico, for defying his authority to tax citizens. Francesca, Ludovico's daughter and Gino's fiancée, pleads for their lives, and the intrigued Prospero agrees to spare whichever one she chooses. Later, the prince sees evidence of the Red Death plague in the village and orders all houses in the infected area burned. The disease obliges Prospero to retreat to his castle, and he forces Francesca to accompany him, intending to dress her in courtly attire and have her watch him indulge in sadistic pleasures as part of her instruction in diabolism. Juliana, the prince's mistress, is jealous of Francesca but aids her attempt to help Gino and Ludovico escape. The plot is foiled, however, and at one of the events preceding Prospero's annual masked ball, the prince orders the men to cut themselves with five knives, one of which is poisoned. Ludovico is impaled on Prospero's sword when he attempts to kill the prince with one of the weapons, and Gino is banished to the burning village, promising to return. Juliana, meanwhile, sacrifices herself to Satan while Prospero watches unperturbed. On his way back to town, Gino meets a strange figure in red, who takes him back to the castle and instructs him to wait outside for Francesca. As the mysterious intruder enters the ball, Prospero and his guests die of the Red Death, but Gino and Francesca are permitted to survive.

“The Masque of the Red Death” was apparently the story that inspired Roger Corman to start making movies based on the works of Poe. You might ask why, in that case, his first crack at the subgenre was The Fall of the House of Usher, and I honestly couldn’t give you an answer. But for whatever reason, Corman didn’t get around to filming The Masque of the Red Death until 1964, when it was obvious to everyone except possibly the director himself that he was getting sick of Poe adaptations, and the result was a disjointed, muddled, and nearly lifeless movie that just barely squeaks by on the basis of excellent visual composition and a splendid performance from star Vincent Price.

This would have been a difficult movie to make under the best of circumstances, though, because the original story is scarcely five pages long, and is written like a campfire tale. Characterization is literally at the level of “there’s this guy, see, and one day he...”, while months’ worth of action is passed over in single sentences, and every other element of the story is utterly subordinated to the final shock in the last paragraph. As temptingly cool as the underlying premise is, it would be a challenge to turn “The Masque of the Red Death” into a fifteen minute short, let alone a feature film. So inevitably, screenwriter Charles Beaumont was forced to invent scenes, characters, and motivations wholesale, and even then, he felt compelled to splice in a second Poe story, “Hop Frog,” as a subplot in order to bulk up his script to the required length.

The film begins with an old peasant woman encountering a strange man in a hooded red robe, sitting beneath a tree and dealing himself a Tarot hand. The man flags the old lady down, and gives her something to take with her to her village. She is to be his messenger, the hooded man explains, and sends her on her way.

Just hours after her arrival back home, her village finds itself playing host to its lord, Prince Prospero (Price). The prince has come to announce the date of the annual feast he holds for the nobility at his castle, the leftovers from which he has traditionally given back to the peasantry in what could arguably be seen as the feudal equivalent of an income tax refund. But this year, the peasants are not so placid in their acceptance of Prospero’s “generosity.” As a young man named Gino (Witchcraft’s David Weston) explains, one of their women met a holy man in the woods that evening, who told her that their day of deliverance was at hand. With news like that, Gino and his people feel little inclination to kiss Prince Prospero’s ass, whatever his rank. The prince is enraged, and he orders his soldiers to kill Gino, as well as an older man named Ludovico (Nigel Green, from The Skull and Jason and the Argonauts), who makes the mistake of sticking up for Gino. And when a lovely young girl named Francesca (Jane Asher, who had a tiny role in The Creeping Unknown/The Quatermass Xperiment) sticks up for both condemned men (she’s Ludovico’s daughter and Gino’s fiancee), Prospero plays the sort of nasty trick on her that Vincent Price characters are justly famous for, “magnanimously” agreeing to spare one of the men, and insisting that Francesca choose which it will be.

But Prospero’s fun is soon interrupted by prolonged and hideous screaming coming from one of the village huts. When he sends one of his men to investigate, that man finds the old lady from the first scene, keeled over dead on the floor, her skin covered in hundreds of tiny hemorrhages. The symptoms are unmistakable— the dreaded Red Death has come to Prospero’s domain. When the prince hears that, he orders his soldiers to pack up Gino, Ludovico, and Francesca, and burn the village to the ground while he and a handful of men escort the prisoners to the castle. Prospero may fear the Red Death, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to let it spoil his fun.

Then again, Prospero is almost certainly damned anyway. It isn’t just that he’s an evil bastard, although he certainly is that; more importantly, Prince Prospero and his wife, Juliana (Hazel Court, from The Curse of Frankenstein and Dr. Blood’s Coffin), are practicing Satanists. That would go some way toward explaining all the evil, wouldn’t it? In the prince’s case, Satanism looks a lot like a combination of sadism and hedonism. Whether he’s torturing prisoners, trying to force Gino and Ludovico to fight a duel against each other, or romancing the captive Francesca, all Prospero is really interested in is his own pleasure. And so it is scarcely surprising that he takes advantage of the need to quarantine his estate against the Red Death to convert his planned banquet into a weeks-long debauch. The assembled nobility will be plied with all the food and drink they can keep down, and presented with amusements ranging from dancing midgets to a lethal game of chance involving Gino, Ludovico, and five daggers, one with a poisoned blade (think of it as a renaissance version of Russian roulette). And as the climax to the celebration, an all-night masquerade will be held in the great hall of the castle. All Prospero’s nobles need to do to get in on the excitement is follow a few simple directions in traveling to his estate: stay the hell away from any peasant villages where the Red Death might have broken out. The fate of one lord who disregards the prince’s instructions is enough to ensure that everyone else does exactly as they are told.

Meanwhile, Prospero has been working on Francesca, and the girl proves surprisingly susceptible to persuasion. Though she professes a firm belief in Christianity, her simple peasant’s faith has no answer for the thorny philosophical questions with which the prince bombards her— how, for example, does one reconcile an all-powerful, benevolent deity with the undeniable domination of the world by cruel and evil men? When Prospero asserts that if ever the universe was ruled by a god of love and mercy, that god is now long gone, Francesca can offer no reply. The prince’s interest in converting the girl makes Juliana very nervous, however. She, after all, has no desire to see her place at Prospero’s side taken by some low-born wench who just happens to be a better-than-average piece of ass. Unfortunately for Juliana, though, her strategy for shoring up her position yields results rather different from those she sought, and the scheming lady ends up with a whole new appreciation of the capabilities of hunting falcons.

Juliana’s fate is only slightly less grisly than that of Prospero’s friend, Alfredo (Patrick Magee, from And Now the Screaming Starts and Dementia 13). Alfredo has, over the course of his stay with Prospero, developed quite a letch for Esmeralda (Verina Greenlaw, who was all but invisible in The Haunting the year before), the beautiful midget dancer who performs at Prospero’s court. But given that Alfredo is one of the prince’s closest friends, it goes without saying that his affection for the girl doesn’t lead him to treat her any better than he would any other commoner, and his sustained nastiness toward her brings upon him the vengeance of Hop Toad (Skip Martin, from Vampire Circus and Horror Hospital), the male dwarf who works as Esmeralda’s partner in her act. Hop Toad gets his revenge by suggesting a costume for Alfredo to wear to the masquerade. The dwarf knows that Prospero owns (for no very good reason) a gorilla suit that should fit Alfredo nicely. Hop Toad contends that if Alfredo wears this costume to the masque, and makes a big scene by molesting all the women and generally causing a ruckus, he’ll be the life of the party. Hop Toad can then come in and pretend to bring him under control for further laughs and hilarity. Alfredo agrees that Hop Toad’s idea sounds like a hoot and a holler, but what the dwarf neglected to mention was that he would “bring Alfredo under control” by chaining him to the chandelier, hoisting him to the ceiling, and setting him on fire. But Prospero gets the joke, and when it’s all over, he orders Hop Toad rewarded with five pieces of gold.

And now, at last, we have arrived at the point of the movie, and the only part of it that has much to do with the story from which it takes its title— the masquerade. Gino breaks out of Prospero’s castle, and on his wanderings through the surrounding woods, he meets up with the same red-robed man as the woman in the first scene. After a short talk, in which Gino explains who he is and where he has come from, the hooded stranger has Gino lead him to the castle, and before sneaking in, the man in red promises his companion that he will see to Francesca’s safety. Now obviously, there can be little question at this point who the hooded man really is, though Prospero himself doesn’t get it at first. The prince’s initial assumption is that his unannounced guess is his long-awaited master, Beelzebub, or at the very least his emissary. But when his guests start hemorrhaging to death all around him, Prospero puts the pieces together, and he is stunned to learn that his life-long devotion to Satan is no protection against the Red Death.

If you ask me, I think what Corman should have done was get Richard Matheson to write a “Masque of the Red Death” segment into the script for Tales of Terror back in 1962. Then the story’s greatest strengths— its brevity and directness— could have been deployed in service of the film adaptation, rather than standing as the basis for an unfavorable comparison. Poe’s story just doesn’t have enough meat to it to support a feature-length treatment, and all the extraneous material Beaumont was forced to add mainly serves to bog the movie down in directionless subplots. But there is one thing Beaumont added to the story that I really did enjoy. After all the plot threads are tied up, and everything seems to be fully over, the camera returns to the Red Death, sitting, as is his wont, beneath a tree, playing with his Tarot deck. Suddenly, he is joined by a similarly garbed figure, but wearing a black robe, rather than red. That’s right, the Red Death and the Black Death have gotten together to compare notes! And before long, a veritable rainbow of multicolored Deaths have arrived on the scene; I gave up guessing which diseases they were supposed to represent after Yellow Fever put in his appearance. It’s a fun scene, and it makes a great ending to a mostly forgettable movie.

  

Fuji Neopan Acros 100

Rodinal 1:50, 14m @19degC

 

I couldn't resist the sub-$20 pro-pack of acros in 120 the other day when I made my big 4x5 and 120 film order and this roll immediately on the heels of my Tmax 100 roll was meant to give me some comparison between the two films. Never having used Acros before I wasn't sure what developer to use so I'll probably try Xtol, HC-110 and maybe Tmax on the next 3 rolls to complement the Rodinal here, then I might try Rodinal stand using EI 50.

 

Initial reactions: much clearer film base than TMax 100, and lacking the purplish tint, the apparent sharpness was greater just looking at the negatives and I'd say this was backed up once they were scanned and applied with a similar amount of unsharp mask as the TMax 100. They are really close, and I wonder if the difference isn't the Rodinal rather than the emulsion.

 

If you look at the last 6x7 Contact Sheet #2 and the last two frames of the cloudy sky on the water you can compare almost one to one to the second two frames on the Acros 100 roll. They were all shot within 10 min or so of eachother. Again this isn't a scientificly controlled enough test to be sure but I used the same exposure for all four of these frames and the Acros 100 rendered the clouds as brighter than the Tmax 100...but just a bit, playing with it in LR I was able to make the two match eachother pretty easy and to be honest it could be more developer than anything else.

 

The final observation which is imperceptible at the contact sheet magnification is the grain characterization, Tmax to me is smoother and more even, additionally what I call the midtones seems to have a broader range whereas the tipoff between dark and light on Acros seems to be more distinct.

 

I'm going to be out of town for the rest of the week but when I get back I'll post some 100% enlargement comparisons especially from those cloud and water pictures. ENJOY!

 

*The 10th, missing frame is a +1 exposure of the tree in the bottom row

BSE image of a ceramic material.

 

Courtesy of Érico Teixeira Neto

 

Image Details

Instrument used: Inspect Family

Detector: BSE

 

SRNL’s postdoctoral student, Maria Kriz, works on structural characterization of materials using X-Rays.