Batman: tip of the iceberg 1/2

(First scene takes place at the same time as the gunman 4/4)

Bruce wakes up to find himself hanging by his legs in the freezer room of what seems to be the iceberg lounge. Extremely ostentatious and really quite cold. A place he’s visited many times what with being one of the richest men in the world. He looks around the room for some way to make an escape. He notices the latch of a skylight on the ceiling behind him. He must be on the top floor. He begins to attempt to swing himself in order to take hold of the latch but it is not an easy task to do with tied up hands. He pauses for a moment. Once more he attempts to grab the latch but is soon distracted by the echoing sound of bullets. There’s a shootout in the bar. Just what he needs. Again he try’s his luck at the skylight, this time succeeding with the motivation of not being shot. His hands are tied by a single thick rope which now rests tediously around the latch. He begins to move his arms back and forth slowly weakening the bond of the rope and finally releasing his hands. Now with the use of his hands he removes a batarang from his pouch and cuts, in one movement the rope which ties his legs. He drops to the ground, landing on his feet and edges cautiously towards the freezer door. The shooting stops so unable to unlock the door he prepares for a fight

———————————————————

(Second part continues on from the gunman 4/4)

Oswald: and tell me Floyd. What compelled you to play along with carmine. The mans a shambles. I’d have to kill him if I ever met him in the flesh

Floyd: let’s just say I liked the cash he was paying me. I wasn’t tight for money or anything cos I usually demand a lot with my normal jobs but once he was willing to double my 5 grand, I knew it had to be done and not killing anyone seemed worth it at that point

Oswald: well we both saw how that worked out for The bastards. Haha. Excellent work on those two henchmen Floyd and the batman well. That’s not an easy task to carry out!...any way moving on here is the freezer. Shall we take a look

Floyd: I’ll go in first. There’s no knowing what he’s been up to in there

Lawton takes the key from Oswald and unlocks the door. Far easier than the paper clip he used before. He steps into the ice cold atmosphere of the room and notices there’s something missing. Or someone that is

Floyd: Oh shit...he’s gone

Oswald: what! Gone?! How?!

Cobblepott peers into the freezer room until his sight is blocked. Blocked by the black silhouette of the batman

He lurches forwards grasping the sharp end of his cane, Missing the batman who is now on the other side of his small,pale body

Floyd turns around and fired rapidly in the direction of the moving batman

Oswald: get the rat!!

Floyd puts his mask on and chases the bat. He fires several rounds but the bat drops from the balcony and heads towards the back door. Floyd begins to chase after him but is then bought to a halt by Oswald

Oswald: no no! He’s not worth it. We have plans to be acting upon. Once we have the power in this city the batman will have lead in his head. And you will put it there! Do not worry about that for one minute!

———————————————————

The batcave

After returning to the cave, Bruce takes note of a distant sound coming from up the stairs and within the manor.

He then recognises two voices. The first of course being the voice of his old butler and the man he for a long time has considered a father. The second

however, is completely new to Bruce and without hesitation he tears away his blood stained batsuit, proceeding to quickly dress himself in an un ironed shirt and some black chinos. Completely shoeless he makes his way up to the house to find Alfred and another sitting about the kitchen table talking as if they are two old friends from before Bruce’s time. Which is likely due to the fact that they are. The man talking to Alfred is around the same age as Bruce’s father and has short yet chaotic afro hair only slightly grey at the tips. Engulfing the mans small and narrow eyes are a pair of huge circular glasses. Alfred notices Bruce’s standing by the doorway and immediately introduces the man

Alfred: Bruce! You remember Lucius?

Lucius Fox: I don’t imagine you do. You were only a child when I last saw you

Yes. Lucius Fox. Bruce remembers the man instantly. An old and dear friend of both His father and Alfred, he held an important job at Wayne tech, being responsible for much of their technological innovations over the years

Bruce: yes. Of course. It’s been a long time. I do remember you though. A good friend of my father.

Lucius: most certainly Bruce. Your dad was a great man. I owe more than my life to that man. And it goes without saying that he had a hell of a lot more sense when it came to business than the new guy.

Bruce: yes it’s true. I’m all his time my father kept both Queen industries and lexcorp where they belonged. But ever since we lost him, nothings been quite the same really. In terms of both business and spirit....anyway enough of that. What brings you here Lucius? Besides, of course, friendship

Lucius: Alfie here was telling me about your new project and i thought I could lend a hand.

Bruce: you told him?!

Alfred: about your newfound passion for collecting classic sports cars. Yes I did. How else would the man know to develop these fantastic new blue prints

Lucius pushes several blue prints towards Bruce and begins to explain his work with a great sense of pride

Lucius Fox: now I’m sure you recognise this old car as your very own fathers from 20 odd years ago. If there was one thing besides family that that man loved with every bone in his body, it was that car. As well as mentioning your new hobby, Alfie brought up that it was merely just rotting away in your garage and that to me was a real damn shame. Something had to be done. So I drew up these blueprints, made some calls and orders and with some hope I’ll have her fixed up soon enough and she’ll be flying faster than she ever did back when your old man first took her out.

Bruce: wow. Lucius. You didn’t have to do this. These alone are a work of art. It’ll be a thing of beauty. I truly will owe you

Lucius: haha no. Let’s just say It’s payback for the things your dad did for me back in the day. Making it as an engineer in the 50s wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for a black man you know. He never judged me for what I looked like,where I came from. Luther did of course. But not him

Bruce: well I’m glad he didn’t Lucius. And you owe him nothing. Common decency should be free. We both know that

Lucius: thanks Bruce means a lot from his son....anyway I’ll be going now. Got a bus to catch. And I’ll have that car fixed up in no time

Alfred: don’t be stupid Lucius! I’ll drive you home. It’s all my pleasure!

Vintage postcard.Johnny Sheffield in Bomba: The Jungle Boy (Ford Beebe, 1949).

Johnny Sheffield (1931-2010) was one of Hollywood's most famous child stars. He was unforgettable as Tarzan's adopted son Boy in eight Tarzan films starring Johnny Weissmuller. Between 1949 and 1955, he starred in twelve Bomba films for Monogram Pictures.

Johnny Sheffield was born John Matthew Sheffield Cassan in 1931 in Pasadena, California, USA. His father was the actor Reginald Sheffield who began as a child star and later turned to character acting. In 1938, Sheffield became a child star after he was cast in the juvenile lead of a West Coast production of the highly successful Broadway play 'On Borrowed Time', which starred Dudley Digges and featured Victor Moore as Gramps. The seven-year-old Sheffield played the role of Pud, a long role for a child. He later went to New York as a replacement and performed the role on Broadway. That year he also played Napoleon's son in the short MGM film The Man on the Rock (Edward L. Cahn, 1938). When Maureen O'Sullivan wanted out of her Jane role in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan series, it was decided that she and Tarzan would adopt a son (they had to adopt, according to the Legion of Decency, because they weren't married) before she died. Weissmuller personally selected Sheffield from 300 boys for the part of Boy. The role was inspired by Bobby Nelson's portrayal in Tarzan the Mighty (Jack Nelson, Ray Taylor, 1928). Athletic by nature, little Johnny was taught to swim by swimming Olympian Weissmuller. Johnny Sheffield's feature debut in Tarzan Finds a Son! (Richard Thorpe, 1939) was such a success that MGM signed him to six more films as Tarzan's Boy. Sheffield played Boy in three Tarzan films at MGM, and in another five after Johnny Weissmuller, and production of the film series moved to RKO. Brenda Joyce played Jane in the last three Tarzan films in which Sheffield appeared.

In between the Tarzan films, Johnny Sheffield played supporting parts in other films. Sheffield appeared in the musical Babes in Arms (Busby Berkeley, 1939) with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, classmates of his at the studio school. Johnny and his brother Billy Sheffield were both in Knute Rockne All American (Lloyd Bacon, 1940), playing football player and coach Knute Rockne at different ages. By the time of Tarzan and the Mermaids (Robert Florey, 1948), Johnny Sheffield was too big for the part of Boy. The film merely said he was away at school. When Monogram Studios learned Sheffield had been dropped, they picked him up for s series of B-films based on Roy Rockwood's adventure novel 'Bomba'. The first was Bomba: The Jungle Boy (Ford Beebe, 1949). Between 1949 and 1955, Sheffield made twelve Bomba films for "Poverty Row" studio Monogram Pictures. Sheffield retired from films at age 24 after starring in his twelfth Bomba film Lord of the Jungle (Ford Beebe, 1955). He then made a pilot for a television series, Bantu the Zebra Boy, which was created, produced, and directed by his father, Reginald Sheffield. Although the production values were high compared to other TV jungle shows of the day, a sponsor was not found and the show was not taken up as a weekly series. In his later years, Sheffield sold bootlegged copies of the pilot to collectors on videotape. After leaving show business, Sheffield completed a business degree at UCLA. Turning his attention to other fields, he involved himself variously in farming, real estate and construction. For a time, he was a representative for the Santa Monica Seafood Company importing lobsters from Baja California in Mexico. In 1959 he married his wife Patricia and they would have three children, Stewart, Regina and Patrick Sheffield. In 2010, Johnny suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Chula Vista, California, four hours after he fell off a ladder while pruning a palm tree. Sheffield was 79. His brother Billy Sheffield died two months later.

Sources: Ed Stephan (IMDb), Find A Grave, Wikipedia and IMDb.

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

Vintage postcard, no. 3120.

American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).

Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.

With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.

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

Swiss-German-British postcard by News Productions, Baulmes / Filmwelt Berlin, Bakede / News Productions, Stroud, no. 56501. Photo: Collection Cinémathèque Suisse, Lausanne.Brigitte Bardot and Yves Robert in Les Grandes Manoeuvres / Summer Manoeuvres (René Clair, 1955), produced by Filmsonor and Rizzoli Films.

Beautiful French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she established herself as an animal rights activist and made vegetarianism sexy.

Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modeling career and found herself in May 1949 on the cover of the French magazine Elle. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand/Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953 she attended the Cannes Film Festival where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956 she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. She made her first US production in 1953 in Un acte d'amour/Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.

Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smashing success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. Woman's immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the shooting of Et Dieu créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), directed by her husband Roger Vadim, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at that time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.

Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped her international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten' and fascination of her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad, or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theaters like lemmings.BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne/La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957) which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur/Love is my profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "this Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defense attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre is able to shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960 postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.

Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957 and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre/Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career. Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée/Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at Films de France: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the highpoint of her career when she agreed to make this film with high profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names, was based on an actual incident and is a resonant image of a celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterward Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.

Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men including Sami Frey, her co-star in La Vérité/The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris/Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963). She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres/Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires/Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses/Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury, and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.

Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973 just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976 she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewelry and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990's she became also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France, and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal is a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularizing bikini swimwear, in early films such as Manina/Woman without a Veil (1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photoshoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."

Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Films de France, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

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

I've worn this dress twice now, and both times it was to cheer myself up. The first time was last year after a round of redundancies at work saw me lose a couple of close friends. And then again this weekend after the bunch of mendacious shit-stains who have been destroying this country for the past six years got re-elected by idiots who chose greed and fear over decency and humanity.

Anyway, it's a cute dress and maybe one day I'll wear it just because of that.

"No nipples, please - we are Maltese!"

They are 'more Catholic than the Pope' here ;) Which doesn't stop them from killing their journalists, or politicians messing with shady business featured in Panama Papers and the like...

In the context of events, this decency appeal could be funny if it wasn't rather sad :(

Following the outrage in Germany yesterday it is sometimes difficult to see the wood from the trees....but freedom, democracy and decency across our European lands and borders will win through in the end.....

Tomorrow the sun will rise and it will be a bright day.....

Nikkor 20mm AF f2.8D

The silence of the Colombian forests are disturbed by the sound of a tired engine and cracking twigs as the van meanders slowly down the dirt track road. From inside, Larry tries the best he can to steer the thing away from the ditches at either side of the road as he squints to look ahead.

Larry: You’re sure it’s down here?

Morden: Positive.

To the side of him, Eric leans forwards and observes the passing trees with the eyes of a small child on Christmas morning. He wipes his brow with his arm.

Morden: We passed a load of trees coming out. It can’t be far from here, I’m sure of it.

Larry: Well you let me know if you see any tree that looks familiar, okay?

Morden: Sure thing bo-Larry.

Behind them, Cliff sits perched on his seat eagerly listening to Rita, sat opposite him with a glowing expression. Any hostility obviously taking a break for the time being.

Rita: So I go in, and there’s me, Basil and this girl called Tammy. All very proper, thinks herself the next big thing.

Cliff: Uh-huh.

Rita: And the panel ask us to all come up one by one, stand on the spot and tell them something that makes us happy and something we fear. Do you follow?

Cliff: Yeah.

Rita: And Tammy of course decides she’ll go first, so up so goes and – Cliff, do tell me if I’m boring you?

Cliff’s head begins nod, but he catches himself and sits back with a start.

Cliff: Huh? No, no way.

Rita: What was I just saying?

Cliff: Actin’.

Rita: Acting. And?

Cliff: Uh… Tommy-

Rita: Tammy.

Cliff: Tammy was just about to… uh… to do actin’, or somethin’?

Rita: Are you asking me or telling me?

Cliff: …asking you?

Rita: Cliff, if you’re going to pretend to take an interest in my life, at least have the decency to-

But she’s cut off by Larry raising a hand to them from up front and the van slowing to a halt. She and Cliff turn to look at him, but before they can speak he brings a finger to his bandaged mouth to silence them. Cliff looks around restlessly and shrugs at him. Larry, still silent, brings his other hand to his ear and points outside. They listen for a moment, each staring out the windows, before Eric adjusts himself and speaks up in a nervous whisper.

Morden: What is it?

Larry: There’s someone out there.

Eric swallows and turns an alarmingly pale shade of white. Cliff ignores this and leans in to face him.

Cliff: If this has got somethin’ to do with you…

Morden: It hasn’t! I promise! I don’t know what’s going on.

They all look at each other for a second, basking in the glorious tension of the unknown.

Rita: Maybe it was a deer?

Larry: I don’t think you get deer in Colombia…

Morden: Oh no, I think you-

A rock smashes through the back window and thuds onto the carpet. For the briefest of moments there is calm, before the sounds of manic shouting fill the air around the van and Larry dives out of his seat.

Larry: GET DOWN!

Another projectile smashes into the front windscreen but fails to break it. Eric falls backwards off his seat and squeals as he hits the ground head first. Cliff and Rita get to their feet but dive for cover as something hits the roof and sends a loud bang echoing through the van.

The next few moments happen in a blur – Cliff struggles back to his feet as the door of the van is ripped open and a ragged, branch of a man dives in headfirst wielding a homemade spear. He goes to grab Cliff but is met with a robotic fist to the jaw. He falls backwards out the van as voices ring out from outside.

Voice: Protect the Idol! Protect him!

Rita grabs a hold of the window ledge and pulls herself up, but gasps as she notices two figures emerge from the undergrowth wielding spears and weighing up stones in their filthy hands. She attempts to make out who – or what – they are, but underneath their torn, faded clothing they could be anything. She can’t be sure, but it looks like one of them is wearing the worn remains of a Hawaiian shirt.

Rita: They look like crackheads!

Cliff: They are fuckin’ crackheads!

Cliff yells as another set of hands appear in the doorway and pull him outside. There is movement in the van and for a minute Rita thinks Larry has been knocked out, before she breathes a sigh of relief and watches as the Negative Spirit climbs out of his torso and darts for the door. It strikes Cliff’s attacker and he collapses backwards into the ditch. She goes to the door to look for Cliff, but shrieks as a stone flies through the window behind her and strikes her in the back of the head.

Rita trips down the step and lands on the dirty ground. All around her, emerging from the trees, are scatty, bedraggled figures, erratic in their movements and shouting unintelligible words at each other. She makes out about five of them before she notices Cliff, struggling as two more of the attackers attempt to restrain him. Overheard she sees the Spirit rear up and disappear around the other side of the van to the sound of more unintelligible shouting.

Voice: What is that thing?!

Voice: Forget it! We have the Idol! Protect him! Protect him!

She lifts her head off the ground as the figures surrounding Cliff produce a crude net and throw it over his head. She goes to shout, but is knocked back to the ground as another assailant tramples over her and goes inside the van.

Voice: There are more! More heathens!

Voice: Leave them! Protect the Idol!

She hears a groan from inside and watches in horror as Larry’s unconscious body is thrown across the interior of the van. The Spirit emerges from the other side and launches itself back into him, throwing Larry’s attacker off balance and sending them running back over her body and outside. She manages to pull herself up, noticing the skin on her arms beginning to melt, but regrets it as the man who had been inside the van turns and looks at her with wide, bloodshot eyes.

Voice: What about her? She is his muse!

Voice: Take the muse! Leave the others! Protect the Idol!

Rita goes to shout before the butt of a spear is brought down on her head and the world turns dark.

The candidate loves to "wind people up" with his outrageous statements. His words are not governed by reality or common decency , He is wound up, in turn, by dictators who he admires and by his adoring followers.

The original photo was taken a the famous Pike's Market in Seattle where a fish was being caught by a worker. Photoleap was used to create this image.

North Vancouver, BC

The world seems gone crazy and so the good old values of honesty and decency, but it is up to each of us to make sure that good will always triumph against evil, each of us has a unique mission.....

Spennymoor is a town and civil parish in County Durham, England. It is south of the River Wear and is 7 mi (11 km) south of Durham. The civil parish includes the villages of Kirk Merrington, Middlestone Moor, Byers Green and Tudhoe.

The land on which Spennymoor now stands was once a vast expanse of moorland covered with thorn and whin bushes (Spenny Moor). In 1336 its placename was recorded as Spendingmor. The name is probably derived from the Old English or Old Norse spenning and mōr, meaning a moor with a fence or enclosure.

Another theory of the place-name's origin is from the Latin spina, meaning thorn (possibly from the Roman influence at Binchester) combined with the Old English or Old Norse mōr. CE Jackson, in his Place Names of Durham published in 1916 suggested a combination of the Old Norse spaan with Old English mar, meaning the moor named after the shingle-hut erected thereon.

Neither Britons nor Romans cultivated the moor, but on the site of Binchester, a village about 5 miles (8 km) to the southwest, the Romans built a camp around which grew up the settlement of Vinovium. The name Binchester is the usual Old English corruption or adaptation of the Roman site name.

St Paul's Church

This fortress must have been of great strength, for it stood on a height above the River Wear; many coins, urns, altars and pieces of Roman pottery have been found, as well as the remains of a hypocaust of the heating system. Later, Binchester became one of the "vills" of the Earl of Northumberland who held it until 1420 when it passed to the Nevilles who finally forfeited it with other lands in 1569. As is to be expected, the moor itself offers little of historical interest but it is linked with the records of Kirk Merrington, Whitworth Old Park, Binchester, Byers Green and Tudhoe, all of which form a part of the early days of Spennymoor. All these villages had common rights on the moor but, as it became denuded by increasing flocks, some of the local people were induced to relinquish their rights and so, gradually, the common became the property of just one owner – Merrington Priory. The Manor of Merrington belonged successively to the priors, monks and dean and chapter of Durham Cathedral.

Today, Merrington church is one of the most prominent local landmarks. It was originally built by the Normans and its splendid strategic position led to it being fortified in 1143 by the Scots intruder, William Cumyn. When he was finally attacked and overcome, the church roof was destroyed but the building remained as one of the most interesting Norman churches in the county until 1850 when it was almost wholly rebuilt – although retaining the form of its predecessor. Inside, the most interesting feature is the screen, a typical example of late-17th century work.

The Norman Conquest meant little to the border folk at first, for they had lived with the constant threat of massacre by raiding Picts and Danes, but then William's soldiers "laid waite" the county and distributed the Saxon nobles' estates among themselves. however, William allowed some of the previous owners to retain their lands, and one of these was Whittleworth – now Whitworth – whose first known proprietor was Thomas de Acle who held it in 1183. Nevertheless, the whole of this countryside was made desolate by William's soldiers, and for many years it was the haunt of outlaws and wild animals.

On 16 October 1346 David of Scotland was encamped with a great army on the hills near Durham, and raiding bands under a Douglas had been terrorising the neighbourhood. Edward lll was otherwise engaged at Crecy in France at the time, but his Queen, Phillipa, with the Archbishop of York, the Bishops of Durham, Lincoln and Carlisle, and the Lords Neville and Percy and others marched North, and with an array of 16,000 men, moved along the ridge from Auckland to Merrington. Her advance guards clashed with some of Douglas' men near Ferryhill and chased them back to the bridge at Croxdale (Sunderland Bridge). Butchers Race, one of the Five Lanes which meet at Tudhoe Crossroads, was so named after this foray. The next day the main bodies of the two armies met at Neville's Cross, near Durham, and the Scots were slaughtered. During the battle, the prior from Durham and his monks knelt on a little hillock in the Shaw Wood and prayed for an English victory while holding aloft, impaled on a spear, the Holy Corporax Cloth from the Cathedral.

In 1420 the Manor of Whitworth and much of the other land in the vicinity, from Raby to Brancepeth, and including Old Park, Byers Green, Newfield and Tudhoe, became Neville property, and the Earl of Westmorland (a Neville) was granted a licence from Bishop Langley to impark 40 acres at Whitworth, and so began the Whitworth park of today.

The moor itself comes into the record in 1615 as the result of "a general muster on the moor of all men able to bear arms within the bishopric, between the ages of 15 and 60; the gathering amounted to 8,320" (Fordyce). Some military training seems to have been given, doubtless with a view to the then unsettled state of the country due to the growing tension between Parliament and the King. Quite a few of these men must have been miners, as at that time "coale pits" were being worked at Whitworth, Byers Green and Fernhill. In 1677 the small freeholders and the local gentry divided 243 acres of the moor between themselves, an act which was confirmed by the Chancery Court. The only portion of the common that was left was a small plot reserved for the use of a spring of water.

Up to 1800 the moor remained largely barren and the few roads across it were dangerous. The one good road was maintained by tolls collected at turnpike gates. Some of the largest horse-race meetings in the North took place on the moor, and miners and their families attended in all their holiday splendour. These men, early industrial workers, wore their hair long and on these gala days it flowed freely over their shoulders instead of, as usually was the case, being tied in curls. Floral waistcoats and ribboned hats were worn on these highly colourful occasions.

Modern Spennymoor was built on mining and has its origins with the sinking of the Wittered pit in 1839. Rough houses were built for the pit workers – houses with two rooms and a loft, more like "piggeries than human habitation" according to Dodd. The first coal from Merrington Colliery was brought up in 1841; a pit with a chequered career which only prospered under the partnership of L.M Reay and R.S. Johnson, who made a fortune out of it. The trade depression of the late 19th century, however, caused its closure in 1882.

The coal mining at Whitworth and a small foundry at Merrington Lane were the earliest industries, but in 1853 the Weardale Iron and Coal Company opened its great ironworks at Tudhoe. As a result, many hundreds of immigrant workers came here from the Midlands and more rows of dark little houses were erected. More workers came from Wales and Lancashire, with the opening of the mine at Page Bank (ten lives were lost in a pit fire here in 1858), and with the sinking of a new pit at Tudhoe in the 1880s. The latter resulted in colliery workers' houses springing up on the main Durham Road. Slightly before that, in the 1860s, a rather advanced area of working-class housing had been erected at Tudhoe Grange, built by Marmaduke Salvin to house local workers. These houses were, unusually, semi-detached and arranged in a chequerboard layout, very much in contrast to the dreary terraces that were then the standard.

Although these days of rapid industrialisation and rapid growth of population were days of ignorance and squalor, they also saw the 19th century drive for education and religion. A National School was built and opened in 1841; St. Paul's Church was built at Spennymoor in 1858 and all through these formative years the non-conformist churches combined welfare work with prayer. An era of prosperity dawned in the 1860s and 1870s when the miners were earning £1 per day. Spennymoor was ringed with collieries, black furnaces and coke ovens and the new prosperity showed itself in the building of better houses and in the opening of Co-operative stores. The comparative isolation of its moorland situation ended too with the opening of a branch railway from the mainline at Ferryhill in 1876.

However, as always in industrial life, boom was followed by "bust" – or "near bust", and by 1879 miners' wages were down to 4s 9d a day and those of ironworkers to a mere 3s a day. On top of these economic misfortunes came the terrible explosion at Tudhoe Colliery in 1882 when 37 lives were lost. A strike, which lasted 13 weeks, paralysed the area in 1892, although out of the enforced idleness came foundations of new growth, for the machinery at the Tudhoe Iron works was then renovated and a new mill laid down. The works then possessed the largest mill in Europe, capable of rolling plates up to 13 feet in width.

When, in 1894, Spennymoor and its adjacent villages achieved a measure of self-government on the Spennymoor Urban District Council, the new authority found itself facing a legacy of poor housing. With few exceptions, the housing situation was little better than when Dodd had described the houses as "more like piggeries". In 1874 the then Local Government Board had reported: "Nothing could well exceed the nuisance attendant on the disposal of excrement and refuse in Spennymoor. There are entire streets without any closet accommodation whatever and in its stead open wooden boxes are placed opposite nearly every doorway for the reception of the excrement, ashes and other refuse; an arrangement which, besides being revolting to every sense of decency, is stated to be offensive in the extreme, especially in hot weather. It is impossible to walk between the rows of cottages without being convinced that the surface of the ground is to a large extent composed of the overflowing contents of these midden boxes. The back streets stand deep in filth and mud." These appalling conditions continued into the 20th century and even by 1920 fewer than 10% of the town houses had water closets. In 1923 only four houses were built and there was still massive overcrowding in back-to-back properties. In the next few years only between one and four houses were built in any year and in 1929 the housing situation was still reported as acute which, from the recorded facts, seems self-evident.

These squalid conditions were paralleled by the ever-uncertain economic conditions in industry. Although coalmining continued and the ironworks and engineering businesses were also providing employment, the start of the 20th century saw the start, too, of a long period of depression. The first blow was the closure in 1901 of the ironworks which had been rendered obsolete by the pace of change elsewhere. The effect of the closure was relieved by the sinking of the Dean and Chapter colliery in 1904, but the reliance on this one basic industry was to persist until the 1960s. Even before the big coal strike of 1926 the collieries had begun to close. Three closed in 1924 and the strike saw another two fail. Spennymoor became part of the Southwest Durham depressed area. Although schemes were inaugurated to relieve the gloom nothing could make up for the lack of steady employment. In 1930 the coke ovens which remained on the ironworks site were only working intermittently. Even by 1938 the situation had improved little. The Cleveland iron trade, which used the coal and coke produced at Spennymoor, was depressed. The production of these raw materials at Coulson's engineering works, Kenmir's furniture factory and newly opened brickworks at Todhills were the main, if limited, sources of employment. Unemployment was over 33%.

Despite the high levels of unemployment, the housing situation at last took an upturn in the 1930s when the Urban District Council began to use its wider powers to take action on unfit houses. By 1935 the first 66 Council houses had been built, and a year later the first 106 North Eastern Housing Association houses were erected on the Racecourse Estate site. Although these were the only houses built before the war, they did provide some hope and allowed the clearance of some of the worst of the squalid areas. Nevertheless, the situation remained bad and there were still far too many damp, badly lit and ventilated houses opening onto small, paved yards or back streets.

World War II had diverse effects upon the town. On the one hand it brought housing efforts almost to a standstill, but on the industry front it saw the resurgence of Spennymoor as a major centre. The main factor was the opening in 1941 of a Royal Ordnance Factory at Merrington Lane and since then this estate has provided a constant source of alternative employment to the coal industry. The end of World War II, however, saw this industrial activity greatly curtailed and hard times returned, although without the severity of the earlier pre-war years. The run-down of the mining industry, however, was nevertheless a serious blow.

On 24 December 1944, Tudhoe's cricket ground was hit by a rogue V-1 flying bomb, which had been air-launched by a German Heinkel He 111 and was aimed at Manchester. The explosion cratered the field and blew out the windows of surrounding houses and of St. Charles' Church. This was the furthest north any V-1 landed during World War II.

In 1963 changes were indicated and Durham County Council and then Ministry of Housing and Local Government agreed that Spennymoor should be a new "growth point" and that town centre redevelopment should take place; that the Tudhoe ironworks site should be reclaimed; that a major highway scheme should be put into hand; that the Royal Ordnance Factory Industrial Estate should be extended and that the Green Lane Industrial Estate should be developed.

Spennymoor shared some brief film success in the early 90's with the production of 'Anymore for Spennymore' starring a few of the locals.

There were, of course, early problems, but the new industries became established and, in most cases, began to expand. The coal industry has been replaced by manufacturers of consumer goods, and factories of Electrolux, Thorn Lighting and Black and Decker were established. Rothmans International also had a cigarette factory, employing more than 400 people, in Spennymoor from circa 1980 up until 2000.

Housing, too, has made great strides since the end of the War. By the end of 1963 over 1,120 sub-standard houses had been cleared and as many new Council houses built for letting – whilst over 400 houses had been improved by grant aid. In 1963 too there came the first private building developments to take place since back in the days of the 19th century colliery owners. The 800-house estate at Greenways and the 300-house estate at Tudhoe Grange were started, although it was not until the industrial prosperity of the 1970s that private house building reached 100 a year.

The greatest project came with the development of the Tudhoe ironworks site – 70 acres that was turned into the Bessemer Park Housing Estate. In 1968 work commenced on blocks of flats and houses there (comprising 1,009 household units in total) and this allowed the clearance of 500 unfit houses as well as the provision of housing for workers coming to the new factories. The blocks of flats on the Bessemer Park Housing Estate were subsequently demolished in the 1980s, due to serious problems with damp in the flats that rendered them extremely unpopular with tenants.

In 1966 the town opened a new bus station, between Cambridge Street and Silver Street, to relieve traffic congestion on the High Street. This bus station was subsequently redeveloped as a car park circa 1990. Also in 1966, the nearby Parkwood Shopping Precinct (which included a Woolworths and a supermarket) was opened. In 2016 it was announced that the Parkwood Precinct would be substantially redeveloped due to low tenancy rates in the shops, an escalating issue since the turn of the millennium.

Dutch postcard by Uitgeverij Takken, Utrecht, no. AX 5204.

Beautiful French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she established herself as an animal rights activist and made vegetarianism sexy.

Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modeling career and found herself in May 1949 on the cover of French magazine Elle. Her incredible beauty readily apparent, Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand/Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953 she attended the Cannes Film Festival where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956 she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. She made her first US production in 1953 in Un acte d'amour/Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.

Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smashing success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. Woman's immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the shooting of Et Dieu créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), directed by her husband Roger Vadim, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at that time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.

Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped her international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten' and fascination of her in America consisted of magazines photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad, or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theaters like lemmings.BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne/La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957) which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur/Love is my profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "this Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defense attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre is able to shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous-and deadly-side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960 postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.

Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957 and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre/Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career. Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée/Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at Films de France: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the highpoint of her career when she agreed to make this film with high profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names, was based on an actual incident and is a resonant image of a celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterward Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.

Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men including Sami Frey, her co-star in La Vérité/The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris/Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963). She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres/Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires/Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses/Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.

Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973 just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976 she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewelry and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990's she became also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal is a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularizing bikini swimwear, in early films such as Manina/Woman without a Veil (1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photoshoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."

Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Films de France, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

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

French postcard by Editions P.I., offered by Les Carbones Korès, no. 412. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1953.

American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).

Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.

With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.

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

"The image of a Syrian child's lifeless body washed up on the shores of a Turkish beach this week brought the world to its knees. His name was Aylan Kurdi, and he was just three years old.

We need to do better."

light the dark, adelaide, south australia

#lighthedark

Callie is known locally as 'black jesus' - he is kind, a deep thinker, ridiculously easy company.

Six days a week, his long gangly legs and endless ropey arms make their way around the island by bicycle, (often balancing a variety of fruits and coconuts on his handlebars to sell), easily traversing 20km-30km a day.

On this day, he told me that he had recently had a stroke and that he had some paralysis down his right side. The doctor told Callie that it was a good thing that he took one of his epic bicycle rides shortly after the stroke had hit, because doing so had minimised the lasting affect of the heart-event on his limbs.

Before the portraits, I showed Callie the images I had taken of his sister Anna - he got emotional: there she is...there she is'...

Callie, and ordinary men and women like him, make you feel part of something that matters. That a world of decency, respect, hard work, honesty and self-sufficiency, can and does still exist.

Whenever I speak to Callie or see one of his enormous hands lift from a handlebar to waive as I pass him, his give-everything smile beaming, I realise that 'god is one of us' and that our blessings are too many to count.

As you can see there is yet another PHOTO THIEF @ work!

How sad, do people really not know what COPYRIGHT means, in SIMPLE words... IF IT IS NOT YOUR IMAGE, THEN, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO IT!!!

It is an INFRINGEMENT of the LAW!

If you love an image SOOOOO MUCH that you'd like to 'use' it, you have the duty and obligation to ask the creative brain behind the image AND HAVE THE COURTESY and DECENCY then to credit the artist, like you would with a painting or sculpture!

From now on I am going to publicly NAME AND SHAME THEM.

Please do not use this image on websites, blogs or any other media without my explicit permission. © All rights reserved

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015

PROLOGUE

Paul Jaisini was like a messiah, as you wish, who saw/understood the impending end and complete degeneration of Fine art or Art become and investment nothing more than that. He predicted the bubble pops art when everybody would eventually become an artist, including dogs cats and horses, because they as kids followed the main rule: express yourself without skills or knowledge or any aesthetic concerns. J. Pollack started pouring paints onto canvases; Julian Schnabel, former cab driver from NY, suddenly decided he could do better than what he saw displayed in galleries, so he started gluing dishes on canvases; A.Warhol, an industrial artist who made commercial silk-screen for the factories he worked in, started to exhibit "Campbell's soup" used for commercial adds... and later the thing that made him an "American Idol": by copying and pasting Hollywood celebrities (same type of posters he made before for movie theaters).

When Paul Jaisini stood out against the Me culture in the US by burning all of his own 120 brilliant paintings (according to the then-new director of Fort Worth MoMa Museum, who offered hin an exhibition of his art in 1992, and later the Metropolitan Museum curator, Phillippe de Montebello, in 1994).Paul probably assumed all fellow true fine artists would join him or stand by him against corruption of the art world.

And after 20 years of his stand-off...the time has finally come today. Many artists and humanitarians around the world took a place beside him. His invisible Paintings became a synonym for the future reincarnation of fine art and long lost harmony. The establishment is in panic! The "moneybags" (as Paul Jaisini named them) are in panic, because they invested BILLIONS of dollars in real crap made by

craftsmen. Now they realize that the reputation of American legends of expressionism was nothing but a copy of Russian avant-garde" Kazimir Malevich, Vasiliy Kandinsky and tens of others from France and Germany.. US tycoon investors were spending billions on "Me more original, than you". "Artist Shit" is a 1061 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, filled with feces. A tin can was sold for £124,000, 180,000 at Sothebys, 2007.

EPILOGUE

Before I resume promoting and admiring a very important art persona on today's international art arena, I'd like to clear up some BIG questions; people ask continuously and subconsciously, directly & indirectly: "Why does the name Paul Jaisini, flood the Internet in such "obnoxious" quantities that it's started suppressing some other activities that my friends might share with the rest of the Internet's Ego Me only Me www society? I can't just answer this... so I'll try to explain why I'm writing this: Jaisini's followers keep posting art and info about,

He IMHO the only hope in quickly decomposing visual fine art. "Paul Jaisini realized many years ago, in 1994, when he declared (at that time to himself only) the start of a New era, a New vision, that he is trying to redirect from the rat race, started by an establishment in post-war New York, long before the Internet culture.

Sub related information: Adolf Gottlieb, Mart Rothko, etc (after visiting Paris France in 1933):

"We must forget analytical art, we must express ourselves, as a 5 year old child would, without a developed consciousness. Forget about results - do what you feel, EXPRESS yourself with your own unique style"

With this statement Mark Rothko starts to teach his students, degeneration of fine art begins, and the generation of war of styles took a start signal of the material race, greatly rewarded by establishment "individual" - eccentric craftsmen - show business clowns.

Sub related Information: In the summer of 1936, Adolf Gottlieb painted more than 800 paintings, which was 20X more than he created in his whole art career as a painter, starting from the time of Gottlieb becomes a founding member of "The Ten" group in NYC "Group of Ten" was a very peculiar, enigmatic group... Based on a religious point of view;(where a human figure was prohibited from being created)

GLOSSARY

IN 1997, Paul Jaisini's best friend Ellen Y.K.Gottlieb started a cyber campaign by promoting on a very young Internet, back then, Paul Jaisini's burned paintings as Invisible Paintings, visible only through poetic essays. She and a handful of people saw his originals and were devastated that nobody could ever see them again. "We, his fans, believe that someday Paul will recreate his 120 burned paintings if he has any decency and moral obligation to his fans, who have dedicated decades to make it happen, for their Phoenix to rise from the ashes

and the whole world will witness that all these years we spent to get him back to re-paint the Visuals again were not in vain," - said E.Y.K.Gottlieb in 2014 during the 20th anniversary celebration of Invisible Paintings to GIGroup in NYCity. So now, hopefully, this clears up why I and others do what we do - our "cyber terrorism" of good art, dedicated to Paul Jaisini's return, which is & and was our mission & our goal. We post good art to fight "troll art" which is worthless pics, after being passed through 1-click filters of free web apps. We are, in fact, against this www pops pollution, done with "bubble art" by the out of control masses with 5 billon pics a day: Pics of cats, memes, quotes,

national geographic sunsets and waterfalls, not counting their own daily "selfies: and whatever self-indulging Me-ego-Me affairs, sponsored happily by photo gadget companies like Canon, Nikon, Sony...who churn out higher quality madness tools at lower cost.

This way Government taking away attention from the real world crisis of lowest morality & economical devastation. The masses are too easily re-engineered/manipulated by the Establishment PopsStyle delivered to them by pop music and Hollywood "super" stars. In 1992 Paul Jaisini's Gleitzeit theory predict such a massive, pops self-entertain madness, following technological

explosion, but not in illusive scales.

Uber Aless @2015 NYC USA

NOTE Date's numbers and events can be slightly inaccurate.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015

PROLOGUE

Paul Jaisini was like a messiah, as you wish, who saw/understood the impending end and complete degeneration of Fine art or Art become and investment nothing more than that. He predicted the bubble pops art when everybody would eventually become an artist, including dogs cats and horses, because they as kids followed the main rule: express yourself without skills or knowledge or any aesthetic concerns. J. Pollack started pouring paints onto canvases; Julian Schnabel, former cab driver from NY, suddenly decided he could do better than what he saw displayed in galleries, so he started gluing dishes on canvases; A.Warhol, an industrial artist who made commercial silk-screen for the factories he worked in, started to exhibit "Campbell's soup" used for commercial adds... and later the thing that made him an "American Idol": by copying and pasting Hollywood celebrities (same type of posters he made before for movie theaters).

When Paul Jaisini stood out against the Me culture in the US by burning all of his own 120 brilliant paintings (according to the then-new director of Fort Worth MoMa Museum, who offered hin an exhibition of his art in 1992, and later the Metropolitan Museum curator, Phillippe de Montebello, in 1994).Paul probably assumed all fellow true fine artists would join him or stand by him against corruption of the art world.

And after 20 years of his stand-off...the time has finally come today. Many artists and humanitarians around the world took a place beside him. His invisible Paintings became a synonym for the future reincarnation of fine art and long lost harmony. The establishment is in panic! The "moneybags" (as Paul Jaisini named them) are in panic, because they invested BILLIONS of dollars in real crap made by

craftsmen. Now they realize that the reputation of American legends of expressionism was nothing but a copy of Russian avant-garde" Kazimir Malevich, Vasiliy Kandinsky and tens of others from France and Germany.. US tycoon investors were spending billions on "Me more original, than you". "Artist Shit" is a 1061 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, filled with feces. A tin can was sold for £124,000, 180,000 at Sothebys, 2007.

EPILOGUE

Before I resume promoting and admiring a very important art persona on today's international art arena, I'd like to clear up some BIG questions; people ask continuously and subconsciously, directly & indirectly: "Why does the name Paul Jaisini, flood the Internet in such "obnoxious" quantities that it's started suppressing some other activities that my friends might share with the rest of the Internet's Ego Me only Me www society? I can't just answer this... so I'll try to explain why I'm writing this: Jaisini's followers keep posting art and info about,

He IMHO the only hope in quickly decomposing visual fine art. "Paul Jaisini realized many years ago, in 1994, when he declared (at that time to himself only) the start of a New era, a New vision, that he is trying to redirect from the rat race, started by an establishment in post-war New York, long before the Internet culture.

Sub related information: Adolf Gottlieb, Mart Rothko, etc (after visiting Paris France in 1933):

"We must forget analytical art, we must express ourselves, as a 5 year old child would, without a developed consciousness. Forget about results - do what you feel, EXPRESS yourself with your own unique style"

With this statement Mark Rothko starts to teach his students, degeneration of fine art begins, and the generation of war of styles took a start signal of the material race, greatly rewarded by establishment "individual" - eccentric craftsmen - show business clowns.

Sub related Information: In the summer of 1936, Adolf Gottlieb painted more than 800 paintings, which was 20X more than he created in his whole art career as a painter, starting from the time of Gottlieb becomes a founding member of "The Ten" group in NYC "Group of Ten" was a very peculiar, enigmatic group... Based on a religious point of view;(where a human figure was prohibited from being created)

GLOSSARY

IN 1997, Paul Jaisini's best friend Ellen Y.K.Gottlieb started a cyber campaign by promoting on a very young Internet, back then, Paul Jaisini's burned paintings as Invisible Paintings, visible only through poetic essays. She and a handful of people saw his originals and were devastated that nobody could ever see them again. "We, his fans, believe that someday Paul will recreate his 120 burned paintings if he has any decency and moral obligation to his fans, who have dedicated decades to make it happen, for their Phoenix to rise from the ashes and the whole world will witness that all these years we spent to get him back to re-paint the Visuals again were not in vain," - said E.Y.K.Gottlieb in 2014 during the 20th anniversary celebration of Invisible Paintings to GIGroup in NYCity. So now, hopefully, this clears up why I and others do what we do - our "cyber terrorism" of good art, dedicated to Paul Jaisini's return, which is & and was our mission & our goal. We post good art to fight "troll art" which is worthless pics, after being passed through 1-click filters of free web apps. We are, in fact, against this www pops pollution, done with "bubble art" by the out of control masses with 5 billon pics a day: Pics of cats, memes, quotes,national geographic sunsets and waterfalls, not counting their own daily "selfies: and whatever self-indulging Me-ego-Me affairs, sponsored happily by photo gadget companies like Canon, Nikon, Sony...who churn out higher quality madness tools at lower cost.

This way Government taking away attention from the real world crisis of lowest morality & economical devastation. The masses are too easily re-engineered/manipulated by the Establishment PopsStyle delivered to them by pop music and Hollywood "super" stars. In 1992 Paul Jaisini's Gleitzeit theory predict such a massive, pops self-entertain madness, following technologicalexplosion, but not in illusive scales.

Uber Aless @2015 NYC USA

NOTE Date's numbers and events can be slightly inaccurate.

#gleitzeit #paul-jaisini #invisible #painting #art #futurism #art-news,

IMAGE INFO

- The viewpoint for this historic & rare image is looking southwards from where the future Arden Street climbs the hill northwards from Bream Street towards what will be the hillside suburb of South Coogee.

- The same viewpoint today [2022]:

www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.9179172,151.2574208,3a,49.5y,....

- I have dated the image mid-way between 1882 & 1887 (ie circa 1885), since the Coogee Palace Aquarium & Baths had not yet been built (they opened November 1887) & the steam tram loop line was opened in 1882.

- Note that there are two brave souls wading in the shoreline of Coogee Beach during daylight hours (not swimming, so technically not illegal under the Public Decency laws at that time).

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

SOURCE INFO

- B&W original photographer was Henry King.

- The original silver gelatin dry plate glass negative (full plate) was digitized by the Museum of Applied Arts & Science & is available from the M.A.A.S. online Tyrrell Collection here:

ma.as/31071

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

CREDITS

- Henry King (photographer)

- Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (aka Powerhouse Museum) New South Wales for their valuable work in digitizing, archiving & making available online this rare historical content.

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

COPYRIGHT STATUS

- The original B&W image was no longer restricted by commercial Copyright at time of download, per advice -

"Out of Copyright

Reason for copyright status: Created/Published Date is Before 1955

Material type: Photograph

Government copyright ownership: No Government Copyright Ownership".

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

PROCESS INFO

- I downloaded a copy of the digitized original (large file size & very faded with bad emulsion damage).

- I initially repaired/cropped damaged sections using Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite (Windows), then restored contrast & sharpness & applied an adjusted duo-tone curve for better tonal range.

- Duo-tone image size = 3217x2400pm [7.7MP]

French postcard in the Entr'acte series by Éditions Asphodèle, Mâcon, no. 003/10. Collection: B. Courtel /D.R. Gregory Peck and Bob Kennedy on the set of Mackenna's Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969). Caption: Senator Bob Kennedy visits the film crew shooting in Arizona, starring Gregory Peck.

American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).

Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948) and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.

With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946) and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.

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

The South front of the Marks and Spencer's building on the corner of Bothwell Street and Wellington Street, Glasgow.

This shot is for Jimmy Black, to reassure him that some "relics of the old decency" still exist in Glasgow, despite the reconstruction of the last decade or so. Give yourself a treat and visit his photostream here to see a master processer at work.

www.karlwilliamsphotography.co.uk

Okay, well, so, I gave in to the temptation that I’d been feeling ever since I got Fiyero, and:

FIYERO: ‘EY!

NICK: Hmm, not bad at all. The pants are short and the waist is too low, but the jacket suits me very well, I’d say.

FIYERO: Why?!??

BRUNO: Who’s this clown? Beat it, buddy; there *are* decency laws, y’know.

NICK: What do you think, Nimmie?

NIMMIE: Well, on *you* it looks good.

FIYERO: Why do you hate me??!??!??

You will find 200+ of my poems HERE. fno.org/poetry/index.html

I wrote this poem a year ago in November but it rings true.

No news is good news

The news

Such as it is

Lately

Offends

Alarms

And provokes me

Until I want to look away

Blind myself to the barbaric slayings

The killings

The murders

The hate crimes

The wars

The storms

The wildfires

And the political mayhem

That is the norm of the day

I want to pretend

None of this is real

And substitute my own version of reality

A life without Putin

And the slaughter of innocents

A world without Trump

And his cascade of lies and falsehoods

A time without mass murders

Shooters cutting down families

School children

And concert goers

A peaceful, gentle life

We can only imagine

With kindness, civility and decency

The norm

Not the exception

© Jamie McKenzie, all rights reserved

You will find more of my poems and songs here

and in The Storm in Its Passing and Flights of Fancy.

My songs are at

www.youtube.com/user/edtech2008/videos

It was election week and Ben the politician was doing the rounds of the rosebush constituency, smiling, associating himself with "lesser" insects and taking every opportunity to have his picture taken with larvae and the elderly. He always travelled with a couple of PR bugs and of course half a dozen ex special forces beetles wearing shades and speaking into hidden microphones. I saw Ben as he was doing the rounds and he was only too pleased for me to photograph him, under the right circumstances of course. Ben walked around with a perma-smile tattooed to his face that was as cold as the Icelandic permafrost and an air of aloofness that seemed almost sickeningly palpable. "I want to bring back the values of decency and morality to the garden," he said "I want to ensure that your larvae have a fighting chance of a decent future! For too long have we toiled away under the folly of the incumbent leadership, it is time for change and I am the man for the job. Put your trust in me and the future will be bright for all of us." Suddenly there was a voice from the edge of the bush "What about the allegations of sexual misconduct, fraudulent use of public funds and gross mismanagement of public funds to the extent that trillions were wiped off the pollen reserves." Ben visibly stumbled and a bead of sweat welled up on his carapace, his tattooed smile slipped just for an instance and almost imperceptibly became a grimace. "These false allegations have no foundation in fact," he said as if reading from a script "I have explained all of this to my colleagues and see no sense in further discourse. " The perma-smile reappeared once again as a citizen of the garden was arrested under the "public order act" and taken off for processing. Ben turned around and picked up a small larva and kissed it on the head, no-one saw him wipe his mouth as he handed the larva back to its father. The crowd of bugs that had gathered to hear his inane wittering soon forgot the dissident voice and as if hypnotised returned their glazed stare to Ben, once again lying to his electorate.

West-German postcard by Rüdel-Verlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf, no. 513. Photo: 20th Century Fox. Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, 1952).

American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).

Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.

With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.

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

South-African postcard by East-West Publishers, Cape Town, no. 19.

American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).

Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.

With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.

Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.

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

Kimberly Kemp - Intimate Nurse

Midwood Books F210, 1962

Cover Artist: illegible ... Bruce Minney ... Rudy Nappi ?

"Her treatment went far beyond her duties – beyond decency, too. "

Kimberly Kemp is a pseudonym of Gilbert Fox

This image is copyright, all rights reserved, and not part of the public domain. Any use, linking to, or posting of this image is prohibited without my consent. If you want to use this image in any fashion, please have the common courtesy and decency to ask.

Tilikum Crossing, Portland, Oregon

A view of the Tilikum Crossing while hanging out with the Nightowls. I was testing out my new backup camera, a Canon Rebel t6s. I lucked out here by having both a Portland Streetcar and a Max Train pass in front of me to get these light streaks.

Catching up on some back shots from the beginning of the year

On a walk around the Addington Cemetery with a wonderful Flickr friend. February 13, 2016 Christchurch New Zealand.

There is so much damaged in the cemetery because of the earthquake we have had. It is such a pity as I don' think it will ever be fully repaired.

The Addington Cemetery was established in 1858 when the Scottish Presbyterians of St Andrew’s Church purchased land for a cemetery in Selwyn Street. Although not the first cemetery in Christchurch, Addington was in fact the first “public” cemetery, “being open to all persons of any religious community” and allowing the performance of any religious service “not contrary to public decency”.

The first burial took place on the 10th of November 1858. The cemetery has several persons of note buried within its grounds including activist Kate Sheppard, Christchurch Mayor Tommy Taylor and members of the pioneer family, the Deans.

For More Info:http://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/addington-cemetery/

Thank you so much my dear flick friends for visiting and all you ongoing comments, awards and invites. Sorry I haven't been around much due to being outside and unpredictably busy. I will be catching up with those that I still need to as soon as possible. In the meantime, I wish you all a really lovely and happy Friday and weekend : )) x

This seemed quite an unusual sight for me and it reminded me of one of my favourite songs by Rolf Harris called "Two little boys... had two little toys".

I think different people have a different takes on this song. For me this song celebrates beautiful friendships, humanity and decency.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ATk-5eFy2g

Lyrics

Two little boys had two little toys

Each had a wooden horse

Gaily they played each summer day

Warriors both of course.

One little chap then had a mishap

Broke off his horse's head

Wept for his toy and then cried with joy

As his young playmate said.

Do you think I would leave you crying

When there's room on my horse for two

Climb up here Jack and don’t be crying

I can go just as fast with two.

When we grow up we'll both be soldiers

And our horses will not be toys

and I wonder if we'll remember

When we were two little boys.

Long years passed, war came so fast

Bravely they marched away

Cannons roared loud and in the mad crowd

Wounded and dying lay.

Up goes a shout, a horse dashes out

Out from the ranks so blue

Gallops away to where Joe lay

then came the voice he knew.

Did you think I would leave you dying

When there's room on my horse for two

Climb up here Joe, we'll soon be flying

I can go just as fast with two.

Did you say, Joe, I'm all a-tremble

Perhaps it’s the battle’s noise

But I think it's that I remember

When we were two little boys.

Do you think I would leave you dying

There's room on my horse for two

Climb up here Joe, we'll soon be flying

Back to the ranks so blue

Can you feel Joe I’m all a-tremble

Perhaps it’s the battle’s noise

But I think it’s that I remember

When we were two little boys

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ATk-5eFy2g