This one, of course, is yet another adventure in a typically trite--and, therefore, a perennial favorite--Humorama cartoon idea, but, in addition to those Long Island good ol' boys and their bumper crops of corn, it also owes a tip of the sweat-stained Resistol (if I had one) to John Denver.

 

I was driving through Green Country and surfing through the airwaves the other day, trying to find something--ANYTHING--that wasn't jive-jumpers, Bible-thumpers or neo-conservative leg-humpers, when I managed to catch a "classic country" station over in Fort Smith in the middle of John's "Hey, It's Good To Be Back Home Again"--one of those songs you'll never, ever hear on one of our so-called "oldies" stations in Tulsa (or any other oldies station in any other market, from what my friends tell me) because, if there were any teeth in the truth-in-advertising laws, their station breaks/shameless self-promo ads would be required to say, "K-R-A-P, FM eleventy-seven-point-whatever, [Your Town]'s SOLID CRAP, where you're NEVER going to hear anything YOU want to hear, because our idiot programming director has decided that out of all those thousands of songs you heard back when, ONLY FIFTEEN of them are the Greatest Hits of the Sixties, Seventies, andEighties, and we're going to play them--AND NOTHING BUT THEM--over and over and over and over again until YOU'RE READY TO PUKE!!!"

 

Anyway, hearing one of ol' John's biggest hits--and probably my choice for pick of the litter--actually coming out of my car radio after so long brought back memories, and not just of the summer of '74, when damned near all of us in Armor Officer Basic had that "album" on (really dating myself here) 8-track. My wife mentions him occasionally, and I'm afraid she's not a fan of his. Aside from not liking "yee-haw, spit" music in general, she thinks John was a hypocrite, preaching that we should all go green and bear the expense and effort of environmental conscientiousness, while he went out and got himself killed leaving Sasquatch-sized carbon footprints in the sky in his Rich Boy private airplane. I can kinda sorta see her point, but as a Born Again Believer since I was in three-cornered pants thirty or forty years before Joseph Corn gave it a name in "The Winged Gospel", I'm not only more than inclined to be indulgent with John on thatpoint, but even uncharitably inclined to think the Better Half has, in the old Texas expression, "...done quit talkin' politics and got off onto religion."

 

There is, admittedly, a certain phoniness in John Denver and his music, that others have noticed before, but, in fact, that's one of the things that appeal to me about him, and probably appealed to a great many of his other fans. Because phoniness isn't really the right word. If he didn't quite ring true, I still believe he was singing from the heart--just from a confused heart. That airplane he killed himself in was probably a lot closer to his roots than all that granola-munching and tree-hugging he was singing about, whether he wanted it to be or not. Which, I think, struck a chord (ha, ha) with us, his fans--whether we wanted it to or not.

 

In the chapter on Pickup Truck Chic in "Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars" (which I highly recommend), Paul Ingrassia notes that Loretta Lynn really was a coal miner's daughter and Johnny Cash really was the son of a cotton-pickin' sharecropper, but questions John's credentials as a country singer on the grounds that as the son of an Air Force officer he presumably had it a lot easier (although he adds that his real name being Deutschendorf should count as authentic suffering enough). He goes on to mention that Colonel Deutschendorf--Henry John, Sr.--wasn't just any Air Force officer, mind you, but one who had flown himself into the Air Force Hall of Fame via three world speed records in the B-58 Hustler, back when that "supersonic atomic jet bomber" (as the model box tops screamed it) was the newest and hottest thing on the block. Of course, Ingrassia's tongue was firmly in his cheek, and Idid get a chuckle out of it, but his little joke DID kind of pick at an old scab.

 

I remember one of my high school teachers--a guy I thought was a rational, well-educated, thinking person--going absolutely bug-f*ck & bat-sh*t nuts one day when one of us "young people" used the word "lunch". I mean, you'd a'thought the kid had done gone an' told this poor Good Ol' Boy that his picante sauce was made in New York City, instead of just simply mentioning in passing what he'd brought his peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich to school for. "Lunch", as our outraged teacher made it plain (even if he didn't use the exact words), is something that candy-assed, weenie-wimp YANKEES eat. Southerners--People of the Heartland, REAL Country People, Genuine Down Home Folks--call their noon meal "dinner". By using such an city slicker sissy term as "lunch", we were just showing what a bunch of pantywaists, totally out of touch with our rural heritage, we'd become.

 

If not as stridently as on that occasion, I'd heard that same sort of criticism all my life up to that point, and have continued to hear it--either directly or implied--from denizens of the Great American Ignorance Belt all my life since. There's a sign advertising some kind of drink or chewing tobacco or beef jerky or God knows what taped just to the side of the door at the convenience store where I stop for my Dr. Pepper after work, showing a tough-looking Bubba-thuh-Survivalist in a camouflage t-shirt and bib overalls glaring out at you and, finding your country credentials wanting, letting you know in a no-uncertain-terms sneer that the product--whatever the hell it is--is "NOT FOR CITY BOYS". And, of course, every women's magazine on the rack inside the door has a cover blurb announcing at least one article about "country crafts" or "country decorating" or the like. The message, as it always has been, is still there: country =good, city = bad.

 

And we were city and bad, because, as Ingrassia pointed out, we hadn't picked cotton, we hadn't mined coal, and, worst of all--even though Ingrassia didn't come out and say it--we ate...lunch. And somehow, it was all our fault. It never seemed to click in the heads of that teacher or the other former farmers that made up our parents' generation that if they'd wanted us to grow up to be country boys (and girls), they should have kept us down on Good Ol' Rocky Top in Tennessee--that if they packed up and struck out to strike it rich building Caddies on the General Motors assembly line or bucking rivets at Douglas or North American, it was better than even money that their kids were going to grow up to be Detroit street punks or California beach bums (or, if you made a career out of the Air Force, that your kid just might end up inadvertently kicking the right rudder pedal--and thus the bucket--while trying to switch fuel tanks over Monterrey).

 

In fairness to the Greatest Generation, however, I should add that it did only SEEM as if it never clicked in their heads. In actuality, it probably didn't click so much as it clanged. I think they did know, or at least had some gut feeling, that they'd sold their--and, with it, our--country birthright. Detroit has been in the news over the past decade or two, and especially the last week or two, as the last place on God's green earth anyone would want to be, but even in its heyday fifty years ago, when we their children were starting to groove on the Motown Sound, Bobby Bare was twanging the country blues to his fellow grown-ups about going to sleep in Detroit City and dreaming about those cotton fields back home, about wanting to put his foolish pride on a southbound freight and let it ride. But, of course, he didn't, and neither did the folks he was singing to/about. The money was too good. And, let's face it: we Boomerswere a pretty damned expensive bunch to support (and still are, or will be; no matter how dark their worst fears about the Social Security system might be now, I'm afraid the future is going to show our grandkids they were practically being blase about it).

 

Furthermore, taking responsibility for our own actions (admittedly not a Boomer long suit), it has to be admitted that even as we were being demonized as Agents of the Urban Satan by parental believers in "The Country Gospel" (to adapt Mr. Korn's title), we ourselves were accepting The Belief into our hearts and living it in our lives, whether that meant going back to nature on a hippy commune or commuting to a job in the city from that mobile home on the half acre outside town that was the most Country Living we could afford at the time. Or maybe just cruisin' 'round the Greater Fort Knox-Radcliff-Elizabethtown Metropolitan Area, groovin' on John's 8-track. Maybe we hadn't picked cotton or mined coal, but, to paraphrase those other early Seventies singing icons, Donny and Marie, we WERE a little bit country, even if we were a whole lot rock'n'roll, and we clung to, believed in, expressed, whatever country virtues we had.

 

Yes, as a child I'd felt right at home on the streets of downtown Dallas on those trips with dad to see "the boys" at Central Fire Station and police headquarters and the Sheriff's office in the county courthouse, and I couldn't wait until I was old enough to go to Jack Ruby's Carousel or Abe Weinstein's Colony strip clubs, or get a drink in Sol's Turf Bar, which from the outside looking in YOU JUST KNEW was chock-full of the kind of hard-nosed private eyes, shady operators and shifty characters, chain-smoking reporters and dyed-by-her-own-hand suicide blondes in sheathe dresses, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels that you saw on every self-respecting TV crime show from Perry Mason to Peter Gunn. But if my shoes had felt like they belonged on the sidewalks of Dallas, my bare feet had also felt at home grubbing for potatoes out back of Grandma Brown's, picking corn in Uncle Bill's fields and taking part inthe subsequent shucking bees, and every now and then helping herd Uncle Ralph's cows out of the creek bottoms and up to the barn.

 

More than likely, 99 out of 100 (or maybe the percentage was even higher) of John Denver's fans had a similar urban-rural dichotomy working in their lives. I'm sure those other semi-country boys at Armor School that summer of '74, like Bass from Oklahoma and Barr from Nebraska, Carlino from Colorado and even Ramspacher and Way from upstate New York, did. No doubt graduate of Fort Worth's Arlington Heights High School Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. had had the same dualistic experience, and he put it into words the rest of us could have a feeling for. Words we listened to in those hot new Mustangs and Chargers with four-on-the-floor we'd used our first Army paychecks to buy, even as the lyrics made us suspect that we'd be better, more noble, perhaps even happier, men if we were driving twenty-year-old Chevy or International Harvester pick-ups with three-on-the-tree instead. Words that let us make believe, if only for just a little while, that wewere--or could be, if we just tried--country enough to please our parents (and maybe even ourselves).

 

There was, of course, another reason for latching onto "our country roots"--another group of people altogether we felt/feel the need to impress--or perhaps "offend" is a better word--with our rural virtues. Namely, the aforementioned Perry Mason and Peter Gunn, or more, accurately, the powers-that-be behind them. I sometimes reflect on the irony of the fact that a lot of my James Bond, Tiger Mann, Matt Helm, Travis McGee, Sam Durrell and other paperback tales of glamorous international intrigue in the cosmopolitan fleshpots of the world were selected from the racks in the utility-closet-turned-used-book-buy/sell/trade section of the Pearl Feed Store. The irony is compounded by the fact that the Pearl Feed Store wasn't some trendy little boutique just using a countrified name as a gimmick to sell antiques and folk art and other "junque", but an honest-to-God farm and ranch supply store, and yet it wasn't in our little cotton farming townor in any of the other rural burgs of south Dallas County, but in Oak Cliff--the same inner city part of Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald had his South Beckley Avenue apartment, not far at all from the intersection where he would gun down Officer Tippit, or the Texas Theater where the Dallas cops would catch up with him.

 

Unfortunately, it also confirms--at least in their elitist minds--that no matter how big a city Dallas might think it is, or, for that matter what kind of big cities Des Moines and Denver might think they are, to the New York City-Washington, D.C.-Ivy League Axis of Arrogance (aided and abetted by their stooges in the media and their lackeys in Tinseltown), Dallas and Des Moines and Denver are all just hick towns, and the only people living west of the Hudson, east of Hollywood or outside the Beltway who AREN'T semi-literate rubes with hay in their hair and cowshit on their boots are the REALLY ignorant grits who are confused about which of the two goes where. Just as unfortunately, those of us growing up out here in flyover country let that steady diet of elitist propaganda on television instill yet another inferiority complex in our muddled psyches--the idee fixe that no matter what kind of city slickers our parents mighthave thought us to be, the sad truth was we weren't urban enough (and weren't ever going to be) to suit our self-appointed cultural betters. Unlike our parents though, whom we wanted to please no matter how much rebellion we put on to the contrary, them there fancy pants easterners just kinda pissed us off. And since our idiotic legal system doesn't allow you to just cut loose with a .30-30 on their less-than-useless ivory tower butts (much less offer a two-dollar-an-ear bounty on 'em like it should), we simply made a virtue out of neccessity and adopted a sort of in-your-face version of the "aw shucks, m'am" drawl with a vengeance, to let those jumped-up Harvard-Yale horse's behinds know they ain't half as smart as they think they are. Or, at least, to convince ourselves that they aren't.

 

So, I don't think ol' John was a phony. I just think that like a lot of us he was confused about who he was and where he came from. I remember my dad talking about a former Georgia plowboy who said he'd joined the Air Force because he "...got tired of hiking forty miles a day using a mule's ass for a compass", and recall him saying of Hoof Proudfoot, after seeing his name in the credits of "Empire of the Sun" as the stunt pilot flying the P-51D, that "You just gotta figure he was born an' raised in Anadarko, Oklahoma, and the first pair of shoes he ever owned was throwed to him by an Air Force supply sergeant" (in fact, he was British and an RAF squadron leader, but you can see where that name and the Mustang might give a Texas boy like dad the wrong idea). I think John, like a lot of us, was simply confused at being a generation removed from the kind of guys dad was talking about, and yet a generation or two away from being the kind of guys who canbe comfortable with that. I think he was caught between two worlds, thought you had to be from one or the other and didn't realize you could--indeed, given our upbringing, HAD to--have a foot in both.

 

He didn't realize that he should have been singing "Sometimes, this old farm DOES feel like a long-friend/But, hey, it's good to get home to indoor plumbing again."

from ift.tt/2akAyEk

 

Sometimes in life I feel the urge to rant about things that bother me and, guess what, Trump bothers me. A lot. So I decided since it’s the 2016 election that I would come up with 2016 reasons not to vote for Trump. Of course I realize this may not convince people to not vote for him, but it will allow me to express reasons he should never be the President of the United States. I know 2016 is a lot of reasons to come up with, but I believe I can come up with them. I will try to remember to include links to information backing up reason so that you will see that this isn’t just me making baseless accusations.

 

There will be 99 posts of 21 reasons each over the next 99 or so days. This will give enough time before the election to get all 2016 reasons out.1

 

1. Trump is a liar. As of July 23, 2016, only 29% of statements made by Donald Trump are considered Half True—15%, Mostly True–10%, or True–4% by Politifact. Even during his RNC convention speech, Trump couldn’t avoid lying.2 The Washington Post has accused him of being “pathologically dishonest“; the National Review labeled him the “post-truth candidate“.

 

2. Trump was accused of raping his first wife, Ivana Trump. During a deposition for their divorce, Ivana described a sexual assault perpetrated by Donald against her in 1989. When the rape was discussed in a 2015 article on The Daily Beast, Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization said:

 

“You’re talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse…It is true…You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”3

 

3. Trump was accused of attempting to rape Jill Harth. In 1997, Harth filed a suit against Trump alleging that he sexually assaulted her in 1993. Harth also accused Trump of repeated, unwanted sexual advances. She claims he groped her under the table at a restaurant and he pushed her up against the wall of his daughter’s bedroom and groped her again. The lawsuit was settled, though Trump denied the allegations.

 

4. Trump was accused of raping a thirteen-year old girl. The girl, publicly refered to as Katie Johnson, filed a lawsuit accusing Trump and Jeffrey Epstein of having solicited sex from her at sex parties at their homes in Manhattan in 1994. She claims Trump “took her virginity in 1994 when she was only 13 and being held by Epstein as a slave.” She said they threatened her family and her with harm if she didn’t comply. The claims were corroberated by a person referred to as Tiffany Doe.

 

5. Trump was implicated in the rape and disappearance of a twelve-year old girl. Katie Johnson’s lawsuit alleges that she was forced to participate in sex acts with a girl referred to as Maria Doe for the enjoyment of Donald Trump. Johnson claimed that Trump told her she “shouldn’t ever say anything if I didn’t want to disappear like Maria, a 12-year-old female that was forced to be involved in the third incident with Defendant Trump and that I had not seen since that third incident, and that he was capable of having my whole family killed.” These claims were also corroberated by Tiffany Doe.

 

6. Donald Trump is a birther. Remember when Trump decided to accuse Obama of not being born in Hawaii, meaning he couldn’t be the American president? Yeah, it was quite the story. And guess what? He still identifies as one, despite evidence that Obama was born in the country.4 Birtherism is blatant xenophobia, which has become Trump’s favorite -phobia. Well, aside from Islamophobia. And homophobia.

 

7. In his campaign announcement speech, he accused Mexico of sending rapists and drug dealers. Supporters of Trump like to point out that Trump followed that up with the statement that “some, I assume, are good people“—which doesn’t make it any better. It’s like telling someone that the bowl of strawberries they handed you has rotten berries in it, but that some aren’t actually rotten. It’s a xenophobic, good-luck-guessing-who-is-bad statement. It’s fear-mongering. Trump supporters really ate those rotten berries up. And guess what? It’s pretty much bullshit.

 

8. Trump used slave labor in Dubai. Slave labor was used to build Trump International Golf Course in Dubai. This was supposed to be the “greatest golf course in the world” according to the more-humble-than-you-know Trump. Workers made less than $200 a month and lived in squalorous conditions.

 

9. Trump has been accused of sexual harassment and humiliation by former employees. This year, Elizabeth Davidson filed a complaint with the Davenport Civil Rights Commission over remarks made by Trump while she was working for his campaign in Iowa. He has been accused by multiple women of mocking or degrading women working for him, using dismissive and sexist language to refer to them.

 

10. Trump has stated that he is attracted to his daughter, Ivanka Trump. Multiple times. His first caveat with his incestuous attraction is that he’s married, not that she’s his daughter. He joked about how she’s she could be in Playboy and that he could date her. He only asserts that he’s her father and couldn’t date her as a side note.

 

11. Trump sexualized Tiffany as an infant. In an interview, Trump stated he’d like his then one-year olds daughter Tiffany to inherit her mom’s breasts.

 

12. Trump is hypocritical on Clinton’s vs. Pence’s support of the Iraq War. In last week’s 60 Minutes, Trump defended Pence voting for the Iraq War, while simultaneously bashing Hillary Clinton for her vote. Pence is, according to Trump, entitled to make mistakes. Hypocrisy, Party of Don.

 

13. Trump is hypocritical over receiving money/favors from Saudi Arabia. In another case of “do as I say, not as I do”, Trump likes to imply that Hillary has received money from Saudi Arabia either personally or for her campaign. In actuality, it’s the Clinton Foundation, which Hillary isn’t even in charge of, that received donations. Trump, on the other hand, has been personally bailed out twice by a Saudi prince.

 

14. Trump encouraged violence throughout the primaries. Though he would try blaming it on supporters of Bernie Sanders, Trump repeatedly incited violence at campaign events. And he hasn’t stopped encouraging it.

 

15. Trump University was never a university, it was always a scam. Despite the name, it wasn’t a school. In 2011, the New York Attorney General investigated it for illegal business practices and filed a lawsuit alleging them as a result of what was found during investigations.

 

16. Trump has had not one bankruptcy…

 

17. Not two bankruptcies…

 

18. Not three bankruptcies…,

 

19. But FOUR. Four bankruptcies have been filed as a result of his business dealings.

 

20. Trump mocked a disabled journalist. In November 2015, Trump went on stage & mocked Serge Kovaleski’s hand movements; Kovaleski has a congenital joint disorder.

 

21. Donald Trump thinks he owns black people. He’s repeatedly talked about black people belonging to him.

 

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-SA

 

Yes, I did the math so that it would work out evenly—or, more appropriately, oddly. ↩

 

Oddly enough, his first lie that night was about there being a lack of lies at the 2016 convention. ↩

 

New York’s law allowing marital rape was struck down in 1984—five years before the rape took place. ↩

 

Even if he wasn’t, he’s considered a natural born American because his mom is from Kansas. ↩

 

Related Posts:

 

Definitely More Stable Than Donald Trump January 25, 2016

 

Resting Bitch Face: Internet-Style March 12, 2016

 

Nigh is the End June 24, 2016

 

Retribution: Win Or Lose March 24, 2016

 

#DemPlatform, Calm Your Tits June 25, 2016

 

I’ve been dwelling on the “extras,” lately. The additional layers I use to cover and hide. The inessentials I’ve built up to mean more than they really merit.

I have become synonymous with lipstick. It’s a mask, and I have to be critically aware of it. Why do I feel more myself with it on? How do I feel without it? What does it translate to?

It is a personal, hypocritical challenge to wholeheartedly believe in rejecting social constraints of the body and femininity while sheepishly subscribing to a remaining handful. There are leftover imprints of these influences that I still hold onto, some twisted and stereotypical security blanket.

I feel more “beautiful” with lipstick. My knee-jerk defense is that I wear it “for me,” because I “feel better with it on.” But I feel “better” with it because I have been conditioned to believe there is something missing from me without it. That I need something extra, however dictated or defined, in order to be myself.

But we cannot be apologetic for our bodies.

Lipstick is a trivial metaphor for a greater problem. There are rules and expectations modern feminists believe they are reclaiming - but I worry we are not zooming out far enough. We are “reclaiming” smaller modes of functioning within a system that has stripped us of the fundamental: an innate sense of value irrespective of the physical and external. We have to dive deeper, question more, reject more. Whatever you are wearing or doing or performing “for you,” take a beat and reflect: What convinced you of it in the first place? Are you also enough without it? Are you still you?

I am not throwing away my lipstick - I’m wearing it in bed as I write this (forgot to take it off.) But I am questioning where this “empowerment” comes from, why I have attached to it in this form, and what wearing it “for me” really means. Thinking critically about the extras I attach myself to, and where the harmful juxtapositions are.

German postcard by Franz Josef Rüdel, Filmpostkartenverlag, Hamburg. Photo: Peter Gaue / Tango Film / Filmverlag der Autoren. Margit Carstensen in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant/The bitter tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972).

 

On 1 June 2023, German actress Margit Carstensen (1940-2023) passed away in Stein, Germany, at the age of 83. She was one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's best-known anti-stars and played the title role in his classic films such as Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant/The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972).

 

Margit Carstensen was born in 1940 in Kiel, Germany. She was the daughter of a doctor and grew up in her birth town. In 1958, after completing her secondary education, she studied drama at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater (the State Academy for Music and Theatre) in Hamburg. She got her first stage engagements in Kleve, Heilbronn, Münster and Braunschweig. In 1965, she moved to the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and took on leading roles in plays by John Osborne and Lope de Vega. After a four-year engagement, she entered the theatre scene in Bremen at the Theater am Goetheplatz in 1969. There, she met Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who soon emerged as the most talented and prolific representative of the Neuer Deutscher Film. Under his direction, she starred as Vittoria in Carlo Goldoni's comedy 'Das Kaffeehaus', as the serial killer Geesche Gottfried in the world premiere of Fassbinder's own play 'Bremer Freiheit' and the title role in the Henrik Ibsen adaptation 'Nora Helmer'. All three plays were filmed by Fassbinder in the 1970s. Carstensen became famous as one of the divas and muses of Fassbinder, who started filming incessantly, both for cinema and television. During the 1970s, he directed her 15 times in just 10 years. An impressive series of powerful portraits of women resulted: the lesbian fashion designer in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972), the 19th-century serial killer Gesche Gottfried in Bremer Freiheit (1972), and Nora Helmer, the title role of the woman prying herself out of a bourgeois marriage in the emancipation drama Nora Helmer (1974), based on Ibsen's play 'A Doll's House'. Then she played a young woman who turns out to be married to a perverted and possessive sadist (Karlheinz Böhm) in Martha (1974), a young mother sinking lonely into depression and accompanying anxiety in Angst vor der Angst (1975), and the naive admirer of an unsuccessful megalomaniac poet who fancies himself Stefan George and plunders her savings in Satansbraten (1976). She was hilarious as the hypocritical adulteress in the haunting 'Kammerspiel' psychodrama Chinesisches Roulette (1976), in which she and her husband happen to end up in their holiday home at the same time with their lover. Then she played an RAF terrorist who shoots her husband, a bank manager, in a bank robbery in the crime comedy Die dritte Generation (1979).

 

After her time in Bremen, Margit Carstensen was associated with many theatre companies. Rainer Werner Fassbinder also continued to direct Carstensen on stage. These theatre productions included Ibsen's 'Hedda Gabler', Strindberg's 'Miss Julie' and Clare Boothe Luce's 'Women in New York', which was later filmed by Fassbinder. After a four-year stay in Darmstadt (1973-1976) and then back in Hamburg, Carstensen moved to West Berlin in 1977 to join the Staatlichen Schauspielbühnen (1977-1982). During that busy period, Carstensen was also directed on a few occasions by other filmmakers. For example, film composer Peer Raben and actor Ulli Lommel, who were both members of the Fassbinder clan. For Lommel, she embodied Marlene Dietrich in the historical drama Adolf und Marlene (Ulli Lommel, ) in which a passionately in love Hitler tries to snare Dietrich as his mistress. In the 1980s, Carstensen acted in several noteworthy films: the dramatic horror film Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981) alongside Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill and Heinz Bennent, the blasphemous Liebeskonzil (Werner Schroeter, 1982), and the World War II drama Bittere Ernte/Bitter Harvest (Agnieszka Holland, 1985) with Armin Mueller-Stahl. She also appeared in two parts of the Germany trilogy by controversial director Christoph Schlingensief: Magda Goebbels in 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler - Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker (1989) and a police assistant in media the persiflage Terror 2000 - Intensivstation Deutschland (1994). For stage and film director Leander Haussmann, she starred in Sonneneallee (1999) and in John Gabriel Borkman (2000). On stage, she worked between 1982 and 1995 under the direction of Hansgünther Heyme at the Württembergischen Staatstheater in Stuttgart. She then followed Leander Haussmann, with whom she had already shot two films, among others, to the Schauspielhaus in Bochum (1995-2006). In between, she often took on guest roles and performed several times for the Münchner Kammerspiele. She was also part of the cast that performed the world premiere of Elfriede Jelinek's play 'Bambiland' at the Vienna Burgtheatre in 2003/2004, directed by Christoph Schlingensief. In 2011 she shone alongside Martin Wuttke at the Berlin Volksbühne in René Pollesch's play 'Schmeiß dein Ego weg!' (Throw your ego away). In the cinema, Carstensen appeared in films by younger directors such as Romuald Karmakar (Manila, 2000), Chris Kraus (Scherbentanz/Shattered Glass, 2002), Oskar Roehler (Agnes und seine Brüder/Agnes and his Brothers, 2004), Detlev Buck (Hände weg von Mississippi/Hands off Mississippi, 2007) and Frauke Finsterwalder (Finsterworld, 2013). She made her last on-screen appearance in Tatort: Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt/What is worth living for (Aelrun Goette, 2016). In this episode from the popular Krimi series Tatort/Crime Scene, she, Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann, two other Fassbinder luminaries, emerged as wreak angels. About her old director, Margit Carstensen said: "Fassbinder was a great poet and visionary - with an incredible charisma and insane power." Margit Carstensen died in 2023 at the age of 83 in a hospital in Heide, Germany. Carstensen was awarded numerous awards, including the Filmband in Gold for her performance in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1973) and the Bavarian Film Prize (2002). As early as 1973, she was voted best actress of the year by German film critics. She received the Götz George Award for her life's work in 2019.

 

Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch and German) and IMDb.

I got tagged! :D

 

1.I have my camera back after a week and you know what this means :)

2.I love the mirror on our bathroom! Everyone seems to look good while looking in that mirror, But when I look on a mirror from a different room I'm like, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU!?

3.I've been in a relationship only twice. Because I take those very seriously not like some guys who "collect and select"

4.I don't know why I made a twitter account

5.I wish we celebrate Halloween :(

 

6.I find it weird that some people on Facebook post photos from Tumblr which are acually from Flickr.

7.I'm nice to people who are also nice to me or to my friends.

8.I'm not excited for Christmas. I never am.

 

9.Don't you just hate it when you hear a song in advance and when its video is released everybody would start singing it and claim they've heard it first?

 

10.Isn't it hypocritical to get pissed on someone making a comment about a person whom you really like? and you don't even know that someone?

 

that someone is me. GAWD how did that RANDOM girl saw my tweet about this famous artist who has little fans from where I live and where I go to school to? I'm not talking about Lady Gaga.

    

credits to my sister who took the shot, who knew she had it in her? well, not really.

 

Explored Nov 1, 2010 #375

Be glad for the things I have, Spread a little cheer where ever I can. and Always look for the good. I haven't done resolutions for almost twenty years. But I do aspire to maintain a positive outlook on life with all the crap it keeps sending my way.I can't stand to see a frown. It is a challenge to me to turn every frown I see into a smile. I am always reaching for bubbles of happines. I carry a small bottle of bubbles every where I go. They ALWAYS make people smile. A little smile can change a persons day. and "I" get to share it.

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For: Mondays challenge for January 18th 2010

"in one picture illustrate your one word that describes your New Year's resolution, dream, ASPIRATION or goal"

. . . and use that one word as your title.

 

See other Challengers here:

Monday Photo Challenges and Thursday Retreads

www.flickr.com/groups/1091826@N21/

 

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I was not able to get out to take the photograph I wanted to take, so I created this one from the two below. Using standard "Paint" program that comes with Windows for editing and PS8 for the "artist brush" effects

 

I know there is a lot to read here, but looking it up keeps me out of trouble. :D

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Long before Dr Norman Vincent Peel and “The Power of Positive Thinking”

Or what ever the current “guru” might be, There was a little girl….

Who learned the best part of the Bible and MOST important teachings of it.

In The face of adversity I have ALWAYS found at least one good thing. Though there have been times I had to look really hard for it. But then that is the key to aspiring to have a perpetual Positive attitude. One MUST LOOK for the good especially in the midst of most difficult situations. Prepare for the bad but look for and expect the Good. And That is what I aspire and have alway aspired to do.

Mona Loldwoman

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

POLLYANNA

a Pollyanna,

"one who finds cause for gladness in the most difficult situations," 1921, in allusion to Pollyanna Whittier, child heroine of U.S. novelist Eleanor Hodgman Porter's "Pollyanna" (1913) and "Pollyanna Grows Up" (1915), noted for keeping her chin up during disasters.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

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POLLYANNA SYNDROME

Psychologists and ministers who use the derogatory term, “Pollyanna Syndrome” never read the book. That little girl didn’t deny the bad events in her life. She just didn’t wallow in self-pity and make everybody else miserable. And she based her philosophy on Christ’s teachings

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

Positive Thinking; Pollyanna Syndrome

By Frances Hall

Why do we have such a downer on Pollyanna? After all, she is just a little girl with a big dose of positive mental attitude. Instead of mocking, may we should learn something from her. I’m not saying we have to turn into Pollyanna, but when you think about it, positive thinking is the only sensible way forward. Our thinking creates our reality, so isn’t it just a bit daft to be creating our reality based on negative thinking? When we realise this, we understand we cannot afford the luxury of negative thinking.

As Einstein said, “we are boxed in by the boundary conditions of our thinking”. Mind management is essentially the key to life management, and we all have the power to choose what we think. It may take time and effort to break the habit of negative thinking, but that is just what it is, a habit. So the trick is to cultivate a new habit of looking for the positive. And the first step is to catch yourself when you are thinking negatively. It may shock you just how many of those 60,000 thoughts that run through your mind every day are of the negative variety. Perhaps when you catch yourself thinking negatively, you can turn it into a positive “but”. Whatever it is, look hard for something way to turn it around by seeing an advantage. Focus on the fact that your outer world reflects your inner world.

so which way would you rather think………… Create the habit of positive thinking

A good tool for this is daily affirmations. These are sayings repeated on a daily basis to manifest a more positive reality. It is a way of harnessing the power of words for your benefit because your reality starts with a thought. Help the mind along a more positive path. Just remember the rule with affirmations is that they must be personal, present and positive, for example “today I achieve everything I want effortlessly” rather than “today I will not have any problems”. You can start with something simple like “I choose happiness” or “I create my own reality”. You can write them, say them, sing them, it’s up to you, but a minimum of six times a day is good.

As the saying goes, whether you tell yourself you can or tell yourself you can’t do something you are right. So what have you got to lose by thinking positive?

Frances Hall

After many years working in film and music, Frances changed career direction to find what for her is a more fulfilling way to live. Now an accredited life coach, massage therapist and writer, she is doing what she’d rather be doing - helping people get the most out of their lives. Her intention is to “Liberate, Inspire, Focus, Empower.

check out: www.lifematters.gb.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Frances_Hal

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AND if you'd like to read my favorite part of the book....

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Pollyanna By Eleanor H, Porter

From the book Pollyanna; part of Chapter 22

"Oh, he always said he was, of course, but 'most always he said, too, that he wouldn't STAY a minister a minute if 'twasn't for the rejoicing texts."

"The--WHAT?" The Rev. Paul Ford's eyes left the leaf and gazed wonderingly into Pollyanna's merry little face.

“Well, , that's what father used to call 'em," she laughed. "Of course the Bible didn't name 'em that. But it's all those that begin 'Be glad in the Lord,' or 'Rejoice greatly,' or 'Shout for joy,' and all that, you know--such a lot of 'em. Once, when father felt specially bad, he counted 'em. There were eight hundred of ‘em.

“eight hundred.!”

“Yes--that told you to rejoice and be glad, you know; that's why father named 'em the 'rejoicing texts.”

“Oh.!" There was an odd look on the minister's face. His eyes had fallen to the words on the top paper in his hands--"But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" "And so your father--liked those 'rejoicing texts,' " he murmured

“Oh yes” nodded Pollyanna, emphatically. "He said he felt better right away, that first day he thought to count 'em. He said if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it--SOME. And father felt ashamed that he hadn't done it more. After that, they got to be such a comfort to him, you know, when things went wrong; when the Ladies' Aiders got to fight--I mean, when they DIDN'T AGREE about something," corrected Pollyanna, hastily. "Why, it was those texts, too, father said, that made HIM think of the game--he began with ME on the crutches--but he said 'twas the rejoicing texts that started him on it.”

“And what game might that be?" asked the minister

"About finding something in everything to be glad about, you know. As I said, he began with me on the crutches." And once more Pollyanna told her story--this time to a man who listened with tender eyes and understanding ears.

A little later Pollyanna and the minister descended the hill, hand in hand. Pollyanna's face was radiant. Pollyanna loved to talk, and she had been talking now for some time: there seemed to be so many, many things about the game, her father, and the old home life that the minister wanted to know.

At the foot of the hill their ways parted, and Pollyanna down one road, and the minister down another, walked on alone.

In the Rev. Paul Ford's study that evening the minister sat thinking. Near him on the desk lay a few loose sheets of paper--his sermon notes. Under the suspended pencil in his fingers lay other sheets of paper, blank--his sermon to be. But the minister was not thinking either of what he had written, or of what be intended to write. In his imagination he was far away in a little Western town with a missionary minister who was poor, sick, worried, and almost alone in the world--but who was poring over the Bible to find how many times his Lord and Master had told him to "rejoice and be glad.”

After a time, with a long sigh, the Rev. Paul Ford roused himself, came back from the far Western town, and adjusted the sheets of paper under his hand "Matthew twenty-third; 13--14 and 23," he wrote; then, with a gesture of impatience, he dropped his pencil and pulled toward him a magazine left on the desk by his wife a few minutes before. Listlessly his tired eyes turned from paragraph to paragraph until these words arrested them: "A father one day said to his son, Tom, who, he knew, had refused to fill his mother's woodbox that morning: 'Tom, I'm sure you'll be glad to go and bring in some wood for your mother.' And without a word Tom went. Why? Just because his father showed so plainly that he expected him to do the right thing. Suppose he had said: 'Tom, I overheard what you said to your mother this morning, and I'm ashamed of you. Go at once and fill that woodbox!' I'll warrant that woodbox, would be empty yet, so far as Tom was concerned!"

On and on read the minister--a word here, a line there, a paragraph somewhere else.

"What men and women need is encouragement. Their natural resisting powers should be strengthened, not weakened. . . . Instead of always harping on a man's faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut of bad habits. Hold up to him his better self, his REAL self that can dare and do and win out! . . . The influence of a beautiful, helpful, hopeful character is contagious, and may revolutionize a whole town. . . . People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts. If a man feels kindly and obliging, his neighbors will feel that way, too, before long. But if he scolds and scowls and criticizes--his neighbors will return scowl for scowl, and add interest! . . . When you look for the bad, expecting it, you will get it. When you know you will find the good--you will get that. . . . Tell your son Tom you KNOW he'll be glad to fill that woodbox--then watch him start, alert and interested!"

The minister dropped the paper and lifted his chin. In a moment he was on his feet, tramping the narrow room back and forth, back and forth. Later, some time later, he drew a long breath, and dropped himself in the chair at his desk.

"God helping me, I'll do it!" he cried softly. "I'll tell all my Toms I KNOW they'll be glad to fill that woodbox! I'll give them work to do, and I'll make them so full of the very joy of doing it that they won't have TIME to look at their neighbors' woodboxes!" And he picked up his sermon notes, tore straight through the sheets, and cast them from him, so that on one side of his chair lay "But woe unto you," and on the other, "scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" while across the smooth white paper before him his pencil fairly flew--after first drawing one black line through Matthew twenty-third; 13--14 and 23 .”

Thus it happened that the Rev. Paul Ford's sermon the next Sunday was a veritable bugle-call to the best that was in every man and woman and child that heard it; and its text was one of Pollyanna's shining eight hundred.

 

“Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, ye righteous, and shout for joy all ye that are upright in heart."

END OF CHAPTER

 

If perhaps you'd like to read the entie book, It is available online through:

Classic Book Library : Pollyanna

classicbook.info/books/pollyanna/index.html

 

Main page

Classic Book Library -The Classics Online

classicbook.info/index.html

Genres:

Historical Fiction

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pollyanna 30a

As if the damage to the US, externally and internally wasn't enough. Prevent him also from pardoning his criminally indicted helpers, and anyone else for that matter. And impeach his accomplice enablers in Congress.

German postcard by Franz Josef Rüdel, Filmpostkartenverlag, Hamburg, signed in 1997. Photo: Susanne Brügger, Köln.

 

On 1 June 2023, German actress Margit Carstensen (1940-2023) passed away in Stein, Germany, at the age of 83. She was one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's best-known anti-stars and played the title role in his classic films such as Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant/The bitter tears of Petra von Kant (1972).

 

On 1 June 2023, German actress Margit Carstensen (1940-2023) passed away in Stein, Germany, at the age of 83. She was one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's best-known anti-stars and played the title role in his classic films such as Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant/The bitter tears of Petra von Kant (1972).

 

Margit Carstensen was born in 1940 in Kiel, Germany. She was the daughter of a doctor and grew up in her birth town. In 1958, after completing her secondary education, she studied drama at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater (the State Academy for Music and Theatre) in Hamburg. She got her first stage engagements in Kleve, Heilbronn, Münster and Braunschweig. In 1965, she moved to the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and took on leading roles in plays by John Osborne and Lope de Vega. After a four-year engagement, she entered the theatre scene in Bremen at the Theater am Goetheplatz in 1969. There, she met Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who soon emerged as the most talented and prolific representative of the Neuer Deutscher Film. Under his direction, she starred as Vittoria in Carlo Goldoni's comedy 'Das Kaffeehaus', as the serial killer Geesche Gottfried in the world premiere of Fassbinder's own play 'Bremer Freiheit' and the title role in the Henrik Ibsen adaptation 'Nora Helmer'. All three plays were filmed by Fassbinder in the 1970s. Carstensen became famous as one of the divas and muses of Fassbinder, who started filming incessantly, both for cinema and television. During the 1970s, he directed her 15 times in just 10 years. An impressive series of powerful portraits of women resulted: the lesbian fashion designer in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972), the 19th-century serial killer Gesche Gottfried in Bremer Freiheit (1972), and Nora Helmer, the title role of the woman prying herself out of a bourgeois marriage in the emancipation drama Nora Helmer (1974), based on Ibsen's play 'A Doll's House'. Then she played a young woman who turns out to be married to a perverted and possessive sadist (Karlheinz Böhm) in Martha (1974), a young mother sinking lonely into depression and accompanying anxiety in Angst vor der Angst (1975), and the naive admirer of an unsuccessful megalomaniac poet who fancies himself Stefan George and plunders her savings in Satansbraten (1976). She was hilarious as the hypocritical adulteress in the haunting 'Kammerspiel' psychodrama Chinesisches Roulette (1976), in which she and her husband happen to end up in their holiday home at the same time with their lover. Then she played an RAF terrorist who shoots her husband, a bank manager, in a bank robbery in the crime comedy Die dritte Generation (1979).

 

After her time in Bremen, Margit Carstensen was associated with many theatre companies. Rainer Werner Fassbinder also continued to direct Carstensen on stage. These theatre productions included Ibsen's 'Hedda Gabler', Strindberg's 'Miss Julie' and Clare Boothe Luce's 'Women in New York', which was later filmed by Fassbinder. After a four-year stay in Darmstadt (1973-1976) and then back in Hamburg, Carstensen moved to West Berlin in 1977 to join the Staatlichen Schauspielbühnen (1977-1982). During that busy period, Carstensen was also directed on a few occasions by other filmmakers. For example, film composer Peer Raben and actor Ulli Lommel, who were both members of the Fassbinder clan. For Lommel, she embodied Marlene Dietrich in the historical drama Adolf und Marlene (Ulli Lommel, ) in which a passionately in love Hitler tries to snare Dietrich as his mistress. In the 1980s, Carstensen acted in several noteworthy films: the dramatic horror film Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981) alongside Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill and Heinz Bennent, the blasphemous Liebeskonzil (Werner Schroeter, 1982), and the World War II drama Bittere Ernte/Bitter Harvest (Agnieszka Holland, 1985) with Armin Mueller-Stahl. She also appeared in two parts of the Germany trilogy by controversial director Christoph Schlingensief: Magda Goebbels in 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler - Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker (1989) and a police assistant in media the persiflage Terror 2000 - Intensivstation Deutschland (1994). For stage and film director Leander Haussmann, she starred in Sonneneallee (1999) and in John Gabriel Borkman (2000). On stage, she worked between 1982 and 1995 under the direction of Hansgünther Heyme at the Württembergischen Staatstheater in Stuttgart. She then followed Leander Haussmann, with whom she had already shot two films, among others, to the Schauspielhaus in Bochum (1995-2006). In between, she often took on guest roles and performed several times for the Münchner Kammerspiele. She was also part of the cast that performed the world premiere of Elfriede Jelinek's play 'Bambiland' at the Vienna Burgtheatre in 2003/2004, directed by Christoph Schlingensief. In 2011 she shone alongside Martin Wuttke at the Berlin Volksbühne in René Pollesch's play 'Schmeiß dein Ego weg!' (Throw your ego away). In the cinema, Carstensen appeared in films by younger directors such as Romuald Karmakar (Manila, 2000), Chris Kraus (Scherbentanz/Shattered Glass, 2002), Oskar Roehler (Agnes und seine Brüder/Agnes and his Brothers, 2004), Detlev Buck (Hände weg von Mississippi/Hands off Mississippi, 2007) and Frauke Finsterwalder (Finsterworld, 2013). She made her last on-screen appearance in Tatort: Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt/What is worth living for (Aelrun Goette, 2016). In this episode from the popular Krimi series Tatort/Crime Scene, she, Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann, two other Fassbinder luminaries, emerged as wreak angels. About her old director, Margit Carstensen said: "Fassbinder was a great poet and visionary - with an incredible charisma and insane power." Margit Carstensen died in 2023 at the age of 83 in a hospital in Heide, Germany. Carstensen was awarded numerous awards, including the Filmband in Gold for her performance in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1973) and the Bavarian Film Prize (2002). As early as 1973, she was voted best actress of the year by German film critics. She received the Götz George Award for her life's work in 2019.

 

Sources: Wikipedia (Dutch and German) and IMDb.

‎Matthew 6 - Giving to the Needy

 

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

 

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

 

Macro Monday project – 03/25/13

“6 (six)”

Israel was in mayor part founded on a terrorist campaign, of which the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 (mostly civilians), was only the most notorious example. The bombing was instrumental in the British decision to quit its mandate over Palestine by 1948, leading to the War of Independence and the foundation of the Israeli state. Menachem Begin, later Prime Minister of Israel, ordered the attack. This indicates how at bottom Israel feels about the use of terrorism - it's justified in advancing Zionist interests.

Modern Israel's collective punishment tactics are in morally indistinguishable from terrorism and indeed from Nazi practices of collective punishment.

So this hypocritical bleating about Arab terrorism is really stomach-churning.

Israel has become the new South Africa - a pariah state with only one or two friends. Such a state cannot survive in the long term, nor does it deserve to do so.

Obviously, the only just solution to the Palestinian 'problem' is a single, secular democracy in 'greater Israel' where Jews and Arabs live as equals. However, as the Jews have decided that they cannot outbreed the Palestinians, and therefore could not dominate them in such a state, it seems a two-state solution is the only politically acceptable outcome to the Zionists.

Besides a more realitic approach:

A successful Holocaust (sold as war on terror) on the indigenous population of Palestine, similar what Hitler envisioned but did obviosly not achieve, or the former military tught aligned Bothas rassitsic South Africa has medicated on his native "Nigger problem".

So be it.

What is NOT acceptable to the whole world is that Israel continues to treat the Palestinians and their neighbors like 'dogs' (to quote Golda Meir, another Israeli Prime Minister) until Kingdom Come. In the meantime, excuse us if we shed very few tears for the poor Israeli 'civilians' caught up in the conflict. After all, Israeli brutality tactics are helping to export terrorism throughout the world.

Why should non-Israelis pay for the sins of Israel?~ª

 

Lark: “In other words, you can lift more than that, Queen Incubator. Otherwise, we’ll never get the inventory moved back in before the reopening this weekend.”

 

Magpie: “Ru doesn’t like me overdoing it, and seeing as how we’re still in our honeymoon period, I am apt to concede to his wishes in this matter…*makes her way to a chair, drops into it, motioning for Lark to slide a crate over, so she can prop up her feet*

 

Lark: *rolls eyes while complying* “Yeah, that’s why you’re agreeing with him, not because it means you get to be a total lazy-ass and annoy the rest of us.”

 

Magpie (serenely): “Hater’s gonna hate. Besides, one day you’ll get married and be knocked up with your own excuse to be spoiled and pampered. So why you gettin’ all up in my mug, yo? Hypocrite much?”

 

Lark: *snorts* “You’ve been spending too much time with the surfers. You’re starting to sound just like them, and I wish everyone would stop making comments about me getting married. It bums me out, since it’s clearly never going to happen.”

 

Magpie: *throws her arms wide* “I didn’t mean to bum you out, my dearling. Come to mama for cuddles.”

 

Lark: *hurries over, squeezing into the chair beside Mags*

 

Magpie: *kisses Lark noisily all over her face, then leans back and wipes off the lipstick smudges left behind* “You don’t need to be married or pregnant to be spoiled by us, Larkie. You’re our baby, and that is more than reason enough.”

 

Lark: *relaxes into Magpie’s side* “You’re gonna make a good mom.”

 

Magpie: “I know.”

 

Fashion Credits

***Any doll enhancements (i.e. freckles, piercings, eye color changes, haircuts) were done by me unless otherwise stated.***

 

Lark

Dress: Mattel – The Barbie Look : Tea Party Fashion

Jacket: fakeskin (etsy.com)

Belt: Me

Shoes: IT – NuFace – Great Pretender Lilith

Bracelets: Me

 

Doll is a Great Pretender Lilith.

 

Magpie

Dress: IT – NuFace – Odd Girl Out Colette

Blouse: Jiajiadoll (etsy.com)

Shoes: IT – Fashion Royalty – Going Public Eugenia

Belt: Randall Craig RTW - Delightful

Brooch: Randall Craig RTW

Earrings: IT - NuFace

 

Doll is a Wild at Heart Lilith re-rooted by the most excellent valmaxi(!!!).

 

Sparrow

Skirt & Belt: Randall Craig RTW – April in Paris

Sweater: IT – Fashion Royalty – Life on the Runway

Shoes: Jennifer Sue

Bracelets: Me

 

Doll is a London Mist Imogen.

 

Hawk

Pants: Kelsie of Mutant Goldfish Designs

Shirt: IT – Convention 2013 – Color Infusion Style Lab – Edge of Night: Red Blooded Male

Belt: Volks – WTG? - Selfish

Sneakers & Sunglasses: IT – Homme – Euro-classic Fashion

 

Doll is a Model Citizen Lukas.

  

I am so not about videos on Flickr but how cute is this? The best part of this...She is sleeping talking/walking. She does this almost every night. Different conversation but same time each night. She looks wide awake huh? after the boo boo comment I walked her back to bed and she went right back to sleep. She doesn't remember it in the morning. It's the weirdest thing ever.

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I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.

 

Anyway; Woolpit.

 

I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.

 

On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.

 

And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.

 

Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.

 

The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.

 

The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.

 

But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.

 

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

 

2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.

Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.

 

I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.

 

2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.

 

The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.

 

A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.

 

But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.

 

It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.

 

Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.

 

Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...

 

So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.

 

Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.

 

A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.

 

You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.

 

Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...

 

I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.

 

After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.

 

Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.

 

And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.

 

Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.

 

Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?

 

The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?

 

There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.

 

But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.

 

Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!

 

Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!

 

Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.

 

How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.

 

So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.

 

But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.

 

They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.

 

Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.

 

Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.

 

As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.

 

The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.

 

Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!

 

Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?

 

How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.

 

So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.

 

The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.

 

The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.

 

I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?

 

Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?

Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.

 

- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.

 

www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/woolpit.htm

(oops... forgot I still had this in the camera); after been sent to bed early for playing in the Lab, Mina and Orby return for the wee homonculous' teddy bear... but look what they find! What a hypocritical old Contessa she is!

VERSE OF THE DAY 7/5

 

Matthew 7:5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

 

#verseoftheday #bibleverse #bible #biblestudy #matthew #bookofmatthew #Jesus #Christ #JesusChrist #Christian #Christianity #God #Lord #hypocrite #scripture

Seeking Out Wilder Sounds.

Universalem et gratissimus influxibus mystica palpebrae eius cernent talarium periculum evasit sonis,

chemins de fer nuageux de dévoilement colossale perplexité délire corporelle énormes angoisses enfer serpentine,

inanity byddwch yn ofalus o le cerddoriaeth mandyllog labyrinths fud annirnadwy cael neidiau cydosod congruous,

Metamorphosen kriechen Nächte unzugänglich Rätsel monströsen allegorischen Reinigung fließendem Blut erhabene Bedeutungen,

насильственные сдаются добродетельные крики возродили гармонии болен враждующие империй улыбающиеся вопросы чистилище взаимодействия темные,

comhairleoirí endless paiseanta pinions i bhfolach muffling anamacha trioblóideacha drunken tyranny comhlachtaí intinn hypocritical lot,

descrições asilos frenéticos porfíria distúrbios euforia doenças maníaco produtividade alcançados fenomenalmente,

εφίδρωση κούραση ζύμωση φαρμακοπώλη αλλοιώνοντας εναποθέσεις ακανόνιστη απρόβλεπτη μαχαίρια επαναλαμβανόμενες αναταραχές διαυγή διαμάχη του,

ライトをちらつき吸収混乱不向き外観裕福な謎は、これまでトラバース嘆かわしい音を識別可能な.

Steve.D.Hammond.

Who could possibly disagree with him? Putin is in good company indeed! not a single modern day aristocrat criticised Putin! undoubtedly all applauding Putin for his iron grip on power through the fool proof rule of fear!!!

 

In Sergei Witte’s days 85% of Russian were illiterate, uneducated, poor but hard working peasants who put “caviar, oysters and Pâté de foie on the Aristocracy’s tables

The rule of fear worked on slaves and peasants and Putin hopes that his nuclear arsenals he threatens the free world will do the trick

 

Putin is confusing fear with self-preservation! Ukrainians women and children are running away from gunfire not out of fear but out of a will to preserve their lives to see sunrise next day while their husbands and brothers are staying back to fight without fear for their lives and push back evil invaders

 

The free world has conquered the fear of death and the rule of fear while Putin is still a slave to the forces of darkness and therefore thinks that everyone must be as fearful of death as he is!

 

Putin has been playing with himself all his life which made him blind and emotionally crippled causing many observers to call him “man child”!

 

His followers are in the same boat, crippled by fear of this monster; Putin believes his henchmen are loyal to him out of respect and love not fear; once Putin is no longer a threat to them, they’ll all come out peeing, pooing and spitting on his grave 24/7 just as they do on the Romanov family their ancestors shot In the early morning hours of July 17, 1918

 

Russian uneducated cops are worse than their USA’s colleagues, worse than German Nazis, they come down on dissidents like tons of bricks and law courts are the worst offenders jailing anyone who dares protest for up to 15 years or even death by “bio-chemical agent” to make it look like natural death

 

IN RUSSIA COPS ARE TERRORISTS, LAW IS AN ASS! COURTS ARE INSTRUMENTS OF TERRORISM, LAWERS ARE HANGMEN, ALL ARE INSTRUMENTS OF TYRANNY TURNING HUMAN BEINGS INTO DEAF & MUTE PUPPETS

"People are born without goggles but they make a subconscious choice not to wear them based on society. I love goggles! I'm also a hypocrite: I would NEVER date Pimp. Why? He's too easy. I only date goggle wearers. He f***** himself when he licked that stamp!"

- says kaija channeling the pimp. i think? and how did i become a hypocrite?

 

anyway! pimp passed these wicked goggles onto me (does his title make some sense now?), so naturally i put them on, made a pimp sign and stood around one of the main reading rooms at the campus library while people stared at me openly and probably updated their facebook statuses to reflect the crazy going on in front of them. jerks! but hey, all the weird stuff i didn't do in a school environment as an undergrad i'm taking care of NOW. woo, self-inflicted public humiliation!

 

it was all great fun :) thanks to E for triggering and putting up with me while i continued to walk around campus afterward with these on! and thanks to pimp for the... um, interesting and amusing title he agreed to come up with? :D i had some great back-ups just in case, though :D

 

find the trash and the kid trying to duck out of being in sight!

 

270/365

Ancient Trees (11th Century) @ Ripley Castle,England,UK

 

THE DEER PARK CONTAINS SEVERAL MAGNIFICENT TREES. SOME HAVE PROBABLY BEEN HERE SINCE THE 11TH CENTURY. CERTAINLY THESE OAKTREES MUST BE VERY OLD TO ACHIEVE A GIRTH OF 28.5'.

 

The Ingilby family celebrates 700 years at Ripley CastleThe Ingleby family can trace its history back to 1090, when Sir Robert Ingleby owned land in the village of Ingleby, near Saxelby, Lincs. Another branch of the family had extensive lands in and around Ingleby Greenhow and Ingleby Mill in North Yorkshire. When Sir Thomas Ingleby (c1290-1352) married the heiress Edeline Thwenge in 1308/9 she came with a very substantial dowry: Ripley Castle and its surrounding estates. Like most wedding presents, it has taken the family several generations to work out what to do with it! Life was far from easy: in 1318 the Scots, under Sir James ‘Black’ Douglas, plundered the region mercilessly, destroying 140 of the 160 houses in nearby Knaresborough. In the following year a bovine plague killed almost all of the cattle in the region, leaving thousands destitute and milk in short supply. In 1349 the Black Death struck, wiping out almost half of the local population and leaving numerous hamlets bereft of people.

 

The old village of Ripley was abandoned and the survivors built a new settlement on the site of the current village, on the doorstep of the castle. Sir Thomas was in great favour at the king’s court in London and was appointed as an Advocate in 1347. In 1351 he was appointed as a Justice of Assize. He died the following year and a magnificent tombchest in All Saint’s Church, Ripley, has the figures of Thomas and Edeline lying recumbent on the top, he in his armour and chain mail, she in a long robe and head dress. His oldest son, also called Thomas (1310-1369) also married well: Katherine Mauleverer was descended from Aelfwine, an Anglian of proud descent and one of the largest landowners in the North of England. He followed his father into the royal court, and accompanied Edward III on a hunting trip to the royal hunting forest of Knaresborough in 1357. The king found a wild boar and threw his spear at it, but only injured it. The boar charged the king’s horse, and the king was thrown to the ground. Thomas killed the boar, saving the king’s life. He was knighted, granted the boar’s head emblem as his family crest, and granted the right to hold a weekly market and annual horse fair in Ripley – both continued to be held until the early 1900’s. He was appointed as a justice of the King’s Bench in 1361, the only judge to hold that position apart from the Chief Justice. He could claim £40 pa for expenses, and a further £20pa for holding assizes in different counties.

 

Thomas’s brother, Sir Henry Ingleby, enjoyed an equally notable career. Rector of several parishes, he was appointed Master of the Rolls and Keeper of the Writs, serving under the Lord Chancellor William Edington: he had an office in the Tower of London and paid 40 shillings a year for the privilege of collecting the wool tax from the monasteries. He also oversaw the network of royal horse dealers who bought horses for the royal household, then sold them at a profit: the proceeds were used to build Windsor Castle. He died in 1375 and was buried in York Minster.

 

Sir John Ingleby (1434-1499) inherited the estate from his father at the age of five: his trustees had to testify to his correct date of birth in order to get the estates out of trust when he came of age. Their testimony paints a remarkable picture of an average day in the life of 15th century England. ‘Ralph Acclom remembers John’s birth because he was staying with John, Abbot of Fountains Abbey and rode across with him to baptize the baby. Ralph Apilton remembered John’s birth because he killed a deer between Ripley and Hampsthwaite. Robert Atkinson remembered the date because he rode with John Slingsby from Ripley to Sherburn and was robbed and beaten up, losing 28s and 8d.’John built the castle gatehouse – still there today – and married a wealthy heiress, Margery Strangeways of Harlsey Castle. She bore him a son and heir, William. In 1457 John abandoned his wife, son estates and earthly possessions to become a monk at Mount Grace Priory a Carthusian charterhouse near Northallerton which had been founded by his great grandfather – and was the last resting place for his parents.

 

He was appointed prior of Sheen in 1477 and first visitor of the English province between 1478 and 1496. The royal family worshipped at Sheen and John became the first of three executors for Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, in 1492. He was Henry VII’s special ambassador to Pope Innocent VIII, the king describing him as ‘my captain and envoy’ in one of the letters that John delivered to the Pope. Henry appointed him to oversee the conversion of priory at Sheen into the royal palace of Richmond between 1495 and 1499, and the Pope appointed him bishop of Llandaff on 27th June, 1496. He was buried at the church of St Nicholas in Hertford. His luckless wife, Margery, effectively became a widow when he took holy orders: she spent eleven years raising her son before marrying Richard, Lord Welles. Her luck was no better second time round: Edward IV reneged on a promise of safe keeping and had her husband beheaded in 1469, less than a year after their marriage.Sir William Ingleby (1518-1578) married the staunchly Catholic Ann Mallory and lived through a period of profound religious turbulence. When Henry VIII suppressed the smaller monasteries in 1536, Yorkshire’s old established Catholic families rose in revolt: the Pilgrimage of Grace was a populist and peaceful revolt that received such widespread support throughout the North that the king, heavily outnumbered, was forced to sue for peace. Reneging on a promise of safe keeping, Henry had the organizer, Robert Aske, arrested and put to death: 200 of his fellow pilgrims shared his fate. William received a reward for his staunch loyalty to the crown: Queen Mary wrote ‘For the opinion I have conceived of Sir William Ingleby…I have appointed him Treasurer of Berwick’. The Rising of the North in 1568 was potentially even more serious. The rebels set out from nearby Markenfield Hall and mustered an army that far outnumbered the king’s resources. Sir William, as High Sheriff of York, was obliged to muster additional troops but while doing so was surrounded in Ripon market square, by a group of rebels amongst whom were two of his sons, David and Francis. He had to fight his way out and, deciding that Ripley Castle was too weak to defend, took refuge in the duchy of Lancaster’s Knaresborough Castle until the troops under his command were strong enough to defeat the rebels. The earl of Sussex wrote to

 

William Cecil ‘Sir William Ingleby has served the Queen as truly and as chargeably from the first suspicion of this rebellion, as any man of his rank has done. He has delivered to me, from time to time, better intelligence than I have received from any others. He be such that her majesty may rest assured of his honesty and loyalty’. The rebellion was crushed: David and Francis fled into exile but Sir William’s own son in law,

 

Thomas Markenfield, was executed. Francis Ingleby (1550-1586) studied at Brasenose College, Oxford and read law at the Inner Temple. In 1583, having received a heavenly visitation while staying at Ripley, he emigrated to Reims and became ordained a Catholic seminary priest, returning to England in 1585. There are remarkable parallels with today: a native Englishman, passionately supporting a minority religion, goes abroad to receive militant training in his faith. He returns intent on spreading the word and overthrowing the established religion and government.

 

Francis was hung, drawn and quartered on York Knavesmire in 1586 and beatified by the Pope in 1987. His brother David (1547-1600) became known as ‘the Fox’ for his ability to outrun his pursuers. He was the man who guided the seminary priests around the North of England, leading them from one safe house to another. He married Lady Ann Neville, daughter of the exiled earl of Westmoreland – and another staunch Catholic. David was heavily implicated as a co-conspirator of John Ballard in the Babington treason, a conspiracy to remove Elizabeth I from the throne and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. He and Francis were described as ‘the most dangerous papists in the North’. A huge manhunt was launched to find them: a secret priest’s hiding hole, built to conceal them and other visiting priests while they were at Ripley, was only discovered by accident in 1964. A set of instructions written out for a spy being sent to the royal court in Scotland listed numerous things that the spy should and should not do: it ended with a very simple warning ‘ beware of David Ingleby’. David died in exile in Belgium: Elizabeth I, taking pity on his by now

impoverished widow, awarded her a pension provided she behaved herself. Their cousin Mary Ward spent several of her formative years staying with the Inglebys. In 1609 she founded a Catholic Society for Women, modeled on the Society of Jesus. They founded schools and taught in them, and the nuns were strongly encouraged to work in the community. Pope Urban VIII suppressed the order and it wasn’t until 1877 that her society was fully restored with papal blessing. The Bar Convent in York – which she founded - was the first teaching convent in the world. Sir William Ingleby (1546 - 1618) hosted a visit by James VI of Scotland en route to the king’s coronation as James I of England in 1603. Within two years William was heavily implicated in a plot to kill the king his family and hundreds of MP’s. The Ingilbys were related to or closely associated with, nine of the eleven principal conspirators of the infamous Gunpowder Plot. The mother of Robert and Thomas Wyntour, two of the leading conspirators, was an Ingleby. They had spent the week before the plot was unearthed at Ripley, buying horses from the surrounding district. Sir William and his son were arrested and charged with treason, but were, surprisingly, acquitted of all the charges. The third charge was that of bribing witnesses.

 

Sir William Ingleby (1594-1652) supported Charles I throughout the civil war, raising a troop of horse to fight under the generalship of Prince Rupert of the Rhine. He fought at the battle of Marston Moor, alongside his redoubtable sister, ‘Trooper’ Jane Ingleby, and somehow managed to escape the bloody rout that saw the king’s northern armies defeated for good. He made the safety of Ripley, but was his arrival was followed almost immediately by that of the victorious rebel general, Oliver Cromwell. Sir William leapt into the priest’s secret hiding place, leaving his sister to look after Cromwell. She at first refused to let him into the castle, swearing that she would defend it against all comers. After some negotiation, he was allowed to enter and spend the night there, guarded at pistol point by Jane, to prevent him from searching the castle for her brother. Cromwell, stunned at being held at gunpoint by a woman having just won the greatest victory of his career, did nothing and she saw him off the premises the following morning.

 

Sir William’s son, also called William (1620-1682) was deeply religious – and a closet ‘rebel’. He managed to get the family’s entire fortune captured by the rebels and his father, believing him to have done it on purpose, wrote him a blistering letter, threatening to disinherit him. The letter, signed ‘your loving father’, can be seen at the castle today.

 

William junior was not good looking: his portraits confirm that. In 1659 he employed a dating agent, a Mr E Pitt, to find him a wife, and again we have the correspondence: the mission was successful.Sir John Ingilby (1757 – 1835) married Elizabeth Amcotts, a Lincolnshire heiress. His father in law promised him funds to help the young couple rebuild the castle. Sir John had a row with his father in law half way through the project, and ended up so heavily in debt that he had to flee the country for eleven years while his land agent sold timber to pay off his debts. While he and his wife were abroad their oldest son died at the age of 18, and they were hustled from one European city to another as the Napoleonic wars consumed the continent. A bundle of frequently harrowing letters, written to his agent while he was in exile, survives. By the time he returned, his marriage was over: having had 11 children by his wife, he had a further 5 by Martha Webster, daughter of a local tenant farmer.

 

One son, Edward Webster, had problems involving a gamekeeper’s daughter near Skipton and was placed on board the RM Reynolds at Ramsgate with £200 and a supply of clean shirts: his stepbrother was ordered to remain on the dockside to ensure that he didn’t leave the vessel before it set sail for Sydney. This proved to be a life-changing experience and he and his successors thrived Down Under: Robert Webster was the minister of state for the Olympics in the NSW state government when Sydney won the bid for the games.

 

Sir John’s son Sir William Amcotts Ingilby (1783-1854) was the product of a broken home, and a great eccentric. He was a drinker, gambler and general reprobate: he became an MP, as many such people do. He was a leading Whig, and an outspoken supporter of the reform Act of 1832. His dress sense was spectacularly awful ‘’As to your friend, Sir William Ingilby I am told by a lady who saw him and absolutely took fright at it, that this eccentric baronet walks about Ripley and Ripon too, in his dressing gown, without smalls or loincloth on. The absence of the former was luckily disguised by the wrap of the gown, and is alleged on hearsay: but the naked throat, shirt collar displayed a la Milord Byron, had a striking effect, and produced the scarecrow impression.’ Believing that his tenants and workforce should be well housed in this age of industrial revolution, Sir William demolished the entire village of Ripley and rebuilt it as a model estate village, copying an idea that he had observed in Alsace Lorraine. Instead of a Town Hall, Ripley has a magnificent ‘Hotel de Ville’ – certainly the only one of its kind in England! He died without heir and left the estate to his cousin Henry, telling him that he was doing so because ‘ I don’t believe that you are any longer the canting hypocrite I took you for’. Sir William Ingilby (1829-1918) was a somewhat dictatorial Landlord. He disapproved of alcoholic drink being served on the Sabbath day and closed down the three pubs in the village when the Landlords refused to close on Sundays. The village remained dry for 71 years until the Boar’s Head opened in 1989. When a child ran out of the front door of one of the village houses and startled his horse, causing him to be deposited on the ground in the middle of the Main Street, he prevented further embarrassment by imposing an edict that the villagers should not use their front doors.

 

Having survived several plagues, invasions, civil wars, wars, religious turbulence, a plot to commit regicide, numerous periods of deep recession and everything else that has befallen this country in the last seven hundred years, the Ingilbys can justifiably breathe a sigh of relief that they have arrived safely at this astonishing landmark. Theirs is a story of how one family has been tossed around in the choppy waters of England’s stormy history – and somehow survived, despite being on the losing side more often than not. The history of the Ingilbys is a microcosm of the history of England and features a cast of extraordinarily brave, foolish, eccentric and courageous characters, black sheep and white. They have gone from high office in the court of kings and queens to running a wedding and conference venue and hotel, but they are still at Ripley and the story continues as they steer their family and business through these challenging times. Sir Thomas and Lady Ingilby have four sons and a daughter. A more detailed history of the family, complete with family trees not just of the Ingilby family but various families that became related to the Ingilbys by marriage over the centuries

I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.

 

Anyway; Woolpit.

 

I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.

 

On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.

 

And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.

 

Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.

 

The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.

 

The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.

 

But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.

 

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2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.

Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.

 

I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.

 

2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.

 

The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.

 

A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.

 

But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.

 

It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.

 

Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.

 

Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...

 

So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.

 

Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.

 

A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.

 

You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.

 

Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...

 

I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.

 

After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.

 

Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.

 

And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.

 

Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.

 

Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?

 

The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?

 

There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.

 

But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.

 

Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!

 

Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!

 

Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.

 

How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.

 

So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.

 

But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.

 

They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.

 

Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.

 

Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.

 

As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.

 

The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.

 

Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!

 

Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?

 

How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.

 

So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.

 

The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.

 

The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.

 

I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?

 

Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?

Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.

 

- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.

 

www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/woolpit.htm

EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT -- A person jumps from the north tower of New York's World Trade Center Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001. Mounting an audacious attack against the United States, terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and brought down the twin 110-story towers. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

“The Joke” ―Milan Kundera, 1967

German postcard, no. 18 (of 64). Photo: Constantin. Renato Baldini in Unter Geiern/Among Vultures (Alfred Vohrer, 1964). Caption: Judge Leader and his companions fall for the hypocritical suggestion of some gang members to confide in their leadership. This is how Leader gets into the vultures' quarters.

 

The Euro-Western Unter Geiern/Among Vultures (Alfred Vohrer, 1964), based on one of the Winnetou novels by Karl May. It starred Stewart Granger as Old Surehand, Elke Sommer, Götz George and Pierre Brice as Winnetou. Unter Geiern, released in the US as Frontier Hellcat, was a co-production between West Germany, France, Italy, and Yugoslavia, and was shot in Germany and Yugoslavia.

 

Unter Geiern/Among Vultures (Alfred Vohrer, 1964) was the fourth in the series of 1960s European Westerns based on Karl May's Winnetou character. For the first time, Stewart Granger stars as Old Surehand, although in Karl May's novel Old Shatterhand occurs as the main character. As 'Surehand', his hand is so sure that he can split an arrow aimed at him with a bullet in mid-air! Even Robin Hood would have been flabbergasted. So Granger took over from Lex Barker as Winnetou's white 'blood brother', although his age and stature did not resemble those of Karl May's character. In the books, Surehand is a man with a troubled past, a tormented soul seeking redemption. But the Old Surehand played by Granger is, quite, on the contrary, a jolly good fellow, who’s wearing Sunday trousers under buckskin. The female lead role was played by Elke Sommer, and co-producer Artur Brauner asked Pierre Brice to return as Apache Chief Winnetou. The young Mario Girotti, now better known as Terence Hill, played a supporting part as Baker Jr and the Romanian Gojko Mitic played the Indian Woladeh. In the following years, Mitic became one of the most beloved film stars of Eastern Europe as an Indian rebel in several Defa Westerns. In Unter Geiern/Among Vultures, the experienced trapper Old Surehand and Winnetou investigate the murders of a frontier mother and daughter in Llano Estacado, a border area to New Mexico and Texas. The surviving husband, farmer Baumann, believes that his wife and daughter were murdered by Indians of the Shoshone tribe, but Old Surehand suspects that it is the work of a gang of bandits known as The Vultures, who disguise themselves as Indians while committing their crimes. When attractive Annie (Elke Sommer), who was to deliver precious diamonds to Baumann, is kidnapped by the Vultures, Winnetou, Old Surehand and their friend Old Wabble pursue the gang. Meanwhile, the young Martin Baumann (Götz George) tries to free Annie.

 

The first Karl May Western, Der Schatz im Silbersee/Treasure of Silver Lake (Harald Reinl, 1962) had been the most successful German film of the 1962/1963 season. Director Harald Reinl and producer Horst Wendlandt then created a series of Euro-Westerns, all based on the novels by Karl May. Their next film, Winnetou - 1. Teil/Apache Gold (Harald Reinl, 1963) was in fact a prequel to Der Schatz im Silbersee which introduced Apache chief Winnetou and told how he met Old Shatterhand. The script of Unter Geiern combines elements from two different Karl May novels, but Old Surehand appears in neither of them. The reason for this is quite prosaic: originally Lex Barker, who had played Old Shatterhand in the first two films, would appear once again as Old Shatterhand alongside Pierre Brice, in a film called Winnetou und der Bärenjäger/Winnetou and the Bear Hunter, but Wendlandt thought Granger was a big catch and asked his screenwriters to rework the entire script and write Granger/Old Surehand into it. Most critics decided that Unter Geiern could not hold a candle to the earlier Karl May films. The chemistry between Pierre Brice and Stewart Granger did not quite match that of Brice and Lex Barker. At IMDb reviewer, Henri Sauvage, writes: "cinematography is occasionally breathtaking. (If possible, you should try to catch this in letterbox format, just for the gorgeous scenery.) The action sequences come off fairly well, too, and the bad guys are appropriately villainous." Scherpschutter in his review at the Spaghetti Western Database: "Loyal fans of the series often call this one of the better entries. I can only partially agree. The film was aimed at a slightly more mature audience than the previous movies. The slaughter of the Baumann family (although not shown) is quite shocking, and the shootout near the end between the Vultures and the settlers is remarkably violent. But the bulk of the movie is the usual heroic Karl May stuff, with Old Surehand put to a survival test by the Shoshones, and Winnetou leading the Indian braves in true cavalry style to the aid of the settlers when all seems lost. And then there’s Stewart Granger … Reportedly Granger was paid $ 75.000 for the part, which makes him the best-paid actor of the series, and he virtually directed his own scenes. He had completely different ideas about the movie than most other people on the set, and his approach led to a rather incongruous movie, with a dramatic storyline of a young man, Martin Baumann, seeking the murderers of his family members, and a lot of funny and would-be funny scenes – featuring Surehand - thrown in." Unter Geiern was a success in the German cinemas and was awarded the Goldene Leinwand (Golden Screen) for more than 3 million visitors in a year. The Karl May series was to be continued...

 

Sources: Scherpschutter (Spaghettiwestern.net), Spaghettiwestern.net, Wikipedia (English and German), and IMDb.

 

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

Ronoklanti theke uthhe ashaar

  

I am a Bangladeshi. By birth, by heart. I didnt realize the depth of love for my country before i left her. As unfortunate it is, I know my dreams of taking Bangladesh to a better place is as pointless as yours, because we never acted on it. Most of us never will. Like you, I talk about love for my country like a true hypocrite, who sheds tears every now and then, talks about dirty politics over tea party, talk about pride on their honest livinghoood, but failed to do anything significant to change the fate of our motherland.

 

It will be 16th December in a few hours. I wonder what do we talk about now.

The pride and glory of nine month long bloodshed, the sacrifice of 3million brave souls, or do we talk about their shattered dreams?

 

Yes, its easy to curse Pakistan for all they did..

yes, its easy to sing along the patriotic songs, glorifying the awesomeness of our country, but that doesnt change the fate your motherland. never did..

whats the meaning of all this if you cant bring the change, cant accept the new ideas, cant accept the reality to understand whats there to be changed.

whats the point of celebrating the 16th December, if you fail to take bribes, fail to stop corruption, using politics for your personal benefit.

whats the point if you cant take a stand?

when will we learn to blame it on ourselves?

 

`

 

Gone are the days of pride and glory.

its time for you to take a stand. your motherland awaits for your arrival..

  

(originally inspired by shaat shagorer majhi by Farrukh Ahmed.)

  

`

  

Oh, and the song, i know Alternative Rock is hard to digest for most of my Bangalee audience im trying to share my view with, but still, please give it a try. The pupose of linking the song is not meant to please you, but to share my views with you, something i cannot express in words..

A demon covering its true essence with different beautiful masks.

It ain't no joke I'd like to buy the world a toke

And teach the world to sing in perfect harmony

And teach the world to snuff the fires and the liars

Hey I know it's just a song but it's spice for the recipe

This is a love attack I know it went out but it's back.

It's just like any fad it retracts before impact

And just like fashion it's a passion

for the with it and hip

If you got the goods they'll come and buy it

just to stay in the clique

Chorus:

So don't delay act now supplies are running out

Allow if you're still alive six to eight years to arrive

And if you follow there may be a tomorrow

But if the offer is shun

you might as well be walkin' on the sun

Twenty-five years ago they spoke out and they broke out Of recession and

oppression and together they toked

And they folked out with guitars around a bonfire

Just singin' and clappin' man what the hell happened

Then some were spellbound some were hellbound

Some they fell down and some got back up and

Fought back 'gainst the melt down

And their kids were hippie chicks all hypocrites

Because fashion is smashin' the true meaning of it

(Chorus)

It ain't no joke when a mama's handkerchief is soaked

With her tears because her baby's life has been revoked

The bond is broke up so choke up

and focus on the close up

Mr. Wizard can't perform no godlike hocus-pocus

So don't sit back kick back

and watch the world get bushwhacked

News at 10:00 your neighborhood is under attack

Put away the crack before the crack puts you away

You need to be there

when your baby's old enough to relate

 

SmashMouth

British postcard. Photo: Essanay. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

 

American silent screen actress Myrtle Stedman (1885-1938) was known as 'the girl with the pearly eyes'. In 1911, Myrtle and her husband Marshall Stedman were signed by the Selig Polyscope Co. Myrtle was a leading lady in silent films of the 1910s and early 1920s for such companies as Essanay, Bosworth, and Pallas and later, she became a character actress.

 

Myrtle Stedman was born Myrtle Lincoln in Chicago, Illinois, in 1885, and was educated at a private finishing school there. Her musical talents developed quite early. At age 12, she already sang in the chorus of light operas and musical comedies. Her voice was cultivated in France. Her tutor was Marchesi, who was known as one of the finest instructors of voice culture in his country. In 1900, she married Marshall Stedman, a drama school conductor. She starred for a number of seasons in Isle of Spice and The Chocolate Soldier. She performed for a year at the Whitney Theater in Chicago and was a prima donna of the Chicago Grand Opera Company. She decided to abandon her music career altogether for the cinema. In 1911, Myrtle and Marshall Stedman were signed by the Selig Polyscope Co. Her first film was the short Western The Range Riders (Francis Boggs, Otis Turner, 1910), starring Tom Mix. Myrtle's first longer film was the melodrama The Two Orphans (Otis Turner, Francis Boggs, 1911), a three-reeler starring Kathlyn Williams. Myrtle was often directed or paired up with Marshall during those early years, but Myrtle was the one who stood out with filmgoers. 'The girl with the pearly eyes' was not only an adorably enchanting and enigmatic presence in a film drama, but her athletic abilities also complemented Westerns and action adventures. She moved to the Bosworth Company in 1914 and appeared in such noteworthy silents as The Valley of the Moon (Hobart Bosworth, 1914) starring Jack Conway, The Country Mouse (Hobart Bosworth, 1914), Jane (Frank Lloyd, 1915) with Charlotte Greenwood, Peer Gynt (Oscar Apfel, Raoul Walsh, 1915) starring Cyril Maude, and, most notably, the classic Hypocrites (1915), directed by pioneer filmmaker Lois Weber.

 

Myrtle Stedman increased her reputation as a fine actress with The American Beauty (William Desmond Taylor, 1916) for Pallas Pictures, As Men Love (E. Mason Hopper, 1917) with House Peters, In the Hollow of Her Hand (Charles Maigne, 1918) starring Alice Brady, and The Teeth of the Tiger (Chester Withey, 1919). Her son, Lincoln Stedman, made his debut as a juvenile player about this time. Following her rich roles in Reckless Youth (Ralph Ince, 1922), Flaming Youth (John Francis Dillon, 1923) starring Colleen Moore, and The Famous Mrs. Fair (Fred Niblo, 1923), which was considered one of her finest roles, her star began to fade. Her marriage also fell apart and in 1919 the pair divorced. As she regressed into support work, she was able to maintain, however, while others of her acting level fell completely by the waste side. In 1936, she was signed by Warner Brothers to play bit and extra roles. Myrtle suffered a heart attack in late 1937 and declined quickly. Her last release was Accidents Will Happen (William Clemens, 1938) with Ronald Reagan. Myrtle Stedman died in Hollywood in 1938 at age 52. She was interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California. Her ex-husband died in 1943 and her son Lincoln passed away in 1948.

 

Sources: Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

 

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

The short article says it all...

I sincerely hope that I do not offend anyone with this REALITY... and even if I do, I must remind everybody that the last time i checked, there was such a thing as "KALAYAAN SA PAMAMAMAHAYAG"... (those who don't understand that, kindly just translate it via google) I just want awareness in others... nothing more, nothing less...

 

Yes, you might say I have a morbid fascination for capturing life's realities on camera. Morbid, being the operative word because said realities are always anything but.

I do not wish to be the hypocrite because someone once pointed out that the cost of my camera can indeed feed an entire village..... (don't worry, we're friends now, this guy that said this...) but I'd like to think that I make use of my equipment to help in my own way, however small that may be, to jolt people into being aware of what's right under their noses...

Filipinos may be a strong and resilient lot but one must do what one can to better one's lives...

It's not so much that poverty in the Philippines is the main issue here.... nor is it something to expose to the whole world by posting pictures of it in Flickr with the intention of earning others' sympathy. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this particular aspect in our lives. The whole point is to reach out to all concerned, mainly our governing body, and tell them that this shouldn't even BE an issue......if they were doing their jobs right....

I am merely expressing a fact... a sad truth... an unfortunate REALITY, if you will... and if this is the only way I can contribute SOMETHING---ANYTHING.... then, I am more than willing to do it....

A lot of my family, friends and acquaintances practically begged me not to post this as it would bring unnecessary notice to what we so desperately wish to hide.... and why?? Why should I not post this??

I love this picture.. Many of you might not, but I do...

so,if you don't like it then tough...

You don't even have to look at it...

period.... end of story....

I sincerely hope, though, that it would be a start towards a better direction for future governing bodies in the country...

That's it... and that's ALL...

An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedic stage play by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. The action is set in London, in "the present", and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. "Sooner or later," Wilde notes, "we shall all have to pay for what we do." But he adds that, "No one should be entirely judged by their past." Together with The Importance of Being Earnest, it is often considered Wilde's dramatic masterpiece. After Earnest it is his most popularly produced play.[1]

  

Background

 

In the summer of 1893, Oscar Wilde began writing An Ideal Husband, and he completed it later that winter. His work began at Goring-on-Thames, after which he named the character Lord Goring, and concluded at St. James Place. He initially sent the completed play to the Garrick Theatre, where the manager rejected it, but it was soon accepted by the Haymarket Theatre, where Lewis Waller had temporarily taken control. Waller was an excellent actor and cast himself as Sir Robert Chiltern. The play gave the Haymarket the success it desperately needed.

 

After opening on 3 January 1895, it continued for 124 performances. In April of that year, Wilde was arrested for 'gross indecency' and his name was publicly taken off the play. On 6 April, soon after Wilde's arrest, the play moved to the Criterion Theatre where it ran from 13–27 April. The play was published in 1899, although Wilde was not listed as the author. This published version differs slightly from the performed play, for Wilde added many passages and cut others. Prominent additions included written stage directions and character descriptions. Wilde was a leader in the effort to make plays accessible to the reading public.

 

Themes

 

Many of the themes of An Ideal Husband were influenced by the situation Oscar Wilde found himself in during the early 1890s. Stressing the need to be forgiven of past sins, and the irrationality of ruining lives of great value to society because of people's hypocritical reactions to those sins, Wilde may have been speaking to his own situation, and his own fears regarding his affair (still secret).[2] Other themes include the position of women in society. In a climactic moment Gertrude Chiltern "learns her lesson" and repeats LORD GORING's advice "A man's life is of more value than a woman's." Often criticized by contemporary theatre analyzers as overt sexism, the idea being expressed in the monologue is that women, despite serving as the source of morality in Victorian era marriages, should be less judgemental of their husband's mistakes because of complexities surrounding the balance that husbands of that era had to keep between their domestic and their worldly obligations.[3][4] Further, the script plays against both sides of feminism/sexism as, for example, Lord Caversham, exclaims near the end that Mabel displays "a good deal of common sense" after concluding earlier that "Common sense is the privilege of our sex."

 

A third theme expresses anti-upper class sentiments. Lady Basildon, and Lady Markby are consistently portrayed as absurdly two-faced, saying one thing one moment, then turning around to say the exact opposite (to great comic effect) to someone else. The overall portrayal of the upper class in England displays an attitude of hypocrisy and strict observance of silly rules.[4]

 

Dramatis Personae

The Earl of Caversham, K.G.

Lord Goring, his son. His Christian name is Arthur.

Sir Robert Chiltern, Bart., Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs

Vicomte De Nanjac, Attaché at the French Embassy In London

Mr. Montford, secretary to Sir Robert

Mason, butler to Sir Robert Chiltern

Phipps, butler to Lord Goring

James, footman to the Chilterns

Harold, footman to the Chilterns

Lady Chiltern, wife to Sir Robert Chiltern

Lady Markby, a friend of the Chilterns'

The Countess of Basildon, a friend of the Chilterns'

Mrs. Marchmont, a friend of the Chilterns'

Miss Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert Chiltern's sister

Mrs. Cheveley, blackmailer, Lady Chiltern's former schoolmate

 

Plot

 

An Ideal Husband opens during a dinner party at the home of Sir Robert Chiltern in London's fashionable Grosvenor Square. Sir Robert, a prestigious member of the House of Commons, and his wife, Lady Chiltern, are hosting a gathering that includes his friend Lord Goring, a dandified bachelor and close friend to the Chilterns, his sister Mabel Chiltern, and other genteel guests. During the party, Mrs. Cheveley, an enemy of Lady Chiltern's from their school days, attempts to blackmail Sir Robert into supporting a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Apparently, Mrs. Cheveley's dead mentor and lover, the Austro-Hungarian Baron Arnheim, convinced the young Sir Robert many years ago to sell him a Cabinet secret, a secret that suggested he buy stocks in the Suez Canal three days before the British government announced its purchase. Sir Robert made his fortune with that illicit money, and Mrs. Cheveley has the letter to prove his crime. Fearing the ruin of both career and marriage, Sir Robert submits to her demands.

 

When Mrs. Cheveley pointedly informs Lady Chiltern of Sir Robert's change of heart regarding the canal scheme, the morally inflexible Lady Chiltern, unaware of both her husband's past and the blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert renege on his promise. For Lady Chiltern, their marriage is predicated on her having an "ideal husband"—that is, a model spouse in both private and public life that she can worship: thus Sir Robert must remain unimpeachable in all his decisions. Sir Robert complies with the lady's wishes and apparently seals his doom. Also toward the end of Act I, Mabel and Lord Goring come upon a diamond brooch that Lord Goring gave someone many years ago. Goring takes the brooch and asks that Mabel inform him if anyone comes to retrieve it.

 

In the second act, which also takes place at Sir Robert's house, Lord Goring urges Sir Robert to fight Mrs. Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. He also reveals that he and Mrs. Cheveley were formerly engaged. After finishing his conversation with Sir Robert, Goring engages in flirtatious banter with Mabel. He also takes Lady Chiltern aside and obliquely urges her to be less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Once Goring leaves, Mrs. Cheveley appears, unexpected, in search of a brooch she lost the previous evening. Incensed at Sir Robert's reneging on his promise, she ultimately exposes Sir Robert to his wife once they are both in the room. Unable to accept a Sir Robert now unmasked, Lady Chiltern then denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him.

 

In the third act, set in Lord Goring's home, Goring receives a pink letter from Lady Chiltern asking for his help, a letter that might be read as a compromising love note. Just as Goring receives this note, however, his father, Lord Caversham, drops in and demands to know when his son will marry. A visit from Sir Robert, who seeks further counsel from Goring, follows. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cheveley arrives unexpectedly and, misrecognized by the butler as the woman Goring awaits, is ushered into Lord Goring's drawing room. While she waits, she finds Lady Chiltern's letter. Ultimately, Sir Robert discovers Mrs. Cheveley in the drawing room and, convinced of an affair between these two former lovers, angrily storms out of the house.

 

When she and Lord Goring confront each other, Mrs. Cheveley makes a proposal. Claiming to still love Goring from their early days of courtship, she offers to exchange Sir Robert's letter for her old beau's hand in marriage. Lord Goring declines, accusing her of defiling love by reducing courtship to a vulgar transaction and ruining the Chilterns' marriage. He then springs his trap. Removing the diamond brooch from his desk drawer, he binds it to Cheveley's wrist with a hidden device. Goring then reveals how the item came into her possession. Apparently Mrs. Cheveley stole it from his cousin, Mary Berkshire, years ago. To avoid arrest, Cheveley must trade the incriminating letter for her release from the bejewelled handcuff. After Goring obtains and burns the letter, however, Mrs. Cheveley steals Lady Chiltern's note from his desk. Vengefully she plans to send it to Sir Robert misconstrued as a love letter addressed to the dandified lord. Mrs. Cheveley exits the house in triumph.

 

The final act, which returns to Grosvenor Square, resolves the many plot complications sketched above with a decidedly happy ending. Lord Goring proposes to and is accepted by Mabel. Lord Caversham informs his son that Sir Robert has denounced the Argentine canal scheme before the House. Lady Chiltern then appears, and Lord Goring informs her that Sir Robert's letter has been destroyed but that Mrs. Cheveley has stolen her letter and plans to use it to destroy her marriage. At that moment, Sir Robert enters while reading Lady Chiltern's letter, but as the letter does not have the name of the addressee, he assumes it is meant for him, and reads it as a letter of forgiveness. The two reconcile. Lady Chiltern initially agrees to support Sir Robert's decision to renounce his career in politics, but Lord Goring dissuades her from allowing her husband to resign. When Sir Robert refuses Lord Goring his sister's hand in marriage, still believing he has taken up with Mrs. Cheveley, Lady Chiltern is forced to explain last night's events and the true nature of the letter. Sir Robert relents, and Lord Goring and Mabel are permitted to wed.

 

Reception

 

The play proved extremely popular in its original run, lasting over a hundred performances. Critics also lauded Wilde's balance of a multitude of theatrical elements within the play. George Bernard Shaw praised the play saying "Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough Playwright. He plays with everything; with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre."[2]

 

Selected Production History

 

An Ideal Husband was originally produced by Lewis Waller, premiering on the 3rd of January, 1895 in Haymarket Theatre. The run lasted 124 performances. The original cast of the play was:[5]

 

Mr. Alfred Bishop, THE EARL OF CAVERSHAM, VISCOUNT GORING, Mr. Charles H. Hawtrey, SIR ROBERT CHILTERN, Mr. Lewis Waller, VICOMTE DE NANJAC, Mr. Cosmo Stuart, MR. MONTFORD, Mr. Harry Stanford, PHIPPS, Mr. C. H. Brookfield, MASON, Mr. H. Deane, JAMES, Mr. Charles Meyrick, HAROLD, Mr. Goodhart, LADY CHILTERN, Miss Julia Neilson, LADY MARKBY, Miss Fanny Brough, COUNTESS OF BASILDON, Miss Vane Featherston, MRS. MARCHMONT, Miss Helen Forsyth, MISS MABEL CHILTERN, Miss Maud Millet, and MRS. CHEVELEY, Miss Florence West.

 

Oscar Wilde was arrested for "gross indecency" (homosexuality) during the run of the production. At the trial the actors involved in the production testified as witnesses against him. The production continued but credit for authorship was taken away from Wilde.[2]

 

An Ideal Husband was revived for a Broadway production featuring the Broadway debut of film stars Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray. Denison and Gray had earlier starred in a West End Theatre revival that had proved extremely popular for English audiences.[6]

 

Film, television and radio adaptations

 

1935 film

Main article: An Ideal Husband (1935 film)

 

A 1935 German film directed by Herbert Selpin and starring Brigitte Helm and Sybille Schmitz.

 

1947 film

 

Main article: An Ideal Husband (1947 film)

 

A lavish 1947 adaptation was produced by London Films and starred Paulette Goddard, Michael Wilding and Diana Wynyard

 

1998 film[edit]

 

Main article: An Ideal Husband (1998 film)

 

It was adapted for the screen in 1998. It starred James Wilby and Jonathan Firth

 

1999 film

 

Main article: An Ideal Husband (1999 film)

 

It was adapted once more for the screen in 1999. It starred Julianne Moore, Minnie Driver, Jeremy Northam, Cate Blanchett and Rupert Everett. The film adapts the play to some measure, the most significant departure being that the device of the diamond broach/bracelet is deleted, and instead Lord Goring defeats Mrs. Cheavley by making a wager with her: if Sir Robert capitulates and supports the scheme in his speech to the House of Commons, Goring will marry her, but if he sticks to his morals and denounces the scheme, she will give up the letter and leave England.

 

Television and radio

 

The BBC produced a version which was broadcast in 1969 as part of their Play of the Month series. It stars Jeremy Brett and Margaret Leighton and was directed by Rudolph Cartier. It is available on DVD as part of The Oscar Wilde Collection box-set.

 

BBC Radio 3 broadcast a full production in 2007 directed by David Timson and starring Alex Jennings, Emma Fielding, Jasper Britton, Janet McTeer and Geoffrey Palmer. This production was re-broadcast on Valentine's Day 2010.

 

L.A. Theatre Works produced an audio adaptation of the play starring Jacqueline Bisset, Rosalind Ayres, Martin Jarvis, Miriam Margolyes, Alfred Molina, Yeardley Smith and Robert Machray. It is available as a CD set, ISBN 1-58081-215-5.

 

Quotes

LORD GORING: Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

  

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: All sins except a sin against itself, love should forgive.

  

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all?

  

LORD GORING: Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

  

MRS. CHEVELEY: Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

  

PHIPPS: I will speak to the florist, my lord. She has had a loss in her family lately, which perhaps accounts for the lack of triviality your lordship complains of in the buttonhole.

 

LORD GORING: Extraordinary thing about the lower classes in England - they are always losing their relations.

PHIPPS: Yes, my lord! They are extremely fortunate in that respect.

 

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

This Bit comes from when the Americans were filming their version of the play “an Ideal Husband”

A couple of newspapers picked up on it at the time.

The film was shot on several sites, including an Italian waterfront.

At the end of the week it was their custom to have a “wrap” party celebrating the end of the week’s shoot.

The ball scene had been filmed that day and most of the cast attended the get-together still in costume. This included 3 of the minor actresses who had bonded during the filming.

After the revelry was dying out, these 3 decided to go it alone, leaving the stage room to hit several of the bars and a casino located on the riverfront. Making a decidedly poor decision, they opted to wear the elegant gowns and shimmering jewelry they had donned for the stylish ball act( much of which was later cut from thye movie, including their roles) .

Needless to say the young trio of pretty actresses garnered a considerable amount of male attention as they made their rounds. They left their last stop in the wee early hours of the morning only to discover they taxi they had paid to wait for them had vanished. A dapper young man with a foreign accent that made the girls swoon came upon the young ladies, and after they explained their predicament, offered some aid. He invited them to a back room off a nearby alley to wait while he brought his private car around, suggesting that it would be a place of refuge to stay warm from the cool ocean air( only one of the actresses had a wrap).

About ten minutes after he had left them a masked man burst in brandishing a wicked looking blade. He demanded their ”jools” and “perses” than after receiving their valuables, had them strip down to their silky undergarments. He then bundled the lot and ran off. They could hear tires screeching off in the night. The dapper male never returned, and it was hours before their pitiful cries of help were heard by a passing vagrant, who after making sure they had nothing more of value, disappeared, than must have had a change of heart, for he summoned a patrolman to help them.

Two of the ladies had been wearing prop gowns and rhinestones, but the third, a minor relative of the New York Cabot family, had been waering her own designer gown(worth 2000 pounds) and her family diamonds( worth 55000 pounds sterling) So it was generally regarded that the ladies were scammed by a couple of professionals who had been out on the prowl for such prey, knew where to find it, and how to acquire her valuables.

Then, two weeks later another young lady, again unescorted, had decided to do a tour of the same riverfront establishments. She did so after attending a relatives wedding reception. She had met a rather handsome man while out drinking, and the pair had set off for a second bar when a masked man mugged them of their valuables. Including a 30000 lira ring she had worn, and 10000 Lira of other jewellery. Her friend dropped her off at the bar and went for help, disappearing in the night. Her description of the pair matched the ones who had robbed the Actresses.

 

Courtesy of Chatwick University Archives

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No Part of this can reprinted, duplicated, or copied be without the express written permission and approval of Chatwick University.

 

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What is atheism?

Modern atheists claim that atheism is the non-belief in ALL deities. They also say that atheism is not a belief - and does not require any beliefs. Some even say that atheism is similar to something like not being a stamp collector or not engaging in some other hobby.

However....

Is it rational or feasible to reject ALL deities?

Rejecting all deities seems fine at first glance. However, if we bother to consider what it really means, we soon realise that rejecting ALMOST ALL deities may be feasible - BUT not every deity, because there is one particular exception..

 

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence realises that not all deities (gods) are the same. They can’t all be lumped together. There is one particular deity that is fundamentally different from all the others. There is one particular deity that it is not credible for any rational person to reject or dismiss. This may seem like a bold statement but, as we will see, it is not logically possible to reject the deity (God) that is regarded as the ‘Creator’ or supernatural, first cause of the universe.

 

Why?

 

Because, if you reject the supernatural, first cause, you have no option but to transfer all the creative powers and godlike attributes of the supernatural, first cause to nature or the natural/material realm. This means you effectively deify nature.

So by attempting to eliminate one deity - a supernatural, first cause (God) - you simply create another deity with similar, godlike powers (such as Mother Nature or Mother Earth) to replace it.

Therefore, no rational person can honestly reject belief in a creator god. The only question is; which god best fits the bill of being the creator of the universe?

Is it the supernatural, first cause monotheists call ‘God’- or a natural, first cause - a material god of nature?

 

So we are left with the option of choosing which creator god (first cause) to believe in? Either - a supernatural, first cause (God) - or a natural, first cause (a material, pagan style god)? We do not have the choice or luxury of believing in neither, there is no other option. This reveals the atheist claim that it is rational, feasible or logical to reject ALL deities as completely bogus.

 

A most crucial question in this matter is ….

Why is there something rather than nothing?

It seems the most logical viewpoint would be the idea of eternal nothingness – i.e. total non- existence - that there is not, never was and never has been, the existence of anything. However, it is not that easy, we don’t have that option, because something definitely does exist and thus we are forced to face the question of why and how something exists here and now, rather than an eternal, infinite nothingness?

We are left with only two options for where the ‘something’ we know as the material universe came from? - It either came from:

1) An eternally, pre-existing nothingness.

OR

2) An eternally, pre-existing something.

The first option of something tangible/material arising of its own volition from absolute and complete nothingness is not logically credible. It is safe to say it is a certain impossibility. There is no rational argument that can be made for such a scenario. Which means that we are forced to accept the second option (an eternally pre-existing something) as the only credible possibility for the origin of everything that now exists.

If the ‘something’ that eternally pre-existed the material universe has always existed, it must be entirely self-sufficient in its ability to exist. Which means it is eternally self-existent, i.e. not dependent on anything else, other than itself, for its origin or its continued existence. It always has, and always will exist.

In other words, it is non-contingent and completely independent and autonomous. Nothing can effect, cause or prevent its existence in any way.

It also has to be the first cause of everything else that exists. Without it nothing else could exist.

 

What does science tell us?

Science tells us that all material entities are regulated by natural laws - natural laws are based on the properties of natural/material things. Natural laws allow scientists to make predictions concerning the behaviour of all natural entities. It is obvious that natural things can never exceed the limits of their own inherent properties which natural laws describe. One natural law, that is actually the founding principle behind all scientific research, is the Law of Cause and Effect. It tells us that every natural effect/entity has to have a sufficient or adequate cause. A causeless, natural entity is impossible according to science, science cannot entertain such a prospect, because scientific research is based on looking for a sufficient cause or causes of EVERY natural occurrence. Scientists expect every natural occurrence to be contingent - to be adequately caused. Science cannot look for non-causes. That would be a nonsense. The dilemma here for atheists is that the first cause of everything had to be uncaused, it had to be eternally self-existent, it could not be contingent, it could not be subject to the limits of any natural laws, it had to be entirely autonomous and self-sufficient. It could not rely on causes or anything else for its existence, it had to contain within itself everything it required to exist and furthermore to bring everything else that exists into existence.

 

Atheism is not just a rejection of a Supernatural First Cause, it is also the BELIEF (by default) in the only other option ... a NATURAL first cause.

Atheists may call their natural, first cause - a big bang, a quantum fluctuation of nothing, a singularity, a cyclical universe, a self-creating universe, string theory, or any other fantastical invention.

It makes no difference, because none of them can be UNCAUSED and none of them are ADEQUATE as a first cause of everything that exists in the universe. They are all contingent and all inferior to the end result, and consequently ALL are disqualified as possible, first causes by the Law of Cause and Effect.

 

So atheists simply transfer the creative powers, properties and qualities, that theists attribute to a Supernatural, First Cause (God), to a natural entity. In other words, they effectively deify matter/energy and credit matter/energy with godlike, creative powers. Thus atheism is simply a revamped version of the discredited beliefs of pagan naturalism.

Remember the pagan belief in the all powerful Sun god (Ra), or the Moon god, Mother Nature etc.? EXACTLY!

 

“Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.” — Atheist Carl Sagan

 

A natural first cause is an impossibility, there is no such thing as an UNCAUSED NATURAL event or entity.

That is not my opinion, it is the verdict of science, which is founded on the principle that every natural effect/event/entity requires an adequate cause. There is no exception to that rule. Which means any scenario atheists propose as a natural, first cause cannot be regarded as scientific. They are all unscientific nonsense.

People may be surprised to hear that, because we are conditioned by the popular media and incessant, atheist hype to believe that such proposed, natural causes are a scientific version of origins. It is complete hogwash, they all violate scientific principles without exception, and have got nothing to do with science. The public is being cynically conned and manipulated. All atheist, naturalistic, origin scenarios are based purely on ideology and the pagan religion of naturalism, and that - behind the mask - is the true nature of atheism.

 

Pagan naturalism was soundly debunked by the onset of modern science and the understanding that all natural occurrences are contingent - that all natural occurrences MUST have an adequate cause and are subject to, and limited by, natural laws based on the inherent properties of matter/energy. The idea that nature/material things are some sort of power unto themselves - that they are all powerful, autonomous, non-contingent entities which can behave with impunity unrestricted by natural laws etc., that things can just happen the due to the vagaries of Mother Nature etc. was demonstrated by science to be nonsense. Regardless of this, modern atheists are intent on reviving pagan naturalism in a different guise. We have to wonder why?

 

The law of cause and effect is the basis of science. If you deny it, you step outside of science into the realm of metaphysics or magic. That is why atheist naturalism (which credits nature/matter/energy with autonomous powers, unfettered by the restraints and limitations of the law of cause and effect and other natural laws, which are intrinsic to nature) is really a religion. Even worse, it is not a rational religion, it is one which defies logic, science and reason.

 

The law of cause and effect (which is the fundamental basis of the scientific method) tells us that EVERY natural effect/event/entity has to have an adequate cause. The material universe as a whole is no exception. It had to have a beginning and a cause - it is a contingent thing, it cannot exist without causes. Therefore, it cannot possibly be UNCAUSED. It had to have a sufficient cause to bring it into existence). That is the verdict of science. Science can only look for adequate causes, not non-causes. That is the fundamental principle behind all scientific enquiry. Whereas, if we go back far enough, the very first cause of everything material had to be UNCAUSED (i.e. non-contingent and thus non-material) because it is the FIRST cause. No other cause could have preceded it. If another cause preceded it - it would not be the first cause, it would be only a secondary cause and not FIRST. So the first cause of the material realm couldn't be a natural, contingent entity. That would violate the law of cause and effect. Hence for anyone to propose that the first cause could be a natural thing is illogical, unscientific nonsense.

 

What about the idea that our knowledge is limited, that we cannot know what took place at the beginning of the universe, we cannot know what laws existed? And therefore to propose a supernatural, first cause (God) as the Creator is just a desperate or lazy way of filling a gap in our knowledge? This is the so-called God of the gaps argument.

 

If we trust science, we cannot propose a natural, first cause of the universe as a logical or scientific possibility. We do know that for certain. So that is not a gap in knowledge.

Our present knowledge is sufficient to rule out a natural, first cause of the universe as impossible according to well established, scientific principles.

The law of cause and effect makes scientific research possible. It is only possible because we trust the scientific principle that we can expect to find an adequate cause or causes for EVERY natural occurrence. If we claim we don't know whether the universe had an adequate cause or that a natural first cause is possible, we are ignoring science and stepping outside of science into fantasy. That is ALL we need to know, in order to conclude that the atheist paradigm is fatally flawed.

 

The law of cause and effect is exactly that which, as the basic founding principle of modern science, demolished all pagan, naturalist religions, it demolished belief in the autonomous, creative powers of material things. Atheists apparently want to resurrect that belief.

What is science?

Science is: 'knowledge' through seeking and discovering causes. If anyone claims a natural event happened without an adequate cause - they are anti-science.

 

Therefore, to say "we don't know" what laws existed at the origin of the material universe or that the universe may have always existed, as some atheists do, is utter nonsense. The law of cause and effect pertains to matter/energy and ALL natural occurrences - wherever they may be.

All natural events whether inside or outside of the universe are governed by the law of cause and effect. Just like gravity (which is an inherent property of matter), so the principle of causality is an inherent property of everything in the natural world. . Everything ... means all natural entities, events and effects. All natural things, by their very nature, are contingent, that is a fact, and they can't be anything else.

They can never act independently of causes, to say they can is to invoke magic, it is definitely not science.

 

That then, is our understanding of science, it is not just an opinion or assumption. It is the very basis of the scientific method that we can expect to find an adequate cause of every natural occurrence. To say that there may be some natural occurrences that are not subject to the law of cause and effect is to dispute the scientific method. So atheism has no valid, scientific argument, it is just pie-in-the-sky fantasy.

 

Is it possible to know the attributes (or character) of God - the Supernatural, First Cause?

 

The evidence that a natural, first cause is IMPOSSIBLE (because it violates natural laws) should be sufficient for any rational person to conclude that the first cause could not be a natural entity, and therefore has to be supernatural. Furthermore, the first cause HAS to be adequate for the effect.

If an effect of the first cause is the universe, then that cause has to embody the potential and power to produce everything that exists in the universe. Nothing in the universe can be superior to that which ultimately caused the universe.

 

AN EFFECT CANNOT BE GREATER THAN ITS CAUSE.

 

Therefore - if there is life in the universe - the first cause or the universe MUST have life.

If there is intelligence in the universe - the first cause MUST have intelligence.

If there is consciousness in the universe - the first cause MUST be conscious.

If there is law in the universe - the first cause MUST be a lawmaker.

If there are morals in the universe - the first cause MUST be moral.

If there is justice in the universe - the first cause MUST be just.

If there is love in the universe - the first cause MUST be loving.

And so on ...

All the powers, properties and qualities that exist in the universe were created by the first cause, so the first cause must possess the ability to create those attributes. None of those attributes can be greater in any respect than the attributes possessed by that which created them. There is no conceivable natural, origins scenario that is adequate to account for every quality that exist in the universe. Which shows that the so-called big bang, singularity or any other proposed, natural, origins scenario is not possible as a first cause.

 

The Bible says we were made in the image of a Creator God who is the first cause of everything material, including us. The Bible thus reveals and confirms the SCIENTIFIC principle that an effect cannot be greater than its cause. We cannot have any properties or powers that are superior to that which caused the universe, we have inherited all our attributes from the first cause and are therefore made in the image of that cause (the Creator God, as described in the Bible).

 

1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

 

2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

 

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

Psalm 14King James Version (KJV)

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Atheism revealed as false - why God MUST exist.

www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/18927764022

 

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"I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism"

"If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God"

Lord William Kelvin.

Noted for his theoretical work on thermodynamics, the concept of absolute zero and the Kelvin temperature scale.

 

The Law of Cause and Effect is a fundamental principle of the scientific method. Science literally means 'knowledge'. Knowledge about the natural world is gained through seeking adequate causes for every natural occurrence. An uncaused, natural ocurrence, is a completely, unscientific notion.

Concerning the Law of Cause and Effect, one of the world's greatest scientists, Dr. Albert Einstein wrote: “All natural science is based on the hypothesis of the complete causal connection of all events”

Albert Einstein. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Hebrew University and Princeton University Press p.183

 

FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE

The Law of Cause and Effect. Dominant Principle of Classical Physics. David L. Bergman and Glen C. Collins

www.thewarfareismental.net/b/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/b...

 

"The Big Bang's Failed Predictions and Failures to Predict: (Updated Aug 3, 2017.) As documented below, trust in the big bang's predictive ability has been misplaced when compared to the actual astronomical observations that were made, in large part, in hopes of affirming the theory."

kgov.com/big-bang-predictions

________________________________________________

 

IS NATURE A GOD?

 

Is nature a god?

Apparently, atheists think so.

Atheists believe that nature is the first cause (creator) of everything, including itself.

 

Atheists believe that nature created itself from nothing ....

‘A Universe from Nothing’ Lawrence Krauss.

“The universe can and will create itself from nothing” Stephen Hawking.

They believe that (Mother) nature has all the creative powers and abilities that monotheistic religions attribute to a creator God.

 

Just how credible is the atheist belief in nature as a godlike entity?

AND - Do atheists have any logical, scientific or rational argument to support the belief that nature has such incredible, creative powers?

The answer to that is NO!

Atheist's religious-like devotion to naturalism is a completely blind faith. It is a faith that cannot be supported by any rational argument because it contradicts logic and scientific laws, as explained below:

 

Something or nothing?

There are only two alternatives, something or nothing. Existence or non-existence?

Existence is a fact!

We know something exists (the physical universe),

but why?

Two questions arise …why is there something rather than nothing?

And where did that something come from?

 

Obviously, something cannot arise from nothing, no sane person would entertain such an impossible concept. However, an incredible fantasy that the universe created itself from nothing, is being proposed by some, high profile atheists, and presented to the public as though it is science. A sort of ‘theory of everything’ that purports to eliminate a creator. For example, the campaigning, militant atheist Lawrence Krauss has written a book which claims the universe can come from nothing, ‘A Universe from Nothing’.

Anyone who is silly enough to spend money on a book which makes such a wild, impossible claim, soon realises that Krauss’s ‘nothing’ is not nothing at all, but an exercise in ‘smoke and mirrors’. His ‘nothing’ involves the pre-existence of certain, natural laws and quantum effects. That is certainly not 'nothing'. And his book, with the deceptive title, simply kicks the problem of - why there is something rather than nothing? into the long grass.

 

A well, publicised example of the universe allegedly being able to arise from nothing was one presented by Professor Stephen Hawking, and summed up in a single sentence:

“Because there is a law, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”

 

It is not intelligent, sensible or scientific to believe that everything created itself from nothing.

In a state of infinite and eternal nothingness, nothing exists and nothing happens - EVER.

Nothing means absolutely ‘nothing’. Nothing tangible and no physical laws, no information, not even abstract things, like mathematics. If nothing exists there can be no numbers or anything based on numbers.

 

Furthermore, you don’t need to be a genius, or a scientist, to understand that something CANNOT create itself.

Put simply, it is self-evident that - to create itself, a thing would have to pre-exist its own creation to carry out the act of creating itself. In which case, it already exists.

And, if anything at all exists, i.e. in this example ‘gravity’, it cannot be called 'nothing'.

Furthermore, ‘gravity’ cannot be a creative agent, it is merely an inherent property of matter – it is obvious that a property of something cannot create that which it is a property of. And also, How can something pre-exist that which it is a property of?

Thus, we are obliged to conclude that nonsense remains nonsense, even when presented by highly regarded scientists.

“Fallacies remain fallacies, even when they become fashionable.” GK Chesterton.

 

Such nonsensical propositions are vain attempts to undermine the well, established, law of cause and effect, which is fatal to atheist ideology.

Incredibly, Hawking's so-called replacement for God completely ignores this law of cause and effect, which applies to ALL temporal (natural) entities, without exception.

Therefore, Stephen Hawking's natural, 'theory of everything' which he summed up in a single sentence can, similarly, be debunked in a single sentence:

Because there is a law of cause and effect, the universe can't and won't create itself from nothing.

 

Religion?

Once we admit the obvious fact that the universe cannot arise of its own accord from nothing (nothing will remain nothing forever), the only alternative is that ‘something’ has always existed – an infinite ‘something’. For anything to happen, such as the origin of the universe, the infinite something, cannot just exist in a state of eternal, passive inactivity, it must be capable of positive activity.

If we examine the characteristics, powers, qualities and attributes which exist now, we must conclude that the ‘something’, that has always existed, must have amazing (godlike) powers to be able to produce all the wonderful qualities we see in the universe, including: information, natural laws, life, intelligence, consciousness, etc.

This means we need to believe in some sort of ‘godlike entity’. The only remaining question is - which god?

Is the godlike entity a creator, or simply nature or natural forces as atheists claim? Seeking an answer to that question is the essential role of religion, which essentially utilises logic and reason, rather than just relying on blind faith.

 

Why God MUST exist ...

There are only two states of being (existence) – temporal and infinite. That. which has a beginning, is ‘temporal’. That which has no beginning is ‘infinite’.

Everything that exists must be one or the other.

The temporal (unlike the infinite) is not autonomous or non-contingent, it essentially relies on something else for its beginning (its cause) and its continued existence.

The universe and all natural things are temporal. Hence, they ALL require a cause or causes.

They could NOT exist without a cause to bring them into being. This is a FACT accepted by science, and enshrined in the Law of Cause and Effect.

The Law of Cause and Effect tells us that every, natural effect requires a cause. And that - an effect cannot be greater than its cause/s.

This is a fundamental principle, essential to the scientific method.

“All natural science is based on the hypothesis of the complete causal connection of all events” Dr Albert Einstein. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Hebrew University and Princeton University Press p.183

No temporal effect can be greater than (superior to) the sum-total of its cause or causes

It is obvious that - something cannot give what it doesn’t possess.

A temporal entity can be a subsidiary cause of another temporal entity, but cannot be the initial (first) cause of the entire, temporal realm - which includes ALL natural effects and entities.

 

Consider this simple chain of causes and effects:

A causes B

B causes C

C causes D

D causes E

‘A, B, C & D’ are all causes and may all look similar, but they are not, there is an enormous and crucial difference between them. Causes B, C & D are fundamentally different from cause A.

Why?

Because A is the very first cause and thus had no previous cause. It exists without a cause. It doesn’t rely on anything else for its existence, it is completely independent of causes - while B, C & D would not exist without A. They are entirely dependent on A.

Causes; B, C & D are also effects, whereas A is not an effect, only a cause.

So, we can say that the first cause ‘A’ is both self-existent and necessary. It is necessary because the rest of the chain of causes and effects could not exist without it.

We also must say that the subsequent causes and effects B, C, D and E are all contingent. That is; they are not self-existent, they all depend entirely on other causes to exist. We can also say that A is eternally self-existent, i.e. it has always existed, it had no beginning.

Why?

Because if A came into being at some point, there must have been something other than itself that brought it into being … which would mean A was not the first cause (A could not create A) … the something that brought A into being would be the first cause. In which case, A would be contingent and no different from B, C, D & E. We can also say that A is adequate to produce all the properties of B, C, D & E.

Why?

Well, in the case of E, we can see that it relies entirely on D for its existence. E can in no way be superior to D, because D had to contain within itself everything necessary to produce E.

The same applies to D, it cannot be superior to C. Furthermore, neither E or D can be superior to C, because both rely on C for their existence, and C had to contain everything necessary to produce D & E.

Likewise, with B, which is wholly responsible for the existence of C, D & E.

As they all depend on A for their existence and all their properties, abilities and potentials, none can be superior to A, whether singly or combined. A had to contain everything necessary to produce B, C, D & E including all their properties, abilities and potentials.

Thus, we deduce that; nothing in the universe can be superior in any way to the very first cause of the universe, because the whole universe, and all material things that exist, depend entirely on the abilities and properties of the first cause to produce them.

Conclusion …

A first cause must be uncaused, must have always existed, and cannot be in any way inferior to all subsequent causes and effects. In other words, the first cause of the universe must be eternally, self-existent and omnipotent (greater than everything that exists). No natural entity can have those attributes, that is why a Supernatural, Creator God MUST exist.

 

Entropy

The initial (first) cause of the temporal realm had to be something non-temporal (uncaused), i.e. something infinite.

The word ‘temporal’ is derived from tempus, Latin for time. - All temporal things are subject to time - and, as well as having a beginning in time, natural things can also expect to naturally degenerate, with the passage of time, towards a decline in function, order and existence. The material universe is slowly in decline and dying.

The natural realm is not just temporal, but also temporary (finite). Science acknowledges this with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (law of entropy).

As all natural things are temporal, we know that the initial (first), infinite cause of everything temporal cannot be a natural agent or entity.

The infinite, first cause of everything natural can also be regarded as ‘supernatural’, in the sense that it is not subject to natural laws that are intrinsic only to natural things, which it caused.

This fact is verified by science, in the First Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that there is no ‘natural’ means by which matter/energy can be created.

However, as the first cause existed before the natural realm (which is subject to natural laws, without exception), the issue of the first cause being exempt from natural laws (supernatural) is not something extraordinary or magical. It is the original and normal default state of the infinite.

If the material universe was infinite, entropy wouldn’t exist. Entropy is a characteristic only of natural entities.

The infinite cannot be subject to entropy, it does not deteriorate, it remains the same forever.

Entropy can apply only to temporal, natural entities.

Therefore, we know that the material universe, as a temporal entity, had to have a beginning and, being subject to entropy, will have an end.

That which existed before the universe, as an original cause of everything material, had to be infinite, because you cannot have an infinite chain of temporal (material) events. The temporal can only exist if it is sustained by the infinite.

As all natural entities are temporal, the (infinite) first cause could not possibly be a natural entity.

So, the Second Law of Thermodynamics supports and confirms the only logical conclusion we can reach from the Law of Cause and Effect, that a natural, first cause is impossible, according to science.

This is fatal to the atheist ideology of naturalism because it means there is no alternative to an infinite, supernatural, first cause (a Creator God).

The Bible explains that the universe was created perfect, without the effects of entropy such as decay, corruption and degeneration. It was the sin of humankind that corrupted the physical creation, resulting in physical death and universal entropy ...

Scripture: Romans 8:18–25

"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

 

Can there be multiple infinite, first causes? It is evident that there can be only one ‘infinite’ entity. If, for example, there are two infinite entities, neither could have its own, unique properties.

Why?

Because, unless they possessed identical properties, neither would be infinite. However, if they both possessed the very same properties, there would be no distinction between them, they would be identical and thus a single entity.

To put it another way …

God, as an infinite being, can only be a single entity, if He was not, and there was another infinite being, the properties which were pertinent to the other infinite being would be a limitation on His infinite character, and vice versa. So, neither entity would be infinite.

 

Creation - an act of will?

For an infinite cause to produce a temporal effect, such as the universe, an active character and an act of will must be involved. If the first cause was just a blind, mechanistic, natural thing, the universe would just be a continuation of the infinite nature of the first cause, not temporal (subject to time). For example, if the nature of water in infinite time was to be frozen, it would continue its frozen nature infinitely. There must be an active agent involved.

Time applies to the temporal, not the infinite. The infinite is omnipresent, it always was, it always is, and it always will be. It is the “Alpha and the Omega” as the Bible explains.

Jesus claimed to be omnipresent, when referred to Himself as “I am”. He was revealing that His spirit was the infinite, Divine spirit (the infinite, first cause of everything temporal).

 

Therefore, what we know about the characteristics of this supernatural entity, are as follows:

The single, supernatural entity:

1. Has always existed, has no cause, and is not subject to time. (is infinite, eternally self-existent, autonomous and non-contingent).

2. Is the first, original and deliberate cause of everything temporal (including the universe and every natural entity and effect).

3. Cannot be, in any way, inferior to any temporal or natural thing that exists.

In simple terms, this means that the single, infinite, supernatural, first cause of everything that exists in the temporal realm, has the capability of creating everything that exists, and cannot be inferior in any powers and attributes to anything that exists. This is the entity we recognise as the creator God.

The Bible tells us that we were made in the image of this God. This is logical because it is obvious, we cannot be superior to this God (an effect cannot be greater than its cause).

So, all our qualities and attributes must be possessed by the God in whose image we were made.

All our attributes come from the creator, or supernatural, first cause.

Remember, the logic that something cannot give what it doesn’t possess.

We have life. Thus, our creator must be alive.

We are intelligent. Thus, our creator must be intelligent.

We are conscious. Thus, our creator must be conscious.

We can love. Thus, our creator must love.

We understand justice. Thus, our creator must be just, etc. etc.

Therefore, we can logically discern the character and attributes of the creator from what is seen in His creation.

This FACT - that an effect cannot be greater than its cause/s, is recognised as a basic principle of science, and is it crucial to understanding the nature and attributes of the first cause.

It means nothing in the universe that exists, resulting from the action of the first cause, can be in anyway superior to the first cause. We must conclude that, at least, some attributes of the first cause can be seen in the universe.

 

Atheists frequently ask how can we possibly know what God is like?

The Bible (which is inspired by God) tells us many things about the character of God, but regardless of scripture, the universe itself gives us evidence of God’s nature.

For example: can the properties of human beings, in any way, be superior to the first cause?

To suggest they are, would be to violate the scientific principle that an effect cannot be greater than its cause.

All the powers, properties, qualities and attributes we observe in the universe, including all human qualities, must be also evident in the first cause.

If there is life in the universe, the first cause must have life.

If there is intelligence in the universe the first cause must have intelligence.

The same applies to consciousness, skill, design, purpose, justice, love, beauty, forgiveness, mercy etc.

Therefore, we must conclude that the eternally, self-existent, non-natural (supernatural), first cause, has life, is conscious, has intelligence and created the temporal as an act of will.

We know, from the law of cause and effect, that the first cause cannot possibly be any of the natural processes frequently proposed by atheists, such as: the so-called, big bang explosion, singularity or quantum mechanics.

They are all temporal, moreover, it is obvious that none of them are adequate to produce the effect. They are all grossly inferior to the result.

 

To sum up:

Using impeccable logic and reason, supported by our understanding of established, natural, physical laws (which apply to everything of a natural, temporal nature) acknowledged by science, humans have been able to discover the existence of a single, infinite, supernatural, living, intelligent, loving and just creator God.

God discovered, not invented!

Contrary to the narrative perpetuated by atheists, a personal, creator God is not a “human invention”, and He is certainly not a backward substitute for reason or science, but rather, He is an enlightened, human discovery, based on unimpeachable logic, reason, rationality, natural laws and scientific understanding.

 

The real character of atheism unmasked.

Is belief in God just superstitious, backward thinking, suitable only for the uneducated or scientific illiterates, as atheists would have us believe?

Stephen Hawking is widely acknowledged as the best brain in modern atheism, his natural explanation for the origin of the universe "Because there is a law, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing" was claimed by some, to have made belief in a creator God redundant. This is an atheistic, natural, creation story, summed up in a single sentence.

When we realise what atheists actually believe, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that it is atheism, not monotheism, which is a throwback to an unenlightened period in human history. It is a throwback to a time when Mother Nature or other natural or material, temporal entities were regarded by some as having autonomous, godlike, creative powers –

“the universe can and will create itself from nothing”

The discredited concept of worshipping nature itself (naturalism) or various material things (Sun, Moon, idols etc.) as some sort of autonomous, non-contingent, creative, or self-creative agents, used to be called paganism. Now it has been re-invented as 21st century atheism ...

The truth about modern atheism is it is just pagan naturalist beliefs repackaged.

“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.” - G.K. Chesterton.

 

God’s power.

Everything that exists is dependent on the original and ultimate cause (God) for its origin, continued existence and operation.

This means God affords everything all the power it needs to function. Everything operates only with God’s power. We couldn’t even lift a little finger, if the power to do so was not permitted by God.

 

What caused God?

Ever since the 18th century, atheist philosophers such as David Hume, Bertrand Russell etc. have attempted to debunk the logical evidence for a creator God, as the infinite, first cause and creator of the universe.

The basic premise of their argument is that a long chain of causes and effects, going back in time, did not necessarily require a beginning (no first cause, but rather an infinite regress). And that, if every effect requires an adequate cause (as the Law of Cause and Effect states), then God (a first cause) could no more exist without a cause, than anything else.

This latter point is summed up in the what many atheists regard as the killer question:

“What caused God then?”

This question wasn’t sensible in the 18th century, and is not sensible today, but incredibly, many atheists still think it is a good argument against the Law of Cause and Effect and continue to use it.

As explained previously, the Law of Cause and Effect applies to all temporal entities.

Temporal entities have a beginning, and therefore need a cause. They are all contingent and dependent on a cause or causes for their beginning and existence, without exception.

It is obvious to any sensible person that the very first cause, because it is FIRST, had nothing preceding it.

First means 'first', it doesn’t mean second or third. If we could go back far enough with a chain of causes and effects, however long the chain, at some stage we must reach an ultimate beginning, i.e. the cause which is first, having no previous cause. This first cause must have always existed with no beginning. It is essentially self-existent from an infinite past and for an infinite future. It must be completely autonomous and non-contingent, not relying on any cause or anything else for its existence. Not temporal, but infinite.

So, the answer to the question is that - God was not caused, only temporal entities (such as ALL natural things) essentially require a cause.

God is the eternally, self-existent, ultimate, non-contingent, supernatural, first. infinite cause of everything temporal.

As explained earlier, the first cause could not be a natural entity, it had to be supernatural, as ALL natural entities are temporal and contingent (they all require causes).

 

Is the atheist, infinite regress argument sensible?

This is the argument against the need for a first cause of the universe. The proposition is that; a long chain of natural causes and effects, going back in time, did not necessarily require a beginning (an infinite regress). This proposition is nonsensical.

Why?

It is self-evident that you cannot have a chain of temporal effects going backwards in time, forever. It is the inherent nature of all temporal things to have a beginning. Likewise, for a long chain of temporal causes and effects, there must be a beginning at some point in time. Contingent things do not become non-contingent, simply by being in a long chain.

Temporal + temporal can never equal infinite.

Moreover, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that everything physical is subject to entropy.

Therefore, it is an absurd notion that there could be a long chain of temporal elements in which, although every individual link in the chain requires a beginning, the complete chain does not. And, although every individual link in the chain is subject to the law of entropy, the chain as a whole is not, and is miraculously unaffected by the effects of entropy, throughout an infinite past, which would have caused its demise.

 

What about the idea that infinite regress is acceptable in maths?

Maths is a type of information - and information, like truth, is not purely physical.

It can require physical media to make it tangible, but while the physical media is always subject to entropy, information is not. 1+1 = 2 will always be true, it is unaffected by time, or even whether there are any humans left to do mathematical calculations.

Jesus said; Heaven and Earth may pass away, but my words will go on forever. Jesus is pointing out that truth and information are unaffected by entropy.

For example: historical truths, such as the fact that Henry VIII had six wives, will always be true. Time cannot erode or change that truth. Even if all human records of this truth were destroyed, it would never cease to be true.

As the Christian, apologist Peter Keeft has made clear, maths is entirely dependent on a positive integer, i.e. the number one. Without this positive integer, no maths is possible. Two is 2 ones, three is 3 ones, etc.

The concept of the number one also exists as a characteristic of the one, infinite, first cause. - God is one. - God embodies that positive integer (number one/first cause), essential for the operation of maths. Without the number one, there could be no number two or three, etc. etc. There could be no positive numbers, no negative numbers and no fractions.

The fact that an infinite ‘first’ cause exists, means that number one is bound to exist. In a state of eternal and infinite nothingness, there would be no information and no numbers and nothing would be ‘first’. So, like everything else, maths is made possible only by the existence of the one, infinite, first cause (God).

 

Atheism is an insidious and deceptive cult, which attempts to indoctrinate the public through relentless hype and propaganda.

Here is some good news for any theists reading this. All atheist arguments are easily demolished. Not because I, or any other theist, is exceptionally clever, but because atheism is based on lies and deceit. Once people realise that, it becomes obvious that there will be major flaws in EVERY atheist argument. It is then a simple matter, for anyone interested in truth, to expose them.

 

Atheism is claimed to be the scientific viewpoint and supporter of science. That is the great deception of the modern age.

What is the truth?

Science is based on looking for adequate causes of EVERY natural happening or entity AND on making predictions and assessments about the natural world, based on the validity of natural laws.

Atheism is based on ignoring the fact that EVERY natural happening or entity requires an adequate cause, not just ignoring it, but even actively opposing it.

Unbelievably, atheism is about looking for, and hoping to find, non-causes and inadequate causes.

Atheism is also against the scientific method, of making assessments and predictions based on the validity of natural laws, and in favour of rejecting and challenging the validity of natural laws.

Because the existence of natural laws which support the necessity of an adequate, first cause is fatal to the atheist cult.

 

The often repeated atheist argument that we just don’t know whether causality or any other natural laws existed before the start of the universe, is not a valid argument for atheism. Even if it was a sensible argument, the very best that could be said of it, is that it is an argument for agnosticism.

'Not knowing' (agnosticism) is a neutral position, it is not an argument for or against theism or for or against atheism. If you claim to be in the ‘don’t know’ camp and are a genuine agnostic, you have to sit firmly on the fence - you have no right to ridicule and lambast theists who believe that causality and natural laws are universally valid and by the same token you cannot ridicule atheism. Those who ridicule and attack theism are not genuine agnostics, because they come down firmly on the side of atheism. That is not a ‘don’t know’ (agnostic) position.

 

The argument for atheism cannot be simply based on ‘not knowing’ whether the law of cause and effect and other natural laws existed prior to the universe. Atheism depends on a definite rejection of causality and natural laws at the beginning of the material realm.

And that argument also reveals atheists as gross hypocrites.

When Stephen Hawking declared to the world: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing” atheists applauded and crowed about ‘science’ making God redundant. How come they didn’t criticise him for claiming he knew the law of gravity pre-existed the universe? Apparently, Hawking KNEW the law of gravity existed, but decided that the law of cause and effect and other natural laws didn’t exist. What happened to the: “we just don’t know what laws existed before the universe or Big Bang” argument on that occasion? Unbelievable hypocrisy! Which effectively demolishes the bogus atheist argument that “we don’t know what laws existed”. What atheists actually mean to say is that: “we know that laws which support our argument did exist, but we don’t know that laws which destroy our argument existed”.

 

The only way atheist, naturalist beliefs can be true, is if natural laws and the basic principle behind the scientific method are not true and valid.

So there is a straight choice between supporting atheism - OR supporting the universal validity of science and natural law. You can't do both...

 

Dr James Tour - 'The Origin of Life' - Abiogenesis decisively refuted.

youtu.be/B1E4QMn2mxk

_____________________________________________

 

This video contains the Public Request of Forgiveness by Amândio Brito, a compulsorily reformed Judge on behalf of the Public Confessions on Orgies, recently made in the Republic of Cape Verde.

These are excuses for my Relatives, for the Family of my wife Eydira Brito, for the whole Society, for all my co-workers and for all Cape Verdeans, especially from the islands of Santiago, São Nicolau and Fogo.

Part 1 of the Video briefly explains how my false religious experience was in CRASDT, since I began to learn Bible Truth with Mr. Inácio Cunha, and then I listened to Satan and fell into terrible sins, until That I decided to confess everything, publicly.

Part 2 of the Video explains the consequences that, in a month and a little more than 10 days, I suffered at my family, marriage, society and work levels, with my Public Confessions, but also the Great Gain that I obtained with that.

The third and final part of the Video contains my specific apologies, some additional clarification, and a Serious Appeal to all those who are suffocated by sin.

This video is for everyone.

And forgiveness, I ask you all.

Trudeau hasn't stopped shredding all facts of his corruption!

*best seen on black

Have you ever come to a place in your life where you are fed up with life and wanted to just simply go home? You dialed God’s number in prayer and asked Him to come and take you home to that celestial city above where there are no tears, pain, sorrow, and death. The pressure’s of life and its curves have come up to your neck, and you could not take it any longer? You have wondered how the world and the society we live in could be that bad. What happened, and where have we gone wrong?

The world does not know peace in spite of all its science and technology! Peace has eluded our lands! Society is dying, people are dying in the thousands, from the cradle to the crown. With the events of September 11th, 2001, still fresh in the minds, we wonder, where is God when it really hurts?

Where is God when we really need Him? Why do the righteous and the good people suffer at the hands of the evil and the wicked ones? Does God really care? Does He not realize that we are perishing under the oppressive reign of Satan, who dominates the hearts and minds of abominable people who have turned their lives over to sin and crime! Does He not care that the operations of Satan, the prince of darkness and hell, are running rampant on earth?

 

The daughter of a very prominent and renowned world evangelist, while being interviewed on a TV show, was asked, How could God allow tragedies such as 911, Katrina and other catastrophes that are bombarding planet earth? I was taken back by her insightful and profound response. She said, I believe that God is very deeply saddened by these calamities happening in the world just as we are, but for years we have been telling God to get out of our schools, get out of our government and our personal lives. God, being the gentle Being that He is, gracefully and calmly backed out with no hard feelings! This is so similar to the story of Saul. Read it for yourselves (1 Samuel 1:). The story tells of the Israelite's who told God that they wanted someone with flesh to sit on their throne. So Saul, the son of Kish took over the reign. Very interesting story and I do hope that you will read it.

 

How can we expect God to give us His blessings and protection if we demand that He leave us alone? And when stuff starts happening such as: terrorists striking, anthrax scares, school shootings, disease epidemics, and environmental disasters, we question the where abouts of God!

Peri scoping our world, we can pinpoint where the move to get God out of our personal lives started. A woman, by name of Madeline O’Hare (who was found murdered just after this), started it all. She was the lady who insisted that we do not need the Lord's prayer in schools. Society, agreed and with the Supreme Court’s permission, prayer was removed from public schools!

Then someone said, why do we need to have the Bible in our schools, do we really need to read this in our schools? Mind you- this is the Bible that says; Thy shall not Kill! Thou shall not steal! Thou shall not commit adultery! Thy shall not bear false witness against your neighbour! Thou shall not covet your neighbor's wife, goods, or any other belonging, and thou shall love your neighbour as yourself! Society said, No, and that it created more problems than naught! And the Bible was removed from the public schools.

Then along came Dr. Benjamin Spock and, being an expert in child psychology, insisted that we refrain from spanking our children when they misbehave because their tiny personalities would be warped and we could very well damage their self-esteem for life. Funny thing too, as with Madeline O'Hare who came to an untimely demise, Dr. Spock later on in life committed suicide!

Being that he was the expert, we believed him and disobeyed God ( Proverbs 22:6; 29:7 )! So according to Dr. Spock, we should let our children misbehave! And of course, it should follow that school administrators said faculty in any school should not touch students when they misbehave because they do not want any bad publicity and they do not want to be sued. Society agreed and threw disciplining students in school, out the window!

Another being from the same gene of Madeline O’Hare said, Let us permit our daughters to have abortions if they want and they won’t even have to tell their parents. Society said, great - we can live with that!

And yet another top elected official said, It should not matter to the society what anyone does in his or her private life including the president as long as we have a job and our economy is good and booming!

Yet someone else came up with, Let’s print magazines, books with pictures of nude people and call it wholesome, down-to-earth appreciation for the beauty of the body! Society said, great, that’s acceptable! And then someone else took this appreciation for the beauty of the body a step further and published nude pictures of children. Society says, That’s cool everyone is entitled to their opinion and free speech! Well it was inevitable that someone saw the fortune to be had and started making the pictures visible and for sale on the internet!

 

Now comes along the entertainment industry that promotes profanity, violence, witchcraft, Satanism, illicit sex, hatred, vengeance, drugs, alcohol, and the likes of Harry Potter…! What appears to be just entertainment has grown and society says, It is just entertainment and we all know it to be unreal, nobody takes it seriously!

 

Funny, isn’t it? Now we ask, why are our children have no conscience? Why do they not know right from wrong? Why does it not bother them to kill strangers, their classmates? Why is it they throw their newborn babies into the garbage? Why are they promiscuous with any sex? Why is there so much bloodshed and killing on our good earth? If we take a moment, we probably could figure out the answers to these questions. Without any equivocation, it has to do with the Law of Sowing and Reaping! Plain English- We Reap What We Sow!

 

When we trash God, we should not wonder why the world is going to hell. If we believe what the newspapers say, but question the word of God, we should not be surprised when our children have no conscience. If we want to go to heaven with rules we have made ourselves instead of the Bible, we surely will not get there! When people open their mouths and confess that they believe in God and yet sell their lives to Satan, they will live outside the presence of God! When you are worried about what other people think of you more than what God thinks of you, you know that you are a pagan and an idol worshipper. When your tongue is always wagging and telling people what you think, but when the word of God tells you what God thinks about you, you call it religion and you forbid anyone shoveling it down your throat! You are against God if you can put up with lewd, vulgar, and obscene language through the cyber space and yet cringe with vengeance when God is being discussed publicly in schools and the workplace! If you are fired up for the Lord Jesus Christ on Sunday and yet live like the child of the devil from Monday to Saturday, you know that you are a hypocrite and a million miles away from God!

 

Twenty centuries ago, the world’s most unforgettable character, Jesus Christ stepped out of eternity into time … from heaven to earth! History tells us that Jesus was born of a woman in Bethlehem and He grew up in Nazareth. For 33 years he walked among us, he lived a perfect life. He performed many notable miracles which still baffle mankind! Jesus came to earth on a mission: to solve the problem of man’s sin and to reunite man and God! He did this by giving up His own life. Jesus’ death on the cross paid the debt for every sin ever committed by man. He paid the supreme price for our redemption!

Awesome isn’t it! And what’s even more awesome is the fact that three days after His death, He proved once and for all that He was indeed God, by His resurrection!

 

The most astounding event in all of history was the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and this was witnessed by many, many people! Jesus certainly accomplished His mission and bridged the gap between God and man. And it is through the death of Jesus Christ, you can come alive spiritually RIGHT NOW! It is all up to you!

Turn from your own way, ask Jesus Christ to forgive your sin, and personally invite Him to come into your life- right now…!

He wants to give you a new heart and change you from the inside out so that your world as crazy as it may be, can make sense to you from God’s point of view and not yours. Do It Now… You certainly will not be sorry!

 

Behold I stand at the door, and knock: If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him… (Revelation 3:20)

 

****

 

St. Maria Basilica, Rome, Italy

Matthew 6 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

The image from Chapter 3 of my DC serial Countdown to Justice, which can be read here: jampotstudios.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/countdown%20to%...

 

Volume I is all finished now. Get set for Volume II, which begins in February!

"Sotto la superficie di una tranquillità diffusa vi e' molto di piu': la cattiveria degli ipocriti, lo squallore degli arrivisti e la violenza, fisica e verbale, della quotidianita'"

 

"Under the surface of a widespread tranquility there is much more: the malice of the hypocrites, the squalor of the careerists and the violence, physical and verbal, of everyday life"

Merry Christmas!

 

From 'The Bears of Sheffield' 2021

'Bare Necessities' by Lisa Maltby

 

Don't spend your time looking around

For something you want that can't be found

When you find out you can live without it

And go along not thinking about it

I'll tell you something true

The bare necessities of Life

Will come to you

 

Although I am a devout atheist, I can only imagine how God and Jesus would feel if they looked down on our lavish feasts while so many fellow human beings starve, some to death. Yes, I am a hypocrite in that respect, but I have done, and do my bit for the homeless. The Bare Necessities are all we need.

 

So, as I always preach, please take time to spare a thought for those less fortunate than you and I, and as usual the homeless and the less well off, and those that have helped us through the last 2 years, those that have lost someone, etc.

 

Have a fantastic time. Very best wishes to all for Christmas and the New Year.

 

Stay Safe, Stay Well, Stay Sane(ish) and knuckle down for another year.

 

'The Bears of Sheffield' was a trail of 60 artistic bears located in various parts of Sheffield. There was also a Little Sleuth of 100 smaller bears, designed by local children and teachers. They were designed to raise money for the Sheffield Children's Hospital Charity. They were auctioned off at the end of the bear season, and raised more than £750000 for that charity.

 

I've uploaded around half of them here if interested. Loads more to upload : www.flickr.com/photos/petermit2/albums/72157720119267732

 

but i will do it for you.

we'll start among the hypocrites,

the melody of our time,

so say goodbye to the world.

    

View Large On Black

The revenge upon her would be sweet, even though it was purely theoretical.

She was the very epitome of every stuck up girl who ever passed judgment on those she refused to view as an equal. And I? I possessed the subtle skill to knock her smirking ego down a few pegs.

  

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

  

In late spring of the year 1952, a, bank rented safety deposit lockbox, dusty from many years gone by, was opened. The box had laid unclaimed, the banks records having been destroyed during the Nazi blitzes of World War Two. When its existence became known, an attempt was made to contact the owner, whose family surname was well known in the county. The name turned out to be an alias, no such person ever existed.

 

Please read the account below to learn more about the person who was believed to have rented the strongbox, as well as what he had placed inside……….

 

**********

  

Case Study 84 :

 

Warning, these are the raw, bare unusual facts as originally recorded. Some names, times, places and some facts have been altered for obvious reasons.

Exerted from the private letters of Mr. Harley Q. circa early 1900’s.

 

Name: Harly Q. circa 19 …

 

Subject: Seemingly a rather dexterous scoundrel

 

Place: A large coastal metropolis

 

Time: A period of time in late autumn

  

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

 

Harly’s story as related:

  

The following affair occurred during my younger days when my youth and its’ raw passions were still a strong pull on my reactions! Now, how do I start?

  

The Blonde dancing in front of me was was dressed up like a movie star on a red carpet. Only about nineteen, her slinky gown created the impression of having been poured along her curvy, voluptuous figure, like shimmering liquid satin, fluidly swishing as she swirled about the massive chamber! It all made her appear far older and mature than she obviously thought she was. For some, her looks and personality may have been seen as charming and fun. “But for me personally, the only thing charming about her was the way her abundant sparkling jewellery played with the lights from the large chandeliers which held my upmost command!

  

But wait, I may be placing the carriage before the steed…….

 

Allow me to restart:

  

I had taken a long train into town with the intention of spending a few days relaxing from my previous month of hectic “professional” affairs. Rewarding myself, I located my lodging in a fancy upscale hotel situated across the street from a cavernous Ballroom, checking in for a fortnight. Since my social calendar was unusually light, with only the one high society event, a wedding that I was planning to attend the following Sabbath, at a “chapel” located in one of the cities sprawling suburbs. I spent the first day perusing the cultural calendar of the local papers, and ended up circling one or two events of interest that would be taking place later that month. I than took care of my remaining personal business, locating a reputable bank and renting out one of their lockboxes, before allowing myself some time off from my endeavors.

  

I than spent the first portion of my week taking in moving picture shows, visiting stores and hanging out at the local museums and antique shoppes. It felt great not worrying about work, although I will did admit that my mind scoped out a few prospects as I was out and about, walking amongst the great masses..

  

It was mid-week during my stay, while making my way back to the hotel suite, that I decided on a whim to pop into the Ballroom to see what it was all about. I walked into the massive lobby full of activity and wandered about, looking into the massive main ballroom, meeting rooms and various party rooms. As I was leaving I discovered a wall containing posters for all the upcoming events. One poster caught my eye. It advertised the occurrence of a Halloween Ball to take place that very weekend, Tickets still available. The Ball seemed to be the very type of party I was partial to, combining all of my favorite types of affairs, a large gathering frequented by the rich, and everyone attending would be in costume.

  

Purchasing a pair of tickets (less questions asked) I went out the very next morning scouting various shops in search of my own costume. I finally settled on a highwayman’s attire. It seemed appropriate, and the ribbon style “ masque” over my eyes set off the vacation beard that had been growing quite nicely since my last outing. On my way out to pay for the costume I spied a half off bin. On top of the pile was a phantom of the opera mask. On impulse I added it to my bundle and went to the checkout.

  

Although I really didn’t have the feeling that this concern would lead to anything, I mean, who wears good jewellery with a costume ? But a little bored by the inactivity, I was none the less growing excited about the venture. I still decided to play it cautious by setting up my usual safe guards, just in case.

  

A few blocks away from the Ballroom and my hotel suite I found a small chain style motel. Going to the desk I purchased rent for a room for the night, paying in advance. Going into the small room I laid down my purchases and headed back out to the street via a back stairwell, bypassing the registrars chambers. I headed back to my hotel suite to prepare for the evening.

  

After showering, I changed into a suit, shirt and tie. I then headed out onto the street a couple of hours before the ball was set to begin. Regaining my small quarters in the chain motel I changed into my new persona for the evening’s festivities and left via the same back door I had used earlier. I walked back to the Ballroom, getting my share of looks until I reached my destination, where I blended right in with the other arriving costumed guests.

  

I followed the stream to the ballroom proper. The main doors leading inside were large, made of a fancy scrolled oak, held open, and guarded by a pair of burly security types.

Apparently which, I soon gathered, was appearing to be the only security present for the evening’s festivities. Capital, I thought, smirking to myself as I joined my fellow guests.

  

I walk onto a landing, immediately in front of a long bannister guarding a set of wide stairs ascended downwards. I went off to one side, and paused at the railing, starting to survey with eager anticipation, the crowded room below.

  

All was quite glittering, as large chandeliers set off a spectrum of colors with any crystal or glass it touched. It especially created shimmers as it played off the colorful jewelry the lavishly costumed ladies present were wearing. Several dozen couples were dancing in front of a 17 piece orchestra, a slow dance, and many were dancing almost too close. Many more people were mingling around tables of appetizers. A large, chattering crowd was also gathered at the long oak bar that took up one whole side of the huge room. It was to the bar that I headed, to observe the merry proceedings.

  

But the Ball, as it turned out, was a bust, so to speak. Although several attempts were made to ask a number of charming (to me) ladies to add me to their dance cards, they all were, unfortunately, full. I should have suspected it would turn out this way, but I still harbored an all too familiar nagging feeling in the back of my head that something was still going to happen, call it intuition if you need to label it. So I nursed my drink, reminiscing about how I had reached this point in my then still young life…..

  

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favorite poets, once said” Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Long before the the time I discovered this quote I found that my life’s path had already been heading that way.

  

Without boring anyone with far too many details of my rather complicated youth, I discovered while quite young that I had a certain knack for adeptness at being able to nimbly pick pockets. When I was eighteen ( having graduated high school at seventeen) and out on my own in the world, I found this skill quite useful. But it was at a wedding reception in my early twenties where I became of age, so to speak.

  

She was older than me, resplendent in a sleek black satin gown with bright white frills, long white satin gloves upon which graced a pair of diamond bracelets. She was very tipsy and would not take no for an answer when asking for a dance partner. She cornered me and before I could catch my wits, we were in a close embrace on the dance floor. I was totally mesmerized by the feel of her warm figure emitting through the sensuous satin gown. My eyes feasted upon the dazzling show put on by her flashy twin bracelets. When the exquisitely long dance ended and she moved on: I was left with a lot of pleasantly mixed feelings, I was also left with my first trophy, the Lady’s appealing necklace of pearl that I had ever so delicately sipped off her throat, using the sleekness of her satin gown to its fullest advantage.

  

I found myself enthralled with my new “hobby”, and over the course of the next couple of years sought out fancy dress affairs to better learn how to master the art of attracting and dancing with any lady I chose. Along the way I managed to accumulate quite a few trophies for my efforts. I stayed under everyone’s radar by picking out only those females who had been enthusiastically imbibing and by allowing myself to acquire only one trophy per gathering, two if the function was large enough.

  

During this period I made two discoveries: One was that most women would rather assume their jewel had been merely lost long before ever considering that they had been robbed of it. The second was that most of my collection of pretty trophies carried an equally pretty price, and could quite acceptably be turned into ready cash.

  

So, by the tender age of twenty two, my life started to lead where there had ever been but few tracks. And thus we finally come to this particular branch of my rather unique, lengthily crooked trail….

  

So, there I was, on a bar stool, alone and growing more bored by the minute, wishing something interesting would happen. I can remember thinking, as I looked over my fellow partiers about a saying that I had always found to be amusingly true. “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” I don’t know who first said it, but brother, the person was right on the money. As I had witnessed for myself time and time again. So I just settled in and watched the amusing antics of the wealthy among the crowd, especially those of …“the girl!’

The girl was a stunning young blonde who was probably just fresh out of high school, with the maturity level of a grade schooler!

  

I kept catching my eye on her all evening, and once or twice, was sure she caught mine looking. But I was not watching her for the reasons she would think were mine. To her I was just some male face in the crowd, exhibiting his lust. But, the reason my eyes kept traveling upon her was for an entirely different one. I just found nothing to be more annoying than a sulky, immature young whelp who believes she is the apple of everyone’s eye, making an absolute nuisance of herself. She was running around, making silly remarks about people, sometimes to their face. Hanging out with her group of friends whom seemed to be of the same mold as my blonde, one girlfriend was even dressed appropriately enough, as a willowy witch.

  

The Blonde was dressed up like a movie star on a red carpet. Only about nineteen, her slinky gown created the impression of having been poured along her curvy voluptuous figure, like shimmering liquid satin, fluidly swishing as she bounced about the massive chamber, slipping in and out amongst the guests! It all made her appear far older and mature than she obviously thought she was. For some, her looks and personality may have been seen as charming and fun. “But for me personally, the only thing charming about her was the way her abundant sparkling jewellery played with the lights from the large chandeliers which held my command! But I had decided, as far as I could tell, that she was wearing nothing but cheap rhinestones, which like her, appeared totally fake. But, as they say, appearances can sometimes be deceiving!

   

This girl was the epitome of every condescending stuck up high society girl that probably everyone has had the misfortune to be the victim of. The girl, who mainly because of her looks, was popular with everyone like her, and had no use for those who, forever what reason they deemed, was ostracized by those of her type. In high school I knew girls like this one, and was a witness, sometime victim, to many a scene of arrogance displayed by girls like her. This one was young, too young to be acting the way she was. Her mannerisms were just a beacon, reaching out out to be taught a lesson.

  

Wallowing in my boredom, a spark began to kindle into flame deep within my brain. Determined not to let the evening be a total loss, I decided act upon it. My plan being to theoretically get revenge on all those smirking girls who tormented me during high school, by knocking this cocky little scamp down a few pegs, using the best of my abilities..

  

Now, I’m not one normally to act as judge, jury, and executioner in most situations, in my selected line of work it would be hypocritical. But obviously old wounds’ had been opened, this long haired girl scampering about reminded me of ones whom had ridiculed me, another lifetime, one that I had left behind A long time ago. The opportunity for bittersweet revenge had presented itself for the taking, and the pull to obtain a little solace by using my unique talents was far too great to resist. Talk about mixing pleasure with business I though wickedly to myself, smiling with the inviting thought.

  

Believe me, this girl would be no innocent victim, and nothing I was about to attempt would leave her with any type of lasting impression, or harm. But if I could cause her at least some considerable discomfort to ruin the rest of her evening out, it would be reward in and of itself! I again eyed her sparkling jewels with all the seriousness I would have given any I was really interested in acquiring. Although she didn’t fit my favorite pre-requisite, she certainly was not drunk on alcohol, she was merely just intoxicated in her own questionable self-esteem, which can work just as well.

  

I waited until her friends had all apparently deserted her for the evening and leaving her, quite vulnerably, alone. I walked up behind her and tapped her shoulder. She whirled facing me, her eyes going from happy expectations to a glare! “What do you want!? she snipped disdainfully”. Calmly I held her gaze, “I was hoping you would help me win a bet” I asked in what I hoped was my most wily voice. She was curious, but wary of me, “as you should be my pretty miss”, I remember thinking to myself. Her eyes sized me up and down, and I seized the moment to take in her jewels, not at all disappointed in them, but my curiosity was aroused about her necklace, I definitely needed to get a closer look to appraise them! “Why should I help you,” she practically spitted out he words like daggers.

  

“It’s this way miss, a couple of boys over at the bar bet me 50 quid that I could not get a dance with the prettiest girl here.” “Me?” she asked primping, no I confessed, I picked you, they had wanted me to dance with someone far less pretty, in my opinion.

I don’t think so; she said with a slight hint of hesitation, my card is full. Just for fifteen minutes I implored. That’s all I need (which was the truth), and Ill split my winnings with you on top of it. She finally bought it, hook line, sinker and pound signs in her adorable violet coloured eyes. Fifteen minutes she specified, before, be-grudgingly, allowing me to lead her to the dance floor.

  

Now, as I took her stiff body in my arms, I was able to satisfy my curiosity about the girl’s necklace, and it caused a dilemma to rear its thought provoking head. While she was busy looking around to make sure none of her friends saw her dancing with me, I allowed myself a couple of precious minutes to think. Her long rhinestone earrings were clip held, and an easy pick. I wanted to try for them both,( I knew how I would do it), and losing a pair of earrings would send a message that they had not just fallen away. Also, I would be suspected by her, which suited me just fine. However, my dilemma was caused by the vixen’s pretty necklace. While the rest of her plentiful jewels were cheap rhinestones as I had suspected the row of diamonds that rippled blazingly around her throat were in fact, the real McCoy. So, which should I go for? The necklace would be profitable and easy but she may just suspect its clasp had broken. The earrings would be just for a sporty trophy, not worth anything but for the knowledge that she would know she had been a victim. Ah, life’s precious little quandaries!

  

So, I continued with the dance, my partner still rigid, so very true to her character. Then, with five minutes left, I made up my mind on what she would not be leaving the ball still wearing. She was a charmer, this disdainful one. Her stiff figure was warm to the touch, underneath the scintillating slippery gown. The show her sparkling jewels produced was most pleasing to the eye. All in all quite a pretty portrait, a shame it was that I was not allowed to appreciate it. Which was fine by me! I was able to concentrate freely on the task at hand. I looked around, the coast was still clear. Then eyeing for one last time her mesmerizingly swaying long earrings and the flickering diamonds that graced her pretty little throat, I executed my move..

  

By the time the final five minutes were up I had the selected jewelry in my pocket without even the slightest notice from my unwilling dance partner. Then, fifteen minutes to the second (good thing I had been keeping track of the time) she broke it off. “Thank you”, I said, to which she mumbled, “my money, sir!” I told her I had to collect it, and would meet her by the ladies powder room. I left her waiting, smiling inwardly to myself at the empty space from which the missing jewelry was glaringly gone from her.

  

She had no doubt that I would be back with her money, was I not merely like one of her household servants, who routinely, without question or error, existed to do her bidding. It would be a major jolt to her system when she realized I was not coming obediently back to her. I had no doubt she would spend some time searching me out for her money once she realized I was not coming back forthwith, with the intention of lecturing me on how I should act around my betters. So I knew that her immediate attention would be elsewhere upon realizing I was tardy, and that it would take quite a bit of time before she recieved a second shock of an altogether different sort.

  

I left with my prize, walking past the two guards with such a carefree air that even they would never have suspected that I could possibly have been up to any mischief. I made good time getting back to the dingy motel room. Changed out of my costume and back into the shirt and tie I had worn. The highwayman costume, which had served me well, I rolled in a bundle under my arm, I again left by the back stairwell and retraced my earlier steps, whistling, back to the suite in the hotel. Along the way the costume was stuffed unceremoniously into a handy trash bin. My little operation had been a complete success. The evening was after all, not going to be a total loss.

  

Back in my suite I stowed the newly acquired jewels the girl had worn into one of my many secret hiding spots. There they would be safe until I could convey it to my banks lockbox on Monday. As I finished I, spied the phantom of the opera mask lying discarded on top of a table. A shame it would not be used….

 

A thought washed over me that would not be denied! Risky, but it would make my evening complete. I quickly shaved off the thin beard, and restyled my hair. I changed from my suit into my tux and tails. Scooping up the phantom mask I headed back to the costume ball. Placing the mask on before entering, I presented my second ticket( not very often did the opportunity arise to use both of the pair of tickets I customarily purchased!) I walked past the two security types without a second glance from them, they absolutely did not recognize me, which meant I had passed that test. My objective now was to try and catch the second half of the show; namely the shimmering liquid satin gowned brats squawking reaction when she first discovered her jewels were gone.

  

I regained a bar seat just in time.

  

She did not disappoint!

  

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Epilogue

 

When, in the presence of both bank and county officials, the strong box was opened, it was found to contain a fairly large collection of the Kings currency, equaling roughly £500 , and a selection unmatched jewelry, rings, single earrings, bracelets, and necklaces, worth a almost £3.000. Also inside was small a bundle of papers. The papers, old and yellowed, appeared to contain the partial handwritten journals of a certain Mr. Harly Q___ , esq. The papers were examined, but gave no clues to who Harley was, or to his current whereabouts. But the journals presented clues as to Harly’s nature, and as a consequence the money and jewels were considered stolen goods and handed over to the authorities. No one knows what became of them, as for the papers, they were handed over to a relative of one of the government officials, and also, for a period of time, lost.

 

The journal was rediscovered amongst the personal files of the late Professor Sedwig Dermitt phd, llc.a dex,

Recovered, restored, and now kept in the human behavioral archives of the criminology dept, Chatwick U.

  

Courtesy of Chatwick University Archives

 

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Have a wonderful "Fathers Day" to all Dads among friends and around the world

 

Dad,I love you forever.

 

What do you feel today?Lingering absence or loss,

Do you still feel the cold, left out feeling,?

Is this how you allow yourself to feel about dad!

Though we miss their presence every day.

 

Today is indisputably not much different

Thoughts of his last breath comes often

But again detour them from mind

Never understood why devotion had to leave!

 

Walk around as if melancholy never exists,

Am I looming over stifled bouts of sadness!

The void never fulfill, no matter what!

No reasons ever enough to console minds.

 

It’s hypocritical to be moaning around

Thoughts never leap forward on other days

Aren’t they part of your every day routine?

Feel them alongside each day, unconditionally.

 

Each tear we shed reach them like streams,

Making them anxious to run back to us,

Impossible but hearts runs through the wind,

Reassuring with a touch, oblivious to many.

 

Reality still remains the same, harsh, unrelenting,

Life reassures, relative comforts, friend’s supports,

Yet vacuum remains same, big enough to engulf,

Undying wind of love, remains strong as ever

"He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome—more loathsome, if possible, than before—and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled."

 

-The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

"TOLERANT" acts as if the only fact is that what they believe and they will not TOLERATE anyone who refuses to think like them! This means they are not TOLERANT! They are HYPOCRITES!!

I thought id try visualise this scripture...as a" creative exercise" ....was so close to getting it right :) ...will continue to working on it i suppose/anyways.

............................................

Exposition:

14:1-5 Mount Sion is the gospel church. Christ is with his church, and in the midst of her in all her troubles, therefore she is not consumed. His presence secures perseverance. His people appear honourably. They have the name of God written in their foreheads; they make a bold and open profession of their faith in God and Christ, and this is followed by suitable actings. There were persons in the darkest times, who ventured and laid down their lives for the worship and truth of the gospel of Christ. They kept themselves clean from the wicked abominations of the followers of antichrist. Their hearts were right with God; and they were freely pardoned in Christ; he is glorified in them, and they in him. May it be our prayer, our endeavour, our ambition, to be found in this honourable company. Those who are really sanctified and justified are meant here, for no hypocrite, however plausible, can be accounted to be without fault before God.

 

Credits

Scripture Exposition :Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

 

Design & Direction :Sthe55

Images: Fish Stock - Deviant Art & (Water, Rocks, dancing woman - Stock Exchange)

 

Made with Photoshop CS6 and good music.