"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!

  

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

 

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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All rights and copyrights observed by Chatwick University, Its contributors, associates and Agents

 

The purpose of these chronological photos and accompanying stories, articles is to educate, teach, instruct, and generally increase the awareness level of the general public as to the nature and intent of the underlying criminal elements that have historically plagued humankind.

 

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

These photos and stories are works of fiction. Any resemblance to people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

As with any work of fiction or fantasy the purpose is for entertainment and/or educational purposes only, and should never be attempted in real life.

We accept no responsibility for any events occurring outside this website.

 

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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.

Fameuse réplique par tartuffe à Dorine.

 

Molière (1622-1673) comedy "le tartuffe"

  

Tartuffe (full title: Tartuffe, or the Hypocrite, French: Tartuffe, ou l'Imposteur) is a comedy by Molière, and arguably his most famous play. It was written and first performed in 1664 at the fêtes held at Versailles, and almost immediately censored by the outcry of the dévots ("devout" [people]), who were very influential in the court of King Louis XIV. While the king had little interest in suppressing the play, he eventually did so because of the dévots. The word dévots referred to those who claimed to be very religious, but as Molière points out in Tartuffe, these same people were often religious hypocrites.

 

The name has passed into many languages, used to denote a hypocrite, especially one who affects religious piety.

  

Molière is one of the key authors of French culture. It represents, in our view as to those of the world, what he called "the French spirit. It will give a vital impetus to the theater, knocking in classical aesthetics, imposing the comedy genre as noble and posing as a player, spectator and critic of his time.

 

In the seventeenth century, under the long reign of Louis XIV, the arts and letters are encouraged. King loves the pomp, festivals, entertainment and love of theater. It seeks to rehabilitate the actors and personally attached to some creative Molière.

 

PS I am not able to make translation of the title in English, using an automatic translator will not give the right sens. If someone is able to translate it, I will be very happy to get the translation.

 

Sorry for those who couldn't understand the title because it was the title who gives me the inspiration.

 

#A #RudyGiuliani #Gold #Coins #HairDye #Farts #Fart #AirFreshener #HorribleSmell #Flatulence #TheVapors #Borat #AffordableHealthcareAct. #Obamacare #Masturbation #Twitter #TemperTantrum #BarackObama #statue #ovaloffice #disinfectant #bleach #chlorox #lysol #chlorinebleach #101 #wipes #DrTrump #Medusa #ClashoftheTitans #Snake #Rattlesnake #Slimeball #ForkedTongue #scales #hairdye #eastereggdye #PAAS #loreal #missclairol #DonaldTrump #narcissisticpersonalitydisorder #JaredKushner #DonaldTrumpJr #COVID19 #Coronavirus #Pandemic #DrAnthonySFauci #MikePence #testicle #penis #dick #balls #AsktheMortician #disease #pneumonia #infection #flu #JimmyKimmel #JimmyFallon #StephenColbert #SethMyer #minilogue #quarantine #sociadistancing #6feet #MitchMcConnell #handsanitizer #novelcoronavirus #trumplies #wipes #stayathome #workfromhome #homeschooling #deathtoll #StevenMnuchin #MikePompeo #testspositive #testsnegative #farright #freaks #ventilator #medicalmask #hospitalbed #temporarymorgue #WuhanChina, #novelcoronavirus #sociallydistant #selfquarantine #SeanHannity #FakeNews #infectiousdisease #FoxNews #epidemic #publichealthemergency #CDC #AndrewCuomo #CenterForDiseaseControl #CNN #flatteningthecurve #worldhealthorganization #recession #depression #contagious #WHO #narcissisticpersonalitydisorder #positive #negative #coronavirus #pandemic #COVID19 #infection #Dr.AnthonyFauci #trumpcausescancer #windmill #windpower #windturbine #antivaxxer #bigfoot #UFO #lochnessmonster #flyingsaucer #mythology #atlantis #bermudatriangle #flatearth #wikileaks #angels #fallenangels #45 #BiggestBaby #dirtydiaper #TheMuellerInvestigation #WilliamBarr #AttorneyGeneral #Report #TheEmperorsNewClothes #TheExorcist #Pazuzu #God #JesusChrist #LindaBlair #possessed #KingofDemons #SarahSanders #hypocrite #Exorcism #Pampers #TheWall #NeverGiveIn #Bullshit #dirtydiaper #diaperrash #PooPooBaDoop #Clemson #Wendys #burgerking #football #KellyanneConway #SarahHuckabee #Trolls #Kremlin #KremlinTroll #RussianTroll #RobertMueller #FISA #SteveBannon #MikePence #Twitter #Tweet #wiretap #Twit #wiretapped #Twat #dontaldtrump #WashingtonDC #MamaAyeshas #wallofpresidents #CIA #GOP #KKK #ISIS #FBI #BLM #LGBT #Russia #VladimirPutin #Russianinterference #AlternativeFacts #MicrowaveOven #Camera #sexdrugsandrockandroll #HillaryClinton #BernieSanders #BarackObama #PresidentoftheUnited #plannedparenthood #bigot #jihad #OsamabinLaden #DumpTrump #NotMyPresident #Dontee #DonteesInferno #thewalkingdead #republican #pedophile #WomensMarch #badhombre #conservative #rape #RiencePriebus #DonaldMcGahn #FrankGaffney #JeffSessions #GeneralJamesMattis #GeneralJohnKelly #StevenMnuchin #AndyPuzder #WilburRoss #CathyMcMorrisRodgers #MitchMcConnell #KTMcFarland #MikePompeo #NikkiHaley #LtGenMichaelFlynn #BenCarson #BetsyDeVos #TomPrice #ScottPruitt #SeemaVerma #PaulRyan #TrumpTower #MarriageEquality #KuKluxKlan #NewYorkCity #Hanksy #MelaniaTrump #BarronTrump #IvankaTrump #TiffanyTrump #EricTrump #DonaldTrumpJr #JaredKushner #conflictofinterest #emolument #RiggedElection #TemperTantrum #Tweet #Twitter #Twit #ManChild #DiaperBlowout #Trump #poop #turd #bigbaby #manindiapers #Inauguration #ScottBaio #TedNugent #TheRockettes #RadioCityMusicHall #MormonTabernacleChoir #Medusa #breitbart #lies #NationalEnquirer #douchebag #POS #Pussy #PussyGrabber

#terrorist #Taliban #jihad #MexicanWall #racism #jihad #nobannowall #confederateflag #Nazi #Islam #Freedom #AmericanNaziParty #TheRollingStones #Democrat #CivilRights #Idiot #abortion #tinfoilhatsociety #tyrant #foxnews #MerylStreep #Liberal #SaturdayNightLive #AlecBaldwin #MelissaMcCarthy #AdolfHitler #BenitoMussolini #Dictator #Megalomaniac #KingComplex #Demagogue #Narcissist #Delusional #Nuts #Oligarch #Populist #tyrant #Narcissistic #Autocracy #Oligarchy #DelusionsofGrandeur #GodComplex #MangoMussolini #DerPumpkinfuhrer #Apocalypse #NuclearButton #OvalOffice #civilliberties #goldenshowers #tinyhands #discrimination #TrumpGate #freedomandjusticeforall #TheBible #JesusChrist #The12Apostles #FredPhelps #GodHatesFags #WestboroBaptistChurch #RedNeck #ScienceFiction, #rapistsandmurderers #antiGay #homophobe #dinosaurs #religiousright #AmericanFamilyAssociation #hategroup #BruceJenner #CaitlynJenner #BarbieandKen #Mattel #PopeFrancis #QueenElizabeth #KeepYourPeckerUp #PatRobertson 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#ForkedTongue #scales #hairdye #eastereggdye #PAAS #loreal #missclairol #DonaldTrump #narcissisticpersonalitydisorder #JaredKushner #DonaldTrumpJr #COVID19 #Coronavirus #Pandemic #DrAnthonySFauci #MikePence #testicle #penis #dick #balls #AsktheMortician #disease #pneumonia #infection #flu #JimmyKimmel #JimmyFallon #StephenColbert #SethMyer #minilogue #quarantine #sociadistancing #6feet #MitchMcConnell #handsanitizer #novelcoronavirus #trumplies #wipes #stayathome #workfromhome #homeschooling #deathtoll #StevenMnuchin #MikePompeo #testspositive #testsnegative #farright #freaks #ventilator #medicalmask #hospitalbed #temporarymorgue #WuhanChina, #novelcoronavirus #sociallydistant #selfquarantine #SeanHannity #FakeNews #infectiousdisease #FoxNews #epidemic #publichealthemergency #CDC #AndrewCuomo #CenterForDiseaseControl #CNN #flatteningthecurve #worldhealthorganization #recession #depression #contagious #WHO #narcissisticpersonalitydisorder #positive #negative #coronavirus #pandemic #COVID19 #infection #Dr.AnthonyFauci #trumpcausescancer #windmill #windpower #windturbine #antivaxxer #bigfoot #UFO #lochnessmonster #flyingsaucer #mythology #atlantis #bermudatriangle #flatearth #wikileaks #angels #fallenangels #45 #BiggestBaby #dirtydiaper #TheMuellerInvestigation #WilliamBarr #AttorneyGeneral #Report #TheEmperorsNewClothes #TheExorcist #Pazuzu #God #JesusChrist #LindaBlair #possessed #KingofDemons #SarahSanders #hypocrite #Exorcism #Pampers #TheWall #NeverGiveIn #Bullshit #dirtydiaper #diaperrash #PooPooBaDoop #Clemson #Wendys #burgerking #football #KellyanneConway #SarahHuckabee #Trolls #Kremlin #KremlinTroll #RussianTroll #RobertMueller #FISA #SteveBannon #MikePence #Twitter #Tweet #wiretap #Twit #wiretapped #Twat #dontaldtrump #WashingtonDC #MamaAyeshas #wallofpresidents #CIA #GOP #KKK #ISIS #FBI #BLM #LGBT #Russia #VladimirPutin #Russianinterference #AlternativeFacts #MicrowaveOven #Camera #sexdrugsandrockandroll #HillaryClinton #BernieSanders #BarackObama #PresidentoftheUnited #plannedparenthood #bigot #jihad #OsamabinLaden #DumpTrump #NotMyPresident #Dontee #DonteesInferno #thewalkingdead #republican #pedophile #WomensMarch #badhombre #conservative #rape #RiencePriebus #DonaldMcGahn #FrankGaffney #JeffSessions #GeneralJamesMattis #GeneralJohnKelly #StevenMnuchin #AndyPuzder #WilburRoss #CathyMcMorrisRodgers #MitchMcConnell #KTMcFarland #MikePompeo #NikkiHaley #LtGenMichaelFlynn #BenCarson #BetsyDeVos #TomPrice #ScottPruitt #SeemaVerma #PaulRyan #TrumpTower #MarriageEquality #KuKluxKlan #NewYorkCity #Hanksy #MelaniaTrump #BarronTrump #IvankaTrump #TiffanyTrump #EricTrump #DonaldTrumpJr #JaredKushner #conflictofinterest #emolument #RiggedElection #TemperTantrum #Tweet #Twitter #Twit #ManChild #DiaperBlowout #Trump #poop #turd #bigbaby #manindiapers #Inauguration #ScottBaio #TedNugent #TheRockettes #RadioCityMusicHall #MormonTabernacleChoir #Medusa #breitbart #lies #NationalEnquirer #douchebag #POS #Pussy #PussyGrabber

A #terrorist #Taliban #jihad #MexicanWall #racism #jihad #nobannowall #confederateflag #Nazi #Islam #Freedom #AmericanNaziParty #TheRollingStones #Democrat #CivilRights #Idiot #abortion #tinfoilhatsociety #tyrant #foxnews #MerylStreep #Liberal #SaturdayNightLive #AlecBaldwin #MelissaMcCarthy #AdolfHitler #BenitoMussolini #Dictator #Megalomaniac #KingComplex #Demagogue #Narcissist #Delusional #Nuts #Oligarch #Populist #tyrant #Narcissistic #Autocracy #Oligarchy #DelusionsofGrandeur #GodComplex #MangoMussolini #DerPumpkinfuhrer #Apocalypse #NuclearButton #OvalOffice #civilliberties #goldenshowers #tinyhands #discrimination #TrumpGate #freedomandjusticeforall #TheBible #JesusChrist #The12Apostles #FredPhelps #GodHatesFags #WestboroBaptistChurch #RedNeck #ScienceFiction, #rapistsandmurderers #antiGay #homophobe #dinosaurs #religiousright #AmericanFamilyAssociation #hategroup #BruceJenner #CaitlynJenner #BarbieandKen #Mattel #PopeFrancis #QueenElizabeth #KeepYourPeckerUp #PatRobertson #BatteredWomanSyndrome #FranklinGraham #Cracker #JudyGarland #TheWizardofOz #BarbraStreisand #BettyWhite #MarilynMonroe #ValleyoftheDolls #PeytonPlace #DowntonAbbey #MaggieSmith #JudyDench #EvaGreen #MissPeregrine #DarylDixon #jabbathehutt #EmperorPalpatine #StarWars #StarTrek #RickGrimes #TeaParty #GlennBeck #RushLimbaugh #fakeNews #politicallyincorrect #BillMaher #AngelaMerkel #TheresaMay #RosieODonnell #MegynKelly #TheManchurianCandidate #BadCombOver #commemorativecoin #collectorsitem #ebay #buffalonewyork #artvoice #carlpaladino #byecarl #OutrageFatigue #hotair #weaponsofmassdestruction #motherofallbombs #farts #farting #robertmueller #bombingsyria #kellyanneconway #brettkavanaugh #sexualassault #harrassment #metoo #supremecourt #kanyewest #kimkardashian #idiot #incoherent #dumptrump2020 #rosegardenmassacre #ivankatrump #jaredKushner #Donaldtrumpjr #erictrump #Stephenmiller #mitchMcConnell #Williambarr #KellyAnneConway #KayleighMcEnany #LyingBitches #sarahhuckabeesanders #sexdrugsandrockandroll #Death #Dying #GrimReaper #AlternativeFacts #liarliarpantsonfire #masturbation #jerkoff #Disinfectant #Purell #Re-election2020 #God #Lysol #Coronavirus #SteveBannon #syphiliticskinlesions #Pandemic #DrAnthonySFauci #MikePence #Death #dying #AsktheMortician #pneumonia #infection #flu, #influenza, #quarantine #socialdistancing #6feet #HopeHicks #WilliamBarr #handsanitizer #trumpslies #wipes #narcissisticpersonalitydisorder #deathtoll #stayathome #workfromhome #homeschooling #ventilator #medicalmask #novelcoronavirus #sociallydistant #SeanHannity #FakeNews #TuckerCarlson #infectiousdisease #FoxNews #CNN #epidemic #CDC #AndrewCuomo #CenterForDiseaseControl #worldhealthorganization #recession #depression #contagious #ProudBoys

Who are the hypocrites here?

Visit this location in Second Life

One of the "Heavy Hitters" from the BioShock video games !

Everything is made of sculpey and the sword is a customized lego sword.

 

"And so, the Prophet led us into Peking, where we demonstrated to the Sodom Below the true mission our Founders had given us. And when the Mandarins and hypocrites of Washington betrayed him, our Prophet did not heel. He did not come crawling for their forgiveness... Like our fathers broke from the Great Apostate, our Prophet broke with these so-called "patriots"... and today is the day we celebrate the secession..."

―Zealot of the Lady

 

fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/100/8/a/bioshock_infinite...

 

view large/on black!!!

 

re edittt.

good idea on jody's part to make the tea thing my photo projecttt.

i think the seagull's a bit much, or maybe it's a nice touch? idkk.

hope tank likes it.

 

anyway, i'm bored so i might as well do the 25 things thing i've been tagged in about 9873245987324 times on fb. awesome that i don't have to tag anyone 'cause i can't on flickr. (:

 

1. i have the tendency to throw things at people i don't like.

2. i think kidz bop is the stupidest thing to ever make an appearance on earth.

3. ditto on snuggies.

4. i've bitten my nails since 1st grade. they get long over the summer, and get progressively shorter as the school year goes on. worst habit EVER.

5. i sing in the shower.

6. i love love love musiccc. not like, oh hey i know ten bands that are okay. i like, NEED music. a day without music is deff. an off day.

7. i break headphones a LOT.

8. i can identify my friends by how they smell. not by like, their grossness or anything, i just know who smells like what. but i can never name what their scent is. i just associate what they smell like with their name, like, 'oh it smells like (insert name here) in here!'

9. i have trouble falling asleep a lot 'cause i think too much.

10. i don't think turning 16 is that big of a deal.

11. i have this intense fear of puking in public. ewww.

12. i'm terrified of needles, but somehow i pierced my own ears? i'd prolly still cry if someone said i had to get a shot.

13. i hate history because i suck at it. or is it, i suck at history because i hate it? idkk either way, it makes my top 10 list of things that are lame.

14. somehow i always end up convincing myself that procrastinating is okay.

15. i have short eyelashes. it annoys me.

16. i hate it when people try to make incredibly biting social commentaries, and end up looking like complete asses.

17. i'm a total hypocrite.

18. my science teacher can't tell the difference between me and this other asian girl in the class. he's always giving me her assignments and giving my assignments to her. SERIOUSLY we don't all look alike. ish.

19. i think my photography is pretty insignificant on the amateur-professional spectrum. it's true it's trueee!

20. i've been listening to this song on repeat the whole time i've been filling this thing out.

21. i drag my letters out a lot like thisssssssssssssssssssss. idk why.

22. i wish i was skinnier.

23. i miss my sister when i don't see her all week. which is like, all the time except over the summer.

24. the only part of my body that i realllly like are my calves. hahahahaha.

25. i'm not worried about the future.

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

 

Renato Baldini (1921-1995) was an Italian actor who appeared in 87 films between 1950 and 1983 and specialized in the genres 'en vogue' in Italian cinema.

 

Baldini started as actor in 'Fotoromanzi'. He made his film debut with a small role in Renato Castellani's È primavera... (1950). In the same year he was promoted to the leading role by Francesco De Robertis who wanted him in his Il mulatto, opposite Umberto Spadaro. Throughout the 1950s Baldini was an actor much loved by the most popular audiences. In the early 1950s he worked in many films in leading roles, as in Pietro Germi's La città si defende (1951), co-scripted by Federico Fellini; Vedi Napoli e poi muori (Riccardo Freda, 1952); Delitto al luna park (Renato Polselli, 1952) with Franca Marzi; Napoli è sempre Napoli (Armando Fizzarotti, 1954) with Lea Padovani; Foglio di via (Carlo Campogalliani, 1954) with Cosetta Greco; etc.. Baldini also had many important supporting parts in modern melodramas as in Luigi Comencini's Persiane chiuse (1951) and Rosalba, la fanciulla di Pompei (Natale Montillo, 1952), and historical dramas such as Teodora (Riccardo Freda, 1954) with Gianna Maria Canale. Tall, well-built, handsome, he usually plays the role of the strong-willed man with a strong character, loyal and honest, but at times also evil, violent antagonists. In 1954 he had the lead in Duilio Coletti's La grande speranza, as the commander of a submarine who torpedoes the enemy but still saves the wrecked foreign sailors. He becomes enamored with a British auxiliary (Lois Maxwell, the future Miss Moneypenny from the Bond films).

 

From the early sixties, when the kind of films he liked best disappeared from the screen, Renato Baldini adapted to very different roles. Apart from a supporting part in Valerio Zurlini's La ragazza con la valigia (1961) starring Claudia Cardinale and Jacques Perrin, he acted mostly in Peplum films such as I giganti di Roma (1964) by Antonio Margheriti; he would do several films with him. In 1964 Baldini was a supporting actor in several of the German Karl May adaptations: Unter Geiern, Winnetou II, and Der Schut. In 1965 he played in two Italowesterns, shot in Spain: ¡Que viva Carrancho!/ L'uomo che viene da Canyon City and Dos pistolas gemelas/Una donna per Ringo. These were followed by several other Italowesterns by e.g. Antonio Margheriti (Joe l'implacabile, 1967, a.o.), while he also played in other genres such as gangster films, science-fiction, spy stories, comedies with Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, and, from the early 1970s on: western comedies with Terence Hill, thrillers, dramas on corruption, etc. His pseudonyms then were King MacQueen, Rene Baldwin und Clay Slegger. In 1971 Baldini acted in Dino Risi's In nome del popolo italiano, starring Ugo Tognazzi, a film about the crisis of the Italian judiciary and the growing phenomenon of corruption. His last part was that of the lover of Pascale Reynaud in the summer comedy Sapore di mare 2 - Un anno dopo (1983). Of Baldini's television activity one remembers: I racconti del maresciallo by Mario Landi (1968); E le stelle stanno a guardare by Anton Giulio Majano (1973); Qui squadra mobile by Anton Giulio Majano (1976); Nessuno deve sapere by Mario Landi (1973); and L'amante dell'Orsa Maggiore by Anton Giulio Majano (1983).

 

Sources: Italian Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

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

Definition of coney

 

1 a : rabbit fur

 

b(1) : rabbit

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coney

========================================================

Neil Gorsuch pioneered the nominee smirk in portraits of future supreme court justices. "Bart" Kavanaugh hasn't stopped smirking since prep school, though during his confirmation hearing he let the mask slip and revealed the beer sneer that made him famous.

 

Here, Amy Covid Rabbit is continuing the tradition with a Gorsuchian smirk of her own. I'd be smirking too if I'd managed to crash the Olympian heights of the supreme court with a downmarket law degree. (By the way, unbeknownst to me, someone beat me to the smirk trope. If you'd like to see "Bart" Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch in full smirk, please follow this link:

twitter.com/espinsegall/status/1092980423867678721 )

 

While she poses as a supermom, she's actually a headband-wearing shark.

 

I'll go out on a limb and say that Amy Covid Rabbit is also a homophobe. Republicans did their utmost to make it seem that inquiring into Covid Rabbit's religious beliefs would be akin to asking how long she's been practicing cannibalism. It worked.

 

Because Mitch McConnell rushed her nomination through at a million times the speed of light, Amy Covid Rabbit was not asked about her leadership role at a school that practices institutionalized homophobia.

 

Just as Covid Rabbit hides her extreme right-wing views behind a sorority-girl façade, evangelical fundamentalist Protestants and their ilk cloak their homophobia under the hypocritical and sanctimonious mantle of "religious freedom."

 

They want the "freedom" to codify their religious beliefs and impose them on the entire society. Don't be surprised if, in a case that's at the Court, Covid Rabbit rules in favor of the Catholic adoption agency that discriminates against LGBT couples.

www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/adoption-agency-should-be...

 

And they have the nerve to whine about "the gay agenda."

 

Here's the story about the school Covid Rabbit helped oversee. While you read it, think of the questions you wish Dianne Feinstein or that old queen Lindsay Graham had had the guts to ask.

 

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents and made it plain that openly gay and lesbian teachers weren’t welcome in the classroom.

 

The policies that discriminated against LGBTQ people and their children were in place for years at Trinity Schools Inc., both before Barrett joined the board in 2015 and during the time she served.

 

The three schools, in Indiana, Minnesota and Virginia, are affiliated with People of Praise, an insular community rooted in its own interpretation of the Bible, of which Barrett and her husband have been longtime members. At least three of the couple’s seven children have attended the Trinity School at Greenlawn, in South Bend, Indiana.

 

The AP spoke with more than two dozen people who attended or worked at Trinity Schools, or former members of People of Praise. They said the community’s teachings have been consistent for decades: Homosexuality is an abomination against God, sex should occur only within marriage and marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

 

Interviewees told the AP that Trinity’s leadership communicated anti-LGBTQ policies and positions in meetings, one-on-one conversations, enrollment agreements, employment agreements, handbooks and written policies — including those in place when Barrett was an active member of the board. Trinity Schools Inc. is a tax-exempt non-profit organization that receives some financial support from government-funded tuition voucher programs, according to its federal tax returns.

apnews.com/article/south-bend-only-on-ap-amy-coney-barret...

 

Before I sign off, I'll give you a sneak preview of Covid Rabbit's first first Supreme Court opinon: Baa-baa, ra-a-ra, shalisha-sha-a-sha-asha-hasa-harasah! Hiro---shi---shi---sha---a---karasha!! Kaaaa!

 

Why riders should not object to pics being taken

 

1. Riders should give photographers the same respect riders expect

 

By this I mean one should not tell others what they can or cannot do or call them perverts. If I rider believes they have the right to tell photographers what they can and cannot do in public. Then perhaps the riders should not be on such events as they are in my opinion pure hypocrites. They would not want members of the public calling them perverts for being nude in public nor would they want people to prevent them from being nude in public.

 

2. Safety

 

On the event some members of the public tried to kick some riders. Having photographers means these people can be photographed and pics given to the police. With no photographers if a rider is assaulted, then they may not have any evidence.

 

3. Safely 2

 

Another aspect is that if a member of the public makes false claims about a rider. Such as the rider was doing something sexual. Having pics taken protects them as they have evidence to prove no wrong doing took place.

 

To Party!!!

 

kick it!

You wake up late for school

Man, you don't wanna go

You ask your mama "Please?"

But she still says, "No!"

You missed two classes

And your homework

But your teacher preaches class

Like you're some kinda jerk

You gotta fight

For your right

To party

Your pop caught you smoking

And he said, "No way!"

That hypocrite

He smokes two packs a day

Man, living at home

Is such a drag

Now your mom threw away

Your best porno mag

You gotta fight

For your right

To party

Kick it!

You gotta fight!

Don't step out this house

If that's the clothes you're gonna wear

I'll kick you out of my home

If you don't cut that hair

Your mom busted in and said

"What's that noise?"

Aw, mom you're just jealous

It's the BEASTIE BOYS!

You gotta fight

For your right

To party

You gotta fight

For your right

To party!!!

Party

Party

Party

 

B.B.

 

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CLIENT: Ilm Path Academy

 

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So far in life I have been challenged many ways both professionally & personally. When it comes to travel somehow always managed to get the best experiences. But here, we were in wonderland, with crime rates against women are on the rise, we getting proved the true followers of some of the famous literature, here we were challenged in its true sense. The ritual of men dressed up as women was amusing. Unlike in all other festivals and celebrations women dressed up in the simplest attire during the occasion, we ended up staring at women as if they are men & wise versa. We talked to few girls who said, they are jealous, planning to adopt some fashion from these men & felt very very safe.

 

Many with different orientations were getting a chance to express themself without hypocrite society and so called moral police creating troubles. Personally this opportunity for personal expression and freedom was something we loved about the event.

 

But more than all these there is a troubling side too - it was in ugliest forms here with men abusing men, chasing them, tickling and it goes on. It was like suddenly there was a more appealing species around & the masses turned towards them. So what matters is just the appearance and nothing else ? The pads strategically placed to capture eyeballs around the waist and on chest was all that mattered here. Looks like the existence of species is greatly dependent on how erotic the appearance can be & its very difficult define personal freedom, sexual orientations, crime etc when masses can be so easily manipulated with their basic instincts itself.

 

I agree, we were bit lost, but right now that seems to be exact issue at hand. We are all lost as a society, as a nation and as a species itself.

 

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Let's put this one down to wishful thinking rather than anything that we are likely to see in reality. Whilst I love to see them, I am somewhat doubtful of the commercial value of 'heritage' liveries - although there are exceptions and it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise. I cannot claim credit for the imaginative play on the name of the former Sunderland District Omnibus Company, but that's another story. This particular bus is old enough to have carried an 80th anniversary version of SDO livery when new in 2005, although it is depicted here with contemporary Go North East advertising (25-Apr-13).

 

All rights reserved; not to be posted on Facebook or anywhere else without prior written permission. Please follow the link below for additional information about my work and the techniques used:

www.flickr.com/photos/northernblue109/6046035749/in/set-7..

 

Sometimes an old photo doesn't mean anything until later. Now, this dark and lonely street from December takes on a bit more feeling for me, with its people—isolated and solitary people, but still people—present within the enclosing darkness. Now it both mirrors the isolated feeling of this time and recalls the familiar sight of figures moving casually through the world.

 

"And I've got something I've been trying to let go,

Pulling me back every time."

 

I'm a little hypocritical, but we all are in some way. I know the importance of the shooter's decisions and training, and obviously the look of my photos, and their strengths and (especially) failings, primarily come from me, with secondary characteristics coming from the equipment. I acknowledge the importance of particular equipment to me, even as I advise others to not worry too much about gear, and acknowledge that my own reliance on certain minutiae is a weakness I have. But this to me is an "equipment image," which is perhaps part of why it took me a while to see anything meaningful in it. The sense of depth conveyed by the tonality in the asphalt, and the way the patches of light play over the concrete, are the reasons I bought this camera. It easily pulls me in and conveys the reality of this familiar location uncommonly well, reminding me of the feeling of actually being there at night, in addition to just what’s there, and for those reasons this dark and simple shot entertains my eyes. If I'd shot it with other equipment that didn't render the same sense of depth, I'd probably toss it, but that lens doing what it does brings me visual pleasure, and reminds me why I love that tiny camera. There’s just an extra sense of reality it captures for me.

 

Basic C1 edit on X1 jpeg.

(L1170568c)

Brucie tells us to head for the Cathedral. He knows that whoever the fuck is there waiting for us, he just dropped a death sentence on them. Yeah, and I'm somehow the idiot. Whatever, any chance to get my hands on the guy who apparently offed Mike's family. I hate women killers. I hate child killers. This guy did both. Shit like this is bonus points to me. Anyway, Mike and I took the Roadblade to the Cathedral. Thing is the Roadblade is a one seater, so Mike decided holding onto the rollbar would have to do. I'd call him crazy, but if there's one thing I hate it's hypocrites, and now's no time to make myself my own worst enemy. Mike was pretty pushy about getter there quick. Mentioned something about a guy called Father Alister at the church. Never liked priests, but Mike's my buddy so I gotta help him out.

 

"Can we go a little slower please, Jerrick?"

 

"You wanna get there fast, don't you? What about that Alister guy?"

 

"There's no point worrying about him if my skull is all over the pavement."

 

"Yeah, but that Hurt guy will probably get impatient. Trust me, bloodthirsty killers have no patience."

 

"Trust me, Jerrick, I know."

 

"Fuck yeah. So, that Hurt fuck. What are you gonna do to him when you get your hands on him?"

 

"I've had a few....creative ideas. Some to make even you envious."

 

"Stop teasing me, Mr. Lane."

 

"Hmhmhm..."

 

"Seriously though, can;t wait to hear this bastard scream. Comes to our city, messes with my people...He's gonna be wall decoration once we're done."

 

"Hell yeah!"

 

"W-whoa there. Out of character much, Mike."

 

"I apologize. The thought of finally avenging myself and my fallen family just...excites me."

 

"No need to apologize, man. That excite you're feeling right now is all natural. I get it every time before I rip open your garden variety killers, child molesters, blah blah. It's out-fucking-standing."

 

"I can easily see why. I think tonight's gonna be a fun night for us, Jerrick."

 

"Y'see Mkie, it's shit like this that's why we're buddys, y'know that? Don't fucking EVER say otherwise"

 

"Heheh. Couldn't dream of it....hey, the Cathedral's just ahead!"

 

And so it begins....

“The time of a man's life is as a point; the substance of it ever flowing, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to corruption. His soul is restless, fortune uncertain, and fame doubtful; to be brief, as a stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as a smoke, so are all that belong unto the soul. Our life is a warfare, and a mere pilgrimage. Fame after life is no better than oblivion. What is it then that will adhere and follow? Only one thing, philosophy. And philosophy doth consist in this, for a man to preserve that spirit which is within him, from all manner of contumelies and injuries, and above all pains or pleasures; never to do anything either rashly, or feignedly, or hypocritically: only to depend from himself, and his own proper actions: all things that happen unto him to embrace contentendly, as coming from Him from whom he himself also came; and above all things, with all meekness and a calm cheerfulness, to expect death, as being nothing else but the resolution of those elements, of which every creature is composed. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common unto all, why should it be feared by any? Is not this according to nature? But nothing that is according to nature can be evil.”

 

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Julia Gillard (Pictured) managed to get our now ex prime minister Kevin Rudd booted out of the job , mid term, because of the Carbon Tax. She promised not to bring it in. Last week She approved it ! Hypocrisy riles me !!! I own the pictures of the truck and chimneys , NOT Gillard.

The truck driver will also be getting a $450 fine for talking on phone while driving but shh hahaha

 

The big deal ??? The local plant of the steel mill which employs a VERY BIG percentage of the local population may shut down, a tax on fuel delivery will be put in place, meaning higher Fuel prices...

 

sorry for those who dislike politics

View On Black • Oh you Spidy that tagged me, where art thou so I can kick your butt?!

 

Kidding aside, I did that exercise before, but it’s fun so I’ll do it… I just won’t tag anyone ‘cause that’s the part I don’t like. I’m suppose to tell you 10 things on me… So here it goes!

 

1-As I’m getting to doing these 10 things list , I recall doing it before. I look through my flickr and realize not only did I do it before, but Spidy is one that tagged me. AH HA! So you can see one here and also here. Damn you, forget your coffee! Hahaha (kidding!)

 

2-I’m the biggest procrastinator in the world when it comes to organising my personal stuff and yet, I’m the most dedicated, hard working and finicky person at the job. I can’t stand lazy workers.

 

3-I get bored easily. But when I’m enthusiastic or excited about something I just dive into it.

 

4-I can eat pretty much everything, I like good food and enjoy a good meal. I don’t mind if it’s expensive as long as it lives up to expectations. Nothing pisses me off like an expensive but crappy meal.

 

5-I have no clue how it happened.. But I don’t really like Chrismas anymore.

 

6-There is nothing in the world in my opinion that justify being hypocrite.

 

7-Isn’t it annoying when someone asks for your opinion but can’t handle the truth? If you just want me to tell you what you want to hear, then fuck off and don’t ask me.

 

8-It sucks but I’m a very emotional person. I cry easily…

 

9-I redefined unsexiness (I know, that’s not a word) with my Sorel boots, but you know what? I don’t care.

 

10- Too bad I’m too old… Would’ve loved to be a model.

 

Bonus

 

11- I shot this pic with this shot in mind stylewise... Infortunately, Robert Pattinson wasn't there. Damn! Hahaha

 

From right to left: Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo (1861-1945), Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944), Jacques-Théodule Alfred Cartier (1884-1941), Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair (1844-1923), and Abdulrahman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Ibrahim (1875-1960) circa March 1912.

 

(Contrary to earlier conflicting accounts about the location of this famous photograph, local historians now believe it was taken during Jacques Cartier's introductory visit to Salman Bin Hussain Matar, the undisputed doyen of the Bahraini pearl industry for more than five decades, in his townhouse on the island of Muharraq by one of Cartier's assistants, while seated outside on the elevated, columned portico (iwan) of the main reception hall in the inner courtyard of the house, since the densely populated, once-walled old Muharraq town, with its maze of narrow, winding streets, was not only the largest urban centre on the small island but also the political capital of Bahrain and the seat of power for the Al Khalifa ruling dynasty from 1810 to 1923)

 

(The date of birth of Yusuf Kanoo of 1861 in the caption above is arguably the most accurate of all his purported birth dates, in particular when compared to the other two widely circulated unsubstantiated discretionary dates of 1874 and 1868, the first of which is found in the British National Archives (India Office Records), vaguely based on Yusuf Kanoo's own account, casting doubt on the questionable veracity of the information-gathering methods of the British archival records, while the second is a more recent date, first appearing as the official birth date of Kanoo in the late 1990s; it is important to note that, with few exceptions here and there, prior to the gradual establishment of the modern bureaucratic centralised state system in Bahrain in the 1920s, and the following decades, virtually every birth date in Bahrain and the rest of the basic protection social contract of Arab Gulf polities, where the livelihoods and worldly possessions of the people were under the protection of a specific ruler in a loosely designated geographical area, was usually determined by word-of-mouth discretionary supposition, collective consensus, and, in some rare cases, chronicled by momentous or calamitous events occurring at random during any given time in a certain year, such as warfare, lethal epidemics or destructive natural disasters, the year is typically identified by a distinctive feature or characteristic attributed to the calamity itself, and the person born in the year in question, irrespective of gender, is routinely referred to as "being born in the year of so-and-so" and, at best, by adding the season of birth according to the seasonally unaligned Islamic Hijri Calendar, with this becoming, as time passed, part of the folk memory of the Bahraini people and the Gulf region in general, at a time when a sizeable portion of the indigenous local population was both illiterate and semiliterate, before the government-sponsored formal education system was introduced in the early 1920s and 1930s in the newly formed Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, for example, when the devastating Spanish flu pandemic reached Arabia as a whole in the autumn of 1919, including Bahrain, resulting in the death of more than fifteen hundred inhabitants in Bahrain alone, the year of the outbreak was called "The Year of Mercy" due to the frequency of funerary prayers and supplications for mercy for the souls of so many victims who succumbed to the disease one after another, an Islamic religious nomenclature once commonly used in the Arabian Peninsula in relation to the catastrophic recurrences of virulent diseases that ravaged the Peninsula, with people in Arabia sauntering through a never-ending cycle of rampant epidemics with very high mortality rates; as one would expect under such conditions, these adversities were not dissimilar to those in mediaeval Europe or in the relatively advanced neighbouring Fertile Crescent, and such was the febrile nature of life in Arabia that people were constantly girding themselves for the worst, in view of the practically complete lack of modern medical care facilities, preventive healthcare, quarantine measures (including immunisation) and public sanitation, with the three modern healthcare facilities exceptions in the Gulf, which were significantly effective, though insufficient, operating chronologically with the opening of each of them, starting with the commercial, for-profit enterprise medical services of the American Mission Hospital in 1903 in Manama, Bahrain, followed three years later by the semi-gratuitous medical services of the chronically underfunded Victoria Memorial Hospital, together with its quarantine facility, in 1906, located near the sea, directly across from the British political agency (now the British Embassy), further down the same long, meandering street as the American hospital, both facilities catered not only to the local Bahraini population but also to those from the eastern and central regions of present-day Saudi Arabia, and finally, in 1914, the American Mission Hospital of Kuwait served Kuwait and its environs of urban and desert sedentary communities, where there was practically a yearly infestation of at least one epidemic, most notably bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, and smallpox, causing numerous fatalities in a short space of time; this was particularly the case within the Arab states along the western coast of the sparsely populated and largely penurious Arabian Gulf and throughout the mostly arid environment of the Arabian Peninsula, excluding a small number of places where there was plenty of water to support sustainable agriculture, including Yemen, in southern Arabia, and large oases such as Al-Qasim, Medina, and Al-Ahsa, during the first third of the twentieth century, before the transformative discovery of oil in the 1930s and 1940s and the subsequent development of an efficient, free governmental medical system funded by oil revenues; however, one of the most noteworthy calamities to leave an indelible mark on the collective consciousness of the Gulf's populace was an odd hurricane of cataclysmic proportions which took place on the 1st of October 1925, dubbed "The Year of the Sinkage", inflicting variable damage to buildings and the surrounding environment, especially vulnerable mud huts with palm-frond thatched roofs (known as barastis) in coastal, agricultural and fishing villages belonging to indigent, toiling fishermen and indentured farmers, were torn apart and interspersed across far-flung distances, and, needless to say; the pearl fishing industry was hit hard during the final weeks of the four-month-long summer pearling season in anticipation of the onset of the dormant winter months for the industry and its ancillary essential sectors in the Gulf, the cornerstone of the region's fragile monocultural economy, with thousands of boats sunk and, tragically, over five thousand lives, predominantly sailors, lost in a single thunderous, foreboding night in the otherwise almost always placid waters of the Gulf; the calamity wrought havoc in its wake, leaving a path of devastation across a vast region, primarily in the central part of the Arabian Gulf, centring on the Bahrain archipelago and the eastern coastline of the Qatar peninsula, coupled with a number of islands and the scantily populated coastal towns and villages along the present-day eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, including Dammam (now a large metropolis) and Tarout Island, well-known back then for its small fishing and pearl diving communities, namely the famous pearl fishing town of Darin and also the nearby farming town of Qatif, where one hundred and fifty people died from falling date palm trees on their homes, in addition to Ras Tanura, and to a lesser extent Jubail in the north, thus the perfectly apt appellation, as these rudimentary speculative and dubious methods were the order of the day, rather than any accurate, bureaucratic official government or religious documentation specifying the exact date and year of birth, with the first large-scale issuance of birth registration certificates in Bahrain beginning in earnest in the 1950s, given the discovery of an officially notarised endowment trust fund transfer deed dated Thursday, the 15th of Rabi' al-Thani 1295 in the Hijri Calendar, corresponding to the 18th of April 1878 in the Gregorian Calendar, the credibility of the two earlier-mentioned alleged dates of birth of Yusuf Kanoo is decidedly undermined, as the respected foodstuff merchant Ahmed Mohamed Kanoo and his eldest son Yusuf were among the nine legally required consenting male adults who validated the strict transfer of wealth procedure, and since both of the previously stated birth dates of Yusuf Kanoo relevant to the timeline of the binding legal solemnity of such a document are incompatible with the required legal age of the witnesses, it is illogical to say that Yusuf Kanoo was either an undiscerning child of four or a child of ten, which indicates he was a minor in both instances and lacked the legal age and, therefore, full legal capacity, to appear before an Islamic Sharia judge or any other judge of any civil or religious denomination, and it should be clarified that, with the exception of Iran (historically known as Persia), which is still reliant on its own highly precise and unique Solar Hijri Calendar, designed by the renowned Muslim polymath Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), time and age measurements and the foundation for standard civic purposes of all aspects of mundane life, not just religious holidays, worshipping activities, and festivities, were calculated in the Arabian Gulf and much of the Islamic world at that time, according to the purely lunar Islamic Hijri Calendar's dynamic but orderly unaligned seasons of the monthly cycles of the phases of the Moon, in contrast to the seasonally aligned, more dependable Gregorian, and less complex Solar Calendar, and all currently in use others, in a number of Asian nations, such as China, India, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, are regulated by their indigenous hybrid Lunisolar Calendar's overlapping intercalations of both the positions of the Moon and the Sun, in compatibility with the Western globalised economic realities of modern life, in conclusion, as expounded earlier in the text, in the absence of a centralised efficient bureaucratic state system in the late modern period, from roughly the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf, it was a challenging task to determine the precise birth dates of the vast majority of the population, including those of the ruling and mercantile elites, with a few rare anomalous exceptions, mostly among the clergy, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that Yusuf Kanoo, as one of the signatories of the said revealing document, was of the irrefutable legal adult discerning age of eighteen lunar years, marking the adulthood threshold where individuals were recognised as legally responsible for their actions according to the prevailing consensus of the four principal Islamic Sunni orthodoxy schools of jurisprudence since the mediaeval period, at the time, before the partial implementation of more secular, Western-influenced administrative reforms and legislation by the British colonial local authorities in the Gulf in the first third of the twentieth century, the Gregorian solar calendar was steadily replacing the lunar Hijri calendar in daily civic use, among other modernising measures, as part of the British worldwide imperial colonial grafting policy, similar to that of the French and Portuguese but in a less brutal, less culturally imperialist and less bloodstained manner, by paternalistically integrating Britain more vigorously with its racially inferior and inherently less civilised colonies in varying degrees, while taking into account the distinct circumstances of each of the occupied territories according to British evaluation that constituted the British Empire through the self-designated various British classifications of each territory (such as Colonies, Crown Colonies, Charter Colonies, Protectorates, Mandates, etc.) via the subtle influence of cultural assimilation, thus securing the long-term economic interests of Britain, through primarily peaceful persuasion and, when necessary, forceful means, evidenced by the aforementioned administrative reforms implemented in post-World War One Bahrain, where both grafting methodologies were aggressively adopted; these approaches were derived from the ancient yet still-in-use horticultural technique of grafting, in which different strains of plant tissues are united to create a robust, inseparable bond that promotes the optimal growth of desirable traits, mirroring the sophisticated strategies employed by all the major European colonial powers to ensure future dominance over their colonies through cultural hegemony)

 

(In light of the fact that Bahrain was the centre of the pearl trade in the Arabian Gulf, renowned worldwide for producing some of the finest natural pearls since antiquity, the small seafaring nation became the haunt for anyone seeking business success in the lucrative, highly sought-after market for natural pearls in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, igniting what might have been an unprecedented pearl mania in recorded history to satisfy the ever-increasing international demand for pearl jewellery, especially among the upper echelons of Indian society, dominated by the British Raj vassal potentates of Hindu Maharajas and Muslim Nawab princes, the feudal successors of the then-defunct once-mighty Mughal Empire, the waning old European royalties, supremely embodied by the doomed absolutist and fabulously extravagant Russian imperial house of Romanov, the vigorous burgeoning capitalist upwardly mobile Western bourgeoisie, and the extraordinarily wealthy urban-dwelling ostentatious nouveau riche American tycoons, primarily of New York, amidst the sweeping American Industrial Revolution, epitomising the opulence and excess of the era known as the "Gilded Age," as in the case of the young French jeweller Jacques-Théodule Alfred Cartier (1884-1941), who opted to bypass the exorbitant prices of the monopolistic Parisian pearl dealer coterie by sourcing pearls directly from local suppliers in the Arabian Gulf, marking the final connection between the international Western jewellery industry, where natural pearls were marketed as luxury finished products in the high-end jewellery stores of major Western capitals and cities such as London, Paris, and New York, and the intricate hierarchical network of interwoven business relationships within the centuries-old, tradition-steeped history of the Arabian Gulf pearl trade, personified by the four transnational Arab merchants, each of whom was associated with Bahrain to a varying degree due to its advantageous economic standing in comparison to its Arab Gulf neighbours in this iconic picture taken by one of Jacques Cartier's assistants and meticulously stored in the photo albums of the Cartier company archives in Paris, along with hundreds of other photographs taken during his several trips to the Gulf and India, as Cartier was keen on photographically documenting as much as he could of all the major events he had participated in during these trips, particularly those from his second extended visit to Bahrain in 1912, and also his handwritten, pedantically detailed travel journal containing vital information about the places he visited and the key people he met in his trips to the Orient and other parts of the world, but let us be clear, this picture for the most part is about the three noted pearl merchants he conducted business with: Al-Thukair, Bin Matar, and Al-Ibrahim, who more or less share similar backgrounds since they all hail directly from the Najd region in central Arabia, taking into account that Bahrain meant a different thing for each of them; for Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair (1844-1923), it was a second home away from home after his beloved birthplace of Unaizah in Najd; however, for the magnanimous and highly esteemed longest reigning doyen of the Bahraini business community for over half a century, the honourable, staid and reticent Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944), it was his native birthplace, as his grandfather and namesake moved to Bahrain from Najd in 1825, making it his permanent home, and finally, for Abdurrahman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Ibrahim (1875-1960), Bahrain was a worthwhile frequent business destination, situated halfway between his country of origin, Kuwait, on the northern tip of the Arabian Gulf, where his family moved from Najd in the early 1700s, soon after the country was established as an independent sovereign political entity by the Al-Sabah dynasty of the Bani Utbah tribal confederation of Najd, and the bustling British-founded Indian entrepôt city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai, the present financial capital and most populous city in India and the abode of choice of Al-Ibrahim until the end of his life, apart from being his final resting place, the vibrant commercial hub on the Arabian Sea and the main gathering place for Arab traders and their families in the Indian subcontinent for nearly a century, and in many instances, the real head start for a slew of industrious young Arab merchants from the generally inhospitable, population-repelling, and, on the whole, economically deprived pre-oil Arabian Peninsula as for the apparent role of the fourth Arab in the picture as an Arabic-Hindi and English interpreter in this historically significant photograph, the shrewd and influential merchant Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo (1861-1945), whose ancestors originated from Najd, north of the present-day Saudi capital, Riyadh, emigrated more than a hundred years before his birth to the broadly Arab eastern coast of the Arabian Gulf; then after one or two generations in the early nineteenth century, the descendants of those ancestors decided once again to relocate to the pearl-rich island state of Bahrain off the western coast of Arabia near their ancestral homeland in the Najd plateau, central Arabia, following a temporary sojourn on what is now erroneously called the Persian coast, as scores of Arabs from the hinterlands of Arabia did in the past for one reason or another before the creation of today's artificial political borders when the Gulf was an Arabian lake for many centuries, needless to say, Kanoo's role was not just confined to language interpretation; therefore, first and foremost, it is necessary to shed light on his business interests and activities preceding his fortuitous foray into the shipping agency sector in 1911, when he was appointed the Bahraini shipping agent for the pioneering, albeit ill-fated and short-lived first fully Arab-owned shipping and passenger enterprise, "The Arab Steamers, Limited", by the majority of the principal shareholders of the budding company, most of whom were his friends, where he embraced wholeheartedly this unexpected business opportunity that came knocking at his door, as it would also play a pivotal role in shaping his future business career, making him synonymous with the shipping liner and oil tanker industries in the last three decades of his life and, posthumously, the eponymous company he founded up to the present, notwithstanding his involvement in significant business activities other than shipping, including the acquisition in 1913 of the highly profitable agency for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now British Petroleum "BP"), in particular, before the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 and the introduction of locally oil-refined byproducts with the opening of the Bahrain refinery in 1936, the paramount byproduct of these in the Bahraini market in the first third of the twentieth century was Kerosene, also known as paraffin, when monthly shipments of thousands of barrels of this essential commodity were imported from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's refinery in Abadan in the northern Gulf used to arrive in Bahrain for local consumption, to be transported by dhow boats from a steamship anchored in deep water in the middle of the sea to the port of Manama (the current site of Bahrain Financial Harbour), a small shallow-water port incapable of receiving deep-draught large ships, then uploaded onto donkey-pulled carts to the warehouses of the nearby seaside landmark building belonging to Yusuf Kanoo in Manama, but after the building was sold, in 1934, the Kerosene shipments were stored in the warehouses of Kanoo's main office building inside the old Manama souk (the future office building of the Y.B.A. Kanoo Group until 2016), for distribution to the local Kanoo subagents, as kerosene oil was indispensable for domestic use as the primary fuel source for lighting lamps, portable lanterns and, to a smaller degree, cooking stoves, since most Bahrainis relied on wood for cooking, while some low-income families used dried cow dung as a cheaper alternative to the more costly wood before liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders were gradually introduced and an electrical power grid was established in the 1930s and the following decades, other oil derivatives, especially petrol and diesel fuel, were less significant products since the country only had two hundred motor vehicles by 1930; Yusuf Kanoo was also the first local merchant to import diesel-electric engines, ice-making machines and mechanical water pumps into Bahrain after World War One, and he became the refuelling and ground handling agent for Imperial Airways' long flights from London, landing in Bahrain en route to Karachi and Delhi in British India, whilst also handling the Orient Express-like, exorbitantly expensive nine-day flight to Sydney, Australia, in 1929, the predecessor of "British Airways", for he was the only Bahraini supplier of petroleum products for almost twenty years, laying the groundwork for the future highly lucrative Kanoo regional aviation ground handling business in the Gulf, specifically in Bahrain and across Saudi Arabia, and his efficiency in managing plane refuelling resulted in his appointment as the travel agent for Imperial Airways in 1937, thus becoming the owner of the first airline travel agency in Bahrain, which ten years later, in 1947, would become the first agency in the Gulf to be accredited by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), among the myriads of products and services he launched in Bahrain and the Gulf as a whole, inadvertently leading to the development of arguably the first local Western-style management-based modern business firm in the Arabian Gulf, with the contemporary state-of-the-art Y.B.A. Kanoo regional conglomerate still maintaining substantially a similar scope to the then-nascent businesses of its forward-thinking founder Yusuf Kanoo in the early twentieth century, most significantly shipping, travel, machinery, and oil & gas, where the company has steadily risen to become a market leader in these sectors across all of its operational markets, achieving this in less than two decades after its founder passed away in 1945, this growth has been evident particularly since the impactful first oil boom in the mid-1970s in its three main regional markets by business size: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, as these new businesses and technologies were briefly touched upon above for the duration of Yusuf Kanoo's fifty-five-year business career, in which he weathered numerous trials and tribulations through an almost unbroken chain of three major global crises: the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, as Yusuf was chiefly a banker and general trader during the first twenty years of his long business career, and as a British-influenced maverick entrepreneur with a global perspective, branching out from the foodstuff business of his father, Ahmed Muhammad Kanoo (1835-1905), one of the major wholesale foodstuff merchants in Bahrain in the late nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, and the owner of two large mixed-use elongated buildings in Manama built in the traditional Gulf architectural style, primely located close to each other, separated by the existing narrow Al Khalifa Avenue, flanked from the right side of the main building by an equally detached building of similar length but slightly broader width, formerly belonging to the brothers Abdullah & Salman Kamal, constituted the current smaller attached row of buildings consisting of shops, representing a miscellaneous collection of businesses and trades, mostly in the retail sector, owned by several different proprietors, are on the left side of the now covered pedestrian no-car strip of Souq Bab Al Bahrain Avenue, across from what were once customs bonded warehouses, the present-day site of Bab Al Bahrain shopping mall, whereas the left side of the Kanoo building is flanked by another building of the same length belonging to Sheikh Hamad, the 33-year-old crown prince of Bahrain and future ruler, and which remains in the possession of his descendants from the Bahraini royal family, as the main building is a nearly five-hundred-foot-long three-story building and fifty-five-foot width, one of the largest detached commercial buildings in Manama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while the smaller opposite one, the once seaside building is a two-story over two hundred feet long and also detached as its much larger sister, yet of identical width, with the first floor of the smaller building serving as a private residence for the only surviving male offspring of Ahmed Kanoo, Yusuf, whom he and his two nephews and soul heirs then sold several decades later in 1934 to the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Hamad (1932-1942), coupled with other properties sold to others, the most important being Yusuf Kanoo's own constructed impressively huge two-story building on a plot of land reclaimed from the sea at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest mixed-use commercial and residential building in Bahrain and the whole Gulf back then, the present site of several prime location properties owned by the Bahraini royal family, consisting of the Unitag Group building and its car park, the Regency Intercontinental Hotel's auxiliary Plaza Spa and wellness building at the back, and the adjacent large building alongside it where a number of largely financial firms and banks operate, covering the total three-hundred-foot right wing width of the old building, and at one point facing the old customs house, part of the one hundred and twenty thousand square feet plot of land encompassing the entire incomplete rectangular-shaped semi-bottom square bracket building, including the three-hundred-foot built-up two wings width across the two-hundred-foot length of the semi-courtyard partially unbuilt hollow-shaped space opposite the sea at the back of the property, serving as a docking area for the building, where in the mid-1970s, the Regency Intercontinental Hotel was erected on sea-reclaimed land in front of the docking area, which Yusuf Kanoo sold to prominent Kuwaiti pearl merchant Helal Bin Fajhan Al-Mutairi (1855-1938) in late 1934 for a quarter of a million British Raj rupees, the official currency used across the Gulf as the polities of the Gulf were under the jurisdiction of the British Indian Raj, in a desperate sale transaction to alleviate some of his massive debt incurred as a result of the global crisis of the Great Depression, as with a multitude of merchants across the Arabian Gulf, nevertheless, the present site of the smaller building is the Bab AL Bahrain Hotel, and all of the rented spaces on the four corners of the ground floor of the detached property, as the previous property is also owned by the royal family of Bahrain, located in close proximity to the Bab Al Bahrain archway (Gateway of Bahrain) historical landmark in Manama separated by just a thin aisle pedestrian passage between the two buildings, the upcoming exposition, is partly based on an amalgamation of varied documented materials spanning both local and foreign, including archival sources, notarised official documents, diaries, biographies, and so on, but above all based on the detailed descriptive notarised "deed of gift" of Ahmed Muhammad Kanoo, the father of Yusuf Kanoo, outlining in detail how he gifted specific holdings of his fixed and movable assets during his lifetime to his four adult heirs, these were his four adult offspring, his two sons Yusuf and Muhammed, and his two daughters Latifa and Hussa, where the aforementioned properties and their boundaries were clearly stated, among other heirlooms, leaving no room for ambiguity or obfuscation, dated 5th of Jumada al-Awwal 1323, in Hijri Islamic Calendar, corresponding to Saturday 8th of July 1905, in Gregorian Christian Calendar, penned shortly prior to the passing of Ahmed, stating that the two neighbouring buildings belonging to him in Manama were gifted to his sons Yusuf and Muhammed equally, whereas the large rear building served as the future headquarters offices of the titular firm of the eldest son of Ahmed, Yusuf, he posthumous Y.B.A. Kanoo regional conglomerate was owned by the nephews and heirs of Yusuf, the sons of his deceased younger brother Muhammed, Jassim and Ali Kanoo, and their immediate eight male offspring and their legal heirs' descendants of both sexes, given that Muhammed died soon after his father Ahmed in 1905 of the plague during one of the deadly infectious diseases outbreaks at the turn of the twentieth century in Bahrain, since Yusuf did not have children of his own despite his three successive marriages, the building described above became symbiotically attached to the Y.B.A. Kanoo family business in the minds of many ordinary Bahrainis, especially dwellers of old Manama, for several generations from the death of Ahmad in 1905 to the death of his son Yusuf forty years later on the 21st of December 1945, and then operating continuously from the same premises for the next seven decades, albeit the old traditionally built structure was rebuilt in a Semi-Mediterranean commercial style using modern building materials in the late 1950s, until finally in 2016, when the company moved to a new steel and glass high-rise headquarters after more than a century in the same location, however, with respect to the smaller building, it became solely owned by Yusuf Kanoo, explaining why it was sold by him, as thoroughly discussed earlier, with the two daughters of Ahmed receiving gold jewellery, in contrast to the commonly held, inaccurately long-perpetuated conception that Yusuf Kanoo started from humble origins and died practically bankrupt in 1945, as will be explained further in the text, it should be noted that when Yusuf established the first local bank in Bahrain and the entire Gulf, including Persia (Iran) in 1890, he was venturing into the risky uncharted territory of banking business in the Arabian Gulf at a time when banking was associated, at least in this deeply conservative puritanical region of the Arab world in the local Muslim collective consciousness, with unethical exploitative usury, as the Bank of Yusuf Kanoo remained the only bank in Bahrain for thirty years until the opening of the British-owned Oriental Bank in 1920 (The Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China), the present-day Standard Chartered Bank, having been inspired by the successful banking firms of the British Raj in India, the Kanoo Bank was significantly different from regular commercial banks as it leaned more towards private banking, targeting Bahraini wealthy pearl merchants with sizeable monetary surpluses, some of whom were occasionally in need of significant cash flows for the thousands of indentured workers on their payroll throughout the four-month-long summer pearl diving season in a non-banking-based economic environment, particularly those of the island of Muharraq and its towns where Yusuf Kanoo was constantly courting their goodwill, as they were the real drivers of the fragile local monocultural economy, as with the rest of the region, Muharraq was the most active pearling town in the Arabian Gulf, thanks in large part to having the richest pearl oyster beds in the Gulf in its northern waters, and, as a matter of course, home to the highest number of pearl divers and the largest fleet of pearling vessels in the region, the former political capital of Bahrain and the seat of power of its Al Khalifa ruling dynasty for over a century, and the beating heart of the pearling industry of the tiny archipelago, the most salient of those Muharraq's merchants was the closest, steadfast, and trusted friend of Yusuf Kanoo and chief creditor, referred to earlier in the preface, one who cannot be commended highly enough or quantify his innumerable virtuous deeds, the celebrated, unassuming, and bonhomous legendary philanthropist Salman Bin Matar, who was widely recognised for donating large amounts of rice and dates to the poor in Bahrain during the dire economic conditions of the First and Second World Wars to alleviate the sudden shortages of imported foodstuffs, principally rice, the staple food for the vast majority of Bahraini people regardless of class, stemming from disruptions in international supply chains caused by military operations, and to make matters worse, the economic strife of the First World War was compounded by a virulent epidemic, as in the situation in Bahrain, where five thousand people died from an outbreak of plague in December 1914, as referred to by the British political agent in Bahrain, Captain Keyes, in his correspondence with his superior, Major Trevor, the Deputy Political Resident of the British Residency in Bushehr, Persia (Iran), on the 5th of December 1914 in the following excerpted letter passage: (Divers and coolies continued to leave Bahrain till the outbreak of plague in December when hundreds of Persians also left. Plague further reduced the population by some 5000. There was then a slight revival of trade and the profits in coffee and tea were so good that several merchants took advantage of the cheapness of the labour market to collect stones and build, thus, giving work to numbers of the most indigent. There was also a market for household articles, old clothes etc, and it was not till February that any people were entirely without resources. Two or three merchants, notably Salman Bin Matar, then made large donations of rice and dates, and work was found for some men by the Agency), in conjunction with his bountiful donations in times of economic crises, there was the daily sight of long queues of the less fortunate at his doorstep all year long, both at his winter and summer residences, awaiting alms of the generous distribution of cooked meals made of lamb and rice, since Salman Bin Matar was Bahrain's wealthiest merchant for nearly fifty years and its largest property owner, aside from being its most consequential pearl merchant from the 1890s until his greatly lamented death on the 10th of February 1944, the subsequent concise bracketed excerpt below originates from a declassified comprehensive report compiled by two British political agents, Captain N. N. E. Bray (1885-1962) and Major H. R. P. Dickson (1881-1959), who served consecutively though briefly in Bahrain, whereas the latter would significantly influence the modern history of country's northern neighbour Kuwait as a future political agent, this report offers a glimpse into the mindset of these colonial officers and the prevailing racist climate in the West, as reflected in this extremely subjective observational case study of the people of Bahrain from a British colonial perspective, verifying the typical racist European tropes and stereotypes of how none white people were widely viewed back then, including two opposing lists of influential Bahrainis who played central roles in shaping the socioeconomic and political landscape of the small state, either by aligning with Britain or opposing it, with Salman Bin Matar prominently placed at the top of the Whitelist, this list evidently refers to a group of the wealthiest and most powerful high-ranking Bahrainis who were considered allies of the British, conversely, the Blacklist represents a diverse group of individuals from all segments of Bahraini society, belonging to various social backgrounds, faiths, affiliations, and origins, unified by the suspicion and hostility they faced from the British colonial authorities in Bahrain, for reasons that were not exclusively political, Bin Matar was described in this special 1920 report by the British political agency in Bahrain as follows: quote (1. Salman Bin Matar. A wealthy pearl merchant, very friendly.) a simple yet emblematic description of a man who maintained a modest demeanour all his life despite his immense wealth, dedicating much of his long life to assisting the downtrodden and improving the quality of life of the Bahraini people in general in every way possible irrespective of their race, ethnicity, creed, or colour, in particular, through the introduction of modern formal government education, as he was one of the founders of the first formal school in Muharraq, the former capital of Bahrain in 1919, he was also a vital member of all the governmental councils and committees of the newly formed bureaucratically centralised, and chronically underfunded Bahraini state, where he unfailingly provided generous financial funding to these fledgling government bodies, both before and after the discovery of oil in 1932, and continued to do so until his death, as evidenced by a short though thoughtful obituary in the declassified British colonial annual archival report of 1944 on Bahrain, the following is the slightly edited bracketed obituary: (The death occurred during the year of Haj Salman Bin Matar, one of the leading pearl merchants of Muharraq, who was well known for his philanthropic deeds. For several years he provided food for large numbers of poor people who were daily fed at his doors. He sat on various councils and committees and was a valuable member of the community), he was also well-known for his significant contributions as the biggest and longest-standing depositor of the Kanoo Bank until its bankruptcy and permanent closure at the height of the Great Depression in the early 1930s; furthermore, he was accredited for waiving all of his large outstanding debts to his local and regional debtors during the decade-long debilitating depression crisis, followed by the conflagration of the Second World War, including, as expected, the debt of Yusuf Kanoo, his lifelong friend and confidant amounting to more than half a million Indian British Raj silver rupees without legal recourse, a considerable fortune in the pre-oil Arabian Gulf, in spite of the constant insistence of Yusuf Kanoo on offering his most prized possession, his mixed-use monumental building, which he then sold to Kuwaiti pearl merchant Helal Al-Mutairi, as previously mentioned, and additional properties comprising the building gifted to him and his late brother by their father, who he sold as above indicated to the ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad, and a medium-sized date palm orchard within the vicinity of Al Khamis village near Manama, to cover the stupendous debt of Salman Bin Matar, after all the last-ditch attempts of Kanoo, a trustworthy man of impeccable integrity in all of his business dealings, to offer the building among other assets to Bin Matar in exchange for the defaulted debt had failed, thus, upon the arrival of Al-Mutairi at dusk, a good friend of both eminent Bahraini merchants from Kuwait, to seal the critical sale deal of the building on an unspecified day in a cold late December evening of 1934, Yusuf Kanoo, accompanied by his prospective Kuwaiti buyer, walking in the unlit dark narrow alleys of Muharraq, aided by oil lanterns carried by assistants, went to the winter residence townhouse of Salman Bin Matar in the heart of the old town of Muharraq in a poignant final gesture of sincere goodwill to persuade him to accept the building as the least credible rightful legal settlement for the substantial outstanding debt; however, he resolutely declined, a clear attestation to the incomparable altruism and nobility of this exceptional gentleman, demonstrated by being deservedly afforded the appellation 'Father of Orphans and Protector of Widows' by the Bahraini people many a decade before these affairs, an honorific that remained synonymous with him throughout much of his long adult life and posthumously until the present, due in no small part to the cherished memories he represents for a lot of Bahrainis from all walks of life passed down through the generations, as he is unanimously recognised as the preeminent philanthropist Bahrain has produced in modern times, and also as its foremost pearl merchant of the golden age of the pearl trade, interestingly, the preceding debt case incident represents a compelling true moral story seldom seen in our fast-paced, materialistically driven, and consumer-oriented globalised village society in a world increasingly characterised by cynicism, moral apathy, and venal propensity, where meaningless vapid and insipid hypocritical rhetoric about human rights is routinely harangued tediously on the world media, serving as irrefutable proof of the remarkable mutual fidelity and devotion these two friends held for each other throughout their long friendship of over fifty years, lasting from the mid-1890s to their close deaths separated by just well over a year, prompting Yusuf Kanoo, a few months after this defining incident in 1935, to take the necessary precautions to ensure the continuity of his business enterprise for posterity by transferring ownership of his company and all of his remaining properties into the safe and capable hands of his nephews, Jassim and Ali, ten years before his passing in 1945, except for the dear to him 'Anglo-Persian Oil Company' (APOC) agency, now the multinational oil giant British Petroleum (BP), which remained under his ownership until his death, stipulating that the company will continue to bear his name after his death, thereby eliminating any future claims by creditors, and to limit the inheritance to the two brothers as the sole heirs of Yusuf Kanoo and their male progeny, ensuring the smooth transition of the family business in a traditional patriarchal society as a logical consequence, Yusuf died with virtually no inheritance left behind, debunking the notion that his heirs rebuilt his company from scratch, bearing in mind that the previously mentioned nephews at the time of Yusuf's death were middle-aged, well-established businessmen in their own right, owning business interests independently from the firm of their illustrious uncle, and married with grown-up children and even grandchildren, whose pioneering sons, Ahmed, the eldest son of Ali, and Muhammed, the eldest son of Jassim, and their diligent younger brothers, following steadily in the footsteps of their great uncle, Yusuf Kanoo, in the late 1940s, ably taking on the heavy mantle of his, expanding the resilient eponymous company he built almost sixty years prior across the Arabian Gulf, transforming it into the multinational regional conglomerate it is today, the following bracketed excerpt from the declassified 1945 colonial annual report of the British political agency in Bahrain on internal and external affairs of the country and the Arabian Gulf is an edited obituary of Yusuf Kanoo, explicitly confirming his high status both locally and regionally, as the unfounded and nebulous age of Kanoo, stated to have been born in 1874 in the said archival obituary, has been refuted conclusively in the comprehensive and detailed missive above on the different hypotheses about his age, delving concisely into the chaotic rudimentary birthdate documentation methods in Bahrain and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula before the establishment of modern centralised bureaucratic state systems in the region, which commenced in earnest after the end of World War One, (On the 21st December Haji Yusuf Ahmed Kanoo died at the age of 71, (most likely between 84 and 85). His association with His Majesty's Government started in 1898 in the time of the Agent Haji Ahmed bin Abdul Rasool (Al Safar). He continued to serve as Assistant until the arrival of Mr. Gaskin in 1902, and was associated with Major Prideaux and Captain Mackenzie until 1909. He received the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal II. Class in 1911, the title of KHAN SAHIB in 1917 and the M.B.E. in 1919. In 1924, a C.I.E. was bestowed upon him. In 1913, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company appointed him their agent in Bahrain. He received honours from the late King Hussain of the Hedjaz and, also, from His Highness the Amir (Abdullah) of Transjordan (now kingdom of Jordan), who granted him the title Pasha. The death of this well-known old Arab was marked in Bahrain by the closing of the bazaars for one day. The political Agent sent a message of condolence to the bereaved family.), at any rate, the collapse of the only Bahraini indigenous-owned bank during the Great Depression reflects the far-reaching cataclysmic effects of the first economic crisis of the modern economic realities of the ever-increasingly interconnected world of the twentieth century, turning it into a global phenomenon where plenty of financial institutions and businesses irrespective of size were falling prey to insolvency, engendering widespread economic hardship and turmoil; the momentous collapse of Kanoo Bank had a significant impact on the establishment of another indigenous bank in Bahrain, delaying the whole process for a quarter of a century until the establishment of the first commercial Bahraini-owned bank in the country, the National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) in 1957, in view of the modest oil revenues of the slowly gaining momentum new Bahraini oil economy in comparison to the exponentially oil-rich Arab Gulf neighbours of Bahrain, namely Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and to a lesser extent Qatar in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the arrival of the last two crucial newcomers on the oil-producing scene in the Arabian Gulf, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the Sultanate of Oman, where the former would later become the dominant Emirate of the newest robust country in the Arabian Gulf, and its newly rebuilt capital city, Abu Dhabi, would be proclaimed the federal capital of the seven dynastic Emirates of the federal state of the UAE after independence from Britain in 1971, due to its geographical size and enormous hydrocarbon wealth, not to mention the British loosening of their monopolising grip on the Bahraini local banking sector in the aftermath of the brief but consequential Anglo-French debacle of the 1956 Suez crisis, which was up until then under complete control of the British, symbolised by only two British banks, the formerly alluded to Standard Chartered Bank and the British Bank of the Middle East (BBME), what is now the HSBC Bank Middle East, the second biggest Kanoo Bank depositor was leading pearl merchant Muhammad Bin Rashid Bin Hindi Al Mannai (1850-1934), also from the historic previously walled eponymous town of Muharraq, as Salman Bin Matar, the largest and most densely populated on the island, with an architectural landscape signalised by the few extant buildings of the once-forest of wind towers and sun-gleaming white facades of traditional ornate residential and commercial buildings constructed mostly of coral stone and covered in white lime mortar, forming the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Pearling Path, standing as testament to the prosperous and storied past of the island, when Muharraq was the pearl capital of the entire Gulf, along with the respected merchants and cousins Sayyid Khalifa Bin Abdulghafoor Al Sadah (1839-1912) and Sayyid Abdullah Bin Ibrahim Al Sadah (1853-1932) of the historically seafaring sand spit town of Al Hidd on the southeastern extremity of the island, these key pearl merchants and other business leaders were the primary economic drivers of the local economy and the largest employers prior to the turning point discovery of oil and the following gradual formation of the modern centralised state bureaucratic apparatus system in the Arabian Gulf region; yet, it is a little-known fact that Yusuf Kanoo was also a sagacious and trusted pearl broker, both locally and regionally, acting as a sort of decorous middleman interpreter and poised interlocutor between visiting international pearl dealers and their local and regional counterparts as the socially savvy, energetic, and knowledgeable multilingual comprador Yusuf Kanoo would turn his hand to anything commercially favourable, oddly enough, the majority of those international pearl dealers were French Jews, such as Léonard Rosenthal (1874-1955), Jacques Bienenfeld (1875-1933), and Solomon Pack (Date of birth unknown), who forged not only strong business relations with their Arab counterparts, but also strong enduring friendships in the Gulf and throughout Arabia; two prime examples of these friendships stand out: the first was between Abdulrahman Bin Hassan Algosaibi (1880-1976), the famed transnational, well-travelled pearl merchant based in Bahrain from Najd in central Arabia, and Albert Habib, the affable, fluent-in-Arabic, Paris-based pearl merchant and nephew of Léonard Rosenthal, who, like many others during the 1930s, struggled with bankruptcy owing to the Great Depression and for whom Algosaibi generously paid his medical bills following a post-crisis malaise brought about by the abrupt price plunge of natural pearls, causing him to lose most of his sizable fortune, demonstrating the loyalty and support of Algosaibi during hardship and adversity, the other notable friendship was between the international pearl dealer, the benevolent Muhammed-Ali Zainal Alireza (1884-1969) of Jeddah and David Bienenfeld (1893-1973), the younger brother of the Jacques mentioned above; Alireza earned the title "The King of Pearls" in the Arabian Gulf during the 1920s and later became known as "The King of Diamonds" in post-World War Two India, when the farsighted Alireza eschewed his pearl trade business altogether after the worldwide collapse of the pearl market in the mid-1930s, as a direct outcome of the Great Depression, impelling him to move aggressively into the diamond trade in India, where diamonds were first discovered thousands of years ago; this opportune move came after his permanent relocation from Paris to Bombay with his small family, just before the German blitzkrieg invasion of France in 1940; Bombay thereafter became his second home after his birthplace of Jeddah, where he lived until his death in 1969 and was laid to rest, it should be pointed out that in the interwar period, Alireza moderately dealt in cut diamonds and diamond jewellery alongside his main pearl business, and this involvement gave him some familiarity with the more stable diamond trade when compared to the recurrently volatile and unpredictable pearl market, unlike some of his pearl merchant peers who emerged from the Depression unscathed or with minimal losses and opted for comfortable retirement, he chose not to rest on his past pearl trade laurels, but instead, in less than a decade of his highly successful business transition, he became the principal diamond merchant in India and one of the foremost in the world in the 1950s, as for Alireza's preceding friendship with David Bienenfeld, who was forsaken and shunned by most of his friends, particularly those from the bourgeoisie French elite, after the loss of his and his family's wealth due to the Great Depression of 1929, except for his noble Muslim Arab religiously conscientious business partner and close friend Alireza, who stood by him and his family steadfastly until the end, Alireza was renowned in the Arabian Gulf for the earlier pearl-related sobriquet, for he was perceived as a bearer of good fortune by local pearling communities, as he, together with his other distinguished pearl merchants' French Jewish friends (typically the family firms of 'Léonard Rosenthal et Frères' [Léonard Rosenthal & Brothers] and the 'Bienenfeld Brothers', operating from offices in the same building on Rue La Fayette in Paris), was responsible for purchasing nearly a third of the per-annum pearl produce of the entire Gulf, spanning from Kuwait to Dubai, in the 1920s, while the remainder was either bought by Indian merchants from the Banyan community, who frequently visited the Gulf many decades before their Western counterparts, or sold directly by Gulf merchants in Bombay, dispelling the recently propagated and deliberately Western media-manufactured myth of imagined animosity between the followers of the two Abrahamic faiths, aiming to give credence to the ongoing destructive colonial legacy of the Sykes-Picot agreement in the modern Middle East, and also in some fringe, largely unrecognised polemical academic Western circles of the intractable ancient discord between predominantly Arab Muslim majority in Muslim-governed polities on one side, and particularly followers of other monotheistic religions on the other, these are Jews and Christians, as Jews, Muslim Arabs, Arab Christians, non-Arab Muslims, non-Arab Christians, and, in some cases, Mandaeans and Zoroastrians, with a special dispensation for Hindus and Buddhists, coexisted peacefully under the collective term of "Dhimmīs" (protected people) status Islamic jurisdiction, derived from the singular dhimmi (Arabic: ذمي) meaning "protected person" this jurisdiction was initially intended according to the Qur'anic text for the people of the covenant or the monotheistic people of the book, specifically Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans, even though these scriptures are Islamically deemed interpolated or corrupted sacred texts before including other religious groups in the aftermath of the century-long Arab Islamic conquests following the death of prophet Muhammad in 632 AD, considering this jurisdiction pervaded throughout the mediaeval Islamic world's golden age, in the 8, 9, and 10th centuries, and subsequent centuries, and even during the two tumultuous bloody centuries of the Crusades, stretching from Muslim Iberia all the way to Central Asia and later centuries in the Ottoman Empire, where tens of thousands of Spanish Jews fled the torturous persecution of the dreadful inquisition court under Catholic Spain after the fall of the only remaining Muslim stronghold of Granada in 1492, the last bastion of tolerance, culture, learning, and diversity in the Iberian Peninsula to the safety of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, as for the so-called friction between Muslims and Jews, it is a newfound phenomenon that began to rear its ugly head when British imperial designs for the Near Eastern legacy of the Ottoman Empire converged with Zionism, a late nineteenth-century Jewish nationalist ideology strongly influenced by emerging nationalist movements in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and concurrent European settler colonial experiences involving mass displacement and extermination of native populations in the Americas, Africa, and Australia, leading to the portending Balfour Declaration of 1917 and culminating in the genocidal bloodstained establishment of the state of Israel thirty years later, in the years 1947 and 1948, forcibly displacing and ethnically cleansing the majority of the Palestinian Arab indigenous population and their rich deeply rooted and nuanced cultural heritage in its wake (known in the Arab world as "The Nakba," the catastrophe or calamity), with unwavering and unequivocal Anglo-French support at all levels and from the bulk of the Western bloc until the mid-1960s, when the steering helm of the Middle East was taken over by the new mighty American-led Western alliance thenceforth, creating an unduly artificial and ephemeral schism in the primordial cradle of civilisations and monotheism in the fertile crescent and Arabia amongst adherents of two of the three major Semitic monotheistic closely related Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ever since, but other than the former significant foreign international pearl dealers, there were a number of local exceptions from the Arabian Peninsula during the heyday of pearls in the roaring twenties, represented by none other than the cosmopolitan and multilingual venerable Hijazi (from the Hijaz region of western Arabia) pearl dealer Muhammad-Ali Zainal Alireza, who intermittently resided between Paris and Bombay with his second English wife, Ruby Elsie Jackson (1919-1974), the mother of his three daughters, Aminah, Hafsa and Mariam, his only offspring, and a member of the prominent transnational Persianized Arab trading Alireza family of Jeddah, he was generally regarded for his extraordinary largesse and numerous philanthropic charitable works throughout the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, most notably, his invaluable progressive contributions to the eradication of pervasive illiteracy in Arabia and other regions of the Muslim world through the proliferation of formal modern education for both genders, encompassing the entire twelve-year curriculum, which has constituted his most enduring legacy; strikingly, Alireza established his first formal, comprehensive charitable school, named "Alfalah" (meaning "success" in Arabic), in Jeddah at the tender age of twenty-one in 1905, followed by a similar institution in the holy city of Mecca in 1911 and later complemented by a network of charitable schools for both sexes bearing the same name in Bombay, Dubai and Bahrain in the first three decades of the twentieth century; of these, only the schools in Jeddah and Mecca remain operational, while the others were closed in the 1950s after being superseded by government-funded formal educational institutions; Alireza was also the only merchant from Arabia to own both a flat on the world-famous Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris and a house in the exclusive Cleveland Square in London in the 1920s, and in addition to the aforementioned periodic visits of the Paris-based pearl tycoons, Bahrain was regularly visited by well-known international jewellers, such as the acclaimed French jewellers of the house of Cartier and their representatives, as well as representatives of other prestigious Western jewellery houses, including the American Tiffany & Co, who frequented the Gulf on pearl purchasing expeditions, with a special focus on Bahrain, the regional pearl trade centre, with its exceptionally well-stocked pearl oyster beds, the source of its unparalleled rare-hued coveted pearls, this is attributed by environmental experts to the flow of undersea freshwater springs found in the shallow waters of Bahrain, a phenomenon unique to this archipelago on the western shores of the Arabian Gulf, giving it its then-advanced economic position and international fame; however, of particular significance is that in the early twentieth century, natural pearls were priced internationally in French francs, as Paris was the undisputed international pearl trade centre during the golden age of pearls, when pearls were valued more than fourfold the price of diamonds in world markets owing to their rarity and natural shape, especially after the discovery of the South African diamond mines until the 1929 Wall Street stock exchange crash, precipitating a catastrophic, slow, remorseless onslaught of a global decade-long economic depression, coinciding with the introduction of the much cheaper Mikimoto Japanese cultured pearls and the discovery of oil in the Gulf, beginning with Bahrain in 1932, the Arabian Gulf centre of the pearl fishing industry, and followed in the next few years by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, supplanting the quasi-feudal industry of pearl fishing's gruelling, low-paying vicious circle of servitude indentured labour, and the time-consuming, with prolonged health risks such as blindness and deafness, particularly for pearl divers, who often had lower life expectancy than the rest of the crew members due to their primitive, sparsely clad protective diving gear, suggesting it gave little protection from the months-long detrimental exposure to the sea salinity and hazardous predatory marine creatures, followed immediately by the Second World War, delivering the final death blow to the already severely weakened reeling pearl industry by the protracted Great Depression, as if the timing of these calamitous events had conspired in a preordained twist of fate, resulting in a disastrous collapse in pearl prices from which it would not recover for several decades, effectively bringing an end to the seasonally highly organised and regimented centuries-old pearl fishing industry with its ancient rich cultural traditions of the in-part husbandry industry of dhow boat shipbuilding and its various supplementary traditional crafts and folklore, featuring boat crew folk dances and the soulful, melancholic sea shanty bard songs transmitted orally from one generation to another, performed by deep-voiced, highly skilled, mostly illiterate singers in the Gulf, this once colossal industry, employing at its zenith in the 1920s around a third to half of the able-bodied male workforce across the Arabian Gulf, has since the late 1990s transformed into an occasional immensely financially rewarding experience resembling a solitary treasure-hunting pastime, on top of being an equally rewarding tourist attraction for some fortunate scuba diving tourists)

 

The two excerpts below are from two different sources; the first is slightly edited, from an archival file of the British colonial Arabian Gulf Residency in Bushehr, Persia (Iran), covering the period from the 1st to the 31st of March 1912, pertaining to the timeline of the visit of Jacques Cartier to Bahrain, a tiny section of the stupendously detailed file consisting of miscellaneous news reports received by the Gulf Residency (the 'Political Diary' of the Residency) relating to various areas of Persia (Iran) and the Arabian Gulf, for each month from November 1911 to December 1920. The reports were compiled by the Political Resident in the Arabian Gulf (Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Zachariah Cox) or, in his absence, by the Officiating Political Resident, the Deputy Political Resident, or the First Assistant Resident. (There are discrepancies between the diary of Jacques Cartier and the said report regarding the exact dates of Cartier's arrival and departure and the unveiling of his unrealised intended final destination on his second extended Arabian Gulf trip) while the second excerpt is a citation from the book "Cartier: Jewellers Extraordinary", by Hans Nadelhoffer, which is part of the author's description of Jaques Cartier's trips to the Orient, particularly to the Arabian Gulf, and his adoption of local business customs and practices during these trips.

 

The following two brief paragraphs provide a first-hand British archival summary of Jacques Cartier and his travel companions' trip to the Arabian Gulf in March 1912.

 

A young Frenchman, Monsieur Jacques Cartier, arrived with two companions, Monsieur Maurice Richard, also a Frenchman, and Mr. J. S. Sethna, a Parsi Indian by the Arab Steamer "Tynesider" on March 13th. They came to the Agency to get an order of exemption for the quarantine at Kuwait. When they learned that this was impossible, they determined to stay in Bahrain until the "Tynesider" returned from Basra. They were put up by Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair to whom they brought recommendations from Bombay Arabs. They left for Bombay on the return of the ship on 1st April.

 

Monsieur Cartier represents the firm of Cartier of Paris and London (175 New Bond Street) and his visit was professional. He cultivated the acquaintance of the local Arab merchants and is said to have brought pearls to the value of Rs. 25,000. He informed the Political Agent that he might return to Bahrain for the pearl season of 1913. Others say that his companion, Mr. Sethna previously dealt in pearls on his own account and will be sent to work for the firm here.

 

The edited citation below is from the book "Cartier: Jewellers Extraordinary" by Hans Nadelhoffer.

 

Jacques Cartier was the firm's special expert on pearls, and it was he who accompanied the sales assistant Maurice Richard on various journeys to the Arabian Gulf and to India. In accordance with Oriental custom, he would sit cross-legged in his negotiations with local traders, and he learned the customs, languages, and habits of the various nations that he visited. Two of his journeys were recorded in the form of a diary and various other reports.

 

www.google.com.bh/books/edition/Cartier/xnKpjh1gkqgC?h

www.anarchyisleroleplay.com/

 

[12:53] Míα Phιllιps (Sophi4h Resident) steadied herself as she straightened up from the wall, ok she might have a bruise or two but she could live with that, she watched him trying to open the door while keeping his focus on her, trying to piss her off by calling her that name along with others. "You'll never know what I live for but I promise you this you junkie fuck, you ever end up in my ER you better pray it's my day off." She smirked at him, actually smirked, ohhh all the thoughts of what she could do to him, not like he wasn't easily recognizable, as he went to open the door she did one last thing, she threw the knife, not like a professional would have done by holding the blade part, dumb move maybe but she put some damn force into it as she sent it flying towards him and the door, would she get him before he got out and away?

  

[13:00] Wilbur Fitzgerald glared at her....but a smile seemed to tug at his lip...her threat didn't seem to bother him, maybe a welcome..how many times has he been Narcaned...never left to die an enemy turned angel....even more reason to piss her off, "Fucking hypocritical, cow..." he spit in her direction the saliva only a little..his mouth was dry, lips cracked...he jaw twitched...he laughed... his back on the door...opening it but as soon as he was turning to head out...he yelled...his back arched the blade sunk into the side of his arm just below the shoulder..."YOU fuckin bitch!:" he stumbled down the front of the steps, landing on his side, his arm limp the knife protruding..." Fuck!...." his own knife he had dropped. unsure where it landed...but he was crawling away trying to get to his knees...he was speaking the words incoherent...

“Breathe” ―Anna Nalick, 2005

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdRHSuPxgXo

 

“Two AM and she calls me ‘cause I’m still awake,

Can you help me unravel my latest mistake,

I don’t love him, winter just wasn’t my season

Yeah we walk through the doors, so accusing their eyes

Like they have any right at all to criticize, hypocrites,

You’re all here for the very same reason” 🎶

This train don't carry no gamblers,no hypocrites,no midnight ramblers.....this train is bound for glory.....this train.(Woody Guthrie) Rusk County,Texas. 3.23.12. This is an old rail line that's not in use anymore in Rusk County.....not to be confused with the train ride available in the city of Rusk,Texas. I belive this line ran from Henderson to Overton.

With the bullet of this gun, I will tie the broken pieces back into one. To kill the side of me that I despise, to crush every single word that became a lie. I am the biggest hypocrite, but I knew it all along, that i would see my words come true, no matter how i avoided them.

 

And then comes acceptance ...

 

This is based on that side of ourselves that we have trouble accepting and is part of my clone series.

... can never be hidden.

 

I am tired of hypocrites here in flickr. nearly exhausted.

As always, danke to my dear Mortisha Blacksoul for being the absolute perfect decoy and for this beautiful image... Ich schätze dich sehr. 🌹

 

Waking up from a nameless decay

My life was in dream and my faith was in chains

Hypocrites kept me blind, still the Force is mine

The Force is mine

 

Would it be in my heart to efface

Emotions for flesh and to stay out of doctrines' range?

I am caught in a veil of illusions that haze my sight

 

If you think forever

Things will never change

When you find your sense again

You should follow its way

If you think forever

It is hard to see

When you find you truly believe

You should follow your spirit as your guide

 

Hey!

 

Evolution in mind, heart and soul

Has brought me to see and to reach to my virgin glow

I have changed how to be, but it still is me

Whoa!

 

There is no one to stop my very strife

And all of my dreams now can be lived in life

I have learned how to see and believe in me, all time

 

If you think forever

Things will never change

When you find your sense again

You should follow its way

If you think forever

It is hard to see

When you find you truly believe

You should follow your spirit as your guide

 

Hey!!

 

Lost Horizon

So it’s almost the weekend. And typically I’m an advocate of a weekend being lived like a Corona commercial, but that would be hypocritical of me. I sleep in until around 7:30, and then begin doing things. I know I need to fertilize the lawn, meet like 2 or 3 clients, probably take the kids to the park or beach, Church Sun morning, clean the house, go shopping, do laundry, get an oil change, etc, etc… doesn’t sound like I’m in a hammock in Bali wearing a Borat mankini drinking a golden beer with a lime in it. Honestly, I couldn’t do that for more than about 20 minutes without doing something else. My mind rests when it’s sleeping, otherwise, it likes to exercise.

 

So I hope your weekend is either relaxing, productive or otherwise fulfilling.

 

And enjoy it with a Corona.

 

Q anon:Shit will be exposed

 

[12:59] Tom Cloud: (Saved Sat Aug 08 21:50:49 2020)You have been ejected from 'WE-ARE-Q' by Tom Cloud.

[13:01] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): Hey Neo Nazi, we start action to create our own group, with your minor brothels hypocrite creep

[13:01] Tom Cloud: grow up terry

[13:01] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): fuck u.

[13:01] Tom Cloud: no thx i 'm picky

[13:02] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): tought ypu were wiser

[13:02] Tom Cloud: wise to you and all your stupid tricks, don't worry all been sent to patch

[13:03] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): WhaHaHaha Patch 'dick 'linden?

[13:03] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): thats wher Q is for

[13:03] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): get those asholes

[13:04] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): you protect them

[13:05] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): I think its better to open that group open

[13:05] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): to all

[13:05] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): if not? I create a new group

[13:06] Tom Cloud: go ahead

  

13:16] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): Dear Willow, I like to join your group We are Q. now I see a guy Tom Cloud prevents me to join your group, can you please open your group? regards Beatrice

[13:19] Wɪʟʟᴏᴡ J Eᴠᴇʀʟʏ (willow.nova): no the group is closed now. Only people Tom allows to join will be able to join.

[13:19] Beatrice Bieler (bb2har): Ok no problem, new group is on the way, bye Have a nice day

  

We-Are-Q!

This group is for Q Followers and Patriots on Second Life to meet. WWG1WGA

To join contact - Tom Cloud

youtu.be/80s5xuvzCtg

Rules: Love your Country and respect your fellow patriots.

If you would like a tag to send notices please contact Willow Nova Thank you

Q, Q-anon, Patriots, Great Awakening, MAGA, POTUS

#A #AffordableHealthcareAct. #Obamacare #Masturbation #Twitter #TemperTantrum #BarackObama #statue #ovaloffice #disinfectant #bleach #chlorox #lysol #chlorinebleach #101 #wipes #DrTrump #Medusa #ClashoftheTitans #Snake #Rattlesnake #Slimeball #ForkedTongue #scales #hairdye #eastereggdye #PAAS #loreal #missclairol #DonaldTrump #narcissisticpersonalitydisorder #JaredKushner #DonaldTrumpJr #COVID19 #Coronavirus #Pandemic #DrAnthonySFauci #MikePence #testicle #penis #dick #balls #AsktheMortician #disease #pneumonia #infection #flu #JimmyKimmel #JimmyFallon #StephenColbert #SethMyer #minilogue #quarantine #sociadistancing #6feet #MitchMcConnell #handsanitizer #novelcoronavirus #trumplies #wipes #stayathome #workfromhome #homeschooling #deathtoll #StevenMnuchin #MikePompeo #testspositive #testsnegative #farright #freaks #ventilator #medicalmask #hospitalbed #temporarymorgue #WuhanChina, #novelcoronavirus #sociallydistant #selfquarantine #SeanHannity #FakeNews #infectiousdisease #FoxNews #epidemic #publichealthemergency #CDC #AndrewCuomo #CenterForDiseaseControl #CNN #flatteningthecurve #worldhealthorganization #recession #depression #contagious #WHO #narcissisticpersonalitydisorder #positive #negative #coronavirus #pandemic #COVID19 #infection #Dr.AnthonyFauci #trumpcausescancer #windmill #windpower #windturbine #antivaxxer #bigfoot #UFO #lochnessmonster #flyingsaucer #mythology #atlantis #bermudatriangle #flatearth #wikileaks #angels #fallenangels #45 #BiggestBaby #dirtydiaper #TheMuellerInvestigation #WilliamBarr #AttorneyGeneral #Report #TheEmperorsNewClothes #TheExorcist #Pazuzu #God #JesusChrist #LindaBlair #possessed #KingofDemons #SarahSanders #hypocrite #Exorcism #Pampers #TheWall #NeverGiveIn #Bullshit #dirtydiaper #diaperrash #PooPooBaDoop #Clemson #Wendys #burgerking #football #KellyanneConway #SarahHuckabee #Trolls #Kremlin #KremlinTroll #RussianTroll #RobertMueller #FISA #SteveBannon #MikePence #Twitter #Tweet #wiretap #Twit #wiretapped #Twat #dontaldtrump #WashingtonDC #MamaAyeshas #wallofpresidents #CIA #GOP #KKK #ISIS #FBI #BLM #LGBT #Russia #VladimirPutin #Russianinterference #AlternativeFacts #MicrowaveOven #Camera #sexdrugsandrockandroll #HillaryClinton #BernieSanders #BarackObama #PresidentoftheUnited #plannedparenthood #bigot #jihad #OsamabinLaden #DumpTrump #NotMyPresident #Dontee #DonteesInferno #thewalkingdead #republican #pedophile #WomensMarch #badhombre #conservative #rape #RiencePriebus #DonaldMcGahn #FrankGaffney #JeffSessions #GeneralJamesMattis #GeneralJohnKelly #StevenMnuchin #AndyPuzder #WilburRoss #CathyMcMorrisRodgers #MitchMcConnell #KTMcFarland #MikePompeo #NikkiHaley #LtGenMichaelFlynn #BenCarson #BetsyDeVos #TomPrice #ScottPruitt #SeemaVerma #PaulRyan #TrumpTower #MarriageEquality #KuKluxKlan #NewYorkCity #Hanksy #MelaniaTrump #BarronTrump #IvankaTrump #TiffanyTrump #EricTrump #DonaldTrumpJr #JaredKushner #conflictofinterest #emolument #RiggedElection #TemperTantrum #Tweet #Twitter #Twit #ManChild #DiaperBlowout #Trump #poop #turd #bigbaby #manindiapers #Inauguration #ScottBaio #TedNugent #TheRockettes #RadioCityMusicHall #MormonTabernacleChoir #Medusa #breitbart #lies #NationalEnquirer #douchebag #POS #Pussy #PussyGrabber

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Didn't realize til I pulled out the last bags, a little quote from Charlie Rangel.

Nice quote from Rangel but being a lifetime New Yorker, one of the most hypocritical men (as all politicians are) you'll find.

Wish Lego went with a different individual to quote from.

 

Ah, but the side of the box is what's it all about.

It really was a excellent build, fun, interesting and new techniques. A joy to build and behold.

 

Excelsior! ;)

Restricting Regulations.

Gravido mentes debating fæcne dimensiones periculosa cogitationes asperis signa,

Consigli litiganti imprudente potabile montaggio castigo insulta ritardi eterni ricercati,

régimes heolstor diffamation justice actes diffamatoires arrogants lâches dispositions décès prétendants absents colère,

ατομιστικής θεωρήματα μηχανική γραμμική ανάλυση ανεπαίσθητη επαναστάσεις αναβοσβήνει αυταπάτες ντυμένο,

gymwynasgar fynd rhagddi ymwybodol vituperations cigyddion sgrechian tyllu Audacity hetelic yn thrigolion digwyddiadau a gychwynnwyd,

emoções irreprimíveis estremecer línguas calúnia inquietos escondido máquina divisar inteligência infernal,

Externalisierung Scheidungen Missverständnis vorübergehenden getaucht Poesie Gegenwartsflugblätter verbrannt,

móitífeanna breoite léirítear sceitsí mundane humiliating aghaidheanna hypocrites dearaí bailéad breithmheasanna brionnaithe mainneoidh,

恐ろしい拘束囚人無実の声が勤勉な刑務所が偽りの指導者を成長させる寄生虫豊富閉じ!

Steve.D.Hammond.

2 AM and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake,

"Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?,

I don't love him. Winter just wasn't my season"

Yeah we walk through the doors, so accusing their eyes

Like they have any right at all to criticize,

Hypocrites. You're all here for the very same reason

 

'Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable

And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table

No one can find the rewind button, girl.

So cradle your head in your hands

And breathe... just breathe,

Oh breathe, just breathe

 

May he turned 21 on the base at Fort Bliss

"Just a day" he said down to the flask in his fist,

"Ain't been sober, since maybe October of last year."

Here in town you can tell he's been down for a while,

But, my God, it's so beautiful when the boy smiles,

Wanna hold him. Maybe I'll just sing about it.

 

Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable,

And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table.

No one can find the rewind button, boys,

So cradle your head in your hands,

And breathe... just breathe,

Oh breathe, just breathe

 

There's a light at each end of this tunnel,

You shout 'cause you're just as far in as you'll ever be out

And these mistakes you've made, you'll just make them again

If you'd only try turning around.

 

2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song

If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me,

Threatening the life it belongs to

And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd

Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud

And I know that you'll use them, however you want to

 

But you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable,

And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table

No one can find the rewind button now

Sing it if you understand.

and breathe, just breathe

woah breathe, just breathe,

Oh breathe, just breathe,

Oh breathe, just breathe.

 

ANNA NALICK Breathe [2am]

  

Church, fortress of dignity and high standards, yet a dark institution for centuries. Last Sunday we took a long walk in a remarkable neigborhood called Hacou, land of the witches. We crossed an old footpath dated back to the dark ages. A cast-iron sign said, the pedestrian route originated from1303. In the17th century, outside the village Heure le Romain, they burned witches at a stake .

 

Between the15th and the17th century the church played a prominent role regarding executions in relation to religious issues. With the right hand they offered a hypocrite gesture to safe the poor soules for eternity and with the other hand the church provided moral support for the executioner. If only they new what the devil looks like, the eternal battle with evil should be history for a long time. ‘The Men of the Cloth’ only had to look in the mirror...

 

As a general rule; if you can't have a laugh, visiting a sacred building, run!

 

Courtesy of Skeletal Mess for some of the textures.

  

The cross was made conspicuous when on it Jesus died,

It signifies the cruelest shame for Him they can’t abide;

He called them wicked hypocrites and told them what they’d been

He sought to teach them better things and save them from their sins.

 

Today the cross holds highest place as many a temple grand

Tis’ often worn as jewelery as we see on every hand,

And maybe it reminds us of Him who suffered loss

Or may perhaps be worn with pride and then it is no cross.

 

Some perchance do fight in wars their country for to save,

But others live as Jesus taught and an example give,

One gives his life up freely defending that is right

And others have a lonely time and make a lifelong fight.

 

Did Jesus do more good for us by what He said and taught

Or by the death He died and the redemption which it brought?

We maybe dwell too much on death, too much attention give, And

Forget that Christ has lived for us and He taught us how to live.

 

He suffered much upon that cross and cried out with the pain;

Forgive them Father- for they know naught the misery they gain.

He suffered while He lived for us , despised and rejected of men

He only came to offer life and all we offered Him was shame!

 

The soldiers put Him to His death and saw the job got done

But when He lived, He worked it out and He was only one;

I’ll not despise the death He died or how He suffered loss

But I’ll still maintain that the life He lived might be the hardest cross.

 

The human Christ had enemies from the time that He was born

But what a blessed triumph on that resurrection morn;

Take up your cross and follow Me is the message that He sends,

And we like Him shall triumph if He will call us friends.

-- T J Lovatt

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For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. -- ( 2 Corinthians 5: 21 )

 

*****

  

It's all about being flexible, and avoiding choices whenever possible. Choices suck, they are inherently limiting.

 

"Hypocrites kick with their hind feet while licking with their tongues” -Russian Proverb

 

Secret 27:

I am extremely flexible and double jointed in some places. Before martial arts helped bring out that flexibility even more, I was a gymnast for two years.

1. If people are gonna hate you, think you are a hypocrite, no matter what you do to convince them otherwise, they will not change their view. I had been called all kind of name and I tried everything to prove them wrong. But in the end I realized that it was futile. People are gonna believe in whatever they want to believe in. Haters are gonna hate. life could be brutally simple sometimes.

 

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

"SO edgy"..